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The New Yorker contributing writer Ruth Marcus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Pam Bondi’s removal from her post as Attorney General. They examine the series of missteps and failures that led to her firing—from her continued mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein files to her inability to effectively carry out Donald Trump’s efforts to target his political enemies. They also explore the long-term damage Bondi has done to the Department of Justice, and whether her ouster—alongside Kristi Noem’s dismissal as Secretary of Homeland Security—signals a new era of shakeups within the Trump Administration.

This week’s reading:

“Pam Bondi’s Legacy of Flattery and Destruction,” by Ruth Marcus

“A U.S.-Iran Ceasefire Is Here, but Trump’s Stone Age Mentality Endures,” by Ishaan Tharoor

“Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?,” by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz

“How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics,” by Antonia Hitchens

“The Forest Service—a Force Across Rural America—‘Reorganizes’ Under Trump,” by Bill McKibben

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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In 1986, Amy Hau started working with the Japanese American artist, designer, and architect Isamu Noguchi as an assistant at his studio complex, in Long Island City. In 2024, she returned to the space, which now houses the Noguchi Museum—what the artist had called his “gift to the city”—as its director. Lately, Hau spends most of her reading time on archival material related to the artist, but she sat down with us to discuss a few books that have influenced her work and the way she thinks about Noguchi and his themes—among them displacement, community, inheritance, and cross-cultural exchange. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa

by Marilyn Chase

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I’m always fascinated by artists’ biographies—reading about where they came from, how they were able to do the work that they did, their obsessions and their points of view. Asawa was born in California in 1926, and was one of over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans who were interned during the Second World War.

I think it’s easy to pigeonhole people into categories—Asian, for one—or to define them by their painful experiences. But Asawa, like Noguchi, showed real resilience. In 1942, Noguchi chose to enter an internment camp in Arizona because he hoped to help find a way to make the conditions livable for the people who had no choice. Both of them came out of these difficult experiences saying I’m not going to be defined by this.

Another thing that’s amazing to me about Asawa, and that Chase’s book reveals, is her relationship to her family and her community. She had six children. There are photographs of her kids in here, sitting around with her as she’s making her work. She also devoted a lot of time to teaching and working with schoolkids on public-art projects in San Francisco, which is remarkable to me.

Hidden in Plain Sight

by Karin Higa

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Higa was a pioneering art historian and curator who died in 2013, when she was only in her late forties. It’s so sad that we lost her voice. In this book, which is a collection of some of her writing, she covers famous artists, like Asawa, but also artists who were little known. And these artists—she makes it clear that they’re Asian, yes, but they’re also American. Her thinking was very multicultural. I always thought, How wonderful, to be celebrating the confluence of different cultures in these artists’ lives and works. That’s a theme I think about with regard to Noguchi’s work, too. Because, in some ways, he did have a little bit of an identity crisis. When he was in the U.S., he was sort of seen as Japanese, but in Japan, he was seen as an American. When he went back to Japan after the war, he proposed a memorial for Hiroshima, but it was rejected because he was an American, and it was thought that his participation would have been too painful for people, at that time. So Noguchi struggled all his life to find a balance, asking questions like, Where do I belong? Am I more Asian, or am I more Western? He used that tension when he needed to. And, I also think that, toward the end of his life, when I got to know him, he had a real sense of arriving, in a way. He received a National Medal of Arts, and he also got special recognition from the Japanese government. To see that acknowledgment late in his life, to be embraced by both, really meant a lot, I think.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

by Edmund de Waal

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This is a lovely book that takes you through a personal journey. It’s a kind of history of de Waal’s family, European Jews who were once wealthy art collectors, that’s told through the history of the pieces they collected. Most of them were confiscated by the Nazis in 1938, but one group of items escaped—a collection of two hundred and sixty-four small Japanese figurines, known as netsuke. De Waal is really insightful, and his writing is just beautiful. To me, there’s something timeless, even eternal, about the netsuke. You know that they’re made in a specific time period, but when you learn about the way that they were loved and treasured, you realize that they have a quality that carries over from one time to the next.

Last week, after the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, parroted his boss’s threat to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” Tehran’s diplomats responded on social media. “At a time when you were still in caves searching for fire, we were inscribing human rights on the Cyrus Cylinder,” Iran’s Embassy in South Africa posted, on X. “We endured the storm of Alexander and the Mongol invasions and remained; because Iran is not just a country, it is a civilization.” Days passed and bombs kept falling, while oil tankers idled on either side of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had effectively closed in retaliation for the war launched by Israel and the United States. Then, President Donald Trump—likely frustrated by the cascading economic consequences of Iran’s blockade, the regime’s refusal to capitulate, the growing unease among his MAGA base, or the apparent leaks from mutinous advisers inside the White House—put forward an apocalyptic ultimatum. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he posted on social media, early on Tuesday. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

This was astonishing language, even for Trump, whose aggressive rhetoric has become background noise. Some Democrats cited the post as evidence of the President’s deteriorating mental fitness and his inability to remain in office. Iran’s envoy to the United Nations said that Trump was broadcasting “his intent to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.” António Costa, the president of the European Council, said that targeting civilian infrastructure, particularly energy facilities, is “illegal and unacceptable,” and added, “This applies to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and it applies everywhere.” Pope Leo XIV told reporters, “There are certainly issues of international law here, but even more, it is a moral question concerning the good of the people as a whole, in its entirety.”

But the United States and Israel have shown little regard for international law, or other such obligations. The Trump Administration believes it can secure perceived U.S. interests however it sees fit; earlier this year, Trump told the Times that he was constrained only by his “own morality.” If that statement didn’t offer much clarity, Trump’s close adviser, Stephen Miller, delivered his own explanation of the Administration’s guiding principles. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller told CNN, in January. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

This embrace of atavistic thinking in Washington—call it Stone Age mentality—may play well with Trump’s nationalist base at home, but it has done little to advance his aims in the Middle East. By Tuesday night, his bluster had given way to what sounded like relief at finding an off-ramp. After a group of regional intermediaries, led by Pakistan, brokered a temporary truce, Trump announced on social media that he would “suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” contingent upon the regime allowing the strait to reopen. Trump claimed that the United States had “already met and exceeded all Military objectives” and was close to clinching “Longterm PEACE with Iran.” The Pakistani Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said that U.S. and Iranian delegations were invited to Islamabad for potential talks later this week. As of Wednesday morning, Iran’s civilization still stood.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the negotiations that follow. Previous rounds of talks between U.S. and Iranian interlocutors were cut short by American and Israeli bombardments on Iranian targets, and defined by vast deficits in trust and understanding between the parties. Those gaps remain. The statements issued from Washington and Tehran on Tuesday evening already showed a clear divergence: Trump claimed that the Strait of Hormuz would be immediately opened to the free flow of ships, whereas the wording from the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, suggested that “safe passage” would be possible only in “coordination” with the Iranian military—an indication that Tehran sees the strait not as a bargaining chip but as permanent leverage. The ten-point Iranian plan that Trump said formed a “workable basis” for future dialogue included demands that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium for a nuclear program, that years of sanctions on Tehran be dropped, that Iran get compensated for war damages, that the U.S. withdraw its forces deployed in the Middle East, and that Israel cease its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, in Lebanon. (Israel says Lebanon is not included in the ceasefire and multiple strikes have continued today in Beirut and across the country.) Trump, who has repeatedly claimed that his campaigns have “decimated” Iran’s military and wiped out its nuclear facilities, is unlikely to agree to these conditions.

Still, Trump will be hard-pressed to convince anyone aside from his most ardent supporters that what has happened in the past six weeks constitutes an American success. Iran’s military may be degraded—its stores of ballistic missiles and attack drones depleted, and the regime’s top ranks eliminated—but the Islamic Republic is intact and not, as Trump once asserted, on its last legs. Some analysts argue that the regime is emerging from the confrontation in a position of even greater strength. If the current terms of the ceasefire hold, “Iran will be able to rebuild capabilities within a year,” Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London, wrote on X. “Iran will have more disposable income that will be put into building a more powerful military dictatorship,” he added, gesturing to the sanctioned Iranian oil that the Trump Administration has allowed into the market, and the internal regime realignments after the U.S. and Israel killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “The people in place might be less theocratic but also less pragmatic and more belligerent,” Krieg continued. “The race to build a bomb might be on again (with outside help) as the previous fatwas will be void after this experience.”

Meanwhile, in just a matter of a month of so, the United States and Israel have already spent billions of dollars on the war, burned through stockpiles of critical munitions, antagonized international and domestic public opinion, jeopardized U.S. military personnel and bases in the Middle East, and committed possible war crimes. The U.S.-Israeli strikes have killed thousands of people and triggered retaliatory attacks from Iran on targets across the Middle East. Iran’s “civilization” has been in the crosshairs for a while: officials say that some thirty Iranian universities have been hit, in addition to the Pasteur Institute in Tehran, a celebrated, century-old institution that specializes in the study of infectious diseases. UNESCO World Heritage sites in Isfahan, a former Safavid imperial capital and a jewel of Perso-Islamic architecture, have also been damaged by strikes.

Trump may claim the opening of the strait as a victory, but it simply marks a return to a pre-war status quo—with Iran more aware of its ability to control the passage. It is one of the more predictable outcomes of a war that Trump decided to initiate—a war that quickly spiralled beyond anything that the White House had anticipated, and left Trump resorting to desperate threats to obliterate Iran. Some in Trump’s camp now doubt there’s enough lipstick to put on this pig. “This war is actively weakening American power, increasing the danger to American citizens, and frustrating the president’s important efforts at addressing our many domestic challenges,” Oren Cass, the chief economist at American Compass, a right-wing think tank, lamented on social media. “It has closed a strait that was previously open, strengthened the incentive for other nations to pursue nuclear weapons, and in this most recent rhetoric made more plausible their use.”

A Pew poll from the last week of March found that about two-thirds of Americans don’t have confidence in Trump’s ability to make good policy decisions regarding Iran. Outside the U.S., the view is all the more dismal. Trump’s war has provoked a series of crises across the rest of Asia, which relies on energy imports from the Gulf. Throughout South Asia, cooking-gas shortages in cities forced hotels and restaurants to shutter. Inflation soared and currencies tanked. Airlines scaled back operations in Vietnam. As the flow of oil from the Gulf stopped, the Philippines declared a national energy emergency in late March. “Hormuz has exposed both the fragility of the fossil fuel system and the limits of American power,” Mona Ali, a professor of economics at the State University of New York, wrote. “Washington no longer seems able to win the wars it starts or manage the economic fallout of its recklessness.” As countries across the region scramble for a future where they are less vulnerable to this sort of oil shock, they will seek to expand investment in renewable energy. In doing so, they’ll be tapping into supply chains already dominated by Beijing, whose clout and influence has quietly grown during the war. Trump said that China played a role behind the scenes to bring Iran to the table. According to a 2025 survey, China was already viewed more favorably than the United States in several Arab countries, and it may find new opportunities to present itself as a reliable partner for the region in an age of Trumpist disruption. “China will have waited out its rival’s self-inflicted exhaustion and emerged, without firing a single shot, as the principal strategic beneficiary of a war it did nothing to start,” Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, wrote.

If Trump or his allies are at all aware of this emerging geopolitical reality, they’ve shown no signs of it. Instead, the President can only muster his chest-thumping, Stone Age triumphalism, his gloating about U.S. military preëminence and success, no matter the contradicting facts on the ground or the murkier strategic picture. Stephen Walt, an international-relations scholar at Harvard Kennedy School, described Trump’s foreign-policy strategy as that of a “predatory hegemony”—that is, he explained in a Foreign Affairs essay, “its central aim is to use Washington’s privileged position to extract concessions, tribute, and displays of deference from both allies and adversaries, pursuing short-term gains in what it sees as a purely zero-sum world.” The latest war in the Middle East ought to make clear the hollowness of this approach, which, as Walt put it, will “generate growing global resentment” and “create tempting opportunities for Washington’s main rivals.”

“People admire the Wild West cowboy approach to geopolitics only when it is successful,” Malcolm Turnbull, the former Prime Minister of Australia, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “America’s friends are not just hoping for an early end to this war of choice. They also hope that America’s fever breaks, that wild impulsive strategic moves are replaced by a more orderly approach to geopolitics.” They shouldn’t hold their breath. ♦

Not long after moving to New Orleans, I walked by a woman pushing a stroller that contained a possum wearing a birthday hat. I did what any reasonable person would do and texted basically everyone I knew about this remarkable event. A few years later, I entered a crowded bar looking for a seat and realized that the only stool not occupied by a human patron was acting as a perch for a large tropical bird. This time, I merely said “Excuse me” (to the bird) as I shuffled past in search of a spot in the back.

You see a lot of strange things in this city, and eventually most of them are no longer worth texting your friends about. At a certain point, you can stop really noticing. Unless you’re the New Orleans writer Nancy Lemann, for whom “the whole point of everything” is “to notice things more.” Lemann, who is seventy, and whose books have been largely out of print for the past two decades, is enjoying some notice this spring, as two of her early works, “Lives of the Saints” (1985) and “The Ritz of the Bayou” (1987), are being reissued, and a semi-fictional novel, “The Oyster Diaries,” is being published for the first time. The first of these—a cult favorite among writers, particularly youngish women writers—put Lemann on the map as a singular stylist, capable of crystalline insights into the miscreants and oddballs of the American South and great bursts of unrestrained sentiment. Sort of like if Charles Portis listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell.

“Lives of the Saints” is narrated by Louise Brown, who has recently returned to her native New Orleans after four years of college in the Northeast, as she catalogues the various symptoms of decay among members of her Southern aristocratic class. It opens at the wedding of Henry Laines and Mary Grace Stewart, where, we are told, everyone has breakdowns, “including the bride and groom. Especially the bride and groom.” Lest you miss the tenor of the evening, Louise continues, “Everyone was too drunk. Everyone was unglued.” This is all in the first three paragraphs, and the breakdowns—a capacious category that, for Lemann, seems to encompass everything from rages to amiable fugues—do not let up. They befall men and women, children and the elderly; later, an entire family is afflicted in a single afternoon. One begins to think that the condition is hereditary—that, instead of a Habsburg jaw, the wealthy white denizens of New Orleans high society are saddled with emotional problems. Louise describes Mrs. Stewart, the mother of the bride, as a woman who “could spend an entire afternoon talking about what hat she wore when she was fifteen,” and Mrs. Stewart’s mother-in-law, rather fortuitously, as a woman for whom “there was no subject dearer to [her] heart than the subject of what hat she wore when she was fifteen.” Two pages later, the elder woman is telling Louise about a “little red hat” she wore in the summer of 1912.

Amid the sweltering heat and almost menacingly lush greenery, Louise compiles an exquisite taxonomy of local types. Mary Grace, who “had the spark of divine fire, which you find in a face not quite pretty enough,” is described as “the type of girl you see being dragged screaming from a convertible sports car outside of the bar at the Lafayette Hotel at three in the morning by her father and brothers.” An adorably irritating young child is introduced as “the type of person who would run into the house on weekday mornings and slide under the dining room table and make racing-car noises while everyone was trying to eat breakfast.” Louise, you could say, is the type of girl who likes to imagine a category of person with a sole inhabitant.

Familiarity breeds peevishness, and Louise is able to so precisely classify the “hysterics,” “catastrophes,” and “lunatics” of her milieu because they are too close for her own comfort. She is an observer and a product of a certain pathological excess: too much heat and too much booze, too much money and too much free time, all among people who live too much in the past and know too much about one another. The novel is like a sweaty, Southern “Brideshead Revisited,” being both about the dying world of a once triumphant class whose rule was never justified, and about how terrible it is to fall in love with a Catholic.

Here, the Catholic is Claude Collier, who has many sterling qualities, despite his fondness for hanging out with “wino lunatics, dissipated businessmen, crooked politicians, demented young lawyers, debutantes, alcoholics, and sleazy men.” Louise has known him since childhood, and his father, Mr. Collier, an eccentric lawyer, has acted as a sort of surrogate parent to her. In Claude—a wayward young man whom everyone nonetheless finds promising—Louise sees a vessel for her remaining idealism. He can hardly enter a scene without her near-ecstatic mention of his virtues: in the glow of Louise’s admiration, his profligacy becomes generosity, his indifference to the chaos around him a calm simplicity, his aversion to literature a sign of a more soul-deep wisdom. “It was the air about him, gentle and uncorrupt, some steady, noble thing,” she observes. He was “simply better than most people in his heart, and you could look up to him.”

Louise loves Claude in the way that you love someone when you are in your early twenties and have a job proofreading an eight-hundred-page book titled “Texas Business Law”: with blazing, idiotic conviction. But Lemann, to her credit, does not play this for laughs. You believe Louise when she declares, “My heart was not trained to love anyone but him. I could only love one person. This was my innate principle.” Those who have gone about their lives without falling for such a dissipated trap of a person may wonder how she could be so naïve. But the inevitability of doom does not lessen its impact. Like the unseemly family wealth that funds all those gin-soaked garden parties, or the nameless Black maids on their periphery, some truths are willfully ignored in the haze of romantic self-conception.

“One deception can be traded for another, greatness and betrayal lie beside each other closely intertwined,” Lemann writes early on in her next book, “The Ritz of the Bayou,” suggesting that she has learned a few things. The book, a work of nonfiction that began as an assignment for Vanity Fair, is ostensibly about the governor of Louisiana being charged with bribery and corruption, but it serves primarily as a way to turn Lemann’s eye for disgrace and disrepair to a broader set of social circumstances. She is less interested in outlining the facts of the case—Governor Edwin Edwards and seven associates, including his brother and nephew, were indicted for fraud and bribery related to an alleged scheme that involved selling state hospital permits—than in painting the various scenes and characters in and around it. “There is so much human frailty floating around that it is a dramatic thing to see,” Lemann writes. “I had never seen so much of it, all at once, and it was a sort of breathtaking spectacle.”

The book is told through a whirlwind series of vignettes, some no longer than a few sentences: one minute Lemann is making an arch observation about the Louisiana Board of Ethics, the next she is in raptures about trees. Always, her eye is drawn away from the spectacle of the trial and toward the people who make spectacles of themselves. This includes the notoriously charming Governor Edwards, often accompanied by his “long-suffering wife” and “bombshell daughter,” the Governor’s nephew (“fraud defendant by day, cocktail bar pianist by night”), a stereotypically Southern lawyer named Pappy Triche, and the “jazz-crazed assistant prosecutor,” who appears everywhere but inside the courtroom. Also in the mix are the Governor’s many female admirers who show up to watch the trial, and a gaggle of fellow-reporters, one of whom eventually becomes Lemann’s lover. Despite the seriousness of the charges, she reports, “a lot of people in the courtroom were psychotically jolly.”

But Lemann herself is a bit confounded, at least when she arrives. The outcome of the trial seems foreseeable early on. “The Prosecutor was not winning when he moralized about the Governor, who is known for gambling, womanizing, and risqué bon mots, for people hold few things as dear as those,” she notes dryly. Prospective jurors have a litany of poor excuses: illness, the possibility that a nephew knows the Governor, constipation. Everything is taking too long: “The Prosecutor had sixty-five witnesses. We were on number three at the time. Reporters sometimes grew depressed.” Lemann finds an unexpected bright spot in an attorney named Camille Gravel, who, she has heard, managed to tame the wildness of his youth and is now the most dignified and elegant man in the whole city—a rare home-town boy who made good.

The real action happens outside of the courtroom—at the Cairo Club, or the bar at the Lafayette Hotel, or F&M Patio Bar—where the heat and the music and the drinks have a way of bringing Lemann back to herself. “You may be filled with longing and unease, but one thing you know—when you are there, your ticker’s back in business,” she writes. Though the events of “The Ritz of the Bayou” play out in the course of almost a year, reading the book feels like spending one long night out with a brilliant stranger you’ve met at a bar, one who can tell you the kinds of stories you would hopelessly mangle if you attempted to repeat them.

Not everyone thought that this was a good thing. The critic James Wolcott, in his introduction to the book, recounts being in the office of Tina Brown, who was the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair at the time, when she first received Lemann’s draft, and how Brown was “dissatisfied—borderline exasperated—with the copy.” Lemann had not included any facts or details about the trial. She forgot to mention what the charges even were. In fairness to Brown, this is true. Instead of legal analysis, Lemann writes extensively in the book about a man she meets on the train who insists on calling her his “little shrimp remoulade.” There is a whole section devoted to a secret committee for an even more secret Mardi Gras social club, the purpose of which was to draw up psychological profiles of prospective members based on drawings they did of a horse. In return for her weird, digressive, and highly mannered manuscript, Lemann received a kill fee. The implication is that she got distracted and failed to notice the most important things. But this is precisely wrong. It is only because Lemann turns her gaze to the things that really matter to her—how people act, and what they believe in spite of the facts facing them—that the book feels like a small miracle. And she gets away with it in the same way Governor Edwards did: with an abundance of style.

New Orleans looks a little different forty years later, and so does Lemann. Her new book, “The Oyster Diaries,” finds a Lemann-esque woman named Delery Anhalt, originally from New Orleans, now living in a tony D.C. neighborhood, having traded her wastrel youth for a respectable late middle age. (Parts of the book initially appeared as first-person pieces in Harper’s Magazine and The Paris Review.) As the novel opens, Delery becomes, in her typical fashion, “riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute basis.” At first, her despair is a little hard to fathom. She has two woke daughters who find her politics retrograde, in-laws who annoy her, and a husband whom she loves, though in her description of that love you begin to suspect where we’ll find trouble: “The ordinary things he left in his wake, like his allergy-ridden Kleenex strewn among the bedsheets, had emanated that strange radiance to me, as if they were the relics of saints.”

We learn that Delery’s saintly husband is capable of profound betrayal, the kind that makes you “mentally nauseous to think of.” She couldn’t see what was right in front of her. So she heads home to New Orleans, where she revels in memories of a youthful fling she once had with a man in whom she observed “a loping generosity and angelic self-effacement that dispelled my doubts in man.” His name, as it happens, is Claude Collier. This Claude Collier is twenty-eight, a year older than the one we first meet in “Lives of the Saints.” This Claude Collier woos Delery and eventually marries the “long-suffering” Louise, who leaves him years later. This Claude Collier takes a job at his father’s law firm after Mr. Collier dies of a heart attack, opting to stay in New Orleans rather than abruptly disappearing as he does at the end of “Lives of the Saints.”

It’s probably for the best that Mr. Collier is killed off here, since many of his most memorable qualities—a love of the law, a Yankee transplant wife, a habit of eating oysters every day at noon at the Pearl—have been given to another character, Delery’s father, August Anhalt. These enduring quirks have their origin in Lemann’s life: in “The Ritz of the Bayou,” she writes about her father, an eccentric lawyer who appears as “the courtroom philosopher,” and who keeps a log with the date and grade (B+, C) of the oysters he eats every day at the Pearl.

“This story does not start at the same old party,” Lemann writes in the final section of “The Oyster Diaries.” “I would have to be the same old girl for that.” And yet the story does start again. Claude Collier is once again generous and noble. Lemann, like the talkative older ladies of her youth, clutches the motifs of her past like talismans. Her tendency to repeat herself, the compulsion that gives her work such a musical quality and that has so confounded reviewers (“Why does she so persistently and jarringly use repetitions?” a critic wrote in the L.A. Times in 1987), is both her greatest tool and her greatest theme. Perhaps, she suggests, repetition could be seen less as a compulsion than as a mark of inimitable style. A pair of women at a wedding can once more discuss the hats they wore at fifteen. A lawyer can eat oysters every day at noon at the Pearl, and can show up in three different books doing exactly that. Like a warm summer night or a third cocktail, Lemann lulls and envelops you. Like a breakdown, she lets you get carried away. ♦