Cartoon by Mary Lawton
2026-04-04 00:06:01
2026-04-04 00:06:01
In late February, a family in Tehran received a call from an imprisoned relative, Ali Asadollahi, a thirty-seven-year-old poet and dissident. He had been taken from his home in late January by security officers who were arresting suspected sympathizers of the protests that had erupted across Iran earlier that month. Ali, who wasn’t formally charged, called his family to say that he would be released on bail, and asked them to gather the funds and collect him from prison. But his family wouldn’t hear from him again for weeks. The next day, the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, launching the country into war.
The Asadollahis set out to Evin Prison, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains north of the city, where they believed Ali was detained. State-controlled television had announced that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been “martyred,” and the highways out of Tehran were clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic as people tried to escape the capital. When the Asadollahis finally arrived at Evin, a crowd had formed outside, made up of hundreds of other Iranians who had similarly braved the ongoing bombardment to reach their loved ones. The Asadollahis headed toward Ward 209, a repository for political prisoners that’s run by Iran’s intelligence ministry. But they were turned away by the guards, who told them that the ward’s detainees had been transferred elsewhere.
The Asadollahis went to the Islamic Revolutionary Court, in eastern Tehran, hoping to find someone there who could provide more information. An officer confirmed that Ali had been taken to a new location, but he wouldn’t provide more details. One of his relatives updated the family’s group chat, which included relatives outside Iran:
“Guys, I’ve been told that those who were in Ward 209 have been taken out of Evin.”
“They’ve been transferred somewhere else—we don’t know where.”
“I’m really worried—what if they take them to a safe house and then bomb that place?”
Soon after the Asadollahis went home, the Revolutionary Court was hit by an air strike—part of President Donald Trump’s widening liberation campaign, which he has said is meant to help Iranians “take over” their country. Trump’s call to action was astounding for many people, like the Asadollahis, whose relatives had already served prison sentences for protesting the Islamic Republic. “My family has faced repression and psychological torture from this regime for my entire life,” Shailin, one of Ali’s sisters, told me. She spoke to me from Germany, where she had fled after participating in Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom movement, which flared up in September of 2022 and led to the arrest of around twenty thousand protesters, including Ali and another sister, Anisha.
Shailin and her siblings come from a family of dissidents who have long hoped to see the government fall. But she was enraged by the U.S. and Israel’s military campaign, which had wedged her relatives in Iran between autocracy and possible death. If her family left their houses to search for her brother, they risked encountering air strikes that were now “destroying our oil, our water, and our neighborhoods,” Shailin told me. She called Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “manipulators” who have “no interest in changing the regime” in Iran. (In a speech on Wednesday night, Trump said as much, claiming, “regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change,” though he added that regime change was a by-product of his operation in Iran.) “This is not the war we wanted,” Shailin said. “This is just some new hell.”
As Trump threatens to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” many Iranians are still grappling with the human consequences of the protests that occurred before the war, which pushed the Islamic Republic toward a political precipice. The regime ruthlessly cracked down on hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who emerged in the streets in late December and early January. No one knows exactly how many protesters were killed, but estimates range from seven thousand to thirty thousand. Even more were arrested: as many as fifty thousand people are thought to be held in facilities across the country, many after receiving harsh sentences in court proceedings that were closed to the public. Some of those prisoners have since been transferred to new locations, making it harder for their families to find them, let alone advocate for them.
Prisoners have been moved because of staffing, food, and capacity shortages at the facilities where they were being held. There’s also the potential of the jails themselves becoming military targets: last June, during the Twelve-Day War, Israeli air strikes hit Evin Prison, killing roughly eighty people, including detainees, visiting family members, and prison staff. Security officers forced the remaining prisoners to walk, shackled and at gunpoint, through a “tunnel of horror” to an undisclosed location, according to Mehdi Mahmoudian, a screenwriter and activist who was previously imprisoned at Evin, with whom I spoke last month. He later wrote that he felt “caught between the claws of foreign beasts and domestic torturers being passed from one to another.”
Since the bombardment in March, prisoners have been moved to military zones, police facilities, safe houses, and other jails that have been damaged by air strikes, too, according to human-rights groups and relatives of prisoners. Families like the Asadollahis were also fearful that the regime would use the U.S.-Israeli assault as a pretext to abuse or kill their loved ones under the cover of war. “Prisoners are in real danger of being routinely executed in this darkness,” Hadi Ghaemi, the director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, told me. In March, a group of detainees were shot and killed by guards at a prison in Sistan-Baluchestan, an impoverished province in southeast Iran, after they protested the living conditions in their wards. That same month, in the city of Qom, Iranian authorities hanged three men who were accused of killing police officers during the nationwide protests. These executions “crossed a critical threshold,” according to a statement from the United Nations, which noted that these were the first Iranians to be hanged in connection with the demonstrations. “We are afraid they will not be the last,” the statement read.
The Islamic Republic has also been doubling down on propaganda, and enlisting its supporters—including soldiers, their families, and children as young as twelve years old—to come out and “occupy the enemy within, so that it doesn’t have a chance to mobilize,” Ghaemi said. “They’re telling their base that they are fighting two wars—one is against foreign aggression, and the other at home, against protesters in the streets.” In a recent television interview, Iran’s police chief, Ahmadreza Radan, warned that, “from now on, if someone acts at the enemy’s behest, we will no longer consider them protesters or anything of the sort. We will regard them as the enemy.” Shortly after, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (I.R.G.C.) said that any future protests would be met with an even “harsher blow” than before. Ghaemi said that this language was reminiscent of the propaganda that helped fuel and justify other historic atrocities, such as the massacres in Myanmar or Rwanda. “The regime is making it clear that any dissident, protester, or anyone else who is not with them will soon get their wrath,” he said. “It is deeply worrying.”
Since early March, when the war began, Iranian authorities have arrested at least fifteen hundred people, including activists and civilians accused of speaking to foreign media outlets. The regime has also broadcast hundreds of forced confessions on state television. One woman sent me a video of her eighteen-year-old nephew, his face blurred as he sits for a staged interrogation in which he admits that he “made a mistake” by joining a January demonstration in the city of Isfahan, where four security officers were said to have been killed.
The public displays of control are happening amid an internal bureaucratic collapse. Several dozen Iranian leaders and their deputies have been killed since the war began. Military experts from the Institute for the Study of War have verified strikes on at least seventeen of the sixty-nine known police stations in Tehran, in addition to fourteen of the twenty-three military bases overseen by the Basij, a paramilitary organization that operates under the authority of the I.R.G.C. While the I.R.G.C. is still in place, many local police and paramilitary officers have abandoned their posts, making it almost impossible for residents to report missing people. Recurring internet blackouts have also compromised communications, and caused even more confusion for families, who have been racing to confirm the fates of those who have disappeared.
Shailin Asadollahi told me that her family’s group chat had turned into a live feed of ad-hoc forensics, chronicling their efforts to find her brother. She sent me some of her exchanges with her relatives, including texts, voice notes, and satellite images—any evidence that could help them confirm his whereabouts. In one message, a relative wrote that she had heard that authorities were transferring prisoners to a military complex in northern Tehran. Shailin started searching for others who could help her confirm the tip. A woman told her that several of her relatives had been escorted by security agents to a checkpoint on Artesh Highway to collect a prisoner there. The highway is near a military zone, called Lavizan, which has been targeted five times during the war, according to military experts. Shailin sent satellite images of the road and its surroundings to her family members inside Iran. “I never knew if I was helping them or just stoking their fear,” Shailin told me.
Shailin’s relatives in Iran—largely deprived of a voice themselves—told her to publicize their plight. Shailin appeared on Persian-language television programs and spoke to international media outlets; she also asked PEN International, a group that advocates for free expression, to publish a letter, which was signed by more than a hundred writers and scholars, calling for Ali’s release. And she posted selfie videos on her personal Instagram account, which collectively received more than one million views. “I’m calling on anyone who can hear me . . . to help us,” she said in a post on March 5th, nearly one week after the war started. She explained that her family was under the impression that her brother had been moved to a military zone that was getting bombed. “If this is true, Ali Asadollahi and other prisoners are being used as human shields,” she said.
In a post from March 13th, Shailin addressed her brother’s captors directly. “Why won’t you release him?” she asked. “My family has risked everything under this barrage of threats, going to every office to find out where Ali is. You give no answers.”
The publicity campaign paid off. On March 17th, Shailin received a phone call from Ali, who told her he had been released. He was finally coming home. “I did not recognize his voice,” Shailin told me, breaking into tears. Ali sounded despondent. He spoke in a hushed tone, and he slurred his words. But he managed to thank her for bringing attention to his case. “There is a big Hell,” he added, before handing the phone to his wife, who told Shailin that she suspected Ali had been tortured while he was detained.
The Asadollahis are part of a fortunate fraction of Iranian families who have reunited with their imprisoned relatives. After she publicized Ali’s story, Shailin’s phone turned into a makeshift hotline for other families whose relatives were still languishing in Iran’s prisons. She had received hundreds of messages from people inside and outside the country who requested her help bringing international attention to their cases. Many who reached out to her were ordinary Iranians—the “people least likely” to report disappearances, she noted, who messaged her using pseudonyms or fake accounts on social media. “They have been terrorized by this regime for decades,” she explained. “They don’t have the experience or courage to speak out. How could they?” They had believed that soliciting media attention would only provoke their relatives’ captors.
Shailin managed to refer some families to human-rights groups that advocate for prisoners in Iran. She also assisted several of them with writing scripts for their own selfie videos on Instagram, such as Leila Moradi, a woman whose brother had been transferred from Evin Prison to Fashafouyeh Prison, south of Tehran.
“Some days I just stay in bed,” Shailin told me, during a recent phone call. “These are not my family members. But I think about them incessantly, even when I try to rest, as if they are my own brother.”
Hamidreza Mohammadi, the brother of Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said that families like his have long endured “psychological torture.” Narges, who is one of many prominent activists and journalists who have been detained since December, was beaten by security agents in Mashhad before she was taken to a detention center run by the intelligence ministry, according to her relatives and Chirinne Ardakani, a human-rights lawyer based in Paris, who represents her. Over the next two months, her family received just two phone calls from her and few details about her circumstances. Others released from the same prison reported that Narges, who has a heart stent, had been taken to the hospital twice for cardiovascular problems and for injuries she had sustained during her arrest.
In February, a judge sentenced Narges to seven and a half years in prison for “assembly and collusion against national security” and “propaganda against the Islamic Republic Regime.” She was transferred to a more remote prison in Zanjan, a city that has since been targeted multiple times by air strikes. Last week, Narges was finally allowed a brief visit with her sister and two lawyers, who were alarmed at how rapidly her health had deteriorated. “She had lost weight, she was very pale,” and she was accompanied by a nurse, “because she was not in good shape,” Ardakani, who was briefed on the visit, told me. Narges said she had recently passed out in her cell for more than an hour before her cellmates managed to get the attention of the prison guards. She regained consciousness in the prison infirmary, where a doctor told her she had likely suffered a heart attack. Authorities had since dismissed her lawyers’ requests to send her to a hospital for urgent treatment. Her case was not an exception, according to a researcher at Human Rights Watch, who told me that they had confirmed similar reports from prisons across Iran, where detainees were routinely denied access to adequate medical care, including specialized treatment at hospitals.
One prisoner in his thirties, whom I will call Amin, was arrested in Tehran on January 8th. After his mother learned that he had been taken by security agents, she drove from her home in northern Iran to Fashafouyeh Prison, where she believed he was being held. She slept outside the prison in her car for three nights until officials confirmed that her son was inside. Afterward, she was allowed to visit with him every Tuesday. The first day they met, he could not stand to greet her because his left leg had been badly beaten during an interrogation. His mother put money in his jail commissary account, so he could buy snacks and meals. She showed him how to clean his clothing, which had become infested with bedbugs. And she recruited someone who worked in the prison to smuggle Amin antibiotics for an ear infection.
On March 2nd, an explosion damaged part of Fashafouyeh Prison. “He was terrified,” Amin’s sister, whom I will refer to as Deli, told me in a phone interview from Germany. She said her brother had called their mother, hours after he felt the blast, crying—he was worried that more attacks on the facility would prompt the guards to start shooting prisoners. “He wanted my mother to be there, to be his witness in case he was killed or relocated,” his sister told me.
“The day Khamenei was killed was honestly one of the best days of my life,” she continued. “But, at the same time, I was scared to death. Every time I thought about my brother in the hands of the regime—I knew they were angrier and more unpredictable than ever.”
Days after the explosion, Amin called his mother in Iran again, with better news. He had been told that he’d soon be released on bail. He seemed confident that he had a good chance of going home: the authorities were scrambling to make room in their wards to accommodate an influx of detainees from other facilities across the capital, he said. The judge assigned to Amin’s case was Iman Afshari, known in Tehran for his tough sentences—a reputation that led the European Union to place him on a blacklist, in January, for human-rights abuses. Deli explained to me that Israel and the U.S. had been targeting courthouses and the homes of influential Iranian officials. “I would never have guessed in my lifetime that I would pray for such a murderous man to stay alive—long enough to free my brother,” she said.
Later that month, there was an explosion near the Sadr city courthouse, in northern Tehran, where Amin’s mother was waiting to post bail for Amin alongside hundreds of others who had gathered to follow up on their jailed relatives. She survived the attack and returned the next morning, clutching the deed to her family’s house. She got there in time to hear a courthouse official call her son’s name. She pledged their house as security for his release and was able to bring Amin home. When Deli saw him on a video call, later that week, she said “he looked like a diminished version of himself.” He barely spoke and appeared to have lost weight. She didn’t ask him about the details of his imprisonment. “I didn’t want to upset him,” she told me.
The situation in Iran is especially harrowing for relatives who suspect that their loved ones are already dead. These families exist in a unique kind of limbo: caught between hope and grief, and denied any sense of closure. One father in his sixties, whom I will call Rebin, told me he lost contact in early January with his son, who had joined the protests in Tehran. Later that month, his daughter, who lives abroad, received a call from an unknown number informing her that her brother had been shot and killed. “Your family must collect his body,” the caller said, before abruptly cutting the line.
The phone conversation, which lasted less than two minutes, sent the family on an endless chase to find their relative. Rebin shaved and put on a white shirt and a brightly colored tie—a direct rebuke to the clerics whose burial rites demand that mourners appear unshaven and wear dark clothing. “I refuse to wear their uniform of defeat,” he told me. “This tie is the only weapon I have to unsettle their cruelty.” For the next two weeks, Rebin visited morgues, cemeteries, police stations, prisons, and forensic offices in Tehran and its neighboring districts. Trucks and vans, filled with bodies, arrived every few days. He stood among groups of families who were all on a similar hunt. He searched piles of corpses in body bags as if he was “turning the pages of a horror book,” he told me. “It was endless.” The impossibility of his quest began to settle in. He felt so disenfranchised and so thoroughly cut off from information that he began to believe the authorities were purposefully withholding evidence about his son’s fate as punishment for his own history as a political activist. “They want to torture me,” he said. “Was he shot in the heart? In the head? A thousand questions torment me.”
Rebin carries a despairing sense of hope in him, months later. “Every sound I hear, I think it might be him,” he told me. “Sometimes I think perhaps he is still alive. Perhaps there has been some mistake.” He had spent hours scrolling through online images and videos of the January demonstrations, hoping to catch a glimpse of his son among the mass of dark figures. “I searched everywhere,” he said, in a selfie video that he sent to his family and friends. “There’s no sign of him. I don’t know what I should do.” The video was discovered by intelligence agents in his province, one of whom warned that he “would settle things” with Rebin for broadcasting his story. “Our country is currently in a situation where our rulers threaten that anyone who reports news abroad will be accused of espionage and treason,” he told me. “If you mention my name, rest assured, they will kill me without a trial.”
After the war started, Rebin said that bombs would not deter him from driving to the capital once more to search for his son. “The heart wants to believe that its loved one will be found,” he wrote me, in a text message, before setting out for Tehran. “It may not be logical, but hope and longing always deceive a person.” He was determined, at the very least, to arrive in time to witness the fall of the regime. “I have waited my entire life for this moment,” he told me. “If this government ends, I will know my son’s absence will not have been for nothing.” ♦
2026-04-03 22:06:01
Congress created the office of Attorney General in the Judiciary Act of 1789, providing for the appointment of a person “learned in the law” to advise the President on legal matters. Of the eighty-four men and three women who have held the job since then, the most recent occupant, Pam Bondi, who was fired on Thursday, would face some competition for the title of worst Attorney General. After all, some of her predecessors were outright corrupt: Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, served time in prison for helping orchestrate the Watergate break-in and coverup. Some were heedless of the Constitution they had sworn to uphold: Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer, directed the raids that bear his name, leading to the mass arrest and deportation of suspected anarchists. But no Attorney General in history has caused more damage to the department itself—damage that promises to long outlast Bondi's tenure, and to be deepened, not repaired, by whoever is chosen to succeed her.
Bondi, a former Attorney General of Florida, has presided over a department that has eagerly subordinated itself to President Donald Trump’s whims. That submission, made manifest by the banner of a glowering Trump that now hangs from the Department of Justice building, included seeking to bring baseless cases against Trump’s perceived political enemies, ordered up by the President himself; purging the department of career lawyers and F.B.I. agents deemed insufficiently loyal; and launching a belligerent campaign against “rogue judges” who dared to challenge Administration actions. Beyond the mass firings, the ranks of the department have been depleted by the departure of employees who could not stomach the new order; the resulting loss of expertise will take generations to rebuild. So will the department’s credibility: under Bondi, it has squandered the traditional deference afforded to lawyers who appear in court on behalf of the United States, known as “the presumption of regularity.” “You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it, in my view,” the federal judge overseeing the government’s efforts to deport Kilmar Ábrego García told department lawyers last year, and she is far from alone in her exasperation.
Bondi fawned over Trump in a way unbefitting the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. At an early Cabinet meeting, Bondi said, “President, your first one hundred days has far exceeded that of any other Presidency in this country, ever, ever.” She treated Democratic members of Congress with undisguised contempt, including at an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, in February. “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer. Not even a lawyer,” Bondi yelled at the panel’s ranking Democrat, Jamie Raskin, of Maryland (who, as it happens, is a Harvard Law graduate and a former constitutional-law professor). Questioned about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, Bondi deflected. “The Dow is over fifty thousand right now, the S. & P. at almost seven thousand, and the Nasdaq smashing records, Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming,” she said, launching a thousand memes.
But Bondi’s departure does not augur a better world to come. Like the former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom Trump fired in March, Bondi had become a political liability. She had, in the words of the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, “completely whiffed” on dealing with conservative clamor for the Epstein files. As Wiles told Vanity Fair, “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.” No single issue has plagued Trump’s second term more than his dealings with the convicted sex offender, and Bondi botched the matter from the start—a reality underscored by the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee’s vote, last month, to subpoena Bondi’s testimony regarding the Epstein files.
Trump’s move to get rid of Noem, however, also reflected some degree of recognition that the mass-deportation campaign had gone too far, or at least turned off too many Trump supporters. In Bondi’s case, the President was reportedly furious not because she went too far but because she had failed to do his bidding swiftly and effectively enough. His dwindling patience emerged in a Truth Social post from September, 2025—Trump reportedly had meant it as a private message to Bondi—in which the President addressed her as “Pam” and railed about the department’s failure to secure indictments against the former F.B.I. director James Comey, the New York attorney general Letitia James, and the California senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump instructed Bondi. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” The department duly secured indictments of Comey and James, only to have them dismissed after a federal judge found that Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer tapped by Trump to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had been improperly appointed. Since then, the department has been stalled in its efforts to secure the kind of prosecutions that he has demanded. Prosecutors were stymied in their efforts to find a criminal case in President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to grant pardons. A federal grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress who had posted a video reminding service members they are not obliged to follow illegal orders. In Virginia, grand juries twice balked at indictments of James after the original charges were tossed.
The new Attorney General is apt to be just as destructive as Bondi—maybe even more so, given that Bondi, who had little familiarity with the federal legal system, was not terribly effective in the job. Trump named the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, formerly one of the President’s criminal-defense lawyers, as acting Attorney General. Blanche is a veteran of the prestigious Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, and there was some hope, when he was named to the department’s No. 2 role, that he would help stand up for its independence. But there is little evidence that Blanche has tempered Trump’s worst instincts, and ample illustration that he is fully on board with the President’s agenda. He conducted a credulous interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, last July, which looks even shoddier now than it did then, in light of the Epstein documents that have since been released. Last week, Blanche spoke at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, a venue far more partisan than is common for a Deputy Attorney General. Blanche did not shy away from politics—he plunged in. Disputing reports that he had been a Democrat, Blanche paused. “Everybody’s supposed to say ‘Boo,’ ” he told the audience, before thanking them when they responded accordingly. This is not acceptable behavior from a senior law-enforcement official.
Maybe Blanche will get the job permanently. Maybe Trump will turn to Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, who has no prosecutorial experience but has demonstrated the primary requirement: unswerving fealty to Trump. Years ago, during his first term, Trump was lamenting the perfidy of his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, the former Alabama senator. Sessions was insisting on recusing himself from the probe into the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia; Trump wanted him to stay, the better to protect his interests. “Where’s my Roy Cohn,” Trump demanded, referring to the legendary former fixer who had shown Trump how to bend the legal system to his will. With Bondi gone—she’ll be “transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector,” Trump announced in a post—his quest for the next Roy Cohn continues. Anyone he picks for the post will understand clearly what that entails. ♦
2026-04-03 19:06:02
This year’s edition of the New Directors/New Films series, an annual collaboration between MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center that began in 1972, highlights a diverse array of movies with invigorating approaches to narrative form—foremost, “Variations on a Theme,” the second feature by the South African filmmakers Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, which weaves together multiple story lines in its hour-and-five-minute span. The film is set in a mountain village where an elderly woman named Hettie (Hettie Farmer) lives alone on a small farm, tending her flock of goats with increasing difficulty. The village’s Black residents, including Hettie, are energized by a promising but tangled effort to redress a long-standing injustice—the unequal compensation received by Black South African soldiers in the Second World War. Meanwhile, a man obsessively seeks buried treasure beneath his home. The life of the rural region is framed in airy and luminous wide-screen images that recur with a lyrical vision of vast arcs of time amid dramatic social change.
A simple setup gives rise to quiet complexity in the Tibetan American director Tenzin Phuntsog’s first dramatic feature, “Next Life,” set in an unnamed American suburb (filmed largely in his parents’ house, in California). There, an old Tibetan man (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar) requests a Tibetan doctor to tend to his ever more troubling ailments. As the patient weakens, he hopes to visit Tibet once more, prompting his son (Tenzin Phurpatsang) to seek out a visa for him from a Chinese consulate; meanwhile, the family turn toward their religious traditions, which Phuntsog strikingly and movingly embodies in poised and serene images of a rare, modest, yet exalted spirituality.
Pete Ohs’s modernist melodrama “Erupcja” stars Charli XCX as a young woman who, while vacationing in Warsaw with her boyfriend (Will Madden), reconnects with an old friend (Lena Góra). The two women’s powerful, mysterious bond is sketched in sharp yet subtle dramatic strokes that are all the more thrilling for their breathless rapidity. It will be released in theatres on April 17; its festival screenings are an enticement to the aptly impatient.—Richard Brody
Much has been said about opera recently—that it’s out of touch, that it’s a dying art, that it doesn’t have enough Ping-Pong in it. No matter what we’re willing to admit, there’s a reason why this is a prevailing perception, so how do we rise to the challenge of changing it? The Met’s latest attempt is by putting on “Innocence,” the final opera by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, which tells a story of grief and trauma after a devastating school shooting. Told in two time lines, one near-present and one past, with a libretto by Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” dissects the personal impact of gun violence, taking on a tragically common occurrence. One can imagine more irrelevant things.—Jane Bua (The Metropolitan Opera; select dates April 6-29.)
Cannibalism, rape, a severed tongue and hands, filicide . . . Quentin Tarantino has nothing on Shakespeare. In the Bard’s early tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” acts of revenge pile up like so many bodies. The bloodletting begins with Titus (Patrick Page), a Roman general who returns from a victorious campaign against the Goths, carting along their deposed queen, Tamora (Francesca Faridany), and her three sons, one of whom is executed to avenge Titus’s own sons slain in battle. It’s a credit to the director, Jesse Berger (for Red Bull Theatre), that he doesn’t shy away from the play’s gore, especially vivid against the set’s ghostly columns, whose sleekness aligns with the neofascist chic of the costumes. It’s a credit to the agile cast that they find humor in the gallows.—Dan Stahl (Pershing Square Signature Center; through April 19.)
The 2021 album “Skin” introduced the bruised songcraft of the British singer-songwriter Joy Crookes to the wider world. After several EPs and a nomination for Rising Star at the 2020 Brit Awards, she met the moment with a soulful pop sound, smuggling in references to her London upbringing, as the child of Bangladeshi and Irish immigrants, and meditating on the awakenings of young adulthood. “Skin,” shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, cultivated a lithe, jazzy voice that eased through the hushed rhythms of mellow R. & B. production, and her follow-up, “Juniper,” from September, is just as subtle but even more refined, its sonic acuity mirroring its clarity of thought.—Sheldon Pearce (Irving Plaza; April 13.)
In his twenties, the title character of Chekhov’s “Ivanov,” played by Zachary Desmond, was filled with passion and purpose. Now, at thirty-five, he’s a self-loathing, debt-ridden farmer who bemoans “a lethargy in my soul.” His disaffection baffles his acquaintances and pains his tubercular wife (a superb Quinn Jackson), whose doctor (Lambert Tamin) has only contempt for her husband’s agonizing. To convey Ivanov’s world-weariness without wearying the audience is a challenge that Michael DeFilippis’s production doesn’t always meet—despite its well-acted, artfully designed, energetic staging of Paul Schmidt’s resonant translation. There’s a built-in repetitiveness to the material, not unlike the thought patterns of depression itself, that constitutes a Russian rebuke to myopic American optimism: sometimes it doesn’t get better.—Dan Stahl (West End Theatre; through April 12.)
A century ago, the choreographer Martha Graham cobbled together an evening of original works at a Broadway theatre, her first. Could she have known then that it was the start of a momentous career? The troupe she created, Martha Graham Dance Company, has survived, despite tall odds. In its centenary season, it performs three of Graham’s most well-known dances, all about love: “Appalachian Spring” (1944), with its spacious score by Copland, is about hopeful, expansive love; “Diversion of Angels” (1948), about different facets of love and its twin, passion; and “Night Journey” (1947), inspired by the Oedipus myth, chronicles love (and lust) gone horribly wrong.—Marina Harss (New York City Center; April 8-12.)
“The Drama,” the writer and director Kristoffer Borgli’s earnest story of love forged and fraying, is set in Boston and spans about two years in the lives of Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya); not even these stars’ vibrant and thoughtful performances can rescue the film from ridicule. During a wine-drenched evening, the soon to be married couple, along with two friends (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), confess the worst thing they’ve ever done; one such admission puts the wedding at risk, as well as friendships and even professional standing. Borgli offers a childish view of romance, leaping from acquaintance to engagement with no substance in between, and the fancy editing scheme of flashbacks and leaps ahead merely calls attention to the underlying void.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
Michael Schulman on spring fabulosity.
1. “The Rocky Horror Show”—the louche sci-fi musical that went from underground stage sensation in London to cult movie and queer touchstone—returns to Broadway, directed by Sam Pinkleton (“Oh, Mary!”) and starring Luke Evans, Stephanie Hsu, Juliette Lewis, and Rachel Dratch. In anticip-p-pation, I suggest streaming the documentary “Strange Journey,” which came out last year, for the film’s fiftieth anniversary. It’s directed by Linus O’Brien, the son of Richard O’Brien, the British New Zealander who wrote the show (and played Riff Raff) and then went on a gender odyssey.
2. If your idea of heaven is flipping through a 1982 issue of Interview, good news: Library180, a chic, by-appointment magazine reference library, now occupies a bright room on the twenty-sixth floor of an office building on Maiden Lane. Created by Nikki Igol and Steven Chaiken, who worked together at the fashion magazine V in the early two-thousands, the place is stocked with vintage issues of Paper, Vogue, and more. Through a red chain-link curtain is a back room containing the likes of Screw, Al Goldstein’s erotic tabloid from the sixties and seventies.
3. Julio Torres, one of the most original minds in comedy, wrote surreal sketches for “Saturday Night Live” before unveiling his brilliant 2019 HBO special, “My Favorite Shapes,” in which he sat at a conveyor belt in futuristic silver garb and narrated the inner lives of objects that rolled by. He’s back on HBO with a companion piece, “Color Theories.” Using a synesthetic logic all his own, Torres explains why Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson is orange, Catholicism is purple, and navy blue is the nefarious color that secretly runs the world.
Spring in the trenches.
Springtime, at least in New York City, is, in this writer’s humble opinion, somewhat overrated. Sure, it has its pleasures: the vibrant return of window-box buttercups, the reopening of the Central Park boathouse, the ornate millinery of the Fifth Avenue Easter Bonnet Festival, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s “Cherry Watch” live map tracking exactly when each Sakura blossom blooms, the thrift stalls at the Hester Street Fair, the annual New York Botanical Garden Orchid Show, the renewed chance to drink a cold beer at a baseball game. But, mostly, city dwellers are deprived of the true glories of the season. We aren’t watching chicks hatch or witnessing the miracle of foaling or plucking clumps of wild ramps from the earth. Instead, we continue traipsing through concrete, burdened with utter confusion about what, exactly, to wear: spring is a time of meteorological fakeouts; one day it will be balmy, the next frigid. Or, mornings are crisp and call for bundling up, but dress in too many layers and you’ll overheat by noon. Rain, April’s rude house guest, visits erratically and unannounced.
So, what to put on? One timeless solution is the trenchcoat, a relic of the First World War, which has, over the last century, become the go-to topper for sensible urbanites during these mercurial months: blocking wind and moisture without ever feeling too heavy makes it the ideal garment for unpredictable conditions. The original trenchcoat, designed by Thomas Burberry for the British Army, was made of Burberry-invented waterproof gabardine. Now you can find trenches (or at least trench-ish coats) in nearly every material under the sun—crêpe, suède, twill, jacquard, Gore-Tex. What makes a trench a trench? Some say it’s the cut; traditional trenches are long and double-breasted, with epaulettes, a waist belt, and storm flaps. But these days, trenches come in all shapes: cropped, batwing, even backless. The classic Burberry trench ($2,995) is khaki, but modern trenches adhere to no set color rules. Perhaps the definition is more spiritual than fixed. If it looks like a trench and feels like a trench, then it must be one. The market is teeming with options, but a few that caught my eye this season include the Riva from the Frankie Shop ($495), a streamlined tan number with an unexpected shoulder detail; the Lana from Apparis ($325), a playful approach in sheer leopard-print organza, and, for those in a splurge-y mood, the Aspen from Aligne ($849), in smooth green leather the shade of a Castelvetrano olive. I’m still no spring evangelist, but to stroll through the park in a new coat? It’s enough to make you feel reborn.
—Rachel Syme
P.S. Good stuff on the internet:
2026-04-03 19:06:02
In late February, a family in Tehran received a call from an imprisoned relative, Ali Asadollahi, a thirty-seven-year-old poet and dissident. He had been taken from his home in late January by security officers who were arresting suspected sympathizers of the protests that had erupted across Iran earlier that month. Ali, who wasn’t formally charged, called his family to say that he would be released on bail, and asked them to gather the funds and collect him from prison. But his family wouldn’t hear from him again for weeks. The next day, the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, launching the country into war.
The Asadollahis set out to Evin Prison, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains north of the city, where they believed Ali was detained. State-controlled television had announced that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been “martyred,” and the highways out of Tehran were clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic as people tried to escape the capital. When the Asadollahis finally arrived at Evin, a crowd had formed outside, made up of hundreds of other Iranians who had similarly braved the ongoing bombardment to reach their loved ones. The Asadollahis headed toward Ward 209, a repository for political prisoners that’s run by Iran’s intelligence ministry. But they were turned away by the guards, who told them that the ward’s detainees had been transferred elsewhere.
The Asadollahis went to the Islamic Revolutionary Court, in eastern Tehran, hoping to find someone there who could provide more information. An officer confirmed that Ali had been taken to a new location, but he wouldn’t provide more details. One of his relatives updated the family’s group chat, which included relatives outside Iran:
“Guys, I’ve been told that those who were in Ward 209 have been taken out of Evin.”
“They’ve been transferred somewhere else—we don’t know where.”
“I’m really worried—what if they take them to a safe house and then bomb that place?”
Soon after the Asadollahis went home, the Revolutionary Court was hit by an air strike—part of President Donald Trump’s widening liberation campaign, which he has said is meant to help Iranians “take over” their country. Trump’s call to action was astounding for many people, like the Asadollahis, whose relatives had already served prison sentences for protesting the Islamic Republic. “My family has faced repression and psychological torture from this regime for my entire life,” Shailin, one of Ali’s sisters, told me. She spoke to me from Germany, where she had fled after participating in Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom movement, which flared up in September of 2022 and led to the arrest of around twenty thousand protesters, including Ali and another sister, Anisha.
Shailin and her siblings come from a family of dissidents who have long hoped to see the government fall. But she was enraged by the U.S. and Israel’s military campaign, which had wedged her relatives in Iran between autocracy and possible death. If her family left their houses to search for her brother, they risked encountering air strikes that were now “destroying our oil, our water, and our neighborhoods,” Shailin told me. She called Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “manipulators” who have “no interest in changing the regime” in Iran. (In a speech on Wednesday night, Trump said as much, claiming, “regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change,” though he added that regime change was a by-product of his operation in Iran.) “This is not the war we wanted,” Shailin said. “This is just some new hell.”
As Trump threatens to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” many Iranians are still grappling with the human consequences of the protests that occurred before the war, which pushed the Islamic Republic toward a political precipice. The regime ruthlessly cracked down on hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who emerged in the streets in late December and early January. No one knows exactly how many protesters were killed, but estimates range from seven thousand to thirty thousand. Even more were arrested: as many as fifty thousand people are thought to be held in facilities across the country, many after receiving harsh sentences in court proceedings that were closed to the public. Some of those prisoners have since been transferred to new locations, making it harder for their families to find them, let alone advocate for them.
Prisoners have been moved because of staffing, food, and capacity shortages at the facilities where they were being held. There’s also the potential of the jails themselves becoming military targets: last June, during the Twelve-Day War, Israeli air strikes hit Evin Prison, killing roughly eighty people, including detainees, visiting family members, and prison staff. Security officers forced the remaining prisoners to walk, shackled and at gunpoint, through a “tunnel of horror” to an undisclosed location, according to Mehdi Mahmoudian, a screenwriter and activist who was previously imprisoned at Evin, with whom I spoke last month. He later wrote that he felt “caught between the claws of foreign beasts and domestic torturers being passed from one to another.”
Since the bombardment in March, prisoners have been moved to military zones, police facilities, safe houses, and other jails that have been damaged by air strikes, too, according to human-rights groups and relatives of prisoners. Families like the Asadollahis were also fearful that the regime would use the U.S.-Israeli assault as a pretext to abuse or kill their loved ones under the cover of war. “Prisoners are in real danger of being routinely executed in this darkness,” Hadi Ghaemi, the director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, told me. In March, a group of detainees were shot and killed by guards at a prison in Sistan-Baluchestan, an impoverished province in southeast Iran, after they protested the living conditions in their wards. That same month, in the city of Qom, Iranian authorities hanged three men who were accused of killing police officers during the nationwide protests. These executions “crossed a critical threshold,” according to a statement from the United Nations, which noted that these were the first Iranians to be hanged in connection with the demonstrations. “We are afraid they will not be the last,” the statement read.
The Islamic Republic has also been doubling down on propaganda, and enlisting its supporters—including soldiers, their families, and children as young as twelve years old—to come out and “occupy the enemy within, so that it doesn’t have a chance to mobilize,” Ghaemi said. “They’re telling their base that they are fighting two wars—one is against foreign aggression, and the other at home, against protesters in the streets.” In a recent television interview, Iran’s police chief, Ahmadreza Radan, warned that, “from now on, if someone acts at the enemy’s behest, we will no longer consider them protesters or anything of the sort. We will regard them as the enemy.” Shortly after, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (I.R.G.C.) said that any future protests would be met with an even “harsher blow” than before. Ghaemi said that this language was reminiscent of the propaganda that helped fuel and justify other historic atrocities, such as the massacres in Myanmar or Rwanda. “The regime is making it clear that any dissident, protester, or anyone else who is not with them will soon get their wrath,” he said. “It is deeply worrying.”
Since early March, when the war began, Iranian authorities have arrested at least fifteen hundred people, including activists and civilians accused of speaking to foreign media outlets. The regime has also broadcast hundreds of forced confessions on state television. One woman sent me a video of her eighteen-year-old nephew, his face blurred as he sits for a staged interrogation in which he admits that he “made a mistake” by joining a January demonstration in the city of Isfahan, where four security officers were said to have been killed.
The public displays of control are happening amid an internal bureaucratic collapse. Several dozen Iranian leaders and their deputies have been killed since the war began. Military experts from the Institute for the Study of War have verified strikes on at least seventeen of the sixty-nine known police stations in Tehran, in addition to fourteen of the twenty-three military bases overseen by the Basij, a paramilitary organization that operates under the authority of the I.R.G.C. While the I.R.G.C. is still in place, many local police and paramilitary officers have abandoned their posts, making it almost impossible for residents to report missing people. Recurring internet blackouts have also compromised communications, and caused even more confusion for families, who have been racing to confirm the fates of those who have disappeared.
Shailin Asadollahi told me that her family’s group chat had turned into a live feed of ad-hoc forensics, chronicling their efforts to find her brother. She sent me some of her exchanges with her relatives, including texts, voice notes, and satellite images—any evidence that could help them confirm his whereabouts. In one message, a relative wrote that she had heard that authorities were transferring prisoners to a military complex in northern Tehran. Shailin started searching for others who could help her confirm the tip. A woman told her that several of her relatives had been escorted by security agents to a checkpoint on Artesh Highway to collect a prisoner there. The highway is near a military zone, called Lavizan, which has been targeted five times during the war, according to military experts. Shailin sent satellite images of the road and its surroundings to her family members inside Iran. “I never knew if I was helping them or just stoking their fear,” Shailin told me.
Shailin’s relatives in Iran—largely deprived of a voice themselves—told her to publicize their plight. Shailin appeared on Persian-language television programs and spoke to international media outlets; she also asked PEN International, a group that advocates for free expression, to publish a letter, which was signed by more than a hundred writers and scholars, calling for Ali’s release. And she posted selfie videos on her personal Instagram account, which collectively received more than one million views. “I’m calling on anyone who can hear me . . . to help us,” she said in a post on March 5th, nearly one week after the war started. She explained that her family was under the impression that her brother had been moved to a military zone that was getting bombed. “If this is true, Ali Asadollahi and other prisoners are being used as human shields,” she said.
In a post from March 13th, Shailin addressed her brother’s captors directly. “Why won’t you release him?” she asked. “My family has risked everything under this barrage of threats, going to every office to find out where Ali is. You give no answers.”
The publicity campaign paid off. On March 17th, Shailin received a phone call from Ali, who told her he had been released. He was finally coming home. “I did not recognize his voice,” Shailin told me, breaking into tears. Ali sounded despondent. He spoke in a hushed tone, and he slurred his words. But he managed to thank her for bringing attention to his case. “There is a big Hell,” he added, before handing the phone to his wife, who told Shailin that she suspected Ali had been tortured while he was detained.
The Asadollahis are part of a fortunate fraction of Iranian families who have reunited with their imprisoned relatives. After she publicized Ali’s story, Shailin’s phone turned into a makeshift hotline for other families whose relatives were still languishing in Iran’s prisons. She had received hundreds of messages from people inside and outside the country who requested her help bringing international attention to their cases. Many who reached out to her were ordinary Iranians—the “people least likely” to report disappearances, she noted, who messaged her using pseudonyms or fake accounts on social media. “They have been terrorized by this regime for decades,” she explained. “They don't have the experience or courage to speak out. How could they?” They had believed that soliciting media attention would only provoke their relatives’ captors.
Shailin managed to refer some families to human-rights groups that advocate for prisoners in Iran. She also assisted several of them with writing scripts for their own selfie videos on Instagram, such as Leila Moradi, a woman whose brother had been transferred from Evin Prison to Fashafouyeh Prison, south of Tehran.
“Some days I just stay in bed,” Shailin told me, during a recent phone call. “These are not my family members. But I think about them incessantly, even when I try to rest, as if they are my own brother.”
Hamidreza Mohammadi, the brother of Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said that families like his have long endured “psychological torture.” Narges, who is one of many prominent activists and journalists who have been detained since December, was beaten by security agents in Mashhad before she was taken to a detention center run by the intelligence ministry, according to her relatives and Chirinne Ardakani, a human-rights lawyer based in Paris, who represents her. Over the next two months, her family received just two phone calls from her and few details about her circumstances. Others released from the same prison reported that Narges, who has a heart stent, had been taken to the hospital twice for cardiovascular problems and for injuries she had sustained during her arrest.
In February, a judge sentenced Narges to seven and a half years in prison for “assembly and collusion against national security” and “propaganda against the Islamic Republic Regime.” She was transferred to a more remote prison in Zanjan, a city that has since been targeted multiple times by air strikes. Last week, Narges was finally allowed a brief visit with her sister and two lawyers, who were alarmed at how rapidly her health had deteriorated. “She had lost weight, she was very pale,” and she was accompanied by a nurse, “because she was not in good shape,” Ardakani, who was briefed on the visit, told me. Narges said she had recently passed out in her cell for more than an hour before her cellmates managed to get the attention of the prison guards. She regained consciousness in the prison infirmary, where a doctor told her she had likely suffered a heart attack. Authorities had since dismissed her lawyers’ requests to send her to a hospital for urgent treatment. Her case was not an exception, according to a researcher at Human Rights Watch, who told me that they had confirmed similar reports from prisons across Iran, where detainees were routinely denied access to adequate medical care, including specialized treatment at hospitals.
One prisoner in his thirties, whom I will call Amin, was arrested in Tehran on January 8th. After his mother learned that he had been taken by security agents, she drove from her home in northern Iran to Fashafouyeh Prison, where she believed he was being held. She slept outside the prison in her car for three nights until officials confirmed that her son was inside. Afterward, she was allowed to visit with him every Tuesday. The first day they met, he could not stand to greet her because his left leg had been badly beaten during an interrogation. His mother put money in his jail commissary account, so he could buy snacks and meals. She showed him how to clean his clothing, which had become infested with bedbugs. And she recruited someone who worked in the prison to smuggle Amin antibiotics for an ear infection.
On March 2nd, an explosion damaged part of Fashafouyeh Prison. “He was terrified,” Amin’s sister, whom I will refer to as Deli, told me in a phone interview from Germany. She said her brother had called their mother, hours after he felt the blast, crying—he was worried that more attacks on the facility would prompt the guards to start shooting prisoners. “He wanted my mother to be there, to be his witness in case he was killed or relocated,” his sister told me.
“The day Khamenei was killed was honestly one of the best days of my life,” she continued. “But, at the same time, I was scared to death. Every time I thought about my brother in the hands of the regime—I knew they were angrier and more unpredictable than ever.”
Days after the explosion, Amin called his mother in Iran again, with better news. He had been told that he’d soon be released on bail. He seemed confident that he had a good chance of going home: the authorities were scrambling to make room in their wards to accommodate an influx of detainees from other facilities across the capital, he said. The judge assigned to Amin’s case was Iman Afshari, known in Tehran for his tough sentences—a reputation that led the European Union to place him on a blacklist, in January, for human-rights abuses. Deli explained to me that Israel and the U.S. had been targeting courthouses and the homes of influential Iranian officials. “I would never have guessed in my lifetime that I would pray for such a murderous man to stay alive—long enough to free my brother,” she said.
Later that month, there was an explosion near the Sadr city courthouse, in northern Tehran, where Amin’s mother was waiting to post bail for Amin alongside hundreds of others who had gathered to follow-up about their jailed relatives. She survived the attack and returned the next morning, clutching the deed to her family’s house. She got there in time to hear a courthouse official call her son’s name. She pledged their house as security for his release and was able to bring Amin home. When Deli saw him on a video call, later that week, she said “he looked like a diminished version of himself.” He barely spoke and appeared to have lost weight. She didn’t ask him about the details of his imprisonment. “I didn’t want to upset him,” she told me.
The situation in Iran is especially harrowing for relatives who suspect that their loved ones are already dead. These families exist in a unique kind of limbo: caught between hope and grief, and denied any sense of closure. One father in his sixties, whom I will call Rebin, told me he lost contact in early January with his son, who had joined the protests in Tehran. Later that month, his daughter, who lives abroad, received a call from an unknown number informing her that her brother had been shot and killed. “Your family must collect his body,” the caller said, before abruptly cutting the line.
The phone conversation, which lasted less than two minutes, sent the family on an endless chase to find their relative. Rebin shaved and put on a white shirt and a brightly colored tie—a direct rebuke to the clerics whose burial rites demand that mourners appear unshaven and wear dark clothing. “I refuse to wear their uniform of defeat,” he told me. “This tie is the only weapon I have to unsettle their cruelty.” For the next two weeks, Rebin visited morgues, cemeteries, police stations, prisons, and forensic offices in Tehran and its neighboring districts. Trucks and vans, filled with bodies, arrived every few days. He stood among groups of families who were all on a similar hunt. He searched piles of corpses in body bags as if he was “turning the pages of a horror book,” he told me. “It was endless.” The impossibility of his quest began to settle in. He felt so disenfranchised and so thoroughly cut off from information that he began to believe the authorities were purposefully withholding evidence about his son’s fate as punishment for his own history as a political activist. “They want to torture me,” he said. “Was he shot in the heart? In the head? A thousand questions torment me.”
Rebin carries a despairing sense of hope in him, months later. “Every sound I hear, I think it might be him,” he told me. “Sometimes I think perhaps he is still alive. Perhaps there has been some mistake.” He had spent hours scrolling through online images and videos of the January demonstrations, hoping to catch a glimpse of his son among the mass of dark figures. “I searched everywhere,” he said, in a selfie video that he sent to his family and friends. “There’s no sign of him. I don’t know what I should do.” The video was discovered by intelligence agents in his province, one of whom warned that he “would settle things” with Rebin for broadcasting his story. “Our country is currently in a situation where our rulers threaten that anyone who reports news abroad will be accused of espionage and treason,” he told me. “If you mention my name, rest assured, they will kill me without a trial.”
After the war started, Rebin said that bombs would not deter him from driving to the capital once more to search for his son. “The heart wants to believe that its loved one will be found,” he wrote me in a text message, before setting out for Tehran. “It may not be logical, but hope and longing always deceive a person.” He was determined, at the very least, to arrive in time to witness the fall of the regime. “I have waited my entire life for this moment,” he told me. “If this government ends, I will know my son’s absence will not have been for nothing.” ♦
2026-04-03 19:06:02
The Roland TR-808, a dictionary-size drum machine released in 1980, weighed eleven pounds, cost twelve hundred dollars, and was technologically unprecedented. Although drum machines had existed for decades, they’d typically used preset sounds (snare, kick, hi-hat) to play preset rhythms (foxtrot, waltz, bossa nova). The 808, by contrast, had an onboard computer, allowing musicians to program their own sounds and percussion patterns. These could be arranged into longer, songlike sequences that played automatically.
When the 808 was released, pretty much no one knew what to do with it. It was quickly discontinued. But then secondhand prices fell by some ninety per cent. Musicians started buying used 808s and experimenting with them. The machines soon helped create countless hit songs (Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”), and began to exert an influence on popular music comparable to that of the electric guitar. Musicians discovered that they could employ 808s to build tracks by themselves, pursuing their own idiosyncratic visions without collaboration or compromise. They used the machine’s proudly synthetic sounds and pattern-based logic to create distinctive new genres—electro, dance, hip-hop.
Today, the sound of the 808 is everywhere, and instantly recognizable. What might be less obvious is that the compositional structures of the 808 and its descendants are pervasive, too. Many songs are now written on computers, using sequencers, patterns, and loops, with notes laid out in perfect synchrony on a rhythmic, 4/4 grid. Sound design—the particular timbre of a bass drum or a synth sweep—often defines the identity of a track. More generally, musicians are no longer hemmed in by limits. To make fantastic songs, they don’t need to know music theory or even own instruments; using synths and samples, they can twist knobs to transpose chords, or select a symphony orchestra from a drop-down menu. In fact, they can compose sounds that have never been created by any instrument on Earth, and listeners will gladly follow them into new sonic realms. Traditional instruments haven’t been replaced—we still listen to acoustic guitar—but they exist within a much larger synthesized landscape.
Suppose that the story of “artistic” artificial intelligence follows roughly the same shape as the story of the drum machine. Where are we in that story? We might be in 1983—the year the 808’s successor, the 909, was introduced. (To hear the difference, compare Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” to Madonna’s “Vogue.”) At that time, electronic music was still new, and people had all sorts of objections to it. They said that computerized instruments required neither musicianship nor talent, and that their sound was intrinsically clunky and inexpressive. (To some musicians, that was the point.) They argued that music made with machines lacked the soul and spontaneity of sweaty, striving human beings jamming in a room. (For some, this impersonality was desirable.) They worried that electronic music would put musicians out of work. (The American Federation of Musicians, which had opposed recorded music in the nineteen-thirties, also picketed Don Lewis, the engineer behind the 808, when he performed.) Prestigious producers maintained that, while drum machines might be useful during the songwriting process, they shouldn’t appear on completed recordings. Many listeners felt that, on some fundamental level, electronic music was simply wrong—that it was a form of deception and cheating, that it was destroying music itself.
All of these concerns were valid. But they paled before the forces of democratization, creativity, and taste. It turned out that electronic instruments got lots of people into music-making; that those people used them in clever, fun, and resonant ways; and that listeners liked what they heard. There was simply no arguing with “It’s Tricky” and “Planet Rock,” with “Born Slippy” and “Nothing Compares 2 U.” And so, if the parallel holds, it will soon be unpersuasive to say that art made with A.I. is automatically fake or bad. The tools themselves won’t determine what counts as art; that will depend on how they’re used.
Parallel lines can always diverge; we might conclude that A.I. is no ordinary tool, and that it has no place in our artistic lives. This seems to be the lesson of “Shy Girl,” the horror novel that was recently unmasked as being generated at least partly through artificial intelligence. The book, which follows a young woman who’s been imprisoned as a “pet” by her sugar daddy, was originally self-published; it found a substantial audience online and was acquired by the publishing house Hachette. A few months ago, readers started pointing out that its prose seemed synthesized. The writing, they said, was weighed down by endless adjectives and metaphors, and had a chatbot’s unvarying cadence and tone. Pangram, an A.I.-detection firm, analyzed “Shy Girl” and declared that it was seventy-eight per cent A.I.-generated. Mia Ballard, the book’s author, suggested that a freelance editor to whom she’d given her manuscript might have run the book through A.I. without her consent. Eventually, Hachette cancelled its publication.
Reading all this, you might imagine a detective story in which the synthetic nature of “Shy Girl” is slowly unearthed by tech-savvy online sleuths. But, actually, the novel reads like A.I. from its opening lines:
I wear a pink dress, the kind that promises softness and delivers none. Its tulle is brittle and sharp, brushing against my fur like a thousand tiny teeth, a cruel lover that bites with every move. Every scratch keeps me in place, a reminder of what I am: a pet, a thing shaped for looking, for praise, for command.
If you have the sounds and rhythms of A.I. in your ear, then you can recognize them here almost instantly. To you, “Shy Girl” might feel automated. It’s as though its author failed to program her own patterns, leaving us to listen to the machine’s preset samba and cha-cha. For many people, this is the most obvious argument against using A.I. to write fiction: it simply doesn’t sound good.
And yet the value of a novel isn’t only in its prose. On Amazon, “Shy Girl” has a rating of four out of five stars, based on input from hundreds of reviewers. Many of them praise its premise and ideas—features of the book that it seems reasonable to think were shaped by human decision-making. (One reviewer describes knowing about “the controversy” surrounding the novel, but liking it anyway: “The premise sucked me in.”) The big-picture reality is that many novels are poorly written. They can still succeed with readers because fiction, like music, is a forgiving art form. Just as a good song can have a groovy beat but a predictable melody, so a piece of fiction can work on some levels but not others. Partial success can be enough, as long as readers find something that moves them—suspense, beauty, realism, fantasy, even just a sympathetic protagonist in whom they can recognize themselves.
If the creation of fiction is a layered endeavor—if premise, plot, style, and so on are to some extent separable—then must all the layers be made by the same individual? This question has already been answered by practicing writers in a variety of disciplines, who often work in groups and teams. James Patterson, who produces one out of every seventeen hardcover novels sold in the United States, does so by providing collaborators with detailed outlines and treatments, effectively running what’s been described as a “novel factory.” (He might oversee thirty projects simultaneously, publishing fifteen books a year.) This practice exiles him completely from the realm of literary fiction; some might even question whether Patterson is really a writer. But our expectations vary by context, with implicit understandings that we rarely make explicit. When reading a Booker Prize-winning novel, we expect every word to have been written by the author, but when reading journalism we assume that both writers and editors played a role. We frequently praise the showrunners of prestige television, who rely on groups of writers to produce scripts. When a screenwriter wins an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the word “original” means only that the script isn’t an adaptation; a lot of people, credited or not, may have contributed to the final product. Perhaps we’re more open to writerly collaboration when it’s part of a larger project, such as a film, which is itself inherently collaborative. But what if the larger project is the continuation of Patterson’s “Alex Cross” series, which has been running since 1993? No individual could write that many books. A factory is simply required.
It seems inevitable that writers will use A.I. to start their own factories. In February, in the Times, Alexandra Alter interviewed Coral Hart, a pseudonymous romance novelist who has used A.I. tools to speed-write hundreds of novels, which she’s self-published on Amazon under dozens of names. After Hart prompts her system into motion, it can produce, in forty-five minutes, a draft ready for human revision (about, for example, “a rancher who falls for a city girl running away from her past”). Although none of Hart’s novels have been best-sellers, she makes “six figures” through her method, Alter reports, and also offers online classes for aspiring A.I.-assisted romance novelists. The future implied by the story is one of depersonalized, industrial-scale fiction production, where authors become showrunners, supervising A.I. writers’ rooms. One risk, of course, is that readers of such fiction won’t necessarily know who, or what, was involved in producing what they read, undermining the implicit understandings on which they depend. (Amazon asks Hart to disclose her use of A.I.; she sometimes doesn’t.)
But is high-volume production the only option A.I. offers? A lot depends on your goals and perspective. I’m an extremely amateur musician, and I’ve certainly found that technology has increased my productivity. Sitting at my computer, armed only with a two-octave MIDI keyboard, I can hurtle through the steps of composition; I could spam Spotify with two new tracks a day, writing an album a week. But that’s not what I’m doing. Instead, I’m using musical technology to help me get to where I want to go. I couldn’t possibly perform my songs for an audience—I can barely play a dozen bars of piano without making a mistake—but that’s not my aim. I just want to listen out loud to what I hear in my head. To put it in grandiose terms, I want to realize a vision.
Presumably, many aspiring writers want to do the same. They have ideas and want to realize them, but can’t; they need nudges, aids, templates, rough drafts. The further artists move out of amateur hour and into the professional realm, of course, the more we expect their work to reflect their “real” capabilities. But what is real? Through the audio-software company Spitfire, the award-winning Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds offers a tool called Cells, which listens to what you play, conjuring around it a shimmering orchestral cloud, characterized by “harmonic movement that follows the composer’s tonality.” Many similar, behind-the-scenes tools assist professional musicians, allowing them to move from improvised ideas to finished compositions. The evolving strings created by Cells sound amazing; you’ve likely heard something like them in a movie theatre. This isn’t A.I.—but it almost is. Has it destroyed the essence of music?
Writing is different—we might reasonably hold this view. I’m sympathetic to it. I write for a living, which means that I’m in love with both the idea of writing and with doing it myself, without A.I. I have an exalted sense of what good writing is. When people ask me what I do for work, I tell them that I’m a journalist; I don’t like to use the word “writer” because I don’t feel worthy of it. I’ve worked my whole life to acquire what skills I have, and I consider myself adept at addressing the essentially technical problems that often bedevil less experienced writers. But the higher, more inspired levels of writing—the imaginative, artistic, inspired aspects—feel a bit out of reach.
My respect for the craft is part of a broader outlook. In my twenties, I went to graduate school in English. My professors there were gifted close readers. Some, such as the poetry critic Helen Vendler, had come up during the rise of the New Criticism—the school of thought, dominant around the nineteen-forties, which held that the best way to read was to inspect every word and punctuation mark, asking what it accomplished. The professor who influenced me the most, Philip Fisher, taught us the “classic” novels—“Pride and Prejudice,” “The Brothers Karamazov”—and knew how to close-read their structural features. He could explain how individual scenes were contrapuntally related, or how strands of plot and registers of language entwined and diverged to make meaning.
It wasn’t all about ideas. The university had a rare-books library. While teaching “Ulysses,” I showed my students Joyce’s marked-up galleys: they could see where, writing in the margin, he’d added a second “yes” to the end of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. In another class, we looked at a collection of miniature handmade books in which, as children, Charlotte Brontë and her brother Branwell had written their poems and stories. These artifacts affirmed that writing was both a life-spanning enterprise and a way of life. It was one of the highest uses for a mind.
It was easy, especially in that atmosphere, to take a certain conception of “writing” for granted. I knew that, whatever the activity of writing was—difficult, mysterious, important, even, in various postmodern ways, “unstable”—it was also direct and unambiguous. In other art forms, the role of the creator could be more complex, and the status of the art work more fluid. In music, there was Brian Eno; in painting, there was Andy Warhol; in sculpture, there was Andy Goldsworthy; in film, there was Werner Herzog. Marina Abramović depended on audience participation for her performance art. Jeff Koons was a C.E.O.-artist, running an assembly line. In all sorts of ways, artists were using technology to extend themselves, and to change their relationship to their art. But the written word, I thought, was largely exempt from all this. There was experimental literature in which the role of the author could be tweaked; in popular fiction, authorship could be a flexible concept. Yet “real” writing—the literary kind—remained simple.
Now that artificial intelligence is breaching the wall around writing, that simplicity is no longer something we’ll be able to assume. But, by the same token, the virtues of the traditional approach, which once hardly needed to be articulated, now stand in greater relief. In an autotuned or A.I.-synthesized world, perfection and imperfection carry new meanings: the human faults that technology irons out become perfect in their own way, and the smooth surfaces created through technology risk feeling blank and featureless. “Our relationship with technology is very ambivalent in the fact that it’s a very strong love-hate relationship,” Thomas Bangalter, of Daft Punk, told the art magazine Whitewall, in 2009. “There is no limit anymore with technology.” But, he went on, “any kind of human behavior has to be put against some kind of frustration.” The same technologies that expand the creative process also threaten to short-circuit it. To be an artist, Bangalter concluded, “What you have to learn is restraint—put your own limits.” ♦
