The Puppet Master A Skydive From

the Stratosphere
of the Alt-Right p. 40 p. 54

LO L A WAS WH E N MY G R AN D FATH E R GAVE H E R TO

MY MOTHER AS A GIFT. WE BROUGHT HER TO AMERICA .
FOR 56 YEARS, SHE TOILED IN OUR HOME.

M Y F A M I L Y S S L A V E

BY ALEX TIZON

Will Trump Destroy

the Dollar?
How Pixar Lost Its Way
Can Child Psychopaths
Be Cured?
How Twin Peaks
JUNE 2017
Invented Modern TV
T H E AT L A N T I C .C O M
 My American vodka beats
the giant imports every day.
Try American! Its better.
 O F N O PA RT Y O R C L I Q U E

CONTENTS | JUNE 2017

VOL. 319NO. 5

Features

40 54 64 78
His Kampf 26 Miles Lolas Story When Your
BY G RA E M E WOO D Above Earth BY A LE X TI ZO N Child Is
Richard Spencer is a BY L A U R A PA R K E R She lived with my a Psychopath
troll, an imp, an icon How Alan Eustace, family for 56 years. BY BA R BA RA
for white supremacists. a Google engineer She raised me and my BRADLEY HAGERTY
He was also my high- on the edge of siblings, and cooked Psychopathy can
school classmate. retirement, broke the and cleaned from be spotted in a
Heres how he became world record for high- dawn to dark without toddler, but has long
a symptom of this altitude jumping pay. I was 11 before been considered
American moment. I realized she was my untreatable. A new
familys slave. approach offers hope.

In October 2014, Alan Eustace jumped from the

stratosphere135,890 feet above the ground.

Photograph by IAN ALLEN T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 3

 CONTENTS | JUNE 2017
VOL. 319NO. 5

Dispatches

ECONOMY
15
Will Trump Destroy STUDY OF STUDIES
the Dollar? 23
How a clash with the Fed Make Time for Boredom
could stoke inflation and The surprising benefits
destabilize the economy of stultification
BY S E BASTIAN MALL ABY B Y J U D E S T E WA R T

BIG IN ... MOSCOW

18 SKETCH
The Embargo Diet 20 TECHNOLOGY
Putins ban on agricultural RuPaul Gets Political 24
imports from the West has Americas top drag queen explains why drag is The End of Forgetting
led to a locavore movement. the ultimate retort to Trump. And a new age of nostalgia
BY N OAH S N E I D E R BY S P E N C E R KO R N HAB E R BY B E N ROWE N

Departments

8 Editors Note Poetry

10 The Conversation 87
The Tavern Trees
96 The Big Question BY DAN I E LLE C HAP MAN
What was the best exit
of all time?

4 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
ITS NOT JUST
STREETLIGHTS.
ITS ABOUT A SENSE
OF COMMUNITY.
ODIS JONES
FORMER CEO, PUBLIC LIGHTING AUTHORITY OF DETROIT

At one point, 40 percent of streetlights in Detroit didnt work.

That made life even more difficult for a city that was already struggling.

The Public Lighting Authority of Detroit devised a plan to reilluminate

the city. But finding a bank to finance the project during Detroits bankruptcy
was challenging. Citi stepped up and committed its own capital, which
encouraged other investors. 65,000 new LED lights were installed, lighting
the way as a model for similar projects around the world.

For over 200 years, Citis job has been to believe in people and help
make their ideas a reality.

citi.com/progressmakers

2017 Citibank, N.A. Member FDIC. Equal Opportunity Lender. Citi, Citi with Arc Design and The Worlds Citi are registered service marks of Citigroup Inc.
 CONTENTS | JUNE 2017
VOL. 319NO. 5

The Culture File

THE OMNIVORE
28
How Twin Peaks
Invented Modern
Television
As a long-belated Season 3
arrives, a look back at the im-
measurably influential series
BY J A M E S PA R K E R

FILM
34
How Pixar Lost Its Way
For 15 years, the animation studio was the best on the planet. Then Disney bought it.
BY C H R I STO P H E R O R R

BOOKS
37
BOOKS When Black America
31 Was Pro-Police
Screw Wisdom As crime rose from the
In a bold new memoir of fe- late 60s to the 90s, so did
male middle age, libido oblit- inner-city support for
erates the usual bromides. law-and-order policies.
BY L AU RA K I P N I S BY PA U L B U T L E R

Fiction

88
On the
Deeds Not Words Cover
On the eve of World War I, two teachers
at a girls school in Britain break rules in Photograph by
the name of womens freedom. Alan Berner
BY TE SSA HAD LEY

6 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
Aspen
en
Ideas
2017 Follow the
conversation
JUNE 25 - JULY 1
#ASPENIDEAS

A S P E N I D E A S . O R G
 EDITORS NOTE

A R E P O R T E R S S T O R Y

T
H E P U L I T Z E R P R I Z E W I N N I N G reporter Times, and he served as the Seattle bureau chief of the Los
Alex Tizon built an exemplary career by listening Angeles Times. He was also a well-reviewed author; his 2014
to certain types of peopleforgotten people, peo- memoir, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, was a self-
ple on the margins, people who had never before lacerating examination of the complexities, humiliations, and
been asked for their stories. Alexs wife, Melissa Tizon, told me small victories of Asian men trying to adjust to life in America.
recently that her husband was always impatient with small His interest in the lives of people situated far outside the
talk, because he believed that all people had within them an mainstream was abiding and deep. When he came to us with
epic story, and he wanted to hear those epic storiesand then the enthralling, vexing story of his immigrant family and its ter-
help tell them to the world. Somewhere in the tangle of the rible secret, we recognized that this was the sort of journalism
subjects burden and the subjects desire is your story, he The Atlantic has practiced since its inception. The magazine was
liked to say. founded in 1857 by a group of New England abolitionists eager
His mission aligned well with The Atlantics, and we were to advance the cause of universal freedom. When I first read
pleased to publish, in the April 2016 issue, In the Land of a draft of Alexs piece, I imagined that the founderspeople
Missing Persons, a beautifully rendered story about ordinary like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and
people who mysteriously disappeared in the Alaska wilder- Harriet Beecher Stowewould not have believed that 154 years
ness. And we were thrilled when Alex offered us the chance after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
to publish a story he had been waiting much of his life to tell, humans would still be enslaving other humans, in America and
the remarkable tale of Lola, the woman who was his familys across the planet. The eradication of all forms of slavery remains
secret slave in the Philippines, and who remained their slave an unfinished goal of civilization, and of this magazine, and sto-
when they moved to America. ries like Alexs help us understand slaverys awful persistence.
And we were heartbroken to learn on Friday, March 24, that Melissa told Denise and me that Alex wanted, more than
Alex Tizon had died. His story editor here at the magazine, anything else, to bring Lolas story to the world. This was his
Denise Kersten Wills, found out late that evening that Alex ultimate story, Melissa said. He was trying to write it for five or
had been found dead in his home in Eugene, Oregon. He had six years. He struggled with it. But when he started writing it for
died in his sleep, of natural causes. He was 57 years old. The Atlantic, he stopped struggling. He wrote it with such ease.
His death is a tragedy for Melissa; their daughter, Maya; his Alex did not know that we would be putting his piece on
B E T T Y U D E S E N / T H E S E AT T L E T I M E S

daughter from an earlier marriage, Dylan; and Alexs broth- the cover of this issue; he died the day we made that decision,
ers and sisters. His death represents a loss for his students at before we had a chance to tell him. His death, quite obviously,
the University of Oregon, where he was a beloved journalism could have derailed publication of what turned out to be his
professor. And his death is a loss for the editors and readers final story, but his family, led by Melissa and his siblings,
of this magazine, who were just coming to worked with us during this uniquely trying
know Alex and his gifts. time to make publication possible. We are
Alex Tizon at a journalism
Alex was a much-admired reporter in workshop in 1991.
grateful to them. And we are grateful that
the Pacific Northwest. He shared a Pulitzer He believed that all people have Alex shared his storyhis epic storywith us.
Prize in 1997 while on the staff of The Seattle within them an epic story. Jeffrey Goldberg

8 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
This brave, hopeful, sensitive account,
grounded in the latest neuroscience,
will be both enlightening and Beautiful, often
comforting to the millions who heartbreaking,
often funny,
struggle with anxiety. always moving.
S U S A N C A I N , author of Quiet M A R I A K O N N I K O VA ,
author of
The Confidence Game

Poignant, funny,
illuminating, and
unflinchingly honest.
JORDAN SMOLLER,
professor of psychiatry,
Harvard Medical School

A fascinating book for

anyone who has
wrestled with anxiety.
GRETC HEN RUBIN,
author of
The Happiness Project

A beacon in the
darkness for those
living with anxiety
disorders in silence.
Former First Lady
R O S A LY N N C A R T E R ,
co-founder, The Carter Center

ON SALE MAY 16, 2017

Read an excerpt at ReadItForward.com/OnEdge @andreaapetersen
THE CONVERSATION
RESPONSES & REVERBERATIONS

Sexism in
Silicon Valley
For the April cover story, Liza Mundy
asked, Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to
Women? She explored the multimillion-
dollar efforts of high-profile tech companies
to improve conditions for female
employees, some of which have been
unsuccessful and some of which still hold
out promise for positive changes.

It was terrible to read in Liza the only man in the room for at This article could have been rule. He sees this as a decline
Mundys article that women least a brief period. Although written about any industry or in support for democracy,
in tech fields today are facing it isnt possible to quantify the professional group. I despair especially among the young.
the same kinds and level effects of these lunches, they sometimes of living to see the Perhaps, but it might be a
of discrimination that my did produce some interesting day when men get their heads decline in support specifically
women colleagues and I expe- results. One admiral at the on straight and recognize that for U.S.-style democracy.
rienced in physics in the 1960s Office of Naval Research was our greatest natural resource is The will of the major-
and 70s. I agree with Ms. so discomfited that he talked our people. Surely refusing to ity is routinely subverted
Mundy that the issue remains nonstop for an hour and a half allow half of that resource to at the federal level these
most intractable in fields without touching his food. reach its full potential is fool- days. By design, rural states
where genius is celebrated; Lunch groups also send a ishness carried to the extreme. are overrepresented in the
women and minorities are subtle message throughout the Robert Blackshaw U.S. Senate. The Electoral
seen as less likely to possess organization that women will GLENWOOD, MD. College has overruled the
that elusive quality, and support one another. popular vote twice in the past
by extrapolation to be less Kristl Hathaway, Ph.D. five presidential elections,
competent generally. A profes- DEALE, MD.
Containing Trump and ever since some states
sor I had hoped to work with In the March issue, Jonathan withdrew electors right
in graduate school candidly Having females leading in Rauch argued that while Donald to vote their conscience,
told me that he couldnt add the C-suite makes all the Trump might try to govern as the Electoral College does
me to his research group, difference. Leadership starts an authoritarian, civil societys nothing to prevent a dema-
because hed already agreed at the top. Role modeling response would determine his gogue from assuming the
to hire another woman and transforms organizations. My success. He noted a decline in sup- presidency. Gerrymandering
the group couldnt tolerate two experience informs me that port for democracy in America congressional districts has
of us. the rule of three is magic: (and around the world), but become such a science that
One tactic that we used then One female leader is not pointed to encouraging signs in 2012, more votes were cast
might be useful in tech compa- enough to change the culture. such as the creation of groups like across the nation for Demo-
nies. Gather as many technical Three begins the process. After Trumpthat the public will crats than for Republicans,
women from all levels of your Female leadership is hold government accountable. but Republicans retained a
organization as possible and perhaps one of the only areas strong majority in the House
invite the men in responsible where the concept of trickle- Jonathan Rauch is alarmed at of Representatives. This
positions to join you for lunch, down economics works. the proportion of people in the phenomenon has happened
one at a time. This allows each Anne Bonaparte U.S. saying it would be good
man to see how it feels to be MILL VALLEY, CALIF. or very good for the Army to Continued on page 12

10 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 Join the
smart shoppers
& experienced
travelers who
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Fixing Techs Loss Points Caravan

since 1952
Prompted by the April cover story, The Atlantics Gillian B. White interviewed Melinda Gates
about women in technology. Here are portions of their conversation. To read the full Q&A, visit
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have so much bias in the system, youre
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later or taking it out. intersectionality as you pursue gender Sonoma Wine Country.
diversity? Computer science seems like Day 1, 2
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Day 3. Explore Yosemite
one of these areas where there could National Park. Overnight
White: You mentioned being an be the danger of moving the needle Bridge
in the Yosemite area.
undergrad and feeling like gender for affluent women, or white and Asian
equity would increase in the world of women who are already in the space Day 4. Visit Monterey.
computer science. Why do you think in higher numbers, but leaving out See dramatic vistas on
that, in large part, hasnt happened? black women, Latinas, and those who the Big Sur. Overnight
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sure. We know there are these gaps computer science is as easily accessible. Day 5. Spot seals resting
what I call loss pointsthat start all the Gates: I think we have to reach people along ocean beach. Enjoy
Day 3
way at the kindergarten level. Then you where they are. If we only go to the Bridalveil Fall a visit to Hearst Castle.
see it again at elementary, you see it in elite institutions that are doing a good
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certain things at each of those diverse student body, then I think youll Hollywood attractions.
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 TH E CO N V E RSATI O N

in a number of state legisla- The parliamentary system THE BIG QUESTION

tures, too. Senate Majority is far from perfect, but it is On TheAtlantic.com, readers answered Mays Big Question and
Leader Mitch McConnell much more efficient than our voted on one anothers responses. Here are the top vote-getters.
unquestionably thwarted the perpetual gridlock.
intent of the Constitution
with his shameful treatment
Republicans have carried
the popular vote in a presi- Q: What was the most
of Barack Obamas Supreme dential election exactly once significant environmental
Court nominee Merrick
Garland, and has suffered no
in the past 28 years, but all
the bugs of U.S. democracy
catastrophe of all time?
ill consequences whatsoever. are currently working in their
These are the only features favor. They are not about to 5. The advent of the 3. It was, is, and will be the
of American democracy agree to give up those advan-
Anthropocene epoch, melting of Arctic sea ice.
which ushered in human- Gerald Bazer
young people have ever tages. As such, democracy
induced environmental
known; is anyone surprised in the U.S. will not change
disasters like mass extinc- 2. The end-Permian extinc-
that they view it as a sham? unless, of course, the gener-
tion, worldwide pollution, tion, nicknamed the Great
If a new democracy some- als take over. To be clear: Im and climate change, posing Dying, when a staggering
where in the developing world not advocating such a thing. as a prelude to Earths number of species died out.
declared that it was okay for But I can see why young sixth extinction. All life on Earth today is
the party in power to redraw people may view it as no Dan Fredricks descended from the small
district boundaries solely worse than the status quo. percentage of species
for the purpose of staying in Patrick Leach 4. The Bhopal gas-leak that survived.
power, how would we react? HOUSTON, TEXAS disaster in 1984, in which Toni Bal
I submit that America has hundreds of thousands of
been running the beta-test people were exposed to 1. Getting hooked on burning
version of democracy all these Athens as Analogy methyl isocyanate gas and fossil fuels as gas and for
years. The U.S. was the first In Aprils Making Athens Great other chemicals. electricity and heating.
modern democracy, but, like Again, Rebecca Newberger Claire B. Ruben Patrik Dahl
an initial version of software, Goldstein looked to Plato and
there are bugs in the system. ancient Athens for an example
In addition to the problems of how a citizen responds when to his fellow Athenians their cause, smugly dismissed their
Ive already listed, the U.S. a democracy that prides itself moral arrogance. less cultured, less worldly
split the legislative and execu- on being exceptional betrays its But when it comes to moral countrymen in the hinterland
tive functions but combined highest principles. arrogance, its pretty hard to and were openly contemptu-
the head of state with the top Hillary Clintons ill-fated ous of their brutish leader.
head of government. We Analogizing from the ancient presidential campaign, drip- This hubris has brought us
made it difficult for govern- past can be fun, but it often ping with Periclean supe- to where we are now. Whats
ment to get anything done reveals more about the analo- riority as Clinton famously more, defeat has done little to
(checks and balances) but gist than either the past or the castigated her opponents quell moral superiority. The
also to remove officeholders present. Although she never supporters as deplorables. left still clings to its dogmas
when they fail to perform. mentions the president by Here is another reading of and will brook no discussion,
Other countries installed name, Rebecca Newberger ancient history and modern let alone dissent. (No, you
upgraded parliamentary Goldstein sees the election of politics: The 2016 election pro-life so-called feminists,
versions of democracy, in Donald Trump as a reaction- was the Peloponnesian War you cant march with us.)
which the heads of state and ary repudiation of all that and, despite its superior Where does Plato come
government are kept separate, makes America good. In her culture, Athens again lost. out in all this? While Ms.
and the governing majority view, Americas election of The coastal elites, like the Goldstein talks about Platos
has the power to get things Trump is akin to Athenss seafaring Athenians, cosmo- dialogues, conspicuously
done. If leaders fail, they can execution of Socrates and, by politan and supremely self- absent is any specific mention
quickly be removed through extension, reason and virtue. satisfied, confident of victory of his Republic, whichwith
a vote of no confidence. Socratess crime? Pointing out and the rightness of their its militaristic caste, the

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12 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 Adaptive Markets
guardians, controlling political power; Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
its reliance on the Noble Lie (alternative Andrew W. Lo
facts?); and its censorship of poets
Andrew Lo is a brilliant financial economist, visionary
resembles Sparta more than Athens.
innovator, bold contrarian, gifted writer, and an
Its as if after his sojourn abroad, Plato
unrelenting idealist. These traits are evident in this
returned home to tell his fellow Athe-
wonderful book.
nians, Since we couldnt beat them, we
John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group
might as well join them.
and the First Index Mutual Fund, and author of
Joe Borini
NEW YORK, N.Y. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

Cloth $37.50
Rebecca Newberger
Goldstein replies: The Financial Diaries
Platos unique place in the Western
philosophical canon is not a matter of the How American Families Cope in a World
adequacy of every solution he proposed but of Uncertainty
rather of the profundity and continued Jonathan Morduch & Rachel Schneider
relevance of the problems he unearthed.
This sharp-eyed, sympathetic study . . . has a
Among these problems none is more timely
compelling new angle on the effects of long-term
than figuring out how we, prone to unreason
financial instability on working-class families. . . . This
and factionalism, can best live together in a
is a must-read for anyone interest in causes ofand
civil society that will promote the flourishing
potential solutions toAmerican poverty.
of all. The proposals that we find distasteful
Publishers Weekly, starred review
in the Republicthe censorship of the arts,
one (and only one) Noble Liewere extreme Cloth $27.95

measures intended to meet the extreme

defect Plato detected in human nature:
The Sum of Small Things
our susceptibility to an irrationality that
can push us toward injustice and disaster. A Theory of the Aspirational Class
It was a first attempt to think out a society Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
that would suppress what is worst in us,
Just as Thorstein Veblen captured his time with the
including our turning politics into a team
phrase conspicuous consumption, Elizabeth Currid-
sport, as when major policies are equated
Halkett nails the contemporary rise of a subtler but no
with minor gaffes.
less materialist inconspicuous consumption. This book
Joe Borini gets one aspect of Platos
is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand
utopia flagrantly wrong: The guardians
modern cities or culture today.
are not military soldiers on the Spartan
Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the
model but rather thinker-statesmen (and
Creative Class
some of them philosopher-kings) who have Cloth $29.95

undergone decades of education, becom-

ing not only knowledgeable but also, more
Beating the Odds
important, purified of narrow self-interest.
To clinch the deal, Plato suggested that these Jump-Starting Developing Countries
thinker-statesmen not be allowed to hold Justin Yifu Lin & Clestin Monga
private property, a negative inducement for
Justin Yifu Lin and Clestin Monga draw on long
would-be leaders of the wrong type.
experience and insightful analysis to show how
Here, too, Plato was pondering a question
successful economic development depends, first and
whose answer continues to elude us: How do
foremost, on a pragmatic assessment of each nations
we arrange our political system to attract to
comparative advantages and a realistic understanding
positions of great power those who will not
of how they can change over time.
abuse it?
Roger Myerson, University of Chicago, Nobel
Laureate in Economics
Cloth $35.00
To contribute to The Conversation, please
email letters@theatlantic.com. Include your
full name, city, and state. See our e-books at
press.princeton.edu
Slack is where work happens, for millions of people
around the world, every day. Find out why at slack.com.
 DISPATCHES
Psychologists discov-
ered that many people
would rather self-
administer electric
shocks than sit alone
with their thoughts
for 15 minutes.
I D E AS & PROVOC ATI O NS Jude Stewart,
June 2017 p. 23

ECONOMY

Will
Trump
Destroy
the
Dollar?
How a clash with the Fed
could stoke inflation and
destabilize the economy
BY S E B A ST I A N M A L L A BY

O
N MEMORIAL DAY week-
end in 1988, George Herbert
Walker Bush emerged from
his family compound in Ken-
nebunkport, Maine, to deliver a warn-
ing. Genteel, dapper, blue-blooded, and
careful, the presidential candidate cut a
decidedly un-Trumpian figure; he had
always seemed a little like Scott Fitzger-
ald made him up, an acquaintance once
remarked. The setting that weekend
sharpened the contrast: In place of the
swampy, chandeliered indulgence of
Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort, the with patrician courtesy. By todays stan- political allies. His Treasury secretary,
Bush-family retreat was quintessential dards, it was a milquetoast protest; in last Nicholas F. Brady, tried to punish the
New England. But the content of Bushs years campaign, Trump crudely accused hawkish Fed chair, Alan Greenspan,
message presages Trump, and his sub- the Fed of keeping interest rates low to by excluding him from parties. There
sequent actions suggest how one aspect get Hillary Clinton elected. But Bushs would be no more invitationsnone!
of Trumps presidency might evolve. meaning was evident. He was using his Brady decreed. Whoosh! Boom! Stop!
Bushs target was the Federal platform as the presumptive Republican he sputtered. The administrations
Reserve, which he feared might strangle presidential nominee to question the budget director, Richard Darman, put
the economy and, should he win the elec- Feds competence in setting interest rates. the word out that there was some-
tion, weigh down his presidency. As a The Kennebunkport warning gave thing creepy about Greenspan, a then-
word of caution: I wouldnt want to see way to a full-blown attack after Bushs unmarried 65-year-old who called his
them step over some [line] that would election. Administration officials took mother every day. Perhaps he was a bit
ratchet down economic growth, Bush to TV to urge low interest rates; Bush like Norman Bates, the mother-fixated
told reporters, masking his warning filled vacancies on the Feds board with figure in Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho?

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y D O U G C H AY K A T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 15
 D I S PATC H E S

Bush ultimately paid for his Fed- pragmatists by background. They know prices, thus boosting inflation; and infla-
bashing populism. Greenspan stood that bald attacks upon the Fed can back- tion, once permitted, can be tamed only
up to the pressure and kept short-term fire. In an interview with The Wall Street by means of painful job losses. But in the
interest rates high; meanwhile, the pres- Journal in April, Trump himself sounded short run, a Fed-created sugar high can
sure itselfthe open attempt to meddle a conciliatory note, saying of Janet Yel- transform a presidents fortunes.
with the Fed for political gaincaused len, the Fed chair, I respect her. But Now, after years of rock-bottom
investors to fear future inflation. As Trump also demonstrated a willingness interest rates following the 2008 crisis,
a result, long-term interest rates also to go after the Fed during his campaign. the possibility of hiring bottlenecks and
remained highbanks, for example, He has bashed other institutions and price pressures has reappeared on the
wouldnt lower the mortgage rates they experts, including the courts and the horizon. Having recovered painfully and
offered, thinking that they might need media. And Trumps outsized expecta- slowly from the crash, the U.S. economy
high rates in order to make money on tions for economic growth make conflict is expected to grow by more than 2 per-
the loans if inflation picked up down between the Fed and the White House cent this yearnot very fast, but faster
the road. That, in turn, dampened eco- seem all too plausible. than the roughly 1.8 percent that the
nomic growth, contributing to Bushs Fed considers to be sustainable with-
loss in 1992. Bill Clinton and his suc-
cessors learned a lesson from Bushs
self-inflicted injury: Dont criticize the
A LL PRESIDENTS face a dilemma
regarding the economy. They are
judged in large part according to how
out increasing the rate of inflation. The
labor market, after all, is tight: Headline
unemployment stands at 4.5 percent,
Fed; dont even comment on it. Since wages, jobs, and retirement nest eggs considerably below its average of 6.2 per-
then, Fed independence has come to perform on their watch. Yet they have cent since the start of 2000. The broader
seem like a given, as solid as the inde- little control over that performance. measure of unemploymentincluding
pendence of newspapers or the courts. Growth, ultimately, is determined by workers who have given up looking for
Until now, that is. Under President long-term (and in some cases mys- jobs and part-time workers whod prefer
Trump, it is possible, for the first time terious) factors: demographic trends, to work full-timetells a similar story.
in a generation, to imagine a concerted business innovation and technological With workers now relatively scarce,
attack on the central bank. Conceiv- progress, the education level of the work- companies must offer more to attract
ably, the United States could repeat force. Under the right circumstances, them. Higher wages, when matched by
the story of the mid-1960s and 70s, some measurestax cuts, government higher productivity, are a good thing. But
when a 15-year period of central-bank spending can boost growth, at least for if wages rise merely because of worker
independence was brought to an end a while. But for the most part, presidents scarcity, companies may have to pass on
by presidential bully- cannot quickly influence the costs to consumers, stoking inflation.
ing. Back then, Lyndon the deeper elements that Given these facts, the Fed has little
B. Johnson summoned For the govern growth. choice but to hike the short-term inter-
the Fed chairman, Wil- first time in There is, however, one est rate from its current low levelif
liam McChesney Mar- a generation, lever that seems tempt- inflation is allowed to accelerate too
tin Jr., to his Texas ranch it is possible ingly close to their grasp. If much, workers will pay a terrible price
and shoved him around to imagine the Fed can be persuaded later. Sure enough, the Fed has already
the living room while pro- a concerted to hold down inter est started down that path, lifting borrow-
claiming that low interest attack on rates, cheap loans can ing costs in December and then again
rates were imperative in the Fed. boost home purchases, car in March; two more hikes are expected
a time of war. Boys are purchases, and businesss before 2017 is over. In a normal political
dying in Vietnam and Bill spending on factories and climate, this might feel routine. After all,
Martin doesnt care! he yelled. Martin machines, pumping up demand and the Fed is still paying people to borrow,
ultimately delivered the looser money juicing the economy. The Feds power in the sense that its lending rate is nega-
that Johnson wanted. Richard Nixon fol- is especially tantalizing because of the tive after accounting for inflation. But
lowed up by publicly smearing Martins technocratic tidiness of its decisions todays political climate is far from nor-
successor, Arthur F. Burns, until he, too, a single committee of experts sets the mal. If Trump believes even part of his
complied. Because Martin and Burns, short-term interest rate as it pleases, own rhetoric, his reaction to Fed tighten-
unlike Greenspan, buckled, the U.S. with no need to run the gantlet of lobby- ing could well become aggressive.
went through the most extreme bout of ists, advocates, and congressional com- Trump officially maintains that the
inflation in its peacetime history. mittees. In the long run, of course, lower economy can grow at an annual rate of
Might Trump repeat this pattern? interest rates are not a magic elixir. The 4 percent. Some of his advisers have tried
Gary Cohn, the top White House eco- extra demand may run ahead of the to dial back this expectation: Mnuchin
nomic adviser, and Steven Mnuchin, economys ability to supply things, caus- has said that growth of 3 percent is
the Treasury secretary, are Wall Street ing scarcity that leads buyers to bid up achievable. But even that is way above

16 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 ECONOMY

the Feds 1.8 percent estimate of sustain- the initiative. When Bushs lieutenants one big historical lesson that Yellen can
able growth. If the Fed, acting on its judg- came after him, whispering slanders to apply. And she holds an ace, if she is will-
ment of the safe speed limit, continues to the press, they got a taste of their own ing to use it.
raise interest rates, it will be announcing medicine: Greenspan was on friendly The lesson is that it pays to manage
that the administrations growth ambi- terms with journalists, and he could plant the Feds board ruthlessly. In the 1980s,
tions are delusional. The president, for stories better than anyone. So skillfully Ronald Reagans team undermined
his part, can be expected to believe that did Greenspan manage his reputation Greenspans predecessor, the redoubt-
the monetary gurus are conspiring to that he proved impossible to unseat. The able Paul A. Volcker, by appointing ad-
frustrate his promises to voters. Bush team reluctantly appointed him to a ministration loyalists as Fed governors.
Higher interest rates do not merely second term, fearing that removing him Toward the end of his tenure, Volcker
dampen growth; they do so through spe- might shake Wall Streets confidence. lost votes on three occasions; with at least
cific channels. Interest-rate-sensitive Janet Yellen will struggle to replicate four of the seven governors on the Feds
parts of the economy get squeezed some parts of the Greenspan model. board prepared to gang up against him,
first; the prime example is real estate, Whereas Greenspan had strong ties to he no longer fully controlled his own in-
which may not be welcome news to this both Republicans and Democrats, Yel- stitution. Greenspan applied the dark arts
particular president. The tradable parts len lacks Republican alliesa vulner- of bureaucratic politics to avoid this fate.
of the economy also suffer, because ability, given the makeup of todays When Clinton appointed a potential chal-
higher interest rates attract capital from Congress. Whereas Greenspan operated lenger as Fed vice chairman, Greenspan
abroad, putting upward pressure on in pre-Twitter Washington, Yellen faces sidelined him so firmly that he eventu-
the dollar and hence making it more a vicious media free-for-all. Yet there is ally left (some possibly not-coincidental
expensive for foreigners to buy Ameri-
can goods. That will appeal even less to
Trump, because the most tradable sec-
tor of all is manufacturing.
During his campaign, Trump
pledged to protect blue-collar workers
in the industrial swing states. If the Fed
sustains a strong dollar, precisely those
workers will suffer. Trump likewise
pledged to cut the trade deficit. A strong
dollar may cause its expansion. Even
Trumps election promises about immi- VERY SHORT BOOK EXCERPT
gration may be undone. The stronger
the dollar, the greater the incentive for
a Mexican worker to earn wages in the
CROOKS WIN VOTES
U.S. and send money home to relatives. across the political spectrum nominate
I N I N DI A , PA RT I E S
In sum, the White House and the
candidates who have criminal cases pending against them. The
Fed are likely to find themselves at
loggerheads. The question is how the countrys two truly national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party
parties to this conflict will choose to and the Indian National Congress, both select a fair number of
behave. Trump may indulge his bellig- parliamentary candidates14 and 11 percent, respectivelywho
erent instincts, or he may listen to his face serious charges, such as assault or murder. In one sense, the
pragmatic counselors. The Fed, for its answer to why these parties nominate candidates with criminal
part, may cave in to pressure, as it did
backgrounds is painfully obvious: because they win. Across the
under Martin and then Burns. Or it may
resist, following the Greenspan model. past three general elections, clean candidates had a win rate of
6 percent. The win rate for candidates facing a charge of any type,

A S A STREET-FIGHTING defender
of the Feds independence, Green-
span was a master. During his showdown
by contrast, was just above 17 percent, and those facing serious
charges had an 18 percent chance of winning. While there is some
variation in the prevalence of candidates with criminal cases
with George H. W. Bushs administration,
the Treasury tried to get a bill through
across parties, this is not an issue facing any one political party or
Congress that would have curbed the type of party: It is clear that criminality in politics is widespread.
Feds regulatory power; Greenspan used Adapted from When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics,
his relationships with lawmakers to bury by Milan Vaishnav, published in January by Yale University Press

Illustration by JOE MCKENDRY T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 17

 Aleksandr Mikhailov and
DI SPATC H ES Boris Akimov, co-founders of
the restaurant LavkaLavka

press criticism may have encouraged swanky, import-heavy

his departure). When Clinton tried to establishments set the
appoint a troublemaker in his stead, tone for the post-Soviet
Greenspan used his Senate connections Moscow food scene, has
to block confirmation. Since Greenspans opened a string of more
retirement in 2006, fashion has swung locally focused projects:
against his domineering style; Fed gov- Valenok, which serves
B IG I N MOSCOW
ernors feel free to express their views in upmarket versions of
public, and the power of the interest-rate-
setting Federal Open Market Committee
THE EMBARGO DIET Soviet classics; Farsh,
a burger chain that
is less concentrated in the chair. But now, uses only Russian meat;
and Syrovarnya, which

T
with the Feds independence in peril, the
RY THE in Ukraines east in 2014, produces its cheeses
pendulum must swing back. Three of
deer heart, Putin responded by ban- on-site. Meanwhile, White
the seven governorships currently stand
Boris Akimov ning agricultural imports Rabbit, where executive
empty. Trump will get the Fed he wants suggests from behind a from the European Union, chef Vladimir Mukhin
unless Yellen actively resists. bushy beard. My stomach the U.S., and several creates modern spins on
The ace that Yellen holds is that, sinks, but I cannot refuse: other countries. Customs prerevolutionary Rus-
although her term as chair expires in Akimov is a demigod in inspectors made a show sian recipesmoose-lip
February, her appointment as a governor the Moscow food world, of destroying banned dumplings, the cabbage
runs to 2024. Fed chairs usually resign and we are sitting in products at the border, soup shchi, a yogurt
from the board when their term expires, LavkaLavka, the flagship resulting in surreal scenes drink that Mukhin serves
but they are not obligated to do so. If restaurant of the Lavka- of cheese thrown into with goose liveris now
Trump refuses to keep her in the drivers Lavka farmers coopera- incinerators and geese No.23 on the Worlds 50
seat, she could remain on the Feds board tive. The crimson meat flattened by bulldozers. Best Restaurants list.
and do some vigorous back-seat driv- comes thinly sliced atop Although the em- Akimov cautions that
ing. The last chair to stay onMarriner a celery puree, with a gar- bargo sent food prices the movement is just
S. Eccles, in 1948proved devastatingly nish of cowberry sorbet. soaring, Russians largely beginning. Challenges
effective. By force of character and intel- Its surprisingly tender. supported it: According abound, including Rus-
lect, he remained an influential voice,
When I first visited to the Levada Center, sias shoddy infrastruc-
the cooperative five an independent polling ture, which can make
achieving his full revenge in 1951, when
years ago, its footprint organization, most say getting food from farms
he helped lead a Fed revolt against the
was limited to a cramped it has made Russia more to tables a nightmare
president who had demoted him. shop and caf hidden respected. Russia can (local is a relative term
If, despite recent conciliatory signals, in a labyrinthine provide for itself, crowed in a country with 11 time
Trump were to drop Chair Yellen, a back- courtyard, and its focus the pro-Kremlin tabloid zones). Nonetheless, he
seat-driving Governor Yellen could on fresh produce and Moskovsky Komsomo- says, people are thinking
be formidable. Her public pronounce- homemade delicacies lets. And indeed, the more about what they
ments might sway markets more than was still novel. Russian ban has been a boon eat, about responsible
those of the new chair; she could lead cuisine remained mired for Russian agriculture. consumption, about
a posse within the interest-rate-setting in a Soviet-era bog of With many ingredients supporting local farm-
committee, and her backers might potatoes and borscht. unavailable (and others ers. LavkaLavka now has
include the heads of the regional Feds, Fine dining mostly rendered prohibitively an expansive suburban
whose appointments are largely free of involved imported expensive after the ruble market and five smaller
presidential influence. The mere pros- cuisine, and locavorism went belly-up in 2014), shops, along with the res-
pect that Yellen might do this could be remained foreign, at chefs are seeking pro- taurant, whose ingredi-
enough to cause the administration to least in concept. Yet over ducers closer to home. ents are all sourced from
back down. The Feds independence is
the past several years, a After the sanctions, Russian producers.
band of Russian farmers, everyone understood After the deer heart
not enshrined in law, but a determined
chefs, and restaurateurs that theres no other way comes a salad of crab
central banker with the stomach for a
have launched a revival out, Uilliam Lamberti, an from Kamchatka and a
fight can find ways to sustain it. of Russian gastronomy. Italian chef behind sev- delicate river pike perch.
They have found an eral Moscow establish- We chase it down with in-
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker unlikely ally in President ments, told the culinary fused polugar, an ancient
Senior Fellow for International Economics Vladimir Putin. After the magazine Afisha Eda. Russian bread wine (a
at the Council on Foreign Relations, and West slapped sanctions In a sign of the forefather to vodka) thats
the author of The Man Who Knew: The on Russia for annexing times, Arkady Novikov, enjoying a comeback.
Life and Times of Alan Greenspan. Crimea and stoking a war a restaurateur whose Noah Sneider

18 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC P h o t o g r a p h b y L I Z A Z H I T S K AYA

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 D I S PATC H E S

RuPauls Drag Race, his reality-TV show.

Then he referenced a viral video from
Ts Madison, a transgender activist and
former porn star: You better step your
pussy up. Get on a business, bitch! He
delivered this spiel with the clipped,
decisive tone of a therapist on the clock.
Nature will not allow you to just sail on
through doing some factory job, he
said. We dont do factories anymore.
At 56, RuPaul is in little personal
danger of being phased out; he is, to
the contrary, one of gay pop cultures
most enduringly relevant figures. Over
the past quarter century, he has done
more than anyone to bring drag to the
American mainstream. At the same time,
he has used his platform to act as life
coach to the queer masses, counseling
self-love and hard work to combat social
stigma and inner doubt. (Catchphrase:
If you cant love yourself, how in the hell
you gonna love somebody else?) But
lately, thanks to political developments,
this inspirational package has come with
a dose of indignation, and a sharpened
sense of social purpose.
In November, RuPaul tweeted that
he was finding it hard to carry on busi-
ness as usual after America got a giant
swastika tattooed on her forehead, and
he told New York magazines Vulture
website that Donald Trumps win felt
like the death of America. By the time
I met up with him in March, right before
the premiere party for Drag Races ninth
SKETCH season, his mood had improved con-

RuPaul
siderably, but his focus was still on the
political scene. My optimism is back. I

Gets Political
understand what it is we must do, he
said. Were going to mobilize young
people who have never been mobilized,
through our love of music, our love of
Americas top drag queen explains why drag is love, our love of bright colors.
the ultimate retort to Trump. Such mobilization would seem to
BY S P E N C E R KO R N H A B E R already be in progress, thanks to Drag

R
Race. Tuning in is like entering a fluores-
U PAU L C H A R L E S , Ameri- lookshe made a hand motion to sug- cent cocoon of camp, where men who
cas most famous drag queen, gest widgets being moved from one part perform as women battle in a wild re-
sat on a gold lam couch at of an assembly line to the next. imagining of Project Runway. Launched
a luxury hotel in Midtown If you were a factory worker and on Logo, Viacoms queer-focused net-
Manhattan one Tuesday in March, dol- your job was to put this to this from work, in 2009, the show is ubiquitous in
ing out advice for the white working class. 9 to 5, we dont do that anymore, he many gay-friendly circles; this spring, it
Wearing a patterned suit jacket and black said, his soft voice carrying the imperi- moved to VH1, in a bid to bring drag to a
slacksone of his signature out-of-drag ous, jokey edge familiar to viewers of wider audience.

20 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC Illustration by JOHN CUNEO

 The moment seems ripe for it. An named Katya Zamolodchikova, tweeted a formalitytheyve been together
ad for Season 9 features the tagline the same caption with a photo of her- for 23 yearsit contributes to the sense
Drastic times call for dragtastic mea- self crouching grotesquely in a green that this is a time of personal flourish-
sures and RuPaul saying, We need bodysuit and Birkenstocks. ing for RuPaul. In a nod to his popularity
Americas next drag superstar now RuPauls own Twitter feed has (as well as to how insane politics has got-
more than everthe implication become a steady source of GIF-laden ten), John Oliver proposed on Last Week
being that cross-dressing has taken on jabs against the Manchurian pump- Tonight that the drag queen could run
a special charge under Trump. Which kin, his preferred term for the president. for president as the progressive reality-
isnt to say the show wasnt socially RuPaul: Whats the Tee?, the motivational TV-star retort to Trump (hypothetical
engaged before. In the Obama era, Drag and comedic podcast he co-hosts with slogan: Make America fierce again).
Race cheered on gay rights and reveled Michelle Visage, a Drag Race judge, has In April, RuPaul debuted as a recurring
in gender identitys vagaries just as gay begun devoting more time to current character on the Netflix sitcom Girlboss,
rights were making significant gains events. The title track of his new album, playing the main characters crotchety
and many Americans were beginning American, uses thumping neighbor; J. J. Abrams is
to grapple in earnest with transgender dance pop to assert that develop ing a dramedy
peoples existence. Still, the rejection gay black drag queens The rejection based on RuPauls years as
of a woman president in favor of a man are as American as any- of a woman a fixture of the New York
who reportedly prefers his female staff- one else. Hes deejayed president City club scene.
ers to dress like women and whose events to benefit Planned in favor of a The source material
supporters rail against cucks and the Parenthood and the ACLU man whose is rich. After a childhood
pussification of America places drag in in recent months. When I supporters split between San Diego
a more obviously defiant context: The suggested that his level of rail against and Atlanta, in the care of
pussification of Americathe freedom political engagement had cucks gives first his mother and later an
of men to partake in that which society increased, he replied that older sister, RuPaul worked
has marked as feminine and vice versa hed long been outspoken
drag new as an entertainer and shape-
is exactly what RuPaul wants. about politics but not poli-
salience. shifting party presence,
The early months of the Trump cies. Now Ive been happy donning loincloths and dab-
presidency have seen drag flourish as a to talk about policies, he said. Because bling in David Bowieesque androgyny
form of political critique. The signature the worlds gone batshit fucking crazy. while fronting the new-wave bands Wee
pop-culture send-up of the adminis- Wee Pole and RuPaul and the U-Hauls.
tration has come not from Alec Bald-
wins pursed-lip Trump on Saturday
Night Live but from Melissa McCarthys
I N P E R S O N, RuPaul is very much Eventually, he settled in New York. By
the same self-possessed bald bean- 1993, hed shellacked himself into the
pole that Drag Race audiences have 7-foot-tall (in heels) glamazon charac-
wild-eyed Sean Spicera parody of watched dispense advice and shade to ter who rocketed to fame off the dance
macho huffiness that reportedly infu- contestants except his freckles are single Supermodel (You Better Work);
riated Trump because, a source told more noticeable, and his shade can this, in turn, led to a talk show on VH1.
Politico, he doesnt like his people to be turned on you. At one point, while Now Drag Race aims to subject less estab-
look weak. This reaction led some discussing the virtues of transforma- lished drag queens to some of the same
critics to call for SNL to drag up the en- tion, he eyed my outfit and suggested trials of charisma, uniqueness, nerve,
tire administration; Kate McKinnon has that drag could teach the squares of the and talent that he once faced. My
since portrayed Jeff Sessions, and Rosie world to live a little, sartorially speak- career has been built on the fringe of the
ODonnell has offered to play Steve Ban- ing: When you think youve landed on status quo, RuPaul told me. There was
non. Underscoring the sense of gender this look with the black jeans and blue no blueprint for what I do.
panic in Trumpland, one of early 2017s shirt for the rest of your life, were here Of course, drag as its commonly
defining memes came when a conser- to say, You know, its just clothes. (For practiced today did exist before
vative Twitter user added the words the record, my pants were dark green.) RuPaul, mostly among queer folks
This is the future liberals want above As we talked, RuPaul seemed to be whose pageants, any decent social
a picture of a niqab-clad woman and looking over my shoulder into the hotel theorist will tell you, delighted in expos-
a drag queentwo bogeyladies of the lobby; he was, he explained, watching ing the artificiality of both femininity
culture warssitting comfortably on for his husband, Georges LeBar, who and masculinity. RuPauls rise to star-
one New York City subway bench. The was on his way with a chicken panini. dom was part of a public coming-out
fact that for many liberals this indeed The two married in January, partly for the practice, which coincided with
was a perfectly lovely vision prompted out of concern that same-sex marriage a wave of 90s-era drag-themed mov-
much hilarity; one of Drag Races stars, a could be rolled back under Trump. ies, including The Adventures of Priscilla,
deranged-Russian-prostitute character Though the wedding was in some ways Queen of the Desert and the acclaimed

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 21
 D I SPATC H ES

documentary Paris Is Burning. Though a gorilla; Jaymes Mansfield had on a guardians of straight white orthodoxy
the decade was a boon to his career, he Muppets-inspired bodice; Kimora Blac should lighten up, but he feels much the
thinks back with some frustration on sported breasts evoking a pervy video- same way about, among others, liberal
various cultural gatekeepers who treated game designers version of the female types who want him to apologize for
him more as a curiosity than as a social form. Though some of the queens using the word tranny. Though RuPaul
critic. He says hes always approached talked up their fishinessthe joy- supports federal protections for trans-
drag as punk rockas an instrument fully crass drag term for seeming like gender people and welcomes trans
of resistance. Just being someones a real womantheir outlandish getups contestants on Drag Race, he can sound
punch line is not my idea of fun. illustrated one of RuPauls central asser- downright conservative when talking
Today, even as he finds himself at new tions: that drags real purpose has less about the self-seriousness of liberal
heights of acclaim, RuPaul sometimes to do with passing for another gender identity politics (he declines to describe
feels that same sense of than with highlighting gen- himself as a liberal). And Drag Races
being misunderstood. Be- ders artificiality. cheeky flirtation with gender and racial
fore a recent TV appear- Im not At one end of the red stereotypesto say nothing of how it
ance promoting Drag Race, doing drag carpet, Sadie Gennis, a reappropriates terms like bitchhasnt
a producer asked whether to give TVGuide.com editor, asked always rated as politically correct. Ill
hed be willing to teach the you makeup each queen to play a game make a joke about something and peo-
shows host how to walk tips, RuPaul of word association with ple will print it out and it sounds awful,
like a supermodel. The re- says. This some names: Oscar the when its really clear my standpoint is
quest offended him. Im has always Grouch, Emma Stone, Live your life, be free, do what you feel
not doing drag to give you been a Donald Trump. The re- you need to do, he told me.
makeup tips, he told me. sponses to Trumps name As the premiere party got under way,
This has always been a
political were remarkable in their RuPaul appeared onstage, startling the
political statement. That
statement. uniformity. Sasha Velour: sold-out housethe advertised lineup
political statement doesnt Already a horrifying drag of performances by Drag Race personal-
exactly lend itself to specific action items, queen. Eureka OHara: Girl, that hair- ities hadnt included his nameand re-
of course; RuPaul is as fluent in righteous lines a mess. You aint never heard of ceived the loudest applause of the night,
woo-woo as any outspoken celebrity. lace glue? Shea Coule: Girl, look how despite the fact that he was the only one
Following your heart is the most political orange you fucking look, girl! (The last whose outfit wouldnt have drawn a sec-
thing you can do, he told me at one point. line, which quotes a now-legendary Drag ond look on the street. Introducing a clip
Yet he seems sincere in his conviction Race squabble about makeup,
that it is worth seeking out the deeper has shown up on anti-Trump
meaning of things that appear super- protest signs.)
ficial. On a recent episode of Whats the This notion of Trump as
Tee?, he quizzed the actress Leah Remini a drag queen is a common
on her acrylic nails and then, without punch line, thanks not only to
pausing, asked, I wonder what the his Technicolor tan, bouffant
subtext of having nails is? Psychologi- hair, and love of insults, but
cally speaking, whats underneath that? also to his exaggerated display
And he seems equally sincere in his of masculinity. And yet when I
belief that lewd puns and piled-high put to RuPaul the idea that the
wigs can fight everything from gender president is a drag artist, he
essentialism to consumerism. Our cul- drew an important distinction:
ture is about choosing an identity and Trump actually believes he
sticking with it so people can market shit is that thing. As drag queens,
to you, he said. Anything that switches we know were putting on a
that around is completely the antithesis facade and were always aware
TOM HILL/WIREIMAGE/GETTY

of what our culture implores us to do. of it, which is what scares the
status quo. He believes he

O U T S I DE DR AG R AC E S season-
premiere party, at the PlayStation
Theater, in Times Square, the latest
looks good. He believes hes
looking like a real man.
However visceral RuPauls
crop of contestants mugged for the distaste for Trump, he isnt
cameras. Nina Bonina Brown wore quite your typical Hollywood RuPaul in 1979, at age 18. He says hes always approached
facial prosthetics designed to resemble progressive. Yes, he thinks the drag as punk rockas an instrument of resistance.

22 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 SKETCH

of Season 9, he explained that the first show have come to expect. The casts first the episode had been filmed before
episode would feature Lady Gaga. He meeting quickly gave way to sniping about November, it was not hard, watching it, to
turned to the drag queen Lady Bunny, a eyebrow shapes; one queen was done up anticipate the turns that Drag Race might
longtime friend. We tried to get Lady like a voluptuous rodent. But the open- take in the future.
Bunny [for the show], but she turned ing episode, which aired later in March, This whole election thing was prob-
us down, he said, letting out a high, also reflected an engagement with larger ably the best thing that could have hap-
knowing laugh. Lady Bunny, you are issues. One contestant sobbingly told pened, RuPaul had remarked to me
a whore. Lady Gaga that her career had helped save earlier in the day, before leaving his
The video that followed boasted much lives; another wore a leotard scrawled hotel. Because everyone is getting
of the frivolity and bizarreness fans of the with #BLACKLIVESMATTER. Though woke. These bitches are waking up.

STUDY OF STUDIES snacking,[6] binge- cises. Once all the obvious

drinking,[7] risky sex,[8] answers were exhausted,

Make Time
and problem gambling.[9] participants gave more and
In fact, many of us would more inventive answers

for Boredom
take pain over boredom. to fend off boredom.[12]
One team of psychologists A British study took these
discovered that two-thirds findings one step further,
of men and a quarter of asking subjects to com-
The surprising benefits of stultification women would rather self- plete a creative challenge
B Y J U D E S T E WA R T administer electric shocks (coming up with a list of
than sit alone with their alternative uses for a house-

B
OREDOM HAS, measure an individuals thoughts for hold item). One group of
paradoxically, overall propensity to feel 15 minutes.[10] subjects did a
become quite bored (whats known as trait Probing this boring activity
interesting to academics boredom). By contrast, the phenomenon, first, while the
lately. The International Multidimensional State Bore- another team others went
Interdisciplinary Boredom dom Scale,[3] developed in asked volun- straight to the
Conference gathered 2008, measures a persons teers to watch creative task.
humanities scholars in feelings of boredom in a boring, sad, or Those whose
Warsaw for the fifth time given situation (state bore- neutral films, boredom
in April. In early May, its dom). A German-led team during which pumps had
less scholarly forerunner, has since identified five they could self- been primed
Londons Boring Conference, types of state boredom: in- administer elec- were more
celebrated seven years of different, calibrating, search- tric shocks. The prolific. [13]
delighting in tedium. At ing, reactant, and apathetic bored volun- In our
this event, people flock to (indifferent boredom teers shocked always-
talks about toast, double characterized by low themselves connected
yellow lines, sneezing, and arousalwas the mellow- more and harder than the world, boredom may be
vending-machine sounds, est, least unpleasant kind; sad or neutral ones did.[11] an elusive state, but it is a
among other snooze- reactanthigh arousalwas But boredom isnt all bad. fertile one. Watch paint dry
inducing topics. the most aggressive and By encouraging contempla- or water boil, or at least put
What, exactly, is every- unpleasant.)[4] Boredom tion and daydreaming, it away your smartphone for
body studying? One widely may be miserable, but let no can spur creativity. An early, a while. You might unlock
accepted psychological one call it simple. much-cited study gave par- your next big idea.
definition of boredom is Boredom has been linked ticipants abundant time to
the aversive experience of to behavior issues including complete problem-solving Jude Stewart is the author
wanting, but being unable, bad driving,[5] mindless and word-association exer- of Patternalia.
to engage in satisfying
activity.[1] But how can you THE STUDIES: [4] Goetz et al., Types of Boredom the Boredom (Addictive Behaviors [11] Nederkoorn et al., Self-Inflicted
quantify a persons boredom [1] Eastwood et al., The Unengaged
(Motivation and Emotion, June 2014)
[5] Steinberger et al., The
Reports, June 2016)
[8] Miller et al., Was Bob Seger
Pain Out of Boredom (Psychiatry
Research, March 2016)
level and compare it with Mind (Perspectives on Psychological Antecedents, Experience, and Right? (Leisure Sciences, Jan.2014) [12] Schubert, Boredom as an
Science, Sept. 2012) Coping Strategies of Driver Boredom [9] Mercer and Eastwood, Is Antagonist of Creativity
someone elses? In 1986, [2] Farmer and Sundberg, Boredom in Young Adult Males (Journal of Boredom Associated With Problem (Journal of Creative Behavior,
psychologists introduced Proneness (Journal of Personality
Assessment, Spring 1986)
Safety Research, Dec. 2016)
[6] Havermans et al., Eating and
Gambling Behaviour? (International
Gambling Studies, April 2010)
Dec. 1977)
[13] Mann and Cadman, Does Being
the Boredom Proneness [3] Fahlman et al., Development and
Validation of the Multidimensional State
Inflicting Pain Out of Boredom
(Appetite, Feb. 2015)
[10] Wilson et al., Just Think: The
Challenges of the Disengaged Mind
Bored Make Us More Creative?
(Creativity Research Journal,
Scale,[2] designed to Boredom Scale (Assessment, Feb. 2013) [7] Biolcati et al., I Cannot Stand (Science, July 2014) May 2014)

Illustration by CHRISTOPHER DELORENZO T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 23

 D I S PATC H E S

Eurosignal pager). Retro Site Ninja lets

you revisit web pages from the 90s.
This is just the beginning: While
these apps and websites let us glimpse
the past, other technologies could place
us more squarely inside it. But although
psychologists believe nostalgia is crucial
for finding meaning in life and for com-
batting loneliness, we dont yet know
whether too much of it will have nega-
tive, even dystopian, effects. As technol-
ogy gives us unprecedented access to our
memories, might we yearn for the good
old days when we forgot things?

1 Breaking the 3-D Wall

In her 1977 essay collection, On
Photography, Susan Sontag wrote that
photos actively promote nostalgia by
slicing out [a] moment and freezing it.
Because a photographs perspective is
TEC H NOLOGY camera for amateurs. Ads soon posi- fixed, a viewer cant move within it, and is

The End of
tioned it as a necessary instrument for unable to experience the captured space
preserving recollections of children and the way the photographer or her subject

Forgetting
family celebrations. According to Nancy did. New technology, however, can turn
Martha West, the author of Kodak old photos into 3-D graphics that provide
and the Lens of Nostalgia, the camera the illusion of moving through space.
allowed people to arrange their lives Imagine the bullet time effect
And a new age of nostalgia in such a way that painful or unpleasant made famous by The Matrixin which
BY B E N R OW E N aspects were systematically erased. a scenes action is either stopped or dra-

W
Technology is poised to once again matically slowed down, while a camera
H E N U N C L E Joshua, revolutionize the way we recall the seems to weave through the tableau at
a character in Peter past. Not so long ago, nostalgias trig- normal speedapplied to an old family
De Vriess 1959 novel, gers were mostly spontaneous: catch- photo, viewed on your laptop. Whereas
The Tents of Wickedness, ing your proms slow-dance song on The Matrix required 120 cameras to
says that nostalgia aint what it used the radio, riffling through photo albums achieve its signature effect, a new
to be, the line is played for humor: To while you were home for the holi- approach known as 3-D camera map-
those stuck in the past, nothingnot days. Today, thanks to our devices, we ping allows special-effects teams to
even memory itselfsurvives the test of can experience nostalgia on demand. inexpensively add dimensionality to 2-D
time. And yet Uncle Joshuas words have The Nostalgia Machine website plays photos. Recently, media designers like
themselves aged pretty well (despite songs from your favorite music year; Mikls Falvay have used the approach
being widely misattributed to Yogi another app, Sundial, replays the songs to enhance archival images taken with
Berra): Technology, though ceaselessly you were listening to exactly a year ago. a single still camera, giving viewers
DEAGOSTINI; SSPL/GETTY

striving toward the future, has continu- The Timehop app and Facebooks On the impression that they are navigating
ally revised how we view the past. This Day feature shower you with pho- spaces photographed years ago.
Nostalgiagenerally defined as a tos and social-media updates from a Artists have used other new tech-
sentimental longing for bygone times given date in history. The Museum of niques to project old photographs onto
underwent a particularly significant Endangered Sounds website plays the 3-D spaces. For its production of A 1940s
metamorphosis in 1888, when Kodak re- noises of discontinued products (the Nutcracker, for example, the Neos
leased the first commercially successful chime of a Bell phone, the chirping of a Dance Theatre, in Mansfield, Ohio, used

CIRCA 1000: Sei Shnagon, 1839: Louis Daguerre, a

THE MACHINERY a Japanese courtier, 1688: Johannes Hofer coins the painter and diorama artist,
completes The Pillow term nostalgia to describe psy- unveils the daguerreotype
OF MEMORY: Book,, an early example of chological symptoms observed in process, which prints photo-
an introspective diary. homesick Swiss mercenaries. graphs on silver-plated copper.
A TIMELINE

H ISTORY 1000 A.D. 1700 1800

24 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC I l l u s t r a t i o n b y A LVA R O D O M I N G U E Z
 *

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PICADOR
 TEC H NOLOGY

3-D-graphics software to transform project. After months of poring over conducted an elaborate series of experi-
1940s photos of Mansfield into virtual old footage and photos, Rothberg was ments that involved showing subjects
set pieces that dancers could interact skeptical that the resulting experience video clips while taking fMRI scans of
with, creating the illusion that they were would dislodge additional memories, their brains, and then using a math-
moving through old city streets. In this but when she put on the Oculus Rift ematical model to map how visu al
way, audience members who grew up headset and walked across the virtual patterns translated into brain activity.
in the 40s were treated to the feeling of houses parquet-floored hallway, some- After presenting a new clip to the sub-
traveling through childhood landscapes. thing felt off: In the real house, a floor- jects, the researchers used the resulting
Down the line, we may experience board had been loose and rose at one fMRI data to reverse engineer, from an
new forms of three-dimensional enter- end, though she had not thought about archive of other footage, a video mashup
tainment at home. Testing the appeal of that fact in many years. As VR gear that bore a striking resemblance to the
holographic content, the BBC last year becomes cheaper, more of us might be clip the subjects had actually seen. Gal-
unveiled a rudimentary holographic able to re-create and then tour our own lant believes that we could one day map
TV, which used a variation on a Vic- childhood homesimagine an immer- brain activity triggered by a recalled
torian theater techniqueinvolving a sive, autobiographical version of Mine- memory and then reverse engineer a
transparent acrylic pyramidto make craft or The Sims. video of that memory.
footage of a beating heart and a dino- For now, though, memory movies
saur animation appear to float in midair.
Although the BBC has no plans to bring
such a TV to market, other companies
3 Backing Up Your Memories
Of course, to appreciate detailed
replications of ones past, one must have
are a long way off. In a 2015 experiment,
Gallant found that his model was three
times more accurate at guessing the
are pursuing higher-tech commercial detailed memories of ones pastand image a subject was looking at than at
products, among them Samsung, which memory typically deteriorates with age. guessing one she was merely recall-
has patented a design for a TV that But experiments on other primates sug- ing. Another difficulty is that memories,
would broadcast laser-generated holo- gest that technological interventions especially nostalgic ones, shift over
graphic images. When the technology is may one day help us overcome this time. What you recall is confabulated,
eventually perfected, people may watch frailty. Theodore Berger, a biomedical made up, Gallant told me. Even if you
home movies play out not on a screen engineer and neuroscientist at the can make a faithful reconstruction of a
but in the center of their living room. University of Southern California, has memory you decode from the brain, that
developed a means of translating the memory is already wrong.

2 Reliving History
Even in 3-D, movies have a lim-
ited capacity for evoking real-life expe-
neuron-firing pattern that the brain uses
to code short-term memory into the pat-
tern it uses to store long-term memory
Even if we had total recall, it might
be best to avoid incessantly replay-
ing memories, both for the sake of our
riences. A viewer will never be able to a method he likens to translating Span- psychological equilibrium and for the
choose his own perspectiveto walk to ish to French without being able to sake of our lives in the here and now.
another room, say, or to view a scene understand either language. In some Ditto clicking from one nostalgia app to
from the vantage point of a child rather human trials, the translations have been another. Clay Routledge, a psychology
than from that of a taller adult. Virtual- found to be 90 percent accurate. Using professor at North Dakota State Univer-
reality technology promises to give users this method, Bergers team has created a sity who wrote the leading textbook on

SERGIO SCHNITZLER; TIMQUO/SHUTTERSTOCK

a chance to do just that. mathematical model capable of record- nostalgia, says the emotion is typically
In a tantalizing example of how VR ing the signals a rhesus monkeys brain healthy; in moderation, it can even lead
might be personalized in the future, produces in response to stimuli, trans- you to seek out new experiences. But he
Sarah Rothberg, an NYU researcher lating them, and feeding them back to cautions that too much time focusing
who specializes in virtual reality, has the brain in order to facilitate long-term on the past could jeopardize your abil-
re-created her old house in Memory recalleven when the monkey has been ity to engage in other opportunities that
Place: My House, an Oculus Rift expe- drugged so as to inhibit the formation of will form the basis for future nostalgic
rience cum traveling art exhibit. Enter- lasting memories. memories. In other words, nostalgia
ing various rooms prompts the playing One day, we may even be able to really wont be what it once was if, in the
of home videos, filmed years before create backups of our memories. In future, you have nothing to remember
by Rothbergs late father, whose early- 2011, UC Berkeley researchers led by but the time you spent swiping through
onset Alzheimers disease inspired the Jack Gallant, a cognitive neuroscientist, your phone, remembering.

1965: Kodak launches Super8 film, EARLY 1980S: A handful of radio sta- 2017
cameras, and projectors. The new tions, including KRQX in Dallas and
film doesnt need to be threaded into WMET in Chicago, inaugurate the 2013: Oxford Dictionaries 2050: People watch
cameras manually, helping spawn classic-rock radio genre; Baby Boom- selects selfie as the word movie reconstructions of
the home-movie craze. ers revel in the songs of their youth. of the year. their earliest memories.

1970 2000 P RE DICTIONS

DICTION S 2060

26 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 The
CULTURE FILE
gamma-saturating the frontal lobes
of the public. Shes de-ad, said
Jack Nance, as sawmill worker Pete
Martell, into the telephone. He was
pop-eyed and panic-warped, getting
as much spooked-rustic torque
onto the vowel sounds as he could
manage. Wra-apped in pla-astic.
Who was dead? Who had been
wrapped in plastic? Why, Laura
Palmer, of course. Alpha girl, vir-
tues orb, homecoming queen, apple
of the communitys eyethe com-
munity in question being the logging
town of Twin Peaks, population
51,201, high in the misty Northwest.
Laura Palmer, washed up at the riv-
ers edge in her shroud of industrial
sheeting, looked strangely trans-
muted: Her face was metallic silver-
blue, composed in an expression of
vestal serenity, and her beyond-this-
world brow was flecked with glitter-
ing river minerals. In the background
thrummed the queasy, slo-mo gush
of those Angelo Badalamenti chords.
And as the somber doctor and the
THE OMNIVORE handsome sheriff and the sheriff s

How Twin Peaks Invented improbably tall deputy gathered

around her body, the deputy buckled

Modern Television and began to weep. My God, Andy,

muttered the sheriff. Is this gonna
happen every damn time?
And nowthe intervening quar-
As a long-belated Season 3 arrives, ter century having been, apparently,
a look back at the immeasurably influential series a mere blip, a quick writhe of Lynch-

T
BY J A M E S PA R K E R ian static across the screenTwin
Peaks is back for a belated Season 3
H E S E N S AT I O N A L E N T R A N C E into mass consciousness of on Showtime, featuring many of the
David Lynch and Mark Frosts Twin Peaks, 27 years ago, was an event original cast members and helmed
that defies replication. To begin with, back then there actually was a once again by writer-director Lynch
mass consciousnessor, at least, there were a lot of people watch- and writer Frost. Its vulgar to query
ing the same shows at the same time. Norm said something funny the creative impulse behind this res-
on Cheers and a single, vast chuckle rumbled westward across the urrection, but somewhere in there,
continent and sank hissing into the Pacific. No Netflix in 1990. No personalized view- surely, is the sense that they kind of
ing recommendations. Just the perennially white-hot maw of the popular imagination, blew it the first time around. Twin
into whichluscious and secretive as a fog bankrolled Twin Peaks, with its unprecedented Peaks dominated 1990, must-see TV
stew of occultism, irony, horror, deadpan, soap opera, canned narrative, dream logic, burn- for a global viewership that included,
ingly beautiful young people, and postmodern diddling-about. The shows pilot had the apocryphally, Queen Elizabeth II.
feel of an initiation, as if some species of hermetic lore was now being diffused outward, And then it fell to pieces in 1991,

28 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC I l l u s t r a t i o n b y S T. F R A N C I S E L E VATO R R I D E

 NEW FROM NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

MALACHY McCOURT
In this beautifully rendered memoir, Malachy McCourt
shows us how to live life to its fullest, grow old without
acting old, and laugh at death.

The idea of death A born storyteller.

cannot take away a His musings about
great mans sense of death are lyrical,
humour. Malachy bittersweet, and filled
McCourtgoes to the with humor.
coalface and manages to ED BURNS
dig out a tunnel of light.
COLUM McCANN

A lovely wee book with A fabulous, funny,

a huge questing soul.... joyous journey.
I couldnt put it down. Hilarious and
LIAM NEESON heartbreaking.
JUDY COLLINS

ON SALE
5/16/17

AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER, EBOOK, AND AUDIO

 superseded as spectacle by the Gulf War and done everything-signifies vibe of The X-Files, but there
in artistically by its own internal entropy, by the The are glimmering splinters of Twin Peaks in Break-
loopy plotlines, tonal wobbles, bad ideas, and Culture File ing Bads trippy desert-sizzle; in the irruptive,
out-of-control conceits that we now recognize as disabling dreamtime of Bran Stark on Game of
the symptoms of a long-form TV series entering THE OMNIVORE
Thrones; and in the absurdist plot spirals, the giz-
its decadent phase. That the organic breakdown mos and MacGuffins, of Lost. The Sopranos paid
occurred in Season 2rather than in Season 4 or 5, homage with Agent Cooperesque fugue states
as it might nowadaysonly highlights the volatil- and shots of trees blowing in the wind, rippling
ity and then-novelty of the constituent elements. in their fullness and strangeness. And how is it
Because lets be clear: Without Twin Peaks, and finally communicated to Tony Soprano, after
its big-bang expansion of the possibilities of televi- years of repressed suspicion, that Big Pussyone
sion, half your favorite shows wouldnt exist. The of his most trusted sidekicksis ratting him out
absorptive, all-in serial, sonically and visually entire, to the FBI? By a talking fish, in a delirium, after
novelistically cantilevered with deep structure and some bad chicken vindaloo. It doesnt get more
extending backwards into the viewers brain, was Twin Peaks than that.
simply not a thing before Lynch and Frost. With Then there was the garmonbozia. In Twin Peaks:
Twin Peaks they effectively renegotiated TVs con- Fire Walk With Me, the much-scorned theatrical-
tract with its audience. You didnt tune in to this release prequel that Lynch made after the end
show the same way that you tuned in to L.A. Law of the series, the little red-suited man pops up
or Murder, She Wrote. You tuned in psychedelically, again and slurs out something that gets subtitled
as it were, ready to be transported. You were in, as I want all my garmonbozia (pain and sorrow).
or you were out: a binary decision. The story arcs, Moments later, we see him in horrible close-up,
the curves of character development, were long, Without nibbling on a spoonful of something that looks
longer than the show itself, receding into mystery. Twin Peaks, like creamed corn. Deep as we are in Lynchian
If you missed an episode, you were disoriented. If
you watched every episode carefully, you might
half your wackiness here, the meaning is not obscure: The
little red-suited man and his fellow denizens of
still be disoriented. Remarkably, this has become favorite the dream realm have a taste for human suffering,
something like the norm. shows which they call garmonbozia and consume in the
Thus the drama of Twin Peaks unfolded on two wouldnt form of a viscous, pearlescent psychic distillate.
planes: what was happening in the showwho
killed Laura Palmer?, etc.and then, more sub-
exist. Twin Peaks, as a narrative, had a core of almost
blackout darkness. Who killed Laura Palmer? Her
liminally, what the show was doing to the medium, father, Leland, played by Ray Wise, with his huge
to television. And on both planes it was the same and buggily handsome/disturbing Klaus Kinski
story, a reckless privileging of the irrational and face. Leland had been molesting his daughter for
the nocturnal, and a push to see how much of it years, and she, in her brokenness, had crossed
we could take. Watch the pilot again and marvel over to the druggy, sex-work side of Twin Peaks,
as Lynch, the master, the nutcase, so loads each sucked into the towns undertow of exploitation.
frame with preconscious materialtinnital back- This was the spine of the plot. For all its whimsy,
ground river-roar, ghostly whooping of a ceiling Twin Peaks was piled high with garmonbozia.
fan, crawl of the camera around a roomthat a Viewers, in fact, had never before experienced
genuine transdimensional pressure is felt, as of such (pain and sorrow) on the small screen, and
something sinister and unaccommodated trying to this too was part of the shows breakthroughto
get in. A new kind of tension: diffracted, half-real. blow open, in a subterranean way, the emotional
FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by range of TV drama. Dollops of garmonbozia have
Kyle MacLachlan, arrives in Twin Peaks with his since become standard.
gusto, his heart-healthiness, his extraterrestrial What can, or should, we expect from Season 3?
relish for the 10,000 things of the sensory world: To calmly anticipate another ream of seamless
Man, smell those trees. Smell those Douglas firs! prestige television, of the sort that is now ubiq-
He works procedurally and trench-coatedly, his uitous, feels like an insult to the raw wizardry of
jawline nobly shining, but he also believes that the David Lynch. We will watch it, at any rate, not
solution to the mystery of Laura Palmers death anchored to time and the boxy television set,
has been delivered to him in a dreama dream but weightlessly adrift in our personal viewing
featuring a little rolling-jointed man in a red suit, cells. It might be great. It might be a disaster. But
talking in slithery half-words, with subtitlesif he it wont blow our minds. It cant, because that
can only interpret the dream correctly. already happened.
Stylistically, the most immediate posthumous
effect of all this might have been the gnostic, James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

30 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 Admittedly Im not the best audience for
BOOKS fare like thisIm the kind of person who, upon

Screw Wisdom encountering any version of the statement Im

the kind of person who , instantly disbelieves
whatever comes next. The little Freud in me hears
dissimulation, overassertion, someone trying to
In a bold new memoir of female middle age, strong-arm the world into seeing her in a flattering
libido obliterates the usual bromides. way, like an aging film star through a Vaselined

M
BY L AU R A KI PN IS lens. Over dinner recently, an acquaintance (single
and approaching a certain age) returned repeat-
I D D L E AG E L OV E S its platitudes, chiefly the edly to the theme of not wanting to be coupled.
ones about hard-won wisdom and the many She wondered why people kept insisting she get
things that once seemed important but no longer coupled, and proleptically bemoaned how much
do as you face down impending mortality and narrower her life would be were she coupled.
irrelevance. And dont forget the ones about small What I heard was someone desperate to couple.
things that are far more important than youd Having confessed to what an enormous bitch
realized. Among the many indignities of aging is the irresistible tempta- I am, I can only assume that the reason I wasnt
tion to reach for some menu of bromides and convey to the world those invited to contribute to the latest volume in the
invaluable lessons about living. Bitch franchise, The Bitch Is Backsuccessor to
This isnt exactly scintillating stuff, and for women writers the ground 2002s best-selling The Bitch in the Houseis my
is especially well trod. The demise of your looks and sexual attractiveness obvious failure to fit the profile prescribed by
(colloquially known as fuckability) a few decades before men suffer the the subtitle, Older, Wiser, and (Getting) Happier.
same fatesorry, weve heard it, and heard it some more. The condition is While Im definitely older, Ive learned nothing,
insulting enough minus the compensatory nuggets of sagacity about how and given the state of things, I feel pretty sure the
not fretting over your looks is freeing, or about how getting laid is still fun only people getting happier are the ones who are
just not that important, and guess what: Men arent so crucial after all! heavily medicated.
Loving yourself is what really matters. The problem is not that Im uninterested in
Then theres the mandatory wryness. God save me from wryness. reading about how others are navigating such

Illustration by ELENI KALORKOTI T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 31

midlife quandaries as whether to get Botox, or The effect is to unleash a dangerously rambunc-
how to spice up sex after 30 years with the same The tious writer on the world. The quippiness of Poser
boring husband when you were never that into Culture File has deepened into something stylistically far
sex in the first place. Im as fascinated as anyone more distinctive. Sentence for sentence, a more
by the sex lives of my peers, their medical condi- BOOKS
pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think
tions and romantic travails, their weight gains and of. To hedge the accolade slightly, I suspect some
other life exigencies. And dont get me started portion of the pleasure was narcissistic on my
on that eternal heterosexual-female quandary: part: I kept recognizing myself in these pages,
Menmonsters or just perpetually disappointing? especially in their evocations of middle-aged
But the midlife progress report is a deadly befuddlements, and of the surprisingly long
genre for a writer; that way lie banality and drab half-life of adolescent inchoateness.
prose, or so I found myself ungenerously reflecting Still burdened by an overinsistent libido
while perusing The Bitch Is Back. Theres plenty to despite her crumbling body (Theres really no
identify with, and an admirably diverse selection dignified way to go to seed as a woman), Dederer
of life experiences on offer (arranged marriage, is, by her account, a perpetual hot mess. But so
transgender marital dilemmas, cancer, loss of are a lot of the middle-aged women she knows.
a child). Many of the writers have proved their She and her girlfriends meet for crying sessions,
literary bona fides elsewhere. Still, I could have sobbing self-indulgent buckets of tears for no par-
done with fewer updates from contributors to the ticular reason. She kisses men (and the occasional
first Bitch volume, who catch us up on the past 15 woman) who arent her husband, and fantasizes
years as though were all at a high-school reunion. about men who arent her husband while in bed
I noticed I was doing more skimming than pon- with her husband. All the sins and impurities that
dering. Having the editor, Cathi Hanauer, frame What knits yoga was meant to cleanse apparently flourished
certain essays with arm-twisting commands didnt things instead. She lusts after a short-story writer encoun-
help: Read her story. Get inspired. Make the world
better. Live your life, Live your life, Live your life.
together tered at a literary conference; an email flirtation
ensues, eventually discovered by her husband.
is sex, and

I
(In Poser, she and her husband virtuously shared
D B E E N T R Y I N G to figure out why this all the men an email account and a laptop, the Information
well-meaning volume left me feeling so
peevish when I read Claire Dederers latest
who were Age version of a marital chastity belt.)
This is all quite a treat: a 50ish lady memoirist
memoir, Love and Trouble, whose subtitle, A Midlife and are with no epiphanies in sight. Nothings figured out
Reckoning, would seem to put it dangerously close a delivery and nothings getting better, except Dederers
to The Bitch Is Backs wheelhouse. Except her system prose, which has acquired a wonderful sordidness.
subtitle could as easily have been Getting Stupider
Every Day. I immediately cheered upI believe
for it. Its not really what memoirists say about them-
selves that tells you who they are; its the structure
Ive found in Dederer a peevishly kindred spirit. of their metaphors. Metaphors are a way of smug-
I was not expecting this, since I recalled gling in backdoor meanings, and Dederer embeds
her previous book, Poser: My Life in Twenty- them in her sentences like shrapnel. An old couch
Three Yoga Poses, as rather weighed down by the her toddlers played on is as stained with shit and
figuring-things-out imperative, despite some vomit and blood as the backseat of Travis Bickles
irreverence at the expense of a generation of taxi. The sun [in Utah] was unforgiving, like a
hollow-eyed women, chasing virtue. Thats Mormon rapist. She roots around in old letters
how Dederer anointed her circle of North Seattle like a truffle pig. Her own previous memoir, its
enlightenment-seeking mothers, who were busy feminine themes wrapped in yoga (a quintessen-
ensuring their worthiness by pureeing their own tial lady book, she acknowledges), reminds her
organic baby food. An obsession with moral of a scallop wrapped in bacon.
cleanliness, she shrewdly observed, fueled their Rather than telling you what to think of her,
preservative-free lifestyles and yoga practices. Not shes immersing you in an idiosyncratic conscious-
that she was entirely immune from the condition ness. For Dederer, even when its sunny, things
herself. But as a participant-observer mocking are filthy, swinish, thrillingly violent; sedate
the native rituals while sipping the delicious local middle-class lives are a little sickening. Feminin-
nectar, she made sure to toss in a fair amount ity, too, conceals a wealth of dirtiness beneath
of eye-rolling for the benefit of yoga haters and the pretty frills. Dederer is suitably ambivalent
purity shunners like myself. about being slotted into what she regards as the
Love and Trouble is a different sort of animal. obviously lesser gender, but instead of trafficking
Though Dederer continues to perambulate the in uplifting slogans, she savors the secret squalor.
virtue theme, this time she does so as an apostate. She finds creative work-arounds.

32 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 One such work-around was to become a world- mechanics of plotting as any novelist. Never mind
class slutI use the word with utter respectas The what occurred in your life; its the ordering of
an adolescent and into her 20s. Shes often quite Culture File events into a story that matters. In lesser hands,
funny and pretty unrepentant about fucking her that means retrospectively positing causes and
way through much of the Western world. Some- effects: This happened because that happened first,
times the sex was accidentalthat is, she was like on a billiard tablethis ball hit that ball, which
passed out. Not all of this activity was particularly went in that hole. We all do it, aided by therapists
pleasurable or happy-making, but for Dederer the and well-meaning friends. My mother didnt love
allure of sex lay in its mystical power to transport me, so I found a man who wouldnt love me either.
her out of herself while simultaneously grounding My mother didnt love me, so I found a woman
her. And she valued the sense of power it gave her who would. Our stories vary, but we subject them
over men. That adolescent clueless bitch is still to familiar geometries. We make the facts jump
breathing hard down her neck, well into middle age. through familiar hoops, also known as tropes:

D
traumas, dark moments, reversals, epiphanies. But
EDERER REF U SE S TO pathologize or causality is the mother of all clichs, and the clichs
regret any of this. Even more admirable dont fall far from the midlife-reckoning industry.
is the way the restless sexual seeking of After reading early chapters of the memoir,
yesteryear is echoed in the memoirs restlessness Dederers agent wanted to know: Why all the slut-
of form. Love and Trouble is like the town pump of tiness? So Dederer wonders whether she should
memoir idioms. We get first person, second person, frame a disturbing episode that took place when
lists, annotated maps, how-to manuals, a case she was 13a grown-up friend of her mothers
study of a teenage slut replete with graphs, and hippie boyfriend climbed into her sleeping bag
two letters. Both are addressed to Roman Polanski, and frottaged her one night, though didnt go
whose violations of a 13-year-old girl occasion furtheras the source of her later bed-hopping
Dederers reflections on the sexual encroachments and adult incoherence. Maybe the sleeping-bag
that punctuated her own rather feral teenage thingy is the key to everything?
years. She also spins out a rape scenario without Life is lived forward, but can only be understood
betraying whether its fantasy or reality. I was backward, said Kierkegaard. To put it another way,
reminded of the formal promiscuity of Jennifer midlife reckonings revise the events of the past to
Egans A Visit From the Goon Squadthere, too, make the present comprehensible. But Dederer,
the real story is in the ruptures. refreshingly unwilling to impersonate a billiard
The memoirs constantly shifting vantage ball, dismisses as a bullshit narrative construct
points allow Dederer to keep returning to the same the idea that a single event can change your life.
themes without wearing them out. What knits She even ups the ante: Maybe that teenage sexual
things together is, of course, sexthe stranger- LOVE AND
encroachment was, at some level, desired? Theres
fucking of adolescence, the been-there-done-that TROUBLE: no way to know, but reversing the causal arrows
of married sex, the illicit flirtations, all the men A MIDLIFE lets her do some hard thinking about the erotics of
RECKONING
who were and are a delivery system for sex, sex violation stories and how much pleasure theyve
CLAIRE DEDERER
as a delivery system for an elusive sense of self. Knopf
yielded, and still do, in her psyche. Indeed, female
And the power of sex to unravel everything you masochism is a gift that keeps giving in Dederers
thought you knew about yourself. And the power hands. She gets as much mileage from it as Philip
of fucking men to rectify the injustice of not hav- Roth did from Newark.
ing been born a man in a world that favors them. Some of us prefer to cast ourselves as the
Dederer is startlingly frank here, and women victim of events, using stories of injuries and
arent always the greatest fans of frankness on these affronts to dodge tougher issues, including the
matters. Shes equally candid about masochistic deep, intransigent weirdness of simply being
yearnings to be passive, dominated, victimized, female. At some point I realized (epiphany!) that
fantasy-rapedand also sexually adored in a way the promiscuities of Love and Trouble were rather
that will (hopefully) solve everything. Even the heroic: a case of stomping down the temptation to
tedium of marital sexa frequent theme in The tell an easier story and look pretty in the worlds
Bitch Is Back, toobecomes, in Dederers treatment, eyes. Would that we all managed to stomp down
THE BITCH IS
surprising stuff. Marriage is essentially plotless, BACK: OLDER,
such temptations.
but a dick has a plot, she writes, offering up a set WISER, AND End of life lesson.
of instructions on how to fuck your husband of 15 (GETTING)
HAPPIER
years. A lot of brio is required to put it quite so pithily. Laura Kipniss new book, Unwanted Advances:
EDITED BY
Of course when it comes to plot, Dederer is CATHI HANAUER Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, was
on home turf: Memoirists are as involved in the William Morrow published in April.

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 33
 Walt Disney Animation Studiosadrift at the time
FILM of its 2006 acquisition of the then-untouchable

How Pixar Lost Its Way Pixarhas rebounded with such successes as
Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, and Big Hero 6.
One need only look at this years Oscars: Two
Disney movies, Zootopia and Moana, were nomi-
For 15 years, the animation studio was nated for Best Animated Feature, and Zootopia
the best on the planet. Then Disney bought it. won. Pixars Finding Dory was shut out altogether.

A
BY C H RISTO PH E R O R R This thriving expansion of high-quality ani-
mated storytelling would not have been possible
WELL-REGARDED HOLLYWOOD INSIDER recently without Pixar. The studio literally reinvented the
suggested that sequels can represent a sort of creative genre with Toy Story, the first computer-generated
bankruptcy. He was discussing Pixar, the legendary 3-D-animated feature film. Each subsequent Pixar
animation studio, and its avowed distaste for cheap release offered new feats of technical wizardry,
spin-offs. More pointedly, he argued that if Pixar were from engineering the delicate trajectories of
only to make sequels, it would wither and die. Now, millions of individual strands of fur in 2001s
all kinds of industry experts say all kinds of things. But it is surely relevant Monsters, Inc. to capturing the wondrous interplay
that these observations were made by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, between light and water in 2003s Finding Nemo.
in his best-selling 2014 business-leadership book. Even as others gradually caught up with Pixars
Yet here comes Cars 3, rolling into a theater near you this month. You visual artistry, the studio continued to tell stories
may recall that the original Cars, released back in 2006, was widely judged of unparalleled depth and sophistication. Pixars
to be the studios worst film to date. Cars 2, which followed five years later, signature achievement was to perfect a kind of
was panned as even worse. And if Cars 3 isnt disheartening enough, two crossover animated cinema that appealed equally
of the three Pixar films in line after it are also sequels: The Incredibles 2 and to kids and adults. The key was managing to tell
(say it isnt so!) Toy Story 4. two stories at once, constructing a straightforward
The painful verdict is all but indisputable: The golden era of Pixar is childrens story atop a more complex moral and
over. It was a 15-year run of unmatched commercial and creative excellence, narrative architecture. Up, for example, took a
beginning with Toy Story in 1995 and culminating with the extraordinary relatively conventional boys adventure tale and
trifecta of WALL-E in 2008, Up in 2009, and Toy Story 3 (yes, a sequel, but a harnessed it to a moving, thoroughly grown-up
great one) in 2010. Since then, other animation studios have made consis- story of loss, grief, and renewal.
tently better films. The stop-motion magicians at Laika have supplied such The theme that the studio mined with great-
gems as Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. And, in a stunning reversal, est success during its first decade and a half was

34 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC Illustration by ZOHAR LAZAR

 parenthood, whether real (Finding Nemo, The to find. And with its foreshadowing of eventual
Incredibles) or implicit (Monsters, Inc., Up). Pixars The abandonment, Toy Story 2 laid the groundwork for
distinctive insight into parentchild relations stood Culture File still further thematic development. That promise
out from the start, in Toy Story, and lost none of was fulfilled almost a decade later, in Toy Story 3,
its power in two innovative and unified sequels. a concluding chapter in which Andy finally heads
Who would want to see a movie about a little boy off to college and a new life, leaving behind toys
who plays with dolls?, Michael Eisner, then the and parents alike.
CEO of Disney, obtusely asked when told of plans Almost as renowned as Pixars onscreen magic
for the Pixar debut. (Disney was to co-finance it.) throughout this period was its collaborative cul-
But the films creative premise is preciselyand ture. Under the leadership of the studios founder
cruciallythe reverse: Toy Story is a movie about and creative guru, John Lasseter, it relied heavily
dolls who want to be played with by a little boy. on a small, mutually reinforcing group of gifted
That inversion complicates and intensifies animators and editors: Pete Docter, Andrew Stan-
the films emotional power. In their desire for ton, Joe Ranft, Lee Unkrich, and Brad Bird (who
the attention of 6-year-old Andy, the toys joined Pixar in 2000). Known informally as the
particularly Woody the cowboy and Buzz Light- Braintrust, the group grew over time, but these
year the spacemanmirror childrens eagerness five men and Lasseter stood out for their collegial
to capture their parents attention. Yet of course self-criticism and ethos of constant refinement
Andy is not a parent. Hes a child, and its the toys Pixar in the pursuit of perfection. So strong was their
that are mostly accorded the role of grown-ups.
(An astute bit of psychological realism: Andy, like
perfected synergy that every time outside directors were
brought in to handle a film (as they were for Toy
most kids, uses them to pantomime adulthood.) a kind of Story 2 and Ratatouille), they were ultimately
So even as, on one level, Woody and Buzz act as crossover replaced by one of the early members of the
children to Andys parent, on another they act
as parents to Andys child: His happiness is their
cinema that Braintrust. In 2004, a Disney subsidiary, Circle 7
Animation, was created to produce sequels to
responsibility, and they will resort to the most- appealed Pixar films. Dubbed Pixarent, its doors were
extreme measures imaginable to ensure it. equally soon closed and all its scripts scrapped.
to kids
A
Toy Story thrilled adults and kids alike with this
canny and moving portrayal of the parentchild
bond. And its creators seemed to appreciate
and adults. N D T H E N , after Toy Story 3, the
Pixar magic began to fade. The last
what a rich emotional and dramatic vein they film of the golden era, it was also the
had tapped into. Following the movies success, first film begun after Disney acquired Pixar for
Disney, then the distributor for Pixar, pushed for $7.4 billion in 2006, when Lasseter and Catmull
the production of a quickly made, direct-to-video were made, respectively, the chief creative officer
sequel. Such second-tier fare has long been a and the president of both studios. The sequels
lucrative Disney sideline, generally produced that followedCars 2 (a spy spoof ) in 2011 and
by the in-house subsidiary Disneytoon Studios. Monsters University (a college farce) in 2013
(Examples of its output include such classics as lacked any thematic or emotional connection to
The Lion King 1 and The Little Mermaid: Ariels the movies that spawned them. Though better
Beginning.) But Pixar rebelled, on the grounds that than either of those two, Brave, Pixars 2012 foray
the studio aspired only to excellence. Instead it into princessdom, was a disappointment as well.
produced, at breakneck pace, a theatrical-release The studio rallied with Inside Out in 2015. But the
sequel that met the high bar set by the original. inferior The Good Dinosaur (also in 2015) and last
In his 2014 book, Creativity, Inc., Catmull years mediocre Finding Dory only confirmed the
describes the episode as the crucible in which overall decline, which was particularly noticeable
Pixars true identity was forged. Toy Story 2 in comparison with the revival under way over at
(1999) didnt merely equal the original. The Disney Animation.
sequel enriched it, presenting Woody with a new Catmull once said that Pixars intent was to
but related quasi-parental dilemma: Should he make one sequel for every two original features.
spend the rest of his life untouched and pristine The ratio since 2010 has been closer to the inverse.
on the shelf of a vintage-toy collector? Or should Especially lamentable was the announcement,
he return to enjoy loving play with a rowdy boy in 2014, of plans for Toy Story 4. The narrative
(as the movie opens, Andy has inadvertently torn and emotional arc of the trilogy had clearly been
Woodys arm half off) who will ultimately outgrow completed with Andys departure for college. The
and discard him? In the end, Woody opts for the third installment had even closed, lovingly, with
messy combination of joy and sacrifice with Andy, a shot that neatly mirrored the opening shot of
as apt a metaphor for parenthood as youre likely the first film: the fluffy-white-clouds-on-blue-sky

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 35
wallpaper of young Andys bedroom in Toy Story conglomerate in the history of the world, commer-
giving way to real white clouds in the real blue sky. The cial opportunities multiply exponentially. There
Yet instead of concluding on that touching note, Culture File are a dozen Disney theme parks scattered across
Pixar has opted for what has been described as the globe in need of, well, themes for their rides.
a franchise rebootsurely the most dispiriting FILM
So the year after its acquisition of Pixar, Disney
phrase in contemporary cinema. announced that it would open Toy Story Midway
The differing trajectories of Pixar and Disney Mania the following year at both Disney World
Animation have hardly gone unremarked. At the and Disney California Adventure. Later in 2007,
time of the merger, Disney was demoralized Disney announced a $1.1 billion redesign of its
and failing as a company, Catmull observed failing California Adventure park, featuring a
a couple of years ago, before adding, Disney is new, 12-acre Cars Land. Additional Toy Story and
now successful. About Pixar, he was less san- Finding Nemothemed rides are in the works in
guine: There are major issues were addressing Shanghai and Tokyo.
at Pixar now. Indeed, the overlap between the Pixar movies
Lasseter and Catmull do, after all, have only that beget sequels and the movies that inspire
so many hours in their days to devote to their rides at Disney amusement parks is all but total.
competing obligations at Pixar and Disney, as Theme-park rides are premised on an awareness
Catmull made clear in his book. If the studio of the theme in question, and young parkgoers are
with the corporate parents name on it took pre- less likely to be familiar with movies that are more
cedence, that would hardly be a surprise. Nor than a decade old. If you want them clamoring
would it be surprising if the dilution of focus took to experience Toy Story Midway Mania, theyll
a toll, given how dependent Pixars culture was need a Toy Story 4. Cars Land could use a Cars 3,
on an intimate circle of innovative minds. (Other and Finding Nemoassociated rides were due a
Braintrust members have been pursuing interests Finding Dory. Who better to preside over all this
beyond Pixar too: Stanton explored live-action Subtle corporate synergy than Lasseterwho, to note yet
filmmaking with John Carter, and Bird did the themes one more of his many titles, is also the principal
same with Mission: ImpossibleGhost Protocol
and Tomorrowland.)
dont easily creative adviser for Walt Disney Imagineering,
the subsidiary responsible for designing the rides?
Still, the erosion of Pixars uncompromising translate Pixar has promised that after the upcoming
creative independence cant be reduced to a case into glut of sequels, the studio will focus on original
of inadequate oversight. The Disney merger seems amusement- features. But were grown-ups, and though the
to have brought with it new imperatives. Pixar
has always been very good at making money, but
park rides. once inimitable studio has taught us to believe
in renewal, it has also trained us in grief and loss.
historically it did so largely on its own terms. The Im not sure I dare to expect much more of what
studio, remember, rejected a low-quality direct- used to make Pixar Pixar: the idiosyncratic stories,
to-video Toy Story 2, and instead worked round the deep emotional resonance, the subtle themes
the clock to come up with another tour de force. that dont easily translate into amusement-park
But Lasseter, among his other obligations, now rides. Im thinking of the heartbreaking, waltz-
oversees Disneytoon Studios as well. In that capac- set Married Life segment of Up, which packs
ity he served as the executive producer of 2013s more emotion into four minutes than most Oscar-
Planes and its 2014 sequel, Planes: Fire & Rescue. nominated dramas manage in their entire running
The two movies arelike virtually all Disneytoon time. Or the wistful solitude of WALL-Es robotic
filmsshameless, derivative cash grabs. What protagonist, left behind on Earth to clean up his
makes them unique is that they are also explicit creators mess. Or Anton Egos artful critique of
spin-offs of Pixars Cars franchise, a development criticism at the end of Ratatouille, arguably the
that would have been almost unimaginable before slyest words on the subject since Addison DeWitts
the merger. As Lasseter himself explained, By in All About Eve.
expanding the Cars world, Planes gave us a whole None of these films is scheduled to have a
new set of fun-filled situations. sequel. And none is particularly suited to becom-

N
ing a theme-park ride (though Disney unveiled
O T T O M E N T I O N a whole new set Ratatouille: The Adventure at, of course, Disney-
of toys. Merchandising has, naturally, land Paris). Which cant help but raise the ques-
always been a temptation for Pixar (as tion: Would Pixar even bother making those
for any purveyor of kids movies). And Disney pictures anymore?
has played a central role in the marketing and
merchandising of Pixar films since 1991. But when Christopher Orr is a senior editor and the
you become a division of the largest entertainment principal film critic at The Atlantic.

36 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 Much of what Forman reports would not sur-
BOOKS prise anyone who has spent time at a black church

When Black America

or a black barbershopor in the company of my
mother. In the 60s, she marched with Malcolm X,

Was Pro-Police and during the 80s, after the public school where
she taught was vandalized, she said, Those nig-
gers should be put under the jail. My moms ideas
about criminal-justice policy are informed by
As crime rose from the late 60s to the 90s, so did getting held up at gunpoint in front of our house
inner-city support for law-and-order policies. on Chicagos South Side, seeing family members

A
BY PAU L B U T L E R suffer from addiction, and watching the cops treat
my stepfather like a criminal after he got into a
F R I C A N A M E R I C A N S L A M E N T that the cops fender bender with a white man.
are never there when you need themthat 911 is a Needing the criminal-justice system to help
joke, as the Public Enemy song goesand then they keep you safe, to be fair in its investigations, and
complain that their communities are overpoliced. to be merciful with people whove run afoul of
These gripes arent so much inconsistent as they are the lawthis urgent, unwieldy agenda explains
underdeveloped, or they have been until now. James much of African American politics, from the
Forman Jr.s revelatory new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punish- anti-lynching campaigns of the early 20th century
ment in Black America, sets out to describe how, and explain why, both to the Black Lives Matter movement today. As
complaints are valid and what that means for criminal-justice reform. Forman reminds his readers, black people have
If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, you might expect black long been vigilant, often to no avail, about two
folks, who are disproportionately victims of crime, to support the politics of kinds of equality enshrined in our nations ideals:
law and order. And they frequently have done just that, according to Forman, equal protection of the law, and equal justice
a former public defender in Washington, D.C.; a co-founder of a D.C. charter under the law.
AL SEIB/GETTY; KENT D. JOHNSON/AP

T
school for at-risk youth; and now a professor at Yale Law School. Using the
District of Columbia (aka Chocolate City) as his laboratory, Forman docu- HE ABSENCE OF equal protection has
ments how, as crime rose from the late 1960s to the 90s, the citys African been, historically, the most vexing prob-
American residents responded by supporting an array of tough-on-crime lem in the lives of African Americans. The
measures. A 1975 measure decriminalizing marijuana died in the majority- NAACP was founded in 1909 partly in response
black city council, which went on to implement one of the nations most to the federal and state governments turning a
stringent gun-control laws. Black residents endorsed a ballot initiative that blind eye to white violence against blacks. More
called for imposing harsh sentences on drug dealers and violent offenders. than half a century later, as open-air drug markets
Replicated on a national level over the same period, these policies led to flourished in inner-city neighborhoods, black
mass incarceration and aggressive policing strategies like stop-and-frisk, activists perceived a related form of racist neglect
developments that are now looked upon as affronts to racial justice. by the state. The police, they believed, would have

Illustration by MIKE M C QUADE T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 37

 shut down those markets had they existed in white overenforcement. He also notes that racist can
communities. In fact, as Forman notes, many activ- The be, from the perspective of African Americans,
ists thought that those in power actually condoned Culture File an inaccurate way to describe criminal-justice
the availability of drugs in the hood, as a means to policies that burden primarily black criminals.
keep the black man down. (In those days, it was BOOKS
Forman doesnt endorse these views. Rather, he
black menrather than all black peoplewho demonstrates how influential they were in the
were seen as principally injured by racism, a fallacy black body politic during an era of high crime.
that made its way into government policy under At the same time, he avoids any hint of the
the guise of the controversial Moynihan Report gotcha spirit that some commentators found in
in 1965.) The black radical Stokely Carmichael, Michael Javen Fortners Black Silent Majority: The
speaking at a historically black college in 1970, said, Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment,
Fighting against drugs is revolutionary because which mines similar territory. Whereas Fortners
drugs are a trick of the oppressor. analysis could be read as a rejoinder to the Black
Back then, many white progressives were Lives Matter movementimplying that early sup-
pro-pot, and disinclined to see drug prohibition as port for harsh sentencing in drug cases undercut
part of a revolutionary utopia. African American later critiques of the policyFormans experience
suspicion of white liberals is a theme throughout as a D.C. public defender gives him more street
Locking Up Our Own. One reason the 1975 effort cred. His stories about clients make it clear that,
to decriminalize marijuana in Washington, D.C., however well-intentioned black middle-class
failed is that the bills two primary supporters were power brokers were in fashioning conservative
white men. Forman quotes the spoken-word art- approaches to criminal justice, the policies that
ist Gil Scott-Herons portrayal of a typical white resulted were devastating to the larger community.
member of Students for a Democratic Society: Some of those stories will stay with me a long
He is fighting for legalized smoke / All I want I knew how time. One woman lost her hard-won job at FedEx
is a good home and a wife and children / And
some food to feed them every night.
to cross- because she got arrested for possessing a little
bit of weed, and then couldnt get the job back
Scott-Herons very traditional wish list reveals examine a even after the prosecutors dropped the case. Her
another important explanation for black support of defendant arrest record will follow her like a curse for the
law and order. Not for the first time, many middle-
class African Americans subscribed to the politics
and mock rest of her life, all because cops pulled her over,
supposedly for the infraction of driving a car with
of respectability: The race advances, the view his refer- dark tinted windows. Though Brandon, a scared
goes, when black people demonstrate that they are ences to 15-year-old kid, had a gun, he never used it. He
capable of living up to white standards of morality his baby was sent to jail for six months anyway when a
and conduct. Among the black elite, advocacy for
lenient criminal-justice policies was deemed an
mama. cop found him carrying it (along with a small
amount of pot). Forman doesnt tell us how things
admission that black interests were allied with turned out for Brandon, but few boys sentenced
the interests of criminals. That sort of solidarity to D.C.s notorious Oak Hill juvenile-detention
would hardly help the cause. For many bougie facility left better off than they came in. Sending
African Americanscertainly those in cities like a nonviolent kid there was like sending him to a
Washington and Atlanta, where light-skinned finishing school for criminals.

I
blacks dominated the middle classcolorism
was also at work: The fact that their dark-skinned WAS A PROSECU TOR in D.C. during part
hoodlum cousins were getting locked up was not of the time that Forman writes about, and
a problem. Indeed, one of the primary arguments I have some stories too. I loved standing
for allowing African Americans to join Atlantas in front of juries in my best suit, announcing
police department in the 1930s and 40s was that my name and declaring that I represented the
they would be better able than white officers to United States. (The federal government is the
distinguish between elite blacks and the riffraff. primary local prosecutor in the capital, because
As Forman tells the story, the politics of respect- of the citys status as a district and not a state.)
ability converged with other cultural and social The jurorsoften elderly black peoplewould
influences to shape tough-on-crime attitudes in beam at me, and I imagined them thinking, You
the black community. He builds on, among other go, boy, you represent the United States! I didnt
things, two conclusions associated with the work know the term politics of respectability at the time,
of the Harvard Law School professor Randall but I did know how to cross-examine a defendant
Kennedy. In Race, Crime, and the Law, Kennedy (virtually every single one was black) and mock
argues that African Americans suffer more harm his diction and references to his baby mama,
from underenforcement of the law than from and then button up my jacket and give the jury

38 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
a look indicating that they and I were middle- crime went down dramatically across the country.
class Negroes and the defendant was a thug who The It has continued, by and large, to decline. Activists
needed to be locked up. I won most of my cases, Culture File have turned their attention to mass incarceration
and Formans book helps me understand that and police violence. Even mainstream civil-rights
my trial-advocacy skills werent the only reason. organizations now focus on reducing sentences
But I didnt win all my cases, and that helps me and making the police more accountable and
understand that not all the black people in D.C. transparent. Gone are the days when some black
were as complicit as Forman implies. When I was activists and politicians aimed to equip cops with
in training, various experienced prosecutors told more-powerful guns, as thenD.C. Mayor Marion
us rookies that in some cases we would convince Barry wanted to do during the crack wave that
the jury that the defendant was guilty. But if it began in the late 80s.
was a drug case, jurors might find him not guilty As everyone knows, Barry himself got caught
because they didnt want to send another young up in that epidemic and eventually, like a lot of
black man to jail. That did indeed happen, and the African American politicians who figure in
when I left the prosecutors office and became a Formans account, changed his mind about what
law professor, I learned that this practice of jury was in the best interests of the community. If law-
nullification is not simply legal. It is a check built and-order policies had actually worked to make
into the Constitution, through the double-jeopardy neighborhoods safer, maybe people would have
clause, which has been interpreted to mean that been willing to tolerate them, despite the racial
not-guilty verdicts cannot be reversed for any disparities and erosions of civil liberties they
reason. The purpose is to let the people, rather entailed. But they did not work. Most criminolo-
than a power-mad prosecutor of the kind I used gists dont credit aggressive policing and harsh
to be, have the final say in the fate of the accused. sentencing with substantially reducing crime, in
I am not sure what Forman would make of the part because crime went down in jurisdictions
fact that in the nations capital, widespread jury that werent relying on those policies.
nullification in drug cases coincided with the city At its best, democracy is about being creative
councils passage of a law in 1994 that took away and experimental, learning from mistakes and
the right to a jury trial in many misdemeanor cases. trying a different approach. Locking Up Our Own
As a result, D.C. residents have fewer rights to makes a powerful case that the African American
a jury trial than do the residents of most states. community was instrumental in creating a monster.
More-vivid evidence of deeply mixed impulses We should be grateful that the same community
with perverse consequences would be hard to from nullifying D.C. jurors and Black Lives Matter
find: A law passed by a majority-black city council activists to writers like Michelle Alexander and
protected prosecutors (who, though you wont LOCKING UP OUR artists like Beyonc and Kendrick Lamaris
learn this from Forman, remain majority-white) OWN: CRIME leading the fight to take the monster down.
from the judgment of majority-black juries. AND PUNISHMENT
IN BLACK
Locking Up Our Own is a well-timed, nuanced AMERICA
Paul Butler is a professor at Georgetown
examination of the past, but I am glad that the JAMES FORMAN JR. University Law Center. His new book, Chokehold:
story it tells is over. Beginning in the early 90s, FSG Policing Black Men, will be published in July.

HOW S T HI S for game called Ever- classroom of stu- into at home, school,
a challenge? Write a When, in which he is dents (Aidan among and work also test
novel about virtual- a Water Elf named them) who could care them in ingenious
reality gaming and Tildor. Collin, a college less about Emerson, ways. Goodman, like
high-school teaching, dropout, is a virtuosic Shakespeare, Haw- the best teachers, is
and make it a story artist whose remark- thorne, or Dickinson. intent on watching
that adults and kids able chalk drawings But Goodman, as obsessive fantasies
will find hard to put land him a nearly deft a plot engi- turn into imaginative
down. In her new round-the-clock neer as any game determination. Read-
novel, Allegra Good- job at Arkadia, the designer, makes sure ers will be too, pulled
man creates suspense creator of EverWhen. her characters dont along by her protago-
COVER TO COVER
where you might least And NinaCollins stay trapped behind nists quests, which
The Chalk expect to find it. girlfriend and the closed doors. She are not to follow rules
Artist Aidan is a teenager daughter of Arkadias gives them unusual or slay dragons. The
holed up in his bed- owneris a Teacher- love travails to real goal is to face
ALLEGR A
GOODMAN room, consumed at all Corps recruit. Every navigate. The other complicated selves.
DIAL hours by a multiplayer day she walks into a troubles they stumble Ann Hulbert

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 39
 RICHARD SPENCER
IS A TROLL,
AN IMP, AN ICON
FOR WHITE
SUPREMACISTS.
HE WAS ALSO
MY HIGH-SCHOOL
CLASSMATE.
HERES HOW
HE BECAME A
SYMPTOM OF THIS
AMERICAN MOMENT.

BY
GRAEME
WOOD

40 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
PHILIP MONTGOMERY

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 41
 kid whod once cribbed my chemistry notes now had some-
thing to say.
Spencer invited me to join a discussion group he was orga-
nizing, the Robert Taft Club. I was wary when he evaded my
questions about the politics of his club. He seemed reluctant to
reveal too much, too soon. I made a point to lose his business
card (he was the literary editor of The American Conservative, it
said) and forget about him, as I had 10 years before.

O R M O S T O F the 25 years we have known

each other, my attitude toward Spencer was
indifference. He arrived at St. Marks School of
Texas, our Dallas all-male prep school, in eighth
grade. We shared a home-room adviser and both
took Latin, which he pronounced, with a verbal
tic that persists today, as if the middle consonant
were a d, as in the name Aladdin.
Spencer passed his classes but didnt excel. He played base-
ball and football, but you wouldnt have gone to games to see
N D E C E M B E R 1 7 , 2 0 0 7, the lib- him play. I remember little to admire and little to despise
ertarian magazine Reason held a Christmas basha Very other than, perhaps, the featureless mediocrity he represented
Special, Very Secular Christmas Partyat its office in Wash- to my ambitious teenage self. When I graduated, in 1997, hav-
ington, D.C. The guest of honor, the late Atlantic book critic ing won admission to the Ivy League and achieved escape velo-
Christopher Hitchens, tugged liberally on his drink and gave a city from the Dallas suburbs, it was the mediocrity of Richard
speech about how the holiday season was oppressive (like Spencer that I was insufferably proud to have left behind.
living in fucking North Korea). Then near the height of his But after the Christmas party, my indifference slowly gave
powers as an anti-theist pamphleteer, Hitchens led the crowd way to a surreal curiosity, on its way to loathing. I monitored
in a tuneless rendition of Tom Lehrers A Christmas Carol, his activities, distantly. Spencers writing kept appearing,
before slipping away and leaving the guests to the open bar advancing ever more extreme opinions in ever more obscure
and the mistletoe. journals. In 2008, he began popularizing the term alt-right. On
Among those guests was a figure from my past. I had not Facebook, he posted images of himself with John Derbyshire
seen Richard Spencer in more than 10 years. He was not yet a polymathic, often charming writer who was fired from
known as our generations most prominent white supremacist. National Review in 2012 for racismand Richard Lynn, an Eng-
I remembered him as my eighth-grade-chemistry lab partner lish psychologist who has argued that East Asians are slightly
and high-school classmate. We spotted each other and walked smarter than whites, who are in turn much smarter than blacks.
closer, circling uncertainly for a few seconds, before he spoke Spencer hosted Ron Paul, then not yet widely known to have
my name and confirmed that a wormhole had indeed opened published antiblack screeds in the 1980s and 90s, at his dis-
from late-1990s North Dallas. cussion club.
Spencer must have sensed my surprise (I would have In 2011, he moved from Washington to Whitefish, Montana,
sooner expected to see our gym teacher at a Washington maga- where his mother owns a vacation home and a commercial
zine party). He told me he had blossomed intellectually since building. (She is the heiress to cotton farms in Louisiana, and
high school. Then he asked me what I thought of Hitchenss his father is a respected Dallas ophthalmologist.) There he
fulminations against God. I had no interesting opinion on the edited and published a new online magazine, Alternative Right,
subject. But Spencer did. and soon took over the National Policy Institute. Founded in
Was Hitchenss critique of Christianity, he said, not as 2005 by William Regnery II, of the conservative Regnery pub-
wan and naive as Christianity itself? Christianity had bound lishing family, NPI is a white-identity think tank with little
together the civilizations of Europe, and now Hitchens wanted money and virtually no staff. During the next five years, Spen-
to replace it withwell, what exactly? American neoliberal cer merged its mission with his own. It remained essentially a
internationalism? Why should anyone care if Christianity was one-man operationthe Whitefish house owned by Spencers
irrational and illiberal, when rationality and liberalism had mother is listed in official filings as NPIs principal office, and
never been its purpose? Hitchens had missed the point. its 2015 IRS filing shows that Spencer drew just $13,275 in salary
Spencer wasnt exactly defending Christianity; he said that and was the only paid employee. Still, under Spencers direction,
he, like Hitchens, was an atheist. But he longed for something NPI put on two conferences and published two books that year.
as robust and binding as Christianity had once been in the Alternative Right showed signs of erudition. It was not the
West, before churches surrendered their power to folk-singing product of the same Spencer I had known in high school, whod
liberals and televangelists. managed to misquote Shakespeare (A poor player who struts
I think Spencer knew he had me at a loss, because he curled and frets his hour upon the stage, then heard no more) and mis-
out a smile and let his point hang in the air. I was flummoxed spell the name of a SportsCenter anchor (Craige Killborne) on
by his argument, a more thoughtful Nietzschean critique than his yearbook page. The magazines racism and sexism were ex-
I was prepared to take onand by the unnerving fact that the pressed with good grammar and a coherent view of the world.

42 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 SPENCER
That view, now well known as the platform of the alt-right, can
be summarized as white European cultural and racial suprem-

LONGED
acy, with a deep contempt for democracy. An active comment
section revealed the sites id: Many of the commenters profile

FOR SOMETHING
photos featured the double-rune insignia of the SS.
When Donald Trump began adopting alt-right themes
during his presidential campaign, Spencer threw him his sup-
port. On August 25, 2016, in a scripted campaign speech, Hill-
ary Clinton said that the Trump campaign didnt represent AS ROBUST
Republicanism as we have known it. Controlling his campaign,
she said, was an emerging racist ideology known as the alt- AND BINDING AS
CHRISTIANITY
right. With one major-party presidential nominee using his
nomenclature, and the other accused of supporting his ideas,

HAD ONCE BEEN

Spencer got famous, and he moved into an apartment in North-
ern Virginia. (He continues to live part-time in Whitefish.)

IN THE WEST.
A number of mortified St. Marks alumni conspired to speak
out against him. Eight from our class of 69, myself among
them, wrote an anti-Spencer statement on a crowdsourced
fund-raising website, supporting resettlement of refugees in
Dallasa cause we chose because we knew it would irritate
him. By December, after videographers from The Atlantic
filmed Spencer receiving Nazi salutes and saying Hail Trump!
Hail our people! Hail victory!, the school community had
kicked in more than $60,000. (The school itself denounced
the ideas espoused by Spencernow its most prominent alum-
nus since Owen Wilson and his brother Lukethough it didnt
name him outright.)
Spencer mocked us on his blog, saying that the Brooks
Brothers Brigade had turned on one of its own. He scoffed reporter, an Asian woman, stood in the corner and did not
at our having chosen refugeesnonwhite and non-Christian introduce herself, uneasy, perhaps, at the thought of exchang-
as the recipients of our largesse. We had reacted, he wrote, by ing pleasantries with a Spencer associate now that the cameras
deciding to commit civilizational suicide even harder than were off and she wasnt professionally required to do so.
before If this episode doesnt express the end stage of WASP Spencer walked over, carrying a freshly pressed espresso,
decline, I dont know what does. His fans concurred. I sup- and said hello. He dresses nattily and today wore a patterned
pose from a Darwinian point of view we have to accept that shirt, a wool vest, and a sport coat. He looked like the scion of
most Whites are no longer fit for survival, reads the posts a Montana banking family, dressed up and ready to film a com-
second-most-popular comment. We need a Western Purge, mercial in a log cabin, assuring local ranchers that their depos-
a Noahs Ark moment where the traitors came [sic] be thrown its would be safe with him. Only the Reich-evoking fascist-chic
to the niggers to be raped and murdered. (fashy) haircut would have been out of place.
Once the crew was gone, he and the young man Id met
HEN I A SKED SPENCER to meet me in Janu- outside (a minion, he called himself ) ate lunch with me at a
ary, before Trumps inauguration, he showed nearby Thai restaurant. The meal was interrupted once, by a
better manners than his fans. (He denies that young black woman who asked whether he was Richard Spen-
he advocates violence.) The front door of his cer, the famous racist. Yes?, Spencer said, cowering half-
apartment in Alexandria, just outside Wash- playfully. She declared that he doesnt look as mean in person
ington, is not clearly marked, and even though before walking off. (Because so many of his critics liken him
he had given me the address, I wouldnt have found it had a to a Nazi, Spencer often gets this sort of compliment, for the
bespectacled young man not intercepted me outside, while I simple courtesy of not mauling Jews or screaming in German
was rummaging around trash cans looking for a house number. in public.) Spencer asked me to leave his minions identity out
Can I help you? he asked. He had brown hair and a geeky affect. of the storyI have a normie [conventional] job, the min-
I wasnt sure how to reveal to a stranger that I had come to ion explained, and I dont want to get punished for thisbut
meet Richard Spencer. I am supposed to meet someone, I otherwise kept the conversation on the record.
said, so vaguely that I must have sounded like I was en route Spencer began by complimenting my reporting for this
to a drug deal or an orgy. magazine on the Islamic State. Your articles on ISIS have been
Do you have edgy political beliefs? he asked, looking at me popular on the alt-right, he told me.
askance. (Yet another bland code word: edgy, discussion club, I winced: Anti-Muslim bigots liked that I had described ISIS
policy institute, even alt-right itself.) as an Islamic movement, linked to traditions within Islam. Is
No, I said, but Im here to meet someone who does. He that because you hate Muslims?, I asked.
motioned me upstairs, to a newly renovated yuppie apartment No, he said. Because ISIS is an identity movement.
where a television news crew was striking its equipment. The Because they have ideas, and because you wrote about their

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 43
 the alt-right triumphs, were going to probably
throw you in jail. Well hold you guys accountable.
Other targets among the alumni community
included Kurt Eichenwald, class of 1979, a News-
week journalist who had written critically about
Trump and the alt-right during the 2016 campaign.
Eichenwald suffers from epilepsy, and in Decem-
ber, a Twitter user calling himself @jew_goldstein
tweeted a strobe-light GIF to him that triggered a
series of seizures, leading to temporary partial pa-
ralysis on his left side. Spencer blanked on Eichen-
walds name, and both he and the minion laughed
as they tried to recall it.
What is that guys name? The one whom we
almost killed?
No, no, the minion corrected him, with the pre-
cision of in-house counsel. We did not send that.
Spencer revised his statement. We collec-
tively almost killed him. Some alt-right shitlord
alt-right-speak for online activistsent him a
meme. Two months later, @jew_goldstein was re-
vealed as John Rivello, 29, of Maryland, and charged
with cyberstalking and aggravated assault with a
deadly weapon. According to the federal criminal
complaint, Rivello wrote, in private messages, I
hope this sends him into a seizure and Lets see
if he dies. Spencer retweeted an appeal to crowd-
fund Rivellos defense against lying #fakenews
Kurt Kikenwald. (Eichenwald is Episcopalian.)
Spencer worried about political correctness at our
alma mater today. What if theres some kid at St.
Marks who is an alt-right shitlord, who has an anony-
mous Twitter account, posting videos, following me,
retweeting me? he asked. Whats going to happen
to him if he gets discovered? He looked troubled.
A bookshelf in ideas. Also, they are a grassroots move- If you had been overtly racist, the way you are now, back
Spencers office. ment. Theyve built themselves up fast, when we were students, I told him, Im sure youd have been
He counts the from nothing. expelled or sent to the school psychologist.
German scholars
Friedrich Nietzsche I told him I was a leader of the Brooks He said I might be right.
and Carl Schmitt Brothers Brigade and had contributed to
both skeptics our classs effort to disown him. It was N D E C E M BE R , the hipster-Marxist magazine
of democracy
among his most hurtful, he admitted, to find himself Jacobin published an online essay, The Elite
important intellec- officially reviled by our schools com- Roots of Richard Spencers Racism, that sought
tual influences. munity. They should be proud to have to understand his white supremacy. He repre-
a graduate who is changing the world. sents a common and longstanding (if overlooked)
He said that singling him out among alumni, for nothing more phenomenon: the well-educated and financially
than political thoughtcrime, was unfair. comfortable bigot, the author, Michael Phillips,
He proposed other alumni who deserved condemnation. I wrote. His blend of racism and elitism represents only an ex-
met a St. Marks guy who had been a bundler [fund-raiser] for treme version of a worldview that has long prevailed among
George W. Bush, Spencer told me. Spencer said that hed sensed the affluent in Spencers hometown.
condescension from the man, and had chewed his tongue raw to Phillips knows Dallas, but he has Spencer exactly wrong.
keep from upbraiding him. You led to the deaths of tens of thou- Still, for purposes of comparison, its helpful to describe a
sands of Americans, and millions in Iraq! Who are you to talk? worldview that flourished when Spencer and I were growing
In his view, the Bush administration had manipulated the up there. Sometimes called good-ol-boy conservatism, it
country into war. Spreading democracy and freedom are, reached its apotheosis in the candidacy of Clayton Williams
Spencer said, false ideals, distracting Americans from what for governor in 1990. Williams, now 85, campaigned with
really mattersnamely, a consciousness of their identity as a cowboy hat seemingly stitched to his skull. An oil-and-gas
whites with a shared Christian heritage. mogul, he stood for backslapping redneck valueslimited gov-
Spencer fantasized about the reversal of fortune that might ernment, satisfaction with the social status quo of 1957 or so,
come if the fund-raisers enemies should gain more power. If and Texas pride. Williamss campaign tanked in part because

44 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 SPENCER SEES
he joked openly, in front of reporters, that rainy weather is like
rapesometimes you just have to relax and enjoy it. (How

AMERICAN
tender were our sensibilities then, that an election could turn
on such a quip.) Many good ol boys were racist. But they knew

VALUES
that it was distasteful to talk about race too much, and they
knew that the correct answer, when asked about it in public,
was to deny that it mattered or that it should matter. Williams
lost the election to Ann Richards but won the straw poll in my
sixth-grade class at St. Marks. AS SOMETHING
At lunch, Spencer and I tried to think back to the distant
land of 1990s Dallas, for memories of our shared education NOT TO RESTORE,
on race. Our class was mostly white, with a few Asians and
Hispanics and a lone black student. I was one of a very small BUT TO
REPLACE. HIS
number of students of mixed race (half-Asian, half-white, in
my case). Our school had hired multicultural facilitators to

HAIL TRUMP
lead workshops on prejudice, we recalled, so at some official
level we had been taught the racial dogma of 90s liberal-

SPEECH
ism. I wondered whether Spencer had reacted rebelliously,
becoming racist out of irritation at the clichs of the era. But
he remembered these sessions less clearly than I did and
seemed, if anything, less annoyed by their memory than I
was. (I had found the facilitators condescending.) DESCRIBES
Spencer was, however, also less sensitive to the actual rac-
ism common at St. Marks and other elite institutions in Dallas A DISEASED
COUNTRY.
back then. He could not recall in any detail the occasional prej-
udice, racial lampooning, or social segregation that students
of color remember vividly. In 11th grade, a history teacher
performed an outrageous Mickey Rooneyesque pantomime
of the Japanese, to teach us about Pearl Harbor. After a black
alumnus, the brother of our black classmate, was randomly
murdered while home from Morehouse College, the campus
did not convulse with mourning, as it surely would have for a
white student. Instead, the reaction was muted, as if the com-
munity was unsure what grief about a black student should
look like. I just dont remember that much from that period
of my life, Spencer told me while we ate.
Of the two of us, Spencer had been closer to John Lewis, It is not a play especially beloved in Texas bro culture, and
our only black classmate. According to Lewis, he and Spencer classmates who saw Spencer in that period report that he
had been friends. Now Lewis, a businessman in California, is took on a Wildean air, dressing foppishly and affecting accents.
estranged from St. Marks because of the schools slowness to (On Facebook last year, one of the card-carrying bros of our
ostracize Spencer from the alumni community. class called Spencer Homo Himmler, although he quickly
My upbringing did not really inform who I am, Spencer apologized for the derogatory use of homo. Spencer denies
said with a shrug. Then he reconsidered. I think in a lot of the stupid rumor, widely whispered among our classmates,
ways I reacted against Dallas. Its a class- and money-conscious that he is gay. He is married to a Russian Canadian woman,
placewhoever has the biggest car or the biggest house or the Nina Kouprianova, who lives with their toddler daughter in
biggest fake boobs, he told me. Theres no actual commu- Montana.) That Spencer may have experimented with his
nity or high culture or sense of greatness, outside of having a identity as a young man is hardly surprising or incriminating
McMansion. He emphasized culture in a way that evoked a he was, after all, still in his teens, and entitled to try
full-bodied, Germanic sense of Kultur. In fact, Spencer has on personae.
joked that he would like to be the Kulturminister of a white He lasted just one academic year at Colgate before trans-
ethno-state. He imagines himself having a heroic role in the ferring to the University of Virginia, where he majored in mu-
grand cycle of history. I want to live dangerously, he said. sic history and English. He developed intellectually after a
Most people aspire to mediocrity, and thats fine. Not every- swift kick in the cortex from Richard Wagner and, ultimately,
one can be controversial. Not everyone can be recognized by a Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher
random person in a restaurant. whose skepticism of democracy and egalitarianism later made
In the fall of 1997, he struck out from Dallas to find his him beloved by the Nazis. You could say I was red-pilled by
cultural fortunes at Colgate University, in upstate New York. Nietzsche, Spencer told me. To red-pill, in alt-right slang,
His time there produced even more profound amnesia, and is to enter a vertiginous spiral of awakening and reassessment.
he doesnt say much about it, except that he starred in a The term comes from The Matrix, in which Keanu Reevess
production of Oscar Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest. character discovers, after swallowing a red pill, that his

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 45
46 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 AT A TRUMP VICTORY PARTY ON
ELECTION NIGHT, SPENCER
WAS SPOTTED HOOTING
AND RUNNING ABOUT GIDDILY.
IN A SINGLE EVENING, HIS TIMELINE
SKIPPED A DECADE AHEAD.
T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 47
 who influenced me a great deal. It was there I
started questioning the fundamental nature of de-
mocracy, Spencer said. (Pippin doesnt remem-
ber him. I regard his rhetoric and activities as
loathsome and despicable, Pippin wrote to me. I
revere the founding principles of liberal democracy,
and want no association with the man.) At a party
during his year at Chicago, he confessed his politi-
cal leanings to the Marxist philosopher Gopal Bala-
krishnan, then a professor at the school. Spencer
recalls that Balakrishnan gave a professional diag-
nosis on the spot: Youre a fascist.

M E R I C A N S D I S M AY E D BY their
countrys direction have sought
exile and renewal in Europe many
times: Think of John Reeds migra-
tion to Bolshevik Russia in 1917, or
Ezra Pounds flight from Americas
botched civilization to Mussolinis Italy. In the
early 2000s, Europe far surpassed America in right-
wing innovation, and when Spencer arrived in Ger-
many in 2002, he landed on a continent pregnant
with multiple nationalist, anti-immigrant groups:
Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the National Front in
France, Jrg Haiders parties in Austria.
He spent parts of the next few years study-
ing German on the banks of the Chiemsee, a lake
southeast of Munich; working as a gofer at the Ba-
varian State Opera; and reading widely in German
literature and history. Among the German ideas he
adopted was a concept of race different from the
universe is counterfeit, his fellow A whiteboard one he and I had been taught in our multicultural workshops
humans are enslaved to false dreams, Spencer uses to in the 90s. In the modern era, American discussion of race
and he himself is destined to free them. plan his YouTube has limited itself, by convention, to a few canonical categories:
videos, which
The false dreams from which Spen- he records in black, white, Asian, American Indian, Hispanic. Race isnt
cer found himself freed were the dreams his apartment just color, Spencer told an audience in December. Color is,
of the good ol boy, who goes to church in a way, a minor aspect of race.
on Sunday and does things as his granddaddy did before him. For Spencer, race is more akin to the German Volksgeist, lit-
Spencer started off with Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Mor- erally the spirit of a people. Volksgeist is associated, histori-
als, a systematic dismantling of the moral and religious truths cally, with Johann Gottfried von Herder (17441803), and
of European civilization. Nietzsche saw Christianity as a slave Germans became enchanted with it during the 19th century.
religion, a consolation to the weak. Spencer says that the gen- Some would say the Second World War was the culmination
eral effect, an inversion of his moral universe, was shattering. of German devotion to their own Volksgeist. Herders followers
The influence of Nietzsche may explain why Spencers con- proposed that each people has an essence that distinguishes
servatism is not, in good-ol-boy fashion, merely an attempt it from others. Germans are not French; French are not
to revive a bygone way of life. Some people in the alt-right Zulus; Zulus are not Koreans. The idea was adopted by the
are kind of like, Women go back to the kitchen, gays go back black American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois (18681963), who
in the closetlike everything was great in the 50s. I dont traveled to Germany at the same age as Spencer and drank his
believe that at all. The concerns of conservative Christians philosophy of race from the same Teutonic fountains:
dont interest him. He doesnt mind gay marriage, and he fa-
vors legal access to abortionpartly to reduce the number of
blacks and Hispanics. Smart people are not using abortion as The history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but
of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores
birth control It is the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics
or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores
who use abortion as birth control, he said recently on AltRight. and overrides the central thought of all history. What, then,
coms YouTube channel. This can be something that can be a is a race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of
great boon for our people, our race. common blood and language, always of common history,
Spencer graduated from UVA in 2001, then proceeded to traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and
the University of Chicago for a masters degree in humanities. involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of
He said he studied there with the philosopher Robert Pippin, certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.

48 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 Spencer told me the Volksgeist he advocated was that of BVIOUSLY, GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIAL ISM
white Christendom, a group with indistinct geographical is not something that has any direct relationship
borders, but roughly including European peoples, from Ibe- with what Im doing right now, Spencer told
ria to the Caucasus, who were Christian as of a few hundred me. That was horseshit, but I let him continue.
years ago. I proposed that this understanding of white Euro- Nazis were violent, he said, and that is not
pean culture seemed arbitrary. It ignored the divisions that something that I would have anything to do with.
European identity movements found crucial. He suggested Ive never advocated that or ever glorified that. I am a dissident
that any concept of identity could be knocked down if over- intellectual. I am not in charge of the police force or the Army.
analyzed, and overanalysis would only lead to inaction. I Im not ordering the roundup of anyone and throwing them
could just sit here masturbating in my own filth, he said, prob- into camps.
ably rhetorically. There is the small matter of his aesthetic, starting with
The importance of identity creation for Spencer cannot be the famous fashy haircut. One might, with exceptional
overstated. It is why every black-on-white rape must be por- charity, attribute the haircut to a trollish desire to get his en-
trayed as the ravishing of all white womanhood, and every Syr- emies worked up. But hair aside, his appropriation of Nazi
ian orphan who moves into an American city as the general of tropes is relentless. In his notorious speech that ended in a
a colonizing army. roomful of fascist salutes, for instance, he referred to the
I asked whether I, as someone who is half-Chinese but had mainstream media as the Lgenpresse (lying press), a
a classical Western education, would fit within his group, and Nazi-era smear against anti-Hitler media, even if Spencer
he hedged, impishly. Im a generous guy, he told me. If flubbed the pronunciation.
you truly identify with our people, I would not have any prob- More to the point, Spencers ideas themselves are Nazi to
lem with that. But there were genetic deal breakers. A full- the core, and he knows it, even if many of his followers do not.
blooded African, no matter how wonderful he might beIm Hitler, too, viewed politics as a struggle and disdained those
not sure that would really work. who imagined it instead as cooperative. For his own race he en-
The other German forerunner Spencer claims is Carl visioned a special destiny, like that of an apex predator, expand-
Schmitt (18881985), who was, for a time, the court political ing its territory until it occupied the land nature intended for
philosopher of the Third Reich. Schmitts work has enjoyed a it. Here is Spencer, in that same Hail Trump speech, on the
renaissance recently, and even liberals have found it useful, in destiny of whites:
part as a worthy oppositional philosophy that has forced them
to improve their own. Spencer is hardly Schmitts heir. But his
To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a
reading of Schmitt is fair and reasonably nuanced. conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward For us, it
Theres this notion of parliament as an endless debate, is conquer or die. This is a unique burden for the white man,
Spencer explained over lunch. Liberalism accepts that dis- that our fate is entirely in our hands. And it is appropriate
agreement is part of the political process, and that people who because within us, within the very blood in our veins as chil-
disagree profoundly can live together. But eventually, Schmitt dren of the sun, lies the potential for greatness.
argued, the parliamentary debate does end, and someone That is the great struggle we are called to. We are not
gets his way while someone else does not. The states job is to meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace. We were
provide not the coffeehouse for the debate, but the threat of not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most
a beating to compel the loser to accept the result. Politics is despicable creatures to ever populate the planet. We were
meant to overcomeovercome all of it. Because that is natu-
inherently brutal, Spencer told me. Its nonconsensual by its
ral and normal for us. Because for us, as Europeans, it is only
very nature. The state is crystallized violence.
normal again when we are great again.
To this already dangerous political philosophy Schmitt
eventually added a further provocation. Given that debate,
procedure, and politics all end in the same place crystallized Thwarting the competition among races, Hitler proposed
violencewhat or whom should the violence serve? The in Mein Kampf, was a cavalcade of abstractions: justice, human
answer, he said, is some group of close affinity. And the groups rights, democracy, communism, capitalism. Spencer mocks
with the most full-bodied affinity, a common mythology and these same abstractions as shibboleths of the modern age.
experience, are races. The idea of the ethnic identity will Members of the mainstream right, he said in a December 2016
pervade and dominate all our public law, Schmitt wrote in speech, talk about global capitalism, and free markets, and
1933, and he was just getting started. Within a few years, he the Constitution, and vague Christian values of some sort. But
was defending the nearly complete annihilation of law and they never ask that question of Who are we? They never ask that
politics as the Fhrers prerogative as champion of the Ger- question of identity. His Hail Trump speech describes
man race. In times of emergency, Schmitt argued, the leader
can declare the law null (he called this a state of exception) the concepts that are now designated problematic and
and use force at will to serve the state. associated with whitenesspower, strength, beauty, agen-
The upshot of this philosophy is, in Spencers interpretation, cy, accomplishment. Whites do and other groups dont We
to devalue the homespun truths that have united Americas dont exploit other groups. We dont gain anything from their
political parties for decades. Good ol boys, neoconservatives, presence. They need us, and not the other way around.
and liberals all honor democracy, freedom, markets, human
rights, and various other abstractions. To Spencer, these are These are among the most orthodox Nazi statements ever
idols, and their twilight is upon us. uttered by an American public figure.

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 49
 PENCER WEAR S a permanent naughty grin, as They are also both young. Trumps supporters skew old, but
if he is getting away with something. In a sense, the alt-rights warriors are Spencers age (he is 39) or younger.
he is: There are vanishingly few true Nazis in this Millennials are rapidly untethering themselves from Ameri-
country, and few people believe everything Spen- can values that until recently have been described as bedrock.
cer believes. And yet he has become a beacon The political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa
to those resentful of the direction of American have noted that belief in the essential importance of living in
society and of their own lives. That grin is the grin of a man a democracy has dropped off dramatically among the young,
who cannot believe his luck at being a fascist just at fascisms and support for Army rule has increased to one in six Ameri-
moment of American ascent. cans. A generation ago it was one in 16.
The American right has had extreme fringes for some time, Perhaps some of this disregard for the cornerstones of mod-
operating on low radio frequencies and languishing in obscu- ern Western government can be written off as (very late) ado-
rity. Perhaps the best known of these was the John Birch Society, lescent posturing. Spencer himself is aware of the hipness gap
founded in 1958 as a dying wheeze of McCarthyism. But the that yawns between the alt-right and liberalism, to the formers
Birchers existed to vanquish communism. Individual members advantage. The young are suckers for rebellion, and Spencers
were racist, but the societys leaders tolerated blacks and Jews is a rebel movement. Some will age out of rebellion, but oth-
willing to rail against the Reds. (George Schuyler, a former offi- ers will, like malevolent Peter Pans, refuse to grow out of the
cial of the NAACP, was a member.) The Birchers were twisted fascism of their youth.
patriots, and in their patriotism they resemble mainstream con- Spencer expects many of his critics to fall in line once vic-
servatives (think Clayton Williams, but also George W. Bush) tory comes. People are herdlike, he told me. Theres a story
much more closely than they resemble Spencer. about a Bolshevik agitator who was always getting harassed
Spencer emerges from a darker tradition, one that sees and beaten up by a policeman in Moscow. Ten years later, the
American values as something not to restore, but to replace. Bolshevik was in power, and the same man came into his office
His Hail Trump speech, even more than Trumps American and literally clicked his heels: Onwards with the revolution, sir!
carnage inaugural address, described a diseased America, its
culture mired in filth and its cities rotted. He nodded to HE AMBITION IS EVIDENT but the path to
the Founding Fathers and the disapproval they would cast on victory unclear. Spencers revolutionaries seem,
modern Americabut only to note that their ideals clash with at present, to consist largely of anonymous
present-day liberalism, and not to suggest that their ideals are online activists. The alt-right has masterfully
his own. inflated itself by fielding zombie armies of
No census of the alt-right exists. The movement, such as Twitter accountsjust like ISIS doesand troll-
it is, may have come together and found public expression in ing journalists and others capable of amplifying
part because of the internet, where its followers can amass its collective voice. The closest connection between Spencer
and reinforce one anothers pathologies. But clearly a few of and the White House is Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser
its claims have acquired special salience, all at once. to President Trump. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Spen-
The world may be no more complicated now than it was in the cer called himself a mentor to Miller. He told me that the two
past, but exposure to more aspects of it has proved disorienting of them worked and socialized with each other as members
to many Americans. Far-off wars and economies determine, or of Duke Universitys conservative union, while Miller was an
seem to determine, the fates of more and more people. Govern- undergraduate and Spencer a graduate student in intellectual
ment has grown so complicated and abstract that people have history. (After receiving his masters from the University of
come to doubt its abstractions altogether, and swap them for the Chicago, Spencer studied for a doctorate at Duke, though he
comforting, visceral truths of power and identity. never earned his degree.) But Miller denies any close associa-
Meanwhile, religion has faded. Hitchens would have said tion between them, and he told The Washington Post that he
thats for the best. But at the Christmas party, Spencer was condemn[s] Spencers rancid ideology.
right about religions power. It exerted a binding force and As Spencer himself notes, Donald Trump is not a creature
sense of purpose on its followers, and in its absence, the alt- of the alt-right or, one suspects, of any other coherent politi-
right is delighted to supply values and idols all its own. cal philosophy. He is, Spencer has said, compromised by the
It is impossible to hear Spencer or Trump speak about the perversions that define this decadent society (so much for
filth and carnage of America without sensing that many Spencers ever getting a plum ambassadorship), and he doesnt
of their followers consider the whole American project dis- really mind blacks and Jews, when having them around suits
credited. Spencers is only one philosophy offering itself as an his purposes. I suspect that any high-ranking official in the
alternative. As we talked, I was frequently reminded of John Trump administration would be fired if discovered collabo-
Georgelas, the 33-year-old Dallasite who is now the Islamic rating with Richard Spencer. (Then again, Sebastian Gorka, a
States highest-ranking American. (I profiled Georgelas in the deputy assistant to Trump for national security, has allegedly
March 2017 issue of this magazine.) Both men are the only associated with a far-right Hungarian group known for its
sons of wealthy north-Dallas physicians. They both bloomed Nazi tiesGorka denies thisand he retains his office.) Some
late, intellectually and politically, and overcompensated by statements by Steve Bannon, Trumps chief strategist and the
immersing themselves in books and ideas with gusto un- former chief executive of his presidential campaign, harmo-
common among their bourgeois demographic. Both admired nize with Spencers core claims. In 2015, when discussing the
Ron Paul, and both saw their home country as a broken land alleged overrepresentation of Asians among executives in
and themselves as its savior. Silicon Valley, Bannon told a guest on the satellite-radio show

50 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 wanted to be the alt-rights William F. Buckley Jr.
an intellectual entrepreneur who patrols the ideas
behind the politics, swinging the nightstick when
someone from his movement gets out of line.
Buckley emerged, at an age younger than Spen-
cer is now, as a cultural icon, the founder and editor
of mid-20th-century Americas most unsubmissive
journal of ideas, National Review, and later the host
of its most highbrow television show, Firing Line.
Buckley had a flair for theater. He injected his ideas
into the public consciousness both openly and insid-
iously, by announcing them loudly, and by making
roguish and heretical asides in otherwise sleepy mo-
ments of debate. The poison (or antidote, depend-
ing on your view) entered the bloodstream with only
the slightest prick feltbut felt it was, and many a
viewer came to love and hate Buckley for the thrill
of intellectual disorientation. Spencer lacks this
suave touch, but he tries to work a lowbrow form of
the same magic, through the obnoxious, needling
harassment that he and his shitlords call trolling.
There is a value to shock, Spencer told me.
You can open someones mind with something
shocking: Ive never thought of that before! I cant
believe he actually said that! There is something
to be said for not just retreating into a bourgeois,
boring version of my ideas. Here is the kernel of
truth in Spencers justification of his Hail Trump
salutes as ironic, or performative. The salutes pro-
voked sputtering rage from right-thinking people,
and between sputters the enraged dropped their
intellectual guard. It is hard to be enraged and ana-
lytical all at once, and many chose rage. But rage
confers no defense against ideas. Take the term
ethno-state. I dont want to sound like Im bragging,
but ethno-state has now been used in mainstream
Detritus on Spencers Breitbart News Daily that a country is sources! (This article is one of them.) That term would never
floor, including more than an economy. Were a civic be used before. Theyre not necessarily original ideas to me,
a file folder labeled society. The obvious questionwhy but theyve never been brought to the mainstream in this way.
Loyalty and
Betrayal, a news- wouldnt Asians be a part of American
paper published by civic society?has an answer that Spen- N INAUGURATION DAY, Spencer gave an inter-
the Greek neo-Nazi cer is ready to provide. The guest on the view to an Australian television station near Frank-
party Golden Dawn,
and handwritten podcast, who did not dissent from Ban- lin Square in Washington, D.C., and was asked to
notes describing nons comment, was Donald Trump. explain his movements mascot, a homely cartoon
an encounter Before the election, Spencer wrote frog. Its Pepe, he said. Its become kind of a
with police on Twitter: Forget the polls. We have symb and then a masked assailant clocked him
a candidate for President whos de- on the ear, hard enough to send him reeling off camera. Spen-
mystifying racism and the financial power structure. No cers many, many haters shared the video, gloating, and even
matter what happens, he continued, I will be profoundly mainstream outlets glamorized the assault by distributing re-
grateful to Donald Trump for the rest of my life. At a Trump mixes of the footage. I do not recall seeing Buckley assaulted on
victory party in Washington on election night, Spencer was camera, although Im sure many viewers would have enjoyed
spotted hooting and running about giddily. He had hoped that the spectacle; Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal would gladly have
Trumps candidacy would be a small step toward the main- contended in a semifinal for the privilege of coldcocking him.
streaming of his ideas. In a single evening, his timeline skipped I went back to see Spencer again a few days later. He had
a decade ahead. The long-term goal, Spencer says, is the estab- upgraded his security. The nebbishy sentinel who had caught
lishment of a post-American white ethno-state, through a me out by the trash cans had been replaced by another man,
slow process of awakening ethnic pride and instituting govern- halfway between bodyguard and babysitter, who accompanied
ment policies that reflect a new white race consciousness. Spencer when he left his apartment. A new dead bolt secured
Spencer has been casing out a role for himself as a human the door, and a Bowie knife rested on a windowsill. There was
alarm clock in this process of awakening. He told me that he a pistol in the kitchen.

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 51
 I WENT BACK
Spencer was obviously right when he said he should not be
assaulted. But we both could taste the irony in the situation. If

TO SEE SPENCER
he hadnt caught himself, he might have started talking about
his human right not to be brutalized with impunity. Instead

A FEW DAYS
he recovered, and used the irony to his advantage. The fact
that they are excusing violence against Richard Spencer inher-
ently means that they believe that theres a state of exception,

AFTER HE where we can use violence, he said. I think theyre actually

kind of right.

GOT SLUGGED. War is politics by other means and politics is war by other
means, he said. We dont all want the same thing. And thats

HE HAD
why I think there is a kind of state of war going on.

UPGRADED
S ONE WHO knew Spencer when we were both
hapless, overprivileged adolescents, sharing a de-

HIS SECURITY.
sire to transcend our origins, what interests me the
most about him is his self-reinvention, the intellec-

HE INSISTED
tual costume changes (foppish actor, grad-school
blowhard, opera-director manqu, and now archi-
tect of a white utopian dream of world-historical consequence)

THAT WE ORDER spanning three decades. After all, it is said that one of the great
advantages of America is that its daughters and sons can escape

LUNCH RATHER the strictures of the world in which they were raised, be unlike
their forefathers. Spencer has certainly done that.

THAN GOING
Much about his most recent and significant transforma-
tion reminds me of a 1957 Norman Mailer essay, The White

OUT IN PUBLIC.
Negro, that tried to explain trends in white culture during an
age that was, in some ways, as disorienting as our own. Living in
the shadow of nuclear annihilation, and having freshly returned
from war, whites found their own culture anemic and soporific.
They craved dangerand they found it by imitating blacks, who
knew danger without craving it, and whose culture, language,
and daily life were smelling salts for their own. Mailer described
the sensation: No Negro can saunter down a street with any
real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk [He
knows] in the cells of his existence that life [is] war, nothing
but war. Spencer, too, is a pale imitator. He wanted danger, or
thought he did, and now he has it.
Spencer must have known that the life he was choosing
Spencer was hit twice, once under the left eye and once on would get him hated and taunted. But he seemed at most half-
the right ear. The eye sported a shiner, and the ear was crusted aware that it would get him slugged in the face, and completely
with blood. Spencer said his eardrum had ruptured. It kind of unaware that it might get him killed. Fifty years ago, George
feels like when youre flying in a plane and your ears pop, he Lincoln Rockwell, the urbane leader of the American Nazi
said. It basically feels like that all the time. He insisted that Party, was shot dead in the parking lot of a laundromat, just
we order our Thai food in this time. You saw that I got spotted seven miles from where Spencer lives now. There must be an
even the last time we were out, he said, referring to the black intellectual thrill in knowing that people might care enough
woman at lunch. I dont know how people will react now. to want to kill you. Spencer seemed unsure whether the thrill
Am I just going to be harassed for the rest of my life? Liv- would remain worth the risk.
ing in Whitefish is quite difficult, he said, due to protests. I It is difficult to conceive of a path to repentance for Spencer.
thought there would be a little bit of anonymity in Alexandria. There is enough in his philosophy that is challenging to the mod-
Now he could not walk around without fear. ern American condition, and enough about the modern Ameri-
He said he was going to change his haircutId remarked can condition that is challenging to itself, that he isnt likely to be
that it made him stand outbut insisted that fashion was the convinced of his error. His revolutionary movement is unlikely
reason. I think the fascist haircut has peaked. Aesthetically, to succeed. But it is, I fear, authentic and durable. The shame
I think it can definitely be improved on. Maybe Ill try a Tom of its indecency is felt only by those who share the country with
Cruise, from Mission: Impossible IV. Spencer, not by the man himself.
He sounded vulnerable, for the first time since hed said the
St. Marks campaign had wounded him. I have a right as a Graeme Wood is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and
citizen to walk the streets and not be attacked, and I have the the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the
right to be protected, he complained. Islamic State.

52 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 GRIPPING FASCINATING

A fascinating look The Romanovs

into the regions history, is epic history
the forces of tribalism, on the grandest scale....
and the global implications An excellent account.
of an Arab world in revolt. Anthony Beevor,
Charlie Rose Financial Times

[An] intelligent A slam-bang study

page-turner.... of Churchills wit and wile as
he navigates the Boer War
like [a] proto-James Bond.
USA Today
A New York Times and
Washington Post
Notable Book

A splendid book Absorbing....

that I recommend to Gets the synapses
anyone with an interest sparking.
in how science works
and in the power of
human imagination
and ability.
The Wall Street Journal

Also available in eBook

VINTAGE Read excerpts, author interviews, and more at VintageAnchor.com ANCHOR
54 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 26

MILES

ABOVE

EARTH By L A U R A P A R K E R

How Alan Eustace, a Google engineer on the edge of retirement, broke the world record for high-altitude jumping

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 55
 ON Anyone watching would have witnessed an odd sight:
Eustace was wearing a bulky white space suitthe
MAY8 ,
kind NASA astronauts wear. He looked like a free-
2013, falling Michelin Man.
Through his giant space helmet and oxygen mask,
ALAN
Eustace could see the ground stretched out for miles.
EUSTACE, But the view wasnt his main concern. He hadnt quite
worked out how to control the space suit, which, unlike
THEN
a typical skydiving suit, weighed about 265 pounds and
THE was pumped full of pressurized air. Eustace, an experi-
enced skydiver, knew how to shift his body to change
56-YEAR-OLD
direction or to stop himself from spinninga prob-
SENIOR lem that, if uncorrected, can lead to blackout, then
death. But when he started to rotateslowly at first,
VICE
then faster and fasterhis attempts to steady himself
PRESIDENT just made things worse. He felt like he was bouncing
around inside a concrete box.
OF
At 10,000 feet, Eustace pulled a cord to open his
KNOWLEDGE parachute. Nothing happened. Then he tried a backup
cord. That one didnt work either. Eustace knew
AT
better than to panic: Three safety divers had jumped
GOOGLE, with him to monitor his fall. Within seconds, one of
the divers reached across Eustace and yanked open
JUMPED
the main chute.
FROM All Eustace had to do now was depressurize his suit,
which would deflate it and allow him to steer himself
AN
toward the landing area. He reached for a dial on the
AIRPLANE side of the suit and turned it. Nothing happened. With
the suit still pressurized, Eustace couldnt extend his
18,000
arms overhead to grab the handles that controlled the
FEET chute. He began slowly drifting off course. Soon he lost
sight of the safety divers. He tried to radio for help, but
ABOVE
got no response. He now had a more pressing prob-
THE lem: As he approached the ground, he saw that he was
headed straight for a giant saguaro cactus. Unable to
DESERT
maneuver his chute, he leaned as far to the right as he
IN could and just managed to avoid the cactus, instead
landing headfirst in the sand.
COOLIDGE,
He craned his neck to look around. The suit was
ARIZONA. still pressurized, which meant that he didnt have
enough flexibility to take his helmet
off to breathe. He tried his radio
again. Still dead. He knew the safety div-
ers would have alerted rescuers that hed
gone off course. He just didnt know how far J. MARTIN HARRIS PHOTOGRAPHY (OPENING SPREAD);

off course hed gone. He calculated that he

had two hours of oxygen left in his tank. If
he sat still and didnt panic, he should have
enough to survive until the rescue team
found him. His other option was to try de-
pressurizing the suit again. But if that didnt
work, hed have wasted a significant amount
of oxygen in the effort. He decided to wait
until he had just 15 minutes of oxygen left. By
that point, he would be desperate enough to
DANIEL BLIGNAUT

try anything.
The sun beat down as Eustace lay by the
cactus, watching the meter on his oxygen tank.
Twelve minutes and what felt like an
eternity later, he heard the sound of an
 Gulfstreams fly at much higher speeds than
typical jump planes, so fast that experts wor-
ried anyone exiting midair would risk get-
ting sucked into the engine, or hitting the
tail of the plane, or getting burned to death
by the exhaust.
Eustace wasnt a jet pilot, or a professional
daredevil. He was an engineer from Florida
who had designed computer-processing
units for 15 years in Palo Alto before Larry
Page persuaded him to join his growing
company over breakfast one morning in
2002. Eustace hadnt been skydiving in 26
years, but the idea intrigued him: He wasnt
convinced that the skeptics were right. As an
engineer, he preferred to approach a prob-
lem from first principles. If it was impossible,
why? What was the trajectory of the exhaust?
Would the FAA grant approval to open the
door mid-flight, which would require cir-
cumventing the user manual?
Eustace spent the next few months try-
ing to answer these questions, in between
projects that demanded his more immedi-
ate attention. He eventually lined up a sky-
diver to try a jump out of a Cessna Caravan,
another high-speed aircraft. Luckily, the sky-
diver landed without incident. Whats more,
he filmed himself. When Eustace brought
Brin the footage, Brin seemed surprised
that he had followed up. But by this point,
Eustace was hookedand he was starting
to consider trying the jump himself. All hed
have to do was get reacquainted with the
equipment and do a couple of test jumps.
In August 2010, Eustace took a few days
off and went down to the suburbs of Los
Angeles, where he did six practice jumps
with an instructor, a professional stunt sky-
diver named Luigi Cani. The two hit it off
Cani was warm and friendly, and seemed up
for anything. He loved the Gulfstream idea.
approaching helicopter. Oh good, he thought, relaxing. Im A few months later, Eustace was back home in Mountain
nowhere near dead. View when his phone rang. It was Cani. He wanted to know
Which was fortunate, because this was only a practice round. whether Eustace had heard about a guy named Felix Baumgart-
What Eustace was gearing up for was something much more ner, who was after an even bigger challenge: He was trying to
dangerous: a jump from seven and a half times the altitude, the beat the high-altitude-skydiving record with a jump from the
highest ever attempted. A skydive from the edge of space. upper reaches of the stratosphere, more than 100,000 feet in
the air. Cani had found a sponsor to launch a competing effort,
H E W H O L E T H I N G began innocently enough. and wondered whether Eustace could advise him on the type
Eustace was sitting in his office at Googles head- of equipment hed need.
quarters in Mountain View, California, one day in late
T 2008 when his boss Sergey Brin dropped by. Brin knew
Eustace had skydived recreationally in the past, and
wanted to know whether he thought it would be possible for Above: Alan Eustace at home in Mountain View, April2017.
Opposite page: Eustaces jump from 18,000 feet
someone to jump out of a Gulfstream, a large, expensive pri- above Coolidge, Arizona, in May2013his first test
vate jet that Brin sometimes used. of the space suit in action. Opening spread: Eustace ascend-
Brin had already asked around, but almost everyone ing to the stratosphere by helium balloon, October 2014.
hed consulted Gulfstream pilots, military skydivers, even
the company that makes the jethad advised against it.

PHOTOGR APHS BY IAN ALLEN T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 57

 Eustace was delighted. He was sure Baumgartner was the first to come with a sound scientific support system, cour-
way aheadhe had backing from the energy-drink company tesy of Red Bulls team of professionals. The effort, amplified by
Red Bull, which had hired more than three dozen team mem- Baumgartners high-octane personal life, attracted a lot of press.
bers with backgrounds in NASA, the Air Force, and the aero- Eustace was an unlikely competitor. The son of an aero-
space industrybut he liked Cani, and wanted to see him space engineer for Martin Marietta (a forerunner of Lockheed
create some healthy competition. He agreed to help in any way Martin), Eustace had grown up loving planes, but his first time
he could. But before Canis effort could kick off, his funding jumping out of one18 years old, dragged along by his best
fell through. friendhe felt less exhilaration than ambivalence. The equip-
Eustace considered this news. He led a quiet, comfortable ment was primitive coveralls, thick boots, military-grade
life. He wasnt after publicity or adrenaline. But this was the parachutesand Eustace landed hard. The experience was a
engineering challenge of a lifetime. Forget the Gulfstream. He blur. He didnt know whether hed done it right, and he cer-
could attempt the stratosphere jump himself, and fund it with tainly didnt plan to do it again.
his own savings. He thought for a few months and called Cani Then the instructor handed him his evaluation. His friends
to ask for his blessing. Cani laughed, amused. Go for it, he said. jump was terrible, but the instructor had deemed Eustaces per-
fect. So when his friend wanted to go back a week later, Eustace
H E A T M O S P H E R E I S D I V I D E D into went along. He enjoyed it much more the second time: He was
five layers. The higher you go, the thinner the air, less nervous, and could actually remember what he had done.
until eventually you hit outer space. The layer closest He went again, and again, and after his 10th jump, he invested in
T to Earth, the troposphere, is where weather occurs.
The next layer, between 33,000 and 160,000 feet
a higher-performance parachute. Then he mastered a stand-up
landing, instead of a drop-and-roll. He learned to dive, swoop,
above sea level, is the stratosphere. It marks the beginning somersault, slow down, and speed up, until skydiving became
of whats known as near spacethe threshold between the less like falling than like flying.
planet we experience on the ground and the mysteries of the Eustace began skydiving as often as he could manage be-
universe beyond. tween classes at the University of Central Florida, where he ma-
Prior to the onset of the space race in the late 1950s, much jored in computer science and went on to get his doctorate. But
of the scientific study into high altitudes was focused on the as his career took off, Eustace invested less and less time in the
stratosphere. Starting in the 1930s, sci- sport. Eventually, he sold his equipment.
entists used high-altitude balloons to Skydiving from the stratosphere
gather meteorological data and docu- seemed like a drastic way to get back into
ment various changes in the upper atmo- practice. But the more he thought about
sphere. Then, in 1960, a United States it, the harder it was for him to imagine
Air Force captain named Joseph Kittinger someone else doing it. His day job
rose 102,800 feet in a gondola suspended overseeing Googles engineerswas all
from a helium balloonand jumped. Kit- THE about building technology to solve prob-
tinger was part of Project Excelsior, a pre- lems and move people forward. Breaking
space-age military operation designed to TEST the record would be a personal challenge,
study the effects of high-altitude bailouts. DUMMY but more important, it would be a chance
An earlier attempt, from 76,400 feet, had to push the boundaries of human experi-
almost killed him: His equipment had SPUN ence. First, hed need a suit.
malfunctioned and hed lost conscious- W I L D LY
ness; he was saved only by his automatic HE LIST OF THINGS
emergency parachute. His next jump,
ON that can go wrong when para-
from 74,700 feet, had gone better. This HER chuting from extreme heights is
onehis thirdset a high-altitude-
skydiving record that would remain in
WAY T nearly endless. The stratosphere
is cold, for onethe tempera-
place for more than 50 years. DOWN. ture can reach more than 100 degrees
NASA would soon send a man into orbit, below zero. The air is also about 1,000
ONE
and ambitions would turn to the moon. times thinner than at sea level, which
The expansion of the space program TIME, means that without a pressurized suit,
coincided with a series of catastrophic bodily fluids start to boil, creating gas
HER
balloon accidents, and exploration into bubbles that lead to mass swelling.
the stratosphere was largely abandoned. ARMS The environment is so hostile that
That is, until 2010, when Baum- high-altitude jumpers have to bring their
AND
gartner announced that he was going own. For his record-breaking jump, Kit-
after Kittingers record, with the backing LEGS tinger wore a partial-pressure suita
of none other than Kittinger himself FLEW close-fitting garment with a network of
plus a hefty sponsorship from Red Bull. thin inflatable tubes that squeeze the
Plenty of people had contacted Kittinger OFF. body to make up for the decrease in
over the years, wanting him to help them atmospheric pressureon top of four
break the record, but Baumgartner was layers of clothing for warmth. On the way

58 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 SKYWARD
AMBITIONS 1
A brief chronicle of
high-altitude jumps 2

1 . A L A N E U S TAC E
(2014) 135,890 feet

2. FELIX
BAUMGARTNER
(2012) 127,852 feet
Baumgartner had to overcome
claustrophobia to put on 3
Eustace (center) skydiving with friends in 1981, a pressurized suit and ride a
while getting his doctorate in computer science at the small gondola 24 miles into
University of Central Florida the sky. His record-breaking
jump also made him the
first person to free-fall faster 4
than the speed of sound.
up, which took about an hour and a half, he rode in an open gon-
dola that contained an oxygen supply, a communications sys- 3. JOSEPH
tem, altimeters, and the power source for his electrically heated KITTINGER 4
gloveseverything he needed to survive prolonged exposure (1960) 102,800 feet
to the altitude. Kittinger, a U.S. Air Force
But gondolas present their own risks. In 1962, a Soviet air- captain, made three strato-
force colonel named Pyotr Dolgov hit his head on the side of spheric jumps from an
his gondola when he jumped from almost 94,000 feet, crack- open gondola. The final
ing the visor of his helmet and accidentally depressurizing his one set a record that would
suit. He died before he hit the ground. A few years later, an stand for 52years.
amateur skydiver from New Jersey named Nick Piantanida
was unable to switch from the oxygen supply in the gondola to 4. PYOTR DOLGOV
the one attached to his suit when he reached his intended jump AND YEVGENI
height of 123,500 feet, and had to abort the trip. (An unknown ANDREYEV 5
equipment malfunction on his next attempt would be fatal.) (1962) 93,970 and 83,523 feet,
Gondolas are also heavy. Baumgartners team was using one respectively
that weighed almost 3,000 pounds. Ditching the gondola not
These two Soviet air-force
only would be safer, Eustace figured, but would also allow him parachutists rode a gondola
to start his jump from a greater height. into the stratosphere together.
But nobody had ever attempted a stratosphere jump without Andreyev survived the
one. If Eustace was going to rise 26 miles into the air attached to jump, but Dolgov, who exited
nothing but a helium balloon, hed need a suit that would pro- second, was killed when his
vide the same environmental protectionsoxygen, instruments, suit depressurized. They were
climate controlthat a gondola would. In short, he would need both named Heroes of the
a space suit. The problem was that no one had designed or flown Soviet Union in 1962.
a new space suit in about 40 years. NASA has been using essen-
tially the same version of the Apollo suit since the 1970sand 5. NICK
Eustace couldnt just borrow one of those. He needed a suit that P I A NTA N I DA
could survive a slow ascent into the stratosphere and a fast de- (1966) 57,600 feet
scent, with swift changes in temperature and velocity, and that
Midway up to an intended jump
could also support the weight of a giant parachute.
height of more than 100,000
Eustace began to dedicate his nights and weekends to feet, Piantanidas equipment
thinking about the design. He was still working 80-hour weeks malfunctioned. Ground control
at Google, but he had a lot of vacation time saved up, and his released his gondolas emer-
bossesBrin and Pagewere encouraging. A saying inside gency parachute, but by the
the company was that employees should have a healthy dis-
TOM PLONKA

time he reached the ground,

respect for the impossible. he had lost consciousness from
Eustaces wife, Kathy Kwan, was less enthusiastic. The oxygen deprivation. He died
couple had two daughters, 11 and 16, and she knew the history four months later.
 of the sport. Eustace was so engrossed chamber to determine how it would hold
in the technological challenges that the up in free fall. They hung Eustace from
possibility of death didnt really enter AS a nylon strap and spun him around so
his mindany risk, he thought, could be he could practice operating his equip-
EUSTACE
mitigated by enough advance prepara- ment in midair. Next came a series of
tion. The couple made an uneasy truce: DRIFTED thermal tests, to ensure the suit could
Kwan would support Eustaces project, handle subzero temperatures. Eustace
HIGHER,
and he would avoid bringing it upno was suspended inside a sealed, liquid-
stratosphere talk at the dinner table. WHOLE nitrogen-cooled chamber for five hours
(Kwan politely declined to speak with at a time. Small tubes in the suit were
STATES
me, saying she preferred not to dredge supposed to circulate hot water around
up those particular memories.) APPEARED his limbs and chest to keep him warm.
In October 2011, a contact in the AND But the tubes ended at the wrists, mean-
aviation industry connected Eustace ing that, even with a pair of electrically
with a married couple named Taber RECEDED. heated mountain- climbing gloves,
Mac Callum and Jane Poynter, co- HE Eustaces hands eventually began to
founders of Paragon Space Develop- freeze. The team gave him a pair of oven
ment. MacCallum and Poynter had been TURNED mitts to wear on top of the gloves.
two of the eight crew members on the HIS In October 2012, a year into Eustaces
famous Biosphere 2 project of the early work with Paragon, Felix Baumgart-
90s, living in a sealed artificial world HEAD ner succeeded in breaking Kittingers
for two years to determine whether hu- TO 1960 record, free-falling to Earth from a
mans could survive in closed ecosystems height of 127,852 feet. Reporters from all
beyond Earth. They had started Paragon LOOK over the world came to witness the event,
to create biological and chemical life- FOR and a live webcast of the jump racked up
support systems for hazardous environ- more than 8 million views. Rather than
ments, like the deep sea and outer space. THE deter Eustace, Baumgartners jump gave
The couple was used to getting calls MOON. him a test case. Shortly after exiting the
from people asking all kinds of crazy capsule, Baumgartner entered a danger-
things: Can you fly me into space? Would ous spin. He was able to right himself in
it be possible to strap me to a rocket? But time, but Eustace would be less agile in
this was the first time theyd heard any- his suit and knew that he would need to
one propose a stratosphere jump with- figure out how to avoid the same problem.
out a capsule. MacCallum was intrigued Eustace and his team began doing
enough to set up a call with Eustace, and dummy drops from airplanes in the Ari-
the two spoke for more than an hour. A week later, Eustace zona desert. The test dummy, known as IDA (for Iron Dummy
flew down to Paragons headquarters, in Tucson, Arizona, and Assemble), was made from welded high-pressure pipes, the
spent a day presenting his idea. kind used in industrial plumbing. She was dropped from vari-
MacCallum and Poynter soon agreed to lead Eustaces ous heights, equipped with a parachute that opened at a preset
engineering team. They gathered the companys leading engi- altitude. She spun wildly on her way down. One time, her arms
neers, mechanics, and flight operators to work on the design, and legs flew off.
and commissioned ILC Doverthe same manufacturing com- The team tried to fix the problem by introducing a drogue
pany that makes NASAs suitsto build a prototype. a round parachute about six feet across that is supposed to add
Eustace soon began making regular trips to Tucson for stability. The Coolidge jump, in May 2013, was Eustaces first
testing. The team put the suit in a wind tunnel and a vacuum chance to test the equipment himself. While nearly everything
went wrong, the biggest problem remained spin. Eustace
began spinning almost immediately after he left the plane,
even with the drogue, and the suit was too rigid to allow him
to correct himself midair the way he would during a skydive
from a lower altitude.
After the Coolidge jump, the team decided to raise the attach-
ment point of the drogue, moving it from the seat of the suit to

A member of Paragons engineering team testing how the

VOLKER KERN

suit would respond to changes in air pressure

60 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 Balloon equipment module:
Connects the balloon to the jumper.
The module fires a small explosive
to detach the jumper for descent.

Depressuriza-
tion valve: The
Instrument jumper pulls the
panel: safety loop and
Displays turns the valve
oxygen-tank to depressurize
levels, suit the suit, making
pressure, it easier to steer
and altitude. in preparation
for landing.

Equipment-module
chest pack:
Contains two Parachute
oxygen tanks, radios, handles:
monitoring devices, Attached to cords
and a thermal unit to that open the
heat the water that main and reserve
circulates through parachutes.
the suit to keep the
jumper warm.

Mountaineering boots:
A RT/ P H OTO G R A P H Y C R E D I T

Designed for expeditions on

SUITED Mount Everest, climbing boots
FOR worn under the space suit
THE protect from the extreme cold
and can bear a load of more
STR ATO S PH E R E than 400 pounds on landing.
 The team strapped Eustace to a
massive helium balloon 525 feet in
diameter when fully inflated, roughly
the size of a football stadiumand un-
tethered it from the launchpad. Just like
that, Eustace was on his way. He felt
relaxed, almost drowsy, as the balloon
rose above the airport. He worried for
a moment that he might fall asleep and
miss the jump.
As Eustace drifted higher, he began
to make out landmarks: New Mexicos
White Sands, the Rocky Mountains. Crop
circles became tiny specks. Whole states
appeared and receded. At 70,000 feet,
the sky darkened. Delicate cloud forma-
the back of the neck. That would make tions appeared below him. Eustace felt like he was floating
Eustace fall at a slight angle, and there- above a lace doily. At 80,000 feet, the curvature of Earth
fore not spin. To keep his arms from get- became visible. He turned his head to look for the moon.
ting tangled up in the strings when the Of course, he was also comparing his flight path to the
chute deployed, the engineers added a projections, keeping an eye on the time and the stratospheric
boom that would extend when the drogue winds that were expected to kick in and push him east, and
opened and keep it at a safe distance from Left: Inflat- doing a mental rehearsal of the emergency procedures. At
the suit. They called the system SAEBER. ing the helium one point, Eustace stopped climbing fast enough, so ground
balloon that
When the team tested the system would carry control radioed him to let him know that it was releasing two
on IDA from 120,000 feet, her spinning Eustace to the 30-pound ballast weights. Each ballast had its own parachute,
slowed from 400 rpm to 22 rpm, a gen- stratosphere. and he watched with interest as they fell back to Earth.
tle pirouette. Eustace did more practice Right: Eustace After two hours and seven minutes, Eustace reached
starting
jumps, learning to stick out his elbows his ascent.
135,890 feet. This was float altitude: The balloon had expanded
to correct himself in midair. They were Below: Eustace as far as it could, so he would not rise farther. Ground control
finally ready. in his AirCam. would now detach him by remote control. The countdown
began. On zero, Eustace felt the balloon snap and drift off.
USTACE WOKE UP For a single moment, he felt like he was hovering in midair. He
well before dawn on Friday, did a backflip. Then he did another.
October 24, 2014, in a tin shed Then SAEBER kicked in, launching the drogue and pushing
E on an unused strip of land next
to the airport in Roswell, New
Eustace into a downward position, facing Earth. The strato-
sphere was quiet as Eustace began free-falling, but soon he
Mexicoa site that had been chosen for
its open space and relatively few cacti.
The weather was perfect.
He spent two hours sitting in a
vinyl recliner behind the shed breathing
pure oxygen, to prevent decompression
sickness. He drank water and Gatorade.
Occasionally he stood and did some
stretches to get nitrogen out of his tissues.
Then he pulled on a diaperit would be a
long ride upand was helped into his suit
by four team members. They attached
two GoPros to his chest and wheeled him
out to the launchpad on a dolly.
J. MARTIN HARRIS PHOTOGRAPHY

Kwan had chosen to stay home. The

girls had school that dayEustace and
Kwan had decided to keep them on their
normal schedulebut had been granted
permission to bring their phones to
class so they could get updates from the
launch site. The Paragon team and a
single reporter from The New York Times
would be the only onlookers.

62 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
could hear the rush of air inside his hel- roof, so everyone on board can have a
met. He passed 822 miles an hour, break- 360-degree view of space. The capsule
ing the speed of sound. At about 8,300 THE has a small bathroom, Wi-Fi, and a bar. It
feet above the groundafter four min- will be a five-hour flight in total: one and
utes and 27 seconds of free fallEustace STRATOSPHERE a half hours up, then a couple of hours
deployed his main parachute. Nine and WAS floating at about 100,000 feet before the
a half minutes later, he landed with a descent. Eventually, World View hopes
smile on his face. His team rushed over, QUIET to hold wine tastings and photography
barely able to contain the whoops and AS classes in the stratosphere. The company
yeahs. The record was his. is targeting late 2018 for its first flight.
The Times reporters story would not EUSTACE Eustace isnt planning to gohe feels
run until later that day, and Eustaces BEGAN it would be anticlimactic. He had hoped
reception was decidedly more muted than to venture out in his space suit again, but
Baumgartners. After he was freed from FREE-FALLING, ultimately decided that another jump
the suit, he helped clean up the landing BUT would put too much strain on his family.
site, check the GoPro footage, and wrap So he takes every other chance he gets to
up the parachute. That night, the whole
SOON launch himself skyward.
team went to a Mexican restaurant in Ros- HE A few years after he started working
well. Eustace was on his third margarita as an engineer, Eustace bought a bright-
COULD
when he got a text from his sister, who was yellow Lockwood AirCam, a small two-
at a bar in Florida and, by some cosmic HEAR seater with an open cockpit. He took
coincidence, had bumped into none other me to see it one blustery afternoon in
THE
than Joseph Kittinger. Recognizing him, December, in a private hangar at the
she went up to him and said, Hey, did RUSH San Carlos Airport. We drove there from
you know that my brother just broke your Eustaces house in his Tesla, to which he
OF
record? Kittinger congratulated Eustace had recently upgraded, at Kwans urging,
by phone the next day and invited him to AIR from a 2002 Honda Accord.
have a beer sometime. Baumgartner, too, I had confessed earlier that I was ter-
INSIDE
released a statement congratulating him. rified of heights. Just dont scream too
The next Monday, Eustace was back HIS loudly in my ear when were up there,
behind his desk at Google. H E L M E T. he joked as we pulled up to the hangar.
That could really make us crash.
A S T D E C E M B E R , We geared up: puffy pants and jack-
Eustaces suit was put on display ets and heavy helmets. Eustace helped
at the Smithsonians National strap me into the back seat, then jumped
L Air and Space Museum in Chan-
tilly, Virginia. In the two and a
in the front. After a few radio calls to
flight control, we pointed down the run-
half years since the jump, Eustace has way and took off. The plane lived up to
given countless talks about the suitat its taglineslow and lowand at first,
NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SpaceX. But most peo- it was almost like we were floating in a balloon. But as we got
ple still dont know that Eustace broke Baumgartners record. higher, flying over the tops of office buildings, the wind picked
If someone says, Hey, this is the guy who holds the record for up. Although I was wearing gloves, my hands started getting
the highest-altitude jump, he told me, people will usually numb. I thought about putting them in my pockets, but didnt
just turn to me and ask, Oh, are you Felix? want to let go of the sides of the plane, which I was gripping
He retired from Google a few months after the jump to with all my strength. We rose higher and higher and banked
focus on his own projectsincluding consulting for a space- right over the San Francisco Bay. The water glittered below us,
tourism company called World View, which MacCallum and the bridge stretching across the horizon.
Poynter helped form while Eustace was working on his jump. After about 20 minutes, I heard Eustaces voice in my ear:
Ventures including SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have been Do you want to take control? There was a small control stick
working on ways to send civilians into space on rockets. World in front of me, which Eustace had shown me how to use before
View is building an eight-person spacecraft that will float up we took offa slight pull to go higher, a push sideways to turn.
into the stratosphere using a helium balloon, then detach and Still holding on to the side of the plane with one hand, I used
float back down with the help of a steerable parachute, like my other to tilt the stick slightly to the right. The plane tilted to
the one Eustace used. The trip will be significantly cheaper the right. Oh!, I said, in genuine surprise, forgetting my fear
than going into space$75,000 a ticket compared with about for a moment. Im flying!
$250,000 for a ride with Virgin Galacticwhich, if not quite Eustace just laughed. Go higher! he said.
democratizing the experience, will at least give more people
an opportunity for perspective-altering views. Laura Parker has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair,
Inside World Views facility in Tucson sits a full-size replica The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. She is a co-author of
of the Voyager capsule. It has four big windows and a bubble Power Play: How Video Games Can Save the World.

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 63
 She lived with my family for 56 years.
She raised me and my siblings,
and cooked and cleaned from dawn to
darkalways without pay.
I was 11, a typical American kid, before
I realized she was my familys slave.

Lolas Story
BY A L E X T I Z ON

64 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 65
 The ashes filled
a black plastic box
about the
size of a toaster.
A
It weighed three and a half pounds. T BAGGAGE CLAIM
I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed in Manila, I unzipped my suit-
it in my suitcase this past July for the case to make sure Lolas ashes
trans pacific flight to Manila. From were still there. Outside, I inhaled
there I would travel by car to a rural the familiar smell: a thick blend of
village. When I arrived, I would hand exhaust and waste, of ocean and sweet
over all that was left of the woman who fruit and sweat.
had spent 56 years as a slave in my fam- Early the next morning I found a
ilys household. driver, an affable middle-aged man
Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. who went by the nickname Doods,
We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, and we hit the road in his truck, weav-
with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes ing through traffic. The scene always
that I can still see looking into minemy stunned me. The sheer number of cars
first memory. She was 18 years old when and motorcycles and jeepneys. The peo-
my grandfather gave her to my mother ple weaving between them and moving
as a gift, and when my family moved to on the sidewalks in great brown rivers.
the United States, we brought her with The street vendors in bare feet trotting
us. No other word but slave encompassed alongside cars, hawking cigarettes and
the life she lived. Her days began before cough drops and sacks of boiled peanuts.
everyone else woke and ended after we The child beggars pressing their faces
went to bed. She prepared three meals against the windows.
a day, cleaned the house, waited on my
parents, and took care of my four siblings
and me. My parents never paid her, and
they scolded her constantly. She wasnt
kept in leg irons, but she might as well
I had a family, a career, a house
have been. So many nights, on my way in the suburbsthe American dream.
to the bathroom, Id spot her sleeping in And then I had a slave.
a corner, slumped against a mound of
laundry, her fingers clutching a garment
she was in the middle of folding.
To our American neighbors, we Doods and I were headed to the
were model immigrants, a poster fam- place where Lolas story began, up
ily. They told us so. My father had a north in the central plains: Tarlac prov-
law degree, my mother was on her way ince. Rice country. The home of a cigar-
to becoming a doctor, and my siblings chomping army lieutenant named
and I got good grades and always said Tomas Asuncion, my grandfather. The
please and thank you. We never family stories paint Lieutenant Tom
talked about Lola. Our secret went to as a formidable man given to eccen-
the core of who we were and, at least for tricity and dark moods, who had lots
us kids, who we wanted to be. of land but little money and kept mis-
After my mother died of leukemia, tresses in separate houses on his prop-
in 1999, Lola came to live with me in a erty. His wife died giving birth to their
small town north of Seattle. I had a fam- only child, my mother. She was raised
ily, a career, a house in the suburbsthe by a series of utusans, or people who
American dream. And then I had a slave. take commands.

66 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
Lola Pulido (shown Slavery has a long history on the
here at age 18) came islands. Before the Spanish came,
from a poor family in a islanders enslaved other islanders, usu-
rural part of the
Philippines. The ally war captives, criminals, or debtors.
authors grandfather Slaves came in different varieties, from
(bottom left) gave her warriors who could earn their free-
to his daughter as a gift.
dom through valor to household ser-
The site of her
childhood home is vants who were regarded as property
shown below. and could be bought and sold or traded.
High-status slaves could own low-status
slaves, and the low could own the low-
liest. Some chose to enter servitude
simply to survive: In exchange for their
labor, they might be given food, shelter,
and protection.
When the Spanish arrived, in the
1500s, they enslaved islanders and later
brought African and Indian slaves. The
Spanish Crown eventually began phas-
ing out slavery at home and in its colo-
nies, but parts of the Philippines were
so far-flung that authorities couldnt
keep a close eye. Traditions persisted
under different guises, even after the
U.S. took control of the islands in 1898.
Today even the poor can have utusans
or katulongs (helpers) or kasambahays
(domestics), as long as there are peo-
ple even poorer. The pool is deep.
Lieutenant Tom had as many as
three families of utusans living on his
property. In the spring of 1943, with
the islands under Japanese occupation,
he brought home a girl from a village
down the road. She was a cousin from
a marginal side of the family, rice farm-
ers. The lieutenant was shrewdhe saw
that this girl was penniless, unschooled,
and likely to be malleable. Her par-
ents wanted her to marry a pig farmer
twice her age, and she was desperately
unhappy but had nowhere to go. Tom
approached her with an offer: She could
have food and shelter if she would com-
mit to taking care of his daughter, who
had just turned 12.
Lola agreed, not grasping that the
deal was for life.
She is my gift to you, Lieutenant
Tom told my mother.
I dont want her, my mother said,
knowing she had no choice.
Lieutenant Tom went off to fight the
Japanese, leaving Mom behind with Lola
in his creaky house in the provinces. Lola
fed, groomed, and dressed my mother.
When they walked to the market, Lola
held an umbrella to shield her from the
sun. At night, when Lolas other tasks
were donefeeding the dogs, sweeping

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 67
the floors, folding the laundry that she had grown up dreaming of, where every-
had washed by hand in the Camiling thing they hoped for could come true.
Rivershe sat at the edge of my moth- Dad was allowed to bring his family
ers bed and fanned her to sleep. and one domestic. Figuring they would
One day during the war Lieutenant both have to work, my parents needed
Tom came home and caught my mother Lola to care for the kids and the house.
in a liesomething to do with a boy she My mother informed Lola, and to her
wasnt supposed to talk to. Tom, furious, great irritation, Lola didnt immediately
ordered her to stand at the table. Mom acquiesce. Years later Lola told me she
cowered with Lola in a corner. Then, in a was terrified. It was too far, she said.
quivering voice, she told her father that Maybe your Mom and Dad wont let me
Lola would take her punishment. Lola go home.
looked at Mom pleadingly, then with- In the end what convinced Lola was
out a word walked to the dining table my fathers promise that things would
and held on to the edge. Tom raised the be different in America. He told her that
belt and delivered 12 lashes, punctuat- as soon as he and Mom got on their feet,
ing each one with a word. You. Do. Not. theyd give her an allowance. Lola
Lie. To. Me. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. Lola could send money to her parents, to all
made no sound. her relations in the village. Her parents
My mother, in recounting this story lived in a hut with a dirt floor. Lola could
late in her life, delighted in the outra- build them a concrete house, could Lola at age 27 with Arthur, the authors
geousness of it, her tone seeming to change their lives forever. Imagine. older brother, before coming to the U.S.
say, Can you believe I did that? When We landed in Los Angeles on May 12,
I brought it up with Lola, she asked 1964, all our belongings in cardboard Pwede ba? she said to my parents. Is it
to hear Moms version. She listened boxes tied with rope. Lola had been possible? Mom let out a sigh. How could
intently, eyes lowered, and afterward with my mother for 21 years by then. In you even ask?, Dad responded in Taga-
she looked at me with sadness and said many ways she was more of a parent to log. You see how hard up we are. Dont
simply, Yes. It was like that. me than either my mother or my father. you have any shame?
Seven years later, in 1950, Mom mar- Hers was the first face I saw in the morn- My parents had borrowed money for
ried my father and moved to Manila, ing and the last one I saw at night. As a the move to the U.S., and then borrowed
bringing Lola along. Lieutenant Tom baby, I uttered Lolas name (which I more in order to stay. My father was
had long been haunted by demons, first pronounced Oh-ah) long before transferred from the consulate general in
and in 1951 he silenced them with I learned to say Mom or Dad. As a L.A. to the Philippine consulate in Seattle.
a .32- caliber slug to his temple. Mom toddler, I refused to go to sleep unless He was paid $5,600 a year. He took a sec-
almost never talked about it. She had Lola was holding me, or at least nearby. ond job cleaning trailers, and a third as a
his temperamentmoody, imperial, I was 4 years old when we arrived in debt collector. Mom got work as a tech-
secretly fragileand she took his les- the U.S.too young to question Lolas nician in a couple of medical labs. We
sons to heart, among them the proper place in our family. But as my siblings barely saw them, and when we did they
way to be a provincial matrona: You and I grew up on this other shore, we were often exhausted and snappish.
must embrace your role as the giver came to see the world differently. The Mom would come home and upbraid
of commands. You must keep those leap across the ocean brought about a Lola for not cleaning the house well
beneath you in their place at all times, leap in consciousness that Mom and enough or for forgetting to bring in the
for their own good and the good of the Dad couldnt, or wouldnt, make. mail. Didnt I tell you I want the letters
household. They might cry and com- here when I come home? she would say

L A L L P H O T O S C O U R T E S Y O F A L E X T I Z O N A N D H I S FA M I LY
plain, but their souls will thank you. OL A N EV E R G OT that allow- in Tagalog, her voice venomous. Its
They will love you for helping them be ance. She asked my parents about not hard naman! An idiot could remem-
what God intended. it in a roundabout way a couple ber. Then my father would arrive and
My brother Arthur was born in 1951. of years into our life in America. Her take his turn. When Dad raised his
I came next, followed by three more mother had fallen ill (with what I would voice, everyone in the house shrank.
siblings in rapid succession. My par- later learn was dysentery), and her family Sometimes my parents would team up
ents expected Lola to be as devoted to couldnt afford the medicine she needed. until Lola broke down crying, almost as
us kids as she was to them. While she though that was their goal.
looked after us, my parents went to It confused me: My parents were good
school and earned advanced degrees, Alex Tizon passed away in March. to my siblings and me, and we loved them.
joining the ranks of so many others with He was a Pulitzer Prizewinning But theyd be affectionate to us kids one
fancy diplomas but no jobs. Then the big journalist and the author of Big moment and vile to Lola the next. I was
break: Dad was offered a job in Foreign Little Man: In Search of My Asian 11 or 12 when I began to see Lolas situ-
Affairs as a commercial analyst. The sal- Self. For more about Alex, please ation clearly. By then Arthur, eight years
ary would be meager, but the position see the editors note on page 8. my senior, had been seething for a long
was in Americaa place he and Mom time. He was the one who introduced the

68 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
word slave into my understanding of what Moms eyes was a shadow of something catch glimpses of my familys secret. He
Lola was. Before he said it Id thought of I hadnt seen before. Jealousy? once overheard my mother yelling in the
her as just an unfortunate member of Are you defending your Lola?, Dad kitchen, and when he barged in to inves-
the household. I hated when my parents said. Is that what youre doing? tigate found Mom red-faced and glaring
yelled at her, but it hadnt occurred to me Ling said she wasnt hungry, I said at Lola, who was quaking in a corner. I
that theyand the whole arrangement again, almost in a whisper. came in a few seconds later. The look on
could be immoral. I was 13. It was my first attempt to Billys face was a mix of embarrassment
Do you know anybody treated the stick up for the woman who spent her and perplexity. What was that? I waved it
way shes treated?, Arthur said. Who days watching over me. The woman who off and told him to forget it.
lives the way she lives? He summed up used to hum Tagalog melodies as she I think Billy felt sorry for Lola. Hed
Lolas reality: Wasnt paid. Toiled every rocked me to sleep, and when I got older rave about her cooking, and make
day. Was tongue-lashed for sitting too would dress and feed me and walk me to her laugh like Id never seen. During
long or falling asleep too early. Was school in the mornings and pick me up sleepovers, shed make his favorite Fil-
struck for talking back. Wore hand-me- in the afternoons. Once, when I was sick ipino dish, beef tapa over white rice.
downs. Ate scraps and leftovers by her- for a long time and too weak to eat, she Cooking was Lolas only eloquence. I
self in the kitchen. Rarely left the house. chewed my food for me and put the small could tell by what she served whether
Had no friends or hobbies outside the pieces in my mouth to swallow. One sum- she was merely feeding us or saying she
family. Had no private quarters. (Her mer when I had plaster casts on both legs loved us.
designated place to sleep in each house (I had problem joints), she bathed me When I once referred to Lola as a
we lived in was always whatever was with a washcloth, brought medicine in distant aunt, Billy reminded me that
lefta couch or storage area or corner the middle of the night, and helped me when wed first met Id said she was my
in my sisters bedroom. She often slept through months of rehabilitation. I was grandmother.
among piles of laundry.) cranky through it all. She didnt complain Well, shes kind of both, I said
We couldnt identify a parallel any- or lose patience, ever. mysteriously.
where except in slave characters on TV To now hear her wailing made Why is she always working?
and in the movies. I remember watch- me crazy. She likes to work, I said.
ing a Western called The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance. John Wayne plays Tom
Doniphon, a gunslinging rancher who
barks orders at his servant, Pompey, We spent our first decade in the country trying to fit in.
whom he calls his boy. Pick him up, Having a slave did not fit. Having a slave gave
Pompey. Pompey, go find the doctor. Get me grave doubts about what kind of people we were,
on back to work, Pompey! Docile and obe-
dient, Pompey calls his master Mistah
what kind of place we came from.
Tom. They have a complex relationship.
Tom forbids Pompey from attending

I
school but opens the way for Pompey N T H E O L D C O U N T RY, my Your dad and momwhy do they
to drink in a whites-only saloon. Near parents felt no need to hide their yell at her?
the end, Pompey saves his master from treatment of Lola. In America, Her hearing isnt so good
a fire. Its clear Pompey both fears and they treated her worse but took pains Admitting the truth would have
loves Tom, and he mourns when Tom to conceal it. When guests came over, meant exposing us all. We spent our
dies. All of this is peripheral to the main my parents would either ignore her or, first decade in the country learning the
story of Toms showdown with bad guy if questioned, lie and quickly change ways of the new land and trying to fit
Liberty Valance, but I couldnt take my the subject. For five years in North in. Having a slave did not fit. Having a
eyes off Pompey. I remember thinking: Seattle, we lived across the street from slave gave me grave doubts about what
Lola is Pompey, Pompey is Lola. the Misslers, a rambunctious family of kind of people we were, what kind
One night when Dad found out that eight who introduced us to things like of place we came from. Whether we
my sister Ling, who was then 9, had mustard, salmon fishing, and mowing deserved to be accepted. I was ashamed
missed dinner, he barked at Lola for the lawn. Football on TV. Yelling during of it all, including my complicity. Didnt
being lazy. I tried to feed her, Lola said, football. Lola would come out to serve I eat the food she cooked, and wear the
as Dad stood over her and glared. Her food and drinks during games, and clothes she washed and ironed and
feeble defense only made him angrier, my parents would smile and thank her hung in the closet? But losing her would
and he punched her just below the shoul- before she quickly disappeared. Whos have been devastating.
der. Lola ran out of the room and I could that little lady you keep in the kitchen?, There was another reason for
hear her wailing, an animal cry. Big Jim, the Missler patriarch, once secrecy: Lolas travel papers had expired
Ling said she wasnt hungry, I said. asked. A relative from back home, Dad in 1969, five years after we arrived in the
My parents turned to look at me. said. Very shy. U.S. Shed come on a special passport
They seemed startled. I felt the twitch- Billy Missler, my best friend, didnt linked to my fathers job. After a series of
ing in my face that usually preceded buy it. He spent enough time at our fallings-out with his superiors, Dad quit
tears, but I wouldnt cry this time. In house, whole weekends sometimes, to the consulate and declared his intent to

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 69
stay in the United States. He arranged lingered, then went back to my room,
for permanent-resident status for his scared for my mom and awed by Lola.
family, but Lola wasnt eligible. He was

D
supposed to send her back. O O D S WA S H U M M I N G .
Lolas mother, Fermina, died in 1973; Id dozed for what felt like
her father, Hilario, in 1979. Both times a minute and awoke to his
she wanted desperately to go home. happy melody. Two hours more, he
Both times my parents said Sorry. said. I checked the plastic box in the tote
No money, no time. The kids needed bag by my sidestill thereand looked
her. My parents also feared for them- up to see open road. The MacArthur
selves, they admitted to me later. If the Highway. I glanced at the time. Hey,
authorities had found out about Lola, as you said two hours two hours ago, I
they surely would have if shed tried to said. Doods just hummed.
leave, my parents could have gotten into His not knowing anything about the
trouble, possibly even been deported. purpose of my journey was a relief. I had
Lola raised the author (left) and his
They couldnt risk it. Lolas legal status siblings, and was sometimes the only enough interior dialogue going on. I was
became what Filipinos call tago nang adult at home for days at a time. no better than my parents. I could have
done more to free Lola. To make her life
better. Why didnt I? I could have turned
in my parents, I suppose. It would have
I heard Mom weeping and ran into the living room blown up my family in an instant. Instead,
to find her slumped in Lolas arms. my siblings and I kept everything to our-
selves, and rather than blowing up in an
Lola was talking softly to her, the way she used to with instant, my family broke apart slowly.
my siblings and me when we were young. Doods and I passed through beauti-
ful country. Not travel-brochure beauti-
ful but real and alive and, compared
tago, or TNTon the run. She stayed our minds. Just from conversations she with the city, elegantly spare. Moun-
TNT for almost 20 years. overheard, she could list the first name tains ran parallel to the highway on
After each of her parents died, Lola of every girl I had a crush on from sixth each side, the Zambales Mountains to
was sullen and silent for months. She grade through high school. the west, the Sierra Madre Range to the
barely responded when my parents When I was 15, Dad left the family for east. From ridge to ridge, west to east, I
badgered her. But the badgering never good. I didnt want to believe it at the could see every shade of green all the
let up. Lola kept her head down and did time, but the fact was that he deserted way to almost black.
her work. us kids and abandoned Mom after 25 Doods pointed to a shadowy outline
years of marriage. She wouldnt become in the distance. Mount Pinatubo. Id

M
Y FAT H E RS resignation a licensed physician for another year, come here in 1991 to report on the after-
started a turbulent period. and her specialtyinternal medicine math of its eruption, the second-largest
Money got tighter, and my wasnt especially lucrative. Dad didnt of the 20th century. Volcanic mudflows
parents turned on each other. They pay child support, so money was always called lahars continued for more than
uprooted the family again and again a struggle. a decade, burying ancient villages, fill-
Seattle to Honolulu back to Seattle to My mom kept herself together ing in rivers and valleys, and wiping out
the southeast Bronx and finally to the enough to go to work, but at night shed entire ecosystems. The lahars reached
truck-stop town of Umatilla, Oregon, crumble in self-pity and despair. Her deep into the foothills of Tarlac prov-
population 750. During all this mov- main source of comfort during this time: ince, where Lolas parents had spent
ing around, Mom often worked 24-hour Lola. As Mom snapped at her over small their entire lives, and where she and
shifts, first as a medical intern and then things, Lola attended to her even more my mother had once lived together. So
as a resident, and Dad would disappear cooking Moms favorite meals, cleaning much of our family record had been lost
for days, working odd jobs but also (wed her bedroom with extra care. Id find the in wars and floods, and now parts were
later learn) womanizing and who knows two of them late at night at the kitchen buried under 20 feet of mud.
what else. Once, he came home and told counter, griping and telling stories about Life here is routinely visited by cata-
us that hed lost our new station wagon Dad, sometimes laughing wickedly, clysm. Killer typhoons that strike sev-
playing blackjack. other times working themselves into a eral times a year. Bandit insurgencies
For days in a row Lola would be the fury over his transgressions. They barely that never end. Somnolent mountains
only adult in the house. She got to know noticed us kids flitting in and out. that one day decide to wake up. The Phil-
the details of our lives in a way that my One night I heard Mom weeping ippines isnt like China or Brazil, whose
parents never had the mental space for. and ran into the living room to find her mass might absorb the trauma. This is
We brought friends home, and shed slumped in Lolas arms. Lola was talking a nation of scattered rocks in the sea.
listen to us talk about school and girls softly to her, the way she used to with my When disaster hits, the place goes under
and boys and whatever else was on siblings and me when we were young. I for a while. Then it resurfaces and life

70 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
proceeds, and you can behold a scene disruption and the expense, and would A slave, Mom said, weighing the
like the one Doods and I were driving accuse Lola of faking or failing to take word. A slave?
through, and the simple fact that its still care of herself. Mom chose the second The night ended when she declared
there makes it beautiful. tack when, in the late 1970s, Lolas teeth that I would never understand her
started falling out. Shed been saying for relationship with Lola. Never. Her voice

A
C O U P L E O F Y E A R S after months that her mouth hurt. was so guttural and pained that thinking
my parents split, my mother Thats what happens when you dont of it even now, so many years later, feels
remarried and demanded brush properly, Mom told her. like a punch to the stomach. Its a terrible
Lolas fealty to her new husband, a Cro- I said that Lola needed to see a den- thing to hate your own mother, and that
atian immigrant named Ivan, whom she tist. She was in her 50s and had never night I did. The look in her eyes made
had met through a friend. Ivan had never been to one. I was attending college clear that she felt the same way about me.
finished high school. Hed been married an hour away, and I brought it up again The fight only fed Moms fear that
four times and was an inveterate gam- and again on my frequent trips home. A Lola had stolen the kids from her, and
bler who enjoyed being supported by my year went by, then two. Lola took aspi- she made Lola pay for it. Mom drove
mother and attended to by Lola. rin every day for the pain, and her teeth her harder. Tormented her by saying, I
Ivan brought out a side of Lola Id looked like a crumbling Stonehenge. hope youre happy now that your kids
never seen. His marriage to my mother One night, after watching her chew hate me. When we helped Lola with
was volatile from the start, and money bread on the side of her mouth that still housework, Mom would fume. Youd
especially his use of her moneywas had a few good molars, I lost it. better go to sleep now, Lola, shed say
the main issue. Once, during an argu- Mom and I argued into the night, sarcastically. Youve been working too
ment in which Mom was crying and Ivan each of us sobbing at different points. hard. Your kids are worried about you.
was yelling, Lola walked over and stood She said she was tired of working her fin- Later shed take Lola into a bedroom
between them. She turned to Ivan and gers to the bone supporting everybody, for a talk, and Lola would walk out with
firmly said his name. He looked at Lola, and sick of her children always taking puffy eyes.
blinked, and sat down. Lolas side, and why didnt we just take Lola finally begged us to stop trying
My sister Inday and I were floored. our goddamn Lola, shed never wanted to help her.
Ivan was about 250 pounds, and his bari- her in the first place, and she wished to Why do you stay? we asked.
tone could shake the walls. Lola put him God she hadnt given birth to an arro- Who will cook? she said, which I
in his place with a single word. I saw this gant, sanctimonious phony like me. took to mean, Who would do everything?
happen a few other times, but for the I let her words sink in. Then I came Who would take care of us? Of Mom?
most part Lola served Ivan unquestion- back at her, saying she would know all Another time she said, Where will I go?
ingly, just as Mom wanted her to. I had about being a phony, her whole life was This struck me as closer to a real answer.
a hard time watching Lola vassalize her- a masquerade, and if she stopped feeling Coming to America had been a mad
self to another person, especially some- sorry for herself for one minute shed see dash, and before we caught a breath a
one like Ivan. But what set the stage for that Lola could barely eat because her decade had gone by. We turned around,
my blowup with Mom was something goddamn teeth were rotting out of her and a second decade was closing out.
more mundane. goddamn head, and couldnt she think of Lolas hair had turned gray. Shed heard
She used to get angry whenever Lola her just this once as a real person instead that relatives back home who hadnt
felt ill. She didnt want to deal with the of a slave kept alive to serve her? received the promised support were
wondering what had happened to her.
She was ashamed to return.
She had no contacts in America, and
no facility for getting around. Phones
puzzled her. Mechanical thingsATMs,
intercoms, vending machines, anything
with a keyboardmade her panic. Fast-
talking people left her speechless, and
her own broken English did the same
to them. She couldnt make an appoint-
ment, arrange a trip, fill out a form, or
order a meal without help.
I got Lola an ATM card linked to my
bank account and taught her how to use
it. She succeeded once, but the second
time she got flustered, and she never
tried again. She kept the card because
she considered it a gift from me.
I also tried to teach her to drive. She
The author (second from the left) with his parents, siblings, and Lola dismissed the idea with a wave of her
five years after they arrived in the U.S. hand, but I picked her up and carried her

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 71
to the car and planted her in the drivers
seat, both of us laughing. I spent 20 min-
utes going over the controls and gauges.
Her eyes went from mirthful to terri-
fied. When I turned on the ignition and
the dashboard lit up, she was out of the
car and in the house before I could say
another word. I tried a couple more times.
I thought driving could change her
life. She could go places. And if things
ever got unbearable with Mom, she
could drive away forever.

F
OUR LANE S BECAME TWO,
pavement turned to gravel.
Tricycle drivers wove between
cars and water buffalo pulling loads
of bamboo. An occasional dog or goat
sprinted across the road in front of
our truck, almost grazing the bum-
per. Doods never eased up. Whatever
didnt make it across would be stew Lola at age 51, in 1976. Her mother died a few years before this picture was taken;
today instead of tomorrowthe rule of her father a few years after. Both times, she wanted desperately to go home.
the road in the provinces.
I took out a map and traced the route left at Camiling, the town Mom and and let her have her own bedroom. She
to the village of Mayantoc, our destina- Lieutenant Tom came from. Two lanes cooperated when my siblings and I set
tion. Out the window, in the distance, became one, then gravel turned to dirt. out to change Lolas TNT status. Ron-
tiny figures folded at the waist like so The path ran along the Camiling River, ald Reagans landmark immigration bill
many bent nails. People harvesting rice, clusters of bamboo houses off to the side, of 1986 made millions of illegal immi-
the same way they had for thousands of green hills ahead. The homestretch. grants eligible for amnesty. It was a long
years. We were getting close. process, but Lola became a citizen in

I
I tapped the cheap plastic box and G AV E T H E EU L O GY at Moms October 1998, four months after my
regretted not buying a real urn, made funeral, and everything I said was mother was diagnosed with leukemia.
of porcelain or rosewood. What would true. That she was brave and spir- Mom lived another year.
Lolas people think? Not that many were ited. That shed drawn some short straws, During that time, she and Ivan took
left. Only one sibling remained in the but had done the best she could. That trips to Lincoln City, on the Oregon
area, Gregoria, 98 years old, and I was she was radiant when she was happy. coast, and sometimes brought Lola
told her memory was failing. Relatives That she adored her children, and gave along. Lola loved the ocean. On the
said that whenever she heard Lolas us a real homein Salem, Oregonthat other side were the islands she dreamed
name, shed burst out crying and then through the 80s and 90s became the of returning to. And Lola was never hap-
quickly forget why. permanent base wed never had before. pier than when Mom relaxed around her.
Id been in touch with one of Lolas That I wished we could thank her one An afternoon at the coast or just 15 min-
nieces. She had the day planned: When more time. That we all loved her. utes in the kitchen reminiscing about
I arrived, a low-key memorial, then a I didnt talk about Lola. Just as I had the old days in the province, and Lola
prayer, followed by the lowering of the selectively blocked Lola out of my mind would seem to forget years of torment.
ashes into a plot at the Mayantoc Eter- when I was with Mom during her last I couldnt forget so easily. But I did
nal Bliss Memorial Park. It had been five years. Loving my mother required that come to see Mom in a different light.
years since Lola died, but I hadnt yet kind of mental surgery. It was the only Before she died, she gave me her jour-
said the final goodbye that I knew was way we could be mother and sonwhich nals, two steamer trunks full. Leaf-
about to happen. All day I had been feel- I wanted, especially after her health ing through them as she slept a few
ing intense grief and resisting the urge started to decline, in the mid-90s. Dia- feet away, I glimpsed slices of her
to let it out, not wanting to wail in front betes. Breast cancer. Acute myelogenous life that Id refused to see for years.
of Doods. More than the shame I felt leukemia, a fast-growing cancer of the Shed gone to medical school when
for the way my family had treated Lola, blood and bone marrow. She went from not many women did. Shed come
more than my anxiety about how her rel- robust to frail seemingly overnight. to America and fought for respect as
atives in Mayantoc would treat me, I felt After the big fight, I mostly avoided both a woman and an immigrant phy-
the terrible heaviness of losing her, as if going home, and at age 23 I moved to sician. Shed worked for two decades
she had died only the day before. Seattle. When I did visit I saw a change. at Fairview Training Center, in Salem,
Doods veered northwest on the Mom was still Mom, but not as relent- a state institution for the developmen-
Romulo Highway, then took a sharp lessly. She got Lola a fine set of dentures tally disabled. The irony: She tended

72 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
to underdogs most of her professional and Ivan: My father was lazy, Ivan was a dentures, and went back to the puzzle.
life. They worshipped her. Female col- leech. I learned to tune her out. Harder Progress, I thought.
leagues became close friends. They did to ignore was her fanatical thriftiness. She planted a garden in the
silly, girly things togethershoe shop- She threw nothing out. And she used to backyardroses and tulips and every
ping, throwing dress-up parties at one go through the trash to make sure that kind of orchidand spent whole after-
anothers homes, exchanging gag gifts the rest of us hadnt thrown out anything noons tending it. She took walks around
like penis-shaped soaps and calendars useful. She washed and reused paper the neighborhood. At about 80, her
of half-naked men, all while laughing towels again and again until they disinte- arthritis got bad and she began walk-
hysterically. Looking through their grated in her hands. (No one else would ing with a cane. In the kitchen she went
party pictures reminded me that Mom go near them.) The kitchen became glut- from being a fry cook to a kind of arti-
had a life and an identity apart from the ted with grocery bags, yogurt containers, sanal chef who created only when
family and Lola. Of course. and pickle jars, and parts of our house the spirit moved her. She made lavish
Mom wrote in great detail about each turned into storage fortheres no other meals and grinned with pleasure as we
of her kids, and how she felt about us on word for itgarbage. devoured them.
a given dayproud or loving or resent- She cooked breakfast even though Passing the door of Lolas bedroom,
ful. And she devoted volumes to her none of us ate more than a banana or Id often hear her listening to a cassette
husbands, trying to grasp them as com- a granola bar in the morning, usually of Filipino folk songs. The same tape
plex characters in her story. We were all while we were running out the door. She over and over. I knew shed been send-
persons of consequence. Lola was inci- made our beds and did our laundry. She ing almost all her moneymy wife and I
dental. When she was mentioned at all, cleaned the house. I found myself say- gave her $200 a weekto relatives back
she was a bit character in someone elses ing to her, nicely at first, Lola, you dont home. One afternoon, I found her sit-
story. Lola walked my beloved Alex to have to do that. Lola, well do it our- ting on the back deck gazing at a snap-
his new school this morning. I hope he selves. Lola, thats the girls job. Okay, shot someone had sent of her village.
makes new friends quickly so he doesnt shed say, but keep right on doing it. You want to go home, Lola?
feel so sad about moving again There It irritated me to catch her eating She turned the photograph over and
might be two more pages about me, and
no other mention of Lola.
The day before Mom died, a Catho-
lic priest came to the house to perform The priest asked Mom whether there was
last rites. Lola sat next to my mothers anything she wanted to be forgiven for.
bed, holding a cup with a straw, poised to She reached over and placed an open hand on
raise it to Moms mouth. She had become
extra attentive to my mother, and extra
Lolas head. She didnt say a word.
kind. She could have taken advantage
of Mom in her feebleness, even exacted
revenge, but she did the opposite. meals standing in the kitchen, or see traced her finger across the inscription,
The priest asked Mom whether there her tense up and start cleaning when then flipped it back and seemed to study
was anything she wanted to forgive or be I walked into the room. One day, after a single detail.
forgiven for. She scanned the room with several months, I sat her down. Yes, she said.
heavy-lidded eyes, said nothing. Then, Im not Dad. Youre not a slave here, Just after her 83rd birthday, I paid her
without looking at Lola, she reached I said, and went through a long list of airfare to go home. Id follow a month
over and placed an open hand on her slavelike things shed been doing. When later to bring her back to the U.S.if she
head. She didnt say a word. I realized she was startled, I took a deep wanted to return. The unspoken pur-
breath and cupped her face, that elfin pose of her trip was to see whether the

L
OL A WA S 7 5 when she came face now looking at me searchingly. I place she had spent so many years long-
to stay with me. I was married kissed her forehead. This is your house ing for could still feel like home.
with two young daughters, living now, I said. Youre not here to serve us. She found her answer.
in a cozy house on a wooded lot. From You can relax, okay? Everything was not the same, she
the second story, we could see Puget Okay, she said. And went back to told me as we walked around Mayantoc.
Sound. We gave Lola a bedroom and cleaning. The old farms were gone. Her house
license to do whatever she wanted: sleep She didnt know any other way to be. I was gone. Her parents and most of her
in, watch soaps, do nothing all day. She realized I had to take my own advice and siblings were gone. Childhood friends,
could relaxand be freefor the first relax. If she wanted to make dinner, let the ones still alive, were like strangers.
time in her life. I should have known it her. Thank her and do the dishes. I had It was nice to see them, but every-
wouldnt be that simple. to remind myself constantly: Let her be. thing was not the same. Shed still like
Id forgotten about all the things Lola One night I came home to find her to spend her last years here, she said, but
did that drove me a little crazy. She was sitting on the couch doing a word puz- she wasnt ready yet.
always telling me to put on a sweater zle, her feet up, the TV on. Next to her, Youre ready to go back to your gar-
so I wouldnt catch a cold (I was in my a cup of tea. She glanced at me, smiled den, I said.
40s). She groused incessantly about Dad sheepishly with those perfect white Yes. Lets go home.

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 73
L
OL A WA S A S DEVOT E D to
my daughters as shed been to
my siblings and me when we
were young. After school, shed listen
to their stories and make them some-
thing to eat. And unlike my wife and
me (especially me), Lola enjoyed every
minute of every school event and per-
formance. She couldnt get enough of
them. She sat up front, kept the pro-
grams as mementos.
It was so easy to make Lola happy.
We took her on family vacations, but she
was as excited to go to the farmers mar-
ket down the hill. She became a wide-
eyed kid on a field trip: Look at those
zucchinis! The first thing she did every
morning was open all the blinds in the
house, and at each window shed pause
to look outside.
And she taught herself to read. It was
remarkable. Over the years, shed some-
how learned to sound out letters. She
did those puzzles where you find and
circle words within a block of letters.
Her room had stacks of word-puzzle
booklets, thousands of words circled in
pencil. Every day she watched the news
and listened for words she recognized.
She triangulated them with words in the
newspaper, and figured out the mean-
ings. She came to read the paper every
day, front to back. Dad used to say she
was simple. I wondered what she could
have been if, instead of working the rice
fields at age 8, she had learned to read
and write.

The old farms were gone. Her house was gone.

Her parents and most of her siblings
were gone. Childhood friends, the ones still alive,
were like strangers.

During the 12 years she lived in our

house, I asked her questions about her-
self, trying to piece together her life
story, a habit she found curious. To my
inquiries she would often respond first
with Why? Why did I want to know
about her childhood? About how she
met Lieutenant Tom?
I tried to get my sister Ling to ask
Lola about her love life, thinking Lola
Lola returned to the
would be more comfortable with her.
Philippines for an
Ling cackled, which was her way of say- extended visit after
ing I was on my own. One day, while her 83rd birthday.

74 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 Lola and I were putting away grocer-
ies, I just blurted it out: Lola, have you
ever been romantic with anyone? She
smiled, and then she told me the story
of the only time shed come close. She
was about 15, and there was a hand-
some boy named Pedro from a nearby
farm. For several months they harvested
rice together side by side. One time, she
dropped her boloa cutting implement
and he quickly picked it up and handed it
back to her. I liked him, she said.
Silence.
And?
Then he moved away, she said.
And?
Thats all.
Lola, have you ever had sex?, I
heard myself saying.
No, she said.
She wasnt accustomed to being
asked personal questions. Katu-
long lang ako, shed say. Im only a ser-
vant. She often gave one- or two-word
answers, and teasing out even the sim-
plest story was a game of 20 questions
that could last days or weeks.
Some of what I learned: She was
mad at Mom for being so cruel all those
years, but she nevertheless missed her.
Sometimes, when Lola was young, shed
felt so lonely that all she could do was
cry. I knew there were years when shed
Top: Lola with her
sister Juliana,
dreamed of being with a man. I saw it
reunited after 65 in the way she wrapped herself around
years. Middle: Rice one large pillow at night. But what she
fields in Mayantoc, told me in her old age was that living
near where Lola
was born. Bottom: with Moms husbands made her think
Lola and the author being alone wasnt so bad. She didnt
in 2008. miss those two at all. Maybe her life
would have been better if shed stayed
in Mayantoc, gotten married, and had
a family like her siblings. But maybe it
would have been worse. Two younger
sisters, Francisca and Zepriana, got sick
and died. A brother, Claudio, was killed.
Whats the point of wondering about it
now? she asked. Bahala na was her guid-
ing principle. Come what may. What
came her way was another kind of fam-
ily. In that family, she had eight children:
Mom, my four siblings and me, and now
my two daughters. The eight of us, she
said, made her life worth living.
None of us was prepared for her to
die so suddenly.
Her heart attack started in the
kitchen while she was making dinner
and I was running an errand. When
I returned she was in the middle of

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 75
it. A couple of hours later at the hospi-
tal, before I could grasp what was hap-
pening, she was gone10:56 p.m. All
the kids and grandkids noted, but were
unsure how to take, that she died on
November 7, the same day as Mom.
Twelve years apart.
Lola made it to 86. I can still see
her on the gurney. I remember look-
ing at the medics standing above this
brown woman no bigger than a child
and thinking that they had no idea of
the life she had lived. Shed had none
of the self-serving ambition that drives
most of us, and her willingness to give
up everything for the people around
her won her our love and utter loyalty.
Shes become a hallowed figure in my
extended family.
Going through her boxes in the attic
took me months. I found recipes she

the bag, and walked over to a wooden

bench and sat down. She reached inside
I remember looking at the medics standing and pulled out the box and looked at
above this brown woman no bigger every side. Where is Lola? she said
than a child and thinking that they had no idea softly. People in these parts dont often
get their loved ones cremated. I dont
of the life she had lived. think she knew what to expect. She
set the box on her lap and bent over so
her forehead rested on top of it, and at
had cut out of magazines in the 1970s first I thought she was laughing (out of
for when she would someday learn to joy) but I quickly realized she was cry-
read. Photo albums with pictures of my ing. Her shoulders began to heave, and
mom. Awards my siblings and I had won then she was wailinga deep, mourn-
from grade school on, most of which we ful, animal howl, like I once heard com-
had thrown away and she had saved. I ing from Lola.
almost lost it one night when at the bot- I hadnt come sooner to deliver Lolas
tom of a box I found a stack of yellowed ashes in part because I wasnt sure any-
newspaper articles Id written and long one here cared that much about her.
ago forgotten about. She couldnt read I hadnt expected this kind of grief.
back then, but shed kept them anyway. Before I could comfort Ebia, a woman
walked in from the kitchen and wrapped

D
OODSS TRUCK PULLED UP Top: The author with Lolas sister Gregoria. her arms around her, and then she
to a small concrete house in the Above: Lolas grave site. began wailing. The next thing I knew,
middle of a cluster of homes the room erupted with sound. The old
mostly made of bamboo and plank arranged along the walls, leaving the peopleone of them blind, several with
wood. Surrounding the pod of houses: middle of the room empty except for me. no teethwere all crying and not hold-
rice fields, green and seemingly endless. I remained standing, waiting to meet my ing anything back. It lasted about 10
Before I even got out of the truck, people host. It was a small room, and dark. Peo- minutes. I was so fascinated that I barely
started coming outside. ple glanced at me expectantly. noticed the tears running down my own
Doods reclined his seat to take a nap. Where is Lola? A voice from another face. The sobs died down, and then it
I hung my tote bag on my shoulder, took room. The next moment, a middle-aged was quiet again.
a breath, and opened the door. woman in a housedress sauntered in Ebia sniffled and said it was time to
This way, a soft voice said, and I with a smile. Ebia, Lolas niece. This was eat. Everybody started filing into the
was led up a short walkway to the con- her house. She gave me a hug and said kitchen, puffy-eyed but suddenly lighter
crete house. Following close behind was again, Where is Lola? and ready to tell stories. I glanced at the
a line of about 20 people, young and old, I slid the tote bag from my shoulder empty tote bag on the bench, and knew
but mostly old. Once we were all inside, and handed it to her. She looked into it was right to bring Lola back to the
they sat down on chairs and benches my face, still smiling, gently grasped place where shed been born.

76 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
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 When
When
Your Child
Your Child
Is a
Psychopath
Psychopath Psychopathy has long been
considered untreatable. Experts can spot it
in a child as young as 3 or 4.
But a new clinical approach offers hope.

BY BA R BA R A B R A D L E Y H AG E RT Y

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y L O L A D U P R E

78 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 all her cognitive, emotional, and physi-
cal milestones. She had no learning dis-
abilities, no emotional scars, no signs of
ADHD or autism.
But even at a very young age, Saman-
tha had a mean streak. When she was
about 20 months old, living with foster
parents in Texas, she clashed with a boy
in day care. The caretaker soothed them
both; problem solved. Later that day
Samantha, who was already potty trained,
walked over to where the boy was playing,
pulled down her pants, and peed on him.
This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale She knew exactly what she was doing,
Jen says. There was an ability to wait
of 10. Were sitting in a conference room at the until an opportune moment to exact her
San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, revenge on someone.
Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult When Samantha got a little older, she
would pinch, trip, or push her siblings
conversations between troubled children, their and smile if they cried. She would break
worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today into her sisters piggy bank and rip up all
the bills. Once, when Samantha was 5,
promises unalloyed joy. Samanthas mother is visiting Jen scolded her for being mean to one of
from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which her siblings. Samantha walked upstairs to
means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. her parents bathroom and washed her
mothers contact lenses down the drain.
The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail Her behavior wasnt impulsive, Jen says.
polish. At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and It was very thoughtful, premeditated.
Jen, a former elementary-school
has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a teacher, and Danny, a physician, realized
smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), they were out of their depth. They con-
and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite sulted doctors, psychiatrists, and thera-
pists. But Samantha only grew more
(math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal dangerous. They had her admitted to a
preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable psychiatric hospital three times before
sending her to a residential treatment
territorythe events that led her to this juvenile- program in Montana at age 6. Samantha
treatment facility nearly 2,000miles from her family would grow out of it, one psychologist
Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. assured her parents; the problem was
merely delayed empathy. Samantha was
I wanted the whole world to myself, she says. So I impulsive, another said, something that
made a whole entire book about how to hurt people. medication would fix. Yet another sug-
gested that she had reactive attachment
Starting at age 6, Samantha began I choked my little brother. disorder, which could be ameliorated
drawing pictures of murder weapons: Samanthas parents, Jen and Danny, with intensive therapy. More darkly
a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for adopted Samantha when she was 2. and typically, in these sorts of cases
poisoning, a plastic bag for suffocating. They already had three biological chil- another psychologist blamed Jen and
She tells me that she pretended to kill dren, but they felt called to add Saman- Danny, implying that Samantha was
her stuffed animals. tha (not her real name) and her half reacting to harsh and unloving parenting.
You were practicing on your stuffed sister, who is two years older, to their One bitter December day in 2011, Jen
animals?, I ask her. family. They later had two more kids. was driving the children along a wind-
She nods. From the start, Samantha seemed ing road near their home. Samantha
How did you feel when you were a willful child, in tyrannical need of had just turned 6. Suddenly Jen heard
doing that to your stuffed animals? attention. But what toddler isnt? Her screaming from the back seat, and
Happy. biological mother had been forced to when she looked in the mirror, she saw
Why did it make you feel happy? give her up because shed lost her job Samantha with her hands around the
Because I thought that someday I was and home and couldnt provide for her throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was
going to end up doing it on somebody. four children, but there was no evidence trapped in her car seat. Jen separated
Did you ever try? of abuse. According to documentation them, and once they were home, she
Silence. from the state of Texas, Samantha met pulled Samantha aside.

80 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 What were you doing?, Jen asked. forms, they can produce a dangerously Researchers believe that two paths
I was trying to choke her, Samantha antisocial individual, or even a cold- can lead to psychopathy: one domi-
said. blooded killer. Only in the past quarter nated by nature, the other by nurture.
You realize that would have killed century have researchers zeroed in on For some children, their environment
her? She would not have been able to the early signs that indicate a child could growing up in poverty, living with abu-
breathe. She would have died. be the next Ted Bundy. sive parents, fending for themselves
I know. Researchers shy away from calling in dangerous neighborhoods can
What about the rest of us? children psychopaths; the term carries turn them violent and coldhearted.
I want to kill all of you. too much stigma, and too much deter- These kids arent born callous and
Samantha later showed Jen her minism. They prefer to describe chil- unemotional; many experts suggest that
sketches, and Jen watched in horror dren like Samantha as having callous if theyre given a reprieve from their
as her daughter demonstrated how to and unemotional traits, shorthand environment, they can be pulled back
strangle or suffocate her stuffed animals. for a cluster of characteristics and from psychopathys edge.
I was so terrified, Jen says. I felt like I
had lost control.
Four months later, Samantha tried to
strangle her baby brother, who was just
two months old. I w a n t t o k i l l a l l o f y o u ,
Jen and Danny had to admit that S a m a n t h a t o l d h e r m o t h e r.
nothing seemed to make a difference
not affection, not discipline, not therapy.
I was reading and reading and reading,
trying to figure out what diagnosis made
sense, Jen tells me. What fits with
the behaviors Im seeing? Eventually behaviors, including a lack of empathy, But other children display callous and
she found one condition that did seem remorse, or guilt; shallow emotions; unemotional traits even though they are
to fitbut it was a diagnosis that all the aggression and even cruelty; and a raised by loving parents in safe neigh-
mental-health professionals had dis- seeming indifference to punishment. borhoods. Large studies in the United
missed, because its considered both rare Callous and unemotional children Kingdom and elsewhere have found
and untreatable. In July 2013, Jen took have no trouble hurting others to get that this early-onset condition is highly
Samantha to see a psychiatrist in New what they want. If they do seem caring hereditary, hardwired in the brainand
York City, who confirmed her suspicion. or empathetic, theyre probably trying especially difficult to treat. Wed like to
In the childrens mental-health to manipulate you. think a mother and fathers love can turn
world, its pretty much a terminal diag- Researchers believe that nearly everything around, Raine says. But
nosis, except your childs not going 1 percent of children exhib it these there are times where parents are doing
to die, Jen says. Its just that theres traits, about as many as have autism the very best they can, but the kideven
no help. She recalls walking out of or bipolar disorder. Until recently, the from the get-gois just a bad kid.
the psychiatrists office on that warm condition was seldom mentioned. Still, researchers stress that a cal-
afternoon and standing on a street cor- Only in 2013 did the American Psychi- lous childeven one who was born that
ner in Manhattan as pedestrians pushed atric Association include callous and wayis not automatically destined for
past her in a blur. A feeling flooded unemotional traits in its diagnostic psychopathy. By some estimates, four
over her, singular, unexpected. Hope. manual, DSM-5. The condition can go out of five children with these traits
Someone had finally acknowledged her unnoticed because many children with do not grow up to be psychopaths. The
familys plight. Perhaps she and Danny these traitswho can be charming and mysterythe one everyone is trying to
could, against the odds, find a way to help smart enough to mimic social cuesare solveis why some of these children
their daughter. able to mask them. develop into normal adults while others
Samantha was diagnosed with More than 50 studies have found end up on death row.
conduct disorder with callous and that kids with callous and unemotional
unemotional traits. She had all the
characteristics of a budding psychopath.
traits are more likely than other kids
(three times more likely, in one study) to
become criminals or display aggressive, A trained eye can spot a cal-
lous and unemotional child by
age 3 or 4. Whereas normally

P sychopaths have always been

with us. Indeed, certain psycho-
pathic traits have survived
because theyre useful in small doses:
the cool dispassion of a surgeon, the
psychopathic traits later in life. And
while adult psychopaths constitute only
a tiny fraction of the general population,
studies suggest that they commit half of
all violent crimes. Ignore the problem,
developing children at that age grow
agitated when they see other children
cryand either try to comfort them or
bolt the scenethese kids show a chilly
detachment. In fact, psychologists may
tunnel vision of an Olympic athlete, the says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at even be able to trace these traits back
ambitious narcissism of many a politi- the University of Pennsylvania, and to infancy. Researchers at Kings Col-
cian. But when these attributes exist in it could be argued we have blood on lege London tested more than 200 five-
the wrong combination or in extreme our hands. week-old babies, tracking whether they

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 81
preferred looking at a persons face or words but not the music is how Kiehl optimal level of physiological arousal,
at a red ball. Those who favored the ball describes it. They just dont have the and psycho pathic people seek out
displayed more callous traits two and a same circuitry. stimulation to increase their heart rate
half years later. In particular, experts point to the to normal. For some kids, one way of
As a child gets older, more-obvious amygdalaa part of the limbic system getting this arousal jag in life is by shop-
warning signs appear. Kent Kiehl, a as a physiological culprit for coldhearted lifting, or joining a gang, or robbing a
psychologist at the University of New or violent behavior. Someone with an store, or getting into a fight. Indeed,
Mexico and the author of The Psychopath undersize or underactive amygdala may when Daniel Waschbusch, a clinical
Whisperer, says that one scary harbinger not be able to feel empathy or refrain psychologist at Penn State Hershey
occurs when a kid who is 8, 9, or 10 years from violence. For example, many Medical Center, gave the most severely
old commits a transgression or a crime psychopathic adults and callous children callous and unemotional children he
while alone, without the pressure of do not recognize fear or distress in other worked with a stimulative medication,
peers. This reflects an interior impulse peoples faces. Essi Viding, a professor their behavior improved.
toward harm. Criminal versatility of developmental psychopathology at The second hallmark of a psycho-
committing different types of crimes University College London recalls show- pathic brain is an overactive reward
in different settingscan also hint at ing one psychopathic prisoner a series of system especially primed for drugs, sex,
future psychopathy. faces with different expressions. When or anything else that delivers a ping
But the biggest red flag is early vio- the prisoner came to a fearful face, he of excitement. In one study, children
lence. Most of the psychopaths I meet in said, I dont know what you call this played a computer gambling game pro-
grammed to allow them to win early
on and then slowly begin to lose. Most
people will cut their losses at some point,
Kent Kiehl notes, whereas the psycho-
I d o n t k n o w w h a t y o u c a l l t h i s e m o t i o n , pathic, callous unemotional kids keep
one psychopathic prisoner said, looking at a going until they lose everything. Their
p h o t o o f a fe a r f u l fa c e , b u t i t s w h a t brakes dont work, he says.
p e o p l e l o o k l i k e j u s t b e f o r e y o u s t a b t h e m . Faulty brakes may help explain why
psychopaths commit brutal crimes:
Their brains ignore cues about danger
or punishment. There are all these
decisions we make based on threat, or
prison had been in fights with teachers in emotion, but its what people look like the fear that something bad can hap-
elementary school or junior high, Kiehl just before you stab them. pen, says Dustin Pardini, a clinical psy-
says. When Id interview them, Id say, Why does this neural quirk matter? chologist and an associate professor of
Whats the worst thing you did in school? Abigail Marsh, a researcher at George- criminology at Arizona State University.
And theyd say, I beat the teacher uncon- town University who has studied the If you have less concern about the nega-
scious. Youre like, That really happened? brains of callous and unemotional tive consequences of your actions, then
It turns out thats very common. children, says that distress cues, such youll be more likely to continue engag-
We have a fairly good idea of what as fearful or sad expressions, signal ing in these behaviors. And when you get
an adult psychopathic brain looks submission and conciliation. Theyre caught, youll be less likely to learn from
like, thanks in part to Kiehls work. He designed to prevent attacks by raising your mistakes.
has scanned the brains of hundreds of the white flag. And so if youre not sen- Researchers see this insensitivity
inmates at maximum-security prisons sitive to these cues, youre much more to punishment even in some toddlers.
and chronicled the neural differences likely to attack somebody whom other These are the kids that are completely
between average violent convicts and people would refrain from attacking. unperturbed by the fact that theyve
psychopaths. Broadly speaking, Kiehl Psychopaths not only fail to recog- been put in time-out, says Eva Kimo-
and others believe that the psycho- nize distress in others, they may not nis, who works with callous children
pathic brain has at least two neural feel it themselves. The best physiologi- and their families at the University of
abnormalitiesand that these same dif- cal indicator of which young people New South Wales, in Australia. So its
ferences likely also occur in the brains of will become violent criminals as adults not surprising that they keep going to
callous children. is a low resting heart rate, says Adrian time-out, because its not effective for
The first abnormality appears in the Raine of the University of Pennsylva- them. Whereas rewardtheyre very
limbic system, the set of brain struc- nia. Longitudinal studies that followed motivated by that.
tures involved in, among other things, thousands of men in Sweden, the U.K., This insight is driving a new wave of
processing emotions. In a psychopaths and Brazil all point to this biological treatment. Whats a clinician to do if the
brain, this area contains less gray matter. anomaly. We think that low heart emotional, empathetic part of a childs
Its like a weaker muscle, Kiehl says. A rate reflects a lack of fear, and a lack brain is broken but the reward part of the
psychopath may understand, intellectu- of fear could predispose someone to brain is humming along? You co-opt
ally, that what he is doing is wrong, but committing fearless criminal-violence the system, Kiehl says. You work with
he doesnt feel it. Psychopaths know the acts, Raine says. Or perhaps there is an whats left.

82 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 members cuff his wrists, shackle his feet,
and begin to lead him away. Suddenly
he swivels to face me and laughsa
menacing laugh that gives me chills. As
young men yell expletives, banging on
the metal doors of their cells, and others
stare silently through their narrow plexi-
glass windows, I think, This is as close as I
get to Lord of the Flies.
The psychologists Michael Caldwell
and Greg Van Rybroek thought much
the same thing when they opened the
Mendota facility in 1995, in response to a
nationwide epidemic of youth violence in
the early 90s. Instead of placing young
offenders in a juvenile prison until they
were released to commit moreand
more violentcrimes as adults, the Wis-
consin legislature set up a new treatment
center to try to break the cycle of pathol-
ogy. Mendota would operate within the
Department of Health Services, not the
Department of Corrections. It would be
run by psychologists and psychiatric-care
technicians, not wardens and guards. It
would employ one staff member for
every three kidsquadruple the ratio at
other juvenile-corrections facilities.
Caldwell and Van Rybroek tell me
that the states high-security juvenile-
corrections facility was supposed to
send over its most mentally ill boys
between the ages of 12 and 17. It did, but
what Caldwell and Van Rybroek didnt
anticipate was that the boys the facility
transferred were also its most menacing
and recalcitrant. They recall their first
few assessments. The kid would walk
out and we would turn to each other and
say, Thats the most dangerous person
Ive ever seen in my life, Caldwell
says. Each one seemed more threaten-
ing than the last. Were looking at each
other and saying, Oh, no. What have we
done?, Van Rybroek adds.
What they have done, by trial and
error, is achieve something most people
thought impossible: If they havent cured
psychopathy, theyve at least tamed it.
Many of the teenagers at Mendota
grew up on the streets, without parents,

W ith each passing year, both

nature and nurture con-
spire to steer a callous child
toward psychopathy and block his exits
to a normal life. His brain becomes a
turn away. By his teenage years, he may
not be a lost cause, since the rational
part of his brain is still under construc-
tion. But he can be one scary dude.
Like the guy standing 20 feet away
and were beaten up or sexually abused.
Violence became a defense mecha-
nism. Caldwell and Van Rybroek recall
a group-therapy session a few years
ago in which one boy described being
little less malleable; his environment from me in the North Hall of Mendota strung up by his wrists and hung from
grows less forgiving as his exhausted Juvenile Treatment Center, in Madison, the ceiling as his father cut him with a
parents reach their limits, and as teach- Wisconsin. The tall, lanky teenager has knife and rubbed pepper in the wounds.
ers, social workers, and judges begin to just emerged from his cell. Two staff Hey, several other kids said, thats

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 83
 like what happened to me. They called punishment and dangling rewards. good behavior confers basketball cards
themselves the piata club. These boys have been expelled from and internet radio inside these walls,
But not everyone at Mendota was school, placed in group homes, arrested, sohe believeswill it bring promo-
born in hell, as Van Rybroek puts it. and jailed. If punishment were going tions at work. Say youre a cook; you
Some of the boys were raised in middle- to rein them in, it would have by now. can [become] a waitress if youre doing
class homes with parents whose major But their brains do respond, enthusi- really good, he says. Thats the way I
sin was not abuse but paralysis in the astically, to rewards. At Mendota, the look at it.
face of their terrifying child. No mat- boys can accumulate points to join ever He peers at me, as if searching for
ter the history, one secret to divert- more prestigious clubs (Club 19, Club confirmation. I nod, hoping that the
ing them from adult psychopathy is 23, the VIP Club). As they ascend in world will work this way for him. Even
to wage an unrelenting war of pres- status, they earn privileges and treats more, I hope his insight will endure.
ence. At Mendota, the staff calls this candy bars, baseball cards, pizza on
decompression. The idea is to allow a
young man who has been living in a state
of chaos to slowly rise to the surface and
acclimate to the world without resorting
to violence.
Saturdays, the chance to play Xbox or
stay up late. Hitting someone, throwing
urine, or cussing out the staff costs a boy
pointsbut not for long, since callous
and unemotional kids arent generally
I n fact, the program at Mendota
has changed the trajectory for many
young men, at least in the short
term. Caldwell and Van Rybroek have
tracked the public records of 248 juve-
Caldwell mentions that, two weeks deterred by punishment. nile delinquents after their release. One
ago, one patient became furious over I am, frankly, skepticalwill a kid hundred forty-seven of them had been
some perceived slight or injustice; who knocked down an elderly lady and in a juvenile-corrections facility, and 101
every time the techs checked on him, stole her Social Security check (as one of themthe harder, more psychopathic
he would squirt urine or feces through Mendota resident did) really be moti- caseshad received treatment at Men-
the door. (This is a popular pastime at vated by the promise of Pokmon cards? dota. In the four and a half years since
Mendota.) The techs would dodge it and But then I walk down the South Hall their release, the Mendota boys have
return 20 minutes later, and he would do with Ebsen. She stops and turns toward been far less likely to reoffend (64 per-
it again. This went on for several days, a door on our left. Hey, she calls, do I cent versus 97 percent), and far less
Caldwell says. But part of the concept hear internet radio? likely to commit a violent crime (36 per-
of decompression is that the kids going Yeah, yeah, Im in the VIP Club, a cent versus 60 percent). Most striking,
to get tired at some point. And one of voice says. Can I show you my basket- the ordinary delinquents have killed
those times youre going to come there ball cards? 16 people since their release. The boys
and hes going to be tired, or hes just Ebsen unlocks the door to reveal a from Mendota? Not one.
not going to have any urine left to throw skinny 17-year-old boy with a nascent We thought that as soon as they
at you. And youre going to have a little mustache. He fans out his collection. walked out the door, theyd last maybe
moment where youre going to have a This is, like, 50 basketball cards, he a week or two and theyd have another
positive connection there. says, and I can almost see his reward felony on their record, Caldwell says.
Cindy Ebsen, the operations director, centers glowing. I have the most and And when the data first came back that
who is also a registered nurse, gives me a best basketball cards here. Later, he showed that that wasnt happening, we
tour of Mendotas North Hall. As we pass sketches out his history for me: His step- figured there was something wrong
the metal doors with their narrow win- mother had routinely beat him and his with the data. For two years, they tried
dows, the boys peer out and the yelling stepbrother had used him for sex. When to find mistakes or alternative explana-
subsides into entreaties. Cindy, Cindy, he was still a preteen, he began molest- tions, but eventually they concluded
can you get me some candy? Im your ing the younger girl and boy next door. that the results were real.
favorite, arent I, Cindy? Cindy, why The abuse continued for a few years, The question they are trying to
dont you visit me anymore? until the boy told his mother. I knew it answer now is this: Can Mendotas
She pauses to banter with each of was wrong, but I didnt care, he says. I treatment program not only change the
them. The young men who pass through just wanted the pleasure. behavior of these teens, but measurably
these halls have murdered and maimed, At Mendota, he has begun to see that reshape their brains as well? Research-
carjacked and robbed at gunpoint. But short-term pleasure could land him in ers are optimistic, in part because the
theyre still kids. I love working with prison as a sex offender, while deferred decision-making part of the brain con-
them, because I see the most success gratification can confer more-lasting tinues to evolve into ones mid-20s.
in this population, as opposed to older dividends: a family, a job, and most of The program is like neural weight
offenders, Ebsen says. For many, friend- all, freedom. Unlikely as it sounds, this lifting, Kent Kiehl, at the University
ship with her or another staff member is revelation sprang from his ardent pur- of New Mexico, says. If you exercise
the first safe connection theyve known. suit of basketball cards. this limbic-related circuitry, its going
Forming attachments with callous After he details the centers point sys- to get better.
kids is important, but its not Mendotas tem (a higher math that I cannot follow), To test this hypothesis, Kiehl and the
singular insight. The centers real break- the boy tells me that a similar approach staff at Mendota are now asking some
through involves deploying the anoma- should translate into success in the out- 300 young men to slide into a mobile
lies of the psychopathic brain to ones side worldas if the world, too, oper- brain scanner. The scanner records
advantagespecifically, downplaying ates on a point system. Just as consistent the shape and size of key areas of the

84 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
boys brains, as well as how their brains as a child. I remember when I bit my He started talking in therapy and in
react to tests of decision-making ability, mom really hard, and she was bleeding class. He quit mouthing off and settled
impulsivity, and other qualities that go and crying. I remember feeling so happy, down. He developed the first real bonds
to the core of psychopathy. Each boys so overjoyedcompletely fulfilled and in his young life. The teachers, the
brain will be scanned before, during, satisfied, he tells me on the phone. It nurses, the staff, they all seemed to
and at the end of their time in the pro- wasnt like someone kicked me in the have this idea that they could make a
gram, offering researchers insights into face and I was trying to get him back. It difference in us, he says. Like, Huh!
whether his improved behavior reflects was more like a weird, hard-to-explain Something good could come of us. We were
better functioning inside his brain. feeling of hatred. believed to have potential.
No one believes that Mendota grad- His behavior confused and eventu- Carl wasnt exactly in the clear. After
uates will develop true empathy or a ally terrified his parents. It just got two stints at Mendota, he was released
heartfelt moral conscience. They may worse and worse as he got bigger, his just before his 18th birthday, got married,
not go from the Joker in The Dark Knight father tells me. Later, when he was a and at age 20 was arrested for beating up
to Mister Rogers, Caldwell tells me, teenager and occasionally incarcerated, a police officer. In prison, he wrote a sui-
laughing. But they can develop a cogni- I was happy about it. We knew where he cide note, fashioned a makeshift noose,
tive moral conscience, an intellectual was and that hed be safe, and that took and was put on suicide watch in solitary
awareness that life will be more reward- a load off the mind. confinement. While there, he began
ing if they play by the rules. Were By the time Carl arrived at Mendota reading the Bible and fasting, and one
just happy if they stay on this side of the Juvenile Treatment Center in Novem- day, he says, something very powerful
law, Van Rybroek says. In our world, ber 1995, at age 15, he had been placed shifted. He began to believe in God.
thats huge. in a psychiatric hospital, a group home, Carl acknowledges that his lifestyle
foster care, or a juvenile-corrections falls far short of the Christian ideal. But

H ow many can stay the course

for a lifetime? Caldwell and
Van Rybroek have no idea.
Theyre barred from contacting former
patientsa policy meant to ensure that
center about a dozen times. His police
record listed 18 charges, including
armed burglary and three crimes
against persons, one of which sent
the victim to the hospital. Lincoln Hills,
he still attends church every week, and
he credits Mendota with paving the way
for his conversion. By the time he was
released, in 2003, his marriage had dis-
solved, and he moved away from Wis-
the staff and former patients maintain a high-security juvenile- corrections consin, eventually settling in California,
appropriate boundaries. But sometimes facility, foisted him on Mendota after where he opened his funeral home.
graduates write or call to share their he accumulated more than 100 serious Carl cheerfully admits that the death
progress, and among these correspon- infractions in less than four months. business appeals to him. As a child, he
dents, Carl, now 37, stands out. On an assessment called the Youth Psy- says, I had a deep fascination with
Carl (not his real name) emailed a chopathy Checklist, he scored 38 out of knives and cutting and killing, so its a
thankful note to Van Rybroek in 2013. a possible 40five points higher than harmless way to express some level of
Aside from one assault conviction after the average for Mendota boys, who what you might call morbid curiosity.
he left Mendota, he had stayed out of
trouble for a decade and opened his
own businessa funeral home near
Los Angeles. His success was especially
I remember when I bit my mom really
significant because he was one of the
hard, and she was bleeding and
harder cases, a boy from a good home
c r y i n g , C a r l s a y s . I r e m e m b e r f e e l i n g
who seemed wired for violence.
Carl was born in a small town in Wis-
s o h a p p y, s o o v e r j o y e d .
consin. The middle child of a computer
programmer and a special-education
teacher, he came out angry, his father
recalls during a phone conversation. His were among the most dangerous young And I think that morbid curiosity taken
acts of violence started smallhitting a men in Wisconsin. to its extremethats the home of the
classmate in kindergartenbut quickly Carl had a rocky start at Mendota: serial killers, okay? So its that same
escalated: ripping the head off his favor- weeks of abusing staff, smearing feces energy. But everything in moderation.
ite teddy bear, slashing the tires on the around his cell, yelling all night, refus- Of course, his profession also
family car, starting fires, killing his sis- ing to shower, and spending much of the requires empathy. Carl says that he
ters hamster. time locked in his room, not allowed to had to train himself to show empathy
His sister remembers Carl, when he mix with the other kids. Slowly, though, for his grieving clients, but that it now
was about 8, swinging their cat in circles his psychology began to shift. The staff s comes naturally. His sister agrees that
by its tail, faster and faster, and then let- unruffled constancy chipped away at hes been able to make this emotional
ting go. And you hear her hit the wall. his defenses. These people were like leap. Ive seen him interact with the
Carl just laughed. zombies, Carl recalls, laughing. You families, and hes phenomenal, she
Looking back, even Carl is puzzled could punch them in the face and they tells me. He is amazing at providing
by the rage that coursed through him wouldnt do anything. empathy and providing that shoulder

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 85
 for them. And it does not fit with my other women home for sex, even when I would say an 8. Because 8s difficult,
view of him at all. I get confused. Is that shes there. And while hes never seri- very difficult.
true? Does he genuinely feel for them? Is he ously beaten her up, he has slapped her. Ive grown to like Carl: He has a
faking the whole thing? Does he even know He would say sorry, but I dont know lively intellect, a willingness to admit
at this point? if he was upset or not, she tells me. his flaws, and a desire to be good. Is
After talking with Carl, I begin to So you wondered if he felt genuine he being sincere or manipulating me?
see him as a remarkable success story. remorse? Is Carl proof that psychopathy can be
Without [Mendota] and Jesus, he tells Honestly, Im at a point where I tamedor proof that the traits are so
me, I would have been a Manson-, dont really care anymore. I just want deeply embedded that they can never
Bundy-, Dahmer-, or Berkowitz-type of my son and myself to be safe. be dislodged? I honestly dont know.
criminal. Sure, his fascination with the Finally, at 3:15 p.m., Carl shuffles
morbid is a little creepy. Yet here he is,
now remarried, the father of a 1-year-
old son he adores, with a flourishing
business. After our phone interview, I
decide to meet him in person. I want to
into the courtroom, handcuffed, wear-
ing an orange L.A. County jumpsuit. He
gives us a two-handed wave and flashes
a carefree smile, which fades when he
learns that he will not be released on bail
A t the San Marcos Treatment
Center, Samantha is wearing
her new yoga pants from Tar-
get, but they bring her little joy. In a
few hours, her mother will leave for the
witness his redemption for myself. today, despite pleading guilty to assault airport and fly back to Idaho. Samantha
and battery. He will remain in jail for munches on a slice of pizza and sug-

T he night before Im scheduled

to fly to Los Angeles, I receive a
frantic email from Carls wife.
Carl is in police custody. He considers
himself polyamorous, and had invited
another three weeks.
Carl calls me the day after his
release. I really shouldnt have a girl-
friend and a wife, he says, in what
seems an uncharacteristic display of
gests movies to watch on Jens laptop.
She seems sad, but less about Jens
departure than about the resumption
of the centers tedious routine. Saman-
tha snuggles with her mom while they
one of his girlfriends over to their apart- remorse. He insists that he wants to watch The BFG, this 11-year-old girl who
ment. They were playing with the baby keep his family together, and says that can stab a teachers hand with a pencil at
when his wife returned. She was furious, he thinks the domestic-violence classes the slightest provocation.
and grabbed their son. Carl responded the court has mandated will help him. Watching them in the darkened
by pulling her hair, snatching the baby He seems sincere. room, I contemplate for the hundredth
out of her arms, and taking her phone to When I describe the latest twist in time the arbitrary nature of good and
prevent her from calling the police. She Carls story to Michael Caldwell and evil. If Samanthas brain is wired for
called from a neighbors house instead. Greg Van Rybroek, they laugh know- callousness, if she fails to experience
(Carl says he grabbed the baby to protect ingly. This counts as a good outcome empathy or remorse because she lacks
him.) Three misdemeanor charges for a Mendota guy, Caldwell says. the neural equipment, can we say she is
spousal battery, abandonment and Hes not going to have a fully healthy evil? These kids cant help it, Adrian
neglect of a child, and intimidation of a adjustment to life, but hes been able Raine says. Kids dont grow up want-
witnessand the psychopath who made to stay mostly within the law. Even this ing to be psychopaths or serial killers.
good is now in jail. mis demeanorhes not committing They grow up wanting to become base-
I go to Los Angeles anyway, in the armed robberies or shooting people. ball players or great football stars. Its
naive hope that Carl will be released on His sister sees her brothers outcome not a choice.
bail at his hearing the next day. A few
minutes before 8:30 a.m., his wife and
I meet at the courthouse and begin the
long wait. She is 12 years Carls junior, Samantha knows that her thoughts about
a compact woman with long black hair hurting people are wrong, and she
and a weariness that ebbs only when tries to suppress them. But the cognitive
she gazes at her son. She met Carl on training cannot always compete.
OkCupid two years ago while visiting
L.A. andafter a romance of just a few
monthsmoved to California to marry
him. Now she sits outside the courtroom,
one eye on her son, fielding calls from in a similar light. This guy got dealt a Yet, Raine says, even if we dont label
clients of the funeral home and wonder- shittier hand of cards than anybody Ive them evil, we must try to head off their
ing whether she can make bail. ever met, she tells me. Who deserves evil acts. Its a daily struggle, plant-
Im so sick of the drama, she says, to have started out life that way? And ing the seeds of emotions that usually
as the phone rings again. the fact that hes not a raving lunatic, come so naturallyempathy, caring,
Carl is a tough man to be married locked up for the rest of his life, or dead remorsein the rocky soil of a callous
to. His wife says hes funny and charm- is insane. brain. Samantha has lived for more
ing and a good listener, but he sometimes I ask Carl whether its difficult to play than two years at San Marcos, where
loses interest in the funeral business, by the rules, to simply be normal. On a the staff has tried to shape her behav-
leaving most of the work to her. He brings scale of 1 to 10, how hard is it? he says. ior with regular therapy and a program

86 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 that, like Mendotas, dispenses quick
but limited punishment for bad behav-
ior and offers prizes and privileges
candy, Pokmon cards, late nights on
weekendsfor good behavior. T H E TAV E R N T R E E S
Jen and Danny have spotted green
shoots of empathy. Samantha has made Fairfield, Tennessee
a friend, and recently comforted the girl
after her social worker quit. Theyve Having forced the stiff U.S. Mail flag up
detected traces of self-awareness and
and left the card crackling among cricket nymphs,
even remorse: Samantha knows that
her thoughts about hurting people are the wheel ruts little rocks nibbling at my soles,
wrong, and she tries to suppress them. the cattle grate a memory, a lock installed
But the cognitive training cannot always
to forbid locals from riding donuts on the lawn
compete with the urge to strangle an
annoying classmate, which she tried to or chucking empties in the boondocks,
do just the other day. It builds up, and from which fireflies still drowse into the grasp
then I have to do it, Samantha explains. like spirits, Eliza says, like will-o-the-wisp
I cant keep it away.
It all feels exhausting, for Samantha all at once they sweep up from the grass:
and for everyone in her orbit. Later, I hackberry, coffee, sweet gum, ash, and beech,
ask Jen whether Samantha has lovable centuries of speechlessness pitched to a high,
qualities that make all this worthwhile.
unfiltered exactitude my praise stabs at
It cant be all nightmare, can it?, I ask.
She hesitates. Or can it? even as they fall back to papery, aromatic stars
It is not all nightmare, Jen responds, and elephant ears fruited savagely as maces.
eventually. Shes cute, and she can be
fun, and she can be enjoyable. Shes
Danielle Chapman
great at board games, she has a wonder-
ful imagination, and now, having been
apart for two years, her siblings say they Danielle Chapmans collection of poems is Delinquent Palaces.
miss her. But Samanthas mood and
behavior can quickly turn. The chal-
lenge with her is that her extreme is so
extreme. Youre always waiting for the
other shoe to drop. her. But even Samantha has wondered a drivers license?, Jen asks. To go on
Danny says theyre praying for the whether they have regrets. She said, dates? Shes smart enough for college
triumph of self-interest over impulse. Why did you even want me?, Jen but will she be able to negotiate that
Our hope is that she is able to have a cog- recalls. The real answer to that is: We complex society without becoming a
nitive understanding that Even though didnt know the depth of her challenges. threat? Can she have a stable romantic
my thinking is different, my behavior We had no idea. I dont know if this relationship, much less fall in love and
needs to walk down this path so that I would be a different story if we were marry? She and Danny have had to
can enjoy the good things that I want. looking at this now. But what we tell her redefine success for Samantha: simply
Because she was diagnosed relatively is: You were ours. keeping her out of prison.
early, they hope that Samanthas young, Jen and Danny are planning to bring And yet, they love Samantha. Shes
still- developing brain can be rewired Samantha home this summer, a pros- ours, and we want to raise our children
for some measure of cognitive morality. pect the family views with some trepi- together, Jen says. Samantha has been
And having parents like Jen and Danny dation. Theyre taking precautions, such in residential treatment programs for
could make a difference; research sug- as using alarms on Samanthas bedroom most of the past five years, nearly half
gests that warm and responsive parent- door. The older children are larger and her life. They cant institutionalize her
ing can help children become less tougher than Samantha, but the family forever. She needs to learn to function
callous as they get older. will have to keep vigil over the 5-year- in the world, sooner rather than later.
On the flip side, the New York psy- old and the 7-year-old. Still, they believe I do feel theres hope, Jen says. The
chiatrist told them, the fact that her shes ready, or, more accurately, that hard part is, its never going to go away.
symptoms appeared so early, and so shes progressed as far as she can at San Its high-stakes parenting. If it fails, its
dramatically, may indicate that her Marcos. They want to bring her home, to going to fail big.
callousness is so deeply ingrained give it another try.
that little can be done to ameliorate it. Of course, even if Samantha can slip Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the author
Samanthas parents try not to easily back into home life at 11, what of of Life Reimagined: The Science, Art,
second-guess their decision to adopt the future? Do I want that child to have and Opportunity of Midlife.

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 87
 FICTION

DE E DS
NOT
WO R D S
B y TESSA HADLEY
T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 89
 A
L L T H E G I R L S at
St. Clements loved
The Making of JANE AUSTEN Miss Mulhouse. Quite
a few of them had

Devoney Looser loved her even before

she broke windows in a shop on Oxford
Street and was arrested as a suffragette.
Austen fans have another
She was graceful and earnest and angu-
book to add to their larly thin, with a lot of very soft hair and
libraries.Publishers large, interesting pale eyes, the lower
Weekly lids languidly heavy. Her intensity was
of the smoldering and not the flaring
A potential game changer, kind, and she read Browning and Dante
full of force and originality. Gabriel Rossetti to the girls in her les-
Janine Barchas, author sons. I have been here before, / But when or
of Matters of Fact in Jane how I cannot tell: / I know the grass beyond
the door, / The sweet keen smell
Austen: History, Location,
After the news of her arrest had
and Celebrity spreadsomeones father had found
$29.95 hardcover / ebook her name in the newspaperloving
Miss Mulhouse became a kind of cult
in the school and no one dared not
belong. The girls decorated their desks
in Womens Social and Political Union
colors, purple and green and white, and
stuck pictures of the Pankhursts inside
their desk lids. They found out their
press.jhu.edu
teachers first name, Lauraperhaps it
had been in the list in the newspaper
and passed it around in hushed voices,
like an initiation into occult knowledge.

WhiteWalls
Fervently some of them began mugging
Magnetic up on suffragist politics; one of the day-

Whiteboard girls had a brother with a printing set,
Steel Wall Panels and they composed angry pamphlets
with BELIEVE AND YOU WILL CONQUER
in big letters set crookedly on the front
page, or LIBERTY AND NO SURRENDER.
All through prayers one morning, one of
these pamphlets was pinned at the very
center of the honors board, where the
names of distinguished alumnae were
picked out in gold. Afterward discussion
surged among the groups of girls: Had
the teachers and the headmistress really
not noticed their pamphlet? Or had they
OPENING SPREAD: TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY

seen it and chosen to leave it there? Some

of them were known to be sympathizers.
Edith Carew taught Latin, and
approved in principleof course
of votes for women, but was too skep-
Turn your room, office, or hallway into a creative tical to be an enthusiast for any politi-
hot-spot. WhiteWalls provide the vital avenue cal cause. Laura Mulhouse had always
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full of poetry books and her air of high-
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90 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 she could be petty over borrowed tea- leaving actual marks on her body, and wood-paneled and poky, and all of the
cups in the staff room. Edith thought looked for them after theyd spent time headmistresss energies were bent on
that Laura played up to certain suscep- together. Fitz was heavy and shambolic, raising funds for a modern science block.
tible girls, too, encouraging them to wor- with black hair and a beard, and silky Every afternoon at the end of the school
ship her. Edith and the French teacher, black hair on his chest. Edith was trim day, when she wasnt on duty and Fitz
Mr. Briers, had privately called Laura with a neat figure; she had dreaded that could get away, Edith climbed the back
the Lady of Shalottit was Mr. Brierss this body would bloom and fade under staircase in Old Court to the French
first shared joke with Edith, though they her clothes without any man ever know- office, hardly more than a cupboard
gave it up later when Laura was in prison. ing it. Unfortunately, and it was just her under the roof, where French gram-
By that time, anyway, Edith wasnt giv- luckthe only thing to do with her luck, mar books were kept, along with spare
ing Laura Mulhouse much thought. Her chairs and editions of Racine and Victor
mind was all absorbed in lower things: Hugo. This staircase was forbidden to
She was drowning in her love affair with
Loving Miss Mulhouse the girls. Fitz would be waiting for her;
Fitzsimmon Briers. became a kind of cult he would hurry her over the threshold,
Edith was 34 and lively and not bad- nuzzling her hands and her arms as if
looking and had always expected to in the school and no he was too hungry to delay. Then hed
get married, but humiliatingly she had
to own up to Fitz that this was her first
one dared not belong. lock the door behind them and lay out
on the floorboards the blankets hed
experience of love certainly of what brought from home, which smelled of
she shyly called intimate relations. Edith thought, was to laugh at itFitz mothballs. Sometimes rain drummed
Fitz was the most intelligent man Edith was married, with a child. He wouldnt on the sloping roof, enclosing them;
had ever gotten anywhere close to; his talk about his wife, just said she was an sometimes the sun baked down on it
dry humor and his good taste, and his invalid and didnt go out much. Edith and their skins were slick with sweat.
appreciation of her, changed her life had never seen her. People said shed Edith could hardly believe that this
as drastically as if shed found foot- had a nervous collapse. French cupboard, which had been so
prints on an island where shed been St. Clements had moved recently prosaically ordinary, could transform
beginning to believe she was alone. into an 18th-century gentlemans resi- into the scene of such revelations. After
Sometimes she felt this alteration so dence built on the hillside above a town their intimacies, while she lay curled in
intensely that she imagined he must be on the south coast; the classrooms were the crook of his arm, he read to her out

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 of Phdre or Madame de Stal. He had
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Time to
a beautiful accent and got carried away
with the sound of the words; Edith had
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think again
haunted by the perils of their situation,
Sleek, narrow sides and rigid
bow & stern molds for though shed never been fearful in her
paddling speeds up to 6mph life before. They might be found out and
she would be disgraced and they would
both lose their jobs. Or she might con-
ceive a childthough Fitz assured her
that he knew what he was doing.
Meanwhile word went around that
Miss Mulhouse was on a hunger strike in
prison, and being force-fed. Passion for
the movement blew up fervidly among
The Sea Eagle RazorLite 393rl solo inflatable kayak is the girls. They asked permission to hold
ready to travel when you are. Packs down small to fit meetings in the common room. In the
into an RV storage compartment, car trunk or truck end the headmistress agreedthough
bed. Inflates to 10psi in minutes. Whether exploring
not all her teachers supported herand
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slow moving rivers. Measures 1210 x 28 & weighs they had to be moved into the refectory.
3.5 lbs. It packs down to just 22 x 22 x 12 for easy Certain members of the staff went along
storage. Starting at $949* complete with paddles, too. Crazes had swept the school before,
seats, foot rest, pump, storage bag and repair kit. Edith rememberedfor automatic
*NY & WA residents add sales tax. writing, and the novels of Marie Corelli;
Classic texts last winter half the girls were wearing
800-748-8066 M-F 9-5 EST crosses hidden under their blouses, and
Passionate students Dept AT067B swapping around scent bottles supposed
19 N. Columbia St., Ste 1. Port Jefferson, NY 11777 to be filled with holy water. Fitz agreed
Real learning with Edith that the force-feeding was
barbaric, but he said that Laura Mul-
at the Made in USA Since 1982. house had gone to Oxford Street intent

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only encouraged hysterical behavior.

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At the end of one afternoon, when
Edith and Fitz climbed the stairs to the
Discussion-based, WWW. MERCERANDSONS.COM French cupboard, its door was daubed
evening classes CATALOG 1-800-705-2828 SWATCHES with slogans in white paint. END THIS
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In her shock Edith was confused for a
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Annapolis, MD self-publishing services Dont be silly. Its nothing to do with
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us. Its those blasted suffragettes.
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Fitz was right, of courseit turned
www.sjc.edu out the slogans were all over the place,
the work of the girls whod been sus-
pended and whod crept back with a
bucket of whitewash while the school
was in afternoon lessons. He said Edith
had better not stay, there was bound to
be uproar. Sick with her disappointment,
she made her way downstairs. All that

92 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
was left for her now was to return to her
lodgings, heat up her supper of leftover
meat and vegetables and rice pudding
over the paraffin lamp, prepare her les-
sons for the next day. I might as well be
dead, she thought, crossing the school
garden. The evening was tenderly sunlit
and warm, and a little breeze turned the
leaves of the young beech trees pale side
outbut all of its loveliness was wasted.
She was waylaid by a fourth-former, a

Sometimes rain
drummed on the
sloping roof, enclosing
them; sometimes the
sun baked down on it
and their skins were
slick with sweat.
big-bosomed gushing girl called Ursula
Smythe with a WSPU badge pinned to
her lapel. Ursula was carrying a petition
clipped to a board.
Miss Carew, do you support votes
for women? Will you sign the petition
for our poor Miss Mulhouse?
Bad-temperedly, Edith pushed the
petition away. For goodness sake, Worlds Finest Eye Cream!
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T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 93
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11812 N Creek Pkwy N, Ste 103Bothell, WA 98011 blouses paraded calmly, arm in arm, or before. Isnt it all so foul? Dont you hate
chased one another squealing around the idea of all this death and pain?
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tm already knitting socks for soldiers. Edith explain. Whatever my opinions are,
and Fitz were on a bench at a turn in the how can I stay at home teaching French
INCREASE AFFECTION path, tucked behind some holly bushes; to little girls, when other men are giving
Created by
when Edith raised her voice Fitz warned their lives out there?
Winnifred Cutler, her that the girls were watching, but She thought that if only she could
Ph.D. in biology she hardly cared. He had his back half- touch him, she could win him back.
from U. of Penn,
post-doc Stanford. turned, with his shoulder in its ghastly What does your wife think?
Co-discovered khaki hunched against her, as if he were He turned his hooded eyes on her,
human pheromones only enduring their conversation. His gleaming in righteous anger. Dont
in 1986
black hair, which had been carelessly speak about my wife.
(Time 12/1/86; and
Newsweek 1/12/87) unkempt in the days when he read Then Edith guessed that he had a
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Dr. Cindy (FL) 13 orders I was out at an upscale AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to Atlantic Address Change, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-
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up to me: the surgeon from Harvard, a Greek who 800-234-2411). Privacy: we make portions of our customer list available to carefully screened companies that offer
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94 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC
 scene, contaminating it. She jumped
up from the bench as if she had to save
herself from his new patriotic stupidity.
But no matter how she saw through his
condemnation, she couldnt escape it:
He had power over her, because of what
had happened in the French cupboard.
It was another sentimental postcard: Miosz
She was unchaste, she had forfeited A Biography
the white flower of a blameless life, she Andrzej Franaszek
wasnt the kind of woman a man would EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY
go to war for. Fitz was allowed to think
Aleksandra Parker Michael Parker
this if he liked. She walked away from
him through the garden without looking + A Literary Hub Books to Read Selection
back once, and went inside the school to Tolerant, perceptive, beautifully written
collect her booksshe had 10 minutes, and utterly objective . . . Generous excerpts
thankfully, before classes started. She of Mioszs writing [makes] it almost an
needed to sit for a moment in the class-
anthology of his poetry and essays . . . The
room, to collect herself, because her legs
Parkers translation is not only elegant, but
were shaking.
also generally faithful to the original. . . A
And on her way up the back stairs
she met Laura Mulhouse coming down. magnificent [and] sensitively translated
Laura had spent the summer at home biography of a very great poet.
with her mother, recovering from her Donald Rayfield, Literary Review
ordeal in prison; now shed quietly Belknap Press $35.00

resumed her teaching. The girls hadnt

made any great fuss over her. The head- Far-Right Politics in Europe
mistress and all the other teachers had
Jean-Yves Camus Nicolas Lebourg
TRANSLATED BY Jane Marie Todd
How can you give Has much of interest to say about the
yourself to this broad span of right-wing movements in
Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Eastern
beastly war? she Europe; about the influence of thinkers like
raged. I cant believe the antidemocratic Italian philosopher Julius
Evola (a favorite of top Trump adviser Stephen
you dont see through Bannon) and Alexander Dugin, the intellectual
it all as I do. guru of Putinism; and about the contacts
among all of these.
been reinstated; no one spoke now about David Bell, The Nation
the madness of last term. Edith stopped Belknap Press $29.95
H U LTO N - D E U T S C H C O L L E C T I O N / C O R B I S ; M U S E U M O F LO N D O N /

to let her pass on the narrow staircase.

Laura didnt look as intense as she used Courting Death
to: She was oddly stooped and her hair
The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment
lay dead flat and her complexion was
lusterless and clammy. Edith remem- Carol S. Steiker Jordan M. Steiker
HERITAGE/GETTY; JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE

bered what shed read about force- +A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book
feeding: the India-rubber tube pushed
The Steikers deliver an extraordinarily well-
up the womens noses, the indignity and
dreadful pain and the choking and vom- documented, forceful and ferocious assault
iting. Both of them were broken, Edith on state and federal administration of capital
thought. In their shame, they could punishment. . . Courting Death is, almost
hardly bear to look at each other. certainly, the best book on this subject.
Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post
Tessa Hadley, who lives in London, is the Belknap Press $29.95
author of six novels and two short-story
collections. This story appears in Bad
Dreams and Other Stories, published in H A RVA R D U N I V E RS I T Y P R E SS | w w w.hup.har vard .ed u
the U.S. in May.

T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2017 95
THE BIG QUESTION

Q:
What is the best exit
of all time?
noticed the shows poor Thomas J. Straka,
attendance, and said, Five Pendleton, S.C.
people? I aint performing Richard Nixon exited
Phil Keoghan, host, near Mecca), and Buddha for no motherfucking five twice. After he lost the
The Amazing Race (who meditated beneath a people. He turned and gubernatorial election
At 10:56 p.m. on July 20, pipal tree in India). After slowly walked offstage as, in California, in 1962, he
1969, Neil Armstrong their exits, each founded a on cue, the Sanford and Son famously said, You dont
exited the Eagle, religion. More than 4 billion theme started right back have Nixon to kick around
Apollo 11s lunar module, people now follow one of up again. anymore. And then, after
and entered the history these faiths. he resigned the presidency,
books. As half a billion Stephanie Danler, author, he gave that iconic victory
people watched live from Sweetbitter wave from the White House
Earth, Armstrong became The Irish exit, otherwise South Lawn. Both exits are
the first human to walk on known as leaving a party in the history books.
the moon. without saying goodbye.
Its the best thing to hap- Gary Kohl, Toronto, Canada
Brian Wolly, digital editor, pen to party etiquette in Socrates crushed his
Smithsonian magazine my lifetime. Do not pause persecutors arguments,
By voluntarily stepping and make a drinks date that took his poison, and left
down from the presidency you will surely cancel. Do a legacy that has lasted
after two terms, George not get roped into one last through the ages.
Washington did his part to tequila shot or a nightcap
keep the United States from at a murky after-party.
becoming an autocracy. His Fetch your belongings, get
farewell address laid out into your Lyft, draft your
an exemplary vision for the thank-you text, and enjoy
country he helped build, Sacha Zimmerman, senior the silence.
forewarning against messy editor, The Atlantic
international entanglements Elvis, of course, famously READER RESPONSES
and petty domestic disputes. left the building. Bo Wang, Palo Alto, Calif.
In short, Washington taught Pheidippides, the
us how to say goodbye. Jen Kirkman, comedian and ancient-Greek foot soldier
author, I Know What Im turned courier, is reported
Michael Finkel, author, DoingAnd Other Lies I to have run from Marathon Margaret Whitt, Gerton, N.C.
The Stranger in the Woods Tell Myself to Athens to deliver news Thelma and Louise joy-
Its a three-way tie The best exit of all time is of the Greeks victory over ously driving at top speed
between Jesus (who left comedy folklore. The story the Persians in the Battle over a cliffcredits roll.
society to wander alone goes that Redd Foxx was of Marathon. We are vic- Want to see your name on this page?
in the Sinai desert for slowly walking onstage to torious! he uttered, before Email bigquestion@theatlantic.com
40 days), Muhammad the Sanford and Son theme collapsing and passing on with your response to the question for
our September issue: What was the
(who retreated to a cave song when he stopped, to the afterworld. most important letter in history?

96 JUNE 2017 T H E AT L A N T IC Illustrations by GRAHAM ROUMIEU

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