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The New Yorker staff writers Dexter Filkins and Clare Malone join Tyler Foggatt to examine Donald Trump’s appointments of former congressman Matt Gaetz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to his Cabinet. Gaetz, who has been nominated for Attorney General, is one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders and the former subject of a sex-trafficking investigation run by the Department of Justice. (Gaetz has denied all allegations.) Trump has chosen Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, giving one of the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists broad powers over public health. How would these men reshape the legal and medical infrastructures of our federal government? And will they even be confirmed?
The Oscar-nominated actor Josh Brolin—known for his roles in films such as “No Country for Old Men,” “Dune,” and the “Avengers” franchise—has been keeping journals since childhood. He drew on some of them for his memoir, “From Under the Truck,” which is out in November. A diary of his life in Hollywood, it’s also a record of a lifetime of debauchery, danger-seeking, and love—especially the love he shared with his sometimes chaotic mother, Jane Cameron Agee, who died in 1995. A few weeks ago, Brolin spoke with us about some of his formative reading experiences. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
When I was twenty, I did a play in New York where I was an Irish priest. For research, I flew to Dublin, where I basically lived in shitty places and looked for priests to talk to. I didn’t know what to read, but, when I went into the bookstore, there was Joyce.
I didn’t have a literary family. My mother read a lot, but she read horror books. “Portrait” is an example of a book that turned me onto a new world. It sort of slapped me. The rector’s long description of Hell threw me into maybe the worst nightmares I’ve ever had. There was also something about Stephen Dedalus and his innocence, growing up in a Catholic school, where he was bombarded by religion and also trying to find his individuality within it, that somehow paralleled what I went through. I grew up on a ranch around country people, which I loved, and I look back on now and love even more—but when you’re in the middle of it and you’re feeding sixty-five horses every morning, it’s, like, Get me the fuck out of here.
This is the first big book that I read. I think I was in my twenties. You know when you look at a book that big and you go, ‘Fuck, how am I ever gonna read this?’ Then there’s some ego involved when you’re done, because you can go, ‘Yep, I read this.’ I think that was my initial reaction, but then I got into the story.
The book is about Gary Gilmore, a murderer who was put on death row in Utah when capital punishment had been suspended. He challenged the state to execute him—basically demanded that he be shot. He was saying, Don’t be a fakery of a government, do what you say you’re going to do. You’re blaming me for not acting how you want me to act, but then you say you’re going to kill me, and you don’t. So how are you any different than I am?
I got in trouble a lot when I was younger, and I think part of the reason the book struck me so much is because it’s about somebody living a life that maybe exists in me, or would exist if I grew up in a different place and different time. Maybe that’s why I became an actor—to explore different aspects of myself. With a character like this, you go, ‘Yeah, there’s nothing about him that I can identify with.’ But, if you’re honest, really?
This book is about the life of Michelangelo. I read it when I was travelling in Florence when I was eighteen. On that trip, after I had run out of money and started doing odd jobs, I met a French girl on the bus to Florence. The girl was staring at me, so I figured there was something going on. Anyway. She asked me to sleep in her tent. Then she got bored of that after a couple of days, and then she met a guy with a motorcycle and went off with him. But she said, ‘Stay in my tent.’ So I stayed in her tent, and I read “The Agony and the Ecstasy.”
I was really lonely then. I would spend hours and hours at the Uffizi or at the Accademia, just looking at Michelangelo’s sculptures. There was one point when I realized that I was on exactly the same hill looking at exactly what Michelangelo had been looking at in one of Irving Stone’s descriptions. Those things blew me away. But I think mostly what I took from the book was a sense of the extremes he was willing to go to in order to deepen his experience and his art. There’s a part where Stone writes about Michelangelo breaking into a morgue. Doing that was punishable by death, but Michelangelo wanted to look inside the corpses, he wanted to understand the relationship between the bone and the skin and the muscles. His willingness to take things as far as possible fascinated me. This is like Daniel Day-Lewis doing “My Left Foot.” Most people find that ridiculous, but I go, I get it. I get it. You want to see if you can take it that much further, and whether it will have an effect or not.
One of the movie industry’s many recent laments is that 2024 has given us no Barbenheimer—no box-office showdown between two thrillingly brainy blockbusters, cemented together in the cultural imagination and in the commercial stratosphere. And yet, just in time for Thanksgiving, here come two wishfully galumphing epics, “Wicked” and “Gladiator II.” One is a revisionist fantasy of Oz, the other a revisionist history of Rome, and both are chockablock with political conspiracies, authoritarian abuses, and foul-tempered monkeys, none of which adds up to a full-blown phenomenon. If “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” struck blows for risk and originality in Hollywood, the slickly refurbished wares of “Wadiator”—or, if you prefer, “Glicked”—suggest a safe retreat to known quantities. Choose your own adventure, but, whether it leads to the Colosseum or to the Emerald City, you’ve surely been there before.
In “Wicked”—or, as it appears onscreen, “Wicked: Part I”—that familiarity is entirely the point. The movie, directed by Jon M. Chu with some of the whirligig showmanship he brought to “In the Heights” (2021) and “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), kicks off a two-part adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, which was itself loosely based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” All yellow brick roads lead back to L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” though the classic 1939 film adaptation exerts the mightiest influence, having immortalized the Wicked Witch as a green-skinned, broomstick-riding cackler—played by Margaret Hamilton, in one of the most primally terrifying movie-villain performances.
Evil this delectable can no longer be simply savored; it must be deconstructed, and lucratively prequelized, in the manner of sympathetic villain origin stories like “Maleficent,” “Joker,” and “Cruella.” It makes sense that “Wicked,” a forerunner of this trend on the page and the stage, has now found its place on the screen, where the story can shoulder its full weight in cinematic Baumbast. And so the real Wicked Witch steps out from behind the curtain—and, lo, she is Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), an intellectually gifted, morally courageous, and grievously misunderstood outcast, whose only crime is having been born with a complexion of chlorophyll.
Much of “Part I,” scripted by Winnie Holzman (who wrote the book for the musical) and Dana Fox, unfolds at the ill-named Shiz University—Hogwarts with Munchkins—where Elphaba arrives as a caregiver for her newly enrolled sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who has a disability. But Elphaba’s irrepressible talents catch the attention of the school’s headmistress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), prompting a rivalry with Galinda (Ariana Grande, billed as Ariana Grande-Butera), a shallow, self-absorbed classmate who will eventually become Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Elphaba and Galinda are forced to be roommates, and they go together like asparagus and bubble gum. But Galinda is more than just a walking dumb-blonde joke: she’s the secret seriocomic weapon of “Wicked,” and Grande balances her delightful queen-bee insouciance with a porcelain vulnerability worthy of Baum’s own China Princess. Beneath every exaggerated hair toss, she unleashes a poignant frisson of panic.
When the two witches finally set their differences aside (cue “Popular,” the deftest and funniest of Stephen Schwartz’s songs), Galinda’s joy is unfeigned; her friendship with “Elphie” fills a real void. Erivo makes you believe it. Her coolly magnetic stare is her onscreen superpower, and here it serves to modulate the narrative clutter swirling around her. As a fastidiously retconned “Wizard of Oz” prequel, “Wicked” has its puzzle-box pleasures: the uninitiated can muse over the narrative significance of, say, a terrified lion cub, a bicycle basket, or a hunky prince (an assured Jonathan Bailey) who foretells his future with the lyric “Life is painless / for the brainless.” As a parable of political radicalization, however, the movie soon turns lumbering and obvious. Oz is in the grip of creeping totalitarianism, and the more Elphaba grasps the stakes, the more pointed the hats she has to wear become: she’s a feminist crusader, an animal-welfare activist, and, in time, a full-blown resistance leader, with the not so wonderful Wizard of Oz (a well-cast Jeff Goldblum) as her target.
Given the story’s insistence on not judging a witch by her color, is it churlish to say that I wish “Wicked: Part I” looked better? (And also that, at two hours and forty minutes, there were less of it to look at?) The visual bar here is admittedly high; no new movie can be expected to match the dazzling Technicolor brilliance of “The Wizard of Oz,” a picture I’ve seen so many times that even its flaws feel like old friends: the lopped-off lines, the mismatched edits, the shot in which Hamilton’s Witch, about to vanish in a poof of smoke, misses her mark by a second or two. These imperfections, far from diminishing the experience, give the older film a material weight, a conviction about its own magic, for which the pristine digital surfaces of “Wicked” can conjure no equivalent. It’s not easy being green screen, but, even so, there is little in this movie’s muted palette and washed-out backlighting to make you muse, even for a second, “What a world, what a world.”
Near the end, though, “Wicked” does surge to a kind of life. The climax is protracted but darkly thrilling: ugly secrets spill into the open, winged monkeys screech and scatter, and Elphaba comes into full possession of her powers. “It’s time to try defying gravity,” she belts to the skies, and the film shrewdly follows suit, with a vertiginous airborne number that doesn’t just feel like Oz—it feels like Vegas. You’d want to see it projected onto the Sphere, perhaps with Elphaba soaring on a rhinestone-studded broomstick and then leaving the MGM Grand—sorry, the Emerald City—in the dust. “Part II” looms next year; until then, Elphie has left the building.
The lesson of “Wicked,” should you happen to miss it, is that the appearance of villainy can be deceiving. “Gladiator II,” in its own punchy, stabby, neck-chomping way, upholds the same principle. Directed by Ridley Scott, nearly a quarter century after he steered the first “Gladiator” (2000) to smash returns and Oscar glory, this is the sword-and-sandal epic as both sequel and shell game. Clean good-vs.-evil demarcations are a thing of the past, and motives and alliances can be murderously tricky to suss out. The hero, at least, is no mystery: he is Lucius (Paul Mescal), a fierce young warrior of Numidia, who, after experiencing crushing defeat and tragic personal loss, is hauled off to Rome as a prisoner of war. Soon he will be a gladiator in the Colosseum, where a bloody quest for vengeance begins.
But vengeance against whom? Is his enemy Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the general who inflicted his particular agony—or do Pascal’s soft eyes and grave sighs signal us to look elsewhere? Perhaps Lucius should blame the emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), monstrous twin tyrants who have sent the empire spiralling into decadence. And what of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a wily slaveowner who casts Lucius into the arena, recognizing a total killer when he sees one? What’s his long game?
After a while, it barely seems to matter, and “Gladiator II,” following a propulsive opening stretch, recedes into the long shadow of its predecessor. If the first “Gladiator” still retains much of its visceral and emotional force, that’s because it serves us our revenge-thriller poison straight; to see the mighty general Maximus (Russell Crowe) smack down the unambiguously loathsome emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) remains an irreducible pleasure. As “Gladiator II” opens, Maximus has been dead for sixteen years, and, though his fighting spirit becomes a guiding light of sorts for Lucius, their bond never feels more than circumstantial. The lead role is a stretch for Mescal, but a good one. After the art-house melancholy of “All of Us Strangers” and “Aftersun,” he tears into Lucius’s red-meat physicality with voracious fury, as if it were his first and possibly last meal; all the sadder, then, when that fury suddenly evaporates in the face of narrative expedience.
Even so, we are not not entertained. There is, for one, the invigorating if empty-calorie flash of Denzel Washington, who will play Othello on Broadway next year, and who might have seen, in the warrior-whisperer role of Macrinus, an opportunity to channel his inner Iago. The arena battles have an agreeably batshit, can-you-top-this conceptual absurdity; you won’t soon forget a scene in which Lucius fends off a deranged baboon, or when the Colosseum is reconfigured into a kind of third-century Sea World, complete with snapping sharks. In planting us squarely in the splash zone, Scott and his collaborators pander so unabashedly to our bloodlust that it rings all the more hollow when “Gladiator II” suddenly fancies itself a civics lesson, entreating its characters to mourn their failing empire and dream of its glorious rebirth. We get it, we get it: there’s no place like Rome. ♦
At a wide desk in a bedroom somewhere sits a figure, her back facing the camera, supported by an ergonomic white office chair. Her head is bracketed by puffy, white noise-cancelling headphones. Her wrists rest on a foam cloud as she plays a pixelated farm-simulation video game called Stardew Valley on a handheld Nintendo Switch. She is surrounded by screens. An expansive computer monitor in front of her displays footage of another game. A monitor to the side projects an animation of some friendly forest landscape, with animals flitting among gently swaying trees. On the wall, lights the shape of geometric tiles cast a soft glow in changing colors according to whatever is onscreen. On floating shelves above her rest small potted plants, signs of organic life amid a tranquil technological ecosystem. Her keyboard has keys in pastel colors that clack like a typewriter’s; next to it rests a glass mug of grass-green matcha latte. You can find proliferating versions of this figure across TikTok and Instagram, under the hashtag #cozygaming. She is completely ensconced in a serene environment, a self-contained digital and physical cocoon. Her accessories, the room’s soothing décor, and even her soft clothes and fuzzy blankets complement and extend the world of her games. As one cozy-gaming content creator put it, “Like someone having a bubble bath and candles and a glass of wine, you’re turning a typical normal activity into something more relaxing.”
Cozy gaming has become not just a social-media genre but a life style. The trend can be traced back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nintendo released the latest iteration of its Animal Crossing series, in March of 2020, just in time for quarantined players to hide away as they built cutesy, cartoonish islands populated by anthropomorphized creatures and shared them with one another. The game, which has sold nearly fifty million copies to date, became emblematic of pandemic escapism, offering a kind of parallel virtual society in which interaction was still possible. Around the same time, a law student named Kennedy started posting videos of herself playing Animal Crossing and other, similarly soothing games, under the name @cozy.games, eventually accumulating six hundred thousand followers on TikTok and countless imitators.
Kennedy has the requisite office chair and wide wooden desk, but she also plays games, and reads, in a lounge chair complete with a body pillow and a chunky knit blanket that her cat lays atop. The cozy style is made up of “warm lighting, natural materials, soft textures, and, most importantly, knickknacks that make you happy,” Kennedy (who goes by her first name only, or by the nickname Cozy K) told me recently. “Coziness is that warm glow of peace and safety.” Even as the threat of COVID-19 receded, the popularity of cozy content has continued to grow, helping to preserve some of the housebound, self-cosseted mood of quarantine for a world now buffeted by economic instability, international conflict, and political upheaval. Cozy gaming is “reassuring during turbulent times,” Kennedy said. A few days after Trump’s victory in the 2024 Presidential election, she posted a video of herself throwing down a newspaper, screaming, and retreating to her desk to play the Sims. The caption read, “my daily routine until further notice😌(🥲)”
Meditative video games such as the Sims or Minecraft have long offered players a form of immersive escapism into worlds of their own making. Stardew Valley, with its now famous pixelated barns and crops, was first released in the twenty-tens, a decade that also saw the rise of hygge, a Scandinavian stylized coziness to combat the darker seasons. Luxury candles and weighted blankets became millennial status symbols. But the popularity of #cozygaming represents a new ideal of technologically enabled self-soothing, both onscreen and off. The world-weary pursuit of comfort has filtered from video games to other forms of gadgetry and entertainment, with each new video and accessory designed to foster a sensory environment of unrelenting harmoniousness. As the physical world becomes more alienating, we build ourselves benign parallel universes to burrow into. The archetypal cozy bedroom becomes a form of virtual reality.
Coziness is achieved not only through what’s on our screens but through the look of the screens themselves. One feature of the cozy-tech era is that our technological devices conjure something increasingly comforting and organic. Where once Apple’s designs were defined by a sleek geometric flatness, whether the razor-thin MacBook Air or the iPad Pro, they are lately getting blobbier and more intimate—designed not just to be held in our hands but attached to our person. The Apple Vision Pro V.R. headset creates a holistic digital environment, even broadcasting a simulation of the wearer’s eyes on its external screen. The Apple Watch monitors your vital signs; AirPods can now function as hearing aids. All of them provide the coziness of a technological second skin, a diaphanous filter that regulates your sensory input, insuring comfort before you even have to think about it.
For all the anxieties surrounding the advent of artificial intelligence—the threat of deepfakes, the surge in bot spam—A.I. technology has also ushered in visions of sweetly humanoid devices that adjust themselves to our personal preferences. On Apple TV+’s gently techno-dystopian mystery series “Sunny,” released this year, Rashida Jones plays a woman named Suzie opposite a feminine robot named Sunny, whose huge, spherical head features a face glowing forth from a screen like an emoji sprung to life. Sunny is the creation of Suzie’s husband, who died under ambiguous circumstances, leaving her alone in their life in Kyoto. “I was programmed for you,” the robot tells her during their slapstick detective quest to find out what really happened to him. Suzie’s home is cozily warm and insulated, filled with funky furniture that she lies around on in a haze of grief, swathed in soft, thick fabrics. She often gazes at her phone, a rounded, blue device that has the plastic texture and saturated hue of a Playmobil toy. Sunny initially speaks in an obsequious ChatGPT-generic tone, but the robot gradually adopts Suzie’s speech patterns, softening Suzie’s initial skepticism. Suzie and Sunny sit together on the couch, watching TV like snug domestic companions. In one scene, Sunny cuddles into bed with Suzie to comfort her, emitting fake breathing sounds. A.I. is something intimate and tactile, the show seems to promise, capable of lulling a user into acceptance by emulating human traits. The user is coddled by the machine, voluntarily infantilized.
The first generation of actual A.I. devices is adopting the cozy aesthetic, too. These devices have organic names—Rabbit, Humane, Friend. Like Sunny, they are playfully designed, compact, and blob-like, unthreatening and trusty confidants. Humane’s Web site describes its product as an “intelligent, voice-powered wearable companion”; it’s a pin that gazes outward from your chest and analyzes the world with its camera. Friend, the creation of Avi Schiffmann, a twenty-two-year-old entrepreneur, is a necklace hung with a plastic orb, with a light embedded at its center to represent its “soul,” Schiffmann told me recently. Scheduled for release early next year, it uses A.I. to process conversations and sounds around you, and then it texts you its observations about whatever is happening, whether you’re going through a breakup, hiking in the woods, or getting a promotion at work. It’s a “superintelligent, omnipresent entity that you talk to with no judgment in the most intimate way,” Schiffmann said. Friend swaddles its user in protective surveillance. Schiffmann’s inspiration for the Friend product included his childhood encounters with games and animated shows from the nineties—Tamagotchi, Pokemon, Digimon—which featured little creatures who follow their owners around. The design of Friend recalls the Digivice from Digimon, a handheld gadget with buttons, antennae, and a tiny screen on which a user’s digital companions appear, before they are summoned by the Digivice out of the digital world and into the real one. Like the Pokemon trainers of yore, the modern adult A.I. user who ventures out into the wider world can draw comfort from knowing she’s never really alone.
Social media in its original form reflected an urge to connect with other people living their lives somewhere else in the real world. The coziness trend suggests that the Internet and artificial intelligence can lead us ever inward. In the cozy era, our screens and the related accoutrements of digital life fulfill all of our emotional and sensory needs. Stef Kight, a journalist in the D.C. area, and a fan of cozy content, told me that the trend is connected, in her mind, with a TikTok mantra: Romanticize your life. As she put it, “Let’s romanticize even the most insular, habitual things that we do. We can still make it enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing and comfortable.” Last winter, Kight hosted a reading retreat for her book club, gathering twenty women in two plush houses in Virginia to read and discuss books amid a snow-covered landscape—another aestheticized act of coziness, though a notably social one. By contrast, the archetypal cozy figure at her desk, plugged into multiple screens, is an image of loneliness which is also meant to assuage loneliness. #Coziness, in a way, stylizes isolation, making it look desirable. This is an old paradox of the digital world: the same platforms that provide connection also have a way of cutting us off. But #cozygaming suggests that the solution is to surround yourself with yet more gadgets and devices, whether an ergonomic Aeron desk chair, a video projector that turns your wall into a scene from “Harry Potter,” or a new A.I. companion who follows your every move. As Friend’s Avi Schiffmann told me, “I do think the loneliness crisis was created by technology, but I do think it will be fixed by technology.”
Liv Charette, a cozy-gaming TikTok creator and musician living in Nashville, told me that the message of cozy video games is “It’s O.K. to be childlike.” Others have described the pursuit of coziness as a way of “healing your internal child.” As the usual markers of adulthood—establishing a career, buying property, starting a family—become more elusive for today’s young people, cozy gaming offers a form of domesticity through the worlds on their screens. A post on Threads, in October, pinpointed the irony: “Stardew Valley is a game that lets you live out your wildest fantasies like: - Making friends - Owning a home - Earning a living wage - Going outside.” Unpacking, another popular game, involves moving into new spaces and putting objects away. Vampire Therapist features the titular figure helping his patients improve their immortal lives through cognitive-behavioral therapy. Wylde Flowers is about a witch who arrives in a new town and begins cultivating a coven. The themes are interchangeable; the underlying format remains the same. You develop relationships, construct residences, and customize landscapes. If one digital world or another doesn’t work out, you can just reset the game or pick a new one, the way you might shift the position of a pillow to make yourself that much more comfortable.
Within the cozy games and the footage of people playing them, though, there seems to be a desire for something beyond the screen, the sorts of physical experiences hinted at by the games’ analog subject matter—farming, potion-mixing, construction. Similarly, A.I. products answer a yearning for social interaction and the comfort of community with a simulacrum thereof, a machine friend who never needs anything from you in return. Eleanor, a young British gamer, got into cozy content creation on TikTok under the username @cozy.eleanor after dropping out of college and moving home to her parents’ farm, outside of Cambridge, to deal with chronic illness. She turned to games such as Stardew Valley and Life Is Strange, an interactive narrative about American adolescence, in part because they offered tangible forms of achievement during a stalled time in her life. “Video games for me have been a savior,” she told me. In a recent video, titled “lazy sunday evenings 🍂☕,” Eleanor sits in dim, warm light at her desk, where she plays Animal Crossing on her Switch, crochets, and completes a page from a coloring book while watching a Studio Ghibli animated film on her monitor. A lit candle glimmers next to the screen and a vase of flowers decorates the desk. Her accessories—keyboard, mouse, controllers—are tucked away into neat cubbies.
Turning her childhood bedroom into a zone of maximal coziness—including, recently, with the addition of a white Aeron chair—was a way of asserting control. “I don’t see a lot of progress in my day-to-day life getting better, so seeing the progress of arranging my desk, it was like a physical progressing,” Eleanor said. Her surroundings are “immersive,” she continued, “you’re keeping the vibe going”; the outside world is kept at bay. Beyond the walls of the house, her parents run a farm with real chickens and ducks and fields of wheat. Eleanor knows that the cozy aesthetic is a fantasy, just as role-playing games and neighborhoods of anthropomorphized creatures are fantasies. It is ultimately an expression of alienation, an indulgence in the kinds of unreality that technology excels at providing. She said, of the agricultural life, with all its physicality and mess, “The reality, for people who play farming Sims, would not appeal quite so much.” ♦
In September, the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) signed a two-million-dollar contract with Paragon, an Israeli firm whose spyware product Graphite focusses on breaching encrypted-messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal. Wired first reported that the technology was acquired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—an agency within D.H.S. that will soon be involved in executing the Trump Administration’s promises of mass deportations and crackdowns on border crossings. A source at Paragon told me that the deal followed a vetting process, during which the company was able to demonstrate that it had robust tools to prevent other countries that purchase its spyware from hacking Americans—but that wouldn’t limit the U.S. government’s ability to target its own citizens. The technology is part of a booming multibillion-dollar market for intrusive phone-hacking software that is making government surveillance increasingly cheap and accessible. In recent years, a number of Western democracies have been roiled by controversies in which spyware has been used, apparently by defense and intelligence agencies, to target opposition politicians, journalists, and apolitical civilians caught up in Orwellian surveillance dragnets. Now Donald Trump and incoming members of his Administration will decide whether to curtail or expand the U.S. government’s use of this kind of technology. Privacy advocates have been in a state of high alarm about the colliding political and technological trend lines. “It’s just so evident—the impending disaster,” Emily Tucker, the executive director at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, told me. “You may believe yourself not to be in one of the vulnerable categories, but you won’t know if you’ve ended up on a list for some reason or your loved ones have. Every single person should be worried.”
The scandals catalyzed by the use of this surveillance technology in other democracies demonstrate the temptations of its misuse, and the elusiveness of accountability. This August, a prosecutor in Greece declined to hold government officials there responsible for a sprawling phone-hacking campaign that targeted opposition politicians and journalists. The country’s Supreme Court, in a report that was kept sealed but reported on by Politico, rubber-stamped the hacking as incidental to legitimate state operations. The victims’ phones had been infected with Predator, spyware from Cytrox, a North Macedonian firm founded by Israeli nationals, which can hijack a phone to undetectably access its camera, microphone, and all of its data, including messages and photos. The hacking attempt was discovered on a phone owned by Nikos Androulakis—who leads one of Greece’s major political parties—after he sent his device for testing by a lab run by the European Parliament. The Greek Supreme Court reviewed a hundred and sixteen cases of alleged state surveillance, and found that Thanasis Koukakis, an investigative journalist who has reported on Greece’s banks, had been targeted. (The country’s Prime Minister has claimed that he was unaware of the hacking, though he ostensibly oversees the country’s intelligence operations.)
Poland’s Prime Minister, earlier this year, confirmed allegations that a prior government there had deployed another potent spyware technology, Pegasus, made by the Israeli firm NSO Group, to hack opposition politicians in a surveillance dragnet, which a special committee of the country’s Senate has deemed a breach of constitutional standards. (A former Prime Minister defended the surveillance to a parliamentary committee earlier this year, arguing that it was predominantly “used against criminals.”) Spain, as I reported in this magazine in 2022, appears to have carried out a massive campaign of hacking against civil society and politicians linked to the separatist movement in the autonomous region of Catalonia, in concert with violent police crackdowns and arrests. (Spain’s former intelligence chief later admitted to the espionage, saying that it was carried out with the approval of the country’s judiciary.) “The system of checks and balances we have come to take for granted in the West has unravelled before our eyes,” Artemis Seaford, a Greek and U.S. dual national and a technology executive, whose phone was hacked in the Greek surveillance effort, told me. “If it can happen in Greece, a modern Western democracy, why could it not also happen in the United States?”
In the U.S., Trump has repeatedly promised to execute the “largest deportation program in American history” upon taking office, arguing, often with little basis in reality, that cities and towns have been “invaded” and “conquered” by “criminals.” He has selected as his national-security adviser Michael Waltz, who, as a congressman, successfully advocated for the expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, rooting his arguments in a desire to deport undocumented immigrants for the sake of national security. (“The fastest growing group entering through our southern border is now from China, our number one adversary,” Waltz told the House at the time.) Within hours of Trump’s election to a second term, ICE—which is still under the authority of President Biden, but which has often seemed sympathetic to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric—put out a new call for private companies to submit plans for augmenting the agency’s surveillance infrastructure, including ankle monitors, and software and hardware used for tracking targets’ biometrics. Human Rights Watch, responding to ICE’s deal with Paragon in October, warned that expanding the agency’s surveillance infrastructure would exacerbate “concerns about ICE abusing people trying to cross the US-Mexico border, surveilling border communities, and surveilling, harassing, interrogating, detaining, and blocking journalists, lawyers, and activists working on or near the border.” Immigration lawyers told me that such an expansion would create a frightening digital panopticon, not just for the 3.7 million people awaiting immigration hearings and the millions more who have managed to avoid immigration enforcement measures but for the wider population. “The fact that it’s the Department of Homeland Security, in particular, that has the technology means it may not be used exclusively for immigration and deportation,” Tucker, of the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, told me. “D.H.S. is often the chosen agency to acquire technologies that are legally questionable because they are, in practice, subject to less oversight than basically all the other federal agencies.”
Already, the United States has struggled with transparency and restraint. In 2019, the F.B.I. secretly purchased Pegasus through a government contractor. (The F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, told Congress that the spyware had been acquired for limited testing purposes, but internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the New York Times show that the agency seriously considered deploying it operationally, and even drew up guidelines for prosecutors navigating disclosures about its use.) In 2021, the same F.B.I. contractor purchased another NSO Group technology, a phone-tracking solution called Landmark. The same year, the Commerce Department added NSO Group and other spyware-makers to a list of entities blocked from doing business with American companies. The Biden Administration later issued an executive order, plans for which were first disclosed in this magazine, banning the “operational use by the United States Government of commercial spyware that poses risks to national security or has been misused by foreign actors to enable human rights abuses.” These measures were limited and already left ample loopholes. In an interview for a new documentary, “Surveilled,” that followed my reporting on the subject, Nathaniel C. Fick, the Biden Administration’s Ambassador-at-Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, defended the “legitimate law enforcement and national security uses of these technologies,” and declined to answer my questions about specific measures for such use. Few legal experts I spoke with expected the Trump Administration to continue even such halting efforts to self-police government surveillance—nor did they expect that a potential Justice Department under Matt Gaetz would aggressively champion the already porous protections afforded by case law interpreting the Fourth Amendment in the context of personal data privacy. Tucker added, “With Trump making it clear that he envisions executive authority as being subject to no legal restraints, with the kind of appointments he’s made, and with the composition of Congress, they believe they can essentially do whatever they want with this technology—to immigrant communities, to activists.”
Decisions by the White House and by Republican lawmakers about spyware will have implications across a variety of policy areas that Trump and his associates are upending and that reach far beyond Washington. In recent years, an array of states, including Texas, Florida, and California have reportedly purchased spyware and other surveillance technologies; legislators and regulators will dictate whether that trend continues. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, at least two states have already used private personal data to prosecute people for getting abortions. That practice could expand with more widespread and affordable access to this technology.
Trump has threatened his political enemies, reposting comments calling for a military tribunal for Liz Cheney and observing that General Mark Milley’s behavior would have once been punishable by “DEATH!” He has also demonized the free press, suggesting, for example, that he wouldn’t mind if people were to “shoot through the fake news” and that journalists who protect sources should be imprisoned. These comments target the populations that have been most vulnerable to overzealous spyware campaigns in other Western democracies. “When this happens in an authoritarian system, it is horrific but unsurprising,” Seaford, the technology executive who was hacked during Greece’s spyware campaign, told me. “When it happens in a democracy, however, it creates a sense of disorientation: ‘Could this happen to me? Here? Really?!’ And yet it can, and it does.” ♦
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, a former Obama Administration official, was six years old when she became, as she puts it, “a card-carrying Indian”—an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, from whom she is descended on her mother’s side. The occasion was marked by the delivery of a typewritten card, issued by the tribe’s enrollment office. It was the size of a driver’s license, but it was much more symbolically freighted; her mother made Schuettpelz wash her hands before she was allowed to touch it.
Schuettpelz’s Lumbee relatives are mostly concentrated in the tribal seat of Pembroke, North Carolina, a town of around twenty-eight hundred people, two-thirds of whom are Native American. In Pembroke, her family “live in a circle,” on a looping gravel road where various cousins and aunts and uncles reside close to one another. “If you stood in the middle of this circle and yelled loud enough, I’m certain you could call everyone to supper,” she writes.
Schuettpelz, who grew up in Iowa and still lives in the Midwest, has spent most of her life feeling alternately inside and outside the circle. Her maternal grandfather, who was Lumbee, met a German woman during his service in the Second World War; they married and moved to the Midwest. During some summers, Schuettpelz’s family took the thousand-mile trip to North Carolina, where she partook in local bonfires and visited with relatives. The Lumbee community in Pembroke was a cohesive world, verging on insular, and her sense of belonging to it was entwined with the insecurity that she didn’t belong enough.
Tribes have the right to determine their own citizenship requirements. Schuettpelz takes pains to note, repeatedly, that “every tribe is different,” and each has its own criteria for membership. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina requires direct biological descent from the tribe’s “base rolls”—a list of tribal members compiled decades ago—as well as a demonstrated understanding of Lumbee history and culture. (At one time, this meant taking a test; currently, applicants must attend a class.) In adulthood, Schuettpelz learned that her enrollment had lapsed and she would have to reapply. Her trips to the Lumbee enrollment office felt akin to going to the Department of Motor Vehicles: there were lines and clipboards and unflattering photographs. Although she met all the requirements, including passing the test, “the process had sewn inside me a thick thread of doubt about my identity,” she writes.
Schuettpelz’s experience sparked her curiosity about the larger story of tribal membership, its personal and political meaning, a story she unspools in “The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America,” an ambivalent and genre-bending work of reportage, memoir, and history. Her unstable, evolving relationship with her Native identity is not uncommon, she learned. In 1990, a little under two million Americans selected “American Indian or Alaskan Native” as their race on the U.S. census. In 2000, when respondents were first allowed to select more than one racial category, that number doubled; within two decades, it had more than doubled again. Schuettpelz offers various explanations, including changes in census response guidance and initiatives to expand census operations on reservations, where populations have historically been undercounted. But, Schuettpelz notes, none is wide-ranging enough to account for such an “astronomical rise.” It is simply—or not so simply—the case that vastly more people are now identifying as Native.
But only a fraction of the ten million people who ticked the “American Indian or Alaska Native” box on census forms in 2020 are enrolled in tribes recognized by states or the federal government. When prompted to indicate their tribal affiliation, more than 1.6 million people wrote some form of “Cherokee”; there are three federally recognized Cherokee tribes in the U.S., with a combined total of nearly half a million members. In other words, the number of people who identify as Native is far greater than the number of people who are officially recognized as such. Complicating matters further, the census counts “American Indian” as a racial category, while tribal membership is closer to a legal status. Native identity is thus a matter of individual identification that is also determined by tribal and federal authorities. Perhaps more than any other quasi-racial category, Native-ness is mediated by institutions that have their own vested interest in letting people in (or keeping them out).
Schuettpelz, a former adviser to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, admits that she “view[s] the world through the lens of data.” She’s partial to the kind of information that can fit on a spreadsheet. Faced with a puzzle—in this case, how tribal nations have come to determine membership—her instinct, she writes, is to turn to “something that’s always been a comforting presence in my life: Microsoft Excel.” She sets herself the goal of building a database of tribal enrollment policies which will encompass as many as possible of the three hundred and forty-seven federally recognized Native American tribes in the contiguous United States. (She opts not to include Alaska Native communities, or tribal nations—including the Lumbee—which are state-recognized but lack federal recognition.) The majority of tribes for which she can find information base their membership on blood quantum, or the percentage of ancestry that’s traceable to a particular tribe. The second most common method is based on lineage, requiring members to identify a direct ancestor who was a tribal member.
There are tangible benefits to proving one’s lineal connection to a federally recognized tribe. Some tribes offer members child care, housing assistance, or annual payments from casino revenue. (Schuettpelz notes that many people often assume that per-capita payments are much larger, and more prevalent, than they actually are.) The federal government provides health care from the Indian Health Service and grants set aside for Native students. Perhaps more important, there are also intangible advantages. Membership shores up Schuettpelz’s sometimes wobbly sense of identity, and binds her to the community. Native identity “is not so much who you claim, but who claims you,” she writes, quoting Jimmy Beason, an Osage professor and writer.
“The Indian Card” is not a simple story of finding peace through belonging. In researching tribal membership policies, Schuettpelz finds much that makes her uneasy. She interviews a number of Native people who have bumped up against the limitations of tribal enrollment policies: Schuettpelz’s research assistant cannot complete her membership application unless she obtains a birth certificate from her largely absent father or her noncommunicative grandfather. Then, there is a man who serves as his tribe’s historian but cannot enroll because his tribe determines membership patrilineally and his father was white.
The federal government also involves itself in determining who officially “qualifies” as Native, through the issuance of a document known as the Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, which functions as an official validation of a person’s blood quantum. The C.D.I.B. sounds like a relic of a much older time; in fact, its origins are obscure, and, as far as Schuettpelz can figure, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began issuing C.D.I.B. cards in the nineteen-seventies. The certificate remains a present-day requirement to access certain federal benefits, and some tribes mandate a C.D.I.B. as a precursor for enrollment. The idea of the government certifying citizens’ bloodlines clearly makes Schuettpelz uneasy. “Focus, especially, on the word blood,” she writes. “Let your mind wander to other U.S. policies that granted the federal government the power to quantify people by blood that remain in place today. Let yourself realize that there aren’t any.”
In the Colonial era, the U.S. approached tribes as fellow sovereign nations to be dealt with on a government-to-government basis. But the terms of the treaties were often exploitative, or ignored when they became inconvenient. By the mid- to late nineteenth century, tribal nations had been decimated through the cumulative effects of war, disease, land seizure, and removal. It’s during this period, when the violent extermination campaigns of the early Colonial era had given way to more bureaucratically obfuscated damage, that Schuettpelz identifies a key shift. The government grew less concerned about fostering relationships with tribes; instead, the focus of interest was, increasingly, individual Native Americans. Native identity began to be seen less as a political designation, a membership in a specific tribe, and more as a racial one. At the same time, the U.S. government became increasingly invested in, as Schuettpelz puts it, “adjudicating Indianness.”
The federal government had never been particularly good at this; the U.S. census didn’t include “Indian” as an option until 1860. (Even after that point, Schuettpelz notes, many Lumbee were categorized as “mulatto.”) Schuettpelz’s Lumbee great-great-grandmother, who was born around 1860, was given three different racial identifiers on census rolls.
Things changed during the allotment era, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the federal government divided collectively owned tribal lands into plots, and allocated them to individual owners. As a part of determining who qualified for land, the Dawes Commission charged federal agents with making “correct rolls” of tribal citizens, some of which are still used in present-day blood-quantum calculations. Compiling what came to be known as the Dawes Rolls was often haphazard, what Schuettpelz calls “a non-process process.” Some white families, seeking access to allotted land, were rumored to have bribed their way onto the rolls. Given little official guidance, federal officials sometimes relied on racist assumptions. Agents tasked with drawing up the official list for the Mississippi Choctaw were instructed that a person who “showed a predominance of Choctaw blood and characteristics”—that is, they looked Indian—didn’t have to present documentation of ancestry.
Tribal members with African ancestry likely faced the most obstacles to official inclusion. Until the late eighteen-sixties, a number of tribes had practiced slavery. (The so-called Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole—were given that honorific in part because they enslaved people.) In many cases, those freed from slavery were incorporated into tribes as full citizens, known as freedmen. But, when Dawes agents were putting together their lists, freedmen and their descendants were often kept on a separate roll, or not included at all. (This racist past is still alive in present-day tribal policies. Of the five tribes, only the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma allows freedmen descendants to exercise full citizenship rights.)
This approach to determining who “counted” as Native differed greatly from how African Americans were categorized. The historian Mikaëla Adams tells Schuettpelz that the idea that “one drop” of African blood made someone Black was, in part, intended to maximize the number of people who could be enslaved. In contrast, Adams points out, “White people weren’t as much after Native bodies as land.” Because land not allocated to tribal members was open to settlement by non-Natives, there was an incentive to undercount the number of Natives.
Blood quantum, with its mathematical fussiness and emphasis on purity, bears little relationship to many tribes’ pre-contact approaches to belonging, which tended to be based on a looser approach to kinship. (Schuettpelz’s caveat applies here more than ever—every tribe is different, and historians’ understanding of pre-contact tribal traditions is very much partial.) But, despite its tainted origins, blood quantum is still a part of many tribes’ contemporary policies. As Schuettpelz discovers, the sample tribal constitution offered on the Bureau of Indian Affairs Web site suggests a one-quarter blood-quantum requirement for membership. The ramifications for tribes are potentially dire: while other sovereign nations welcome new citizens via multiple pathways, blood quantum forecloses those possibilities, reducing belonging to the blunt logic of blood. As Native people continue to urbanize and intermarriage becomes more common, the reductive mathematics of blood quantum makes it increasingly likely that members of subsequent generations will not qualify for tribal citizenship, no matter their connections with their families, culture, history, and language. As tribal membership dwindles, so, too, may tribal political power. “Blood quantum,” Schuettpelz fears, “will become a tool of extinction.”
Schuettpelz ends “The Indian Card” ’s first chapter with a cliffhanger of sorts, questioning whether she will enroll her children in the Lumbee Tribe. The suspense feels fabricated, an imposition of a linear structure on this admirably questing, ranging book. I was never in doubt as to what decision Schuettpelz would make. For all her excavations of the tainted origins of contemporary practices, she clearly still sees tribal citizenship as an important bulwark against the forces of assimilation, extermination, subjugation, and disenfranchisement. Her own enrollment has come to be “not just a source of protection but of pride,” one that feels increasingly like “an act of political dissent.”
Schuettpelz may have come to regard blood quantum with “dismay” and even “disgust,” but the principles of tribal sovereignty and self-determination hold primacy: it is, ultimately, up to tribal nations how they choose to proceed. The Dawes Rolls are an imperfect tool—as are so many of the founding documents of the United States. “The Indian Card” ends, appropriately, without resolution, but, rather, with a recognition. “Yes, Tribal membership and enrollment were imposed on Native communities. Yes, often the processes behind enrollment were racist and fraught with misunderstanding and mismanagement. Yes, even today, some policies around enrollment do not serve the very people they are intended to serve,” Schuettpelz writes. Still, she concludes, “Having a robust membership is protective of Tribal survival; it means we are alive.” ♦
Throughout the night of November 8th, my sleep was pierced by the smell of a burning forest. It is a familiar scent to me, something I associate with working as a wildland firefighter in California, New Mexico, and Arizona. In my dream state, I did not wonder why the smell of a wildfire was wafting through the window of my apartment on the south side of Prospect Park, Brooklyn. In the morning, I woke to a bizarre, upside-down world in which I was receiving messages about a forest fire in the middle of New York City. Even the preëminent historian of fire, Stephen Pyne, sent an e-mail from his home in Arizona with the subject heading “Fire in Brooklyn?!”
The Prospect Park fire started sometime in the evening in a sloped wooded area of the Ravine, which is known as Brooklyn’s only forest. The flames burned through the leaf litter and established in downed logs, illuminating the trees in an orange glow. Over the next few hours, it burned a hill bordered by a winding asphalt path; by 10 P.M., firefighters had fully contained it at a couple of acres.
I like to turn to the New York Post for thoughtful environmental reporting, and, after the fire, I read with interest that “scores of squirrels, birds, raccoons, skunks and other critters that call the Brooklyn oasis home were forced to flee the burned sector—and it could take years for them to return, according to wildlife experts.” A park official also warned that it would take “many seasons” for the forest to recover from the loss of “all” its ground cover.
I went to the park, hopped a fence, and trudged through crispy leaves until I reached a beautiful grove of towering sweet gums and red oaks. In places, the ground was gray and ashy. But, contrary to what the news coverage had suggested, I found plenty of acorns and leaves underfoot and only a few trees with burn marks. The flames had clearly been hottest in an area that looked like it had been a camp—someone’s Walden on the Dog Pond—and the spot was still littered with debris: charred cans and pots and crispy boots. Some of the oaks had the largest scorches at their bases. But oaks are a species that not only tolerates fire but flourishes from intermittent burning, which creates mineral-rich seed beds and an open, sun-drenched understory for regeneration. Some ecologists hypothesize that the reason oak species across the eastern United States have undergone a sixty-per-cent decline in density in recent decades is because of a lack of fire.
As I walked through the footprint of the burn, with birdsong floating above me and squirrels leaping on the ground feasting on acorns, I thought that, at worst, Brooklyn now had its own inadvertent experiment and study plot in fire ecology.
On the ground in Prospect Park the night of the firet was F.D.N.Y’s deputy commissioner of public information, James Long. Brush fires in autumn are not uncommon in New York City, according to Long. What is extraordinary is the number of them this year. In the first two weeks of November, the F.D.N.Y. responded to two hundred and seventy-one fires, the most in its history. The cause is a deeply weird drought that is currently gripping much of New York. “I don’t recall going through this long of a stretch without rain,” Long said.
For weeks now, more than ninety per cent of the Northeast has experienced abnormal dryness. In some places, such as New York and New Jersey, the deficit of rainfall is nine inches and soil moisture is ninety-five-per-cent below average. The result is that the Northeast has become extremely combustible. Typically, the region’s wildfire season is in April and May, but maps of recent fires in Maine, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island resemble maps of California in August, with hundreds of red dots. The Associated Press reported that Massachusetts typically has around fifteen wildland fires each October; this October, there have been about two hundred. Last week, the biggest wildfire in the country was in California, but the second biggest was a fire outside Sundown, New York. So far this year, around a hundred and forty thousand acres have burned across the East—roughly double the amount at this time in 2023.
For thousands of years, before European settlement, the Northeast burned frequently. Native Americans intentionally set many of these fires; colonizers said that the “sweet perfume” of forest fires could be smelled at sea long before the land itself was visible. The historic memory of these fires, as well as the folk traditions of past generations who burned for agriculture, hunting, and wild foods, has nearly vanished. But this year is a reminder that fire is not something that only happens in other, faraway places. “Historically, for as long as we have records, fire was always around,” Stephen Pyne told me. “So it’s not that the Northeast doesn’t burn. It’s just that we’ve eliminated the conditions and now we may be restoring some of those conditions.”
According to Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the cause of the current drought is some random atmospheric variability: a high-pressure system over the central and eastern United States that is suppressing rainfall and refusing to budge. “If you look at precipitation records over the past century, it’s been getting wetter and wetter, particularly in October,” Seager said. “Then this one dry October appears as a stunning decline in precipitation amongst what has over all been a wetting trend.”
Seager has described wetting periods as “epic pluvial” events happening on top of climate change, which already promises to deliver more and more of them to the Northeast. One of Seager’s studies looked at tree rings to reconstruct four hundred and seventy-two years of moisture availability in New York, and it found that, in the past fifty years, the region has been undergoing a particularly epic pluvial event. But the tree rings also show droughts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a severe drought in the nineteen-sixties. (1963 was a particularly tragic wildfire season in New Jersey.) The Earth’s atmosphere is complex enough that, every now and then, Seager explained, “something really strange is going to happen and there’s going to be a long sequence of dry weather.”
This is the strangeness we are currently living through, and it is revealing that, much like the West, the Northeast and its forty millions acres of forest has conditions that can create catastrophic fires. Forests are denser than they were a few decades ago and are susceptible to drought, disease, and destructive fires. There are millions of homes situated in the wildland-urban interface, areas where houses and flammable vegetation are in close proximity. (Indeed, from 1990 to 2010, the most U.S. homes in the wildland-urban interface were in the East.) And for more than a century the Northeast has practiced near-total fire suppression even in landscapes that might benefit from fire. Now, as Neil Pederson, a senior ecologist at Harvard Forest, in Massachusetts, told me, “we do have to get more used to fire. We have to think about fire more often.”
In other parts of the U.S., communities have already begun to reckon with fire and started using land-management techniques—selective thinning and prescribed fire—to the benefit of their landscapes. In this regard, some might be surprised to learn that New Jersey is far ahead of its neighbors. For each of the past two years, the state has burned some twenty thousand acres of forest, grasslands, and marsh. I have heard people call New Jersey one of the longest uninterrupted fire-lighting cultures in the country, beginning with Indigenous burning practices and stretching to today, with some private landowners and cranberry farmers burning to protect their watersheds..“We jealously protect our surrounding land, but to do that we have to manage it,” Stephen Lee III, a fifth-generation farmer whose family has stewarded the same land in the state’s Pinelands since 1868, told me. “Controlled burning is a part of that management and it has to be done somewhat regularly.”
After the Prospect Park fire, I called Bob Williams, a professional forester born and raised in New Jersey, and asked him what the fire weather was like in the state. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such perfect conditions for fire,” he said. For decades, Williams has tried to persuade officials that the state needs to triple the number of acres it treats with prescribed fire to even begin paying down its fire deficit—the amount of acres that would have burned naturally without suppression. He testified before members of the New Jersey Assembly in 2019, and said, bluntly, “We are going to have fires that will be comparable to what destroyed Paradise, California. That’s going to happen.”
On November 8th, Williams told me that he left his office in Laurel Springs to get a soda from the local Wawa. It was a regular routine of his but not a regular day. It hadn’t rained in the state for forty-one days It was the driest October in Williams’s seventy-three years of being alive, and the driest since record-keeping began, in 1895. Across the Pinelands, at least thirty ponds had gone dry. Box turtles that would typically be burrowing for hibernation were instead making long migrations in search of wetlands in the forest.
On the way to the Wawa, Williams noticed something ephemeral and shifting up in the sky and mistook it for clouds. But as he walked back to his truck, soda in hand, he was stunned to see a plume of dark, almost black smoke boiling up from the tree line ahead of him. It was the initial smoke from a conflagration, what would be called the Bethany Run Fire, exploding in energy and strength before him. “It was amazing,” Williams said.
For the next hour, Williams drove around to watch the progression of the fire from box-store parking lots and cul-de-sacs where distraught homeowners were being evacuated. The Bethany Run Fire blew through three hundred and sixty acres before firefighters contained it. It is one of more than five hundred starts that New Jersey firefighters have responded to since October. “Fortunately, the wind was in the direction that avoided those homes,” Williams told me. “Some day, it’s not going to be.”
Last Sunday, I filled my car with gas in Brooklyn and drove north toward the Ramapo Mountains in Orange County, New York. The smell of wildfire was with me the entire way. I was searching for the Jennings Creek Fire, which had started in the same couple of days the Bethany Run Fire and the fire in Prospect Park. It had burned through five thousand acres and killed one firefighter. It had been almost ninety-per-cent contained, after a week of burning, but strong winds had coaxed it back to life the day before I left. The flames had escaped one of the firefighters’ containment lines, and more than sixty-five households in the village of Greenwood Lake were evacuated.
As I drove into the village, I immediately saw the fire in a patch of sloped forest about a mile away. It sent a constant stream of silver smoke into the wan, cloudless sky. I parked at the Greenwood Lake Fire District, where volunteer support staffers were organizing pallets of blue Gatorade and Monster Energy drinks for crews in the parking lot. There were six state crews working the fire, including one from the Department of Corrections. Also working the fire was the Chief Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew, which had flown out from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Browning, Montana. Josh Birdrattler, the crew’s superintendent, said the crew had observed how similar the leaf litter was to the grass fires they were accustomed to. “We’re applying our tactics from back home to here,” he said. “Once the wind quits, the fire seems to quit.”
I sat at a picnic table and talked to Bob Rogers, a major with the state forest rangers who was the fire’s incident commander. Rogers had just woken from a nap after working straight through the night. To our right, the fire continued to send up smoke. Two helicopters circled over it, bringing buckets of water from the lake. By the end of the day, they had dropped more than twenty thousand gallons.
The terrain up there, Rogers told me, was mostly oak trees and was incredibly steep and rocky. “We’re talking seventy degrees in parts,” he said, holding his hand up near-vertically to show me. What had this autumn been like for him and his crews? I asked. “We’ve been running and gunning since October,” he said. “Normally, we have a short fall season—but not like this.”
At my feet, I noticed a couple of empty nips of Fireball whiskey. Behind Rogers was thousands of acres of forest. We would need a lot of rain in the coming months to thwart the drought. There is so much more that could burn. There is a lot more we could do to make sure it survives. Either way, we are going to be dreaming and waking up to fire for a long time to come. ♦
Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to end the war in Ukraine, which, depending on your perspective, began when Russia invaded Ukraine, in early 2022, or when it annexed Crimea and fomented separatism in eastern Ukraine eight years earlier. Many Ukrainians fear that Trump—who is both skeptical of sending more military aid to Ukraine and an admirer of Vladimir Putin—will force the Ukrainian government to agree to cede chunks of its territory to Russia. At the same time, the Ukrainians are clearly exhausted from the war, and the Biden Administration’s support has not been enough to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor.
To talk about the war, I recently spoke by phone with Rod Thornton, an associate professor in the defense-studies department at King’s College London, and an expert on the Russian military, who has lived in both Moscow and Kyiv. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed what the arrival of North Korean troops allied with Russia says about the state of the war, what Trump plans to promise Ukraine and Russia, and how the war might have been expected to play out if Kamala Harris had won the election.
How would you define where the war is right now?
It is a stalemate. Yes, there are advances on various fronts, but a few hundred metres or kilometres here and there. The only big advance was made by the Ukrainian side into Kursk Oblast back in August. And that is what the Russians are now trying to sort out, as it were, using the North Korean troops.
A recent piece in the New York Times stated, “Two senior [Ukrainian] officials said that defending Ukraine’s interest in potential talks would hinge not on territorial boundaries, which are likely to be determined by the fighting, but on what assurances are in place to make a cease-fire hold.” For a long time, Ukrainians have said that they would not agree to any deal that requires them to give away territory. To me, this suggests the Ukrainians believe that Trump is going to push for a deal that will be favorable to the Russians. The question now is not about whether they will have to give up territory but how to make sure that any peace holds. How do you understand what that means in practice?
Well, in practice, it’s very hard to say—just like it’s hard to say what might happen with Trump—but the idea is that he comes down on both sides and says, “Right, let’s hold the line,” i.e., the front lines where they are now. That will be, I think, Trump’s mantra. Putin might accept that because he is under a lot of pressure domestically to get this war finished in a way that looks beneficial to Russia, and to himself.
Zelensky, on the other hand, will not appreciate the front lines being fixed where they are now. But I think Trump is going to put on so much pressure that Zelensky’s got no real option. And Zelensky himself is under pressure domestically to end this war. People in Ukraine are sick of it, sick of the casualties and the drain on the economy, and living in a wartime environment. This allows Zelensky some leeway to accept the front lines where they are, without pushing for the Russian forces to leave, which has been the Ukrainian position till now: they want Ukrainian territory entirely free from Russian occupation. That’s no longer in the cards. In many ways, both sides, Putin and Zelensky, might be amenable to what Trump suggests because of the war weariness in both countries.
What’s being raised in the Times article is the question of how Ukraine can have any confidence that, after a deal is agreed to, Russia won’t just try and take more territory in six months, or whenever. And I’m sure the Ukrainians would harken back to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and the separatism that was encouraged by Russia in eastern Ukraine before and after. Even with a peace agreement in place, the Russians continued to mess around with the front lines, and then there was the full invasion of Ukraine, in 2022.
Trump would say to Putin, Accept this, or otherwise we will do X. Trump’s approach to politics is to make these threats, and I think Putin would accept. Putin isn’t going to accept a pullout of Russian forces, and Trump is not going to make him do that. Trump has already said, in essence, that Crimea’s lost. Crimea’s been lost, basically, since the start of the war, back in 2014, when it all first kicked off. I think the Ukrainians have to accept that Crimea is lost. It’s the eastern Donbas where the true problems will arise, if they do arise. But I think Trump makes a difference. Trump will tell Putin, Do not use any more aggression. And Putin will listen to Trump.
If I were the Ukrainians, my concern would be that we are agreeing to give up more territory in the east, and the Russian military will be stationed there, and the only hope that we have that they’re not going to attack again is that Donald Trump is making some sort of guarantee. That would not fill me with much confidence.
Well, no. But, again, what is the alternative? The alternative is that Ukrainians keep on fighting and fighting and fighting without American financial support. If Trump is going to use that as leverage on the Ukrainian side, saying, O.K., we’ve supported you financially and militarily, but we’re going to cut off the money unless you do this, then the Ukrainians haven’t really got an option. Trump is going to hold their feet to the fire. He’s going to say, Accept this or we pull the plug. The Europeans haven’t got the money or the military ability to help Ukrainians on their own. It’s the United States that supplies the money, the military heft, the intelligence sources and satellites. And if Trump pulls the plug on that what do the Ukrainians do?
So your sense is that if Trump comes into office and says that military aid to Ukraine is over, and then that aid actually stops, the Ukrainians would basically collapse?
Well, it’s not just American military help; it’s American financial help. The Ukrainian economy is just not operating. It’s only being supported by Western money, and significantly by American money. We have to remember that factor. But you also have to factor in what I said earlier: the war weariness in Ukraine, among the Ukrainian population. Yes, there are those who want to keep on fighting the Russians, but, for most of the population, they are sick of this war. It isn’t going to be that much of a problem for Zelensky if the front lines are maintained as they are and Putin provides the Ukrainians with the promise that he will not start any future aggression, at least while Trump is in office.
But just to go back to my question: If no deal is reached and American aid stops—military aid, financial aid—do you think the war would essentially be lost for Ukraine?
Yes, because think about something like artillery shells. On the front, something like ten thousand artillery shells are being fired a day, right? That’s a lot. Now, where do those shells come from? They mostly come from the United States. The war at the front line is an artillery war. You do simple things like cut off the supply of artillery shells to Ukraine, and what does the Ukrainian military do? It’s got nowhere to go. It can’t defend itself.
So Trump has that leverage, that power to, in essence, end the war. And the Europeans, as I said, yes, they can do bits and pieces, but they haven’t got the clout, the financial or military clout, to help Ukraine in a way that the United States can. The Europeans can’t step in if the American help is pulled. It’s that simple. Zelensky is very much at the beck and call of whatever Trump wants.
You said earlier that there was some pressure on Putin domestically. People keep saying there’s going to be pressure, domestic pressure, on Putin. But it just seems like the war keeps going on. He’s basically throwing bodies at the front lines, and the Russian economy has chugged on, and he’s chugged on. Have we all overstated the domestic pressure on him?
Yes, it’s chugged on, the Russian economy, but it can’t keep on chugging forever. It can’t keep up this military spending ad infinitum. There’s got to come a point soon where the Russian economy, if the military spending continues, is going to collapse. And Putin needs to get a deal before that happens.
So yes, there’s no real domestic protest, even in the population that’s been clamped down on, but it’s the economy. Putin has to keep paying pensions, he has to keep paying wages for government employees. If the money for that is no longer there, then really, the people will get onto the streets and say, Enough is enough. The economic model now is basically a wartime economy. And you can keep a wartime economy going for a certain period, but, at the end of the day, you are going to run out of financial resources. You’re going to run out of the ability to maintain basic services within the country if you haven’t got enough money, if you’re spending too much on the war. And the Russian economy has been supporting this war for several years now. It can’t keep going on. Putin knows that. That’s the internal pressure on Putin, and it’s probably why he will accept some sort of deal proposed by Trump.
The Russians haven’t got the military power to push forward and seize enormous amounts of territory again. That’s beyond their capabilities. The Russians have lost so many men and lost so much military equipment that they are in no position to launch any major offensive. Yes, a bit here and there, but no major offensives. So where does Putin go? It’s a stalemate.
If Trump had lost the election and Kamala Harris were coming into office, and continuing the Biden policy of arming Ukraine, what would happen?
I would suggest that if Harris came to power, and the West—the United States and the Europeans—supported Ukraine for another year, that would be enough to break the Russian economy. The Russians would not be able to continue to fight the war in the way that they are doing because of the drain on the Russian economy. The Russians wouldn’t lose on the front line, with all their troops being defeated or anything. But they would lose eventually, because a war economy has to go back to being a civilian economy at some point.
What do you make of Russia turning to North Korea for troops? [According to American officials, North Korea has recently sent more than ten thousand troops to fight alongside Russia.]
What the Russian military is short of is manpower. Putin does not want to have full-scale mobilization, i.e., calling up all the old reservists, because he’s telling the Russian people, “This is a minor war. We’ll just get this sorted out with the professional army and we won’t involve the civilian population.” He doesn’t want this to become an unpopular war, and it would become an unpopular war if you have mass mobilization. There’s been a partial mobilization, yes, but not a full one. He doesn’t want to call up young men in St. Petersburg and Moscow, because he must maintain the idea that this war does not involve the middle-class youth.
But he’s calling up men from the various ethnic minorities in eastern Siberia. He’s been calling up prisoners. We all know about the Wagner mercenaries. He needs troops, but he doesn’t want to go to the Russian people and say, I need more of you to do the fighting and dying. So he goes to North Korea, where he can get tens of thousands of troops. North Korea is going to bend over backward to help Russia. Most of these guys are going to be used to help retake the part of Kursk Oblast, which is within Russia proper, that has been overrun by Ukrainian forces. There are an estimated fifty thousand North Korean and Russian troops ready to move into the Kursk Oblast.
The problem is that these North Korean troops need to be trained. They need to be inculcated into Russian doctrine, into Russian ways of operating. There’s a language barrier. So it’s not very straightforward for these North Koreans to be used immediately. It will take, I think, several more weeks before they can really be used.
But I don’t think the Ukrainians are going to want to fight too desperately for Kursk Oblast. They’re going to pull out once they see the mass of North Koreans facing them. And also North Korean artillery shells will be another boon to the Russian military. The North Koreans have millions of artillery shells that actually are the same calibre as Russian artillery pieces, so there’s no drama there.
Do we have a sense of whether these North Koreans are highly trained?
They’re trained to North Korean standards, i.e., they would’ve done a bit of service in North Korea, but North Koreans have a very basic way of conducting warfare. It’s all about artillery and mass waves. They’d have to be trained to operate as the Russians would like them to: battalion, brigade, and division structures; things like communication, use of radios, use of various pieces of military equipment that North Koreans won’t be familiar with. How do you communicate? How do you tell a North Korean battalion how to operate if nobody in that battalion speaks Russian and none of the Russians speak Korean? These things have to be ironed out. So you get all these troops, but you’ll have to train them for at least several weeks, if not months, before they can become useful, shall we say, on the front lines.
There have been a lot of bleak things about this war, but the prospect of North Korea essentially throwing a bunch of not very highly trained troops at the front line to potentially be killed is pretty bleak.
Yes, it is. But we saw this happening with the Russians already. The Russians are losing thousands of men a week. These North Koreans will be offered money by the Russians. I think you’ll get a lot of volunteers. If you’re a starving North Korean, and you’ve got this chance of earning quite a bit of money fighting for the Russians, then you’re going to do it.
That’s still pretty bleak, but yes.
Yeah, it’s bleak. It’s the way things are on that front line. It’s a slaughterhouse, whether it’s Russians who are being slaughtered, or Ukrainians, or North Koreans.
The Biden Administration just decided to allow Ukraine to use American long-range missiles to strike within Russia. What do you make of this new policy?
It’s just a continuation of a policy. But especially with this Kursk situation, there is a Russian buildup to push the Ukrainians out, and that buildup could be a target for the Ukrainians. I think that’s the major reason the Ukrainians are being allowed to use them now. I don’t think it’s a major deal. The French and the British are on the verge of allowing this, too. It’s an evolution of policy rather than a revolution.
If we do have a situation where there’s some sort of peace deal established around the current front lines, and there’s some sort of security guarantee, but it is essentially based on just Putin’s word, that seems like an incredibly fragile situation that could be broken at any time.
Yeah. Trump will do something, offer Putin some sort of olive branch. Things like the reduction of sanctions, for instance. And, again, the sanctions regime is really harming the Russian economy. But you said “peace deal.” There won’t be a peace deal. There’ll be a ceasefire. And you’ll get what’s also appeared in other parts of the former Soviet Union, the kind of frozen conflicts like in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia. It will be a frozen conflict in Ukraine, and it will be frozen until one of the parties sees some sort of benefit in unfreezing it. ♦
The second triennial survey at El Museo del Barrio, “Flow States,” is loosely organized around the concept of diasporas and the movements of people across nations, geographies, and cultures. A major point the exhibit tries to make is that the current state of Latino art, which is the focus of these triennials, has been shaped by those movements, because Latino identities are inevitably the result of complex mixtures and interactions.
The show was assembled by a team of three: Rodrigo Moura, El Barrio’s chief curator; his colleague Susanna V. Temkin; and Maria Elena Ortíz, a guest curator from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. They selected works from thirty-three artists based in the U.S., Latin America, the Caribbean, and—expanding the geographical reach beyond the Americas for the first time in a triennial—Europe. They included two Filipino artists because, in Temkin’s words, they are part of “a shared imperial history that left a mark on their names.” The Philippines went through both Spanish colonization and U.S. occupation, and its people are often mistaken for Latinos in this country owing to their Spanish-sounding names. The curators themselves only learned that one of the artists, the late Lance de los Reyes, was Filipino when they contacted his estate. Norberto Roldan, the other Filipino artist selected, presents a series of altar-like assemblages of abandoned objects, materials, and debris from a gentrifying neighborhood in Quezon City—which, to the curators, recall the syncretic altars often found in Latino households.
“We are never declaring or defining what Latinx art is,” Temkin told me. “On the contrary, we are showing the vast diversity of what artists of Latinx descent and beyond are creating today.” Despite the historical and cultural contributions of Latino communities, El Museo del Barrio is one of a handful of museums in the U.S.—including the Museum of Latin American Art, in Los Angeles—exclusively dedicated to preserving, collecting, and exhibiting Latino art. (Efforts to fill the gap have led to legislation to create a Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino.) And, according to Patrick Charpenel, El Museo’s executive director, just a small number of other major museums have made serious efforts to incorporate Latino art, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Pérez, in Miami; and the Whitney, in New York, among others. At the same time, he said, El Museo remains “rooted in the local community, with a focus on social justice.” During a panel with the curators on the opening night of the exhibition, the moderator, Marina Reyes Franco, a curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, summed it up more precisely: “There is just no other place like this, that has a story like this, that can put on a show like this.”
El Museo was founded in 1969 as an art and educational center for the East Harlem Puerto Rican diaspora. The people of El Barrio, as the neighborhood was (and still is) known, had long suffered from neglect from the city government. In response, the local chapter of the Young Lords, a group of Puerto Rican social-justice activists, led a series of high-profile actions, such as a weeks-long campaign of burning garbage in the streets to protest the lack of sanitation services. As part of those efforts, a group of families, artists, and activists demanded that the neighborhood’s schools teach the history and culture of the Puerto Rican people, who made up the majority of its population. The city eventually appointed Raphael Montañez Ortiz, an artist and community activist, to create a new curriculum. Instead, as he wrote in a 1971 essay, he chose to create a museum “to afford me and others the opportunity to establish living connections with our own culture.” It opened in a public-school classroom and was intended to be a community museum that would exhibit work by Puerto Rican artists and offer educational programs.
“Ninety-five per cent of museums are born of capital accumulation or state will,” Rodrigo Moura told me. “Instead, this museum was born out of the determination of the Puerto Rican people in this neighborhood. It is probably one of the most important legacies of that historical moment.” Initially funded by the city, it became a nonprofit in 1971, and exhibited works by Puerto Rican artists almost exclusively until 1977, when its fourth director, the Nuyorican poet Jack Agüeros, opened it up to other Latin American artists living and working in the city. In 1999, the museum launched its first biennial, called “The (S) Files” (“S” for “selected”), showcasing the work of Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American artists working in the New York area.
In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, the neighborhood’s demographics began to change to include more Mexicans and Dominicans, and the museum’s board of directors and administration also shifted away from a predominantly Puerto Rican composition. After a series of crises, including financial mismanagement (as a nonprofit, the museum is funded by government grants, philanthropic donations, and corporate sponsorships) and a void in leadership that led to staff departures, the museum decided to expand its purview to include Latin American artists with no connections to New York City’s Latino communities. In 2002, the museum’s first non-Puerto Rican executive director, Julián Zugazagoitia, who was born in Mexico, put on a show of works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. It attracted a record number of visitors but also accusations of Latin American élitism—the argument being that artists based in Latin America often benefit from more resources and attention from cultural institutions in the U.S. than Latino artists do.
In 2017, Charpenel, who is also Mexican, became the executive director. Two years later, at an exhibit celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, a group of artists and academics protested what they saw as a case of institutional gentrification: people from outside the community had co-opted the museum. Montañez Ortiz dismissed the criticism as “agoraphobic ethnocentricity” that ignored the broad experiences and connections of the Latino people. If the museum wanted to remain relevant and succeed, it had to expand.
Considering that New York City has the largest Latino population of any city in the country—almost two and a half million people in a population of 8.8 million—El Museo’s quarters remain modest. After making several moves, it found a permanent home, in 1977, in the Heckscher Building, a city-owned former orphanage turned public school, on Fifth Avenue and East 104th Street, across from the Central Park Conservatory Garden. (El Museo currently shares the building with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, a high school, and a music school.) It occupies ten thousand square feet of gallery space on the first floor, but that is woefully insufficient, Charpenel said. The museum also has a café, a theatre that seats more than five hundred people, and office space spread throughout the building.
But there’s not enough room to have permanent exhibits from the eighty-five hundred works in the collection—it spans eight hundred years, starting with art from the Taíno people, the original inhabitants of Puerto Rico—and the museum is forced to close when a major show is being mounted. (It was closed for six weeks prior to “Flow States.”) Charpenel is working with the city to obtain more gallery space. He told me, “Latinx cultural institutions need to be large institutions that project the complexity of the Latinx experience.”
He added that the unique history of El Museo has also allowed it to be at the vanguard of what is now more widely accepted as the purpose of museums. “Museums used to be spaces that collected historical and cultural trophies, places where one could go to protect those trophies. But now it’s about exposing them and having them used by the community,” Charpenel said. The first triennial, “Estamos Bien” (“We Are Fine”), opened in 2021, amid the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, and dealt with the recurring issue of identity by exploring what it meant to be Latino at that moment. It included more than forty artists from across the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Now, with the second triennial, El Museo has taken another step forward.
At the center, “Distance Drawing, attempt to draw the distance between San Juan and New York (approx. 1,610 miles). Realized only 0.32 percent (5.1523 miles),” by Tony Cruz Pabón.Photograph by Matthew Sherman / Courtesy El Museo del Barrio
Throughout “Flow States,” beginning with the poster and the catalogue design by Estudio Gráfico, São Paulo, the connections and trajectories between home countries and their diasporas are represented. Perhaps their most explicit rendering is in the work of Tony Cruz Pabón, an artist from San Juan. Almost two weeks before the show opened, on a Friday around lunchtime, I found him drawing a six-foot-long mural in graphite pencil on a white-painted gallery wall. He had been at it for four days and was barely a fifth of the way through. Part of his “Drawing Distance” series, the lines attempt to illustrate the journey from San Juan to East Harlem. The space between the lines varies, creating denser and lighter areas, conveying a sense of changing speed. Cruz Pabón has never lived in El Barrio, he told me, but the neighborhood “has always felt like a part of us over there.”
The museum’s original spirit of community participation is present in several works, which are meant to engage the visitors by encouraging them to interact with the art pieces or by inviting them to step or sit on the works. One way to access the gallery is by going through a beaded curtain, painted by Cosmo Whyte, a Jamaican artist based in Los Angeles. The painting—depicting students’ legs and arms as they run from the police—is Whyte’s rendering of a photograph of the riots at the University of the West Indies, in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1968, which were triggered by the government’s banning of the Black activist and academic Walter Rodney. Visitors are inevitably touched by the beads as they enter the gallery. In another room, an overwhelming smell fills the visitor’s nostrils; it comes from dozens of little tree-shaped car deodorizers, which are common in Puerto Rico, that Chaveli Sifre, a Puerto Rican artist based in Berlin, has installed along the baseboard. The scent, “Caribbean Colada,” is described by the manufacturer as “an escape to a tropical island with juicy pineapple and sweet coconut” and expresses Sifre’s nostalgia for her home town and the connection between the sense of smell and memory. Visitors are invited to pick up a deodorizer from a basket and take it home.
Later in the show, the visitor is asked to sit on a bench facing Maria Guzmán Capron’s whimsical large-scale textile installation (about ten and a half feet high by nine feet wide), a futuristic face made of several body parts titled “En Tu Mirada” (“In Your Eyes”). Guzmán Capron, the daughter of Peruvian and Colombian parents, is an Italian-born and raised artist based in Oakland, California. The bench, which is in the shape of a person on all fours, is titled “Aquí para Ti,” or “Here for You.”
A painting created as part of “Rutas” project, by Studio Lenca.Courtesy the artist and Natalie Kates
The educational tradition of El Museo can be found in two series, created by participants in several workshops. The first consists of signs drawn by immigrants living in New York City, with birds—representing migratory flights—as the common topic. The artist who led the workshop, Mark Menjívar, is leading two bird-watching tours in Central Park as part of the triennial. The second series, led by the artist José Campos, a formerly undocumented Salvadoran migrant to the U.S. who is currently based in the U.K. and who goes by the name Studio Lenca, is titled “Rutas” (“Routes”). The series consists of deeply moving paintings created in workshops in Mexico City and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, by migrants who have marched through jungles and deserts to the U.S. One painting shows a black bridge that extends into a dark-blue sky, ending abruptly on its way to the stars; two human figures, perhaps parent and child, sit on a bridge right before it abruptly ends, staring into the void, a Venezuelan flag floating in the sky above them. Several other paintings portray the harrowing passage through the Darién Gap, the sixty-mile stretch of rain forest on the border of Panama and Colombia, which has become a major (and lethal) route for migrants: one shows a dozen crying pebble-shaped faces with eyes and mouths contorted by sadness floating on a river; another, an ominous dense landscape with tiny human figures walking in the distance.
“Non-linear route II,” by Sarita Westrup.Photograph by Matthew Sherman / Courtesy El Museo del Barrio
Another stunning work about borders is a large-scale sculpture by Sarita Westrup, a Mexican American artist originally from the Rio Grande Valley. It is a knitted, closed-loop tube of reed, dyed bright pink with cochineal, which hangs from a rod suspended some seven feet above the ground. (“The cochineal is a bug that consumes prickly pear cacti, resulting in a vibrant rose hue when used as a pigment,” Mia Lopez, a curator at the McNay Art Museum, in San Antonio, Texas, explains in the show’s catalogue.) The tube is arranged in meandering twists, representing back-and-forth border crossings.
Yet, no matter the realities represented, there is definitely an optimistic energy in “Flow States.” Maybe because, according to Temkin, this is a “very hopeful moment for Latinx art.” Or perhaps it is the intimate setting: thirty-three is a small number of artists for a typical large-scale periodical art exhibition. El Museo has to do with the little space it has, but the small scale makes the widely diverse works feel very close to one another—a closeness that, in the words of Moura, “emphasizes difference as a value, and diaspora as a constitutive element of our society, especially at a moment in which democracy is being challenged.” ♦
A little more than a week before the Presidential election, Donald Trump hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden that some speculated would be the death knell of his campaign. Eleven days after his victory, he returned to the Garden for an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, walking onto the arena floor to Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass.” Trump was flanked by his longtime friend Dana White, the C.E.O. of the U.F.C., who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped Trump mobilize young men to the polls. Behind the two men were key members of the next Trump era: Elon Musk; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson; Tulsi Gabbard; and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“It’s always loud when he comes here, but now that he’s won? Now that he’s the President again? Oh, my God,” Joe Rogan, a longtime U.F.C. commentator, announced from the floor. Trump closed in on the octagon and pulled Rogan into a long embrace, as the crowd roared. Then, for around twenty minutes, Trump and his allies continued to stand just outside the cage. Every now and then, someone in the audience would start up a chant of “U.S.A.” There was a boom of applause when Trump danced to “Y.M.C.A.”
The headline fight was between two heavyweight champions, Jon Jones and Stipe Miocic, but much of the audience had come to see the President-elect, who had suggested, during an appearance on Rogan’s podcast in October, that he would be in attendance. (“I’ll either go as President, or I’ll be depressed and I won’t bother going,” he said.) “We heard Donnie Trump was coming through and couldn’t miss that,” a twenty-four-year-old man named Robert, from suburban New Jersey, told me. His friend Keith added, “It just makes it seem like he wants to be part of what all the regular people do.” A twenty-year-old fan named Tiny Boadu, who wore a MAGA hat and a Trump shirt, similarly described Trump as a “person of the people.” Boadu said that Trump’s love of U.F.C. was a major part of his appeal. “Presidents don’t usually come out to events like this,” he told me.
The U.F.C., valued at more than twelve billion dollars, is the world’s largest mixed-martial-arts organization. “As the U.F.C. has grown, there’s been a lot of people that have jumped on the bandwagon and became fans,” White told me. “Trump was there from the beginning.” When the U.F.C. first launched, in 1993, it was marketed as a blood sport with no gloves, no time limits, and almost no rules. This led to nationwide controversy, with John McCain famously referring to the sport as “human cockfighting.” In 2001, when Dana White and Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta stepped in and bought the company, the U.F.C. had been nearly regulated out of existence. White was tasked with cleaning up the sport’s image and working with regulators to ease restrictions. That year, Trump helped save the fledgling sport by hosting multiple events at the Trump Taj Mahal, his casino in Atlantic City. The Taj Mahal was in ruinous debt and would later go bust, but the U.F.C.—and Trump’s friendship with White—thrived. When Trump launched his first Presidential campaign, in 2015, White was one of the first public figures to endorse him. And during and after his first term, Trump was able to look to the U.F.C. as a sort of safe space. In October, 2019, Trump was roundly booed at a World Series game in Washington, D.C. The next week, he went to a U.F.C. event at M.S.G. “Every time when he was getting hammered at his worst, we’d walk into that arena and the place erupts and goes crazy,” White told me. “It shows other people, Oh, wait. Everybody doesn’t hate Donald Trump like the media is telling us.”
White credits the U.F.C.’s recent spike in popularity to the COVID-19 pandemic. When other major sports leagues went on pause, the U.F.C., which largely utilizes its own production team, continued to hold and promote events during lockdown. This made White something of a hero among conservatives, as he circumnavigated COVID-19 restrictions perceived as draconian by many on the right. It also attracted bored young men to the sport. Jonathan Charbonneau, a sixteen-year-old at the M.S.G. event, told me, “The sport was there for me to watch in COVID and stuff like that, when I had nothing else to do. It gave me something to look forward to, something to do when I couldn’t even leave my house.”
At the Garden, Trump and his entourage sat next to White. Seated nearby was Taylor Lewan, one of the hosts of Barstool Sports’s popular podcast “Bussin’ with the Boys.” During Trump’s 2024 campaign, White played a pivotal role in brokering relationships between Trump and certain hosts among the canon of “bro-casts”: Lewan and his co-host, Will Compton, Theo Von, Adin Ross, Andrew Schulz, the Nelk Boys, and, of course, Rogan. White explained that the goal was to mobilize members of the younger generation that typically don’t vote. Young men, one of the most unreliable demographics in politics, make up a large part of U.F.C.’s audience. “You’re getting conversations in these podcasts, and you yourself, as a young kid, get to really see who Donald Trump is,” White explained. “Not the bullshit you hear from the far-left media.” During Trump’s victory speech, he invited White onstage, and White specifically thanked Von, Ross, the Nelk Boys, and other podcasters for their help.
The penultimate fight of the night got underway: Michael Chandler, a muscle-bound Midwesterner, versus the Brazilian fighter Charles Oliveira. Chandler took a beating for the first four rounds, then tried to steal a victory in the closing seconds of the fight. As Oliveira clung to him like a backpack, Chandler rose to his feet and slammed his opponent on his back and head. Their bodies crashed into the canvas, and the crowd roared. Then Chandler did it again, rising to his feet and crashing once more into the floor, with Oliveira still on his back. Trump stared on, seemingly unmoved. “All I know how to do is throw American badass caution to the wind. Madison Square Garden, are you not entertained?” Chandler said, moments after losing the fight.
The evening closed with a fight between two legends. In one corner stood Jon Jones, considered by some to be the greatest U.F.C. fighter of all time—a massive, gangly man who had built a reputation for his run-ins with the law and for finishing his opponents with a violence notable even among cage fighters. In the other was two-time U.F.C. heavyweight champion Stipe Miocic, known for his indefatigable pace and unbreakable chin.
In a battle of two aging, creaky, sometimes lurching heavyweights, Jones finished Miocic with a spinning back-kick to the ribs in the second round. While Miocic writhed in pain, Jones celebrated in the middle of the ring with a dance mimicking Trump’s, pumping his arms into the air back and forth. (Outside the ring, Trump could be seen high-fiving Kid Rock.) In his post-fight interview, Jones thanked Trump for attending, then led the crowd in chants of “U.S.A.”
“I’m proud to be a great American champion,” Jones told the crowd. “I’m proud to be a Christian American champion.” He left the ring and gave Trump his championship belt. In that moment, Jones appeared as an almost-mythological figure, a living legend in a sport still being carved out of history. Standing eye to eye with him was Trump, who, in every way, was being presented by the U.F.C. as his spiritual equal.
The product White is selling—two people locked in a cage, engaging in a mixture of boxing, wrestling, Brazilian jujitsu, Muay Thai, and karate among other martial arts—mirrors Trump’s own appeal in many respects. The U.F.C. alternates between the camp theatrics of show business and a kind of abject brutality that is impossible to look away from. The sport is now fully in the mainstream, but it still has a chip on its shoulder, casting itself and its fans as widely misunderstood.
“Donald Trump is tougher and more badass than anybody,” White told me. “You can only pray that you’re a quarter of the man that Donald Trump was when a guy tried to take seven shots at his head with a high powered rifle with a fucking scope on it.”
This is the image that helped propel Trump to the Presidency. The question is whether it’s replicable. (It’s hard to imagine, for instance, young U.F.C. fans flocking to the polls to vote for J. D. Vance in 2028.) White, for his part, told me that he’s done helping with Presidential campaigns. Trump is a friend—but the rest of the G.O.P. may be on their own. “I’m never fucking doing this again,” he said. “I want nothing to do with this shit. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. I want nothing to do with politics.” ♦
Just before the election, I went to see a play. It was staged for a small group, was about ninety minutes long, and was followed by a Q. & A. For all that time, the audience sat quietly, respectful and absorbed, listening intently to what was said.
Afterward, during cocktail hour, I stood with another guest, a scientist who works in artificial intelligence. Almost immediately, we started talking about the rapid progress of A.I. systems that work with words. “Have you tried ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode?” he asked me. (I had.) “The conversations you can have with it are almost as good as the median conversation you can have with a person!” We laughed, self-conscious about both our small talk and the contrast implicit in what we were discussing. We’d spent the evening in one linguistic world—a heightened one, in which every word mattered. We were now describing another world, in which words could be produced endlessly, and hardly mattered at all. Technology seemed to be ushering us from the first world into the second.
Over the next hour, I had good conversations with other audience members; they said interesting things, and revealed intriguing facets of themselves. On the other hand, I’d been spending a lot of time watching interviews with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—conversations that tended to be below average. On shows like “60 Minutes,” and in her CNN town tall, Harris had been charming and trenchant but also repetitive and inflexible. Restrained by her determination to stay on message, she often failed to answer questions directly. Trump, for his part, lied, rambled, and spouted nonsense, as usual. And yet his lack of constraint at least made him entertaining. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he told casual stories about being President that made the job seem fun (“Macron, of France—good guy, he’s, like, a friend of mine . . . I called him, I said, ‘Emmanuel . . .’ ”); on the professional golfer Bryson DeChambeau’s YouTube show, he cheerfully asked detailed golf questions before finishing eighteen holes at twenty-two under par. The golf outing was totally irrelevant to the Presidency—“BROOO I didn’t know Trump was chillll like that,” a commenter wrote—but, at his victory speech, Trump invited DeChambeau onstage, along with Dana White, the C.E.O. of the U.F.C. So maybe it wasn’t so irrelevant, after all.
Harris’s and Trump’s flawed performances were typical of the duelling communication styles now wielded by Democrats and Republicans. Broadly, Democrats preach while Republicans riff; Democrats stick to their messages while Republicans let loose with whatever comes into their heads. (J. D. Vance has spoken at some length about how much he’s been influenced by the movie “Boyz n the Hood.”) The differences aren’t just a matter of style. They reflect contrasting approaches to language, and perhaps to thought. In the Democratic world, people speak defensively, mindful of the rules they might break and of the possibility that their words will come back to haunt them. In the Republican world, people speak offensively, with the aim of making things happen, and no one cares too much about what was said in the past. Each side hates the way the other talks. To Republicans, Democrats seem rehearsed and wooden, trapped by orthodoxy, teacherly in a condescending way. To Democrats, Republicans seem scattershot, unserious, unhinged. It’s often said that Americans no longer know how to talk to each other; this is why.
The kinds of speech that strike us as authentic, satisfying, and desirable change with time, and depend on our position in the world and on the conversations happening around us. After the play, talking about A.I. and surrounded by amiable chitchat, I wondered whether, someday soon, conversations with human beings would be deemed lacking if they didn’t exhibit chatbot-like speed and responsiveness. Maybe there are some circles, in tech or elsewhere, where the quality of “the median conversation you can have with a person” is already measured unfavorably against the yardstick of A.I. Or perhaps the opposite is true: maybe we’re coming to value the awkwardness, vulnerability, and spontaneity of human conversation even more. In either case, our communications technologies will be shaping our speech—or, more accurately, continuing to shape it, since the mutual incomprehension we’re experiencing today results, in part, from networks that have already influenced our intuitions about how we should talk.
A simple, or perhaps usefully simplistic, way to understand how communication has changed is to think in terms of volume. Ever since the invention of the printing press, the sheer number of words we exchange has multiplied, and the Internet has dramatically accelerated this process. In his recent essay about the conditions that have made the Trump phenomenon possible, Adam Gopnik described “long-winded and shapeless” podcasts as “the essential medium” of our time. Of course, it’s not just podcasts that are long-winded and shapeless—prolixity is fundamental to online culture. Newspapers publish not twice a day but all day; cable news drones on and on; a post on X is short, but the scroll never ends. An army of new assertions masses every minute and marches on us through our screens. We welcome the invasion because, somehow, we remain bored.
We often say that information that succeeds in this new ecosystem has “gone viral.” But virality is a shallow, fleeting, even passive form of success; to become centrally relevant is harder. You have to be interesting—ideally, not just interesting but provocative—and quantity is vital, too, as it affords for a kind of digital malleability. If you record three-hour-long podcast episodes, as Rogan does, then you benefit from the fact that those episodes can be split into many short clips, which can recirculate forever on different platforms, creating rabbit holes. Through volume, it becomes possible to speak to multiple audiences at once, sometimes in ways that are not self-consistent. Economists and computer scientists talk about the “network effects” that take root in big interconnected systems; what they mean is that the most connected parts of a system become the most valuable. Online, this happens partly because successful creators diffuse themselves; they stop being nodes in the network and become shifting clouds of nodelets. The whole can be glimpsed only in parts, from the bottom up.
The most torrential producers, like Rogan or Taylor Swift, create endless streams of malleable, interesting content which can flow through any media pipeline, reaching even the uninterested. You don’t tune in to them—they find you. The flip side of that reach is that everyone can respond; there’s always the threat of backlash. Performers are critiqued and policed by their audiences, also in ways that are not consistent. And so, ultimately, online success depends on a loose coalition of welcoming audiences, which can drift together and apart both from one another and from the performer at their center, whom they all regard in slightly different ways. It’s the kind of thing a postmodern theorist might have described in the nineteen-eighties, only today it’s not theoretical.
It’s taken a while, but now it’s evident that politicians, too, can thrive by producing vast quantities of malleable, interesting content. A politician can post and tweet and retweet; he can speak off the cuff in memorable ways, encouraging people to film and upload his remarks. He can go on podcasts or give epic, rambling speeches, talking for hours with all sorts of people, so that clips of the best bits can be shared. He can cultivate multiple media channels—not just staid press conferences and interviews but also social-media platforms, merchandise, and memes. If he does all this, he can become dominant and inescapable, rising above the sea of information while his opponents sink beneath the waves.
A politician who takes this approach becomes a different kind of politician. In order to talk so much, and in so many contexts, he may need to give up on having consistent, focussed, and pre-formulated messages. You can’t go on all those long-winded podcasts unless you’re willing to share whatever’s in your head—and whatever’s in your head might not be accurate, respectable, or logical; it may not represent what you “really” think. Moreover, a politician who makes a lot of provocative, contradictory statements finds himself tied to whatever sticks. Although he can still direct his audience, he must also follow their unruly reactions. Whatever they believe he has to at least consider.
This kind of politics is exciting and surprising. (A word Trump fans often use is “refreshing.”) It asks and answers certain questions. Do we want our leaders to work out their often boring positions in advance, in consultation with experts and insiders? Or do we believe that such position-crafting is in some sense anti-democratic, and prefer a process of collective improvisation? The Trump movement distrusts the experts who craft positions. It also internalizes the dynamics of the Internet, transforming them into a political stance. At its center, there’s uncertainty. What does Trump really think? What’s his plan? Is the “chillll” Trump in charge, or the crazy one? Some people vote for the golfer, others for the toxic xenophobe, and their votes add up.
The challenges posed to Democrats by this approach to politics are severe. The new information environment rewards improvisational politicians and punishes message-based ones. It makes nostalgia for the old world—the one in which people trusted experts, institutions, and the media—politically dangerous, because messages drafted by institutions don’t rise above the sea of information. What’s required is a kind of political-content factory. Not a ninety-minute play, followed by a Q. & A., but a chatbot, producing endlessly.
Political messages could seem tired anyway, even before Trump. A message-based politician must endlessly negotiate the content of those messages, which can have a narrowing effect: in a recent podcast, the Times journalist Ezra Klein described the network of experts and activists who help shape Democratic positions as an “institutional straitjacket,” orienting the Party inward. Messages often need to be taught (if they’re complicated) or enforced (if they’re contentious); although some voters enjoy learning (and teaching), many don’t like being treated like pupils. Still other messages are anodyne and forgettable. What does “build back better” mean? What is the “opportunity economy”? It’s telling that the most energizing talking point of the Harris campaign was that Trump and his circle were “weird.” That moment would’ve been exactly that—a moment—in Trumpworld. The Democrats lingered over it, turning it into yet another message, which was soon overwhelmed by Trump’s free-wheeling meme machine: his real Operation Warp Speed.
Is it possible to imagine a Democratic politician who produces, in endless quantities, the kind of political content that people consume today? Someone who can riff forever, saying out loud whatever eccentric ideas come into her head, confident not only that she won’t be punished for what she says but also that, by riffing, she’ll find out what sticks? Such a person could break out of the silo of “proper” political discourse, taking advantage of the online dynamics that have allowed the American right to transform from a political identity into a cultural movement—but perhaps only at the cost of being alienating, ignorant, or wrong. We might end up in the second linguistic world—the one in which words are produced constantly, and hardly matter—when we desperately want to remain in the first.
A few years ago, no one could have predicted that Elon Musk would buy Twitter and remake it. Today, no one can say, with any real certainty, how the advent of A.I. will change the way we communicate. You never know. Maybe politics need to catch up to technology; possibly, the networked world is forcing leaders to listen to people they previously ignored. In that case, on the other side of a period of upheaval, new political messages may better represent the priorities of voters. It could also be that politics are simply changing, becoming more fluid and less coherent. At least for now, the network itself seems hostile to the old way of doing things. Whether there’s a good, new way remains to be seen. ♦
Judging by how commonly birth control is practiced in the United States, it ought to rank among the least controversial of subjects. In surveys, ninety-nine per cent of women of reproductive age report having used contraception in their lifetimes. Catholics avail themselves of it at about the same rate as other Americans. Evangelicals do, too. Given the fact that heterosexual Americans, like humans in general, tend to be fans of non-procreative sex, this is not so surprising. Nor is it new. In the nineteenth century, lots of people tried to game their gametes, especially anyone lucky or wealthy enough to have a discreet private physician; or who could read between the lines of newspaper ads slyly offering “rubber goods for men” or “married women’s friends” or “French periodical pills”; or who knew a midwife able to whip up an herbal concoction that might or might not work. Between 1800 and 1900, the average number of children for white married couples (the group most studied) dropped from just over seven to less than four—a decline marked enough to suggest the purposeful wrangling of fertility, whether through abstinence or intervention.
And yet birth control is contested: condemned, still, by the Catholic Church; regularly undermined by attacks on reproductive rights that are aimed at abortion but take access to contraception as collateral damage; and scrambled into weird fulminations about female sexuality from right-wing talk-show hosts and Trumpian influencers. In Stephanie Gorton’s timely and well-researched new book, “The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America” (Ecco), you can read a number of quotes from champions of reproductive rights which seem bracingly relevant and even radical today.
But the quote that best captures the maddening persistence of this conflict comes from the other side—the judge who, in 1917, presided over the trial of Margaret Sanger for the crime of opening a birth-control clinic. Women, he said, simply did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” For all that women’s roles have changed, for all the new contraceptive products that have appeared since, this attitude seems never to have been entirely vanquished.
“The Icon and the Idealist” is a dual biography of two twentieth-century birth-control crusaders—one (Sanger) famous, the other (Dennett) far less so. It’s also a closeup portrait of their rivalry—tactical, temperamental, and at times political.
Dennett was the older of the two women by seven years, born Mary Coffin Ware in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1872. Her father, who made a precarious living as a hide-and-wool merchant, died the year she turned ten. To support Mary and her siblings, her mother became a tutor and a chaperon for young American women touring Europe. The children went to live in a brownstone in Boston occupied by two maternal aunts and an uncle, along with a parade of boarders and guests. The family maintained a proud legacy of New England progressivism—one relative was Lucretia Coffin Mott, the suffragist and abolitionist—and this legacy clearly inspired the young Mary.
The New England prudery that went with it confounded her. Dennett once glimpsed an aunt taking a bath in a “long-sleeved, high-necked night gown,” she later wrote, washing “from head to foot without once unbuttoning that stern white cotton emblem of modesty,” as though hiding her naked body from herself. It “made me feel that I should be a very shocking and reprehensible little girl if I did not take my own bath in the same manner.”
Dennett remembered her youth as “a mixture of rebellion and beauty-hunger.” She grew into a self-consciously bohemian new woman, who wore glasses and shirtwaists, rode a bicycle, took a keen interest in William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and did not rush into marriage. In her late twenties, she tied the knot with William Hartley Dennett, an M.I.T.-educated architect who shared her admiration for Morris. The couple built a house outside Boston in the Arts and Crafts style, attended anti-imperialist and world-peace-movement meetings, and took to sex like ducks to water. “She was determined to shed the prudery of her upbringing,” Gorton writes, “and seemed to have succeeded.” But Dennett’s labors and deliveries were difficult. The birth of the couple’s first son, Carleton, in 1900, almost killed her. A second son was unable to nurse from breast or bottle and died of malnutrition at three weeks. The precipitate delivery of their third son, Devon, left her in pain for years. The Dennetts did not want to risk another pregnancy, and, because neither knew much about contraception, they stopped having sex altogether, unhappily for both.
Hartley, as Dennett’s husband was known, soon took up with a friend of the couple’s, a young suffragist named Margaret Chase, whose husband did not object. Mary did—she was open-minded but monogamously inclined. She viewed Margaret as “the tiger type, but intellectual in her method,” and was unmoved by Hartley’s new conviction that “no woman should expect the monopoly of her husband’s affections.” The Dennetts divorced, and, since Hartley refused to pay child support, Mary had to become self-reliant. She moved to New York, and went to work for a women’s-suffrage association, where she grew frustrated with the movement’s reluctance to racially integrate its first national march, in 1913. (“The suffrage movement stands for enfranchising every woman in the United States,” she pointedly wrote in a letter to one of its leaders.) According to Gorton, Dennett soon “formulated her theory that three elements were necessary for a fair society: economic independence for women, the end of every type of privilege, and safe, reliable contraception.” Men had to become much more involved in child rearing, too. “It is not possible,” Dennett wrote, “for the selfsame work to be broadening and beautifying if women do it, and petty and inconsequential if men do it.”
In Greenwich Village, and, in particular, in a radical women’s group called Heterodoxy, she found like-minded comrades. The feminists of Heterodoxy engaged in deliriously taboo-bending discussions of free love, free speech, Freud, and socialism, often gathering in a basement bistro on MacDougal Street known as Polly’s, where the anarchist management liked to address patrons as “bourgeois pigs.” After her divorce, Dennett seems to have had only one other physical relationship in her life, a brief affair, at forty-two, with a married man in the suffrage movement. Before their assignation, in a borrowed apartment, Dennett had to ask him “to look after some safe-guard”—despite committing herself to the cause of family planning, she still knew little about how birth control itself might work.
But, for a person whose life did not contain a lot of sex, Dennett proved to be an ardent and scandalizing champion of it. In 1915, she began work on a sex-education pamphlet for young people. Her boys were then adolescents, and the educational materials available to them about sexuality seemed absurdly sentimental and euphemistic to her, heavy on botanical and pollination metaphors—the birds and the bees, quite literally. Dennett’s pamphlet, “The Sex Side of Life,” which was published in 1919, enjoyed the unusual distinction of being purchased for chapters of the Y.M.C.A. and lauded by the caustic anti-prig H. L. Mencken. The mutual sexual pleasures that Dennett’s text tenderly evokes are, to be sure, restricted to the married, heterosexual sort. Yet its heartfelt dispensing with shame, its empathetic treatment of sexual curiosity and yearning, its reassurances about masturbation, and its anatomically correct drawings (made by Dennett herself) could probably get “The Sex Side of Life” banned in certain school districts in the U.S. today. On one subject, though, Dennett had to be circumspect. “It is against the law,” she wrote, “to give people information as to how to manage their sex relations so that no baby will be created unless the father and mother are ready and glad to have it happen.”
It was at one of Heterodoxy’s meetings, probably at Polly’s, that Dennett first met Margaret Sanger, a small, auburn-haired woman with lively hazel eyes, who was perfectly willing to talk animatedly and publicly about birth control. One reason the Dennetts had been so clueless about contraception was the Comstock Act, the federal obscenity statute hustled onto the books by the fervid anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock. Adopted in 1873, the Comstock Act prohibited the mailing of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials—pornography and sex toys, but also any item or information “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” Advocating openly for contraception required nerve and a certain charisma. Sanger had both. Dennett invited her to lunch at her studio apartment, where they told each other their life stories all afternoon. It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, or at least a long and productive collaboration. It wasn’t.
Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins, in 1879, in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children. Her parents were Irish immigrants, and the family never had much money. Her father, Michael, was a stonemason. Her mother, Anne, suffered from tuberculosis, but managed to survive not only those eleven childbirths but seven other pregnancies that ended in miscarriage, before she died at fifty. When Margaret was just eight, she assisted for the first time at one of her mother’s deliveries, Gorton tells us, while Michael stood by “offering his wife a flask of whiskey.” The Comstock Act and the spirit of repression that gave rise to it meant that such an experience might have no purchase outside the home—no reality, almost. A child could see her mother give birth, in whatever paroxysms of pain or distress, clean up afterward, and then go out into a world where no one was supposed to depict or discuss things like that. (Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, the Hays Code, which governed what could be shown in the movies, explicitly forbade any representation of childbirth, “in fact or in silhouette.”) That cognitive dissonance would, in time, radicalize Sanger.
In her early thirties, Margaret went to work as a visiting nurse in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many of her patients begged her for contraception, but she had none to give. “Middle-class women,” Gorton writes, “were far more likely to have a diaphragm, sponge or douching solution on hand.” The women Margaret was seeing “passed each other advice about how to use a knitting needle, or a cup of turpentine, or a strategic fall to end an unwanted pregnancy.” On a hot summer day in 1912, she was summoned to Grand Street by a father of three whose twenty-eight-year-old wife had become unconscious after trying to abort her latest pregnancy on her own. In the story Margaret often told about her epiphany, she called the woman Sadie Sachs. Three months later, she returned to the same apartment, where a comatose Sachs was now dying from another self-induced abortion. By then, Margaret was married to William Sanger, an architect and a socialist, with whom she would have three children. (Unlike Dennett’s life, Margaret’s was filled with affairs—H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, one of her defense attorneys, a Greek anarchist, a Spanish anarchist—along with an alienating later marriage to a wealthy older man who helped fund her cause while complaining bitterly that he had married one.) “After Sadie Sachs’s death, Sanger went home to her sleeping household, where she stayed awake all night,” Gorton writes. Sanger, in a memoir, recalled vowing to “tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard.”
“I can’t find my phone.”
Cartoon by Victoria Roberts
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Being heard, to Sanger, meant being confrontational in a way that suited a personality more flamboyant than Dennett’s. Soon she was writing a column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for the New York Call, a socialist paper. It drew the attention of Comstock’s Post Office censors, who declared the paper unmailable. Demonstrating a flair for creative provocation that would serve her and her movement well, Sanger produced a final column in the form of a blank box under the headline “What Every Girl Should Know: NOTHING! By Order of the Post Office Department.” Sensational arrests for breaking the law were part of Sanger’s M.O. from early on. In 1916, when she opened a Brooklyn clinic that distributed diaphragms and contraceptive advice, men and women, some pushing baby carriages or trailing children, lined up around the block, dramatic testimony to the demand that Sanger was trying to meet. And when, ten days later, the police shut the clinic down and arrested her, Sanger “insisted on walking the mile-long route to jail, thus making herself available to reporters,” Gorton writes. At least one desperate patient yelled after her, “Come back! Come back and save me!”
Dennett took a dim view of Sanger’s commitment to lawbreaking—shortsightedly, given how much publicity it brought for their shared mission. She was focussed instead on changing the laws, and, specifically, on getting Congress to excise the reference to contraception from the Comstock statute. In 1915, Sanger returned from Europe to face charges at home stemming from her latest publication, a magazine called The Woman Rebel. Pegging Dennett as an amiable comrade who knew her place in the movement, she paid her a visit, asking for the support of Dennett’s new organization, the National Birth Control League. Dennett turned her down. For Sanger, who, as Gorton points out, had spent a year in exile and would shortly be grieving the death of her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, from pneumonia, this must have been a galling disappointment. For Dennett, it was simply a matter of protecting the strategy she believed in from unnecessary scandal or controversy. She would lobby the virtually all-male House and Senate for that change in the Comstock law repeatedly, and fruitlessly, throughout the next decade. Now and then, she’d win commitments from a member of Congress—who would later back out. One admitted that his willingness to address the issue had made him the laughingstock of the Senate cloakroom.
The rift that began with Dennett’s refusal to back Sanger in 1915 grew wider over the years. Dennett periodically turned up at rallies and meetings to support Sanger, but she also prodded her single-mindedly, and with little encouragement on Sanger’s part, to endorse Dennett’s lobbying goals. The tactical dispute had a deeper significance. Sanger eventually supported a change to the Comstock Act that would allow physicians, and physicians only, to mail birth-control information and devices—a compromise she thought would win institutional legitimacy and insure safety. Dennett’s approach, by contrast, was based on the idea that freely circulating information was a good in itself, and should not be subject to a professional monopoly that might help some people more than others.
Sanger’s plan earned the movement the vital support of the American Medical Association, but Dennett had a point: the emphasis on medical gatekeeping has sometimes undercut reproductive rights. It has made mail-order abortion medication vulnerable to fearmongering about its safety, for example, and probably postponed the arrival of over-the-counter birth-control pills. (The first ones went on the market in the U.S. this year, though they have long been available in dozens of countries.) But the rivalry between the two birth-control leaders was also personal. Dennett thought that Sanger cared too much about her own glory and wanted to dominate the movement. Sanger could be notably mean about Dennett, and once wrote to a colleague, “The more I see the acts of the person in question, the more I am inclined to believe that a sanitarium is the proper place for her.”
For many years now, Sanger’s reputation has suffered from the knowledge that she sought out allies in the eugenics movement and parroted some of its rhetoric. She came to find eugenics useful, much more so than the socialism and feminism she’d espoused in the teens. Eugenics made it acceptable to talk about sex and reproduction in places—the halls of Congress, for example—where it had always been avoided. So much more palatable, in nineteen-twenties America, to invoke the breeding of fitter, native-born children than to speak of gender equality or sexual freedom. Besides, as Gorton says, Sanger seems to have believed in this claptrap. It must have been easier to buy into once she’d mostly cut herself off from the bohemian left that had nurtured and challenged her in her Greenwich Village days. (Emma Goldman had once been a mentor; Sanger turned her back on her when she was deported.) In 1932, Sanger gave a speech titled, disturbingly, “My Way to Peace,” in which she called for a “stern, rigid policy of sterilization”; the restriction of immigration to keep out the “feeble-minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes”; and the lifelong sequestration of “illiterates, paupers, unemployables . . . [and] dope fiends” to farmlands and homesteads where they’d be taught to work.
Dennett was different. She was not immune to the popularity of eugenics, which had sunk rhizomic roots in American culture. She, too, “insisted birth control would bring higher quality offspring,” Gorton writes. But “she was decidedly less keen than Sanger was to meld her birth control activism with the eugenics movement, and she never embraced ‘negative eugenics’ as Sanger did when she repeatedly argued the ‘unfit’ should not be permitted to reproduce.” Dennett was wary of any theory that might encourage the state to encroach on private lives for nationalistic interests, and critical of arguments about the global threat of overpopulation.
Gorton says she started off wanting to champion Dennett as “the underdog hero of the birth control movement,” but became more appreciative of Sanger’s boldness and organizational genius in a way that made that reclamation project less straightforward. In the end, she offers a measured assessment of Sanger—clear-eyed and critical, but unwilling to discard her legacy. Sanger’s eugenics, she argues persuasively, focussed on weeding out disability, not sorting by race. This is cold comfort, but worth pointing out, since one strand of the anti-abortion movement has painted abortion as a means of genocide against Black Americans, with Margaret Sanger as the scheme’s mastermind. (She did not actually advocate for the right to abortion, deeming the matter too controversial.) The fact that Sanger established birth-control clinics in Harlem and in the South—albeit with the backing of W. E. B. Du Bois and other Black leaders—has been taken as evidence of a targeted eugenics campaign. Clarence Thomas invoked this line of thinking in his opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood in 2019, and Samuel Alito took up the thread in the Dobbs opinion.
My own experience of reading about the two women led me in the opposite direction from the one Gorton took: I grew to admire Dennett more. It wasn’t just that Dennett kept a healthy distance between herself and the eugenics movement. It was also that she conquered her shyness and fear of notoriety (both of which were magnified when her divorce was covered in the newspapers as a titillating scandal) to become the center of a significant case in the history of American free-speech law. In 1928, Dennett, who for years had been quietly selling “The Sex Side of Life” in small print runs that she financed herself, got caught in what Gorton calls “a classic Comstockian trap.” An agent for the Postal Service had posed as a “Mrs. Miles” from Virginia, who was interested in buying a copy of Dennett’s sex-ed pamphlet, and Dennett had subsequently been arrested on obscenity charges. She went to trial, represented by the A.C.L.U. attorney Morris Ernst, in January, 1929. The jury was made up entirely of men. The judge insisted that he had never before seen the word “vagina” in print, and seemed to Dennett to have been “inexpressibly shocked” by her pamphlet. Dennett took comfort in the presence of her two adult sons, sitting on either side of her throughout the trial, and tried her best to ignore the description of her in the press as a “little grandmother.” She was one by then, but she was also an “energetic fifty-seven,” in Gorton’s words, and not exactly confined to a rocker on the porch. (Much of the press about the case was sympathetic and indignant: The Nation condemned her persecution for “sexological heresy”; a New Jersey newspaper suggested that her trial would expose as much American ignorance as the Scopes trial had.)
Dennett was found guilty. “It is the government which is disgraced,” she said of the verdict. “Not I.” She and Ernst appealed to the Second Circuit, and Judge Augustus Noble Hand (the cousin of his fellow-judge Learned) sided with Dennett, establishing an influential new precedent in American obscenity law. An “accurate exposition of relevant facts,” written in “decent language” and with serious intent, could not be regarded as obscene, Hand wrote. The ruling undermined the so-called Hicklin test, a British import that had been relied upon since the nineteenth century in such cases, which held that if any portion of a work could arouse libidinous urges in anybody it had to be held obscene as a whole. Hand ruled that such an “incidental tendency” was insufficient, and “outweighed by the elimination of ignorance, curiosity and morbid fear” that a work such as “The Sex Side of Life” might accomplish. The decision opened the way for a series of rulings in the twentieth century, with implications for everything from the importation of contraceptive devices (United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries) to the publication of modernist literature (United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses”).
One of the most valuable takeaways from Gorton’s book is how it complicates the usual dichotomies of movement leadership: the insider versus the outsider, the institutionalist versus the radical, Martin Luther King, Jr., versus Malcolm X. Sanger remained committed for many years to direct action: opening illegal clinics, getting arrested, proposing a global birth strike. But her tactics were more transgressive than her social vision was. She ended up seeking the mantle of professional respectability among “scientific” eugenicists and the medical establishment. Dennett was the more cautious personality, and she devoted many years to the conventional politics of Washington lobbying. Yet she ended up embracing and promoting a liberatory, democratic vision of free speech, in which access to knowledge would transcend economic or professional privilege.
Dennett lived out the rest of her life in a low-key fashion, attentive to her family and indulging an interest in handicrafts. (In one of those charming, when-worlds-collide moments, she sold a pair of leather bookends she’d hand-tooled to Marlene Dietrich.) She died in 1947. Her son Carleton kept “The Sex Side of Life” on the back of the toilet so that his children could read it easily and without asking. Sanger remained a leader of the movement, and lived until 1966, long enough to be interviewed on television by a cigarette-smoking Mike Wallace, and to see the Supreme Court uphold a right to contraception for married couples in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut.
The Comstock statute survives both women. In 1971, Congress removed the reference to contraception, but Comstock itself lives on as a so-called “zombie statute,” on the books but seldom enforced, maintaining until recently the ghostly purity of its creator. In the lead-up to this year’s Presidential campaign, however, a number of people on the right—including the authors of Project 2025, an unofficial policy blueprint for a second Trump Administration—proposed reviving enforcement of the 1873 statute as a way of criminalizing the mailing of abortion drugs. Eugenics, too, is enjoying something of a moment again, this time almost exclusively among conservatives—the pro-natalism of J. D. Vance and Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s invocations of “bad genes” and immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” The closure of family-planning clinics in the wake of Dobbs, meanwhile, has made it harder for many people to access birth control. Americans just elected a man who, in the menacingly paternalistic Comstock mold, vows that, “whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.” Sanger and Dennett would probably remain rivals if they were alive today. But they would both be appalled to learn how many of their battles are still being fought. ♦
In 1868, horse-drawn carriages delivered the ten-thousand-odd components of a giant pipe organ from the factory of Henry Erben, near Manhattan’s Five Points neighborhood, to St. Patrick’s Basilica, on Mott and Prince. The parish, then largely Irish, was still grieving the loss of so many young men from the Fighting 69th at Bull Run and Antietam. Moneyed interests were moving uptown. Erben’s organs, meanwhile, were regularly shipped thousands of miles, to Havana, Caracas, the Western frontier. For an immigrant neighborhood in a young country that had just survived a great rupture, the purchase of a cathedral organ to rival Europe’s finest was a source of pride. A wave of Italians followed the Irish. (The Erben organ appears in “The Godfather: Part III.”) Then came Dominicans and Chinese. The organ remained in service. After more than a hundred thousand liturgies, the church’s musical director would say that the sound of the Erben at Old St. Patrick’s still carried “a tinge of sadness” from the Civil War.
Or maybe it was the accumulated soot and the clumps of plaster in the pipes, the duct tape over cracked leather. By 2024, at any rate, the organ, like the nation’s politics, was in rough shape. Rather than let it die, a group called Friends of the Erben Organ (supporters include Martin Scorsese) committed to a painstaking renovation. Over three weeks in February, a crew disassembled the contraption. “Half of the church was covered in pipes and mechanisms,” Jared Lamenzo, the musical director, recalled, noting that the wooden levers that supplied wind to the bellows were so large they “looked like you would tie up a pack of Clydesdales to them.” Off the organ went, in several box trucks, to an old tobacco warehouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, one of the few places left where horse-drawn carriages transport anyone other than tourists, and where craftsmen specialize in pre-electric technology.
“You still smell tobacco on a damp day,” Hans Herr, one of the owners of Brunner & Associates, an organ works, said recently, thumbing a suspender, after greeting Lamenzo and some fellow organ mavens, who had arrived from the city in a Porsche Cayenne that was now parked next to a cornfield. Inside the warehouse, and in a garage behind it, technicians were working on the organ’s innards: applying alcohol to the oxblood-stained wooden pipes, attending to “witness marks” (dried candle wax, pencil notations) on the bellows, which turned out to have been reconfigured during a prior intervention, in 1902. A worker who was huddled over a slanted desk joked that he was packaging antique “New York City coal dust” for resale. To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor. The keys themselves looked filthy. “We could put hydrogen peroxide on it, but I’m guessing Jared probably likes the yellowed look,” Herr said. Lamenzo nodded, but he acknowledged that the ivories had been replaced in 1969.
One of the buffs who had accompanied Lamenzo was Laurence Libin, a curator emeritus of the musical-instrument collection at the Metropolitan Museum. He theorized that hand lotions and sanitizer expedited the aging process. Libin approached with a device for measuring the width of the keys and noted some irregular spacing between them. “It’s interesting that the ones in the center are gentle at the corners, and the ones that you don’t use are sharp as nails,” he said.
Up on the third floor, another technician demonstrated cone tuning, a means of bending the tops of thin metal pipes either inward or outward by using a cone-shaped brass hammer. He surprised his guests by mentioning a phone app that specifies exactly how many millimetres of adjustment are required to achieve a desired pitch. “There’s an app for this?” Libin asked, incredulous.
“There’s an app for everything,” the technician went on. “It’ll also correct for temperature. You can tell it, ‘I’m tuning the organ and it’s sixty-three degrees in the room, but I need it to sound correct when it’s seventy-two degrees.’ ”
“Cutting-edge technology applied to medieval technology,” Libin said, marvelling.
In the garage, dozens of crates labelled “Erben NYC” were untouched. It’ll be months before Herr and his colleagues are ready to reconstruct the organ and test it, only to break it down again to be trucked back to Mott Street. The atmosphere in the warehouse was studiously cheerful, and a visitor, thinking ahead to the 2026 midterms, wondered whether the tinge of sadness could yet be exorcised from the organ’s sound. ♦
I hate to say I told you so, but here we are. Kamala Harris’s loss will go down in history as a catastrophe that could have easily been avoided if more people had thought whatever I happen to think.
Take immigration. It’s a major issue, and I believe that the Harris campaign should have tacked to the left on it instead of trying to beat Republicans at their own messaging. Except I also think that Democrats should be trying harder to appeal to conservative rural voters who worry that immigration is out of control. Doing both of these things at once would have been so simple. And yet.
I hate to sound smug, but this was totally predictable if you happen to share whatever my exact world view is.
Then there’s the economy. Some people say it’s bad and that’s why she lost. Other people say it’s good but not enough people know it’s good and that’s why she lost. Unfortunately, I am the only voter who is smart enough to believe both.
Just look at the polling. Americans want to fight climate change in a way that doesn’t disrupt our current system, which fuels climate change. Democrats need to start speaking to these people!
And Liz Cheney? Kamala never should have campaigned with her. But also she should have campaigned way more with her, and they should have got matching tattoos and competed as a team on “The Amazing Race.” One thing you can’t deny: whatever thing I think, I was right.
The list of issues I was correct about goes on and on. Guns? Harris owns too many, but also not enough. Tim Walz? He was a terrible choice, but also the best choice. Charlotte? Kamala should have changed her first name to that, except, hold on, doing so would have made no sense.
When you look at things from my perspective and no one else’s, it all becomes clear.
There’s sure to be a lot of finger-pointing among Democrats in the coming months. But one thing is certain—Democrats need to have a bold, progressive vision for the future that does not alienate voters who dislike things that are bold, progressive, or visions for the future.
We’re just begging to lose again if we don’t do this.
In the meantime, the Party has a lot of soul-searching to do. How are we going to win back pro-labor voters? I ask this based not on data, which I am too intelligent to actually look up, but on a vague feeling I have that we need to win back pro-labor voters. Similarly, when will we start directly addressing the concerns of affluent suburban families while at the same time not worrying about those families and instead going all in on disaffected, left-wing youth?
And why aren’t we talking more about Social Security? Unless we should actually be talking less about Social Security? These are the questions that Democrats need to be asking themselves.
This is not the first time I’ve been right. When Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, it proved what I believed, which is that running left of center is a winning strategy. When he won again, in 2012, it backed up my belief that Mitt Romney was weird and off-putting. When Donald Trump won in 2016, I was once again vindicated because I argued something that I now forget but which undeniably made sense at the time—you had to be there, I guess. And in 2020 my being-correct streak continued as Biden swept into office with over all less hair than he had in the nineteen-eighties, as I predicted he would.
You’ve got to hand it to observers who are me and no one else. We totally saw this coming. Take notice, fellow-Democrats. All that’s left for us to do is to pick up the pieces and learn some tough lessons that reaffirm whatever thing we already believed. You know, the way we always do. ♦
One morning this past March, Aimee Solway arrived at her job at the Alameda County district attorney’s office, in Oakland, California, and found about a dozen boxes piled next to her desk. Each was labelled with the name of a defendant, Ernest Dykes, and inside were the files of the prosecutors who had worked on his case. Dykes had committed a murder during the course of a robbery in 1993, when he was twenty years old, and he was convicted and sent to death row. Now fifty-one, he was still fighting his sentence.
In California, death-penalty litigation often takes decades to be resolved, and five years ago Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions in the state. So last year, in an effort to ease the backlog, a few old cases were referred to a federal judge, Vince Chhabria, of the Northern District of California, for possible settlement—to see if there was a way to resentence the defendants and end their litigation. One of the cases was Dykes’s.
Solway, a deputy district attorney, had been hired to review old convictions, and Dykes’s case was one of her first assignments. She would need to weigh in at an upcoming settlement conference with Judge Chhabria and Dykes’s lawyers, so she had ordered the trial files. She opened a box, glanced at a few of the documents, and then turned to other tasks, including a call with Dykes’s attorneys. Later that day, she went back to the boxes—she was looking for the police reports—and in one of them she discovered a stack of index cards held together by a rubber band.
On the cards were handwritten notes, which Solway realized were comments about prospective jurors for Dykes’s trial, presumably compiled by the prosecutors. One card described an “MW”—male, white—who was a Republican and in favor of the death penalty. That didn’t seem too surprising, but a card for a Black woman read “Don’t believe she could vote D/P”—for the death penalty—and characterized her as a “Short, Fat, Troll.” A card for a forty-seven-year-old man said that he had a “Jewish background.” Another card, for a man who had a Ph.D. in physics, read “I liked him better than any other Jew But No Way,” then added, “Must Kick, too Risky.”
Solway immediately knew that some of the notes posed a serious problem. Historically, prosecutors had sought to keep certain groups of people off juries who they assumed would be less likely to vote for a conviction. That practice had denied untold numbers of Americans their constitutional right to a fair trial. To counter this, the California Supreme Court, in 1978, banned striking jurors because of their race, ethnicity, or religion. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Batson v. Kentucky, prohibited prosecutors nationwide from eliminating jurors based on their race. “The harm,” the Court found, “extends beyond that inflicted on the defendant and the excluded juror to touch the entire community,” and the result is to “undermine public confidence in the fairness of our system of justice.”
Solway knew that, if prosecutors in Dykes’s case had discriminated against potential jurors, his constitutional rights had been violated. She also knew that the remedy for that sort of violation was to reverse the conviction. Given that possibility, another prosecutor might have put the index cards back in the box and tried to forget about them. Solway did not. She had previously worked at the California Appellate Project in San Francisco, a nonprofit organization that helps lawyers representing people on death row. But, because she was only a few weeks into her job at the D.A.’s office, she wasn’t sure how her bosses would react to her discovery. She later recalled that she “sort of sheepishly” walked into her supervisor’s office to show her the cards—and to say that she thought they should be handed over to Dykes’s lawyers. Solway remembers telling her, “I don’t think we can settle this case without disclosing this evidence.”
Soon, the Alameda County district attorney, Pamela Y. Price, was studying the cards. Price had just become the D.A., in 2023—she was the first Black person to hold the position—and she thought the cards contained “pretty incontrovertible evidence that you’re excluding Jewish people” from the jury, she later said. Her team shared the notes with Judge Chhabria, and he ordered Price to do a full review of the office’s past capital convictions. At a press conference on April 22nd, Price announced, “We do have evidence of actual prosecutorial misconduct.” She added, “We have notes made by prosecutors in some of the cases,” as well as courtroom transcripts showing “the ways in which the jurors were questioned.” The evidence “suggests plainly that many people did not receive a fair trial in Alameda County,” she said. “It is something that we have to make right.”
The Supreme Court determined twice in the nineteen-seventies that the death penalty was being enforced in ways that were unconstitutional. In 1977, the California legislature passed a new death-penalty bill to comply with the latest ruling, and the following year voters passed a state ballot initiative to significantly expand the list of “special circumstances” under which a prosecutor could seek the death penalty for first-degree homicide. In the next few decades, California prosecutors sent more than a thousand people to death row.
Governor Newsom declared the moratorium in 2019, but there are still more than six hundred people, including twenty women, with death sentences in California—more than in any other state. Thirty-four were prosecuted by the Alameda County D.A.’s office. They range in age from thirty-three to eighty-one. The one with the oldest case arrived on death row in 1981; the most recent was sentenced in 2016.
To comply with Chhabria’s order, Price’s staff searched decades-old files, identified thousands of pages of jury-selection materials, and shared them with lawyers for the defendants. Prosecutors’ offices are sometimes referred to as “black boxes,” because their inner workings are shielded from public view. But the old trial files in Alameda County have revealed the jury-selection tactics sometimes used in capital cases, particularly by some prosecutors assigned to an élite group known as the Death Team.
In 1980, James Anderson became the first prosecutor in the Alameda County D.A.’s office to win a death-penalty case after capital punishment was reinstated. The son of a milkman, Anderson grew up in San Francisco and joined the D.A.’s office straight out of law school, in 1969, when he was twenty-six. When the office created the Death Team, in the mid-eighties, he was assigned to it. Anderson was up by five every morning, ran five miles, and was at his desk before seven-thirty. He handled many of the most notorious murder cases, and was prone to using terms like “hyena” or “reptile” when referring to defendants during closing arguments. In a memo to a judge about one defendant, who was convicted of murdering a young woman after kidnapping, robbing, and raping her, he wrote, “An early execution is only too fitting for him.”
“I quack-quacked here, I quack-quacked there . . . I mean, I pretty much quack-quacked everywhere. Do you mind if I take my break?”
Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap
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The Death Team worked on the ninth floor of the Alameda County Courthouse, an eleven-story Art Deco structure built in the nineteen-thirties, next to Lake Merritt, in Oakland. (The county encompasses Oakland, where about a quarter of the population lives; thirteen smaller cities, including Berkeley; and several unincorporated areas.) The D.A., John J. Meehan, had his office on the ninth floor, as did many of his top officials. In the late eighties, Anderson began sharing an office with a fellow death-penalty prosecutor named John R. Quatman, known as Jack, who had spent seven years studying at a seminary before transferring to U.C. Berkeley, in 1967, and then attending law school. He was a few years younger than Anderson and, at five feet six, several inches shorter. Colleagues called him Squatman, and he often poked fun at his own height in an attempt to win over jurors—standing on his toes, for example, when he went up to speak to the judge. He and Anderson were close friends, and were among the highest-profile prosecutors in the courthouse.
Obtaining a death verdict, Anderson once said, was a “mark of distinction” in the office. As Quatman put it, “Anybody can try a homicide successfully. Not everybody can try a death-penalty case successfully.” A capital prosecutor had to win twice: first at trial (persuading twelve jurors to convict a defendant of first-degree murder with a so-called special circumstance) and then during the “penalty phase” (persuading all the jurors to sentence the defendant to death). The key, Quatman said, was to pick the right jury, and the pressure to win was intense: “Every other day, the boss comes by—‘How’s that case going?’ ” Preparing for and trying a death-penalty case could take at least a year, and after Anderson or Quatman sent a defendant to death row they framed his mug shot and hung it on their office wall, next to a copy of his death verdict.
The first death-penalty case that Quatman prosecuted was that of Fred Harlan Freeman, a mechanic from Richmond, who had suffered severe hearing loss as a child. He was forty-seven years old and had been charged with fatally shooting a man during a robbery at a bar in Berkeley, in 1984. The case had seemed almost impossible to win—it was nearly three years old when Quatman got it, and the police had lost some of the evidence. And Quatman himself had misgivings about the case. He later said, “My big issue with Fred Freeman was that it never should’ve been a death-penalty case because he wasn’t that bad a guy.” (Freeman had two prior felony convictions for armed robbery, but, Quatman explained, nobody had been shot in those incidents.) He added, “We had shootings in bars every day in Oakland, and they weren’t death-penalty cases.” But a committee in the D.A.’s office decided which cases were capital cases, and, Quatman said, a prosecutor who questioned the committee’s decision risked losing out on future death-penalty assignments.
Picking a jury in a capital case was far more onerous than in a typical homicide case. Prospective jurors had to fill out questionnaires and be interviewed individually by lawyers for both sides to determine not only whether they could be fair but whether they were “death qualified.” (Those who said that they could never vote for the death penalty were dismissed, as were those who said that they would always vote for it.) This part of the process could take a couple of months, and eventually the prospective jurors who remained—perhaps a hundred people—returned to the courthouse for the second phase, known as the Big Spin. On that day, they sat together in the spectator section of the courtroom while a clerk spun a metal cannister, pulled out cards, and read off names. The first twelve people who were called took seats in the jury box.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys had the names of all the prospective jurors ahead of the Big Spin, and they learned as much as they could about them. Quatman was particularly thorough: he checked if they had ever been arrested, pulled driving records, and drove by potential jurors’ homes to see if there were any bumper stickers on their cars indicating their political views. During the Big Spin, both prosecutors and defense attorneys could use an allotted number of peremptory challenges, which did not require an explanation, to remove jurors. (The allotted number at the time was twenty-six for each side.) Discrimination based on where a person lives is legally permissible, and Anderson told me, “I had a cardinal rule: if they lived in Berkeley, they were off the panel.” Quatman agreed: “You didn’t want those guys on the jury. They start questioning everything you do.”
Prosecutors often brought notes—one index card for each juror. There wasn’t enough time to read every word on every card, though, so beforehand they would assign each possible juror a score. Quatman used a scale of zero to ten. “Zero is somebody you want to get off that jury any way you can,” he explained. “My rule was six and above.” Each time a potential juror was removed, another took that person’s seat in the jury box. The process ended when the allotted challenges ran out—or earlier, if both sides agreed on a jury.
Judge Stanley P. Golde, a revered courthouse figure known as the Maven, presided over Freeman’s trial. Quatman knew Golde well; the judge had been a guest at his wedding, and Quatman was a frequent visitor to his chambers. There was always an urn of hot coffee, and lawyers gathered there to socialize, talk business, and seek Golde’s counsel. In April, 1987, one day before the Big Spin began in the Freeman case, Golde permitted lawyers for both sides to eliminate a few additional jurors, though it was not the usual protocol. Freeman’s attorney did so, but Quatman did not.
Afterward, in Quatman’s telling, Golde called him into his chambers and said, “Quatman, what are you doing? You didn’t challenge the Jew,” adding, “No Jewish person could sit on a death-penalty jury and return a verdict” for death. Quatman said that Golde, who was Jewish, reminded him that after the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann had been captured in Argentina, in 1960, Israelis were divided on whether he should be executed. Quatman responded, “Say no more.”
Before the trial began, Quatman removed three potential jurors he thought might be Jewish. In the end, he prevailed: the jury convicted Freeman, then voted to send him to death row. (Later, Quatman said that the verdict was “due more to the defense attorneys’ incompetence than to my efforts,” citing their “substandard” case during the penalty phase, which seemed “thrown together in a haphazard fashion.”)
According to Quatman, his fellow-prosecutors often made a point of striking Black jurors, too, especially women, in cases in which the defendant was Black. In 1991, Anderson prosecuted three men; one of them, a white insurance agent, had allegedly hired the other two, both of whom were Black, to kill his ex-wife. During the Big Spin, eleven Black people were called to the jury box, and Anderson removed nine of them. He won two death verdicts—for the ex-husband and for one of the hired men. (The other man got life without parole.)
Anderson was named the head of the Death Team in 1991. Quatman was no longer a member; he had been made a supervisor, overseeing a team of felony-trial prosecutors. In June, 1992, the D.A.’s office sent a group of prosecutors to attend a three-day seminar on trying death-penalty cases, organized by the California District Attorneys Association. Quatman, who by then had won three death verdicts, was one of the speakers; his topic was jury selection. He prepared a four-page outline that included notes about the sorts of people he didn’t want as jurors, because he thought they might be too empathetic (psychiatrists, nurses, doctors), and those he did want (women over forty, blue-collar workers).
The seminar was held at Humphreys Half Moon Inn, in San Diego, and was attended by a couple of hundred people, representing district attorneys’ offices around the state. Quatman, near the end of his presentation, shared a piece of advice that was not in his outline. As one colleague, Colton Carmine, later put it, “He prefaced his remarks by saying, ‘I know I probably shouldn’t say this, and I’m probably going to get in trouble.’ ” But then, Carmine added, “he said, ‘Never, ever leave a Jewish person on a capital jury. It’s just not fair to the case, and it’s not fair to the jurors, given what’s happened to them in the past, to ask them to execute another human being by lethal gas.’ ” (At the time, California used a gas chamber for executions.)
Yet even though Quatman had publicly encouraged fellow-prosecutors to violate a defendant’s right to a fair trial, he was not reprimanded. His boss, Thomas J. Orloff, then a chief assistant to the D.A., later said that nobody told him about Quatman’s comments. The California District Attorneys Association, in fact, sent Quatman a thank-you letter, noting that the “attendees seemed to have benefited from the instruction.” By the next year, however, Quatman was no longer working in the courthouse. While speaking to a judge in his chambers, Quatman had used a sexist slur to refer to a female prosecutor on his trial team. Another lawyer overheard him, and soon everyone in D.A.’s office knew about it. Quatman was later transferred to the office’s consumer-fraud unit, in a building six miles away, and he blamed Orloff for what he saw as a demotion. (Orloff told me that John Meehan, who has since died, “was the D.A. then and made the decision.” But Orloff defended the transfer: “I mean, here’s a guy you’ve got doing criminal cases who is a total loose cannon.”)
Anderson oversaw the Death Team until 2004, when he retired, at the age of sixty-one, after thirty-four years in the D.A.’s office. A headline in the Oakland Tribune read “A passionate foe of killers cedes stage.” Anderson had “gotten more murderers condemned to execution than any other prosecutor in California history”—ten death verdicts, the story reported. “ ‘There was nothing we couldn’t get away with,’ Anderson said with a mischievous smirk. ‘We cut a wide swathe through things, but we produced a lot of results.’ ”
On March 22, 2005, Jack Quatman was back in a courtroom in the Bay Area, but this time he was on the witness stand. As unlikely as it seemed, he was testifying at a hearing on behalf of Fred Freeman. Quatman’s wife, Phyllis, who had worked as a prosecutor in a neighboring county, was in the courtroom that day, too. She remembers seeing her husband’s former colleagues “staring at us like we were traitors to the team,” as she put it years later. “And we were traitors to the team. There’s no question, I guess.”
After five years in the consumer-fraud unit, Quatman had grown frustrated, and he quit in 1998. He and Phyllis had two young children, and, at her prompting, they moved to Whitefish, Montana, a town of five thousand in the Rocky Mountains, sixty miles from the Canadian border. The couple opened a law practice there. Phyllis also represented a man on death row in California, handling his state habeas petition. (Once defendants have exhausted their direct appeal, they can file a habeas petition in state court, challenging their conviction or their sentence, or both, and if they lose they can file one in federal court. With such a large death row, California often relies on habeas attorneys from out of state.) In March, 2003, Scott F. Kauffman, a lawyer with the California Appellate Project, travelled to Whitefish to help Phyllis with her petition, and she invited him to their home for dinner.
That evening, Quatman and Kauffman got to talking, and the two men finished a bottle of wine, then opened another. The conversation eventually turned to Alameda County. Quatman spoke about his days in the D.A.’s office and his first death-penalty trial—Fred Freeman’s—and his uneasiness about it. He also mentioned that, before the trial had started, Judge Golde, who had died in 1998, suggested that he not keep any Jewish jurors.
Kauffman knew one of the attorneys handling Freeman’s habeas petition, Gary D. Sowards, and he asked Quatman if he could pass along his comments. Quatman agreed, and Sowards soon met with him in Montana, then sent him a declaration recapping their meeting and asked him to sign it. The declaration stated that “Fred Freeman did not fit the real-world standard for one deserving the death penalty”; that his lawyers had been “worse than ineffective”; that in the Alameda D.A.’s office it had been “standard practice to exclude Jewish jurors in death cases”; and that, in this case, Golde had reminded Quatman to do so.
Quatman initially balked at signing. Friends and other attorneys advised him not to sign—not to break ranks with his former colleagues. But Phyllis saw it differently. She recalled telling him, “You have to do this because this man’s life is on the line, and he didn’t get a fair trial, and this”—the unethical striking of jurors—“is endemic in your office.” She added, “You have a moral duty to tell the truth.” In late May, 2003, Quatman signed the declaration.
In July, 2004, the California Supreme Court ordered an evidentiary hearing in Freeman’s case, focussed on Quatman’s claims about excluding jurors—and the backlash began. Anderson told a reporter that Quatman’s claims were “ludicrous.” As Anderson later said to me, “People just couldn’t believe that he would suddenly become a turncoat, so to speak, and try and damage the office by making these allegations.” He added, “I mean, you’ve been in the office for so long and all of a sudden just turn against it because you had a falling out with the boss?” That theory, that Quatman was driven by a grudge, was pervasive in the D.A.’s office.
Orloff, who had become the district attorney in 1994, put a prosecutor named Morris D. Jacobson in charge of the “Quatman investigation,” as it was known. On November 16, 2004, Jacobson and a few staff members met to strategize. According to notes from the meeting, which District Attorney Price’s office released in October, the participants discussed the “sensitive nature of case and need for confidentiality.” The notes also read “Left it w/ Morris saying he would give us direction. Wants to find dirt on Quatman.”
Jacobson interviewed prosecutors who had worked with Quatman to determine who might be called to testify at the hearing—and an inspector from the D.A.’s office went to Montana to speak with lawyers who knew him there. The California Supreme Court appointed Kevin J. Murphy, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge who had previously worked as a prosecutor, to oversee the hearing. Freeman’s legal team, which included Sowards and three other lawyers, argued that it was a conflict of interest for the D.A.’s office to represent itself, so lawyers from the state attorney general’s office wound up defending the office in court.
Six days before the hearing began, the New York Times published a story about Quatman’s allegations. Anderson gave the reporter, Dean E. Murphy, a quote that was perhaps more revealing than he intended. Murphy wrote that, according to Anderson, “many prospective jurors, including Jews and blacks, were excluded because of backgrounds, professions and political beliefs. ‘That is not a racist thing, but just common sense,’ Mr. Anderson said. ‘It is an axiom. It is not because of prejudice. Their politics are not going to be on your side.’ ”
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The hearing, however, did not focus on whether there was a pattern of Alameda prosecutors striking certain groups of people from death-penalty juries. The California Supreme Court had stipulated that the proceeding should focus on just two questions: Had Judge Golde advised Quatman to strike Jews from the jury in the Freeman case? And had Quatman done so on his advice? (Ordering an evidentiary hearing with such a narrow focus was not unusual for the California Supreme Court.)
Quatman took the stand on the first day, and the attorney representing the D.A.’s office asked why he had struck the three potential jurors he thought were Jewish. “Because you wanted to win, right?” the attorney said. “That’s correct,” Quatman replied. The attorney also asked why he didn’t report Golde’s comments to anyone. “Judge Golde was considered the dean of the courthouse,” Quatman said. “I don’t think anyone would have believed me, and I would have been transferred and spent the rest of my career in Livermore Muni Court.”
Some of the attorneys who testified defended Golde, who, it was noted, was no longer alive to defend himself. Before becoming a judge, he had been a successful defense attorney, whose clients included a former mayor of Oakland, protesters involved with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and an Oakland Raiders wide receiver. One attorney described Golde as “my adviser,” adding, “He was probably that to many people.”
The hearing, which lasted five days, subsequently turned into a referendum on Quatman’s character. A few lawyers were brought in from Montana, but their complaints were fairly petty, and one said that Quatman had “a good reputation for truth and honesty.” Yet eight current and former Alameda County prosecutors testified, and many recounted unethical acts that he had allegedly committed, such as failing to hand over documents to defense attorneys and coaching a trial witness by leaving a photograph of a person whom he wanted the witness to identify “in plain view on his desk.” A former colleague described Quatman as “willing to bend or break rules to win more than any prosecutor should be.”
Colton Carmine, who joined the D.A.’s office in 1979, testified about the 1992 seminar where Quatman advised prosecutors against picking Jews for capital juries. He said of Quatman’s remarks, “I don’t think it’s an ethical statement to make.” One of the last people to testify was James Anderson. Freeman’s attorney asked him if Golde had ever advised him on which jurors to strike. “Nope, never did,” Anderson answered. The attorney then tried to ask whether “there were certain axioms in the office about who should be on a jury,” but Judge Murphy cut him off, after the defense objected.
Near the end of the hearing, a lawyer from the attorney general’s office reiterated the theory that Quatman had made his allegations out of anger, and Murphy seemed to find that argument persuasive. He ruled in favor of the D.A.’s office, declaring, “Mr. Quatman’s allegations about Judge Stanley Golde and the alleged incident” are “not true.” He added, “I also concluded from the evidence that Mr. Quatman is dishonest and unethical.”
This past spring, when Aimee Solway found the juror notes from Ernest Dykes’s trial, the D.A.’s office looked to see which prosecutors had handled the case. Carmine had tried it. (He is retired and did not respond to requests for an interview.) Jacobson assisted during the jury-selection process. Now a judge on the Alameda County Superior Court, he declined to be interviewed, saying in an e-mail that he is “not permitted to comment on pending litigation.” (After Price released the notes from the 2004 meeting, Jacobson denied any wrongdoing, telling the Daily Journal, “There was no cover-up.”) In 2009, Freeman died in prison, at the age of sixty-nine.
When Pamela Price moved into the D.A.’s office, in 2023, she learned that her desk had once belonged to Earl Warren, the former Chief Justice of the United States, who served as the Alameda County D.A. from 1925 to 1938. The executive offices needed renovating, so Price decided to set up an office in a building across from the Oakland Coliseum where some other prosecutors worked—and she took Warren’s desk with her. When I met her there, last summer, a quote from Maya Angelou hung on her office wall: “As long as you are breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.”
Price had not known the name Jack Quatman, but after she started reviewing her office’s history of jury-selection practices in capital cases, and discovered the 2005 hearing, she came to her own conclusion. “It was very clear they had circled the wagons around the misconduct,” she said. “The strategy was to discredit Mr. Quatman, despite the fact that—as one of my deputies pointed out—he had been a long-term valued member of this office for decades. And then, suddenly, they all decided that he was the biggest liar.” She added that the allegations of juror discrimination in capital cases were “a problem that has not been examined or considered credibly in this office. And we are going to do it.”
Unlike her predecessors, Price had not previously been a prosecutor. Now sixty-eight, she grew up in Ohio, spent time in foster care, attended Yale and then Berkeley Law, and ran her own civil-rights law firm, in Oakland, where her clients included female prison guards who successfully sued the state after alleging that they had been sexually harassed at work. Price was elected D.A. as part of the progressive-prosecutor movement, which began in 2015 in an effort to address inequities in the criminal-justice system and to end mass incarceration by taking a less punitive approach.
But, by the time Price was sworn in, the movement had lost its momentum, and critics soon accused her of not being punitive enough. She was blamed for Oakland’s high crime rate and has received a barrage of negative press coverage, including a recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle about her office’s failure to meet a one-year deadline to file charges in hundreds of misdemeanor cases, which allowed the alleged perpetrators to go unpunished. In 2022, a recall vote had led to the ouster of the progressive San Francisco D.A., Chesa Boudin. On November 5th, Price herself faced such a vote, and lost by a margin of about two to one. She is expected to be removed from office in December, once the vote tally is certified.
In November, 2023, before the juror cards were discovered in Dykes’s case, a federal judge appointed two habeas lawyers—Brian Pomerantz, who is based in North Carolina, and Ann-Kathryn Tria, of Los Angeles—to represent Dykes in settlement conferences. Pomerantz, who was made the lead counsel, already had two clients from Alameda County in prison with death sentences, and he had long suspected that something had gone wrong in the Alameda D.A.’s office. One client was a man named Charles Stevens, who in 1993 was convicted of killing four people and attempting to kill another six, and whose case Pomerantz described as “the worst Batson violation in Alameda County,” referring to the Supreme Court decision. During the Big Spin in Stevens’s case, the prosecutor, Kenneth Burr, dismissed six out of six Jews and seven of nine Black people who were called to the jury box. In 1997, Burr was appointed as a judge on the Alameda County Superior Court. (He died in 2023.)
In March, Pomerantz and Tria joined Solway on a Zoom call to discuss Dykes’s case. The facts of his crime were that, on the afternoon of July 26, 1993, Dykes, who was unemployed, started drinking malt liquor, and then tried to rob his landlady, Bernice Clark, with a gun while she sat in her Oldsmobile in the parking lot of his apartment building, in East Oakland. A bullet was fired and hit her in the neck, then struck and killed her nine-year-old grandson, Lance, who was seated beside her. Dykes later claimed that the gun had gone off accidentally while he was trying to grab Clark’s wallet from her, and that he had not intended to shoot anyone. After a story in the Oakland Tribune named him as a suspect, he surrendered to the police.
There was nothing in the court transcript to suggest that prosecutors had discriminated against prospective jurors before Dykes’s trial. But, near the end of the Zoom call, Pomerantz complained to Solway about her office’s history of violating Batson. He recalled telling her, “Your office has been dirty for forty years. You know it and I know it. If your D.A. really wants to be a progressive prosecutor, go into the files.”
It was later that same day that Solway found the stack of index cards, and later that week she e-mailed Pomerantz and Tria thirty-one pages of notes, some from the cards and some from yellow legal pads that she had also found in the boxes. Pomerantz read the notes in disbelief. “For ten years, I’ve been chasing this,” he told me, “looking at stuff from different Alameda cases and trying to prove pattern and practice, and suddenly it was all here.”
This spring, when Judge Chhabria ordered Price’s office to review its juror-selection files in capital cases, he appointed Pomerantz and Tria to assist with distributing them to the lawyers representing the defendants. Pomerantz hired a team of professionals to scan the documents at the D.A.’s office, and he and Tria collected some sixty thousand pages, which included juror questionnaires and prosecutors’ notes. They received eleven thousand pages related to Dykes’s case, including about two hundred lengthy juror questionnaires; in another case, they got only fourteen pages. For twelve of the cases, they were told that the jury-selection documents were not found.
For the capital cases prosecuted by James Anderson—six were still being litigated—most or all of the jury-selection materials seemed to be missing. Anderson told me that he had a practice of keeping only the documents that the office needed to handle appeals, and of getting rid of his “work product,” including notes that he had taken on jurors and witnesses, as well as personal items, such as thank-you notes from victims’ relatives. “We were told to purge the files” of work product, he said, because the office had limited storage space. “It wasn’t anything to try to deceive people.” (Quatman said that there was no official protocol; some prosecutors kept their notes, and others did not.)
Pomerantz and Tria studied the documents for weeks. “I’ve seen a lot of disturbing things,” Tria told me. Prosecutors sometimes wrote notes about potential jurors that had nothing to do with their views. One card described a white woman from San Leandro as “Attractive for Age.” (She was forty-eight.) Another card noted that a nineteen-year-old woman had come to court wearing a “denim long dress slit up side.” On another, someone wrote that a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Pleasanton was “cute” and “Loves Animals” and that, as to the likelihood of her voting for a death verdict, “She can do it!”
Reporters began calling Pomerantz and asking questions, including whether the sort of prosecutorial misconduct uncovered in the Dykes case, during the nineteen-nineties, had continued. Before long, he had an answer: he and Tria found evidence showing that Alameda County prosecutors had been documenting which potential jurors were Jewish or Black into the two-thousands. A list from 2008, for example, consisted of summaries of potential jurors and the phrase “Juror is African American” in bold type next to certain names—“clearly trying to make it stand out,” Pomerantz said.
In July, I met with Pomerantz at his home, in North Carolina. When I arrived, he was standing in his driveway, talking on the phone to Dykes. A few minutes later, Pomerantz handed me the phone. I asked Dykes what he remembered about his trial. “I had no understanding of what was going on,” he said. “But I can tell you what I do remember—just looking forward, not making eye contact with no one. Just staring at that flag that was over the judge, counting the stars.”
Dykes had been on death row for decades at San Quentin, the oldest prison in California, with the rest of the state’s condemned men. But Governor Newsom had recently ordered the death row dismantled, and the men were moved to other prisons. This spring, Dykes was transferred to a facility in Stockton. When his settlement negotiations started, he thought that his sentence might be changed to life without parole. But, when Pomerantz told him about the juror notes, he began to hope for a better settlement: a sentence that would allow him to go before the parole board and, perhaps one day, to get out of prison. “Maybe I can get twenty-five to life,” he recalled telling himself. In fact, it was starting to look as if his sentence might be reduced to just a little more time than he had already served. He sounded shocked by the possibility. “I try not to think ahead,” he said, “because to do so would be catastrophic in a sense, at least for me.”
Several men at Dykes’s prison had been following his case in the news, but, he said, he tried not to discuss his situation with anyone. “There was one individual who came up to me one day—he actually wanted to shake my hand,” he said. “I didn’t know how to process that, because I know what I did, and I am very remorseful for that.” He added, “I took the life of a little boy. . . . And for an individual to come up to me and congratulate me because I happened to slip on a banana peel, as far as my trial—I can’t be happy about that.”
Jack Quatman is now seventy-eight and retired, and he and Phyllis still live in Montana. This summer, I visited them at their home, a modern single-story house with floor-to-ceiling windows. We sat at a long wooden table, from where we could see a neighbor’s horses grazing nearby. A few months earlier, Phyllis said, she had received an e-mail from Scott Kauffman, the lawyer who had come to dinner in 2003. He had sent her an article about Price’s press conference announcing the discovery of the notes in Dykes’s case. Now, finally, there was evidence to confirm Quatman’s allegations about the office’s jury-selection practices. The news had stunned them, but neither evinced a sense of satisfaction. “Somebody said, ‘Don’t you want to take a victory lap?’ ” Quatman told me. “No, I don’t want to take any laps.”
It was apparent, though, that he still loved to talk about his days as a prosecutor. “I liked the pressure,” he said. “I liked the fact that the bell went off and you had to perform.” By his count, he had tried at least two hundred cases, including some twenty homicides and the three capital cases. I asked the Quatmans if they wanted to look at some of the juror notes from the Dykes case, and, for the next hour or so, they read them on my laptop. One card stated that a would-be juror was from Texas. (“You want to keep that guy—he’s from the express-lane death-penalty state,” Quatman said.) Another stated that an individual had previously served on a jury that had voted to acquit. (“Goodbye.”) When Quatman saw the two cards that identified prospective jurors as Jews—including the one that read “Must Kick, too Risky”—he said, “I don’t know what he was thinking. You don’t put the reasons down on the card that you take to court. You just grade him.”
“This has been a historic mission, which for me personally has represented the culmination of a lifetime of preparation and research in a ceaseless quest to expand mankind’s knowledge of the cosmos. But, to answer your question, yes, I sometimes pee in the suit.”
Cartoon by Tom Reese
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Though it had been nearly twenty years since Quatman testified at Freeman’s hearing, Phyllis spoke about that day as if it had just happened. “He was sick to his stomach. And he just said, ‘I just don’t think I should do this. How can I turn against my old office?’ ” she recalled. “He’d been there twenty-five years. That was like a family.” After the hearing, “there was literally no one in the office who would talk to him,” she said. “There was a lot of regret on Jack’s part because of the backlash.” She told me, “I will take the blame for it, because I’m the one that pushed him and said, ‘You need to do this.’ ” But, she added, “I don’t regret it.”
Throughout the spring and summer, Judge Chhabria oversaw a series of settlement conferences, with prosecutors from the D.A.’s office and the attorney general’s office and with lawyers for the defendants, to try to negotiate resolutions in twelve capital cases from Alameda County. The discovery of the notes in Dykes’s case had given the defendants new leverage. Habeas attorneys who might previously have accepted a life-without-parole deal were now looking for something better. For the D.A.’s office, the stakes were clear: if a defendant was allowed to keep litigating his case, and there was strong evidence of constitutional violations at his trial, the conviction risked being overturned.
That’s what happened in the case of Curtis Lee Ervin, who had been prosecuted by James Anderson in 1991. (Ervin was the man convicted of murder after an insurance agent had hired him and another man to kill his ex-wife. Both of his co-defendants are dead. At the trial, Anderson had removed nine of the eleven Black potential jurors.) The attorney general’s office responds to habeas petitions filed in federal court, and for decades it had defended the work of Alameda’s capital prosecutors. But this summer the A.G.’s office conducted a full “comparative juror analysis” in Ervin’s case—examining the answers given by all the prospective jurors to determine whether race had been a factor in removing any of them. At the end of July, the A.G.’s office submitted to Chhabria a Notice of Concession of Error stating that “Batson was violated in this case. Ervin is entitled to a new trial.”
Chhabria vacated Ervin’s conviction on August 1st, and a few days later District Attorney Price held a press conference in which she apologized to the victim’s relatives, saying that “because of prosecutorial misconduct, because of the failure of the supervisors of Mr. Anderson and so many failures over the years,” the family was having to endure the trauma of “having this whole situation once again brought up.” Price had sixty days to decide whether to retry Ervin or to release him. He is now seventy-one, relies on a walker, and has been incarcerated for thirty-eight years. She chose to prosecute him again, and he remained incarcerated, awaiting a new trial. Last month, however, her office changed course and offered him a deal that, if he pleaded guilty or no contest to a lesser charge, would allow him to get out of prison next year. He accepted.
The settlement conferences, in federal court, were confidential—participants were not permitted to discuss what happened there—but the resentencing proceedings have taken place in the courtroom of Judge Thomas E. Stevens, of the Alameda County Superior Court, at the same courthouse where Anderson and Quatman tried their capital cases. The proceedings have been extremely emotional at times, with family members standing up in Stevens’s courtroom to voice confusion, shock, distress, and anger that the person who killed their loved one might have his sentence changed. In the case of a man named Maurice Boyette, who shot and killed two people in 1992, at the age of nineteen, a relative of one of the victims told Stevens that it seemed as if the families, not the prosecutors, were being punished for prosecutors’ misdeeds.
James Anderson is now eighty-one and lives in a nearby county, where he drives an Alfa Romeo with a license plate that reads “190PC”—a reference to the California penal code for first-degree murder. When I called him to ask about Ervin’s case, he said, “How could I have done something wrong” when the jury sentenced two of the co-defendants—“a white guy and a Black guy”—to death but “spared another Black guy,” giving him a life sentence, “because he really wasn’t the one on the initial contract?” Anderson added, “Tell me that’s not a fair jury.” He insisted that he had just one consideration when picking jurors in a capital case: “Do you have the guts to do this—look the guy in the eye and say, ‘I sentence you to death’?” He said, “It’s got nothing to do with race, creed, or color.”
In July, another man Anderson sent to death row, Keith Thomas—about whom Anderson had said, “An early execution is only too fitting”—was also resentenced, to twenty-three years to life. “I think they’re going after me because I’ve got the most capital verdicts in the state,” Anderson said. “I’m pretty proud of what I did, and I’m very upset with the way Miss Price is trying to undo hard work, which I think was fairly done.” He added, “I think she’s doing it just because of race.” When I asked him what he meant, he said, “Because the people that she’s trying to undo the cases—the defendants’ races are Black.” He went on, “I don’t see her trying to undo cases of the white defendants I’ve convicted.” (“All of the cases under review are not only Black defendants,” Price said, in response. “Mr. Anderson is not well informed.”)
In recent months, some of the defendants’ attorneys worried that if Price were recalled her successor would be less committed to resentencing their clients. As the election drew closer, the pace of proceedings picked up, with four taking place in the last ten days of October. So far, of the thirty-four defendants from Alameda County who were in prison with death sentences this spring, fourteen have been resentenced.
Ernest Dykes learned his fate at his resentencing, which took place on August 13th. Kristie Clark Trias, the older sister of the boy Dykes killed, had planned to attend but changed her mind. In a letter to Judge Stevens, she wrote, “My absence from these proceedings does not mean that we no longer care about the outcome. It is a way for me to protect myself from the overwhelming pain.”
Pomerantz and Tria were both present in Stevens’s courtroom, as was Solway. Dykes followed the proceedings on Zoom from Stockton. In the courtroom, he appeared on a large screen, wearing a blue inmate’s uniform and glasses. Recapping the history of Dykes’s case, Solway said that her discovery of the notes had been “a bit of a random event” and that “what popped out was immediately recognizable evidence of constitutional violations at trial.” She pointed to the fact that Dykes had been just twenty at the time of his crime and that he had suffered “childhood trauma.” In her view, “what would have been fair” was a sentence of twenty-five to life. “And Mr. Dykes has now served over thirty years,” she said. As a condition of his resentencing, a psychologist had met with him earlier to determine whether he was a threat to public safety. Solway said the psychologist found that “there is precious little reason to believe that the defendant will return to a life of crime.”
When it was Pomerantz’s turn to speak, he agreed that Solway’s discovery “came through random circumstances,” but, he said, “it was not a random event, in that their office did what previous administrations would not do”—dig into the allegations of Batson violations to determine their extent. He added, “The documents that came out in Mr. Dykes’s case have been there the whole time. They have been sitting there the whole time, and no one else wanted to see what was there.” Pomerantz made it clear that he thought there might be further ramifications for the prosecutors involved in this case and others, and he mentioned that the State Bar of California, which disciplines attorneys, had contacted him and Tria. (He had sent the State Bar documents from capital cases handled by seven Alameda County prosecutors.)
The proceeding lasted nearly an hour. At times, Pomerantz and Tria looked up at the screen on the side of the courtroom and saw that their client was getting emotional, taking his glasses off to wipe his eyes. Near the end, Judge Stevens said that he would grant the D.A.’s request for a new prison sentence—thirty-one years and nine months—as long as Dykes agreed to waive his right to appeal. “Does your client agree to that?” Stevens asked.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Tria said.
On the screen, Dykes gave a thumbs-up. He will be released from prison in the spring. ♦
Hunkered down in a West Side restaurant the other night, the writer and director George C. Wolfe and the choreographer Camille A. Brown reminisced about how they’d met. Wolfe, who is a puckish seventy years old and had on a fuzzy blue sweater, couldn’t quite remember. “It was in 2018, I believe,” Brown said. She is forty-four, and had long dreadlocks and gold hoops in her ears. She reminded Wolfe that he had hired her that year to choreograph his film “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Now the two are working together on the upcoming Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” starring Audra McDonald as the first Black Mama Rose.
Wolfe weighed in on how it was going: “Robin Wagner, the brilliant set designer, had this saying: ‘ “Collaboration” is a word that directors invented to make everyone feel good about obeying them.’ ” Brown smiled. Wolfe added, “Camille is having the time of her life.”
Brown and Wolfe had arranged to go together to the Midnight Theatre, near Hudson Yards, to see a burlesque dancer named Angie Pontani perform. Pontani has been consulting with Brown about the strippers’ dances in “Gypsy,” including the famous number “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” featuring the Strumpet with a Trumpet and her fellow-ecdysiasts. (Brown’s work on the warhorse Jule Styne–Stephen Sondheim musical will not include Jerome Robbins’s original choreography.) Before the show, the two friends were catching up in the private dining room of the theatre’s restaurant. On arriving, Wolfe took one look at a table set for twelve and said, “Lots of seats. One for each of our multiple personalities.”
Sipping a cranberry juice, Wolfe explained how, in his conception of “Gypsy,” “burlesque is the place where truth gets told.” In the musical, which is based on Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir, the stage mother Rose finally gives up on vaudeville and pushes her daughter Louise into stripping. “By the time we get to Act II, vaudeville is dead,” Wolfe said. “In place of aspiration and romanticism is truth. And, if strippers are going to survive this place, then truth becomes their weapon. So it becomes this crash course between What We Were Planning For and What Is.”
Louise comes into her own on the burlesque stage, eclipsing her cosseted little sister, June. “Having been the girl who was never ‘seen,’ Louise winds up being very, very seen,” Wolfe said.
“It’s not voyeurism,” Brown noted. “It’s her taking the space.” Later in the show, Mama Rose takes the space in her own way, belting her showstopping cri de coeur “Rose’s Turn.” “One story is told through song, and one is told through dance,” Brown said.
“Some people call Rose a monster,” Wolfe said. “This is a character in a musical written in 1959, who is standing center stage and singing, ‘Someone tell me, when is it my turn? Don’t I get a dream for myself?’ A mother, saying, ‘Where’s mine?’ ” He went on, “Male characters get to sing about that stuff all the time: ‘I gotta be me!’ ‘To dream the impossible dream!’ ” Brown nodded. Wolfe added, “Welcome to the mess of parenting. Welcome to the mess of not receiving what you thought you were due.”
Ten minutes before curtain, Wolfe and Brown took their seats in the theatre. Pontani came out wearing a sparkly silver ensemble, accessorized with long gloves and heels, and performed three slinky, sensuous dances, interspersed with peppy versions of standards performed by a quintet led by Pontani’s husband, Brian Newman, who is the bandleader for Lady Gaga’s jazz shows. During the burlesque numbers, Pontani energetically manipulated her arsenal of G-strings and feather fans into a storm cloud of come-hither and don’t-even. When she gleefully swirled her tasselled pasties in her husband’s face, Wolfe burst out laughing. Earlier, he’d talked about the strippers in “Gypsy” and how they have “a toughness, but also a humanity.” Pontani, he said, “helped us find not just what is sensually assaultive but that which is humane.”
After taking their bows, Pontani and Newman came out into the audience to say hello to Wolfe and Brown. Pontani, in a honking Jersey accent, expounded on one of her dances, a ballet-themed piece in which she’d been draped in a bit of gauzy white fabric. “I love a costume that fits in a ziplock,” she said.
Thanking her, Wolfe said that he had an early rehearsal, and Brown needed to catch a train. A few moments later, they were gone. Gone like vaudeville. ♦
From the ferry to Cherry Grove, a historic queer enclave on Fire Island, the Belvedere Guest House looks like a plate of meringues. Closer up, pastel gates and an ornate fountain hint at the compound’s high-camp interior. As a rule, the guests are all men. But this year an artist and onetime Guggenheim-grant recipient named Samantha Nye persuaded the Belvedere’s owners to let her rent the grounds for a four-day film project—a lesbian takeover of the inner sanctum.
Several weeks before the shoot, in the waning days of the regular season, Nye walked two freshly thawed cakes to a community center situated a few blocks from the Belvedere, to serve at an afternoon casting call. She was looking for ten to fifteen lesbians over the age of sixty for a large group scene that she referred to as a “pleasure party.” She had secured soft commitments from a few out-of-towners, including a former nun, but, given the cost of accommodations in Cherry Grove, she needed to drum up interest among the locals.
An advertisement for the event featured one of Nye’s recent paintings, a Hieronymus Bosch-like tableau of nude seventysomethings. “Weirdly, I never went through a phase of not painting older women,” she said. Peers bored her as subjects. In art school, the only self-portraits she painted included her mother and grandmother. Slowly, she took herself out of the work. “I’m thinking of Matthew McConaughey in ‘Dazed and Confused’: ‘I get older, they stay the same age,’ ” Nye, who is forty-four, said. “It’s kind of like that, but in reverse.”
She set up in the community center’s theatre, where leaflets announced upcoming productions: a trans reimagining of Sondheim, a one-man show called “Pearl Necklace.” She changed into a striped yellow caftan, her black curls piled high.
A few women trickled in, including Kathleen O’Donnell, a longtime renter who had offered to photograph the event. She was too young to participate, but she had been trying to spread the word about Nye’s project. The reaction had been mixed. “When people hear ‘pleasure party,’ they kind of think of one thing,” she said.
“If it can help you get the friends that feel timid, I’m happy to rename,” Nye told her. “Because pleasure really tends to everything.” Examples were furnished: sunbathing, holding hands, a fully clothed simulation of a book club. “The only thing I ask is that people are comfortable around nudity and sexuality, because other people may choose to perform in that way,” she said.
Nye approached O’Donnell’s friend Martha Lorenzo, a retired special-education teacher, who wore a raffia cowboy hat. “You seem interested,” Nye said. “A little on the fence, but—”
“I have commitment issues,” Lorenzo said.
O’Donnell offered her friend a gentle encouragement: “How cool would it be for you to be in it? After the fact?”
Lorenzo scoffed: “Oh, so, when I’m not here on earth you can watch me?”
Nye: “We want to experience it with you now, and then, yes, have this artifact.”
Lorenzo considered. “I’m going to be a tree,” she said.
“You can be a tree!” Nye replied.
“No, I actually want to be a tree,” Lorenzo said. “When I die, I want to be a tree.”
Nye explained that an intimacy coördinator would be on hand at the shoot. “She has ways that people can be nude, feel nude, be seen as nude, but not actually be nude,” Nye said.
Lorenzo cut in: “You mean, you would Photoshop me to have a new body?”
“No!” Nye said. “No Photoshop.”
She ushered some guests to a folding table, where the two cakes sat, oddly, amid plates of fake desserts. “You have to decide what you think is real,” she said.
The event wrapped shortly after a visit from a union electrician who introduced herself as Nikki Tits. Nye was desperate to cast her, but she was hard to pin down. Later, Nye canvassed the beach, without much success. A dog pawed at a sand sculpture of a prone cowboy in a Speedo. The dog’s owner was too young to participate in the film, but she directed Nye down the sand. “There are ladies down that way that might be in your age group,” she said. “And they’re both fully naked, like, all of the time.” Nye approached. Two friends, Judy Greenberg and Ellen Gold, clothes off, were smoking a joint and sipping vodka-cranberries from red cups. They said that they had met years earlier at Robert Moses beach, when Greenberg spotted Gold sitting alone knitting pocketbooks out of videotape. Nye made her pitch.
Greenberg said, “I heard about it, but I didn’t inquire, because we’re not lesbians.”
“You know what?” Nye said. “That doesn’t matter to me.” Greenberg gave her a spliff for the walk back. ♦
