Amy Weiss-Meyer | The Atlantic

Patti Smith’s Family Secrets

2025-10-31T09:00:00-04:00

Even from the back, Patti Smith was unmistakably Patti Smith. Standing on a downtown-Manhattan sidewalk on a late-summer afternoon, she wore loose jeans rolled at the cuff, white high-tops, a black blazer, and—on a cool day for August, but still an August day—a wool cap over her long gray hair. We had arranged to meet at a gallery owned by friends of hers and, for the time being, we were locked out. A life-size horse statue was the only thing visible through the glass windows, like one of Smith’s lyrics come to life. Someone came a few minutes later to open the door, and we stepped into the cool interior to discuss Smith’s new memoir, Bread of Angels.

Smith, who turns 79 in December, was preparing for a busy fall ahead: the release of her memoir, an international concert tour to mark the 50th anniversary of her seminal album, Horses. In addition to reading the book, I’d spent the preceding weeks listening to her songs on repeat, and one lyric in particular seemed like it might be a kind of key to her career, which over the course of six decades has comprised poetry and performance, memoir and drawing, photography and painting, an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a National Book Award. “People say, ‘Beware,’ but I don’t care,” she sings defiantly in the first track on Horses. “The words are just rules and regulations to me.” After a pause she repeats the last word, elongating the vowel for emphasis: “Meeeeee.”

I already knew that she started chafing early on against authorities and edicts. Smith writes in the memoir about a question that came to her as she sat in Bible study in South Jersey at the dawn of the 1960s: What will happen to art? Her father, Grant—the man who taught her to question everything—had recently taken their family of six to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was a fan of Dalí; Patti, 12, was captivated by Picasso and cubism. Now, listening to a Jehovah’s Witness elder describe the coming apocalypse, she couldn’t shake the image of museums in flames: “sculpture, great architecture, to say nothing of Picasso’s paintings.” Who would rescue the art?

Her mother, Beverly, had joined the Witnesses after her own father’s sudden death, drawn to the promise of a reunion in the New World. Smith was attracted to the Witnesses’ status as outsiders; on Saturdays, she forswore cartoons to go door-to-door and preach the good news, relishing the hostile reception the proselytizers often got. Already wary of pledging her allegiance to anything, she didn’t mind that the religion forbade saluting the flag at school. But there was no satisfying answer to the problem of the art. When she brought it up with another elder, she “was told that there was no place for art in Christ’s Kingdom.” And so “I cast off my religion”—not without regret—and “gave my evolving self to art.”

I hoped to understand more, talking to Smith, about that double me. Did it represent a certain self-involvement, or a profound self-confidence, a desire to not only break others’ rules but write her own? Her interests could hardly be more eclectic. She checks in daily with Pope Leo’s latest statements, she told me (“He’s a measured man, he’s intelligent”). She watches Al Jazeera and reads The Times of Israel. She inhales detective shows, especially British ones, and takes writing breaks to listen to “Ride,” by Lana Del Rey, four times in a row. She has probably read Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poem A Season in Hell more than any other nonacademic alive. On Substack, she is beloved for her video musings on topics as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Nikolai Gogol, and her cat. She has 1.4 million Instagram followers.

Smith and I sat on a green velvet couch drinking (very good) oat-milk matcha lattes, which seemed a bit on the nose as emblems of a city that has changed drastically since Smith first stepped off the bus at Port Authority with her plaid suitcase at age 20, in 1967.The decade of Smith’s life that followed is well known, practically mythological, thanks largely to her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, which has sold more than a million copies in the U.S.: her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, the bohemian coterie at the Hotel Chelsea, the poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery accompanied by electric guitar that unexpectedly led to rock stardom.

Just Kids is a chronicle of young love and freewheeling artistic experimentation in a New York City where, as Smith writes, “fifty cents was real money” and you might run into Dalí himself, or befriend Allen Ginsberg, or fall for the playwright Sam Shepard before realizing he was married (Smith did all of that). The book works as well as it does because of its fairy-tale-like focus on its two singular protagonists, fated for greatness and tragedy. Although it ends with Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS in 1989, at age 42, virtually none of the narrative takes place later than 1974. It is not a book about what unfolded after that for Smith—about being famous, or a mother, or a widow. Fifteen years ago, Smith told me, she wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to write about her late husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith—the man whom, she writes in Bread of Angels, “I loved for a time more than myself.”

If Just Kids is about innocence and ambition, Bread of Angels—a sister to that book, Smith told me—deals with the more painful realities of experience. She fills in what the earlier memoir leaves in the background: her childhood, her marriage, her fame. There turned out to be a twist. When Smith had already written most of the manuscript, she stumbled onto revelations about her family that upended her sense of self. “I had to really think about the truth of my life,” she told me. “And what I had thought was not so.”

Patti Smith performing with the Patti Smith Quartet in London, July 2024 (Jim Dyson / Getty)

Picasso was on her mind once more as she wrote. She approaches nonfiction in the spirit of cubism, she said: “You look at all different angles of the same face.” And if you’re Smith, an editor lets you get away with prose that uninhibitedly shifts registers, veering from detailed memories into something close to magical realism and back. Smith’s ever-present sense of destiny, her mystical optimism, and her penchant for rebellion make for reminiscences that can sound at once bombastic and humble, half-invented and visceral. It struck me that the need she felt, nearing 80, to tell a new story of her very existence was perhaps perfectly in keeping with a lifetime of reinvention.

In Smith’s baby book, her mother wrote down two of her early questions: What is the soul? What color is it? Beverly, a waitress who had another daughter and then a son in the two years after Smith was born (and eventually one more daughter), had little time for her eldest’s metaphysical ponderings. Money was tight, especially when Smith’s father, who worked as a machinist after returning from World War II, was on strike. The family faced eviction on several occasions and moved more than a dozen times before Smith was 8, mostly around the Philadelphia area, before settling in South Jersey. She was often sick—pneumonia, tuberculosis, German measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever.

Convalescing, she would lie in bed, “picturing the characters in my books, spinning them adventures beyond the page.” With each illness, “I was privileged with a new level of awareness,” she writes in Just Kids, describing her feverish hallucinations. Even the derelict setting of the temporary “barracks” where the family lived for a time in Philadelphia seems somehow lovely in that book, “an abandoned field alive with wildflowers.” In Bread of Angels, she widens the frame. We learn of the bleakness surrounding the field: “a concrete area with overflowing trash bins, oil barrels, rusted cans, and discarded junk.” The children played in a crawl space “dotted with the red eyes of large city rats.”

At school, Smith was a misfit, but at home, as the oldest, she was the proud leader of her siblings, her first crew and audience. The loyal troupe fought with bullies and acted out Smith’s tales, some of which were loosely based on her favorite books (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women, Nancy Drew). “I learned how to tell stories from my mother, who just had a natural affinity,” she told me. Her father loved reading poems aloud to the family. When Smith got in trouble for missing school one day—she’d been waylaid communing with a turtle in a pond where she felt sure spirits lived—Beverly was angry, but Grant understood.

She loved her family, but had a sense of being and looking different from the others. As a girl, scanning for resemblance among snapshots and mementos, Smith noticed an old newspaper clipping of her father winning a race as a young man, and saw herself in it; she was also a fast runner, one who yearned to break through ribbons. Looking at the photo, she said to herself, This is who I am. I am you. She kept it in a tin frame for years.

Yet Smith’s ambitions were more literary than athletic. “I believed I could write the longest book in the world,” she recalls in Bread of Angels, inhabiting a grandiose young self. “I would record the events of every single day. I would write it all down in such a way that everyone would find something of themselves.”

Fame and fortune, Smith insists, were never her primary objectives—making art was. She worked hard, but she portrays herself as not so much a hustler as a believer in the power of fate. “I don’t know how to play guitar,” she said in a 1976 interview, “but I just get in a perfect rhythm and I play. I don’t care.” The risk of sabotaging commercial success evidently didn’t deter her. After “Because the Night,” the 1978 song she co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen, became a hit, she declined promotional opportunities and refused to lip-synch the song on Dick Clark’s show; doing so seemed inauthentic. “The single quickly slid off the charts,” she writes in Bread of Angels. “It appeared I had been somewhat naïve in believing one got successful solely by their own merit.” When her label urged her to take the word heroin out of “Dancing Barefoot” so that it could be played on the radio, Smith would not comply (she said that she was actually singing heroine; she was always squeamish about needles and tended to stay away from hard drugs).

Smith wasn’t trying to produce chart-toppers anyway. Her songs—influenced by rock, punk, and reggae—are striking and confident and cathartic, but unconventional in ways that challenge the casual listener. Some feature layered tracks of exploratory spoken word that seem almost improvisational; elsewhere, her lyrics showcase her magpie-like poeticism, with echoes of Rimbaud, William Blake, Sylvia Plath, the Beats.

While on tour in Detroit in 1976, Smith met the man she would marry, and immediately felt “a gravitational force.” She was starting to dislike the person she was becoming, she told me: “demanding, presumptuous, and agitated.” Smith said that although she hated to “play the gender card,” she realizes now that the take-no-prisoners persona she was developing was probably a necessity as a rare front woman in a male-dominated scene. “People like to look at me as this tough, punky shit-kicker,” she told an interviewer in 1975 during a recording session for Horses. “Well, I am like that,” she said. “But I’m also very fragile.” By the end of the 1970s, she knew she had to walk away. And so she did, leaving New York for a private life with Fred in a suburb of Detroit, his hometown.

The couple bought a stone house covered in vines, and a boat that Fred hoped to take out on the water but never did. Instead, they sat inside the boat in their yard and listened to baseball games, to Beethoven and Coltrane. Baseball and boats were Fred’s passions, but Smith readily followed his lead. “Soon after we were married,” she writes, “Fred expressed the wish for a son. I hadn’t thought of having children.”

When she got pregnant, Smith was certain she would have a boy, and she did; they named him Jackson. A similar sequence played out, in her telling, with their daughter, Jesse, born five years later. All of it—having children because her husband wanted them, putting her career on hold to tend pear trees in a midwestern suburb—might come across as out of character for Smith, who spent her formative years subverting traditional gender roles. At the same time, her portrayal of the interlude as fated, and fulfilling thanks in part to that feeling, is pure Smith.

She derived real satisfaction from motherhood, and still does. (Both Jackson, now 43, and Jesse, 38, regularly perform with her.) The constraints of parenting young kids forced her to focus on writing prose and poetry in Michigan, she told me, but she never fully abandoned music. She and Fred played together at home and produced an album in New York in the late ’80s. (It flopped, though a song on it—“People Have the Power”—has endured.) Fred “was a troubled man,” Smith writes, “but I was never to penetrate the true nature of those troubles.” Elliptical about the details of the chronic health struggles he faced, she calls his decline “the tragedy of my life.”

Fred died in November 1994 of heart failure. The next month, Smith’s beloved brother, Todd, had a stroke while wrapping Christmas presents and died. After returning to New York with her kids, Smith began work on a new album and went on tour with Bob Dylan. People seemed to assume that she had spent the preceding years doing nothing, a perception that still bothers her. “Just because I’m not on the stage somewhere or you haven’t read an article about me does not mean that I don’t exist as a conscious being who’s evolving creatively, intellectually,” she told me.

In Michigan, she had formed a family and written “a million words” at her kitchen table each morning, a kind of self-apprenticeship. Without that practice, she would never have written Just Kids. “So, I would say, time well spent.”

Near the end of our conversation, Smith brought up her desire, invoked early in her memoir, to write something in which everyone would find a piece of themselves. It was a goal she hadn’t fulfilled, she acknowledged. “Nobody knows how anybody feels,” she said. But she hoped this new book would at least remind her readers, “You’re not alone.”

In the penultimate chapter of Bread of Angels, she describes the shock of learning, at age 70, that her biological father was not Grant Smith, but another World War II veteran, “a handsome gunner from the 766th Bombardment Squadron” whom Smith speculates her mother may have met at a nightclub while Grant was out of town. The gunner’s heritage was 100 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. As a girl, Smith had fantasized about being from a tribe of nomadic aliens or Native Americans. Now she found that she was descended quite literally from a wandering people.

Smith chose to write about her discovery not to reveal some great secret or proclaim a new identity. “Who cares whether I’m Ukrainian Jewish or Scotch Irish?” she said to me. “But what I do relate to is the idea of a people who have been constantly displaced”—perhaps not a universal experience, but an all-too-common one.

This genuine desire to speak broadly to the human condition can veer, at times, toward New Age self-help. “How can we leap back up” after hardship? Smith asks in Bread of Angels.

By returning to our child self, weathering our obstacles in good faith. For children operate in the perpetual present, they go on, rebuild their castles, lay down their casts and crutches, and walk again.

The sentiment sounds gauzy, and then you remember the subtext. Smith wasn’t just a dreamy kid. She was also defiant, intent on doing things her way—the words are just rules and regulations to me—hard and weird though that way could be. Setbacks could also present artistic possibilities. This is still how she sees the world: Beware ? Why? “I just do what I want,” she said in 2022. “Or I don’t do it.”

This is why people watch Smith on Substack as she reads children’s stories out loud in the dark or flips through her old passports; it’s why they ask her to sign copies of Just Kids at concerts. Maybe, her fans hope, by spending time with Smith, they, too, will take on some of this toughness tinged with wonder, this ability to revisit past selves and to carry on, come what may.

As Smith and I talked that afternoon at the gallery, the low light made everything in the airy space feel somehow outside of time. Smith’s face, I noticed, was barely lined. Her plans sounded fluid. She’s ready to disappear into prose less tethered to reality, she said. Bread of Angels will be her last memoir; she’s working on a Japanese detective story and a book called The Melting, and other things she wasn’t ready to tell me about. When I asked her how old she felt, she didn’t hesitate. “Ten and 100,” she said. She laughed, then assured me that she really meant it.

This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “Patti Smith’s Lifetime of Reinvention.”

We’re All Living in a Carl Hiaasen Novel

2025-05-08T09:00:00-04:00

Nothing about Carl Hiaasen’s outward appearance suggests eccentricity. I’ve seen him described as having the air of “an amiable dentist” or “a pleasant jeweler” or “a patrician country lawyer.” He is soft-spoken, courteous, and plainly dressed. The mischief is mostly detectable in his eyes, which he’ll widen to express disbelief or judgment, or cast sideways to invite a companion to join him on his wavelength, raising his brows for effect.

Every so often, he’ll say something that serves as a reminder of why his name has become synonymous with Florida Weird. We were eating turkey sandwiches at his kitchen table one afternoon earlier this year when Hiaasen told me about Rocky I and Rocky II, the pet raccoons he kept in the 1970s. Raccoons, he told me, resist discipline. “You can’t address them as you would a dog,” he said, “because they take it personally.”

Things reached a breaking point with Rocky I when the raccoon climbed a bookshelf and tried to pry from the wall the first bonefish Hiaasen had ever caught, which his father had gotten mounted for him. “I had been at war with the raccoon for a while,” Hiaasen said, as though everyone knows what that’s like. “He was fucking with me.” Eventually, after chasing the animal through his tiny apartment, Hiaasen found Rocky “pissing all over the keys of my typewriter and looking me right in the eye.”

To say that something is straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel is by now only a slightly less clichéd way of saying that truth, especially in Florida, is stranger than fiction. At 72, Hiaasen has dozens of books to his name, virtually all set in the state. They have sold some 14 million copies in the United States and been translated into 33 languages. Hoot, a novel for children, has been wildly popular for two decades. The novels for adults form a genre unto themselves: part crime thriller, part satire, part unvarnished social commentary. His latest, Fever Beach, is just out from Knopf. A series based on Hiaasen’s novel Bad Monkey, starring Vince Vaughn, began streaming last year on Apple TV+, and another, based on Skinny Dip, is in the works at Max.

Hiaasen’s books are animated in equal measure by righteous anger and a penchant for the absurd. He has spent decades trying to explain to his non-Floridian readers that reality provides much of the inspiration for his fiction. From 1976 to 2021, he covered crooked developers, corrupt politicians, and South Florida’s “cavalcade of crime” (as he once put it, sounding like a 1930s newsreel) for the Miami Herald, first as a reporter and then as a columnist. The job provided near-infinite grist for his imagination. Today, he drives around in a midsize white Cadillac SUV—the state car—with a bumper sticker that says WTF: WELCOME TO FLORIDA.

[From the July/August 2020 issue: Lauren Groff on the dark soul of the Sunshine State]

His work can’t help but call to mind the “Florida Man” meme popularized a decade ago by an eponymous Twitter account. (A recent, real-world headline: “Florida Man Saves Neighbor From Jaws of 11-Foot Gator by Hitting It With His Car.”) But in recent years, the Florida story has gotten harder to distinguish from the national story.

“When you’re writing satire, you’re looking for targets,” Hiaasen told an interviewer in 2016. “But you’re looking for targets that you can actually improve on in satire.”

Hiaasen’s humor remains sharp and outlandish, but some of the darker currents of contemporary American life—the guns, the anger, the conspiracy theories—have become painfully personal. In 2018, his younger brother, Rob, was murdered in the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, where he was an editor and a columnist. Hiaasen still finds it difficult to talk about his brother’s death.

The only way he knows how to process it all, he says, is to keep working. Nearly every day, he makes the short drive to the office he rents on the second floor of a generic-looking commercial plaza, puts on a pair of industrial-grade earmuffs, and writes. “The concept of retirement—I can’t even imagine,” he told me. What would he do with all the material?

Hiaasen lives in a section of Atlantic-facing Florida known as the Treasure Coast. It got its name in the 1960s, after scavengers identified the offshore wreckage of 18th-century Spanish ships and began to turn up gold and silver coins and jewelry. Their finds, worth millions of dollars, sparked a treasure-hunting craze. The name endured, and soon a new treasure hunt—for waterfront property—began. It never ended. Driving around one morning, Hiaasen took me to see a cluster of tall condo buildings walling off the ocean from view. He quickly turned around to get us back to a less densely populated stretch of beach. “It’s just so fuh—” he began, before cutting himself off. “Ugly.”

The novelist Carl Hiaasen near his home in Vero Beach, Florida (Irina Rozovsky for The Atlantic)

Hiaasen spends much of his free time fly-fishing for bonefish and tarpon, and many of the most memorable scenes in his fiction take place in nature. His protagonists are typically people who love the outdoors and its creatures, and are willing to go to great lengths to prevent the pillage of the environment by ruthless developers who have succumbed to what he calls, in one book, “the South Florida real-estate disease.” His best-known recurring character is a wild-haired, one-eyed man named Skink, who lives off the grid in the Everglades and eats roadkill for dinner; for fun, he shoots out the tires of tourists’ cars.

Skink has an unlikely backstory: He is, in fact, an ex-governor of Florida—a man so principled, so incorruptible, that he was driven to exile in the wilderness after making himself the archenemy of “the people with the money and the power,” who “viewed him as a dangerous pain in the ass.” Only a few trusted allies know his whereabouts or his true identity. When someone in the novel Double Whammy asks Skink who he is, really, he tells her, “I’m the guy who had a chance to save this place, only I blew it.” The earnestness would be too much if Skink weren’t such a lovable weirdo, more often at work devising plots to foil greedy speculators and invasive vacationers—burning down a theme park, for instance—than lamenting his own futility.

Hiaasen’s books are not whodunits, exactly. Usually it becomes clear within 100 pages or so who’s guilty of what, and why. The question becomes what they’ll do next, and whether they’ll get away with it. A sense of cosmic justice, shot through with dark humor, pervades these novels: Many of the bad guys end up suffering at the hands of nature itself, especially when they have tried to subdue it. In Skin Tight, a great barracuda bites off an antagonist’s hand. In Native Tongue, a loathsome theme-park security guard drowns after being raped by a sexually frustrated captive dolphin. In 2020’s Squeeze Me, invasive Burmese pythons keep turning up near the Palm Beach club owned by an (unnamed) American president; one of his supporters becomes a meal.

Hiaasen’s skill as a writer lies less in the virtuosity of his sentence-level prose than in the exuberant strangeness of his plots and the inner lives of the people who inhabit them. This is a world of murderers for hire, sleazy lobbyists, incompetent lawyers, sketchy doctors, and thieving ex-husbands. Yet even the most detestable characters are more complicated than they appear at first glance: Hiaasen aims to create, as he once put it, villains whom “people don’t want to shoot right away.”

[From the May 2000 issue: The unlikely father of Miami crime fiction]

Nor are Hiaasen’s good guys always the ones you’d expect. The hero of Strip Tease is a very beautiful, very smart stripper. (Women, in Hiaasen’s novels, tend to be both very beautiful and very smart.) The character Twilly Spree, who first appears in Sick Puppy and plays a major role in Fever Beach, has a hot temper, a rap sheet, and a multimillion-dollar inheritance from his “land-raping grandfather,” which he uses to bankroll environmental lawsuits. He has been banned for life from the city of Bonita Springs, having once sunk a corrupt city councilman’s party barge, but shows little remorse. “That slimeball loved his stupid boat,” he says of the incident. “So, yeah, I do enjoy ruining a bad guy’s day.”

Hiaasen stopped writing his column in 2021, but with characters like Twilly and Skink—people who do things he says he’s fantasized about but would never dare attempt—his fiction remains an arena where he can play out his karmic Florida daydreams. “Some mornings I sit in the traffic and I think the best thing that could happen would be for a Force 12 hurricane to blow through here and make us start all over again,” he told a British newspaper in 1990. In a sly joke for anyone with a memory for storm names, the dedication page of his 1995 novel, Stormy Weather, reads simply: “For Donna, Camille, Hugo and Andrew.”

As a child in the 1950s, in Plantation, Florida—then a tiny Fort Lauderdale suburb at the edge of the Everglades, now a city of nearly 100,000—Hiaasen would collect and sell poisonous snakes with his friends for $2 a foot (the rate for nonpoisonous snakes was lower). His boyhood menagerie also included a monkey, an opossum, and what he was told was a baby alligator, which he adopted when neighbors moved. The animal, technically a caiman, eventually escaped. Hiaasen told me he saw it again (he thinks) a couple of years later, when he was out fishing and looking for turtles in a nearby canal.

He speaks about this childhood proximity to nature with a kind of nostalgic reverence. The destruction of that nature, seemingly overnight, to make way for shopping malls and highways felt personal. “It was so painful and infuriating to see,” he said. “It wasn’t that long ago that we were just hanging out, riding around in these pastures and going through these woods and creeks, and they just all got bulldozed.” A prank he played with some friends, pulling up survey stakes from a nearby construction site, later became the basis for Hoot, which is about a group of kids trying to protect an owl habitat from encroachment by a pancake house.

But development was also the reason Hiaasen was born a Floridian. His paternal grandfather, also named Carl Hiaasen, moved from North Dakota to Florida in 1922 and helped found one of the first law firms in Broward County; his father became a lawyer too. Both represented developers, which was, Hiaasen says, what all lawyers in Florida did in those days.

At Plantation High School, Hiaasen started a satirical newsletter called More Trash. In college, he transferred from Emory to the University of Florida to study journalism, and wrote columns for The Florida Alligator—mostly about politics, but with a sense of humor. He had watched Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show every night as a kid and mailed jokes to the show (he didn’t hear back). As Watergate and the Vietnam War filled the news, Hiaasen found late-night comedy to be a salve. “You always felt better: Okay, somebody else gets how stupid this thing is,” he told me. “It was just a relief.”

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

He graduated right before Richard Nixon resigned, and soon began working as a reporter in Cocoa, Florida. Hiaasen had married his high-school girlfriend, Connie, and become a father at 18. His college experience had not been a typical one, but “I never felt like I missed anything,” he told me. He was always shy, and he liked the stability of being a husband and father. In 1976, Hiaasen took a job at the Herald, and he and his family moved back to Plantation.

He was already writing fiction. At Emory, he’d met a recent medical-school graduate, Neil Shulman, who had creative aspirations. Hiaasen began working as Shulman’s ghostwriter; they collaborated on two comic novels (one of which was later turned into the movie Doc Hollywood ). A few years after starting at the Herald, Hiaasen joined the paper’s investigative team, writing articles with headlines such as “Developments Scar the Land, Foul the Sea.” He worked closely at the paper with William Montalbano, with whom he co-wrote three crime novels in the early 1980s. Soon he decided to write a novel of his own.

Tourist Season was published in 1986. Its most memorable character is Skip Wiley, a Miami newspaper columnist who becomes so furious about “the shameless, witless boosterism that made Florida grow” that he starts a terrorist cell aimed at discouraging tourism and migration from the north. (“This is not murder,” Wiley says at one point, after he has kidnapped a retiree and is threatening to feed her to an endangered North American crocodile. “It’s social Darwinism.”) Hiaasen himself had just become a columnist. He didn’t kidnap anyone, but his skeptical, adversarial posture made enemies: the mayor, the Cuban community, civic boosters. A Miami city commissioner once introduced a resolution condemning him by name.

The column became a thrice-weekly platform for Hiaasen’s opinions, albeit a mostly local one. His books—he went on to publish a novel every couple of years—gave him a national audience. He began appearing on talk shows to entertain viewers with tales of Florida’s real-life “freak festival.” “I get more complaints from people about Carl Hiaasen’s work than anything else,” the president of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce told the St. Petersburg Times in 1989. “I choose not to read his material.”

Hiaasen in 1991, taking time off from his newspaper column (Acey Harper / Getty)

Some reviewers complained that the genre blending was confusing, the plots too far-fetched. “If one critique dogs the author, it’s that he writes essentially the same book over and over again, upping the absurdity quotient each time out,” a Boston Globe writer observed in 2000. But readers kept buying the books. The Chicago Sun-Times described Hiaasen in the late ’90s as having gone “from cult favorite to best seller to brand name.”

He also acquired a legion of hard-to-pigeonhole fans, among them Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush. More important to Hiaasen were the musicians he befriended after they read his fiction, including Warren Zevon and Jimmy Buffett. In 1995, Buffett paid tribute to Hiaasen’s work in a song called “The Ballad of Skip Wiley.”

The more famous Hiaasen got, the more people liked to ask him when he was going to finally flee Florida. But he has never seriously considered living anywhere else. The sense of loss he feels for the Florida he once knew seems to be matched by a morbidly curious compulsion to witness the state’s continued degeneration, and a stubborn refusal to give up the fight. “There’s a circus element that’s hard not to watch living here,” he said. “It would be kind of a bummer not to see it unravel.”

The joke about Vero Beach is that it’s where grandparents go to visit their grandparents. In the manicured neighborhood where Hiaasen has lived since 2005, the midsize SUVs are always gleaming, the hedges neatly trimmed. Walking around, I saw gray-haired men driving golf carts through unpaved lanes and passed a retirement-age woman wearing a white baseball cap embroidered in gold thread with a “47” and an American flag. At the public-beach entrance, two men scanned the sand with metal detectors, looking for treasure.

None of these people seemed like Hiaasen’s people, exactly. He prefers being in a fishing boat to sitting on the beach, and though he lives down the street from an oceanfront country club, he no longer golfs. (One character in Fever Beach refers to golf as “the white man’s burden.”) He generally casts himself as a sort of winking misanthrope, which has made for an effective public persona, and isn’t far from reality. “Mark my words,” the legendary New York columnist Jimmy Breslin once said after meeting a young Hiaasen. “He has killed people.”

Hiaasen is, at the very least, a cynical introvert. “There’s a glut of assholes on the loose,” he wrote in his 2018 book Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You’ll Never Hear. “The ability to sidestep and outwit these random jerks is a necessary skill.”

What is it like to live with him? “Writers are impossible,” he told me. “My experience has been—” he laughed, and started again. “The feedback I’ve gotten is that they can be hard.” He and Connie divorced in 1996. In 2018, he separated from his second wife, Fenia; she and their son eventually moved to Montana. It was a lonely period. When Hiaasen was living in the Keys after his first marriage broke up, he’d started breeding albino rat snakes. This time, he had his two dogs, and his work.

He was at his office on June 28, 2018, when he got the call from his sister. A man had entered the Capital Gazette newsroom—where their brother, Rob, worked—and opened fire. No one could reach Rob, and Hiaasen had a bad feeling. He drove home to watch TV, and eventually got confirmation: Rob had been among the five people killed. He was 59. (Prosecutors later said the gunman, Jarrod W. Ramos, was seeking revenge for a 2011 article the newspaper had published about his guilty plea in a harassment case.)

Talking about the shooting, Hiaasen seemed torn between a brother’s anguish and a journalist’s critical remove. “There’s a cumulative amount of slaughter that we apparently have become so accustomed to. It’s so routine,” he told me. “You could hardly be totally surprised by it, given everything else that’s happened.” That same year, teenagers from Parkland, Florida, had boarded buses to Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., to share their grief and rage over the murder of their classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School; Hiaasen had written about the students in his column. “You write about it and you write about it, and, of course, then Rob gets killed,” he said.

As we talked about Rob, Hiaasen got quieter. He stared up to his left at the ceiling, then down to his right at the floor. At times he almost mumbled. “You always think about what the last seconds would have been like, when the guy comes in, blasting away,” Hiaasen said. “The way your mind works, you can’t help but imagine those things.”

After Rob was murdered, Hiaasen started seeing a therapist who specialized in grief. He didn’t go to the trial, or to the sentencing, where the killer received five life terms without parole, plus additional prison time. “I didn’t think it would be good for anybody for me to be sitting there,” Hiaasen said. Though he’s read plenty of accounts of victims’ families feeling a sense of peace in the aftermath of a verdict like this one, he hasn’t experienced any such feelings himself: “That guy could suffer a horrible, gruesome death, and I wouldn’t shed a tear. But it wouldn’t dull any of the pain.” After a couple of months away from the newspaper, his byline returned to the Herald with a column about the shooting. “Each of us struggles with overwhelming loss in our own way,” it said, “so I wrote a column, which, after an eternity in this business, is all I know how to do.” Most of all, Hiaasen wanted to convey his respect for Rob as a writer and an editor.

[Read: For the love of the local newspaper]

It was during that terrible summer of 2018 that he met the woman who would become his third wife. Katie was a recent Florida transplant, then 29, who was also divorced and worked in health-care IT. The two struck up a conversation at a restaurant and became friends. Hiaasen (who was 65 at the time) insists that he wasn’t looking for a younger woman; certainly, he told me, Katie wasn’t looking for an older man, let alone hoping to remarry. They started dating a year or so later, and got married at the courthouse in Key West in 2020, on a day when the weather was bad for fishing.

That same year, Hiaasen published Squeeze Me—the book about pythons slithering around Palm Beach. He dedicated it to Rob’s memory. When I asked him if Rob’s death had made him more sensitive to violence, or more wary of employing it in his novels, Hiaasen said it probably had. Then he smiled and added quickly, “Don’t get me wrong. I want dreadful things to happen to the bad guys in my books.”

After Squeeze Me, people started leaving angry comments on Hiaasen’s Amazon page. “I’d like a REFUND!” one reviewer wrote, citing disappointment with “page after page of vitriolic and vituperative character assassination of DJT.” “Fiction should be escape, not an in your face political hit-job,” another person wrote. They felt betrayed—why did this author they used to turn to for a good laugh insist on mocking Donald Trump?

Hiaasen found this response amusing, but it also confused him. “All I could think was, Had they not read anything I’d ever written before? How in the world could you be shocked?” His work, he said, has always been political.

True, but in less polarized times, his work was political in less polarizing ways. Being anti-corruption, for instance, is a position that has traditionally been shared by a bipartisan majority, and Hiaasen has vilified politicians, real and imagined, of both parties.

But at a certain point between the election of 2000, when the recount saga put Florida in the national spotlight, and the 2023 revelation that Trump was storing classified documents in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, something changed. You could no longer write satire about Florida’s dark side the way Hiaasen always has without writing, in some way, about national politics. And when the butt of the joke is the MAGA movement itself, some readers will inevitably take it as an affront.

Fever Beach will not redeem Hiaasen with these readers. In the first chapter, we meet Dale Figgo, a former Proud Boy who was kicked out of the group after January 6, when he accidentally smeared feces on a statue of a Confederate general whom he mistook for Ulysses S. Grant. Shunned by the mainstream white-supremacist community, Figgo has started his own group, “Strokers for Liberty.” (The Proud Boys’ restrictions on masturbation—laid out, for real, in a handbook that became evidence in one of the January 6 trials—are a running joke in Fever Beach.)

Courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf

Because this is a Hiaasen novel, where dreadful things happen to dreadful people, Figgo’s attempts to run a militia prove disastrous. His clever and clear-eyed tenant and housemate, Viva Morales, is constantly thwarting his schemes. She throws away the trigger of his AR-15. She refuses to tell him how to spell Fauci for his flyers. Eventually, she teams up with Twilly Spree—he of the inherited millions, short fuse, and habit of sponsoring environmental lawsuits—to infiltrate and take down the “confederacy of bumblefucks.”

Hiaasen’s hope for his fiction, as he told me more than once, has always been that it will make people laugh for the right reasons. He wants his readers to have the same comforting experience that he did watching Johnny Carson all those years ago: You’re not crazy. The world is.

Those who think the way Hiaasen does will no doubt get some relief from seeing Dale Figgo have skin from his scrotum grafted onto his nose (long story) and, later, get tied up in a Pride flag. The Key West drag queens in this book turn out to be better with their fists than the pathetic Strokers. But who has the last laugh? At times, Fever Beach risks reading like liberal-Boomer fan fiction—a pleasing fantasy, but perhaps too quick to validate its audience’s worldview or, worse, to offer false reassurance that a majority of bad actors are, as Viva suspects Figgo of being, “too dumb to be dangerous.” In real life, most would-be Proud Boys don’t have cunning, progressive housemates who will throw away their gun parts. Some of them even have security clearances.

“Futile gestures that feel good at the time. That’s my weakness,” Twilly says near the end of the book. When I asked Hiaasen about this line, he told me that he can relate to Twilly’s sentiment. But then he brought up Edward Abbey’s 1975 book, The Monkey Wrench Gang—a novel about a group of radical environmental activists who sabotage what they see as efforts to encroach on the land of the American Southwest; it became a touchstone for Hiaasen, as it is for Twilly. Just because a gesture is likely to be futile, Hiaasen seemed to be saying, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth making.

This, ultimately, may be the reason so many readers keep coming back to Hiaasen. The humorist Samantha Irby, a Hiaasen superfan, told me she admires a man who, at a point in his career when he could easily coast on tales of “husbands and wives trying to kill each other,” has instead chosen to write explicitly political satire. “I know how to find NPR if I really want to bum myself out,” Irby said. “Reality with a side of escapism is a blessing for our fragile minds at this time.”

Two days after Trump took office in January, a man in a red hoodie, a black MAGA hat, and large sunglasses stepped off a plane in Miami. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, was newly released from federal prison after having been granted clemency by the president, and was now heading home. A few onlookers cheered, and he made his way out of the terminal to a waiting black SUV.

The next night, Hiaasen was seated in the choir room of a Vero Beach church, riffing with his friend and longtime Herald colleague Dave Barry about Tarrio’s freedom and other recent news. Barry, who is also famous for his Florida-specific humor, was in town to headline a benefit at the church for a local literary foundation. Hiaasen was set to introduce him to the 600-person audience.

As the old friends talked, I learned about the reptile egg that Hiaasen had given Barry for his 50th birthday, in 1997. They’d named the egg Earl; Barry was pretty sure it had had a snake inside, but his wife hadn’t wanted to wait to find out. He’d been forced, he said, to get rid of the egg before it hatched.

Hiaasen had just gotten back from a short trip to the Caribbean. He and Katie had left the country, he said, because he simply couldn’t bear to watch the inauguration from Florida. They’d done the same thing a few months earlier for Election Day. Hiaasen described his behavior as “cowardly.”

Did being away help take his mind off things, at least? I asked him. “I thought it would,” he said. “But there’s no hiding.” The news alerts still came through on his phone. Yet after decades of covering Florida and its politics, Hiaasen told me, “you sort of condition yourself not to be apoplectic.” You keep watching the circus, and you keep writing about it. Plus, he said, “I do have a certain amount of faith in karma.”

Karma came up again when we discussed the people-eating pythons in Squeeze Me : No, real-life invasive pythons have never eaten any human beings. They have eaten large animals, though, and as the climate warms, they are bound to move north. So the novel’s plot, Hiaasen insisted, is not outside the realm of possibility. He smiled. “Trust in nature,” he said.

This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “We’re All Living in a Carl Hiaasen Novel.”

The Rooneyverse Comes of Age

2024-09-20T07:00:00-04:00

A few pages into Intermezzo, Peter, a 32-year-old Dublin lawyer, is lying in bed with his 23-year-old girlfriend, Naomi, touching her underarm and thinking about how she “hardly ever shaves anywhere except her legs, below the knee.” He doesn’t mind—he likes it, actually; there’s “something sensual in her carelessness.” But her grooming practices are notable as a marker of the couple’s nearly decade-wide age gap: “He told her once that back in his day, the girls in college used to get bikini waxes. That made her laugh.” Naomi herself, “the image of youth and beauty,” is still in college. “Those Celtic Tiger years must have been wild,” she tells Peter in response, a reference to Ireland’s pre-2008 economic boom—which she is too young to remember.

From the start, Intermezzo—the fourth novel by the Irish author Sally Rooney, who’s known for chronicling love and friendship among a certain bookish, vaguely political cohort of Millennials—is preoccupied with questions of age and age difference; questions cosmetic, practical, ethical, and existential. Writing in the close third person, Rooney tells a story of grief, guilt, and love in chapters that alternate between following Peter and his brother, Ivan. Ivan, 10 years younger than Peter (around Naomi’s age), is a former chess prodigy who worries that his best playing years are behind him. Gen Z has officially entered the Rooneyverse—and they’re making the Millennials feel old.

Peter and Ivan, whose father has just died of cancer, have a strained relationship that turns adversarial as the novel proceeds. Peter thinks Ivan is “a complete oddball,” “kind of autistic.” Ivan, well aware of his own social shortcomings—he’s “often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts,” berating himself for his difficulty reading other people—thinks Peter is aloof and self-important. The one thing they can agree on is that they love Sylvia, Peter’s ex-girlfriend, who has become a kind of older-sister figure to Ivan and an intermediary between the brothers. (That Peter still loves Sylvia is, naturally, an obstacle in his relationship with Naomi.)

Both brothers regularly attribute their mutual antipathy to the age gap. But that doesn’t deter Ivan from embarking on an unlikely romance (his first ever) with Margaret, a woman some 14 years his senior who is separated from her alcoholic husband. “We’re at very different stages in our lives,” Margaret warns Ivan. “It can’t go on forever.” Or can it?

What does it mean to love someone whose experience of the world has been fundamentally dissimilar to one’s own? Are sexual relationships by nature exploitative? If so, who’s exploiting whom? Can two people ever really understand each other? Rooney has repeatedly explored these puzzles in her fiction by spinning a web of interconnected characters—friends, family members, lovers, ex-lovers. Frances, the 21-year-old narrator of her debut novel, Conversations With Friends (2017), has an affair with a married 30-something male actor. The two protagonists of Normal People (2018), Marianne and Connell, partake in a years-long will-they-or-won’t-they dance made all the more dicey by their starkly opposite class backgrounds. (Marianne also contends with a cruel older brother.) Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) has two primary romantic pairs, each complicated by divergent pasts and trajectories.

Intermezzo features a laundry list of other signature Rooney ingredients as well: Catholicism; socialist politics; dysfunctional families; chronic illness; intense friendships marked by love, envy, and mutual caretaking. There’s a reason Sally Rooney has become shorthand for, in the words of the actor and Gen Z favorite Ayo Edebiri, “emotionally stunted Irish ppl going thru it.”

But something big has shifted here. The main players in Rooney’s first two novels were college-age, busy wondering when their real life would start; even the protagonists of Beautiful World, approaching 30, asked earnestly what kind of person they wanted to be. Rooney’s latest characters, newly alert to the weight of years, are as attuned to regret as to anticipation; they’re preoccupied with what kind of person they have already been. Looking more warily in the mirror, they don’t always like what they see.

[Read: The hazards of writing while female]

Since she arrived on the Anglophone cultural scene at 26, Rooney, now 33, has been hailed—and disparaged, in some corners—as a generational portraitist, and Intermezzo’s emphasis on aging reads in part as a reflection of the evolving Millennial group-consciousness. Boomers said that 40 was the new 30; Millennials, we’re told, act as though 30 is the new 70. “Hark, the Millennial Death Wail,” a New York Times headline announced earlier this year:

Could it be a shtick? Remember, millennials are the first generation who learned to mine their lives for social media content, and “aging” may be a category that is too robust to leave on the shelf.

In tapping into 30-somethings’ self-serious cries of mortality, Rooney is examining that impulse to wail—and gently mocking it. She has also set out to probe something deeper and more enduring, more universally human: grief itself. On this larger canvas, Rooney’s characters aren’t the only ones who can’t decide how dark or hopeful to feel. Neither, a reader might conclude, can their author.

In novels, as in chess, openings are crucial. Here are some things we learn right away in Intermezzo: At their father’s funeral, Peter gave the eulogy and was offended by the “resplendent ugliness” of Ivan’s suit. Ivan, who still wears braces, feels that he was closer with their father than Peter was, and regrets not having given the eulogy himself. Peter neglected to tell Naomi about the death; he didn’t want her coming to the funeral, didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why the younger woman was there. Instead, he invited Sylvia.

Readers can discern a lot about the Peter-Ivan, Peter-Naomi, Peter-Sylvia relationships from this fact pattern. The opening also contains hints that, though the death has occurred offstage, it may well be the central event around which everything else orbits, the point from which there is no return. Where to next? How to make meaning of one’s life, of life itself and the evanescence of memories, in the midst of pain and suffering?

Time haunts the novel. Peter realizes that he is half the age his father was when he died, “already middle-aged by that calculation. Frightening how quickly it all falls away.” “Trapped in claustrophobic solitude,” drinking too much and swallowing pills in order to sleep, he googles things like “panic attack or am I dying how to tell.” Ivan, who has been singularly focused on his chess career, thinks “maybe I’ve really wasted a lot of my life” (and he’s only 22!). His thoughts, too, are obsessive, a cesspool of “debilitating dark regret and misery.” The brothers can’t help but take it out on each other. Round and round they go.

Sylvia, beloved and trusted by both, is a deft emissary but can do only so much for them, self-possessed and empathetic though she is. The end of her youth came swiftly: A terrible traffic accident when she was 25 left her in chronic pain. She broke up with Peter, we learn, not wanting him to feel burdened—or to be, herself, the cause of that burden. She carries on, stoic almost to the point of martyrdom.

At least, that’s how it looks from the outside. Rooney carefully guards Sylvia’s perspective, along with Naomi’s. Everything we learn about them is filtered through Peter’s wounded-child inner monologue, which has a way of reducing them to pawns he plays off against each other—Naomi, the manic pixie dream girl who makes Peter self-conscious about his age even as she makes him laugh; Sylvia, the tragic friendly ghost who represents all that’s been lost.

[Read: The small rebellions of Sally Rooney’s Normal People]

If the women’s opacity can be frustrating (clearly they’re a lot more complicated than he seems to recognize), Peter’s yearning, his anguish, can sometimes feel over the top, verging on what we Millennials might call “emo.” Here is Peter buying a bottle of vodka after a fight with Sylvia, fantasizing about what he’d like to tell the young store clerk:

I too was twenty-five once, and even younger, though I readily concede that for you at this moment it must be hard to imagine. Life, which is now the most painful ordeal conceivable, was happy then, the same life. A cruel kind of joke, you’ll agree. Anyway, you’re young, make the most of it. Enjoy every second. And on your twenty-fifth birthday, if you want my advice, jump off a fucking bridge.

But the melodrama is perhaps the point—grief, Rooney recognizes, rarely unspools at anything like a measured pace or intensity. Elsewhere, Peter’s jittery existentialism is almost modernist in its expressive sparseness: “The man helps Sylvia into her coat as Peter looks on. Calmer now. Attuned to the quieter feelings. Under what conditions is life endurable? She ought to know. Ask her. Don’t.”

For Ivan’s grief, Rooney finds a register of raw earnestness that proves unexpectedly affecting. “Nothing will ever bring his father back from the realm of memory into the realm of material fact, tangible and specific fact,” he thinks, “and how, how is it possible to accept this, or even to understand what it means?”

Rooney’s proposition in Intermezzo that love is the surest antidote to disorienting loss won’t surprise her readers. She has often been read as a kind of Millennial Jane Austen; though she’s by no means confined to the conventional marriage plot, she has been loyal to a less traditional happily-ever-after ethos. Her first two novels end on hopeful notes, with much-desired reunions between bruised lovers, for the time being at least. To have implied any certainty of lifelong monogamous bliss for her 20-somethings would have rung false. In Beautiful World, which also ends with a reunion, Rooney upped the ante by zooming ahead to a tidy domestic scene—marriage and babies on the horizon—that left many readers (me among them) afraid that she’d lost her edge.

What the chorus of complaints about that ending missed, though, is the fundamental continuity in her fiction so far: Sally Rooney loves love, romantic and otherwise, and she is endlessly drawn to stories that scope out different ways of redeeming it. In Intermezzo, as she surely intends, I found myself rooting most fervently for the pairing—Ivan and Margaret—that seemed to most defy the odds. Margaret (the one woman in the book whose interiority we do gain access to) has known a dark side of marriage, and Ivan stands to benefit from her clear-eyed resilience. At one point, he tells her that he wishes he were her age. “With painful fondness she replies: Ivan, that’s your life. Don’t wish it away.”

Once again, in this novel, Rooney seems prepared to grant her characters a slightly off-kilter yet still harmonious ending, this time against a backdrop of personal grief and family strife.

That she has managed, mostly, to have it both ways in her fiction—her Millennials may feel adrift, but they can count on a hefty share of good luck—is precisely what irks her fiercest critics. It’s also surely a very conscious choice, and the way she supplies tidy closure, even as she subverts it, is a testament to her skill as a novelist.

In the context of a book so concerned with matters of aging, death, and despair, this habitual ambiguity takes on new meaning. How hopeful should a person be? One line from Ivan toward the end of the novel encapsulates Rooney’s own apparent ambivalence. “We’re both young, in reality,” he tells Margaret. Then he adds, “Anything is possible. Life can change a lot.” His observation is romantic, sentimental even, intended to reassure her that their bond can last. Yet Ivan’s words are also bracing in their realism, a reminder that nothing is guaranteed. If his Millennial elders can figure out a way to sustain hope in the face of acute doubt, they might find that they’re not just aging; they’re growing up.

Do the Oscars Still Mean Anything?

2024-03-07T10:42:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

“Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon,” Raymond Chandler wrote in The Atlantic in 1945.

Chandler, at the time already a popular author of detective fiction, had lately begun working as a screenwriter, but he still considered himself an outsider in the movie business. “I hold no brief for Hollywood,” Chandler wrote. “I have worked there a little over two years, which is far from enough to make me an authority, but more than enough to make me feel pretty thoroughly bored. That should not be so. An industry with such vast resources and such magic techniques should not become dull so soon.”

Yet dull is exactly what Chandler found the industry to be. Its people, he thought, were essentially shallow backstabbers:

I suppose the truth is that the veterans of the Hollywood scene do not realize how little they are getting, how many dull egotists they have to smile at, how many shoddy people they have to treat as friends, how little real accomplishment is possible, how much gaudy trash their life contains. The superficial friendliness of Hollywood is pleasant—until you find out that nearly every sleeve conceals a knife.

Among Chandler’s many complaints was what he perceived as a lack of respect for writers. “The first picture I worked on was nominated for an Academy award (if that means anything),” he recounted, “but I was not even invited to the press review held right in the studio.”

Do the Academy Awards mean anything? In the lead-up to Sunday night’s 96th Oscars, you too may find yourself asking this question about what another 1940s Atlantic writer once termed “the Academy’s annual rodeo of self-approbation.”

“For years,” my colleague David Sims, who covers film, wrote recently, “the panicked question around the Academy Awards has been the same as the one bedeviling every other pop-cultural awards show: Does anyone even care anymore?” Especially in 2024, following a year in which Hollywood was frequently in the news for its ongoing streaming woes and protracted labor disputes, one might naturally conclude that the glitz of the red carpet is little more than a showy distraction from the truly important issues facing the industry and its workers.

In fact, showy distraction is a key part of the Oscars’ DNA. As Dana Stevens has written in The Atlantic, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed in 1927, “when the silent era was coming to an abrupt close and the studio system’s grip on the industry was tightening. As the craft guilds formed in the 1920s began to threaten strikes, the MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer banded together with a group of influential industry players, including producers, directors, writers, and actors, to establish a bulwark against growing labor unrest.” The awards, created the following year, were essentially a bet on keeping the talent in line: “If I got them cups and awards,” Mayer reflected decades later, “they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted.”

From the vantage point of the 1940s, Mayer’s bet seemed to have more or less paid off. Members of the Academy, Chandler lamented in a 1948 Atlantic essay, “Oscar Night in Hollywood,” were “conditioned to thinking of merit solely in terms of box office and ballyhoo.” True quality, according to Chandler, mattered little: “A superb job in a flop picture would get you nothing.”

Still, even the cynical Chandler thought that the awards, at their best, could serve as a reminder of film’s artistic potential. “In the motion picture we possess an art medium whose glories are not all behind us,” he wrote. “It has already produced great work, and if, comparatively and proportionately, far too little of that great work has been achieved in Hollywood, I think that is all the more reason why in its annual tribal dance of the stars and the big-shot producers Hollywood should contrive a little quiet awareness of the fact.” (“Of course it won’t,” Chandler concluded. “I’m just daydreaming.”)

Also in 1948, Jean Hersholt, then the president of the Academy, put a more positive spin on things, boasting in an article for The Atlantic that the Academy had “already firmly succeeded in establishing round the world the idea of creative incentive.”

This week, I asked David for his thoughts on these 1940s characterizations of what—and whom—the Oscars are for. In 1948, David told me, Chandler wasn’t wrong: The awards were “essentially a back-patting popularity competition between the big studios, still years away from recognizing anything approaching independent or foreign cinema. All of that is still baked into the show, of course—there’s no night more filled with self-congratulation—but what Chandler probably didn’t anticipate is that the Oscars became a way for serious adult cinema to survive as a studio interest.”

The Oscars, that is, are one reason that, instead of focusing solely on maximizing profit, Hollywood continues to make genuinely good movies that may or may not prove to be hugely popular. David acknowledged that “in today’s globally minded market, companies mostly care about worldwide grosses.” But, he said, “winning a big trophy is still a motivating factor. That’s how we get sophisticated movies like Poor Things, American Fiction, and even Oppenheimer, along with the more daring material up for awards this year, like The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall.”

Maybe the awards ceremony does, after all, provide a valuable “creative incentive” for the people who make movies—even if watching it from afar can be rather dull for the rest of us.

Confronting the Unbelievable

2023-09-17T07:00:00-04:00

Photograph by Irina Rozovsky

When the photographer Irina Rozovsky moved from Boston to Athens, Georgia, she began taking walks around her new neighborhood. She’d push her daughter’s stroller to a nearby wooded path, trying to get the baby to sleep, and photograph what she could along the way. One day in 2018, after a storm, the path was flooded. A young girl stood in the bright sun at the edge of the murky water, observing the strange new scene before her—“confronting the unbelievable,” as Rozovsky puts it. The image reminded Rozovsky of the fairy-tale trope of a child getting lost in the forest. “It’s both a romance and a nightmare,” she told me.

Rozovsky’s untitled photograph will be on display this fall at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, as part of the exhibition “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1845.” In an introduction to an accompanying book, the Atlantic contributing writer Imani Perry reflects on the 21st-century photographers who capture the region’s distinctive landscapes with compositions that evoke a 19th-century sense of the sublime. In the South, Perry writes, “nature takes over everything that humans create and destroy.”

Rozovsky insists that the work is not making an environmental statement. As a mother, she worries about the role that humans have played in warming the world her daughter will inherit. But as a photographer, she told me, she was drawn to this particular scene for its “serene and surreal” beauty, its unsettling scale.

A relative newcomer to the South, Rozovsky has been struck by the high drama of its nature. “It can be so wild,” she said, even just down the street in Athens. She’s not religious—but when trees fall, or a path floods like this, Rozovsky said, it can feel almost biblical. “There’s something larger than us.”

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Confronting the Unbelievable.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What Do You Do When You Realize You’re Ruining the Earth?

2023-08-17T10:55:28-04:00

“Thinking ecologically about global warming requires a kind of mental upgrade,” Timothy Morton, the environmental philosopher, has written, “to cope with something that is so big and so powerful that until now we had no real word for it.” In 2008, Morton tried to invent one: hyperobject. The term doesn’t necessarily connote a value judgment, that this enormous thing is good or bad, but simply that in its hugeness it is inescapable, like air. To wrap one’s mind around the idea of a hyperobject is to accept that we, humans, “can’t jump out of the universe.” And according to Morton, being able to acknowledge the scale of a phenomenon as all-encompassing as, say, climate change, to name it, might be the first step toward actually doing something about it.

Hyperobjects abound in our globalized world: the internet, fast fashion, microplastics—things that cannot easily be measured using a single metric. A character in Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, tries to explain the concept and lands on this: “It’s something so big and sticky with so many parts that it can’t be seen, something that touches so many other things.” Something, another character offers, like the oil industry.

It’s 2014, and Bunny Glenn, Kiesling’s protagonist is building a career in that very industry, though not without some moral squeamishness. For her, the hyperobject is personal; she feels compelled to defend her involvement in a system that she knows is a major driver of climate change. “I work for the non-oil part of it, the part that is moving away from oil,” she rushes to clarify, stretching the truth.

Some readers might reflexively judge Bunny for her complicity; surely her choice to drive a Prius to work can’t offset the impact of her company’s decades of fossil-fuel exploration—what’s referred to as “upstream” in oil-industry parlance. But what about downstream, a category, Bunny knows, that includes “plastics and face lotion and basically everything you might ever buy in a supermarket or Target or Neiman Marcus or Walmart, everything they would stick in your arm in a hospital or use to listen to your heart”? Plenty of well-meaning people insist, like Bunny, that they’re trying to move away from oil. Virtually no one in the developed world, Kiesling reminds us, is not complicit in some way. Perhaps the line between culpability and innocence, this novel suggests, is blurrier than the average liberal reader might like to imagine.

That liberal reader might in fact be Kiesling’s target audience. This book is the first to be released under an imprint created by Crooked Media, the wildly popular Trump-era resistance-podcast franchise. (The publisher, Zando, also has an Atlantic line of books.) A tagline on the new imprint’s website—“Reading: it’s not just for tweets anymore”—doesn’t inspire much confidence. You’d be forgiven for wondering if Mobility is more political screed than art.

Kiesling, however, has pulled off a rare feat: a deeply serious, deeply political novel that is, quite often, fun to read. It’s a coming-of-age story full of delicious detail, keen satire, and complex humanity. It’s informative without being didactic, thoughtfully confronting subjects such as climate change and American imperialism and gender inequality and white flight without taking itself too seriously. Kiesling is not in the business of preaching to the already converted—she’s here to hold up a mirror to her readers, and to make anyone who cracks this book open squirm a little.

And why not? “We need philosophy and art to help guide us, while the way we think about things gets upgraded,” Timothy Morton wrote in 2015. Perhaps the novel is as good a tool as any for helping us think about the ways a hyperobject such as the oil industry touches our lives and what we do—or don’t do—about it.

We first encounter Bunny as a bored American teenager in Baku, the oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan, where her father works for the U.S. embassy as a public-information officer, selling the idea of America. It’s the summer of 1998, and Bunny passes long, hot, lonely days fantasizing about boys, watching soap operas with the family’s kindly upstairs neighbor, reading and rereading a handful of English-language magazines and books; her British Cosmopolitan is “dog-eared to denote the women Bunny one day hoped to resemble and the products she one day hoped to buy.” Yet she’s generally uncurious about what is happening around her just then, keeping “the world of grown-ups, the world of work”—in her case, the world of the embassy—at an arm’s length. She knows enough, but not too much, and prefers it that way. “There had been a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Bunny knew,” Kiesling tells us. “It was sort of ongoing, she thought, and she tended not to listen when it was spoken of.”

Bunny’s also aware, in a hazy way, that “oil was the big thing about where they lived now”—the reason for so much Western interest in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Exxon has sponsored the first-ever Azeri-English dictionary, “which sat in the middle of the Glenns’ embassy-assigned coffee table, mostly unconsulted by her, along with a photo book called Azerbaijan: Land of Fire, which carried the logos of Statoil and BP.” For her part, Bunny is more interested in reading articles such as “8 Ways to Heat Up the Summer.”

[Read: How Lydia Kiesling fled to write her next novel]

Introducing Bunny as an angsty teenager is an inspired move. The moody, self-centered fog of adolescence is, after all, a fitting proxy for the state of willful semi-ignorance that can become the default when contemplating the climate crisis. A majority of Americans see the warming world as a threat. But it’s tempting to throw up one’s hands and wonder, what can be done, really? Can’t the grown-ups solve the problem? It’s comforting, even in adulthood, to cling to innocence, to continue to make reckless choices and believe, on some level, that the fairy tales of glossy magazines may yet prove real.

Most of us grow up eventually though, or at least we like to think we do. In Bunny, Kiesling has drawn a character who seems stuck in that teenagerdom even as she ages. The novel follows her into the 21st century, as she stumbles into young adulthood. Desperate for a job, any job, at the depths of the recession in 2009, Bunny applies to a temp agency called ManPower and winds up in the all-female administrative pool of a hydrogeologic engineering firm. Before long she’s become the girl Friday for one of the company’s owners, who takes Bunny with him when he leaves to start a new, technology-focused wing of his father-in-law’s oil business. “At first most of it would probably be oil and gas tech, drilling,” he tells Bunny, promising that “over time, it would invest in other kinds of technology, renewables, batteries, clean energy.” Thus begins her career in the oil industry.

Bunny can’t help but be attracted to oil’s vaguely glamorous aura—in her childhood, in booming Baku, oil was sexy, exciting. Now, in Houston, it’s wealth and power and a means to affording the life she envisions for herself. Somehow, the moving away from oil part of the deal always remains just out of reach. Tellingly still going by her childhood nickname into her 30s, Bunny admires specialized knowledge and expertise but doesn’t always feel herself capable of possessing it—or maybe she just can’t be bothered. She reads books to learn more about the industry and takes a course called “Managing the Firm in the Global Economy,” but she still finds it “very confusing.” She’s not dumb, exactly, just more comfortable dwelling on the surface of things.

When her brother’s girlfriend, a Swedish socialist, laments that “oil companies and their friends in politics” are “the biggest obstacles” to meaningful climate action, Bunny doesn’t disagree, but she’s not willing to concede that her own actions may be part of the problem. “I get how these companies are looking out for themselves,” she replies, before abdicating responsibility. “I don’t know a lot about this stuff. I just think that we have this huge system that’s already in place. I don’t know; it’s like our dad … He didn’t always like whoever the president was, but he worked to do what he could at the job.”

What Bunny can do, she eventually decides, is devote herself to “the ‘women in energy’ stuff” that’s emerging in the 2010s, corporate America’s Lean In era. This “stuff” is ripe for parody, and some of the novel’s most enjoyable, and illuminating, provocations emerge when Kiesling sends Bunny to talks with names such as “Storytelling Oil and Gas,” where speakers celebrate “diversity” and promote networking opportunities “to bring together the amazing women of this industry, the women literally powering our world.” Bunny tells herself that this is progress.

Bunny’s father, for his part, resigns from a decades-long foreign-service career when Donald Trump becomes president. (Kiesling’s own father, John Brady Kiesling, is a former diplomat who resigned his post in the lead-up to the Iraq War; the protagonist of her first novel, The Golden State, is also a diplomat’s daughter.) But instead of quitting oil and gas, Bunny, like the industry itself—which insists on being called “energy” now—rebrands. She finally decides to use her real name, Elizabeth, when, in her late 30s, she takes on the title of “director of outreach and communications” at an “energy solutions” firm. Her new job is all about perfecting the appearance of things, telling the right story—including “commissioning, editing, and posting YouTube videos of oilfield workers and support staff lip-syncing to Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ and dancing at a project site.” Once again, it’s vibes over matter: Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth!

Near the end of the novel, on a trip back to Baku, going through “the streets she had roamed as a teenager looking for tampons and perfume and listening to Dave Matthews,” Bunny, now Elizabeth, reflects on just how far she’s come. “In her small way Elizabeth had become knowledgeable,” Kiesling writes, “although the scale of the oil complex still escaped her. But now, rather than trying to understand the hyperobject, she let it wash over her, focused on her own projects.”

If Mobility is a morality tale about a person who chooses blindness over sight, what lesson should we take from it? What kind of future awaits us if we, like Bunny, choose to live in ignorance and then spin into a good story all that we can’t control? Widespread destruction, for one thing. In 2017, Bunny is out of town when Hurricane Harvey ravages Texas. But when the state floods again, just two years later, she can’t exempt herself from the fallout. Her late grandmother’s home in Beaumont, where her mother has been living, is destroyed, the family’s heirlooms and souvenirs and photos “lying in meaningless, miscegenated rubble.” Bunny weeps. Then she mines the tragedy for content, later telling the story onstage at an industry event to demonstrate her “personal stake in the energy transition.”

[Read: ‘Things don’t always change in a nice, gradual way’]

Bunny maintains her faith that there is nothing, still, that a neat narrative can’t fix. “Her mother had hated this house anyway,” she thinks. “They would have to see this as a blessing.” She eventually migrates to Portland, Oregon, where, “if you had money, the charming old houses could be retrofitted tastefully” to withstand longer smoky seasons, wetter winters, hotter summers. Laid off after she has her only child, Bunny begins “applying her fluency to securing the house, thinking about their individual energy future,” her gaze firmly averted from the hyperobject.

But the point of Morton’s concept of the hyperobject is to label an ungovernable, overwhelming reality, and in doing so tame it enough to look it squarely in the eye. If we don’t, Kiesling suggests, we are part of the problem, whether or not we’ve devoted our careers to oil production. Bunny, with her stories and her privilege, can’t avoid the dangers of the world she’s helped create forever—and neither, this novel implies, will anyone else.

In a final, brief section set in 2051, as Bunny awaits the birth of her first grandchild, we get an unsettling glimpse of what that world might look like. Kiesling doesn’t offer reassurance, or absolution. We are left, instead, with a deep sense of foreboding. Ignoring the hyperobject is no longer an option.

Judy Blume Goes All the Way

2023-02-27T08:00:00-05:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

Like tens of thousands of young women before me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something strange was happening to my body.

I had just returned from visiting the author in Key West when I noticed a line of small, bright-red bites running up my right leg. I was certain it was bedbugs—and terrified that I’d given them to Blume, whose couch I had been sitting on a few days earlier.

I figured that if the creatures had hitched a ride from my hotel room, as I suspected, the courteous—if mortifying—thing to do would be to warn Blume that some might have stowed away in her upholstery, too.

In Key West and in Brooklyn, beds were stripped, expensive inspections performed: nothing. After a few days, I had no new bites. I was relieved, if further embarrassed. I apologized to Blume for the false alarm, and she responded with a “Whew!” I hoped we had put the matter behind us.

The next morning, another email appeared in my inbox:

Amy—When I am bitten by No-See-Ums (so small you can’t even see them and you were eating on your balcony in the evening)—I get a reaction, very itchy and the bites get very red and big. They often bite in a line.

It was “just a thought,” she wrote. “xx J.”

Here was Judy Blume, the author who gave us some of American literature’s most memorable first periods, wet dreams, and desperate preteen bargains with God, calmly and empathetically letting me know that an unwelcome bodily development was nothing to be ashamed of or frightened by—that it was, in fact, something that had happened to her body too. Maybe, on some level, I’d been seeking such reassurance when I emailed her in the first place. Who better to go through a bedbug scare with?

For more than 50 years, Blume has been a beloved and trusted guide to children who are baffled or terrified or elated by what is happening to them, and are trying to make sense of it, whether it has to do with friendship, love, sex, envy, sibling rivalry, breast size (too small, too large), religion, race, class, death, or dermatology. Blume’s 29 books have sold more than 90 million copies. The New York Daily News once referred to her as “Miss Lonelyhearts, Mister Rogers and Dr. Ruth rolled into one.” In the 1980s, she received 2,000 letters every month from devoted readers. “I’m not trying to get pity,” a typical 11-year-old wrote. “What I want is someone to tell me, ‘You’ll live through this.’ I thought you could be that person.”

Blume, now 85, says that she is probably done writing, that the novel she published in 2015 was her last big book. She doesn’t get many handwritten letters anymore, though she still interacts with readers in the nonprofit bookstore that she and her husband, George Cooper, founded in Key West in 2016. Some fans, women who grew up reading Blume, cry when they meet her. “Judy, hi!” one middle-aged visitor exclaimed when I was there, as if she were greeting an old friend. She was from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where Blume raised her two children in the ’60s and ’70s, though she admitted that the author would have no reason to know her personally. “Well hello, and welcome!” Blume said.

Blume loves meeting kids in the store too. Usually, though, she avoids making recommendations in the young-adult section—not because of the kids so much as their hovering parents. “The parents are so judgmental ” about their kids’ book choices, she told me. “They’re always, you know, ‘What is this? Let me see this.’ You want to say, ‘Leave them alone.’ ” (Key West is a tourist town, and not everyone knows they’re walking into Judy Blume’s bookstore.)

Such parental anxiety is all too familiar to Blume. In the ’80s, her frank descriptions of puberty and teenage sexuality made her a favorite target of would-be censors. Her books no longer land on the American Library Association’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books list, which is now crowded with novels featuring queer and trans protagonists. Yet Blume’s titles are still the subjects of attempted bans. Last year, the Brevard County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group based in Florida, sought to have Forever … taken off public-school shelves there (the novel tells the story of two high-school seniors who fall in love, have sex, and—spoiler—do not stay together forever). Also in 2022, a Christian group in Fredericksburg, Texas, called Make Schools Safe Again targeted Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (it mentions masturbation).

These campaigns are a backhanded compliment of sorts, an acknowledgment of Blume’s continued relevance. Her books remain popular, in part because a generation that grew up reading Blume is now old enough to introduce her to their own children. Some are pressing dog-eared paperbacks into their kids’ hands; others are calling her agent. In April, the director Kelly Fremon Craig’s film adaptation of Blume’s 1970 novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret will open in theaters. Jenna Bush Hager is bringing Blume’s novel Summer Sisters to TV. (Hager and her twin, Barbara Pierce Bush, have said that Summer Sisters is the book that taught them about sex.) An animated Superfudge movie is coming to Disney+, and Netflix is developing a series based on Forever … . This winter, the documentary Judy Blume Forever premiered at Sundance Film Festival (it will be streaming on Amazon Prime Video this spring).

Today’s 12-year-olds have the entire internet at their disposal; they hardly need novels to learn about puberty and sex. But kids are still kids, trying to figure out who they are and what they believe in. They’re getting bullied, breaking up, making best friends. They are looking around, as kids always have, for adults who get it.

They—we—still need Judy Blume.

I got my first email from Blume two weeks before my trip. “Hi Amy—It’s Judy in Key West,” she wrote. “Just want to make sure your trip goes well.” I hadn’t planned to consult the subject of my story on the boring logistics of the visit, but those details were exactly what Blume wanted to discuss: what time my flight landed, where I was staying, why I should stay somewhere else instead. Did I need a ride from the airport?

The advice continued once I arrived: where to eat, the importance of staying hydrated, why she prefers bottled water to the Key West tap. (Blume also gently coached me on what to do when, at dinner my first night, my water went down the wrong pipe and I began to choke. “I know what that’s like,” she volunteered. “Bend your chin toward your chest.”) I’d forgotten to bring a hat, so Blume loaned me one for rides in her teal Mini convertible and a walk along the beach. When I hesitated to put it on for the walk, eager to absorb as much vitamin D as possible before a long New York winter, she said, “It’s up to you” in that Jewish-mother way that means Don’t blame me when you get a sunburn and skin cancer. I put on the hat.

Blume and Cooper came here on a whim in the 1990s, during another New York winter, when Blume was trying to finish Summer Sisters. “I would say to George, ‘I wonder how many summers I have left,’ ” Blume recalled. “He said, ‘You know, you could have twice as many if you lived someplace warm.’ ” (Cooper, a former Columbia Law professor, was once an avid sailor.) Eventually they started spending most of the year here.

Blume enjoys a good renovation project, and she and Cooper have lived in various places around the island over the years. They now own a pair of conjoined condos right on the beach, in a 1980s building whose pink shutters and stucco arches didn’t prepare me for the sleek, airy space they’ve created inside, filled with art and books and comfortable places to read while watching the ocean. In the kitchen, a turquoise-and-pink tea towel with a picture of an empty sundae dish says I go all the way.

At one end of the apartment is a large office where Blume and one of her assistants work when she’s not at the bookstore. Her desk faces the water and is littered with handwritten notes and doodles she makes while she’s on the phone. She plays Wordle every day using the same first and second words: TOILE and SAUCY.

Usually, Blume told me, she sleeps with the balcony door open so she can hear the waves, though she’s terrified of thunderstorms, so much so that she used to retreat into a closet when they arrived. This condo has thick hurricane glass that lessens the noise, and now, with a good eye mask, Blume can bear to wait out a storm.

Blume spoke about her anxieties, and her bodily travails, without a hint of embarrassment. When I visited, she was still recovering from a bout of pneumonitis, a side effect of a drug she’d been prescribed to treat persistent urinary-tract infections. It had been months since she’d felt up to riding her bike—a cruiser with bright polka dots painted by a local artist—or been able to walk at quite the pace she once did (though our morning walk was, in my estimation, pretty brisk). Lately, she had been snacking on matzo with butter to try to regain some of the weight she’d lost over the summer.

Selected Blume novels, in order of publication. At bottom, a 2014 reissue of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, repackaged for the digital age. (Courtesy of Judy Blume; Simon & Schuster)

Blume’s fictional characters are memorably preoccupied with comparing height and bra size and kissing techniques, as Blume herself was in her preteen and teenage years. Nowadays, when she has lunch with her childhood friends Mary and Joanne, with whom she’s stayed close, the three talk about things like hearing aids, which Mary had recently argued should be avoided because they make one seem old. But Joanne said that nothing makes someone seem older than having to ask “What?” all the time, and Blume, a few weeks into using her first pair, was glad she’d listened to Joanne.

Her body is changing, still. “I’m supposed to be five four. I’ve always been five four,” Blume said during breakfast on her balcony. “And recently the new doctor in New York measured me, and I said, ‘It better be five four.’ ” It was 5 foot 3 and a quarter. “I said, ‘No!’ And yet, I have to tell you, all this year I’ve been saying to George, ‘I feel smaller.’ It’s such an odd sensation.”

She knows it happens to everyone, eventually, but she thought she’d had a competitive advantage: tap dancing, which she swears is good for keeping your posture intact and your spine strong. Her favorite teacher no longer works in Key West. But some nights, Cooper will put on Chet Baker’s fast-paced rendition of “Tea for Two,” and she has no choice. “I have to stop and tap dance.”

Before she was Judy Blume, tap-dancing author, she was Judy Sussman, who danced ballet—“That’s what Jewish girls did”—and made up stories that she kept to herself. She grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where her father, Rudolph Sussman, was a dentist, and the kind of person everyone confided in; his patients would come to his office just to talk. Her mother, Esther, didn’t work. Her brother, David, four years her senior, was a loner who was “supposed to be a genius” but struggled in school. Blume distinguished herself by trying hard to please her parents. “I knew that my job was making the family happy, because that wasn’t his job,” she told me.

She felt that her mother, in particular, expected perfection. “I didn’t doubt my parents’ love for me, but I didn’t think they understood me, or had any idea of what I was really like,” she has written. “I just assumed that parents don’t understand their kids, ever. That there is a lot of pretending in family life.”

As a child, Blume read the Oz books and Nancy Drew. The first novels she felt she could identify with were Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. When she was 11, the book she wanted to read most was John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live, but she wasn’t allowed (it has a lot of sex, as well as an awkward mother-daughter conversation about periods). She did read other titles she found on her parents’ shelves: The Catcher in the Rye, The Fountainhead, The Adventures of Augie March.

In the late 1940s, David developed a kidney condition, and to help him recuperate, the Sussmans decided that Esther and her mother would take the children to Miami Beach for the school year (Rudolph stayed behind in New Jersey so he could keep working). Blume’s 1977 novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, is based on this time in her life. Its protagonist, 10-year-old Sally, is smart, curious, and observant, occasionally in ways that get her into trouble. She asks her mother why the Black family she befriends on the train has to switch cars when they arrive in the South, and is angry when her mother, who admits that it may not be fair, tells her that segregation is simply “the way it is.” She has vivid, sometimes gruesome fantasy sequences about personally confronting Hitler.

When Sally finds out that her aunt back home is pregnant, she writes her a celebratory letter full of euphemisms she only half-understands; her earnest desire to discuss the matter in adult terms even as she professes her ongoing fuzziness on some key details makes for a delicious bit of Blume-ian humor: “Congratulations! I’m very glad to hear that Uncle Jack got the seed planted at last.” What Sally really wants to know is “how you got the baby made.”

Blume, who hit puberty late, had similar questions at that age. She faked menstrual cramps when a friend got her period in sixth grade, and even wore a pad to school for her friend to feel through her clothes, as evidence. When she was 14 and still hadn’t gotten her period, Esther picked her up from school one day and brought her to a gynecologist’s office. Blume later recalled that the doctor barely spoke to her at all. “He put my feet in stirrups, and without warning, he examined me.” She cried all the way home. “Why didn’t you tell me he would do that?” she asked her mother. “I didn’t want to frighten you,” her mother replied. Blume was furious.

Her father, the dentist, was slightly more helpful. When she caught impetigo at school as a teenager, she developed sores on her face and scalp—and “down there,” as she put it. “I asked my father how I was going to tell the doctor that I had it in such a private place,” Blume has written. “My father told me the correct way to say it. The next day I went to the doctor and I told him that I also had it in my pubic hair.” Blume “turned purple” saying the words, but the doctor was unfazed. She learned that there was power in language, in knowing how to speak about one’s body in straightforward, accurate terms.

She went to NYU, where she majored in early-childhood education. She married her first husband, a lawyer named John Blume, while she was still in college. For their honeymoon, Blume packed a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that her brother had brought home from Europe. It was still banned in the United States. “That book made for a great honeymoon,” she has said.

Blume graduated from college in 1961; that same year, her daughter, Randy, was born, and in 1963 she had a son, Larry. She’d always loved babies, and loved raising her own. But being a Scotch Plains housewife gave her stomach pains—a physical manifestation, she later said, of her discontent.

“I desperately needed creative work,” Blume told me. “That was not something that we were raised to think about in the ’50s, the ’40s. What happens to a creative kid who grows up? Where do you find that outlet?”

Blume spent “God knows how long” making elaborate decorations for dinner parties—for a pink-and-green-themed “evening in Paris,” she created a sparkling scene on the playroom wall complete with the River Seine and a woman selling crepe-paper flowers from a cart. She was never—still isn’t—a confident cook. “I used to have an anxiety dream before dinner parties that I would take something out of the fridge that was made the day before and I’d drop it,” she told me.

“I didn’t fit in with the women on that cul-de-sac,” she said. “I just never did. I gave up trying.” She stopped pretending to care about the golf games and the tennis lessons. She started writing.

The first two short stories Blume sold, for $20 each, were “The Ooh Ooh Aah Aah Bird” and “The Flying Munchkins.” Mostly, she got rejections.

In 1969, she published her first book, an illustrated story that chronicled the middle-child woes of one Freddy Dissel, who finally finds a way to stand out by taking a role as the kangaroo in the school play. She dedicated it to her children—the books she read to them, along with her memories of her own childhood, were what had made her want to write for kids.

Around the same time, Blume read about a new publishing company, Bradbury Press, that was seeking manuscripts for realistic children’s books. Bradbury’s founders, Dick Jackson and Robert Verrone, were young fathers interested, as Jackson later put it, in “doing a little mischief” in the world of children’s publishing. Blume sent in a draft of Iggie’s House, a chapter book about what happens when a Black family, the Garbers, moves into 11-year-old Winnie’s all-white neighborhood. Bradbury Press published the book, which is told from Winnie’s perspective, in 1970.

Today, Blume cringes when she talks about Iggie’s House—she has written that in the late 1960s, she was “almost as naive” as Winnie, “wanting to make the world a better place, but not knowing how.” In many ways, though, the novel holds up; intentionally or not, it captures the righteous indignation, the defensiveness, and ultimately the ignorance of the white “do-gooder.” (“I don’t think you understand,” Glenn, one of the Garber children, tells Winnie. “Understand?” Winnie asks herself. “What did he think anyway? Hadn’t she been understanding right from the start. Wasn’t she the one who wanted to be a good neighbor!”)

The major themes of Blume’s work are all present in Iggie’s House : parents who believe they can protect their kids from everything bad in the world by not talking to them about it, and kids who know better; families attempting to reconcile their personal value systems with shifting cultural norms. Years later, Blume asked Jackson what he’d seen in the book. “I saw the next book, and the book after that,” he said.

After Iggie’s House, Blume published the novel that would, more than any other, define her career (and earn Bradbury its first profits): Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Margaret Simon is 11 going on 12, newly of suburban New Jersey by way of the Upper West Side. She’s worried about finding friends and fitting in, titillated and terrified by the prospect of growing up (the last thing she wants is “to feel like some kind of underdeveloped little kid,” but “if you ask me, being a teenager is pretty rotten”). When Margaret came out, the principal of Blume’s kids’ school didn’t want it in the library; he thought elementary-school girls were too young to read about periods.

I remembered Margaret as a book about puberty, and Margaret’s chats with God as being primarily on this subject. Some of them, of course, are. (“Please help me grow God. You know where. I want to be like everyone else.”) But reading the book again, I was reminded that it is also a thoughtful, at times profound meditation on what it means to define your own relationship to religious faith.

Margaret’s Christian mother and Jewish father are both proudly secular. She fears that if they found out about her private prayers, “they’d think I was some kind of religious fanatic or something.” Much to their chagrin, she attends synagogue with her grandmother and church with her friends. She’s trying to understand what her parents are so opposed to, and what, if anything, these institutions and rituals might have to offer.

Several Blume fans I talked with remembered this aspect of the novel far better than I did. The novelist Tayari Jones, whose career Blume has championed, told me that the way Margaret is torn between “her parents’ decisions and her grandparents’ culture” was the main reason she loved the book. “I’m Black, and I grew up in the South. Being raised without religion made me feel like such an oddball,” Jones told me. “That really spoke to me even more than the whole flat-chested thing, although there was no chest flatter than my own.”

The writer Gary Shteyngart first encountered Margaret as a student at a Conservative Jewish day school. He found the questions it raised about faith “mind-blowing.” “I think in some ways it really created my stance of being apart from organized religion,” he told me. (The book stuck with him long after grade school; Shteyngart recalled repeating its famous chant—“I must, I must, I must increase my bust!”—with a group of female friends at a rave in New York in the ’90s. “I think we were on some drug, obviously.”)

Margaret was not a young-adult book, because there was no such thing in 1970. But even today, Blume rejects the category, which is generally defined as being for 12-to-18-year-olds. “I was not writing YA,” she told me. “I was not writing for teenagers.” She was writing, as she saw it, for “kids on the cusp.”

The letters started right after Margaret. The kids wrote in their best handwriting, in blue ink or pencil, on stationery adorned with cartoon characters or paper torn out of a notebook. They sent their letters care of Blume’s publisher. “Dear Judy,” most began. Girls of a certain age would share whether they’d gotten their period yet. Some kids praised her work while others dove right in, sharing their problems and asking for advice: divorce, drugs, sexuality, bullying, incest, abuse, cancer. They wanted to scream. They wanted to die. They knew Judy would understand.

Blume responded to as many letters as she could, but she was also busy writing more books—she published another 10, after Margaret, in the ’ 70s alone. It’s Not the End of the World (1972) took on the subject of divorce from a child’s perspective with what was then unusual candor. “There are some things that are very hard for children to understand,” an aunt tells 12-year-old Karen. “That’s what people say when they can’t explain something to you,” Karen thinks. “I can understand anything they can understand.”

Blume visits with sixth graders in 1977. (Jane Tarbox / Getty)

Blume’s mother, Esther, was her typist up until Blume wrote Forever …, her 1975 novel of teen romance—and sex. The book is dedicated to Randy, then 14, who had asked her mother to write a story “about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die.” Forever … got passed around at sleepovers and gained a cult following; it is a book that women in their 50s can still recite the raciest page numbers from (85 comes up a lot). It’s also practical and straightforward: how to know if you’re ready, how to do it safely. The protagonist’s grandmother, a lawyer in Manhattan, bears more than a passing resemblance to her creator, mailing her granddaughter pamphlets from Planned Parenthood and offering to talk whenever she wants. “I don’t judge, I just advise,” she says.

The same year Forever … came out, Blume got divorced after 16 years of marriage, and commenced what she has referred to as a belated “adolescent rebellion.” She cried a lot; she ate pizza and cheesecake (neither of which she’d had much interest in before, despite living in New Jersey). Within a year, she had remarried. She and her children and her new physicist husband—Blume calls him her “interim husband”—landed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he had a job. Blume knew from the start that the marriage was a mistake, though she didn’t want to admit it. “He was very much a know-it-all,” she told me. “It just got to be too much.” She was unhappy in Los Alamos, which felt like Stepford, but she kept writing. By 1979, she was divorced again.

In the midst of this second adolescence, Blume published her first novel for adults. Wifey, about the sexual fantasies and exploits of an unhappy New Jersey housewife, came out in 1978. She never intended to stop writing for children, though some assumed that Wifey’s explicitness would close that door. After the novel was published, Blume’s mother ran into an acquaintance from high school on the street. Bess Roth, whose son was Philip Roth, had some advice for her. “When they ask how she knows those things,” she told Esther, “you say, ‘I don’t know, but not from me!’ ”

In December 1979, George Cooper, who was then teaching at Columbia, asked his ex-wife if she knew any women he might want to have dinner with while he was visiting New Mexico, where she lived with their 12-year-old daughter. Cooper showed his daughter the four names on the list. His daughter, being 12, told him he had to have dinner with Judy Blume.

Dinner was Sunday night; Monday, Blume and Cooper saw Apocalypse Now. He called and sang “Love Is the Drug” over the phone (Blume thought he was singing “Love is a bug”). Tuesday night, Blume had a date with someone else. Cooper came over afterward, and he never left. They got married in 1987, to celebrate their 50th birthdays.

“The enjoyment of sexuality should go for your whole life—if you want it to,” Blume told the writer Jami Attenberg, in a 2022 conversation at the Key West Literary Seminar. “If you don’t, fine.” I don’t judge, I just advise. She had a product endorsement to share with the audience: George had given her a sex toy, the Womanizer, and it was fabulous. “Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that great? He got it for me and then I sang its praises to all of my girlfriends.”

Blume’s steadfast nonjudgmentalism, a feature of all her fiction, is part of what has so irritated her critics. It’s not just sex that Blume’s young characters get away with—they use bad words, they ostracize weirdos, they disrespect their teachers. In Deenie and Blubber, two middle-grade novels from the ’70s, Blume depicts the cruelty that kids can show one another, particularly when it comes to bodily differences (physical disability, fatness). “I’d rather get it out in the open than pretend it isn’t there,” Blume said at the time. She didn’t think adults could change kids’ behavior; her goal was merely to make kids aware of the effect that behavior could have on others.

In 1980, parents pushed to have Blubber removed from the shelves of elementary-school libraries in Montgomery County, Maryland. “What’s really shocking,” one Bethesda mother told The Washington Post, “is that there is no moral tone to the book. There’s no adult or another child who says, ‘This is wrong.’ ” (Her 7-year-old daughter told the paper that Blubber was “the best book I ever read.”)

[Read: How banning books marginalizes children]

As Blume’s books began to be challenged around the country, she started speaking and writing against censorship. In November 1984, the Peoria, Illinois, school board banned Blubber, Deenie, and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, and Blume appeared on an episode of CNN’s Crossfire, sitting between its hosts. “On the left, Tom Braden,” the announcer said. “On the right, Pat Buchanan.” Braden tried, sort of, to defend Blume’s work, but Blume was more or less on her own as Buchanan yelled at her: “Can you not understand how parents who have 9-year-olds … would say, ‘Why aren’t the kids learning about history? Why aren’t they learning about the Civil War? What are they focusing in on this nonsense for?’ ” Blume explained that it wasn’t either/or—that her books were elective, that kids read them “for feelings. And they write me over 2,000 letters a month and they say, ‘You know how I feel.’ ”

“ ‘I touched my special place every night,’ ” Buchanan replied, reading from a passage in Deenie about masturbation. (After the bans received national publicity, the Peoria board reversed its decision but said younger students would need parental permission to read the books.)

Despite, or perhaps because of, the censorship, Blume was, in the early ’80s, at the peak of her commercial success. In 1981, she sold more than 1 million copies of Superfudge, the latest book in a series about the charming troublemaker Farley Drexel Hatcher—a.k.a. Fudge—and his long-suffering older brother, Peter. Starting that year, devoted readers could purchase the Judy Blume Diary—“the place to put your own feelings”—though Blume reportedly declined offers to do Judy Blume bras, jeans, and T‑shirts. Mary Burns, a professor of children’s literature at Framingham State College, in Massachusetts, thought Judy Blume was a passing fad, “a cult,” like General Hospital for kids. “You can’t equate popularity with quality,” Burns told The Christian Science Monitor. “The question that needs to be asked is: will Judy Blume’s books be as popular 20 years from now?” Burns, obviously, thought not.

But 20 years later is about when I encountered the books, when my first-grade teacher pressed a vintage copy of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing into my hands in the school library one day. I continued reading Blume over the coming years—as a city kid, I was especially intrigued by the exotic life (yet familiar feelings) of the suburban trio of friends in Just as Long as We’re Together (1987) and Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson (1993). In fourth grade, I tried to take Margaret out of my school library and was told I was too young.

I recently went back to that school to speak with the librarian, who is still there. The young-adult category has exploded in the years since I was a student, and these days, she told me, tweens and young teens seeking realistic fiction are more likely to ask for John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give), or Jason Reynolds (Long Way Down) than Judy Blume. She implied that the subjects these authors take on—childhood cancer, police violence, gun violence—make the adolescent angst of Blume’s books feel somewhat less urgent by comparison.

Yet Blume’s books remain popular. According to data from NPD BookScan, Margaret tends to sell 25,000 to 50,000 copies a year; the Fudge series sells well over 100,000. (The Fault in Our Stars, which was published in 2012 and became a movie in 2014, sold 3.5 million copies that year, but has not exceeded 100,000 in a single year since 2015.) A portion of these sales surely comes from parents who buy the books in the hope that their kids will love them as much as they did. But nostalgia alone seems insufficient to account for Blume’s wide readership; parents can only influence their kids’ taste so much. “John Updike once said that the relationship of a good children’s-book author to his or her audience is conspiratorial in nature,” Leonard S. Marcus, who has written a comprehensive history of American children’s literature, told me. “There’s a sense of a shared secret between the author and the child.” Clearly, something about these stories still feels authentic to the TikTok generation.

Now that Blume’s books seem relatively quaint, I asked my former librarian, can anyone who wants to check them out? Absolutely not, she said. Her philosophy is that “the protagonist, especially with realistic fiction, should be around your age range.” It’s not censorship, she insisted, just “asking you to wait.”

Back in 2002 or 2003, not wanting to wait, I’d bought my own copy of Margaret. I loved that book, all the more so because I knew it was one adults didn’t want me to read.

For her part, Blume believes that kids are their own best censors. In Key West, she told me the story of a mother who had reluctantly let her 10-year-old read Forever … on the condition that she come to her with any questions afterward. Her daughter had just one: What is fondue?

“Is growing up a dirty subject?” Blume asked Pat Buchanan on Crossfire. What were adults so afraid of? What made it so hard for them to acknowledge that children were people too? In her fiction, Blume had always taken the kids’ side. But as her own kids got older and she began to reflect on her experience raising them, Blume gained more empathy for parents. In 1986, she published Letters to Judy: What Your Kids Wish They Could Tell You, “a book for every family to share,” featuring excerpts and composites of real letters that children (and a few parents) had sent her over the years, plus autobiographical anecdotes by Blume herself. “If you’re wondering why your child would write to me instead of coming to you,” she wrote, “let me assure you that you’re not alone. There were times when my daughter, Randy, and son, Larry, didn’t come to me either. And that hurt. Like every parent, I’ve made a million mistakes raising my kids.”

When she would describe the project to friends and colleagues, they’d nod and say, “Oh, letters from deeply troubled kids.” Blume corrected them. “I would try to explain,” she wrote, “that yes, some of the letters are from troubled kids, but most are from kids who love their parents and get along in school, although they still sometimes feel alone, afraid and misunderstood.” She admitted in the book’s introduction that “sometimes I become more emotionally involved in their lives than I should.” Blume replied directly to 100 or so kids every month, and the rest got a form letter—some with handwritten notes at the top or bottom. After Letters to Judy came out, more and more kids wrote.

Today, the letters are in the archives of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale. Reading through them is by turns heartwarming, hilarious, and devastating. Some letter-writers ask for dating advice; others detail the means by which they are planning to kill themselves. Blume remembers one girl who said she had the razor blades ready to go.

Blume’s involvement, in some cases, was more than just emotional: She called a student’s guidance counselor and took notes on a yellow Post-it about how to follow up. One teenage girl came to New York, where Blume and Cooper had moved from New Mexico, for a weekend visit (they took her to see A Chorus Line ; she wasn’t impressed). Blume thought seriously about inviting one of her correspondents to come live with her. “It took over my life at one point,” Blume said of the letters, and the responsibility she felt to try to help their writers.

“Hang in there!” Blume would write, a phrase that might have seemed glib coming from any other adult, though the kids didn’t seem to take it that way when she said it: They’d write back to thank her for her encouragement and send her updates.

Her correspondence with some kids lasted years. “I want to protect you from anything bad or painful,” Blume wrote to one. “I know I can’t but that’s how I feel. Please write soon and let me know how it’s going.”

After spending a day in the Beinecke’s reading room, I began to see Blume as a latter-day catcher in the rye, attempting to rescue one kid after the next before it was too late. “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all,” Holden Caulfield tells his younger sister in J. D. Salinger’s novel:

Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.

Perhaps, through these letters, Blume had managed to live out Caulfield’s impossible fantasy.

When your books sell millions of copies, Hollywood inevitably comes calling. Blume, long a skeptic of film or TV collaboration, was always clear with her agent that Margaret was off the table. “I didn’t want to ruin it,” she told me. Some books, she thought, just aren’t meant to be movies. “It would have been wrong somehow.”

Then she heard from Kelly Fremon Craig, who had directed the 2016 coming-of-age movie The Edge of Seventeen. Blume had admired the film, which could have drawn its premise from a lost Judy Blume novel. Its protagonist, Nadine, is an angsty teen who has recently lost her father and feels like her mom doesn’t get her. Fremon Craig and her mentor and producing partner, James L. Brooks, flew to Key West and went to Blume’s condo for lunch. (Blume had it catered—no reason to have anxiety dreams about serving food on a day like that.) They convinced Blume that Margaret could work on the screen.

Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret and Rachel McAdams as her mother, Barbara, in the movie adaptation of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Dana Hawley / Lionsgate)

Blume served as a producer on the film, gave Fremon Craig notes on the script, and spent time on set, heading off at least one catastrophic mistake when she observed the young actors performing the famous “I must increase my bust” exercise by pressing their hands together in a prayer position. (The correct method, which Blume has demonstrated—with the caveat that it does not work—is to make your hands into fists, bend your arms at your sides, and vigorously thrust your elbows back.)

The result of their close collaboration is an adaptation that’s generally faithful to the text. Abby Ryder Fortson, who plays Margaret, manages to make her conversations with God feel like a natural extension of her inner life.

If anything, the movie is more conspicuously set in 1970 than the book itself, full of wood paneling, Cat Stevens, and vintage sanitary pads. Blume told me that Margaret is really about her own experience growing up in the ’50s; she just happened to publish it in 1970. The movie, unfolding at what we now know was the dawn of the women’s-liberation movement, adds another autobiographical layer by fleshing out the character of Margaret’s mother, Barbara (Rachel McAdams), who now recalls Blume in her New Jersey–mom era. In the book, Barbara is an artist, and we occasionally hear about her paintings; on-screen, she gives up her career to be a full-time PTA mom. She’s miserable.

Preteens aren’t the only ones in this movie figuring out who they are, and what kind of person they want to become. By the end of the film, Barbara has quit the PTA. She’s happily back at her easel.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by how easy it was to confide in Blume. Still, I hadn’t expected to reveal quite so much—I was there to interview her. Yet over the course of our conversations, I found myself telling her things about my life and my family that I’ve rarely discussed with even my closest friends. At one point, when I mentioned offhand that I’d been an anxious child, Blume asked matter-of-factly, “What were you anxious about when you were a kid?” She wanted specifics. She listened as I ran down the list, asking questions and making reassuring comments. “That’s all very real and understandable,” she said, and the 9-year-old in me melted.

[Read: Judy Blume still has lots to teach us]

It was easy to see why so many kids kept sending letters all those years. Even those of us who didn’t correspond with Blume could sense her compassion. To read one of her books is to have her tell you, in so many words, That’s all very real and understandable.

This kind of validation can be hard to come by. Tiffany Justice, a founder of Moms for Liberty, has said that the group is focused on “safeguarding children and childhood innocence,” an extreme response to a common assumption: that children are fragile and in need of protection, that they are easily influenced and incapable of forming their own judgments. Certain topics, therefore, are best avoided. Even adults who support kids’ learning about these topics in theory sometimes find them too awkward to discuss in practice.

Blume believes, by contrast, that grown-ups who underestimate children’s intelligence and ability to comprehend do so at their own risk—that “childhood innocence” is little more than a pleasing story adults tell themselves, and that loss of innocence doesn’t have to be tragic. In the real world, kids and teenagers throw up and jerk off and fall in love; they have fantasies and fights, and they don’t always buy what their parents have taught them about God.

Sitting across from her in the shade of her balcony, I realized that the impression I’d formed of Blume at the Beinecke Library had been wrong. Much as she had wanted to help the thousands of kids who wrote to her, kids who badly needed her wisdom and her care, Blume was not Holden Caulfield. Instead of a cliff for kids to fall off, she saw a field that stretched continuously from childhood to adulthood, and a worrying yet wonderful lifetime of stumbling through it, no matter one’s age. Young people don’t need a catcher; they need a compassionate coach to cheer them on. “Of course I remember you,” she told the kids in her letters. “I’ll keep thinking of you.” “Do be careful.”

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “Judy Blume Goes All the Way.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Story of Marion Ehrlich

2022-11-14T07:00:00-05:00

Marion Ehrlich turned 5 on January 27, 1933, a few days before Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. If she was too young to fully appreciate the significance of his elevation, she was surely old enough to sense the fear it must have caused in her family—she lived with her parents, Hugo and Gertrud, and an older brother, Gerd, who was 10—and among other German Jews. Did she have any kind of a birthday party that year? Was anyone in the mood to celebrate? Maybe, for a time, ordinary life went on.

[From the December 2022 issue: How Germany remembers the Holocaust]

The Ehrlichs were not practicing Jews, but they could not have ignored the effects of the Nazis’ rise to power for long. By the spring of 1933, a new law limited the number of Jewish students allowed to attend German public schools (Marion eventually attended a Jewish school); in September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Nuremberg race laws, laying the groundwork for the legal persecution of Jews.

In 1940, Marion Ehrlich was a student at the Jewish middle school in Lindenstrasse, Berlin. (Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Harry Kindermann)

In 1937, when Marion was 9, the city of Berlin celebrated its 700th anniversary; Nazi flags hung from the Brandenburg Gate, and parents brought their children to watch the celebratory parade. That year, the Ehrlichs moved to an apartment at Giesebrechtstraße 15, in the Charlottenburg neighborhood. During the Kristallnacht pogroms, in November 1938, Marion’s father, a lawyer, was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was released from the camp in 1940, but died later that year as a result of his imprisonment.

The apartment at Giesebrechtstraße 15 grew more crowded as other Jews who had lost their own home moved in with Marion and her family; its seven rooms eventually housed 14 people. The family was first threatened with deportation in 1941.

After Jewish schools were closed in 1942, Ehrlich and other students performed forced labor in the Weissensee Jewish cemetery in Berlin. (Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Harry Kindermann)

In 1942, when the last remaining Jewish schools were closed, Marion performed forced labor at a Jewish cemetery. She was soon deported, at the age of 14. She died at Auschwitz.

Eight decades later, a record of Marion Ehrlich’s life appears on the cover of The Atlantic’s December 2022 issue. The cover photograph shows a plaque bearing her name, set into the cobblestones outside Giesebrechtstraße 15, in Berlin. Ehrlich’s is just one of tens of thousands of “stumbling stones,” or Stolpersteine, that serve as memorials to people who were victims of the Nazis across Europe. Clint Smith describes the project in his cover story, which asks what the United States can learn from Germany about atonement:

Each 10-by-10-centimeter concrete block is covered in a brass plate, with engravings that memorialize someone who was a victim of the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The name, birthdate, and fate of each person are inscribed, and the stones are typically placed in front of their final residence. Most of the Stolpersteine commemorate the lives of Jewish people, but some are dedicated to Sinti and Roma, disabled people, gay people, and other victims of the Holocaust.

In 1996, the German artist Gunter Demnig, whose father fought for Nazi Germany in the war, began illegally placing these stones into the sidewalk of a neighborhood in Berlin. Initially, Demnig’s installations received little attention. But after a few months, when authorities discovered the small memorials, they deemed them an obstacle to construction work and attempted to get them removed. The workers tasked with pulling them out refused.

In 2000, Demnig’s Stolperstein installations began to be officially sanctioned by local governments. Today, more than 90,000 stumbling stones have been set into the streets and sidewalks of 30 European countries. Together, they make up the largest decentralized memorial in the world.

Like the Stolpersteine, so many of Germany’s most powerful memorial efforts, Smith finds, “emerged—and are still emerging—from ordinary people outside the government who pushed the country to be honest about its past.” It is in part thanks to their determination that Marion’s story can still be told today.

Is She a Fluke? A Token? A Trailblazer?

2022-08-02T07:00:00-04:00

For her new book, The Only Woman, the documentary filmmaker Immy Humes collected 100 group portraits—of artists, astronauts, civil-rights leaders—that share a common trait: Each photo has only one woman. Can you spot her? Depending on your point of view, she might seem like an emblem of progress, evidence of old-fashioned gender inequality, or both. Is she a fluke? A token? A trailblazer?

Lisette Dammas
Jury for the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, New York City, 1951
(Bettmann / Getty)

Mia Westerlund Roosen
Artists celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City, 1982
(Courtesy of Castelli Gallery, New York, and Center for Creative Photography / © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate)

Gloria Richardson
Civil-rights leaders meet with Robert F. Kennedy, Washington, D.C., 1963
(Afro American Newspapers / Gado / Getty)

Katharine Graham
Board of directors of the Associated Press, New York City, 1975
(Shutterstock / AP)

This article appears in the September 2022 print edition with the headline “A Man’s World.”

The Power of Trump’s Magnetism in One Photo

2021-12-10T07:00:00-05:00

Photograph by Peter van Agtmael

At a Donald Trump rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, on January 28, 2020, supporters turned to watch the president approach the podium. “I think it’s more interesting to look at the movement he created than at the man himself,” the photographer Peter van Agtmael says. He chose to capture the moment before the president’s entrance, as members of the audience held their own cameras aloft in anticipation.

This made “the intensity of the adulation for Trump,” stoked by upbeat music and raucous chants, the focus of the image. A year later, van Agtmael photographed the crowd that gathered outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “It felt like a culmination of what I’d seen,” he says.

A detail of the photograph (Peter van Agtmael / Magnum)

This article appears in the January/February 2022 print edition with the headline “The Warm-Up.”

What Stephen Sondheim Knew About Endings

2021-11-27T19:30:00-05:00

Back in 2020, I might’ve imagined the end of the pandemic being something like that gum commercial: everyone together, vaccinated, picking the same time to come safely and communally out of lockdown and get back to the way things were before, so grateful to be alive we practically leapt into one another’s arms as soon as we got the chance. That is not, of course, the way things have gone in 2021. But the closest I’ve felt to that gum-commercial feeling came from being in the audience at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on a recent Monday night, an experience I’ve played and replayed in my head since learning that Stephen Sondheim died suddenly on Friday at 91.

November 15 was the reopening night for Sondheim’s Company, which had abruptly ceased previews in mid-March 2020. This production, directed by Marianne Elliott, had previously run in London, and it makes the formerly male protagonist of the show, Bobby, a female Bobbie instead. My colleague Sophie Gilbert has aptly described Elliott’s reimagining of the musical as “a kind of 21st-century Lewis Carroll fever dream.” Bobbie becomes our latter-day Alice, a disoriented but intrepid navigator trying to make sense of the strangeness of contemporary bourgeois life. In that way, it is sort of a perfect show for right now, when a lot of us feel a bit like observers trying to relocate our place as participants in the world. “It’s much better living it than looking at it,” Bobbie’s friends say. They’re talking about love and marriage, but the line takes on a more expansive meaning during a pandemic. In the audience, it was hard not to feel elated to be living.

[Sophie Gilbert: Marianne Elliott’s gender-flipped Company mines modern ambivalence about marriage]

The nervous excitement in the crowd reminded me of the opening-night energy at a school musical, every member of the audience hoping for the best, just so proud and happy to be there. These were the die-hards, people who had waited throughout the pandemic for this moment. An older man and woman in the row ahead of me compared notes on the many versions of the show they’d seen over the years; the two people next to me kept turning to each other and shrieking. Every seat had a shiny party hat on it, and audience members gamely strapped them on—a nod to the evening’s celebratory mood and to the surprise birthday party at the center of the show.

At first, when some people stood up and started clapping, I was confused; the show wasn’t starting yet. Then a few more joined, and soon most of the theater was standing, facing a row in the middle of the orchestra section. Sondheim himself was taking his seat for the evening. How did he look? everyone I later told about the performance wanted to know. Did he seem well?

From the few, partial glimpses I caught of Sondheim from the mezzanine, he seemed better than well, smiling wide enough you could tell despite the mask. (He doesn’t seem to have been ill; indeed, he reportedly enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner with friends the night before he died.) He was so very alive, in fact, applauding so joyfully after every number, that his presence was utterly reassuring: We had, all of us, made it through. We could be surrounded, once again, by hundreds of strangers and not fear for our lives. It was tempting to think that everything, maybe, would actually be okay, and this genius composer who never really aged would live forever to help guide us through the difficult, confusing times ahead.

I’m sure Sondheim knew better, though. He never believed in simple happy endings, but he knew exactly how to take advantage of his audience’s yearning for them. In Into the Woods, for which he wrote the music and lyrics, the characters end Act I singing the jaunty “Ever After,” blissfully unsuspecting of the complications that await them in the second act.

Sondheim’s work was at its strongest when it lingered in the pain of the dawning realization that no ever after ever lasts long. His music and lyrics looked squarely at life and insisted, gently and eloquently, that of course it was never going to be exactly how we wanted it to be, that messiness and ambiguity were to be expected, and could even be part of the beauty. Voices overlapped, words whizzed by, anxiety and sorrow and joy were written into the very structure of the songs. “I put it in as low a key as possible,” Sondheim once said of the opening of Sweeney Todd. “Always with a slight crescendo, so there’s always a little leaning in, as if something’s about to happen and then doesn’t. The feeling is of lifting the audience a little bit and then dropping, lifting and dropping.” I saw him give this explanation in a 2004 PBS documentary, but the footage is clearly from an unspecified time long before 2004.

[Read: Tick, Tick … Boom is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s best work since ]Hamilton

He said it casually, as though this lifting and dropping of thousands of human beings were the easiest thing in the world to pull off. But to see Sondheim solely as a magician would be to miss the point. “Art isn’t easy” the refrain in Sunday in the Park With George goes. Sondheim loved collaborating, his New York Times obituary says, but he often worked alone, late into the night, when writing or composing. He wasn’t necessarily convinced by Company’s conclusion that being alone is incompatible with being truly alive. Or maybe, unlike so many generations of devoted theatergoers, he just didn’t see that as the show’s true conclusion.

Before Company, Sondheim said in the 2004 documentary, musicals “would always lead to the so-called happy ending. We were saying something ambiguous, which is ‘Actually, there are no endings’; it keeps going on is what, really, Company’s about.”

The night Company reopened, Times Square was eerily empty. Just north of 42nd Street, I heard a man announce to no one in particular, “Now you will all watch me take a COVID test.” He swabbed himself and I kept walking. I spent the subway ride home anxious about all the unmasked people riding the C train with me. So much for the romantic optimism of Sondheim’s city of strangers.

Which, I guess, is the point: It keeps going on. We haven’t reached the pandemic’s ever after yet, and if we do it won’t be in a single glorious moment. Cases are rising, again. A new variant has arrived, about which we know little. Sondheim has departed. But Company’s run goes on too; you can watch it on 45th Street this winter, if you wear your mask. There are no endings.

‘We Didn’t Need Money. We Needed Paper Cranes.’

2021-09-28T06:30:00-04:00

Darby Northington and his mom and younger brother had almost made it to school. They’d gotten a late start that morning; it was the beginning of the year at P.S. 234, an elementary school just north of the World Trade Center, where Darby was in third grade, and everyone was still getting into a new routine. They were about to cross Chambers Street when a plane flew directly overhead.

When Darby told me this story, on Zoom in late August, he looked toward the ceiling and held both his arms up in parallel, as though he were catching a basketball, to indicate the plane’s path. He remembered thinking, Whoa, this is the closest I’ve ever seen one of these. The plane was low and loud. When it hit the North Tower, everyone stood and stared. Darby said something to his mom about the accident they’d just witnessed. “She was like, ‘It’s not an accident,’” he recalled.

Darby is an investment banker now, with a reddish beard and a kind smile; he apologetically interrupted himself at one point to tell someone off camera that he’d already fed the cats their breakfast. I don’t think we’d met before, but it’s possible that our paths had crossed at some point. Though I wasn’t a student at P.S. 234, I was also a third grader in downtown Manhattan on 9/11, and some of Darby’s former classmates are acquaintances and friends with whom I’m still in touch. Recently, I talked with nine of them, and with their teacher, Kara Pranikoff, about that strange third-grade year and the two decades that have passed since.

The classmates already knew one another well in 2001; Pranikoff had been their second-grade teacher too, her first year at the school. “They come into third grade way more independent than second graders,” Pranikoff told me. “They’re really able to put things together. They can read fluently enough and they can write fluently enough and they can speak fluently enough.” Things start to gel at that age. You know your way around the neighborhood. In New York City, maybe you can walk to the corner alone, even if you need to wait for an adult to cross the street. It was already a heady developmental moment for them—for us—when the towers fell.

Now we are adults. At 28, we are just old enough to remember what things were like before the attacks, and young enough to have come of age in a thoroughly post-9/11 country. Our memories of a time without the TSA or the War on Terror are hazy and easy to dismiss, even to ourselves, the way all childhood memories are. On some level, this is true for anyone born in the United States in the early 1990s. But the rupture—the understanding that the events of a single, scary day became foundational to the political and social reality of the entire world—is especially acute for the kids from P.S. 234. For them, it was palpable; it got on their hair and clothes and in their lungs.

[Read: America's deliberate empathy in teaching 9/11]

That day, and in the weeks and months that followed, they became symbols for a nation reeling from the shock of terrorism. What better metaphor for that collective trauma than a group of schoolchildren jolted out of their normal lives by a surprise attack? Newspapers and magazines published articles about P.S. 234. The kids were frightened, these stories reported, but they still wanted to color and play; childlike wonder was, perhaps, recoverable.

The kids from P.S. 234 would be the first to tell you that others had it much worse. No one I spoke with lost an immediate family member on 9/11, though some of them knew adults who were killed. None of them was permanently displaced, though many lived in the so-called frozen zone near Ground Zero and had to leave their home temporarily. These 8-year-olds were among the thousands of students displaced from downtown schools. They didn’t return to P.S. 234 until February 2002.

But when Darby and I spoke, he told me that he sees his community’s 9/11 story as one of pulling together and his family’s story as one of luck. After the first plane hit, his mom wondered aloud if she should go help out at the scene of the explosion. Darby begged her not to go, to stay with him and his brother. “If she had,” he said, “she might not be with us today.”

For Darby, the primary lesson—a useful one, he thinks—was that bad things happen in the world. As he got older, “a lot of stuff just kind of fell under a rubric of, like, Yeah, that’s expected.” He didn’t suffer from too much anxiety, or PTSD. Better to expect the terrible than be caught off guard.

“You could say, certainly, that that’s a loss of innocence,” Darby reflected. But he can only faintly remember what it was like to have a sense of innocence in the first place.

2001

A week or so after the attacks, the kids started school again at P.S. 41, a couple of miles north. Space was tight, with up to three classes sharing a room. Pranikoff talked with the students about what had happened, asking them to reflect on questions like ‘What did you do to stay safe?’ “Because we were so responsible and because were so calm, and listen to grownups advice not one kid got hurt,” one student wrote. They were encouraged to write letters to whomever they wanted—the mayor, firefighters, relatives. “Dear Bush,” a student wrote in October, “Why Don’t bome them very good? how about starting wiht small Bomes Then the bome’s get Biger, biger and Biger!!” That month, the kids moved out of P.S. 41 and into a Catholic school that had closed.

Darby thought that the fresh starts were exciting, like going back to school after summer vacation—you’re seeing your friends again, and have a lot to catch up on. Others had a harder time adjusting to the new environments.

Jesse Benedetti internalized the message that there was someone out there who wanted him and his peers dead, for no reason at all—or at least no good reason. He still lives downtown and works in film production, and his gravelly voice has a world-weariness to it. September 11 “made life feel more real,” he told me. “I felt very vulnerable.”

[Amy Zegart: None of my students remember 9/11]

Sean Wils lived on Duane Street, just north of P.S. 234. His mom picked him up at school after the first plane hit, shortly before 9 o’clock; they saw the second plane hit the South Tower on their way home. At their apartment, he remembers watching the ceiling lamp sway, and his mom holding him tight. “When the shaking stopped,” he told me, “she looked out the window and she just said, ‘The building’s gone.’”

Weeks later, back at school, Sean remained on high alert. “For months afterward, every single day, I thought I could die that day,” he said. He asked his parents if they could move out of the city, but they never considered leaving. His mom was the chair of the local community board, and, the week after 9/11, she started taking Sean with her to some of the meetings about how to rebuild the neighborhood. Eventually the daily fear went away.

At one point, when the kids were still at P.S. 41, Laura Bush visited. When students and teachers saw all the police and security vehicles, their first thought was that something terrible had happened, again. The first lady was given letters from students, and she read some aloud, including Sean’s, which dryly thanked George W. Bush for his protection and ended with an all-caps “GOD BLESS AMERICA.” In Sean’s view, the president had not protected them at all—his letter was pure sarcasm. Somehow, that got past whoever was in charge of selection.

The first lady would not be the only special visitor. Showing support to P.S. 234 gave people a way to feel like they were doing something, anything, to help, when so little could be done. The perks were nice, if a little random. Jackie Chan made an appearance and let people touch his biceps. Peter Yarrow came to sing “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Schools across the country offered to start pen-pal programs (P.S. 234 politely declined; classes were already behind on the curriculum as it was). Kids in Hiroshima folded and sent 10,000 paper cranes.

“It was hard sometimes to grasp that we were really the focus of the situation,” Sonia Marshall recalls. She lives in Los Angeles now, and when we spoke, she was visiting her mom in New York for the first time since before the pandemic started. People sent stuffed animals and friendship bracelets and plants and cards and books. It became a running joke among the teachers: Another round of teddy bears!

“Some of it was a bit extravagant,” Nadia Galpern, another classmate, says. P.S. 234 was well funded, with active and well-connected parents. Still, it felt good to know that people were thinking about them. “We didn’t need money,” Harrison Spelman told me. “We needed paper cranes.”

Kara Pranikoff, the kids' teacher, saved the drawings they made after 9/11, including this one by Nadia Galpern. (Nadia Galpern / Courtesy of Kara Pranikoff)

Parents, worried about exposure to unhealthy levels of dust and asbestos, and about the mental health of their children, debated how soon the school could safely return to its building downtown. But most of the kids lived in the neighborhood anyway. They smelled the lingering stench and saw soldiers patrolling the street corners. In December, Pranikoff had them respond to the prompt “Do you want to return to P.S. 234?” Nadia wrote:

I want to go back to P.S. 234 because I live one block from the school so I think we should go back because I live there and I see it every day and it wasn’t as bad as the first time. I miss P.S. 234 so I want to go back.

If they went back, Sean wrote at the time, they could “do our normal things, get back to our routines and live our way in our home.” (He said he remembers privately being more ambivalent about the prospect of going back.)

A couple of months later, they did return. “After many months, the kids at P.S. 234 are finally back home,” LeVar Burton told viewers in an episode of Reading Rainbow that featured some of Pranikoff’s students. The episode includes a music video in which students sing about their gratitude for the support they’ve received and how happy they are to be back at their own school. “I think the idea was to show the world that we were doing okay,” Sonia said.

2021

Harrison Spelman left P.S. 234 a few years after 9/11 and came to my school; he was in my fifth-grade class. I called him in late August, the first time we’d spoken since middle school. He’s a sommelier now; he lives in Bushwick, he said, but not the cool part.

He wanted to tell me about the photos first, “just so you know where I’m at.” On his bedroom wall, he keeps two: one taken from the South Tower in the ’70s, looking north at night, and another taken from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, looking toward the towers. Seeing them every day, he said, “makes it real to me—the life before, which obviously is a very small part of my life now.” He likened the feeling to the concept of terroir, in wine parlance: “These images for me are a sense of time and place.” In the photos on Harrison’s walls, the towers aren’t the symbols they became, fraught with politics and patriotism. They are just buildings, existing alongside other buildings, full of people, full of life.

The day itself, and what he saw—people jumping out of those buildings, burning papers falling from the sky—is still hard to think about. A few years ago, he found a copy of a Time magazine his mom had saved that was full of 9/11 photographs. I’m ready for this, he thought. He surprised himself by crying as he slowly turned the pages.

[Read: In Manhattan, children still battle 9/11-related illnesses]

Kate Nadel is now a graduate student in information sciences. (She is also dating my cousin.) After 9/11, her mom framed a photo Kate had taken for a second-grade class project: the towers, as seen from their roof. Sometime that fall, she had Kate stand on the roof again, in the same spot, and hold the framed photo. This time, the sky behind her was empty. In the newer photo, she’s wearing a black I ♥ NY T-shirt and a bright-green bandana. She’s smiling, a kid humoring her mom—she thought the whole thing was kind of silly. Today she sees it as a record of grief, several times over: grief for the old landscape of the neighborhood, where the towers were simply a fact, taken for granted—and, more recently, for the ease of that familiar spot on the roof, the feeling of having a home base in Tribeca. (When Kate left for college, her parents sold the apartment and moved out of the city.) The photo of the photo makes those layers of loss less abstract. “This is what we have,” Kate says of the photo, an accounting of “lost things and places.”

When he was 19, Harrison spent a few months working in New Orleans. He noticed a difference between people who had arrived in the city after Hurricane Katrina and people who had lived there during the storm. There was a seriousness about the people in the latter group. “You could just tell,” he said. “That kind of educated me. It showed me, like, they’re survivors. It helped me to understand who I was.” He considers himself extremely fortunate, as survivors go—but he’s seen the ads on the subway advertising benefits available to 9/11 first responders, and the TV commercials about mesothelioma. I asked him if he worries about that stuff at all. “Am I afraid? Yes, I’m afraid, but I’m afraid of a lot of things. And until those things manifest, I can handle a little fear.”

I didn’t get the sense from anyone I spoke with that fear is keeping them up at night. But even those who say they’re totally fine admit that a few things still nag at them from time to time. Sean Wils lives in San Francisco now, and works for a nonprofit that develops affordable permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness. “I’m not someone who lets the lows get me too low and not someone who lets the highs in life get me too high,” he told me when we first spoke, in August. “I think a lot of that is grounded in 9/11 … I feel very comfortable in moments of crisis.” When we spoke again in mid-September, he had just returned to San Francisco after visiting his family in New York, where he took a walk on September 11 retracing his steps from P.S. 234 to his parents’ apartment. What he’d said about being comfortable in moments of crisis was true, he reiterated, but the experience of sweating profusely on the flight back had reminded him that he was still an anxious plane rider. (This feeling is common among the P.S. 234 alums, though some people I spoke with said they didn’t fear planes or flying at all.)

Sean Wils's drawing of the towers. He saw the second plane hit after his mom picked him up from school. (Sean Wils / Courtesy of Kara Pranikoff)

So much is unknowable. Did the asthma Nadia developed at age 12 have anything to do with 9/11? “People were like, ‘You can’t go back [to P.S. 234].’ But I was living there,” she told me. “I had to live somewhere.” Nadia lives in Astoria now and is a hospice social worker. She still participates in the official 9/11 health surveys. “I think it’s affected my life in ways I don’t know,” she said.

It’s impossible to say, in a lot of cases, if 9/11 is why someone got cancer, or a factor in someone else’s constant low-grade anxiety. As a teenager, a student from Pranikoff’s class took his own life. What effect, if any, did 9/11 have on him?

Several of the people I talked with told me that as they’ve gotten older, they’ve come to see their unusual proximity to history as something more than a painful, if formative, set of personal memories. Darby is normally a private person, he said, but he replied to me when I reached out, because he feels a sense of obligation to talk about 9/11 on the record. “You know how they talk about the last World War II vets who are alive?” he asked. “You don’t have to wait until you’re, like, 90-something to start feeling urgent about” documenting these stories. This is why Darby, like Nadia, still participates in the health studies. “I’d like to think that we should try to be constructive about these things,” he said.

Kara Pranikoff believed in the power of preserving her class’s experience too. For years, though, she had a hard time talking about 9/11. In the spring of 2002, she had her first baby. Before she went on leave, she collected some documents from the school year—students’ work about 9/11, news clips, the letters she’d written to parents—and stowed them away. Until I got in touch with her this summer, she had not revisited the files. But the papers were there, sitting in a glossy paper shopping bag, waiting. “I knew it was important,” she said. She just wasn’t ready to deal with it yet.

When we first spoke, in July, Pranikoff had just finished her final year of teaching at P.S. 234. Once again, she had been tasked with helping 8-year-olds carry on with the business of schooling as the world fell apart around them. In mid-September, shortly after the anniversary of 9/11, I asked her how she thought those kids would remember, 20 years from now, being in school in 2020 and 2021. Pranikoff considered my question and, in her kind, teacherly way, declined to make any firm predictions. The significance of this past year and a half, she said, “depends on what happens with the world.”

Which, who knows, really? Maybe Pranikoff’s final cohort of students at P.S. 234 will look back in two decades and think about what it was like to listen to their parents worry about the very air they were breathing at school, to have things that used to feel safe and normal suddenly become dangerous or even life-threatening. They’ll remember hearing about people who were very sick or who died from something they had never heard of just a couple of years earlier. Maybe, once they are adults themselves, they will think about how scared the adults must have been, much as the students from Pranikoff’s 9/11 cohort do now when they think back to 2001. Maybe they won’t think about it at all. For kids, the main thing to do is to keep going to school and playing with your friends and practicing your times tables. To carry on. Twenty years is a long time.

Pranikoff was heading out soon, for a drink at the restaurant where Harrison works. “How weird is that?” she asked, laughing. “I’ve known him since he was 7 or 8, and tonight he’s going to pour me a glass of wine.”

What New York Looked Like After 9/11

2021-08-09T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Eugene Richards

This article was published online on August 9, 2021.

Eugene Richards lives in Brooklyn, but was out of the country on September 11, 2001. When he returned to New York City four days later, he has written, he “metamorphosed into a bruise.” He stayed home, convinced that no one needed another photographer surveying the wreckage. But Richards’s wife and collaborator, Janine Altongy, insisted that they go see it. “You can’t avoid history, not when you’re so close to it,” he remembers her saying. Over the course of several months, Richards and Altongy traversed the city, recording scenes of loss from the long aftermath of the attacks. Their 2002 book, Stepping Through the Ashes, is a collection of Richards’s photographs and Altongy’s interviews with survivors, bereaved family members, first responders, and others.

These days, Richards and Altongy almost never go back to Ground Zero. The memorial pools that now mark where the two towers stood, Richards says, are “so far, far away from the experience” of walking the smoke-filled streets that fall. If it were up to him, the site would be simpler, less polished—perhaps just the portions of the buildings’ facades that remained after the attacks. Two decades on, his photos are a stark reminder of a time when those ruins were all that was visible, a time that already feels long past.

A bird flies by a building a block away from the World Trade Center. On September 25, the area was still shrouded in thick yellow air.

Left: A snow globe covered in dust and debris, for sale near the site of the World Trade Center on September 24. Right: The fires at Ground Zero burned for months after the attacks.

Outside the memorial service for the Brooklyn firefighter David Fontana, in October. His body had not yet been found, so mourners carried an empty casket into the church. “I chose to have a coffin because I knew that my son would be able to understand it a little more,” Fontana’s wife, Marian, told Altongy. Later, Fontana’s remains were found and the family held a second funeral.

Left: Lieutenant William Ryan, a firefighter from Staten Island, holds his granddaughter. He recalled “how desperately he had wanted to believe there would be people found alive.” Right: A group from Massachusetts prays on the east side of Broadway—as close as the public could get to the site of the attacks in late September.

Norma Margiotta, the widow of Lieutenant Charles Margiotta, a firefighter from Ladder Company 85, wears mementos of her husband.

Left: Missing-person posters, like these at the VA Medical Center in Manhattan, covered the city. Right: Outside the memorial service for Leon Smith Jr., a firefighter from Ladder Company 118, in Brooklyn.

Eventually the missing-person posters came down. “The cleanup went on forever, but the hope for any kind of human restitution was gone,” Richards says.

Lower Manhattan, reflected in a window of the Staten Island Ferry in January 2002. “Everybody was trying to come to terms with the empty skyline,” Richards says.

This article appears in the September 2021 print edition with the headline “Before the Smoke Cleared.”

‘A Wishing So Strong That There Are Moments She Nearly Believes It’

2021-05-16T08:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: Read Morgan Thomas’s new short story, “Bump.”

“Bump” is a new short story by Morgan Thomas. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Thomas and Amy Weiss-Meyer, a deputy managing editor at the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Amy Weiss-Meyer: “Bump” begins with a confrontation of sorts, addressed “to those who accuse me of immoderate desire.” The line immediately raises a tantalizing question: Should we be accusing this narrator of immoderate desire? And if so, desire for what? Even before readers know Louie’s name or her predicament, we see her in relation to the perceptions of others, who may or may not be judging her. What’s the function of this preemptive self-defense?

Morgan Thomas: In my reading, Louie has been accused of immoderate desire, and the story is her response. In that sense, I don’t see her self-defense as preemptive. We see, near the end of the story, the first glimpses of that accusation, the events that likely led to it. In those last scenes, the people on whom Louie relies for emotional support and security fail to understand Louie’s desire to be pregnant and mock the pregnancy bump she’s bought.

The beginning of this story also makes me feel hopeful. Louie directly addresses and rebukes those who would accuse her. She doesn’t succumb to their judgment of her desires. She isn’t afraid to desire things that others might deem inappropriate or impossible. Louie has several things—a lucrative job, a relatively stable long-term relationship, frank conversations with her grandmother—that I, as a genderqueer and queer person, have only recently dared to dream for myself. The first line opens the door for the story to expand visions of queer and trans desire.

Weiss-Meyer: Louie is a trans woman who has accepted that she will never be pregnant. Still, when a co-worker reveals that she thinks Louie is expecting, Louie goes along with the misconception, ordering a pregnancy bump online. She claims that her attachment to the bump is an attachment to the idea of pregnancy, yet she’s clearly also grappling with her role as a caregiver—for her grandmother, for Len’s baby, for Len himself. How much is she deceiving herself about her own desire?

Thomas: Louie desires a child. I can’t say whether she desires a child because she wants to raise a child or because pregnancy and motherhood are intimately tied to her conceptions of family, success, and womanhood. I think distinguishing the two would be difficult for her, as it is for many people, as it is for me. I don’t see this as self-deception, but as the eternal difficulty of distinguishing personal desire from collective expectations of what we should want.

Does Louie understand that the bump is not a child and will not result in a child? I think she does. I also think she wishes the opposite were true, that the bump could result in a child, a wishing so strong that there are moments she nearly believes it. I don’t see this wishing as self-deception either. To me, Louie’s experience of pregnancy—as “an end in itself, the enactment of a ritual”—is real, a realness founded on a combination of external acknowledgment and a deeply internal sense of commitment and connection to the bump.

Weiss-Meyer: Did you start writing with the character of Louie, or did the idea for the story start with the bump?

Thomas: The story began as a conversation with two friends about the ties of pregnancy and childbirth to conceptions of womanhood. Both friends—one a cis woman who doesn’t want kids, the other a trans woman who does—expressed grief related to the entangling of womanhood with motherhood. I wrote “Bump” to further explore that shared grief.

Weiss-Meyer: Louie strives to “polish” herself, and admires others who do the same. Her boyfriend, Len, for instance, has gotten rid of his southern accent, “like it was nothing, doing away with a whole part of yourself.” Is polish always about artifice, or can it be an expression of authenticity?

Thomas: Artifice suggests falseness, and I don’t see polish, as it manifests in the story, relating to falseness. The story uses the notion of “polishing” to encompass a wide range of behaviors. Some of those, like learning to code, offer financial security and social status. Some, like doing away with a southern accent, are about obscuring an aspect of identity. Some, like using makeup and nail polish, are about presenting in the world as femme.

For Louie, polish is sometimes related to questions of gender, of wanting to be perceived in a certain way. This isn’t artifice. Everyone performs gender.

The Ilocano/Visaya/Xicano artist and scholar Rafael/a Luna-Pizano has asked whether trans is something we do or something we are. I think the only possible answer is both, but I’m interested in the spaces where that bothness breaks down, moments when I can be genderqueer without doing anything to enact genderqueerness, without thinking about how I’m perceived.

For me, these are usually moments of solitude. Some of my favorite moments of “Bump” are when Louie is alone with the bump, when we see the bump as something more than polish, as part of Louie’s sense of herself.

Weiss-Meyer: The bump makes Louie visible to her co-workers in new and exciting—and risky—ways. Is the risk part of her attraction to the gambit?

Thomas: I don’t see Louie deliberately seeking risk. In spite of her privileges, Louie experiences the risks that trans people, especially trans women, face in this country—hatred, harassment, violence. But there are also internal sources of risk. A deeply felt desire, ignored too long, can sublimate into an uglier thing—into self-hatred, isolation, despair. I see the bump as Louie’s attempt to shift away from that internal risk, toward fulfillment and contentment.

Weiss-Meyer: The bump comes to feel like a part of Louie’s body. She describes it as vulnerable, in need of protection. Do you consider the bump its own character in the story?

Thomas: I don’t consider the bump a character, but I do see the bump as usefully troubling two conceptions about who we are and how we relate to each other.

First, I think of Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber’s article “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” which argues that biological individuality doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Our bodies are porous and composite, forever incorporating new elements—pacemakers, antibodies, IUDs—and changing shape. So when Louie says the bump is an extension of her body, I believe her. Why couldn’t it be?

Second, I hope “Bump” expands our sense of caretaking, of that which is worthy of care. I’ve become more and more aware of the rules determining who and what can be loved, in what ways, and how much—hierarchies of partner, family, friend. Questioning those hierarchies and insisting on the validity of a wide variety of expressions of love and care is for me part of the work of queerness.

So I wouldn’t say that the bump is a character. Rather, it offers access to Louie’s character by substantiating Louie’s not-at-all-immoderate desire.

The Surreality of Documenting 2020

2021-04-23T08:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Peter van Agtmael

Image above: A scene from inside a funeral home in Queens, New York

In the early months of 2020, the photographer Peter van Agtmael covered a gun-rights rally in Richmond, Virginia, and a Trump rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. Van Agtmael had been working as a photojournalist for 16 years, documenting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and life across the United States. By mid-March, the news was closer to home: He spent the beginning of lockdown recording the world from the window of his Brooklyn apartment.

Left: Early spring 2020 in McCarren Park, in Brooklyn. Right: The photographer’s chapped hand.

“I am still struggling to figure out exactly how to photograph this thing,” van Agtmael wrote in a diary entry on March 17, 2020, the first time he ventured into pandemic-stricken Manhattan. “What will resonate in a year or a decade? It’s just a bunch of pictures of people with masks.”

A year later, van Agtmael published 2020, a collection of photographs and diary entries from a singular span of American life. Over the course of 13 months (the book ends with Joe Biden’s inauguration), van Agtmael went to more Trump rallies; immersed himself in protests in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd; and, in Washington, D.C., captured both the revelry that followed Biden’s win and the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

But some of the most affecting shots in the book are quieter, more solitary—eschewing big, newsmaking events for private moments of fear, grief, disorientation, and sometimes even joy. We see van Agtmael’s hand, raw from the constant washing of early spring, and a masked woman surrounded by tree buds that, van Agtmael points out, evoke the coronavirus’s protein spikes. A girl does a backbend in a park while, nearby, a man in a gas mask reads a book; a closed playground, empty despite the seemingly lovely weather, radiates an eerie stillness. “A touch of surrealism, a touch of abstraction, was the best way I could find to reckon with the trauma of the events,” van Agtmael told me.

Domino Park, in Brooklyn, May 2020

A nearly empty hotel in Milwaukee

In May, van Agtmael began working on an assignment at a funeral home in Queens that was then handling five times its usual volume of bodies. He recorded how he watched “the stringy, sticky blood clots getting pumped out of a deceased COVID victim.” In addition to his photographs from the funeral home, the book includes a haunting family portrait that van Agtmael took as he videochatted with his mother and sister while editing photos from the assignment—life and death, side by side.

Bodies awaiting embalming at a funeral home in Queens

Left: A man stops in the middle of the sidewalk, sets down his bottle of hand sanitizer, and does a few one-armed push-ups before moving on. Right: Van Agtmael videochatting with his mother and sister while he edits photos from the funeral home (the face of the deceased has been obscured to protect their privacy).

He is still, he said, not quite sure how we’ll look back on our pandemic year, what narratives we’ll form. “It doesn’t really feel like the past yet,” van Agtmael said. “Maybe in 20 years I’ll see it completely differently.”

A closed playground in Maryland

What Novelists Can Learn From Playwrights

2021-01-21T09:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Read Brontez Purnell’s new short story, “Early Retirement.”

“Early Retirement” is taken from Brontez Purnell’s forthcoming novel-in-stories, 100 Boyfriends (available on February 2). To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Purnell and Amy Weiss-Meyer, a deputy managing editor of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Amy Weiss-Meyer: In the first few lines of the story, the narrator, Antonio, describes his new habit of applying Preparation H to the bags beneath his eyes. It’s a darkly funny introduction to a character who is both vain and shiftless, self-conscious but unapologetically himself. What, to you, are the primary uses of humor in storytelling?

Brontez Purnell: Sometimes I feel like I write fiction from a strong theater background—fiction is drama, and the story has to move. In my head humor and drama are such close siblings. Fraternal twins, maybe? One is always coming out of the other. Also, the character in the story, Antonio, is experiencing a deep depression, and there are ways (sometimes) when in those bouts we become these funny characters. Like, people who show up to CVS in complete pajamas and slippers—midday, no less. Are these people deeply depressed? Oh, hell yeah. Are they kind of funny to watch? Yes. I just like Antonio as a character because you can tell he likes, or at the very least is certainly not afraid of, who he’s become.

I feel like I use humor as a tool the same way my characters are using it: as a flotation device, a defense mechanism, a point at which to rest or energize. What can’t humor do, really? I like taking risks in my writing, and using humor is kind of based in risk—it can sometimes be dismissed as lacking intellectual rigor, and worse still be seen as lowbrow. I think all good theater and literature should run the zodiac of feelings: Some of it should be sad, some of it profound; some of it should be boring and some of it should jump completely off the cliff. Whatever vehicle I’m using, I’m always trying to arrive at a certain sense of balance.

Weiss-Meyer: Some of the funniest asides in your writing are also the most cutting: on the gentrification of San Francisco, for instance, or white neoliberals. Do you see your fiction as a form of social commentary?

Purnell: I’m really, really Black and really, really gay so by design anything I write becomes “social commentary.” It’s sooooooooo exhausting. I have always wanted to have Walter Cronkite’s very specific white-man privilege; they literally called him “the most trusted man in America.” Like, whatever came out of his mouth was the honest-so-help-me-God truth. I would really hope that’s where my social commentary would vibrate someday, at the same pitch as that. That said, I would also like to quote a writer friend of mine and say, “I’ve done too much petty hustling to be wildly credible”—again, truth. As for my relentless attack on whiteness, I can assure any offended white neoliberals that I have only about as much contempt for white neoliberal fundamentalism as it has for me.

Weiss-Meyer: Antonio is a struggling actor who’s nearly ready to quit the field. He wants applause, but has grown uncomfortable with direct attention. Is that dilemma primarily a professional one, or is it playing out in his personal life too?

Purnell: Strictly professional. All plot and drama aside, he’s really just like any person who has come to hate his job. This story is about an actor, but could have easily been about a teacher, a pilot, a professional skateboarder, a tech engineer. He’s a marijuana grower by trade, which is seasonal work. He’s reexamining the seasons in his life, and deciding he has to make a change if he wants to grow and be happy.

Weiss-Meyer: The phrase early retirement implies a choice to voluntarily walk away from one’s profession. In Antonio’s case, the final blow to his career comes when he gets drunk and blacks out during a performance—his “onstage retirement party.” Is there a sense of joy, or liberation, to be found in the ruins of a career?

Purnell: I think sometimes that we as people can behave like shook-ass octopuses in times of distress—like, totally gnaw our own arm off to get out of a situation. That said, though his exit was violent and bloody, I think Antonio mostly feels a liberation or a weight let off his shoulders.

Weiss-Meyer: Throughout the story, Antonio references the feeling of being underwater, which, depending on his mood, can be either comforting or disconcerting. He also spends time working near a lake poisoned with mercury, in a place where he needs to make special trips to the store to procure drinking water. What is the function of water as a metaphor in the story?

Purnell: It works in a lot of ways. When he’s listening to the highway at night and intuiting it as hearing the ocean, he’s conjuring a kind of peace for himself. But then there’s this other battle with water as bell jar, making everything dense and murky, and there’s a hard distortion on how to move ahead, or where to file memories. He’s intensely tethered to both metaphors.

Weiss-Meyer: The task of “killing all the boys” (eliminating male plants from the marijuana crop he tends) suits Antonio, as does working alone. Is the alienation temporary, or does it signal a larger shift toward solitude? Is he done seeking applause?

Purnell: I think certainly for the time being he’s done, but again, this story had a strong sense of “seasons” to it. He’s done for this season of his life, but I can’t say what that character would do in the long run. He has a certain combustible quality, right?

Caleb Crain on Math, Solitude, and the Nature of Time

2020-09-09T09:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: Read Caleb Crain’s new short story, “Trajectory.”

“Trajectory” is a new story by Caleb Crain. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Crain and Amy Weiss-Meyer, a deputy managing editor at the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Amy Weiss-Meyer: The story’s title, “Trajectory,” is a clever nod to flight and to the course of a life. Did you come up with the title before or after you wrote the story?

Caleb Crain: After. Math has been popping up in stories that I’ve written lately, maybe because I’m drawing on ideas and feelings that date from childhood, when math was important to me, and to who I thought I was going to be (it didn’t turn out that way). I think the title was a way of adding a connection to some of those mathematical elements, which include ideas about undecidable truths and hypothetical worlds.

Weiss-Meyer: Samuel, the protagonist of “Trajectory,” seems, like other protagonists you’ve written, to self-identify as standing apart from others. What draws you to writing about characters who are markedly different from the people around them?

Crain: To help a child express his feelings about his adoptive parents, with whom he was struggling, a psychologist once stood the parents in the family’s driveway, drew a circle around them in chalk, and asked the child to stand where he wanted to live: inside the circle if he wanted to belong to the family, outside if he didn’t. The child stood exactly on the chalk line itself—and screamed bloody murder if asked to take a step inside or outside. Oh, that’s me, I said to myself when I read the case history. (Of course, I say that about pretty much every case history I read.)

Weiss-Meyer: Where did you get the idea for a character who has memories of flying?

Crain: From a recurring dream. One of the odd things about being middle-aged is that now, when I redream a recurring dream, I seem to be aware that I have a history with it. I feel aware, even while inside the dream, that my experience of it has changed over the years, and so have the feelings and concerns that I have while dreaming it.

When I was very young, many of the stories I wrote were drawn from dreams and were full of fantasy elements, which I gave up after I came out of the closet. Maybe free-flying (as it were) imagination seemed too much like hiding, whereas my new task was to do justice to reality. For a long time, I was a pretty strict realist, but lately I seem to be relenting.

Weiss-Meyer: The turning points in “Trajectory” arrive when Samuel comes into contact with others. When he meets the god, for instance, he becomes ambitious and eager to impress. But we learn little about the other characters beyond the effect they have on Samuel. What do you see as the function of these secondary characters in the story, and more generally of secondary characters in your work?

Crain: There’s a lot of romance in the idea of oneself as a loner, and someone like Samuel is very susceptible to it. But even a loner experiences his self to a large extent as something that happens to him through other people. He can only discover some of its contours in the company of other people.

Weiss-Meyer: In a single sentence, a daring leap in time occurs and we find ourselves with an older Samuel. Had you always imagined this temporal transition happening seamlessly in the story?

Crain: In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark folds the future death of one of her characters into the novel’s present, and in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” Mavis Gallant collapses years and years of regret into a parenthetical. The uncanny thing is how familiar this kind of collapse starts to become, once one is old enough to be aware of oneself as existing along a particular span of years, and only along that span. A friend from childhood dies, and while remembering him, and trying to mourn him, at a certain point you suddenly feel like you can see and hear yourself and him at 12 years old again, not knowing what’s going to happen over the next 40 years.

Weiss-Meyer: Samuel considers death as he “falls away” in the sky and again when he’s being tossed in a turbulent ocean. Does fear possess a unique ability to reveal truths about human experience that other emotions don’t?

Crain: It’s a great motivator! On the other hand, as punishments go, death may be a bit too final to be considered instructive.

The Bush-Gore Recount Is an Omen for 2020

2020-08-17T11:16:00-04:00

Twenty years ago this fall, the United States was plunged into 36 days of turmoil as lawyers, judges, political operatives, and election workers grappled with the uncertain result of the presidential contest in Florida. Whoever won the state would win the presidency. In the end, after start-and-stop recounts and the intervention of courts at every level, Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, was declared the victor, edging out Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat.

The story of the 2000 Florida recount offers a reminder of just how chaotic the electoral process can become—and of how disarray in a single state can undermine faith in the democratic process nationwide. The U.S. Constitution gives individual states the responsibility for conducting elections. Rules and procedures vary widely. Today, at a time far more polarized than two decades ago, not just one but every state faces potential challenges to the integrity of its electoral process. In many states, the balloting technology is antiquated. And in many states, registering to vote has deliberately been made harder, especially for the poor and people of color. A continuing shift toward widespread voting by mail—accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—seems likely to provoke lawsuits based on discredited claims that the practice spurs voting fraud.

A cause for truly legitimate concern is something else entirely: whether the U.S. Postal Service can handle the expected volume and return marked ballots to election officials in time for them to be counted in November’s national elections. On August 13, in an interview on Fox News, President Donald Trump declared his opposition to providing the financially troubled USPS with additional funding, giving as an explicit reason a desire to hamper mail-in voting, which he had previously said “doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” The USPS has already announced plans for cutbacks in service across the board. On August 14, The Washington Post reported that the Postal Service had informed 46 states and the District of Columbia that it could not guarantee that mailed-in ballots could be delivered in time to be counted.

[Read: The postal service can handle the election—if it’s allowed to]

The account here, drawn from interviews with more than 40 people with firsthand experience of the Florida-recount saga, is both a history and a warning.

I. Election Night

As votes were counted on the night of November 7, 2000, Bush watched the returns at the governor’s mansion, in Austin. Gore watched the returns at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel, in Nashville. The weather in both cities was chilly and wet. By the end of the night, Gore held a lead over Bush in the national popular vote, which he would never lose, but the contest in the Electoral College was tight, and it all came down to Florida. The election, both campaigns understood, was far from over.

Leading up to the election, polls had indicated that the race between Bush and Gore would be close, with an especially slim margin in several key states. Potentially affecting the outcome were two other candidates: Ralph Nader, of the left-wing Green Party, and Pat Buchanan, of the right-wing Reform Party.

On Election Day, a number of counties in Florida reported problems. A confusing ballot—the so-called butterfly ballot—in Palm Beach County prompted thousands of voters to cast their ballot unwittingly for Buchanan. Ballots in Duval County also caused confusion; some 22,000 votes there were disqualified because voters chose more than one candidate. The punch-card apparatus used elsewhere in the state sometimes failed to punch out a hole completely, meaning that the machine would not record a ballot choice.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush campaign general counsel): On the Monday before the election, we had the luxury of being able to go out for lunch. Campaign operatives stop asking lawyers questions the closer it gets to Election Day—they know what the law is by that point. We were in our favorite dive Mexican restaurant in Austin. Somebody asked about recounts, and I said, “I’ve been doing a lot of recounts over the past 16 years, and there is no way we will ever have a presidential recount. The last one was in 1876. It will not happen again.”

[Norm Ornstein: The November election is going to be a mess]

Ron Klain (Gore recount committee general counsel): I got a call on Election Day from a lawyer named Lester Hyman, probably at 8 a.m., Nashville time. His daughter, Liz, had called him to say that people were coming out of the polling places in Palm Beach, and they were confused about who they had voted for. They thought they might have voted for Pat Buchanan by accident. I found [Gore adviser] Michael Whouley, reported this to him, and then frankly didn’t really think much about it. It was just one polling place in Palm Beach.

Nick Baldick (Gore operative in Florida): It was, like, 11 a.m. when we got our first call about the butterfly ballot. We knew it was creating huge anxiety and fear, and that we would lose some votes, and we knew that the election was going to be close.

Karl Koch (Gore aide): My phone was blowing up with calls, people saying, “Oh my God, something awful is happening in Palm Beach.” We tried to start communicating messages—“Make sure you’re paying attention to your ballot.” But at that point, we’re way past the halfway point of Election Day.

Just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN projected that Gore would win Florida, putting him on track to gain the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. The projection was premature. Polls were still open in western Florida, where the Bush vote was likely to be strong, and there were issues with the exit-poll and vote-tally information provided by the consortium Voter News Service, on which all of the networks relied.

Clay Roberts (director of the Florida Division of Elections): I had a TV on in my office, and I’m watching the national coverage. They called Florida while the polls were still open west of the Apalachicola River. I had sent a letter to all the networks making sure that they knew that Florida had two time zones, and that they weren’t to report Florida results until after 7 p.m. Central time.

Karl Rove (Bush chief strategist): We’re talking to [Tim] Russert; we’re talking to Bob Schieffer; we’re talking to anybody in the press who we could talk to. I lambasted Bernie Shaw for calling Florida without all the polls closed. He was incredulous, like, “What do you mean the polls aren’t all closed?” I said, “You’ve got the entire panhandle of Florida in the Central time zone, and they’re still voting.”

[Read: The voting disaster ahead]

Chris Lehane (Gore press secretary): I have this vivid memory of being on the top floor of the Loews—in the presidential suite, ironically—where the vice president was, with his family. The networks called Florida for Gore. At that point, he’s the president-elect, and I remember referring to him as that.

David Morehouse (Gore trip director): We thought we had it. I didn’t pop any champagne corks, but I’m sure there were champagne corks popped. I remember seeing Karl Rove on the networks saying they had prematurely called Florida. I thought that was just the Bush campaign doing their spinning.

Before long, the networks put Florida back into the “Undecided” column. Then, just after 2 a.m., they gave the state, and the presidency, to Bush. Gore called Bush to concede and headed to the War Memorial Auditorium to make a concession speech.

Judy Woodruff (CNN anchor): We were not making the call. It wasn’t Bernie Shaw and Judy Woodruff—it was the CNN political unit, which was in contact with the consortium. We were live on the set and we were getting information they conveyed through our earpieces. We started hearing that there was going to be a rescinding of the call.

Joe Lieberman (Gore’s vice-presidential candidate): The networks pulled back the announcement that we had carried Florida. My wife was exhausted, and she said, “Let’s go back to our room.” We go back to our suite in our hotel, and as you walk in, there’s a foyer table, and she just sweeps a bowl of flowers onto the floor. My wife is maybe more expressive than I am.

Karl Koch (Gore aide): My wife was on the phone in Tallahassee with an open line to the national war room, and she’s laughing and saying, “All I can hear is Michael [Whouley] walking around saying, ‘Oh, fuck.’”

Michael Feldman (Gore traveling chief of staff): It all happened very quickly. I cannot tell you what network it was, but the network called Florida for Bush and then the election for Bush. Somebody went to change the channel, and then changed the channel again, and then changed the channel again. Every network had called the election for Bush.

Betsy Fischer Martin (NBC producer): I remember [Tom] Brokaw saying, “This would be something, if the networks managed to blow it twice in one night.” Later he said, “We don’t just have egg on our face. We have a whole omelet.”

Michael Feldman (Gore aide): There wasn’t a ton being said, but at some point the vice president and [his campaign manager] Bill Daley went next door to an adjacent room. I believe it was then that the vice president called Governor Bush and had that first conversation.

But new information soon became available, and within the hour, Gore called Bush to retract his concession, saying: “Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you.” With only a few thousand votes separating the two candidates, Florida was very much in play.

Jeff Greenfield (CNN analyst): While we were waiting for Gore to concede, even a numerically challenged person like myself began to notice that the vote margin in Florida for Bush was shrinking by the minute. Gee, that’s odd. We’ve called the race; he’s the next president. But these new numbers …

Karl Rove (Bush strategist): I had this red phone on my desk—talk about a classic cliché—and only one person had the number, so when it rang, it was either some pizza joint or it was Governor Bush. I picked up the phone, and he says, “What the heck is going on?” And I said, “We don’t know.”

[Laurence H. Tribe, Jennifer Taub, and Joshua A. Geltzer: Trump has launched a three-pronged attack on the election]

Michael Feldman (Gore aide): We were riding to the War Memorial, and at some point, my White House pager went off. It was Michael Whouley. He said, “I’m looking at the secretary of state of Florida’s website. It’s under 6,000 votes. We’re within the automatic recount. Are you with Bill?” We added Bill Daley to the call.

Ron Klain (Gore aide): My cellphone rang, and it was Ron Fournier of the Associated Press. And Ron said, “Why is Al Gore conceding?” I said, “Because we lost the election, Ron.” And he said, “Do you know that the Associated Press, the nation’s oldest news organization, has not yet declared Florida for Bush?” I hung up and called Nick Baldick, who was running Florida for Gore, and I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” He was like, “Hey, no one in Nashville has called me. I hear you guys are conceding. What’s going on up there?”

[From the September 1896 issue: The election of the President]

Chris Lehane (Gore aide): I remember the holding room we were in at the War Memorial, the bowels of the amphitheater—you know, stone and brick, like from the 1920s, water dripping all around. And it’s in that room that, like, the fate of the free world is hanging in the balance.

Michael Feldman (Gore aide): Gore walked in, and he was not happy to be there. Bill [Daley] said to him, “It’s under 1,000 votes.” I’m on the phone, and I just remember him looking at Bill and at me, and it was like, What?

Joe Lieberman (Democratic vice-presidential candidate): Bill Daley called [Bush campaign chair] Don Evans and said the vice president would like to talk to Governor Bush. They put him on, and Al says, “Governor, it’s so close now that I must tell you I feel compelled to withdraw my concession.” And there’s silence, and a little back-and-forth, and then silence, and then Al says, “Well, I don’t care what your little brother says. I’m formally telling you I am no longer conceding, thank you, good night.” Somebody said, “Oh, man, that was incredible. You called Jeb his little brother.” And Al said, “I didn’t call him his little brother. He said to me, ‘My little brother tells me that we’re definitely going to carry Florida.’”

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): It was 40 degrees and raining in Austin, and no one cared in the least: You had just won the presidency. Except the vice president should have been out conceding. It was taking a long time. There were big Jumbotrons set up around the stage, and all of a sudden [CNN political correspondent] Candy Crowley was going, “Give me a mic! Give me a mic! The vice president has withdrawn his concession.” Then the weather felt really bad—cold and wet and rainy.

Kristen Silverberg (Bush policy adviser): We stumbled back to the offices. One of the lawyers for the campaign was online, Googling Florida recount rules. I remember thinking that wasn’t very confidence-inspiring.

Karl Rove (Bush strategist): At 2:48, our statewide lead dropped to 39,600 votes. Palm Beach County was the last big one to come in. At 3 a.m., it came crashing in: We were down to an 11,000-vote lead. Ten minutes later, 10,000. Thirty minutes later, 6,000. By 3:47, we were 2,000, and at 4:10, our margin settled in at about 1,800 votes.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): About 3:30 in the morning, Don Evans came up to me and said, “All right, you better get that recount mechanism going. Time to saddle up.”

Chris Lehane (Gore aide): There’s a number of us, including myself, clearly falling asleep as we’re standing up. And we go to a meeting, and there’s a bunch of lawyers in the room who have been on call in case there were issues. They’re talking about how you win these recounts by being smart about the districts you pick to do the recount in. I still remember Mark [Fabiani] spoke out against that and argued that, you know, this is a presidential campaign. It cannot look like we’re trying to cherry-pick.

[Read: How Donald Trump could steal the election]

Mark Fabiani (Gore deputy campaign manager): I remember going to see Gore at the end of the night, and him coming out of his bedroom with the bathrobe that the hotel had given us. We all got monogrammed bathrobes with our initials on them.

Michael Feldman (Gore aide): I still have my monogrammed Loews Vanderbilt robe. That’s a trigger.

November 17, 2000: A Palm Beach County canvassing-board member holds up a disputed ballot for examination by lawyers for the two major political parties. The man at right is Republican John Bolton, later George W. Bush’s UN ambassador and Donald Trump’s national security adviser. (Greg Lovett / AFP via Getty)

II. The Battle Begins

On the morning of Wednesday, November 8, the Bush and Gore campaigns began sending lawyers and volunteers to Florida. The narrow margin had set in motion an automatic mechanical recount—checking the machines and the tallies—but not a recount by hand. The mechanical recount reduced Bush’s margin to 327 votes. Gore had the right to request a hand recount in each of Floria’s 67 counties—the request had to be made county by county—but he asked for a recount in just four: Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. All of them were populous and heavily Democratic. They were also counties where problems with voting had been concentrated. Bush’s post-election effort in Florida was led by the former secretary of state James A. Baker. Gore’s effort was led by the former secretary of state Warren Christopher.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): When you go into a recount, you need people in four different disciplines: You need lawyers. You need people who can be sure the ballots are secure and not tampered with. You have to have communications people. And you need people who are good in logistics. One of the great things about campaign people is that they know how to get the impossible done in a real hurry. There were planes already on standby.

Jill Alper (Democratic consultant): I remember saying, “Gosh, I wish we had a plane,” and then saying, “Wait. We have the Lieberman plane.” We put the all-call out. People started coming back.

Alan Rose (Gore staffer): I remember thinking, I can’t believe Lieberman has been on this plane for the whole election. It was a broken-down old charter. It was unmarked—no shrink-wrapped logo.

Kristen Silverberg (Bush aide): I left from Austin on the first plane at maybe five or six. I remember asking, “What do we know about Florida recount law?” Everybody kind of stared at each other. Then we all went to sleep for an hour.

Jill Alper (Democratic consultant): I was in the front of the plane. With one of the lawyers, I put together a little recount training guide. I used the microphone that the stewardesses would normally use.

Alan Rose (Gore staffer): We landed in Tallahassee at the same time Jeb Bush did, coming from Austin. On the tarmac, we walked right by him.

Theodore Olson (Bush lawyer): I was flying to meetings in Los Angeles. Somewhere over the middle of the United States—there were telephones on airplanes in those days—I checked messages, and I had two calls from people in connection with the Bush campaign asking if I could get to Tallahassee right away. I told them I was going the wrong direction at 30,000 feet. When I got to Los Angeles, I turned around.

Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): I had clothes for just a few days. We had to build all the basics, from learning Florida election law to office space, food, places to stay. We were getting very good lawyers to come down, but where do you put them?

Bret Baier (Fox News reporter): One weekend, the hotels were all booked because of the Florida–Florida State game. I ended up staying in someone’s house, like, in a guest room. I woke up looking at a family picture, thinking, What is this room? And who is that family in the photo?

David Boies (Gore lawyer): When I arrived at the offices in Tallahassee, I was greeted by Ron Klain, who said, “Welcome to Guatemala.”

Ron Klain (Gore aide): If you had to think about the worst possible place to fight this thing out, other than maybe Texas, Florida was the most adverse circumstance you can imagine. The person in charge of running the whole thing is the fucking candidate’s brother, Jeb Bush. If I handed you how Florida worked on a piece of paper, you would say, “This is a Third World banana republic.”

Karl Koch (Gore aide): The Bush argument was easier than our argument—“The votes have been cast; it’s over.” We had to make the argument for why the election wasn’t over, and people don’t want to hear that argument.

Mark Fabiani (Gore aide): Some of us proposed a plan where on Sunday night, after the NFL games, Gore would make an address. He would have done it in Florida, and he would have done it in front of a group of senior citizens—you know, primarily Jewish people who had been disenfranchised by the butterfly ballot and had ended up voting for Pat Buchanan. And he would say to them, “Look, I know this is heartbreaking for you. But here’s what I think is the best thing for this country. I pledge not to bring legal action, and I know that some of you might want me to bring legal action on the butterfly ballot. I pledge not to bring this action to court. However, I pledge to resolve it as speedily as possible with a statewide recount that would be supervised by some, you know, eminent people.” That was what some of us thought we should do. Probably Bush would have rejected it. But it at least would have given us a dramatic moment, and it would have put Gore in a good position. Even if we then had to go to individual county recounts, we could say, “Look, we wanted to do a statewide recount, and the other side wouldn’t do it.” And this was all very much in motion. And then Senator Lieberman attended a meeting on Saturday after the Sabbath ended and argued very strongly against this. So we ended up staking out a position of, you know, limited recounts in limited counties. And that led the other side, of course, to take the position that that’s unfair.

Joseph Geller (chair, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): When the first of the official campaign people started trickling in, somehow they made a decision, I believe without asking us, that they were only interested in manual recounts in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia. Well, you know, that could be their opinion, but that might have been the moment where the campaign was lost.

Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): We wanted to emphasize finality and fairness. And part of finality and fairness was accepting the rules, as opposed to writing the rules to serve the outcome the other side wanted. We always had to be careful about a public dynamic that everybody should just keep counting until the result flips. Our message was that Bush won, various recounts reestablished this, and it’s time to end the push for a different result. Gore’s slogan was “Count all the votes,” but he undermined his own position, because he started by seeking hand recounts in only four very Democratic counties. He didn’t ask for a statewide recount, and his team tried to block some military absentee ballots.

The organizational styles of the Bush and Gore efforts were markedly different. Bush remained aloof, focused on a presumptive transition to the presidency; Florida was tightly overseen by Baker (Bush’s brother Jeb, the governor, had officially recused himself). In contrast, Gore was personally involved; decision making was more inclusive and dispersed.

Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): The Gore people were actually way ahead of us. They’ve got a plane with 70 lawyers. They’ve got all this preparation done. I arrived the day after the election, and Baker and [Bush campaign manager] Joe Allbaugh had come from Texas on a private plane. We were the first three down there. We’re really starting from scratch. But by the end, we had specialized teams focusing on the Florida courts, and on the different divisions of the Florida courts, absentee and other ballot issues, and on the federal courts. We had separate people on TV. Then we had recount teams. Baker and a few of us coordinated briefings with Governor Bush. If you look at David Boies—in the last week, he was doing all the courts, TV, and advising Gore by himself. Boies was very good, but he was stretched too thin, and we had talent that could match him in each area. Also, Governor Bush had empowered Baker, so we could make decisions and stick with them.

Fred Bartlit (Bush lawyer): After the election, Ron Klain and I would go to places and talk about the recount. Ron would recall these huge conference calls with 40 or 50 people. Gore himself would be on the call. And the calls would go on for a long time. Then they’d ask me. I said we had a morning meeting for about 40 minutes with four of us headed by Secretary Baker. George Bush was never there. We believed in SEAL Team Six, not the 3rd Infantry Division.

Kimball Brace (voting-equipment expert witness): I remember an hour-long phone call with Al Gore. He was very inquisitive about what I knew in terms of voting equipment. Either he had been very well briefed or he had a great big file cabinet next to him. He kept asking, “What about these vendors? Who owns this company?” All kinds of things.

Joshua Bolten (Bush policy director): Bush didn’t have a lot to do. He made the smart judgment that he should not attempt to be the field commander. He was at the ranch most of the time.

III. Hanging, Dimpled, Pregnant

Legal actions went forward on many fronts; the chair of the Miami-Dade canvassing board referred to the proliferation of suits as “musical courts.” The Bush camp sought to stop hand recounts, and lost, on constitutional grounds, in federal court. The Gore camp sought, in state court, to prevent certification of the results until hand counts in four counties were complete—and momentarily prevailed, in the Florida Supreme Court. Separately, the Gore camp won a ruling by a Florida judge, Jorge Labarga, that so-called dimpled chads could be considered by officials conducting recounts.

Meanwhile, the laborious process of hand counting got under way in Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Volusia Counties. It was tedious and fractious. Hanging over everything: a running clock. The Electoral College would meet on December 18. If election disputes were not resolved, the matter would pass to the Florida legislature in advance of that deadline.

Jorge Labarga (circuit-court judge): The main thing I was asked to rule on is: What was the intent of the voters? The way voting went was you had this little card and you insert it into this machine, and then you puncture the circle of the people you’re voting for. And then that card full of holes would be inserted into a computer. People don’t always follow directions. Instead of just puncturing the hole for Al Gore, some people would write Al Gore. Or you could see where they tried to push the little chad through—there’s, like, a bulge in it—but it held in place. That would be a “pregnant” chad. The question for me was: Do we have to have a complete removal of the chad? Or what about a person who wrote in the name Al Gore—do we count that? Clearly they indicate intent. I ruled that they should be counted.

Mark Glaze (recount volunteer): They brought out the physical ballots in boxes. And the monitor, a theoretically neutral person, would, one by one, go through the ballots and hold them up. And there would be an observer from the Gore side, and one from the Bush side. The monitor was not supposed to let us touch the ballots.

Jon Winchester (recount volunteer): It was a sweatshop. We got in there and counted ballots for hours and hours. One of the observers would say, “Oh, this is a good one,” and the other would say, “Oh, I object—that one’s questionable.” And we’d have to put it into the canvassing-board pile [for review].

Ann McFall (Volusia County canvassing-board member): They fed the canvassing board and the workers for the canvassing board—they had turkey legs every night brought over from the prison. You had some really important people just holding up these long, long turkey legs. Oh my God, it was something.

Jorge Labarga (circuit-court judge): When the case was done, the election supervisor rented a Ryder truck, and the truck carried all those ballots to Tallahassee. The happiest day of my life was when I saw that yellow truck on the Florida Turnpike heading north, away from me.

Katherine Harris, Florida’s Republican secretary of state—the official responsible for overseeing elections—proved to be a lightning rod. Democrats questioned whether she was impartial, because she had been co-chair of George W. Bush’s Florida campaign. Some Republicans worried about her political skills in a crisis.

The Gore campaign had hoped to achieve as much as possible in the “protest” period, before certification, at the county level. Harris argued that challenges would be better afterward, statewide, in the “contest” period. Pressing for certification, Harris sought speedy completion of recounts, or an end to them. The role played in her office by the Republican operative Mac Stipanovich remains a matter of dispute.

Leon St. John (lawyer for Palm Beach County): Time was on the side of the Republicans, because Bush had a lead and there was a deadline to certify the vote under Florida law.

Katherine Harris (Florida secretary of state): My role was to protect Al Gore’s legal rights, not his political viability, so I was focused on certification and trying to follow the law, although the Florida Supreme Court delayed me several times. The Gore campaign felt that they had to prolong the protest phase, and hopefully gain more votes, but what happened when they did that, they short-circuited the time in the contest phase, and there wasn’t time to do the manual recount statewide as we should have had.

Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): All the political whirlwinds were buffeting Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. She was trying to be fair under Florida statutes, but the Florida Supreme Court was inventing new law and the press was clobbering her. I don’t know whether it came through Jeb Bush or the Republican Party, but Katherine was given Mac Stipanovich as an adviser to steady her nerves. His nickname was “Mac the Knife.” Mac, a former marine, had run [Jeb] Bush’s first, and losing, campaign for governor. A great personality and mind, one of those colorful people you come across in state politics, with a wealth of knowledge about local personalities, battles, and bodies. At the time, he was studying for a master’s degree in medieval French history.

Mac Stipanovich (Republican operative): I was sitting in Latin class when my phone vibrated. I looked down and saw who it was and stepped outside, and the ask was: Could I get into Katherine Harris’s office and help her? I had a good relationship with Harris. I had helped in her election, and we’d been personal friends ever since. The strategy was to bring the election in for a landing, to make it end, to get it over with, to just keep squeezing down the options. My primary job was to give strategic advice and to counsel Katherine. I was fairly well known in Tallahassee. I would arrive early in the morning, be driven in from outside into the parking garage, go up to her office, stay there until everything was over at night, and then be driven out of the parking garage to my car off-site. Driving into the capital past reporters who would have recognized me would not have inspired confidence that impartiality was the rule in the secretary of state’s office.

Deborah Kearney (counsel, secretary of state’s office): Mac Stipanovich was friendly with Katherine, and he would come visit and they would talk. I think one time he either tried or he actually sat in on a meeting with us, and we just said, “No, we don’t want his input; we don’t need his input; we don’t like his input.”

Katherine Harris (Florida secretary of state): By the way, there are those who say that they were back-channeling to the Bush campaign, or that I was a puppet and they were pulling my strings, but that’s absolutely not true. Mac is just Mac. It was important for him to be able to say whatever he wanted to say so he could write history, so he could help write a film, so he could be so important in this recount. But he’s not even a footnote to me.

On Wednesday, November 15, Harris announced that no further votes from hand recounts would be accepted and that she intended to certify the results of the election in Florida. According to the Associated Press, at this time Bush held a lead over Gore of 286 votes. It would expand to about 930 when absentee ballots from overseas were counted; Gore’s attempt to exclude absentee ballots arriving after the official deadline proved unsuccessful in the courts. On November 17, the Florida Supreme Court stepped in to prevent certification until it could rule on whether hand recounts should be accepted; in the meantime, hand recounts continued. On Tuesday, November 21, the court decided unanimously that hand recounts should go on, and gave the counties five days to finish them.

Charles T. Wells (chief justice, Florida Supreme Court): We came out with our ruling on Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving and extended the time to receive the recount until the Sunday after Thanksgiving at 5 p.m. if the secretary of state’s office was open that day, or 9 a.m. the following day if it wasn’t open. Well, that was met very adversely by the Bush people, who maintained that we had no leeway in which to extend the time. It was also met with an adverse reaction from the Miami-Dade County canvassing board, which maintained that this was not sufficient time for them to count. So they just disbanded their efforts.

Craig Waters (spokesperson, Florida Supreme Court): A number of businesses realized that they could get their logo on worldwide television if they simply sent someone to stand in front of where I was making announcements and hold up a sign. I looked up one time and there was a septic-tank service that kept driving past the podium.

Joseph Klock Jr. (lawyer for Katherine Harris): We developed a rule, and the rule was that any time we won anything, we’d make it a point of celebrating within two hours, because it basically took about two hours before the Supreme Court would reverse what we were able to accomplish.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): We got the sense that the majority of judges on the Florida Supreme Court didn’t really like us much. We thought we had the better of the arguments, but the loss was not a terrible shock. [Bush lawyer] Ted Olson had all the papers ready, so we were pretty quick to go up to the Supreme Court.

Many ballot disputes involved whether punch-through machines had completely dislodged a “chad” next to a candidate’s name—thereby indicating a voter's choice—or had left them slightly hanging. Sometimes the machine merely left an impression, or a “dimple.” (Robert King / Newsmakers)

IV. The Brooks Brothers Riot

On Wednesday, November 22, the day after the state supreme court’s ruling, the Bush campaign petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari—that is, asked it to review the lower court’s decision. That same day, Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney, suffered a mild heart attack. Also that day: the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, which unfolded in the office building where the Miami-Dade recount was taking place. Dozens of Bush volunteers from out of state had descended on Miami: “50-year-old white lawyers with cell phones and Hermès ties,” as The Wall Street Journal described them. Many gathered to protest the recount, and the protest spiraled out of control. Caught up in the confrontation was Joe Geller; he was at the scene by chance, hoping to demonstrate how voting machines processed punch cards. In the aftermath, the Miami-Dade recount was halted.

Ron Klain (Gore aide): I really thought we were going to be ahead in the tally after Thanksgiving weekend. We had this delay in the certification ’til Sunday. We just needed to get the count finished in Miami-Dade, and we would have been ahead. Sunday night, Katherine Harris would have faced the certification with Gore ahead. And that plan went awry. One reason was the Brooks Brothers riot.

Duane R. Gibson (Bush volunteer): We could see instances—I could, anyway—where I thought the Democrats were cheating. Challenging things. Delaying things. And it was starting to be a sham, in my view. About a dozen of us, we said, “This is a bunch of baloney. Let’s go up and let’s see what’s going on at the election office,” which was in the Miami-Dade County office building. And what happened was, the head of the Democratic Party in Miami-Dade, he walks in there, like carte blanche. There’s a big glass window, like at a bank. And all the ballots are sitting back there, right? And I see this guy pick up a ballot and put it in his pocket. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Joe Geller (chair, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): I arrived in the middle of a protest rally. They were chanting, “Let us in! Let us in!” They were banging on the doors and on the glass partitions. The staff all knew me. So I went to the window and said, “Can you please give me a sample ballot?” The protest all around us is getting louder and louder and rowdier and rowdier, and it seemed like we waited forever. Finally the elections woman came back and passed me a sample ballot. It was labeled official Democratic Party training ballot in capital letters, clearly visible. And a Republican operative says, “What do you have there?” And I hold it up, so she can see what’s written on it. And she looked at me, and she looked around at the screaming individuals, and she yells, “He’s got a ballot! He stole a ballot!” She could not possibly have been confused.

Duane R. Gibson (Bush volunteer): We started yelling, “Hey, he took a ballot! He took a ballot!” We were like, “This is such a sham.” We don’t know what’s going on with those ballots back there. I mean, who knows if they’re taking votes out or putting new votes in. Ballots are getting handed to the head of the Democratic committee in Miami. So we started shouting. “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” And it got louder and more energized. And the cameras came.

[From the July/August 2020 issue: The dark soul of the sunshine state]

Joe Geller (chair, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): They’re saying, “This guy stole a ballot.” A mob descended on me, yelling and screaming at me and jabbing me with their elbows. I make it to the elevator and take the elevator downstairs, and in the elevator, it’s dead silent. When the elevator doors open, and there are cameras again, they start yelling. There’s one guy in particular dogging me, who had followed me from upstairs. He keeps saying things like “You’re in trouble.” As I head to the exit of the building, he launches himself into me, full body. I turn around and head back to the escalator, and just as I get to the foot of the steps, a cop comes up to me and says, “They say you stole a ballot.” I say, “Absolutely not. I have a training ballot of the Democratic Party. I’m permitted to have that.” His sergeant comes up, and I explain again. He says, “Well, I want to see it.” And I say, “That’s fine, but we’re not going to do it right here with CNN live. At the distance the cameras are, you’re not going to be able to read it. If you’ll step around the corner with me, I’ll be happy to show it to you.” I step around the corner and show it to the guy. He says, “Let’s go back to the elections office, and they’ll verify what you say, I’m sure.” And of course the woman says, “Yes, that’s Mr. Geller. I gave him a Democratic Party sample ballot.” So the cops say, “Okay, sorry, Mr. Geller,” and walk me through the elections office to a back elevator. I pass what used to be called the counting room, and see, through the glass walls, all three members of the canvassing board and some of their staff. They’re all looking worried. I drive home and immediately put on the TV. One of the members of the canvassing board says, “Well, we were trying to finish this recount, but under the current circumstances, I don’t think it’s possible.” They were frightened.

Jamie Holland (Democratic poll watcher): I remember seeing some of the protest and wondering, Why isn’t our passion as strong as theirs? The other side is catching the media, and we’re just grinding it out without that sense of being equally outraged.

Mac Stipanovich (Republican operative): Somebody said at the time—this is probably unfair—that while the Democrats were bent over their calculators, we were breaking bar stools over their heads.

Mark Fabiani (Gore aide): I was in D.C. at the Ritz-Carlton, around Thanksgiving. [Gore aide Chris] Lehane comes over, and we’re sitting in the lobby. There’s a harpist playing in one corner. And as we’re sitting there talking, this huge rat just saunters across the entire lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, as if it didn’t have a care in the world. We thought it was a metaphor for the entire situation. We started calling the hotel the “Rats-Carlton.”

The so-called Brooks Brothers riot: Republican operatives protest the hand recount of ballots that machines had been unable to tally, November 22, 2000. (Reuters)

V. The Supreme Court

On Friday, November 24, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Gore. Two days later, on Sunday night, Katherine Harris certified the vote tally in Florida, and Bush’s lead stood at 537 votes. Some recount results were excluded—the results from Palm Beach County had arrived two hours late. Miami-Dade had stopped its recount.

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): Ron Klain called, and he said, “We really need help. It looks like there is an issue about federal-court intervention with the electoral recount, and we need you to fly down to Florida immediately.” The question of whether, as a matter of federalism, this is an appropriate intervention was very much up in the air. The next morning, I appeared in federal court, and I remember arguing that it was inappropriate for a federal court to intervene at this point. If there were any constitutional issues about the recount, they could be properly handled at the state level and in the state court.

[Read: Does Brett Kavanaugh agree with Bush v. Gore?]

Charles Fried (Bush lawyer): The feeling many of us had was that the Florida Supreme Court had one commitment above all: that George W. Bush not be elected. They hated him—not every one of them—because of tort reform. The Florida Supreme Court at the time was very plaintiffs-oriented, and many of them had come up through the most aggressive parts of the plaintiffs bar. The thought that this man should become president was unbearable, because in Texas he had really two signature issues—educational reform and tort reform.

Barbara Pariente (justice, Florida Supreme Court): Our court was criticized as being political, but there were at least two other cases that we ruled on—including the Palm Beach County butterfly-ballot case and the absentee-ballot case from Martin County and Volusia County—where we ruled for then-Governor Bush. A different decision in any one of those cases would have “given” the election to Vice President Gore.

Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court were held on Friday, December 1. Laurence Tribe argued for the Gore campaign. Theodore Olson argued for the Bush campaign. On Monday, December 4, the Court chose, in effect, to kick the ball down the road, when all nine justices agreed to vacate the Florida decision and ask the state supreme court to clarify its arguments.

Joseph Klock Jr. (lawyer for Katherine Harris): They had 750 people in the courtroom that day. The tables where the counsel sit is usually a respectful distance from the bench, but they had pushed the tables all the way up so that they were almost touching it. From where I was sitting, I could look straight up and see Justice Ginsburg, four and a half feet away.

Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court reporter): The court first sent the case back to the lower court to revisit its decision, and I thought that when they did that, the handwriting was on the wall. Either the Florida Supreme Court was going to do what the Supreme Court wanted it to do, or the Supreme Court was not going to uphold what the state court did.

Charles T. Wells (chief justice, Florida Supreme Court): They asked us to explain in more detail what the basis of our decision was. I considered that what they did was actually punt—they recognized that there really wasn’t a case in controversy at that point on the Bush side, and they sent it back to us.

Theodore Olson (Bush lawyer): We were thrilled. The Court vacated the decision and asked the Florida Supreme Court to explain what it was doing and what kind of legal standards it was applying and whether it was aware of certain federal statutes and constitutional issues. And the Florida Supreme Court basically ignored that. We felt that we had a very strong case that the way the statewide recount was being undertaken was capricious and arbitrary and very inconsistent.

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): I viewed that as victory because I thought the Supreme Court of Florida would respond quickly and persuasively. Little did I know that the Florida court would essentially take this request from the U.S. Supreme Court for an explanation and put it in some desk drawer, and that this would provoke anger among the Supreme Court justices.

Though it did not respond to the U.S. Supreme Court immediately, on Friday, December 8, the Florida Supreme Court did overturn a lower-court ruling and order a statewide hand recount of some 60,000 ballots that voting machines had, for one reason or another, rejected. The vote this time was not unanimous—it was 4–3, with the chief justice in the minority—and it was all but certain to invite immediate high-court scrutiny. On Saturday, December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay and halted the recount.

Barbara Pariente (justice, Florida Supreme Court): When we had our court conference, it was not as collegial as the conference after the first opinion, where we had all autographed our names on the opinion. By the time of this opinion, it was hard to feel that we were going to be able to resolve this controversy in a way that was not going to have significant political repercussions.

Charles Fried (Bush lawyer): The Supreme Court of Florida proceeded to order a recount, which they’d been told to stop doing. And this was so blatant that three of the Florida justices, including the chief justice, dissented from the decision. So my perspective was simply this: that what was going on was an obvious violation of both due process and equal protection.

Barbara Pariente (justice, Florida Supreme Court): It was certainly not a pleasant atmosphere, writing that opinion. I pulled an all-nighter. But it became more unpleasant for me the next morning. I was on my way to Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of The Federalist—to reread what it says about the role of the judiciary—and I hear on NPR that the U.S. Supreme Court has accepted jurisdiction, and not only that, but they’ve stopped the statewide recount.

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): The stay by the U.S. Supreme Court, issued ultimately 5 to 4, was the decisive signal that something dramatic was happening. And I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to have to convince the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court of Florida understands what it’s talking about.

David Boies (Gore lawyer): I was in a sports bar across the street from the Governors Inn, in Tallahassee. I had been in the office and had spoken to Vice President Gore. We were all very happy. The votes were being counted. He was steadily gaining on Governor Bush. My work was essentially done, and I was going home. They had all these television screens, and a crawler came across that said the Supreme Court had issued an order stopping the vote count. My initial reaction was that this had to be a mistake. There had not been an opportunity to brief or argue the case. There were substantial issues as to whether there was really a federal question involved. The Supreme Court had never intervened in a presidential election to affect the counting of the votes in a state.

Tamarra Matthews Johnson (clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor): We knew that the stay was going to issue. A television was set up in a conference room, and it showed the ballot counting in Florida. One guy was using a device, like a magnifying glass, to study ballots. And then you see the banner at the bottom of the screen saying the Supreme Court has issued a stay. I still marvel at the fact that this order comes down from a thousand miles away, the Court has said stop, and everyone just stops.

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): I remember being squirreled away in a large suite at the Watergate Hotel, trying to prepare for the oral argument, and I get a call from Ron [Klain] saying, “Are you available to talk to Warren?” So Warren Christopher comes up to my suite at the Watergate. He was quite a regal fellow. He wanted to know if he could put his topcoat down. So he puts his coat down, and he says, “Can we sit down and talk?” His mood was so grave. He obviously didn’t have great news. He said, “I have spoken with the vice president, and we’ve decided that David [Boies] should handle the second argument.” I said, “Well, it’s certainly up to the vice president and you, Mr. Christopher, but what’s the theory?” And he said, “Al thinks that the Court’s main interest will be in the details of how things are going down in Florida, what the nature of the recount is.” And I said, “With all respect, I think that’s ridiculous. I don’t think the Court gives a shit about what’s happening in Florida as such. It simply wants to decide for the country what has happened in this very chaotic situation where it looks like the Florida recount is sort of an exercise in chaos rather than in democracy. And I think it’s important for the Court to understand, as a matter of federal law, why the appropriate thing is to let the recount go on, even under some corrected formula.” He said, “That’s all very well, but the vice president has decided that David should handle it. Will you help him get ready for the argument?” I said, “Of course.”

Ron Klain (Gore aide): I didn’t really know David Boies before our time in Florida. I came to have great respect for him as a lawyer, a brilliant legal mind. But arguing in the Supreme Court is this very specialized thing, and Larry Tribe is probably the best person living today to argue in the Supreme Court. I obviously have a longtime personal relationship with Larry. He’s been my professor in law school, my mentor. People didn’t love his argument the first time around when we went to the Supreme Court, but there was no question in my mind that Larry was the right choice. It never dawned on me we were going to do anything else until the vice president called me and said, “Look, I want to rethink this.”

[From the March 2020 issue: The Supreme Court’s enduring bias]

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): David appears in the suite and says, “I only have a couple of hours.” I don’t know what else he had on his schedule. But he said, “Can you help me understand the equal-protection claim?” So we spent really, at most, two or three hours talking about the way the Fourteenth Amendment limited the formula or the approach a state supreme court could use to recount the ballots. And I said I thought there was a solid argument, though not a convincing one, for the proposition that the chaotic and non-uniform way the votes are being recounted violates equal protection, but the key will be the remedy. What happens if the Supreme Court ultimately decides that there is a real Fourteenth Amendment argument? And he said, “That’s a stupid argument; we’re going to win that.” And I said, “I wouldn’t count on it.”

Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court took place on Monday, December 11. The hastily written opinions, which added up to a 5–4 reversal of the Florida court, were made public at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, December 12. Even supporters of the outcome acknowledged that the decision did not reflect the Court at its best. In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens famously wrote: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” On Wednesday, December 13, Al Gore conceded defeat.

David Boies (Gore lawyer): The atmosphere was electric. You’d never had the United States Supreme Court as an institution intervene like this in a presidential election, and you had never had a case where the United States Supreme Court told a state how to count or not count ballots in a presidential election. From an analytical standpoint, from a historical standpoint, from the standpoint of principle, both [Anthony] Kennedy and O’Connor were justices who I thought I should be able to get, and I only really needed one of those. On the other hand, on the prior Saturday, the Court had by a 5–4 majority stopped the vote count, and I thought that it would be extremely difficult for any justice who had taken the extraordinary step of stopping the vote count to now reverse themselves and uphold what the Florida Supreme Court did.

Theodore Olson (Bush lawyer): Article II of the Constitution says the legislature of a state must prescribe the method by which electors are selected in a presidential election. We argued that that provision of the Constitution had been violated because the judiciary was changing the rules by which the votes would be counted and the electors would be selected. We also argued that the recounts violated both the equal-protection and due-process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment because the rules were being changed on the fly after the election—from county to county and from hour to hour, in an effort by the Democrats to produce votes that would change the outcome. Individual voters in different areas of the state were being treated differently with respect to the weight given to their votes.

Joseph Klock Jr. (lawyer for Katherine Harris): I remember at one point the chief justice was looking down at David, and the chief justice said to him, “Well, Mr. Boies, how long should the counting go on?” At which point [Justice Antonin] Scalia said, “Oh, until they win.”

Karl Rove (Bush strategist): I stayed that night at the Hilton in McLean, Virginia. I’d gotten room service and was in my pajamas. I’ve got the television on, and at 10 p.m. the Supreme Court comes back. I have NBC on, and Pete Williams and Dan Abrams are outside the Supreme Court trying to describe the opinion. As I recall, Williams had somebody feed him the opinion from the back to the front. So he is reading the conclusion, and it is that the Court finds that the Florida Supreme Court violates the equal-protection clause and Article II, and the election is over.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): The decision started coming in one page at a time on an old fax machine. We divided up the opinion among all the former Supreme Court clerks, figuring they would have the most instant insight. And it was actually [future Senator] Ted Cruz, reading Justice Stevens’s dissent, who said, “Holy cow, we must have won.”

Ron Klain (Gore aide): Among the many bad things about Bush v. Gore, one of the worst is it takes, like, ’til page seven until you find out the outcome of the case. It’s a horribly written opinion. So I’m reading along, reading along, reading along. I have Gore on the phone, people are bringing me pages one page at a time. Finally we hit the seventh page.

Karl Rove (Bush strategist): I call Bush at the governor’s mansion. He’s in bed reading with the television off. So he turns on the television, and when he turns it on, it is set to CNN. Charles Bierbauer is reading the decision from the front, and he has no clear idea of the conclusion. I say, “Congratulations, Mr. President,” and Bush is like, “What are you talking about?” I tell him what Pete Williams is saying on NBC. And he tells me that the guy on CNN is saying something else. After we go back and forth a couple of times, he says to me, “I’m calling Baker,” and hangs up.

Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court reporter): The decision is the decision—it’s a ticket for one trip only. It’s never been cited in any other case, and nobody expects it ever will be. The odd thing about this was that the five justices in the majority were the court’s moderate conservative and very conservative justices, but all of them agreed on one thing in their general philosophy, and that is they were supporters of a more aggressive protection of states’ rights. And in this case they went for a federal decision that essentially rejected states’ rights. Conversely, the four liberals were people who more often than not were not big supporters of states’ rights, and in this case they were big supporters of states’ rights.

Chris Lehane (Gore aide): I got an email—I don’t even know what it was called in those days. It was somewhere between a pager and a phone. You wore it on your hip. The message was from Gore, and it said, “Please do not trash the Supreme Court. Al.” And I didn’t. I was incredibly impressed and struck by the vice president trying to put the values of the country first. But I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t think about how different the world would be today in so many respects.

Joshua Bolten (Bush aide): I remember Bush warned the staff against triumphalism. He said this has been a really difficult period, and if he was going to be able to govern properly, a lot of people who did not think he was the legitimately elected president were going to have to accept him as president.

Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court reporter): I know in hindsight that Justice O’Connor had second thoughts. She could dig her feet in, but she was a person who was capable of reflection and thinking that she’d been wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean that she would have done something different. It means she had real second thoughts in hindsight about whether the decision had been right.

Joshua Bolten (Bush aide): I just remember thinking, Man, this isn’t the way this should be decided. I believed that Bush won the election, but there would be no way ever of having pure truth on it.

Ron Klain (Gore aide): I am not over it. I don’t think I’ll ever be over it.

Police separate Bush and Gore supporters outside the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices consider the Florida recount issue for the first time, December 1, 2000. (Mark Wilson / Newsmakers)

VI. The Aftermath

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots was conducted by two groups—first by The Miami Herald and USA Today, in conjunction with the accounting firm BDO Seidman; and later by a multi-outlet consortium of news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, in conjunction with NORC at the University of Chicago. The Herald investigation concluded that Bush would still have won, and would likely have widened his lead slightly, even if the Supreme Court had permitted the recount that Gore had sought. The review also determined that, had a full statewide recount of all disputed Florida ballots taken place, with each ballot reviewed from scratch and ballot counters using an inclusive standard, Gore might possibly have won by a few hundred votes. Gore had never requested such a statewide recount. The consortium came to similar conclusions.

Marty Baron (Miami Herald editor): We were left with the big question as to whether the vote was really accurate. Mark Seibel, who was our managing editor for news at the time and now works here at the [Washington] Post, said, “You know, the ballots are public records.” He felt that we could get access to those ballots and that maybe we should do our own recount.

Kirk Wolter (director, Florida Ballots Project, NORC): The goal was simply, what would have happened had SCOTUS not stopped the recount? There were various voting standards on the table at that point in time. It’s been so long, I can’t recount them for you, but the Bush team advanced proposals, the Gore team advanced proposals, the Florida Supreme Court advanced proposals, Katherine Harris had her way of doing things, and so forth. And the question was, under each of those various proposals, what might have happened had the recounts continued?

Marty Baron (Miami Herald editor): In certain counties, we encountered resistance from the supervisors of elections. They argued that it was not, in fact, a public record, and we had to litigate against them. We prevailed in each one of those cases. Now we had to decide what was the standard that was going to be used. First of all, each county had its own system, so in many of the counties, if not most of the counties, it was a punch-card system. We decided that we would look at it under multiple standards. In places like Duval County, as I recall, you actually marked the ballot. You would fill it in. And there were a lot of people who were first-time voters, and they would mark something and cross it out and then mark something else. And obviously we couldn’t count those ballots. And then there was the debate in Palm Beach County, where they had the so-called butterfly ballots, where people were very confused—they thought they were voting for Al Gore and instead they voted for Patrick Buchanan. There were a lot of those people. That said, you could only count the way they actually voted. You couldn’t go back and make a determination as to what they intended to do. You could only look at what they actually did. So we went to every one of the 67 counties. We looked at the results under different standards. We did a calculation. We looked at BDO Seidman’s. We were in very close agreement with BDO Seidman’s calculation. We came to the same conclusion. And the conclusion was that George W. Bush had won Florida and, therefore, won the presidency.

Kirk Wolter (director, Florida Ballots Project, NORC): We were not allowed to actually touch the ballots. Only a county worker was authorized to touch a ballot. So the county worker would hold up the ballot for our workers to review, and if the ballot was clear, that was fine, but if the ballot wasn’t clear, we were allowed to touch the hand of the county worker and move the hand and rotate the ballot and change the position of the ballot in various ways in order to get the best possible view.

Marty Baron (Miami Herald editor): When we launched this inquiry, the Bush campaign and Republicans in general were outraged. They felt that it was an effort to delegitimize a Bush presidency. That wasn’t our intention at all. Our intention was to find out what the real vote was—to do the recount that the U.S. Supreme Court would not allow to proceed. And as it turned out, it showed that George W. Bush had won the election by pretty much any standard. I can tell you two things. Number one, there are still many Democrats who don’t accept that as the result, and ignore this study. And number two, the Republicans have never apologized for having falsely accused us of trying to delegitimize the Bush presidency.

Mac Stipanovich (Republican operative): I believe to this day that George Bush won the election by having a plurality of the votes that were legally cast that day. If you ask me, do I believe that a plurality of the people who went to the polls that day, and tried to vote, tried to vote for George Bush? I don’t think so. But we were counting legal votes.

The nearly 6 million punch-card ballots cast in Florida in the 2000 election remain intact, preserved in boxes and wrapped in plastic at the Florida State Archives, in Tallahassee.

Ballot boxes from the 2000 election in storage in Palm Beach in November 2001. Many of them were sold on eBay to raise money for the county. (Joe Raedle / Getty)

What Ever Happened to the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife?

2020-08-11T12:19:58-04:00

At a September 2012 academic conference in Rome, Karen King, a historian at Harvard Divinity School, made a major announcement. She had discovered a fragment of papyrus that bore a shocking phrase: “Jesus said to them, My wife.” If the scrap was authentic, it had the potential to upend centuries of Roman Catholic tradition.

The journalist Ariel Sabar covered King’s 2012 presentation for Smithsonian magazine, and revisited the mystery of the papyrus’s origins in a 2016 article for The Atlantic, “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife,” in which he tracked down the owner of the papyrus—a man whose identity King adamantly refused to share with the press. Could this man have forged the explosive text? Was King’s discovery too good to be true?

“King called the business-card-size papyrus ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,’” Sabar wrote. “But even without that provocative title, it would have shaken the world of biblical scholarship. Centuries of Christian tradition are bound up in whether the scrap is authentic or, as a growing group of scholars contends, an outrageous modern fake: Jesus’s bachelorhood helps form the basis for priestly celibacy, and his all-male cast of apostles has long been cited to justify limits on women’s religious leadership. In the Roman Catholic Church in particular, the New Testament is seen as divine revelation handed down through a long line of men—Jesus, the 12 apostles, the Church fathers, the popes, and finally the priests who bring God’s word to the parish pews today.” What if there was evidence that Jesus had seen a woman as worthy of discipleship too?

But Sabar’s Atlantic article prompted King to admit that the papyrus was probably a forgery. “I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” King told Sabar of the papyrus’s owner. “He lied to me.” Sabar, for his part, kept reporting. Today he published Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. I spoke with Sabar about his extensive investigation, the nature of truth, and the future of the contested papyrus scrap. An edited transcript of our conversation is below.

Amy Weiss-Meyer: You reported on the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife for Smithsonian magazine in 2012, when the fragment was first revealed in Rome. What convinced you that there was more reporting to be done?

Ariel Sabar: The big thing that troubled, or interested, me right from the start was this question of where did the papyrus that Karen King presented to the world in 2012 come from? What was its source? King had told reporters and other people that she was offering the gentleman anonymity. He asked not to be named and she was going to grant that. She also told me that he was a complete stranger. I remember pressing Dr. King for information but she was very tight-lipped about it. So after the Smithsonian story ran, at the back of my mind was always this question of who is this man, this complete stranger who approached Karen King?

Around 2015, I looked back over the preceding three years of coverage of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife and noticed that scholars were still at something of a standstill. There was definitely an overwhelming majority of scholars who thought it was fake, but there was a minority, including Karen King, who continued to think it was authentic. I didn’t really feel like I could do any sort of scholarly analysis, but one of the questions that I felt as a journalist I might have the skills to investigate was the question of its origins.

Weiss-Meyer: In 2012, you were the only journalist in the room in Rome when Karen King revealed the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Do you remember what you made of it all in that moment?

Sabar: It was a really powerful moment. King had given her talk a somewhat bland title—something like “A New Coptic Gospel Fragment”—so I think a lot of people in the room thought it would be sort of mundane, the sort of thing that gets announced at scholarly conferences about Coptic. A gospel of Jesus’s wife isn’t typically on the menu. The other thing that struck me was, and I write about this in the book, that Karen King offered the room no photographs of this papyrus. She had said that her laptop had broken on the flight to Rome. I’ve no reason to doubt that, but I wondered why, in our interconnected age, it wouldn’t have been possible, for instance, for Harvard, which had lots of images of the papyrus, to have emailed those to her. One of the effects of that, whether deliberate or not, was that it would focus the scholars’ attention on the text itself, on the words, and not on the physical properties of the manuscript. And it was the physical properties of the manuscript—the ink, the handwriting, the conditions of the papyrus—that would start to raise immediate questions as soon as scholars did see those images. Some scholars were really upset that there were no photographs—you can’t come to a conference like this, and address the top scholars in this field, without a photograph. So there was this tension in the room.

Weiss-Meyer: I’m curious how you decided, in Act I of the book, to mostly give readers the story from Karen King’s perspective?

Sabar: I wanted to have readers buy into [the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife being real] in the same way that Karen King and her supporters did, because initially there was a lot to be excited about. I think in many ways you’re rooting for Karen King at the beginning and you’re rooting for this to be true, because it’s so phenomenal. It kind of confirms what a lot of us in our particular age feel about organized religion, which is a lot of the stuff that’s been handed down through the generations, it’s often terribly patriarchal, sometimes misogynistic. It’s not as inclusive as it should be.

Weiss-Meyer: Let’s talk about Walter Fritz, the mysterious Florida man described in the first part of the book as the man who gave King the fragment. We learn his identity in Act III of the book, partly as a result of a lot of dogged reporting on your part. For readers who missed the magazine article, can you tell us how you came to track the man, Walter Fritz, down?

Sabar: Dr. King refused to identify the papyrus’s current owner, but she did name a supposed collector the owner said he’d bought it from—someone named Hans-Ulrich Laukamp. I found a deceased man by that name who’d lived in Florida, and noticed he had a business partner named Walter Fritz. I started doing a number of Google searches on Walter Fritz and of course that brought back thousands of search results. But after running that name through Florida business records, I noticed that there was a Walter Fritz who owned a company called Nefer Art, and nefer sounded like an Egyptian word. So you’ve got a guy who was business associates with the prior owner, and you’ve got a business that has an Egyptian word in its name, and all papyri are from Egypt, so that sort of attracted my attention. Then I noticed deep down in the results that there was an article written for a German Egyptology journal about a kind of cryptic text written on a tablet, authored by a guy named Walter Fritz. All these lights started going off, like, is there any way that all these seemingly different Walter Fritzes can be the same person?

Weiss-Meyer: There are so many twists and turns in the book that you’re very careful not to write about in a sensational way, in part, I think, because one of the lessons of the book is about the dangers of sensationalism. Were there any moments, though, when you felt genuinely shocked by what you had found?

Sabar: When I first spoke with Walter Fritz, he completely denied having anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. He told me a bunch of lies, but I didn’t know that, because all I had was his word. And then I remember doing more Google searches—I’d managed to get his email address through public records, and I remember dropping it in various combinations and iterations into Google, and up popped a web-domain registration. I noticed that a Walter Fritz of North Port, Florida, or maybe it was Nefer Art, had registered the website www.gospelofjesuswife.com, and he had done so three weeks before the announcement [in Rome]. That suggested that he had an inside line on it.

Weiss-Meyer: As you got to know Fritz, did he eventually tell you the truth?

Sabar: There were no freebies with Walter Fritz. You have to do your homework. If you didn’t do the reporting and just asked him to volunteer something, you didn’t get it. You have to find outside corroborating evidence and then come back to him. And then as kind of your reward, he would say, “Yep, that’s true.” And so he’s playing a cat-and-mouse game that made it extremely frustrating but also interesting in many ways.

Weiss-Meyer: It must have made it kind of addictive at times.

Sabar: Yeah, obsessive.

Weiss-Meyer: Are there lessons that you want readers to take from the book?

Sabar: The title, Veritas, is not just a casual allusion to the Harvard motto. It really speaks to, you know, what is the nature of truth and what are the different paths people take to seek it. As journalists, by profession and by temperament, most of us are empiricists. We believe the facts exist. We believe that we can go out in the world and see things, document them, establish a kind of reality through reporting and through investigation. We may not always get all the facts, and we may make mistakes along the way, but we believe that we can get closer to the facts through investigation. I think that’s true of much of academia as well. And then you have people of faith, who in parts of their lives accept the truth of things they can’t always see or prove. I think a third leg of that stool is postmodern scholars—and Dr. King isn’t the only one. They don’t believe in the objective existence of facts as most people think of them. They believe that the people or the groups that have the power to tell and sell a story essentially create reality.

And so there are these different modes of investigation in the book, and part of me was fascinated by what happens when all of those collide in a single story. What happens when all of those flow together in a single institution like the Harvard Divinity School, or even within a single individual like Karen King, who is both a believer and a secular historian but someone who believes that her faith and her secular practice of history can be seamlessly integrated?

So in terms of lessons, I guess I’m going to stick with, you know, the values that I hold dear as a journalist; there’s still value in old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting: knocking on doors, picking up phones, going through documents, and leaving no stone unturned. That process, which can be labor-intensive, leads us to places that are important, especially in our own historical moment, where there’s this rise of “alternative facts” and disinformation campaigns.

Weiss-Meyer: One last question: Where is the papyrus now?

Sabar: The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife is now in the custody of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. I’d been pursuing leads about this for several months, and after multiple inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests, a DHS spokesperson confirmed it on the record for the first time last week.

An official at Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities told me he had heard about the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife for the first time last year, when his friend happened to see a TV show about it online. It seems to have been a rerun of an eight-year-old cable-TV documentary. He told me that Egypt had no prior evidence of the fragment’s existence and no idea if it was real. But papyrus as a writing surface is almost invariably Egyptian, and, as Egypt often does when it hears about newfound artifacts, the official filed a pro forma information request to the U.S.

DHS is the American agency charged with fulfilling such requests, and it took custody of the papyrus from Harvard’s Houghton Library, with Walter Fritz’s apparently eager approval. The DHS inquiry is ongoing. If Egypt decides for any number of reasons that it wants the fragment—which to date it has not—it wouldn’t be the first time a fake has been sent to a country requesting it.

From what I’ve gleaned, Walter Fritz is excited about “giving it” to Egypt—as eager for that country’s imprimatur as he once was for Harvard’s.

Summer Days

2020-06-23T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Clay Benskin

On July 4, 2012, in the early evening, Clay Benskin walked to Washington Square Park, in New York. He had recently started using the black-and-white filter on his phone’s camera to capture the serendipitous moments he observed on his way to work or on his lunch break. Benskin is a superintendent at an apartment building in Tribeca. His street photography, which has since been featured nationally, showcases the energetic spontaneity of city life, its jubilant highs and mournful lows.

In the park that Fourth of July, a man Benskin thinks was homeless stood shirtless atop the fountain’s grates, drenched. Others were closer to the fountain’s perimeter, reveling in the time-honored tradition of cooling off in its waters. In Benskin’s playful framing of the shot—which he calls The Return of the Messiah—the men in the foreground seem to be orbiting the mysterious central figure.

“I took a bunch of shots that day, but that was the one shot I couldn’t wait to get back and look at,” Benskin recalls. “It brings me joy.”

Unlike The Return of the Messiah, most of Benskin’s kinetic photographs are untitled. All of them foreground people—the ways they interact with one another and with their physical surroundings, rushing or resting, in a group or in solitude.

These photos were taken in years past—before the pandemic, before the protests. At first glance, they seem like postcards from another world. Yet Benskin’s skill at capturing the tension and beauty at the intersection of public and private life also lends his work a timeless quality. Always, Benskin shows his subjects as individuals with secrets and stories that the viewer can only guess at.

A version of this article appears in the July/August 2020 print edition with the headline “Independence Day.”

The Beauty of Age

2020-05-10T09:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Erin Kirkland

The King’s Daughters Home in Mexico, Missouri, which opened in 1905, still occupies its original building. The nursing home started with 10 beds for women who had never married—nuns and teachers, mostly, who eventually left their assets to the home, adding to its endowment over the years. Today there are 45 beds, still all for women. “Gracious Living for Gracious Ladies,” the website proudly proclaims.

The week that the photographer Erin Kirkland visited King’s Daughters, in June 2019, two residents died. Kirkland wanted to show joy in her images, she told me, but “there was overall heaviness that tinted everything that week.” Some of that heaviness comes through in the resulting work, but so, too, do the women’s resilience and their care for one another. A 98-year-old comforts an 81-year-old with Alzheimer’s, who doesn’t recognize her visiting husband, by reminding her that she does, in fact, know the man in front of her (first image in story). Two women hold hands at the breakfast table (below). Kirkland worked to keep her photographs free of nostalgia, she said. Her aim, instead, was to focus on the present, celebrating the beauty of age.

Right now, because of the coronavirus, visitors are not allowed inside the home. Some women see family through a window, on videochat, or at a distance in the parking lot; others haven’t seen their relatives in weeks. Residents must stay physically separate from one another and most take all their meals in their rooms. Staff members have their temperature taken at the entrance. In an effort to keep spirits lifted, communal TVs play only the Hallmark Channel—no news. And normal daily activities like dancing, bingo, and Bible study—it is a nondenominational Christian home—go on. Darus Love, the home’s administrator, told me his goal is to foster an environment of “compassionate calm” for the duration of the pandemic. “The ladies,” Love said, have “survived much harder times.”

A View From the Before Times

2020-04-06T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Camille Picquot

Around the time she completed her photographic series Total Ground, shot on the Paris Métro from 2016 to 2018, Camille Picquot created a character named Nelson, a “complete stranger to our society.” “The most common aspects of life appear to me as potential dramas,” a fictional letter from Nelson reads. “What is normal, around here?”

The common and the normal in Total Ground are, in fact, sly deceptions, filled with drama. Some of Picquot’s photographs are documentary, while others are staged, lightly fictionalized renderings of reality. Actors and strangers often stand side by side in a single frame. Some of the more peculiar images in the collection, she says, are purely documentary: She prefers not to invent unrealistic scenarios.

Picquot’s work—in particular, her insistence that close observation can make strange that which most of us take for granted—gains new meaning in this time of global pandemic. “People are standing in big hermetic boxes that move very fast,” she has written of the subway, a mode of transportation that until recently seemed mundane. “Sometimes they stand so close [to] each other that they can touch and smell each other’s skin … They mostly pretend to ignore each other.”

That paradox of “group solitude” is Picquot’s primary subject in Total Ground. She is drawn to “intimate gestures in a public space”—the way people grip a subway pole or adjust their hair. These “microevents,” as she calls them, help shape a larger narrative. What is normal about our interconnected, impersonal existence?, Picquot’s photos ask. What lessons would a stranger to our society draw from a look around today?

This article appears in the May 2020 print edition with the headline “Social Distance.”

The Visible Exhaustion of Doctors and Nurses Fighting the Coronavirus

2020-03-27T12:57:20-04:00

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALBERTO GIULIANI

In early March, as coronavirus cases multiplied in Pesaro, a small city on Italy’s Adriatic coast, new restrictions on daily activity were put in place to try to stop the spread of the virus. Alberto Giuliani, a photographer born in Pesaro, says that at first, people made jokes about the new reality.

[Yascha Mounk: The extraordinary decisions facing Italian doctors]

Last week, Giuliani photographed the doctors and nurses who are treating dozens of coronavirus patients at Pesaro’s San Salvatore hospital. He was not psychologically ready, he told me, for what he saw there. Two floors of the hospital had been entirely transformed into critical-care units; patients on the second floor were unconscious. Giuliani decided to set up his camera on that floor, hoping that the air would be “cleaner” with the patients breathing into ventilators. A nurse cried in the hallway. “They do what they usually do, but they know it doesn’t help,” Giuliani said. “But they keep doing that because it’s the only thing they can do. It’s very heavy to carry.”

From left: Francesca Ruggeri, an ICU nurse; Silvia Ligi, an anesthesiologist; and Federico Paolin, an intensive-care doctor and anesthesiologist

During their shifts, which can run up to 12 hours, these doctors and nurses must be fully covered in protective equipment, which they cannot remove for even so much as a glass of water or a bathroom break. When they finish their shift and remove their mask, they bear deep imprints—physical and emotional—of their efforts to ease the crisis.

Margherita Lambertini, a first-aid surgeon (left), and Silvia Giulianelli, an ICU nurse

From left: Annalisa Silvestri, an anesthesiologist; Roberto Rossi, an anesthesiologist; and Martina Turiani, an ICU nurse

One of the doctors Giuliani photographed, Annalisa Silvestri, told me she hadn’t taken a day off in weeks. She cries every night when she comes home, she said, and has trouble sleeping through the night. The day before we spoke, she had intubated the father of a friend.

Gaia Onisin (left) and Federico Neri, nurse anesthetists

From left: Francesco Masetti, an anesthesiologist; Giulio Mensi, an anesthesiologist; and Serena Perez, an ICU nurse

Francesca Palumbo (left) and Laura Zonghetti, ICU nurses

“We are exhausted physically and emotionally but we must go on,” Silvestri wrote in an email after we got off the phone. “People call us heroes but we don’t feel [like] heroes, we are medical doctors trying our best to do the right thing for our patients. We are here to save everybody but as time passes we have understood that this is not possible due to the high number of cases and the lack of equipment. This realization makes us feel powerless.”

On Friday, a former colleague of Silvestri’s died in the San Salvatore ICU. He was a retired doctor who had been working in a private clinic. He specialized in respiratory medicine.

Annalisa Silvestri

Fine Motor Skills

2020-03-08T08:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Christopher Payne

Image above: The stator generates the magnetic field of the motor. The ends of its copper coils are wrapped in tape for insulation and protection.

The workers at the Ward Leonard factory in Thomaston, Connecticut, build motors for heavy industrial and military use. Unlike most other motors manufactured these days—those found in household appliances such as washing machines and dryers, for example—Ward Leonard’s are fabricated and assembled by hand, in accordance with a painstaking process. That process involves inserting copper coils into metal slots fitted with insulating paper, wrapping the ends of the coils in tape, and dipping the whole thing in resin. It is still the best way to ensure that the finished motors are able to withstand the decades of wear they will face on Navy ships, oil rigs, locomotives, freight elevators, and the like. Some motors take two workers a full week to complete.

In November, the photographer Christopher Payne spent two days documenting the factory workers’ efforts. American manufacturing is something of a preoccupation for Payne; in 2016, he published Making Steinway, “a deconstruction of the piano’s unseen constituent parts and a glimpse into the skilled labor required to make them,” and he is working on a forthcoming book that will collect his photographs of factories around the country. Drawing inspiration from the work of Alfred T. Palmer, the lead photographer for the Office of War Information during World War II, Payne says he aims to capture workers in a heroic light.

At Ward Leonard, Payne was taken with the contrast between the apparent disarray of the cascading coils and the orderly structure to which they would ultimately conform. “It seems chaotic,” Payne says, “but it’s really not—all those little wires and coils have a very specific function and a very specific place.”

Christopher Payne

Making motors by hand enables a level of customization that is important to Ward Leonard customers such as the United States Navy, whose ships rely on motors that can weather harsh conditions.

Christopher Payne

This motor will eventually be immersed in a vacuum-pressurized tank of resin. The resin is absorbed into the tape, then hardened in an oven, creating a sealed insulation system.

Christopher Payne

Christmas Under the Bypass

2019-12-22T13:00:00-05:00

U.S. Highway 90, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2015
Photograph by Joshua Dudley Greer

On a warm, sunny December day in 2015, Joshua Dudley Greer drove into New Orleans and set up his large-format camera beneath Pontchartrain Expressway. The scene Greer encountered was both somber and festive, an assertion of personal space in the bowels of an industrial structure marked no loitering. The tinsel, the carefully placed ornaments, the gold star atop a tree too tall to fit inside its owner’s small tent—these items were hardly practical, let alone portable. They suggested, to Greer, “a public gesture,” an effort, perhaps, to stake out a sense of normalcy.

Greer was in New Orleans as part of a series of road trips he’d begun taking in 2011, during which he photographed people and places on and around the American network of superhighways. “Rather than moving quickly through these spaces,” Greer has written, he “made the decision to slowly and deliberately dwell within them, looking for unforeseen moments of humor, pathos and humanity.”

The New Orleans photo contains layers of humanity. While the viewer’s eye is initially drawn to the individuality of the figure in the foreground, closer inspection reveals others in the distance—a reminder of the scale of homelessness, which is ultimately a systemic, nationwide problem.