newyorker--2020-12-14--Reimagining August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on the Small Screen

When we meet Rainey , she ’ s in Chicago with her female lover , Dussie Mae ( Taylour Paige , overdoing her sweet-young-thang thing ) , being driven around by her nephew , Sylvester ( Dusan Brown ) .
Rainey and her band have been asked to cut a few sides by a white man named Sturdyvant ( Jonny Coyne ) , who owns a small race-music record label where Rainey has worked before .
While Sturdyvant may know what he has in the great , brazen composer of such blues standards as “ See See Rider ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Me Blues ” ( “ Went out last night with a crowd of my friends / They must ’ ve been women ’ cause I don ’ t like no men ” ) , Ma , too , has a strong sense of her own worth .
She sits in the back of her fine car while Dussie Mae sits up front with Sylvester , because empresses do not share thrones .
Wrapped in her summer furs and her beautiful snobbery , Ma looks out at the world with little love .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the only time it ’ s not an embarrassment to be vulnerable is onstage ; there you can have and give life that ’ s not always in danger of being devalued or hurt by the white world .
Once Rainey gets to the studio—she ’ s late , and she doesn ’ t apologize for it—she keeps her distance from others .
It ’ s a lonely business , being the head of your own operation , trying to book paying tours with Black male band members in a racially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and getting paid yourself .
It shuts you off from playfulness and worries your mind .
And , as if that weren ’ t enough , Rainey also has to keep an eye on her anxiety-ridden manager , Irv ( the touching Jeremy Shamos ) , who ’ s supposed to buffer her from white-male demands , including those of the whingy Sturdyvant , who hopes to make as much money as possible by capitalizing on her unique sound .
One song Sturdyvant would like to cut is the popular “ Ma Rainey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , like a number of her works , is about showing your ass and revelling in it : When Rainey looks at Dussie Mae ’ s young bottom , she lights up with lust or irritation , sometimes both .
Dussie Mae wants to be an entertainer , too , but she doesn ’ t have any real talent ; she exists primarily in the eyes of those who desire her .
For Ma Rainey , Dussie may be more of a status symbol than a beloved—a pretty , light-skinned girl whom Rainey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to her success rather than her own desirability in a gay-phobic , color-struck world .
Rainey understands that , in this life , her talent will be her only constant ; intimacy takes time , and there aren ’ t enough hours in the day to tend to both a lover and the big , swamp-deep sound that makes Ma who she is .
And even though Dussie Mae has the power to make her jealous and break her heart , Ma is always more than all right when she performs , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ air ; it ’ s at those times that the singer becomes the object of her own queer gaze .
There ’ s an extraordinarily beautiful moment in Wilson ’ s play when Rainey—after she ’ s taken off her shoes and put on her slippers so that she can relax and start the session—is talking to her trusted old friend and trombonist , Cutler ( the sensitive and soulful Colman Domingo , who , unlike the majority of the cast , tends to underplay his role , and it ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ looking off into space , Ma confesses , “ I always got to have some music going on in my head somewhere .
It keeps things balanced .
Music will do that .
It fills things up .
The more music you got in the world , the fuller it is.
” What Ma doesn ’ t like is silence , even if she has engineered it .
But how does that silence sound to her ?
What does it do to her ?
Does it , like grief , threaten to overwhelm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know , and Davis ’ s performance isn ’ t saying ; entertaining existential questions isn ’ t part of what she does .
Before Ma can sing a note , she needs her Coca-Cola—and where is it ?
When Irv tries to coax her into going ahead without it , she tears him down : “ Get out my face , Irvin .
You all just wait until I get my Coke .
It ain ’ t gon na kill you.
” Irv may object to Rainey ’ s demands , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imperiousness .
His jitteriness and his lap-dog eyes tell us that , for him , being degraded by Ma is sort of exciting .
Rainey sends Sylvester and her bassist , Slow Drag ( Michael Potts ) , out to get some Cokes , so that she can talk to Cutler .
“ They don ’ t care nothing about me , ” she tells him .
She ’ s referring to Irv and Sturdyvant , but she might just as well be talking about the world .
“ All they want is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learned that and they gon na treat me like I want to be treated no matter how much it hurt them.
” There is so much poetic realism in Wilson ’ s script that it ’ s hard to pick a favorite moment , but the over-all impression his language leaves us with is that this woman is a wound and that her injury , like everyone else ’ s , lives right next to her cynicism and her defensiveness .
The point that Ma is always trying to make is this : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sound , you ’ re messing with her soul .
And who wants to go there ?
Ruben Santiago-Hudson , who adapted the play for the screen , has done a creditable job of opening the material up , making some scenes more cinematic , but cinema isn ’ t Wolfe ’ s thing .
He ’ s not at home with framing , with moving a story along pictorially , and his primary influence here is Rob Marshall ’ s 2002 film version of Bob Fosse ’ s “ Chicago , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the twenties .
( Wolfe is a nostalgist at heart , and is never happier than when his actors look like figures out of a John Held , Jr. , drawing . )
Many of the early scenes feel familiar because you ’ ve seen them before , in a hundred and one other Jazz Age pictures where a Black woman gets everyone riled up and in the spirit .
When , toward the middle of the movie , the ambitious young horn player Levee ( the late Chadwick Boseman ) is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his own music , Wolfe has him push through a door that leads out of the rehearsal studio only to be confronted with a brick wall .
The literalization of the characters ’ feelings in clichéd images like this makes “ Ma Rainey ’ s Black Bottom ” dull to watch , which is a shame , because a director with more passion for the medium could have brought so much to this project .
Levee , like most Young Turks , sees only himself , hears only his own story .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and is just as egotistical , but Rainey has been at it since she was a girl and has a band , and Levee doesn ’ t .
The blues , like Ma , is old ; the music Levee wants to play is faster , harder , like him .
Wilson dramatizes the struggle between these two currents in Black culture by conventionalizing the story , and throwing Dussie Mae into the middle of it .
No playwright can do everything , and the ten-play cycle about Black American life that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2005— “ Ma Rainey ’ s Black Bottom ” is the second in the series—is one of the great edifices in American theatrical history .
But there are always cracks in institutions , and , for me , Wilson ’ s depictions of women is one of them .
For sure , they exist in full-blooded ways in several of his plays , but often they ’ re present as a kind of pillow on which Black masculinity gets to rest its weary head .
Levee tells the gold-digging Dussie Mae that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own band , as he tries to kiss and grab her , the implication being that he ’ ll be a bigger and cooler musician than Ma , because he ’ s younger and he ’ s a real man ; Wilson justifies Levee ’ s misogyny with a horrific backstory that ’ s supposed to explain all , but it feels like a made-up story .
( One can hear traces of Hickey , the delusional salesman in Eugene O ’ Neill ’ s “ The Iceman Cometh , ” in Levee @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
Still , “ Ma Rainey ’ s Black Bottom ” is one of the few plays in the American canon that focus on a Black woman , and Rainey is among Wilson ’ s most organic female characters .
The real Rainey ’ s interior life existed in her music , and all Wilson had to do was stand back and listen , and then transcribe it .
Davis has played Wilson women before—most recently , Rose , in the 2010 Broadway revival of the 1987 play “ Fences.
” ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ movie version and won an Oscar for it . )
I saw Davis in the Broadway production , and , whenever she came onstage , I thought of Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland .
In 1961 , the two stars were working on Stanley Kramer ’ s film “ Judgment at Nuremberg , ” and Kramer invited Clift to sit in while Garland shot her scene .
Playing the wife of a lowly German official , Garland sputtered and cried .
When Kramer turned to Clift to get his reaction , Clift was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was moved by the performance but because he felt that Garland had done it “ all wrong.
” Clift , one of the most character-driven of performers , disliked it when acting replaced being .
Davis , like Garland , rarely plays a person ; instead , she embodies marginalization , inadvertently playing to a white audience ’ s idea of what a Black woman is or should be .
I was lucky enough to see Adriane Lenox in the 2005 Broadway staging of John Patrick Shanley ’ s “ Doubt ” —something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Awful and brilliant as a selfish mother who never tried to use her story to elicit our sympathy , Lenox upended the stereotypical view of Black motherhood by not performing tragedy : she was tragic , trapped in circumstances that she understood but wouldn ’ t do anything about .
When Davis took over the role in the 2008 film version , she reverted to the style that has made her part of the troupe of Black actresses , working in the tradition of Beah Richards and Cicely Tyson , whom white people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ noble , ” because they remain self-righteous as they cry and cry .
I don ’ t know what to make of her work in “ Ma Rainey ’ s Black Bottom , ” because she ’ s playing against that type , and that ’ s terrific , and yet there ’ s something in her that keeps her in a state of self-awareness : Look how I ’ m acting here .
And here .
She isn ’ t free enough to risk being disliked , but you can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ embraced and accepted ; Ma didn ’ t play that shit .
To be Wilson ’ s magnetic , tough character , you have to go it alone .
You have to understand where life began for Ma Rainey , and where it ended : in the terrors that she shouted and laughed at and turned into song after song .
♦

The real star of the director George C. Wolfe’s film of August Wilson’s play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (on Netflix, starting December 18th) is Viola Davis’s makeup. Designed by Sergio Lopez-Rivera, it is a masterpiece of Black American style. Lopez-Rivera gives Davis, who plays Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, the singer often described as the “Mother of the Blues,” the rouged look we associate with the era—the play is set in 1927—but filters it through the singer’s extravagant and scrutinizing vision. Bottom-heavy but light on her feet, the forty-five-year-old Rainey is a renegade, with long, sharply drawn eyebrows and a layer of too much shine on her face. She also has a mouth full of gold teeth that flash like artillery whenever she issues a directive or criticizes the incompetence and insurrections that threaten to undermine her stinging authority.
When we meet Rainey, she’s in Chicago with her female lover, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige, overdoing her sweet-young-thang thing), being driven around by her nephew, Sylvester (Dusan Brown). Rainey and her band have been asked to cut a few sides by a white man named Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), who owns a small race-music record label where Rainey has worked before. While Sturdyvant may know what he has in the great, brazen composer of such blues standards as “See See Rider” and the in-your-face queer classic “Prove It on Me Blues” (“Went out last night with a crowd of my friends / They must’ve been women ’cause I don’t like no men”), Ma, too, has a strong sense of her own worth. She sits in the back of her fine car while Dussie Mae sits up front with Sylvester, because empresses do not share thrones. Wrapped in her summer furs and her beautiful snobbery, Ma looks out at the world with little love. To show love is to be vulnerable, and the only time it’s not an embarrassment to be vulnerable is onstage; there you can have and give life that’s not always in danger of being devalued or hurt by the white world.
Once Rainey gets to the studio—she’s late, and she doesn’t apologize for it—she keeps her distance from others. It’s a lonely business, being the head of your own operation, trying to book paying tours with Black male band members in a racially segregated America, while also writing music and getting paid yourself. It shuts you off from playfulness and worries your mind. And, as if that weren’t enough, Rainey also has to keep an eye on her anxiety-ridden manager, Irv (the touching Jeremy Shamos), who’s supposed to buffer her from white-male demands, including those of the whingy Sturdyvant, who hopes to make as much money as possible by capitalizing on her unique sound. One song Sturdyvant would like to cut is the popular “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” which, like a number of her works, is about showing your ass and revelling in it:
The other night at a swell affair
Soon as the boys found out I was there
They said, “Come on, Ma, let’s go to the cabaret”
When I got there you oughta hear me say
Want to see the dance you call the black bottom . . .
Want to see that dance you call your big black bottom
That puts you in a trance. All the boys in the neighborhood
They say your black bottom is really good.
When Rainey looks at Dussie Mae’s young bottom, she lights up with lust or irritation, sometimes both. Dussie Mae wants to be an entertainer, too, but she doesn’t have any real talent; she exists primarily in the eyes of those who desire her. For Ma Rainey, Dussie may be more of a status symbol than a beloved—a pretty, light-skinned girl whom Rainey was able to hook up with thanks to her success rather than her own desirability in a gay-phobic, color-struck world. Rainey understands that, in this life, her talent will be her only constant; intimacy takes time, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to tend to both a lover and the big, swamp-deep sound that makes Ma who she is. And even though Dussie Mae has the power to make her jealous and break her heart, Ma is always more than all right when she performs, and those notes drift up and on the air; it’s at those times that the singer becomes the object of her own queer gaze.
There’s an extraordinarily beautiful moment in Wilson’s play when Rainey—after she’s taken off her shoes and put on her slippers so that she can relax and start the session—is talking to her trusted old friend and trombonist, Cutler (the sensitive and soulful Colman Domingo, who, unlike the majority of the cast, tends to underplay his role, and it’s a relief). Speaking softly, and looking off into space, Ma confesses, “I always got to have some music going on in my head somewhere. It keeps things balanced. Music will do that. It fills things up. The more music you got in the world, the fuller it is.” What Ma doesn’t like is silence, even if she has engineered it. But how does that silence sound to her? What does it do to her? Does it, like grief, threaten to overwhelm her voice? We don’t know, and Davis’s performance isn’t saying; entertaining existential questions isn’t part of what she does.
Before Ma can sing a note, she needs her Coca-Cola—and where is it? When Irv tries to coax her into going ahead without it, she tears him down: “Get out my face, Irvin. You all just wait until I get my Coke. It ain’t gonna kill you.” Irv may object to Rainey’s demands, but he’s turned on by her imperiousness. His jitteriness and his lap-dog eyes tell us that, for him, being degraded by Ma is sort of exciting. Rainey sends Sylvester and her bassist, Slow Drag (Michael Potts), out to get some Cokes, so that she can talk to Cutler. “They don’t care nothing about me,” she tells him. She’s referring to Irv and Sturdyvant, but she might just as well be talking about the world. “All they want is my voice. Well, I done learned that and they gonna treat me like I want to be treated no matter how much it hurt them.” There is so much poetic realism in Wilson’s script that it’s hard to pick a favorite moment, but the over-all impression his language leaves us with is that this woman is a wound and that her injury, like everyone else’s, lives right next to her cynicism and her defensiveness. The point that Ma is always trying to make is this: if you’re messing with her sound, you’re messing with her soul. And who wants to go there?
Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who adapted the play for the screen, has done a creditable job of opening the material up, making some scenes more cinematic, but cinema isn’t Wolfe’s thing. He’s not at home with framing, with moving a story along pictorially, and his primary influence here is Rob Marshall’s 2002 film version of Bob Fosse’s “Chicago,” with its celebration of tinsel and tits in the twenties. (Wolfe is a nostalgist at heart, and is never happier than when his actors look like figures out of a John Held, Jr., drawing.) Many of the early scenes feel familiar because you’ve seen them before, in a hundred and one other Jazz Age pictures where a Black woman gets everyone riled up and in the spirit. When, toward the middle of the movie, the ambitious young horn player Levee (the late Chadwick Boseman) is frustrated at not being able to play his own music, Wolfe has him push through a door that leads out of the rehearsal studio only to be confronted with a brick wall. The literalization of the characters’ feelings in clichéd images like this makes “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” dull to watch, which is a shame, because a director with more passion for the medium could have brought so much to this project.
Levee, like most Young Turks, sees only himself, hears only his own story. He loves music as much as Rainey does, and is just as egotistical, but Rainey has been at it since she was a girl and has a band, and Levee doesn’t. The blues, like Ma, is old; the music Levee wants to play is faster, harder, like him. Wilson dramatizes the struggle between these two currents in Black culture by conventionalizing the story, and throwing Dussie Mae into the middle of it.
No playwright can do everything, and the ten-play cycle about Black American life that Wilson left behind when he died, in 2005—“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is the second in the series—is one of the great edifices in American theatrical history. But there are always cracks in institutions, and, for me, Wilson’s depictions of women is one of them. For sure, they exist in full-blooded ways in several of his plays, but often they’re present as a kind of pillow on which Black masculinity gets to rest its weary head. Levee tells the gold-digging Dussie Mae that he’s going to have his own band, as he tries to kiss and grab her, the implication being that he’ll be a bigger and cooler musician than Ma, because he’s younger and he’s a real man; Wilson justifies Levee’s misogyny with a horrific backstory that’s supposed to explain all, but it feels like a made-up story. (One can hear traces of Hickey, the delusional salesman in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” in Levee’s long monologue about his youth.) Still, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is one of the few plays in the American canon that focus on a Black woman, and Rainey is among Wilson’s most organic female characters. The real Rainey’s interior life existed in her music, and all Wilson had to do was stand back and listen, and then transcribe it.
Davis has played Wilson women before—most recently, Rose, in the 2010 Broadway revival of the 1985 play “Fences.” (She reprised the role in the 2016 movie version and won an Oscar for it.) I saw Davis in the Broadway production, and, whenever she came onstage, I thought of Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland. In 1961, the two stars were working on Stanley Kramer’s film “Judgment at Nuremberg,” and Kramer invited Clift to sit in while Garland shot her scene. Playing the wife of a lowly German official, Garland sputtered and cried. When Kramer turned to Clift to get his reaction, Clift was crying, too. Not because he was moved by the performance but because he felt that Garland had done it “all wrong.” Clift, one of the most character-driven of performers, disliked it when acting replaced being. Davis, like Garland, rarely plays a person; instead, she embodies marginalization, inadvertently playing to a white audience’s idea of what a Black woman is or should be. I was lucky enough to see Adriane Lenox in the 2005 Broadway staging of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt”—something I won’t soon forget. Awful and brilliant as a selfish mother who never tried to use her story to elicit our sympathy, Lenox upended the stereotypical view of Black motherhood by not performing tragedy: she was tragic, trapped in circumstances that she understood but wouldn’t do anything about. When Davis took over the role in the 2008 film version, she reverted to the style that has made her part of the troupe of Black actresses, working in the tradition of Beah Richards and Cicely Tyson, whom white people describe as “regal” or “noble,” because they remain self-righteous as they cry and cry. I don’t know what to make of her work in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” because she’s playing against that type, and that’s terrific, and yet there’s something in her that keeps her in a state of self-awareness: Look how I’m acting here. And here. She isn’t free enough to risk being disliked, but you can’t be Ma Rainey and want to be embraced and accepted; Ma didn’t play that shit. To be Wilson’s magnetic, tough character, you have to go it alone. You have to understand where life began for Ma Rainey, and where it ended: in the terrors that she shouted and laughed at and turned into song after song. ♦
An earlier version of this piece misidentified Viola Davis’s makeup designer for the film and the year that the play “Fences” premièred.


newyorker--2020-12-14--“How To with John Wilson” Offers a Martian’s-Eye View of Homo Sapiens’ Habits

How did “ How To with John Wilson ” make it onto HBO ?
I mean that as a compliment .
The show , an endearing , oddball comic documentary in six half-hour episodes , isn ’ t glamorous , or suspenseful , or slick .
It has minimal drama and no murder , and looks as if it were shot for roughly the same budget that the network once allotted for a pair of Carrie Bradshaw ’ s shoes .
There ’ s no sex—though one episode contains an astonishing , if chaste , display of male nudity—but there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s subject is human behavior , and his terrain is New York , which he trawls with the obsessive devotion of a beachcomber , sifting through the streets with his camera to find the treasures buried among the trash , and not just the figurative kind .
The show opens on an image of an overflowing , graffiti-speckled dumpster , with the Manhattan skyline hovering in the background , waiting for her closeup .
It never comes .
Wilson is interested in what happens at ground level ; when he does look @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the skyscrapers for the scaffolding .
Wilson is thirty-four and lives in Queens .
He has worked as a video editor for a private investigator , and as a cameraman on infomercials .
The first job must have trained him to look for the telling detail , the blip in the pattern , and the second to whet the visual appetite , or simply to tolerate the superfluous and the occasionally grotesque .
( “ How To ” includes some footage from Wilson ’ s infomercial years : lots of closeups of processed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for pun and metaphor , and an affectionate attunement to human foibles and eccentricities , which he captures with sneaky technique .
If you happen to be having an upright nap on a park bench with your jacket draped , shroudlike , over your face , or trying to patiently lure a pigeon into a shopping bag on the streets of midtown in broad daylight , Wilson may well be lurking near you , recording the whole thing .
For years , Wilson posted short films to his Web site , where he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He is , at heart , a collector and collagist , and he hit on the conceit of mock-instructional videos as a way to organize his abundance of material .
One of his fans was the cringe-comedy pioneer Nathan Fielder , who became an executive producer of “ How To , ” pitching the concept to networks as “ ‘ Planet Earth , ’ but for New York.
” That description is sort of right .
In episodes with names like “ How to Make Small Talk ” and “ How to Cover @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Martian ’ s-eye view of the habits and customs of Homo sapiens , though he doesn ’ t profess the expertise of a David Attenborough .
His primary student seems to be himself .
“ Small talk is the glue that binds us all together , and the armor that shields us from each other ’ s darkest thoughts ” is a standard piece of Wilson narration .
His affect is that of an awkward man-child ; he has a slightly squashed , Kermit the Frog voice that sits in the back of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reading-aloud style of a novice public speaker .
Even the closed captioning preserves his “ um ” s .
What makes the show spark is the specificity of the images that Wilson pairs with his deadpan text .
As breezy as the result can seem , his process of foraging is painstaking ; the footage that went into the show took two years to gather .
Wilson edits musically , using visual beats to create tight rhythms , tonal ironies , felicities , and jokes .
The phrase “ New York is filled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when it is paired with the sight of a scowling FedEx driver flaunting his crotch in a va fangool grip .
The show contains an encyclopedic array of grimaces , eye rolls , and acquiescent smiles .
One of my favorite shots is of a portly man in a business suit , rubbing his hands together over and over , in an age-old gesture of distress .
What I felt , after nearly three hours of touring through this human menagerie with Wilson as my guide , was a fresh admiration of our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many variations of the same thing .
Because the success of each episode depends on Wilson ’ s ability to hook a distinctive subject who can nudge it in new directions , we meet a parade of earnest and self-promoting weirdos , not all of equal interest .
You can understand how exciting it must have been for Wilson to discover , in a grocery store , an apostle of “ The Mandela Effect ” —the phenomenon of commonly shared false memories—and to follow him to a conference in Ketchum , Idaho , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ multiverse to explain the fact that they always thought that “ Oscar Mayer ” was spelled with two “ e ” s .
But this kind of American kookiness is not all that hard to sniff out , and Wilson ’ s arch , zoological approach stumbles when it courts his viewers ’ condescension .
The show , with its scavenger-hunt ethos , can get a little cutesy , and some of the gags border on Facebook meme material .
When everyone ’ s a documentarian , the professional loses his edge .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ appreciator .
He likes to talk to people , and people like to talk to him .
On a mission to learn how to cook risotto , he wanders into the back yard of a house flying the Italian flag and ends up in the kitchen , where the owner , a middle-aged Italian-American guy , prepares the dish from scratch .
( At moments like this , it ’ s worth pondering the private worlds that Wilson , a bespectacled , bearded white dude , is given access to , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It can make you a little queasy to watch Wilson focus his lens on some unsuspecting schmo .
Still , you could argue that the quirks that he spies on in secret pale in comparison with what people willingly reveal about themselves .
In “ How to Split the Check , ” Wilson , investigating notions of fairness , attends a dinner on Long Island for an association of soccer referees , which devolves into acrimony and petty theft .
If a group of refs can ’ t establish order , who can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wilson ’ s landlady , an Old Country , kerchief-wearing woman he calls Mama , who invites him to watch “ Jeopardy !
” on her sofa and does his laundry as if he were her young son .
Mama watches Alex Trebek , and the camera watches Mama , returning her devotion with love .
In a sense , “ How To with John Wilson ” is the perfect documentary for our documenting-obsessed culture , a bizarro companion—or corrective—to Instagram ’ s bombardment of images of other landscapes , other homes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that we can show one another—and remind ourselves—where we were , what we saw , what we wore , what we ate .
Wilson opens one episode with a clever montage of people posing for photographs and selfies ; under his living lens , they wobble and bob , straining to keep still .
That kind of preservation of dailiness is what he ’ s after , too .
In an episode called “ How to Improve Your Memory , ” he reveals that , for the past decade , he has kept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , beginning with the time he woke up and what he ate for breakfast .
The sight of the notebooks , divided into grids and filled with cramped handwriting , is startling .
Wilson puts his anxiety on full display ; he has spent years worrying about losing the past , but , when he reads over what he has written , he finds that it has managed to escape anyway .
Memory , in New York , is a way of planting a flag in our ever-shifting city , claiming a stake @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It used to be my favorite bar .
I remember how it was before , and it was better then .
The city is always vanishing , maybe never faster than now .
Wilson shot his last episode in early March , as the coronavirus hit the city .
He enters a supermarket , trying to find the end of a snaking line of panic shoppers , a new era of city life beginning before his eyes .
Then , like everyone else , he retreats home .
Will New York still be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
A true New Yorker doesn ’ t have to ask .
♦

How did “How To with John Wilson” make it onto HBO? I mean that as a compliment. The show, an endearing, oddball comic documentary in six half-hour episodes, isn’t glamorous, or suspenseful, or slick. It has minimal drama and no murder, and looks as if it were shot for roughly the same budget that the network once allotted for a pair of Carrie Bradshaw’s shoes. There’s no sex—though one episode contains an astonishing, if chaste, display of male nudity—but there is a ton of city. Wilson’s subject is human behavior, and his terrain is New York, which he trawls with the obsessive devotion of a beachcomber, sifting through the streets with his camera to find the treasures buried among the trash, and not just the figurative kind. The show opens on an image of an overflowing, graffiti-speckled dumpster, with the Manhattan skyline hovering in the background, waiting for her closeup. It never comes. Wilson is interested in what happens at ground level; when he does look up, he can’t see the skyscrapers for the scaffolding.
Wilson is thirty-four and lives in Queens. He has worked as a video editor for a private investigator, and as a cameraman on infomercials. The first job must have trained him to look for the telling detail, the blip in the pattern, and the second to whet the visual appetite, or simply to tolerate the superfluous and the occasionally grotesque. (“How To” includes some footage from Wilson’s infomercial years: lots of closeups of processed meat.) He has an eye for pun and metaphor, and an affectionate attunement to human foibles and eccentricities, which he captures with sneaky technique. If you happen to be having an upright nap on a park bench with your jacket draped, shroudlike, over your face, or trying to patiently lure a pigeon into a shopping bag on the streets of midtown in broad daylight, Wilson may well be lurking near you, recording the whole thing.
For years, Wilson posted short films to his Web site, where he garnered a small and passionate following. He is, at heart, a collector and collagist, and he hit on the conceit of mock-instructional videos as a way to organize his abundance of material. One of his fans was the cringe-comedy pioneer Nathan Fielder, who became an executive producer of “How To,” pitching the concept to networks as “ ‘Planet Earth,’ but for New York.” That description is sort of right. In episodes with names like “How to Make Small Talk” and “How to Cover Your Furniture,” Wilson takes a Martian’s-eye view of the habits and customs of Homo sapiens, though he doesn’t profess the expertise of a David Attenborough. His primary student seems to be himself. “Small talk is the glue that binds us all together, and the armor that shields us from each other’s darkest thoughts” is a standard piece of Wilson narration. His affect is that of an awkward man-child; he has a slightly squashed, Kermit the Frog voice that sits in the back of his throat, and the halting, reading-aloud style of a novice public speaker. Even the closed captioning preserves his “um”s.
What makes the show spark is the specificity of the images that Wilson pairs with his deadpan text. As breezy as the result can seem, his process of foraging is painstaking; the footage that went into the show took two years to gather. Wilson edits musically, using visual beats to create tight rhythms, tonal ironies, felicities, and jokes. The phrase “New York is filled with friendly people” means something different when it is paired with the sight of a scowling FedEx driver flaunting his crotch in a va fangool grip. The show contains an encyclopedic array of grimaces, eye rolls, and acquiescent smiles. One of my favorite shots is of a portly man in a business suit, rubbing his hands together over and over, in an age-old gesture of distress. What I felt, after nearly three hours of touring through this human menagerie with Wilson as my guide, was a fresh admiration of our species’ physical ability to express so many variations of the same thing.
Because the success of each episode depends on Wilson’s ability to hook a distinctive subject who can nudge it in new directions, we meet a parade of earnest and self-promoting weirdos, not all of equal interest. You can understand how exciting it must have been for Wilson to discover, in a grocery store, an apostle of “The Mandela Effect”—the phenomenon of commonly shared false memories—and to follow him to a conference in Ketchum, Idaho, where attendees swapped elaborate theories of the multiverse to explain the fact that they always thought that “Oscar Mayer” was spelled with two “e”s. But this kind of American kookiness is not all that hard to sniff out, and Wilson’s arch, zoological approach stumbles when it courts his viewers’ condescension. The show, with its scavenger-hunt ethos, can get a little cutesy, and some of the gags border on Facebook meme material. When everyone’s a documentarian, the professional loses his edge.
Fundamentally, though, Wilson is an appreciator. He likes to talk to people, and people like to talk to him. On a mission to learn how to cook risotto, he wanders into the back yard of a house flying the Italian flag and ends up in the kitchen, where the owner, a middle-aged Italian-American guy, prepares the dish from scratch. (At moments like this, it’s worth pondering the private worlds that Wilson, a bespectacled, bearded white dude, is given access to, and the ones he isn’t.) It can make you a little queasy to watch Wilson focus his lens on some unsuspecting schmo. Still, you could argue that the quirks that he spies on in secret pale in comparison with what people willingly reveal about themselves. In “How to Split the Check,” Wilson, investigating notions of fairness, attends a dinner on Long Island for an association of soccer referees, which devolves into acrimony and petty theft. If a group of refs can’t establish order, who can? Another highlight is a portrait of Wilson’s landlady, an Old Country, kerchief-wearing woman he calls Mama, who invites him to watch “Jeopardy!” on her sofa and does his laundry as if he were her young son. Mama watches Alex Trebek, and the camera watches Mama, returning her devotion with love.
In a sense, “How To with John Wilson” is the perfect documentary for our documenting-obsessed culture, a bizarro companion—or corrective—to Instagram’s bombardment of images of other landscapes, other homes, other lives. We take pictures so that we can show one another—and remind ourselves—where we were, what we saw, what we wore, what we ate. Wilson opens one episode with a clever montage of people posing for photographs and selfies; under his living lens, they wobble and bob, straining to keep still. That kind of preservation of dailiness is what he’s after, too. In an episode called “How to Improve Your Memory,” he reveals that, for the past decade, he has kept notebooks listing each day’s activities, beginning with the time he woke up and what he ate for breakfast. The sight of the notebooks, divided into grids and filled with cramped handwriting, is startling. Wilson puts his anxiety on full display; he has spent years worrying about losing the past, but, when he reads over what he has written, he finds that it has managed to escape anyway.
Memory, in New York, is a way of planting a flag in our ever-shifting city, claiming a stake for ourselves. See that bank? It used to be my favorite bar. I remember how it was before, and it was better then. The city is always vanishing, maybe never faster than now. Wilson shot his last episode in early March, as the coronavirus hit the city. He enters a supermarket, trying to find the end of a snaking line of panic shoppers, a new era of city life beginning before his eyes. Then, like everyone else, he retreats home. Will New York still be New York when he ventures out again? A true New Yorker doesn’t have to ask. ♦


The Mail

Hilton Als , in his fine review of the new season of “ The Crown , ” on Netflix , says that Emma Corrin , who plays Princess Diana , seems “ disembodied ” in the role ( On Television , November 23rd ) .
I find his criticism to be overly harsh .
Corrin nails the young Diana ’ s graceful movements and shy gaze .
The season ends before Prince Charles and Diana ’ s divorce ; it was not until afterward that Diana lost her shyness and became the confident woman whom people remember and admire .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Crown ” shows how the British Royal Family ’ s reality is “ more like [ ours ] than not.
” This is most evident in the character of Diana , whose struggle with bulimia and depression holds important lessons .
As an eighteen-year-old , I am surrounded by toxic social-media culture , and my peers constantly compare themselves to others .
In portraying Diana ’ s feelings of defeat and self-hatred , the show offers perspective on how internal suffering can coexist with popularity .
It is through its depiction of Diana @ @ @ @ @ @ @ greatest impact .
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 .

Princess Di Onscreen
Hilton Als, in his fine review of the new season of “The Crown,” on Netflix, says that Emma Corrin, who plays Princess Diana, seems “disembodied” in the role (On Television, November 23rd). I find his criticism to be overly harsh. Corrin nails the young Diana’s graceful movements and shy gaze. The season ends before Prince Charles and Diana’s divorce; it was not until afterward that Diana lost her shyness and became the confident woman whom people remember and admire.
Aphrodite Moissis
Athens, Greece
I agree with Als that “The Crown” shows how the British Royal Family’s reality is “more like [ours] than not.” This is most evident in the character of Diana, whose struggle with bulimia and depression holds important lessons. As an eighteen-year-old, I am surrounded by toxic social-media culture, and my peers constantly compare themselves to others. In portraying Diana’s feelings of defeat and self-hatred, the show offers perspective on how internal suffering can coexist with popularity. It is through its depiction of Diana that “The Crown” has its greatest impact.
Lauren Lisauskas
Derry, N.H.
•
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--2020-12-14--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons December 21, 2020

“ If I weren ’ t petrified of catching a debilitating disease , spreading it to my loved ones , @ @ @ @ @ , I ’ d give him a piece of my mind .
”

“If I weren’t petrified of catching a debilitating disease, spreading it to my loved ones, and being hospitalized for weeks, I’d give him a piece of my mind.”
Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap


newyorker--2020-12-14--The Fiftieth Anniversary of “Feliz Navidad,” the Simplest Song Ever Written

Writing a Christmas hit can be mind-blowingly lucrative , and also a little annoying .
Johnny Marks , who made millions from “ Rudolph , the Red-Nosed Reindeer , ” griped in his later years , “ This is not exactly what I hoped to be remembered for.
” ( Too bad ; “ Rudolph ” was in the headline of his Times obituary . )
José Feliciano has no ambivalence about “ Feliz Navidad , ” his bilingual earworm from 1970 .
He is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with a live-streamed concert , a children ’ s book , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and a re-recording featuring artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda , Michael Bolton , and La India .
“ I ’ m probably going to hear a lot of ka-ching !
” he said recently .
Feliciano was at home in Connecticut , where he lives in an eighteenth-century former tavern .
“ He had his shirt off this morning , sitting out in the sun with his oatmeal , ” his wife , Susan , said .
When a visitor arrived , Feliciano was clothed ( black shirt , black mask , black @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his porch , as his son Jonnie stacked firewood .
Feliciano , who was born blind , is seventy-five , diminutive , and a punster .
Susan guided him to a red barn , where he has a recording studio festooned with gold records and guitars , and he sank into an armchair .
His first memories of Navidad are from his childhood in Puerto Rico , where he was one of eleven boys .
“ We had no septic tanks or anything , ” he recalled .
“ I don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but he stole chickens , and I told my parents that I was going to study chickens—at Perdue University !
” “ When you ’ re blind , you ’ d better have a sense of humor , because you get a lot of jerks in your path , ” he went on .
“ Like , ‘ What ’ s the matter ?
You blind or something ?
’ ‘ Yeah , what ’ s your excuse ?
’ ” His family moved to Spanish Harlem when he was five , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make it as a singer in Greenwich Village .
In 1968 , he released his hit cover of “ Light My Fire ” and caused a firestorm by putting a folksy spin on “ The Star-Spangled Banner ” at the World Series .
One day in 1970 , he and his producer , Rick Jarrard , were planning a holiday album at Feliciano ’ s place in California , in a room with some squawking parrots .
“ Rick said , ‘ José , I think it ’ s time for a new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one was ‘ Rockin ’ Around the Christmas Tree , ’ by Brenda Lee.
” Feliciano added as an aside , “ When I was a kid , I had a mad crush on Brenda Lee.
” Then he crooned a bit of “ All Alone Am I.
” He wrote “ Feliz Navidad ” in ten minutes .
“ That ’ s why it ’ s the simplest song ever written , ” he said .
“ Nineteen words to it ” —six in Spanish ( “ Feliz Navidad , próspero año @ @ @ @ @ @ @ English ( “ I wan na wish you a merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart ” ) , repeated ad nauseam .
“ I wanted a song that belonged to the masses , ” he recalled .
He and Jarrard recorded it at RCA studios , on Sunset Boulevard , in a single take .
“ If you know where your song is going to go , you don ’ t have to fuck around with it too much , ” Feliciano said , letting out a hoot .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Joke ’ em if they can ’ t take a fuck !
’ ” He recorded the track with the Brazilian drummer Paulinho Magalhães , accompanying himself on bass and the cuatro , a ten-string mahogany instrument his uncle had given him .
The song drew on Spanish Christmas carols , known as villancicos .
“ I ’ ll tell you a joke that will illustrate it better , ” Feliciano said .
“ Three people die , and on their way to Heaven St. Peter stops them and says , ‘ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reminds you of Christmas.
’ ” The first man takes out a lighter , signifying candles .
The second shakes some keys , like bells .
The third displays a pair of women ’ s panties .
“ St .
Peter says , ‘ How do these remind you of Christmas ?
’ And he goes , ‘ These are Carol ’ s !
’ ” “ That is terrible , José , ” Susan said .
When “ Feliz Navidad ” came out , Feliciano was still married to his first wife @ @ @ @ @ @ @ high-school student in Detroit who had started a José Feliciano fan club .
“ Instead of taking the bus home , I took it downtown to the department store , where I knew they ’ d have the new album , ” she recalled .
The song became a crossover hit ; Feliciano bought himself a Cadillac Eldorado .
( “ I wanted to be like Elvis , ” he said . )
Does anyone ever complain to him about the way it lodges itself in one ’ s brain ?
“ Sometimes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ ll say ” —he broke into a Yosemite Sam accent— “ ‘ Hey , is yer name José Felicianer ?
’ And I ’ ll say , ‘ Yes , it is.
’ ‘ Well , I jus ’ want you to know , I lurve that Christmas song that you wrote .
It ’ s in my head , and I cain ’ t ever get rid of it.
’ ” “ That ’ s a true story , ” Susan said , and guided him back to the house @ @

José Feliciano Illustration by João Fazenda
Writing a Christmas hit can be mind-blowingly lucrative, and also a little annoying. Johnny Marks, who made millions from “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” griped in his later years, “This is not exactly what I hoped to be remembered for.” (Too bad; “Rudolph” was in the headline of his Times obituary.) José Feliciano has no ambivalence about “Feliz Navidad,” his bilingual earworm from 1970. He is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with a live-streamed concert, a children’s book, a line of branded Teddy bears, and a re-recording featuring artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Bolton, and La India. “I’m probably going to hear a lot of ka-ching!” he said recently.
Feliciano was at home in Connecticut, where he lives in an eighteenth-century former tavern. “He had his shirt off this morning, sitting out in the sun with his oatmeal,” his wife, Susan, said. When a visitor arrived, Feliciano was clothed (black shirt, black mask, black sunglasses) and listening to music on his porch, as his son Jonnie stacked firewood. Feliciano, who was born blind, is seventy-five, diminutive, and a punster. Susan guided him to a red barn, where he has a recording studio festooned with gold records and guitars, and he sank into an armchair. His first memories of Navidad are from his childhood in Puerto Rico, where he was one of eleven boys. “We had no septic tanks or anything,” he recalled. “I don’t mean to rat on my father, but he stole chickens, and I told my parents that I was going to study chickens—at Perdue University!”
“Don’t encourage him,” Susan said.
“When you’re blind, you’d better have a sense of humor, because you get a lot of jerks in your path,” he went on. “Like, ‘What’s the matter? You blind or something?’ ‘Yeah, what’s your excuse?’ ” His family moved to Spanish Harlem when he was five, and he left home at eighteen, to make it as a singer in Greenwich Village. In 1968, he released his hit cover of “Light My Fire” and caused a firestorm by putting a folksy spin on “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the World Series. One day in 1970, he and his producer, Rick Jarrard, were planning a holiday album at Feliciano’s place in California, in a room with some squawking parrots. “Rick said, ‘José, I think it’s time for a new Christmas song.’ Because the last huge one was ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,’ by Brenda Lee.” Feliciano added as an aside, “When I was a kid, I had a mad crush on Brenda Lee.” Then he crooned a bit of “All Alone Am I.”
He wrote “Feliz Navidad” in ten minutes. “That’s why it’s the simplest song ever written,” he said. “Nineteen words to it”—six in Spanish (“Feliz Navidad, próspero año y felicidad”) and thirteen in English (“I wanna wish you a merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart”), repeated ad nauseam. “I wanted a song that belonged to the masses,” he recalled. He and Jarrard recorded it at RCA studios, on Sunset Boulevard, in a single take. “If you know where your song is going to go, you don’t have to fuck around with it too much,” Feliciano said, letting out a hoot. “I used to say to myself, ‘Joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck!’ ”
“O.K., that’s twice,” Susan chided him.
He recorded the track with the Brazilian drummer Paulinho Magalhães, accompanying himself on bass and the cuatro, a ten-string mahogany instrument his uncle had given him. The song drew on Spanish Christmas carols, known as villancicos. “I’ll tell you a joke that will illustrate it better,” Feliciano said. “Three people die, and on their way to Heaven St. Peter stops them and says, ‘I need something from each of you that reminds you of Christmas.’ ” The first man takes out a lighter, signifying candles. The second shakes some keys, like bells. The third displays a pair of women’s panties. “St. Peter says, ‘How do these remind you of Christmas?’ And he goes, ‘These are Carol’s!’ ”
“That is terrible, José,” Susan said. When “Feliz Navidad” came out, Feliciano was still married to his first wife, Hilda, and Susan was a high-school student in Detroit who had started a José Feliciano fan club. “Instead of taking the bus home, I took it downtown to the department store, where I knew they’d have the new album,” she recalled. The song became a crossover hit; Feliciano bought himself a Cadillac Eldorado. (“I wanted to be like Elvis,” he said.) Does anyone ever complain to him about the way it lodges itself in one’s brain? “Sometimes Texans come up to me, and they’ll say”—he broke into a Yosemite Sam accent—“ ‘Hey, is yer name José Felicianer?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘Well, I jus’ want you to know, I lurve that Christmas song that you wrote. It’s in my head, and I cain’t ever get rid of it.’ ”
“That’s a true story,” Susan said, and guided him back to the house. ♦


newyorker--2020-12-14--What If You Could Do It All Over?

What If You Could Do It All Over?

In 1999—our sophomore year—we hit it big .
A company that wired mid-tier office buildings with high-speed Internet hired us to build a collaborative work environment for its customers : Slack , avant la lettre .
It was a huge project , entrusted to a few college students through some combination of recklessness and charity .
We were terrified that we ’ d taken on work we couldn ’ t handle but also felt that we were on track to create something innovative .
We blew through deadlines and budgets until the C-suite demanded a demo , which we built @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friends , and used our corporate AmEx to expense a “ business dinner ” at Nobu .
Unlike other kids , who were what—socializing ?
—I had a business card that said “ Creative Director.
” After midnight , in our darkened office , I nestled my Aeron chair into my IKEA desk , queued up Nine Inch Nails in Winamp , scrolled code , peeped pixels , and entered the matrix .
After my client work was done , I ’ d write short stories for my creative-writing workshops .
Often , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ waking to plunder the vending machine next to the loading dock , where a homeless man lived with his cart .
I liked this entrepreneurial existence—its ambition , its scrappy , near-future velocity .
I thought I might move to San Francisco and work in tech .
I saw a path , an opening into life .
But , as the dot-com bubble burst , our client ’ s business was acquired by a firm that was acquired by another firm that didn ’ t want what we ’ d made .
Our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year—a fork in the road .
We closed our business and moved out of the office .
A few days before graduation , when I went to pay my tuition bill , a girl on the elevator struck up a conversation , then got off at her floor ; on my ride down , she stepped on for a second time , and our conversation continued .
We started dating , then went to graduate school in English together .
We got married , I became a journalist , and we had a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a world , a story .
I ’ m me , not him—whoever he might have turned out to be .
“ The thought that I might have become someone else is so bland that dwelling on it sometimes seems fatuous , ” the literary scholar Andrew H. Miller writes , in “ On Not Being Someone Else : Tales of Our Unled Lives ” ( Harvard ) .
Still , phrased the right way , the thought has an insistent , uncanny magnetism .
Miller ’ s book is , among @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of wonder over what might have been .
Miller quotes Clifford Geertz , who , in “ The Interpretation of Cultures , ” wrote that “ one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.
” He cites the critic William Empson : “ There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep.
” We have unlived lives for all sorts of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because society constrains us ; because events force our hand ; most of all , because we are singular individuals , becoming more so with time .
“ While growth realizes , it narrows , ” Miller writes .
“ Plural possibilities simmer down.
” This is painful , but it ’ s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical , paradoxical .
Even as we regret who we haven ’ t become , we value who we are .
We seem to find meaning in what ’ s never happened .
Our self-portraits use @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some people , imagining unlived lives is torture , even a gateway to crisis .
Miller tells the story of Spencer Brydon , the protagonist of Henry James ’ s tale “ The Jolly Corner.
” As a young man , Brydon left America for Europe , where he “ followed strange paths and worshiped strange gods , ” living as a playboy .
Three decades later , he returns to New York , where he takes stock of his peers .
Many of them are rich , powerful , or respected ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who is single and only superficially accomplished , starts to wonder how he would have turned out if he ’ d stayed .
Would he have become a successful businessman ?
Married his friend Alice , with whom he ’ s reconnected ?
He begins to spend his nights prowling the hallways of his childhood home , convinced that the ghost of the man he might have been wanders there .
Eventually , he meets a version of himself : an apparitional Brydon , with a forbidding face and two missing fingers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rage of personality.
” Watching him , Brydon faints .
He wakes with his head cradled in Alice ’ s lap , and realizes that he loves her : better this life than that one !
Most of us aren ’ t haunted so acutely by the people we might have been .
But , perhaps for a morning or a month , our lives can still thrum with the knowledge that it could have been otherwise .
“ You may find yourself in a beautiful house , with a beautiful wife , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Talking Heads song “ Once in a Lifetime.
” “ And you may ask yourself , ‘ Well , how did I get here ?
’ ” Maybe you feel suddenly pushed around by your life , and wonder if you could have willed it into a different shape .
Perhaps you suddenly remember , as Hilary Mantel did , that you have another self “ filed in a drawer of your consciousness , like a short story that wouldn ’ t work after the opening lines.
” Today , your life is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you can ’ t forget it ’ s there .
“ You may tell yourself , ‘ This is not my beautiful house .
.
.
.
This is not my beautiful wife , ’ ” Byrne sings .
We may imagine specific unlived lives for ourselves , as artists , or teachers , or tech bros ; I have a lawyer friend whose alternate self owns a bar in Red Hook .
Or we may just be drawn to possibility itself , as in the poem “ The Road Not Taken ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ choosing one path over the other made “ all the difference , ” it doesn ’ t matter what the difference is .
Carl Dennis ’ s poem “ The God Who Loves You ” tries to make that difference concrete .
Dennis poses a question to his protagonist , a middle-aged real-estate agent : “ What would have happened / Had you gone to your second choice for college ” ?
A different roommate , a different spouse , a different job : could it all have added up to “ a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re living / On any scale of satisfaction ” ?
Only “ the god who loves you ” knows for sure .
It ’ s an unsettling thought ; Dennis suggests that we pity that all-knowing god , “ pacing his cloudy bedroom , harassed by alternatives / You ’ re spared by ignorance.
” Swept up in our real lives , we quickly forget about the unreal ones .
Still , there will be moments when , for good or for ill , we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , shape us .
Practitioners of mindfulness tell us that we should look away , returning our gaze to the actual , the here and now .
But we might have the opposite impulse , as Miller does .
He wants us to wander in the hall of mirrors—to let our imagined selves “ linger longer and say more.
” What can our unreal selves say about our real ones ?
Among secular people , the absence of an afterlife raises the stakes .
In “ Missing Out : In Praise of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Phillips warns that “ once the next life—the better life , the fuller life—has to be in this one , we have a considerable task on our hands.
” Given just a single shot at existence , we owe it to ourselves to hit the mark ; we must not just survive but thrive .
It ’ s no wonder that for many of us “ the story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living.
” It ’ s likely , Miller thinks , that capitalism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and its accelerating generation of choices and chances , ” has increased the number of our unlived lives .
“ The elevation of choice as an absolute good , the experience of chance as a strange affront , the increasing number of exciting , stultifying decisions we must make , the review of the past to improve future outcomes ” —all these “ feed the people we ’ re not.
” Advertisers sell us things by getting us to imagine better versions of ourselves , even though there ’ s only one life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ YOLO + FOMO , ” a friend tells Miller , summing up the situation nicely .
The nature of work deepens the problem .
“ Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it , ” Miller writes , our “ professional society ” is “ made up of specialized careers , ladders of achievement.
” You make your choice , forgoing others : year by year , you “ clamber up into your future , ” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed .
Historic events generate unlived lives .
Years from now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be if the coronavirus pandemic hadn ’ t shifted us onto new courses .
Sometimes we can see another life opening out to one side , like a freeway exit .
Miller recounts the sad history of Jack and Ennis , the cowboys in Annie Proulx ’ s story “ Brokeback Mountain , ” who are in love but live in Wyoming in the nineteen-sixties and seventies , and so must hide it .
They disagree about how to understand their predicament .
Ennis has no “ serious hard feelings , ” Proulx @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sense of getting short-changed.
” But Jack , Miller writes , “ is haunted by the lives they might have led together , running a little ranch or living in Mexico , somewhere away from civilization and its systematic and personal violence.
” Jack tells Ennis , “ We could a had a good life together , a fuckin real good life.
” The existence he has is spoiled by the one he doesn ’ t .
It makes sense for Jack to dwell on how things might have turned out in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have the same kinds of thoughts even when we ’ re basically happy with our lives .
The philosopher Charles Taylor , who has written much about the history of selfhood , has a theory about why we can ’ t just accept the way things are : he thinks that sometime toward the end of the eighteenth century two big trends in our self-understanding converged .
We learned to think of ourselves as “ deep ” individuals , with hidden wellsprings of feeling and talent that we owed it to ourselves to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we came to see ourselves objectively—as somewhat interchangeable members of the same species and of a competitive mass society .
Subjectivity and objectivity both grew more intense .
We came to feel that our lives , pictured from the outside , failed to reflect the vibrancy within .

Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in high school, and we merged them to form a single, teen-age megacorp. For around six hundred dollars a month, we rented office space in the basement of a building in town. We made Web sites and software for an early dating service, an insurance-claims-processing firm, and an online store where customers could “bargain” with a cartoon avatar for overstock goods. I lived large, spending the money I made on tuition, food, and a stereo.
In 1999—our sophomore year—we hit it big. A company that wired mid-tier office buildings with high-speed Internet hired us to build a collaborative work environment for its customers: Slack, avant la lettre. It was a huge project, entrusted to a few college students through some combination of recklessness and charity. We were terrified that we’d taken on work we couldn’t handle but also felt that we were on track to create something innovative. We blew through deadlines and budgets until the C-suite demanded a demo, which we built. Newly confident, we hired our friends, and used our corporate AmEx to expense a “business dinner” at Nobu. Unlike other kids, who were what—socializing?—I had a business card that said “Creative Director.” After midnight, in our darkened office, I nestled my Aeron chair into my IKEA desk, queued up Nine Inch Nails in Winamp, scrolled code, peeped pixels, and entered the matrix. After my client work was done, I’d write short stories for my creative-writing workshops. Often, I slept on the office futon, waking to plunder the vending machine next to the loading dock, where a homeless man lived with his cart.
I liked this entrepreneurial existence—its ambition, its scrappy, near-future velocity. I thought I might move to San Francisco and work in tech. I saw a path, an opening into life. But, as the dot-com bubble burst, our client’s business was acquired by a firm that was acquired by another firm that didn’t want what we’d made. Our invoices went unpaid. It was senior year—a fork in the road. We closed our business and moved out of the office. A few days before graduation, when I went to pay my tuition bill, a girl on the elevator struck up a conversation, then got off at her floor; on my ride down, she stepped on for a second time, and our conversation continued. We started dating, then went to graduate school in English together. We got married, I became a journalist, and we had a son. I now have a life, a world, a story. I’m me, not him—whoever he might have turned out to be.
“The thought that I might have become someone else is so bland that dwelling on it sometimes seems fatuous,” the literary scholar Andrew H. Miller writes, in “On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives” (Harvard). Still, phrased the right way, the thought has an insistent, uncanny magnetism. Miller’s book is, among other things, a compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been. Miller quotes Clifford Geertz, who, in “The Interpretation of Cultures,” wrote that “one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” He cites the critic William Empson: “There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep.” We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. “While growth realizes, it narrows,” Miller writes. “Plural possibilities simmer down.” This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.
For some people, imagining unlived lives is torture, even a gateway to crisis. Miller tells the story of Spencer Brydon, the protagonist of Henry James’s tale “The Jolly Corner.” As a young man, Brydon left America for Europe, where he “followed strange paths and worshiped strange gods,” living as a playboy. Three decades later, he returns to New York, where he takes stock of his peers. Many of them are rich, powerful, or respected; they have built substantial lives. Brydon, who is single and only superficially accomplished, starts to wonder how he would have turned out if he’d stayed. Would he have become a successful businessman? Married his friend Alice, with whom he’s reconnected? He begins to spend his nights prowling the hallways of his childhood home, convinced that the ghost of the man he might have been wanders there. Eventually, he meets a version of himself: an apparitional Brydon, with a forbidding face and two missing fingers, who strides forward in “a rage of personality.” Watching him, Brydon faints. He wakes with his head cradled in Alice’s lap, and realizes that he loves her: better this life than that one!
Most of us aren’t haunted so acutely by the people we might have been. But, perhaps for a morning or a month, our lives can still thrum with the knowledge that it could have been otherwise. “You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife,” David Byrne sings, in the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.” “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’ ” Maybe you feel suddenly pushed around by your life, and wonder if you could have willed it into a different shape. Perhaps you suddenly remember, as Hilary Mantel did, that you have another self “filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that wouldn’t work after the opening lines.” Today, your life is irritating, like an ill-fitting garment; you can’t forget it’s there. “You may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house. . . . This is not my beautiful wife,’ ” Byrne sings.
We may imagine specific unlived lives for ourselves, as artists, or teachers, or tech bros; I have a lawyer friend whose alternate self owns a bar in Red Hook. Or we may just be drawn to possibility itself, as in the poem “The Road Not Taken”: when Robert Frost tells us that choosing one path over the other made “all the difference,” it doesn’t matter what the difference is. Carl Dennis’s poem “The God Who Loves You” tries to make that difference concrete. Dennis poses a question to his protagonist, a middle-aged real-estate agent: “What would have happened / Had you gone to your second choice for college”? A different roommate, a different spouse, a different job: could it all have added up to “a life thirty points above the life you’re living / On any scale of satisfaction”? Only “the god who loves you” knows for sure. It’s an unsettling thought; Dennis suggests that we pity that all-knowing god, “pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives / You’re spared by ignorance.”
Swept up in our real lives, we quickly forget about the unreal ones. Still, there will be moments when, for good or for ill, we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities; they may even, through their persistence, shape us. Practitioners of mindfulness tell us that we should look away, returning our gaze to the actual, the here and now. But we might have the opposite impulse, as Miller does. He wants us to wander in the hall of mirrors—to let our imagined selves “linger longer and say more.” What can our unreal selves say about our real ones?
Their mere presence in our minds may reveal something about how we live: “Unled lives are a largely modern preoccupation,” Miller writes. It used to be that, for the most part, people lived the life their parents had, or the one that the fates decreed. Today, we try to chart our own courses. The difference is reflected in the stories we tell ourselves. In the Iliad, Achilles chooses between two clearly defined fates, designed by the gods and foretold in advance: he can either fight and die at Troy or live a long, boring life. (In the end, he chooses to fight.) But the world in which we live isn’t so neatly organized. Achilles didn’t have to wonder if he should have been pre-med or pre-law; we make such decisions knowing that they might shape our lives.
Among secular people, the absence of an afterlife raises the stakes. In “Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life,” the psychologist Adam Phillips warns that “once the next life—the better life, the fuller life—has to be in this one, we have a considerable task on our hands.” Given just a single shot at existence, we owe it to ourselves to hit the mark; we must not just survive but thrive. It’s no wonder that for many of us “the story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living.”
It’s likely, Miller thinks, that capitalism, “with its isolation of individuals and its accelerating generation of choices and chances,” has increased the number of our unlived lives. “The elevation of choice as an absolute good, the experience of chance as a strange affront, the increasing number of exciting, stultifying decisions we must make, the review of the past to improve future outcomes”—all these “feed the people we’re not.” Advertisers sell us things by getting us to imagine better versions of ourselves, even though there’s only one life to live: it’s “YOLO + FOMO,” a friend tells Miller, summing up the situation nicely. The nature of work deepens the problem. “Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it,” Miller writes, our “professional society” is “made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement.” You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you “clamber up into your future,” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed.


newyorker--2020-12-14--A Journalist’s Murder in Malta

A Journalist’s Murder in Malta

Refugees and migrants started arriving in Malta by boat from North Africa .
Daphne defended the E.U.
’ s asylum law , as her countrymen advocated sinking the boats at sea .
The phrase “ Daphne sucks black cock ” appeared in spray paint on a wall in Bidnija .
Then the arson attacks began—on a human-rights lawyer ’ s car and on the cars of people who worked for a Jesuit refugee service .
One of the Caruana Galizias ’ dogs disappeared .
Another was shot .
Paul , who was in high school , returned home late one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ men had tried to burn down the house .
They had stacked Molotov cocktails in tires and set them alight against glass patio doors overlooking the valley .
Daphne ’ s sons attended university in Malta , then moved away .
Matthew developed news apps for the Financial Times , then followed a girlfriend to Costa Rica , where he built Web sites for investigative-reporting outlets .
Andrew joined Malta ’ s foreign service , and worked in embassies in Berlin and New Delhi .
Paul moved to London and pursued a Ph.D. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grew smaller , madder , more constricting .
In a country that was ninety-five per cent Catholic and hadn ’ t legalized divorce , she wrote that she ’ d rather sip prosecco than go to church on Easter Sunday .
“ The harassment changes with technology , ” she noted , shortly before her death .
Fewer ranting phone calls to the house , fewer envelopes filled with shit .
An old man sent typewritten letters , which Daphne shared with the boys : “ I used to tell them , ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ again.
’ And eventually he must have died , because they stopped.
” As the threats shifted online , devoted readers tried to help .
A breeder of Neapolitan mastiffs gave her a new guard dog .
But an aging bandit who lived nearby said that the dog was too easily won over with treats .
“ Signora , you need a goose , ” he advised .
Later that year , Joseph Muscat ascended to the role of Labour leader—a move that placed him back in Daphne ’ s crosshairs .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
accession by reversing his position and becoming one of the Labour Party ’ s representatives to the European Parliament .
Daphne vilified him , for this and other fumbles , in an increasingly vituperative tone .
In his first month as Labour leader , she described him as a “ cocky shrimp ” who was “ already proving that his party has promoted him beyond his abilities.
” He was , she wrote , a “ quintessential empty vessel , ” his voice a “ nasal whine , which makes him sound @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s been waiting too long in the queue at a nightclub for a vodka-cranberry juice.
” Muscat ’ s supporters were “ sub-literate , ” his wife ’ s behavior like that of “ the worst sort of vulgar , common and pushy person , ” she wrote .
“ And his aides—oh dear , his aides—don ’ t really have that much going on upstairs.
” The Labour Party portrayed her as a partisan hack .
But her attacks were indiscriminate ; she once dedicated a post to her sudden realization that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a “ truly astonishing resemblance ” to a beluga whale .
Muscat set about trying to modernize the Party platform by making it socially liberal and Eurocentric , and in the next few years he won over many of Malta ’ s youth .
He campaigned in favor of bringing women into the workforce and legalizing divorce , and—after a divorce bill narrowly passed , in 2011—he voiced support for gay rights .
In 2013 , Muscat ran for Prime Minister on a pledge to reduce energy costs by at least twenty-five per @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new power station near the island ’ s southern harbor .
Malta ’ s electricity came from heavy fuel oil .
Muscat ’ s proposed station would run on liquid natural gas , which is cheaper and cleaner .
At a campaign event , a woman who lived near the old power station told him that her husband had died of cancer , and that eight of her grandchildren were asthmatic .
“ She brought tears to my eyes , ” Muscat told the press .
“ Under my watch , I will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to save these people .
I don ’ t want to hear of one child who gets sick.
” By then , Daphne ’ s blog was getting more than half a million visitors each day—more than the population of Malta .
The night before the election , a homicide detective named Keith Arnaud was sent to arrest Daphne at home .
Under Maltese law , news outlets were prohibited from publishing election-related content within twenty-four hours of a vote , and Daphne had just mocked Muscat on her blog .
Upon her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ You don ’ t expect to be in an E.U .
member state and have the police investigating and interrogating people for writing about politics on the Internet.
” The next morning , Labour won the election by the widest margin in post-colonial Maltese history , and Muscat became Prime Minister .
He was thirty-nine .
The I.C.I.J .
partnered with more than a hundred journalists from eighty countries to sort through the information .
But Matthew , who reviewed the files after he was hired to build the Web site for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ documents with Maltese reporters .
“ I identified very early on that the managing director of the Times of Malta was in a criminal relationship with Keith Schembri , ” Muscat ’ s chief of staff , he told me .
“ It was a classic kickback scheme.
” Schembri , who owned a printing-and-paper company , overcharged the Times for services , and directed a portion of the profits to a shell company owned by the newspaper ’ s managing director .
( The director , who resigned soon afterward , denies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mother and told her that he had discovered in the data that Schembri had a shell company of his own .
So did Muscat ’ s energy minister , Konrad Mizzi , who was now in charge of the power-station project that had been central to the Labour Party ’ s campaign .
A Maltese accountant had begun setting up the companies in Panama five days after Muscat won .
Daphne had felt for years that the power station made no sense .
The previous government had approved the construction of an undersea @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Malta directly to the European power grid .
Muscat ’ s power station , she thought , was superfluous , costly , and unreliable—and was likely set up as a kind of cover for distributing taxpayer funds to political allies and friends .
“ In Malta we take it for granted that people and businesses finance political parties so as to have their ‘ stooge ’ in government and get a return on their investment , ” she had written a few months after the election .
“ Elsewhere , this is called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remain quiet until April , when the I.C.I.J .
planned to release the Panama Papers .
But , in early February , after a tense encounter with Mizzi , the energy minister , she posted a cryptic note about members of the Labour Party wearing Panama hats .
A leak turned into a flood of new tips .
Then the dam began to break .
There were trusts in New Zealand , companies in the British Virgin Islands , projects in Montenegro , secret accounts in Shanghai and Dubai belonging to members of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s like a Russian doll—you open the one on top and there ’ s another one underneath , ” Matthew told me .
A third shell company , Egrant , was established at the same time as those owned by the men in Muscat ’ s Cabinet .
But the accountant had taken special care to hide the identity of Egrant ’ s owner .
In the accountant ’ s e-mail correspondence with his Panamanian counterparts—in which Schembri and Mizzi are identified by name—he said that he could reveal the name of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ encrypted call .
“ How unbelievably corrupt they are , ” Daphne wrote .
“ And worse still , they were not tempted into corruption when they were already jaded in power , but actually got into power with the express purpose of being corrupt.
” In a parliamentary declaration filed shortly after Mizzi took office , he had overreported his Maltese bank balance by a quarter of a million euros , as if to preëmpt questions once the funds actually arrived .
( Mizzi denies any financial misdeeds . )
With globalization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entry point to the European Union for dirty money .
“ If you allow a bank that ’ s operating as a laundromat to set up in Malta , it ’ s as good as setting it up in Germany or France , ” Paul said .
“ Once illicit money crosses that border , that ’ s it—it ’ s in.
” An Iranian bank owner apparently laundered funds and violated international sanctions through his branch in Valletta ; Russian oligarchs bought Maltese passports , under an investment scheme launched by Muscat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ citizenship seminars ” in Beirut and Dubai to hawk passports .
In speeches , Muscat recited the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi , which begins , “ Lord , make me an instrument of your peace.
” Daphne published her own version .
“ Henley , make me an instrument of your passport sales , ” she wrote , referring to a global citizenship firm .
“ Where there is despair , let me profit from it ; where there is darkness , let me give it a banking licence.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her suspicions that Egrant belonged to Muscat .
Then a whistle-blower from a bank told Daphne that Egrant belonged to Muscat ’ s wife , Michelle .
Soon afterward , the whistle-blower fled to Greece .
The lead investigator at Malta ’ s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit told his bosses that he could find out who owned Egrant within seventy-two hours , if he was given access to the right tax returns , bank statements , and Labour Party files .
The next morning , he was fired .
Meanwhile , Malta ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ investigating any matters originating from the Panama Papers .
( An independent review by a Maltese magistrate found no evidence linking the Muscats to Egrant—but was also unable to identify the owner . )
“ One of the effects of Muscat kind of eating away at our institutions was that it sent people to my mother , ” Paul said .
Bureaucrats whose internal reports ought to have triggered police investigations saw them quashed instead .
So they leaked to Daphne , transforming her from a columnist into the island ’ s most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t always nail the details , but she was uniquely unafraid .
The Labour Party erected billboards with Daphne ’ s face on them .
“ People began to recognize me who had never recognized me before , ” Daphne wrote .
“ They pulled down their car windows to shout abuse.
” On the Party ’ s TV station , Glenn Bedingfield , a government official and a close friend of Muscat ’ s , hosted a show that regularly portrayed Daphne as a deranged , cackling witch , with a hooked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a whiskey bottle as she typed up batty screeds .
Bedingfield also started a blog , posting from the Office of the Prime Minister .
He published photos of Daphne sent in by the public , making her life on the island intolerable .
He wrote about her more than a thousand times .
“ It was like being in prison , ” Paul said .
“ The last time she went to the beach , people took pictures of her and doctored the photos so that her thighs were larger , her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friends were harassed .
When she found a café where people left her alone , it was raided by the police , under the guise of an audit .
The officers smashed glasses and threw around furniture .
During the summer of 2017 , Daphne ’ s son Andrew was abruptly recalled to Malta from his post in New Delhi .
Around that time , he said , an increasing number of inquiries at the Embassy in New Delhi had been about buying Maltese passports .
“ It was humiliating—Malta was becoming an @ @ @ @ @ @

Daphne’s sons worried about her. She was fifty-three and lived in an old stone farmhouse on the edge of Bidnija, a hilltop hamlet on the island of Malta. From the dining-room table, where Daphne wrote, she could see the morning sunlight glisten on the Mediterranean. But she hadn’t been to the beach in four years. When she left the house, people spat at her, followed her, photographed her, and hurled insults and abuse. Once, when she was taking an afternoon walk in a nearby village, a former mayor gathered a mob and began chasing her. She took refuge in a monastery, where the villagers pounded on the heavy wooden doors. All over the island, there were people who were certain that they hated her but had never read a word she had written. They simply knew her as is-sahhara tal-Bidnija—the witch of Bidnija.
Beyond “this little rock,” as Daphne referred to Malta, she was known for her reporting, which exposed malfeasance and hypocrisy within the governing class. She had come to think of the country as fractured by time, with all the worst elements of globalization grafted onto a population that was otherwise stuck in the past. “Malta is 17 miles by nine and flooded with cocaine, corruption, and filthy money,” she wrote. Her blog, Running Commentary, laced deep investigations with withering taunts, and had an online readership as large as all of Malta’s newspapers combined. In late 2016, Politico Europe included Daphne—along with George Soros, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Sadiq Khan—on its list of “people who are shaping, shaking and stirring Europe.” She was “the blogging fury,” the list read, “a one-woman WikiLeaks, crusading against untransparency and corruption in Malta, an island nation famous for both.”
But her subjects were her neighbors—the Prime Minister lived just down the hill. In recent years, he and his Cabinet had sought to smother her with libel lawsuits. People in his office used their work computers to post cruel gossip about her, accompanied by unflattering photographs. There was little serious effort to refute Daphne’s reports—only to disdain her as an élitist, partisan fraud. (Her surname, Caruana Galizia, had become redundant—everyone knew her as Daphne.) “The greatest difficulties I encounter come from the fact that they have made me into what in effect is a national scapegoat,” she once said.
On the afternoon of October 16, 2017, Daphne prepared a plate of tomatoes and mozzarella for Matthew, her eldest son. He was thirty-one, a computer scientist and a journalist himself. An expert on shell companies, he had shared a Pulitzer Prize for the Panama Papers leak. He sometimes got so caught up in his work that he forgot to eat.
Daphne set down the plate and put on her shoes to go to the bank. Her husband, Peter, a lawyer, had left her a stack of blank checks with his signature. She could not access her own accounts: after she claimed that Malta’s economy minister had visited a brothel while on an official mission to Germany, he persuaded a court to freeze her assets.
Across the valley, a man peered at the house. He watched Daphne climb into her car, and called his brother, who was waiting on a boat just offshore. When she was partway down the hill, the man on the boat sent a text message: “REL 1 = ON.”
A local farmer heard a pop and a scream, and watched Daphne yank the emergency brake. Then the gas tank exploded, launching her car into a field. The boom resonated throughout Bidnija valley.
Matthew ran down the hill, barefoot, squinting in the afternoon sun. When he reached the fireball, he thought for a few seconds that the twisted chassis couldn’t be that of his mother’s car, because it was burning white, and hers was charcoal gray. But then Matthew saw the beginning of the license plate—QQZ—and circled the car, helpless, screaming, searching for his mother’s silhouette, his skin as hot as he could stand it.
“I don’t think she made it,” Matthew told Paul, his youngest brother, an academic in London, in a phone call later that afternoon. Andrew, the middle brother, who was a Maltese diplomat, walked out of the foreign-ministry building and never returned. Paul took the first flight home. During the descent, he could frame the entire island within the window. Somewhere in that vista were the men who had ordered the hit. For the first time in a decade, all three brothers slept in their childhood bedrooms.
Supporters of the government posted memes with images of champagne flutes and witches burning at the stake, and made explosion sounds when they saw Daphne’s family in public. “This isn’t like the troll factory in St. Petersburg,” Paul told me. “These are real people. These were her neighbors.”
Daphne’s sons in the family’s garden. When the boys were young, her critics tried to burn down the house. Photograph by Gaia Squarci for The New Yorker
Daphne’s sons carried her coffin, then left the island to regroup. They suspected that their mother’s murder had been arranged by someone who believed that, in Malta, it was less dangerous to assassinate a reporter than to let her complete her work. To kill to protect a secret—it was a crime as old as any. Somewhere in their mother’s files, they thought, there must be a series of clues.
When Daphne was growing up in Malta, there was only one brand of chocolate, one brand of toothpaste, one brand of bluejeans. After attaining independence from the United Kingdom, in September, 1964—a month after she was born—the island suffered a post-colonial hangover, dominated by a repressive socialist Labour Party. For thousands of years, the island’s language, culture, and architecture had been shaped by invasions from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Now, as the Maltese government distanced itself from the most recent colonial empire, it aligned with China, the Soviet Union, Libya, and North Korea.
“You couldn’t talk about politics at school,” Daphne’s sister Corinne told Paul, after his mother’s death. “A classmate would go back and report to their parents what you were saying. And then your parents got into trouble. Your property would be expropriated, for instance, or you’d be seen as an enemy of the state.”
In the early eighties, Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, who had led the Labour Party for more than thirty years, announced that the country’s Catholic schools would be shut down. Daphne and Corinne weren’t religious, but they joined a protest across the harbor from the capital, Valletta. Daphne was arrested and strip-searched by the police. It bothered her that politicians spoke of themselves as public servants while demanding the kind of uncritical deference required by kings. When she was released from jail, she noted to her sister that the local newspapers were neglecting to cover the crisis.
Mintoff’s party lost power in 1987. The new government opened up Malta’s economy and applied to join the European Union. Daphne soon started writing for the Times of Malta. At twenty-five, with three young sons, she became the country’s first female columnist, and the first journalist to attach a name to her opinions. “And this thing was a double shock,” Daphne told a human-rights researcher, days before her death. “I used to have people actually telling me, ‘But does your husband write them for you? Does your father?’ ”
Daphne grew up reading British magazines; now she transposed their irreverence and humor to her considerably smaller island. Cocktail parties became uncomfortable and friendships frayed. But Daphne found it silly when people chided her for writing critically about relatives and neighbors. “We’re calling ourselves European,” she told them. “You can’t say, ‘Ah, you can write that in London, you can write it in Rome, but you can’t write it in Valletta.’ ”
In 1993, Daphne wrote a column calling for the resignation of the head of the armed forces, after it was reported that he had been helping his son, a prolific cocaine trafficker, avoid customs when entering the country. The first casualty of her column was her long-standing friendship with the trafficker’s brother. The second was one of her sources, who was stabbed in the back with a knife. The third was her front door, which was lit on fire. And the fourth was the truth, when Daphne told her young sons that she had started the fire herself, by forgetting to put out a candle. Paul was six years old, Andrew seven, Matthew eight. They spent the next two weeks at a farmhouse in Gozo, Malta’s tiny satellite island to the north, the children unaware why they were missing school.