The new yorker TruePDF 25 march 2019

Clem doesn’t argue with his critics’ right to lash out, but he is angry when the barbs are anonymous: “I can go be, you know, JimmyJam415 on Twitter, and if I don’t like your articles I

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6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Amy Davidson Sorkin on Brexit mayhem;

free speech with Bubba the Love Sponge;

new moons; Kathy Griffin’s comeback; many faces.

LIFE AND LETTERS

Alexandra Schwartz 20 Benefit of the Doubt

Miriam Toews reckons with her Mennonite origins.

SHOUTS & MURMURS

Don Steinberg 27 Disturbing Digital Coincidences

PERSONAL HISTORY

Kathryn Schulz 28 The Stack

A father’s ravenous love of books.

LETTER FROM LONDON

Ed Caesar 32 Bad Boy

The complicated life of the Brexit backer Arron Banks.

PROFILES

Joshua Rothman 44 What Lies Beneath

The layers of history in Peter Sacks’s paintings.

Hilton Als 68 “Kiss Me, Kate,” “Be More Chill.”

THE CURRENT CINEMA

Anthony Lane 70 “Hotel Mumbai,” “Ash Is Purest White.”

POEMS

Tess Gallagher 50 “Ambition”

Angela Leighton 56 “Pickpocket, Naples”

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4 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

CONTRIBUTORS

p 44) has been an editor and writer at

the magazine since 2012

staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing

and illustrator An exhibition of his sports paintings will be up at San Fran-cisco’s Modernism gallery starting April 11th

pub-lish her latest poetry collection, “Is, Is Not,” in May

magazine’s music critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and

“Listen to This.”

of several novels, including “Half the Kingdom” and “Her First American.”

Her new book, “The Journal I Did Not Keep: New and Selected Writing,” will

be published in June

Doubt,” p 20) has been a staff writer

since 2016

au-thor of “Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon.”

au-thor of, most recently, “Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature” and the poetry collection “Spills.” She is a senior research fellow at Trinity Col-lege, Cambridge

mag-azine’s theatre critic, won the 2017 litzer Prize for criticism He is an asso-ciate professor of writing at Columbia University

p 15), a staff writer, is a regular

con-tributor to Comment She also writes

a column for newyorker.com

p 19), a journalist based in London, is

the news editor of The Economist.

POSTSCRIPT

Maggie Nelson writes about Carolee Schneemann’s revolutionary career and a day that she spent with the artist

CULTURE DESK

Jia Tolentino investigates the dance company Shen Yun, which is so ubiquitous that it has become a meme

Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,

and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

The Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library at

Yale University congratulates

the 2019 prize recipients

THE MAIL

them live well for a long time care teams work alongside other special-ists to help a patient understand how an illness is likely to progress, explore what

Palliative-is most important to hPalliative-is or her quality

of life, and fully consider the benefits and the burdens of different treatment approaches Palliative care is additive—

an extra layer of support—and it can serve an essential function in the ex-periences of patients and their families

Kate Meyers California Health Care Foundation Oakland, Calif

1

À LA MODE

In Helen Rosner’s article about temporary Japanese food, she writes that the French chef Paul Bocuse “pi-oneered what became known as nou-velle cuisine, a modern reimagining of French cooking” (“A Season for Every-thing,” March 11th) It’s true that Bo-cuse is remembered as the figurehead

con-of this movement But, when I viewed him in the nineteen-eighties, he took pains to distance himself from nou-velle cuisine In another interview, in

inter-2007, with the magazine Madame Figaro,

Bocuse, then eighty years old, explained that, in the late sixties, he and twelve other chefs—including Roger Vergé, Raymond Oliver, and Pierre Troisgros—

had been considered the leaders of

the grande cuisine française, and that

crit-ics like Henri Gault, who coined the term “nouvelle cuisine,” wanted to re-brand them As a result, Bocuse’s mis-sion—the innovative use of traditional techniques, showcasing seasonal local produce—became associated with an élitist aesthetic, inaccessible to most people “La nouvelle cuisine,” he said, disparagingly, “is all about the bill!”

Drew Smith London, U.K.

ROGER STONE’S TRICKS

I read with great interest Tyler Foggatt’s

reporting on Roger Stone’s teen-age

elec-tioneering days in Westchester County

(The Talk of the Town, March 18th) I

knew Roger in school—when he was the

president of the student council at John

Jay High School, I was the president of

the student council at the middle school

In 1971, a year after Stone graduated, I

started examining a Westchester County

legislature race for a social-studies

proj-ect, and discovered that Stone appeared

to be organizing churches as part of a

smear campaign against the

incum-bent, R Bradlee Boal, a potential

viola-tion of the Johnson Amendment, which

prohibits nonprofit organizations from

endorsing or opposing political

candi-dates (Stone later told the

Washing-ton Post that his candidate, a

Republi-can named John Hicks-Beach, was the

“dumbest politician” he had ever worked

for.) To my knowledge, my amateur

re-porting was the first investigation into

Stone’s involvement in shady campaign

activities, though certainly not the last

Dean Corren

Burlington, Vt.

1

TAKING CARE

James Marcus’s recollections of his

fa-ther’s final months illustrate the pain,

the poignancy, and the all-around

help-lessness of witnessing the suffering and

decline of a loved one (“Blood Relations,”

March 11th) Amid this poetry,

unfortu-nately, is an all-too-common

mischarac-terization of palliative care, which

Mar-cus describes as a signal, to patients and

to their families, “that the fight is over.”

Marcus’s father was offered hospice care,

a form of palliation that is generally

re-served for people with a life expectancy

of six months or less, who are no longer

pursuing “curative” treatments But

pal-liative care can begin much sooner than

this Palliative-care teams provide

sup-port to people of all ages who are

suffer-ing from serious illnesses Some of these

patients have advanced diseases; others

are undergoing treatment that may help

•

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium We regret that owing to the volume

of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE MAIL

The Met’s breathtaking production of Wagner’s four-part epic is back, with soprano Christine Goerke starring

as Brünnhilde in opera’s ultimate theatrical journey.

metopera.org/ring 212.362.6000

THE RING

In 1938, George Balanchine choreographed dances for Vera Zorina in the Rodgers and Hart musical “I Married

and choreographer of the City Center Encores! production of the show (March 20-24), recently married its star, Sara Mearns (above) One of the boldest ballerinas at New York City Ballet, which Balanchine founded at City Center, in 1948, Mearns is making her début in a speaking role Angelic dancing shouldn’t give her any trouble

PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER HAPAK

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

MARCH 20 – 26, 2019

A desire to shake up received art history is more

than admirable today—it’s urgent for a future

of pluralist values But this wishfully

canon-expanding show of painting and sculpture from

the past eight decades effectively reinforces

the old status quo The first room affects like a

mighty organ chord: it contains the Met’s two

best paintings by Jackson Pollock: “Pasiphặ”

(1943), a quaking compaction of mythological

elements, and “Autumn Rhythm (Number

30)” (1950), a singing orchestration of drips—

bluntly material and, inextricably, sublime The

adjective “epic” does little enough to honor

Pollock’s mid-century glory, which anchors

the standard art-historical saga of Abstract

Expressionism as a revolution that stole the

former thunder of Paris and set a stratospheric

benchmark for subsequent artists The show

takes the old valuation as a given without

men-tioning its vulnerabilities: rhetorical inflation,

often, and macho entitlement, always This

perspective casts artists whose works reacted

against or shrugged off Abstract

Expression-ism as little fish around the Leviathan.—Peter

Schjeldahl (Ongoing.)

“Lucio Fontana”

Met Breuer

The Italian artist is famous for the

mono-chrome canvases, neatly slashed with knives,

that he made—or executed—between 1958

and his death, ten years later, at the age of

sixty-nine This retrospective, curated by Iria

Candela, has a melancholy aspect: it is among

the last of the Met’s shows in Marcel Breuer’s

granite alcazar on Madison Avenue, which the

museum has occupied since the Whitney moved

downtown, in 2015 Conveniently, the chaste

brutalism of the Breuer building—finished

in 1966, the year that Fontana won the Grand

Prize for an Italian painter at the Venice

Bien-nale—feels perfect for it, housing a period style

in period style Despite pleasant surprises—

notably involving the artist’s lesser-known

ce-ramic sculptures, which veer between figuration

and abstraction and can suggest the euphoric

neo-Baroque of a drunk Bernini—the show

has a droopy feel of avant-gardism left out in

the rain of subsequent history So does a lot

of once radical twentieth-century art these

days, as myths of progress in culture complete

their long collapse and mystiques of innovation

gravitate from individual genius to corporate

branding.—P.S (Through April 14.)

“The Value of Good Design”

Museum of Modern Art

The simple flask of the Chemex coffeemaker,

the austere fan of aluminum tines on a garden

rake, and the airtight allure of first-generation

Tupperware exemplify the democratic promise

of the Good Design movement in this edifying

survey, which highlights (although not

exclu-sively) the museum’s role in its history Also

on view—and among the winners of MOMA’s

first design competition, held in 1940-41—is

a molded plywood chair by Charles Eames

and Eero Saarinen; it’s a classic design, but, owing to technological limitations in its day,

it wasn’t mass-produced until 2006 Starting in

1938, MOMA mounted an annual exhibition called “Useful Objects,” which championed the inexpensive and doubled as recommendations for holiday gifts No item had a value of more than five dollars the first year; a decade later, the limit was a hundred dollars By the fifties, the museum had established partnerships with national retailers for the exhibited products, from textiles to appliances, and, in the eighties,

it opened its own design store In the current show, the most compelling items are the every- day gems: Timo Sarpaneva’s cast-iron and teak casserole, from 1959; the original Slinky, from 1945; and a collapsible wire basket, from 1953,

as graceful as a Ruth Asawa sculpture.—Johanna

Fateman (Through June 15.)

Ian Cheng

Gladstone

CHELSEA Meet BOB, a “Bag of Beliefs,” just like you Unlike you, BOB is a serpent, whose existence plays out in real time (this is a live

simulation, not a video loop), on a foot-high screen An unpredictable number of heads emerge from its inconstant skin, which shifts, depending on the day, from pale orange

twelve-to crimson This chimeric demon is made up

of “demons,” A.I lingo for programs that kick

in under specific conditions In Cheng’s show, the condition is you, making offerings via a free iOS app Offered a mushroom or a piece

of fruit, BOB might eat it; offered a bomb, BOB might escape or be killed Has our hero learned anything during its weeks-long saga of death and rebirth? Hard to tell, but thrilling to ponder The entertainment industry employs technology to numb minds; this brilliant young philosopher-artist uses it to spelunk conscious-

ness.—Andrea K Scott (Through March 23.)

Last month, the incomparable Johanna Burton left her curatorial perch at the New Museum to become the director of the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Ohio Her knack for harmonizing visual pleasure and vanguard ideas will be missed (An elegant writer, Burton enlists words in the service of art, which sounds simple enough, until you consider how many curators do just the re-verse.) Her swan song at the museum is a joyful and fierce one-person show,

“The Anthropophagic Effect” (through June 9), by Jeffrey Gibson, a career Choctaw and Chippewa artist who puts traditional techniques (beading, basket weaving) and materials (porcupine quills, birch bark) to firebrand ends Kinship, whether by choice or by blood, is crucial to Gibson, who understands that objects accrue the most meaningful value in relation to people, not bank accounts Don’t be surprised if you walk into this fifth-floor exhibition, whose walls are covered with rainbow tessellations of triangles, and see the artist’s runway-ready riffs on ceremonial garments, which usually hang from the ceil-ing, being worn by his friends in an ad-hoc photo shoot A tender selection of

mid-crafts made by or belonging to Gibson’s family is also on view.—Andrea K Scott

IN THE MUSEUMS

8 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

a whole invisible host into the spotlight with

him (Reviewed in our issue of 3/18/19.)—Vinson

Cunningham (Through March 31.)

Daddy

Pershing Square Signature Center

In this new play by the twenty-nine-year-old Jeremy O Harris (directed by Danya Taymor), Franklin (Ronald Peet), a young black artist, and Andre (Alan Cumming), a wealthy white art collector, meet at a club, stumble back to Andre’s mansion in Bel Air, and immediately begin a psychologically unparsable relationship Frank- lin has a big, potentially career-defining show coming up; his deeply religious mother, Zora (Charlayne Woodard), spurred by a holy—and basically correct—hunch that he’s got side- tracked somehow, shows up, and a kind of war begins Franklin stands anxiously in the middle;

Peet plays him with a sorrowful strain that’s sometimes difficult to watch “Daddy” may

be an acknowledgment of the interpretative peril in which Harris finds himself as an artist given equally to melodrama and serious rumi- nation—a bid to claim his right to subtlety and

ornament, spectacle and pain (3/18/19)—V.C

in their marriage On the plus side, this duction has provided work for three actors (including, most thanklessly, Jordan Sobel, as a bellhop) who are doing what they can with the script they’ve been given On the minus side, at the conclusion of seventy-five minutes of the two main characters exhaustively describing their feelings, almost nothing definite can be said about them except that they like Chinese food How did they meet? Where do they live? What are their jobs? Do they have interests? Friends? Children? Politics? Histories? Fanta- sies? Ideas? The play’s refusal to say is almost

pro-impressive.—Rollo Romig (Through April 7.)

Hatef**k

WP Theatre

Layla (Kavi Ladnier) and Imran (Sendhil murthy, of the series “Heroes”) meet sort-of-cute during a party at his place She is a literature professor, he is a best-selling novelist; they share

Rama-a Muslim bRama-ackground Rama-and Rama-an Rama-aggressively cocky confidence Somehow overcoming painfully awk- ward banter, they embark on a relationship Yet the mutual hostility that underscores their initial flirtation never entirely fades, fuelled by their artistic and political relationships with identity: Layla advocates for positive represen- tations of Islam, whereas all the books by the nonpracticing Imran feature Muslim terrorists Co-produced by Colt Coeur and the WP The- atre and directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, Rehana Lew Mirza’s stilted drama does not even deliver on its title’s in-your-face promise—a scene in which Imran clumsily tries to put on his underwear while cloaked by a sheet is weirdly prudish At least Mirza believes in fairness: the two characters are equally lacking in nuance and

wit.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through March 31.)

The Mother

Atlantic Theatre Company

Isabelle Huppert stars in this drama by rian Zeller, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton and directed by Trip Cullman, about a woman with an alarmingly acute case of empty-nest syndrome (Chris Noth plays her preoccupied husband, Justice Smith her too-beloved son, and Odessa Young the son’s girlfriend, whom she loathes.) Huppert

Flo-is brilliant and often wickedly funny: ars of body language should study the seem- ingly unlimited physical vocabulary she has developed for conveying dissatisfaction If only this production could sustain the spell

schol-it casts in schol-its inschol-itial thirty minutes The

un-The collaborative theatre troupe the Mad Ones made passive-aggressive

banality hilarious—and even revelatory—in “Miles for Mary,” staged Off

Broadway last year and set at the excruciating planning meetings for a

high-school telethon in the nineteen-eighties (The period details, down to the

camel-colored telephones, were cringe-perfect.) The group returns, again

under the direction of Lila Neugebauer, with “Mrs Murray’s Menagerie,”

which has a similarly clammy setup: it takes place in 1979, at a focus group

of parents for a children’s TV program starring a local Philadelphia jazz

musician The show, starting previews on March 26, inaugurates the

Green-wich House Theatre as a new downtown outpost of Ars Nova, the intrepid

Hell’s Kitchen theatre company that has helped launch talents such as Billy

Eichner, Bridget Everett, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.—Michael Schulman

Wooster Group’s “The B-Side: ‘Negro

Folk-lore from Texas State Prisons,’ a Record Album

Interpretation,” directed by Kate Valk, has a

sparse set, from which the actor Eric Berryman

addresses the audience in an earnest, formal

voice, explaining how he came to love and want

to adapt for the stage an LP of blues, work songs,

stories, and sermons The album, “Negro

Folk-soiled sidewalk, a beat-up pegboard) are infused

with needs, desires, histories, and dreams

Be-yond the irresistible “wow” factor of LeDray’s

workaholic perfectionism, there’s a profound

delight in grasping the quiddity of a specific

mop or a lonesome cinder block Even when

the works are fanciful (as when four garments

cling, with hints of desperation, to the corners

of a block of wood), they have the obduracy of

righteous Minimalism, defying associations with

the cute or the twee In this show, LeDray inverts

his usual trope, in meticulous ink drawings, by

inflating antique bookplates until they’re nearly

a foot high Magical.—P.S (Through April 6.)

Hak, who provides narration and projected images, Kitamura strives to confront that loss and trauma in dance, through the additional lens of cross-cultural conversation Six highly supple and agile dancers—some Japanese, some Cambodian—move as if in response to Hak’s images They ripple and buckle, seemingly pulled in many directions Often,

they collapse suddenly to the ground.—Brian Seibert

CONTEMPORARY DANCE

Chant des Sirènes,” the veteran dancemaker is going back to basics, applying his pared-down movement language to his own body When the piece premièred, in 2017, he hadn’t performed

in fifteen years; part of the dance’s subtext is the vulnerability of the body as it submits to

the passage of time.—M.H (March 22.)

Jonah Bokaer Choreography

92nd Street Y

The Harkness Dance Festival continues its monthlong commemoration of Merce Cun- ningham’s centennial, presenting new works

by choreographers who once danced in the Cunningham company Bokaer, whose tenure spanned from 2000 to 2007, was the youngest dancer ever to join In the years since leaving, he’s been exceptionally prolific as a dancemaker, demonstrating a taste for collaborations with visual artists and an interest in his own Middle Eastern origins His new work features live music by the guitarist-composer Alexander

Turnquist.—B.S (March 22-23.)

STREB

Streb Lab for Action Mechanics

The shows that STREB Extreme Action puts

on at its Williamsburg headquarters (weekends

through May 12) have a carnival atmosphere, and not just because eating and drinking are encouraged Will the Action Heroes, as the intrepid dancer-acrobats are styled, collide as they hurl themselves off a trampoline? Will they get whacked by swinging cinder blocks

or huge metal contraptions? Probably not, but they want you to cringe Their newest machine

is the Molinette, a giant bar that revolves like

the blade of a windmill.—B.S (March 23-24

ti-St Luke’s Chamber Ensemble performs three movements from the piece—expect funereal wails and wild, violin-driven romance—in free concerts across all five boroughs Ex- cerpts from some of the composer’s more recent works, and from “Clouds,” by Chou Wen-chung, reveal Frank’s development and influences; premières (one per concert) from

1

DANCE

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet

Joyce Theatre

It’s rare for a touring ensemble to perform to

live music, and even rarer for a contemporary

troupe to do so—it’s too expensive, too

cum-bersome But Aspen Santa Fe has come up

with a simple and elegant solution: a trio of

piano ballets, all accompanied onstage by the

excellent pianist Joyce Yang In Jorma Elo’s

high-spirited “Half/Cut/Split,” the dancers

cavort, speedily, to Schumann’s “Carnaval.”

The surrealism of Fernando Melo’s “Dream

Play”—in which dancers appear to balance on

tightropes and fly—is paired with the spare

melodies of Satie and Chopin And Philip

Glass’s looping motifs set a moody atmosphere

for Nicolo Fonte’s “Where We Left

Off.”—Ma-rina Harss (March 20-24.)

“From the Horse’s Mouth”

Theatre at the 14th Street Y

The latest subject of this series, which combines

reminiscence and performance, is a dancer and

a choreographer, but she’s much better known

as a writer Deborah Jowitt has had one of the

most distinguished careers in American dance

criticism, and one of the longest At the Village

Voice from 1967 to 2011, on her own blog since,

and in several books, she’s set a high standard

for putting dance into vivid words The cast

celebrating her here includes such

luminar-ies as Carmen de Lavallade, Valda Setterfield,

Douglas Dunn, and her fellow-critic Marcia

Siegel.—Brian Seibert (March 20-24.)

Sokolow Theatre

Actors Fund Arts Center

Anna Sokolow, whose choreography combined

social protest with the modern-dance equivalent

of Method acting, died in 2000 This troupe

tends her guttering flame The current program

features her 1968 piece “Steps of Silence,” an

Expressionist evocation of the Soviet Gulag,

and the kind of intensely bleak work that is

rarely made anymore There’s also a new

re-construction of “Three Poems,” which Sokolow

created for Juilliard students in 1973 Adding to

the historical interest is Valerie Bettis’s 1943 solo

“The Desperate Heart,” another kind of vintage

dance drama.—B.S (March 21-24.)

Sylvain Émard

Schimmel Center

The Montreal-based choreographer Émard

made a splash a few years ago with his big,

messy work “Le Grand Continental,” a

large-scale piece conceived for amateur dancers and

set to a pop beat (Imagine something like

an elaborate flash mob.) Now, in his solo “Le

stable, paranoid rehashing of scenes is at first

thrilling, but the script delivers diminishing

returns as it devolves into clichés of French

femininity and madwomen In the end, it’s

an-other story about man-otherhood that only a man

would have written.—R.R (Through April 13.)

10 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

In Wagner’s magnificent tetralogy “Der

Ring des Nibelungen,” the king of the

gods lies and steals in order to build a

co-lossal castle, forcing his daughter

Brünn-hilde—a warrior of uncommon might

and integrity—to deliver him from the

consequences of his unchecked pride and

ambition This season, the

Metropoli-tan Opera brings back Robert Lepage’s

elaborately unimaginative production

of the fifteen-hour work, a costly affair

that required the stage to be reinforced

to withstand the weight of forty-five

tons of aluminum and steel The

dra-matic soprano Christine Goerke, her voice

full of tensile strength, joins the run as

Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre,” on March

25, conducted by the elegant Philippe

Jordan Goerke has a warm yet fearsome

presence onstage, and for some fans she is

this revival’s saving grace.—Oussama Zahr

AT THE OPERA

world première of a newly expanded version

of Lang’s “the writings,” a song cycle based

on scripture from the Tanakh.—Steve Smith

(March 20 at 7:30.)

“A Voice of Her Own”

The Brick Church

Dennis Keene’s choir Voices of Ascension performs a chronological selection of pre- dictably underexposed choral music written

by women, from contemplative monophony

by the medieval sage Hildegard of Bingen to

a world première by the genre-bending Bora Yoon This is no revisionist account—each of the composers featured holds her own proud place in musical history—but it is a corrective

to a male-obsessed canon Is there a good son that Lili Boulanger’s “Hymne au Soleil”

rea-is rarely sung, that threa-is rea-is the first New York performance of Cécile Chaminade’s fairy tale “Ronde du Crépuscule,” or that Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D Minor is eclipsed by lesser works by men? It’s a relief to see the answer

ventured here: an emphatic no.—F.M (March

Mirror.”—S.S (March 21 at 7:30.)

New York Philharmonic

David Geffen Hall

The baritone Matthias Goerne, in his final appearances as artist-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic, sings “The Wound- Dresser,” John Adams’s noble setting of text from Walt Whitman’s account of tending to fallen soldiers during the American Civil War Also on the program, Jaap van Zweden con- ducts Ives’s “Central Park in the Dark” and Brahms’s First Symphony After Saturday’s performance, Adams curates a “Nightcap” at the Stanley H Kaplan Penthouse (March 23 at 10:30), which will showcase works by younger composers he admires in performances by the pianist Timo Andres and the Attacca Quar-

tet.—S.S (March 21 and March 26 at 7:30 and

Webern, and Beethoven.—F.M (March 22 at

7:30; March 28 at 8:30.)

Anthony Griffey / Amy Owens

Morgan Library and Museum

The George London Foundation recital series often pairs recent winners of its annual vocal competition with more established singers Anthony Dean Griffey, who has used his poi- gnant tenor to carve out a niche for himself

in English-language opera, sings arias from

“A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Susannah,”

in addition to an invigorating set of ican art songs and ballads Amy Owens, a budding lyric coloratura soprano, offers a hint of what’s to come with a rendition of Zerbinetta’s virtuosic aria from “Ariadne auf Naxos.” Fun and fluffy duets from the worlds of Broadway and operetta top off the program; Warren Jones accompanies on pi-

The Bad Plus

Village Vanguard

As momentous transitions go, it’s been a atively smooth one for the epochal trio the Bad Plus, which replaced its pivotal pianist Ethan Iverson with the equally skilled player Orrin Evans in 2017 A fine subsequent studio

rel-five composers coached by Frank at her farm

in California may give glimpses of her

fu-ture.—Fergus McIntosh (March 19-April 7.)

Amanda Gookin

National Sawdust

The first edition of the cellist Amanda Gookin’s

Forward Music Project took on large-scale

issues affecting women and girls, including sex

trafficking and child marriage, but the second

edition, titled “in this skin,” pivots toward the

individual Five female composers have written

new works for cello that channel their deeply

personal responses to such concerns as body

shaming, street harassment, and women’s rights

in Iran, drawing on experimental and

multime-dia techniques as wide-ranging as the subject

matter Alex Temple’s “Tactile,” a piece about

“the erotics of everyday life,” uses

ASMR-esque whispers and taps, and Paola Prestini’s

“To Tell a Story” manipulates audio from a

1983 interview with Susan Sontag With its

husky sound, Gookin’s cello gives voice to these

fights and flights of the soul against projected

backdrops designed by S Katy

Tucker.—Ous-sama Zahr (March 20 at 7.)

Theatre of Voices

Zankel Hall

The splendid vocal quartet Theatre of Voices

and its director, Paul Hillier, are ideally suited

to the luminous austerity of works by Arvo

Pärt and David Lang, in a program that also

features the choral ensemble Yale Voxtet and

the organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent

Selections by Pärt will be performed in

con-junction with “Songs from the Soil,” a so-called

visual poem by the Danish filmmaker Phie

Ambo, which follows the seasons on a

bio-dynamic farm Also on the program is the

with brutal honesty.—J.L (March 22.)

Miho Hatori: Salon Mondialité

The Kitchen

No stranger to the quixotic, the onetime Cibo Matto singer Miho Hatori spearheads a mu- sical “imaginary, experimental TV talk show,”

featuring the guitarists Smokey Hormel and Patrick Higgins The concert is inspired by Édouard Glissant’s writings on global pas- tiche, which Hatori links to the New York she moved to in the nineties Is the city evapo- rating in the face of extreme gentrification?

Perhaps But on March 22, at National dust, Hatori’s former bandmate Yuka Honda fronts a similarly ambitious multimedia per- formance—a scheduling coincidence unimag-

Saw-inable in any other locale.—J.R (March 22-23.)

Loco Dice

Avant Gardner

It can be difficult to play fist-pumping, ulist techno without descending into glop, but the Tunisian-born, Düsseldorf-based d.j and producer Loco Dice seems to do it with ease In the early two-thousands, with his studio partner Martin Buttrich, Loco Dice helped midwife the Berlin-centric strain

pop-of techno dubbed, simply, “minimal,” and his taste for freaky hooks has grown decid-

edly more pronounced since then.—M.M

ney also plays at this release party.—M.M

(March 23.)

There’s no use sticking Yves Tumor in any one genre—he expertly pulls from all of them, with an ability to mold the familiar into something un-canny The musician, who is based in Turin, Italy, revels in the indefinable:

in interviews, he circumvents questions about his origins with roundabout non-answers, as if to echo the placelessness of his music Some songs are as clamorous as noise rock, and others are as delicate as ambient house His acclaimed album “Safe in the Hands of Love,” from last year, is serpentine, winding an array of sonic influences around lyrics that brim with affection, pain, and rage The result both attracts and repels, tugging at the ear and then redirecting it At National Sawdust, he performs with a full band on March 25, then returns the following night with the artist and designer

Ezra Miller for an immersive audiovisual experience.—Briana Younger

EXPERIMENTAL ELECTRONIC MUSIC

album, “Never Stop II”—which incorporated

original material from Evans—and absorbing

live performances have proved that the future

looks bright for this once iconoclastic and now

firmly entrenched ensemble.—Steve Futterman

(March 19-24.)

Alternative Guitar Summit

Le Poisson Rouge

In 1969, the Woodstock festival certainly

didn’t want for excessive rain or excessive

guitar-oriented bands To celebrate the fiftieth

anniversary of that mammoth rock fest, Joel

Harrison, the program director of this annual

gathering, ropes in a slew of fellow guitar

visionaries, including Nels Cline, Brandon

Seabrook, and Ben Monder, to present their

own skewed takes on such figures as the

Grate-ful Dead, the Who, and Ten Years After, as

well as Woodstock outliers like Ravi Shankar,

John Sebastian, and Richie Havens.—S.F

(March 21.)

The Music of Van Morrison

Carnegie Hall

One doesn’t envy those tasked with

cover-ing the work of Van Morrison, whose sheer

vocal expressiveness renders the mission akin

to running up a waterslide Yet this

music-education benefit abounds with artists every

bit as individualistic as the tributee, among

them Darlene Love, Patti Smith, and Bettye

LaVette, who specializes in revisionist

inter-pretations of baby-boomer standards The

concert is the fifteenth edition of a tribute

series presented by Michael Dorf, who is

adept at wangling talent—and, on occasion,

luring the fêted to their feast.—Jay Ruttenberg

(March 21.)

José González & String Theory

Apollo Theatre

The Swedish singer-songwriter José

González broke into the indie scene with

a collection of hushed acoustic melodies,

including his 2006 cover of the Knife’s

elec-tro-pop track “Heartbeats.” His work has

al-ways been understated and beautifully spare,

often involving just light vocals and classical

guitar Recently, though, he’s teamed up with

the experimental Swedish-German orchestra

String Theory and filled out his delicate

compositions with spirited arrangements,

imbuing the material with lush new life.—

Julyssa Lopez (March 21-22.)

Optimo

Public Records

This weekend, the recently opened Gowanus

“hi-fi record bar” Public Records hosts a pair

of all-night d.j sets that no serious dancer

should pass up The sharp minimal techno

art-ist Maayan Nidam plays on Saturday, March

23, with Friday given over to the Glaswegian

d.j.s JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, who formed

the duo Optimo in 1997 Their

early-two-thousands mix CDs “How to Kill the DJ Part

Two” and “Psyche Out” stand as models of

freewheeling eclecticism that command bodies

to move.—Michaelangelo Matos (March 22.)

12 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

A copious collection of breathtaking footage of

the 1969 rocket launch, moon landing and walk,

and return home is chopped up, rushed through,

and edited down to near-banality in the director

Todd Douglas Miller’s brisk, superficial

over-view of the historic mission Walter Cronkite’s

news reports serve as frequent voice-overs, as

when the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz

Al-drin, and Michael Collins head to the capsule

(The bright white of their space suits has an

eerie purity.) Images taken aboard the vehicle in

flight offer transcendent thrills that are quickly

intercut with (and undercut by) bland views of

Mission Control Fascinating shots of hundreds

of scientists glued to rows of video terminals and

switchboards are reduced to mere wallpaper; the

work at hand remains a mystery Miller tells the

story impatiently, hitting the high points and

leaving out contemplative wonder; only the

post-moonwalk docking and Earthward trip play out in detail and at length Thudding music

further distracts from the experience.—Richard

Brody (In wide release.)

Captain Marvel

Brie Larson, fully armed with humor and spirit, plays Carol Danvers, a test pilot whose back- story reaches far into the heavens She is also known as Vers, for instance, and fights along- side the Kree as they battle the Skrulls: basic stuff, for anyone properly schooled in Marvel mythology The movie, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, is less entertaining in its explo- sive set pieces than in its cheerful return to the nineteen-nineties, and in the repartee between Larson and Samuel L Jackson, who is digitally morphed into his younger self The heroine, with her dogged quest for identity and her sprightly changes of location, becomes a kind

of intergalactic Jason Bourne, and she sets a fine feminist example for humans and aliens alike

With Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, and Annette

Bening, who is typecast in the role of Supreme

Intelligence.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our

issue of 3/18/19.) (In wide release.)

Out of Blue

It’s no surprise that the books of Martin Amis have put up so stubborn a resistance to being transmuted into film How do you summon a visual charge that can catch, let alone surpass, the busy force of his prose? The latest director

to make the attempt is Carol Morley, who turns

“Night Train,” Amis’s short novel of 1997, into a mood piece, set in New Orleans Patricia Clark- son, with a low-lidded gaze and half a smile, plays Mike Hoolihan, a police detective who probes the puzzling death of an astrophysicist (Mamie Gummer) at an observatory Persons

of interest include the scientist’s colleague (Toby Jones), her boyfriend (Jonathan Majors), and her powerful father (James Caan), although the night sky, too, seems to be a contributing factor Viewers who like their mysteries to be solved, rather than merely mused upon, should prepare for bewilderment The boozy score is

by Clint Mansell.—A.L (In limited release.)

Tale of Tales

Yuri Norstein’s animated feature, from 1979, makes a welcome return—not that anyone who has seen it before is likely to have forgotten the experience Lasting less than half an hour, and boasting the inward coherence of a poem rather than the linear logic of a plot, it presents us with various creatures—a baby, a wolf, a dancing bull, and so on—as they lead us through scenes of a Russian childhood The film is far from ambro- sial, with its strong whiff of alcohol and war, and the soundtrack mixes car engines with lullabies and tangos; nonetheless, Norstein’s capacity to enfold and entrance the viewer remains undi- minished by the years His subsequent work, on which he has toiled ever since, is an adaptation

of Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Every fan will pray that it may yet be brought to completion In

Russian.—A.L (3/18/19) (In limited release.)

vic-of underworld sleaze and leaves him for a poor but honest bank teller (Richard Arlen) Thunderbolt gets arrested while plotting to kill his rival, yet continues to torment him—even from death row With streaks of shadow and jolting contrasts of light to match the film’s eccentric lurches between violence, comedy, and onscreen musical performance (as well as surprisingly prominent turns for a cat and a dog), Sternberg evokes a nerve-jangling city

of macabre menace He turns the limitations

of stiff early sound-recording techniques (as later parodied in “Singin’ in the Rain”) into declamatory acting styles and static images

of a starkly emphatic expressionism; he builds to a frenzied climax of raving, ironic

grandeur.—R.B (Film Forum, March 25.)

The broad theme of BAM’s series “On Resentment” (March 20-28)

gath-ers a wide range of daring movies, such as Spike Lee’s cultural-critical

comedy “Bamboozled,” the Filipino director Lino Brocka’s melodrama

“Manila in the Claws of Light,” and Brett Story’s conceptually bold

documentary “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” from 2016, which

considers the American carceral state as experienced in daily life outside

prison walls Story’s film (screening March 25) follows a chess player

in Washington Square Park who mastered the game in prison; families

enduring the practical and financial burdens of a relative’s incarceration;

police harassment of black Missourians (including those in Ferguson);

and a California convict risking her life fighting forest fires

Through-out, Story finds that such agonies exert grossly disproportionate and

seemingly calculated pressure on black Americans A historical sidebar

about the 1967 Detroit riot presents the subsequent militarization of

law enforcement against black communities as a publicly acknowledged

policy—and as a financial boon to some mainly white communities

An empathetic observer as well as a probing analyst, Story suffuses the

film with grief and indignation.—Richard Brody

IN REVIVAL

TABLES FOR TWO

Marlow & Sons

81 Broadway, Brooklyn

Did any establishment define

early-two-thousands Williamsburg as perfectly as

Marlow & Sons? In 2007, in this

maga-zine’s first review of the restaurant—which

is also, by loose definition, a bodega,

ped-dling artisanal sundries, and a

café—Lau-ren Collins described the aesthetic as “pure

ironic-nostalgic pastiche something

like Ellis Island by way of Epcot.”

Twen-tysomething creatives would flock to the

place, which just turned fifteen, for oysters

and speakeasy-style cocktails in the

eve-ning, then return, hungover, for breakfast

and third-wave coffee in the morning

The menu, though, resisted

mock-ery: it was straightforward and sterling,

changing frequently with the seasons

but anchored by unpretentious

crowd-pleasers like flaky biscuits, tortilla

es-pañola, pâté, and the signature “brick

chicken.” The restaurateurs Mark Firth

and Andrew Tarlow (“Marlow” is a

portmanteau of their names)—who met

working at Keith McNally’s Odeon, and

first opened Diner, next door to

Mar-low—have always had a great knack for

finding and retaining kitchen talent,

using the success of each place to open another The Marlow mini-empire even-tually included Roman’s and Reynard, in the Wythe Hotel, plus a butcher shop–

grocery store, Marlow & Daughters; a bar, Achilles Heel; and a wholesale bak-ery called She Wolf

All have, remarkably, held strong, although Tarlow bought Firth out of the business in 2010 (Firth moved to the Berkshires, where he runs a farm and a tavern called the Prairie Whale,

in Great Barrington) and recently vested from Reynard and the Wythe

di-The business even seems, as of late, to

be experiencing a revival, coinciding with the return, last summer, of Caro-line Fidanza, who was the original chef

at Diner and then went on to open the dearly departed sandwich shop Saltie

Fidanza, now the culinary director

of the whole restaurant group, must be giving everything a nice, hard spit and shine Diner is as good as it’s ever been

Roman’s is arguably at its best, especially when you catch a Saltie-esque sandwich

at weekend brunch She Wolf supplies many of the city’s buzziest restaurants with superlative sourdough Most in-teresting of all, Marlow & Sons, under a new chef, Patch Troffer, is undergoing a quiet but distinctive identity shift When Tarlow asked Troffer—who moved from the Bay Area, where he worked at Bar Tartine and Camino, and whose grand-mother is Japanese—what kind of food

he wanted to be cooking, he replied,

“Japanese-American farm food.”

And so it came to be that the brick

chicken, still impressively succulent and golden-skinned, is served with shiitake mushrooms and sweet potatoes that have been roasted in koji, a mold that grows on rice and is used to make soy sauce A se-lection of pickles includes a tart wakame kraut and a pear kimchi that strikes a wonderful balance of unexpected sweet-ness and heat The excellent, crispy yet pliant sour-cabbage pancake, topped with mayonnaise and fluttering bonito flakes,

is an okonomiyaki by another name Tuesday is Japanese-curry night, when a supremely crunchy pork katsu comes with

a bowl of rice seasoned with house-made furikake, shredded cabbage drizzled in tonkatsu sauce, and, of course, a scoop

of creamy dashi-and-mirin-based curry, punctuated with slippery whole turnips.It’s a surprisingly successful transition, which manages to infuse new life into the place without sacrificing too much nos-talgia The décor—dark wood, salvaged antiques, no tablecloths—is unchanged, and, on a few recent evenings, the crowd seemed to be composed of those same twentysomethings, now in their thirties and forties, discussing child rearing and film rights There are still oysters, and strong cocktails, including one called the Calpis Chuhai, made with a tangy Japanese-style yogurt soda and shochu

If, at the end of the night, the café (which still serves roast-beef sandwiches and that tortilla) has leftover cookies and croissants, the staff will still parcel them into paper bags for departing diners But, first, order

the yuzu-curd tart (Dishes $14-$33.)

—Hannah Goldfield

“A captivating

and big-hearted book

full of compassion and brimming

with insights about the lives of

animals, including human ones.”

—Yuval Noah Harari, New York Times 

best-selling author of 

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Deeply affecting stories of

primates and other animals,

all dramas with great lessons for our own species.”

—Vicki Constantine Croke, The Boston Globe

“GAME-CHANGING.”

—Sy Montgomery, The New York Times Book Review (cover)

“De Waal contributes

immensely to an

ethical sea

change for animals.”

—Barbara J King, NPR

“I doubt that I’ve ever read a book

as good as Mama’s Last Hug…

Not only is the book exceedingly

important, it’s also fun to read, a

real page-turner…

Utterly splendid.”

—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,

New York Times best-selling author

The Hidden Life of Dogs

W W Norton & Company

Independent Publishers Since 1923

wwnorton.com

LAST EXIT TO BREXIT

The lexicon of Brexit, the United

Kingdom’s buffoonishly

misman-aged effort to leave the European Union,

includes technical terms such as

“back-stop” and “customs union,” as well as a

fanciful but revealing one: “unicorn.” It

has come to be a scornful shorthand for

all that the Brexiteers promised voters

in the June, 2016, referendum and

can-not, now or ever, deliver An E.U

offi-cial, referring to what he saw as the U.K.’s

irrational negotiation schemes, told the

Financial Times that “the unicorn

indus-try has been very busy.” Anti-Brexit

pro-testers have taken to wearing unicorn

costumes “A lot of the people who

ad-vocated Brexit have been chasing

uni-corns now for a very long time,” Leo

Varadkar, the Prime Minister of Ireland,

said last week in Washington, D.C.,

where he attended St Patrick’s Day

cel-ebrations His visit coincided with a

se-ries of votes in Parliament that were

meant to clarify the plans for Brexit but

which did nothing of the kind

Instead, the next two weeks will test

how deeply a nation can immerse itself

in self-delusion As a matter of

Euro-pean and U.K law, Brexit is set to

hap-pen on March 29th Members of the

E.U are frustrated because, even though

they have spent two years negotiating a

withdrawal agreement with Prime

Min-ister Theresa May, Parliament has

re-jected it twice, most recently last

Tues-day, which means that there is a risk of

a chaotic, off-the-cliff No Deal Brexit,

without determining new rules for trade,

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

tion to May’s deal are myriad, but they tend to concern the Irish border, which

is why Varadkar has become a central figure in Brexit The U.K wants a harder border with E.U countries than the one that exists, but it also wants to main-tain its current, open border between Northern Ireland (seen as an insepara-ble part of the U.K.) and Ireland Oth-erwise, it can’t fully uphold its commit-ments under the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, which put an end to the vi-olent period known as the Troubles Until that conundrum is resolved, May’s deal would keep the U.K tied to the E.U.; this is the “backstop,” and it en-rages Brexiteers, who insist that the bor-der can be dealt with by inventing new technology Varadkar called this notion

a faith in “magical solutions.”

There has been a failure, among iteers, to see how Ireland has thrived as part of the E.U.; with the principle of free movement of people and goods for-tifying the peace agreement and Dub-lin’s emergence as a business center, the E.U.’s ideals of shared peace and pros-perity have been realized there in a dis-tinct way At this point, Varadkar, who

Brex-is forty, gay, and the son of a doctor from Mumbai and a nurse from County Wa-terford, has more clout in Brussels than May does

In Northern Ireland, Brexit has vived calls for independence The same

re-is true in Scotland; both voted against Brexit There is also a sense of betrayal among many young Britons, who grew

up with the expectation that they could study, work, and build families across the Continent, and now find that future

travel, or such basic matters as drivers’

licenses On Wednesday, Parliament passed a motion saying that it didn’t want

a No Deal Brexit, but—in an absurdity within an absurdity—didn’t legally change the deadline On Thursday, May got Parliament’s approval to ask the E.U

for an extension (Seven of her own inet members voted against her.) But all

Cab-of the other twenty-seven member states must approve it, and several have said that they will not do so unless the U.K

comes up with an actual plan for what

it will do with the added time And should the extension be short, or long enough

to allow a real reconsideration of whether Brexit is even worth doing? The mood

of many European leaders was captured

by Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, who said that he didn’t see the point of just allowing the U.K

to keep “whining on for months.”

The reasons for the M.P.s’

opposi-16 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

THE AIRWAVES

BUBBA THE LOVE SPONGE

Last week, old radio clips surfaced of

the Fox News commentator Tucker

Carlson saying some incendiary things

From 2006 to 2011, Carlson had called

in regularly to a show in Florida, where

he described Arianna Huffington as a

“pig,” Oprah Winfrey as an “anti-man”

crusader who “hate[s] the penis,” and

women in general as “extremely

primi-tive.” Iraqis are “monkeys” who should

“shut the fuck up and obey.” Carlson

also had positive messages He spoke

lustily of Miss Teen South Carolina,

say-ing, “She definitely looks eighteen.” And

he praised white men for “creating

civ-ilization and stuff.”

After the first clips were aired by

Media Matters, many advertisers

aban-doned Carlson’s show (including Just

for Men, the beard-dye brand;

My-Pillow remains) Carlson refused to

apologize He argued instead that

crit-ics on the left have stifled the free flow

of ideas by policing what people “are

allowed to say and believe.” The latest

battle in the free-speech wars had begun

The nation has come a long way since Schenck v United States, which con-firmed that the Constitution doesn’t allow a man to falsely yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre Social laws have proved trickier Can a man yell that pedophilia involving a grown woman and a young boy isn’t so bad, on a national radio show?

To answer that question, the country may soon turn to the case of Love Sponge v Snowflakes

The sponge in question is Bubba the Love Sponge Clem, the host of the radio show that Carlson liked to call Clem, who legally changed his first name to Bubba the Love Sponge in 1999 (it used

to be Todd), likes controversy He terviewed the porn star Stormy Dan-iels about her liaisons with Donald Trump, way back in 2007 Roger Stone has been a recent guest on his show

in-When Hulk Hogan sued Gawker for publishing footage of Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife—which the best friend had arranged to record—

Clem was the best friend

Lightning-rod free-speech cases have often involved figures who are inconve-niently unwholesome The plaintiff in Brandenburg v Ohio was a leader of the

Ku Klux Klan, the ruling in the Citizens United case protected the speech of cor-

porations, and Larry Flynt was the terpiece of Hustler Magazine v Falwell

cen-To this list, we may add Clem, who has, in some quarters, been held up as a free-speech icon for his footloose, some-times vile radio segments After the Carl-son incident, the byline “Bubba Clem”

appeared on the op-ed page of the Wall

Street Journal, where Clem argued that

even contemptible sentiments should

be protected from the “speech police.”

He invoked Lenny Bruce and the ory of “benign violation”—that humor

the-Bubba the Love Sponge Clem

being thrown away for the sake of

na-tional nostalgia

There is a growing public campaign

for a second referendum, backed by an

assortment of Remain-supporting M.P.s

Brexit has fractured the two main

par-ties: many Tories feel that they no

lon-ger have an ideological home; Labour

has been further divided by charges of

anti-Semitism in its ranks Labour’s

offi-cial policy is now to support Brexit, if

not May’s deal, but the first priority of

its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, appears to be

to force a general election that would

make him Prime Minister In February,

he indicated that he would back a new

referendum Last week, though, when

Parliament finally had a chance to vote

on an amendment calling for one, he

instructed his M.P.s to abstain The

amendment was defeated, but its

advo-cates haven’t given up

Indeed, M.P.s voted no last week on

every measure that suggested a specific

way forward, apart from delay They even voted against giving themselves more power to put solutions to a vote

They’re headed for more votes, ing yet another one on May’s deal Ma-

includ-rina Hyde, of the Guardian, wrote that

the story of Brexit is one of “politicians finding out in real time what the thing they had already done actually meant, then deferring the admission or even acceptance of it.”

Those words should resonate for Americans The Brexit debate has been marked by particular British eccentric-ities, but the tendencies it appeals to—

xenophobia, the belief in a lost, past greatness—cross many borders The ad-herents of such movements may see the floundering of Brexit as a reason to re-think their assumptions—or, more dan-gerously, as proof that élites are conspir-ing against them The populist dream subsists in an increasingly troubled sleep

Donald Trump has called Brexit “a

great victory.” Appearing last week with Varadkar, however, he denied that he had supported it; all he had done, he said, was to predict that it would win He re-called the moment: “I was standing out

on Turnberry”—his Scottish golf sort—“and we had a press conference, and people were screaming That was the day before.” In fact, Trump arrived the day after the referendum He might

re-as truthfully have said that he saw a corn on the Turnberry fairway He con-ceded that Brexit has gone badly, but he didn’t think that there should be a sec-ond referendum: “It would be very un-fair to the people that won They’d say,

uni-‘What do you mean, you’re going to take another vote?’” But, as Trump will soon

be reminded, that’s how democracy works: you don’t face voters just once but again and again, as they come to see what your promises amount to And sometimes the second answer is very different

—Amy Davidson Sorkin

Clem doesn’t argue with his critics’

right to lash out, but he is angry when the barbs are anonymous: “I can go be, you know, JimmyJam415 on Twitter, and

if I don’t like your articles I can say the most outlandish things about you—‘I caught him in bed with a goat!’ ” It is the position of Bubba the Love Sponge that accusations of bestiality are best offered with one’s name attached

Clem had a final thought, before hanging up “Don’t write this any other way than you would,” he advised “Just fuckin’ let it rip.”

His attorney, Jeffrey E Nusinov, added his own counsel: “I’m just going

to say, in the spirit of Bubba, don’t even let the editors see it.”

—Zach Helfand

1SHINE ON

GOOD MORNING, MOON

The wish to turn night into day is

not exclusive to casino operators and hedgehogs Scientists in China re-cently announced a plan to replace Chengdu’s street lights with an artifi-cial moon—or illumination satellite—

by sometime next year The fake moon would reflect sunlight from across the solar system, providing a glow roughly eight times brighter than that provided

by the real moon

If Chengdu—more than fifteen times larger in area than New York City—can

do it, could New York? Could the City That Never Sleeps upgrade itself to the City That Knocked Sleep Upside the Head? A call was placed to Roald Sag-deev, a physicist “In principle, there would be no technical difficulty to cre-ate such a moon in New York City,” he said “But it would be quite expensive.”

The moon would likely be made of an aluminum- or silver-coated plastic, and would orbit about three hundred miles above Earth, or 238,500 miles closer than the real moon Louis D Friedman headed a NASA study on solar sails in the nineteen-seventies “The moon,” he surmised, “would be manufactured with ripstops in it, like you have with camp-ing gear, so if you got a tear from a micro-

meteorite the tear wouldn’t propagate.” How big a piece of shiny plastic are

we talking about? “When we did the Halley’s Comet rendezvous mission, in the late seventies”—a failed plan to have

a spacecraft monitor the celestial tor—“the design was something like fifteen kilometres in diameter,” Friedman said “I imagine that would just cover Brooklyn.” No question: a moon for New York would need to be yuge And it would need yuge support from residents (New Yorkers spend about half a billion dol-lars a year on blackout shades.)

visi-“I worry that night is something that people look forward to,” Richard Flor-ida, an urban-studies theorist at the Uni-versity of Toronto, said “People are al-ready concerned about light pollution.” Deborah Berke, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, said, “My fear

is that a New York version would be like the subway—creaky, old, and late.” Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore cop who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said, “It strikes me as a luminary nightmare The idea that more lighting

is better for fighting crime is wrong

Bet-ter lighting is betBet-ter If we could put out

pleasant candlelight and have people ting outside at tables, that’s how you make the city safe, in the Jane Jacobs sense of getting people out on the street.”Before a New York moon could be seriously considered, difficult conversa-tions would need to be had about its draw as a tourist attraction, its effect on wildlife, and the increased stress it would put on parents getting their children to fall asleep in a newly Scandinavianized lightscape “If this moon were more of a decorative or holiday thing, there’s likely

sit-to be more support,” Florida said Berke proposed a bipurpose, daylight-saving orientation: “Between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, it would be up in the sky from four-thirty to seven-thirty, when

it gets dark and depressing Then, in the summer, you would fold it up, flip it over, and drop it down onto the side of the East River and it could be a beach.”

It probably doesn’t help that a lar fake-moon plan devised by Russia fizzled In 1999, engineers tried to use

simi-an orbital mirror launched from the Mir space station to warm the country’s dark northern regions with reflected sunlight The project was abandoned when the mirror, an eighty-three-foot-wide sheet

can’t exist without breaking taboos

The other day, after finishing his

show, Clem agreed to participate in a

discussion about First Amendment

scholarship, over the phone, from his

studio in Tampa He was joined by his

lawyer and one of his producers

Clem said that he’d been reading up

on the law “I’m probably more familiar

with landmarks, you know, like Falwell v

Flynt,” he said “I’m fairly up to speed.”

Did he believe that the Gawker case,

in which the outlet was effectively sued

out of existence for publishing a video,

has negative First Amendment

impli-cations? “You cannot confuse the First

Amendment with a privacy issue,” he

said “The First Amendment doesn’t

give everybody the right to see or have

access to—or even in a newsworthy-type

deal to report on—footage that was in

somebody’s bedroom and was never

meant to be seen.”

Where would he rank the likes of

James Madison among free-speech

he-roes? “I’m sure our country’s

forefa-thers should be thanked before

How-ard Stern,” Clem said “But not in my

messed-up world.”

Clem was thrust into the speech

bat-tle on an otherwise normal Sunday

eve-ning, when he returned from a late

din-ner “I live with my mom, by the way,

and my mom’s a big Fox person,” he

said “She goes, ‘They’re trying to mess

with you and Tucker!’ I’m, like, ‘What?

What did he ever do?’” He added, “I’ve

had homeless people on who have said

very outlandish things, and nobody’s

writing about them.” Clem stayed up

that night reading Twitter—so late that

he slept through his 3 a.m alarm, and

he skipped the show that morning He

never sought to be a free-speech

cham-pion, he said, but he felt that he and his

friend were being unfairly attacked

“I’m not nearly as brilliant as George

Carlin,” Clem said “But I try to be kind

of a dumber, white-trash version of

George Carlin.”

Being a dumb, white-trash George

Carlin has its costs, such as being tried

on felony charges of animal cruelty, in

2002, after he had a wild hog castrated

and slaughtered on the air (he was found

not guilty), or, in 2012, when his plan to

“deep fat fry” the Quran was apparently

shut down by David Petraeus, then the

C.I.A director

18 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

and crinkled her nose: “I smell those marihoochie cigarettes.” Bass boomed from an unseen source “Why is the whole city thumping?” In a V.I.P tent, Aaron Hartzler, Amazon Prime Video’s senior creative director, offered her a drink

“No, thanks,” Griffin said “I want to know what this party is Is Jeff Bezos here? Is he mad?”

Hartzler laughed nervously: “I know, right?”

“Because I like when he’s mad,” she said Hartzler explained that “Good Omens” is a sitcom about the end of the world, “based on a book.”

“I don’t read,” Griffin said “I’m too famous.” Spieller suggested moving to the main party “Celebrities? I just met A.O.C.,” Griffin said She had run into Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier and introduced herself “She had a facial re-action,” Griffin said “I can’t say if it was good or bad.”

Out on the lawn, Griffin bumped into the actress Michaela Watkins She was waving a Polaroid, the result of an elec-tromagnetic “aura reading”—her aura manifested as a hazy magenta cloud in the photo Griffin got in line to have her aura read A technician instructed her to place her palms on a metal box “If you want to look at me, go for it,” he said, readying the camera “If you want to look mysterious, doesn’t really matter None

of those things affect the aura.”

“They don’t?” she asked, disappointed There was a flash, and a Polaroid emerged An amber nimbus bloomed around Griffin’s head An on-hand aura

“interpreter” took a look “It is a big fucking aura,” she said “Very positive, very curious.”

Griffin asked why hers was orangey and Watkins’s was pink

“Well, pink is very tender and ing,” the interpreter said

lov-A band launched into “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Griffin looked wearily

at her hotel, across the street “How am

I going to sleep?” she asked Back in her suite, she and Spieller found Camp-bell sprawled on a sofa bed “I had my aura read,” Griffin said “I could’ve told them what my aura is It looks like a big drag queen Can we say ‘drag queen’ anymore, or no?”

“You can say ‘drag queen’ for another year, probably,” Spieller replied

—Sheila Marikar Kathy Griffin

of Mylar, failed to unfurl and was

incin-erated in space, like a prom decoration

caught in an intergalactic bug zapper

Five years ago, Martin Andersen, an

artist in Rjukan, Norway, successfully

lobbied his town, situated in a deep

val-ley, to install three jumbo mirrors on a

mountaintop in order to bring a

regu-lar blast of sunlight to Rjukan’s dim

main square Andersen is enthusiastic

about the New York moon concept At

the very least, he said, “it would make

for some nice crime-scene photos.”

—Henry Alford

1

BACK TO ZERO DEPT

AURA

The other night, the comedian Kathy

Griffin found herself in the back

of a black S.U.V in Austin, Texas

At-tendees of the South by Southwest

fes-tival sped by on electric scooters,

threat-ening to mow down anything in their

way “We’re going to mow someone

down ourselves,” she said “I have a

cou-ple of names in mind, like Jeff Zucker”—

the C.E.O of CNN “If I see him—

straight to hell.”

Griffin, who is fifty-eight and has a

tangle of tangerine curls, was wearing a

polka-dotted dress She had come to the

festival to shop a new film, “Kathy Griffin:

A Hell of a Story,” which recounts what

has happened to her since the day, in

2017, that a photograph of her holding a

ketchup-streaked mask of Donald Trump

that looked like a decapitated head went

viral The photo was inspired by Trump’s

comment, after a Presidential debate,

that the moderator, Megyn Kelly, had

“blood coming out of her wherever.”

“Even though I don’t mean to defend

her, because she wouldn’t piss on me if

I were on fire, I still thought, Let’s do a

picture where there’s blood coming out

of his wherever and see if he likes it,”

Griffin says in the film “He didn’t.”

According to Griffin, she underwent

arduous investigations by the U.S

De-partment of Justice and the Secret

Ser-vice on suspicion of conspiracy to

as-sassinate the President CNN and Bravo

cut ties with her; she lost endorsement

deals Finding herself unemployable, she went on a global tour (called “Laugh Your Head Off ”) and got detained at airports Death threats streamed in On the bright side, she began doing a brisk business in anti-Trump merchandise on her Web site (The fifteen-dollar “Fuck Trump 80s punk mug” is sold out.) “My

No 1 seller is mugs,” she said “I heard Bob De Niro bought one.”

Griffin financed “A Hell of a Story”

with about a million dollars of her tour earnings “As much as women are more empowered now, it’s still six old white dinosaurs that are the check signers,” she said “Even Shonda Rhimes can’t green-light her own show, which is ridiculous.”

Netflix? “I don’t think they like me,”

Griffin said She recently sent Ted randos, the company’s chief content officer, an upbeat e-mail, writing, “You’re doing some really exciting things in comedy; I’d love to have coffee with

Sa-you.” “It was so not me,” she said

“Nor-mally, I’d be, like, ‘Way to miss the boat, asshole—I’m making history.’” Saran-dos did not reply

Griffin’s S.U.V pulled over “Is this the Amazon party?” she asked Her as-sistant, Caleb Campbell, was behind the wheel, and her publicist, Alex Spieller, rode shotgun Women wear-ing illuminated devil horns and halos made out of pipe cleaners milled around

on the sidewalk “I refuse to wear a halo,”

PARIS POSTCARD

POSTER BOY

Brexiteers may worry that the

Eu-ropean Union is turning the

Con-tinent into one big homogeneous

Euro-land, but in France the artist John

Hamon remains a distinctly domestic

phenomenon It was well past midnight

on a freezing Friday by the time Hamon

parked his car under a no-parking sign

near the Place de la Bourse, in Paris

In the back were an extendable pole,

cans of industrial-strength adhesive,

and a half-dozen posters printed on

plastic, each featuring a blown-up

French passport photo of a

goofy-look-ing teen-ager with wire-rimmed glasses,

wavy hair, and what can only be

de-scribed as a shit-eating grin At the

bottom of the image, in capital letters,

were two words: JOHN HAMON

It took five minutes for Hamon to

extract a poster of himself, slather it

with glue, and, using the pole, attach

it to the façade of a squat concrete

building—the headquarters of Agence

France-Presse, the wire service The

following Monday, A.F.P.’s reporters

and editors may have noticed the poster,

but they would not have been surprised

by it John Hamon’s face has been

smil-ing down at Parisians from apartment

blocks, office buildings, and grands

pal-ais for nearly two decades

Hamon’s ubiquitous picture of

him-self is the only work of art he has ever

produced He justifies this on the

ground that “c’est la promotion qui fait

l’artiste ou le degré zéro de l’art”—“it is

the promotion that makes the artist

or the zero degree of art”—after

Mar-cel Duchamp’s dictum “The

specta-tor makes the picture” and the title of

Roland Barthes’s first book, “Writing

Degree Zero.” He has pasted tens of

thousands across the city, at least

sev-eral hundred of which remain, a

Kil-roy for the twenty-first century The

picture was taken when he was an

eighteen-year-old high-school

stu-dent, in 2000; he started putting up

posters the following year His cheeks

have since filled out, and a scraggly beard covers them He does not allow himself to be photographed

“If I put up my real face, it becomes mine,” Hamon said, sipping a beer at

a late-night café near the Place de la République, the potential vandalism charges of the evening behind him “I want people to be able to appropriate it.” Now thirty-six, he says he is not recognized on the streets, but some-times waiters, seeing his name on his

credit card, ask if he is the John Hamon

“It’s not about me,” he said “It is me

as an artist Not me with my girlfriend.”

Hamon met his girlfriend, Tara Kasenda, on Tinder, where his profile was made up of various versions of his poster The day after he put up the A.F.P

poster, he and Kasenda sat at a bistro,

as gilets jaunes clashed with gendarmes

nearby “A month before I met him, our professor was discussing him in class,”

Kasenda, a master’s student at the Paris College of Art, said “My first question, when we met, was ‘Why are you on Tinder? Is this part of your work?’ He was, like, ‘Yes, I have to do promotion

on all the social-media platforms But also I am looking for a girlfriend.’”

In 2001, when Hamon got started, guerrilla posters were a cost-effective

means of self-promotion “I’m not rich,” he said He is coy when asked how he earns money to live (“A pact with God,” he said.) “It’s not possi-ble to buy a billboard, but if I could

I would,” he said “But with Facebook

I pay maybe a hundred euros, and maybe a hundred thousand see the post.” He has a hundred and thirty-four thousand followers on Instagram, and he now uses the platform to sell prints of his poster, for two hundred euros “Sometimes I think it is more honest to pay for advertising, because you have this freedom, and it is more freedom than you have in a gallery or exhibition.”

Hamon has inspired copycats, though they are short-lived “Sometimes some-one does it for a month or a week or a day and they see how complicated it is,” he said He has also inspired trib-utes Posters picturing a Hamon look-alike with a carrot in his mouth and the words “GO VEGAN” have started ap-pearing around Paris He has been col-laborating with other artists on Insta-gram, who do versions of his posters

“It’s not a problem for me,” he said “I don’t have a problem with vegan.”

“You’re not vegan,” Kasenda said

—Leo Mirani

20 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

Miriam Toews writes irreverently of the sacred and the serious.

LIFE AND LETTERS BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

A beloved Canadian novelist reckons with her Mennonite past.

BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

PHOTOGRAPH BY GRANT HARDER

Before Miriam Toews can sit down

to write, she needs to walk

Some-thing about the body in motion limbers

up the mind and suggests that it should

get moving, too When she is working

on a book, she exists in a state of

height-ened suggestibility, as if everything she

sees and hears were hers for the taking

In her twenties, when she went to

jour-nalism school to learn how to make radio

documentaries, she loved spending hours

with audiotape, a razor blade, and chalk,

seamlessly stitching together the voices

she had gathered, trying to keep her own

voice out of the mix But she found that

she wished she could embellish, add

thun-der and lightning where there had been

only a gentle rain, and that is why she writes fiction

A few years ago, Toews was walking around Toronto, where she lives, turn-ing the idea for a novel over in her mind

She had been thinking about it on and off since 2009, when she read about a se-ries of crimes that had taken place in a remote Mennonite community in Bo-livia known as Manitoba Colony Men-nonites belong to an Anabaptist move-ment that took shape in the Netherlands during the Protestant Reformation

Today, they number about two million worldwide Though most now live mod-ern lives, they, like the Amish, have tra-ditionally kept themselves at a strict re-

move from the sinful world, and some still do Members of Manitoba Colony aren’t on the electrical grid They make their living from farming, but they put steel rather than rubber on the wheels

of their tractors, since rubber tires, which move faster, are forbidden Their first language is Plautdietsch, or Low Ger-man, an archaic unwritten dialect that dates back to sixteenth-century Polish Prussia, where many of their ancestors settled after persecution drove them from home After Prussia, they went to Rus-sia, then to Canada, and then to Mex-ico and points south, not intermarrying with the local population, leaving each place when its laws or customs impinged

on their commitment to separation.Toews learned that between 2005 and

2009 more than a hundred women and girls in Manitoba Colony had been raped

at night in their homes It took some time for them to understand what was hap-pening, because they had almost no mem-ory of the assaults; they would wake in the morning in pain, bruised, with blood

in their beds Some colonists said that the women were being attacked by de-mons sent to punish them for their sins They were suspected of lying to disguise adultery Then, one night, two men from the colony were caught trying to enter a house Along with six others, they were convicted of the attacks They had se-dated their victims by spraying them with

a cow anesthetic made from belladonna.Toews, who is fifty-four, is one of the best-known and best-loved Canadian writers of her generation She grew up

in Steinbach, a town founded by nonites in the province of Manitoba, for which the colony in Bolivia was named (“Toews,” which rhymes with “saves,” is

Men-as recognizably Mennonite Men-as “Cohen”

is Jewish.) Her fiction has often dealt with the religious hypocrisy and patri-archal dominion that she feels to be part

of her heritage, and with a painful tional legacy, harder to name but as pres-ent as a watermark Her father and her sister both died too young, and she sees

emo-a certemo-ain Mennonite tendency towemo-ard sorrow and earthly guilt as bearing some responsibility for their deaths On the other hand, she and her mother are still alive But for the vagaries of history, Toews thinks, they could have been like the women of the other Manitoba

She had no interest in describing the

crimes She tried to imagine how the

women might have responded when they

learned the truth, but her own emotions

kept breaking in She craved revenge

She wanted the women to make the men

of the colony feel fear in their bones, fear

of being attacked, of being killed, of being

tortured or egregiously violated Maybe

they could use the belladonna to knock

out the men and commit

brutal—bru-tal what? The idea seemed hokey, not to

mention absurd Mennonites are pacifists;

one reason they have moved so often

throughout their history is to avoid being

conscripted as soldiers No matter what

had happened to the women, she knew,

they weren’t like her They would keep

their faith

Her characters began to speak to her,

almost as a chorus She chose to let them

address one another instead, to ask the

questions she had and see if answers would

come The women are eight members

from three generations of two closely

connected families, the Friesens and the

Loewens: mothers and daughters,

grand-mothers and granddaughters, aunts and

nieces, cousins She put them together

in a barn loft Their attackers have been

jailed, but the other men of the colony

have gone to post bail The women have

two days to decide what to do:

Greta explains that these horses, upon being

startled by Dueck’s stupid dog, don’t organize

meetings to determine their next course of

ac-tion They run And by so doing, evade the

dog and potential harm.

Agata Friesen, the eldest of the Friesen

women (although born a Loewen) laughs, as

she does frequently and charmingly, and agrees

But Greta, she states, we are not animals.

Greta replies that we have been preyed upon

like animals; perhaps we should respond in kind.

Do you mean we should run away? asks Ona.

Or kill our attackers? asks Salome.

(Mariche, Greta’s eldest, until now silent,

makes a soft scoffing sound.)

The women argue with and shout at

one another, and joke and laugh They

think about salvation, freedom, safety

When they need a break, they sing hymns

The teen-agers in the barn goof off,

braid-ing their hair together and mimbraid-ing

kill-ing themselves from boredom Their

choices are to do nothing, to stay and

fight the men for a more equal position

in the colony, or to leave The colony’s

bishop has asked them to forgive their

attackers If they don’t, he says, they will

be just as guilty in the eyes of God They

have two lives to consider: the one that they are living on earth and the eternal one that they hope to spend in Heaven

Toews called the book, her eighth,

“Women Talking.” It was released in Canada last year, and will be published

in the U.S., by Bloomsbury, next month

She likes the declarative simplicity of the title When people tell her they are sur-prised to find that her novel mostly just consists of women talking to one an-other, she thinks, Yeah, well, I warned you Once, after a foreign publisher turned down one of her novels owing to “a fatal lack of plot,” she suggested that the phrase

be used as a cover blurb In place of plot, she creates pressure, steadily intensify-ing the novel’s atmospheric conditions until it becomes clear that something must either collapse or explode

On a slushy, treacherous January

af-ternoon, Toews was sitting on her living-room rug, holding her grinning six-month-old grandson, Austin, in her lap The house, a narrow Victorian in Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood, was in a comfortable disarray of throw pillows and baby toys Toews was young when she had her children—Georgia, who is Austin’s mother, and Owen, whose daughter, Silvia, had just turned one—and she has become a devoted grandmother, eager to babysit “I loved

being a mother,” she said “I am a mother,

but I mean raising children I know that sounds so retrograde and bullshit, but it’s true.”

Toews’s own mother, Elvira, faced them in a recliner, holding a pile of books

on Mennonite history, their covers trated with bonneted, wide-skirted women and men straining at hand plows “We’re all interrelated,” she said “Literally Let’s see, how am I related to you, Miriam?

illus-She’s my daughter, for one thing.”

“But my parents were second ins,” Toews said

“Her father and I were second ins, so Miriam and I are second cousins once removed!”

cous-“Oh, that’s gross,” Toews said Her Canadian “O”s are as round as frying pans, her voice musical and even “I never even thought of that.”

She pulled her straw-blond hair into

a loose bun, out of the baby’s reach Toews

is Russian Mennonite, a slight mer; her Frisian ancestors arrived in Can-

misno-ada by way of Russia, but they did not intermarry, and it is easy to imagine com-ing across her pale oval face, with its sharp nose and light, frank eyes, in a Dutch portrait gallery A decade and a half ago, on the strength of her author photo, the director Carlos Reygadas cast her as the beautiful, spurned wife of a farmer in his film “Silent Light,” set in

a conservative Mennonite colony in ico Most of her role involved stoically suffering in long, wordless closeups; the scant dialogue was in Plautdietsch, her parents’ first language, which she does not really speak, so she learned her lines phonetically

Mex-There is a Plautdietsch term,

schput-ting, for irreverence directed at serious or

sacred things In conversation, as in art,

Toews is a schputter; she likes to

punc-ture anything that has a whiff of sion or self-importance about it A few years after her experience in “Silent Light,” she wrote a novel, “Irma Voth,” about a Mennonite teen-ager who gets involved

preten-in a film shoot near her family’s farm preten-in Mexico The director is given to grandi-ose pronouncements like “If you’re not prepared to risk your life, then leave now”; Irma, who serves as the Plautdietsch in-terpreter on set, cannily mistranslates the script so that, when the obedient wife is supposed to tell her husband that she loves him, she instead says that she is tired of putting up with his crap

Lately, Toews has focussed her

schput-ting on the city of Toronto, and her

neighborhood in particular—too aloof, with its pet spas and hipper-than-thou boutiques “I think my friends have heard

me complaining enough about tonians not saying hi,” she said, but she can’t help herself The other day, as she was brushing snow off her car, she had yelled out a big, chipper “Hey!” to a passerby who kept on walking as though

Toron-he hadn’t Toron-heard a thing, and sToron-he was still annoyed

She moved to the city ten years ago, from Winnipeg, where she had spent most of her adult life; her marriage was ending, her sister, Marj, was sick, Geor-gia wanted to go to standup-comedy school, and Toews needed a change of scene To this day, she feels like a trai-tor “Nobody moves away from Win-nipeg, especially to Toronto, and es-capes condemnation,” she wrote, in “All

My Puny Sorrows,” her novel about her

sister’s illness and death “It’s like

leav-ing the Crips for the Bloods.”

Elvira followed soon after She lives

on the first floor of the house; Toews

and Erik Rutherford, her partner of nearly

a decade, live on the second The

domes-tic mood is that of an intergenerational

dorm, with Rutherford as the house chef,

and Elvira the resident sports nut; when

the doorbell rings, it plays “Take Me Out

to the Ballgame.” In “All My Puny

Sor-rows,” Toews describes a character based

on her mother as “a short, fat

seventy-six-year-old Mennonite prairie woman

who has lived most of her life in one of

the country’s most conservative small

towns, who has been tossed repeatedly

through life’s wringer,” yet who remains

“jovial and curious and delighted and

oblivious to snottiness.” Elvira is

eighty-three now, but otherwise little changed

A few weeks earlier, a wheel had come

off her walker, and she fell in the kitchen

at night While she waited to be

discov-ered, she sang German hymns,

includ-ing—to tell it made her laugh and

laugh—one with the verse “I won’t walk

without you, Lord, / not a single step.”

Over a lunch of butter-chicken rotis,

the conversation turned to Toews’s

nov-els An Elvira-like figure appears in

just about all of them, pragmatic,

com-ical, full of good sense, though some

of these incarnations are more fictional

than others

“I have no secrets left, and that’s O.K.,”

Elvira said “I stand behind Miriam one

hundred per cent She has a mind I don’t

have, and I know that And with what

they call your coming-out story—”

“Coming-of-age story,” Toews said

“‘A Complicated Kindness.’ ”

The novel, published in 2004, is

nar-rated by sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel,

who has begun to rebel against the

re-pressive religious culture of her small

Mennonite town It won the Governor

General’s Literary Award for Fiction and

became a best-seller, the kind of book

that gets assigned in school and included

on lists of novels that “make you proud

to be a Canadian,” and it turned Toews,

a niche, indie sort of Canadian writer,

into a famous one It is a master class in

schputting; not even Menno Simons, for

whom the faith is named, gets away with

his dignity intact, and many Mennonites

took offense

“I read that book from beginning to

end,” Elvira said, “and I told her, ‘Well, Miriam, it’s a good thing we’re Menno-nites At least you won’t get shot.’ ”

“But I was nervous,” Toews said

Elvira brought up a friend who had met a group of Steinbachers on a Men-nonite heritage cruise to Ukraine “All

he did was mention her name, and they just erupted ‘Miriam Toews tells lies!’ I think I can actually be so bold as to say that there is hatred against Miriam, though what Mennonites don’t do is confront you.”

“It was Marj who also really helped

me a lot, who told me, ‘Listen, people are going to come after you, people will

be angry,’ ” Toews said “She told me to say this thing I’ve said for so long, and

so often, which is that it’s not a critique

of the Mennonite faith or of Mennonite people but of fundamentalism, of that culture of control I wish that people who felt that they were being personally at-tacked could step back and say, ‘Maybe she is really talking about the hypocrisy

of the intolerance, the oppressiveness, particularly for girls and women, the em-phasis on shame and guilt and punish-ment.’ ” Her voice was catching “We all have a right to fight in life.”

“I knew people would talk about it, even if maybe not to our faces,” Elvira said, “and I didn’t want to just say, ‘Well, you can like it or not like it, it doesn’t matter.’ I wanted what, to me, would be

an answer, and I didn’t have one until I went to one of Miriam’s readings in Win-

nipeg There was my neighbor from Steinbach, from when I was a kid I said,

‘What are you doing here?’ And she said,

‘Elvira, when I knew that Miriam was going to be here in person I decided, I’m going How could she write about how

I felt when I was growing up in bach?’ And that was my answer, too.”

Stein-Elvira has the only landline in the house; when it rings, it’s more often than not an old friend from Steinbach, call-ing to let her know that another of their

cohort is gone Later, upstairs and out of earshot, Toews did an impression of her

mother on the receiver: “Oh, good Oh,

good What a relief that must be He’s with the Lord now.” She said, “I can sit

on the stairs and listen in on these versations like a little kid at Christmas, and think, Wow! Imagine that That ter-ror of death—they just don’t have it.”

con-Three days later, Toews was in

south-ern Manitoba, driving from nipeg to Steinbach—“Shitville, as we called it,” she said, staring grimly ahead

Win-It was fifteen degrees below zero Snow slithered across the lanes like smoke The sky was a blinding blue, the prairie a daz-zling white Parallel to the highway, Maersk freight containers in child-bright reds and blues rolled steadily down a train track Steinbach is forty miles from the city; forty years, too, the joke goes Al-though Toews had readily agreed to show

me around, she was feeling apprehensive

“See that feed mill there, with all that rigging?” she said “There was one in Steinbach that I would always pretend was a ship, like I was living in some port city and could sail away.”

We passed a sign for the Mennonite Heritage Village—Toews used to work there during the summer, churning but-ter for tourists—and one advertising the manufacturing business founded by El-vira’s father He had left the business to his sons; his daughters had inherited a comparatively modest fixed sum, and had lived comparatively modest lives “It doesn’t matter to me, except that it was unfair,” Toews said Not long after Sil-via was born, she e-mailed one of her cousins to ask if he might give them some good, solid windows from the com-pany for the baby’s nursery, but he didn’t oblige “And Owen said, ‘Well, a lesson

in the patriarchy is more valuable for via than a window.’ ”

Sil-In “A Complicated Kindness,” Nomi Nickel skewers her town’s homogene-ity: “We all looked pretty much the same, like a science fiction universe.” Steinbach has changed since Toews’s day It is now classified as a city—in Man-itoba, any place with more than seventy-five hundred people can be—and has a growing immigrant population We drove

by a Mexican joint, a sushi joint, a too parlor Three years ago, Steinbach hosted its first gay-pride parade; the

tat-22 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

mayor didn’t attend, but Toews did.

She stopped for old times’ sake in the

parking lot of Frantz Inn, the spot just

outside the town limits where she went

drinking as a teen Her Steinbach had

been dry Now a business on Main Street

advertised home wine-making kits “You

can make some wine, get a tattoo, and

then go see a movie,” she said “What

would our forefathers think?”

It is not lost on Toews that her

sep-aratist ancestors’ fates have depended on

those who wield worldly power, or that

their pacifism has often been contingent

on the conquest of other peoples The

founders of Steinbach came from

Rus-sia in the eighteen-seventies, at the

in-vitation of the newly formed Canadian

government, which offered them land

that had been wrested from people of

the First Nations The newcomers

be-longed to a particularly punitive sect of

Mennonites Harmonizing while

sing-ing hymns was considered sinful, and so

was dancing Trains might encourage

contact with the outside world, so

Stein-bach had no station Someone who was

thought to have done or said something

unacceptable could be shunned by the

church, and cast out of the community

By the time Toews was born, in 1964,

shunning was no longer official practice,

but the atmosphere remained oppressive,

nosy, censorious “It’s a town that exists

in the world based on the idea of it not

existing in the world,” Nomi Nickel says

It was created as a kind of no-frills bunker

in which to live austerely, shun wrongdoers

and kill some time, and joy, before the

Rap-ture The idea is that if we can successfully

deny ourselves the pleasures of this world, we’ll

be first in line to enjoy the pleasures of the

next world, forever But I’ve never really

un-derstood what those pleasures will be.

“That’s Elmdale School, where my

dad taught,” Toews said, as we drove by

a building so squat it seemed nearly

sunken She was his student in sixth grade,

and didn’t know how to reconcile the

alert, engaging man in the classroom

with the silent father who often went

directly to his bedroom and shut the door

when he got home Mel Toews had been

diagnosed with manic depression at

sev-enteen, and for long stretches did not

speak at all; she could count on one hand

the times that her father laughed But

she could sometimes get him to smile,

and she liked the challenge of trying

When she was a child, the rules were simple “Don’t lie, and don’t throw stones,”

Elvira told her; otherwise she did pretty much as she liked The family’s sombre, conservative church bored her Mel had

a perfect attendance record; Elvira let her nap in the pews

Somehow all the problems of the world manage to get into our town but not the strat- egies to deal with them We pray And pray and pray and pray.

But the church’s theology embedded itself in her mind If everything was due

to the will of God, what about terrible things? She had to avoid provoking some disaster She created an obsessive private ritual, kneeling by her bed every night

to beg God for forgiveness “I had to pray for every little detail, every little in-fraction that I could possibly think of, and also express gratitude to God for ev-erybody in my extended family, or some-thing might happen to me in the mid-dle of the night and I could go to Hell, obviously,” she said She finally stopped after Elvira discovered her kneeling with her head on the mattress, fast asleep

It was Marj, six years older, studious and intense like their father, who took church seriously “She started her per-sonal rebellion—her personal develop-ment as a human being, really—much

earlier than I did, and I think she suffered

as a result,” Toews said “She couldn’t fit into that town, but she didn’t really know how to pretend to fit until she could get out, which is what I did.”

Marj was troubled by church politics, and by all that talk of damnation and shame She could not understand why pimply fifteen-year-old boys could get

up and address the congregation, while mature women were forbidden to speak

at all “She would in a very earnest way confront people like my uncles, who were ultraconservative, and ministers, too,” Toews said As a teen-ager, Marj with-drew her church membership and left

to study history at the University of itoba She wished that the minister had come to talk over her decision with her;

Man-if her soul truly was at stake, she thought that it should be worth a fight

We pulled up across the street from the family’s old church In front, the words

“A Time to Listen and Lament” were printed on a letter-board sign

“They keep coming up with real ers,” Toews said

zing-When Toews was in high school,

Elvira underwent what Toews came to call her personal Velvet Rev-olution She considered running for mayor of Steinbach, but worried that

“And that commemorates the best slice in midtown.”

Mel would be mortified if she disturbed

the status quo

One day she got out of bed and went into

the bathroom She looked at herself in the

mir-ror and said, What will I choose? Freedom or

insanity?

At forty, she joined Marj at the

Univer-sity of Manitoba and got a degree in

social work After graduation, she was

posted to Steinbach with Child and

Family Services, the only social worker

who lived in town

Elvira had always known that there

was darkness around her Her

mother-in-law was an alcoholic, getting drunk

on bottles of vanilla extract And

some-thing had happened to Marj, too, when

she was about ten A group of boys,

strangers, took her away in a car,

re-turning her hours later; her new white

hat had been so fouled that it had to

be thrown away But it wasn’t until

El-vira got to Child and Family Services,

and started knocking on doors, that she

saw evil up close—how husbands treated

wives, how wives shut their eyes to what

their husbands did to their sons and

daughters, how nobody spoke of what

she had seen or heard Later, as Toews

wrote “Women Talking,” she thought

of what her mother had told her about

that time

Salome’s youngest daughter, Miep, was

violated by the men on two or possibly three

different occasions, but Peters denied medical

treatment for Miep, who is three years of age,

on the grounds that the doctor would gossip

about the colony and that people would

be-come aware of the attacks and the whole

inci-dent would be blown out of proportion.

Eventually, Elvira opened a private

therapy practice in Marj’s old bedroom

Her friends informed her that she was

a feminist She disagreed, categorically;

her church said that feminism was ful Then she examined the evidence and decided that yes, in fact she was

sin-Toews’s own rebellion was more straightforward She drank and smoked, bought a leather jacket, went to punk concerts in Winnipeg She switched to

a more lenient church, and eventually—

undramatically—stopped going As soon

as she graduated from high school, she was gone: biking in Ireland, sleeping

on beaches in Greece, learning French

in Quebec

She moved to Winnipeg to study film

in college, and had Owen when she was twenty-two Her relationship with his father didn’t last long; he left soon after she gave birth But she loved the cha-otic, improvised joy of motherhood She wasn’t some modest Mennonite house-wife, subject to her husband’s will She could do it her own way

She met a Mennonite guy, lapsed like her, a street performer who ate fire and juggled machetes over people’s heads He had a daughter, she had Owen, and soon they had Georgia In the sum-mer, they would pile the kids into their beat-up VW van, and travel to street-per-formance festivals all over North Amer-ica—“a real seat-of-the-pants existence.”

She didn’t believe in marriage—“like the existence of Heaven and Hell, it’s never really taken with me”—but, on a stop in Vegas, Georgia begged her par-ents to make things official They said their vows in front of a fat-Elvis imper-sonator that night

Toews had started writing during a year she spent studying journalism in Halifax, Nova Scotia She’d been report-ing a radio documentary for the CBC about single mothers on welfare—she’d

been one herself, when she was alone with Owen—and started working on

a novel about them instead She was twenty-eight, and told herself that she would have the novel done by thirty Books had been highly valued in her house; her father had helped found the town’s library But writing one didn’t seem like something that a Mennonite girl from the prairie should, or could, do, and she avoided telling people what she was up to Quietly, she sent her manu-script to Turnstone Press, a small Win-nipeg publishing house, and “Summer

of My Amazing Luck,” a picaresque count of two welfare moms having loopy adventures and getting by in the city, ap-peared in 1996 She dedicated it to Elvira.The novel’s voice was amused, warm, curious, alive on the page Toews won a prize for the most promising writer from Manitoba She had a job in a bookstore

ac-at the time, and whenever she saw her novel on the shelf she’d think, Holy shit,

I got away with it! So she did it again, and two years later published “A Boy of Good Breeding,” about a free-spirited young mother in a Canadian prairie town Both books featured loving but befuddled fathers and comically deter-mined mothers, but they didn’t mention Mennonites That part of herself she didn’t want to touch

Before “Summer of My Amazing Luck” was finished, her father had a heart attack, and retired Teaching had sustained him through his depression Without it, he fell apart He broke his perfect church-attendance record and stopped eating Eventually, he was ad-mitted to the hospital in Steinbach Marj made the nurses promise that they would not release him, even if he told them that he felt fine He could be very con-vincing, she said

All his life, Mel had written to self on yellow recipe cards, notes on top-ics he planned to research, or to-do lists that he put on top of his shoes before bed In the hospital, too confused to do very much, he asked Miriam to write down words for him She wrote, “You will be well again.” He had trouble un-derstanding who “you” was, so she began

him-to address him in the first person, as if she could script his inner monologue herself: “I will be well again.”

In May, 1998, two weeks shy of his sixty-third birthday, Mel got a pass to

“The goal isn’t the exit—it’s the corner office.”

leave the hospital and hitched a ride to

Woodridge, thirty miles away, a town

that, unlike Steinbach, the train passed

through He walked onto the tracks In

his pockets were yellow cards, all blank

As Toews grieved, she read

every-thing she could about suicide She

started writing a symbolic sort of book

involving a ghost, but it was stilted and

she gave it up Then she remembered

how she had communicated with her

father in the hospital, writing to him in

his own voice, and began again

“Swing Low,” which appeared in

2000, is called a memoir, but the

mem-ories in it are Mel’s She wrote in the

first person, from his point of view, and

as she did she came to realize that his

ordinary small-town life, with its quiet

routines and occasional excitements and

upsets, had been, for him, a triumphant

achievement She put words to his faith

and to his pious fear, his bafflement at

his worldly daughters, his love for his

defiant wife Sometimes she wrote things

that she knew Mel could never have

thought, but that she wished he might

have thought one day, to help both of

them find peace

If Elvira is not dead, if I have not killed her,

if she is still thinking about freedom or

insan-ity, mulling it over in the city where she’s

rest-ing, I would say to her: Freedom, sweetheart.

In Steinbach, we stopped at MJ’s

Kafé for Mennonite comfort food

Toews ordered vereniki, chewy white

dumplings filled with white cottage

cheese and covered in a thick white

sauce called schmauntfat, with a hard

split sausage on the side She checked

her phone She had an e-mail from

An-drew Unger, a Steinbach high-school

teacher with whom she has become

friendly He teaches “A Complicated

Kindness” to his juniors and seniors, and

had sent her a photo of one of his

stu-dents’ copies, bristling with sticky notes

like the scan of a brain with all neurons

firing Toews still gets letters from

read-ers thanking her for the book In

To-ronto, she had shown me one, from a

fifty-two-year-old single father, who

told her that he hadn’t so identified with

a teen-ager since reading “The

Outsid-ers,” by S E Hinton

Once she had given her father his

voice, hers could be free “I think I had

probably always wanted to write that book,” Toews told me “But I couldn’t write about Steinbach in any kind of critical way while my dad was alive I didn’t want to upset or offend him, or make him sad And it would have cre-ated fear in him, too.”

Unger runs a humor Web site called the Daily Bonnet, a sort of Mennonite Onion A few years ago, he caused some-thing of a stir with an article announc-ing that a massive statue of Toews was

to be erected in the center of Steinbach

“We’ve done nothing as a community

to recognize or honor her,” he told me later “I think that if she had become

an N.H.L hockey star rather than one

of Canada’s foremost writers, there would be a sign on the edge of town saying, ‘Welcome to Steinbach, Home

of Miriam Toews.’ ”Even so, Toews’s books are now on the shelves at the Steinbach library We found them for sale, too, at the Men-nonite Heritage Village gift shop, near

a T-shirt that read, “Sure Mennonite girls can cook, but Mennonite boys can

eat.” Back in the car, Toews was quiet

Then she said, “That was the best visit I’ve had in a long time.”

At the start of “A Complicated

Kindness,” Nomi’s mother and rebellious older sister have left home under mysterious circumstances that have to do with the church and its bru-tal, sanctimonious leader Nomi lives with her father, a schoolteacher who cannot make sense of what has hap-pened to his family and spends most nights sitting in a lawn chair, staring

at the highway that runs past their house Toews had wanted to give Mel life on the page one last time, but, as she wrote, she sensed that she was be-ginning to lose her sister

Marj had suffered from crippling depression since adolescence, and her adulthood was marked by suicidal

episodes In “The Flying Troutmans,” Toews’s next novel, she appears as Min,

a vital, intense woman who periodically wants to die: “It’s like she’s living per-manently in an airport terminal, mov-ing from one departure lounge to an-other but never getting on a plane.” The novel is narrated by Min’s dishevelled, disorganized younger sister, Hattie, who takes Min’s kids on a road trip to find their long-gone father Toews’s marriage was ending; sometimes she would go

to Marj’s house and lie with her, ther of them speaking, just keeping close She wanted to write in homage to the good times that her family had spent

nei-in their van when the kids were young Set against Min’s depression, the book’s goofy, buoyant spirit is almost unbear-ably bittersweet When Marj read it, she said, “It’s a Valentine to me.”

Around the time, in early 2010, that Toews sent her editor the manuscript of

“Irma Voth,” she learned that Marj had tried again to commit suicide and had been admitted to a psych ward in Win-nipeg Marj refused to eat or take med-ication She wasn’t befogged, as their fa-ther had been She was clear, rational, and adamant She asked her sister to take her to Switzerland, where she thought she could be euthanized Toews didn’t know what to do

Can’t you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorse- ful? Get fat and start smoking and play the piano badly Whatever! At least you know that you will eventually get what you want most in life— What do I want most in life?

Death!

Their aunt, Elvira’s sister, came from British Columbia to help out, suffered a heart attack, had emergency open-heart surgery, and died in the hospital Some kind of dark irony was at work Toews begged the nurses not to let her sister leave on any pretext Marj could be very convincing, she said

Toews was in Toronto when Elvira called to say that Marj had been granted

a temporary release to celebrate her day at home

birth-I got off the phone with my mother and sat down in the palm of a molded plastic hand- shaped chair that Nora had found in some- body’s garbage and said well, then, she’s gone.

In early June, 2010, the day before her fifty-second birthday, Marj left the

26 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

hospital and stepped in front of a train

“She said that she wanted to be in

God’s corner,” Elvira said, after lunch

in Toronto Although Marj had left the

church, she had never quite stopped

believing “Whatever that meant to her.”

“And she did want God to forgive

her,” Toews said “You saw the note she

left, with all of our names, sending love

to all of us, and saying that she hoped

God would accept her.”

What’s a pacifist supposed to do with

eter-nal violence if it can’t be volleyed back directly

at the enemy?

Marj didn’t want to be buried in

Steinbach She was cremated, her ashes

interred at a cemetery in Winnipeg It

comforts Elvira to know where she is

The funeral was held at a local

com-munity center; Elvira’s church in

Win-nipeg helped out, though by that time

she had stopped going there, out of

principle “They had moved to a

dis-trict that seemed not safe,” Elvira said

“So on Sunday morning, after the

church people were in, they would lock

the door And that made me furious! I

said, ‘Look, we have the Gospel, which

means that we invite anybody and

ev-erybody in I refuse to support this

church if you have that door locked,

and that’s the long and short of it.’It

was ridiculous! What good is a church

with locked doors?”

Elvira went to the upright piano and

played a hymn, “Children of the

Heav-enly Father,” that had been sung at Mel’s

and Marj’s funerals

When she finished, Toews said, “I

can’t hear it without crying.” She was

holding Austin, bouncing him a

lit-tle She has recently begun seeing a

therapist, a trauma specialist who

rec-ommends that she synchronize her

breathing with her grandchildren’s She

worries what they might be carrying

in their blood

“We have much to cry about in our

family, and much to be thankful for,”

Elvira said

“It’s a lot of pressure, though, isn’t it?”

Toews said

In “All My Puny Sorrows,” Marj is

Elfrieda Von Riesen, a celebrated

clas-sical pianist, and Toews is Yoli, a

young-adult writer who is struggling to finish

a literary novel Just about everything

else is true to life For all the horror

and sadness and pain inherent in her story, the novel is hilarious, bursting with soul It was important to Toews that the book be as funny as she could make it, because that is what life is like—brutal, comic, everything hap-pening at the wrong moment It was important, too, that it not end with the suicide She needed to show herself and her mother making a new life for themselves in a new place, battered but still breathing

In one scene, Yoli and her mother tend the funeral for her aunt Afterward,

at-there is a freiwilligis, a Mennonite

tra-dition in which friends and relatives tell stories about the departed As a cousin’s wife gets up to speak, her toddler crawls onto the stage and toward the urn:

He sat next to it and banged on it for a while and then, while his mother, oblivious, kept talking about Tina and all her charming qualities, her boldness, her tenderness, her zest for life, the little kid somehow managed

to take the lid off the urn We all watched, open-mouthed, as he started to sift through the ashes of Tina and then fling them around

up there, having a heyday playing with his great-grandma’s remains.

The toddler begins to put the ashes

in his mouth, and his mother stops talking Then his father picks him up and brushes him off:

The mother, my cousin’s wife, turned calmly back to the microphone and finished her story about Tina and her van and I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn’t mean you stop telling the story.

Toews is an artist of escape; she

al-ways finds a way for her ters, trapped by circumstance, to liber-ate themselves Even so, “Women Talking” was particularly taxing to write

charac-It could be claustrophobic, spending so much mental time in that barn con-templating evil, listening to those confined women, trying to figure out how they might get free “I could feel the blood pounding in my body and

my head,” Toews said She thought she might have a stroke “I know that ev-erybody struggles when they write

Just, for me, this particular book had a ticking-time-bomb feeling to it.” She started her writing days with a sudoku puzzle, for the reassurance of organiz-ing numbers instead of words, and

lighted a sandalwood-scented candle,

to encourage calm Later, she went back and added episodes of action that serve

as valves to release narrative steam, and humor, to deepen its flavors, like salt She dedicated the book to Marj, with

an inscription in Italian, a language she

loves—“ricordo le risate” (“I remember

the laughter”)—and to her partner, Erik:

“e ancora ridiamo” (“and still we laugh”).

Recently, touring with the novel, Toews has been approached at readings

by people who tell her that they had heard rumors about what was happen-ing at Manitoba Colony, and were told

to pray about the problem Toews derstands That is what she has done,

un-in her own secular way “You could say,

‘What difference is this going to make?’

Or you could say, ‘It’s thinking It’s ing It’s asking.’ ”

hop-But is forgiveness that is coerced true giveness? asks Ona Friesen And isn’t the lie

for-of pretending to forgive with words but not with one’s heart a more grievous sin than to simply not forgive? Can’t there be a category

of forgiveness that is up to God alone, a egory that includes the perpetration of vio- lence upon one’s children, an act so impossi- ble for a parent to forgive that God, in His wisdom, would take exclusively upon Himself the responsibility for such forgiveness?

cat-If there can be said to be a onist of “Women Talking,” it is odd, dreamy Ona Friesen She is afflicted with

protag-a nervous condition thprotag-at other colonists call Narfa; they consider her tainted, un-marriageable, and keep their distance Her younger sister, Salome, is fiercely protective of her, but they don’t always see eye to eye Salome wants to fight, to draw blood from the men who have hurt her; Ona wants merely the freedom to think She is calmer than the thrilling, furious older sister of “A Complicated Kindness,” and more hopeful than the despairing one of “The Flying Trout-mans” and “All My Puny Sorrows.” She wants to survive And there is a man who loves her: August Epp, a shy, anxious outsider, treated contemptuously by the other men Ona invites him to sit with the women as they conduct their con-versation, to take the minutes, for pos-terity He admires the women’s courage Wherever they go, he can’t follow They’ll meet again after death, or they won’t No one can say They know only that if they leave they won’t be turning back.

SHOUTS & MURMURS

I am beginning to experience what

I would call disturbing digital

coin-cidences Call me crazy, but on

Wed-nesday I asked my Amazon Echo Dot,

“Alexa, what time is it?” On Thursday,

I got an e-mail from Wayfair

sug-gesting that I might like to order a

thirty- inch farmhouse-style wall clock

that lends any room a touch of charm

Coincidence?

While chatting with a colleague via

Skype, I cleared my throat and coughed

twice Hours later, my Facebook feed

displayed an ad for Mucinex On

Sun-day night, I watched a YouTube video

of ICE agents hassling immigrants On

Monday morning, the first song in my

Spotify “Discover Weekly” playlist was

“Cold as Ice” by Foreigner

On a phone call using my landline,

I told my parents that Janice and I were

thinking about having another child

Moments later, the doorbell rang It

was a door-to-door salesman selling

First Response Early Result Pregnancy Test Kits

Janice and I went to a far corner of the living room to discuss our idea of moving to Brooklyn We made sure to whisper to each other, our hands cupped over our lips Nevertheless, we both re-ceived “pins you might like” sugges-tions from Pinterest for boards featur-ing photos of bearded men pushing luxury baby strollers

My cough began getting worse My throat grew raw and sore During a FaceTime conversation with my sister,

I had a coughing fit so bad that I was forced to put down the phone When

I picked it up, there were four ing e-mails from health clinics and hos-pitals Several real-estate agents called and said they had heard that we might

market-be selling the house Bonobos.com e-mailed me with suggestions for jack-ets “that might match that Galapagos Blue shirt you’re wearing.”

I deactivated the smart doorbell, cause I felt that it might somehow be snooping on us, and I flushed my Fit-bit down the toilet The Bluetooth- connected light bulbs seemed safe for the moment Advertisements for var-ious kinds of clocks continued to fol-low me on Web pages across the In-ternet: a cuckoo clock for sale on Etsy,

be-a vintbe-age but possibly broken clock (“not tested”) offered on eBay, a digi-tal clock displaying the time as a se-ries of equations on ThinkGeek.com Janice and I worked out a crude sort

of sign language to communicate lently I pointed at my mouth to in-dicate that I was hungry My phone buzzed with a coupon from Grubhub

si-We sneaked out to the driveway, tending that we were going out to smoke cigarettes The lawn was strewn with fallen tree limbs from the stormy win-ter, and the gutters above the garage overflowed with dead leaves A neigh-bor came over carrying a printout of local landscapers from Angie’s List

pre-I got in my car and drove, just to clear my head At the end of the street, the “check oil” light on the dashboard came on When I pulled into a gas sta-tion, the attendant was holding con-tainers of motor oil high, one in each hand “Thanks for getting here so quickly,” he said “How’s your cough?”While I waited for the oil change,

an e-mail arrived from Monster.com with the subject line “We Found These Jobs for You.” One of the listings was

“Smart-Doorbell Deactivator.” And then came the e-mail from my em-ployer, announcing the layoffs

My health deteriorated further My whole body ached It hurt to move My fever rose to a hundred and five, and soon I was vomiting blood Why had

I ignored those hospital offers? I asked Alexa what the weekend weather would

be She stopped her forecast details at Friday “Last chance for savings” offers from Hotels.com flooded my in-box

As I began to lose consciousness,

I turned on the TV Netflix suggested that I might like to binge its new se-ries about arrogant Wall Street bond traders who are willing to stab any-one in the back to grab more power

I actually hate that kind of show

I think they’re recommending it to everybody 

DISTURBING DIGITAL COINCIDENCES

BY DON STEINBERG

28 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

My father loved books ravenously, and his always had a devoured look to them

PERSONAL HISTORYTHE STACK

The life-changing magic of a disorganized pile of books.

BY KATHRYN SCHULZ

ILLUSTRATION BY ROSE WONG

When I was a child, the grownup

books in my house were arranged

according to two principles One of

these, which governed the downstairs

books, was instituted by my mother, and

involved achieving a remarkable

har-mony—one that anyone who has ever

tried to organize a home library would

envy—among thematic, alphabetic, and

aesthetic demands The other, which

governed the upstairs books, was

insti-tuted by my father, and was based on

the conviction that it is very nice to have

everything you’ve recently read near at

hand, in case you get the urge to

con-sult any of it again; and also that it is a

pain in the neck to put those books

away, especially when the shelves on which they belong are so exquisitely or-ganized that returning one to its appro-priate slot requires not only a card cat-alogue but a crowbar

It was this pair of convictions that led

to the development of the Stack I can’t remember it in its early days, because in its early days it wasn’t memorable I sup-pose back then it was just a modest lit-tle pile of stray books, the kind that many readers have lying around in the living room or next to the bed But by the time

I was in my early teens it was the case—

and seemed by then to have always been the case—that my parents’ bedroom was home to the Mt Kilimanjaro of books

Or perhaps more aptly the Mt St ens of books, since it seemed possible that at any moment some subterranean shift in it might cause a cataclysm The Stack had started in a recessed space near my father’s half of the bed, bounded on one side by a wall and on the other by my parents’ dresser, a ver-tical behemoth taller than I would ever

Hel-be At some point in the Stack’s opment, it had overtopped that piece of furniture, whereupon it met a second tower of books, which, at some slightly later point, had begun growing up along the dresser’s other side For some rea-son, though, the Stack always looked to

devel-me as if it had defied gravity (or haps obeyed some other, more myste-

per-rious force) and grown down the far side

of the dresser instead At all events, the result was a kind of homemade Arc de Triomphe, extremely haphazard-look-ing but basically stable, made of some three or four hundred books

I have no idea why we called this tity the Stack, considering the word’s orderly connotations of squared-off edges and the shelving areas of librar-ies It’s true that the younger side of the Stack mounted toward the ceiling in relatively tidy fashion, like the floors of

en-a high-rise—en-a concession to its green-ater proximity to the doorway, and thus to the more trafficked area of the bedroom, where a sudden collapse could have been catastrophic But the original side was another story Few generally vertical structures have ever been less stacklike, and no method of storing books has ever looked less like a shelf

Some people love books reverently—

my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined

to open any volume beyond a dred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously His always had

hun-a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pis-tachio dust, and bits of the brightly col-ored shells of peanut M&M’s (I have inherited his pragmatic attitude toward books and deliberately break the spine

of every paperback I start, because I like

to fold them in half while reading them.)

In addition to the Stack, my father ically had on his bedside table the five

typ-or six books he was currently reading—a

novel or two, a few works of nonfiction,

a volume of poetry, “Comprehensive

Russian Grammar” or some other

text-booky thing—and when he finished one

of these he would toss it into the space

between the dresser and the wall

Com-pression and accumulation—especially

accumulation—did the rest

To my regret, I have only a single

photograph of the result I have spent

a great deal of time studying it, yet find

many of the books in it impossible to

identify Some tumbled into the Stack

spine in, rendering them wholly

un-knowable, while others fell victim to

low resolution, including a few that are

maddeningly familiar: an Oxford

An-thology whose navy binding and gold

stamp I recognize but whose spine is

too blurry to read; a book that is

un-mistakably a Penguin Classic, but that

hardly narrows it down; an Idiot’s Guide

to I don’t know what In some cases, I

can make out the title but had to look

up the author: “Pirate Latitudes”

(Mi-chael Crichton), “Mayflower”

(Nathan-iel Philbrick), “Small World” (David

Lodge), “The Way Things Were” (Aatish

Taseer) In others, conversely, I can see

the author but not the title: something

by Carl Hiaasen, something by Wally

Lamb, something by Nadine Gordimer,

something by Gore Vidal

Plenty of other books in the Stack,

however, are perfectly visible, and

per-fectly familiar There’s the collected

works of Edgar Allan Poe; there’s “Pale

Fire” and “White Teeth”; there’s

“In-finite Jest” and “Amerika.” There’s

Wal-lace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose,” a book

my father mailed to me in my early

twenties, together with “Our Mutual

Friend,” when I was travelling and lonely

and had run out of things to read In

the Stack, Stegner’s novel has achieved

its own angle of repose, alongside

Rich-ard Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible?”

and Antonio Damasio’s “The Feeling

of What Happens.” Above that is

Ste-phen E Ambrose’s “Undaunted

Cour-age,” about Lewis and Clark’s westward

journey, and Diane McWhorter’s “Carry

Me Home,” about the civil-rights

move-ment in Birmingham There’s Thomas

Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” and

Cor-mac McCarthy’s “The Road,” Michael

Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of

Kavalier & Clay” and Beryl Markham’s

“West with the Night.” There are books

I can remember discussing with my ther—Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” Jon-athan Franzen’s “Freedom,” Sarah Bake-well’s “How to Live”—together with books I had no idea he’d read and, de-spite his insatiable curiosity, no idea he would have cared to read: the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds, Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation,” Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.”

fa-I’m not sure exactly when this tograph of the Stack was taken It must have been after the fall of 2012, since one of the books visible is Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” which came out in September of that year, and be-fore 2016, when my parents moved out

pho-of their home pho-of thirty years and into

a condo, the kind with no stairs for them

to fall down and less space to manage

as they aged There were plenty of books

in the new place, though, and a nice wide clearing by the side of the bed, so

I suspect that, given enough time, it would have housed some kind of Stack 2.0 But it did not, because seven months after my parents moved in my father

died On his bedside table at the time was a new edition of “Middlemarch,” together with a copy of “SPQR,” Mary Beard’s history of ancient Rome, and Kent Haruf ’s “Plainsong.” “Middle-march” my father regarded as the great-est novel in the English language and had been rereading for at least the sixth time I don’t know if he had completed either of the other two books, or even begun them But it doesn’t make any difference, I suppose No matter when

my father died, he would have been—

as, one way or another, we all are when

we die—in the middle of something

I don’t know where my father got his

love of books His own father, a plumber by trade, was an epic raconteur but not, to my knowledge, much of a reader His mother, the youngest of thir-teen children, was sent for her protec-tion from a Polish shtetl to Palestine at the start of the Second World War, only

to learn afterward that her parents and eleven of her twelve siblings had per-ished in Auschwitz Whoever she might

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otherwise have been died then, too;

the woman she became was volatile,

unhappy, and inscrutable My father

was never even entirely sure how

lit-erate she was—in any language, and

least of all in English, which he

him-self began learning at the age of eleven,

when the family arrived in the United

States on refugee visas and settled in

Detroit

It’s possible that my father turned

to books to escape his parents’ chronic

fighting, although I don’t know that

for sure I do know that when he was

nineteen he left Michigan for

Man-hattan, imagining a glamorous new life

in the city that had so impressed him

when he first arrived in America

In-stead, he found penury on the Bowery

To save money, he walked each day

from his tenement to a job at a

drug-store on the Upper West Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father describe in rapturous terms the count-less hours he had spent in what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the re-spite that he found there

But if books were a gift for my ther—transportive, salvific—he made sure that, for his children, they were a given In one of my earliest memories,

fa-he has suddenly materialized in tfa-he doorway of the room where my sister and I were playing, holding a Norton Anthology of Poetry in one hand and waving the other aloft like Moses or Merlin while reciting “Kubla Khan.”

Throughout my childhood, it was his job to read aloud to us at bedtime; to our delight, he could not be counted on

to stick to the text on the page, and on the best nights he ditched the books al-together and regaled us with the home-grown adventures of Yana and Egbert, two danger-prone siblings from, of all places, Rotterdam (My father had a keen ear for the kind of word that would make young children laugh, and that was one of them.) Those stories struck

me as terrific not only at the time but again much later, when I was old enough

to realize how difficult it is to construct

a decent plot When I asked my father how he had done it, he confessed that

he had routinely whiled away his ning commute constructing those bed-time tales I regret to this day that none

eve-of us ever thought to write them down

In a kinder world—one where my father’s childhood had been less des-perate, his fear of financial instability less acute, his sense of the options avail-able to him less constrained—I suspect that he would have grown up to be a professor, like my sister, or a writer, like

me As it was, he derived endless ious pleasure from his daughters’ work Although he seemed to embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not terribly rah-rah about the boot-strap fantasy of the American Dream;

vicar-he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead, how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances he had had along the way Still, given his particular bent,

having a daughter who got paid to read

books was perhaps the consummate

ex-ample of seeing to it that your kids had

a better life than your own

In the weeks and months after my father’s death, my family and I went through his belongings, donating what-ever was useful, getting rid of what no one would want, and divvying up the things we loved, the things that reminded

us of him As a result, some of my ther’s books are my books now: my Dick-ens and Dostoyevsky, my biology and natural history, my literary fiction and light verse and tragedy They came with

fa-me the sumfa-mer after he died, when my partner and I moved in together and merged our worldly possessions Along with the rest of the books, they were the first things we unpacked and put away Although I often identify as my fa-ther’s daughter, there’s no mistaking

“I can probably help you with the crossword, but that’s about it.”

which half of my genome and rearing

was involved in organizing our

house-hold books Not only does Philip Roth

come after Joseph Roth on our shelves;

“The Anatomy Lesson” comes after

“American Pastoral,” and the

nonfic-tion is subdivided into Linnaeus-like

distinctions And yet, as my father knew,

a perfect shelving system is also

inher-ently an imperfect one The difficulty

isn’t all the taxonomic gray areas—

whether to keep T S Eliot’s criticism

with his poetry, for instance, or whether

Robert McNamara’s “In Retrospect”

belongs with memoirs or with books

about the Vietnam War The difficulty

is that anything that is perfectly

or-dered is always threatening to become

imperfect and disorderly—especially

books in a household of readers You

are forever acquiring new ones and

going back to revisit the old, spotting

some novel you’ve always intended to

read and pulling it from its designated

location, discovering never-categorized

books in the office or the back seat or

under the bed You can put some of

these strays away, of course, but,

collec-tively, they will always spill out beyond

your bookshelves, permanently

unre-solved, like the remainder in a

long-division problem This is a difficulty

that goes well beyond libraries No

mat-ter how beautifully your life is arranged,

no matter how lovingly you tend to it,

it will not stay that way forever

I keep two pictures of my father on

my desk now One is a photograph,

taken a year or so before his death, of

the two of us walking down the street

where I grew up My dad has his hand

on my shoulder, and although in

real-ity I am steadying him—he was already

beginning to have trouble walking—it

looks as if he is guiding me It is the

posture of a father with his daughter,

as close to timeless as any photograph

could be The other is the picture of

the Stack Strictly speaking, of course,

that one isn’t a photograph of my

fa-ther at all, and yet I can’t imagine a

bet-ter image of the kinds of things that

normally defy a camera My father’s

ex-uberant, expansive mind; the comic,

necessary, generous-hearted

compro-mises of my parents’ marriage; the

or-igins of my own vocation—they are all

there in the Stack, aslant among the

books, those other bindings 

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32 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

LETTER FROM LONDONBAD BOY

The strange life of the businessman whose fortune helped turn British voters against the E.U.

BY ED CAESAR

As the sun came up in London

on June 24, 2016, Arron Banks

and Andy Wigmore were

walk-ing through Westminster, the political

district of London, smoking cigarettes

and drinking champagne from the

bot-tle The shocking result of the

refer-endum on Britain’s membership in the

European Union had just been

an-nounced: Leave had won

Banks, an entrepreneur whose

for-tune comes primarily from owning

in-surance companies, had financed and

directed the most aggressive wing of the

Leave campaign, Leave.EU, and he had

given or loaned a total of thirteen

mil-lion dollars to various anti-E.U causes

In Britain, where campaign-spending

laws have historically been stringent, and

donations modest by American

stan-dards, Banks’s contributions are thought

to constitute the largest sum ever

do-nated by an individual to a political

cam-paign Banks, who is fifty-two, is short

and moonfaced, and often talks with a

mischievous half smile; Wigmore, a

for-mer Conservative Party operative who

serves as Banks’s communications chief,

also fifty-two, has floppy black hair and

a chaotic manner Virtually inseparable,

and prone to boyish humor, they refer

to each other as Banksy and Wiggy

Although the Leave campaign was

officially led by Vote Leave, a group

whose figureheads included the cabinet

ministers Boris Johnson and Michael

Gove, Banks believed that Leave’s

vic-tory was in many ways his vicvic-tory He

had given considerable financial support

to Nigel Farage, the sharp-tongued

Eu-roskeptic, which had allowed Farage to

remain at the center of the Brexit

de-bate Many experts also believed that

the rambunctious Leave.EU campaign—

which stoked fears of uncontrolled

immigration—had roused voters who

had been unmoved by the more

tech-nocratic messages of Vote Leave A

typ-ical Leave.EU post on Facebook warned

voters that “immigration without assimilation equals invasion.” A post about the dangers of “free move-ment” within the E.U was accompanied

by a photograph of ticking explosives

That night, Banks and Wigmore had stood by Farage’s side as he proclaimed victory, at a crowded party on the banks

of the Thames Farage called the endum “a victory for ordinary people,”

refer-adding, “We have fought against the multinationals, we have fought against the big merchant banks, we have fought against big politics, we have fought against lies, corruption, and deceit.” He concluded, “Let June the twenty-third

go down in our history as our dence Day!”

Indepen-Shortly after 5 a.m., Banks and more took the champagne and headed for a friend’s apartment, to shower and change before making media appear-ances On the way, they spotted an old man, in a tattered Barbour jacket, at-tempting to withdraw large sums of money from an A.T.M The old man recognized them He was terrified that the vote would cause a run on banks in the United Kingdom, and told them,

Wig-in a fury, that they were responsible for whatever happened next

Banks and Wigmore found the uation profoundly comic Their cam-paign had fought against such “lies.” A vote to leave the E.U would not mean panic in the markets, or the collapse of British prosperity Laughing, they as-sured the man that nothing of the sort would happen Banks handed him the bottle of champagne, and urged him to celebrate As Banks recalled it, “He gen-uinely thought the world was going to come to an end!”

sit-Banks told me this story, alongside

Wigmore, on a rainy November afternoon two and a half years later, at

5 Hertford Street—a private member’s club, in Mayfair, where male guests are

required to wear a formal jacket The Brexit project that they had so ardently supported had left the U.K in a state

of panic The government of Prime ister Theresa May had almost imploded several times The withdrawal agree-ment that May had made with the E.U., which was intended to smooth the tran-sition for both parties, pleased nobody, and the deadline for Britain’s departure was approaching with the speed of a meteor (Earlier this month, the impact seemed to have been slightly delayed when Parliament voted to postpone the onset of Brexit, originally set for March 29th, for a few weeks.) May was stuck

Min-in a dismal spot: if she couldn’t get a deal ratified by Parliament, Brexit might well occur with no transition at all Many economists believed that this scenario, known as “no deal,” would shake Brit-ain, causing upheaval at its borders and shortages of food and medicine

This outcome was Banks’s preferred

result “No deal means we leave,” he told

me at the club

Banks was singularly calm about Brexit, but he had to contend with some issues of his own At the request of the Electoral Commission, which over-sees voting in the U.K., he was under investigation by the National Crime Agency—Britain’s version of the F.B.I The commission had asked the agency

to investigate Banks and his chief ecutive, Liz Bilney, after concluding that, among other things, Banks was likely not the true source of all the po-litical contributions made in his name, and that he and others might know-ingly have concealed the provenance of those funds It is illegal in the U.K to use foreigners’ money in electoral cam-paigns “A number of criminal offences may have been committed,” the com-mission declared A spokesperson told

ex-me that Banks’s and Bilney’s stories had

“changed over time,” and that what they told the commission was “not consistent”

Banks’s group, Leave.EU, stoked fears with such messages as “Immigration Without Assimilation Equals Invasion.”

34 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

with company records (Bilney says that

this “evolvement of response” can be

as-cribed to the commission’s failure to

un-derstand “our business structures.”)

A sense of urgency attended the

Na-tional Crime Agency’s investigation, in

part because of widespread fears in the

U.K that foreign actors had meddled

in the Brexit vote

Al-though President

Vladi-mir Putin has claimed that

Russia was ambivalent

about the Brexit

referen-dum, he recently pressed

May to “fulfill the will” of

the British people and rule

out a second referendum

on the U.K.’s membership

in the E.U.—which, polls

suggest, would lead to a

narrow win for Remain Moreover,

several authorities on Russian foreign

policy argue that Putin’s interests are

squarely aligned with the Leave

move-ment Putin, they maintain, considers it

strategically useful to weaken European

alliances, and is happy to cause

uncer-tainty and tumult in Britain, which has

been at odds with Russia on a range of

issues In 2016, for instance, Russia was

under sanctions from both the

Euro-pean Union and the United States for

its annexation of Crimea

According to Andrew Weiss, a

Rus-sia expert at the Carnegie Endowment,

Russian officials believed that the West

had been pursuing a “regime-change

agenda” around the world, particularly

in Ukraine in 2014, and worried that

Pu-tin’s regime might be targeted next

“Rus-sia felt they needed to push back hard,”

Weiss told me “They wanted to

pro-mote cleavages in the West, and that’s

where their promotion of populist and

nationalist groups and—I think—their

support of Brexit fits in.”

Banks’s wife, Katya, is Russian A

prominent “ambassador” for Leave.EU,

Jim Mellon, whom Banks has described

as a “friend and business partner,” made

much of his money by investing in

Rus-sia (A representative for Mellon

de-nied that Mellon has had a “close

busi-ness or professional relationship” with

Banks.) Banks’s 2016 memoir, “The Bad

Boys of Brexit,” acknowledges that

be-fore the referendum campaign he met

with Russian officials, including

Alex-ander Yakovenko, the Russian

Ambas-sador to London Subsequent reporting has uncovered several other previously undisclosed meetings and contacts be-tween Banks and Russian businessmen, during which opportunities with Rus-sian firms in the mineral sector were discussed In light of these connections, and the National Crime Agency’s in-

vestigation, many Britons have asked whether some

of Banks’s political nations can be traced to Moscow Alistair Camp-bell, Tony Blair’s former communications chief, and an ardent Remainer, told me, “There are still

do-so many questions answered about Banks—

un-where the money came from, and his role in the Brexit cam-paign of lies and misdemeanors.”

The government of the U.K has been strikingly muted in its response to the evidence of contacts between Banks and Russian diplomats According to vari-ous reports, in the early months of 2016, while Theresa May was Home Secre-tary, she refused a request by British in-telligence services to investigate Banks’s conduct Since becoming Prime Minis-ter, that July, she has repeatedly declined

to comment on these ing in Parliament The subject is a del-icate one for May Although she cam-paigned for Remain, she has governed

reports—includ-on the principle that Brexit is the ple’s choice and must be enforced Given the tensions surrounding the referen-dum, she is unlikely to invite further probes into the financial background of one of the Leave campaign’s key play-ers Doing so would be tantamount to using a grenade in a pub brawl

peo-In Parliament, however, both Labour and Conservative members have repeat-edly questioned whether Banks’s deal-ings with the Russians in the lead-up to the referendum amounted to an influence campaign by a foreign power In No-vember, 2018, when the National Crime Agency investigation was announced, David Lammy, a Labour M.P., demanded that Britain’s departure from the E.U

be “put on hold until we know the tent of these crimes against our democ-racy.” Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, has called for a “Muel-ler-style inquiry” into whether the “ref-

ex-erendum result was stolen.” The servative M.P Damian Collins has demanded a broader inquiry into Rus-sian interference in British affairs In

Con-an interview at his office in the Houses

of Parliament, he told me that he had serious concerns about the source of Banks’s funds “The reason the ques-tions persist is that he seems to own a number of businesses that don’t make any money,” Collins said “There’s never really been a clear explanation from him about the funding of these campaigns.” Banks recently sent Collins’s constit-uents a letter calling him a “disgrace” and a “snake in the grass.” In an op-ed, Collins responded that he would not be cowed by Banks’s “bullyboy tactics.”

Banks’s affairs have also fallen under

scrutiny outside the U.K Banks, Wigmore, and Farage came to public attention in the U.S shortly after the

2016 elections, when they were graphed with President-elect Donald Trump outside his apartment in Trump Tower A few days later, in London, Banks and Wigmore again met with the Russian Ambassador, recounting their meeting with Trump and passing on contact details for members of Trump’s transition team The British Web site Open Democracy has also reported that,

photo-as early photo-as October, 2015, Banks photo-asked Steve Bannon, who later became the head of Trump’s campaign, for help in exploring possible sources of American funding for Leave.EU (Banks says that this effort never progressed.)

Late last year, e-mails leaked to the

Observer revealed that Leave.EU had

misrepresented to British investigators the extent of its ties to Cambridge An-alytica, the now disgraced and insol-vent British data firm funded by the American political donor Robert Mer-cer to microtarget voters In “The Bad Boys of Brexit,” Banks flatly states that Leave.EU had “hired Cambridge An-alytica.” He later insisted that his group had held only “preliminary discussions” with the firm, and never paid it any-thing; he repeated this claim to me But the leaked e-mails show that discussions extended into 2016—beyond what Banks had previously admitted Bannon is cop-ied on some of these e-mails; in one of them, Banks writes that he “would like

to get CA on the team, maybe look at

the first cut of the data.” When news of

the e-mails broke, Collins called them

evidence of “direct links between the

po-litical movements behind Brexit and

Trump,” and redoubled his campaign to

establish a broad-ranging inquiry

Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair

of the House Intelligence Committee,

told me that there were “parallels and

interconnections in abundance” between

the apparent Russian efforts to influence

Brexit and the well-documented, and

possibly decisive, Russian efforts to

in-fluence the 2016 U.S election He

de-scribed Putin’s ambassadors in D.C and

in London as conduits of “malign

in-fluence.” According to an American

law-yer with knowledge of the special

coun-sel Robert Mueller’s investigation into

links between the Trump campaign and

Russia, Banks and Farage have become

persons of interest in that inquiry (This

is “bollocks,” Wigmore said.)

In December, two South African

in-telligence officials confirmed to me that

Banks, who owns an array of businesses

in southern Africa, including several

di-amond mines, had been the subject of

two investigations by the Hawks, South

Africa’s version of the F.B.I The first

case involved looking into whether Banks

used his diamond mines in South

Af-rica to launder stones from other parts

of Africa—a process known as “salting

the mines.” The second explored whether

Banks, or people close to him, acquired

automatic weapons without a license

during a period of political upheaval in

Lesotho; this investigation was opened

by a branch of the Hawks known as

Crimes Against the State

Considering all these investigations,

Banks and Wigmore were in oddly

high spirits when we met Banks drank

white wine; Wigmore, gin-and-tonic

They frequently reduced each other to

gales of laughter with a joke or a

remi-niscence, and they found it both surreal

and amusing to be figures of suspicion

on three continents A few days before

the meeting, Wigmore sent me a text

about the lives that he and Banks had

been leading since the Brexit vote: “It’s

a film a book and a thriller rolled into

one lol.” He appended to the message

the crying-laughing-face emoji

Banks dismissed much of the

report-ing about him as overheated Remainer

fantasy—the product of journalists and media proprietors who had been “driven crazy by Brexit.” This argument echoes Trump’s claim that Americans who ex-press concerns about his campaign’s com-munications with Russian officials are just displacing their rage over his defeat

of Hillary Clinton Banks said that he’d given money to a campaign in an en-tirely legal way, and now he was being punished for having been effective All the criminal investigations were simi-larly motivated by politics One could not trust the Electoral Commission to act fairly when it referred him to the National Crime Agency, he said, because the commission was filled with Remain supporters Brexit itself was at risk, Banks warned me, because most M.P.s were Remainers, as were many powerful peo-ple outside Parliament

For all his bonhomie, there was a ister aspect to Banks’s embattled outlook

sin-Leave.EU’s social-media feed, which is overseen by Banks, often parroted the alt-right view that liberal global élites exert an outsized sway over politics and the media Two recent posts by Leave.EU had featured images of the financier George Soros, a target of anti-Semitic hatred and a focus of right-wing con-spiracy theories In one post, Soros was pictured as a puppet master controlling Tony Blair; the image echoed a Nazi pro-

paganda poster of the nineteen-forties,

in which a Jewish man controls Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin with strings During our meeting, Banks spoke scathingly of the Web site Open De-mocracy, which has published detailed articles on Banks’s business dealings and political activities The site is partly funded by Soros In October, three days after a pipe bomb was discovered at Soros’s house in Connecticut, Banks tweeted, “I suppose there are good Jews and bad Jews, then George Soros.”

In our conversations, it was obvious that Banks read widely—including pub-lications that he professes to hate, such

as the liberal Financial Times—and that

he was capable of nuanced political thought For instance, he was able to disentangle his support of British union-ism—the idea that England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland should not break apart—from his opposition

to the E.U., an argument that some right-wing M.P.s might have struggled with At other times, he came across as willfully obtuse, the product of an alt-right echo chamber He used Trumpian language about the nefarious motives

of the “deep state.” In Banks’s mind, there was no doubt that important news reached the public only at times most conducive to the interests of powerful but unseen forces At one point in our

“I’d go see if it’s a burglar myself, but you know

how I don’t like confrontation.”