“What if it’s allergies, and a cold, and I’m a hypochondriac?”
Cartoon by Maggie Larson
2026-04-20 22:06:02
2026-04-20 20:06:02
The man had been slumped over his laptop for a week by the time his body was discovered. His deliquescent tissue had seeped under the keys, short-circuiting the motherboard. It was a killing from beyond the grave, flesh and blood’s revenge on silicon. Yet digital death differs, crucially, from the genuine article. Sometimes, with luck, it can be reversed.
It happens to the best of us—the farmer who plowed over his smartphone, the biologist with a flooded lab, the professional photographer whose dog chewed through his SD card just after an important shoot. Losing files is inevitable in our paperless, data-driven, device-mediated world, notwithstanding its fanciful promises of cloud-based immortality.
I used to count myself one of the prepared. Little escapes my archival dragnet: I keep every phone I’ve ever owned in a labelled shoebox, and the archived “souls” of long-defunct computers on a PC called Thoth, for the Egyptian god who records the weighing of hearts on the journey to the afterlife. Then, six years ago, I set my iPhone down on the edge of my bathroom sink, and it fell, shattering on the tiles.
The spiderwebbed screen bled colors, and the keypad flashed, as though ghostly fingers were trying to guess my passcode*.*{: .small} I winced at the expense, but the intangible costs emerged more slowly. I realized that the phone had stopped synching with my iCloud, and, when I brought it to a repair shop, they couldn’t fix it. Among the likely casualties were some of the last texts and voice mails I’d received from my father, who’d died of heart failure not long before.
It was from him that I’d learned to protect my files in the first place. Growing up, I practically lived in his home recording studio, a starship’s bridge of mixers and monitors where he set aside a corner for my experiments with code. A musician who’d played with Miles Davis, and written and produced for Madonna, he was also a data hoarder, and he had spent a decade digitizing his extensive record collection for a custom music server that he dubbed Soulbro.
My father taught me to burn disks, to back up files, and to discharge static electricity before handling a computer’s delicate innards. He had a surgically implanted defibrillator and liked to call himself a cyborg—a boast laced with irony, because the device periodically misfired, delivering shocks that could knock him to the ground. He spent his final weeks in an I.C.U., which appeared to me like a nightmare double of his studio, its monitors transcribing the rhythms of his own waning heart.
The studio took years to clear out. I made disk images of the half-dozen computers, which were subsequently dismantled. Then, this fall, my mother found two hard drives we’d overlooked, which could have been either mine or his. Both failed to register when I plugged them into my computer; one made an ominous grinding noise. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to let them go.
For thousands of data-loss victims, the last resort is a recovery service called DriveSavers. It’s a half hour from San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, in the balmy, scenic suburb of Novato. The boxy, low-rise office overlooks a verdant wetland frequented by otters and egrets. Visiting in January, I felt that I’d arrived in hard-disk heaven.
I was greeted by Sarah Farrell and Mike Cobb, two directors of the company. Farrell, a teacherly woman with blond hair and a beekeeping hobby, oversees business development but used to be an engineer. “In the lab, I just assume everything has been in the toilet,” she told me. “During COVID, I can’t even tell you what people spilled on their MacBooks.” Cobb, who runs engineering, is a genial man with lively blue eyes, and once saved a computer tower from a burrowing squirrel: “He peed right on the power supply.” Cutesy anecdotes alternated with triumphs and tragedies—a school district rescued from a ransomware gang, an iPad salvaged from a plane crash. “They made me too sad,” Farrell said of the worst cases. “I had to be, like, ‘Symptoms, no story,’ or I’d never be able to go home.”
Their handiwork was on display in the lobby’s Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, an exhibition of silicon carnage. “I remember opening this one out on the deck,” Cobb said of an ancient Toshiba laptop, which had burned shut in a fire. “It was like an oyster.” One successfully recovered smartphone had been shredded by a snowblower. Another had been sliced in two by a monorail, like a magician’s assistant. The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. “It’s like the jaws of life,” Cobb said. “If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut.”
DriveSavers receives some twenty thousand inquiries each month. It has saved data for government agencies, multinational corporations, and more than a few celebrities, whose autographed portraits beamed from the lobby walls. Sidney Poitier recovered a draft of his memoir through the company’s good offices; Khloé Kardashian, a phone that fell into a pool. Data loss has been the digital age’s great equalizer: What else could bring together such disparate figures as Willie Nelson, Buzz Aldrin, Gonzo the Muppet, and Gerald Ford?
The memorabilia dated back to the eighties. Back then, hard drives stored so little and cost so much that they were generally more valuable than the files they contained; one forty-megabyte drive on display in the lobby originally retailed for twenty thousand dollars. Advances in storage density, and the digitization of everything from filing taxes to laying out magazines, changed this calculus. “It was like two crossing lines,” Jay Hagan, who co-founded DriveSavers, later told me. “The cost of drives was going down, and the value of data was going up.”
Fittingly, the company emerged from the crash of a hard-drive manufacturer, Jasmine Technologies, where Hagan met his co-founder, Scott Gaidano. In 1989, they established DriveSavers as a repair service for their former employer’s abandoned customers, whom they quickly realized were more concerned about their files than their hardware. “I came up with this theorem,” Steve Burgess, a data- recovery pioneer who sold his own company to the duo, told me. “The value of a person’s data is negatively correlated with whether or not they have it. Once they have it, it really wasn’t worth anything. But, if they don’t have it, it’s worth an arm and a leg and their children.”
Recovering data from an iPhone or a hard drive can set you back three thousand dollars, and from an enterprise server, six figures. Although DriveSavers has a “no data, no charge” policy for most customers, it gets accused of overcharging by scrappier competitors, who tend to attribute the company’s success to attention-grabbing stunts. (One rival has mocked DriveSavers’ engineers as “clowns in spacesuits,” alluding to the protective gear they wear in ads.) But Farrell insists that the fees reflect care and determination. She once spent a week recovering an iPad for a couple with an autistic child who was so attached to a farming simulator that he couldn’t calm down without it. “They still invite me to barbecues,” she said. There have also been litigants who’ve lost their evidence; scientists, their research; the bereaved, their dearly departed’s final words.
DriveSavers’ own death has been foretold many times. The cloud was supposed to destroy them; before that, it was commercial backup services, solid-state drives (SSDs), and encrypted smartphone hardware. Still, people keep finding ways to imperil their files, which grow ever more numerous and irreplaceable. Our precarious datasphere extends from cryptocurrency to telemedicine; now, with the advent of virtual companions, it’s even possible to lose the love of your life to a glitch.
Technological progress may be increasing our exposure. A.I. agents are becoming notorious for accidental deletions, while the proliferation of data centers has wildly inflated the cost of storage. And, despite exponential growth in capacity, the average hard drive’s life span remains just under seven years. Considering the hundreds of zettabytes of data estimated to exist in the world, it’s as though a million Libraries of Alexandria were saved from annihilation solely by hamsters on wheels.
Perhaps this is why I found it so soothing to be among the Diskasters, whose data, after all, had survived. I’d sent my phone ahead of me, and the tour had kindled a cautious optimism about its fate. One vitrine contained a decapitated Mac PowerBook 100, which had spent three days underwater; next to it, for emphasis, a taxidermied piranha bared its teeth. All these devices had escaped the maw of oblivion. Why should mine be any different?
The PowerBook had belonged to a couple of jugglers, Tony Duncan and Jaki Reis, who nearly lost it on a cruise down the Amazon in March, 1993. They were performers on the Ocean Princess, where they juggled swords and torches after dinner. One afternoon, they were practicing as the Princess left Belém, in northeastern Brazil, and promptly hit a sunken wreck. They helped the crew evacuate the ship and were safe in a hotel by nightfall. But they neglected to retrieve their PowerBook, which held their contacts, promotional materials, and financial records. “Everything was on that computer,” Reis told me. “I couldn’t leave it behind.”
Reis talked her way onto a crew member’s unofficial salvage expedition. Back on the Princess, whose lower decks had sunk below the waterline, she waded down a corridor with a flashlight in her mouth, trying not to think about piranhas. She found the laptop fully submerged and assumed that it couldn’t be resuscitated but brought it back with her anyway. “I’m an Apple person,” she explained. Four repair services turned down the case. Then Duncan saw an ad for DriveSavers: “They were, like, ‘Doesn’t seem likely, but what the hell?’ ” Miraculously, they succeeded, and began exhibiting the PowerBook in an aquarium at the annual Macworld trade show. “We should have negotiated for dividends,” Duncan said.
Many such resurrections take place in DriveSavers’ “clean room,” an E.R.-like space equipped with fans and HEPA filters which reminded me of where the Oompa Loompas operate Wonkavision. Before entering, I walked across an adhesive mat that tore the dust from my soles, then donned a mask, gloves, and white coveralls. The room had about eighty computers, which, because of the controlled environment, could safely run in their birthday suits, their bare motherboards mounted to the walls. Monitors showed digits scrolling in columns as repaired hard-disk drives (HDDs) were imaged; others waited in red and blue bins. Phil Reynolds, an engineer, showed me to a table where a four-terabyte drive lay open. “You got a firm grip?” he asked.
It was about the size of a paperback novel, with smooth, reflective disks nestled inside. HDDs store data on swiftly spinning “platters,” usually made of glass or aluminum. Embedded within them are microscopic grains of a magnetic alloy, whose polarities are flipped by “read-write heads” that float just nanometres from the surface. Every year, the grains get smaller, and the means of zapping them more sophisticated; in March, Seagate, one of the leading hard-drive manufacturers, announced a forty-four terabyte drive, its largest ever—a milestone made possible by a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording, which uses a laser to heat each grain for a nanosecond.
Reynolds turned a flashlight on the platters, which reflected our masked faces. A single drive might have two, five, or even ten spinning in parallel, with a stack of heads flitting between them. Because of the speed of revolution, a single grain of dust can be enough to strip the magnetic film and obliterate the underlying data. Another threat is corrosion, usually from immersion in liquid: Reis and Duncan’s hard-drive platters were cleansed with a deionized solution, then swapped into a replacement drive. “All kinds of catastrophic things can happen,” Reynolds said.
My apprenticeship began with a simple disassembly, a typical exercise for new employees. After a brief demonstration, Reynolds handed me pliers and a tiny screwdriver; I struggled to remove one of the actuator magnets, which held so firmly to its opposite that I feared smashing it into the platters. Similarly tricky was the printed circuit board, or PCB, which precisely choreographs the drive’s machinery. Each is particular to its model, Reynolds explained: “Without this chip, you’re not ever going to get that drive to work again.”
Sourcing parts is half the battle. Outside the clean room, I spoke with Pamela Rainger, who manages DriveSavers’ inventory. “These are our donor bodies,” she said with a sweeping gesture. “They’ve all been tested and are ready to give up their lives.” Behind her, more than thirty thousand drives were shelved in antistatic bags on metal racks. It’s not always enough to simply buy a replacement; because of a complex supply chain and the relentless pace of innovation, the donor drive should, ideally, have been made in the same factory, even in the same week, as the recipient. DriveSavers retains a personal shopper in Shenzhen to track down elusive models. For obsolete equipment, they turn to eBay and specialized venders; once, Rainger had to find a match for a forty-year-old drive from an embroidery factory, which had operated a robotic arm. The trickiest category might be novelty items, such as the SpongeBob disposable camera one family had used to document a vacation. “There are actually several SpongeBob disposable cameras,” she said. “I had to find the exact same one.”
Smart devices add yet another layer of complexity. Downstairs from the clean room, I visited the Flash Physical Department, where a handful of engineers hunched over soldering irons, microscopes, and assorted diagnostic tools. I was greeted by Matt Burger, the head of the department, a friendly, bearish young man with glasses and a mop of brown hair, who was putting a thumb drive through an X-ray machine. “Somebody had it in their laptop and dropped it on its side,” he explained. The monitor showed a slightly bent rectangle covered with dots and lines, which didn’t look so bad to me. I listened for a prognosis, hoping that it might have some relevance to my own wounded machines. Then he spotted a faint crack through the tiny region of the drive that held the memory chip. “This is going to be a no-recovery,” he said.
Flash memory is used in thumb drives, smartphones, newer laptops, and SSDs. The technology exploits a phenomenon known as “quantum tunnelling” to trap electrons in floating-gate transistors, like the genies imprisoned by King Solomon. Because they have no moving parts, flash chips are generally considered to be more stable than HDDs. But their design can also complicate data recovery. Many devices integrate flash storage into their main logic boards and cryptographically pair it with other components for security, a practice popularized by Apple. Saving them can involve transplanting not one but several chips. Burger explained, “You have to have it all working as one cohesive thing. No funny business.” The dead man’s laptop, which arrived still soaked in bodily fluids, had required engineers to remove and clean nearly every chip on the logic board before it could be resurrected, much as Egyptian embalmers preserved the stomach, the liver, the lungs, and other organs so that the deceased could function in the afterlife.
The arcane art that makes all this possible is called “microsoldering”—essentially, soldering under a microscope. Burger sat me down for a tutorial at an empty workstation, where a damaged iPhone board had been readied for my inexpert hands. It was an L-shaped thing about the size of my thumb and forefinger; in one of its corners, a chip no bigger than a peppercorn had slightly cracked. “See how it’s impacted there?” Burger asked as I adjusted the microscope. “You can see the actual glass through the top coating.” Burger gave me tweezers and heat-resistant gloves; though my hands felt steady, under the microscope they shook like mad. I was like a giant medical student with a tremor, about to perform surgery on a Who out of Dr. Seuss.
Burger tasked me with swapping out the chip. First, I used a syringe to apply flux, an antioxidant that helps solder stick. Next, I heated the chip with a hot-air gun until the tiny grid of metal balls connecting it to the board melted. “Get your tweezers in there,” Burger encouraged; at last, it came loose. Putting in the new chip was more difficult. I initially struggled to stencil new solder balls onto its underside—“He’s going to break it,” Farrell warned—but managed to finish the procedure, though I inadvertently fused a few resistors in the process. “Have I been fired at this point?” I asked. “Everybody practices,” Burger diplomatically replied. “You could maybe even still salvage data.”
The final stage of a recovery takes place in the Logical Department, a warren of computer towers where engineers analyze the recovered disk images. One of them, Will DeLisi, looked startled as he turned away from a screenful of digits: “They said ‘perfect copy,’ but it’s gibberish, plain and simple.” When files have been deleted, corrupted, or overwritten, it’s his job to reconstruct them; today, he was searching for pictures that had mysteriously vanished. “This file ends mid-sector,” he said, adding that cheap thumb-drive firmware was probably to blame. “The controllers just spit up on top of the file system.”
Files can disappear in any number of ways, only some of which are irreversible. On many systems, deleting them merely removes their addresses from a registry, freeing the space to be overwritten. (This is one reason that the F.B.I. was able to recover deleted e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server.) Similarly, corruption or physical damage might destroy a file’s header, which contains its identifying metadata, while leaving other parts of it untouched. In other words, there are file traces everywhere, like so many ghosts in a vast bardo, which can sometimes be brought back to life.
Logical data recovery is the most D.I.Y.-friendly kind. A YouTuber called Babylonian, who goes to extreme lengths to solve “trivial mysteries,” got nearly seven million views for a video of him “rescuing” a fan’s cherished Pokémon, tragically scrambled in a Game Boy save-cheating attempt fifteen years earlier. (The fan, now an adult, gets emotional when the Pokémon, a Blastoise, is finally retrieved.) But at larger scales it becomes dizzyingly complex. This is especially true when it comes to ransomware, a form of digital extortion that involves encrypting files and threatening to destroy or publish them.
Ransomware recoveries are DriveSavers’ biggest growth area. The day I visited, engineers were racing to unscramble sixty HDDs belonging to a health-care nonprofit. Time was of the essence, but the attackers, too, had been up against the clock. Ransomware attackers usually have limited time before they’re detected. The slowness of encryption forces them to triage. For instance, they might use scatter algorithms that encrypt every _n_th megabyte, or delete backups without “zeroing out”—overwriting with zeroes—the underlying files. All this gives recovery specialists an opening. They can write case-specific code to piece together files from partially destroyed backups, or even infer missing data by identifying patterns of encryption. Ideally, the data can be retrieved without a ransom payment, which, in the case of large organizations, might run into the millions.
The phenomenon has exploded in recent years, with small businesses and municipalities particularly at risk. (Last July, St. Paul, Minnesota, suffered an attack that required the deployment of a National Guard cybersecurity team.) A franchise model allows enterprising hackers to license malware from syndicates. “Literally anyone can sign on as an affiliate through the dark web,” Andy Maus, who oversees DriveSavers’ ransomware recoveries, explained. A.I. has exacerbated the situation, he went on: “You can take an I.T. professional who’s relatively unsophisticated, and suddenly, they can mount a sophisticated attack.” In 2023, the company worked on fewer than fifty ransomware recoveries; last year, the total was nearly three hundred.
Occasionally, even victims who pay their ransoms need data recovery, when the decryptors they “buy” malfunction. Their attackers, anxious to maintain their credibility, sometimes even join them in searching for a fix: “I’ve heard they have excellent customer service,” Farrell said. It’s one of many reasons that DriveSavers’ C.E.O., Alex Hagan—who took over from Jay, his father, in 2023—believes that his industry isn’t going anywhere. “Technology will continue to improve, but as long as humans are involved, there’s room for error,” he told me. “People continue to break stuff.”
The more we entrust to computers, the more they become mirrors of our vulnerability. Each month, DriveSavers receives calls from people facing the loss of their memories, their livelihoods, their businesses, their cryptocurrency wallets. For two decades, the most desperate were fielded by Kelly Chessen, the company’s first “data crisis counselor,” who came to the job from a suicide-prevention hotline. “By the time folks got to us, they’d usually been through several levels of computer work,” she recalled. “There was that element of ‘You’re my last chance!’ ” She talked down I.T. guys sobbing about fumbled company servers and entrepreneurs screaming from the wreckage of their burned-down stores; one woman called because her boss had shot his computer, though, luckily, he’d missed the hard drive. When recoveries failed, Chessen helped callers process their emotions—and often bore the brunt of them: “I can’t tell you how many times I got the whole ‘Well, they got Hillary’s e-mails back!’ ” Because there are no limits on call time, the transition from customer service to therapy was often imperceptible. “I’d tell them, ‘This is a grieving process,’ and you could hear them go, ‘Huh,’ ” she said. “That’s not something they’re used to hearing from a tech company.”
Rarely is data loss more of an occasion for grief than in the aftermath of disasters. The National Transportation Safety Board investigates accidents across the United States. Every year, its vehicle-recorder division processes more than five hundred pieces of evidence from wrecked trains, cars, ships, and planes—not only black boxes but also personal devices. In 2013, photos and a takeoff video from deceased passengers’ phones helped establish that a small plane in Soldotna, Alaska, had crashed because of improperly balanced baggage. Two years later, it salvaged a voyage-data recorder from the wreck of the S.S. El Faro, a cargo ship that sailed into a hurricane and sank with all hands aboard. “These are sometimes the last records, the last words, the last moments of someone’s life,” Ben Hsu, who leads the division, told me. “But our work is technical. The job is to help determine what happened and prevent it from happening again.” Sometimes data extracted from personal devices is shared with victims’ loved ones, offering an opportunity for closure that is all the more significant in the absence of physical remains.
Last year, Jeff Wong had just returned from scattering his father’s ashes in Hawaii when a glow appeared over the mountains near his home in Altadena. He and his family evacuated—and, the next morning, awoke to the news that their home had been consumed by the Eaton Fire. A fire safe in his office seemed to be intact, though; a few weeks later, he enlisted safecrackers to open it. Nearly everything inside had turned to powder, including a dozen storage drives with digitized family photos. But two inner, portable safes had survived, though the drives they contained had partially melted. “You could see the components with plastic fused into them,” he told me. “But they were still shaped like drives, so I had some hope.” After five months, DriveSavers recovered the contents of two of them, with artifacts of the damage still visible in certain images. Missing, however, were most photos of his father’s sojourns across the Pacific after emigrating from China in the nineteen-forties: “They must have been on another drive.”
Whether or not people get their files back, they tend to emerge from the experience of data loss at least slightly changed. Kevin Bewersdorf left New York City for the Catskills in 2016. A filmmaker and visual artist, he yearned for a more grounded life, which he found in the rural town of New Kingston. He embarked on a new career as a full-time contractor and handyman, jobs whose patient intimacy fostered a deep love of the place and its people. “Every day, some little beautiful thing will happen on the job sites—the way the light is shining or a person who stops by,” he said. He made a daily practice of filming such moments, which he saved to an external drive. As years passed, he realized that a film was taking shape.
In November, 2023, Bewersdorf was transferring footage in his blue easy chair when inspiration struck. He reached for a nearby notebook, but his arm caught the cable linking his MacBook to the drive, which crashed to the ground. When he plugged it back in, the drive didn’t even register. He tried to stay calm.
“I pride myself on shunning preciousness,” Bewersdorf told me. “ ‘Oh, my movie, I was gonna make this cool movie’—who cares? There’s a lot going on in the world.” After trying a few home remedies from Google and Reddit, he resolved to move on. Yet sadness gnawed at him, especially after an elderly neighbor he’d often filmed passed away. A friend recommended DriveSavers, and after agonizing over the price tag he sent the drive in. The files were back by Christmas, and last summer “New Kingston” premièred at the Rockaway Film Festival.
“I had more reverence for what I was doing, which is part of the value of death,” Bewersdorf told me. “It’s funny, these ‘files’—what are they, even? Electrons vibrating in some container. But if they can die, if we can lose them in the way that we can lose the information that makes up a person, then they live.” It’s a truth reflected by the very language we use to describe digital storage, he went on: “They say you ‘save’ a file, like it’s going to Heaven—the idea of salvation is woven into it. I don’t know what digital Hell would be. I’m just saying that digital Heaven is where all the files are.”
Yet salvation is never guaranteed. In the summer of 1995, Peter Sacks, then a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, was nearly done with a book he’d been writing for the past seven years. He always drafted in longhand but had recently embraced digital revision, typing out his manuscript on a Kaypro word processor while staying with a friend on Martha’s Vineyard. When the time came to return to Baltimore, he didn’t know what to do with his boxes of handwritten materials. Too polite to impose them on his host, he took them to the landfill, then set out for Logan International Airport.
“There was a sense of unburdening,” he told me at his studio. “But I also didn’t realize the fragility of the medium I was trusting.” The book was on two floppy disks, which he put in a tray at the security checkpoint; upon his arrival in Baltimore, he slotted them into the Kaypro and found that they could no longer be read. There might still have been a chance to save the data were it not for a technical misstep. “You had an option to reformat,” he explained. “I erased the whole thing.”
Sacks enlisted a friend to search the landfill, and he made a series of calls to the university’s I.T. department. But the trash had been turned over, and the specialists said that nothing could be done. The book’s loss seemed to him strangely foretold by its subject: the emergence of modernism in art and literature against the backdrop of mechanization, and the fragmentation of nineteenth-century notions of the poetic “I.” Now it was Sacks himself whose subjectivity had been shattered. “It was a sense of falling and never really hitting bottom,” he recalled. “In some ways, I still haven’t.”
He fell into a depression and largely stopped writing; although he continued composing poetry and occasional essays, he would never again publish a book-length work of prose. During a residency in Marfa, Texas, he entered a period of “mute wordlessness,” taking landscape photos and covering them with lines of Wite-Out. “I was working through the grief of having something disappear,” he said. “But that erasure was also opening up a new space that hadn’t existed, and that became the field into which I moved.”
Sacks is now a highly regarded artist. The walls of his studio were covered with his vibrant, densely collaged paintings. A triptych called “Paradiso” showed a white expanse traversed by ribbons of color, so layered with pigment, textiles, scraps of verse, and found objects that it was almost barnacled. “I’m trying to make something ‘digital’ in the sense of your fingers,” he said, inviting me to touch the work. “The materials are things that seem to have been worn, torn, burned, and have a duration.” And the paintings began, in part, as a meditation on erasure—a rebuke, of sorts, to a digital regime that had abandoned writing’s tactility.
If he still had the erased floppies, he’d probably incorporate them into a work as a memento mori, he told me. I asked whether he’d even want the book recovered, were such a thing possible. “Bring Eurydice back for real?” he replied. “Absolutely. I’m at peace with it, but not that much.”
Before I left DriveSavers, my iPhone was brought out in a little red bin, like a patient on a gurney, or a body in a drawer at a morgue. It was pronounced unrecoverable. The engineers had managed to revive it, but it wouldn’t accept the passcode I’d given them, though I felt certain I’d remembered it correctly. Nevertheless, I declined to use the company’s solid-state shredder, which extrudes a kind of silicon confetti; to me, its gears were the crocodile jaws of the Egyptian goddess Ammit, who eats the hearts of the damned.
A few weeks later, DriveSavers called about those two hard drives I’d found, which I’d also sent them. One had suffered a fatal head crash, but the other merely had a failed control board and had soon been spun up again. The company sent me a flash drive with its data, and I plugged it in with nervous anticipation—might it contain some unfinished work of my father’s? Perhaps I’d find the jazz opera he’d wanted to write about Frederick Bruce Thomas, a Black émigré from rural Mississippi who’d opened a legendary night club in tsarist Moscow.
Alas, the recovered hard drive was mine. I found instant-messenger logs from high school, alternately mortifying and endearing, and various coding projects, including my browser-based version of the ancient Egyptian board game Senet. (Some things never change.) But there were only taunting flashes of the stories and journal entries I remembered writing; in what felt like a prank played by the ghost of my adolescence, I couldn’t guess the password to a locked file saved as “Thoughts.doc.”
Had everything else been on the other drive? Or had I simply imagined all these precious virtual talismans, my father’s and my own? The cascade of disappointments caused me to doubt my own recollections, as though my brain were only a bad pressing of some lost digital master. It also brought back the memory of my first data-loss experience.
I was fourteen when my computer crashed in a botched upgrade. The games I’d been coding were gone, as was the scenery I’d designed for Microsoft Flight Simulator. I was inconsolable. My father, though already in pajamas, put on his blue bathrobe and hastened to the studio to operate. He disassembled the machine, which he’d also built, while I hovered nearby.
The recovery operation stretched into the wee hours. He swapped the drive into another computer, which he used to analyze the corruption. Ultimately, he concluded that the files had been overwritten by Windows Vista—an operating system so buggy that it was nicknamed the Visaster. He broke the news with a sad smile and a line from “The Lion King,” delivered by Scar: “Life’s not fair.”
He told me a story about his own father, who’d left when he was young. They were more or less estranged but met occasionally to pretend otherwise. Once, my grandfather announced that he’d found a roll of film with the only extant footage of my father’s childhood. He invited him over to screen it, hoping, perhaps, to mend through nostalgia a relationship that had never been whole. But the tape had aged so badly that it disintegrated in the projector, along with their illusory reconciliation.
At the time, I was horrified. A child of the early nineties, whose first, second, and third everythings had been meticulously committed to camcorder, I could hardly imagine such a bonfire of beginnings or see that the story was an heirloom infinitely more valuable than the footage it concerned. Now I knew otherwise. It would have been nice to have the voice mails, the diaries, the unfinished music. But some records are most revealing when they’re zeroed out. ♦
2026-04-20 19:06:02
It’s rare that history offers up a simple diagnosis of cultural decline, but we happen to know the exact moment when all of European art headed for ruin. According to the critic John Ruskin, the disaster was called Raphael. The Renaissance master, whose name is only ever sighed in the same breath as Leonardo and Michelangelo, supposedly traded truth for beauty, and ended up destroying both. His work was dull and vapid, a “tasteless poison,” Ruskin said. Just think of all those vacant Madonnas, structurally perfect compositions, and obedient daydreams of antiquity. A modern eyeball can handle only so much before it starts to derange itself in search of a single painterly quirk or sliver of personality.
I had some of this antipathy knocking around in my head before seeing “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” a show in the works for eight years, at the Met. The good thing about exhibitions of scale, featuring hundreds of objects and once-in-a-century levels of rarity—this is the first major Raphael show in the U.S., a herculean undertaking by the curator Carmen C. Bambach—is that it’s almost impossible to be unchanged by them. Either the crust of your resistance thickens, or it crumbles in the face of genius. In this case, my experience was much stranger. I found an artist so spongelike in his adoption of other styles, so dispersed in his influence on other artists, and so mythical in his stature that I could barely form a clear picture of him.
Like all great myths, Raphael’s is full of symmetries. He was born on Good Friday in 1483 and died on Good Friday in 1520. Given that he lived in the center of Christendom, this wasn’t an insignificant coincidence. Even though he died at the age of thirty-seven, reportedly from having too much sex—not from a venereal disease or a fantastic sex injury but literally from an excess of lovemaking—people often preferred to believe that he died at thirty-three, for its Christly associations. His most influential biographer, Giorgio Vasari, said that Raphael was the beneficiary of his mother breast-feeding him instead of handing him off to a wet nurse, and a recent biographer concurs: “This welcoming maternal breast was undoubtedly one of the factors that helped the future artist.” Ah, yes. Undoubtedly.
The more concrete circumstances were no less auspicious. Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, was a well-regarded painter and poet in Urbino, a court town that revolved around the palace of Duke Federico da Montefeltro. The Duke, a lover of the arts, drew the twin currents of Quattrocento painting into his fiefdom: the geometry and the structural intelligence of the Italian manner, as represented by Piero della Francesca, who brought his talents for linear perspective to town not long before Raphael was born; and the fetish for detail in the Flemish manner, as represented by Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. Raphael’s father soaked up both traditions and ran a bustling artist’s workshop, or bottega, in a building connected to the family home. As a child, Raphael would have learned not only how to create charcoal from willow twigs or how to handle a brush made with hog bristles; he would have seen the rigid hierarchies of the bottega—who fetched the water and ground the pigment in the porphyry stone, who conceived of the design for paintings, and how competing personalities were orchestrated toward a single aim. Raphael’s father could manage people below him but also, as a courtier who wrote an entire epic about the life and exploits of Duke Federico, flatter the powerful above him. These were two talents he imparted to his son. Even the most complimentary appraisals of Raphael, which celebrate his multimodal genius—painter, draftsman, architect, poet, surveyor of antiquities—also mention his exquisite social tact and career climbing. He wasn’t just a brilliant artist. He was the politest apparatchik of the High Renaissance.
When we meet Raphael in the show, he’s a young lad wearing a cap. A drawing from around 1500, presumed to be a self-portrait, depicts him with a bit of steel in his eyes. Often regarded as a draftsman first and a painter second, Raphael gives us evidence here to see why. Note the control and tightness of the hatched lines on the cheek, and the way the mark loosens with the locks of hair right next to it, like wind rushing around a building. The darkened edge of his face seems almost gouged into the page, lending a drawing that would otherwise be light and sweet a more interesting mortal heft. By the age of twelve, Raphael had lost both of his parents, and by the age of seventeen he was already a magister—a master painter—taking on a private commission for an altarpiece. He wasn’t done learning, though. Even after his apprentice years, he toiled in the workshop of his mentor, Pietro Perugino.
Perugino isn’t a household name today, but at the tail end of the Quattrocento he was considered by some to be the best painter in Italy. Before Raphael made it to Florence, around 1504, and had his mind rearranged by the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Perugino was his North Star. The exhibition has a number of the teacher’s paintings and drawings, which clue you in to how Raphael picked up his “minute style,” as Vasari called it. In Perugino’s “Saint Augustine with Members of an Augustinian Confraternity” (ca. 1500), notice the crisp little fingers of the faithful, who are shrunken to denote their lesser importance against the big Augustine in the center, with his impressively forked beard. Perugino’s compositions tend to be clumsy in their parallels—two people on the left, two people on the right—and the skin typically looks like candle wax. In the sixteenth century, people started to sour on his work. Paolo Giovio, a physician and a writer, called Perugino’s imagination “sterile.” Michelangelo, never one for niceties, said he was just “inept.”
It’s easy to use Perugino as a foil to Raphael, but I’m not convinced that Raphael ever fully rehabilitated the stiffness out of his master’s bodies. The faces, in particular. It’s as if the candle wax becomes subcutaneous, the skin softened and more graceful but concealing an inner brittleness. Raphael’s admirers often say that he was “the only painter of his generation capable of revealing the souls of the men and women whom he painted,” or that he was a wizard at conveying “psychological presence.” They’re either overstating the case or looking at the work of a different painter. Raphael could certainly extract feeling from the architecture of a body and the distribution of its weight, but the majority of his faces, even the most artificially expressive ones, are unburdened by anything like a psychology. That might sound like a recipe for bad painting. Oddly, it isn’t.
One way to tackle the show at the Met is to go from start to finish, diligently combing through all two hundred and thirty-seven pieces by Raphael and his wider circle. Another is to carve the show closer to the bone, skipping over the contextual padding and focussing on the hundred and seventy-five pieces by Raphael. The third option—and don’t tell the curators I’m suggesting this—is to cut straight to the octagonal chamber in the center of the exhibition, which has five of Raphael’s society portraits, all of them masterpieces. Along the way, you should pause to pay homage to “The Alba Madonna” (ca. 1509-11), a perfect circle of pastoral sweetness, and absorb any drawings that catch your eye, but, if you’re on a tight schedule, an hour concentrated with the portraits is worth more than an hour spread thinly across the rest of the exhibition.
There are two paintings on the left side of the octagon: “La Muta” (ca. 1503-05) and “Portrait of a Young Woman with a Unicorn” (1505-06). Both are very exciting. “La Muta,” or “The Mute,” shows a woman sitting in front of a black void. There’s no historically justifiable reason to call her “the mute,” but Leonardo did write that a painter should capture the mind of a subject via the “gestures and the movements of the limbs, and these should be learned from mute persons, who better actualize them than any other sort of men.” The woman is crossing her hands over her lap, a pose that Raphael may have cribbed from the “Mona Lisa”—he and Leonardo were both in Florence between 1504 and 1508—but the focus of the painting, the point toward which the whole composition plunges, is a single finger. It connects with the bottom of the canvas, as though the sitter is pressing an invisible button.
Odds are that the sitter is Giovanna da Montefeltro della Rovere, who was around forty years old and recently widowed. If that’s true, the entire psychological burden of the piece has been distilled into that one strained digit. Cover the top half of the painting with your hand, and you’ll see that Giovanna’s flat expression bears no relation to the action of her extremities. By removing the face as a theatre of psychology, Raphael puts an unusual pressure on the rest of the painting to communicate and produce feeling. My favorite detail is the red ribbon on Giovanna’s right shoulder, which fastens her sleeve to her dress and floats over the darkness. For some reason, it reminds me of Christ’s loincloth in the paintings of Rogier van der Weyden, rippling against a block of color. There are so many exquisite, Netherlandish, hyperreal details to admire in the piece—the shadow of Giovanna’s necklace, the enamel decorations on her cross, the frizz of her hair—but there’s something about the ribbon that feels like a banner of heartbreak. Even when he emptied out a facial expression, Raphael could produce an ache of sadness with just a few accessories.
All of Raphael’s portraits in the octagon are quite distinct—the palette ranges from emerald green and cinnabar to earthy browns and bone black—but there is one bizarre consistency. To recast a three-quarter-length body as a pyramid, a favorite Renaissance shape, Raphael repeatedly files down the shoulder blades and turns their supporting muscle into a long sloping line, which dives from neck to arm. In theory, this could be a standard beauty modification, like Ingres tossing a few extra vertebrae into a naked back. But Raphael botches the foreshortening and engorges the left trapezius to make it seem closer. The result looks a bit like the internet sensation the Crooked Man, who exercises his left trapezius and nothing else. (Don’t look it up.) The situation is particularly severe in “Portrait of a Young Woman with a Unicorn.” I was so distracted by her trapezius that I kept forgetting she was holding a baby unicorn.
Shipped over from the Galleria Borghese, in Rome, the portrait is the most bracingly odd thing in the show, and well suited for modern eyes. The title says it all, except that the unicorn is more like a lapdog with a horn and the young woman, if it is indeed Laura Orsini della Rovere, is around thirteen, which likely makes this a betrothal portrait, meant to advertise her beauty and her dowry. For more than two centuries, she was overpainted as St. Catherine, the unicorn hidden under a torture wheel. Now the unicorn is back, cutely neighing, its mouth as open as Laura’s is closed. It could be a double-edged symbol of virtue and vice, of chastity and unheeded pleasure, but it could also be a bit of heraldry, to highlight Laura’s family ties. The underdrawing, seen with the help of infrared reflectography, shows that Raphael did some last-minute idealizing of her face (as he did with “La Muta,” whose double chin disappears in the final version). Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had already spun the Renaissance fantasy of the bella donna, with her golden tresses, blue eyes, and pale skin. Laura Orsini is true to type.
Raphael clearly had a thing for blond hair. Laura’s coiffure is dealt with lavishly, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a painter show off so much as in Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti (ca. 1515-16), a dashing young banker whose golden coils roll down his neck with absurd levels of silkiness and precision. Painted a decade after Giovanna and Laura, Bindo isn’t served open-faced and evenly lit; Raphael has him look over his right shoulder, from shadow to light. The painting is about a hundred times more erotic than the other two portraits and at least twice as erotic as “La Fornarina,” Raphael’s nude of a woman he possibly slept with. Just look at Bindo’s neck, exposed by a parted curtain of hair, the feathery wisps of sideburn, the plump lips, the green eyes. On multiple visits, I’ve had a sort of paranormal experience with Bindo’s right eye, in the middle of the canvas. The longer you stare, the more Cyclopean it becomes, so that it starts to levitate, like a jewel, up and out of the painting. The floating eyeball makes this either my favorite piece in the show or one that I need to stay away from.
When Raphael left Florence for Rome, in 1508, he arrived right on time. Pope Julius II was in the process of restoring the Eternal City to its imperial splendor. A lover of rare antiquities, the Pontiff had commissioned work from the architect Donato Bramante, who liked to scurry around town and measure Roman ruins. Bramante was from the Duchy of Urbino, and he recommended his fellow-Urbinate Raphael for a fresco project in the Stanza della Segnatura, a room in the papal apartments. It was specifically in these frescoes, according to John Ruskin, that the gangrene of modernity set in. By putting religious and profane art together—a picture of Christ on one wall and Apollo on another, both equalized in their prettiness—Raphael triggered centuries of decadence. That’s just one opinion, though. Another person might see the Stanza della Segnatura as the height of humanism, a celebration of ancient philosophy over patristic theology, as in “The School of Athens,” Raphael’s most famous work.
The immovable paintings create a problem for any Raphael exhibition that’s not in the Vatican. The way the Met has chosen to deal with this is to toss the Vatican frescoes onto all four walls of a side room via projector. Because the images rotate at a screen-saver pace, my advice would be to focus on the preparatory drawings and cartoons, which are like sparks thrown off some great, beautiful machine. Although I can appreciate “The School of Athens,” with its leisurely construction-site ethos—Socrates and friends lounging around an enfilade of vaults, open to the sky—I’m partial to “The Fire in the Borgo,” one room over at the Vatican. The composition is pure chaos, which is a relief after so many paintings of classical restraint. Raphael arranges more than forty bodies across at least five centers of action, using all kinds of columns, arches, stairs, and loggias to visually slice and dice the space for narrative ease. To encompass the story, about a miracle from 847, when Pope Leo IV stopped a fire with a blessing, Raphael brings you into the fresco through the unshod feet of a woman in agony and leaves you near the very back, with a tiny and serene Leo IV. (Notice how Raphael uses the wind—in hair, in clothes—like invisible twine, wrapping different parts together.) There is no full cartoon of the fresco, but the Met does have a small red chalk drawing of its most poignant moment: a son carrying his father out of the flames.
The final crescendo of the exhibition will seem a tad strange without context—it’s three enormous tapestries (or, rather, second editions of tapestries) that Raphael designed with the assistance of his studio. Woven in wool, silk, and gilt-metal-coated thread, the first set was commissioned to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel, and its cost was astronomical. It contributed to the bankruptcy of the Roman Curia and effectively added gasoline to the Protestant Reformation. (Martin Luther, born the same year as Raphael, visited Rome in 1510 and was appalled by the extravagance of the Pope’s tastes.) The artistic value of the tapestries is that, like “The Fire in the Borgo,” they show Raphael as an ingenious organizer of visual narrative. In “The Miraculous Draft of the Fishes,” birds wheel in the sky, a puff of smoke rises from a chimney in the background—and yet, within this single moment, a multipart story is unfolding, with Christ telling the apostles to cast their net, the apostles hauling fish from the water, and Peter throwing himself at Christ’s feet. Like a proto-Christopher Nolan film, Raphael collapses the second into the minute into the day, and then doubles the scene over itself through a reflection in water. All of this is captured in thread.
When Raphael died, a hundred torches were carried by painters at his funeral, and he was buried in the rotunda of the Pantheon. People were so eager to venerate his remains that skulls of his magically multiplied. Goethe saw one in Rome and swooned over its handsome bone structure, saying that it looked exactly like the kind of skull in which a “beautiful soul could comfortably meander.” (It wasn’t Raphael’s.) The hero worship was eventually punctured, though, and in the nineteenth century Leonardo and Michelangelo would become the twin heads of Renaissance art genius. The nail in the coffin was the Pre-Raphaelites. Raphael has the rare distinction of having an entire aesthetic movement named after a desire to go back to a time before him.
What makes Raphael so difficult to appreciate is that his greatest talents are, in a way, invisible. A brilliant composition isn’t as tangible as a single body rippling with muscle or the sfumato of an earlobe; it’s an interrelation of parts. When the art historian Erwin Panofsky waxes about the composition of Raphael’s “Madonna di Foligno” (1511-12), describing the “well-balanced two-dimensional pattern and an equilibrated distribution of plastic bodies in three-dimensional space,” he ends up sounding like a structural engineer. It’s hard to explain the beauty of the space between things. And supposedly Raphael managed the bodies in his workshop just as well as he did those in his paintings. He went around with a posse of some fifty-odd painters, and his very presence could dispel bad moods and bring out the best in people. That kind of popularity and radiant goodness produces a lineage of artists but doesn’t have the crowd appeal of a lone genius who invents a flying machine or pulls a seventeen-foot sculpture out of a block of marble.
Ruskin said that the only thing clear about Raphael’s compositions was that “everybody seemed to be pointing at everybody else, and that nobody, to my notion, was worth pointing at.” It’s a moving insight on his achievement, in a way. Think of all those heavenward looks in Raphael’s drawings and paintings, such as the man at the center of the Oddi Altarpiece (ca. 1503-05), in which a raised chin can be a medium of transport to somewhere else in the painting, or somewhere above it. Or think of those empty faces which have abandoned their emotion only to have it picked up in a single finger or a ribbon. It’s an art of grace notes and subtleties, of in-betweens and elsewheres. Raphael’s legacy isn’t one masterpiece but so many mysterious crumbs of greatness scattered in sketches and designs, in oil paintings and frescoes. How lovely it would be to see them. ♦
2026-04-20 19:06:02
You don’t want me negotiating for you. I am inclined to fold before the slightest friction and am always the first to blink in a staring contest. These habits may come from my being congenitally risk-averse but also from an overdeveloped capacity for charitable interpretation, for constructing what rationalists online like to call “steel men.” Whatever arguments management might think up for laying me off, I’m sure I can come up with better ones. Thank goodness for those hardened union reps who take muscular pleasure in holding the line and wouldn’t dream of conceding that management could have a case. Where would we pushovers be without the pushy to defend us? Waiting with exquisite patience in the breadline, that’s where.
By all accounts, being a milquetoast is a sort of vice—cowardice masquerading as prudence. But in Aristotle’s typology, where virtue is a mean between two opposing extremes, the opposite of a vice tends to be another vice. Courage and resolution are to be distinguished from my sort of cowardice as much as they are from the reckless bravado of the zealot or the mulishness of dogmatists incapable of recognizing when the other side has a point. Anyone who thinks the only alternative to being a victim is to be a victimizer is missing some important possibilities.
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Have we a word for this virtue? The Stanford philosopher Krista Lawlor believes that we do. In “Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue” (Harvard), she writes wisely and imaginatively about what separates the virtue of reasonableness from the vices it can be confused with. The distinction is more than an academic nicety. At a time when political life tempts us to treat compromise as capitulation, her argument amounts to a defense of the habits that make common life possible.
Unlike some other terms that philosophers use, the adjectives “reasonable” and “unreasonable” are part of our daily language. A thousand couples, at this very moment, must be accusing each other of failing to be reasonable. A hugely popular forum on the British parents’ website Mumsnet is called “Am I Being Unreasonable?” But the highest-stakes appeals to reasonableness have always been in the law.
Lawlor’s book opens with an account of the tragic shooting of Yoshi Hattori, a Japanese exchange student in Baton Rouge who was killed after he approached the wrong house for a Halloween party, in 1992. The question before the jury was whether the fears that had led the homeowner, Rodney Peairs, to fire his gun were “reasonable.” The jury voted to acquit Peairs of manslaughter. Lawlor is not convinced they got it right.
What question did the jurors think they were being asked? Legal scholars have disagreed. “The average Louisiana homeowner in Peairs’s situation could have thought Hattori posed a very real threat of death,” the law professor Cynthia Lee has argued. Like many people, she apparently takes the term “reasonable” to mean “average” or “typical.”
Lawlor finds that troubling. The average person might be prejudiced, and what could be more unreasonable than prejudice? Even if Peairs’s fears were, as the jury’s verdict suggested, typical for his environment, they weren’t reasonable in a deeper sense, the one that Lawlor’s book develops and defends. “People can make mistakes, but being concerned to get it right about value and being reliable in tracking it—that, on my hypothesis, is the heart of reasonableness,” she writes.
It’s no surprise that the notion of the reasonable plays a central role in the law. Certain statutes explicitly appeal to what’s reasonable—exasperating those who find the standard hopelessly indeterminate. Montana once had a traffic law that required drivers to operate their vehicles “in a careful and prudent manner at a rate of speed no greater than is reasonable and proper under the conditions existing at the point of operation.” One frustrated motorist, in 1996, prevailed on the Montana Supreme Court to declare that law “void for vagueness,” because it failed to “give a motorist of ordinary intelligence fair notice of the speed at which he or she violates the law.” The traffic code was appropriately amended to specify maximum speeds.
Yet Lawlor notes that the amended law nonetheless retained a reference to reasonableness. How could it avoid doing so? Could a traffic code provide explicit limits for every possible set of road conditions? Lawlor mischievously imagines what one might look like: “If four inches of snow, go fifteen miles per hour, if six inches, go ten miles per hour, unless there is fog, in which case . . .” Asking drivers to be, quite simply, reasonable, rather than literal-minded sticklers, “is a time-honored way for the law to handle novel situations,” she observes.
“Being Reasonable” is that attractive and unusual thing, a small book on a big subject. Lawlor writes with the pleasing air of someone keen to be understood by a wide range of possible readers. Philosophical theories are summarized in the plainest of plain English, with jargon thoughtfully rationed and examples taken from the most everyday of situations: siblings wondering whether to move their elderly father to an assisted-living facility, friends recommending movies to one another, a hyper-competitive Sunday-softball player steamed by a loss. Her academic interlocutors, no less than the fictional and real people in her illustrations, are unfailingly treated with a charity that exemplifies the virtue she’s writing about.
Lawlor draws a sharp line between being “rational”—the skill used to achieve one’s own goals—and being “reasonable,” an essentially social quality. Consider the notorious “Dictator Game,” beloved by behavioral economists. In this game, a Proposer is given a sum of money and invited to choose in what proportion to split it with a Receiver. The Receiver is not allowed to reject the offer, so a purely “rational” player—that is to say, a self-interested one—would keep the entire sum.
In a study conducted by the psychologist Igor Grossmann, participants agreed that it was perfectly rational for the Proposer to keep all of the money. Yet they considered Proposers “reasonable” only if they offered a fair split—usually around forty or fifty per cent. For Lawlor, this result supports her larger assertion: in ordinary usage, reasonableness names a different mode of thought than rationality does—it treats other people’s claims as having standing.
To be reasonable is to have the capacity to recognize that we aren’t the only ones making judgments of value; other people, too, are evaluators, and their claims on the world also have weight. A master of hardball negotiation might be a rational man, but he is unreasonable if he refuses to recognize the needs and perspectives of others when negotiating. To be reasonable, Lawlor thinks, is to see your point of view as one of many—while avoiding the slide into pliancy, the endless perspective-taking of the pushover.
“If you are reasonable,” Lawlor says, “you are open to the possibility that what matters to the other person does matter.” To be “open to the possibility” requires discernment: you have to be able to decide when what matters to the other person does, and doesn’t, have a legitimate claim on you. Reasonableness, in her formulation, is a “critical-minded assessment of the concerns of others and an open-minded readiness to change one’s own concerns.”
What would it look like, at the limit, to be without such a capacity? Inevitably, Lawlor reaches for a Nazi. Hannah Arendt’s well-known account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann contained, among its other penetrating descriptions of the defendant, this diagnosis: “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became . . . an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” Arendt hit on the word “banal” to describe his iniquity, but here she roots it in an aberration: a lack of the most ordinary of human abilities.
Lawlor’s most compelling metaphor, borrowed from R. Jay Wallace, a philosopher at U.C. Berkeley, is that of a “landscape of value.” Each of us moves through a world strewn with figurative mountains and molehills, continually assessing what matters more and what matters less. Mapping that terrain is a social practice. We learn from one another, and we convey our judgments through “costly signals,” claims that require explanation and defense, rather than “cheap signals” shouted to advertise tribal allegiance. Reasonable people are disposed to signal coöperatively. That is, they assume responsibility for their judgments and grant others standing to challenge them. They’re constantly updating their maps based on what they hear from travellers navigating the same space.
One of Lawlor’s examples concerns the (literal) mountain climber Ed Webster, who, having experienced bouts of anoxia, turned back from Mt. Everest’s summit when he was just three hundred feet from it. He decided that he’d rather relinquish the chance at glory than jeopardize his life. Some mountaineers may have regarded the retreat as a failure of nerve. Even so, the decision tracks value in a way others can recognize. Choosing life over glory is reasonableness in action.
Webster’s decision has one feature that makes it easy to classify as reasonable: it was his to make. No one else had to live under the shadow of its consequences. Although the decision was exercised against a background of possible disagreement, it didn’t require that disagreement to be resolved. Those who considered Webster a failure by some mountaineer’s code could have expressed their disdain, but they knew that Webster was free to make his own choices.
The word we have for the point where this freedom ends is “politics.” Politics, with all its mechanisms, its conflicts, and its institutions, exists because people—even, somehow, reasonable people—disagree. But they must live and act together anyway, under institutions that govern human beings despite their disagreements. That’s a gentle way of saying that those institutions must be prepared, at times, to coerce. It is one thing to chart a landscape of value for yourself; it is another to do so for a society whose members will be bound, often resentfully, by the resulting map.
Lawlor’s book contains chapters devoted to politics, but her inclination to reach for examples of the reasonable and unreasonable that any reader will intuitively share serves her less well here. The question of whether reasonableness has a place in politics does not have an obvious answer. A suspicious reader, all too familiar now with the dismissal of heterodox views as beyond the pale, might see behind her call for political reasonableness a more nefarious agenda: to make a bland moderation the test of virtue.
The thinker on whom Lawlor draws most extensively in her discussion of political reasonableness is John Rawls, that giant of postwar American political philosophy. Rawls provided the most influential modern formulation of what reasonableness demands under conditions of pluralism—the condition under which the people in most of the world’s democracies live. His starting point was not optimism about the likelihood of human agreement but a sober recognition of its unlikelihood.
Modern societies, he thought, are marked by what he called the “burdens of judgment.” People are different; their experiences might have little overlap; their values pull in competing directions. Is it any surprise that conscientious people reasoning in good faith might arrive at incompatible conclusions about what life is for and what justice demands? These disagreements are not curable pathologies but permanent features of a free society. Rawls doesn’t think that we must all be relativists; we still have the right to think our own views true. But he does derive from these premises the counsel of restraint. To be reasonable, in Rawls’s sense, is to accept that one’s deepest convictions may fail to command assent from others who are no less sincere or thoughtful, and then to propose terms of political coöperation that others can appreciate.
This idea of reasonableness is easily caricatured as moral timidity or a bloodless neutrality that drains politics of passion. But Rawls didn’t seek to empty politics of conviction. The alternative to what he called “public reason” is not authenticity, or what Yeats called the “passionate intensity” of the worst, but force. When citizens insist on shaping the basic terms of social life by appealing to premises that others cannot reasonably be expected to accept—revelation, doctrines of transcendence, private moral visions—the result is not a purer politics but a dangerously brittle one.
The unsentimental grounding for this picture of reasonableness was provided by another giant of postwar American philosophy, though not one generally praised for his insights into politics: David Lewis. Better known for his bold and occasionally kooky-sounding arguments in metaphysics, he was also the author of a neglected gem of political philosophy. In an essay titled “Mill and Milquetoast,” Lewis takes aim at the comforting stories liberals sometimes tell themselves about tolerance—that we refrain from suppressing one another because we admire diversity or because we believe that truth will emerge from the clash of ideas. Nonsense. The modern norms of tolerance emerged, rather, as a hard-won peace treaty, hammered out, as Rawls had held, after Europe exhausted itself in religious war. “I won’t suppress you if you don’t suppress me” was not an expression of moral indifference, and still less of a sudden burst of generosity. It was a recognition by the wounded and the grieving of a shared vulnerability.
Reasonableness, like tolerance, is best seen as a convention of restraint, sustained because everyone remembers, however vaguely, what happens when the treaty collapses. In time, the treaty of toleration becomes, Lewis writes, “not just a constraint of conduct, but a climate of thought.” The habits that sustain this treaty and this climate are precisely those that radicals on all sides find contemptible: compromise, procedural fidelity, the refusal to go for broke. Demanding absolutely everything, Lewis says, makes you a bad signatory to an agreement that keeps one from being crushed by rivals the next time they have the chance. Lawlor’s evolutionary story, with its emphasis on shared mapping and coöperative signalling, lends this picture further support. Reasonableness is a survival trait. To be unreasonable is to be a bad survivalist.
Say we accept that picture of how we learned to be reasonable. What keeps the peace treaty in place, frayed though it is? In “Concealment and Exposure,” another neglected gem of liberal philosophy, Rawls’s student Thomas Nagel wrote that society depends not only on what is publicly justified but on what is tactfully left unspoken. Civilization, he suggested, would be impossible if we could read one another’s minds. The world of mind readers would be, of course, a world without hypocrisy but also one without discretion. Forcing every disagreement into the open, and demanding consensus on matters of taste, meaning, or identity, would destroy the very conditions that allow diverse ways of life to coexist.
The point is that some disagreements may be too socially expensive to stage as public trials. Why—to take Nagel’s example of a “culture war” episode from the late nineteen-eighties—did art-world partisans dig in their heels and insist that federal funding should support an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s notoriously provocative photographs? The debate forced a showdown that would have better been avoided. The reason that reasonable liberals may refrain from pressing a victory is not that they hew to Robert Frost’s fond sendup of the type (“so altruistically moral / I never take my own side in a quarrel”). It’s that they understand how fragile the settlement is.
It can be easy to forget in the twenty-twenties, but there was a time when this ethos of restraint defined politics in much of the West. Bill Clinton’s infamous “triangulation,” Tony Blair’s Third Way, and Barack Obama’s insistence on being the most reasonable person in the room were all variations on a single theory of the case: that if you offered terms fair enough to hurt your own side, the opposition, faced with your fairness, would accept them. In retrospect, this faith looks naïve—as, indeed, it looked to some people at the time. But its failures (we are quick to forget its successes) suggest less that reasonableness was a mistake than that too many players stopped believing in the treaty it presupposed. All virtues rely on some set of conditions for their relevance.
Hostility to such politics has been voluble and loud. Left-wing critics of tactical triangulation have maintained that this can be seen only as collaboration with evil. Right-wing impatience with the politics of compromise appears in the disquieting revival of Catholic “integralism,” whose proponents favor capturing the state in order to impose a singular, and religiously inspired, vision of the common good. What unites these movements is a shared contempt for the moderate, who is dismissed as cowardly, unprincipled, or insincere: wimps who inexplicably hate winning.
Lawlor’s account helps explain why this contempt is so corrosive. When one side decides that the treaty was a mistake—that only total victory will do—it stops sending the costly signals that sustain shared “discursive” space. “Better wrong with Sartre than right with Aron,” the slogan used to go in the glory days of the French postwar left. Who wouldn’t prefer the glamour and the redemptive grandeur of the radical Jean-Paul Sartre to the pallid temporizing of the liberal Raymond Aron? But people like Aron have offered something other than the glory of commitment: a sense of imagination, of compassion, an awareness that your foes, too, have ideals that feel glamorous to them.
In defending reasonableness, Lawlor is defending the exhausted majority—those who still want to live together on terms of mutual recognition. She is unlikely to persuade the most passionate of partisans. But she may perhaps give heart to the despised moderates, who may be starting to internalize their critics’ charges that their willingness to compromise is really just a failure of nerve.
Think back to another culture-war moment. In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the rapper and activist Sister Souljah asked, rhetorically, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” To a question about whether there were any good white people, she replied, “If there are, I haven’t met them.” Bill Clinton, then running for President, reproached her when he spoke at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Many on the left saw betrayal and calculation. Why not see it, instead, as a performance of reasonableness, a refusal to allow a minority position within one’s alliance to define the map of value for everyone else?
It is a mistake of the passionate partisan to assume that moderates share the radicals’ principles but lack the audacity to act on them. Perhaps they don’t share those principles. Even if they do, they may value stability over purity and the survival of the treaty over the triumph of a vision. It’s not so much that they hate to win as that they recognize that most victories are temporary. The moderate’s vision may even be the harder one to sustain, requiring a tolerance for frustration and an inurement to defeat and political disappointment. There is something to be said for admitting that the prospects of disagreement are permanent and that wisdom consists not in tearing up the peace treaty but in renewing it.
It’s no secret that half of being a moderate is being a good loser. The other half, less widely acknowledged, is being a gracious winner. One of Aron’s latter-day disciples, Emmanuel Macron, was challenged during his breakout 2017 Presidential campaign over a triangulating phrase he liked to use when registering a reservation about one of his own convictions: “en même temps,” meaning “at the same time,” or “on the other hand.” It was, he freely admitted, “a verbal tic.” He was, however, unrepentant: “I’m going to keep on using it.” ♦
2026-04-20 19:06:02
Condemned to the kitchen counter
radiated by the heartless
Louisiana sun, so dry they bloomed
into a fire hazard. It’s been weeks.
It’s been months. It’s been seasons.
Even the ants who army crawl
under the window after rain
have stopped exploring those morbid petals.
Even the trashcan gags
as they crumble to dust in its maw.
This is drawn from “We All Have Moons We Long to Return To.”
2026-04-20 19:06:02
For the cover of the April 27, 2026, issue, the artist Christoph Niemann depicted a beloved spot in the West Village. “I spent my youth on outdoor basketball courts playing pickup games—until, as an adult, I tore my Achilles tendon trying to relive the past,” Niemann said. “Since then, I’ve resorted to running, swimming, and always stopping to watch the action at the Cage, as that West Fourth Street court is known, when I’m in the neighborhood.”
For more basketball covers, see below:
“March 10, 1951,” by Abe Birnbaum
“Brooklyn Bridge Park,” by Jorge Colombo
“Hang Time,” by Kadir Nelson
Find covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.
