The New Yorker - 24.08.2026
全球报刊态势与全景学术研判总览 — 2026-08-24
🌐 第一部分：全球宏观战略态势报告（SITREP）
今日综述：本日共全量采集并深度研判来自全球各大主流语系与核心地缘区域的 1 份权威报刊与学术特刊。
📡 今日全球主要报道要闻速览
亚太及全球其他媒体 (Asia-Pacific & Global Others) - 《The New Yorker - 24.08.2026.pdf》当代音乐演出阵容：探讨流行音乐定义的扩展，涵盖从Robyn的舞池曲调到Charli XCX的小众风格转化，以及Brandi Carlile的民谣摇滚行动主义。 - 《The New Yorker - 24.08.2026.pdf》嗨，我嗨了 (Hi, I'm High)：大麻供应商瑞秋·贝尔通过拍摄在博物馆和植物园等公共场所吸食大麻的视频，利用社交媒体算法灰色地带获取百万级浏览量。 - 《The New Yorker - 24.08.2026.pdf》庆祝美国的250周年庆典：作者瑞秋·门罗记录了美国建国250周年筹备的混乱，指出两党委员会America250因资金被特朗普的Freedom 250工作组抽走而陷入内斗。
💡 各大报刊的报道脉络呈现出高度多维的地缘博弈、制度转型、社会痛感与前沿科学突破。读者可通过下方【今日跨报思想雷达总矩阵】快速把握各报最具穿透力的思想理论对话与生活世界痛感切入点，或在【全景报刊分卷】中按区域细读每份大报的具体文章精要、制度权力批判与理性情感辩证。
🧭 第二部分：今日跨报思想文化与批判深思雷达总矩阵
本矩阵自动系统汇编当日全球报刊最具穿透力的 【思想与文化深思切入点】 与 【生活世界痛感切入点】，为学者提供一站式理论对话与现象学经验索引：
- （本日暂未提取到独立的跨报思想雷达条目）
📚 第三部分：全景报刊分卷学术档案与精粹汇编
📍 亚太及全球其他媒体 (Asia-Pacific & Global Others)
📰 《The New Yorker - 24.08.2026.pdf》
Magazine - 24.08.2026当代音乐演出阵容
- 城市谈资 / 当代音乐演出阵容：探讨流行音乐定义的扩展，涵盖从Robyn的舞池曲调到Charli XCX的小众风格转化，以及Brandi Carlile的民谣摇滚行动主义。
- 城市谈资 / 嗨，我嗨了 (Hi, I'm High)：大麻供应商瑞秋·贝尔通过拍摄在博物馆和植物园等公共场所吸食大麻的视频，利用社交媒体算法灰色地带获取百万级浏览量。
- 特派报道 / 庆祝美国的250周年庆典：作者瑞秋·门罗记录了美国建国250周年筹备的混乱，指出两党委员会America250因资金被特朗普的Freedom 250工作组抽走而陷入内斗。
- 自然之控 / 承受热浪：分析欧洲城市应对致命热浪的策略，通过法网公开赛球员辛纳中暑的案例，探讨巴黎通过增加绿植和水设施进行生态转型以缓解高温。
- 自然之控 / 巴黎的生态转型：前市长伊达尔戈通过取消停车位、种植15万棵树使巴黎更绿色，现任市长格雷瓜尔则强调应对高温以缓解社会紧张局势。
- 喧哗与低语 / 成为一个人项目：描述一个名为“成为一个人”的项目，通过提供高度定制化的住房、饮食计划（如生酮、纯素）和“自我导向”的价值观来吸引申请者。
- 科学家的孩子们 / 库鲁病与巫术迷信：探讨巴布亚新几内亚福尔族将库鲁病归因于巫术的迷信，揭示该病实际由妇女和儿童食用死者亲人的人肉导致。
- 科学家的孩子们 / 加杜塞克的被监护儿童：讲述诺贝尔奖得主加杜塞克将国外儿童带回美国抚养的故事，以及被监护人鲁威在回到家乡后面对金钱至上主义的迷茫。
- 科学家的孩子们 / 基甸的矛盾感激：通过诗歌表达被监护人基甸对加杜塞克收养行为的复杂情感，在感激其赋予的生活能力的同时，感受到身份认知的痛苦。
- 素描本 / 信仰的灯芯：作者通过个人叙事描述在多元文化环境下对神灵认知的演变，将信仰比作被不同文化之神点燃的灯芯。
- 人物志 / 马哈茂德·哈利勒的审判：讲述巴勒斯坦人哈利勒因抗议以色列被美国政府利用一项宽泛的移民法条款认定为产生“不利外交政策后果”而面临驱逐。
- 人物志 / 哈利勒的政治观点：哈利勒在采访中否认支持哈马斯，批评所有政治派系仅为自身生存而非人民利益工作，表达了回乡探访祖母村庄的愿望。
- 小说 / 隐藏的生活：通过对家庭饮食记忆的描写，探讨个体在时间流逝中如何将逝者与远方之人混淆，以及对根源身份的认同。
- 评论家 / 书籍 / 瑞秋·库斯克对人格的抗议：分析作家库斯克在《M的生活》及此前作品中通过冷峻、极简的散文风格，模糊作者与叙述者界限的“自动小说”创作特点。
- 简评 / 十九世纪性丑闻剖析：以奥斯卡·王尔德案为例，探讨社会在面对秘密性仪式指控时容易陷入的集体歇斯底里及其对名誉的毁灭性影响。
- 菜单内外 / Hooters 餐厅的救赎：探讨知名餐厅 Hooters 在当代社会环境下是否能够通过自我调整实现品牌救赎。
- 当代电影 / 郊狼对阵 Acme 公司：影评分析新电影《郊狼对阵 Acme 公司》，指出电影在致敬传统的同时，让威利·E·郊狼通过法律途径寻求受伤赔偿。
暂无制度批判分析。
暂无情感辩证分析。
The New Yorker - 24.08.2026.pdf
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在罗素·T·戴维斯（Russell T. Davies）的新剧《蹑手蹑脚》（Tip Toe，10月2日）的预告片中，一位华丽的年长同性恋者用这样一句话总结了当今社会的复仇主义：“我以前走进房间时会直接说，‘哒哒！’现在我得蹑手蹑脚地走——以防万一。”今年秋天旨在捕捉时代精神的电视剧虽然不多，但潜力十足。戴维斯凭借以英国曼彻斯特为背景的原创剧集《同志如此之多》（Queer as Folk）成名，此次他通过 Starz 频道的剧集重返该市的夜生活场景；在剧中，艾伦·卡明（Alan Cumming）饰演一名同性恋酒吧老板，他正与一名恐同邻居作斗争，而该邻居的仇恨被网络激进化所煽动。互联网的残酷在 CBS 的《库比蒂诺》（Cupertino，10月8日）中也有体现，这是《傲骨之妻》（Good Wife）创作者罗伯特·金（Robert King）和米歇尔·金（Michelle King）最新的法律程序剧。迈克·科尔特（Mike Colter）主演这部取材于新闻头条的剧集，故事围绕一家新成立的律师事务所展开，该事务所致力于为硅谷最强大公司的受害者提供法律援助。而在 HBO 的离婚剧《战争》（War，10月1日）中，一位科技大亨（多米尼克·韦斯特 饰）的破坏性琐碎之气，与他那位电影明星妻子（西耶娜·米勒 饰）不相上下。
接下来的几个月还将推出一些不落俗套的设定。其中最突出的是 Apple TV 的元喜剧《兄弟》（Brothers，9月23日），由马修·麦康纳希（Matthew McConaughey）和伍迪·哈尔森（Woody Harrelson）主演，他们饰演的虚拟版本发现彼此可能存在亲缘关系。两人搬到一起居住，与此同时，麦康纳希在考虑竞选德克萨斯州州长。CBS 的《永恒之爱》（Eternally Yours，10月8日）则为姻亲之间永恒的不认可注入了超自然色彩，剧中一对吸血鬼夫妇对女儿的人类伴侣心存疑虑。此外，紧随《寡妇湾》（Widow's Bay）出人意料的流行之后，Netflix 的惊悚剧《下方》（Below，10月8日）讲述了一名纽芬兰渔民（乔什·哈特内特 饰）试图将一个神秘的水下生物从他的沿海村庄赶走的经历。
但同样有许多剧集似乎在押注熟悉感和怀旧情结。穆罕默德·阿里在 Prime Video 的《最伟大》（The Greatest，11月4日）中得到了励志化的呈现，由贾伦·贝斯特（Jaalen Best）饰演年轻时的阿里。《不同的世界》（A Different World，9月24日）是《考斯比一家》（Cosby Show）的衍生剧，背景设定在一家历史悠久的黑人大学，该剧在 Netflix 上重启，深受粉丝喜爱的贾斯敏·盖伊（Jasmine Guy）和卡迪姆·哈里森（Kadeem Hardison）回归出演。马丁·劳伦斯（Martin Lawrence）也将在那部传奇情景喜剧的新衍生剧中再次饰演他的“马丁”角色；由汤米·戴维森（Tommy Davidson）主演的 Paramount+ 剧集《瓦内尔·希尔秀》（The Varnell Hill Show，9月1日）将从戴维森饰演的当地脱口秀主持人的视角，审视电视制作的混乱。
深秋总是可靠地带来万圣节节目。在 Peacock 的《水晶湖》（Crystal Lake，10月15日）中，《星期五13日》系列迎来了一部由 A24 制作的前传，由琳达·卡德里尼（Linda Cardellini）主演。而且，尽管《キャ莉》（Carrie）此前已有三次荧幕改编，但这个由斯蒂芬·金创造的角色——一个对欺凌者进行血腥报复的适应不良高中女孩——成为了恐怖片大拿迈克·弗拉纳根（Mike Flanagan）执导的一部新 Prime Video 系列剧（10月7日）的核心，背景设定在现代。这一次，キャ莉所遭受的骚扰被技术放大了——但她的愤怒依然永恒。
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ART
现代主义、波普艺术、克拉斯纳与波洛克
秋季可以说是纽约博物馆最繁忙的季节，此时它们会举办最宏大且最具学术价值的展览——而今年也不例外。最受关注的展览大致可分为两类：一类是探讨经典人物的展览，另一类则是聚焦于长期创作的在世艺术家的展览。
在前者中，现代艺术博物馆（MoMA）的“布朗库西：艺术家及其工作室”（10月25日开幕）规模宏大。这位现代主义雕塑家在巴黎同一个工作室里工作了四十多年；他去世后，将工作室内的物品留给了法国政府，政府随后建造了一个该空间的复制品来展出这些物品。目前该地点暂时关闭，许多物品——底座、家具、照片和工具——将从巴黎运来参加此次展览，为布朗库西冷峻、抽象的雕塑作品提供丰富的、人性化的背景。
惠特尼美术馆同样在押注一个大名。“罗伊·利希滕斯坦：像新的一样”（10月11日）重新审视了这位著名的波普艺术家在我们数字世界中的预见性。利希滕斯坦的绘画极具辨识度，但许多人可能没有意识到，用手工重新创作大众媒体图像需要投入多少劳动。此次展览回顾了他实践的广度，并包括对他 1962 年首次波普艺术展的重现。惠特尼美术馆还有一个小型配套展览“罗伊·利希滕斯坦：1997”（9月5日），聚焦于他生命的最后一年。
大都会艺术博物馆在回顾历史时采取了略有不同的方法。“克拉斯纳与波洛克：现在进行时”（10月4日）并非首个将这对传奇的抽象表现主义夫妇并列展出的展览，但可能是最全面的一次。杰克逊·波洛克更为出名，但李·克拉斯纳比他多活了近三十年。展览在回顾他们生活历程的同时，探讨了这些复杂关系，包括他们结婚的十二年。它将两人置于平等地位——这是一次迟到已久的女性主义修正。
在当代艺术阵营中，新博物馆以“亚瑟·贾法：我是托尼”（9月24日）领衔，这是该艺术家迄今为止规模最大的展览。贾法最初是一名电影摄影师，参与了诸如朱莉·达什 1991 年的电影《尘埃之女》等作品，随后才转向自己的项目。他在 2016 年凭借短视频蒙太奇作品《爱是信息，信息是死亡》崭露头角，该作品捕捉了非裔美国人生活的痛苦矛盾。这次规模宏大的展览不仅展出动态影像作品，还包括绘画、雕塑和装置。
尽管背景不同，贾法和特蕾莎·马戈莱斯在某种程度上是志同道合者：他们年龄相仿，都将社会政治现实转化为强有力的艺术。MoMA PS1 正在举办马戈莱斯作品的回顾展（9月24日），其根源在于她曾接受过法医病理学训练。展览的核心作品《承诺》（2012）是一个整齐的矩形雕塑，由华雷斯城一座废弃房屋的瓦砾制成，该地因极高的女性杀害率而臭名昭著。与此次展览同步，MoMA 在其一个收藏展厅中展出马戈莱斯的一件新作品（9月17日）。
塔琳·西蒙在处理复杂主题时采取了类似的观念艺术方法。今年秋天，她将用《父亲之国，我爱你》（9月18日）填满古根海姆博物馆的圆形大厅，这是一个筹备了近十年的项目。它追踪了一名联邦官僚特工的生活与时代，但采用了西蒙典型的委婉风格，利用照片、文字和其他作品来揭示一个折射出的叙事。如果你更喜欢直接的叙事方式，可以参观布鲁克林博物馆的“漫画艺术”（10月3日），该展主要通过八位资深艺术家的作品来探讨这种流行的日本漫画形式。
—吉莉安·斯坦豪尔
插画：卡蒂·西拉吉
5
秋季预告
剧院
家庭琐事，经典重塑
今年秋季的舞台上充斥着各种家庭，且每个家庭都以其独特的方式地展现出极度的沮丧。在乔恩·罗宾·拜茨（Jon Robin Baitz）的戏剧《其他沙漠城市》（Other Desert Cities，哈德逊剧院；9月29日开始预演）中，由朱莉娅·路易斯-德雷弗斯、埃德·哈里斯和艾莉森·珍妮主演，剧中的父母们面临着女儿即将出版的回忆录对其社会地位构成的威胁。新音乐剧《通缉》（Wanted，詹姆斯· earl 琼斯；10月15日）改编了关于在逃法外之徒双胞胎的故事。西蒙·斯通（Simon Stone）重新诠释的《樱桃园》（The Cherry Orchard，公园大道军械库；9月16日）将契诃夫笔下争吵不休的贵族搬到了首尔，将其设定为韩国大亨。丹尼尔·费什（Daniel Fish）执导了安妮·卡森（Anne Carson）翻译的索福克勒斯最阴郁的杰作《厄勒克特拉》（Elektra，波隆斯基莎士比亚中心；11月10日），该剧基于一个关于家族复仇的古老故事。在劳伦·伊（Lauren Yee）的超现实主义喜剧《伊之王》（King of the Yees，签名剧院；10月6日）中，一名年轻女性在旧金山唐人街寻找她神秘失踪的父亲（由弗朗西斯·朱饰演）。在尼克·佩恩（Nick Payne）的《不信者》（The Unbelievers，市中心曼哈顿剧院俱乐部；10月13日）中，由劳伦·安布罗斯主演，一个家庭在面对心爱的儿子的失踪时进行反思；而《2:22：鬼故事》（2:22: A Ghost Story，露西尔·洛特尔剧院；10月20日）则暗示，空房子很少像看起来那样空旷。理查德·尼尔森（Richard Nelson）为其莱恩贝克政治剧系列增加了另一部作品：《我们将拭目以待》（We'll See，公共剧院；10月25日）讲述了苹果一家在2026年中期选举投票之夜的故事。
经典作品在多个场馆得到了重启。重启版的《幻想曲》（The Fantasticks，海耶斯剧院；10月22日）将这部史上演出时间最长的非百老汇音乐剧重新改编为一部面向百老汇的同性浪漫剧。史蒂文·帕斯夸莱（Steven Pasquale）执导了克利福德·奥德茨（Clifford Odets）的《等待莱夫蒂》（Waiting for Lefty，经典舞台公司；10月15日），这是他的导演处女作，将一部大萧条时期的出租车罢工剧转变为一场沉浸式的工会大厅投票。由杰米·劳埃德（Jamie Lloyd）执导的具有俱乐部风格的《无事生非》（Much Ado About Nothing，冬日花园剧院；10月31日），由汤姆·希德尔斯顿和海莉·阿特维尔饰演互不相让的单身男女。艾玛·赖斯（Emma Rice）带着她的剧团回到了圣安妮仓库，带来了她坚定乐观的《崔斯坦与伊索尔德》（Tristan & Ysult，11月1日）。莫里哀的《想象的病人》（The Imaginary Invalid，托德·海姆斯；9月25日）由比尔·欧文饰演标题中的病人，其过度膨胀的自我意识和巴洛克式的健康仪式在如今这个追求“颜值最大化”（looksmaxxing）的时代被剥离分析。在音乐剧改编版《本杰明·巴顿奇事》（The Curious Case of Benjamin Button，公共剧院；10月8日）的首演中，生活既是向后经历的，也是向后理解的，由安德鲁·杜兰德主演。由鲁本·圣地亚哥-哈德逊执导的奥古斯特·威尔逊那部带有蓝调色彩的《七把吉他》（Seven Guitars，米齐·E·纽豪斯剧院；11月5日）的演员表包括罗斯琳·鲁夫和约翰·道格拉斯·汤普森。在《少数几个好男人》（A Few Good Men，薇薇安·博蒙特剧院；10月8日）中，一名精明的军方律师揭露了一场掩盖真相的阴谋，由布拉德利·惠特福德饰演标志性的反派角色。
当代对话驱动了许多新作品。玛丽亚·迪齐亚（Maria Dizzia）执导了马林·爱尔兰（Marin Ireland）的剧作《既往病史》（Pre-Existing Condition，格林威治之家；9月1日），讲述了家庭暴力后的影响，演员阵容轮换，包括苏珊娜·弗洛德、哈里·内夫、露皮塔·尼永奥和菲莉帕·苏。埃尔斯·温特（Else Went）的《堕落者》（Degenerates，剧作家地平线剧院；9月16日）深入探讨了一个非自愿独身者（incel）群体。安妮·沃什本（Anne Washburn）的《ANON——我们厨房桌上的风暴》（ANON—a tempest at our kitchen table，MCC；9月25日）讲述了一名 TikTok 博主在郊区街道上展开一面骄傲旗后，与她的德克萨斯邻居产生分歧的故事。莎拉·琼斯（Sarah Jones）推出了她的独角戏《美国，是谁伤害了你？》（America, Who Hurt You?，波隆斯基莎士比亚中心；9月10日），而比利·克里斯塔尔（Billy Crystal）在《860》（Imperial；10月1日）中讲述了他的房子被帕利塞德大火吞噬的故事。
对于那些寻求娱乐的人来说，由蒂娜·兰道（Tina Landau）和塔雷尔·阿尔文·麦克雷尼（Tarell Alvin McCraney）共同构思的《布莱克女士竞选总统》（Ms. Blakk for President，葡萄园剧院；10月15日），复活了变装皇后琼·杰特·布莱克（Joan Jett Blakk，由韦恩·布雷迪饰演）在1992年那场令人愉悦且具有反叛色彩的总统竞选。而乔斯林·比什（Jocelyn Bish）那部充满欢乐的《女学生；或，非洲贱女孩剧》（School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play，塞缪尔·J·弗里德曼剧院；9月8日）将一群加纳寄宿学校的高三学生推向了争夺美貌王冠的公开战斗；由德妮·本顿、帕蒂娜·米勒和贾斯敏·艾米·罗杰斯主演。
—Rhoda Feng
6
插画：露西·琼斯（LUCY JONES），素材照片：罗德里戈·瓦兹（RODRIGO VAZ） / Getty，史密斯收藏（SMITH COLLECTION） / GADDO / Getty
大都会 歌剧院
声音
必须 被听到
在本季的大都会歌剧院，体验世界上最伟大嗓音所带来的无与伦比的力量。
Lise Davidsen 和 Quinn Kelsey 将在威尔第《麦克白》的新制作中担纲主演。
门票 $25 起 metopera.org 212.362.6000
PAOLA KUDACKI / MET OPERA
Peter Gelb MARIA MANETTI SHREM 总经理
Yannick Nézet-Séguin JEANETTE LERMAN-KEUBAUER 音乐总监
Daniele Rustioni 首席客席指挥
秋季预告
电影
外太空怪物，一部关于埃隆·马斯克的纪录片
来自世界各地的怪兽电影即将上映，首先是韩国导演罗弘辰的科幻剧《希望》（9月9日），讲述一名小镇警察与当地猎人联手对抗来自外太空的类爬行动物怪物。亚历克斯·休斯顿·费舍尔和埃莉诺·威尔逊的喜剧幻想片《柳条》（10月23日）由奥利维亚·科尔曼主演，她饰演一名中世纪的鱼贩，在找不到现实生活中的丈夫时，订制了一个由标题中的材料制成的丈夫（亚历山大·斯卡斯加德）。山崎贵史的《Godzilla Minus Zero》（11月6日）将在纽约电影节首映，这部设定在1949年日本的剧情片将带回怪兽偶像。
本季范围广泛的纪录片包括约翰·威尔逊的第一部故事长片《混凝土的历史》（9月18日），这是一次对这种无处不在的物质的特立独行地探索，引导他从皇后区前往俄亥俄州的罗马市和拉斯维加斯。朱莉娅·洛克特夫的《我的不受欢迎的朋友们》第一部分展示了导演在莫斯科的记者朋友们面临迫害的情况；在《第二部分——流亡》（10月9日）中，她展示了其中许多人继续在俄罗斯境外开展工作。由已故的威廉·格里夫斯于1972年拍摄的《从前在哈莱姆》（10月16日），聚集了当时许多哈莱姆文艺复兴时期的年长名流，通过讨论和回忆揭示那个时代的个性与成就；该片由其儿子大卫·格里夫斯于2025年死后完成。关于亚历克斯·吉布尼对埃隆·马斯克的调查式肖像片《马斯克》（10月16日），除了四小时的片长外，目前知之甚少。
新的文学改编作品包括《弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的昼与夜》（9月4日），基于作者1919年的小说，讲述一名出身名门的女性（海莉·本内特）为了追求天文学家的职业生涯而拒绝了一场包办婚姻；由蒂娜·加拉维执导。乔治亚·奥克利的《理智与情感》（10月16日）为简·奥斯汀关于经济拮据的达什伍德姐妹浪漫波折的小说带来了全新的演绎；演员阵容包括黛西·埃德加-琼斯、埃斯梅·克里德-迈尔斯、凯特莉奥娜·巴尔夫和博迪·雷·布雷斯纳克。根据科琳·胡佛小说改编的惊悚片《真相》（10月2日）由达科塔·约翰逊主演，她饰演一名作家，开始怀疑她受雇为其代笔的一位成功作家（安妮·海瑟薇）犯下了谋杀罪。
喜剧片则由亚历山德罗·G·伊纳里图的《挖掘者》（10月2日）将汤姆·克鲁斯的超级巨星光芒融入其中，讲述一名石油大亨被总统（约翰·古德曼）召集以阻止一场环境灾难。在约瑟夫·久保田-弗拉迪卡的《哈酱，摇摆你的臀部！》（9月25日）中，故事设定在东京，一名丧偶的舞厅舞者（菊地凛子）迷恋上了一名已婚的舞蹈教师（阿尔贝托·格拉）。莫德·阿帕托执导其母亲莱斯利·曼出演的《诗意许可》（10月16日），讲述一名中年女性在当地大学旁听课程，并与两名年轻学生（库珀·霍夫曼和安德鲁·巴斯·费尔德曼）产生浪漫纠葛的故事。
本季的传记片在精神与肉体、现代与历史之间摆动。《不择手段》（9月4日）由埃莉根斯·布拉顿执导，基于黑帮分子格雷戈里·斯卡帕（马克·沃尔伯格）的真实故事，他在1966年与一名F.B.I.特工（亚雅·阿卜杜勒-马廷二世）合作调查密西西比州民权活动人士被谋杀的案件。迈克尔·道斯的《特技司机》（9月25日）由杰·巴鲁切尔饰演大胆的肯·卡特，他在二十世纪七十年代试图驾驶一辆火箭动力车横跨圣劳伦斯河。《黄金时段》（9月25日）将电视节目《捕捉捕食者》的开发过程戏剧化，由克里斯·汉森（罗伯特·帕丁森）主演；兰斯·奥本海姆执导。亚伦·索金的《社交清算》（10月9日）是《社交网络》的续集，由杰里米·斯特朗饰演马克·扎克伯格，其前员工（麦基·麦迪逊）向一名记者（杰里米·艾伦·怀特）披露了Facebook的内部运作情况。
—理查德·布罗迪
8
插图：KATI SZILÁGYI
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The Folio Society
启发大银幕的书籍
秋季预告
舞蹈
向奥斯卡·王尔德与西妮德·奥康诺尔致敬
今年秋天，舞蹈舞台上的许多令人兴奋的演出都来自访演的舞团和艺术家；毕竟，纽约是一个十字路口。一个典型的例子是：本季的开篇之作——“秋季舞蹈节”（Fall for Dance Festival，纽约市中心中心；9月22日至10月3日），将呈现一段 bulería（一种欢快、快节奏的独舞），由年轻的弗拉门戈巨星胡安·托马斯·德·拉·莫利亚（Juan Tomás de la Molía）表演，他是西班牙舞蹈中喧闹风格的倡导者。此外，迈阿密城市芭蕾舞团也将亮相，演出亚历克谢·拉特曼斯基（Alexei Ratmansky）的《南方玫瑰》（Roses from the South），这是一部以施特劳斯圆舞曲为配乐、俏皮且温柔的新芭蕾舞剧。
在更大规模的演出方面，澳大利亚芭蕾舞团自2012年以来首次回归（市中心中心；10月8日至11日），目前由前美国芭蕾舞剧院（American Ballet Theatre）明星大卫·霍尔伯格（David Hallberg）执掌。该舞团将表演《奥斯卡》（Oscar），这是一部受爱尔兰才子奥斯卡·王尔德（Oscar Wilde）的生平、著作及其臭名昭著的审判所启发的雄心勃勃的新芭蕾舞剧。编舞由以《MJ》闻名的克里斯托弗·惠尔登（Christopher Wheeldon）担纲。值得注意的是，这是极少数深入探讨同性之爱的故事芭蕾舞剧之一。
在《激增》（The Surge，乔伊斯剧院；9月16日至27日）中，编舞师索尼娅·塔耶（Sonya Tayeh）创造了另一种形式的致敬——向艺术家西妮德·奥康诺尔（Sinéad O'Connor）致敬，我们中的许多人将她与青少年时期的焦虑联系在一起。塔耶并没有讲述奥康诺尔的故事，而是通过十名舞者的身体传达这位歌手狂烈的能量，这些舞者全部是四十岁以上的女性，且每个人都有话要说。
总部位于班加罗尔的 Nrityagram 舞团的访问——他们将把《Khankhana》带到乔伊斯剧院（10月13日至18日）——向来是一件盛事，因为该团的驻团编舞师兼领导者苏鲁帕·森（Surupa Sen）是最伟大的印度古典舞奥迪西（Odissi）诠释者之一。森的编舞扩展了这一古老形式，增加了双人舞和动态范围；她的舞者全部在她的指导下训练，动作具有非凡的清晰度和敏锐度。
自从前团员迈克尔·诺瓦克（Michael Novak）接管保罗·泰勒舞蹈公司（Paul Taylor Dance Company）以来，他通过增加新作品和挖掘档案，将剧目扩展到了泰勒之外。在戴维·H·科赫剧院（11月4日至22日），该团体将表演《张力参与》（Tensile Involvement，1953年），这是后者的一个例子，是由如今很少被演出的阿尔温·尼古莱斯（Alwin Nikolais）进行的一次电子音乐与肢体抽象实验。这部作品就像一个迷幻的“翻绳”游戏，舞者们变成了机器中色彩斑斓的零件。该公司还将重新推出《拜占庭》（Byzantium，1984年），这是泰勒的噩梦系列作品之一——是对过去和现在人类的愚蠢与颓废的唤起。
——玛丽娜·哈斯（Marina Hars）
当代音乐
流行与摇滚的多面性
在社交媒体时代，流行音乐已经涵盖了如此之多的不同事物，而从秋季的当代音乐演出阵容中，你可以看到其定义在过去十年中扩展的所有方式。如果流行音乐是一种拥有自身音色的流派，那么这种音色可以在瑞典舞池 sensation Robyn 的曲调中听到（巴克莱中心；9月4日，10日）。如果流行音乐是所有流行事物的融合，那么它的多种轮廓则体现在法国歌手 Lolo Zouaï 的歌曲中，她摆弄着声音与语言的边界（蓝色票据爵士俱乐部；9月9日），以及帕萨迪纳表演者 Tinashe 的歌曲中，自2014年以来，她一直处于独立流行乐打破流派尝试的中心（布鲁克林参数剧院；10月24日）。如果流行音乐是一个剖析何为“酷”且具有影响力之观念的载体，那么看看 Charli XCX（巴克莱中心；9月14-15日）和 Phoebe Bridgers（巴克莱中心；9月24-26日）就足够了，这些艺术家将相对小众的风格和独立明星地位转化为能填满体育馆的狂热追随。
但流行音乐比这些界限更广阔。根源音乐和美式根源音乐（Americana）领域同样充满了流行的可能性。创作歌手 Brandi Carlile 在沉思的民谣摇滚中游刃有余，将个人经历作为行动主义的延伸（森林山体育场；9月26日）。新西兰艺术家 Aldous Harding 让独立民谣感觉像是一场单人综艺，她宏伟的新专辑《Train on the Island》极大地丰富了她的角色阵容（布鲁克林钢铁中心；9月12日）。在无线电城音乐厅，Alabama Shakes 将带着充满灵魂的南方摇滚及其十一年来的首张专辑《I Must Be Dreaming》回归（9月2日），而乡村说唱融合艺术家 Shaboozey——其单曲《A Bar Song (Tipsy)》在2024年席卷排行榜——将演绎纯正的法外之徒风格（10月3日）。
嘻哈音乐在千禧之交倾斜了流行轴心，并且依然是其品味的裁决者。陷阱音乐旋律大师 Don Toliver 将在巴克莱中心展现其明星风采（9月6日），而朋克陷阱先驱 Rico Nasty 则回归
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插画：KATTI SZILAGYI
疑病症的。而且有点疯狂。
想象中的
病者
由莫里哀（MOLIÈRE）编写，比尔·欧文（BILL IRWIN）改编并主演 布兰登·J·迪登（BRANDON J. DIRDEN）执导
百老汇演出 9月25日开始 托德·海姆斯剧院（Todd Haimes Theatre），西42街227号 购票请访问 RoundaboutTheatre.org
《想象中的病者》由三州凯迪拉克（Tri-State Cadillac）荣誉赞助，该公司为 Roundabout 剧团的官方汽车合作伙伴。 《想象中的病者》的主要支持由布兰奇和欧文·劳里基金会（Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation）以及劳拉·佩尔斯国际戏剧基金会（Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater）提供。
秋季预告
在 Knockdown Center 演出，凭借其准备好在 mosh pit 中狂欢的新专辑《RX》（9月13日）。布鲁克林参数剧院（Brooklyn Paramount）将迎来英国地下场景的奇才 EsDeeKid（9月15日），以及自 2010 年代初期以来一直在重塑帮派说唱的 ScHoolboy Q（10月3日）。Vince Staples（布鲁克林钢铁剧院；10月27日）同样如此；他的最新唱片《Cry Baby》将他带向了一个更明确的政治立场，同时也向蓝调摇滚和后朋克方向推进。
在流行光谱的另一个端点，艺术家们正在尝试大众想象中对摇滚乐的定义。9月15-16, 噪音偶像 Kim Gordon 在华沙（Warsaw）扩展了朋克传统的触角。英国虚拟组合 Gorillaz 几十年来一直如此，继续测试乐队定义的边界（麦迪逊广场花园；9月29日）。在同一场馆，脏乱风格的低保真流行融合者 beabadoobee 与鞋帮摇滚复兴者 Wisp 联手演出，将年轻人置于这些失传艺术的中心（10月5日）；而前卫 R&B 的打破常规者 Kelela 则在布鲁克林参数剧院（10月9-10日）将这些声音与她的作品融合，创造出一个全新的化身。随后，10月16日，在纽约伦理文化协会（New York Society for Ethical Culture），菲尔·埃尔弗鲁姆（Phil Elverum）将以 Mount Eerie 的身份演出，其对生命与死亡的深刻沉思完美地映衬了秋日的忧郁。
—谢尔顿·皮尔斯（Sheldon Pearce）
古典音乐
赖希的世界，大都会的谋杀
时间是音乐中最大的谜团：歌曲与声音总是转瞬即逝，却又在它们所处的时刻之外永恒存在。先驱极简主义者史蒂夫·赖希（Steve Reich）在将时间的箭头弯曲成圆环方面，所做的贡献不亚于任何一位作曲家，但即便是他也无法让时间静止：他将在十月迎来九十岁生日，他的家乡正为此关注。在公园大道军械库（Park Avenue Armory），赖希的同名乐团将与 Alarm Will Sound 合作，带来他那万花筒般的《18位音乐家的音乐》（Music for 18 Musicians）的舞台扩展版（10月14-18日）。在 National Sawdust，埃里克·霍尔（Erik Hall）将呈现他对同一作品的沉浸式演绎，并搭配西蒙·滕·霍尔特（Simeon ten Holt）更为华丽但同样具有催眠效果的《固定咏叹调》（Canto Ostinato）（9月26日）。Sô Percussion 将把《鼓击》（Drumming）带到 92NY（10月28日），在这部作品中，赖希利用从埃维族鼓手和巴厘岛甘美兰演奏者那里学到的技巧，编织出脉动的节奏网。布莱斯·德斯纳（Bryce Dessner）和尼科·穆利（Nico Muhly）将参加卡内基音乐厅的一场全赖希曲目演出（10月22日），其中包含两场美国首演。而三一教堂（Trinity Church）则围绕赖希根据希伯来圣经文本创作的设定（《诗篇》、《旅人之祷》、《雅各之梯》）举办三场午间合唱音乐会（9月23日、9月30日、10月7日），随后在10月7日举办一场专题晚会。
大都会歌剧院则剑拔弩张，三位悲剧女主角将唱出驱使她们杀人的原因：野心（威尔第的《麦克白》，9月22日开演，由莉丝·达维森和奎恩·凯尔西饰演背信弃义的苏格兰人）、嫉妒（切鲁比尼的《美狄亚》，10月30日开演，由索尼娅·约切娃饰演主角）以及绝望（普契尼的《托斯卡》，将于11月1日开始另一轮贯穿整个季度的演出）。而对于米西·马佐利（Missy Mazzoli）备受期待的、根据乔治·桑德斯小说《林肯在巴多》（Lincoln in the Bardo）改编的作品（10月19日全球首演），预计将是对悲剧的一种更具唐吉诃德式的诠释，且较少出现捅刺情节。
室内乐协会（Chamber Music Society）的开幕之夜延续这一主题，采用全美国曲目，其中包括《精神病患者》（Psycho）配乐的音乐会版本（10月13日）。在米勒剧院（Miller Theatre），一种不同类型的紧张感驱动着小提琴手詹妮弗·科（Jennifer Koh）对巴赫全部奏鸣曲与组曲的冲击（9月24日）。细腻的英籍牙买加作曲家埃莉诺·阿尔伯加（Eleanor Alberga）将亲自操琴，呈献她的新钢琴五重奏（National Sawdust；10月30日）。与此同时，纽约爱乐乐团通过几部新委约作品，庆祝终于拥有了古斯塔沃·杜达梅尔（Gustavo Dudamel）——终于不用再与洛杉矶共享了。佐莎·迪·卡斯特里（Zosha Di Castri）的《隐形之屋》（Invisible House）和塔妮娅·莱昂（Tania León）的《混血意象》（Imágenes mestizas）将分别与普罗科菲耶夫和马勒的第五交响曲首演（9月16-19日；9月25-27, 29日）。此外，为了给惊悚季献礼，乐团将在电影放映的同时，演奏乔丹·皮尔电影《逃出绝命镇》（Get Out）的原声带（10月28-31日）。
—费格斯·麦金托什（Fergus McIntosh）
插画由露西·琼斯（LUCY JONES）绘制，顶部来源照片来自 GETTY；底部来源照片由 STEPHEN J. COHEN / GETTY 拍摄
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SKECHERS
纽约
市 芭蕾舞团
267
9月22日 开演
旅行者 全球赞助商
彭博 慈善基金会
照片由 Elizaveta Porodina 拍摄 © 2025
城市谈资
评论：选举游戏
唐纳德·特朗普从未因其计票能力而闻名。2021年1月，在他那次臭名昭著的给佐治亚州州务卿打的电话中——当时他试图在他刚刚输掉的总统选举中再找回11,780票——他声称有“数万名”潜在支持者在投票站被拒之门外，且有5,000名死者参与了投票。他随后称乔·拜登的获胜在“统计学上是不可能的”，而他在2024年的随后的胜利则是“129年来最大的授权”。（这些说法均不属实。）在7月的一次演讲中，他要求参议院通过《保障美国选民资格法案》（Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act）——也被称为《拯救美国法案》（SAVE America Act）——他抱怨称有“数千万张选票在邮件中漫无目的地漂浮”，仿佛美国邮政局是一条通往虚无之路。本月晚些时候，在提到多数党领袖约翰·图恩参议员时，他说：“他拥有通过该法案所需的选票。”图恩告诉CNN：“那一定是一种不同的数学形式。”
图恩的计算比特朗普的更准确：参议院在未对《拯救美国法案》进行投票的情况下休会。但特朗普试图改变美国投票参数的这一动荡季节尚未结束；中期选举即将到来，该法案将在9月以某种形式重新出现。而这仅仅是一套方案的一部分，该方案还包括
一项行政命令、起诉威胁以及街头恐吓，所有这些都是为了让特朗普的数学逻辑成立。
四位共和党参议员——丽莎·穆尔科夫斯基、苏珊·柯林斯、汤姆·蒂利斯和米奇·麦康奈尔——反对该法案。该法案将强制要求美国人在登记投票时提供许多人难以轻易获得的公民身份“证明文件”，且通常必须亲自办理。代表阿拉斯加州的穆尔科夫斯基在为《华尔街日报》撰写的一篇评论文章中写道，仅仅是登记投票，就要求她的一些选民从岛上乘坐 Bering Air 航班前往大陆，而结果可能只是发现——如果他们年龄较大、是阿拉斯加原住民或改过姓名的已婚女性——他们的文件不足以作为证明。选民在选举日还需要出示带有照片的身份证件，
或者在邮寄选票时附上身份证件副本，这引发了对隐私的担忧。
然而，国会法案并非特朗普唯一的工具，也不一定是其首选。总检察长 D. 约翰·索尔已向最高法院提交了一项紧急请愿，请求允许总统实施一项关于邮寄投票的行政命令，该命令在中期选举前已被下级法院禁制。该命令极其混乱；如果它被全面实施，不仅会剥夺许多合格公民的投票权，还会破坏邮寄投票系统，甚至可能破坏邮政局。基本上，它强制执行一场多向的“乒乓球游戏”：在选举前60天，国土安全部将根据一组杂乱的数据库，向每个州发送一份其认为的公民名单，而各州则向邮政局提供他们认为有资格进行邮寄投票的人员名单。随后，邮政局将以某种尚未定义的方式，制定一份“邮寄及缺席参与名单”。如果你不在该名单上，邮政局将不允许投递你的选票。不出所料，一家下级法院表示，该命令似乎是对总统权力的一种违宪使用。
这里存在多重讽刺。正如穆尔科夫斯基的反对意见所示，受这些规则影响最严重的美国人将是农村选民，而这些人往往倾向于支持共和党。据估计，大约一半的美国人持有有效的护照——这是最简单的公民身份证明——但在蓝色州纽约，这个数字要高得多
照片插图：CRISTIAN COUCERO； 来源照片：GETTY
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（比例超过 70%），而西弗吉尼亚州的红色地带则低得多（约 20%）。传统上，一直是对共和党人反对将选举实践“联邦化”，他们更倾向于让各州自行处理。
特朗普在此时此刻也在毒化这一进程，而美国的投票系统确实需要加强。对于外国（或国内）干预的担忧，尤其是在人工智能时代，并非凭空想象。每个州都有自己的系统，其中许多系统摇摇欲坠或濒临淘汰。根据布伦南中心（Brennan Center）的数据，一些地方选举管理人员在 eBay 上购买投票机的备件。而过去十年历史性的移民浪潮可能进一步缩小了容错空间。在新泽西州，有 6600 人在向车辆管理局申请执照或身份证件时声明自己是非公民，但却被错误地登记为选民，其中约 400 人参与了投票。该州与一家外部软件承包商就谁该为此负责而产生分歧，但这一失误正是压力之下的系统所呈现的症状。
然而，特朗普在选举安全方案中最显著的特点是其惩罚性。在特朗普 7 月的演讲后，国土安全部部长马克韦恩·马林（Markwayne Mullin）表示：“如果你是非法移民，或者你非法投票，我们将追捕你，找到你，并起诉你。”这是否意味着联邦特工将驻守在投票站周围——即佩戴着徽章的选举压制？政府已起诉数十个州以获取选民信息，而新的行政命令还威胁要起诉任何“协助和教唆”分发甚至印刷非公民可能投递的选票的人。选举工作人员，或证件不完备的合格公民，可能不愿承担这种风险。
那么特朗普在打什么主意？他的提案不会带来安全，但可能会导致混乱，或者产生混乱的感知，而他可以在一场势均力敌的选举之后利用这一点。他可能也在为中期选举如果对他总统任期造成打击而寻找借口。（即便如此，特朗普本人不会出现在选票上，这降低了他作弊的动力；他最关心的是他自己的支持率。）此外，总统可能希望进一步挑起公民与非公民之间的分歧。
上个月，在 Truth Social 上，特朗普告诉图恩（Thune），为了通过《拯救美国法案》（SAVE America Act），他应该废除需要 60 票门槛的阻挠议事（filibuster），并补充说，如果共和党失去对参议院的控制，“民主党会在第一天就这么做”。（他曾询问追随者，“Dumbocrat”或“Dumocrat”哪个是更好的称呼。）“第一天”可能很快就到了，特朗普深知这一点。 ——艾米·戴维森·索金
赠品部门
条纹衫促销
Debbie Tymon 是纽约洋基队的营销高级副总裁，她的办公室位于球场内，就在本垒板后方，窗外可以俯瞰比赛日球迷排队入场的通道。因此，当球迷们为了参加“洋基队渔夫帽之夜”或“洋基队足球球衣之夜”等促销活动而比平时更早排队时，她能亲眼见证自己的劳动成果——通常第一批一万八千名球迷在入场时会收到免费赠品。
如果首球投掷时间是七点，大门可能会在五点开放。“但对于最热门的单品，他们下午一点，甚至十二点半就会开始排队，”Tymon 前几天说道。球场有四个主要入口，那里的队伍可能会重叠，甚至蜿蜒回溯到地铁出口。如果你是个棒球粉丝，这听起来像地狱，但对于致力于提高上座率的 Tymon 来说，这简直是天堂。“这真的让人很有成就感，”她说。
她的工作空间里愉快地堆满了洋基队的纪念品——几乎就像一个十二岁孩子想象中洋基队高管办公室的样子。办公桌上摆放着本赛季最受期待的赠品：一个乔治·康斯坦扎（George Costanza）的摇头娃娃，这个由杰森·亚历山大饰演的《赛恩菲尔德》（Seinfeld）角色将在本月一场对阵休斯顿太空人的比赛中发放。今年夏天的一些赠品与洋基队毫无关系——例如 Hello Kitty 和“KPop 恶魔猎人”的摇头娃娃。但康斯坦扎摇头娃娃除外：该角色在剧集中的几个赛季里曾在洋基队担任“旅行秘书助理”，这使得这项如今已成为年度活动的赠品活动成为了极少数具有真正协同效应的促销。去年的“康斯坦扎日”引起了轰动。当球迷走出球场时，潜伏在侧的投机商出价一百加元购买这些小雕像；如今，卖家在 eBay 上的开价高达一千加元。
今年的康斯坦扎摇头娃娃穿着一件洋基队夹克，手里拿着一个卡尔佐内（calzone）——这是在向 1996 年的一集致敬，在那集中，乔治的雇佣条件取决于他能否为球队现实中的老板、已故的乔治·斯坦布雷纳每天采购茄子卡尔佐内。（在剧中，该角色仅以背面出现，由剧集联合创作者拉里·大卫配音。）在办公桌前，Tymon 举起这个质感扎实、高七英寸的小雕像，并指出了卡尔佐内中精心绘制的腊肠和茄子碎片。“看看这质量？”她说。“把这个”——她举起一枚由另一支大联盟球队发放给球迷的看起来很廉价的胸针——“和这个”——摇头娃娃——对比一下。
Tymon 在洋基队已经度过了她的第四十二个赛季，她的条纹衫职业生涯始于 20 世纪 80 年代，
Debbie Tymon
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瑞典 德国 挪威 丹麦 芬兰 英国 美国 加拿大 法国 瑞士 荷兰
作为团体票和季票销售总监。她是一位优雅、苗条的女性，穿着一件白色连衣裙，戴着一条粗犷的绿松石项链，看起来像是一位在圣达菲或缅因州沿海某地的画廊主。她的同事克雷格·卡特梅尔（Craig Cartmell）也一同出席，他是球队的市场与推广高级副总监，穿着则更为常规：一件洋基队的 Polo 衫和牛仔裤。
卡特梅尔与制作科斯坦扎（Costanza）摇头娃娃的供应商合作，他解释了这一多步骤的流程。首先，必须与掌控该剧版权的华纳兄弟公司达成协议。然后，杰森·亚历山大（Jason Alexander）必须批准该方案。（杰里·赛恩菲尔德（Jerry Seinfeld）是一位著名的大都会队球迷，他对此事没有发言权，不过 Tymon 表示他是摇头娃娃的粉丝。）随后，华纳兄弟与制造商合作设计头部，负责确保演员的形象还原，而洋基队则负责身体部分。值得注意的是，摇头娃娃秃顶部分的轮廓与亚历山大在“卡尔佐尼（calzone）剧集”中的样子完全一致——这再次体现了对细节的关注。
在 Tymon 任职期间，赠品业务发生了变化。“我记得当时试图说服斯坦布伦先生，认为 Beanie Baby 玩偶是一个很好的促销方案，”她说。“斯坦布伦先生说：‘我们不赠送小填充动物。’”那不符合洋基队的风格。但 Tymon 知道，Beanie Baby 可能会通过吸引年轻家庭来扩大球队的粉丝群。她给了斯坦布伦一本 Beanie Baby 目录，并请他给孙辈们看。“让他们挑选第一个 Beanie Baby，”她建议道。“于是他把它带回坦帕，第二天给我打电话，说：‘Valentino！’——一只带着红心的白熊——然后就挂了电话。”历史由此创造。这不仅是一次成功的促销，而且大卫·威尔斯（David Wells）在当天——1998年5月17日——投出了棒球历史上第15场完美比赛。现在，一只洋基队的 Valentino 玩偶被收藏在库珀斯敦的棒球名人堂中。
并非所有的赠品都能成功。Tymon 提到球队曾考虑过一项涉及火鸡角色的摇头娃娃促销活动。“但我们觉得，根据发放的时间点，这可能会产生负面含义，”Tymon 指出。“在六月份经历一次低迷之后，你肯定不想发放一个火鸡头。”
—布鲁斯·汉迪（Bruce Handy）
仅限会员：罗克威的复兴
无论你怎么评价罗伯特·摩西，但这个人在选择浴场方面确实有眼光。在建设琼斯海滩时，他坚持为他的“人民宫殿”使用昂贵的砖块，因为这能与沙滩相得益彰。随后，他在罗克威的雅各布·里斯公园（Jacob Riis Park）建造了一个巨大的装饰艺术风格综合体，为大萧条时期的纽约人提供了丰厚的设施：日光浴室、露天舞池和溜冰场。二十世纪七十年代，在纽约市将里斯公园的控制权移交给联邦政府后，这座公共娱乐纪念碑被关闭了。从那时起，它一直处于休眠状态，像一座废墟一样俯瞰着“人民海滩”。
本月，雅各布·里斯浴场将以“罗克威海洋俱乐部”（Rockaway Ocean Club）之名重新开放。该项目由布鲁克林集市（Brooklyn Bazaar）背后的公司发起，该公司曾曾在威廉斯堡举办仓库派对，现在经营一些海滨步道的特许经营店。翻修这座历史建筑需要 8800 万美元的投资，同时对原有的使命进行了某种程度的升级。该综合体的一部分现在成为了私人俱乐部，会员可以进入一个新的泳池、共享办公空间并享受其他特权。年费 2000 美元起，还不包括高昂的入会费。俱乐部为当地居民和 30 岁以下的人员提供折扣。对于半岛上的一些人来说，这次“拯救”是一次背叛。
“看起来政府在变卖我们的公共财产，”罗克威居民、该市首位女性首席救生员珍妮特·法什（Janet Fash）前几天说道。俱乐部曾联系过 66 岁的法什，希望邀请她举办新回忆录《救生员：一个爱情故事》（Lifeguard: A Love Story）的朗读会。在试营业前几天，俱乐部为法什和她的丈夫鲍勃（Bob）安排了一次参观。
俱乐部的共同所有者乌苏拉·达马尼（Ursula Damani）带领着这次参观，并一直试图在批评声响起前抢占先机。“人们一直在谈论浴场以前是免费的，是公共的，”她在入口附近说道，“但实际上它并不是免费的。”她在一些原有的石灰岩售票窗口前停了下来，当年去海滩的人在这里支付 25 美分租一个储物柜，或支付 50 美分租一间更衣室。
法什戴着一顶绿松石色的渔夫帽，穿着一件花卉印花连衣裙，她读了一块日期为 1932 年的铭牌：“由纽约市为市民的娱乐而兴建。”
“这句话指导了我们项目中的一切，”达马尼说。他们穿过一个庭院，进入了一家将供应地中海美食的餐厅。鲍勃穿着一件印有纽约市消防局（F.D.N.Y.）摩托车俱乐部标志的 Polo 衫，询问起着装要求。“我们刚刚讨论过是否要求穿鞋，”达马尼说，“因为保险原因，我们必须要求穿鞋。”
当政府接管里斯公园时，这座破旧浴场的东翼被交给国家公园管理局（National Park Service）的救生员使用。“人们开玩笑说，首席救生员把它当成了自己的车库，”法什说。她回忆起青少年时期去那栋充满石棉的建筑里参加派对的情景：“所有罗克威的女孩都会来。有一晚有人用了笑气，所有人的说话声音都像鸭子一样。”
在最近一次海滨步道的被起哄事件后，达马尼说她从法什的回忆录中得到了安慰，书中记录了她与救生员工会内部腐败和性别歧视的长期斗争。“我学到了一点，如果我把那些烂事原样还给他们，他们反而会尊重我，”达马尼说。
在二楼，一支施工队正致力于完成二十八间酒店客房的装修，这些房间计划于明年夏天开放。一个铺设着原装水蓝色瓷砖的私人休息室面向大海。下方的海岸线已被围挡两年多，等待清除旧的木桩。“他们没有维护这个公园，”法什（Fash）说道，“这对我来说毫无道理。”达马尼（Damani）将此归咎于官僚主义，她表示这同样推迟了俱乐部的开业：“我们花了六年时间才签下租约。我可能和联邦政府中每一个缩写代表的部门都打过交道。”对于一个代表海滩长期存在的酷儿群体的联盟发起的抵制行动，她并不太担心，该联盟称这个俱乐部是一个“单薄的私有化计划”。“一旦我们开业并
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她说，他们看到的是“这个”。“我对此并不太担心。”
下一站是一个屋顶露台，可以俯瞰曼哈顿的天际线。达马尼（Damani）说：“我们确保公众能够进入这座建筑最精华的部分。”她设想的是类似于意大利海滩俱乐部那样的地方。“他们不会把价格定得太高，”她说，“这非常民主。”法什（Fash）在她的书上签了名，并同意就可能的朗读活动保持联系。
离开导游后，这对夫妇交流了看法。“看到这样一座美丽的建筑重新焕发生机，我很高兴，”法什说。“我会为此花大钱吗？我觉得不会。而且我已经住在海边了。”鲍勃（Bob）说他可能会加入。他的妻子看起来很惊讶。
“我喜欢拥有全方位访问权限，”他说，“我偶尔会带你来这里吃晚餐。”
—杰克·奥芬巴茨（Jake Offenbartz）
权宜之计部门：高级艺术
"展现，而非讲述"是一条古老的写作格言。当涉及到大麻营销时，同样的建议是否适用？“你不能在 Instagram 上发布大麻，”纽约大麻产品供应商 Gotham 的内容总监瑞秋·贝尔（Rachel Bell）前几天说道。她当时站在古根海姆博物馆的圆形大厅里，穿着一条灰色裙子和一件绿色 T 恤。“即使在你所在的州这是合法的，Meta 也不在乎——他们会把它删掉。”
真是扫兴。但记录这种“快感”本身呢？事实证明，这是一个可以避开算法的灰色地带，贝尔在带着一名摄影师吸了电子烟并参观 2023 年 Frieze 艺术博览会时发现了这一点。“我嗨了，”她在这次远征的一段视频中说道，漫步经过一幅类似罗斯科风格的画布。“好吧，这太绝了。太喜欢这个了。”随后，她又在 10 毫克“欢愉”软糖的增强效果下参观了美国自然历史博物馆。“抱歉，伙计们，你们死定了，”贝尔在一对标本羚羊前说道。“猫头鹰真是古怪得要命的生物，”她在另一个展柜前观察道。
这个名为“嗨，我嗨了”（Hi, I'm High）的系列视频浏览量不断攀升，贝尔参观纽约植物园的那集浏览量超过了 100 万次。（“那一集叫《哈德逊河上的奇迹》，”她读着一株玫瑰丛上的标签说，“就像那个降落飞机的家伙一样？”）Gotham 四家门店的访客人数也随之增加。
Gotham 的创始人乔安娜·威尔逊（Joanne Wilson）对结果感到满意。“瑞秋如此迷人且讨人喜欢，仅仅看到她在影响下体验世界并保持好奇，就会让你想要参与其中，”她说。
拍摄这些视频并不总是轻而易举。“在过去的两集中，我们被告知停止拍摄——这简直是我的噩梦，”贝尔说。“当你没清醒的时候，很难迅速调整方向。”在前往古根海姆博物馆的路上，她喝了一罐注入 THC 的柠檬水；她的摄影师詹卢卡·兰达佐（Gianluca Randazzo）则没有喝。“我就像是个‘指定驾驶员’，”他说。
她走到票务柜台，放下了她的信用卡。被拒绝了。“呃。好吧，试试另一张，”她说，在钱包里翻找着。“有人没按时报销费用。”
进入博物馆后，贝尔和兰达佐乘电梯到了顶层。“这里是个讨论你消费了什么的好地方，”兰达佐说。
“就在这个边缘上？”贝尔问。她俯身向下看。“天哪，这会让人感到眩晕！”她停了下来，听到小脚丫跑近的啪嗒声。“我们最大的障碍之一，”她说。“大麻内容中不能出现孩子。”
“在 AKC 狗展时简直是一场噩梦，”兰达佐说。“到处都是孩子。”
贝尔准备开始探索。“那是艺术品还是沙发？”她看着一排灰色垫子问道。“我看到了屁股印。”她向前走，又发现了一些。“确认这些确实是沙发，而不是艺术品，因为为什么会有不止一个？”
他们经过一个长长的黑色圆柱体（“泡沫轴，”贝尔说。这是卡罗尔·博夫的一件符号作品）和一个链条网（“网格，”同样是博夫的作品）。“我听说，大约 58% 来这里的人是为了建筑，而不是为了艺术，”她说。
他们在由漂流木、海贝和孔雀羽毛组成的组合作品前停了下来，标题为《马的泡沫唾液》，同样是博夫的作品。“我不想显得不知感恩，”贝尔说，“但我希望能看到一些绘画。除了这个圆圆的部分，博物馆里还有其他东西吗？”她偶然发现了一些金框画作。“噢，太棒了，”她说。“莫迪利亚尼，走起。”她大声读出皮埃尔·波纳尔一幅描绘桌边女子的画作下方的标签：“画家经常描绘的妻子。这就是我想看到的。你的妻子应该被描绘。”
“你想坐下来聊聊你的感受吗？”兰达佐问。
“设计得太浪费了，”贝尔总结道。“画作不够多。”
三十三岁的贝尔来到了她的
“我们花了这么多时间试图拯救人们的生命，而我们本可以研发出更好的冷冻酸奶。”
瑞秋·贝尔（Rachel Bell）
以一种非传统的方式进入了这一行。作为一名诗人兼小说家，她通过自学 Instagram 来推广自己的作品。“所有我发表作品的小出版社都几乎没钱，所以营销得靠我自己，”她说。她认为，如果她能通过社交媒体推销诗歌，那么她可能也能推销其他东西。当威尔逊（Wilson）找到她时，贝尔正在为一个房地产应用程序运营社交媒体。
“人们总是说，‘哇，你的工作太棒了，’”贝尔说。“你只要嗨起来然后做些事情就行。” 就像是，没错，但之后我还得回复电子邮件。别太兴奋了。”
——希拉·亚斯敏·马里卡尔（Sheila Yasmin Marikar）
悬而未决
烟雾之处
新泽西州的火灾季在技术层面上于五月结束，此后该州的森林防火服务部门将其消防员派遣到了西部：目前，他们分布在明尼苏达州、科罗拉多州、蒙大拿州、爱达荷州和华盛顿州。但对于该部门的监督员比尔·唐内利（Bill Donnelly）来说，新泽西州的火灾季就像整个北美的火灾季一样，感觉永无止境。“最近这段时间，简直就是全年无休，”前几天，他一边说着，一边爬上新泽西州一座新火警瞭望塔的十二层楼梯，这是该州自1948年以来建造的第一座瞭望塔。五十七岁的唐内利留着灰白的平头，1989年二十岁时，他以火警瞭望员的身份进入该部门。那时，每小时一次的天气检查意味着要往返于一座百英尺高的塔楼之间。（如今，数据就在顶层的舱室里。）“我得告诉你，我年轻时那屁股可是铁打的，”他说。
这座新塔位于杰克逊镇（Jackson Township），是该州二十一座塔楼之一。它取代了被一个新住宅开发项目驱逐掉的旧塔。唐内利攀爬的那天，气温九十华氏度，气候干燥且有强风。“这就是‘凯迪拉克’，”他评价这座结构紧凑的塔楼。顶部的走道可以俯瞰二十英里范围内的蓝天，下方是一片绿色的盆地。一场已被观测到的山火在附近的麦奎尔-迪克斯-莱克赫斯特联合基地（Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst）这一军事基地内得到了控制。
塔楼操作员贾斯汀·索尔斯（Justin Sauers）打开舱室的一扇门迎接唐内利，一股寒气扑面而来。“这里比外面低大约三十度，”他说。
舱室中那个六十六英尺房间的核心设备是测角仪，这是一个安装在桌大小的罗盘玫瑰上的瞄准装置。操作员将瞄准线与地平线上的烟雾对齐，记录角度，然后将一根绳子在从房间天花板垂下的地形图上拖动以读取数值。地图上标有附近的其他塔楼，每座塔楼都放射出一根绳子，当其他塔楼通过无线电报告读数时，绳子会被固定在地图上。“绳子越多，你对火灾位置的判定就越精确，”索尔斯说。
“得用老办法——更可靠，”唐内利说。他正扫描着地平线，这是一个长期的习惯。
“很多人甚至不知道新泽西州有火警瞭望塔，”索尔斯说。“我想在去年的琼斯路（Jones Road）火灾之后”——那场火灾在二十天内烧毁了一万五千英亩土地——“人们开始意识到我们还在使用这么多塔楼。这是最好的技术。”
索尔斯穿着一套米色的防火服务制服，戴着冲浪者太阳镜，他拿起无线电发射机准备开始每日的天气广播，但唐内利打断了他。“那边有个烟雾问题，”他指着某个方向说，“起火了！”
“科里，科里，”索尔斯对着无线电说，他在呼叫附近一座塔的操作员。“往我这边看。”
无线电里传出滋滋声。“你发现了什么？”科里·范登贝格（Cory van den Berg）说。
“有一根深色的烟柱升起，我的方向是四十八度。你看到了吗？”
范登贝格说：“我看到的唯一一根烟柱是从基地那边飘出来的。”
索尔斯转向唐内利。“比利，给迪尔打电话。”那是指区域监督员迪尔·凯里（Deale Carey）。
“我该把他派到哪里？”唐内利问。“多少度？”
“四十八度。”唐内利通过无线电传达道。“嘿，迪尔，我们在四十八度方向发现烟雾，大约两英半英里处，沿着河边。你知道‘六十英亩’（Sixty Acre）吗？”（一个公寓协会。）“那是最好的切入点。”
在担任瞭望员之后，唐内利在野外度过了数十年，在当地以及西部地区扑救森林火灾，并培训州外团队。“蒙大拿州的人今年来了，”他说。“他们被震惊了——就像在说，‘我的天，你们这里的火也太大了’。”他还曾在犬类火灾调查组工作；有一次，一只寻血猎犬定位到了一名涉嫌纵火者的父亲，后者正躲在纱门后面。“那家伙告诉我，他的孩子绝不可能在外面纵火，”唐内利说。“然后那条狗直接走上台阶，然后……噗！我就像在说，‘好吧，我的狗似乎这么认为’。”
Sauers 在附近长大——他的父亲是一名兼职消防员——但他直到最近才开始从事瞭望塔工作。“2021年3月14日，莱克伍德发生了一场大火，”他说。“我父亲当时在现场，他突发医疗紧急情况，而林火服务部门团结起来支持我家庭度过难关的方式让我觉得，这就是我想做的事情。”
那天，Donnelly 从一次训练演习中匆忙赶往莱克伍德——那场火灾烧毁了170英亩土地，迫使数百个家庭撤离——他得知 Sauers 的父亲在救护车到达之前，靠一台警察使用的除颤器维持了生命。“他父亲当时真的昏迷了，”Donnelly 说。“但他挺过来了。”
“就在昨天，我负责调度他，”Sauers 说。
Deale 通过无线电报告，他精准定位了一名院子里起火的房主。现在由护林员接手。Deale 报告自己处于可用状态。“By 已清除，”Deale 说，使用了他的服务编号。
“收到，”Sauers 说。“清除且可用。”
—Robert Sullivan
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DISPATCHES
巨大的、愚蠢的、贪婪的乐趣
在庆祝美国250周年庆典的旅途中，体验其起伏。
作者：瑞秋·门罗（RACHEL MONROE）
在这个250周年庆典的夏天，是否可能拥有一次真正愉快且爱国的时光？我决心找出答案。十年前，国会成立了一个由两党组成的委员会——America250，并要求其“规划、鼓励、开发并协调美国建国250周年之前的美国历史纪念活动”。但该团体随后陷入了内斗和诉讼。当唐纳德·特朗普开始他的第二个总统任期时，他组建了自己的工作组——Freedom 250，该组织抽走了 America250 的大部分拨备资金。据报道，那些希望为两党庆祝活动捐款的捐赠者，收到的却是 Freedom 250 的路由号和账号。由于资金缩减，America250 赞助了一系列混乱的纪念活动，包括一场创业比赛、一场关于“标志性美国成就”的知识竞赛、一项全国性的皮克球挑战赛，以及在拉斯维加斯举行的一场名为“代码 + 国家”（Code + Country）的比特币会议。
特朗普举办的庆祝活动中，很少有能吸引我的——比如在白宫草坪上举办的 Freedom 250 品牌 U.F.C. 活动，以及一场基督教祈祷的“国家禧年”活动等等。在华盛顿特区举办的独立日巨型烟花秀听起来是我喜欢的那种壮观场面，但随后总统开始将其称为一场特朗普集会。于是，“伟大的美国州博览会”（The Great American State Fair）似乎成了剩下的最可行选项。我住在德克萨斯州，我想象中的场景就像我们的州博览会那样——巨大的、愚蠢的、贪婪的乐趣——只不过是在国家广场上举行。在6月下旬的开幕日之后，情况立即变得明朗：这场博览会是特朗普意义上的“伟大”（great），也就是说，根本不伟大。这里没有谷仓，没有穿着熨烫整齐的牛仔裤、怀抱纯洁羔羊的庄重的美国未来农民协会（F.F.A.）成员，没有宠物动物园，也没有能让你赢走一只和 F.F.A. 羊一样大的皮卡丘毛绒玩具的套环游戏。这里没有深炸熟食拼盘，没有玉米狗配火辣 Cheetos 的寿司，甚至没有漏斗蛋糕。这里有一个110英尺高的摩天轮，虽然还行，但德克萨斯州博览会的那个几乎高出两倍。
在飞往华盛顿之前，我一直被一种阴云笼罩世界的预感所困扰。结果证明，这并非某种预兆，而是视网膜脱离。一名眼科医生在我的眼睛里注入了一个气泡，并用激光将破洞封住。当我离开诊所时，他告诉我要“避免创伤”。
幸运的是，博览会上几乎没有什么东西活跃到能造成创伤。活动的很大一部分是由代表所有50个州，以及几个领地和哥伦比亚特区的展位组成。这些展位大多由州旅游局出资，由热诚的年轻人负责。在缺乏明显娱乐来源的情况下，
北达科他州第147届年度曼丹牛仔日（Mandan Rodeo Days）的爱国之夜。
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摄影：刘易斯·阿布莱丁格（LEWIS ABLEIDINGER）
游客们在展位之间跳跃，狂热地追求着赠品——钥匙扣、贴纸、太阳镜。逛展的人们互相传递消息：密歇根州有迷你谷物盒，西弗吉尼亚州有预贴邮票的明信片，波多黎各的帆布袋发完了。美国林务局的帐篷外排起了长队。“就算我发的是芜菁，人们也会想要，”一个分发润唇膏和书签的男人低声嘀咕道。一些游客似乎将享受其中视为一种爱国义务。“告诉《纽约客》，我们很高兴能来到这里，”一个戴着 MAGA 帽子的人说。她最喜欢的景点？西弗吉尼亚州的明信片和福克斯新闻（Fox News）的广播区。“他们有白色沙发和所有配套设施，”她说，“他们还提供免费饮用水，我觉得这太棒了。”
然而，免费赠品并不足以驱散那种弥漫在空气中的不安感。“这里很美，”在犹他州展位的一位脸上有酒窝的年轻人在我称赞他的家乡时说道，“不幸的是，现在那里正起火呢。”至少有十个州没有派遣官方代表团，理由是参与成本过高、日程冲突或此次活动的党派基调。在北卡罗来纳州的展位（其展示部分由一支 Nascar 车队赞助），一名肩膀因愤怒而耸起的访客询问，为什么展位里的视频显示器最初包含了邦联旗的图像（这些图像随后被移除了）。“我们受邀来到这里是为了展示北卡罗来纳州的韧性，”一名工作人员僵硬地重复着。在“信仰与家庭”展馆中，圣经博物馆在派发扇子，一名五旬节派传教士在推广反疫苗宣传册，而一个舒适的阅读角则展出了诸如《我的第一本纸板书：第二修正案》之类的材料。当我到达爱荷华州的展位时——那里列出的在爱荷华州博览会上可以用签子串起来吃的东西（猪排、奶昔、山核桃派）让我向往起德梅因市——我已经中暑且疲惫不堪，我开始怀疑这次博览会是否实际上是一个高明的计策，旨在通过让美国其他任何地方看起来都比这里好，从而刺激国内旅游。
傍晚，在酷暑消退后，我前往国家广场东端的美国心脏地带竞技场（American Heartland Arena），那里正在举行一场小型牛仔竞技赛。看台上座无虚席，全天第一次，空气中回荡着真正的热情。播报员简短且刻意地涵盖了牛仔竞技的包容性历史——包括 vaqueros（西班牙语牛仔）和原住民骑手，牛仔和女牛仔——随后，一名带着选美冠军式微笑、身着亮片服装的女性进入了狭窄的泥地围栏。她跨在两匹马上，每只脚分别踩在它们的背上。马匹以快速的小跑绕圈，距离近到我可以看见骑手的大腿肌肉因用力而颤抖。“如果我们有更多空间，她会全速前进，”播报员说。随后，她微笑着挥手离开了竞技场。播报员引导我们将注意力转向一个播放套索历史视频的大屏幕。人们又开始刷手机了。几小时前我在“美国母亲协会”（Moms for America）展位上领到的免费圆珠笔，不知怎么已经没墨了。像我之前的许多美国人一样，我看着周围的世界，意识到这一切已经到头了。是我该向西行走了。
北达科他州的梅多拉（Medora）被誉为“西部最棒的小镇”和“北达科他州最具历史意义的小镇”。在 19 世纪 80 年代，当该地区还被称为达科他领地时，西奥多·罗斯福曾在那里长时间逗留，过牛仔生活并投资牧场。“在这个充满山丘和高原的国家，我生命的浪漫开始了，”他后来说道。根据最新的人口普查，梅多拉有 121 名全职居民，在夏天会变得热闹起来。今年 7 月的一个典型日子里，大约有四名罗斯福扮演者在街上游荡，可以通过他们的胡须、圆滚滚的肚子以及散播的质朴智慧来辨认。镇上的许多酒吧、餐厅和酒店的名称都引用了“T.R.”——在梅多拉，人们用这种带有所有权的亲昵称呼这位第 26 任总统。
这座小镇给人一种被某种永久性装饰旗帜覆盖的印象，而且在 7 月 4 日独立日期间会全力以赴：在西奥多·罗斯福早午餐之后，一场充满烟花棒的游行将沿着主街一直延伸到镇广场。今年，小镇预计会有大量人群前来庆祝美国的 250 周年庆典，这恰好与镇上的西奥多·罗斯福总统图书馆的开馆时间重合。这座图书馆是一座耗资 4.5 亿美元的夯土建筑，被构想为罗斯福保护自然遗产的建筑体现，人们早在数年前就安排好行程前来参观。还有什么比这里更适合沉浸在一些老派的爱国狂热之中呢？
在我预订前往北达科他州的机票后，我得知特朗普也有同样的想法。这座图书馆的盛大开幕现已成为一项 250 周年庆典活动，特朗普计划在 7 月 1 日的剪彩仪式后发表讲话。当我抵达美多拉（Medora）时，租赁车已全部售罄，一群穿着过紧裤子、肩膀宽阔的“使美国再次伟大 (Make America Great Again)”男孩正三人一组，趾高气扬地走在人行道上。我原以为这次访问的高潮将是“美多拉音乐剧”（Medora Musical），这是一场始于 20 世纪 60 年代的爱国歌舞回顾秀，充满了戴着牛仔帽的男人和穿着褶边裙的女人，他们说着陈词滥调的笑话，然后突然爆发出高亢且毫无讽刺意味的和声。演出在燃烧山露天剧场（Burning Hills Amphitheatre）举行，这是一个可容纳近三千人的户外场馆，可以俯瞰恶地（Badlands）的壮丽景色；在关键时刻，舞台布景会向两侧滑开，马匹随即奔向舞台。我很容易被感动，尤其是面对这种小镇演出，我本期待着能流下眼泪。但演出被取消了——镇上的传闻说，工作人员必须加固剧场的舞台，以承载总统演讲时身后那个防弹屏障的重量。
许多恶地小镇人口稀少且毫无美感，被干旱以及油气开采的繁荣与萧条周期所摧残。但美多拉更为繁荣；这里没有廉价折扣店，取而代之的是没完没了的法外之徒庸俗艺术。1986 年，Mr. Bubble 的创始人、北达科他州企业家哈罗德·谢弗（Harold Schafer）成立了西奥多·罗斯福美多拉基金会（Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation），该基金会现在运作起来像是一个非营利性的酒店综合体，经营着四家酒店、一个露营地、“霸凌讲坛”高尔夫球场（Bully Pulpit Golf Course）、TR 酒馆、一家披萨店、一家冰淇淋店、一个家庭度假村、一个马厩以及其他半打企业。你可以在美多拉度过一个长周末，而在不知不觉中，你消费的所有场所都属于该基金会的实体。这里的劳动力主要是国际化的季节性员工；员工们住在宿舍里，在工人食堂用餐，仿佛美多拉是一个公司镇，而其主要产品就是“美多拉
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体验”。（并非所有人都认同这一点。在一家不属于基金会的杂乱店铺里，我看到一本访客簿上有一条字迹颤抖的信息：“感谢 2007 年以来所有的顾客，在他们如此努力地试图将我们挤出去并取得完全控制权时，帮助了小企业主的成功。”）美多拉有时感觉像一场关于美国的奇怪而愉快的梦。两天之内，我有两次发现自己被困在镇上方的孤峰上没有车可搭，其中一次还是在倾盆大雨中；两次提供我搭车帮助的友好陌生人，结果竟然都是罗斯福家族的人。
镇上最常听到的故事是，二十五岁的西奥多·罗斯福在母亲和妻子因不同原因于同一天去世后前往西部。（新图书馆展出了他的日记，在那一天，他画了一个巨大的黑色“X”，并写道：“我生命中的光芒熄灭了。”）在这里，这位患有哮喘且富有的年轻政治家，在与一群阳刚之气十足的男人共处的户外时光中得到了增强，变得足够强壮以迎接他的命运。但罗斯福第一次访问达科他领地实际上是在一年前，即1883年。当时他开始了一次狩猎之旅，正如他在给妹妹的信中所写，他打扮得像个“正经的牛仔花花公子”，穿着一套鹿皮套装，系着丝绸围巾，蹬着鳄鱼皮靴。这次远征并未按计划进行。即便在当时，狂野西部也已是一个正退向朦胧、英勇过去的神话。草原上不再有雷鸣般奔跑的野牛群，取而代之的是高达一层楼、长达一百英尺的骨骸堆。罗斯福花了九天时间才杀死一只野牛；一年之内，加拿大以南仅剩约三百二十五只。北太平洋铁路最近刚刚完工，该地区原住民被暴力驱逐，为由不在地地主——洛克菲勒家族、范德比尔特家族、惠特尼家族以及少数英国公爵和伯爵——控制的大规模畜牧业和小麦农场扫清了道路。几十年后，罗斯福在担任总统期间，在俄克拉荷马州的威奇托山脉建立了全国第一个野生动物保护区，而他不得不从布朗克斯动物园进口野牛来填充该区。
在梅多拉一个明亮的早晨，我见到了丹·布拉姆，一名来自华盛顿特区的政策分析师和 T.R. 爱好者。2022年，
布拉姆在约会软件 Hinge 上创建了一个个人资料，称他正在寻找“一名 +1 陪同前往北达科他州恶地参加西奥多·罗斯福总统图书馆开幕式的人”。他与瑞秋·科尔曼匹配成功，后者的资料提到，她尚未访问过的少数几个州之一就是北达科他州。他们开始约会，她惊讶地发现他的床头挂着一张罗斯福的照片；当他们最终搬到一起住时，她要求他将收集的纪念品集中放在浴室里，现在那里成了 T.R. 主题区。他们在2025年结婚。“大家都以为我会在誓言中提到他，”布拉姆说。他克制住了，但他的朋友们在祝酒词中提到了几次。在梅多拉，他和科尔曼穿着定制 T 恤，上面印着拉什莫尔山的画，但除了罗斯福以外的面孔都被替换成了他们的狗以及朋友们的狗。
布拉姆曾为伊丽莎白·沃伦工作，他告诉我，在她手下工作的经历加深了他对罗斯福作为反垄断者角色的欣赏。最近，另一位政治人物——同样是一位具有民粹主义触觉和帝国野心的富有纽约人——一直试图将自己与罗斯福联系起来。在宾夕法尼亚州巴特勒对特朗普的暗杀企图强调了这种平行关系。这是一个被枪击的候选人——正如罗斯福在1912年被一名男子枪击一样，那名男子声称在梦中受到了威廉·麦金莱复仇幽灵的指示——并且继续进行竞选。去年
夏天，两幅写着“美国工人优先”的三层楼高横幅出现在华盛顿特区的劳工部大楼上。一幅印着 T.R. 的面孔，另一幅印着 D.J.T. 的面孔。
2024年，特朗普在北达科他州获得了自德怀特·D·艾森豪威尔以来任何总统候选人中最高的得票率，尽管他在全国范围内的支持率极低，但在该州仍有大量粉丝。在他
他在美多拉（Medora）露面当天，等待他的人群慷慨且宽容，就像我在参加的每一次“使美国再次伟大”（MAGA）活动中看到的那样。（部落主义的乐趣之一，就是你可以多么友善地对待部落内部的人。）我们乘坐巴士前往燃烧山露天剧场（Burning Hills Amphitheatre），那里的空气因酷热而显得朦胧。在附近图书馆的一次私人听众面前，特朗普称赞罗斯福是一个过着“极其狂野生活”的人，一个“不想听医生的”人，一个“不想保持安静——他想要变得伟大”的人。
我在露天剧场找了个座位，旁边是一位衣着考究、满头银发、退休的休斯顿脊椎按摩师，他戴着印有总统印章的袖扣，口袋里装满了乔治·H·W·布什纪念币。他低声告诉我，他来美多拉是为了向罗斯福致敬，而不是为了现任总统。“特朗普听说有场游行，就决定他必须出现在前面，”他抱怨道。正午的阳光毫不留情；一名女性晕倒，被急救医疗技术员（E.M.T.s）抬走。在等待了几个小时后，二十几个穿着背带裤、戴着牛仔帽的男人——“粗骑兵”（Rough Rider）再现者们——在音响系统大放“Hot Stuff”曲调时大步走上舞台。在任何其他语境下，我都会以为他们要开始脱衣服；然而，他们却肃穆地站着，直到总统拖着步子走出来，向人群竖起大拇指。他告诉我们，这个国家一直在衰落，但现在它是前所未有的火热。他告诉我们，他的一个儿子建议他不要说谁获得的选票更多，是他还是T.R.。他告诉我们，华盛顿特区正准备迎接独立日当天三位数的温度，但他计划发表“一个非常长的演讲”，就为了证明他能做到。急救医疗技术员匆忙赶去帮助另一位快要中暑的观众。（根据比林斯县警长办公室的数据，活动现场有45人因与高温相关的事件需要医疗救助。）我想起《独立宣言》中阐述的平等承诺一直未能完全实现，而且即便如此，我依然怀念那位会对该承诺口头表示支持的总统。那位脊椎按摩师在约20分钟后离开了；当我半小时后离开时，特朗普仍在演讲。
音乐剧被重新安排在次日晚上；我希望它能消除特朗普那种脆弱且刻薄的民族主义所留下的后味，尽管
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对于一部戏剧作品来说，这似乎是个过高的要求。在演出时，我再次遇到了那位脊椎按摩师。他穿着一套细条纹西装，皮肤被晒伤了。“我认为我仍然是一个共和党人，”他坦白道。南方的天空聚集起阴森的乌云。演员们刚唱完一首歌——布鲁克斯和邓恩（Brooks & Dunn）的《只有在美国》（Only in America）——演出就因为雷电而被叫停。是时候开车启程了。
特朗普向南前往拉什莫尔山（Mt. Rushmore），他曾半开玩笑地说想把自己的脸刻在那个纪念碑上；而我走向了另一个方向。当我沿着94号州际公路向东行驶时，恶地（Badlands）起伏的地形让位于农田，黑色的牛群像散点图一样聚集在草原的平面图上。在北达科他州的曼丹（Mandan），戴尔·帕尔克竞技场（Dale Pahlke Arena）正在举办“爱国之夜”，第147届年度曼丹牛仔竞技日（Mandan Rodeo Days）在此举行。在食品摊位旁，一个说话温和、受到众人明显敬重的人原来就是戴尔·帕尔克本人，他是一家当地银行的总裁兼首席执行官，也是牛仔竞技活动的长期支持者。“能源和农业是我们这里最大的两件事，”他说。“石油可以是好事，也可以是变幻莫测的，但农业一直都在。”
据我所知，在早年间，牛仔竞技是一项随意的活动，夹在棒球赛和社区烧烤聚会之间。而如今，它已成为专业牛仔协会（Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association）巡回赛中的一项正式赛事，该协会是全球同类组织中规模最大的。在牛仔圈里，7月4日被称为“牛仔圣诞节”——这是竞争赛季高峰期一个稳定获利且繁忙的时段。与圣诞节一样，后勤方面的周旋可能比享受本身更让人心累，至少对牛仔们来说是这样。一名参赛者整个周末都在曼丹（Mandan）、坐牛大集结（Sitting Bull Stampede，位于南达科他州莫布里奇）以及美多拉北部的基尔迪尔山圆集（Killdeer Mountain Roundup）之间开车往返——这一巡回路线大约有四百英里。
聚集在公牛出入口处的参赛者们看起来专注且旅途疲惫，我不忍心用关于美国的问题去打扰他们。我翻阅着节目单，上面的骑手名字带有牛仔浪漫小说主角那样悠长的节奏：坎宁·巴斯（Canyon Bass）、里根·休斯（Riggen Hughes），
“那些东西在海底看起来会很完美！”
基顿·斯特里特（Keaton Street）、莱恩·利珀（Lane Leeper）。在我身边，一对名叫达斯蒂（Dusty）和桑迪（Sandy）的老夫妇——“我们很脏（dirty），”达斯蒂开玩笑说——正勤勉地记录着各项比赛的结果，就像在记录棒球赛的计分表一样。一名来自夏威夷海库（Haiku）的骑手科比·雅各布森（Koby Jacobson）抽到了名为“纸割”（Paper Cut）的纯黑公牛。当出入口打开时，“纸割”在场内剧烈挣扎，直到蜂鸣器响起，雅各布森从动物身上跃起，踉跄着走开，他的皮套在飘动。达斯蒂眯起眼睛评估道：“八十五分，”他断言。片刻之后，播报员公布了正式得分：八十五分。达斯蒂满意地颔首，桑迪则轻捏他的手臂。
当天深夜，曼丹举办了“草原烟火音乐会”（Prairie Pyro-Musical）——在爱国主义和流行音乐的配乐中进行爆炸表演——该活动被宣传为北达科他州历史上规模最大的烟花表演。烟花公司 Pegasus Illuminations 的共同所有者兼活动协调员之一加里森·里斯纳（Garisson Risner）给出了一个更稳妥的评价。“我认为可以说，那是那天晚上北达科他州规模最大的烟花表演，”他说。
“在烟花领域，世界上有很多‘凯伦’（Karens，指爱挑剔的人），所以我们尽量谨慎措辞。”Pegasus 公司总部位于北达科他州的莫特（Mott，人口653人），他们深谙如何打造一场表演。去年除夕，该公司在60秒内点燃了 280 万 支罗马蜡烛——创下了吉尼斯世界纪录——目标是“提高人们对退伍军人心理健康重要性的认识”。
我在一片宽阔且倾斜的草地上找了个位置，孩子们在等待表演时正激烈地进行着光剑大战。坐在我身后的一名男子在手机上直播特朗普在拉什莫尔山的演讲，但我只能听到碎片化的内容：“你们的第二修正案……我们土地上的共产主义威胁……我们的美国祖先。”已经过了预定的开始时间，但还没有任何东西爆炸。孩子们在草地上横冲直撞，以越来越激进的语调高喊着“美国！美国！”两个男孩在草地上的毯子和露营椅之间穿梭，要求人们宣誓对美国的爱。
烟花界对美国的两百
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周年庆典，但里斯纳告诉我，超过 90% 的烟花是在中国制造的，而特朗普的关税给这件事泼了冷水。“如果一个客户原本有 1 万加元的表演预算，因为是 250 周年庆典，他们将预算增加到 1.5 万加元，并问我们：‘那么我们能把表演规模扩大多少？’，你基本上得告诉他们：‘不能’，”他说。一些市政府转向了无人机表演——由 LED 灯组成的集群，可以通过编程形成一只秃鹰，然后是乔治·华盛顿，接着是硫磺岛升旗仪式。与烟花相比，无人机表演更便宜，对狗的惊扰更小，且更环保，但它们就像二维码一样毫无魅力。
“草原烟火音乐会”（The Prairie Pyro-Musical）很乐意将重点放在“烟火”上。现场有彗星烟花、喷泉烟花、闪光灯。在 135 英尺的高空有一个爆炸轮。对我来说新鲜的是“龙之息”——在地面上产生能烧掉眉毛的蘑菇云火焰。资深的烟火技术人员可能觉得“龙之息”没什么好令人印象深刻的（“你只需要将接近 450 加仑的汽油倒入一堆金属管中，然后直接将其炸掉，”里斯纳解释道），但它们激起了观众的狂热。孩子们陷入了狂喜，挥舞着光剑，他们的爱国情怀升华为某种更原始的东西。“火球！火球！”一个女孩尖叫道。
在独立日，在西塞顿-瓦佩顿奥亚特（Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate）的仪式场地上——这是一个横跨南达科他州东北部和北达科他州一小部分的部落国家——下午的热气稳步上升。戴雷尔·德科托（Darell Decoteau）是一个穿着夏威夷衬衫、健谈的男人，他正啜饮着一大杯塑料杯装的柠檬水，他在里面倒入了一包 Sonic Ocean Water 的调味粉，使液体变成了鲜艳的蓝色。那是波瓦瓦（powwow）周末——在达科他语中称为 wacipi——数千人从明尼阿波利斯、南德克萨斯州和加拿大赶来庆祝。现场有面部彩绘、高尔夫球赛，以及闪烁着红、白、蓝三色的发光新奇杯。在场地中心的一个长椭圆形区域，穿着叮当裙（jingle dresses）的女性随着稳定、沉重的鼓声，以轻快地步履在草地上移动。德科托解释说，Wacipi 在达科他语中意为“他们在跳舞”。在舞者上方，一圈美国国旗在飘扬，每面旗帜代表一名来自该社区且已故的退伍军人。
这场波瓦瓦比大多数 7 月 4 日的庆祝活动更具矛盾色彩。后来成为西塞顿-瓦佩顿奥亚特的部落在 19 世纪举行了首次 7 月 4 日波瓦瓦，当时大平原上的原住民国家被强行迁入保留地，其文化和语言受到压制。部落被劝阻，随后是被禁止从事许多仪式活动，尤其是被切斯特·亚瑟时期的内政部长亨利·泰勒（Henry Teller）称为“异教徒舞蹈”的活动。“当我们唱歌跳舞时，每个人都会担心这成了一个战争派对之类的，”德科托告诉我。该部落与美国签署的条约于 1867 年建立了特拉弗斯湖保留地（Lake Traverse Reservation），当时由一名叫加布里埃尔·伦维尔（Gabriel Renville）的人领导，他获得了联邦当局的许可来庆祝美国的诞生。当时有宴会、舞蹈、长曲棍球，以及一场比赛，伦维尔的斑马马跑赢了一个白人的赛马。这场表面上的爱国活动每年重复一次，充当了一种掩护，成为部落成员聚集和跳舞的借口。据某些记载，这是美国持续运行时间第二久的波瓦瓦。该部落找到了其他社区聚集的出口，将传统转化为白人社会可以接受的形式。“因为我们不能举行波瓦瓦，所以我们变成了一个庞大的牛仔竞技社会，”德科托说。“我们是一个社交性很强的民族。”
德科托告诉我，他的父母在西海岸相识，他们于六十年代迁至那里，这是联邦一项激励原住民离开保留地并在城市地区定居的计划的结果。该计划是世纪中期一项旨在寻求同化并削弱部落主权的运动的一部分。但德科托是由他的祖父母抚养长大的，他们就住在距离仪式场地几英里远的地方；如今，他在当地学校教授达科他文化，并担任 powwow 筹备委员会成员。他带我参观了场地，大约每隔十英尺就停下来握手——其中一人戴着一顶王子帽，穿着一件印有“使美国再次原住民化”（MAKE AMERICA NATIVE AGAIN）字样的衬衫，正在推广一个位于明尼阿波利斯的公共艺术项目，以及
“我刚结束一段相当严肃的感情。”
一名销售缎带裙和手工银饰的女性，以及来自危地马拉、销售印有彭德尔顿（Pendleton）图案的仿制 Labubu 的摊贩。几个孩子飞奔而过，挥舞着塑料机关枪。德科托皱了皱眉。“规定是不允许带枪的，但肯定是有摊贩偷偷带进来了，”他说。
在这种环境下，询问人们关于独立宣言通过周年纪念的想法感觉有点傻。“新来的人，”一名男子宽容地说道。“你是来听听关于美国两百五十年的原住民视角的？”约翰·海明格（John Heminger）问道，他是一名长脸且精力充沛的摄影师。“你是说被窃取的土地、被撕毁的条约、寄宿学校，以及代际创伤？”随后，他露出了一个灿烂且令人卸下防备的笑容。海明格建议，周围有些人可能对爱国主义有一些有趣的见解——比如 Kit Fox 协会，这是一个以大平原战士团体命名的退伍军人组织。当海明格领我走向他们时，他提到原住民在军队中的服役率与其他族群相比很高，我问他为什么会这样。“这是我们拥有的战士传统，”他说，然后停顿了一下，“以及极端的贫困。”
Kit Fox 的成员们在遮阳棚下。两名曾在越南服役的男子坐在助行设备中打盹；伊拉克和阿富汗的退伍军人一边聊天，一边将空弹药装入弹匣，为当晚的盛大入场式（Grand Entry）做准备。“老实说，我之前很犹豫要不要参军。并不是因为我害怕——纯粹是因为我们部落与美国陆军之间的历史，”一名叫尼科德姆斯·科迪·西博伊（Nicodemus Cody Seaboy）的伊拉克战争退伍军人告诉我。“但我爷爷告诉我，当我们在小比格霍恩（Little Bighorn）获胜时，我们缴获了他们的旗帜，现在轮到你去捍卫那面旗帜了，因为那面旗帜属于我们。”该协会还计划当晚为马修·科德尔（Matthew Cordell）举行一场欢迎回家仪式，他是一名部落成员，也是陆军预备役的一名后勤军官。科德尔最近刚从科威特的驻扎地返回，在那里，一次伊朗无人机袭击导致他所在部队的六名士兵死亡，三十多人受伤。西博伊解释说，这次仪式旨在“召唤我们的灵魂回家，减轻我们不得不目睹的死亡与破坏，这样我们就能把这一切留在那里，回来
再次生活在和平之中。”科德尔穿着军装，表情痛苦，是个很有礼貌的人，他就坐在附近。“他们今晚要为我做一些特别的事情，”他告诉我。“我在心理上还没准备好，但为了帮我痊愈，这件事必须发生，因为我们部队受创相当严重。”
我回到看台等待仪式开始。德科托（Decoteau）就在那里，抿着他那杯颜色美得不自然的柠檬水。天空突然暗了下来，仿佛有人关掉了调光开关，德科托皱眉看着手机上的天气应用。“在这片大草原上，东风吹来没好事，”他说。一场风暴以猛烈的势头袭来。几分钟后，风暴离去，空气在随之而来的洗刷中变得清新。鼓手们奏起了“盛大入场”（Grand Entry）的曲调，北狐（Kit Fox）的成员们走上了草地。我看到那些越南战争退伍军人将黑色的棒球帽换成了战冠。随后是欢迎回家仪式。人群随着节拍缓慢地围成一个圆圈，科德尔（Cordell）位于中心。家人们和穿着叮当作响裙装的舞者们加入了进来，直到仪式场地充满了喧闹与使命感。有人将科德尔蹒跚学步的女儿递给了他。当他有节奏地原地踏步时，孩子依偎在他的胸前，他的面部表情难以捉摸，脚步从未慢下来。仪式结束后，舞蹈和歌唱仍在继续。这一天显得格外宽广，宽广到足以容纳这个国家所有的矛盾——悲伤、失望、自豪、同情，以及所有我无法名状的一切。
晚上10点之后，当我走向车时，天空还残留着一丝光亮。我经过一个垒球场，一名言简意赅的播报员正不紧不慢地解说着当天的第11场、也是最后一场比赛。“佩顿（Peyton）现在只有九个指甲在比赛，”我听到他这么说。在华盛顿特区，总统再次谈论起共产主义者，随后无数烟花被点燃，浓烟覆盖了国家广场（the Mall）。我钻进车里，摇下车窗，以便在开车离开时能继续听到鼓声。在渐暗的光线中，我经过一片玉米地——正如预言的那样，高度及膝。“有时情况会变得混乱，但现在一切都很顺利，”过了一会儿，德科托给我发来短信，“现在我们要舞到深夜。” ♦
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自然的控制
应对酷暑
随着夏季变得愈发致命，欧洲的城市正竞相寻求自我重塑。
作者：埃里克·克林恩伯格（ERIC KLINENBERG）
规划者们正重新启用三种古老的冷却方式：水、土壤和遮荫。
5月下旬，世界男子网球排名第一的扬尼克·辛纳（Jannik Sinner）在罗兰·加洛斯球场对阵排名第五十六位的胡安·曼努埃尔·塞伦多洛（Juan Manuel Cerúndolo）的第二轮比赛中，正处于绝对领先地位。英语使用者通常将其称为法网公开赛，该赛事在一年中传统上最美好的时节举行，当时巴黎人正沉浸在温和的空气中。
辛纳是一位身材瘦长的24岁意大利人，红发，肘部尖锐，底线击球如同散弹枪般迅猛。他此前已连续赢下30场比赛，是绝对的夺冠热门。在轻松拿下两盘后，他距离胜利仅差一局，获胜概率超过99%。然而，就在塞伦多洛准备发球时，辛纳
面露难色，小心翼翼地走了几步，伸展他显然在抽筋的双腿。他们比赛时间还不到两小时，但这个5月感觉像8月。巴黎笼罩在一个热穹顶之下，红土球场在直射的阳光下烘烤。
通常情况下，辛纳以爆发性的能量进攻，在长腿下蹲后迅速弹起，每次击球后双脚都会离开地面。而现在，他笨拙地拍击球，鞋子似乎陷入了红土中。他惨败丢掉了接下来的两局，随后抱怨可能脱水并请求医疗救助。在近十分钟的暂停后，比赛恢复。辛纳蹒跚前行，面色痛苦，感到眩晕、僵硬且虚弱。他输掉了那一盘，接着输掉了后面两盘，最终输掉了整场比赛。“热浪击垮了
他，”一名播报员宣布道，并认为以体能著称的诺瓦克·德约科维奇成为了赢得该赛事的新热门。第二天，德约科维奇在第五盘比赛期间在场上呕吐并输掉了比赛。
进入半决赛的20岁捷克选手雅库布·门希克（Jakub Menšík）情况更糟。在赢得一场耗时4小时41分钟的比赛后，他瘫倒在红土场上，在医护人员带来冰块时，他因抽筋而痛苦地蜷缩了四分多钟。“在这种天气下比赛简直疯了，”他在被轮椅推往更衣室后说道。
几代以来，法网公开赛一直被视为进入欧洲夏季的理想门户。在2026年，世界级运动员在酷暑条件下崩溃的景象，成为了欧洲大陆快速变暖正使这一理想走向终结的最新迹象。
尽管气候科学家在20世纪80年代就警告极端高温构成了日益增长的危险，但欧洲的政策制定者直到2003年8月一场导致超过7万人死亡的热浪袭来时，才真正意识到问题的严重性。那些官员仍然未能预料到的是，欧洲的变暖速度将是全球平均速度的两倍多。许多区域性因素解释了原因。其一是该大陆与快速变暖的北极之间的联系。积雪退却露出了颜色更深的地面，从而吸收更多阳光；随着土壤干燥，它们冷却空气的能力下降。与此同时，强风将热空气从非洲向北输送，而气溶胶污染的减少使得更多阳光进入，这一过程被称为“增亮”。这些效应共同为如今威胁欧洲健康、文化和经济的猛烈夏季、破坏性山火和令人窒息的热穹顶铺平了道路。
从历史上看，高温一直未能引起危机级别的关注。与那些具有视觉冲击力的灾难——飓风、地震、龙卷风、洪水、火灾——不同，极高温度很少能产生足以在网络上疯传的戏剧性画面。典型的受害者是贫困地区年老、贫穷且社交孤立的居民，这使得热浪成为了针对那些在公共生活中基本被忽视的人群的“隐形杀手”。
然而，在过去的五年里，欧洲的高温已变得过于致命，以至于无法被忽-
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插图：马特奥·贝尔顿（MATTEO BERTON）
--。
据估计，2022年有7万例与高温相关的死亡，2023年为4.8万例，2024年为6.3万例。今年6月——西欧有记录以来最热的6月——至少记录到了1万例超额死亡，当时巴黎气温突破了华氏105度，波尔多达到108.5度，加斯科涅达到111.7度。埃菲尔铁塔和卢浮宫提前闭馆，博物馆解释称其建筑“未能充分适应气候变化”。法国西南部的一座核电站关闭了一个反应堆，因为用于冷却的河水温度过高。数十名年轻人（包括一名21岁的职业足球运动员）在开放水域寻求清凉时溺水；三名法国儿童在酷热的汽车内死亡。一些巴黎人则在设有空调的酒店中避暑。
在欧洲的旅游旺季期间仍有空房，这一事实表明其规模近3万亿加元的旅游业面临麻烦，而旅游业占据了该大陆国内生产总值（G.D.P.）的很大一部分。越来越多的游客放弃在感觉像桑拿房一样的城市度夏，转而预订在冰岛、挪威或丹麦的“凉爽假期”（coolcations）。在一项调查中，超过一半的旅行者表示，他们因为极端天气或自然灾害而避开了某些目的地。一项2023年的欧盟委员会研究预测，“旅游需求变化呈现出明显的南北模式”，且在“更高温的预设情景下变得更加显著”，这预示着马德里、里斯本、雅典和米兰将面临日益严重的经济后果。
“前往欧洲城市旅行是为了文化体验，”安大略省滑铁卢大学的旅游学者丹尼尔·斯科特（Daniel Scott）告诉我。“无论是巴黎、巴塞罗那还是罗马，你都会四处漫步，观光、逛街、乘坐河船游览、参观博物馆、去餐厅或咖啡馆。大部分时间你都在户外。”气候变化正日益将愉悦之旅变成一场逃避痛苦的练习。“我在欧洲时，总是注意到有多少人拥挤在树下和阴凉处，”斯科特说。“但在某些景点，比如卫城，根本无法避开烈日。在格外炎热的日子里，红十字会会分发饮用水，医护人员预先就位，因为他们知道很多人在下来时会出现问题。”
巴黎和卫城一样，并非为这种天气而建，且适应缓慢。法国人以警惕空调而闻名，认为空调是对文化规范的冒犯，是对建筑美学的威胁，并且会加速变暖。6月份发布的一项益普索（Ipsos）调查发现，78%的法国人认为空调“不尊重环境”。只有约25%的法国家庭安装了空调，而意大利约为60%，美国则为89%。
问题在于，今年夏天仅仅是未来险恶天气的预演。法国气象局（Météo-France）预计，到2050年，法国经历极端高温天数的次数将增加到现在的5倍，到2100年将增加到10倍。未来气候变化年代的幸存者可能会记得2026年还算温和。
与当前的美国政府不同，大多数欧洲政府将气候变化视为深刻的威胁。无论是通过传统的空调，还是通过热泵和地热系统等低碳技术，增加机械冷却似乎不可避免，即使在法国也是如此。电气化和对可再生能源的加大投资同样如此。然而，主权国家的行动缓慢。在危险最为紧迫的城市中，建筑师、规划师和官员们正竞相降低景观温度，围绕三种古老的冷却形式——水、土壤和阴凉——创造性地重新设计城市。
今年七月，我抵达米兰时，欧洲夏季的第三波热浪正进入最剧烈的阶段。气象学家将其称为“欧米茄阻塞”（Omega block）：一个高压系统将来自非洲沙漠的热空气困在欧洲大陆之上，阻挡了冷气流。这种高温不仅构成了城市公共卫生的威胁，在整个西欧，它还为大规模的森林火灾紧急情况创造了条件，导致七月下旬法国和西班牙有超过三十万人被迫搬迁，并在阿尔梅里亚省造成十二人死亡。
我此行是为了会见斯特凡诺·博埃里（Stefano Boeri），
一位米兰建筑师兼城市规划师，以围绕树木设计建筑，偶尔甚至设计整个大都市区域而闻名。首先，我想参观他的标志性项目“垂直森林”（Bosco Verticale）：两栋分别高二十六层和十九层的公寓塔楼，其深阳台上种植的树木、灌木和开花植物足以填满十二英亩的森林，更不用说大约二十种鸟类，博埃里将它们全部视为租户。我在无数的照片和视频中见过垂直森林，但在街道平面上亲眼目睹它时，那种感觉既令人兴奋又超现实。我从闷热的人行道上眯起眼睛向上看，只见建筑像巨大的红杉一样耸立，其叶片繁茂、随风波动的外立面显得生机勃勃，令人惊叹。
博埃里的一名助手安排我参观位于较高塔楼九层的一套紧凑型一居室公寓，该公寓由博埃里的公司维护。窗户透过纠结的、深色且皮革质感的冬青栎叶框住了天际线；令人感到迷茫的是，粗壮的树干扎根在巨大的种植槽中，并由垂直钢缆固定以抵御风暴。我推开沉重的阳台门。光线透过叶丛滤入，微风带来了橄榄树、鼠尾草和迷迭香的香气。这里的空气明显比下方的人行道凉爽。尽管早晨的温度已经接近九十华氏度，但我只想坐在那里，听着鸟鸣，感受着建筑和我一起呼吸。
那天下午，博埃里在他的工作室迎接了我，那是一家位于市中心附近绿意盎然的街区、由出版社改建而成的亮黄色建筑。六十九岁的他举止优雅且随性，留着银发，笑容温暖，习惯将眼镜架在额头上。在他周围，大约六十五个人正俯身在摆满新垂直森林模型的长桌前。当我们走在他们之间时，博埃里告诉我，他从小就对人与树木之间的共生关系深感兴趣，那时他读了伊塔洛·卡尔维诺的小说《树上的男爵》。书中，一个十二岁的男孩科西莫反抗他的贵族家庭，以及启蒙运动中自然与文化之间虚假的划分，他爬上一棵冬青栎，并在树冠中度过了余生。在那里，他狩猎、收获、建立图书馆、坠入爱河，并写了一份关于男人、女人、儿童、动物、鱼类、昆虫以及所有植物的权利宣言。
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博埃里希望创造出具有这种生命力的建筑。他解释道：“我想让一些看似不可能的事情变得合理且可能，去创造一种新的感知——一座作为外立面的森林，一座一百二十米高的建筑，它活着，在呼吸，并随着季节的变换和树木的生长而不断变化。”
但他在设计垂直森林时的理由并非仅仅出于浪漫主义。“绿色建筑具有许多生态效益，”他说，“由矿物质构成的外立面会吸收高温，这意味着室内会变得更热，街道也会如此，因为建筑在夜间会释放热量。垂直的树冠能让室内温度降低几度，这意味着它需要的能量更少。它还能清除空气中的污染，因为树木吸收碳和灰尘。”
他补充道：“当然，它也是一个栖息地。它维持着生命。”
虽然垂直森林（Bosco Verticale）从街道上看令人惊叹，但我看到的更迷人的景象则在内部，而那里只有足够富有的居民才能进入。博埃里（Boeri）在全球拥有 30 个已完工或在建的垂直森林，他承认存在负担能力的问题。在他的工作室里，他向我展示了近期旨在更广泛地推广垂直森林益处的项目，包括在埃因霍温的社会住房、在深圳的一家康复中心，以及在布鲁塞尔的一次林木改造。
在国际上，博埃里最出名的是向上建筑。但他还有一个更宏大的项目延伸在地面上。2007 年左右，他提出了“地铁森林”（Metrobosco）计划，这是一个占地 7.4 万英亩的绿带，旨在用数十万棵树将米兰环绕起来。“这里的树冠仅覆盖了城市的 15%，”他说。在巴塞罗那，这一数字约为 25%；在纽约，为 23%。“我们需要更多的树来净化空气，但我们也需要更多树来降低温度，”他说。在大多数现代城市中，“遮荫是我们最宝贵的资源之一，而种植树木——大量大量地种植——是获得更多遮荫的最佳方式。”
如此宏大的项目需要政府的大力支持。博埃里是著名建筑师奇尼·博埃里（Cini Boeri）之子，且出身于米兰一个有影响力的家族，他拥有启动该项目的社会资本。然而，在种植了约 30 万棵树之后，该项目因政治风向的转变而失败。
垂直森林的成功为博埃里提供了另一个机会。2019 年，他创立了 Forestami，这是一个公民组织，目标是在 2030 年前种植 300 万棵树，相当于为米兰大都市区的每位居民种一棵树。“我们可能无法达到这个数量，”博埃里承认，“但我们现在明白，重要的不是树的数量，而是叶子的数量和树冠的大小，以及我们能产生的地面遮荫量。”
第二天下午，在“体感温度”高达 90 华氏度的情况下，我前往帕尔科诺德米兰诺（Parco Nord Milano），这是一个占地 2300 英亩的城市森林。Forestami 的科学总监玛丽亚·基亚拉·帕斯托雷（Maria Chiara Pastore）和技术总监（兼帕尔科诺德总监）里卡多·吉尼（Riccardo Gini）同意带我去看一些新种的树冠。在经过一段漫长的住宅和商业区后，这座成立于 20 世纪 70 年代、由旧工业遗址改建的公园突然出现在眼前。那里有一个巨大的绿色休闲区，赤裸上身的骑行者和跑步者（吉尼将其戏称为“帕尔科诺德制服”）经过小喷泉和池塘。帕斯托雷穿着一件红白花纹的太阳裙和凉鞋，幸好她引导我们离开滚烫的石质停车场，进入一间带空调的小办公室，在那里她分享了显示米兰树木分布不均的数字地图。
在市中心，通过种树来增加遮荫的选择有限。除了少数公园和私人庄园，社区通常只有狭窄的人行道，几乎没有种植空间。“现实情况是，已经没剩下多少空间了，”帕斯托雷告诉我。通过拆除街道铺装来创造空间，不可避免地会引发政治压力，因为这要求人们放弃停车位并改变驾驶习惯。尽管如此，在四年时间里，米兰已经完成了 70 多个拆除铺装的项目（大多规模较小），这些项目集中在居民争取更多遮荫和绿地的街区。“人们很喜欢，”帕斯托雷说，“只是完成这些需要大量资金、极长时间和大量工作。”
吉尼（Gini）是一位农学家，在过去的四分之一个世纪里，他监督在北公园（Parco Nord）种植了约二十万棵树。他拥有古铜色的皮肤、强壮的双手和开朗的性格，这些都是从事这项工作所必需的。离开办公室后，吉尼开车带我们穿过一片绿草如茵、古树参天的广阔区域，来到一片由幼苗和灌木组成的斑块地带。他蹲下身检查年轻的枫树和橡树，其中一些只有几英尺高，树干仅有手指般粗细。“大树来自托斯卡纳的一个苗圃，那里的土壤与我们这里的相似，”他解释道，并指出了那些生长茂盛的树木，以及一些尽管灌溉充足但可能无法存活的小树。“我以前知道该选择哪些物种，但气候变化让这件事变得困难。也许现在我们需要来自南方的树种。”帕斯托雷（Pastore）同时也是米兰理工大学（Politecnico di Milano）的教授，她的同事们正在测试哪些物种在新的、更炎热的环境中生长得最好。“变量太多了，”她说，“更多的热量。更多的降雨。更多的干旱。昆虫。新的病原体。这项科学研究很困难。”
这些幼苗的基部被白色塑料保护罩包裹着，高度还不足以形成林冠。在午后烈日的直射下，几分钟后，我们的衣服就被汗水浸透了。“我们去阴凉处吧，”吉尼说，引导我们进入一片更成熟的森林，那里生长着二十年树龄的角树，其锯齿状且深皱的叶片看起来几乎像打过褶一样。瞬间，我们感到了舒缓。加州大学洛杉矶分校（U.C.L.A.）的环境规划师 V. 凯利·特纳（V. Kelly Turner）告诉我，“站在阴影中的人，感觉温度比几英尺外站在阳光下的人低 20 到 40 摄氏度。”（是的，摄氏度。）在这里，当温度接近 100 华氏度时，这片角树林将拉斯维加斯的夏日变成了旧金山的春天。
在已有的公园里种树是 Forestami 工作中较简单的一部分。“现在我们要给你们看一些更具挑战性的，”帕斯托雷说。
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我们向西行驶了 17 英里到达维图奥内（Vittuone）。在那里，Forestami 与当地一家合作社及市政府合作，将一块被工厂、仓库和摩托车店包围的空置工业地块转变为林区。我问帕斯托雷为什么选择这个地点，以及他们是否期待游客光临。“也许有一天会吧，”她说。但树木带来了另一个好处。“这片土地不会变成另一座工厂，从而产生更多的碳排放和热量，”她说。
在我们检查的第一片植被区里，没有一寸阴凉，干枯如干草般的草地在我们的脚下发出嘎吱声。“我想灌溉系统坏了，”吉尼沮丧地说，指着三排干枯的野樱桃幼苗。他打了一个电话，然后向一簇生长旺盛的田枫和杨树走去，它们在阳光下闪烁着光泽的叶片轻轻飘动，并向我们招手。这里的林冠比北公园的更小、更稀疏，但阴凉发挥了魔力，降低了温度，并带来一阵温柔且清爽的微风。
在米兰的最后一天，我拿上随身携带的一把反光伞，漫步在垂直森林（Bosco Verticale）周边的街区。就像曼哈顿的高线公园（High Line）——另一个具有影响力的绿色设计项目——它是一件令人叹为观止的、充满魅力的巨型植物作品，不仅催生了一批新的城市公园，还构建了一个由设计师店铺和企业摩天大楼组成的奢侈生态系统。但在米兰飞速发展的阴影中，新的森林正在生长。在附近，我发现了另一片绿地：树木图书馆（Biblioteca degli Alberi）——这是一个后工业时代的扩张地带，在城市的帮助下，这里被改造成为一个于 2018 年开放的 25 英亩公共公园，其中包含 22 片圆形森林和 13.5 万株植物。几个街区外的托切路（Via Toce）上，市政府最近通过将两者之间繁忙的街道改为步行街并拆除铺装，将两个小公园合并在了一起。现在，绿地边缘的一所幼儿园为孩子们提供了一个安全且很快将拥有遮荫的活动区域。“我们必须将沥青和汽车从街道上清除，将空间还给植物和人类，”博埃里（Boeri）说道，“这不仅仅是为了让米兰成为一个更好的居住地，更是为了让米兰变得更凉爽。”对于博埃里来说，这类项目
使他一生的工作形成了一个圆满的闭环。在卡尔维诺的小说中，年轻的科西莫通过搬到树上重新构建了自己与社会的关系；而在博埃里的愿景中，社会通过将树木移入城市，重新构建了自身与自然的关系。
离开米兰后，我追随热浪前往巴塞罗那。那里的干球温度略低，但湿度持续之高，以至于我希望能见面的一个朋友以及计划采访的两名气候专家都已经逃离了那里。“我没法停止出汗，”我的朋友有些尴尬地给我发信息，“有人在街上死掉了……小心点。”另一位联系人提到，这座城市刚刚创下了 105 华氏度的最高气温纪录，但他也提出了一个积极的一面：也许我可以避开巴塞罗那臭名昭著的人潮。
在高温给巴塞罗那带来的所有问题中，失去每天通常到访的 16 万名游客中的一部分，在大多数官员和居民的优先级名单中排名很低。一些当地人举行了抗议活动，高喊着“游客回家去”，并用水枪攻击游客。但旅游业在巴塞罗那雇佣了超过 16 万人，约占其经济产出的 13%，这解释了为什么尽管人们担心游客过多，但仍有超过 70% 的居民认为旅游业是有益的。正午时分，当我抵达这座城市游客最多、拍照最多的走廊——兰布拉大道（La Rambla）时，街道上几乎没有遮荫，而且出人意料地没什么人。在通常午餐时间挤得水泄不通的波盖利亚市场（La Boqueria），我走向一个著名的繁忙吧台
并坐在了几个空位之一。
随后，这种空旷成了谈论的话题。“大家的收入都少了很多，”迭戈·彭佐·维瓦斯（Diego Penzo Vivas）在加泰罗尼亚广场（Plaça de Catalunya）附近的一家酒店酒吧告诉我，他是一位经常接待美国人的资深导游，“我们的团少了，而且每个团的人数也减少了。我在一个导游群组的 WhatsApp 聊天中，里面的故事简直疯了。人们出现热应激，呕吐，要求回酒店——不只是在这里，整个欧洲都是这样。梵蒂冈、巴黎、马德里。”彭佐补充道，“我们不得不开始组织夜游。目前，这是我接到的主要业务。”
日落后，我在扩展区（Eixample）的一家塔帕斯酒吧见到了安德雷娜·塞哈斯（Andreina Seijas）。作为一名城市规划顾问，她致力于帮助城市改善夜间生活。四十一岁的塞哈斯在哈佛大学获得博士学位，曾在七个城市生活过。“我在巴塞罗那开始观察到，人们正试图像在塞维利亚或马拉加那样安排他们的日程，”她告诉我，“你留在家里开着空调，关上百叶窗，睡个午觉，然后直到晚上 8 或 9 点之后才出门。”对于许多能负担得起深夜酒吧和餐厅的游客来说，这仅仅意味着在阳光灿烂时避开兰布拉大道（La Rambla）。但对于当地人来说，情况可能更困难。“巴塞罗那拥有极佳的社会基础设施，但许多公园、图书馆、学校和老年中心在深夜就关闭了，而且午夜后的公共交通非常有限，”塞哈斯说，“也许我们需要借鉴迪拜的做法，让海滩全天 24 小时开放。”
“我们确实在改变做事的方式，”建筑师克拉拉·索拉-莫拉莱斯（Clara Solamorales）在我们将咖啡馆更换之后告诉我，
“当我处理尸体时，它们对我产生了印记。”
因为第一家咖啡馆的空调坏了。“你知道 toldos 吗，就是塞维利亚街道上悬挂的那种纺织遮阳篷？现在这里也计划安装一个，就在哥特区（Gothic Quarter）附近，作为全市遮荫项目的一部分。”索拉-莫拉莱斯长期以来一直欣赏塞维利亚的降温策略，这座城市是欧洲最热的城市之一，早在几代人之前就采用了这种策略。将其移植到巴塞罗那，标志着这座城市的文化和生态转型。“高温也改变了我的执业方式，”她说，“在我的整个职业生涯中，直到今年我才安装空调。以前一直靠交叉通风、电风扇和户外空间。现在我别无选择。我安装的第一台空调就在我的办公室里。”
在巴塞罗那另一个闷热的日子里，市议会办公室的空调运行完美——这与我穿过哥特区前往此处时经过的闷热地铁站和街道截然不同，在那里，一个 toldo 将会大受欢迎。在入口处，一名保安带着同情的目光递给我一卷纸巾。在与市第一副市长莱亚·博内特（Laia Bonet）和首席建筑师玛丽亚·布希加斯（Maria Buhigas）的会面中，我了解到，适应极端高温、山火和干旱已成为一项全市范围的规划工作。
早在“绿色城市主义”这个词出现之前，巴塞罗那就是该领域的领导者。1859, 工程师伊尔德丰斯·塞达（Ildefons Cerdà）提交了一项扩张计划，该计划打破常规，将即使是住宅街道的宽度也设为 20 米——每侧人行道 5 米，中间马车道 10 米。塞达致力于践行那句公式化的口号——“将城市乡村化，将乡村城市化”，他要求在整个街道景观中布置植被。在接下来的一个世纪里，居民和城市机构种植了数以千计的树木，其中包括相当于数片森林规模的伦敦平面树，其巨大的分枝和宽阔的树冠经常在街道上方交汇。数以千计的树木依然存在，形成了充满蝉鸣和鸟叫的绿色走廊，将交通噪音降低为低沉的嗡嗡声。然而，这座城市的树冠覆盖率仍未达到塞达所设想的程度。
在 20 世纪 90 年代，在 1992 年奥运会后失控的开发以及日益增加的交通和污染之中，人们要求回归塞达的模型：增加种植，并且激进地减少汽车。1993, 巴塞罗那开设了第一个“超级街区”（superblock），这是位于埃尔博恩（El Born）的一个保护区，汽车进入受到严格限制，将空间留给人类和植物。随后在 2005. 的格拉西亚（Gràcia）又出现了两个类似的区域。在 2016 和 2023, 之间，市长阿达·科劳（Ada Colau）扩大了这一计划，并增加了四条被称为“绿色轴线”的线性公园，其中一条长度近两英里。在翻新区域，新栽的树木与古老的伦敦平面树并肩而立，孩子们在绿荫掩映的街道上踢足球。
然而，巴塞罗那的大部分地区仍未被超级街区或绿色轴线所覆盖。这座城市只有四分之一的区域拥有树冠覆盖，其余部分则在正午的烈日下烘烤。扩展超级街区和公园被证明十分困难。消防车和救护车需要能够进入每一个街区，而且植被表面的维护成本远高于沥青。随后，气候变暖介入其中。“从 2021 到 2025 年，我们这里遭遇了严重的干旱，”博内特说道。“有时我们无法种植，在整个加泰罗尼亚地区都无法灌溉。正当巴塞罗那试图增加绿地时，我们失去了大约 7500 棵大树。”高温和干旱正在摧毁那些旨在缓解它们的措施。
树木绝非唯一的受害者。近年来，巴塞罗那发生了数千起与高温相关的死亡和疾病病例，且集中在贫困和移民社区，这些地方的空调和绿色走廊十分匮乏。“我们知道，城市里的每个人经历热浪的方式并不相同，”博内特说。“因此，高温不仅仅是一个环境问题，它还是一个社会公正问题，因为它对老年人、儿童和低收入家庭的影响最大。”基于这个原因，她说，“我们正优先考虑弱势群体使用公共空间的区域。我们正在全市安装 200 个新的遮阳结构，其中许多位于操场。我们正在为学校安装空调以适应气候，并利用旅游税来支付费用，从而让旅游业帮助城市进行适应。”
自从 2023 年豪梅·科尔博尼（Jaume Collboni）就任市长以来，巴塞罗那的高温干预措施已从超级街区和绿色走廊转向为高风险人群提供直接保护。2025 年，该市扩大了其“气候避难所”（Refugios Climáticos）网络，这一计划得到了世界卫生组织的赞赏，并启发了从巴黎到罗马的类似措施。现在，500 多家图书馆、教堂、商店以及其他公共和私人空间欢迎任何
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需要空调、饮用水或休息的人。有些场所提供免费 Wi-Fi 和休息室；所有场所都显示在城市应用程序中并附有路线指引。另一项名为“雷达”（Radars）的计划将孤立的老年居民与邻居联系起来，由邻居提供陪伴并在极端天气期间查看他们的状况。针对儿童，巴塞罗那正在社区广场开设小型水上乐园，配备淋浴设施和水枪。在一个闷热的周六早晨，我参观了其中一个，发现大约 20 个孩子全身湿透且兴高采烈，而他们的父母则心满意足地坐在阴凉处。
布希加斯在另一项举措中找到了特别的成就感：将某些中间区域——她称之为“剩余空间”——转变为具有吸水能力的绿地。“这类空间多种多样，”她在一个小会议室里解释道。“有些是屋顶，有些是废弃空间，有些是建筑之间的空间。”该市的目标是将巴塞罗那五分之一的剩余土地进行改造。一名同事投影了一张奥里奥尔·马托雷尔花园（Jardins d’Oriol Martorell）的照片。“规划显示地下有一个车站，上方是一个绿地，”布希加斯说。“你看到绿地了吗？”屏幕上显示的是一片后工业时代的地狱景象：一大片粗糙的混凝土，边缘是一堵布满涂鸦的墙。“我没看到。你无法使用这个空间。它是死掉的。它不仅分隔了两个不同的社区，而且通过吸收阳光并在夜间释放所有能量，使这两个社区都变得更热。”
她继续说道：“现在看看我们正在做的事。”下一张幻灯片显示该地点被改造成为一个公园，拥有树木、花卉、透水铺装和舒适的座椅。“这将有助于连接邻里，并帮助他们降温，”布希加斯说。“另一件重要的事情是，这并不太贵。”计划在明年以这种方式改造 50 英亩的土地。“它不会像巨型公园那样引起关注，”她说，“但它将产生影响。”
在我离开巴塞罗那的最后一晚，西班牙赢得了世界杯。接近午夜，当终场哨声响起时，所有 170 万 名居民以及每一位游客似乎都在街道上跳舞，汗流浃背且兴奋不已。第二天早晨，尽管彻夜未眠但依然亢奋，我在那个正受到关注的巨型公园里见到了来自 Buhigas 办公室的一支团队。
格洛里亚公园（Parc de les Glòries）于 2025, 年开放，在其 21 英亩的面积内，拥有约一千棵树、五万多株植物和灌木、雨水花园、游乐场、体育设施、水上乐园以及一片宽阔的草地。其植被由不适合饮用但适合植物的地下水灌溉，这在深受干旱困扰的城市中是一种奢侈。到九点半，人们已经舒舒服服地躺在柔软的草地上，小憩、阅读，沉浸在前一晚胜利的喜悦中。
我乘坐室外自动扶梯，穿过格洛里亚地铁站旁的一座仙人掌花园进入公园。早晨已经变得闷热，公园的大部分区域仍暴露在加泰罗尼亚明亮的阳光下。设计师们和我躲在一座巨大的凉棚下，它高近十米，长七十米。其刷成白色的金属柱像是一只巨型毛虫的腿，在密集排列的外壳所提供的阴影带下，空气突然变得可以忍受。滑板运动员疾驰而过。日间露营者向草地奔去。这里曾是一个高速公路互通立交桥，位于曾经的大型工业区，当我们站在那里时，可以短暂地想象巴塞罗那找到了一种让自己冷却下来的方法。
气候适应没有简单的胜利。走出凉棚，我们进入了一个拥有柔软合成地面的巨大游乐场，那里有一座安装了长金属滑梯的游乐“山”。没有人在使用它。设计师在很多方面做得如此正确，却忽略了为其遮阳。滑梯已经热到足以灼伤皮肤。
在应对细节方面挣扎的绝非只有西班牙。当我在巴塞罗那时，环法自行车赛的组织者试图通过缩短一个困难的山地赛段以及在道路上喷涂白色油漆以降低表面温度，来防止骑手过热。但据称这种油漆在阳光下变得湿滑，导致包括一名以擅长下坡著称的骑手在内的三名骑手摔车。
当我到达巴黎时，天气已经转凉。巴黎的新任市长埃马纽埃尔·格雷瓜尔（Emmanuel Grégoire）正关注着今年夏天三次打破纪录的热浪以及随之而来的热浪。在我们会面前不久，他的新闻秘书发来消息：“我们可以骑车去吗？”很快，在市政厅（Hôtel de Ville）的庭院里，格雷瓜尔穿着一套干练的蓝色西装，戴着棕色太阳镜，脚蹬漆黑的牛津鞋迎接了我。在附近，有人在调整一辆自行车，结果发现其车座坏了。“用我的吧，”格雷瓜尔说，向我提供他的绿色 Voltaire 电动自行车，“这是巴黎最好的自行车。”
我们的第一站是市政厅前的广场。前一年，巴黎将其部分散热的石质广场替换为一片茂密的城市森林，包括五十多棵大树和两万株灌木与植物。在一棵刺槐树下，格雷瓜尔摘下太阳镜，承认虽然气候适应一直是其竞选的核心，但他没料到这么快就会出现这么多场热浪。“在过去的二十年里，我们一直试图改造这座城市，说我们需要使其适应气候变化，”他说，“现在，甚至那些曾对我们的计划持怀疑态度的人也在说，‘快点，再快点，再快点！’”
格雷瓜尔（Grégoire）是一位四十八岁的社会党人，于三月就职。他身材精瘦且精力充沛，留着银色短发和修剪整齐的胡须，无论是在骑自行车还是在交谈时，都倾向于快步领先。他接手的是一座正在经历欧洲最雄心勃勃的生态转型之一的城市。他的前任安妮·伊达尔戈（Anne Hidalgo）在市政府工作了二十五年，期间增加了自行车道，减少了汽车流量，并扩大了行人空间。在过去的二十年里，巴黎取消了数万个停车位，种植了超过十五万棵树，并在住宅区和商业街道增加了茂密的植被。汽车流量下降了百分之五十以上，自行车使用量增加到三倍，空气污染骤减。与世纪之交时相比，巴黎变得更干净、更绿色、更健康——除了在酷暑时。
我们骑车前往塞纳河右岸的步行大道，这里现在是一个长四英里的公园，骑行者、慢跑者和漫步的游客熙熙攘攘。经过一面攀岩墙、一个游乐场和一个沙滩排球场后，我们到达了一个高架喷雾站。一名赤裸上身的老人沉浸在喷雾中，孩子们在其中跑过，咯咯地笑着。“让我们试一下，”格雷瓜尔说。我跟在他后面走了进去。
“在热浪期间，确实存在社会紧张局势，”在我们的衣服以一种令人不安的速度晾干后，他告诉我，“人们感到紧张、焦虑且愤怒。应对高温不仅需要改善健康，还需要改善社会状况。这就是为什么我们要建设这样的公园，并开放新的游泳区域。”
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巴黎最著名的全新游泳地点出人意料地是塞纳河。在法国花费 15 亿加元 billion 升级该地区的下水道、雨水和废水系统后，塞纳河在 2024 年向奥运选手开放，次年向公众开放。但格雷瓜尔指的是穿过拥挤住宅区的圣马丁运河（Canal Saint-Martin）。这里长期被污染，但现在已经足够干净可以游泳。在热浪期间，平时聚集在运河边的年轻人开始跳入水中。
“我看到过警察追赶男孩女孩，告诉他们禁止游泳的视频，”他说，“但人们需要一种降温的方式，而我需要警察去做其他事情。现在，当水质安全时，我们在塞纳河有了三个新的游泳区。它们对于应对热浪至关重要，但也能激发欢乐与幸福。它们提高了日常生活的质量。”
当我问到巴黎能为那些受高温威胁最严重的人做些什么时，格雷瓜尔的语气变得沉重。他描述了类似于巴塞罗那的、旨在接触社会孤立居民的项目，并承认老年人需要更多的机械冷却设备。今年六月法国热浪导致的超额死亡人数中，约三分之二是七十五岁或以上的人群。不过他说，另一个紧迫的挑战是保护儿童。几乎所有巴黎的学校都缺乏空调或足够的通风设施。
“直到今年，我们的重大热浪都发生在暑假期间，”他说，“现在我们意识到，五月、六月、九月，而且可能有一天在十月，我们都会遇到热浪。我们的学校在建造时并未考虑到这种天气，所以我们现在需要一个解决方案。”
在伊达尔戈的第二个任期内，该市开始改造其六百多所公立幼儿园和小学。它将校门外的街道改为步行街，拆除了院内的沥青，并增加了树木和遮阳结构。这些改变改善了户外空间，但在五月和六月的热浪期间，室内保护几乎没有。教室像烤箱一样。学生们在危险的环境下参加重要考试，年幼的孩子回家时处于脱水或患病状态。官员们必须在保持学校开放与让孩子们回到同样闷热的公寓之间做出选-
择。家长们要求给出答案。
自六月以来，格雷瓜尔（Grégoire）启动了另一轮改造。“首先，我们必须防止热量进入建筑，”他解释道，“所以我们正在安装百叶窗以遮挡阳光。其次，我们必须改善空气流通。我们正在安装吊扇，并且设计了一种特殊的门”——这种门布满了孔洞——“有助于在夜间进行自然通风。第三，我们正在采取更多措施为庭院遮荫，拆除那些会变得非常、非常烫的沥青路面，让庭院成为更凉爽的游玩场所。”
由于我带有美国人的偏见，我询问是否安装空调（或许使用热泵）会更简单且更安全。格雷瓜尔表示，他在某些环境下支持机械制冷，但怀疑其在教室中带来的即时益处是否足以证明增加能源消耗的合理性。在经历了今年夏天之后，许多家长可能会持有不同意见。明年竞选总统的极右翼政治人物玛丽娜·勒庞（Marine Le Pen）提出了一项“空调大计划”（grand plan pour la climatisation），将空调描述为对儿童和老年人健康至关重要的设施。我在巴黎遇到的几位进步人士和绿党支持者担心，这个问题会助力她的竞选活动。
2017年，一个气候科学家团队警告称，到本世纪下半叶，法国可能会经历一场“超级热浪”，且到世纪末，气温可能会超过122度。亚历山大·弗洛伦廷（Alexandre Florentin）是一位四十岁的气候政策工程师，在巴黎郊区长大，他在一篇科学论文中看到了这个数字，从此无法将其忘怀。
“我热爱伊达尔戈（Hidalgo）市长为巴黎所做的一切，”当我们坐在卢森堡公园（Luxembourg Gardens）的山毛榉和悬铃木树下时，他告诉我。这里是该市最凉爽的户外空间之一。“我小时候，空气质量糟糕透顶。我有呼吸系统问题、哮喘，并尝试过各种治疗。现在人行道上有树木和植物，汽车减少了。这里干净舒适，我骑车去任何地方。我在自家的街区能看到蜜蜂和蝴蝶。但在巴黎，我们一直表现得好像只要削减排放就无需适应一样。显然，这是一个错误。”
2020年，弗洛伦廷以绿党身份竞选市议员并加入了伊达尔戈的联盟。“我向绿党建议推进一项名为‘50℃的巴黎’的议程，”他回忆道。“我们需要改变对话方式，使其不再仅仅围绕减缓目标，比如到2050年实现碳零排放，因为这给人们一种印象，认为他们还有二十或三十年的时间来适应。在今年夏天之前，我们就知道学校里的情况很危险，但我们做得不够。”他停下来看着一只鸭子从我们长椅后面走过。“我们需要明白，未来就是现在。”
弗洛伦廷和一组同事在三年前发布了一份报告。“我们有两个主要的政策结论，”他告诉我。“第一，我们无法适应一切。我们不能将整个社会搬迁到另一种气候中。我们无法完全改变我们的基础设施、建筑和生态系统。我们没有足够的资金或时间。这意味着我们必须确定优先级，精准找出我们可以做得更好的事情。第二，我们并非能适应任何情况。存在一个硬性极限。天气可能会变得太热。我不想搬到挪威成为一名气候难民，但有些人已经在讨论离开这座城市。我们面临着失去栖息地的真实风险。这就是问题的核心。”
随后，弗洛伦廷折叠起他的自行车，和我一起向塞纳河走去，指给我看那些种植箱、步行街，以及巴黎最终可能不得不放弃的历史悠久的锌制屋顶。那天天气晴朗明亮，但我们都意识到，就在我们交谈时，猛烈的山火正席卷法国，其强度足以产生前所未有的火积雨云（pyrocumulonimbus）或“火云”，迫使大量民众离开家园。他询问我在其他地方见过哪些有前景的干预措施。我提到了城市森林、绿色轴线、水上公园、避难所和去铺装街道。
他听进去了，专注地看着我，问道：“你见过任何开发地下空间的计划吗？”
我告诉他我没见过。
“那么，我们得考虑一下，”他说，“因为不久之后，我们将迎来连续三天温度超过 45 度，也就是华氏 113 度的日子。到那时，我们所有人都需要一个可以躲起来的地方。” ♦
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喧嚣与低语（SHOUTS & MURMURS）
入学参观：成为一个人
作者：杰西卡·巴卡尔（JESSICA BACAL）
欢迎！大家请聚拢一点，好让你们都能听到我的声音。很高兴你们申请加入“成为一个人”项目——而且，特别是申请来到这里！我叫克莱尔，整个夏天我一直在带领这些参观团。
我们先来看看住房选择的一个例子，请跟我来。
这是一个“公共空间”或“客厅”。如你们所见，这里超级温馨——有毛茸茸的豆袋椅、矮桌和大屏幕。你们可以用客厅来和朋友闲逛、刷手机、打游戏、强迫自己做瑜伽，或者只是在哭泣时摆出一些悲伤的姿势。最棒的是，你们可以根据自己的独特目标，以及个人的恐惧程度来决定做什么。这符合我们之前在 PowerPoint 中提到的核心价值——“自我导向”。
接着来到厨房：定制饮食计划的方式也多种多样。你们将掌控自己的饮食，选择是无穷无尽的：纯素、犹太洁食、清真、素食、无麸质、生酮、古法饮食、有机且可持续、完全不可持续、“帅哥 TikTok 饮食”、 “赞达亚的一日饮食”、美国女孩娃娃食物。我很挑剔，但每天都能找到想吃的东西。你们会有一张卡，买杂货、点外卖什么的直接刷卡就行。这里有很多不错的餐厅，真的能满足每个人的需求——我的意思是，有人想要抹茶吗？如果你发现自己整晚没睡，比如在翻阅你人生伴侣的数千封私人电子邮件，这里 24 / 7 都有食物供应！刷卡记录会出现在你们每月末收到的账单上——总有人会反应，像这样：“什么————？”
现在我要告诉你们关于现实世界体验的多种选择，因为它们就在你们门外：给车做年检、假装没看到街上讨钱的人，或者甚至拿着东西去随便一家银行办理公证。你们还将有机会让自己参与各种能获得报酬的体验，这与我们的核心价值“充实”相一致。很多人选择金融或法律，但也有艺术或写作的路径。对于选择后者的人，我们提供一份“自我怀疑证书”。总之，我想说，无论他们做什么，这里的几乎每个人都被一种对自身的深层责任感所驱动。
一旦进入有偿体验，你们将有绝佳的机会与同事竞争一些东西，比如“老板的眼神关注”和“受邀参加夏威夷会议”。晋升和加薪确实会发生，除非你在像我这样的非营利组织工作，哈哈。这里也有些人从不参与有偿体验，但卡里的额度却不知为何无穷无尽——他们不自我表明身份，但你能猜出来，因为他们选择将“购买丹麦现代家具”作为他们的现实世界体验之一。
我们继续走。我会停在这个有床的房间，回答每次参观都会被问到的问题：人们是如何匹配并住在一起的？所以，你们将基于一些因素进行匹配——仅举例来说——你参加派对的频率如何，你有多爱干净，你是晚睡还是早起，你是否投票给特朗普，你想要孩子吗，你们能否忍受对方的家人，你是犹太教徒、基督徒、穆斯林还是印度教徒，等等。匹配将由你们根据这些偏好自行完成。
另一个我经常被问到的问题是：如果我与某人匹配但结果不理想怎么办？这种情况确实会发生，甚至在我身上也发生过！首先，有咨询师可以帮你处理这类问题，但你也可以直接更换新匹配对象，或者搬到单人间。这涉及与律师办理一些简单的手续——我确实这么做过，完全没什么大不了的。结果只是证明我们的作息时间不同，而且他私下里一直在和聊天机器人搞某种性关系。
在结束之前，我想告诉你们我为什么选择来到这里，以及——更重要的是——我为什么留下来。我的意思是，当我刚到这里时，感觉我就能做我自己。然后，在这里待了一段时间后，我开始好奇：那个“自己”是谁？然后，什么是“自我”？有人拥有自我吗？还有，这一切真的重要吗？但我意识到我只需要让自己忙起来，于是我开始带领这些导览，并参与其他活动——校内魁地奇、芥末品鉴俱乐部、橡皮鸭赛跑，这太好笑了，因为它们就那样漂浮着。有时可能会涉及酒精，但你们没从我这儿听到过这件事！我还开始学习计算机科学，这样我就能在前任生活伴侣的电脑上安装间谍软件。开玩笑的——大概吧！总之，我就在书店放你们下来，这样你们就不会忘记购买你们的“我是一个人”周边商品。♦
LUCI GUTIERREZ
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特约记者
科学家的孩子
一名研究人员在南太平洋研究一种疾病。但他最大的实验，却是对他带回家的那些孩子所进行的。
作者：瑞秋·阿维夫（RACHEL AVIV）
每个工作日的早晨，卢维·伊卡巴拉（Luwi Ikabala）都会在巴布亚新几内亚高地的戈罗卡（Goroka）主市场里，在成堆的红薯和柴火旁摆好一台缝纫机。卢维用一个黄色的食用油罐当椅子。运气好的时候，他通过缝袖口和补破衣物赚到的钱足够买一袋大米。在等待顾客时，他阅读小说，将喜欢的段落抄在日记本里。他最喜欢的作家是费奥多尔·陀思妥耶夫斯基。在过去的四十年里，他一直坚持写日记，并在条目中拟定诸如“自由之气”、“回忆她——过去”、“关于软弱”以及“我是谁？”之类的标题。
卢维经常觉得自己是“这个地球上活过的最穷的人”，“一个失败的完美典型”。他在街上接触陌生人，询问对方的问题，直到他发现一个可以“在情感上触动他们”的机会。他提供建议，然后对方有时会给他一点钱。一篇标题为“本应成为某个人物”的日记条目，描述了他与一位老友的相遇，对方曾看到他在戈罗卡的街道上漫无目的地行走。那位朋友不明白为什么卢维没有在生活中做出更多成就。但他写道，“坚持写日记”让他“至少觉得自己是个什么人——虽然不是什么大人物——但以我自己的方式，是个独立的人”。
现年五十七岁的卢维是在诺贝尔奖得主、儿科医生兼病毒学家 D. 卡尔顿·加杜塞克（D. Carleton Gajdusek）的鼓励下开始写日记的，卢维将他描述为“美国的父亲”。加杜塞克在巴布亚新几内亚居住期间研究库鲁病（kuru），这是一种仅存在于该国东部高地的致命脑病。直到二十世纪三十年代，那里的人们对外界来说仍然是未知的。卢维和他的朋友们过去常常簇拥在加杜塞克的打字机旁，手搭在他的肩膀和大腿上，而他则记录着他们的生活：他们吃掉的昆虫，他们的情绪，以及他们对着鸟类唱歌的方式。加杜塞克写了六十万页日记，从十三岁开始，直到 2008 年他以八十五岁之龄去世前几周结束。卢维保存着一份加杜塞克记录他出生的日记副本。“当我出生时，卡尔顿就在那里，将我带到了这个世界上，”卢维告诉我。
有时，卢维感觉到一种写下自己故事的冲动“缓缓地向指尖蔓延”。在读完保罗·塞鲁（Paul Theroux）的一本在二手店发现的小说《我的秘密历史》（My Secret History）后，卢维感到一阵战栗。“我多么希望写一个类似这样的故事，”他写道。他想要“将脑海中的一切具象化”。五月我拜访他时，他站在市场里的缝纫机旁告诉我：“我的故事将从一个非常、非常偏远地区的童年开始，在那里，一个不寻常的科学家，一个来自远方的人，搬到了我房子旁边居住。”但是，只要他坐下来准备写作，就会发现自己陷入沉睡。
在五十年代末和六十年代初，当加杜塞克进入巴布亚新几内亚高地的村庄时，人们会用高亢的声音喊道：“白人来了！”“大家快来，快来！”他在日记中写道，孩子们欣喜若狂，但妇女们则留在屋内，从草屋里窥视。加杜塞克在美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）经营着一个实验室，专注于儿童发育以及他所谓的“少数残存的社会——在这些社会中，文明和人类的主要宗教尚未在抚养儿童的社会结构上留下印记”中的疾病。他给孩子们发棒棒糖，并采集他们的血液和尿液样本。他还提供抗生素治疗并为伤口包扎。“虽然这些人目前仍是战士和食人族，但他们处于‘受控’状态且非常配合，”他在写给美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）副主任约瑟夫·斯马德尔（Joseph Smadel）的信中这样写道。
在东部高地的福尔族（Fore people）社区中，大约一万四千人里每年有百分之一的人死于库鲁病（kuru）；在福尔语中，这个词的意思是“颤抖”或“恐惧”。“这是一种如此惊人的疾病，以至于人们在阅读临床描述时只能持怀疑态度，”加杜塞克（Gajdusek）告诉斯马德尔（Smadel）。福尔族人认为这种病是由术士的秘密攻击引起的。患者会出现发抖、过度大笑和肢体抽搐的症状；随后他们将失去站立或吞咽的能力。大多数人在一年内死亡。罗纳德·伯恩特（Ronald Berndt）和凯瑟琳·伯恩特（Catherine Berndt）是福尔族地区的首批人类学家，他们怀疑这种疾病是否是对与白人接触的一种心身反应。澳大利亚殖民官员给一些村庄带来了新工具，如钢刀和斧头，以及禁令——禁止武装战争和食人行为。罗纳德·伯恩特写道：“社会或文化事件可能会对人体本身产生深远影响，甚至在很大程度上干扰人体，使其停止运作。”
加杜塞克每年都会在高原上度过一段时间——他将其描述为香格里拉，是他达到“人类幸福巅峰”的地方——并学习了福尔语。卢威（Luwi）的父亲和叔叔帮他在瓦耶蒂（Waieti）建了一栋房子，距离卢威家的棚屋约三十英尺。瓦耶蒂是一个位于山坡上的小村庄，海拔五千英尺以上，云雾在下方的山谷中聚集。加杜塞克的房子有编织竹墙和圆顶屋顶，屋顶由茅草制成。在墙上，他贴了一张约翰·恩德斯（John Enders）的照片——后者因在小儿麻痹症研究方面的工作于1954年获得诺贝尔奖——以及一幅提香（Titian）为教皇之孙拉努乔·法尔内塞（Ranuccio Farnese）绘制的肖像画，画中的人物穿着华丽的新斗篷，看起来太年轻了。他向每一个进来的人解释道：“这是我民族过去的一位首领之子，”他
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卢威在少年时期随卡尔顿·加杜塞克移居美国。“我是世界上最伟大的科学家之一的儿子，”卢威说。
摄影：TAJETTE O'HALLORAN
37
解释道。
加杜塞克在库鲁病患者临终前照顾他们，然后说服其家属让他进行尸检，并用斧头、毯子和盐作为回报。在一次尸检后，他写信给斯马德尔说：“我在凌晨2点，在狂风暴雨中，在原住民的棚屋里，在灯笼光的照射下，在没有脑刀的情况下切开了大脑。”他就在自己用餐的同一张桌子上进行一些解剖。卢威回忆道：“有些人说，‘我们不应该挖掘坟墓——他在做什么？’而另一些人则说，‘哦，他是来研究这种病的，让他研究吧。’”卢威的表妹丽贝卡·塔鲁比（Rebecca Tarubi）的父亲曾协助加杜塞克进行尸检，她告诉我：“人们会问，‘大脑去哪了？’我们会说，‘卡尔顿把它们放在一个小碗里带到美国去了。’”卢威的叔叔科耶（Koiye）过去常将脑组织和内脏送到一个设有跑道的殖民援助站。随后，这些身体部位被液氮冷冻，并运往马里兰州贝塞斯达的美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）。
卢威和其他孩子们无论加杜塞克去哪里都跟着他，他经常给他们拍照。“我们中的一个人拿着他的胶卷，另一个人拿着相机包，第三个人拿着三脚架，然后我们就把它架起来，”卢威说。“我以前从未见过自己的脸”——他的村子里没有镜子或反光金属——“当卡尔顿给我们看拍的照片时，我们都会对着自己长成那样的脸咯咯地笑。我们会说，‘哦，我的额头是这样的，我的眼睛这么大。’”在的一组照片中，卢威单脚站立，吐出舌头；另一个男孩在扭屁股；第三个男孩用双手在眼睛周围做成杯状，仿佛他也在拿着相机。这些赤脚且光着上身的孩子们试穿加杜塞克的鞋子和袜子，并观察他皮肤的纹理。“我现在是主人了，”一个穿着他的T恤和短裤的孩子对加杜塞克说。
Luwi 第一次使用铅笔和纸是在 Gajdusek 的鼓励下。Gajdusek 每当来到 Waieti 以及附近的其它小村落时，总是会带上书写用品，以及弹珠和网球。他收集了数百幅由东高地儿童绘制的画作，而这些孩子在画画时是人生中第一次拿起铅笔。由于从未接触过图片，孩子们创造了自己的视觉词汇。起初，他们并不构思人物形象。相反，他们绘制几何图案，几乎就像是在纸上进行“编织”或“编辫子”，Gajdusek 这样写道。（这些画作与数十万页的往来信件、日志和照片一起被保存在美国国家医学图书馆。）
Gajdusek 几乎每天都在日志中记录，有时在入睡时笔触渐弱，将思绪转化为梦境。在他位于 Waieti 的房子里，他收藏了让-皮亚杰、约翰·洛克、威廉·福克纳、弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫、大卫·休谟和亨利·詹姆斯的著作。他注意到，“对我带到这里的那一叠书籍和杂志的‘不断翻阅’，产生了一种关于文字和书写的氛围，这种氛围如此强烈，以至于具有诱惑力。”孩子们开始要求学习数字和字母。他们坐在 Gajdusek 家的地板上，用货运箱当书桌。“就这样，我来到这里研究‘原始’，却用我自己的复杂性将其毁掉了！”Gajdusek 在日志中写道，“该死！”当面对空白页时，孩子们开始画出一排排均匀的标记，模仿字母的外观。在其中一幅画中，一个孩子在页面上画了一本大书的草图，书上有波浪形的线条。在书下方，四个火柴人举起双臂，将书高高举起，像是一件神圣的祭品。
Luwi 大约四岁时，他的母亲开始抱怨头痛和关节疼痛。“坐起来时，她颤抖且不稳定，”Gajdusek 在 1972 年的日志中写道，“她声称耳朵里有像‘水’一样的轰鸣声。”她变得如此虚弱，以至于 Luwi 的父亲在他们小屋的横梁上，就在她的床正上方挂了一根绳子，以帮助她把自己拉起来。有一次，Luwi 让她给他拿水，她用棍子打了他，因为他打扰了她。“这是我对那个赋予我生命的女人唯一的记忆，”他告诉我。
他的祖母已经死于库鲁病（kuru），这是一种主要折磨妇女和儿童的疾病。“他们说我们必须恐惧，因为库鲁巫师正在社区中游走，”Luwi
一个迷失在时间之沙中的 2008 年文青
说道。人们认为，巫师通过窃取受害者的头发、衣服、指甲或粪便碎片，并将它们与叶子一起包裹成捆来锁定目标。然后他们念诵咒语，用棍子敲击这个包裹，并将其留在泥地里。随着包裹腐烂，预定的受害者据称也会同步恶化直至死亡。
库鲁病（Kuru）变得如此普遍，以至于在一些小村庄里，每一名女性对应三名男性。一段时间内，福尔族（Fore）几乎每天举行大规模会议，试图禁止库鲁巫术。（其他疾病也被认为是由巫术引起的，但采用了不同的技术。）“你们这些男人试图把我们消灭，”一名女性在 1962 年的一次会议上说道。一名男子问道：“如果女性全部消失了，你们以后去哪里找妻子？”会上有人呼吁巫师站出来忏悔。在一个村庄里，男人承认了自己的巫术行为，然后将手放入肥皂水中，承诺再也不做此类事情。但由于库鲁病的死亡病例仍在继续，人们怀疑这些男人没有说实话，会议随后停止了。
雪莉·林登鲍姆（Shirley Lindenbaum）是一位在六十年代与丈夫在该地区工作的人类学家，她记得一名神经学家曾问：“成年女性以及男女儿童做了哪些成年男性不做的事情？”她和丈夫回答道：“他们吃死者。”男性通常禁食人肉，因为人们认为这会削弱他们的体力。但福尔族的妇女和儿童将死去的亲人作为哀悼仪式食用；正如一名澳大利亚巡逻员所言，这是一种将死者融入自身，从而“不仅减轻悲伤，甚至减轻丧失感”的方式。林登鲍姆和她的丈夫开始怀疑，库鲁病是通过食人行为传播的。
在疾病的最后阶段，患者经常出现失禁并产生褥疮。“我仍然能感觉到那个味道，”卢威（Luwi）说。“人体有一种难以忍受的独特气味。”他的母亲无法接受在日益无助的情况下由他人照顾。有一天，当她独自在家时，她用编织袋的敲打树皮做了一个套索。她用绳子把自己吊在床上的横梁上，自缢而死。
卢威回忆起自己被从花园里叫进屋的情景。屋里，大人们在哭泣。“我的父亲把我抱在膝盖上，握住我的右手，把它放在我的心口上，告诉我：‘你的母亲去世了。’这件事我将永远记得。”
村里有几十个失去母亲的孩子。“我只是加入了那个已经在受苦的群体，”卢威说。一名德国传教士的妻子教一些失去父母的大女孩如何照顾年幼的孩子，包括婴儿。“她们当时只是孩子，大约九岁或十岁，她们会来到我们这里，像母亲一样照顾人，”卢威说。他的父亲很快再婚，并与新妻子育有子女。卢威忘记了母亲长什么样，但人们告诉他，他长着她的脸。关于她的自杀，他在日记中写道：“我已经原谅了她所采取的勇气。”
“那些参与库鲁病传奇的研究人员不仅拿走了死于库鲁病受害者的脑组织，”卢威在多年后写道，“他们甚至带走了活着的孩子。”他的叔叔姆巴金塔奥（Mbaginta'o）是卡尔顿·加杜塞克（Carleton Gajdusek）从高地带回美国的 16 名孩子中的第一个。“在遇到卡尔顿之前，他一生从未写过一个字，”卢威在谈到姆巴金塔奥时说。“我认为这是一项卡尔顿为了理解大脑功能而进行的研究所。”
该项目并非正式构思，但加杜塞克（Gajdusek）撰写了声明，在卫生与公众服务部的信头纸上记录了监护权的转移，并让实验室的同事在公证员面前担任见证人。在他的个人简历中，有一个名为“儿童（领养自美拉尼西亚和密克罗尼西亚）”的章节，列出了他在 20 世纪 60 年代至 90 年代期间在美国抚养的 36 名儿童。芝加哥大学的人类学教授朱迪思·法夸尔（Judith Farquhar）职业生涯始于美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）加杜塞克的实验室，她表示，她在那里的职责之一就是偶尔带孩子们去超市购物和就医，并处理他们入学注册和接种疫苗的文书工作。她当时觉得自己在协助一项“高尚的实验”，不过她补充道，“这完全不像那种你先提出假设并试图证明它的系统性实验。”加杜塞克从慈善和人类学的角度来界定他的项目：他正在研究人类文化的“兰花”——脆弱且即将灭绝，但能揭示人类及其生存状态，而这种状态可能再也无法被目睹！
加杜塞克在一份法律声明中解释说，他选择姆巴金塔奥（Mbaginta'o）是因为他看起来“最聪明，最能适应文明社会”。姆巴金塔奥来自安加人（Anga people），当时被称为库库库人（Kukukuku），他们居住在比福尔人（Fore）更偏远的地区，周围环绕着无人居住的森林和陡峭的山脉。在姆巴金塔奥多年后写的一篇由加杜塞克编辑的大学论文中，他描述了自己成年礼的第一次启动仪式。在竹笛的唤醒下，他和包括年仅七岁的男孩在内的其他少年开始与家中的女性告别，直到长大成人前他们都不会再见到这些女性。在接下来的三天里，他们的背部被棍子击打，口中含着动物的心脏，并前往一条溪流，在那里，一根白茅草叶被塞进他们的鼻孔，直到血流进水中。姆巴金塔奥写道，在第二天，“年轻的初学者必须吮吸年长已入会男性的阴茎，以便快速成长。这种同性行为必须作为男人们的秘密，如果告诉女性，讲述者将被处死。”
研究该社区的人类学家描述过这种启动仪式，该习俗在 90 年代基本被废弃。加杜塞克在一本由其员工打字、由美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）印刷并分发给数百名同事的日志中推测道：“我在西库库库地区发现了一种文化（而且我相信，至少在过去，这对整个库库库族都是成立的），在这种文化中，少年爱——或恋童癖——已被制度化。”
在完成启动仪式后不久，姆巴金塔奥逃离了安加人。他的父母都去世了。他开始生活在
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福尔人之中，在鲁维（Luwi）祖父的照顾下，称鲁维的母亲为姐姐。就在那里，他遇到了加杜塞克。“他是我见过的第一个白人，”他后来写道。“他教会我他的西方世界，让我丛林生活中的认知感到困惑。”
在控制巴布亚新几内亚的澳大利亚殖民政府的许可下，加杜塞克和姆巴金塔奥于 1963 年一起离开该国，途中在关岛停留，访问了一家美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）的实验室。姆巴金塔奥不知道自己的年龄，但加杜塞克猜测他十一岁。在走廊里，他们经过一间停尸房，一名白色的尸体正被装入棺材。“姆巴金塔奥在看到尸体时突然停住了，他如此惊讶地凝视着它，以至于我也感到惊讶，”加杜塞克在日志中写道。加杜塞克询问怎么了，姆巴金塔奥回答道：“Wait man em i dai tu?”——“白人，他也死了吗？”加杜塞克写道，直到那时，面对尸体，姆巴金塔奥才能“突然意识到，我也属于凡人这个种族”。
在美国，迎接他们的是加杜塞克的朋友约瑟夫·韦格斯坦（Joseph Wegstein），他是国家标准局的一位著名计算机科学家。韦格斯坦在的一封学校推荐信中写道：“他穿得像个刚从英国殖民地办公室出来的男孩，但他跨越的不是英国殖民历史，而是10,000年的时光。”韦格斯坦接着写道，在机场，姆巴金塔奥（Mbaginta'o）“除了‘你好’、‘是’和‘不是’之外什么也不说。”1965年获得诺贝尔奖的法国生物学家弗朗索瓦·雅各布（François Jacob）在信中写道，加杜塞克想看看“这个生活在荒野森林中的男孩，是否能够适应现代且精致的生活”。
姆巴金塔奥在乔治城日校（Georgetown Day School）注册为六年级学生。韦格斯坦每周三次辅导他的数学。加杜塞克写道：“他的不安全感和焦虑驱使他努力工作、安静地退缩，并勤勉地尝试提供帮助，以完成很多事情，以取悦他人！”没有自己家庭的韦格斯坦为姆巴金塔奥准备餐食，给他买衣服，带他去航海，并在加杜塞克不在时记录他们在一起生活的日记。在美国生活三个月后，姆巴金塔奥随加杜塞克去看了安德烈·塔可夫斯基的电影
《我的名字叫伊万》（My Name Is Ivan），讲述了一个在第二次世界大战期间担任侦察员的十二岁孤儿，他在梦中回到了童年。姆巴金塔奥很快决定给自己起一个新名字，以便美国人更容易发音：从现在起，他将被称为伊万（Ivan）。
伊万在第一年学习迅速，随后似乎进入了平台期。在他的一位导师在伊万在场的情况下向加杜塞克建议，他“可能单纯缺乏学习更多知识的智力和能力”。加杜塞克在日记中写道，他觉得伊万“部分理解”了导师的话，因为他立即变得“压抑且语塞”。谈话结束后，加杜塞克在高速公路上开车，抽泣不止。他写道：“想到伊万的命运，我感到苍白无力。我预见到这对我们两人来说都将是一场真正的悲剧。”加杜塞克在日记中对伊万写道：“甚至你的同学在看到你被当作小白鼠时也感到愤怒！！”
伊万似乎意识到，在他年幼时拥有更多的权力。在他开始长痤疮后，加杜塞克写道，伊万“蜷缩在我身边，腼腆地呜咽着说他不想长大，他想一直当个小男孩。如果我称他为大男孩或青年，他会感到深受伤害。”
加杜塞克感到伊万深层的需求——那些“毫无头绪的撅嘴和‘受伤’的表情”——让他日益感到压抑。有一次，加杜塞克因为伊万在准备文学考试时没有选择他推荐的书而感到恼火。加杜塞克写道：“于是我爆发了，打了他好几次，并向他灌输一个事实：他在学校里没有成绩，而且并不是他自以为是的那个正统的八年级学生。”另一次，当伊万抵制做学校作业时，加杜塞克告诉他，他准备“放弃”并将他送回家。加杜塞克写道：“他哭得如此剧烈且可怜，如此彻底地崩溃，身体地剧烈抽搐，以至于我无法阻止他。他如此死气沉沉且悲惨地恳求和抽泣——只能发出‘不，卡尔顿，不，卡尔顿，求求你，求求你，求求你卡尔顿，不，卡尔顿，求求你’的声音。”在另一次争吵后，伊万在夜间逃跑了，加杜塞克写道，他被愧疚感折磨得如此疯狂，以至于在 4:30 A.M.（凌晨 4 点 30 分），他“安静地在房子周围走动，检查大树的树枝，看看伊万是否吊在其中一根上面”。
一天晚上，加杜塞克带伊万去看
日本电影《怪谈》（Kwaidan），该片改编自四个超自然寓言。放映结束后，伊万在一家餐厅告诉加杜塞克，他一直看到一些让他想起电影中鬼魂的人。“他显然感到恐惧和不安，并且是自发地说道，抱怨这些并非梦境，而是在白天的办公桌前出现的幻象，”加杜塞克写道。加杜塞克陷入恐慌，担心“整个‘实验’可能会突然瓦解”。他写道，“Mbaginta'o 产生幻觉、妄想并进展到完全痴呆型精神分裂症的可怕阴影，及其所有潜在影响……我所有可怕的责任，在我面前若隐若现。”伊万曾倾诉，他在幻象中看到一些在身体上发生变化、变得丑陋且苍老的幽灵。
死于库鲁病（kuru）的人的冷冻器官被不断地运往贝塞斯达：五组眼睛；七十五份大脑标本。“抚摸那个我记忆犹新的婴儿的大脑，真是奇怪，”在一名一岁幼儿的组织送达后，加杜塞克写道。伊万在实验室工作，起初是志愿者，后来进入美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）的工资单，他在为灵长类动物注射库鲁病患者提取物时负责固定它们。加杜塞克产生给动物注射的想法，是因为一名兽医病理学家注意到，库鲁病患者的大脑与患有瘙痒病（scrapie）的绵羊大脑相似，后者是一种通过接触感染组织传播的致命神经系统疾病。考虑到福尔族（Fore）的葬礼仪式，加杜塞克决定测试库鲁病是否也具有传染性，这是一个极具吸引力的可能性。
1963年，加杜塞克的同事、澳大利亚人迈克尔·阿尔珀斯（Michael Alpers）对一名叫基格亚（Kigea）的孩子进行了尸检。阿尔珀斯将她描述为一个“极好的小女孩”，随着病情进展，她说话“轻柔且害羞”，最终只能发出哼唧声。基格亚大脑的液化部分被注入了一只名叫黛西（Daisey）的黑猩猩体内。两年之内，黛西变得冷漠，很快她的身体开始颤抖；随后她开始蜷缩在笼子里的架子上，几乎处于僵直状态。另外两只被注射的黑猩猩也出现了类似的症状。“你觉得它们看起来像患了库鲁病吗？”1965年，身在巴布亚新几内亚的加杜塞克在给伊万的一封信中问道。
加杜塞克和他的同事们结——
40 《纽约客》，2026年8月24日及31日
加杜塞克在所罗门群岛，约1963年。他后来因对致命疾病库鲁病的研究而获得诺贝尔奖。
论认为库鲁病已传播给黑猩猩，并在发表于《新英格兰医学杂志》的一篇论文中宣布发现了一种其行为无法用现有传染模型解释的传染病。库鲁病没有任何典型的感染迹象，如发烧或免疫反应，并且它违背了接触后很快会发病的预期。这项研究表明，人们对传染病的界定过于狭隘，并促使科学家重新评估他们处理其他退行性疾病的方式。2013年发表在《病原体》（Pathogens）杂志上的一篇论文将这一发现称为“20世纪生物医学科学最伟大的贡献之一”。
库鲁病实验使加杜塞克在1976年获得了诺贝尔奖，这使他处于一种周围人很少对他拒绝的地位。历史学家沃里克·安德森（Warwick Anderson）写道：“他获得的大脑越多，他就越有机会与其他科学家建立关系，让他们欠他的人情。”在伊万在美国的前七年里，加杜塞克又领养了五个孩子，他们来自密克罗尼西亚的一个人口不足三百人的岛屿法伊斯（Fais），以及附近的一个珊瑚环礁乌利西（Ulithi）——这两个地方他都曾去进行医学研究。伊万不明白为什么加杜塞克不断地把新孩子带回家。“这让我很失望，因为你从未告诉我关于他们的事，”他写信告诉他，并补充道，“不过，你能把他们现在带到这里来替代我，你真是太好了。”
当加杜塞克（Gajdusek）把第五个孩子带回家时，伊万（Ivan）正在斯沃斯莫尔学院（Swarthmore College）就读，他在几位加杜塞克的朋友写信敦促录取后才得以进入该校。第一学期结束时，一名院长打电话给加杜塞克，告诉他伊万无法继续学业。“游戏结束了，”加杜塞克写道，“现在我们玩‘野蛮人’的游戏结束了，他们希望他能再次快乐地变回野蛮人，好让他们以及我也能卸下所有的道德责任。”伊万回到了巴布亚新几内亚，注册进入大学，随后辍学。“我知道我的生活很疯狂，我只是不知道如何与任何人沟通，”伊万写信给加杜塞克，“我对未来的生活感到非常恐惧。我不知道我想成为什么。”
加杜塞克并未因此打消念头，半年后，他又从巴布亚新几内亚带回了第二个孩子。一名定居在高原地区的德国传教士创办了一所路德会学校，加杜塞克请求他从学生中寻找一名合适的候选人。“如果他的年龄在12岁或以下，可能会比较合适，”他在一封信中写道，“这样在航空机票上还能享受半价优惠，并且能让我进一步考虑带两个回来。”加杜塞克最终列出了一份包含八名学生的名单，然后决定选择最年幼的孩子，一个十二岁的男孩。用该国的主要语言托克皮辛语（Tok Pisin），这个男孩写信向父母请求许可。“一位年轻的主人说他想带我去美国，”他写道，“他不是白白带我去。他想带我去那里，他想让我去白人的大学校。”
在七十年代，继塔斯基吉（Tuskegee）丑闻——一项长达四十年的实验，其中数百名患有梅毒的黑人男性在不知情的情况下被研究且被拒绝治疗——之后，科学家们开始遵守保护人类研究对象的新规定。但是
courtesy U.S. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
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“他们就在壁橱里，加里。这是我最后一次告诉你我们把骸骨藏在哪里。”
这些规则并不适用于加杜塞克的孩子们，因为他已将他们纳入自己的家庭。“当人们开始告诉我，把这些男孩带到美国接受教育是多么慷慨、多么无私、多么高尚时，我觉得自己多么愚蠢，多么无法回应，”加杜塞克在日记中反思道，“面对那些感到担忧、询问我真实动机和真实目的的人，我反而觉得自在得多。”
1975年，即巴布亚新几内亚脱离澳大利亚独立的那一年，鲁威（Luwi）加入了第二批前往普罗萨（Purosa）就读新政府学校的福尔族（Fore）儿童，普罗萨曾是一个殖民时期的医疗站，距离他的村庄有一天的步行路程。他说，在课程开始之前，“我们走进丛林，砍柴，把柴带回来，然后制作椅子。”加杜塞克曾送给鲁威一本韦氏词典作为礼物，鲁威在业余时间学习它。有些词让他感到困惑，比如“obliged”——它的发音与他认为的并不一样。
随着殖民行政人员和传教士进入高原地区，食人习俗已经结束，库鲁病（kuru）也开始消退。当新病例出现时，通常发生在多年前就曾接触过该病的人身上。“科学家们从未治愈过任何人，”鲁威告诉我，“他们能找到的唯一补救办法就是告诉人们：‘你必须改变你的生活。’”他将流行病的结束与教会和学校的到来联系在一起。
1981年，路威（Luwi）正坐在教室里，这时学校校长用扩音器喊了他的名字。他和同桌伊吉（Iggy）被要求到学校办公室报到。加杜塞克（Gajdusek）在那里等着，准备带他们去美国。校长此前一直不愿放人，但加杜塞克在日记中写道：“由于我现在是他们的法定监护人，我最终说服了他让他们离开。”两天前，路威的叔叔和伊吉的父母已经表示同意。另外两名福尔族（Fore）儿童也加入了他们。其中一名叫苏珊娜（Susanna）的十一岁女孩回忆起得知目的地时的哭泣：“卡尔顿（Carleton）说，我现在就带你走，于是我哭得更厉害了，我母亲说，别哭了，于是我就闭上了嘴。”在日记中，加杜塞克将她描述为“比我想象的更难对付”。
路威并没有考虑过自己是否想离开。“他直接从教室里把我们挑了出来，我们当时很困惑，”他说，“美国是一个除了发生某种奇迹 otherwise 没人能去的地方。”他只有几分钟时间用一个布袋收拾自己的物品。韦伯词典（Webster’s Dictionary）太重了带不走，于是他把它塞在朋友的床垫下作为礼物。
路威的表妹丽贝卡（Rebecca）在学年期间路威寄住在普罗萨（Purosa）她家，她说：“我环顾四周没看到他，于是我说，‘路威？路威在哪儿？’”一名同学告诉她：“他彻底走了。就是那个白人带走的。”
加杜塞克开车带着路威和其他孩子前往戈罗卡（Goroka），伊万（Ivan）现在住在那里。他们在伊万家过了一夜。“我们成了卡尔顿的新鸟儿，”路威说。伊万已婚，有两个孩子，在一家小型博物馆担任策展人，该馆收集东高地的文物，如面具和盾牌。他对加杜塞克的计划持怀疑态度。五个月前，他曾写信给加杜塞克：“我和我的妻子真的非常不赞同你带这么多新男孩。我们想知道你从这些男孩身上能获得多少好处？”
伊万的女儿露易莎（Louisa）告诉我，她的父亲从未谈起过他的过去。她只知道他在美国受过教育。“我的父亲不讲述他来自哪里，去了哪里。他什么都不讲，”她说。当露易莎询问父亲在美国度过的时光时，他告诉她：“忘了吧。”
伊万把孩子们送到戈罗卡的机场，并试图给路威一些关于适应美国生活的建议，但路威不记得他说过什么，只记得他的语法是“损坏的”。路威觉得伊万没能把英语学好很可惜。在带他跨越世界的飞机上，路威大部分时间都在呕吐。
路威和其他三个孩子搬进了前景山（Prospect Hill），那是马里兰州弗雷德里克（Frederick）一座破旧的18世纪庄园。加杜塞克的五个男孩已经住在那里。这座房子
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坐落在六英亩的土地上，有八个壁炉、一座凉亭、一个排球场和一个带跳板的游泳池，周围环绕着风信子、紫藤和樱桃树。附近没有邻居，也没有电话。加杜塞克将这种生活条件描述为“傲慢的孤立”。在路威到来的第一天，加杜塞克带新孩子们参观了美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）。“我们置身于外国人的丛林之中，”路威回忆道。第二天，路威在当地的一所公立学校开始了八年级的学习。
曾帮助抚养第一批男孩的计算机科学家韦格斯坦（Wegstein）患上了阿尔茨海默病。一名在加杜塞克实验室工作的中国儿科血液学家金程廷（Cheng-Ting Chin）搬进了前景山。她请求加杜塞克娶她，但在信中他告诉她，他需要“摆脱所有束缚性的个人关系和承诺，除了我的孩子们——我在挑选他们时他们都处于青春期前——而且即使是对他们，”他补充道，“我希望他们成年后将我仅仅简化为一个记忆。”他在日记中写道，他真正爱的是“那些我可以掌控、玩耍、以爱和惊叹凝视，然后将其送回大海的小鱼”。
在餐桌上，Gajdusek 有时会大声朗读文学作品，时间长达两小时。他有一份强加给孩子们的标准作者名单：詹姆斯·乔伊斯、欧内斯特·海明威、马克西姆·高尔基、安德烈·纪德、D. H. 劳伦斯。“阅读，阅读，甚至做笔记，或者至少列一份书名、作者以及你能提出的任何评论的清单，”他给一个男孩写道。他给孩子们发了日记本，然后在晚上花多达一小时的时间批改他们的记录。他将自己比作十五世纪佛罗伦萨的赞助人洛伦佐·德·美第奇，在寻找他的米开朗基罗。
“晚上 10:58，Gajdusek 给了我这个笔记本，”Luwi 在一个盖有联邦供应服务局（Federal Supply Service）库存编号的绿色布面日记本上写道。他开始记录的方式与 一模一样：日期、时间以及所在地。“我今天梦到这本笔记本在未来将成为 Luwi 历史上最重要的书，”他写道，并补充说，“我不知道如果我把这张纸给我的妻子和孩子，他们会说什么。”
有些记录读起来像是一篇关于美国郊区青少年时期的人类学报告。在 1984 年—— 记录道，这是“乔治·奥威尔之年”——上学的第一天，他观察到：“每个人都对我说‘新年快乐’，他们还问我圣诞节收到了什么礼物，还问我的假期过得怎么样。这对我很有效。”他内化了 审视他生活的框架。在一次因家务事与 争吵后，他写道：“（野蛮人）（野蛮人）（野蛮人）。” 不记得是 在说那个词，还是因为他在想象 的想法而使用了括号。
“Carleton 拍了我的下巴几次，所以我走到外面的垃圾区点了一把大火，睡在木炭里，” 在另一次关于谁洗碗的争吵后写道。第二天， 独处，翻阅关于巴布亚新几内亚的书籍。其中一本书名为《初识读写研究》（A Study in Nascent Literacy），包含了他叔叔 Koye 的信件。Koye 曾是 最忠实的助手之一，随他旅行并携带设备。 认为 是 Waieti 第一个识字的人。 在十几岁早年写这些信时，读起来像被记录下来的演讲。信件经常以“请听我的信息”开头，仿佛 正站在集会上发表公告。他列出了死于库鲁病（kuru）的人员名单，表达了他多么想念 Ivan，并请求供应物资：圆珠笔、书、一条毯子、一把吉他。他在笔记末尾写道，“我是 ”以及“就这些。我的简短信息结束了。”
将这些信件给其他孩子看，他们嘲笑 简单的写作方式。“我们把它当成笑话，” 说。但他对他叔叔的蜕变产生了一种新的敬意。“他正在学习将思想转化为信息，”他说。那天晚上， 梦见自己回到了村庄打猎。但在森林里他找不到任何可以猎杀的动物。当他饥肠辘辘地回到家时，他写道，“我的父亲追赶我们，告诉我们一个去打猎的人不能空手而归。”第二天， 产生了一个类似的白日梦，但这一次，那个不认同他的家长是 。在去商店买卡带之后，他写道，“我慢慢走回家，梦见自己是一个非常原始的男孩，在见到 Carleton 后躲在洞穴里。”
鲁维的代数和木工课成绩是 D，而在美国历史课上，当他必须站起来大声朗读关于 1812 年战争的论文时，他的头简直要“烧掉了”。他在日记中写道：“天呐，我真的非常需要帮助。”但加杜塞克经常出差，或者忙于工作。有些夜晚，家里没有一个成年人在。早晨，他和其他男孩在咖啡里倒入威士忌，以便在走去学校的路上保持温暖。有一天晚上，加杜塞克因为鲁维太吵且没洗衣服而愤怒地离家而出，鲁维写道：“祝卡尔顿好运，无论你现在在哪里享用美食，或许还喝着一杯香槟，但请记住，我们依赖于你。”
在日记中，加杜塞克有时描述与他的孩子们——特别是较小的男孩——赤裸地睡在同一张床上。鲁维说，加杜塞克会对他的阴茎和睾丸的生长发表评论，并鼓励他手淫。鲁维无法定义加杜塞克在做什么。“我只是保持沉默，”他告诉我。“我可以假装自己在家，在丛林里。”他在怀耶蒂（Waieti）关于加杜塞克最早的记忆也涉及性化的课程。“他会带我们去一个让我们感到自由的安全地方，然后问我们，‘这个东西叫什么名字？’”鲁维说。“他会询问某些植物，手，脚，生殖器。他会抓我们的睾丸说，‘这个叫什么？’”
殖民者和人类学家也经常用色情词汇来描述异域之地——将其视为并非完全真实的地方，在那里他们爱上了人们的差异，以及他们新获得的自由与权力。“我逃离我的工作，我的同事，我‘模式化的生活’，以寻找自我——一个变得凶猛而奇怪的自我，”加杜塞克写道。学者安妮·麦克林托克（Anne McClintock）将热带地区比作一个“心灵的魔幻
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灯笼，欧洲将其中禁忌的性欲望投射其上。”但加杜塞克让这些幻想变得可携带。当他把孩子们带回家后，他继续想象，对男孩的吸引力——他承认自己的性取向使他成为“我们物种中的一个异常个体”——是可以被纵容且没有危害的。
吉迪恩·怀瓦伊梅（Gideon Waiwaime）在来到加杜塞克家生活时十岁，他说加杜塞克每年会给他做几次体检，并长时间挤压他的睾丸，时长令他惊讶。“我当时以为那是检查过程的一部分，”吉迪恩告诉我。“所以我认为，我们就顺其自然吧。”他的室友年纪较大，建议他“远离那个老头”。吉迪恩说，当加杜塞克拍打其他男孩的私处时，“我们会拿这件事开玩笑，比如，‘噢，我看到那个老头对你做了什么。’”他觉得被加杜塞克触摸是“来到美国的配套条件的一部分”。
加杜塞克经常邀请十几个客人来晚餐。“我们烹饪并准备好一切，就像为他们开餐厅一样，”鲁维说。加杜塞克保留了一本访客簿，上面有访问他家的人的签名，包括弗雷德里克市的市长；牙买加的第一夫人；创造了“分形”一词的数学家本努瓦·曼德博（Benoit Mandelbrot）；发现汉坦病毒的李浩旺（Ho Wang Lee）；以及在诺贝尔委员会任职二十多年并最终成为其秘书的约兰·K·汉森（Göran K. Hansson）。作为一名诺贝尔奖得主，加杜塞克有权提名其他医生和科学家角逐该奖项，访客们为了能进入加杜塞克所说的“名单”而竞争。鲁维说，在用餐结束时，“我们会询问是否可以为他们冲咖啡或拿冰淇淋。”生物物理学家、以色列第四任总统埃弗拉伊姆·卡齐尔（Ephraim Katzir）在给加杜塞克的信中写道：“看到你成功地将你的‘孩子们’转化为一个协作的儿童社会，真是太棒了。”
Gajdusek 经常受邀参加国际医学会议，有时他会带着那些孩子一起。在一次前往意大利的行程中，他在那里做了三次讲座，他和 Luwi 都记录了他们租用车辆的品牌、办理酒店入住的时间、乘坐轮渡跨越的海峡、接送他们的司机以及窗外的景色——两人的措辞几乎完全相同。（并非所有 Gajdusek 的孩子都热衷于写日记。一名来自托比岛（Tobi，一个长度不足一英里的密克罗尼西亚岛屿）的男孩曾写道：“我的感觉非常可疑。我并不想记住任何事情。”）
Luwi 和其他高地男孩有时会参加 Gajdusek 关于库鲁病（kuru）的讲座，Luwi 感觉到他们的出现增加了他的可信度。那些母亲死于库鲁病的孩子同样面临患病的风险，因为他们经常一起参加葬礼宴会。“它可能已经在我的体内了，”Luwi 说，“所以他们会对我就进行研究，而这将是一项很好的研究，因为比起他们对黑猩猩做的那些研究，他们在华盛顿将拥有一个真实的标本。”
在 Luwi 在美国的第三年，Gajdusek 阅读了亨利·詹姆斯的前两部小说，《罗德里克·哈德逊》（Roderick Hudson）和《监视与警戒》（Watch and Ward）。Gajdusek 观察到，这两部小说讲述的都是那些“自认为的恩人”，而这些人“基本上是性功能残缺的天才”。他被詹姆斯对被卷入恩人轨道的青少年心中那种“不应承担的义务感，以及囚禁、奴役或洗脑感”的洞察所震撼。他在日记中抄录了《罗德里克·哈德逊》中的几行文字。“愿我能更好地学会，在我接触的所有孩子身上创造自由而非束缚，”他写道。
在高中期间，Luwi 在 Gajdusek 的日记中基本消失了。他主要出现在男孩们的名单中：去博物馆；踢足球；应对时差；获取大学招生手册；在以每小时 60 英里的速度行驶在新泽西收费公路（New Jersey Turnpike）上时，与 Gajdusek 谈论家乡死于库鲁病的人们。孩子们融合成了一个集体。“我们是太平洋的少年 / 我们的岛屿如此宽广，”一名男孩在诗中写道，“当医生来访时，我们随行而行。”
Gajdusek 经常写到“长期关系如何因忽视或直接的破坏行为而缓慢崩溃和瓦解”，并补充道：“这令我着迷，而且由于我日益成为这种疏离的一部分，我心怀敬畏地观察它们。”他注意到，“问题始终在于，那个‘结局’（denouement）依然存在。”
Luwi 成为了这样一个麻烦的来源。1986 年秋天，他进入了位于纽约州北部的保罗·史密斯学院（Paul Smith’s College），他记得自己是少数几个非白人学生之一。他酗酒严重，不完成学业。一年后，他因成绩不及格被开除。他告诉 Gajdusek ：“我不能再待在这个地方了。我只想回家。”Gajdusek 意识到 Luwi 在大学的一年“伤害了他的自尊”，于是给他买了一张前往巴布亚新几内亚的机票。
在出发前的那天晚上，Luwi 的朋友们在公园举办了一个派对，他彻夜饮酒。第二天一早 Gajdusek 见到他时，在记录中写道，Luwi “在醉酒的不平衡状态中流泪，有时近乎愤怒，哭诉说我避开了他且‘从未与他交谈’”。几个小时后，Gajdusek 将他送往机场，在候机厅向哭泣的 Luwi 挥手告别。“我很高兴他走了，”Gajdusek 写道。
就在同一天，Gajdusek 最新的被监护人 Daniel 从密克罗尼西亚抵达。他九岁，其父亲是第一批从密克罗尼西亚来到美国的男孩之一。在 Luwi 离开两天后，Gajdusek 写道：“我爱上了 Daniel！他是一个极好、聪明、警觉且不挑剔的小男孩。”
卢威回到巴布亚新几内亚时，感觉除了一个“赤裸的身体”外，自己一无所有。他住在戈罗卡伊万的家里，在一家销售食品和工具的商店工作。他不想谈论在美国度过的时光。“我们用英语使用的解释与母语不同，”他说，“用母语时，你必须动用很多很多词汇，而这些词汇可能会堆积成山，即便如此，我依然无法将其剖析清楚。”
卢威对他离开的这些年里发生的变化感到迷茫。“就像在美国一样，金钱在这里——巴布亚新几内亚——也正变得‘至高无上’，”他在写给加杜塞克的信中这样写道。他记得一种平等主义的生活方式，但他发现 wantoki（一个托克皮辛语词汇，意为“同语”，指说同一种语言的人）不再像过去那样“免费赠送花园里的食物了”。
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--。
圣保罗
我所有的朋友都有他们的神与天堂 以及抵达那里的计划。他们为了大斋期放弃性爱， 为了终身放弃猪肉，他们点燃香，点燃 蜡烛，向死者供奉水果。 现在是否是坦白我曾因为一个男孩叫我佛教徒 而咬了他的一次好时机？没关系，那时我才六岁 且不知道佛教徒是什么意思， 没关系，当时我们就在一座佛教寺庙里。 在很长一段时间里，我认为神是由我死去的亲人们 轮番扮演的。在很长一段时间里，神是一个腰带环上 挂着一串钥匙的男孩。我从未像那时那样充满信仰， 但我从未像现在这样频繁地与神交谈——现在 我的渴望仅仅是鸟类的渴望。在某个时刻， 有人邀请我参加复活节，然后是逾越节，然后是开斋节 而有一晚我与安德鲁的神交谈，又有一晚我 与萨姆的神交谈。我与萨夫的神交谈。我是一根灯芯， 被任何路过的神点燃——一种为他人的奇迹 而准备就绪的胃口。然后保罗病了 然后好转了，于是我说 谢谢你，谢谢你。 保罗和我来自一座城市，起初以一名私酒贩之名命名， 后来又以一名圣人之名重新命名；当他去世时， 我飞往一座只有他知道的城市，那里的湿度 抚平了我熨在裤子上的褶皱。 我一生都在流淌我的羞辱，将光线昏暗中的男孩 塑造成圣徒，从未考虑过天堂，只考虑过好天气。 但既然我所有死去的亲人都被不同的神召回家中， 我知道他们并不像我想象的那样，全部在同一个地方 等待着我。在很长一段时间里，我认为只要将 我的信仰投向任何一个讲坛的大致方向，就能挺过去。 谢谢朋友们向我展示你们的神， 也谢谢诸神向我展示我的朋友们， 但我选择的天堂，是一个我可以离开的天堂。
—纽恩 (Hieu Minh Nguyen)
路威来自高地的同桌 伊吉，带着美国大学的学 位回到了巴布亚新 几内亚，并在政府部门找到了一份工作。 但大多数其他的高地男孩 回国时是“赤裸”的，正如路威的表妹丽贝卡 所说。（一个男孩最终定居在 美国。）比路威早一年去美 国的塞纳·安努亚，也因为成绩不合格 被大学开除，回到了他的村庄。 “我感到羞愧，无法在家乡的 家人面前现身，”塞纳告诉我。加杜塞克 给了他及其兄弟姐妹一份 “人生地图”，他说，但他们中的大多数人 “没有找到进入那片土地的大门”。
路威的一些留在高地的 同学成为了警察、 医疗专业人员和教师，路威觉得 如果他从未离开前往 美国，他的前景可能会更好。他决定回学校读书， 在巴布亚新几内亚北海岸的 神圣之言学院（Divine Word Institute）。加杜塞克 支付了学费。但路威依然在酗酒， 一年后，他的成绩不足以继续学业。“我想 我天生就是一个失败者或卢瑟，”他写信给 加杜塞克。“非常感谢您 努力尝试让我重回正轨，但我就是做不到。”
他搬回了怀耶蒂（Waieti）。在日记中， 他称之为“最后一页”。他娶了一位表妹， 但怀耶蒂与他记忆中的样子不同。“如今， 你几乎听不到孩子玩耍、人们吟诵或 歌唱的人类声音，”他告诉加杜塞克。好几个家庭 已经搬到了其他村庄或沿海 地区。怀耶蒂的中心 已被野草占据。
路威偶尔会从怀耶蒂出发旅行两天 前往戈罗卡，以便能从一家二手店 买书。“我嘲笑我自己，”他告诉我。“ 我觉得自己是谁？我想证明什么？”他用一个 军用背包把书背回家。他说，当他在路上 经过人们身边时，他们会嘲讽地喊道： “那个士兵先生要去哪里？”他明白 他们的意思是 “你在美国待过，现在却失业了？”“对我来说 最好的做法就是倾听并继续走， 因为我无法反驳这些人，”他告诉我。在日记中， 他写道，“我除了在为计划一个计划的计划 以执行一个 —-- -- 之外，什么也没做。”
Luwi 在一封写给 Gajdusek 的信中说，他当时正处于宣布自己“不适合”在这个社会生存的边缘。但他补充道，“我最大的希望和一直思考的梦想就是写作。”他请求 Gajdusek 给他寄一些钢笔和便签本，并分享一些“与人类生活社会层面相关的书籍”的书名。Luwi 写道：“只要给我一个名字，我就去读。”有时在天气干燥时，他会在森林里过夜，为了捕捉以瑰丽如宝石般的羽毛而闻名的极乐鸟并将其出售。他在那里用叶子盖了一间小屋，当听到拍翅声时，他就用用雨伞骨架制作的箭射击这些鸟。他说，在小屋里等待时，“我在森林里开了一个孔让光线照进来，然后开始写作。我将心思倾注在日记页上，向自己剖析自己。”
到了九十年代， 的实验室已经让数百只动物感染了类似于库鲁病（kuru）的神经系统疾病。人们逐渐意识到，库鲁病以及类似的神经退行性疾病（如克雅氏病和致死性家族性失眠症）中的感染源是一种被称为朊蛋白（prion）的错误折叠蛋白质——这个词是由加州大学旧金山分校的神经学家 Stanley Prusiner 创造的，他因这一发现于 1997 年获得诺贝尔奖。Prusiner 研究过库鲁病，在 1980 年访问高地后，他为了帮 一个忙，将 Sena Anua 带到了美国，
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Sena 当时九岁。“斯坦说，能带他体验第一次坐电梯、第一次住酒店、第一次逛动物园、第一次去餐厅，这本身就是充足的回报，” 在日记中写道。
实验室的一名研究员 Mark Godec 表示，当他在美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）看到 时，“他身边通常围着五六个男孩，其中一些看起来不超过九或十岁。”Godec 决定阅读堆在架子上的 五十年代、六十年代和七十年代的日记。“它们就在那里，就在我的办公桌上方，”他告诉我。他被其中涉及的青春期前儿童的数量所震惊，而 似乎认为这些孩子在与他“调情”或“诱惑”他。
曾在 实验室工作的芝加哥大学人类学家 Judith Farquhar 在多年前就警告过 ，最好私下印刷他那些更私人化的日记，而不是依赖 N.I.H. 提供资金，并使用其工作人员进行转录和装订。“在你看来可能含糊其辞的讨论，在我看来却相当透明，”Farquhar 写道。当我问她担心什么时，她说：“嗯，当然是关于性行为不端的怀疑威胁。”她说，随着 年龄的增长，他不断地坦白自己的性癖好，“以至于我们所有人都对此感到完全厌烦了。”
当 Godec 询问同事如何看待实验室负责人的行为时，他说，“很明显，大家已经达成了一项共识：这不关我们的事。”1995 年，在实验室工作几年后，他将一盒 的日记交给了参议员 Nancy Kassebaum，她是监督 N.I.H. 的劳工与人力资源委员会主席。他在那些包含对男孩性描述的页面上贴了便利贴。Godec 告诉我：“我意识到，我正处于一场由一名诺贝尔奖得主在 N.I.H. 内部运行了三十年的恋童癖行动之中。”（在八十年代，马里兰州警方曾对 进行调查，因为至少有一名美国男子——一名 N.I.H. 同事之子——投诉自己在六十年代孩童时期遭受过性虐待，但由于警方无法找到近期的受害者，该案随后被结案。）
监察长办公室和
美国联邦调查局（F.B.I.）展开了调查。监察长办公室（O.I.G.）的一名特工弗兰克·阿德尔曼（Frank Adelman）开始采访加杜塞克（Gajdusek）实验室的科学家们，但阿德尔曼告诉我，他们“极力保护”加杜塞克。“他们不认为加杜塞克所做的事情有什么不对。他们认为这个男人是个圣人。”在加杜塞克实验室工作了二十五年的科学家大卫·阿舍（David Asher）告诉阿德尔曼：“无论加杜塞克做了什么，他都是公开地，并且在
美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）下属专注于神经系统疾病的部门——N.I.N.D.S.管理层的全面知情和同意下完成的。”
到九十年代初，加杜塞克的家中住着九名儿童和青少年。他写道，他不再相信自己的教育计划能培养出像“兰波或波德莱尔”那样的人。“我不是一个可以修剪枝叶的园丁，而是一个面对人类荒原保护工作的生态学家。”有些孩子在学校打架；有些则在商店偷窃和喝酒。他们举办的泳池派对一直持续到黎明。伊万（Ivan）写信给住在加杜塞克家的女儿露易莎（Louisa）说：“我不希望你变得像卡尔顿（Carleton）的那些孩子一样，他们现在没在做任何对自己有意义的重要事情。”伊万也送了他的儿子（名叫卡尔顿）过去，但后者因盗窃被捕，为了避免被起诉，他回到了家中。西弗吉尼亚大学的一位教授凯利·沃森（Kelly Watson）研究殖民主义并正在撰写一本关于加杜塞克的书，她当时与其中一些男孩就读于同一所高中。她说，那些男孩以举办喧闹的派对而闻名。加杜塞克的房子被视为喝酒和吸毒的场所。
一名 F.B.I. 特工开始尝试采访这些孩子，但唯一愿意坦诚交流的是一名二十三岁的青年，我称他为迈克尔（Michael）。他在十四岁时在密克罗尼西亚的火山岛波纳佩（Pohnpei）遇到了加杜塞克。迈克尔告诉我，他的离开被安排得如此之快，以至于他从未向父母道别。在美国，加杜塞克很快找到了触碰他的方法。“因为他是医生，他可以说，‘嘿，过来。我需要检查你，因为你得确保你的体检合格’，或者类似的话，”迈克尔说。“我不明白。我总是试图找理由给自己解释。”
在日记中，加杜塞克将迈克尔描述为“以一种奇怪且令人不安的方式显得冷漠”，经常在没有告知到达的情况下“潜入屋内”。“我察觉到了一种愤怒，”加杜塞克记录道。在一次争吵后，迈克尔说他想回家，加杜塞克写道，迈克尔解释说“他一直想回家，是我把他留在这里的”。到迈克尔上大学时，加杜塞克承认这种关系是“病态的”，但他将责任归咎于迈克尔。“我一直希望并祈祷他能解决他与我之间那些古怪的冲突，”他写道。
迈克尔同意为 F.B.I. 秘密录制一段与加杜塞克的对话。1996年，他给加杜塞克的实验室打电话，说调查人员一直试图询问他。
加杜塞克正准备前往巴黎参加一个关于朊病毒疾病的会议，并在会上发表主旨演讲。他告诉迈克尔，他只需要说自己从未被猥亵过。
“所以你想要，你想要我，就像，对他们撒谎？”迈克尔问。
“是的，”加杜塞克说。“绝对要。”
“好吧，现在我想想，我想知道为什么。”
“什么？”
“我想知道你为什么对我那样做。”
加杜塞克切换到了办公室的私人线路。“听着，”他说。“如果你继续跟人们谈论这件事，你会给我们带来巨大的麻烦，你会让那些在读大学的孩子们失去生活保障，会冻结我的账户。我将不得不离开这个国家。明白了吗？”
“难道你不明白，你对我所做的事，你知道，可能是我在美期间如此不安的很多原因所在？”
“我小时候和我的叔叔玩过，”加杜塞克说。“我和我的兄弟玩过。”他说密克罗尼西亚和巴布亚新几内亚的孩子们也做同样的事情。
“我不知道你是从哪里学到那个的，”迈克尔说。“你是第一个
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对我这么做的人。”他回忆起加杜塞克如何“在不同的地方多次”对他“进行口交”。他问道：“难道你没意识到我并不想那样做吗？”
“不，我没意识到，”加杜塞克说。
“我很害怕。你在伤害我。”
“噢，我不知道，”加杜塞克说。“我道歉，我非常抱歉。”他说他希望迈克尔能早点告诉他。“情况是……我是一个……私生活非常困难且复杂的人。我试图寻找如何定义自己，我试图……像牧师或修女那样将其转化成——”
“卡尔顿，我感觉你把我们带到这里，仅仅是……为了你……自己的目的，”迈克尔说。
“噢，天呐，”加杜塞克说。
“这就是我从你身上感受到的，”迈克尔继续说道。“我不了解那些女孩，但屋子里的所有男孩——我知道他们倾向于拿这类事情开玩笑，而且我们试图把这件事留在屋子里，因为在某种程度上，我们试图保护你。”他问加杜塞克：“你这样做多久了？”
“我一生都在这样做，”加杜塞克回答。但他表示，他对孩子们的投入不亚于任何一个美国父母。
“你知道，其他人也可以投入同样多，并获得更好的结果，”迈克尔说，并补充说他“仔细研究过统计数据”，而加杜塞克抚养的男孩中只有一小部分过得不错。
“嗯，我设法照顾了非常多心怀感激的人，”加杜塞克说。
“他们就像我们现在这样，靠自己照顾自己，”迈克尔说。“如果你认为照顾孩子就是把钱扔在他们手里，然后——”
“我不乱扔钱，”加杜塞克说。“我给予时间。时间与关注。”
“不，关注是你给我们在所有人中最后才给的东西，”迈克尔说。
三周后，加杜塞克在从一次旅行返回的途中被逮捕，在那次旅行中，他获得了他的第十二个荣誉博士学位。他被指控两项虐待儿童罪。另一个来自密克罗尼西亚的男孩（来到美国时十一岁）也表示自己遭到了猥亵。然而，在他提供证词后不久，他的父亲和叔叔前往马里兰州争取他的监护权并将其带回家。该男孩撤回了之前的说法。
卢威告诉我，托克皮辛语（Tok Pisin）中没有“性虐待”这个词。“这类事情在我们的社区中从未被公开讨论或思考过，”他说。“我们知道存在局限性，卡尔顿有他接触我们的方式，”但卢威并不认为自己是受害者。“如果发生了，我的日记里会有记录，”他告诉我。“我会写下来的。”他说，他的日记就是加杜塞克的为人之证明。卢威认为加杜塞克是一个“喜爱孩子的人”，但他无法将那些他不想要的关注，与那些塑造了他如今之人的关注区分开来。
“我知道我想变得像你一样——不是在你的宏大成就和名声方面，而是在我自己的微小方式上，”卢威在得知加杜塞克被捕后立即写信告诉他。“卡尔顿完全是另一种类型的人——他像一个偶像，或者像上帝。”他接着写道，“如果我是天堂之门的天使，决定人类的命运，卡尔顿，你将在舒适的床垫上通过大门，由一千名天使陪伴，伴随着将你扫入天堂永恒幸福之中的音乐。”
加杜塞克的至少十名养子养女也写了同情和支持的信，但在他们的赞美中隐含着另一种形式的伤害。“我在你身上看到了我想要看到的一切，以及我想成为的一切，”其中一人写道。“在我余生的时间里，我必须尝试将此与真实的自我调和。”
在他的日记以及给同事的信件中，加杜塞克表现得自以为是。
他辩称自己的所作所为“并不比躺在草地上或采摘蒲公英更严重”，并引用安加人的成年礼作为辩护。这些仪式旨在让男孩们进入社区，作为共同步入成年阶段的一部分，但加杜塞克却将其视为一种永恒的许可，用来对他私下对一个个男孩实施的行为进行正当化。斯德哥尔摩卡罗林斯卡学院的教授乔治·克莱恩（George Klein）曾任诺贝尔奖评选委员会成员三十六年，他认可加杜塞克的观点，并告诉他，他好奇“西方世界是否能‘赶上你的脚步’”。他写道：“对于性问题上典型的犹太-基督教-伊斯兰教式的伪善，我与你一样感到愤慨。”然而，加杜塞克却被许多同事写信称知道指控一定是虚假的这一事实所困扰。“我对我的朋友们原本抱有更高的期待，”他说，“他们在掩饰，在撒谎。”
1997年2月，加杜塞克认罪。根据协议，他仅在弗雷德里克县拘留中心服刑一年，并在获释后可以离开美国。检察官斯科特·罗尔（Scott Rolle）告诉我：“当潜在的受害者被藏起来并消失在西太平洋之后，案件的其余部分就瓦解了。”伊万飞往美国接回吉迪恩·怀瓦伊梅（Gideon Waiwaime）和另一名儿童，两人在加杜塞克被捕后都被安置在寄养家庭中。在吉迪恩回到村庄后，他写道：
“这座城市真的变了。我小时候，那里没有那个咖啡杯。”
给加杜塞克的一首诗，开头是：“这是我的终结，但你继续生存。”
加杜塞克很享受监狱生活。“我发现自己比人生中任何时候都更高效，且享乐地沉溺于撰写论文（数千页）以及阅读和研究之中，”他写道。他意识到，这一年的拘留可能是他“最长且最精彩的日志”。他惊叹于监禁的“极高效率”。洗手池和马桶就在床边几英尺远。餐食和邮件直接送到门前。“监狱里的时间过得多么快啊！”他写道，“我拥有的书比我能读完的还要多，而且不用离开座位就能使用馆际互借。”
美国国立卫生研究院（N.I.H.）没有解雇加杜塞克，而是允许他辞职。艾滋病研究员、当时世界上被引用次数最多的科学家之一罗伯特·加洛（Robert Gallo）帮他在马里兰大学的人类病毒学研究所安排了一间办公室，并邀请他加入该研究所期刊的编辑委员会。在狱中，加杜塞克继续发表学术论文。他在日记中写道，澳大利亚科学院院长古斯塔夫·诺萨尔（Gustav Nossal）向他保证，正在努力为他在澳大利亚国立大学争取一个职位。（该职位最终并未实现。）美国最著名的精神分裂症研究员之一E. 富勒·托雷（E. Fuller Torrey）则在一些琐事上提供帮助，比如核实加杜塞克是否被允许在牢房里存放一本重达20磅的《剑桥莎士比亚全集》。
在加杜塞克获释当天，包括神经学家奥利弗·萨克斯（Oliver Sacks）和物理学家弗里曼·戴森（Freeman Dyson）在内的朋友们在监狱接他，随行的还有他抚养长大的四个孩子。“无论他之前做了什么或没做什么，显然这对孩子们没有坏处，”戴森在2014年出版的一本名为《伟大的头脑》（Great Minds）的书中接受采访时说道。戴森说他有三个英雄：理查德·费曼、马丁·路德·金以及加杜塞克。“当他出狱时，他说的第一句话是‘他们摧毁了奥斯卡·王尔德，但他们没有摧毁我’，”戴森说，“所以他绝对是个英雄。”
获释当晚，加杜塞克飞往巴黎，那里的一家法国研究中心——阿尔弗雷德·费萨尔神经生物学研究所（Institut de Neurobiologie Alfred Fessard）已为他安排了独立办公室。该研究所还出版了他被捕那一年的日记。书名为《登顶之巅极其壮丽：结局略显艰难》。
2011年，卢威（Luwi）得知村里有传闻说他是个巫师。一名当地议员（一名选出的村代表）的妻子突然去世。卢威认为该女性患有某种从未被正确诊断的疾病。“人们死亡是有原因的，”他在日记中写道。但村民们说，是他导致了她的死亡。
尽管库鲁病（kuru）已经终结，但对巫术的指控依然存在，并传播到了此前并不将此纳入信仰体系的地方。在巴布亚新几内亚的许多地区，被指控者通常是弱势的、被边缘化的女性；但在高地地区，指控有时会针对那些被认为获得了不公平优势或声望，或者与群体格格不入的男性。澳大利亚国立大学研究巴布亚新几内亚巫术暴力的学者米兰达·福赛斯（Miranda Forsyth）表示：“巫术指控与嫉妒密切相关，源于一种认为某些人拥有他人所没有之物的感觉。这是一种在从未有过这些差异的社会中，试图理解新出现的不平等现象的方式。”
卢威说，在库鲁病结束之后，村里第一个被指控为巫师的人是他的叔叔科耶（Koiye）。1993年，一直住在加杜塞克（Gajdusek）废弃房屋里的科耶被指控利用秘密力量导致另一名男子死亡。一群男人用箭射击他——其中三支箭中了他的胸口——并将他赶出了村庄。
科耶逃走后，卢威搬进了加杜塞克的房子，为了不引起怀疑，他多年来一直与叔叔保持距离。在2011年的日记中，他列出了那些成为“指控者依据”的要点：他在那名女性的葬礼上玩牌时使用了异常大额的资金；他被该女性丈夫的狗咬过。“噢，请上帝！帮帮我，”他写道，“我是纯洁的——无辜的——在那次死亡中甚至没有任何线索！”
卢威决定不再参加葬礼，因为怀疑往往在葬礼上滋生。“在这里收集的信息构成了指控的强力支撑 / 基础，”他写道。但在2013年，当一位好友去世时，拥有四个孩子的卢威无法缺席。他将朋友的木制棺材放在自家门前，以便人们吊唁。棺材上覆盖着泥土，在将其搬进屋之前，卢威用一桶水和一块海绵将其清理干净。“这是我最大的错误，几乎让我丢了性命，”他说，“那些把我当成巫师的人——这证实了我也杀死了这个男人。”
两个月后，卢威正和朋友在树下玩牌，这时一名男子从后面走来，用砍刀砍了他的头部。他日记中的下一篇条目名为《我被砍的那一天》。他头骨上的伤口深5厘米，长12厘米。躺在戈罗卡（Goroka）的一张医院病床上，他写道：“我仍然看到那个男人在我的花床间奔跑跳跃。我一直在问自己，为什么我会被像猪一样砍掉。”
卢威住院了近三个月，并需要多次输血。他无法理解人们怎么会认为他——在所有人之中——会从事巫术。“我是世界上最伟大的科学家之一的儿子，”他说，“卡尔顿（Carleton）没有教我成为一名巫师。”在日记中，卢威写道：“如果他们还是不能明白我是个什么样的人，我在房子里给他们留下了超过10年的生活日记记录……这应该能帮助他们对我做出更准确的评估。”但他的房子被洗劫了，包括二十年日记在内的所有财物都被重新分配或销毁了。
到那时，加杜塞克已经去世，记录他身体衰败情况的日记被保存在美国国家医学图书馆。“我将我终生的男色癖好带入了我的医学事业，并且在两方面都取得了成功，极少失败，”他在去世前两个月写道，“如果没有保护者，我永远不会成功。”他生命中的最后十年住在欧洲，并为了讲座和会议而旅行。“是的，我过了一段充实的生活，尽管我的健康和性格中存在所有那些古怪和奇癖，”他写道，“我还是设法将其扭转成了一段充满冒险、近乎神话般的人生，为此我只能感到欣喜。”
卢威告诉他的妻子和孩子，要把他当成一个“死人”。他们被赶出了瓦耶蒂，不得不定居在一个新村庄。卢威的
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罗兹·查斯特的速写本
[⚠ 低质量翻译，建议复核] # 纵横迷宫
R. Chast
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收入来源——一座咖啡园——无人收割。他留在戈罗卡，因为他的身体状况不稳定，不能远离医院；他已无法从事体力劳动。他极其思念孩子们，以至于喜欢想象他们正在给他发送信息——他写道，“鸟儿在为我歌唱”。
他行走时感到眩晕且摇晃。他在日记中写道：“我将永远是‘那个男人’。看，在那儿——没错，就是他。”他的视线模糊，身体阵阵作痛。他写道：“我无法找到比我见过的那些垂死的库鲁病患者更令人宽慰的例子来比拟这些痛苦了。我见过他们经历的痛苦，以及孩子们看着他们跌倒在地时的笑声。”
卢威仍然保留着一张头骨伤口的照片，那是袭击发生三天后拍的，以及他在医院就诊的医疗记录，这些都被夹在他日记本的第一页——那是一个带扣的黑色皮革笔记本。他住在戈罗卡郊外自己搭建的一间棚屋里，用木棍撑起帆布做成走廊。他睡在一块泡沫垫上。他与他的六年级老师共用这个空间，在他失踪前往美国之前，他曾是这位老师的学生。“我决定接纳他，这样我可以继续从他的反馈中学习，”卢威告诉我，“我老师的孩子们说，‘你们两个就像亲父子一样。’”
我在阅读了卢威在 80 年代在美国写的日记（这些日记被存档在国家医学图书馆）后开始寻找他。我和他第一次通话是通过安东尼娅·米申（Antonia Mission）的电话，她是戈罗卡的一名记者，曾帮我找到他。卢威将他目前的日记本对着屏幕展示。“每年我都会写完一本这样的日记，”他说。他坐在阳光下的长凳上，背靠着一面芥末黄色的混凝土砌块墙。他告诉我，他仍然倾向于阅读加杜塞克推荐的作者，并总结了一个他从陀思妥耶夫斯基那里学到的观点：“幸福不能通过理性的生存计划来获得，”他说，“而必须通过苦难来获得。”
大约六周后，我飞行了 33 小时到达戈罗卡，与他以及其他被加杜塞克抚养长大的男人见面。卢威在机场的围栏外等待，机场位于戈罗卡市中心，其跑道几乎与城镇本身一样长。他走路时带着不易察觉的跛行，戴着一顶写有“耶稣是主，基督”的帽子遮住伤口。塞纳·安努亚（Sena Anua）和劳纳科·瓦特（Launako Wate）——另一名曾在普罗斯佩克山生活过的男人——就站在他身边。他们乘巴士并步行走了好几个小时才赶到。
“我可以公开表达我的感受吗？”塞纳是一名自给自足的农民，在我抵达城镇的第一个早晨这样问我。“你是根据他的涂鸦而来的，”他开始说道，指的是卢威。然后他对他（卢威）说，“你主导。我来这里只是为了支持你。我从未感到自豪，但我为你感到自豪，我想让你知道我支持你。”在接下来的时间里，塞纳有着教授般的气质，且似乎习惯于面对听众，他关于自己的描述每次不超过一两句话。他也有一段想要讲述的故事：塞纳的父亲曾协助加杜塞克进行尸检——他被人们称为“窃贼”或“盗墓者”——而同样协助过库鲁病研究人员工作的塞纳认为，他和他的父亲没有得到应有的认可。但他拒绝透露更多细节。他明白故事很少能从多个视角讲述，因此不想分散卢威主张的注意力。“我会解释，但仅限于一定范围，”当我向他提问时，他这样说道。劳纳科则更加谦卑。在六个小时的时间里，他只说了寥寥数语。
自从那次砍刀袭击后，鲁威（Luwi）开始带着一个新的目标写作。在调查自己为何成为目标之后——他认为在一次土地纠纷后，人们首先对他产生了怀疑——他写道，他决定“仔细审视并评估……我在村庄居住的17年”，以便能够理解为何巫术仍具有如此强大的力量。关于巴布亚新几内亚巫术相关袭击次数的可靠数据并不存在，因为受害者和证人担心
“当然，我最喜欢用这艘船做的事就是航向开阔的水域，然后尖叫，尖叫，不停地尖叫。”
遭到报复，很少举报这些罪行，而警察往往也认同指控者的信念。但民族志学者和援助人员表示，在过去半个世纪里，针对疑似巫师的袭击有所增加，且变得更加公开和随意，不再遵循传统的习俗。鲁威接受治疗的戈罗卡（Goroka）医院在2004年发布了一份报告，描述了越来越多的家庭请求进行尸检，以确定亲人的死亡是否由巫术引起（通过摘除器官、投毒或其他手段）。“谁是领导者——我们如何埋葬死者——现在是时候审视我们基本上是如何生活的时候了，”鲁威在日记中写道。
他认为，库鲁病（kuru）的研究人员未能解决他们的研究本应解决的问题。“白人们不明白巫术是如何嵌入生活系统之中的，”他说。库鲁病流行期虽然结束了，但早逝的情况依然在继续；根据一项统计，东高地地区每八个孩子中就有一个在五岁前死亡。科学家们未能提供一个足够有说服力的疾病理论来取代旧有的理论。“美国和世界可以吹嘘库鲁病研究以及获得的众多奖项，但这些研究的结果是什么？”鲁威问道。“他们带了我们中的少数几个人去美国接受教育，但本可以为社区做些什么——他们没有建学校，没有建诊所，也没有为女性实现自我而开展任何项目。”他告诉我：“他们拿走了他们想要的东西，留给我们一个空碗。”
吉迪恩·怀瓦伊梅（Gideon Waiwaime）曾随加杜塞克（Gajdusek）在美国生活了五年，他说一旦回到家乡的安加（Anga）地区，当人们生病时，能够解释病因的界限感觉截然不同：“很难说这是一种天生的疾病，还是有人在试图杀死你。”他的父亲在为加杜塞克搬运多年行李后，被指控为“投毒者”，不得不逃离村庄。后来，当吉迪恩在村里的一所学校工作时，他也成为了目标。他看到一群男人拿着砍刀向他跑来。“他们试图追上我，但我比他们快，”他说。他最终逃到了该国首都莫尔兹比港（Port Moresby），但在那里找不到工作。
在吉迪恩和鲁威看来，曾与加杜塞克共事或由其抚养的男孩中，被贴上巫师标签的人数多得离奇。也许正是那些吸引加杜塞克的特质，以及他们后来在美国培养出的特质——抱负、独立、大胆——也让他们被认作是巫师。“那些不顺从村庄观念或想法的人——村庄必须想办法除掉他们，”鲁威说。
在我访问之后，住在莫尔兹比港机场附近定居点的吉迪恩给我发短信说，他花了一整天时间看着“滚滚黑烟升起”。他的姐夫被指控从事巫术，房子被纵火焚烧。吉迪恩听说自己的名字也在被标记为处决的人员名单上。他一直待在屋里。“我总是把自己锁起来，”他写信告诉我。“最好的办法就是小心翼翼，不信任任何人，除非我离开巴布亚新几内亚，否则我无法获得自由。我们所有人（卡尔顿的孩子们）在这里都不安全。”
鲁威说，他计划将自己的自传命名为《掉头》（U-Turn），“因为我一直在走，走，走，然后我决定转身看看我是怎么走过来的。”他告诉我：“卡尔顿花时间观察我们，但我们的人也在观察卡尔顿。所以这个故事是双向的。”他说，加杜塞克过去常在深夜在怀耶蒂的墓地散步；鲁威至今仍在好奇他究竟在做什么。他说，有些人推测，“卡尔顿是我们死去的亲人之一，现在他回到了我们身边，与灵魂沟通。”鲁威想将村民们的记忆汇编成一份报告，创建一份属于他自己的档案。他在日记中写道：“我希望采访卡尔顿度过人生大部分时光的那个村庄里的每一位公民——他们回忆起当年的卡尔顿是什么样子，他们去了哪里，做了什么，以及对卡尔顿的看法。”
伊万已经在 2005 年死于一次哮喘发作。他前往戈罗卡的医院使用雾化器，就像他之前很多次做的那样，但那天那里出现了短缺。“我在思考我的生命故事，我将写关于
你是如何将我从原始文化带入现代世界的，”他在给加杜塞克的一封信中这样写道。“也许你可以帮我写这个故事。你觉得怎么样？”但他的女儿路易莎说，即便在生命尽头，她父亲的过去对她来说依然是个谜。“只有卡尔顿知道，并将这个故事写在他的日记里，”她说。
基甸也在努力讲述自己的故事。“她离开了秋意轻盈飘落的土地，” / “去寻找隐藏在我墙壁中的回响，”在我访问之后，他在一首诗中这样写道。在美国时，他的身份是一名作家——加杜塞克曾沉思道，基甸“或许是我那十几名年幼的孩子中唯一具有创造力的一个”——但在加杜塞克被捕后，当他回到巴布亚新几内亚时，他失去了灵感。不过，在与我们的交谈之后，他重新开始写作——一部回忆录，以及大量诗歌，其中十二首题为《致卡尔顿·加杜塞克》。这些在 13 天内写就的致敬诗，以不同的语调表达了对加杜塞克收养他作为孩子的“牺牲”所持有的矛盾感激之情。“你从中得到了什么？”他写道。“你对我故事的认知是什么？”这些诗捕捉到了那种被赋予了无法拥有的生活能力的痛苦。他两次写道：“我希望我从一开始就不是我自己。”
鲁威也挣扎于这样一种感觉：尽管他所经历的一切改变了其他地方科学的进程——2002 年，一名确定了朊病毒结构的瑞士化学家获得了第三个源于加杜塞克库鲁病研究的诺贝尔奖——但在怀耶蒂及其他地方几乎没有留下痕迹。多年前，鲁威曾争取将孩子们的初级学校更名为加杜塞克纪念社区学校。他的提议被拒绝了。尽管如此，他还有其他唤醒人们记忆的计划。草丛已经覆盖了加杜塞克的房子，那里再次成为了森林的一部分。但鲁威从那里抢救了一些加杜塞克的旧杂志，以及他的煤气罐和科尔曼灯。 “对于那些不再被使用的东西，你能拿它们怎么办？”他问道。“我在考虑把它们存起来建个博物馆——任何能帮我们记住那座山上发生过严肃事情的东西。” ♦
《纽约客》，2006 年 8 月 24 日及 31 日
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人物简介
激烈的言辞
马哈茂德·哈利勒因抗议以色列而被拘留。现在他正处于被驱逐出境的边缘。
安德鲁·马兰茨 著
所有幸福的家庭都相似，这也许是对的，也许不对；但可以肯定的是，任何拥有一辆车的已婚夫妇，无论幸福与否，在某个时刻都必须决定由谁来开车。对于马哈茂德·哈利勒（Mahmoud Khalil）和他的妻子努尔·阿卜杜拉（Noor Abdalla）来说，这并不是一个困难的决定。三十一岁的哈利勒青年时代在叙利亚大马士革的一个巴勒斯坦难民营中度过，在那里他没有太多时间学习开车；直到最近，他一直走在成为一名高级外交官的道路上，而这个职业通常涉及的是被接送而非开车。另一方面，阿卜杜拉出生并成长于密歇根州的弗林特，在她能轻易看到仪表盘上方之前就学会了开车。（她现在依然很矮，以至于开车似乎仍需费些劲，不过她现在是一名三十岁的牙医，直到最近还每天通勤。）按照根深蒂固的美国传统，她把车当成第二个客厅。“那是让我最舒服的地方，”她去年秋天说道，并亲昵地拍了拍方向盘。
那是十月的一个周二，刚过黎明，一轮粉色的太阳在北新泽西的石油精炼塔上冉冉升起。阿卜杜拉正从布鲁克林开往费城的联邦法院，速度很快，夫妇俩将在那里旁听一场口头辩论，哈利勒干巴巴地称之为“我的案件之一”。他坐在副驾驶座上，两只手各拿一部手机：一部是他自己的，用来给规模庞大的公益法律团队成员发短信；另一部是阿卜杜拉的，他用它来放音乐。音乐大多是古老的黎凡特民歌，时不时被导航软件发出的英文通知打断：“前方有警察。”
哈利勒于 2022 年搬到曼哈顿，并迅速适应了美国文化。（在某种意义上，他甚至拥有了那种最典型的美国身份：网红。）在哥伦比亚大学攻读公共与国际事务硕士期间，他成为了或许是最受瞩目的亲巴勒斯坦活动人士。在 2023 年 10 月 7 日哈马斯袭击以及以色列入侵加沙之后，许多大学爆发了动荡的抗议活动，而哥伦比亚大学的抗议活动经常出现在电视新闻中。哈利勒是少数几个从未戴口罩遮脸的学生抗议者之一，成为了反犹太复国主义运动的象征。唐纳德·特朗普总统在第二任期开始几周后，正站在埃隆·马斯克身边，在白宫草坪上推销特斯拉，这时一名记者问到了哈利勒。“我认为我们应该把他赶紧赶出这个国家，”特朗普说。尽管哈利勒是合法永久居民，但国务卿马可·鲁比奥写了一份三段式的备忘录，宣布他因其“信仰、言论或关联”而“可被驱逐”。哈利勒被送往路易斯安那州农村的一个 ICE 拘留中心，在那里被关押了一百多天，错过了儿子的出生。
在费城，阿卜杜拉将车停在距离自由钟几个街区的地方，抚平了她的希贾布，将运动鞋换成了高跟鞋。哈利勒像平时在公共场合出现前那样，心不在焉地尝试伪装自己，戴上了一顶印有“Lucky”字样的棒球帽。每当走到门口，他都会侧身让路，微微鞠躬，并绅士地伸出一只手臂在身前引导，直到所有人都走进去。他通过安检进入法院的大理石大厅，一块玻璃面板上刻着一位名叫勒纳德·汉德（Learned Hand）的著名法学家的名言：“如果我们想要维持民主，就必须遵守一条诫命：不可配给正义。”
听证会由三位联邦法官主持，每位法官由不同的总统任命。这种人员配置显得过于巧合。由特朗普任命的那位蓄着浓密胡须的白人男子，在早早地且频繁地打断发言，眼睛里充满了难以置信。由乔·拜登任命的法—
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tee，第一位成为第三巡回法院法官的黑人女性，偶尔会挑起眉毛，但大部分时间保持沉默。在中间——无论是比喻意义上还是字面意义上——是一位由乔治·W·布什任命的银发法官。法官们正在审理数起分布在各州和联邦管辖区的上诉案件之一，该案名为“哈利勒诉特朗普案”（Khalil v. Trump）。此案除了决定哈利勒的命运外，还可能在移民法、国家安全法以及对第一修正案的解读方面设定严苛的先例。政府方面的律师并未否认哈利勒在美国境内合法居留，也未否认政府是因为他的政治观点而将其定为目标，或这可能会对其他人的言论产生寒蝉效应。相反，在案件的不同阶段，他们似乎只是暗示，尽管存在这些宪法层面的担忧，总统仍有权拘留哈利勒，且联邦法院无法阻止他。
听证会结束后，哈利勒和他的律师在国家宪法中心前合影留念，那里的一块50吨重的理石板上刻着第一修正案全部45个单词，随后他们步行前往一家拉面店吃午餐。在开车回家之前，哈利勒和阿卜杜拉在一家名为富兰克林研究所（Franklin Institute）的科学博物馆里待了几个小时。他在一系列互动屏幕前停了下来，学习投掷棒球的正确姿势，以及他在火星上能跳多高。在其中一个关于心理健康的展览屏幕上，一个提示框问道：“你今天感觉如何？”选项有“兴奋”、“自信”和“悲伤”。他思考了一会儿，然后没有选择任何一项就离开了。
由两名共和党任命的法官撰写的大多数意见书在1月的一个周四早晨出炉。它剥夺了哈利勒之前的法律保护，使他面临被驱逐出境的风险。而且该意见书更进一步，缩小了
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特朗普政府称，哈利勒的言论本应合法，除非这些言论损害了“美国核心利益”。
摄影：SHARIF HAMZA
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人身保护令（habeas corpus）的权利，而人身保护令旨在保护人们免受非法拘禁。“我们针对五种情况制定了计划——从最好到最差，1到5号方案，”哈利勒的一位律师告诉我，“我们现在处于5号方案。”几十年来，无论是左翼还是右翼倾向的法官都认为，像人身保护令这样的宪法权利适用于美国领土上的每一个人，无论是否为公民。但现在，特朗普政府正在质疑这些长期存在的原则，而一些法官似乎倾向于追随其脚步。（“在遭受入侵期间，人身保护令可以被暂停，所以这是我们正在积极考虑的一个选项，”特朗普的高级顾问之一斯蒂芬·米勒曾告诉记者。）当我与哈利勒交谈时，他说：“我没有做任何违法的事，所以我当然会尽一切努力留下。”然而他补充道，“这并不令人震惊，在我的生活以及我从小听亲戚讲述的故事中，这种‘有一天你可能会被强迫离开’的概念一直存在。”
目前，哈利勒住在布鲁克林，离展望公园（Prospect Park）不远，他住的大楼大堂里摆着高大的花瓶，播放着舒缓的音乐。我第一次去他公寓时，他光着脚开门，抱着六个月大的儿子迪恩（Deen），孩子有着浅褐色的头发和丰满的双颊，午睡后还在打哈欠。所有的婴儿都很可爱，但这个孩子长得格外好看——就像鲁本斯笔下的婴孩耶稣像，只不过如果那位弗兰德斯画家能更真实地描绘一名拿撒勒人的肤色会更好。哈利勒带着半个微笑，把脖子伸向走廊看向我的身后，仿佛在暗示我可能被跟踪了。这是一个玩笑，但也不完全是个玩笑。
一个低矮的书架顶上摆放着粉丝寄给他的艺术品，其中包括一件手绘作品，上面写着“释放马哈茂德·哈利勒”（“这件我们通常藏得更深，”他说着，将其放在一个艺术家南·戈尔丁送给他的陶瓷杯后面）。他与迪恩坐在客厅的地板上，阿卜杜拉端来了葡萄——成年人的吃整颗，婴儿的吃捣碎的。哈利勒正在写一本回忆录，部分素材源自他在美国移民和海关执法局（ICE）拘留期间写的日记；他递给我一盒日记，让我翻阅。他在其中一篇日记中写道：“我周围嘈杂得像学校食堂一样——西班牙语、印地语、蹩脚的英语。”在另一篇中，“袋鼠法庭”（kangaroo court）这个词用英语和阿拉伯语潦草地写着。
哈利勒始终彬彬有礼，这种礼貌有时显得过于拘谨，甚至近乎冷漠。他拥有哥伦比亚大学的硕士学位，但没有全职工作。“我把时间花在陪伴孩子和与律师通话上，”他说——这听起来像是一个波尔什特带（Borscht Belt）式笑话的铺垫，但他似乎找不到那个笑点。他还经常公开演讲（在 Twitch 直播中，或在西南大会的舞台上），展现出政治家所谓的始终如一的“信息纪律”。然而，纪律严明的传声者并不总是能产生最有趣的内容。一天下午，哈利勒乘车前往熨斗区的一家小型工作室，录制一集《亚当·弗里德兰秀》（The Adam Friedland Show），这是一个将真诚的左翼主义与荒诞的尴尬喜剧相结合的访谈节目。面对哈利勒，弗里德兰很难找到喜剧切入点。在开始录制前，哈利勒带着一群法律顾问走进来，弗里德兰面无表情地开玩笑说：“你的随从比贾斯汀·比伯还多。”现场一片死寂。“这将是我们有史以来最有趣的一集。”
哈利勒小时候，他的祖母经常给他讲一个故事：1948年，她被强行驱逐出位于现今以色列的提比里亚，不得不步行四十英里前往叙利亚。（途中，她在帐篷里生下了哈利勒的父亲。）哈利勒就读的学校由联合国管理，位于大马士革第二大巴勒斯坦难民营中。他聪明且好奇，但家里没有多少书。他的父亲是一名焊工，六年级后辍学；他的母亲是一名公务员，没有完成高中学业。“我有一个叔叔是诗人，他以前常让我帮他把诗打字录入，”哈利勒告诉我，“比起学校，这才是我真正学习读写的方式。”
他在2011年满十六岁，那一年正是“阿拉伯之春”。在该地区所有的独裁者中，叙利亚独裁者巴沙尔·阿萨德在镇压异见方面或许是最残酷的。有一天，哈利勒的姑姑还在一家非营利组织工作；第二天，办公室就被突袭，他的姑姑在没有解释的情况下被送进监狱。哈利勒和几个最勇敢的朋友参与了一些小规模的抵抗行动——在墙上喷涂亲民主的口号，在临时手机（burner phone）里保存抗议歌曲——但他们都明白其中的危险。“如果被警察抓到，你会被折磨或被杀，”哈利勒说，“我们都有应急计划：‘如果他们抓了我，快跑回家把我的电脑埋在院子里。’”
在哈利勒十八岁生日一周后，他听说他的两个朋友阿里和巴沙尔被捕了。“我想，‘如果他们抓了他们，下一个就是我’，”他告诉我。他带着二十五叙利亚镑——不到五十美分——逃往黎巴嫩，最终在贝鲁特住了十年。他自学了法语和英语；他在一家援助组织工作，随后进入英国大使馆。2016年，他遇到了一名叙利亚裔美国大学生——阿卜杜拉，她当时在贝鲁特度过志愿者暑假。在她回到密歇根州后，他办理了加拿大签证，两人在安大略省温莎的底特律河畔相会，他们在一家 Tim Hortons 咖啡店坐了好几个小时。阿卜杜拉即将从密歇根大学弗林特分校毕业，她被选为班级的毕业典礼演讲者，两人一起修改了她的演讲稿草案。文中写道：“我们能生活在这样一个国家，是多么荣幸。我可以安全地与教授交谈，进行激烈的讨论……我可以安全地怀揣远大梦想。”哈利勒在2023年成为了哥伦比亚大学的学生。不久之后，他们开车前往布朗克斯的一个法院，在那里结了婚。一年后，哈利勒拿到了绿卡。
阿萨德政权在2024年垮台，但哈利勒那两个朋友的遗体从未被找回；他们的家人认为他们被折磨致死，并被埋在了一个万人坑里。哈利勒告诉我，叙利亚的生活残酷得令人无法忍受，“但至少我们知道风险所在。没有人用‘这是一个民主国家’来对我们进行情感操纵（gaslighting）。然后你来到这里，一切都变得如此混乱。”特朗普并没有无限的独裁权力，但那些本应制约其威权本能的机构（如国会和法院）是否能够胜任这项任务，这一点完全不明确。尽管如此，哈利勒继续说道，“这里依然存在着一种论调，即‘这是地球上最伟大的民主国家，每个人的权利都得到保障’。”
在一系列改变生活的时刻，我一直陪伴在哈利勒身边，看着他面对好消息和噩耗时的反应，但我从未见他露出破绽。这种沉稳有其优势。然而他注意到，“我很难表达我的情感，
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甚至很难触及我的情感，”这使得撰写回忆录变得很困难。（这本书名为《无地可立：拘留笔记》，将于下个月出版。）最近，在威廉斯堡的一家家具店里，阿卜杜拉和哈利勒看中了一张似乎非常适合他们厨房的桌子，但他们犹豫是否要购买：等到桌子送到时，哈利勒可能已经离开了。“对于努尔来说，这种不确定性实在太沉重了，”他说。“但我的整个生活一直是不确定的。”
2024年4月17日黎明前，数十名学生活动人士在哥伦比亚大学校园中心的一片草坪上搭建了帐篷，这些帐篷是在亚马逊上批量购买的。他们挂起了巴勒斯坦国旗和手绘标语（“当你阅读时，加沙在流血”）。那天早上，其中一人告诉我，“我们称之为一次占领”，他故意讽刺地使用了这个词——但其他组织者称之为营地，而这个名称最终被沿用了。哈利勒在草坪上主持了一场教学研讨会，他盘腿而坐，引导关于巴勒斯坦“种族隔离”的讨论。在他看来，多年来巴勒斯坦一直被视为一个“次要问题”，但现在全世界都在关注。
大学召集了纽约市警察局（N.Y.P.D.），警员逮捕了一百多名抗议者。学生们在相邻的草坪上建立了另一个营地。随后，几名学生占领了汉密尔顿大厅，将自己封锁在内部。这一次，纽约市警察局派遣了一个战术单位，利用监控无人机和军用风格的装甲车清空了该建筑。
哈利勒并不在进入汉密尔顿大厅的那组人之中。“我甚至不赞同将那种方式作为一种策略，”他告诉我。在营地里，他担任组织者和中间人，向大学管理人员传达 fellow-protesters（同行抗议者）的需求，并转达管理人员的回复。“我知道如何用官僚语言沟通，”他说。一名大学管理人员告诉我，与其他一些学生活动人士相比，哈利勒被认为是一个冷静的调解员。
学生抗议者称自己为反犹太复国主义者；而他们的对手则指责他们反犹太主义。当其他哥伦比亚大学的学生在营地外举行反抗议活动并挥舞以色列国旗时，有人威胁要对他们实施暴力。一些身份明显的犹太学生在走出校园大门时，遭到人们大喊“滚回波兰！”的嘲讽。（在这两种情况下，目前尚不清楚实施者是学生还是校外人员。）在我们的交谈中，哈利勒与这些事件保持距离。“发生了一些反犹太主义的事情，一些不可接受的事情，”他说。有一次，一个营地外的人“走过来开始大喊‘去他妈的犹太人’，而那个拿着扩音器的人说，‘你不代表我们，走开’。”
“人肉搜索车”在校园内巡回，拍摄抗议者的照片，然后公开展示他们的姓名。两名学生被顶级律师事务所撤回了录用通知；另一名被宣传为“哥伦比亚大学领先的反犹太主义者”之一的学生，起诉了拥有该人肉搜索车的公司，指控其诽谤。一些抗议者的照片被发布在 Canary Mission 网站上，该网站声称旨在“记录宣传仇恨美国、以色列和犹太人之人及团体”。一个名为 Betar 的激进犹太复国主义团体（被广泛认为是一个仇恨团体）编写了学生抗议者的档案（或如 Betar 所称的“圣战分子”）。哈利勒和他的朋友们将这种曝光视为一种荣誉勋章。“我们的笑话是‘Canary Mission 是我们的约会软件’，”他说。“除非你在 Canary Mission 上有个人资料，否则你并不真正属于这个运动。”
与此同时，在他们不知情的情况下，右翼智库传统基金会（Heritage Foundation）正在撰写一份名为“以斯帖计划：一项打击反犹太主义的国家战略”的报告。该报告于 2024 年 10 月 7 日发布，称“所谓的亲巴勒斯坦运动”实际上是“一个组织严密的全球哈马斯支持网络（HSN）的一部分，因此实际上是一个恐怖主义支持网络”。该报告引用了 Canary Mission，列举了几个目标，包括让反以色列抗议者“被驱逐出美国”。在当时，这看起来像是虚张声势。
随后特朗普再次当选。“在拜登时期，我们就像在陡峭的山坡上推一块巨石，”时任 美国分会主任的罗斯·格里克（Ross Glick）告诉我。现在，突然之间，“我们在白宫有了朋友”——而且在“司法部、F.B.I.、D.H.S.”也有朋友。在之前的政府任期内， 被视为一个边缘团体；而现在，它显然能够进入行政部门一些最权力人物的办公室，包括鲁比奥（Rubio）和米勒（Miller）。格里克及其同事游说官员执行“以斯帖计划”的目标，尽管格里克说，“这不需要太多说服”。“你知道‘对着唱诗班布道’（指对早已认同的人说教）这个表达吗？” 甚至提供了名单，建议政府驱逐那些“美国的敌人”。
纽约州总检察长对 进行了调查，发现该组织通过威胁和骚扰针对纽约的穆斯林和犹太人；作为和解协议的一部分，该组织同意停止在纽约州的所有运营。到那时，格里克已不再在 工作。（数年前，他曾承认骚扰前女友）。在回应《纽约客》的询问时，国土安全部的一位发言人
“从小侧架拿一个果汁小杯到c7空间。”
安保部门写道：“任何暗示美国仅仅因为接到通知就会对恐怖分子同情者采取行动的说法，不仅荒谬而且是错误的。”白宫发言人写道：“关于 Betar 的官员通过斯蒂芬·米勒（Stephen Miller）与白宫有直接联系的指控是错误的。他甚至从未听说过这个团体。”但我查阅了此前未公开的电子邮件，其中曾担任鲁比奥（Rubio）高级顾问的刘·奥洛夫斯基（Lew Olowski）将 Betar 的一份名单视为政府采取行动的触发点，询问道：“……撤销哈马斯活动人士签证的时间表是什么？”不到两周后，奥洛夫斯基再次催促，并补充说他需要一份“关于我们进展的更新”。对此，另一名国务院工作人员指出，该名单似乎已被“提供给鲁比奥国务卿的办公室”并“发送给了……斯蒂芬·米勒”。（奥洛夫斯基未回应置评请求；一名国务院发言人表示：“我们坚持撤销那些试图破坏美国及其所代表之价值的个人的签证决定。”）
哈利勒（Khalil）至少出现在 Betar 的一份名单上，被错误地标识为“学生签证持有者”。2025年3月5日，他参加了哥伦比亚大学的另一次抗议活动，他未遮掩面孔的影像在社交媒体上迅速传播。“疑似外国国民警报，”Canary Mission 发布道。当时在哥伦比亚大学的一位以色列教授沙伊·大卫戴（Shai Davidai）标记了鲁比奥，写道：“传播恐怖主义宣传应该是可被驱逐出境的罪行，不是吗？”
两天后，哈利勒和阿卜杜拉（Abdalla）在莫宁赛德高地（Morningside Heights），在结束斋月禁食的晚餐后步行回家。当他们打开公寓大楼的大门时，两名身穿便装的魁梧男子跟他们进了屋。另外两名男子——显然是联邦特工，尽管他们仅自称是“警察”——正在大厅等待。他们声称哈利勒的学生签证已被撤销。“我没有学生签证，”他回答道，“我有绿卡。”这让特工们暂时感到困惑，但随后其中一人打了电话，他们还是逮捕了哈利勒。（“他们不肯说在和谁通话，但显然是某个高层，”阿卜杜拉告诉我。）他们给哈利勒戴上手铐，强行将他押过马路，塞进一辆没有标志的 SUV 中。当时怀孕八个月的阿卜杜拉跟在他们身后走到室外，流着泪，呼吸急促，询问为什么要把哈利勒带走。那些男人没有回答就开车离去了。在接下来的二十多个小时里，没有人能告诉她丈夫在哪里。
哈利勒在曼哈顿下城被登记，随后被带到一个拥挤且灯光亮堂的房间里，被告知在地板上睡觉。清晨，他被带到新泽西州的一个拘留中心待了几个小时；之后，他被开车送往约翰·F·肯尼迪国际机场。“他们戴着镣铐把我带进去，周围围满了警卫，就像我是巴勃罗·埃斯科巴（Pablo Escobar）一样，”他告诉我，“我完全不知道我们要去哪里。我看到了‘LA’，以为是洛杉矶。”在飞机上坐在他旁边的特工似乎也很困惑。“我从他的肩膀后面看到他在谷歌搜索我，试图弄清楚为什么这件事这么严重。”他们在达拉斯降落，在等待飞往路易斯安那州的接驳航班时，太阳下山，当天的禁食结束。警卫带哈利勒去了机场的一家 Wendy's 餐厅，给他买了一个芝士汉堡。
如果正如勒纳德·汉德（Learned Hand）所言，不受限制的公正（unrationed justice）是民主的前提，那么美国从未是一个完整的民主国家。美国总统有着长期违法行为的历史，而美国法院则有着长期纵容他们的历史，尤其是当总统能够提出某种与国家安全相关的理由时。1942年，在富兰克林·德拉诺·罗斯福的领导下，十万名“日裔人士”（其中大多数是美国公民）被强行关进军事拘留营。当时，尽管处于战争的迷雾之中，许多评论员仍能看出其中残酷的讽刺：在对抗法西斯主义的战争中，一边在境内搜捕种族少数群体并将他们关进营地，一边却很难声称占据道德高地。
尽管如此，情况变得更加完善了，或者说，缺陷不再那么触目惊心。政治家们煽动了二十世纪五十年代的反共狂热，但到那个年代末，法院在一定程度上约束了行政部门，宣布此前二十年间的许多越权行为为非法。总统们继续试图扭曲或打破规则，且经常得逞。乔治·W·布什政府使用无需搜查令的窃听来监视大量美国人；巴拉克·奥巴马政府则以惊人的热情追捕举报人。不过，当这些总统受到其他部门的制约时，他们至少表现得像是受到了教训。
但特朗普，尤其是在他的第二个任期内，只知道加倍下注。首先，他决定谁是他的敌人，以及他们将如何受到折磨；随后，他的下属会想出一些在法庭上可能站得住脚的事后辩解。该政府为了压制不顺从言论而采取的最协调的努力，或许就是其持续进行的
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针对大学的运动，它通过诉讼、调查和其他手段来实施——其中一些是合法的，一些是非法的，还有一些处于法律灰色地带。在与联邦政府达成的一项和解协议中，哥伦比亚大学同意支付超过两亿美元，并确保“所有学生，无论是国际学生还是国内学生，都致力于维护美国大学的悠久传统”。
2024年，持有学生签证的土耳其博士候选人吕梅莎·厄兹图尔克（Rümeysa Öztürk）在《塔夫茨日报》（Tufts Daily）上共同撰写了一篇由八段组成的评论文章。文章以克制的语气指责以色列“明显违反国际法”。2025年2月，Canary Mission 为厄兹图尔克创建了一个档案；仅引用该评论文章，便指责她从事“反以色列活动”。次月，美国国土安全部（D.H.S.）下令逮捕她。当时大约是傍晚五点，厄兹图尔克正走在马萨诸塞州萨默维尔一个安静的住宅区，一名戴面具的便衣特工在人行道上将她抓走并塞进了一辆面包车。“这是绑架吗？”她的一位邻居问道。Betar 在 X 上发布了视频，得意地写道：“她在我们的名单上。”随后在法庭上，一名美国移民与海关执法局（ICE）特工作证称，上级命令他快速办理厄兹图尔克的逮捕手续，并补充道：“我不记得有什么时候像这样由上而下直接下令的。”
政府撤销了厄兹图尔克的签证并试图将其驱逐出境，声称她的行为表明其“支持被指定的恐怖组织”，但一名移民法官裁定政府未能完成其举证责任。随后，特朗普领导的美国司法部（DOJ）解雇了该移民法官——这显然是对名义上独立的法院的一种干预——并提起上诉。（上个月，一组联合国专家谴责了“美国大规模任意撤换移民法官以及移民法院持续政治化的现象”。）与此同时，厄兹图尔克获得了儿童发展专业的博士学位，并回到了土耳其。
根据一名名为彼得·哈奇（Peter Hatch）的美国移民海关执法局（ICE）官员的证词，在 Canary Mission 和 Betar 向政府举报的大约五千名亲巴勒斯坦学生中，ICE 显然对其中约两百人进行了调查，将其视为逮捕或驱逐的潜在目标。其中一小部分演变成了针对哈利勒（Khalil）、厄兹图尔克（Öztürk）以及少数其他亲巴勒斯坦抗议者的案件。
政府并不需要赢得这些案件才能产生影响。传统基金会（Heritage）的报告建议，通过将亲巴勒斯坦抗议者作为反面典型，可以给其他“潜在示威者”灌输“恐惧”，从而威慑未来的反以色列活动。在去年 11 月发表的一篇论文中，美国大学教授协会和中东研究协会认为，这种情况已经在一定程度上发生了：“针对反犹主义的调查正在产生一套新的政府监视系统，用于监控校园言论。”
特朗普试图蔑视宪法限制的一些尝试与近现代美国历史是一致的，但另一些则不然。要为这些行为寻找先例，你必须追溯到 1832 年，当时首席大法官约翰·马歇尔（John Marshall）写了一份令总统安德鲁·杰克逊（Andrew Jackson）不悦的意见书。作为回应，杰克逊说，或者据传说过：“约翰·马歇尔做出了他的决定；现在让他去执行吧。”换句话说，行政部门和司法部门本应是平等的分支，但掌握枪支的是行政部门。这通常被理解为一个关于自由民主脆弱性的寓言——法治与丛林法则之间仅有一线之隔。但在 2022 年，在一次极右翼播客中，一名来自俄亥俄州的参议员候选人赞许地引用了杰克逊的这句俏皮话，将其视为“特朗普应该怎么做”的典范。那位参议员候选人 J. D. 万斯（J. D. Vance），现在是副总统。
这种倒退甚至震惊了那些本就有理由感到幻灭的人权律师。宪法权利中心（Center for Constitutional Rights）的法律总监巴赫尔·阿兹米（Baher Azmy）曾花费多年时间为关塔那摩湾的被拘留者辩护。在回忆那些案件时，他表示：“我们输了很多。”但当有明确证据表明政府侵犯了某人的基本权利时，“你仍然可以将此提交给法官，包括那些最坚定的保守派，并且你可以获得一次公正的听证。”现在，阿兹米担心，关塔那摩那段糟糕的旧时光开始显得像美好的旧时光了。他是哈利勒法律团队的主要律师之一。“针对马哈茂德的案件纯粹是威权主义的指令，”阿兹米说，“我们不喜欢你所说的话，所以我们要利用联邦政府的所有力量让你离开。”提到他的出生地埃及，阿兹米继续说道，“我以前常说我很幸运不必在那里当律师，能够在一个法治有意义的国家生活和工作。而现在感觉就像是，‘看，妈，我终究还是成了埃及的律师’。”
二月，哈利勒穿着他最好的西装，拿着一杯外带的小白咖啡，快步走在美国国会大厦的地下隧道中。他在华盛顿停留三天，私下会见了十几位立法者，而且像往常一样，他迟到了。他的身边跟着一名律师，以及来自宪法权利中心和另一个进步组织“犹太和平之声”（Jewish Voice for Peace）的倡导者。这群人发现了来自佛罗里达州的共和党国会议员兰迪·法恩（Randy Fine），并刻意绕道而行。法恩多次要求驱逐哈利勒；他还表达过这样的观点，即“巴勒斯坦事业是邪恶的”，且“在狗和穆斯林之间做选择并不困难”。我问，既然可以拍摄并使其在网上走红，为什么要避免与法恩发生冲突？“我这辈子已经经历过足够多的走红时刻了，”哈利勒说。
这群人来到了伊尔汗·奥马尔（Ilhan Omar）的办公室。她是来自明尼阿波利斯的民主党国会议员，以政治斗士著称。不过此时，她看起来 mostly 疲惫。最近，明尼阿波利斯的国土安全部（D.H.S.）特工枪杀了抗议者勒妮·古德（Renee Good），随后又枪杀了另一人亚历克斯·普雷蒂（Alex Pretti）。“他们在我的选区带走了一个五岁的孩子，”奥马尔用低沉且颤抖的声音说道，“他们简直冷酷无情。”
哈利勒接触的国会议员资历越高，这些立法者的语气就越谨慎。众议院民主党 No. 2 凯瑟琳·克拉克（Katherine Clark）在国会大厦中心拥有一间宫殿般的办公室，里面挂着水晶吊灯，镜框镶金。克拉克外交辞令地表示：“我们全心全意地热爱我们的进步派成员。但我好奇你是否联系过我们那些更支持以色列的成员——某些
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可能会说，‘你知道，我们在这个具体问题上可能有分歧，但这关乎一个更高的原则。’”
“我很乐意亲自前往与任何人会面，”哈利勒说，“到目前为止，我们还没看到多少兴趣。”
在会议之间的休息时间，这群人在来自底特律的众议员拉希达·特莱布（Rashida Tlaib）的办公室里放松。她的墙上装饰着一系列“良性麻烦”的经典海报（罗莎·帕克斯、雪莉·奇泽姆、戴着库非亚头巾的纳尔逊·曼德拉），以及一张较新的海报：“释放马哈茂德·哈利勒”。如果说其他左翼议员表现得像哈利勒的朋友，那么作为国会中唯一的巴勒斯坦成员，特莱布则把他当成心爱的侄子对待。“我们的长辈会告诉我们，‘安静点，别惹麻烦，’”特莱布用她那响亮的密歇根口音说道，“直到今天，我母亲还是这么对我说的。我就像在说，‘妈，太晚了！我已经进国会了！’”
特莱布询问了哈利勒案件的最新进展。在他被捕后，国土安全部发布了一份声明，使用了让人想起“以斯帖计划”（Project Esther）报告的措辞，宣称他“领导了与哈马斯——一个被指定的恐怖组织——一致的活动”。政府的各种发言人重复了这一指控，但在针对哈利勒提交的众多法庭文件中，政府从未指控他煽动暴力、实质性支持恐怖主义或犯有任何其他罪行。（在哈利勒被美国移民和海关执法局（ICE）拘留期间，政府为其驱逐提供了额外的理由，声称他在绿卡申请中遗漏了相关信息。）哈利勒的同行活动人士曾高喊“全球化起义”和“从河流到大海，巴勒斯坦将获得自由”。哈利勒在一次较为激进的发言中表示，“巴勒斯坦人尝试了多种形式的抵抗”，包括“武装抵抗，这在国际法下是合法的”。这些观点存在争议；有些人认为它们具有内在的威胁性。但几乎没有人怀疑这些言论受到第一修正案的保护。（鲁比奥在他的备忘录中确认，哈利勒因此被捕的“信念”和“陈述”在其他方面是合法的。）即便哈利勒公开信奉反犹太主义，或在校园里披着哈马斯的旗帜走动，这种行为虽然令人厌恶，且可能成为哥伦比亚大学将其开除的理由，但并不违法。
在我们的采访中，我要求哈利勒阐明他对哈马斯的看法。他对这个问题感到愤慨——他认为自己没有理由因此被盘问，就像那些抗议伊朗战争的人不应该被要求为哈梅内伊政权的罪行负责一样——但当被追问时，他表示哈马斯的领导人与所有领导人一样，应对他们针对以色列人和巴勒斯坦人所犯下的任何战争罪行负责。他对法塔赫、巴勒斯坦权力机构或任何其他巴勒斯坦政党都没有好话。他说：“政治派系通常是为了自身的生存而工作，而不是为了人民的利益。”任何与巴勒斯坦人交谈过的人都会发现，哈利勒的大部分政治观点并无特别之处。他说：“我想活得足够久，以看到我的同胞拥有一个安全且自由的家园，并且我想在死前被允许去我祖母的村庄参观一次。”
当鲁比奥认定哈利勒可以被驱逐出境时，他依赖的是一项晦涩且措辞宽泛的移民法条款，该条款允许国务卿单独指定任何其在美存在可能产生“不利外交政策后果”的非公民。（1996年，一名联邦法官认定该条款违宪——巧合的是，该法官是唐纳德·特朗普已故的姐姐玛丽安·特朗普·巴里——但她的裁决不被认为是具有约束力的。）该条款极少被调用——例如，1995年，在一名涉嫌洗钱的墨西哥公职人员马里奥·鲁伊斯·马西欧在美国被捕后曾被调用。但鲁比奥的备忘录将法律延伸到了无法辨认的程度。他主张哈利勒参与了营造“对犹太学生敌对环境”的抗议活动；因此，他继续留在该国将损害“美国核心利益”，特别是打击反犹主义的目标。
在一些评论员看来，这一切都不应该引起争议。
“每个国家都有权控制谁可以进入，”保守派智库曼哈顿研究所的宪法学者伊利亚·夏皮罗告诉我。“在这个国家，这包括意识形态审查——你不能是纳粹，不能是共产主义者，不能对政治体制产生毒害。”夏皮罗继续说道，如果哈利勒因为意识形态原因被驱逐，那么“这是一个移民问题，而不是言论自由问题。国会可以修改移民法，但本届政府是在按照法律的字面意思执行。”前贝塔尔（Betar）官员罗斯·格里克告诉我：“你不能在拥挤的剧院里大喊‘起火了’，但你可以站在校园中间大喊‘全球化起义’（Globalize the intifada），而这是一种号召针对犹太人的暴力？不行。去你的。滚出这个国家。”
但许多专家持有相反观点：他们认为政府因政治言论而惩罚任何人（无论是否为公民）都是典型的违反第一修正案的行为。“这是一个似乎认为总统可以做任何事情的政府，”纽约大学（N.Y.U.）法学教授、进步派法律评论员梅丽莎·默里说道。但她继续指出，即使假设一项措辞模糊的法规赋予了国务院自行撤销签证的权力，“他们仍然不能以违反宪法保护（如言论自由或免受歧视的自由）的方式来执行。而这些保护确实适用于绿卡持有者”——或者至少，直到现在为止是适用的。当拜登担任总统时，保守派猛烈抨击他据称热衷于通过扼杀自由表达将校园变成“安全空间”。如果他单独针对一名他不喜欢其政治观点（比如一名恰好持有绿卡在美的反跨性别活动人士）的学生，然后利用政府权力的每一个杠杆将该学生驱逐出境，他们会如何反应？
当哈利勒或他的律师被问及他可能被驱逐出境的情况时，他们倾向于在公开记录中以一种乐观的含糊态度来回应：没有宪法理由将其驱逐。即便如此，我说，这种情况仍可能发生。政府可以将他送上一架飞往阿尔及利亚的飞机，因为他通过母亲家族拥有该国国籍；政府可以强迫他前往叙利亚或黎巴嫩，在那里他的生命可能会受到威胁；政府甚至可以将他送到一个“第三
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国”，比如卢旺达或南苏丹，就像它对待其他被拘留者那样。在最初几次拜访哈利勒和阿卜杜拉时，我不愿深究这一点，但最终我直接问了他们：如果政府真的将他遣走，计划是什么？阿卜杜拉和迪恩会随他一起走，还是他独自离开？
有一瞬间，恐惧似乎在阿卜杜拉的脸上闪过。显然，尽管他们一直担心，但尚未讨论过具体的方案。但哈利勒的笑容没有动摇。“现在谈这些还太早，”他说。
“他们不会驱逐我的，对吧？”阿卜杜拉转向哈利勒问道，“他们能那样做吗？”
“Habibi（亲爱的），不会的，”哈利勒说着，揉了揉她的背，“你是美国人。”
在第三巡回法院做出裁决、使哈利勒再次面临被驱逐风险的那天，我去公寓看望他和阿卜杜拉。“今晚本该是我们的约会之夜，”阿卜杜拉告诉我。但现在，哈利勒说，他的律师正在“给美国国土安全部（D.H.S.）发邮件寻求澄清——以确保我离开家仍然是安全的”。直到一天结束，律师仍未收到回复，因此他们建议哈利勒和阿卜杜拉取消约会，留在室内。
哈利勒再次制定应急计划。“我有一部特殊的电话，预存了一堆号码，”他告诉我。如果他在外面被美国移民及海关执法局（ICE）的特工伏击，“我可以在口袋里按下一个按钮，努尔和所有律师都会收到通知。”他曾习惯每天带迪恩出去散步，只有他们两个。他停止了这样做，因为他被一个画面所困扰：一名警员给他戴上手铐将他带走，留下他的孩子独自在展望公园（Prospect Park）中间的婴儿车里。
四月，移民上诉委员会发布了最终决定，驳回了哈利勒的所有论点并批准将其驱逐。 “通常，这样的案件需要数年时间，”前移民上诉法官奥梅罗·洛佩斯（Homero López）告诉我。“他们几天之内就准备就绪，这在我看来暗示了白宫的介入。”哈利勒的律师以这一点和其他异常情况为由申请重新审理此案，但他们的动议被否决。他们目前计划向最高法院提起上诉。哈利勒和他的律师担心，如果法院同意审理他的案件，可能会发布一项进一步
“我最大的弱点？纵火。”
限制移民或所有美国人言论自由的意见。但如果法院不受理此案，哈利勒可能就走投无路了，届时他将不得不离开这个国家。
今年春天，芝加哥大学的法学教授阿齐兹·胡克（Aziz Huq）在一次讲座中描述了“美国法律运作方式的一次突然‘相位转移’”——从“标准的自由主义合法性”转向某种更严酷且危险地反复无常的状态。他讨论了几个正在审理的案件，包括哈利勒（Khalil）的案件，并认为这些案件预示着美国“双重国家”的出现。胡克借用了恩斯特·弗兰克尔（Ernst Fraenkel）的术语，弗兰克尔是一位德国犹太人，在柏林执业直到 1938 年逃亡；他最终抵达芝加哥，并在那里完成了一本名为《双重国家：独裁理论之贡献》的书。根据弗兰克尔的观点，威权政体在两条平行轨道上执行司法：为国家的忠诚臣民提供“规范性”的法律保护，而对其敌人则采取“不受约束的专断”。（凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊大法官在她最近的一份意见书——当然，是一份反对意见——中引用了这本书。）胡克告诉我，通过这种类比，他并不是在说美国国家的每一个敌人都会被送进集中营。“有回响，但只是部分回响，”他说。
上个月，我最后一次去家里拜访了哈利勒。迪恩（Deen）现在已经一岁多了，坐在阿卜杜拉（Abdalla）的腿上，她正给他读一本名为《谁在农场里躲猫猫？》的绘本。哈利勒仍处于一种官僚主义的叠加状态：移民上诉委员会已发布了最终的驱逐令，但从技术上讲，在他所有的法律挑战得到解决之前，政府不应该驱逐他。但如果政府真的这么做了呢？政府本不应该入侵委内瑞拉并绑架其总统尼古拉斯·马杜罗（Nicolás Maduro）。但它确实这么做了，现在马杜罗就在布鲁克林，距离哈利勒的公寓不到四英里，被关在一家以食物中长蛆而闻名的监狱里。作为哈利勒保释的条件，政府已经知道他住在哪里。如果 ICE（移民海关执法局）特工在他的住址蹲点并当场将其逮捕怎么办？有什么能阻止他们？规范？几张纸？“我们是一个超级大国，”斯蒂芬·米勒（Stephen Miller）在 1 月份说，“在特朗普总统的领导下，我们将像超级大国那样行事。”如果官员们认为符合其利益，他们现在就可以行动，以后再请求原谅。“我的律师一直在给我这些提醒，这些‘了解你的权利’培训，”哈利勒告诉我。“我问——他们讨厌我说这个，但我忍不住——‘如果我知道我的权利，政府也知道我的权利，但他们根本不在乎怎么办？’” ♦
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小说
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插画：RICHA KASHELKAR
尼迪（Nidhi）十四岁时，她的母亲再次怀孕了。人们对此感到惊讶是可以理解的，而且看来没有人比她的父母更惊讶。他们像往常一样开玩笑，既开关于怀孕的玩笑，也开关于导致怀孕之行为的玩笑。
她的母亲说：“如果我们早知道，我们会在做爱时加点戏剧效果，yaar。现在这个可怜的孩子长大后会变成银行家或其他某种无聊的东西。”
她的父亲则一脸纯真的惊讶：“我起来上厕所，就这么简单。回来的时候肯定走错路了。”
他们在尼迪面前开这些玩笑，而尼迪对此并不感到尴尬。她的父母一直这样说话。并不是说他们粗俗，准确地说，他们只是觉得没有必要在这些事情上保护她。就像尼迪六岁时那个推着手车卖蔬菜的人。在尼迪看来，他的农产品看起来很新鲜，但她的母亲还是挥手让他走开。有一天，她说：“看着。他现在要摸他的睾丸了。”尼迪看到那个男人的手滑进裤子里，看到了那次偷偷摸摸的抚摸。当他走到他们家门口时，他用同一只手拿起一个番茄递给他们，像一个光亮的诱饵。
尼迪意识到，其他父母不会对孩子说“睾丸”这个词。其他父母会对这类事情使用一些特殊的词汇，俏皮且古怪。尿液被叫做“soo-soo”或“chi-chi”。粪便被叫做“caca”。阴道通常被叫做“花朵”或“花蕾”。（至于阴茎被叫作什么，尼迪不确定。）发生性行为被叫做“亲近”，或者令人困惑地被称为“友谊”。尼迪的邻居帕亚尔养了一只名叫露西的可卡西班牙猎犬，它经常在车道上滴下血点。帕亚尔一家将这种情况以及所有月经现象都称为“露西的问题”。
但尼迪并不反感父母的坦率。这是一个无关紧要的事实，就像她父亲的斜视，或者她母亲——一位前婆罗多舞（Bharatanatyam）舞者——在露台上为当地妇女教授的有氧操课一样，即便在怀孕期间，她依然在继续教学。每天早晨，在尼迪吃早餐时，这些妇女会穿着袜子，手指勾着 Keds 鞋，兴高采烈地走进屋里，大声喊着：“早安，大姐！”然后笑着走上露台的楼梯，那里尼迪的母亲已经为她们准备好了步骤指导和哑铃。
然后，在一个周二，在怀孕十六周时，尼迪的母亲打电话给她的学生，请她们不要来了；她感到很疲倦。尼迪的父亲开车送她去诊所。当尼迪放学回家时，她的母亲已经把自己锁在卧室里，尼迪再次成了一个独生女。
“给她几天时间，”她父亲说。
但几天时间并没有起到作用。尼迪的母亲一直待在卧室里，而且这一次，她的父亲不愿透露那个房间里发生了什么，那里现在只传出难以捉摸的声音：低沉的轰鸣声；尖厉的哭喊声；以及巨大的、像坟墓一样的寂静。
她的父亲最终告诉她，最好让尼迪在别处住一段时间。和谁一起？一个朋友？尼迪无法想象在朋友家住超过一两晚。深入窥视他人生活，或者让他们窥视自己的生活，这个想法让她感到不安。
不，不是朋友，她父亲说。甚至不在班加罗尔。他的姨妈——尼迪的姑奶奶——住在马德拉斯（或者叫金奈，就在几年前改名）。她叫贾亚。她是父亲母亲五个兄弟姐妹中最年长的，她有一栋带大花园的房子，非常适合探索。而且最棒的部分是？那栋房子里装满了书。事实上，他十五岁时，哥哥得了水痘，他曾在那里住过一周。他记得那一周简直是天堂。他确信尼迪也会有同样的感觉。
事实证明，他如此确信，以至于已经给贾亚姨妈打了电话，对方说欢迎尼迪在需要的时间里一直住下去。
“那会是多久？”尼迪问。
“噢，宝贝。”她的父亲叹了口气。“相信我。你不想看到她现在的样子。”
三天后，他和尼迪在坎顿门车站（Cantonment Station）的站台上等待布林达万快车（Brindavan Express）。尼迪穿着她最喜欢的牛仔短裤，就是那条带贴袋的。一旦火车到达马德拉斯，她需要打一辆自动人力车前往贾亚姨妈位于阿迪亚尔（Adyar）社区的家。（显然，并没有在车站接她的打算。）附近的一家人在听说她独自旅行后，提出帮她照看。
她的父亲向他们表示感谢。然后他转向尼迪。“顺便说一下，你应该了解一下帕德米尼，”他说。“她是贾亚的儿媳。她有智力障碍。”
他用他那旧有的、轻松的语气说话。即便像“智力障碍”（retarded）这个词——尼迪很快就会学会将其从自己的词汇表中剔除——他也让这个词听起来没有阴影。“她现在应该四十多岁了。但从心智上来说，我觉得她更接近十岁或十一岁。”
“她结婚了？”
“她是个寡妇。贾雅的儿子——我的表哥尚卡尔——不到三十岁就去世了。据我所知，他是在不了解帕德米尼情况的情况下娶她的。我是指她的状况。她的家人一直保密。直到婚礼后才有人意识到，但在能采取任何措施之前，尚卡尔就死了。如果我没记错的话，他死在非洲某个地方。莫桑比克，大概？总之，我的家人一直说尚卡尔是个天才。那种读一遍书就能背下来的人。”
“那她呢？”尼迪追问道，“她留下来了？即便在他死后？”
“帕德米尼？”她的父亲听起来很惊讶。“嗯，是的。我想贾雅本可以将她送回娘家，但对方为了把她嫁出去耍了个相当卑劣的把戏。如果他们把她接回去，天知道会发生什么？”
尼迪沉默了。她和父亲看着那列落满灰尘的旧火车缓缓进站。
她的父亲说：“在我住在那里的时候，感觉就像有个妹妹一样。”他对着尼迪忧伤地笑了笑，“也许你也会有同样的感觉。”
贾雅姨妈没有提出帮尼迪拎行李箱。她还认为尼迪这辈子喝的苹果汁不够多。她盯着尼迪的双腿，低声嘀咕道：“苹果汁对皮肤有好处。你父亲住在那里的时候喝了很多苹果汁。”
尼迪瞥了一眼自己的腿。在她看来，双腿
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看起来挺好的，强健、轻盈，呈现出菊苣般的棕色。
“这就是为什么你父亲的肤色这么好，”贾雅姨妈继续说道，“苹果汁。但你的母亲，我想，没那么白吧？”
“她比我父亲白，”尼迪指出。她很快就会学会不要这么做。
“是吗？”贾雅姨妈是个高个子女人，肩膀倾斜，像男人一样。她的纱丽——用刺绣着微小金鸟的皇家紫色丝绸制成——笔直地垂下，没有任何为了凸显臀部或腰身而产生的起伏。她稀疏的头发被紧紧地拉在头皮上，像小提琴弦一样。
这段对话发生在贾雅姨妈的客厅里，尼迪的目光不断地四处扫视。她觉得这个房间有些不对劲，无论是比例还是布置。在看起来遥远得像有几英里外的房间尽头，一台笨重的电视机摆在一把孤独的白色塑料椅前。在她和大姨妈站立的前门附近，蜷缩着一张华丽的红木沙发，其丑陋的橙色软垫被厚厚的塑料膜包裹着。房间长长的中间部分完全——
完全是空的。看着那里让尼迪感到一阵反胃，仿佛那里的地板不可信。
“身体健康是好事，”贾雅姨妈宣布道，“但健康来自于日常劳动。如果你不健康，就意味着你干活不够，于是你就弯腰触趾，像驴一样踢腿，结果内部就搞混了。”
在短暂的困惑之后，尼迪明白了。贾雅姨妈在谈论有氧操课。她是说尼迪的母亲是因为上有氧操课才失去孩子的，因为她像驴一样踢腿，导致内部搞混了。
尼迪想象着那个孩子在母亲体内爬行，拼命寻找子宫，而在正确的位置找不到后，悄悄地萎缩而死。她知道这很荒谬，但她没有努力去压制这个画面。这给了她一种与房间空旷中心相同的感觉，一种肮脏且隐藏之物的闪现。突然间，她父母那种开朗的透明感——他们粗俗的玩笑，他们急于点破那些不该被提及之事的渴望——在尼迪看来变得有些令人尴尬。
她说：“谢谢您让我住在这里。”
“好吧，”贾雅姨妈耸了耸肩，“你父亲把这事说得像紧急情况一样。”
尼迪的房间在厨房旁边，从那股淡淡的麻袋味来看，这里曾经是个储藏室。房间狭小且没有窗户，让她想起在读过的一本小说中，一位著名艺术家的房间被描述成这样：一张单人床，一把椅子，一台落地扇。她立刻就喜欢上了这里。贾亚阿姨睡在房子另一侧一个大得多的房间里。那间房的一面墙排满了窗户，另一面墙排满了橱柜，还有两张单人床。就在这时，尼迪想起了帕德米尼，她还没见到对方。
大约十分钟后，帕德米尼走了进来，拎着一个装满秋葵和光亮葫芦的网兜。她的头发是灰色的——这在某种程度上令人惊讶——并扎成一个低发髻。她穿着一件方正的棉质上衣和一条及踝的帕瓦代风格长裙，那是尼迪在很多年前就停止穿着的款式。她的臀部宽阔，肩膀纤细且圆润。她的脸毫无疑问是中年人的样子，带着一种沉思且惊愕的神情。当她看到在房间里整理行李的尼迪时，她猛地停住了脚步。
“你好，”尼迪说。
帕德米尼笑了，但这看起来更像是一种条件反射而非友好。也许她忘了尼迪要来，或者贾亚阿姨根本没费心提醒她。（在见到了她的姑婆后，尼迪觉得这完全有可能。）帕德米尼没有回应招呼，而是消失在厨房里。直到那时，尼迪才想到她可能是哑巴。
尼迪花了几天时间才理清自己的新处境。她发现，帕德米尼不仅负责购物和烹饪，还负责其他所有事情。她洗衣服，并将它们挂在房子后面杂草丛生的花园里的晾衣绳上。她用一个有尼迪头部那么大的研钵捣碎香料。她用蘸了盐的半个柠檬刷洗铜器。她剥豌豆，揉面团，剔除
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扁豆里的石子。她唯一不做的是扫地和拖地。一个名叫安比卡的年轻女人每天来做这些工作，而且她抱怨得如此之多，心怀如此之多恶意，以至于尼迪心怀愧疚地希望帕德米尼能直接把这些活儿也接管了。
因为帕德米尼似乎并不介意她必须完成的所有工作。说她享受其中可能太夸张了，但这些工作在她身上没有留下任何痕迹。好几天以来，尼迪一直在观察她，试图寻找秘密绝望的迹象，但什么也没发现。在执行任务时，帕德米尼精力充沛，有条不紊，专注且能干。然而，她并不是哑巴。随着她习惯了尼迪，她在尼迪面前变得相当健谈。她的对话主要由陈述句组成，其中一些比其他的更令人费解。
“叮叮响的女人今天没来，”她可能会一边熟练地削胡萝卜一边说。
或者：“把你的半截裤子给我，我来洗。”
或者：“我得把脏东西放进热地方。”
前两句很容易理解。“叮叮响的女人”是指安比卡，她戴着许多叮当作响的手镯。“半截裤子”是指尼迪的牛仔短裤。但关于脏东西在热地方的事依然是个谜。起初，尼迪试图解读帕德米尼那些更晦涩的断言，但在这一点上，帕德米尼像贾亚阿姨一样：她不喜欢被质问。她会陷入一种闷闷不乐的沉默，尼迪最终放弃了。尽管如此，帕德米尼确实像她父亲承诺的那样善良。她确保尼迪的衣服被折叠得整整齐齐，为她留出凝乳中的奶油（尼迪喜欢在上面撒糖吃），并在她喝傍晚茶时，给她准备煮花生作为惊喜。
当帕德米尼工作时，贾亚阿姨坐在客厅的塑料椅子上看着电视。这似乎是她唯一在做的事。她是个不安分的观众，几分钟内会切换十几次频道。由此产生的一连串片段——《海滩救护队》、一部印地语肥皂剧、泰米尔语新闻，然后又是《海滩救护队》——如此令人心烦意乱，以至于尼迪倾向于避开她，而更喜欢帕德米尼的陪伴。
帕德米尼同样对电视不感兴趣。当她
抱着一臂衣服穿过客厅，坐在沙发上用削皮刀择绿豆时，她的目光也不会偷偷瞟向屏幕。但尼迪承认，这或许是因为需要集中注意力，因为工作中任何疏忽都会招来贾亚阿姨的立即指责。在那栋房子里，事情必须以某种特定的方式完成。有一次，凝乳没有凝固，贾亚阿姨没有像尼迪的母亲那样做——也就是耸耸肩，跑去商店买几包软软的成品。相反，她嗅了嗅那酸溜溜、稀稀拉拉的东西，然后故作姿态地将其淋在米饭上，用手指搅拌，带着僵硬的尊严吃下去，像个流亡在外的老皇帝。
尼迪在马德拉斯并不不快乐，但她很快就感到厌倦了。随着她发现最初的大部分假设都是错误的，这种厌倦感变得更加尖锐。她的房间起初看起来如此浪漫，但每天傍晚都变得热得难以忍受。花园乍一看很有前景，像基普林笔下的场景，但实际上是一个被冷酷地忽视的地方，长满了长而锋利的草，让尼迪的脚踝肿了起来；此外，她确信自己曾见过一条棕色的小蛇闪进洞里。（帕德米尼毫无惧色，每天下午都光着脚进花园晾衣服。）但尼迪最大的错误是没带一本书。考虑到
她父亲所说的话，她原以为在贾亚阿姨家能发现一个真正的图书馆，但一周后，除了通过邮寄寄来的《拉尼》（Rani）杂志，她没看到任何装订成册的东西，而那些杂志她是读不懂的，因为是用泰米尔语写的。是她父亲记错了？那些书曾经存在过吗？尼迪推断，很可能那些书不属于贾亚阿姨，而是属于她那个天才儿子，在他去世后被送走了。当她有一天问帕德米尼关于这些书的事情时，这种怀疑得到了加强。
“书？”帕德米尼重复了一遍。然后她用手指了指天空。
马德拉斯在海岸边，但尼迪还没见过海滩。当她提到出游的可能性时，贾亚阿姨低声说：“啊，海滩。上个月在马里纳海滩发现了一具女孩的尸体。她……暴露了。”在说“暴露”这个词时，她遗憾地瞥了一眼尼迪的短裤。
因此，尼迪发现自己整天在房子里闷闷不乐，出汗，翻阅着晦涩难懂的《拉尼》页面，听着帕德米尼悦耳且滔滔不绝的闲聊。她想过恳求父亲让她回班加罗尔，但他必然会问为什么，而她不想撒谎，声称仅仅是乏味而已其实是难以忍受。他每隔一天就给家里打电话，当她向他保证自己很好时，他的宽慰之情显而易见。当尼迪问起她的母亲时，他只说：“到时候再说。”
访问一周后，发生了一件事。尼迪坐在铺着塑料罩的沙发上，蜷起腿以便安比卡在下面扫地，帕德米尼在厨房里。就在那时，贾亚阿姨在她那把白椅子上放了一个屁。一个漫长的、可怕的、咕噜作响的排气。她没有回头，也没有道歉。屏幕上，两个穿着白色短裤的男人正在打网球。尼迪和安比卡对视了一眼，然后移开了目光。
直到现在，安比卡对尼迪完全不感兴趣，但她似乎觉得这次事件将她们团结在了一起。后来，当尼迪在房间里时，安比卡悄悄走过来，低声说：“脏老骆驼，不是吗？”
“谁？”尼迪故作不知地问。
“还有另一个。”安比卡带着懒散而奢侈的恶意告密道。“我知道我不该那样说那些人。上帝创造了他们，就像创造你和我一样。我只是在说——你能理解为什么丈夫会跑掉。”
“我以为他死了，”尼迪说。
“所有男人都有那种‘感觉’，你知道的。”安比卡严肃地看着尼迪，仿佛她在故意刁难。“如果他们不能在
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家里表现出来，他们还能怎么办？ 他们得去别的地方，不是吗？”
“你干完活了吗？” 尼迪礼貌地问道。
“除了露台房，所有地方都可以。” 安比卡防御性地瞥了一眼天花板。“但这不是我的错。他把门锁上并带走钥匙。他以为我能穿墙而过吗？”
这一次，尼迪真的不知道她在说什么。
“那个教授。噢，对了，你不认识他。他是她儿子的朋友。说自己来自非洲，但我听说非洲人皮肤都是黑色的，而他在我看来就像个普通的印度人。他每隔几个月就来一次。”
“他住在我的房间里吗？”
“储藏室？”安比卡显得被冒犯了。“不，他住在楼上。那是唯一一间有空调的房间。每当他在的时候，我都会尽量在里面扫地久一点——那里又舒服又凉快——但他总是把我赶走。说我打扰他阅读。”
“阅读？”尼迪猛地抬起头。“你是说书？”
“还能是什么？他上面有几百本书。书的大君，我就是这么叫他的。”
尼迪之前没怎么关注露台上的那个小房间，但现在她走上去检查了一下。门框上积了数月的灰尘，死锁已经失去了光泽，但挂在上面的挂锁却是新的。尼迪差点开口问贾亚阿姨关于那个教授的事，但随后她想起了安比卡说过的话。他是她儿子的朋友。那个死去的儿子，尚卡尔，自从尼迪到达这里以来，就再没人提起过他一个字。
她没有问。
一个半星期过去了。帕德米妮出去买蔬菜，回来时，她给了尼迪一卷从市场买的廉价且色彩鲜艳的手镯。尼迪已经很多年没戴过这种手镯，并认为它们很幼稚，但此刻她莫名地被触动了。她的父亲打电话来说，母亲的情况还没有好转。安比卡叹了口气，继续扫地。贾亚阿姨看了五分钟的《终结者》，然后切换到了一个设定在水晶迷宫里的游戏节目。
然后有一天早晨，尼迪醒来发现餐桌旁坐着一个男人。他
哀歌
我们从来不是一个挑剔食物的家庭。 我们几乎不知道什么叫“美食鉴赏家”。 好食物就是你喜欢的食物；口味意味着偏好。
星辰眷顾这片街区， 曾有一家 Po' Folks 餐厅，后来变成了 Folks，随后关门，但在我的潜意识里
它依然在那里，连那个 Po' 字也完整保留， 因为我离开得太久， 以至于我将逝者与远方之人混淆。
因此，对我而言，我的祖父母依然在呼吸。 他们在一家充满乡土气息的小店里， 享受着炸鸡、甜茶
和比司吉；在那里我还是个孩子，父母正值中年。 我没有北上，也没有背弃 那些起点。我也没变成一个美食家
大约五十岁，她猜测，他顶着个秃顶的 脑袋，身形瘦长，手指纤细且 渐尖。他穿着一件黄色条纹睡裤 和一件白色 V 领内衣。“你好，”他说。 “如果昨晚打扰到你，我很抱歉。 那些航班总是来得那么该死地 晚。我是苏迪尔（Sudhir）。”
他的口音与尼迪（Nidhi）所认知的 任何口音都略有出入。“你没打扰我，”她说，谨慎地 坐了下来。这是事实。尽管天气炎热，她还是 在他在抵达时睡得正香。
帕德米妮（Padmini）端来了伊德利（idlis），在 多层塔状的容器中冒着热气，还有一碗 钢制的椰子蘸酱。那位教授——肯定是他——身体前倾， 赞赏地嗅了嗅。
接着，贾雅姨妈（Jaya Aunty）穿着一件 亮橙色的丝绸纱丽款款走来。“吃吧，吃吧！”她 喊道。“光闻味道可填不饱肚子！”她对着自己的笑话咯咯地笑了起来。
尼迪盯着她。这咯咯的笑声是怎么回事？ 还有这种语气，如此娇嗔且 妩媚？那位教授似乎也在想同样的事情，因为他 转过头，直接看向尼迪。在他的目光中，尼迪察觉到一种 对贾雅姨妈这场小表演之荒诞的无奈认可，但 除此之外，她还看到——或者认为她看到了——一种恳求。他在请求 尼迪配合他。
“已经在纠缠我了？”教授问道，严肃地转回身看向尼迪的 姑婆。“你在退化，我亲爱的 贾雅。上次你还体面到 等到早餐后才开始。”
“真是个幽默的人，”贾雅姨妈再次咯咯地笑了起来。 “你一点都没变。”
尼迪后来得知，这位教授并非 教授，而是一名商人。他的 名字叫苏迪尔·德赛（Sudhir Desai），他是 肯尼亚人。也就是说，他家族中的某个人 一百年前从古吉拉特邦去了肯尼亚，并定居在 那里的海岸边。苏迪尔·德赛出生在名为蒙巴萨（Mombasa）的小镇，所以他 不像尼迪那样是印度人。他用很多话向她解释了这一点，眼神温柔，仿佛在说 她可能无法理解。
“有点像甘地，”尼迪说。 “南非的印度人。”
他正准备吃最后一块 伊德利，但停了下来，看着她。
“不错，”他说。“有点像。是的。” “你是来做生意的吗，苏迪尔？” 尼迪问。她之前试过叫他叔叔，但他告诉她 他更喜欢被叫作苏迪尔，这让她意识到 他比她猜测的年纪还要大。
“生意？”他笑了。“不。我 来这里，嗯，可以说，是为了一个爱好。”
帕德米妮走进餐厅
64 《纽约客》，2026年8月24日与31日
或真正的业余爱好者， 没有人害怕邀请我共进晚餐， 因为我像专家一样烹饪或点餐。
我该将我纯真的恳求寄往何处？ 无论我学到了什么，我依然是我， 并渴望与那些
我将思念的人，或将思念我的人共餐， 当先行者走上那条街道之时。 我们将一起尽情享用我们所能
舀出的任何食物。既然星辰主宰 无论我们的计划如何， 一份回执（R.S.V.P.）永远只是“也许”，
那么聚在一起的理由 从未如此清晰。 晚餐便是点睛之笔。
——艾德里安娜·苏（Adrienne Su）
并把伊德利塔端走了。苏迪尔·德赛对着她微笑，但她忽略了他。她看起来心不在焉且阴沉，就像尼迪刚来那几天时她那样。苏迪尔·德赛叹了口气看向尼迪，仿佛在说：我在努力了。
尼迪问：“什么样的爱好？”
他的房间和她的房间差不多：一张床，一把椅子。但因为在露台上，这里一点也不像洞穴。房间有两个尺寸尚可的窗户，不在露台侧，而是在外墙上，其中一个窗户安装了一个小型空调。空调发出咔哒咔哒的响声，尼迪的皮肤在人造的寒冷中感到刺痛。
另一个不同之处在于，他的房间里塞满了书。胶合板书架沿墙排列，书板的中部已经弯曲。这些书的状态也不太好。许多书脊已经脱落，尼迪能看到将书页固定在一起的绳子和胶水。尽管如此，它们依然是书。苏迪尔·德赛看着她的表情笑了。
“别太兴奋。它们不是小说。”他做了一个假装占卜的动作，手指触碰太阳穴，“某种直觉告诉我，你是那种对小说痴迷的女孩。”
她确实如此。但听到他这么说，她反而希望自己不是。
“你应该看看我刚来时的样子，”他说，轻轻拂过一本破旧的册子，“贾雅把它们放在楼下。就在客厅正中央。好几年没人看过了。它们快散架了。书页掉在地上，有衣鱼，有霉菌，你能想到的都有。我把书架搬到了这里，安装了空调。虽然没什么大用——有个除湿机会更好——但至少它们不再在楼下腐烂了。”
所以这就解释了客厅里的空缺，尼迪想。她再次环顾四周。
“收集旧书，”她说，“这就是你的爱好？”
“不完全是。”他笑了。“我第一次来是为了吊唁。贾雅的儿子，尚卡尔——你知道他吗？他在蒙巴萨去世了。我在那里见过他几次，甚至帮他安排了将遗体送回家的事宜。几年后，我因为一些业务在印度，我想，为什么不去向那位悲痛的母亲表达敬意呢？你知道这种事情的惯例。”
尼迪点点头，装作知道的样子。“我开始翻阅那些书，发现了一个关于神智学（Theosophy）的令人印象深刻的小收藏。我以前从未听说过它。长话短说，我被迷住了。你熟悉神智学吗，尼迪？海伦娜·布拉瓦茨基？安妮·贝赞？”
“安妮·贝赞，”尼迪重复道，假装在思考，“她是主权自治运动（Home Rule）的人，对吧？”
“尼迪，”他缓慢地说道，“我被你惊艳到了。”
她不得不抿住嘴唇以防笑出来。提到安妮·贝赞纯属运气；尼迪去年在学校学习过主权自治联盟。一种细微的快感在她内心开始嗡鸣，但她同时也意识到了一闪而过的轻蔑。赢得他的钦佩竟然如此简单！
“那么，”苏迪尔·德赛说，“如果你知道这个，那么你一定知道神智学会的总部在阿迪亚尔，几乎就在隔壁。多年来，这成了我的传统。每隔几个月飞过来一次，住在贾雅家，阅读，听一些讲座。这让我保持清醒。”
“我可以借一本吗？”尼迪问，“其中一本书？”
“当然可以。它们是你姑姑的，不是我的。”
“那你为什么要把门锁上？”她并非有意语气如此尖锐。
苏迪尔·德赛显得很惊讶。然后他笑了。“啊，”他说，“你知道的——习惯使然。”
她选择了安妮·贝赞写的《神智学与神智学会》，不是因为这本书看起来诱人，而是因为她觉得现在自己意外地与贝赞产生了某种联系。虽然这不是小说，但她开始喜欢其中那种古旧的韵律，以及每当贝赞被她思想的壮丽所震撼时，文中跳出的 obs! 和 abs!。有时，尼迪甚至对书中的劝诫产生了一种温和的优越感，这些劝诫从热烈得像孩子一样（“听听那只鸟，它整个小小的生命都在阳光的喜悦中膨胀！”）到纯粹的古怪（“当六颗宝石系在你的额头时，你将被视为准备好进入启动之门”）。
她大部分时间都在那个铺着塑料罩的沙发上阅读，或者在苏迪尔·德赛（Sudhir Desai）那间凉爽的房间里阅读。每当她感到厌倦时，就会和他讨论她读到的内容。他也通常在阅读，但会带着一丝苦笑将书搁在一边，说：“好吧，让我听听最新的长篇大论。”在这些对话中，他喜欢扮演信徒的角色，耐心地抵御她的攻击，捍卫人类灵魂的完美以及所有生命欢乐的统一。尼迪（Nidhi）注意到，
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结果是，她倾向于让自己显得比实际感受到的更加愤世嫉俗且好争吵。她争辩说，如果乌托邦真的存在，人类会在一个月内想办法将其摧毁。非物质主义是那种由那些没有真正面临饥饿危险的人所宣扬的幻想废话。而且，所谓的“启动之门”（Portal of Initiation）到底是个什么鬼？
她知道自己是在为了苏迪尔·德赛而调整自己的状态——显然，听到这么年轻的人说出如此刻薄的话让他觉得很有趣——而且她也知道，在他在场时，改变的不仅仅是她。自从他到来后，贾亚阿姨（Jaya Aunty）看电视的时间减少了；她发现观察他要有趣得多。他做的每一件事都能让她咯咯大笑。有一天，他衬衫上的一个纽扣掉了，他便要针线。“针！线！”贾亚阿姨咯咯地笑了起来。“你们这些单身汉！什么都要靠自己搞定，是吧？切（Chee）！”帕德米妮（Padmini）一分钟就能把它缝好。
然而，改变最大的是帕德米妮。尼迪在近三周内认识的那个喋喋不休的女人消失了。不再有甜蜜而没用的礼物，不再有惊喜的花生。帕德米妮变得和安比卡（Ambika）一样不满，沉重地走在工作中，几乎不说话。尼迪无视了自己更好的直觉，将帕德米妮堵在角落里，试图探寻原因。
她们站在厨房里，帕德米妮转身面对尼迪。她的表情因愤怒而扭曲。她从切菜板上拿起一个西红柿，把它举在尼迪的鼻子下面，然后用力捏碎。果汁和种子从她的指缝间喷射而出。在帕德米妮拿起另一个之前，尼迪退出了房间。
关于帕德米妮行为的一个线索浮现了。那是一个周五的午后，贾亚阿姨在切换频道，尼迪在读贝桑特（Besant）的书，帕德米妮从花园里走进来，她刚才在那里晾衣服。脚后跟上粘着草屑，一件晾衣夹从她衬衫的下摆上垂下来。苏迪尔·德赛在神智学会（Theosophical Society）参加一场讲座。这是他参加的第二次此类讲座，尼迪因为没有被邀请而感到隐约的失望。
电视机停在了电影《泰坦尼克号》上。
尼迪沮丧地注意到，那是性爱场景，就是杰克和露丝把车窗弄得雾蒙蒙的那一段。（尼迪在两年前和父母一起在电影院看过《泰坦尼克号》，在那场戏时她偷偷看了他们一眼。他们两人都在微笑。）帕德米妮转头看向电视。她的目光只停留了几秒钟，没有明显的反应，但这足以让尼迪摸索出一个模糊的理论。
苏迪尔·德赛一定让帕德米妮想起了她死去的丈夫，毕竟他曾是对方的朋友。他一定让她想起了她曾短暂拥有过的生活——作为一个成年人，一个已婚女性——那段生活被残酷地夺走，取而代之的是与贾亚阿姨一起度过的这段无尽的、如黄昏般迟缓的童年。
至于帕德米妮和她的丈夫是否曾在车里做过杰克和露丝所做的事情，尼迪没有勇气去想象。但她确实相信，这就是为什么每当苏迪尔·德赛穿着条纹睡衣在屋里闲逛时，帕德米妮总是皱眉不悦。他是一个被憎恨的媒介；他的出现唤起了另一个男人的幽灵。
那是一个闷热的夜晚——每个夜晚都很热，但这一晚感觉像是被热气感染了——尼迪在床上辗转反侧。晚餐时她的腰部一直酸痛，果然，内裤上出现了经血那般暗淡的锈色。她整个晚上都感到疲惫，很早就睡了，但半夜被痛经惊醒。她悄悄走到浴室，换上了一片新的卫生巾。她用一张为了这个目的而偷来的旧《Rani》杂志页将用过的卫生巾包裹起来，扔进垃圾桶。在回房间的路上，她犹豫了，渴望能有一丝凉风吹在脸上。
她决定去露台。水泥地烫得几乎让人无法站立。角落里生长的一株九重葛投下尖锐且颤动的阴影。空气感觉像烟雾一样浓稠。这里找不到哪怕一点点缓解。她转身准备回屋，然后在苏迪尔·德赛紧闭的门前停了下来。她想象着他熟睡的样子，一条长腿悬在床边。单身汉睡觉时会赤裸上身吗？甚至全裸？尼迪
自顾自地笑了起来，那是一种轻柔的笑，其中包含着一个疑问，一种眩晕的、半开玩笑的胆量。她会这么做吗？就偷看一眼？ 如果他醒了，很容易把它当作一个玩笑掩盖过去。她将手掌贴在门上，推了一下。
门从里面锁住了。她的第一反应是宽慰。第二反应则是极度的惊恐。难道他某种程度上预料到她会这么做？他采取了预防措施？某种直觉告诉我，你就是那种女孩。 ……然后她想起了他说过锁门是因为习惯，于是她放松了下来，甚至又笑了一次，这次是笑自己的惊慌。尽管如此，当她走下楼梯回到闷热的卧室时，她的腿微微颤抖，仿佛刚刚经历了一场惊险的逃脱。
那个月她的出血量比平时多，每隔几个小时就得换一次卫生巾。只有一次，她允许自己想象母亲所经历的折磨——奔跑的护士、叫喊声、血淋淋的取出过程——随后便将其抛之脑后。垃圾桶里包裹着的卫生巾越来越多。她不安地盯着它们。垃圾桶什么时候会被清空？如果她知道把卫生巾拿到哪里去，她会自己处理掉。
一个下午，她在客厅读书时，帕德米尼出现了。贾雅阿姨在电视机前睡着了。尼迪不知道苏迪尔·德赛在哪里。
“帕德米尼，”尼迪笑了，很高兴能分分心。随后，她僵住了：“你在做什么？”
因为帕德米尼怀里抱着尼迪丢弃的所有卫生巾。起码有十几个。其中一两个因为她粗心没有用足够的纸包裹，已经散开了，褶皱的边缘展开，露出了里面的深色污渍。
“帕德米尼！”尼迪尖叫道，“别碰那些东西！”她环顾四周，看贾雅阿姨是否醒来，但她的姑婆睡眠极深，没有动弹。
“它们很脏。他不应该看到这些，”帕德米尼平静地说。“他”指的是苏迪尔·德赛。
怀抱着尼迪的血迹，帕德米尼走进了花园。尼迪依然恳求她扔掉那些东西，跟在后面，长草刺痛着她的脚踝。她们走过晾衣绳，
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走过纠结的藤蔓和下垂的红色猴尾仙人掌，来到尽头的一丛巨大的野生马缨丹灌木前。帕德米尼绕过灌木，消失在视线中。尼迪跟了上去。
帕德米尼挖了一个火坑，周围环绕着深色的岩石。岩石上有灰色的灰烬碎片，以及潮湿烟灰那令人窒息的恶臭。她将尼迪的卫生巾扔进中心，然后后退。尼迪走近了一些，向坑里窥视。很明显，帕德米尼在这里焚烧家中的垃圾，但没有一样是被完全烧尽的；空气太潮湿，无法完全焚毁。尼迪看到了几页烧焦的《Rani》，几个被烧过的土豆皮，以及一些看起来很熟悉的黄白相间的布碎片。
尼迪眯起眼睛，试图辨认那块布。认出来后，她猛地抬头看向帕德米尼。帕德米尼正拿着一根火柴去点其中一块包裹着的卫生巾，火苗无力地闪了一下，但没烧起来。帕德米尼并不在意，又点了一根火柴。十分钟后，她用掉了一整盒火柴，成功地将尼迪的卫生巾变成了像一窝萎缩的黑鸡蛋一样的东西。空气中弥漫着塑料烧焦的臭味。
在接下来的时间里，尼迪在犹豫是否要告诉苏迪尔·德赛他的睡衣遭遇了什么。最终，她没有说。她也说不上为什么。也许他根本没注意到睡衣丢了。毕竟，他一直没提起。而且，她担心如果提起这件事，他会想亲自去看那个火坑，然后整个尴尬的故事就会全部泄露：帕德米尼手中的卫生巾，蒸汽氤氲的车厢里的杰克和露丝，以及她关于帕德米尼、鬼魂和爱情的那些愚蠢理论。
终于，苏迪尔·德赛邀请尼迪去听一场神智学会（Theosophical Society）的讲座。贾雅阿姨显然很不高兴，但无法批评他，于是说：“啧。一个孩子听那个能干什么？”
他轻敲她的头。“亲爱的贾雅，你拥有这么聪明的大脑，不需要这些，但我们这些普通人喜欢开阔心胸。”她随即陷入满足的咯咯笑声中，再也没有人反对尼迪陪他一起去。
学会的校园在阿迪亚尔河畔向四周延伸，宁静的步行道上点缀着古老的建筑和略显凌乱的树木。主楼被刷成了宁静的黄色，唯有一面红色的装饰墙上，八个白色石膏象头正凝视着外面。这场关于透视能力的讲座由一名戴金边眼镜的高个子男人主讲，开场是一首诗。尼迪试图记住这首诗，但只记得第一句，在男人说话时，她在心中反复诵读：噢，隐藏的生命，在每一个原子中跃动。噢，隐藏的生命，在每一个原子中跃动。噢，隐藏的生命……
之后，苏迪尔·德赛带她在校园里走走，向她介绍这里的亮点：为地球上每种宗教建立的神龛、古老的榕树，以及为学者和志愿者提供的住所。他们往回走时正值黄昏。尼迪很安静。她的出血量减少了，但感到精疲力竭。苏迪尔·德赛似乎也有些低落。他不停地敲击着胸前口袋里的一支钢笔。嗒，嗒，嗒。
他说：“我想告诉你一些事情。”然后，他没有看尼迪，开始讲述一个故事。那是关于一名他在战争期间结识的美丽的德国护士。他没有具体说明是哪场战争，尼迪也没有问。他和那名护士曾有过一段热烈的恋情，她怀孕了。她恳求苏迪尔·德赛带着她和孩子回到德国，但他不能。不是因为他不想，而是因为他和另一个男人已经在制定——
制定将飞机飞入丛林的计划。
尼迪静静地听着，不知道该如何看待这段非同寻常的告白，而且随着讲述的进行，内容变得越来越混乱。其中提到了种族灭绝、武装游击队、一处宝石藏匿点，以及一个叫斯帕基的人。而等到这一切结束时（种族灭绝？飞行？），已经太迟了。他无法让自己去联系那名德国护士或那个孩子——那是他的孩子。为什么？因为时间过去了太久。而且——为什么要撒谎呢？——因为他害怕。
他们走到了贾雅阿姨家的门前。尼迪能看到窗户里亮着灯。
苏迪尔·德赛轻声说：“我以前从未告诉过任何人这件事。我不知道为什么告诉你。只是……我感觉到你身上有一种不可思议的智慧，尼迪。你是一个成熟的灵魂。我只是知道，如果有人能理解我，那一定是你。”
尼迪没有回应。她看到了自己的样子——如此为自己的大胆和勇气而兴奋，此刻却像个傻瓜，像个孩子一样，在黑暗中站在他紧闭的门前。她突然想哭。
“那是你遇到尚卡尔的时候吗？”她大声问道，“就在这一切发生的时候？”
“尚卡尔？”他困惑地皱起眉头。“噢，那个尚卡尔。不，那是很久之后在蒙巴萨的事。有人把我们介绍给对方。我想，他们觉得我可以帮他创业，所以他想开始一项……”
“嘿，不许踢人！”
“……生意。但我立刻就看出这事儿没戏。”
“为什么？”
“那是个半成品主意。”苏迪尔·德赛耸了耸肩。“他不是最聪明的那类人。”
“我听说他是个天才。”
他短促地笑了一声，带着感激，仿佛尼迪是故意在开玩笑以逗他开心。“尚卡尔？天才？当然。为什么不呢？我们就叫他天才吧。一个彻头彻尾的天才（full-fletched genius）。”
后来，她会告诉自己，这样说话是很自然的。毕竟，这已经成了她的角色，她在面对他时扮演的角色，也是他本人鼓励的角色。读小说的尼迪。好争论、有主见、早熟且睿智的尼迪。她还能怎么回应？
“是 full-fledged，”她说。
“什么？”他的语调上扬。带着警觉。或许是惊恐。
“Full-fledged，”她重复道。“不是 ‘full-fletched’。”
他再次笑了起来。“尝试得不错，但你错了。这个词是指箭。箭尾的羽毛叫做 fletching。”
“我知道 fletching 是什么，”她轻声说，“但这个词不是这么来的。”
他看着她，但没有说话。他们进了屋。晚餐后，苏迪尔·德赛道了晚安，回楼上休息了。贾雅阿姨和帕德米尼随后不久也上床睡觉了。尼迪刷完牙，正坐在床边，在电风扇前乘凉，这时有人敲她的门。
“我在想，”他语气愉快地说，“你是否愿意睡在我的房间里。”
他解释说，有个紧急情况把他叫走了。他要直接去机场，在那里等到飞往孟买的早班飞机起飞。从那里，他将飞往内罗毕，然后前往蒙巴萨。他说，想到自己睡在空调房里而她却在下面忍受酷暑，他感到很愧疚。他说，没有理由不让她从今晚起使用他的房间。事实上，就从现在开始。看，他已经收拾好行李准备出发了。
确实如此。他的行李箱立在门边，笼在月光之中。
“那贾雅阿姨怎么办？”尼迪低声问。“她不会知道你发生了什么。”
“噢，贾雅现在习惯我这样了。她知道我会回来的。”
床单不干净。上面有他的味道——汗味和一种尼迪不熟悉的肥皂味——但她太累了，不在意这些。空调虽然吵，但效果很好，她不得不下楼从自己的房间拿床单来铺在他的床单上。书架若隐若现；寒意让她蜷缩；街道上的路灯将光线漏进房间。有那么一刻，她以为自己永远无法入睡，但她错了。
当门打开时，她没有完全醒来。一切都显得遥远；她的感觉像是幽灵一般。如果说她产生了一个念头，那就是：他来了。奇怪的是，这并没有引发恐慌。在这种半梦半醒的状态下，没有什么感觉是危险的，也没有什么在威胁她。她对周围的环境拥有一种平静的、无法解释的掌控力。她是做梦的人，是操纵木偶的人，因此这一切——床垫的下陷；细微的叹息；压在她身上的柔软的人体重量；前后摇晃，起初不稳定且胆怯，随后势头增强；长长的发丝在她的裸臂上地轻挠——这一切的发生，都是因为她在意识的某个遥远角落里，如此意愿。
她无法准确地说出是在什么时候意识到的。但即便如此，她也没有动。她没有把帕德米尼推开。她没有尖叫。原因是她瞥见了帕德米尼的表情。
帕德米尼闭着眼睛。她的表情显得很奇怪，带着一种紧迫感，一种不耐烦的渴望，仿佛在等待某件事发生，一件很久以前就答应过她的事。尼迪心想，肯定很快，帕德米尼就会认出她，但对方只是发出了一声轻微的、沮丧的叫喊，然后将头埋在尼迪的肩头，加大了力度，隔着两层床单用力地将臀部撞向尼迪——热情、坚定，且完全徒劳。这种情况持续了多久，尼迪说不清楚，但突然之间，帕德米尼滚开了。她站了起来，背对着尼迪。她的头发散落在肩头，银色且非常美丽。
随后她离开了。尼迪僵在原地好几分钟。最后，她下了床，穿过房间，
关上门，用颤抖的手指将其锁上。
当然，她现在不再相信他遇到了任何紧急情况。她怎么会愚蠢到那样认为？她想象着他拎着手提箱悠闲地走向神智学会，请求留宿一晚；或者走在阿迪亚尔阴暗的街道上，经过打呼噜的守卫和警觉的街狗，内心感到宁静且自我满足，甚至带着一种父亲般的姿态，觉得自己给了她有用的教导，给了她认为她极需学习的一课：你以为你很聪明。你以为你了解这个世界。但，小姑娘，你根本什么都不知道。
八天后，她回到了班加罗尔。她的父亲深感愧疚，连续几周对她百般宠爱。她的母亲起初很沉默，有些局促，试探。但玩笑话渐渐重新出现，像“胎儿”、“宫颈机能不全”、“清宫”这样的词汇也再次出现。尽管如此，情况已不再相同；之间出现了一种明确的隔阂，一种地形的偏移，将尼迪置于一边，而她的父母在另一边。
尼迪发现自己并不在意这一点。
她不在意是因为在回家的火车上想到的一件事。她闭上眼睛，车厢有节奏的摇晃让她回想起帕德米尼的摇晃，以及最后那声痛苦的轻叫。接着，在那层床单之下的不再是尼迪的身体，而是她父亲的。她自己的父亲在十五岁时，身材瘦长且缺乏经验，面对这种事态的发展感到恐慌，试图决定该怎么做，该如何反应。
当然，尼迪并不真的认为发生在她身上的事情也发生在过他身上——如果发生过，他绝不会把她送到那里——但在火车上的那几秒钟里，她妥协了，允许自己这样想象。他是否会像她一样保持不动，等待这一切结束？他是否会反抗并尖叫？
或者，他是否会做出完全不同的反应？♦
注册即可在收件箱中接收作者访谈。
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照片来源：盖蒂图片社（GETTY）
书籍
消失之举
瑞秋·库斯克对“人格”的抗议。
作者：贝卡·罗斯费尔德
瑞秋·库斯克（Rachel Cusk）新小说《M的生活》（Life of M）中的主人公有一种奇特的入睡技巧。她“想象一面砖墙。它填满了她的视野；其边缘不可见。她用一件狭长的工具开始凿掉第一块砖周围的灰泥，通常是正对着她的那一块。她稳健且平静地工作。灰泥松动并一片片脱落。当灰泥被清除后，她用手将砖块向前推。砖块掉到墙的另一侧，现在原处出现了一个白色光芒组成的小矩形。她用工具开始凿掉它旁边或上方的砖块，然后是再旁边或再上方的。由光组成的白色形状变得越来越大。当它足够大时，她便爬了过去。”
这个意象很好地概括了库斯克自身的轨迹。作为自动小说（autofiction）——这一刻意模糊叙述者与作者界限的文学亚类型——的统治女王，她以冷峻、如玻璃般剔透的散文风格和极简的视觉严苛感而闻名。她的名声建立在 2010 年代大获赞誉的三部作品之上——《轮廓》（Outline, 2014）、《过境》（Transit, 2016）和《赞誉》（Kudos, 2018）。这些作品中沉默寡言的叙述者费伊（Faye）在某种程度上像她的创造者：一名有两个孩子的英国离婚作家，
自由是库斯克笔下的人物——尤其是女性角色——所渴望却匮乏的东西。
插图：杰克·史密斯
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但关于她的其他信息我们几乎一无所知，而且她很少为自己发声。相反，她在文学节和晚宴上倾听一系列滔滔不绝的对话者时，表现得像一个录音设备。
据库斯克自己所述，她在 2012 年开始厌倦传统小说。当时，在出版了记录她与丈夫激烈分手的争议回忆录《后果》（Aftermath）并遭到敌视对待后，她在接受《卫报》采访时将其描述为经历了一场“创作之死”。在接下来的几年里，她既无法阅读也无法创作小说，因为小说在她看来已变得“虚假且令人尴尬”。但仔细审视库斯克的作品可以发现，早在那时之前，她就已经在准备抛弃这种形式的基本要素。她几乎在刚开始写小说时，就开始一块块地将其拆除，以寻找其背后刺眼的白色空白。
库斯克的前三本书（其中两本在她三十岁前出版）配备了所有传统设施：场景、人物、情节，而且为了稳妥起见，还加入了对简·奥斯汀和勃朗特姐妹自觉的致敬。这些早期尝试幽默、愤世嫉俗，且辞藻过于繁冗，以至于很难相信它们出自同一个后来因风格精炼、流畅而备受推崇的女人之手。然而，到了第四部小说，
她开始对她所选择且显然已经开始鄙视的形式发起一场低调的反叛。《幸运儿》（The Lucky Ones, 2003）、《在褶皱中》（In the Fold, 2005）、《阿灵顿公园》（Arlington Park, 2006）和《布拉德肖变奏曲》（The Bradshaw Variations, 2009）——这些她中期且最优秀时期的产物——更像是相互关联的人物素描，而非有情节的小说。每部作品都呈现了一组不满的英国郊区居民的群像——怨恨枯燥工作的丈夫，哭闹且爱打断话语的幼儿，以及最关键的，被沉重的家务负担所淹没、焦虑不堪的妻子。
这些关于家庭荒芜的阴郁且令人畏惧的小说文字洗练，但略显过时，不仅因为其中包含人物和对话（这些手段在后来的库斯克作品中被舍弃），还因为它们讲述的是居住在宽敞房屋中、通常依靠单一收入生活的中上层阶级家庭。（库斯克的小说总是设定在某种令人向往的房产中，且通常由那种日益过时的生物——富裕的家庭主妇——居住。）尽管如此，尽管这些作品带有某种古旧感，但她中期的小说在技巧上达到了冰冷的极致。在库斯克擅长描写的那些端庄的郊区，女性被她们别无选择只能扮演的角色活活吞噬。母亲的身份，或许比婚姻更甚，起到了限制和囚禁她们的作用。在库斯克那部坦率得令人心痛的 2001 年回忆录《一项生命之作》中，她将生育孩子比作经历了七次以上的监禁。她写道：“对我而言，母亲的身份就像是一个与世隔绝的院落。”那是一个“牢房”，一个“陷阱”，而她则是其中的一名“囚犯”。
作为社会囚禁的记录，库斯克的中期小说令人印象深刻，但作为风格上的成就，它们则更加耀眼。在这些作品中，她的散文变得紧凑，呈现出一种闪亮且具有流线感的状态。其意象冷酷且细致：阳光透过窗户落下，形成“巨大的倾斜板块”，一件睡衣在床上摊开，像“一条蛇蜕下的皮”。这些书籍所呈现的基调——干脆、不感情用事、严苛——服务于其诊断。它们是对一种常见的女性病症的临床描绘：生活被压缩得过于整洁，以至于无法获得自由。
如果在库斯克的全部作品中有一个词被反复提及，那就是“自由”。自由是她的角色——尤其是女性角色——渴望却匮乏的东西。这些拥有宽敞后院和下午咖啡小组的妻子和母亲们，希望从什么中获得自由？对于库斯克来说，自由意味着摆脱将一个人封闭在有限自我之中的社会和历史外壳。在 2018 年接受本杂志采访时，她告诉亚历山德拉·施瓦茨（Alexandra Schwartz）：“我认为‘性格’（character）已不再存在”——但她最优秀小说中的女性确实在努力摆脱它。对她们而言，性格不仅存在，而且起到了院落、牢房、陷阱的作用。因此，获得自由就是逃离性格，并随之逃离整个小说创作的人为架构。库斯克似乎认为女性身份的惯例与小说在最传统和程式化形式下的惯例是同构的：她始终用明确的叙事术语来讨论母亲身份和婚姻。在《一项生命之作》中，她反思道：“我的爱情先后遵循了家庭叙事，然后是浪漫叙事的惯例。我从未试图重写这些惯例。我顺应了它们的节奏，它们的情节。”
然而，从《大纲》三部曲开始，库斯克试图通过完全拒绝情节来重写这些惯例。无论费伊（Faye）去哪里——去一家优雅的酒吧，去亲戚宽敞的乡村别墅，去希腊海岸的一个岛屿——人们都在对她说话，而这三部曲由
“我们承认我们有帽子。现在怎么办？”
冗长的独白组成，偶尔穿插一句“他说”或“她说”。在飞机上坐在费伊旁边的一个男人告诉她关于不得不给自己的狗实施安乐死的事；一名剧作家讲述她的离婚以及后来遭受的袭击；每个人都含糊且宏大地谈论爱与死亡。餐具叮当作响。夕阳西下，潮水轻轻拍打着岸边。一个角色评论道：“命运……只是处于自然状态下的真理。”另一个角色沉思道：“我之前没有意识到……航行在多大程度上是对进步的信念，以及对你所抛在脑后的之物的固定性的假设。”
这些令人惊讶的俗套台词并非总是缺乏讽刺意味。其中一些是由那些在费伊看来显然傲慢且自命不凡的角色说出的，但另一些则是由费伊本人说出的——而且，无论如何，费伊的声音与她遇到的人们并无二致。无论她是坐在飞机上一个陌生人的身边，还是与装修她公寓的工人攀谈，随之而来的伪哲学思考都是一样的。
这部三部曲是库斯克截至当时的创作计划在逻辑上的顶峰。通过刻意的省略，她又从立面上拆掉了一块砖，从而更接近下方等待着的白色光芒。在采访中，她解释说，她试图捕捉一个个体性已被一套标准文化体验所取代的世界。费伊所承受的那些独白，旨在反映一种普遍的观点，就像希腊戏剧中由合唱团表达的那种共有视角。正如费伊在《大纲》（Outline）中所说，她在寻找一种“当焦点变为人类部分的总和而个体被抹除时所产生的那种客观性”。性格已经过时，因为我们都坍缩成了一个（舒适、健康、见多识广的）人，在文学节和俯瞰大海的高级餐厅里，用高调的语气谈论心碎与美学。
那么，在三部曲的拆除之后还剩下什么？还有什么需要撤销的？在《赞誉》（Kudos）中，库斯克停止了给地点命名。书中大部分情节发生的城市仅仅被称为“这座城市”——任何城市，每一座城市，这正是一个作为任何且每一个人的叙述者所恰当的背景。在三部曲之后的时期，她也停止了给人们命名，将他们缩减为字母。
在《第二名》（Second Place，2021）中，一个名叫 M 的女人邀请一位名叫 L 的艺术家在她的房产上绘画。《游行》（Parade，2024）则走得更远：它讲述了一系列艺术家（其中一些显然是以现实生活中的原型为模版），他们全部被命名为 G。
那个名为 G 的模糊整体，是库斯克想象“自我”之后之物的最佳尝试。但她无法完全将其具象化；无形之物，就其本质而言，很难被形式化，而《游行》（这确实是一场游行，一群相互渗透成一个无定形非人物的角色之行列）充满了苍白无力的抽象。一旦独立的自我液化成胶质般的普遍性，唯一能获得的就是诸如“纯粹的感知……不涉及任何互动，没有主观性”这样贫血的观察。《游行》在抹除界限方面几乎达到了神秘主义的程度，而且像所有神秘主义文本一样，它始终处于即将颤抖着陷入毫无意义的边缘。一群 G 之中的一位创作了装置艺术，其中一块布“悬挂在天花板上”，体现了“没有身份、没有面孔或特征的人类形态。这个漂浮的存在是没有性别的”。一个同样漂浮的存在——如此缺乏摩擦，如此匮乏戏剧性，如此可预见地枯燥——便是《M 的生活》（Life of M）的叙述者，这是库斯克迄今为止最弱的一部小说。
《M 的生活》是一本笨重的书，包含三条截然不同的线索，每条线索聚焦于一个不同的角色（或一种对角色的不同抗议）。有几个章节由 I 叙述，关于 I，我们几乎一无所知；I 可能是男性或女性，年轻或年老。我们唯一知道的是，他或她有一个伴侣（同样是一个无名且无性别的虚无之辈），该伴侣因某种未指明的疾病住进了医院，且他或她生活在一座城市里（尽管这座城市同样令人恼火地模式化）。或许最重要的一点是，I 是一位作家，与一位名叫 M 的女演员成为了朋友。一个初始值面对另一个初始值。
关于 M 的第三人称章节——我们理解这些章节可能是 I 不准确的想象——构成了本书的主体（其中一部分最初是本杂志的一篇故事）。小说开头写道：“不久前，我告诉演员 M 我在考虑为她写自传。”接下来的内容大概是叙述者试图兑现其威胁的努力。但可能
如果没有“自动”（auto），就不能称之为自传；而对于一个缺乏第一人称视角的人来说，也不可能写出传记。M 没有稳定的身份，只有一系列她能完美演绎的角色。她看待自己的方式就像观众看待她那样，模仿着那个她无法真正成为的完整人格。“她扮演过抑郁的人，但她没有任何证据表明抑郁是真实的，”叙述者写道。“与情感作斗争的人类……构成了她表演剧目的一大部分，”但真实的情感对 M 来说依然是陌生的。当她在银幕之外时——就一个名人能真正处于银幕之外的程度而言——她的主要特征是亲切。但即便这种亲和力的标志，即她那“不知疲倦的机制”般的微笑，也带有某种人工痕迹。
或许是因为 M 没有内心生活，她很大程度上是由我们发现她的那些奢华环境所定义的。“这是”，随后是对 M 所在地点的简短描述，这句话在构成 M 章节的片段开头反复出现：“这是一辆豪华轿车的内部”；“这是一栋高层建筑顶楼的水疗中心”；“这是一家隐藏在走廊深处的餐厅”。由于 M 经常出入的地方大多极其奢华，她的章节带有生活方式杂志的光泽。考虑到小说中唯一具有感官质感的段落是对豪华酒店房间、海滨别墅和顶楼水疗中心的描述，很难让人相信小说中对这位演员空洞之心的尽职谴责。库斯克几乎是以一种充满爱意的细节，地毯式地描述 M 租用的度假屋露台上的家具——一张“配有四把喷粉钢椅的优雅圆形大理石桌”，一张“配有灰褐色垫子的长宽柚木日晒床”。这些句子比库斯克关于 M 的任何文字，更不用说关于 I 的文字，要具有多少倍的触感！
但在叙述者看来，M 与我们其他人的区别不在于她显得脱离肉体，也不在于她几乎总是在扮演某个角色。库斯克反复地、以一种不加掩饰的激烈态度暗示，演员与普通公民并没有他们看起来那么不同——事实上，我们都受制于我们所扮演的角色。M 与普通人的不同之处仅在于，她以异常高的频率从一个角色跳到另一个角色，放弃了更
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持久的表演所能提供的定义。甚至连人格的残余也避开了她。
媒体最持久提出的问题——M 是否基于库斯克现实生活中的熟人娜塔莉·波特曼（据报道，波特曼对这种暗示感到被冒犯）——其答案就像这种询问方式一样显而易见且乏味。M 的电影作品集与波特曼的惊人相似：她像波特曼一样在孩童时期开始演艺生涯，并且出演了一部很容易被认作是《黑天鹅》（波特曼最成功的作品）的电影。但在书末一个元文本场景中，M 告诉叙述者：“我不喜欢你塑造我的方式，”而叙述者抗议说，他或她写的不是传记而是一部小说：“但这并不是你……这不是任何人。”库斯克的罪名不在于她将真实的人作为角色的灵感（作家自古以来一直如此），而在于她小说的主人公“不是任何人”，她只不过是一个用来将自我的消解主题化的工具。
构成《M的一生》（Life of M）的第三条线索由“我们”来叙述，它呈现出一种更为顽固的对具体性的拒绝。“我们”既“不年轻”也“不年老”，且与“我”一样，既非男性也非女性。他们同样生活在“这座城市”中。熟悉库斯克传略的读者——她与现任丈夫、画家西蒙·斯卡梅尔-卡茨（Siemon Scamell-Katz）住在巴黎——可以从“我们”透露的寥寥细节中推测出她生活的蛛丝马迹。“这座城市”游客熙攘，并拥有一座像埃菲尔那样的高塔。但如果没有这些辅助信息，“我们”将模糊到几乎无法辨认，就像一个在雾中变得模糊的形状。他们过着一种具有生活的轮廓，却毫无重量或实质的生活。“我们处于生命的中间，谈论我们在那里看到的东西，我们的感受，已经发生的事件以及它们可能意味着什么，”他们报告道。他们在那里看到了什么？他们感觉如何？发生了什么事件？在这些问题得不到解答的情况下，除了对小说最敷衍的姿态，还能产生什么吗？
最终，“我”、“M”和“我们”这几个部分从未得到令人满意的整合。库斯克对小说的最后一次冒犯，是将它分解为互不协调的元素，而没有在凝聚力上做出任何妥协。尽管她以严谨著称，《M的一生》并非一次有纪律的拆解；它是混乱且随意地，像一台随机崩溃的机器。随着库斯克对虚构文学愈发轻蔑，且愈发坚持艺术的记录功能，她的作品变得愈发模糊且不具体，像陈旧的墨水一样褪色成模糊的不确定性。她对自己最新一本书风格的野心，在叙述者对一部关于性虐待回忆录的赞赏描述中表达得足够清晰。这部回忆录的基调“既非个人化也非非个人化，它拥有一种深刻且无可置疑的权威，一种客体的权威”。但一本书应该以客体的权威来写吗？客体的权威源于其不可渗透性——但过于绝对的不可渗透性将完全排除写作与行动。
鉴于她梦想将自我的特殊性分解为普遍性的温暖液体，库斯克发明了一种几乎无法被识别为小说的全新小说形式也就不足为奇了。毕竟，我们所认知的小说关注的是受社会世界指令约束的人，而不是接近于事物视点的人。在采访中，库斯克将以关联“社会”的方式“观察世界”与以关联“艺术”的方式观察世界相对比，仿佛小说艺术的最高典范——伊迪丝·华顿的《纯真时代》、亨利·詹姆斯的《使节》、弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的《达洛维夫人》——没有充盈着社会观察。 “我们”如此反社会，以至于决定性地反小说：其结果与其说是具有生动唤起力的虚构作品，不如说像本科生的艺术理论。“许多热门的绘画展都以抽象艺术为特色，” “我们”观察到。“很难知道这些画作意味着什么。它们与现实的距离似乎是确定的，但在这种情况下，它们在展示什么？人们站在这些画作前，仿佛在等待它们自我解释。有时，站在这样的画作前，似乎我们也可以变得抽象。”
有时，《M的一生》威胁要变成一本完全由这类空洞内容组成的书，尤其是当模糊的不精确性也渗透进 M 的部分时：一处美丽的海滨景色“似乎能让心静下来，并将其展开成—。
时间的实质。”（在短短一个分句中，竟然如此拙劣地重复使用“it”和“itself”来指代两个不同的名词！）最终，在被剥夺了自我揭示或行动的可能性后，“我们”被简化为赤裸裸地陈述其意图：“我们被这种元素、特质所击中，它既如此具有定义性，又如此具有局限性……我们不再通过特质来运作。”很难想象，在放弃了所有能为一本书增添质感或魅力的东西之后，还能有什么可说的，但这部小说依然在接下来的近四十页中喋喋不休。
库斯克使用另一个词的频率几乎与“自由”一样高：“命运”。她的角色如此强烈地渴望自由，是因为他们陷入了命运的泥潭，而在库斯克的小说中，这种命运表现为中产阶级家庭，以及——正如评论家安德里亚·隆·楚（Andrea Long Chu）敏锐地指出的——一种基于退行性生物学定义的女性特质。《一项生命之作》（A Life's Work）中，库斯克在描写母亲身份时写道：“很难说我在这件事上有任何选择。”2019年，她在《时代杂志》（Times Magazine）的一篇随笔中宣称，“母亲身份是女性存在中不可分割的一个方面”。
尽管库斯克在近期的采访中声称她不再“感到有性别之分”——随着孩子长大，她已经过了为人母的阶段——但她近期的小说表明，她在具体构思性别之后的生活时遇到了困难。女性处境的不可逃避性在库斯克的价值观中如此核心，以至于她宁愿想象人格的终结，也不愿想象一种围绕异性婚姻和生育而组织的生存方式的终结。《M的一生》（Life of M）的叙述者最终成功地打破了二元对立——在最后一幕中，M问道：“你是男生还是女生？”——但这却是以打破任何我们可以理解为“人性”的东西为代价的。与许多执迷于陈旧且狭隘的女性观的思想家不同，库斯克似乎并不以她所认为的自然秩序为乐。她的传统主义源于她的宿命论：她足够女性主义，以至于会对那些蜷缩在房子里的郊区母亲的命运感到悲哀，但她太本能地认同性别的基础性，以至于不相信其条款能够真正被改变。
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库斯克似乎得出结论，如果女性身份是一个不可改变的事实，那么她至少可以在她的小说中进行补偿性的暴力。她可以砍向那个异性恋规范性的产物，那个始于婚姻情节且始终本质上关注着最令她愤怒的家庭屈辱的形式：小说。我们在生活中无法做到的事情，注定要在小说中演习，即便我们是通过攻击小说作为一种人类实践的根基来实现的。
然而，尽管库斯克主观上如此，她仍未能将“角色”从她的作品中彻底清除。角色依然顽固地闯入，即便是在那些她最努力试图将其放逐的书籍中。她是通过融合通常能丰富小说的各种竞争声音的嘈杂感来实现“虚空”（kenosis）吗？还是说，认为普世之声听起来如此像你自己的声音——因此普世之声只在地中海设备精良的租住房中响起——这才是自恋式自我夸大的顶峰？在这部三部曲中，伪装成自我否定的东西在实践中起到了将世界重新塑造为某种特定人物形象的作用：缺乏幽默感、世界主义、自命不凡。在《M的一生》中，角色视角与书籍视角之间的过滤层更少。M听起来像“我”，而“我”听起来像“我们”，他们共同重复的空洞抽象概念与小说自身的承诺之间的距离完全崩塌。在这两种情况下，库斯克散文中那种忧郁的节奏既有一种权威感，又有一种沉闷的自我关注，其句法僵硬而庄重，且对现实中差异的真正变幻表现出极大的不耐烦。
然而，我宁愿不喜欢库斯克的语调，也不愿读一本——那还能称作书吗？——完全没有语调的书。一个真正剥离了人格的人，将像一块石头那样，仅仅存在于世而不再干预世界。库斯克仍在写作，这证明她无法真正想象出她声称渴望的那种自我的否定。在《游行》（Parade）中，她承认“小说是一种声音，而声音必须属于某个人”。如果她真的成功地变成了“没有人”，她将停止写那些希望自己不是小说的小说。取而代之的，将只有一道白光，不源自任何特定之处，向着毫无波澜的虚空放射。♦
简评
《雅虎男孩》（The Yahoo Boys），卡洛斯·巴拉甘（Carlos Barragán）著（Farrar, Straus & Giroux 出版）。在这部引人入胜的调查报告中，作者于 2022 年前往尼日利亚的拉各斯，寻找多年前将其母亲卷入网络浪漫诈骗的人。他发现，由于历史原因和贫困，那里为一群被称为“雅虎男孩”的青年的出现提供了温床，这些人致力于利用虚假身份、伪造的裸照和甜言蜜语来欺骗西方目标。在巴拉甘的叙述中，尼日利亚的公共舆论将这种由药物和挥霍消费驱动的“雅虎生活方式”视为一把双刃剑，既是国家声誉的污点，又是强大的经济引擎。通过追踪四个“雅虎男孩”的故事，本书拼凑出了一幅数字时代孤独的图景——这种孤独同样地扭曲了骗子与被骗者。
《不可言说》（Unsayable），迈克尔·坎宁汉（Michael Cunningham）著（Random House 出版）。在这部温情的回忆录开头，身为著名小说家的作者观察到，世界本身就“自给自足。它既不知道也不在乎是否有人在书写它。”那么，为何还要写作？在接下来的篇幅中，坎宁汉回忆了他在加利福尼亚中产阶级郊区的成长经历，对他同性恋身份的逐渐觉察，在斯坦福大学作为反主流文化学生的时光，以及他担任男妓和调酒师的经历；与此同时，他详细阐述了写作的多种目的，并就如何写好作品提供了指导。写作是一种娱乐方式，是将“转瞬即逝之物转化为永恒之物”，是去“呈现并认出每件事物和每一个人”。
《日出》（Sunrise），蒂亚·奥布雷特（Téa Obreht）著（Random House 出版）。这部万花筒般的小说在三条时间线中展开，开篇于 2024 年，一架塞斯纳飞机在怀俄明州的山区坠毁。一名幸存者独自在荒野中徘徊，直到她发现了“日出”——一座被遗弃的西部旧镇。而就在大约二十年前，当地居民科尔（Coll）正不遗余力地试图保护这个地方。然而，当科尔遇到一名同样对该镇遗产感兴趣的作家时，他的计划被干扰了。这位作家分享了她的手稿（嵌入在小说中，背景设定在 1902 年），其中包含了关于“日出”镇及其创始人——一个科尔长期崇拜的人——鲜为人知的真相。随着叙事线的汇聚，奥布雷特揭示了我们对历史的认知与对自我的认知之间的关系。
《皮肤接触》（Skin Contact），伊莉莎·费森（Eliza Faison）著（Cardinal 出版）。在这部幽默且深思的小说开头，已婚女性弗朗西丝（Frances）告诉丈夫本（Ben），她“有点”迷恋一名女服务员——由此开启了他们的开放式婚姻。她和本很快发现了与他人发生关系的乐趣，无论是一起还是分别进行。对于 30 岁的弗朗西丝来说，这次尝试起初是为了帮助她应对失去母亲的悲痛。随后，就在她意识到自己可能想要孩子时，本爱上了另一个女人。在看似“轻浮”的生活与感觉“压抑”的生活之间徘徊，这对夫妇必须决定什么才是适合他们的正确道路。
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书籍
制造性丑闻
一场十九世纪的恐慌，是关于我们热衷于公开羞辱的寓言。
亚当·戈普尼克 著
某种特定类型的丑闻，其形态在不同时代之间惊人地相似。一个富有魅力且神秘的人物被指控进行具有威胁性和剥削性的秘密性仪式。指控开始传闻，随后在当地爆发，吸引了当局的关注并引发调查。回顾来看，指控可能毫无事实根据，可能包含部分事实，或者包含相当一部分事实。但指控的真实性与审讯的激烈程度几乎没有关系。那些原本会对故事持怀疑态度或具备分寸感的人会被吓到，很快发现提出异议风险太大。指控在社会中蔓延，摧毁名誉，
无论是否应得。事后，社会重新振作，意识到其过激之处并感到后悔——尽管对于那些被卷入风暴的人来说，这一切已经太迟了。
有时，就像二十世纪八十年代的麦克马丁学前教育中心“撒旦崇拜”案那样，歇斯底里之下除了更多的歇斯底里之外，什么也没有。有时，就像塞勒姆审巫案那样，恐慌之下潜藏着真实但无害的“魔法”底层。有时指控是有分量的，但背景比指控所暗示的更为复杂——例如二十世纪八十年代的理查德·贝克，这位具有克林顿式风格的旧金山禅宗大师被指控性剥削其追随者。或者，就像十九世纪九十年代对奥斯卡·王尔德的起诉那样，相反的真相可以共存：王尔德是一场残酷审讯的受害者，一位伟大且仁慈的喜剧作家，因国家无权惩罚的欲望而被判处苦役；而他的性伴侣包括十六、十七岁的工人阶级青少年，他们太容易被像他这样富有的人所剥削。
在十九世纪末美国发起的反对“白奴”——即所谓的邪恶外国人绑架中产阶级白人女孩——的运动中，也存在类似的模式。正如学者们指出的，涉事女性被如此对待：既被视为荡妇，又被视为受害者。社会学家布赖恩·多诺万在一本关于该主题的书中描述了白奴恐慌如何同时充当反对卖淫的进步运动，以及对本土主义恐惧的证明。这一套路被证明具有极强的生命力。它成为了惊悚片系列电影《飓风营救》（Taken）的引擎，片中阿尔巴尼亚黑手党在纯洁的美国女儿抵达戴高乐机场后立即将其绑架，被呈现为出国旅行的一项常态化风险。
这些丑闻中最早、最古怪且最具启发性的案例之一，现在成了克里斯托弗·克拉克的一本精湛且详尽的新书《柯尼斯堡丑闻》（A Scandal in Königsberg，企鹅出版社）的主题，克拉克是剑桥大学的雷吉乌斯历史教授。涉事丑闻爆发于十九世纪三十年代的普鲁士大学城柯尼斯堡——在经历了战争和动荡之后，那里现在是俄罗斯孤立的城市加里宁格勒。曾在那里教学和写作的伊曼努尔·康德依然是前一代人的先知，他的思想仍在滋养着争论，营造出一种充斥着许可与禁忌的氛围。在镇民的理解中，康德的作品似乎暗示，只有纪律严明的理性才能保护宗教免受非理性狂热的影响。面对非理性狂热出现时所产生的愤怒，读起来就像是亨里克·易卜生重写了安东尼·特罗洛普的作品：一场大学城的争端，起初变得酸楚，随后变得阴森。演员表中的人物名字像是出自梅尔·布鲁克斯之手，其中包括芬克·冯·芬肯斯坦伯爵和伯爵夫人，但赌注很高，后果也很严重。
故事始于 1810 年，当时一名曾在柯尼斯堡大学学习的年轻牧师约翰·威廉·埃贝尔——
指控在社会中蔓延，摧毁名誉，无论是否应得。
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插画：索菲·霍林顿
--。
堡，以教师和传道者的身份回到了这座城市。埃贝尔极其真诚且充满好奇心，在学生时代，他就被普鲁士受教育精英阶层中盛行的理性主义神学所震惊。那是“高等批评”的黎明时期，德国学者开始将圣经视为一部历史文本，认为其受到神话的影响并带有创作条件的烙印。这种倾向在 1835 年大卫·弗里德里希·施特劳斯的《耶稣传》出版时达到了最剧烈的爆发。在许多信徒看来，这种方法诱导了无神论；克拉克将人们对施特劳斯著作的强烈抗议比作穆斯林对《撒旦诗篇》的反应。
就像威廉·F·巴克利（William F. Buckley, Jr.），或者任何其他在 40 年代末进入哈佛或耶鲁，发现自己身处嘲讽者和怀疑者之中的天主教孩子一样，埃贝尔拼命地寻找权威。他在约翰·海因里希·舍恩赫尔（Johann Heinrich Schönherr）那极具吸引力且模糊的教义中找到了它，后者是一位比他大 14 岁的古怪、自学成才的神智学者。就人们所能理解的而言，舍恩赫尔的思想始于对阳光照射下睡莲的一瞥。由此，他推断出两种原初力量，一种是炽热的光，另一种是倾泻而下的水，两者的碰撞解释了从人类创造到邪恶起源的一切。这些力量可以被想象成两个生命体，通过隐喻的延伸，可以被视为男性和女性。（这个想法在詹姆斯·乔伊斯《芬尼根的觉醒》中仍以一种变形的形式出现，乔伊斯在离开都柏林之前吸收了神智学思想，采用了将水视为女性，将山脉或矿物视为男性的观念。）
更广泛地说，调和理性与浪漫本能的努力是那个时代的核心：一方面，似乎有证据表明一切都可以用机械解释；另一方面，则有一种强大的直觉认为生命依然神秘而崇高。在舍恩赫尔的教义中，埃贝尔看到了调和这两者的手段。这是一种典型的、德意志式的通过更多理性来抵制理性的真诚尝试。这是一个常见的套路。人们至今仍在使用科学来证明宗教一直以来都是正确的。眼睛的设计、细菌的鞭毛、量子跃迁、电子所谓的自由意志——在每一个现代时期，总有一些芬芳的科学隐喻被抓来作为
可发现的神圣秩序的证据。就在 80 年代，约翰·厄普代克还写了一整部小说《罗杰的版本》，讲述了另一个像埃贝尔一样易冲动的年轻传道者陷入这种妄想的情况。（不出所料，他也陷入了情欲之中。）科学杀死了迷信，但似乎也随之带走了灵魂。而将灵魂重新安置回去，便成了受教育的传道者的任务。
神智学的主要二元论虽然表面上很抽象，但很快就倾向于一种色情化的解读。灵魂如果被过度浸染，就会被解读为性，而埃贝尔恰恰是一个极具“灵魂”的人。他被描述为拥有中分且闪亮的卷发，“像个女士”，以及其他让他对女性信徒产生吸引力的“女性化”特质。他化身为一名“敏感型”教授，很快聚集了一批忠实的追随者，其中许多是女性，人们称他们为“埃贝尔派”。在那个小大学城里，他们自然引发了流言蜚语。“在埃贝尔身边很有趣——至少对于像伊达·冯·德·格罗本（Ida von der Groeben）这样的女性来说，”克拉克在写到一位年轻的富孀时这样说道，埃贝尔帮助她摆脱了忧郁，“而且她并不是唯一一个被认为通过埃贝尔的布道和牧养建议而从多年的忧郁中觉醒，从而能够享受日常生活的人。”
不可避免地，传闻演变成了指控。在当地一位好管闲事的贵族芬肯斯坦伯爵（Count Finckenstein）与他那信奉埃贝尔主义的姐妹闹翻后，他开始散布这些传闻。在给一位信奉埃贝尔主义的表亲的信中，伯爵指责这位牧师建议通过非法性行为作为通往神圣化的路径。伯爵声称，埃贝尔甚至曾“多次通过暗示敦促我在他面前这样做，感谢上帝，我没有这样做！”。伯爵写道：“这是撒旦在这些可怜的人身上作祟，这是腐烂的果实，这是威胁所有加入埃贝尔团体女孩的危险。这就是为什么只有女性或男性两性畸形者有兴趣加入的原因。”在芬肯斯坦的叙述中，女性和女性化的男性是埃贝尔腐败行为的天然猎物，也是其腐败的证明。
随后，埃贝尔圈子内的一位同行牧师海因里希·迪斯特尔（Heinrich Diestel）在看到这封信后，写了一篇愤怒的抗议信来反驳芬肯斯坦的指控，但就像我们这个时代许多被误解的电子邮件一样，这反而让事情变得更糟。迪斯特尔质问道，谁能责备埃贝尔推广一种旨在“毫无例外地神圣化人类生活的每一个领域，神圣化并升华社会和家庭关系，不仅神圣化并升华教堂，而且神圣化并升华房屋，不仅神圣化并升华集会大厅，而且神圣化并升华卧室”的基督教？这是一个时机不对且考虑不周的句子。尽管迪斯特尔随后明确表示，没有人建议将卧室变成妓院，但将性引入神圣语境就足以撼动这个由互相关联的镇民组成的小世界。很快，这场争端升级为教会纪律调查和刑事诉讼。
对埃贝尔和迪斯特尔的起诉充满了此类事件中常见的偏见。在为自己辩护之前，埃贝尔要求查看他被指控行为的证据，并确切知道是谁在指控他。当然，这反而损害了他的处境。一个在回答之前想要知道指控内容的人，总是被怀疑在争取时间。而且，尽管“两个原初存在”的教义旨在将宗教与理性、虔诚与历史结合起来，但听起来确实可疑。它听起来像是一种诱惑：“亲爱的，为什么不退到圣器室里继续讨论两个原初存在的教义呢？”这让人想起后来古斯塔夫·克里姆特（Gustav Klimt）对阿尔玛·马勒（Alma Mahler）的追求，当时克里姆特以极高尚的姿态试图说服她，精神之爱与肉体之爱必须在每一种自然关系中共存。
在审讯中，迪斯特尔作证说，他和埃贝尔曾与已婚教区居民讨论过性问题，并且以一种在现在看来具有令人钦佩的后弗洛伊德式坦率的态度，在讨论婚姻关系时鼓励“对裸体的凝视”。迪斯特尔解释说，埃贝尔博士建议那些向他倾诉对夫妻关系质量或道德产生怀疑的丈夫，在光亮处而非黑暗中与妻子发生性行为，因为用埃贝尔的话说，“对裸体的凝视有助于将幻想从其意象中解放出来，并将盲目的欲望转化为对配偶自觉的爱意”。尽管这种建议听起来很奇怪，但它呼应了当代由互联网色情引发的论点，即幻想在任其发展时可能会变得
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专横，而清晰可见的真实身体可能会成为道德修复的工具。
埃贝尔公开表达的观点似乎大多是健康的，甚至具有前瞻性的现代感。他区分了两种形式的羞耻感：一种是对变态或放荡行为的正当道德反感，这种反感能抑制恶习；另一种则是配偶之间因被对方看到裸体而产生的纯粹惯例性的羞耻感。埃贝尔认为，后者是虚假的羞耻，在充满爱的婚姻中没有正当地位。克拉克暗示，对于像伯爵这样的丈夫来说，牧师试图引导他们的妻子并让她们更容易接受性行为的尝试，是对男性特权的不可容忍的侵犯。
然而，这些妻子很可能确实被那些牧师所吸引，因为她们觉得这些牧师比自己的丈夫更体贴，且在性方面的要求更少。也许埃贝尔的追随者们实践着某种狂喜的灵性主义。这个圈子里受压抑的女性可能在逃离残酷的婚姻并与充满爱心的牧师交流中找到了解放；而且，如果这种逃离有时演变为亲密关系，这在当时并非没有先例，也不一定不可原谅。
尽管如此，关于埃贝尔与其信徒之间在做什么的问题席卷了普鲁士，占据了那些刚刚从18世纪记录义务的模式转向更现代的宣传角色的报纸版面。克拉克告诉我们，有一段时间，柯尼斯堡似乎没有人对除了“穆克人”（Muckers，埃贝尔追随者的称呼）那些耸人听闻的生活之外的任何事情感兴趣。在这种情况下，模糊不清并不会减轻怀疑，反而给想象力留下了发挥的空间。
随后，正如经常发生的那样，伪科学补充了煽情主义。令人惊讶（或者说应该是令人惊讶）的是，在抗生素、麻醉药甚至基本卫生条件出现之前的时代——那时医生能做的绝大多数就是观察、记录和担忧——他们竟然拥有与现在相同的威望和影响力。于是，路德维希·威廉·萨克斯（Ludwig Wilhelm Sachs）介入了，他是一名柯尼斯堡的医生，曾是埃贝尔圈子的成员，因被驱逐而心怀愤恨。萨克斯用一种让那些尚未压抑掉对上世纪“压抑记忆”专家们那种虚假自信之记忆的人感到熟悉地语气，作证称他可以为埃贝尔追随者之间“真正”发生了什么提供科学的解释。
萨克斯像那些伪心理学家一样，对心理紊乱有一种相当单一的因果解释：这是由手淫引起的。他痴迷于将这种行为视为现代道德沦丧的根源，因此处处都能察觉到它的存在，并阴暗地暗示该圈子在神秘神学的掩护下进行手淫仪式，或许还有口交。萨克斯声称，埃贝尔将自己想象成“原初火之实体”，并将该团体关于原初生物的教义变成了受控性行为的理论依据，且据称这些行为被赋予了更高的精神意义。既然是“火”，埃贝尔就可以随意点燃女性的激情。
经过进一步调查，事实证明萨克斯在投射自己的想法，而非在报道事实。结果显示，他本人在抚摸和骚扰病人方面有着长期且令人毛骨悚然的名声，尽管这些证词似乎并未损害他的可信度。后世的压抑记忆专家也是如此：针对权威主张所提出的反面证据，反而被用来证实被掩盖的罪恶之深。
最终，位于柏林的皇家行政法院（Royal Cameral Court）作出了判决。埃贝尔被裁定蓄意违反职业职责并成立“非法教派”罪名成立。他被永久撤销首席执事职务，并被禁止担任公职。更糟糕的是，他“将被送往一家矫正机构，并在那里被监禁，直到其‘改善’情况被确定”。由于个人行为不端（personal irregularity）的指控被撤销，判决有所减轻：他被指责的是建立教派，而非性行为。
埃贝尔和迪斯特尔（Diestel）提出了上诉。1842年，上诉法院将该罪名从蓄意违反职责减轻为过失违反职责，宣布埃贝尔成立教派罪名不成立，并撤销了对其监禁的判决。但法院维持了撤销两名牧师职务的决定。埃贝尔在支持者为他购买的一栋小房子里短暂居住了一段时间，随后离开柯尼斯堡，与伊达·冯·德·格罗本（Ida von der Groeben）定居在路德维希堡，后来有几名忠实的埃贝尔追随者加入了他们。上诉使他免于监禁并洗清了名声，但未能恢复他的事业。一些
他的追随者们——克拉克并未报道这一点，或许是因为其后果已远远超出了他的故事范围——最终来到了巴西，将“穆克”（Mucker）精神带入了南里奥格兰德州的德国新教定居点。在那里，在19世纪70年代，他们的千年王国运动引发了与邻居及军队的血腥冲突——这段往事在巴西人的记忆中依然如此鲜活，以至于激发了两部电影的创作。
审判可能是不公正的，而其目标在某种意义上可能是负有罪责的。许多被宗教裁判所迫害的马拉诺人确实秘密地保持着犹太身份。20世纪50年代对美国共产主义者的迫害依然是一个耻辱之源，即便其中一些被卷入其中的人，包括朱利叶斯·罗森堡及其圈子，确实将斯大林领导下的苏联利益置于他们自身民主国家的利益之上。可以想象，埃贝尔的女性信徒在缺乏懂得如何提供性慰藉的丈夫时，可能被鼓励去寻求这种慰藉。关键在于，一场审判的社会成本如此之高，以至于受害者的有罪或无辜仅是账目的一部分。在一个迫害以及对迫害的偏执变得平常的社会中，其付出的代价往往高于审判旨在揭露和遏制的恶行。
在最后一章中，克拉克描述了理性主义批评者如何应对这场丑闻。这似乎证明了康德是正确的。理性必须在所有事情上取得胜利，否则，以“穆克”人为代表的非理性浪潮将潜入日常生活。当然，讽刺之处在于，埃贝尔及其追随者认为自己的思维方式本质上是科学的，是通过自然来推演启示。
尽管如此，针对来自普鲁士柯尼斯堡的审判冲动，最强有力的回应来自法国哲学家本杰明·常量（Benjamin Constant）。常量与他的情妇斯塔尔夫人及其圈子共同达成了一个观点——并非直接回应柯尼斯堡丑闻，而是回应那个时代道德化的公共绝对主义——即自由需要隐私才能繁荣。如果没有关于私人生活的配套理念，任何关于自由的理念都无法持续。常量解释说，这就是现代自由与古代自由的区别之一。古人期望公民在公共场合可见：
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进行辩论、审判、牺牲、树立榜样。而现代人将公共生活与私人生活分开，为私人活动留出尽可能大的空间：阅读、交谈、用餐、倾听，甚至（尽管常量和斯塔尔夫人没有明说，但他们确实这样生活）进行愉快的私情。
常量早前提供了一个强有力的假设，涉及一名站在门外的凶手：无论诚实多么有价值，一个人都没有义务告诉凶手其预定的受害者是否在家。在不那么戏剧性的事情中，同样的道德分寸可能适用于那些让社交生活变得可以忍受的普通欺瞒与沉默。在排练期间对舞台表演者的批评是有益的，但在首演之夜则可能是刻薄的。最金色的金科玉律并非“你想别人怎么对待你，你就怎么对待别人”，而是“你想别人如何体谅你，你就如何体谅别人”。
愤慨的康德对量量的“无害即无错”观点提出了反驳：如果你依赖于那些犯错之人的证词，你怎么能知道没有造成伤害？如果凶手在门外，无论后果如何，必须说出真相。（康德的崇拜者坚持认为他并非这个意思，但如果不是，很难看出他还能是指什么。）对于康德来说，对诚实原则的例外处理威胁到了道德判断的基础。
总的来说，现代人在原则上与孔斯坦（Constant）保持一致，但在面对康德（Kant）时依然会说“不行”。我们希望自己拥有隐私，却要求他人承担责任。尽管没有人认为安妮·弗兰克（Anne Frank）应该为了服从某种抽象的诚实义务而被出卖给盖世太保，但当被揭露私生活的人是意识形态上的敌人时，我们很轻易地、甚至很热切地搁置了孔斯坦的隐私原则。包括克林顿时期的布雷特·卡瓦诺（Brett Kavanaugh）在内的共和党人，为了让总统和一名实习生共同承受公众的羞辱，并不在乎详细记录两人之间性关系的私密细节——即便这种关系是在权力不对等的影响下达成的，但双方是自愿的。而我们这些鄙视特朗普主义的人，太少扪心自问，特朗普试图掩盖与斯托米·丹尼尔斯（Stormy Daniels）之间显然是自愿的关系，是否构成了适当的起诉理由。法律或许有其主张，但人们消费这些私密事实的胃口则具有另一种性质。
“我希望我永远不需要用到它，但知道它在那儿让我感觉好多了。”
这种消费欲望具有另一种性质。
然而，如果没有一种诚实——以及追求真相——的伦理，我们如何能希望评判道德？当代康德主义者可能会说，对于法国人来说，总统骑着摩托车去情妇家并希望这件事被保密是可以接受的，但这是我们想要的生活方式吗？我们是否更倾向于对公众人物的个人生活一无所知？如果我们没有能力去查明，又如何知道造成了怎样的伤害？毕竟，伤害的程度可能会被受害者误判，而受惊的囚徒并不总是会提出申诉。
“一个抽象的、孤立的、独立、僵化且不可改变的想法——它适合在人类中投入使用和传播吗？”孔斯坦问道。在某种程度上，这让人想起莫里哀《厌世者》中的道德观：对于孔斯坦来说，日常生活中微小的欺骗和掩饰比绝对坚持诚实更具道德意义。对于埃贝利人（Ebelians）也是如此：我们可以决定，如果没有埃贝利人受到伤害或投诉，那么无论他们做了什么，无论我们怎么想，就随它去吧。
对柯尼斯堡（Königsberg）案例的恒久指责是，坦率和忏悔可能变成另一种形式的残酷。而绝对的康德主义者则警告说，隐私崇拜可能会掩护虐待，保护权势者免受可能揭露其所作所为的审查。我们内心深处的普鲁士人想要将一切公开，坚持认为任何没有什么可隐藏的人都应该愿意将一切展现在大众面前。而我们内心的巴黎人则想要保护黄昏时的情欲，认为这对于文明至关重要。在普鲁士人和巴黎人之间，存在着我们现代道德中一个永久的争论，它尚未解决，且可能无法解决。我们可以尝试在抵制恶意的同时识别渎职，但这需要耐心、分寸感和个案判断——而现代媒体使得这些品质几乎无法实现，这种媒体在柯尼斯堡已以报纸的形式出现，并助长了那里的丑闻。与此同时，历史的漩涡在旋转，普通人，无论好坏，都淹没其中。
奇怪的是——正如“泥浆人”（Muckers）在构思他们的原初生物时理应预见到的——一颗疾驰的火球与倾泻的水流相撞，产生的不会是创造性的丰盈，而是一次短暂且嘈杂的颤抖，随后是蒸汽与沉默。这本该是对他们的警告，也本该是对我们的警告。但事实并非如此。♦
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菜单内外
眼睛看这里
Hooters 能否重振旗鼓？
汉娜·戈尔德菲尔德（HANNAH GOLDFIELD）著
在 1995 年秋天，也就是“向华盛顿进军”三十年后，体育酒吧兼餐厅连锁店 Hooters 举行了一场属于自己的游行。美国平等就业机会委员会（E.E.O.C.）指控 存在非法招聘行为，这是一项为期四年的调查的一部分。时任公司副总裁的迈克·麦克尼尔（Mike McNeil）向《洛杉矶时报》抱怨道，期间员工在餐厅里简直是“与联邦监管员和调查员撞在一起”。问题出在男性身上： 拒绝聘用男性担任调酒师或服务员，而委员会要求该公司设立一项 2200 万美-
元的基金，分发给受害者。国家妇女法律中心（National Women’s Law Center）的律师马西亚·格林伯格（Marcia Greenberger）引用 1964 年的《民权法案》告诉《时报》，法律仅在显而易见的情况下允许例外——“如果你需要一名奶妈，你不需要向男性提供这份工作”——并指出航空公司曾辩称乘客更喜欢由年轻漂亮的女孩担任机舱乘务员，但他们败诉了。
麦克尼尔召集了大约一百名正式被称为“ 女孩”的员工在华盛顿特区举行抗议。她们在制服外面穿着品牌运动服，制服由霓虹橙色的超短裤、为了营造晒黑假象的肉色连裤袜，以及印有一只猫头鹰的紧身白色 T 恤组成，猫头鹰那巨大的乳房状眼睛充当了餐厅标志中两个“O”字母。这些女性中包括文斯·吉格利奥蒂（Vince Gigliotti），他是该连锁店佛罗里达州一家分店的一名身材魁梧且留着胡须的经理，他此前也曾出现在整页报纸广告和广告牌上，穿着 女孩的制服并戴着金色的长假发；配文是“华盛顿，清醒点！”抗议一年后，E.E.O.C. 退缩了，认为“将稀缺的诉讼资源投入到其他案件中……更为明智”。
成立于 1983 年，在巅峰时期全球扩张至四百多家门店，多年来面临着无数此类挑战：指控其存在性骚扰以及基于体重和种族的歧视的诉讼；2021 年，员工因公司引入更短的、类似丁字裤的短裤而发起抗议。当控制特许经营权的 of America 公司在 2025 年宣布破产时，这几乎不令人感到惊讶。从 Friendly’s 到红龙虾（Red Lobster），中产阶级连锁餐厅的消亡似乎已不可避免。在互联网色情内容无处不在的时代，为了看几道乳沟而前往一家鸡翅餐厅的想法听起来简直古色古香。
但事实证明， 并不打算在没有反抗的情况下就此倒下。去年秋天，另一家拥有包括佛罗里达州克利尔沃特首家门店在内的 Inc. 公司收购了另外一百多家门店以及品牌的控制权。根据自 1992 年起担任 Inc. 首席执行官的尼尔·基弗（Neil Kiefer）的说法，该连锁店的计划是将自己重新定位为一家适合家庭的社区餐厅：依然会有超短裤和紧身衣，但不再有比基尼之夜。在《纽约时报》中，基弗坚称这种努力——用他的话说是“重新 化”——仅仅是回归初心。“我们正在找回让我们成为一家海滩主题餐厅而非女孩酒吧的特质，”他说。这一说法在我看来既不真诚又在自我破坏。那些“女孩”元素不正是全部核心吗？
进入位于克利尔沃特原址的 博物馆——门楣上的标牌将其称为“博物馆（Museum）”——是免费的：经过接待台向右转，那里有
该连锁店正将其品牌重塑为社区餐厅，取消比基尼之夜。
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照片插图：杰森·富尔福德（JASON FULFORD）与塔玛拉·肖普辛（TAMARA SHOPSIN）
--。
由一名被称为“门口 Hooters 女郎”的员工接待，然后你便进入了内部。一面画廊墙上挂着几十年来身材火辣的员工们的装裱照片，以及最初的菜单，上面将餐厅招牌的卷曲薯条宣传为“由一名被我们锁在后房墙上的爱达荷州难民完全手工去皮并切方”。玻璃展示柜中的文物使 Hooters 历史上的关键时刻永恒化：该品牌短命的航空公司及其 Nascar 赞助期间留下的玩具飞机和赛车；一个被称为“芹菜夹具”的落灰的不锈钢装置，由 的第一任主厨查克·赖利（Chuck Riley）发明，用于在与鸡翅一同上桌前将芹菜茎干净地切成两半。
巧合的是，赖利仍在工资单上，且大多数时间在公司总部工作，那是一栋位于餐厅后方几百码处的矮小两层建筑。不久前，我在一个兼作公司食堂的木镶板测试厨房里找到了他——除了那一头灰发和睿智且忧郁的眼神外，他显得苗条且稚气，正在将一批批炸虾拌入各种酱料中。当我对他能在 工作四十年感到惊叹时，赖利腼腆地笑了笑说：“为什么不呢？”他通过免提电话与吉尔·迪吉安南托尼奥（Gil DiGiannantonio）商量，后者是 的创始人之一，主导了最初的菜单——两人曾一起学习操作深炸锅——他当时在科罗拉多州的家中参与讨论。
迪吉安南托尼奥属于一个由六名男子组成的团体，他们大多是年轻的已婚父亲，从事通用承包和酒类销售等行业，他们一时兴起地开设了 。现在已成为公司传说的一个笑话是，他们需要一个不会被赶出去的地方。“在那个时候，有很多所谓的‘蕨类酒吧’（fern bars），”最初担任餐厅律师的基弗（Kiefer）告诉我，他指的是一类装饰着盆栽和蒂法尼灯的高端聚集地，旨在促进年轻专业人士（yuppie）的求爱。“我们某种程度上恰恰相反。”
最初六人中的另一位埃德·德罗斯特（Ed Droste）从事房地产工作，在营销方面很有天赋。店名和吉祥物受到了史蒂夫·马丁（Steve Martin）的一段段子的启发：“我认为将女性的乳房称为‘boobs’、‘jugs’、‘winnebagos’或‘golden bozos’是贬义的，你应该只称它们为‘’。”在基弗的讲述中，他和德罗斯特与妻子们在海滩上时，将一张名片递给了一位名叫琳恩·奥斯汀（Lynne Austin）的丰满金发女郎，她刚刚赢得了一场比基尼比赛，他们问她是否想在一家餐厅工作。就像从海沫中诞生的维纳斯一样， 女郎诞生了，这是一个兼具阳光般亮丽外貌和一种异常亲昵的款待方式的原型：在 ，当你点一壶百威轻啤时，你的服务员可能会直接滑进你身边的卡座里。
在克利尔沃特，我和两名前 女郎一起共进午餐：公司学习、发展与培训总监贝基·摩尔（Becky Moore），以及负责所有德克萨斯州门店的执行副总裁安德里亚·希尔（Andrea Hill）。在一张高脚桌旁，希尔——一位穿着干练的四十多岁黑人女性——主导点了一桌她最喜欢的菜肴：泰式蜂蜜虾、甜辣代托纳比奇鸡翅、深炸酸黄瓜和雪蟹腿，并确保每个人都有足够的纸巾擦手。希尔被 雇佣时还是个大学生，地点在芝加哥，而她当天下午晚些时候将飞往那里：她的好朋友，也就是她担任服务员时真正的“第一天战友”，即将迎来孙辈，她要去参加婴儿洗礼派对。
这种连续感被证明是 Hooters 世界的一个显著特征：摩尔是一位来自佛罗里达州东部、三十多岁且活泼开朗的当地人，高中毕业后就进入了这家连锁店，她向我讲述了她的“名誉侄子”蔡斯——一个父母在幼儿时期就经常带他来这里的青少年。我们的服务员布里安娜是一名刚大学毕业的学生，她也是在这家餐厅长大的。她的母亲金伯利·本内特曾是另一名 Hooters Girl，现在是公司的财务总监。
我试探性地问摩尔和希尔，如果有人将 Hooters 描述为剥削女性，她们会怎么说。两人都没有退缩。“我个人认为，人们只是不了解，”希尔说，“我不认识多少公司能——我十一年前是一名 Hooters Girl，而现在我是执行副总裁。我没有传统的管理经验，也没有工商管理硕士（M.B.A.）学位，但他们投资了我。”她说，这套制服与她当啦啦队时穿的制服并没有那么
大的区别。“而且无论我对它有什么感觉，我只要回头看，发现其他所有人也都穿着它。”
“这里总会有个女孩支持你，”摩尔补充道。当我讲述自己在餐厅工作的经历，以及当一名同事因为内衣肩带外露被遣回家时，我感受到的那种替代性的羞辱感时，两名女性都同情地向我点头。我的一位高中同学在 Hooters 愉快地工作了五年，她告诉我，当她在一家更高档的酒吧工作时，她感到自己更像被物化，且更频繁地受到骚扰。也许，Hooters 这种将潜规则公开化的做法中蕴含着某种价值。
2018, 作家兼导演安德鲁·布贾尔斯基（Andrew Bujalski）发行了一部名为《支持女孩们》（Support the Girls）的电影，讲述了一家名为 Double Whammies 的虚构餐厅的员工故事。（Hooters 启发了如此之多的模仿者，包括 Twin Peaks 和 Ojos Locos，以至于它被认为是一个流派的开创者：胸罩餐厅。）最近当我问布贾尔斯基是什么吸引他选择这个场景时，他将其描述为一个谜题：他喜欢“没有任何两个顾客，也没有任何两个服务员，会对这个地方应该是什么样子以及应该意味着什么持有完全相同的看法”这一想法。
几周前，在参观完距离不远的水族馆后，我带着家人去了加利福尼亚州长滩的一家 Hooters。在喧闹的餐厅里数出大约十三个孩子，也许我不应该感到惊讶。就我的两个孩子而言，这是一家为他们设计的餐厅：可爱的动物吉祥物；每面墙上都有电视；年轻女性带着与他们夏令营辅导员一样友好、耐心的神情，提供蜡笔、炸薯球和柠檬水。食物没有超出任何人的预期，但啤酒冰凉，价格公道。“我爱 Hooters！”我七岁的儿子宣布道。我又是谁，能反驳他呢？♦
琐碎部门
摘自《贝尔蒙特（马萨诸塞州）公民先驱报》。
一名克里利路居民报告称，有人用喷漆在他的篱笆上写了一个解剖学上正确的术语。
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当代电影
微调 (FINE TOONING)
《郊狼对阵 Acme 公司》(Coyote vs. Acme)
作者：贾斯汀·张 (JUSTIN CHANG)
在 1952 年的《乐一通》(Looney Tunes) 短片《行动：兔子》(Operation: Rabbit) 中，兔八哥遇到了卡通生物殿堂的另一位成员。“请允许我自我介绍，”那个人物说着，亮出了一张名片，“我的名字叫威利·E·郊狼 (Wile E. Coyote)，天才。”这并非该角色的首次亮相——他在三年前的《快与毛》(Fast and Furry-ous) (1949) 中就已登场，当时他正追——
试图捕捉猎物的尝试，结果惨不忍睹。
由导演戴夫·格林 (Dave Green) 和编剧萨米·伯奇 (Samy Burch) 执导的新长篇喜剧《郊狼对阵 公司》中，一个低调但耐人寻味的魅力在于，这部电影同名犬类角色从未打破他的沉默誓言——这既是对传统的致敬，也服务于叙事
在戴夫·格林的电影中，威利·E·郊狼寻求对其多次受伤的赔偿。
（由配音演员梅尔·布兰克 (Mel Blanc) 演绎），但那是他第一次被赋予名字和说话的能力。这个名字被沿用了下来；而话语则逐渐消失。兔八哥带着他嚼胡萝卜时的快节奏谈吐，在他们偶尔的对决中自然地激发了该角色健谈的一面。但迅速成为威利·E·郊狼宿敌的是路跑者 (Road Runner)，他们共同秉持着沉默——尽管有“哔哔！”声——这赋予了他们猎人与猎物之间的动态关系一种原始的潜流。他们不需要对话来定义自己，尤其是因为他们的追逐戏是在如此富有表现力的碰撞声和爆炸声的配乐中展开的——那是捕食者的音乐。在一部从伊恩·弗雷泽 (Ian Frazier) 1990 年在本杂志上发表的才华横溢的幽默文章《郊狼诉 公司》(Coyote v. ) 中汲取宽松灵感的故事里，威利·E·郊狼需要一个人能代表他发言。他在凯文·艾弗里 (Kevin Avery) (威尔·福特 Will Forte 饰) 身上找到了这个人，后者是一名来自阿尔伯克基的笨拙人身伤害律师，他勉强同意在针对 公司的诉讼中代表郊狼。 公司是许多产品的制造商，多年来他的客户通过邮购订购了大量此类产品以帮助捕捉路跑者，结果不仅毫无成效，反而适得其反。电影的开篇段落是对“买家懊悔”的一首史诗颂歌，通过将新拍摄的动作场景与经典《乐一通》短片片段相结合，提醒我们，原告购买的每一件 产品——包括火箭动力溜冰鞋、电磁手套、微型弹弓、巨型投石机以及大量的铁砧和爆炸物——都发生了故障并产生反作用，导致了令人捧腹的惨痛结果。
鉴于这一切，凯文——他的律师事务所是以华纳兄弟动画传奇人物泰克斯·艾弗里（Tex Avery）、查克·琼斯（Chuck Jones）和迈克尔·马尔蒂斯（Michael Maltese）命名的——并不认为他的客户（他称其为 Wile E.）胜算很大。尤其是面对像 Acme 这样的大型企业集团，该公司被不时地描述为“世界上最大的公司”以及“一家重视其公司……家族的家庭价值观公司”。凯文倒霉且懒散，根本不是 Acme 那群由巴迪·克雷恩（Buddy Crane）率领的圆滑律师大军的对手；巴迪在各方面都是个“重量级”人物，由演员兼前职业摔角手约翰·塞纳（John Cena）以一种强壮的傲慢姿态饰演。但凯文很幸运地拥有一个野心勃勃的实习生佩奇（Paige，拉娜·康多饰演）——她同时也是他的侄女——她只要看一眼 Wile E. 那堆积如山的 Acme 垃圾，看到的就不仅是一座令人心惊的证据山，还有一场阴险阴谋的迹象。这部电影将动画与真人实拍画面相结合，采用了侦探故事的形式，延续了这种混合媒介的先例，如《谁陷害了罗杰兔》（1988）和《乐一通：重返行动》（2003）。坦白说，情节的构思并不如前提设定那样强有力，但结构上的轻微松散反而带来了一个好处，能够容纳一系列在小角色中出没的“乐一通”角色，其中鸟类拥有叙事优先级：达菲鸭（Daffy Duck）成了忧郁且疯狂的背景故事之源，翠儿（Tweety）则像是一种微型的双面间谍——一个金丝雀陷阱——而最有效的是，大公鸡（Foghorn Leghorn）被塑造成一个自命不凡且具有威胁性的 Acme 统治者。
不出所料，揭秘的关键在于人类和卡通人物在待遇上的残酷双重标准。在一个更丰富的故事版本中，这个动画种族隔离社会中可疑的准则和习俗本身可能会成为一个引人入胜的谜团，就像在《谁陷害了罗杰兔》中那样，但没关系。注意到《郊狼对阵 Acme》（Coyote vs. Acme）不是什么是一件令人欣慰的事，而赞美
80
插画：安东尼·胡切特（ANTONY HUCHETTE）
它是什么则是一种享受。它不像《空中大灌篮：新传奇》（2021）那样是一场在内容同质化中挣扎的 CGI 糟糕风暴（那是近期尝试此类混搭的制片厂电影之一），而是一部轻快、幽默且往往优雅的复古之作，由一群对原版“乐一通”宇宙持有明显但不过分的敬畏之心的艺术家创作而成。（在某个时刻，电影制作者俏皮地发出了一丝正义的蔑视：臭鼬佩佩（Pepé Le Pew）在银幕上仅出现约一秒钟，仅仅是为了让他作为一个令人厌恶的性骚扰者而被“取消”。）电影拥有华丽且线条清晰的画面；动画的手绘线条既从真人实拍环境中脱颖而出，又与之无缝融合。卡通角色利用这两种模式的交汇点，迸发出灵感十足的喜剧混乱，无论是在 Wile E. 用来沟通的各种标牌中，还是在卡通投掷物撞击实际物理财产的重复奇观中。
福特（Forte）一直拥有某种适合卡通化的体质，具备橡胶般的肢体感和憨傻的魅力。他在这里的表演充满了腼腆的笑容和像 Gumby 一样柔软的四肢，从一套棕褐色西装中伸出，与他凌乱的黑发相结合，使他在视觉上几乎成了 Wile E. 郊狼本身棕色和米色调的对应物。这两个角色都对失败的恶臭深有体会。关键的区别在于，凯文允许失败定义并击垮他，而 Wile E. 将其视为更新的源泉——一种反向的氪石。这只精瘦、凶悍、黄眼睛的沙漠犬依然是他那个 era, 最顶尖的乐观主义者之一，而《郊狼对阵 Acme》将
他那种推倒重来的不懈精神，以及对执念的专一追求，被用毫不掩饰的英雄主义措辞来描述。剧本不止一次地提到西西弗斯，他是虚构作品中少数几个在“被巨石砸中”的霉运程度上能与本片主角相媲美的人物。即便在审判前及审判期间，他蜷缩在阿尔伯克基一家破旧的汽车旅馆里，威利·E. 也没有所谓的休息时间。他一如既往地勤奋，夜复一夜地钻研蓝图，设计鲁布·戈德堡机械，其中一台机器是为了确保隔壁打盹的凯文能在早晨醒来、穿好衣服并准备好出发。天才永不眠。
在《郊狼对阵 Acme》（Coyote vs. Acme）的开头，我们看到了本片制作公司之一华纳动画集团（Warner Animation Group）的标志，屏幕上特意将其描述为“ 公司的全资子公司”。在片尾字幕快结束时，有一段献词：“献给所有在关键时刻发帖、分享、举牌并发声的人。这部电影之所以能登上大银幕，是因为有你们。”这两段首尾呼应的信息指向的是该片原发行商华纳兄弟探索公司（Warner Bros. Discovery），该公司在 2023 年为了抵税而突然搁置了这部电影。这并非该公司近年来唯一一次因为债务累累而砍掉自家产品、浪费所有参与者的时间和才华的行为；从未完工的电影《蝙蝠女》（Batgirl）和《史库比！节日惊魂》（Scoob! Holiday Haunt）也是同样的受害者。但《郊狼对阵 》是一部已完成的作品，而这部电影可能永远无法面世的阴霾引发了整个行业的抗议。三年后，《郊狼对阵 》终于由另一家发行商 Ketchup Entertainment 在电影院上映——我想，要给这个名字最恰当的致敬，大概就是带着一篮子烂番茄去华纳工作室的大门口。
《郊狼对阵 》可能不是一部伟大的电影，但作为一个讲述顽强的弱者对抗毫无灵魂的企业恶意势力的故事，它确实为自身的好莱坞不幸提供了一个相当绝妙的隐喻。电影的最终对决发生在一次美国参议院听证会上，而主持会议的正是埃尔默·法德（Elmer Fudd）。我不禁想到了已经发生的国会程序，以及即将到来的联邦审判，因为派拉蒙-天舞（Paramount Skydance）——这个媒体领域中臃肿且与特朗普结盟的“”——正试图吞噬华纳的残余部分。这次合并对电影、动画片或人类来说都不是好兆头。在如此现实的阴郁之中，《郊狼对阵 》的结局却带来了一次出人意料的冲击：它静静地、动人地肯定了威利·E. 郊狼与路跑鸟之间永恒的纽带，这两个喜剧对手在皮毛与羽毛之下，结果是志同道合的灵魂。这让我莫名地想起了芭芭拉·斯坦威克在《伊芙女士》（1941）中的表现，那是派拉蒙——乃至整个好莱坞——有史以来制作的最优秀的电影之一，她总结了角色对亨利·方达饰演的那个呆萌心上人的爱：“我需要他，就像斧头需要火鸡一样。”但谁是斧头，谁又是火鸡？ 公司是否两者都卖？♦
《纽约客》是 ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. 的注册商标。版权所有 ©2026 CONDÉ NAST。保留所有权利。美国印刷。
漫画配文大赛
每周，我们都会提供一幅需要配文的漫画。您，即读者，提交配文，我们选出三位入围者，然后由您投票选出最喜爱的一项。本周由 Elisabeth McNair 创作的漫画配文提交截止日期为 8 月 30 日，星期日。8 月 10 日大赛的入围作品见下文。我们将在 9 月 14 日刊中公布获胜者以及本周大赛的入围者。任何 13 岁或以上的人士均可参赛或投票。如需参赛并阅读完整规则，请访问 contest.newyorker.com。
本周大赛
m.6.mitna
入围作品
“你可以躲，但你跑不掉！” Jio Park，加利福尼亚州洛杉矶
“小径将我引向道路的一个分叉口。一个极小的叉子。” Izabela Kline，加利福尼亚州伯班克
“如果我用法语讲，会更恐怖。” Brandon Lawniczak，加利福尼亚州米尔谷
获胜配文
“我认为是时候讨论这个房间本身了。” Pao Roy，路易斯安那州新奥尔良
THE NEW YORKER
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通过两本由小说和诗歌编辑精选的卓越短篇小说和诗歌选集，庆祝本杂志的首个百年。收录作品包括 J. D. Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Vladimir Nabokov, Jamaica Kincaid, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Sandra Cisneros 等人的作品。
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谜题与游戏部门
纵横字谜
一个适合初学者的谜题。
作者：ROBYN WEINTRAUB
横向
1 “绝对没兴趣” 为无花果树传粉的昆虫 14 睡衣派对深夜里被问到的问题 15 2025 年以莎士比亚之子命名的赵婷（Chloe Zhao）电影 16 啃，例如啃苹果 17 The Bird（巴尔的摩 M.L.B. 球队的吉祥物） 18 经典 Polo 衫品牌 19 《圣诞节的十二天》中的一对之中的一个 21 计分板上的安大略省最大城市 22 浏览，例如浏览报纸 23 活力 / 魅力 24 泰勒·斯威夫特（Taylor Swift）的“英雄” 26 创个人纪录的表现 27 “Mis” 28 学位帽的装饰物 30 没在公交车上抢到座位，例如 32 由三个连续字母组成的男性名字 33 也是一种投资首字母缩写词的男性名字 34 “现代艺术展区中女性艺术家的比例低于 5%，但 85% 的 are female”（艺术活动团体 Guerrilla Girls 在 1989 年海报上的声明） 36 快速看了一眼（at） 40 大或小的数字 41 塔（关于语言多样性起源的圣经故事的一部分） 43 “我刚刚经历了完全一样的事情！” 44 非专业人士？ 45 指导原则 46 最常见的韩国姓氏 47 可能需要特快运输的购买商品 50 《Blockers》中的演员兼摔跤手 John 51 长椭圆形、内填奶油的糕点 52 热情地拆开 54 以芝士牛排闻名的城市，简称 55 2017 年被错误宣布为最佳影片而非《月光》（Moonlight）的电影
56 键盘输入错误 57 氢、氦以及另外 116 种元素
向下 (DOWN)
1 野生动物生物学家眼中的草原或沙漠 2 大峡谷国家公园所在地州 3 机智的反驳 4 像彩虹色的头发一样 5 用捣碎的芋头制成的卢奥（Luau）菜肴 6 对玛姬·辛普森而言，帕蒂或塞尔玛是其____ 7 外科医生的缝线 8 蕨类和真菌的生殖部分 9 小贩的商品 10 在……之内 11 打盹 12 埃尔维斯（指代埃尔维斯·普雷斯利扭动舞步的绰号） 13 像令人尖叫的过山车俯冲一样 15 “别乱动！” 20 皮肤照片 25 杂志的一本副本 26 常见于玛芬蛋糕中的水果 27 许多大学生的负担 29 机场登机口公布的预计时间：缩写 31 演唱《Let You Love Me》的歌手瑞塔 34 像有纹理的淋浴垫一样 35 海滩上的沙粒
36 “做梦吧！” 37 糕点师用的锡罐 38 受人尊敬的 39 不仅仅是请求 40 容易激动 / 不安的 42 大众汽车中作为“打车游戏”（punch buggy）目标的车型 44 进展极其缓慢 45 艰苦工作 48 天使服装的一部分 49 许多零售商电子邮件中的词汇 50 歌手纳特或娜塔莉 53 他是适合你的（ewe / you）家伙！
上一道谜题的答案：
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AUGUST 24 & 31, 2026
4 GOINGS ON
15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson Sorkin on Trump's voting proposals; Costanza day; the Jacob Riis Bathhouse; high art; on alert at a New Jersey fire tower.
DISPATCHES
Rachel Monroe 22 Big Dumb Gluttonous Fun Celebrating America's Semiquincentennial.
THE CONTROL OF NATURE
Eric Klinenberg 28 Taking the Heat The end of the European summer.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Jessica Bacal 35 Admissions Tour: Being a Person
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Rachel Aviv 36 The Scientist's Children Why did a Nobel laureate bring home wards from abroad?
SKETCHBOOK
Roz Chast 49 "A Crossword Odyssey"
PROFILES
Andrew Marantz 52 Fighting Words The trials of Mahmoud Khalil.
FICTION
Madhuri Vijay 60 "Hidden Life"
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Becca Rothfeld 69 Rachel Cusk's protest against personhood. 73 Briefly Noted Adam Gopnik 74 Anatomy of a nineteenth-century sex scandal.
ON AND OFF THE MENU
Hannah Goldfield 78 Can Hooters revive itself?
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Justin Chang 80 "Coyote vs. Acme."
POEMS
Hieu Minh Nguyen 45 "Saint Paul" Adrienne Su 64 "Lament"
COVER
Diana Ejaita "Before the Plunge"
DRAWINGS Bruce Eric Kaplan, Dabin Han, Paul Noth, Polly Adams, Rich North, Brendan Loper, Liana Finck, Ellis Rosen, Emily Flake, Roland High, Drew Dernavich, Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby, Tommy Siegel and Dan Kirkwood, Michael Maslin, Victoria Roberts, Edward Steed SPOTS Antonio Giovanni Pinna
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CONTRIBUTORS
Rachel Aviv ("The Scientist's Children," p. 36), a staff writer, was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Her latest book, "You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters," came out last month.
Eric Klinenberg ("Taking the Heat," p. 28), the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in Social Science at N.Y.U., is the author of "2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed."
Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 15), a staff writer and a former senior editor, joined the magazine in 1995.
Madhuri Vijay (Fiction, p. 60) is the author of the novels "The Far Field," which won the JCB Prize for Literature, and "The Festival," due out in 2028.
Robert Sullivan (The Talk of the Town, p. 21) has contributed to the magazine since 1991.
Adrienne Su (Poem, p. 64) will publish her sixth poetry collection, "Naming It," next year.
Andrew Marantz ("Fighting Words," p. 52), a staff writer, has contributed to the magazine since 2011. He is the author of the book "Antisocial."
Rachel Monroe ("Big Dumb Gluttonous Fun," p. 22), a contributing writer and the author of "Savage Appetites," has written for the magazine since 2017.
Diana Ejaita (Cover) is the illustrator of Zora Neale Hurston and Ibram X. Kendi's "The Power of Our," out this month. The Times named her book "Making Art" one of the best of 2025.
Jessica Bacal (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 35), an editor of the forthcoming book "Pedagogies of Possibility," is the director of Reflective Practices at Smith College.
Hieu Minh Nguyen (Poem, p. 45) is the author of, most recently, "Staying Still," which will be published next month.
Sheila Yasmin Marikar (The Talk of the Town, p. 20) has written for the magazine since 2016. Her most recent novel, "Incidentals," came out in March.
THE WEEKEND ESSAY
When Middle Age Comes Into Focus By E. Tammy Kim
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TELEVISION
Tech Revenge, a Young Muhammad Ali
In the trailer for the new Russell T. Davies drama "Tip Toe" (Oct. 2), a flamboyant gay elder sums up today's social revanchism when he says, "I used to walk into a room and just go, Ta-da! Now I tiptoe—just in case." The TV shows that aim to capture the Zeitgeist this fall are few but brimming with potential. Davies, who came to prominence with the original "Queer as Folk," set in Manchester, England, returns to that city's night-life scene with the Starz series, in which Alan Cumming plays the owner of a gay bar contending with a homophobic neighbor whose big-
bitory is stoked by online radicalization. Internet cruelty also features in CBS's "Cupertino" (Oct. 8), the latest legal procedural from the "Good Wife" creators Robert and Michelle King. Mike Colter stars in the ripped-from-the-headlines drama, which centers on a new law firm that sets out to advocate for the victims of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies. In the case of HBO's divorce drama "War" (Oct. 1), the destructive pettiness of a tech mogul (Dominic West) is matched by that of his movie-star wife (Sienna Miller).
The next few months also offer up some offbeat premises. Foremost among them is Apple TV's meta-comedy "Brothers" (Sept. 23), which stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson playing versions of themselves who discover that they may be related. The pair move in
together, as McConaughey contemplates a Texas gubernatorial run. The immortal disapproval of the in-laws gets a supernatural spin with CBS's "Eternally Yours" (Oct. 8), in which a married vampire couple look askance at their daughter's human partner. And, on the heels of the surprise popularity of "Widow's Bay," the Netflix thriller "Below" (Oct. 8) finds a Newfoundland fisherman (Josh Hartnett) trying to stave off an enigmatic underwater creature from his coastal village.
But just as many shows seem to be betting on familiarity and nostalgia. Muhammad Ali gets the inspirational treatment in Prime Video's "The Greatest" (Nov. 4), starring Jaalen Best as an up-and-coming Ali. "A Different World" (Sept. 24), the "Cosby Show" spinoff set at a historically Black university, gets a Netflix reboot with returning fan favorites Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison. Martin Lawrence, too, reprises his "Martin" character, in a new spinoff of that legendary sitcom; starring Tommy Davidson, Paramount+ 's "The Varnell Hill Show" (Sept. 1) looks at the mayhem of TV production, from the point of view of Davidson's local talk-show host.
Late autumn reliably brings Halloween programming. The "Friday the 13th" franchise gets an A24-produced prequel in Peacock's "Crystal Lake" (Oct. 15), starring Linda Cardellini. And, despite three prior screen adaptations of "Carrie," the Stephen King character—a maladjusted high-school girl who takes bloody revenge on her bullies—anchors a new Prime Video series (Oct. 7) from the horror honcho Mike Flanagan, set in the present day. This time, Carrie's harassment is amplified by technology—but her rage remains timeless.
—Inkoo Kang
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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 24 & 31, 2026
ILLUSTRATION BY LUCY JONES SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GETTY
FALL PREVIEW
ART
Modernism, Pop Art, Krasner and Pollock
Fall is arguably the biggest season for New York's museums, the time when they mount their most ambitious and scholarly shows—and this year does not disappoint. The highest-profile shows can largely be grouped into two categories: exhibitions that engage with canonical figures and those which spotlight long-working living artists.
Among the former, the Museum of Modern Art's "Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio" (opens Oct. 25) looms large. The modernist sculptor worked in the same studio, in Paris, for more than forty years; when he died, he left its contents to the French state, which built a replica of the space to display them. That site is temporarily closed, and many of the items—pedestals and furniture, photographs and tools—are coming from Paris for this show, giving Brancusi's cool, abstract sculptures a rich, human context.
The Whitney Museum is betting on a big name, too. "Roy Lichtenstein: Like New" (Oct. 11) reëxamines the prescience of the renowned Pop artist in our digital world. Lichtenstein's paintings are highly recognizable, but many people may not realize how
much labor went into re-creating images from mass media by hand. This exhibition surveys the breadth of his practice, and includes a reproduction of his first Pop-art show, in 1962. A small companion exhibition at the Whitney, "Roy Lichtenstein: 1997" (Sept. 5), focusses on the last year of his life.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking a slightly different approach to revisiting history. "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous" (Oct. 4) isn't the first exhibition to put the storied Abstract Expressionist couple side by side, but it may be the most comprehensive. Jackson Pollock was more famous, but Lee Krasner outlived him by almost three decades. The show navigates these complexities while moving through their lives, including the twelve years that they were married. It places them on equal footing—a feminist corrective that's been a long time coming.
In the contemporary camp, the New Museum leads the charge with "Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony" (Sept. 24), the artist's largest exhibition yet. Jafa started out as a cinematographer, working on films such as Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust," from 1991, before transitioning to his own projects. He broke through in 2016 with the short video montage "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death," which captures the painful contradictions of African American life. This expansive show features not
just moving-image work but also paintings, sculptures, and installations.
Though they come from different backgrounds, Jafa and Teresa Margolles are kindred spirits of a kind: artists of similar ages transmuting sociopolitical realities into potent art. MOMA PS1 is mounting a survey of Margolles's work (Sept. 24), which is rooted in her training as a forensic pathologist. The exhibition's centerpiece, "La promesa" (2012), is a neat rectangular sculpture made of rubble from an abandoned house in Ciudad Juárez, a place infamous for high rates of femicide. In tandem with the show, MOMA is displaying a new work by Margolles in one of its collection galleries (Sept. 17).
Taryn Simon takes a similarly conceptual approach to complex subjects. This fall, she's filling the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda with "Father Country I Do Love You" (Sept. 18), a project that's been in the works for nearly a decade. It tracks the life and times of a bureaucratic federal agent, but obliquely, in Simon's typical style, using photographs, text, and other works to reveal a refracted narrative. If you prefer more straightforward storytelling, visit the Brooklyn Museum's "Art of Manga" (Oct. 3), which explores the popular Japanese comics form primarily through the work of eight seasoned artists.
—Jillian Steinhauer
ILLUSTRATION BY KATTI SZILÁGYI
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FALL PREVIEW
THE THEATRE
Family Affairs, Classics Revised
This fall's stages brim with families, each exquisitely disconsolate in its own way. The parents in Jon Robin Baitz's drama "Other Desert Cities" (Hudson; previews begin Sept. 29), which stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, and Allison Janney, face a threat to their social standing in the form of a daughter's forthcoming memoir. The new musical "Wanted" (James Earl Jones; Oct. 15) adapts the story of outlaw twins on the lam. Simon Stone's reupholstered "The Cherry Orchard" (Park Avenue Armory; Sept. 16) transposes Chekhov's squabbling aristocrats into Korean tycoons in Seoul. Daniel Fish directs Anne Carson's translation of Sophocles' grimest masterwork, "Elektra" (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; Nov. 10), based on the ancient
tale of familial revenge. A young woman chases her mysteriously vanished father (Frances Jue) through San Francisco's Chinatown in Lauren Yee's surrealistic comedy "King of the Yees" (Signature Theatre; Oct. 6). In Nick Payne's "The Unbelievers" (Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center; Oct. 13), with Lauren Ambrose, a family reckons with the disappearance of a beloved son, while "2:22: A Ghost Story" (Lucille Lortel; Oct. 20) suggests that empty houses are rarely as vacant as they appear. Richard Nelson adds another installment to his Rhinebeck political play cycle; "We'll See" (Public; Oct. 25) follows the Apple family on Election Night of the 2026 midterms.
Classics get a reboot at several venues. A revival of "The Fantasticks" (Hayes; Oct. 22) remixes the longest-running Off Broadway musical ever as a gay romance for Broadway. Steven Pasquale makes his directing début with Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty" (Classic Stage Company; Oct. 15), turning a Depression-
era cab-strike drama into an immersive union-hall vote. A clubby "Much Ado About Nothing" (Winter Garden; Oct. 31), directed by Jamie Lloyd, stars Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as the sparring singletons. Emma Rice brings her company back to St. Ann's Warehouse with her determinedly upbeat "Tristan & Ysult" (Nov. 1). Molière's "The Imaginary Invalid" (Todd Haimes; Sept. 25) features Bill Irwin as the titular patient, whose gibbous self-regard and baroque health rituals are exfoliated for our looksmaxxing age. Life is both lived and understood backward in the première of a musical adaptation of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Public; Oct. 8), starring Andrew Durand. The cast of August Wilson's bluesy "Seven Guitars" (Mitzi E. Newhouse; Nov. 5), directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, includes Roslyn Ruff and John Douglas Thompson. A slick military lawyer uncovers a coverup in "A Few Good Men" (Vivian Beaumont; Oct. 8), with Bradley Whitford as the iconic antagonist.
Contemporary conversations drive many new works. Maria Dizzia directs Marin Ireland's play "Pre-Existing Condition" (Greenwich House; Sept. 1), about the aftermath of domestic abuse, with a rotating cast that includes Susannah Flood, Hari Nef, Lupita Nyong'o, and Phillipa Soo. Else Went's "Degenerates" (Playwrights Horizons; Sept. 16) ventures into an incel community. Anne Washburn's "ANON—a tempest at our kitchen table" (MCC; Sept. 25) finds a TikToker at odds with her Texas neighbors after a Pride flag is unfurled on a suburban street. Sarah Jones debuts her solo show "America, Who Hurt You?" (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; Sept. 10), and Billy Crystal, in "860" (Imperial; Oct. 1), tells us about his house that was consumed by the Palisades Fire.
For those looking for a good time, "Ms. Blakk for President" (Vineyard; Oct. 15), co-conceived by Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney, resurrects the gleefully insurgent 1992 Presidential campaign of the drag queen Joan Jett Blakk (Wayne Brady). And Jocelyn Bish's joyous "School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play" (Samuel J. Friedman; Sept. 8) thrusts a class of Ghanaian boarding-school seniors into open combat over a beauty crown; Denée Benton, Patina Miller, and Jasmine Amy Rogers star.
—Rhoda Feng
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ILLUSTRATION BY LUCY JONES, SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS BY RODRIGO VAZ / GETTY, SMITH COLLECTION / GADDO / GETTY
The Met ropolitan Opera
THE VOICE
MUST BE HEARD
Experience the unparalleled power of the greatest voices in the world, this season at the Metropolitan Opera.
Lise Davidsen and Quinn Kelsey star in a new production of Verdi's Macbeth.
Tickets start at $25 metopera.org 212.362.6000
PAOLA KUDACKI / MET OPERA
Peter Gelb MARIA MANETTI SHREM GENERAL MANAGER
Yannick Nézet-Séguin JEANETTE LERMAN-KEUBAUER MUSIC DIRECTOR
Daniele Rustioni PRINCIPAL GUEST CONDUCTOR
FALL PREVIEW
MOVIES
Outer-Space Monsters, an Elon Musk Doc
Creature features arrive from around the world, starting with the South Korean director Na Hong-jin's science-fiction drama "Hope" (Sept. 9), in which a small-town police officer joins with local hunters to fight reptilian monsters from outer space. Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson's comedic fantasy "Wicker" (Oct. 23) stars Olivia Colman as a medieval fishmonger who, when she can't find a real-life husband, commissions one (Alexander Skarsgård) made of the titular material. Takashi Yamazaki's "Godzilla Minus Zero" (Nov. 6), premiering at the New York Film Festival, brings back the kaiju icon, in a drama set in Japan in 1949.
The season's wide-ranging documentaries include John Wilson's first feature film, "The History of Concrete" (Sept. 18), an idiosyncratic exploration of the ubiquitous substance, which leads him from Queens to Rome, Ohio, and Las Vegas. The first part of Julia Loktev's "My Undesirable Friends" showed the filmmaker's journalist friends in Moscow facing persecution; in "Part II—Exile" (Oct. 9), she shows many of the same people continuing their work outside Russia. "Once Upon a Time in Harlem" (Oct. 16), filmed in 1972, by the late Wil-
liam Greaves, gathers many of the then elderly luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance for discussions and reminiscences that bring the era's personalities and achievements to light; the film was completed posthumously, in 2025, by his son, David Greaves. Little is known about "Musk" (Oct. 16), Alex Gibney's investigative portrait of Elon Musk, other than its four-hour running time.
New literary adaptations include "Virginia Woolf's Night and Day" (Sept. 4), based on the author's 1919 novel, about a wellborn woman (Haley Bennett) who, in order to pursue a career as an astronomer, rejects an arranged marriage; Tina Gharavi directed. Georgia Oakley's "Sense and Sensibility" (Oct. 16) gives Jane Austen's novel, about the romantic tribulations of the financially straitened Dashwood daughters, a fresh workout; the cast includes Daisy Edgar-Jones, Esmé Creed-Miles, Caitriona Balfe, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach. The thriller "Verity" (Oct. 2), based on a novel by Colleen Hoover, stars Dakota Johnson as a writer who comes to suspect that a successful author she's been hired to ghostwrite for (Anne Hathaway) has committed murder.
Comedy is joined with the megawatt celebrity of Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's "Digger" (Oct. 2), about an oil tycoon who is summoned by the President (John Goodman) to head off an environmental catastrophe. In Josef Kubota Wladyka's "Ha-Chan, Shake Your
Booty!" (Sept. 25), set in Tokyo, a widowed ballroom dancer (Rinko Kikuchi) becomes infatuated with a married dance teacher (Alberto Guerra). Maude Apatow directs her mother, Leslie Mann, in "Poetic License" (Oct. 16), about a middle-aged woman who audits a class at a local college and becomes romantically entangled with two younger students (Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman).
The season's bio-pics veer between mind and body, modern times and history. "By Any Means" (Sept. 4), directed by Elegance Bratton, is based on the true story of the mobster Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), who, in 1966, collaborated with an F.B.I. agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to investigate the murder of civil-rights activists in Mississippi. Michael Dowse's "The Stunt Driver" (Sept. 25) stars Jay Baruchel as the daredevil Ken Carter, who sought to drive a rocket-powered car across the St. Lawrence River in the nineteen-seventies. "Primetime" (Sept. 25) dramatizes the development of the TV program "To Catch a Predator," featuring Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson); Lance Oppenheim directed. Aaron Sorkin's "The Social Reckoning" (Oct. 9), a sequel to "The Social Network," stars Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, whose former employee (Mikey Madison) discloses internal workings at Facebook to a journalist (Jeremy Allen White).
—Richard Brody
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ILLUSTRATION BY KATI SZILÁGYI
The Folio Society
The books that inspired the big screen
foliosociety.com
FALL PREVIEW
DANCE
Homage to Oscar Wilde, Sinéad O'Connor
Much of the excitement coming to dance stages this fall arrives via visiting companies and artists; New York is, after all, a crossroads. A case in point: the season's opening salvo, the Fall for Dance Festival (New York City Center; Sept. 22-Oct. 3), features a bulería (a joyful, fast-paced solo), performed by the spectacular young flamenco star Juan Tomás de la Molía, a proponent of the raucous side of the Spanish dance. It also includes an appearance by Miami City Ballet, in Alexei Ratmansky's "Roses from the South," a playful and tender new ballet set to Strauss waltzes.
On a grander scale, the Australian Ballet returns for the first time since 2012 (City Center; Oct. 8-11), now under the direction of the former American Ballet Theatre star David Hallberg. The company performs "Oscar," an ambitious new ballet inspired by the life, writings, and notorious trial of the Irish wit Oscar Wilde. The choreography is by Christopher Wheeldon, of "MJ" fame. It is, notably, one of a very few story ballets to delve into the subject of same-sex love.
In "The Surge" (Joyce Theatre; Sept. 16-27), the choreographer Sonya Tayeh creates a different kind of homage—
to an artist, Sinéad O'Connor, whom many of us associate with the angst of our teen-age years. Rather than tell O'Connor's story, Tayeh channels the singer's ferocious energy through the bodies of her ten dancers, all women over forty, all with something to say.
A visit by the Bangalore-based company Nrityagram—which brings "Khankhana" to the Joyce (Oct. 13-18)—is always an event, because the troupe's resident choreographer and leader, Surupa Sen, is one of the greatest interpreters of the Indian classical dance Odissi. Sen's choreography extends this ancient form, adding partnering and dynamic range; her dancers, all trained under her tutelage, move with extraordinary clarity and incisiveness.
Since the former company member Michael Novak took over the Paul Taylor Dance Company, he has expanded the repertory beyond Taylor, both by adding new works and by digging into the archives. At the David H. Koch Theatre (Nov. 4-22), the group performs "Tensile Involvement" (1953), an example of the latter, an experiment in electronica and physical abstraction by the now seldom-performed Alwin Nikolais. The piece is like a trippy cat's cradle, in which the dancers become colorful parts of a machine. The company is also bringing back "Byzantium" (1984), one of Taylor's nightmare pieces—an evocation of the folly and decadence of man, past and present.
—Marina Hars
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
The Many Facets of Pop and Rock
Pop music has come to encompass so many different things in the social-media age, and you can see all the ways its definition has expanded in the past decade across the fall slate of contemporary-music shows. If pop is a genre with its own sound, that sound can be heard in the tunes of Robyn, the Swedish dance-floor sensation (Barclays Center; Sept. 4, 10). If pop is an amalgamation of all things popular, its many contours are reflected in the songs of the French singer Lolo Zouaï, who fiddles with sonic and language boundaries (Blue Note Jazz Club; Sept. 9), and in those of the Pasadena performer Tinashe, who has been at the center of indie-pop's genre-bending efforts since 2014 (Brooklyn Paramount; Oct. 24). If pop is an idea that picks apart what it means to be cool and influential, look no further than Charli XCX (Barclays Center; Sept. 14-15) and Phoebe Bridgers (Barclays Center; Sept. 24-26), artists who have parlayed relatively fringe styles and indie stardom into arena-filling cult followings.
But pop is bigger than even those confines. The realms of roots music and Americana are also rife with pop possibilities. The singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile eases through reflective folk rock that offers the personal as an extension of activism (Forest Hills Stadium; Sept. 26). The New Zealand artist Aldous Harding makes indie folk feel like a one-woman revue, her magnificent new album, "Train on the Island," greatly adding to her cast of characters (Brooklyn Steel; Sept. 12). At Radio City Music Hall, Alabama Shakes returns with soulful Southern rock and its first album in eleven years, "I Must Be Dreaming" (Sept. 2), and Shaboozey, the country-rap fusionist whose single "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" stormed the charts in 2024, goes full outlaw (Oct. 3).
Hip-hop tilted the pop axis at the turn of the millennium and remains an arbiter of its taste. The trap melodicist Don Toliver leans into his star turn at Barclays Center (Sept. 6), and the punk-trap trailblazer Rico Nasty returns
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ILLUSTRATION BY KATTI SZILAGYI
Hypochondriacal. And a little maniacal.
THE IMAGINARY
INVALID
WRITTEN BY MOLIÈRE ADAPTED BY AND STARRING BILL IRWIN DIRECTED BY BRANDON J. DIRDEN
ON BROADWAY STARTING SEPT. 25 Todd Haimes Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street GET TICKETS AT RoundaboutTheatre.org
The Imaginary Invalid is proudly supported by Tri-State Cadillac, the Official Auto Partner of Roundabout Theatre Company. Major support for The Imaginary Invalid is provided by the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation and the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater.
FALL PREVIEW
to form at Knockdown Center, on the back of her mosh-ready new album, “RX” (Sept. 13). Brooklyn Paramount welcomes EsDeeKid, a phenom of the U.K. underground scene (Sept. 15), and ScHoolboy Q, who has been reinventing gangsta rap since the early twenty-tens (Oct. 3). The same could be said of Vince Staples (Brooklyn Steel; Oct. 27); his latest record, “Cry Baby,” takes him to a more explicitly political place, while also pushing into blues rock and post-punk.
At another point on the pop spectrum, artists are toying with the conception of rock music in the popular imagination. At Warsaw, on Sept. 15-16, the noise icon Kim Gordon extends the reaches of the punk tradition. The virtual British group Gorillaz tests the boundaries of what a band is, as it has been for decades (Madison Square Garden; Sept. 29). At the same venue, the grungy, lo-fi pop smelter beabadoobee and the shoegaze revivalist Wisp team up for a show that puts young people at the center of those lost arts (Oct. 5), and the avant-R. & B. mold-breaker Kelela blends those sounds with her œuvre to create a new avatar at Brooklyn Paramount (Oct. 9-10). Then, on Oct. 16, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Phil Elverum performs as Mount Eerie, with poignant meditations on life and death perfectly reflecting autumn melancholy.
—Sheldon Pearce
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Reich’s World, Murder at the Met
Time is the great mystery of music: songs and sounds are always ephemeral, yet they exist beyond their moments. The pioneering minimalist Steve Reich has done as much as any composer to bend time’s arrow into a circle, but not even he can make it stand still: he turns ninety in October, and his home town is taking note. At the Park Avenue Armory, Reich’s eponymous ensemble is joined by Alarm Will Sound for a staged, expanded version of his kaleidoscopic “Music for 18 Musicians” (Oct. 14-18). At National Sawdust, Erik Hall presents his immersive take on the same piece, paired with the more florid but equally hypnotic “Canto Ostinato,” by Simeon ten Holt (Sept. 26). Sô Percussion brings “Drumming,” in which Reich weaves pulsating rhythmic nets using techniques he learned from Ewe drummers and Balinese gamelan players, to 92NY (Oct. 28). Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly are among the performers in an all-Reich program at Carnegie Hall (Oct. 22) which includes two U.S. premières. And Trinity Church anchors three lunchtime choral concerts (Sept. 23, Sept. 30, Oct. 7) around Reich’s settings of Hebrew Biblical texts (“Tehillim,” “Traveler’s Prayer,” “Jacob’s Ladder”), before a dedicated evening on Oct. 7.
It’s knives out at the Metropolitan
Opera, where three tragic heroines sing of what drove them to murder: ambition (Verdi’s “Macbeth,” opening Sept. 22, with Lise Davidsen and Quinn Kelsey as the treacherous Scots), jealousy (Cherubini’s “Medea,” opening Oct. 30, with Sonya Yoncheva in the title role), and desperation (Puccini’s “Tosca,” which begins another season-spanning run on Nov. 1). Expect a more quixotic take on tragedy, and fewer stabbings, from Missy Mazzoli’s long-anticipated setting of George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” (world première Oct. 19).
Opening night at the Chamber Music Society stays on theme with an all-American program that includes a concert version of the “Psycho” score (Oct. 13). At the Miller Theatre, a different sort of tension animates the violinist Jennifer Koh’s assault on Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas (Sept. 24). Eleanor Alberga, a subtle British Jamaican composer, will be at the keyboard to present her new piano quintet (National Sawdust; Oct. 30). Meanwhile, the New York Philharmonic celebrates having Gustavo Dudamel all to itself—finally, no sharing with Los Angeles—with several new commissions. Zosha Di Castri’s “Invisible House” and Tania León’s “Imágenes mestizas” première alongside the fifth symphonies of Prokofiev and Mahler, respectively (Sept. 16-19; Sept. 25-27, 29). And, for its contribution to the spooky season, the orchestra will play the soundtrack to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” while the movie screens (Oct. 28-31).
—Fergus McIntosh
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUCY JONES, SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GETTY (TOP); SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN J. COHEN / GETTY (BOTTOM)
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SKECHERS
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THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT ELECTION GAMES
Donald Trump has never been noted for his vote-counting skills. In January, 2021, during his infamous call to Georgia's secretary of state looking to find eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty more votes in the Presidential election he'd just lost, he claimed that "fifties of thousands" of his potential supporters had been turned away at the polls, and that five thousand dead people had voted. He later called Joe Biden's win "statistically impossible," and his own subsequent victory, in 2024, "the biggest mandate in 129 years." (None of those claims are true.) In a speech in July, in which he demanded that the Senate pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act—also known as the SAVE America Act—he complained that there were "tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail," as if the U.S. Postal Service were a road to nowhere. Later in the month, he said, referring to Senator John Thune, the Majority Leader, "He's got the votes" to pass the bill. "That must be a different form of math," Thune told CNN.
Thune's count was more accurate than Trump's: the Senate adjourned without voting on the SAVE America Act. But what has been a season of tumult in Trump's efforts to change the parameters of voting in the United States is not over; the midterms are fast approaching, and the bill will be back in some form in September. And it is only one part of a package that includes
an executive order, threats of prosecution, and street-level intimidation, all in an effort to make Trump's math work.
Four Republican senators—Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, and Mitch McConnell—have opposed the bill, which would mandate that Americans produce "documentary proof" of citizenship that many cannot easily obtain in order to register to vote, and that they generally must do so in person. Murkowski, who represents Alaska, wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that just registering would require some of her constituents to take a Bering Air flight from an island to the mainland, perhaps only to find—if they are older or Native Alaskan or married women who have changed their name—that their documents are not proof enough. Voters would also need to present a photo I.D. on Election Day
or send a copy of their I.D. with mail-in ballots, leading to privacy concerns.
Acts of Congress, however, are not Trump's only tool, or necessarily his preferred one. Solicitor General D. John Sauer has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court, asking that the President be allowed to implement an executive order, regarding mail-in voting, that lower courts have enjoined ahead of the midterms. The order is an absolute mess; if it were ever fully put into effect, it would not only disenfranchise many eligible citizens but break the mail-in-voting system and possibly the Postal Service. Basically, it mandates a multidirectional game of Ping-Pong, in which, by sixty days before an election, the Department of Homeland Security would send each state a list of people who it believes are citizens, based on a grab bag of databases, and the states would give the Postal Service lists of people they believe are eligible for mail-in voting. The Postal Service would then, in some yet to be defined way, craft a "Mail-in and Absentee Participation List." If you are not on that list, the Postal Service would not be allowed to deliver your ballot. Unsurprisingly, one lower court has said that the order appears to be an unconstitutional use of Presidential power.
There are multiple ironies here. As Murkowski's objections indicate, some of the Americans most affected by these rules would be rural voters, who tend to lean Republican. It's estimated that about half of Americans hold valid passports—the easiest proof of citizenship—but the number is far higher in blue New York
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIAN COUCERO; SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GETTY
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(more than seventy per cent) than it is in red West Virginia (about twenty per cent). And traditionally it has been Republicans who have opposed “federalizing” election practices, preferring to leave states to their own devices.
Trump is also poisoning the process at a moment when the system for casting votes in the United States really does need shoring up. Concerns about foreign (or domestic) interference, especially in the age of A.I., are not fanciful. Each state has its own system, and many are rickety or verging on obsolescence. According to the Brennan Center, some local election managers get spare parts for voting machines on eBay. And the historic wave of immigration in the past decade probably does narrow the margin for error. In New Jersey, sixty-six hundred people who had stated, when applying for licenses or I.D.s with the Motor Vehicle Commission, that they were non-citizens were mistakenly reg-
istered to vote, and about four hundred of them did so. The state and an outside software contractor are at odds about who was at fault, but the lapse is symptomatic of a system under pressure.
The most distinctive characteristic of the Trump approach to election security, though, is how punitive it is. After Trump’s speech in July, the D.H.S. Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said, “If you are an illegal, or you are voting illegally, we will hunt you down, we will find you, and we will prosecute you.” Would that mean federal agents stationed around polling places—election suppression with a badge? The Administration has sued dozens of states to obtain voter information, and the new executive order includes a threat to prosecute anyone “aiding and abetting” the distribution or even the printing of a ballot that a non-citizen might cast. Election workers, or eligible citizens with imperfect paperwork, might not want to take the risk.
So what is Trump up to? His proposals would not yield security, but they could lead to disorder, or the perception of it, which he could make use of in the wake of a close election. He may also be looking for excuses should the mid-terms deliver a rebuke to his Presidency. (That said, Trump himself won’t be on the ballot, reducing his incentive to cheat; it’s his own numbers he cares about most.) And the President may want to further stoke divisions between citizens and non-citizens.
Last month, on Truth Social, Trump told Thune that in order to pass the SAVE America Act he should do away with the filibuster, with its threshold of sixty votes, adding that, if the Republicans lose control of the Senate, “the Democrats will do it on day one.” (He has asked his followers whether “Dumbocrat” or “Dumocrat” is the better name.) “Day one” may be close, and Trump knows it. —Amy Davidson Sorkin
GIVEAWAY DEPT.
PIN-STRIPED PROMO
Debbie Tymon, the New York Yankees’ senior vice-president of marketing, has an office at the Stadium, situated behind home plate, with a window that overlooks the concourse where fans line up to get in on game days. She can thus witness the fruits of her labor when the line forms earlier than usual for such promotional events as Yankees Bucket Hat Night or Yankees Soccer Jersey Night, when the first clutch of fans—typically eighteen thousand of them—are handed freebies as they enter.
The gates might open at five for a seven-o’clock first pitch. “But, for the hottest items, they’ll start lining up at one in the afternoon, twelve-thirty even,” Tymon said the other day. The Stadium has four main entry gates, where the lines can overlap and even snake back toward the subway exits. This sounds like hell if you’re a baseball fan, but it’s heaven for Tymon, who is pleased to play a part in boosting attendance. “It really is gratifying,” she said.
Her workspace is cheerfully cluttered with Yankees memorabilia—pretty much what a twelve-year-old might fantasize a Yankees executive’s office to look like. On the desk sat what is likely this season’s most anticipated giveaway: a bobblehead likeness of George Costanza, the “Seinfeld” character played by Jason Alexander, which will be handed out at a game against the Houston Astros this month. Some of this summer’s giveaways have nothing to do with the Yankees—Hello Kitty and “KPop Demon Hunters” bobbleheads, for example. But not the Costanza bobblehead: the character worked for the Yankees across several seasons as “the assistant to the travelling secretary,” making this giveaway, now an annual event, the rare promotion with genuine synergy. Last year’s Costanza day was a sensation. As fans exited the Stadium, lurking entrepreneurs offered a hundred dollars for the figurines; today, sellers ask for as much as a thousand bucks on eBay.
This year’s Costanza bobblehead wears a Yankees jacket and holds a calzone—a tribute to the 1996 episode in which George’s employment becomes contingent on procuring daily eggplant calzones for the team’s real-life owner, the late George Steinbrenner. (The char-
acter is seen only from behind on the show and was voiced by the series’ co-creator Larry David.) At her desk, Tymon hoisted the pleasingly solid, seven-inch figurine, and pointed out the carefully painted bits of pepperoni and eggplant in the calzone. “Look at the quality?” she said. “Compare this”—she held up a chintzy-looking pin that another major-league team had given out to its fans—“to this”—the bobblehead.
Tymon is in her forty-second season with the Yankees, having begun her pin-striped tenure in the nineteen-eighties,
Debbie Tymon
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as the director of group- and season-ticket sales. An elegant, slender woman, she was wearing a white dress with a chunky turquoise necklace and could have passed for a gallerist in Santa Fe or somewhere on the coast of Maine. She was joined by her colleague Craig Cartmell, the team's senior associate director of marketing and promotions, who was dressed more predictably, in a Yankees polo shirt and jeans.
Cartmell, who worked with the vender who made the Costanza bobblehead, explained the multistep process. First, a deal had to be struck with Warner Bros., which controls the rights to the show. Then Jason Alexander had to sign off on the concept. (Jerry Seinfeld, a prominent Mets fan, had no say in the matter, although Tymon said that he's a fan of the bobbleheads.) Warner Bros. then worked with the manufacturer to design the head, assuming responsibility for the actor's likeness, while the Yankees took charge of the body. It's worth noting that the contours of the bobblehead's bald spot map precisely onto Alexander's in the calzone episode—again, attention to detail.
The giveaway business has changed during Tymon's tenure. "I remember trying to convince Mr. Steinbrenner that the Beanie Baby was a good promotion," she said. "Mr. Steinbrenner said, 'We don't give away little stuffed animals.'" That was not the Yankee Way. But Tymon knew that Beanie Babies might expand the team's fan base, by luring young families. She gave Steinbrenner a Beanie Baby catalogue and asked him to show it to his grandchildren. "Let them pick the first Beanie Baby," she suggested. "So he took it home to Tampa, called me the next day, and said, 'Valentino!'—a white bear with a red heart—and hung up." History was made. Not only was it a successful promotion but David Wells pitched the fifteenth perfect game in baseball history that day: May 17, 1998. A Yankees Valentino now resides in Cooperstown, at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Not all giveaways pan out. Tymon mentioned the team had considered a bobblehead promotion involving a turkey character. "But we felt there could be negative connotations depending on at what point in the season you
gave it out," Tymon noted. "After a June swoon, you don't want to give away a turkey head."
—Bruce Handy
MEMBERS ONLY DEPT. ROCKAWAY REVIVAL
Say what you will about Robert Moses, but the man had an eye for bathhouses. For Jones Beach, he insisted on expensive brick for his "people's palaces" because it complemented the sand. His follow-up, a giant Art Deco complex in Jacob Riis Park, in the Rockaways, introduced generous amenities to Depression-era New Yorkers: a solarium, an open-air dance floor, a skating rink. After the city ceded control of Riis to the federal government, in the nineteen-seventies, the monument to public recreation was shuttered. Since then, it has lain dormant, hovering over the People's Beach like a ruin.
This month, the Jacob Riis Bathhouse is reopening as the Rockaway Ocean Club. The project began with the firm behind Brooklyn Bazaar, which once threw warehouse parties in Williamsburg and now runs some boardwalk concessions. Overhauling the historic building required eighty-eight million dollars in investment, along with some upscaling of the original mission. A portion of the complex is now a private club, with members-only access to a new pool, a co-working space, and other perks. Annual memberships start at two thousand dollars, not including a hefty joining fee. The club offers discounts for locals and people under thirty. To some on the peninsula, the rescue was a betrayal.
"It seems like the government is selling off our public property," Janet Fash, a Rockaway resident and the city's first female chief lifeguard, said the other day. The club had reached out to Fash, who is sixty-six, about hosting a reading of her new memoir, "Lifeguard: A Love Story." A few days before the soft opening, a tour was arranged for Fash and her husband, Bob.
Ursula Damani, a co-owner of the club, was leading the tour and had been
trying to get ahead of the criticism. "People keep talking about how the bathhouse was free, it was public," she said near the entrance. "But actually it wasn't free." She stopped at some original limestone ticket windows, where beachgoers once paid a quarter for a locker or fifty cents for a dressing room.
Fash, who had on a turquoise bucket hat and a floral-print dress, read from a plaque, dated 1932: "Erected by the city of New York for the recreation of its citizens."
"This has guided everything in our project," Damani said. They passed through a courtyard into a restaurant that will serve Mediterranean cuisine. Bob, who wore a polo with the logo of an F.D.N.Y. motorcycle club, asked about the dress code. "We just had this conversation about whether we're requiring shoes," Damani said. "We have to, because of insurance."
When the government took over Riis, the east wing of the crumbling bathhouse was given over to the National Park Service lifeguards. "People joked the chief lifeguard used it like it was his garage," Fash said. She recalled going to parties in the asbestos-filled building as a teen-ager: "All the Rockaway girls would come. One night there was nitrous. Everyone was talking like a duck."
After a recent boardwalk heckling incident, Damani said she had been consoled by Fash's memoir, which traces her long battle against corruption and sexism in the lifeguard union. "I learned that if I give the shit back to them, they respect me," Damani said.
On the second floor, a construction crew worked on finishing twenty-eight hotel rooms, set to open next summer. A private lounge, clad in original aquamarine tiles, faced the sea. The shoreline below has been fenced off for more than two years, pending the removal of old wood pilings. "They have not maintained the park," Fash said. "It doesn't make sense to me." Damani blamed bureaucracy, which she said had also delayed the club's opening: "It took us six years to sign the lease. I've probably dealt with every acronym in the federal government." She was less concerned about a boycott by a coalition representing the beach's long-standing queer community, which has called the club a "flimsy privatization scheme." "Once we open and
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they see this, she said. "I'm not too worried about it."
Next stop was a roof terrace, with views of the Manhattan skyline. Damani said, "We made sure the public has access to the best part of the building." She had envisioned something like an Italian beach club. "They don't overprice things," she said. "It's very democratic." Fash signed a copy of her book and agreed to be in touch about the possible reading.
Away from the guide, the couple compared notes. "It makes me happy to have such a beautiful building coming back to life," Fash said. "Am I going to be shelling out money? I don't think so. But I already live at the ocean." Bob said that he might join. His wife looked surprised.
"I love having all-access," he said. "I'll bring you for dinner once in a while."
—Jake Offenbartz
WORK-AROUND DEPT. HIGH ART
"S how, don't tell" is an old adage about writing. Could the same advice apply when it comes to marketing cannabis? "You cannot post weed on Instagram," Rachel Bell, the content director of Gotham, a New York purveyor
of marijuana products, said the other day. She was standing in the rotunda of the Guggenheim, wearing a gray skirt and a green T-shirt. "Even if it's legal in your state, Meta doesn't care—they're gonna take it down."
Major buzzkill. But what about documenting the buzz itself? That turns out to be a gray area that can elude the algorithm, as Bell found when she hit a vape and visited the 2023 Frieze Art Fair with a cameraman. "I'm stoned," she says in a video from the expedition, ambling past a Rothko-esque canvas. "All right, that's gorge. Loving that." A trip to the American Museum of Natural History, enhanced by a ten-milligram "cheer" gummy, followed. "Sorry, guys, you're dead," Bell says in front of a pair of taxidermy antelopes. "Owls are freaky-deaky creatures," she observes at another vitrine.
Views of the series—titled "Hi, I'm High"—accrued, reaching more than a million for Bell's trip to the New York Botanical Garden. ("That one's called Miracle on the Hudson," she says, reading the label on a rosebush. "Like the guy who landed the plane?") So did visitors to Gotham's four stores.
Joanne Wilson, Gotham's founder, is pleased with the results. "Rachel is so charming and likable that just seeing her experience and be curious about the world under the influence makes you want to get involved," she said.
Shooting the videos is not always a cinch. "The past two episodes, we were told to stop filming—which is, like, my worst fear," Bell said. "It's hard to pivot when you're not sober." On the way to the Guggenheim, she'd drunk a can of THC-infused lemonade; her cameraman, Gianluca Randazzo, abstained. "I'm, like, the designated driver," he said.
She walked up to the ticket counter and put down her credit card. Declined. "Ugh. O.K., let's try the other one," she said, fishing through her wallet. "Somebody didn't do her expense report on time."
Once inside, Bell and Randazzo took the elevator to the top. "This is a good spot to talk about what you've consumed," Randazzo said.
"On the ledge here?" Bell asked. She leaned over. "Jesus, that will make you feel vertiginous!" She paused, hearing the pitter-patter of little feet approaching. "One of our biggest obstacles," she said. "Kids can't be in cannabis content."
"It was a nightmare at the A.K.C. dog show," Randazzo said. "So many children."
Bell was ready to start exploring. "Is that art or a couch?" she asked, considering a row of gray cushions. "I see butt prints." She wandered ahead and found some more. "Confirmed that those are, in fact, couches, not art, because why would there be more than one?"
They passed a long black cylinder ("Foam roller," Bell said. A glyph by Carol Bove) and a chain-link net ("Netting," also Bove). "I heard, like, fifty-eight percent of people who come here come for the building, not the art," she said.
They stopped at an assemblage of driftwood, seashells, and peacock feathers, titled "The Foamy Saliva of a Horse," another Bove. "I don't want to sound ungrateful," Bell said, "but I'd like to see some paintings. Is there more to the museum than just the roundy part?" She stumbled across some pictures in gilt frames. "Oh, hell yeah," she said. "Modigliani, let's go." She read aloud the label below a Pierre Bonnard painting of a woman at a table: "The painter's oft-depicted wife. That's what I like to see. Your wife should be depicted."
"Do you want to sit and talk about how you feel?" Randazzo asked.
"Very wasteful, the design," Bell concluded. "Not enough pictures."
Bell, who is thirty-three, came to her
"We spent all this time trying to save people's lives when we could have been coming up with better fro-yo."
Rachel Bell
job in a sideways fashion. A poet and novelist, she schooled herself in Instagram to promote her work. “All of the small presses that I published with had, like, no money, so marketing was on me,” she said. If she could sell poetry through social media, she thought, she could probably sell other things. When Wilson found her, Bell was running social media for a real-estate app.
“People are always, like, ‘Wow, your job is amazing,’” Bell said. “You just get high and do stuff.” Like, yeah, but then I have to reply to e-mails. Don’t get too excited.”
—Sheila Yasmin Marikar
UP IN THE AIR
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
New Jersey’s fire season technically ended in May, and the state’s forest-fire service has since dispatched its firefighters to the west: currently, they are in Minnesota, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. But to Bill Donnelly, the service’s warden, New Jersey’s fire season, like North America’s, can feel unending. “As of lately, it’s just been three-sixty-five,” he said the other day, as he climbed twelve flights of stairs in New Jersey’s new fire tower, its first since 1948. Donnelly, who is fifty-seven and
has a graying crewcut, started in the service as a fire-tower observer in 1989, when he was twenty. Back then, the hourly weather check involved trekking up and down a hundred-foot tower. (Today, the data is in a cabin up top.) “Let me tell you, I had buns of steel back in the day,” he said.
The new tower, one of twenty-one in the state, is in Jackson Township. It replaced one evicted by a new housing development. The day Donnelly climbed, it was ninety degrees, with dry conditions and a stiff breeze. “This is the Cadillac,” he said, of the taut structure. A catwalk at the top commanded a twenty-mile view of blue sky, a bowl of green below. A wildfire, already observed, was under control on Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, a nearby military base.
Justin Sauers, the tower’s operator, opened a door in the cabin to greet Donnelly, releasing an arctic blast. “It’s about thirty degrees cooler in here,” he said.
The centerpiece of the cabin’s sixty-six-foot room is the alidade, a sighting device attached to a table-size compass rose. The operator aligns the sight with smoke on the horizon, notes the angle, then drags a string across a topographical map hanging from the room’s ceiling to take a reading. The map shows other towers close by, each radiating a string that is fastened to the map when other towers radio in readings. “The more strings, the more precise you can get on where the fire is,” Sauers said.
“Gotta go old school—more dependable,” Donnelly said. He was scanning the horizon, a long-standing habit.
“A lot of people don’t even know New Jersey has fire towers,” Sauers said. “I think after Jones Road last year”—a fire that burned fifteen thousand acres in twenty days—“people started realizing how many towers we still use. It is the best technology.”
Sauers, who wore a beige fire-service uniform and surfer sunglasses, grabbed his radio transmitter to start the daily weather broadcast, but Donnelly interrupted. “There’s a smoke problem right there,” he said, pointing. “We got a fire!”
“Cory, Cory,” Sauers said into his radio, addressing the operator of a nearby tower. “Look up towards me.”
The radio crackled. “What do you got?” Cory van den Berg said.
“Dark column coming up, my forty-eight. You have it?”
Van den Berg said, “The only column I see is coming off the base.”
Sauers turned to Donnelly. “Billy, call Deale.” That would be Deale Carey, the section warden.
“Where am I sending him?” Donnelly asked. “How many degrees?”
“Forty-eight.” Donnelly radioed. “Hey, Deale, we’re picking up smoke at forty-eight degrees, about two and a half miles, along the edge of the river. You know Sixty Acre?” (A condo association.) “That’s a good place to start.”
After beginning as a tower operator, Donnelly spent decades in the field, fighting forest fires locally and out West and training out-of-state teams. “Montana was here this year,” he said. “They were blown away—like, holy shit, you guys have some big fires.” He also worked the canine fire-investigation unit; once, a bloodhound located a suspected arsonist’s father, hiding behind a screen door. “Guy’s telling me there’s no way his kid was outside and lit the fire,” Donnelly said. “And then the dog came right up the steps and . . . bloosh! I was, like, ‘Well, my dog seems to think so.’”
Sauers grew up nearby—his father is a part-time firefighter—but only got into tower work recently. “We had the big fire in Lakewood on March 14th of 2021,” he said. “My dad was there, and he suffered a medical emergency, and the way the forest-fire service came together to support my family through it—I was, like, this is what I want to do.”
Donnelly had raced up to Lakewood from a training exercise that day—the fire burned a hundred and seventy acres, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of families—to discover that Sauers’s father had been kept alive by a police defibrillator until an ambulance arrived. “His father got really knocked out,” Donnelly said. “But he came back.”
“Just yesterday I got to dispatch him,” Sauers said.
Deale radioed in, having pinpointed a homeowner with a fire in his yard. The warden would now move in. Deale reported himself available. “By is clear,” Deale said, using his service number.
“Copy that,” Sauers said. “Clear and available.”
—Robert Sullivan
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DISPATCHES
BIG DUMB GLUTTONOUS FUN
On the road to celebrate the ups and downs of America's Semiquincentennial.
BY RACHEL MONROE
Was it possible to have a genuinely good, patriotic time this Semiquincentennial summer? I was determined to find out. A decade ago, Congress set up a bipartisan commission, America250, and asked it to "plan, encourage, develop, and coordinate the commemoration of the history of the United States leading up to the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States." But the group became riven by infighting and lawsuits. When Donald Trump began his second term as President, he formed his own task force, Freedom 250, which siphoned off much of America250's allocated funding. Donors seeking to contribute to the bipartisan celebrations were reportedly given Freedom 250's routing and account numbers instead. With its diminished bankroll, America250 sponsored
a chaotic suite of commemorative activities, including a startup competition, a trivia contest about "iconic American achievements," a nationwide pickleball challenge, and a Bitcoin conference, called Code + Country, in Las Vegas.
Few of Trump's celebrations—a Freedom 250-branded U.F.C. event on the White House lawn and a "national Jubilee" of Christian prayer, among others—appealed to me. The giant Independence Day fireworks show in Washington, D.C., sounded like my kind of spectacle, but then the President started referring to it as a Trump rally. The Great American State Fair seemed like the most promising option left. I live in Texas, and I pictured something like our state fair—big, dumb, gluttonous fun—but on the National Mall. After the opening day, in late June, it immediately be-
became clear that the fair was "great" in the Trumpian sense of the word, which is to say, not great at all. There were no barns where solemn Future Farmers of America in pressed jeans cradled pristine lambs, or petting zoos, or ring-toss games where you could win a stuffed Pikachu the size of an F.F.A. sheep. There were no deep-fried charcuterie boards or corn-dog-and-Hot Cheetos sushi or even funnel cakes. There was a hundred-and-ten-foot Ferris wheel, which was fine, although the one at the Texas fair is nearly twice as tall.
Before I flew to Washington, I was plagued with the feeling that a dark cloud was encroaching on the world. This was not a portent, it turned out, but a retinal detachment. An ophthalmologist injected an air bubble into my eye and zapped the hole shut with a laser. As I left the office, he told me to "avoid trauma."
Fortunately, little at the fair was lively enough to traumatize. Much of the event consisted of booths representing all fifty states, plus several territories and the District of Columbia. They were mostly paid for by state tourism boards and staffed by earnest young people. In the absence of obvious sources of amusement,
Patriot Night at the hundred-and-forty-seventh edition of the annual Mandan Rodeo Days, in North Dakota.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY LEWIS ABLEIDINGER
visitors hopped among booths in feverish pursuit of swag—key chains, stickers, sunglasses. Fairgoers passed the word along: Michigan had mini cereal boxes, West Virginia had prestamped postcards, Puerto Rico was out of tote bags. A line formed outside the U.S. Forest Service tent. “I could be handing out turnips and people would want ’em,” a man dispensing lip balm and bookmarks muttered. Some visitors seemed to see enjoying themselves as a form of patriotic duty. “Tell The New Yorker that we’re happy to be here,” a woman in a MAGA hat said. Her favorite attractions? West Virginia’s postcards and the Fox News broadcast area. “They have the white sofa and everything,” she said. “They’re also giving out free water, and I think that’s amazing.”
Free stuff wasn’t sufficient to keep an ambient sense of dread at bay, however. “It is beautiful,” a dimpled young man at the Utah booth said when I complimented his state. “Unfortunately, it’s on fire right now.” At least ten states did not send official delegations, citing the cost of participation, scheduling issues, or the partisan tenor of the event. At the North Carolina booth, whose display was sponsored in part by a Nascar team, a visitor, his shoulders hunched in anger, asked why the video monitors in the booth originally included images of the Confederate flag. (They had since been removed.) “We were invited to be here to showcase the resiliency of North Carolina,” a staffer repeated stiffly. In the Faith & Family pavilion, the Museum of the Bible gave away fans, a Pentecostal preacher promoted anti-vax literature, and a cozy reading nook featured material such as “My First Board Book: The Second Amendment.” By the time I reached Iowa’s booth—whose list of items you can get on a stick at the Iowa State Fair (pork chop, smoothie, pecan pie) made me long for Des Moines—I was heat-struck and weary, and I wondered whether the fair was actually a brilliant ploy to spur domestic tourism, by making everywhere else in the U.S. seem better than here.
In the evening, after the heat broke, I made my way to the American Heartland Arena, at the eastern end of the Mall, where a small rodeo was under way. The bleachers were packed, and for the first time all day the air hummed with
genuine enthusiasm. The announcer gave an abbreviated and pointedly inclusive history of rodeo—vaqueros and Native riders, cowboys and cowgirls—and then a woman with a pageant smile and a spangled outfit entered the narrow, dirt-floored corral. She stood astride two horses, one foot on each of their backs. The horses circled the ring at a swift trot, passing close enough that I could see the rider’s thigh muscles tremble with effort. “If we had more space, she’d go at full speed,” the announcer said. Instead, she left the arena, smiling and waving. The announcer directed our attention to a large screen playing a video about the history of the lasso. People began thumbing at their phones again. The free pen I’d been given at the Moms for America exhibit, hours earlier, had somehow already run out of ink. Like many Americans before me, I looked at the world around me and realized that it was played out. It was time for me to head west.
Medora, North Dakota, has been called “the best little town in the West” and “North Dakota’s most historic town.” Throughout the eighteen-eighties, when the area was still known as the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt spent extended spells there, cowboying and investing in ranchland. “In this country of hills and plateaus, the romance of my life began,” he later said. Medora—which has a hundred and twenty-one full-time residents, according to the latest census—comes alive in the summer. On a typical day this July, around four Roosevelt impersonators were roaming the streets, identifiable by their mustaches, stout bellies, and dispensing of homespun wisdom. Many of the town’s bars, restaurants, and hotels have names referencing “T.R.,” as the twenty-sixth President is known, with proprietary familiarity, in Medora.
The town gives the impression of being draped in a kind of perma-bunting, and it goes all out for the Fourth of July: a Teddy Roosevelt brunch is followed by a sparkler-filled parade down Main Street to the town square. This year, the town expected huge crowds to come celebrate America’s two hundred and fiftieth, which coincided with the opening of the town’s Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. The library, a four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar rammed-earth build-
ing, was envisioned as an architectural embodiment of Roosevelt’s conservation legacy, and people had arranged their trips to see it years in advance. What better place to indulge in some old-fashioned patriotic razzmatazz?
After I booked my flight to North Dakota, I learned that Trump had the same idea. The library’s grand opening was now a Freedom 250 event, and Trump planned to make a speech after the ribbon-cutting, on July 1st. When I arrived in Medora, rental cars were sold out and broad-shouldered MAGA boys in too-tight pants were swaggering down the sidewalk, three abreast. The high point of my visit, I had imagined, would be the “Medora Musical,” a patriotic song-and-dance revue, dating from the nineteen-sixties, filled with men in cowboy hats and women in ruffled skirts making corny jokes, then bursting into soaring, irony-free harmonies. Performances take place at the Burning Hills Amphitheatre, a nearly three-thousand-person outdoor arena with dramatic views of the Badlands; at a pivotal moment, the stage set slides open and horses gallop onstage. I am a soft touch, particularly for a small-town show, and was looking forward to crying. But the performance was cancelled—word around town was that crews had to reinforce the amphitheatre’s stage to bear the weight of a bulletproof barrier for the President to speak behind.
Many Badlands towns are depopulated and unpicturesque, worn down by drought and the boom-and-bust cycle of oil-and-gas extraction. But Medora is more prosperous; in lieu of dollar stores, there is relentless outlaw kitsch. In 1986, Harold Schafer, the North Dakota entrepreneur behind Mr. Bubble, established the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, which now functions as a kind of nonprofit hospitality conglomerate, operating four hotels, a campground, the Bully Pulpit Golf Course, TR’s Tavern, a pizza place, an ice-cream parlor, a family resort, a horse stable, and a half-dozen other businesses. You could spend a long weekend in Medora and, without realizing it, patronize only foundation entities. The workforce is largely international and seasonal; employees live in dorms and eat at a workers’ cafeteria, as if Medora were a company town whose primary product is the Medora
23
experience. (Not everyone is on board. In a cluttered store not owned by the foundation, I saw a guestbook with a message in shaky handwriting: “thank you to all our patrons since 2007 for helping small business owners succeed when they are trying so hard to push us out and take complete control.”) Medora sometimes feels like a strange, cheerful dream about America. Twice in two days, I found myself stranded without a ride on a butte above town, once in pouring rain; on both occasions, the friendly stranger who offered me a lift turned out to be a Roosevelt.
The story you most often hear around town is that a twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt travelled west after his mother and his wife died on the same day, of different causes. (The new library displays his journal, in which that day is marked with a large black “X” and the sentence “The light has gone out of my life.”) Here, the wealthy and asthmatic young politician, bolstered by time spent outside among manly men, grew strong enough to meet his destiny. But Roosevelt’s first visit to the Dakota Territory actually took place a year earlier, in 1883, when he embarked on a hunting trip, dressed like “a regular cowboy dandy,” as he wrote to his sister, in a buckskin suit, a silk neckerchief, and alligator-hide boots. The expedition did not go as planned. The Wild West was even then a myth receding into a hazy, heroic past. In place of herds of bison thundering across the prairie, there were piles of bones a story high and as much as a hundred feet long. It took Roosevelt nine days to kill a bison; within a year, there would be only around three hundred and twenty-five left south of Canada. The Northern Pacific Railway had recently been completed, and the violent displacement of the region’s Native populations had cleared the path for large-scale cattle operations and wheat farms controlled by absentee landowners—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, and a smattering of British dukes and earls. A few decades later, after Roosevelt, as President, opened the nation’s first game preserve, in Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains, he had to stock it with bison imported from the Bronx Zoo.
On a bright morning in Medora, I met Dan Bram, a policy analyst and a T.R. enthusiast from D.C. In 2022,
Bram created a profile on the dating app Hinge that said he was looking for “a +1 to the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library opening in the North Dakota Badlands.” He matched with Rachel Coleman, whose profile noted that one of the few states she had yet to visit was North Dakota. They began dating, and she was startled to discover that he had a picture of Roosevelt hanging above his bed; when they eventually moved in together, she asked him to consolidate his collection of paraphernalia into the bathroom, which is now T.R.-themed. They married in 2025. “Everybody assumed I was going to talk about him in my vows,” Bram said. He refrained, but his friends worked a few mentions into their toasts. In Medora, he and Coleman wore custom T-shirts featuring a drawing of Mt. Rushmore with the non-Roosevelt faces replaced by those of their dog and their friends’ dogs.
Bram had worked for Elizabeth Warren, and he told me that his stint with her deepened his appreciation of Roosevelt’s role as an anti-monopolist. More recently, a different politician—another wealthy New Yorker with a populist touch and imperial ambitions—has been trying to identify himself with Roosevelt. The assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, emphasized the parallels. Here was a candidate who got shot—as Roosevelt was, in 1912, by a man who’d been instructed to do so in a dream by the vengeful ghost of William McKinley—and kept on campaigning. Last
summer, a pair of three-story banners reading “American Workers FIRST” appeared on the Department of Labor building, in D.C. One featured the face of T.R., the other that of D.J.T.
In 2024, Trump won the highest vote share of any Presidential candidate in North Dakota since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and, despite his abysmal approval ratings nationwide, he still has plenty of fans in the state. On the day of his
appearance in Medora, the crowds awaiting him were magnanimous and forbearing, as they have been at every MAGA event I’ve attended. (One of the pleasures of tribalism is how nicely you get to treat others inside the tribe.) We rode buses up to the Burning Hills Amphitheatre, where the air was hazy with heat. Nearby, in front of a private audience at the library, Trump praised Roosevelt as a man who led “a freaking wild life,” who “didn’t want to listen to his doctor,” who “didn’t want to be quiet—he wanted to be great.”
I found a seat at the amphitheatre next to a dapper, snowy-haired, retired Houston chiropractor with Presidential-seal cufflinks and a pocket full of George H. W. Bush commemorative coins. He quietly let me know that he had come to Medora to honor Roosevelt, not the current President. “Trump heard about a parade and decided he had to get in front of it,” he grumbled. The midday sun was relentless; a woman collapsed and was carried off by E.M.T.s. After several hours of waiting, two dozen men in suspenders and cowboy hats—Rough Rider reReactors—strode onstage as the sound system blasted “Hot Stuff.” In any other context, I’d have expected them to start disrobing; instead, they stood stoically as the President shuffled out, thumbs-upping the crowd. He told us that the country had been dying, but now it was the hottest it had ever been. He told us that one of his sons had advised him not to say who got more votes, him or T.R. He told us that D.C. was bracing for triple-digit temperatures on the Fourth of July but that he planned to give “a really long speech” just to show that he could. The E.M.T.s scurried to help another wilting audience member. (Forty-five people at the event required medical assistance for heat-related incidents, according to the Billings County Sheriff’s Office.) I thought about how the promise of equality laid out in the Declaration of Independence has always been incompletely fulfilled and how, even so, I missed having a President who paid lip service to it. The chiropractor exited after about twenty minutes; when I left, a half hour later, Trump was still going.
The musical was rescheduled for the following night; I hoped that it would dispel the aftertaste of Trump’s brittle, mean-spirited nationalism, although that
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seemed like a tall order for a theatrical production. At the performance, I ran into the chiropractor again. He sported a seersucker suit and a fresh sunburn. “I think I’m still a Republican,” he confessed. Dark clouds massed ominously to the south. The cast got through one song—Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America”—before the show was called off, owing to lightning. It was time to drive on.
Trump headed south, to Mt. Rushmore, a monument he’s half joked about wanting to get his face onto; I went another way. As I drove east on Interstate 94, the rumpled topography of the Badlands gave way to farmland, and black cows clustered like scatter plots on the flat graph of the prairie. In Mandan, North Dakota, it was Patriot Night at the Dale Pahlke Arena, where the hundred-and-forty-seventh edition of the annual Mandan Rodeo Days was taking place. By the food stands, a soft-spoken man whom everyone was treating with conspicuous deference turned out to be Dale Pahlke himself, the president and C.E.O. of a local bank and a longtime rodeo supporter. “Energy and agriculture are our two biggest things here,” he said. “Oil can be good, oil can be fickle, but agriculture’s here all the time.”
In its early years, I was told, the rodeo was a casual affair sandwiched between baseball games and community cookouts. Nowadays, it’s a sanctioned event on the circuit of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, the largest organization of its kind in the world. In rodeo circles, the Fourth of July is known as Cowboy Christmas—a reliably lucrative and hectic period during the peak of the competitive season. As with Christmas, the logistical wrangling can outweigh the enjoyment, at least for the cowboys. One competitor spent the weekend driving between Mandan, the Sitting Bull Stampede (in Mobridge, South Dakota), and the Killdeer Mountain Roundup, north of Medora—a circuit of roughly four hundred miles.
The competitors huddled by the bull chutes looked focussed and road-weary, and I didn’t have the heart to pester them with questions about America. I flipped through the program, in which the riders had names with the loping cadence of protagonists in cowboy-romance novels: Canyon Bass, Riggen Hughes,
“Those will look perfect at the bottom of the ocean!”
Keaton Street, Lane Leeper. Near me, an elderly couple named Dusty and Sandy—“We’re dirty,” Dusty joked—diligently marked the results of the contests, as if recording a baseball game’s box score. A rider named Koby Jacobson, from Haiku, Hawaii, drew Paper Cut, a jet-black bull. When the chute opened, Paper Cut thrashed across the arena until, at the sound of the buzzer, Jacobson launched himself off the animal and staggered away, his chaps flapping. Dusty squinted appraisingly. “Eighty-five,” he pronounced. A moment later, the announcer gave the official score: eighty-five. Dusty nodded, satisfied, as Sandy squeezed his arm.
Later that night, Mandan hosted the Prairie Pyro-Musical—explosions accompanied by a soundtrack of patriotic and pop music—which was advertised as the biggest fireworks display in North Dakota’s history. Garisson Risner, a co-owner of the pyrotechnics company Pegasus Illuminations and one of the event’s co-ordinators, gave a more measured assessment. “I think it would be safe to say it was the largest fireworks display in North Dakota that night,” he said.
“There are a lot of Karens in the world when it comes to pyrotechnics, so we try to watch what we claim.” Pegasus, which is based in Mott, North Dakota (population six hundred and fifty-three), knows how to put on a show. Last New Year’s Eve, the company lit 2.8 million Roman candles in sixty seconds—a Guinness World Record—with the goal of “bringing awareness to the importance of mental health for veterans.”
I found a spot in a broad, sloping field, where children engaged in furious lightsabre battles as they awaited the show. A man sitting behind me streamed Trump’s Mt. Rushmore speech on his phone, but I could hear only fragments: “Your Second Amendment . . . The menace of Communism in our land . . . Our American ancestors.” It was past the scheduled start time, and nothing had yet exploded. Children rampaged across the grass, chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” in increasingly aggressive tones. Two boys wove between the field’s blankets and camp chairs, demanding that people proclaim their love for America.
The pyrotechnics world had big expectations for the U.S.’s two hundred
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and fiftieth, but more than ninety per cent of fireworks are manufactured in China, and Trump's tariffs had put a damper on things, Risner told me. "If we had a customer that had a ten-thousand-dollar show and they upped their budget to fifteen thousand because it was the two hundred and fiftieth, and they asked us, 'So how much bigger of a show can we get?', you basically had to tell them, 'None,' he said. Some municipalities shifted to drone shows—swarms of L.E.D. lights that could be programmed to form a bald eagle, then George Washington, then the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. Compared with fireworks, drone shows are cheaper, less alarming to dogs, and more environmentally friendly, but they are as charmless as a QR code.
The Prairie Pyro-Musical happily kept the emphasis on the "pyro." There were comets, fountains, strobe pots. There was an exploding wheel a hundred and thirty-five feet in the air. New to me was the dragon's breath, ground-based mushroom clouds of eyebrow-singeing flame. Sophisticated pyrotechnicians may not find dragon's breath all that impressive ("You take just shy of four hundred fifty gallons of gasoline, you put it in a bunch
of metal pipes, and you literally blow it up," Risner explained), but they riled up the crowd. The children grew manic with glee, their lightsabres flailing, their patriotism sublimated into something more primal. "Fireball! Fireball!" a girl shrieked.
On Independence Day, on the ceremonial grounds of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, a tribal nation that spans northeastern South Dakota and a small part of North Dakota, the afternoon heat rose steadily. Darell Decoteau, a voluble man in a Hawaiian shirt, sipped from a large plastic cup of lemonade into which he'd tipped a flavor packet of Sonic Ocean Water, turning the liquid a vibrant blue. It was powwow weekend—wacipi, in the Dakota language—and several thousand people had travelled there from Minneapolis and South Texas and Canada to celebrate. There was face painting, a golf tournament, and light-up novelty cups that flashed red, white, and blue. In a long oval at the center of the grounds, women in jingle dresses moved across the grass with light, quick steps to the sound of a steady, thumping drum. Wacipi means "they are dancing" in Dakota, Decoteau explained. Above the
dancers flapped a ring of American flags, each representing a military veteran from the community who had passed away.
The powwow was more ambivalent than most Fourth of July celebrations. The tribe that would become the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate held its first Fourth of July powwow in the nineteenth century, during a period when the Native nations on the Great Plains were forced onto reservations and their cultures and languages were suppressed. Tribes were discouraged, and later prohibited, from engaging in many ceremonial practices, particularly "heathenish dances," as Henry Teller, the Secretary of the Interior under Chester Arthur, called them. "When we'd sing and dance, everyone would get all worried that it was a war party and all that," Decoteau told me. The tribe, whose treaty with the U.S. established the Lake Traverse Reservation in 1867, was led by a man named Gabriel Renville, who received permission from federal authorities to celebrate the birth of America. There was feasting, dancing, lacrosse, and a competition in which Renville's spotted horse outpaced a white man's racehorse. The ostensibly patriotic event repeated every year, serving as a kind of decoy, an excuse for tribal members to gather and dance. It is by some accounts the second-oldest continually operating powwow in the U.S. The tribe found other outlets for communal gathering, ways of translating its traditions into something palatable to white society. "We became a big rodeo society because we couldn't powwow," Decoteau said. "We're a social people."
Decoteau told me that his parents met on the West Coast, where they had moved in the sixties, the result of a federal program that incentivized Native Americans to leave reservations and settle in urban areas. The program was part of a mid-century campaign that sought assimilation while eroding tribal sovereignty. But Decoteau was brought up by his grandparents, who lived a few miles from the ceremonial grounds; these days, he teaches Dakota culture in local schools and serves on the powwow's planning committee. He gave me a tour of the grounds, stopping to shake hands every ten feet or so—with a man in a Prince hat and a "MAKE AMERICA NATIVE AGAIN" shirt who was promoting a public-art project in Minneapolis, with
"I just got out of a pretty serious relationship."
a woman selling ribbon skirts and hand-made silver jewelry, with venders from Guatemala selling knockoff Labubus in Pendleton prints. A couple of kids sprinted by, brandishing plastic machine guns. Decoteau frowned. “No guns is the rule, but one of our venders must have snuck some in,” he said.
Asking people about the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence felt a little silly, given the context. “Newcomers,” one man said tolerantly. “You’re here to get the Native perspective on two hundred fifty years of America?” John Heminger, a photographer with a long face and restless energy, asked me. “You mean stolen lands, broken treaties, boarding schools, generational trauma?” Then he gave a wide, disarming grin. There were people around who might have some interesting thoughts about patriotism, Heminger suggested—the Kit Fox Society, a veterans’ organization named for a Great Plains warrior group. As Heminger led me over to them, he mentioned that Native Americans serve in the military at a high rate compared with other ethnic groups, and I asked him why he thought that was. “It’s that warrior tradition that we have,” he said, then paused. “And the extreme poverty.”
The Kit Fox members were under a shade structure. Two men who had served in Vietnam sat in mobility devices, dozing; Iraq and Afghanistan veterans chatted as they loaded blanks into magazines in preparation for the Grand Entry that evening. “I was reluctant to join the Army, to be honest. It wasn’t that I was scared—it was just because of the history between our tribe and the U.S. Army,” an Iraq War veteran named Nicodemus Cody Seaboy told me. “But my grandpa told me that, when we won at Little Bighorn, we captured their flags, and now it’s your turn to defend that flag, because that flag belongs to us.” The society also planned to hold a welcome-home ceremony that evening on behalf of Matthew Cordell, a tribal member and a logistics officer in the Army Reserve. Cordell had recently returned from a tour in Kuwait, where an Iranian drone attack had killed six soldiers in his unit and injured more than thirty others. The ceremony was meant “to call home our spirit, to alleviate the death and destruction we had to see, so we can leave all that there and come back
and live in peace again,” Seaboy explained. Cordell, a polite man wearing fatigues and a pained expression, sat nearby. “They’re doing something special for me tonight,” he told me. “I wasn’t ready for it, mentally, but it needs to happen to help me heal, because our unit got messed up pretty good.”
I made my way back to the stands to await the ceremony. Decoteau was there, sipping his beautifully unnatural lemonade. The sky darkened suddenly, as if it had been turned down by a dimmer switch, and Decoteau frowned at a weather app on his phone. “Nothing good comes from an east wind out here on the prairie,” he said. A storm arrived with pounding ferocity. Minutes later, it passed, the air washed clean in its wake. The drummers picked up a Grand Entry song, and the Kit Fox members stepped onto the grass. I saw that the Vietnam veterans had exchanged their black baseball caps for war bonnets. Then came the welcome-home ceremony. The group moved to the beat in a slow circle, with Cordell at the center. They were joined by family members and by dancers in their jangling skirts until the ceremonial grounds felt charged with noise and purpose. Someone handed Cordell his toddler daughter. She nestled into his chest as he stepped rhythmically in place, the expression on his face unreadable, his feet never slowing. After the ceremony, the dancing and singing continued. The day felt impossibly wide, broad enough to accommodate all the country’s contradictions, the grief and disappointment and pride and fellow-feeling and everything else I couldn’t name.
The sky was still holding on to a shred of light when I walked to my car, after 10 P.M. I passed a softball field, where a laconic announcer unhurriedly narrated the eleventh and final game of the day. “Peyton here is playing with nine fingernails,” I heard him say. In D.C., the President was talking about Communists again, before so many fireworks were shot off that the Mall was blanketed by thick smoke. I got in my car and lowered the windows so I could keep listening to the drums as I drove away. In the waning light, I passed cornfields—knee-high, as prophesied. “Things get hectic at times but things are smooth now,” Decoteau texted me, a little while later. “Now we will dance late into the night.” ♦
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27
THE CONTROL OF NATURE
TAKING THE HEAT
As summers grow deadlier, Europe's cities are racing to reinvent themselves.
BY ERIC KLINENBERG
Planners are returning to three ancient forms of cooling: water, soil, and shade.
In late May, Jannik Sinner, the world's top-ranked men's-tennis player, was closing out a dominant second-round performance against Juan Manuel Cerúndolo, ranked fifty-sixth, at Roland Garros. The French Open, as English speakers tend to call it, takes place during a traditionally splendid time of the year, when Parisians delight in the temperate air.
Sinner, a lanky twenty-four-year-old Italian with red hair, sharp elbows, and ground strokes like shotgun blasts, had won thirty consecutive matches and was the overwhelming favorite. After cruising through two sets, he was one game from victory, with a win probability above ninety-nine per cent. Then, as Cerúndolo prepared to serve, Sinner
grimaced, took a few gingerly steps, and stretched his apparently cramping legs. They had played for less than two hours, but this May felt like August. Paris lay beneath a heat dome, and the red-clay courts were baking in direct sunlight.
Ordinarily, Sinner attacks with explosive energy, crouching on his long legs before springing upward, his feet leaving the ground after each shot. Now he slapped awkwardly at the ball, his shoes seemingly stuck in the clay. He lost the next two games badly, then complained of possible dehydration and called for a medic. After a nearly ten-minute time-out, play resumed. Sinner hobbled on, grimacing, dizzy, stiff, and weak. He lost the set, then the next two, and so the match. "The heat got to
him," an announcer proclaimed, deeming the famously fit Novak Djokovic a new favorite to win the tournament. The next day, Djokovic vomited on the court during the fifth set and lost.
Jakub Menšík, a twenty-year-old Czech who reached the semifinals, fared even worse. After winning a four-hour-and-forty-one-minute match, he collapsed onto the clay, where he writhed with cramps for more than four minutes as medics brought ice. "It's insane to play in this weather," he said, after being taken to the locker room in a wheelchair.
For generations, the French Open has embodied the ideal gateway to the European summer. In 2026, the spectacle of world-class athletes breaking down in sweltering conditions became the latest sign that the Continent's rapid warming is bringing that ideal to an end.
Although climate scientists warned in the nineteen-eighties that extreme heat posed a growing danger, policymakers in Europe didn't come to grips with it until August, 2003, when a heat wave killed more than seventy thousand people. What those officials still failed to plan for was that Europe would warm at a rate more than twice the global average. A number of regional factors explain why. One is the Continent's connection to the rapidly warming Arctic. Retreating snow exposes darker ground that absorbs more sunlight; as soils dry, they're less able to help with cooling the air. Meanwhile, strong winds carry hot air north from Africa, while declining aerosol pollution admits more sunlight, in a process called "brightening." Together, these effects have set the stage for the fierce summers, destructive wildfires, and suffocating heat domes that now threaten Europe's health, culture, and economy.
Historically, heat has evaded crisis-level attention. Unlike camera-ready disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, fires—blistering temperatures rarely produce images dramatic enough to go viral. The typical victims are old, poor, and socially isolated residents of disadvantaged areas, making heat waves invisible killers of people largely invisible in public life.
In the past five years, however, Europe's heat has become too lethal to ig-
28
ILLUSTRATION BY MATTEO BERTON
nore: an estimated seventy thousand heat-related deaths in 2022, forty-eight thousand in 2023, and sixty-three thousand in 2024. This June—Western Europe's hottest on record—at least ten thousand excess deaths were recorded as Paris topped a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, Bordeaux hit 108.5, and Gascony reached 111.7. The Eiffel Tower and the Louvre closed early, the museum explaining that its building is "not sufficiently adapted to climate change." A nuclear plant in southwestern France shut down a reactor because the river water used to cool it was too warm. Dozens of young people, including a twenty-one-year-old professional footballer, drowned while seeking relief in open water; three French children died in broiling cars. Some Parisians took refuge in air-conditioned hotels.
The fact that rooms were available during Europe's prime vacation season suggests trouble for its nearly three-trillion-dollar tourism industry, a hefty share of the Continent's G.D.P. More visitors are giving up on summer holidays in cities that feel like saunas and booking "coolcations" in Iceland, Norway, or Denmark. In one survey, more than half of travellers said that they had avoided particular destinations because of extreme weather or natural disasters. A 2023 European Commission study forecast "a clear north-south pattern in tourism demand changes" that "becomes more pronounced for higher warming scenarios," signalling growing economic consequences for Madrid, Lisbon, Athens, and Milan.
"Travelling to European cities is about cultural experience," Daniel Scott, a scholar of tourism at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, told me. "Whether it's Paris, Barcelona, or Rome, you amble around, sightseeing, street shopping, taking a riverboat tour, going to a museum, a restaurant, a café. Most of that time, you're outside." Climate change increasingly turns pleasure trips into exercises in escaping pain. "When I'm in Europe, I always notice how many people crowd under trees and shaded areas," Scott said. "But at some attractions, like the Acropolis, there's no way to avoid the blazing sun. On especially hot days, they've got the Red Cross giving out water, medics pre-positioned because they know
many people are going to be in trouble when they come down."
Paris, like the Acropolis, was not built for this weather, and has been slow to adapt. The French are famously wary of air-conditioning, considering it an affront to cultural norms, a threat to architectural beauty, and an accelerant of warming. An Ipsos survey published in June found that seventy-eight per cent of the French regard air-conditioning as "not respectful of the environment." Only some twenty-five per cent of French homes have air-conditioning, compared with around sixty per cent in Italy and eighty-nine per cent in the United States.
The problem is that this summer is only a preview of the treacherous weather that lies ahead. Météo-France projects that France will experience five times as many extreme-heat days by 2050 and ten times as many by 2100. Survivors of the coming climate-changed decades may remember 2026 as mild.
Most European governments, unlike the current American Administration, recognize climate change as a profound threat. More mechanical cooling, through conventional air-conditioning or less carbon-intensive technologies like heat pumps and geothermal systems, seems inevitable, even in France. So do electrification and greater investment in renewable energy. Yet nation-states have moved slowly. It's in cities, where the danger is most urgent, that architects, planners, and officials are racing to lower the temperature of the landscape, inventively redesigning it around three ancient forms of cooling: water, soil, and shade.
This July, I arrived in Milan just as Europe's third heat wave of the summer entered its fiercest stretch, following what meteorologists called an "Omega block": a high-pressure system had trapped hot air from the African deserts over the Continent, blocking cooler currents. The heat posed more than an urban public-health threat. Across Western Europe, it was creating the conditions for a vast wildfire emergency that in late July displaced more than three hundred thousand people in France and Spain and killed a dozen in Almería province.
I had come to meet Stefano Boeri,
a Milanese architect and urban planner known for designing buildings, and occasionally whole metropolitan areas, around trees. First, I wanted to see his signature project, Bosco Verticale: two apartment towers, twenty-six and nineteen stories high, whose deep balconies hold enough trees, shrubs, and flowering plants to fill twelve acres of woods, not to mention some twenty species of birds, all of which Boeri considers tenants. I had seen Bosco Verticale in countless photographs and videos, but encountering it at street level was exhilarating and surreal. Squinting up from the muggy sidewalk, I saw the buildings towering like giant redwoods, their leafy, wind-rippled façades startlingly alive.
One of Boeri's assistants arranged for me to visit a compact one-bedroom apartment that Boeri's firm maintains on the ninth floor of the taller tower. Its windows framed the skyline through tangles of dark, leathery holm-oak leaves and, disorientingly, thick tree trunks rooted in enormous planters and secured against storms by vertical cables. I slid open the heavy balcony door. Light filtered through the foliage, and soft gusts carried scents of olive trees, sage, and rosemary. The air was markedly cooler than on the sidewalks below. Though the morning was already approaching ninety degrees, I wanted only to sit there, listening to birdsong as the building, and I, breathed.
That afternoon, Boeri greeted me at his studio, a bright-yellow converted publishing house in a verdant neighborhood near the city center. Casually elegant at sixty-nine, he has silver hair, a warm smile, and a habit of propping his glasses on his forehead. Around him, some sixty-five people hunched over long tables lined with models of new vertical forests. As we walked among them, Boeri told me that he had been fascinated by the symbiosis between people and trees since childhood, when he read Italo Calvino's novel "The Baron in the Trees." In it, a twelve-year-old boy, Cosimo, rebels against his aristocratic family, and the Enlightenment's false divide between nature and culture, by climbing a holm oak and spending his life in the canopy. There, he hunts, harvests, builds a library, falls in love, and writes a declaration of rights
29
for men, women, children, animals, fish, insects, and all vegetation.
Boeri hoped to invent buildings that had this feeling of vitality. He explained, “I wanted to make plausible and possible something that apparently was impossible, to create a new perception—a forest that’s a façade, a building, a hundred and twenty metres tall, that lives and breathes and constantly changes as the seasons change and the trees grow.”
But his reasons for the vertical forests weren’t merely romantic. “Green buildings have a lot of ecological benefits,” he said. “Façades made of minerals absorb the high temperatures, which means the interior gets hotter, and the streets do, too, because the building gives off heat at night. A vertical canopy keeps the interior several degrees cooler, which means it requires less energy. It takes pollution out of the air, because trees eat carbon and dust.”
He added, “Of course, it’s also a habitat. It sustains life.”
Though Bosco Verticale is astonishing from the street, the more enchanting view I saw inside is accessible only to those rich enough to reside there. Boeri, who has thirty vertical forests around the world that are completed or under construction, acknowledges the affordability issue. In his studio, he showed me recent projects designed to spread the benefits of vertical forests more widely, including social housing in Eindhoven, a rehabilitation center in Shenzhen, and an arboreal retrofit in Brussels.
Internationally, Boeri is best known for building upward. But an even more ambitious project of his extends across the ground. Around 2007, he proposed Metrobosco, a seventy-four-thousand-acre greenbelt meant to encircle Milan with hundreds of thousands of trees. “The tree canopy here covers only fifteen per cent of the city,” he said. In Barcelona, the figure is roughly twenty-five per cent; in New York, twenty-three. “We need more trees to clean the air, but we also need more to cool it,” he said. In most modern cities, “shade is one of our most precious resources, and planting trees—lots and
lots of trees—is the best way to get more of it.”
A project this ambitious requires substantial government support. Boeri, the son of the acclaimed architect Cini Boeri and a member of an influential Milanese family, had the social capital to launch it. But, after some three hundred thousand trees were planted, the project foundered owing to a shift in political tides.
Bosco Verticale’s success gave Boeri another opening. In 2019, he founded Forestami, a civic organization that is aiming to plant three million trees, one for every resident of metropolitan Milan, by 2030. “We might not get that many,” Boeri conceded. “But we now understand that it’s not the number of trees that matters. It’s the number of leaves and the size of the canopy, the amount of surface shade we can produce.”
The next afternoon, with “real feel” temperatures in the nineties, I travelled to Parco Nord Milano, a twenty-three-hundred-acre urban forest, where Maria Chiara Pastore, Forestami’s scientific director, and Riccardo Gini, its technical director (and the director of Parco Nord), had agreed to show me some fresh canopy. After a long residential-and-commercial stretch, the park, which was established in the nineteen-seventies on a former industrial site, suddenly came into view. There was a vast green recreation zone, where bare-chested cyclists and runners (Gini remarked on the “Parco Nord uniform”) passed by small fountains and ponds. Pastore, in a patterned white-and-red sundress and sandals, mercifully led us from the hot stone parking lot into a small air-conditioned office, where she shared digital maps showing Milan’s uneven distribution of trees.
In the city center, options for adding shade by planting trees are limited. Beyond a few parks and private estates, neighborhoods typically have narrow sidewalks that leave little space for planting. “The reality is, there is not much room left,” Pastore told me. Creating it—by de-paving the streets—inevitably brings the political heat that comes from asking people to cede parking spaces
and change driving habits. Still, in four years, Milan has completed more than seventy de-paving projects, mostly small, on blocks where residents pushed for more shade and green space. “People love it,” Pastore said. “It just takes a lot of money, a very long time, and a lot of work to get it done.”
Gini, an agronomist who has overseen the planting of some two hundred thousand trees in Parco Nord in the past quarter century, has the tan skin, strong hands, and hearty disposition that are requisite for the job. After we left the office, Gini drove us through a lush expanse of mature trees in grassy meadows to a patchwork of saplings and shrubs. He crouched to inspect young maples and oaks, some only a few feet high, their trunks a finger’s width. “The big trees come from a nursery in Tuscany where the soil is similar to what we have here,” he explained, pointing out trees that were flourishing and smaller ones that, despite ample irrigation, might not survive. “I used to know which species to get, but climate change is making it difficult. Maybe now we need trees from the south.” Pastore, who’s also a professor at the Politecnico di Milano, has colleagues testing which species will grow best in the new, hotter environment. “There are so many variables,” she said. “More heat. More rain. More drought. Insects. New pathogens. The science is hard.”
The saplings, their bases encased in white plastic shelters, were not yet tall enough to form a canopy, and, after a few minutes in the direct afternoon sun, we were sweating through our clothes. “Let’s go into the air-conditioning,” Gini said, guiding us into a more mature forest with twenty-year-old hornbeams, whose serrated, deeply corrugated leaves looked almost pleated. Immediately, we felt relief. V. Kelly Turner, an environmental planner at U.C.L.A., told me that “a person standing in the shade can feel twenty to forty degrees Celsius cooler than someone who’s standing in the sun just a few feet away.” (Yes, Celsius.) Here, with the thermometer approaching a hundred, the grove of hornbeams turned a Las Vegas summer day into a San Francisco spring.
Planting trees in an established park is the easier part of Forestami’s work. “Now we’re going to show you something more challenging,” Pastore said.
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We drove seventeen miles west to Vittuone, where Forestami had partnered with a local coöperative and the municipal government to turn an empty industrial lot surrounded by factories, warehouses, and motorbike shops into a wooded area. I asked Pastore why they'd chosen this site and whether they expected visitors. "Maybe someday," she said. But the trees brought another benefit. "The land won't become another factory, with more carbon emissions and more heat," she said.
There was not an inch of shade in the first vegetation zone we inspected, and the grass, brittle as hay, crunched beneath our feet. "I think the irrigation system is broken," Gini said glumly, pointing to three rows of desiccated wild-cherry saplings. He made a phone call, then marched toward a stand of thriving field maples and poplars, their fluttering leaves glossy in the sun, and beckoned us. The canopy was smaller and thinner than Parco Nord's, but the shade worked its magic, lowering the temperature and delivering a gentle, refreshing breeze.
On my last day in Milan, I grabbed a reflective umbrella I'd packed and walked through the neighborhoods around Bosco Verticale. Like Manhattan's High Line, another influential green-design project, it's a breathtaking work of charismatic megaflora that has seeded both a new crop of urban parks and a luxury ecosystem of designer shops and corporate skyscrapers. But, in the shadows of Milan's runaway development, new forests are growing. Nearby, I found another stretch of green: the Biblioteca degli Alberi—the Library of Trees—a postindustrial sprawl that the city helped turn into a twenty-five-acre public park that opened in 2018, complete with twenty-two circular forests and a hundred and thirty-five thousand plants. A few blocks away, on Via Toce, the city had recently melded two small parks by pedestrianizing and de-paving the busy street between them. A nursery school on the green's edge now has a safe—and, soon, shaded—area for children to play. "We have to get the asphalt and the cars off the streets and return them to plants and people," Boeri said. "It's not just about making Milan a better place to live. It's about making Milan cooler." For Boeri, such projects
bring his life's work full circle. In Calvino's novel, young Cosimo remakes his relationship with society by moving into the trees; in Boeri's vision, society remakes its relationship with nature by moving the trees into the city.
From Milan, I chased the heat to Barcelona, where the dry-bulb temperature was slightly lower but the humidity so persistently high that a friend I'd hoped to meet, and two climate experts I'd planned to interview, had fled. "I can't stop sweating," my friend messaged me, sheepishly. "People have died on the streets. . . . Be careful." Another contact noted that the city had just set a heat record, of a hundred and five degrees, but suggested an upside: perhaps I'd avoid Barcelona's notorious crowds.
Of all the problems that heat poses for Barcelona, losing some of the hundred and sixty thousand tourists who typically visit each day ranks low on the priority lists of most officials and residents. Some locals have staged protests, chanting "Tourists go home" while targeting visitors with water guns. But tourism employs more than a hundred and sixty thousand people in Barcelona and accounts for around thirteen per cent of its economic output, which explains why, despite concerns that the city gets too many visitors, more than seventy per cent of residents consider tourism beneficial. At midday, when I arrived on La Rambla, the city's most heavily visited and photographed corridor, the street had little shade and surprisingly few people. At La Boqueria market, normally jam-packed at lunchtime, I found my way to a famously busy bar counter
and took one of several open seats.
Later, the emptiness became the subject of conversation. "Everybody's making way less money," Diego Penzo Vivas, a veteran tour guide who often works with Americans, told me at a hotel bar near the Plaça de Catalunya. "We're doing fewer tours, and we have fewer people on the tours. I'm on a WhatsApp chat with a bunch of guides, and the stories are crazy. People are getting heat stress, vomiting, asking to go back to the hotel—not just here, all over Europe. The Vatican, Paris, Madrid." Penzo added, "We've had to start doing night tours. Right now, that's the main business I'm getting."
After sundown, I met Andreina Seijas at a tapas bar in Eixample. An urban-planning consultant, she helps cities improve life at night. Seijas, who is forty-one, got her doctorate at Harvard and has lived in seven cities. "What I'm starting to see in Barcelona is people trying to organize their schedules the way they do in Seville or Málaga," she told me. "You stay home with your A.C., close your shutters, take a siesta, and then, after 8 or 9 P.M., you emerge." For visitors, many of whom can afford late-night bars and restaurants, this merely means avoiding La Rambla in the sunshine. For locals, it can be harder. "Barcelona has great social infrastructure, but many parks, libraries, schools, and senior centers are closed late in the evening, and public transit is limited after midnight," Seijas said. "Maybe we need to adopt Dubai's approach toward keeping beaches open twenty-four hours."
"We're definitely changing how we do things," the architect Clara Solamorales told me, after we switched cafés
“They imprinted on me when I was dumping the body.”
because the air-conditioning wasn’t working in the first one. “You know the toldos, those textile canopies they hang over the streets in Seville? There’s one planned here now, near the Gothic Quarter, as part of the citywide shadows project.” Sola-Morales has long appreciated Seville’s cooling strategy, which the city, among the hottest in Europe, adopted generations ago. Transplanted to Barcelona, it signals the city’s cultural and ecological transformation. “The heat has changed my practice, too,” she said. “In my entire career, I’d never installed air-conditioning until this year. It was always cross-ventilation, fans, outdoor space. Now I have no option. The first one I put in is in my office.”
On another muggy day in Barcelona, the air-conditioning worked perfectly in the city-council offices—a far cry from the steamy Metro stations and streets I’d passed through on my way across the Gothic Quarter, where a toldo would have been welcome. At the entrance, a security guard handed me a roll of paper towels with a sympathetic look. In meetings with the city’s first deputy mayor, Laia Bonet, and its chief architect, Maria Buhigas, I learned that adapting to extreme heat, wildfires,
and drought had become a citywide planning effort.
Barcelona was a leader in green urbanism long before the term existed. In 1859, the engineer Ildefons Cerdà submitted an expansion plan that broke with convention by making even residential streets twenty metres wide—five for each sidewalk and ten for carriages. Committed, as the formula goes, to “ruralizing what’s urban and urbanizing what’s rural,” Cerdà called for vegetation throughout the streetscape. Over the next century, residents and city agencies planted thousands of trees, including several forests’ worth of London planes, whose enormous branches and broad crowns often meet above the street. Thousands remain, forming green corridors alive with cicadas and birdcalls, reducing traffic noise to a hum. Yet the city’s tree cover falls short of what Cerdà envisioned.
In the nineteen-nineties, amid runaway development and increasing traffic and pollution after the 1992 Olympics, there was demand for a return to Cerdà’s model: more planting and, radically, fewer cars. In 1993, Barcelona opened its first “superblock,” a protected area in El Born where automobile access was highly restricted, giving space to people and plants. Two more followed,
in Gràcia, in 2005. Between 2016 and 2023, the mayor Ada Colau expanded the initiative and added four linear parks, known as “green axes,” including one almost two miles long. In the renovated areas, newer trees stand beside the heritage London planes, and children kick soccer balls across leafy streets.
Most of Barcelona, however, remains ungraced by superblocks or green axes. A quarter of the city has tree canopy; the rest bakes under the midday sun. Extending the superblocks and parks proved difficult. Fire trucks and ambulances need access to every block, and vegetated surfaces cost far more than asphalt to maintain. Then the warming climate intervened. “From 2021 to 2025, we had a terrible drought here,” Bonet said. “At times, we couldn’t plant. We couldn’t irrigate, across all Catalonia. Just when Barcelona was trying to increase the green space, we lost around seventy-five hundred big trees.” Heat and drought were destroying the measures meant to temper them.
Trees were hardly the only casualties. Barcelona has suffered thousands of heat-related deaths and illnesses in recent years, concentrated in poor and immigrant neighborhoods, where air-conditioning and green corridors are scarce. “We know that not everyone in the city experiences heat waves the same way,” Bonet said. “So heat is not just an environmental issue. It’s a social-justice issue, because it affects older people, children, and low-income households the most.” For that reason, she said, “we’re prioritizing the areas where vulnerable people are using public space. We’re installing two hundred new shade structures around the city, many in playgrounds. We’re acclimatizing schools with air-conditioning and paying for it with the tourist tax, so that tourism can help the city adapt.”
Since Jaume Collboni became the mayor, in 2023, Barcelona has shifted its heat interventions from superblocks and green corridors toward direct protection for those most at risk. In 2025, it expanded its network of Refugios Climáticos, or Climate Shelters, a program hailed by the World Health Organization which has inspired similar measures from Paris to Rome. More than five hundred libraries, churches, stores, and other public and private spaces now welcome any-
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one who needs air-conditioning, water, or rest. Some offer free Wi-Fi and rest rooms; all appear on a city app with directions. Another program, Radars, connects isolated elderly residents with neighbors who provide companionship and can check in on them during extreme weather. For children, Barcelona is opening small water parks in neighborhood plazas, with showers and water guns. One sultry Saturday morning, I visited one and found some twenty children drenched and delighted as their parents sat contentedly in the shade.
Buhigas found particular satisfaction in another initiative: turning certain in-between areas—“leftovers,” as she calls them—into absorbent green spaces. “There’s a variety of them,” she explained in a small conference room. “Some are rooftops. Some are abandoned spaces. Some are the spaces in between buildings.” The city aims to transform a fifth of Barcelona’s leftover land. A colleague projected an image of the Jardins d’Oriol Martorell. “The zoning says that there is a station underground and a green space on top,” Buhigas said. “Do you see the green space?” The screen showed a postindustrial hellscape: a vast expanse of rough concrete bordered by a graffiti-covered wall. “I don’t. You cannot use this space. It’s dead. And not only does it separate two different neighborhoods—it makes both of them hotter by attracting the sun and then releasing all that energy at night.”
She went on, “Now look what we’re doing.” The next slide showed the site transformed into a park, with trees, flowers, permeable pavement, and comfortable seating. “This is going to help connect neighbors, and it’s going to help them cool down,” Buhigas said. “The other important thing is that it’s not very expensive.” The plan was to make over fifty acres of land in this way during the next year. “It won’t get the attention of a giant park,” she said, “but it’s going to make a difference.”
On my last night in Barcelona, Spain won the World Cup. When the final whistle blew, near midnight, all 1.7 million residents, along with every tourist, seemed to be dancing, sweaty and exhilarated, in the streets. The next morning, sleepless but still buzzing, I met a team from Buhigas’s office in the giant park getting that attention.
Parc de les Glòries, which opened in 2025, contains, within its twenty-one acres, around a thousand trees, more than fifty thousand plants and shrubs, rain gardens, playgrounds, sports facilities, a water park, and a broad meadow. Its vegetation is irrigated with groundwater unfit to drink but suitable for plants, a luxury in a drought-plagued city. By nine-thirty, people were stretched out on the soft grass, napping, reading, and revelling in the previous night’s victory.
I rode an outdoor escalator up into the park through a cactus garden beside the Glòries Metro station. The morning was already steamy, and much of the park remained exposed to the bright Catalonian sun. The designers and I took refuge beneath an immense pergola, nearly ten metres high and seventy metres long. Its white-painted metal columns resembled the legs of a giant caterpillar, and, under the shaded bands of its densely lined shell, the air was suddenly tolerable. Skateboarders shot past. Day campers raced toward the meadow. The site was a former highway interchange, in what had once been a large industrial area, and as we stood there it was possible, briefly, to imagine Barcelona finding a way to cool itself.
Climate adaptation offers no easy victories. Beyond the pergola, we entered a vast playground with soft synthetic terrain and a play “mountain” fitted with long metal slides. Nobody was using it. The designers, after getting so much right, had neglected to shade it. The slides were already hot enough to burn.
Spain is hardly alone in struggling with the details. While I was in Barcelona, Tour de France organizers tried to keep riders from overheating by shortening a difficult hill stage and spraying white paint on the road to lower surface temperatures. But the paint allegedly became slippery in the sun, and three riders, including one known as a master of descents, crashed.
The weather had cooled by the time I reached Paris, where the city’s new mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, was focussed on the summer’s three record-setting heat waves, and on those to follow. Moments before our meeting, his press secretary messaged: “Can we do it by bike?” Soon, in the Hôtel de Ville courtyard, Grégoire greeted me in a
smart blue suit, brown sunglasses, and jet-black oxfords. Nearby, someone adjusted a bicycle whose seat turned out to be broken. “Take mine,” Grégoire said, offering me his green Voltaire e-bike. “It’s the best bike in Paris.”
Our first stop was the plaza in front of city hall. The previous year, Paris replaced part of its heat-radiating stone esplanade with a dense urban forest, including more than fifty large trees and twenty thousand shrubs and plants. Beneath a honey locust, Grégoire removed his sunglasses and acknowledged that, although climate adaptation had been central to his campaign, he had not expected so many heat waves so soon. “We spent the last twenty years trying to transform the city, saying we need to adapt it to climate change,” he said. “Now even people who were in doubt about our plans say, ‘Go faster, faster, faster!’”
Grégoire, a forty-eight-year-old Socialist who took office in March, is lean and energetic, with short silver hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and a tendency to race ahead, both on his bicycle and in conversation. He inherited a city undergoing one of Europe’s most ambitious ecological transformations. Anne Hidalgo, his predecessor, spent twenty-five years in city government adding bicycle lanes, reducing car traffic, and expanding pedestrian space. Over the past two decades, Paris eliminated tens of thousands of parking spaces, planted more than a hundred and fifty thousand trees, and added thick vegetation to residential and commercial streets. Car traffic fell by more than fifty per cent, bicycle use tripled, and air pollution plummeted. Paris is cleaner, greener, and healthier than it was at the turn of the century—except when it broils.
We cycled to the pedestrianized promenade along the Seine’s Right Bank, now a four-mile park abuzz with cyclists, joggers, and strolling tourists. Past a climbing wall, a playground, and a beach-volleyball court, we reached an elevated misting station. A shirtless old man luxuriated in the spray while children ran through it, giggling. “Let’s give it a try,” Grégoire said. I followed him in.
“There was real social tension during the heat wave,” he told me, after our clothes had dried with unsettling speed. “People were nervous, anxious, and angry. Dealing with the heat requires improving
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the social situation, not only health. That's why we're making parks like this, and opening new swimming areas."
The most famous new Parisian swimming spot is, improbably, the Seine, which opened to Olympic competitors in 2024 and to the public the next year, after France spent $1.5 billion upgrading the region's sewer, stormwater, and wastewater systems. But Grégoire was referring to the Canal Saint-Martin, which runs through crowded residential neighborhoods. Long polluted, it is now clean enough for swimming. During the heat waves, young people who normally gathered beside it began jumping in.
"I saw videos of policemen running after boys and girls to say it's forbidden to swim," he said. "But people needed a way to cool down, and I needed police doing other things. Now, when the water is safe, we have three new swimming areas in the Seine. They're important for heat waves, but they also stimulate joy and happiness. They improve the quality of daily life."
When I asked what Paris could do for those most endangered by the heat, Grégoire's tone grew sombre. He described programs similar to Barcelona's for reaching socially isolated residents, and acknowledged a need for more mechanical cooling for the elderly. Around two-thirds of excess deaths in France's heat wave this June were of people seventy-five or older. Still, he said, another immediate challenge was protecting children. Nearly all Parisian schools lack air-conditioning or adequate ventilation.
"Until this year, our major heat waves happened during summer holidays," he said. "Now we realize that we will have heat waves in May, June, September, and probably, one day, October. Our schools were not built for this weather, so we need a solution, now."
During Hidalgo's second term, the city began transforming its six hundred or so public preschools and elementary schools. It pedestrianized streets outside entrances, removed courtyard asphalt, and added trees and shade structures. These changes improved outdoor spaces but offered little indoor protection during the May and June heat waves. Classrooms baked. Students took consequential exams in dangerous conditions, and young children returned home dehydrated or ill. Officials had to choose be-
between keeping schools open and sending children to equally stifling apartments. Parents demanded answers.
Since June, Grégoire has launched another round of renovations. "First, we have to keep the heat out of the buildings," he explained, "so we're installing shutters to block the sun. Second, we have to improve air circulation. We're putting in ceiling fans and also creating a specific kind of door"—it's heavily perforated—"that helps natural ventilation at night. Third, we are doing more to shade the courtyards, taking out the asphalt, which gets very, very hot, and making them cooler places to play."
Confessing to an American bias, I asked whether it would be easier and safer to install air-conditioning, perhaps using heat pumps. Grégoire said he supports mechanical cooling in some settings but doubts that its immediate classroom benefits would justify the additional energy use. After this summer, many parents may disagree. Marine Le Pen, the far-right politician running for President next year, has proposed a "grand plan pour la climatisation," presenting air-conditioning as essential to the health of children and older people. Several progressives and Green Party supporters I met in Paris feared that the issue would boost her campaign.
In 2017, a team of climate scientists warned that, by the second half of the century, France could experience a "mega-heatwave," and that, by century's end, it could see temperatures in excess of a hundred and twenty-two degrees. Alexandre Florentin, a forty-year-old climate-policy engineer who grew up outside Paris, encountered the figure in a science paper and couldn't shake it.
"I love what Mayor Hidalgo did for Paris," he told me as we sat beneath beech and plane trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, one of the city's coolest outdoor spaces. "When I was a kid, the air was terrible. I had respiratory problems, asthma, and attempted treatments. Now we have trees and plants on the sidewalks, fewer cars. It's clean and comfortable, and I bike everywhere. I see bees and butterflies on my block. But in Paris we've been acting as if cutting emissions meant we wouldn't have to adapt. Clearly, that was a mistake."
In 2020, Florentin ran for city coun-
colic as a Green and joined Hidalgo's coalition. "I suggested to the Greens that we advance an agenda called Paris at 50°C," he recounted. "We needed to change the conversation so it was not just about mitigation targets, like carbon zero by 2050, because that gave people the impression that they have twenty or thirty years to adapt. We knew about the dangerous conditions in schools before this summer, but we didn't do enough." He paused to watch a duck cross behind our bench. "We need to understand that the future is now."
Florentin and a group of colleagues released a report three years ago. "We had two main policy conclusions," he told me. "First, we cannot adapt everything. We cannot take our whole society and put it in a different climate. We cannot entirely change our infrastructure, our buildings, our ecosystems. We don't have enough money or time. That means we have to prioritize, to pinpoint the things we can do better. Second, we cannot adapt to anything. There is a hard limit. It could get too hot. I don't want to move to Norway and be a climate refugee, but some people are already talking about leaving the city. There's a real risk that we will lose our habitat. That's what this is about."
Afterward, Florentin unfolded his bicycle and walked with me toward the Seine, pointing out planters, pedestrianized streets, and the historic zinc rooftops that Paris may eventually have to surrender. The day was clear and bright, but we were both aware that, as we spoke, ferocious wildfires, strong enough to generate an unprecedented pyrocumulonimbus, or "fire cloud," was tearing through France, forcing vast numbers of people from their homes. He asked what promising interventions I had seen elsewhere. I mentioned urban forests, green axes, water parks, shelters, depaved streets.
He took it in, looked at me intently, and asked, "Have you seen any plans for developing the underground?"
I told him I hadn't.
"Well, we should think about it," he said, "because before long we're going to have three days in a row when the temperature is more than forty-five degrees, or a hundred and thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. When that happens, we're all going to need a place to hide." ♦
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SHOUTS & MURMURS
ADMISSIONS TOUR: BEING A PERSON
BY JESSICA BACAL
Welcome! Let's gather so you can all hear me. It's wonderful that you're applying to Be a Person—and, specifically, that you're applying here! My name is Claire, and I've been leading these tours all summer.
We'll start by looking at an example of housing options, so follow me.
This is a "common space" or "living room." As you can see, it's super cozy—furry beanbag chairs, low tables, big screen. You might use your living room for hanging with friends, scrolling on your phone, gaming, forcing yourself to do yoga, or just holding sad poses while crying. What's awesome is that you decide what to do based on your unique goals, and also on your individual level of dread. It fits our core value of "Self-Direction," which you saw in the PowerPoint earlier.
Moving on to the kitchen: there are also so many ways to personalize the meal plan. You're going to take ownership of your meals, and the choices are endless: vegan, kosher, halal, vegetarian, gluten-free, keto, paleo, Organic and Sustainable, Totally Unsustainable, Handsome Man TikTok, What Zendaya Eats in a Day, American Girl Doll food. I'm picky, and every day I find something. You'll have a card, and you just swipe it for groceries, takeout, what-
ever. There are a bunch of decent restaurants and really something for everyone—I mean, matcha, anyone? If you find yourself up all night, like, scanning thousands of your life mate's personal e-mails, there's food available 24/7! The card swipes will show up on a bill you get at the end of every month—there's always someone who's, like, "Whaaaaaaaat?"
Now I'm going to tell you about the many options for real-world experience, because they're right outside your door: getting your car inspected, pretending you don't see a guy on the street asking for money, or even bringing something to get notarized at a random bank. You'll also have the chance to place yourself in assorted experiences for which you will receive compensation, which aligns with our core value of "Enrichment." A lot of people do finance or law, but there are paths in art or writing as well. For people who choose those, we offer a certificate in self-doubt. Anyway, I'd say that no matter what they do, almost everyone here is driven by a deep sense of responsibility to themselves.
Once you're in a paid experience, there are awesome opportunities to compete with co-workers for stuff like "eye contact from the boss" and "get-
ting invited to the conference in Hawaii." Promotions and raises do happen, unless you work at a nonprofit like I do, ha ha. There are also people here who never participate in paid experiences but somehow have endless swipes on their card—they don't self-identify, but you figure it out, because they choose Danish-modern-furniture shopping as one of their real-world experiences.
Let's keep going. I'll stop at this room with the bed and answer the question that comes up on every tour: How do people match up to live together? So, you'll match based on things like—just for example—how much do you party, how neat are you, do you sleep late or get up early, did you vote for Trump, do you want kids, can you stand each other's families, are you Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, etc. The matching is something you're going to do on your own, based on those preferences.
Another question I always get: What if you match with someone and it doesn't work out? So, this happens, and it even happened to me! First of all, there are counsellors you can talk to in order to deal with issues like these, but you can also just switch to a new match or move to a single. That involves some simple paperwork with a lawyer—I actually did it, it was totally not a big deal. It just turned out that we were on different schedules, and he was secretly having this whole sex thing with a chatbot.
Before we close, I want to tell you about why I chose to be here, and—more important—why I stayed. I mean, when I got here, it just felt like I could be myself. Then, once I was here for a little while, I started to wonder: Who is that self? And then, what is a self? Does anyone have one? And does anything matter? But I realized I just needed to keep busy, and so I started leading these tours, and getting involved in other stuff—intramural Quidditch, Mustard-Tasting Club, rubber-duck racing, which is hilarious because they just bob. There might be alcohol involved sometimes, but you didn't hear that from me! I also started studying computer science so I could install spyware on my ex-life match's computer. Just kidding—kind of! Anyway, I'll leave you at the bookstore, so you won't forget to pick up your "I'm a Person" merch. ♦
LUCI GUTIERREZ
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A REPORTER AT LARGE
THE SCIENTIST'S CHILDREN
A researcher studied a disease in the South Pacific. But his biggest experiment was on the wards he took home.
BY RACHEL AVIV
Every weekday morning, Luwi Ikabala sets up a sewing machine beside piles of sweet potatoes and firewood at the main market in Goroka, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Luwi uses a yellow cooking-oil cannister for a chair. On a good day, he makes enough money from hemming sleeves and mending torn clothes to buy a bag of rice. As he waits for customers, he reads novels, copying passages that he likes into his journal. His favorite author is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He has kept a journal for the past forty years, giving the entries headings such as "Air of freedom," "As I recall her—the past," "About Weakness," and "Who am I?"
Luwi often feels like the "poorest man that ever lived on this planet earth," "a perfect example of a failure." He approaches strangers on the street and asks about their problems, until he sees an opening to "touch them emotionally." He offers advice and then they sometimes give him a little money. One journal entry, headed "Supposed to be somebody," described an encounter with an old friend who'd seen him aimlessly walking the streets of Goroka. The friend didn't understand why Luwi wasn't doing more with his life. But "keeping up with my diary writing," he wrote, made him "at least feel like I am someone—not too big—but someone in my own way."
Luwi, who is fifty-seven years old, took up journal writing at the urging of the Nobel Prize-winning pediatrician and virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, whom he described as "Father of America." Gajdusek lived in Papua New Guinea while researching kuru, a fatal brain disease that existed only in the country's eastern highlands. Until the nineteen-thirties, the people there remained unknown to the outside world. Luwi and his friends used to crowd around Gajdusek's typewriter, their hands on his shoulders and thighs, as he documented their lives: the insects
they ate, their moods, the way they sang to birds. Gajdusek wrote six hundred thousand pages of journals, beginning when he was thirteen and ending weeks before he died, in 2008, at the age of eighty-five. Luwi keeps a copy of the journal in which Gajdusek recorded his birth. "When I was born, Carleton was there to bring me out into the world," Luwi told me.
At times, Luwi feels the urge to write his story "slowly creeping towards my fingertips." After reading "My Secret History," a novel by Paul Theroux, which he'd found in a thrift shop, Luwi got chills. "How I wish to write a story similar to this," he wrote. He wanted to "put all that is in mind into form." Standing over his sewing machine at the market, where I visited him in May, he told me, "My story would start with childhood in a very, very remote area, where an unusual scientist, a man from far, far away, came to live just next to my house." But, as soon as he sits down to write, he finds himself falling asleep.
As Gajdusek entered villages in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the late fifties and early sixties, people called out in a high pitch, "White man is coming!" "People, come, come!" The children were jubilant, he wrote in his journal, but women stayed inside, peering out of their huts. Gajdusek ran a lab at the National Institutes of Health focussed on child development and diseases in what he called the "few remaining societies wherein civilization and the major religions of mankind have not yet set their pattern of imprint upon the social fabric in which the child is reared." He gave lollipops to the children and collected blood and urine samples from them. He also administered antibiotics and bandaged wounds. "Although the people are still current warriors and cannibals, they are well 'under control' and very cooperative," he wrote
to Joseph Smadel, the associate director of the N.I.H.
One per cent of the Fore people, a community of some fourteen thousand in the eastern highlands, were dying each year of kuru; its name, in the Fore language, means "trembling" or "fear." "It is so astonishing an illness that clinical description can only be read with skepticism," Gajdusek told Smadel. The Fore said that the disease was caused by secret attacks from sorcerers. The victims would shiver, laugh excessively, and jerk their limbs; then they would lose the ability to stand or swallow. Most of them would die within a year. Ronald and Catherine Berndt, the first anthropologists in the Fore region, wondered whether the disease could be a psychosomatic reaction to contact with white people. Australian colonial officers had brought new tools, like steel knives and axes, as well as prohibitions—against armed warfare and cannibalism—to some villages. "Social or cultural events," Ronald Berndt wrote, "may have far-reaching effects on the human organism itself, even to the extent of interfering so drastically with it that it ceases to function."
Gajdusek spent part of every year in the highlands—he described it as Shangri-La, the place where he reached the "heights of human happiness"—and learned the Fore language. Luwi's father and uncle helped build him a house about thirty feet from Luwi's family's hut, in Waieti, a hamlet on a mountainside, more than five thousand feet high, with clouds pooling in the valleys below. Gajdusek's house had braided-bamboo walls and a domed roof, made of thatched cogon grass. On the wall, he taped a picture of John Enders—who'd won the Nobel Prize in 1954, for his work on polio—and a print of Titian's portrait of Ranuccio Farnese, the Pope's grandson, who looks too young for his lavish new cloak. "A chief's son from my people's past," he
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As a boy, Luwi moved with Carleton Gajdusek to the U.S. "I am the son of one of the world's greatest scientists," Luwi said.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TAJETTE O'HALLORAN
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explained to anyone who came inside.
Gajdusek took care of kuru patients as they died, then persuaded their family members to let him perform autopsies, rewarding them with axes, blankets, and salt. "I did it at 2 A.M., during a howling storm, in a native hut, by lantern light, and sectioned the brain without a brain knife," he wrote Smadel, after one autopsy. He performed some dissections on the same table where he ate his meals. "Some people said, 'We're not supposed to dig up graves—what is he doing?'" Luwi recalled. "And others were saying, 'Oh, he came to look at the disease, let him look at it.'" Luwi's cousin Rebecca Tarubi, whose father had assisted Gajdusek with autopsies, told me, "People would ask, 'Where are the brains?' And we would say, 'Carleton put them in a little bowl and took them to America.'" Luwi's uncle Koiye used to take brain tissue and internal organs to a colonial aid post with an airstrip. Then the body parts were frozen with liquid nitrogen and shipped to the N.I.H., in Bethesda, Maryland.
Luwi and the other children followed Gajdusek wherever he went, and he often
photographed them. "One of us would carry his film, another the camera case, and a third the tripod, and then we'd set it up," Luwi said. "I had never seen my face before"—there were no mirrors or reflective metals in his village—"and when Carleton showed us his shots we would all be giggling at the type of faces we were carrying around. It was, 'Oh, I have this kind of forehead, I have these kinds of big eyes.'" In one series of photographs, Luwi stands on one foot and sticks out his tongue; another boy wags his butt; a third boy cups his hands around his eyes as if he, too, is holding a camera. The children, who went barefoot and shirtless, tried on Gajdusek's shoes and socks and examined the texture of his skin. "Me masta now," one child told Gajdusek while dressed in his T-shirt and shorts.
The first time Luwi used a pencil and paper was at the encouragement of Gajdusek, who always brought writing supplies, along with marbles and tennis balls, when he came to Waieti and to other hamlets nearby. He collected hundreds of drawings by children in the eastern highlands who were holding a
pencil for the first time in their lives. Having never been exposed to pictures, the children invented their own visual vocabulary. They did not initially compose human figures. Instead, they drew geometric patterns, almost as if "weaving" or "braiding" their way across the paper," Gajdusek wrote. (The drawings are saved at the National Library of Medicine, along with hundreds of thousands of pages of correspondence, journals, and photographs.)
Gajdusek wrote in his journal almost every day, sometimes trailing off as he fell asleep, transcribing thoughts as they turned to dreams. In his house in Waieti, he kept books by Jean Piaget, John Locke, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, David Hume, and Henry James. The "constant fingering through the stack of books and magazines I brought here," he noticed, "has produced an aura about the word and writing which is so intense as to be bewitching." The children began demanding lessons in numbers and the alphabet. They sat on the floor of Gajdusek's house, using cargo boxes as desks. "Thus I come to study the 'primitive' and ruin it with my own sophistication!," Gajdusek wrote in his journal. "Damn it!" When presented with blank pages, the children started drawing rows of even marks that mimicked the appearance of letters. In one drawing, a child covered a page with a sketch of a large book with lines of wavy strokes. Below it, four stick figures, arms raised, held the book aloft, like a sacred offering.
Luwi was about four years old when his mother began complaining of headaches and joint pain. "When sitting up, she trembles and is unsteady," Gajdusek wrote in his journal, in 1972. "She claims that there is a roar like 'water' in her ears." She became so weak that Luwi's father hung a rope from a beam in their hut, directly over her bed, to help her pull herself up. Once, Luwi asked her to get him water, and she hit him with a stick, for bothering her. "That's the only act I remember from the woman who gave me life," he told me.
His grandmother had already died of kuru, a disease that mostly afflicted women and children. "They said we have to be fearful, because kuru sorcerers were moving around the community," Luwi
A 2008 HIPSTER LOST IN THE SANDS OF TIME
said. The sorcerers, it was thought, targeted their victims by stealing bits of their hair, clothes, nails, or feces, and wrapping them in a bundle with leaves. Then they said a spell, beat the bundle with a stick, and left it in muddy ground. As it rotted, the intended victim was supposed to simultaneously deteriorate until death.
Kuru had become so prevalent that in some hamlets there were three men for every woman. For a time, the Fore held almost daily mass meetings to try to ban kuru sorcery. (Other illnesses were also thought to be caused by sorcery, but with a different technique.) "You men are trying to wipe us out," a woman said at a meeting in 1962. A man asked, "Where will you find wives from in the future—if women are completely finished?" There were calls for sorcerers to come forward and repent. In one village, men confessed their acts of sorcery and then put their hands into soapy water, promising that they would never do such things again. But, when kuru deaths continued, there were doubts that the men had told the truth, and the meetings stopped.
Shirley Lindenbaum, an anthropologist working in the region with her husband in the sixties, remembers a neurologist asking, "What do adult women and children of both sexes do that adult men don't do?" She and her husband responded, "They ate the dead." Men generally abstained from human flesh, because it was thought to sap their strength. But Fore women and children ate dead kin as a mourning ritual; it was a way, as one Australian patrol officer put it, to incorporate the dead into themselves and "lessen not only the sorrow, but even the idea, of loss." Lindenbaum and her husband began to suspect that kuru was somehow transmitted through cannibalism.
In the final stage of the disease, people often became incontinent and developed bedsores. "I can still sense the smell," Luwi said. "The human body has a distinct smell that is unbearable." His mother could not accept the idea of people caring for her as she grew increasingly helpless. One day, when she was alone in the house, she made a noose from beaten bark that she used for weaving bags. Lifting herself with the rope dangling over her bed, she hanged herself from the beam.
Luwi recalled being beckoned from the garden. Inside the house, adults were weeping. "My father sat me on his lap, took my right hand, placed it on my heart, and told me, 'Your mother is dead.' That I will always remember."
There were dozens of children in the village without mothers. "I just joined in with the group that was already
suffering," Luwi said. A German missionary's wife taught some of the older girls who had lost their parents how to care for the younger children, including infants. "They were just kids, about nine or ten, and they would come to us and act like mothers," Luwi said. His father quickly remarried and had children with
his new wife. Luwi forgot what his mother looked like, but people told him that he carried her face. Of her suicide, he wrote in his journal, "I have forgiven her for the courage she took."
"The researchers who came to partake in the kuru saga took not only the brains of the deceased kuru victims," Luwi wrote, years later. "They even took the living children." His uncle Mbaginta'o was the first of sixteen children from the highlands whom Carleton Gajdusek brought home to the United States. "Before Carleton, he had never in his life written a word," Luwi said, of Mbaginta'o. "I think this was a study that Carleton took to understand the functions of the mind."
The project was not conceived formally, but Gajdusek wrote declarations, documenting the transfer of guardianship on Department of Health and Human Services letterhead and had colleagues in his lab serve as witnesses before a notary. A section of his C.V. titled "Children (adopted from Melanesia and Micronesia)" listed thirty-six children whom he raised in the U.S., from the sixties through the nineties. Judith Farquhar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago who'd begun her career working in Gajdusek's lab at the N.I.H., said that one of her responsibilities there was to occasionally take the children grocery shopping and to medical appointments, and to handle paperwork for their school
registration and vaccines. She felt that she was assisting with a "noble experiment," though, she added, "it was nothing like a systematic experiment where you'd have a hypothesis and try to prove it." Gajdusek framed his project in philanthropic as well as anthropological terms: he was studying "orchids" of human culture—fragile and soon to be
extinct, but revealing man and his condition as it may never be seen again!"
Gajdusek selected Mbaginta'o, he explained in a legal declaration, because he seemed the "most intelligent and adaptable to civilized society." Mbaginta'o came from the Anga people, then known as the Kukukuku, who lived in a
more remote region than the Fore, surrounded by uninhabited forest and steep mountains. In a college essay that Mbaginta'o wrote years later, edited by Gajdusek, he described the first rite of his initiation into manhood. Awakened by bamboo flutes, he and other boys, some as young as seven, began saying goodbye to the women in their family, whom they wouldn't see again until they grew up. During the next three days, they were struck on the back with sticks, held animal hearts in their mouths, and went to a stream where a blade of cogon grass was stuck up their noses until they bled into the water. On the second day, Mbaginta'o wrote, "the young novices must suck the penises of the older initiated men in order to grow up fast. This homosexual act was to remain a secret of the men, and if it was told to the women, the teller would be killed."
Versions of this initiation practice, which was largely abandoned by the nineties, have been described by anthropologists studying the community. "I have found here in the Western Kukukuku (and I believe that in the past, at least, it was true for the entire Kukukuku) a culture in which pederasty—or pedophilia—has been institutionalized," Gajdusek speculated, in a journal that was typed up by his staff, printed by the N.I.H., and distributed to hundreds of his colleagues.
Not long after his initiation, Mbaginta'o ran away from the Anga people. Both of his parents had died. He began living
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among the Fore, under the care of Luwi's grandfather, calling Luwi's mother his sister. It was there that he encountered Gajdusek. "He was first white man ever met," he wrote later. "He thought me his western worlds and confuse me in my bush life."
With permission from the Australian colonial government, which controlled Papua New Guinea, Gajdusek and Mbaginta'o left the country together in 1963, making a stop in Guam on the way, to visit an N.I.H. lab. Mbaginta'o didn't know his age, but Gajdusek guessed that he was eleven. In the hallway, they passed a morgue where a white corpse was being loaded into a coffin. "Mbaginta'o stopped short at the sight of the body, and beheld it in such amazement that I too was amazed," Gajdusek wrote in his journal. Gajdusek asked what was wrong, and Mbaginta'o responded, "Wait man em i dai tu?"—"The white man, he died, too?" It was only then, confronted with the corpse, Gajdusek wrote, that Mbaginta'o could "suddenly grasp the fact that I, too, belong to a race of mortals."
In America, they were greeted at the airport by Gajdusek's friend Joseph Wegstein, a prominent computer scientist at the National Bureau of Standards. "He was dressed like a boy fresh from a British Colonial office, but instead of stepping out of British Colonial history, he was stepping across 10,000 years of time," Wegstein wrote in a school recommendation. At the airport, Wegstein continued, Mbaginta'o "would not say anything but 'hello,' 'yes,' and 'no.'" In a letter, François Jacob, a French biologist who'd won the Nobel Prize in 1965, wrote that Gajdusek had wanted to see "whether this boy, living in the wild forest, could be accustomed to the modern and sophisticated life."
Mbaginta'o enrolled as a sixth grader at Georgetown Day School. Wegstein tutored him in math three times a week. "His insecurity & anxiety directs him to hard work & quiet withdrawal & diligent attempts to help, to accomplish much, to please!" Gajdusek wrote. Wegstein, who didn't have his own family, prepared meals for Mbaginta'o, bought him clothes, took him sailing, and kept a journal of their time together when Gajdusek was away. After three months in the U.S., Mbaginta'o went with Gajdusek to see the Andrei Tarkovsky film
"My Name Is Ivan," about a twelve-year-old orphan who works as a scout during the Second World War and is visited by dreams of his childhood. Mbaginta'o soon decided that he would adopt a new name, easier for Americans to pronounce: from now on, he would be called Ivan.
Ivan learned rapidly for the first year and then seemed to plateau. One of his tutors suggested to Gajdusek, in Ivan's presence, that he "simply might lack the intelligence and ability to learn more." Gajdusek felt, he wrote in his journal, that Ivan "partly understood" the tutor's words, because he immediately became "repressed & tongue-tied." After the conversation, Gajdusek drove down the highway, sobbing. "I pale at the thought of Ivan's fortune," he wrote. "I foresee real tragedy in it for us both." Addressing Ivan in his journal, Gajdusek wrote, "Even your school mates rebelled at seeing you as a guinea pig!!"
Ivan seemed to understand that he had held more power when he was small. After he began to get acne, Gajdusek wrote that Ivan "cuddled up to me and coyly whimpered that he does not want to grow up, that he wants to stay a little boy. He is seriously hurt if I refer to him as an older boy, a young man."
Gajdusek felt increasingly oppressed by the depth of Ivan's needs—his "clueless pouts and 'hurt' expressions." Once, Gajdusek became annoyed that Ivan, studying for a literature exam, hadn't selected the books that he'd recommended. "I thus exploded, struck him several times and rammed home the truth that he is not graded in his school and is not the legitimate eighth grader he assumes himself to be," Gajdusek wrote. Another time, when Ivan resisted doing his schoolwork, Gajdusek told him that he was ready to "give up" and send him back home. "He cried so intensely & so pitifully, so completely overcome & with such body wracking sobs that I could not stop him," Gajdusek wrote. "He so lifelessly & wretchedly pleaded & sobbed—only getting out 'No Carleton, No Carleton, Plis, Plis, Plis Carleton, No Carleton, Plis.'" After another fight, Ivan ran off at night, and Gajdusek was so frantic with guilt, he wrote, that at 4:30 A.M. he "walked quietly around the house inspecting the branches of the big trees to see if Ivan was not hanging from one."
One night, Gajdusek took Ivan to see
the Japanese film "Kwaidan," a rendering of four supernatural fables. At a restaurant after the screening, Ivan told Gajdusek that he had been seeing people who reminded him of the ghosts in the film. "He was clearly frightened & disturbed & said this spontaneously, complaining that these were not dreams but occurred as visions in the daytime at his desk," Gajdusek wrote. Gajdusek panicked, fearing that "the whole 'experiment' might suddenly disintegrate." The "dreadful spectre of Mbaginta'o hallucinating & having delusions & progressing to fully demented schizophrenia," he wrote, "loomed before me with all its implications . . . all my terrible responsibility." Ivan had confided that in his visions he saw apparitions who were changing physically, growing ugly and old.
Frozen organs from people who had died of kuru were continually shipped to Bethesda: five sets of eyes; seventy-five brain specimens. "How strange to fondle the brain of the infant I so well remember," Gajdusek wrote after the tissues of a one-year-old arrived. Ivan worked in the lab, both as a volunteer and, later, on the N.I.H.'s payroll, and held primates as they were injected with the extracts of kuru victims. Gajdusek had come to the idea of injecting animals after a veterinary pathologist noticed that the brains of kuru patients resembled those of sheep with scrapie, a fatal neurological disease transmitted through exposure to infected tissues. Gajdusek decided to test whether kuru could be infectious, too, a compelling possibility given the Fore's mortuary rituals.
In 1963, Gajdusek's colleague Michael Alpers, an Australian, had performed an autopsy on a child named Kigea. Alpers described her as a "wonderful young girl," who, as her illness progressed, spoke "softly and shyly," eventually only grunting. Liquefied parts of Kigea's brain were put into a chimpanzee named Daisey. Within two years, Daisey became apathetic, and soon her body trembled; then she began huddling, almost catatonic, on a shelf in her cage. Two other injected chimpanzees developed similar symptoms. "Do you think they look as though they had kuru?" Gajdusek, who was in Papua New Guinea, asked Ivan in a letter, in 1965.
Gajdusek and his colleagues con-
40 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 24 & 31, 2026
Gajdusek in the Solomon Islands, around 1963. He later won a Nobel Prize for his research into kuru, a fatal disease.
cluded that kuru had been transmitted to the chimpanzees, and in a paper for The New England Journal of Medicine they announced the discovery of an infectious disease whose behavior could not be explained by existing models of contagion. Kuru had none of the typical signs of infection, such as fever or immune response, and it defied the expectation that sickness would follow soon after exposure. The research suggested that the boundaries of infectious disease had been conceived too narrowly, and prompted scientists to reassess how they approached other degenerative illnesses. A 2013 paper in Pathogens called the discovery “one of the greatest contributions to biomedical sciences of the 20th century.”
The kuru experiments, which won Gajdusek the Nobel Prize in 1976, put him in a position in which people around him rarely said no. “The more brains he acquired,” the historian Warwick Anderson wrote, “the more opportunities he had to build relationships with other scientists, to make them indebted to him.” During Ivan’s first seven years in the U.S., Gajdusek adopted five more children, from Fais, an island in Micro-
nesia with fewer than three hundred people, and from Ulithi, a nearby coral atoll—both places where he had gone to do medical research. Ivan didn’t understand why Gajdusek kept bringing new children home. “It is disappointing me because you never told me about them,” he wrote him, adding, “However, it’s nice of you to bring them here and now so that they can replace me.”
By the time Gajdusek brought his fifth child home, Ivan was at Swarthmore College, where he had been admitted after several of Gajdusek’s friends wrote letters urging his acceptance. At the end of the first semester, a dean called Gajdusek and told him that Ivan could not continue. “The game is up,” Gajdusek wrote. “It is their hope, now that our game of playing with the savage is over, that he will happily become a savage once again to relieve them of all moral responsibility, & me too.” Ivan returned to Papua New Guinea, enrolled in college, and then dropped out. “I know my life is crazy and I just don’t know how to communicate with anybody,” Ivan wrote Gajdusek. “I am very scared about my future life. I do not know what want to become.”
Undeterred, Gajdusek took home a second child from Papua New Guinea half a year later. The German missionary who had settled in the highlands had started a Lutheran school, and Gajdusek asked him to find a good candidate among the students. “It would probably be advisable if his age was just 12 or under,” he wrote in a letter. “This would have the added advantage of half fare on the airlines and would further permit me to even contemplate bringing two.” Gajdusek eventually drew up a list of eight students, and then decided on the youngest child, a twelve-year-old boy. In Tok Pisin, the country’s main language, the boy wrote to his parents seeking permission. “A young master said he wants to take me to America,” he wrote. “He is not taking me to go for nothing. He wants to take me there and he wants me to go to the big school of the white men.”
In the seventies, in the wake of the Tuskegee scandal, a forty-year experiment in which hundreds of Black men with syphilis were studied without their knowledge and denied treatment, scientists began adhering to new regulations to protect human research subjects. But
COURTESY U.S. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
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“They’re in the closet, Gary. And this is the last time I tell you where we keep the skeletons.”
those rules didn’t apply to Gajdusek’s children, because he had incorporated them into his family. “How stupid I feel & how unable to reply, when people start to tell me how generous & how altruistic & how fine it is of me to bring the boys to America for education,” Gajdusek reflected in his journal. “I feel far more comfortable with those who worried, ask me for my real motives & my real purpose.”
In 1975, the year that Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia, Luwi joined the second class of Fore children to attend a new government school in Purosa, a former colonial aid post, a day’s walk from his village. Before the lessons began, he said, “we went out into the bush, chopped wood, brought it back, and made chairs.” Gajdusek had given Luwi a copy of Webster’s Dictionary as a gift, and in his free time Luwi studied it. Some words he found perplexing, like “obliged”—it didn’t sound the way he thought it should.
As colonial administrators and mis-
sionaries had penetrated the highlands, the practice of cannibalism had ended and kuru had begun to recede. When new cases emerged, it was in people who had been exposed to the disease years before. “The scientists never cured anybody,” Luwi told me. “The only remedy they could find was telling people, ‘You have to change your life.’” He associated the end of the epidemic with the coming of churches and schools.
In 1981, Luwi was sitting in class when the headmaster of his school called his name on a megaphone. He and his desk mate, Iggy, were to report to the school office. Gajdusek was waiting there, to take them to the U.S. The headmaster had been reluctant to release them, but “I finally talked him into letting them go since I was now their legal guardian,” Gajdusek wrote in his journal. Two days earlier, Luwi’s uncle and Iggy’s parents had given their consent. Two other Fore children were also joining them. One, an eleven-year-old named Susanna, recalled crying when she learned where she was headed: “Carleton said, I will take you
now, so I begin to cry more and so my mother said, stop crying so I shut my mouth.” In his journal, Gajdusek described her as “trickier than I expected.”
Luwi did not consider whether he wanted to leave. “He just picked us out of the room, and we were confused,” he said. “America was a country where no one could go except through some kind of miracle.” He had only a few minutes to gather his belongings in a cloth sack. The Webster’s Dictionary was too heavy to take, so he slipped it under a friend’s mattress as a gift.
Luwi’s cousin Rebecca, whose family he boarded with in Purosa during the school year, said, “I looked around and I didn’t see him, and I said, ‘Luwi? Where is Luwi?’” A classmate told her, “He’s fully gone. It was just that white man.”
Gajdusek drove Luwi and the other children to Goroka, where Ivan now lived. They spent the night at Ivan’s house. “We were Carleton’s new birds,” Luwi said. Ivan was married, with two children, and worked as the curator of a small museum that collected artifacts from the eastern highlands, like masks and shields. He was skeptical of Gajdusek’s plan. “I and my wife are really discouraging about you for taking too many new boys,” he had written Gajdusek five months earlier. “We would like to know how much are you going to get benefits from all these boys?”
Ivan’s daughter, Louisa, told me that her father had never spoken about his past. All she knew was that he’d been educated in the U.S. “My father doesn’t tell a story about where he came from, where he went. He doesn’t tell a story about anything,” she said. When Louisa asked her father about his time in the U.S., he told her, “Just forget it.”
Ivan took the children to the airport in Goroka and tried to give Luwi some advice about adjusting to the U.S., but Luwi doesn’t remember his words, except that his grammar was “corrupted.” Luwi felt sorry that Ivan hadn’t learned to speak English better. On the planes that took him across the world, Luwi vomited much of the way.
Luwi and the three other children moved into Prospect Hill, a dilapidated eighteenth-century estate in Frederick, Maryland. Five of Gajdusek’s boys were already living there. The house,
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which sat on six acres of land, had eight fireplaces, a gazebo, a volleyball court, and a swimming pool with a diving board, and was surrounded by hyacinths, wisteria, and cherry trees. There were no immediate neighbors and no telephone. Gajdusek described the living conditions as “haughty isolation.” On Luwi’s first day, Gajdusek gave the new children a tour of the N.I.H. “We were in a jungle of foreigners,” Luwi recalled. The next day, Luwi started eighth grade at a local public school.
Wegstein, the computer scientist who had helped raise the first generation of boys, had developed Alzheimer’s. A pediatric hematologist from China named Cheng-Ting Chin, who worked in Gajdusek’s lab, moved into Prospect Hill. She asked Gajdusek to marry her, but in a letter he told her that he needed to be “free of binding personal ties and commitments except to my kids—who are all prepubertal when I pick them—and even with them,” he added, “I want them as adults to reduce me to a memory alone.” The people he really loved, he wrote in his journal, were “the small fish whom I can handle, play with, behold with love and wonder and return to the sea.”
At the dinner table, Gajdusek sometimes read literature aloud for up to two hours. He had a standard list of authors that he pressed on his children: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Maxim Gorky, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence. “Read & read & even take notes or, at least, keep a list of titles & authors & any comments you can make,” he wrote to one boy. He gave the children journals and then spent up to an hour at night correcting their entries. He compared himself to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the fifteenth-century Florentine patron, looking for his Michelangelo.
“At 10:58pm Gajdusek gave me this note book,” Luwi wrote one night, in a green cloth journal stamped with a Federal Supply Service stock number. He began entries the same way Gajdusek did: with the date, the time of day, and his location. “I was dreaming today that this notebook would be the most important book in the future in the History of Luwi,” he wrote, adding, “I don’t know what my wife and children will say if I give them this paper.”
Some entries read like an anthropo-
logical account of suburban American adolescence. On his first day of school in 1984—“George Orwell’s year,” Luwi noted—he observed, “Everyone said to me ‘Happy New Year’ and they also asked me what I got for Christmas presents and asked me also about how my holiday was. It was working good for me.” He internalized the frame through which Gajdusek saw his life. After a fight with Gajdusek about chores, he wrote, “(savages) (savages) (savages).” Luwi can’t remember if Gajdusek was saying that word, or if he had used parentheses because he was imagining Gajdusek’s thoughts.
“Carleton slap me on my chin couple of times, so I walked outside to the trash area and made a big fire and slept in the charcoal,” Luwi wrote after another fight, over who would do the dishes. The next day, Luwi kept to himself, looking through books about Papua New Guinea. One book, “A Study in Nascent Literacy,” comprised letters from his uncle Koye, who had been one of Gajdusek’s most loyal helpers, travelling with him and carrying his equipment. Luwi considered Koye the first person in Waieti to become literate. Koye’s letters, composed when he was in his early teens, read like speeches that had been recorded. “You listen to my message,” the letters often began, as if Koye were standing up to make an announcement at a gathering. He listed people who had died of kuru, expressed how much he missed Ivan, and asked for supplies: ballpoint pens, books, a blanket, a guitar. He ended
the notes by saying “I am Koye” and “That is all. My short message is over.”
Luwi showed the letters to the other children, and they laughed at Koye’s simple writing. “We took it as a joke,” Luwi said. But he felt new respect for his uncle’s metamorphosis. “He was learning to create a message out of thoughts,” he said. That night, Luwi dreamed that he was back in his village, hunting. But
he couldn’t find any animals in the forest to kill. When he returned home, hungry, he wrote, “my father chased us and told us that a man who goes hunting doesn’t come home without anything.” The next day, Luwi had a similar day-dream, but this time the disapproving patriarch was Gajdusek. After going to a store to buy cassettes, he wrote, “I walked back home slowly and dreamed that I was a very primitive boy, hiding in a cave after I saw Carleton.”
Luwi got D’s in algebra and woodshop, and his head almost “burnt down” when he had to stand up in his U.S.-history class and read aloud his paper about the War of 1812. “BOY DO I NEED HELP VERY MUCH,” he wrote in his journal. But Gajdusek was often travelling, or busy with work. There were nights when no adult was at home. He and the other boys poured whiskey in their coffee in the morning, to keep warm as they walked to school. After Gajdusek stormed off one evening, angry that Luwi was being too noisy and hadn’t done the laundry, Luwi wrote, “Good luck Carleton wherever you are out having a nice meal and maybe a glass of champagne but remember we depend on you.”
In his journal, Gajdusek sometimes described sleeping in the same bed, naked, with his children, specifically the younger boys. Luwi said that Gajdusek commented on the growth of his penis and testicles and encouraged him to masturbate. Luwi couldn’t categorize what Gajdusek was doing. “I just kept shut,” he told me. “I could pretend that I was home, in the bush.” His earliest memories of Gajdusek in Waieti also involved sexualized lessons. “He would take us to a safe place where we would feel free, and then ask us, ‘What’s the name of this thing?’” Luwi said. “He would ask about certain plants, the hands, the feet, the genitals. He would grab our balls and say, ‘What do you call this?’”
Colonizers and anthropologists, too, often described foreign lands in erotic terms—as not-quite-real places where they fell in love with people’s differences, as well as their newfound freedom and power. “I run from my work, my associates, my ‘patterned life,’ to find myself—a self growing fierce and strange,” Gajdusek wrote. The scholar Anne McClintock likened the tropics to a “magic
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lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires.” But Gajdusek made these fantasies portable. When he brought the children home, he continued to imagine that an attraction to boys—he recognized that his sexuality made him “an aberrant individual of our species”—could be indulged without harm.
Gideon Waiwaime, who was ten when he came to live with Gajdusek, said that Gajdusek would give him a medical exam a few times a year and squeeze his testicles for a length of time that surprised him. “I just thought that was part of the examination process,” Gideon told me. “So I thought, We will just flow with it.” His roommate, who was older, advised him to “stay away from the old man.” Gideon said that when Gajdusek would pat the private parts of other boys, “We would make fun of it, like, ‘Oh, I saw what the old man did to you.’” He felt that being touched by Gajdusek was “part of the package of coming to America.”
Gajdusek often invited a dozen guests for dinner. “We cooked and prepared everything, like a restaurant for them,” Luwi said. Gajdusek kept a guestbook that was signed by people who visited his house, including the mayor of Frederick; the First Lady of Jamaica; Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who coined the term “fractal”; Ho Wang Lee, who discovered the Hantaan virus; and Göran K. Hansson, who was part of the Nobel Assembly for more than two decades and eventually became its secretary. As a Nobel laureate, Gajdusek was entitled to nominate other doctors and scientists for the prize, and visitors jockeyed to be “on the list,” as Gajdusek put it. At the end of the meals, Luwi said, “we’d ask if we could make them coffee or get them ice cream.” Ephraim Katzir, a biophysicist and the fourth President of Israel, wrote Gajdusek in a letter, “It was wonderful to see how you succeeded in transforming your ‘kids’ into a cooperative children’s society.”
Gajdusek was frequently invited to international medical conferences, and sometimes he took the children with him. On a trip to Italy, where he gave three lectures, he and Luwi both wrote down the make of the vehicle they rented, the time they checked in to their hotel, the straits they crossed in a ferry, the peo-
ple who drove them, and the views from the windows—in almost identical terms. (Not all of Gajdusek’s children took to their diaries with enthusiasm. “My feeling was very questionable,” a boy from Tobi, a Micronesian island less than a mile long, wrote once. “I was not trying to remember anything.”)
Luwi and the other highland boys sometimes attended Gajdusek’s lectures about kuru, and Luwi sensed that their presence gave him more credibility. The children of mothers who died of kuru were at risk of developing the disease, too, since they had often taken part in mortuary feasts together. “It could already be in my system,” Luwi said. “So they would just do a study on me, and it would be a good study, because, instead of those studies they did on the chimpanzees, they will have a real specimen in Washington.”
During Luwi’s third year in the U.S., Gajdusek read Henry James’s first two novels, “Roderick Hudson” and “Watch and Ward.” Both novels are about “would-be benefactors” who are “basically sexually crippled, gifted persons,” Gajdusek observed. He was struck by James’s insights about “the sense of undeserved obligation, and imprisonment or slavery or mind washing” in youth drawn into a benefactor’s orbit. He copied several lines from “Roderick Hudson” into his journal. “May I learn ever better to produce freedom in adolescence & not bondage in all the kids I touch,” he wrote.
During high school, Luwi mostly disappeared from Gajdusek’s journals. He appears largely in lists of boys: going to a museum; playing soccer; navigating jet lag; obtaining college brochures; talking to Gajdusek, as they drive sixty miles per hour on the New Jersey Turnpike, about people dying from kuru at home. The children dissolve into a collective. “We the lads of the Pacific/Our Island very wide,” one boy wrote in a poem. “When the doctor came to visit, We followed for the ride.”
Gajdusek often wrote about the ways in which “relationships of long standing slowly fall apart and disintegrate from neglect or directly destructive action,” adding, “This fascinates me and since I am increasingly a part of such alienations I look at them in awe.” He noted, “It re-
remains as always, the ‘denouement’ that are the problem.”
Luwi became one such source of trouble. In the fall of 1986, he went to Paul Smith’s College, in upstate New York, where he remembers being among only a handful of students who weren’t white. He drank heavily and didn’t do his schoolwork. After a year, he flunked out. He told Gajdusek, “I cannot stay around this place anymore. I just want to go home.” Gajdusek, who recognized that Luwi’s year in college had “injured his ego,” bought him a ticket to Papua New Guinea.
The night before his departure, Luwi’s friends threw a party at a park and he stayed up all night drinking. When Gajdusek saw him early the next morning, he wrote, Luwi was “in tears & at times near to rage in inebriated disequilibrium, crying that I avoided him & ‘never talked with him.’” A few hours later, Gajdusek took him to the airport and waved at him from the departure lounge as Luwi cried. “I am very glad that he is off,” Gajdusek wrote.
That same day, Gajdusek’s newest ward, Daniel, arrived from Micronesia. He was nine years old, the son of a man who had been one of the first generation of boys from Micronesia to come to the U.S. “I am in love with Daniel!” Gajdusek wrote, two days after Luwi left. “He is a wonderful, bright & alert & non-demanding small boy.”
Luwi returned to Papua New Guinea feeling as if he had nothing to show for himself except for a “raw body.” He stayed at Ivan’s house, in Goroka, and worked at a store that sold food and tools. He didn’t want to talk about his time in the U.S. “The explanations we use in English are different from the native tongue,” he said. “In the native tongue, you have to collaborate with many, many words, and it could fall into a heap of words and still I cannot break it down.”
Luwi was disoriented by how much had changed in the years he was gone. “As in the States, money is becoming ‘everything’ here in Papua New Guinea,” he wrote to Gajdusek. He remembered an egalitarian way of living, but he discovered that wantoki—a Tok Pisin word meaning “one talk,” or people who speak the same language—no longer “give away garden foods for nothing as it was in the old days.”
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SAINT PAUL
All my friends have their gods & their heavens & their plans on how to get there. They forfeit sex for Lent, pork for life, they light incense, they light candles, they offer fruit to the dead. Is this the right time to confess that once I bit a boy for calling me a Buddhist? Never mind I was six & did not know what Buddhist meant, never mind we were inside a Buddhist temple. For so long, I thought god was played by a rotating cast of my dead. For so long, god was a boy with a ring of keys on his belt loop. I never had as much faith as I did then, but I never talked to god as much as I do now—now that my want is just the want of birds. At some point, someone invited me to Easter, then to Seder, then to Eid & for a night I talked to Andrew's god, & for a night I talked to Sam's god. I talked to Saf's god. I was a wick lit by any god that wandered by—an appetite primed for the miracles of others. & then Paul got sick & then got better, & I said thank you thank you. Paul & I are from a city first named after a bootlegger & then renamed after a saint & when he died, I caught a flight to a city only he knew, where the humidity flattened the pleats I'd ironed into my pants. All my life, I've bled my humiliations, made saints of boys in bad lighting, never considered heaven, only good weather. But since all my dead have been called home by different gods, I know they're not, like I imagined, all waiting in the same place for me. For so long, I thought I could get through by throwing my faith in the general direction of any pulpit. Thank you friends for showing me your gods, & thank you gods for showing me my friends, but the heaven I choose is a heaven I can leave.
—Hieu Minh Nguyen
Luwi's desk mate from the highlands, Iggy, had come back to Papua New Guinea with an American college de- gree, and he'd found a job in government. But most of the other highland boys re- turned "naked," as Luwi's cousin Rebecca put it. (One boy ended up settling in the U.S.) Sena Anua, who had gone to Amer- ica a year before Luwi, had also failed out of college and returned to his village. "I was ashamed to present myself before my family at home," Sena told me. Gaj- dusek had given him and his siblings the "map of life," he said, but most of them "didn't find the gate to that land."
A few of Luwi's classmates who had stayed in the highlands became police officers, health professionals, and teach- ers, and Luwi felt that his prospects would
have been better if he'd never left for the U.S. He decided to go back to school, at the Divine Word Institute, on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. Gajdusek paid the school fees. But Luwi was still drinking, and, after a year, his grades weren't high enough to continue. "I guess I am just a born failure or loser," he wrote Gajdusek. "I thank you very much for your efforts in trying to get me back on track but I just couldn't."
He moved home to Waieti. In his journal, he called it "the back page." He married a cousin, but Waieti was differ- ent than he remembered. "Today, you could hardly hear a human sound of chil- dren playing or people chanting or sing- ing," he told Gajdusek. Several families had moved to other villages or coastal
areas. The center of Waieti had been taken over by wild grass.
Luwi occasionally travelled two days from Waieti to Goroka so that he could buy books from a thrift shop. "I laugh at myself," he told me. "Who do I think I am? What am I trying to prove?" He carried the books home in a military backpack. As he passed people on the road, he said, they'd call out, mockingly, "Where is that soldier man going?" He understood that what they meant was "You were in America, and now you are unemployed?" "The best thing for me to do was just to listen and walk on, be- cause I cannot disagree with these peo- ple," he told me. In his journal, he wrote, "I am doing nothing but planning a plan for a plan to carry out a plan—plan-plan- plan-plan-plan."
Luwi was on the verge of declaring himself "UNFIT" to live up to this so- ciety," he told Gajdusek in a letter. But, he added, "my biggest hope and a dream that I always think of is of writing." He asked Gajdusek to send him pens and pads of paper, and to share the titles of "books that have something to do with social aspects of human life." Luwi wrote, "Just give me a name and I will take them up." Sometimes, when the weather was dry, he spent nights in the forest, in order to catch birds of paradise, known for their extravagant, jewel-like feathers, which he sold. He made a hut there with a leaf roof, and, when he heard the sound of flapping wings, he shot at the birds with arrows he'd made from umbrella spokes. As he waited in the hut, he said, "I made a hole in the forest so the light shined in, and started writing. I put my mind to the pages of my journal, explain- ing myself to myself."
By the nineties, Gajdusek's lab had infected hundreds of animals with neurological diseases that resembled kuru. It had gradually become clear that the infectious agent in kuru and simi- lar neurodegenerative diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and fatal fa- milial insomnia, was a misfolded pro- tein called a prion—a word coined by Stanley Prusiner, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who in 1997 won a Nobel Prize for his discovery. Prusiner had studied kuru and, after a visit to the highlands in 1980, he had brought Sena Anua to the U.S.,
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as a favor to Gajdusek. Sena was nine. "Stan says he is amply rewarded by the experience of bringing him to his first elevator, first hotel, first zoo, first restaurant," Gajdusek wrote in his journal.
Mark Godec, a fellow in Gajdusek's lab, said that, when he saw Gajdusek at the N.I.H., "he was usually surrounded by a half-dozen boys, some of whom looked no more than nine or ten." Godec decided to read through Gajdusek's journals from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, which were stacked on a shelf. "They were right there, up above my desk," he told me. He was shocked by the number of prepubescent children who Gajdusek seemed to think had been "flirting" with or "seducing" him.
Judith Farquhar, the University of Chicago anthropologist who had worked in Gajdusek's lab, had warned Gajdusek years earlier that it would be better to privately print his more personal journals, rather than to rely on the N.I.H. to fund the process and to use its staff to transcribe and bind them. "Discussions that may look veiled to you look pretty transparent to me," Farquhar wrote. When I asked what had concerned her, she said, "Well, of course, it was the threat of suspicions of sexual misconduct." She said that as Gajdusek had aged, he'd kept confessing his sexual interests "to the point that all of us were completely bored by it."
When Godec asked colleagues what they made of their lab chief's behavior, he said, "it was clear that a consensus had been arrived at: this is none of our business." In 1995, after working in the lab for several years, he brought a box of Gajdusek's journals to Senator Nancy Kassebaum, the chair of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, which oversaw the N.I.H. He had put Post-it notes on the pages where there were sexual descriptions of boys. Godec told me, "I realized I'm in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the N.I.H. by a Nobel laureate for thirty years." (In the eighties, police in Maryland had investigated Gajdusek after at least one American man, the son of an N.I.H. colleague, complained of being sexually abused in the sixties, as a child, but the case had been closed when the police couldn't find recent victims.)
The Office of Inspector General and
the F.B.I. opened investigations. Frank Adelman, an agent for the O.I.G., began interviewing scientists in Gajdusek's lab, but they were "terribly protective," Adelman told me. "They didn't see anything wrong with what Gajdusek was doing. They thought the man was a saint." David Asher, a scientist who had worked in Gajdusek's lab for twenty-five years, told Adelman, "Whatever Gajdusek has done, he has done it openly and with
the full knowledge and consent of the management of N.I.N.D.S."—the section within the N.I.H. focussed on neurological conditions.
By the early nineties, Gajdusek had nine children and young adults in his home, and he no longer believed his educational program was going to produce a "Rimbaud or a Baudelaire," he wrote. "I am not a gardener who can prune out, rather an ecologist faced with preservation of the human wilderness." Some of the children were getting into fights at school; others were shoplifting and drinking. They threw pool parties that lasted until dawn. "I don't want you to ending up like some of Carleton's boys, who are now not doing any important things for themselves," Ivan wrote to his daughter, Louisa, who was living in Gajdusek's house. Ivan had also sent his son, named Carleton, but he was arrested for theft and, rather than face charges, returned home. Kelly Watson, a professor at West Virginia University who writes about colonialism and is working on a book about Gajdusek, went to high school with some of the boys at the time. She said that they had been known for the rowdy parties they threw. Gajdusek's house was seen as a place to drink and do drugs.
An F.B.I. agent began trying to interview the children, but the only one who spoke freely was a twenty-three-year-old whom I'll call Michael. He had met Gajdusek in Pohnpei, a volcanic island in Micronesia, when he was fourteen. His departure was arranged so
quickly, Michael told me, that he never said goodbye to his parents. In America, Gajdusek quickly found ways to touch him. "Being a doctor, he could say, 'Hey, come here. I need to check you, because you've got to make sure your medical is clear,' or whatever," Michael said. "I didn't understand it. I was always finding reasons to explain it to myself."
In his journal, Gajdusek described Michael as "aloof in a strangely disturbing way," often "slinking into the house" without announcing his arrival. "I detect a certain rage," Gajdusek noted. After a fight, Michael said he wanted to go home, explaining, Gajdusek wrote, that "he has always wanted to anyway, it is me who is holding him here." By the time Michael was in college, Gajdusek acknowledged that the relationship was "pathological," but he blamed Michael. "I keep hoping and praying that he will resolve his peculiar conflicts with me," he wrote.
Michael agreed to secretly record a conversation with Gajdusek for the F.B.I. In 1996, he called Gajdusek at his lab and said that investigators had been trying to question him.
Gajdusek was about to leave for Paris for a conference on prion diseases, where he would give the keynote lecture. He told Michael that he should simply say that he was never molested.
"So you want, you want me to, like, lie to them?" Michael asked.
"Yes," Gajdusek said. "Absolutely."
"Well, now that I'm thinking about it, I wanna know why."
"What?"
"I wanna know why you did it to me."
Gajdusek switched to a private line in his office. "Look," he said. "If you go on and talk to people about that, you're gonna get us in so much trouble that you're gonna close the life down for the kids at college, close my accounts down. I'll have to go out of the country. Catch on?"
"Don't you understand that what you did to me, you know, possibly has to do with a lot of why I'm so disturbed while I'm here in America?"
"I played around with my uncle as a kid," Gajdusek said. "I played around with my brother." He said that kids in Micronesia and Papua New Guinea did the same thing.
"I don't know where you learned that from," Michael said. "You're the first one
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who did it to me." He recalled how Gajdusek "did oral sex" on him "many times in different places." He asked, "Didn't you realize that I didn't want to do it?"
"No, that I didn't," Gajdusek said.
"I was scared. You were hurting me."
"Oh, I didn't know," Gajdusek said. "I apologize, and I'm very sorry." He said that he wished Michael had told him earlier. "The story is . . . that I am . . . a person who has a very difficult, great private life. I'm trying to find how to identify, and I tried to . . . transpose it like a priest or a nun to—"
"Carleton, I'm getting the feeling that you brought us here just . . . for your . . . own purpose," Michael said.
"Oh, Jesus," Gajdusek said.
"That's what I'm getting from you," Michael continued. "I don't know about the girls, but all the boys in the house—I know they tend to joke about stuff like that, and we're trying to keep it in the house, 'cause in some way we tried to protect you." He asked Gajdusek, "How long have you been doing this?"
"All my life," Gajdusek responded. But he said that he was as committed to his children as any American parent.
"You know, other people could make as much commitment and have good results," Michael said, adding that he had "studied carefully the statistics" and that only a fraction of the boys Gajdusek had raised were doing well.
"Well, I managed to take care of an awful lot of people who are grateful," Gajdusek said.
"They took care of themselves like we are doing right now," Michael said. "If you think taking care of kids is throwing money in their hands and—"
"I don't throw money around," Gajdusek said. "I give time. Time and attention."
"No, attention is the last thing you give to any of us," Michael said.
Gajdusek was arrested three weeks later, on his way back from the trip, during which he had received his twelfth honorary doctorate. He was charged with two counts of child abuse. Another boy from Micronesia, who had been eleven when he came to the U.S., had said that he, too, was molested. Not long after he gave a statement, though, his father and uncle went to Maryland to get custody of him and take him home. The boy retracted what he'd said.
Luwi told me that Tok Pisin does not have a term for "sexual abuse." "Such matters are never openly discussed or thought about in our community," he said. "We knew there were limitations, that Carleton had some ways of approaching us," but Luwi did not consider himself a victim. "It would appear in my journals," he told me. "I would have written about it." His journal, he said, was proof of Gajdusek's character. Luwi understood Gajdusek to be a "child lover," but he couldn't separate the attention he hadn't wanted from the attention that had made him who he was.
"I know I want to become like you—not in your big ways and your name, but in my own little way," Luwi wrote Gajdusek, as soon as he learned of his arrest. "CARLETON IS ANOTHER KIND ALTOGETHER—HE IS LIKE AN IDOL, OR LIKE GOD." He went on, "If I were the angel at the gates of heaven, deciding the fate of men, Carleton, you would pass through the gate on a mattress of comfort accompanied by a thousand angels with music that would just sweep you away into everlasting happiness in Paradise."
At least ten of Gajdusek's adopted children also wrote letters of sympathy and support, but implicit in their praise was a different sort of injury. "I saw in you all I wanted to see and all I wanted to be," one wrote. "For the rest of my life I've had to try to reconcile that with what I am."
In his journals and in letters to colleagues, Gajdusek was self-righteous,
arguing that what he'd done was "no more serious than lying on the grass or picking a dandelion," and he cited the Anga initiation rites as justification. These ceremonies had brought boys into their communities, as part of a shared passage into manhood, but Gajdusek treated them as a timeless license for the acts that he'd committed privately, one boy at a time. George Klein, a professor at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, who was part of the Nobel Assembly for thirty-six years, validated Gajdusek's opinions, telling him that he wondered if "the Western world can 'catch up with you.'" He wrote, "I share your indignation about the typically Jewish-Christian-Moslem hypocrisy on sexual matters." Gajdusek was troubled, though, by how many colleagues wrote letters saying that they knew the charges must be untrue. "I thought better of my friends," he said. "They are dissimulating and lying."
In February, 1997, Gajdusek pleaded guilty. As part of his agreement, he would serve only a year in jail, at the Frederick County Detention Center, and he could leave the country upon his release. The prosecutor, Scott Rolle, told me, "The rest of the case fell apart when the potential victims were squirrelled away and disappeared back to the Western Pacific." Ivan had flown to the U.S. to retrieve Gideon Waiwaime and another child, who had both been placed in foster care following Gajdusek's arrest. After Gideon returned to his village, he wrote
"The city has really changed. When I was a kid, that coffee cup wasn't there."
Gajdusek a poem that began, “This is the end of me but you live on.”
Gajdusek enjoyed jail. “I find myself more productive and hedonistically lost in essay writing (thousands of pages) and reading and studying than ever before in my life,” he wrote. His year of detention, he realized, could be his “longest and best Journal.” He marvelled at the “great efficiency” of incarceration. The sink and toilet were just feet from his bed. Meals and mail were delivered to his door. “How the time in jail has flown by!” he wrote. “I have more books than I can use and access to inter library loan without leaving my seat.”
The N.I.H. did not fire Gajdusek; instead, he was allowed to resign. Robert Gallo, an AIDS researcher and at the time one of the most widely cited scientists in the world, helped arrange an office for him at the Institute of Human Virology, at the University of Maryland, and invited him to join the editorial board of its journal. In jail, Gajdusek continued publishing academic papers. He wrote in his diary that Gustav Nossal, the president of the Australian Academy of Science, had assured him that he was working to secure an appointment for him at the Australian National University. (The position never materialized.) E. Fuller Torrey, one of the country’s best-known schizophrenia researchers, assisted with smaller matters, like checking to see if Gajdusek was permitted a twenty-pound copy of the Cambridge Shakespeare in his cell.
On the day of Gajdusek’s release, friends, including the neurologist Oliver Sacks and the physicist Freeman Dyson, met him at the jail, along with four of the children he had brought up. “Whatever he may or may not have been doing, it was clearly not bad for the kids,” Dyson said in an interview for a 2014 book titled “Great Minds.” Dyson said that he had three heroes: Richard Feynman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gajdusek. “When he came out of jail, the first thing he said was ‘They broke Oscar Wilde, but they did not break me,’” Dyson said. “So he is definitely a hero.”
The evening of his release, Gajdusek took a flight to Paris, where a French research center, the Institut de Neurobiologie Alfred Fessard, had arranged for him to have his own office. The institute also published the journal he had
kept the year of his arrest. It was titled “Ascent to the Zenith Was Magnificent: Denouement Was a Bit Difficult.”
In 2011, Luwi learned of rumors in his village that he was a sorcerer. The wife of a local councillor, an elected village representative, had suddenly died. Luwi assumed that the woman had a disease that was never properly diagnosed. “There is a reason why people die,” he wrote in his journal. But villagers said that he had caused her demise.
Despite the end of kuru, sorcery accusations had persisted, spreading to places where they hadn’t previously been part of the belief system. In many regions of Papua New Guinea, the accused were vulnerable, marginalized women, but in the highlands accusations were sometimes made against men who were seen as accruing unfair advantage or prestige, or who stood apart from the group. Miranda Forsyth, a scholar at the Australian National University who studies sorcery violence in Papua New Guinea, said, “Sorcery accusations are intensely related to jealousy, to the sense that some people have access to things that others don’t have. It’s a way of making sense of new inequalities in a society that had never previously had these differences.”
Luwi said that, after kuru ended, the first person in his village to be targeted as a sorcerer was his uncle Koiye. In 1993, Koiye, who had been living in Gajdusek’s abandoned house, was accused of using secret powers to cause another man’s death. A group of men shot him with arrows—three of them landed in his chest—and chased him out of the village.
Luwi, who moved into Gajdusek’s house after Koiye fled it, spent years keeping his distance from his uncle, so as not to attract suspicion, too. In his journal, in 2011, he listed points that had become the “base for my accusers”: he’d played cards with an unusual amount of money at the woman’s funeral; he’d been bitten by her husband’s dog. “Oh please God! Help me,” he wrote. “I am pure—innocence—not even a clue in the death!”
Luwi decided that it was no longer safe to go to funerals, where suspicions often festered. “Information gathered here makes up a strong support/base for accusations,” he wrote. But, in 2013, when a close friend died, Luwi, who had four children, could not stay away. He put his
friend’s wooden casket in front of his house so that people could pay their respects. The coffin was covered with mud, and, before bringing it inside his house, Luwi cleaned it off with a bucket of water and a sponge. “This was my greatest mistake, which almost cost me my life,” he said. “The people who were looking at me as a sorcerer—it confirmed that I had killed this man, too.”
Two months later, Luwi was playing cards with friends under a tree when a man came from behind and struck him in the head with a machete. “The Day I was Chopped” was the next entry in his journal. The wound in his skull was five centimetres deep and twelve centimetres long. Lying in a hospital bed in Goroka, he wrote, “I still see the man running & jumping over my flower beds. I keep asking myself the reasons why I was chopped like a hog.”
Luwi was hospitalized for nearly three months and required several blood transfusions. He couldn’t understand how people could think that he, of all people, would practice sorcery. “I am the son of one of the world’s greatest scientists,” he said. “Carleton did not teach me to be a sorcerer.” In his journal, Luwi wrote, “If they still cannot figure out the kind of man I am, I have left them at the house more than 10 years of my diary records of my life. . . . That should help them to assess me more.” But his house had been looted, his belongings, including two decades’ worth of journals, redistributed or destroyed.
By then, Gajdusek was dead, his journals documenting his physical decline preserved at the National Library of Medicine. “I carried my lifelong pederasty into my medical career and succeeded in both with very few failures,” he wrote, two months before he died. “Without protectors I would never have succeeded.” He had spent the last decade of his life living in Europe and travelling for lectures and conferences. “Yes, I have lived a full life and with all the weirdness and quirks of my health and my personality,” he wrote, “I managed to twist it into an adventurous, almost mythological one, and for that I can only rejoice.”
Luwi told his wife and children to consider him part “dead man.” They had been chased away from Waieti and had had to settle in a new village. Luwi’s
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SKETCHBOOK BY ROZ CHAST
A CROSSWORD ODYSSEY
R. Chast
49
source of income, a coffee garden, went unharvested. He stayed in Goroka, because he was not medically stable enough to be far from a hospital; he could no longer do physical labor. He missed his children so much that he liked to imagine that they were sending him messages—“sang to me by the birds,” he wrote.
He was dizzy and wobbly when he walked. “I will always be ‘that man,’” he wrote in his journal. “There he is—yes, that’s him.” His vision was blurred, and his body throbbed. “I cannot relate all these pains to a more soothing example than that of the dying kuru patients that I had witnessed,” he wrote. “The pains I saw them going through and the laughs children had watching them stumble to ground.”
Luwi still has a photograph of his skull wound, taken three days after the attack, as well as the medical record of his hospital stay, inserted on the first page of his journal, a black leather note-
notebook with a snap. He lives in a shack that he built on the outskirts of Goroka, hanging canvas over sticks to create a veranda. He sleeps on a strip of foam. He shares the space with his sixth-grade teacher, whose class he’d been in before he disappeared to the U.S. “I decided to take him in so that I could continue to learn from his feedback,” Luwi told me. “My teacher’s children say, ‘You two are a good father and son.’”
I had looked for Luwi after reading his American journals from the eighties, which were archived at the National Library of Medicine. The first time he and I spoke, using the phone of Antonia Mission, a reporter in Goroka who had helped me find him, Luwi brought his current journal to the screen. “Every year I keep completing one of these,” he said. He sat on a bench in the sun, leaning against a mustard-yellow cinderblock wall. He told me that he still gravitated to the authors Gajdusek had recommended, and he summarized an idea
he’d taken from Dostoyevsky: “Happiness cannot be earned by a reasoned plan of existence,” he said, “but must be earned by suffering.”
About six weeks later, I flew thirty-three hours to Goroka to meet with him and other men who had been brought up by Gajdusek. Luwi was waiting outside the fence of the airport, which is situated in the center of Goroka, its runway stretching almost as long as the town itself. He walked with a well-disguised limp and wore a cap that read “Jesus Is Lord, Christ” covering his wound. Sena Anua and Launako Wate, another man who had lived at Prospect Hill, were standing next to him. They had travelled several hours, by bus and on foot.
“May I openly express my feelings?” Sena, a subsistence farmer, asked me, on my first morning in town. “You are here on his scribbles,” he began, referring to Luwi. Then he told him, “You lead. I’m only here to back you up. I have never been proud, but I am proud of you, and I want you to know that I am behind you.” For the rest of the day, Sena, who had the bearing of a professor and seemed accustomed to an audience, wouldn’t say more than a sentence or two about himself. He, too, had a story he wanted to tell: Sena’s father had assisted Gajdusek with autopsies—he was known as the “thief man” or “grave looter”—and Sena, who had also helped kuru researchers with their work, felt that he and his father had not been properly credited. But he refused to share more than a few details. Understanding that stories are seldom told from more than one perspective, he didn’t want to diffuse Luwi’s claim. “I will explain, but only to a limit,” he said, when I asked him a question. Launako was even more deferential. In the course of six hours, he said just a few words.
Since the machete attack, Luwi had begun writing with a new purpose. After investigating why he was targeted—he believed suspicion first fell on him after a land dispute—he decided to “carefully assess and evaluate . . . my 17 years residency in my village,” he wrote, so that he could understand why sorcery retained such force. There are no reliable data about the number of sorcery-related attacks in Papua New Guinea, because victims and witnesses, fearing
“And, of course, my favorite thing to do with the boat is sail out to open water and scream, and scream, and scream.”
retribution, seldom report these crimes, and police officers often share the accusers' beliefs. But ethnographers and aid workers say that attacks against suspected sorcerers have risen in the past half century, becoming more public and improvised, and no longer following inherited traditions. The hospital in Goroka where Luwi was treated published a report, in 2004, describing how an increasing number of families were requesting postmortem examinations, to determine if sorcery was the cause of a relative's death (through the removal of organs, poisoning, or other means). "Who are the leaders—how we bury our dead—it is time to look to dig up how we basically live," Luwi wrote in his journal.
He believed that the kuru researchers had failed to address the problem their research was supposed to resolve. "The white men did not understand how sorcery is embedded in the system of life," he said. The kuru epidemic had ended, but premature deaths continued; according to one count, one in eight children in the eastern highlands died before the age of five. Scientists had not offered a compelling enough theory of illness to replace the old ones. "America and the world can brag about the kuru studies and the many, many prizes, but what was the outcome of those studies?" Luwi asked. "They took a handful of us to America to be educated, but something could have been done for the community—they built no school, no clinic, no project for women to be who they can be." He told me, "They took what they wanted and left us with an empty bowl."
Gideon Waiwaime, who had been in the U.S. with Gajdusek for five years, said that once he was back home, in the Anga region, when people fell sick, the limits of what could explain it felt different: "It's hard to say whether it's a natural-born disease or they're trying to kill you." His father, after years of carrying Gajdusek's belongings, had been accused of being a "poison man" and had had to flee their village. Then, when Gideon was working at a school in his village, he was targeted, too. He saw men running toward him with machetes. "They tried to catch up with me, but I was faster than them," he said. He ended up escaping to Port Moresby,
the country's capital, but he couldn't find work there.
It seemed to Gideon and Luwi that an uncanny number of boys who had worked with, or been brought up by, Gajdusek were labelled sorcerers. Perhaps some of the same qualities that had drawn Gajdusek to them, and that they had then cultivated in the U.S.—aspiration, independence, boldness—also made them recognizable as sorcerers. "Those who do not comply with the village's ideas or thoughts—the village has to find a way to eliminate them," Luwi said.
After my visit, Gideon, who lives in a settlement near the Port Moresby airport, texted me that he had spent the day watching "dark clouds of smoke rising." His brother-in-law had been accused of sorcery, and his home had been set on fire. Gideon heard that his own name was on a list of people marked to be killed. He stayed inside his house. "I am always locked up," he wrote me. "My best way is to watch every step I take and not trust anyone, unless I am out of PNG then I will be free. All of us (Carleton's kids) are not safe here."
Luwi plans for his autobiography to be titled "U-Turn," he said, "because I have been going, going, going, and then I decided to turn around and see how I walked." He told me, "Carleton spent time observing us, but our people were also watching Carleton. So the story was both ways." He said that Gajdusek used to walk in the graveyard in Waieti at night; Luwi still wonders what exactly he was doing. Some people, he said, theorized that "Carleton is one of our dead relatives, and now he's here with us, communicating with spirits." Luwi wanted to compile the villagers' memories into a report, creating an archive of his own. He wrote in his journal, "I hope to interview every citizen of the village where Carleton lived the good part of his life—what they recall of Carleton in those days, where they went and what they did and how they felt about Carleton."
Ivan had already died, in 2005, from an asthma attack. He went to the hospital in Goroka to use a nebulizer, as he had done many times before, but there was a shortage that day. "I am thinking about my life story and I will write about
how you brought me up from a Primitive culture to the Modern world," he wrote Gajdusek in a letter. "Maybe you can help me to write this story. What do you think?" But his daughter, Louisa, said that, even at the end of his life, her father's past remained a mystery to her. "Only Carleton knew and wrote the story in his journals," she said.
Gideon was working on telling his story, too. "She left the land where autumn softly falls,"/To seek the echoes hidden in my walls," he wrote in a poem after my visit. In the U.S., he'd identified as a writer—Gajdusek had mused that Gideon was "perhaps the only creative one of my dozen of younger kids"—but when he returned to Papua New Guinea, after Gajdusek was arrested, he lost his inspiration. Following our conversations, though, he began writing again—a memoir, as well as a flurry of poems, twelve of which were titled "Tribute to Carleton Gajdusek." Each of the tributes, written in the span of thirteen days, expressed different registers of ambivalent gratitude for Gajdusek's "sacrifice" for taking him in as his child. "What have you gotten out of this?" he wrote. "Have you made a perception of my story?" The poems captured the pain of being equipped for a life he couldn't have. Twice, he wrote, "I wish I were not myself to begin with."
Luwi also struggled with the sense that what he had lived through, though it had altered the course of science elsewhere—a third Nobel Prize, stemming indirectly from Gajdusek's kuru work, was awarded in 2002, to a Swiss chemist who'd determined the structure of prions—left little mark in Waieti and beyond. Years earlier, Luwi had fought to change the name of his children's primary school to Gajdusek Memorial Community School. His proposal was rejected. Still, he had other plans for stirring people's memories. Grass had grown over Gajdusek's house, and it had become part of the forest again. But Luwi had saved some of Gajdusek's old magazines from the place, as well as his gas cylinders and Coleman lanterns. "What can you do with things that have gone out of use?" he asked. "I'm thinking about storing them up for a museum—anything to help us remember that something serious happened on that mountain." ♦
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 24 & 31, 2006
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PROFILES
FIGHTING WORDS
Mahmoud Khalil was detained for protesting Israel. Now he's on the verge of being deported.
BY ANDREW MARANTZ
It may or may not be true that all happy families are alike, but it's certainly true that any married couple with a car, happy or unhappy, must at some point decide who will do the driving. For Mahmoud Khalil and his wife, Noor Abdalla, this was not a difficult decision. Khalil, who is thirty-one, spent his youth in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, where he didn't have much time for driving lessons; until recently, he was on track to become a high-level diplomat, a career that usually involves not driving but being driven. Abdalla, on the other hand, was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, and she learned to drive before she could see easily over the dashboard. (She is still short enough that this seems to require some effort, though she is now a thirty-year-old dentist who until recently had a daily commute.) In the inveterate American tradition, she treats her car as a second living room. "It's where I'm most comfortable," she said this past fall, giving her steering wheel an affectionate pat.
It was a Tuesday in October, just after dawn, and a pink sun was rising over the oil-distillation towers of northern New Jersey. Abdalla was making good time from Brooklyn to the federal courthouse in Philadelphia, where the couple would observe oral arguments in what Khalil dryly called "one of my cases." He sat in the passenger seat, holding a phone in each hand: his own, from which he texted members of his sprawling pro-bono legal team, and Abdalla's, which he used to d.j. The music, mostly old Levantine folk songs, was interrupted every now and then by a notification from a navigation app, in English: "Police ahead."
Khalil moved to Manhattan in 2022, and he adapted quickly to American culture. (In a sense, he even came to inhabit that most American of identities: an influencer.) At Columbia, where he was a master's student in public and international affairs, he became perhaps the
most visible pro-Palestine activist. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza, there were turbulent protests at many universities, and those at Columbia were often featured on TV news. Khalil, one of the few student protesters who never wore a mask to hide his face, became a symbol of the anti-Zionist movement. President Donald Trump, a few weeks into his second term, was standing next to Elon Musk, shilling Teslas on the White House lawn, when a reporter asked about Khalil. "I think we ought to get him the hell out of the country," Trump said. Although Khalil was a legal permanent resident, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, wrote a three-paragraph memo declaring him "deportable" owing to his "beliefs, statements, or associations." Khalil was sent to an ICE detention center in rural Louisiana, where he was held for more than a hundred days, missing the birth of his son.
In Philadelphia, Abdalla parked a few blocks from the Liberty Bell, smoothed her hijab, and swapped her sneakers for high heels. Khalil made a half-hearted attempt to disguise himself, as he often does before going out in public, putting on a baseball cap emblazoned with the word "Lucky." Every time he approached a door, he stepped aside, bowing slightly and stretching a chivalrous arm in front of him, until everyone else had gone. He passed through security and into the marble lobby of the courthouse, where the words of a renowned jurist named Learned Hand were etched on a glass panel: "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice."
The hearing was before three federal judges, each appointed by a different President. The casting seemed almost too on the nose. The Trump appointee, a white guy with a thick beard, interrupted early and often, his eyes bulging with incredulity. The Joe Biden appoin-
tee, the first Black woman to become a Third Circuit judge, occasionally raised her eyebrows but remained mostly silent. In the middle, figuratively and literally, was a silver-haired judge appointed by George W. Bush. The judges were hearing one of several appeals, spread across various state and federal districts, in a case called Khalil v. Trump, which, in addition to determining Khalil's fate, could set stark precedents in immigration law, national-security law, and the interpretation of the First Amendment. Lawyers for the government did not dispute that Khalil was in the U.S. legally, that the Administration had targeted him because of his political opinions, or that this might have a chilling effect on other people's speech. Rather, at various points in the case, they simply seemed to suggest that the President had the authority to detain Khalil despite these constitutional concerns, and that federal courts could not stop him.
After the hearing, Khalil and his lawyers posed for photos in front of the National Constitution Center, where all forty-five words of the First Amendment were engraved on a fifty-ton slab of marble, then walked to a ramen bar for lunch. Before starting the drive home, Khalil and Abdalla spent a couple of hours at a science museum called the Franklin Institute. He stopped at a series of interactive screens, learning the proper form for pitching a baseball, and how high he would be able to jump on Mars. On one screen, part of an exhibition on mental health, a prompt read "How are you feeling today?" The options were "Excited," "Confident," and "Sad." He considered them for a moment, then moved on without registering a choice.
The majority opinion, by the two Republican appointees, came down on a Thursday morning in January. It stripped Khalil of his previous legal protections, making him vulnerable to deportation. And it went further, narrowing the right
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The Trump Administration says Khalil's statements would be lawful except that they compromise "core American interests."
PHOTOGRAPH BY SHARIF HAMZA
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to habeas corpus, which protects people from unlawful detention. “We game-planned for five scenarios—one to five, from best to worst,” one of Khalil’s lawyers told me. “We’re in Scenario 5.” For decades, both left- and right-leaning judges had taken for granted that constitutional rights like habeas corpus applied to everyone on American soil, citizen or not. But now the Trump Administration was calling such long-standing principles into question, and some judges seemed inclined to follow its lead. (“The writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion, so that is an option we’re actively looking at,” Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s senior advisers, had told reporters.) When I spoke with Khalil, he said, “I did nothing illegal, so of course I will do whatever I can to stay.” And yet, he added, “it isn’t shocking, in my life and in the stories I grew up hearing from my relatives, this concept that, one day, you might be forced to leave.”
For now, Khalil lives in Brooklyn, not far from Prospect Park, in a building with tall vases of flowers and soothing music in the lobby. The first time I visited his apartment, he answered the door barefoot, holding Deen, his six-month-old son, who was sandy-haired and ample-cheeked, still yawning after a nap. All babies are cute, but this was a gratuitously good-looking baby—like a Rubens portrait of the infant Jesus, if the Flemish had been more realistic about a Nazarene’s complexion. Khalil, with a half smile, craned his neck into the hallway and looked behind me, as if to raise the possibility that I was being followed. This was a joke but, also, not entirely a joke.
On top of a low-lying bookshelf were art works that fans had sent him, including a hand-painted piece reading “Free Mahmoud Khalil.” (“We usually keep this one more hidden,” he said, placing it behind a ceramic cup that the artist Nan Goldin had given him.) He sat with Deen on the living-room floor, and Abdalla served grapes—whole for the adults, mashed for the baby. Khalil was writing a memoir, drawing in part on the diaries he’d kept during his time in ICE detention; he handed me a box of the diaries and let me flip through them. “There’s noise around me like a school cafeteria—Spanish, Hindi, broken English,” he’d written in one entry. In another, the
phrase “kangaroo court” was scrawled in English and Arabic.
Khalil is unfailingly polite, in a way that can come across as mannered, almost aloof. He has his master’s degree from Columbia, but not a full-time job. “I spend time with my baby, and on calls with my lawyers,” he said—it felt like a setup for a Borscht Belt joke for which he couldn’t quite find the punch line. He also speaks publicly (on Twitch streams, onstage at South by Southwest), exhibiting what a politician might call consistent message discipline. And yet disciplined messengers do not always make for the most entertaining content. One afternoon, Khalil took a car to a small studio in the Flatiron district to tape an episode of “The Adam Friedland Show,” an interview program that combines earnest leftism and absurdist cringe comedy. With Khalil, Friedland struggled to find a comedic angle. Before they started rolling, Khalil walked in with a “posse” of legal advisers, and Friedland deadpanned, “You’ve got more reps than Justin Bieber.” Crickets. “This is gonna be our funniest episode ever.”
When Khalil was a child, his paternal grandmother often told him the story of how, in 1948, she’d been forced out of Tiberias, in contemporary Israel, and had to walk forty miles to Syria. (On the way, she gave birth to Khalil’s father in a tent.) Khalil’s school, run by the U.N., was in the second-biggest Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus. He was bright and curious, but there weren’t many books at home. His father, a welder, left school after sixth grade; his mother, a civil servant, didn’t finish high school. “I had one uncle who was a poet, and he used to make me type up his poems,” Khalil told me. “That, more than school, was how I really learned to read and write.”
He turned sixteen in 2011, the year of the Arab Spring. Of all the despots in the region, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was perhaps the most ruthless in crushing dissent. One day, Khalil’s aunt was working at a nonprofit; the next, the office was raided and his aunt was sent to prison without explanation. Khalil and a few of his bravest friends engaged in small acts of resistance—spray-painting a pro-democracy slogan on a wall, saving a protest song on a burner phone—but they all understood the danger. “If the police catch you, you
will be tortured or killed,” Khalil said. “We all had our contingency plans: ‘If they take me, run to my house and bury my computer in the yard.’”
A week after Khalil’s eighteenth birthday, he heard that two of his friends, Ali and Bashar, had been arrested. “I thought, ‘If they came for them, they will be coming for me next,’” he told me. He fled to Lebanon with twenty-five Syrian pounds—less than fifty cents—and ended up staying in Beirut for a decade. He taught himself French and English; he got a job with an aid organization, and then with the British Embassy. In 2016, he met a Syrian American college student—Abdalla—who was spending the summer volunteering in Beirut. After she returned to Michigan, he got a Canadian visa, and they met in Windsor, Ontario, on the banks of the Detroit River, where they sat in a Tim Hortons for hours. Abdalla, who was about to graduate from the University of Michigan-Flint, had been selected to be her class’s commencement speaker, and they edited a draft of her speech together. “We are all so privileged to be living in a country such as this one,” it read. “I’m safe to converse with my professors and have passionate talks . . . and I’m safe to dream big.” Khalil became a Columbia student in 2023. Soon afterward, they drove to a courthouse in the Bronx, where they were married. A year later, Khalil got his green card.
The Assad regime fell in 2024, but the bodies of Khalil’s two friends were never recovered; their families assumed that they had been tortured, killed, and buried in a mass grave. Life in Syria was untenably brutal, Khalil told me, “but at least we knew the risks. Nobody was gaslighting us, saying, ‘This is a democracy.’ Then you come here, and it’s all so confusing.” Trump did not have boundless dictatorial powers, yet it was not at all clear whether the institutions that were supposed to check his authoritarian instincts, such as Congress and the courts, were equal to the task. Still, Khalil continued, “there’s this discourse of ‘This is the greatest democracy on earth, where everyone’s rights are guaranteed.’”
I was with Khalil during a series of life-altering moments, as he reacted to both propitious and disastrous news, but I never saw his poker face slip. This stolidity had its advantages. And yet, he noted, “I struggle to show my emotions,
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even to access my emotions,” which made it difficult to write a memoir. (The book, “No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention,” comes out next month.) Recently, at a furniture store in Williamsburg, Abdalla and Khalil spotted a table that seemed perfect for their kitchen, but they were hesitant to buy it: by the time it got delivered, Khalil might be gone. “For Noor, this uncertainty is just too much,” he said. “But my whole life has been uncertain.”
Before dawn on April 17, 2024, dozens of student activists pitched tents, purchased in bulk on Amazon, on a lawn in the middle of Columbia’s campus. They strung up Palestinian flags and hand-painted signs (“WHILE YOU READ, GAZA BLEEDS”). “We’re calling it an occupation,” one of them told me that morning, using the word with intentional irony—but other organizers called it an encampment, and that was the name that stuck. Khalil led a teach-in on the lawn, sitting cross-legged and facilitating a discussion about “apartheid” in Palestine. For years, it seemed to him, Palestine had been treated as a “side issue,” but now the world was paying attention.
The university called in the N.Y.P.D., and officers arrested more than a hundred protesters. Students set up another encampment, on an adjacent lawn. Later, a few students took over Hamilton Hall, barricading themselves inside. This time, the N.Y.P.D. sent a tactical unit, which cleared the building using surveillance drones and a military-style armored vehicle.
Khalil wasn’t part of the group that entered Hamilton Hall. “I wasn’t even on board with that as a tactic,” he told me. In the encampments, he acted as an organizer and as a go-between, communicating his fellow-protesters’ demands to university administrators and relaying the administrators’ responses. “I know how to speak bureaucrat,” he said. A university administrator told me that Khalil, in contrast with some of the other student activists, was known as a levelheaded mediator.
The student protesters called themselves anti-Zionist; their opponents accused them of antisemitism. When other Columbia students staged a counter-protest outside the encampment, holding Israeli flags, people threatened them
with violence. Some visibly Jewish students, walking out of the campus gates, were heckled with shouts of “Go back to Poland!” (In both cases, it’s not clear whether the perpetrators were students or outsiders.) In our conversations, Khalil distanced himself from these incidents. “There were some antisemitic things that happened, some unacceptable things,” he said. At one point, someone from outside the encampment “came over and started shouting, ‘Fuck the Jews,’ and the person with the megaphone said, ‘You don’t represent us, go away.’”
“Doxing trucks” circled the campus, photographing protesters and then publicly displaying their names. Two students had offers from white-shoe law firms rescinded; another student, who had been advertised as one of “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites,” sued the company that owned the doxing truck for defamation. Some protesters’ photos were posted on Canary Mission, a website that purports to “document people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.” A militant Zionist group called Betar, which is widely considered a hate group, compiled dossiers of student protesters (or “jihadis,” as Betar referred to them). Khalil and his friends treated such exposure as a badge of honor. “Our joke was ‘Canary Mission is our dating app,’” he said. “You weren’t really a part of the movement unless you had a Canary Mission profile.”
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, was working on a report called “Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.” The report—
published on October 7, 2024—said that “the so-called pro-Palestinian movement” was actually “part of a highly organized, global Hamas Support Network (HSN) and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.” Referencing Canary Mission, the report enumerated several goals, including getting anti-Israel protesters “deported from the U.S.” At the time, this seemed like bluster.
Then Trump was re-elected. “Under Biden, we were pushing a giant boulder up a steep hill,” Ross Glick, who was then the director of Betar’s U.S. chapter, told me. Now, suddenly, “we had friends in the White House”—and also in “the Justice Department, F.B.I., D.H.S.” Under previous Administrations, Betar had been treated as a fringe group; now it apparently enjoyed access to the offices of some of the most powerful figures in the executive branch, including Rubio and Miller. Glick and his colleagues lobbied officials to pursue the objectives of Project Esther, although “it didn’t take much convincing,” Glick said. “Do you know the expression ‘preaching to the choir?’” Betar even furnished lists of names, suggesting “enemies of the US” whom the government should deport.
The New York Attorney General investigated Betar and found that it had targeted Muslim and Jewish New Yorkers with threats and harassment; as part of a settlement, the organization agreed to cease its operations in the state. By then, Glick was no longer working at Betar. (Years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to harassing an ex-girlfriend.) In response to inquiries from The New Yorker, a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland
H I G A
"Small juice glass from side rack to space c7."
Security wrote, "Any suggestion that the United States would take action against a terrorist sympathizer simply because it was told to is not only ridiculous but FALSE." A White House spokesperson wrote, "Allegations that officials from Betar had a direct line to the White House through Stephen Miller are FALSE. He has not even heard of this group." But I reviewed previously undisclosed e-mails in which Lew Olowski, who has served as a senior adviser to Rubio, treated one of Betar's lists as a spur to government action, asking, "What's the timeline for . . . revoking the visas of Hamas activists?" Less than two weeks later, Olowski prodded again, adding that he owed "an update on our progress." In response, another State Department staffer noted that the list appeared to have been "provided to Secretary Rubio's office" and "sent to . . . Stephen Miller." (Olowski did not respond to a request for comment; a State Department spokesperson said, "We stand by our decisions to revoke visas from individuals who seek to undermine America and hate what it stands for.")
Khalil was on at least one of Betar's lists, incorrectly identified as a "student visa holder." On March 5, 2025, he went to another protest at Columbia, and footage of his unmasked face ricocheted around social media. "SUSPECTED FOREIGN NATIONAL ALERT," Canary Mission posted. Shai Davidai, an Israeli professor who was then at Columbia, tagged Rubio, writing, "Distrib-
uting terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense, no?"
Two days later, Khalil and Abdalla were in Morningside Heights, walking home from a dinner breaking the day's Ramadan fast. When they opened the door to their apartment building, two large men wearing plain clothes followed them inside. Two more men—federal agents, apparently, though they would identify themselves only as "police"—were waiting in the lobby. They claimed that Khalil's student visa had been revoked. "I don't have a student visa," he replied. "I'm on a green card." This confused the agents for a moment, but then one of them made a phone call, and they proceeded to arrest Khalil anyway. ("They wouldn't say who they were talking to, but it was clearly someone high up," Abdalla told me.) They handcuffed Khalil and frog-marched him across the street to an unmarked S.U.V. Abdalla, who was eight months pregnant, followed them outside, tearful and short of breath, and asked why Khalil was being taken. The men drove off without answering. For more than twenty-four hours, no one could tell her where her husband was.
Khalil was booked in lower Manhattan and led to a crowded, brightly lit room, where he was told to sleep on the floor. In the early morning, he was taken to a detention center in New Jersey for a few hours; from there, he was driven to John F. Kennedy International Airport. "They walked me inside with shackles on, sur-
rounded by guards, like I was Pablo Escobar," he told me. "I had no idea where we were going. I saw 'LA' and thought it was Los Angeles." The agent sitting next to him on the plane also seemed confused. "I saw over his shoulder that he was Googling me, trying to figure out why this was a big deal." They landed in Dallas, and, while they waited for a connecting flight to Louisiana, the sun went down, ending the daily fast. The guards took Khalil to a Wendy's in the airport and bought him a cheeseburger.
If it's true, as Learned Hand said, that unrationed justice is a prerequisite for democracy, then the U.S. has never been a full democracy. American Presidents have a long history of acting unlawfully, and American courts have a long history of letting them get away with it, especially when they can muster a rationale that has something to do with national security. In 1942, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a hundred thousand people "of Japanese extraction," most of them American citizens, were forced into military internment camps. At the time, despite the fog of war, many commentators could see the grim irony: it's hard to claim the moral high ground in a war against Fascism while rounding up racial minorities at home and locking them in camps.
Nevertheless, things got more perfect, or less glaringly imperfect. Politicians stoked the anti-Communist fervor of the nineteen-fifties, but, by the end of the decade, the courts had reined in the executive branch somewhat, declaring many of the overreaches of the previous twenty years illegal. Presidents kept trying to bend or break the rules, and they often got away with it. The George W. Bush Administration used warrantless wiretaps to spy on a wide swath of Americans; the Barack Obama Administration pursued whistle-blowers with surprising zeal. When these Presidents were checked by the other branches, though, they at least appeared to be chastened.
But Trump, especially in his second term, knows only how to double down. First, he decides who his enemies are, and how they are to be afflicted; later, his underlings come up with post-hoc justifications that might hold up in court. Perhaps the Administration's most concerted effort to suppress disobedient speech has been its ongoing pressure
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campaign against universities, which it has carried out through lawsuits, investigations, and other tactics—some lawful, some unlawful, and some that inhabit a legal gray area. In a settlement with the federal government, Columbia agreed to pay more than two hundred million dollars and to insure that “all students, international and domestic, are committed to the longstanding traditions of American universities.”
In 2024, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. candidate on a student visa, co-wrote an eight-paragraph op-ed in the Tufts Daily. In a subdued tone, it accused Israel of “clear violations of international law.” In February, 2025, Canary Mission created a profile for Öztürk; it accused her of “anti-Israel activism,” citing only the op-ed. The following month, D.H.S. ordered her arrest. Öztürk was walking through a quiet residential neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts, at around five in the evening, when masked plainclothes agents snatched her off the sidewalk and stuffed her into a van. “Is this a kidnapping?” one of her neighbors asked. Betar posted footage on X, gloating, “She was on our list.” Later, in court, an ICE agent testified that higher-ups had ordered him to fast-track Öztürk’s arrest and added, “I can’t recall a time that it’s come top down like this.”
The government revoked Öztürk’s visa and tried to deport her, asserting that her actions indicated “support for a designated terrorist organization,” but an immigration judge ruled that the government had failed to meet its burden of proof. Trump’s D.O.J. then fired that immigration judge—a clear act of interference in a nominally independent court—and appealed. (Last month, a group of U.N. experts denounced “the mass arbitrary removal of immigration judges and continued politicisation of immigration courts in the United States.”) Öztürk, meanwhile, got her Ph.D., in child development, and moved back to Turkey.
According to the testimony of an ICE official named Peter Hatch, of roughly five thousand pro-Palestine students that Canary Mission and Betar reported to the government, ICE apparently investigated some two hundred as potential targets for arrest or deportation. A smaller fraction of these resulted in the cases against Khalil and Öztürk, and a handful of other pro-Palestine protesters. The
government doesn’t have to win these cases for them to have an effect. The Heritage report suggested that making an example of pro-Palestine protesters could instill “fear” in other “potential demonstrators,” deterring future anti-Israel activism. In a paper published last November, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association argued that some of this had already happened: “Antisemitism investigations are producing a new system of government surveillance and monitoring of campus speech.”
Some of Trump’s attempts to flout constitutional limits are consistent with recent American history, but others are not. To find a precedent for them, you’d have to go back to 1832, when Chief Justice John Marshall wrote an opinion that displeased President Andrew Jackson. In response, Jackson said, or is said to have said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” In other words, the executive and the judiciary are supposed to be coequal branches, but the executive is the one with the guns. This is generally understood as a parable about the fragility of liberal democracy—the thin line between the rule of law and the law of the jungle. But in 2022, on a far-right podcast, a senatorial candidate from Ohio quoted Jackson’s quip approvingly, citing it as a model for “what Trump should do.” That senatorial candidate, J. D. Vance, is now the Vice-President.
Such backsliding has shocked even the human-rights lawyers who already had reason to be disillusioned. Baher Azmy, the legal director at the Center
for Constitutional Rights, spent years defending detainees at Guantánamo Bay. “We lost a lot,” he recalled, of those cases. But when there was clear evidence that the government had violated someone’s fundamental rights, “you could still put that in front of judges, including the most hardened conservatives, and you could get a fair hearing.” Now, Azmy fears, the
bad old days of Guantánamo are starting to seem like the good old days. He is one of the main lawyers on Khalil’s team. “The case against Mahmoud is nothing but an authoritarian diktat,” Azmy said. “We don’t like what you have to say, so we are going to use the full weight of the federal government to make you leave.” Referring to Egypt, where he was born, Azmy continued, “I used to say how lucky I was that I didn’t have to be a lawyer there, that I got to live and work in a country where the rule of law meant something. And now it feels like, ‘Look, Ma, I’m a lawyer in Egypt after all.’”
In February, Khalil was wearing his best suit, carrying a flat white in a to-go cup, and walking briskly through the underground tunnels in the U.S. Capitol. He was in Washington for three days, meeting privately with more than a dozen lawmakers, and, as usual, he was running late. He was flanked by one of his lawyers and by advocates from the Center for Constitutional Rights and another progressive organization, Jewish Voice for Peace. The group spotted Randy Fine, a Republican congressman from Florida, and gave him a wide berth. Fine has repeatedly called for Khalil to be deported; he has also voiced the opinion that “the Palestinian cause is evil” and that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Why avoid a confrontation with Fine, I asked, when they could film it and go viral? “I’ve had enough viral moments for a lifetime,” Khalil said.
The group reached the office of Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minneapolis who has a reputation as a political pugilist. At the moment, though, she mostly looked tired. Recently, D.H.S. agents in Minneapolis had shot and killed a protester, Renee Good, and then another, Alex Pretti. “They took a five-year-old in my district,” Omar said, in a low, shaky voice. “They’re just heartless.”
The higher Khalil got on the rungs of congressional seniority, the more circumspect the lawmakers sounded. The No. 2 House Democrat, Katherine Clark, has a palatial office in the heart of the Capitol, with crystal chandeliers and mirrors in gilded frames. “We love our progressive members with our whole heart and soul,” Clark said, diplomatically. “But I wonder if you’ve reached out to our more pro-Israel members—someone
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who may say, 'You know, we might disagree on this particular issue, but this is about a higher principle.'
'I'd be happy to come down and meet with anyone,' Khalil said. 'So far, we haven't seen much interest.'
When the group had downtime between meetings, they relaxed in the office of Representative Rashida Tlaib, from Detroit, whose walls were decorated with a greatest-hits lineup of good-trouble posters (Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Nelson Mandela wearing a kaffiyeh), plus a more recent addition: 'Free Mahmoud Khalil.' If other leftist representatives acted like Khalil's friends, then Tlaib, the only Palestinian member of Congress, treated him like a favorite nephew. 'Our elders will tell us, 'Be quiet, don't get in trouble,' Tlaib said, in her sonorous Michigan accent. 'To this day, my mother says this to me. I'm, like, 'Mom, it's too late! I'm in Congress!'
Tlaib asked for updates on Khalil's case. After he was arrested, D.H.S. issued a statement declaring, in language reminiscent of the Project Esther report, that he had 'led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.' Various Administration spokespeople repeated this accusation, but, in its many court filings against Khalil, the government never alleged that he had incited violence, materially supported terrorism, or committed any other crime. (While Khalil was in ICE detention, the government provided an additional justification for his removal, claiming that he had omitted relevant information from his green-card application.) Khalil's fellow-activists had chanted 'Globalize the intifada' and 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.' Khalil, in one of his more controversial statements, said that 'Palestinians have tried multiple forms of resistance,' including 'armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law.' These views are contentious; some take them to be inherently threatening. But almost no one doubts that they are protected by the First Amendment. (In his memo, Rubio confirmed that the 'beliefs' and 'statements' for which Khalil had been arrested 'are otherwise lawful.') Even if Khalil had openly espoused antisemitic beliefs or walked around campus draped in a Hamas flag, his behavior, though it would have been abhorrent and potential grounds for expulsion from
Columbia, wouldn't have been illegal.
In our interviews, I asked Khalil to clarify what he thinks of Hamas. He resents the question—he doesn't see why he should be grilled on this any more than someone who protests the war in Iran should be made to answer for the crimes of the Khamenei regime—but, when pressed, he said that Hamas's leaders, like all leaders, should be held accountable for any war crimes they've committed, against both Israelis and Palestinians. He had no kind words for Fatah, or for the Palestinian Authority, or for any other Palestinian political party. 'Political factions usually work for their own survival, not for the good of the people,' he said. Anyone who has ever spoken to a Palestinian would find most of Khalil's political opinions unremarkable. 'I want to live long enough to see a safe and free homeland for my people, and I want to be allowed to visit my grandmother's village once before I die,' he said.
When Rubio determined that Khalil could be deported, he was relying on an obscure and broadly worded provision of immigration law that enables the Secretary of State to single out any noncitizen whose presence in the country could have 'adverse foreign policy consequences.' (In 1996, a federal judge found the provision unconstitutional—coincidentally, the judge was Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump's late sister—but her decision is not considered binding.) The provision has been invoked only rarely—for example, in 1995, after Mario Ruiz Massieu, a Mexican public official suspected
of money laundering, was apprehended in the U.S. But Rubio's memo stretched the law beyond recognition. He maintained that Khalil had participated in protests that fostered 'a hostile environment for Jewish students'; his continued presence in the country, therefore, would compromise 'core American interests,' specifically the objective of combatting antisemitism.
According to some commentators, none of this should be controversial.
'Every country has the power to control who enters,' Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, told me. 'In this country, that includes ideological screenings—you can't be a Nazi, you can't be a Communist, you can't be toxic to the body politic.' If Khalil is ejected for ideological reasons, Shapiro continued, then 'that's an immigration issue, not a free-speech issue. Congress could change immigration law, but this government is following it as it's written.' Ross Glick, the former Betar official, told me, 'You're not allowed to yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre, but you can stand in the middle of a campus shouting, 'Globalize the intifada,' which is a call for violence against Jews? No. Fuck you. Get out of this country.'
But many experts argue the opposite: that it's a textbook violation of the First Amendment for the government to punish anyone, citizen or not, as payback for political speech. 'This is an Administration that seems to believe the President can do anything,' Melissa Murray, a law professor at N.Y.U. and a progressive legal commentator, said. But even assuming that a vaguely worded statute gives the State Department the power to revoke visas at its discretion, she continued, 'they still can't do it in ways that contravene constitutional protections, like freedom of speech or freedom from discrimination. And those are protections that do apply to green-card holders'—or, at least, they have until now. When Biden was President, conservatives lambasted him for his purported eagerness to turn campuses into 'safe spaces' by stifling free expression. How would they have reacted if he'd singled out a student whose political views he disliked—an anti-trans activist, say, who happened to be in the U.S. on a green card—and then used every lever of governmental power to get that student deported?
When Khalil or his lawyers were asked about his potential removal from the country, they tended to respond, at least on the record, with an optimistic hedge: there was no constitutional reason for him to be deported. Even so, I said, it could happen. The government could put him on a plane to Algeria, where he holds citizenship through his mother's family; it could force him to go to Syria or Lebanon, where his life might be in danger; it could even send him to a 'third
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country,” such as Rwanda or South Sudan, as it has done to other detainees. I was reluctant to press the point during my first few visits with Khalil and Abdalla, but eventually I asked them outright: If the government did send him away, what was the plan? Would Abdalla and Deen go with him, or would he go alone?
For a moment, fear seemed to flash across Abdalla’s face. For all their worrying, apparently, they hadn’t yet talked through specific scenarios. But Khalil’s smile didn’t waver. “It’s too early to talk about these things,” he said.
“They wouldn’t deport me, right?” Abdalla said, turning to Khalil. “Could they?”
“Habibi, no,” Khalil said, rubbing her back. “You’re American.”
The day the Third Circuit opinion came down, making Khalil vulnerable to deportation again, I went to see him and Abdalla at their apartment. “Tonight’s supposed to be our date night,” Abdalla told me. But now, Khalil said, his lawyers were “e-mailing D.H.S. to get clarification—to make sure it’s still O.K. for me to leave the house.” At the end of the day, the lawyers still hadn’t heard back, so they advised Khalil and Abdalla to cancel their date and stay inside.
Once again, Khalil was making contingency plans. “I’ve got a special phone, with a bunch of numbers preloaded,” he told me. If he was out somewhere, and ICE agents ambushed him, “I can press one button, in my pocket, and Noor and all the lawyers will be notified.” He had been in the habit of taking Deen out for a daily walk, just the two of them. He stopped doing that, haunted by the image of an officer handcuffing him and taking him away, leaving his baby alone in a stroller in the middle of Prospect Park.
In April, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued its final decision, rejecting all Khalil’s arguments and approving his deportation. “Normally, a case like this would take years,” Homero López, a former immigration appeals judge, told me. “They had this ready to go within days, which, to me, suggests engagement from the White House.” Khalil’s lawyers moved to reopen the case, citing this and other irregularities, but their motion was denied. They are currently planning to appeal to the Supreme Court. Khalil and his lawyers worry that if the Court agrees to hear his case it could issue an opinion that further
“My greatest weakness? Arson.”
curtails the speech rights of immigrants, or of all Americans. But if it doesn’t take the case Khalil may be out of options, at which point he would have to leave the country.
This spring, Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, gave a lecture describing a sudden “phase shift in the way the law operates in the United States”—from “standard liberal legality” to something harsher and dangerously capricious. He discussed several active cases, including Khalil’s, arguing that they indicated the emergence of an American “dual state.” Huq was borrowing the term from Ernst Fraenkel, a German Jew who practiced law in Berlin until he fled, in 1938; he ended up in Chicago, where he completed a book called “The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship.” According to Fraenkel, authoritarian regimes dispense justice on two parallel tracks: “normative” legal protections for loyal subjects of the state, and “unchecked arbitrariness” for its enemies. (Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the book in one of her recent opinions—a dissent, naturally.) By making the comparison, Huq told me, he wasn’t saying that every enemy of the American state would be sent to a concentration camp. “There are echoes, but they’re partial echoes,” he said.
Last month, I visited Khalil at home
one more time. Deen, now more than a year old, sat in Abdalla’s lap as she read him a picture book called “Who’s Hiding on the Farm?” Khalil was still in a state of bureaucratic superposition: the Board of Immigration Appeals had issued a final order of removal, yet, technically, until all his legal challenges were resolved, the government was not supposed to remove him. But what if it did? The government wasn’t supposed to invade Venezuela and kidnap its President, Nicolás Maduro. But it had, and now Maduro was in Brooklyn, not four miles from Khalil’s apartment, in a jail known for its maggot-infested food. As a condition of Khalil’s bail, the government already knew where he lived. What if ICE agents were to stake out his address and apprehend him on sight? What was stopping them? Norms? Pieces of paper? “We’re a superpower,” Stephen Miller said in January, “and under President Trump we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.” If officials decided it was in their interest, they could act now and ask for forgiveness later. “My lawyers keep giving me these refreshers, these ‘know your rights’ trainings,” Khalil told me. “I ask—they hate it when I say this, but I can’t help myself—‘What if I know my rights, and the government knows my rights, but they just don’t care?’” ♦
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FICTION
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ILLUSTRATION BY RICHA KASHELKAR
When Nidhi was fourteen, her mother became pregnant again. People were understandably surprised, no one more so, it seemed, than her own parents. They made their usual jokes, both about the pregnancy and about the deed that had produced it.
Her mother: "If we'd known, we'd have put some drama into the sex, yaar. Now this poor kid will grow up and become a banker or some other boring thing."
Her father, all innocent astonishment: "I woke up to go the bathroom, that's it. Must have made a wrong turn on the way back."
They made these jokes in front of Nidhi, who was unembarrassed by them. Her parents had always spoken like this. It was not that they were crass, exactly. They just didn't see the use in shielding her from things. Like the man who sold vegetables from a handcart when Nidhi was six. His produce looked fresh, as far as Nidhi could tell, but her mother nevertheless waved him on. One day, she said, "Watch. He's going to touch his testicles now." Nidhi saw the man's hand slide down into his trousers, saw the furtive fondling. When he reached their house, he picked up a tomato with the same hand and held it out to them, a glossy enticement.
Other parents, Nidhi was aware, did not say "testicles" to their children. Other parents had special words for such things, pert and whimsical. Urine was "soo-soo" or "chi-chi." Feces were "caca." Vaginas were usually "flowers" or "buds." (What penises were called, Nidhi wasn't sure.) Having sex was "getting close" or, confusingly, "friendship." Nidhi's neighbor Payal had a cocker spaniel named Lucy, who regularly dripped spots of blood onto the driveway. Payal's family called this, and all menstruation, "Lucy's problem."
But Nidhi did not resent her parents' frankness. It was an unremarkable fact, like her father's lazy eye, or the aerobics classes for local women that her mother, a former Bharatanatyam dancer, taught on their terrace—and continued to teach even as her pregnancy progressed. Each morning, while Nidhi ate breakfast, these women would troop cheerfully into the
house in socked feet, Keds hooked to their fingers, calling out, "Good morning, big sister!" and laughing as they climbed the stairs to the terrace, where Nidhi's mother was already laying out their steps and dumbbells.
Then, on a Tuesday, sixteen weeks into her term, Nidhi's mother phoned her students to ask them not to come; she was feeling tired. Nidhi's father drove her to a clinic. By the time Nidhi got home from school, her mother had locked herself into her bedroom, and Nidhi was an only child again.
"Give her a few days," her father said.
But a few days did not help. Nidhi's mother stayed in her bedroom, and, for once, her father would not reveal what went on inside that place, from which only unfathomable sounds now emerged: low booms; yipping cries; vast, tomb-like silences.
What her father did say, eventually, was that it might be best if Nidhi stayed somewhere else for a while. With whom? A friend? Nidhi could not imagine spending more than a night or two at her friend's houses. The idea of looking so deeply into their lives, or having them look into hers, disturbed her.
No, not a friend, her father said. Not even in Bangalore. His maternal aunt—Nidhi's great-aunt—lived in Madras (or Chennai, as it had become only a few years ago). Her name was Jaya. She was the oldest of his mother's five siblings, and she had a house with a huge garden, perfect for exploring. And the best part? The house was chock-full of books. He'd stayed there himself for a week, in fact, when he was fifteen and his brother had fallen ill with chicken pox. He remembered that week being pure heaven. He was sure that Nidhi would feel the same.
So sure, it turned out, that he'd already called Jaya Aunty, who had said that Nidhi was welcome to stay as long as needed.
"And how long will that be?" Nidhi asked.
"Oh, sweetheart." Her father sighed. "Trust me. You don't want to see her this way."
Three days later, he and Nidhi waited on the platform at Cantonment Station
for the Brindavan Express. Nidhi was wearing her favorite denim shorts, the ones with the patch pockets. Once the train arrived in Madras, she was expected to catch an auto to Jaya Aunty's house, in a neighborhood called Adyar. (Apparently, there was no question of being met at the station.) A family nearby, on hearing that she was travelling alone, offered to keep an eye on her.
Her father thanked them. Then he turned to Nidhi. "By the way, you should know about Padmini," he said. "She's Jaya's daughter-in-law. She's retarded."
He spoke in his old, easy manner. Even the word "retarded," which Nidhi would soon learn to expunge from her vocabulary, he made free of shadows. "She'll be in her mid-forties now. But, mentally, you'll find her closer to ten or eleven, I'd say."
"She's married?"
"She's a widow. Jaya's son—Shankar, my cousin—died before he was thirty. From what I've heard, he married Padmini without knowing about her. Her condition, I mean. Her family kept it secret. Nobody realized until after the wedding, but, before anything could be done, Shankar died. He died somewhere in Africa, if I recall. Mozambique, maybe? Anyway, my family always said that Shankar was a genius. The kind of fellow who could read a book once and memorize it."
"What about her?" Nidhi persisted. "She stayed? Even after he died?"
"Padmini?" Her father sounded surprised. "Well, yes. Jaya could've sent her back to her family, I suppose, but they'd pulled a pretty dirty trick to marry her off. Who knows what they'd have done if they'd gotten her back?"
Nidhi was silent. She and her father watched the dusty old train pull in.
Her father said, "It felt like having a younger sister for a while. Back when I stayed there." He smiled sadly at Nidhi. "Maybe it'll be the same for you."
Jaya Aunty did not offer to help with Nidhi's suitcase. She was also of the opinion that Nidhi had not drunk enough apple juice in her life. She murmured, looking at Nidhi's legs, "Apple juice is good for the skin. Your father drank lots of apple juice when he stayed here."
Nidhi glanced at her legs. They
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appeared fine to her, strong and lithe and chicory brown.
"That's why your father's complexion is so nice," Jaya Aunty went on. "Apple juice. But your mother, I think, is not so fair?"
"She's fairer than my father," Nidhi pointed out. She would soon learn not to do this.
"Is that so?" Jaya Aunty was a tall woman with sloping, mannish shoulders. Her sari—royal-purple silk stitched with miniature golden birds—hung straight down without any visible deviation in service to hips or buttocks. Her scant hair was pulled taut across her scalp, like violin strings.
This conversation was taking place in Jaya Aunty's living room, and Nidhi's eyes kept darting about. There was something wrong with the room, she thought. With its proportions or its arrangement. At the far end, which seemed miles away, a blocky television sat before a lone white plastic chair. Where she and her great-aunt stood, by the front door, an ornate rosewood sofa hunkered, its ugly orange upholstery embalmed in thick plastic. The long middle of the room was com-
completely empty. Looking at it gave Nidhi a queasy feeling, as if the floor there could not be trusted.
"It's good to be fit," Jaya Aunty declared. "But fitness comes from doing daily work. If you are not fit, it means you are not doing enough work, and so you touch your toes and kick your legs like a donkey, and things get mixed up inside."
A moment of bewilderment, and then Nidhi understood. Jaya Aunty was talking about the aerobics classes. She was saying that Nidhi's mother had lost the baby because of the aerobics classes, because she had kicked her legs like a donkey and things had gotten mixed up.
Nidhi imagined the baby crawling around in her mother's body, desperately seeking the uterus, and, failing to find it in its proper place, quietly shrivelling up and dying. It was ridiculous, she knew, but she made no effort to suppress the image. It gave her the same feeling as the room's empty middle, a flash of something dirty and hidden. Suddenly, her parents' cheerful transparency—their coarse jokes, their eagerness to name things that should not
be named—appeared to Nidhi in a faintly embarrassing light.
She said, "Thank you for letting me stay here."
"Well," Jaya Aunty shrugged. "Your father made it sound like an emergency."
Nidhi's room was off the kitchen and, judging by the faint odor of gunnysacks, had once been a storeroom. Tiny and windowless, it reminded her of a room, belonging to a famous artist, that was described in a novel she'd read: a single cot, a chair, a standing fan. She loved it immediately. Jaya Aunty slept in a much larger room on the other side of the house. It had windows lining one wall, cupboards lining the other, and two single cots. And that was when Nidhi remembered Padmini, whom she had still not seen.
Padmini came in about ten minutes later, carrying a net bag bulging with okra and shiny gourds. Her hair was gray—somehow a surprise—and tied in a low bun. She wore a boxy cotton blouse and an ankle-length pavadai-style skirt, the kind that Nidhi had stopped wearing years earlier. Her hips were wide, her shoulders slender and curved. Her face, indisputably middle-aged, had a pensive, startled quality. When she caught sight of Nidhi, who was unpacking in her room, she stopped short.
"Hi," Nidhi said.
Padmini smiled, though this appeared more reflex than friendliness. Perhaps she'd forgotten about Nidhi's arrival, or perhaps Jaya Aunty had not bothered to warn her about it. (Having now met her great-aunt, Nidhi felt that this was entirely possible.) Padmini did not respond to the greeting and vanished into the kitchen. Only then did it occur to Nidhi that she might be mute.
It took Nidhi a few days to piece together her new situation. Padmini, she discovered, did not only the shopping and the cooking but everything else, too. She washed clothes and hung them on the clothesline in the overgrown garden behind the house. She pounded spices in a mortar the size of Nidhi's head. She scoured copper vessels with lime halves dipped in salt. She shelled peas, kneaded dough, picked stones
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from dal. The only things she did not do were sweep and mop. A young woman named Ambika came in daily to do these, and she did them with so much grumbling and ill will that Nidhi guiltily wished that Padmini would just take care of them herself.
For Padmini did not seem to mind all the work she had to do. It would be an exaggeration to say that she enjoyed it, but it left no mark upon her. For days, Nidhi observed her for signs of secret despair but could detect none. While she was carrying out a task, Padmini was unflagging, methodical, focussed, capable. She was not, however, mute. As she grew used to Nidhi, she became fairly talkative in her presence. Her conversation consisted primarily of declarations, some more enigmatic than others.
"The ping-ping lady didn't come today," she might say, deftly peeling a carrot.
Or: "Give me your half pants. I'll wash them."
Or: "I have to put the dirty things into the hot place."
The first two were easy enough to follow. The ping-ping lady was Ambika, who wore many jangly bangles. "Half pants" were Nidhi's denim shorts. But the business about dirty things in the hot place remained a mystery. In the beginning, Nidhi tried to decipher Padmini's more obscure assertions, but, in this one regard, Padmini resembled Jaya Aunty: she did not like being questioned. She would fall into a sulky silence, and Nidhi eventually gave up. Still, Padmini was every bit as kind as her father had promised. She made sure that Nidhi's clothes were perfectly folded, saved her the cream from the curd, which Nidhi loved to eat sprinkled with sugar, and surprised her with boiled groundnuts, to go with her evening cup of tea.
While Padmini worked, Jaya Aunty sat in the plastic chair in the living room and watched TV. It was all she appeared to do. She was a restless viewer, changing channels a dozen times within minutes. The resulting stream of clips—"Baywatch," a Hindi soap, the Tamil news, "Baywatch" again—was so disorienting that Nidhi tended to avoid her, preferring Padmini's company instead.
Padmini, too, was uninterested in TV. She did not linger to watch when she
walked through the living room with an armful of clothes, nor did her gaze steal to the screen as she sat on the sofa, trimming green beans with a paring knife. But this, Nidhi conceded, was perhaps the result of a need to concentrate, since any oversight in her work earned Jaya Aunty's prompt disapproval. Things had to be done a certain way in that house. Once, when the curd did not set, Jaya Aunty did not do what Nidhi's mother would have done—namely, shrug her shoulders and nip out to the store for a couple of squishy packets. Instead, she sniffed at the sour, runny stuff, then ostentatiously poured it over her rice, mixed it with her fingers, and ate it with stiff dignity, like an old emperor in exile.
Nidhi was not unhappy in Madras, but she was soon bored. Her boredom was sharpened by the discovery that most of her initial assumptions were wrong. Her room, which had seemed so romantic, became unbearably hot each evening. The garden, so promising and Kipling-like at first glance, was, in fact, a place of grim neglect, filled with long, sharp-edged grass that made Nidhi's ankles swell; plus, she was sure she'd once seen a small brown snake flashing into a hole. (Padmini showed no fear, going barefoot into the garden each afternoon to hang clothes.) But Nidhi's worst mistake of all was not having packed a single book. Given
what her father had said, she had expected to find a veritable library at Jaya Aunty's house, but after a week she had not seen anything between two covers except for the Rani magazines that came by post, which she could not read because they were in Tamil. Had her father misremembered? Had the books ever existed? Likely, Nidhi reasoned, they'd belonged not to Jaya Aunty but to her genius son, and, after his death, they'd been given away. This suspicion
was strengthened when she asked Padmini about them one day.
"Books?" Padmini echoed. Then she pointed a finger heavenward.
Madras was on the coast, yet Nidhi had not laid eyes on the beach. When she mentioned the possibility of an outing, Jaya Aunty murmured, "Ah, the beach. A girl's body was found on Marina Beach last month. She was . . . exposed." "Exposed" was spoken with a regretful glance at Nidhi's shorts.
Consequently, Nidhi found herself moping around the house, sweating, flipping through the unintelligible pages of Rani, listening to Padmini's pleasant, purling talk. She thought about begging her father to let her return to Bangalore, but he would inevitably ask why, and she did not want to lie and claim that what was merely tedious was unbearable. He called the house every other day, and, when she assured him that she was fine, his relief was palpable. When Nidhi asked after her mother, he just said, "We'll see."
A week into her visit, something happened. Nidhi was sitting on the plastic-covered sofa, drawing her legs up so that Ambika could sweep underneath, and Padmini was in the kitchen. That was when Jaya Aunty farted in her white chair. A long, terrible, gurgling discharge. She did not turn her head or apologize. On the screen, two men in white shorts were playing tennis. Nidhi and Ambika looked at each other, then looked away.
Until now, Ambika had demonstrated exactly no interest in Nidhi, but she seemed to feel that this incident had united them. Later, when Nidhi was in her room, Ambika sidled up and whispered, "Dirty old camel, isn't she?"
"Who?" Nidhi asked disingenuously. "And the other one." Ambika tutled with lazy, luxurious spite. "I know I shouldn't speak badly about people like that. God made them, same as you and me. I'm just saying—you can understand why the husband ran off."
"I thought he died," Nidhi said. "All men have the feeling, you know." Ambika regarded Nidhi sternly, as if she were being difficult. "If they can't
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show it at home, what can they do? They have to go somewhere else, no?
"Have you finished your work?" Nidhi asked politely.
"Everything but the terrace room." Ambika flicked a defensive glance at the ceiling. "But it's not my fault. He locks the door and takes the key. Does he think I can walk through walls?"
This time, Nidhi really had no idea what she was talking about.
"The professor. Oh, right, you don't know him. He was a friend of her son. Says he's from Africa, but I've heard that everyone in Africa has black skin, and he just looks like a normal Indian to me. He comes here every few months."
"Does he stay in my room?"
"The storeroom?" Ambika looked of- fended. "No, he stays upstairs. It's the only room with A.C. Whenever he's here, I try to sweep inside as long as possible— it's so nice and cool—but he always sends me away. Says I disturb his reading."
"Reading?" Nidhi's head shot up. "You mean books?"
"What else? He's got hundreds up there. The maharaja of books, that's what I call him."
Nidhi had not paid much attention to the little room on the terrace, but now she went up to examine it. Months of dust lined the doorjamb, and the dead bolt was dull, but the padlock hanging from it was new. Nidhi nearly asked Jaya Aunty about the professor, but then she recalled what Ambika had said. He was a friend of her son. The dead son, Shankar, about whom not a word had been breathed since Nidhi arrived.
She did not ask.
A week and a half passed. Padmini went out for vegetables, and, when she came back, she presented Nidhi with a roll of cheap, colorful bangles from the market. Nidhi, who hadn't worn such ban- gles in years and considered them baby- ish, was unaccountably moved. Her father called to say that there was still no im- provement in her mother. Ambika sighed and swept. Jaya Aunty watched five min- utes of "The Terminator" before switch- ing to a game show set in a crystal maze.
Then one morning, Nidhi woke up to find a man at the dining table. He was
LAMENT
We were never a family of food snobs. We barely knew what a food snob was. Good food was food you liked; taste meant partiality.
The stars had blessed the neighborhood with a Po' Folks, which later transformed into Folks, then closed, but in my psyche
it's still there, complete with the Po' because I left so long ago that I confuse the dead with the far away.
Thus, to me, my grandparents breathe. They relish fried chicken, sweet tea, and biscuits at a down-home place
where I'm a kid, my parents middle-aged. I haven't gone north nor betrayed those beginnings. Haven't turned gourmet
around fifty, she guessed, with a bald- ing head, a long body, and slim, taper- ing fingers. He wore yellow pajama bot- toms with white stripes, and a white V-necked undershirt. "Hello," he said. "Sorry if I disturbed you last night. Those flights always come in so bloody late. I'm Sudhir."
His accent stood just to the side of any that Nidhi recognized. "You didn't disturb me," she said, cautiously taking a seat. It was true. She'd man- aged, despite the heat, to sleep through his arrival.
Padmini brought in idlis, steaming in their many-tiered tower, and a steel bowl of coconut chutney. The profes- sor—it had to be him—leaned forward and sniffed appreciatively.
Then Jaya Aunty sailed in, in a bright-orange silk sari. "Eat, eat!" she called. "Smelling it won't fill your stom- ach!" She giggled at her own joke.
Nidhi stared. What was this gig- gling? And this tone, so purring and coquettish? The professor seemed to be thinking the same thing, for he swiv- elled his head and looked at Nidhi di- rectly. In his look, Nidhi detected a sad acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of Jaya Aunty's little performance, but, more than that, she saw—or believed she saw—an entreaty. He was asking Nidhi to go along with it.
"Already pestering me?" the profes- sor asked, turning gravely back to Nidhi's great-aunt. "You're regressing, my dear Jaya. Last time, you had the decency to wait until after breakfast."
"Such a joker," Jaya Aunty giggled again. "You haven't changed at all."
The professor, Nidhi learned, was not a professor but a businessman. His name was Sudhir Desai, and he was Kenyan. That is, someone in his fam- ily had gone to Kenya from Gujarat a hundred years ago and had settled on the coast there. Sudhir Desai had been born in a town called Mombasa, so he was not Indian in the way that Nidhi was. He explained this to her in so many words, with a kind look that said she probably wouldn't understand.
"Sort of like Gandhi," Nidhi said. "The Indians in South Africa."
He was about to eat his last piece of idli but stopped and looked at her.
"Not bad," he said. "Sort of. Yes." "Are you here on business, Sudhir?" Nidhi asked. She'd already tried calling him Uncle, and he'd told her that he pre- ferred Sudhir, which was how she knew that he was even older than she'd guessed.
"Business?" He laughed. "No. I'm here, well, for a hobby, you could say."
Padmini came into the dining room
64 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 24 & 31, 2026
or true amateur, and no one's afraid to invite me to dinner because I cook like an expert or order that way.
Where do I lodge my innocent plea? Whatever I've learned, I'm still me and want to share a table
with the people I'll miss or who'll miss me when whoever's going first goes down that street. Together we'll devour whatever we're able
to ladle out. Since the stars command that no matter our plans, an R.S.V.P. is always a maybe,
the reasons to gather have never been clearer. The dinner is gravy.
—Adrienne Su
and took the idli tower away. Sudhir Desai smiled at her, but she ignored him. She seemed withdrawn and sullen, the way she'd been during Nidhi's first days. Sudhir Desai turned to Nidhi with a sigh, as if to say, I'm trying.
Nidhi asked, "What kind of hobby?"
His room was not unlike hers: a bed, a chair. But, being on the terrace, it was not at all cavelike. It boasted two decent-sized windows, not on the terrace side but on the exterior wall, one of which was fitted with a small A.C. unit. The A.C. was rattling away, and Nidhi's skin smarted in the artificial cold.
The other difference was that his room was jammed with books. Plywood shelves lined the walls, their planks bowed in the middle. The books weren't in great condition, either. Many of the spines had peeled off, and Nidhi could see the string and glue that held the pages together. Still, they were books. Sudhir Desai laughed at the look on her face.
"Don't get too excited. They're not novels." He touched his temples in mock divination. "Something tells me you're the type of girl who's crazy for novels."
She was. But hearing him say it made her wish she wasn't.
"You should have seen them when I first came," he said, gently brushing
a tatty volume. "Jaya had them downstairs. Bang in the middle of the living room. Nobody had looked at them for years. They were falling apart. Pages on the floor, silverfish, mold, you name it. I brought the shelves up here, installed the A.C. It's not much—a dehumidifier would be better—but at least they're not rotting away down there anymore."
So that explained the void in the living room, Nidhi thought. She looked around again.
"Collecting old books," she said. "That's your hobby?"
"Not exactly." He smiled. "The first time I came, it was a condolence visit. Jaya's son, Shankar—you know about him? He died in Mombasa. I met him there a few times, even helped with the arrangements to send his body home. A few years later, I was in India on some business, and I thought, Why not pay my respects to the grieving mother? You know how it goes."
Nidhi nodded as though she did. "I started looking through the books and found an impressive little collection about Theosophy. I'd never even heard of it before. And, long story short, I became hooked. Are you familiar with Theosophy, Nidhi? Helena Blavatsky? Annie Besant?"
"Annie Besant," Nidhi echoed, pretending to think. "She's Home Rule, right?"
"Nidhi," he said slowly. "I am impressed."
She had to press her lips together to keep from laughing. Annie Besant was pure luck; Nidhi had studied the Home Rule League in school last year. A tiny motor of pleasure had started to hum away inside her, but she was aware, too, of a flash of scorn. How easy it had been to arouse his admiration!
"Well," Sudhir Desai said, "if you know that, then you must know that the Theosophical Society headquarters are in Adyar, practically next door. Over the years, it's become a tradition of mine. Fly in every few months, stay with Jaya, read, attend some talks. It keeps me sane."
"Can I borrow one?" Nidhi asked. "One of the books?"
"By all means. They're your aunt's, not mine."
"So why do you lock the door?" She had not meant to sound so sharp.
Sudhir Desai looked startled. Then he laughed. "Ah," he said. "You know—force of habit."
She chose "Theosophy and the Theosophical Society," by Annie Besant, not because it looked enticing but because she felt herself accidentally bound to Besant now. And though it wasn't a novel, she came to enjoy its old-timey cadences, the obs! and abs! that popped up whenever Besant was overcome by the splendor of her ideas. At times, Nidhi even harbored a kindly superiority toward the book's exhortations, which ranged from the ardently childlike ("Listen to the bird as its whole little being swells in the delight of the sunshine!") to the simply kooky ("And when the Six jewels are bound upon your forehead, then shall you be seen as ready to enter the Portals of Initiation").
She did most of her reading on the plastic-covered sofa, or else up in Sudhir Desai's cool room. Whenever she grew bored, she talked to him about what she had read. He, too, was usually reading but would set his book aside with a wry "All right, let's hear the latest screed." In these dialogues, he liked to adopt the role of believer, patiently defending against her attacks the perfection of the human soul, the joyful oneness of all beings. Nidhi noticed that,
65
as a consequence, she tended to make herself out to be even more cynical and quarrelsome than she really felt. If utopia ever came to exist, she argued, human beings would find a way to destroy it within a month. Nonmaterialism was the sort of wishful nonsense preached by those who weren't in any real danger of going hungry. And what the hell was a Portal of Initiation anyway?
She knew that she was modulating herself for Sudhir Desai's benefit—it evidently amused him to hear such harshness from someone so young—and she knew, too, that she wasn't the only one changing in his presence. Jaya Aunty had been watching less TV since his arrival; she found it far more entertaining to watch him. Everything he did made her shriek with laughter. A button came off his shirt one day, and he asked for a needle and thread. "Needle! Thread!" Jaya Aunty cackled. "You bachelors! Manage everything on your own, is it? Chee!" Padmini will fix it in one minute flat.
It was Padmini, however, who was the most altered. Gone was the garrulous woman Nidhi had known for close to three weeks. There were no more sweet, impractical presents. No surprise groundnuts. Padmini became as disgruntled as Ambika, clomping through her work and barely speaking. Ignoring her better instincts, Nidhi cornered Padmini and tried to probe for a reason.
They were standing in the kitchen, and Padmini spun to face Nidhi. Her expression was distorted with anger. She picked up a tomato from the cutting board, held it under Nidhi's nose, and squeezed. Juice and seeds spurted from between her fingers. Before she could pick up another one, Nidhi backed out of the room.
A clue to Padmini's behavior surfaced. It was after lunch on a Friday, Jaya Aunty was flipping channels, Nidhi was reading Besant, and Padmini came in from the garden, where she'd been hanging clothes. Bits of grass stuck to her heels, and a clothespin dangled from the hem of her blouse. Sudhir Desai was at the Theosophical Society for a talk. It was the second such talk he'd attended, and Nidhi had been vaguely disappointed not to have been invited.
The TV landed on the movie "Titanic."
It was the sex scene, Nidhi noted with dismay, the one in which Jack and Rose steam up the car window. (Nidhi had watched "Titanic" in the theatre with her parents a couple of years before and had glanced at them during this scene. They were both grinning.) Padmini turned her head to look at the TV. Her glance lasted only a few seconds, and she did not visibly react, but this was enough for Nidhi to grope her way to a dim theory.
Sudhir Desai must remind Padmini of her dead husband, whose friend, after all, he had once been. He must remind her of the life she'd so briefly had—as an adult, a married woman—a life that had been cruelly snatched away and replaced with this endless twilit childhood with Jaya Aunty.
Whether Padmini and her husband had ever done any of the things that Jack and Rose did in that car, Nidhi was not brave enough to imagine. But she did believe that this was why Padmini scowled whenever Sudhir Desai was in the house, lounging in his striped pajamas. He was a hated medium; his presence conjured up the ghost of a different man.
It was a hot night—every night was hot, but this one felt infected by heat—and Nidhi was tossing in bed. Her lower back had ached during dinner, and, sure enough, there was the tarnished rust of her period in her underwear. She'd been tired all evening and had fallen asleep early, but she was awakened by cramps in the night. She crept to the bathroom and put on a fresh pad. Wrapping the used one in a page torn from an old Rani she'd filched for the purpose, she chucked it into the bin. On her way back to her room, she hesitated, desperate for some air on her face.
She decided to go up to the terrace. The cement was so hot that it was almost painful to stand on. A bougainvillea growing in the corner threw spiky, quivering shadows. The air felt as thick as smoke. There was not a jot of relief to be found. She turned to go back inside, then paused before Sudhir Desai's closed door. She pictured him asleep, one long leg dangling off the side of the bed. Did bachelors sleep bare-chested? Maybe even naked? Nidhi
laughed to herself, a soft laugh that contained a question, a giddy, half-serious dare. Would she? Just a peek? Easy to pass it off as a joke if he woke up. She placed a palm on the door and pushed.
It was locked from the inside. Her first reaction was relief. Her second, utter horror. Had he somehow been expecting her to do this? Had he taken precautions? Something tells me you're the type of girl. . . . Then she remembered what he'd said about locking the door—force of habit—and she relaxed, even managing another laugh, this one at her own panic. Nevertheless, as she walked down the stairs toward her stuffy bedroom, her legs trembled slightly, as if she'd made a narrow escape.
She bled more than usual that month and had to change pads every few hours. Only once did she allow herself to imagine her mother's ordeal—nurses running, shouts, the gory extraction—before putting it out of her mind. Her wrapped pads multiplied in the bin. She stared at them uneasily. When would the bin be emptied? If only she knew where to take the pads, she'd get rid of them herself.
She was reading in the living room one afternoon when Padmini appeared. Jaya Aunty had fallen asleep in front of the TV. Nidhi didn't know where Sudhir Desai was.
"Padmini," Nidhi smiled, glad for a distraction. Then, stiffening: "What are you doing?"
For Padmini held in her arms every one of Nidhi's discarded pads. There had to be a dozen of them. One or two, where she had been careless and not used enough paper, were coming undone, their crimped edges unfurling to expose the dark smears inside.
"Padmini!" Nidhi yelped. "Don't touch those!" She glanced around to see if Jaya Aunty had woken, but her great-aunt was an extraordinarily heavy sleeper and did not move.
"They're dirty. He shouldn't see them," Padmini said calmly. "He" meant Sudhir Desai.
Arms full of Nidhi's blood, Padmini stepped out into the garden. Nidhi, still pleading with her to drop them, followed, the long grass stinging her ankles. They went past the clothesline,
66
past matted vines and drooping red monkey-tail cactuses, to an enormous, wild lantana bush at the far end. Padmini walked around it, disappearing from view. Nidhi followed.
Padmini had made a fire pit, ringed by dark rocks. There were flakes of gray ash on the rocks, and the choking stink of wet soot. She dropped Nidhi's pads into the center and stepped back. Nidhi went closer and peered into the pit. It was apparent that Padmini burned the household trash here, but nothing was fully incinerated; the air was too humid for that. Nidhi saw several charred pages of Rani, a few singed potato peels, some scraps of yellow-and-white cloth that looked familiar.
Nidhi squinted, trying to identify the cloth. When she did, she looked up sharply at Padmini, who was holding a match to one of the wrapped pads, which flared limply but didn't catch fire. Unfazed, Padmini lit another match. After ten minutes, she'd used up an entire box of matches and succeeded in reducing Nidhi's pads to a nest of shrivelled black eggs. The air stank of burnt plastic.
For the rest of the day, Nidhi debated whether to inform Sudhir Desai of the fate of his pajamas. In the end, she didn't. She couldn't say why. Perhaps he hadn't noticed that they'd gone missing. He hadn't said anything, after all. Plus, she feared that if she broached the subject, he'd want to see the fire pit for himself, and then the whole embarrassing story would come tumbling out: her pads in Padmini's hands, Jack and Rose in the steamy car, her silly theories about Padmini and ghosts and love.
Finally, Sudhir Desai invited Nidhi to a Theosophical Society talk. Jaya Aunty, clearly displeased but unable to criticize him, said, "Psh. What will a child do listening to that?"
He tapped her on the head. "You don't need it with that big brain, my dear Jaya, but we ordinary people like to expand our minds." She subsided into contented giggles, and no further objection was raised to Nidhi accompanying him.
The Society was a sprawling campus on the Adyar River, its peaceful walking paths dotted with old buildings
ings and gently unkempt trees. The main building was painted a tranquil yellow, except where eight white plaster elephant heads stared out from a red-accented wall. The lecture, on the subject of clairvoyance, was given by a tall man with gold-rimmed spectacles, and it began with a poem. Nidhi tried to memorize this but retained only the first line, which she recited to herself as the man spoke. Oh, hidden life, vibrant in every atom. Oh, hidden life, vibrant in every atom. Oh, hidden life . . .
Afterward, Sudhir Desai walked her around the campus, pointing out its highlights: the shrines built to every religion on earth, the ancient banyan tree, the accommodations for scholars and volunteers. It was dusk when they started back to the house. Nidhi was quiet. Her bleeding had tapered off, but she felt exhausted. Sudhir Desai, too, seemed subdued. He kept tapping a fountain pen in his breast pocket. Tap, tap, tap.
He said, "I want to tell you something." Then, without looking at Nidhi, he began a story. It was about a beautiful German nurse whom he'd met during the war. He did not specify which war, and Nidhi did not ask. He and the nurse had had a passionate affair, and she'd become pregnant. She begged Sudhir Desai to return with her and the baby to Germany, but he couldn't. Not because he didn't want to but because he and another man were already mak-
making plans to fly a plane into the jungle.
Nidhi listened in silence, not knowing what to make of this extraordinary confession, which became more garbled as it went on. There was mention of a genocide, armed guerrillas, a cache of gemstones, someone named Sparky. And, by the time all that was over (the genocide? the flying?), it had been too late. He could not bring himself to contact the German nurse or the child, who was his child. Why? Because too much time had passed. And also—why lie?—because he was afraid.
They had reached Jaya Aunty's gate. Nidhi could see lights in the windows.
Sudhir Desai said softly, "I've never told anyone this before. I don't know why I told you. It's just . . . I sense this incredible wisdom in you, Nidhi. You're an old soul. I just knew that, if anyone could understand me, it would be you."
Nidhi didn't respond. She was seeing herself—so thrilled by her own audaciousness, her daring—standing like a fool, like a child, in the dark before his closed door. She suddenly wanted to weep.
"Is that when you met Shankar?" she asked loudly. "While all of this was happening?"
"Shankar?" He frowned in confusion. "Oh, that Shankar. No, that was much later, in Mombasa. Some people introduced us. He wanted to start a
"Hey, no kicking!"
business, and they thought I could help him, I guess. But I saw right away that nothing would come of it.”
“Why not?”
“It was a half-baked idea.” Sudhir Desai shrugged. “He wasn’t the smartest fellow.”
“I heard he was a genius.”
He gave a short, grateful laugh, as if Nidhi were being droll on purpose to cheer him up. “Shankar? A genius? Sure. Why not? Let’s call him a genius. A full-fletched genius.”
Later on, she would tell herself that it was a natural thing to say. It had become her role, after all, the one she played with him, the one he himself had encouraged. Nidhi, reader of novels. Argumentative, opinionated, precocious, wise Nidhi. How else could she have responded?
“Full-fledged,” she said.
“What?” There was an uptick in his voice. Of vigilance. Perhaps of alarm.
“Full-fledged,” she repeated. “Not ‘full-fletched.’”
He laughed again. “Nice try, but you’re wrong. It refers to an arrow. The feathers at the bottom are called fletching.”
“I know what fletching is,” she said quietly. “And that’s not where the word comes from.”
He looked at her but did not speak. They went into the house. After dinner, Sudhir Desai said good night and retired upstairs. Jaya Aunty and Padmini went to bed soon afterward. Nidhi brushed her teeth and was sitting at the edge of her bed, cooling off in front of her fan, when there was a knock at her door.
“I was wondering,” he said pleasantly, “if you’d like to sleep in my room.”
He had been called away by an emergency, he explained. He was going straight to the airport, where he would camp out until the early plane to Bombay departed. From there, he’d fly to Nairobi, and on to Mombasa. He said that he’d felt guilty sleeping in his air-conditioned quarters while she sweltered down here. He said that there was no reason she shouldn’t take his room, starting tonight. Starting now, in fact. Look, he was all packed and ready to go.
So he was. His suitcase stood by the door in a pool of moonlight.
“What about Jaya Aunty?” Nidhi whispered. “She won’t know what happened to you.”
“Oh, Jaya’s used to me by now. She knows I’ll be back.”
The sheets weren’t clean. They smelled of him—of sweat and a soap that Nidhi wasn’t familiar with—but she was too tired to care. The A.C. was noisy but effective, and she had to go downstairs and fetch the sheet from her own room to add to his. The bookshelves loomed; the cold constricted her; light leaked into the room from the street lamps below. For a moment, she thought that she would never be able to fall asleep, but she was wrong.
When the door opened, she didn’t wake up fully. Everything reached her from far away; her sensations were ghostly. If she did have a thought, it was: He’s here. Strangely, this did not provoke panic. While she was in this half-asleep state, nothing felt dangerous, and nothing menaced her. She possessed a calm, inexplicable authority over her surroundings. She was the dreamer, the puppet master, and so all of this—the dip of the mattress; the tiny sigh; the soft human bulk pressing down on her; the back-and-forth rocking, erratic and timid at first, then gaining in momentum; the long strands of hair tickling her bare arm—all of it was happening because she, in some distant part of her mind, had willed it so.
She could not say exactly when she understood. But, even then, she did not move. She did not fling Padmini off. She did not scream. The reason was that she had caught sight of Padmini’s expression.
Padmini’s eyes were closed. She wore a funny look of urgency, of impatient longing, as if she were waiting for something to happen, something that had been promised to her long ago. Surely, Nidhi thought, any minute, Padmini would recognize her, but she only let out a small, frustrated cry and, burying her head in Nidhi’s shoulder, increased her efforts, dashing her hips hard against Nidhi’s through the two sheets—passionate, determined, and utterly ineffectual. How long it lasted, Nidhi couldn’t say, but all at once Padmini was rolling off. She was standing up, her back to Nidhi. Her hair hung loose past her shoulders, silvery and very beautiful.
Then she was gone. Nidhi stayed motionless for several minutes. Finally, she got out of bed, crossed the room,
closed the door, and, with shaking fingers, latched it.
She did not believe now, of course, that he’d had any kind of emergency. Why had she been stupid enough to think so? She imagined him strolling with his suitcase to the Theosophical Society and requesting a bed for the night, or else walking the dark streets of Adyar, past snoring watchmen and vigilant street dogs, feeling serene and self-congratulatory, even fatherly, at having provided her with useful instruction, the lesson he thought she so badly needed to learn: You think you’re smart. You think you know the world. But, little girl, you don’t know a damn thing.
Eight days later, she was back in Bangalore. Her father, guilt-ridden, spoiled her for weeks. Her mother was withdrawn at first, a little sheepish, tentative. But jokes slowly reappeared, as did words like “fetus,” “cervical insufficiency,” “evacuation.” Still, things were not the same; there had been a definite blocking off, a shift of terrain that put Nidhi on one side, her parents on the other.
Nidhi found that she did not mind this.
She did not mind because of something that had occurred to her during the train ride home. She had closed her eyes, and the rhythmic rocking of the carriage had brought back the rocking of Padmini, her anguished little cry at the end. And then it was not Nidhi’s body under those sheets but her father’s. Her own father at fifteen years old, lanky and inexperienced, panicking at this turn of events, trying to decide what to do, how to respond.
Naturally, Nidhi did not actually think that what had happened to her had also happened to him—if it had, he would never have sent her there—but, for those few seconds on the train, she gave in and allowed herself to imagine it. Would he have held still, as she had, and waited for it to be over? Would he have fought and screamed?
Or would he have done something else entirely? ♦
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68
THE CRITICS
SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GETTY
BOOKS
VANISHING ACT
Rachel Cusk's protest against personhood.
BY BECCA ROTHFELD
The protagonist of Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Life of M," has a peculiar technique for falling asleep. She "visualizes a brick wall. It fills her field of vision; its perimeters are out of sight. With a narrow implement she begins chipping at the mortar around a first brick, usually the one directly in front of her. She works steadily and calmly. The mortar loosens and falls away piece by piece. When it has been removed she pushes
the brick forward with her hand. It falls down the other side of the wall, and now in its place there's a small rectangle of blank white light. With her implement she begins chipping at the brick beside or above it, and then at the one beside or above that. The white shape made of light gets bigger and bigger. When it is big enough, she crawls through it."
It is as good an image as any for Cusk's own trajectory. The reigning queen of
autofiction, the literary subgenre in which the lines that divide narrator from author are knowingly smudged, she is renowned for her cool, glassy prose and her stark austerity of vision. Her reputation rests on three works that she published to great fanfare in the twenty-tens—"Outline" (2014), "Transit" (2016), and "Kudos" (2018). Their reticent narrator, Faye, resembles her creator insofar as she is a divorced British writer with two children,
Freedom is something that Cusk's characters—particularly her female characters—long for and lack.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JACK SMYTH
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but we learn almost nothing else about her, and she rarely speaks on her own behalf. Instead, she operates like a recording device as she listens to a series of long-winded interlocutors at literary festivals and dinner parties.
Cusk, by her own account, began to tire of traditional novels in 2012, when she endured a bout of what she described, in an interview with the Guardian, as “creative death” following the publication and hostile reception of her controversial memoir “Aftermath,” which details her acrimonious separation from her husband. For several years, she could neither read nor write fiction, which had come to seem “fake and embarrassing” to her. But a careful examination of Cusk’s work reveals that she had been preparing to jettison the rudiments of the form well before then. She had scarcely started writing novels when she began taking them apart, brick by brick, in search of the white vacancy glaring beyond them.
Cusk’s first three books, two of which were published before she was thirty, are outfitted with all the traditional amenities: scenes, characters, plots, and, for good measure, self-conscious allusions to Jane Austen and the Brontës. These early efforts are funny, cynical, and so overwritten that it is hard to believe they were produced by the same woman later hailed for her spare, sleek style. By Cusk’s fourth novel, however,
she was staging an understated revolt against the form she had chosen and had evidently already started to disdain. “The Lucky Ones” (2003), “In the Fold” (2005), “Arlington Park” (2006), and “The Bradshaw Variations” (2009)—the products of her middle and best period—are more like interlinked character sketches than like plotted novels. Each presents a group portrait of a handful of disaffected British suburbanites—husbands who resent their deadening jobs, toddlers who whine and interrupt, and, above all, hassled wives subsumed by a crush of household obligations.
These bleak, formidable novels of domestic desolation are crisply written but slightly old-fashioned, not only because they contain characters and dialogue (devices that Cusk would later dispense with) but because they are about upper-middle-class families living in spacious homes, typically on a single income. (A Cusk novel is always set in a piece of aspirational real estate, often one inhabited by that increasingly obsolete creature, the affluent housewife.) Still, for all their quaintness, the books of her middle period are icily virtuosic. In the prim suburbs that are Cusk’s specialty, women are swallowed alive by parts they have no choice but to play. Motherhood, perhaps even more than marriage, serves to restrict and entrap them. In Cusk’s smartingly honest 2001 memoir, “A Life’s Work,” she likens hav-
ing children to enduring a period of incarceration upward of seven times. “Motherhood, for me, was a sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world,” she writes. It was a “cell,” a “trap,” in which she was an “inmate.”
As chronicles of social imprisonment, Cusk’s middle novels are impressive, but as stylistic feats they are more dazzling still. In them, her prose tightens into something gleaming and aerodynamic. Its imagery is merciless and meticulous: sun falls through windows in “great slanting slabs,” and a pair of pajamas sprawls across a bed like “the discarded skin of a snake.” The affect of these books—brisk, unsentimental, exacting—serves their diagnosis. They are clinical portrayals of a familiar feminine malady, the life too tidily compacted to be free.
And if there is one word that Cusk repeats throughout her corpus, it is “freedom.” Freedom is something that her characters—particularly her female characters—long for and lack. What do these wives and mothers, with their ample back yards and their afternoon coffee groups, hope to be free of? For Cusk, freedom involves wriggling out of the social and historical integuments that enclose a person into a bounded self. “I don’t think character exists anymore,” she told Alexandra Schwartz in 2018, in an interview published in this magazine—but the women in her best novels certainly struggle to cast it off. For them, character not only exists but functions as a compound, a cell, a trap. To achieve freedom, then, is to escape character, and with it the whole edifice of novelistic contrivance. Cusk seems to see the conventions of womanhood and the conventions of fiction, in its most traditional and mannered incarnations, as isomorphic: she consistently discusses motherhood and marriage in explicitly narrative terms. In “A Life’s Work,” she reflects, “My loves have observed the conventions first of the familial narrative, then of the romantic. I have never sought to rewrite these conventions. I have accorded with their cadences, their plot.”
Beginning with the “Outline” trilogy, however, Cusk sought to rewrite them by way of rejecting plot altogether. Everywhere Faye goes—to an elegant wine bar, to a relative’s sprawling country house, to an island off the Greek coast—people talk at her, and the trilogy consists of
“We admit we have hats. Now what?”
prolix monologues occasionally punctuated by a “he said” or a “she said.” A man sitting next to Faye on a plane tells her about having to put his dog to sleep; a playwright recounts her divorce and a later assault; everyone speaks vaguely and grandiosely about love and death. Silverware clanks. The tide laps softly against the shore as the sun sets. One character remarks, “Fate . . . is only truth in its natural state.” Another muses, “I hadn’t realized . . . how much of navigation is the belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind.”
These surprisingly cheesy lines are not always devoid of irony. Some are delivered by characters Faye evidently believes to be pompous and pretentious, but some are delivered by Faye herself—and, at any rate, Faye’s voice is indistinguishable from those of the people she meets. Whether she sits down next to a stranger on a plane or strikes up a conversation with a worker renovating her apartment, the ensuing pseudophilosophizing is the same.
The trilogy is the logical culmination of Cusk’s project up to that point. With its calculated omissions, she removes another brick from the façade and comes that much closer to the white glow waiting beneath. In interviews, she has explained that she was trying to capture a world in which individuality has been supplanted by a set of stock cultural experiences. The soliloquies to which Faye is subjected are meant as a reflection of the general point of view, the kind of shared perspective expressed by the chorus in a Greek play. As Faye puts it in “Outline,” she is in search of the “sort of objectivity that arose when the focus became the sum of human parts and the individual was blotted out.” Character is obsolete because we have all collapsed into one (comfortable, healthy, well-travelled) person who talks in high tones about heartbreak and aesthetics at literary festivals and expensive restaurants overlooking the sea.
So what is left after the demolitions of the trilogy? What remains to undo? In “Kudos,” Cusk stopped naming places. The city where most of the book takes place is just “the city”—any city, every city, the proper setting for a narrator who is any and every person. In her post-trilogy period, she stopped naming people, too, truncating them into letters. In
“Second Place” (2021), a woman called M invites an artist called L to paint on her property. “Parade” (2024) goes even further: it is about a series of artists (some of them clearly modelled on real-life analogues) all called G.
The mush that is G is Cusk’s best attempt to imagine what comes after selfhood. But she cannot quite picture it; formlessness is hard, by its very nature, to formalize, and “Parade” (which really is a parade, a procession of characters who bleed into one amorphous non-character) is full of toothless abstraction. Anemic observations such as “Pure perception . . . involves no interaction, no subjectivity,” are all that’s available once separate selves have liquefied into gelatinous generality. “Parade” is almost mystical in its erasure of delineation, and, like all mystical texts, it is always on the verge of quavering into meaninglessness. One of the gaggles of Gs creates installations in which a piece of cloth is “suspended from the ceiling,” embodying “human form without identity, without face or features. It was genderless, this floating being.” A similarly floating being—so devoid of friction, so bereft of drama, so predictably boring—is the narrator of “Life of M,” Cusk’s weakest novel yet.
“Life of M” is an unwieldy book with three disparate threads, each focussed on a different character (or a different protest against character). Several sections are narrated by I, about whom we learn almost nothing; I could be male or female, young or old. All we know is that he or she has a partner (also a nameless and genderless nonentity) who winds up in the hospital with an unspecified disease, and that he or she lives in a city (though it, too, remains aggravatingly schematic). Perhaps most important, I is a writer who befriends an actress called M. One initial confronts another.
Third-person sections about M—sections that we understand to be I’s perhaps inaccurate imaginings—make up the meat of the book (part of which began as a story in this magazine). “A little while ago, I told the actor M I was thinking of writing her autobiography,” the novel begins. What follows is presumably the narrator’s effort to make good on his or her threat. But there can
be no autobiography without the “auto,” and no biography of someone who lacks a first-person perspective. In lieu of a stable identity, M has only a string of parts that she plays consummately. She sees herself as her audience might see her, imitating the cohesive person she cannot quite become. “She has acted the parts of depressed people, but she has no evidence that depression is real,” the narrator writes. “Humans struggling with their feelings . . . forms a large part of her acting repertoire,” but authentic emotion remains alien to M. Her chief characteristic when she is offscreen—insofar as any celebrity is ever truly offscreen—is her affability. But even the hallmark of this approachability, “the indefatigable mechanism” of her smile, has something artificial about it.
Perhaps because M has no inner life, she is defined largely by the lavish settings in which we find her. The phrase “it is,” followed by a brief description of M’s locale, recurs at the start of the fragments that make up M’s sections: “It is the interior of a limousine”; “It is a spa on the top floor of a tall building”; “It is a restaurant, hidden away down a passage.” Because so many of the places that M frequents are luxurious, her sections have the sheen of a life-style magazine. It is hard to credit the novel’s dutiful condemnation of the actor’s vapidity, given that the only passages with any sensory texture are those describing opulent hotel rooms, beach houses, and rooftop spas. In almost loving detail, Cusk lingers over the furniture on the terrace of a vacation house that M is renting—an “elegant round marble table with four powdered steel chairs,” a “long and wide teak daybed with taupe-colored cushions.” How much more tactile are these sentences than any of Cusk’s writing about M, much less about I!
But what distinguishes M from the rest of us in the narrator’s eyes is not that she seems disembodied, or that she is almost always playing a role. Cusk repeatedly suggests, with unsubtle vehemence, that actors are not as different from private citizens as they may seem—that, in fact, we are all beholden to the parts we perform. M is unlike an ordinary person only insofar as she flits with unusual frequency from one role to the next, forgoing the definition that more
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enduring performances afford. Even the vestiges of a personality elude her.
The question that has been most persistently posed by the press—whether M is based on Cusk's real-life acquaintance Natalie Portman, who is reportedly offended by the implication—has an answer as obvious as the very line of inquiry is tedious. M's filmography bears a marked resemblance to Portman's: she began her acting career as a child, as Portman did, and she appeared in a movie that is readily identifiable as "Black Swan," Portman's greatest success. But, in the book's final, metatextual scene, M tells the narrator, "I don't like the way you portray me," and the narrator protests that he or she has written not a biography but a novel: "But it isn't you... It isn't anyone." Cusk's crime is not that she has used a real person as inspiration for a character, as writers have done since time immemorial, but that the protagonist of her novel "isn't anyone," that she is little more than a device for thematizing the dissolution of the self.
The third thread that makes up "Life of M" is narrated by We, and it presents an even more dogged refusal of specificity. We is "not young" and "not old," and, like I, they are neither male nor female. They, too, live in "the city." Readers familiar with the outline of Cusk's biography—she lives in Paris with her current husband, the painter Siemon Scamell-Katz—can divine hints of her life in the scant details that We reveals. "The city" is teeming with tourists, and it boasts an Eiffel-like tower. But, without the benefit of this auxiliary information, We would remain so hazy as to be almost illegible, like a shape becoming indistinct in the mist. They lead something that has the silhouette, but none of the weight or the substance, of a life. "We are in the midst of our lives and talk about what we see there, what we feel, the events that have occurred and what they might mean," they report. What do they see there? How do they feel? What events have occurred? Can anything more than the most desultory gesture at a novel emerge while these questions go unanswered?
In the end, the I, M, and We sections are never satisfactorily integrated. Cusk's final affront to the novel is to disaggregate it into unreconciled elements without making any concession to cohesion. Despite her reputation for rigor, "Life of
M" is not a disciplined dismantling; it is discombobulated and haphazard, a machine breaking down at random. As Cusk has become more disdainful of fiction and more insistent on the documentary function of art, her work has become vaguer and less concrete, fading like old ink into blurred indeterminacy. Her ambition for the style of her latest book is stated clearly enough in its narrator's admiring description of a memoir about sexual abuse. The tone of this memoir "was neither personal nor impersonal, it possessed a deep and unmistakable authority, the authority of an object." But should a book be written with the authority of an object? The authority of objects derives from their imperviousness—but too total an imperviousness precludes writing and action altogether.
In light of her dream of disintegrating the particularities of selfhood into the warm liquid of universality, it is no surprise that Cusk has invented a new sort of novel that is nearly unidentifiable as such. After all, the novel as we know it concerns itself with people bound by the dictates of the social world, not people approximating the point of view of things. In interviews, Cusk has contrasted "seeing the world" in a way that relates to "society" with seeing it in a way that relates to "art," as if the highest instances of the novelistic art—Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," Henry James's "The Ambassadors," Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"—weren't suffused with social observation. We is so antisocial as to be decidedly anti-novelistic: what results is less like fiction, with its vibrant evocations, than like undergraduate art theory. "Many of the popular painting exhibitions feature abstract art," We observes. "It is difficult to know what these paintings mean. Their distance from reality seems assured, yet what in that case are they showing? People stand in front of these paintings as though waiting for them to explain themselves. Sometimes, standing in front of paintings such as these, it has seemed possible that we too could become abstract."
At times, "Life of M" threatens to become a book composed entirely of vacuities like these, especially when squishy imprecisions infiltrate M's sections, too: a beautiful seaside view "seems to still the heart and unfold it into the
substance of time itself." (That ugly near-repetition of "it" and "itself" to refer to two different nouns in the span of a single clause!) In the end, deprived of the possibility of self-revelation or action, We is reduced to baldly stating their intentions: "We are struck by this element, character, which is at once so defining and so limiting... We do not operate any longer through character." It is hard to imagine that, after a renunciation of everything that might lend texture or fascination to a book, there is anything left to say, but the novel rattles on for nearly forty more pages.
There is another word that Cusk uses almost as often as "freedom": "fate." Her characters yearn for freedom so acutely because they are mired in the morass of fate, which, in a Cusk novel, takes the form of the bourgeois family and—as the critic Andrea Long Chu has astutely argued—of a femininity understood in regressive biological terms. "I could hardly be said to have any choice in the matter," Cusk writes of motherhood in "A Life's Work." In 2019, she declared in an essay in the Times Magazine that "motherhood is an inextricable aspect of female being."
Although Cusk has claimed in recent interviews that she no longer "feels gendered"—she has aged out of motherhood now that her children have grown up—her recent fiction demonstrates that she has trouble envisaging life after gender in any concrete detail. The inescapability of the female condition is so central to Cusk's world view that she can sooner imagine the end of personhood than the end of a way of being organized around heterosexual marriage and childbearing. The narrator of "Life of M" has at last succeeded in breaking free of the binary—in the final scene, M asks, "Are you a guy or a girl?"—but only at the expense of breaking free of anything we could understand as humanity. Unlike many thinkers wedded to a retrograde and restrictive conception of womanhood, Cusk seems to take no joy in what she perceives as the natural order of things. Her traditionalism derives from her fatalism: she is enough of a feminist to lament the lot of suburban mothers ensconced in their houses, but she subscribes too instinctively to the elementality of gender to believe that its terms can truly be altered.
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If womanhood is an immutable fact, Cusk seems to conclude, she can at least do compensatory violence to her fiction. She can slash at that artifact of heteronormativity, the form that began with the marriage plot and has always essentially concerned the domestic indignities that most gall her: the novel. What we cannot do in life we are doomed to rehearse in fiction, even if we do so by attacking the very basis of fiction as a human practice.
Still, very much despite herself, Cusk has not succeeded in expunging character from her work. It obstinately intrudes, even in the books from which she has most arduously endeavored to exile it. Is she achieving kenosis by amalgamating the cacophony of competing voices that usually enrich a novel? Or is it the height of narcissistic self-magnification to suppose that the universal voice sounds so much like your own—and therefore that the universal voice speaks only from well-appointed rentals on the Mediterranean? In the trilogy, what masquerades as self-abnegation serves in practice to recast the world in the image of a particular kind of person: humorless, cosmopolitan, self-important. In “Life of M,” there is even less of a filter between the characters’ perspectives and that of the book. M sounds like I sounds like We, and the distance between the airy abstractions that they all repeat and the novel’s own commitments collapses entirely. In both cases, there is something at once magisterial and leadedly self-regarding about the melancholic rhythms of Cusk’s prose, with its stiff and stately syntax and its utter impatience with the real vagaries of difference.
Yet I would rather dislike Cusk’s voice than read a book—would it even be a book?—without a voice at all. Someone who had really divested herself of personhood would simply exist without intervening in the world, the way a rock does. That Cusk goes on writing is evidence that she cannot really envision the negation of self that she claims to desire. In “Parade,” she confesses that “a novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone.” If she ever succeeds in becoming no one, she will stop writing novels that wish they weren’t novels. Instead, there will be only a flash of white light, originating nowhere in particular, beaming out into the uneventful void. ♦
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Yahoo Boys, by Carlos Barragán (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In 2022, the author of this engrossing investigation travelled to Lagos, Nigeria, to find the person who, years earlier, ensnared his mother in an online romance scam. What he discovered was a place primed by its history and its poverty for the emergence of youths, known as Yahoo Boys, dedicated to conning Western marks using false identities, fake naked pictures, and flattery. In Barragán’s account, Nigerian public discourse casts the Yahoo life style—fuelled by drugs and extravagant spending—as a double-edged sword, both a stain on the country’s reputation and a powerful economic engine. As the book follows four Yahoos, it assembles a story of loneliness in the digital age—a loneliness that deforms scammer and scammed alike.
Unsayable, by Michael Cunningham (Random House). When this warm memoir begins, the author, a celebrated novelist, observes that the world is “sufficient unto itself. It neither knows nor cares if anyone writes about it.” Why write, then? In the pages that follow, Cunningham remembers his upbringing in middle-class suburban California, his gradual awareness of his gayness, his time as a countercultural student at Stanford, and his stints working as a hustler and a bartender, all the while elaborating writing’s many purposes—and offering guidance on how to do it well. It’s a way to entertain, to turn “ephemera into objects,” to “render and recognize everything and everyone.”
Sunrise, by Téa Obreht (Random House). This kaleidoscopic novel, which unfolds across three time lines, opens in 2024, with the crash of a Cessna in the mountains of Wyoming. A survivor wanders alone through the wilderness until she finds Sunrise, an abandoned old Western town. It’s the very place that, some twenty years earlier, a county local, Coll, is working tirelessly to preserve. But, when Coll meets a writer who’s similarly interested in the town’s legacy, his plans get derailed. The writer shares her manuscript—embedded within the novel and set in 1902—which contains little-known truths about Sunrise and the man who founded it, someone whom Coll had long revered. As the narratives converge, Obreht teases out the relationship between our conceptions of history and of ourselves.
Skin Contact, by Eliza Faison (Cardinal). At the outset of this funny and pensive novel, Frances, a married woman, tells her husband, Ben, that she “sort of” has a crush on a waitress—thereby kicking off their open marriage. She and Ben soon discover the joys of sleeping with other people, both together and separately. For Frances, who is thirty, the experiment is, at first, a way to help her cope with the grief of losing her mother. Then, just as she is realizing that she might want to have a child, Ben falls in love with another woman. Torn between a life that might seem “frivolous” and one that feels “flattening,” the couple have to decide what, for them, is the right path.
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BOOKS
MAKING THE SEX SCANDAL
A nineteenth-century panic is a parable about our zeal for public shaming.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
The shape of a certain kind of scandal is remarkably similar, epoch to epoch. A charismatic, mysterious figure is accused of conducting secret sexual rituals that are threatening and exploitative. The accusation rumbles, then explodes locally, drawing in authorities and prompting an investigation. In retrospect, the accusation may contain no truth, some truth, or considerable truth. But the integrity of the accusation has little to do with the intensity of the inquisition. People who might otherwise bring some skepticism or sense of proportion to the story are intimidated and soon find it too risky to object. The accusation works its way through society, annihilating reputations,
deservedly or not. Afterward, the society picks itself up, recognizes the excesses, and regrets them—though too late for those caught in the tempest.
Sometimes, as with the McMartin Preschool “satanism” case, in the nineteen-eighties, there is nothing underneath the hysteria but more hysteria. Sometimes, as with the Salem witch trials, a real, if harmless, substratum of “magic” underlies the panic. Sometimes the accusations have weight, but the context is more complicated than they imply—as with Richard Baker, the Clintonesque San Francisco Zen master accused, in the nineteen-eighties, of sexually exploiting his adepts. Or, as with Oscar Wilde’s
prosecution, in the eighteen-nineties, opposing truths can coexist: Wilde was the victim of a brutal inquisition, a great and benevolent comic writer sent to hard labor for desires the state had no business punishing; and his sex partners included working-class teen-agers, sixteen and seventeen, who were too readily exploited by wealthy men like him.
There’s a similar pattern in the crusades launched in late-nineteenth-century America against “white slavery”—the supposed kidnapping of middle-class white girls by evil foreigners. As scholars note, the women involved were treated, so to speak, as both vixens and victims. The sociologist Brian Donovan, in a book on the subject, describes how the hysteria over white slavery served at once as a progressive campaign against prostitution and as a vindication of nativist fear. The trope proved remarkably resilient. It became the engine of the “Taken” thriller franchise, in which the abduction of wholesome American daughters, immediately after landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport, by Albanian mafiosi is presented as a standing risk of foreign travel.
One of the earliest, oddest, and most instructive of these scandals is now the subject of a fine and detailed book, “A Scandal in Königsberg” (Penguin Press), by Christopher Clark, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. The scandal in question erupted in the eighteen-thirties in the Prussian college town of Königsberg—today, after wars and upheavals, the isolated Russian city of Kaliningrad. Immanuel Kant, who had taught and written there, remained the oracle of a previous generation, and his ideas still fertilized argument, creating an atmosphere dense with permissions and prohibitions. Kant’s work, as the townspeople understood it, seemed to suggest that only disciplined rationality could guard religion against irrational enthusiasm. The furor that greeted the appearance of irrational enthusiasm plays like Anthony Trollope rewritten by Henrik Ibsen: a college-town dispute, turning first sour and then sinister. The cast includes figures with names out of Mel Brooks, among them Count and Contessa Finck von Finckenstein, yet the stakes were high, and the consequences grave.
The story begins in 1810, when Johann Wilhelm Ebel, a young cleric who had studied at the University of Königs-
The accusation spreads through society, annihilating reputations, deservedly or not.
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ILLUSTRATION BY SOPHY HOLLINGTON
berg, returned to the city as a teacher and preacher. Exceptionally sincere and curious, Ebel had been startled, as a student, by the rationalist theology prevalent among Prussia's educated elite. This was the dawn of the "higher criticism," when German scholars began to read the Bible as a historical text, touched by myth and marked by the conditions of its making. The tendency found its most explosive expression when David Friedrich Strauss's "Life of Jesus" appeared, in 1835. To many believers, the approach invited atheism; Clark compares the outcry over Strauss's book to the Muslim reception of "The Satanic Verses."
Like William F. Buckley, Jr., or any other Catholic kid arriving at Harvard or Yale in the late nineteen-forties to find himself among jeerers and doubters, Ebel searched desperately for authority. He discovered it in the appealingly mushy teachings of Johann Heinrich Schönherr, an eccentric, self-taught theosophist fourteen years his senior. Schönherr's ideas, as best one can understand them, began with a glimpse of water lilies illuminated by the sun. From this, he inferred two primordial forces, one a fiery light and the other cascading water, whose collision explained everything from the creation of mankind to the origin of evil. These forces could be imagined as two beings and, by metaphoric extension, as male and female. (The idea still appears, in a transmuted form, in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," where Joyce, who had absorbed theosophical ideas before leaving Dublin, took up the notion of water as woman and mountains or minerals as man.)
More broadly, the effort to reconcile reason and romantic instinct was central to the era: on one side, there was the seeming proof that everything was susceptible to mechanical explanation; on the other, the powerful intuition that life remained mysteriously sublime. In Schönherr's teachings, Ebel saw a means of harmonizing the two. This was an earnest, Germanic kind of resistance to reason by way of more reason. It's a familiar move. People still use science to prove that religion was right all along. The design of the eye, the flagellum of the bacterium, the leap of the quantum, the supposed free will of the electron—in every modern period, some fragrant scientific metaphor is seized upon as evidence of
a discoverable divine order. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, John Updike wrote an entire novel, "Roger's Version," about another excitable young cleric, much like Ebel, in the grip of this delusion. (Predictably, he is also in the grip of sex.) Science kills superstition but seems to take the soul with it. It became the task of the educated cleric to put the soul back in.
Theosophy's principal binary, though on the surface abstract, lent itself rather quickly to an erotic interpretation. Soul, left to steep, gets read as sex, and Ebel was nothing if not soulful. He was described as having long, shiny curls parted down the middle "like a lady," among other "feminine" qualities that made him alluring to women worshippers. He embodied the sensitivo professor, and soon gathered devoted followers, many female, whom people referred to as Ebelians. They naturally inspired gossip in the small college town. "It was fun to be around Ebel—at least for women like Ida von der Groeben," Clark writes of a wealthy young widow whose melancholy Ebel helped lift, "and she was not the only one of whom it was said that Ebel's preaching and pastoral advice had awakened them from years of melancholy, rendering them capable of taking pleasure in everyday life."
Inevitably, rumors curdled into accusations. After Count Finckenstein, a local aristocrat with busybody tendencies, fell out with his Ebelian sister, he started spreading them. In a letter to an Ebelian cousin, the Count accused the pastor of recommending an illicit sexual encounter as a path to sanctification. Ebel had even "urged me by means of hints on a number of occasions to do this in his presence, which I didn't do, praise be to God!" the Count claimed. "This is Satan's work on these poor people, this is the rotten fruit, these are the dangers that threaten all girls who join the Ebel group. And this is why only women or male hermaphrodites are interested in joining it." Women and feminized men, in Finckenstein's telling, were the natural prey and proof of Ebel's corruption.
Then a fellow-clergyman within the Ebel circle, Heinrich Diestel, who had been shown the letter, wrote a wrathful protest against Finckenstein's claims and, as with so many misjudged e-mails of
our own day, made things worse. Who could reprimand Ebel, Diestel asked, for promoting a Christianity that aimed to "sanctify every domain of human life without exception, to sanctify and ennoble social and domestic relationships, to sanctify and ennoble not just churches but also houses, not just meeting halls but also bedrooms?" This was an ill-timed and ill-considered sentence. Though Diestel went on to make clear that no one was proposing to turn bedrooms into brothels, introducing sexuality into a sacred context was enough to shake the little world of interconnected townspeople. Soon, the quarrel escalated into both a church disciplinary inquiry and a criminal proceeding.
The prosecution of Ebel and Diestel was as prejudiced as such things typically are. Before Ebel would defend himself, he demanded to see evidence of what he was being accused of, and to know exactly who was accusing him. This, of course, only damaged his case. Someone who wants to know the charges before answering them is always suspected of buying time. And, then, the doctrine of the "two primordial beings," though meant to bind religion to reason, and piety to history, certainly sounded fishy. It had the ring of a come-on: "My dear, why not retire into the sacristy to continue our discussion of the doctrine of two primordial beings?" It recalls the later wooing of Alma Mahler by Gustav Klimt, in which Klimt, with exquisite high-mindedness, tried to convince her that spiritual and physical love must coexist in every natural relation.
Interrogated, Diestel testified that he and Ebel had talked about sex with married parishioners, and, with what now seems like admirable post-Freudian frankness, had encouraged the "contemplation of nakedness" in discussions of marital relations. Dr. Ebel, Diestel explained, advised husbands who confided doubts about the quality or morality of their conjugal relations to have sex with their wives in the light rather than in the dark, because, as Ebel put it, "the contemplation of nakedness could help to free the fantasy from its images and transform blind lust into conscious affection for the spouse." Strange as this counsel sounds, it echoes contemporary arguments, spurred by internet pornography, to the effect that fantasy can become
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tyrannical when left to itself, and that the real body, seen plainly, might become an instrument of moral repair.
Ebel's professed views seem mostly wholesome, even presciently modern. He distinguished between two forms of shame: a proper moral recoil from perversity or licentiousness, which restrained vice, and a merely conventional shame felt by spouses at being seen naked by each other. The latter, Ebel argued, was false shame, with no rightful place in a loving marriage. For husbands like the Count, the attempts of the pastors to counsel their wives and make sex more acceptable to them were, Clark suggests, an intolerable infringement on masculine privilege.
Yet the wives may well have been genuinely attracted to clergymen they found more sympathetic, and less sexually demanding, than their husbands. Perhaps the Ebelians practiced some kind of ecstatic spirituality. The repressed women of the circle probably found liberation in escaping brutal marriages and communing with the loving pastor, and, if the escape did sometimes take an intimate turn, it would not have been unprecedented, nor necessarily unforgivable.
Still, the question of what Ebel was doing with his adepts swept through Prussia, dominating the newspapers that had only recently begun to emerge from their eighteenth-century chronicling of obligations to a more modern publicizing role. For a while, Clark tells us, nobody in Königsberg seemed interested in talking about anything other than the lurid lives of the Muckers, as the Ebelians came to be called. Obscurity, in such cases, does not dampen suspicion; it gives the imagination room to work.
Then, as so often happens, pseudoscience supplemented sensationalism. It's astonishing, or should be, that doctors—in an era before antibiotics, anesthesia, or even minimal hygiene, when what they could mostly do was watch, record, and worry—had the same prestige and influence they have now. And so Ludwig Wilhelm Sachs, a Königsberg physician and a former member of Ebel's circle, embittered by his expulsion, intervened. In a tone familiar to those who have not yet repressed memories of the spurious confidence possessed by the past century's "repressed memory" ex-
perts, Sachs testified that he could offer a scientific account of what really went on among the Ebelians.
Sachs, in the way of pseudo-psychologists, had a fairly monocausal explanation of psychological disturbance: it was due to masturbation. Obsessed with the act as the source of modern moral dissolution, he detected it everywhere, and darkly implied that the circle enacted rituals of masturbation, and perhaps oral sex, under cover of mystical theology. Ebel, Sachs claimed, imagined himself as the "primordial fire entity," and had turned the group's doctrine of primordial beings into a rationale for controlled sexual practices, supposedly consecrated by higher spiritual meaning. Being fire, Ebel was free to inflame women.
On further inquiry, Sachs proved to be projecting more than he was reporting. He himself, it emerged, had a long and creepy reputation as a fondler and harasser of his patients, although their testimonies don't seem to have damaged his credibility. It was the same with the repressed-memory experts of a later age: evidence offered against a claim to authority is taken to confirm the depth of the evil being concealed.
At last, the Royal Cameral Court, in Berlin, issued a judgment. Ebel was found guilty of premeditated breach of professional duty and of founding an "illegal sect." He was permanently dismissed from his post as archdeacon and barred from holding public office. Worse, he was "to be conveyed to a correctional institution and confined there until his 'improvement' could be determined." The sentence was somewhat lightened by the dismissal of charges of personal irregularity: it was sects, not sex, for which he was blamed.
Ebel and Diestel appealed. In 1842, the appellate court reduced the offense from a premeditated breach of duty to a negligent one, acquitted Ebel of founding a sect, and quashed his confinement. But it upheld the dismissal of both clergymen. Ebel stayed briefly in a small house that his supporters had bought for him, then left Königsberg and settled with Ida von der Groeben in Ludwigsburg, where a few faithful Ebelians eventually joined them. The appeal spared him imprisonment and cleared his name but did not restore his career. Some of
his followers—as Clark does not report, the consequence being perhaps too far outside his story—ended up in Brazil, carrying the Mucker spirit into the German Protestant settlements of Rio Grande do Sul. There, in the eighteen-seventies, their millenarian movement provoked a bloody conflict with neighbors and the military—an episode still so alive in Brazilian memory that it inspired two films.
It is possible for an inquisition to be unjust and for its targets to be, in some sense, guilty. Many Marranos persecuted by the Inquisition did secretly maintain a Jewish identity. The persecution of American Communists in the nineteen-fifties remains a source of shame, even if some caught up in it, including Julius Rosenberg and his circle, really did place the interests of Stalin's U.S.S.R. above those of their own democracy. It is conceivable that Ebel's women adepts were encouraged to seek sexual consolation in the absence of husbands who knew how to give it. The point is that an inquisition's social cost is so high that its victims' guilt or innocence is only part of the accounting. A society in which persecution, and paranoia about persecution, becomes ordinary pays a price often higher than the evil that the inquisition set out to expose and contain.
In his closing chapter, Clark describes how rationalist critics responded to the scandal. It seemed to prove Kant right. Reason had to triumph in all things, or else waves of unreason, of which the Muckers were a model, would insinuate themselves into daily life. The irony, of course, was that Ebel and his followers considered themselves essentially scientific in their cast of mind, reasoning toward revelation by way of nature.
Still, the most potent answer to the inquisitorial impulses emanating from Prussian Königsberg came from the French philosopher Benjamin Constant. Together with his lover Madame de Staël and their circle, Constant arrived at the idea—not in direct response to the Königsberg scandal but in response to the moralizing public absolutism of the age—that liberty required privacy to flourish. No idea of liberty was sustainable without a companion idea of private life. This, Constant explained, was part of what distinguished modern liberty from ancient liberty. The ancients expected citizens to be publicly visible:
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debating, judging, sacrificing, setting examples. The moderns separated public and private life, and allowed the largest possible sphere for private activity: reading, conversing, dining, listening, even (though Constant and de Staël didn't say so, they certainly lived it) conducting agreeable liaisons.
Constant had earlier supplied a forceful hypothetical that involved a murderer at the door: whatever the value of honesty, one had no duty to tell a murderer whether his intended victim was at home. The same moral tact might apply, in less histrionic matters, to the ordinary deceptions and silences by which social life is made bearable. Criticism helpful to a stage performer during rehearsal may be unkind on opening night. The most golden of golden rules was not "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" but "Feel for others as you would want them to feel for you."
An indignant Kant offered a rebuttal to Constant's no-harm-no-foul view: How could you ever know there was no harm if you depended on testimony from those who had committed the foul? If the murderer was at the door, the truth must nonetheless be told, whatever the consequences. (Kant's admirers insist he didn't mean it quite this way, but, if he didn't, it's hard to see what else he meant.) For Kant, exceptions to truthtelling threatened the basis of moral judgment.
On the whole, modern people are constant with Constant in principle and still say "can't" with Kant. We want privacy for ourselves, accountability for others. Although no one believes that Anne Frank should have been betrayed to the Gestapo in obedience to an abstract duty of truthtelling, we readily, even eagerly, suspend Constant's rule of privacy when the private life exposed belongs to an ideological enemy. Republicans, including Brett Kavanaugh during the Clinton years, thought little of cataloguing the intimate details of a sexual relationship between a President and an intern, consensual if shadowed by an inequality of power, for the public humiliation of both. Those of us who despise Trumpism too rarely asked ourselves whether Trump's efforts to conceal an apparently consensual relationship with Stormy Daniels were the proper grounds for prosecution. The law may have had its claims. The appetite with which the intimate facts
"I hope I never need to use it, but I feel better knowing it's there."
were consumed had another character.
Yet without an ethic of truthtelling—and truth-seeking—how can we ever hope to judge morality? It's fine for the French, the contemporary Kantian might say, to have Presidents who take their motor scooter to their mistresses' homes and expect it to be kept quiet, but is that how we want to live? Do we prefer to know nothing about the personal lives of our public figures? How do we know the harm being done if we're not in a position to find out? The extent of harm, after all, can be misjudged by those suffering it, and complaints are not always offered by the frightened captive.
"An abstract isolated idea, independent, inflexible and unchangeable—is it fit to be put into use and circulation among mankind?" Constant asked. In a way recalling the morality of Molière's "Misanthrope," the small deceptions and duplicities of ordinary life become more moral for Constant than a categorical insistence on honesty. And so with the Ebelians: we could decide that if no Ebelian was harmed or complained, then let it be, whatever they did and whatever we may think of it.
The Constant reproach to the Königsberg case is that candor and confession can become cruelty by another name. The
categorical Kantian, in turn, warns that the cult of privacy can shelter abuse, protecting the powerful from the scrutiny that might expose what they have done. The Prussian within us wants to force everything into the open, insisting that anyone with nothing to hide should be willing to put everything on display. Our inner Parisian wants to protect twilight concupiscence, believing it essential to civility. Between Prussian and Parisian lies a permanent argument of our moral modernity, unresolved and probably unresolvable. We can try to recognize malfeasance while resisting malice, but doing so requires patience, proportion, and case-by-case judgment—qualities made nearly impossible by the modern media, already emerging in Königsberg in the form of newspapers and helping to fuel the scandal there. Meanwhile, the whirlpools of history spin, and ordinary people, good and bad alike, drown in them.
What's odd is that—as the Muckers should surely have foreseen when they contemplated their primordial beings—a streaking fireball colliding with a cascade of water would produce not creative plenitude but a brief, noisy shudder, and then steam and silence. That should have been a warning to them, as it ought to be to us. It isn't. ♦
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ON AND OFF THE MENU
EYES UP HERE
Can Hooters revive itself?
BY HANNAH GOLDFIELD
In the fall of 1995, three decades after the March on Washington, the sports bar and restaurant chain Hooters staged a march of its own. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (E.E.O.C.) had accused Hooters of illegal hiring practices, as part of a four-year probe during which staff were “tripping over federal regulators and investigators in our restaurants,” as Mike McNeil, then the company’s vice-president, complained to the Los Angeles Times. The problem was men: Hooters declined to hire them as bartenders or servers, and the commission was demanding that the company create a fund of twenty-two million dol-
dollars to be disbursed among victims. Citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Marcia Greenberger, an attorney for the National Women’s Law Center, told the Times that the law permits exceptions only in obvious cases—“If you needed a wet nurse, you wouldn’t have to offer the job to men”—and pointed out that airlines had once argued that travellers preferred attractive young gals to staff plane cabins, and that they had lost.
McNeil gathered about a hundred Hooters Girls, as they’re formally known, to picket in D.C. They wore branded tracksuits over their uniforms, which consisted of neon-orange hot pants; nude pantyhose, to give the illusion of a sun-
tun; and tight white T-shirts emblazoned with an owl whose big mammiform eyes serve as the double “O’s” in the restaurant’s logo. Among the women was Vince Gigliotti, a burly and mustachioed manager at one of the chain’s Florida locations, who had also been featured in full-page newspaper ads and on billboards wearing a Hooters Girl uniform and a long blond wig; the caption read “Washington Get a Grip!” A year after the protest, the E.E.O.C. backed off, deeming it “wiser . . . to devote its scarce litigation resources to other cases.”
Hooters, which was founded in 1983, and expanded, at its peak, to more than four hundred locations worldwide, faced myriad such challenges over the years: lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and discrimination based on body weight and race; an employee protest, in 2021, over the introduction of even shorter, thong-like shorts. It was hardly a shock when Hooters of America, the corporation that controlled franchising rights, declared bankruptcy in 2025. The extinction of the middle-class chain restaurant, from Friendly’s to Red Lobster, appeared all but inevitable. In the age of ubiquitous internet porn, the idea of going to a chicken-wing restaurant to see some cleavage sounded almost quaint.
But Hooters, it turned out, was not going down without a fight. Last fall, Hooters Inc., a separate company that owned the first-ever location, in Clearwater, Florida, among others, acquired more than a hundred additional stores, as well as control of the brand. The plan, according to Neil Kiefer, Hooters Inc.’s C.E.O. since 1992, was for the chain to remarket itself as a family-friendly neighborhood restaurant: there would still be short shorts and snug tops, but no more bikini nights. In the New York Times, Kiefer insisted that this effort—to “re-Hooterize,” as he put it—was simply a return to form. “We’re getting back to what makes us a beach-themed restaurant as opposed to a girlie bar,” he said, a claim that struck me as both disingenuous and self-sabotaging. Wasn’t the girlie stuff the whole point?
Admission to the Hooters museum—the “Museum,” as the sign hanging above its threshold calls it—at the original Clearwater location is free: hang a right past the hostess stand, attended
The chain is rebranding as a neighborhood restaurant, sans bikini night.
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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JASON FULFORD AND TAMARA SHOPSIN
by what's known as a Hooters Girl at the Door, and you're in. A gallery wall features framed photos of bodacious employees across the decades, as well as the original menu, which advertises the restaurant's signature curly fries as "peeled and squared entirely by hand by an Idaho refugee whom we have chained to the wall in the back room." Artifacts in glass display cases immortalize key moments in Hooters history: toy planes and race cars left over from the brand's short-lived airline and its Nascar sponsorship; a dusty stainless-steel contraption known as a celery jig, invented by the first Hooters chef, Chuck Riley, to cleanly slice stalks in half before serving them with wings.
As it happens, Riley is still on the payroll, and works most days at the company headquarters, a squat two-story building a few hundred yards behind the restaurant. Not long ago, I found him—slim and boyish but for a shock of gray hair and wise, hangdog eyes—in a wood-panelled test kitchen that doubles as the company canteen, tossing batches of fried shrimp in a variety of sauces. When I marvelled at the fact that he'd spent four decades at Hooters, Riley smiled sheepishly and said, "Why not?" On speakerphone, he consulted with Gil DiGiannantonio, a Hooters founder who spearheaded the original menu—the pair learned to operate a deep fryer together—and who was weighing in from his home in Colorado.
DiGiannantonio was part of a group of six men, most of them young, married fathers working in industries such as general contracting and liquor sales, who opened Hooters on a lark. The joke, now cemented in company lore, is that they needed a place they couldn't get kicked out of. "At the time, there were a lot of what you'd call 'fern bars,'" Kiefer, who started as the restaurant's lawyer, told me, referring to a category of upscale hangouts, decorated with potted plants and Tiffany lamps, that were meant to facilitate yuppie courtship. "We were sort of the opposite of that."
Ed Droste, another of the original six, who worked in real estate, had a knack for marketing. The name and the mascot were inspired by a Steve Martin bit: "I believe it's derogatory to refer to a woman's breasts as 'boobs,' 'jugs,' 'winnebagos,' or 'golden bozos,' and you
should only refer to them as 'hooters.'" In Kiefer's telling, he and Droste were at the beach with their wives when they handed a business card to a buxom blonde named Lynne Austin, who had just won a bikini contest, and asked her if she wanted to work at a restaurant. Like Venus from the sea foam, the Hooters Girl was born, an archetype that encompassed both sunny good looks and an unusually cozy kind of hospitality: at Hooters, your server might slide into the booth next to you while taking your order for a pitcher of Bud Light.
In Clearwater, I went to lunch with two former Hooters Girls: Becky Moore, the company's director of learning, development, and training; and Andrea Hill, the executive vice-president in charge of all Texas locations. At a high-top table, Hill, a sleekly dressed Black woman in her forties, took charge of ordering a spread of her favorite dishes—honey Thai shrimp, sweet-and-spicy Daytona Beach wings, deep-fried pickles, and snow-crab legs—and made sure that everyone had plenty of paper towels to wipe their hands. Hill was a college student when she was first hired at Hooters, in Chicago, where she'd be flying later that afternoon: her best friend, her "literal Day One" from her time as a server, was expecting a grandchild, and she was going to the baby shower.
This sense of continuity turned out to be a prominent feature of the Hooters universe: Moore, a bubbly eastern-Florida native in her late thirties who started at the chain out of high school, told me about her "honorary nephew," Chase—a teen-ager whose parents had brought him in regularly as a toddler. Our server, a recent college graduate named Brianna, had grown up in the restaurant, too. Her mother, Kimberlie Bennett, another former Hooters Girl, is now the company's financial controller.
I asked Moore and Hill, tentatively, what they might say to someone who characterizes Hooters as exploitative of women. Neither of them flinched. "I believe, personally, that people just don't know," Hill said. "I don't know many companies that—I was a Hooters Girl eleven years ago, and I'm the executive vice-president now. I don't have conventional management experience, I don't have an M.B.A., but they invested in me." The uniform, she said, wasn't so
different from the one she'd worn as a cheerleader. "And anything that I felt about it, I would turn around, and everybody else had it on, too."
"There was always a girl there that would have your back," Moore added. When I recounted my own experience of working at a restaurant, and the sting of secondhand humiliation I'd felt when a co-worker was sent home because her bra straps were showing, both women nodded sympathetically. A high-school classmate of mine who happily worked at Hooters for five years told me that she'd felt more objectified, and been more frequently harassed, when she got a job at a higher-end bar. Maybe there was something valuable in the Hooters approach of saying the quiet part out loud.
In 2018, the writer and director Andrew Bujalski released a film called "Support the Girls," about the staff of a fictional restaurant called Double Whammies. (Hooters has inspired so many imitators, including Twin Peaks and Ojos Locos, that it's considered the originator of a genre: the breastguard.) When I asked Bujalski recently what drew him to the setting, he described it as a riddle: he liked "the idea that no two customers, no two waitresses, quite have the same idea of what this place is supposed to be and supposed to mean."
A few weeks ago, I took my family to the Hooters in Long Beach, California, after a visit to the aquarium, a short walk away. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised to count some thirteen children in the bustling dining room. As far as my own two kids were concerned, this was a restaurant designed for them: cute animal mascot; televisions on every wall; young women with the same friendly, patient countenance as their camp counsellors offering crayons, tater tots, and lemonade. The food exceeded no one's expectations, but the beer was cold and the price was right. "I love Hooters!" my seven-year-old son declared. Who was I to argue with him? ♦
Department of Delicacy
From the Belmont (Mass.) Citizen-Herald.
A Creeley Road resident reported someone wrote an anatomically correct term on his fence in spray paint.
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THE CURRENT CINEMA
FINE TOONING
“Coyote vs. Acme.”
BY JUSTIN CHANG
In the 1952 “Looney Tunes” short “Operation: Rabbit,” Bugs Bunny encounters another member of the cartoon-critter pantheon. “Allow me to introduce myself,” the figure says, brandishing a business card. “My name is Wile E. Coyote, Genius.” It wasn’t quite the character’s first appearance—he’d made his début three years earlier, chas-
disastrously ill-advised attempts to capture his prey.
One of the modest but telling charms of “Coyote vs. Acme,” a new feature-length comedy from the director Dave Green and the screenwriter Samy Burch, is that the eponymous canine never breaks his vow of silence—a nod to tradition that also serves a narrative
In Dave Green’s film, Wile E. Coyote seeks compensation for his many injuries.
ing the Road Runner, in “Fast and Furry-ous” (1949)—but it was the first time he’d been given a name and the gift of words (delivered by the voice actor Mel Blanc). The name would stick; the words would fade. Bugs, with his carrot-chomping patter, naturally brought out the character’s talkative side in their occasional matchups. But it was the Road Runner who swiftly became Wile E. Coyote’s nemesis, and they shared a commitment to muteness—“Beep-beep!” notwithstanding—that gave their hunter-and-hunted dynamic a primal undertow. They didn’t need dialogue to define them, especially since their chases played out to such an expressive soundtrack of crashes and booms—the music of a predator’s
purpose. In a story that draws loose inspiration from Ian Frazier’s brilliant humor piece “Coyote v. Acme,” which was published in this magazine in 1990, Wile E. Coyote needs someone who can speak on his behalf. He finds that someone in Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a bumbling personal-injury lawyer from Albuquerque, who reluctantly agrees to represent him in a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation, the manufacturer of the many, many products that his client has ordered by mail over the years to help catch the Road Runner, to worse than no avail. The movie’s early passages are an epic ode to buyer’s remorse, reminding us, with a mix of newly shot action scenes and excerpts from classic “Looney Tunes”
shorts, that every one of the plaintiff’s Acme purchases—they include rocket-powered roller skates, electromagnetic gloves, tiny slingshots, enormous catapults, and anvils and explosives galore—has malfunctioned and backfired, with hilariously punishing results.
For all that, Kevin—whose law practice is named for the Warner Bros. animation legends Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese—doesn’t think his client, whom he addresses as Wile E., has much of a case. Especially against a mega-conglomerate like Acme, which is variably described as “the biggest corporation in the world” and “a family-values company that values its family . . . of companies.” Kevin, hapless and lazy, is no match for Acme’s army of super-slick lawyers, who are led by Buddy Crane, a heavyweight in every sense; he’s played, with beefy swagger, by the actor and former professional wrestler John Cena. But Kevin is fortunate to have an ambitious intern, Paige (Lana Condor)—she’s also his niece—who takes one look at Wile E.’s sky-high pile of Acme junk and sees not just a damning mountain of evidence but also signs of a sinister conspiracy. The film, blending animation and live-action footage, takes the form of a detective story, following such precursors in this hybrid medium as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988) and “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” (2003). Truth be told, the plotting isn’t quite up to the strength of the premise, but the slight slackness of structure has the benefit of being able to accommodate an array of “Looney Tunes” characters in bit parts, with narrative priority for the birds: here’s Daffy Duck as a fount of mournfully deranged backstory, Tweety as a kind of diminutive double agent—a canary trap—and, most effectively, Foghorn Leghorn as a preening, menacing Acme overlord.
The revelations hinge, unsurprisingly, on a cruel double standard in the ways humans and toons are treated. In a richer version of the story, the dubious codes and customs of this animation-apartheid society might themselves have become a compelling source of mystery, the way they did in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” but no matter. It’s a relief to note what “Coyote vs. Acme” isn’t and a pleasure to celebrate
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ILLUSTRATION BY ANTONY HUCHETTE
what it is. It isn't a flailing, content-regularizing C.G.I. shit storm in the manner of "Space Jam: A New Legacy" (2021), one of the latest studio movies to attempt this kind of mashup, but, rather, a fleet, funny, often elegant throwback, made by artists with an obvious but not overweening reverence for the original "Looney Tunes" universe. (At one point, the filmmakers playfully sound a note of righteous contempt: Pepé Le Pew gets about a second of screen time, just so he can be cancelled as an odious sex pest.) The film has a gorgeous, crisply delineated surface; the hand-drawn lines of the animations both pop out from and mesh seamlessly with their live-action environments. The toon characters mine the intersection of those modes for inspired bursts of comic mayhem, whether in the various signs that Wile E. holds up to communicate or in the recurring spectacle of falling cartoon projectiles crashing into actual, physical property.
Forte has always had something of a cartoon-ready constitution, with his rubbery physicality and goofball charm. His performance here is all sheepish grins and Gumby limbs, jutting out of a tan suit that, juxtaposed with his scraggly dark hair, makes him almost a visual correlative to the brown and beige of Wile E. Coyote himself. Both characters are deeply acquainted with the stench of failure. The crucial difference is that Kevin has allowed it to define and crush him, whereas Wile E. sees it as a source of renewal—a kind of reverse Kryptonite. This lean, mean, yellow-eyed desert canine remains among the leading optimists of his era, and "Coyote vs. Acme" casts
his back-to-the-drawing-board tirelessness, his single-minded pursuit of his obsession, in unabashedly heroic terms. More than once, the script references Sisyphus, one of the few characters in fiction who can rival its protagonist for bad luck with boulders. Even when he's holed up in a fleabag motel in Albuquerque before and during the trial, Wile E. has no use for downtime. As industrious as ever, he spends night after night poring over blueprints and devising Rube Goldberg machines, including one to insure that Kevin, snoozing away next door, will be awake, dressed, and ready to go in the morning. Genius never sleeps.
At the beginning of "Coyote vs. Acme," we see a logo for Warner Animation Group, one of the film's production companies, which is pointedly described onscreen as "a wholly owned subsidiary of the Acme Corporation." Near the end of the closing credits, there's a dedication "to everyone who posted, shared, held up signs, and spoke out when it counted. This film made it to the big screen because of you." The target of these two bookending messages is the film's original distributor, Warner Bros. Discovery, which abruptly shelved the movie in 2023, in exchange for a tax writeoff. It wasn't the only occasion in recent years that the company, ridden with debt, had pulled the plug on its own product, squandering the time and talent of all involved; the never-completed movies "Batgirl" and "Scoob! Holiday Haunt" were fellow-victims. But "Coyote vs. Acme" was a finished work, and the looming probability that the film would never see
the light of day provoked an industry-wide outcry. Three years later, "Coyote vs. Acme" is finally being released in theatres by another distributor, Ketchup Entertainment—a name that can only be properly honored, I'd suggest, by a trip to the Warner studio gates, with a basket of rotten tomatoes at the ready.
"Coyote vs. Acme" may not be a great movie, but, as a story that pits a scrappy underdog against the forces of soulless corporate malevolence, it does come equipped with a pretty great metaphor for its own Hollywood misfortunes. The movie's final showdown takes place at a U.S. Senate hearing, presided over by none other than Elmer Fudd. I couldn't help but think of the congressional proceedings that have already happened, and of the federal trial that looms, as Paramount Skydance—the bloated, Trump-aligned Acme of the media landscape—seeks to devour what remains of Warner. It's a merger that doesn't bode well for movies, cartoons, or humans. Amid such real-world bleakness, the ending of "Coyote vs. Acme" manages an unexpected wallop: a quietly moving reaffirmation of the immortal bond between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, comic adversaries who turn out, beneath the fur and the feathers, to be kindred spirits. I was reminded, of all things, of Barbara Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve" (1941), one of the finest movies Paramount—indeed, Hollywood—ever produced, summing up her character's love for Henry Fonda's dopey dreamboat: "I need him like the axe needs the turkey." But which is the axe, and which is the turkey? And does Acme carry either? ♦
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制度与权力批判深度研判：The New Yorker (2026-08-24)
▌ 本日全报思想与文化深思雷达 (Intellectual & Cultural Significance Radar)
在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的报道后，以下 2 个具体议题在制度结构、权力技术与法理合法性层面最值得学者进一步深思：
-
【选举制度的联邦化之争与技术脆弱性】
[F14_26, F15_27, F15_28]（版面：评论/选举游戏）- 事件简述：唐纳德·特朗普试图通过《保障美国选民资格法案》将选举实践联邦化，而共和党传统上主张州级自主。与此同时，布伦南中心揭示了州级选举系统严重老化（如在 eBay 上购买备件）且缺乏统一标准的制度危机。
- 制度批判切入点：分析“联邦权力”与“州权”在选举管理中的结构性张力，以及技术基础设施的匮乏如何为权力操纵提供制度空间。
-
【文化生产中的时代精神与复仇主义叙事】
[F3_5, F3_6]（版面：主报深度版面/技术复仇）- 事件简述：罗素·T·戴维斯的新剧《蹑手蹑脚》（Tip Toe）通过一个年长同性恋者的视角，揭示了当今社会一种“蹑手蹑脚”的复仇主义心态，反映了社会交往中权力关系的微妙位移。
- 制度批判切入点：探讨当代文化产品如何捕捉“时代精神”，以及社会规范的剧烈变动如何转化为一种个体层面的心理防御机制与权力博弈。
▌ 精选核心专题深度思想论证 (In-Depth Dialectical Monograph)
专题一：选举权力的碎片化治理与“例外状态”的制度诱导
本期报道揭示了美国选举制度中一个深刻的结构性矛盾：联邦权力与州级自主权在选举管理上的脱节，不仅导致了技术层面的崩溃，更在法理上为权力的扩张预留了接口 [F15_27 🔍]。从制度现实困境来看，布伦南中心的数据揭示了一种官僚失能的极端状态——地方选举管理人员在 eBay 上购买投票机备件 [F15_28 🔍]。这种基础设施的极度碎片化，实际上构成了一种“制度性真空”。当选举系统处于这种摇摇欲坠的状态时，任何微小的技术误差（如新泽西州 400 名非公民错误登记）都会被迅速放大为政治危机 [F15_28 🔍]。
在此情境下，权力运作采取了典型的危机叙事逻辑 [F14_26 🔍]。特朗普通过声称拜登获胜在“统计学上是不可能的”，试图将常规的民主计票程序定义为一种“危机状态”。在这种叙事框架下，他提出的《保障美国选民资格法案》不再是简单的立法建议，而是一种试图通过联邦化手段绕过州级自主权的权力重构。这种话语技术极其精巧：它一方面利用共和党内部对“联邦化”的传统恐惧 [F15_27 🔍] 来制造内部张力，另一方面又以“消除欺诈”为名，试图将选举的最终裁决权从分散的州级官僚机构转移到联邦权力中心。
从制度视角分析，这种碎片化的选举机器本身就是一种程序保障的失效。当制度无法提供统一的、可预测的程序保障时，权力便不再通过程序运作，而是通过对程序的“定义权”来运作。这种从“程序合法性”向“定义合法性”的转移，标志着民主制度在面对技术老化与政治极化时的脆弱性。当代 AI 干预风险的加入 [F15_28 🔍]，进一步强化了这种不安全感，使得权力行为体能够更轻易地将技术漏洞转化为政治武器。
专题二：文化镜像中的社会契约重构与“复仇主义”心理
在关于罗素·T·戴维斯新剧《蹑手蹑脚》（Tip Toe）的评论中，一个关键的隐喻被提出：一个曾经可以自信地走进房间说“哒哒！”的人，现在必须“蹑手蹑脚地走——以防万一” [F3_6 🔍]。这一细节不仅是对剧作的描述，更是对当代社会权力关系位移的精准捕捉。这种从“直接表达”到“谨慎试探”的转变，揭示了社会契约在当代文化语境下的某种断裂。
这种“蹑手蹑脚”的状态，实际上是社会复仇主义（Revanchism）在日常生活中的微观体现 [F3_6 🔍]。当社会规范在短时间内发生剧烈变动，且这种变动伴随着强烈的道德审判与权力反转时，个体在公共空间中的行为模式会从“权利主张”转向“风险规避”。这种心理状态反映了权力不再通过显性的法律或制度运作，而是通过一种弥散的、不可预测的社会监督机制（如社交媒体时代的取消文化或道德审查）来实施。
从文化研究的角度看，戴维斯试图捕捉的“时代精神”实际上是一种深层的焦虑：个体在面对一个快速演变的价值体系时，失去了对自身社会位置的确定感。当“复仇”成为一种潜在的社会逻辑，公共空间便不再是对话的场所，而变成了充满陷阱的雷区。这种文化现象揭示了制度在调节社会冲突时的失能——当正式的法律制度无法提供足够的安全感与公正感时，社会成员倾向于在非正式的、基于恐惧的心理契约中寻求生存。
▌ 面向学者的制度研究开放性追问 (Open Research Horizons)
- 【关于技术基础设施与民主韧性的研究】：当关键的民主基础设施（如投票机）依赖于非正式市场（如 eBay）维持时，这种“技术贫困”如何通过降低制度的容错空间，从而诱导政治行为体采取极端的权力重构手段？
- 【关于社会规范变动与个体行为心理的研究】：文化作品中呈现的“复仇主义”心态如何反映现实中权力结构的位移？这种从“显性权力”向“弥散性监督”的转变，如何影响公民在公共空间中的表达自由与身份认同？
- 【关于联邦制与行政集权之争的研究】：在危机叙事的驱动下，原本主张分权的政治力量为何会转向支持联邦化集权？这种逻辑转向在其他民主制度的危机时刻是否具有普适性？
理性与情感辩证深度研判：The New Yorker (2026-08-24)
▌ 本日全报生活世界痛感与情感政治深思雷达 (Lifeworld & Affective Significance Radar)
在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在个体生命体验、情感撕裂与生活世界崩解层面最值得学者进一步深思：
-
【复仇主义下的社交萎缩】
[F3_5, F3_6]（生活领域：文化与身份/社会心理）- 事件简述：在罗素·T·戴维斯的新剧《蹑手蹑脚》（Tip Toe）中，一个年长同性恋者描述了当今社会的复仇主义氛围，使得人们在进入房间时不再能自信地宣告存在，而必须“蹑手蹑脚”以防万一。
- 情感政治切入点：分析当代社会“取消文化”或复仇主义如何将公共空间转化为充满监视感的心理战场，导致个体在表达自我与规避风险之间产生深层的情感焦虑。
-
【阶级化的肉身痛感与生存权】
[F8_15 🔍]（生活领域：健康与身体/城市生存）- 事件简述：报道提及了多种怪兽电影，其中《Godzilla Minus Zero》设定在1949年的日本，通过怪兽的破坏展现战后废墟中的生存状态。
- 情感政治切入点：探讨极端灾难（无论是虚构的怪兽还是现实的战争）如何将个体简化为纯粹的生存生物，分析在系统性崩溃面前，肉身的脆弱性如何成为连接不同阶层个体的唯一情感共鸣点。
-
【数字时代的身份表演与异化劳动】
[F11_20 🔍]（生活领域：劳动与就业/数字生活）- 事件简述：流行音乐的定义在社交媒体时代被极大地扩展，歌手如 Lolo Zouaï 通过摆弄声音与语言的边界来定义自己的艺术轮廓。
- 情感政治切入点：探讨在算法驱动的流行文化中，艺术家的“身份”如何被转化为一种可消费的、碎片化的“音色”或“轮廓”，分析个体在追求艺术表达的快感与满足市场算法需求之间的张力。
▌ 精选核心专题理性与情感辩证论证 (The Dialectic of Logos and Pathos Monograph)
专题一：复仇主义逻辑与主体性空间的坍缩——以《蹑手蹑脚》为例
在罗素·T·戴维斯的新剧《蹑手蹑脚》（Tip Toe）中，出现了一个极具认识论意义的隐喻：一个曾经自信地走进房间说“哒哒！”的人，现在必须“蹑手蹑脚”地行走 [F3_6 🔍]。这里揭示了社会治理理性（Social Logos）与个体生命体验（Phenomenological Pathos）之间的剧烈冲突。
从理性维度看，当代的“复仇主义”或社会纠偏机制往往被包装成一种追求正义的逻辑——通过追溯过去的错误并对其进行惩戒，以构建一个更纯净、更具包容性的未来。这种逻辑是线性的、审判式的，它试图通过建立一套严格的道德审计系统来量化个体的“正确性”。
然而，这种理性在生活世界中产生的实际效果却是情感上的寒蝉效应。当“蹑手蹑脚”成为一种生存策略时，个体的主体性空间发生了坍缩。这种痛感并非源于具体的惩罚，而是一种持续的、弥散性的焦虑：个体不再被视为一个动态发展的生命，而被简化为一个可能被随时触发的“错误样本”。这种从“哒哒！”（自信的自我宣告）到“蹑手蹑脚”（恐惧的自我隐藏）的转变，标志着个体在公共空间中情感权力的丧失。
这里发生了深刻的辩证摩擦：旨在通过“正义”实现解放的理性工具，在实践中却制造了新的心理囚笼。这种断裂诊断出当代文化的一种悖论——当我们试图用绝对的道德理性来清理社会空间时，我们可能在无意中摧毁了人类社交中最宝贵的、允许模糊与宽容的生命活力。
专题二：选举制度的系统性脆弱与政治信任的崩解
在关于美国选举游戏的评论中，展现了一种制度理性（Institutional Logos）与政治现实（Political Pathos）的严重脱节。一方面，制度端试图通过《保障美国选民资格法案》等法律手段来强化选民资格的核实 [F14_26 🔍]；另一方面，现实中的投票系统却处于“摇摇欲坠或濒临淘汰”的状态，甚至出现选举管理人员在 eBay 上购买备件的荒诞景象 [F15_28 🔍]。
这种Logos 的失效直接导致了情感层面的极化。当唐纳德·特朗普声称获胜是“129年来最大的授权”而对方称其“统计学上不可能”时 [F14_26 🔍]，数据和统计学（理性的最高形式）不再是共识的基石，而变成了攻击的武器。在这种语境下，理性被工具化为一种“选择性认知”，用以支撑既有的情感立场。
更深层的痛感在于信任的结构性崩塌。新泽西州非公民被错误登记为选民的案例 [F15_28 🔍]，在理性层面可能只是软件承包商的技术失误，但在情感层面，它被放大为对整个民主制度合法性的质疑。当个体意识到支撑其政治权利的底层系统如此脆弱时，其产生的不再是对技术的失望，而是一种深层的政治异化感。
这种辩证关系揭示了：如果制度理性不能在物理层面（如投票机的更新、软件的精准）提供可靠的支撑，那么任何上层的法律修补都无法平息底层的政治焦虑。当“统计学”被用来制造分裂而非达成共识时，理性便成为了情感撕裂的催化剂。
▌ 面向学者的伦理与社会心理开放性追问 (Open Research Horizons)
- 【关于“社交恐惧”的政治社会学研究】：当“复仇主义”成为一种社会潜意识，个体在公共空间中的行为模式如何从“自我呈现”转向“风险规避”？这种转变如何长期影响社区的信任构建？
- 【关于技术失效与政治极化的相关性研究】：底层技术设施（如投票系统）的低效与崩溃，如何通过心理机制转化为对宏观政治制度的敌意？是否存在一个临界点，使得技术故障直接触发政治危机？