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One cold morning in 1980, when I was not yet four years old, my mother woke me while it was still dark, pressing her face against my cheek. “We have to leave,” she whispered. “Right away.” I rolled off my mattress, pulled on some clothes, and followed her down five flights of stairs without a word, carrying my sneakers and walking on tiptoe so I didn’t wake the neighbors. Outside, my father was already chipping ice from the windshield of our rusted station wagon.

My mom stood in the doorway. Her hair, which she had kept short and dyed red, as part of a disguise, was starting to grow out, straight and dark down to her shoulders. She stood still, cradling my baby brother, but her eyes kept flickering to the Harlem intersection, following each car that passed. Finally, my dad whistled twice, our usual signal—one short, one long—and she led me into the back seat. My dad glanced behind us once to see if we were being followed, winked at me in the rearview mirror, and then swung our car toward Interstate 80, headed west.

My memories of this time are hazy, of course. I remember them the way anyone “remembers” the important moments of their childhood—overlaid with family lore, stories my parents told, and details I’ve reconstructed from recent conversations. But underneath it all there are real sense memories. Among my earliest, maybe imprinted by the fear of that night: the cold smell of the city, and the fuzzy disorientation of waking up while it was still dark out. I remember wondering why we were leaving, and what was going to happen to us next.

A decade earlier, my mother, Bernardine Dohrn, had declared war on the United States government. She and my father, Bill Ayers, helped found the militant revolutionary group the Weather Underground, and committed themselves to opposing the Vietnam War and fighting back violently against what they saw as a fascist police state here at home. They and their friends set off bombs at the N.Y.P.D. headquarters, the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon. They wore disguises, lived under fake names, built a network of safe houses, and became the focus of an international manhunt. In 1970, the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover called my mom “the most dangerous woman in America.” That October, she became only the fourth woman in history on the F.B.I.’s “Ten Most Wanted” list.

I was born underground and spent my early years on the run. By 1980, though, my parents had finally decided to turn themselves in. A plea deal awaited us in Chicago, but, for the deal to work, we had to make it to the courthouse in person. If we were caught along the way, my mom would spend decades in prison. It was a tense drive that night; my dad says that he kept our station wagon well below the speed limit.

The next morning, we pulled into a rest-stop Burger King. While my mom stayed in the car to nurse the baby, my father and I went inside, and a nice elderly couple started talking to me in line, just making conversation. “Hey, sweetheart,” the man said, smiling down at me. I had shoulder-length blond hair at the time, and people always assumed I was a girl. “You all on vacation?”

I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, but my dad was busy ordering our food, and I felt like I had to say something. My response has, in the years since, become a running joke in my family.

“We’re going to Chicago,” I told them, “so my mom can turn herself in to the F.B.I.”

My dad turned, surprised, trying to catch up. “Oh. Yeah, I don’t know,” he said, trying to force a laugh. “Maybe something he saw on TV? Hey, Z, you need to use the bathroom before we go? Say bye.”

I waved. And, before we got our food, he picked me up and ran for our car. As he peeled back out onto the highway, he told my mom that he thought somebody had recognized him. He was trying to protect me, I think. My dad knew that I was desperate not to disappoint my mother—that I wouldn’t want to admit I had broken the underground’s strict codes of secrecy. I looked up to her. I admired her. I wanted to be like her.

Of course, as I got older, that got more complicated. My parents’ brand of violent resistance, I now know, had tragic consequences for our family, and deadly costs for the people around us. Three of my parents’ closest friends were killed in an accidental dynamite explosion as they planned an attack on a U.S. Army base. Others spent decades behind bars, leaving their children without mothers or fathers. And years later, when the group splintered into increasingly militant factions, some took part in a disastrous bank robbery that killed an innocent guard and two police officers—three men who were just doing their jobs that day, and who left behind their own kids, their own families.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just remember watching my mom’s face in the rearview mirror, wondering what she was thinking—whether she was also scared—as she scanned the maps in our faded Rand McNally road atlas. In our family, my father was usually the one driving, but there was never any doubt who was setting our direction.

“Get off at the next exit,” she ordered him. “We’ll switch to local roads.”

My mother wasn’t always a revolutionary. She grew up a middle-class white girl in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. Her dad was the credit manager for a local chain of appliance stores, a second-generation Jewish immigrant, and a lifelong Republican. My mom seemed, at first, eager to please; she was a straight-A student, and, at seventeen, became the first person in the family to go to college, at the University of Chicago, where she soon went on to law school as one of only a handful of coeds in her first-year class.

But letting your daughter see more of the world than you did means that she might come to see that world quite differently. In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago to lead a series of protests against racism and housing discrimination. “Seeing King, night after night, speaking in churches,” my mom told me recently, “it changed my life.” The civil-rights movement needed lawyers—ideally people willing to work for free—and she soon signed up to volunteer. “I knew nothing,” she said, laughing. “Second-year law student. I had an armband that said ‘Legal.’ It was ridiculous!”

In 1968, my mother was in New York when she heard screams coming from the street outside. Dr. King had just been killed in Memphis, Tennessee. My mom grabbed her purse and got on a subway to Forty-second Street. “I don’t know why I did,” she told me. “But, by the time I got there, there were thousands and thousands of people in Times Square. I wanted to be in a crowd of people who were mourning. And angry. Both.”

That rage drove her away from King’s politics of nonviolence and toward a more militant ideology. She was soon elected to the national leadership of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student protest group in the country at that time. It was through S.D.S. that she met my dad, the son of a prominent utilities C.E.O. He had grown up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, burned his draft card at the University of Michigan, and then dropped out of school to protest full time.

Then, in 1969, my mother split S.D.S. in half, forming a more radical faction of the group called Weatherman. (The name was taken from the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.”) That October, Weathermen rampaged through Chicago’s upscale shopping district—the Magnificent Mile—with bricks, chains, and baseball bats, breaking windows, smashing cars, and brawling with armed police officers: the so-called Days of Rage riots. Their statement following the protest gave the title to Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film about modern American revolutionaries:

FROM HERE ON IT’S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER—WITH WHITE YOUTH JOINING IN THE FIGHT AND TAKING THE NECESSARY RISKS. PIG AMERIKA BEWARE. THERE’S AN ARMY GROWING IN YOUR GUTS AND IT’S GOING TO BRING YOU DOWN.

My mother had found a new, more revolutionary role model to follow—Fred Hampton, the charismatic twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Chicago Black Panthers. They became friends and comrades. The Weathermen and Panthers held meetings together and exchanged intel about government surveillance and police informants. It seemed for a moment that they might help realize Hampton’s dream of an interracial “rainbow coalition” of radical activist groups.

But, two months later, Hampton was also dead, executed by Chicago police while he slept in his bed with his pregnant girlfriend beside him. An F.B.I. informant had spiked Fred’s Kool-Aid with a sedative so he wouldn’t wake up during the deadly late-night raid. This new killing drove my mother and her friends over the edge. “I was in a rage,” she told me, still visibly furious decades later, “at the absolute stench of American life.”

The next night, Weathermen placed plastic coffee cups filled with black powder under the hoods of police squad cars across Chicago. The explosion wrecked the cruisers and blew out the windows of nearby buildings. A few months later, my mom and dad, along with roughly a hundred other members of the group, changed their names, cut ties with their families, and disappeared.

On May 21, 1970, an audiotape was delivered to newspapers across the country on behalf of their newly renamed group, the Weather Underground. “Hello, this is Bernardine Dohrn,” the recording begins. “I’m going to read a declaration of a state of war.” Two weeks later, a dynamite bomb exploded on the second floor of the N.Y.P.D. headquarters. President Richard Nixon immediately called an emergency Oval Office meeting. “Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans—mostly under thirty—are determined to destroy our society,” he told his intelligence chiefs. “I do not intend to sit idly by while self-appointed revolutionaries commit acts of terrorism throughout the land.”

When I was still a kid, driving with my parents across the country, I think I imagined that the underground was a physical place, as if it might have its own two-page spread in the road atlas mapping a hidden archipelago of safe houses, communes, and meetup spots—a whole secret subterranean geography. But it wasn’t a place, really; my father used to say that it was just a state of mind. “I went underground by changing my name,” he told me. “One day I was one thing, and the next day I was another.”

Finding a new name was surprisingly easy. A Weatherman would drive out to a rural graveyard and look around until he found the headstone of a person who would have been about his age but had died as an infant. Then he’d head over to the county courthouse and ask for a replacement birth certificate. Soon, he would have an official government license with his photo, but a new name and a whole new identity.

My dad grew his beard out. My mom cut her hair short, dyed it red, and started dressing like a California hippie—big glasses and flowing dresses—rather than in her signature black leather, miniskirts, and knee-high boots. They set up safe houses—cheap apartments in working-class neighborhoods. They took jobs as construction workers, longshoremen, and nannies—work that didn’t require a Social Security card and always paid at the end of the day, in cash.

Meanwhile, their bombing campaign intensified. In July, a bomb shook a U.S. Army base near the Golden Gate Bridge. The next day, an explosion shattered the glass-and-marble lobby of the Bank of America building in New York. The method they used was simple: a young white woman dressed up as a secretary would walk into a building, place a bag or a purse in an empty rest room or office, set a timer, and walk out. A few hours later, someone would call in a warning. Minutes after that, the bomb would explode.

The warning calls mostly prevented serious casualties. After an accidental explosion in a West Village bomb factory killed three Weathermen, those who survived, shaken by their friends’ deaths, swore off deadly violence. But the attacks, though meant to be symbolic, were still dangerous—and reckless. And, although Weathermen today still insist that they were not terrorists—that their bombs were intended not to maim or kill but to send a message—the fact is that setting off bombs carries an implicit threat of violence. It can terrorize people. And while there may be moments in history when some of us would concede the necessity of illegal, violent resistance—Nazi Germany, say, or the South under chattel slavery—dynamite is a self-defeating tool in a democracy, however imperfect. Blowing up buildings doesn’t help build a mass movement or create momentum for lasting change.

But, if the goal was to draw attention, the Weather Underground’s bombing campaign was a huge success. It turned my mother into a symbol—a heroic anti-government outlaw to some, a violent, un-American terrorist to many more. Actors and rock stars from the counterculture scene—including the band Jefferson Airplane—started donating money and cars to the cause. Alt-weeklies reprinted my mother’s mug shot with the message “Bernardine Dohrn welcome here!” Teen-agers hung the page in their windows or on their walls, like today’s dorm-room posters of Che Guevara or Malcolm X or Tupac—less a sign of a specific political ideology than an impressionistic display of youthful rebellion.

That September, my parents were contacted by a cult of weed and LSD dealers in California with the incredible name the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who wanted help breaking their hero, Timothy Leary, out of prison. Leary, a Harvard psychologist turned acid guru, had become famous for urging young people to use LSD to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” He had been sentenced to twenty years behind bars for possession of two joints—an early test case in the government’s “war on drugs”—and the members of the Brotherhood were determined to free him. In exchange for a paper bag full of cash—twenty thousand dollars in unmarked bills—the Weather Underground agreed to do the job.

They came up with a plan. Using blueprints smuggled in by a radical lawyer representing both Leary and my mother, they gave Leary instructions on how to climb, hand over hand, along a telephone wire for more than two hundred feet across the prison campus, in the middle of the night. Once over the concrete wall, he dropped down to a patch of grass, where a group of Weathermen were waiting in a van, dressed to look like a family on a fishing trip. They quickly dyed Leary’s hair, gave him new clothes and a passport, and spirited him out of the country—but not before he and my parents celebrated together in a forest clearing, smoking a joint and listening to Jimi Hendrix. “It was fun,” my mom remembers. “I mean, we’re standing there in a redwood grove in California, and there’s all these headlines about him being gone.”

As the decade wore on, though, my parents grew up—as happens to young rebels—and my mother, unexpectedly, started thinking about having kids. “Maybe it was turning thirty,” she told me. “I was so adamant until that moment. I was really sure—that wasn’t going to be me. And suddenly it was me. I don’t know how to explain it.” She found out she was pregnant from a free clinic in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Home pregnancy tests were not yet widely available, so she had to risk showing up at the clinic in person, then calling for the results a few days later. The nurse on the line sounded apologetic as she broke the news; most unmarried women were apparently eager for a negative result. “I’m really sorry to tell you this,” she said. “But you’re pregnant.” My mother, though, was ecstatic. “Ahhh!” she shouted into the phone. “That’s so wonderful!”

My parents rented a scruffy one-bedroom apartment overlooking a park in the Fillmore District. They bought bags of thrifted baby clothes and decorated the apartment with cheap wall hangings and stuffed toys. “We’d been safe for a long time,” she told me, when I asked whether she considered the dangers of having a child while she was a fugitive. “I felt that we knew how to be safe.” They found a midwife through trusted friends. And I was born at home, in the spring of 1977, in a safe house, underground.

Bernardine Dohrn and Zayd Ayers Dohrn, disguised as Rose and Z, on a family road trip.Photograph courtesy the author

My parents never lied to me about any of this—except maybe by omission. My mom says she tried to explain it to me so a four-year-old could understand. We were part of a rebel alliance, like Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia, fighting an evil empire. We were outlaws, like the animated fox from Disney’s “Robin Hood,” stealing from the rich to give to the poor. So I knew, from my earliest memories, that my parents had broken the law, and that the F.B.I. was chasing us. But I don’t think I ever understood exactly who—or what—“F.B.I.” was. Why did F.B.I. want to catch us? What would happen if it did? I had no way to imagine a federal agency. To me, it just felt like a scary presence pursuing our family all the time—a childhood bogeyman.

According to my parents, by the time I was three I had learned to recognize plainclothes cops and F.B.I. agents in a crowd. You had to look at their shoes (cheap leather loafers, well shined) and their cars (American-made, stripped-down, but with souped-up radio antennas and the telltale rumble of an upgraded V-8). They taught me never to use landlines that could be traced—we carried rolls of dimes in our pockets and made our calls from pay phones. I learned to speak in code. “Brown shoes” meant undercover agents. Living on the run was being “in on the joke.”

When I was four, I learned to walk a “trajectory,” the complicated mix of turns and switchbacks we used to lose a tail. Up the stairs onto the elevated tracks, wait two minutes, double back again, through the park, across the basketball courts, around the corner. It was a bit like playing a game—a grownup version of dress-up or hide-and-seek, but only my family knew all the rules. At every place we stopped for more than a week or two, my parents got new jobs, dyed their hair strange colors, spoke in new accents, and took on unfamiliar names. My mom went by Louise (Lou) Douglas, Rose Brown, Lorraine Anne Jellins, H. T. Smith, Sharon Louise Naylor, and Karen Lois DeBelius. My dad became Joe Brown, Tony Lee, Jules Michael Taylor, Hank Anderson, and Michael Joseph Rafferty, Jr. I wanted to be part of their grownup world. So, even though no one knew my real name anyway, and I wouldn’t have a birth certificate until I was five, around strangers they started calling me Z.

It all seemed strangely normal. Pretty much everyone I knew back then was a fugitive. And, over the years, I met other kids whose parents were also on the run—“Panther cubs” and “Weather kids” like me, with no school and no regular place to call home. Jad Joseph, whose father, Jamal, was an underground member of the New York Black Panthers, remembers his dad telling their family to get ready for a car trip, and snapping, “If you’re thirty seconds late, someone could die!” Jad told me, “I was just, like, ‘Dad, no one’s gonna die because we’re late to Grandma’s.’ ”

Other friends remember being toted around as “beards” when their parents were out scouting bombing runs. The idea was that a couple with a kid in tow wouldn’t look too suspicious taking a walk near a police station or an Army base. My friend Thai, whose parents were part of the Weather Underground leadership, remembers his father, Jeff Jones, coming home one day to find their family’s Hoboken apartment surrounded by cops—a fire inspector had spotted his tiny crop of marijuana plants on the fire escape. Jeff picked Thai up at preschool that afternoon, and their family never went home. They abandoned everything they owned overnight—medical records, books, baby pictures, toys.

My family spent time at communes in Oregon, where I played with other kids in a waterfall we called “the washing machine” and learned to milk the cow (named, naturally, Emma Goldmilk). We stayed in trailer parks in Virginia and flophouses in the slums of Detroit. But I noticed, leafing through the road atlas, that we never visited the tourist sites the guide suggested: Disneyland, the Hoover Dam, the Alamo. On the rare occasions we took time to sightsee in my family, it was to visit monuments to injustice—the bloody sites of lynchings and massacres and violent uprisings—so I could internalize lessons in radical resistance. “These were freedom fighters,” my mom would whisper. “This is where they were murdered. Remember. You’re a freedom fighter, too.” I didn’t much feel like a freedom fighter, and, given the gruesome, tragic ends that seemed to meet most of my parents’ heroes, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to become one.

Still, despite all the obvious danger, I knew that my parents would always protect me, no matter what. This was the foundation on which my shaky sense of security was built—that my birth had changed everything. My mother and father always told me that they had stopped taking part in violent “actions” after I was born, that they had committed themselves, for the sake of our family, to a different kind of future. But, like most origin stories, I now know that ours was mostly a myth.

By the late seventies, my family was back in Harlem. My father, as Tony Lee, had taken a job as a teacher at my preschool so he could keep an eye on me. My mother was pregnant again, working at an upscale kids’-clothing boutique on Eighty-first Street called Broadway Baby. As I learned only recently, the job offered an unexpected side benefit: whenever my mom met a customer of a certain type—a woman who was young, white, and pregnant, like her—she would ask for an I.D. to verify a check, and then quickly memorize her personal information. A few days later, a woman would walk into a D.M.V. office and tell the clerk she’d lost her I.D. She would verify her identity with the correct name, birth date, address, and license number, and be issued a replacement on the spot. These I.D.s were then used to rent vehicles that were used in a spree of bank robberies by former members of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, fugitive splinter cells determined to keep the revolution alive.

Sometime around 1978 or 1979, my parents took me on my first camping trip, to Alderson, West Virginia. My memories of the trip are vague and impressionistic, mostly based on stories I heard later. But I think of it as a fun few weeks: my first time pitching a tent, cooking on a portable gas-powered stove, lying on a blanket under the stars. Recently, though, as I reconstructed my family’s path through the underground, I noticed something strange about that particular dot in the road atlas: our campsite was right next door to a federal prison, F.P.C. Alderson, which, in 1979, was best known for holding a female inmate named Assata Shakur.

Shakur had been a leading member of the New York Black Panthers, a group that joined my parents underground in the early seventies, rechristened itself the Black Liberation Army, and launched an all-out war against the N.Y.P.D., sparking a series of bloody confrontations in which both police officers and members of the Black underground were killed. Shakur was, like my mom, young, militant, female, and photogenic, and she soon became a political symbol and the focus of a joint F.B.I./N.Y.P.D. manhunt. The N.Y.P.D.’s former deputy commissioner called Shakur “the soul” of the B.L.A., “the mother hen, who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.”

Shakur was finally arrested in 1973, after a traffic stop turned into a deadly firefight that killed two state troopers, wounded Shakur, and killed her best friend—the man I’m named after—Zayd Malik Shakur. By 1978, when we took our family camping trip to West Virginia, Assata had been locked up for four years, and her friends in the Black underground were desperate to free her.

When I pointed out to my father the “coincidence” of our camping location, he finally admitted—though their involvement isn’t publicly known—that they had been recruited to case the prison. “We took a lot of pictures,” he told me. “Drawing maps and trying to figure out if there was a way to get Assata out. There was a sense that a couple of young white people with a baby could do anything without attracting any attention.”

The maps were never used, because Shakur was transferred from West Virginia to a prison in New Jersey. That fall, an old friend reached out to my father through the underground communications network, dialling a number printed on a faded piece of plastic Dymo tape and speaking to him from a public phone booth. A few days later, my dad watched from a high rock outcropping as the man walked a trajectory through Central Park. Finally, they fell in step on the bridle path around the reservoir, and the man got down to business: the Black Liberation Army had a job for Bill to do—something illegal, and potentially dangerous. “I remember weighing it with Bernardine very heavily,” my dad told me, when I asked him about the choice he made that day. “I didn’t really want to do it on some level. But, on another level, I wanted nothing more than to do it.”

“You were a father,” I reminded him. “Didn’t you think about that? About the risks you were taking?”

“Well, it’s like everything else about being involved in the movement,” he said. “On the one hand, like every other human being, the speck of the universe you understand best is your life. So, you want to have that. On the other hand, if you’re a person who’s made a commitment to something larger, you want that larger thing to work also. And so it’s never quite left me—this contradiction. How do you take responsibility for yourself and your family, and at the same time take some responsibility for the larger world?”

A few weeks later, my dad called in sick to work at my preschool. He left me at home with my mom, who was now seven months pregnant with my brother, and caught the 1/9 train to a parking garage downtown. There, he found a van waiting for him. The key was under the mat. A garage ticket was tucked into the visor. An hour later, he parked the van outside a Laneco department store in a strip mall in New Jersey and settled down to wait.

A few miles away, the B.L.A. paramilitary leader Sekou Odinga arrived at the prison. He handed over an I.D., signed the visitors’ log with a fake name, and was taken in to see Shakur. They embraced, and, under cover of the hug, Odinga passed her a .357 Magnum revolver. The pair quickly took a prison matron hostage. Within minutes, two more armed B.L.A. soldiers arrived, handcuffed a guard at gunpoint, and, with Shakur, piled into a hijacked van, drove out through the gates of the prison without firing a shot, and scattered into waiting getaway cars driven by white friends from the underground.

A few miles away, my dad’s B.L.A. contact knocked on his window, loaded something or someone into the back of his van, and told him to drive. My father still isn’t sure what he was carrying; he doesn’t think it was Shakur herself, but the underground had to disperse a wide range of people and equipment that day—guns and fugitives and members of the support network. “One of the things about an action like that,” he told me, “is the elaborateness of it means that you can play a very small role in a small corner, not even fully understanding what the larger piece is.”

But as he pulled the van onto a road in New Jersey, heading toward Manhattan, he started to feel nervous. “I had my hands on the wheel at two and ten,” he remembered. “I was trying to look as normal as I could possibly look.” Then he saw a roadblock ahead, a state trooper waving half the cars over for a search. “They were onto it,” he told me. “It was really terrifying. But, of course, the whole point of me driving the van is I’m a young white guy driving a van, and they’re not looking for that.” He held his breath, hoping the white edge would hold. “He looked right at me. And I . . . just went by. I remember, very clearly, being absolutely giddy once I passed that cop. I made it! I got through! I had survived!” He parked the van, left the key and the parking ticket, called in its location, and came back home.

In 1984, Shakur surfaced in Havana, where she was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro’s leftist government. She lived in Cuba for decades, giving talks and writing her autobiography, and became a global symbol of Black liberation—what she called a “maroon,” or escaped slave. Shakur died last year, having inspired generations of Black writers and activists, hip-hop artists like Nas and Mos Def, and the character of the militant Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor, in the film “One Battle After Another.”

But for me the story of Shakur’s jailbreak was not just a piece of radical political history but a surprising revelation about my own family. Because, though I had always understood, growing up, that my parents were willing to sacrifice their friends, their freedom, and even their lives for their cause, it had somehow never occurred to me that they were willing to sacrifice my brother and me, too.

“Did you really think about what would happen if you were caught?” I asked my father, recently.

He’s eighty-one now, with glasses and wisps of white hair sticking out from under his baseball cap. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought my life would end.”

“So why?”

“Because it mattered,” he said. “Because the world needed it to happen.”

Assata Shakur leaves a New Jersey courthouse in 1977.Photograph from AP

Shakur’s escape turned out to be the final successful action of the revolutionary undergrounds of the nineteen-seventies. Two months later, in early 1980, my brother Malik was born, and my parents decided to turn themselves in. Our flophouse in Harlem was growing crowded. Not with possessions—Malik’s crib, like mine, was a dresser drawer lined with blankets. But, just as some parents realize after their second kid that they’re going to need a larger place, or a minivan, my mother decided that a family of four was just too big for the underground life style. “I felt like we hadn’t hurt you too much by having you be a fugitive,” she told me. (I didn’t agree, exactly, but I let it slide.) “Two kids was another thing. And you were getting older. The world had moved on.”

So, that December, my parents woke me up in the middle of the night for our last cross-country drive through the underground. In a courthouse in Chicago, surrounded by police and microphones, my mother read a brief statement, making it clear that surrendering didn’t mean she was giving up. “I regret not at all our efforts to side with the forces of liberation,” she told the judge. “I remain committed to the struggle ahead.” She pleaded guilty to bail-jumping and to aggravated battery, misdemeanors left over from the Days of Rage riots, ten years earlier, when a cop had tried to grab her and she’d kicked him in the balls. She paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine and was released that same day, with three years of probation.

It still amazes me that a former most-wanted fugitive could escape with a slap on the wrist. But my mom had been underground for a long time; most of the charges against her had been dropped due to F.B.I. misconduct exposed in the COINTELPRO scandal—warrantless wiretapping, break-ins, burglaries, and blackmail attempts. The government had its own crimes to cover up. And, by 1981, the sixties must have felt like ancient history; Ronald Reagan was about to be sworn in as President, elected on a promise to “make America great again.” Most of the country seemed ready to move on.

As it turned out, my parents got out just in time. Later that year, some former members of the Weather Underground and the B.L.A. tried to hold up a Brink’s armored car in upstate New York; it turned into a deadly firefight, with the robbers shooting a guard and two police officers. This was a moral and political catastrophe for the movement; it led to dozens of arrests, and the end of the last fragments of the underground. My parents’ friends David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin had driven a getaway truck in that robbery. Both were sentenced to decades behind bars. They left behind their infant son, Chesa, telling the babysitter they’d be back soon, and simply never came home.

My parents adopted Chesa when he was just eighteen months old. He became a part of our family, my second brother, and a living reminder, for me, of how easily I could have lost my mother and father the way Chesa lost his. “I was still breast-feeding when they were arrested,” he told me, recently. “Later, I would say to them, ‘Why did you both have to go? . . . It only takes one person to drive a car.’ ”

Years passed. My brothers and I grew up. We went to high school. We played Little League. There were sometimes flashes from our fugitive past: a clicking sound on the phone that could be (or was I being paranoid?) an F.B.I. wiretap; letters from Canada or Cuba arriving without postmarks. But by the time we were teen-agers my parents had regular middle-class jobs, and our family had a fairly typical American life. Our story faded from the news. Most people we met had never heard of the Weather Underground. When our friends or neighbors discovered our family’s past, their reaction was usually disbelieving or mildly titillated, as if they’d found out a parent in the P.T.A. had once been a porn star.

After years of struggle and therapy, Chesa became a straight-A student, a Rhodes Scholar, and went on to Yale Law School. He eventually became the district attorney of San Francisco, part of a wave of progressive prosecutors elected during the racial reckoning over George Floyd’s killing. He was later recalled—part of the backlash to that moment—and now runs a legal advocacy center at U.C. Berkeley’s law school, working to reform the criminal-justice system from within.

Assata Shakur also left behind a child—her five-year-old daughter, Kakuya—who is now a social worker in Chicago, with her own family. She last saw her mother more than twenty years ago. “I think about that a lot,” Kakuya told me, before her mother’s death, “that she remembers me as a fifteen-year-old. Like, wow, my mother really doesn’t know who I am as a woman. She doesn’t know my children.” Kakuya told me she still admires her mother’s radical commitment but also feels a sense of loss and regret about the costs of her mother’s struggle. “Why would you have a child?” she asked, rhetorically. “Why did you do that when you knew you couldn’t raise me?”

All of us kids who grew up in the underground know that feeling—of being unwilling casualties of our parents’ war. None of us decided to follow in our parents’ violent footsteps. Most dedicated our lives to raising families, and to a more incremental, peaceful type of change. Our parents—our childhood heroes—turned out to be flawed human beings who never quite lived up to their own revolutionary ideals, and we all had to live with the knowledge that their radical choices had costs not just for us but for the other families who were hurt, the other kids who had to grow up without their parents.

I’ve spent years trying to untangle what I admire about my mother and father—their sacrifice and commitment, their radical solidarity with the Black freedom movement—from the violence and factionalism that often undermined their cause. That contradiction may be why I became a writer instead of a revolutionary—because I never quite felt their black-and-white moral certainty about what comes next, or their radical instinct to blow things up in an effort to change the world.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately, in this new era of racial reckoning, police violence, and rising authoritarianism, about what the future will look like for our children. My wife and I have two daughters of our own, and I think often about how to explain to them their family story. Of course, our girls don’t need to learn to recognize undercover cops or walk a trajectory—not yet—but I still wonder what parts of their revolutionary legacy they might find useful, either as inspiration or as cautionary tale. Because this is the funny thing about inheritance: It starts as something you receive, maybe reluctantly, from your past. But it becomes something you have to decide how to pass on to the future.

Recently, I sat down with my mother in her living room, in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago. She’s eighty-four now, with silver in her hair and a network of fine wrinkles across her skin. But her green eyes are still intense as always, watching me.

“You know, it’s funny,” she told me. “You’ll see when you’re this old—I hope you get to be this old. I think about my parents more now than I have for years and years. My dad cut himself off from his family for so long.” Her father, Bernard, had run away from his own parents at fourteen to chase his version of the American Dream. “It was ironic when I kind of replicated that pattern,” she said. “Went on the run. Although it’s a very American, immigrant pattern, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” I started. “I’m not sure. . . . Nobody else in our family ever became a revolutionary, or a federal fugitive.”

She suddenly smiled, looking straight at me.

“Your kids might,” she said. “You never know.” ♦

This is drawn from “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.”

In the weeks after Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential victory, Joshua Aaron, a software developer in Texas, kept asking himself, “What can I possibly do to help?” On the campaign trail, Trump had vilified immigrants, promising to carry out “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” Aaron, the son of a rabbi, had grown up around Holocaust survivors and saw parallels to the rise of the Third Reich. “They’re running the same exact playbook,” he told me. “Making people afraid of their neighbor, militarizing the streets, all under the guise of ‘We’re going to keep you safer.’ Safer from whom?” Aaron thought about writing an op-ed or speaking at a rally, but such gestures struck him as painfully insufficient. He wanted to give power to other people, so he thought of what’s most often in their hands. “We take our phones everywhere we go,” he said. “We take it into the bathroom with us. We take it to the shopping center with us. It’s in the car with us. Having that with you at all times gives you a sense of security.”

Aaron decided to develop ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to report and view ICE sightings within a five-mile radius of their location. Posts expired after four hours, because he figured that agents were unlikely to stay in one place for long. The platform was designed to act as an early-warning system, much like the “police reported ahead” feature in the navigation app Waze. “If you’re walking down the street and four blocks ahead of you somebody reports a sighting, turn left, turn around, go home,” he explained. “Just avoid that confrontation in the first place.”

When Aaron submitted the app to Apple, last February, it was initially rejected. “They wanted to vet it,” he said. “You know, Is this legal?” The fact that he had no plan to monetize the application—ICEBlock would not track users’ location or collect any of their data—seemed to raise suspicions. But after multiple meetings between Aaron and Apple’s representatives, the company seemed satisfied that, per its guidelines, ICEBlock would not solicit or encourage criminal behavior. The app was released last April, to little fanfare. Around three thousand people had downloaded it by June 30th, when CNN ran an interview with Aaron. “Then it just kept growing and growing,” he told me. By the next day, ICEBlock was the most downloaded free social-networking app in the App Store.

Aaron said that his inbox was flooded with e-mails from grateful users. Mothers living abroad were relieved there was an app to check if ICE agents were near their children, and the heads of foreign companies thanked Aaron for keeping their U.S. employees safe. Social-media posts show that ICEBlock was used across the country, from the Bronx to Opelika, Alabama, with sightings of federal agents reported at car washes, Mexican restaurants, and grocery stores. Some immigrant advocates worried that there was no mechanism to verify that the information posted on the application was real. (“Every time we would go and respond, it was not ICE,” a volunteer at the mutual-aid group NorCal Resist told me. “It was police or a smog check or a D.U.I. checkpoint.”) Aaron said that incorporating a method of moderation or verification—such as the voting system in Waze—would have required collecting user data that might someday fall under a subpoena. “What’s the worst-case scenario?” he asked me. “I opted for ‘Stay away for a couple of hours,’ because nobody gets hurt.”

Even if ICEBlock wasn’t always accurate, the Trump Administration was quick to view it as a threat to its mass-deportation campaign. Shortly after the CNN interview aired, Kristi Noem, who was then the Homeland Security Secretary, posted on X, “This sure looks like obstruction of justice.” ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, accused CNN of “enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade U.S. law” and “willfully endangering the lives of officers.” The following morning, the Administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, said that he was “begging the Department of Justice to look into this and hold people accountable.” Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, soon confirmed that her department was taking aim at Aaron: “We are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out, because that’s not a protected speech.”

Aaron was dismissive of the Administration’s threats. “It couldn’t have been better publicity, honestly,” he said. “Let them talk.” ICEBlock included a disclaimer that it was intended for “information and notification purposes only” and was “not to be used for the purposes of inciting violence or interfering with law enforcement.” Such measures may have staved off prosecution, but they haven’t prevented other kinds of attacks. Right-wing activists soon learned that Aaron’s wife, Carolyn Feinstein, was an auditor at the Justice Department. Andrew Wilson, an avowed paleoconservative who hosts a debate show on YouTube called “The Crucible,” shared on X the couple’s address and phone numbers. Trump’s self-proclaimed “loyalty enforcer,” Laura Loomer, chimed in, too. “This is yet another vetting failure by Pam Blondi,” she posted. “Carolyn Feinstein needs to be FIRED from the DOJ immediately.”

Two days later, on July 18th, Feinstein received a termination notice. The letter cited “lack of candor,” even though she had informed the government that she was married to Aaron and held a share in the company that ICEBlock was registered to (a precaution in case something happened to her husband). Aaron told me that Feinstein had played no role in the development of the app and had never downloaded it. He described her as scrupulous and hardworking. “They couldn’t get to me, so they got to my wife.”

A week later, a deliveryman showed up at the couple’s home with a pizza. The name on the order was Theodora Kaczynski—a female version of the Unabomber. “It was an obvious ‘We know where you live’ kind of thing,” Aaron said. Soon, the couple was receiving deliveries from slice shops across the city. “It was an entire day of just pizza after pizza after pizza.”

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration’s expansion of immigration enforcement inside American cities brought even more attention to Aaron’s app. That summer, teams of ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers were sent to Los Angeles, where, by the end of August, they arrested more than five thousand immigrants. ICEBlock reached a million users that month, with more than ten thousand joining each day. Aaron spent long hours at his computer answering queries, fixing bugs, and releasing updates to serve his growing base. He was also working on a version for Android, the operating system immigrants tend to use. “Whenever this Administration says ‘ICE-tracking apps,’ we know they’re talking about ICEBlock,” he told me. “They just stopped using the name, because they realized that, the more they do, the bigger it gets.”

Before sunrise on September 24th, a twenty-nine-year-old gunman with a bolt-action rifle climbed onto the roof of an immigration attorney’s office in Dallas and began firing rounds at the city’s ICE headquarters, a two-story building across the street. Bullets sprayed its walls and windows and pierced a van carrying a group of shackled immigrants. Norlan Guzmán Fuentes, a landscaper from El Salvador, was fatally wounded. Miguel Ángel García, a housepainter from Mexico, was taken to a hospital, where he died five days later. His wife was about to give birth to their third child.

No law-enforcement officers were hurt, but the shooter, Joshua Jahn—who was found dead at the scene—had left behind notes indicating that the agents had been his intended targets. “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror,” one of the notes said. “To think, ‘is there a sniper with AP rounds on that roof?’ ” An unspent shell casing read, in dark-blue letters, “ANTI-ICE.”

Even though the shooting had occurred at a government building with a known address, officials began to claim that ICE-tracking apps, such as ICEBlock, had enabled Jahn’s actions. The day after the attack, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, wrote on X that Jahn had searched for apps that shared the locations of ICE agents. Marcos Charles, an ICE associate director, claimed that Jahn had actually used those apps, and blamed their creators and distributors for putting agents in danger. “It’s a casting call to invite bad actors to attack law-enforcement officers,” he said at a press conference that afternoon. “It’s no different than giving a hit man the location of their intended target.”

On September 30th, a few days after the attack, Loomer called out Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the heads of Apple and Google, for making such programs available. “The shooter who shot up ICE agents in Dallas, Texas was using an ICE tracking app,” she wrote on X. “Why are you going to very fancy dinners at the White House and kissing President Trump’s ass while also allowing for this type of lawlessness and criminal activity to take place in your App Stores?”

Two days later, Apple took down ICEBlock. A message on Aaron’s developer portal said that the company had received information from law enforcement which showed the app’s purpose was “to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.” Bondi was quick to take credit. She told Fox News that the Justice Department had “reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.”

At least four similar apps were axed in the following days, including Eyes Up, a platform that archived videos of arrests, raids, and abuses by immigration agents. Its creator, Mark Hodges, received the same message as Aaron, even though Eyes Up did not provide agents’ real-time locations. In both cases, Apple cited a rule that forbids discriminatory, defamatory, and mean-spirited content directed at “targeted groups” such as racial, religious, and sexual minorities.

Around the same time, Google removed from its Android store at least three apps that tracked immigration operations. The company told 404 Media that the apps were taken down because they publicized the location of a “vulnerable group” that had recently faced a violent attack. A couple of weeks later, Meta removed a Facebook page that published ICE sightings in Chicago. A company spokesman said the page had violated the platform’s policy on coördinated harm, which bans “outing the undercover status of law enforcement.”

The Administration’s treatment of immigration officers as a vulnerable group rests on claims that agents now face unprecedented threats. The day after the Dallas shooting, Trump issued a Presidential memorandum called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” (NSPM-7), which cited a thousand-per-cent increase in attacks on ICE officers and claimed that such acts of violence were not “a series of isolated incidents” but the “culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation.” The President called for a “new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies” and instructed the Justice Department to prosecute anyone involved to “the maximum extent permissible by law.” In a subsequent memorandum to federal prosecutors, which was leaked to the press, Bondi wrote that “rampant criminal conduct rising to the level of domestic terrorism” included “organized doxing of law enforcement.”

In November, after months of refusing to release hard numbers, D.H.S. reported that there had been two hundred and thirty-eight assaults on ICE officers between January 21st and November 21st, up from nineteen during the same period the previous year. A number of factors likely contributed to the increase. ICE announced that it hired twelve thousand officers last year, more than doubling the department’s operational workforce. The agency waived age limits for new recruits, relaxed its vetting process, and decreased the training period for incoming officers. Its agents were instructed to shift their focus from immigrants with criminal records to anyone who might be in the country illegally. By mid-October, ICE had carried out around a hundred thousand “at-large” arrests—in homes and public spaces, at worksites—more than in any year of the first Trump Administration.

Even so, when reporters at the L.A. Times analyzed court records in Chicago, San Diego, Portland, Los Angeles, and D.C.—cities where the Trump Administration had conducted mass raids or deployed the National Guard—they found only a twenty-six-per-cent increase in complaints of attacks against federal law enforcement. ICE and Border Patrol agents were presumed the victims in about sixty per cent of cases. Most of the incidents had not resulted in physical injuries; in some cases, prosecutors charged people for assaulting agents with such weapons as a tambourine, an umbrella, and a Subway sandwich. Multiple defendants, however, appeared to have been hurt in the altercations. In Los Angeles, Jonathon Redondo-Rosales was charged with assault for smacking an agent with a hat after a car struck him. In Chicago, Marimar Martinez was accused of ramming her car into a Border Patrol vehicle, despite video evidence suggesting the officer swerved his car into hers; an agent subsequently shot her five times. Since Trump returned to the White House, more than forty people have died in encounters with ICE or while in the agency’s custody, but no deportation officers have been killed on duty since ICE was created, in 2003.

According to documents obtained through open-records requests by Property of the People, a transparency nonprofit, the Trump Administration has launched a concerted effort to suggest that immigration officers are facing heightened risks. “Everyone from federal agents to beat cops have been inundated with dubious safety alerts,” Ryan Shapiro, the organization’s director, told me. The New Yorker reviewed more than a dozen unclassified documents about ICE-tracking apps, many of them created by fusion centers—intelligence hubs created after 9/11 to share information about criminal and terrorist threats. Some of the earliest reports focus on People Over Papers, a map that allowed users to anonymously submit ICE sightings. Unlike reports on ICEBlock, posts tended to feature detailed information about each incident, including photographs and videos. Last February, the Vermont Intelligence Center concluded that “malicious actors seeking to cause harm to law enforcement and immigration officers” could use initiatives such as People Over Papers to carry out attacks.

The first government documents that Shapiro obtained about ICEBlock attempted to establish a connection between the application and assaults on immigration agents. On July 23rd, the F.B.I. issued a report about ICEBlock that cited two recent attacks against D.H.S. facilities in Texas which the department had attributed to violent extremists. During a Fourth of July protest outside an Alvarado detention center, at which demonstrators were setting off fireworks, an assailant fired a gun, wounding a police officer. A few days later, a young man shot at a Border Patrol building in McAllen, injuring one employee and two officers. The Bureau’s D.C. office lacked “specific reporting regarding the current use of ‘ICEBlock,’ ” but it was concerned about “the combination of rising violence and capabilities of the application.”

Scarlet Kim, a senior attorney at the A.C.L.U. who reviewed the documents, told me that the connection was spurious. “The government is not substantiating those concerns of safety threats with actual threats,” she said. “They point here and there to attacks on facilities, but they have in no way connected the apps to those attacks.”

Intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have also repeatedly raised concerns that tracking apps could be used to dox immigration agents—which, according to a D.H.S. analysis, carried the “downstream threat of violence by violent opportunists or domestic violent extremists.” Traditionally, doxing refers to the release of someone’s personal information—a home address or phone number—with the intent to intimidate or to encourage others to retaliate. Facts about law-enforcement officers, such as their names, badge numbers, and work license plates, don’t typically qualify. Nor does the location of on-duty agents, or recordings of them in public spaces. Even if sharing such information could be considered doxing, Kim said, it would be protected by the First Amendment, unless it fell within a narrow exception, such as an incitement to violence. “These documents suggest that government officials should be particularly immune from doxing, but that’s just not true,” she told me. “To the contrary, the power that officials exercise makes it even more important that people be free to publish information about them.”

Yet immigration agents now routinely wear masks, drive unmarked cars, and refuse to identify themselves. At the same time, they use advanced technology to profile migrants and protesters, including an app built by Palantir that helps to locate potential deportation targets and to determine which neighborhoods to raid.

“Agency responses to ICE-tracking apps are illustrative of a broader drive to target even the most mundane forms of anti-ICE organizing and pro-immigrant sentiment as extremism and terrorism,” Shapiro told me. An F.B.I. report from November shows that the agency pursued dozens of investigations into perceived threats against immigration enforcement, more than a quarter of which were classified as domestic terrorism. Separately, it was conducting NSPM-7 domestic-terrorism investigations in twenty-seven cities. When I asked Shapiro if he foresaw the government opening terrorism investigations into developers such as Aaron, he said, “It’s a near-certainty that it’s already happening.”

Some activists have found creative ways to continue providing a platform for reports on ICE. People Over Papers, which was taken down from the Padlet platform following pressure from Loomer, now functions as a progressive web app—users can add it to their home screens and receive notifications as they would on a normal application, without having to go through an app store. More than five hundred thousand people have signed up. Other platforms, such as Eyes Up, are still accessible as traditional websites. The government, in turn, is searching for new ways to shut these services down. “Some of the websites have publicly available source code under an open-source license, allowing them to easily be replicated or copied,” another F.B.I. report from November warned. The Bureau called for greater collaboration with technology companies to “remove websites or applications that pose a public-safety risk.”

ICEBlock, on the other hand, is now available only to users who had downloaded it before it was deleted by Apple. Aaron told me that the program’s design and large user base have made it all but impossible to turn ICEBlock into a progressive web app. “I would rather fight it out in the courts in the hopes that we can get it reinstated and declared protected speech, rather than try to bring a half-assed solution to the market that will end up hurting people,” he said.

On December 8th, Aaron filed a lawsuit against Bondi, Homan, Noem, and Lyons. The complaint alleges that the pressure they put on Apple to remove ICEBlock violated the First Amendment, which prohibits officials from “coercing private entities to suppress disfavored expression.” It also holds that their threats against Aaron were designed to chill his speech and to deter others, such as CNN, from amplifying or facilitating it. The federal district court of D.C. has been asked to declare those actions illegal and to forbid government officials from threatening, investigating, or prosecuting Aaron and from pressuring Apple or any other distributor of ICEBlock to block the application.

The case could have wide-ranging consequences on efforts to document and track the activities and abuses of immigration agents. If Aaron is successful, the court will set a precedent that will not only protect him but may also shield other activists and developers from censorship and prosecution. (On February 11th, Hodges, the creator of Eyes Up, along with the founder of the Chicago-sightings Facebook page similarly sued Bondi and Noem for violating their First Amendment rights.

Earlier this month, the government requested that Aaron’s lawsuit be dismissed, largely on the ground that he had failed to show that officials had coerced Apple into taking down his app. A judge has yet to decide whether the case will proceed. “I can’t control what they are going to try to do,” Aaron told me. “I will fight to my death against it, but I will not live in fear. If you’re afraid, they win.” ♦

There are certain hand-wavy ways in which one can dispel an image’s strangeness. Confronted with something weird, you could call it “dreamlike,” “surreal,” or, if you’re feeling lofty, “visionary.” These designations are, first and foremost, vague. (Whose dream, exactly, is it like?) But the terms also function as thought-terminating clichés, short-circuiting the magic of the work itself. The œuvre of the fifty-five-year-old Norwegian photographer Torbjørn Rødland has been described using all of the above words, but none of them capture his pictures’ flummoxing, beguiling mélange of romanticism, humor, spirituality, sex, horror, glamour, and poignancy. In fact, Rødland would prefer that we don’t attempt to pin down his work with explanations at all. “I think this is a big difference between artists and non-artists. Non-artists, they hate when they don’t understand something. But for artists, if we see something and we don’t fully understand it, it’s a gift,” he told me recently.

“In a Norwegian Landscape 17,” 1995.Courtesy STANDARD (OSLO)

“Banana Black,” 2005.Courtesy Nils Stærk

Rødland has spent most of his life bridling against expectations. He grew up in Stavanger, a city known for its oil industry, without much in the way of exposure to the arts. “I saw some Munchs and some Ernst collages, and I also remember listening on the radio to some sort of pathetic painters and having an ironic teen-age reaction to how they spoke about their work,” he recalled. An avid draftsman from an early age, Rødland was able to parlay his sardonic streak into a career as an editorial cartoonist and illustrator, beginning at a local city paper when he was just sixteen. But his cartoons, and some early stabs at photography, were not enough to get him into a local art school. After his application was rejected, he told me, “I talked to the director, and he said I would never be an artist.”

After a detour studying the humanities, he was admitted to the National College of Art and Design, in Bergen, which housed the country’s pioneering institute for the study of photography. There, he was exposed to the vanguard practices of German and American photography in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, which took a hip, self-aware approach to image-making. A professor impressed upon him that embracing this contemporary mind-set was the only way to shake off the shackles of the stodgy, overly Romantic work that had made him sneer as a teen. “Poetic realism is completely dead,” Rødland remembers being told.

“Church Rope,” 2024-26.Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

“Tar and Feather No. 2,” 2008-26.Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Ever the contrarian, Rødland decided to forge a middle path. His first mature photographs made during his university years revisited Scandinavian Romanticism—typified by the stormy, sublime landscapes of painters such as Johan Christian Dahl—with a sly spin. In the pictures, which were collectively titled “In a Norwegian Landscape,” Rødland places himself in a series of preposterously beautiful scenes of pristine Nordic nature. A long-haired, black-clad figure, occasionally toting a plastic grocery-store bag, he appears less the lonely Romantic hero in the grip of awe and more a modern man in a possibly vain search for the sincere. Rødland told me that he views his work as a kind of “reënchantment project”; like some kind of media-savvy, post-modern Nietzsche, he hoped that his images could open up space for the mythological in a culture sorely lacking it, all while avoiding the perils of cheesiness, sentimentality, and cliché.

You would be right to think that this sounds like the delusional grandiosity of an undergraduate. Nevertheless, I’d argue that Rødland has achieved something not far from his initial goal. The works for which he has now become widely known are near-editorial pictures that roil beneath their glossy surfaces with archetypal feelings that have yet to find a name. Who could forget a picture, which graced the cover of Artforum more than a decade ago, of an uncannily adult baby staring sagaciously into the lens, its hand placed gingerly over its heart in a gesture that looks like reverence? Similarly seared into my brain is an image of a partially peeled banana with the phallic fruit painted glistening black; a blond-haired child stretching to take a bite of a hanging apple whose flesh has been penetrated all over with silver coins, and drips with a thick strand of honey; a person’s hand seen in closeup, wrapped in an amorous embrace with an octopus tentacle that vanishes up the human’s sleeve. I could go on. Maybe the photographs are not quite mythic, but they have a way of burrowing into your unconscious like few art works can these days, as visual culture seems in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own banal profusion. Maurizio Cattelan, who also wielded a banana with profound memetic effectiveness, is one of the few other artists whose work has this kind of stickiness, but his recent sculptures have leaned more on the public’s appetite for stunts, whereas Rødland plumbs more mysterious depths.

Rødland’s new show, which is currently on view at the David Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea, finds him experimenting with a fresh set of tools and unearthing old, unseen work. A majority of the photographs on display are recent pictures shot with a vintage 35-mm. Rollei 35S, an uncharacteristically low-res format for the artist. Rødland told me that he woke up one morning a few years ago and found himself “thirsty for grain,” owing in part to the advent of A.I.-image-generation models, which Rødland noticed could mimic the kind of high-fidelity, goopy tactility that defined much of his older work.

But the tone of the new pictures also suggests a return to the Romanticism that rankled him in his youth, or at least a lighter, less conflicted touch. Here, Rødland shows us a sweeping French landscape featuring a gnarled tree perched atop a poppy-dotted hill or an image of a woman playing the viola by a placid pond, whose title, “Tavener’s The Lamb,” references a piece by the British composer John Tavener which is adapted from a poem by William Blake. This is not to say that Rødland has gone soft, exactly, though the show does include two tender shots of his own young children. Rather, he is responding to an ambient visual environment in which these kinds of quiet photographs are increasingly out of place. And he has not banished the strange entirely. Take, for instance, a scene featuring a woman in a kind of avant-garde milkmaid ensemble confronting a monstrously tall figure that, upon close examination, is actually a child perched atop a man’s shoulders, wearing a long trench coat.

“Arms,” 2008.Courtesy STANDARD (OSLO)

“The First Curtain,” 2024-26.Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Tucked away in the back of the exhibition is a collection of older work, a series of larger, high-res images featuring people in various states of undress. In contrast to the 35-mm. pictures, these works are plainly confrontational: a woman wielding a gigantic, hyper-realistic dildo, with which she has apparently violated an apple pie; a muscly youth who has been tarred and feathered; a statue of one of the three wise men, hands outstretched, receiving a woman’s naked bottom, which glows in the light. Taken alongside his other recent photography, this turn to the flesh might be seen as a complementary probing of the same impulse: When faced with a glut of A.I. slop, how do you break through and truly touch your audience? Whereas the intimate, snapshot-style images call us to bask in the anachronistic warmth of the analog, the profane photographs beckon toward the messy pleasures of the body.

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The Washington Roundtable examines the potential for a “blue wave” in the 2026 midterms. The hosts are joined by Morris Katz, a twenty-six-year-old Democratic political strategist for Zohran Mamdani, and Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine. Katz argues that for the Party to win a historic majority in the next election, it needs to embrace outsider candidates who refuse money from corporate PACs and aren’t “apologetic” about the government’s role in people’s lives. “We can run a campaign that says, ‘Donald Trump said he’d end forever war and lower costs and he hasn’t’—that will be successful,” Katz says. “I think even more successful would be that we are going to end forever wars, and we are going to lower costs by taking on monopolies—by taking on price gouging, by raising wages, by taxing billionaires more.”

This week’s reading:

“​​Donald Trump Is Breaking Up with Europe,” by Susan B. Glasser

“How the War in Iran Became a Race to Stabilize the Global Economic Order,” by Sudarsan Raghavan

“A Former Prisoner of the Iranian Regime Watches Trump’s War,” by Jason Rezaian

“The Distant Promise of Iran’s Would-Be King,” by Azadeh Moaveni

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Fantasies take many forms, including ones closely based on reality. An example is “Yes,” the Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s furious and grotesque satire of Israeli life—or, properly speaking, the lives of Jewish Israelis—in the wake of the October 7th attacks. Lapid’s frenzied and disgusted vision emerges as he follows the fortunes of a young Tel Aviv couple—a jazz pianist known only as Y (Ariel Bronz), pronounced “yud,” and a dancer named Yasmine (Efrat Dor). At the start of the movie, little suggests their artistic background: they’re working as sexy disco clowns at a big outdoor party for the rich and the politically connected. Yasmine bops from guest to guest, flinging her arms around them and planting kisses on their lips, while Y crawls around, sucks on a dildo, stands up and pounds an electric keyboard, and gets his head dunked in gooey vats of pink and green goo. He feigns drowning, Yasmine strips to a bikini to save him, and he spits up an orange Ping-Pong ball. Then the couple find themselves facing off against an I.D.F. commander (Rodia Kozlovski) in a so-called song battle: the officer roars “Love Me Tender” while Y goes nuts to the Eurodance hit “Be My Lover.” The party’s decadent chaos gets its meaning nailed to the screen at the end of the scene, with a glimpse of an art book showing George Grosz’s satirical 1926 painting “Pillars of Society”—a repulsive mockery of Weimar Germany’s militaristic bourgeoisie.

But where Grosz targets only the vain and prosperous, Lapid puts his struggling bohemians at the heart of corruption. The party concludes with sex work—Y and Yasmine go home with a rich, middle-aged woman and service her with their tongues in her ears. Delighted with the results, the woman invites them to a gathering on a yacht to celebrate Israeli Independence Day. There, Y runs into an acquaintance named Avinoam (Sharon Alexander), now cynically working as an Army P.R. rep, who connects him with a Russian Jewish oligarch (Aleksey Serebryakov). The oligarch offers Y a lucrative job: setting to music “an anthem for the victory generation,” a bloodthirsty text celebrating Israel’s war on Gaza. (Sample lyrics: “Destroy, destroy. . . . Exterminate. . . . There will be nothing left.”) Y takes the job and, as he immediately foresees, loses his soul.

Yasmine and Y live in a modest but airy apartment with their infant son, Noah, whom they adoringly sing to and dance with. This playful and bouncy family dynamic is, oddly, at the center of “Yes,” in that Y’s dramatic pivot to active complicity with ideas and actions that he finds repugnant arises from an impulse that is both philosophical and paternal. In a meandering monologue, he outlines a cynical, speculative paradox that mixes vague autobiographical memories with despair at the idea of his baby boy growing up in an Israel that seems to have no future. Recalling that his adolescent rebellion took the form of a thunderous “no,” Y now thinks that the more courageous form of revolt is to say “yes.” He teaches Noah that those are the only two words in the world, that the Mediterranean seductions of Israeli life (weather, sea, agriculture) are irresistible, and that there’s nothing to do but submit. “Submission is happiness,” Y tells his son, and attempts to demonstrate the truth of this by accepting the anthem commission in willful defiance of his own values.

Those humanistic and critical values are, for Y, not merely some abstract doctrine but a vital aspect of his identity. They are the ideals of his late mother, with whom he was very close and whose voice echoes in his head throughout, as he recalls her stern judgments of Israel’s policies and her resistance to its militarism. When he was a young music-conservatory student, she urged him to join an Army band in order to avoid active military service—telling him, approximately, “Let the neighbor’s child get killed.” Furthermore, Y’s grief over his mother’s death turns out to have been a crucial factor in bringing him and Yasmine together. He fears what his mother would say about his choice: he imagines her unleashing a storm of rocks upon him from the sky; when the Independence Day yacht almost capsizes, he sees evidence of her supernatural reproach. But none of this stops him from plunging into his own moral and political degradation, capitulating to the moral nullity that he sees all around him in public displays of patriotic pomp and in quiet private avowals of bloodlust.

Y shouldn’t need a judgment from the beyond to show him the way; if his eyes and ears were open, he’d find a moral compass at home. When he exultantly tells Yasmine about his commission and shows her the text he is to set, she is calmly but unambiguously dubious. Yet his enthusiasm runs roughshod over any doubt, and it’s hardly a spoiler to say that his decision imperils his marriage. In his turmoil, he reconnects with a former partner, a woman named Lea (Naama Preis), to whom he bares his soul before it’s gone. In this way, Lapid keeps the emotional aspect of Y’s self-defilement at the forefront of the drama. And inextricable from this personal crisis is a crisis of a different sort: whether it’s bearable to live in Israel and transmit to one’s child an Israeli identity. The drama gives the question of emigration a radical twist: could effacing one’s own past free the next generation from compromise and complicity?

When discussing “Yes,” it’s irresistible to go into extensive detail, because Lapid keeps the movie whirling at a vertiginous pace, packing the screen with action and the soundtrack with talk, music, and noise. He uses the camera mimetically, jerking and gyrating and plunging and dashing to keep up with all the physical activity and hectic states of mind. The two main characters are relentlessly perky, and everyone they meet seems to burst with energy and purpose, expressing themselves in dialogue that’s by turns confrontational, confessional, exuberant, agonized, ribald, and sententious. The pace of observation is furious, and even simple plot points are crosshatched with micro-incidents, asides, and gestures that overflow the boundaries of a screenplay and spill out into life at large.

That delirious excess befits the essence of Lapid’s method, which is a fusion of fiction with indigestibly and irreducibly nonfictional elements. That method was also evident in his previous feature, “Ahed’s Knee” (2021), in which a filmmaker (likewise referred to as Y) confronts censorship in Israel’s cultural bureaucracy while contending with his mother’s grave illness. (The next film Y is planning, meanwhile, is about a real-life incident: a young Palestinian woman’s act of protest and an Israeli official’s statement that he wishes she’d been shot.) And Lapid’s preceding movie, “Synonyms” (2019), was about a young man named Yoav—starts with “Y”—who, intending to shed his Israeli identity, moves to Paris, which is where Lapid now lives. By comparison with these films, Lapid’s approach to both fantasy and nonfiction in “Yes” is far freer. Much that’s memorable in the new movie is nonfictional in an ordinary, baseline, yet therefore all the more startling way. Biking in the city, Y passes through a tunnel adorned with an enormous Israeli flag; walking at night, he’s in the presence of a crowd that’s exulting to a band’s performance, streamed on an enormous screen, of a patriotic song. Travelling from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea in search of meditative solitude, Y passes a wall that divides Israeli from Palestinian territory, goes through a checkpoint, drives on a road for (he says) Jewish drivers only, and passes a prison where, he says, a thousand Palestinian people are being held captive.

The very core of the movie—the song that Y is to set—likewise bears the crucial stamp of nonfiction. In a prologue and an epilogue, Lapid emphasizes that it’s a found object, based on a 1947 song that, after the October 7th attacks, was “distorted” into a rant of hate and vengeance; lest we doubt this, he includes an actual published video of children singing the song. The use of a prologue is noteworthy, and similar to the way that Lapid began “Ahed’s Knee” with news accounts of the incidents on which that movie was based. The fictions of both films are factually contextualized from the start. But “Yes” differs from “Ahed’s Knee” in that it also contains a sort of documentary, one that’s integrated more tangibly into the drama and, for that reason, less responsibly.

Y calls Lea, his ex, who drives over to pick him up near the Dead Sea. After a meal at a hotel, he urges her to go west, to the border with Gaza. There, they get advice from a soldier, who tells them where they can get a clear view of the Israeli strikes—a place appallingly called the Hill of Love. Y climbs it and looks out, seeing large clouds of smoke rise while gunfire and explosions resound in the distance; it’s death in real time. The inclusion of such a scene with a fictional character standing before it is a breach of decency that reflects the general limits of “Yes”: the limits of form. The moment demands, instead, that people stand there and speak in their own names—whether the actor Bronz, breaking character, or Lapid himself, breaking the narrative context, or both, in order to enfold in the very form of the movie the enormity, the incommensurability, of the documentary reality.

Incorporating the real-life war in the movie’s fictional setting brought to mind another recent film about Israel’s war on Gaza, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” by the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, in which an actual recording of a child from Gaza who was trapped in a car under siege by Israeli forces is integrated into a dramatization of representatives at Palestine’s emergency-services offices who spoke with her and recorded the call. In both films, the effect is of a diminution, a depersonalization—not to say, a desecration of the experience of horror that the documentary element embodies. (My colleague Justin Chang, reviewing Ben Hania’s film, criticized its “roughshod mistreatment of primary material.”)

It’s all the more striking, in “Yes,” because Lapid also constructs a brilliant, moving, and thoughtful scene by which to approach the horrors endured by Israelis during the October 7th attacks. Lea, it turns out, became an official Army propagandist after the attacks, and her duties involve issuing, to international media, accounts of the atrocities that were inflicted on Israeli victims. At Y’s insistence, she tells him about them as they drive. The scene is all talking, much of it of Lea in closeup, and it’s written and performed with wide-ranging awareness and complex motives and emotions. The litany of horrors is also a horror of litanies: the authentic pain of the victims is both contained and debased in the propagandistic digest, in the professional way in which it is dispensed—along with Lea’s self-questioning about her role in disseminating it. Here, Lapid achieves a remarkable balance: Lea’s monologue about realities and representations simultaneously dignifies traumatic experience and critiques the packaging of trauma. And yet, in the scene on the Hill of Love, Lapid offers no self-questioning, no sense of cinematic exertion or trouble, in the fictional framing of the real agonies of Gaza.

The film’s failures of form fall on both sides of the fiction and nonfiction divide. “Yes” is a daring, angry, anguished rant that feels first person in every aspect except the cinematic one; it must have taken ropes to keep Lapid from leaping out of the director’s chair and popping up in front of the camera. If so, I wish he’d followed his impulses—and that he’d granted his actors a similar freedom to speak in their own names, too. The fiction of “Yes” is so intense, so persuasive, so affecting that metafictional breaches in the fourth wall would not have risked diminishing its power. The delineation of Y’s relationships with Yasmine and Lea—the wife, free-spirited and hedonistic yet clear and decisive, and the ex, personally compromised but far more morally probing—suggests a novelistic insight. (The enduring melancholy of the exes’ long-ago breakup emerges in the movie’s most freely joyful scene: a spontaneous, comedic duet at a hotel-restaurant piano.) On the other hand, Lapid is so intent on expressing himself, as if in his own voice, through the consistent and closed-off force of fiction that he neglects his characters, leaving their psychology thin—nowhere more than in Y’s crucial pivot, embracing all that he reviles.

Y asserts that his ambition was to be the “heaviest” Israeli pianist; instead, long before political debasement beckoned, he had already become a clown in his own eyes. This is revealed deep into the movie, when Yasmine is trying to free him from the commission, and encourages him to return to playing jazz piano. His response is that it’s pathetic to play to, as he puts it, thirty people bobbing their heads. He says that they were miserable then—because they were poor. He declares that his motive for taking the commission is just money. But that explanation falls far short of what’s already stated in his “yes” monologue and implied in the twisted arc of his career: the self-abasement, self-betrayal, and self-loathing of Y’s clowning led him to accept a commission that he despises.

“Yes” asserts that there is no essential difference between yes and no when living in a compromised place that lives by lies. It proposes that, if even living in Israel involves a certain complicity, then there may even be an underlying honesty, however perverse, in unflinchingly embracing that complicity. The fantastic story is a metaphor, a thought experiment: about giving up, voluntarily, everything that gave life meaning and then seeing if your life still has meaning; about acting against your deepest impulses and convictions to find out whether you remain yourself. In considering the nature of Israeli identity, it confronts identity itself. The movie’s rage is righteous, its symbols profound. It is hard to imagine a fiction film that could rise to the severe aesthetic demands of its enormous subjects, but “Yes” is the rare film that challenges the cinema at large to try. ♦

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Thousands of federal prosecutors have been fired or have resigned from their roles since Pam Bondi took over as Attorney General. She has made no secret of weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue Donald Trump’s vendettas. One of those prosecutors is Troy Edwards, who quit a senior national-security position in the Eastern District of Virginia. As an assistant U.S. attorney in D.C., Edwards had won convictions against members of the Oath Keepers for January 6th-related offenses. Edwards is also the son-in-law of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, and, when the Justice Department indicted Comey on grounds widely seen as flimsy, Edwards knew he had reached his red line. (The charges were quickly dismissed, though without prejudice.) The New Yorker’s legal correspondent Ruth Marcus talks with Edwards about his decision to leave, how he broke it to his family, and why he thinks other prosecutors should not follow his lead.

Further reading:

• “Pam Bondi’s Contempt for Congress,” by Ruth Marcus
• “The Flimsy, Dangerous Indictment of James Comey,” by Ruth Marcus
• “Pam Bondi’s Power Play,” by Ruth Marcus

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