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Among the Emberá people of Colombia, almost nobody uses the word “suicide.” Instead, loved ones speak of jais, the native word for “spirits.” The Emberá are a large Indigenous community living in remote villages along the country’s west coast, a region plagued by acute poverty and violence from armed groups that are vying for drug-trafficking routes. “The jais are taking our children away,” one member of the community told Santiago Mesa, a Colombian photographer who has been documenting the surge of Emberá youth suicides in recent years. The jais are believed to be malign forces that appear mostly at night, taking over their victims’ consciousness and forcing them to end their lives. Mesa, a native of Medellín, visited the Emberá in mid-2024, not long after a sixteen-year-old named Yadira Birry hanged herself at her school using a traditional paruma, a large, colorful piece of cloth that women use as long skirts.

The girl’s mother, Miralba Birry, told Mesa, “Before Yadira killed herself, people in our community didn’t think much about that.” But soon after Yadira’s death ten more members in her village, a community of only a hundred and forty-one people, also attempted to kill themselves using parumas. One of them was Luisa, Yadira’s older sister. The girl mentioned to Mesa that she had been seeing Yadira in her dreams, beckoning her to the other side. “Yadira tells me she’s doing O.K., but she never lets me see her face,” Luisa said. Her mother took her to a jaibaná, a traditional priest, who tried to keep the jais at bay with smoke and prayers. “My daughter’s case was part of that same illness,” Miralba said.

Mesa’s photo series, titled “Jaidë,” or “House of Spirits,” conjures the mystical outlook of the women he met, using an ethereal yellow-and-orange palette to portray the grieving. An overexposed photo shows Miralba from the torso up, looking into a white sky, with a ray of light almost sanctifying her face. Another picture shows three of the Birry sisters wearing their red-and-blue parumas on their heads, lingering like ghosts around Yadira’s grave. For another shot, Mesa asked Yadira’s family to stand in front of lighted candles one evening, in the classroom where she died.

“By then, the local authorities were very worried about it happening so often,” Mesa told me. “They had never witnessed something like this at this scale.” The Emberá elders say that they have been noticing a rise in suicide attempts since around 2015. According to UNICEF, the annual suicide rate among the Emberá is some five hundred cases per hundred thousand people, nearly a hundred times higher than the rate among Colombians at large. Yet the phenomenon is hard to track in the remote villages where the Emberá live, not just because most can be reached only by boat, and have little phone service, but also because of the taboo around the topic.

In the municipality of Bojayá, an Emberá man named José Luis Dogirama Sanapi is keeping his own record, in a notebook listing the names of the hundred and twelve people who have died by suicide in the past ten years, plus the four hundred and twenty-three who have attempted to kill themselves. He became interested in the subject because of his own past yearning for death, which he came to understand as a result of the never-ending violence plaguing his ancestral land. “In 1997, a guerrilla group forcibly recruited me into their ranks,” Sanapi told me by phone. “I lost eight years of my life in a living hell, and when I came back home I was completely traumatized.” He eventually found solace working with a local church.

Mesa, too, pursued his photography project, in part, because he’d has his own struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts. His mental health stabilized with the help of therapy and S.S.R.I.s. “Fifteen days after taking the medicine, I no longer felt cramps in my feet, no longer had mental fog,” he recalled. Enjoying a clear mind, he started to pay more attention to the tragic and puzzling news of suicides coming out of the Emberá territories. “Jaidë” wasn’t the first time that Mesa had felt compelled to chase death with a camera. He now lives in Bogotá but had previously worked for a tabloid in his home town of Medellín, where he’d often photograph the bodies of people who had been killed by hit men, or sicarios, a crime that is still common in a city that once was ruled by Pablo Escobar. “I needed to do something different after that work, something far away from classic photojournalism, something less explicit and more dreamlike,” Mesa said.

He discovered that most of those dying by suicide among the Emberá were women, and that there were common forces behind their despair. One was domestic violence. In the rain forest, Mesa met a mother of three kids who had attempted suicide in 2023. She did not hesitate to identify her husband as the main reason behind her wish to die. “I just couldn’t take his abuse anymore,” she said. (Having survived the suicide attempt, the woman remains married to the same man; divorce in the Emberá community is considered out of the question.) Often, the hostilities that women described facing were both personal and societal. Before making his first trip to the Pacific Coast, Mesa met two trans Emberá women living in Bogotá, who had attempted to die by suicide while living in crowded shelters for homeless Emberá. “They had left their land because of violence among guerrillas and paramilitaries,” Mesa said. “They survive in absolute poverty, and their families reject them for being trans. How much harder could life get?” In “Jaidë,” one of them, Ahitana, poses for a photo while looking down at the floor of a shelter, her expression defeated, her face barely illuminated by a small ray of light.

Mesa told me, “I am not sure this crisis can be fixed with a medical visit to these remote areas, because there is something more structurally wrong there, a strong feeling that you’re not part of a society.” When he visited the Emberá, several armed groups had imposed a curfew, and villagers could leave their homes only in the morning, to farm. “Some people say that their lands have been cursed by the armed conflict, that the spirits of those killed are the ones that haunt the young ones who then want to commit suicide.”

Mesa’s goal was to capture that haunting, and no photograph does so more vividly than one of Luisa Ignacia Chamorro, a young woman who had tried to hang herself seven days before their meeting. It was her second attempt. She spoke a bit about the jais, but then she cut the conversation short and allowed Mesa to follow her as she cropped the grass in front of her home. His image shows her kneeling with her face turned away from the camera. Rain falls around her. She grips a machete in one hand and holds it across her body, preparing to bring it slashing toward the ground.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to Minneapolis to assist ICE agents who have been conducting extensive and violent operations in the city. Clashes between those agents and protesters have intensified over the past ten days, after an ICE agent shot and killed a Minneapolis resident named Renee Good. Trump has previously raised the prospect of using the Insurrection Act—which grants the President vast powers to deploy the military to enforce domestic law—if, he said, courts, governors, or mayors were “holding us up.”

To talk about the history and text of the Insurrection Act, and exactly what it does and does not allow, I recently spoke by phone with Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, and an expert on Presidential emergency powers. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed the possible limits courts might place on the President, the arguments over Supreme Court precedents and how they might alternately impede or liberate Trump, and the dangers of the military working as a “force amplifier” for ICE.

Before the President’s declaration on Thursday that he might invoke the Insurrection Act, for months he had been sending the National Guard to cities, although that seems to have come to an end after a recent Supreme Court ruling. Can you talk about what that ruling said and why it may have stymied the President, at least in terms of the National Guard?

It actually didn’t stymie the President in terms of the National Guard. It stymied the President in terms of the law he was relying on, which is 10 U.S.C. § 12406. That law does authorize federalization and deployment of the National Guard, but so does the Insurrection Act, and the Supreme Court did not rule on the Insurrection Act. So insofar as the Insurrection Act is still on the table, federalization of the National Guard is still on the table.

What the Supreme Court held was that Trump could not rely on 10 U.S.C. § 12406 except in situations where he also had legal authority to deploy active-duty armed forces, but where deploying those armed forces would not be sufficient to execute the laws of the United States. And that ruling was based on language in 10 U.S.C. § 12406 saying that the President can federalize the National Guard only if the President is unable with regular forces to execute the law.

Right, so that was a 6–3 ruling, with Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett joining the three more liberal justices. The ruling makes it seem that the law is written, or interpreted by the Supreme Court, in a way that suggests that deploying the National Guard is more serious than deploying regular armed forces because you have to exhaust your possibilities with the regular armed forces before mobilizing the National Guard. I think most people listening to this would think, Oh, the National Guard would be less serious than actually sending in a division of the Marines.

Yes, it is certainly counterintuitive. It seems like pulling out a howitzer when a rifle would suffice, but it’s actually not. You have to look at what was going on in the early nineteen hundreds s when 10 U.S.C. § 12406 was passed. It’s not that the National Guard was considered to be more serious at the time; it’s that the National Guard was thought to be less competent. The National Guard was considered to be unruly, undisciplined, and disorganized, to the point that when they were deployed, it often resulted in bloodshed, or at least that was the perception back then. That’s why the legislative history is what it is.

But 10 U.S.C. § 12406 is the only law that requires that active-duty armed forces be first, or at least that the President considers using them before going to the National Guard. The Insurrection Act does not have any such requirements. So, under the Insurrection Act, the President could deploy federalized National Guard forces if that’s what he wanted to do.

Let’s then take a step back. Can you talk about what the Insurrection Act is?

I think the best way to think about the Insurrection Act is that it’s the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act. That’s the law that normally prohibits federal armed forces from participating in civilian law enforcement. The Insurrection Act allows the President to deploy active-duty armed forces or to federalize and deploy National Guard forces to quell civil unrest or to execute the law in a crisis.

Posse Comitatus was signed into law in 1878. The Insurrection Act is an amalgamation of laws passed between 1792 and 1874. So even the last meaningful update of the Insurrection Act happened before the passage of Posse Comitatus. At the time, it was an authorization, not an exception. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibited federal armed forces from participating in law enforcement unless there is an express statutory or constitutional exception. And the Insurrection Act, which already existed, constitutes such an exception.

I recently read a piece by Jack Goldsmith basically saying that the Insurrection Act more or less gives the President power to do what he wants—incredibly broad power. Is that your analysis, too?

Well, it gives the President remarkable power. I don’t think it gives the President the power to do anything he wants. There are criteria in the Insurrection Act for deployment. Those criteria are on their face broad, and the law gives the President significant discretion. However, the Department of Justice has long taken the position that the law is limited by the Constitution and tradition, and so the department has interpreted the Insurrection Act to apply in a much narrower set of circumstances than the actual text of the law would suggest. I think that’s an important gloss.

Does it matter what the Department of Justice said in the past, given how we’ve seen the D.O.J. act in 2026?

Well, the Department of Justice tends to argue that it matters what it has said in the past. Now, of course, this Department of Justice might not make that argument, but certainly anyone challenging the invocation of the Insurrection Act will. And they won’t just be saying that the Court should defer to the Department of Justice’s past interpretations. They will be pointing out that those interpretations are in fact grounded in the Constitution and tradition.

What kind of limits has the department thought were reasonable in the past?

There is a 1964 memorandum that takes the position that the law should be invoked only in three circumstances. First, if a state requests assistance to put down an insurrection against the state government. Second, if invocation of the Insurrection Act is necessary to enforce a federal court order. And third, if state and local law enforcement has completely broken down.

The most recent invocation of the act was by President George H. W. Bush, in 1992, during the riots after the Rodney King verdict, which I think would possibly fit under your third example. Before that, the act was invoked during the civil-rights movement, which I guess would maybe be your second example. Is that more or less accurate?

I would say that that is more or less accurate. And to put a finer point on it, at least in the past hundred and thirty years, the Insurrection Act has only been invoked when a governor has requested assistance because state and local law enforcement was completely overwhelmed—an obvious example would be Los Angeles in 1992, when riots killed sixty-three people and caused a billion dollars’ worth of damage—or when states themselves were actively obstructing civil-rights laws and federal court orders implementing civil-rights law.

Which is the opposite of your first circumstance, where states are requesting federal help, because obviously the governors of segregationist states were not requesting federal help during segregation.

Exactly. And there was a similar situation during Reconstruction.

The law says, however, that the President can use force “as he considers necessary.”

In specific situations.

O.K. So what are those situations?

It’s quite wordy, and the law is filled with vague and archaic terms, but essentially there needs to be some kind of obstruction to the execution of federal law or state civil-rights laws, and that is a meaningful limit. As broad as that is, it is still a meaningful limit in the sense that, for example, you couldn’t use the Insurrection Act to address street crimes. Trump threatened to use the Insurrection Act in Chicago to address violent crime, and those types of crimes are governed by state and local law. That’s not obstruction of federal law. So there are limits.

I thought that Supreme Court precedent basically said what is “necessary” can be defined by the President.

Not entirely. There is an 1827 Supreme Court decision that includes language to the effect that the President is the sole judge.

This is Martin v. Mott that you are talking about?

Right. However, as the plaintiffs have argued in the recent litigation over the deployment of National Guard forces, the facts of that case were extremely different from the facts of the deployments that President Trump has attempted or undertaken or proposed, because, in that case, a soldier refused orders to deploy during the War of 1812. And what the Court was looking at was whether a soldier could essentially go to court to refuse to deploy during a foreign invasion, and that implicates some of the President’s most potent powers in the area of foreign relations. That’s very, very different from a domestic deployment scenario during civil unrest for the purpose of executing civilian law. And the question of whether a soldier can challenge the President’s authority is a different question from whether the authority can be challenged at all.

There’s also the fact that since Martin v. Mott, the Supreme Court has issued several decisions that suggest that there is an exception to the rule that was articulated in Martin v. Mott, for situations in which the President is acting in bad faith, where he has exceeded a “permitted range of honest judgment,” where he has acted in a way that involves “manifestly unauthorized exercises of power,” or where he has made an “obvious mistake,” and I’m piecing together quotes from different decisions. So to tease out a general rule from those cases, the President can cross a line where the courts have the authority to step in.

So, if courts determine that, say, Trump is sending troops to a city to lock up political opponents, they might rule against him?

“As he considers necessary” relates to the steps he can take if the criteria are satisfied. I’m sort of oversimplifying, because the statute is very wordy, but there are three different provisions of the Insurrection Act. In one of the provisions, there is language that vests in the President the discretion to determine whether the criteria have been satisfied. The other two provisions do not have such language. I think the Supreme Court’s case law indicates that even the broadest of discretion can be abused, so that even the provision of the Insurrection Act that vests discretion in the President permits intervention by the courts in a situation where the actions of the President are manifestly unauthorized, or when the President has acted in bad faith.

There’s one other thing I should say, which is that even though Martin v. Mott addressed the Insurrection Act and not 10 U.S.C. § 12406, in the recent litigation over that law, the Administration argued that the rule of deference—I should say, the rule of judicial non-reviewability—in Martin v. Mott should apply, and the Ninth Circuit interpreted Martin v. Mott as requiring very substantial deference, but not absolute deference. And what the Ninth Circuit said was that the President just needed a “colorable” basis for his determination, which means a plausible basis, but that the court could review the determination to make sure there was a colorable basis.

Did you think there were clues about how the Court might rule on the Insurrection Act in the recent National Guard case we discussed? And what specifically did you make of Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence and especially a footnote of his that people have focussed on?

Because the majority held that under 10 U.S.C. § 12406 the President needs to have the authority to deploy the active-duty armed forces and at least consider using the armed forces before deploying and before federalizing the National Guard, people thought this decision might actually result in the President going first to the active-duty armed forces. But I think that analysis overreads the majority opinion. As we discussed, the rule that the President has to go first to the active-duty armed forces only applies when the President is taking action under 10 U.S.C. § 12406.

There is an implication in that Kavanaugh footnote in his concurrence that the President might, instead of invoking the Insurrection Act, rely on a supposed inherent constitutional power to deploy active-duty armed forces to protect federal property personnel and functions. But that claimed inherent power has never been squarely endorsed by the courts. That is a long-standing executive-branch theory, but there are many holes in the theory, and it is far from the settled law that the Administration tries to present it as being.

Do you think the Insurrection Act needs to be changed or repealed or updated?

Yeah, it absolutely needs to be reformed. On its face, it gives the President a dangerous amount of discretion, and as an exception to one of the most important protections that we have for democracy and individual liberty, namely the Posse Comitatus Act, it should be drafted narrowly and with safeguards against abuse. And actually, the original version of the law, which dates back to 1792, had safeguards built in. It required ex-ante judicial approval for deployments. It provided that the authority to deploy troops would terminate thirty days after the next session of Congress began. It only authorized the deployment of the militia, not active-duty troops. It included a sunset. And then over time, these protections were stripped out of the law. And I think it’s clear in today’s environment that greater safeguards are needed.

A critical way in which it needs to be reformed is that the criteria for deployment need to be narrowed. One provision of the law authorizes deployment when there is a “conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of Justice under those laws.” Taken literally, that would allow the President to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division in response to two people trying to intimidate a witness in a federal trial. In addition, the law should be reformed to insure the Congress and the courts have a meaningful role in checking abuse.

If the President does invoke the Insurrection Act, where would the challenges come from? Who would the plaintiffs be in a case like this? Would the challenge come from citizens or states? How might that work?

I think it would come from states, especially if President Trump federalized the National Guard forces in those states and removed them from the command and control of the governor. But even if not, I think that the states would bring lawsuits and to the extent that the deployment of troops exacerbated the unrest in those states and required a greater deployment, or put a strain on state and local law enforcement in responding to that unrest, that would be a basis for the states to bring a lawsuit. In addition, any person who is injured by the deployment of troops under the Insurrection Act would have standing to bring a lawsuit. And by injured, I don’t mean literally physically injured, but harmed in some way by the deployment. So it could come from individuals. It almost certainly would come from states.

You mentioned earlier that the National Guard originally was seen as not being very competent. Without wanting Trump to do this, of course, it occurred to me that the idea of Minneapolis having American troops in it as opposed to ICE agents does in many ways seem like it could result in a lowering of the temperature.

It is true that service members are more disciplined than ICE officials, but there are a couple of caveats there. First of all, even though they are better disciplined and more professional, they also are not trained in civilian law enforcement or in quelling civil unrest. That is not their training. They are trained to fight and destroy an enemy. And so in a tense face-off or confrontation with civilians, there is a danger that they will fall back on their combat training. I think we cannot discount that. In Los Angeles, for example, there was a situation where marines were accompanying police to a house where there was a domestic disturbance and the police officers said to “cover me” as they went into the house. “Cover” means something very different in the Marines, and they opened fire on the house. It was only by good fortune that no one was killed.

The very, very different training and mind-set and culture of the armed forces make them a poor fit for this kind of mission. And the Administration acknowledged this in the briefs that they filed in the Supreme Court appeal on the National Guard case—they said that the reason that they could invoke that law without deploying active-duty armed forces is because the standing military is less well suited than the National Guard to perform this kind of mission. Not only that, the Administration said that using the standing military to protect federal personnel and property in Illinois would significantly impede execution of the federal immigration law.

Sure, but they will just change their position on this.

You’re not wrong. But it’s pretty awkward when they’ve made that representation to the Supreme Court.

The other point that I want to make is that if the military were being deployed to try to bring ICE under control, that would be one thing. That’s not the purpose. The purpose of deploying the military here would be to enable the violence and lawlessness that we’re seeing from ICE. And so even if the military itself is not engaging in these kinds of destructive actions, it is there to insure that ICE is able to do so. It would serve in that way as a force amplifier for ICE. ♦

In January, 2022, the British cellist Steven Isserlis was walking to a professional engagement when catastrophe struck. The skies opened. Isserlis was holding the three-hundred-year-old cello he prizes above all other possessions, and he watched in horror as it was ruined in the pouring rain. At last, to his inexpressible relief, he woke up.

Isserlis often has nightmares about his cello. Losing it. Leaving it somewhere. The strings falling off without warning. At sixty-seven, he is one of the world’s most celebrated concert cellists, but when he thinks about these scenarios he frowns and gently shakes his baroque gray ringlets. For more than fifteen years, Isserlis has been playing an eighteenth-century Stradivarius cello named the Marquis de Corberon, for the French aristocrat who once owned it. Though it spends most of its time in a white hard-shell case, it faces an array of dangers limited only by the whims of fate and, perhaps, the scope of its owner’s imagination. Speaking to me at his living-room table, in North London, Isserlis suddenly stood up and began speed-walking away. “I’m just going to rush into the other room and put the cello in the case,” he said, his voice growing fainter, “because I’m worried it’s getting cold.”

Isserlis’s instrument is about four feet tall. Worth millions of British pounds, it was crafted in 1726, when Antonio Stradivari, the Cremonese luthier, was in his eighties. Over the course of his career, Stradivari went from making large, lumbering cellos to creating smaller, more innovative ones that became the blueprint for the modern instrument. The Marquis is one of the last pieces he made in this classic form. “The sound is uniquely magnificent,” Robert Brewer Young, a luthier who has made more than fifteen copies of this specific instrument, told me. “There’s an archetypal form of cello that has a perfect evolution, and ends, as far as we know, with the Marquis de Corberon.”

Each evening, Isserlis plants a goodnight kiss on the cello’s beechwood scroll as he returns it to its case. Someday, he knows, he will do this for the last time—not because the instrument will be stolen, or damaged, but because it doesn’t belong to him. The 1726 Marquis de Corberon Stradivarius is owned by London’s Royal Academy of Music, which has entrusted it to Isserlis on a long-term loan.

The Academy provides plenty of students with instruments from its collection, but the Marquis is the only trophy piece that also lives and travels with an international soloist. People at the Academy speak about the pair as if they were joint and equal envoys for the institution. “Steven is a great ambassador for the collection and for the Academy,” Susana Caldeira, the Academy’s head of collections, said. “And so is the instrument.” The loan comes with strict conditions about travel, security, and maintenance; if Isserlis violates these conditions, the instrument could be instantly recalled. In fact, it could be recalled at almost any time. When the arrangement was most recently renewed, the academy reminded Isserlis that the loan’s term was five years. “I said, ‘No, it’s a loan for life’,” Isserlis told me. “ ‘Because if you take it away from me, I’ll kill myself.’ ”

Isserlis was born in London to a musical family, and rose to prominence around 1992, when his recording of “The Protecting Veil,” a soaring, hypnotic work for cello and orchestra by John Tavener, became a rare classical best-seller. In Britain, he is now something of a classical-music celebrity, interviewing widely, presenting documentaries, and publishing children’s books about the lives of great composers. His concert schedule is considered extreme even by industry veterans. “He can’t do anything less than a hundred and ten per cent all of the time,” Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, told me. “That’s the way he plays the cello. That’s him.”

Isserlis told me that he flies at least a hundred times a year, and mostly he brings the Marquis with him. Flying is difficult. The cello can’t go in the hold, he explained. (“Would you put your baby in the hold?” he asked.) The Marquis gets its own seat. What it lacks is a passport number, which means it has spent a lot of time being snarled in airline check-in systems. Isserlis has often missed a can’t-miss flight while standing in a terminal lobby, watching the clock tick down.

Then there’s security. At London’s Heathrow Airport, Isserlis told me, the process involves widely spaced mechanical rollers that cause him grief and anxiety. Isserlis asked if I knew the machines at Heathrow. I said I did, but not in detail. “You would if you were a cellist,” he said. Beyond security are more horrors. If Isserlis needs to use the toilet, the cello must come with him. On flights, there is turbulence. And, in a few days, there is another plane to catch.

“It’s a big responsibility in a way you can’t think about that much,” Isserlis told me. “Because, if you do, you go mad.” Before his never-ending tours, Isserlis has to tell the Academy if he plans to visit countries that may be unsafe, so that the institution can assess risk. The cello must be evaluated in-house once a year. New conditions can also be proposed at will by the cello’s insurers, making Isserlis’s life instantly more confusing or expensive. “I know exactly what to expect when Steven comes through the door,” Freeman-Attwood told me, in a practiced, understanding voice. “But we always find a workable solution.”

For Isserlis, the conditional nature of the arrangement is painful in and of itself. An instrument is an epoch in a player’s life, and Isserlis can tell the story of his career through the cellos he’s used: a soft-spoken Guadagnini, bought in the seventies for the now-low price of thirty-five thousand pounds; a robust and hearty Montagnana, perfect for playing concertos with powerful orchestras; even another Stradivarius, borrowed from Japan’s Nippon Music Foundation at the turn of the millennium, once his musical star was truly ascendant. Isserlis returned that cello after being offered the Marquis: a tacit recognition that he was now the preëminent solo cellist in England.

There seemed to be an element of destiny at work, because he had encountered the Marquis long before. In the nineties, Isserlis was attending a chamber-music festival on the Cornish coast when he heard Zara Nelsova, often called the Queen of the Cello, give a small recital. Nelsova, with her pearl necklace and coiffed volutes of blond hair, was celebrated as a player of extravagant power. At close quarters, Isserlis could feel the depth and resonance of her instrument. A friend turned to him and said, “That’s the cello for you.”

In 1960, the cello had been donated to the Royal Academy of Music, on the strict condition that it would be loaned to Nelsova for as long as she lived. A deep bond seemed to exist between the pair. In the early two-thousands, when Nelsova was dying, Isserlis visited her Manhattan apartment, which overlooked Central Park. He found her in bed, lying next to the cello. It was still there when the Academy sent someone to retrieve it after her death, resting alone on the silky red bedspread.

When Isserlis was born, in 1958, a Stradivarius might have set you back a hundred thousand dollars. Today, one costs millions, a price even successful soloists can’t afford. Instead, many players compete to use instruments owned by foundations and wealthy benefactors. In this inscrutable economy, prestige has a way of slipping between people and objects. The use of a precious instrument confers status on a player until he reaches a certain level of fame, at which point the relationship inverts, and the player starts adding market value to the instrument. Concert programs and CD liners keep careful track of who plays what, and by whose leave. For a small circle of connoisseurs, these alliances are almost as absorbing as the music itself.

Occasionally, dealers and patrons will arrange short-term loans for select players, even if doing so involves flying the instruments halfway around the world for an evening. Joey Carr, a former employee of the London violin dealer J & A Beare, told me that she was once asked to transport an entire quartet for a concert. To get through the airport, Carr said, she wore a cello on her back and a travel bag around her neck, with a double violin case in one hand and a viola case in the other. “It’s very hard to just get a coffee on the way to the plane,” she said, “because your hands are full of millions of pounds’ worth of violins and cellos.”

Great instruments confound our sense of why and how things are valuable. A seven-figure price tag reminds us of paintings, another class of object that concentrates huge amounts of capital. Yet instruments are also tools, a way of making the marvellous sound from which their value is supposed to derive. Each part of a violin’s sculptural beauty has a specific, practical function aimed at helping the player make the best music they can. The challenge that confronts the caretakers of these objects is considerable: how do you conserve an instrument when so much of its value stems from its use as an instrument, out in the hard-edged world, with all the risks that entails?

Long-term loans to trusted players, like Isserlis, are one practical solution, but they have their own problems. Theoretically, there’s merit in a system that tries to match the best players with the best instruments. But the practical upshot is a conservationist’s nightmare: a large proportion of the world’s best string instruments spend their lives travelling the globe for the benefit of audiences that would cheerfully admit they can’t tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a modern instrument. It is hard to think of objects this valuable that also fly this much, apart from perhaps the planes themselves.

The question of how to fly with a cello is a bugbear among many string players. After making inquiries about Isserlis’s cello case, I found myself on the phone with its maker, Alan Stevenson, an English musician who got into the protection industry in the seventies, after watching a dropped double-bass shatter into hundreds of pieces. (Stevenson died late last year.) He said he asked every customer whether they were planning to check their cello; if they said yes, he would only sell them one of his stronger cases. “Part of my business is trying to protect cellos from the cellist,” he said.

For Stevenson, what mattered most was a musician’s level of “awareness”—a term he used with repeated, baleful emphasis. I told him I had watched Isserlis run from the room to prevent his cello from getting cold. “He’s aware, you see,” Stevenson said. He told me that a top player might warily check a good modern cello worth, say, thirty-five thousand pounds. “But for another cellist that thirty-five thousand pounds is a fortune, yeah?” Stevenson said. “That other cellist wouldn’t dare check it in. He’ll check in a five-thousand-pound cello.” Theoretically, you could plot every string player on earth on a graph with two axes: the ability to bear the costs of potential damage, and the psychological tolerance of risk. Somewhere along the line, everyone breaks.

Perhaps some level of pain is hard-coded into the life of a professional soloist, whose existence is structured around the act of performing complex music to an impossibly high standard. Isserlis described his world as one of airports, green rooms, restaurants, and hotels. “I often say I should get a life,” he offered, brightly. But he also told me, in more subdued tones, about the terror before a concert, the sense of vulnerability and exposure. As his audiences have grown, so, too, have the expectations.

When I first met Isserlis, I hoped to ask him about the most famous pieces in the cello repertoire: the mysterious suites of Johann Sebastian Bach, about which he once wrote a colorful and opinionated book. To my surprise, Isserlis told me he no longer plays them in concert. We were sitting on the empty stage of Wigmore Hall, a splendid chamber hall in central London that Isserlis calls his “musical home.” Almost ten years earlier, he had performed the suites here for sellout crowds over two nights. Isserlis said these were probably the most successful concerts he had ever done, but the experience was so torturous he never wanted to repeat it. The thought of going out there alone, playing unforgiving Bach from memory, was too frightening. “Here I am playing my favorite music, in my favorite hall, with my favorite cello, with my favorite bow,” he said. “So the only thing that can possibly be bad is me.”

Since we were alone, I asked Isserlis if he would play something, just so I could hear the cello at close range. Obligingly, he opened the battle-scarred case and pinioned the instrument between his knees, before leaning the scroll against his chest. As his body made contact with the instrument, he gave a boyish smile. “It feels like a part of me,” he said. “It really does.” Then he laid his bow on the strings and played two octaves of a simple minor scale.

I had been worried that the subtle beauties of this great instrument would elude me. Perhaps they did. I can only report that I was literally struck by the sound he made. Vibrations filled the air, making it feel like an element in which we were both swimming. I felt grateful for the cumulative human effort that had produced this ether from horsehair, sheep gut, and wood. When silence resumed, I told Isserlis he seemed visibly relaxed with the cello in his arms. “Well, it would be sad if I wasn’t,” he laughed. “Since I do it every day.” Before the instrument went back in its case, I caught a look at its wooden back. Near the neck was a big knot, where a branch once grew. ♦

On January 8th, the twelfth day of mass protests in Iran, which began when shopkeepers, responding to runaway inflation, closed Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the Iranian government shut down public access to the internet, further shrouding an already largely closed society. Nevertheless, isolated images and details have been smuggled out, giving a hint of how brutal and monumental these events are.

Video clips have circulated of people outside a morgue, unzipping body bags as they search for their loved ones. In the western city of Ilam, near the Iraqi border, security officials stormed a hospital to try to seize wounded protesters, while medical staff resisted. An ophthalmologist at a hospital in Tehran reported that it has been overwhelmed by casualties, including many people who were shot in the eye. In the conservative city of Mashhad, a journalist said that the streets were “full of blood.” The Iranian government has acknowledged the deaths of two thousand people, though international observers fear that the total may be much higher. The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, insisted on Tuesday that the regime was in “its last days or weeks.” If he proves to be correct, it will be because of hundreds of thousands of brave acts by Iranian citizens—acts of discontent but also of idealism.

The portfolio of this crisis landed across classified Washington, on the desks both of career staff in the intelligence and diplomatic services and of Donald Trump’s recent appointees, among whom idealism is an increasingly shunned philosophy. The norm in American foreign policy has been that all interventions, including blatantly self-serving ones, are pitched in elevated humanitarian terms. During Trump’s second Administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process are wielded only opportunistically. In Venezuela, Trump followed his ouster of Nicolás Maduro not by supporting the democratic opposition but by sanctioning the ascent of the dictator’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez, seemingly in exchange for oil revenues. (The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, could only offer her Nobel Peace Prize medal.) Just after the New Year, in a conversation that also touched on annexing Greenland, against the will of its people, the White House adviser Stephen Miller gave CNN’s Jake Tapper the emerging party line: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against undocumented migrants and, more and more, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also makes plain the hypocrisy in Trump’s embrace of the Iranian opposition. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government has denounced the protesters it has killed, calling them terrorists; the Trump Administration has said that Renee Good, the woman shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, was engaging in an act of “domestic terrorism.” If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers “to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants—and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.” The Administration is asserting, too, an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice-President J. D. Vance baldly asserted that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.

Even so, although the President’s intrinsic sympathies are with strongmen—Putin, Orbán, Kim—his strategic interests in Iran are with the protesters. (As it happens, the Administration’s old allies in Israel and its newer ones in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states all want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the President made some gestures of solidarity. “keep protesting,” he urged. “help is on the way.”

Exactly what kind of help remains unclear. Trump’s adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, once the crown prince of Iran, but the White House found the deposed royal unconvincing. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told reporters. In posts and appearances, the President returned to more familiar themes: he mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened tariffs against countries that trade with it, and announced a little bit of progress—the Iranian government had apparently reversed a plan to execute Erfan Soltani, a twenty-six-year-old shop owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. “We’ve been told the killing is stopping,” Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, struggled with his verb tenses. “It has stopped. It is stopping.”

In Iran, the despotic regime is fragile and desperate, and, as Merz suggests, it may soon fall. But it may also survive, by means of violent repression, and by Thursday the news from Tehran had quieted. Sounds of gunfire had faded; there were no new bonfires. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States and its allies had maintained a system of humanitarian interventionism, until the President so delightedly detonated it. “In the first year of his administration,” the Times noted last week, Trump “dismantled the instruments of soft power—such as Voice of America and the State Department unit that dropped internet capability into Iran—that were key to democracy promotion.” What he is left with are his threats and a hollow sort of exhortation that borrows from the same program of humanitarian interventionism that he has so explicitly disavowed. “Iran is looking at freedom,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “perhaps like never before.”

Perhaps. The President’s statements of allegiance—and, potentially, the internet that Elon Musk has offered to make available for free via Starlink—may well strengthen the resolve of the Iranian opposition. But Trump’s domestic acts, in a countervailing way, may embolden the regime. Cynicism travels, too. Right now, he is faced with a mass protest in Minneapolis against a government show of power that is growing increasingly unpopular, and his reaction has been to double down: on Thursday, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops to the upper Midwest.

What supplies all these events with a sense of approaching a precipice is the open contestation between pro- and anti-democratic forces, happening both here and abroad, in view of each other. Through the partial curtain between the two societies, we are watching what is happening in Iran. And Iran, surely, is watching us. ♦

Bob Weir died on January 10th, at seventy-eight, even though I thought he was immortal. I saw him for the first time in 1969, when the Grateful Dead played at the Fillmore East, and I was an impressionable schoolboy. I remember that he moved in a lurching, twitchy way, like a marionette, as though tension that had built up in his body was being abruptly shed. The studious manner in which he addressed his guitar suggested that it had been given to him only moments before he went onstage, and he was fascinated by it. Each chord, each passing tone, each cluster of notes, each pointed remark seemed like the confirmation of an abstruse mathematical assertion happened upon by chance in the midst of chaos. Clearly he was surprised and delighted by his discoveries; sometimes he shook his head as if in awe. He was also beautiful. Later in life, he grew a white mustache and beard, which made him look like a prospector or a sea captain, but when he was young he had an androgynous allure. He had the nature of a polite and well-meaning cowboy, and a shy and understated charisma and grace. More than once, over the years, it occurred to me that he was the holy fool of the Grateful Dead.

I met Weir thirty-five years ago, when I was writing a story for Talk of the Town about a children’s book that he and his sister, Wendy, had written. The story never ran, but I wrote a long piece about him for another magazine. After it was published, Weir called to say that he liked the piece, and thanked me for writing it. In my entire life as a writer, no one else has ever done that. The principles of being a gentleman, Weir told me, had been instilled by his father, Frederick, an engineer.

After that, I saw Weir fairly often when he came to New York. Everyone wanted to party with him at night, it seemed, but his days were often free, and we would take walks in Central Park, or go to the Met, or have lunch. For a time, we worked on a project for which he raised some money and gave me a share, and I would go to California and stay with him and his wife, Natascha Muenter; their daughters, Chloe and Monet, were away at school. Weir lived in Mill Valley, but mostly we would stay at a house he had in Stinson Beach, about ten or twelve miles away. The narrow blacktop road over the hills and through the woods to the ocean is full of sharp turns, with steep drops on one side, and I felt like I hadn’t lived until I’d travelled it with Weir passing cars on blind curves.

Weir was one of the loveliest, most unaffected, open-hearted people that I’d ever encountered. So far as I can tell from other tributes I’ve read, this was a common impression among those who met or knew him. He was also incorrigibly mischievous. Early on in the Grateful Dead, his nickname was Mr. Bob Weir Trouble. I think he was given it after he pulled a cap pistol at an airline counter while playing cowboys and Indians with other members of the band. The gesture got the Grateful Dead banned from the airline. Or, he might have got the name after throwing a water balloon at a cop from the upper floor of the band’s house in San Francisco. Weir couldn’t be drafted for the Vietnam War because he had been arrested for marijuana, but he knew that his draft board had to retain any correspondence from a citizen, so he occasionally sent it anything he could fit into a mailbox, usually rocks and bricks and sticks.

Although Weir was a serious person it was easy to make him laugh. He made you feel when you were with him that he had no other place to be, that things had worked out to bring the two of you together, and that he meant to enjoy this gift from life. He could also be unreachable when a dark mood was upon him, but it always seemed a sort of neurological unreachability, a matter of his wiring, rather than an emotional one. Sometimes we would talk about my son, who is autistic, and Weir would say, “I’m autistic, too.” He might have been, mildly; it’s hard to know. His friend John Barlow, with whom Weir wrote a number of songs, once told me, “Bob marches to the beat of a different drummer, and it might not be a drummer at all.”

He had insomnia, and he struggled plenty with drinking and with sleeping pills, and did stints in rehab. Sometimes when I was with him he would be abstaining from alcohol, and other times he would drink. When he drank, he was mostly solemn and silent.

The first time I met Weir, I didn’t think he was very smart. I’d expected to meet someone who had a life of the mind and found the same pleasure in reading that I do. Weir eventually explained that he was severely dyslexic, to the point that even trees on a hillside sometimes switched places in his mind’s eye. Over time, I realized that he had an original and penetrating mind, one developed from what he heard, what he saw, what came to him in his imagination.

He loved football. I can remember the pleasure of hearing him say, about playing the sport in high school, “I was flipped out about football.” He was a scrawny kid, but he was fast and totally fearless and would do anything the coach told him to. I realized that sports had been an essential model for him as a musician. It had given him a way of finding a place in the Grateful Dead—enacting a role as a member of a crew. For the rest of us, the Grateful Dead was a band, but I think for Weir it was a team. He was a permanent teen-ager, but of a rarified kind—not so much stuck fast in a period as still capable of visiting the sanctified territory of wonder and deep engagement. He had maintained a connection to the place where big dreams come from.

There was a raised-by-wolves quality about him, a kind of loopy, feral radiance. He had been brought up by prosperous adoptive parents, but he’d found his biological father later in life. One night in Stinson Beach, seven or eight years ago, after we had gone to dinner and come back to the house, I asked about Weir’s childhood, and he answered at some length. “As a matter of record, I was born Steven Lee Sternia in San Francisco, in 1947,” he said. “Sternia—‘of the stars’—was an assumed name, an alias basically, and didn’t belong either to my mother or father, who weren’t married to each other, or married at all. They had been living in Tucson, where they were students at the University of Arizona—my mother was studying drama. My father had been in the Air Force, and he was going to school on the G.I. Bill. I heard he’d been the youngest bomber pilot in the Air Corps, having flown, I think, a Martin B-26 Marauder in the war. The B-26 was mainly for troop support, and it wasn’t all that maneuverable. It was slow and heavily armored, and it had stubby wings, and because it flew low, it took a lot of ground fire. It was known as the Widow-maker.

“The deception about my name was because my being born, my existing at all, was meant to have been kept a tidy secret from my mother’s family. She already had a daughter, born a few years earlier, somewhere between Ohio and Arizona. She believed that if her family found out about me, they would think that she was reckless and unfit as a mother and take the daughter from her, although I’m not even sure she exactly still had the daughter. Or maybe they already thought she was reckless and unfit, and she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of being proved right. According to my birth certificate, her first name was Phyllis. When I tried to find her years later, with a private detective, he told me that she had covered her tracks. Anyway, I was adopted at birth by Eleanor Claire Cramer and Frederick Utter Weir.

“My first memory was probably a dream, but I remember being in my crib and being really painfully, painfully bored and looking across the room to a window and then a round, bald-headed figure peeping over the window into my room. I was two and a half, maybe three.

“My first major formative memory, and first in any detail— my guess is I was maybe three—I was asleep and dreaming. I think I might have been in Alaska or somewhere on the Northwest Coast, although it could even have been the California Sierras. I was in the yard of an abandoned mine of some sort. There were old, weathered ramps and chutes where conveyor belts used to run, but there was no one around. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I don’t know what I was doing there, it didn’t matter, I was just wandering around. I looked up one of those chutes, and there was an enormous dark-gray wolf at the top. He was looking at me, and his eyes had me pinned, and I could see he was about to pounce. Suddenly I was in mortal fear. I said, ‘Don’t do that,’ but he did. Everything went black, and I woke up screaming. Since that dream, I’ve always had more than just a fascination for wolves, and there have been important times in my life when some sort of spectral wolf has appeared in one form or another and made its presence known.” Then he said, “By the time I was fifteen, I was already the person I am now.” ♦

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The Washington Roundtable is joined by Robert Kagan, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for a conversation about the pressures facing American democracy, the security of elections, and how these domestic tensions interact with the collapse of international norms. Nearly a decade after his prescient 2016 column for the Washington Post, “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” Kagan contends that the U.S. has moved beyond the warning and into a full democratic crisis. “There is no chance in the world that Donald Trump is gonna allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections, because that will be the end of his ability to wield total power in the United States,” Kagan says.

This week’s reading:

“The Minnesota War Zone Is Trump’s Most Trumpian Accomplishment,” by Susan B. Glasser

“What It’s Like to Be Trump’s Closest Ally Right Now,” by Sam Knight

“A D.H.S. Shooting Puts Portland Back Under the Microscope,” by James Ross Gardner

“Jay Powell, the Prepster Banker Who Is Standing Up to Trump,” by John Cassidy

“How Donald Trump Has Transformed ICE,” by Isaac Chotiner

“How Colombia’s President Reached an Uneasy Détente with Donald Trump,” by Jon Lee Anderson

“Iran’s Regime Is Unsustainable,” by Robin Wright

“The Supreme Court Gets Back to Work,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

“The Lights Are Still On in Venezuela,” by Armando Ledezma

“How Marco Rubio Went from ‘Little Marco’ to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler,” by Dexter Filkins

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.