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Early Saturday morning, when President Donald Trump launched a bombing raid on Venezuela and captured its strongman President, Nicolás Maduro, few observers were entirely surprised. Trump has long said that he wanted Maduro out of power, branding him a narco-terrorist and placing a fifty-million-dollar bounty on his head. In recent months, Trump and his “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, have deployed a huge military force to the region, launching attacks on at least thirty so-called narco-boats and killing more than a hundred alleged drug runners.

Maduro and his wife were taken into custody aboard the U.S.S. Iwo Jima, an assault ship; unverified photos circulated of Maduro in handcuffs. Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly congratulated Trump, saying that Maduro had been indicted in the Southern District of New York on drug-trafficking and other charges and would “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who by all accounts was key to the campaign, re-shared a post on X that he made in July: “Maduro is NOT the president of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government. Maduro is the head of the Cartel de los Soles, a narco-terror organization which has taken possession of a country.” Rubio’s assertions, like Trump’s claims that the attacks on boatmen have stopped fentanyl smuggling into the U.S., were unaccompanied by any publicly available evidence.

I interviewed Maduro in 2017, as Trump began agitating for his removal. Maduro spoke of his mentor, Hugo Chávez, the founder of the Bolivarian revolution. Chávez was a fierce ideologue, but, Maduro said, even he had avoided pushing the U.S. too far. “He understood that he needed to have a good relationship with el poder”—the power. Maduro’s own relationship with Trump was tendentious. He mocked Trump in rallies, calling him the “king of wigs.” But he was also willing to meet with his envoy Richard Grenell last year, reportedly to discuss a deal under which Venezuela provided access to its oil reserves, the largest in the world. That deal was evidently set aside as various members of the Administration debated how to proceed.

Back in 2017, the prospect of an outright attack on Venezuela seemed remote. “No one involved in real military planning has ever thought of this as a place we’d put blood and treasure into—because, quite apart from anything else, there’s no national-security threat,” a U.S. official told me at the time. In Trump’s second term, though, he has sought to reassert the Monroe Doctrine, by which the U.S. had dominion in its sphere of influence. In a celebratory press conference Saturday morning, he proclaimed, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” He also spoke forthrightly about taking over the Venezuelan oil industry, which he has repeatedly argued should belong to the United States. Right-wing leaders in Latin America seem happy to enable him: Javier Milei of Argentina and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, jubilantly welcomed the attack on Venezuela. On the left, Presidents Gabriel Boric of Chile, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico expressed deep concerns. The Communist leaders of Cuba called for the international community to resist “state terrorism”—no doubt fearful that the Trump Administration intends to go after them next. Trump suggested as much in his press conference. Rubio, a longtime critic of Cuba, came to the lectern to add, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government I’d be concerned, at least.”

The operation to remove Maduro came precisely thirty-six years after President George H. W. Bush sent the U.S. military to invade Panama and depose General Manuel Noriega. A former American proxy, Noriega had begun criticizing the United States in rallies and machete-waving speeches; he was taken into custody and, like Maduro, accused of drug trafficking. When I met Noriega in prison, in 2015, two years before his death, he largely insisted on his innocence but expressed regret at having taken on the Americans. If he had the chance to do things over, he said, he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Trump insisted in Saturday’s press conference that, by deposing Maduro, he had removed the “kingpin of a vast criminal network” that trafficked huge amounts of cocaine into the U.S. Ironically, just weeks before, he had extended a full pardon to the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who in 2024 was convicted in the Southern District of New York of cocaine trafficking and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. Trump’s reasoning was that, like him, Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” by political opponents.

When I met with Maduro in 2017, he spoke bluffly about the limits of the effort to remove him from office. “They want me out, but, if I leave this chair, whom shall we put in it?” he said. “Who can be the President?” Many Venezuelans support Edmundo González and María Corina Machado, the apparent winners of the Presidential election that Maduro stole in 2024. González was the Presidential candidate, but the real power is Machado, a conservative Catholic from a wealthy family who built a following as an ardent critic of the Maduro regime. Both have been in hiding, though Machado appeared in Oslo last month to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. Cannily, she dedicated the award “to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump.”

In the press conference, Trump called Machado “a very nice woman” but said that she doesn’t have the “respect within the country” to lead. Instead, he said, the U.S. would “run” Venezuela in the immediate term, as part of a “group” that also apparently included U.S. oil companies. They will have to contend with Maduro’s senior officials, who remain largely in place. They include the hard-line military chief General Vladimir Padrino López; Diosdado Cabello, the equally hard-line interior minister; and Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, a tough-minded operator. All have denounced Maduro’s abduction. Padrino, in a press conference of his own, condemned “the most criminal military aggression” and declared the activation of a national-defense plan, including widespread mobilization of Venezuelan forces on land, sea, and air. Reportedly, in response, Trump said that the U.S. was prepared to mount a second military intervention. Yet many questions remain unanswered. Why take out Maduro and leave his supporters in place? Can his loyalists still carry the timeworn Bolivarian revolution forward? Will Trump offer Maduro refuge in another country—perhaps Turkey—in exchange for his asking his comrades in Caracas to stand down? Or will the remaining officials find a way to hold on to power? (In the press conference, Trump praised Delcy Rodríguez, saying that she had been exceptionally coöperative.)

It remains to be seen how Venezuelans, both in government and in the street, will respond to the increased presence of U.S. power in their country. Twenty-four years ago, I spoke with Hugo Chávez in Fuerte Tiuna, a military headquarters in Caracas that was bombed in last night’s raid. He told me that he would never let the Americans take him alive, to parade him around like a trophy. Chávez, who died of cancer in 2013, avoided such a humiliation. Maduro did not have the insight, or the instincts, to forge a different destiny for himself. ♦

On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump announced that the United States military, working with American law-enforcement officials, had carried out a strike in Venezuela, capturing the country’s President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro was indicted in a federal court in New York for his role in what the Administration claims is a narco-terrorism conspiracy. At a press conference later on Saturday, Trump said, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” He also said that he was not concerned about “boots on the ground,” referring to an American military presence.

I spoke by phone on Saturday morning with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of its Center for Global Legal Challenges. She is also the president-elect of the American Society of International Law. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Maduro can legally be tried in American courts, the long history of U.S. meddling in Latin America, and what makes Trump’s decision so uniquely dangerous.

What is the legal basis, such as it is, for this action?

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a legal basis for what we’re seeing in Venezuela. There are certainly legal arguments that the Administration is going to make, but all the arguments that I’ve heard so far don’t hold water. None of them really justify what the President seems to have ordered to take place in Venezuela.

What are the arguments that you’ve heard from either people in the Administration or from their supporters?

We’re still in the early hours, but the arguments that have been made in the run-up to this full-scale effort have largely focussed on self-defense against drug traffickers, who they claim are being supported or maybe even directed by Maduro and his administration. The problem is that that really doesn’t work under international law. There is a right of self-defense under the United Nations charter, which allows states to use force in self-defense against an armed attack. But it’s never been used for something like drug trafficking. And so all of these boat strikes that have been taking place over the past couple of months, which have been justified as self-defense, don’t fall within anything that anyone would recognize as self-defense under international law. Self-defense generally requires that there’s actually an armed attack. And it seems like they’re making a similar argument here to justify the capture of Maduro and the use of force on land in Venezuela.

What do you think of the argument that lots of people in America die from drug overdoses and so this is a form of self-defense?

Look, when the U.N. charter was written eighty years ago, it included a critical prohibition on the use of force by states. States are not allowed to decide on their own that they want to use force against other states. It was meant to reinforce this relatively new idea at the time that states couldn’t just go to war whenever they wanted to. In the old world, the pre-U.N. charter world, it would have been fine to use force if you felt like drug trafficking was hurting you, and you could come up with legal justification that that was the case. But the whole point of the U.N. charter was basically to say, “We’re not going to go to war for those reasons anymore.”

The charter included a very narrow exception, which was an exception for the use of self-defense. The idea there was that surely we shouldn’t have to wait for the Security Council to authorize a use of force in order to defend ourselves if we’re attacked. But that was meant to be a narrow exception.

If drug trafficking is a reasonable justification, then a whole range of possible arguments can be made that basically mean that self-defense is no longer a real exception. It’s the new rule. Why couldn’t you make the same argument about communicable diseases? There’s bird flu coming from a country, and therefore we have a legal justification for the use of military force. Once we start going down that road, the idea that there’s any limit evaporates. I mean, yes, drugs are horrific. Do they cause loss of life in the United States? Absolutely. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a terrible scourge, but the idea that because drugs are coming from a country it justifies an invasion and a change of administration in that country basically gets rid of any kind of limits on the use of force.

What other arguments have you heard from the Administration?

One of the claims is that Maduro is not, in fact, the leader of Venezuela. This is something that they’ve been saying for a while now—that he’s not the legitimate leader of the country, that they don’t recognize him as the head of state. And that might justify his seizure and indictment, although using military force to do that would not be justified. I don’t know how they get from there to an argument that they can use military force in Venezuela.

What do you mean, exactly, about his “seizure and indictment”? Venezuela had an election. It was not a free election. He declared himself President, and he’s broadly recognized as the President of Venezuela, but, again, he was not freely elected by the people of Venezuela. That could justify his indictment in an American court?

I should back up. As part of this military operation, at least one of the key goals seems to have been the capture of Maduro and his wife, who have been indicted for criminal charges in the Southern District of New York. The only way they can do that is if they’re claiming that he’s not a head of state, because heads of state get immunity and heads of state are not subject to criminal prosecution in the domestic courts of other states. That’s just a basic rule of international law. The United States has long recognized it.

So you were not saying that the fact that he stole an election per se means you can grab him and try him in an American court, but rather that if he were not a head of state, that would at least allow for trying him in an American court, which normally would not be the case?

Right. So if he’s not actually a head of state, then head-of-state immunity doesn’t apply. And it’s connected to this broader question of the use of military force in that it may be that they would make a claim, although I haven’t yet seen this, that because he’s not the legitimate head of state that somehow they have a legal authority to use force to grab him. But, again, the two don’t connect. So the problem is that merely saying that he’s not head of state doesn’t then justify the use of military force in Venezuela.

Five years ago, Maduro was federally indicted in a Manhattan court on charges of narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking.

Yes. The 2020 indictment argued that he and several other Venezuelan officials had participated in a violent narco-terrorism conspiracy with various non-state actor groups, including the FARC, which is a Colombian group, and that that had been connected to drug trafficking in the United States. [A new indictment, unsealed on Saturday, reiterated the previous charges and added Maduro’s wife and son to the list of defendants.]

So if Maduro goes to trial in an American court, is this going to be a contested legal issue about whether he can even be tried based on whether he is the head of state of Venezuela? Is that something that American courts are going to have to weigh in on?

Yes, it is something that the American courts are going to have to weigh in on. It definitely is the case that his lawyers will make the argument that he’s a sitting head of state at the time that he was seized and that he remains the sitting head of state and therefore under international law and under U.S. law, he should be given immunity, which means that he’s not subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and can’t be criminally charged. This has come up once before with the criminal indictment of Manuel Noriega, the former leader of Panama, when the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989 and seized Noriega and then brought him back to the United States and indicted him for drug smuggling and money laundering.

Back then, Noriega argued that he enjoyed head-of-state immunity, and the executive branch argued that he didn’t because the United States had not recognized him as a legitimate leader of Panama. That gives us a hint as to what is likely to happen in this case. My guess is that the United States will argue that it’s never recognized Maduro as a legitimate leader of Venezuela and therefore he doesn’t receive immunity. And the courts are going to be in the position of having to decide whether they defer to the executive branch’s determination that he’s not head of state or whether they make an independent assessment of his legitimacy as a leader of Venezuela.

How did the Noriega case play out?

In the Noriega case, the courts deferred to the executive branch. They said they were going to accept that the executive branch said that he’s not a constitutional head of state, and therefore he can, in fact, be prosecuted.

Seems quite possible they will do so again now.

It seems likely they’re going to do the same thing. I mean, this is a weaker argument on the part of the executive branch.

Why weaker?

Maduro did clearly seize power after losing the election. But, nonetheless, he’s been acting as the head of state for quite a while, and he’s been recognized by a number of other countries as a legitimate head of state. He’s been exercising the powers of head of state. He’s been directing the military. He’s been running the country. Noriega had served as an unelected military dictator alongside various Panamanian Presidents. So he had a weaker claim to be head of state. But, to be clear, none of that justified the use of force.

So, according to international law, if you are acting like the head of state and have the powers of the head of state, you are the head of state?

There’s some uncertainty, but generally speaking, under international law, if you exercise effective control, you are basically running the country.

The idea that Trump can basically decide who is the head of state of a given country is absurd and terrifying to me. At another level, there does seem to be something absurd and even terrifying about the idea that someone who is not elected can become the leader of a country and then will be recognized as the leader of that country and receive the immunities afforded to heads of state. How do you think about that?

It’s an area of law that is unsettled and can create real problems. The dangerous thing here is the idea that a President can just decide that a leader is not legitimate and then invade the country and presumably put someone in power who is favored by the Administration. If that were the case, that’s the end of international law, that’s the end of the U.N. charter, that’s the end of any kind of legal limits on the use of force. And if the President can do that, what’s to stop a Russian leader from doing it, or a Chinese leader from doing it, or anyone with the power to do so? We’ve been supporting Ukraine, and its war against Russia and Putin has been making very much the same argument about Zelensky.

You’re right to point out however, absolutely, that there’s something that seems also wrong from a democratic perspective about the idea that whoever manages to control a country somehow gets to be in charge of it, even if they’re not legitimate, even if they haven’t won the election. This has been a real source of tension in international law. Who gets to decide who is a legitimate leader? Who is it to make the decision that they should use military force to address that problem?

Let me just quickly go back to Noriega, because this does seem very similar to what George H. W. Bush did in Panama. In that case, a bad guy was running a country, the country’s not in great shape, there was a long and sordid history between the country and the U.S., and the U.S. decided to overthrow the person and arrest them. Do you think this is a good analogy for what we’re seeing now? Were there major differences?

Yeah, it’s similar. There were a number of arguments made by the Bush people that were similar. There were some differences back then, and there was also a claim that the Panama Canal treaties gave a legal justification for the invasion, but otherwise the arguments are very similar. It’s important to note that the U.N. General Assembly condemned that invasion as a flagrant violation of international law, and I think that was a correct assessment. It was clearly illegal and we’re doing something clearly illegal again here in Venezuela. So, yes, it does seem like we’re following a fairly similar playbook.

When I e-mailed you suggesting that we do an interview, you responded and mentioned the Monroe Doctrine. Was there anything else you wanted to say about that?

What’s troubling here is that it seems that President Trump may be making good on his promise and his national-security strategy that he issued last month to revive the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine was basically a justification by the United States to exercise force in Latin America. And that was renounced by President Franklin Roosevelt as part of a shift away from the idea that states could use force whenever they wanted to. It was an endorsement of the idea that we’re outlawing war as a way of solving our problems. But Trump’s claim that he’s creating a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine suggests that this is not just a one-off. The Panama invasion was at least a one-off.

In his press conference, Trump said that the United States would “run the country.” And he made it clear that he was not “afraid” to put boots on the ground—for years, if necessary. That’s nothing like the operation to seize Noriega from Panama, which was short-lived. And it’s nothing like anything Trump has done before today. His previous illegal uses of force were all over shortly after they began. The scale of the operation that will be required is massive, and it means putting U.S. soldiers at long-term risk.

He also claimed that we would take the oil in Venezuela. He even suggested that some of the oil would be taken to pay the United States back for oil “stolen” from us—presumably a reference to nationalization of the oil companies in the nineteen-seventies. That is looting, plain and simple, and clearly unlawful. It also makes clear that this is not about what’s best for the Venezuelan people. It’s all about the oil.

Yes, Trump also just said on Fox News that this was a message to Mexico and that his Administration may have to follow up by doing something in Mexico. I don’t think he meant removing Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, but still.

Yeah, that’s the danger. And, just to be clear, this is catastrophic as a shift away from a world in which we deal with our problems peacefully toward a world in which we deal with our problems using military force.

I’m not sure that the United States for any extended period of time has ever dealt with its problems in Latin America peacefully.

But it has not invaded countries and got rid of their leaders as a way of dealing with problems like drug trafficking. This is a different level.

It did support numerous coups.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, the U.S. has not got a perfect record. There’s no doubt about that, and it has betrayed its values many times, but this is of a different order. This is just a blatant throwing-the-whole-thing-out and making a claim to be able to use force whenever it wants.

Trump does some things that are really uniquely bad and other things that are in line with the behavior of past American Presidents, but that feel more disturbing because of how he goes about them. It’s interesting to think about how this fits in one of those two boxes.

It is telling that, in that Fox interview, he was very dismissive of any suggestion that Congress should somehow have been involved in this. And, of course, it’s important to remember that it’s not just international law that’s an issue here; it’s also U.S. domestic law and particularly constitutional law that requires the President to go to Congress to seek authorization before using force against another country. [At the press conference, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, said that this was “not the kind of mission you can do congressional notification on,” characterizing it as “largely a law-enforcement” operation.] And part of what’s troubling here is not just that the President has used force in clear violation of domestic law and international law but that it’s clear he couldn’t care less about the fact that he’s breaking these rules. We’re talking not just about the U.N. charter but about the U.S. Constitution.

And that just suggests there may be no limits, that he’s just going to do what he thinks is warranted based on his own kind of reasoning, as opposed to any kind of constraints or legal limits or having to seek advice or consent from the international community or the U.S. Congress. That, I think, is what’s so scary about this. ♦

Janet Delaney’s father, Bill, worked as a salon-to-salon salesman, peddling hair and beauty products throughout the greater Los Angeles area for thirty-two years. In 1980, when Delaney was twenty-seven and her father was preparing to retire, she decided to photograph him at work. She disdained the things her father sold—Revlon “Ever-So-Lively,” Revlon Realistic rubber bands with perm rods, Diamond Delight by the gallon. “I would use none of it. In my mind, Revlon represented capitalism’s oppressive hold on women’s self-image,” she writes in a new book of photographs, “Too Many Products Too Much Pressure,” which is being published, by the Los Angeles-based indie press Deadbeat Club, forty-five years after she took the pictures. “At the time, I was a bushy-haired hippie,” Delaney, who is now seventy-three, told me. “I was a feminist, and I wouldn’t wear lipstick, and I wouldn’t do my hair up or wear nylons or any of the things that my dad attributed to success and a good presentation,” she added.

Back when Delaney was growing up, Bill was practically the only father on their street who wore a suit to work. He was soft-spoken and always polite—a trait he had needed to survive a precarious childhood in Chicago. Born in 1915, he was adopted from an orphanage at age two; by the time he was ten, both of his adoptive parents had died. He moved in with his adoptive grandfather, who left him at home alone every night while he worked as a watchman. When a local priest heard about this, he arranged for Bill to work as a live-in houseboy for a wealthy widow whom Bill came to call Mother Wood. But she didn’t “step into a familial role,” Delaney told me. When her fortune was wiped out in the Great Depression, Bill had to move out, and he went to work as a stock boy, then as an usher at a movie theatre, and then as a truck dispatcher, before becoming a beauty-product salesman. In 1941, Bill met Delaney’s mother, Connie, and married her just three months later. They both “came from nothing,” Delaney told me, and saw having a family as an achievement. (Connie’s parents had had a rough divorce.) “There was a real resilience and a sense of love in the house,” Delaney said.

Delaney’s older brother and sister were born in Chicago, but the family moved to Compton, California, before she was born. She was thirteen in 1965, when the Watts Rebellion ignited through nearby neighborhoods. Her sister, who was ten years older, had graduated from Berkeley and married a man who turned out to have schizophrenia. She moved home with a three-month-old baby, and Delaney listened to her sister talk about the progressive ideas she had learned at college. They decided that Delaney would spend a summer living with her in Haight-Ashbury, helping to look after the child. Those months made a huge impression on Delaney. (She remembers her mother asking what it had been like. “Mom, it was far out,” was all she could say.) Her parents’ world now felt like a place “where everything was artifice,” she said. “Everything was makeup and hairdos and clothing.”

In eleventh grade, Delaney signed up for a photography class. There, she was introduced to her first camera, a Yashica. The darkroom felt safe. “I created a life based on making sure I could be a photographer,” she said. In 1979, she enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the San Francisco Art Institute. (Bill sold enough products to send all three of his kids to college.) She had spent six months in Central America taking photographs a couple of years before, but those pictures didn’t reflect the feelings she had experienced while taking them. She wanted to be “working from the inside,” she decided. She told her father that she wanted him to be her subject, and he agreed to the project without hesitation. Soon, she learned that he’d been telling the women at the salons all about her. “When I showed up with a camera, nobody was surprised, because they knew I was a photographer,” she said. “They knew so much about me and they were just charmed to meet me, finally.” Bill had been showing them pictures of his kids for decades.

“Too Many Products Too Much Pressure” is, in part, a psychological portrait of Delaney’s father at work. Looking at the photographs, you feel his anxiety and exhaustion, his awareness of playing the part of a salesman, and the accumulation of paperwork as he makes his sales; the more he does, the more there is to do. In one image, he lies in a bubble bath, but his expression is one of alarm, as though he is staring at all the work he has done and has yet to finish. Any disdain that Delaney may have had for his occupation seems to melt away, particularly as the women who work in and run the salons appear in the pictures. At one salon, above a row of glass-bowl hairdryers, there’s a poster showing a perm machine from the nineteen-twenties that looks like something out of Frankenstein’s lab. A woman is attached to it, her hands clasped as though begging for mercy. Farther along the wall are the framed and embroidered words, “Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.” Delaney photographs the salon employees as they stare into space, or negotiate good-naturedly with Bill, or coax short fine hair onto rollers.

Delaney interviewed her father for the project, too, and his quotes appear in the book. “Working in a beauty shop is not the most masculine thing that the average man thinks about doing,” he told her. Still, he was proud of being a salesman. “I know that nothing happens until something is sold,” he said. Bill taught Delaney how to talk to anyone, she told me, which proved to be a useful skill for an artist who mainly photographs strangers. She also learned to embrace a “constant feeling of work.” And she learned the importance of recording things that otherwise disappear—“I’m an archivist at heart,” she told me. When her mother would talk about her family, Delaney’s father “would get really quiet,” she said. She and her siblings would ask him about his family, and he would reply, “Well, I don’t have much to say.” She realized later that her father “photographed so much.” He was consciously creating a record for his kids that he didn’t have of his own childhood; also, “he liked gadgets.” Now his children have 8-mm. movies, “a huge amount” of color slides, and carefully compiled albums with deckle-edged pictures and white-ink captions.

There is something in Delaney’s images that makes us want to understand and know her father—and, perhaps, to know the Bills in our own lives better. Delaney showed the photographs in Chicago, and a man came up to her afterward. He was “worked up, a little anxious,” she said, “and he goes, ‘I just have to go home and talk to my dad right away.’ ”

In 1922, a recent high-school graduate from Berkeley, California, moved to Los Angeles, with the hope of becoming an actress. She called herself Helen Joan Lowell, eventually dropping the Helen and going by Joan. She got work as an extra in “Souls for Sale,” a movie about a young woman who tries to become a Hollywood star. The bit part didn’t attract much attention but, later that year, a detail from her biography did: Lowell told a reporter that, from the time she was an infant, she had lived on a four-masted ship, the Minnie A. Caine, captained by her father. She had spent sixteen of her nineteen years on the schooner, she said. Living on land was still new to her.

The following February, the Los Angeles Times featured Lowell in a story on Hollywood extras. Having grown up alongside an all-male crew, Lowell “never saw another girl until she was 16,” she said. Another L.A. paper reported that Lowell had survived shipwrecks and scurvy as a child, and dubbed her “the most fascinating catch of the far-flung movie net in many moons.” That June, her nautical history helped her land a major role in a sea epic called “Loving Lies.” She and the movie’s screenwriter and producer, Thompson Buchanan, began dating. Lowell soon got smaller parts in other movies, including Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush,” released in 1925. Two years later, Lowell and Buchanan were married, in a secret ceremony.

It was the era of the Hollywood starlet, when the right personal history could hasten one’s rise to national fame. Lowell was not a gifted actress, but newspapers across the country wanted interviews. The details she offered varied somewhat, though few people seemed to notice. Lowell initially said that her mother died shortly after giving birth to her, and that she went to live on the ship at six months old. Later, she’d say her mother had given her up because she was sick of raising kids, and would peg the start of her life at sea to the age of three months. Sometimes she said she moved aboard the ship even earlier, after doctors told her father that she was “too frail to live.”

Lowell hit the speaking circuit, delighting radio stations and businesswomen’s groups with her story. In 1928, she and Buchanan dined with a prominent publicist, Edward Bernays, in his Manhattan home. Bernays listened to Lowell’s stories with such “rapt attention” that he forgot to eat his meal, he later told a correspondent. He urged Lowell to write a book about her life; a month later, she brought him a first chapter. He forwarded it to a literary agent, George T. Bye, who contacted the upstart press Simon & Schuster, which had launched in 1924. Richard Simon and Max Schuster met with Lowell, then drew up plans to publish her memoir. Lowell asked them whether she should take writing classes. “If you study how to write, we’ll break your neck!” Simon replied. Lowell later claimed that she wrote a draft in eight weeks.

The manuscript she turned in was full of remarkable tales. When Lowell was an infant, the ship’s crew puzzled over how to feed her; while docked at Norfolk Island, one sailor brought a goat on board, nicknamed it Wet Nurse, and fed its milk to Lowell for months. (“I owe my life today” to Wet Nurse, Lowell writes.) Lowell also recounts witnessing a mass wedding in the South Pacific, after which the couples publicly consummated their marriages, and claims to have watched her father save their ship from a waterspout by shooting it with a rifle. At the book’s climax, the Minnie A. Caine catches fire off the coast of Australia; to survive, Lowell swims three miles to shore, with a pair of kittens clinging to her back.

The book, titled “The Cradle of the Deep,” was scheduled for publication on March 7, 1929, and Simon & Schuster positioned it as a blockbuster. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which, in a few short years, had amassed more than a hundred thousand subscribers, made the memoir an official pick, effectively guaranteeing big sales. A wire service proclaimed that the book would “be one of the literary sensations of the year.” The director D. W. Griffith took an interest, eventually optioning the “The Cradle of the Deep” for film, with Lowell attached to star.

It was not long before people began poking holes in Lowell’s story. But the book didn’t sink—it was a great success, in part for reasons new to her era and familiar to ours. “The Cradle of the Deep” appeared just as the publishing industry was consolidating a new kind of influence in popular culture, in concert with new forms of mass media. And Lowell weathered the inevitable controversy in a manner that feels distinctly contemporary: with a seeming awareness that, these days, fame of any kind can be profitable.

The first warning sign surfaced shortly before the book was published. When Simon sent a copy to a wholesaler, one employee, an avid sailor, told him that he thought the book was the “biggest hoax of the century.” Simon took the accusation to Lowell, asking if she might have embellished parts of her life. Lowell denied it. Then, in early March, Simon got a call from an editor at the New York Herald Tribune, who warned him that her paper had asked Lincoln Colcord, a freelance writer and hobbyist sailor, to review the book. Colcord had filed an article so critical the paper worried that it verged into libel. A meeting was set to broker the peace.

Lowell and her publishers met with Colcord and his editor at the Simon & Schuster offices. Colcord said that she did not write like a person who had spent any time at sea, insisting that her book was riddled with fictitious slang and technical impossibilities. For instance, Colcord said, Lowell’s crew “reefs,” or folds, a topsail, which was not possible on the ship that Lowell was riding. Lowell whipped out a pen and paper and attempted to diagram how to fold the topsail. But Colcord kept probing, and Lowell grew agitated. Finally, a Herald Tribune book critic who was present interrupted: a friend of his worked on an ocean liner, he said—he’d call him up to settle the debate. “Hey, can you reef the topsails of a four-masted schooner?” he asked the man on the phone. A voice shouted back, “Hell, no!”

Sensing that she was losing the argument, Lowell rushed at Colcord, winding up to throw a punch before stopping short a few feet away from him. “If you weren’t so old,” she said, according to Colcord, before sitting back down. “God damn it!” she shouted. “No one has ever called me a liar before!” Both Simon and Schuster hurried to Lowell’s side. “Never mind, Joan,” they told her, according to Colcord. “We still believe in you.”

Days later, “The Cradle of the Deep” became a best-seller. This magazine called it “vivid, rich, and vigorous”; as far away as Honolulu, booksellers struggled to keep the book in stock. At the launch party, celebrities and high-society types gathered on an ocean liner, the Île de France. Griffith was there, as was the adventurer Robert Ripley and the editor John Farrar. “Gee, I can’t tell you how happy I am,” Lowell wrote to her publishers. “I feel as I used to feel on the ship when we were in the center of a hurricane, and the air suddenly becomes still and every heart-throb sounds like a canon.”

That metaphor, with its unspoken promise of imminent peril, was more apt than she knew. Ten days after the book’s publication, the Herald Tribune printed Colcord’s review, under the innocuous headline “Sea Movie.” Based on her descriptions of sailing, Lowell was “far from being a real seaman,” Colcord wrote. In fact, he argued, her book—destined to be the biggest memoir of 1929—read like an elaborate hoax.

After the review appeared, reporters began to dig in. Joan Lowell, they discovered, was not her real name—she had been born Helen Joan Wagner. The Minnie A. Caine had not burned at sea; it was docked in Oakland, California, and very much intact. Four different acquaintances came forward to say that Lowell had attended school with them in Berkeley through middle and high school. An old next-door neighbor of several years said that Lowell was “not gone for extended periods.” A classmate showed the Herald Tribune a photo of Lowell starring as Lady Macbeth in a school play.

Some details held up. Lowell’s father really was a ship captain. And he, at least, had experience with disaster: in 1908, his ship, the Star of Bengal, struck a rock off the coast of Alaska and sank, and more than a hundred crew members died. Lowell was not on that ship, though she did sometimes sail on the Minnie A. Caine as a child. Her mother worked on board as a stewardess, preparing meals for the crew. A sailor named Harvey Jeans said that Lowell gravitated to the books on deck, and had appointed herself the ship’s librarian.

The fraud became a national story. “Any damn fool can be accurate—and dull,” Lowell told one reporter. “I’ll admit that the cats were thrown in for color,” she said. But she was defiant, and would confess to no other major inaccuracies. Meanwhile, the book only grew more popular. The Book-of-the-Month Club offered its subscribers the option to return the book for a full refund, but only a few thousand did. Simon & Schuster reclassified the book as fiction and, to the firm’s surprise, more orders poured in—the following week, the book topped the best-seller list again, in its new category. “The Cradle of the Deep” became the third-best-selling nonfiction title of 1929, and Lowell made forty-one thousand dollars in royalties, equal to more than three-quarters of a million dollars today. By 1930, she had become slightly more candid, allowing that the book was “80 percent true.” But she insisted that at least one of the changes she’d made—the burning of the ship at sea—was a charitable act “to save the hide of the insurance company.”

The literary journal The Bookman published a debate on the moral significance of Lowell’s fraud, and invited Colcord to contribute. “If today we have reached the point of progress where a literary hoax is condoned as good business … then we have fallen on evil times in American literature,” he wrote. Fake memoirs were not new, certainly; the early twentieth century saw a spate of them, including “The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang,” which was ostensibly the autobiography of a Chinese general but was actually spun up by a white American fraudster, and “Long Lance,” the first-person account of a Blackfoot warrior from Montana, written by a North Carolina-born Black man with no documented Blackfoot heritage. (Literary acts of racial fraud constitute a subgenre of their own.) Still, Colcord was not wrong to suggest that something different was afoot.

Hollywood, suddenly an entertainment powerhouse, was turning a parade of young women into stars; radio stations such as CBS and NBC—along with a new generation of mass-media outlets, including The Saturday Evening Post—could now ferry stories of scandal across America. Celebrity and publicity were beginning to take recognizably modern forms. The trajectory of Lowell and her book seems less reminiscent of “The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang,” which was debunked just six years before “The Cradle of the Deep” was published, than of James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” published more than seven decades later. Like Frey, Lowell was a self-dramatizing fraudster, taking elements of her real life and grandly embellishing them. And she responded to the ensuing notoriety in a similar way. For all of the public humiliation, neither Lowell nor any of her enablers seemed much hurt by it. The book kept selling, reporters kept scheduling interviews, and Lowell, rather than run from the bad press, decided to lean in.

In 1930, Lowell divorced Buchanan. Despite, or perhaps because of, her dubious relationship to facts, she landed a job as a reporter at a Boston tabloid owned by William Randolph Hearst, the Daily Record. Soon, she was churning out scoops that stretched credulity. Among the highlights was her alleged abduction by a naturist colony, in which a group of nude dancers encircled Lowell during a “weird, bacchanalian revel,” and a naked fireman pulled her in for a kiss. Just days after the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh disappeared, in March, 1932, Lowell claimed that she spoke to a woman who knew the kidnappers.

She began pitching a second book, to be titled “Gal Reporter.” The “Cradle of the Deep” fiasco had reportedly given Richard Simon a “nervous breakdown,” and Simon & Schuster did not elect to publish this one—but Farrar & Rinehart stepped in, and it came out in 1933. “I was hailed as a genius, a sensational young-girl author,” Lowell writes. “Book publishers asked me to sign contracts for my next ‘works.’ Cameras clicked, wine flowed, telegrams arrived.” Compared to that reception, “Gal Reporter” got a modest response. Lowell decided to go bigger: in the spring of that year, she announced her imminent departure for a trip around the world, with her aging father, in a forty-eight-foot schooner. At each new port they reached, they would “bite a chunk out of the nearest tree to show we’ve been there,” she told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. They would be at sea for “three to five years,” she said, adding, “If the landlubbers don’t like it this time they can eat it.”

Hundreds of spectators gathered outside a Brooklyn port that April to see Lowell set off. She’d hired two crew members after placing a classified ad in a local paper: “Wanted. Able bodied men. Object adventure. No pay.” She’d received hundreds of applications, she said, from doctors, bankers, dentists, and engineers—including five men who’d offered to marry her. She hired a former marine named Solon J. Sawyer and a firefighter named Otto Siegler. Also onboard was Harry Squire, a cameraman who planned to film Lowell’s journey for RKO Pictures; a film contract had already been signed.

Lowell claimed that, a few weeks or so after setting sail, a storm destroyed her water supply. Her father grew delirious, and when she tried to call for help she found that the radio was broken. Someone on the ship found a ginger-ale bottle with water left in it; bafflingly, everyone in the crew agreed to offer the water to a dog on board. Lowell sent out distress signals. When the schooner was just off the coast of El Salvador, a tramp steamer spotted them and finally supplied fresh water.

Lowell returned to Brooklyn just two months after she left, asking friends and fans for money—she said that she’d use the funds to repair the ship and set sail again. She’d left her schooner, and seemingly her father, in the Caribbean Sea. “Joan Lowell Is Home and Broke,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer announced. By the time she sped back to her father, in July, she had somehow recruited Leo Tolstoy’s grandson to work on her ship as a deckhand; New York gossip pages reported that the two were “romancing.” But, even with a second go-round, the planned multiyear expedition lasted only about ten months. Lowell was back in New York the following February, now on crutches—thanks to a skirmish with an alligator, she said.

She sent her producers a hundred thousand feet of film, which eventually became “Adventure Girl.” To promote the film, RKO ran an essay contest, and a fashion brand put out a “line of silks” inspired by the new release; the studio touted Lowell as “The Most Publicized Girl in the World.” The opening credits acknowledge that pivotal moments have been restaged but leaves the impression that everything really happened. Lowell plunders an emerald out of a wrecked ship, starts a fistfight with a local ruler, nearly dies when a boa constrictor wraps itself around her neck, and is wounded by an alligator. Journalists were suspicious. A reporter for Photoplay wondered how Squire could have kept filming during a storm while a crew member was flung into the water and after Lowell dove in to save him. “That’s why I think Harry is a wonderful cameraman,” Lowell replied.

Box-office results were disappointing. Lowell sued the production company, claiming that she was unable to work because of injuries sustained on set. The lawsuit was later dismissed; by then, Lowell was in Anápolis, Brazil, living with a New York ship captain named Leek Bowen in an eleven-room country house. They’d started a coffee plantation. Lowell offered land to other American celebrities she knew, eventually trying to sell plots to Janet Gaynor and Mary Martin; later accounts credited Lowell with starting a “land boom” in the region. Lowell did not have the right to sell the property that she sold to Martin, however, and Martin discovered this only when she arrived at her new home and the real owners shot at her.

Lowell wrote a third and final memoir, which she hoped to call “Westward Whoa!” It was pushed, in 1952, under the less enthusiastic title “Promised Land.” Her editor insisted that the book include photographs, to show that it was true. The Oscar-winning actress Joan Crawford pushed her producer to option the book, later calling Lowell a “very special person.” But the adaptation stalled, and the option lapsed. In July, 1957, Brazilian officials arrested Lowell, alleging that she’d written bad checks totalling fifteen thousand dollars. True to form, Lowell had her own version of events, telling a local paper that one of the claimants had brought a gang of thieves to her farm and threatened to kill her husband. “I am a victim of persecution,” she said, during the three weeks she spent in jail. The Daily News reported that she looked “pale and haggard” in her cell.

Her fame had diminished: after the first reports of her arrest in Brazil trickled out, the Daily News wrote that “few eyebrows were raised in Manhattan,” although “here and there, old friends and readers with long memories talked of Joan Lowell and the sensations she created in the ’20s and ’30s.” Her longtime agent, George T. Bye, died a few months after her release—when an agency took over his client list, no one there seemed to know who she was. Lowell died in her home in November, 1967, likely of pulmonary edema. The Times ran an obituary describing her as the author behind “one of the most sensational literary controversies of its time.”

When it came to her death, truth and subterfuge again seemed to blur. One Brazilian newspaper reported that Lowell had received an arson threat a week before she died—and Lowell’s maid told the press that her boss had woken up uncharacteristically early that day and made herself coffee, something she apparently never did. Could she have poisoned herself? Probably not, but you could hardly blame the public for asking. ♦

On October 10th, a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas officially ended two years of war in the Gaza Strip. The deal, which was pushed by the Trump Administration, left Israel in control of a little more than half of Gaza, with Hamas controlling the rest. Several Israeli soldiers and some four hundred Palestinians have been killed since the agreement went into effect. (The over-all death toll since the conflict began includes approximately two thousand Israelis and seventy-one thousand Palestinians.) The availability of humanitarian aid in the territory has improved—the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is backed by the United Nations and other non-governmental organizations, has said that Gaza is no longer experiencing famine—but access to food and medicine remains at dangerously substandard levels.

I recently spoke by phone with Ayed Abu Ramadan, the chairman of the Gaza Chamber of Commerce, about the current situation on the ground. (He was in Gaza City when we spoke.) Abu Ramadan was elected to the position by other business leaders in 2023; the chamber, which represents thousands of businesses, is not part of the Hamas-led government. It has been trying to help restart Gaza’s economy, and Abu Ramadan is considered an important actor in future reconstruction efforts. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the humanitarian crisis still facing Palestinians, what has and has not changed since the ceasefire, and why he decided to stay in Gaza.

How would you describe the situation in Gaza right now?

I describe it as a humanitarian catastrophe, despite the fact that the mass killing has stopped. An inhumane situation persists in Gaza. There are roughly nine hundred thousand people living in tents and on the streets without running water—sitting, sleeping, cooking, and going to the toilet in the same place, which is usually a tent that does not protect them from rain, or from sun or heat. Kids cannot go to school. There is no proper health care, no economy, no jobs. It’s really terrible.

And what about in terms of food and medical aid being able to enter the territory? Israel cut off aid completely for a couple of months in March, April, and May of 2025. How much food has been able to get in since this ceasefire began, almost three months ago?

Israel is allowing partial aid to come into Gaza. They are allowing, for example, rice and flour—things like that. But they are heavily restricting, for example, eggs, meat, and chicken. And, in order to bring in these things, you have to pay something called “coördination commissions.” For example, if you want to bring in a truckload of frozen chicken or meat, you sometimes have to pay as much as a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Inflation is going up in Gaza, and people have lost their purchasing power because they are not working. Around eighty per cent of people are unemployed. Around ninety per cent of families are below the poverty line.

So, again, Israel is putting restrictions on entry of aid into Gaza. They’re preventing school supplies from entering Gaza. So even the informal school programs cannot really proceed. Health care is really a problem, because there are not enough medicines. Even for chronic diseases, for people with cholesterol or heart problems, only with great difficulty can they find some quantities of their needed medications. Israel is controlling the entry points, the crossings into Gaza, and preventing essential goods from entering. Basic necessities are prevented from coming in. So it is a big problem.

Who’s interacting with the Israelis here? Who is trying to get supplies on the trucks? Is this being done through people in Gaza, like yourself, or is it being done by aid agencies?

This is mainly happening through humanitarian and U.N. agencies, such as UNICEF. They are talking to the Israelis directly. Humanitarian agencies have to apply for coördination and the applications go to the Israelis, but there is often no reply. We, as business leaders, have tried to talk to the Israelis several times throughout the past two years, but they are always ignoring our correspondence. Israelis are talking to certain Palestinian traders to tell them that they are allowed to bring in some food items, but they are not communicating with the Chamber of Commerce or the Palestinian Authority, or any official entity in Gaza. So they are talking to specific merchants, but we are not sure why. [A spokesman for COGAT, an Israeli agency responsible for facilitating the entry of aid into Gaza, told The New Yorker that it does not deal with the Chamber of Commerce in Gaza, but that “a limited number of local merchants have been approved by the defense establishment.”]

Is this about just making it difficult for Palestinians?

There is no explanation from the Israelis, and there are no comments from their side. But I think it’s economic warfare. I think it’s to allow some Israeli-favored people to profit here from this. It’s also to shock Palestinians so their health will deteriorate. It’s about deepening malnutrition, making life difficult. [More than thirty separate aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, had their licenses to operate in Gaza suspended on January 1st, after Israel claimed that they had not provided information about their local employees. These groups will be forced to fully stop operations by March. The COGAT spokesman told The New Yorker, “Despite attempts by several international organizations and various actors in the international arena to falsely portray the State of Israel as preventing or delaying the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, we clarify that the reality is entirely the opposite of the published claims.”]

The Gaza Strip is more or less divided between the half controlled by Hamas and the half that is controlled by the Israelis. How has this changed what life is like for Gazans?

In terms of the half of the Strip that is controlled by Israel, they’re not allowing anybody in, and anybody who comes close to what they call the yellow line may get shot or killed. So all Gazans are living inside the Hamas-controlled side, and that’s not enabling us to access our farmland, for example, or garbage-dump sites. There are also cities on the other side, even though they have been largely demolished. Factories and industrial areas are also on that side. There were several wastewater-treatment plants, too. It’s an essential part of Gaza, which is so small. It’s really causing a difficult situation.

Is one of your concerns that this is going to become a long-term border, and that the Gaza Strip and the people who live in it are going to be permanently stuck in the part of Gaza that they’re in now?

No. I think that we have a ceasefire agreement. We have a Trump plan, and we are sure, or hopeful, that the Trump plan will work and President Trump will be able to, if not convince, then force the Israelis to stick to the plan and withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

This is your hope, you’re saying?

It’s hope, and really we believe that it will most likely happen.

Is there a reason that you’re more hopeful about this than I am?

[Laughs.] Because I want to believe it. It’s our only hope. The situation cannot really continue like this.

How would you describe the attitude toward Hamas in the Gaza Strip now?

In what sense? They are controlling everything in Gaza. They are trying to help the situation in Gaza. They are providing security for us, which is most important. You cannot leave things in a vacuum. If you leave New York in a vacuum, without security, without police, what will happen? Same thing in Gaza. So we’re very comfortable with their keeping the security in Gaza. For instance, before the signing of the ceasefire agreement, there was lots of looting of humanitarian aid, and these looters were backed up. They were militias backed up by Israel and protected by Israel. The main one was the Abu Shabab group. They used to loot trucks, and then take refuge in Israeli-controlled areas. That has stopped. It stopped because the de-facto government is preventing them from doing it.

I know that a lot of prominent businesspeople, including you, decided to write a letter to Trump urging an end to the war, right before the ceasefire came into effect. Some of the people who signed that letter were very critical of Hamas in other venues. Was there a division about how much to be critical in the letter?

Anybody in Gaza can be critical of Hamas. It’s O.K. We have freedom to talk about Hamas or anybody else. [Palestinians in Gaza, including journalists, have been physically assaulted for criticizing or reporting negatively on Hamas. Since the ceasefire went into effect, Hamas has also carried out executions of people whom it claims were political rivals or collaborators with Israel.] I mean, it’s a personal opinion, so there’s no problem with that. Is that your question? Maybe I did not understand your question.

Well, I know you’ve said that you think the Palestinian Authority will be better able to bring about a long-term solution and a two-state solution, which you advocate.

Well, it’s our only hope, actually. We want to be united with the West Bank, and the Palestinian Authority is the best scenario for this. We hope we will have elections. I mean, Palestinians deserve to decide, and to have elections—they deserve to select their representatives and to have an exchange of authority.

Right, because the last elections in Gaza were a couple of decades ago, correct?

Exactly. Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about what your job is?

I’m the chairman of the Gaza Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture. We are trying here to help our members get their papers for reactivating bank accounts, or to start businesses both outside and within Gaza. We’re trying to help them organize local markets, and coördinate or actually do some networking for them with humanitarian actors. And we do trainings. But there isn’t much we can do, because of Israeli restrictions. They are even preventing some fuel for the private sector. They are preventing the entry of agricultural seeds like tomato, cucumber, whatever, with the intention to keep all people dependent on humanitarian aid and not to be productive. So my job is really difficult, because there isn’t much I can do, but we’re trying to promote, for example, electronic payments, because all the banknotes in Gaza, the cash, is getting worn out and Israel won’t allow us to replace these banknotes.

So we do lots of advocacy work. We collect information about local markets, about some economic indicators. We produce reports in that regard. We make the international community and humanitarian actors aware of the situation, so they can be informed when making plans. We are also doing some really small projects, trying to help people in the food-production sector start or improve their businesses, but we are making very limited interventions because of the lack of finance and production-input materials.

A lot of people in your position or somewhat similar positions managed to leave Gaza during the war. You did not. Can you talk about why you stayed?

Yes. When the war started, I was new in my position: I was elected at the beginning of 2023, and nine months later the war broke out. I felt that I was obliged to stay with the people who elected me in Gaza. I really like Gaza so much, and I don’t think I can stay out of Gaza for long. And what am I going to do outside? Being a Palestinian, it is very difficult to be somewhere outside. And I know many people are in Egypt now, but they are in difficult situations economically. I didn’t think that it would go on this long, of course. But I’m very happy that I did not leave because being outside Gaza for such a long time is not an easy thing.

I know that the humanitarian situation is still not great. I know that people are still dying. I’m just curious what it feels like in the Strip, and if people have become more hopeful or not in the last couple of months since the ceasefire.

To be honest, I cannot talk for all people in Gaza and about their experiences. I’m one of the few lucky people, in that I still have my home and I have a concrete roof. I have tents all around my house, and I see them every morning when I go to work and when I come back. When I go out, and I am properly dressed and have combed my hair, I really feel ashamed. But people can take these hardships and their life goes on, and they are very hopeful and thankful for God. And when their tent is flooded, or when their tent flies with the wind, there’s so much resilience—they keep on trying and trying to make a life. And kids are playing football in the street, and people have made stalls to sell little things, like small shops. People are really trying. They are being very resilient, which makes me feel really good and hopeful despite the inhumane situation they are living in.

Do you feel that there’s resentment toward people who’ve been more fortunate?

Not at all. Not at all. I don’t know what’s deep in their heart, but from dealing with them—I mean, there are thousands around me. I’ve never been harassed or had anyone talk that way to me.

When you talk to people or when you just think about how things are going, does this feel like just another month in the post-October 7th era for Gaza, or does it feel like something new is starting?

The ceasefire has started a new era in Gaza. You can’t imagine the amount of killing that was happening beforehand, and the amount of fear. We were almost sure that we would be kicked out of the Gaza Strip. Things were going in that direction until President Trump forced Israel to stop the war, and we are really, really grateful for this. We can take any hardship and we can manage our lives in Gaza, but we cannot do the same outside of Gaza. We recognize the amount of hardship awaiting us in order to achieve our hopes and dreams, because we have Israel here, who does not want us to be in Gaza. But we are determined, and we are insisting on staying in Gaza. We have no other place to go to, really, and we don’t want to go to any other place. We don’t want to go to Somalia, Indonesia, or even the United States. We are not really interested. We like Gaza. We want to stay in Gaza. We want to have a life in Gaza. ♦

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Since she reëmerged as a star in the 2024 film “The Substance,” Demi Moore has been very busy. She has a major role in the current season of Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman” series, and she has two highly anticipated films coming out this year: a science-fiction film directed by Boots Riley, and “Strange Arrivals,” alongside Colman Domingo, about a couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. She sat down at The New Yorker Festival in the fall with the staff writer Jia Tolentino to discuss her varied career and how she has dealt with the pressures of the industry.

This episode was recorded live at The New Yorker Festival, on October 25, 2025.

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