newyorker--2020-12-07--A Tycoon’s Deep-State Conspiracy Dive

A Tycoon’s Deep-State Conspiracy Dive

At the time , many people in the business world considered Byrne to be an almost clairvoyant entrepreneur .
In early 2000 , years before Amazon and eBay popularized the practice known as “ dropshipping , ” Overstock , which sells furniture and household goods , allowed third-party venders to send items directly to customers through its Web site .
In 2004 , a year before Amazon Prime was introduced , Byrne launched Overstock ’ s Club O membership program , which gave shoppers a year ’ s worth of shipping for a flat fee .
And in 2014 Overstock @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bitcoin for purchases .
Byrne is the son of John J. Byrne , an insurance magnate whom Warren Buffett , a family friend , once called “ the Babe Ruth of insurance.
” Patrick Byrne has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford and regularly cites Friedrich Hayek , Martin Luther King , Jr. , and the conservative economist Thomas Sowell in conversation .
Former employees describe a memory trick he likes to perform , in which he studies a deck of cards for a few minutes and then recites back the order of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ When he ’ s on , he ’ s smart , charming , complex , and brilliant , ” Marc Cohodes , who was once a critic of Overstock and is now an investor in the company , told me .
Byrne is also a showman ; in 2014 , he arrived at the breaking-ground ceremony for Overstock ’ s new headquarters , in the suburbs of Salt Lake City , by parachute , tearing off his flight suit to reveal a tuxedo .
Byrne was best known for waging a sensational @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stock traders in the early two-thousands .
He accused them of colluding to drive down the stock prices of various companies , including his own—a claim that seemed unlikely , even preposterous .
He was mocked for the outlandish , bullying ways in which he presented his findings .
“ Everyone said for years , ‘ Patrick Byrne is crazy , ’ ” John Welborn , an economics lecturer at Dartmouth College who has worked as a consultant for Byrne , told me .
But , shortly after the financial crisis began , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and regulators soon cracked down on the practice he ’ d described .
Since then , Byrne has fashioned himself as a whistle-blower on financial malfeasance , using his Web site , Deep Capture , as a platform .
The posts on the site are filled with cartoonish euphemisms ( “ Men in Black ” for F.B.I .
agents ) and bombastic prose ( “ I swam around on Wall Street 2005-2008 drawing fire from the Establishment ” ) , and they feature blocks of italicized text , lists , layers of footnotes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reading .
Byrne ’ s accounts of his battles with high finance include descriptions of yearslong collaborations with the F.B.I .
and Mafia plots to kill him .
Critics note that Byrne often exaggerates his importance , includes only details that support his theories , and has made false claims about his adversaries .
( In 2016 , a Canadian court found that he had committed libel against a businessman and ordered him to pay a million dollars . )
David Luban , a professor of law at Georgetown University who has known @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , observed that improbable things seem to happen to Byrne with remarkable frequency .
“ He ’ s a hard man to bet against , ” Luban said .
“ So many of his stories that have seemed utterly incredible turn out to be true.
” For a decade , Byrne , who is a prominent figure in libertarian circles , was the chair of an educational foundation launched by the free-market economists Milton and Rose Friedman .
On his second day at FreedomFest , after he spoke on a panel , Maria @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , she said that she was a special assistant to the deputy governor of Russia ’ s central bank , Alexander Torshin .
According to Byrne , she told him , “ We know about you , we know about your relationship with Milton Friedman , we watch your videos on YouTube about liberalism.
” She asked if she could meet with him privately , and Byrne invited her to have lunch in his suite .
Byrne told me that he immediately wondered if Butina was a “ red sparrow ” —a reference @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence , in which a former ballerina becomes a spy for the Russian government , seducing and killing her targets .
Before their lunch , Byrne said , he crafted sharp weapons from two coat hangers , which he stashed under the bed and under the sofa , and made a mental note to keep a close watch over his food and drink .
He was surprised to discover that Butina was an intellectual .
They spent an hour and a half talking about Chekhov , Dostoyevsky , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of economics .
Butina said that she had been born in Siberia and placed in an élite educational program .
She claimed to be close to several oligarchs , a few of whom were powerful politicians who believed that she could become President someday .
She invited Byrne to speak about cryptocurrency and liberalism at an event in Russia , and , before she left , she proposed that they stay in touch as he planned his visit .
Byrne said that he knew “ the number you were supposed to call if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , like a good-looking Russian gal comes up to you and says , ‘ We want you to come to Russia.
’ ” He claims that he reported the interaction , assuming that it would reach the F.B.I.
, which would likely instruct him to stay away from Butina .
Instead , he said , federal agents came to see him , and after some discussion they gave him permission to meet with her again .
Byrne is a bachelor who likes to say that his “ Acts I and II ” of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but that he has “ no Act III.
” What followed was an on-and-off romantic affair that lasted for a year and a half .
During this time , Byrne claims , he was informing on Butina to the F.B.I .
( The F.B.I.
, in accordance with policy , will not confirm any meetings or relationship with Byrne . )
Byrne described the twists and turns of his exchanges with Butina and with his F.B.I .
handlers in a widely circulated series of posts , written in his digressive , heavily footnoted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Capture in the summer of 2019 .
They lay out a complex narrative reminiscent of the plot of a John Le Carré novel .
Byrne explains that , in time , he came to distrust the federal agents he was working with , believing that they were manipulating him and setting up Butina .
In July , 2018 , Butina was arrested and charged by the Department of Justice with acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Russian government .
She was sentenced to eighteen months in prison .
By then , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
had crystallized into a belief that he had been part of a plot by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration to commit political espionage , in an attempt to control the next President .
Butina ’ s arrest came at a time when the country was fixated on stories of Russian interference in the 2016 election .
That month , the special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officials .
Butina , a beguiling and ambitious young woman who courted powerful men and fetishized guns , captured the public imagination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Days after the election , she had held a costume birthday party at which she was dressed as Empress Alexandra and reportedly boasted about being involved in the Trump campaign ’ s communications with Russia .
She had enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner with Representative Mark Sanford , Republican of South Carolina .
She ’ d attended a Styx concert with J. D. Gordon , a Trump campaign aide , and had befriended the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist .
Then , in July , an article appeared detailing her affair with Byrne .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the company that had been at the center of his life for two decades .
Hours after his resignation , he appeared on the Fox Business Network wearing a red “ Make America Grateful Again ” baseball cap .
When the host , David Asman , asked him why he had resigned , Byrne smiled , saying that he had left Overstock in a “ perfect place.
” But , he said , “ I ’ ve been warned that , if I come forward to America , the apparatus of Washington @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” He made a pummelling gesture with his hands .
“ I have to get that away from the company.
” He claimed that he had been unwittingly drawn into a scheme of high-level corruption—he referred to “ fishy ” orders from “ honorable federal agents ” —that was part of a plot perpetrated by the deep state against Trump and other political leaders .
He jumped from subject to subject , twice almost breaking into tears .
To viewers , it looked like a moment of psychological unravelling .
Nearly all his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unproven .
“ The bottom line is : it ’ s a big coverup , ” Byrne said , sounding anguished .
“ There was political espionage conducted against Hillary Clinton—Hillary Clinton , Marco Rubio , Cruz , and Donald Trump.
” He continued , “ This isn ’ t a theory of mine—this isn ’ t a political position .
I was in the room when it happened .
I was part of it.
” In the past five years , conspiracy theories that might once have seemed fringe have come to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One of the most prominent , QAnon , holds that leading Democrats engage in Satan worship and in child-trafficking rings .
Another suggests that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was coerced into stepping down , in 2018 , to protect his son , formerly a Deutsche Bank employee , from being implicated in the ongoing Russia investigation .
Byrne ’ s beliefs about a deep-state plot rivalled these in baroque complexity and seemed equally fantastical .
Marc Cohodes , the Overstock investor , said that Byrne looked “ like a nut.
” But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his ideas , like many conspiracy theories , might contain seeds of truth .
Jonathan Johnson , who replaced Byrne as the C.E.O .
of Overstock , recalled the mid-two-thousands , when Byrne was pilloried during his crusade against Wall Street .
“ From 2005 to 2008 , he was made to look crazy , and in 2008 he was vindicated , ” Johnson told me .
“ I don ’ t know all the facts on this , as I did with the Wall Street stuff .
But I do know Patrick @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me at all if he is vindicated again.
” Last month , Butina published a memoir in Russia , “ Prison Diary , ” about her time in D.C. and her experience in the American penal system .
Her description of the romance with Byrne is broadly consistent with his , although he suggests that she was better connected politically than she claims to have been .
Robert Driscoll , Butina ’ s attorney , told me , “ Although Patrick ’ s story seems far-fetched , the parts of it that I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much able to verify .
It makes me not dismiss the rest of what he says out of hand , even though some of it ’ s pretty wild.
” Byrne has insisted that he is not a Trump supporter , but his Deep Capture posts feature a common right-wing theory that has been promoted on social media , on Fox News , and by President Trump : that coöperation between the Trump campaign and Russia , which sparked an F.B.I .
investigation , was a hoax perpetrated by Democrats , or , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ collusion delusion.
” Shortly after Trump was elected , he began warning his followers that longtime employees of the federal government would try to sabotage his agenda .
In May , 2019 , Attorney General William Barr appointed John Durham , the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut , to look into the origins of the F.B.I.
’ s Russia investigation , and into what Barr has described as political spying against Trump .
In late January , I met Byrne at his suite in the Gramercy Park Hotel , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He had just returned from Southeast Asia , where he had devoted himself to scuba diving and writing the Deep Capture posts about Butina .
He is broad-shouldered , with dirty-blond hair and a weathered , square-jawed face .
He seemed at once energized and exhausted , restlessly opening snacks from the minibar and searching for a pencil and a pad of paper .
“ When I ’ m talking to people , I often take notes or sketch things out , ” he said , rubbing his forehead .
He mentioned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and said that Durham ’ s investigation would reveal the extent of the conspiracy in which he was an “ unknowing pawn , ” and would result in “ a stack of indictments.
” He hinted at revelations that , he said , he was not yet at liberty to share .
“ At the very latest , after the coming election , I will reveal something , no matter who wins , ” he told me .
“ There are basically two different realities emerging .
And , unfortunately , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
”

In July, 2015, Patrick Byrne, the founder of the online discount retailer Overstock, delivered a twenty-minute talk at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian conference in Las Vegas. Other speakers included the venture capitalist Peter Thiel; John Mackey, the chief executive officer of Whole Foods; and the Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. Byrne’s talk, entitled “Turtles All the Way Down: How the Crypto-Revolution Solves Intractable Problems on Wall Street,” was a version of one he had given many times before. It touched on several of his interests, including the kind of liberalism usually referred to as libertarianism, the flaws in the structure of the stock market which make it vulnerable to manipulation, and how a blockchain-based financial system could eliminate those flaws. After the talk, a line of people waited by the stage to speak to Byrne. Standing a little apart from them was a young woman with thick red hair, a pale, wide face, and a Russian accent. Introducing herself as Maria Butina, she said that she was the president of a Russian gun-rights group. Judd Bagley, a former Overstock executive who accompanied Byrne to the conference, recalled that, after the exchange, Byrne had “a little sparkle in his eye.”
At the time, many people in the business world considered Byrne to be an almost clairvoyant entrepreneur. In early 2000, years before Amazon and eBay popularized the practice known as “dropshipping,” Overstock, which sells furniture and household goods, allowed third-party venders to send items directly to customers through its Web site. In 2004, a year before Amazon Prime was introduced, Byrne launched Overstock’s Club O membership program, which gave shoppers a year’s worth of shipping for a flat fee. And in 2014 Overstock became the first major retailer to accept bitcoin for purchases.
Byrne is the son of John J. Byrne, an insurance magnate whom Warren Buffett, a family friend, once called “the Babe Ruth of insurance.” Patrick Byrne has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford and regularly cites Friedrich Hayek, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the conservative economist Thomas Sowell in conversation. Former employees describe a memory trick he likes to perform, in which he studies a deck of cards for a few minutes and then recites back the order of the cards, one by one. “When he’s on, he’s smart, charming, complex, and brilliant,” Marc Cohodes, who was once a critic of Overstock and is now an investor in the company, told me. Byrne is also a showman; in 2014, he arrived at the breaking-ground ceremony for Overstock’s new headquarters, in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, by parachute, tearing off his flight suit to reveal a tuxedo.
Byrne was best known for waging a sensational legal battle with several investment firms and stock traders in the early two-thousands. He accused them of colluding to drive down the stock prices of various companies, including his own—a claim that seemed unlikely, even preposterous. He was mocked for the outlandish, bullying ways in which he presented his findings. “Everyone said for years, ‘Patrick Byrne is crazy,’ ” John Welborn, an economics lecturer at Dartmouth College who has worked as a consultant for Byrne, told me. But, shortly after the financial crisis began, Byrne’s suspicions were confirmed, and regulators soon cracked down on the practice he’d described.
Since then, Byrne has fashioned himself as a whistle-blower on financial malfeasance, using his Web site, Deep Capture, as a platform. The posts on the site are filled with cartoonish euphemisms (“Men in Black” for F.B.I. agents) and bombastic prose (“I swam around on Wall Street 2005-2008 drawing fire from the Establishment”), and they feature blocks of italicized text, lists, layers of footnotes, endnotes, and links to further reading. Byrne’s accounts of his battles with high finance include descriptions of yearslong collaborations with the F.B.I. and Mafia plots to kill him. Critics note that Byrne often exaggerates his importance, includes only details that support his theories, and has made false claims about his adversaries. (In 2016, a Canadian court found that he had committed libel against a businessman and ordered him to pay a million dollars.) David Luban, a professor of law at Georgetown University who has known Byrne since teaching him as an undergraduate, observed that improbable things seem to happen to Byrne with remarkable frequency. “He’s a hard man to bet against,” Luban said. “So many of his stories that have seemed utterly incredible turn out to be true.”
For a decade, Byrne, who is a prominent figure in libertarian circles, was the chair of an educational foundation launched by the free-market economists Milton and Rose Friedman. On his second day at FreedomFest, after he spoke on a panel, Maria Butina approached him again. This time, she said that she was a special assistant to the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank, Alexander Torshin. According to Byrne, she told him, “We know about you, we know about your relationship with Milton Friedman, we watch your videos on YouTube about liberalism.” She asked if she could meet with him privately, and Byrne invited her to have lunch in his suite.
Byrne told me that he immediately wondered if Butina was a “red sparrow”—a reference to the 2013 novel that was turned into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, in which a former ballerina becomes a spy for the Russian government, seducing and killing her targets. Before their lunch, Byrne said, he crafted sharp weapons from two coat hangers, which he stashed under the bed and under the sofa, and made a mental note to keep a close watch over his food and drink.
He was surprised to discover that Butina was an intellectual. They spent an hour and a half talking about Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, John Locke, and the Austrian school of economics. Butina said that she had been born in Siberia and placed in an élite educational program. She claimed to be close to several oligarchs, a few of whom were powerful politicians who believed that she could become President someday. She invited Byrne to speak about cryptocurrency and liberalism at an event in Russia, and, before she left, she proposed that they stay in touch as he planned his visit.
Byrne said that he knew “the number you were supposed to call if you had something strange happen to you, like a good-looking Russian gal comes up to you and says, ‘We want you to come to Russia.’ ” He claims that he reported the interaction, assuming that it would reach the F.B.I., which would likely instruct him to stay away from Butina. Instead, he said, federal agents came to see him, and after some discussion they gave him permission to meet with her again.
Byrne is a bachelor who likes to say that his “Acts I and II” of a relationship are “dynamite,” but that he has “no Act III.” What followed was an on-and-off romantic affair that lasted for a year and a half. During this time, Byrne claims, he was informing on Butina to the F.B.I. (The F.B.I., in accordance with policy, will not confirm any meetings or relationship with Byrne.) Byrne described the twists and turns of his exchanges with Butina and with his F.B.I. handlers in a widely circulated series of posts, written in his digressive, heavily footnoted style, that he published on Deep Capture in the summer of 2019. They lay out a complex narrative reminiscent of the plot of a John Le Carré novel. Byrne explains that, in time, he came to distrust the federal agents he was working with, believing that they were manipulating him and setting up Butina. In July, 2018, Butina was arrested and charged by the Department of Justice with acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Russian government. She was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. By then, Byrne’s suspicions about the F.B.I. had crystallized into a belief that he had been part of a plot by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration to commit political espionage, in an attempt to control the next President.
“What should I say this is about?” Cartoon by David Sipress Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Butina’s arrest came at a time when the country was fixated on stories of Russian interference in the 2016 election. That month, the special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officials. Butina, a beguiling and ambitious young woman who courted powerful men and fetishized guns, captured the public imagination. New details continued to emerge: Days after the election, she had held a costume birthday party at which she was dressed as Empress Alexandra and reportedly boasted about being involved in the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia. She had enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner with Representative Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina. She’d attended a Styx concert with J. D. Gordon, a Trump campaign aide, and had befriended the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist. Then, in July, an article appeared detailing her affair with Byrne.
In August, Byrne suddenly resigned from Overstock, the company that had been at the center of his life for two decades. Hours after his resignation, he appeared on the Fox Business Network wearing a red “Make America Grateful Again” baseball cap. When the host, David Asman, asked him why he had resigned, Byrne smiled, saying that he had left Overstock in a “perfect place.” But, he said, “I’ve been warned that, if I come forward to America, the apparatus of Washington is going to grind me into dust.” He made a pummelling gesture with his hands. “I have to get that away from the company.” He claimed that he had been unwittingly drawn into a scheme of high-level corruption—he referred to “fishy” orders from “honorable federal agents”—that was part of a plot perpetrated by the deep state against Trump and other political leaders. He jumped from subject to subject, twice almost breaking into tears. To viewers, it looked like a moment of psychological unravelling. Nearly all his claims were exaggerated, false, or unproven. “The bottom line is: it’s a big coverup,” Byrne said, sounding anguished. “There was political espionage conducted against Hillary Clinton—Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Cruz, and Donald Trump.” He continued, “This isn’t a theory of mine—this isn’t a political position. I was in the room when it happened. I was part of it.”
In the past five years, conspiracy theories that might once have seemed fringe have come to be embraced by millions of Americans. One of the most prominent, QAnon, holds that leading Democrats engage in Satan worship and in child-trafficking rings. Another suggests that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was coerced into stepping down, in 2018, to protect his son, formerly a Deutsche Bank employee, from being implicated in the ongoing Russia investigation. Byrne’s beliefs about a deep-state plot rivalled these in baroque complexity and seemed equally fantastical. Marc Cohodes, the Overstock investor, said that Byrne looked “like a nut.” But other people close to Byrne suggested that his ideas, like many conspiracy theories, might contain seeds of truth. Jonathan Johnson, who replaced Byrne as the C.E.O. of Overstock, recalled the mid-two-thousands, when Byrne was pilloried during his crusade against Wall Street. “From 2005 to 2008, he was made to look crazy, and in 2008 he was vindicated,” Johnson told me. “I don’t know all the facts on this, as I did with the Wall Street stuff. But I do know Patrick, and it won’t surprise me at all if he is vindicated again.”
Last month, Butina published a memoir in Russia, “Prison Diary,” about her time in D.C. and her experience in the American penal system. Her description of the romance with Byrne is broadly consistent with his, although he suggests that she was better connected politically than she claims to have been. Robert Driscoll, Butina’s attorney, told me, “Although Patrick’s story seems far-fetched, the parts of it that I could verify with Maria I was pretty much able to verify. It makes me not dismiss the rest of what he says out of hand, even though some of it’s pretty wild.”


newyorker--2020-12-07--The Skeletons at the Lake

The Skeletons at the Lake

In 1956 , the Anthropological Survey of India , in Calcutta , sponsored several expeditions to Roopkund to investigate .
A snowstorm forced the first expedition to turn back , but two months later another expedition made it and returned to Calcutta with remains for study .
Carbon dating , still an unreliable innovation , indicated that the bones were between five hundred and eight hundred years old .
Indian scientists were intensely interested in the Roopkund mystery .
The lake , some thought , was a place where holy men committed ritual suicide .
Or maybe the dead were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ army sent by the Sultan of Delhi in an ill-fated attempt to invade Tibet , or a group of Tibet-bound traders who had lost their way .
Perhaps this was hallowed ground , an open-air cemetery , or a place where victims of an epidemic were dumped to prevent contagion .
People in the villages below Roopkund had their own explanation , passed down in folk songs and stories .
The villages are on the route of a pilgrimage to honor Nanda Devi , a manifestation of Parvati , a supreme goddess in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the foothills of the Trisul massif , where locals believe that the goddess lives with her husband , Shiva .
It may be the longest and most dangerous pilgrimage in India , and a particularly perilous section—the Jyumra Gali , or Path of Death—runs along a ridge high above Roopkund .
As the villagers tell it , long ago Nanda Devi left her home to visit a distant kingdom , where she was treated discourteously by the king and queen .
Nanda Devi cursed the kingdom , unleashing drought and disaster , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In order to appease the goddess , the royal couple embarked on a pilgrimage .
The king , who liked his entertainments , took along a bevy of dancing courtesans and musicians , in violation of the ascetic traditions of the pilgrimage .
Nanda Devi was furious at the display of earthly pleasures , and she shoved the dancing girls down into the underworld .
The pits into which they are said to have sunk are still visible high on a mountainside .
Then , according to the legend , she sent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whirlwind , which swept all the pilgrims on the Path of Death into the lake .
Their skeletons are a warning to those who would disrespect the goddess .
This story is retold in “ Mountain Goddess , ” a 1991 book by the American anthropologist William Sax .
Now a professor at Heidelberg University , he stumbled upon a reference to the lake and the bodies as an undergraduate , in the nineteen-seventies , and was fascinated .
He and a friend travelled to the hamlet of Wan , the settlement closest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agreed to guide them up the pilgrim trail to the lake .
The trail climbs through deep forests , emerging above the tree line , at eleven and a half thousand feet , into meadows carpeted with wildflowers .
To the north is a vast wall of Himalayan peaks , some of the highest in the world .
From there , the route follows steep ridgelines and leads past an ancient stone shrine , festooned with bronze bells and tridents and containing a statue of the elephant deity Ganesha .
Then , at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a pass and up a series of switchbacks through scree to Roopkund .
The lake , about a hundred and thirty feet across and ten feet deep , is an emerald jewel nestled in a bowl of rock and ice .
( In Hindi , roop kund means “ beautifully shaped lake.
” ) Almost as soon as Sax and his companions arrived , they were engulfed by a blizzard and stumbled around the bone-strewn cirque in whiteout conditions , calling for one another and nearly adding their own bodies to the charnel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ barely made it back to Wan with his companions , and spent ten days recovering in his guide ’ s stone hut .
Yet his passion for the place was undimmed .
He went on to write a doctoral thesis about the local traditions surrounding Nanda Devi .
In the late eighties , he went on the pilgrimage himself , the only Westerner to have done so at that time , after which he published “ Mountain Goddess.
” The book describes how the Himalayas , “ associated for thousands of years in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ places and powerful , ascetic renouncers , ” became the setting for followers to show devotion to the goddess by “ giving suffering ” to their bodies .
In 2005 , Sax was featured in a National Geographic documentary about the lake .
The Indian media company that made the film assembled a team of archeologists , anthropologists , geneticists , and technicians from research laboratories in India and the U.K. to collect and study the bones .
In the decades since Sax first visited , the lake had become a popular destination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was being ruined .
Bones had been stolen ; others had been rearranged in fanciful patterns or piled in cairns .
Almost none of the skeletons were intact , and it was impossible to tell which bones belonged together or where they had originally lain .
Nature had added to the confusion , churning and fracturing the bones with rock slides and avalanches .
But a recent landslide had exposed a cache of fresh bones and artifacts .
Under a slab of rock , the team found the remains of a woman , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and still had skin and flesh .
The scientists removed tissue samples for testing , shot video , and collected bones and artifacts .
The team estimated that the area contained the remains of between three hundred and seven hundred people .
The scientific analysis swiftly discounted most of the prevailing theories .
These were not the remains of a lost army : the bones were from men , women , and children .
Aside from a single iron spearhead , no weapons were found , and there was no trace of horses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ battle , ritual suicide , murder , or epidemic disease .
Nor was Roopkund a cemetery : most of the individuals were healthy and between eighteen and thirty-five years old .
Meanwhile , the team ’ s geographic analysis laid to rest the idea of traders lost in the mountains , establishing that no trade route between India and Tibet had ever existed in the area .
Although the Tibetan border is only thirty-five miles north of Roopkund , the mountains form an impassable barrier .
Besides , no trade goods or beasts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Artifacts retrieved included dozens of leather slippers , pieces of parasols made of bamboo and birch bark , and bangles made of seashells and glass .
Devotees of Nanda Devi carry parasols and wear bangles on the pilgrimage .
The dead , it appeared , were most likely pilgrims .
DNA analysis showed that all the victims appeared to have a genetic makeup typical of South Asian origin .
Bone and tissue samples were sent to Oxford University for carbon dating .
The new dates , far more accurate than the 1956 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ninth century .
Tom Higham , who performed the analysis , concluded that the victims had perished in a single event and had “ died instantaneously within hours of one another.
” Meanwhile , a team of bioarcheologists and paleopathologists noted the presence of two distinct groups : there were “ rugged , tall ” people with long heads and also some “ medium height , lightly built , round headed ” people , who displayed a curious shallow groove across the vault of the skull .
The scientists concluded that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of tall Brahmans from the plains of India and a company of shorter , local porters , whose skulls were marked by years of carrying heavy loads with a tumpline looped over their heads .
The investigation also revealed that three or possibly four skulls had compression fractures on the crown that had probably occurred at the time of death .
“ It is not a weapon injury , ” the researchers noted , but came “ from a blow from a blunt and round heavy object.
” This stretch of the Himalayas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crops and damage property .
The team concluded that , around the year 800 A.D. , a group of pilgrims were caught in a storm on the exposed ridge above Roopkund and were pummelled to death by giant hailstones .
Over the years , landslides and avalanches had rolled the bodies down the steep slope into the lake and the surrounding area .
Not only did the mystery of Roopkund appear to be solved ; it also seemed that the local tales of Nanda Devi ’ s wrath had originated in an actual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nature Communications published the baffling results of a new study conducted by sixteen research institutions across three continents .
Genetic analysis and new carbon dating revealed that a significant proportion of the Roopkund remains belonged to people from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean , most likely near Crete , and that they had perished at the lake only a couple of centuries ago .
Not long before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the U.S. , I visited Reich at Harvard Medical School .
His office is a minimalist space with a whiteboard , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glass looking across Avenue Louis Pasteur to the red brick façade of the Boston Latin School .
Reich is a lean , fit man in his mid-forties who speaks with rapid , quiet precision .
His self-deprecating manner conceals a supremely self-confident iconoclast who is not averse to toppling received wisdom , and his work has attracted criticism from some anthropologists , archeologists , and social scientists .
The Reich lab , the foremost unit in the country for research into ancient DNA , is responsible for more than half the world ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Having so far sequenced the DNA of more than ten thousand long-dead individuals from all over the globe , the lab is almost halfway through a five-year project to create an atlas of human migration and diversity , allowing us to peer deep into our past .
The work has produced startling insights into who we are as a species , where we have come from , and what we have done to one another .
Hidden in the human genome is evidence of inequality , the displacement of peoples , invasion , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Under the scrutiny of science , the dead are becoming eloquent .

The DNA from the Iberian skeletons can’t tell us what kind of culture the Yamnaya replaced, but it does much to corroborate Gimbutas’s sense that the descendants of the Yamnaya caused much greater disruption than other archeologists believed. Even today, the Y chromosomes of almost all men of Western European ancestry have a high percentage of Yamnaya-derived genes, suggesting that violent conquest may have been widespread.
The team members of the Roopkund study planned a variety of tests for the bones. DNA sequencing would show the ancestry of the victims and whether they were related to one another, and carbon dating would estimate when they died. The researchers would test for disease, and analyze the chemistry of the bones to determine the victims’ diet and where they might have grown up. Under sterile conditions, the scientists in Hyderabad drilled into long bones and teeth, producing a powder. Vials of this were sent to Harvard and to other labs in India, the United States, and Germany.
“It’s not actually that much after taxes.” Cartoon by Avi Steinberg Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
An ancient human bone is packed with DNA, but, in many cases, ninety-nine per cent or more of that is not human. It is the DNA of billions of microbes that colonized the body during the decomposition after death. To tease the tiny fraction of human DNA from this mass of microbial debris requires a chemical ballet of enormous delicacy, and the risk of contamination is high. Stray DNA molecules from people who handled the remains can ruin an entire sample.
David Reich’s lab has a “clean room” for extracting and processing DNA from human tissue. Personnel pass through a dressing area, where they don a full-body clean suit with booties and hood, double pairs of nitrile gloves (the inner one sealed to the suit with tape around the wrists), a hairnet, a face mask, and a plastic shield. The clean room is maintained at positive pressure, which keeps the airflow directed outward, to curtail the entry of airborne DNA. After anything is touched in the room, the outer pair of gloves must be stripped off and a fresh pair put on, in order to prevent the transfer of DNA from surface to surface. Intense ultraviolet light shines whenever the room is empty, to destroy stray DNA. The light is shut off when the lab is occupied, because it burns human skin and eyes.
When I visited, a technician was working on a nubbin of bone from an ancient Roman who lived in Belgium. The whine of a sandblaster filled the air as she removed excess bone from a tiny treasure chest of DNA—a spiral cavity in the inner ear called the cochlea. The bone in which the cochlea is embedded is the densest in the body, and provides the best source of preserved DNA in ancient remains. DNA this old breaks up into short strands. Getting enough to sequence requires complex processes, one of which involves placing samples in a machine that produces a polymerase chain reaction, copying the fragments up to a billion times. The lab doesn’t sequence the entire DNA molecule, much of which is repetitious and uninformative, but maps about a million key locations.
Reich had asked a graduate student in his lab, Éadaoin Harney, to take charge of the Roopkund project. Her role was to analyze the Roopkund DNA, wrangle the worldwide team, assemble the results, and write the resulting paper as its lead author. (She has since taken a job as a postdoctoral researcher at the genomics firm 23andMe.) By the middle of 2017, it was apparent that the Roopkund bones belonged to three distinct groups of people. Roopkund A had ancestry typical of South Asians. They were unrelated to one another and genetically diverse, apparently coming from various areas and groups in India. Roopkund C was a lone individual whose genome was typical of Southeast Asia. It was the Roopkund B group, a mixture of men and women unrelated to one another, that confounded everyone. Their genomes did not look Indian or even Asian. “Of all places in the world, India is one of the places most heavily sampled in terms of human diversity,” Reich told me. “We have sampled three hundred different groups in India, and there’s nothing there even close to Roopkund B.”
Harney and Reich began exploring the ancestry of the Roopkund B group, comparing the genomes with hundreds of present-day populations across Europe, Asia, and Africa. The closest match was with people from the Greek island of Crete. “It would be a mistake to say these people were specifically from Crete,” Reich said. “A very careful analysis showed they don’t match perfectly. They are clearly a population of the Aegean area.” The Roopkund B group made up more than a third of the samples tested—fourteen individuals out of thirty-eight. Since the bones at the lake were not collected systematically, the finding hinted that the Mediterranean group in total might have been quite large. One-third of three hundred, the lower estimate of the Roopkund dead, is a hundred people.
As bizarre as the result seemed, it nonetheless matched an analysis of bone collagen that the Max Planck Institute and the Harvard lab had done on the same individuals, to determine their diet. Dietary information is stored in our bones, and plants, depending on how they fix carbon during photosynthesis, create one of two chemical signatures—C3 or C4. A person who eats a diet of C3 plants, such as wheat, barley, and rice, will have isotope ratios of carbon in their bones different from those of a person eating a diet high in millets, which are C4. Sure enough, the analysis of Roopkund bone collagen revealed that, in the last ten or so years of their lives, the Roopkund A people ate a varied C3 and C4 diet, typical for much of India; Roopkund B ate a mostly C3 diet, typical of the Mediterranean.
During the study, the Reich lab had divided up its bone-powder samples, sending one portion to the carbon-14-dating laboratory at Penn State. (Doing this rather than having the Penn State samples sent straight from Hyderabad was a way of insuring that the labs were working on the same individuals.) When the carbon-dating results came back, there was another surprise: there appeared to have been multiple mass-death events at Roopkund. The Roopkund A individuals probably died in three or possibly four incidents between 700 and 950 A.D. The Roopkund B group—from the Mediterranean—likely perished in a single event a thousand years later. Because carbon-14 dating is difficult to interpret for the period between 1650 and 1950, the deaths could have occurred anytime during that span, but with a slightly higher probability in the eighteenth century. The lone person of Southeast Asian ancestry in Roopkund C died around the same time.
The eighteenth-century date was so unexpected that Reich and Harney at first thought it might be a typo, or that the samples had been contaminated. Harney wrote up the findings, in a paper co-authored by twenty-seven other scientists. She told me, “We hoped that after the paper was published someone would come forward with information that would help us determine what might have happened at Roopkund—some historian or a person with knowledge of a group of European travellers who vanished in the Himalayas around that time.”
When William Sax learned of the results, he was incredulous. He had spent years in the mountain villages below the lake, among the devotees of Nanda Devi. The women consider themselves to be keepers of the goddess’s memory, and Sax had recorded and translated many of their songs and stories of the pilgrimage. He feels certain that if a large party of travellers, especially foreign travellers, had died at Roopkund in recent centuries, there would have been some record in folklore. After all, despite the new study’s surprises, the Roopkund A group was not inconsistent with the earlier findings.
“I never heard a word, not a hint of a story, no folktale or anything,” Sax told me. “And there’s absolutely no reason to be up there if they weren’t on the pilgrimage.” The idea of a group of eighteenth-century Greeks on a Hindu pilgrimage seemed far-fetched. A simpler explanation would be that the Roopkund B bones somehow got mixed up while sitting in storage. “It is quite possible that these bones were contaminated,” he said, and the researchers were simply taking their provenance on trust: “They didn’t actually collect them themselves.” Having been fascinated with the region’s way of life for four decades, he also found the scientists’ perspective lacking. “This isn’t just a story about bones,” he said. “It’s also a story about human beings and religious devotion.”
Many anthropologists and archeologists are uneasy about the incursion of genomics into their domain and suspicious of its brash certainties. “We’re not schooled in the nuances,” Reich admitted to me. “Anthropologists and geneticists are two groups speaking different languages and getting to know each other.” Research into human origins and the differences between populations is always vulnerable to misuse. The grim history of eugenics still casts a shadow over genetics—a field with limitless appeal for white supremacists and others looking to support racist views—even though, for half a century, geneticists have rejected the idea of large hereditary disparities among human populations for the great majority of traits. Genetic science was vital in discrediting racist biological theories and establishing that racial categories are ever-shifting social constructs that do not align with genetic variation. Still, some anthropologists, social scientists, and even geneticists are deeply uncomfortable with any research that explores the hereditary differences among populations. Reich is insistent that race is an artificial category rather than a biological one, but maintains that “substantial differences across populations” exist. He thinks that it’s not unreasonable to investigate those differences scientifically, although he doesn’t undertake such research himself. “Whether we like it or not, people are measuring average differences among groups,” he said. “We need to be able to talk about these differences clearly, whatever they may be. Denying the possibility of substantial differences is not for us to do, given the scientific reality we live in.”


newyorker--2020-12-07--Edward Steed’s “Tree of Life”

Edward Steed’s “Tree of Life”

The cover for this week ’ s issue tells a big story , maybe the biggest of all stories : the story of creation .
Like many creation tales , it involves a tree .
We talked to the artist Edward Steed about what led him to such an image during the holidays , when many of us are contemplating a winter of gloom .
Did you believe in Santa Claus as a child ?
What stories did you encounter as a kid or in school that still capture your imagination ?
I believed in Father Christmas , but I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ My earliest memory of him is of pretending to believe in him .
I was sitting on his lap and knew he was a fake but didn ’ t want to cause a problem for him .
So I didn ’ t say anything .
When I read the Bible these days , I see it has some good stories , but that sort of thing never really caught my imagination when I was young .
I suppose it just couldn ’ t compete with the great films of that era , such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sean Connery .
As you demonstrate here , most monsters are made up of rearranged animal parts .
It ’ s hard to imagine an eye or a mandible that hasn ’ t occurred somewhere in nature .
Do you ever spend time looking at biology textbooks , by chance ?
I just spend a lot of time drawing .
It ’ s easy to design a completely new and unusual creature , but it ’ s difficult to make something new that is also sort of believable .
In this case , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ familiar or too strange .
A lot of fantasy creatures are quite unimaginative , just two existing animals glued together—and some real animals are fairly unbelievable .
Some birds of paradise are not realistic .

The cover for this week’s issue tells a big story, maybe the biggest of all stories: the story of creation. Like many creation tales, it involves a tree. We talked to the artist Edward Steed about what led him to such an image during the holidays, when many of us are contemplating a winter of gloom.
Did you believe in Santa Claus as a child? What stories did you encounter as a kid or in school that still capture your imagination?
I believed in Father Christmas, but I don’t remember that time. My earliest memory of him is of pretending to believe in him. I was sitting on his lap and knew he was a fake but didn’t want to cause a problem for him. So I didn’t say anything.
When I read the Bible these days, I see it has some good stories, but that sort of thing never really caught my imagination when I was young. I suppose it just couldn’t compete with the great films of that era, such as “The Rock,” starring Sean Connery.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
As you demonstrate here, most monsters are made up of rearranged animal parts. It’s hard to imagine an eye or a mandible that hasn’t occurred somewhere in nature. Do you ever spend time looking at biology textbooks, by chance?
I just spend a lot of time drawing. It’s easy to design a completely new and unusual creature, but it’s difficult to make something new that is also sort of believable. In this case, most drawings ended up looking either too familiar or too strange. A lot of fantasy creatures are quite unimaginative, just two existing animals glued together—and some real animals are fairly unbelievable. Some birds of paradise are not realistic.


newyorker--2020-12-07--A Dad-Rocker in the State Department

A Dad-Rocker in the State Department

When Joe Biden tapped Antony Blinken , a veteran of the Obama and Clinton Administrations , to be his Secretary of State , a quick batch of thumbnail bios noted that he was a “ guitar aficionado.
” Did this mean that he was a connoisseur of the object itself—a collector of fine guitars ?
Or that he knew a lot about guitar players ?
Or that he was an ace player himself ?
The clickbait-industrial complex quickly discovered that Blinken had a Spotify page , with two singles he ’ d recorded two years ago , under the handle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ here was another dad-rocker Pro-Tooling his sideline musings and chord changes into presentable foist-it-on-your-friends form .
As someone with connections , money , and letterhead , he ’ d had help along the way .
He ’ d played with Alex Chilton , from Big Star , and Grant Hart , from Hüsker Du , and Jeff ( Skunk ) Baxter , the session whiz known for his work with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers , as well as for his expertise in the field of missile defense .
Blinken was also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ journalists and the former Obama spokesman Jay Carney .
They had a bad-pun name ( Coalition of the Willing ) and a nice-ring-to-it genre ( wonk rock ) .
The Spotify tracks were called “ Lip Service ” and “ Patience.
” Jokes wrote themselves , as they will .
One sensed , in the spasm of media excitement at this bit of late-boomer geek normalcy , the giddiness , in microcosm , over a restoration at Foggy Bottom .
Blinken ’ s friends have been calling the task he faces there “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doings and non-doings of the past four years will be a knotty task , not least because the current Administration has recently kept doing new things , or allowing things to be done , that could be hard to undo .
Like most people his age , Blinken , as a pre-Internet kid , presumably has his fair share of non-undoable but hard-to-dig-up juvenilia .
But some of it has made the digital leap .
In the early eighties , at Harvard , Blinken wrote dozens of columns in the Crimson about politics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should not imperil a Senate confirmation ; he was no radical firebrand or real-life Alex P. Keaton .
His hottest take , not unprescient , was that the Olympics , owing to cost and politics , should be permanently relocated to Switzerland .
One also finds , interspersed with Council on Foreign Relations boilerplate , a few instances of rock criticism : juvenilia ’ s juvenilia .
Here was the future diplomat as aspiring Lester Bangs .
He didn ’ t gut anyone ; he didn ’ t pull a Jon Landau , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ swatted down Jimi Hendrix in Rolling Stone .
This was 1981-82 , an odd in-between era for rock music .
As Blinken , a Beatles and blues man , wrote , also not unpresciently , “ Record sales are way down , new and true talent rare , and it takes prehistoric monsters like Fleetwood Mac and Crosby , Stills and Nash to deliver the goods.
” Nor was this period a career peak for the artists he took up : Bob Dylan , Lou Reed , the Who .
( It may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Marshall Crenshaw . )
Still , Blinken would contribute more to the genre than any of his future predecessors at State .
There is no record of Mike Pompeo or Warren Christopher going to the mat for Tiny Tim or Deep Purple .
Perhaps they didn ’ t know that if you wrote reviews the labels sent you freebies .
The Who album Blinken wrote up was “ It ’ s Hard ” —no “ Tommy , ” but it had a few bangers .
He began , “ I remember in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ second year of high school .
After class , I would go home and release the pent-up frustration of unrequited love with my stereo .
One track in particular spun over and over again on the turntable : ‘ Bargain ’ by The Who .
As the music blasted forth , I would listen to Roger Daltrey and pretend his golden throat was mine .
In my dream , the brown-eyed girl would sit entranced while I half sang , half shouted Pete Townshend ’ s lyrics .
.
.
.
Then , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into my arms .
The dream , alas , was never more than just that—a dream .
But The Who were always an impossible-to-ignore reality.
” The previous spring , he ’ d written , of Lou Reed ’ s latest , “ ‘ The Blue Mask ’ is the work of a mature artist.
” The record was Reed ’ s turn away from the avowed queerness of his earlier solo work and toward an oddly timed celebration of heterosexuality and the straight married life .
“ Reed , a veteran of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , could easily have become a cynic with age , ” Blinken wrote .
“ But instead of displaying unalloyed disgust , Reed confronts us with a touchingly realistic album that tempers anger with hope.
” Blinken also demonstrated a diplomat ’ s knack for conciliation in his review of Dylan ’ s “ Shot of Love , ” the last in his born-again trilogy .
Critics had whacked Dylan around for his muddled pieties , but Blinken , the stepson of a Holocaust survivor , cut him some slack .
“ While @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his every word , we should at least respect his right to be his own man , ” Blinken wrote .
“ Bob Dylan is no man ’ s lackey.
” After Thanksgiving , Blinken posted a new track on Spotify , called “ Without Ya.
” It ’ s about a woman , naturally , but the timing of the upload , and a few of the lyrics— “ Must be light along the way/Lead us to a brand new day ” —could lead one to wonder if it ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with a little anger .
♦

Antony Blinken Illustration by João Fazenda
When Joe Biden tapped Antony Blinken, a veteran of the Obama and Clinton Administrations, to be his Secretary of State, a quick batch of thumbnail bios noted that he was a “guitar aficionado.” Did this mean that he was a connoisseur of the object itself—a collector of fine guitars? Or that he knew a lot about guitar players? Or that he was an ace player himself? The clickbait-industrial complex quickly discovered that Blinken had a Spotify page, with two singles he’d recorded two years ago, under the handle (and pun) Ablinken. So here was another dad-rocker Pro-Tooling his sideline musings and chord changes into presentable foist-it-on-your-friends form. As someone with connections, money, and letterhead, he’d had help along the way. He’d played with Alex Chilton, from Big Star, and Grant Hart, from Hüsker Dü, and Jeff (Skunk) Baxter, the session whiz known for his work with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, as well as for his expertise in the field of missile defense. Blinken was also in a band with a couple of journalists and the former Obama spokesman Jay Carney. They had a bad-pun name (Coalition of the Willing) and a nice-ring-to-it genre (wonk rock). The Spotify tracks were called “Lip Service” and “Patience.” Jokes wrote themselves, as they will. One sensed, in the spasm of media excitement at this bit of late-boomer geek normalcy, the giddiness, in microcosm, over a restoration at Foggy Bottom.
Blinken’s friends have been calling the task he faces there “the Great Undoing.” Taking on the doings and non-doings of the past four years will be a knotty task, not least because the current Administration has recently kept doing new things, or allowing things to be done, that could be hard to undo. Like most people his age, Blinken, as a pre-Internet kid, presumably has his fair share of non-undoable but hard-to-dig-up juvenilia. But some of it has made the digital leap. In the early eighties, at Harvard, Blinken wrote dozens of columns in the Crimson about politics and foreign affairs. His collegiate opining should not imperil a Senate confirmation; he was no radical firebrand or real-life Alex P. Keaton. His hottest take, not unprescient, was that the Olympics, owing to cost and politics, should be permanently relocated to Switzerland.
One also finds, interspersed with Council on Foreign Relations boilerplate, a few instances of rock criticism: juvenilia’s juvenilia. Here was the future diplomat as aspiring Lester Bangs. He didn’t gut anyone; he didn’t pull a Jon Landau, who at Blinken’s age boldly swatted down Jimi Hendrix in Rolling Stone. This was 1981-82, an odd in-between era for rock music. As Blinken, a Beatles and blues man, wrote, also not unpresciently, “Record sales are way down, new and true talent rare, and it takes prehistoric monsters like Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills and Nash to deliver the goods.” Nor was this period a career peak for the artists he took up: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, the Who. (It may have been one for his lone comer, Marshall Crenshaw.) Still, Blinken would contribute more to the genre than any of his future predecessors at State. There is no record of Mike Pompeo or Warren Christopher going to the mat for Tiny Tim or Deep Purple. Perhaps they didn’t know that if you wrote reviews the labels sent you freebies.
The Who album Blinken wrote up was “It’s Hard”—no “Tommy,” but it had a few bangers. He began, “I remember in agonizing detail a crush I had my second year of high school. After class, I would go home and release the pent-up frustration of unrequited love with my stereo. One track in particular spun over and over again on the turntable: ‘Bargain’ by The Who. As the music blasted forth, I would listen to Roger Daltrey and pretend his golden throat was mine. In my dream, the brown-eyed girl would sit entranced while I half sang, half shouted Pete Townshend’s lyrics. . . . Then, charmed by my earnestness she would fall into my arms. The dream, alas, was never more than just that—a dream. But The Who were always an impossible-to-ignore reality.”
The previous spring, he’d written, of Lou Reed’s latest, “ ‘The Blue Mask’ is the work of a mature artist.” The record was Reed’s turn away from the avowed queerness of his earlier solo work and toward an oddly timed celebration of heterosexuality and the straight married life. “Reed, a veteran of a difficult business and a difficult era, could easily have become a cynic with age,” Blinken wrote. “But instead of displaying unalloyed disgust, Reed confronts us with a touchingly realistic album that tempers anger with hope.”
Blinken also demonstrated a diplomat’s knack for conciliation in his review of Dylan’s “Shot of Love,” the last in his born-again trilogy. Critics had whacked Dylan around for his muddled pieties, but Blinken, the stepson of a Holocaust survivor, cut him some slack. “While we do not have to agree with his every word, we should at least respect his right to be his own man,” Blinken wrote. “Bob Dylan is no man’s lackey.”
After Thanksgiving, Blinken posted a new track on Spotify, called “Without Ya.” It’s about a woman, naturally, but the timing of the upload, and a few of the lyrics—“Must be light along the way/Lead us to a brand new day”—could lead one to wonder if it’s a statement of purpose, too. Hope, with a little anger. ♦


newyorker--2020-12-07--Zosia Mamet Is a Horse Girl

Zosia Mamet Is a Horse Girl

Mamet , who is thirty-two , wore riding breeches and tall boots .
She was spending her afternoon at the Stables at MiraBella , in Florida , New York , about two hours north of the city , where she has been riding for two years .
Last spring , Mamet and her husband , the actor Evan Jonigkeit , gave up their Manhattan rental and moved upstate .
Although the move wasn ’ t animated by the pandemic , it dovetailed with it .
“ We ended up having this totally unprecedented pause , which meant I ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ six days a week , ” Mamet said .
She led the horse out of her stall toward the grooming area , where she secured her to the barn ’ s ceiling with a pair of cross ties .
“ We just celebrated the one-year anniversary since I got her , ” she said , brushing the animal , whose eyes followed her owner ’ s movements .
“ Usually , on Mondays , the barn is closed .
Look at her !
She ’ s , like ” —Mamet ’ s voice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tween— “ ‘ Mom , it ’ s my day off !
What are you doing ?
’ ” Best known for her six-season run as Shoshanna Shapiro , the plucky ditz savant on Lena Dunham ’ s “ Girls , ” Mamet is now starring in “ The Flight Attendant , ” a fizzy murder mystery on HBO Max in which she plays Annie , the levelheaded lawyer best friend to Kaley Cuoco ’ s good-time girl and murder suspect .
Holding up a sleek black rider ’ s helmet , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actually a wrap gift from Kaley .
She ’ s a horse girl , too !
” “ I ’ ve always been a horse girl , ” she went on .
“ I was born in Vermont , and my parents ” —the playwright David Mamet and the actress Lindsay Crouse— “ had gotten my older sister a pony .
She was , like , ‘ Cute , whatever.
’ But I was , like— ” She mimicked ecstatically throwing her arms around Ten ’ s neck .
“ From then on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ horse nerd .
I read all the ‘ Saddle Club ’ books , this dorky Y.A .
series , ” she said .
“ That kind of love is like something in your blood ; you either have it or you don ’ t .
Sometimes I describe it like an illness.
” She leaned down and began to clean out the dirt compacted in a horseshoe .
“ Ten has four shoes , ” she said .
“ Some have just two .
My first horse was Lucy , and I got @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Los Angeles , and she lived until I was , maybe twenty-seven ?
” She worked a pebble from one shoe ’ s grip .
“ My grandmother on my mom ’ s side was a big rider , ” she said .
“ She was riding her horse , Uncle Sam , after a bad storm , and there was a downed power line and she didn ’ t see it , and Uncle Sam stepped on it .
He died underneath her !
Very sad.
” She turned to Ten again @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she said .
“ I ’ ve recently started showing her , and a few days ago we were clipping her to make everything look nice , and we went a little too short with the forelock .
So she ’ s working with a smaller bang than usual.
” Outdoors , it was nippy but clear , and Mamet mounted Ten and began circling the ring , accelerating to a trot .
“ What we ’ re doing now is what ’ s called flatwork , ” she called out .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when we ’ re not jumping .
I ’ m teaching her to get into a frame .
You see how she curls her head down ?
That ’ s what we want .
It makes them elongate their stride.
” She clucked rhythmically as she led the horse around the ring .
“ Ooh , this is a canter now , ” she said .
“ There you go , mama !
” After a few more spirited circles , she paused .
“ There ’ s nothing I ’ d rather @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actor , ” she said .
“ But I ’ ve been kicked in the teeth so many times .
It ’ s such a hard profession ; there ’ s so much rejection , and so much instability and pressure .
Riding is my solace.
” She patted Ten ’ s neck .
“ My trainer has this saying : ‘ Ride the horse you have today.
’ Ten may have done something perfectly yesterday , and then I try to do it again and it ’ s colder , it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and my leg isn ’ t as on her , and , for whatever reason , exactly what I did yesterday isn ’ t getting the same response .
And acting is the same .
You have to accept the circumstances you have and the moment you ’ re in , and remember you ’ re doing this thing because you love it.
” Ten snorted , as if in rejoinder .
“ Good girl , Tenny , ” Mamet said .
♦

Zosia Mamet Illustration by João Fazenda
On a recent Monday, Zosia Mamet, the actress, unwrapped a peppermint candy and offered it to her six-year-old dappled gray horse, Ten. “Nom nom nom. Yes, you good girl!” she said, her eyes soft, as the mare chomped loudly on the treat, then butted a velvety muzzle into her owner’s palm. “Horses love peppermints. Right, Tenny girl?”
Mamet, who is thirty-two, wore riding breeches and tall boots. She was spending her afternoon at the Stables at MiraBella, in Florida, New York, about two hours north of the city, where she has been riding for two years. Last spring, Mamet and her husband, the actor Evan Jonigkeit, gave up their Manhattan rental and moved upstate. Although the move wasn’t animated by the pandemic, it dovetailed with it. “We ended up having this totally unprecedented pause, which meant I’ve been able to ride Ten five or six days a week,” Mamet said. She led the horse out of her stall toward the grooming area, where she secured her to the barn’s ceiling with a pair of cross ties. “We just celebrated the one-year anniversary since I got her,” she said, brushing the animal, whose eyes followed her owner’s movements. “Usually, on Mondays, the barn is closed. Look at her! She’s, like”—Mamet’s voice took on the cadence of a petulant tween—“ ‘Mom, it’s my day off! What are you doing?’ ”
Best known for her six-season run as Shoshanna Shapiro, the plucky ditz savant on Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” Mamet is now starring in “The Flight Attendant,” a fizzy murder mystery on HBO Max in which she plays Annie, the levelheaded lawyer best friend to Kaley Cuoco’s good-time girl and murder suspect. Holding up a sleek black rider’s helmet, she said, “This gorgeous thing was actually a wrap gift from Kaley. She’s a horse girl, too!”
“I’ve always been a horse girl,” she went on. “I was born in Vermont, and my parents”—the playwright David Mamet and the actress Lindsay Crouse—“had gotten my older sister a pony. She was, like, ‘Cute, whatever.’ But I was, like—” She mimicked ecstatically throwing her arms around Ten’s neck. “From then on, I was hooked, a full-on horse nerd. I read all the ‘Saddle Club’ books, this dorky Y.A. series,” she said. “That kind of love is like something in your blood; you either have it or you don’t. Sometimes I describe it like an illness.” She leaned down and began to clean out the dirt compacted in a horseshoe. “Ten has four shoes,” she said. “Some have just two. My first horse was Lucy, and I got her when I was thirteen, in Los Angeles, and she lived until I was, maybe twenty-seven?” She worked a pebble from one shoe’s grip. “My grandmother on my mom’s side was a big rider,” she said. “She was riding her horse, Uncle Sam, after a bad storm, and there was a downed power line and she didn’t see it, and Uncle Sam stepped on it. He died underneath her! Very sad.” She turned to Ten again. “Hey, boo-boo!” she said. “I’ve recently started showing her, and a few days ago we were clipping her to make everything look nice, and we went a little too short with the forelock. So she’s working with a smaller bang than usual.”
Outdoors, it was nippy but clear, and Mamet mounted Ten and began circling the ring, accelerating to a trot. “What we’re doing now is what’s called flatwork,” she called out. “All the stuff we do in training when we’re not jumping. I’m teaching her to get into a frame. You see how she curls her head down? That’s what we want. It makes them elongate their stride.” She clucked rhythmically as she led the horse around the ring. “Ooh, this is a canter now,” she said. “There you go, mama!” After a few more spirited circles, she paused. “There’s nothing I’d rather do in the world than be an actor,” she said. “But I’ve been kicked in the teeth so many times. It’s such a hard profession; there’s so much rejection, and so much instability and pressure. Riding is my solace.” She patted Ten’s neck. “My trainer has this saying: ‘Ride the horse you have today.’ Ten may have done something perfectly yesterday, and then I try to do it again and it’s colder, it’s earlier, I’m tired and my leg isn’t as on her, and, for whatever reason, exactly what I did yesterday isn’t getting the same response. And acting is the same. You have to accept the circumstances you have and the moment you’re in, and remember you’re doing this thing because you love it.” Ten snorted, as if in rejoinder. “Good girl, Tenny,” Mamet said. ♦


newyorker--2020-12-07--The Italian Genius Who Mixed Marxism and Children’s Literature

How I love this image , with its dark , wet , secret transactions , its mud and molecules .
This is Rodari ’ s metaphor for cognition .
In his view , children learned not by having something jammed into their brains—the multiplication tables , the sonnets of Petrarch—but by responding , almost involuntarily , to a sight , an idea , or often just a word , absorbing it , moving other mental contents around to make room for it , and thereby creating something new .
There seems to be no question that Rodari ’ s concern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his youth .
A modest man , he spoke not of his own difficulties but of other people ’ s—his mother ’ s , for example .
She went to work at the age of eight , he wrote , first in a paper factory , then in a textile works , then as a domestic .
When he began teaching , his pupils , too , were poor .
In the winter , some could not come to school , because they had no shoes .
Many of them also spoke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lest people make them feel embarrassed .
Apart from his students ’ ability to get to school , what most concerned Rodari was the development of their imaginations .
He said that a line of Novalis ’ s , which he read as a young man , always stuck in his mind : “ If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic , then we would be able to discover the art of inventing stories.
” This he connected with fantasist art of his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Surrealism is a brew of many ideas , but the one most important to Rodari , it seems , was the simplest , the pairing of opposites—particularly the joining of a dream world to a punctilious realism .
A hardy movement , Surrealism lasted from the nineteen-twenties until well after the Second World War , because it fit those wild and disastrous years .
A locus classicus is Vittorio De Sica ’ s breakthrough film , “ Miracle in Milan ” ( 1951 ) , which ends with a collection of homeless people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the authorities , taking off , on broomsticks , into the sky .
Italy , after the war , was very , very poor .
De Sica ’ s other early films— “ Shoeshine , ” “ Bicycle Thieves , ” “ Umberto D. ” —give a sense of this , as do Rossellini ’ s “ Paisan ” and “ Rome , Open City.
” The country was also humiliated .
Many Italian artists were glad to move into new territory .
Surrealism provided a picture of the truth they now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with the memory of a happier past : trees , pocket watches , town squares , pretty women .
Many of the early Surrealists were committed Marxists .
In “ The Grammar of Fantasy , ” Rodari writes of a day that he spent drinking wine with friends in a village outside Kazan , near the Volga .
The group visited a local landmark , a wooden house whose furniture , he noticed , was curiously arranged .
Sturdy benches were set under the windowsills , so that the erstwhile owners ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and out by the windows rather than by the door , could do so without breaking their necks .
This , Rodari later decided , was a lesson of Communism .
As it turned out , the house had once been the property of Lenin ’ s grandfather .
Whether or not Lenin adapted his political philosophy from his grandparent ’ s furniture arrangements , Rodari learned critical thinking from Marxist doctrine .
Whatever he writes about , he subjects to questioning , scrutiny , a mild irradiation of irony , or just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in part , he said , from Russian formalist critics of the early twentieth century such as Viktor Shklovsky , who called it ostranenie , defamiliarization . )
People in the West tend to associate Marxism with thought control .
It is hard to convince them that , in the late nineteenth century , Marxism was considered by its adherents to be the standard-bearer of thought liberation .
In keeping with Rodari ’ s concern for children ’ s imaginations , some stories in “ Telephone Tales , ” like the stone in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fantasy , ” journey into distant realms of strangeness .
Two of them feature a little girl named Alice Tumbledown .
Alice falls a lot , into places where we wouldn ’ t think to look for a missing child .
Her favorite landing place is the silverware drawer in the kitchen .
She loves it there , in the spoon section .
One time , her grandfather finds her inside the alarm clock .
Later , he has to fish her out of a bottle .
“ I was thirsty and fell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Alice wanders into the ocean .
She ’ d like to become a starfish , she thinks : Who would want to live inside a clamshell , in that cold , pungent fluid , next to that pink blob of a clam ?
Alice .
But then she thinks of her parents , how they love her and would miss her .
Regretfully , she pries the shell open , swims out , and goes home .
I don ’ t know of any writer , before Rodari , who would have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worse , or better .
In the tale called “ Pulcinella ’ s Escape , ” a Pulcinella marionette ( Punch , from Punch and Judy ) manages to cut the strings that attach him to his control bar .
He escapes from the puppet theatre and hides in a nearby garden , where he survives by eating flowers .
When winter comes , there are no more flowers , but he ’ s not afraid .
“ Oh , well , ” he says , “ I ’ ll just die here.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ spring , a carnation grows on the spot where his body lies .
Under the ground , he says to himself , “ Who could be happier than me ?
” Here , and in “ Alice Falls Into the Sea , ” two realities sit side by side , looking rather surprised , but not actually annoyed , to see each other .
Yes , it would be rather dark and lonely under the ground or inside a clamshell .
But how peaceful !
But there ’ s always a hitch .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Mun is not a good name for a planet , nor should anyone try to eat an alarm clock .
As for the rain of Jordan almonds , Rodari says that people always waited for it to come back , but it never did .
The humor is not as daffy as in Edward Lear , and not as elaborate as in Lewis Carroll .
( Rodari loved both writers . )
“ Telephone Tales ” also carries a heavy load of sarcasm .
In one story , a man ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gogol . )
It is finally chased down , brought back , and reattached to the man ’ s face .
The man remonstrates with it : “ ‘ But why did you ever run away in the first place ?
What did I ever do to you ?
’ The nose glared at him .
.
.
and said , ‘ Listen , just never pick me again as long as you live.
’ ” Rodari was also fond of bathroom jokes .
King Midas , when his touch-of-gold magic is revoked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
For a brief time , everything he touches turns to shit .
These narratives were probably very popular with listeners young enough to remember their toilet training , but adults , too , may have enjoyed such talk .
Some people have asked whether Rodari ’ s writing , so witty and strange , is not better suited to adults than to children , but children apparently love it .
Rodari , before publishing his work , often tried it out on elementary-school classes , and made a note of which parts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that , like “ Alice in Wonderland , ” his writing makes children feel intelligent .
Rodari once said that it might be best not to worry about whether his books were for children or adults , but just to consider them “ books , tout court.
” It would be hard for anyone , of any age , not to love the illustrations—mostly in Magic Marker—that Enchanted Lion commissioned for “ Telephone Tales , ” from the Italian artist Valerio Vidali .
The book design itself harbors surprises .
Some pages have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Others are gatefold pages , where you pull the inner edge and another page folds out .
In the drawings , you are shown entire worlds of semi-abstract figures : giant noses , a palace made of ice cream , birds eating cookies , plus , of course , kings and queens and a princess in a tower .
The pages are sewn with stitches worthy of a Balenciaga gown .
It is astonishing that the book costs only $ 27.95 .
Go buy one , right now .
Politics accompanied Rodari @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He first visited the Soviet Union in 1951 and went back every few years thereafter , to accept prizes , judge competitions , and , as he no doubt felt , just to do his part .
Communism , in some measure , gave him his morals , without laying its heavy hand on his blithe spirit .
But in the end , according to Vanessa Roghi ’ s biography , it let him down .
He wasn ’ t the only one .
Events in the Soviet Union—the show trials of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ three years after Stalin ’ s death , enumerating the man ’ s crimes—caused leftists across the Western world to abandon their loyalty to the U.S.S.R .
If those developments didn ’ t discourage them , later ones did : the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 , the quelling of the Prague Spring in 1968 .
Many Western Marxists openly disavowed the Soviet system , but not Rodari .
He had been a Communist practically from his teen-age years , and he would not abandon the Party now , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even after Italy ’ s so-called “ years of lead , ” beginning in the late sixties , when the country was shocked almost daily , it seemed , by acts of political terrorism .
( An especially horrifying episode was the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro , a centrist who had served five terms as the nation ’ s Prime Minister , by the Red Brigades , a neo-Marxist organization .
Italians who lived through those years still speak of them with emotion . )
In 1979 , when Rodari @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Union , he found little to praise about the country in which he had once placed so much hope .
Roghi quotes his travel diary , in which he deplores the venality of the Soviet Union and the hypocrisy of its young people .
“ One thing is certain , ” he wrote .
“ They aren ’ t Communists.
” Rodari fans , however , should thank the U.S.S.R. By inspiring him and then disappointing him , it set him free , to work in a genre , the so-called children ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have to confront his bitterness .
And , in the end , it drove him beyond bitterness , into a wonderful wildness .
The year before that last trip to the Soviet Union , Einaudi brought out Rodari ’ s final novel , a brilliant satire of both capitalists and revolutionaries .
( It was published in English in 2011 with the title “ Lamberto , Lamberto , Lamberto.
” ) In the book , a certain Baron Lamberto , who is ninety-three and fears that he may die , hears that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was endlessly repeated you could live forever .
He decides to give it a try .
He has his servants speak his name continuously into microphones placed in the attic of his castle .
By the end—despite the best efforts of a gang of terrorists , who take him hostage and cut off his ear ( this is actually funny ) —he survives .
Rodari didn ’ t .
Not long after “ Lamberto ” was published , an aneurysm was discovered in his leg .
This necessitated a seven-hour operation , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But then , three days later , he died suddenly , of heart failure .
He was only fifty-nine .
I hope that his soul is at rest on the Planet of Truth .
♦

How I love this image, with its dark, wet, secret transactions, its mud and molecules. This is Rodari’s metaphor for cognition. In his view, children learned not by having something jammed into their brains—the multiplication tables, the sonnets of Petrarch—but by responding, almost involuntarily, to a sight, an idea, or often just a word, absorbing it, moving other mental contents around to make room for it, and thereby creating something new.
There seems to be no question that Rodari’s concern for education was related to the poverty of his youth. A modest man, he spoke not of his own difficulties but of other people’s—his mother’s, for example. She went to work at the age of eight, he wrote, first in a paper factory, then in a textile works, then as a domestic. When he began teaching, his pupils, too, were poor. In the winter, some could not come to school, because they had no shoes. Many of them also spoke a non-standard Italian, and he worried lest people make them feel embarrassed.
Apart from his students’ ability to get to school, what most concerned Rodari was the development of their imaginations. He said that a line of Novalis’s, which he read as a young man, always stuck in his mind: “If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of inventing stories.” This he connected with fantasist art of his own time, above all Surrealism. Surrealism is a brew of many ideas, but the one most important to Rodari, it seems, was the simplest, the pairing of opposites—particularly the joining of a dream world to a punctilious realism. A hardy movement, Surrealism lasted from the nineteen-twenties until well after the Second World War, because it fit those wild and disastrous years. A locus classicus is Vittorio De Sica’s breakthrough film, “Miracle in Milan” (1951), which ends with a collection of homeless people who have just seen their shantytown razed by the authorities, taking off, on broomsticks, into the sky. Italy, after the war, was very, very poor. De Sica’s other early films—“Shoeshine,” “Bicycle Thieves,” “Umberto D.”—give a sense of this, as do Rossellini’s “Paisan” and “Rome, Open City.” The country was also humiliated. Many Italian artists were glad to move into new territory. Surrealism provided a picture of the truth they now faced—ugliness, violence, ruin—combined, however, with the memory of a happier past: trees, pocket watches, town squares, pretty women.
Many of the early Surrealists were committed Marxists. In “The Grammar of Fantasy,” Rodari writes of a day that he spent drinking wine with friends in a village outside Kazan, near the Volga. The group visited a local landmark, a wooden house whose furniture, he noticed, was curiously arranged. Sturdy benches were set under the windowsills, so that the erstwhile owners’ children, who liked to come in and out by the windows rather than by the door, could do so without breaking their necks. This, Rodari later decided, was a lesson of Communism. As it turned out, the house had once been the property of Lenin’s grandfather. Whether or not Lenin adapted his political philosophy from his grandparent’s furniture arrangements, Rodari learned critical thinking from Marxist doctrine. Whatever he writes about, he subjects to questioning, scrutiny, a mild irradiation of irony, or just wit. (Rodari inherited this approach in part, he said, from Russian formalist critics of the early twentieth century such as Viktor Shklovsky, who called it ostranenie, defamiliarization.) People in the West tend to associate Marxism with thought control. It is hard to convince them that, in the late nineteenth century, Marxism was considered by its adherents to be the standard-bearer of thought liberation.
In keeping with Rodari’s concern for children’s imaginations, some stories in “Telephone Tales,” like the stone in the pond in “The Grammar of Fantasy,” journey into distant realms of strangeness. Two of them feature a little girl named Alice Tumbledown. Alice falls a lot, into places where we wouldn’t think to look for a missing child. Her favorite landing place is the silverware drawer in the kitchen. She loves it there, in the spoon section. One time, her grandfather finds her inside the alarm clock. Later, he has to fish her out of a bottle. “I was thirsty and fell in,” she explains. Elsewhere, Alice wanders into the ocean. She’d like to become a starfish, she thinks:
But instead she fell into the shell of a giant mollusk just as it was yawning, and it immediately snapped shut its valves, imprisoning Alice and all her dreams. Here I am, in trouble again, thought Alice. But she also felt what silence—what fresh, cool peace—was there inside the giant mollusk. It would have been wonderful to stay there forever.
Who would want to live inside a clamshell, in that cold, pungent fluid, next to that pink blob of a clam? Alice. But then she thinks of her parents, how they love her and would miss her. Regretfully, she pries the shell open, swims out, and goes home. I don’t know of any writer, before Rodari, who would have explored such an experience.
There is worse, or better. In the tale called “Pulcinella’s Escape,” a Pulcinella marionette (Punch, from Punch and Judy) manages to cut the strings that attach him to his control bar. He escapes from the puppet theatre and hides in a nearby garden, where he survives by eating flowers. When winter comes, there are no more flowers, but he’s not afraid. “Oh, well,” he says, “I’ll just die here.” And he does. In the spring, a carnation grows on the spot where his body lies. Under the ground, he says to himself, “Who could be happier than me?” Here, and in “Alice Falls Into the Sea,” two realities sit side by side, looking rather surprised, but not actually annoyed, to see each other. Yes, it would be rather dark and lonely under the ground or inside a clamshell. But how peaceful!
“Do you need anything else from the store?” Cartoon by Akeem Roberts Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In keeping with his leftist sympathies, there is a rich vein of utopianism in Rodari’s work. “When they are little, children must stock up on optimism,” he wrote, “for the challenge of life.” In one story, Jordan almonds rain down from a cloud in the sky. In a later tale, a Russian astronaut reports that, on Planet X213, people who don’t want to get up in the morning just grab the alarm clock and eat it and go back to sleep. Another planet, called Mun, has a machine that manufactures lies:
For one token, you could hear fourteen thousand lies. The machine contained all the lies in the world—the lies that had already been told, the lies that people were thinking of at that very moment, and all the others that would be invented in the future. Once the machine had recited all the possible lies, people were forced to always tell the truth. That’s why the planet Mun is also known as the Planet of Truth.
But there’s always a hitch. Even a young child could tell you that Mun is not a good name for a planet, nor should anyone try to eat an alarm clock. As for the rain of Jordan almonds, Rodari says that people always waited for it to come back, but it never did. The humor is not as daffy as in Edward Lear, and not as elaborate as in Lewis Carroll. (Rodari loved both writers.) “Telephone Tales” also carries a heavy load of sarcasm. In one story, a man’s nose runs away. (Rodari credits Gogol.) It is finally chased down, brought back, and reattached to the man’s face. The man remonstrates with it: “ ‘But why did you ever run away in the first place? What did I ever do to you?’ The nose glared at him . . . and said, ‘Listen, just never pick me again as long as you live.’ ” Rodari was also fond of bathroom jokes. King Midas, when his touch-of-gold magic is revoked, does not immediately revert to normal. For a brief time, everything he touches turns to shit. These narratives were probably very popular with listeners young enough to remember their toilet training, but adults, too, may have enjoyed such talk.
Some people have asked whether Rodari’s writing, so witty and strange, is not better suited to adults than to children, but children apparently love it. Rodari, before publishing his work, often tried it out on elementary-school classes, and made a note of which parts made the children laugh. I think that, like “Alice in Wonderland,” his writing makes children feel intelligent. Rodari once said that it might be best not to worry about whether his books were for children or adults, but just to consider them “books, tout court.”
It would be hard for anyone, of any age, not to love the illustrations—mostly in Magic Marker—that Enchanted Lion commissioned for “Telephone Tales,” from the Italian artist Valerio Vidali. The book design itself harbors surprises. Some pages have extra little inner pages glued to them. Others are gatefold pages, where you pull the inner edge and another page folds out. In the drawings, you are shown entire worlds of semi-abstract figures: giant noses, a palace made of ice cream, birds eating cookies, plus, of course, kings and queens and a princess in a tower. The pages are sewn with stitches worthy of a Balenciaga gown. It is astonishing that the book costs only $27.95. Go buy one, right now.
Politics accompanied Rodari all the days of his life. He first visited the Soviet Union in 1951 and went back every few years thereafter, to accept prizes, judge competitions, and, as he no doubt felt, just to do his part. Communism, in some measure, gave him his morals, without laying its heavy hand on his blithe spirit. But in the end, according to Vanessa Roghi’s biography, it let him down. He wasn’t the only one. Events in the Soviet Union—the show trials of the thirties, Khrushchev’s famous speech three years after Stalin’s death, enumerating the man’s crimes—caused leftists across the Western world to abandon their loyalty to the U.S.S.R. If those developments didn’t discourage them, later ones did: the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the quelling of the Prague Spring in 1968.
Many Western Marxists openly disavowed the Soviet system, but not Rodari. He had been a Communist practically from his teen-age years, and he would not abandon the Party now, or not publicly. He stood by it even after Italy’s so-called “years of lead,” beginning in the late sixties, when the country was shocked almost daily, it seemed, by acts of political terrorism. (An especially horrifying episode was the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, a centrist who had served five terms as the nation’s Prime Minister, by the Red Brigades, a neo-Marxist organization. Italians who lived through those years still speak of them with emotion.) In 1979, when Rodari made his last trip to the Soviet Union, he found little to praise about the country in which he had once placed so much hope. Roghi quotes his travel diary, in which he deplores the venality of the Soviet Union and the hypocrisy of its young people. “One thing is certain,” he wrote. “They aren’t Communists.”
Rodari fans, however, should thank the U.S.S.R. By inspiring him and then disappointing him, it set him free, to work in a genre, the so-called children’s tale, where he would not have to confront his bitterness. And, in the end, it drove him beyond bitterness, into a wonderful wildness. The year before that last trip to the Soviet Union, Einaudi brought out Rodari’s final novel, a brilliant satire of both capitalists and revolutionaries. (It was published in English in 2011 with the title “Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto.”) In the book, a certain Baron Lamberto, who is ninety-three and fears that he may die, hears that the Egyptian pharaohs believed that if your name was endlessly repeated you could live forever. He decides to give it a try. He has his servants speak his name continuously into microphones placed in the attic of his castle. By the end—despite the best efforts of a gang of terrorists, who take him hostage and cut off his ear (this is actually funny)—he survives.
Rodari didn’t. Not long after “Lamberto” was published, an aneurysm was discovered in his leg. This necessitated a seven-hour operation, which seemed at first to be successful. But then, three days later, he died suddenly, of heart failure. He was only fifty-nine. I hope that his soul is at rest on the Planet of Truth. ♦


newyorker--2020-12-07--My Colleague, the Antichrist

My Colleague, the Antichrist

The Antichrist was a pretty good guy , but , when we went for drinks after work , if he got drunk he ’ d start ranting on and on about how he was going to rule the world and how we ’ d all bow down and worship him .
You wanted to say , “ Give it a rest , Antichrist.
” Plus , he would conveniently make himself scarce just before the bill came .
Another annoying thing about the Antichrist was that he was always complaining that our department was not committing enough abominations .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ points .
When my girlfriend dumped me , he said , “ Don ’ t worry , there are plenty of other harlots in the sea.
” And he was a great coach for our softball team , the Evil , Vicious Bluebirds ( formerly the Bluebirds ) .
He had us focus on what he called the “ three basics ” : good fielding , good hitting , and leading our opponents astray .
Imagine my surprise when I saw him on the big TV in Times Square .
He was on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saying that he was the new ruler .
I nudged the man next to me .
“ I know that guy , ” I said .
Under the evil reign of the Antichrist , life in New York didn ’ t change much .
One new rule was that you had to join the Church of Satan .
I was able to join the Reformed Church of Satan .
It was less strict .
Instead of sacrificing children , we would merely tease them .
I decided to go see the Antichrist .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It seemed like an eternity .
Most of the people waiting had sold their souls , and now they were trying to get them back .
Yeah , right .
Good luck with that !
I had to laugh .
A she-devil with a forked tongue came by to make sure that my name was on the list .
I started to ask her out , but they called my name .
Before I was allowed in , the demon guards frisked me and made sure that I had the Mark of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years earlier , in my fraternity days .
The Antichrist was sitting at a huge desk that looked out on what used to be the Statue of Liberty but was now the Statue of Depravity .
Like the Statue of Liberty , the Statue of Depravity was a gift from France .
He looked tired .
He was signing papers with a pen that wrote with flaming ink .
If the flaming ink stopped , he had to shake the pen hard to make it start again .
He finally looked up and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he said , but I ’ m not sure he did .
It was nice of him to say so , though .
“ What can I do for you ?
” he went on .
I told him that I wanted him to put a curse on my friend Don .
He said he would .
“ Is that all ?
” he said .
“ Yep .
That ’ s it.
” I had a thought .
“ Say , you want to go get a drink ?
” “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ I ’ m in A.A. now.
” He stood and walked to the window and stared out .
“ Let me ask you something , ” he said wistfully .
“ How much weeping and gnashing of teeth can you take before it drives you round the bend ?
” I took the opportunity to tiptoe out .
The Antichrist kept his word .
He put a curse on Don , but not a very good one .
Every now and then , Don would stub his toe , and occasionally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nothing very heavy .
That was about it .
Once , a bag of flour fell on his head .
That was pretty good .
Maybe I should have asked for a new recliner .
I need one .
Maybe a new recliner and a million dollars .
The other day , I heard on the news that the Antichrist had been cast into the fiery lake forever .
It ’ s too bad , because if he ’ d stuck it out at the investment bank he ’ d probably be a @ @ @ @ @

I knew the Antichrist. We worked together in New York, at a major investment bank. (Due to the nondisclosure agreements we had to sign, neither the Antichrist nor myself can disclose which investment bank.)
The Antichrist was a pretty good guy, but, when we went for drinks after work, if he got drunk he’d start ranting on and on about how he was going to rule the world and how we’d all bow down and worship him. You wanted to say, “Give it a rest, Antichrist.” Plus, he would conveniently make himself scarce just before the bill came.
Another annoying thing about the Antichrist was that he was always complaining that our department was not committing enough abominations.
But the Antichrist was not without his good points. When my girlfriend dumped me, he said, “Don’t worry, there are plenty of other harlots in the sea.” And he was a great coach for our softball team, the Evil, Vicious Bluebirds (formerly the Bluebirds). He had us focus on what he called the “three basics”: good fielding, good hitting, and leading our opponents astray.
Imagine my surprise when I saw him on the big TV in Times Square. He was on all the TVs, in fact, saying that he was the new ruler. I nudged the man next to me. “I know that guy,” I said.
Under the evil reign of the Antichrist, life in New York didn’t change much. One new rule was that you had to join the Church of Satan. I was able to join the Reformed Church of Satan. It was less strict. Instead of sacrificing children, we would merely tease them.
I decided to go see the Antichrist. I had to wait outside his office. It seemed like an eternity. Most of the people waiting had sold their souls, and now they were trying to get them back. Yeah, right. Good luck with that! I had to laugh.
A she-devil with a forked tongue came by to make sure that my name was on the list. I started to ask her out, but they called my name. Before I was allowed in, the demon guards frisked me and made sure that I had the Mark of the Beast, which I had got years earlier, in my fraternity days.
The Antichrist was sitting at a huge desk that looked out on what used to be the Statue of Liberty but was now the Statue of Depravity. Like the Statue of Liberty, the Statue of Depravity was a gift from France.
He looked tired. He was signing papers with a pen that wrote with flaming ink. If the flaming ink stopped, he had to shake the pen hard to make it start again. He finally looked up and saw me.
“How’s it going?” I said. “Remember me?”
“Of course,” he said, but I’m not sure he did. It was nice of him to say so, though. “What can I do for you?” he went on.
I told him that I wanted him to put a curse on my friend Don.
He said he would. “Is that all?” he said.
“Yep. That’s it.” I had a thought. “Say, you want to go get a drink?”
“No, thanks,” he said. “I’m in A.A. now.”
He stood and walked to the window and stared out. “Let me ask you something,” he said wistfully. “How much weeping and gnashing of teeth can you take before it drives you round the bend?”
I took the opportunity to tiptoe out.
The Antichrist kept his word. He put a curse on Don, but not a very good one. Every now and then, Don would stub his toe, and occasionally something would fall on him, but nothing very heavy. That was about it. Once, a bag of flour fell on his head. That was pretty good.
Maybe I should have asked for a new recliner. I need one. Maybe a new recliner and a million dollars.
The other day, I heard on the news that the Antichrist had been cast into the fiery lake forever. It’s too bad, because if he’d stuck it out at the investment bank he’d probably be a partner by now. ♦


newyorker--2020-12-07--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons December 14, 2020

“ Just because the election is over doesn ’ t mean we have to stop predicting its outcome .
”

“Just because the election is over doesn’t mean we have to stop predicting its outcome.”
Cartoon by William Haefeli