newyorker--2020-04-13--Ben Lerner on the Voice-Mail Genre

Ben Lerner on the Voice-Mail Genre

Your story in this week ’ s issue , “ The Media , ” opens as its narrator is “ walking at dusk through the long meadow , recording this prose poem.
” How important is the combination of time and movement to the piece ?
Yeah , that ’ s important : the walking , the dusk , the recording device ; the gait of the body and the dying of the light and the ancient impossible desire to get it all down somehow , whether the medium is pen and paper or voice mail .
Language always involves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ message through any medium , you are no longer identical to the person who left it—you are older than the “ I ” who wrote “ I ’ m writing you , ” the “ I ” who said “ I ’ m calling you ” —but the message takes on a life of its own , becomes a fragment of another present renewed by a recipient in whatever near or distant future ; it ’ s a little linguistic miracle , and if I ’ m ever numb to it I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I wanted “ I ’ m calling ” to sound casual and contemporary— “ I ’ m calling to check in ” —but also to sound archaic , part of the history of poets calling , poets crying out among the hierarchies .
( I realize only now that this text was in part enabled by Peter Gizzi ’ s beautiful poem “ It Was Raining in Delft , ” where the speaker moves quickly from the language of the phone to the belated language of poetry : “ I will call in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ve been walking for 7 hrs on yr name day .
/ Dead , I am calling you now.
” ) And the question of “ poetic calling ” is in many ways the subject of the prose : he , the speaker , lacks the Orphic power to animate the world or the power to bring back the dead , but—like everybody else—he faces the related if diminished task of trying to find meaning in the world and to share it with friends .
So he ’ s in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he ’ s also in the million meadows that have appeared in poems ( Chris Nealon has a great recent poem , called “ White Meadows , ” taking on the tired meadow trope ) .
The media in “ The Media ” are an iPhone 6 with a badly cracked screen and the ancient technology of poetry .
Technologies for throwing the voice across space and time .
As delicate as an insect ’ s wing .
There ’ s an unnamed interlocutor or interlocutors in “ The Media ” —a friend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A mutual friend of theirs has overdosed , perhaps intentionally .
How significant are those calls and the opening up of the piece—and the routine of the narrator ’ s day—to the world outside his family and his immediate surroundings in Brooklyn ?
It opens up his individual “ singing ” to the social .
Maybe we ’ re getting fragments of the actual voice mails he ’ s leaving mixed with fragments of his poetic meditations , prose fading in and out of poetry , poetry fading in and out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his head , unsent , unleft voice mails .
( I wish “ unleft ” were a word . )
The calls also create an important dynamic in the piece because the speaker wants to make those calls without his daughter hearing—he is dissembling with his daughter , protecting her from the difficult news , or protecting himself from having to explain it , just as he ’ s dissembling when he allows her to think she ’ s pulled the bus ’ s stop cord herself .
So there is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re running “ The Media ” — “ this prose poem ” —under the rubric of fiction , but what do you consider the piece to be ?
What ’ s the difference , for you , between thinking of this as a story and thinking of it as poetry ?
I consider it to be more prose poem than story , but it ’ s not like I can proffer a stable definition of prose poetry ; the instability is the point .
Certainly , I think of the relative brevity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and repetitions as belonging more to poetry than to a conventional prose narrative .
But there is a narrative frame of sorts—I mean both the narrator leaving these strange voice mails with their lyrical flights and what can be inferred from them .
I like having it appear here as “ fiction , ” but maybe somewhere else it could appear as poetry .
It ’ s like those eye tests where they ask you to read a letter through one lens and then another—what ’ s revealed or distorted by this lens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
This piece will ultimately be part of an ongoing collaboration with the artist Barbara Bloom .
Another text for that project is a kind of audio tour .
They all involve poetry and elements of fiction and nonfiction , but they can be curated or displayed differently at different times , set on different planes—here on a wall , there in a book , as a recording , et cetera .
Maybe the genre of this piece is “ voice mail.
” The speaker refers to himself as being in a “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” and later thinks about what he might tell his daughters he does when they ask .
How self-conscious is the poet of the twenty-first century when it comes to status definitions ?
The “ discipline in crisis ” language is more from the academy than from poetry .
I ’ d probably been reading something about enrollment in English departments , but if you Google “ discipline in crisis ” my guess is you will find hits for all of the humanities and most social sciences .
( And I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many things we care about . )
That said , poetry is not in crisis ; poetry , like other kinds of writing , is a highly various set of practices which do not live or die by markets or enrollments or subscribers ( although somebody—usually an older white guy—does seem to proclaim the death of poetry every few years ) .
But , yes , in many ways , this piece is the speaker ’ s , is my , response to a question from his daughter : What is your job @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the first grade ) has asked me that a lot lately , and , while I can more or less explain teaching to her satisfaction , I ’ m hard pressed to offer a coherent account of my work as a writer .
Part of what this piece plays with is the way writing—at least so-called creative writing—doesn ’ t exactly code as work , but isn ’ t exactly leisure .
My girls see me typing and erasing or reading and have a hard time understanding why exactly I call that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as I—like many writers I know—both feel like I ’ m working all the time and like I should go get a “ real job.
” This question of the status of literary labor is an old one .
As I ’ ve written about elsewhere , Whitman is one figure for the strange status of writing as work .
On the one hand , the guy claims to be doing the most important work he can imagine : he ’ s writing the secular bible of the United States .
On @ @ @ @ @ @ @ always taking his ease under a flowering tree .
He ’ s always “ loafing.
” I think , in this prose poem or story or whatever we ’ re calling it , the narrator is trying to think about whether “ making visible ” significance through art is something he can do , and if that might aid him as a father or help him help a despairing friend .
But there is that moment where the professionalization of the poet is travestied—the job interview in a hotel where they call on @ @ @ @

Photograph by Elinor Carucci
Your story in this week’s issue, “The Media,” opens as its narrator is “walking at dusk through the long meadow, recording this prose poem.” How important is the combination of time and movement to the piece?
Yeah, that’s important: the walking, the dusk, the recording device; the gait of the body and the dying of the light and the ancient impossible desire to get it all down somehow, whether the medium is pen and paper or voice mail. Language always involves time travel: when you leave a message through any medium, you are no longer identical to the person who left it—you are older than the “I” who wrote “I’m writing you,” the “I” who said “I’m calling you”—but the message takes on a life of its own, becomes a fragment of another present renewed by a recipient in whatever near or distant future; it’s a little linguistic miracle, and if I’m ever numb to it I’ll quit reading and writing altogether. I wanted “I’m calling” to sound casual and contemporary—“I’m calling to check in”—but also to sound archaic, part of the history of poets calling, poets crying out among the hierarchies. (I realize only now that this text was in part enabled by Peter Gizzi’s beautiful poem “It Was Raining in Delft,” where the speaker moves quickly from the language of the phone to the belated language of poetry: “I will call in an hour where you are sleeping. I’ve been walking for 7 hrs on yr name day. / Dead, I am calling you now.”) And the question of “poetic calling” is in many ways the subject of the prose: he, the speaker, lacks the Orphic power to animate the world or the power to bring back the dead, but—like everybody else—he faces the related if diminished task of trying to find meaning in the world and to share it with friends. So he’s in the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, and he’s also in the million meadows that have appeared in poems (Chris Nealon has a great recent poem, called “White Meadows,” taking on the tired meadow trope). The media in “The Media” are an iPhone 6 with a badly cracked screen and the ancient technology of poetry. Technologies for throwing the voice across space and time. As delicate as an insect’s wing.
There’s an unnamed interlocutor or interlocutors in “The Media”—a friend or friends the narrator’s calling. A mutual friend of theirs has overdosed, perhaps intentionally. How significant are those calls and the opening up of the piece—and the routine of the narrator’s day—to the world outside his family and his immediate surroundings in Brooklyn?
It opens up his individual “singing” to the social. Maybe we’re getting fragments of the actual voice mails he’s leaving mixed with fragments of his poetic meditations, prose fading in and out of poetry, poetry fading in and out of conversation. The more lyrical messages are in his head, unsent, unleft voice mails. (I wish “unleft” were a word.) The calls also create an important dynamic in the piece because the speaker wants to make those calls without his daughter hearing—he is dissembling with his daughter, protecting her from the difficult news, or protecting himself from having to explain it, just as he’s dissembling when he allows her to think she’s pulled the bus’s stop cord herself. So there is that drama of innocence and experience.
We’re running “The Media”—“this prose poem”—under the rubric of fiction, but what do you consider the piece to be? What’s the difference, for you, between thinking of this as a story and thinking of it as poetry?
I consider it to be more prose poem than story, but it’s not like I can proffer a stable definition of prose poetry; the instability is the point. Certainly, I think of the relative brevity and sonic slippages and weird syntactic recombinations and repetitions as belonging more to poetry than to a conventional prose narrative. But there is a narrative frame of sorts—I mean both the narrator leaving these strange voice mails with their lyrical flights and what can be inferred from them. I like having it appear here as “fiction,” but maybe somewhere else it could appear as poetry. It’s like those eye tests where they ask you to read a letter through one lens and then another—what’s revealed or distorted by this lens, this frame, or that one? This piece will ultimately be part of an ongoing collaboration with the artist Barbara Bloom. Another text for that project is a kind of audio tour. They all involve poetry and elements of fiction and nonfiction, but they can be curated or displayed differently at different times, set on different planes—here on a wall, there in a book, as a recording, et cetera. Maybe the genre of this piece is “voice mail.”
The speaker refers to himself as being in a “discipline in crisis, this cut-flower business,” and later thinks about what he might tell his daughters he does when they ask. How self-conscious is the poet of the twenty-first century when it comes to status definitions?
The “discipline in crisis” language is more from the academy than from poetry. I’d probably been reading something about enrollment in English departments, but if you Google “discipline in crisis” my guess is you will find hits for all of the humanities and most social sciences. (And I’m sure for magazines. And so many things we care about.) That said, poetry is not in crisis; poetry, like other kinds of writing, is a highly various set of practices which do not live or die by markets or enrollments or subscribers (although somebody—usually an older white guy—does seem to proclaim the death of poetry every few years). But, yes, in many ways, this piece is the speaker’s, is my, response to a question from his daughter: What is your job? My older daughter (who is in the first grade) has asked me that a lot lately, and, while I can more or less explain teaching to her satisfaction, I’m hard pressed to offer a coherent account of my work as a writer. Part of what this piece plays with is the way writing—at least so-called creative writing—doesn’t exactly code as work, but isn’t exactly leisure. My girls see me typing and erasing or reading and have a hard time understanding why exactly I call that “work.” Their confusion mirrors mine, as I—like many writers I know—both feel like I’m working all the time and like I should go get a “real job.” This question of the status of literary labor is an old one. As I’ve written about elsewhere, Whitman is one figure for the strange status of writing as work. On the one hand, the guy claims to be doing the most important work he can imagine: he’s writing the secular bible of the United States. On the other hand, he’s always taking his ease under a flowering tree. He’s always “loafing.” I think, in this prose poem or story or whatever we’re calling it, the narrator is trying to think about whether “making visible” significance through art is something he can do, and if that might aid him as a father or help him help a despairing friend. But there is that moment where the professionalization of the poet is travestied—the job interview in a hotel where they call on him to sing.


newyorker--2020-04-13--The Strokes’ Eerily Prescient “The New Abnormal”

The first time the Strokes put out an album in the midst of a local and national crisis was on October 9 , 2001 .
The U.S. release of their full-length début , “ Is This It , ” had been delayed by 9/11 , and the band had scrambled to excise “ New York City Cops , ” a sneering indictment of the city ’ s police force , from the CD .
( It remained on the vinyl . )
New York was grieving and dazed , but the Strokes seemed so emblematic of the city ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nearly patriotic .
When “ Is This It ” was released , I was twenty-one , and in my first semester of an M.F.A .
program .
I worked as an editorial intern at Spin a couple of days a week , and spent most of my evenings drinking cheap beer and going to see bands at the Mercury Lounge , a small rock club on the Lower East Side .
I wore threadbare vintage T-shirts and artfully disintegrating Chuck Taylors , and never went anywhere without a Manhattan Portage messenger bag and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was young , broke , privileged , and oblivious ; I believed that New York was the exact center of the universe .
As such , I was almost too perfectly positioned to receive the Strokes as a kind of nihilist gospel .
I worshipped the band instantly and thoroughly .
Musically , the Strokes weren ’ t doing anything particularly innovative , and critics of the band excitedly pointed out how easy it was to find precedents for its anxious , hooky indie rock : the Velvet Underground , Television , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while since rock and roll had sounded so rangy and bored .
In the late nineties , the genre had grown angry and hypermasculine .
Bands such as Staind , Creed , and System of a Down , all of which had No .
1 records in 2001 , were led by red-faced men who sang with almost unfathomable conviction .
Julian Casablancas , the Strokes ’ handsome and vaguely bummed-out lead singer , was listless by comparison .
He drank too much—sometimes he leaned on the microphone stand to steady himself—and his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When we was young , oh man , did we have fun , ” Casablancas sang , on “ Someday.
” Even at twenty-two , he was already over it .
Now , eighteen years later , as the city again attempts to steady itself , the Strokes have released “ The New Abnormal , ” the band ’ s sixth album and its first since 2013 .
The title is eerily prescient—a handy summation of how daily life in New York has changed since the start of the year .
This is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nostalgia is a heavy and intoxicating force .
“ The New Abnormal ” sounds better to me than almost anything else I ’ ve listened to this spring .
The album was produced by Rick Rubin , whose method consists mostly of stripping songs of extraneous or maudlin elements , compressing the audio , and pumping up the volume .
Rubin can turn an ordinary song into a bullet .
His practice of reduction and amplification doesn ’ t work for every artist , but this distillation has made the Strokes sound only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ band was never really beloved for its subtlety . )
The Strokes first played “ Bad Decisions , ” an early single from the album , in February , at a rally for Bernie Sanders in Durham , New Hampshire .
( Many popular indie-rock acts , including Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend , have performed at events in support of the Sanders campaign ; one of the great pre-pandemic joys was watching Sanders carefully consult his notes before yelling an artist ’ s name . )
“ Bad Decisions ” has all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , including an overly familiar chorus .
( “ Last Nite , ” from “ Is This It , ” featured a riff based on Tom Petty ’ s “ American Girl ” ; “ Bad Decisions ” resembles Billy Idol ’ s “ Dancing with Myself ” enough that Idol and his writing partner , Tony James , were preëmptively given a songwriting credit . )
“ I ’ m making bad decisions / Really , really bad decisions , ” Casablancas sings , in the song ’ s final chorus .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
” in a way that sounds equal parts celebratory and despairing .
He seems to understand that the effects of poor judgment can be both banal and devastating , and that our worst behavior is often deliberate and premeditated .
Sometimes we know that we ’ re doing something stupid , but we do it anyway .
Acknowledging the paradox helps to neutralize the shame .
The Strokes ’ music makes everything feel less high-stakes .
This might be why it sounds so good in an emergency .
Nothing is ever so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shrugged off .
People arrive and depart , relationships begin and fracture , things are lost , parties get boring—whatever .
Casablancas ’ s songs briefly make a person feel like she ’ s just a little bit above it all , worn out in a sexy , oblique way , rather than in the usual gutted , ugly way .
“ The room is on fire as she ’ s fixing her hair , ” Casablancas sang , on “ Reptilia , ” a track from “ Room on Fire , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Casablancas is forty-one now , a husband and a father , but he remains repulsed by melodrama and displays of sentimentality .
Instead , he is a stealthily emotive singer—he often ends notes with a delicate little flourish , letting his voice become full and pretty , if only for a moment .
He does this to incredible effect in “ At the Door , ” a tense , spare song about cycles of self-flagellation .
Its verses feature only Casablancas ’ s voice and a synthesizer .
He sings of blankly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : For much of the twenty-tens , it seemed as if the Strokes might be done making records altogether .
In interviews , the band members were often cagey about their interpersonal dynamics , though it was still widely understood that on their first three releases ( “ Room on Fire ” was followed by “ First Impressions of Earth , ” in 2006 ) Casablancas functioned as a sort of default creative director , writing all the lyrics and most of the music .
When Casablancas ’ s bandmates ( the guitarists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Valensi , the bassist Nikolai Fraiture , and the drummer Fabrizio Moretti ) suggested that Casablancas consider a more collaborative approach to the work , he complied—but one got the sense that he did so with deep bitterness .
The recording of “ Angles , ” the band ’ s fourth record , was fraught .
Casablancas was supposedly absent for most of the sessions , recording his parts alone .
“ It was awful—just awful , ” Valensi later told Pitchfork .
The band chose not to tour or to do any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ release , the jittery and unfocussed “ Comedown Machine , ” from 2013 .
Meanwhile , Casablancas quit drinking , moved upstate , and started a new band , the Voidz .
He began writing different sorts of songs .
“ Human Sadness , ” a meandering , eleven-minute freak-out from the Voidz ’ s album “ Tyranny , ” seemed to speak to some long-simmering avant-garde aspirations .
( Casablancas ’ s vocals are mostly incomprehensible , and a scratchy guitar solo lasts a full minute . )
If “ Is This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Underground ’ s “ Loaded , ” then “ Tyranny ” is Casablancas ’ s “ Metal Machine Music ” —weird , gorgeously antagonistic , and expressly noncommercial .
It ’ s interesting to wonder if the Strokes will appeal to listeners born in the years following “ Is This It ” —young people who are in thrall , perhaps , to some of what the Strokes inspired ( the Arctic Monkeys , Ty Segall ) but not necessarily to the band itself .
“ I ’ m not scared / Just don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not listening , you hear ?
” Casablancas sings , on “ Selfless.
” The sensation he ’ s describing—a kind of purposeful disengagement—is familiar to anyone who came of age in the nineties , but apathy of this sort is largely anathema to Generation Z .
Will the idea that life is too mortifying to be taken seriously compute for teen-agers who spend their spare time screaming themselves hoarse at climate protests ?
They have fought to hone and perpetuate a grammar of inclusivity , in which no one is made to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pleasure of listening to the Strokes is in feeling as if you have arrived someplace exclusive , where heartache doesn ’ t quite register .
Yet Casablancas is not apolitical ; he has spoken often and at length about his own distrust of capitalist systems , despite being a product of them .
( His father is John Casablancas , the founder of Elite Model Management ; his mother is a former Miss Denmark ; and he grew up attending various boarding and private schools . )
In a 2018 appearance on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Corden , ” Casablancas wore a militaristic black cargo vest .
As Corden gamely attempted to stuff its pockets with orange slices , Casablancas issued a warning : “ We ’ re in an invisible war , my friend .
Got ta be ready.
” Perhaps there is an emotional tipping point where caring too much begins to look like not caring at all .
The Strokes might know it better than any other band .
♦

The first time the Strokes put out an album in the midst of a local and national crisis was on October 9, 2001. The U.S. release of their full-length début, “Is This It,” had been delayed by 9/11, and the band had scrambled to excise “New York City Cops,” a sneering indictment of the city’s police force, from the CD. (It remained on the vinyl.) New York was grieving and dazed, but the Strokes seemed so emblematic of the city’s excesses and allure that loving them felt nearly patriotic.
When “Is This It” was released, I was twenty-one, and in my first semester of an M.F.A. program. I worked as an editorial intern at Spin a couple of days a week, and spent most of my evenings drinking cheap beer and going to see bands at the Mercury Lounge, a small rock club on the Lower East Side. I wore threadbare vintage T-shirts and artfully disintegrating Chuck Taylors, and never went anywhere without a Manhattan Portage messenger bag and an enormous pair of headphones. I was young, broke, privileged, and oblivious; I believed that New York was the exact center of the universe. As such, I was almost too perfectly positioned to receive the Strokes as a kind of nihilist gospel. I worshipped the band instantly and thoroughly.
Musically, the Strokes weren’t doing anything particularly innovative, and critics of the band excitedly pointed out how easy it was to find precedents for its anxious, hooky indie rock: the Velvet Underground, Television, the Stooges. But it had been a while since rock and roll had sounded so rangy and bored. In the late nineties, the genre had grown angry and hypermasculine. Bands such as Staind, Creed, and System of a Down, all of which had No. 1 records in 2001, were led by red-faced men who sang with almost unfathomable conviction. Julian Casablancas, the Strokes’ handsome and vaguely bummed-out lead singer, was listless by comparison. He drank too much—sometimes he leaned on the microphone stand to steady himself—and his eyes were soft and doleful. “When we was young, oh man, did we have fun,” Casablancas sang, on “Someday.” Even at twenty-two, he was already over it.
Now, eighteen years later, as the city again attempts to steady itself, the Strokes have released “The New Abnormal,” the band’s sixth album and its first since 2013. The title is eerily prescient—a handy summation of how daily life in New York has changed since the start of the year. This is a lonesome and frightening time, and nostalgia is a heavy and intoxicating force. “The New Abnormal” sounds better to me than almost anything else I’ve listened to this spring. The album was produced by Rick Rubin, whose method consists mostly of stripping songs of extraneous or maudlin elements, compressing the audio, and pumping up the volume. Rubin can turn an ordinary song into a bullet. His practice of reduction and amplification doesn’t work for every artist, but this distillation has made the Strokes sound only sharper and more potent. (The band was never really beloved for its subtlety.)
The Strokes first played “Bad Decisions,” an early single from the album, in February, at a rally for Bernie Sanders in Durham, New Hampshire. (Many popular indie-rock acts, including Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend, have performed at events in support of the Sanders campaign; one of the great pre-pandemic joys was watching Sanders carefully consult his notes before yelling an artist’s name.) “Bad Decisions” has all the elements of a classic Strokes single, including an overly familiar chorus. (“Last Nite,” from “Is This It,” featured a riff based on Tom Petty’s “American Girl”; “Bad Decisions” resembles Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” enough that Idol and his writing partner, Tony James, were preëmptively given a songwriting credit.) “I’m making bad decisions / Really, really bad decisions,” Casablancas sings, in the song’s final chorus. Then he drags out a “Yeeeaaahhh!” in a way that sounds equal parts celebratory and despairing. He seems to understand that the effects of poor judgment can be both banal and devastating, and that our worst behavior is often deliberate and premeditated. Sometimes we know that we’re doing something stupid, but we do it anyway. Acknowledging the paradox helps to neutralize the shame.
The Strokes’ music makes everything feel less high-stakes. This might be why it sounds so good in an emergency. Nothing is ever so unbearable that it can’t be shrugged off. People arrive and depart, relationships begin and fracture, things are lost, parties get boring—whatever. Casablancas’s songs briefly make a person feel like she’s just a little bit above it all, worn out in a sexy, oblique way, rather than in the usual gutted, ugly way. “The room is on fire as she’s fixing her hair,” Casablancas sang, on “Reptilia,” a track from “Room on Fire,” the follow-up to “Is This It.”
Casablancas is forty-one now, a husband and a father, but he remains repulsed by melodrama and displays of sentimentality. Instead, he is a stealthily emotive singer—he often ends notes with a delicate little flourish, letting his voice become full and pretty, if only for a moment. He does this to incredible effect in “At the Door,” a tense, spare song about cycles of self-flagellation. Its verses feature only Casablancas’s voice and a synthesizer. He sings of blankly accepting whatever he’s got coming:
I can’t escape it
Never gonna make it
Out of this in time
I guess that’s just fine.
For much of the twenty-tens, it seemed as if the Strokes might be done making records altogether. In interviews, the band members were often cagey about their interpersonal dynamics, though it was still widely understood that on their first three releases (“Room on Fire” was followed by “First Impressions of Earth,” in 2006) Casablancas functioned as a sort of default creative director, writing all the lyrics and most of the music. When Casablancas’s bandmates (the guitarists Albert Hammond, Jr., and Nick Valensi, the bassist Nikolai Fraiture, and the drummer Fabrizio Moretti) suggested that Casablancas consider a more collaborative approach to the work, he complied—but one got the sense that he did so with deep bitterness. The recording of “Angles,” the band’s fourth record, was fraught. Casablancas was supposedly absent for most of the sessions, recording his parts alone. “It was awful—just awful,” Valensi later told Pitchfork. The band chose not to tour or to do any interviews or appearances to promote its next release, the jittery and unfocussed “Comedown Machine,” from 2013.
Meanwhile, Casablancas quit drinking, moved upstate, and started a new band, the Voidz. He began writing different sorts of songs. “Human Sadness,” a meandering, eleven-minute freak-out from the Voidz’s album “Tyranny,” seemed to speak to some long-simmering avant-garde aspirations. (Casablancas’s vocals are mostly incomprehensible, and a scratchy guitar solo lasts a full minute.) If “Is This It” is analogous to the Velvet Underground’s “Loaded,” then “Tyranny” is Casablancas’s “Metal Machine Music”—weird, gorgeously antagonistic, and expressly noncommercial.
It’s interesting to wonder if the Strokes will appeal to listeners born in the years following “Is This It”—young people who are in thrall, perhaps, to some of what the Strokes inspired (the Arctic Monkeys, Ty Segall) but not necessarily to the band itself. “I’m not scared / Just don’t care / I’m not listening, you hear?” Casablancas sings, on “Selfless.” The sensation he’s describing—a kind of purposeful disengagement—is familiar to anyone who came of age in the nineties, but apathy of this sort is largely anathema to Generation Z. Will the idea that life is too mortifying to be taken seriously compute for teen-agers who spend their spare time screaming themselves hoarse at climate protests? They have fought to hone and perpetuate a grammar of inclusivity, in which no one is made to feel insufficient, but so much of the pleasure of listening to the Strokes is in feeling as if you have arrived someplace exclusive, where heartache doesn’t quite register.
Yet Casablancas is not apolitical; he has spoken often and at length about his own distrust of capitalist systems, despite being a product of them. (His father is John Casablancas, the founder of Elite Model Management; his mother is a former Miss Denmark; and he grew up attending various boarding and private schools.) In a 2018 appearance on “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” Casablancas wore a militaristic black cargo vest. As Corden gamely attempted to stuff its pockets with orange slices, Casablancas issued a warning: “We’re in an invisible war, my friend. Gotta be ready.” Perhaps there is an emotional tipping point where caring too much begins to look like not caring at all. The Strokes might know it better than any other band. ♦


newyorker--2020-04-13--Annie Ernaux, a Memoirist Who Mistrusts Her Own Memories

A young woman has her first sexual experience .
She is pleased to be desired by someone .
She does not feel humiliated .
But , later , she is mocked , tormented by others who believe that she has debased herself .
Those whom she thought of as her friends now treat her like nothing .
She feels shame .
Is the shame hers ?
Or is it a reflection of what is expected of her ?
“ To go all the way to the end of ’ 58 means agreeing to the demolition of all the interpretations I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Annie Ernaux writes in “ A Girl ’ s Story ” ( Seven Stories ) , published in French in 2016 , and now in English , translated by Alison L. Strayer .
The book is an account of a sexual encounter Ernaux had as a teen-ager , and it is both a reconstruction of events and a deconstruction of feelings .
The emotional history , she hopes , will be the most personal one , the truest one .
The challenge of being a historian , however , is knowing whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comes from within .
The book circles around the summer of 1958 , when eighteen-year-old Annie is working as a camp counsellor in northern France , in a town she calls “ S. ” She is sheltered and naïve ; aside from a trip to Lourdes with her father , she has barely left home .
At camp , she develops a crush on a man she calls H. He looks like Marlon Brando : “ She does not care that the other female counselors murmur to each other that he ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thinks of him as “ the Archangel.
” What draws her to H is a need to be seen .
No one has ever looked at her with such a “ heavy gaze.
” They dance at a counsellors ’ party .
“ Seduction ” is not the right word for what happens next .
But Ernaux doesn ’ t give these events a single name .
Instead , she describes , as clearly as she can , how she follows H to her room , how “ she feels his sex prod @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
.
.
There is no difference between what she does and what happens to her.
” Soon , “ a thick jet of sperm explodes in her face , gushing all the way into her nostrils.
” The precision of this language doesn ’ t necessarily evoke pleasure , but Annie is consumed by emotion , desperate for H and the possibility of his desire .
Ernaux is an unusual memoirist : she distrusts her memory .
She writes in the first person , and then abruptly switches and speaks about herself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ the girl of ’ 58 ” or “ the girl of S. ” At times , it seems as though she were looking at herself in an old photograph or a scene in a movie .
She tells us when she is getting lost in the story , and where her memory goes blank .
Ernaux does not so much reveal the past—she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it—as unpack it .
“ What is the point of writing , ” she says , “ if not to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at unearthing , her prose combines the spare and the unsparing .
She seems desperate to put it all on the page : period blood , abortions , contraceptive pills , dirty underwear , erections , and semen .
But Ernaux ’ s writing is rubbed down , simple , almost clinical in its exactness .
From the vantage of adulthood , she Googles and questions , she revisits old haunts and reads old letters , as if she were a detective cracking an unsolvable case : the mystery of her own past @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done , one senses , with the expectation of ever truly settling on a truth .
“ I am not trying to remember , ” she writes .
“ I am trying to be inside .
.
.
.
To be there at that very instant , without spilling over into the before or after .
To be in the pure immanence of a moment.
” Of course , our recollections aren ’ t continuous , and you can ’ t always get “ inside , ” no matter how many angles you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perhaps one reason that Ernaux , both as a girl and as an adult , can ’ t help but turn to those around her for cues .
As readers , we lose access to “ the girl of S , ” often at the moments when we need it most .
Instead , Ernaux begins to discuss the reactions of the other counsellors : Reading this book in 2020 , one is tempted to think of these gaps and tricks of memory in terms of trauma—the kind of trauma that keeps women @ @ @ @ @ @ @ full account of their own lives .
Completion , we ’ re told , is a necessary condition for truth .
“ Don ’ t tell us the story of your life , it ’ s full of holes , ” the other counsellors like to say .
Her peers dig up her letters and read them out loud to one another .
They drag her to H ’ s door .
The teen-age Ernaux does not realize what is happening .
It is only later that she perceives the effects of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Long live whores ” on her mirror in toothpaste , these words begin to shape how she sees herself .
And it isn ’ t so easy to look away from the mirrors that society creates for us .
When Ernaux leaves the camp , she develops bulimia , and her period stops .
“ I could not imagine there was a name for my behavior .
.
.
.
I thought of it as a moral failing .
I don ’ t believe I linked it to H. ” These links @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , has always been after .
In the sixty years and twenty books since the summer of 1958 , she has been devoted to a single task : the excavation of her own life .
“ I would go so far as to judge my previous books as vague approximations ” of reality , Ernaux writes in “ A Girl ’ s Story.
” In one , she describes a love affair ; in another , the relationship between her parents .
Throughout , the contours of her story stay the same—a childhood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grocers , the shame of her lower-class upbringing , the clash of these origins with her later literary successes .
Her mother “ knew all the household tips that lessened the strain of poverty .
This knowledge .
.
.
stops at my generation .
I am only the archivist , ” she writes in her 1988 book , “ A Woman ’ s Story.
” Ernaux ’ s books are small , simple , rarely exceeding a hundred pages .
In each , she is always asking how she can be sure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ A Woman ’ s Story , ” she talks about her mother ’ s death .
Nearly a decade later , in “ I Remain in Darkness ” ( 1997 ) , she goes back to that moment and declares her recollection incomplete—she hadn ’ t fully described her mother ’ s long cognitive decline , the terrors of dementia .
A consistent voice guides each of these revisitations : a scientific and searching “ I.
” The books are whittled down to an intense core—not a confession but a kind of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have brought Ernaux fame , prizes , and a number of stylistic descendants .
Central to her work is an awareness that the most intimate moments of life are always governed by the circumstances in which they occur—that probing the personal will also involve investigating the historical .
This is clearest in “ Happening ” ( 2000 ) , an account of an abortion Ernaux had in 1963 .
Early in the book , she describes going to see an acquaintance who is known as an activist for greater access to birth control @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Then he tells her that he can ’ t help her .
After she has travelled to Paris to obtain the abortion , she hears that “ a woman who lived round the corner would do it for three hundred francs .
.
.
.
Now that I no longer needed them , suddenly , bevies of abortionists were springing up left , right , and center.
” By the time Ernaux published the book , abortion had been legalized .
But a victory in legislation does not make disclosure any easier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ discrimination is passed , former victims tend to remain silent on the grounds that ‘ now it ’ s all over , ’ ” she writes .
“ So what went on is surrounded by the same veil of secrecy as before .
”

A young woman has her first sexual experience. She is pleased to be desired by someone. She does not feel humiliated. But, later, she is mocked, tormented by others who believe that she has debased herself. Those whom she thought of as her friends now treat her like nothing. She feels shame. Is the shame hers? Or is it a reflection of what is expected of her?
“To go all the way to the end of ’58 means agreeing to the demolition of all the interpretations I’ve assembled over the years,” Annie Ernaux writes in “A Girl’s Story” (Seven Stories), published in French in 2016, and now in English, translated by Alison L. Strayer. The book is an account of a sexual encounter Ernaux had as a teen-ager, and it is both a reconstruction of events and a deconstruction of feelings. The emotional history, she hopes, will be the most personal one, the truest one. The challenge of being a historian, however, is knowing whether what she felt—and what she still feels—really comes from within.
The book circles around the summer of 1958, when eighteen-year-old Annie is working as a camp counsellor in northern France, in a town she calls “S.” She is sheltered and naïve; aside from a trip to Lourdes with her father, she has barely left home. At camp, she develops a crush on a man she calls H. He looks like Marlon Brando: “She does not care that the other female counselors murmur to each other that he’s all brawn, no brains.” She thinks of him as “the Archangel.”
What draws her to H is a need to be seen. No one has ever looked at her with such a “heavy gaze.” They dance at a counsellors’ party. “Seduction” is not the right word for what happens next. But Ernaux doesn’t give these events a single name. Instead, she describes, as clearly as she can, how she follows H to her room, how “she feels his sex prod at her belly through her jeans. . . . There is no difference between what she does and what happens to her.” Soon, “a thick jet of sperm explodes in her face, gushing all the way into her nostrils.” The precision of this language doesn’t necessarily evoke pleasure, but Annie is consumed by emotion, desperate for H and the possibility of his desire.
Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory. She writes in the first person, and then abruptly switches and speaks about herself from a distance, calling past selves “the girl of ’58” or “the girl of S.” At times, it seems as though she were looking at herself in an old photograph or a scene in a movie. She tells us when she is getting lost in the story, and where her memory goes blank. Ernaux does not so much reveal the past—she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it—as unpack it. “What is the point of writing,” she says, “if not to unearth things?”
In this attempt at unearthing, her prose combines the spare and the unsparing. She seems desperate to put it all on the page: period blood, abortions, contraceptive pills, dirty underwear, erections, and semen. But Ernaux’s writing is rubbed down, simple, almost clinical in its exactness. From the vantage of adulthood, she Googles and questions, she revisits old haunts and reads old letters, as if she were a detective cracking an unsolvable case: the mystery of her own past. But none of this investigating is done, one senses, with the expectation of ever truly settling on a truth. “I am not trying to remember,” she writes. “I am trying to be inside. . . . To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after. To be in the pure immanence of a moment.”
Of course, our recollections aren’t continuous, and you can’t always get “inside,” no matter how many angles you try. The difficulty of interiority is perhaps one reason that Ernaux, both as a girl and as an adult, can’t help but turn to those around her for cues. As readers, we lose access to “the girl of S,” often at the moments when we need it most. Instead, Ernaux begins to discuss the reactions of the other counsellors:
I will have to present another list that includes the coarse taunts, the hooting and jeering, the insults passed off as jokes, whereby the male counselors made her an object of scorn and derision, they whose verbal hegemony went unquestioned and was even admired by the female counselors.
Reading this book in 2020, one is tempted to think of these gaps and tricks of memory in terms of trauma—the kind of trauma that keeps women from giving, or getting, a full account of their own lives. Completion, we’re told, is a necessary condition for truth. “Don’t tell us the story of your life, it’s full of holes,” the other counsellors like to say. Her peers dig up her letters and read them out loud to one another. They drag her to H’s door. The teen-age Ernaux does not realize what is happening. It is only later that she perceives the effects of this “verbal hegemony.” When someone writes “Long live whores” on her mirror in toothpaste, these words begin to shape how she sees herself.
And it isn’t so easy to look away from the mirrors that society creates for us. When Ernaux leaves the camp, she develops bulimia, and her period stops. “I could not imagine there was a name for my behavior. . . . I thought of it as a moral failing. I don’t believe I linked it to H.”
These links are what Ernaux, as a writer, has always been after. In the sixty years and twenty books since the summer of 1958, she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life. “I would go so far as to judge my previous books as vague approximations” of reality, Ernaux writes in “A Girl’s Story.” In one, she describes a love affair; in another, the relationship between her parents. Throughout, the contours of her story stay the same—a childhood in Normandy as the daughter of two grocers, the shame of her lower-class upbringing, the clash of these origins with her later literary successes. Her mother “knew all the household tips that lessened the strain of poverty. This knowledge . . . stops at my generation. I am only the archivist,” she writes in her 1988 book, “A Woman’s Story.”
Ernaux’s books are small, simple, rarely exceeding a hundred pages. In each, she is always asking how she can be sure that her memories are correct. In “A Woman’s Story,” she talks about her mother’s death. Nearly a decade later, in “I Remain in Darkness” (1997), she goes back to that moment and declares her recollection incomplete—she hadn’t fully described her mother’s long cognitive decline, the terrors of dementia. A consistent voice guides each of these revisitations: a scientific and searching “I.” The books are whittled down to an intense core—not a confession but a kind of personal epistemology. In France, they have brought Ernaux fame, prizes, and a number of stylistic descendants.
Central to her work is an awareness that the most intimate moments of life are always governed by the circumstances in which they occur—that probing the personal will also involve investigating the historical. This is clearest in “Happening” (2000), an account of an abortion Ernaux had in 1963. Early in the book, she describes going to see an acquaintance who is known as an activist for greater access to birth control. He tries to sleep with her. Then he tells her that he can’t help her. After she has travelled to Paris to obtain the abortion, she hears that “a woman who lived round the corner would do it for three hundred francs. . . . Now that I no longer needed them, suddenly, bevies of abortionists were springing up left, right, and center.” By the time Ernaux published the book, abortion had been legalized. But a victory in legislation does not make disclosure any easier. “When a new law abolishing discrimination is passed, former victims tend to remain silent on the grounds that ‘now it’s all over,’ ” she writes. “So what went on is surrounded by the same veil of secrecy as before.”
In typical Ernaux fashion, she reads over her old diary to compare what she still remembers with what she experienced at the time:


newyorker--2020-04-13--On the Front Lines of the Coronavirus Crisis

April 7th : At 8 A.M. , a line to collect meals at the Bowery Mission , on Manhattan ’ @ @ @ @ @ In a recent statewide poll , forty-one per cent of New Yorkers said that they @ @ @ @ @ to afford food .

April 7th: At 8 A.M., a line to collect meals at the Bowery Mission, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In a recent statewide poll, forty-one per cent of New Yorkers said that they were concerned about being able to afford food.


The Mail

Susan B. Glasser , in her piece about the Republican operative Sarah Longwell , writes that Longwell , unlike many Republicans , “ did not make her accommodations , political and moral , with the new President ” ( “ Hope Dies Last , ” March 30th ) .
Although Longwell is certainly resisting Donald Trump now , she is still a member of the party that made his ascendancy possible .
The G.O.P .
that Longwell joined at the turn of the twenty-first century was the same party that welcomed white people who resented Lyndon B. Johnson ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ AIDS epidemic , which killed hundreds of thousands of mostly gay , black , brown , and poor Americans .
Ronald Reagan pushed to deregulate corporations and slash taxes for the wealthy , intensifying inequality .
He also courted the religious right , which roundly rejects scientific truths , and he used racist dog whistles , such as the term “ welfare queen.
” In the early two-thousands , George W. Bush ’ s Administration chipped away at abortion rights and established ineffectual , abstinence-only sex education .
The truth is that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a small , vocal , and increasingly reactionary slice of the American electorate for more than fifty years .
What did Longwell think would happen when a white alleged billionaire promised to “ make America great again ” by deporting Mexicans , banning Muslims , and curtailing women ’ s reproductive autonomy ?
Trump may have reaped the harvest , but the G.O.P .
tilled the ground and planted the seeds .
As a retired doctor who is occasionally involved in clinical research , I was interested in Henry Alford ’ s analysis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Town , March 30th ) .
His article and my own observation of similar panics in France suggest that toilet-paper shortages are a trend in the West .
Data on the usage of toilet paper in Asian countries during the pandemic would help determine whether such hoarding is a phenomenon elsewhere in the world .
In any case , this crisis provides a unique opportunity to compare how objective factors ( like housing , environment , and access to goods ) and subjective factors ( like education levels , religious beliefs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ panics .
It may sound a bit silly , but this information would be useful not only to scientists and psychiatrists but also to toilet-paper manufacturers , distributors , and consumers across the globe .
Alford ’ s piece reminded me of my time teaching in post-Soviet Russia during the economic depression there in the nineteen-nineties , a collapse that makes our recent stock-market downturn look like a blip .
In Russia , there wasn ’ t enough toilet paper to hoard .
When I recall how much time we spent every day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rolls , I wonder how we got anything else done .
The only kind that was available was rough and gray , and it was not perforated into individual sheets .
At the university where I taught , there was no toilet paper at all ; instead , old textbooks on Marxism-Leninism were “ repurposed ” in the restrooms , one book per stall .
You simply tore off the number of pages you needed , then consigned them to the sewer pipe—rather than to the dustbin—of history .
Letters should be sent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 .

The Long Game
Susan B. Glasser, in her piece about the Republican operative Sarah Longwell, writes that Longwell, unlike many Republicans, “did not make her accommodations, political and moral, with the new President” (“Hope Dies Last,” March 30th). Although Longwell is certainly resisting Donald Trump now, she is still a member of the party that made his ascendancy possible.
The G.O.P. that Longwell joined at the turn of the twenty-first century was the same party that welcomed white people who resented Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil-rights legislation. It also ignored the AIDS epidemic, which killed hundreds of thousands of mostly gay, black, brown, and poor Americans. Ronald Reagan pushed to deregulate corporations and slash taxes for the wealthy, intensifying inequality. He also courted the religious right, which roundly rejects scientific truths, and he used racist dog whistles, such as the term “welfare queen.” In the early two-thousands, George W. Bush’s Administration chipped away at abortion rights and established ineffectual, abstinence-only sex education.
The truth is that the Republican Party has been the sanctuary of a small, vocal, and increasingly reactionary slice of the American electorate for more than fifty years. What did Longwell think would happen when a white alleged billionaire promised to “make America great again” by deporting Mexicans, banning Muslims, and curtailing women’s reproductive autonomy? Trump may have reaped the harvest, but the G.O.P. tilled the ground and planted the seeds.
Ebony Edwards-Ellis
New York City
Toilet-Paper Musings
As a retired doctor who is occasionally involved in clinical research, I was interested in Henry Alford’s analysis of toilet-paper panic hoarding (The Talk of the Town, March 30th). His article and my own observation of similar panics in France suggest that toilet-paper shortages are a trend in the West. Data on the usage of toilet paper in Asian countries during the pandemic would help determine whether such hoarding is a phenomenon elsewhere in the world. In any case, this crisis provides a unique opportunity to compare how objective factors (like housing, environment, and access to goods) and subjective factors (like education levels, religious beliefs, and cultural traditions) influence toilet-paper panics. It may sound a bit silly, but this information would be useful not only to scientists and psychiatrists but also to toilet-paper manufacturers, distributors, and consumers across the globe.
Jean-Claude Roujeau
Châtenay-Malabry, France
Alford’s piece reminded me of my time teaching in post-Soviet Russia during the economic depression there in the nineteen-nineties, a collapse that makes our recent stock-market downturn look like a blip. In Russia, there wasn’t enough toilet paper to hoard. When I recall how much time we spent every day trying to find just one or two rolls, I wonder how we got anything else done. The only kind that was available was rough and gray, and it was not perforated into individual sheets. At the university where I taught, there was no toilet paper at all; instead, old textbooks on Marxism-Leninism were “repurposed” in the restrooms, one book per stall. You simply tore off the number of pages you needed, then consigned them to the sewer pipe—rather than to the dustbin—of history.
Sharon Hudgins
McKinney, Texas
•
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--2020-04-13--The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic

The investor who calls himself the Australian headed out for a walk on his farm in the Alps of New South Wales , three hundred miles south of Sydney .
This was a morning in late March .
He ’ d been holed up there for a month with his wife and three kids , plus two portable oxygen units and a store of hydroxychloroquine .
“ But my intention is not to get it , ” he said , of COVID-19 .
“ I don ’ t plan to see anyone until October.
” He was talking on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ caw of crows in the background , and the luffing of the wind .
“ I only see four other people in the valley .
If I need to kill them , I will.
” One assumed , from the way he laughed , that this was a joke .
The Australian , who spoke on the condition that his name not be used , is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty .
“ Billions dude looks like me , ” he wrote , in a WhatsApp message accompanied by a pair @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Damian Lewis , the actor who plays a hedge-fund magnate in the Showtime series “ Billions.
” “ He stole my look.
” Reared in Sydney , the Australian moved to New York in 1994 , when he turned twenty-two , to trade commodities at Goldman Sachs .
At JPMorgan , he and a couple of his countrymen—known as the Aussie mafia—earned the firm hundreds of millions in profits during the early months of the financial crisis , in 2008 .
In 2015 , he moved to Singapore .
Proximity to China , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the history of virulent diseases led him to pay special attention to the effects that recent outbreaks had had on financial markets .
SARS , H1N1 , Ebola .
Last October , he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster , Dan Carlin , called “ The End Is Always Near.
” “ So I had pandemics and plagues in my head , ” the Australian said .
“ In December , I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China , and then in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.
” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family , and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find .
On the flight back to Australia , he and his wife wore some , to the bewilderment of other passengers .
He quickly put some money to work .
He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech , one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks , with the expectation that when the virus made it across @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contracts to produce more .
The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share , and so , for cents on the dollar , he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars : he was betting that it would go up much more than that .
By the end of February , the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share .
He shorted oil and , as a proxy for oil , the Canadian dollar .
( That is , he bet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shorted U.S. equities .
“ You don ’ t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have , ” he said over the phone .
No argument here .
He wouldn ’ t specify an amount , but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year .
Emboldened by vindication , the Australian , walking through the countryside , laid out his prognosis for the United States and the world .
America needed to “ rip off the Band-Aid , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the borders , shut off all international commerce , declare martial law , deploy the military to build field hospitals and isolation wards , and arrest or even fire on anyone who didn ’ t abide by a stay-in-place protocol .
( “ In 1918 , in San Francisco , a cop shot someone in broad daylight for being outside without a face mask , and the cop was celebrated for it !
” ) Or perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ four weeks , ” he said .
The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months , if not years , of total isolation from the world .
“ If you don ’ t trade with China , they ’ re screwed , ” he said .
“ You ’ d win this war .
Let the rest of the world burn.
” The problem , he said , was that , perhaps more now than ever , Americans lack what he called “ social cohesion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to commit to such a path .
“ Plus , you have guns .
Lots of guns .
And all the base materials for your drugs , like ninety-seven per cent , come from China.
” He predicted that any less stringent measures—the slow removal of the Band-Aid that we are experiencing now—would result in social unrest bordering on civil war , and the decimation of our medical ranks .
“ So suddenly everyone who ’ s seen ‘ House ’ would be a doctor , ” he said .
Politically , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ center , yet he thought it ridiculous that the United States doesn ’ t have nationalized health care .
He predicted the cancellation of the Presidential election , or Donald Trump ’ s resignation , or the creation of an emergency leadership council , to which , throughout the conversation , he nominated Generals Mattis and Petraeus , Bill Gates , and Gary Cohn , for whom the Australian had worked at Goldman Sachs .
“ You could have either four weeks of pain and a future boom or years of this rolling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are just selfish .
They ’ re not thinking .
They ’ re morons.
” It was one such moron , an old friend of mine , who had introduced me to the Australian .
They ’ d overlapped at Goldman Sachs .
I ’ d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend ’ s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues ( he called them the Fokkers , for an acronym involving his name ) , all of them men , most of them expensively educated financial professionals , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ few with connections in high places .
The general disposition of the participants , with exceptions , was the opposite of the Australian ’ s .
Between memes , they expressed the belief , with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery , that the media , the modellers , and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus—that it was little more than another flu , and that effectively shutting down the economy to prevent , or at least slow , the spread of the virus would turn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the long run , than the virus itself .
“ The biggest own goal in memory , ” one Fokker wrote .
They constituted a sample of the-cure-is-worse-than-the-disease segment of the population , and , on the day of my conversation with the Australian , President Trump appeared to be steering hard their way .
Defying the dire prognostications and pleadings of the medical establishment , Trump threw out there that businesses would soon reopen and that economic activity might kick in again by Easter .
( Oh , well . )
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ was perhaps this prospect , as well as the unprecedentedly large two-trillion-dollar stimulus package passed in the Senate , that caused the stock market to rally , after one of the most precipitate collapses in its history .
( As a general rule , despite the assertions of the financial media , it is difficult to say with any certainty which relevant facts or sentiments may make the market indices go up or down on any given day . )
On March 26th , when the Labor Department reported that a record 3.3 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ previous week—as if every man , woman , and child in Philadelphia and Phoenix suddenly joined the breadline—both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S. & P. 500 shot up more than six per cent .
The crosswinds were fierce .

The investor who calls himself the Australian headed out for a walk on his farm in the Alps of New South Wales, three hundred miles south of Sydney. This was a morning in late March. He’d been holed up there for a month with his wife and three kids, plus two portable oxygen units and a store of hydroxychloroquine. “But my intention is not to get it,” he said, of COVID-19. “I don’t plan to see anyone until October.” He was talking on a cell phone. You could hear the caw of crows in the background, and the luffing of the wind. “I only see four other people in the valley. If I need to kill them, I will.” One assumed, from the way he laughed, that this was a joke.
The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty. “Billions dude looks like me,” he wrote, in a WhatsApp message accompanied by a pair of photos. He did indeed resemble Damian Lewis, the actor who plays a hedge-fund magnate in the Showtime series “Billions.” “He stole my look.” Reared in Sydney, the Australian moved to New York in 1994, when he turned twenty-two, to trade commodities at Goldman Sachs. At JPMorgan, he and a couple of his countrymen—known as the Aussie mafia—earned the firm hundreds of millions in profits during the early months of the financial crisis, in 2008. In 2015, he moved to Singapore. Proximity to China, a bearish disposition, and an interest in the history of virulent diseases led him to pay special attention to the effects that recent outbreaks had had on financial markets. SARS, H1N1, Ebola. Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find. On the flight back to Australia, he and his wife wore some, to the bewilderment of other passengers.
He quickly put some money to work. He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share. He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.
“You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have,” he said over the phone. No argument here. He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.
Emboldened by vindication, the Australian, walking through the countryside, laid out his prognosis for the United States and the world. America needed to “rip off the Band-Aid,” he said. The federal government should close the borders, shut off all international commerce, declare martial law, deploy the military to build field hospitals and isolation wards, and arrest or even fire on anyone who didn’t abide by a stay-in-place protocol. (“In 1918, in San Francisco, a cop shot someone in broad daylight for being outside without a face mask, and the cop was celebrated for it!”) Or perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.” The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path. “Plus, you have guns. Lots of guns. And all the base materials for your drugs, like ninety-seven per cent, come from China.” He predicted that any less stringent measures—the slow removal of the Band-Aid that we are experiencing now—would result in social unrest bordering on civil war, and the decimation of our medical ranks. “So suddenly everyone who’s seen ‘House’ would be a doctor,” he said. Politically, the Australian considered himself well right of center, yet he thought it ridiculous that the United States doesn’t have nationalized health care. He predicted the cancellation of the Presidential election, or Donald Trump’s resignation, or the creation of an emergency leadership council, to which, throughout the conversation, he nominated Generals Mattis and Petraeus, Bill Gates, and Gary Cohn, for whom the Australian had worked at Goldman Sachs. “You could have either four weeks of pain and a future boom or years of this rolling bullshit and a depression. But people are just selfish. They’re not thinking. They’re morons.”
It was one such moron, an old friend of mine, who had introduced me to the Australian. They’d overlapped at Goldman Sachs. I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s. Between memes, they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus—that it was little more than another flu, and that effectively shutting down the economy to prevent, or at least slow, the spread of the virus would turn out to be far more harmful, in the long run, than the virus itself. “The biggest own goal in memory,” one Fokker wrote.
“Suicide due to innumeracy,” another noted.
They constituted a sample of the-cure-is-worse-than-the-disease segment of the population, and, on the day of my conversation with the Australian, President Trump appeared to be steering hard their way. Defying the dire prognostications and pleadings of the medical establishment, Trump threw out there that businesses would soon reopen and that economic activity might kick in again by Easter. (Oh, well.) In the next few days, it was perhaps this prospect, as well as the unprecedentedly large two-trillion-dollar stimulus package passed in the Senate, that caused the stock market to rally, after one of the most precipitate collapses in its history. (As a general rule, despite the assertions of the financial media, it is difficult to say with any certainty which relevant facts or sentiments may make the market indices go up or down on any given day.) On March 26th, when the Labor Department reported that a record 3.3 million Americans had filed jobless claims the previous week—as if every man, woman, and child in Philadelphia and Phoenix suddenly joined the breadline—both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S. & P. 500 shot up more than six per cent. The crosswinds were fierce.
Meanwhile, New York’s health-care system was sinking into chaos, as COVID-19 cases swamped hospitals. That day, there were more 911 calls than there had been on September 11, 2001. Some Fokkers, however, felt that it was important not to get swept up in apocalyptic tales or media reports, or to fall for the Chicken Littles. They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.
As in epidemiology, the basis of the financial markets, and of arguments about them, is numbers—data and their deployments. Reliable data about COVID-19 have been scarce, mainly because, in the shameful absence of widespread testing, no one knows how many people have or have had the virus, which would determine the rate of infection and, most crucially, the fatality rate. The numerator (how many have died) is known, more or less, but it’s the denominator (how many have caught it) that has been the object of such speculation. If I had a roll of toilet paper for every finance guy’s analysis of the death rate I’ve been asked to read, I’d have toilet paper. Most of these calculations, it seems, are arguments for why the rate is likely to be much, much lower than the medical experts have concluded. The less lethal it is, the better the comparison to the flu, and therefore the easier it is to chide everyone for getting so worked up over it. As Lawrence White, a professor of economics at George Mason University, tweeted, “Almost everyone talking about the #coronavirus is displaying strong confirmation bias. Which only goes to prove what I’ve always said.”
Still, it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings. What’s the trade-off? How many deaths are tolerable? Zero? Tens of thousands, as with the flu? Or whatever number it is that will keep us from slipping into a global depression? The public-health hazards of deepening unemployment and poverty—mental illness, suicide, addiction, malnutrition—are uncounted.
Financial people love to come at you with numbers, to cluck over the innumeracy of the populace and the press, to cite the tyranny of the anecdote and the superior risk-assessment calculus of the guy who has an understanding of stochastic volatility and some skin in the game—even when that skin is other people’s. But while risk and price are intertwined, value and values are something else entirely. It can be hard to find the right math for those.
In the months following the first tidings of COVID-19 from China, Trump played down its potential impact—attempting to jawbone a virus, or at least the perception of it. But a virus, unlike a President, doesn’t care how it’s perceived. It gets penetration, whether you believe in it or not. By the time, later in March, that he acknowledged the scale of the pandemic (and sought to convince those who hadn’t been paying attention that he’d been paying attention all along, except to the extent that he’d been distracted), it had long been abundantly clear that he cared more about the economic damage—even if it was only in relation to his reëlection prospects, or to the fate of his hotel and golf-resort businesses—than about any particular threshold regarding loss of life or the greater good. Others, perhaps on his behalf, have tried to expand his position. For a few days, the message, reinforced by the likes of Glenn Beck (“I’d rather die than kill the country”) and Dan Patrick, the soon-to-be-seventy lieutenant governor of Texas (“If that’s the exchange, I’m all in”), was that we might have to sacrifice our elders for the sake of the economy. The politics of it were perverse. Many of the same people who had cited “death panels” in the fight against Obamacare were now essentially arguing the opposite. One man’s cost controls are another man’s eugenics.
For Trump, the economy is basically the stock market. He’s obsessed with it, much the way he fixates on television ratings. The stock market is, among other things, a great mood indicator. But it isn’t the economy—not even close. As we’re now discovering, to more horror than surprise, the cessation of commercial activity—travel, tourism, entertainment, restaurants, sports, construction, conferences, or really any transactions, in significant volume, be they in lawyering, accounting, book sales, or sparkplugs—means no revenue, no ability to make payroll or rent, mass layoffs, steep declines in both supply and demand, and reverberations, up and down the food chain, of defaults on debt. That’s the economy.
This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease. Corporate debt, high-yield debt, distressed debt, student debt, consumer debt, mortgage debt, sovereign debt. “It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”
The trader was one of those guys who had been muttering about a financial collapse for a decade. The 2008 bailout, with the politically motivated and, at best, capricious sorting of winners and losers, rankled, as did the ongoing collusion among the big banks, the Federal Reserve, and politicians of both parties. He’d heard that the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines—a “revolver frenzy,” as the financial blog Zero Hedge put it, in publishing a list of the companies “that managed to get their money in time.” Corporate America had hit up the pawnshop, en masse. In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.


newyorker--2020-04-13--Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Fractured Fairy Tale

It was raining in London on the evening of March 5th , and so only a small crowd had gathered outside Mansion House , the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London , to watch the Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive for an awards ceremony hosted by the Endeavour Fund , a charity that supports wounded ex-servicemen and women .
As press photographers waited for the couple to dart from Land Rover to lobby , they had little hope of a great shot : rain complicates flash photography , and the Duke and Duchess might be obscured by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who has frequently photographed the Royal Family , had an inspiration : flashes of cameras in the crowd could create a dramatic backlighting effect , as in a studio shot , and other flashes might illuminate the faces of the Sussexes , Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle .
Hussein snapped a picture the split second that the couple , their arms linked under a single umbrella , turned toward each other and smiled .
The image became instantly iconic .
The pair gazed into each other ’ s eyes with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the rain falling around them like glittering confetti .
Although the photograph suggested nuptial bliss , it marked the conclusion of a whirlwind divorce—the abrupt separation of the Duke and Duchess from the United Kingdom and its monarchy .
The event was the couple ’ s first public appearance in the U.K. since announcing , in January , via Instagram , that they were relinquishing their roles as “ ‘ senior ’ members of the Royal Family ” and would henceforth be spending much of their time in North America , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ progressive new role within this institution.
” In the days after the Endeavour Fund event , the couple—who , amid alarm over the spread of the coronavirus , had left their nine-month-old son , Archie , in Canada , where they had been living—carried out their final engagements before formally stepping down from their official duties , at the end of March .
The Duke and Duchess will no longer use the honorific H.R.H.
, which stands for His—or Her—Royal Highness , though they will retain the titles .
In February , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at a conference on sustainable travel asked him how he preferred to be addressed .
“ Just call me Harry , ” he said .
The couple will also stop receiving income from the Sovereign Grant , the pot of public money allocated to the Queen and to family members who represent her in official roles .
( The Sovereign Grant currently amounts to about a hundred million dollars . )
The Sussexes have declared that they plan to work , with the goal of becoming financially independent , though for now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ receive funding , reportedly amounting to several million dollars , from the Duchy of Cornwall , the property of Harry ’ s father , Prince Charles .
An indication of the kind of revenue streams they may explore came in February , when Harry travelled to Miami and gave a speech at an investment summit sponsored by JPMorgan ; he spoke of the lingering trauma of his very public childhood and bereavement .
And last year he signed up to produce , with Oprah Winfrey , a documentary series for television , on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the Sussexes ’ wedding , which took place in May , 2018 , in Windsor .
Markle , the former star of the TV series “ Suits , ” may resume her Hollywood career ; at the end of March , the Sussexes relocated to Los Angeles .
( President Donald Trump greeted their arrival by tweeting that the U.S. will not pay for their security . )
According to royal experts , the only approximate modern precursor to Megxit—the term that was inevitably coined for the Sussexes ’ departure—was the abdication @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Edward VIII stepped down from the throne in order to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson , of Baltimore , Maryland ; he became the Duke of Windsor and retreated into a long exile of decadent mooching , in France and elsewhere .
Constitutionally speaking , there is no real parallel .
A king ’ s abdication reorders the unfolding of history : without Edward ’ s withdrawal , the current queen , who is now in the sixty-ninth year of her reign , might never have ascended the throne .
Harry ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ affect the succession .
It has , however , inspired a collective reckoning , for which the British public has been especially primed by three seasons of “ The Crown , ” in which the soul-crushing nature of the institution has been amply depicted .
How bad must being an H.R.H .
be in order to make someone want to quit ?
In the three months since the Sussexes announced their intention to step down—reportedly , before consulting the Queen , Prince Charles , or Prince William—the British people , or at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been reeling like a spouse blindsided by a partner ’ s sudden announcement of irreconcilable differences .
The question of who , or what , was to blame for the rupture has yet to be conclusively answered .
Were Harry and Meghan millennial weaklings retreating into self-care and self-pity , unwilling to withstand the scrutiny of their public life in exchange for the material luxury of their private one ?
Were they pampered hypocrites , lecturing others about climate change while cheerfully leaping aboard private jets belonging to celebrity friends ?
Were they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Were they fatally undermined by the royal establishment ?
Were they too ambitious for their second-fiddle roles ?
Or were they , despite all their privilege , victims—he the target of relentless attention since birth , and she the object of barely concealed racism ?
Admittedly , these have not been Britain ’ s most pressing concerns in recent months .
Storms and floods battered the nation for much of the winter , and the instability and anxiety caused by the coronavirus have loomed much larger than the royal drama , especially in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , during which Britain has entered lockdown , with hospitals on a war footing .
Prince Charles , the heir to the throne , is among the tens of thousands who have tested positive for COVID-19 , though his case turned out to be a mild one .
On April 5th , the Queen , for only the fifth time in her reign , delivered a special address to the nation .
Speaking from Windsor Castle , where she has been in self-isolation , she called on Britons to remain “ united and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that “ we will meet again.
” That same evening , Boris Johnson , the Prime Minister , was admitted to the hospital with persistent symptoms of COVID-19 ; he went on to spend three nights in intensive care but was , according to Downing Street , in the “ early phase of his recovery ” by week ’ s end .
Dickie Arbiter , a former press secretary at Buckingham Palace , and now a familiar royal commentator , told me , of Harry and Meghan ’ s departure , “ It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the last thing she wants to see is her family disappear into the sunset—and it is also a letdown for the British people .
But the British people are stoic , and they get on with it .
And , if that ’ s what Harry and Meghan want , good luck to them.
” Yet , even as much larger crises emerged , the ongoing story of Harry and Meghan was compelling to observe , in part because the constitutional insignificance of their actions is counterbalanced by the symbolic weight of those @ @

It was raining in London on the evening of March 5th, and so only a small crowd had gathered outside Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, to watch the Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive for an awards ceremony hosted by the Endeavour Fund, a charity that supports wounded ex-servicemen and women. As press photographers waited for the couple to dart from Land Rover to lobby, they had little hope of a great shot: rain complicates flash photography, and the Duke and Duchess might be obscured by an umbrella. Luckily, Samir Hussein, who has frequently photographed the Royal Family, had an inspiration: flashes of cameras in the crowd could create a dramatic backlighting effect, as in a studio shot, and other flashes might illuminate the faces of the Sussexes, Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle. Hussein snapped a picture the split second that the couple, their arms linked under a single umbrella, turned toward each other and smiled. The image became instantly iconic. The pair gazed into each other’s eyes with the insular complicity of newlyweds, unscathed by the rain falling around them like glittering confetti.
Although the photograph suggested nuptial bliss, it marked the conclusion of a whirlwind divorce—the abrupt separation of the Duke and Duchess from the United Kingdom and its monarchy. The event was the couple’s first public appearance in the U.K. since announcing, in January, via Instagram, that they were relinquishing their roles as “ ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family” and would henceforth be spending much of their time in North America, where they hoped to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution.” In the days after the Endeavour Fund event, the couple—who, amid alarm over the spread of the coronavirus, had left their nine-month-old son, Archie, in Canada, where they had been living—carried out their final engagements before formally stepping down from their official duties, at the end of March. The Duke and Duchess will no longer use the honorific H.R.H., which stands for His—or Her—Royal Highness, though they will retain the titles. In February, in Edinburgh, the person introducing the Prince at a conference on sustainable travel asked him how he preferred to be addressed. “Just call me Harry,” he said. The couple will also stop receiving income from the Sovereign Grant, the pot of public money allocated to the Queen and to family members who represent her in official roles. (The Sovereign Grant currently amounts to about a hundred million dollars.)
The Sussexes have declared that they plan to work, with the goal of becoming financially independent, though for now, at least, they will continue to receive funding, reportedly amounting to several million dollars, from the Duchy of Cornwall, the property of Harry’s father, Prince Charles. An indication of the kind of revenue streams they may explore came in February, when Harry travelled to Miami and gave a speech at an investment summit sponsored by JPMorgan; he spoke of the lingering trauma of his very public childhood and bereavement. And last year he signed up to produce, with Oprah Winfrey, a documentary series for television, on mental-health issues; Winfrey was a guest at the Sussexes’ wedding, which took place in May, 2018, in Windsor. Markle, the former star of the TV series “Suits,” may resume her Hollywood career; at the end of March, the Sussexes relocated to Los Angeles. (President Donald Trump greeted their arrival by tweeting that the U.S. will not pay for their security.)
According to royal experts, the only approximate modern precursor to Megxit—the term that was inevitably coined for the Sussexes’ departure—was the abdication crisis of 1936. Then, King Edward VIII stepped down from the throne in order to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, of Baltimore, Maryland; he became the Duke of Windsor and retreated into a long exile of decadent mooching, in France and elsewhere. Constitutionally speaking, there is no real parallel. A king’s abdication reorders the unfolding of history: without Edward’s withdrawal, the current queen, who is now in the sixty-ninth year of her reign, might never have ascended the throne. Harry’s retirement from the family business does not affect the succession. It has, however, inspired a collective reckoning, for which the British public has been especially primed by three seasons of “The Crown,” in which the soul-crushing nature of the institution has been amply depicted. How bad must being an H.R.H. be in order to make someone want to quit?
In the three months since the Sussexes announced their intention to step down—reportedly, before consulting the Queen, Prince Charles, or Prince William—the British people, or at least their representatives in the media, have been reeling like a spouse blindsided by a partner’s sudden announcement of irreconcilable differences. The question of who, or what, was to blame for the rupture has yet to be conclusively answered. Were Harry and Meghan millennial weaklings retreating into self-care and self-pity, unwilling to withstand the scrutiny of their public life in exchange for the material luxury of their private one? Were they pampered hypocrites, lecturing others about climate change while cheerfully leaping aboard private jets belonging to celebrity friends? Were they just bored, or burned out? Were they fatally undermined by the royal establishment? Were they too ambitious for their second-fiddle roles? Or were they, despite all their privilege, victims—he the target of relentless attention since birth, and she the object of barely concealed racism?
Admittedly, these have not been Britain’s most pressing concerns in recent months. Storms and floods battered the nation for much of the winter, and the instability and anxiety caused by the coronavirus have loomed much larger than the royal drama, especially in the weeks since the Sussexes’ visit, during which Britain has entered lockdown, with hospitals on a war footing. Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, is among the tens of thousands who have tested positive for COVID-19, though his case turned out to be a mild one. On April 5th, the Queen, for only the fifth time in her reign, delivered a special address to the nation. Speaking from Windsor Castle, where she has been in self-isolation, she called on Britons to remain “united and resolute,” and reassured her subjects that “we will meet again.” That same evening, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was admitted to the hospital with persistent symptoms of COVID-19; he went on to spend three nights in intensive care but was, according to Downing Street, in the “early phase of his recovery” by week’s end.
Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary at Buckingham Palace, and now a familiar royal commentator, told me, of Harry and Meghan’s departure, “It is sad for the Queen—at ninety-three, the last thing she wants to see is her family disappear into the sunset—and it is also a letdown for the British people. But the British people are stoic, and they get on with it. And, if that’s what Harry and Meghan want, good luck to them.” Yet, even as much larger crises emerged, the ongoing story of Harry and Meghan was compelling to observe, in part because the constitutional insignificance of their actions is counterbalanced by the symbolic weight of those actions.
They were saying, in effect, that life on a pedestal is not a life worth living—especially when being regularly knocked off that pedestal, sometimes for the slightest sign of human fallibility, is an essential part of the job. Harry’s appealing request for informality in Edinburgh was instantly hailed as proof of his amiable nature; when he then made the less populist gesture of travelling first class, with an entourage, for the train journey back to London, the press reproached him for being snooty. The Duke and Duchess are hardly the first in the Royal Family to wonder whether the benefits of their place at the top of British society outweigh the scouring scrutiny that comes with it. Yet it is rare, and captivating, when someone actually acts on such feelings.
The royal dukedom of Sussex, which the Queen granted her grandson only hours before his wedding, is one of the titles that the monarch has bestowed on members of her family, to mark a special occasion or a new phase of life. Prince William, Harry’s older brother, and his wife, the former Catherine Middleton, were named the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at the time of their wedding, in 2011. And last year, when the Queen’s youngest son, Edward, the Earl of Wessex, turned fifty-five, his mother gave him an additional title: the Earl of Forfar, named for a Lowland town north of the Scottish port of Dundee. The title is for the Earl’s use while in Scotland—the honorific equivalent of a sturdy, plaid-lined mackintosh.
If Markle, who grew up middle class in duke-free Los Angeles, Googled the Sussex title before her wedding ceremony, she likely gleaned some insight into the peculiar constraints of the institution she was marrying into. Prince Harry is only the second Duke of Sussex: the title had been extinct for a hundred and seventy-five years before the Palace polished it up for reuse. The first Duke of Sussex was Prince Augustus Frederick, a son of King George III; and, like his great-great-great-great-great-great-nephew Harry, he had a wandering youth, a fiery desire to live as he wished, and an inclination to balk at the strictures of monarchy.
Augustus was born in 1773, a few years before his father lost control of the American colonies. Portraits reveal a good-looking young man with, like Harry, strawberry-blond hair and a ruddy complexion. Augustus had a sensitive brow, voluptuous lips, and a tendency to gain weight—later ceremonial portraits depict him as plump, dressed in tight white britches and velvet robes.
Markle, who spoke her mind politically before joining the Royal Family, which frowns upon such things, might have found much to like about Prince Augustus. He was liberal-minded, and in the later years of his life he supported electoral reform and extending the franchise beyond the gentry. Before meeting Harry, Markle was a United Nations advocate for women, and campaigned for gender equality. Augustus was a royal patron of several charities, including the Jews’ Hospital, in London’s East End. He claimed that his philanthropic work had made him more aware than other aristocrats of the lives of ordinary British people. “I have every respect for the nobility of the country,” he once said, in the House of Lords. “But . . . education ennobles more than anything else.”