newyorker--2020-05-20--A U.S. Expat in China Weighs the Decision of Where to Shelter in Place

In 1665 , as the bubonic plague approached London , a local bachelor debated whether to leave town , as Daniel Defoe wrote in “ A Journal of the Plague Year.
” The man ’ s brother was departing for a retreat in the countryside that he had arranged for his wife and children , and tried to convince the bachelor to follow suit .
With his mind “ greatly oppressed , ” the bachelor calculated pros and cons : it would be safer in the countryside , but there were no more horses to hire in the city , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leaving with had already fled .
After a long , serious deliberation , the man decided to stay put and seek refuge in God only .
For those who have the option to relocate to a less affected area during a pandemic , the decision isn ’ t necessarily an easy one .
In January , as the coronavirus broke out in China , Chris Tuazon , a copywriter from California who resides in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen with his wife , Laura , their two daughters , and his mother-in-law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Defoe ’ s bachelor .
Seeing the increasing number of COVID-19 cases as the country began to shelter in place , Tuazon stayed awake at night , wondering if he should take his whole family back to the U.S .
In the video above , Tuazon offers a visual journal of the eighty-odd days his family spent in lockdown , including their deliberations over whether to stay in China or travel to the U.S. His daughters are one and three ; he has asthma , and his mother-in-law is immunocompromised .
Flights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but availability was becoming limited—and what if someone on the plane had the virus ?
By the end of January , President Trump banned entrance to the U.S. for anyone coming from China , except for U.S. citizens , permanent residents , and a few other exceptions ; even if they had been able to find a flight and felt safe about travelling , Tuazon ’ s mother-in-law wouldn ’ t have been able to get in .
The family decided to stay .
In a crisis like this , the option to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ course , often a luxury—not everyone has property , family elsewhere , the means to travel , or other resources that provide additional security .
As New York City became an epicenter of the outbreak , many decided to decamp to the suburbs and beyond .
According to data from a geospatial-analytics company , the wealthier a neighborhood is , the more of its residents have left .
But the decision to leave a heavily affected region , or not to leave , is not entirely dictated by material circumstances .
To some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vote of confidence .
“ It came down to I did not trust the Chinese government as much as the American government in terms of taking care of the situation , ” Tuazon reflected , on his earlier impulse to head for the U.S. His wife , who is from China , thought otherwise .
As COVID-19 escalated to a global pandemic , hundreds of thousands of overseas Chinese students scrambled to fly back to China .
Tuazon showcased a few strict public-health measures taken in his neighborhood by way of contrasting the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Tuazon and his family were able to gradually and cautiously resume a normal life—going to work , taking the kids outside for walks—as his family back in California had begun anxiously waiting for the time when it would be safe to be outside again .
This time , “ maybe , maybe my wife was right , ” Tuazon said , chuckling , “ which spouses hate to say .
”

In 1665, as the bubonic plague approached London, a local bachelor debated whether to leave town, as Daniel Defoe wrote in “A Journal of the Plague Year.” The man’s brother was departing for a retreat in the countryside that he had arranged for his wife and children, and tried to convince the bachelor to follow suit. With his mind “greatly oppressed,” the bachelor calculated pros and cons: it would be safer in the countryside, but there were no more horses to hire in the city, and the servant he had planned on leaving with had already fled. After a long, serious deliberation, the man decided to stay put and seek refuge in God only.
For those who have the option to relocate to a less affected area during a pandemic, the decision isn’t necessarily an easy one. In January, as the coronavirus broke out in China, Chris Tuazon, a copywriter from California who resides in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen with his wife, Laura, their two daughters, and his mother-in-law, faced a conundrum similar to that of Defoe’s bachelor. Seeing the increasing number of COVID-19 cases as the country began to shelter in place, Tuazon stayed awake at night, wondering if he should take his whole family back to the U.S. In the video above, Tuazon offers a visual journal of the eighty-odd days his family spent in lockdown, including their deliberations over whether to stay in China or travel to the U.S. His daughters are one and three; he has asthma, and his mother-in-law is immunocompromised. Flights out of China were still available, but availability was becoming limited—and what if someone on the plane had the virus? By the end of January, President Trump banned entrance to the U.S. for anyone coming from China, except for U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and a few other exceptions; even if they had been able to find a flight and felt safe about travelling, Tuazon’s mother-in-law wouldn’t have been able to get in. The family decided to stay.
In a crisis like this, the option to pack up and leave is, of course, often a luxury—not everyone has property, family elsewhere, the means to travel, or other resources that provide additional security. As New York City became an epicenter of the outbreak, many decided to decamp to the suburbs and beyond. According to data from a geospatial-analytics company, the wealthier a neighborhood is, the more of its residents have left.
But the decision to leave a heavily affected region, or not to leave, is not entirely dictated by material circumstances. To some extent, it can also be a vote of confidence. “It came down to I did not trust the Chinese government as much as the American government in terms of taking care of the situation,” Tuazon reflected, on his earlier impulse to head for the U.S. His wife, who is from China, thought otherwise. As COVID-19 escalated to a global pandemic, hundreds of thousands of overseas Chinese students scrambled to fly back to China. Tuazon showcased a few strict public-health measures taken in his neighborhood by way of contrasting the federal response in the U.S. By April, Tuazon and his family were able to gradually and cautiously resume a normal life—going to work, taking the kids outside for walks—as his family back in California had begun anxiously waiting for the time when it would be safe to be outside again. This time, “maybe, maybe my wife was right,” Tuazon said, chuckling, “which spouses hate to say.”


newyorker--2020-05-20--Bolinas, California, the Town That Tested Itself for the Coronavirus

Bolinas , California , is not a place one finds oneself by accident , in part because it is a place that must be found .
Out on the edge of the North Bay of San Francisco , off a main highway , it can be approached only by narrow roads that have the form of waves : byways through the eucalyptus , snaking drives along the dry cliffs of the coast .
Not far beyond the blackened trace of last fall ’ s fires , a hairpin turn leads to a swerving road down a thick peninsula between the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ population sixteen hundred , is at the heel , like a town that has drawn back and back and now has nowhere left to go .
For fifty years , this place has marked the center of a blue America where big business and invasive government are subjects of equal distrust .
The town ’ s virtues , its residents believe , flow from shared intentions and a close-knit community .
In 1976 , the journalist Orville Schell , a resident , published “ The Town That Fought to Save Itself , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to chart its own course in terms of life style and growth .
( Schell , who reported on China for The New Yorker , in the late seventies and eighties , also co-founded , in Bolinas , the humane cattle farm Niman Ranch . )
The town is best known for its 1971 moratorium on new water permits , which was done in the name of resource management but had the happy effect , for locals , of making development almost impossible to sustain .
In many ways , it has never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ town remains off-sewer , processing waste with an elaborate system of natural treatment ponds .
It is filled with little farms kept thriving by bright dreams of living off the land .
The residents—commuters , surfers , literal and spiritual campers—unify their consciousness with brightly painted wooden signs slung around town , setting the tenor of the place : “ Gratitude , ” a classic , appears in multiples ( “ Gratitude !
.
.
.
Gratitude !
.
.
.
Gratitude !
” ) , while recent updates , such as “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strung up in trees .
The signs give Bolinas a Candy Land charm , except in place of candy the town seems to offer chai , doulas , and hemp .
The changes that the twenty-first century has wrought on the Bay Area—scooters and world-dominating industry , boutique coffee shops and keto bowls to go—have largely passed over Bolinas , though a few tech leaders have bought houses there ; the town ’ s utopian self-regulation makes it seem like a place that they can call their own .
This winter , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social change from which Bolinas could not flee .
On January 11th , China reported its first death caused by COVID-19 ; on January 21st , a resident of Washington State , who had travelled to Wuhan , became the first confirmed case in the United States ; and , by mid-February , fatalities spanned the world .
On March 16th , a group of counties across the Bay Area declared shelter-in-place orders ; a few days later , California ’ s governor , Gavin Newsom , became the first to institute a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grew .
“ There are a lot of , frankly , aging hippies here whose idea of social distancing is to hug each other a little bit less , ” Jyri Engeström , a venture capitalist who has a house in town , said .
“ It kept me up at night.
” Engeström and others began thinking about how they might protect their town .
What ensued was a remarkable effort , blending grassroots coördination and startup ingenuity .
By late April , Bolinas would be one of a handful of towns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ testing to all of its residents and workers .
( The others were in San Miguel County , Colorado , and Fisher Island , Florida . )
Its self-testing procedures are being studied as a model in countries as different as New Zealand and Uganda ; the town is also a key participant in a study of coronavirus spread run by epidemiologists at the University of California , San Francisco .
In a matter of weeks , this tiny separatist retreat of surfers , artists , drifters , and venture capitalists claimed a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Bolinas ’ s testing site opened on April 20th , and closed after April 23rd .
Each morning , Aenor Sawyer , its medical director , drove her bright-red farm tractor to the site and parked it there as a beacon for the rest of town .
In ordinary times , Sawyer is an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at U.C.S.F.
, but the arrival of COVID-19 had struck her close to home—she is vulnerable to respiratory infection , and her sister spent months on a ventilator with ARDS , after a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
At the site , a plaza-like lot abutting Bolinas ’ s volunteer fire station , six white tents normally rented for weddings had been set up .
Sawyer ’ s role there was to maintain clinical standards and protocol , and to offer as much bedside manner as one can to a line of vehicles .
“ It ’ s a little anxiety-producing for people to have these tests done , ” she said .
“ They hear a lot of stories.
” It was a warm afternoon .
Thick light and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which was in whitecaps .
The lot sat between a field of rippling high grass surrounding the sewer ponds and a skate park with a brightly painted mural , the motto in which , “ Keep Bolinas Sacred , ” had been graffitied to read “ Keep Bolinas Skated.
” As cars arrived , by reservation , a volunteer entered test subjects ’ contact information into a computer .
It was sent , via a MiFi router , to the tents down the line , where it was verified by technicians and used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ divided the cars into four lines , each leading to a different drive-through testing tent .
Upon checking in , participants got surgical masks , even those who were already wearing masks of their own : by standardizing masks , the organizers could make testing faster and keep safety protocols consistent .
Drivers proceeded to their tents and rolled down their windows .
An examiner dressed like an astronaut—white bodysuit , white gloves , face shield—approached .
Drivers and passengers extended their arms out their car windows for pinpricks .
If people got @ @ @ @ @ @ @ needles , there was a protocol for guiding their cars aside .
Mask down , mouth swab ; mask up ( the probes often induced a cough or a sneeze ) , nose swab .
Within seventy-two hours , tested individuals began receiving notice of their COVID-19 infection status , usually by text message .
If the tests were positive , they would be called by U.C.S.F .
research physicians , and the county health department would follow up for contact tracing .
Working in this way , Bolinas ’ s one site @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thousand people in a workweek—an astounding efficiency for one small site .
Wind flustered Sawyer ’ s gray hair as she darted among cars in sunglasses and a mask , conferring with other organizers via old-school walkie-talkies .
“ Aenor to Jyri !
Aenor to Jyri—come in , Jyri , ” she shouted , into her device .
Jyri Engeström appeared from behind the fire station , wearing the outfit in which he ’ s often seen : a button-down shirt in a wet-hay shade , tight jeans , and hiking boots .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ but , with a mop of blond hair and round black-rimmed glasses , looks younger .
A KN95 mask , in the shape of a coffee filter , drooped over his nose .
( The KN95 is the Chinese version of the N95—it ’ s easier to obtain , and cheaper . )
In normal times , Engeström and his partner , Caterina Fake , a co-founder of Flickr , spend half of each week in San Francisco ; they homeschool their kids , easing the back-and-forth .
When the pandemic hit , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his family ’ s status as an outlier in the town ’ s demographics .
“ The median age here is fifty-two , ” he said .
“ I ’ m from Finland , where we have universal health care.
” Medical care for acute COVID-19 was sure to devastate the personal finances of several people in town .
Although more recent arrivals , like Engeström , have tended to be roundly wealthy people in search of different life styles , Bolinas ’ s median income has fallen below the national average as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many long-term homeowners in a state increasingly common in coastal California : house rich but cash poor .

Bolinas, California, is not a place one finds oneself by accident, in part because it is a place that must be found. Out on the edge of the North Bay of San Francisco, off a main highway, it can be approached only by narrow roads that have the form of waves: byways through the eucalyptus, snaking drives along the dry cliffs of the coast. Not far beyond the blackened trace of last fall’s fires, a hairpin turn leads to a swerving road down a thick peninsula between the sea and a lagoon. Bolinas, population sixteen hundred, is at the heel, like a town that has drawn back and back and now has nowhere left to go.
For fifty years, this place has marked the center of a blue America where big business and invasive government are subjects of equal distrust. The town’s virtues, its residents believe, flow from shared intentions and a close-knit community. In 1976, the journalist Orville Schell, a resident, published “The Town That Fought to Save Itself,” an account of Bolinas’s efforts to chart its own course in terms of life style and growth. (Schell, who reported on China for The New Yorker, in the late seventies and eighties, also co-founded, in Bolinas, the humane cattle farm Niman Ranch.) The town is best known for its 1971 moratorium on new water permits, which was done in the name of resource management but had the happy effect, for locals, of making development almost impossible to sustain.
In many ways, it has never stopped being 1971 in Bolinas. The town remains off-sewer, processing waste with an elaborate system of natural treatment ponds. It is filled with little farms kept thriving by bright dreams of living off the land. The residents—commuters, surfers, literal and spiritual campers—unify their consciousness with brightly painted wooden signs slung around town, setting the tenor of the place: “Gratitude,” a classic, appears in multiples (“Gratitude! . . . Gratitude! . . . Gratitude!”), while recent updates, such as “Feel the Bern,” have been strung up in trees. The signs give Bolinas a Candy Land charm, except in place of candy the town seems to offer chai, doulas, and hemp. The changes that the twenty-first century has wrought on the Bay Area—scooters and world-dominating industry, boutique coffee shops and keto bowls to go—have largely passed over Bolinas, though a few tech leaders have bought houses there; the town’s utopian self-regulation makes it seem like a place that they can call their own.
This winter, though, the coronavirus brought a wave of social change from which Bolinas could not flee. On January 11th, China reported its first death caused by COVID-19; on January 21st, a resident of Washington State, who had travelled to Wuhan, became the first confirmed case in the United States; and, by mid-February, fatalities spanned the world. On March 16th, a group of counties across the Bay Area declared shelter-in-place orders; a few days later, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, became the first to institute a statewide policy. In Bolinas, alarm grew. “There are a lot of, frankly, aging hippies here whose idea of social distancing is to hug each other a little bit less,” Jyri Engeström, a venture capitalist who has a house in town, said. “It kept me up at night.”
Engeström and others began thinking about how they might protect their town. What ensued was a remarkable effort, blending grassroots coördination and startup ingenuity. By late April, Bolinas would be one of a handful of towns in the United States to offer coronavirus testing to all of its residents and workers. (The others were in San Miguel County, Colorado, and Fisher Island, Florida.) Its self-testing procedures are being studied as a model in countries as different as New Zealand and Uganda; the town is also a key participant in a study of coronavirus spread run by epidemiologists at the University of California, San Francisco. In a matter of weeks, this tiny separatist retreat of surfers, artists, drifters, and venture capitalists claimed a place at the forefront of pandemic strategy.
Bolinas’s testing site opened on April 20th, and closed after April 23rd. Each morning, Aenor Sawyer, its medical director, drove her bright-red farm tractor to the site and parked it there as a beacon for the rest of town. In ordinary times, Sawyer is an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at U.C.S.F., but the arrival of COVID-19 had struck her close to home—she is vulnerable to respiratory infection, and her sister spent months on a ventilator with ARDS, after a post-surgical complication—so she was moved to help. At the site, a plaza-like lot abutting Bolinas’s volunteer fire station, six white tents normally rented for weddings had been set up. Sawyer’s role there was to maintain clinical standards and protocol, and to offer as much bedside manner as one can to a line of vehicles. “It’s a little anxiety-producing for people to have these tests done,” she said. “They hear a lot of stories.”
The doctors Aenor Sawyer and Ayesha Appa were among those who led testing operations and organized medical volunteers. Photograph by Barbara Ries / UCSF
It was a warm afternoon. Thick light and strong wind skidded off the Pacific, which was in whitecaps. The lot sat between a field of rippling high grass surrounding the sewer ponds and a skate park with a brightly painted mural, the motto in which, “Keep Bolinas Sacred,” had been graffitied to read “Keep Bolinas Skated.” As cars arrived, by reservation, a volunteer entered test subjects’ contact information into a computer. It was sent, via a MiFi router, to the tents down the line, where it was verified by technicians and used to label sample tubes. The volunteer divided the cars into four lines, each leading to a different drive-through testing tent.
Upon checking in, participants got surgical masks, even those who were already wearing masks of their own: by standardizing masks, the organizers could make testing faster and keep safety protocols consistent. Drivers proceeded to their tents and rolled down their windows. An examiner dressed like an astronaut—white bodysuit, white gloves, face shield—approached. Drivers and passengers extended their arms out their car windows for pinpricks. If people got woozy from the sight of blood or needles, there was a protocol for guiding their cars aside. Mask down, mouth swab; mask up (the probes often induced a cough or a sneeze), nose swab. Within seventy-two hours, tested individuals began receiving notice of their COVID-19 infection status, usually by text message. If the tests were positive, they would be called by U.C.S.F. research physicians, and the county health department would follow up for contact tracing. Working in this way, Bolinas’s one site could test and log more than two thousand people in a workweek—an astounding efficiency for one small site.
Wind flustered Sawyer’s gray hair as she darted among cars in sunglasses and a mask, conferring with other organizers via old-school walkie-talkies.
“Aenor to Jyri! Aenor to Jyri—come in, Jyri,” she shouted, into her device.
Jyri Engeström appeared from behind the fire station, wearing the outfit in which he’s often seen: a button-down shirt in a wet-hay shade, tight jeans, and hiking boots. He is in his early forties, but, with a mop of blond hair and round black-rimmed glasses, looks younger. A KN95 mask, in the shape of a coffee filter, drooped over his nose. (The KN95 is the Chinese version of the N95—it’s easier to obtain, and cheaper.) In normal times, Engeström and his partner, Caterina Fake, a co-founder of Flickr, spend half of each week in San Francisco; they homeschool their kids, easing the back-and-forth. When the pandemic hit, however, Engeström grew acutely aware of his family’s status as an outlier in the town’s demographics. “The median age here is fifty-two,” he said. “I’m from Finland, where we have universal health care.” Medical care for acute COVID-19 was sure to devastate the personal finances of several people in town. Although more recent arrivals, like Engeström, have tended to be roundly wealthy people in search of different life styles, Bolinas’s median income has fallen below the national average as its real-estate values have soared, leaving many long-term homeowners in a state increasingly common in coastal California: house rich but cash poor.
As his worries mounted, Engeström read an article, in the Guardian, about comprehensive testing in the Italian town of Vò, outside Venice—once the site of an outbreak, now home to no new cases, thanks to identification and isolation of every infected resident. Bolinas is about half the size of Vò, Engeström reasoned, and so, with similar testing, it could also firewall the disease. “Weirdly, everyone here calls Bolinas ‘Bo,’ ” he said, pointing to a nearby array of painted placards that rendered the “O” in “Bo” as a peace sign. It was, he figured, kismet.
Engeström mentioned his idea to a friend, who noted that another business leader in town—Cyrus Harmon, the founder of Olema Pharmaceuticals—had read the same article and emerged with a similar idea. The two of them approached a third Bolinas entrepreneur, Mark Pincus, who had founded the gaming company Zynga. “He said, ‘Well, how much do you think it’s going to cost?’ ” Engeström said. “We’re, like, ‘We don’t know—we think it’s probably going to be a few hundred thousand dollars.’ ” Pincus offered to pitch in a hundred thousand, to get the wheels turning, and Engeström and Harmon, through a local nonprofit, set up a GoFundMe to raise the rest—a little more than three hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars more. Sawyer was at pains to point out that many residents who hadn’t given to the campaign still contributed. “Donations come in many different currencies,” she said. “Some people have financial capacity. Other people have artistic capacity, like the volunteers who do the signs. Other people have, you know, ideas.”
In a matter of weeks, the tiny separatist retreat of Bolinas claimed a place at the forefront of pandemic strategy. Photograph by Ezra Shaw / Getty
In “The Town That Fought to Save Itself,” Schell wrote of Bolinas’s pride in conceiving of homespun responses that buck the mainstream order. When a drunk local, angry at the prospect of development, one day broke the windows of a real-estate office, slashed the tires of a fancy car, and ended up in jail, a resident whom Schell calls Judith Weston took up her guitar and wrote a song:


newyorker--2020-05-20--The Mysterious “Sweating Sickness” in Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” Trilogy and the Private Country of

The Mysterious “Sweating Sickness” in Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” Trilogy and the Private Country of Illness

At the beginning of quarantine , when the magnitude of the moment was blooming so strangely , I felt anesthetized by simultaneity .
Too much was happening , and so much of it was frightening .
Graves were being dug in trenches in New York City .
Bicycle-delivery guys were strapping on masks and oven mitts and setting off down empty streets , their lives in their hands .
At lunch , I ’ d sit down to eat a turkey sandwich and stare , befuddled , at its arbitrary triangles , and then at the green branch that was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back and forth in the wind .
At night , I tried to read “ Wolf Hall , ” figuring that there was no better time to become absorbed in Hilary Mantel ’ s Tudor trilogy , about the life of Thomas Cromwell , the legendary fixer for Henry VIII—the final installment , “ The Mirror and the Light , ” had just been published .
At first I couldn ’ t focus ; my hands kept reaching for my phone , refreshing hospitalization numbers .
But , gradually , I got swept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of magnitude and immediacy .
Mantel writes history like it ’ s always on the cusp of occurring , which it is—as if the exile of a great cardinal is as inexorable and as surprising as the rain that starts falling on his face as he cries , riding away .
It was 1527 , spring and summer .
And then , around page 90 , Mantel introduces a mysterious plague .
“ The warm weather has brought sweating sickness to London , and the city is emptying , ” she writes .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ all about pills and infusions , and friars in the streets are doing a lucrative trade in holy medals .
This plague came to us in the year 1485 , with the armies that brought us the first Henry Tudor .
Now every few years it fills the graveyards .
It kills in a day .
Merry at breakfast , they say : dead by noon.
” One day that summer , the sweating sickness kills Cromwell ’ s wife , Liz : he comes home to find her corpse on the bed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the whole house smelling like burning herbs .
Liz has to be buried quickly , with no funeral permissible ; the family is supposed to hang a bundle of straw outside the house as a sign of infection , to restrict entry for forty days , and to keep themselves at home .
Cromwell ’ s mother-in-law suggests , tentatively , that they don ’ t have to admit that Liz had sweating sickness—they could cite another cause of death , forgo the straw , and go on with their lives .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ London would come to a standstill , ” she says .
But , in the end , the family follows precautions .
Cromwell stays in his room , reading Petrarch and Machiavelli .
The plague passes lightly over London , and , in September , the family gathers to mourn Liz .
The next summer , the sweating sickness returns .
“ People say , as they did last year , that you won ’ t get it if you don ’ t think about it , ” Cromwell observes .
They ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he sends his two daughters away from London .
Infection reaches Henry VIII ’ s court , and Henry leaves , trying to “ outride the plague , moving from one hunting lodge to the next.
” He ’ s in the midst of trying to replace Catherine of Aragon with Anne Boleyn , the latter of whom goes off to the country , to self-isolate at a family estate .
She gets infected , but recovers quickly ; Henry , who has a powerful fear of illness , declines to visit , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the royal universe , and extends to matters of illness : rubies , people say , will ward off the plague .
Henry ’ s men , eager to understand the fate of their country , pore over the king ’ s astrological chart ; they map a comet ’ s progress across the sky and consult a nun who claims to communicate with the dead .
Cromwell ’ s rise to power is rooted partly in his understanding that England ’ s path is , above all , determined by earthly matters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of fallible bodies—whether there will be enough food for the army , whether the queen will produce a son .
The “ usual business , ” he thinks , in the second book , means “ war and peace , famine , traitorous connivance ; a failing harvest , a stubborn populace ; plague ravaging London , and the king losing his shirt at cards.
” Because monumental matters are mundane in Mantel ’ s trilogy , the mundane feels monumental—an aspect of the book that has harmonized with the heightened sensory awareness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to mark life in quarantine .
Mantel ’ s narrative present is so sharp-edged that a feeling of unfolding consequence pervades every ordinary morning , “ misty and dappled , ” when “ the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves , ” and “ there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell : the whole world luminous , its angles softened , its scent watery and green.
” Both the sweating sickness and the bubonic plague recur throughout the trilogy , which covers the period between 1500 and 1540 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Henry ’ s right hand—and then his fatal reversal of fortune .
Plague serves as a backbeat , a periodic reminder that summer has come again .
As Henry travels around the country , his routes are adjusted : riders gallop ahead and return , bringing reports of plague cases in one village or another .
( “ Henry , brave on the battlefield , pales almost before their eyes and wrenches around the horse ’ s head : where to ?
Anywhere will do , anywhere but Farnham.
” ) In “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cromwell ’ s cook cracks a joke about the disease .
He ’ s standing with Cromwell , who is offering tastes of bread dipped in a new sort of herb oil to passing members of the household .
One servant comes in and sneezes , and the cook says , dryly , “ That will be the plague.
” Researchers have suggested that the mechanism behind bubonic-plague transmission may have evolved as early as the Bronze Age .
In the sixth century A.D. , the Plague of Justinian wiped out much of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the bubonic plague , now known as the Black Death , is the deadliest pandemic in history .
It peaked in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century , killing up to half of the continent ’ s population ; the death rate is estimated to have been between sixty and ninety per cent .
A third plague pandemic began in the nineteenth century , originating in China and hitting the United States by 1900 .
It was early in this third pandemic that the cause of bubonic plague was finally identified , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yersin .
( The culprit , the bacterium now known as Yersinia pestis , was renamed , for him , in 1944 . )
Bubonic plague was spread by fleas , who became infected with Yersinia pestis when they bit infected animals , such as rodents .
Though Black Death-era public-health measures—isolation of the infected , precautionary quarantine for travellers—created a template for the plague that still , in part , persists , it was the identification of Yersinia pestis that paved the way for effective prevention and treatment .
Today , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ threat , although cases still crop up , including a few in the U.S. every year .
But there is no hard answer for what sweating sickness was .
It was known in Cromwell ’ s time as sudor anglicus , meaning the “ English sweat , ” and there were five outbreaks of it in England , the first in 1485 and the last in 1551 .
Victims did , in fact , often die within hours of their first symptoms , developing a high fever and “ copious malodorous sweating , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Infectious Diseases ; the exact cause of death may have been dehydration , but this remains unknown .
Because the disease killed so swiftly , and because it had other peculiar features—it seemed mainly to affect English people , even when it travelled across borders , and it was particularly infectious among wealthy young men—superstitions abounded .
The sweating sickness seemed like a “ mysterious minister of fate , like an evil spirit , with malice and sagacity , ” according to “ Encyclopædia of Superstitions , Folklore , and the Occult @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was published in 1903 .
People have suggested that the sweating sickness was a form of scarlet fever , or anthrax , or typhus , or flu .
Maybe it was an enterovirus , the genus of viruses that includes poliovirus .
In 1993 , there was an outbreak of a similar illness in the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States , which researchers eventually identified as a new sort of hantavirus , a type of disease that is transmitted by rodents .
If the sweating sickness was a form of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people were more likely to fall victim to it : their households were larger , with rat-friendly kitchens , and their housekeepers may have aerosolized the virus when brushing rat droppings off the floor .
But this is speculation .

“The Monk,” by Hans Holbein, depicting death. Art work by Hans Holbein / Alamy
At the beginning of quarantine, when the magnitude of the moment was blooming so strangely, I felt anesthetized by simultaneity. Too much was happening, and so much of it was frightening. Graves were being dug in trenches in New York City. Bicycle-delivery guys were strapping on masks and oven mitts and setting off down empty streets, their lives in their hands. At lunch, I’d sit down to eat a turkey sandwich and stare, befuddled, at its arbitrary triangles, and then at the green branch that was budding outside the window, being buffeted back and forth in the wind. At night, I tried to read “Wolf Hall,” figuring that there was no better time to become absorbed in Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, about the life of Thomas Cromwell, the legendary fixer for Henry VIII—the final installment, “The Mirror and the Light,” had just been published. At first I couldn’t focus; my hands kept reaching for my phone, refreshing hospitalization numbers. But, gradually, I got swept up in the book’s convergence of magnitude and immediacy. Mantel writes history like it’s always on the cusp of occurring, which it is—as if the exile of a great cardinal is as inexorable and as surprising as the rain that starts falling on his face as he cries, riding away. It was 1527, spring and summer. And then, around page 90, Mantel introduces a mysterious plague.
“The warm weather has brought sweating sickness to London, and the city is emptying,” she writes. The “gossip in the shops is all about pills and infusions, and friars in the streets are doing a lucrative trade in holy medals. This plague came to us in the year 1485, with the armies that brought us the first Henry Tudor. Now every few years it fills the graveyards. It kills in a day. Merry at breakfast, they say: dead by noon.”
One day that summer, the sweating sickness kills Cromwell’s wife, Liz: he comes home to find her corpse on the bed, her jaw bound with linen, the whole house smelling like burning herbs. Liz has to be buried quickly, with no funeral permissible; the family is supposed to hang a bundle of straw outside the house as a sign of infection, to restrict entry for forty days, and to keep themselves at home. Cromwell’s mother-in-law suggests, tentatively, that they don’t have to admit that Liz had sweating sickness—they could cite another cause of death, forgo the straw, and go on with their lives. “If we all stayed at home, London would come to a standstill,” she says. But, in the end, the family follows precautions. Cromwell stays in his room, reading Petrarch and Machiavelli. The plague passes lightly over London, and, in September, the family gathers to mourn Liz.
The next summer, the sweating sickness returns. “People say, as they did last year, that you won’t get it if you don’t think about it,” Cromwell observes. They’re wrong, of course, and he sends his two daughters away from London. Infection reaches Henry VIII’s court, and Henry leaves, trying to “outride the plague, moving from one hunting lodge to the next.” He’s in the midst of trying to replace Catherine of Aragon with Anne Boleyn, the latter of whom goes off to the country, to self-isolate at a family estate. She gets infected, but recovers quickly; Henry, who has a powerful fear of illness, declines to visit, sending his best.
Magical thinking pervades the royal universe, and extends to matters of illness: rubies, people say, will ward off the plague. Henry’s men, eager to understand the fate of their country, pore over the king’s astrological chart; they map a comet’s progress across the sky and consult a nun who claims to communicate with the dead. Cromwell’s rise to power is rooted partly in his understanding that England’s path is, above all, determined by earthly matters, by taxes and leases and questions of fallible bodies—whether there will be enough food for the army, whether the queen will produce a son. The “usual business,” he thinks, in the second book, means “war and peace, famine, traitorous connivance; a failing harvest, a stubborn populace; plague ravaging London, and the king losing his shirt at cards.” Because monumental matters are mundane in Mantel’s trilogy, the mundane feels monumental—an aspect of the book that has harmonized with the heightened sensory awareness that, on some days, seems to mark life in quarantine. Mantel’s narrative present is so sharp-edged that a feeling of unfolding consequence pervades every ordinary morning, “misty and dappled,” when “the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves,” and “there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green.”
Both the sweating sickness and the bubonic plague recur throughout the trilogy, which covers the period between 1500 and 1540, tracking Cromwell’s ascent—he becomes Henry’s right hand—and then his fatal reversal of fortune. Plague serves as a backbeat, a periodic reminder that summer has come again. As Henry travels around the country, his routes are adjusted: riders gallop ahead and return, bringing reports of plague cases in one village or another. (“Henry, brave on the battlefield, pales almost before their eyes and wrenches around the horse’s head: where to? Anywhere will do, anywhere but Farnham.”) In “The Mirror and the Light,” Cromwell’s cook cracks a joke about the disease. He’s standing with Cromwell, who is offering tastes of bread dipped in a new sort of herb oil to passing members of the household. One servant comes in and sneezes, and the cook says, dryly, “That will be the plague.”
Researchers have suggested that the mechanism behind bubonic-plague transmission may have evolved as early as the Bronze Age. In the sixth century A.D., the Plague of Justinian wiped out much of the Byzantine Empire. The second pandemic of the bubonic plague, now known as the Black Death, is the deadliest pandemic in history. It peaked in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, killing up to half of the continent’s population; the death rate is estimated to have been between sixty and ninety per cent. A third plague pandemic began in the nineteenth century, originating in China and hitting the United States by 1900. It was early in this third pandemic that the cause of bubonic plague was finally identified, in Hong Kong, by the bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. (The culprit, the bacterium now known as Yersinia pestis, was renamed, for him, in 1944.) Bubonic plague was spread by fleas, who became infected with Yersinia pestis when they bit infected animals, such as rodents. Though Black Death-era public-health measures—isolation of the infected, precautionary quarantine for travellers—created a template for the plague that still, in part, persists, it was the identification of Yersinia pestis that paved the way for effective prevention and treatment. Today, the bubonic plague no longer poses an existential threat, although cases still crop up, including a few in the U.S. every year.
But there is no hard answer for what sweating sickness was. It was known in Cromwell’s time as sudor anglicus, meaning the “English sweat,” and there were five outbreaks of it in England, the first in 1485 and the last in 1551. Victims did, in fact, often die within hours of their first symptoms, developing a high fever and “copious malodorous sweating,” Paul R. Hunter writes in Reviews of Infectious Diseases; the exact cause of death may have been dehydration, but this remains unknown. Because the disease killed so swiftly, and because it had other peculiar features—it seemed mainly to affect English people, even when it travelled across borders, and it was particularly infectious among wealthy young men—superstitions abounded. The sweating sickness seemed like a “mysterious minister of fate, like an evil spirit, with malice and sagacity,” according to “Encyclopædia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World,” which was published in 1903. People have suggested that the sweating sickness was a form of scarlet fever, or anthrax, or typhus, or flu. Maybe it was an enterovirus, the genus of viruses that includes poliovirus. In 1993, there was an outbreak of a similar illness in the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States, which researchers eventually identified as a new sort of hantavirus, a type of disease that is transmitted by rodents. If the sweating sickness was a form of hantavirus, this could explain why wealthy people were more likely to fall victim to it: their households were larger, with rat-friendly kitchens, and their housekeepers may have aerosolized the virus when brushing rat droppings off the floor. But this is speculation.
In “Wolf Hall,” two years after Liz Cromwell dies of the sweating sickness, the disease returns to London. Cromwell lets his daughters, Anne and Grace, remain in the city—his mother-in-law wants to keep the family together, believing that, “since the infection killed so many last year, it won’t be so violent this year.” (Besides, she adds, they keep the house so clean.) But the girls contract the sickness. In the midst of her fever, Anne falls into “black stillness, only her hand moving, the fingers clenching and unclenching.” The fever breaks at dawn, but then it rises again, and Cromwell sits with her, “watching her fight and lose.” Both daughters die. Anne had been learning Greek, and Cromwell wonders if, in death, her soul knows the language; perhaps “in a simple twist of unbecoming,” the dead “know everything they need to know.”
Throughout the trilogy, Cromwell carries around with him a mostly dormant fever, which he contracted as a journeyman in Italy. In the first book, he relapses, and his perceptions become heavy and hallucinogenic. He closes his eyes, and “ladies move behind his lids: transparent like little lizards, lashing their tails.” In his feverish brain, numbers start walking out of books; venison in the kitchen turns back to deer, which rub themselves on the trees in the forest; the noises of the house become the noises of another country, and imaginary furniture scrapes across the floor. When we are ill, we are not so much different from those who have been ill before us, and the same is true when we are fearing a plague. This is the private country of illness, which we all visit—a hazy, purgatorial land that outlasts every person who arrives there, sweating in their sheets. In 1552, the physician John Kays, who preferred the Latinized name of Johannus Caius, published a book about the sweating sickness that is particularly haunting now. “As it founde them so it toke them,” Caius writes, “some in sleape some in wake, some in mirthe some in care, some fasting and some ful, some busy and some idle, and in one house sometyme three sometyme fiue, sometyme seuen sometyme eight sometyme more some tyme all, of the whyche, if the haulfe in euery Towne escaped, it was thoughte great fauour.”
Caius provides the most detailed surviving account of the disease. He describes a pain that spreads from the back to the extremities to the organs, followed by a “madnes” of the head and a “passion” of the heart, then a “marueilous heauinesse,” and a powerful desire to sleep, along with a terrifying sense of being bound or closed up. Patients should not be allowed to sleep, he writes, because sleep will allow the venom of the sickness to run to the heart. He suggests pulling on their ears, nose, or hair to keep them awake. His prescriptions are sometimes unexpectedly intimate: “Cause theim to lie on their right side, and bowe theim selues forward, call theim by their names, and beate them with a rosemary braunche, or some other swete like thynge.” He warns that patients should be careful of a false sense of recovery. They are on their way to health only after the body has become lank and light and cheerful; caregivers should let the patient smell something fresh and comforting, like an orange, or a lemon, or a piece of hot bread. Those who have been sick should wait a while before they leave the house, and reëenter warily, only on a “faire bright daye.”


newyorker--2020-05-20--A New Way to Listen to The New Yorker

A New Way to Listen to The New Yorker

By now , many of us have found little tricks for coping with life in quarantine , savoring a dash of humor or a virtual journey to a far-flung world .
From our respective homes , New Yorker staff members have been seeking new ways to deliver the insight , comfort , and escape that you look for in our pages .
When you can ’ t hold the magazine or look at a screen , we now offer an option that doesn ’ t require reaching for your glasses : audio .
We ’ re excited to announce that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ New Yorker Today app , along with podcasts and The New Yorker Radio Hour .
Each week , several features from the magazine and our Web site are recorded for listeners , with offerings that range from news and cultural coverage to fiction and poetry .
All new recordings can be played directly from the Today app , through the Top Stories feed , making it easy to listen to The New Yorker ’ s latest as you go about your day .
Recent recordings include Susan B. Glasser ’ s weekly column @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Profile of Fiona Apple , and George Saunders ’ s latest short story , read by the author himself .
The Today app ’ s new audio player allows you to adjust the listening experience to your liking , speeding up or slowing down , rewinding , and even displaying the text version of the story—or the episode details , for podcasts—in case you ’ d like to read along .
If you prefer to browse your device ’ s other offerings ( or perhaps go for a masked walk ) while you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ play in the background .
Consider it the app ’ s version of social distancing .
To get started , download the New Yorker Today app for free , or update to the latest version—audio is available on devices with iOS 11 or newer systems .
Happy listening !

By now, many of us have found little tricks for coping with life in quarantine, savoring a dash of humor or a virtual journey to a far-flung world. From our respective homes, New Yorker staff members have been seeking new ways to deliver the insight, comfort, and escape that you look for in our pages. When you can’t hold the magazine or look at a screen, we now offer an option that doesn’t require reaching for your glasses: audio.
We’re excited to announce that narrated stories are now available in the New Yorker Today app, along with podcasts and The New Yorker Radio Hour. Each week, several features from the magazine and our Web site are recorded for listeners, with offerings that range from news and cultural coverage to fiction and poetry. All new recordings can be played directly from the Today app, through the Top Stories feed, making it easy to listen to The New Yorker’s latest as you go about your day. Recent recordings include Susan B. Glasser’s weekly column from Washington, Emily Nussbaum’s Profile of Fiona Apple, and George Saunders’s latest short story, read by the author himself.
The Today app’s new audio player allows you to adjust the listening experience to your liking, speeding up or slowing down, rewinding, and even displaying the text version of the story—or the episode details, for podcasts—in case you’d like to read along. If you prefer to browse your device’s other offerings (or perhaps go for a masked walk) while you listen, the audio will continue to play in the background. Consider it the app’s version of social distancing.
To get started, download the New Yorker Today app for free, or update to the latest version—audio is available on devices with iOS 11 or newer systems. Happy listening!


newyorker--2020-05-21--Revisiting the Violence and Style of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull”

The first movie première that I ever attended was the one for Martin Scorsese ’ s “ Raging Bull , ” at the Ziegfeld , in the fall of 1980 , thanks to a friend with connections .
I was a recent college graduate on my first job ( in commercials ) and a Scorsese-phile on the basis of the three films of his that I ’ d seen : “ Mean Streets , ” “ Taxi Driver , ” and , above all , “ New York , New York , ” none of which prepared me for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and physicality in “ Raging Bull , ” which I ’ ve considered , ever since , a high point of Scorsese ’ s work .
Strangely , I didn ’ t rewatch the film for many years—even after the start of what I consider the Scorses-aissance , the astounding outburst of creative inspiration that followed “ The Departed ” ( more specifically , his Oscar for “ The Departed ” ) and has marked his past decade of films , from “ Shutter Island ” to “ The Irishman.
” Finally , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Raging Bull , ” of course , is a bio-pic of Jake La Motta ( Robert De Niro ) , who was raised in the Bronx in an immigrant Italian family and became the middleweight champion of the world in 1949 , losing his title two years later and then losing his zest for the sport .
He opened a night club , did jail time for procuring an underage girl for his male customers , and became a raconteur and monologuist in New York night spots .
The story is told as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Motta , fat and scarred and thick-voiced , prepares in a tawdry little dressing room to take the stage in a club and recite doggerel ; it cuts back to 1941 , when he was making his hard climb from obscurity and enduring his first defeat , and continues through his rise as a boxer—and it doesn ’ t so much document his fall as reveal him to have been as base at the time of his great successes and colossal failures as he was at the very start .
It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ without the hindsight of Scorsese ’ s career since .
The connections with “ The Irishman ” are significant , for instance , both in subject and in style , starting with the flashback framework .
Both films involve a Mafia boss successfully crushing the protagonist ’ s conscience , and include a small but significant element that I ’ d call “ the vanishing first wives.
” And , of course , both films star Robert De Niro ( whose appearance is significantly altered in both films ) and co-star Joe Pesci @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Raging Bull ” ) .
But , above all , both films are distinguished by an absence of psychology , a trait that renders them subject to negative judgments from critics with narrow expectations of a character study .
Jake La Motta is a psychopathic character whose controlled violence in the boxing ring is continuous with his uncontrolled violence outside of it—and , outside of it , much of it is directed toward the women in his life .
It ’ s suggested that he beats his first wife , Irma—and his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( Cathy Moriarty ) , are appallingly , horrifically seen ; he fights his brother Joe ( Pesci ) outside the ring while also sparring with him in it .
La Motta ’ s violence is essentially sexual ; what arouses his fury toward Vickie is , above all , jealousy , the overwhelming anger at the idea of her having relations with , or even an attraction to , another man .
Though he ’ s furiously motivated by lust , he ’ s also bound by the long-standing tradition that a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abstinence—in effect , by sexual frustration .
Yet his own self-denial also denies his wife a vigorous sex life , which she complains about—and which fuels his jealousy all the more , with catastrophic results .
Even in his career , violence and sex are fused : his main metaphor for defeating his opponents is homosexual rape ; his casual banter , and Joe ’ s with his tough-guy acquaintances , is homosexual , homophobic , and sexually violent .
Yet “ Raging Bull ” ( whose script is credited to Paul Schrader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work by Scorsese and De Niro ) doesn ’ t at all psychologize La Motta ’ s twisted and tormented behavior .
The drama certainly isn ’ t devoid of psychology—the logic of behavior is clear and consistent , and the action doesn ’ t come off as willful symbolism .
Rather , La Motta ’ s character isn ’ t diagnosed or traced to specific personal experiences or explained by aspects of backstory .
The peculiarity of the film “ Raging Bull ” —and its enduring inspiration—is its transformation of La Motta @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a negative mirror that makes him a perfect and closed embodiment of the milieu to which he belongs .
That ’ s because “ Raging Bull , ” like “ The Irishman , ” is a drama of Mafia power , of the interpenetration of ostensibly legitimate society—professional sports and the media complex surrounding it—and the violent reign of organized crime .
The central plotline of the earlier film is La Motta ’ s vaunted independence ; he grew up and rose to fame in a tough ethnic-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Though they try to lure La Motta into their orbit , he refuses even to associate with them—knowing all the while that , despite his heralded successes in the ring , it would be nearly impossible for him to fight for the middleweight championship unless the bout is approved and arranged by the Mob .
Nonetheless , he keeps his distance ; meanwhile , Joe schemes to end-run organized crime by using the levers of sport itself , and the related clamor of media , in the hope of forcing professional managers ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But sex gets in the way : seeing Vickie at a night club in the company of the very gangsters who ’ ve been making overtures to La Motta , Joe approaches them aggressively and then starts a fight that lands him in trouble with the Mob boss , Tommy Como ( Nicholas Colasanto ) , who extorts a commitment from Joe to get La Motta ( whom Joe calls “ Jack ” throughout ) to coöperate—which means to throw a fight for the benefit of gamblers .
And despite his resulting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Commission for his misdeed , La Motta indeed gets his title shot—and wins .
The little world to which La Motta belongs—and , indeed , the larger one to which he connects—is a man ’ s world , and a white man ’ s world .
There isn ’ t a woman seen in it who ’ s anything but a housewife or a playgirl , not a single female professional in sight—and not a person of color anywhere , not at a public pool , not even in a crowd of boxing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s opponent is black .
( His first defeat comes at the hands of a black fighter named Billy Fox , played by Eddie Mustafa Muhammad ; his greatest rivalry is with Sugar Ray Robinson , played by Johnny Barnes . )
La Motta and his circle consistently refer to black boxers with an Italian racist slur ; they use sexual slurs for women and gay men ; their crude language expresses crude emotions , and reflects the narrow scope of their experience—and of the unchallenged , unreflective assumptions of the segregated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the media that they consume .
And there ’ s plenty of non-ethnic , nonsexual violence in their everyday lives as well : La Motta tosses around threats and epithets with a flagrant aggression and an unchecked hostility that also reflects the impunity that he demands—where he can get it , or get away with it .

The first movie première that I ever attended was the one for Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” at the Ziegfeld, in the fall of 1980, thanks to a friend with connections. I was a recent college graduate on my first job (in commercials) and a Scorsese-phile on the basis of the three films of his that I’d seen: “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” and, above all, “New York, New York,” none of which prepared me for the blend of austerity and fury, abstraction and physicality in “Raging Bull,” which I’ve considered, ever since, a high point of Scorsese’s work. Strangely, I didn’t rewatch the film for many years—even after the start of what I consider the Scorses-aissance, the astounding outburst of creative inspiration that followed “The Departed” (more specifically, his Oscar for “The Departed”) and has marked his past decade of films, from “Shutter Island” to “The Irishman.” Finally, this week, I did.
“Raging Bull,” of course, is a bio-pic of Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro), who was raised in the Bronx in an immigrant Italian family and became the middleweight champion of the world in 1949, losing his title two years later and then losing his zest for the sport. He opened a night club, did jail time for procuring an underage girl for his male customers, and became a raconteur and monologuist in New York night spots. The story is told as a flashback from 1964, when La Motta, fat and scarred and thick-voiced, prepares in a tawdry little dressing room to take the stage in a club and recite doggerel; it cuts back to 1941, when he was making his hard climb from obscurity and enduring his first defeat, and continues through his rise as a boxer—and it doesn’t so much document his fall as reveal him to have been as base at the time of his great successes and colossal failures as he was at the very start.
It’s impossible to see “Raging Bull” without the hindsight of Scorsese’s career since. The connections with “The Irishman” are significant, for instance, both in subject and in style, starting with the flashback framework. Both films involve a Mafia boss successfully crushing the protagonist’s conscience, and include a small but significant element that I’d call “the vanishing first wives.” And, of course, both films star Robert De Niro (whose appearance is significantly altered in both films) and co-star Joe Pesci (his first major role is in “Raging Bull”). But, above all, both films are distinguished by an absence of psychology, a trait that renders them subject to negative judgments from critics with narrow expectations of a character study. Jake La Motta is a psychopathic character whose controlled violence in the boxing ring is continuous with his uncontrolled violence outside of it—and, outside of it, much of it is directed toward the women in his life. It’s suggested that he beats his first wife, Irma—and his repeated assaults on his second, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), are appallingly, horrifically seen; he fights his brother Joe (Pesci) outside the ring while also sparring with him in it.
La Motta’s violence is essentially sexual; what arouses his fury toward Vickie is, above all, jealousy, the overwhelming anger at the idea of her having relations with, or even an attraction to, another man. Though he’s furiously motivated by lust, he’s also bound by the long-standing tradition that a boxer’s strength is sparked by abstinence—in effect, by sexual frustration. Yet his own self-denial also denies his wife a vigorous sex life, which she complains about—and which fuels his jealousy all the more, with catastrophic results. Even in his career, violence and sex are fused: his main metaphor for defeating his opponents is homosexual rape; his casual banter, and Joe’s with his tough-guy acquaintances, is homosexual, homophobic, and sexually violent.
Yet “Raging Bull” (whose script is credited to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, with significant uncredited work by Scorsese and De Niro) doesn’t at all psychologize La Motta’s twisted and tormented behavior. The drama certainly isn’t devoid of psychology—the logic of behavior is clear and consistent, and the action doesn’t come off as willful symbolism. Rather, La Motta’s character isn’t diagnosed or traced to specific personal experiences or explained by aspects of backstory. The peculiarity of the film “Raging Bull”—and its enduring inspiration—is its transformation of La Motta into an opaque and external unit, a negative mirror that makes him a perfect and closed embodiment of the milieu to which he belongs.
That’s because “Raging Bull,” like “The Irishman,” is a drama of Mafia power, of the interpenetration of ostensibly legitimate society—professional sports and the media complex surrounding it—and the violent reign of organized crime. The central plotline of the earlier film is La Motta’s vaunted independence; he grew up and rose to fame in a tough ethnic-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, where mobsters were prominent and familiar. Though they try to lure La Motta into their orbit, he refuses even to associate with them—knowing all the while that, despite his heralded successes in the ring, it would be nearly impossible for him to fight for the middleweight championship unless the bout is approved and arranged by the Mob. Nonetheless, he keeps his distance; meanwhile, Joe schemes to end-run organized crime by using the levers of sport itself, and the related clamor of media, in the hope of forcing professional managers’ hand in setting up a title fight.
But sex gets in the way: seeing Vickie at a night club in the company of the very gangsters who’ve been making overtures to La Motta, Joe approaches them aggressively and then starts a fight that lands him in trouble with the Mob boss, Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto), who extorts a commitment from Joe to get La Motta (whom Joe calls “Jack” throughout) to coöperate—which means to throw a fight for the benefit of gamblers. And, despite his resulting suspension by the New York State Boxing Commission for his misdeed, La Motta gets his title shot—and wins.
The little world to which La Motta belongs—and, indeed, the larger one to which he connects—is a man’s world, and a white man’s world. There isn’t a woman seen in it who’s anything but a housewife or a playgirl, not a single female professional in sight—and not a person of color anywhere, not at a public pool, not even in a crowd of boxing fans at bouts in which La Motta’s opponent is black. (His first defeat comes at the hands of a black fighter named Billy Fox, played by Eddie Mustafa Muhammad; his greatest rivalry is with Sugar Ray Robinson, played by Johnny Barnes.) La Motta and his circle consistently refer to black boxers with an Italian racist slur; they use sexual slurs for women and gay men; their crude language expresses crude emotions, and reflects the narrow scope of their experience—and of the unchallenged, unreflective assumptions of the segregated, misogynisitc world in which they work and the media that they consume. And there’s plenty of non-ethnic, nonsexual violence in their everyday lives as well: La Motta tosses around threats and epithets with a flagrant aggression and an unchecked hostility that also reflects the impunity that he demands—where he can get it, or get away with it.
Yet the constant churn of anger that consumes La Motta in the wider world and in the ring are equalled by the self-shredding fury of his suffering—which also gets its supreme expression in boxing. Scorsese films the boxing sequences with a hallucinatory high-contrast palette and in kinetic closeups that render the cruelty and the pleasure in inflicting pain, the destructive frenzy—and the passion, the virtually Christ-like serenity in agony and grace in suffering. One scene, when La Motta prepares for a ferocious beating by Robinson, shows him in a terrifyingly patient exaltation of anticipation of pain that, he knows, he well deserves for the pain that he has caused those closest to him. It’s a moment of conscience in torment that glows and flares only briefly, but with an intensity to burn a hole in the screen.
The compact, compressed solidity with which La Motta’s unilluminated, impersonal character is composed makes him not a cipher or a void but a distillation of the worst of the particular world he lives in—and a paradoxical hero whose ability to win fame and fortune from those elements is itself an indictment of the world at large. From the metaphor of fighting to succeed, he actually fights; from a radically gendered world comes his carnal possessiveness and delusional jealousy; from the discarding of traditional morality comes cavalier indifference and uninhibited cruelty; from his roots in his community comes tribalism; from the American dream of an immigrant family’s success comes a will to win at any cost; from the corruption of institutions comes obliviousness to the very notion of justice or fairness. Scorsese doesn’t dramatize the process that turned a man into a raging bull but, rather, unites the action and the character with the milieu—which is why so much, and so much of the best of “Raging Bull,” is less a matter of action than of inaction, of potential energy, of the storm that’s brewing rather than the one that’s unleashed.


newyorker--2020-05-20--Susan Rothenberg’s Asteroidal Impact on the New York Art World

Susan Rothenberg , who died this week , at the age of seventy-five , in Galisteo , New Mexico , her home for thirty years , was the best thing that happened to the art of painting in New York in the nineteen-seventies .
I say “ thing ” because the effect of the horse paintings that Rothenberg sprang on the world in 1975 , at the scruffy loft gallery 112 Greene Street , in a nascent SoHo , in a city wracked by poverty and chaos , was like an asteroid impact .
It triggered mass extinctions among the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ formalist abstraction .
There were rebellious realist styles at the time , and infusions of conceptualist ideas .
But nothing prepared us for the powers of a young woman from Buffalo—trained as a sculptor and , small and lithe , sometimes a dancer—who had been painting for barely two years .
Married to the sculptor George Trakas at the time , Rothenberg started with small works in water-soluble mediums—fields of broken brushwork with lines down the middle , stabilizing silhouette images of horses—so that she could wash her hands quickly when their baby @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Trakas later divorced .
( It would be good to have a month-by-month chronology—what ensued in her life from then until the Greene Street show—to enhance the major museum retrospective that , shockingly , Rothenberg has yet to be given , despite her secure fame . )
At 112 Greene , her huge paintings in acrylics made some of us laugh with sheer wonderment .
In stentorian blacks and orangish browns , they had formal rigor aplenty , as flat and integral as any current abstraction .
But that was perfunctory , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ commenced to blow sky high .
The great horses loomed , ranging in form from crude cartoonishness to hints of plausible equine anatomy .
All seethed with emotion—the isotope that had gone missing from the mandarin styles of the day , in which carefulness had displaced suggestions of anything worth caring about .
The works conveyed anger , exaltation , and self-abandoning intrepidity .
They felt personal , albeit on a grand scale .
In an era preoccupied with what to do in art and how to do it , Rothenberg addressed and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ She palpably made the pictures not only because she could but because she had to .
The historic upshot was a rebirth of Expressionism , with kinetic force and unmistakable authenticity .
So it seemed to me then and seems to me now .
The rest is a long story replete with changing imagery—heads and human figures , usually fragmentary , as well as animals—and ever more eloquent touch .
( One of her masterpieces is a vision of Piet Mondrian dancing the foxtrot , as was his wont , in a blizzard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ acrylics , Rothenberg mastered oil paints , which brought fugitive beauty and aching tenderness to her furiously worked surfaces .
I take pride in having introduced Bruce Nauman to her work in a show at the superb , now bygone Willard Gallery , in 1981 .
( It was fun to watch his stony skepticism of painting crack a little . )
They met subsequently , married in 1989 , and moved to Nauman ’ s ranch outside Santa Fe , living on familial terms with horses , chickens , dogs , cats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ petroglyphs and pottery shards .
Rothenberg seldom revisited New York except for periodic shows of her work at the Sperone Westwater gallery , rendering her rather ghostly , while legendary , as a presence on the contemporary scene .
But stand in front of one of her paintings .
She ’ s fully there , with a jolt of what permanently rearranged my sensibility , and the art world ’ s , in 1975 .

Susan Rothenberg, who died this week, at the age of seventy-five, in Galisteo, New Mexico, her home for thirty years, was the best thing that happened to the art of painting in New York in the nineteen-seventies. I say “thing” because the effect of the horse paintings that Rothenberg sprang on the world in 1975, at the scruffy loft gallery 112 Greene Street, in a nascent SoHo, in a city wracked by poverty and chaos, was like an asteroid impact. It triggered mass extinctions among the time’s dinosaur species of mannerly formalist abstraction. There were rebellious realist styles at the time, and infusions of conceptualist ideas. But nothing prepared us for the powers of a young woman from Buffalo—trained as a sculptor and, small and lithe, sometimes a dancer—who had been painting for barely two years.
Married to the sculptor George Trakas at the time, Rothenberg started with small works in water-soluble mediums—fields of broken brushwork with lines down the middle, stabilizing silhouette images of horses—so that she could wash her hands quickly when their baby daughter, Maggie, cried. She and Trakas later divorced. (It would be good to have a month-by-month chronology—what ensued in her life from then until the Greene Street show—to enhance the major museum retrospective that, shockingly, Rothenberg has yet to be given, despite her secure fame.) At 112 Greene, her huge paintings in acrylics made some of us laugh with sheer wonderment. In stentorian blacks and orangish browns, they had formal rigor aplenty, as flat and integral as any current abstraction. But that was perfunctory, a nod to the tradition that Rothenberg commenced to blow sky high. The great horses loomed, ranging in form from crude cartoonishness to hints of plausible equine anatomy. All seethed with emotion—the isotope that had gone missing from the mandarin styles of the day, in which carefulness had displaced suggestions of anything worth caring about. The works conveyed anger, exaltation, and self-abandoning intrepidity. They felt personal, albeit on a grand scale. In an era preoccupied with what to do in art and how to do it, Rothenberg addressed and answered a rarer question: Why? She palpably made the pictures not only because she could but because she had to. The historic upshot was a rebirth of Expressionism, with kinetic force and unmistakable authenticity. So it seemed to me then and seems to me now.
Rothenberg’s paintings of horses seethed with emotion, the isotope that had gone missing from the mandarin styles of the day. Art work by Susan Rothenberg / ARS / Courtesy Sperone Westwater
The rest is a long story replete with changing imagery—heads and human figures, usually fragmentary, as well as animals—and ever more eloquent touch. (One of her masterpieces is a vision of Piet Mondrian dancing the foxtrot, as was his wont, in a blizzard of feathery strokes.) Tiring of acrylics, Rothenberg mastered oil paints, which brought fugitive beauty and aching tenderness to her furiously worked surfaces. I take pride in having introduced Bruce Nauman to her work in a show at the superb, now bygone Willard Gallery, in 1981. (It was fun to watch his stony skepticism of painting crack a little.) They met subsequently, married in 1989, and moved to Nauman’s ranch outside Santa Fe, living on familial terms with horses, chickens, dogs, cats, and ambient treasures of ancient Indian petroglyphs and pottery shards. Rothenberg seldom revisited New York except for periodic shows of her work at the Sperone Westwater gallery, rendering her rather ghostly, while legendary, as a presence on the contemporary scene. But stand in front of one of her paintings. She’s fully there, with a jolt of what permanently rearranged my sensibility, and the art world’s, in 1975.


newyorker--2020-05-20--Remembering Aimee Stephens, Who Lost and Found Her Purpose

Before I saw Aimee Stephens , on October 8 , 2019 , I heard applause and chanting : “ We love you , Aimee !
Ai-mee !
Ai-mee !
” I couldn ’ t yet see Stephens herself : she was in a wheelchair that her wife , Donna , was pushing , and a gaggle of lawyers obscured my view .
We were in the plaza in front of the Supreme Court , which had just heard the first transgender-rights case in its history .
Stephens was the person at the center of this case , and this was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her name and their gratitude .
Stephens , dressed in a tailored black skirt suit and a white blouse , was beaming .
Stephens died last week , at the age of fifty-nine , following a long illness .
Jay Kaplan , her lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan , told me that Stephens , who entered hospice care at the end of April , had fervently hoped to live to hear the Supreme Court decision in her case .
She did not : the decision may come down anytime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a significance to Stephens ’ s outfit on the day of the hearing .
These were the clothes that she would have worn to her job as a funeral director if she had not been fired six years earlier , when she came out to her employer as transgender .
Stephens wrote about this in her coming-out letter to her employer and co-workers : “ I intend to have sex reassignment surgery .
The first step I must take is to live and work full-time as a woman for one year .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ August 26 , 2013 , I will return to work as my true self , Aimee Australia Stephens , in appropriate business attire.
” Stephens , who was born and grew up in North Carolina , was assigned male at birth and lived as a man well into her late forties .
But , when she was a child , she thought of herself as a girl , and , with time , the struggle between her sense of self and the life she was leading as a married man and a professional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become strained when she came out to her wife , Donna , in 2009 .
For the next few years , Stephens lived as a woman at home and a man at work , and this , too , proved untenable .
One day , she found herself standing in the back yard , a gun in her hand , planning to take her own life .
Then , as she often told people in interviews and public speeches , she decided that she liked herself too much to stop living .
She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coming-out letter .
“ I have known many of you for some time now , and I count you all as my friends , ” it began : What I must tell you is very difficult for me and is taking all the courage I can muster .
.
.
.
I have a gender identity disorder that I have struggled with my entire life .
I have managed to hide it very well all these years .
.
.
.
With the support of my loving wife , I have decided to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is .
.
.
.
I realize that some of you may have trouble understanding this .
In truth , I have had to live with it every day of my life and even I do not fully understand it myself .
.
.
.
As distressing as this is sure to be to my friends and some of my family , I need to do this for myself and for my own peace of mind and to end the agony in my soul .
.
.
.
It is my wish that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
& G.R .
Harris Funeral Home doing what I have always done , which is my best !
Stephens ’ s employer , Thomas Rost , responded with a letter of his own : a separation agreement and an offer of a severance package contingent on Stephens agreeing to stay quiet .
Stephens rejected the offer and called the Michigan A.C.L.U .
instead .
The A.C.L.U .
referred her to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission , which took the case to federal court .
Stephens lost her case but then won on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Then her former employer appealed .
In the meantime , Stephens could not find work .
Kaplan told me that she tried a variety of funeral homes in the Detroit area , but , despite her years of experience , no one would hire her .
Stephens retrained as a medical assistant and found a job , but by this time her health , undermined by a period of time without health insurance , deteriorated so badly that she could no longer work .
By the time the case reached the Supreme Court @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Instead of arguing what had been the E.E.O.C.
’ s position—that Stephens ’ s firing constituted discrimination “ because of sex , ” which is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the Justice Department claimed that it is legal to discriminate against people because they are transgender .
Speaking at the Supreme Court , the A.C.L.U .
lawyer David Cole argued that what happened to Stephens could be viewed as sex discrimination no matter how one perceived her : as a man who presents himself in an insufficiently masculine manner ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or as a woman who is somehow insufficiently female .
This line of argument , which treats transgender identity as somehow conditional , was painful for a lot of trans people to hear .
If it was painful for Stephens , she did not let on .
“ Being the center of a massive legal case , you don ’ t necessarily feel seen in every aspect of how the court contends with your case , ” the A.C.L.U .
attorney Chase Strangio , who worked on the case , said , speaking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that you are pushing the boundary of what the law can do .
”

Whatever the Supreme Court decides about her case, Aimee Stephens will be remembered as a civil-rights hero. Photograph by Eamon Queeney / NYT / Redux
Before I saw Aimee Stephens, on October 8, 2019, I heard applause and chanting: “We love you, Aimee! Ai-mee! Ai-mee!” I couldn’t yet see Stephens herself: she was in a wheelchair that her wife, Donna, was pushing, and a gaggle of lawyers obscured my view. We were in the plaza in front of the Supreme Court, which had just heard the first transgender-rights case in its history. Stephens was the person at the center of this case, and this was why hundreds of activists were now chanting her name and their gratitude. Stephens, dressed in a tailored black skirt suit and a white blouse, was beaming.
Stephens died last week, at the age of fifty-nine, following a long illness. Jay Kaplan, her lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, told me that Stephens, who entered hospice care at the end of April, had fervently hoped to live to hear the Supreme Court decision in her case. She did not: the decision may come down anytime in the next six weeks.
There was a significance to Stephens’s outfit on the day of the hearing. These were the clothes that she would have worn to her job as a funeral director if she had not been fired six years earlier, when she came out to her employer as transgender. Stephens wrote about this in her coming-out letter to her employer and co-workers: “I intend to have sex reassignment surgery. The first step I must take is to live and work full-time as a woman for one year. At the end of my vacation on August 26, 2013, I will return to work as my true self, Aimee Australia Stephens, in appropriate business attire.”
Stephens, who was born and grew up in North Carolina, was assigned male at birth and lived as a man well into her late forties. But, when she was a child, she thought of herself as a girl, and, with time, the struggle between her sense of self and the life she was leading as a married man and a professional man became intolerable. Her marriage had become strained when she came out to her wife, Donna, in 2009. For the next few years, Stephens lived as a woman at home and a man at work, and this, too, proved untenable. One day, she found herself standing in the back yard, a gun in her hand, planning to take her own life. Then, as she often told people in interviews and public speeches, she decided that she liked herself too much to stop living. She commenced a months-long process of composing her coming-out letter. “I have known many of you for some time now, and I count you all as my friends,” it began:
What I must tell you is very difficult for me and is taking all the courage I can muster. . . . I have a gender identity disorder that I have struggled with my entire life. I have managed to hide it very well all these years. . . . With the support of my loving wife, I have decided to become the person that my mind already is. . . . I realize that some of you may have trouble understanding this. In truth, I have had to live with it every day of my life and even I do not fully understand it myself. . . . As distressing as this is sure to be to my friends and some of my family, I need to do this for myself and for my own peace of mind and to end the agony in my soul. . . . It is my wish that I can continue to work at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Home doing what I have always done, which is my best!
Stephens’s employer, Thomas Rost, responded with a letter of his own: a separation agreement and an offer of a severance package contingent on Stephens agreeing to stay quiet. Stephens rejected the offer and called the Michigan A.C.L.U. instead. The A.C.L.U. referred her to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which took the case to federal court. Stephens lost her case but then won on appeal, in the circuit court. Then her former employer appealed.
In the meantime, Stephens could not find work. Kaplan told me that she tried a variety of funeral homes in the Detroit area, but, despite her years of experience, no one would hire her. Stephens retrained as a medical assistant and found a job, but by this time her health, undermined by a period of time without health insurance, deteriorated so badly that she could no longer work.
By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, the federal government had switched positions. Instead of arguing what had been the E.E.O.C.’s position—that Stephens’s firing constituted discrimination “because of sex,” which is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the Justice Department claimed that it is legal to discriminate against people because they are transgender.
Speaking at the Supreme Court, the A.C.L.U. lawyer David Cole argued that what happened to Stephens could be viewed as sex discrimination no matter how one perceived her: as a man who presents himself in an insufficiently masculine manner (by dressing as a woman), or as a woman who is somehow insufficiently female. This line of argument, which treats transgender identity as somehow conditional, was painful for a lot of trans people to hear. If it was painful for Stephens, she did not let on. “Being the center of a massive legal case, you don’t necessarily feel seen in every aspect of how the court contends with your case,” the A.C.L.U. attorney Chase Strangio, who worked on the case, said, speaking about Stephens. “But you feel that you are pushing the boundary of what the law can do.”
Kaplan told me that Stephens had found a great sense of purpose in her job, in the role of someone who comforts families in grief, and that losing it had been devastating. She found purpose again, Kaplan said, in fighting to insure that what happened to her would not happen to transgender people who came after her. She also became a media spokesperson, granting interviews even as her health failed and she had to undergo dialysis three times a week. She told her story over and over, and answered the same inane questions, such as, “Aimee, what’s your message to Americans who don’t understand what it means to be transgender and may struggle with employees like yourself in their own workplace?” (This was asked by an ABC reporter on the eve of the Supreme Court hearing; imagine that phrasing applied to any other social group.)
The day before the hearing, Stephens gave media interviews until she was utterly depleted, Kaplan said. The next day, Strangio said, she was sick in the morning but energized after the hearing, because of “the experience of being a force for change.” Whatever the Supreme Court decides, Stephens will be remembered as a civil-rights hero. But it is perhaps more important that she be remembered as someone whose life was shorter and much harder than it should have been.


newyorker--2020-05-20--A Case From a Judge’s Past May Offer a Clue as to How the Michael Flynn Inquiry Will Proceed

Michael Flynn , President Trump ’ s first national-security adviser , pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I .
agents , in December , 2017 , in a case brought by the special counsel Robert Mueller .
Earlier this month , the Justice Department asked Judge Emmet G. Sullivan , who oversaw the case against Flynn , to dismiss it , on the ground that the F.B.I .
had no basis to conduct an interrogation of him .
What should Sullivan do ?
What can he do ?
Can a judge maintain a prosecution that the government—the prosecution itself—refuses to continue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s motion and just proceed to sentence Flynn ?
The answers are not entirely clear .
But there is a clue about what may happen in an especially dramatic chapter from Sullivan ’ s past .
Last week , John Gleeson , a retired federal judge , published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post , denouncing the Justice Department ’ s attempt to dismiss the case .
“ The record reeks of improper political influence , ” Gleeson wrote .
“ Government motions to dismiss at this stage are virtually unheard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suggestion : “ It can appoint an independent attorney to act as a ‘ friend of the court , ’ ensuring a full , adversarial inquiry , as the judge in the Flynn case has done in other situations where the department abdicated its prosecutorial role.
” Sullivan clearly read the piece , because he promptly appointed Gleeson himself , who is now in private practice , to argue against the dismissal of the case against Flynn .
Gleeson ’ s passing reference to Sullivan ’ s history “ in other situations ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the clue to what may happen this time .
It was a reference to a disgraceful episode in the recent history of the Justice Department : the failed prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens , Republican of Alaska .
In brief , Stevens was charged with neglecting to report as gifts certain renovations that had been made on his vacation home in Alaska .
He was convicted in a trial before Judge Sullivan in 2008 , shortly before he lost a bid for a seventh term in the Senate .
During and especially after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prosecutors had withheld a variety of exculpatory material from Stevens ’ s defense .
In light of this , Eric Holder , in one of his first acts as Attorney General , in 2009 , dropped the prosecution .
Not satisfied with simply ending the case , Sullivan ruled that “ the interest of justice requires the appointment of a non-government disinterested attorney ” —in that case , it was Henry F. Schuelke III , a Washington lawyer—to investigate the prosecutorial misconduct .
While Schuelke was conducting his inquiry , Stevens died in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the prosecutors committed suicide .
( I wrote about the Stevens prosecution saga here . )
In other words , Sullivan has appointed Gleeson to much the same role as he had named Schuelke , a decade earlier .
Of course , there is a major difference between the Stevens and Flynn cases .
Stevens was about an excess of prosecutorial zeal , while Flynn is about insufficient effort by the Justice Department : cheating to win versus cheating to lose .
“ Nothing has changed on the merits of the case against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explanation for the motion to dismiss , other than there might be some kind of improper behavior going on here , ” Sam Buell , a professor at Duke Law School and a former federal prosecutor , told me .
The big question for Gleeson , then , is how he will want to proceed with his investigation .
He could simply review the Justice Department ’ s pleadings in the case and conclude , as he did in his op-ed piece , that there is no basis for the government ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Flynn was justified , and his guilty plea for lying should stand .
At that point , Sullivan would have to decide whether to grant the government ’ s motion and end the case , anyway , or proceed to sentence Flynn .
( Sullivan could also seek to charge Flynn with contempt for lying in his courtroom about his interactions with the F.B.I . )
It would apparently be without precedent for Sullivan to sentence a defendant even though the government has moved to dismiss the case , but that doesn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t happen .
Alternatively , Gleeson could ask to proceed much as Schuelke did , and ask Sullivan for permission to examine witnesses to determine why the Justice Department reversed course .
( Schuelke took two years and produced a five-hundred-page report about the misconduct in the Stevens case . )
An investigation with witnesses would open the door for Gleeson to examine William Barr , the Attorney General , and others in his chain of command to determine if there was any improper influence in the government ’ s decision .
Either @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will move with considerably more dispatch than Schuelke did .
In a letter to Sullivan this week , Gleeson wrote that he will make his first report to the court on June 10th .
In the meantime , on Tuesday afternoon , Flynn ’ s lawyers asked the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C .
Circuit to order Sullivan to dismiss the case , as the Justice Department requested .
In the absence of such an order , which seems unlikely , Gleeson will plow ahead .
He said that his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any additional factual development I may need before finalizing my argument.
” This means that he will indicate at that time whether he wants Sullivan to call witnesses before deciding whether to dismiss the case .
The judge , for his part , has set a hearing in the case for July 16th , which may turn out to be only the beginning of his inquiry into why the Justice Department tried to drop the case against Flynn .

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s appointment of an independent attorney suggests that Michael Flynn is not out of the woods yet. Photograph by Charles Dharapak / AP / Shutterstock
Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national-security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents, in December, 2017, in a case brought by the special counsel Robert Mueller. Earlier this month, the Justice Department asked Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who oversaw the case against Flynn, to dismiss it, on the ground that the F.B.I. had no basis to conduct an interrogation of him. What should Sullivan do? What can he do? Can a judge maintain a prosecution that the government—the prosecution itself—refuses to continue? Can this judge deny the government’s motion and just proceed to sentence Flynn? The answers are not entirely clear. But there is a clue about what may happen in an especially dramatic chapter from Sullivan’s past.
Last week, John Gleeson, a retired federal judge, published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, denouncing the Justice Department’s attempt to dismiss the case. “The record reeks of improper political influence,” Gleeson wrote. “Government motions to dismiss at this stage are virtually unheard of.” He offered the court a suggestion: “It can appoint an independent attorney to act as a ‘friend of the court,’ ensuring a full, adversarial inquiry, as the judge in the Flynn case has done in other situations where the department abdicated its prosecutorial role.” Sullivan clearly read the piece, because he promptly appointed Gleeson himself, who is now in private practice, to argue against the dismissal of the case against Flynn.
Gleeson’s passing reference to Sullivan’s history “in other situations” as a foe of prosecutorial misconduct is the clue to what may happen this time. It was a reference to a disgraceful episode in the recent history of the Justice Department: the failed prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. In brief, Stevens was charged with neglecting to report as gifts certain renovations that had been made on his vacation home in Alaska. He was convicted in a trial before Judge Sullivan in 2008, shortly before he lost a bid for a seventh term in the Senate. During and especially after the trial, it came out that prosecutors had withheld a variety of exculpatory material from Stevens’s defense. In light of this, Eric Holder, in one of his first acts as Attorney General, in 2009, dropped the prosecution. Not satisfied with simply ending the case, Sullivan ruled that “the interest of justice requires the appointment of a non-government disinterested attorney”—in that case, it was Henry F. Schuelke III, a Washington lawyer—to investigate the prosecutorial misconduct. While Schuelke was conducting his inquiry, Stevens died in a plane crash, and one of the prosecutors committed suicide. (I wrote about the Stevens prosecution saga here.)
In other words, Sullivan has appointed Gleeson to much the same role as he had named Schuelke, a decade earlier. Of course, there is a major difference between the Stevens and Flynn cases. Stevens was about an excess of prosecutorial zeal, while Flynn is about insufficient effort by the Justice Department: cheating to win versus cheating to lose. “Nothing has changed on the merits of the case against Flynn, therefore there is no credible explanation for the motion to dismiss, other than there might be some kind of improper behavior going on here,” Sam Buell, a professor at Duke Law School and a former federal prosecutor, told me.
The big question for Gleeson, then, is how he will want to proceed with his investigation. He could simply review the Justice Department’s pleadings in the case and conclude, as he did in his op-ed piece, that there is no basis for the government’s legal conclusion—that the F.B.I.’s interrogation of Flynn was justified, and his guilty plea for lying should stand. At that point, Sullivan would have to decide whether to grant the government’s motion and end the case, anyway, or proceed to sentence Flynn. (Sullivan could also seek to charge Flynn with contempt for lying in his courtroom about his interactions with the F.B.I.) It would apparently be without precedent for Sullivan to sentence a defendant even though the government has moved to dismiss the case, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t happen.
Alternatively, Gleeson could ask to proceed much as Schuelke did, and ask Sullivan for permission to examine witnesses to determine why the Justice Department reversed course. (Schuelke took two years and produced a five-hundred-page report about the misconduct in the Stevens case.) An investigation with witnesses would open the door for Gleeson to examine William Barr, the Attorney General, and others in his chain of command to determine if there was any improper influence in the government’s decision. Either way, it looks as if Gleeson will move with considerably more dispatch than Schuelke did. In a letter to Sullivan this week, Gleeson wrote that he will make his first report to the court on June 10th.
In the meantime, on Tuesday afternoon, Flynn’s lawyers asked the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to order Sullivan to dismiss the case, as the Justice Department requested. In the absence of such an order, which seems unlikely, Gleeson will plow ahead. He said that his submission on June 10th will report “any additional factual development I may need before finalizing my argument.” This means that he will indicate at that time whether he wants Sullivan to call witnesses before deciding whether to dismiss the case. The judge, for his part, has set a hearing in the case for July 16th, which may turn out to be only the beginning of his inquiry into why the Justice Department tried to drop the case against Flynn.