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Forest Whitaker’s “Waiting to Exhale” is perhaps the quintessential “chick flick”—and an ideal case study for all that the cinematic subgenre can do. The “chick flick” often concerns heroines in the midst of personal transformation, and it’s capacious enough to enfold romantic comedies (“You’ve Got Mail”), tragedies (“The Notebook”), friendship fables (“Beaches”), and mother-daughter dramedies (“Terms of Endearment”). Its conventions are cosmic: the serendipitous, life-altering “meet-cute” is sometimes a literal collision, if not a metaphorical one, and chance encounters have a way of adding up. Well-placed songs provide relief; mood and weather mix, as in “Moonstruck.” “Exhale,” about four women friends who support one another through a series of interpersonal crises, fits in the matrilineal musing, the music, the camaraderie, the pathetic fallacy—when one character finally ends her sexual dry spell, rain falls in the desert. These movies show women exploring their options, taking steps to pursue goals and love connections. In Whitaker’s film, the protagonists are in different stages of nursing grief and developing new relationships. Because change is an act fraught with anxiety and confusion, the quartet spends the movie processing with one another, rhapsodizing, backsliding, and searching for moments to release—to let themselves breathe.

In February, New York’s Metrograph theatre hosted the Divorced Women’s Film Festival, screening “Waiting to Exhale” along with other cinematic depictions of dissolution, including “The Age of Innocence,” “The First Wives Club,” and “The War of the Roses.” Haley Mlotek, the program’s curator and the author of a book on the sociocultural impact of no-fault divorces, explained that the movies she chose “are classics not because they are reflections of life, exactly, but because they can be visions of our feelings.” Her selections center on women with emotional foresight who are also on the cusp of realizing what they truly want. As a divorced woman in her mid-thirties who was about to make a career pivot, I could relate to those characters in flux. I went to see “Waiting to Exhale” just after Valentine’s Day.

When “Exhale” premièred, thirty years ago today, I was six, and far too young to watch it, so I experienced it as a mystery of language and gesture and unspoken reference. Then, the film’s milieu was my mother’s: full of romantic crosstalk, long-distance phone calls, rueful rhythm and blues, and the kinds of brilliantly made-up faces I associated with Fashion Fair Cosmetics, where she was a counter manager. In the interim between her years as a thirtysomething and mine, the movie has existed as an artifact of the relatively edgy “it’s the” nineties, and, owing to its Grammy-winning, multiplatinum soundtrack, a hallmark in the history of tie-in marketing. Babyface, who produced the album and wrote or co-wrote all but one of its songs, did so after reading the screenplay; an intergenerational all-star cast of soul, R. & B., and pop acts like Houston, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan, Brandy, and TLC, underscores the narrative.

Adapted from Terry McMillan’s best-selling 1992 novel of the same name, “Exhale” is equal parts “women’s picture,” a.k.a. weepie, Black women’s “chick flick,” and precursor to sitcoms like “Girlfriends” and “Insecure.” The film, which inaugurated a spate of adaptations of other McMillan novels, also marked a watershed moment in the representation of the Black professional class. The subject of talk-show chats, watch parties, and discussion dinners—organized and attended by the likes of Gayle King, no less—when it premièred, the film became as much a sociological phenomenon as an artistic one. In a 1995 story for the New York Times, the reporter Karen de Witt declared that “ ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ the movie, is rapidly proving to be ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ the event,” and quoted a woman who said, of the collective filmgoing experience, “This is our ‘Million Man March.’ ’’ As an adult, I’d rented and streamed the film alone; at Metrograph, I got to see it for the first time with other people.

“Exhale” begins with a radio d.j. chiding his listeners for being slow to determine their New Year’s resolutions. Then we hear the voices of four women making promises: to ignore her mother’s advice, to start a catering business, to “whip something” on an ex, to lose weight. The d.j. poses a question: “Do you know where you want to be tonight . . . and where do you want to be next year?” Savannah (Whitney Houston) is the first friend we see, driving along an empty highway, at precisely the moment she’s crossing state lines into Arizona. A voice-over imparts her inner monologue: “The deal is, the men in Denver are dead. No wonder I’m changing towns again. It’s gotta be better in Phoenix.” The desert vista stretches, its ochre sand shifting into a dissolve transition, and you can imagine Savannah as the lead in some kind of outlier Western: a drifter, she’s been shot down, bang-bang, but in Nancy Sinatra’s sense of the phrase. Chanté Moore’s “Wey U” plays on the radio, scoring a montage of the women’s physical and existential check-ins. We drop into their minds, too. Bernadine (Angela Bassett) is scattered, making a to-do list of all that needs to be done for her husband, John (Michael Beach), and their two young children. Robin (Lela Rochon) bemoans her attachment to the wrong men, while Gloria (Loretta Devine) sulks about missing quality time with her teen-age son, Tarik (Donald Adeosun Faison). The story follows the women over the course of a year, as they endure setbacks and entanglements of all sorts—but, ultimately, their romantic triumphs and disappointments are subordinate to the platonic bonds they share.

The film’s best-known set piece comes after John announces to Bernadine that he’s leaving her for his (white) bookkeeper, after she’d sacrificed her own dreams to help him with his company. Intent on payback, Bernadine strips all of his clothing from the closet and begins tossing them into his BMW, power-walking between the closet and the vehicle in just a robe and a negligee, carting each load of belongings in a child’s wagon. All the while, she recites a litany of domestic slights, revving herself up for the natural conclusion of this ugly expungement. Pantomiming John, she screams, “I need you to be the fuckin’ background to my foreground!” At the end of her soliloquy comes the coup de grâce: She strikes a match, lights a cigarette, and tosses a flame through the car’s sunroof, then observes the steaming pile of Italian suits and ties, a funeral pyre to an eleven-year marriage. She saunters off, leaving the fiery wreckage behind her. Whitaker’s blocking is sublime—it seals Bernadine’s shift from dutiful wife to a woman prioritizing her single self. When I watched that scene at Metrograph, the entire theatre clapped and cheered.

In a 2024 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Bassett said that the grandeur of that moment was inspired by her own mother. Over the decades, her interpretation of a woman scorned going scorched earth has found its way into the work of filmmakers such as Tyler Perry; unsurprisingly, it’s also become a meme. To my mind, this sequence initiated a new strain of American Kabuki theatre, one different from the dialled-up, campy performances of Bette Davis, in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” or Faye Dunaway, in “Mommie Dearest.” Bernadine’s strain of Black feminine righteous indignation and disappointment was also distinct from the often comical ferocity of the Blaxploitation heroine. It was less lyrical and more melodramatic than that of the women in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” which was adapted for PBS’s “American Playhouse” program in 1982, after its Broadway run. Nor did it resemble the upper-class animus of Dominique Deveraux (played by the inimitable Diahann Carroll) on “Dynasty,” or the maternal dressing-downs by Phylicia Rashad’s Clair Huxtable on “The Cosby Show.”

What that “Waiting to Exhale” scene did differently was this: it presented vernacular anger on an operatic scale; it was “Porgy and Bess” at the multiplex. It treated rage as something to be reclaimed. Bassett transmits the surreal shock of learning that her vows were spoken on shaky ground—and makes over-the-top seem properly modulated. That bold, extravagant sensibility has shown up ever since, in such films as Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman,” Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade,” and music videos by Kelis, Taylor Swift, Summer Walker, and Lily Allen. There were lots of movies about female revenge in the nineties, from “Thelma & Louise” to “Set It Off” to “Eye for an Eye,” but none conveyed that wrath in a way that felt as febrile and visceral. The shot of Bassett’s smoldering walk from the barbecued Beemer represents a dashed decade of the character’s yuppie (Buppie) aspirations. It became a crucial image in a taxonomy of feminine fury.

But the grandiosity of “Waiting to Exhale” ’s most famous moment overwhelms the movie’s subtle introspection. It’s only occurred to me on recent viewings, including that screening in February, just how thoughtful it is, and how intent its makers are on staging their characters’ contemplation. A few weeks before the Divorce series, I saw Kathleen Collins’s film “Losing Ground,” from 1982. It could have been on Mlotek’s list; in fact, it offers a kind of skeleton key to understanding an underrated aspect of “Exhale” ’s legacy. “Losing Ground,” one of the first feature films directed by a Black woman, is a rom-com about the foibles and discoveries of Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), a Black philosophy professor studying religious ecstasy and “ecstatic experience” one summer in New York. It’s a scintillating season: when she’s not in the library, she flirts with a fellow-aesthete, tries her hand at acting, and considers reconciling with her smug painter husband. Following Collins’s lead, Whitaker, McMillan, and her co-screenwriter Ronald Bass dramatized a cohort of women seeking ecstatic experiences of their own. How to live is a topic of constant discussion, and these conversations are the catalyst for the inching progress they make by the story’s end. It’s no coincidence that the film is bookended by New Year’s Eve celebrations, which naturally invite reflection. The closing scene, in which the four embrace as fireworks go off, punctuates all of this onscreen thinking with external action to match. Along with “Losing Ground,” “Exhale” belongs to a subgenre of intelligent women’s pictures about transitions: John Berry’s “Claudine,” John Sayles’s “Lianna,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Barbra Streisand’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces.” For at least one movie patron in 1995—the woman who mentioned the Million Man March in her Times interview—going to see “Exhale” was a proxy for political gathering. In 2025, it’s a reminder that lots of revolutions have to start somewhere internal first.

The state border that Savannah crosses at the start of “Waiting to Exhale” is the first of many dividing lines: an either-or choice between old habits and new ones. There’s a weird chime between that opening sequence and Houston’s last days, after she’d wrapped filming a “Sparkle” remake in Detroit, in late 2011. Flying would have brought her home to her norm too soon, so she chose to travel by car back to Atlanta, in order to extend the good feeling of working on something creative. I wonder what Houston thought about during that long drive, and what she envisioned for herself. “Waiting to Exhale” was the second in a series of blockbusters she appeared in, which represent only a sampling of what she could have done. Her filmography is peppered with what-ifs, including an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s “Tar Baby,” which she was set to star in back in the eighties. Her death a few months after that ride home meant an adaptation of “Getting to Happy,” McMillan’s “Exhale” sequel, could not move forward. Midway through the original film, during Gloria’s birthday party, the women sit around smoking, listening to Franklin’s contribution to the soundtrack, “It Hurts Like Hell,” and questioning one another about heartbreak and art. There’s an ashtray of stubbed butts on the coffee table. “Why do they write these damn songs?” Savannah asks. “To make you think and believe and dream you could feel like this?” ♦

In March, 2016, Peter Navarro introduced himself to students in Managing Geopolitical Risk in an Age of a Rising China, a new undergraduate course at the University of California, Irvine. Donald Trump was then a month away from becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for President. Navarro, who had tenure at the business school, was an academic oddity: he worked at a research university, but he’d done little serious research since finishing his doctorate in economics, at Harvard, thirty years earlier. And he didn’t seem to enjoy contact with students. A former friend of his, an economist, recently said, “I don’t think he liked teaching that much—he liked talking.” Navarro had secured a life of privilege and frustration. He lived in a big house in Laguna Beach with an ocean view and a pool surrounded by statuary. But he plainly yearned to be somewhere, or someone, else.

Professors often develop side hustles. But Navarro had long sought to trade his academic status for a more dazzling form of power—mayor of San Diego, stock guru, Democratic congressman, television host. He’d largely failed in these ambitions, thanks in part to traits he recognized in himself: he was arrogant, abrasive, and disdainful. “The problem was my personality,” Navarro wrote, in an account of his struggles as a political candidate. Although he once compared his charisma to Barack Obama’s, he knew that many who met him regarded him as an asshole. He was always getting into spats. Shortly before Navarro’s new course began, he sent an e-mail to John Graham, another U.C. Irvine professor, asking, “Are you frigging deaf, dumb, and blind?”

Navarro had first pitched his class in a mass e-mail to thirty thousand students. That spring, only seventeen had enrolled. The room could have held a hundred. “He was not a prominent professor,” one of the students who’d chosen to take the course recently recalled.

She remembers him as skinny and “a little bit on the shorter side.” Navarro, who is about five feet seven, was an avid cyclist, bodysurfer, and cold-bath plunger. Then as now, he resembled an agitated basketball coach: rolled-up sleeves, graying hair combed straight back from a tanned and taut face. Long drawn to language aimed at making mundane tasks sound muscular or militaristic, he instructed students to bring “laptop capability.”

Navarro had just published “Crouching Tiger,” his third book to describe China as an ugly threat to America and the world. The previous two, from 2006 and 2011, had portrayed China as an amoral economic force; the new one emphasized the country’s rising military ambitions. It was bluntly polemical—Chinese missiles were “designed to literally ram American satellites out of the sky”; a submarine base was “right out of a James Bond novel”—and it contained no evidence that Navarro could speak Chinese or had even visited China. Footnotes frequently cited op-eds and Wikipedia. The book was largely ignored. A “Crouching Tiger” account on Twitter attracted only a few dozen followers. When Navarro was challenged about his expertise in a testy Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, he replied, “Many of my experts . . . get much of their source material directly from the Chinese.” When comments dried up, Navarro asked, “any body out there????”

Yet, as Navarro’s student discovered, the class was the book. Each week, students discussed either “Crouching Tiger” or episodes of an accompanying documentary series that Navarro clearly hadn’t quite finished assembling. “We would watch these weird videos,” the student said. In addition to talking-head interviews, “there would be, like, ‘INSERT ANIMATION HERE’ ”; Navarro appeared in front of an unaltered green screen. The student wondered if she was enrolled in a book-marketing focus group. Not long after, the videos began to appear on YouTube.

Navarro’s teaching assistant, Ben Leffel, who had lived and worked in China, didn’t share Navarro’s geopolitical views. (Leffel, who now teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told me that he always saw Navarro as a charlatan drawn to “performative warmongering.”) Leffel tried to be a moderating influence—particularly on the many occasions when Navarro did not come to class—but the course remained yoked to “Crouching Tiger.” The student said that the class’s message was simple: “We have to be afraid of China.”

The final exam was held in early June, around the time that Navarro had what he has called a “surreal” experience. One morning, he has written, he walked down the hill from his home to Victoria Beach—“hallowed ground from where I would launch my paddle board and cruise out among the seals and dolphins.” He was expecting a call. Stephen Miller, who was then a thirty-year-old speechwriter for Trump and who now oversees the federal government’s effort to terrorize people perceived to be undocumented immigrants, wanted to talk. Navarro wrote, “As I sat down in the sand hoping that my cell phone reception would hold, the key thing that kept popping into my mind was how close I was to power—yet, in tiny Laguna Beach, so far away.”

Navarro likes to say that he was one of only three senior advisers to serve Trump from his first campaign to the end of his first term. The others he identifies are Miller and Dan Scavino, who is now a deputy chief of staff. In the taxonomy of political sidekicks, Navarro, who advises on trade, isn’t a carrier of darkly destructive principles, like Miller. Nor is he a natural political fixer. And he can’t be described as a persuasive orator. His frequent TV appearances—where he tends to be uninterruptible, while gesturing with his index and pinkie fingers extended, like Paulie Walnuts on “The Sopranos”—can be off-putting even to allies. His friend Stephen Bannon, the former White House adviser turned broadcaster, once cut off Navarro’s microphone to break his flow.

Navarro’s role is that of mad-professor hype man: the President’s economics mascot. As Navarro, referring to Trump, has put it, “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right.” Navarro’s position gives him moments of extraordinary influence on the world economy, even as it has left him ample time to pursue personal projects, including a memoir published this fall. Of Navarro’s fifty or so posts on X in October, one was about the government shutdown, one was a photograph of the Washington Monument, one referred to the Dodgers, and the rest promoted his new book.

“It works because he’s a Letterboxd guy, she’s a Strava girl, the in-laws will be Facebook people, and we’re all living in a nightmare.”

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Larry Remer, who worked as a political consultant for Navarro in the nineties, told me that his former client’s “transcendent” personality trait was the certainty that he was underappreciated. That feeling is one of the forces holding Trump’s coalition together. When Trump’s first term began, Navarro had no reason to rethink his posture of resentment: he was given a second-rung title, as the director of a new entity called the National Trade Council, with a “buy American” focus; he was parked in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which he called an “outhouse”; he worked on unrequested memos (which he has called “guided missives”) that often cited his previous writings. But he survived, becoming the most conspicuous backer of the President’s long-held and false belief that the United States is being “ripped off” when it trades internationally. Navarro supported Trump’s theories in person, when he was invited to join him—he has claimed that it’s “a running joke between me and the President as to who figured out the problems with free trade first.” More frequently, he addressed Trump via Twitter, the Sunday news shows, and CNBC.

Before 2016, Navarro was largely unconnected to modern, Fox News-shaped Republican politics. He certainly wasn’t a true believer. His most notable political attachment of recent years had been to John Edwards, the former Democratic senator and Presidential candidate. (After Edwards dropped out, in 2008: “We’ve lost a good one.”) Nor was Navarro a lonely single-issue policy enthusiast looking for a political home. His hawkishness on China had been populist and intemperate, but it took the form of showy frustration about that country’s unpunished transgressions, not a rigorous proposal for American change. Navarro was open to all kinds of policy ideas. His own could sound silly or circular: make every country abide by free-trade norms; balance the federal budget; elect a President like Winston Churchill.

Navarro hadn’t even held a consistent view about the economic risks of imposing tariffs on another country’s goods in response to unfair trade practices. In his final years as a professor, a student could open The Power of Macroeconomics—a popular digital course that Navarro had recently updated—and read his warning that “trade wars are born” through “such retaliatory measures.” The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, Navarro noted, had “helped push the entire global economy into the Great Depression.” The same student could read “Death by China” (2011), in which Navarro complained that, ahead of any retaliatory tariff, “the Wall Street Journal will really try to scare us by referencing the role of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in triggering the Great Depression,” adding, “It’s all so much cow manure.” Even “Crouching Tiger,” which appeared in 2015, stopped short of full-throated support for tariffs against China, acknowledging that they would probably be inflationary and affect poorer Americans disproportionately. Navarro also wrote that any effective response to China required “global cooperation and coordination.”

Then Navarro started working for a man who thinks that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” and that tariffs are “the greatest thing ever invented.” He wholeheartedly backed Trump’s unilateral 2018 tariffs on China, which started a trade war. In time, Navarro learned to say “Democrat” Party, instead of “Democratic,” and to call Anthony Fauci an “absolutely evil” man allied with Chinese “Commies.” And, from a rally stage in North Carolina, Navarro packed disdain and boastfulness into the same two syllables: “When I was at Hah-vahd, getting my doctorate . . . ”

Long-term service to Trump requires both egomania and its opposite: self-annihilation. The man whom Navarro likes to call the Boss seems to value insincere, or bought, obeisance—the flapping and fussing of a maître d’—more than heartfelt fandom, which lacks the piquancy of humiliation. This work environment has clearly suited Navarro, whose sense of his own worth, though strong, seems to be divorced from allegiance to his own ideas, and who had long craved audiences of more than seventeen people. He was ready to do whatever.

His aggressive sycophancy in Trump’s first term foretold how everyone around the President would behave in the second. Navarro is the template for the Cabinet secretaries who now wait in line to flatter Trump in long, televised White House meetings. The new ubiquity of this stance seems likely to diminish the standing of the man who first perfected it. But, in a recent e-mail exchange, Navarro sounded sanguine about sharing the stage. This time, he told me, “everyone is pulling the oars in the same direction and the Boss has gotten more done in ten months than Presidents typically do in two terms.”

The intensity of Navarro’s obeisance, and his combativeness, has sometimes made him a figure of fun. Conservatives discovered that it was permitted—and surely cathartic—to disparage Navarro publicly, in language that they wouldn’t dream of using to describe the President himself. (Bannon has called criticism of Navarro “veiled attacks on President Trump.”) Lou Dobbs, interviewing Navarro on the Fox Business Network, once accused him of “peddling pablum.” Jared Kushner, who helped bring Navarro into the White House in 2016, has described him as eccentric and untrustworthy. Senator Rand Paul called him a “walking economic fallacy.” Elon Musk was still in Trump’s inner circle when, several months ago, he referred to Navarro as “dumber than a sack of bricks” for taking shots at Tesla amid his defense of widespread tariffs. Even Trump, whose character assessments tend to be uncomplicated, has reached for irony to evaluate Navarro. “He’s a little different,” Trump said, to laughter, at a signing event at the White House in 2020. “We have all types.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Navarro put on what he called his “Big Boy Harvard Researcher Pants” to help reassure the President that he’d actually won. That December, Navarro published the first of three pseudo-scholarly reports, filled with sophistry about voter fraud (drop boxes, mail-in ballots), to argue that Joe Biden’s decisive victory was likely illegitimate. A Washington Post analysis called the report possibly the most embarrassing document ever created by a White House staffer. Trump included a link to Navarro’s report in a tweet that ended, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Navarro later proudly claimed that his election-denying writings had underpinned a plan, led by Bannon and nicknamed the Green Bay Sweep, to have Congress block certification of the Electoral College vote, and so allow Republican-dominated state legislatures to cook up new slates of electors. The Green Bay Sweep became, in Navarro’s words, the “last, best chance to snatch a stolen election from the Democrats’ jaws of deceit.”

In 2022, Navarro disregarded a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Then, after ignoring a criminal subpoena to appear before a grand jury, Navarro was indicted on charges of contempt of Congress. He was convicted in 2023. The following March, Navarro—at the age of seventy-four—began a four-month sentence in a senior dorm at a federal prison camp in Miami.

This past January, six months after his release, Navarro returned to government, as a senior trade adviser. He wasn’t Vice-President—Bannon had promoted that idea on his podcast—nor was he atop a federal agency, with direct authority to enact policy. And he was back in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, not the White House, and had a staff of just four—or, as he put it to me, “a purposely lean team built for speed and efficiency.”

But he was still, arguably, the world’s most influential economist. He was an architect of the President’s “Liberation Day,” in April, which tore up existing trade agreements and set very high, and widely ridiculed, tariff rates on imports from allies and antagonists alike. Navarro hasn’t disclosed his exact role in those tariff calculations. “What happens in the White House Situation Room, stays in the White House Situation Room,” he told me. The tariff announcements, one part of this Administration’s remodelling of America into a rogue superpower, brought immediate confusion to the world economy, and dramatically raised the likelihood of domestic inflation and recession. “Tariffs are tax cuts,” Navarro told Fox News this spring. (They are not.) “Tariffs are jobs. Tariffs are national security. Tariffs are great for America. Tariffs will make America great again.”

I recently called Alan Lebowitz, who was an English professor at Tufts for nearly forty years, until his retirement, in 2006. In the early seventies, Lebowitz accepted Navarro into his undergraduate fiction-writing class. They became friends, and remained in fond contact into this century. In the acknowledgments in one of Navarro’s many books, he wrote that he was “eternally indebted” to his old teacher.

“I have to say that I am puzzled and saddened by where Peter is now,” Lebowitz told me. “This is not the Peter I knew. Let me tell you about the Peter I knew.” He described two novels Navarro wrote under his supervision, as an undergraduate. “One of them was called ‘Dope Opera,’ ” Lebowitz recalled. The books were “on the zany side, very verbally playful and adroit.”

According to Lebowitz, “Peter epitomized what was kind of lovable about the kids of that time. He wore his hair to his shoulders. I remember him in snow, walking barefoot.” (Later, according to a former friend, Navarro liked to joke that “there’s one difference between me and Bill Clinton—I inhaled.”) If Navarro appeared to be fully of his era, he kept a distance from the most pressing campus issue, the Vietnam War. Navarro later recalled, “I didn’t have the anger some people did. But I did have the skepticism.”

Lebowitz remembered once taking his young son, Michael, to Navarro’s apartment. “After dinner, Peter got his guitar out and sang folk songs,” he said. His son “was just enchanted.” The next morning, Navarro came by with a guitar for the child, saying that he had an extra one. “I don’t think it was an extra,” Lebowitz said. “You can see why I find it so strange to see where he is now.”

Lebowitz knew that Navarro’s father “had disappeared early.” This, Lebowitz felt, “had surely wounded him.” Albert Navarro had been a saxophonist and a clarinettist who worked as a music teacher and as a bandleader at resort hotels. Peter, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1949, was eight when Al Navarro and His Society Orchestra released an album of standards, including “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Around this time, Navarro’s parents divorced.

His father remarried, moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and had another family. Peter’s mother, Evelyn, settled in Palm Beach, Florida, with Peter and his older brother—a future commercial pilot—in what Peter has described as a garage apartment near the Kennedy compound. This puts it a few miles north of Mar-a-Lago. His mother was a secretary, and then a department manager, at a Saks Fifth Avenue. A family friend, a former marine with a Purple Heart, became a key paternal influence. The family later moved north; Peter was accepted at Tufts while attending high school in Bethesda, Maryland, where he’d perfected specialist skills as a football placekicker. (A kicker must accept that, thanks to his size difference and solitary training, he may not be embraced as a full member of the team.) In 2022, when Navarro griped that he’d been arrested by F.B.I. agents at a Washington, D.C., airport instead of being allowed to present himself at the Bureau’s headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue—in a criminal case about his refusal to keep exactly that kind of appointment—he noted that he lived so close to the F.B.I. office that he could have hit it with a football kicked from the deck of his apartment.

Lebowitz’s understanding was that Navarro had grown up with little money. He had secured a federally subsidized loan offered to students from lower-income families. In the nineties, when Navarro became a serial political candidate, he didn’t emphasize having risen from modest beginnings, as many such aspirants do. Nor did he invoke Palm Beach to discuss the particular experience of having been not rich in a very rich community—which, decades later, on a different scale, became his experience in Trump Administrations run by billionaires and half billionaires, including Trump, Musk, the Treasury Secretaries Scott Bessent and Steven Mnuchin, and the Commerce Secretaries Howard Lutnick and Wilbur Ross. Navarro’s reticence about his background may have reflected a protectiveness toward his mother, who later remarried and became wealthy enough to give him hundreds of thousands of dollars, which helped fund his political career. Mike Aguirre, a former San Diego city attorney and a onetime friend of Navarro’s, recently described that maternal bond as “the only sincere relationship I knew about” in Navarro’s life.

Soon after Navarro graduated from Tufts, in 1972, with an English degree, he flew to northeastern Thailand, as a Peace Corps teacher. He has described motorcycling through the countryside with “the humid air blowing through my hair while screaming out the lyrics to ‘We’re an American Band.’ ” Jim Jouppi, a Peace Corps contemporary in Thailand, lived about fifty miles from Navarro, who sometimes visited on weekends. Jouppi said recently, with slight disapproval, “If you wanted to get laid, you came to my province.” (Navarro denied this, saying that he didn’t remember Jouppi; he noted that, during “the height of the sexual revolution in America,” he “didn’t need a passport to find sex.”) In Jouppi’s memory, Navarro was “full of himself” but dashing, with an impressive head of hair. Decades later, as a federal prisoner, Navarro was disappointed to realize that he had to comb his hair without a mirror.

Before returning to the U.S., Navarro encountered members of the Chinese diaspora in Burma (now Myanmar) and elsewhere. “Many who I met were refugees from the Mao years and Chinese hunger games that killed millions,” he told me. After Navarro began writing about China, in 2006, some U.C. Irvine colleagues, including Ben Leffel, his T.A., doubted that he’d ever been to that country; his books and interviews included no personal recollections. When I asked Navarro about his history of travel to China, he at first deflected, saying that his “more relevant” experience had been in Burma and British Hong Kong. But Navarro later mentioned a “reconnaissance trip” to China, taken in 2006, that involved “leveraging my Peace Corps experience at traveling like a native.” (The same visit could also fairly be described as a vacation, taken with his wife.) After joining the Trump Administration, he visited China again, as a part of a government delegation. According to the Times, he and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin got into a “profanity-laced shouting match” in front of their Chinese counterparts.

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After the Peace Corps, Navarro returned to Boston. He brought Lebowitz some Thai art works that still hang on his dining-room wall. Navarro worked for a while at an energy-consulting firm in D.C., then began a master’s in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Lebowitz recalled that Navarro bought and renovated a three-story building in one of Cambridge’s more downscale neighborhoods. “He was very smart that way,” Lebowitz said. (Navarro told me that his work on this “beautiful rundown Victorian” was his “first practical lesson in economics.”) Navarro later bought a house in Falmouth, on Cape Cod, where he became a devoted windsurfer.

Navarro, whose master’s focussed on energy policy, has said that this work got him increasingly “intrigued with economics and economic analysis.” Much of Navarro’s early public writing argues against rigid price controls in the energy market. He made the case for deregulation—later, “radical deregulation.” Soon after Navarro began his Ph.D. studies at Harvard, in 1979, he sought out Jeff Dubin, an economics Ph.D. student at M.I.T. In an academic discipline that often requires a combination of mathematics and storytelling, Navarro’s clear talent was for the latter; he was a fast, fluent writer. But the former English major “was now in a very rigorous, highly mathematical program,” Dubin recently said. “He didn’t have the facility for that.” Dubin did. As Dubin now puts it, Navarro’s intelligence and entrepreneurial instinct allowed him to see a way to compensate for his deficits: “The solution was, ironically, gains from trade.”

That phrase is at the heart of the free-trade lexicon. Free trade in goods or services, unencumbered by tariffs or other barriers, is likely to lead to greater total output than if there had been no trade. Specialization makes economic sense: not every country should grow its own peppers. (Years ago, Navarro described this as “one of the deepest truths in all of economics.” He now refers to “so-called gains from trade.”)

In Cambridge, Navarro needed to produce a dissertation about the economics of corporate charitable giving. Dubin needed to pay his rent. (“I was a poor student, and he was rehabbing a triplex in Central Square.”) Money changed hands. “He told me the direction he wanted to go, and I helped him get there, theoretically and empirically,” Dubin said. “I might have used his data to set up models and get him going. And then he took over at some point and it became his own.” Dubin, speaking half seriously, described this as “one of my first consulting experiences.” He observed that “most people, at that level, would not pay someone else to help them.” But Navarro saw nothing improper in the exchange, and neither did Dubin.

The two men become close friends. “We went to the Cape together,” Dubin said. “We double-dated.” They also co-wrote several papers. Dubin remembers that Navarro, who was “very into his health, into his body,” was an enthusiast of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a gooey, unregulated byproduct of the paper industry that purportedly soothes muscle strains. According to Dubin, Navarro wasn’t immune to the substance’s notorious side effect: “He reeked of garlic because of it.” (Navarro told me that, today, he doesn’t “drink, smoke pot, use any hard drugs or even prescription medicines,” adding, “Just not my thing. Live clean or die.”)

Navarro’s dissertation, submitted in 1986, doesn’t acknowledge Dubin’s contributions. According to every economist I asked, that omission constitutes an academic violation. Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown, told me that, if someone “is actually developing his models for him, I think it crosses a boundary.” Holzer, who served as the chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Clinton Administration, is a former Harvard acquaintance of Navarro’s. “At a minimum, a footnote acknowledging a person’s input is appropriate,” Holzer said.

Lawrence Goulder, the sole surviving member of Navarro’s dissertation committee, agrees. If Navarro received substantial help, he told me, then some recognition of that would have been “expected,” and its absence was “inappropriate.” (Goulder, who’s now at Stanford, noted that, at Harvard, Navarro had taught him to windsurf.)

Navarro, asked if he’d engaged in an academic deceit, said, of Dubin, “I don’t recall him providing any substantive assistance on my dissertation.” Navarro also pointed to other publications in which he had thanked Dubin for his help.

Later in life, Peter Navarro introduced readers of his books to a friend named Ron Vara. According to “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks,” a 2001 book of financial advice that urged retail investors to be alert to world events, Vara had been the captain of a reserve unit at the time of the Gulf War. He now lived on a houseboat in Miami and was known as the Dark Prince of Disaster, for making “macroplays”—trades taking nimble advantage of sudden onsets of human misery. Vara had macroplayed Hurricane Andrew and a Taiwanese earthquake. In 1986, when Vara was a “struggling doctoral student in economics at Harvard,” he’d apparently been clairvoyant: two days before the Chernobyl disaster, he’d shorted companies invested in nuclear energy.

Vara appears in several other Navarro books, including “Death by China,” where he’s quoted as saying, “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cell phone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.” Vara was also credited as the executive producer (and the musical director) of the videos that Navarro showed to his Rising China class at U.C. Irvine.

“Ron Vara” is an anagram of “Navarro.” Vara’s fictional status was first reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. Navarro had previously hidden the fact of Vara’s nonexistence, even from Glenn Hubbard, who, in 2010, co-authored a book with Navarro in which Vara was quoted. When the Chronicle asked Hubbard, a former dean of Columbia Business School, if he realized that Vara was an invention, and if he was comfortable with that, he replied, “No and no.” An economist friend who used to play golf with Navarro told me that, after reading the “Raining” manuscript, he saw what was going on and urged Navarro to reconsider, saying, “It’s not appropriate.” Navarro ignored him. Today, a note at the start of “Raining” says that Vara is “an alias created by Peter Navarro.”

Everyone has regrets. Not everyone smuggles them into print in the form of an imaginary friend. The Ron Vara of “Raining” surely reveals some of Navarro’s thoughts about how his own life could have turned out. The Dark Prince of Disaster is a fearless, military-trained man with a godlike ability to see everything coming. He knows it all. “Raining,” a book about geopolitical acuity, was published eight months before the 9/11 attacks. It doesn’t mention terrorism. But, in an interview given in October, 2001, Navarro attempted to fill, with what sounds like shamelessness, the gap between himself and his alter ego. He said, “The recent terrorist attack—I mean, it was a cinch to macroplay.”

In the years after Navarro got his Ph.D., a distance started to open between the life he was surely due—as a vigorous Harvard man with catalogue-model good looks—and the one he found himself living. “I always had the idea that Peter wanted to be the next Jack Kennedy,” the former golfing friend told me, adding, “If you get right on the threshold of your dream and don’t get to step through the door, I can imagine that could be pretty difficult.”

In the mid-eighties, while Navarro was finishing his doctorate, he moved to San Diego. He met Janet Chenier, who was then working in a bookstore, and they married. Former friends of the couple describe Chenier as likable and quiet, certainly when juxtaposed with her husband—a dinner guest who didn’t quite get the point of other people talking. The year of his wedding, Navarro turned thirty-seven. Jeff Dubin was by then a professor at Caltech, in Pasadena, and still in his twenties. (He’d get tenure at thirty.) Navarro fiercely desired a professorship at U.C. San Diego, where he’d briefly worked as a lecturer. But, Dubin told me, “he wasn’t strong enough academically.” Navarro instead took a job at the University of San Diego, a small liberal-arts college with a lower academic standing; he tried to remain “in the orbit of the place he really wanted to get to,” Dubin said.

Dubin remembers visits to San Diego filled with windsurfing and bike rides. “He was quite rigid in a lot of ways,” Dubin said. “Or, one could say, ‘disciplined.’ ” At the same time each morning, Navarro disappeared for an hour to write on his computer, in what Dubin called his “capsule.” “I would say, ‘What are you going to write about?’ ‘Well, I don’t know. I just write.’ ”

Navarro published a few research papers, but most of his writing from this period wasn’t academic. His first book, “The Policy Game,” published in 1984, before he finished his Ph.D., was the kind of text that might help an aspiring center-right politician build a reputation for seriousness. It argued that “special interests” of the left and the right—but mainly the left—often pulled decision-makers away from ideal public-interest outcomes. Navarro devoted a chapter to the seductive foolishness of protectionist trade policies. Tariffs, he declared, “make everyone a loser.”

In 1988, Navarro was hired by U.C. Irvine, whose campus is eighty miles north of downtown San Diego; this was despite his publication record, not because of it. The former golfing friend explained to me that, at the time, the university’s business school was young and ambitious, and, “when you’re an emergent program, being able to put a Harvard Ph.D. on your faculty is definitely a consideration.” The Navarros bought a house in Del Mar Heights, which is as close as you can be to Irvine without leaving either the ocean or the city of San Diego. The city boundary ran through their yard.

Dubin recalled that U.C. Irvine solicited his opinion about Navarro’s tenure candidacy. “I struggled,” he told me. “We were friends, and yet he was not a strong academic.” Dubin’s evaluation focussed on the impressive reach of Navarro’s nonacademic writing. “I was threading a needle,” he said. He laughed. “To some degree, he’s my fault.”

When Navarro ran for mayor of San Diego, in 1992, he already had some local fame. For several years, he’d been arguing that the city had reached its residential capacity. “Growth is a game that has losers and winners,” he’d said. “The people who win are the developers and the immigrants. The people who lose are the ones who already live here.” He described one local housing proposal as “Appalachia.”

Navarro had first offered such commentary as the spokesperson for a group that pressed the city to impose a tight quota on the construction of new housing. (San Diego’s population was then growing nearly three times as fast as Los Angeles’s.) Navarro subsequently founded his own group, largely financed by his mother, which he called Prevent Los Angelization Now!, or PLAN! The champion of deregulation here embraced radical regulation, in a way that served his interests as a homeowner but was also politically astute. Navarro was a self-declared “conservative Republican,” in a Republican town, but his confrontational stance toward the real-estate industry garnered him allies to his left. And local reporters working on almost any topic—traffic, sewage, immigration—would be glad for a comment from someone who could be described as a “slow-growth” guru.

“And, up next, eight hours of white noise, going out to Susan and her husband, Tom.”

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Peter Andersen, a local academic and a green activist, supported Navarro’s agenda, and still remembers him as an environmentalist “comrade-in-arms”—even if Navarro’s desire to become a “mover and shaker” was intense. But Scott Flexo, another of Navarro’s friends, who was then a political-science graduate student, told me that he long ago decided that PLAN! had been merely “an organization that allowed Peter to run for office.” Flexo added, “He didn’t like teaching at U.C.I.—he felt that he was better than the faculty, I think.”

In 1991, Navarro changed his voter registration to independent. When he joined the nonpartisan primary for the 1992 mayoral election, Susan Golding, the front-runner, was a Republican with some real-estate backing. Navarro could position himself to her left. (Just two years later, he announced that he was a Democrat—a member of “the party of the people and not the power brokers.”) He was an energetic candidate, adept at scathing sound bites, but the San Diego Union Tribune raised an eyebrow at his “chameleon-like tendencies,” and noted that “when he meets with African Americans he speaks with what can only be termed a black street dialect.”

The top two candidates in that primary would remain on the ballot for the general election. Navarro came in first, Golding second. This was a remarkable upset, although Andersen and Flexo, who both worked on the campaign, found it hard to celebrate: on the night of this victory, Navarro didn’t even thank his volunteers. (Andersen recalled Flexo muttering, “What an asshole.”) Andersen told me of another occasion when a hardworking volunteer, a doctor, ran into Navarro at a restaurant. According to Andersen, “This doctor said, ‘Peter, can I join you?’ And Peter said, ‘Not really. I’m trying to focus.’ ”

Someone who knows Navarro well recently described him to me as an introvert. If that’s accurate, the trait clearly coexists with exhibitionism and pugnaciousness. During the mayoral race, Navarro got into a small physical fight with Golding’s press secretary, Nikki Symington—he also called her a “pig”—and another with a sixty-five-year-old man at La Jolla Cove. (“If he wasn’t so old, I would have kicked his ass,” Navarro reportedly said at the time.) After his primary success, Navarro was newly exposed to scrutiny; he was challenged on his funding, and on his principles. According to Flexo, such pushback “made him lose his mind.” Andersen told me, “I would use a technique with him called systematic desensitization, a relaxation therapy. I’d get him kind of cooled down.” Navarro arrived shivering at one radio debate in La Jolla wearing nothing but a Speedo, after swimming a mile to get there.

Golding’s ex-husband was in prison for money laundering, a fact that Navarro highlighted in attack ads released shortly before the election. At a televised debate, Golding objected, tearfully, to having had her family dragged into the race. Navarro scoffed that her crying was rehearsed.

He was probably right. Tom Shepard, then a Golding consultant, told me, dryly, that “the issue came up in debate preparation.” But, he went on, “a male candidate discounting the heartfelt protestations of a woman live on camera was really powerful.” It was immediately clear, to Navarro and to others, that he’d made a mistake.

Navarro lost by four points. In 1993, he ran for office again—this time for city council—and was defeated again. The following year, he failed in a bid for county supervisor. In 1996, he ran for a Southern California congressional seat, as a Democrat. This race drew national attention: he had a photo op with Vice-President Al Gore, shared a stage with Hillary Clinton, and spoke briefly at the Democratic National Convention. But Navarro once more fell short, this time by more than ten points.

Lisa Ross, a family friend of the Navarros, worked as his communications director during his congressional run. (She had previously volunteered on a public-access show, “News Behind the News,” that Navarro hosted.) Although she’d seen him gradually become “more and more brittle” in the face of electoral disappointments, she was still shocked by his peevishness during that campaign. On a visit to the editorial board of a local paper, for example, Navarro began by slamming a tape recorder onto the table. (Ross, recalling the moment: “Oh, God, just shoot me.”) She and Navarro never recovered their friendship. According to Mike Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, the congressional defeat threw Navarro “into a Grand Canyon of failure.” His marriage also ended, although he soon began a relationship with Leslie LeBon, an architect and one of his recent M.B.A. students. They later married.

In 1998, Navarro published a score-settling political memoir, “San Diego Confidential,” in which he recalled having learned, via focus groups and polling, that many voters saw him as “overbearing and obnoxious” and “an opportunist.” This data “revealed to me a frightening part of my personality,” he wrote, adding that most people “would rather vote for a nice person they sometimes disagree with than for an asshole who perfectly represents their views.” That insight didn’t lead him to modulate his tone. The memoir describes a San Diego city-council member as a “bespectacled lesbian with the thick, amorphous body of a bull dyke gone to seed.”

In 2001, Navarro ran in his fifth and final race, for city council, and received less than eight per cent of the vote. That year, he launched a new career as a get-rich investment adviser, citing Ron Vara as his model of success. This work came to include several books, numerous CNBC appearances, and a blog about investing. In August, 2008, a month before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Navarro advised his readers to buy U.S. stocks, arguing, “This is not a good time to be short.”

In 2010, Michael Addis thought of himself as a comedy director; his best-known work was a documentary about hecklers at standup shows. When Navarro asked him to direct a film derived from “Death by China,” which he’d written with Greg Autry, a Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Irvine, Addis’s reaction was “That sounds like a terrible title.” But Addis had just divorced, and he needed the money. “I was desperate,” he recalled. He and Navarro agreed on a weekly rate.

Addis isn’t particularly proud of the resulting film. But he likes some parts, and, despite having leftish leanings, he has vestigial respect for Navarro. He was “a guy who just would get up early, study like crazy,” Addis said. “He wasn’t a bad guy. He cared about this concept that America could be stronger if we didn’t outsource so many jobs. I think his heart was in the right place.”

Addis and Navarro filmed interviews with figures sympathetic to Navarro’s cause, including the Democratic congressman Tim Ryan, of Ohio, and Tom Danjzcek, of the Steel Manufacturers Association. This was a bare-bones operation. Addis sometimes operated a camera and also asked a question or two.

Navarro explained to Addis that he planned to link these interviews with animated sequences providing editorial commentary. The “Death by China” book, and, before that, “The Coming China Wars,” from 2006, catalogued acts of Chinese-government delinquency, derived from both reliable secondary sources (the Financial Times) and questionable ones (Ron Vara). Navarro presented these sins—including currency manipulation, intellectual-property theft, and environmental degradation—as significant drivers of China’s extraordinary economic transformation. If one set aside the most powerful mechanisms behind China’s growth, such as low labor costs and industrial planning—although it wasn’t clear why one would set those aside—then it was easy to see that the country had scammed its way to success. Western sunniness about coexistence with China, of the Tom Friedman kind, should be scorned. America hadn’t been outpaced by a flawed rival; it had been mugged. Navarro dedicated “The Coming China Wars” to “our children,” for whom the “catastrophe” of a dominant China was a greater threat than nuclear or biological war.

Addis recalled making a teasing suggestion. “I was, like, ‘We need to have a knife, and it says, “Made in China,” and it stabs the U.S., and blood pours out.’ ” According to Addis, Navarro replied, “That’s a great idea!” Addis told him, “I’m kidding.” Navarro ran with it anyway. The resulting sequence resembles a Halloween Week sofa promotion advertised on local TV.

Addis sometimes worked with Navarro at a house that Navarro and LeBon had recently bought and renovated in Laguna Beach, south of U.C. Irvine. The view from the deck “was insane,” Addis said. Navarro was extraordinarily focussed; from the moment he opened the door for Addis, they were at work. Navarro might continue a discussion while taking a cold-water plunge in a specialized indoor tub. (Navarro described these dips to me as “good for the body and soul.”) In a collaboration that lasted two years, on and off, Addis could remember only one purely social interaction, when Navarro asked if he wanted to take a break and watch “The Big Bang Theory.” (Addis declined.)

According to Addis, Navarro was certain that HBO would acquire their film. Addis told him he was wrong. They were assembling seventy-five minutes of talking-head interviews, followed by onscreen text instructing viewers to call their representatives to demand “a strong manufacturing base.” The film has no real narrative or wit, unless you count the dagger puncturing the Midwest, or the Bruce Springsteen pastiche, written by Navarro, that plays over the end credits. (“I used to work in a factory / Right now, I’d work for anything . . . They sent our jobs away / And in China, they’re not workers, they’re just slaves.”)

Navarro ended up taking the director’s credit for himself. Addis was a little relieved to give it up; he became a producer. Navarro had by then accepted that the film was not going to be a mainstream hit, and he seemed deflated. After a preview screening, Addis recalled, Navarro conceded that the stabbing sequence was “maybe a bit much.” Navarro doesn’t remember saying that; he now regards this animation as the “signature image” of the film. “Wouldn’t change it for the world,” he told me.

Like the acknowledgments in Navarro’s Ph.D. dissertation, the end credits of “Death by China” omit an important detail. They don’t acknowledge that Nucor—a Charlotte-based steel company facing competition from rising Chinese steel production—gave Navarro a million dollars to make it.

Navarro has sometimes been asked why he became fixated on lambasting China in the mid two-thousands. He has consistently responded that, in the early years of the century, he noticed that his M.B.A. students and ex-students were struggling to find good jobs. In his effort to understand this, Navarro concluded that “all roads” led to China’s lawless rise.

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This makes little sense. In 2005, the U.S. unemployment rate for college graduates was about two and a half per cent, the same as it had been ten years earlier. In the same period, real G.D.P., adjusted for inflation, increased by forty per cent. For decades, the American economy had been losing manufacturing jobs—more to automation than to overseas competition—but gaining other jobs. This was no comfort to a discarded factory worker, but it didn’t leave a would-be entrepreneur or executive particularly exposed.

But decrying China’s misdeeds surely looked like an opportunity—a self-positioning macroplay. As Navarro’s former friend Scott Flexo put it, “He’s always looking for something to blame.” This cause, nominally bipartisan, could help him build powerful alliances. And, as with the topic of San Diego real estate, any counter-argument had to meet him partway: property developers can indeed be snakes; the Chinese economy is not a model of free trade. Without great risk to his social status, Navarro could deploy the hyperbolic and xenophobic rhetoric that he clearly enjoyed. He could ask, “Why are so many Chinese black hearts so willing to poison the world’s food and drug supply for profit?”

Navarro’s romance with Nucor was first evident in 2009. In his book “Always a Winner: Finding Your Competitive Advantage in an Up-and-Down Economy,” he gushed that Nucor was “the safest, highest-quality, lowest-cost, most productive, and most profitable steel company in the world.” He praised Nucor’s “uncanny ability to profitably navigate through the up-and-down movements of the business cycle.” (In fact, Nucor had lost half of its value in the fifteen months before the book’s publication.) Navarro’s mother gave the book four stars, but not five, on Amazon.

Navarro and Dan DiMicco, then Nucor’s chairman and C.E.O., subsequently co-wrote an essay for Barron’s which argued that the U.S. should “get tough with China.” In 2011, in the book version of “Death by China,” Navarro included a section titled “Be Like Nucor Steel’s Dan DiMicco—Not G.E.’s Jeffrey Immelt.”

The Nucor alliance anticipated the ideologically flexible spirit in which Navarro entered the White House. Even the most slapdash, “black hearts”-infused critique of Chinese-government practices will tend to draw an author into passing appreciation of political transparency, pollution controls, a free press, the rule of law, worker protections, religious tolerance, the freedom to protest, and other values that used to carry weight in both of America’s main political parties. (“Crouching Tiger” contrasts American democracy to Chinese “corruption and plundering.” The book version of “Death by China” quotes Camus: “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”) But anyone being paid by Nucor in 2010 was being pulled hard in another direction. Nucor was anti-union; it had paid huge fines for disregarding environmental regulations; it had a record of mistreating minority workers. DiMicco stepped down in 2012. After a spell as a Trump-campaign adviser, in 2016, he became visible as a QAnon-curious Twitter presence with opinions about George Soros.

DiMicco and Navarro never announced that their mutual regard had a cash component. That fact became known only because of the peculiar efforts made to hide it. In March, 2011, Nucor sent a million dollars, in two checks, to Michael Shames, an old friend of Navarro’s who ran a nonprofit, the Utility Consumers’ Action Network (UCAN), whose stated mission was to protect the interests of California energy customers. A few days later, Shames signed a contract in which Navarro—acting as a “consultant” for UCAN—agreed to make the “Death by China” documentary for a million dollars. In return, UCAN would receive five DVDs of the film.

That spring, David Peffer, a lawyer at UCAN, began a whistle-blowing campaign that alerted the organization’s board to various odd accounting actions taken by Shames, including this deal. A steel company had paid for a film that clearly served its interests through a consumer nonprofit that had nothing to do with China or steel. When the San Diego Reader first reported on this funding triangle, a Nucor representative told the paper that routing the cash through UCAN had been Navarro’s idea. (Navarro has said that the arrangement was “completely transparent.”) Peffer recently told me that he could see no reason for UCAN’s involvement, unless it was to “muddy the waters” in a way that likely broke laws related to taxes and the regulation of nonprofits. Shames, explaining the deal, told me, “Whenever a company gives any kind of money to a nonprofit, they can write that off.”

The F.B.I. opened an investigation. In 2012, UCAN hired a new executive director, Kim Malcolm, in a belated attempt to clean house. Malcolm told me that she spent much of her tenure responding to law-enforcement queries and subpoenas. She also heard from Navarro, a lot. At that stage, he had received only six hundred thousand dollars of his “consultancy” fee. “He was calling, like, three or four times a week, begging me for the rest of the money,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I can’t just write a check for four hundred thousand dollars . . . with an F.B.I. investigation going on that includes this.’ ” Finally, she agreed to meet for lunch in San Diego. “He showed up to our meeting about a million-dollar transaction in surfer shorts,” she said. “He had long hair—he looked like a hippie. I’m, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”

Malcolm eventually had to respect Navarro’s contract: she co-signed a four-hundred-thousand-dollar check to him. In a subsequent legal filing, Malcolm wrote, “I do not know whether the Death by China transaction was lawful.” No charges were ever brought against Navarro, Shames, or Nucor.

Michael Addis noted that the film surely cost much less than a million dollars. He said, of Navarro, “He was a good economist, in terms of making money for himself.” Navarro told me that he never “took a dime” from “Death by China”; he acknowledged that there had been money left over, but he said he spent it on the “Crouching Tiger” documentary series he’d assigned to his students in 2016.

When Stephen Miller called Navarro on Victoria Beach, in June, 2016, Trump had just become his party’s presumptive Presidential nominee. In Navarro’s giddy memory of that day, Miller was asking for input on a major speech about trade that Trump would soon be delivering. As Navarro wrote, “I now found myself sitting in the warm sand on Victoria Beach talking to Candidate Trump’s one and only speechwriter about what would become arguably the best speech—at least on economics and trade—of the president’s career.”

That speech began with steel. “The legacy of Pennsylvania steelworkers lives in the bridges, railways, and skyscrapers that make up our great American landscape,” Trump said, in Monessen, Pennsylvania, on June 28th. “But our workers’ loyalty was repaid—you know it better than anybody—with total betrayal.” He went on, “When subsidized foreign steel is dumped into our markets, threatening our factories, the politicians . . . do nothing.” Trump addressed familiar Navarro themes: China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization, in 2001, had enabled “the greatest job theft in the history of our country”; China unfairly subsidizes its domestic industries; China is “a currency manipulator.” Navarro, whose well-founded fear is that if he doesn’t praise himself nobody will, has described this speech as “sheer political and policy poetry,” and compared it to the Gettysburg Address.

After the talk on the beach, Navarro became an acknowledged part of the Trump campaign, and began giving media interviews. For the previous few months, Navarro had been a hidden, informal campaign adviser. Jared Kushner has taken credit for first reaching out to him. Vanity Fair has reported that, after Trump had given his son-in-law the task of finding someone sympathetic to his views on international trade—oddly consistent over the years—Kushner Googled his way to “Death by China,” then made a cold call. Countering this, Navarro has claimed a long-standing correspondence with someone in Trump’s office, although he can’t get that person’s name straight. He also seems to believe in an absurd myth, rashly repeated by a writer at the Los Angeles Times in 2011, that Trump had read “hundreds of books about China over the decades,” including one of Navarro’s. A Trump blurb for the film version of “Death by China”—“I urge you to see it”—apparently dates from after the start of his 2016 campaign. Someone well acquainted with Navarro told me that, before Navarro heard from Kushner, he had been trying hard to attract the attention of both Presidential campaigns; he never heard back from Hillary Clinton’s.

Navarro, long rejected and unelected, made no attempt to set professorial boundaries in his new advisory role. He threw himself into every campaign argument. Trump hadn’t hired a kooky, maverick academic who happened to agree with him on tariffs, as has often been suggested. Rather, he’d found someone with no compunctions about performing agreement. Navarro, in his ethnic scapegoating, quickness to anger, and difficulty with noncompliant women, may have been temperamentally aligned with the MAGA movement he was joining. But, aside from the topic of Chinese black hearts, almost nothing that Navarro has said or written in support of Trump reflects views that he’d consistently articulated beforehand.

Unlike many people in the Administration, Navarro was prepared to take Trump’s words literally—when the President said he wanted to tear up NAFTA overnight, say, or to overturn the 2020 election. And Navarro has had the agility to follow, in a synchronized swerve, Trump’s changing message on any issue, from the value of the COVID vaccine to the finality of the Liberation Day tariff rates. (Navarro: “This is not a negotiation.” Trump: “The tariffs give us great power to negotiate.” Navarro: “The Boss is going to be chief negotiator.”) Navarro came to define himself against those around Trump who—lacking the rigor of his unsqueamish servitude—sometimes pursued strategies of delay and diplomacy. Navarro, using language from military aviation, told me that in the first Administration “there were simply too many bogies inside the perimeter” to “swiftly move the Trump agenda.” He has identified these obstacles as a “confederacy of globalists, Never Trump Republicans, wild-eyed Freedom Caucus nut jobs, and self-absorbed Wall Street transactionalists,” and he has taken the time to insult many of them individually, including John Bolton, Gary Cohn, Stephanie Grisham, John Kelly, Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, Don McGahn, H. R. McMaster, Steve Mnuchin, Mick Mulvaney, Brad Parscale, Mike Pence, Rob Porter, Wilbur Ross, and Rex Tillerson. (He speaks warmly of Miller and Bannon, and had a soft spot for Anthony Scaramucci, because he also went to Tufts.)

Navarro’s transformation from professor to courtier was immediate. Even before Trump won in 2016, Navarro wrote in support of banning Muslims from entering the U.S., and declared that deporting eleven million migrants would do no harm to the economy. He also co-wrote a policy paper proposing that any measures taken to reduce the U.S. trade deficit would—inevitably, mathematically—increase growth. This is false. The Cato Institute called the idea “a logical prank.” Harry Holzer, the Georgetown economist, told me, “The things he says now violate the most elementary principles of macroeconomics—stuff you learn in the first semester.”

Navarro’s former golfing friend defined an opportunist as someone “willing to trade out conditions that you or I would consider important simply to be in a place. I think that describes Peter.” He went on, “I don’t think that he doesn’t care what people say about him. I think he recognizes that it’s the price of him being able to be where he is.”

In September, 2016, Navarro flew to New York. He met Bannon and Miller, and was given a corner to work in on the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower. He has described his first encounter with Trump: “I get into the back of a black SUV and sit behind the Boss,” he wrote. “It will be my first face-to-face meeting with him—but I don’t quite see his face yet. He’s talking on his cell phone first to Rupert Murdoch. ‘How we doing Rupert? How are we doing? What are you hearing?’ ” When Trump at last acknowledged Navarro, it was with a look that Navarro chose to interpret this way: “Welcome to the Big Apple you Laguna Beach rube. And welcome to the big time.”

On July 17, 2024, just after midnight, Navarro was released from the prison camp in Miami. Later that day, he flew to Milwaukee, to make his second-ever speech at a political party’s national convention.

A woman named Bonnie Brenner flew with him. They were newly engaged. Brenner, who is in her early sixties, worked for decades as an assistant to senior banking executives. She and Navarro had met in the corridor of their apartment building, in Washington, D.C., not long after the January 6th riot. Navarro had then just finalized his divorce from Leslie LeBon, who had added a note to her website: “For all emails received regarding the Trump Administration, we will forward your email address to a politician of our choice and make a donation to them in your name.” In the divorce settlement, Navarro, who had orchestrated the Administration’s “buy American” rhetoric, got the Lexus.

“B . . . twelve! You have a B-twelve deficiency.”

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Navarro no longer had a relationship with U.C. Irvine. Around the time he left the White House, carrying a framed photograph of a 2018 meeting between Trump and President Xi Jinping that he’d attended in Buenos Aires, the university removed Navarro’s online courses, and his biography, from its website. Navarro told me that he missed nothing about U.C. Irvine but its Olympic-size swimming pool: the campus was “a woke bastion of Blue State dogma.”

In June, 2022, Navarro was arrested as he and Brenner were about to board a plane to Nashville, where he was scheduled to appear on Mike Huckabee’s TV talk show. Navarro recently wrote that he can still feel “the cold steel” of the handcuffs. According to an F.B.I. report, agents adjusted his handcuffs three times, in response to his complaints. (The report also notes that he called them “kind Nazis.”) He was taken to the U.S. District Court building on Constitution Avenue. Despite being a former White House official, he wrote, he was treated with no more deference than the system’s usual “parade of rapists, thieves, murderers, drug addicts, burglars, pimps, and hookers.”

Dozens of other Trump loyalists had found ways to be unhelpful to the January 6th committee without risking arrest. Navarro could have turned up for his hearing and said next to nothing. Instead, he repeatedly proposed that executive privilege excused him altogether. This was showboating. Navarro could offer no evidence that Trump had invoked this privilege. And executive privilege, even if invoked, would likely not apply to electoral conspiracies. Besides, Navarro had already happily discussed the Green Bay Sweep plot in a book and in interviews with MSNBC’s Ari Melber, among others. (Melber: “You do realize these investigators can hear you when you talk on TV?”)

In 2023, Navarro was convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress. At his sentencing, Navarro experimented, after two years of cocky public obstruction, with a bespoke form of humility. Referring to his experience with the Department of Justice, he told the judge, “I’m a Harvard-educated gentleman, right? But the learning curve when they come at you with the biggest law firm in the world is very, very, very steep.”

During Navarro’s incarceration, Brenner talked with Steve Bannon on his “War Room” podcast, and showed off a new diamond ring. On prison visits, she said, “my heart breaks inside.” Bannon congratulated her on her engagement. Navarro was “not the easiest day at the beach,” he said, and needed “a steady hand.” On Navarro’s birthday, Brenner wrote on his Substack, urging his supporters to “go dance with your loved ones, go sing, go laugh, go find joy for me and him today.”

Navarro had been sleeping in a bunk-bed dormitory that held about fifty older inmates. The facility’s security regime is at the lowest level in the federal system, but his account of prison life foregrounds razor wire and the prospect of rape. “Nobody hands you a rulebook when you enter prison,” he has written. “You learn fast: some rules are written on paper, the rest are carved into the culture. Who you sit with, who you avoid, when to talk, when to shut up—the wrong move can cost you more than privileges.” In fact, a well-compensated prison consultant can provide something close to a rulebook; Navarro had hired one, Sam Mangel, who’d served a term in the same camp. Navarro also had access to weekend visits that lasted hours, five hundred minutes of phone time a month, and a recreational area set up for basketball, racquetball, pickleball, softball, and bocce. Brenner described Navarro exercising in a “huge field,” and quoted him saying “Motion is the potion.”

When Donald Trump, Jr., visited the camp, he told Navarro that he looked like Robert De Niro in “Cape Fear.” “Peter had the slicked-back hair,” Don, Jr., later said, and he was “jacked.” At the time of his release, Navarro had just turned seventy-five. He had contended with a COVID infection. Previously “145 pounds soaking wet,” in his own description, he had lost ten pounds. He was also tanned, and hadn’t had a chance to fix a missing lower tooth. When he put on a suit and tie, he resembled a Depression-era drifter spruced up for court.

Someone posted a video of his arrival in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was under way. In the clip, he is wheeling luggage that looks very much like a model made by Showkoo, a Chinese manufacturer. He was repeatedly stopped in the hallways. People called him “sir.” He told me, “It was tremendously heartwarming and uplifting but also confirmed my belief that the Democrat weaponization of our justice system would be a salient issue in the campaign.”

Don, Jr., hugged him, and didn’t flinch when Navarro portrayed himself as part of a trinity of martyrs, along with Steve Bannon (who’d also gone to prison for contempt of Congress) and Don, Jr.,’s, father, who’d just survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Navarro also told Don, Jr., that, when he had glanced at live coverage of the start of the Butler rally on a prison TV, he had known, Ron Vara-like, that a shooting was likely. “First rule—secure the rooftops,” he said.

During the first Trump term, Navarro had sometimes felt nostalgia for the campaign. “The beauty of working in Trump Tower was that I had no boss,” he has written. Between 2017 and 2021, he’d had influence, on and off, but it clearly didn’t feel quite like real power. Bannon has quoted Trump asking, “Where’s my Peter?,” which seems to sum things up: the President valued Navarro, but didn’t keep him at his side. He’d been invited in, then shut out. Navarro was disappointed with what he called his “nosebleed” seats at the first Trump Inauguration, and he hated that his status in the White House was lower than that of, say, Miller or Bannon. (At the time, however, Navarro told Bloomberg that he thought of his single-person staff as a “SWAT team.”) Things got worse: the National Trade Council was folded into Gary Cohn’s National Economic Council, and Navarro had to copy Cohn on his outgoing communications, even though Navarro regarded him as a “treacherous misfit.” After Cohn left the White House, in 2018, Navarro became more prominent. He was able to encourage and defend Trump’s trade war against China. “The Trump China tariffs were one of the few things Biden left alone,” he told me with pride. He added, “America has a long way to go before it fully reclaims its manufacturing base both from China and the rest of the world.” And, during the COVID crisis, Navarro had a high-profile role as a supply-chain coördinator. (A House subcommittee later found that Navarro had likely overpaid for ventilators by half a billion dollars.)

But many accounts, Navarro’s among them, tell of years of large and small humiliations. He was kept out of key meetings, including during the pandemic, when he wasn’t put on the main government task force; his calls weren’t returned; nobody wanted his memos, including one in which he misidentified which Administration official had written a hostile and anonymous Times op-ed. Olivia Troye, an adviser to Vice-President Mike Pence, has said that she had standing orders to take such memos out of Navarro’s hands, shred them, “and make sure he never stepped foot” in the Vice-President’s office. Navarro once grabbed Troye’s wrist to try to wrestle back some of his documents. (Navarro told me that Troye’s story was “utter bullshit.”) He became known as a West Wing lurker, and as someone likely to make a scene in a corridor—by, say, yelling at the head of the F.D.A. about the virtues of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment. Navarro has recalled, “I’d be sitting in the Oval or the Roosevelt Room fighting just about everybody else. And it was uncanny.”

Last July, in Milwaukee, he had a few hours of simple, happy fawning. It didn’t last. A few months later, as Navarro was upending the world economy, Musk called him “truly a moron.” And, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick once sneaked into the Oval Office, at a time when Navarro was known to have an appointment elsewhere, to persuade the President to put a ninety-day pause on most tariffs, and to type out a Truth Social announcement of the pause while they waited. (Navarro, by keeping to his schedule that day, added more than four trillion dollars to the S. & P. 500’s total market capitalization.)

Navarro told me that he, Bessent, Lutnick, and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative, “work beautifully together.” He proposed that “any disagreements are over at the margin, not about direction. One band, one sound.” He said that his new office—his “seal team”—had contributed to Administration work on such issues as fisheries, shipbuilding, fraud detection, and the elimination of the de-minimis rule, which had exempted low-value imports from tariffs. But a source in the Trump Administration described Navarro as having become “completely irrelevant,” and added, “I don’t know why he still goes to work, or if he even knows how boxed out he is. His life is a fiction. He’s not a player at all. He takes meetings about steel, that’s pretty much it. The President blames Peter for the Liberation Day rollout.” Navarro dismissed this, telling me that anonymous sources “have always sought to marginalize my role.” (A White House spokesperson called Navarro “an integral asset for President Trump’s trade and economic team.”)

But in Milwaukee, as Navarro headed toward the convention stage, he was a hero. During his previous national-convention speech, in 1996, Navarro had extracted modest applause from a late-afternoon audience by exhorting, “Let’s win one for hope—for the man from Hope! Bill Clinton!” This time, his appearance began with a long ovation, to which he responded with a broader smile than he’d ever before shown in public. (Navarro told me that he “never expected the beautifully warm welcome.”) He joked with his audience about showing them where he’d put a prison tattoo. He then added, to renewed applause, “Indeed, this morning I did walk out of a federal prison.” He went on, “If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, be careful—they will come for you.” Then, after Navarro accused the Biden Administration of opening America’s borders “to murderers and rapists, drug cartels, human traffickers, terrorists, Chinese spies, and a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens,” Brenner joined him onstage. He introduced her as “my beautiful girl”—no name—and they kissed. Then he looked out into the hall, grimly raised his fist, and said, “I love you.” ♦

Daring to Be Free, by Sudhir Hazareesingh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This history reconstructs the extraordinary stories of “fugitive resisters” to examine the crucial role that captives played, over centuries, in dismantling the transatlantic slave trade. If abolition was impossible without decrees by Western governments, Hazareesingh argues, it was unthinkable without enslaved peoples’ own push for emancipation. Documenting diverse acts of rebellion from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, his book shows how guerrilla strategies—influenced by spiritual traditions and characterized by solidarity across social groups—were deployed from the earliest days of enslavement, and helped to shape ideological currents of autonomy and self-determination.

The Second Estate, by Ray D. Madoff (Chicago). The aristocrats of France’s ancien régime did not have to pay taxes. America’s modern-day plutocrats, this bracing book contends, enjoy a similar privilege. By eschewing salaries, lobbying Congress to gut the estate tax, and contriving elaborate writeoffs and work-arounds, the very rich have placed much of their wealth beyond the reach of the state. To finance America’s teetering Social Security system and to pay for programs such as Medicare, the federal government relies primarily on revenues collected from working people. The U.S. tax code is around seven thousand pages long; Madoff makes its failures gripping and accessible in a book that can be read, with as much pleasure as indignation, in an afternoon.

What We’re Reading

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Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino (Celadon). In this diabolical satirical thriller, a millennial woman resorts to extreme measures to secure the million-dollar house of her dreams. Margo, who works in P.R., and her husband, a government lawyer, have been outbid on eleven homes in the Washington, D.C., area, where they live. Determined to escape “real estate purgatory” through property ownership and start a family, Margo stalks a London-bound couple in the hope of snapping up their brick Colonial in a posh suburban neighborhood. Kashino, a former real-estate reporter, playfully charts the increasingly unhinged tactics Margo employs as she takes the art of negotiation to a frightening level.

A Love Story from the End of the World, by Juhea Kim (Ecco). Set in the near future, these finely wrought stories examine lives and relationships amid climate change and technological innovation. Characters are at once accustomed to and unnerved by the measures that allow for their survival: a “biodome” that protects against perpetual sandstorms; ships that house humanity after the land has become unlivable. The stories portray characters of varying ages living across the world—a young woman coming of age on a reservation in Oregon, a South African boy who forms a rapport with an elephant—while examining human selfishness and finding gleaming moments of care and conviction, often prompted by an encounter with a nonhuman being. Humanness, Kim suggests, cannot be wrested from the natural world: when we lose the latter, we lose ourselves.

Andrea Zevallos declared 2016 her “year of dating.” She was twenty-seven, working at Universal Studios Hollywood, the theme park, and determined to find love. She calculated it would take three dates a week. By December, she was losing hope. “It was exhausting,” she said. Then, while scrolling OkCupid, she noticed a “cute guy” with a “Hamilton” reference in his handle. His name was Alex Switzky, and like her he was a musical-theatre enthusiast and aspiring screenwriter. He was different from the other men she’d met. On their second date, he started planning a third. Zevallos “was used to L.A. guys cagey about any sort of calendar.” One day, Switzky called her. Accustomed to texts, she assumed that he was about to break up with her. “The most millennial response,” she recalled, laughing. At the time, Switzky was a tow-truck dispatcher. “I like the phone,” he said.

Five years later, Zevallos was enrolled in an M.F.A. program in screenwriting, and Switzky was working at Final Draft, a screenwriting-software company. One night, after watching “Ted Lasso” over a plate of tahini noodles, Switzky proposed. Zevallos said yes without hesitation, especially because they had already agreed to sign a prenuptial agreement if they married. “What if one of us gets lucky and sells a script?” she had pointed out. “Who would retain that I.P.?”

If you hear “newly engaged couple” and picture a movie montage of dress fittings and wrinkled brows over seating charts, you are missing an increasingly key scene—the moment when someone pops the latest question, Should we get a prenup? According to a 2023 Harris poll, twenty-one per cent of Americans say that they have signed one, up from only three per cent in 2010. Millennial and Gen Z respondents account for most of that uptick, at forty-seven and forty-one per cent, respectively. These figures are nearly impossible to verify—prenups are typically filed in court only in the event of a divorce. But a recent survey by YouGov, in the U.K., at least attitudinally confirms the findings: more than half of those under forty-five said that they want their future partner to sign a prenup.

It used to be that the prenup plot existed to threaten the marriage one. On “Sex and the City,” when Charlotte is advised to negotiate after being served a prenup that puts her on a vesting schedule, she grumbles, “Negotiate? I can’t even buy stuff on sale.” Now prenups show up across the cultural landscape as part of basic financial hygiene. Bethenny Frankel, formerly of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” appeared on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” and encouraged listeners to get a prenup, citing her ten-year divorce battle; one online comment read, “Louder for the people in the back,” with a clap emoji. Zola, a wedding-planning site, has a “How to Do a Prenup Party in Style” guide, suggesting you commemorate your prenup in a “leather-bound book engraved with both of your names and the date of signing.” It’s quite the vibe shift from the “Seinfeld” episode in which George asks his fiancée for a prenup in the hope that she’ll be so offended she’ll call off the wedding.

Today’s younger generations tend to favor easy exits. Earlier this year, the Times reported that Gen Z is skittish about opening bar tabs. “If we want to move somewhere else, it’s a lot harder to close out and then leave,” one reveller said. If divorce is the ultimate settling up, then it’s fortunate for this cohort that planning to part has never been simpler. The past few years have seen the rise of new apps such as HelloPrenup, Wenup, and Neptune that fast-track the process; the latter has couples discuss their finances with an A.I. chatbot before being matched, by algorithm, with a lawyer. In 2024, Libby Leffler, Sheryl Sandberg’s former chief of staff at Facebook (now Meta), publicly launched an online prenup company called First. There, users could at one point take a quiz with multiple-choice questions, including “When you think of the future, it looks like . . . ?” One possible answer: “Shared goals, different playlists.”

Zevallos and Switzky opted to use HelloPrenup after seeing it on an episode of “Shark Tank.” With the tagline “Love, Meet Logic,” the app, which charges five hundred and ninety-nine dollars per contract, asks standard questions about alimony and real estate but also offers cutting-edge optional clauses. The Social Image Clause sets a financial penalty for posting “humiliating or disrespectful” content about your ex online. With the Embryo Clause, you can decide how you want to allocate your frozen embryos and who will pay for storage fees. There’s also a clause that reimburses for home renovations—save your Lowe’s receipts. For research purposes, I created an account to draft a prenup ahead of my fake wedding to Harry Styles. There was a helpful tutorial: If we live in California but get married in Hawaii, which state should we write the prenup for? I guessed California. A friendly voice replied, “Correct. Ten points for Gryffindor!”

I’m a millennial, part of the generation that has famously spent our down payments for a house on avocado toast. What, I wondered, are people who don’t have much to begin with so worried about losing? “This generation just doesn’t trust marriage,” Kaylin Dillon, a thirty-eight-year-old financial adviser who calls herself the Prenup Coach, told me. Young couples come to her, she said, because she’s willing to strategize both joint and individual plans to grow wealth. After all, roughly twenty-five per cent of millennials are the children of divorce or separation. (By the mid-eighties, most states had adopted no-fault divorce laws, leading to a spike in divorce rates.) Adam Newell, the creator of a “Bravo-focused” YouTube channel called “Up and Adam!,” told me that his parents have been divorced eleven times between the two of them. “Your whole life is uprooted,” he said of the constant moves. Before marrying his husband, he wanted a prenup stating that he could keep his Palm Beach home. Though premarital assets are separate by law, they can become shared if you start, well, sharing them—in some states, for instance, by moving your spouse into a home you purchased solo and opting to significantly remodel together. (The legal term is “commingling.”)

Millennials and Gen Z-ers also account for nearly forty per cent and thirty per cent, respectively, of the country’s student-loan borrowers, who collectively hold $1.8 trillion in debt. Elizabeth Carter, a matrimonial-law professor at Louisiana State University who advises First, told me that if you pay off a pre-marriage student loan with funds earned during the marriage, without a prenup, you could be required to reimburse your spouse for a portion of those funds post-divorce. “I always liked to teach that around Halloween,” she said. “You know, something scary.”

Prenups have also benefitted from a rebrand. In the past, the word conjured visions of a wealthy man trying to sniff out a gold-digger by sealing off his assets. Now prenups are being pitched to young professional women as a way to take charge of their finances and insure better remuneration. Leffler, in an op-ed for Fortune, encouraged brides-to-be to lean in: “We would never launch a startup without equity agreements or join a company without understanding our compensation package. Why are any of us willing to say ‘I do’ without a clear financial framework?” The personal-finance influencer Vivian Tu, a.k.a. Your Rich BFF, posted a TikTok for her 2.7 million followers titled “What’s in my prenup (and my purse)!”

Clause by clause, the contemporary prenup offers a window into how money, the nature of work, and what even counts as an asset are in flux. (HelloPrenup has a blog post on crypto and one called “How to Protect Your Labubu.”) But can an online contract made without a lawyer (unless you pay extra) really anticipate all the plot twists of happily ever after? And is there a price to pay for all this frantic accounting, the Splitwise-and-Venmo-ization of marriage?

Switzky and Zevallos eventually decided that any I.P. they create individually would be listed as “separate property,” though they admitted that the divvying up has proved tricky day to day. “If one of us comes up with an idea, one of the first things that we do is ask, ‘O.K., who owns this?’ ” Switzky told me. “ ‘Is this mine? Is this yours? Ours?’ ”

This fall, I went to a recording studio in Chelsea to meet Julia Rodgers, the Boston-based C.E.O. and founder of HelloPrenup, who was in New York taping episodes of “The HelloPrenup Podcast,” which highlights trends in dating and in divorce law. Lauren Lavender, her C.M.O., greeted me in a light-blue sweatshirt that read “You had me at hello prenup.” We sat in a control room and watched Rodgers interview an attorney named Lisa Zeiderman about the impact of A.I. in divorce cases. Rodgers asked whether a relationship with an A.I. companion could violate an infidelity clause. “Yes, and you can absolutely subpoena messages with a chatbot,” Zeiderman replied. “I tell all my clients, ‘Be careful how much you start confiding.’ ”

The next morning, I met Rodgers for brunch in SoHo at Sadelle’s, one of the last places Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were photographed together before announcing their divorce. (Reportedly, there was no prenup.) Rodgers, who is thirty-eight, scanned the menu through tortoiseshell glasses before settling on avocado toast.

“I got the idea when an apple fell out of a tree and hit me on the head.”

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I had first seen Rodgers in a clip from “Shark Tank.” She and her co-founder, Sarabeth Jaffe, had pitched their startup in 2021 while wearing wedding dresses. Initially, it didn’t look as though they were going to get an “I do.” “People who want prenups are going to a lawyer,” Robert Herjavec, one of the show’s investors, or sharks, argued. Then Rodgers said the magic words: “Sixty trillion dollars.” She was referring to the Great Wealth Transfer, the unprecedented sums that baby boomers have begun passing down to their children—some estimates put the figure at more than a hundred and twenty trillion dollars—and want to protect. Millennials “go online,” she said. “They find HelloPrenup. They satisfy their parents. They create a valid prenuptial agreement, and they’re done.” She made it sound as seamless as Seamless.

Two other sharks, Nirav Tolia, the co-founder of Nextdoor, and Kevin O’Leary, a software tycoon, were convinced. “Marriage is the ultimate startup,” O’Leary told me. “Every startup has a business plan. Why isn’t marriage the same way?” Tolia and O’Leary received a thirty-per-cent stake in HelloPrenup. In exchange, Rodgers and Jaffe got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and millions of eyeballs. Now, at least according to internal data, one in five couples nationwide who initiate the prenup process do so through HelloPrenup; the company attracts five thousand users per month and says that it “safeguards” $26.7 billion in assets.

All founders have an origin story involving some intractable problem that they simply could not accept. For Rodgers, it was paper. Her mother was a matrimonial attorney, and Rodgers, as part of her childhood chores, organized stacks and stacks of financial-disclosure documents, including for couples getting prenups. There had to be a better way, she would later say. While attending Suffolk University Law School, she took a class called Lawyers and Smart Machines, on how to automate certain legal processes. “They taught us coding, which I did not excel in,” she admitted. That’s where Jaffe, an engineer, later came in, though the two eventually had their own split. (Rodgers preferred not to go into detail.)

Rodgers began developing her platform a few years after graduating from law school, just before her own wedding, to another lawyer. “We were the first couple to use HelloPrenup,” she said. “We were the test case.” She and her husband had met on Match.com—“old school,” she noted—and got married in 2019, in Newport, Rhode Island, at the picturesque Castle Hill Inn, overlooking Narragansett Bay. “Oh, my God, I had the best wedding. I had the best wedding,” she said.

Surveying the scene at Sadelle’s, we guessed where Affleck and Lopez might have sat. “It’s so crowded,” Rodgers observed. “Maybe in the back somewhere.” We started discussing the end of her own marriage. She and her husband had a baby in 2020, and the onset of the pandemic left them without family help. “He’s a patent litigator. He was very busy. I was working as an attorney, plus trying to build this business,” she said. “It was just, like, pressure on pressure on pressure.” They divorced in 2022.

But the COVID lockdown also primed HelloPrenup for success. No one wanted to visit a lawyer’s office. “Everything was becoming digitized in a really rapid way,” Rodgers said. By early 2021, roughly two and a half million women had left the labor force, in what became known as a she-cession. An article on HelloPrenup’s site sounded off: “Who was expected to stay home, watch the kids, become a pseudo-teacher, take care of household responsibilities and manage to still be at their work-from-home desk eight hours a day? Women.” Amid the ashes of girlboss feminism, Rodgers saw opportunity. “Prenups can solve for the motherhood penalty, because you can have an equalization clause,” she told me, explaining that a greater share of assets could compensate for a stay-at-home parent’s lost earning potential.

Rodgers refers to prenups as “the modern vow,” as they can govern finances and other major life decisions during marriage. Couples today want those choices to be made in the spirit of equality and backed by a contract. “They ask, ‘Are our in-laws going to move in? Are we going to buy a house or do the FIRE method and travel the world?’ ” FIRE is a life style popular with millennials and Gen Z marked by extreme saving and aggressive investment; it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.” An elder millennial, I had to look it up.

In February of 1990, it was reported that Donald and Ivana Trump were divorcing, after thirteen years of marriage. The news dominated the headlines. “They ran it before the story out of South Africa,” one outraged New Yorker told a local TV crew, referring to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison that week. People immediately began speculating about the spoils. “It’s not just a marriage on the line. It’s Donald Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker,” the journalist Richard Roth declared on CBS News. The couple had a prenup—and three “postnups”—allegedly granting Ivana around twenty million dollars, a fraction of Trump’s purported five-billion-dollar fortune. “IVANA BETTER DEAL,” read the cover of the Daily News. In a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Jan Hooks, playing Ivana, balks at the prenup: “That contract is invalid. You have a mistress, Donald.” (There were rumors that Trump had been unfaithful with a Southern beauty queen named Marla Maples.) Phil Hartman, playing Trump, flips through the pages of the contract before saying, “According to Section 5, Paragraph 2, I’m allowed to have mistresses provided they are younger than you.”

The prenup largely held. Ivana got a measly fourteen million, a mansion in Greenwich, an apartment in Trump Plaza, and the use of Mar-a-Lago for one month a year. But it was understandable that the public thought that Trump’s entire empire might be at stake. In the eighties, prenups were usually in the news for getting tossed out. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Steven Spielberg was ordered to pay his ex-wife, the actress Amy Irving, a hundred million dollars after a judge voided their prenup, which had allegedly been scrawled on a scrap of paper. (Irving conveyed through a representative that “there was no prenup ever even discussed.”)

For much of the twentieth century, judges almost always refused to enforce prenups, fearing that they encouraged divorce and thus violated the public good. They were also concerned that measures to limit spousal support could lead to the financially dependent spouse—usually the woman—becoming reliant on welfare. Nonetheless, in the twenties, as divorce rates increased, potentially pricey payouts became a topic of national debate. As the sociologist Brian Donovan observes in the 2020 book “American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith,” a veritable “alimony panic” set in. To avoid paying any, men transferred deeds, created shell companies, and, in New York, set up “alimony colonies” in out-of-state locales such as Hoboken, where they wouldn’t be served with papers. Even though courts were equally loath to award alimony—“Judges publicly criticized alimony seekers as ‘parasites,’ ” Donovan writes—the perception that men were being fleeced persisted. I was reminded of the 1959 film “North by Northwest,” in which the executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) gets lured into a dangerous mission and protests by quipping, “I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives, and several bartenders dependent upon me.”

Ex-husbands longed for a legal remedy. There had been limited cases since the eighteenth century in which prenuptial contracts were recognized in the U.S., but these typically pertained to the handling of a spouse’s assets after death. The idea of a contract made in anticipation of divorce was considered morally repugnant. In an oft-cited case from 1940, a Michigan judge refused to uphold a prenup, emphasizing that marriage was “not merely a private contract between the parties.” You could not personalize it any more than you could traffic laws.

But by the early seventies there was no stemming the tide of marital dissolution: the divorce rate had doubled from just a decade earlier. In 1970, a landmark case, Posner v. Posner, was decided in Florida. Victor Posner, a prominent Miami businessman, was divorcing his younger wife, a former salesgirl. He asked the judge to honor the couple’s prenup, which granted Mrs. Posner just six hundred dollars a month in alimony. The judge, in his decision, acknowledged the cultural shift: “The concept of the ‘sanctity’ of a marriage as being practically indissoluble, . . . held by our ancestors only a few generations ago, has been greatly eroded in the last several decades.”

As prenups became more regularly enforced, popular culture took note. In a 1976 episode of the sitcom “The Jeffersons”—about a successful African American couple named George and Louise (played by Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford), who own a chain of dry-cleaning shops—a neighbor raises the topic of prenuptial agreements after hearing that the Jeffersons’ son is engaged. In 1981, the erotic thriller “Body Heat” updated the plot of “Double Indemnity” for the prenup era. In theory, the femme fatale (Kathleen Turner) could now just get a divorce, under no-fault laws, and live comfortably. “You’ll come out all right,” her lover (William Hurt) tells her, thinking of alimony. “No, I signed a prenuptial agreement,” she corrects him. “What?” he responds, before the movie gives “contract killer” a whole new meaning.

It was in the eighties, though, that prenups truly began to “trend up,” as Patricia Hennessey, a divorce attorney who teaches at Columbia Law School, told me. When I visited her office in midtown, I spied a copy of the DSM-IV in her bookcase and asked her about it. “Of course I have the DSM-IV—for custody cases,” she replied. Hennessey started her career as a matrimonial lawyer in 1987, working under the divorce attorney Harriet Newman Cohen, whose clients have included Tom Brady and Andrew Cuomo. It was an exciting time to be a divorce lawyer, depending on what excites you: “All kinds of things were beginning to change then, like property distribution,” Hennessey said.

In the early eighties, following protests by women’s organizations, New York State had passed a new law that declared that all marital assets would no longer go by default to the titleholder—typically the husband—but would have to be divided according to “equitable distribution.” Judges were given a number of factors to consider in determining what was equitable, including the contributions of a “homemaker” to the other spouse’s “career or career potential.” “It encapsulated the idea of marriage as an economic partnership,” Hennessey said. “The person who stayed home and took care of the kids so that the other person could go out and, as one judge put it, ‘slay the dragons of Wall Street’ was considered equal to the person bringing in the money. That was a real sea change. Women started getting a lot more of the marital assets.” Requests for prenups in New York skyrocketed.

But if equitable distribution has long been on the books, I asked Hennessey, why are prenups being touted now as a method to protect stay-at-home mothers? Wasn’t the law already on their side? She explained that the law is one thing; the interpretation of it is another. “I don’t think judges can stop themselves from seeing facts through the prism of their own experience,” she said. Questions can arise about how often stay-at-home parents—eighty per cent of whom are women—actually cooked or cleaned. In contrast, she observed, “nobody ever says about the husband, ‘He didn’t make enough money.’ ”

During the next few weeks, I sat in on Hennessey’s matrimonial-law class. I learned that in most European countries couples getting a marriage license check a box to choose a separate- or joint-property scheme. Nothing like that exists here. “You want to drive a car in New York State, they give you a big, big manual and then they test you,” Hennessey said. “You want to get married in New York, you pay thirty-five dollars to the clerk and they say, ‘Good luck.’ ”

One student asked whether saying “I won’t marry you if you don’t sign a prenup” counts as duress, which invalidates the contract. Many have attempted to challenge prenups on those grounds, Hennessey said—The wedding invitations had already gone out! But, she explained, “it’s only legal duress if the person says, ‘Sign this now or I will shoot you.’ It makes no sense to those of us who live in the world, because emotional duress is just as painful—if not worse.”

On a chilly afternoon, I made my way to Enso Cafe, in Park Slope, to meet Sol Lee, the creator of Neptune, the A.I.-assisted prenup app. I found Lee, who is thirty-four, sitting on a leather couch, wearing a beige fleece sweatshirt, straight-leg jeans, and neon-green sneakers—what she calls her “founder uniform.” Her brown hair fell just below her shoulders. She told me that her husband cuts it. “He says, ‘I’m hooking my talons in so you can’t leave me,’ ” she said. “Because I do prenups, we can kind of joke.”

Lee previously worked at Mastercard, Uber, and a V.C. fund, and also launched, then shuttered, a skin-care health-tech startup. She got the idea for Neptune, she said, while weighing whether to do a prenup herself. It occurred to her that this was a prime opportunity to explore A.I.’s capacity as “a tool for emotional navigation.” Lee said that three thousand users have conversed with the company’s chatbot since its soft launch, in 2024.

At the café, Lee wanted to show me a new analog feature—Fight Night, a card game to help couples brainstorm what they might want in a prenup. “It’s still in beta,” she warned. The cards fell into categories including debt, inheritance, pets. (Although prenups can’t legally dictate custody arrangements for human children, they can for the four-legged kind.) Lee read a sample card: “Money earned during the marriage is, one, fully shared; two, fully separate; or, three, a mix of fully shared and separate.” I held up three fingers to her one. “We’re not aligned!” I exclaimed. I confessed that I didn’t want to have to pay for someone’s overpriced gym membership. Some couples consider that a shared bill, Lee said. “Because I would benefit from looking at my spouse?” I joked. “Dead-ass,” she replied. I noticed Lee’s ring, a huge sparkler, and complimented her. “Thanks, it’s in the prenup,” she said. “It was important to my husband that it stay in his family.”

Prenup signers are making decisions on behalf of their future selves—who will get the house we might one day buy with money we don’t and might never have—with greater ease than I can decide what I want for dinner. But today’s work culture seems to invite a certain amount of projection. More than thirty-five per cent of both millennials and Gen Z-ers identify as entrepreneurs. Neptune features a “startup equity calculator” on its website. Many young people earn part of their income as content creators on TikTok or Instagram. One law firm in San Francisco has even begun marketing prenups to #tradwives; an ex-husband could, after all, argue that he was integral to the brand.

“Sorry we lied about being a centipede, but we all really, really liked you.”

Cartoon by Enrico Pinto

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I often got the sense that prenups were aspirational. Recently, New York did an exposé on non-celebrities who require their dates to sign N.D.A.s, to telegraph their own importance. Were prenups a version of that? If you can’t have Kanye West’s money, you can nonetheless shout, “We want prenup!,” a line from “Gold Digger.” Lee told me that one couple on Neptune included a clause stating that if the marital pool reached five million they’d both waive spousal support. “I really like that, because it’s a positive incentive you’re creating in what’s a negative document,” she said. One of Wenup’s clients told me that she was encouraged to consider a prenup, in part, after listening to the audiobook of “I Will Teach You to Be Rich,” by Ramit Sethi.

I wasn’t unsympathetic. Who wouldn’t, amid all the current recession indicators, crave some modicum of control over one’s future financials? But there was a thin line, I noticed, between managing and manifesting. I spoke to a New York-based theatre actress in her thirties who works part time at Lululemon. Earlier this year, she married a finance guy. At her suggestion, they signed up for HelloPrenup. She wanted any property purchased in the marriage to be in the name of the person who paid for it. This surprised me as, by her own admission, that person was likely to be her husband. “He’s the breadwinner in his, like, hedge-fund job,” she conceded. “But I’m an actress, so there’s a chance, if I get a movie or show or whatever, I can make a lot of money.” She also insisted on an infidelity clause that initially came with a fifty-thousand-dollar penalty per act of cheating. Her then fiancé responded, “You don’t even have fifty thousand dollars.” That didn’t matter, she told me: “I need it to hurt.”

Sharon Thompson, a professor of family law at Cardiff University, in Wales, began researching prenups in 2010, when the Supreme Court first gave them “decisive weight” across England and Wales. That year, the court upheld a prenup between a German paper-company heiress and her ex-husband, an Oxford researcher making thirty thousand pounds a year. Hoping to anticipate what impact the case would have on British culture, Thompson travelled to New York City to interview divorce lawyers, conducting a kind of anthropology of the prenup.

Thompson observed that prenup signers could suffer from “optimism bias.” Though most have heard that the divorce rate is fifty per cent, she said, “for themselves, they’ll say, ‘No, we’re never breaking up.’ ” Optimism bias could lead people to agree to unfavorable terms, as in the case of a woman who signed an especially stingy prenup. When her lawyer, whom Thompson interviewed, asked the groom-to-be what his client was getting out of it, he answered, “Marrying a doctor!”

Similarly, in a 1998 article titled “Bargaining in the Shadow of Love: The Enforcement of Premarital Agreements and How We Think About Marriage,” the American legal scholar Brian Bix wrote about the limits of rationality in negotiating prenups: “Society should be skeptical about the ability of the earlier self to judge the interests and preferences of the later self.” Bix’s prescription for drafting a clear-eyed prenup was, perhaps unsurprisingly, to have each party employ a good lawyer, someone who has seen every way a marriage can fail, who has heard more sad stories than can fit inside the Country Music Hall of Fame.

I flew to Tennessee to meet Rose Palermo, the so-called divorce queen of Nashville, whose clients have included Wynonna Judd and Billy Ray Cyrus. Palermo had recently handled Cyrus’s split from an Australian singer-songwriter named Firerose. Firerose received no spousal support but was entitled to royalties for the songs that she and Cyrus co-wrote, including “After the Storm,” a ballad about overcoming hard times with the help of the right partner. It was released in March of 2024; come May, Cyrus would file for divorce. Behind Palermo’s desk, I noticed a signed handwritten letter from Tammy Wynette. “But I thought she stood by her man,” I said. “She did,” Palermo replied. “About four times.”

Palermo began practicing law in the seventies. Back then, she specialized in protecting up-and-coming country-music stars from predatory contracts or fraudsters. “People would take their money, promise fame, then leave town,” she recalled. Divorce law wasn’t a big leap; here, too, were people who’d been banking on a fairy tale.

I told Palermo about some of my reporting. Prenups, I kept hearing, were a way to take some of the emotion and vitriol out of divorce. (“I don’t know how I will feel about future Alex,” Zevallos told me. “But I want to look out for him now, because right now I love him.”) Was it true that they helped ease the pain? “No, no, no!” Palermo objected, laughing so hard that I thought she was going to knock a pit-bull paperweight right off her desk. “Someone should tell my clients that,” she said. “They keep writing divorce albums.” She stopped to text Kacey Musgraves, a client whose divorce album, “Star-Crossed,” came out in 2021, to tell her that she was being interviewed by a journalist from New York. Musgraves texted back, “You’re iconic.”

Then Palermo got serious. “You’re hoping when you have this prenup you’re going to eliminate all the arguments.” But, she added, “if you have one person that’s ended up being a bigger star than the other, there’s a lot of hostility. It’s ‘You’re going to have all this, and I’m not going to have anything, and I made you what you are.’ ” There was no contract that could save you from a broken heart or your own broken dreams. I asked Palermo if she’d heard a song by the country singer Nicolle Galyon called “prenup.” It’s about a couple with nothing who jokingly consider getting one—“You’d get half of my Christian college loans / Half of my first Nokia phone.” I played it for Palermo. After the bridge—“Ain’t gonna sign no dotted line / What’s mine is yours and yours is mine”—Palermo said, “I love it,” but she didn’t sound convinced.

“Would you get a prenup?” nearly everyone asked when I said I was working on this story. Previously I would have said no, because I’m not a Kardashian. The apps that charge five hundred and ninety-nine dollars a pop aim to bring prenups to the masses, but is that whom they really serve? Prenups essentially exist to override laws that split assets equally, or at least equitably; they generally favor the spouse who has more. (When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement, one X user joked, “that prenup is about to be longer than any book travis kelce has ever read.”) James Sexton, a divorce attorney who founded Trusted Prenup, another app, is a frequent guest of manosphere podcasters such as Andrew Huberman and Andrew Schultz. Sexton accuses his app competitors of being all “girlboss marketing,” and he told me that, despite efforts to democratize prenups, the stereotype remains true: “It’s still more often than not the Goldman Sachs guy marrying a yoga teacher who wants to protect his money.” Did prenups actually have anything to offer the average couple?

I took my questions to Alexia Korberg, the executive director of Her Justice, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation for women and gender minorities living in poverty in New York City, with about six thousand clients annually. Since 2018, it has run the Financial Freedom Project, which supports women facing economic crisis, including as a result of divorce. Korberg told me that those living in poverty are typically splitting not assets but debts. In many cases, it’s “coerced debt”—the result of credit-card applications filled out by a spouse without a partner’s knowledge, for instance.

I expected that Korberg and her colleague Anna Maria Diamanti, Her Justice’s supervising attorney, would regard prenups as a frivolous luxury item. “They’re a privatized solution to a social problem,” I offered, thinking of the motherhood penalty. They didn’t disagree, but they told me that younger generations might be seeking out prenups because there’s greater awareness now of the cost of litigation, both financial and emotional. Even if a prenup only re-states the law, it can neutralize a vengeful ex. “If my prenup says, you know, My 401(k) coming into the marriage is my own, my house that I inherited from my family is my own, then you’re not going to risk having to litigate it later, or litigating it might be much cheaper,” Diamanti said. And litigation, she observed, can become a form of abuse. She sees some partners “file motion after motion just to wear down their victim, just to force them to try to walk away with less.”

Korberg noted that a prenup is educational. “It compels you to learn what is the law in the state of New York, so you don’t have these expectations that you’re entitled to this or to that.” It’s true that, when I spoke to the Neptune chatbot, I learned that debt taken on by a spouse, in that person’s name, could become my responsibility if I “benefited from the debt.” I asked the chatbot what that meant. It replied that, if my partner took out a car loan but I also drove the vehicle, I was benefitting. I didn’t know this, despite having been both married and divorced in the state of New York.

What was the verdict—were prenups good or bad? I had heard both sides, the prosecution and the defense, and had pored over all the evidence only to conclude, well, it depends. Was I spending too much time with lawyers? Definitely, but can anyone really speak generally about a contract that was created to individualize? We sign prenups in pen, but our lives are written in pencil; plans can easily get erased, vows smudged to the point of illegibility. “That’s why older people cry at weddings,” one divorce attorney told me. “Because we know that young couples don’t know what they’re getting into.” I did see the value of at least considering a prenup. The conversation alone is a kind of personality test. Are you about to marry a person who wants to be reimbursed for the wallpaper you put in the nursery, who doesn’t want to help you pay off your student loans, who wants the ring back? Or does this person look at you and think, I want to give this woman everything. ♦

A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the moviegoing unconscious. Newcomers feel shudders of recognition on seeing Murnau’s indelible evocations of a Transylvanian vampire on the prowl: a reverse-negative image of Nosferatu’s carriage clattering through a forest; majestically disquieting sequences of a pestilential ship gliding across the frame; the vampire toting his coffin through the deserted streets of a German town; his shadow seeping along the wall of a stairwell, bony fingers outstretched. Film societies, symphony orchestras, and alternative venues show “Nosferatu” on a regular basis, especially around Halloween. Remakes by Werner Herzog, in 1979, and Robert Eggers, in 2024, have further boosted the fame of the original, although neither matches its sinister lyricism. The appearance of the word “symphony” in the title highlights the revolutionary musicality of Murnau’s style, his way of turning images into silent song.

But how to handle the music itself? Although “Nosferatu” came out five years before sound came in, the composer Hans Erdmann supplied a score that ensembles could play at larger theatres. Much of Erdmann’s music later disappeared, and the surviving fragments, humidly late-Romantic in style, don’t suggest a lost masterpiece. In the absence of a fixed soundtrack, hundreds of alternatives have been devised, variously, by classical composers, film composers, rock bands, doom-metal groups, jazz ensembles, and noise collectives. Just before Halloween, the vocalist and composer Haley Fohr, who performs as Circuit des Yeux, supplied a gloomily atmospheric accompaniment for a screening of “Nosferatu” at the Philosophical Research Society, in Los Angeles—a blend of guitar drones, spectral vocals, and churning minimalist figuration.

In my experience, though, “Nosferatu” is most convincing when backed by organ. Battles with the unholy thrive on churchly tones. In late October, I went to San Diego to see the film at the Balboa Theatre, a century-old movie and vaudeville house. Its prized possession is a 1929 Wonder Morton organ, a four-manual instrument that once resided at a cinema in Queens. The performer was David Marsh, a thirty-year-old musician based in Mission Viejo, California. Marsh, an enthusiast of French organ improvisation, brought no written music to the gig, though he had a plan of action. He told me beforehand, “ ‘Nosferatu’ allows me to use everything I’ve got. There are romantic, sentimental moments, as when the young hero leaves his wife to go to Transylvania, and those call for an Old Hollywood sound. But it’s also horror, and that allows me to be an absolute madman—dissonance, chromaticism, cluster chords.”

In the idyllic early scenes, Marsh deployed a Korngoldian theme with rising intervals of a fifth and a sixth, then shifted it to the minor mode as a Transylvanian chill descended. When Nosferatu showed his corpselike face, the Wonder Morton’s Vox Humana (human voice) and concert-flute pipes buzzed together in a shrill cluster. Relentless ostinato figures underscored Nosferatu’s voyage by boat. The sunrise finale had a touch of M-G-M Messiaen. The audience exploded in applause before Marsh was done, and rightly so.

During the silent era, thousands of movie-theatre organs raised their quirky, quavery voices, with the Mighty Wurlitzer being the most popular model. According to the American Theatre Organ Society, a few hundred instruments remain in theatres, and they are experiencing a modest renaissance. Resident organists accompany silent-film screenings at, among other venues, the Stanford Theatre, in Palo Alto; the Ohio Theatre, in Columbus; the Circle Cinema, in Tulsa; and the Fox Theatre, in Atlanta. A raucous Mighty Wurlitzer at the Castro, in San Francisco, had a longtime cult following; the theatre is undergoing renovation and will reopen early next year with what is billed as the world’s largest digital organ.

In Los Angeles, the best place to see organ-powered silents is at the Old Town Music Hall, in El Segundo. This two-hundred-seat venue, which looks a bit like a Wild West opera house, first opened in 1921, providing entertainment to Standard Oil workers. In 1968, two theatre-organ enthusiasts, Bill Coffman and Bill Field, rented the building and installed a massive twenty-six-hundred-pipe Wurlitzer that they had rescued from the Fox West Coast Theatre, in Long Beach. Coffman and Field died in 2001 and 2020, respectively, but Old Town continues on a nonprofit basis, under the aegis of devoted volunteers.

Before a screening last month, I got a backstage tour from Stirling Yearian, a retired engineer and an amateur organist who helps maintain the Wurlitzer. The pipes, arrayed in chambers at the back of the theatre, must constantly be tuned, tested, and adjusted. In the basement are two vintage Spencer Orgoblo wind blowers, which power the pipes. Further complicating the upkeep is the mechanical intricacy of the Wurlitzer’s built-in sound effects: car horns, doorbells, footsteps, thunder. Yearian told me, “I haven’t accompanied a full-length silent yet, but I’ve done some shorts. They want me to do Laurel and Hardy’s ‘Big Business,’ which will be fun—a lot of door-knocking and door-slamming in that.”

Waiting in the greenroom was Robert Alan York, a veteran organist who studied classical repertory and improvisation in Paris and also possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the American songbook. His assignment that day was a demanding one: King Vidor’s 1925 film “The Big Parade,” a two-and-a-half-hour epic about a rich playboy who goes to fight in the First World War and learns the ways of the common man. York told me, “When I first played it cold, I found myself in tears at times. It starts out as a sweet, romantic thing, and then it gets very intense.” Like Marsh in San Diego, York had no music in front of him, trusting that his memory and instinct would carry him through.

If “Nosferatu” has eerily failed to age, parts of “The Big Parade” are difficult for modern audiences to digest. The hero’s antic flirtations with a French maiden drag on at inordinate length, leaving an organist little room for creative invention. Later, though, Vidor generates an atmosphere of muddy dread that anticipates the harrowing tableaux of Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” released five years later. Two complementary images frame the central battle sequences: first, trucks carry cocksure soldiers toward the front; then ambulances bring their bodies back. York responded with menacing pedal tones and Mahlerian march rhythms, relying heavily on the Wurlitzer’s automated drums.

On Halloween itself, silent-film buffs in L.A. gravitate toward Disney Hall. For more than twenty years, Disney has marked the day by screening a classic horror silent with the mightiest imaginable soundtrack: live accompaniment on its sixty-one-hundred-pipe concert organ, which the composer Terry Riley once nicknamed Hurricane Mama. This year’s offering was Wallace Worsley’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” from 1923, with Lon Chaney in the lead. At the console was Clark Wilson, a virtuosic, period-conscious organist who intermingles improvised episodes with stock pieces of the kind that were often used in the silent period: Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre,” the Largo from Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “La Marseillaise.” These days, horror directors like to unsettle audiences with subterranean skronks and rumbles: none could equal the seismic impact of Hurricane Mama’s thirty-two-foot-long C pipe.

Audiences tend to come away from theatre-organ screenings in a jubilant mood, and I think I know the reason. Here, passive consumption becomes active and creative: the performer reacts with individual spontaneity while summoning sounds of orchestral heft. The technological mastery of cinematic spectacle is humanized by the immediacy of live performance. You understand why an artist like Murnau considered silent film the perfect medium. ♦

In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data” and “Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity.” I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she’d finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.

Caroline’s academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. “I can’t remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless,” she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to “the end of a row” she couldn’t remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia.

Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it’s more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese. It often occurs in combination with additional speech and language issues, and with anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and other so-called comorbidities, although dyslexia itself can have such profound psychological and emotional impacts that some of these conditions might be characterized more accurately as side effects.

Estimates of dyslexia’s incidence in the general population vary, from as high as twenty per cent—a figure cited by, among others, Sally Shaywitz, a co-founder of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity—to as low as zero, as suggested by Richard Allington, a retired professor of education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who in 2019 told participants at a literacy conference that legislators who supported remediation for students with reading disabilities should be shot. Nadine Gaab, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me that the best current estimates fall between five and ten per cent.

There are reasons for the inconsistency. The condition varies in type, severity, and presentation of symptoms, and early literacy skills have historically been hard to measure. Many children with dyslexia (and their parents) never learn they have it. Because a common strategy for avoiding the embarrassment of reading aloud is to act in a way that results in being sent to the principal’s office, dyslexic students are often treated primarily as discipline problems. At every grade level, they are more likely to be suspended, expelled, or placed in juvenile detention, especially if their families are economically disadvantaged. According to a 2011 study of four thousand high-school students by Donald J. Hernandez, then a sociology professor at Hunter College, more than sixty per cent of those who failed to graduate had been found to have reading deficits as early as third grade. More often than not, schools don’t intervene effectively, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes as a result of misguided pedagogy, sometimes for fear of incurring instructional or legal costs.

The personal and societal consequences can be catastrophic, since even to work at many minimum-wage jobs you need to be able to read. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that proven methods for teaching dyslexic students—which enabled Caroline to become an avid reader by middle school—have been known for decades. What’s more, the main principles that inform those methods have been shown to underlie successful reading instruction for all students, whether they have dyslexia or not. (An administrator at a school for students with reading disabilities told me, “What works for our students actually works for everyone. It’s a matter of dosage.”) Many American schools don’t use scientifically supported instructional methods, though, and, partly because they don’t, dyslexia can be hard to distinguish from what one elementary-school principal described to me as “dystaughtia.” If reading were taught better, almost all students would benefit, and students with neurological differences would be easier to identify and treat before their difficulties with reading derailed their lives. “There’s a window of opportunity to intervene,” Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, told me. “You don’t want to let that go.”

Shaywitz, in her book “Overcoming Dyslexia,” cites an account, published by a German doctor in 1676, of “an old man of 65 years” who lost the ability to read after suffering a stroke. “He did not know a single letter nor could he distinguish one from another,” the doctor wrote. This was perhaps the first published description of what’s known today as acquired dyslexia, caused by damage to the brain. Two centuries later, a doctor in England wrote a paper about a case of what he called “congenital word blindness.” It involved a fourteen-year-old boy who was unable to read despite years of instruction by teachers and tutors. He could recognize “and,” “the,” “of,” and a few other one-syllable words, and he knew the letters of the alphabet, but when the doctor dictated vocabulary to him he misspelled nearly everything, writing “sening” for “shilling” and “scojock” for “subject.” His disability stood out, the doctor wrote, because his schoolmaster had said that he would be “the smartest lad in the school if the instruction were entirely oral.”

Spoken language arose at least fifty thousand years ago, and the brain has evolved with it. As a consequence, most children learn to speak early and easily, without formal instruction. (Deaf children pick up signing readily, too.) Reading and writing are different. They were invented only about five thousand years ago, and natural selection has not configured the brain to facilitate them. “You can’t just lock a group of kindergartners in a library and expect them to emerge, a couple of weeks later, as readers,” Gaab told me. “It’s more like learning a musical instrument. You can listen to Mozart all your life, but if I put you in front of a piano and say, ‘Play Mozart,’ you will fail.”

To become literate, people have to repurpose parts of the brain that evolved to perform other tasks, such as object recognition and sound processing. “What we have to do, over the course of learning to read, is coördinate these areas to communicate with each other and build what we call a reading network,” Gaab said. The areas are connected by axon bundles, which she likened to highways. The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his book “Reading in the Brain,” writes, “Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?”

Sometimes the axon highways almost seem to pave themselves. My daughter, Laura, began to read all of a sudden, the summer before kindergarten. (“It’s hard to believe that ‘knock’ starts with ‘k,’ ” she said, while following along as I read her a bedtime story about Amanda Pig.) But even she didn’t become a reader entirely on her own. All children have to learn the relationships between letters and meaningful sounds. For some it’s harder than for others. “Maybe instead of four lanes you have two,” Gaab said, “or instead of a smooth surface you have a bumpy one.” Caroline had a large vocabulary, and she was read to as often as Laura was, both at home and at school, and there were just as many colorful plastic alphabet magnets stuck to the refrigerator in her kitchen. But she needed teachers who understood that literacy doesn’t happen naturally, especially for children with dyslexia.

A decade ago, Emily Hanford, a senior correspondent at American Public Media, was researching a story about college-level remedial-reading classes. She became interested in dyslexia and then in literacy generally, and in 2022 she produced an immensely influential podcast series, “Sold a Story,” about reading instruction in American schools. The central argument is that teachers all over the country employ instructional methods and materials that were proved, long ago, to be not just ineffective but counterproductive. Such methods, Hanford demonstrated, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how children learn to read. They direct beginning readers to look for hints in illustrations and to make deductions based on context, word length, plot, and other cues, with only incidental reliance on the sounds represented by letters. The idea is that, as children become adept at deduction, the mechanical side will, in effect, take care of itself.

Skilled reading has many elements. A popular metaphor is the “reading rope,” created by the psychologist Hollis Scarborough in 2001. It depicts eight “strands,” which readers weave together as they become proficient. The strands include not just an understanding of the sounds represented by letters and combinations of letters but also such elements of language comprehension as vocabulary, grammar, reasoning, and background knowledge. All the strands are necessary. In Hanford’s view, the ones related to word recognition, including phonological awareness and decoding, have often been neglected. That harms many students and is a disaster for children with dyslexia.

Antipathy to phonetic decoding is sometimes traced to the nineteenth-century American educator Horace Mann, who described the letters of the alphabet as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and argued in favor of teaching children to recognize words as discrete units. A later, more powerful influence was Marie Clay, a teacher and researcher in New Zealand, who studied schoolchildren learning to read and concluded, in the nineteen-sixties, that understanding the relationships between letters and sounds wasn’t essential. Hanford, in the second episode of “Sold a Story,” says, “Her basic idea was that good readers are good problem solvers. They’re like detectives, searching for clues.” The best clues, Clay reasoned, were things like context and sentence structure. Frank Smith, a British psycholinguist, came to the same conclusion. He argued that, to a good reader, a printed word was like an ideogram. “The worst readers are those who try to sound out unfamiliar words according to the rules of phonics,” he wrote, in 1992.

There have always been opposing voices. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” a brutal indictment of “whole word” methods. “If they had their way, our teachers would never tell the children that there are letters and that each letter represents a sound,” Flesch writes. To illustrate the problem, he recounts a story, told by a literacy researcher, about a boy who could read the word “children” on a flash card but not in a book. (The boy explained that he recognized the flash card because someone had smudged it.) Flesch’s book spent months on best-seller lists, but teaching methods like the ones he had seemingly destroyed remained widely used.

“We’re only walking to the other end of the cage.”

Cartoon by Lynn Hsu

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Today, two of the most popular reading-instruction programs are Units of Study, whose principal author is Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Both are traceable to the work of people like Clay and Smith, and both are sold by the same educational publisher. They have remained entrenched in school systems even though scientific studies have shown that their theoretical foundations are flawed. Technology that allows researchers to track the eye movements of people as they read has demonstrated, for instance, that good readers actually do decode words by looking closely, if quickly, at letters and combinations of letters. Dehaene writes that “ ‘eight’ and ‘EIGHT,’ which are composed of distinct visual features, are initially encoded by different neurons in the primary visual area, but are progressively recoded until they become virtually indistinguishable.” If fluent readers are able to read familiar words in a way that makes it seem as though they’re recognizing ideograms, it’s because they analyzed them phonetically during earlier encounters, prompting their brains to create permanent neural pathways linking spelling, sound, and meaning.

Struggling readers, in particular, need instructors who have been trained in what’s now broadly referred to as structured literacy, research-based instruction, or the science of reading. Such methods are rooted in a neuroscientific understanding of the elements of reading, with an emphasis on enabling students to accurately decode written representations of spoken language. Amy Murdoch, the director of the reading-science program at Mount St. Joseph University, in Cincinnati, said that these methods provide the best framework to teach even non-dyslexic people to read; still, at many universities it is possible to earn an advanced degree in early education without learning them. Margaret Goldberg, a co-founder of the Right to Read Project, a California-based nonprofit, told me that one reason for the persistence of discredited methods may be that they seem intuitively correct to the kinds of people who become elementary-school teachers. “When I train teachers, I ask them how they learned to read,” she said. “And most of them will say they did it very easily, and they’ll have memories of things like sitting at a little table while their teacher pointed out a few things.” With Laura as my sample of one, I would have assumed that teaching a child to read requires nothing more than taking lots of family trips to the library.

Goldberg told me about a workshop she attended in 2015, when she was working as a literacy coach at a low-performing public school in Oakland. The workshop introduced teachers and others to Units of Study, which the school system had just purchased. Participants were shown pages from a story about a kangaroo, written in an alphabet they didn’t recognize. (It turned out to be Greek.) Goldberg recalled that the presenter told them not to worry about the words: “He said, ‘Just see how much reading you can do without even knowing the alphabet.’ ” When Goldberg objected that this kind of guessing wasn’t the same thing as reading, the presenter told her she was wrong.

“In normal science, a theory whose assumptions and predictions have been repeatedly contradicted by data will be discarded,” Seidenberg, the cognitive neuroscientist, writes in his book “Language at the Speed of Sight.” “But in education they are theoretical zombies that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons such as empirical disconfirmation, leaving them free to roam the educational landscape.”

Calkins eventually added phonics to Units of Study, partly in response to Hanford’s reporting. Nevertheless, in 2023, New York City began phasing out the curriculum, which it had used for years. The city recently released test results showing that the number of students meeting the bar for proficiency has risen by seven percentage points. (Columbia’s Teachers College moved away from Units of Study, too.)

Anne Wicks, an education and economics specialist at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, told me that Hanford’s podcast helped transform what had been a relatively obscure academic debate into an approachable subject for laypeople. The remote schooling required by COVID also had a significant impact, Wicks said, by showing many parents how their children were actually being taught. Since 2020, more than forty states have passed laws that push schools to emphasize the science of reading. Legislation doesn’t necessarily translate into classroom change, especially if teachers (and teachers’ unions) resist. In places that have fully committed to improved teacher training, though, results have been impressive. Wicks said that Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee have turned improved curricula into better test results—a change that has been called the “Southern surge.”

Karin Chenoweth, a former columnist for the Washington Post, who has written several books about successful schools, told me about a district that she’s studied closely in Steubenville, Ohio. “It’s in Appalachia, and it’s under-resourced, and it has hardly any tax base, and it’s over ninety per cent disadvantaged,” she said. “But in some years one hundred per cent of their kids in grades three and four meet state standards in reading.” In 2000, the district adopted a science-backed program, Success for All, which was developed in the nineteen-eighties by two professors at Johns Hopkins. At least as important as the program, Chenoweth told me, was that the district’s teachers embraced a different way of teaching. “Building a school culture like that isn’t easy,” she said. “But once the teachers saw the effects they fiercely protected it and they wouldn’t go back.”

Steven Dykstra is a retired clinical psychologist in Milwaukee. He didn’t think much about dyslexia until his son had trouble reading in first grade. He and his wife arranged a conference with the teacher, who asked whether they read to their son at home. “When we assured her that we had read to him every night since he was only a few months old, she was confused,” he told me. “She asked us, ‘Are you sure?,’ as if we had hallucinated all these many hours.” The teacher then asked what they did when their son struggled to read a word. “We told her that we helped him sound it out,” he said. “That was her ‘Aha!’ moment. ‘That’s the problem,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s messing him up. You need to stop doing that. Phonics doesn’t work.’ ”

Dykstra was employed for thirty-three years by Milwaukee County’s public-health department, and he spent most of that time on a mental-health-crisis team that provided counselling to children and young adults. He told me about a case involving a sixteen-year-old girl who had been engaged in many kinds of self-destructive behavior. “She took drugs, and she would sell herself, and she would wake up after being drunk with these awful amateur tattoos,” Dykstra said. She eventually agreed to meet with him on the condition that they do so in her parents’ garage and keep the door open so that she could flee if she felt she needed to.

During their conversation, Dykstra said, the girl surprised him by revealing that she was unable to read—something that hadn’t come up during weeks of interviews with people in her life. The girl told him that, in elementary school, she had avoided being called on by doing things like pretending to be sick or walking out of the room, and that she had once hit a teacher with a book. She didn’t mind being punished, she said, because no punishment could be worse than the laughter of her classmates. “Then the conversation shifted to other things,” Dykstra continued. “I said, ‘You know, lots of other people wouldn’t do the things you do, like go to a motel with a stranger for forty dollars, because they would feel such intense shame.’ And she looked at me like I was an idiot. She said, ‘I’ve been ashamed every minute of my life since I started first grade. I’m used to it.’ ”

Partly because of his experience with that girl and with his son, Dykstra told me, in counselling sessions with young people he always asked, “When you started school, was there one thing that was harder than anything else?” Often, he said, the answer was reading. For children who can’t read, every school day holds the potential for repeated humiliation, and the severity of the humiliation grows as the gap between them and their classmates widens. Hanford told me, “If you are a kid who is struggling to read, you are experiencing failure really fast, and you are experiencing massive confusion, and it is actually fucking frightening.”

To a school administrator, dyslexia can seem to be a problem that solves itself, since many sufferers drop out before graduation. But for some the harm continues long after school. Kareem Weaver, a co-founder of Fulcrum, a literacy nonprofit based in Oakland, told me that more than forty per cent of all imprisoned adults in the U.S. have dyslexia, and that as many as eight in ten are “functionally illiterate.” The correlation between illiteracy and incarceration has been known for a long time. A 1993 review by the Department of Justice found “ample evidence of the link between academic failure and delinquency.” It also found that “research-based reading instruction can be used to reduce recidivism and increase employment opportunity for incarcerated juvenile offenders.” Teaching reading to imprisoned adults has a similar effect on both recidivism and employment. Intervening earlier is obviously more effective, as well as more humane. It’s also less expensive. The average cost of maintaining an inmate on Rikers Island is more than half a million dollars a year.

Caroline’s dyslexia was identified in second grade, and afterward she spent three years at Windward, a private day school for children with language-based learning disabilities. During the time she was there, in the early two-thousands, Windward had an elementary and middle school in White Plains. It has since expanded to the Upper East Side. The total enrollment is about nine hundred and fifty. When Caroline was admitted, she was reading at a pre-kindergarten level and suffering from insomnia and intense anxiety. Both ended when she began to read.

The structured-literacy program employed for the youngest Windward students is called P.A.F., which stands for Preventing Academic Failure. It’s an adaptation of what’s known as the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching dyslexics and other struggling readers. Samuel Orton was a pathologist and neuropsychiatrist who, in the nineteen-twenties, noticed that people who had suffered left-hemisphere brain injuries had reading difficulties that were similar to those of certain bright children who underperformed in school. He referred to such difficulties as “strephosymbolia,” a coinage whose Greek roots mean “reversed symbols.” Even without modern scanning technologies, he correctly deduced that the condition involved a breakdown in what Seidenberg later called the “leftward shift” in the brain of a developing reader. (Language-related activity occurs in both hemispheres of the brain but becomes concentrated in the left one as we learn to read.) Anna Gillingham was an educator who, with encouragement from Orton, devised teaching methods and materials that rely on explicit, narrowly focussed instruction in the relationship between spoken language and its representation in writing. Students follow a sequence of increasingly complex steps involving things like letter-sound relationships and syllabication, with lots of repetition. (A literacy expert told me, “A typical learner needs three to five repetitions. A struggling reader might need ten to twenty repetitions. A dyslexic reader might need two hundred repetitions.”) Orton-Gillingham is not the only approach to teaching children with reading disabilities—and some of its techniques, such as tracing letters in the air and whispering words or speaking them aloud, are controversial—but methods based on it are widely used in the U.S. in programs that treat dyslexia.

In early September, I visited Windward’s White Plains elementary-school campus, for grades one through five, and watched from the parking lot as students were dropped off by parents and school buses. Staff members greeted each child on the sidewalk in front of the building while a teacher played music from a boom box. Enthusiasm for school is rare among children with dyslexia, but I saw smiles, laughter, and high fives. For many of the students, Windward is likely the first school they’ve attended where simply showing up in the morning doesn’t fill them with dread.

Later that day, I sat in on a fifth-grade reading class, accompanied by Jamie Williamson, the head of the school. A strip of red tape ran along the left edge of each student’s desktop, as a visual reminder that writing in English moves from left to right. A sign at the front of the room read “THE FIRST THING I DO IS ALWAYS THE SAME . . . I PICK UP MY PENCIL AND WRITE MY NAME!”

“We are going to go on a vowel hunt,” the teacher said. “Let’s put on our vowel-hunting glasses.” From her laptop, she projected vocabulary words, one at a time, onto a whiteboard. The first word was “picnic.”

“Our first job is to underline the vowels,” she said. “Who can raise their hand and tell me what vowels we would need to underline in this word?”

“Both of the ‘i’s,” a girl said.

The next task was to place a dot between any pair of consonants.

“Where would I put a dot? Scarlett?”

“In between the ‘c’ and the ‘n.’ ”

“Right there. You’ve got it. Nicely done.”

Then a student “scooped” the syllables, by drawing curved lines, on the whiteboard, under “pic” and “nic.” Finally, all the students read the word aloud.

After they had given half a dozen words the same treatment, the teacher said, “I think we’re ready to write some syllables of our own. Please pick up your pencil and put the tip of your pencil on the next clean line. Are we ready?” As the students worked, a teacher-in-training walked from desk to desk, correcting errors immediately.

Windward’s teachers follow highly structured lesson plans. Students memorize rules about letter sounds, letter combinations, and grammar. They also receive instruction in essay organization and composition. Their progress is monitored and evaluated, and reading classes are regularly rearranged so that students are always grouped with others at similar levels of proficiency. After three to five years, almost all Windward students transition to conventional schools. When Caroline left, after fifth grade, she was reading in the ninety-fifth percentile, and she later qualified for her new school’s gifted program. Windward had made her not only an avid reader but also a skilled writer. (Toward the end of her third year, she wrote a poem that ended, “So come and read, so come and read, Come don those literary Wings!”) Still, dyslexia is a lifelong condition. She told me that she reads slowly, especially academic papers, and that when she writes she will sometimes spell the same word different ways in the same paragraph. But without the help she got at Windward her adult career would have been impossible.

Just before my visit, Windward had held orientation sessions for new parents. Williamson said that at one session a mother told him that her daughter had come home from school, during the first week, and asked to order a book so that they could read together on the couch in the evenings. The mother said that she had excused herself to go to the bathroom, then closed the door and cried. She told Williamson that her daughter had never wanted a book before. “And this was day three,” he said.

Every year, Windward’s faculty trains roughly fifteen hundred teachers from other schools, both on site and online, through a program called the Windward Institute. This past summer, the institute worked with teachers for the Central Brooklyn Literacy Academy, in Crown Heights, a new public elementary school for struggling readers, including those with dyslexia. Most of the teachers were skeptical initially, Williamson told me, largely because they worried that P.A.F. would leave little room for their own creativity. “Before they actually got into a classroom with kids, they were, like, ‘This is going to be the most boring thing ever,’ ” he said. Once they began working with students, though, they changed their minds. “They knew the kids well, because they were from their own schools,” he said. “So they knew that this kid wouldn’t sit still, and wasn’t successful, and was disruptive. But all of a sudden the same child was front and center, really engaged, working incredibly hard.”

C.B.L.A. is the second public school in the city which is specifically for children with reading disabilities. The first was the South Bronx Literacy Academy, which opened in 2023. Both schools are the product of a multiyear effort by the Literacy Academy Collective, an organization founded by half a dozen women who have children with learning disabilities. The women first met in 2019, drawn together by shared frustration with the city’s failure to teach their children to read. In 2021, with teachers trained by the Windward Institute, L.A.C. ran a six-week summer-school pilot, in Harlem. The organization did the same in the Bronx the following summer, then ran a yearlong pilot program for two classes of students in an existing school, also in the Bronx. The pilot was successful, and before the year was half over the Department of Education began the process of establishing S.B.L.A. By the time the school opened, the women’s own children were too old to benefit from it, but their organization has remained deeply involved, supplementing the budgets of both literacy academies with private fund-raising and providing administrative and classroom support. (Their story is told in the documentary “Left Behind,” which was released in 2025.)

“Switching to a third party doesn’t mean I’ll get back together with you.”

Cartoon by Tom Toro

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I visited S.B.L.A. in September. The school occupies one floor of a shared building on a narrow, crowded street half a mile from Yankee Stadium. It was early in the school year, and staff members were dealing with complications resulting from bus routes and other transportation challenges—a significant issue, since the school draws students from beyond the neighborhood. Bethany Poolman, the principal, told me, “All the streets here are one-way, so if you get stuck you might be stuck forever.”

Poolman has the energy of a pep-squad leader, and she operates at close to full speed all day long—filling in for an absent teacher, tracking down missing classroom materials, breaking up a playground fight. She majored in religion at Haverford, then joined Teach for America as a special-education teacher at a middle school in the Bronx. She spent a decade there before moving to administration. “We have two brand-new students who are in the lowest reading group,” she said. “They just joined us, and they’re sweet as pie, both of them, but they cannot name the twenty-six letters.” One had been held back twice. Rather than put him in a class with students two years younger, the school placed him just one grade behind and assigned a reading specialist to help him catch up.

“If you were to have a conversation with him, you’d have no idea,” she said. “But then you put three letters in front of him and he can’t read ‘cat.’ ”

I said I was amazed that children could make it so far in school without knowing the alphabet.

“Correct,” Poolman said. “But they’re here now.”

She introduced me to three fifth-grade girls, now in their third year at S.B.L.A. I asked them what they remembered about the schools they’d attended previously.

“If we didn’t get the word right, we would have to stay inside for recess,” one said. “We would have to write the word, like, fifteen times, until we got it, and then we would still have to stay inside, because they said there was no point to go to recess because there wasn’t enough time.” No recess is the elementary-school equivalent of solitary confinement. For kids with dyslexia and other reading challenges, who feel isolated to begin with, not being allowed to play with classmates makes socialization even harder. The girls told me that their old classmates had made fun of them, but no one did that now. They liked school. They liked their teachers. They were about to graduate to chapter books.

In 1975, Congress passed what’s now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which entitles disabled children to a “free appropriate public education,” and in 1993 the Supreme Court ruled that the act can force school districts to cover private-school tuition if public equivalents fail. Taking advantage of that provision for children with dyslexia has never been easy, however. To qualify, parents must submit an Individualized Education Program, a legal document that details their child’s special-education needs (and that has to be updated regularly), plus, in some cases, a neuropsychological examination, which can cost thousands of dollars. They also have to demonstrate that the public system has exhausted its ability to address their needs. Many parents of dyslexic children don’t know that this type of aid exists, and, even if they do, can’t afford to meet the requirements or hire lawyers to argue their child’s case. Windward’s tuition is roughly seventy-six thousand dollars a year, and other private dyslexia programs cost about as much. Much of the $2.3 billion that New York City spends annually on “non-public and contract schools per Special Education mandate” benefits families who have the means to pay private tuition up front and sue the city for reimbursement.

S.B.L.A. and C.B.L.A. use some of the same instructional materials that Windward does, but, because they are public schools on public budgets, they deal with constraints that Windward doesn’t. Windward can limit admission to students who have confirmed diagnoses and are all but certain to benefit from its classes. It has a well-funded financial-aid program, which covers almost the entire cost for some students, but the children in the hallways (and the cars I saw at drop-off) wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the campus of any super-expensive private school in Westchester.

The literacy academies enroll many children who have trouble with more than reading: severe emotional issues, little knowledge of English. New teachers at Windward spend two years in training before they take over classes of their own, a long-term apprenticeship that the literacy academies can’t match. And the academies have to meet city and state requirements that private schools don’t, including standardized testing that preëmpts instructional time and isn’t necessarily meaningful for their students.

Nevertheless, the academies have had the same kind of impact on students and families that Windward has. Ruth Genn, L.A.C.’s executive director and co-founder, told me that she hopes that within a few years there will be a network of five or six literacy academies across the city, but that the organization’s ultimate goal is “to learn from these schools and incorporate aspects of what they do throughout the system.” L.A.C. has been instrumental in changing the way teachers are trained in New York State. A pivotal moment, Genn said, occurred in 2023, when city education officials announced that they would no longer hire teachers who had not been trained in the science of reading.

At S.B.L.A., the lower grades are more likely than the upper grades to have openings for new students—and the same is true at Windward. The reason is not that dyslexia is less common among younger children but that teachers and parents usually fail to identify reading problems until they’ve become obvious. “In second grade, no one is freaking out,” Poolman said. “When you talk to families, there’s less urgency, because the kids’ teachers aren’t alarming them yet.” (She said that when S.B.L.A. opened there were ten thousand second and third graders in the Bronx who would have qualified for it.) One achievement of the city’s outgoing mayor, Eric Adams—who has dyslexia and campaigned in part as an education reformer—is that the city has begun screening for risk of dyslexia in all students from kindergarten through ninth grade.

Earlier intervention would make everything easier. Gaab told me that she thinks of reading as beginning in utero, since that’s when sound and language perception begins. Seidenberg, in “Language at the Speed of Sight,” cites a longitudinal study, employing electroencephalography, in which measurements of brain activity in newborns in response to speech “were strongly related to the same children’s spoken language skills at ages three and five and to reading impairments at age eight.” Such findings constitute a powerful argument for identifying children at risk as early as possible, when the differences are smaller and children who have difficulties are less likely to have suffered negative effects of any kind. One of the most telling indicators in young children, Seidenberg told me, is family history. (Caroline has an uncle who struggled all through school with what he suspects is dyslexia.) Gaab and her colleagues have been working with librarians and pediatricians to create a screening protocol.

I went back to S.B.L.A. the week before Thanksgiving and visited several classes with Poolman. In one, five students sat around a U-shaped desk. The teacher sat in the center and could see all the children’s papers without moving. “All right, guys. I’m going to say a sentence,” she said. “Then I’m going to say it again. You’re going to repeat it, and then you’re going to write it. Ready? They can swim. They can swim.”

“The teachers provide scaffolds, and there’s a whole science to that, because you don’t want to give students more than is necessary,” Poolman said. The teacher dictated another sentence. One boy wrote a “d” backward, like a “b,” but the teacher looked at him and then at the word, and he spotted his mistake. Poolman continued, “If he hadn’t understood, she would have said something, but she didn’t give him more than she had to. Teachers have to learn to do that. It isn’t easy.”

Music played over the P.A. system to mark the end of the period. Poolman and I stood in the center of the main hallway, and students streamed past on either side. “That girl who just went by is in her third year here,” she said. “When she started, she could not read a word. In reading class, she would put her head down on her desk and fall asleep—like, anxiety-induced narcolepsy.” Gradually, though, she had come around. “I remember the day she read aloud for the first time,” Poolman said. “She was so excited that she was shaking.” ♦