THE NEW YORKER— Vol.XCVIII #36__ Nov. 07, 2022 (Adrian Tomine’s “Fall Sweep”)

human makes mistakes, and I am a meaningful. He said he’d told Farhadi, year. He also said he’d read a story in
human being, and I made a mistake.’ “You are a successful,powerful,rich man “Getting Lost in Solitude”that was based
Then I will take my complaint back.” going against a woman from Shiraz who in New York, and that maybe one day,
has none of the things that you have. if he made a film set in the city, an el-
They did not reach an agreement. That’s not a victory.That’s a loss.That’s ement of that story would come to him
Farhadi gave the criminal court a nine- embarrassing. What you need to do is subconsciously and appear in his film.
page chart analyzing the alleged sim- satisfy her—in the traditional, Shake- “I will say, ‘Yes, I read your article, and
ilarities between “A Hero” and Masih- spearean sense. It’s not about winning it had an effect on me,’” he said. “Every
zadeh’s documentary. He put each the court case. What you want is for second, we are getting something from
similarity in one of three categories: her to feel seen and acknowledged— the environment, from talking to peo-
“news” (the detail had already been not that you did everything in your ple, and we are not aware of this.”
published in an article), “custom” (a power not to do this one thing.”
character is drawing on a conventional He told me, speaking through a
phrase or idea, like comparing a good When I spoke with Farhadi in July, translator, that when “A Hero” had
thing to a miracle), or “idea, plan, guid- he was preparing to spend sev- screened at Cannes they were still fi-
ance” (the films resembled each other eral months in America, to work on a nalizing the credits; he’d meant to in-
because he had instructed his students new movie. I asked him about a rumor clude Masihzadeh’s name, but there
to adopt his cinematic approach).“Am- I’d heard, that he was relocating to the had been a mistake. He apologized for
biguity in characterization, doubts U.S. permanently.The Iranian govern- talking about his student at all. “It
about the authenticity of conversations ment had been punishing expressions doesn’t mean she’s not a good person,”
and situations, changing the direction of dissent with increasing severity, and he said. “I made all my films about the
of the story, etc., are all constant ele- three filmmakers had just been put in fight between good and good, and I un-
ments of my work,”he wrote in a state- prison.“The truth is that this has placed derstand her.When I was young,I loved
ment to the court. It seemed like a me in a crossroads about what I should my first film—it was not a very good
joke, he added, that he could be ac- do,” Farhadi said. “On the one hand, film, but at the time I believed, ‘This is
cused of stealing these very elements if I make movies in Iran, my movies mine.’I can understand her feeling about
from a student. are so much more effective—they’re so her documentary.”
much more powerful and more impor-
The case has now been before the tant for my people in Iran. On the I repeated an observation he’d once
criminal court for five months, but it other hand, if I stay and make these made about the structure of his films:
may be much longer before the judge movies, it’s almost as if I’ve accepted a small mistake sets off a series of un-
reaches a decision. Mani Haghighi told the political situation and the normal- intended consequences, spiralling into
me that, when he spoke with Farhadi ization of these events, as if I’m indif- a crisis. I asked whether this formula
about the case last summer, it was clear ferent to it.” applied to the situation he was facing
that Farhadi believed he had done noth- now.“Yes, I am writing notes about this
ing wrong: “He was just in shock. He Farhadi had a calm, thoughtful pres- issue every day, and maybe one day I
told me, ‘This was my idea. I gave it to ence, even when talking about his own will write a script about it,”he said.“On
the students, and then they came back anger. His eldest daughter, who was in the one side, I am surprised. On the
with the results.’ ” Haghighi hasn’t graduate school at Pratt, in Brooklyn, other side, I am happy, because I can
watched any of Farhadi’s films since say, ‘O.K., my films are realistic films.’”
“The Past,”from 2013, because he didn’t was home in Tehran for the summer,
want to be asked to speak publicly about and at one point she came to the com- He shared a piece of writing advice
Farhadi or his work, but he said,“If you puter to tell me that I’d written a book that he sometimes gives students, to
ask me—as a person who hasn’t seen called “Getting Lost in Solitude,”a col- convey how a set of facts can be inter-
either ‘A Hero’ or the documentary but lection of three stories taken from The preted in different ways: “Imagine that
just knows the guy extremely well—this New Yorker and republished in Farsi— one day my friend calls and says,‘I haven’t
is not plagiarism. Asghar is far too in- this was news to me, and it confirmed seen you for such a long time—I really
telligent and interesting as an artist, as the chaotic state of copyright norms in miss you.’We set up a meeting in a café,
a writer, to do something like that.This Iran. Farhadi said that there were wide- and we say normal things. The friend
is him wanting control over authorship. spread misunderstandings about copy- notices that the sun is bothering my
It’s a character flaw.” right law; cases dealt with the issue every eyes and offers to change seats. He says
he is bored, and he’d like to go on a long
The situation reminded Haghighi trip. Then I pay for the coffee and say
of an essay in which the American phi- to myself,‘This person never pays—why
losopher Stanley Cavell argues that King do I always have to pay for his coffee?’
Lear’s failure is his inability to acknowl- Then we say goodbye.
edge his children, to see them for who
they really are. “That’s where the trag- “I have a question,”he went on.“Was
edy takes place in ‘King Lear,’ and it’s there anything strange about the story
kind of similar here,” he said. He as- I told you?”
sumed that Farhadi would win the legal
case, but that the victory would not feel I said no.
“Everything was very normal,” he
said.“This can happen to anyone. Now

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 49

imagine if that friend of mine were to believes it may be because he ignored and courageous women leading protests
leave, get into an accident, and die that warnings not to screen “A Hero” at the for their human rights.” He said, “This
same day. All those moments begin to Jerusalem Film Festival.“Different parts society,especially these women,has trav-
take on different meanings. I might of the government called my assistant elled a harsh and painful path to this
say to myself, ‘He was so kind—he and other people and delivered their point,and now they have clearly reached
was concerned with the sun hurting message,” he said. a landmark.”
my eyes.’ And then I say, ‘I’m such a
bad person for thinking about how he A few weeks later, a twenty-two- A few days later, on state television,
made me pay for his cup of coffee.’ year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died in a journalist closely allied with the gov-
Then I think, He said he wanted to the custody of Iran’s morality police; she ernment mocked Farhadi’s statement.
go on a long trip. Maybe he was talking had been arrested and taken to a “reëd- “Mr. Farhadi calls himself a defender of
about death.” ucation center” because her hijab did women’s rights,” he said. “Now he has
not properly cover her hair. On Insta- to answer Ms. Azadeh Masihzadeh’s
Farhadi continued, “In my movies, gram,Farhadi posted a picture of Amini accusation. . . . Why did he deprive her
it’s the same thing. When some trag- in her hospital bed before she died and of her rights?”He added,“I want to give
edy takes place, we stack everything up wrote, “We have put ourselves to sleep some good news to the dear audience:
like dominoes, and everything becomes against this unending cruelty. We are one of the American media outlets will
a sign of something else.” He said that, partners in this crime.” talk about this case in October. It will
when Masihzadeh came to the set of be published in a magazine, and there
“A Hero” to see him, “she was insulted, Protests broke out in more than will be an answer to this story.” An Ira-
but it was a very normal situation.” On ninety cities, where women took off nian journalist posted the TV clip on
the day that she signed the statement, their hijabs and burned them in the Twitter,writing that the program’s open
he said, “it was a very simple letter, not streets. A well-known actress dared to criticism of Farhadi signalled the “be-
even on letterhead—just on a plain piece appear on Iranian television without ginning of a new era of the Islamic Re-
of paper. But now that this whole thing her hair covered. “This is not true,” she public’s approach to cultural,artistic and
has come about, it has found a differ- explained,referring to the hijab.“Enough media production.”
ent meaning for her.” lies.” Government security forces tear-
gassed and shot at protesters, killing One tragedy of an unjust regime is
In August, the director of the Cinema hundreds of people, including at least that it makes unethical acts seem rel-
Organization of Iran, a branch of the twenty children. “I would sit in my car atively inconsequential: Farhadi may
Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guid- and go around the streets of Tehran,” have abused his power over a student,
ance, announced that soon several film- Farhadi told me.“What I was seeing— but the desire to hold him accountable
makers in Iran would be banned from you don’t need to be political. As a is complicated by the fact that he is
making movies. Although there has human being, what I was seeing was being oppressed by a much larger force.
been no official ruling, Farhadi told me moving.” He posted a video on Insta- Masihzadeh’s story, which until now
he has learned that he’s on the list. He gram urging artists around the world the government media has largely ig-
to stand in solidarity with “progressive nored, is again being taken out of her
hands. In the name of her rights, the
state seems to be offering a justifica-
tion for turning against the nation’s
most prominent filmmaker.

Khodsiani,the author of “Car Dwell-
ers,” the play that Farhadi directed as
a student, told me that, even before
Farhadi lost the government’s favor,
“ninety-nine per cent of Iranian cin-
ema blamed her.” He predicted that, if
the court found Farhadi guilty, people
would say that it was only because he
had provoked Iran’s authorities: “They
will say she is a puppet of the govern-
ment,” he said.

“Will you need a bag, or will you frantically oscillate Farhadi is now in Los Angeles,work-
between paying and jamming everything into your own tote ing on his next movie, but his wife
and daughters are still in Tehran. “My
before the next customer’s items start sliding down?” heart is there,” he told me, in October.
Even if he couldn’t make another movie
under the current regime,he said,“I will
go back again.”Mani Haghighi recently
attempted to leave Iran, for the U.K.

première of his new film, at the BFI ideal of truth from a kind of critical dis- one that you would have ever thought
London Film Festival, but his passport tance, as if at a slight remove—a posi- would fight back—a girl from Shiraz,
was confiscated at the airport and he tion that may give him access to one of an enthusiast.”
was prevented from boarding the plane. his most persistent themes, the ways in
He said that Iranian authorities seemed which good lives are maintained by var- Years ago, Farhadi said in an inter-
to be creating an “exile in reverse”: art- ious shades of selfishness and delusion. view that he had always wanted to
ists can neither work nor leave. A day “The day I decide to retire from film- “make a film about somebody who makes
after his passport was taken, a fire broke making, if I ask myself what I’ve done a mistake, something he didn’t mean to
out at a prison in Tehran where hun- in cinema that makes me happy, and if do, and then spends the film trying to
dreds of protesters and political prison- I’m being honest,” he has said, “I’ll say convince the other person that he really
ers, including the filmmaker Jafar that it’s all the attention I’ve paid to didn’t mean it, and to ask for his forgive-
Panahi, were incarcerated. Panahi sur- lying and subterfuge.” ness.”He continued,“What I really want
vived, but he described the fire as “the is to put the viewers in the shoes of the
worst hours” of his life. In one of our last conversations,when character in a way where they ask them-
I expressed discomfort with the claim selves,‘If I were him, would I forgive the
Farhadi once told a Persian film jour- that I was willfully failing to see the man or not?’And many people don’t for-
nal that, in the course of making mov- truth, Farhadi softened, explaining that give him. Which means that many of us
ies, his definition of morality had he was going through one of the most have this potential violence in us.”
changed, to the point that he could no emotionally difficult moments of his
longer categorically state that lying was life. He didn’t know if he could return Last year, Masihzadeh would have
immoral. “It seems that today, with the to Iran, or if he would ever see his par- forgiven Farhadi if he had simply told
conditions and complexities that hu- ents again. He didn’t know when, or if, her she had given him a good idea, but
manity has to live with . . . part of these his wife and children could get out of in time, as she’d come to feel that he
value judgments and definitions no lon- the country to be with him. He told me, had an almost spooky capacity for con-
ger have much use,”he said. Farhadi de- “I acknowledge that I have problems in trol, she’d become bitter. She said that
nied many of the details in this story, my character,” but he said that these Farhadi had continued to show her: “I
including comments that were captured flaws were not related to the issues I have the power to omit you, to clear
on video. He said that people had told had written about. “I’m not white,” he you, to not let your voice be heard.”Her
me lies—a word that he later said I said. “I’m not black. I’m gray—I’m a view of his work was gradually sour-
shouldn’t use, because the Farsi word for gray person.” He also said that discuss- ing—now the only Farhadi films she
lie, dorough, has a less severe meaning, ing copyright at this moment felt petty: could talk about with unmarred admi-
and so should instead be translated as “There are more important issues to ration were two of his earliest ones. Her
“wrong information.” He also told me talk about in Iran right now.” anger, though, had a limit. “I will be
that the story was unethical. I found it heartbroken if I ever hear that Mr. Far-
hard not to believe him and not to feel But,for some of his female colleagues, hadi has stopped making films,”she told
guilty.In eight hours of phone calls with the protests had opened up the possibil- me. During the second week of pro-
him, I perhaps experienced something ity of no longer having to fulfill expec- tests, Masihzadeh called almost every-
similar to what his colleagues felt when tations that felt like lies.Golshifteh Fara- one she knew: “Even people who were
they wondered if, for the sake of art, hani, the Iranian actress who went into against me”—in her fight with Far-
they should suppress their own perspec- exile in Paris, said that she had decided hadi—“I just wanted to forgive them,
tive.There is no clear threshold at which to speak out in part because she felt that to be united for a bigger reason.” More
crediting someone, artistically or intel- aspects of Farhadi’s behavior “reflect the recently, though, she told me that she’s
lectually, is required. I adopt other peo- ways of the Islamic Republic.” He had no longer sure that she would be upset
ple’s ideas, too, mining conversations become so powerful that he could tell if Farhadi stopped making films.Maybe
with friends and colleagues for insights— people what was true and what wasn’t. she just wouldn’t care.
sometimes even using their words.Even “When I was interrogated, and an intel-
the themes of this article are derivative. ligence person put a paper in front of She described a central theme in “A
I was influenced by Farhadi’s films, to me, I froze,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t Hero”: the idea that broken societies, in
the point that I had to resist the temp- true, but I signed it because of the pres- their longing for a hero, elevate some
tation to turn the article into a story of sure. And look at the parallel: Farhadi people to an untenable position,in which
“good versus good,”a framework that is did the same thing to his student.” they can’t make any errors. “Mr. Far-
both revelatory and potentially danger- hadi, look at your film,”she said.“If you
ous, because it removes the moral va- Taraneh Alidoosti, the actress who watch carefully,you will understand that
lence of causing harm. starred in four of Farhadi’s films, de- this is very easy to solve. You can say,
scribed Farhadi as a “premier gaslighter,” ‘O.K., I made a mistake.’ But he never
Despite feeling betrayed or dimin- but she said that she, like many of his does that.”She cried as she spoke.“I am
ished by Farhadi, nearly everyone I in- colleagues and friends,nonetheless cared so sorry Mr. Farhadi is like that. I’m so
terviewed said that they wanted him to for him and was in awe of his mind. sorry that Mr. Farhadi doesn’t watch his
continue making films.His moral lapses “We never wanted to be the scandal movies carefully. I think he is making
seem closely related to some of his most that would ruin his career—we would films for other people. He doesn’t make
profound insights. He approaches the never do that, and he knew it,”she said. films for himself.” 
She described Masihzadeh as “the last

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 51

ANNALS OF EDUCATION

CLASS WARFARE

School boards are being attacked by partisan saboteurs.

BY PAIGE WILLIAMS

I n August,2020,Williamson County diversity, but not in a strident way.They institution whose members, until re-
Schools, which serves more than provide “mirrors and windows,” allow- cently, enjoyed visibility on a par with
forty thousand students in subur- ing readers both to see themselves in that of the county tax collector.“There’s
ban Nashville, started using an English the stories and to learn about other peo- no glory in being a school-board mem-
and Language Arts curriculum called ple’s lives. The curriculum assigns or ber—and there shouldn’t be,”Anne Mc-
Wit & Wisdom. The program, which recommends portraits of heralded pio- Graw, a former Williamson County
is published by Great Minds, a com- neers: Leonardo da Vinci, Sacagawea, Schools board member, said on a local
pany based in Washington,D.C.,wasn’t Clara Barton, Duke Ellington, Ada podcast last year. Normally, the dis-
a renegade choice: hundreds of school Lovelace. The lessons revolve around trict’s public meetings were sedate af-
districts nationwide had adopted it. readings,augmented with paintings,po- fairs featuring polite exchanges among
Both Massachusetts and Louisiana— etry, speeches, interviews, films, and civic-minded locals. The system’s slo-
states with sharply different political music: in the module “A Hero’s Jour- gan was: “Be nice.”
profiles—gave Wit & Wisdom high ney,” students explore an illustrated re-
approval ratings. telling of the Odyssey alongside the In May, 2021, as the district finished
Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic, while also its first academic year with Wit & Wis-
The decision had followed a strict discussing “Star Wars.” A section on dom, women wearing “Moms for Lib-
process. The Tennessee State Board of “Wordplay” pairs “The Phantom Toll- erty” T-shirts began appearing at school-
Education governs academic standards booth” with Abbott and Costello’s board meetings. They brought large
and updates them every five or six years, “Who’s on First” routine. placards that contained images and text
providing school districts with an op- from thirty-one books that they didn’t
portunity to switch curricula.William- Elsewhere in Tennessee, teachers want students to read. In public com-
son County Schools assembled a selec- were saying that Wit & Wisdom im- ments and in written complaints, the
tion committee—twenty-six parents, proved literacy. The superintendent of women claimed that Wit & Wisdom
twenty-eight elementary-school teach- Lauderdale County, a rural area where was teaching children to hate them-
ers of English and Language Arts.The nearly a quarter of the population lives selves, one another, their families, and
committee presented four options to below the poverty line, published an America. “Rap a Tap Tap,” an illus-
teachers, who voted on them in Febru- essay reporting that his district’s teach- trated story about the vaudeville-era
ary, 2020.Wit & Wisdom was the over- ers had noticed “an enormous differ- tap dancer Bill (Bojangles) Robinson,
whelming favorite. After the selection ence in students’ writing” after imple- by the Caldecott medalists Leo and
committee ratified the teachers’choice, menting the curriculum.Wit & Wisdom Diane Dillon, harped on “skin color
the school board, which has twelve encourages students to discuss readings differences.” A picture book about
members, unanimously adopted Wit & with their families—a father in Sumner seahorses,which touched on everything
Wisdom, along with a traditional pho- County, northeast of Nashville, was from their ability to change color to the
nics program, for K-5 students. pleased that his daughters now talked independent movement of their eyes,
about civil rights and the American threatened to “normalize that males can
Great Minds’s promotional materi- Revolution at dinner. get pregnant” by explaining that male
als explain that Wit & Wisdom is de- seahorses give birth; the Moms sus-
signed to let students “read books they Then, seemingly out of nowhere, pected a covert endorsement of “gen-
love while building knowledge of im- Wit & Wisdom became the target of der fluidity.”Greco-Roman myths: nu-
portant topics”in literature,science,his- intense criticism. At first, the campaign dity,cannibalism.(Venus emerges naked
tory, and art. By immersing students in in Williamson County was cryptic: stray from the sea; Tantalus cooks his son.)
“content-rich” topics that spark lively e-mails, phone calls, public-informa-
discussion,the curriculum prepares them tion requests. Eric Welch, who was first The Moms kept attending school-
to tackle more complicated texts. The elected to the school board in 2010, told board meetings and issuing complaints.
materials are challenging by design: me that the complainers “wouldn’t just Curiously,though they positioned them-
studies have shown that students read e-mail us—they would copy the county selves as traditionalists, they often bor-
better sooner when confronted with commission, our state legislative dele- rowed “woke” rhetoric about the dan-
complex sentences and advanced vo- gation,and state representatives in other gers of triggering vulnerable students.
cabulary.Wit & Wisdom’s hundred and counties.”He said,“It was obviously an Readings about Ruby Bridges—who,
eighteen “core”texts, which range from attempt to intimidate.” in 1961, became the first Black child
picture books to nonfiction, emphasize to attend an all-white school in New
The school board is an American

52 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH FROM GETTY

The group Moms for Liberty accuses teachers of using books to indoctrinate kids about critical race theory and gender fluidity.

ILLUSTRATION BY JOAN WONG THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 53

Orleans—exposed students to “psy­ liminary review, it hadn’t found any vi­ view of Wit & Wisdom whether “the
chological distress” because they de­ olations of protocol.Teachers had spent concept of critical race theory”had come
scribed an angry white mob. (Bridges, a full workday familiarizing themselves up during the process. No, the assistant
in a memoir designed for young read­ with Wit & Wisdom before imple­ superintendent said.
ers, wrote, “They yelled at me to go menting it. As Jenny Lopez, the dis­
away.”) The Moms also declared that, trict’s curriculum director, explained, Moms for Liberty members were
though they admired Martin Luther “Teachers actually had more time than portraying Wit & Wisdom as “critical
King, Jr.,’s iconic line about judging they’ve ever had to look at materials.” race theory” in disguise. Garrett found
others “on the content of their charac­ this baffling. C.R.T., a complex aca­
ter,” the book “Martin Luther King, Jr. The superintendent, Jason Golden, demic framework that examines the
and the March on Wash­ urged his colleagues to take parental systemic ways in which racism has
ington” was unacceptable, shaped American society, is explored
because it contained his­ feedback seriously, includ­ at the university level or higher. As
torical photographs—seg­ ing worries that certain far as the board knew, Williamson
regated drinking fountains, Wit & Wisdom content County Schools had never introduced
firefighters blasting Black was too mature for young the concept. Yet there had been such
Americans with hoses— kids. For example, there a deluge of references to it that Gar­
that might make kids feel were gruesome details in rett had delved into her old e­mails, in
bad.The Moms considered books about shark attacks an unsuccessful attempt to identify
it divisive for Wit & Wis­ and about war.Golden told the origins of the outrage. She told her
dom to urge instructors to the board, “These are real colleagues,“I guess I’m wondering what
remind students that racial concerns.”Yet Golden also happened.”
slurs are “words people use to show dis­ recalled telling a Moms for
respect and hatred towards people of Liberty representative how In September, 2020—four months
different races.” much he trusted the district’s processes after the murder of George Floyd,
for evaluating curricula. two months before the Presidential
At one meeting, Welch watched, The review committee ultimately election, and a month into William­
stunned, as a Moms member said,“You concluded that Wit & Wisdom had son County Schools’ use of Wit &
are poisoning our children,”and “Wit & been an over­all success; still, adminis­ Wisdom—Christopher Rufo, a con­
Wisdom must go!” Welch told me, trators decided to survey teachers quar­ servative activist, appeared on Tucker
“They went from zero to a hundred. terly about how the curriculum was Carlson’s show,on Fox News,and called
Everything from them was aggressive, working.They limited access to the gor­ critical race theory “an existential threat
and threatening in nature.” He said, “It ier images in one Civil War book and to the United States.”Rufo capitalized
was not ‘Let’s have a dialogue.’ It was imposed similar “guardrails” involving on the fact that, given C.R.T.’s aca­
‘Here are our demands.’ ” “Hatchet,”a popular young­adult novel demic provenance, few Americans had
in which a character attempts suicide. heard of the concept. He argued that
When the women in T­shirts first “Walk Two Moons,” a novel by the liberal educators, under the bland ban­
showed up, Welch had never heard of Newbery Medal winner Sharon Creech, ner of “diversity,” were manipulating
Moms for Liberty, and he didn’t recog­ about a daughter’s quest to find her students into thinking of America not
nize its members. The group’s leader, missing mother, was eventually re­ as a vibrant champion of democracy
Robin Steenman, was in her early for­ moved from the Williamson version but as a shameful embodiment of white
ties, with shoulder­length blond hair; in of the program, not because its con­ supremacy. (As he framed things, there
coloring and build, she resembled Mar­ tent was deemed objectionable but, were no in­between positions.) Rufo
jorie Taylor Greene. Board of Educa­ rather, to adjust the pacing of one later called C.R.T. “the perfect vil­
tion members struggled to understand fourth­grade module. Golden, who is lain”—a term that “connotes hostile,
why she’d inserted herself into a matter tall and genial, told the board mem­ academic, divisive, race­obsessed, poi­
that didn’t concern her: Steenman had bers,“The overwhelming feedback that sonous, elitist, anti­American views.”
no children in the public schools. we got was: ‘Man, can’t we just read
something uplifting in fourth grade?’ Rufo found a receptive ear in Pres­
Moms for Liberty members soon And we felt the same way!” ident Donald Trump, who was already
escalated the conflict,publicly as­ At the work session, Golden shared ranting about “The 1619 Project,” the
serting that Williamson County Schools one end of a conference table with collection of Times Magazine essays
had adopted Wit & Wisdom hurriedly, Nancy Garrett, the board’s chair. Gar­ in which slavery is placed at the heart
and in violation of state rules.The school rett, who has rectangular glasses and a of the nation’s founding. On Twitter,
board still wasn’t sure what Moms for blond bob, is from a family that has at­ Trump had warned that the Depart­
Liberty was—who founded it, who tended or worked in Williamson County ment of Education would defund any
funded it. Nevertheless, the district as­ Schools for three generations. She had school whose classroom taught mate­
sembled a reassessment team to review won the chairmanship, by unanimous rial from the project. Trump conferred
the curriculum and the adoption process. vote, the previous August. At one point, with Rufo and banned federal agencies
At a public “work session”in June, 2021, she asked an assistant superintendent from conducting “un­American pro­
the team announced that, after a pre­ who had overseen the selection and re­ paganda training sessions” involving

54 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

“critical race theory” or “white privi- executive order banning C.R.T. from boards and move on from there,” she
lege.” Trump said that Black Lives Mat- schools. Jatia Wrighten, a political sci- said of like-minded parents,“It sounds
ter protests were proliferating not be- entist at Virginia Commonwealth Uni- a little melodramatic, but there is evil
cause of anger over police abuses but versity, told the Washington Post that working against us on a daily basis.”
because of “decades of left-wing indoc- Youngkin had “activated white women maga media—“Tucker Carlson To-
trination in our schools.” Establishing to vote in a very specific way that they night,” Breitbart—showcased Moms
a “1776 Commission,” he urged “patri- feel like is protecting their children.” for Liberty. Media Matters, the liberal
otic moms and dads” to demand that watchdog, argued that influential right-
schools stop feeding children “hateful Days after the alec Webinar on wing media figures were essentially “re-
lies about this country.” (The Ameri- “reclaiming education,” three women cruiting their eager audience” for the
can Historical Association condemned in Florida filed incorporation papers Moms’ campaign.
the Administration’s eventual “1776 Re- for Moms for Liberty, Inc., later de-
port,” highlighting its many inaccura- claring that their “sole purpose” was to Moms for Liberty, which is some-
cies and arguing that it attempted to “fight for parental rights” to choose times referred to as M4L or MFL, is
airbrush history and “elevate ignorance what sort of education was best for their so new that it is hard to parse, from
about the past to a civic virtue.”) kids. One of the organization’s found- public documents, what its leaders are
ers,Tina Descovich—who had recently getting paid. (The founders say that the
Nearly nine hundred school districts lost reëlection to the school board of chairs of local chapters are volunteers.)
nationwide were soon targeted by anti- Brevard County, Florida, after oppos- The group describes itself as a “grass-
C.R.T. campaigns, many of which ing pandemic safety protocols—soon roots” organization, yet its instant ab-
adopted language that closely echoed appeared on Rush Limbaugh’s show. sorption by the conservative media-
Trump’s order not to teach material that Declaring plans to “start with school sphere has led some critics to suspect
made others “feel discomfort, guilt, an-
guish, or any other form of psychologi- “ You’re unlikely to find anyplace on the market that is truly impregnable.”
cal distress on account of his or her race
or sex.” In some red states, the vague
wording was enshrined as law. Republi-
cans filed what became known as “anti-
C.R.T.” bills; they were seemingly cut
and pasted from templates, with simi-
larly phrased references to such terms as
“divisive concepts” and “indoctrination.”

Williamson County Schools was un-
eventfully wrapping up its first term
with Wit & Wisdom when, in early
December, 2020, the American Legis-
lative Exchange Council, which gener-
ates model legislation for right-leaning
lawmakers,hosted a Webinar about “re-
claiming education and the American
dream.” A representative of the Heri-
tage Foundation, the conservative think
tank, warned that elements of a “Black
Lives Matter curriculum” were “now in
our schools.” Rufo—correctly predict-
ing that Joe Biden, then the President-
elect, would abolish Trump’s executive
order—urged state legislators and gov-
ernors to take up the fight.

Continuing the agitation wasn’t just
an act of fealty to Trump; it was cun-
ning politics.The fear that C.R.T.would
cause children to become fixated on
race has resonated with enough voters
to help tip important elections. Last
November, Glenn Youngkin, a candi-
date for the governorship of Virginia,
won an upset victory after repeatedly
warning that the “curriculum has gone
haywire”—and promising to sign an

it of being an Astroturf group—an op- ica—supported the suite of talking the highest property values: the median
eration secretly funded by moneyed in- points about C.R.T. According to NBC home value exceeds eight hundred thou-
terests. Moms for Liberty registered News, in a single week last year Breit- sand dollars.
with the I.R.S. as the kind of social- bart alone published seven hundred
welfare nonprofit that can accept un- and fifty posts or articles in which the It is not a diverse place. Eighty-eight
limited dark money. theory was mentioned. Glenn Beck, per cent of residents are white. Ninety-
the right-wing pundit, declared that five per cent of the school district’s
The leaders had deep G.O.P. con- C.R.T. is a “poison,” urging his audi- teachers are white. Until September, all
nections. One, Marie Rogerson, was a ence,“Stand up in your community and twelve school-board members and the
successful Republican political strategist. fire the teachers. Fire them!” superintendent were white. A Confed-
The other, Bridget Ziegler, a school- erate monument anchors the town
board member in Sarasota County, is On March 15, 2021, Rufo, in a tweet square of the county seat, Franklin.The
married to the vice-chair of the Flor- thread, overtly described a key element square was publicly marked as a for-
ida G.O.P., Christian Ziegler, who told of the far right’s evolving strategy: “We mer slave market only three years ago.
the Washington Post, “I have been try- have successfully frozen their brand— The Confederate flag still flies prom-
ing for a dozen years to get twenty- and ‘critical race theory’—into the public inently in some areas. When the white
thirty-year-old females involved with conversation and are steadily driving up father of Black children recently com-
the Republican Party,and it was a heavy negative perceptions.We will eventually plained about this at a school-board
lift to get that demographic. . . . But turn it toxic, as we put all of the various meeting, a man in the audience sneered,
now Moms for Liberty has done it for cultural insanities under that brand cat- “We’re in the South! ”
me.” Moms for Liberty worked with egory.” He added, “The goal is to have
the office of Florida’s governor, Ron the public read something crazy in the In 2018, several parents joined forces
DeSantis, to help craft the state’s infa- newspaper and immediately think ‘crit- to point out that schools in Williamson
mous “Don’t Say Gay”legislation,which ical race theory.’” County could work harder to be wel-
DeSantis signed into law this past coming to children of color. The group,
March; it forbids instruction on “sex- Williamson County has some of which became known as the Cultural
ual orientation or gender identity” in Tennessee’s top-ranked schools. Competency Council, included Black,
“kindergarten through grade 3 or in a “That’s why people move here,” Eric Asian American,Jewish,and L.G.B.T.Q.+
manner that is not age-appropriate.” Welch,the longtime school-board mem- residents. A school-district official who
ber, told me. He describes the school served as a liaison to the council created
A national phalanx of interconnected system as an economic “asset that pays videos for teacher training and develop-
organizations—including the Manhat- off.”Williamson County has the state’s ment,including one about privilege.That
tan Institute, where Rufo is a fellow, second-lowest unemployment rate and video’s language had clearly been cali-
and a group called Moms for Amer- brated to preëmpt defensive reactions: a
narrator underscored that the concept of
“The line in the script was actually ‘Woof woof,’ but, when we privilege was “not meant to suggest that
started shooting, ‘Bow wow’ came out, and the rest is history.” someone has never struggled or that suc-
cess is unearned.” Even so, the conser-
vative media pounced: the Tennessee Star
said that the video took viewers on a
guilt trip about “the perks white males
supposedly have that others do not,
America’s supposed dysfunctional his-
tory, and how unfair it all is.”Such views
have played well in a county that Trump
carried twice, both times by more than
twenty points. (The Cultural Compe-
tency Council has been disbanded.)

In 2020, Revida Rahman and an-
other parent co-founded an anti-racism
group, One WillCo, after Black parents
chaperoning field trips to local planta-
tions were astonished to see slavery de-
picted as benign. Rahman told me that
some presentations suggested that “the
slaves didn’t really have it that bad—
they lived better than we do, they had
their food provided, they had housing.”
She added,“I beg to differ.”At a school
that one of Rahman’s sons attended,
some white classmates had mockingly

linked arms as if to represent Trump’s evidence that we are teaching critical jected to her “messaging” in support
border wall. race theory,”and urged them to “get rid of covid-19 vaccinations; afterward,
of ” Wit & Wisdom. Brad Fiscus resigned from the school
One WillCo especially wanted the board and the family moved to the East
school system to address the fact that it Afew weeks later, on March 22nd, Coast. For right-wing extremists, the
had a record of disproportionately pun- the school board’s monthly meet- obvious lesson was that rage tactics
ishing students of color—a recent rev- ing took place on Zoom, because of worked.That August,one school-board
elation. Moreover, some teachers used the pandemic. Robin Steenman ap- meeting nearly ended in violence when
racially insensitive materials in their peared before the board for the first two enraged men followed a proponent
classrooms: in an assignment about the time.Wearing a cream-colored sweater of masks to his vehicle, screaming,“We
antebellum economy, students were in- and dangly earrings, she presented her- can find you!”
structed to imagine that their family self simply as a concerned resident who
“owns slaves,” and to “create a list of ex- wanted school officials to reject any di- Moms for Liberty emphasizes the
pectations for your family’s slaves.” versity proposal that involved “The 1619 importance of being “joyful warriors”—
Project, critical race training, intersec- relatable women who can rally their
On February 15, 2021, the school tionality.” She worried aloud that a re- communities.A founder once explained,
board hired a mother-and-son team cent proposal in California to mandate “This fight has to be fought in their
of diversity consultants to gauge the a semester of ethnic studies would be own backyard.” The organization may
depth of the district’s problems with “paraded as a blueprint for the rest of have seen Steenman as particularly well
racism, bullying, and harassment, and the country.” suited to winning over Williamson
to recommend solutions. A conserva- County residents: she was a former B-1-
tive board member, Jay Galbreath, for- Steenman, who appeared to be read- bomber pilot now raising three small
warded information about the consul- ing from notes, asserted that parents children. Her husband, Matt, was also
tants to influential local Republicans, in Virginia were being blacklisted for ex-Air Force—fighter jets.They moved
including Gregg Lawrence, a county “speaking out.” In Pennsylvania, an el- to Williamson County five years ago,
commissioner, and Bev Burger, a long- ementary school had “forced fifth grad- from Texas.
time alderman in Franklin.In an e-mail, ers to celebrate Black communism and
Lawrence complained to Galbreath host a Black Power rally.”In North Car- Another member of their fraternity
that hiring the consultants was the type olina, a teacher had described parents was John Ragan, a former Air Force
of thing that would lead to “the polit- as “an impediment to social justice.” fighter pilot who’d been elected as a Re-
icization of teaching in America where In Ohio, C.R.T. “had to be removed publican to the Tennessee General As-
every subject is taught through the lens from the curriculum, because the stu- sembly in 2010. Ragan, a former busi-
of race.” He wrote, “These young peo- dents were literally turning on each ness consultant from the city of Oak
ple who have been protesting, looting other.” Steenman cited no sources. She Ridge, had been listed as an alternate
and burning down our cities in Amer- said, “If you give them an inch”—then on alec’s education task force. (He says
ica are doing so because they don’t see changed course. Dropping the “them,” that he does not recall attending any
anything about America worth pre- she declared, “If you give one inch to meetings.) He’d once crafted legislation
serving. And why is that? Because our this kind of teaching, then you’re gonna to ban K-8 teachers from using materi-
public schools and universities taught subject yourself to the whole spectrum.” als “inconsistent with natural human re-
them that America is a systemically production”in the classroom. (It failed.)
racist nation founded by a bunch of Several weeks later,Steenman started
bigoted slave owning colonizers.” the Williamson County chapter of Early last year, as Moms for Liberty
Moms for Liberty, building on the was receiving its first wave of national
This exchange was eventually made e-mail sent by the parents of the bi- media attention,Ragan introduced “anti-
public through an open-records request, racial child and harnessing the furious C.R.T.” legislation. He wanted to ban
which also revealed that Burger had energy of families who were already ac- teaching about white privilege or any
helped edit what has been called the cusing the school board of “medical tyr- other concepts that might cause students
foundational complaint against Wit & anny” for requiring students to wear “discomfort or other psychological dis-
Wisdom: a month after the diversity masks. This vocal minority had been tress” because of their race or sex. The
consultants were hired, the parents particularly incensed at one school- wording parroted talking points from
of a biracial second grader e-mailed board member, Brad Fiscus, a former Moms for Liberty, which parroted
school officials to complain that the science teacher whose wife, Michelle, a Trump, who parroted Rufo. Around the
curriculum had caused their son to be pediatrician, was Tennessee’s chief vac- time that Moms for Liberty members
“ashamed of his white half.” Burger cine officer. Williamson County is a began showing up at Williamson County
wrote of her edits,“See what you think.” Republican pipeline to state and na- school-board meetings, Steve Bannon,
She cc’d Lawrence, who forwarded the tional office: the governor, Bill Lee, is the former Trump adviser, said on his
communications to Galbreath and an- from there; Marsha Blackburn, the video podcast that “the path to save the
other school-board member,Dan Cash, maga senator, began her political ca- nation is very simple—it’s going to go
a fellow-conservative who had won his reer as a county commissioner there. In through the school boards.” Calling
seat in 2014, during a Tea Party wave. July, 2021, the state fired Michelle Fis- mothers “patriots,” he urged a “revolt.”
The county commissioner told the cus after conservative lawmakers ob-
school-board members, “Here is more At a committee meeting of Tennes-
see House members, Ragan promoted

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 57

Governor Lee, she said, “Stop serving
the woke-left lobby!” Beck said, “Bill
Lee, shame on you!”Lee signed the bill
into law on the eve of the anniversary
of George Floyd’s murder.

Steenman raised Moms for Liberty’s
visibility by putting on events—
rented plants, live music, charcuterie.

One of them, C.R.T. 101, took place in

May, 2021, before a large audience at

Liberty Hall, a Franklin auditorium in

a renovated stove factory filled with

shops and restaurants. A clinical psy-

chologist from Utah, Gary Thompson,

came onstage and declared that C.R.T.

engenders shame, which can trigger

depression, which could “be pushing

your kids to suicide.” Thompson, who

is Black, showed photographs of his

multiracial family: he and his wife,

a white pediatric neuropsychologist,

have six children. Thompson joked,

awkwardly, that the overwhelmingly

white audience sure didn’t look like

members of the K.K.K. He noted that

he’d voted for Barack Obama, and said

that he approved of Williamson County

“It’s sheer arrogance to believe that your voice is louder Schools’hiring of diversity consultants

than the din of crackers in my mouth.” to assess such problems as racial bul-

lying. He opposed C.R.T., though, be-

•• cause it framed people of color as “vic-
tims.” Choking up, Thompson said,

“That is not the legacy that my parents

his legislation by claiming that he’d ing “artificial divisions” in a “shameless left me.”

heard about a seven-year-old William- pursuit of political power.”His bill passed. Moms for Liberty often advances its

son County girl who had had suicidal Senator Raumesh Akbari, who chairs cause by enlisting Black conservatives,

thoughts, and was now in therapy, be- the Tennessee Senate Democratic Cau- or by borrowing snippets from their

cause she was ashamed of being white. cus, said,“This offensive legislation pre- public comments.The organization has

(No such family has ever publicly come tends skin color has never mattered in posted a video clip of Condoleezza Rice

forward.) Two Black Democrats sharply our country,” adding that “our children saying that white kids shouldn’t have to

challenged Ragan. Harold Love, a con- deserve to learn the full story.” “feel bad”in order for Black children to

gressman from Nashville, asked him Once the Governor signed the bill feel empowered. Steenman has collab-

whether the proposed legislation would into law, Moms for Liberty would be orated with Carol Swain, a political

make it illegal for teachers to even men- able to devise complaints arguing that scientist at Vanderbilt, who vocally

tion “The 1619 Project.” When Ragan certain elements of public instruction opposes same-sex marriage and once

replied that instructors could talk about violated a Tennessee statute. Violators described Islam as “dangerous to our

it as long as they taught “both for and could be fined hundreds of thousands society.” This past January, Moms for

against,” Love said, “It’s kind of hard of dollars,potentially draining resources. Liberty sponsored a conference or-

to be ‘for or against’slavery.”G.A.Hard- Steenman, appearing on Blackburn’s ganized by Swain, American Dream,

away, a congressman from Memphis, video podcast,“Unmuted with Marsha,” whose branding heavily featured im-

argued on the House floor that a law let slip a tactical detail: the moment ages of Martin Luther King, Jr. Be-

limiting discussion of race, ethnicity, Tennessee’s new law took effect, Moms fore the event, King’s daughter Bernice

discrimination, and bias contradicted for Liberty would have a complaint tweeted an admonition about those

“the very principles that our country against Wit & Wisdom “ready to go” who took her father’s “words out of

was formed on.” to the state. Blackburn praised Steen- context to promote ideas that oppose

Ragan pushed ahead, arguing that man as “the point of the spear.” his teachings,” adding that Steenman’s

“subversive factions,” “seditious charla- Steenman also appeared on Glenn chapter, having “sought to erase him,”

tans,” and “misguided souls” were creat- Beck’s show. As if speaking directly to was now “using him to make money.”

58 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

At the C.R.T. 101 gathering, the au- screen behind her, showed the “find- tle brainwashing assholes will never get
thor of the original complaint against ings”of a Moms for Liberty “deep dive” hold of my kids!”After Eric Welch and
Wit & Wisdom revealed herself on- into Wit & Wisdom. She elicited gasps others publicly challenged Steenman
stage to be Chara Dixon, a mom in her from the audience by saying that the about the tweet—and another one de-
forties. Nervously holding a copy of curriculum contained books that de- claring that her children would never
her speech, she introduced herself as a picted “graphic murder,” “rape,” “pro- attend public schools—the account van-
naturalized citizen.(She had emigrated, miscuity,” “torture,” “adultery,” “still- ished. (Steenman agreed to an inter-
decades earlier, from Thailand.) Dixon, birth,” and “scalping and skinning,” view, but did not keep the appointment.
whose husband, Brian, is white, recalled along with content that her organiza- A Moms for Liberty spokesperson,call-
helping their seven-year-old son with tion considered to be “anti-police,”“anti- ing my questions “personal in nature,”
a Wit & Wisdom assignment about a church,”and “anti-nuclear family.”Rhet- largely declined to provide answers.)
“lonely little yellow leaf.” The audience oric about “empowering the students”
laughed when she declared,“It was bor- was suddenly “everywhere,” she com- Privately,certain defenders of Wit &
ing.” A book about a chameleon: “An- plained. Without presenting any evi- Wisdom referred to Moms for Liberty
other boring story!” Her son had also dence, she claimed that elementary- members as the Antis. In a sly move,
read about King’s “I Have a Dream” school students now needed counsellors some adopted the seahorse as a symbol
speech, which was “beautiful and up- to help them “overcome the emotional of what one parent described to me as
lifting”; but the tale of Ruby Bridges trauma” caused by Wit & Wisdom. “the resistance.” This summer in Wil-
and the “angry white mob”was depress- liamson County, I saw seahorse stick-
ing. Dixon said that in her son’s child- Steenman’s events often strayed far ers on cars and laptops. When I met
hood world “there’s no color.”(She soon from the particulars of Williamson Rahman for lunch, she was wearing
became Moms for Liberty’s treasurer.) County Schools. At one of them, the seahorse earrings. At a school-board
proceedings were interrupted when campaign event for a candidate who
Dixon seemed to conflate Wit & someone walked onstage and breath- opposed Moms for Liberty, a volunteer
Wisdom and C.R.T. Steenman, in an lessly announced news from Virginia: wore a seahorse pendant on a necklace,
official complaint to the Tennessee De- Glenn Youngkin,the candidate for gov- alongside a gold cross. At least one per-
partment of Education, wrote, “There ernor who’d crusaded against C.R.T., son connected to Moms for Liberty
does not have to be a textbook labeled had won. The audience cheered as if had become concerned about the group’s
‘Critical Race Theory’ for its harmful Youngkin were one of their own. motives and tactics, and was secretly
tenets to be present in a curriculum.” monitoring them from the inside.This
At the C.R.T. 101 event, she took the Steenman’s claims about Wit & Wis- person told me, “I’m the one in the
stage and told the audience that the dom were so tendentious that sev- trench, and I don’t want to get caught.”
threat of “Marxist” indoctrination at eral ardent supporters of the public
school could be vanquished by oppos- schools looked her up on social media. Many Moms and like-minded par-
ing “activist” teachers, curricula, and Among other things, they discovered ents wanted both Wit & Wisdom and
diversity-driven policy. An m.c. cheer- a Twitter account, @robin_steenman. Superintendent Golden gone. Gold-
ily ended the evening by reminding On August 9,2020,Matt Walsh—a col- en’s contract was up for annual review
everyone that “today’s kids are tomor- umnist for the Daily Wire, the conser- before the 2021-22 school year began.
row’s voters.” (One Moms for Liberty opponent re-
vative media site co-founded by the cently tweeted, “The m.o. nationwide
The Williamson County chapter of pundit Ben Shapiro—had shared a is to fire Supt’s and hire ideologues.”)
M4L held its next big event, Let’s Talk thread by a Philadelphia teacher who At a meeting where the board planned
Wit & Wisdom, at a Harley-Davidson expressed concern that meddlesome to vote on Golden’s future, one of the
franchise in Franklin. Steenman had parents might overhear classroom con- superintendent’s many supporters im-
been having trouble finding a venue versations during online learning and plored the elected officials to “hold the
when the dealership’s owner offered his undermine “honest conversations about line” against the “steady attack on our
showroom. Calling the man a “true pa- gender/sexuality.” (The Daily Wire is public schools.” The Antis were louder.
triot,” Steenman presented him with a headquartered in Nashville, and Sha- A man wearing an American-flag-
folded and framed American flag that, piro has propagated Moms for Liber- themed shirt shouted, “We, the par-
she said, had accompanied her on a ty’s messaging.) In a retweet of Walsh, ents, are awake, we’re organized, and
bombing mission in Afghanistan. @robin_steenman had posted,“You lit- we’re extremely pissed off.”He declared,
“We’re gonna replace every board mem-
Moms for Liberty had invited the ber in here with people just like me.
entire school board to the event, but the Nothing would make us happier than
only members who showed up were the to surround you with a roomful of
group’s three clear allies. One, a former American patriots who believe in the
kindergarten teacher who opposed mask- Constitution of the United States and
ing, liked to hug people during breaks Jesus Christ above!”
at school-board meetings.The other two
were Cash and Galbreath,both of whom The Antis jeered at speakers who
were up for reëlection on August 4,2022. expressed support for Golden or the
district’s diversity efforts.They mocked
Steenman, gesturing toward a large

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 59

a woman whose daughters had experi- ical ideology. As the magazine Govern- candidates in partisan school-board
enced anti-Asian slurs at school. The ing put it last year, “The goal of having races. Girdusky boasted that, in 2021,
mom told the board,“I’ve heard people nonpartisan elections is not to remove his pac “did fifty-eight elections in seven
say that teaching these parts of our all politics” but “to remove a conflict states and we won forty-two.”Girdusky
history is ‘racist’ or ‘traumatic.’ What’s point that keeps the school board from said that his goal this year is to boost
traumatic is Black, Latino, Asian, and doing its job.” For people who target at least five hundred school-board can-
L.G.B.T.Q.kids going to schools where school boards, conflict has become a didates nationwide. He urged the au-
they face discrimination and don’t feel tool. In Texas, a PAC linked to a cell- dience to “vote from the bottom up—
safe.”A local psychologist,Alanna Truss, phone company which recently funded go from school board and then go all
said, “I’m yet to see a child in my prac- the maga takeover of several school the way up to governor and senator, and
tice who’s been traumatized by our coun- boards paid for an inflammatory mail we’ll have conservative majorities across
ty’s curriculum choices. I have, however, campaign blaming a classroom shoot- the entire electorate.”
seen many students experiencing trauma ing on administrators who had “stopped
due to being discriminated against and disciplining students according to Crit- Last November, mere weeks after
bullied within our schools, related to ical Race Theory principles.”In August, Tennessee lawmakers voted to allow
race, religion, gender, and sexuality.” during a panel at cpac, the gathering partisan school-board races, Steenman
of conservatives, the former Trump of- launched a pac, Williamson Families.
Six of the school-board members, ficial Mercedes Schlapp warned that, Its approach was markedly similar to
who serve four-year terms, were coming though Republicans were focussed on that of Southlake Families, a Texas pac
up for reëlection in August of 2022. (The federal and state elections,“school board whose orchestrated takeover of a school
other six will finish their terms in 2024.) elections are critical.” The panel’s title, board in that state has led to attempted
As the Wit & Wisdom furor grew, an- “We Are All Domestic Terrorists,” de- book bans.Both pacs have worked with
other component of the right-wing as- risively referred to recent instructions Axiom Strategies, a political-consult-
sault on schools locked into place: last from Attorney General Merrick Gar- ing firm that has helped seat high-
fall, state lawmakers passed a bill legal- land to the F.B.I. for devising a plan to profile Republicans, including maga
izing partisan school-board elections. protect school employees and board figures. Allen West, the chair of the
Moms for Liberty called the change “a members from threats of violence. Texas G.O.P.,has urged Southlake Fam-
HUGE step forward.” ilies to export its takeover blueprint to
Joining Schlapp onstage was Ryan suburbs nationwide. Wealthy suburbs
Educators and policymakers have Girdusky, the founder of the 1776 Proj- are some of America’s purplest districts,
long believed that public education ect pac,which funnels money to G.O.P. and winning them may be key to con-
should operate independently of polit- trolling the House, the Senate, and the
Presidency. Anne McGraw, the former
Williamson County Schools board
member, told me that the advent of
Moms for Liberty “shows how hyper-
local the national machine is going
with their tactics.”She observed,“Moms
for Liberty is not in Podunk, America.
They’re going into hyper-educated,
wealthy counties like this, and trying
to get those people to doubt the school
system that brought us here.”

Steenman’s pac quickly took in about
a hundred and seventy-five thousand
dollars—an unusually large amount for
local politics in Tennessee. The pac
held an inaugural event featuring John
Rich, a country singer who had ap-
peared with Trump on “The Celebrity
Apprentice.” Rich, who has no appar-
ent connection to Williamson County,
has contributed at least five thousand
dollars to Steenman’s pac.

“My phone is definitely spying on me—I just got an ad for ‘bad sex.’ ” Progressives and policy experts have
long suspected that right-wing at-
tacks on school boards are less about
changing curricula than about under-
mining the entire public-school sys-

tem, in the hope of privatizing educa- comments “reprehensible and irrespon- him “a strong advocate for what’s right.”
tion. During the alec Webinar about sible.” Even Republican politicians For Welch’s seat, Steenman’s pac
“reclaiming education,” the Heritage backed away. The speaker of the Ten-
Foundation representative declared nessee House, Cameron Sexton, ac- backed William (Doc) Holladay, an
that “school choice” would become knowledged that Arnn had “insulted optometrist who, like Steenman, had
“very important in the next couple of generations of teachers who have made no children in Williamson County
years”; controversies about curricula, a difference for countless students.” Schools. Holladay had shown up at
he said, were “opening up opportunity school-board meetings to denounce
for policymakers at the state level” to Moms for Liberty’s role in the C.R.T. as “racist.”On Facebook, where
consider options like charter schools. broader war on public schools became he’d railed against pandemic protocols,
ever clearer in July, at the group’s in- his posts were routinely flagged or re-
This isn’t the first time that the cul- augural national summit, in Tampa. moved because they contained mis-
ture wars have taken aim at public ed- information. His top “news” sources
ucation. But Rebecca Jacobsen, a pro- DeSantis, who delivered a key address, included the Epoch Times, which reg-
fessor of education policy at Michigan was presented with a “liberty sword.” ularly promotes right-wing falsehoods.
State University, believes that this era Another headliner was Trump’s former
is different, because social media has Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, Last year, Charlie Wilson, the pres-
made it easy for national operatives to whose family has connections to Hills- ident of the National School Boards
stage “a coördinated, concrete” scare dale.To an enthusiastic crowd that in- Association, characterized local school-
campaign designed to drive parents to- cluded Steenman, DeVos declared that board members as fundamental guard-
ward alternatives to public schools: the U.S. Department of Education— ians “of democracy, of liberty, of equal-
“The message, at its core, is: ‘Beware the agency that she once oversaw— ity, of civility and community, and of
of your public-education system. Make should not exist. the Constitution and the rule of law.”
sure your kid’s teachers aren’t up to Holladay, a felon who believes the
something.’ ” Early this year, Eric Welch, the conspiracy theory that Trump is still
school-board member, was lean- the “legitimate President,” seemed
The timing of “anti-C.R.T.” legis- ing against seeking reëlection. Both of more like an opportunist. In 2008, he’d
lation is no coincidence. Instead of put- his sons had graduated—he was the pleaded guilty to multiple counts of
ting forth a platform, the Republican one who handed them their high-school prescription fraud and forgery; the
Party has tried to maintain power by diplomas when they crossed the stage. Tennessee Department of Health had
demonizing its opponents and critics His wife, Andrea, wanted him to take put him on probation for “immoral,
as sinister and un-American. In the it easy for a while. unprofessional or dishonorable con-
lead-up to the midterms, the G.O.P.’s duct,” noting that he had also worked
alarmism about critical race theory has School-board service, which is time- “while impaired.” The state licensure
accompanied fear-mongering about consuming and can be tedious, requires board later added five more years of
L.G.B.T.Q.+ teachers being “groom- diplomacy, a breadth of knowledge, probation upon discovering that he’d
ers.” Conservative media aggressively and the ability to make complex, well- made “untruthful” claims about “pro-
promote both campaigns. From Fox informed decisions.At meetings, Welch, fessional excellence or abilities.” (Hol-
News to the Twitter account Libs of who considered ideologues and bullies laday told me that he has turned his
TikTok, the messaging has been con- a threat to public education, often re- life around.)
sistent: many public-school teachers butted misinformation about covid-
are dangerous. 19 and Wit & Wisdom. At one meet- When Welch heard that Holladay
ing, he’d pointedly read aloud from a and other figures he considered to be
Lee, the Tennessee governor, has title that he found on a Moms for Lib- unsuitable were seeking authority over
leveraged this discord while trying to erty site: the book, written by a fol- the schools, he tweeted,“I’m running.”
reformulate school funding: in Janu- lower of the John Birch Society, He told his wife, “I don’t know that
ary, he announced plans to create fifty referred to Black people as “pickanin- I can walk away and let these people
new charter schools in partnership nies.” Rahman, the co-founder of One be in charge.”The “Tennessee School
with Hillsdale College, a private Chris- WillCo, the anti-racism organization, Board Candidate Guide” notes that,
tian school in Michigan, whose pres- told me, “He came with all the re- for the office of school board, “the
ident, Larry Arnn, headed Trump’s ceipts.”Welch’s detractors had declared best, most capable and most farsighted
1776 Commission. The plan partially him arrogant and rude; Rahman called citizens of each community should
collapsed after a Tennessee television be drafted.”
station aired footage of Arnn, during
a private appearance in Williamson During the campaign, Holladay
County, comparing public education tried to frame Welch, a lifelong Re-
to “the plague”and arguing that teach- publican, as a “liberal” for having sup-
ers are educated in “the dumbest parts ported masking and Wit & Wisdom.
of the dumbest colleges in the coun- Welch publicly noted that he had in-
try.” J. C. Bowman, the executive di- terned for Senator John Warner, of
rector and C.E.O. of Professional Virginia, and attended the Inaugura-
Educators of Tennessee, called Arnn’s tion of George W. Bush. Holladay,
who had no military service, bragged

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 61

about being a patriot; Welch is an didate would “call for the arrest of a that his children attended local schools.
Army veteran. WCS librarian.”) In fact, Russell’s three children lived
in his native state of Ohio.
In a Q. & A. published by One As Holladay campaigned, he re-
WillCo, candidates were asked to de- peatedly invoked the nationwide par- Throughout America, maga types
scribe their involvement with William- tisan divide. In an interview that ap- were targeting education officials. In
son County Schools. Welch explained peared on YouTube, he declared that Maine, a man plastered a school-board
that, in addition to serving on the conservatives were fleeing blue states member’s photograph on a sign and
executive board of the district’s parent- for places like Williamson County be- surrounded it with rat traps, telling
teacher association, he had “run wres- cause the left was trying to “destroy NBC News, “This is a war with the
tling tournaments as a booster fund- the last remaining refuges of conser- left,” and “In war, tactics and strategy
raiser, spray painted end zones, worked vatism and patriotism.” If Williamson can become blurry.” A member of the
concessions, volunteered for holiday County “goes blue,” he said, the rest Proud Boys ran for a school-board seat
shows setup/breakdown, built theatre of the state would follow, and if Ten- in California. On September 27th, the
sets, cleaned bleachers, mopped floors.” nessee “doesn’t stay red” it will be “a American Libraries Association sent
Holladay’s answers: “Speaking out at huge blow to the country.” an open letter to the F.B.I. director,
school board meetings”; “Helping to Chris Wray, asking for help: in the pre-
lead activist groups in order to effect On Election Day, Welch, a wiry vious two weeks alone, “bombing or
needed changes.”When asked why he ex-wrestler, erected a pole tent shooting threats” had forced the tem-
was running, he said that “the school outside Hunters Bend Elementary porary closing of libraries in five states.
board has largely been operating in a School, a voting precinct. Holladay’s Tennessee was one of them.
manner that runs counter to the con- supporters set up nearby. I arrived to
servative principles that most people find Welch, wearing khaki shorts and In Williamson County, Moms for
who live here hold dear.” This and other a “re-elect eric welch” T-shirt, Liberty members couldn’t claim igno-
answers betrayed profound ignorance squaring off in the parking lot with a rance of the beliefs of some of the can-
of what a school board does. Holladay supporter who was saying, didates they and Steenman’s pac sup-
angrily, “I’ve laid people out for less ported. Williamson Families donated
Moms for Liberty had been broad- than that!” a thousand dollars to the campaign of
ening its campaign against Wit & Wis- an ex-marine who was running for
dom and was now targeting reading The man, Brian Russell, described county commissioner, and who had
materials available in school libraries, Welch as the aggressor—“He shoulder- publicly warned the school board, “In
which provided access to the Epic app, checked me”—but multiple witnesses the past, you dealt with sheep. Now
a repository of nearly fifty thousand characterized the altercation differ- prepare yourselves to deal with lions!
children’s books. In a local news seg- ently. Meghan Guffee, a Republican I swore an oath to protect this coun-
ment, Steenman read aloud, “I-is-for- running for reëlection to the county try from all enemies—foreign and do-
intersex,”from a book called “The Gay- commission, told me that Russell had mestic. You harm my children, you be-
BCs,”which was available on Epic, and demanded to know why Welch had come a domestic enemy.”
said, “What parent wants to explain blocked him on social media. Welch,
‘intersex’to their child that,at this point, trying to walk away, had responded, That guy lost. So did Holladay.
doesn’t even understand sex?” “I’m ending this conversation. You’re Welch beat him by five hundred
an ass.” and fifty-nine votes. Welch was sur-
Holladay tried a similar maneuver. prised that anybody had voted for Holla-
During a live-streamed candidate In a public Facebook post, Russell day, later telling me, “If you had to de-
forum, he handed his interviewer a had declared Welch to be “as bad as a sign a candidate who is unqualified and
passage from “Push,” the acclaimed pedophile.”Guffee said that she’d heard should not be on a board of education,
novel by Sapphire, and asked him to Russell,in the parking lot,accuse Welch that’s what he’d look like.”
read it aloud. (If this was the same pas- of having “voted to teach third grad-
sage that Holladay later showed me on ers how to masturbate.” (Russell de- Candidates backed by Moms for
his cell phone, it began, “Daddy sick nies this.) Guffee was particularly ap- Liberty members won, however, in two
me, disgust me, but he sex me up.”) The palled that her six-year-old daughter, other districts. A Republican who ap-
interviewer was Tom Lawrence, a gen- who was with her at the voting site, peared to have no connection to the
tlemanly fixture on AM radio who has had witnessed Russell’s hostility. She public schools beat Ken Chilton, who
been called “the voice of Williamson told me, “That is not how this com- ran as an independent and who, the
County.” Lawrence scanned the text munity does things.” day after the election,tweeted that Ten-
and declined to share it with viewers, nessee lawmakers’ decision to allow
saying,“It has words like ‘orgasm’in it.” Before leaving the school grounds, partisan school-board elections had
Holladay, noting that the book could Russell, a painting contractor in his “created a monster.”
be found in one of the local high schools, early fifties, told me that he was angry
declared, “Whoever is responsible for about Wit & Wisdom: “When my Jay Galbreath, the board member
putting that book in the library should daughter comes home and her best who had forwarded the e-mails about
be arrested.”(In a tweet,Welch expressed friend is Black, and she’s wondering diversity consultants to other conser-
astonishment that a school-board can- why ‘I’m bad because I’m white. . . . ’” vative politicians, had found himself
This and other comments suggested challenged from the right flank—by

62 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

a M4L-affiliated candidate whose • •
campaign signs said “reject crt.”
As if to prove his opposition to Wit & Or are we chipping away at our larg- The slick rollout of Moms for Lib-
Wisdom, Galbreath had posted pub- est public institution and the system erty has made it seem less like a good-
licly, on Facebook, that progressives that has been at the center of our de- faith collective of informed parents
were “constantly looking at ways to mocracy since the founding of this and more like a well-funded opera-
inject and normalize things like gen- country?” She noted that some Amer- tion vying to sway American voters
der identity, the black lives matter icans “don’t trust their schools and teach- in a pivotal election year. Steenman’s
movement, and LGBTQ by weaving ers anymore,” adding, “That’s radical.” chapter recently announced a slate of
it into curriculum.”Williamson Strong, upcoming talks: “Gender Ideology,”
a pac composed of local progressives Moms for Liberty’s campaign, “Restorative Justice,” “Comprehen-
who have long defended the public meanwhile, continues to widen. The sive Sex Ed,”“History of Marxism in
schools, called for Galbreath’s resig- organization now claims two hundred Education.”I asked Jacobsen whether
nation, noting, “This is pure hate and forty chapters in forty-two states, she thinks that Moms for Liberty
speech, and it has NO place in a posi- and more than a hundred thousand members actually believe that a cur-
tion of influence or power over 40,000+ members. It has thrown a fund-raising riculum like Wit & Wisdom dam-
children and their education. It has gala, featuring Megyn Kelly, in which ages children. “I don’t know what
no place in Williamson County, pe- the top ticket cost twenty thousand anybody believes anymore,” she re-
riod.” The group, whose leaders in- dollars. In late October, a spokesper- plied. “We seem to have lost a sense
clude Anne McGraw, the former son for the Moms told me that the of honesty. It may just be about power
school-board member, observed, “All organization—ostensibly a charity— and money.” 
filters have apparently been obliter- is a “media company.”
ated now that he’s competing for votes
against an MFL-endorsed candidate.”
Despite the controversy, Galbreath
won reëlection.

A month before the vote, a civil
action was filed against Wit & Wis-
dom: the parents of an elementary-
school student sued the school board
and various administrators in the dis-
trict on behalf of a conservative non-
profit that they had just launched, Par-
ents’ Choice Tennessee. The lawsuit’s
complaint echoed Moms for Liberty’s
assertions that the curriculum’s “harm-
ful, unlawful and age-inappropriate
content” represented a “clear violation
of Tennessee code.” If the lawsuit
succeeds, Williamson County Schools
may have to find a new curriculum and
pay fines. (Citing the litigation, Wil-
liamson County Schools officials de-
clined to comment for this article.)

The lawsuit may have been de-
signed, in part, to give the impression
that there was more local opposition
to Wit & Wisdom than actually ex-
isted. There are eighteen thousand
students in the district’s elementary
schools, but according to a district
report only thirty-seven people had
complained about the new curricu-
lum. Fourteen of the complainants
had no children in the system.

Rebecca Jacobsen, the Michigan
scholar, looks for clues in such data.
She said, of the vitriol toward school
boards,“Is this a blip,and we’ll rebound?

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 63

FICTION

64 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB MITCHELL

S he tried the door. The door was let herself in, which was O.K., fine, no of his car in the driveway and then the
unlocked. She went in. problem,everybody was a friend of some- front door slamming, right on cue. If
The moment was layered and body’s. And she remembered the cham- her eyes drifted to the clock radio on
complex,almost like a fairy tale,but where pagne, good champagne from France the nightstand it was only a reflex, and
were the three bears? Upstairs, barking. and colder than winter in Poughkeep- because she was already in bed, read-
Did bears bark? No, but dogs did, and sie,which had helped moderate the buzz ing and half watching some outer-space
that was what was going on here, dogs she’d been riding for three sleepless days slasher movie (with the sound muted
barking and scrabbling with their black and nights now—and the singer from so she didn’t have to hear the screams),
shiny toenails—pawnails?—at the closed the band, who’d come up to her at the she didn’t bother to go downstairs.Cam-
door at the top of the stairway, the stair- buffet table as if he wanted something eron ate at the store, anyway, and if he
way that was carpeted and strewn with from her and made some sort of lame was hungry there were cold cuts and a
soft, welcoming shadows cast by various joke about the way she was going at the fruit salad in the refrigerator. She
objects in the dimmered glow of the dessert display and then flapped away thought of texting him about the fruit
lamp behind the couch that was only ten like a six-foot crow once she opened up salad, which she’d just made that night,
feet from where she was standing.There her smile and he got a good look at her but if he opened the refrigerator he
were pillows on the couch, a whole flo- teeth and the sore at the corner of her couldn’t miss it,so why bother? At some
tilla of them, and there were two arm- mouth she couldn’t stop picking at, and point, she drifted off with the book still
chairs flanking it, a coffee table, book- so fuck him, fuck everybody. But that propped up in her hands, as she did
shelves, the black nullity of a flat-screen was her right hand, weighed down with every night, both dogs and three of
TV affixed to the wall across from her. all that food she didn’t really feel like the cats stretched out in various con-
When she moved, and she moved only eating, not at this point, when the only figurations beside her and at the foot
a foot or two into the room—edging, thing she wanted was to crash, as if that of the bed. Usually, she slept through
that was what she was doing,edging in— would have been understandable to any the night, but not this night, because
the screen gave back her reflection in a of them standing around locked into at 2:36 A.M. both dogs rose up on their
way that was too obscure to matter. their tunnel vision that featured nobody haunches and started barking for all
but themselves, and what about her left they were worth.
There may have been a voice call- hand? What was this? She saw that she
ing from the room at the top of the had a plastic sack dangling from the The first door she tried was locked,
stairs—“Cameron, is that you? Hello? bunched fingers of that hand, too, and so she moved to the next one,which
Is somebody there?”—but it was lost in for a minute, what with the newness of gave onto a bathroom—or a half bath,
the uproar of the barking,and it wouldn’t the surroundings and the barking of the actually, as she saw when she flicked
have applied to her, in any case, because dogs and the voice that had gone unan- the light on. It was like any bathroom
her name wasn’t Cameron and she wasn’t swered and had stopped expecting any- in anybody’s house—toilet, sink, mir-
there, was she? She was still back at the thing now, she momentarily blanked on ror, towel rack, framed cartoon on the
party, the bar-bee-cue she’d lucked into what was in there.Until the dogs seemed wall—and if it could have been cleaner
on this fine, cheery holiday afternoon to run out of breath and she remembered: she wasn’t complaining. The cartoon
that had somehow become night when makeup. Blush, foundation, and eyeliner was a Gary Larson, the one with two
she wasn’t devoting her full attention to she’d borrowed from the Rite Aid some- dogs in a courtroom full of cats—cat
the details. In her right hand was a plas- where down the street and around the judge, cat lawyers, cat jury. It was funny,
tic sack containing spareribs lathered in corner, out on the boulevard that was but she’d seen it before, and whoever
a gooey red sauce, two ears of corn still like a stage set, same street lamps, same used this bathroom must have seen it a
wrapped in the blackened tinfoil in tired palms, same traffic lights going thousand times now, and how funny
which they’d been roasted over the grill, green and going red and going green. was that?
a container of what looked to be potato
salad, and dessert, lots of dessert: two O.K., all right, fine. But she didn’t She could have looked at herself in
napoleons, a wedge of cherry pie, and a need makeup now—that would be for the mirror but she didn’t, because look-
fistful of chocolate-dipped strawberries tomorrow. The food, too. What she ing at herself right then was outside the
she’d picked out herself, after the host- needed now, because her legs felt as limp realm of possibility, but the idea of the
ess,whose name may have been Renée— and soft-boned as the barbecued ribs in bathroom, the fact of it and the fact that
she reminded her of her mother on one their squishy plastic bag, was sleep. A she was in it, reminded her that she had
of her mother’s good days—had insisted bed. Sheets. A blanket. What were all to pee and this was as good a time as
that she take some food with her, be- these doors? Doors didn’t exist for noth- any. When she was done, she flushed
cause I don’t know what we’re going to do ing. There had to be a bed behind one and put down the lid,washed her hands,
of them, didn’t there? and went back out into the main room,
with it all. where she plopped down on the couch
She remembered that there had been Dawn’s son had got home at eleven- for a minute, just to stop things from
thirty, same as the past two nights, spinning. That was when she noticed
a band at the party—bass, guitar, drums, because they’d given him an extra shift that there were two more doors to try,
a singer—the joyous reverberative thump so that baggers with seniority could one giving onto what looked to be a
of which had led her to push open the take the holiday off.There was the sound study, with a desk and a laptop, and the
back gate off the alley and give all those
wondering faces a friendly little nod and

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 65

other—bingo!—revealing the bedroom of their bond, which went beyond just always suffused with somebody else’s
she’d been looking for, and if the dogs being neighbors. The other part was misery but never hers, never theirs.Was
had started up again it was nothing to that they were both junior-high teach- she even going to tell Tammy? And, if
her. She belonged here. This was her ers, though in different school districts. so, how would she put it? Especially
room. Or it ought to have been, because since the girl had gone into Tammy’s
whether she’d grown up in this house “I hear you. I mean, it’s terrifying, room and had maybe even sat at the
or not it was the room she would have but Buster’s so huge he’d scare off any- vanity, trying on makeup she’d proba-
chosen, though the clothes hanging in body, right? Even if he is a big pussy- bly stolen from Rite Aid, though she
the closet were the wrong size and the cat. And Ernie’s a pipsqueak, but I’ve hadn’t attempted to take anything from
colors and patterns weren’t even close seen him get riled up—like the time the house, not Tammy’s laptop or iPad
to her style. And the shoes! They made that woman came around canvassing or anything else as far as she could see.
her feel sorry for whoever had actually for the mayor’s race, remember that?” Which was strange.And then the whole
taken the time to go to the store and thing with the bed . . .
pick them out and put down cash for “Ankle biter,” she said, and laughed
them—or a credit card, as the case at the memory.“But you know what I’m The 911 operator had instructed
may be. She reflected briefly on the fact saying. First thing I did was lock the Dawn to stay in her room with the door
that she’d once had a credit card her- bedroom door,and Cameron was down- locked and definitely not try to con-
self and how nice that was—hand it stairs in his room and he always locks front whoever it was who’d broken into
across the counter and you got what- his, because he doesn’t want anybody the house and flushed the toilet and
ever you wanted. going in there—me, that is—so I texted flicked the lights on and off. Just sit
him not to make a sound and dialled tight. They were on their way.
Except drugs. Drugs were cash only. 911. Why risk the dogs getting hurt?”
The food she left in the bathroom, The police arrived within ten min-
but she kept the makeup with her, and “What about Tammy?” utes, give them credit there.They didn’t
maybe she even sat down at the vanity “Talk about small mercies—she was use their siren or the flashing lights, and
and tried the blusher and the lipstick, spending the night at Beau’s house, be- they parked two doors down and came
not that it mattered at this point. In the cause she’d had a couple of beers at his up on foot for the element of surprise.
morning, she told herself. In the morn- family’s Memorial Day party and didn’t They wound up going in through the
ing,everything would be different.But— want to drive. Or so she said over the front door, which Cameron must have
and here’s where the cold hard world phone.”Her daughter—seventeen,com- forgotten to lock when he got back from
interceded to cut her down, the way it bative, pampered, and privileged, and work (though, of course, he never forgot
always did—she’d barely closed her eyes way too obsessed with crime shows and to lock his bedroom door—that was au-
before she woke to the overhead light doom-scrolling—would have been se- tomatic for him,even if he was just jump-
and three faces lined up in a row, star- riously traumatized, or worse, because ing up from his console to get a soda out
ing down at her. her door was never locked. And that of the refrigerator). They found the girl
was something Dawn didn’t want to in Tammy’s bed, fast asleep, the com-
“Why didn’t you let the dogs out?” even begin to imagine, this girl push- forter and sheets stripped back and
“I would have,if I’d known,but ing her way in while Tammy was lying thrown on the floor as if they were of no
I was afraid to, because it could have there asleep in her own bed, with her use to her. She herself didn’t get a good
been anybody down there.With a knife movie posters on the wall and the Min- look at her from the window at 3 a.m.,
or a gun or who knows what?” the nearest street lamp a dull blur at the
nie Mouse night-light she’d had since far end of the block,but she seemed slim
She was sitting on the couch in the she was three years old pushing back and maybe even pretty,and she was wear-
living room, the couch where the girl the shadows. ing a rumpled yellow tunic dress that left
had apparently stretched out and left a her legs bare, and her shoes were high-
long red smear of something on one of She gazed out the window at the top sneakers. By then the police had
the pillows, which turned out to be bar- sunstruck palms that lined the street brought the squad car into the driveway,
becue sauce, thankfully, and not blood. out front, the safe and tranquil street in and one of them put a hand on the girl’s
Dawn herself had taken a washcloth to a decidedly safe middle-class neighbor- head to keep her from banging it on the
it first thing in the morning—after pho- hood, where the only crimes were com- doorframe as they put her in the back
tographing it, that is. For evidence. Not mitted in her daughter’s imagination. seat, just like in the movies.
that the police needed it, since they al- Or had been until now. Home invasion.
ready had the girl in custody. Frightening words,chilling words,words She tried to tell them she lived there—
out of the morning paper, which was look at the evidence right before
She’d been on the phone pretty much their eyes, because here she was, in her
the whole morning, talking her way own room, in her own bed—but one of
through last night’s events, as if she the three faces staring down at her, the
could somehow neutralize them, make one that wasn’t mushrooming out of
them make sense. At the moment, she the collar of a neat blue uniform, be-
was talking to Chrissie Wagner, who longed to a kid of sixteen or seventeen,
lived directly across the street and, like acne, arms like two strings of dangling
her, was a single mother, which was part

66 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

sausages, and hair that might have been “It’s not that I don’t want to try new places, it’s that I can’t start
cool if somebody would only get their collecting a new format of takeout containers.”
shit together and cut it right, and he
was saying, “She’s lying. I’ve never seen ••
her before.She broke in,she’s the one—
she broke in! ” talk about it, O.K.?,” and slammed the grandmother had crocheted for her—
door to her room so hard that the pic- and tramped through the house and
She was only the tiniest bit drunk at tures on the wall rattled in their frames. out the back door, where she stuffed it
this point, and the crank buzz that had Two minutes later, she was back out in all into the trash can, the sentry lights
kept her going for all these glorious, the hallway, demanding to know who’d snapping on to catch the hard white
blazing, mile-a-minute days had totally been in her room. flash of her elbows and the suffering
deserted her, to the point where her icon of her face.
whole body felt as if it were encased in So the story came out, and before
cement and all she wanted from this Dawn could even catch her breath her So they booked her and let her go,
world and this existence was sleep, but daughter had apportioned the blame— back out into a night that was start-
she looked at the kid’s big, dumb dump it was her fault, all her fault. And her ing to brighten around the edges. She
truck of a face and couldn’t help her- stupid brother’s. “What, am I going to was cold, wrapping her arms around
self, so she said, “You’re the one that get head lice now from my own pillow? herself and making sleeves of both hands,
broke in! Oh, my God, Officer, Officer, Or aids, or whatever? Some street per- but her actual sleeves were attached to
who is he? What’s he doing here?” son sleeping in my bed? Is that fair? Is her denim jacket with the butterfly patch
that what you want?” flapping across the shoulders and her
“She’s lying!” the kid repeated, and shades in the pocket, which was back
now the cops were giving him the What was fair and what wasn’t didn’t at Luther’s, she thought, or at least she
look, and so she kept it up, repeating, enter the equation. She said, “I put hoped it was, but where was Luther’s
“My God, my God,” till it was like a everything in the wash—with bleach— from here? She had no idea, and she
little song she was singing to put her- and vacuumed the rug twice, and I hadn’t gone a block before she had to
self to sleep. know, I know, honey, because I feel vi- go down on her hands and knees on
olated, too.” somebody’s front lawn and vomit up
That set him off. His face clenched, the dregs of the champagne. She would
and he started barking like the dogs up- Tammy just glared at her,then stalked have stretched out right there on the
stairs, “Yeah, right, prove it. What’s the back into her room and angrily stripped
address, huh? The phone number? The the bed,bundling everything up—sheets,
name on the mailbox? My mom.What’s pillows,blankets,the bedspread her dead
my mom’s name?”

The thing was, there was nothing
they could charge the girl with be-
sides trespassing, since she hadn’t bro-
ken in and hadn’t stolen anything, but
when they asked Dawn if she wanted
to press charges she said yes. As much
as she’d have liked to be sympathetic,
she just couldn’t get past the sense of
violation, which made her feel dirty and
insecure in her own home, and that
was inexcusable, absolutely and cate-
gorically, and so yes, she was going to
press charges. As it turned out, the girl
was twenty-two, her name was Tanya
Swifbein, and she had no fixed address.
She’d been arrested only once before,
for disturbing the peace; no details on
that beyond what you could glean from
the charge itself, but she’d disturbed the
peace in this household, that was for
sure. Tammy had wound up spending
the entire weekend at Beau’s, without
calling or even texting, which was be-
yond irritating, and when she came in
late Monday night with bloodshot eyes
and liquor on her breath she just said,
“Mom, don’t, because I’m not going to

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 67

grass and slept until the sun came up THE WISHBONE
and fried her like an egg, but here was
the gardener, slamming out of his truck In the still of night
with all his rakes and hoses and gar- old fears emerge.
dening paraphernalia strapped to the
top of it, and so she pushed herself up Those closest relatives
and started off down the street, going you’d found barely
nowhere. Of course, she didn’t have a bearable, cornucopias
phone. Her phone had disappeared of family dystopia
somewhere along the line there, so she spilling into
couldn’t call Luther and wouldn’t have “amusing anecdotes”
known the phone number,in any case— decades later
or even, for that matter, what his last like a much-thumbed
name was. The street was Marigold, rosary, or litany
wasn’t it? If she could find Marigold, of the dead.
she’d recognize the house for sure, but
where was Marigold? She didn’t have Old vexations,
a clue. Meanwhile, her feet were like tics and mannerisms,
boxcars, giant boxcars strapped to her wincing at the pinch
ankles, and she dragged them along of the drunk uncle
with her down the block till she saw (so handsome!—but
what looked to be a park up ahead, and died young),
that seemed like just the place, because stooping to avoid
there’d be a bench there, and maybe a the hacking cough
rest room, a water fountain, and she soon to propel
could sleep, just sleep, and worry about your Hungarian grandfather
the rest later. to his grave.

Well, there was a bench there, as it Those years!
turned out, standard issue, painted a Pride redacts the grave
graffiti-hatched forest green, but only long heartbreak of loving
one bench, a solitary bench, and a bum the one more than
was curled up on it,his face turned away he’d loved you,
from her like a promise he wasn’t about who’d favored your
to keep. The rest room was locked, but sister, and not you
she found a water fountain and drank who at twelve rolled
till she could feel it coming up, then your eyes, such
slapped water on her face and ran it
through her hair and saw that there tened strips of cardboard that weren’t her grandfather, when he died, did it
was a dirt path behind the rest room even that dirty—a bed, a bed made just elsewhere and came back to them in a
that led up into some sort of dense for her. But then, as she brushed back glazed ceramic jar the color of olive oil,
undergrowth, where at least she could the fringe of dried-out vegetation that and if there were pictures on TV of the
crash for a while and let things settle. hung over the cardboard like a canopy, dead bodies lying sprawled in the streets
She didn’t want to get high—she was she saw the rest, and it was so sudden of Ukraine she wasn’t there, was she?
no addict, not really, not like some of and inadmissible it was like being at- But she was here now, and here was this
them—but the thought of it, of the way tacked by all the snarling bears and little girl stuffed half in and half out of
the first hit made her feel invincible, wolves in the deepest, darkest forests of a black plastic trash bag somebody had
like a superhero supercharged with en- the earth: there was another human stashed under a bush in a public park
ergy,made her calculate: sleep first,then being there, a girl, a little girl, but she in the Golden State of California.
figure out how to find Luther, then see wasn’t breathing and she wasn’t mov-
what the day would bring. ing and if her eyes were open she wasn’t Of course, and Dawn could have
seeing anything. predicted it, the girl—Tanya—
Birds spoke to her, saying what they never showed up for her court date and
were going to say in their own language, To get this straight, to get it precisely there was nothing anybody could do
and then the sun jumped over the ridge right: she’d never seen a corpse before, about that, not until the next time she
to explode in her face like a supernova, because that wasn’t who she was. Even
bushes to the right of her, bushes to the
left, nature just an endless repetition of
the obvious—but here, what was this?
Somebody had dug out a little nest under
one of the bushes and lined it with flat-

68 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

boredom!—jaws police were asking for the public’s help
wrenched in yawns in identifying her. She was wearing
pink Crocs, pajamas in a blue-and-
at Thanksgiving white polar-bear print, and a yellow
twinge of nausea visor bearing the logo “Princess” in a
clammy-white turkey bold black looping cursive. She didn’t
carcass and skin, stink have any I.D. on her—what eight-year-
of eviscerated gut old did?—and no distinguishing marks,
and in the “gravy boat” as far as the police could see.
coarse curdles of
grease. Pope’s nose, When Dawn did an online search,
giblets and innards, the picture that came up—a police
“wishbone” carefully sketch of the girl’s face and torso—
removed from the ravaged jumped out at her. She’d seen her some-
skeleton and perched atop place, she was sure of it, but where? It
the fridge to dry, couldn’t have been at school—the girl
forgotten and forlorn was too young, a child, just a child. Her
until rediscovered face was narrow and serious, but the
in December, brittle eyes were all wrong and the mouth, too,
and easily broken— slack and lifeless and like no mouth
Make a wish, Joyce!—but she’d ever seen. But then she had to re-
what could you have mind herself that this was only a sketch,
possibly wished, so young? not a photo—a photo would have been
To be older? more than anybody could bear.
To be out of there?
To be—where? She should have flagged somebody
down, but once she was back out
Stunned now to recall on the street the words just couldn’t
how all at that table seem to get past the barrier of her
are gone now, mere brain: There’s this dead girl, this dead
ectoplasm in a dim body? Like, back there in the bushes? She
region of the brain. was trembling, that was what she was
How heedless you’d loved doing, lifting her big boxcar feet one
them after all, as step at a time and trembling all over,
they’d loved who- even though it wasn’t cold, or not es-
ever it was, was you. pecially, the sun tracking her every-
where she went. There were people
—Joyce Carol Oates sitting on a bench at the bus stop, and
she almost leaned in over their bowed
got arrested, anyway. The Memorial street, which meant that she was going heads and slumped shoulders and told
Day weekend gave way to a non-holiday to have to take it to the garage, what- them, but then they would have called
weekend and then another one after ever that was going to cost. The lawn the police and the police would auto-
that, and the whole incident began to needed cutting.There were more weeds matically assume she was the guilty
fade away. The school year was wind- in the flower bed than flowers. party. She’d already been photographed
ing down,which meant tests and grades and fingerprinted and all the rest of it,
and the usual madhouse rush. She and It was her daughter who told her and wasn’t that enough for one night?
Tammy went shopping for a dress for about the little girl in the trash bag, So she just kept walking, like a zom-
commencement, Cameron picked up who’d been found in the park not ten bie, and everything was sorrowful now,
an extra day a week at the market, the blocks from here, and how nobody everything.
weather turned hot. Both dogs got knew who she was or what had hap-
tapeworm—which was disgusting— pened to her, more evidence of the cor- Luther said he’d been looking for
and had to stay out in the yard till the ruption of the world. As if she needed her and that was why he happened to
pills went to work. Her car didn’t seem it. As if any of them needed it. be driving by and also just happened
to want to start in the mornings, and, to have a box of Dunkin’ Donuts on
when it did, it spewed a black cloud The girl was estimated to be be- the front seat, including two of the Ba-
of exhaust as she wheeled out onto the tween eight and ten years old. She was varian Kremes that were her favorite,
thin, skinny, as if she hadn’t had enough and so she was rescued by her knight
to eat, as if she’d been abused, and the in shining leather and all that started
up again.

She didn’t tell him about the girl,
didn’t tell anybody, but she was tempted

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 69

to borrow his phone to call her mother and out were glassy-eyed by the end a king shit if there ever was one—
back in New York and just sob over of the night, she understood that there she’d gone outside for a breath of air,
the line, because her mother didn’t were times when you just had to let not depleted, not fully, not yet, and
want to hear from her anymore and the boundaries drift. As long as no- found herself going off down the street
was not now or ever again going to body got hurt.That was the worry, al- in whatever direction her feet seemed
send her money only to have it go up ways the worry, but beyond a certain to want to take her. It was a neigh-
a glass tube. Was that clear? Yes, Mom, point there was nothing you could do borhood, and it was beginning to look
clear as Smirnoff (which was what her about it. familiar to her, palm trees with fronds
mother drank, in a tall glass, all day like heaps of dirty clothes, cars parked
long). She stayed away from partying As for the little girl, the child stuffed bumper to bumper, hardly any lights
for a couple of days, just to get her into the trash bag and abandoned on anywhere and everybody in bed,
strength back, and once she was ori- like a dead animal, she realized she’d because it was 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., or
ented she went to her storage locker been right—she had seen her before. something like that. She might as well
and picked up a few things to wear A week after the discovery of the body, have been following a trail of bread
and two twenties from the stash she the newspaper identified the girl as a crumbs, because she went straight to
kept there in the inside pocket of the local resident, Evena Clarkson, and the house, which she couldn’t have
black puffer jacket she was going to they ran a photo of her, with a plea found on any rational basis, even if
wear on the airplane back to New York for anyone who might have seen any- you’d given her a map.
when her mother finally relented and thing unusual to come forward. In the
sent her a ticket. She slept for most of photo, the girl was smiling into the The dogs didn’t bark. They were
two days straight, and made sure to lens, her eyes as wide as the world, her out back in the fenced-in yard, hav-
brush her teeth when she was con- shoulders arched and her head cocked ing committed some sort of crime,
scious, though the damage was already as if she’d been dancing for the cam- and that made them unsure of them-
done and if she ever got to a dentist era, and that was when it clicked. selves. Timid, they were timid, and
it was going to cost more than she’d when she held out her hand the big
ever make in this lifetime, and then it Back in February, she’d gone with one came up to the fence and licked
was Friday and she and Luther scored Chrissie to talent night at the elemen- it, his tongue working at her fingers
and she became the single most pow- tary school because Chrissie’s son, like a warm washcloth. This time the
erful woman alive on the planet and Robert, who was something of a piano front door was locked. But she climbed
everything was under control. prodigy, was one of the performers. over the fence and got into the yard
It was the usual sort of thing, kids with the dogs, and they were just fine
She could see what Tammy was singing along to prerecorded tracks or with that and so was she. Was the
doing, pushing the limits and using even, for the minimally talented, lip- kitchen window open? Or maybe just
the break-in as an excuse, but when synching, but then this girl had stepped cracked an inch to let in a seep of the
she stayed out all night on a school out of the wings alone, leaned into the cool night air flowing off the ocean
night Dawn took away her car keys microphone, and delivered an a-capella that was however many blocks away?
and grounded her. Which led to the ballad that hushed the whole audito- It was. And she didn’t really think be-
usual fights and tantrums and threats, rium. Dawn recognized the song—it yond appreciating that it had to be
with the added anxiety of graduation was from an animated feature Tammy lifted as silently as possible. Of course,
hanging over it all. had been obsessed with at that age— the dogs were right there, just watch-
and maybe that had something to do ing her, cheering her on in a silent,
“I’m not even going to go, O.K.? Is with it, with the rush of her feelings steadfast way and thinking, no doubt,
that what you want?” from back then, when everything was that she was going to let them in.
so much simpler, but she’d found her- Which she wasn’t.
“Suit yourself,” she said, sounding self on the verge of tears.The girl had
just like her own mother. presence. She had talent. And when She stood in the kitchen a moment,
her voice rose up you forgot the echoey just feeling things, listening, taking
But, of course, that was all non- sound system and the imperfect light- in the strange mélange of odors—of
sense, and when the day approached ing that made all the performers look cooking, of dog, of dust and mold and
Tammy relented, as they both knew as if they were carved out of stone, the ancient grease worked into the
she would, and they wound up hold- because you were soaring right along burners of the stove—till they felt fa-
ing a reception at the house for her with her. miliar. Then she went on through the
and Beau and a few of her friends, ca- living room with its dimmered light
tered by Hana Sushi and floated on a This time the party was all in her and heaped-up pillows, eased open
raft of carnations and white roses and head. It had been days now and the bedroom door, and got into bed,
baby’s breath. There was dancing and she was getting delusional, which and so what if there was somebody
a computer collage of the kids at all always happened to her at the end, already in it? This was her tale, and
ages and fruit punch and sodas but because her body was trying to tell nobody else’s. 
no alcohol, not till they were of age— her something. (And she wasn’t
she was sorry, but that was the way it listening.) After the fight with Lu- NEWYORKER.COM
was going to have to be—and if a cou- ther—and with Bob, his friend Bob,
ple of the kids who kept slipping in T. Coraghessan Boyle on crimes and fairy tales.

70 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

THE CRITICS

BOOKS

SEVERANCE

Jack Welch was the most admired C.E.O. of his day. Have we learned the right lessons from him?

BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

In late April of 1995, Jack Welch suf- He was a plainspoken, homespun dy- in Fairfield, Connecticut, for wine and
fered a crippling heart attack. He was namo—a pugnacious gnome with a pizza.Then, when he got home and was
then in full stride in his spectacular run large bald head and piercing eyes that brushing his teeth, it happened. Boom.
as the C.E.O. of General Electric. He made him as instantly recognizable as His wife rushed him to the hospital at
had turned the company from a sleepy Elon Musk is today. 1 a.m.,running a red light along the way.
conglomerate into a lean and disciplined When they arrived, Welch jumped out
profit machine. Wall Street loved him. But, that spring, his fabled energy of his car and onto a gurney, shouting,
The public adored him. He was called seemed to flag. He found himself taking “I’m dying, I’m dying!”An artery was re-
the greatest C.E.O. of the modern age. naps in his office. He went out to din- opened,but then it closed again.A priest
ner one night with some friends at Spazzi,

Corporate excellence, Welch believed, came from getting rid of underperforming units and underperforming employees.

ILLUSTRATION BY MAXIME MOUYSSET THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 71

wanted to give him last rites. His doc- to reassess—to perform a kind of psy- buy a bottle of wine for less than a hundred
tor operated a second time. “Don’t give chic stock repurchase. Eisner was cer- dollars. That was absolutely one of the take-
up!” Welch shouted. “Keep trying!” tain he’d glimpsed that kind of emo- aways from that experience.
tional recalibration when Welch phoned
The great C.E.O.s have an instinct him that day from his sickbed and pep- Varney: After the operation, you would
for where to turn in a crisis, and Welch pered him with questions about what not buy a bottle of wine for under a hundred
knew whom to call. There was Henry he was facing.Eisner recalled years later, dollars. And before the operation you wouldn’t
Kissinger, who had survived a triple by- “As I was talking to him, I was think- be seen dead drinking a bottle of wine over a
pass in the nineteen-eighties, and was ing, Oh. This tough man’s human.” hundred dollars.
always willing to lend counsel to the
powerful.And,crucially,the head of Dis- So it’s understandable that Varney Welch: Right.
ney, Michael Eisner, one of the few tried again, asking him whether he was Varney: Is that it?
C.E.O.s on Welch’s level.Just a year ear- moved by a sense of his own mortality. Welch: That’s about it.
lier,Eisner had survived an iconic C.E.O.
cardiac event: a bout of upper-arm pain Welch: You know what I thought, Stuart? By midsummer, Welch was in the
and shortness of breath that began at Larry Bossidy, my friend at AlliedSignal, asked office, doing deals. In mid-August—a
Herb Allen’s business conference in Sun me, he said, “Jack, what were you thinking of scant three months after his bypass—
Valley, Idaho, and ended with Eisner just before they cut you?” I said, “Damn it, I he made the finals of a tournament at
staring God in the face from his bed at didn’t spend enough money.” the illustrious Sankaty Head Golf Club,
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los on Nantucket.
Angeles. The first chapter of Eisner’s Varney: No. Now wait a minute. Wait a
marvellous autobiography, “Work in minute. Hold on. Hold on. General Electric was formed in
Progress” (1998), is devoted to the story 1892, out of the various electricity-
of his ordeal, complete with references Welch: I did. related business interests of Thomas
to Clint Eastwood, Michael Ovitz, Jef- Varney: No, no. Edison, the most storied of all Ameri-
frey Katzenberg, the former Senate Ma- Welch: I did. can inventors. J. P. Morgan was the
jority Leader George Mitchell,Sid Bass, banker who put the deal together; the
Barry Diller, John Malone, Michael Jor- Most C.E.O.s, in their public ap- Vanderbilt family was involved, too.
dan, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David pearances,are circumspect,even guarded. From the beginning, G.E. was reso-
Geffen, “my friend” Dustin Hoffman, Welch was the opposite, which explains lutely blue-chip. In the course of the
Tom Brokaw, Robert Redford, Annie why he has been the subject of so much twentieth century, it was G.E., more
Leibovitz, Steven Spielberg, and at least attention and scholarly interest. There than, say, A.T. & T. or General Motors,
three prominent cardiologists. In one were boxcars full of books written about that was the preëminent American cor-
moment of raw vulnerability, he called him during his time at the helm of G.E., poration. It was the stock that grand-
his wife over to ask about the doctor who still more during his long retirement mothers from Greenwich owned.
was slated to do his surgery: “Where was (some of them written by Welch him-
this guy trained?” he asked. He explains, self ), and even today, in the wake of his During the nineteen-seventies, the
“She knew I was hoping to hear Har- death, in 2020, the financial writer Wil- company was run by the English-born
vard or Yale.” No such luck. “ ‘Tijuana,’ liam D. Cohan has delivered the Reginald Jones, a tall, austere man who
she replied, with a straight face.” absorbing seven-hundred-page opus was once named the most influential
“Power Failure” (Portfolio), a book so businessman in the country by his peers
The point is that when a corporate comprehensive it gives the impression in corporate America. “Reg Jones, who
legend has a blocked artery, expecta- is decisive, elegant, and dignified, is also
tions are high.So after Welch published that all that can be said about Jack has described by GE people as sensitive and
his own memoirs, the enormous best- finally been said. human; and the affection the GE fam-
seller “Jack: Straight from the Gut” ily has for him is obvious,” Robert L.
(2001), one of the first questions that Then again,maybe not.He was kind Shook wrote in his book “The Chief
interviewers on his book tour wanted of irresistible: Executive Officers: Men Who Run Big
to ask was what he had learned from Business in America,” from 1981. “He’s
his brush with death. Varney: It never crossed your mind that quick to praise and hand out credit,”
this is a major event? Your life is threatened. one executive told Shook.“He’ll always
In an interview Welch gave in 2001 say, ‘I don’t do it all by myself.’”
for the PBS show “CEO Exchange,” Welch: It happened so fast that I honestly
hosted by Stuart Varney,Varney brought didn’t think that. We all are products of our Jones made two hundred thousand
up his quintuple bypass. background. And I didn’t have two nickels to dollars a year and lived in a modest
rub together, so I’m relatively cheap. And I al- Colonial in Greenwich. Jimmy Carter
Varney: Was that a real change in life ways bought relatively cheap wine. And I al- twice tried to get him to join his Cab-
for you? A change in perhaps your spiritual ways looked at the wine price in the restaurant. inet. Several times a year, Jones would
approach? And I could never, I swore to God I’d never travel to Harvard Business School and
then to Wharton, at the University of
Welch: No. Pennsylvania, to take the pulse of the
schools where the next generation of
In the Eisnerian tradition, a heart G.E.’s leadership was almost certainly
attack is an opportunity to take stock, incubating. The bookshelf in his of-
fice held volumes devoted to sociol-

72 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

ogy, philosophy, business, and history.
“The General Electric culture is best

exemplified by the concern we have for
each other,”Jones told Shook.“Let’s say
one of our fellows has a problem—per-
haps a serious illness or a death in the
family. I will usually do what I can for
the family. And here we think that is
quite natural.”

Within two years of securing the top
job, in 1972, Jones was already planning
for his succession. And, from the be-
ginning, he could not take his eyes off
a young manager at G.E.’s operations
in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who ran
the company’s metallurgical and chem-
ical divisions. As Jones confided to a
labor historian years later:

I went to the vice president in charge of “And, with these lenses, can you tell me which image
the executive manpower development and I will look better on my dating profile?”
said give me a list of the contenders for my
job! And he gave me a list with 17, 18 peo- ••
ple on it. And I looked at the list and I said,
well, you don’t have Jack Welch there? Well, dred thousand workers in the first half “Jack, get off my fucking ass. No business
he said, well he’s so young. He’s kind of a, you of the nineteen-eighties. There are lots tonight,” Langone said. But Jack wouldn’t take
know, not a typical G.E. guy. He’s a bit of a of sentences in Cohan’s “Power Failure” no for an answer.
wild man and so on and so forth. I said, put like this: “Ten thousand people, or half
his name on the list. the people who once worked there,were “I need five minutes,” Jack insisted. They
let go.”Or: “McNerney got the job after went to Bossidy’s backyard. “The party’s in-
Why was Jones so drawn to Welch? a rather infamous annual managers’ side,” Langone said. “He puts me against the
The conventional criticism of hiring at meeting in Boca Raton in January 1991, fucking wall. He said, ‘I want you to go on the
the upper echelons of corporate Amer- when Jack fired four division C.E.O.s. GE board.’ I said, ‘What?!?!’ ”
ica is that like tends to promote like.The ‘You could have heard a pin drop,’ Mc-
Dartmouth grad who summers in Ken- Nerney recalled.” Or, of an air-condi- Reginald Jones, one imagines, never
nebunkport meets the young Williams tioning business in Louisville that Welch backed anyone up against a wall. And
grad who summers in Bar Harbor and did not like, and subsequently sold off: he would never have been caught dead
declares, By golly, that young man has in North Palm Beach.
the right stuff! But in deciding to turn “This was a flawed business,” he contin-
G.E. over to Welch, Jones was replacing ued. But the people in Louisville who made Did he see something in Welch that
himself with his opposite. Cohan writes: the air conditioners took pride in them and he could not find in himself ? Was he
were shocked when the business was sold to so critical of his own tenure at Ameri-
“He was regal,” explained one former GE Trane. “It really shook up Louisville,” he said. ca’s flagship corporation that he felt a
executive. “Jones just had an aura about him. I hundred-and-eighty-degree turn was
remember being in a room and when he walked He did not feel their pain. Quite the in order? The most charitable explana-
in, it was like the king walked in.” Where Jones contrary. tion is that the transition from Jones to
was reserved, Jack was gregarious. Jones was Welch came at the end of one of the
tall—six foot four—while Jack was short— Cohan gives us a lot of alpha-male more unsettling decades in the history
five foot eight on a good day. . . . Around GE straight talk,like the time Welch cornered of American capitalism, and Jones may
going to see Reg Jones was like going to see Ken Langone,the billionaire co-founder have felt that the sun had set on his
the president in the Oval office. Going to see of Home Depot, at a party at Larry brand of corporate paternalism.
Jack was like going to see a fraternity brother Bossidy’s house in Florida, not far from
at a tailgate party. Welch’s own place in North Palm Beach. After Welch, at age forty-five, was
named the new C.E.O. of General
Welch did not view General Elec-
tric as one big,warm family.He thought
it was bloated and senescent. Jones was
known for calling people when they lost
a loved one.Welch seemed to enjoy fir-
ing people. It is quite possible, in fact,
that no single corporate executive in
history has fired as many people as Jack
Welch did.He laid off more than a hun-

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 73

Electric, Jones called him into his of- panies that made things—companies the numbers, give them a second and third
fice to bestow some final words of wis- such as G.E.—had long been permitted chance.
dom.Another recent book about Welch, to lend money to their customers. They
David Gelles’s “The Man Who Broke could behave like banks, in other words, The fourth one’s the one you’re talking about.
Capitalism” (Simon & Schuster), re- but they weren’t really banks. Banks were The tough one. The horse’s neck that makes
counts the exchange: encumbered by all kinds of regulations the numbers on the backs of people. The go-to
that had the effect of limiting their profit person in an organization. And an organiza-
“Jack, I give you the Queen Mary,” Jones margins. The markets considered them tion that doesn’t root them out, can’t talk about
said. “This is designed not to sink.” risky, so they paid dearly to raise capital. values, can’t talk about the human equation.
But blue-chip G.E. had none of those
Jack didn’t miss a beat. burdens,which meant that,when it came In a perfect world, the interviewer
“I don’t want the Queen Mary,” he snapped to making money,Welch’s non-bank bank would have asked a follow-up question:
back. “I plan to blow up the Queen Mary. I could put real banks to shame. He then What are these “values” that you’re
want speedboats.” used the proceeds from G.E. Capital to talking about? Surely the desire to meet
acquire hundreds of companies. In the Wall Street’s quarterly estimates—as
Then Jones threw his successor a warm glow of G.E.’s riches, Welch ar- much as it felt like a value in Welch’s
party at the Helmsley Palace Hotel, in ticulated a series of principles that cap- universe—does not amount to an ac-
midtown Manhattan, where Welch tivated his peers.Fire nonperformers with- tual moral belief system. And then per-
had a few too many cocktails and out regret. Shed any business that isn’t haps a second follow-up: Doesn’t the
slurred his way through his remarks to first or second in its market category.Your fourth category—the “tough” manager
the group. The next morning, Jones duty is always to enrich your shareholders. who makes the numbers but does not
stormed into Welch’s office.“I’ve never have the values—sound a lot like you,
been so humiliated in my life,” he told In his interview with Varney, Welch Mr. Welch?
Welch. “You embarrassed me and the took a question from the audience about
company.”Welch worried that he would how, in enacting these principles, a But few ever asked questions like
be fired, losing his chance at glory be- C.E.O.could tell the difference between that of Welch. So the man himself re-
fore it had even begun. Cohan writes, leaders who create an “edge” and those mains opaque, and the best we can do
“He was despondent for the next four who simply create “fear.”Welch explained is try to piece together the clues scat-
hours.” By lunch, apparently, he had that there were four types of manager: tered throughout “Power Failure.”
put his existential crisis behind him.
That’s our Jack. One who has the values and makes the One time in Welch’s senior year of
numbers: love them, hug them, take them on- high school, his hockey team lost to a
Welch believed that the responsi- ward and upward. crosstown rival,and Jack,who had scored
bility of a corporation was to de- his team’s only two goals,threw his stick
liver predictable and generous returns to Second one doesn’t have the values, doesn’t in anger. Cohan writes:
its shareholders. In pursuit of this goal, make the numbers, get them out of there. That’s
he exploited a loophole in the regulatory easy, too. Next thing he knew, his mother was in the
architecture of corporate finance. Com- locker room. She bounded right up to him,
The third one has the values, doesn’t make oblivious to the fact that the guys around her
were in various states of undress. She grabbed
him by the jersey in front of everyone. “You
punk,” she yelled at him. “If you don’t know
how to lose, you’ll never know how to win. If
you don’t know this, you don’t belong any-
where.” He paused for a moment, recalling the
memory. “She was a powerhouse,” he said. “I
loved her beyond comprehension.”

“What if, instead of ‘in excelsis Deo,’ we all After college, at the University of
went ‘shoo-bop-dip-doo-wop’?” Massachusetts, Amherst, he earned a
Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the
University of Illinois. His thesis was on
condensation in nuclear power plants.
“I thought it was the most important
thing in my life,” he tells Cohan. For
many people, years of immersion in a
complex intellectual endeavor would
leave an imprint. Not for Welch. Con-
densation in nuclear power plants does
not come up again.

Golf, by contrast, was “one of the
few constants in Jack’s life,” Cohan
writes. “One way or another, there was
always golf.” But did he like the game
for its own sake? Or was it simply, to

adapt Clausewitz’s dictum, the contin- BRIEFLY NOTED
uation of business by other means?
After Welch left G.E., the details of The Other Side of Prospect, by Nicholas Dawidoff (Norton).
his retirement package were made pub- The result of eight years of reporting, this deft chronicle
lic. It included a pension of $7.4 mil- delves into the story of Bobby Johnson, a sixteen-year-old
lion a year and a mountain of perks. from New Haven, who, in 2006, was coerced into confessing
He got the use of a company Boe- to a brutal murder he didn’t commit. Dawidoff presents por-
ing 737, at an estimated cost of $3.5 mil- traits of the individuals involved, juxtaposed with research on
lion a year. He got an apartment in segregation, the Great Migration, and mass incarceration.
Donald Trump’s 1 Central Park West, Bobby, though widely considered innocent, was convicted
plus deals at the restaurant Jean- because he “fit a false stereotype about how things worked
Georges downstairs, courtside seats at in poor neighborhoods.”The book details his childhood, his
Knicks games, a subsidy for a car and time in prison, and—after a single-minded lawyer secures his
driver, box seats at the Metropolitan release, in 2015—the challenges and the disorientation Bobby
Opera, discounts on diamond and jew- experiences upon reëntering society.
elry settings, and on and on—all this
for someone worth an estimated nine The Beloved Vision, by Stephen Walsh (Pegasus). This musical
hundred million dollars. And then, fi- study charts the rise of Romanticism,in the nineteenth century,
nally, G.E. agreed to pay the monthly as composers came to see individual voice as the key to emo-
dues at the four golf clubs where he tional expression, and began to assert their “existential being
played. It would be nice to hear from through a recognizable, even idiosyncratic musical language.”
the high-priced attorney who negoti- Walsh provides biographical sketches of composers and assess-
ated that last line item. Would it have ments of their work, and weaves in subplots across decades
been a deal breaker? Did Welch be- and geography—the impact of nationalism, the development
lieve golf had been so central to his of program music, the ubiquitous spectre of Beethoven. Ob-
performance as C.E.O. that it made serving that “obsolescence is always the lurking fate of music
sense for the company’s shareholders not quite of the front rank,” Walsh explores the influence of
to pay those monthly dues? relatively obscure composers,such as Louise Farrenc and Hein-
rich Marschner, with generous, contagious curiosity.
A few months after he recovered from
his bypass surgery, Welch went to see The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco). Mc-
his heart surgeon,Cary Akins.They had Cracken’s latest novel straddles the line between fiction and
become friends.“He was incredibly cor- memoir, though she rejects the term “autofiction” as sounding
dial for somebody who was that pow- “like it might be written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European.”
erful,” Akins tells Cohan. Welch had It is August, 2019, and the unnamed narrator, sightseeing in
wanted the operation to be done on a London, is haunted by the presence of her late mother, who
Friday, so that he would have three days grew up “disabled and Jewish in small-town Iowa,” was stub-
of recovery under his belt before the born and bad with money, and was also brilliant and efferves-
news hit the stock market—and Akins cent and a great appreciator of life. “Once somebody is dead,
obliged. Now Welch wanted to talk. the world reveals all the things they might have enjoyed if they
weren’t,” the narrator laments. McCracken delivers a searing
“You’re doing great,” Akins told him. meditation on loss and the impossibility of depicting, in art,
“Well, go ahead and ask your question,” the entirety of a person.
Jack said.
“What?” Akins replied. Properties of Thirst, by Marianne Wiggins (Simon & Schuster).
“Go ahead and ask your question,” he said Set around the time of Pearl Harbor, this poignant saga cen-
again. ters on the town of Lone Pine, in California’s Central Valley,
“What do you mean?” Akins responded, where Rocky Rhodes has built a beautiful home for his wife,
genuinely confused. a doctor and a cook of some renown. After she dies, of polio,
“Well, I presume you’re gonna want me to he struggles to raise their son and daughter while trying to
give you some money,” Jack said. protect the area from the Los Angeles water authorities. The
“You didn’t pay your bill?” Akins replied. son, joyful and reckless, moves out at thirteen and joins the
“Come on, now,” Jack said. “You must have Navy at nineteen. When the government establishes a Japa-
thought about this. Do you want me to do- nese American internment camp on the land across from
nate something?” Rocky’s, the newcomers become enmeshed in the locals’ lives.
“Jack, it never crossed my mind,” Akins The novel’s resounding theme, “You can’t save what you don’t
replied. love,” applies to people and landscapes alike.

Akins had performed a feat of skill, THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 75
born of professional dedication. Welch
saw a shakedown in the offing. And
maybe that’s the key: Welch was most
comfortable reducing anything of value

to a transaction. He gave Akins a gen- managers in Boca Raton. “Only time
erous donation—though it came from will tell if Jack is the best business leader
G.E.’s charitable foundation, not from ever, but I know he is one of the great-
his own pocket. est human beings I have ever met,”Im-
melt said. But by that point the Welch
It has become fashionable to deride legend was so huge that such blandish-
today’s tech C.E.O.s for their grandi- ments seemed obligatory.
ose ambitions: colonizing Mars, curing
all human disease,digging a world-class What Immelt quickly discovered
tunnel. But shouldn’t we prefer these was that Welch had handed him a mess:
outsized delusions to the moral impov- a company built out of pieces that had
erishment of Welch’s era? no logical connection. Once the global
financial crisis arrived, the elaborate
“In all of our many discussions, the game that Welch had been playing with
only time he spoke about his children G.E. Capital collapsed. Wall Street
was when he told me that he ‘loved woke up to the fact that a non-bank
them to pieces’ but that he had made was every bit as risky as a real bank,
‘a mistake’ when he gave each of them and the company never quite recov-
a bunch of G.E. stock when he first ered. Immelt was eventually forced out,
became C.E.O.,” Cohan writes. Be- in disgrace. Almost two decades after
cause the stock had performed well, Welch handed the reins to Immelt,
they each had something like fifty Cohan met Welch for lunch at the Nan-
million dollars in company shares. Al- tucket Golf Club. All Welch wanted
though two of his four kids went to to talk about was how terrible a job he
Harvard Business School and one went thought his successor had done. The
to Harvard’s Graduate School of De- share price had collapsed, and Welch
sign, they all quit their jobs, disap- was disconsolate.
pointing their father. “They turned
out differently than I’d hoped,”Welch “He’s full of shit,” Jack said. “He’s a bull-
tells Cohan. “We’re close. But they shitter.”
got too much money. . . . If I had to
do it all over again, I wouldn’t have “But Jack,” I asked, “didn’t you choose Jeff?”
given it to them.” A father reflects, Yes, he conceded, he had. “That’s my bur-
after a lifetime, on his troubled rela- den that I have to live with,” he continued.
tionship with his children, and con- “But people have been hurt. Employees. Peo-
cludes that he should have adjusted ple’s pensions. Shareholders. It’s bad.” There
their compensation. were tears in his eyes. “I fucked up,” he said
again. “I fucked up.”
As Welch prepared for retirement
from G.E., in 2001, the search for As Cohan and Welch ate lunch, the
his successor became a public specta- golfer Phil Mickelson and the C.E.O.
cle. He identified three plausible inter- of Barclays came over to pay homage.
nal candidates. Their faults and their Welch may have been long gone from
strengths were openly debated. The fi- the C-suite, but, in a certain kind of
nancial press was riveted. The choice country-club dining room, he remained
was up in the air until the last minute, a rock star.Then Welch offered to drive
when Welch settled on Jeff Immelt,who Cohan back to his house, a few miles
was then running G.E.’s health-care away.They got into Welch’s Jeep Cher-
unit. Welch had had his eye on Immelt okee, and Welch refused to put on his
for a long time.Years before,Welch had seat belt, so the warning bell chimed
sent him to Louisville, to run G.E.’s the whole ride back.
sprawling appliance-manufacturing hub
there. The job was stressful, and Im- Off he drove. When he got to the left turn
melt’s weight hit two hundred and eighty out of the Nantucket Golf Club, onto Mile-
pounds.“You’re never going to be C.E.O. stone Road, he did something odd. Instead of
if you don’t lose weight,”Cohan reports keeping to the right side of Milestone Road,
Welch telling him. “You’ve got to get as other American drivers do, he decided to
your fucking weight down. Can’t have drive in the middle of the road, with the Cher-
everybody fucking fat.” okee straddling the yellow line. Needless to
say, the drivers coming toward us on Mile-
When Immelt took over from Welch, stone were freaking out. One after another,
he addressed a gathering of top G.E. they all pulled off to the right onto the grassy
edge of the street, giving Jack full clearance to
continue driving down the middle of the road.
He didn’t seem to notice. 

A CRITIC AT LARGE If Borges were alive today, he could
call his garden a multiverse and be done
THE NEVER-ENDING STORY with it. An idea that seemed fantastical
in the forties—that our universe is one
Can the multiverse keep expanding forever? of many, and that these parallel worlds
might share the same past or the same
BY STEPHANIE BURT characters—now seems to be every-
where. The multiverse has spawned
In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published explaining the complicated idea that countless comics, empowered science-
“The Garden of Forking Paths,” a many different realities can coexist in fiction writers like Charles Stross and
short story in which a spy travels to the a mazelike web of time lines.“This net- N. K. Jemisin, and inspired television
home of an English scholar. There they work of times which approached one shows as divergent as “Adventure Time,”
discuss an odd book by the spy’s great- another, forked, broke off, or were un- “Rick and Morty,”and “Star Trek: Dis-
grandfather, Ts’ui Pên. Rather than fol- aware of one another for centuries, covery.” It has started to shape our lan-
low a single plot, the book aims to ex- embraces all possibilities of time,” the guage: instead of saying that the rise of
plore countless story lines.“In all fictional scholar goes on. “We do not exist in the multiverse was never inevitable, I
works, each time a man is confronted the majority of these times; in some can tell you that there’s a world in which
with several alternatives he chooses one you exist, and not I; in others I, and not it never became popular. In our world,
and eliminates the others,” the scholar you; in others, both of us.” The story it’s very popular: the concept has given
says. “In the fiction of the almost inex- invites the reader to imagine what else, rise to billion-dollar movies associated
tricable Ts’ui Pên he chooses—simulta- other than the world we know, might with Marvel Studios, from “Avengers:
neously—all of them. He creates, in this be possible.But the spy ultimately won- Endgame” (2019) to “Spider-Man: No
way, diverse futures, diverse times which ders whether, if everything that can Way Home” (2021).
themselves also proliferate and fork.” happen does happen, any choice is re-
ally worth making. All these multiverses might add up
Borges devoted most of his story to to nothing good. If all potential end-
ings come to pass, what are the conse-
Film studios plan to spend billions of dollars on more multiverse entertainment. quences of anything? What matters?
Joe Russo, the co-director of “End-
game,”has warned that multiverse mov-
ies amount to “a money printer” that
studios will never turn off; the latest
one from Marvel, “Doctor Strange in
the Multiverse of Madness,” a sloppily
plotted heap of special effects notable
for its horror tropes, cameos, and self-
aware dialogue, has earned nearly a
billion dollars at the box office. This
year, Marvel Studios announced the
launch of “The Multiverse Saga,” a
tranche of movies and TV shows that
features sequels and trequels,along with
the fifth and sixth installments of the
“Avengers” series. (“Endgame,” it turns
out, was not the end of the game.) War-
ner Bros. has released MultiVersus, a
video game in which Batman can fight
Bugs Bunny, and Velma, from “Scooby-
Doo,”can fight Arya Stark,from “Game
of Thrones.” Even A24, a critically ad-
mired independent film studio, now
counts a multiverse movie,“Everything
Everywhere All at Once” (2022), as its
most profitable film.

There’s a reason that studios plan to
spend billions of dollars—more than
the economic output of some coun-
tries—to mass-produce more of the
multiverse: tens of millions of people
will spend time and money consuming

ILLUSTRATION BY PHILIP LINDEMAN THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 77

• • explore alternate histories in which hu­
manity took a wrong turn. Philip K.
it. Is the rise of the multiverse the death them all, thereby creating many dis­ Dick’s novel “The Man in the High
of originality? Did our culture take the tinct temporal dimensions and distinct Castle”(1962)—celebrated by sci­fi fans
wrong forking path? Or has the multi­ histories.” The multiverse, for Staple­ at the time, and more recently a TV se­
verse unlocked a kind of storytelling— don, was a mind­expanding place of ries from Amazon Prime—begins with
familiar but flexible, entrancing but grandeur and complexity. a time line on which the Axis has de­
evolving—that we genuinely need? feated the Allies. One of Dick’s point­
Such storytellers could draw on the of­view characters, Juliana, travels to
The first time that the multiverse work of scholars and scientists. In the Wyoming to visit the reclusive author
had a moment, Franklin D. Roo­ sixteenth century,the Florentine thinker of “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” a
sevelt was President and Marvel Com­ Giordano Bruno posited an infinite banned and scandalous novel in which
ics did not yet exist. Science­fiction universe populated with many worlds; the Allies won the war. The book, Ju­
writers of the nineteen­thirties didn’t he was later burned at the stake. Four liana tells its author,“showed that there’s
have a unifying name for the many hundred years on, Erwin Schrödinger a way out”—another world, and there­
worlds they were exploring, but the (of the cat in a box which is both dead fore “nothing to want or hate or avoid”
concept helped them to think about and alive) and Werner Heisenberg (of in this one. But the author did not write
why we tell stories and what we can the uncertainty principle), among oth­ the novel alone; he relied on commu­
learn from imagined worlds. In Mur­ ers, tried to explain their findings about nications received via the I Ching.Con­
ray Leinster’s short story “Sidewise in quantum physics. Atoms and elemen­ fronted with the question of who won
Time” (1934), chronological anomalies tary particles, Heisenberg wrote,“form the Second World War, he answers
transport dinosaurs, Russian colonists, a world of potentialities or possibili­ sadly, “I’m not sure of anything.”
and Confederate soldiers from alter­ ties rather than of things or facts.”And
nate time lines into the present day. A according to what is known as the The term “multiverse”seems to have
math instructor hopes that his modern many­worlds interpretation of quan­ assumed its modern meaning in the
knowledge will make him all­powerful, tum mechanics, proposed by Hugh Ev­ sixties. (William James used it much
but his students refuse to follow him, erett III in 1957, to observe the universe earlier, but in a different way.) The hero
as their experience with Roman legions is to create multiple copies of it. In of “The Sundered Worlds,”by the Brit­
has put them off dictatorships. The other words, everything that can hap­ ish fantasy novelist and editor Michael
British writer Olaf Stapledon, whom pen does happen—in some reality. You Moorcock, describes “the theory of the
Borges admired,wrote in his novel “Star may have ordered the chicken, but ‘multi­verse,’ the multi­dimensional
Maker” (1937) about a cosmos—one of somewhere you ordered tofu, or grilled universe containing dozens of differ­
many—with “strange forms of time”: stegosaurus; a world exists in which ent universes.” He hopes to move be­
“Whenever a creature was faced with Hillary, and the Mets, and your kid’s tween them with something called the
several possible courses of action,it took softball team won. Shifter. This multiverse serves to ex­
pand the scope and the stakes of a space
Some writers used the multiverse to opera; Moorcock later used the con­
cept as a metaphysical device and a way
to unify his novels. Many of his books
feature some version of an “Eternal
Champion” who is doomed to take on
world­saving quests.On occasion,these
Champions cross universe boundaries,
hang out together, and work toward a
common goal.

Moorcock’s multiverse of Eternal
Champions echoes Joseph Campbell’s
“hero with a thousand faces”—a culture­
bearer, like Aeneas or Luke Skywalker,
whose journey reshapes his society. But
Moorcock’s most famous Champion,
Elric of Melniboné, created in 1961,
feels like a sendup of Campbell’s macho
archetype. Elric, a pale, last­of­his­line
aristocrat whose true love is his cousin,
is weakened and hollowed out by his
epochal role; he chooses heroism only
reluctantly, and instead allows his mur­
derous sword to guide him. Nor does
he take the multiverse very seriously.

78 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022

“Certain ancient sorcerers of Melni­ team up across worlds,like rock­and­roll with Billy Batson, a.k.a. Captain Mar­
boné proposed that an infinite number supergroups, and so could bad guys. But vel or Shazam, who originally appeared
of worlds coexist with our own,” he a multiverse can get so crowded with in Fawcett comics. Shazam got his own
muses. “Indeed, my dreams, of late, alternate realities that each one starts big­budget film in 2019. In October,
have hinted as much! . . . But I cannot to lose its significance. A 1964 Justice Black Adam got one, too, starring
afford to believe such things.” As in League comic introduced Earth­3, Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson.
“The Garden of Forking Paths,”multi­ “where every super­being is a criminal,”
versal thinking can result in jadedness and DC Comics eventually manufac­ The multiverse first appeared in fic­
or even cynicism. The more you see tured dozens of alternate Earths.Then, tion as a plot device or a philo­
what all heroic journeys share, the less in 1985, editors at DC decided to sim­ sophical notion that could power in­
you care about each one. plify. “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” writ­ teresting stories. But in the second half
ten and drawn by the industry­leading of the twentieth century multiplexes
Other novelists treated alternate team of Marv Wolfman and George multiplied, superhero films found com­
Earths and time lines as social and po­ Pérez, visited oblivion on Earth after mercial success, and franchises that re­
litical experiments. Joanna Russ’s 1975 Earth until just one, with one Super­ turned to popular heroes, such as James
novel, “The Female Man,” now a cor­ man, remained. Overlong, with ultra­ Bond or Luke Skywalker, dominated
nerstone of feminist science fiction, fol­ high stakes on every page, “Crisis on the box office. Against this backdrop,
lows four versions of the same person: Infinite Earths” makes tough reading the multiverse evolved from a story­
present­day Joanna; Jeannine, in a sti­ today, though the line art by Pérez telling tool to a business tactic, one of
fling, decades­long Great Depression; (who died in 2022) holds up beauti­ several that enable vast entertainment
confident Janet, from the all­women fully. In one array of parallel panels, companies to recycle beloved charac­
planet Whileaway; and dangerous Jael, heroes watch entire worlds fade into ters. The multiverse may be one of the
from a militarized Earth split into Man­ the emptiness of the white page. The reasons that the critic and writer Eliz­
landers and Womanlanders. Will Jo­ single remaining Earth, for a while, abeth Sandifer decries “the Mar­
anna adopt Jael’s brand of violence in evokes Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time”: velization of all things.” Francis Ford
order to build the future that Janet en­ the Empire State Building shares a city Coppola has made a similar complaint:
joys? The book uses the multiverse to with dinosaurs, biplanes, and “Jet­ “A Marvel picture is one prototype
frame the dilemma. “Every choice be­ sons”­style futurism, and we witness movie that is made over and over and
gets at least two worlds of possibility,” “the past and future merging with the over and over and over again to look
it explains, “or very likely many more.” present, creating impossible anoma­ different.” According to Martin Scor­
lies.” Later in the story, heroes try to sese, these big­budget movies displace
Comic­book writers invoked the mul­ traverse the multiverse by running on real works of art:“In many places around
tiverse and its branching time streams the Flash’s “cosmic treadmill.” this country and around the world,fran­
for more practical reasons. They needed chise films are now your primary choice
to renew old characters, and to recon­ Marvel Comics began to assemble if you want to see something on the
cile conflicting, previously published its own alternate Earths in the seventies, big screen.”
adventures. In the forties, DC Comics and they have piled up over the years:
portrayed the Flash ( Jay Garrick,chem­ Earth­616, Earth­811, Earth­1191. DC, It’s true that the age of corporate
istry student) in a wide, shallow hat for its part, orchestrated “Crisis” after intellectual property has swallowed
with tiny wings. But the Flash of the “Crisis”—“Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!,” Hollywood. Just a handful of compa­
fifties (Barry Allen, forensic scientist) nies—Disney (which owns Marvel
wore a red mask.“Flash of Two Worlds!” “Infinite Crisis,” “Final Crisis,” and so Entertainment and Lucasfilm),Warner
(1961), written by Gardner Fox, with on—merging, destroying, and remak­ Bros.Discovery (which owns DC Films),
art by Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella, ing its multiverses again and again to Sony Pictures,Paramount Global—now
asks,“How many Flashes are there? . . . accommodate new slates of characters, hold the rights to the fictional people
Is Barry Allen the real Flash? Or is Jay some of them acquired from other who stride across our screens. Watch­
Garrick?” Barry’s superfast vibrations publishers. Black Adam, an ancient ing their pulse­pounding prequels and
transport him to another Earth, where Egyptian with magical powers and the sequels can itself feel like running on a
he recognizes Jay—not as a real super­ antihero in the 2022 story line, “Dark cosmic treadmill: because corporate
hero but as “a fictional character ap­ Crisis on Infinite Earths,” entered DC owners tend to resist change, heroes
pearing in a magazine called Flash Comics as a resident of Earth­S, along often end up right where they started
Comics!” Earth­One and Earth­Two (and we get a “new”Spider­Man movie
“vibrate differently—which keeps them every few years). Multiverses seem to
apart,”but super­vibrators like the Flash make it easier for big companies to cre­
can link them. (Delightfully, DC Com­ ate new­yet­old heroes. No wonder ci­
ics’ vibration­based multiverse prefig­ nephiles have had enough.
ures physicists’superstring theory,which
proposes that the universe really does And yet this explanation for multi­
comprise vibrating strings.) verse mania—that it’s a cynical ploy to
squeeze money out of moviegoers—
Multiversal superhero comics launched does not fit all the facts. Marvel hits
new kinds of plots: heroes could now

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 79

such as “Iron Man” were blockbusters tious 2015-16 series from Marvel Com- about representation,” he went on, but
well before the studio embraced the al- ics, by Jonathan Hickman and Esad “about giving kids options to express
ternate time lines and multiple uni- Ribić, a mysterious catastrophe oblit- themselves.”When so much of our cul-
verses found in the comics. And super- erates the cosmos.The forward-thinking ture is sequels and prequels and re-
hero fans, especially diehards who have Doctor Strange and the masked tyrant boots, we might need multiverses all
explored multiverses for decades, love Doctor Doom create, “from the shat- the more, so that we can imagine what
to see creators riff and reimagine. Mar- tered remnants of broken Earths,” a else is possible.
vel Comics readers are proud, not an- planet to hold the surviving Marvel he-
noyed, that “every little story is part of roes.They then carve up the planet into Why do we live in a multiversal
the big one,” as Douglas Wolk writes genres, much as a corporate manager moment? One theory holds that
in “All of the Marvels,”his book-length would carve up an entertainment com- the ascent of the multiverse matches
history of the comics and their heroes. pany: mythic warriors inhabit Doom- our need to keep up many identities.
In those tales,alternate Earths and time gard, while Howard the Duck lives in We may feel like different people as we
lines often allow familiar characters to New Quack City. Doom thinks the slide from Instagram to Slack to the
step off the metaphorical treadmill, to planet belongs to him, but we know family group chat; we code-switch as
do big things that they could not oth- that he in turn belongs to God Disney. we move between work and home and
erwise do. Prestigious and straight-ar- parent-teacher conferences. Victorians
row heroes die, or turn evil, or come To Coppola and Scorsese, multi- might have been wowed by the two-
out as gay; in a 1994 issue of Marvel’s versal blockbusters may represent the faced Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this the-
“What If?,”Jean Grey,from the X-Men, dark time line of popular culture. But, ory goes,but nowadays we require some-
burns our solar system to ash. In one at their best, these works can still amaze thing stronger—hence a TV show like
2003 issue of the universe-hopping se- and inspire. When “Spider-Man: Into “Loki,” whose titular antihero has nu-
ries “Exiles,”Tony Stark becomes a to- the Spider-Verse” came out, in 2018, merous manifestations,including a man,
talitarian technocrat until the Fantas- many film critics judged it a cinematic a woman, a child, an alligator, and a
tic Four’s Sue Storm takes him down; achievement and the best superhero President. Every time I try to answer
in another, Spider-Man’s girlfriend movie to date. It owed its success not questions from both my kids at the same
Mary Jane dates the woman of her to any brand-new character but to how time, without burning their cinnamon
dreams.These characters aren’t the “real” the movie helped us to see new sides toast or showing up late to a Zoom call
Jean Grey or Tony Stark or Mary Jane, of a familiar one. The film illustrated, with my students, I think there must be
so audiences and advertisers need not especially for young people, that there something to this hypothesis.
worry that their favorite characters will are multiple ways to see yourself in a
never be the same. hero, even if you don’t look much like But it still doesn’t explain why the
the white male Peter Parker with whom English singer-songwriter Grace Petrie
Some comics even seem self-aware Spidey began. “Today,there is a Spider- would invoke the multiverse in her
about their own status as intellectual Man for every kid,” the comics critic heart-crushing song “Done Deal,”about
property. In “Secret Wars,” the ambi- Zachary Jenkins wrote. “It’s not just an affair: “I know that out there some-
where in a fairer universe, we were a
“Maybe try turning the mug around so its done deal, darling, and you met me
inspirational message faces you?” first.” Nor does it explain why politi-
cal commentators, during the Trump
Presidency, tweeted longingly about
Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton became
President. When the poet Stella Wong
writes, in her thoughtful collection
“Spooks” (2022), that she was “taken as
an only child / with multiverses.There’s
nothing // worse than the sense of being
alone,” she does not seem to be writ-
ing about the fragmentation of our post-
modern identities. Neither does the
hip-hop duo Atmosphere in their new
single “Sculpting with Fire,” with its
melancholy refrain,“So many other re-
alities exist simultaneously.” These ev-
eryday multiverses contemplate com-
forting but fragile alternatives to our
one and only Earth.

Multiversal stories, told well, can re-
veal not only what might have been but
what could still be. In “Everything Ev-

erywhere All at Once,” an exhausted long and skeptical looks at their elders. Your Anniversary
Chinese laundromat owner named Ev- They may wonder whether they will
elyn,played with verve by Michelle Yeoh, become their parents, or whether they Immortalized
discovers very suddenly that her reality can choose something else altogether: in Roman Numerals
is one of many.Her husband,Waymond, whether history must repeat,or whether .646.6466
tells her to walk into a supply closet, it can be rewritten. We parents, mean-
then claps a Bluetooth headset onto her; while, learn from our children what is C H I LT O N S . C O M
he has come, we learn, from another possible and what could have been.Chil-
time line. The headset lets Evelyn tap dren are bringers of change and agents
into the talents of her alternate selves—a of chaos; they can seem to come from
spy, a martial artist, a chef. “Every tiny another dimension. But their very pres-
decision creates another branching uni- ence can balance out our multiversal
verse,” Waymond-from-another-time- ennui. Shouldn’t we at least try to give
line later tells her. them a better world than this one?

On Evelyn’s too-real time line, her A generation ago, before the Mar-
daughter, Joy, is rebellious, sullen, and— vel Cinematic Universe existed, Philip
to the dismay of Evelyn’s father—gay. Pullman created a multiverse in “His
But somewhere else in the multiverse Dark Materials” (1995-2000), a trilogy
her daughter has become a villain de- of novels that became a film, a play, and
termined to scramble all reality.“Noth- an HBO TV series. Though a repres-
ing matters,” Joy’s alter ego says, echo- sive religious institution forbids research
ing the Borgesian spy for whom choices into other worlds, two children named
lose their meaning. “Everything we Lyra and Will find a special knife that
do gets washed away in a sea of every can cut doorways between them. But
other possibility.” The symbol of Joy’s the doors create ghostly spectres that
nihilism is an everything bagel, shaped feed on human souls, and they are also
like a zero, or like the iris of an eye. Ev- open to adults, who wreak havoc all
elyn starts out quietly despising—or, at over. Lyra and Will themselves come
best, reluctantly resigning herself to— from different worlds,and (spoiler alert)
the laundromat, the family, and the they fall in love while they try to save
world she knows. But in order to save everything and everyone.Yet at the end
the multiverse she has to accept herself of the trilogy they have little choice but
and her kid. to seal the doorways and give up their
use of the knife. Some readers consider
In a different world, “Everything Pullman’s ending needlessly harsh, but,
Everywhere,” with its many moments like the creators of “Everything Every-
of absurdist comedy, might feel like a where,” he seems to have a message for
parody of Marvel movies. Yet critics the next generation. Your imagination
praised it, rightly, for originality. The can introduce you to astonishing peo-
director-writers Daniel Kwan and Dan- ple and take you to incredible places,
iel Scheinert fuse the psychology of Pullman suggests, but you can’t just stay
multiversal fiction—its potential for de- there. Your reality needs you.
spair over endless, meaningless choice,
for example—with the open-ended, The garden of forking paths cannot
high-stakes storytelling of superhero continue to fork forever, if we are to
tales. Marvel may own the idea of Tony find meaning there. Multiverses speak
Stark, or at least the right to make to the part of us that wants every op-
money from him, but the notion of the tion to be open, that wants the journey
multiverse belongs to anyone who can to go on and on. Of course, no journey
use it to tell a good story. really does—and at the end of many
multiversal stories the tangle of time
Our fears about the future, and our lines resolves into one, or a traveller fi-
hopes for the children who will inhabit nally arrives at the right version of his-
it, may be a final reason that twenty- tory and decides to stay. Such endings
first-century audiences welcome tale seem to invite us to return to our one
after tale of multiple Earths, and why life, on our one planet, with some added
alternate time lines are flourishing in spark of hope or curiosity or resolve.
our time. In so many multiversal sto- They speak to the part of us that wants,
ries,from “Sidewise in Time”to “Every- like Evelyn and Lyra and so many ver-
thing Everywhere” and “Spider-Verse,” sions of Spider-Man, to go home. 
members of the rising generation take

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 81

THE THEATRE attested, perhaps, to New York’s status
as a truly global, endlessly fascinating
HIGHWAY TO HELL city. Or it was evidence of the open-
minded erudition of London audiences.
David Hare’s portrait of Robert Moses, “Straight Line Crazy.” Or maybe it was—and still is, in New
York—simply a matter of the star power
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Moses.

The biggest surprise of “Straight Line But nobody in that scene, I can assure Moses was, by all accounts, a brutal
Crazy,”David Hare’s new play about you,thought of Moses as a pop phenom- man and an awful hang.He mastered the
the tsarist urban planner Robert Moses, enon worthy of international attention. art of getting highways and public works
is that it originated in London, where it swiftly built. He exerted a subtle but ex-
received good reviews, earlier this year, Why, then, were people in the U.K. panding power over governors—espe-
at the Bridge Theatre. Moses is best so interested in the workings of New cially his friend Al Smith, played by
known as the builder of a preponderance York state government? The play has Danny Webb—and over his favored press
of New York City’s highways, and as the landed at the Shed, in Hudson Yards, outlet, the Times. Can you imagine An-
subject of Robert Caro’s masterly biog- under the direction of Nicholas Hytner drew Cuomo with even less native charm
raphy “The Power Broker.” In another and Jamie Armitage, much closer to its and even more sadistic control? If so,
life, I worked in city government; “The natural habitat. At the performance I at- you’re getting warm. Fiennes can’t help
Power Broker”was a prerequisite for po- tended,every time a New York City street but seem more sympathetic than it’s rea-
lite conversation among young techno- or neighborhood was named, knowing sonable to believe Moses really was.
crats. The book and its often maligned laughter followed. Somebody near me
subject came up in passing chatter and whooped at the mere mention of Wash- “Straight Line Crazy”—the title is a
in official speech, like Scripture quoted ington Square Park. I wouldn’t have reference to Moses’s compulsive tendency
among preachers and Biblical scholars. thought that those lines would crack as to draw straight lines on maps and then,
well across the pond.The whole scenario implausibly, to gather the resources and
marshal the bureaucratic will to make
Ralph Fiennes makes Moses seem like a great, perhaps slightly tortured artist. them physical facts as roadways—plays
out in two longish acts, three decades
apart.The first is set in the nineteen-twen-
ties, when Moses is just beginning to
wield influence, and planning to open
Jones Beach to the public,making it pos-
sible (but not really possible, for the car-
less riffraff) to get there by the new South-
ern State Parkway. The second is set in
the fifties, when Moses finally meets his
match: a group of activists who stymie
his efforts to build a highway through
Washington Square Park. Both acts take
place, for the most part, in Moses’s of-
fice—there are elements here of, among
other genres, the office comedy.

Throughout, Fiennes ably displays
Moses’s faults—his stubbornness, his
dishonesty,his bullying,his barely veiled
prejudices against people of color and
the poor—but he also makes him seem
a bit like a great, perhaps slightly tor-
tured artist surrounded by dopes.Moses
is worried that people don’t like him
when they meet him, but we can easily
imagine Fiennes’s crafty version of the
man winning over a crowd or two.

This is a bit of a pattern: “Straight
Line Crazy” has a glossiness that cuts
against the crude, blunt force of Moses’s
still contested achievement.(In this way, it
matches the irony of its setting at Hudson
Yards, a sleek, strange airport-terminal-
esque complex plopped down on the West

82 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY ANUJ SHRESTHA

Side like one of Moses’s roads.) It scrupu- less development—these are conflicts
lously declines to portray Moses as blin- that persist, and that are now, perhaps,
kered and corrupt—the traditional stance, more intractably polarized than ever.
more or less, since “The Power Broker”
encased the man in villainous amber,back “Straight Line Crazy”is supposed to
in 1974.This is Moses smoothly repaved, be a character study of Moses, but by
if not essentially rerouted. He still wants the end—despite some glancing men-
the same things—total dominance over tions of his alcoholic wife, Mary—he
the built environment of New York; ab- still feels underexamined. He wins a big
solute control over how its citizens move, fight and then he loses one. His racism
preferably by car—but, in this lukewarm and classism are addressed in impreca-
show, he has the plausible deniability of tory dialogue with Finnuala,and shown
the do-gooder reformer. implicitly through his disdain for Ma-
riah (Alisha Bailey), a young Black em-
The play’s fuel is Moses’s overconfi- ployee who deplores his “slum clear-
dent machismo, but it’s punctuated and ance” policy, but they are never really
given its structure by monologues from tested by the fire of argument. A fuller
women. Sometimes they’re delivered in Jacobs might have made for a clearer
an Irish lilt, by Finnuala Connell ( Judith Moses—some personalities shine bright-
Roddy), a longtime aide to Moses who, est under the light of direct antagonism.
in the first act, is portrayed as cautiously
curious, then captivated by Moses’s bril- Moses and his acolytes toss out the
liance,but in the second act becomes dis- idea that Jacobs and her ilk are
illusioned.Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) nothing but rich provincialists, selfishly
delivers speeches, too, providing a lyrical opposed to change because they like
counterpoint to Moses’s coldhearted their quiet environs. These days, he’d
toughness. Jacobs was a hero of Green- call her a NIMBY.Through a clever feat
wich Village, a bard of the kind of place of imagination, Hare even places this
with busy sidewalks and hundreds of assessment in Jacobs’s mouth. In a coda
safety-insuring “eyes on the street.” Her toward the end of the play, she worries
opus “The Death and Life of Great that her style of community-based pro-
American Cities” spawned a generation test, focussing on the history and the
of density-loving urbanists oriented more aesthetics of particular neighborhoods,
toward pedestrians than toward cars. contributed to the makeup of today’s
When Jacobs first tramped onstage and profanely overpriced SoHo. There’s no
introduced herself,the crowd gave an im- highway there,thank God—Moses pro-
promptu ovation, happy to see an urban posed one—but it’s impossible for a
legend—the uncomplicatedly good kind. regular person to rent an apartment.

But Jacobs never really emerges as a Many of today’s urban-policy nerds,
flesh-and-blood character. In the sec- who call themselves YIMBYs—Yes,in My
ond act, we see her at activist meetings, Back Yard—might make the same in-
but that’s just pretext for more conve- dictment of Jacobs. At one point, Moses
niently expository speechifying. In the says, astutely, that fashions in urban pol-
fight over ramming a highway through icy “blow right back in.”He’s right about
Washington Square Park, we never get that; I sense a Moses moment coming,
a full hearing of the ideas that inspired perhaps foreshadowed by this play’s rel-
Jacobs’s crusades and, more pressingly atively equalizing portrayal of the man.
for this play, helped defeat the formi- You’d think it would be difficult to dis-
dable Moses, humiliatingly, and put a miss a civic dynamo like Jacobs, but I bet
halt to his grand and destructive plans. some of these market-oriented YIMBYs
would do just that. Well-meaning citi-
This is a very talky show—the ac- zens seem tired of contending with po-
tors’ bodies are mostly static, and the litical bad faith. Why not, then, look to
dance is in the parrying of their ideas. technocratic Caesars like Moses to brow-
But, in all the talking, it would have beat the opposition and get things done?
been nice to hear Jacobs’s and Moses’s
ideologies come into sustained and It’s a real fight,happening everywhere,
meaningful contact. Car versus foot; spurred by lowered expectations, fore-
suburban ersatz populism versus shortened horizons,and a pervasive feel-
city-dwelling bourgeois comfort; care- ing of scarcity. Let’s have it out, onstage
ful preservation versus the logic of end- and everywhere else. 

ON TELEVISION coherent plot—ironically, owing to the
screenplay written by Rice.) The show’s
NEW BLOOD reimagined Louis ( Jacob Anderson) is
an urban striver, surrounded by possibil­
“Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire,” on AMC. ity yet stifled at every turn. Lestat (Sam
Reid), a relatively enlightened émigré
BY INKOO KANG from France, fumes at Louis’s social con­
dition:“This primitive country has picked
To be a vampire is to be free. That’s In the novel,which begins in the eigh­ you clean!”In a swoon of infatuation and
the irresistible promise made to teenth century,Louis is a white Louisiana white saviorism, he turns Louis into a
Louis de Pointe du Lac, a Black business plantation owner who is turned into a vampire,believing that this will empower
owner and a closeted gay man living in vampire by Lestat de Lioncourt, a mani­ his companion. But it takes the French­
the Jim Crow South, in “Anne Rice’s In­ pulative opportunist to whom the “fledg­ man a long while to realize what his lover
terview with the Vampire,” on AMC. A ling”nonetheless feels a draw that he can­ understands intuitively: not even immor­
lustily unfaithful adaptation of Rice’s 1976 not explain.The series,set in a gleamingly tality supersedes race.
novel of the same name, the historical re­created New Orleans in the nineteen­
fantasy drama is the first television series tens and in the mid­pandemic present, In its most compelling moments,“In­
based on the author’s work. (AMC plans makes the mysterious,mesmeric relation­ terview” explores which powers a Black
to develop several more,including “Anne ship between Louis and Lestat overtly vampire can or cannot wield in a segre­
Rice’s Mayfair Witches,” set to début in queer.(The director Neil Jordan’s shoddy gated America. Louis can slaughter a
January.) “Interview”marks an auspicious 1994 film adaptation, which starred Brad man for making a racist comment, but
start to this I.P. venture; by taking lavish Pitt and Tom Cruise as Louis and Le­ he can’t overthrow an old boys’club with
and clever liberties with the source text, stat, respectively, has been accused of the means and the connections to sys­
the series may well surpass Rice’s vision blanching the story of its homoerotic sub­ tematically bankrupt Black entrepreneurs
in resonance and complexity. text.Its greater sin,perhaps,is its near­in­ like himself. This crushing reality cre­
ates a rift between him and Lestat, who
The series is a gothic domestic soap—Lifetime themes gussied up in Southern finery. presumes that he’s given Louis the ulti­
mate gift: a way to opt out of racism and
homophobia by checking out of society
altogether. But, after Louis joins the un­
dead, he only clings more firmly to the
tatters of his humanity. (“You chase after
phantoms of your former self,” Lestat
scolds, in the series’ gracefully curlicued
dialogue.) Of course,Louis wants to stay
close to his mother (Rae Dawn Chong)
and his sister (Kalyne Coleman). His
partner either does not understand what
it is to be Black or is too detached from
earthly concerns to care.Blood and fangs
aside,“Interview”would be compulsively
watchable were it merely a study of a
toxic interracial relationship.

At its proudly overripe heart, the se­
ries is a gothic domestic soap—Lifetime
themes gussied up in Southern finery.
The early episodes, somewhat unevenly
paced, are largely devoted to the cur­
dling of Louis and Lestat’s romance, an
ecstatic honeymoon followed by the
drip­drip of erosive disappointment. It’s
not always fun to behold, but who can’t
relate? The midseason introduction of
Claudia (Bailey Bass), a fourteen­year­
old whom Louis and Lestat kill, resur­
rect, and adopt as their daughter, tilts
the show into dark comedy.When Clau­
dia temporarily takes command of the
voice­over narration, the insatiable baby
vamp gleefully positions herself as a hum­

84 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY RICARDO DISEÑO

ming horror-movie villain, luring a po- portant has-beens so out of touch with 1 IN 5
lice officer to his death dressed in a sailor the modern world that they would have CHILDREN
blouse with ribbons in her hair. Claudia perished long ago if not for the inter- SUFFERS
can be a mopey irritant, and the confu- ventions of their self-effacing familiar. FROM HUNGER.
sion she experiences between her sexual And in Showtime’s garishly unsubtle re-
appetites and her bloodthirst leads to make of “Let the Right One In,” a fa- COVID,
predictably disastrous consequences.But ther’s all-consuming dedication to his CONFLICT AND
it’s also she who, watching her fathers vampire child sucks the life out of him— CLIMATE CHANGE
with an adolescent’s unsparing gaze, fi- and still doesn’t guarantee anything be-
nally alerts Louis to the slow-boiling yond her immediate survival. HAVE MADE
pot that’s become his “marriage.” GLOBAL HUNGER
Vampirism spurs an identity crisis in
The present-day scenes take us to Louis, who goes from being trapped in EVEN WORSE.
Dubai, where Louis recounts his the closet to being trapped in Lestat’s
story to a journalist. It’s easy to imag- coffin.In today’s direct-to-reader media-
ine this Louis—or any version of him— scape, in which the mediation that jour-
spending much of the twentieth cen- nalism offers is often bypassed, Louis’s
tury searching for someone who can desire for a writer to narrate his experi-
hear the woe in his cross-Continental ences initially seems like an obligatory
adventures. Rice’s journalist was mostly throwback. But one soon gets the sense
a function of the novel’s framing device: that Louis is in need of an interlocutor—
a “boy”too callow to understand Louis’s or, really, just a therapist—to help him
many regrets.(The character was played make sense of his life, particularly the
by Christian Slater in the movie,in what choice of passion that ultimately stripped
was arguably the production’s most egre- him of whatever freedom he had in the
gious casting failure.Somehow,the one- first place.His plight is a wonderfully ca-
time heartthrob with the fiendish grin pacious metaphor, especially for those in
and the Mephistophelian eyebrows ends marginalized groups, for whom libera-
up playing a harmless weirdo instead of tion is often a more fraught endeavor.
a seductive villain.) Here the journalist
is Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), a This is the second time that Anderson,
snappish, once prominent reporter who came to prominence playing Dae-
whom Louis encountered half a cen- nerys Targaryen’s eunuch general Grey
tury ago in San Francisco. (Their last Worm, in “Game of Thrones,” has em-
meeting didn’t go well; Daniel’s attempts bodied romanticism repressed by sombre
to interview Louis ended with punc- principles. Watching him onscreen, this
ture wounds in the writer’s neck.) The time with the benefit of actual character-
resumed sessions take place at Louis’s ization, feels like witnessing a star rising
home: a penthouse apartment that ad- in real time.“Interview”flits through many
mits limited sunlight in the daytime. modes—tragic, erotic, comic, melodra-
Louis hasn’t murdered in decades. And matic—and Anderson, as Louis, inspires
he intends to expose the existence of unshakable confidence as the series’
vampires, a mission that’s sure to get through line, especially in serio-camp
him killed by members of his own kind. scenes like the one in which he explodes
while recalling an encounter with his sis-
It’s a credit to the scripts that the testy ter’s baby: “I almost ate my nephew, Le-
conversations between journalist and sub- stat!”Anderson manages to make Louis’s
ject are as engaging as the scenes of Lou- ever-heavier guilt engaging, rather than
is’s transformation from mortal to (self- an endurance test. But even the actor’s
loathing) monster. Daniel,suffering from wounded charisma can’t make up for the
Parkinson’s, bristles at Louis’s youth and series’ most glaring flaw: the sense of in-
health. But “Interview”belongs to a new, timacy we lose when the action in this
melancholy era of vampire entertain- decades-spanning saga constantly jumps
ment that’s finally caught up with Rice’s ahead to the “important stuff,” instead
most poignant insight: that the isolation of offering a sense of its characters’ daily
intrinsic to a life outside society and time lives.“Interview”strives to be the burgundy
renders vampiredom, for all its miracles, velvet chaise longue of TV shows: an art-
rather pitiable. In FX’s “What We Do ful and inviting kitsch object that might
in the Shadows,” the bloodsuckers are reawaken our senses if we allow ourselves
latter-day Norma Desmonds: self-im- to get lost in it. It’s only fair that we’d
want to luxuriate a little longer. 

THE CURRENT CINEMA furnishes his settings with the diligence
of a novelist—no one could accuse “Ar-
PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST mageddon Time”of being heavy on plot.
Paul performs poorly in his studies, gets
“Armageddon Time” and “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.” busted for smoking weed in the toilets,
and, despite the fact that Esther is the
BY ANTHONY LANE head of the PTA, winds up going to pri-
vate school.Johnny also quits,though the
The title of the new James Gray practical but emotionally useless Irving two of them stay in touch and get into
film,“Armageddon Time,”is taken ( Jeremy Strong), discusses, with a hint various scrapes.Meanwhile,Paul’s grand-
in part from a remark made by Ron- of empathy, the problem of load-bear- father grows sick.Reagan is elected Pres-
ald Reagan, on cable TV, in Novem- ing bridges under stress.There is laugh- ident. Irving blows a fuse. Shit happens.
ber, 1979.Talking to Jim Bakker—who ter at the expense of the Nazis, with in-
appeared both eschatologically fearful dignation to match. Soon enough, the Although much of the action unfolds
and, frankly, stoned—Reagan said,“We chaos dies down, and it’s time for bed. in a minor key, its impact on Paul is all
might be the generation that sees Ar- too major; the adolescent mind, as Gray
mageddon.” He was not referring to That is only one of the social scenes, understands, can be a tool of magnifica-
unrushed and finely modulated, that tion. He himself was born in 1969 and
grew up in Queens, so the movie can be
James Gray’s film re-creates the early-eighties Queens of his boyhood. read as a riff, I guess, on themes from his
childhood, including an early interest in
the paltry prospect of global nuclear punctuate the film. Each of them feels painting (hence the copy of a Kandin-
war. He was musing on what might like a small drama unto itself. Look at sky that Paul produces for his art class).
come to pass “if we let this be another what we learn, for instance, from an ini- From Gray to Graff is not the longest
Sodom and Gomorrah.” Much worse. tial sequence at Paul’s school. First, he journey, and the trip will be hailed as a
and his classmates meet their new teacher, homecoming by fans of the director, es-
We glimpse this sobering exchange Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk), known pecially those flummoxed by his last two
on a television set in the Graff house- as Turkey. Second, it’s swiftly established ventures—“The Lost City of Z” (2016),
hold, in Queens. It’s now 1980, and the that Paul is the kind of kid who draws which packed its principal characters off
Graffs have just enjoyed one of their caricatures (“I just want to make people to the Amazon, and “Ad Astra” (2019),
own apocalypses at the dinner table. laugh”) and pulls disco moves when Tur- which sent Brad Pitt into space. I would
Our hero, Paul (Banks Repeta), who key’s back is turned.Third,Paul befriends trade the latter, in its entirety, for the
has recently started sixth grade at a pub- Johnny Davis ( Jaylin Webb), who is sight of Paul and his grandfather launch-
lic school, scorns the food cooked by Black. Obliged to repeat the year, he ing a toy rocket in Flushing Meadows,
his mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), looks and sounds a little older than Paul, with the World’s Fair towers in the back-
and, to her great vexation, orders Chi- and wiser, as if already clued in to the ground. After a delicious delay, we see
nese dumplings over the phone. His injustice that’s coming down the track. the rocket falling gently, on a parachute,
grandfather,Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), Since it is coming, why not make some far away. The thrill of the moment has
whom he adores, doesn’t really help by mischief to fill the days? burned out; now begins the process of
describing Esther’s spaghetti as “bloody retrieval, before the memory cools.
worms.” Paul’s father, the technically Despite such density of detail—Gray
Yet this is not an exercise in nostal-
gia—nothing like, say, the honeyed re-
membrances of Barry Levinson’s “Lib-
erty Heights” (1999), which is set in
Baltimore, in 1954. In that alluring film,
a Jewish teen-ager pines for a Black girl
at his school. (When he says he finds
the girl attractive, his mother replies,
“Just kill me now.” Bebe Neuwirth at
her most bitingly sublime.) There is no
disguising the racial divide, yet the se-
renity of Levinson’s storytelling some-
how closes and heals the rift, whereas
the fractiousness in “Armageddon Time”
is of an altogether deeper strain. “The
Blacks are coming in,” Paul’s grand-
mother says, bemused by changes in
the neighborhood; fortunately,she never
discovers that Johnny, with nowhere to
sleep, has sought refuge in the Graffs’

86 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY POLA MANELI

back yard. Unlike the youthful romance the surrounding cast. Hathaway is very then, fifteen minutes have been shed.
in “Liberty Heights,” which bore the touching as Paul’s mother, continually Will that be enough?
gleam of a better society, the alliance of skirting despair, and, as viewers of “Suc-
Paul and Johnny looks doomed from cession”can attest, Strong is just the guy The tale revolves around Silverio
the start, and the movie, gazing for- for showing weakness under siege. And (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a journalist,
ward,sees no cause for harmony or hope. the villain of the piece? Please welcome a director of documentary films, and an
Maryanne Trump ( Jessica Chastain), unmistakable proxy for Iñárritu, right
Matters come to a fateful head when, royally arrayed in purple, who addresses down to his beard. A longtime resident
with Johnny’s assistance,Paul breaks into the pupils at the private school, telling of Los Angeles, and shortly to receive
his new school, after dark, and steals a them, “You can be anything you want an award for his general fabulosity, Sil-
hefty computer. (Shades of Antoine, to be.” (That would be news to Johnny, verio returns to his native Mexico. This
played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, in Truf- who wanted to be an astronaut.) If they mission, though scarcely arduous, sucks
faut’s “The 400 Blows,” from 1959, who arrive at success, she adds, it’s because him into phantasmagoric reveries on his
pinches a typewriter from his father’s de- “you earned your way there.” No doubt life,his obsessions,and his looming mor-
serted office, again with a pal in tow.) her brother Donald would agree. tality. As with Fellini’s “8 1/2”(1963), you
When the culprits are caught, we are led can’t help asking,Why is it only the peo-
into the last and the baldest of the mov- What is a Netflix movie? On the ple with the most cushioned existences
ie’s lengthy scenes, deliberately unre- evidence of new releases, we who get to have existential crises? Ev-
deemed by charm or humor,as Gray dis- can risk a tentative equation. If x is the eryone else is too busy, I suppose.
closes the fork in the road—the path amount of money that should reason-
that awaits the white kid, whose family ably be doled out for a given produc- Like “Armageddon Time,”“Bardo”is
has the luck of good connections, versus tion, and y is the ideal length for the shot by the cinematographer Darius
the rocky route that faces his Black com- story, and z is how close the project lies, Khondji,and the result brims with beauty,
panion, whose boyhood is about to be in inches, to the director’s heart, then beyond dispute.From the opening image,
left behind in the dust. As Irving admits the finished film equals (3x/2 + 7y/4) of Silverio’s shadow hastening over a
to Paul, “It’s unfair. But life is unfair.” to the power of z. That would explain scrubby wilderness and lifting off, to a
not only “Blonde” and the forthcom- pullulating party where he gyrates alone,
There is plenty that doesn’t work in ing “White Noise” but also the latest mid-throng, listening to Bowie’s “Let’s
“Armageddon Time.”It is studded with extravaganza from Alejandro G.Iñárritu, Dance”inside his head (it should be called
strange elisions: when Paul and Johnny “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful “Let Me Dance”), scene after scene is
play hooky from a visit to the Guggen- of Truths.” Even the title is puffed up. calculated to colonize the senses.Yet Iñár-
heim and cut loose in Manhattan, we ritu’s grand designs, even at their most
brace ourselves for the consequences. The running times are a particular morally fervent,leave you ill at ease.When
Zilch. There are snatches of fantasy giveaway. The folks at Netf lix have Silverio climbs a hill of bodies—Indig-
(Paul imagines being lavished with pub- streaming in their blood,and their fond- enous Mexicans,unmoving and unclad—
lic applause for his art), which seem to est wish is that, with a murmur of “just and finds none other than Hernán Cortés
have dropped in from another movie. one more”and a sustaining bowl of Cap’n at the peak, what is honestly more strik-
And it must be said that the central role Crunch, we submit to another episode ing: the movie’s rage at past atrocities,
is too much for any young actor to be of “Stranger Things” at ten to two in committed by invading oppressors, or
laden with. Paul is meant to be a class the morning. That yen for a marathon the care with which Iñárritu, the master
clown and a troublemaker and a dreamer; lingers in middle-distance movies; when craftsman,has made a sculpture from the
to play all those instruments at once, so “Bardo” had its première, at the Venice naked and the dead? 
to speak, would require the impulsive Film Festival, it lumbered onward for
genius of a Léaud. six minutes shy of three hours. Since NEWYORKER.COM

Support is on hand, however, from Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 7, 2022 87

CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Shannon Wheeler,

must be received by Sunday, November 6th. The finalists in the October 24th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the November 21st issue. Anyone age thirteen

or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“”

..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“You have something in your teeth.” “Goodnight trees, goodnight dirt. Goodnight
Sylvia Hardy, Vancouver, B.C. human race on the earth.”

“I thought we were going to grab something together.” Benjamin Vidalis, Santa Fe, N.M.
Carl Weinschenk, East Hills, N.Y.

“Your stomach is growling.”
James Cecil, Baltimore, Md.

1 234567 8 9 10 11 12

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT. 13 14

THE 15 16
CROSSWORD
17 18 19
A moderately challenging puzzle.
20 21 22
BY ERIK AGARD
23 24 25
ACROSS
1 Moved sideways in a video game 26 27 28
8 Cereal brand owned by Kellogg’s
13 “The thing I’m holding right now” 29 30 31
14 Chongqing culinary specialty
15 Censors sensitive information from 32 33 34 35
16 Really good
17 Ninety-one or ninety-two, grade-wise 36 37 38
18 Confirmation or coronation
19 Part of M.F.D.P.: Abbr. 39 40 41
20 Shelters with flaps
21 Stadium lot? 42 43 44
22 Six, in Spanish
23 Exhort 45 46 47
24 Top ___ Entertainment (record label)
25 Stretch in a seat 48 49
26 Sister of Macy and Maggie in the
50 51
“Charmed” reboot
27 Somewhat, informally 50 Depart from a predetermined path 30 Subway rodents
28 Gravelly quality 51 1995 co-star of Houston, Rochon, and 31 Chloe x Halle, for example
29 Director of the 1972 film “Sambizanga” 35 August birthstone
32 “___ the Night” (Disney Channel Devine 38 River out of which the Padma flows
39 To-do-list parts
Christmas movie) DOWN 40 ___ up (come clean)
33 Brazenly disobey 1 Societal level 41 Dalmatian’s “declarations”
34 Cut 2 The American Girl Café, for example 43 Well-organized
36 Trail near a sugary spill 3 Vehicle that might take several minutes 44 Hawaiian coffee region
37 Nevada city home to the National 46 Org. that certifies flight instructors
to cover one yard? 47 Garment that’s reversible?
Bowling Stadium 4 “Thank you,” in Swahili
38 Flexibility 5 “Stop getting distracted!” Solution to the previous puzzle:
39 Antacid brand 6 Otolaryngologists, for short
40 ___-shui 7 First word of a Midwestern capital CR E AM APR I L ROE
41 Something credible is said to hold it 8 Type of Wagyu beef
42 Like some people in queerplatonic 9 Morehouse College city: Abbr. H I LDA T RAC I I DS
10 Card game with eight foundation piles
relationships, for short 11 Process that increases the value of AVA I L MEDA L CO T
43 Assess
44 Video-game company for which a well- quarters RE TOLD P A R AMO R E
12 To-do-list parts
known cheat code is named 14 Dwellings that might have thatched DR E S S ED RECYCL E
45 Rays whose snouts are lined with sharp
roofs A LOT T H EM
teeth 16 Belt to match?
47 Got down 18 Gift you can’t give someone V ENTUR E AGUE S S
48 Works in a bakery 21 Buzz phrase used to market eggs
49 Word after Disco or Dante’s 22 Verb in a filet-mignon recipe F ANTAS Y S POR T S
24 “Whoops!”
25 Run like a Rottweiler QANDA S E S S I ONS
27 Cheek
URDU T I AS

AWA R E O F E R E AD E R

ROL E P L AY Y EHUD I

TR I I L I AD GONG S

ESS C I RR I GRE EK

R EM S E EDY SASSY

Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at

newyorker.com/crossword