fty rytd

Plus: The Drone Leaker Howley, p.20 /Eleven Madison Park, Bite by Bite by Bite Rachel Sugar, p.46

By Kerry

By Adam Platt &

July 19–August 1, 2021

®

No, you beg.

How adopting a dog in the city became more competitive than getting into college. by allie conti

P H OTO G R A P H CO U R T E S Y O F B O B H AY E S

j u ly 1 9 – au g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

features

It’s a Dog’s Market

How the pandemic puppy boom made it next to impossible to get a rescue.

By Allie Conti 14

Call Me a Traitor

Daniel Hale exposed the machinery of America’s clandestine warfare.

Why did no one seem to care?

By Kerry Howley 20

Will You Ever Change?

Lessons in restorative justice.

By Amelia Schonbek 28 Daniel Hale at home with his cat, Leila, in 2020.

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

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j u ly 1 9 – au g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

Martin Herlihy, Ben Marshall, and John Higgins of the comedy group Please Don’t Destroy.

intelligencer

strategist

the culture pages

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35

51

62

Biden’s FDR-size strategy

By Jonathan Chait

What the teens think is cool, right now

Please Don’t Destroy’s viral sketch comedy

By Rebecca Alter

tv by Jen Chaney The Naomi Osaka docuseries highlights the tennis pro’s vulnerability podcasts by Nicholas Quah Jamie Loftus makes a full-throated argument for “Cathy” movies

by Bilge Ebiri Space Jam 2 fouls out

Best Bets

8

39

The “invisible creators” behind flavor

By Rachel Sugar

Browses vintage racks in Dimes Square

The Group Portrait

10

62 Minutes With …

Brawling children in Greenpoint

By Joshua David Stein

The Look Book

54

42

A reimagined Richard III in Harlem

By Helen Shaw

Design Hunting

A beachside condo that doubles as a design lab 46

Food

12

Inkwell

Publishing’s still hooked on Trump

By Alex Shephard

Is Eleven Madison Park’s all-plant menu worth the price tag?

Critics

Boys, Interrupting

Another Bard, Another Park

56

100 Bewildering Hours at Cannes “It is as if everyone has agreed (sans me) to pretend everything is totally normal”

By Rachel Handler

66

To Do

Twenty-five picks for the next two weeks

60

Another Prince Album Sees the Light

The making of Welcome 2 America

By Craig Jenkins

4 Comments 74 New York Crossword,

by Matt Gaffney 76 The Approval Matrix

on the cover: Jack, adopted by Tori and Paris through In Our Hands Rescue. Photograph by Bobby Doherty for New York Magazine. this page: Photograph by DeSean McClinton-Holland for New York Magazine.

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The National Interest

Comments

TH SOUND OF MY INBOX Insurrection Day

By Michael Wolff

The financial promise of email newsletters has enticed so many writers to launch so many micropublications that they have,in turn, created a new literary genre.

By Molly Fischer Photo illustration by Party of One

AndItsAftermath

By Talia Lavin, Rick Perlstein, and MychalDenzelSmith Plus: Merrick Garland vs. Trump’s Mob,byAndrewRice

1

New York’s latest issue marked six months since the Capitol insurrection

(“Before, During, After January 6,” July 5–18). In “His Longest, Dumbest Day”— an excerpt from the new book Landslide— Michael Wolff took readers inside Donald J. Trump’s White House while the events unfolded. Commenter joanie1 wrote, “Wolff gets DJT in a way many writers don’t. They want to think, ‘I have to take him seriously cause he’s potus and I’m a political writer. If I point and laugh then what does that make me here?’ [Wolff] just looks at him and sees what’s there.” Others wished Wolff had been more skeptical of his sources’ motivations, with smarticat commenting, “He’s used another bunch of

Trump associates desperately trying to rewrite the history of this Presidency and their association with it.” Also in the retro-

spective, historian Rick Perlstein traced the violent origins of the Republican Party’s core (“The Long Authoritarian History of the Capitol Riot”). On Twitter, @maximillian_ alv wrote, “There’s a deeply unsettling and (as a former conservative) deeply familiar truth [Perlstein] puts his finger on in this piece.” Rounding out the package, Andrew Rice examined how the attorney general’s response to January 6 has disappointed many liberals (“The Prosecution Depends Entirely on Merrick Garland, of All People”). “He is a church mouse entering

a dogfight,” chucke323 wrote. “Absolutely the wrong man for the job, and the pity is that Biden isn’t too far removed from his AG in disposition and philosophy.”

In “The Sound of My Inbox,” Molly Fischer wrote about the “parasocial pleasure” of email newsletters (July 5–18).

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4 new york | july 19–august 1, 2021

The Daily Beast’s Max Tani credited Fischer with understanding “what has de-

lighted me about the newsletter bubble (creative, refreshing writing that feels like access to an exclusive club), and what has been exhausting about it (media Twitter, but longer and I’m paying for it).”

On the notion that newsletters have become too much like the rest of the internet, novelist Jami Attenberg, whose Substack was featured in the story, responded, “I started my newsletter in part so I could spend less time on Twitter but still maintain an online presence of some kind, and honestly it has worked.” Morning Brew writer Rachel Cantor agreed: “That escape still exists. It’s the writers who follow their curiosity who magically align with our idiosyncratic tastes, who capture our attention and—when we finish reading—leave us wanting more.” The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims countered, “At various

points in history there have been manias for keeping a diary and now we can just share everything all the time and I do wonder what that’s done for our ability to introspect and be alone with our thoughts.”

“There is an always-the-bridesmaid quality to Jennifer Coolidge’s career, of sliding doors and missed opportunities,” E. Alex Jung wrote in his reconsideration of the actress (“The OtherWoman,” garita Noriega noted, bared her soul in this i takes guts and, unsurprisingly, a great sense of humor.” Theater critic Rob Weinert-Kendt wrote, “Of all the talents I was lucky to catch live at 3

45

the Groundlings back in the day (Ferrell, Kattan, Parnell, Oteri, Forte), Jennifer Coolidge was the strangest and most special. But that didn’t prepare me for this odd, captivating feature.” As for Coolidge’s remembrance of the agent who told her early on that she would never cast her in anything because of her looks, teeny.lavin wrote, “I wonder where that LA casting

agent is today—I hope they read this article and kick themselves around the block for not being smart enough to realize they were in the presence of a comic genius.”

David Freedlander delved into how the New York City Board of Elections impeded the city’s first rankedchoice election (“Who Won?” July 5–18).

Maria Ordoñez, the co-chair of Grassroots Action NY, which advocated for the implementation of ranked-choice voting, responded, “ ‘Old-school incompetence’ is the perfect way to phrase what happened.

And while the BOE’s mess hasn’t had a positive effect on voters’ perception of RCV, we’ve still seen a historic level of diversity, in everything from policy to age, in every election this cycle.” Reader dsimon agreed that the inefficiency had more to do with the BOE than RCV itself: “I think releasing ‘intermediate’ results 4

running the ranked-choice voting process is a mistake … There’s no service in supplying incomplete results except to get up the hopes of some candidates’ supporters who will then end up need-

lessly disappointed and perhaps unfairly critical of the RCV system.”

L Send correspondence to comments@nymag.com.

Or go to nymag.com to respond to individual stories.

CANCER DOESN’T STOP. FOR ONE NIGHT. WE STAND TOGETHER.

SATURDAY

The National Interest: Jonathan Chait Biden’s Everything Bill The sweeping $3.5 trillion package is so big it might paradoxically be passable.

6 new york | july 19–august 1, 2021

harry hopkins, a close adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, is said to have summarized the administration’s political strategy like so: “We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.” It worked quite well for the Democrats well past FDR’s time. But around the mid-1960s, as the taxes began to bite into middle-class wallets and many white voters came to see the spending as benefiting people who didn’t look like them, the formula stopped working. At some point, “tax and spend” became a hackneyed insult of the Democratic agenda, with the third part— “elect”—dropped from the mantra.

Biden’s ambition for an FDR-size presidency died on November 3, when the election delivered a narrow governing margin in Congress that seemed to bode a Clinton- or Carter-size presidency instead. But the goal of an FDR-style presidency—shaped along the same contours, though smaller in scale—remains very much alive. That ambition came into its clearest view on July 13, when

P H OTO G R A P H S : L A U R I PAT T E R S O N / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( S A N D W I C H ) ; P R I N C E S S D L A F / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( F L AG )

inside: America’s flavor capital / The brawling boys of Brooklyn / The enduring genre of Trump literature

Senate Democrats announced their more or less unified support for a huge, sweeping domestic-spending package. It would come in at roughly $3.5 trillion minus the normal congressional haggling down of the price.

Tax, spend, elect.

The precise contents of the bill have yet to take final form. In general, though, it will include a clean-electricity standard and deployment of green technology, expansions for Medicaid and Medicare, subsidies for child care and community college, and a $300-per-month child tax credit. It will, in other words, be a big climate plan, a big health-care plan, a big education plan, and a big social-policy plan wrapped in a single package. At first blush, the sheer size of the bill may appear to be a political liability— how does Biden get every single Democratic senator, and almost every single House Democrat, to vote for the same thing, especially when the most moderate members are afraid to be seen as too liberal?

As it turns out, the sheer size creates a kind of protection by reducing Biden’s agenda to a single vote. Some moderate Democrats from conservative states or districts may wish to position themselves to the administration’s right, but none of them can afford to let Biden’s presidency come crashing down in Congress. Perhaps the most important clue to the president’s fate came from Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, who said in January, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” The worst possible outcome for any Democrats—the opening that will let the Republican Party back into power— would be for their party to be seen as having failed at governing. They can and will negotiate the parameters, but the only leverage they hold is mutually assured destruction.

Democratic moderates traditionally worry that their party will overreach and alienate the conservative-leaning voters they need. That fear is not irrational. There are plenty of elements of the Democratic program that don’t play in Peoria. This is especially true of the left-wing rhetoric that conservatives are so skillful at plucking out of progressive hothouses and introducing into the national media. But the Democratic megabill ought to be able to steer clear of the culture wars (though Republicans will try very hard to stoke them anyway). Its primary ambitions are concrete benefits for broad constituencies: enhanced payments for families with children, and expanded Medicare benefits covering dental, hearing, and vision. One poll found that the expanded Medicare package commanded the support of 83 percent of the public.

Building a bill out of popular elements does not guarantee people will like it. The

Democrats will negotiate the bill’s parameters, but they hold is mutual destruction.

Affordable Care Act provides the classic cautionary tale: Even though nearly every single element in it received strong public support, most Americans said they opposed “Obamacare,” which came to signify in the public mind something different and scarier than its components. One reason is that months and months of fruitless negotiations gave the impression that the program was a mess.

Another is that Congress built in a several years’ delay for the law’s main functions to start working. Obamacare eventually did win majority support but only after Republicans tried to abolish it.

Democrats in Congress appear to have learned the lesson. They are not bothering to engage in Potemkin negotiations with Republicans whose only goal is to take up time and gum up the works. Nor will they make the mistake of letting years pass before voters taste the fruits of Congress’s labor. The checks to parents, the first year of which was seeded in Biden’s quickly passed pandemic rescue bill in March, are already going out the door. The Medicare benefits ought to begin swiftly enough for Democrats to actually have something to run on in the midterm elections.

The right will complain about Democrats jamming through a huge expansion in government. But the source of its panic is not that the public rejects these proposals.

Biden’s spending will “be popular with a large group of Americans,” complains an editor at the conservative Washington Times. His policies “will be politically impossible to reform or repeal,” predicts The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.

Republicans are unnerved by Biden’s proposals precisely because they suspect Americans will like them.

The beauty part of the deal, parts of which must be fully paid for under parliamentary rules, is that Democrats can finance all these goodies exclusively by

raising taxes on the rich. This reflects a structural reality of American politics and the economy: Because the rich have gained so much wealth over the past generation, and because Republicans have worked so maniacally to reduce their taxes, there’s a ton of money waiting to be claimed simply by taxing them at reasonable levels.

Biden campaigned on a plan to raise $4 trillion over the next decade by taxing corporations, heirs, and households earning $400,000 a year or more. Not only do serious center-left economists think he can do this without creating a significant economic drag—so do serious center-right economists. Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin calculates that Biden’s tax hikes will shave a minuscule 0.2 percent off GDP over the long run. The American Enterprise Institute pegs the economic cost slightly lower. That is a tiny, almost imperceptible cost to growth when measured against the enormous social and economic benefits of the healthier, better-educated, and less-polluted economy it would finance.

The political opportunity this presents Democrats is irresistible: They can shower benefits on 99 percent of the public and offload the cost onto one percent. The only catch is that the one percent hold disproportionate sway—not only with Republicans, who categorically refuse to raise their taxes for any reason, but to a degree among Democratic moderates, who have made fretful noises about the dangers of taxing corporations too heavily. Since every dollar in social spending has to be paid for with a dollar in new taxes on the rich, the size of the final Democratic bill will boil down to moderates listening to the economists and pollsters and not the guy in the polo shirt who sidled up to them at their last fundraiser to whine about the capital-gains tax.

The final, and perhaps most powerful, centripetal force holding together the Democrats is Donald Trump. The self-styled president-in-exile looms over everything they do. As they make use of their narrow window to govern, he is laying the groundwork for a possible second run.

The best defense they have against a repeat Trump challenge (backed by a more uniformly anti-democratic Republican Party) is a popular and successful Biden presidency. That objective is lurking in Biden’s mind when he invokes Roosevelt.

FDR remade the government’s role, but his purpose in doing so was to preserve capitalism and democracy from radical threats. Against Trump’s campaign of confusion and hate, Biden’s party can offer concrete material benefits. Capitalism may not require saving at the moment, but ■ democracy does. july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

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intelligencer

The Group Portrait: America’s Tastemakers

Across the river, a quiet industry determines the flavors of our foods.

By Rachel Sugar

what does a strawberry taste like?

It depends. Do you mean a fresh strawberry, a ripe strawberry, a jammy strawberry?

Because it matters, says Elaine Kellman, a flavorist at Citromax in Carlstadt, New Jersey, who has spent the past 30 years breaking down taste sensations into their chemical parts. To capture the full-bodied sweetness of an ultraripe strawberry, “you would take a strawberry flavor and add chemicals like maltol and furan ereas a jammy one might need a hin mine, and a fresh one might require a dash of grassy cis-3-hexenal.

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There are, by most estimates, only about 500 flavorists in the U.S., and if you have eaten food from a box in America, you have certainly tasted their work. Flavorists are responsible for the end of the ingredients list, the mysterious “natural and artificial flavors” that make ketchup taste ketchup-y and imitation meats meaty. And many of them happen to work in New Jersey, which has become a hub of American flavor. The Swiss giant Firmenich, for example, has its U.S. headquarters in Plainsboro, and Symrise is in Teterboro, as is Takasago, and a Givaudan outpost is in East Hanover. There

is Robertet in Piscataway, International Flavors & Fragrances in South Brunswick, Brookside in Branchburg, Flavor Dynamics in South Plainfield, and Signature Flavors in Freehold. This partly has to do with location and price: New Jersey is close to the area’s ports but with cheaper land than New York.

At play, too, is the Silicon Valley principle: It’s good to be near competitors because that means you’re near clients (and future hires).

Despite the industry’s influence over what we eat, “most people don’t know about us,” Kellman says, and that is on purpose. Flavorists cannot tell you which food brands Photograph by Jake Chessum

they’ve worked with or what flavors they’ve made. “We’re invisible creators,” says Alison Freedman, a flavorist at Firmenich. She remembers the thrill of seeing the first of her flavors go to market—a sweet brown caramel flavor for a CPG (consumer packaged goods) company, but “we can’t really get into details further than that.”

Because of the secrecy, when a flavorist talks to another flavorist, certain lines don’t get crossed. “We can share general things but not the secretive things that we’re working on,” says Belayet Choudhury, an industry vet. (He’ll allow that he did,

from left: Elaine Kellman of Citromax, Alison Freedman of Firmenich, Marie Wright of ADM, Belayet Choudhury of Savorx, and Alexandra Nicoletti of Robertet.

30 years ago, create a strawberry flavor for Pepperidge Farm and has been involved in seasoning certain high-profile ramen noodles.) At the same time, there is deep camaraderie, because flavorists share a very particular approach to experiencing the world: nose-first. Smell, more than taste, determines flavor, and they spend their careers learning to smell. “When you have a meal with other flavorists, you dissect the food and drinks just like at work,” says Freedman. “We talk about flavor, the way things taste, the way things make us feel, all the sensations. That’s the common language.” ■

intelligencer

Zack Wilson squares off on the Greenpoint playground.

62 min u tes w ith …

The Greenpoint Kids’ “Fight Club” Watching a group of 5-to-7-year-olds tussle in a park while their parents brawl online over whether that should be allowed. by joshua david stein

n a sweltering summer afternoon, a welter of yelps rose from the playground in the northeastern corner of Greenpoint’s leafy, tidy Monsignor McGolrick Park. The playground had been lined with a sturdy foam in 2018 to soften the landings of children—but there were still injuries to

O

10 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

be had. And the heat would not deter the meeting of the Greenpoint Fight Club, a group of 5-to-7-year-olds that gathers after school on most days for combat with the approval of the parents.

Had this been a true fight club, of course, it would have remained secret.

As any passing fan of Chuck Palahniuk knows, the first rule of Fight Club is Photograph by DeSean McClinton-Holland

intelligencer

you do not talk about Fight Club. (It is also the second rule.) But then, on an early Thursday evening in May, a parent posted a question on the “Williamsburg/ Greenpoint Families” section of the Facebook group Brooklyn Baby Hui. “Did anybody see the kids’ ‘fight club’ happening at McGolrick playground today?” she wrote. “I don’t know how else to describe it … I was a bit shocked at how aggressive it was and it was apparently parent-sanctioned as there was a group watching.”

Her post sparked a mêlée among Greenpoint parents on a forum normally reserved for queries about pediatricians and nannies and mysterious but minor sick-child symptoms. At stake wasn’t just the matter of the potential for bloody noses but the use and purpose of public space. What, if any, level of fear or discomfort is acceptable in a park? How, if at all, should one individual’s parenting decisions accommodate the sensitivities of others? And are there any safe spaces left, on Facebook or in McGolrick?

For her part, the original poster had been concerned that her children, who saw the tussling, might feel scared. “I’m all for kids wrestling and having some fun,” she wrote. “My kids do it at home all the time, but watching this full-on fight fest was very jarring and something I wouldn’t want my kids to witness.” She ended with the suggestion that “maybe the parents involved can take the kids to a grassy area instead. There’s plenty of room at McGolrick.”

The comments came fast and hard.

Some agreed with her. One parent wrote that “the public playground is a great space for everyone to [blow off steam] but everyone also needs to feel safe doing so and this post is about someone expressing they do not feel safe.”

Someone else added that roughhousing “might not be behavior everyone wants their children exposed to.” Another local mother tartly said, “So you want to make a 6-year-old move to the grass because he wants to play a sport he plays so your child won’t see it. That feels kind of entitled,” before adding, “Lots of things happening in a public park that I don’t agree with. But it comes with the territory of living in New York City.”

Eventually Julie Wilson, the mother of one of the children involved, stepped in to clarify. “Here’s the story,” she explained.

“There’s a bunch of kids who like playfighting. Some of them (including mine) take martial-arts classes and use the skills they’ve learned. Some just like to wrestle and jump on each other. Because we all

have very active boys, we’re in the park every day. At some point most days, the kids end up fighting, usually on the rubber mats by the tightrope where there’s the most room. As parents we don’t want anyone to get hurt but we want our kids to play the way they like, so we set some rules (no kicks, no punching) and let them do their thing.”

And so it went. Parents offended by the notion of a fight club squared off against parents offended by parents offended by the notion of a fight club. What was clear was that whatever your private parental choices are, in a public park, those choices will be subject to countless other parental choices. As one person put it to me, “I guess you can look at the fight club as an issue of private parenting in public.” In this sense, the post had ignited a debate about whose values matter more on a ground designed to be neutral. Tempers flared. Never has the red-heart emoji been deployed to such passive-aggressive devastation.

I decided to go see for myself. McGolrick Park has an almost small-town feel and is used almost exclusively by those under 15 and over 75. As part of a renovation, two playgrounds had opened on the northern edge just before the pandemic: one for 2-to-5-year-olds and, just to the east of that, one for 5-to-12-year-olds.

It was 2:45 p.m. when I pushed open the creaky gate to meet Wilson, who was wearing a black tank top and khaki scrubs with her curly hair tied back.

Wilson, who grew up in Manhattan, has a bit of a “mayor of Greenpoint” air about her. She knows everyone and has an opinion on most things. Her son, Zack, as she mentioned in the Facebook group, is in the fight club, whose total membership,

“I was a bit shocked at how complained one parent online. “And it was apparently parent-sanctioned.”

according to Wilson, amounts to fewer than ten. “Usually,” she says, “there are no more than four here at a time.”

The fight club happens in the older children’s playground, which is where I spotted Zack, a spry 6-year-old wearing camouflage pants and from whose black T-shirt poked out a freckly, smiling, slightly mischievous face. Around his lips, the fine dust of just-eaten Cheetos formed a penumbral grin. Next to Zack, in the padded area near the lily pad in the older children’s playground, stood Danny, a 7-year-old a few inches shorter than his opponent. The two were playing seemingly benignly with a broken Skip Ball Zack had brought. For about ten minutes, Wilson and I watched, each of us secretly willing the children to battle.

Finally, the two boys began to circle each other. For a brief moment, it looked as if they would engage, but then they took off at a full run. Over and under the climbing structure, Zack pursued Danny. They ran past other children playing peacefully— girls dangling from monkey bars, boys swirling down the spiral slide. Beyond them, around the perimeter of the playgrounds, sat parents, many gazing into their phones, some, no doubt, following the high jinks of Brooklyn Baby Hui. Each, no doubt, held tightly to their own private parenting philosophy but, at least for the moment, kept those feelings to themselves. Apart from the good-natured shrieks of children at play, there was no sign of conflict. Neither parents rushing to confront one another over the use of public space nor children banished to roll around in the glass and rocks.

Eventually, near the monkey bars once again, Zack reached his opponent. Deftly ducking under an outstretched arm, Zack took back control. He held Danny’s arms behind his back and flung the young man to the ground. No sooner had Danny’s torso touched down when Zack again took off like a rabbit. Danny jumped up in hot pursuit. He was gaining on Zack, but just then the shaved-ice cart sounded its far-off chime, and the boys paused, as if dogs distracted by squirrels or sailors by sirens. Zack and Danny stopped in their tracks and ran to their mothers to plead for ices. Fight club was over for the day.

At least it was IRL. But what scrapes and bruises children forget, parents nurse for years. The discussion wasn’t resolved. It was simply fallow. As another McGolrick mother texted when I reached out for an interview, “I’m hesitant to put something out there which might make me some enemies among the ‘park parent’ community. (It’s cutthroat lemme tell you!)” ■

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

11

Inkwell: Alex Shephard Trump Books Are Magic Everyone in publishing is sick of the former president. But they keep making books about him anyway.

12 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

the past six months have been good to the book-publishing industry. Book sales, helped along by pandemic-induced lockdowns, are up. Adult-fiction sales have risen 30 percent year over year. And most of all, Trump hasn’t been in office. “Postelection, there’s been a breath of Thank God, we don’t have to do Trump books anymore,” one editor told me.

The lull has come to an end. After a brief reprieve from the dishy ticktocks that emerged from the turbulence of the Trump era, publishers are gearing up for a flurry of books detailing the final days and aftermath of his presidency. The Wall Street Journal reporter Michael C. Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win This Election and Michael Wolff’s third Trump book, Landslide, kicked things off on July 13. A week after that came Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s second Trump book, I Alone Can Fix It. In the coming months, we will see volumes by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, ABC’s Jonathan Karl, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser and the New York Times’ Peter Baker, the Times’ Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, the Times’ Jeremy W. Peters, the Photo-illustration by Ben Denzer

P H OTO G R A P H : B R E N DA N S M I A LO W S K I / A F P V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ( T R U M P )

intelligencer

intelligencer

Times’ Maggie Haberman, and the Washington Examiner’s David M. Drucker.

Most of the publishing insiders I spoke to responded to the coming wave of Trump books with an audible sigh and an eye roll.

“After the first few, all of these books seemed repetitive,” the editor said. “At a certain point, you had to wonder—do readers really care about some absurd thing some aide heard Trump say? I’m skeptical about this current crop of books, but my skepticism has been proven wrong again and again.”

Publishers were initially slow to capitalize on the chaos of the Trump era. When the journalist David Cay Johnston pitched a book about Trump in 2015, he was met with silence from big publishers. (He did end up selling the book, which was released in 2016.) At first, no one thought Trump would get the Republican nomination, then no one thought he would win the presidency. Books take months, if not years, to produce—by the time Trump volumes started rolling off the presses, the thinking went, he would be back hosting The Apprentice.

The Trump boom didn’t really begin until January 2018, when Wolff’s Fire and Fury set the template for future blockbusters: full of juicy detail, mired in the swamp. Above all, it made Trump mad. Thanks in part to a pathetic cease-and-desist letter sent by the president’s lawyers, the book was an instant megaseller and inaugurated the industry’s version of a gold rush.

Success followed a predictable pattern.

Excerpts and scoops would be published in tip sheets, newspapers, and magazines.

Trump would respond by calling the author a hack and a liar. Sales shot upward before falling just as quickly. Fire and Fury sold nearly 2 million copies in three weeks before it faded from the headlines. Its paperback edition sold fewer than 10,000.

For people with #resistance in their bio, hitting buy now was irresistible. For publishers, it was almost like printing money. In 2020, Mary L. Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened, and Woodward’s Rage all sold hundreds of thousands of hardback copies.

NPD BookScan’s Kristen McLean called 2020 a “record-setter.” Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt credited these sales with helping to revive the flagging chain. “The company had lost its direction to a considerable degree and above all had lost its confidence,” he said. “That sense of having bumper days and long queues and having to rush to unpack cartons and get the stock out there—that brought back a lot of the joy of bookselling.”

For many publishing employees, however, the feeling was hardly one of jubilation.

“After Trump won, we were horrified,” a for-

“It’s the same people who read books about Hitler’s last days,” a publicist said.

“It’s victory porn.”

mer big-five marketing director told me.

“The attention, the enrichment of people we suddenly decided were on our side because they decided to say something mean about Trump—it all felt gross.”

The Trump boom also had career repercussions. “These last few years, if you weren’t working on the big Trump book, you’re under the radar,” one senior Simon & Schuster publicist told me. (“Hanging out with Joe and Mika is kind of fun,” the publicist added, referring to the hosts of Morning Joe, but it’s “weird to get involved in that excitement, though, because you don’t give a shit!”) For editors of fiction and “serious” nonfiction, the past few years were a nightmare. “There was a sense that people had spent their entire careers knowing how to publish serious, important books by serious, important people, and they were getting blown out of the water by trashy, shat-out tell-alls,” said the former marketing director.

It doesn’t help morale that readers don’t particularly seem to care either. “People approached these books like merch,” said literary agent Kate McKean. “We all buy books we intend to read but don’t—it’s not that the content doesn’t matter, but people buy them the way they buy a shirt, a hat, a sticker.”

“Many of these political books are bought to express support and opposition to something,” said Matt Latimer, founder of the literary agency Javelin, “to make you feel like you’re doing something. And you are!

Many of the books that were published did upset the president.”

Success was hardly guaranteed (Siege, Wolff ’s follow-up to Fire and Fury, sold fewer than 50,000 copies in hardcover), but every book at least had a chance of selling hundreds of thousands. For publishers, who will tell you their industry is really a highbrow form of gambling, these odds were too good to pass up. “Every editor I know is exhausted by this shit, but it might sell so you

have to publish it,” said an editor at Hachette. “You can talk endlessly about this guy, even if there isn’t that much interesting to say. Anyway, these books are easy to make.”

Now, we’re entering what one Penguin Random House publicist calls the “Downfall stage” of Trump’s presidency, referring to the film. “It’s the same people who read books about Hitler’s last days,” the publicist said.

“It’s victory porn.”

That trend of righteously performative book buying may have dissipated, however, now that Trump has lost his dual bully pulpits: the presidency and his Twitter account.

He has seemingly lost his preternatural ability to dictate the news cycle—and thus draw attention to the anti-Trump books.

“The very tweets that drove sales of [James Comey’s] A Higher Loyalty and Fire and Fury—that’s no longer available as a source of immediate Trump complaint converted to anti-Trump sales gratification,” one senior editor at Macmillan told me. “I think there are many people hoping that this continues, but we’re starting to see that the foundations of it are pretty shaky going forward.”

Many editors, moreover, noted that interest has shifted toward other issues, most notably racial justice. “The same people in the industry who were acquiring Trump books are now buying books like How to Be an Antiracist and So You Want to Talk About Race,” said the Hachette editor. “That has become just as much of a hashtag trend as Trump books were. You’re seeing insane money for these books now, and it’s the same editors buying them—people who know how to follow a trend.”

While there was considerable skepticism about the sales prospects of books by former Trump officials like Mike Pence and Betsy DeVos, everyone agreed a book by Trump himself would mean a sales bonanza for publishers. “Every time a new book comes out rehashing the last four years, we come one step closer to publishing Trump,” one Penguin Random House publicist said.

But a suitor among publishing’s big five has yet to emerge. The head of the likeliest candidate, Trump’s former publisher Simon & Schuster, told staffers in May the company would not be acquiring a book by the 45th president. Instead, there is speculation that Trump may be a good fit for a new, independent, “anti-cancel-culture” publisher, All Seasons Press, founded by former Simon & Schuster and Hachette executives.

Even if Trump doesn’t publish a presidential memoir, one thing is clear: Books about him aren’t going away. “There are 15 or 20 books about Nixon coming out in the next year,” Latimer told me. “I hate to tell you this, but this is not going to be the end ■ of Trump books, no matter what.”

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

13

ADOPTING USED TO BE A GOOD THING THAT GOOD PEOPLE COULD DO. THESE DAYS, YOU’RE PROBABLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH. IT’S A DOG’S MARKET

By Allie Conti

Photographs by Bobby Doherty 14

NORI, adopted by Jayne through Animal Haven Shelter.

It

was a rainy Sunday in June, and Danielle had fallen in love.

The 23-year-old paralegal spent the first part of her afternoon in McCarren Park, envying the happy dog owners with their furry companions. Then she stumbled upon an adoption event in a North Brooklyn beer garden, where a beagle mix being paraded out of the rescue van reminded her of the dog she grew up with, Snickers. It all felt like fate, so she filled out an application on the spot. She was then joined by her best friend and roommate, Alexa, in sitting across from a serious-looking young woman with a ponytail who was searching for a reason to break her heart.

Danielle and Alexa were confident they would be leaving with Millie that day: After all, they had a 1,000-square-foot apartment within blocks of McCarren and full-time employment with the ability to work from home for the foreseeable future.

But the volunteer kept posing questions that they hadn’t prepared for. What if they stopped living together? What if Danielle’s girlfriend’s collie mix didn’t get along with her new family member? What would be the solution if the dog needed expensive training for behavioral issues? Which vet were they planning to use?

All of which, upon reflection, were reasonable questions. But when it came to the diet they planned for the dog, they realized they were out of their depth.

Danielle recalled that Snickers had lived to 16 and a half on a diet of Blue Buffalo Wilderness, the most expensive stuff that was available at her parents’ Bay Area pet store. “Would you want to live on the best version of Lean Cuisine for the rest of your life?” sniffed the volunteer with a frown.

She would instead recommend a smallbatch, raw-food brand that cost, when they looked it up later, up to $240 a bag.

“If you were approved, you’d need to get the necessary supplies and take time off from work starting now,” the dog gatekeeper said. “And the first 120 days would be considered a trial period, meaning we would reserve the right to take your dog back at any time.” The would-be adopters nodded solemnly.

The friends rose from the bench and thanked the volunteer for her time. Believing they were out of earshot, the volunteer

summed up the interview to a colleague: “You just walked by, and you’re fixated on this one dog, and it’s because you had a beagle growing up, but you want to make your roommate the legal adopter?”

When Danielle and Alexa were young, one could still show up at a shelter, pick out an unhoused dog that just wanted to have someone to love, and take it home that same day. Today, much of the process has moved online—to Petfinder, a.k.a.

Tinder for dogs, and various animalshelter Instagram accounts that send cute puppy pics with heartrending stories of need into your feed and compel you to fill out an adoption application as you sit on the toilet. Posts describing the dogs drip with euphemisms: A dog that might freak out and tear your house up if left alone is a “Velcro dog”; one that might knock down your children is “overly exuberant”; a skittish, neglected dog with trust issues is just a “shy party girl.” Certain shelters have become influencers in their own right, like the L.A.-based Labelle Foundation, which has almost 250,000 Instagram followers and counts Dua Lipa and Cara Delevingne among its A-list clients. Rescue agencies abound, many with missions so specific that you could theoretically find one that deals in any niche breed you desire, from affenpinschers to Yorkshire terriers.

This deluge of rescue-puppy content has arrived, not coincidentally, during a time of growing awareness of puppy mills as so morally indefensible that even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could draw fire for seemingly buying a purebred French bulldog in early 2020. Then came the pandemic puppy boom, a lonely, claustrophobic year in which thousands of white-collar workers, sitting at home scrolling through their phones, seemed simultaneously to decide

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they were finally ready to adopt a dog. The corresponding demand spike in certain markets has simply overwhelmed the agencies: New York shelters that were used to receiving 20 applications a week were now receiving hundreds, with as many as 50 people vying for a single pup.

The rescue dog is now, indisputably, a luxury good, without a market pricing system at work to manage demand. A better analogy might be an Ivy League admissions office. But even Harvard isn’t forced to be as picky as, say, Korean K9 Rescue, whose average monthly applications tripled in 2020.

And yet someone has to pick the winners—often an unpaid millennial Miss Hannigan doling out a precious number of wet-nosed Orphan Annies to wannabe Daddy Warbuckses and thus empowered to judge the intentions and poop-scooping abilities of otherwise accomplished urban professionals, some of whom actually did go to Harvard.

This has led to some hard feelings.

Every once in a while, someone will complain on Twitter about being rejected by a rescue agency, and it will reliably set off a cascade of attacks on “entitled rich white millennials assuming they can have whatever they want,” followed by counterattacks on those who “appoint themselves the holy sainted guardian of all animals.”

Danielle was ultimately deemed unworthy, not even receiving a generic rejection letter over email. After all, there isn’t really that much incentive for the rescue agencies to be polite these days.

THE MODERN ANIMAL-RESCUE movement grew alongside the childwelfare movement in the mid-19th century.

It got another boost in the years following

“Any adoptable dog without a medical issue IS GONE

BY NOON ON SATURDAY.”

MEATBALL, adopted by Matt and Clara through Louie’s Legacy Animal Rescue.

University of Texas at Austin, where she lectures on animal rights to a demographically diverse body of students—everyone from cattle ranchers to vegan punks—most of whom cry when she shows The Ad in class. “It absolutely brings down the house,” she says. “Every time.”

Theoretically, the point of dog adoption is that there are more dogs born into the world than there are humans lined up to care for them. But as interest grew, the supply problem became less acute. Thanks to widespread spay and neuter policies, there are simply too few unwanted litters for what the adoption market wants.

National chains like PetSmart partnered with local shelters to supply its animals for sale. Savvy rescues in dog deserts like New York hooked up with shelters in the Deep South, where cultural attitudes toward spaying and neutering pets are much more lax. While there is no official registry of how many shelter dogs are available in the U.S., in 2017, researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine for Mississippi State University published a study reporting that the availability of dogs in animal shelters was at an all-time low.

“That is,” says Sayres, “an environment that leads to a kind of irrational, competitive behavior.” The rescue mutt had become not just a virtue signal but a virtue test.

Who was a good enough human being to deserve a dog in need of rescuing?

HEATHER REMEMBERS THE OLD easy days. “I went on Craigslist and an hour later, I had a puggle,” she says of her first dog-getting experience with her boyfriend in college. George the puggle humped everything in sight, shed everywhere, and chewed through furniture until the end of his life, but she loved him all the same.

Flash-forward 16 years: She and that boyfriend are married, have two kids, and can’t seem to get a new dog no matter what they try. Yes, she could find a breeder easily online (currently for sale on Craigslist: a Yorkie-poo puppy from a breeder asking $350 and just a few screening questions).

“A lot of these rescues’ Instagram pages say things like ‘URGENT: NEED TO FIND THIS GUY A HOME.’ Meanwhile, I am screaming, u turned me down!’ ” 18 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

But instead, in the middle of the pandemic, “I was sending ten to 12 emails a night and willing to travel anywhere, and no one would give us any sort of animal,” she remembers. Shelters would send snappy emails about how her family wasn’t suited for a puppy, even though they made good money and had clearly cared for their dearly departed George—they once drove three hours to get the dog a specially made knee brace. “I was trying to be really up front with people and would say that my daughter has autism and that I have a 3-year-old, and they would say no. It felt like they were saying, ‘We don’t give dogs to people who have disabilities.’”

It didn’t matter what kind of dog she applied for—older, younger, bigger, smaller—there was always an officialsounding excuse as to why her family wasn’t suitable. (“Pups this age bite and jump and scratch and while they are cute to look at, they are worse than a bratty ADHD toddler, without diapers,” one rescue wrote. “Sorry.”)

She considered looking at emotionalsupport animals that work specifically with autistic youth but found out they could cost 18 grand and require a two-year waiting period. She couldn’t stomach the idea of setting up a GoFundMe, as other people in the community had. “It got to the point of me wondering, Okay, so what dogs do children get?” she recalls. “I always thought that dogs and children go together.” By the fall of 2020, Heather had turned back to breeders. “People get a little spicy when you say you paid for a dog. You want to scream that you tried your hardest, but it wasn’t possible,” she says.

Others, like Zainab, figured out ways to work the system. She blanketed agencies with applications in the early months of the pandemic, applying for 60 dogs. (The ease of applying online might also explain the statistics.) She thought the fact that she had a leadership role in public education would demonstrate that she was both successful and nurturing. “I’m a professional, I make good money, and I have a master’s degree,” she tells me. She was rejected all the same.

Finally, a co-worker suggested Zainab make a résumé in order to stand out. The multipage document—which features testimonials from high-powered friends, including local elected officials—is what got her an exclusive meeting with Penny the pug in a parking lot. She was handed over with a leash tied around her neck and vomited in the front seat of Zainab’s car about three blocks later. Success!

Or take Lauren, who’d had dogs all her life and found living solo during covid lonely. “You can’t be without an animal at this particular (Continued on page 69)

R E TO U C H I N G B Y B O B B Y D O H E R T Y

World War II, when Americans were moving out to the suburbs in droves, according to Stephen Zawistowski, a professor of animal behavior at Hunter College. Suddenly, there were highways, yards, and space. Walt Disney was making movies about children and dogs that promoted the idea that no new home was complete without a loyal animal companion. (Zawistowski said that one might call this the Old Yeller Effect, but there were various riffs on the same theme over the ensuing decades. Essentially, Flipper was “Let’s put Lassie in the water.”)

In the early ’80s, University of Pennsylvania researchers confirmed the effects that animal companionship has on everything from blood pressure to heart conditions to anxiety. Pets were no longer just how you taught Junior to be responsible; they might be critical to maintaining adults’ physical and mental health. The way people spoke about animals started changing. The idea that “homeless” dogs were sent to the “pound” because they were “bad” went out of fashion. “Suddenly, you had ‘rescue’ dogs brightly lit in the mall,” says Ed Sayres, a former president of the ASPCA who now works as a pet-industry consultant. “Basically, we gave animals a promotion.” Meanwhile, in the late ’80s, spay and neuter procedures had been streamlined and were being recommended by vets as well as by Bob Barker on The Price Is Right.

Then came The Ad. Released in 2007, it featured close-ups of three-legged dogs and one-eyed cats rescued by the ASPCA over a wrenching rendition of Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.” The commercial warned that “for hundreds of others, help came too late.” In just a year, the ad raised 60 percent of the ASPCA’s annual $50 million budget. The organization was reportedly able to increase the grant money it gave to other animal-welfare organizations by 900 percent in ten years. It is difficult to overstate the emotional hangover The Ad inflicted on millennials and members of Gen Z. Janet M. Davis is a historian at the

KERA, adopted by Nicholas and Brianna through Muddy Paws Rescue.

Y KE Y H WLEY

ne y rk jul 1 – gust 1, 2 21

2

aniel everette hale was the best dishwasher in Nashville. He was faster, more efficient, more knowledgeable about the machinery that makes a restaurant run. He could predict when the kitchen would need bowls and when small plates; he could take apart the dishwasher and deliver an impromptu lecture on the proper cleaning thereof. He was 31, slight, with a buzz cut and tattoos down his taut forearms, and while he thought himself the best, in the minds of the men for whom he worked he was a touch too invested. If something broke, such as a spray nozzle, he’d show up the next day with a new spray nozzle and tools to install it, having never checked with management at all, at which point management might say, “Daniel, we already had a backup spray nozzle.” Despite the excellence of his washing, he had been fired many times from many kitchens for generally being a pain in the ass. He was, for instance, persistently pressing the staff to demand higher wages and was repeatedly disappointed that the staff seemed uninterested.

There was only one restaurant that lived up to the standards of the best dishwasher in Nashville. This was Folk, which Daniel recalls as a “beautiful, just beautiful brandnew restaurant with, like, impeccable aesthetics and these big ceiling-high windows that let the light shine in during the midday and a beautiful marble bar and all these fresh, locally sourced ingredients.”

The staff was disciplined and well trained and not given to the episodes of sexual harassment he had seen in other restaurants. In the open kitchen, he discovered “this really cool dish machine, a single-rack dish machine I hadn’t used before.” The staff was “like a family,” and the muchcelebrated chef was “always, always there,” not at all like the “complete asshole dirtbag restaurant guys” he’d worked for before.

But eventually, as he had in many other Nashville kitchens, Daniel became too difficult an employee to manage, too timeconsuming in his ever-expanding list of ideas for improvement, and one evening in May 2019, the chef let him go.

Daniel got drunk, met a woman, went home with her, and immediately regretted it. In the night, he opened a condom but didn’t use it. He returned to his apartment early the next morning and called a close friend to whom he would lament the loss of his job. “I loved it there,” he was telling his friend, there on the porch on a wet May morning in Nashville. “I loved it.

I loved every minute of it.”

Daniel heard a rustling in the leaves beside the porch and thought perhaps it was his roommates, though in retrospect they would not be up at 6 a.m. on a Thursday. He stopped speaking.

A man in black ran toward him with a drawn gun. Then two more men. Then six.

This is it, Daniel thought. Finally.

The FBI agents swarmed him, searched him. Last time this had happened, the agents had seemed to Daniel contemptuous, but these guys seemed slightly embarrassed, as if to acknowledge that it was all “a little excessive.” An FBI agent stuck his hand in Daniel’s pocket and pulled out the unwrapped condom.

“You couldn’t have warned me?” the agent said.

On the drive to work that morning, the chef turned on NPR, which is how he learned that the dishwasher he had just fired had been seized for stealing documents about the secret assassination program we have come to call the drone war. anyone can build a combat drone. If you build a drone for your little makeshift country, no one will be impressed. We may think of drones as indestructible, ironclad, and this is the impression defense companies attempt to impart with the hard names they give the machines they build—Predator drone, Reaper drone, Hunter drone—but in fact the original word, drone, is elegantly apt, and all of these are an attempt to mask the dumb delicacy it captures. Drones are flimsy, light little wisps of things, vulnerable to lost signals and sleepy pilots, vulnerable to gusts of wind and hard rain, lightning, ice. You will send a drone whirling into the sand should you turn

22 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

too hard into a breeze or press the wrong button on your joystick; should you fly into an area of excessive electromagnetic noise or accidentally fly the drone upside down for a long while, oblivious. They slam into mountains, crash into other planes, fall into farms, sidewalks, and waterways. Sometimes they simply go silent and float away, never to be found again. Hundreds and hundreds of military drones we have lost this way, scattered across the globe. It’s okay. They’re cheap. We make new ones.

What is notable is not the drone but the network that keeps it aloft. This is where American power asserts itself: the satellites we rocket into the sky and the shallow-bowled receivers we nail to the ground. Concrete bases, trucks dragging satellites in their beds, the cables American soldiers lay in ditches they’ve dug into someone else’s desert. (“A fuckton of cables,” as one whistleblower explained it to me.)

Most of this hard and heavy infrastructure is maintained in a secrecy upheld by the CIA, which runs one drone program, the military, which runs another, the agencies that serve them, and the contractors that serve the agencies. In 2015, an insider leaked dozens of pages of documents about the inner workings of the American drone program, including information about the bureaucracy behind the “kill list” over which Barack Obama then presided. The Intercept published an eight-part series centered on these documents that became a book. “A ‘second Snowden’ Leaks to The Intercept,” announced CNN, an alliteration that would prove irresistible across media; “A Second Snowden Has Leaked a Mother Lode of Drone Docs,” read a headline in Wired. Amnesty International called for a congressional investigation. First Snowden called it “an astonishing act of civil courage.”

Nearly no one knew who Second Snowden was then or for years afterward.

After he was seized in the early-morning raid and released on bail and prosecuted through a pandemic, he stopped shaving

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F B O B H AY E S (O P E N E R ) ; N AT I O N A L B I R D / TO R S T E N L A P P ( P R OT E S T )

and grew what a friend called “a ZZ Top beard.” He lost weight and began to wear clothes donated by concerned acquaintances; someone else’s large khakis hung off him, the waistband folded over, a belt yanked to the last loop. Friends pressed him to go public with the story of how and why, but Daniel maintained that in talking about himself, he would be taking the spotlight from victims of the drone war.

He rarely left his room.

In November 2020, his housemate coaxed him out for a beer at a place called Moreland’s Tavern in Northwest D.C. When Daniel arrived, eight people he knew were seated at tables outside in the cold. The intervention had been arranged by the housemate and by one of Daniel’s closest friends, an activist named Noor Mir, who knew that Daniel was hesitant to impose on people and that he needed help. “I think it’s hard for men to understand that it’s okay to feel really, really scared,” Mir told me.

They went around the table, one by one, and told Daniel that he had to get his shit together. He needed to participate in his defense. He needed to prepare for the possibility of prison. He needed to con-

p

pr tes

sider the future care of his cat. He needed to tell his story, because if he failed to do that, the prosecution’s story would stand unchallenged. Daniel had his feet on a chair, his arms around his knees, supremely uncomfortable. Two hours in, the last person said what he had come to say. They waited for Daniel to respond.

“All right, everybody,” he said, halfsmiling for the first time that evening.

“Can we shut the fuck up now?”

Daniel told none of his friends he was ready to talk, but on April 4, he called me.

He said he didn’t want to be called a whistleblower. He preferred the word traitor.

No one owns a secret state, and no one answers for it. There was a moment in 2012, 2013, when various people outside Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan began to notice that inside Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan, the U.S. was waging constant, secret war under a set of rules known to few. It was May 2013 when Obama finally felt it necessary to give his big drone speech, in which he acknowledged that drones were morally complicated, promised to “review proposals to extend oversight,” deemed them an unfortunate necessity for the

n fr

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safety of Americans, and generally gave the impression that he would make the program accountable. But everything of note that happens in this story happened after such gestures were forced, and made, and forgotten. daniel did not come to the Air Force so much as he surrendered. He had grown up the son of a disapproving, Biblequoting truck-driver father in Bristol, Virginia, which is just across the state line from Bristol, Tennessee. He is a descendant of Nathan Hale, hanged by the Brits in 1776 for attempting to pose as a Dutch schoolmaster and steal information on troop movements (according to Daniel, “not a very good spy”). Daniel’s parents were under constant stress: food pantries, endless dinners of rice and beans. The services he attended as a child were “fire and brimstone”—country music, his sister said, was sufficiently sinful to send you to hell. Among the various Appalachian churches was one, Emmanuel Baptist Church, where the pastor was revealed to be raping and torturing a young girl he and his wife had kidnapped. It was 1998, and Daniel was 11.

By the time he finished high school, Daniel trusted a single source of information, which was Democracy Now! Daniel’s father had, from a very young age, suggested the military as a way out of poverty, but Daniel was already on an intellectual journey in which he would come to see Edward Snowden as insufficiently extreme; he wanted nothing to do with it.

He tried enrolling in a regional UVA campus and dropped out. He tried community college and dropped out. He met a friend on the internet playing World of Warcraft, moved to Vegas to look for work at a casino, could find no such work (“I was kind of a dipshit at the time,” he says), and moved back home. He answered a job ad that said it did not require experience and was given a bus ticket to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he joined a bunch of kids he describes as “mostly runaways.” The company put them up, two to a room, in

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

23

hotels, and had them selling magazines door-to-door. You could get rich, the managers said, if you kept at it. You could be like them. It would be hard to imagine a worse salesman than Daniel Hale, who once told me he has frequent nightmares because “any person of conscience in America builds up a sense of dread.” Humiliated, he asked his dad for a ride home. Now he was in Bristol again, 21, with no real prospects and a sense of how brutal the world could be to a man with no skills for which the world had asked. He and his father got into a fight that became physical. Daniel walked into a military-recruitment office in a strip mall near a Walmart. He took a test, aced it, and was told he could do anything he wanted.

It wasn’t so bad, the life he had accepted when no others made themselves known, under a new president who made promises in which it was tempting to believe: the closing of Guantánamo, an end to forever war. Daniel assumed it was impossible to be a president without becoming a war criminal, but he had attended an Obama rally in his hometown. At the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, he studied Mandarin for the greater glory of the state. He adored his classmate Michael, with whom he had long conversations about politics and indie rap. He thought a lot about ways to get dishonorably discharged, but he woke up in the morning and went to class.

Obama did not in fact close Guantánamo in his first 100 days. He did not end the drone program or usher in a new age of transparency. Not a week into office, he authorized two drone strikes that killed 14 people, many of whom were not the targets. Obama increased the tempo of attacks and would, two years later, introduce the novel element of killing American citizens. At first the strikes had been limited to “Al Qaeda and associated forces,” but gradually they were found useful for forces it was extremely hard to argue were associated with Al Qaeda. It was useful, Obama found, to employ drone strikes against

the tribal enemies of various governments the U.S. was supporting. It was useful to target not just high-ranking members of various organizations but low-level members; useful to evolve the whole thing from an assassination program to a holistic counterinsurgency machine. In parts of Pakistan, locals had stopped drinking Lipton tea, out of fear that the tea bags were homing devices used by the CIA to attract drones.

In early 2001, the U.S. did not know how to launch a missile from a Predator drone without damaging the drone. In early 2001, one could not have run an assassination program based on geolocation, simply because terrorism was not yet run on cell phones. Fourteen years later, the Pentagon was planning to spend nearly $3 billion on unmanned aerial vehicles in a single year. The president had access to technologies available to no president before him, and he opted to use them.

Obama, Daniel concluded, was “a clown,” “just a complete fraud,” who would uphold the worst policies of his secretive predecessor. But now it was 2010, and the national security state’s ability to keep its secrets was beginning to break down. While at the Defense Language Institute, Daniel says, an officer came into his classroom and forbade them from searching for a term relatively new to the world: WikiLeaks. If they did so, they’d lose their security clearance.

Julian Assange had packaged, edited, and dramatically unveiled leaked footage of American soldiers shooting a man holding a camera because they had thought the camera was a gun. On YouTube, one could watch the photographer die and one could watch a van pull up and a man jump out to help the photographer the Americans had shot. One could watch, on YouTube, as the Americans shot up the van, though if one were watching closely, one would already have seen that in the front of the van were two small children.

One could hear a deep silence as the American soldiers watched the limp children being carried from the van.

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“Well, it’s their fault,” one hears a soldier say, “for bringing their kids into battle.” daniel was sent to Fort Meade, which he describes as full of “just total dorks.

Just the most extreme dorks you’ve ever met in your life.” He found peace away from the dorks on long motorcycle rides.

He liked to go very fast. He missed Michael and Michael’s wife, Diane. He was bored, so bored that he began to toy with the idea of deploying. Perhaps if he were at the center of the war, he could make a small part of that war slightly less unjust. Someone from among them would be sent. Why not him? Wasn’t it better to know than not to know? He was rationalizing his way out of Maryland.

Daniel was 25 years old. Over the course of his life, he and everyone he knew had come to carry beacons in their pockets, continuously beaming their location to towers owned by someone else. These were years in which Americans slowly became accustomed to being tracked in exchange for small conveniences or simply as the price of engaging in contemporary life. It was hard to turn off the location data on your phone, and even if you made the effort, many apps would continue tracking, so most of us did not bother. It was disturbing to know that the totality of our email and private messages was being scanned by Google and Facebook, but then we’d already agreed to be tracked by our phones. That a “virtual assistant” you’ve voluntarily placed in your bedroom had the capacity to record private conversations was not ideal, but then even terrorists found that the convenience of communication outweighed the risks. That was how Daniel found them.

Daniel didn’t know what jsoc was when he was given his deployment papers, though by the time he arrived at Fort Bragg, he knew it was exclusive.

Others with this assignment were given access to a privileged part of the base, one of the few places where you didn’t wear a hat and where the soldiers had

WHAT IS NOTABLE IS NOT THE DRONE BUT THE NETWORK THAT KEEPS IT ALOFT. beards. A captain had told him not to tell others he was involved in jsoc.

“Everybody around you is jerking each other off about how cool this is or whatever,” he says. He believed it; he thought it was cool. He still didn’t know what was going on, really. “The first thing they do,” he says, “is sit you down and you take a basic course in cell-phone technology. How do cell phones work, how do they interact with a network, how do those networks operate, the towers, what’s a sim card, what’s a handset.”

Daniel was shown a box that would be placed on a drone and would pretend to be a cell tower, such that the cell phones of targets would communicate with it.

He was beginning to understand.

When he arrived in Afghanistan in 2012, it became Daniel Hale’s job to stare at a screen and direct a drone from wherever it was to the location of a cell-phone number in which the military had interest. He and the other analysts spent their days in a wooden shed, surrounded by dusty old computers still running Windows XP. There were phones and televisions and knots of thick black cable. From the computer, he turned on the box in the drone that searched for the cell-phone data. He loaded the box with the information for people the military was thinking about tracking. He tweaked settings to try to lock on. When he was done, he told someone by chat, and that person focused the camera. It was out of his hands at that point, but he could, if he wished, watch the missile, in a fraction of a second and with a force that shatters concrete, incinerate a group of men.

The whole thing had the air, as such work often does, of having been grandly conceived and then slapped together.

Officially, everyone was supposed to sign out every time their shifts ended, but to log off and log in required so much time, so many links broken and reestablished, that according to Daniel it rarely happened. Once, he says, he tried to explain this on the phone to someone back at the NSA and was told to stop talking; the analyst did not want to know about that.

The intuitive argument against drones is that they introduce space between target and assassin, that they remove the element of danger from the act of killing.

This is an argument that has followed every advance in military technology beyond the perfect reciprocity of the swordfight: There was safety too behind a cannon. Guns were considered cowardly. Snipers were cowards and so were men who fired from submarines. But remove is not necessarily the experience of drone warfare, which is really surveillance warfare. Day after day, the drone will send video feed of the same man leaving the same house and returning again.

One becomes familiar with the patterns of his life, and what one cannot know, imagination builds out. At night, when the infrared camera is operative, people appear as red blobs. It is hot, and they go on the roof to sleep. “I saw them having sex with their wives,” said one drone pilot.

“It’s two infrared spots becoming one.” A lit cigarette is a sun bobbing before a mouth. This is not the straight path of increasing distance between assassin and target. This is deep, half-imagined, crazymaking intimacy. This is something new.

O

ver the course of the War on Terror, as we used to call it before it simply became American foreign policy, swathes of Pakistan and Yemen came to be under 24-hour surveillance by drone, which is to say that people living in these areas today cannot cross the street without knowing that they are being recorded and that the recording will be sent to a satellite and sucked into a receiver, where the footage will be stored in the service of someone’s idea of American security. It will very likely never be watched, because there are not enough analysts to analyze all of the footage that the U.S. produces; where privacy is afforded, it is afforded by the grace of inefficiency. Drones, writes Michael Boyle, a senior fellow in national security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, have “led the United States to displace its

original goal—to fight al Qaeda more effectively—in favor of a larger one of knowing, and possibly even controlling, greater portions of the earth than it had previously imagined possible.”

Shortly before Daniel Hale arrived in Afghanistan, the Air Force deployed what it called “Gorgon Stare”: a drone video system that involves 368 cameras covering 40 square miles at a time. It used to be that, in watching, we suffered a “soda straw” problem; one could watch, as if through a tube, a single figure cut his way across a landscape to the exclusion of the surrounding land. Wide-area aerial surveillance, familiar from films shot from above, is in fact new to the world; only in the past decade has it become possible to watch a whole landscape, to track a whole network of men who meet at a location and watch them each walk home.

This view is enabled by something called a high-altitude long-endurance drone, the acronym for which is hale.

In the months when he worked in the drone program, Daniel Hale never touched a drone, never flew one, never even worked on a base from which they lifted into the air. The idea that his own moral righteousness could affect the war in any way now struck him as absurd.

Sometimes the machine for which he worked was called “one warhead one forehead,” because each mission targeted only one man. But the men were very often surrounded by other men as the missile found them. This is what ate at him. He knew nothing about these people; none of them would have been the target of the attack. But they would die too. And though the Obama administration would deny this, many men would reportedly not be counted as civilians but as “enemies killed in action.” Daniel knew cell phones could have been passed from presumed terrorists to other people entirely, and innocent people and those around innocent people would then be killed instead. He knew no one back home was thinking about this. “There were two worlds,” Chelsea Manning once said. “The world in America, and the

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THE WHOLE THING HAD THE AIR OF HAVING BEEN GRANDLY CONCEIVED AND THEN SLAPPED TOGETHER. world I was seeing.” The gap between what America did and what Americans knew was part of the horror, and it was the part that appeared ameliorable. daniel had once wanted to be a journalist, and he was still considering this possibility when he landed back in D.C. There were many journalists of whom he did not approve, but there was one he trusted because this journalist had worked for Democracy Now! His name was Jeremy Scahill, and he had just written a book called Dirty Wars, which would be adapted for a documentary, the adaptation nominated for an Oscar. In April 2013, Daniel saw him speak at the bookstore Politics and Prose. He approached Scahill afterward and texted a friend to say that a reporter wanted him to “tell my story about drones at the opening screening of his documentary.” Back at work, Daniel’s superiors told him to “read everything you can get your hands on because it will make you a better analyst.” It is likely that they did not intend that he should search “Jeremy Scahill” and “Dirty Wars” on his NSA computer, though this is how he chose to interpret their advice.

In June, when Scahill had a book event at D.C.’s Busboys and Poets, Daniel Hale was right there beside him on a makeshift dais at the front of the room. A year after the joint appearance, The Intercept published a 166-page internal document that laid out the rules under which the Obama administration put people on terrorist watch lists. A year after that, The Intercept published the Drone Papers, an eight-part report that became a book with an introduction written by the anonymous leaker.

Together, Scahill and the leaker created a moment in which the media acknowledged the existence of wars waged in secret with a clumsy ineptitude counter to promises of “precision.”

“Our source was someone who is directly involved with the assassination program. And this person got to a point where they felt like they couldn’t not speak out,” Scahill told NPR. What few

people knew, at the time, was that the government almost certainly knew who the Second Snowden was and, for mysterious reasons, did nearly nothing about it either before or for years after the Drone Papers were published.

D

aniel doesn’t think his father’s religiosity is “relevant” to this story, but he also says he was “called upon” to leak these documents, that he, like the biblical Daniel, has “premonitions,” and that a “righteous justice” will soon fall upon this country.

When he returned from Afghanistan, he wanted to go to school, and for this he needed money, and as an analyst with security clearance, money was easily made. Six months after meeting Scahill, Daniel had left the Air Force and started working for Leidos, a company that makes more than $10 billion a year in revenue by convincing the federal government of its utility. He said he would only do it for six months, a promise he kept. He was assigned to a little-known government agency called the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which had recently built a $1.7 billion building, the third-largest federal office building in the D.C. area.

The diction employed by the NGA has that quality, beloved by military prose stylists, of pointlessly combative abstraction. “Dependency on technology is not our goal—we must leverage and master it,” wrote the agency’s director in 2020.

“We’re soon moving to a point,” said another executive at the agency later that year, “where we think, essentially, every part of the planet will be imaged on a daily basis.” From the top, the building is two half-circles set around a dome so as to resemble, with the literalism typical of so much public art and architecture, a giant eye.

Daniel moved into a room in a million-dollar, 4,700-square-foot McMansion in Lorton, Virginia, owned by the divorced mother of a friend. The streets were wide and quiet, and all the

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trees looked like they’d been planted yesterday. At the NGA, Daniel sat at a desk among many other desks in a forgotten corner of a long cubicle farm on the sixth floor of a giant eye and entered location data for geographic points in China on U.S.-government maps. He was finally using his Chinese. It was dull makework, a lot of “boring days and stupid meetings.” He could plot 1,000 points a day, and he did so for days on end, though, he says, all the same information was available on Google Maps. Behind him was “a big kind of jolly guy” who had the right taste in music but was “very outspoken about things like his opposition to abortion.” The most interesting people were not government lifers but outsiders brought in for some technical wizardry, and this was the case with the design analyst Daniel was wasting time with one day. He was someone Daniel wanted to learn from, “a very fascinating dude, a fringe kind of guy,” and at one point in the conversation the fascinating dude asked Daniel to pull up some footage of drone strikes. “He had this sick fascination with it,” says Daniel. “He wanted to watch people die. I had this, like, really deep sinking feeling, you know, and I basically expressed to him that this was repulsive.” He talked about having operated the drones, his part in it, and the design analyst was taken aback.

“Something was speaking to me,” says Daniel, “very deeply, something I hadn’t felt since I left Afghanistan, and it was telling me again, You can’t let this go. This is your last opportunity. If you don’t do this, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

Given his role in the war machine, he had begun to think of himself as a war criminal who ought to be in jail anyway. (“Should I be in jail for paying taxes?” I asked him. “Probably,” he said.)

Daniel began searching on his work computer, using terms he’d picked up in Afghanistan. For the most part, the documents he found were as new to him as they would be to the public; he was learning about what he had been involved in as he both read his screen and tried to moni-

P H OTO G R A P H : N A S H V I L L E P O L I C E D E PA R T M E N T V I A A P

tor the room so he could switch back to his work if someone passed by his computer. There was a graphic of the “kill chain,” the bureaucratic process through which Obama approved a strike: little yellow arrows pointing on a diagonal all the way up the page, landing at potus. There was further evidence that when militaryage males were murdered in a strike, they were classified as militants, an accounting trick that lowers civilian-death counts, and there was an account of a five-month period in Afghanistan in which U.S. forces hit 19 people who were targets of strikes and 136 who were not the targets.

There were admissions that the intelligence on which strikes were based was often bad and that strikes made it difficult to get good information because the people who might have provided that information had just been killed by the strike. There was the report detailing the secret rules the government uses to place people on the terrorist watch list. “Each thing that I would discover would lead to something else,” Daniel said, “something more.” Together, these documents form a picture of a country vacuuming up massive amounts of information and struggling to transform that information into knowledge. One gets the sense that the Obaman air of “certainty” and “precision” around drones is possible only if one has considerable distance from the process.

It was in February, only three months after he had begun to work for Leidos, that he began printing. He printed six separate documents on February 28, 2014, according to the indictment, and later that day texted Scahill. it’s extremely challenging to smuggle electronic data out of a place set up to prevent you from doing so. Paper is harder to catch on its way out the door.

Daniel printed the reports—17 of which he would allegedly give to The Intercept, totaling dozens of pages—on a nearby printer. He brought the reports back to his desk. He stuffed them under his shirt, against his back. It wasn’t unusual for the guards to search you on the way out;

sometimes they found papers related to someone’s work, accidentally taken, and sometimes they wrote you up for it, but papers stuffed under one’s shirt would be challenging to explain. He walked out of the eye with them tucked under his waistband, terrified he would be searched. He drove back to the lonely mansion surrounded by lonely mansions.

This was in and of itself an extraordinarily brave and reckless act. Every search by an employee with security clearance on a government computer is tracked, every page printed logged. He seems to have provided them to a reporter with whom he had publicly appeared, who had

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recently co-founded The Intercept, a publication premised on the act of disclosing classified documents. He was also participating in a documentary on drone whistleblowers, which meant that a camera crew periodically showed up at the mansion and set up equipment and invited him to expound, at length, on the record, about crimes of the state.

Daniel was not done. Through April, May, July, and August, according to the indictment, he printed out more and more documents. In July, The Intercept published the government’s secret rules for putting people on the terrorist watch

list; the documents informed not only the Drone Papers, for which Daniel later became known, but a slew of other Intercept pieces published between 2014 and 2016. Daniel smuggled them out, and sometimes, because he didn’t “want to leave a trail of evidence,” he, incredibly, smuggled them back in, where he placed them in the bag where all classified printed material is meant to go.

Daniel’s last day at Leidos was August 8, 2014. Looking back, he said there was something off in everyone’s manner that day, “a weird niceness” in the affect: shaking his hand, wishing him well, lamenting that he couldn’t stay longer.

He got home, took off his clothes, and poured himself a Scotch. He was in his underwear, playing video games in his room, when he heard a “cop knock,” loud and insistent. When he opened the door he was pushed inside, shown badges.

Twenty agents with guns, he said, let themselves in.

That you’ve invited something into your home does not mean you’re prepared to face it. Daniel was terrified. An agent led him to a small room sometimes used as an office in a corner of the house to which he had never been and left him there to hear the sounds of his friend’s mom’s house being torn apart. For seven hours, they left him there to worry. They searched his phone, where he had Scahill in his contact list. If they were this interested, they would already know which documents he had viewed and which printed on what days. If they knew enough to come here, there was little else to know.

Daniel waited for the moment they would finish and take him to jail. He thought about all the things he would want to take care of before going to prison and how now he would not be able to take care of them, because although he had known they would come, he had not prepared. Eventually he got so bored he started talking to the FBI agents. Some of them had also been to Afghanistan, doing interrogations.

Toward the end of the raid, the woman who owned the house came home to find (Continued on page 71) black cars in the

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Can face-to-face meetings between a victim and an abuser—a form of

What Set You Off ?

Didn’t You Care About Me? What Did I Do to Make This Happen?

Have You Learned Anything From This?

Will You Ever Change?

restorative justice—help a society overwhelmed with bad behavior?

By Amelia Schonbek / Illustration by James Zucco

29

ate on a fall afternoon ten years ago, Cheryl and Troy walked into a room and shook hands. It was a small space at the Justice Center in Portland, Oregon, almost entirely taken up by a conference table and chairs. Beads of rain covered the room’s one long window. Cheryl sat next to it so she could look out, which helped remind her to breathe. She had barely eaten that day, just enough so she wouldn’t be sick to her stomach.

Cheryl and Troy were strangers, though, in one sense, they knew each other well. For years, Cheryl had been in a string of violent relationships, and Troy had a long history of getting drunk and abusing his partners. In 2005, he went to prison for 22 months for choking his girlfriend. Cheryl and Troy met that afternoon because both of them wanted desperately to change, yet nothing had freed them from the destructive patterns they were in. By this time, Cheryl, who was then in her 60s, had tried therapy and found it isolating to sit opposite someone who hadn’t lived through violence. And Troy, then in his 40s, attended Alcoholics Anonymous, though he sometimes struggled to accept the pain he had caused others without making excuses.

After years of trying to move on from their experiences, they both discovered restorative justice, a form of conflict resolution that brings together survivors and offenders with a focus on repairing the damage done, rather than punishing the person responsible. They each a a practice called a The question of how to respond to incidents of domestic and sexual violence has

never had a particularly good answer. The criminal-justice system has long been the only option, and the tiny number of people whose cases even made it to court had to choose between reliving their trauma and not seeking justice at all. In 2017, when Me Too broke open the collective rage and grief that had been building inside survivors after decades of being dismissed and disparaged, the question became impossible to ignore. The more these stories— which fell on a whole spectrum of abuse, from workplace creepiness to rape—were told, the clearer it became that the existing options for resolving the instances were seriously limited. The accused were called out, a few were convicted of crimes, and some were fired or divorced. Then what?

“If we want the #MeToo movement to be about more than just which celebrity will be the next to fall, or whose comeback must be stopped—if we want it to lead to real, lasting, and widespread cultural change—we need to talk,” wrote the journalist Katie J.M. Baker, “about what we do with the bad men.”

A lot of people weren’t ready to have that complicated conversation right away.

It was thrilling to be able to speak out about the experience of harm and feel heard. It was possible, finally, to see men like Larry Nassar and Bill Cosby, who’d assaulted dozens of women and girls over years and years, convicted of their crimes.

Sending them to prison looked like an acknowledgment of all the pain they had caused and a warning to other men that t away with abuse. It felt to celebrate. But that warning hasn’t stopped more stories from surfacing. And after being sent to prison,

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Cosby’s conviction was overturned on a technicality—even the catharsis of seeing the most egregious cases closes didn’t last.

So now, nearly four years on from Me Too, we’re left looking forward, trying to untangle the intricate issue of what the consequences should be for people who have caused harm, and to figure out the harder thing: how to welcome them back into society while also caring for the people they have hurt. Practitioners of restorative justice think their approach is one way to navigate it all. Their work focuses on what survivors need to recover, and the process is designed to benefit the larger community as well: If you help people understand the impact of their choices, the thinking goes, they may change how they act in the future. Though it’s often used to resolve cases involving young people or low-level crimes, women’s advocates are divided over whether to apply restorative justice to domestic- and sexual-violence cases. And only a handful of programs have ever done it.

When she first began to consider a surrogate dialogue, Cheryl was apprehensive. Long ago, she had learned you should never give an abuser ammunition because he would use it against you. What if she met with a guy and then afterward he tried to track her down? Still, she had some questions she badly wanted to ask all the men who’d hurt her: Didn’t you care about me? Have you learned anything from this? What are you doing to keep from doing it again? Cheryl didn’t know whether the dialogue would be meaningful or whether she would be able to get through it. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the question that had stuck with her the longest: What did I do to make this abuse happen in my life?

An organization called Domestic Violence Safe Dialogue had paired Cheryl with a mentor named Marci who would help her prepare for the exchange and be present as her advocate. Cheryl learned that the framework for the dialogue gave her complete control over the situation, the length of the meeting, how deep the questions went, and what the goals of the conversation were. Later, they planned how Cheryl could respond if her dialogue partner said something inappropriate or frightening. They set a code word that Cheryl could use if she needed Marci to speak up in her defense or stop the conversation entirely.

In the room that day, Marci sat down beside Cheryl, with Troy and his advocate across from them, and a facilitator took a seat at the head of the table. Marci

conferred quietly with the facilitator while everyone else sat still and silent.

Inside, Cheryl panicked. When Troy sat down, she wondered what would happen if he got mad, if he reached across the table and hit her. She remembered how she had learned to keep herself calm during performance reviews at work: She placed her hands on the table, very quietly, and looked Troy straight in the eye. Troy had walked into the room feeling calm, sure that he would be able to handle whatever came up. If I want to stay sober, he told himself, I have to do this.

cheryl: I was willing to do this because I didn’t want to carry this fear, guilt, shame, responsibility anymore. I had done my best to get rid of it by my own means, but I still had it.

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heryl grew up in a middle-class neighborhood outside Portland during the 1950s and ’60s in a house that overlooked fields and orchards. In the summer, she would often sleep in the backyard with friends. She knew not to invite them in because her dad could lose it at any moment. When Cheryl was a baby, her mother took her to the basement when she cried to keep her father from hitting her. Cheryl doesn’t remember much about growing up, but she remembers the night her father said to her mother, “I’m going to take this gun, and I’m going to kill those kids and then kill myself.” Her three brothers would run out of the house when their father was enraged, but she often stayed to try to negotiate between her parents. When Cheryl was 19, her father died. I’m so glad, she thought. Soon after, the whole family got together to celebrate. (To protect her identity, Cheryl asked that only her first name be used.)

After her father was gone, Cheryl’s life didn’t change in the ways she had hoped it would. She had a boyfriend who drank too much and hit her. When they split up, she began seeing a man she met through a co-worker. Soon he began to ask her to list everyone she had talked to while they’d been apart. Cheryl was taking karate lessons, and her boyfriend didn’t like all t ta m him. “Wh nt?” d.

Crap, Cheryl thought. She felt herself being pulled back toward a familiar dark place,

where the need to make a man happy blotted out everything else. She called her boyfriend and told him it wasn’t going to work out. After they hung up, he came over and beat and choked her until her eardrums ruptured.

The next day, Cheryl called her mother, who called the police. “You tell him everything,” Cheryl’s mother instructed her when the detective arrived, and she did.

The detective listened, then Cheryl remembers him saying, “We can arrest him, but the laws on this are pretty weak.

You’ll have to come and tell your story, and he’ll say you’re a liar. It might just make him more angry, and he might kill you the next time.”

From the outside, it was usually hard to tell that anything was wrong in Cheryl’s life. She worked at a big corporation, and people around her would say, “You’re so good at your job, you’re so confident.”

Yet, again and again, Cheryl’s boyfriends turned out to be controlling or abusive, just like her father had been. Maybe I am broken, she thought. Maybe all this is my fault. Some days were so hard that she would think, I just can’t do one more day like this. She thought about ending her life.

When she was 37, Cheryl began to see someone new. The man didn’t hit her, but there were signs. “Are you going to wear that?” he’d ask. “You don’t know how to make good decisions.” Cheryl saw what was happening and said to herself, You cannot do this again. It took her a year to end the relationship.

Six weeks after the breakup, the man drove up to her house, stepped from his car, and shot himself in the head in front of her. As her neighbors rushed him to the hospital, Cheryl stood outside her house and waited for the police to arrive. She had reached bottom.

“I am either going to die,” she realized, “or I am going to stick around and do things differently.” This is how Cheryl wound up in a room with Troy, a man she didn’t know who had been violent with his girlfriend, to try to understand why he had done what he did.

troy: I fly by the seat of my pants.

I’ll jump into anything feet first.

When they asked me to do the dialogue, I didn’t go into it like, “Okay,

“You can never fully have justice, right?

Something’s been taken.”

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let’s get this over with.” It was, “Okay, I belong here, this is what I need to do.” It was a relief, I guess: I’m doing the right thing.

T

roy grew up the only child of a single mother. He was polite, though he always liked to be the center of attention, and he hated when he made mistakes. The first time Troy tried alcohol, as a teenager, he drank so much he passed out on a neighbor’s couch. The next morning, he woke up confused about how he’d gotten there.

He got wasted a couple more times in high school, on each occasion drinking until he was ill. Although he hated getting sick, he loved feeling cool and making people laugh, and he wanted to drink more and more.

Troy graduated from high school and got a job in construction. It was the late ’80s, and it seemed that everyone he worked with had a drug or alcohol problem. He started making a lot of money, more than he needed. It didn’t really matter what substance someone put in front of him—if it was there, he was going to do it.

Troy always thought that growing up with a single mother had given him a solid respect for women. When he was drunk, though, everything went out the window. In 1992, he got married and adopted his wife’s daughter. Soon they had another daughter together. He never hit his wife, but they argued all the time.

Troy would pick fights to justify storming out of the house and going to drink; he wasn’t around for his kids, and he withheld money from his wife.

His marriage broke up in 2001, and afterward he lived on the street. A few years later, he began dating another woman, and he fought with her, too. She hated Troy’s drinking, and when she confronted him about it, he lied. During one fight, Troy began to choke her. What am I doing? he realized, and he ran out of the house. He made it only three or four blocks before the police caught him.

After his arrest, Troy felt that he no longer knew who he was. He felt sorry for himself, and angry that the public defender assigned to his case pushed him toward a plea deal.

Troy took it and went to prison for 22 months. His 9-year-old daughter wrote him a letter saying she must be the reason h ng. e his h ke hen he got out: Drug and alcohol treatment was a condition of his early release. He

found 12-step work to be moving, and when he reached the fifth step and sat across from his sponsor, Troy admitted to him “the exact nature of my wrongs.” Troy was used to talking about the things he had done—he’d had to recite them in court and to his probation officer— although in those cases he was thinking, What do I want to hide so that I don’t look bad? With his sponsor, he felt for the first time that he could be truly honest.

“Alcoholism does a good job of isolating, making you feel like nobody knows your problems,” Troy said. When he read a list of his wrongs to his sponsor, a man who had hurt people and had made amends, Troy realized, Oh, I’m not all alone. We’re all dysfunctional. “It took the shame away,” he later said.

AA emphasizes completing actions on the path to recovery, and Troy took the approach to heart. Okay, he thought, I have to continually do something. That’s my medicine for my alcoholism. He asked the facilitator of his treatment program if she knew of any ways he could give back to the community, and she gave him a phone number for DVSD. Troy wondered if this thing called restorative justice was in some way self-serving. But what he wanted most was to stay sober, and he was willing to give anything a try.

cheryl: I lived afraid for 38 years of my life. I didn’t know that people didn’t feel that way all the time. In the dialogue, that wounded part of me was fighting about being in a room with an abuser and opening up, but I was ready to go.

It felt like coming to a crescendo. troy: Honestly, when I heard about the dialogue, I thought, If this is going to help keep me sober, I’ll do whatever it takes.

To sit across from another individual and do this—if it helps them, and in turn helps me, then I’m okay with that.

R

estorative justice is a modern interpretation of a very old idea: Its central principles resemble the conflict-resolution methods of Navajo and Maori people, among others. Its contemorm can be traced back to t in 1974, when two teenage boys slashed tires and broke windows all through a Mennonite community in

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Ontario. A court officer named Mark Yantzi was handed the case. After the boys pleaded guilty, Yantzi noticed that the legal system offered no mechanism for them to literally repay their debt to the people whose property they’d damaged.

Yantzi proposed to the judge that they all try something new: The boys would knock on the door of each victim’s house and ask what the damage had cost them.

A few weeks later, the boys would return, this time with money to repair the houses or cover insurance costs. One of the homes they visited was owned by a woman who had lived in it nearly all her life. Before, she had never locked her doors or felt unsafe. The house had a picture window, and the boys had thrown a brick through it. She told them that after the vandalism, she became so fearful that she couldn’t be at home alone. “But now I sit across from you,” she said to the boys, “and I see that I really had no reason to be afraid.” “You got a sense that they were making connections … that helped to kind of bind them back into the community,” Yantzi later said.

Yantzi’s early experiments unfolded alongside a growing awareness among progressive-minded activists that sending people to prison is a dehumanizing practice that answers violence with more violence, rather than with rehabilitation. As they searched for more holistic, less punitive ways to resolve criminal cases, community groups and allies in the legal system picked up Yantzi’s work and added to it.

Nearly five decades later, restorative justice encompasses many interconnected ways of resolving conflict, both within the traditional justice system and outside it. The idea, for example, of atoning for the destructive violence of slavery through reparations is rooted in restorative principles. Forty-five states allow some form of restorative justice into their criminal proceedings; a judge can divert a case into a restorative process—so that a young or first-time offender might avoid a conviction, for instance—or a victim’s family may ask for their case to be resolved this way. In other instances, those involved in a crime might turn to nonprofit restorative-justice programs long afterward to bring closure beyond what the courts could offer. And in cases of domestic and sexual violence, such processes could be a potential way of seeking justice in the many situations where prosecutors decline to bring charges.

The fact that restorative justice was an option available to Cheryl as a survivor of domestic violence was deeply controversial

even ten years ago. In the ’70s, while Yantzi was looking for ways to resolve cases outside the courtroom, mainstream feminist activists were trying to get the legal system to take domestic violence and sexual assault seriously. The system had long told women who were abused that it was a private matter to be worked out with their boyfriends or husbands. Many activists thought that enacting laws against domestic and sexual violence would help survivors find justice and dissuade men from harming women. So they fought to pass legislation requiring arrests in domesticviolence incidents, criminalizing marital rape, and making it easier for women to take out restraining orders against men who harmed them.

The problem was this strategy mostly didn’t work. In 1995, the year after the Violence Against Women Act was signed into law, the National Institute of Justice noted that there was “little conclusive evidence” that criminalizing domestic violence actually discouraged offenders or protected victims. Even now, as more and more people admit that legal solutions alone aren’t enough, the question of whether restorative justice is appropriate in cases of rape and domestic abuse has not gone away.

“More police and more jails are never going to solve the problem,” says Beth E. Richie, who leads the department of criminology, law, and justice at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “There was never any illusion that we could arrest our way out of this thing.” As an antiviolence activist in the 1980s, Richie saw how cops used force with Black communities: It mirrored the violence many women experienced from their partners.

She and her fellow organizers instead advocated for another approach, one that acknowledged patriarchal abuses of power. They did not want to simply remove offenders from their communities. They wanted their communities to work with offenders and help them figure out how to stop being violent, and they wanted women who had been abused to be able to express what they needed. In a lot of cases, it turned out, what those women wanted was not to be questioned by detectives or cross-examined in open court but to talk about what had happened on their own terms.

cheryl: The majority of what I wanted was to be heard.

And I wanted to hear the truth,

“For men to be able to break the silence of their most horrible secrets, they have to believe you’re not going to judge them.”

and I didn’t know if he could tell me his real truth or not. I wanted to ask, “What do you believe set you off?” I could tell he didn’t know how to talk to me about what had happened. But I just went for it.

I thought, This is my time to ask those questions that have been controlling me. troy: I am fortunate—or unfortunate—that I never blacked out when I was drinking. I know all the crappy things I did and how I treated people. When it came time, I didn’t leave anything out.

C

arrie outhier banks, who founded the Domestic Violence Safe Dialogue program Cheryl and Troy participated in, began working at a women’s crisis shelter in the 1990s. She soon realized that all her clients blamed themselves for how their partners treated them, no matter what anybody else said.

S ho pt many women from le viol ationships: “ ‘If I had just tidied the kids’ shoes,’ they’d say, ‘maybe he wouldn’t have hit me.’ ”

Outhier Banks had read about a program in Canada that arranged conversations, called surrogate victim-offender dialogues, between unrelated rape survivors and perpetrators who had taken responsibility for their actions. The surrogate approach was experimental, intended to meet the needs of victims for whom a direct dialogue with those who had harmed them was impossible. “The survivors were able to ask the perpetrators the question that everybody asks,” Outhier Banks told me. “ ‘What did I do wrong?’ And the perpetrators were able to say, ‘Nothing. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ That’s exactly what the survivors I worked with need to hear: ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ ” Outhier Banks finished a Ph.D. in conflict resolution and became one of only a few facilitators who were willing to use restorative dialogues in cases of domestic violence. At the time, most feminist advocates were highly skeptical. They felt that the particular power dynamics of gender violence made it near impossible for victims and offenders to engage in any kind of balanced conversation.

“Men can’t change—that’s a lot of what I heard,” Outhier (Continued on page 73)

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

33

PATSY New York

AVA K. Minneapolis

LUCY Howell, NJ

AVA M. Los Angeles

CAROLINE Niskayuna

STEFANY Brooklyn

LEIGH Richmond, VA

IZABELLA Foster City, CA

15 OF OUR POLL RESPONDERS

➸

SAM Englewood, NJ

MIMI C. Philadelphia

ZIVI New York

CALLA Cambridge, MA PENELOPE Aspen, CO

ALYSSA Hong Kong

What Is Actually Cool to Buy in 2021? ➸ when we last polled this age group, two years and a pandemic ago, American Eagle mom jeans were the thing, as were square sunglasses. From our new pool of responders, who replied to our survey from (among other places) New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Hong Kong, Vail, and Madrid (78 percent of them identified as female, 6 percent as male, 5 percent as nonbinary, and 11 percent didn’t specify), we learned a lot can change in a couple of years—TikTok is now the ultimate influencer, claw clips have overtaken scrunchies, and the Ordinary is hot on Glossier’s heels.

ELISHA Redondo Beach, CA

➸

best bets:

-teen poll

r

av

Cottagecore, a back-tothe-land aesthetic that peddles in picnics, frilly dresses, and crafting, took over during the pandemic—most of the teens we spoke to said it’s the superior core.

I A P c

s se

53%

Oreos, Pit Viper sunglasses, Velcro hair rollers, Flintts Mints, Squishmallows, and a gua sha stone.

Cottagecore

9%

Revlon hot-air brush

for supersmooth blowouts.

Lovecore

Angelcore

Sequined-heart dresses, red lipstick, pink hair ribbons, acrylic statement earrings.

Pastel corsets, silk slip dresses, iPhone cases with wings, rose-tinted glasses.

r

HING

RA

S n S

S

Both labels, per the teens, let them try out trends for cheap, though many were quick to inform us that they weren’t fond of either brand’s less than ideal sustainability record: “I love the clothing, but I don’t love the brand because of unethical practices,” said Mercedes of Brandy Melville. “Their stuff is just really cute, and it sucks,” added Alyssa.

rt S 19%

57

%

Etsy 6%

Grailed 6%

thredUP 5%

shein

Poshmark

Allover-Print Bandanna Halter Top, $6

ps aw Cli Cla

Repurposed Vintage

36 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

AirPo ds

ucke t Ha ts

Pants

F l Ro

Scrunch ies

ed Tie-dygs in Th

LESS COOL

Dr. s Marten VERY COOL

THE

Chai Mini $375

marketplace

Brandy Melville & Shein

Connor Tank, $16

Desra Silk Mini $495

8%

T

brandy melville

LOVESHACKFANCY MINIDRESSES

aby-doll dresses, mary-jane flats, hair bows.

The (found on) TikTok products mentioned most: LED strip lights, Hydro Seal Band-Aids (as an acnetreatment hack), and the

CL

These (CottagecoreStyle)

Are Extremely Popular Right Now

in the past few years, TikTok has emerged, essentially, as an adolescent HSN—and the reason respondents said they bought everything from fake buttons that make jeans fit better to ‘Chromatica’

T

And Fittingly,

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E S U B J E C T S ( P R E V I O U S PAG E ) ; E N T E R TA I N M E N T P I C T U R E S / A L A M Y ( L I T T L E W O M E N / COT TAG E CO R E ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F L A U R E N / D R E S S E S A N D C A P E S. CO M ( LO V E CO R E ) ; © F I N E A R T P H OTO G R A P H I C L I B R A RY / CO R B I S / CO R B I S V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ( A N G E LCO R E ) ; G A B B Y J O N E S / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( P H O N E ) ; C A S TAWAY V I N TAG E / F L I C K E R ( R E P U R P O S E D) ; CO U R T E S Y O F R E TA I L E R S ( P R O D U C T S )

By Chloe Anello

u (

St l f

EM J R A substantial difference between this year’s poll and the one we conducted two years ago is that teens, when asked to name those who most inspire their shopping habits, now seemed far less interested in big celebrities and influencers with millions of followers (like, say, Devon Lee Carlson). Instead, they tended to bring up smaller social-media presences with follower counts in the 10,000-to-100,000 range. We talked to a handful of these so-called microinfluencers to find out which items have gotten them the most engagement (with no brand affiliation involved).

Cailey Ork

“These camo pants are from the boys’ section at Walmart.”

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E S U B J E C T S ( M I C R O I N F LU E N C E R S ) ; I M AG E D O C / A L A M Y ( N E X P L A N O N ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F R E TA I L E R S ( P R O D U C T S )

Sophie Wood

wrangler

“One of my most major fashion staples is adding men’s hats to my outfits— like this ‘NY L.A.’ one from Grailed.

It’s definitely my most frequent DM, as most people don’t realize I usually find them in the men’s section rather than women’s, in my boyfriend’s closet, or thrifted.”

Boys’ Stretch Cargo Pants, $15

Kate Glavan

“NY L.A.” Hat, $80

holiday brand

“Everyone is asking about what’s on my feet for my runs around NYC.” Deja Foxx

“I posted about my experience with the Nexplanon birth-control implant and had so many people in my DMs wanting to know more. Some shoppable products that go along with it: Flex menstrual discs, which are a must when switching birth control; Sustain condoms because the implant doesn’t protect against STIs; and

Curology, which helped me keep my skin in check with hormone changes.”

hoka one one Bondi 7 Sneaker, $150

nexplanon Birth-Control Implant, price varies

Alivia McKenzie

“[The items] I get asked most about are probably my sweatshirt and sweat suit from Okay to Rest; it’s

news on

Is THE ORDINARY ow cooler than GLOSSIER? Teens still love Glossier—31 percent of those surveyed called it their favorite beauty brand—but in terms of skin care, they seem to prefer the classic drugstore brand Neutrogena and the not-so-awashin-millennial-pink brand the Ordinary.

a small female-owned brand

out of Vancouver with thoughtful messaging and the perfect relaxed fit.”

Magda

If you consider a sweatshirt a “top,” then yes, that was technically the winning style in this year’s poll—as 49 percent of teens reported it was their most-worn item for Zoom school. But at the opposite end of the silhouette spectrum, the corset was incredibly popular, including a Bridgerton corset from a brand called Hamany, bought by teen Carley; a Victoria’s Secret version noted

by Zoë; an Urban Outfitters one purchased by Mimi C.; and this Amazon find of Dylan’s: “I was inspired to buy it from TikTok—it’s decently good quality, although I can’t completely breathe in it.”

okay to rest

Sweat-suit Top, $115; “When I first started wearing these Bottom, $110 rings, just before the brand got huge, I was getting a lot of DMs from people asking where they’re from and how they could get their hands on one— some people even asked if they could buy them off me since they la manso Pinky were selling out so quick.”

Promise Ring, $82

“I love the Ordinary’s products because they are not too expensive and consist of simple ingredients,” said Ciara. Dylan thought the company makes it easy for skin-care newcomers to experiment with different ingredients and said it’s a step above drugstore brands for the same price: “My favorite so far is the Caffeine Solution.

This is because I never get enough sleep, and I like to make it look like I do.”

And some are just over Glossier. “I used to like Glossier more, but they are kind of outdated and boring now. They keep releasing boring products that are just copies of each other,” said Margot, an ex–Glossier superfan. )

continued

best bets: N

V R

-teen poll v

T EN S FULL

Favorite

HOM

A product breakdown from 15-year-old Jaden, hair entrepreneur and TikTok star, of what she uses for herself and her (mostly teen) clients.

s

LED lights

Blue-light-blocking glasses Seventeen teens said they bought these to make Zoom school easier. Ava K. got this pair from Peepers ($27) because she was “getting pretty bad headaches every day doing distance learning” September through April. “They’re really quite comfortable and not heavy or tight.”

After seeing them on TikTok, Claudio bought LED lights “because they’re a fun alternative to conventional lighting and very laid-back for a night in with friends.” They also look cool in TikTok videos and are a bit less dainty than twinkle lights. (Philips Hue Bluetooth Smart Lightstrip, $25.)

v

“I use this to keep the braids really neat and make my parts really crisp and precis

“When I’m done, there may be a couple pieces of hair sticking t when I put this on lways lays down the nd it doesn’t flake.”

The Only Workout Item Mentioned More Than On Was the Weighted

v

Style Fa o Edge Booster Strong Hold Water-Based Pomade, $9

“Edge Booster properly slicks down edges.

This is the perfect extreme hold for all hair types.”

Oval In yet another development from our last poll, teens said they now prefer a thinner oval shape for glasses. Ava K. feels “funky” in this pair from Mango ($30), and Mimi H. shops at Shein for hers: “Shein has been upping their sunnies game.”

A respondent named Aida bought this la-Hoop after seeing it on TikTok: “I like it because it’s not an intense workout; it’s xed. I watch TV while I do it sometimes.

Though I think overall [workout] Toks are triggering for teenagers, cially ones with eating disorders.”

Claw clips Claw clips ranked high on the coolness scale, and one of the go-to brands is Free People, according to Mimi C. Another fan named Caroline said she has been eyeing the ones specifically for thick hair by Kov ($23).

fy teens “Sweatpants” was one of the most common answers to “What is the item of clothing you’ve worn most this year?”

(No surprise.) When pressed to name the most comfortable sweatpants, the teens’ answers fell all over the price spectrum:

5%

Alo Yoga 46%

Other

38 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

5 Stripe, $156

Champion

hanes

5%

aviator nation

Aerie

Rosa, $32

16%

brandy melville

28%

Cost $14—or $156.

F r

Men’s Ultimate Cotton, $14

Nk I T

P H OTO G R A P H S : @ J AY M A R I E S T Y L E Z / I N S TAG R A M ( B R A I D S ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F R E TA I L E R S ( P R O D U C T S )

Ampro Shine ’n Jam Conditioning Gel, $5

Nairobi Wrapp-It Shine Foaming Lotion, $12

the look book goes to

A Dimes Square Clothing Rack Trying on Armani pants and rare Tiffany & Co. caps at Chad Senzel’s vintage pop-up (@chadsenzelarchive), which appears most Saturdays at Canal and Ludlow Streets. interviews by louis cheslaw and daniel varghese

MELISSA RICH

Comedian and writer, Lower East Side What brought you to the rack?

I live in the neighborhood, so I pass by Chad all the time.

I’ve bought a lot of really cool stuff from him. Like a Von Dutch tank top.

What brought you to New York in the first place?

I’m a comedian, and I was doing stand-up in Pittsburgh and working at the Capital Grille steakhouse. They transferred me to the Midtown East location, which is right by the U.N. It was wild to move to the big city but still have to wear the same uniform, which was disgusting.

Did you wait on any famous politicians? One day, we saw

these different-looking Secret Service agents around; there were often Secret Service in there for, you know, whoever, but this time, they looked pretty intense. And they started going through our bags.

Obviously, all of us had weed.

But they let us in, and my boss was like, “Michelle Obama is in the dining room. Nobody talk to her. N walk str But then when she walked through the dining room, she waved and gave us little, like, finger guns. It was so cute.

Photographs by DeSean McClinton-Holland

39

the look book: dimes square vintage shoppers What brings you here today? I play basketball

for UCLA, and we’re in New York for the ESPYs. We’re nominated for Game of the Year for our crazy overtime game versus Gonzaga. During COVID, without the fans, we were just pulling up to games in our sweat suits.

But now that the fans and cameras are coming back, you have to look good again. Which is why we’re rolling through the streets, shopping.

JAIME JAQUEZ JR.

STEPHANIE NEEL

College student, Los Angeles

FRANK CARSON

Archivist, East Village

Vintage-store owner, Lower East Side

How are people dressing in the neighborhood these days? I’ve dabbled

with things that are maybe trendier, but to me, a big old T-shirt and a hat is true New York LES fashion, way more than a little bag or a silk scrunchie.

Same with my street jewelry that turns my hands different colors. Gangrene till I die, bro.

REED KILGORE

MICHAEL JOHNSTON JR.

Retail manager, Crown Heights

Designer, Downtown Brooklyn

AMRIT DHILLON

Gallery assistant, Lower East Side

Did you get anything? Yes, these

Armani pants. I really liked their soft-green color. At first, I was like, “Chad, are these going to be too big on me? And does anyone care if I change right here?” They look really good, if I do say so myself.

JAKE SMITH

Editorial assistant, Bushwick

40 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

GRACE DOUGHERTY

Actor, Los Angeles

GIANCARLOS RODRIGUEZ

A&R representative, Lower East Side

So this is your rack?

Yes. The story is I’m from Vermont, and growing up, I’d go all the time to the local Goodwill and find all these funky clothes.

Three summers ago, I started trying out this rack thing. First in Soho, which I thought would be great because, like, Soho is notorious for people with money.

It didn’t do well. Then in Dumbo, which, same. Now here, which has been great. I got laid off a few months ago because of COVID, but I’m doing well enough with this that it’s a full-time job.

CHAD SENZEL

JAKE SHARKEY

Vintage dealer, Harlem

SCOTT IRBY-RANNIAR

Producer, Chinatown

Mechanic, Harlem

You live right around here? A little bit north,

like closer to Houston.

That’s a very different scene than Dimes Square, though it’s still super-super-sceney.

It’s the worst. It’s like 80 percent TikTokInstagram people and then 20 percent people rolling up in their souped-up Corolla with the windows down blasting Pop Smoke.

COLE STAR

MINH CAO

Designer, Carroll Gardens

Designer, Downtown Brooklyn

ALEX DILENA

Interior designer, Lower East Side

What are you up to? I was just

walking by with my Dalmatian, Pongo.

I bought him in the pandemic.

I always wanted a Dalmatian, but I thought they were too big.

Then I heard there were miniature Dalmatians. When I saw Pongo, I thought, Wow.

KAYLA JOHNSON

Recruitment manager, Upper East Side

ALI AKSAHIN

Model, Lower East Side

BIJAN SHAHVALI

Vintage-store owner, Bedford-Stuyvesant

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

41

design hunting

The “Melo Clock”

on the windowsill is a Locus of Occult product.

The pink side table

is a Locus prototype made from industrial foam and papier-mâché.

The dining table,

which doubles as a work table, is by Anna Karlin, and the secondhand chairs were painted by Daniel King before Emma Hastil moved in. The candleholder is Locus.

A Live-in, Surf-Out Ro Daniel King and Emma Hastil started their company, Locus

42 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

The photograph

was taken by King in the Australian Bush in 2015 for the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

The “Wiggle Pillow” on the sofa was designed and sewn by Hastil, who also painted the fabric.

Th er ug i

sv int ag ef rom

the 19 80 s.

The coffee table holds various Locus objects.

ockaways DIY Design Lab of Occult, at home during the pandemic. by wendy goodman Photographs by DeSean McClinton-Holland

design hunting

Hastil and King

Y

ou’re really seeing this apartment on a good day,” says Daniel King of the two-bedroom Rockaway condo where he and Emma Hastil live and from which they run their design business, Locus of Occult. Their dining table is more often than not used as a worktable, and patterns and drop cloths are usually all over the living-room floor.

King moved here two and a half years ago from the Lower East Side, following friends who wanted to live in a “beach town full of artistic people and different cultures” that just happens to have subway access to the rest of the city. He grew up in Australia and loved being able to walk in his wet suit to go surfing. He met Hastil through a mutual friend who had stopped by his condo with her to say hello while on a beach excursion. The two hit it off immediately. Hastil left her 200-square-foot room in Bed-Stuy, where she didn’t have space for much; her move to the beach took all of two hours.

Before the pandemic, King often was flying around for his work as a fashion and portrait photographer. (The Rockaways is also convenient to JFK airport.) Hastil, who studied fashion design at Pratt, worked for a while in Los Angeles for a branding agency before returning to New York, where she had a gig creating kids’ graphics.

During lockdown, “we had a lot of time on our hands,” Hastil recalls. So they decided to make things. “We had been drawing and playing with Sculpey, doing arts and crafts leading up to this.

Once you realize you can just try something, trial and error, it opens you up to doing more.”

Hastil’s investigation of materials brought them to Jesmonite, a water-based composite product.

“You can color it, and color has always been really important to me,” Hastil says. But they had to buy it in bulk. “It weighs a ton, so the shipping costs were high. I thought, If we do this, we’re either going to get a ton of it or we’re not going to do it. So we got a ton of it!” she says, laughing.

The apartment has become their lab. They even constructed a lamp with the material left over from making objects: “We poured the excess into a big dish and layered it up, and we smashed it and sealed it and drilled it and made the lamp from the pieces.”

Now that the business is going (Liberty London, among other places, is selling Locus pieces), King confesses that logistics need to be worked out: “All the big stuff and manufacturing side we still haven’t figured out, but the smaller homewares we make here ourselves.” Hastil adds, “Because we have no formal background in object design, we have a very M er h to our work—how can we cre rv ith the ■ skills we do have?”

44 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

on the beach, a short walk from their place.

The orange “Island Chair”

was built by the pair to replace another their dog had barfed on. “We always wanted a wiggly chair,” King says. The “Popov Bookends” on the seat are from their company.

The portrait

of Hastil above the bed was done by her friend Michelle Sauer.

The painting is one King bought at a group show that was a fund-raiser for Nepal earthquake relief.

The banana bowl

The side tables

are by Locus; the hanging lamp is

by Ugly Rugly.

Blue’s bed was made by Hastil.

P H OTO G R A P H S : D E S E A N M CC L I N TO N - H O L L A N D ( P O R T R A I T, D I N I N G TA B L E , B E D R O O M ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F DA N I E L K I N G ( R E M A I N I N G )

was designed by King and made by the pair.

food reopening

‘Were You in Veggie Nirvana?’

An amateur vegan and a professional food critic on Eleven Madison Park’s all-plant menu. by adam platt and rachel sugar

Tomato Tea With Lemon Verbena

Rachel Sugar: Before we get to the actual meal, which cost $729.46 for two people plus $168.76 for drinks,

let’s clarify that our main goal was to get two different perspectives—mine as a vegan and yours as a longtime restaurant critic—on the new food at Daniel Humm’s restaurant.

Adam Platt: I was surprised when you told me you’re vegan because I’ve seen you eat butter.

RS: For work, I’ll eat what chefs serve

“One of the best things I have ever tasted in my life.”

Yellow Tomato Dosa

without animal products to feel like self-improvement. People hate self-

improvement. “Oh, you’ll feel so great when it’s over” is not the same as “Oh, the meal was so delicious.” So that’s what I wanted from this $700 vegan meal—for it to be spectacular by any measure. And it started off very well. They brought out tiny cups of “heirloom-tomato tea infused with lemon-thyme.” Very minimalist. A clear broth in a simple white bowl with an elegant bundle of fresh thyme. I will admit

ever considered cutting meat out of your diet?

AP: No. Are you kidding me? I should

46 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

think I’ve actually had a vegan meal that has lasted ten or 12 courses and cost as much as a round-trip ticket to Paris.

RS: That sense of virtue has always

struck me as a hurdle. I want food to be pleasurable. I don’t want eating a meal

because I think my job involves trying to understand what they’re going for.

But otherwise, I’m vegan. Have you

be vegan, though. I should be done, at this stage of my consumptive life, with meat and potatoes. My daughters say, every day, “You eat too much meat, Dad.” By the way, I fortified myself for the meal at EMP by eating almost an entire chicken from Citarella for lunch.

RS: So we were both doing something new here. You were experimenting with

veganism, and I was experimenting with eating at Eleven Madison Park.

AP: You’d never eaten there?

RS: No! And we should mention that I had to ask the restaurant’s publicrelations agency just to get our reservation, but we did pay for the meal.

AP: Maybe you should start by asking me about some of my most memorable vegan meals.

RS: Okay. What are your most memorable vegan meals?

AP: There aren’t any. I will say that there’s always something vaguely virtuous and satisfying about having endured a grand vegetarian meal, although I don’t

I was skeptical of this because it sounded extraordinarily pretentious,

“Ten stars for those dosas.”

but I was wrong because it was one of the best things I have ever tasted in my life.

AP: It did not suck! In fact, it tasted deeply flavorful, like the essence of a Illustrations by Nishant Choksi

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F A DA M P L AT T A N D R AC H E L S U G A R

t has been about a month since the chef Daniel Humm unveiled the newest menu at his extravagant, almost comically luxurious Manhattan restaurant Eleven Madison Park. The big news, of course, is that this latest iteration of EMP (which was once known for dishes like lavender-glazed duck and opulent blocks of slow-cooked pork) eschews animal products, instead offering a fully plantbased meal. Does it live up to the hype and the price? Food critic Adam Platt and Grub Street’s writer Rachel Sugar weigh in.

Celtuce in Variations With Rice

at, which is pretty much the image our friends at EMP strive to create the second you walk in the door. And the mysterious little souped-up vegan dips imparted serious umami flavor. Let the record show: We ate this course in monkish silence,

much the way I imagine vegans eat all their meals.

RS: It was delicious. I did think, though, if we’re nitpicking, that everything sort of had the same umami punch to it—all the pieces are at the same level. It was incredible, but if this were figure skating, and if I were the Russian judge, I’d say I wanted something to cut through the sameness a little bit.

AP: Everything was amped up to the

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F A DA M P L AT T A N D R AC H E L S U G A R ( P E A S ) ; R O S A L I N D R A P PA P O R T ( P O R R I D G E )

“I couldn’t help think that a few salty lardons would have enlivened the general flavor of this porridge immeasurably.” thousand tomatoes, and we’re not even in tomato season yet. Not that I care—I’m agnostic about seasons when it comes to tomatoes. I’ll eat a tomato at any time of the year, especially if there’s a vat of mayonnaise nearby. Anyway, this was a lovely, spiritual introduction to our dinner and also to the season of summer tomatoes, which hasn’t arrived yet.

RS: I felt sort of stupid because I knew it would be good. That’s what they do here.

They make good food. But this was indeed very good.

AP: How many stars would you give this tea?

RS: Ten out of ten. Absolutely the best tomato tea I’ve ever had.

AP: Go easy with your tens. You can’t give everything a ten. I’d give this delicious elixir an 8.5. It sort of set up the

whole meal. It opened up the palate, and it said to both of us, You are in the presence of master technicians—this is what we can do with plants. And now we’ll give you more of our delicious plants.

RS: The second dish, also tomato, was a tomato salad with pickled strawberries and tiny tomato-stuffed dosas with a shiso leaf wrapped around the end served in a custom wooden mini dosa holder. And it came with dips: pine-nut purée and green-tomato relish with coriander.

AP: The dosa, especially, is a brilliant idea. Sleek, delicious, and beautiful to look

same level of umaminess. On the other hand, if it were a non-vegan restaurant, it would have all been butter. Ten stars for those fucking dosas—I’m a dosa fan—and

been simmered with seaweed, then we wrapped the peas and seeds in decked-out baby-gem lettuce cups topped with sorrel leaves and dollops of pea-and-miso-lemon crème fraîche.

AP: It was all quite impressive, but the little seeds did not taste like caviar.

RS: It was the most traditionally

vegan-tasting dish we ate all night.

I wasn’t unhappy. Again, it was delicious, it was meticulous, but it had the familiar aura of veganness.

AP: Ahhh, the dreaded aura of veganness! I actually preferred my little bowl of temple celtuce gruel to this. But it was an important signifier in the meal to show you where you are, to show you that this is still a caviar-style joint. It’s hard to charge people $700 and make it seem like it’s worthwhile, and this dish is one of the ways they do that. On a

I’d give seven, maybe six and a half, stars to the very good salad.

RS: We were off to a strong start.

theatrical level, I think they succeed, although the theater felt a little dated.

RS: It was very beautiful. I should have

But the next course, you had concerns.

They brought us these immaculate little bowls of “broken rice porridge” with ribbons of celtuce on top, luxuriating in a celtuce-and-ginger broth and accented with alyssums.

AP: The whole setup looked very

Instagrammed it, but I was too proud.

AP: Who doesn’t love faux caviar?

chaste, very delicate and pure and obviously good for you, and also possibly very boring.

RS: Everything you think about vegans.

AP: I’ll admit there were all sorts of

encapsulates the contradictions that big-money gourmet destinations like this find themselves in: How can we be progressive and “gourmet” at the same time? How do we appeal to the new

internal alarms going off in my fatty, butter-soaked carnivore brain. The dish

generation without losing the old one that,

looked like something—and I don’t mean this as a criticism necessarily—that you’d encounter at a Buddhist-koan fat farm, deep in a piney forest somewhere.

RS: Did you still feel that way after

Who doesn’t love a polished silver bowl emblazoned with antique frickin’ pheasants? But it’s all very fin de siècle, very Gilded Age, and the Gilded Age is supposed to be over. The dish sort of

Tonburi With Peas and Baby Lettuce

tasting it?

AP: Sort of. It had a beautifully subtle texture, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s also beautiful to look at, and they gave it a hidden umami punch—they seem to be putting kombu or something in these dishes to give them all a uniform kick.

I couldn’t help thinking that a few salty lardons of bacon would have enlivened the general flavor of this porridge immeasurably.

RS: Then they brought out what is clearly meant to be one of the iconic dishes of this new vegetal age. In a

gleaming silver tureen, we had iced peas bedecked with mint-and-chive oil and a perfect mound of tonburi, which, as we learned, is an ancient Japanese seed that looks like caviar. The tonburi seeds had

“It was delicious, it was meticulous, but it had the familiar aura of veganness.”

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

47

food most opulent-looking dish yet but in many ways the most pedestrian. It was

a dish that only a real vegan could love, but it seems that even you didn’t love it.

RS: It was vegan-y in a way that I like.

Comfortable. Wholesome. But I also feel like I can get that sensation with a tempeh burrito in Berkeley. However,

I didn’t love it. It felt a little slimy.

AP: I’m supposed to say that. You’re supposed to defend dishes like this to death.

RS: What I will defend to death is that kitchens can always do cool stuff with vegetables. Part of caring about vegan food is holding it to the same standards as the rest of the non-vegan world.

the bread, which came next, was triumphant. Was it bread? They said it was made with sunflower milk and chickpea flour and aquafaba and nutritional yeast and coconut oil and laminated with sunflower butter.

AP: So complicated, all these vegan recipes, but it was an almost exact copy of the famous EMP bun and butter, down to the tasteful burlap sack in which the bun was served. You have to give them credit.

RS: But that’s what a place like this can do! That’s why I was so excited about it.

CCucumber With Melon and Smoked Daikon

“The essential vegetableness, and even tofuness, of it all eluded me.”

Please develop insanely elaborate recipes with 9,000 ingredients over the course of three years—that is perfect.

about this one until I checked my notes.

AP: It was quite lovely to look at,

“Texturally, I didn’t love it.

It felt a little slimy.”

Bread

“An almost exact copy of the famous EMP bun and butter.”

AP: I’m not going to complain too much

about the tricked-up, uncannily realistic vegan butter that was served on the side, except to say that it was not fucking butter.

Like much of the food, it was shot through with that piercing, one-note umaminess, which substitutes for the great multitextural rainbow of non-vegan fatty, oil, and dairy flavors that Carnivore Nation knows and loves.

RS: Then we had a cucumber-daikonavocado-honeydew … thing. A salad?

A tartare? A cooling mélange? Texturally,

Summer Squash W With Lemongrass and Marinated Tofu

Like, these allegedly “wholesome” ingredients can be as exquisite as anything else.

AP: At this point in our dinner, Platt has begun drifting into sullen silence, dreaming of old-fashioned proteins—the kind of crackly, butter-and-honey-slicked whole-roasted birds and beef and fish for which this restaurant was once famous.

RS: What about seitan or tofu?

AP: I grew up in Asia. I love tofu.

I love seitan. I love them all. I don’t view them as fake meat. I view them as delicious in their own right. They give you protein. They give you a little heft, but you don’t feel like you want to go die after a good tofu dinner. I still eat all this meat, but even I am rebelling. In my old carnivore age, I’m beginning to find the servings in these restaurants—oversize steaks and giant flaps of fish—a little concerning, actually. So bring on the

a medley of yellowy, summery squash colors all intricately carved and tweezed and plated. Unfortunately, there also seemed to be a lot of that umami paste, so the essential vegetableness, and even tofuness, of it all eluded me a little bit.

RS: But then came one of my favorites: the world’s fanciest jalapeño popper.

I thought it was delightful. It came with a zillion different toppings, to be administered with three tiny spoons and one large set of tweezers. By that point,

Sweet Pepper With Swiss Chard

seitan, please, but maybe give me a little bit of animal protein for that fatty, crunchy, back-of-the-mouth goodness.

RS: Our next course allegedly

contained tofu, somewhere, although where was not exactly clear to me at the time. What I got was an assortment of squash with sesame in a broth of lemon verbena. Honestly, I kind of forgot

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“One of the finest jalapeño poppers that I’ve ever tasted.”

P H OTO G R A P H S : E VA N S U N G ( B R E A D, C U C U M B E R TA R TA R E ) ; CO U R T E S Y O F A DA M P L AT T A N D R AC H E L S U G A R ( S Q U A S H , S W E E T P E P P E R )

by the way, has all the money? It’s the

Beet With HHorseradish and Herbs

Fight, vegan, fight!

RS: The first course—that tomato tea—

was transcendent in a way that felt like ultraluxury. I have no idea how they did it, which is what I want from a restaurant like this. And, like you say, it’s not even tomato season, but it was the most intense tomato experience I’ve ever had. So they can do it. And they’re opting, for whatever reason, which I’m sure is excruciatingly intentional, not to do it with this beet, which felt like a direct response to filet, just like the tonburi felt like a direct response to caviar. There was still a bit of a meat-

hours and 22 minutes in. First: a lone palate-cleansing strawberry stuffed with strawberry “yogurt,” sake lees, and finger limes.

Blueberry With Elderflower

based framework, even if there was no actual meat.

AP: Unlike at your average vegan joint

“Chefs love showpiece beets these days.”

in Bushwick, at restaurants like this they’re trained to make every bite a heightened experience. I thought they were sometimes a little afraid of letting the vegetables just be vegetables.

I can’t believe I said that. we hadn’t had a fun one in a while. The

dosa was fun. The popper was fun. It was joyful. There was a sense of humor. The caviar seeds, I felt, were deeply humorless.

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F A DA M P L AT T A N D R AC H E L S U G A R ( B E E T S ) ; E VA N S U N G ( E G G P L A N T, S T R AW B E R RY )

AP: The great vegan canon is not known for its sense of humor, but this was one of the finest, most ethereal, most pleasurable jalapeño poppers that

“It was refreshing but also opulent.”

RS: I want the ingredients to be

Eggplant With TTomato and Coriander

AP: One thousand stars for that gussied-up, slightly tangy strawberry, which was served with proper hautegourmet ceremony atop a little mountain of crushed ice.

RS: That was followed by … the menu describes it as “Blueberry With

I’ve ever tasted.

RS: Then there was The Beet. I’ve noticed that chefs love showpiece beets these days. Here, the beet was

Elderflower,” which is an understatement. It was a semi-frozen coconut-

dehydrated and smoked and roasted over the course of three days, then it

was baked in a ceramic vessel made by a potter in Staten Island, which was shattered with a steel hammer by our server, who then used giant shears to bushwhack through a tangled herbal nest to reveal our majestic beet. It looked organ-y. A surprisingly visceral experience.

AP: This seemed to be the faux filet part of dinner, the beginning of the final crescendo, with a lot of theatrics

thrown in. But I appreciated all of the theatrics and, as usual at EMP, the service was more or less impeccable. I also appreciated that unlike the eighth course of a regular tasting menu, I wasn’t feeling impossibly bloated, staring at another goddamn “Kobe” beef filet through a haze of regret. I was happy to eat my fancy beet, but there was that omnipresent vegan-umami thing going on again.

Let the beet be the beet!

RS: Yeah.

AP: You’re the person who should be fighting for the essential beet spirit of this beet. Stand up for your people!

“An authentically meaty eggplant. I loved it.” trusted. And I thought we got that with the last dish, which was roasted eggplant with more pickled eggplant on top. There was still that same umami

flavor, whatever it is, but it worked for me here. An authentically meaty eggplant.

I loved it.

AP: I loved the steaklike eggplant creation, too. It was sprinkled with coriander blossoms, I dimly recall, and beautiful to look at. The eggplant had

blueberry … puck, and when you broke into it, there were slow-cooked blueberries and meringue bits and mochi balls and bits of something called “rice cream”—there was a lot going on. It was sweet and salty and also fizzy?

AP: There was a smooth, comforting, dairylike aspect to it, which may or may not have been coconuts. It was refreshing but also opulent. A thousand more stars!

RS: They finished strong.

AP: Were you in veggie nirvana?

RS: I don’t think I could be. I’m so deeply uncomfortable with the price. Not that I’m saying it’s too high for the level of skill and number of people that go into it, but the number still makes me itchy.

AP: You seemed a bit uncomfortable in this rarefied world in general.

RS: I mean, yes.

AP: Weirdly, I think you might have

a kind of soft but meaty texture, and there was a tinge of teriyaki-style flavor.

RS: And at that point, we’d been

been more critical of the meal than I was.

I left feeling sort of enlivened and refreshed.

RS: I left feeling like I should have

eating for, what, three hours? According to my notes, dessert was served three

Instagrammed those peas when I had the chance.

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

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WHITNEY

JULIE MEHRETU

FINAL WEEKS BOOK TIMED TICKETS

Installation view of Julie Mehretu (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 25, 2021–August 8, 2021). Photograph by Ryan Lowry In New York, the exhibition is sponsored by

New York magazine is the exclusive media sponsor.

Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street whitney.org #JulieMehretu @whitneymuseum

the classical theatre of harlem

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dispatch from cannes

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prince’s vault

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critics

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to do

The CULTURE PAGES

Boys, Interrupting Photograph by DeSean McClinton-Holland

At home with the members of sketch-comedy group Please Don’t Destroy, viral auteurs of the absurd roommate run-in.

By Rebecca Alter july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

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I

t’s 80 degrees out but feels hotter inside this fourbedroom apartment on the upper Upper West Side, where the AC is off to cut noise and the three members of sketchcomedy group Please Don’t Destroy are on their 19th take of the same 15-second stretch of video. The setup of this sketch is that the guys—Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall— are all watching Family Feud when an Anonymous-style hacker intercepts their TV feed and addresses them by name. They consider and film every possible variation on the opening segment like food scientists lab-testing a new variety of Twinkie: Should they lean forward when the hacker appears on TV or all fall back onto the couch?

Should they play it like terror or just confusion? At what point should their friend—and today’s cameraman—Pete Christmann whip the iPhone around to catch their reactions?

The hacker character isn’t scary, just extremely lame in that male-coded sort of way where he wants to talk about dogecoin and maybe meet up at Barcade.

Partway through, Herlihy realizes that the sketch—which, like many of their videos, will probably get at least 100,000 likes when they post it to Twitter and TikTok—is simply them “just being mean to a weird guy.”

“Yep,” Marshall says. “That’s what comedy is!”

If you are even vaguely interested in comedy and know what a “For You” page is, odds are you’ve seen videos made by Please Don’t Destroy. You probably also have no idea that that’s what the group is called—maybe you have referred to its members as “those comedy boys” or the “funny TikTok roommates.” (They signed off emails to me as “The Boys.”) Herlihy, Higgins, and Marshall—22, 25, and 26, respectively—started going viral over the past year as live comedy was mostly shut down and everyone was feeling the burnout of being at home and online all day.

Their frenetic videos usually throw the viewer into a scene between roommates in this exceedingly normal apartment, often starting mid-sentence with one character laying out something balls-tothe-wall kooky as if it’s the plainest fact you’ve ever heard (a new type of dog has been invented, Netflix made a documentary about Herlihy’s boring life) before launching into a litany of absurd and surprising jokes on the main premise, caus-

ing even more absurd reactions. Their videos capture what it feels like to share all your space and time with weird roommates, in a way that manages to be comforting: They have the rapport and selfassured rhythm of friends who spent the pandemic making one another laugh.

They had each been posting individual comedy videos to their respective Twitter accounts that would get a few thousand likes; the first time I saw one of their videos was when Herlihy posted a sketch called “Color-blind Glasses” in May 2020, which he says “was the first one that was like, Oh, wow, people are seeing this.” By the fall, the group was posting more sketches that take place in this apartment—where Herlihy and Marshall live with Christmann and Brady Lees—sometimes with just one of the trio talking on-camera to an off-camera straight man, or with all three, or with the three of them plus Christmann and Lees.

Then, in March 2021, they exploded: Marshall tweeted a Please Don’t Destroy sketch in which he announces he has been vaccinated, only for the others to realize that whatever happened to him (“I think it was the Dumbrekka?” he says. “It was the cheapest one, like $300 or something”) was definitely not Fauci approved.

The camera alternates between Herlihy and Higgins reacting with horror and Marshall nonchalantly listing off his postvaxx symptoms, such as “expelling a ton of black bile.” It ends with two punch lines for the price of one: a topical Johnson & Johnson dig and the slapstick beat of

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Marshall passed out on the floor. As soon as it’s over, you let it loop back to the start to catch the five to ten jokes you missed the first time around.

Heidi Gardner from SNL was one of the big names who shared a Please Don’t Destroy video early on. She first saw the group perform about two years ago, when she was invited to one of the weekly live sketch shows the guys were organizing at the time. “Watching them, they reminded me of when I was a teenager, and it was like the first time I saw [the sketch group] Stella or the first time I saw Jack Black,” says Gardner. “And I was just like, Holy shit. I could watch this all night long.

I almost felt embarrassed of how much of a fan I quickly became.”

The group’s results tend to look easy, tossed off, but today the guys have shot a full hour of footage for what will later become a one-minute sketch. We turn the AC back on and settle into the living room, which is like an I Spy game for fans of their sketches: They’re sitting on the couch I’ve seen in videos like “Nothing Like Sundays With the Guys” (you know, the one where they watch a David Foster Wallace interview as if it’s a football game). The fake Shailene Woodley 2K21 video game sits in their media console, and the framed black-and-white graduation photo of Herlihy and his “classmate” SpongeBob SquarePants stands on a bar cart. “They’re less souvenirs,” says Herlihy, “and more us not wanting to clean up.” the group known as Please Don’t Destroy was founded in 2017 at—like any number of gangly-comedy-boy collectives before it—NYU. Herlihy and Higgins are both from the New York area, while Marshall is from Savannah. Herlihy, who liked to write short stories in high school, jokes that “as a 13-year-old, I wanted Simon Rich’s life.” Marshall made movies at his arts high school, including one that featured a very embarrassing Harlem shake, which he shared in a video he made for Comedy Central’s social media last year.

At NYU, he and Higgins joined the student sketch group Hammerkatz. Listening to the three of them explain how they started doing comedy together is like watching those cute old-couple segments from When Harry Met Sally…, if one of the meet-cutes featured a throuple made up of white men in their early-to-mid-20s.

“When I was a senior and Martin was a freshman, we were both in the stand-up club Astor Place Riots,” says Marshall.

“Martin was really funny—” “And Ben was fine—” says Herlihy.

“And we were like, ‘We should start a show to do more stand-up,’ because we

just thought we were going to be standups. It was called “Please Don’t Destroy My Farm” at the pit, and it ended up being this really high-concept thing where I was an evil businessman coming to destroy Martin’s farm. We were hosting in character, and it was so unnecessarily complicated. We purely did characterbased bits. And we had John come on and play a cow, in a full costume, who didn’t say any words the whole time. And then eventually—” “I begged to speak onstage with these guys,” says Higgins.

They graduated one after another in 2017, 2018, and 2019 and kept doing comedy shows with NYU peers like Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri. They also started making (and still make) slightly longer sketch videos destined for YouTube with sets, costumes, music, and extras that are full of rubes and misunderstandings, calling to mind the Netflix show I Think You Should Leave. During the pandemic, they spent every day writing together—first over video call, then with Higgins walking over from his apartment nearby—and they haven’t stopped. “This is something we were largely doing to keep ourselves sane during the pandemic,” says Marshall. “It’s something to work on and do every day to feel like you’re creating something.”

I find myself applying boy-band logic to their roles in the group: Herlihy’s the meticulous one who always finds the weirdest turn of phrase for a character, Marshall’s the unifier who keeps them all on track, and Higgins is the affable wild card, happy to stick to joke pitching and acting.

“They are the brain masters behind the videos,” Higgins says, pointing to the others.

“Brain masters,” Herlihy and Marshall repeat back at him. Whoever pitches a sketch owns it: He’ll edit the footage, share different cuts with the group for notes, and put it on his personal Twitter.

Three white guys doing comedy and posting it online is a story as old as videosharing itself—the Ur-white-boy comedic trio the Lonely Island is key to the story of how YouTube became YouTube. The Please Don’t Destroy guys acknowledge that. “It’s a caveat of this entire conversation,” Marshall says. “We went to NYU and are not drowning in debt. We’re very privileged to have access to what we’ve had access to.” Although Herlihy doesn’t bring it up himself, his father is Adam Sandler collaborator Tim Herlihy, who wrote The Wedding Singer and Happy Gilmore, among many other Sandler classics. Martin was recently credited as Teenage Zombie in the film Hubie

Ben Marshall, John Higgins, Martin Herlihy, and Brady Lees.

At right, Marshall shows off the Band-Aid from his Dumbrekka vaccination.

Halloween, which his father co-wrote with Sandler. (“Hope my star making turn as Teenage Zombie will be a huge part of the piece!!!” Herlihy writes to me when I email him to confirm the connection.)

If their work touches on any identity at all, it’s generational, a zillennial doing away with sketch-comedy conventions— the story arcs, the base reality, all that Upright Citizens Brigade shit. “Especially in the videos they’re putting on TikTok and Twitter, there’s a definite awareness of how everyone has ADHD now,” says Gardner.

“So their pacing is incredible. Everything’s fast and loose and wild, but all the jokes are there.” At the same time, the videos feel like an update of the classic sitcom concept of New Yorkers just hanging out on a couch. Please Don’t Destroy’s videos capture the tension and strange, shifting dynamics of being in your 20s and trapped in a tiny space with people like the “guy who loves musicals and also has no awareness of personal boundaries,” who keeps barging in to accost his roommate about musicals that don’t exist with names like Candlelight and Good-bye Toledo. Many of us have lived with that person. Some of us have been that person.

Still, the group’s sketches stand out on Twitter and TikTok for being exactly that: sketches rather than strung-together non sequiturs. On TikTok, these guys’ selfuploads are doing Bo Burnham numbers: That vaccine sketch now has over 19 million views. Gardner envisions them going on SNL one day, and their newfound viral fame has gotten them some attention from other established people too. “Patton Oswalt retweets some of our stuff,” Marshall says.

“He has been really nice.” What they really want to do next, though, is write a movie or

a TV show. I spy a corkboard tucked away in a corner with color-coded index cards on it. “Oh, that was an outline for a movie that we’re writing,” Marshall says.

“We’re writing stuff to star in,” says Higgins.

“The dream,” says Herlihy. They’re about to start pitching around a scripted series they’ve been working on with Anthony King, backed by Seth Meyers and Late Night producer Mike Shoemaker’s production company.

Two weeks after our interview, I go to an outdoor comedy show in the backyard of the City Reliquary in Williamsburg. Just as the opening act goes on, it starts to pour.

I find myself pinned in the back behind a herd of umbrellas, with no view of the stage, waiting out the rain as the ground turns into a swamp. After a couple of sets of standard Brooklyn alternative-comedy fare (including, yes, a comedic PowerPoint presentation in the rain), on comes Please Don’t Destroy. A big tent is blocking my view as Herlihy, Higgins, and Marshall stand onstage; I can see only their legs.

For a wet and miserable audience, they pull out one sketch after another, running through them like snappy vaudeville pros. There is one about adults in the Nerf-gun aisle, another about an all-American guy (Marshall) whose son (Higgins) is inexplicably Italian. These are capital-R routines, the kind that work best live. The kind people used to buy Nichols and May records for.

It is a brilliant contrast after a year of watching their videos, and they seem stoked to be performing live again, a world away from the experience of video fame—just three pairs of legs sprinting ■ around a stage.

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

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Another Bard, Another Park

Classical Theatre of Harlem and Will Power refashion Richard III.

By H E L E N S H AW seize the king is in Marcus Garvey Park through July 29.

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outdoor theater is one of our city’s purest traditions: gorgeous performances in green surroundings, free for all. Certainly this summer, open-air productions are a civic lifeline—but at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the gathering has taken on an even more intense sense of mission. For years, CTH’s Uptown Shakespeare in the Park at Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park presented the European canon, including Antigone, Romeo and Juliet, and The Bacchae. This summer, though, producing artistic director Ty Jones has put up a new classic, Will Power’s Seize Photograph by Victor Llorente

the King, a contemporary verse play built on old bones.

A decade before Hamilton, in plays like Flow (2003) and The Seven (2006), Power established a hip-hop theater tradition. With Seize the King, he engages an older lyric strategy, slicing through contemporary culture to show its sedimentary underlayers. Power’s often comic drama uses the story from Shakespeare’s Richard III—a wicked duke murders his way to the crown—and he tells it using metered, heightened language. But Power yokes the galloping Elizabethan lyric to modernity. Seize the King’s reality is half

then, half now. A queen may muse, “Why, I might choose me, that’s a thought / Why not? Have I not half the council in my bra strap?” It’s also a familiar place where an insecure state kills a Black child. And although the play predates the January insurrection, its portrait of a man who won’t not be king seems predictive. Still, “this is not Trump walking around onstage,” Power says. “It’s more like, Who are we as a species? How do we deal with these different energies that have always existed?”

The play’s director, Carl Cofield, says, “We try to be a theater company that’s in

conversation with the world around us and the Harlem community,” and he notes the performance stimulates conversation about those who claim to serve. It’s not just a play for 2021 and its elections, though—it redefines the whole notion of “classical.” In staking out a new pantheon for living Black writers, CTH plans to seize first the king, then the canon. “That’s where we are in a global reckoning, an artistic reckoning,” Cofield says. “And that’s something that Classical Theatre of Harlem has been trying to drill down into. What makes something stand the ■ test of time?”

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

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100 Bewildering Hours at Cannes The most glamorous film festival remains unchanged—except for that pesky Delta variant.

By R A C H E L H A N D L E R the cannes film festival ran from July 6 to 17.

I

n the days leading up to the 74th annual Cannes Film Festival, I begin to wonder: Am I willing to risk becoming grievously ill in the name of cinema? covid-19 numbers are steadily climbing across Europe, with the mysterious Delta variant seeming to evade the vaccines more successfully than its older, weaker brethren; meanwhile, I am readying myself to sit in crowded, windowless rooms for 12 days straight with thousands of strangers whose vaccination status will remain unknown to me and many of whom are French, i.e., give no fucks. As I roam New York City buying integral supplies (KN95 masks and vegan-leather miniskirts), I send no fewer than 600 panicked messages to my patient editor, imagining all of the ways I might die on the Croisette directly in front of Tilda Swinton.

Somehow, I arrive in Cannes, courtesy of a flight on which I’m seated near a mopey Scandinavian teen who coughs on my head and an Uber driver who exclusively plays deep-house Coldplay remixes.

In the weeks before the festival, attendees had received exactly one (1) email from the Cannes press office about covid protocols, written in the opaque and lilting style of all Cannes emails, which tend to evoke an image of a French person laughing maniacally and smoking three cigarettes while typing. “You may enter the Palais only if you can provide a vaccination confirmation,” it begins, “(if you come from the EU).” I read the email many times, then replied, asking if I was to understand that, because my vaccine was not administered in Europe but rather in the filthy trenches of America, I would be required to take covid tests every 48 hours, despite my having gotten the exact same vaccine they were administering in France.

Four emails and three weeks later, the press office confirmed that yes, everyone who is not blessedly European will be getting tested every 48 hours in a free on-site facility requiring advance scheduling on a website my laptop would subsequently recognize as malware. Later, when I show up to the festival-sponsored tent to muster several milligrams of saliva and drool them into a tiny tube, I think primarily of my oral surgeon, who only days earlier had yanked a spontaneously decaying wisdom tooth from my mouth and specifically instructed me not to spit during recovery. I explain this to the test administrator, who is happy to instead give me the most brain-probing nasal PCR I’ve received in my whole covid life. I test negative. This doesn’t actually matter, except to me, because they only check these results at random.

Cannes has long been the most glamorous and most insane of its category, a byzantine maze of retrograde fashion rules

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and hierarchical regulations meant to create and sustain an overarching sense of individual defeat and unworthiness. It’s kinky, really. Ultimately, it succeeds each year in encouraging a sort of universal Stockholm syndrome among its confused and jet-lagged attendees, who find themselves desperate for more pain and rejection in the hopes of glimpsing the back of Bella Hadid’s head 600 rows in front of them. But this year, it all feels particularly bizarre, more snarlingly intense even than the French men in tuxes who harangue you for a ticket to the gala screenings as you walk into the Palais des Festivals. It is as if everyone has agreed (sans me) to pretend everything is totally normal in the interest of preserving some kind of cinematic dignity that has almost been lost— and that, in fact, returning to deifying celebrity as a concept above all else will somehow save us from the possibility that things might go back to being bad. Nothing has changed at Cannes, exactly, and that’s the problem: Nearly everything has remained the same, despite that whole international mass-death event we’re still in the middle of. I can’t stop thinking, What in the European fuck am I doing here? the cannes opening-night gala is a screening of Leos Carax’s Annette, a film about how Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard give birth to a puppet and attempt to turn it into a lucrative financial export. Everyone who attends is required to wear black tie and suppress their human instinct to survive. I put on a black dress and red lipstick and head to the Lumière auditorium, passing the covid tent on my way. Outside it, a woman in heels is openly weeping.

Gendarmes wielding rifles (to prevent covid) waltz cheerily in front of the red carpet, where Driver and Cotillard will soon arrive, unmasked, to wave at a bunch of fans and photographers who are required to wear masks. I stand there for a while, watching beautiful women try not to sweat in loofahlike gowns. One of them argues with a staffer about having to put on a mask inside and ultimately prevails. Another wears a hat shaped like a candle. Helen Mirren shimmies to the cameras, smirking Britishly; Jessica Chastain, grinning widely, signs a few autographs. All of this is scored by Dean Martin and Line Renaud’s “Relaxezvous,” which is a song about relaxing because everything is great. After a few minutes, a staffer sternly informs me I am not allowed to watch this display and ushers me inside. As a result, I miss the auspicious arrival of Bella Hadid.

actually a Gap—that we can pick up right where we left off, that cinema can and will survive, that the most important thing is getting back into the theaters. Years from now, we won’t even remember the Gap. “What was the Gap, Mom?” a little French child might say in the year 2050, although in French. His mother will shush him.

“There was no Gap, mon chéri,” she’ll say, staring off into the middle distance, smoking three cigarettes.

One of the French speakers muses on the power of the theatrical experience.

“Maybe we’ll be different at the end of the festival,” she says. “That’s the aim of a film.” I make a note to ask myself how different I am in 12 days. After Annette ends, Driver sparks up a cigarette inside the theater during a five-minute standing ovation (which has now become the standard for every Lumière screening, rendering the very concept meaningless; perhaps Driver, understanding this, was primally driven to smoke). I head to the “intimate” after-party on a rooftop nearby. I’ve now been awake for 30 hours, which is neither here nor there but maybe important for context. When I arrive, the bouncer asks to see my American vaccine card, despite the fact that it has been declared fundamentally useless to the festival. Fortunately, I have it with me, having anticipated these sorts of everchanging fantastical whims.

P H OTO G R A P H : K AT E G R E E N / G E T T Y I M AG E S

Bong Joon Ho

Inside the theater, I’m directed to a seat at the highest point of the balcony, roughly 500,000 feet above sea level.

I’m surrounded by coutured French people of all ages, few of whom are wearing a mask and some of whom cough nihilistically into the air. I wonder if my desire to stay alive is American exceptionalism. The ceremony itself is equally vertiginous. A stream of unmasked celebrities takes the stage to say various things about movies and one another.

Pedro Almodóvar welcomes Jodie Foster, who’s receiving an honorary award for being Jodie Foster; Jodie Foster speaks fluent French for many minutes about the honor of receiving her Jodie Foster Award; Spike Lee expresses a desire to “speak French like Jodie Foster,” who returns to the stage and speaks more French. She is one of the only speakers to address all of the annihilation we’ve experienced as a globe,

albeit briefly. “Lots of us have spent the year shut up in our little bubbles, and others were faced with suffering, anxiety, pain, and mortal fear,” she says. Many strange onstage jokes follow about the mask mandate. “It’s complicated to know who is hiding behind the mask,” says one of the speakers in a confusing attempt at levity and perhaps inadvertently explaining all of human behavior.

Bong Joon Ho, always a breath of fresh air, shows up and explains, somewhat bewilderedly, that he’s there because the festival asked him to “bridge the gap” between 2019’s event (at which he won the Palme d’Or) and this year’s. “I have the impression that there was no gap,” says Bong.

“I simply have the impression that the festival couldn’t take place one year, but I don’t think the cinema ever stopped per se.” Everyone onstage talks a lot about the Gap, sort of like it was the Rapture, insisting that even though it was a Gap, it wasn’t

usually there is a heavy party scene at Cannes—cocktails on the beach, passed apps on little bar-side tables, dancing in an area heavily roped off from Leonardo DiCaprio, whose back you can sort of see but who is mostly obscured by the lurking silhouette of Quentin Tarantino. This year, the beach is relatively quiet, with dance floors unilaterally banned. I understand this to mean that there are either fewer parties or that people are just having them anyway and only inviting the roped-off people. The latter turns out to be the case, which makes perfect sense for Cannes—the festival gets off on exclusion, and covid seems to be another way for it to cultivate a sense of sweaty striving among its attendees.

In a half-hearted attempt to maintain some sense of what the fest is calling its “health-and-safety protocol,” the Annette after-party is serving no food, though the alcohol is flowing freely. As such, everyone is wasted and looking over their shoulders, wondering when a famous person might show up so that they can act like they don’t care that said famous person is in attendance. No famous people ever show up. The bar is crowded with

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T h e C U LT U R E PAG E S

Adam Driver, star of Annette.

“I don’t think the cinema ever stopped per se.”

Jodie Foster, recipient of the Palme d’Or for lifetime achievement.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, director of The Lost Daughter and jury member.

Marion Cotillard, featured in Annette.

drunk people smoking at one another, screaming over the melancholy sounds of “California Dreamin’.” I can’t drink yet because of my tooth situation, so I simply watch them. A nice woman I have just met in the elevator tries to hand me a drink, and when I explain I have to wait a few days, her friend launches into a slurred explanation of the theory of relativity. “It’s all relative,” she concludes.

“Have alcohol.”

The next morning, I order an iced coffee at a café, and they instead give me a little silver bucket of ice in which to pour a cup of piping-hot coffee. I drink the lukewarm coffee out of the bucket. When the server arrives at the table to take my food order, she laughs in disbelief. I try to switch the coffee back to the cup, but it’s too late. She knows I drank out of a little ice bucket. In the wake of a Tuesdayevening news story suggesting that France is on the verge of a dangerous

fourth wave driven by that pesky Delta variant, I decide to give the smaller press screenings a shot, hoping my fellow neurotic journalists will be more likely to comprehend their mortality. I am correct about this, for the most part, though I still find myself next to the occasional Frenchman whose mask is hanging around his neck.

That night, I’m invited to a cocktail reception at the Scandinavian Terrace, where the famed Scandi Joachim Trier is being celebrated for his new movie, The Worst Person in the World. I eat vegetarian sushi and drink my first glass of wine in a week while chatting with some journalist and publicist friends about our confusion over every single thing that is happening. The mood is placid, and the ground is covered in Astroturf. At any given time, there are maybe 36 people at the party. “It’s different from being French,” says a woman giving a speech

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about the region’s cinematic exports. “But we feel we have a lot to offer.”

That day, Deadline reports that three covid cases are popping up per day at Cannes; the festival denies this and says the number is zero. I get an invite to a luncheon being held in a few days that reads, incredibly, “After those long lockdown periods that have been plunging the world into a deep crisis, the Cannes Film Festival’s comeback in its original form also announces celebrations and joyous occasions that go along with it even though caution and physical distancing must continue because our long fight against covid-19 is unfortunately far from behind us.”

I head to another party, this one hosted

by A24 on the beach, to celebrate After Yang, a movie about a robot who malfunctions and subsequently ruins Colin Farrell’s life. The film’s stars file into the party, save for Farrell and Justin H. Min

P H OTO G R A P H S : S T E P H A N E C A R D I N A L E / CO R B I S / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( L E E , M I R R E N ) ; DA N I E L E V E N T U R E L L I / W I R E I M AG E (GY L L E N H A A L , COT I L L A R D, D R I V E R ) P H OTO G R A P H O P P OS I T E: V I T TO R I O Z U N I N O C E LOT TO / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( F OS T E R)

Helen Mirren

Spike Lee, president of the Cannes jury.

Mj Rodriguez

Jessica Chastain

Tilda Swinton and Timothée Chalamet, featured in The French Dispatch.

P H OTO G R A P H S : PA SC A L L E S EG R E TA I N / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( S W I N TO N ) ; S T E FA N I E R E X / P I C T U R E A L L I A N C E / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( M AC D OW E L L , RO D R I G U E Z ) ; C H R I S TO P H E S I M O N / A F P / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( M U R R AY ) ; K AT E G R E E N / G E T T Y I M AG E S (C H A S TA I N )

“I knew COVID was serious when we started having nicknames for it—like Corona.”

and Sarita Choudhury, who are not at Cannes for reasons undisclosed but probably self-preservation related. Jodie Turner-Smith shows up in a sort of dominatrix-couture situation; Haley Lu Richardson stands nearby in a flower crown and a white dress. Someone asks me if she is Florence Pugh, and for a moment, I don’t know.

The vibes at the A24 party are the most reasonable I’ve encountered yet: low-key but genuinely fun, with several dumpling options available and no walls. Nearby, the film’s 9-year-old star, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, smiles for selfies with various adults. “I knew covid was serious when we started having nicknames for it,” says a man I’ve just met near the dumplings. “Like Corona.” Crystal Moselle, the director of Skate Kitchen and HBO’s Betty, stops by the circle of people I’m standing in and grabs a few boxes of the fries that are being passed out, all of

Bill Murray and Lyna Khoudri, featured in The French Dispatch.

Andie MacDowell

which have pools of ketchup in them but only at the bottom. By the time you get to the ketchup, most of the fries are gone.

I study Moselle’s subtly sparkly tooth jewelry before she walks away to talk to someone who has something to talk about other than this ketchup situation. A few minutes later, Turner-Smith places a pillow on the floor, kneels on top of it, and begins DJ-ing from a laptop. Nobody invades her space, and I feel, briefly, like we may someday attain some kind of gentle equilibrium as a species.

By 1 a.m., I am exhausted from dumplings and my reintroduction to alcohol, but I hop into an Uber to go to a villa party for the film Cow, Andrea Arnold’s documentary about, well, cows. I urgently need to know if there will be cows at the villa. At the massive wrought-iron door, my temperature is taken, and I’m asked to show my vaccine card. The space is decorated like it was abandoned in the cocaine

“Maybe we’ll be different at the end of the festival. That’s the aim of a film.”

’80s. Roughly 200, or maybe 400, people stand around a gigantic glittering pool and dance sleepily on a (banned) indoor dance floor. Nobody famous shows up, which at this point makes a lot of sense.

There are, of course, no cows either, but there is a statue of one next to the pool.

I walk over and touch him on his cow leg, which is solid and cold. I get a glass of wine in a plastic cup from a person who may or may not be a bartender, and I spend most of the party waiting in line for the single bathroom, thinking about my complicity in upholding a culture of wealth and arbitrary worship that has no interest in sustaining anything but itself.

The next day, news will break that Cannes is now allowing non-E.U. citizens to get a vaccine health pass so that they no longer have to get tested every 48 hours. Shortly thereafter, news will break that, actually, no, they are not ■ doing that, sorry.

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SHELBY J., BACKING VOCALIST:

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MORRIS HAYES, KEYBO MUSICAL DIRECTOR:

TAL WILKENFELD, BASSI

HAYES:

HAYES:

SHELBY J.:

FIORILLO:

HAYES:

WILKENFELD:

WARFIELD:

HAYES:

SHELBY J.:

WILKENFELD:

SHELBY J.:

tv

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podcasts

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movies

T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S

CRITICS

Jen Chaney on Naomi Osaka … Nicholas Quah on Aack Cast …

Bilge Ebiri on Space Jam 2.

T V / JEN CHANEY

The Inner Game A study of a champion still struggling to feel like one. the sound of a tennis ball hitting a racquet or bouncing off a court’s surface over and over, forehand after forehand, is as fundamental to Naomi Osaka as her own heartbeat. In Naomi Osaka, the Netflix docuseries about perhaps the most successful tennis champion of her generation, director Garrett Bradley amplifies that metronomic rhythm. In scenes when the 23-year-old is playing the game and some when she isn’t, the sound is as relentless, urgent, and inescapable as the athlete’s high standards for herself. It is also reflective of Bradley’s immersive and intimate approach—one that extends beyond attempting to explain who Osaka is in order to make the audience feel how it feels to be her.

Naomi Osaka is divided into three episodes—“Rise,” “Champion Mentality,” and “New Blueprint”—that reflect the arc of Osaka’s career without including some of the more recent events in that timeline, specifically her withdrawal in May from the French Open. Before the start of that tournaNAOMI OSAKA ment, she announced on Instagram that she would not participate in NETFLIX. post-match press conferences for mental-health reasons, noting that the process of answering questions, especially after a loss, often feels like “kicking a person while they are down.” After her first-round win, 62 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

French Open officials fined her $15,000 for skipping the press conference and threatened to default her from both that competition and future Grand Slams—so Osaka withdrew from the tournament the next day. She issued a statement that she was trying to exercise self-care after suffering bouts of depression following the 2018 U.S. Open and experiencing anxiety during Q&As. The next month, she withdrew from Wimbledon to (according to her agent) take “some personal time with friends and family.”

All of this happened too late to be shown in the docuseries. Nonetheless, Bradley centers Osaka’s struggles to maintain equilibrium. After losing to Belinda Bencic at the 2019 U.S. Open, Osaka talks about needing to “mentally take a break.” At times, she wonders about her identity outside tennis: “For so long, I’ve tied winning to my worth as a person. What am I if I’m not a good tennis player?” Following her loss to Coco Gauff at last year’s Australian Open, Osaka

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Naomi Osaka

P H OTO G R A P H : TO N Y KO R O DY / S YG M A V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S

films herself taking a late-night stroll— “It’s either walk or don’t sleep and lose my mind”—and reflecting on the then-fresh loss of Kobe Bryant, her friend and mentor.

“I’m supposed to carry on his mentality in tennis, and here I am … I haven’t won a Grand Slam, like, I’m losing matches because I’m mentally weak,” she says through sniffles, looking directly into her phone camera. No one, it seems, is harder on Osaka than Osaka herself.

Contrary to her inner monologue and the narrative spun by French Open officials and some tennis observers, this daughter of a Japanese mother and a Haitian father comes across not as weak but as deeply introspective. In snippets of press conferences included in the series, the four-time Grand Slam winner seems very capable of answering questions. After she loses the Australian Open to Gauff, journalists ask how devastated she is. She responds more honestly than most athletes in postgame interviews. “I’m sort of like the vessel that everyone’s hard work is put into, and I wasn’t able to, like, do what I was supposed to do,” she says. The problem isn’t that Osaka is too meek to speak—it’s that she absorbs public feedback through her every pore.

Tennis is a lonely sport, especially the singles game. It seems as if there’s only one person who can be blamed for errors, and those mistakes affect everyone in a player’s orbit: coaches, trainers, parents, sponsors.

With great care and empathy, Bradley— who was given extraordinary access to her subject—shows how much that weighs on Osaka, who has spent her entire life working toward winning titles. Old home movies of the future star, made shortly after her family moved from Japan to the U.S. when she was 3 years old, show her running around on a tennis court with her sister, Mari, both of them swinging racquets nearly as big as their bodies.

Bradley was nominated for an Academy Award for her 2020 documentary Time, which followed a Louisiana woman’s long battle to relieve her husband from an unjust prison sentence. Just as she was in the making of that film, Bradley is sensitive to the minutiae of Osaka’s life. Moments that might seem small become significant through the filmmaker’s lens—as when Osaka, having just settled into her own home, moves her U.S. Open trophy from a prominent perch and replaces it with a piece of art from her sister. Naomi Osaka acknowledges how the athlete’s multiracial identity and family history have shaped who she has become; at one point, while describing the financial hardships of her early childhood, Osaka says, “It was either become a champion or probably be broke.”

While this series is less aggrandizing than a lot of sports documentaries, it still asserts a very specific point of view. The first episode covers Osaka’s 2018 U.S. Open victory over Serena Williams, her childhood hero. It makes clear the significance of the win—Osaka was the first Japanese player of any gender to win a Grand Slam—and how delighted, and rattled, Osaka is afterward. But Bradley also leaves out some major contextual details in her telling: The umpire, perceiving that Williams was being coached while playing, imposed code violations against her. Williams denied she was coached and went on to argue with the umpire for the rest of the match. When Osaka beat her, some spectators claimed the match had been stolen; they booed during the trophy ceremony and made Osaka cry.

We don’t see any of that conflict in the Netflix series. At first, it seems like a glaring oversight. By the end of Naomi Osaka, though, it registers as a deliberate choice, one that avoids painting Osaka as a victim and establishes her instead as an individual.

There’s a version of Osaka’s story that could

have characterized her as Williams’s Gen-Z descendant, a young woman of color with great power in her stroke and high visibility as a cultural figure off the court. (In 2020, Osaka surpassed Williams to become the highest-paid female athlete in the world.)

Bradley takes pains to define Osaka on her own terms, outside the longest shadow in women’s tennis. As proof of the player’s agency, the series emphasizes Osaka’s decision to speak out against racial injustice last summer by withdrawing from the semifinals at the Western & Southern Open and wearing face masks that highlighted the names of victims of police violence during the U.S. Open.

Osaka’s constant acknowledgments of her own fallibility feel new, a change from the hypermanaged images and aggro intensity that have characterized some of the major tennis stars of the past. Naomi Osaka—released a week before Osaka heads to the Tokyo Olympics—is very clearly the first chapter in this player’s story. It reveals a global athletic star just beginning to understand that the ball is ■ truly in her court.

P O D C A S T S / NICHOLAS QUAH

More Like Tragicomic Revisiting Cathy, neurotic of the funny pages. the first time I read the word Aack! was in the global syndication of the daily comic strip “Cathy,” nestled between “Garfield” and “The Far Side” in the English-language newspapers in Malaysia, where I grew up. I lived half a world away from the creator of “Cathy,” Cathy Guisewite, but the main character’s catchphrase imprinted itself onto my brain anyway—a testament to the strip’s power in the ’80s and ’90s. “Cathy” is now typically evoked with mixed feelings, denigrated for what it is half-remembered to represent: the angst of a distinctly boomerish upper-middle-class white woman exasperated by her attempts to “have it all” (a man, a white-collar job, a body that fits with conventional beauty standards) and wracked with guilt about the whole thing. The comic ran in newspapers for 34 industrious years, from 1976 to 2010, and its brand of fame adds to the complication: Surely anything beloved by so many suburban, middle-aged moms must be antithetical to good taste.

Jamie Loftus does not believe this. And in Aack Cast, the audio series that debuted last month, she mounts a full-throated argument for “Cathy” and its complexity. To see it, she posits, you just have to take the strip’s whole context on its own terms—the character, the time frame, Guisewite herself. You also have to, you know, actually read the comics. (And Loftus has read all of them.) Through a mix of interviews, literary analysis, and opinion, Aack Cast pays close attention to how the character navigated the fluid mores of an accelerating culture. When confronted with the changes of the comic strip’s many eras—by Loftus’s accounting, “Cathy” spanned seven presidents and two feminist movements—Guisewite’s creation often seems circumspect, uncertain of how she feels about the new july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

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Cathy Guisewite in 1982.

things being asked of her. Cathy is a figure tentativeness about committing to feminist defined by figuring stuff out. ideals can be read as conservative, almost Oh, and there’s this: “While it’s never regressive. But Loftus has enormous empashown in the comic, obviously, Cathy thy for the character, and that makes up fucks,” Loftus emphasizes in the first epi- the backbone of the podcast’s philosophy. sode, checking off a list of men who appear “I think Cathy is a symbol of how women’s as the character’s boyfriends. “She fucks, anxieties and concerns can be considered and to think that she only dreams of fuck- embarrassing, or not worthy of discussion, ing but never does is to fundamentally mis- if the character in question isn’t a perfect understand Cathy.” role model,” she says.

Loftus is a singular voice in podcasting: She extends that assessment to Cathy’s messy yet precise, confident yet conflicted. creator, too. As Loftus makes clear, Cathy Also, very funny. The comedian and TV Guisewite the person is not Cathy the charwriter turned to audio several years ago acter. Guisewite didn’t even want to name and has become a model for what a truly the strip after herself. (It was her syndicate’s independent voice in the medium can idea.) But as the second episode highlights, sound like. (Her first solo audio project the challenges that Cathy faces are about was 2020’s My Year in Mensa, in which the same ones that Guisewite confronted she documents her strange journey of in her own life—the emotional morass of becoming a member and, soon food and body image, the struggle after, persona non grata of the between self-definition and an self-described high-IQ society.) obsession with men. Guisewite Aack Cast—which she created started the strip when she was AACK CAST IHEARTMEDIA. with support from and distribuin her 20s and became a minor tion by iHeartMedia—is her third celebrity during the comic’s highlongform audio project in about a water-mark years—we’re talking year and a half. It follows Lolita a global-merchandising empire Podcast, released last fall, which revis- and appearances on Johnny Carson. Like ited the controversial legacy of Nabokov’s Cathy, she is subject to her own evolutions.

1955 novel, and the two podcasts could Talking to Loftus about an early interview be considered companion projects: Both in which Guisewite had said, “No matter are unorthodox feats of cultural journal- what a woman does, having a man in her ism about artifacts intimately connected life is the most important thing,” the Guiseto mainstream ideas regarding women wite of today admits, “I read that now … It’s and womanhood. (Loftus also co-hosts truly like reading your diary. You just want the weekly The Bechdel Cast with Caitlin to throw up. Or burn it.”

Durante, exploring the portrayal of women Even as Loftus argues for Cathy and in film.)

Guisewite’s relevance, though, she remains All of Loftus’s skill sets are detectable in alive to critiques—mostly, critiques about Aack Cast, which is currently slated to run the fact that the comic shows only a specific for eight episodes: She stitches together slice of female experience. The strip broke archival and interview tape with sketch- through during an era when the medium like re-creations of the comics and her was dominated by male cartoonists, with own narration, drifting between reporting, female viewpoints virtually nonexistent. personal essay, and jokes. The character’s But perspectives like Guisewite’s take up obsession with her weight and the strip’s a lot more space today. Loftus insists on 64 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

complexity, placing an emphasis on how we’re always negotiating the politics of the moment, our own perspective, and the hand we’re dealt. A position of relative privilege doesn’t necessarily cancel out the pains you may feel. Both things can be true at the same time.

A huge part of what’s appealing about Loftus’s longform audio projects is how personal they seem to her. Between delivering her arguments and findings, Loftus periodically dips into her own life, refracting her insecurities and uncertainties into the analysis. She takes that approach whether the subject is “Cathy,” Lolita, or even Mensa. In the Mensa series, she excoriates the group’s toxic culture and its very concept. But you can also hear how she is affected by the Mensans’ treatment of her—how it flares up her insecurities about being a person in the world. In that sense, Cathy and Loftus are kindred spirits. At the end of the day, they’re both just trying to ■ figure stuff out. Aren’t we all?

M O V I E S / BILGE EBIRI

This IP Can’t Dunk King James gets traded to the Warner Bros. super-team. “athletes acting, that never goes well.” This throwaway joke uttered by LeBron James in Space Jam: A New Legacy may be the film’s only pseudoacknowledgment that the original Space Jam wasn’t an unimpeachable masterpiece. For years, the 1996 hit, in which Michael Jordan, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and a variety of Looney Tunes characters are forced to play an intergalactic game of basketball, was one of those movies kids adored and parents forced themselves to sit through. James, who was 11 when Space Jam came out, was reportedly one of those kids and has now replaced Jordan as the star of the franchise, perhaps setting the stage for a lucrative post-NBA career.

Here’s the good news for King James: Questions about who’s the better player aside, he is certainly a better actor than His Airness ever was. He also has the advantage of working with journeyman director Malcolm D. Lee (The Best Man, Undercover Brother, Girls Trip), an underappreciated pro who keeps things

P H OTO G R A P H : © 2 0 2 1 WA R N E R B R O S. E N T E R TA I N M E N T I N C .

bouncing along—a step up from the first toward the Road Runner while branfilm’s Joe Pytka, who, despite being an dishing a giant knife and fork, is just silly acclaimed commercial director, couldn’t enough to work. Lola Bunny (voiced by properly frame a close-up.

Zendaya) training to become an Amazon The film’s basic idea has value too. Those warrior in Wonder Woman’s Themyscira— of us who became parents in the subsequent sure, why not? Inserting Foghorn Leghorn years have discovered that the combination into Game of Thrones, or Speedy Gonzaof NBA superstars and classic cartoon char- les and a leather-clad Granny into The acters remains potent to this day. Which Matrix, however, just feels like IP Mad may be why the premise of Space Jam: A Libs. The less said about Yosemite Sam New Legacy hasn’t steered far from that of becoming the Sam in Casablanca’s “Play its predecessor: Our hero must assemble a it again, Sam” scene, the better. team with Bugs, Daffy, and the rest of the Is this all starting to sound familiar? The Looney Tunes crew for a high-stakes game bad guy’s plan is pretty much the movie’s against some intimidating creatures who plan: Embed LeBron James into a variety have been given the skills of real-life bas- of Warner Bros. properties. Like most corketball stars (including Klay Thompson, porate cinematic endeavors, Space Jam: A Diana Taurasi, and James’s own New Legacy tries to have it both Lakers teammate Anthony Davis). ways, professing to be on the side SPACE JAM: A NEW This time, however, the game of the angels while doing the work LEGACY they must play is something of the Devil. It criticizes shameDIRECTED BY MALCOLM D. LEE. called Dom Ball, a freewheelless, moneygrubbing attempts WARNER BROS. PG. ing, gravity-defying variation on to synergize and update beloved basketball created by LeBron’s classics (as LeBron himself puts tech-savvy 12-year-old son, Dom it, “This idea is just straight-up (Cedric Joe), whose preference for gaming bad”), all the while shamelessly synergizing and coding over hooping frustrates his per- and updating beloved classics. Late in the fectionist dad. Father and son have wound film, when the 2-D Looney Tunes characup at odds thanks to the sinister machi- ters suddenly become three-dimensional nations of Al G. Rhythm (Don Cheadle), a and grow photo-realistic fur, they express sentient algorithm (get it?) who wants to disgust at themselves. It’s the movie’s best punish LeBron because the basketball star joke because the folks at Warner would dismissed his plan to integrate LeBron’s probably like nothing more than to churn likeness into a variety of studio properties out “live-action” versions of these cartoon (Batman vs. LeBron! LeBron of Thrones! icons à la its rival Disney.

LeBron and the Chamber of Secrets!).

But maybe the problem is that the picAl G. sucks Dom and LeBron into his ture should have gone further. While the digital kingdom and turns son against father. While Al G. ingratiates himself with the child, Dad is sent spinning off into the LeBron James distant reaches of the so-called Serververse, ultimately landing in Toon World, whose sole inhabitant is now a lonely Bugs Bunny (voiced by Jeff Bergman). LeBron’s arrival in Toon World may be the film’s most entertaining passage, as he transforms into an old-fashioned, 2-D animated version of himself and promptly begins to do Looney Tunes things like fall off cliffs and crash to the ground as a disembodied, bouncing basketball head that Bugs must then pump back into its full human shape.

Such psychedelic slapstick retains the ability to surprise. (Older viewers may recall that the popularity of the original Space Jam initially led not to a sequel but to a delightful full-on animated feature called Looney Tunes: Back in Action in 2003.)

Things get a bit more uneven after LeBron and Bugs commandeer Marvin the Martian’s spaceship and, in an attempt to recruit their own team, travel to different movie and TV worlds. The sight of Wile E. Coyote replicating a shot from Mad Max: Fury Road, diving in slow motion

idea of incorporating LeBron and Looney Tunes into all these classic Warner properties may sound brazen, it isn’t brazen enough: The conceit loses energy pretty quickly, a series of jokes nobody bothered to develop beyond “What if?” This debilitating lack of inspiration becomes apparent during the climactic game, played in front of a massive crowd filled with even more familiar characters, from the ScoobyDoo gang to the Jetsons to the ThunderCats to the Iron Giant to King Kong to Mr. Freeze to an assortment of Jokers. Also there: Bette Davis’s character from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (really) and the droogs from A Clockwork Orange.

Outrageous! But is it, though? Plopping all these disparate characters into the film feels like the kind of thing we’re supposed to deem “crazy” and maybe even get offended by … if only any of them did anything crazy or offensive or even remotely interesting. (Seriously, what’s the point of throwing King Kong into the crowd and not having him do King Kong things?)

This is the real problem with so much franchise filmmaking. The studios rarely seem to want to do anything with their properties other than to remind us that they still own them. In the grand scheme of things, the new Space Jam isn’t hateful or inept; it fills a two-hour hole in the schedule, which keeps parents happy, and it boosts the brand, which keeps shareholders happy. Whether it could have also been a good movie may not have crossed ■ anyone’s mind.

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10.

4.

(like Caryl Churchill and Mac Wellman), and a meditation on Anne Sexton’s poetry directed by Jim Petosa (August 13–17). helen shaw TV

T h e C U LT U R E PA G E S

To

7. Watch Ted Lasso Return of the King of Nice.

AppleTV+, July 23.

As Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis is still baking biscuits and acting all folksy in season two. But a new team psychologist (Sarah Niles) might be the first person to prove immune to Coach’s charms. Maybe she’ll be more impressed if he shows her his Golden Globes acceptance speech? j.c.

MOVIES

8. See

Playing With Sharks

From Sundance.

Disney+, July 23.

Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read.

J U LY 2 1– AU G U S T 4

Australian diver Valerie Taylor started out spearfishing but has since become one of the world’s most prominent conservationists. Sally Aitken’s doc includes immense amounts of footage from her career—much of it shot in collaboration with Taylor’s late filmmaker husband, Ron— which makes it as transporting as it is insightful and moving. bilge ebiri ART

POP MUSIC

1. Listen to For Free The title track is a Joni Mitchell cover.

BMG, July 23.

Folk-rock lifer David Crosby had a rough 2020.

The inability to tour pinched his finances. The Crosby, Stills & Nash legend channeled his frustrations in music. For Free, Croz’s eighth studio album, keeps his late-career hot streak alive with ten plush, stately folk songs touting collaborations with Michael McDonald, Donald Fagen, Sarah Jarosz, and his eldest son, James Raymond. craig jenkins TV

2. Watch

Summer Olympics

Games on.

NBC, July 23.

The Tokyo Games apparently cannot be stopped: That means the opening ceremony, airing live at the ripe hour of 6:55 a.m. ET, will take place with pomp, pageantry, and the usual very long parade/ flag-identification quiz. jen chaney BOOKS

3. Read Something New

Under the Sun

Think Don DeLillo meets Inherent Vice.

Hogarth, August 3.

A simmering ecothriller conjures an L.A. plagued by privatization and wildfires where all but the wealthiest Californians have to drink WAT-R, a synthetic water substitute. Alexandra Kleeman interrogates the manifold ways our lives are shaped by our imperiled environment, foregrounding the

slow-motion catastrophe of climate change and its attendant anxieties. cornelia channing MOVIES

4. See The Green Knight Oh my God, Dev Patel.

In theaters July 30.

A24’s medieval epic is David Lowery’s take on the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain, played with all of the noble heroics Dev Patel can muster, which, trust me, is a lot. sangeeta singh-kurtz OPERA

5. See The Barber

of Seville

Rossinian virtuosity.

Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, July 27 to 28.

You know normal life is resuming when opera is back, albeit only semi-staged. Teatro Nuovo, founded by conductor Will Crutchfield to uphold the glories of bel canto style, performs Rossini’s romp with selectively historical meticulousness.

Crutchfield, with violinist Jakob Lehmann, leads the same number of players as at the 1816 premiere, conducting some of the time from a period fortepiano. justin davidson THEATER

6. See PTP/NYC Think the “long thought.”

ptpnyc.org, through August 17.

Every year, the Potomac Theatre Project presents serious-minded seasons with the likes of Barker and Pinter. This year, the repertoire will be virtual, but its tradition of theater as a place to think the “long thought” will remain. Offerings include Standing on the Edge of Time (July 23–27), a compilation of pieces by the group’s favorite writers

66 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

9. See Joshua Marsh Spreading his gifted wings.

Mother Gallery, 1154 North Avenue, Beacon, through August 15.

Marsh’s chromatically intense dreamscapes in his first solo show at this Hudson Valley gallery feature curves and configurations that suggest waterfalls, flows, the spirit rising, and atmospheric pressures opening. jerry saltz TV

10. Watch Sexy Beasts

Win a date with a half-dolphin, half-human.

Netflix, July 21.

The bizarre reality series dares to ask, “What if we merged The Masked Singer with The Bachelor?”

You might even see a beaver-man matched with a lady with a leopard’s head. j.c.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

11. Hear The Knights Worth the hike to Westchester.

Venetian Theater, Caramoor Summer Music Festival, Katonah, New York, July 30.

At Caramoor, an hour’s drive north of Manhattan, Pekka Kuusisto leads the tight-knight chamber orchestra in two new works—Nico Muhly’s Shrink and Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst—framed by Bach and Beethoven. j.d.

POP MUSIC

12. Listen to Spiral Darkside’s second album.

Matador, July 23.

A decade ago, Chilean-American electronic musician Nicolás Jaar and Brooklyn-based multiinstrumentalist Dave Harrington began collaborating on moody atmospherics and subtle dance-

F R O M A F T E R PA R T I E S : S TO R I E S B Y A N T H O N Y V E A S N A S O. CO P Y R I G H T 2 0 2 1 R AV Y S O A N D A L E X A N D E R G I L B E R T TO R R E S. E XC E R P T E D B Y P E R M I S S I O N O F E CCO, A N I M P R I N T O F H A R P E R CO L L I N S ( B O O K E XC E R P T ) .

For more culture coverage and streaming recommendatio see vulture.co

7.

8.

P H OTO G R A P H S : CO U R T E S Y O F N E T F L I X © 2 0 2 1 ( M A S T E R S O F T H E U N I V E R S E , S E X Y B E A S T S ) ; R O N & VA L E R I E TAY LO R ( P L AY I N G W I T H S H A R K S ) ; A P P L E T V + ( T E D L A S S O) ; CO U R T E S Y O F A 24 ( T H E G R E E N K N I G H T )

14.

music airs as Darkside; their new set delivers an alluring serving of heady, hazy night music. c.j.

Get Lost

MOVIES

13. See BlackStar

Film Festival

Eighty films, in person and online. blackstarfest.org, August 4 to 8.

This exceptional Philadelphia-based fest has showcased the work of Black, brown, and Indigenous artists for a decade. Highlights include Writing With Fire, a doc about an Indian newspaper run by Dalit women; Teeth, a video about two people struggling to prove to U.K. Immigration their relationship is real; and Beans, a drama about a Mohawk girl coming of age during the 1990 Oka Crisis in Quebec. alison willmore

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14. Watch Masters of the

Universe: Revelation

By the power of Grayskull!

Netflix, July 23.

Kevin Smith created this animated series in which He-Man (voiced by Chris Wood of The Vampire Diaries) faces off against Skeletor (Mark Hamill) because that’s what they used to do in the cartoon nearly 40 years ago and, dammit, we deserve to see them do it again. j.c.

nymag.com/ogs

BOOKS

15. Read Billy Summers Stephen King’s cannon enters the canon.

Scribner, August 3.

Hit man Billy Summers must live under cover for months and months as a writer, until his target arrives. Cottoning to the role, he takes a shot at telling the truth of his life—a Dickensian childhood, war reminiscences à la Tim O’Brien, a hardboiled road trip worthy of Patricia Highsmith. En route to Billy’s fate, pearls of writerly wisdom and King Universe Easter eggs are strewn about with equally dark and delightful results. carl rosen CLASSICAL MUSIC

16. Hear

Ensemble Connect

Via Carnegie Hall.

Madison Square Park, July 28.

In a fusion of music, sculpture, landscape, and urbanism, an idiosyncratic trio (Sae Hashimoto on percussion, Suliman Tekalli on violin, and Ari Evan on cello) performs music by Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, and Ellington—plus Andrea Casarrubios’s Speechless and Leven Zuelke’s At a Cemetery—at Maya Lin’s wintry Ghost Forest. j.d.

MOVIES

17. See Neonoir An evergreen genre.

The Criterion Channel.

There’s tons—tons!—of neonoir films to choose from, but I highly recommend Arthur Penn’s masterpiece, Night Moves; Michael Mann’s groundbreaking first feature, Thief; and Brian De Palma’s gloriously depraved and controversial Body Double. b.e.

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A week-in-review newsletter From the people who make New York

TV

THEATER

18. Watch

23. See Brian Stokes

Behind the Music More secrets will be revealed.

Our man of la Mancha.

Paramount+, July 29.

Lincoln Center, July 21 to 23, August 12 to 14.

The VH1 series reboots with episodes focused on Ricky Martin, LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, New Kids on the Block, and Duran Duran. j.c.

The golden vocal cords of “Broadway leading man” Brian Stokes Mitchell proved most valuable to the city during the shutdown, when he raised spirits nightly by singing “The Impossible Dream” out his Upper West Side window. Now, he presents a free evening of song as part of the Lincoln Center’s “Restart Stages” in lovely Damrosch Park. h.s.

POP MUSIC

19. Listen to

Stand for Myself “Queen of Country Soul.”

Easy Eye Sound, July 30.

British singer-songwriter Yola is a powerhouse vocalist and a writer whose pen netted her four Grammy nominations for her 2019 debut, Walk Through Fire. In her new set, she bends vast expanses of roots music and its many offshoots (soul, gospel, rock, folk, disco, and the blues) to her formidable will. c.j.

ART

20. See Un/Common

Proximity NXTHVN fellows.

James Cohan Gallery, 48 Walker Street, through August 13.

In a tremendous example of artists not just taking the money and running, painter Titus Kaphar and Jason Price have founded the NXTHVN Studio Fellowship in New Haven, focusing on local artists, mostly of color. This exhibition shows that the force is strong outside New York, that whole new foundations are in the process of being built, and that the next art world will be nothing short of thrilling. j.s.

TV

21. Watch

The Pursuit of Love

For Anglophiles and romantics.

Prime Video, July 30.

Written and directed by Emily Mortimer, who also stars, this BBC miniseries follows the captivating, sex-obsessed Linda Radlett (Lily James) and her timid best friend and cousin Fanny Logan (Emily Beecham) as they leave the sheltered country life for the big city. Set in Europe before WWII, the girls are—of course—in search of love, sex, and the perfect husband. Dominic West and Andrew Scott star to great effect. s.s.k.

OPERA

22. See Le Roi Arthus Camelot in the Hudson Valley.

Bard Music Festival, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, July 25 to August 1.

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Mitchell

Like a slumbering princess, Ernest Chausson’s opulent treatment of the King Arthur legend all but disappeared from public consciousness for over a century and is only now getting its staged American premiere in a production directed by Louisa Proske, featuring baritone Norman Garrett and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. j.d.

MOVIES

24. See The Last Letter

From Your Lover

A tantalizing affair.

Netflix, July 23.

This Shailene Woodley–Felicity Jones romantic drama is a perfect sick movie. A messy reporter (Jones) finds a trove of love letters from a couple’s secret affair in 1965. In gorgeous flashback, a ’60s Woodley falls for the sexy reporter profiling her cold, wealthy husband. It’s swoony and lush and the perfect thing to watch while sprawled on your couch with a summer cold. kerensa cadenas TV

25. Watch Cooking

With Paris

The simple life.

Netflix, August 4.

Reality TV might just be where Paris Hilton truly excels. Thankfully, Hilton has returned to her roots with this series based on her YouTube cooking show. Each episode, she will be joined by her famous friends, who will gab and cook. Now that’s hot. k.c.

THE 60-SECOND BOOK EXCERPT

Afterparties

By Anthony Veasna So

always they find us inappropriate, but today especially so. Here we are with nowhere to go and nothing to do, sitting in a rusty pickup truck, the one leaking oil, the one with the busted transmission that sounds like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Here we are with the engine running for the AC, the doors wide open for our bare legs to spill out. Because this, right here, to survive the heat, this is all we have.

An hour ago we became outcasts.

One of us—not me—would not shut the fuck up. And since the grandmas are prepping for the monks and need to focus, we’ve been banished outside to choke on traces of manure blown in from the asparagus farms surrounding us, our hometown, this shitty place of boring dudes always pissing green stink.

(Ecco, August 3)

It’s a Dog’s Market CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 8

time,” she told herself. So she started applying for dogs on Petfinder and boutique-rescue websites. “I would look up at my clock, and it would be two in the morning,” she says. Her hopes were high when she got a meeting with a Chihuahua mix in the suburbs named Mary Shelley. Lauren thought the meeting went well, but it ultimately didn’t result in the interviewer granting the adoption. “Then I was in conspiracy-theory mode, thinking she doesn’t like gay people, or single people, or people who live in the city,” she says. “It was a crazymaking experience. It’s a pandemic, so your world is already turned upside down, but I became psychotic.

“The people who run rescue organizations—this was their moment to shine,” she adds. “Even though they were totally bogged down with requests, they got to feel the power. They got to make someone’s dreams come true or smash them to the ground.”

The inquiries can get extremely personal. “I found the questions very offensive,” says Joanna, a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center nurse who tried to adopt last year with her architect husband. “I was like, ‘What does this have to do with getting a dog?’ ” Her husband didn’t even want to put the thought out into the universe, but he was forced to admit that he’d probably be the one to take a shared pet in the event of a divorce. The two also had to grapple with what would happen if one or both of them died of covid during the pandemic. And would both of them be able to take three days off at a moment’s notice to help the dog acclimate to its new home? “I was frank with her and said, ‘I take care of cancer patients,’ ” says Joanna. “She was very unsatisfied with our answer.”

“The more popular the rescue is on the internet, the more clout they have,” says Molly, a writer in New York. “If you have a really good social-media presence, you can throw your weight around.” (The clout goes both ways: Posting about your rescue dog on Instagram is an indirect way of broadcasting that someone out there deemed you morally worthy enough to be chosen.) She inquired about eight dogs in

six weeks from about five different rescues, only to be continually rejected. She finally got an interview with a rescue agency whose cute dogs she had seen on social media. They asked to tour her apartment over Zoom. Fine. They asked for her references. Great. But then they asked if she would pay for an expensive trainer. She asked if she could wait—not only was it during the height of covid, but the cost of the sessions with the trainer could be close to $1,000. The person she was dealing with said over email that dogs were investments and suggested she look elsewhere.

“I was like, This is so Brooklyn,” she says.

Still, others wished the warning about trainers had been more explicit. At the height of the pandemic, Steven remembers scrolling through social-media post after social-media post saying things like “urgent: need to find this guy a home” while “picturing this dog on a conveyor belt going toward this whirring saw. And meanwhile I am screaming at my phone, ‘I applied and you turned me down!’”

But after securing a dog, he came to believe the process, while tough on the human applicants, wasn’t tough enough when it came to the dog’s needs. Right off the bat, Cooper was very hyper and mouthy when playing. “We were doing the thing that everyone does, like, posting pics: ‘We’re at the park, isn’t this fun, hahaha,’” he says. But the reality was much less Instagram-worthy.

Cooper became difficult to handle, especially in a small New York apartment; mouthiness escalated to gnashing his teeth and guarding food. “It’s embarrassing, and I hate having to tell people we had to give the dog back,” he says. (So much so that Steven requested a pseudonym for himself and for Cooper.) “To be frank, the experience we had with the dog was pretty traumatic. If this volunteer had felt so powerful, I wish that they had said we wouldn’t be able to handle this dog.” Although Steven’s Instagram is replete with photos of other friends’ dogs, evidence of Cooper’s existence has disappeared from the account.

T

he rescue-dog demand has also been stressful for the overwhelmed (and overwhelmingly volunteer) workforce that keeps the supply chain running. On a recent Saturday, Jason was speeding toward JFK airport in a windowless white van covered in graffiti. Though he was on his way to help rescue dogs, he is the first to admit he’s not the biggest fan of the animals.

“I just need something to do,” he says.

“I was going crazy sitting around the house.” His friend, who was employed at a rescue, recommended him for an unpaid gig. Prior to the pandemic, he managed an

Off Broadway play in the city. The 34-yearold, who is athletically built with a shaved head, has a compulsive need to be coordinating a production, and getting dogs to New York City from a different continent is definitely that.

Many of the city’s rescue dogs come from other parts of the world these days, brought over by volunteers who take them through a complicated Customs process. This is part of what Pet Nation author Mark Cushing calls the “canine freedom train.” A former corporate trial attorney, Cushing had thought that American shelters were filled with dogs with a figurative hatchet outside their kennel; that was until his daughter, a shelter volunteer, said that, in fact, scores of people were lined up around the block every weekend in hopes of adopting a handful of dogs.

“I started to talk to shelter leaders across the country,” Cushing says. “And one by one, they said any adoptable dog without a medical issue is gone by noon on Saturday. But the public didn’t know that. Only the dog seekers and the experts did.”

Jason waited in arrivals, ready to stop anyone who walked by with dog crates.

When he saw some, he swooped in. It turned out that he had ended up with an extra animal—one that was yowling like it needed to get out and pee. He couldn’t figure out to whom it belonged, and after about 40 minutes of drama in the pickup area, two large men jumped out of a truck with out-of-state plates. They handed Jason $20 before he knew what was happening, loaded the dog into their Silverado, and sped off toward North Carolina. It was unclear if they were adopters themselves or worked for a shelter.

With that out of the way, Jason tried to carefully maneuver a luggage cart full of the remaining dog crates to the lot where he was parked. When one fell, the animal inside didn’t make a sound, presumably zonked from its long journey across the ocean. More volunteers were waiting at the shelter with food, water, and an enormous number of puppy pads when he arrived.

After the animals decompressed from their long flight, they would be taken to an adoption event, where they would hopefully meet their new humans.

Emily Wells hasn’t taken a vacation in years. She works full time on Wall Street but is also the coordinator for Pixies & Paws Rescue—a job that she does in between calls and meetings and emails. That means responding to DMs on Instagram about available dogs, attending adoption events on weekends, and getting on the phone with a vet at 10 p.m. because one of her fosters got sick. That also means screening applications, which more than doubled during the height of the pandemic. Typically, she denies

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about one-third. This part of her job might not be the most physically demanding, but it does take a psychic toll.

“What I’ve found is a lot of people are very entitled,” she says. “They send nasty emails. I’ve been called every name in the book. But there are reasons we deny. We are entrusted with placing a living, breathing thing in someone’s home for the rest of its life.” She wishes people would understand that the rescue is just her and one other person trying their best to deal with off-thecharts levels of demand. “I know rescues that don’t even reply,” she says. “So the fact that we do and still get shit for that is annoying.” And explaining why someone was rejected can create its own problems: What if they use that information to fib on their next application?

Rescues like Wells’s are largely dependent on foster parents to house the dogs they import. Foster-to-adopt is one way that people adopt pets, a means of testing out compatibility and increasing one’s chances of adopting in a hypercompetitive city. But demand for dogs was so high last year that even proven volunteers couldn’t get their hands on a foster. Take Suchita, an animal lover who moved from India to New Jersey for her husband’s VP job with a big bank in 2019. Unable to work owing to visa issues, she became a prolific dog fosterer for a rescue in Queens. She also worked with a program that pairs volunteers with elderly animal owners who need help taking their pets out on walks. That program was suspended during covid, which left Suchita desperate for more dog time.

Figuring that online volunteer work might fill the void, she started helping another organization wade through its massive backlog of applications by calling references. She offered to foster more dogs but didn’t hear back, nor did her attempts to adopt pan out. When she went ahead and adopted Sasha, a Pomeranian, through another rescue agency, the first organization was not happy. “After I posted Sasha on Instagram, they called me saying it was a conflict of interest to have worked with another agency,” Suchita says. “I was not at all prepared for that. Then they unfollowed me. It really hurt, but no hard feelings.” She is humbly aware of the fact that in New York, there is always someone who has a nicer apartment, a better job, and more experience than you. If everything else is equal, why shouldn’t a shelter try to give a dog to someone who can afford to give it the best life possible?

“They don’t treat humans nicely, but at least they treat dogs nicely,” she says.

In some corners of the rescue world, a reckoning is taking place. Rachael Ziering, the executive director of Muddy Paws

Rescue, which found homes for around 1,000 dogs last year, got her start volunteering at other nonprofits whose adoption processes she found abhorrent. She saw, for instance, people look at adoption applications and say, “Oh, that’s a terrible Zip Code.

I’m not adopting to them.” Or they would judge people based on their appearance.

“I know a lot of groups that will ask for your firstborn along with your application,” she says. “I think it’s well intentioned, but I think it just took a turn at some point. It’s morphed into sort of an unhealthy view that no one’s ever gonna be good enough.

Nobody’s ever perfect—the dog or the person.” Muddy Paws is instead embracing what is known as “open adoption,” a philosophy that allows for rescue volunteers to be more open-minded about what a good dog home might look like. It has started gaining traction among groups like the ASPCA in recent years, in part because the organization’s current president was denied a dog—twice. Instead of rejecting applicants outright based on their giving the “wrong” answers, Ziering’s team speaks with hopeful dog owners at length, learning about their lifestyles and histories to match them with the pet best for their family. Still, even a more inclusive philosophy toward profiling adoption applicants comes up against the intractable math: There are only so many dogs that need homes. Though Muddy Paws rejects less than one percent of applicants, some decide to adopt elsewhere if it means getting a dog faster.

Is any of this good for the dogs? Depends on whom you ask. If the intense questions involved in securing the dog cause someone to reflect before making a decision they’ll regret—sure. Others note that the average dog’s life span has hovered around 11 years for decades. “I think it’s probably true that the majority of people who want to adopt a dog should not,” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist who studies human-animal relationships, tells me. “They don’t have the wherewithal and don’t have what they need to give the animal a good life.” She herself ended up with two pets that didn’t get along at all—a herding mix and a pointer mix whose constant fighting made the idea of hosting a dinner party both perhaps “bloody” and definitely “scary and miserable.” She says shelters shouldn’t “drive away potentially loving and appropriate adopters because they don’t meet predetermined criteria,” but she also sees the importance of a thorough application process that prepares humans for the pitfalls of pet parenthood. “You need to be ready to have a dog who doesn’t like people very much,” says Pierce. When Bella, the 11-year-old she got from the Humane Society, dies, she’s not sure she will get a replacement, noting that the pandemic

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puppy boom is “driven by a reflection of human narcissism and neurosis.”

“A lot of this is driven by Instagram,” she says. “We have this expectation that dogs are not really dogs; they’re toys or fashion accessories.”

I

’m not pushing you, but it seems like you want to bring him home,” the Badass Animal Rescue volunteer said with the controlled energy of a usedcar salesperson. Bill and Sherrie were on the fence, and she could sense the close slipping away.

We are, it seems, witnessing the cooling of the puppy boom.

Although this organization saw applications rise 200 percent during the pandemic, things are now recalibrating back to normalcy. The unbearable loneliness of the pandemic has abated, replaced with anxiety about how to possibly do all the things all of us used to do every day. New Yorkers are being summoned back to the office or planning vacations. Many young professionals are finding that, when given the option between scrolling through rescue websites until 2 a.m. or doing drunken karaoke in a room full of friends, Dog Tinder is losing its appeal. Local shelters are seeing application numbers slip—many say they have returned to pre-covid levels—which, in turn, has made it slightly more of an adopter’s market.

Bill and Sherrie, a middle-aged couple who had lost their English bulldog three years ago, were looking for a replacement.

The dog with a bright-red boner jumped on Bill, and everyone pretended not to notice.

“He definitely has energy,” Bill said brightly.

The couple went to the hallway to talk it over. He was definitely a puller like their old dog, Xena. And he was also a hell of a shedder. The volunteer kept talking about something called a “love match,” but was this really one? “We’re just gonna need a little more time,” Sherrie confessed when they came back inside. No one was making eye contact. As they prepared to leave, the dog jumped up on Bill again, his tongue flopping sideways and his wagging tail spraying white fur. He was clearly not aware that the tenor of the room had shifted. “We might be back,” Bill said with an obvious twinge of guilt. “Don’t worry!”

We will probably look back on the class of pandemic dogs adopted in 2020 as the most desirable unwanted dogs of all time—the ultimate market-scarcity score for a slice of virtuous, privileged New York City. People like Danielle will see them paraded around places like McCarren Park, the living, breathing trophies for self-satisfied owners who made it through the gauntlet. At least ■ for the next 11 years or so.

Call Me a Traitor CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 2 7

driveway, neighbors watching. To Daniel’s horror, she was also interrogated. And then, carrying with them books and computers and paper, on that Friday evening in August, the FBI agents drove away.

Daniel was mystified, paralyzed in his confusion. Would they come back for him tomorrow? He apologized to the woman who owned the house, who was distraught and confused. He said he could not tell her what any of this was about, and he tried to reassure her that she wasn’t in any trouble. He felt he couldn’t stay there, impose on her, a minute longer.

Daniel packed up his few belongings, got on his motorcycle, and left. He says an SUV with three agents inside appeared behind him, and he skipped a curb and tried to lose them. He went 80 miles an hour on the highway, which was “kind of fun actually,” and headed straight for D.C., toward the home of a friend. The next day, he would meet with Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer associated with Snowden, Thomas Drake, and many other people who have disclosed information unflattering to American bureaucracy.

W

hat was there for him to do? The Department of Justice surely had everything it needed to send him to prison on Espionage Act charges, plausibly for a decade, but in August 2014, there was not a whisper of an indictment. Daniel moved to New York City and went to school, as he had said he would. He enrolled in classes like Rhetorical Grammar, and he went to them, but it was extremely hard to care about anything not related to the FBI watching him. He took a class about war and tried not to get angry when people in his classes, kids who had never done anything, said ridiculous things. Someone in his class said it was a feminist achievement for women to go to war, and the gulf between them seemed immeasurable.

It was hard, if not impossible, to do assignments, because assignments required writing, and writing required his computer, of which he had become very frightened. He felt, through it, watched.

Once, his roommate remembers, a popup ad appeared and Daniel slammed the screen shut. The brick walls of his apartment were porous; his roommate noticed that Daniel wadded up gum and stuck it in the holes. The documentarian came to the apartment. There had been a plan to film Daniel walking in the park, but he wouldn’t leave. He didn’t want to be part of the film anymore at all.

There was another film, too. Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour was released that fall.

For ideological fellow travelers, the film ends on an inspirational high point: Glenn Greenwald tells Snowden that a new source has come forward and scrawls something on a piece of paper visible to Snowden but hidden from the camera.

Snowden gives him a look.

“That’s actually—that’s really dangerous— um—on the source’s side. Do they know how to take care of themselves?”

“There’s a chart that goes like this,” says Greenwald. “It’s shaped like this.” Greenwald draws little squares pointing diagonally up the page, and on the top square he writes potus.

On another piece of paper, Greenwald writes, “There are 1.2 million people on various stages of their watch list.”

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” says Snowden, who begins to pace.

“It’s so shocking,” says Greenwald.

“That person is incredibly bold,” says Snowden.

S

econd snowden was at that time a first-semester freshman terrified to use his computer. Once, a Comcast guy showed up at the apartment, installed a router, and left. Then a second Comcast guy showed up, ready to install the router, unaware of the first guy. The first Comcast guy, Daniel concluded, had been bugging the apartment. In February, Citizenfour won an Oscar. Daniel failed all of his classes.

He got a cat called Amber, which he decided was a “stripper name,” so he changed her name to Leila, after Leila Khaled, the first woman to hijack an airplane. He adored Leila. He loved her so much he took her with him when he gave up on New York for Nashville, which meant giving away almost all of his stuff and strapping everything else, including a carrier containing the cat, to his motorcycle.

In October, The Intercept finally published the Drone Papers. Still, no one came for him. No one came for any of it, really. America has not lately been a country that tends to change its ways when revelations reveal it to be unbecoming of empire. It is the lives of leakers that

change. In 2015, Manning was in prison, having not yet attempted suicide therein, Assange was holed up in an embassy, having not yet been imprisoned in the U.K., which would refuse to release him to the U.S. because of the risk that he would commit suicide in U.S. custody, and Snowden remained ever in exile, declaiming with the slightly mad certainty of someone too tethered to reality.

To hear Daniel describe his years in Nashville is to go on a culinary tour of all the high-end kitchens from which he quit or was fired: Le Sel, Sinema, Folk; let go, he says, for an outburst of anger, or for advocating on behalf of others, or for being insubordinate. But in the spring of 2019, Daniel was happy. In all of his years of working with and thinking about and having nightmares about drones, Daniel had never touched one.

Dishes were different. Hot from the washer, they burned his hands. He worked for a caterer and loved being around happy-drunk weddinggoers. He could lose himself in the motion, the immediacy, the sweaty necessity of the work. The kitchen smelled of soap and heat, and he was either absorbed in the motion or fixing a problem. Sonia Kennebeck’s National Bird, the documentary in which Daniel had participated, premiered at Tribeca and in Berlin, and no one came for him. The Council on American-Islamic Relations sued the federal government over the terrorist watch list, the thick rule book Daniel had allegedly leaked, and no one came. Reality Winner was arrested and imprisoned even before the single document she had mailed appeared in The Intercept. Daniel tried to get a Spanish-speaking immigrant dishwasher to agitate for higher pay; the dishwasher simply left and never came back.

T

he drone wars were now under the auspices of Donald Trump, who wiped away rules about reporting dead civilians and made it easier for strikes to be approved.

“The killers need to know they have nowhere to hide, that no place is beyond the reach of American might and American arms,” Trump said. The military was exploring the use of artificial intelligence to sort through all the drone footage. One day when Daniel was expediting food, a big party came into the restaurant wanting ten hamburgers at ten different temperatures, and the chef, “notorious for being a bully and an asshole,” pretended not to hear Daniel as he tried to check the order. It had been five hours like this, the chef pro-

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voking Daniel. He was out of patience.

He just wanted everything to work.

“Goddamn it, Tim, stop fucking me!” he shouted and slammed his hand on the counter without looking, sending his finger straight through a ticket stabber.

Afghanistan was once again in chaos; Trump’s successor would give up on it altogether and close down the base at which Daniel had worked. “PTSD,” writes Hugh Gusterson in Drone, “often seemed to correlate not so much with the absolute scale of raw violence but with its degree of senselessness.”

Over the course of Daniel’s life, he and everyone he knew had come to carry beacons in their pockets, and they had become expert at not thinking about this. Daniel began to feel like he wasn’t being watched. As if the men who had searched his house had forgotten, or ceased to care, and he and Leila could continue life unmolested. It began to seem possible that they would never come for him, until one day in May 2019, they finally did.

D

aniel pleaded guilty in March, after the court ruled that it would not consider what the prosecution called his “supposed ‘good motives’ ” before sentencing, and in the Hale-family tradition was convicted of espionage. At his sentencing hearing in late July, Daniel will be expected to give a statement about remorse. He is in fact overwhelmed by remorse, though none of it is for the crime of exposing the American public to documents about the conduct of their leaders. Of that, he is very proud.

For five years, Daniel waited for the day the FBI would come collect him. For two years after that, Daniel waited for the day he would go to prison. It is challenging to find employment while on “pretrial release,” and it is challenging to conduct a love life. Should he tell people on the first date that he has been indicted? The second? He eventually decided, as is his way, to lead with the hard truth. “Soo, full disclosure,” read his Tinder bio, “I was charged last year with espionage for allegedly giving information about the war in Afghanistan to a group of journalists. My trial is in December and if you know anything about these types of cases you know that my chances of winning are next to none ;P. In the meantime, I’m hoping to meet someone genuine to hang out with and maybe go on a motorcycle ride while the weather is still nice.” He listed his anthem as “Vicious,” by Lou Reed.

These were years in which many people came to believe in a conspiracy

theory in which a high-level whistleblower declared the “deep state” to be run by baby-eating criminals. Part of this theory involved the idea that the NSA had video of everything, such that when the bad guys were defeated, the good guys would be able run the footage of their crimes. Later, some people thought the vaccine that could end the pandemic contained a tracking device to be shot in the arm of every American.

Not everyone thought this, of course.

Many of us thought these ideas were absurd. We read about them from phones on which we had failed to turn off the location data.

A federal judge ruled the terrorist watch list, challenged by 23 people represented by cair, unconstitutional.

“Daniel Hale’s disclosure of the unclassified 2013 Watchlisting Guidance revealed that the criteria for inclusion are circular and illogical,” lawyers for cair later wrote.

The probation office assigned Daniel a therapist, Michael, and the two spoke almost every week for a year. There were weeks when Michael was the only person with whom Daniel talked, but after the intervention, and the protests, Daniel’s close friends noticed a change.

“He had to decide who he was going to be in prison,” Mir said, and he was edging toward this. It would not be a surprise, like the raid. He had time to plan.

He was going to quit smoking, get healthy. There was a list of things to do: see people back home, Mortal Kombat with Mir, make dinner for his friends.

He was talking more about his fears for the future and dark things in his past.

He cried, for the first time in a long time, on his call with Michael.

In April, he received an email from his assigned “pretrial services officer” asking him to come to the office. Daniel assumed the meeting was for a urinalysis to ensure he was meeting the terms of his release. He was happy to be called in, because it would give him an opportunity to ask for leave to visit a friend back in Bristol. When he arrived at the office inside the courthouse, no one was at the desk. He rang the little bell on the counter. He rang it again. He sat down. He rang it a third time. He had to pee terribly; he had held it in for the urinalysis.

Ten minutes passed. Three U.S. Marshals came through the door and put him in handcuffs.

He had violated his release, he remembers the Marshals saying, and the reason they gave was “mental health.” Michael feared he was a danger to himself. The violation was in being perceived as unsta-

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ble when it was in the state’s interest to make sure he lived to serve his time.

Daniel called a friend that night from jail. “They didn’t let me say good-bye to Leila,” he told her, bereft. He had not been able to see Mortal Kombat, visit friends, or make dinner for them. He wanted to get his thoughts on paper, but no one could tell him where to find any.

He was thinking about the thing he always thought about, the story that ran on loop, one of a few moments that rendered his illegal disclosure of documents not, he says, an act of civil disobedience but a “desperate attempt at self-preservation.” Two months into his time in Afghanistan, Daniel recalls connecting a phone number to a predator drone. The phone number belonged to someone they’d been surveilling for a long while in Jalalabad, and now the phone was inside a sedan, and the sedan was speeding toward the border. It was an attempt to escape. The drone struggled against the wind, but the shot was the best shot the commander was going to get. Daniel watched “an explosion onscreen, bright white light, dust.”

When the dust settled, Daniel could see that the car was still intact, though it had taken damage in the back. The car kept going, and he kept watching. They stopped at a village, and a woman got out. Daniel hadn’t realized anyone but the man with the cell phone was inside the car. She opened the trunk and riffled around. She pulled something out.

Then she pulled out something smaller.

And they drove away.

This is what Daniel saw through the soda straw, images that haunt him and a story for which he is the only source. It was his captain, he says, who added the context a week later. The family had been trying to leave together, and after shrapnel from the missile hit two little girls, around ages 3 and 5, the target “ordered his wife to get rid of their bodies so they could escape.”

The story, Daniel says, was related to him as a tale about the inhumanity of the Taliban, but that was not the lesson Daniel took. He can’t really argue with Michael’s assessment. He thinks about the girls every day, and when he does, he thinks about killing himself.

And so in the summer of 2021 Daniel spends his days in a concrete cage eight feet long and ten feet wide, a fragile man in a hard room among many other men in many other rooms. It is out of concern for his well-being that the court wants him always in view. Their interests are his interests. They’re trying to ■ keep him safe.

Will You Ever Change?

CO N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 3 3

Banks remembered. Through the early aughts, when she told stories about her work to other domestic- and sexualviolence-survivor advocates, a lot of people got angry. “We were hated,” she s a i d . S o m e f e m i n i s t a d v o c at e s responded that supporting restorative justice meant you cared more about perpetrators than about victims. Others told her they were concerned that survivors couldn’t handle sitting across from batterers. “I was like, ‘Really?

I think these women are pretty strong.’ ” Outhier Banks was under no illusions that the approach was right for everyone. She had friends who had left violent relationships who told her they had no interest in meeting an offender for a dialogue. “I don’t need some man telling me he was wrong,” they said. “Of course he was wrong.”

“Justice means different things to different people,” Outhier Banks said. “You can never fully have justice, right? Something’s been taken. For me, it’s about what we can do to make a victim as whole as possible.” The survivors she worked with generally had clear and unique ideas about what they wanted out of the process. One woman told Outhier Banks that all she wanted was to walk into the room, face someone who had committed violence that was similar to what her ex had done, and be strong enough to walk out. Another was ready to end her dialogue incredibly fast, as soon as the man she was paired with admitted to wrongdoing. “I wanted to hear someone take responsibility because my ex never will,” she said. “I just needed to know that there are men out there who can change.”

DVSD’s dialogues didn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes men said they would be able to take responsibility for their actions, and when the time came, they couldn’t. Outhier Banks remembers a dialogue in which a man didn’t own up to a lot of what he had done to his wife, and oman on t he table d him ou to admit the ways he’d manipulated and hurt his ex. Often, the man said, when his ex came into the room and started a

conversation, he would turn around and leave while she was mid-sentence because he knew it got under her skin. The woman paused. “Wait, what?” she asked. “Did your ex ask you if you did that on purpose?” She did ask, the man said, and he told her she was crazy every time. That was familiar to the woman: Her own exhusband had done the same thing. “You aren’t crazy,” the man assured her. “He did that on purpose, and I can tell you that because I did it, too. Because it keeps you off your footing, it keeps you in the relationship.” Outhier Banks remembers that, afterward, the woman kept saying, “The mind games … I knew I wasn’t crazy.”

Though there are now hundreds of restorative-justice programs across the country, only a handful work with victims of domestic and sexual violence. Even established programs like DVSD have struggled to overcome resistance to the approach: After losing crucial funding in 2019, it stopped offering surrogate dialogues altogether. Because each restorative-justice program uses slightly different methods, it’s hard to assess how well they work and make the case for their existence beyond participants’ feedback. What research there is points to its value. A 2014 study found 49 percent fewer cases of post-traumaticstress symptoms in crime victims who went through a dialogue process compared with those who did not. And recent studies have routinely found that offenders who participate in restorative processes are less likely to be rearrested than those who move through the traditional justice system.

Underneath all the back and forth about whether, and when, to use restorative justice, there are bigger, murkier questions: If a man has been violent in one relationship, or several, will he ever be capable of acting differently? Whose responsibility is it to accompany him through the process of interrogating his thoughts and actions? What do we do about the men who are unwilling or unable? And if a man is able to meaningfully change, and the woman he abused doesn’t want to have anything to do with him, how should the community respond?

By the time Me Too unfolded, Sonya Shah had been thinking about these questions for a decade. Shah facilitates surrogate dialogues in the Bay Area for those who have committed and survived sexual harm. Like Outhier Banks, she has often b tify her focus on the re ad men. “Understandably, everybody is so pissed at how little attention gender violence has gotten, at how much victim blaming and silence

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and shaming there has been,” she told me. “That needs to happen. After hundreds of years of silence, it’s okay to be angry.” Shah is herself a survivor of sexual assault. She long ago realized that her healing could not be dependent on another person’s suffering. “It is very difficult to hold that we can be furious, but that doesn’t mean that people who have committed this harm are irredeemable,” she said. In Shah’s work as a facilitator, keeping both of these ideas in mind at once is critical. “For men to be able to break the silence of their most horrible secrets, they have to believe you’re not going to judge them,” she said.

If a person has beaten or raped someone, moving past judgment is among the hardest things to do. What Shah and other restorative-justice practitioners advocate requires a huge amount of trust—from individuals and society— that men who are given a second chance won’t take advantage of it. It makes sense that survivors and their supporters would hesitate to offer a potential out to someone whose motivations may be selfserving—say, reducing or reducing a prison sentence—rather than sincere.

And when punishment is framed as closure, as a way to acknowledge and value a victim’s pain, it might feel impossible to turn down. “We go to the punitive because we don’t know there’s any alternative,” Shah told me.

Revenge is also exhilarating. The desire to see a person who has inflicted violence suffer as a result is very old and very human. It’s present in progressive circles— where the public shaming those accused of wrongdoing is routine—just as it is among law-and-order conservatives. In the years following Me Too, Shah has often thought about the impulse to pathologize the perpetrators of sexual and domestic violence, to label them monsters.

“Do we do that because they’re everywhere? Because they’re our fathers, our co-workers?” she wonders. A common refrain in conversations about gender violence is the need to reform the toxic culture that allows men to physically and sexually assault women with little consequence. If one way into that cultural shift requires moving past judgment and extending hope for change to the bad men, will we be willing?

cheryl: I talk to people who say, “People who break the law just need to be punished until they figure out they’re not smarter than the rest of us.” When they say that, I hear

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

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New York Crossword by Matt Gaffney

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23

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28 3

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14 15 16 17 18 26 28 29 30 31 32 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 47 48 49 51 52 53 56 57 58 59 61 62 63 64 65

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Across

“Gangs of New York” extras “Gotta run!”

Sacred bird of the Nile Talking-___ (serious reprimands) Turkey’s highest mountain Clean energy Zippo ‘Fortune’ rival Company named for two states French river known for its valley’s vineyards He mates with the queen Ability to see past noise Place to unwind Huge amount, as of paperwork Performing pair Midwest hub The date of the union Finish Approximately “I’d better be going” Nailed Horror-movie figures Tucson’s county Scarecrows, mostly Free (of) Ending for switch

24

57 Uninspiring 58 Nehi flavor 60 It beat “Milk” and “Frost/ Nixon” for Best Picture 66 Puck’s chain 67 Used, as a beach towel 68 Novelist Zora ___ Hurston 71 CRISPR technology 77 Island of immigration 80 Hot-air-balloon problem 81 Sommelier’s stopper 82 Before now 83 “That’s ___ bad” 84 Flower of the future 85 All-time leading NFL rusher Smith 88 Scandalous info 89 For the ages 92 “Between the World and Me” author Ta-Nehisi 93 Flat-topped areas of the Southwest 94 U.S. Open champ of 1983, 1984, 1986, and 1987 98 Sans-serif typeface 101 “Born in the U.S.A.” subject, briefly 102 Porch spinner 103 Beatty of “Superman”

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104 1774 invention of Daniel Fahrenheit 112 Literary adventure 113 Cuban music 114 Comments-section pests 118 The L of LMM 119 Longest river entirely in Spain 120 “I’m betting every chip” 121 Wimbledon section 122 Putting South African 123 Some end 7-6 124 & 125 Store suggested by this puzzle’s theme entries; just count the letters in the words 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Down

Eastern way Benjamin or Bobby Abu Dhabi’s country, briefly Film-set worker Tasted tea, say ___ Island Ferry Land in a lake, say Othello, e.g.

Lena of “Havana” “M*A*S*H” actor Infomercial offer Like rainy-day activities Björn on the baseline

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Part of, as a conspiracy Boomers, e.g.

Fibula neighbor “It’s ___ the other” Embarrassing public spectacle ___ alcohol Language heard in Manila Pool need Promises up and down Faber products Had sum fun with Faulty firecracker “Get ___, you two!”

At this point Letter on dreidels ___ and outs (complex details) “The Lion King” title role ___ standstill (gridlocked) “Now I get it!”

Gentle alert Watch closely Sing like Bing Part of a plug Writing Fleming Barely defeats Chanteuse Céline Beta user?

Bring up Biblical visitors Troy story?

Fail to possess Soapmaking material Nonreactive with other elements Affair Mark deeply Give the most votes to ___ off (drive) Less friendly Hazardous Started feeling blue “There are many more examples” “Hahahaha!”

Mauna ___ (macadamia-nut brand) Gentleman Billion-year period Goat’s call “Catfish” channel Biden’s st.

Talk ___ about (diss) Honors Security devices Ruby or sapphire, e.g.

Symposium-session starters “Don’t think so” Be a narc Stroll Try to silence again, as a squeak Clubs for Jon Rahm Courtroom cover Round home Be awesome 34 years from now Drama honor “Ali” and “The Insider” director Michael Was a passenger on Tyler or Ullmann Wrangler rival Nine-digit ID

The solution to last week’s puzzle appears on page 67.

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crossword

the fear in their voices that the world is out of their control and they don’t feel safe in it. Lord, that was me for a long time. We do the same thing we know until we know something different. troy: I was told numerous times it’s very important to forgive yourself.

I tend to have low self-esteem. Maybe I’m not worthy of being forgiven.

But at some point in time, I actually started looking at the work I’ve done.

That was when it started clicking.

Okay, you’re not Old Troy. This is the new guy. I’m not the a-hole that my head tells me I am.

T

he road to getting a survivor and an offender together for a dialogue is usually long and uncertain. Over the course of a decade, DVSD facilitated only around 200 of them. Though the process has a lot in common with therapy, it’s more narrowly focused, and ideally the two work in tandem. Most people who haven’t been through it “have a very naïve view of what it takes for someone to be accountable,” Shah told me. “They don’t understand what it actually means to look at yourself, your trauma, privilege, and gender socialization and to unpack that and change it.”

Cheryl sometimes spoke to groups of men who had harmed their partners, and she started to notice that a lot of them had stories that began similarly to hers, with fathers who abused them. She began to wonder if abusers and survivors were two sides of the same coin: people who had experienced horrible things but responded to them very differently.

Troy struggled with the complexity of recognizing the circumstances that had shaped his life while also fully owning the way his actions hurt those around him. He had learned that addiction is a disease, one he surely had. And he knew that many people were alcoholics but did not choose to come home and choke their partners. “I still try to justify my actions,” Troy told me. “I have to say, Okay, this is what I did, and leave it at that.” The lasting impact of incarceration made it harder. “It keeps getting brought up and brought up and brought up,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, I’m trying to move on and be better, yet you’re reminding me about a really crappy time in my life.’

Even if I make amen is label. When is my d ?”

Restorative justice is built on the assumption that people who have done violence don’t want to keep doing it, that

they want to change. Even when they do, the process can be excruciating. And, of course, many people have no interest in acknowledging bad behavior or acting differently. Restorative justice will never be a solution for men such as Cosby and Weinstein who have unapologetically wielded their power to evade consequences. There’s no clear path by which to rehabilitate them as long as they deny or minimize what they’ve done. For restorative justice to take off— and for society to figure out how to diminish the overwhelming amount of bad behavior—it will depend on the very cultural shift it hopes to create, and it will need to unfold alongside many other interventions in order for that to happen.

I

n a courtroom, many stories are told, and the task is to winnow them to a single true story: Someone is guilty of a crime, or they aren’t. In a restorative-justice dialogue, every story, or history, can be true at once, even those that seem to contradict one another. Inevitably, these dialogues mean different things to each person who takes part, and each person remembers them differently.

Cheryl had been sitting across from Troy for 15 minutes when she realized that he might be just as scared as she was.

The room was small, and the table and chairs where they sat took up most of it, so that everybody felt physically close. She watched Troy’s expression as he talked about his relationship with his ex. She could see that he didn’t know what she wanted or how exactly to tell her what he had done. She realized that Troy was there for the same reason she was: “He couldn’t move on from it alone.”

Troy doesn’t remember feeling afraid.

Because he had done so much work in AA on accountability, his preparation was quicker than most; and only a few weeks had passed between his first meeting at DVSD and his dialogue with Cheryl.

When he told people about restorative justice, most of them asked him, “Why would you do that? Why would you relive what happened?” The way Troy understood it, he wasn’t reliving it if he knew that talking about it would help someone else. It was a step that took him “that much farther away from potentially doing that sort of thing again.”

Sitting across from Cheryl, he told the familiar story: how he began drinking as a kid, about his marriage and the ar nts e different forms of a and t the night when he choked his ex-girlfriend. As he spoke, he had a feeling he knew well from his time in AA, which was that he wasn’t

alone in his experiences. Feeling that gave his memories less power than they’d had before. “I guess this is making my peace with it,” he said later. “A kind of agitation that doesn’t exist anymore after a while.”

Cheryl watched Troy as he told her what had happened, and hearing about his life made her feel less alone, too. At the end of her story, she told Troy about her ex-boyfriend who had died by suicide.

Oh my gosh, Troy remembers thinking.

She’s carrying the guilt of this guy killing himself in front of her. He wanted very much to tell her that she wasn’t responsible for what had happened that night.

After an hour, Cheryl was ready to ask Troy the question she had turned over in her head for years: “When you were fighting with your ex, when you were hurting her, what were you thinking about her?”

The question threaded through each of her relationships, all the way back to her father. When she asked it, Cheryl remembers that Troy looked right at her and said, “I wasn’t thinking about her at all. I was just thinking about how angry I was.”

Cheryl asked to take a break, and she and Marci stepped outside. It wasn’t raining anymore, and the air was cool and tasted clean. “I knew at that moment that it wasn’t my fault at all, the way I had been treated by all the men in my life,” Cheryl said. “I had been told that over and over, but until this abuser could look me in the eye and say it, I didn’t believe it.”

They went back inside, and Cheryl talked to Troy for a while longer. She wanted to make sure he knew that violence “was a broken path for him,” that he was doing the things he needed to do in order to make different choices. He told her he was sorry for everything she had gone through. She believed he was sincere.

Then she left, feeling, for the first time, that she wasn’t carrying around the entire weight of everything that had happened to her.

The dialogue didn’t fix everything Troy or Cheryl struggled with in their lives.

Troy was still an alcoholic, and staying in recovery was hard. It took Cheryl many more years to really figure out how to live differently with the knowledge that the abuse she’d experienced wasn’t her fault.

A couple of years after the dialogue, she ran into a woman she’d been acquainted with for a long time. The woman said to Cheryl, “I know you don’t know this, but the man you sat with is my son.” Since then, Cheryl has occasionally seen Troy when she’s over at his mother’s house.

They sometimes sit down and talk a bit, ■ catching up.

july 19–august 1, 2021 | new york

75

Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.

highbrow Here we go again with the wildfires out West …

A record number of Americans OD’d last year, and the Sacklers aren’t gonna pay (all a tthat at much).

… As the Hoover Dam runs low on water.

Billionaires in spaaaaace.

… And Tennessee’s top vaccine official says she got canned for the sin of promoting vaccines to teens.

Pyer Moss’s couture collection. You probably couldn’t ever wear it …

The chaos in Haiti.

Zaila Avant-garde, the spelling-bee champ who is also, somehow, a basketball-dribbling wizard.

Wes Anderson’s incroyable, pandemic-delayed The French Dispatch gets a nine-minute standing ovation at Cannes.

Roadrunner captures tthe magnetic, maddening life force that was Anthony Bourdain.

Emily in Paris keeps getting awards validation …

… But Mj Rodriguez is the first trans performer to be nominated for an Emmy in a major category.

Mike White’s delicious one-percenter satire, The White Lotus.

Brookfield Properties tries to make midtown construction scaffolding Instagrammable.

Now sunscreen can give you cancer?

Tyler, the Creator’s brash and raw Call Me If You Get Lost.

The Nicolas Cage– searches–for–his– stolen–pig movie is actually very good.

Someone paid $1.6 million for a copy of Super Mario 64 from the ancient year of 1996.

Entire staff of Lincoln, Nebraska, Burger King quits in fantastically petty fashion.

LEGO Glock shoots real bullets.

MTA crew shortages are why you’ve been waiting 14 minutes for an A train.

Must we be nostalgic about a Kmart closing?

57-year-old director of bonkers unofficial Céline Dion biopic plays the singer at every age, including 5.

lowb row 76 n e w y o r k | j u l y 1 9 – a u g u s t 1 , 2 0 2 1

Baseball really needed this guy.

Florence Pugh joins the MCU.

HBO Max’s FBoy Island: We already hate ourselves for watching it.

brill iant

A $200 side of fries at Serendipity3 Serend pi y3

Beth Morgan’s bizarro Instagram-stalker novel, A Touch of Jen.

Springsteen! Simon!

Hudson! NYC is back!

Which means you can’t get a ticket.

Xi’an Famous Foods thieves try, fail to cook dumplings during break-in.

No fans at the Tokyo Olympics.

Phoebe Philo is back, and she’s not making Zoom sweatpants.

… But you won’t forget it.

Texas wants to deputize its citizens to sue abortion clinics.

despicable

92nd Street Y’s in person with Jazz in July.

Eric Adams might be the hammiest mayo since Ed Koch.

It looks like the Taliban will win the Forever War.

Republican lawmakers seek to protect the unvaxxed against “discrimination” (not, you know, death from COVID) …

E.U. unveils hugely ambitious emissionscutting plan.

The Netanyahus finds the yuks (and the profundity) in Bibi’s family story.

P HOTOG RA P HS : AL JA ZE E RA E N G L IS H/ YO U TU BE ( WI LD FI RES ); M IC H AE L B U RRE LL / AL AM Y S TOC K P H OTO (B U RN ED PA P ER); B B C NE WS /YO U TU BE ( HOOV ER DAM ); CB S 1 7/YOU TU B E (UN VA XXE D); THE TE N N ESSEE H OLL ER /YOUTUB E ( TENNESSEE); NB C NEW S/YO UTUB E (A FG HA NISTAN); R IC ARDO ARDUE NG O/ REUTE RS/ AL AMY S TOCK PH OTO ( H AI TI ) ; T H E M UP PE TS / YOU TU BE ( BI LL I ONAI RE S ); FAS H IO N FE E D/ YO UT UB E (PYE R M OS S ); N E W YORK R EV IEW B OO KS ( T HE N ETA NYAH U S ); WI K IME D I A CO M M ON S (OXY, E.U. , FR IES ); B ROO KLYN BOROU GH PRE S ID E N T E RI C ADA M S/YOU TU B E (ADA M S ); A JAY SURESH (92 Y ); JOE SKI PP ER/REUTERS/AL AM Y STOC K P HOTO (SPEL LI NG B EE); REUT ER S/ ALAM Y STOC K PH OTO ( PH I LO); S T E PH AN E C ARDI NALE / CORB I S V I A GE TT Y I MAG E S (ANDE RSON) ; LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY (MORGAN); TAKAHIRO KYONO/FLICKR (SPRINGSTEEN); JASON WANG/YOUTUBE ( XI’AN); DENNIS HALLINAN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (BILL); STEPHANIE BRANCHU/NETFLIX (EMILY IN PARIS ); N64GUIDE/YOUTUBE (SUPER MARIO); CULPER PRECISION/INSTAGRAM (LEGO); RICHARD LEVINE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (MTA); DAN DELUCA/FLICKR (KMART ); JOJO WHILDEN/ FX ( ROD RI GU E Z ); CN N /F OC U S FE ATU RES (ROAD RU N NE R); M A RIO PE RE Z/H B O (LOTU S ); CO LUM B IA R ECORDS ( TY LE R); COU RTE SY OF NEON (P I G ); M L B /YOU TU B E (O HTA N I) ; G AUM O NT (A LI N E ); RAC H AE L FLORES/FAC EBO OK (B URG ER KI NG ); M A RVEL STUD I OS (PUG H); CO URTESY OF HB O M AX ( FB OY )

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