newyorker--2020-09-21--The Elusive Peril of Space Junk

The Elusive Peril of Space Junk

For decades , the International Space Station has been hovering over Earth , in an orbit somewhere between two hundred and three hundred miles above sea level .
Its massive rectilinear structure , resembling an Eisenhower-era TV antenna , contains hundreds of thousands of solar cells and a series of pressurized modules that can support life and equipment , all of it weighing close to a million pounds .
Since 2000 , people have been living on the station , in an area comparable to a six-bedroom house : humanity ’ s most expensive real estate .
The station is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live in .
It orbits the planet at more than seventeen thousand miles an hour , many times faster than the Earth ’ s rotation .
A day on the station , from sunrise to sunrise , lasts just ninety minutes .
In the early hours of July 16 , 2015 , members of the U.S. Air Force noticed an alarming development involving the I.S.S .
Since the Cold War , the military has maintained an extensive space-surveillance network .
Every minute , tracking stations across the globe relay a cascade of data @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a bunker carved deep beneath two thousand feet of granite in Colorado .
Some of the information is set aside for and other national-security organizations .
Other portions are forwarded to the 18th Space Control Squadron , in California , which works to prevent collisions in the sky .
Sometime before three that morning , the surveillance network glimpsed a hunk of debris hurtling toward the I.S.S .
A well-known piece of space trash , it had been labelled Object No .
36912 in an extensive inventory of orbital artifacts known as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Soviet military weather satellite , which was launched in 1979 from a Cold War facility near the Arctic Circle .
The cylindrical satellite—resembling an old-fashioned boiler—was designed to work for less than two years .
In the ensuing decades , it had been shedding fragments .
That April , another piece of it had threatened the space station .
Object No .
36912 was likely a torn-off piece of thermal shielding ; it appeared to be relatively light , and no bigger than a large dinner plate .
For years , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But its mass and shape made it highly sensitive to atmospheric drag—its orbit shifting dramatically as the atmosphere expanded and contracted in response to solar activity .
Several weeks earlier , the atmosphere had ballooned , causing Object No .
36912 ’ s orbit to suddenly decay .
As the debris spiralled downward , gathering speed , the Air Force was keeping a close watch , but small things in space can easily evade detection .
The object was visible to just two radar stations , in Alaska and in Florida—and then it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ week .
On July 16th , when it reappeared , Air Force analysts quickly updated their predictions : the object would make a close pass of the space station at 5:29 ( Mission Control time , in Houston ) .
It would clear the spacecraft by about fourteen miles , but penetrate a safety zone around the I.S.S .
called “ the box.
” Then it would loop around the globe , falling farther , and come within striking distance—risking impact , or a “ conjunction.
” If the chance that something in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
is greater than one in ten thousand , the condition is “ red.
” With Object No .
36912 , the probability was more than one in a thousand .
At 2:44 , the Space Control Squadron notified Jim Cooney , the I.S.S.
’ s trajectory-operations officer .
Cooney , a veteran , was asleep at home , but an app on his phone triggers a high-volume alarm for such alerts .
“ Your brain gets engaged really fast , ” he told me .
He had become accustomed to late-night calls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adjusted the spacecraft ’ s trajectory to dodge a fragment of a Minotaur rocket : a former intercontinental ballistic missile repurposed to ferry cargo into space .
These maneuvers have been performed more than two dozen times , and can be executed without much trouble if Houston has five and a half hours ’ notice .
But , when Cooney called the Air Force , he learned that Object No .
36912 would make its closest approach in about four hours .
“ I had them repeat the information to make sure I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he recalled .
Never before had the I.S.S .
faced such a high probability of collision on such short notice .
Moving the station was out of the question .
Instantly , he relayed the news to Houston ’ s flight director , Ed Van Cise , and then rushed to Mission Control , where he joined a tense meeting to discuss the options .
There was only one : instruct the crew to lock down the station—closing hatches between modules—and then shelter in the Soyuz capsule , a Russian vessel that can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ three people aboard the I.S.S .
: one American , Scott Kelly , and two Russians , Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko .
In the Soyuz , they could detach from the failing structure and return to Earth .
In the station ’ s history , its crew had sheltered in the Soyuz only three other times .
Van Cise reached out to Kelly , who was exercising on a treadmill mounted on one of the station ’ s walls .
“ Houston on Space to Ground Two , ” a voice barked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are privatizing.
” This meant that the feed from Mission Control , which usually could be accessed freely by the ground crew , would be nonpublic .
Kelly later wrote in an expedition log that his first thought was , “ Oh , fuck.
” In space , unscheduled private conversations portend bad news : in 2011 , on an earlier mission , Houston had privatized the channel to inform him that his sister-in-law , the Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords , had been shot .
Hearing that the call was for business , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the enormity of the situation sank in .
Fuck , he thought again .
The privatized call was a courtesy , so that Kelly would be prepared once the alert was relayed publicly .
The space station operates on Greenwich Mean Time ; for the crew , the moment that Object No .
36912 either slammed into the structure or zoomed past it would be 12:01 .
Mission Control instructed Kelly to start closing hatches at 10:30 , then retreat with the Russians to the Soyuz at 11:51 , and stay there until @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
At ten o ’ clock , Mission Control contacted Kelly again , to remind him that he and Kornienko had an interview scheduled with morning news programs in Florida and Kentucky .
reasoned that there was time to proceed : the interview would take less than twenty minutes , and lockdown was in half an hour .
“ Seriously ?
” Kelly wrote in his log .
“ We have a satellite coming at us.
” But he and Kornienko got into their positions without protest .
“ We are ready for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dryly , and glanced at his watch .
Then he answered questions about the Kentucky Derby , performed zero-gravity stunts , and tried not to show that he was in a life-threatening situation .
As soon as the transmissions ended , Kelly began locking down hatches throughout the American modules .
Calmly , he floated through the structure—the lab , the cupola , an air lock—with a flashlight in his mouth , to augment the station ’ s dim lighting .
He had asked Houston if the debris hurtling toward the space station @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the hatches , he got a response .
“ It will be in orbital night , ” Houston told him .
“ So , no viewing opportunity.
” “ Copy , ” Kelly said , plainly , but the number was terrifying : the debris and the station were closing in on each other at a combined speed of thirty-one thousand miles an hour .
In orbit , a one-centimetre bolt can have the explosive force of a hand grenade upon impact .
Object No .
36912 was at least ten times larger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shielding was being designed , a astrophysicist named Donald Kessler had asked experts to shoot small objects at metal film cannisters at hypervelocities .
The ballistics revealed that , even if debris penetrated the I.S.S .
cleanly , it could leave a mangled hole upon exit .
Object No .
36912 risked triggering a chain of failures that could destroy the entire structure .
Kelly focussed on procedure .
Houston had told him to pick up a scientific instrument and a medical kit .
He got those , and also some personal items @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mike Foale , who had served on the Mir space station , in 1997 .
Foale had been living in a module called Spektr when a supply ship came in too quickly—like a shark , a cosmonaut onboard recalled , “ this black body covered in spots sliding past ” —and then smashed into it .
To contain the breach , Spektr was sealed , forever separating Foale from his things , including gold pendants he intended to give his wife and children .
“ You always think about what happened to him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with important stuff on the other side , ” Kelly told me .
After locking down the American modules , Kelly caught up with Kornienko and Padalka in the Russian section .
Padalka , the commander of the I.S.S.
, strove to project confidence ; when Moscow Mission Control had asked him about the mood onboard , he responded , “ Fighting spirit !
” Kelly noticed that none of the hatches on the five Russian modules were shut .
( Padalka and Kornienko say that they remember this differently . )
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hatches like we do , ” Kelly wrote in his log .
“ They think it ’ s a waste of time—basically thinking the two most likely scenarios are the thing misses , or catastrophic destruction .
The stuff in-between is way too unlikely to care about.
” Kelly was amazed to find the cosmonauts having lunch .
“ We wanted to eat !
” Kornienko told me .
“ Russians have a proverb , ‘ War is war , but lunch runs on time.
’ ” The Soyuz ’ s food supply @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who knew how long they might be stranded there ?
There were fourteen minutes to spare , so Kelly joined them for a can of Appetizing Appetizer—a dish that , he later recalled , resembled cat food , “ in appearance , consistency , and probably a little bit in taste.
” In Houston , the crew at Mission Control waited tensely .
A wall-size screen contained a depiction of the space station ’ s orbit and a live feed of its interior .
Ed Van Cise fidgeted with a computer mouse .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a hand over his mouth .
Another sat with an emergency manual open ; he told me , “ We know what to do , but we don ’ t know what the outcome is going to be .
This could be terrible , this could be a loss of life.
” At 11:51 , the three men in the space station climbed into the Soyuz capsule , a cramped vessel that looked like a pinched cylinder atop the station .
It was packed with switches and knobs .
“ It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ darker than normal inside , ” Kelly wrote in his log .
“ It ’ s cold.
” He was wearing a black sweatshirt , and he had pulled the hood down nearly over his eyes .
The men were instructed to leave the Soyuz hatch sealed , but unlatched—in case the debris hit the capsule rather than the I.S.S .
and they needed to rush back in .
Kornienko focussed on the latch , imagining the steps he would take in a crisis .
“ There were no words—silence , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was struck by the sudden quiet , as each man retreated into his thoughts .
He wrote in his log , “ I can only hear the sounds of the fans inside the Soyuz , my breathing.
” With the tension growing , Padalka said , “ You know , it will really suck if we get hit.
” A monitor indicated the time , and the men watched the minutes elapse , bracing for 12:01 .
Kelly noticed Kornienko gazing out a porthole .
“ Finally , I said , ‘ Misha @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see anything , ’ ” he recalled .
“ ‘ That thing is going thirty thousand miles an hour , and it ’ s dark outside !
’ Then I noticed that I was looking out the window , and listening , and tensing out , and then at some point you realize , We wouldn ’ t even fucking know if we got hit .
We just would ’ ve been vaporized !
” The three men fell into silence again .
For a while , Kelly listened to his iPod .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and some odd number of seconds I started to grimace , ” Kelly wrote .
“ Thirty seconds go by .
A minute.
” At 12:01 , nothing happened .
Padalka got on the radio .
“ Moscow , ” he said .
“ Do you read ?
” “ Loud and clear .
How are things ?
” “ We ’ re getting into 12:02 , ” Padalka said .
“ Everything is very quiet up here.
” After nearly three tense minutes of radio silence , Padalka called in again : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” The radio crackled .
“ That ’ s all , ” it finally said .
Object No .
36912 had blown past the station .
Later , the Air Force put its distance at less than a mile and a half—a gap it could have closed faster than the blink of an eye .
Three weeks later , it incinerated in the atmosphere .

For decades, the International Space Station has been hovering over Earth, in an orbit somewhere between two hundred and three hundred miles above sea level. Its massive rectilinear structure, resembling an Eisenhower-era TV antenna, contains hundreds of thousands of solar cells and a series of pressurized modules that can support life and equipment, all of it weighing close to a million pounds. Since 2000, people have been living on the station, in an area comparable to a six-bedroom house: humanity’s most expensive real estate. The station is also the fastest structure a person can live in. It orbits the planet at more than seventeen thousand miles an hour, many times faster than the Earth’s rotation. A day on the station, from sunrise to sunrise, lasts just ninety minutes.
In the early hours of July 16, 2015, members of the U.S. Air Force noticed an alarming development involving the I.S.S. Since the Cold War, the military has maintained an extensive space-surveillance network. Every minute, tracking stations across the globe relay a cascade of data to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, in a bunker carved deep beneath two thousand feet of granite in Colorado. Some of the information is set aside for NORAD and other national-security organizations. Other portions are forwarded to the 18th Space Control Squadron, in California, which works to prevent collisions in the sky.
Sometime before three that morning, the surveillance network glimpsed a hunk of debris hurtling toward the I.S.S. A well-known piece of space trash, it had been labelled Object No. 36912 in an extensive inventory of orbital artifacts known as the NORAD catalogue. It had broken off of a Soviet military weather satellite, which was launched in 1979 from a Cold War facility near the Arctic Circle. The cylindrical satellite—resembling an old-fashioned boiler—was designed to work for less than two years. In the ensuing decades, it had been shedding fragments. That April, another piece of it had threatened the space station.
Object No. 36912 was likely a torn-off piece of thermal shielding; it appeared to be relatively light, and no bigger than a large dinner plate. For years, it had circled safely above the I.S.S. But its mass and shape made it highly sensitive to atmospheric drag—its orbit shifting dramatically as the atmosphere expanded and contracted in response to solar activity. Several weeks earlier, the atmosphere had ballooned, causing Object No. 36912’s orbit to suddenly decay.
As the debris spiralled downward, gathering speed, the Air Force was keeping a close watch, but small things in space can easily evade detection. The object was visible to just two radar stations, in Alaska and in Florida—and then it went entirely dark for more than a week. On July 16th, when it reappeared, Air Force analysts quickly updated their predictions: the object would make a close pass of the space station at 5:29 A.M. (Mission Control time, in Houston). It would clear the spacecraft by about fourteen miles, but penetrate a safety zone around the I.S.S. called “the box.” Then it would loop around the globe, falling farther, and come within striking distance—risking impact, or a “conjunction.” If the chance that something in the box will collide with the I.S.S. is greater than one in ten thousand, the condition is “red.” With Object No. 36912, the probability was more than one in a thousand.
At 2:44 A.M. , the Space Control Squadron notified Jim Cooney, the I.S.S.’s trajectory-operations officer. Cooney, a NASA veteran, was asleep at home, but an app on his phone triggers a high-volume alarm for such alerts. “Your brain gets engaged really fast,” he told me. He had become accustomed to late-night calls. Only a month earlier, NASA had adjusted the spacecraft’s trajectory to dodge a fragment of a Minotaur rocket: a former intercontinental ballistic missile repurposed to ferry cargo into space.
These maneuvers have been performed more than two dozen times, and can be executed without much trouble if Houston has five and a half hours’ notice. But, when Cooney called the Air Force, he learned that Object No. 36912 would make its closest approach in about four hours. “I had them repeat the information to make sure I was doing the math right,” he recalled. Never before had the I.S.S. faced such a high probability of collision on such short notice. Moving the station was out of the question.
Instantly, he relayed the news to Houston’s flight director, Ed Van Cise, and then rushed to Mission Control, where he joined a tense meeting to discuss the options. There was only one: instruct the crew to lock down the station—closing hatches between modules—and then shelter in the Soyuz capsule, a Russian vessel that can serve as a lifeboat. There were three people aboard the I.S.S.: one American, Scott Kelly, and two Russians, Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko. In the Soyuz, they could detach from the failing structure and return to Earth. In the station’s history, its crew had sheltered in the Soyuz only three other times.
Van Cise reached out to Kelly, who was exercising on a treadmill mounted on one of the station’s walls. “Houston on Space to Ground Two,” a voice barked, announcing the call. “We are privatizing.” This meant that the feed from Mission Control, which usually could be accessed freely by the ground crew, would be nonpublic. Kelly later wrote in an expedition log that his first thought was, “Oh, fuck.” In space, unscheduled private conversations portend bad news: in 2011, on an earlier mission, Houston had privatized the channel to inform him that his sister-in-law, the Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, had been shot.
Hearing that the call was for NASA business, he was at first relieved. Then the enormity of the situation sank in. Fuck, he thought again. The privatized call was a courtesy, so that Kelly would be prepared once the alert was relayed publicly. The space station operates on Greenwich Mean Time; for the crew, the moment that Object No. 36912 either slammed into the structure or zoomed past it would be 12:01. Mission Control instructed Kelly to start closing hatches at 10:30 A.M. , then retreat with the Russians to the Soyuz at 11:51, and stay there until notified. Kelly cut short his workout.
At ten o’clock, Mission Control contacted Kelly again, to remind him that he and Kornienko had an interview scheduled with morning news programs in Florida and Kentucky. NASA reasoned that there was time to proceed: the interview would take less than twenty minutes, and lockdown was in half an hour. “Seriously?” Kelly wrote in his log. “We have a satellite coming at us.” But he and Kornienko got into their positions without protest. “We are ready for the event,” Kelly said, dryly, and glanced at his watch. Then he answered questions about the Kentucky Derby, performed zero-gravity stunts, and tried not to show that he was in a life-threatening situation.
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As soon as the transmissions ended, Kelly began locking down hatches throughout the American modules. Calmly, he floated through the structure—the lab, the cupola, an air lock—with a flashlight in his mouth, to augment the station’s dim lighting. He had asked Houston if the debris hurtling toward the space station would be visible; as he closed the hatches, he got a response. “It will be in orbital night,” Houston told him. “So, no viewing opportunity.”
“How about relative velocity?” Kelly asked.
“Fourteen kilometres per second.”
“Copy,” Kelly said, plainly, but the number was terrifying: the debris and the station were closing in on each other at a combined speed of thirty-one thousand miles an hour. In orbit, a one-centimetre bolt can have the explosive force of a hand grenade upon impact. Object No. 36912 was at least ten times larger. When the space station’s shielding was being designed, a NASA astrophysicist named Donald Kessler had asked experts to shoot small objects at metal film cannisters at hypervelocities. The ballistics revealed that, even if debris penetrated the I.S.S. cleanly, it could leave a mangled hole upon exit. Object No. 36912 risked triggering a chain of failures that could destroy the entire structure.
Kelly focussed on procedure. Houston had told him to pick up a scientific instrument and a medical kit. He got those, and also some personal items, thinking of an American astronaut, Mike Foale, who had served on the Mir space station, in 1997. Foale had been living in a module called Spektr when a supply ship came in too quickly—like a shark, a cosmonaut onboard recalled, “this black body covered in spots sliding past”—and then smashed into it. To contain the breach, Spektr was sealed, forever separating Foale from his things, including gold pendants he intended to give his wife and children. “You always think about what happened to him when you’re closing a hatch with important stuff on the other side,” Kelly told me.
After locking down the American modules, Kelly caught up with Kornienko and Padalka in the Russian section. Padalka, the commander of the I.S.S., strove to project confidence; when Moscow Mission Control had asked him about the mood onboard, he responded, “Fighting spirit!” Kelly noticed that none of the hatches on the five Russian modules were shut. (Padalka and Kornienko say that they remember this differently.) “The Russians don’t close their hatches like we do,” Kelly wrote in his log. “They think it’s a waste of time—basically thinking the two most likely scenarios are the thing misses, or catastrophic destruction. The stuff in-between is way too unlikely to care about.”
Kelly was amazed to find the cosmonauts having lunch. “We wanted to eat!” Kornienko told me. “Russians have a proverb, ‘War is war, but lunch runs on time.’ ” The Soyuz’s food supply was limited to three days, and who knew how long they might be stranded there? There were fourteen minutes to spare, so Kelly joined them for a can of Appetizing Appetizer—a dish that, he later recalled, resembled cat food, “in appearance, consistency, and probably a little bit in taste.”
In Houston, the crew at Mission Control waited tensely. A wall-size screen contained a depiction of the space station’s orbit and a live feed of its interior. Ed Van Cise fidgeted with a computer mouse. One NASA official stared at a monitor with a hand over his mouth. Another sat with an emergency manual open; he told me, “We know what to do, but we don’t know what the outcome is going to be. This could be terrible, this could be a loss of life.”
At 11:51, the three men in the space station climbed into the Soyuz capsule, a cramped vessel that looked like a pinched cylinder atop the station. It was packed with switches and knobs. “It’s dark outside, so it’s darker than normal inside,” Kelly wrote in his log. “It’s cold.” He was wearing a black NASA sweatshirt, and he had pulled the hood down nearly over his eyes.
The men were instructed to leave the Soyuz hatch sealed, but unlatched—in case the debris hit the capsule rather than the I.S.S. and they needed to rush back in. Kornienko focussed on the latch, imagining the steps he would take in a crisis. “There were no words—silence,” he told me. Kelly, too, was struck by the sudden quiet, as each man retreated into his thoughts. He wrote in his log, “I can only hear the sounds of the fans inside the Soyuz, my breathing.”
With the tension growing, Padalka said, “You know, it will really suck if we get hit.”
“Da,” Kornienko said. “Will suck.”
A monitor indicated the time, and the men watched the minutes elapse, bracing for 12:01. Kelly noticed Kornienko gazing out a porthole. “Finally, I said, ‘Misha, you’re not going to see anything,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘That thing is going thirty thousand miles an hour, and it’s dark outside!’ Then I noticed that I was looking out the window, and listening, and tensing out, and then at some point you realize, We wouldn’t even fucking know if we got hit. We just would’ve been vaporized! ”
The three men fell into silence again. For a while, Kelly listened to his iPod. “As the time approached twelve noon and some odd number of seconds I started to grimace,” Kelly wrote. “Thirty seconds go by. A minute.” At 12:01, nothing happened. Padalka got on the radio. “Moscow,” he said. “Do you read?”
“Loud and clear. How are things?”
“We’re getting into 12:02,” Padalka said. “Everything is very quiet up here.” After nearly three tense minutes of radio silence, Padalka called in again: “Moscow, do we keep waiting?”
The radio crackled. “That’s all,” it finally said. Object No. 36912 had blown past the station. Later, the Air Force put its distance at less than a mile and a half—a gap it could have closed faster than the blink of an eye. Three weeks later, it incinerated in the atmosphere.


The Mail

I could not agree more with Rebecca Mead ’ s lovely article about the therapeutic benefits of having one ’ s hands in the soil ( “ Nature and Nurture , ” August 24th ) .
Her words brought back memories from fifteen years ago , when I was taking part in a development project in an aspiring eco-village in South Africa .
The facilities were rented every few weeks to a Buddhist group that brought victims of the violence in Zimbabwe to the village for workshops and meditation sessions .
On their afternoon breaks , these adults , many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of livelihood , hunger , and torture , came to life as they helped clear new garden beds .
As Mead notes , “ Gardening can be especially helpful for people suffering from P.T.S.D.
, ” and that seemed to be the case for these refugees .
I will never forget seeing them wielding their hoes and pickaxes , singing and laughing , as if they had suddenly been brought back home .
I first heard the achingly beautiful song “ Silang Mabele , ” by Vusi Mahlasela , during that time .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ lyrics fully , I believed it was a love song .
Years later , I learned that it was a call to end poverty—a love song of a different sort .
I ’ m grateful to Mead for the reminder of how close to us a source of healing can be .
As a psychoanalyst immersed in gardening , I found Mead ’ s piece to be enchanting and thought-provoking .
I liked her mention of Donald Winnicott ’ s theory of “ transitional ” spaces , and also Sue Stuart-Smith ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Winnicottian ‘ in-between.
’ ” My own garden exemplifies the spatial concept of a transition from enclosure to freedom , proceeding from a cottage garden hugging the house to a woodland garden near the perimeter of the property , where I like to preserve the illusion of wild space beyond .
During the past forty-plus years , I have observed an unfortunate turn toward gardening as decorating : modern interior spaces , increasingly sterile and stripped of personality , seem to be transplanted outside , with an emphasis on fostering order , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might otherwise emerge .
Similarly , psychoanalysis seeks to cultivate curiosity about the symptoms that a patient is experiencing , as opposed to pulling out symptomatic “ weeds ” by means of an imposed behavioral regime .
I consider my garden and my professional career to be spaces of spontaneous emergence ; I have learned to resist my urge to control my surroundings , and instead strive to maintain an attitude of tolerance , patience , and , above all , wonder and appreciation .
I belong to a group of retirees meeting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ discuss articles from the previous week ’ s New Yorker .
We have valued the many pieces on health-care providers throughout this pandemic , but we especially appreciated Jennifer Gonnerman ’ s profile of Terence A. Layne , a New York City bus driver ( “ Survival Story , ” August 31st ) .
Gonnerman reveals Layne ’ s complexity and also his nobility , telling us about his musician father , his time spent with the Nation of Islam , his stints in prison , the compassion he shows to his passengers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poetry .
The respect with which she treats her subject made this piece an appropriate topic for our Labor Day discussion : it shines a light on the trials and triumphs of the ordinary working people whom many of us often take for granted , in spite of the necessary , even heroic , roles they play in our daily lives .
Letters should be sent with the writer ’ s name , address , and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail @ newyorker.com .
Letters may be edited for length and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any medium .
We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we can not reply to every letter .

Harvesting Hope
I could not agree more with Rebecca Mead’s lovely article about the therapeutic benefits of having one’s hands in the soil (“Nature and Nurture,” August 24th). Her words brought back memories from fifteen years ago, when I was taking part in a development project in an aspiring eco-village in South Africa. The facilities were rented every few weeks to a Buddhist group that brought victims of the violence in Zimbabwe to the village for workshops and meditation sessions. On their afternoon breaks, these adults, many of whom had suffered rape, loss of livelihood, hunger, and torture, came to life as they helped clear new garden beds. As Mead notes, “Gardening can be especially helpful for people suffering from P.T.S.D.,” and that seemed to be the case for these refugees. I will never forget seeing them wielding their hoes and pickaxes, singing and laughing, as if they had suddenly been brought back home. I first heard the achingly beautiful song “Silang Mabele,” by Vusi Mahlasela, during that time. Not knowing enough Setswana to understand the lyrics fully, I believed it was a love song. Years later, I learned that it was a call to end poverty—a love song of a different sort. I’m grateful to Mead for the reminder of how close to us a source of healing can be.
Erika Nelson
Oxford, Ohio
As a psychoanalyst immersed in gardening, I found Mead’s piece to be enchanting and thought-provoking. I liked her mention of Donald Winnicott’s theory of “transitional” spaces, and also Sue Stuart-Smith’s suggestion that a garden can be “a Winnicottian ‘in-between.’ ” My own garden exemplifies the spatial concept of a transition from enclosure to freedom, proceeding from a cottage garden hugging the house to a woodland garden near the perimeter of the property, where I like to preserve the illusion of wild space beyond. During the past forty-plus years, I have observed an unfortunate turn toward gardening as decorating: modern interior spaces, increasingly sterile and stripped of personality, seem to be transplanted outside, with an emphasis on fostering order, rather than on the playful randomness that might otherwise emerge. Similarly, psychoanalysis seeks to cultivate curiosity about the symptoms that a patient is experiencing, as opposed to pulling out symptomatic “weeds” by means of an imposed behavioral regime. I consider my garden and my professional career to be spaces of spontaneous emergence; I have learned to resist my urge to control my surroundings, and instead strive to maintain an attitude of tolerance, patience, and, above all, wonder and appreciation.
Elaine P. Zickler
Moorestown, N.J.
Ode to a Hero
I belong to a group of retirees meeting weekly (now via Zoom) to discuss articles from the previous week’s New Yorker. We have valued the many pieces on health-care providers throughout this pandemic, but we especially appreciated Jennifer Gonnerman’s profile of Terence A. Layne, a New York City bus driver (“Survival Story,” August 31st). Gonnerman reveals Layne’s complexity and also his nobility, telling us about his musician father, his time spent with the Nation of Islam, his stints in prison, the compassion he shows to his passengers and his co-workers, and his humane poetry. The respect with which she treats her subject made this piece an appropriate topic for our Labor Day discussion: it shines a light on the trials and triumphs of the ordinary working people whom many of us often take for granted, in spite of the necessary, even heroic, roles they play in our daily lives.
Miriam Burt
Green Valley, Ariz.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.


newyorker--2020-09-21--Pascal Campion’s “Open Offices”

Pascal Campion’s “Open Offices”

Six months after the coronavirus pandemic descended on New York , many of the city ’ s office buildings still sit empty .
The open office plan that dominates in many corporate settings is antithetical to social distancing—even with new designs , such as plexiglass cages , the office as a place to work and mingle is in peril .
We talked to Pascal Campion , the artist behind The New Yorker ’ s Tech Issue cover , about his experience working in an office and the view outside his window .
How much experience have you had working in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of my career , when I worked as an animator , I worked at a few different companies that had open floor plans .
It was strange to me at first but I eventually got used to it .
You portray a classic office trope : congregating at the water cooler .
What other meeting places do you see as part of office culture ?
The kitchen—I always find it a congenial place to hang out .
People leave cookies and cakes that they don ’ t want to eat at home .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ making tea or coffee that I wouldn ’ t otherwise see or talk to .
In your work as an art director , what are the occasions when you ’ d much prefer to get together with your colleagues in person ?
Mostly to talk about art and things in general .
I feel most of the actual work that I need to do *can and does get done over e-mail , Zoom calls , and such .
But just being able to stop by to chat and generate a conversation out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t have unscheduled hang-out time together .
You designed this image to highlight the view outside the windows .
How important do you think views are in modern offices ?
For me , it ’ s essential—I like to be able to escape , even if it ’ s just in my head .
A window , a view gives me this ability .
I ’ ve worked in offices with no windows to the outside , and I ’ ve found myself incapable of spending extended periods of time in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve had in the past fifteen years has had some kind of view , even if it was just one of my back yard .
Your covers are often based on memories of a trip to New York that you took years ago .
Where would you like to travel next , as soon as it ’ s safe ?
I can ’ t wait to go back to Paris and the South of France .
I miss it so much !
I want to go back to Paris—I have just started @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in France , I didn ’ t know Paris very well but I have been discovering it through trips with my family in the past few years .
And I want to go to the South of France because that ’ s where I grew up .
In these times of being at home all day , I miss the smells , the sounds , and the colors of Provence .
For more covers about people at work , see below :

Six months after the coronavirus pandemic descended on New York, many of the city’s office buildings still sit empty. The open office plan that dominates in many corporate settings is antithetical to social distancing—even with new designs, such as plexiglass cages, the office as a place to work and mingle is in peril. We talked to Pascal Campion, the artist behind The New Yorker’s Tech Issue cover, about his experience working in an office and the view outside his window.
How much experience have you had working in an open office?
At the beginning of my career, when I worked as an animator, I worked at a few different companies that had open floor plans. It was strange to me at first but I eventually got used to it.
You portray a classic office trope: congregating at the water cooler. What other meeting places do you see as part of office culture?
The kitchen—I always find it a congenial place to hang out. People leave cookies and cakes that they don’t want to eat at home. And I usually bump into people there making tea or coffee that I wouldn’t otherwise see or talk to.
In your work as an art director, what are the occasions when you’d much prefer to get together with your colleagues in person?
Mostly to talk about art and things in general. I feel most of the actual work that I need to do *can and does get done over e-mail, Zoom calls, and such. But just being able to stop by to chat and generate a conversation out of nothing is much harder now that we don’t have unscheduled hang-out time together.
You designed this image to highlight the view outside the windows. How important do you think views are in modern offices?
For me, it’s essential—I like to be able to escape, even if it’s just in my head. A window, a view gives me this ability. I’ve worked in offices with no windows to the outside, and I’ve found myself incapable of spending extended periods of time in these places. Every work space I’ve had in the past fifteen years has had some kind of view, even if it was just one of my back yard.
Your covers are often based on memories of a trip to New York that you took years ago. Where would you like to travel next, as soon as it’s safe?
I can’t wait to go back to Paris and the South of France. I miss it so much! I want to go back to Paris—I have just started discovering it. Although I grew up in France, I didn’t know Paris very well but I have been discovering it through trips with my family in the past few years. And I want to go to the South of France because that’s where I grew up. In these times of being at home all day, I miss the smells, the sounds, and the colors of Provence.
For more covers about people at work, see below:


newyorker--2020-09-21--Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln revisionism is not new .
In the nineteen-fifties , Edmund Wilson , in these pages , shook off the crooning hagiography of Carl Sandburg ’ s multivolume biography and replaced it with a vision of Lincoln as a calculating , aggressive nationalist—an American Bismarck , though one in possession of a sternly arresting prose style .
The Civil War , in Wilson ’ s account , was fought for no higher cause than that which makes sea slugs attack other sea slugs : because it is in the nature of beasts to make war .
In place of smiling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This view was taken up , with a few complimentary curlicues , in Gore Vidal ’ s best-selling 1984 novel , “ Lincoln.
” Wilson and Vidal , channelling the ghost of Henry Adams , and seeing themselves as the last redoubts of patrician hauteur , painted their Lincoln against the background of the Cold War .
Lincoln ’ s militarization of the Republic , his invention of an armed national-security state , was taken to be a kind of original sin that would lead to the Pentagon and Vietnam .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but Lincoln was interrogated as much as admired .
( And this was merely the revisionism from the left ; some Southern conservative intellectuals were still muttering “ Sic semper tyrannis.
” ) In the decades that followed , the tone of Lincoln biographies became remarkably more benign .
There were hymnals in praise of Lincoln ’ s wisdom in assembling a Cabinet of political opponents ( though all Presidents in the era assembled Cabinets of their rivals ) and others on the beauty of his language ( though Disraeli , in London @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his own way , and no one was deifying him ) .
Spielberg ’ s Lincoln gave us the beatified , not the Bismarckian , President , even if Daniel Day-Lewis brilliantly caught the high-pitched , less than honeyed tones that Lincoln ’ s contemporaries heard .
In more recent years , however , Lincoln has been under assault—not for being a militarist but for not being militant enough , for not being as thorough an egalitarian as some of the radical Republicans in Congress .
Newer Lincoln biographies have been needed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ David S. Reynolds ’ s Lincoln is very much an Honest Abe—the title of his book , in fact , is “ Abe : Abraham Lincoln in His Times ” ( Penguin Press ) —but he is an updated Abe , fully woke and finely radical .
Indeed , Reynolds , the author of first-rate biographies of Walt Whitman and John Brown , makes much of Lincoln ’ s wonderfully named and often forgotten Wide Awakes—legions of young pro-Lincoln “ b ’ hoys , ” whose resolve and aggression far exceeded that of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Reynolds rightly recycles the metaphor of the President as a tightrope walker , we ’ re assured that , even as the walker might list left and right , his rope stretched forth in a radically progressive direction , aligned with the hot temper of our moment .
Reynolds updates Lincoln by doing what scholars do now : he makes biography secondary to the cultural history of the country .
Lincoln is seen as a man whose skin bears the tattoos of his time .
Cultural patterns are explicated in “ Abe , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ positioned against them , taking on the coloring of his surroundings , rather like a taxidermied animal being placed in a reconstructed habitat in a nineteenth-century diorama at a natural-history museum .
Instead of rising from one episode of strenuous self-making to another , he passes from one frame to the next , a man subsumed .
So , where scholars have long known that Lincoln was plunged into a near-suicidal depression by the early death , in the eighteen-thirties , of his first love , Ann Rutledge , Reynolds connects Lincoln ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sensationalism ” that swept the country , one that placed great prestige on acts of melodramatic emotion .
In Reynolds ’ s account , Lincoln ’ s grief was , in part , a literary affect , or even an affectation , with Lincoln and Poe drinking from the same moody waters .
This mapping of subject onto trope continues on through the last night of Lincoln ’ s life .
John Wilkes Booth ’ s assassination of the President , Reynolds argues , was not only an act of terrorism on behalf @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Method-acting exercise gone significantly wrong .
Extreme self-identification of actor with role was highly valued then ; Junius , the patriarch of the theatrical Booth family , was famed for the hyperintensity of his portrayals , and John , among the three Booth children who became prominent actors , most fully adopted his father ’ s stormy style .
He was pleasing Junius ’ s ghost by enacting Brutus ’ s killing of Caesar , in real time with real weapons .
Reynolds ’ s cultural history illuminates Lincoln—and particularly his transformation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Even readers long marinated in the Lincoln literature will find revelation in the way “ Abe ” re-situates familiar episodes .
Reynolds places Lincoln ’ s early career in New Salem and Springfield , Illinois , in the eighteen-thirties , as a poor farm boy struggling to make himself into a middle-class lawyer , against the radical background of American sectarianism .
We learn that “ free thought ” and “ free love ” —one favoring religious skepticism and the other sex outside marriage—flourished on the frontier , where folks had to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debating club that forbade any appeal to God .
Lincoln participated in both movements , declaring himself a freethinker ( and apologizing for it in a fairly weaselly way later on , when he first ran for office ) and acting as an early advocate for women ’ s right to vote , and to make their own sexual choices .
The young Lincoln was an enthusiastic amateur poet , and his poems are a good guide to one side of his mind : the wild , passionate side , which , Reynolds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ youthful calls for “ cold , calculating unimpassioned reason.
” One poem defended women who ’ d become prostitutes : “ No woman ever played the whore / Without a man to help her.
” Reynolds ’ s cultural frames become more arresting as Lincoln ’ s role grows more public ; public people are always cultural objects .
Lincoln spent February 27 , 1860 , the day he delivered his Cooper Union speech—the speech that made him President , as he later said—at a hotel across from P. T. Barnum ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American life , and how the love of weird spectacle , what we now call the tabloidization of public people , was something Lincoln welcomed ; he played up the comedy of his own appearance in a very Barnum-like way , his enormous body posed against his wife ’ s petite one .
Barnum ’ s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans : General Tom Thumb was a hero , not a freak .
And so with Lincoln , as Reynolds writes : “ His cragged face , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and nose , and swarthy complexion ; his wide ears and unruly black hair ; his huge hands and feet and overly long arms and legs—these features , along with his ill-fitting clothes and awkward gait , made him seem almost as unusual as a Barnum exhibit.
” When Lincoln was President , his Secretary of War , Edwin Stanton , compared him to a baboon , and Lincoln , asked how he could endure the insult , said , “ That is no insult ; it is an expression of opinion ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is that Stanton said it , and Stanton is usually right.
” He saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of American sensation .
( He even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife . )

Lincoln exploited photography to a similar end, beginning on that same February day, when his portrait was taken at Mathew Brady’s studio. Lincoln was usually pictured not as a polished neoclassical man, like his political rivals, but as rough and frontier-made. Americans like a craggy guy in times of crisis. (Humphrey Bogart offered a similar look in the Second World War.) Even his decision to grow a beard seemed meant to evoke a log-cabin hygiene that was then seen as a sign of sincerity. Lincoln knew how to use the expressive forms of his time as a frame for his mythology. Emerson and Whitman, Reynolds demonstrates, understood Lincoln better, as a national figure, than most journalists could. Emerson saw in him the model self-reliant man and Whitman the ideal democratic leader.
As the war begins, Reynolds’s lens widens in ways that are less appealingly whimsical than in the Barnum case but still more genuinely illuminating. He explains the old puzzle of Lincoln’s reluctance to fire the obstreperous and slow-moving General McClellan as a reflection of Lincoln’s enthusiasm for the new technology of war. Lincoln, a backwoods man forever forward-facing, loved state-of-the-art gizmos, even urging an early machine gun upon the Union Army that it wasn’t willing to use. McClellan shared Lincoln’s vision of an army modernized with telegraph communications, military balloons, and railroad transportation. The choice in 1862 was not yet between McClellan and Grant; it was between McClellan and chaos. The culture of war itself becomes a subject in Reynolds’s book: it explains the eventual turn from McClellan to Grant through a broader mid-nineteenth-century turn from elegant Napoleonic battle orchestrations to Clausewitzian frontal assaults.
Sometimes Reynolds’s kind of cultural history demands more suppleness of mind than he displays. When, for instance, he proposes a parallel between Mary Lincoln locked up in the White House and Emily Dickinson isolated in her home, in Amherst, we feel that we are in the presence of a similitude without a real shape: Emily was a Yankee poet of matchless genius, Mary a bewildered Southern woman in an unmanageable role. All they shared was being alone in a big house. Elsewhere, Reynolds expresses perplexity that the pro-Lincoln satirist David Locke persisted in writing sketches in the voice of Petroleum V. Nasby, his impersonation of a Copperhead—an anti-Lincoln, pro-slavery Northerner. “Given Locke’s actual affection and respect for Lincoln, it must have been very hard for him to maintain the outrageous Copperhead pose,” Reynolds writes. But that’s like wondering why a pro-Biden comedian would keep on impersonating a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter. Sticking to the joke is what comedians do.
Even with Reynolds’s more compelling examples of anthropological patterns, small whitecaps of uncertainty may stir in the reader’s mind: a man who loses the love of his life does not need cultural license to mourn, and, though Booth undoubtedly choreographed his assassination with an eye to the crowd and to his father, his brothers Junius and Edwin were committed to the manner but appalled by his deed. Actors know overacting when they see it.
Throughout “Abe,” the terms “culture” and “cultural” recur with such hammering relentlessness (four times on a single page, and in that chapter title as well) that one wishes Reynolds’s editor had given him a thesaurus. Not having enough words means not seeing enough types. Culture is a diffuse thing. Reading a book, choosing a costume, adapting a rhetorical style, transferring a code of conduct from one forum to another, just laughing at a joke—each of these forms of cultural transmission has its own vibration, its own dynamic, and its own web of associations.
What counts is a sense of what counts. It’s true that, as Reynolds shows in his account of sensationalism, Lincoln loved sad parlor songs, but pretty much everyone in the period loved sad songs; to make much of this is like making the possession of an e-mail address a significant cultural token today. On the other hand, although the Shakespeare whom Lincoln loved was very much the Shakespeare beloved by nineteenth-century America—a strenuous moralist, devoted to the explication of characters in extreme emotional states—Lincoln was distinctive in turning this shared Shakespeare into a template for a new kind of oratory. The passionate phrasing and sharp summations of Lincoln’s speeches—“the better angels of our nature”; “of the people, by the people, for the people”—are shaped by the passionate soliloquies and monosyllabic end stops of Shakespeare’s most agonized characters. (Among Lincoln’s favorite passages was Claudius’s guilt-ridden “Oh, my offense is rank” speech.) The interpenetration of Abe and Will is real. It is important to recognize cultural set pieces, but it’s also important to see that they are malleable and self-created. Lincoln made his time as much as he lived in it. That, after all, is why we’re reading this book.
Macro-history gives us a big picture, but politics, as “Hamilton” reminds us, happens in hidden rooms. Readers who seek the political micro-history can turn to Sidney Blumenthal’s multivolume Lincoln biography, now in its third installment—“All the Powers of the Earth” (Simon & Schuster)—with two more promised. Written by someone who bears the battle scars of modern democratic politics, the volumes are all about Lincoln as a battle-scarred democratic politician. (Blumenthal, who was once a staff writer for this magazine, worked as an adviser to President Clinton and distinguished himself in the Ken Starr wars.) Where Reynolds’s account of the most significant act in American political history—Lincoln’s insurgent victory over William Seward, a senator from New York, in the Republican-nomination battle of 1860—is necessarily summary, Blumenthal offers a vividly realized, slow crawl across the Convention floor by someone who has been there.
The heroes of Blumenthal’s most recent volume are the so-called Lincoln Men, a group of boosters and advisers led by David Davis and Leonard Swett, who, with a comic brio right out of Mark Twain, employed every hardball trick in the book to win Lincoln the nomination. At the Wigwam, in Chicago—an immense wooden convention hall, capable of holding more than ten thousand people, and thrown together, American style, in a month—they boxed out the Seward forces, making it physically difficult for his delegates to mingle and make deals.
The Lincolnians also courted a now often overlooked interest group, the émigré Germans, including many exiled by the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. As Blumenthal notes, Lincoln had bought a German-language newspaper, in order to appeal to those key players of the “identity politics” of the time. (It was the equivalent of surreptitiously funding Facebook pages in 2020.) The Germans refused to support anyone who was known to have a pro-nativist taint, which ruled out a lot of dog-eared veteran politicians. At the same time, the nativists spurned Seward, who, as governor of New York, had backed state subsidies for Catholic education. In the end, it all came down to a single eve-of-battle meeting in Chicago between the Lincoln Men and a group of delegates from Pennsylvania, who proposed a flat-out political swap: they’d support Lincoln in exchange for a Cabinet post going to Simon Cameron, a corrupt Pennsylvania senator. David Davis agreed. Lincoln had officially warned him off such dealmaking, but, as he memorably said, “Lincoln ain’t here.” (Lincoln gave Cameron the War Office, not the Department of Treasury he wanted; Davis, for his efforts, got a seat on the Supreme Court.)
Cartoon by Roz Chast Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
As with Kennedy in 1960 and the Obama campaign in 2008, a macro-moment met micromanagement. The background in each case was the elevation of a novice with a gift for speaking, an extraordinary personal story, and a political record too short to have incurred too many grudges. The foreground was sharp dealing. Blumenthal’s kind of intricate political history—providing all the details of how the sprockets and gears engage—feeds, in turn, the larger cultural perspective. It’s hard to grasp, today, the extent to which those émigré Germans were perceived as the soul of the educated élite. (In Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” series, it is the idealized German—and perhaps Jewish—Professor Bhaer, with his heavy accent and love of Goethe, who rescues Jo from conventionality and joins her in building a progressive school.) It may be an obvious truth, but it is still a truth worth telling: history needs both micro-political and macro-cultural perspectives. The room where it happened is part of a world where it could.
Reynolds’s macro-history and Blumenthal’s micro-history coincide in their vindication of Lincoln as a profound radical. Lincoln was a single-issue candidate and a single-cause politician; that issue was slavery and the cause was its abolition. But he was a politician, not a polemicist: he created a broad coalition and placated its parts. He was a pluralist rather than a purist.
His central understanding, registered in his home base of Springfield—where, Reynolds shows, there was a lot more African-American political activism than has often been imagined—was that racist Northerners who could not be driven to equality could still be coaxed toward humanity. Abolition annealed to a broader “Americanism”—an understanding of equality as rooted in the sacred documents of the country—might produce emancipation. This was an insight that Lincoln, with Machiavellian shrewdness, drove to an armed point. Lincoln was not a centrist politician who happened to find himself on top of an erupting volcano in 1861; his election caused the eruption. As Blumenthal shows, Lincoln, in his 1858 debates with the racist senator Stephen Douglas, tactically conceded points about segregation: “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.” But he was emphatic on the central point, that “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.”
In a speech in Peoria, Lincoln declared, about the indifference toward slavery he saw in Congress, “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world . . . and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.” Reynolds, quoting this passage, remarks that “Lincoln’s loathing of slavery comes through as strongly here as it does in any work by the most radical abolitionist.” What separated Lincoln from most other abolitionists was the absence of rhetoric that was intended to frighten as much as teach—what Reynolds calls “dark reform” rhetoric—or that catalogued, graphically but accurately, the physical horrors inflicted by slave masters.
This wasn’t because Lincoln did not know of these horrors. It was because he understood that moving the masses of the North to abolition could be done only by appealing to fundamental principles—reminding them that their own values were being violated, not merely another group’s interests. Reynolds writes that Lincoln, aware of the risks of the kind of nihilistic bloodletting that John Brown would produce, directed “this potentially anarchistic cultural current into two documents treasured by most Americans: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” By linking the fight against slavery to the extension of these documents, rather than to their repudiation, he could build a truly broad antislavery coalition—and an army brutal enough to enforce its mission. Every act of his Presidency, from the gathering of the militias to the speech at Gettysburg, moved toward this end.
It worked, at a price. For Lincoln, the critical issue was the abolition of slavery; racism and its constraints were, for the moment, secondary. Reynolds addresses Lincoln’s supposed racism in considering colonization programs for freed slaves, noting that Martin Delany, the most radical Black activist of the time, had also championed relocating Black people away from the degradations they faced here. It was a back-to-Africa sentiment, a kind of Black Zionism, that both Lincoln and Delany contemplated. Similarly, Lincoln’s notorious letter to the New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley, saying that if he could save the Union without freeing any slaves he would do so, is situated as part of an ongoing joust between Lincoln and Greeley—and, Reynolds says, as a way for Lincoln to garb “his radical antislavery position in the dress of military necessity.”


newyorker--2020-09-21--“Face Time,” by Lorrie Moore

“Face Time,” by Lorrie Moore

I asked my father if he knew where he was and he said , “ Kind of.
” “ You are in the hospital .
Your hip surgery went well .
But there is a virus and you have been found to have it .
You are contagious .
No one can get near .
It ’ s happening all over the world .
You caught it in your assisted-living facility .
The chef had it.
” His blue eyes had a light that appeared to race from the back of his brain to the front .
The brightness of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sudden power , into the screen , then straight through and past me .
“ The Berrywood chef ?
” Now his eyes dulled again .
“ The food was not that good .
I did have a glass of lemonade once that was delicious .
Like in the war .
Cold lemonade in a jam jar.
” He licked his lips .
There was crust in the corner of his mouth , and he picked at it with one of his long , now thin pianist ’ s fingers .
The oxygen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Is there something you need now ?
After we finish FaceTiming , I can phone the nurses ’ desk.
” “ I ’ d like some of that lemonade.
” “ I ’ ll ask them about that.
” Why should this patient be so thirsty ?
Give him a lemonade , for Christ ’ s sake .
Give him the lemonade of his memory and his dreams .
“ We are drying the lungs , ” a doctor had said last week .
“ We don ’ t want him to aspirate.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ quality-of-life issue ?
” I did not say .
Doctors all around the country seemed confused about whether hydration or dehydration was better .
I feared that dehydration meant they were sending him off the exit ramp .
A dry death .
A dry death is better , someone had once told me .
“ But how does anyone know ?
” I had protested .
“ There is no death rattle .
You don ’ t hear the death rattle.
” “ So you mean it ’ s better for us , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Who knew what the dying felt at the end ?
They didn ’ t return calls .
“ That would be very kind of you to ask , ” my father said , delicately trying to moisten his lips with his gray tongue .
He attempted to smile but his whole dry mouth seemed unsplittable and in need of sponging .
His bottom teeth were as dark as teak and twisted in his mouth .
“ When the nurse comes back in , I ’ ll tell her.
” “ Did I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ I feel like I did something wrong.
” “ No .
Not a thing .
The nurse set up the iPad for you but then had to leave .
She ’ ll be back later.
” Three times daily , visored , hazmatted nurses dressed like beekeepers popped in and out of the room , their faces indiscernible , their voices the high , chipper kind that children and the elderly are supposed to prefer .
Birdlike , perhaps .
Good to have the song of a bird .
Even if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rush to get out of there .
Even if they were terrified of their tasks .
“ Are you in any pain ?
” I asked .
“ Oh , not really , ” he said defeatedly .
An exhilarating exchange of ideas was not possible on screens or in this weird dystopia .
Still , I decided to make the situation as interesting as possible .
“ The British Prime Minister has this virus , ” I said .
“ So does Prince Charles .
Also Tom Hanks.
” His face perked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ So I ’ m in good company.
” “ Yes , you are .
And the poor are getting the virus , too , of course.
” “ I ’ m the poor !
” he said .
“ Especially after next month ’ s Berrywood bill.
” Later , I would accuse my quite comfortable friends of appropriating the illness from the disadvantaged , of co-opting a fear of the illness that targeted prisoners , front-line workers , meatpackers , and , of course , the elderly .
“ It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s sight came rushing into his eyes again and brightened up the screen .
“ I just hope I don ’ t have to arm wrestle the meek and the peacemakers for a seat in Heaven .
That would be awkward.
” I gave him a smile , as if everything were all good , then started in with some more about the virus .
I would try to make a bad situation diverting .
He would be interested .
“ It is all over the globe , ” I told him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , except perhaps Finland .
The Finns are a nation of doomsday preppers , so they were completely ready .
They ’ ve been stockpiling for years , out of fear of Russia , so they ’ re in pretty good shape .
Also , South Korea did well .
They are wary of North Korea , so are somewhat disaster-ready .
Same as Taiwan , which fears the mainland.
” I could see him considering this .
“ I guess we just weren ’ t that afraid of Canada , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little jump .
Jokes !
The very wattage of life .
Performance had always been how he conversed , summoning it up from the depths .
Rehearsing the recitation .
Looking for the opening .
There it still was , beneath the bullshit malaria drugs .
“ I guess we weren ’ t !
Even though Trudeau ’ s wife came down with this.
” “ Justin Trudeau .
Yup.
” I could see his focus change and his chest rise with sad and effortful breathing .
“ I am supposed to go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I get there before the pastor I won ’ t have the key.
” I knew the hydroxychloroquine gave people hallucinations .
Still , all the doctors seemed to be using it .
It had the endorsement of Washington , which had invented the undrained drained swamp , and of France , which had invented pasteurization and had been dining out on that ever since , while still serving small , moldy raw-milk cheeses .
“ It will be O.K .
They are giving you medicine.
” The last time he ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during the war , when he actually had malaria .
“ She was pregnant with my older brother and they told her to lie there and not to cough or her lungs would burst.
” I wondered if lungs could really burst .
I had heard this story from my dad on several occasions in my childhood and wondered about its veracity every time , though never out loud .
Now to watch him sending these utterances into the light of the screen was like seeing an old man burn all his poetry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all interesting people , my family , my sister and brother and parents , ” he said , seemingly forgetting about his own three children : Livvy , the eldest , me , in the middle , and Delia , the baby , who had opted out of these scheduled conversations .
“ No-necrophilia Delia , ” she ’ d called herself .
She adored our father but could not participate .
Oddly , it seemed that his daughters , at present , were not as interesting as his childhood family .
Or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ His mind seemed a little rinsed of all of us , even of our mother , who had died eighteen months before , so abruptly that her vividness for me had not been interrupted .
There were still things I made mental notes to tell her .
She would want to know how Dad was doing .
“ Now , you were born on Staten Island , isn ’ t that right ?
” my father said .
I was slightly startled .
“ No , that was Mom.
” I knew I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leaned back against the pillow , and then he pulled it up to look again into the iPad that the nurse had set there on a kind of tray .
He had grown thinner , and silvery stubble covered his chin .
He was trying to be courteous .
He did not ask after me , for which I was grateful .
Who wanted to share the banalities of this life right now : the low buzz of dread in the head like a broken wire ; the endless YouTube links ; everyone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ male friends doing their insane air-guitar concerts on Zoom ; the hours of television news interspersed with highly theatrical , mind-boggling insurance ads ; the early-morning senior mixer at the supermarket ; the neighborhood walks with face masks hanging from one ear like dream catchers .
Women created e-mail threads of their readings of the Bible .
It was all ghastly , especially the singing “ Happy Birthday ” twice as you washed your hands , because it might never actually be your birthday again so have at it .
Well-to-do white families @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bubbles—bubbles that intersected other bubbles so were not bubbles at all—disinfecting grocery bags and ordering from Amazon and Grubhub , and in general claiming the pandemic for themselves .
The shuttered theatres and museums made the gloom of cities everywhere a harrowing one .
Photos of empty boulevards and squares flooded the Internet .
Pierced ears filled back in , because who wore earrings anymore ?
Your badly painted toenails you could say were done by a neighbor girl , home from school , on her deck—a neighbor girl who was actually you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hand sanitizer .
Wisconsin milk had been turned into soap .

“I was hoping for Brahms,” he said.
“We’ll see if we can get some Brahms.”
“You know, Beethoven had one great symphony, the ‘Eroica.’ And then there’s Mozart’s C-Minor. But then Brahms comes in third—he had four symphonies of equal quality.”
“That’s so interesting,” I said. Whenever we spoke of music, he ignored my preference for Tchaikovsky or Duke Ellington. He would sometimes allow for Harold Arlen.
“Only four symphonies, but they were all topnotch.”
I didn’t always know what to say. “Well, I’m going to call the nurses’ station and see if we can get some Brahms for you.”
“Any of the symphonies,” he added.
An aide suddenly appeared on the screen in her beekeeper’s garb. “We are here for his oxygen levels and to change his dressings,” she said.
“O.K. Well, Dad? I’ll leave you to these proceedings. But I’ll hope to reach you later tonight. Livvy’s going to call at some point today. Love you.”
“O.K., honey, good to talk to you,” he said, sounding suddenly as he always had. He would never have said “Love you” back. He had fought in the Philippines. The greatest generation did not do the fey, fake “Love you, too.” The greatest generation did not wear lip balm brought by the aide or don compression stockings—too feminine—and hearing aids were a lot like jewelry, and thus a problem, and were sometimes found lost amid the tangled sheets. The greatest generation had taken a lot of orders early in life and did not want to take any more. The aide peeked into the screen and waved with her gloved hand. “Bye-bye,” she said.
“Thank you. Is it possible to play some Brahms?” I asked her quickly.
“This isn’t Brahms?”
“No.”
“Brahms? How do you spell it?” She seemed to be typing it into the iPad.
I told her, hoping I’d put the “h” in the right spot.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Also, do you have lemonade?” I asked.
“Here’s this,” she said, bringing a plastic cup to my father’s lips. He sipped, then grimaced and waved it away. It looked to be a chartreuse-colored, watery drink made from powder.
“Bye-bye,” the beekeeper said again, as she grew larger in the screen, and then turned the iPad off entirely, so that on my laptop my connection became just a lit square with my own face in it.
My father was too old to grasp technology, so the nurses were the ones to place his FaceTime calls, according to a schedule that Livvy had given them. But the nurses were frazzled and Livvy could be a pain in the neck, though she didn’t know it. Her husband always called her an angel, massaging her shoulders, hoping to get laid. And Delia, of course, had refused to be a part of it. “I can’t watch Dad like this,” she’d said again that day.
The following afternoon, a FaceTime call came in from Livvy. “I thought I’d patch you in and share my time with you,” she said.
“What do you mean? I’m scheduled for a different time.” But Livvy was both bossy and retired, a bad combo. She’d retired too young.
“Watch this,” she said and spun her phone so that through my screen I saw her screen and in her screen I saw my father.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Hey, hi!” my dad croaked uncertainly. Then the screen switched so that I was looking into the black of Livvy’s fireplace.
“Why am I looking into your fireplace?” I asked.
“It’s so he can see you. The way it’s patched in you can’t both see each other at the same time. When he sees you, you don’t see him—”
“I see the fireplace? This is too strange.”
She toggled back and forth between the black hearth and my bewildered father. I didn’t want to be patched in in this manner.
“Well, I thought we could sing to him,” she said. I knew that one afternoon she had used the iPad as a nanny cam, watching him while she folded her laundry. She had Ferberized her children—a method that was also known as “graduated extinction”—letting them wail themselves to sleep as she watched, and I wondered if there wasn’t something similar in what she was doing now.
“I suppose we could sing ‘Danny Boy,’ ” I suggested. “It’s a beautiful song and it matches his name.”
“Oh, I don’t think Dad likes that song. He says they’re not the original words.”
“What do you mean? It’s a beautiful song.”
“Yes, but he objects to it somehow. He says the Irish took it from the English.”
“The Irish stole ‘Danny Boy’? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Now I had questioned her authority. There was always a crisis of expertise with Livvy.
“How about this?” Livvy said. She sang into the phone, “If you’ll be M-I-N-E mine, I’ll be T-H-I-N-E thine, and I’ll L-O-V-E love you all the T-I-M-E time. You are the B-E-S-T best of all the R-E-S-T rest—”
“What the heck are you singing?”
“Dad used to sing me all his old Army songs.” She laughed.
“That’s an Army song? And we still won the war? I think I’m going to go and just wait for my own call with him.”
Now my father, on the screen, let out a howl of anguish and I could see him grimace with agony and sorrow. He tore at his cannula and his gown.
“Whoa,” Livvy said. “What’s going on here? I think he doesn’t want you to go.”
“That’s not it. He hardly knows I’m here.”
My father’s face became a gash of pain. “Bitte, bitte,” he cried hoarsely. With one hand, he fiercely sliced the signal for “cut” at his throat.
“Speaking German. Still sharp,” Livvy said.
“I don’t think speaking one’s college German right now is a sign of being sharp.”
He was clearly hallucinating, agitated, imagining he was a prisoner of war; that was what it must have felt like to him—the cruel isolation, the medicine, the lights, the strange machines all around. Of course, during the war he had been in the Pacific theatre. But hallucinations were not fussy about details like that.
He tugged at the tubes in his arms.
Cartoon by Glen Baxter Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Terror flew from him in a kind of guttural howl like a whale song. “Nein, nein, nein. Bitte. Nein.” He thrashed around in the bed.
I texted Livvy: I can’t watch this. It’s unbearable. Did she no longer know what was bearable and what was unbearable? Well, no one knew anymore. I will speak to him tomorrow. I’m going to give him his privacy.
I got into bed. I turned off the phone ringer and just watched television. Every now and then, the numbers of telemarketers and scammers appeared in white on the screen. At night, my dreams often featured such alerts, scrolling like ticker tape across them, and I would spend much of the dream trying to figure out whose numbers they were.
The next evening—evening was better, Livvy said—I waited hours for the call from the hospital to come. I sat before my computer, waiting for the FaceTime icon to enliven itself. Livvy sent e-mails and texts: Tell them to turn the lights down. They are too bright. I keep telling them to turn them down but they don’t. Ask for Eileen or Carmen. One of them is usually on duty. Ask them if they got the pizza we ordered for them. Livvy’s patient advocacy, I feared, would get him killed. The overrun hospital would triage him, and the hospice staff would move in and put him down like a dog, thanks to his annoying daughters.
The call came in late. The face that filled the screen was a beekeeper’s. Was it Eileen? Was it Carmen? I did not know. She seemed new. “Your very nice father is here, but he is asleep.” She stepped away from the screen, and I saw him with his eyes closed, his head hanging off his neck in a tilted fashion, the oxygen cannula taped in place, his mouth a dark crescent. They had shaved him, so his face was now cleared of the patches of miniature birch forest that had sprung up there. His skin had a butterscotch tinge, and his neck was ropy against the blue cotton of his gown. The nurse stroked his forehead with a latex-covered finger. Gingerly, but several times. “He’s asleep but he’s hanging in there. He’s a sweet man.”
“Thank you for calling me. I’ll try to connect with him tomorrow.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll send you some pictures of him sleeping,” she added, and began tapping the iPad. Then she looked up. “Good night!” she said brightly, performing the role of saintly nurse, her head filling the screen as she moved in to shut it off. Surely her loving-kindness would vanish as soon as the iPad went dark, and her demeanor would reveal an eagerness to be rid of this Covid-ic old guy with his bedsore and immobile hip, his catheter and oxygen tubing.
I called Delia of the camellias, lying on her chaise longue. “He’s stranded there, like someone fallen on a battlefield,” I said. “Everyone is just stepping around him. He’s in the way.” How could I speak the lonely, frantic improvisation of my inadequate self-reliance? She was well versed in her own.
“I told you. I did my crying last week. We had a good long talk just before his surgery. It contained dignity and charity for all. You’ll have to call me when it’s over.” Her voice broke a little.
“Maybe he’ll get out. Maybe he’ll finally test negative and be released to rehab to get his hip working again.” I could not imagine it. Not really. Even that would be hellish. Then I added, sounding still more insane, “Falconers return their old birds to the wild.”


newyorker--2020-09-21--“Spoiler,” by Hala Alyan

“Spoiler,” by Hala Alyan

Can you diagnose fear ?
The red tree blooming from uterus to throat .
It ’ s one long nerve , the doctor says .
There ’ s a reason breathing helps , the muscles slackening like a dead marriage .
Mine are simple things .
Food poisoning in Paris .
Hospital lobbies .
My husband laughing in another room .
( The door closed . )
For days , I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead .
There ’ s nothing to pray away .
The tree loves her cutter .
The nightmares have stopped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know why .
They stopped because I baptized them .
This is how my mother and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in .
I ’ m tired of April .
It ’ s killed our matriarchs and , in the back yard , I ’ ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil .
There is a droopiness to the branches that reminds me of my friend , the one who calls to ask what ’ s the point , or the patients who come to me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their hearts like newborns after the first needle .
What now , they all want to know .
What now .
I imagine it like a beach .
There is a magnificent sand castle that has taken years to build .
A row of pink seashells for gables , rooms of pebble and driftwood .
This is your life .
Then comes the affair , nagging bloodwork , a freeway pileup .
The tide moves in .
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds .
There is debris .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ from where you scratched your own arm trying to fight the current .
It might not happen for a long time , but one day you run your fingers through the sand again , scoop a fistful out , and pat it into a new floor .
You can believe in anything , so why not believe this will last ?
The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming .
I ’ m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in .
I ’ m here to tell you whatever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make it beautiful .

Audio: Read by the author.
Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterus
to throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason
breathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage.
Mine are simple things. Food poisoning in Paris. Hospital lobbies.
My husband laughing in another room. (The door closed.)
For days, I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead.
There’s nothing to pray away. The tree loves her cutter.
The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.
They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my mother
and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.
I’m tired of April. It’s killed our matriarchs and, in the back yard,
I’ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil. There is a droopiness
to the branches that reminds me of my friend, the one who calls
to ask what’s the point, or the patients who come to me, swarmed
with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after
the first needle. What now, they all want to know. What now.
I imagine it like a beach. There is a magnificent sand castle
that has taken years to build. A row of pink seashells for gables,
rooms of pebble and driftwood. This is your life. Then comes the affair,
nagging bloodwork, a freeway pileup. The tide moves in.
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds. There is debris.
A tatter of sea grass and blood from where you scratched your own arm
trying to fight the current. It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out,
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.


newyorker--2020-09-21--Poems That Map the Urges of Private and Political Space

During the winter of 2016 , after the Times sent out disposable virtual-reality headsets to its subscribers , the rooms of our house filled up with animated beasts and haunted dolls .
“ Look at that !
” you would exclaim , pointing at a pile of laundry .
In the chintzy transformations of augmented reality , our children became insects , foxes , muffins .
I could make domestic life temporarily thrilling or scary , then reverse the current and make it humdrum again .
Soon , the estrangement itself came to seem banal .
The crumpled cardboard glasses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Blizzard ” ( Farrar , Straus & Giroux ) , the tenth book of poems by Henri Cole , ordinary life shares a plane with the eerie , the uncanny , and the berserk .
A menagerie of cats , snails , flies , bees , and other creatures fills these poems , acting simultaneously as heralds bearing news and scavengers feasting on our bodies .
A bat trapped in Cole ’ s kitchen chirps out a motto : “ accept and forgive , / accept and forgive—.
” Visiting the grave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sombre mood , Cole greets a stray “ mommy cat.
” She humps his leg while “ meowing ” a grim report : “ Bliss , / loss , trembling , compulsion , desire , / & disease are but coffin liquor now.
” “ Blizzard ” is a retrospective volume , seasoned by loss and disappointment .
“ It ’ s a long game— / the whole undignified , insane attempt at living , ” Cole writes .
Long and also unwinnable , as the many elegies for friends in this book @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life to be post-pas de deux now , ” Cole writes , in “ Kayaking on the Charles.
” That lonely vow at least provides a reset .
In “ Recycling , ” an animal carcass stands in for Cole ’ s own body , also destined for the ground : “ I have no biological function and grow / like a cabbage without making divisions / of myself.
” But poetry , with its formal imperative to start over , line after line , offers a renewed imaginative function .
Post-sex , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only its old uses but its worn-out metaphors .
“ There ’ s more enterprise / In walking naked , ” Yeats wrote , in middle age , casting his stylistic frippery aside .
Cole echoes him in a near-prayer : “ Lord , look at me , / hatless , with naked torso , sixtyish , paddling alone upriver.
” Cole ’ s new poems practice a weirdly vigorous stoicism : their serenity seems like one of the terms of a treaty signed with panic .
Cole is pacified rather than peaceful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from a deep fear that he is capable of ruthlessness , and even of violence .
“ In loneliness , I fear me , ” Cole writes , “ but in society I ’ m like a soldier / kneeling on soft mats.
” Routine actions are seized with sudden menace : “ I cut open the throat of a grapefruit.
” The mantras of the beatified self compete , everywhere , with the more desperate , and more convincing , slogans of impulse : “ Don ’ t want , can have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The rule pertains even to the desire to be free from the rule .
The agonizing cycles of longing play out in a brilliant series of poems about the AIDS crisis and its aftermath .
When a “ handmade / silk tie ” appears in the trash , it seems to cry “ keep me , ” and calls to mind the voices of old friends and lovers , “ Mason , Roy , Jimmy , / and Miguel , ” tugging at Cole ’ s arms “ like it was / @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a friend , “ Epivir , d4T , Crixivan , ” its title a reference to an antiretroviral cocktail , brings back the freak mortal logic of that era : “ To those who didn ’ t / sell well in the bars , it felt like Revenge of the Nerds.
” Those who did are , as Cole puts it , “ memory now.
” “ Blizzard , ” like many of Cole ’ s recent books , is full of sonnets .
He has made the form his own : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with an anecdote , then fall through a trapdoor of reminiscence and rue .
“ Face of the Bee ” is a tense standoff between the insect , emerging from a cut peony , and Cole , in his kitchen , spreading jam on toast .
They ’ re not so different , these two antagonists : The parroted truism is dangerously naïve : elsewhere , in highly personal poems about the Reagan and Trump Administrations—the ravages of the AIDS epidemic and the crises of migrants and refugees—we see what kinds of cruelty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The “ instincts ” that Cole ’ s parents taught him to control were surely , in part , sexual .
Cole ’ s deadpan shout-out hints at a gay son ’ s lingering mixture of emotions , whose precise and beautiful measurement only these loosely metered poems can take .
Better the devil you know : those “ replacements ” sound ominous , a “ force ” so large and malevolent that , unlike poetry , it can not be measured .
Cole began as the prisoner of a grand formalism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Visible Man ” ( 1998 ) , he announced , a little archly , that he ’ d broken free .
But it was only with “ Middle Earth ” ( 2003 ) that he began to follow a long-implied precept , finally articulated in “ Blizzard ” : to “ be precise about objects , but reticent about feelings.
” Cole ’ s interiority is distributive , resting in oddly sentient neckties , rice puddings , and dandelions , each a repository of his imagination .
The dreamer , as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the dream .
What can a poem with a roaming perspective do that a unifocal poem can not ?
It can depict the self from tangential or peripheral moral angles : to the bee , a person is a threat ; to flies , he ’ s food ; to the current President , he ’ s collateral .
The poems in Eduardo C. Corral ’ s second book , “ Guillotine ” ( Graywolf ) , are mostly set in and around the Sonoran Desert , where , as a result @ @ @ @ @ @ @ migrants have died trying to cross to safety .
Their remains are often unidentifiable .
Corral grew up in southern Arizona , in the town of Casa Grande , between Phoenix and Tucson .
Before publishing his first book , “ Slow Lightning , ” the 2011 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize , Corral wrote in a local Starbucks .
These poems begin from the premise that the person writing them , with his freight of interiority , a childhood that haunts him , unrequited passions , a keen loneliness , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with different luck have met a very different fate : You “ sport ” an outfit when you like the way it looks on you .
“ Superstar ” once singled you out as a celebrity , but it long ago became a term we use to designate the kindness or forbearance of quite ordinary people .
A “ Superstar ” T-shirt feels like something a parent might pick out before a child even has a veto .
A striking long poem is one of the anchors of this book .
In “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Corral gives voice , in Spanish and English , to migrants as well as to a few racists .
The poem asks us to imagine each page as one of the fifty-five-gallon water stations set up by a nonprofit to help migrants survive in the desert .
Corral ’ s texts are “ scratched ” onto the surface of the tank , each inscription effacing the last .
Every new poem feels like an arena for survival ; we imagine a person either desperate to live or eager to kill .

During the winter of 2016, after the Times sent out disposable virtual-reality headsets to its subscribers, the rooms of our house filled up with animated beasts and haunted dolls. “Look at that!” you would exclaim, pointing at a pile of laundry. In the chintzy transformations of augmented reality, our children became insects, foxes, muffins. I could make domestic life temporarily thrilling or scary, then reverse the current and make it humdrum again. Soon, the estrangement itself came to seem banal. The crumpled cardboard glasses are in a drawer someplace.
In “Blizzard” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the tenth book of poems by Henri Cole, ordinary life shares a plane with the eerie, the uncanny, and the berserk. A menagerie of cats, snails, flies, bees, and other creatures fills these poems, acting simultaneously as heralds bearing news and scavengers feasting on our bodies. A bat trapped in Cole’s kitchen chirps out a motto: “accept and forgive, / accept and forgive—.” Visiting the grave of a friend, and in a sombre mood, Cole greets a stray “mommy cat.” She humps his leg while “meowing” a grim report: “Bliss, / loss, trembling, compulsion, desire, / & disease are but coffin liquor now.”
“Blizzard” is a retrospective volume, seasoned by loss and disappointment. “It’s a long game— / the whole undignified, insane attempt at living,” Cole writes. Long and also unwinnable, as the many elegies for friends in this book remind us. “I want my life to be post-pas de deux now,” Cole writes, in “Kayaking on the Charles.” That lonely vow at least provides a reset. In “Recycling,” an animal carcass stands in for Cole’s own body, also destined for the ground: “I have no biological function and grow / like a cabbage without making divisions / of myself.” But poetry, with its formal imperative to start over, line after line, offers a renewed imaginative function. Post-sex, pre-corpse, the body has outgrown not only its old uses but its worn-out metaphors. “There’s more enterprise / In walking naked,” Yeats wrote, in middle age, casting his stylistic frippery aside. Cole echoes him in a near-prayer: “Lord, look at me, / hatless, with naked torso, sixtyish, paddling alone upriver.”
Cole’s new poems practice a weirdly vigorous stoicism: their serenity seems like one of the terms of a treaty signed with panic. Cole is pacified rather than peaceful, the discipline in his style arising from a deep fear that he is capable of ruthlessness, and even of violence. “In loneliness, I fear me,” Cole writes, “but in society I’m like a soldier / kneeling on soft mats.” Routine actions are seized with sudden menace: “I cut open the throat of a grapefruit.” The mantras of the beatified self compete, everywhere, with the more desperate, and more convincing, slogans of impulse: “Don’t want, can have. Can’t have, want.”
The rule pertains even to the desire to be free from the rule. The agonizing cycles of longing play out in a brilliant series of poems about the AIDS crisis and its aftermath. When a “handmade / silk tie” appears in the trash, it seems to cry “keep me,” and calls to mind the voices of old friends and lovers, “Mason, Roy, Jimmy, / and Miguel,” tugging at Cole’s arms “like it was / the ’80s again.” An elegy for a friend, “Epivir, d4T, Crixivan,” its title a reference to an antiretroviral cocktail, brings back the freak mortal logic of that era: “To those who didn’t / sell well in the bars, it felt like Revenge of the Nerds.” Those who did are, as Cole puts it, “memory now.”
“Blizzard,” like many of Cole’s recent books, is full of sonnets. He has made the form his own: often they begin loose-limbed and amiable, with an anecdote, then fall through a trapdoor of reminiscence and rue. “Face of the Bee” is a tense standoff between the insect, emerging from a cut peony, and Cole, in his kitchen, spreading jam on toast. They’re not so different, these two antagonists:
. . . No one
Is truly the owner of his own instincts,
but controlling them—this is civilization.
I thank my mother and father for this.
After they died, there were replacements
whose force upon my life I cannot measure.
The parroted truism is dangerously naïve: elsewhere, in highly personal poems about the Reagan and Trump Administrations—the ravages of the AIDS epidemic and the crises of migrants and refugees—we see what kinds of cruelty go by the name of “civilization.” The “instincts” that Cole’s parents taught him to control were surely, in part, sexual. Cole’s deadpan shout-out hints at a gay son’s lingering mixture of emotions, whose precise and beautiful measurement only these loosely metered poems can take. Better the devil you know: those “replacements” sound ominous, a “force” so large and malevolent that, unlike poetry, it cannot be measured.
Cole began as the prisoner of a grand formalism. In his fourth book, “The Visible Man” (1998), he announced, a little archly, that he’d broken free. But it was only with “Middle Earth” (2003) that he began to follow a long-implied precept, finally articulated in “Blizzard”: to “be precise about objects, but reticent about feelings.” Cole’s interiority is distributive, resting in oddly sentient neckties, rice puddings, and dandelions, each a repository of his imagination. The dreamer, as the old saw goes, is every figure in the dream. What can a poem with a roaming perspective do that a unifocal poem cannot? It can depict the self from tangential or peripheral moral angles: to the bee, a person is a threat; to flies, he’s food; to the current President, he’s collateral.
The poems in Eduardo C. Corral’s second book, “Guillotine” (Graywolf), are mostly set in and around the Sonoran Desert, where, as a result of U.S. government policies, thousands of migrants have died trying to cross to safety. Their remains are often unidentifiable. Corral grew up in southern Arizona, in the town of Casa Grande, between Phoenix and Tucson. Before publishing his first book, “Slow Lightning,” the 2011 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Corral wrote in a local Starbucks.
These poems begin from the premise that the person writing them, with his freight of interiority, a childhood that haunts him, unrequited passions, a keen loneliness, and a fearsome imaginative gift, might with different luck have met a very different fate:
. . . Bodies, in the Sonoran desert,
are everywhere
A headless corpse
sporting a T-shirt
that reads: Superstar.
You “sport” an outfit when you like the way it looks on you. “Superstar” once singled you out as a celebrity, but it long ago became a term we use to designate the kindness or forbearance of quite ordinary people. A “Superstar” T-shirt feels like something a parent might pick out before a child even has a veto.
A striking long poem is one of the anchors of this book. In “Testaments Scratched Into a Water Station Barrel,” Corral gives voice, in Spanish and English, to migrants as well as to a few racists. The poem asks us to imagine each page as one of the fifty-five-gallon water stations set up by a nonprofit to help migrants survive in the desert. Corral’s texts are “scratched” onto the surface of the tank, each inscription effacing the last. Every new poem feels like an arena for survival; we imagine a person either desperate to live or eager to kill.
Reduced to its bluntest purpose, all writing is a form of graffiti, an assertion that we exist in this time and place. These “found” poems of Corral’s arrive damaged, their syntax sometimes broken into mismatched columns, the type smudged or overwritten, but their strange beauty remains intact. “Out of clay I shape / sparrows,” one anonymous soul confides:
I give them names
like gossamer
inglenook lagoon
she bathed
a trumpet
in milk
The lyricism of this writing pulls us toward wonder, before, an instant later, documentary fact returns us to horror: “I notch my arms / I notch my thighs / five six days.”
Corral’s choral presentation of desert voices incorporates his own. In the title poem, the Arizona landscape turns up in the subconscious, as Corral follows a pair of nightmarish scorpions moving a razor blade down his body. He grips his mattress, one of the few reminders that he is indoors, in relative safety. The creatures are there to thwart desire—perhaps queer desire in particular. When Corral recalls “dragging my thumb / through his beard, / coppery & difficult,” the scorpions, a gleam in their eyes, “tilt / the blade”:


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