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In Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Oscar-winning 2018 documentary, “Free Solo,” the world-class rock climber Alex Honnold expresses reservations about being shot by a film crew while he attempts to become the first person ever to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan monolith without ropes or a harness. “The idea of falling off . . . It’s, like, kind of O.K. if it’s just by myself, but, like, I wouldn’t want to fall off right in front of my friends,” he says, explaining that usually, when he free-solos—the high-risk practice of no-supports climbing—he tends not to tell anyone he’s doing it. “The fewer people know anything, the better, really.” For Honnold, the documentary suggests, free soloing isn’t about fame or attention or money. Instead, it’s about the climber’s own need to prove to himself that he can overcome mortal risk as well as his own fears. To bring cameras into the equation might mar the authenticity of this pursuit.

If being watched is portrayed as a tricky proposition in “Free Solo,” watching, too, is shown to be fraught. The animating drama of the documentary doesn’t hinge just on whether Honnold will emerge from climbing El Cap with life and limb intact but, also, on whether documenting his ascent is even appropriate—a question that members of the film crew, who are all climbers themselves, grapple with onscreen. “I’ve always been conflicted about doing a movie about free soloing because it’s so dangerous,” Chin says. “It’s hard to not imagine your friend, Alex, soloing . . . and you’re making a film about it, which might put undue pressure on him to do something and him falling through the frame to his death.” At the movie’s climax, as we see Honnold finally ascending to El Cap’s peak, hanging on the wall’s granite surface by his fingertips or balancing on a slim ridge with his toes, the shot occasionally pans to one of the cameramen, Mikey Schaefer, who keeps turning away from his lens. “I can’t believe you guys actually can watch,” he says to his colleagues at one point.

How far we’ve come. On Saturday night, Alex Honnold was back, but this time the whole world was invited to watch as he climbed not a natural wonder but a man-made one—the Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world—as part of a special Netflix streaming event, “Skyscraper Live.” The name of the broadcast called to mind one of those nineteen-seventies disaster movies, like “The Towering Inferno” or “Airport,” in which a catastrophe befalls a built environment to harrowing effect. But if part of the pleasure of those films is watching their protagonists’ struggle to just barely escape whatever outlandish calamity has been thrust upon them, in Honnold’s case, the calamity, were it to come, would be self-inflicted. It would also be streamed globally, and in real time, to millions of Netflix subscribers.

“It’s really just sensationalism for the sake of shock and awe, like verging awfully close to Colosseum type entertainment,” a user wrote in a much liked comment on a Reddit climbing thread, and when I watched the special’s promotional trailer, which leaned hard on the event’s critical stakes, I worried that this take wasn’t wrong. (“If you fall,” Honnold says in the promo, as the camera rushes at a dizzying clip down the length of the nearly seventeen-hundred-foot building, “you’re going to die.”) The fact that “Skyscraper Live” was supposed to take place on Friday night but, at the last minute, got postponed because of rainfall in Taipei, was, on the one hand, reassuring, since it indicated that Honnold and Netflix were being at least somewhat sensible by not taking on more risk than they had already signed up for. On the other hand, it reminded me that there was only so much they could control. What if it started to rain while Honnold was climbing? What if the wind picked up? What if there was seismic activity?

Around 8 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on Saturday, with the ascent up Taipei 101 about to commence, these possibilities were all raised by Mark Rober, a popular science YouTuber and one of the special’s presenters. Rober’s peppy manner—“finally, believe it or not, we’re monitoring earthquakes!”—was echoed by the event’s team of commentators, among them the Netflix sports anchor Elle Duncan, the celebrated rock climber Emily Harrington, and the man-bun- and undercut-sporting W.W.E. fighter Seth (Freakin’) Rollins. The trio’s bland, affable chatter—“the goosebumps are goosebumping,” Duncan offered at one point, perkily—reminded me a bit of watching one of the sleepier Olympic sports (dressage? archery?) rather than a harrowing life-and-death event.

Oddly, I found this comforting, as it took things down a notch from the melodramatic, “are you not entertained?” vibe the event’s promotional push suggested. It also seemed to parallel Honnold’s own hyper-controlled geniality. Wearing a red North Face shirt, black pants, and black-and-yellow shoes, with his dark hair cut short, and only a cannister of chalk to dust his hands with attached to his waist, the climber, who is now forty, bid a mild, tearless farewell to Sanni McCandless, his wife and the mother of his two young daughters. (When considering, in a prerecorded segment, if his willingness to risk his life has been affected since becoming a father, Honnold said, “I didn’t want to die in the mountains before I had kids, still don’t want to die now that we have kids,” which sounded like a “no” to me.) As Honnold approached the building with no great fanfare, as if he were about to board a local bus or enter a midtown CVS—this despite the thousands of cheering, screaming spectators crowding around the building, ready to follow his every move—I marvelled at the fact that he wasn’t even carrying a water bottle. (For some reason this seemed especially insane to me, maybe because I personally feel immediate disquiet if I even forget to bring along a glass of water when I go to bed at night.)

Taipei 101 comprises several sections, each with its own repetitive climbing rhythm. The bottom, Harrington explained, was the “warmup” part for Honnold—a vertical, largely non-angled climb, with only two trickier spirally ornaments which are supposed to represent clouds, but which reminded me of large steel ears; then came the so-called bamboo boxes—eight steep, basin-like sections stacked like so many laundry bins, each about a hundred feet tall, and edged with an architectural dragon-style element that Honnold had to hoist himself past; after came the tower, with a series of overhanging ledges that the climber dangled on, one at a time, before using his core and arm strength to swing his legs up; and then, finally, a spindly spire, complete with a flimsy ladder to allow for Honnold’s final ascent to the small dome at the building’s tippy-top. The whole thing was very Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times” crossed with Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible,” with a dash of “Black Mirror.”

In his brief moments of rest on one impossibly tiny window ledge or another, Honnold would occasionally smile and wave at the spectators assembled below, or at people standing inside the building as he passed, eager to capture a picture of the climber on their phones, through the windows. (Some appeared to try and get his attention for the sake of a better photo op by gesturing at him, which struck me as absolutely diabolical.) Equipped with an earpiece through which he was able to listen to heavy-metal music (Tool is a favorite, the panel told us), Honnold was also fitted with a mike, and his intermittent comments remained brightly impersonal. He was variously “psyched” or “pumped,” or impressed by how “beautiful” the day was in Taipei; a couple of times he admitted that he was getting “kind of tired” and that it felt “very windy.” Nonetheless, he assured the panel, “the view was incredible” and the experience of climbing the building was “so cool.” More than once, these wild understatements put me in mind of the comedian Nathan Fielder, whose odd blankness is often used to great effect in his work—although Honnold seemed perfectly sincere.

Amid all the patter, too, it was sometimes easy to forget that we were watching a unique feat: a man clambering with seemingly preternatural ease up an almost inconceivably enormous structure, often literally dangling between life and death. Honnold reportedly received a six-figure sum for his participation, but in an interview he gave before the special, he explained that he would have climbed Taipei 101 for free, just for himself, had he been able to receive permission to do so without Netflix’s involvement. The spectacle set up by the streaming platform, in this sense, was just a vehicle for him to achieve a lifelong dream. The terrifying reality of this dream hit home for me during the moments in the broadcast when the panel would quiet down for a spell, and viewers were able to experience Honnold’s body onscreen, accompanied only by the sounds emerging from his attached mike: his breathing and grunting; the flapping of his shirt in the wind; the thumps and bumps as his hands and feet connected with the building’s steel and glass. This was some real shit, stomach-turning but, also, inarguably amazing, and when Honnold reached the top of the building’s spire and said, “Sick!” I felt like I finally understood what he meant, in more than one sense of the word. ♦

It should be thistle-covered,
a labor of thunder bent
through it.
It should fountain sweet-
water arcs into catfish-
mouthed bottlenecks.
It should flock blackbirds
into halos about it.
It should be wrapped in guitar
string and whistle
wind up in its branched
hair of calamitous thorn.
Above all, a rose
carried in a pocket
at least a hundred miles.
Beneath all, a 33-r.p.m.
orbit of diamond-cut
tremble. Surrounding all,
the record skipping on
at least a dozen echoing
country yodels.
I ask again:
Where is the shrine
to Johnny Shines?
I peeked into the
dark covering my eyes
with its ethereal hands,
and then only then
did I hear.

For the cover of the February 2, 2026, issue, the artist Peter de Sève celebrates the brave souls who continue to work when the city is paralyzed by a snowstorm. “Blizzards have provided some of my very fondest memories of living in New York,” de Sève said. “All sound is muffled. The few cars on the road are reduced to a crawl, and big grownups like myself become kids again.”

For more snow covers, see below:

“February 4, 1939,” by William Steig

“Polar Bears on Fifth Avenue,” by Bruce McCall

“Whiteout,” by Christoph Niemann

Find Peter de Sève’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.

Finding out what actually happened in the deep past can be a slog, so when ancient history is packaged as mystery—spine-tingling but solvable—it’s hard to resist. Who doesn’t want to know how a lost civilization got lost, or where it might be hiding? The trouble is that what gets touted as a lost civilization often turns out to have been there all along. The people who can’t or won’t see the continuity in front of them have typically been European adventurers or armchair archeologists, busy spinning dismissive theories about the cultures of non-Europeans. The idea that the Pyramids of Egypt are so awesome they could only have been built by aliens is now a meme-able joke, fodder for Reddit debunkers and cheesy History Channel shows.

Still, the fancy persists, implanted like a microchip, ever since Erich von Däniken’s 1968 best-seller, “Chariots of the Gods,” begat the hugely popular 1973 television special “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.” Von Däniken argued that extraterrestrials must have visited Earth to lend a hand with various prehistoric undertakings—the Pyramids, the massive stone carvings of Easter Island, the Nazca Lines. What may have begun as trippy speculation fed on a darker premise: that the present-day peoples of Africa, Polynesia, or Latin America were simply not impressive enough to have had ancestors capable of such feats. (Stonehenge was the rare European site to make an appearance among von Däniken’s confounding examples.)

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The belief that Indigenous monuments must have been made by outsiders has, in more respectable guises, long shaped Western accounts of Indigenous cultural achievement. It continues to do so. The Pyramids of Egypt and the statues of Easter Island are extraordinary, and before modern archeological methods it was often hard to see how such works could have been produced without metal tools or machinery. That conundrum, however, slid easily into a failure of imagination and, specifically, an inability to credit the capacities of people who were not white. Nineteenth-century European explorers concluded that the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe, now thought to have been built by the Shona between roughly 1100 and 1450 C.E., must be the work of Phoenicians or Babylonians or intrepid explorers from another far-flung place or, basically, anyone but the Africans who actually lived there. The pre-Columbian mound complexes scattered across North America met a similar fate. Their builders were variously imagined as giants, a vanquished white race of some kind, or members of the lost tribes of Israel—the last a notion promoted by Josiah Priest, a nineteenth-century pamphleteer with an animus against Native Americans, cited by Andrew Jackson to justify the Indian Removal Act, and taken up, in recent years, by Tucker Carlson.

In “Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island ” (Mariner), a crisp, confident, and convincing new account of the place and its chroniclers, the British archeologist Mike Pitts calls these theories of lost European civilizations and alien drop-ins “demonstrable claptrap.” Yet a much more reputable but equally insulting theory about Easter Island has remained influential, even dominant, Pitts argues. In this version of events, Easter Island is a cautionary tale of a population that destroyed itself, its island paradise, and whatever mysterious civilization had created its thousand or so stone monuments, or moai. (A Dutch captain who landed there on, yes, Easter gave it the name many Westerners still know it by. Rapa Nui is the Polynesian name for the island; Pitts follows the convention of using “Rapanui” for its Indigenous inhabitants.)

“I don’t think God getting bangs is a good sign.”

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Europeans who arrived in the late nineteenth century on this speck of land in the vast eastern Pacific encountered a very small local population in whom they saw little of interest or value. By contrast, the statues—hewn from volcanic stone, with beetle brows, long ski-slope noses, down-turned mouths, and distant gazes, once upright and now toppled or partly buried—earned their respect. They were blocky, minimalist, stylized, enormous, and strikingly different from the representational statues of people and gods the Europeans knew from home.

It was common in these late-nineteenth-century accounts, Pitts writes, to describe Rapa Nui’s inhabitants as “born cannibals,” and to wonder who could have carved the stone figures. Perhaps a cataclysm—an earthquake, a volcanic eruption—had driven those people away. The dearth of trees on the island implied to some that the inhabitants had cut them down to make clubs and shields.

In 1868, when the British naval frigate H.M.S. Topaze stopped at Easter Island to assess its usefulness to the Empire, the captain instructed his men to find a statue that they could bring home. With the assistance of islanders, they dug out an approximately eight-foot figure—one of the smaller, more portable moai, whose head had been spotted protruding from the ground—and hauled it back to the British Museum, where it stands to this day. The statue, known to the islanders as Hoa Hakananai’a, caused a sensation and, Pitts suggests, helped set off a new round of fervid conjecture about Rapa Nui. (Chile, Germany, and the United States soon dispatched ships to collect statues of their own.)

Martin Farquhar Tupper, a poet and an antiquarian favored by Queen Victoria, argued that Rapa Nui was the remnant of a lost continent whose people had perished. The spiritualist Madame Blavatsky saw the statues as evidence of a vanished race of giants who’d fled a mythical continent called Lemuria just before it sunk into the sea. Rapa Nui, Pitts writes, was subjected to “the full fantasy treatment,” based on a cluster of false premises: that the stone was too hard to carve with simple tools; that the island and its inhabitants were incapable of the civilization implied by the monuments; and that the real creators must have come from elsewhere—South America, Mexico, “Lemuria,” or beyond—and then disappeared. Running through it all was a strong note of judgment. The trees were gone because the islanders had cut them down to make war, and their world had been ruined, as Pitts writes, “because they had worshipped the wrong gods and reached above their station.”

Katherine Routledge and a Rapanui man measure the stone foundations of a hare paenga, or canoe-shaped house, on the slopes of Poike, Easter Island, during the Mana Expedition, 1913–16.Photograph from Royal Geographical Society / Getty

When a serious archeological expedition finally took place on Rapa Nui, in 1913-15, its leaders, the British husband-and-wife team Katherine and William Scoresby Routledge, concluded that the islanders they’d met were indeed the descendants of those who had carved the statues. Yet much of their work—Katherine’s in particular—was later lost or ignored. Pitts, who edited British Archaeology for many years and has written books on Stonehenge and the search for Richard III’s remains, first visited Rapa Nui three decades ago and has taken an interest in it ever since. He seems to see a kindred spirit in Katherine, whose legacy, he believes, might have reshaped the island’s existing narrative had it not been cut short in a notably harsh way.

In 1913, Katherine Routledge set out for Easter Island. She was from a wealthy Quaker family in the North of England, and formally trained in modern history. (She had studied at Oxford but received her degree from Trinity College Dublin, in 1895, because Oxford did not then grant diplomas to women.) By the time of the expedition, she was in her late forties and had already carried out archeological field work in East Africa with her husband, Scoresby Routledge, an anthropologist in the gentleman-explorer mold. The impetus for Rapa Nui came from Thomas Athol Joyce, an ethnographer at the British Museum who’d urged the Routledges to go while elderly islanders who remembered the old ways were still alive. Katherine read everything she could about the place, and the couple secured support from the Royal Geographical Society and commissioned a two-masted, ninety-one-foot wooden schooner for an archeological and ethnological survey designed to collect “scientific facts in relation” to the “inhabitants and their arts.”

In the course of sixteen months, from 1914 to 1915, the Routledges and their crew crisscrossed the island on horseback, worked closely with an influential islander named Tepano Ramo a Veriamo, and produced a pioneering survey of Rapa Nui’s topography and monuments. But the oral histories Katherine conducted, interviewing elderly islanders, with Tepano translating, may have been more valuable still. Her informants told her, for example, about funeral practices—about how they wrapped bodies and carried them aloft to the base of coastal plinths. Pitts thinks that Katherine came to understand not only the island’s physical layout but its “psychogeography”: what certain places meant to the people who lived there.

She also formed a bond with a Rapanui prophetess named Angata, the leader of an uprising against the sheep-ranching operation then dominating the island, which took place during the Routledges’ stay. Scoresby dismissed Angata as a “mad woman” and her followers as “ruffians.” Katherine saw a “charming, frail old lady,” with expressive eyes, at the center of a movement that could not be reduced to livestock raiding. As the only woman on the expedition, and as someone who had long chafed at the limits imposed on her in Edwardian England, Katherine may have been predisposed to sympathy. When she thanked Angata for a gift of poultry and potatoes, Angata replied that no thanks were needed; the food, she said, came from God.

However impressive the Routledges’ research, it was no match for the seductive notion of a populace living among the ruins of a once mighty civilization whose origins were a puzzle and whose downfall was an object lesson. That idea was spooky and poignant and metaphorically potent. In particular, the Routledges’ research was no match for the narrative skills and indefatigable energy of the swashbuckling Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Heyerdahl became an international celebrity largely on the basis of his fascination with Easter Island and his eagerness to prove his theories about it, at great personal risk. Heyerdahl, whom Pitts describes as “a charismatic expedition leader, and a driven writer and self-publicist untroubled by historical nuance,” shared the common supposition that the moai could not have been made by ancestors of the present-day islanders. His particular spin was that the moai’s true creators were people who had travelled from the Americas. Pacific peoples weren’t known to be strong on massive visages and the like, popular opinion suggested at the time, whereas groups like the Inca, the Olmec, and the Toltec were. But Heyerdahl had further theories about where these ingenious Americans had come from originally. He took the “patronizing premise” that the Rapanui were not up to the task, Pitts writes, “and bolted on explicit racism.” And so Heyerdahl recast the island’s earliest settlers as members of a Caucasian race who had migrated from what is now Iraq or Turkey to the Americas and then across the Pacific, and who were tall, fair, blue-eyed, and bearded—not unlike Heyerdahl himself, as Pitts wryly observes.

In 1947, to demonstrate that a pre-Columbian voyage from South America to Polynesia was at least possible, Heyerdahl and a crew of five set off from Peru on a forty-square-foot balsa-wood raft he named the Kon-Tiki. After a hundred and one days and some forty-three hundred miles drifting through shark-infested waters, they landed on a reef near Tahiti. The journey showed that such a crossing could be done—which did not, of course, mean that it had been. Still, it was a daring thing to have pulled off, and it yielded a best-selling book, an Oscar-winning 1950 documentary, and fuel for America’s postwar tiki-bar craze.

Heyerdahl’s ideas have been disputed by many scholars working on Rapa Nui, but they found a large and receptive audience, in part because they aligned with some of the conventional wisdom about Rapa Nui’s culture and its supposed violent rupture with its past. In 1994, the island received the Hollywood treatment in a film co-produced by Kevin Costner, not long after “Dances with Wolves.” In “Rapa-Nui,” bare chests, male and female, gleam in firelight, and internecine warfare—a love triangle gone apocalyptic—tears the island apart. Far more seriously, Easter Island became the exemplary case study in Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.” Diamond called it “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources”—through deforestation, soil exhaustion, and overfishing—turning it into a worst-case metaphor for our collective future. The “ecocide” narrative, with Easter Island as its emblem, was eagerly taken up by politicians and podcasters, liberals and conservatives alike. New evidence from pollen analysis indicated that the island had once been home to tall palm trees, possibly even a primeval palm forest. In his writings and lectures, Diamond posed a chilling question: “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree”—like the Once-ler in “The Lorax”—“say while he was doing it?”

The story Pitts tells—drawing on new archeological findings, a fresh reading of eighteenth-century visitors’ accounts, and a reconsideration of Katherine Routledge’s neglected work—is quite different. It will no doubt be contested; Rapa Nui studies is a notably argumentative field, perhaps because so little can be definitively proved in the absence of early written records. All the same, Pitts’s account reflects a broader shift in the consensus, one that many readers will find persuasive, as this one did. He begins from a premise now widely shared: that Rapa Nui was settled in around 1200 by Polynesians who’d sailed in dugout canoes across uncharted reaches of the Pacific from another island. It was an extraordinary journey, but one that requires no transoceanic, or extraterrestrial, embellishment. The settlers spoke a Polynesian language, practiced Polynesian customs, and left descendants who continue to. Genetic studies of ancient and modern Rapanui confirm their Polynesian origins while also suggesting limited contact with South America, likely the result of later voyages rather than founding migration.

The island that the settlers discovered was probably less lush and hospitable than the one they had left. Much of it was open and grassy and studded with rocks, its soil fragile. It had coral reefs but not at sea level, rough surf, and no permanent freshwater streams. Still, the Rapanui made a go of it. Within a few generations, they began carving moai from volcanic stone and mounting them on plinths. Far from self-destructive, the Rapanui proved remarkably resilient.

When Europeans first arrived—a Dutch West India Company ship in 1722, a Spanish expedition from Peru in 1770, a British voyage under James Cook in 1774, and a French one in 1786—they encountered a population that appeared stable and well organized. Visitors noted agricultural practices that included crop rotation and other methods of soil renewal, carried out with what the French captain Jean-François de La Pérouse called “a great deal of intelligence.” The islanders kept chickens and grew taro, yams, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, and bananas.

They also described the statues as depicting distinguished ancestors, and interacted with them—lighting fires in front of them, dancing around them, or sitting before them with bowed heads. None of the eighteenth-century visitors “made a cultural distinction between living islanders and the statues,” Pitts writes. “They took it for granted that the statues were made by the people they met, and had meaning for them.” Population estimates varied, but Pitts places the likely number at around five thousand. (That’s high when compared with other scholars’ approximations, but several thousand seems like a safe assumption.)

“How can you possibly know how I feel?”

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These eighteenth-century European accounts have been underused, Pitts thinks, in part because they were hardly systematic or scientific, and also because some were thought to be lost in a shipwreck and others were scattered and difficult to consult. Today, there’s a range of archeological and genetic work that tends to support their basic observations while countering, or at least complicating, the familiar ecocide narrative. A 2024 genomic study tracking the island’s population over roughly four centuries found no sign of the sharp demographic collapse that is supposed to have occurred around 1600. Research by the American archeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt, among others, suggests that the islanders continued to prosper, and to build stone platforms for their statues, well beyond that date.

The evidence for environmental ruin, too, turns out to be less stark than advertised. The landscape of Rapa Nui probably never incorporated the sort of primeval forest of palm trees imagined in popular accounts, Pitts writes, but was more mixed, and scrubbier, with no one species of charismatic megaflora dominating. And, besides, it seems unfair to single out the Rapanui for cutting down their trees when, as Pitts notes, forest loss is a nearly ubiquitous consequence of human settlement. Medieval Europeans, to take one example, cleared enormous stretches of woodland—up to seventy per cent in parts of France and England by the fourteenth century—for farming, fuel, and timber. Later archeological research, including forensic examination of skeletal remains, has turned up no evidence for cannibalism or for a particularly bellicose society on Rapa Nui.

Something cataclysmic did happen to the Rapanui, but it was no great mystery, or shouldn’t be. In the eighteen-sixties, an Irish entrepreneur named Joseph Charles Byrne proposed a solution to a growing problem facing the Peruvian economy. Plantations producing sugar, the red dye cochineal, and cotton, along with guano operations on coastal islands, needed labor, and the tightening constraints on slavery were making it harder to secure. Byrne suggested looking west, to Polynesia, where, he claimed, workers could be obtained cheaply. So began a round of slaving raids in Polynesia. Rapa Nui was especially attractive because of its relative proximity to South America. “Some 1,500 islanders were taken or killed,” Pitts writes, “as the rest of the community hid in coastal caves and cowered inland.” Byrne skirted formal bans on slavery by having captives sign work contracts—in Spanish, which they could not read—and selling the contracts rather than the people themselves. The slaving raids became a public-relations problem, anyway. They drew criticism in Chilean and Peruvian newspapers, and the French Ambassador in Lima made a fuss. The trade was halted, and ships carrying Polynesian laborers were ordered back.

By then, the damage was done. Some captives had come down with smallpox during an epidemic in Lima and carried it home, spreading it to others. After the crossings and the returns, according to Pitts, more than six thousand Polynesians died, with the Rapanui suffering the heaviest losses. By the late nineteenth century, Rapa Nui’s population had fallen to a hundred and ten people, only twenty-six of them women.

Even so, the island drew outsiders seeking to save souls or make their fortune. First came Catholic missionaries from Europe, who found willing converts among a population still reeling from catastrophe. Then came Chile, which had a navy and a long coastline and was looking for a toehold in the Pacific; in 1888, it annexed Rapa Nui. (The island remains a Chilean province. In the Chilean Presidential elections that brought a law-and-order conservative to power last month, it voted for a leftist woman.) Then came the Chilean branch of Williamson, Balfour, a global firm founded by two Scotsmen with interests in everything from flour mills to railroads and oil fields in Chile and Peru. It alighted on Rapa Nui as the site for a sheep-farming enterprise. From the late nineteenth century to the nineteen-fifties, the island functioned, in effect, as a company state where, as Pitts observes, the sheep got better treatment than the people, with the pastures as well watered as a golf course. The population slowly recovered, but most of the land was given over to grazing, and the remaining Rapanui were confined to a walled settlement. As a result, “generations of gardens, houses and monuments lay abandoned and inaccessible,” Pitts writes, and the practices that sustained historical memory were badly disrupted. Knowledge of the statues grew tenuous among survivors of the raids and their descendants.

After the Routledges returned to England, they gave lectures about and published their findings; Katherine wrote a well-received book about their expedition. She also retained reams of notes, interviews, transcripts, genealogies, and sketches, evidently intending to write up further studies. By the late nineteen-twenties, however, her marriage was foundering, and her mental health was in decline. In 1927, the couple agreed to separate. Living in a grand house overlooking Hyde Park, Katherine packed up Scoresby’s belongings, sent them to a warehouse, changed the locks, and left for Syria and Palestine.

When she returned, she withdrew almost entirely, barricading herself in her seventeen-room house. In 1929, Scoresby’s and Katherine’s siblings had her committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she would remain until her death, seven years later. She was diagnosed with “mania,” believed by her doctors to be hereditary (one of her brothers had spent his life in an asylum after attacking his wife), aggravated, according to the diagnosis, by her “spiritualism.” Katherine appears to have suffered from paranoia and, at times, auditory hallucinations—though not, it seems, during her years in the Pacific. She needed help. Even so, the outcome was undeniably sad: a woman whose life had been defined by travel, research, and writing was cut off from all three. In a 2003 biography of Katherine, “Among Stone Giants,” the archeologist Jo Anne van Tilburg writes that “there is no evidence she ever saw Scoresby again.” For long stretches, she was denied access to books and bridled against the monotony and regulation of institutional life. When she was granted limited freedom to pursue her interests, such as walking in the garden, she exceeded the agreed-on terms and told her doctors she had done so “on principle.”

Even worse, perhaps, the wishes Katherine had set out in her will—that her notes, manuscripts, sketches, and photographs be edited, published, and deposited in a public archive, under the supervision of Thomas Athol Joyce, at the British Museum, or some suitable substitute—were never carried out, even though she had left the means to pay for this work. Scoresby, living in Cyprus and in poor health, showed little interest, and after his death, in 1939, no one else took responsibility. The fact that Katherine had been institutionalized may have tainted her scholarly reputation.

But she is not quite the neglected figure Pitts suggests—there is van Tilburg’s biography, for one thing, and she is regularly cited among a cohort of formidable women archeologists of the early twentieth century. If her papers had been collected and published, they might not have overturned entrenched ideas about Rapa Nui as forcefully as Pitts hopes. He’s surely exaggerating when he writes, “It seemed to me that had Katherine Routledge’s research become fully public,” those reigning narratives “would never have been born.” After all, his whole book makes a strong case for their tenacious utility. Still, it’s a shame that the papers were not available to the archeologists and anthropologists who came looking for them later. And it’s satisfying to see her taken so seriously, by a writer whose indignation on her behalf nearly matches his impatience with the persistent misreading of the island itself.

Rapa Nui continues to generate serious research questions. One that has long absorbed archeologists concerns the movement of the moai: how statues weighing several tons were transported from the quarry where they were carved to their platforms. Some scholars favor a method preserved in Rapanui oral tradition in which the figures were kept upright and made to “walk,” rocked forward with ropes. Heyerdahl demonstrated the technique’s feasibility in the nineteen-eighties, and more recently Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt have done the same, though others still argue for sledges or rollers. The island, in other words, still inspires genuine wonder, which is something quite different from the manufactured mystery of a lost civilization. The real question we should be asking now, as Pitts suggests, is how a people forced to cope with an inauspicious habitat, enslavement, and exploitation managed to survive at all. ♦

A few stanzas from the end of Chaucer’s long poem “Troilus and Criseyde,” the author interrupts his story to indulge in a bit of reception anxiety. “Go, litel book,” he bids the manuscript that’s soon to be out of his hands. “That thou be understonde I god beseche!” Had Chaucer stuck around to witness the ensuing six hundred-plus years of literary discourse—and the past few decades in particular—he might have concluded that, when it comes to being understonde, the litel books aren’t the ones you have to worry about. It’s the big ones that’ll get you.

David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” a book whose notorious bigness comprises both physical size and reputational heft, turns thirty in February. The occasion is a moment to ask how a novel that mourns addiction and venerates humility and patience became a glib cultural punch line—a byword for literary arrogance, a totem of masculine pretentiousness, a red flag if spotted on the shelves of a prospective partner, and reading matter routinely subjected to the word “performative” in its most damning sense. At a thousand and seventy-nine pages, “Infinite Jest” has become a one-liner.

Last year, an article in the Guardian explored the risks of so-called performative reading under the title “Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public?” For the Guardian writer, the question was a rare refutation of Betteridge’s law, the journalistic adage stating that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with a no. Here the answer was a nervous and tentative yes. Mostly, though, the piece drew on and perpetuated the archetype of the noxious “Infinite Jest” bro which has solidified in the quick-drying cement of social media. In 2020, the “Jest” bro hit the big screen in Emerald Fennell’s heavy-handed “Promising Young Woman,” in which a D.F.W. fanboy tells Carey Mulligan’s character that she has to read “Consider the Lobster,” one of the author’s essay collections. Moments later, the fanboy is revealed to be a sexual predator. In this way, “would-be rapist” is added to the already toxic mélange of incel, mansplainer, and poser that constitutes the putative “Infinite Jest” reader. Has anyone met these guys? Not the female journalist in the Guardian: ostentatiously wielding her copy of Wallace’s novel in Washington Square Park, she waits “to be caught in the act, secretly filmed for a TikTok ridiculing my performance.” The only interaction she has is with a polite Gen X dude on the bench beside her, who asks how she’s doing with the book. Her bench mate is, she surmises, the “type of guy who might consider David Foster Wallace a modern-day saint.”

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Wallace, whose mental health was fragile for most of his life, died, by suicide, in 2008, at the age of forty-six. Painfully aware of his shortcomings, Wallace would have been horrified by his own subsequent beatification. Such treatment would instead have given him—to enlist a phrase from “Infinite Jest”—a case of “the howling fantods.” (The phrase conveys something like “the heebie-jeebies,” albeit on a greater order of psychological magnitude.) Death casts an ennobling sheen on any writer, but especially on one who, to use another “Infinite Jest”-ism, eliminated his own map—a coinage that tells us something about Wallace’s aversion to treacly solemnity, even the trace amount present in the euphemism “took his own life.” In the years following Wallace’s death, this aura of saintliness likely derived from the combination of his moral seriousness as a fiction writer—his attunement to the heroism of private suffering and emotional endurance—and the fact of his premature end. In other words, it came to seem unbearable that his characters, many of them fellow addicts and overthinkers, prevail in a way their author could not. Now, however, the appellation “Saint Dave” tends to be used only mockingly, and not just on park benches.

In 2023, the writer Patricia Lockwood chafed at Wallace’s supposed sainthood in a long piece for the London Review of Books. The essay, in its ambivalence, did things other than chafe; Lockwood’s Technicolor mind, much like her subject’s, tends to move quaquaversally, to use a word that perhaps only a sesquipedalian math nerd who modelled his thousand-page novel on a particular fractal (the Sierpiński gasket) would tolerate. Nonetheless, the following lines are representative of Lockwood’s general attitude: “What were the noughties? A time when everyone went to see the Blue Man Group for a while. Men read David Foster Wallace. Men also put hot sauce on their balls.”

Men! But Wallace, alert to the sexism of his forebears and eager to demonstrate his own feminism, once sounded a lot like Lockwood. First, “Infinite Jest” made Wallace the most famous young writer in America. Then it began a mighty, self-sustaining Newton’s cradle of acclaim and backlash, a momentum transfer that hasn’t stopped since. When the novel appeared, in 1996, it was more than a best-seller; it was a phenomenon, a widespread, must-read accessory and experience. A year and a half after “Infinite Jest” came out, Wallace, perhaps with a tinge of his own reception anxiety, reviewed a lesser John Updike novel, “Toward the End of Time,” for the New York Observer. His review seemed a prescient (if covert) attempt to head off the very criticisms that would later confront his own work. Wallace began by dismissing the book’s author, along with Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, as “The Great Male Narcissists.” But his sickest burn—the real hot sauce to the balls—was reserved for Updike, whom Wallace, invoking a friend’s verdict, characterized as “a penis with a thesaurus.” Here was a clear case of the pot calling the kettle atramentous. You don’t need a penis to read “Infinite Jest,” but you might need a dictionary.

Beyond the novel’s fondness for five-dollar words, what is it like to read? Perhaps the greatest disjunction between the book’s reputation and its contents lies in the notion that it’s a pretentious slog no one could honestly enjoy. I first read the novel in 2008, before D. T. Max’s 2012 biography and, later, Mary Karr’s 2018 tweets detailed Wallace’s upsetting and potentially criminal treatment of Karr, once his romantic partner. Fiction is so often the gold extracted from the dross of a damaged life. As Rivka Galchen wrote in her review of Max’s book, “The co-founder of A.A., Bill W., is a guru of sobriety precisely because sobriety was so difficult for him.” Wallace, by implication, was concerned with patience, steadfastness, and tranquillity precisely because these virtues often eluded him in life.

Encountering the novel in my twenties, I was unaware that I was committing a form of gender treason; I knew only that little or nothing I’d read had come close in terms of sheer pleasure. The book had more brio, heart, and humor than I thought possible on the page. It was bizarrely grotesque and howlingly sad; it was sweet, silly, and vertiginously clever. It was also, by virtue of its relentlessly entertaining scenes and the high-low virtuosity of its language, a work that enacted its own theme of addiction. When I finished, I experienced withdrawal: Where to go after “Infinite Jest”? It was, in short, a supposedly unfun thing I would do again, and did.

The novel takes place in a future America, specifically Boston and its environs, and is mainly concerned with two institutions as its zones of action. The first is the Enfield Tennis Academy, where athletically gifted boys and girls (but mainly boys) are drilled in physical and mental preparation for what’s known as The Show, a stab at professional tennis. The second, just down the hill, is the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, where men and women (but mainly men) reckon with their substance abuse. Ambition and addiction, the two traits these institutions respectively represent, share a fat slice of their Venn diagram—an overlap that might be labelled “how to live with yourself.” The self-torturing helices of thought twisting inside the young minds on the courts are no less fraught than the recursive neuroses tormenting the addicts down the hill. Among the former cohort is Hal Incandenza, a star student, teen-age tennis prodigy, secret marijuana addict, and Hamlet manqué. His father, James, an experimental filmmaker and the school’s founder, has killed himself via a MacGyvered microwave oven. Hal was the one who found him, or what was left of him. Hal’s mother, Avril, is having an affair with Charles Tavis, who is either her half or adoptive brother, and has summarily replaced Hal’s father as headmaster of the academy. Much, in other words, is rotten in the state of the Enfield Tennis Academy, or E.T.A. (This most prolix of writers can never resist an abbreviation.)

Hal’s voice begins the novel. As he responds to the authority figures questioning him about his recent “subnormal” test scores, they react with horror: the eloquence of Hal’s internal monologue is at odds with his ability to actually speak. Rather than producing words, he’s emitting “subanimalistic noises and sounds.” Soon, he’s gurneyed off to an emergency room. A notable oddity is the way in which Hal’s first-person narration is abandoned after seventeen pages until close to the end, even though he remains one of the book’s central characters. Why? The novel’s very Gen X diagnosis of the character offers a clue: “One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.” Wallace, once a regionally ranked junior tennis player in his home state of Illinois, later considered a career in academia. One of his undergraduate thesis advisers has said, “I thought of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby.” Hal, in his academic brilliance, tennis talent, and acute anxiety, is the character who most resembles his creator. To grant him ongoing first-person status would be to privilege the book’s most autobiographical consciousness. And Wallace is not much interested in himself. In “Infinite Jest,” he’s going for the least solipsistic rendering of humanity he can pull off, via more than a hundred borrowed selves.

This enormous cast of characters is diverse mostly in terms of the variegated peculiarity of inner lives. As for “diversity” in the sense of gender parity and racial representation: not so much. The two main female characters, Avril Incandenza and Joelle van Dyne, both happen to be gorgeous. When it comes to the novel’s handful of Black characters, some of whom speak in a cartoonish version of Ebonics, perhaps the most tactful thing to be said is something like: It was a different time. And yet from this horde of fretting, feeling, interfacing selves a truth emerges: that loneliness is a universal problem experienced by each person in a unique way. The novel also suggests—mumblingly, without making eye contact, not wanting to be corny about it—that one’s own self becomes a little less hideous the more one attends to other selves. Not all of whom are entirely hideous.

In the weight room of E.T.A., for example, you’ll find Lyle, who maintains a permanent levitating lotus pose, and who lives (in a literal, biological way) off the sweat of others. The most important thing about Lyle, though, is that he’s a guru to anxious students: “Like all good listeners, he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment. It’s like he’s working as hard as you. You both of you, briefly, feel unalone.”

To feel unalone is pretty much what all the novel’s characters, not just tragic Hal, yearn for. Despite the solace Lyle dispenses, however, he’s more curio than hero. If the latter distinction goes to anyone, it’s to Don Gately, the large-hearted, as well as simply large (“the size of a young dinosaur”), addict who stealthily overtakes Hal as the book’s most prominent character. Don becomes a resident staffer at Ennet House, where he meets his fellow-addicts’ demands and offenses with implacable stoicism. His struggle to stay sober involves accepting that the bromides of A.A. (“It works if you work it”; “One day at a time”; and so on)—what Don calls “the limpest kind of dickless pap”—do actually work. In fact, “it starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.”

“Infinite Jest” also involves a Pynchonesque subplot, which is certainly silly and sometimes funny, concerning an organization of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. These militants are seeking a master copy of James Incandenza’s final film, “Infinite Jest,” also known as “the Entertainment,” which is a work so enthralling that anyone who views it becomes catatonic and eventually dies from starvation or dehydration. One of Wallace’s driving anxieties, a black thread running through this novel, was that television addiction (including his own) was inducing brain rot, social atomization, and spiritual death. In light of our mass smartphone and social-media addictions, a TV habit seems almost benign. Oh, honey, I find myself murmuring to the David Foster Wallace of 1996. Had he only known.

In the world of the novel, Boston is recognizably Bostonian but belongs to a U.S. that has subsumed Canada and Mexico to form a superstate by the name of the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. The acronym may serve as a satirical indictment of a thanatotic American culture of bottomless self-gratification, but it’s also a joke about jerking off. The blend of brainy and base is typical Wallace. Here is a guy anxious to assure you that he may have produced a Dostoyevskian work of profligate genius, but he’s also just a regular dumbass like you.

Onanism, albeit of the metaphorical kind, is the very charge Wallace levies against Updike in that review from 1997. Blasting Updike and his fellow-“phallocrats” for their self-absorption, Wallace scoffs, in particular, at the character of Ben Turnbull, who narrates “Toward the End of Time.” Turnbull has undergone surgery for prostate cancer, which would be a sympathetic predicament if not for the fact that his entire hideous self seems to reside in his genitals and their gratification. He is facing what Wallace calls “the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.” In other words, a sort of onanism of the soul afflicts him. What might Wallace, or Updike, for that matter, have made of gooning, the subculture of isolated men masturbating to online pornography for hours or days at a time? For a writer to inhabit the souls of more than a hundred other people is surely the opposite of onanistic, as it is for a reader to do so, whether behind the locked door of a bedroom or among strangers on a park bench. The gentle paradox here, one Wallace was intimately in touch with, is that reading fiction is a form of self-gratification, done alone, that allows a person to feel unalone. And, unlike gooning, or freebasing, reading is the rare instance of an addiction that, as a rule, harms no one and may even sharpen your mind.

Despite this, a pseudo-Freudian emphasis on length and girth still haunts discussions of “Infinite Jest,” and, with it, an implication of the masturbatory—as if big novels were the exclusive preserve of arrogant males (“phallocrats”) whose self-conferred genius permits them to indulge in long-windedness. George Eliot, whose “Middlemarch” runs to more than nine hundred pages in its longest editions, would like a word. As, no doubt, would plenty of living women novelists. (Eleanor Catton, for example, whose “The Luminaries” runs to 848 pages, or Lucy Ellmann, whose “Ducks, Newburyport,” comes in at 1,040.) Late last year, I returned to Wallace’s masterpiece not from some built-in, media-friendly calendar for upcoming literary anniversaries but because two other long novels, both by women, had reminded me of the work. Tess Gunty’s “The Rabbit Hutch” and Alexis Wright’s “Praiseworthy” seemed, through the scope of their ensemble casts and their granular attention to the distinctive suffering of their characters, to pick up where Wallace left off. Just as Don DeLillo’s influence on a generation of women novelists (Rachel Kushner, Zadie Smith, Jennifer Egan, and Dana Spiotta among them) has been underacknowledged, perhaps so, too, has Wallace’s.

Thirty years on, “Infinite Jest” and its author seem poised to undergo not just a reëvaluation but something of a cultural feminization, too. The new, anniversary edition of “Infinite Jest” comes with a foreword from Michelle Zauner, the thirty-six-year-old, queer Korean American front woman of the indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast and the author of the hit memoir “Crying in H Mart”: a person worlds away from the maligned stereotype of the D.F.W. fan. Recently, the writer Hannah Smart (Instagram handle @howlingfantod) wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books about diagramming a nine-hundred-word sentence from Wallace’s short story “Mister Squishy.” Parsing Wallace’s clauses, Smart reflected, has taught her “to distinguish between data and knowledge, to approach all inputs with not just narrative but also linguistic skepticism.” More than this, Smart’s project, an ongoing one, seems to have transcended the grammatical and become devotional. Wallace’s syntax, she believes, reveals a koanistic truth: “the future is eternal, while the present is momentary.”

The ephemeral present includes, of course, a writer’s reputation. If that writer is hailed as a once-in-a-generation voice, the reputation will undergo transmutations. Like Wallace, George Eliot had sainthood foisted on her, although in her case it was within her lifetime: readers wrote to her seeking advice on how to live. Her image as a figure of moral uplift was cemented with the publication of such works as “Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse” (1871), a florilegium of instructive or consoling lines mostly wrested from the fictive surroundings that had loaned them their vitality and moral torque. (That image, in turn, cemented the contempt that a subsequent generation had for her.) Much like “inspirational quotes” littering Instagram, the collection seemed to be a TL;DR cheat sheet for those unwilling to tackle “Middlemarch,” which had been published around the same time. In this way, the volume shows a curious similarity to Wallace’s “This Is Water,” the 2009 vade mecum that came, posthumously, out of a 2005 commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College. In this encomium to mindfulness, Wallace tells a tale of two fish swimming along, oblivious of the fact of water, the medium of their own existence. The words “this is water”—since tattooed on many a wrist—offer themselves as a mantra of consciousness and compassion. An earlier instantiation can be found, however, in “Infinite Jest.” Midway through the novel, Don Gately is chatting with some sober bikers when one of them, a man who goes by the cheery name of Bob Death, asks whether Don’s heard the one about the fish. Another biker supplies a lewd and sexist joke. Not that one, Bob says:

He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away. The young biker leans back and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top’s tits mashed against his back.

We understand Don to be one of the bewildered young fish, although, owing to Mr. Death in the unlikely role of sage, perhaps a young fish now coming to terms with the water in which he swims, learning to pay attention to what merits attention. Wallace’s piscine material is much more successful in this rambunctious, dynamic, take-it-or-leave-it novelistic form than in his fish-out-of-water public performance, years later, before the class of 2005. Wallace gave a commencement speech for the ages, but homily was not his métier. His great novel proposed that the compulsive, addictive character of America, not least its addiction to entertainment, could best be resisted through the engaged reading of fiction. Here is a book about addiction that offers itself as a kind of counter-addiction, an example of the compounding value of sustained attention. The infamous length of “Infinite Jest” is, in this sense, a central feature of its ethic: not bigness as brag but duration as discipline. In a distractible age, Wallace made an argument for the long novel that is won simply by being heard. ♦