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O F N O PA R T Y O R C L I Q U E
VOL. 335–NO. 1 JANUARY 2025 CONTENTS

Features

24
Boley Rides Again
America’s oldest
Black rodeo is back.
By Caleb Gayle

38
COVER STORY
Walk on Air Against
Your Better Judgment
What Seamus Heaney gave me
By Caitlin Flanagan

48
The Fraudulent
Science of Success
Business schools are in the
grips of a scandal that threatens
to undermine their most
influential research—and the
credibility of an entire field.
By Daniel Engber

58
What Happens When You
Lose Your Country?
By Adrienne LaFrance
In 1893, a U.S.-backed coup destroyed
Hawai‘i’s sovereign government. Some
Hawaiians want their nation back.
Aloe vera in Kula, Maui

PHOTOGRAP H BY BRENDAN GEORGE KO 5

JANUARY 2025

Front Dispatches Culture & Critics Back

8
The Commons
11
OPENING ARGUMENT
76
OMNIVORE
88
FICTION
Discussion & Debate The End of Democratic I’m a Pizza Sicko Zamboni
Delusions My quest to make By Honor Jones
The Trump Reaction the perfect pie
and what comes next By Saahil Desai
By George Packer
96
15 80
FILM
Caleb’s Inferno
A crossword by
Caleb Madison
POLITICS Bob Dylan’s Carnival Act
The Gender War Is Here His identity was a performance.
What women learned in 2024 His writing was sleight of hand.
By Sophie Gilbert He bamboozled his own
audience.
By James Parker

18
POLITICS
Marauding Nation
In Trump’s second term, the
84
BOOKS
U.S. could become a global The Longevity Revolution
bully. We need to radically rethink
By David Frum what it means to be old.
By Jonathan Rauch

21
POLITICS 87
Joe Rogan Is the Says the Wind
Mainstream Media Now A poem by David Baker
What happens when the out- On the Cover
siders seize the microphone?
By Helen Lewis

STEVE PYKE / GETTY

6 JANUARY 2025
Behind the Cover: In this month’s cover story, second father of sorts, Flanagan writes, and the poet and
“Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment” (p. 38), his work shaped her understanding of the world. The
Caitlin Flanagan writes about her relationship with the
poet Seamus Heaney. Heaney first met the Flanagan family
during a year spent teaching English at UC Berkeley, where
Flanagan’s father, Tom, was a professor. Heaney became a
cover image shows Heaney at the Royal Society of Litera-
ture, in London, in 1995, months before he was awarded
that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director
THE

Donald Trump is
Washington’s the tyrant the
first president feared,
Nightmare Tom Nichols wrote in the
November 2024 issue.

Letters

Thank you, Tom Nichols, independence; our forefathers skills. He is a domineering

for your timely article pro- died to keep it. For nearly 250 bully who retaliates against

T
filing our Founding Father. years, we’ve dedicated ourselves anyone who challenges him.
President George Washington to getting it right. His moral decision making is
modeled key tenets of public Do we have any idea what based on self-interest; he lacks
service: Be a citizen, serve with we stand to lose? emotional intelligence, and
integrity, graciously pass the Peter Brown his personality is defined by
responsibility on to the next Lyman, Maine paranoia and victimhood. His
citizen. Choosing to juxtapose principal skill for influencing
Washington’s virtues against I admire Tom Nichols’s writing others is creating an attractive
the abomination that is Don- and analysis. I teach courses image and selling a product.
ald Trump not only is appro- on leadership and ethics at In times like these, we need
priate, but should serve as a Georgetown University’s a true leader, not a salesman.
wake-up call to all Americans. Walsh School of Foreign Ser- Kenneth Williams
Sadly, it seems many Ameri- vice. I conducted a review of Chapel Hill, N.C.
cans have lost touch with our 44 peer-reviewed academic-
history. I hope this changes research articles that analyzed As I read “Washington’s
before we find ourselves in various aspects of Trump’s Nightmare,” I returned to
a mad scramble to reclaim leadership style. My con- the historian Erica Armstrong
our more perfect union. Our clusion was that Trump has Dunbar’s Never Caught: The
patriots fought hard for our extremely limited leadership Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit

8 JANUARY 2025
 C OM MONS
DISCUSSION

&
DEBATE

of Their Runaway Slave, Ona I’m grateful for Nichols’s potentially, a diversion from Something has to be done
Judge. Dunbar’s book tells the assessment of Washington’s the example he offers us in our to put an end to this. We need
story of a woman enslaved by legacy. But this aspect of it current struggle with an enforceable code of conduct
George and Martha Washing- deserves deeper engagement. authoritarianism. for the nation’s highest court.
ton, who fled the president’s Kevin L. Cole Seth Wittner
residence in 1796. Washington Sioux Falls, S.D. Worcester, Mass.
pursued Judge until his death. The End of Judicial
The article and book make T om N e ch ols rep l e e s: Independence I graduated from law school in
for a problematic juxtaposition: One of America’s greatest 2010. I didn’t know then that
I, too, celebrate Washington’s Thank you to the many read- achievements could those were the halcyon days,
achievements, his heroism ers who appreciated my look disappear overnight, Anne when precedents such as Roe
and devotion to the republic. back at our first president. Applebaum wrote in the v. Wade and its landmark argu-
But Tom Nichols’s sometimes I, too, found the distance October 2024 issue. ments seemed unassailable. I
hagiographic treatment of the between George Washington was only 25. I had bought into
first president gave me pause. and Donald Trump almost Anne Applebaum provided the teachings about the sanctity
Nichols devotes only one too painful to grasp. Peter an important reminder that of the judiciary’s role in our
passage—about 150 words— Brown raises the real prob- some Supreme Court justices legal system. I believed—I still
to the problem of Washington lem of poor historical literacy appear loyal to President Don- believe—in the ethics of my
and slavery. I understand that among Americans, but I ald Trump and not the Consti- profession, in the dignity of our
his larger interest is in how wonder if the larger issue is tution. But their bad behavior highest courts and what they
Washington “set the standard that our politics have become does not end there: Some are and their decisions symbolize.
of patriotic character for his amoral and transactional, loyal, too, to the billionaire class. Respect for tradition and the
successors” and not necessarily something that Washington Justice Samuel Alito went analysis of capable scholars and
in the glaring contradiction of would have abhorred and that on an expensive fishing trip judges of years past was crucial
Washington and the people he education alone cannot solve. with the billionaire Paul Singer, to my training. But I wonder
enslaved. But if one is to com- Perhaps Kenneth Williams is staying at a lodge that charges what younger people sitting
pare Washington’s virtues with closer to the mark by noting more than $1,000 a night for in constitutional-law classes
Trump’s, this contradiction that Trump, above all else, a room. Afterward, Alito did must think today, having now
demands attention. Shouldn’t is the product of a modern not recuse himself from cases witnessed the ugly, frayed edges
we consider Ona Judge’s night- phenomenon—marketing. involving his benefactor’s hedge of our democracy. What do
mare, as she was pursued I understand Kevin Cole’s fund. Justice Clarence Thomas, these sobering, disappointing
relentlessly by the Washing- objection regarding Washing- not to be outdone, has enjoyed lessons mean for the practice
tons for having dared to claim ton and slavery, but not every gifts and favors from several of law in the future?
what Washington himself had thought and reflection dealing billionaires, taking at least 26 Brittlynn Mourgue
fought for—freedom, dignity, with the first president ought to flights on private jets. Thomas New York, N.Y.
certain unalienable rights? center on slavery. Washington and Alito claimed that they
Nichols prominently features rebelled against an important didn’t know that they were To respond to Atlantic articles or
submit author questions to The Commons,
General John Kelly’s remark institution of his day—monar- obligated to report these far- please email [email protected].
that after serving as president, chism—and to judge him from from-trivial gifts. Include your full name, city, and state.
Washington went home. When the 21st century because he
the Washingtons returned to did not right one of the other Correction: “The Most Remote Place in the World” (November 2024) stated
Mount Vernon, what did their grievous wrongs of the 18th that, relative to the universe, the plane of the International Space Station’s orbit
slaves think? strikes me as ahistorical and, never changes. In fact, because of the Earth’s oblateness, it does shift over time.

edetoreal offeces & correspondence The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column. Manuscripts will not be returned. For instructions on sending
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9
D I S PAT C H E S
OPE NING A RGU M E N T

THE END OF
D E M O C R AT I C
DELUSIONS
The Trump Reaction
and what comes next
BY G E ORG E PAC K E R

The Roosevelt Republic—the progressive

T
age that extended social welfare and equal
rrights to a widening circle of Americans—
righ
eendured from the 1930s to the 1970s. At
end
t end of that decade, it was overthrown
the
bby the t Reagan Revolution, which expanded
iindividual liberties on the strength of a con-
indi
sservative free-market ideology, until it in
serv
t crashed against the 2008 financial cri-
turn
s The era that followed has lacked a con-
sis.
vvincing name and a clear identity. It’s been
vinc
vvariously called the post–post–Cold War,
vari
post-neoliberalism, the Great Awokening,

11
Dispatches

and the Great Stagnation. But politics, it’s something new in experience of oppression that the Electoral College. By this
the 2024 election has shown our national politics—which would determine their collec- thinking, the ultimate obsta-
that the dominant political explains why Trump has been tive political behavior, driving cle to the American promise
figure of this period is Donald misunderstood and written off them far to the left on issues is the Constitution itself. The
Trump, who, by the end of his at every turn. Reaction is insu- such as immigration, policing, United States needs to become
second term, will have loomed lar and aggrieved, and it paints and transgender rights. less republican and more dem-
over American life for as long as in dark tones. It wants to undo The 2024 election exploded ocratic, with electoral reforms
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dozen progress and reverse history, this illusion. Nearly half of Lati- and perhaps a second consti-
years as president. We are liv- restoring the nation to some nos and a quarter of Black men tutional convention to give
ing in the Trump Reaction. By imagined golden age when voted for Trump. In New York more power to the people. This
the standard of its predecessors, the people ruled. They want a City he did better in Queens analysis contains some undeni-
we’re still at the beginning. strongman with the stomach to and the Bronx, which have able truths—the public’s voice
This new era is neither pro- trample on the liberal pieties of majority nonwhite populations, is thwarted by structural bar-
gressive nor conservative. The the elites who sold them out. than in Manhattan, with its plu- riers, partisan machinations,
organizing principle in Trump’s This is why so many vot- rality of wealthy white people. and enormous quantities of
chaotic campaigns, the animat- ers are willing to tolerate—in M. Gessen of The New York plutocratic cash. As long as
ing passion among his sup- some cases, celebrate—Trump’s Republican presidents contin-
porters, has been a reactionary vile language and behavior; his ued to lose the popular vote,
turn against dizzying change, love affairs with foreign dicta- the majoritarian argument was
specifically the economic and tors; his readiness to toss aside tempting, even if its advocates
cultural transformations of the norms, laws, the Constitu- ignored the likelihood that a
past half century: the globaliza- tion itself. Asked by pollsters new constitution would turn
tion of trade and migration, the if they’re concerned about the TRUMP out to be less democratic than
VOTERS
transition from an industrial to state of democracy, these voters DON’T THINK the old one.
an information economy, the answer yes—not because they HE WILL But every election is a
growing inequality between fear its demise, but because it DESTROY reminder that the country
metropolis and hinterland, has already failed them. They DEMOCRACY; is narrowly divided and has
the end of the traditional fam- don’t think Trump will destroy THEY THINK been for decades, with fre-
ily, the rise of previously disen- democracy; he’ll restore it to HE’LL quent changes of control in
franchised groups, the “brown- the people. RESTORE the House of Representatives.
IT TO THE
ing” of the American people. The triumph of the Trump PEOPLE. Now that Trump has won the
Trump’s basic appeal is a vow Reaction should put an end to popular vote and the Electoral
to take power away from the two progressive illusions that College, the majoritarian illu-
elites and invaders who have have considerably strength- sion, like the demographic one,
imposed these changes and ened it. One is the notion that should be seen for what it is:
return the country to its right- identity is political destiny. For an impediment to Democratic
ful owners—the real Ameri- a long time, the Democratic success. It relieved the party of
cans. His victory demonstrated Party regarded demographic Times called it “not a good night the need to listen and persuade
the appeal’s breadth in blue and change in America, the com- for solidarity,” but the presump- rather than expecting the dei
red states alike, among all ages, ing “minority majority,” as tion of like-mindedness among ex machina of population
ethnicities, and races. a consoling promise during immensely diverse groups of and rule changes to do the
For two and a half centu- interim Republican victories: voters should be retired, along work of politics.
ries American politics alter- As the country turned less with the term people of color, When Democrats lose a
nated between progressive and white, it would inevitably turn which has lost any usefulness presidential election, they
conservative periods, played more blue. In the past decade for political analysis. descend into a familiar quar-
between the 40-yard lines of this notion was absorbed into Adjacent to the demo- rel over whether the party
liberal democracy. The values an ideological framework that graphic illusion is a majori- moved too far to the left or to
of freedom, equality, and rule became the pervasive world- tarian one. By this theory, the the center. This time the ques-
of law at least received lip ser- view of progressives—a meta- Democratic Party is kept out of tion seems especially irrelevant;
vice; the founding documents physics of group identity in power by a white Republican their political problem runs so
enjoyed the status of civic scrip- which a generalized “people minority that thwarts the pop- much deeper. The Democratic
ture; the requisite American of color” (adjusted during ular will through voter suppres- Party finds itself on the wrong
mood was optimism. Although the social-justice revolution sion, gerrymandering, judicial side of a historic swing toward
reaction has dominated local of 2020 to “BIPOC”) were legislating, the filibuster, the right-wing populism, and tac-
or regional (mainly southern) assumed to share a common composition of the Senate, and tical repositioning won’t help.

12 JANUARY 2025
 OPE NING A RGU M E N T

The mood in America, as in pro-government. A realign- towns. But something pro- disappeared; and the absence
electorates all over the world, is ment has been going on since found changed around 2008. of any institutions that might
profoundly anti-establishment. the early ’70s: Democrats now I spent the years after the have provided help, including
Trump had a mass movement claim the former Republican financial crisis reporting in the Democratic Party. It was
behind him; Kamala Harris base of college-educated profes- parts of the country that were hard to miss the broken land-
was installed by party elites. sionals, and Republicans have being ravaged by the Great scape that lay open for Trump,
He offered disruption, chaos, replaced Democrats as the party Recession and the long decline but the establishments of both
and contempt; she offered a of the working class. As long that had preceded it, and were parties didn’t see it, and neither
tax break for small businesses. as globalization, technology, growing hostile toward the did most of the media, which
He spoke for the alienated; she and immigration were widely country’s first Black presi- had lost touch with the work-
spoke for the status quo. seen as not only inevitable but dent. Three things recurred ing class. The morning after
Democrats have become positive forces, the Democratic everywhere I went: a convic- Trump’s shocking victory in
the party of institutionalists. Party appeared to ride the wave tion that the political and eco- 2016, a colleague approached
Much of their base is met- of history, while Republicans nomic game was rigged for me angrily and said, “Those
ropolitan, credentialed, eco- depended on a shrinking pool the benefit of distant elites; a were your people, and you
nomically comfortable, and of older white voters in dying sense that the middle class had empowered them by making

ILLUST RATION BY BEN HICKEY 13

Dispatches OPE NING A RGU M E N T

other people feel sorry for moved on from Trump’s hate- and the country to democra- in just a few hands the power
them—and it was wrong!” ful rhetoric and threats of vio- cies around the world. to destroy the very notion of
In some ways, the Biden lence against migrants and The Trump Reaction will objective truth. “Legacy jour-
administration and the Harris political opponents. His cam- test opponents with a difficult nalism is dead,” Musk crowed
campaign tried to reorient the paign was unforgivable—but balancing act, one that recalls on his own X in the week
Democratic Party back toward in the words of W. H. Auden’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous before the election. Instead of
the working class, which was poem “Spain,” “History to the line about a first-rate intel- chasing phantoms on social
once its backbone. Biden defeated / May say Alas but ligence holding two opposed media, journalists would make
pursued policies and passed cannot help or pardon.” ideas in mind while still being better use of our dwindling
legislation to create jobs that The Trump Reaction is able to function. The Demo- resources, and perhaps regain
don’t require a college degree more fragile than it now seems. cratic Party has to undertake some of the public’s trust, by
in communities that have Trump’s behavior in the last the necessary self-scrutiny that doing what we’ve done in every
been left behind. Harris stu- weeks of the campaign did not starts with the errors of Biden, age: expose the lies and graft of
diously avoided campaigning Harris, and their inner circle, oligarchs and plutocrats, and
on her identity as a Black and but that extends to the party’s tell the stories of people who
South Asian woman, appealing long drift away from the most can’t speak for themselves.
instead to a vague sense of patri- pressing concerns of ordinary A few weeks before the
otism and hope. But Biden’s THE TRUMP Americans, toward the eccen- election, Representative Chris
industrial policy didn’t pro- REACTION tric obsessions of its donors and Deluzio, a first-term Demo-
duce results fast enough to off- IS MORE activists. But this examination crat, was campaigning door-
set the damage of inflation—no FRAGILE can’t end in paralysis, because at to-door in a closely divided
one I talked with in Maricopa THAN IT NOW the same time, the opposition district in western Pennsyl-
County, Arizona, or Washing- SEEMS. will have to act. Much of this vania. He’s a Navy veteran, a
ton County, Pennsylvania, this action will involve civil society moderate on cultural issues,
year seemed to have heard of and the private sector along and a homegrown economic
the Inflation Reduction Act. with surviving government populist—critical of corpora-
Harris remained something of institutions—to prevent by legal tions, deep-pocketed donors,
a cipher because of Biden’s stub- augur a coherent second presi- means the mass internment and and the ideology that privileges
born refusal to step aside until dency. He will surround him- deportation of migrants from capital over human beings and
it was too late for her or any- self with ideologues, oppor- communities in which they’ve communities. At one house he
one else to make their case to tunists, and crackpots, and been peacefully living for years; spoke with a middle-aged white
Democratic voters. The party’s because he has no interest in to save women whose lives are policeman named Mike, who
economic policies turned pop- governing, they will try to fill threatened by laws that would had a Trump sign in his front
ulist, but its structure—unlike the vacuum and turn on one punish them for trying to save yard. Without budging on his
the Republican Party’s mass another. The Trump adminis- themselves; to protect the pub- choice for president, Mike
cult of personality—appeared tration, with a favorable Con- lic health from Robert F. Ken- ended up voting for Deluzio.
to be a glittering shell of power gress, will overreach on issues nedy Jr., the nation’s security On Election Night, in a state
brokers and celebrities around a such as abortion and immigra- from Tulsi Gabbard, and its carried by Trump, Deluzio out-
hollow core. Rebuilding will be tion, soon alienating important coffers from Elon Musk. performed Harris in his district,
the work of years, and realign- parts of its new coalition. It Journalists will have a spe- especially in the reddest areas,
ment could take decades. will enact economic policies cial challenge in the era of and won comfortably. What
So much of the Trump that favor the party’s old allies the Trump Reaction. We’re does this prove? Only that
Reaction’s triumph is unfair. among the rich at the expense living in a world where facts politics is best when it’s face-to-
It’s unfair that a degenerate of its new supporters among instantly perish upon contact face and based on respect, that
man has twice beaten a decent, the less well-off. It’s quite pos- with human minds. Local news most people are complicated
capable woman. It’s unfair that sible that, approaching 80, is disappearing, and a much- and even persuadable, and
Harris graciously conceded Trump will find himself once depleted national press can that—in the next line from the
defeat, whereas Trump, in her more among the least popular barely compete with the media Fitzgerald quote—one can “see
position, would once again presidents in the country’s his- platforms of billionaires who that things are hopeless and yet
have kick-started the machinery tory. But in the meantime, he control users algorithmically, be determined to make them
of lies that he built on his own will have enormous latitude with an endless stream of con- otherwise.”
behalf, continuing to under- to abuse his power for enrich- spiracy theories and deepfakes.
mine trust in democracy for ment and revenge, and to shred The internet, which promised
years to come. It’s unfair that the remaining ties that bind to give everyone information George Packer is a staff writer
most of the media immediately Americans to one another, and a voice, has consolidated at The Atlantic.

14 JANUARY 2025
 POLITICS

T H E G E N D E R WA R I S H E R E
What women learned in 2024
BY SOPHIE GILBERT

hroughout Ameri- might mean for our status entourage intent on imposing Musk, who has shown great

T can political his-

tory, two capable,
qualified, experi-
enced women have
run for president on
and sense of self. I simply
wished for voters to reject the
idea, pushed so fervently by
those on Trump’s side, that
women should be subservi-
its archaic vision of gender
politics on the nation, the
Trump-Vance ticket seemed
to outright reject ideas of
women’s autonomy and
enthusiasm for personally
inseminating women, released
an ad referring to Kamala
Harris as a “C word.” (The
ad, which was deleted a few
a major-party ticket. Both have ent incubators, passively rais- equality. Theirs was a cam- days later, winkingly revealed
lost to Donald Trump, perhaps ing the next generation of paign of terminally online the C to stand for “Commu-
the most famous misogynist men who disdain them. This masculinity, largely designed nist.”) And on X, Musk him-
ever to reach the highest office. wish did not pan out. “Your for men, expressed in brutish self reposted a theory that “a
But in 2024, what was even body, my choice. Forever,” terms of violence, strength, Republic of high status males
more alarming than in 2016 the white-supremacist influ- and power. Trump insisted, is best for decision making.”
was how Trump’s campaign encer Nick Fuentes, who has in one late campaign appear- The former Fox News host
seemed to be promoting a ver- dined with Trump at Mar-a- ance, that he would be a pro- Tucker Carlson excitedly com-
sion of the country in which Lago, posted on X on Election tector of women, “whether the pared Trump’s return to office
men dominate public life, while Night. “Women threatening women like it or not.” The vice to a strict father coming home
women are mostly confined to sex strikes like LMAO as if president–elect, J. D. Vance, to give his wayward daughter
the home, deprived of a voice, you have a say,” the right-wing was revealed to have personal “a vigorous spanking.”
and neutralized as a threat to troll Jon Miller wrote on the disgust for child-free women, None of this is new, neces-
men’s status and ambitions. same site. whom he had described as “cat sarily. But as of this writing,
This time around, I For Trump, eliminating ladies” and “sociopathic.” He’d men ages 18 to 29 have swung
wasn’t hopeful. I didn’t let the constitutional right to an also, on one podcast, affirmed a staggering 15 points to the
myself entertain any quixotic abortion was apparently only that the entire function “of the right since 2020, according to
notions about what having the beginning. Bolstered by postmenopausal female” was an Associated Press survey of
a woman in the most pow- that definitive Supreme Court caring for grandchildren. The registered voters. A few years
erful position in the world win and flanked by a hateful super PAC founded by Elon ago, researchers at Penn State

15
Dispatches

found that people’s alignment asinine to everyone else. (“Tam- doomed “capitalist democ- N o t u l l T r u m p voters
with the ideals of “hegemonic pon Tim,” the right-wing racy.” Trump’s ally and former embrace misogyny. And pre-
masculinity”—the celebration social-media nickname given aide John McEntee posted liminary exit polling shows
of male dominance in society to Tim Walz for approving a on X in October: “Sorry we that a sizable minority of
and of stereotypically mascu- measure that supplies period want MALE only voting. The American women voted for
line traits—predicted their products to Minnesota public- 19th might have to go.” For him this time; in an economy
support for Trump in the 2016 school students, is an insult all the attention-getting antics that’s getting more precarious
and 2020 elections. Since then, only if you’re 8 years old or ter- of Trump’s extremely online for every successive genera-
our cultural environment has rified of women’s bodies.) contingent, his brain trust tion, both men and women
been flooded with ever more But the philosophy of the consists mainly of very wealthy, may have been swayed by the
avatars of dopey machismo: people soon to be in power isn’t very powerful men who think promise of prosperity. Still,
steroid-ingesting, crypto- informed just by emotionally women’s rights have simply the teased enforcement of out-
shilling, energy-drink-chugging stunted Twitch streamers and gone too far. Forget the hope dated gender roles has clearly
bros; YouTubers and podcast playground bullies. Peter Thiel, for a female president, or the connected with young men
hosts and misogynist influenc- the entrepreneur and conser- fury at the fact that a charm- in particular. Among voters
ers, all profiting wildly from vative power broker who did ing, hardworking, genuinely ages 18 to 29, the gender gap
the juvenile attention econ- more than anyone to further inspirational candidate like was striking: about 16 points,
omy. The language that the Vance’s post-law career and Harris couldn’t break through according to the AP.
Trump-Vance campaign used helped fund his bid for Sen- all the accreted layers of Ameri- The Trump-Vance adminis-
was intended to resonate with ate, wrote in a 2009 essay that can prejudice. What is going to tration can’t obligate women to
this audience, even if it sounded women getting the vote had happen to women now? go back to the 1960s, though.

16 ILLUSTR ATION BY BEN HICKEY

 POLITICS

It can’t force women out of the own needs and taking care of and morally reprehensible. politics. In September, Semafor
workforce. And it can’t mandate one another. Within hours of He has shamed women for reported that a shadowy con-
that women be subservient to the election result becoming the way they look, for aging, servative network had been
men, sexually, romantically, or clear, Google searches went for having opinions. (Those paying influencers to promote
professionally. One has to won- up sharply for South Korea’s of us who have public perso- sexualized smears of Harris. In
der, then, what will become of feminist protest movement nas online have experienced October, a billboard in Ohio
the men who have been reared “4B”—a social philosophy this sort of treatment too, and briefly drew consternation
on Andrew Tate TikToks and that advocates for women not have seen it snowball with for displaying a mocked-up
violent gonzo porn devoted to to date, marry, have sex with, his encouragement.) None of image of Harris on her hands
women’s sexual degradation. or have children with men. this is in any way negated by and knees, about to engage in
The gender divide is about to (South Korea currently has his decision to make a woman a sex act. (It was paid for by a
grow into a chasm. the lowest fertility rate of any his chief of staff, or to nomi- towing company.)
In the U.S., 63 percent of country in the world.) nate women for key positions. The old analytical terms
men under 30 are currently American conservatism has Even before Harris offi- we use to describe sexism in
single, compared with 34 per- long fetishized motherhood in cially became the nominee politics aren’t sufficient to deal
cent of women in the same a way that made it proximate in 2024, Trump’s allies were with this onslaught of repug-
age group, according to the to power—mothers are lion- attacking her in sexualized nant hatred. Michelle Obama
Pew Research Center. This ized and even encouraged to terms, subliminally linking was right, in her closing argu-
suggests that women aren’t seek political office, as long female power to the so-called ment of the 2024 campaign, to
the only ones who may ulti- as it’s understood that they’re threat of unfettered female note that Harris had faced an
mately suffer from this com- doing so on behalf of others. sexuality. Early in July, Alec astonishing double standard:
ing rupture in American life. Sarah Palin, the first female Both the media and Ameri-
So, too, will the men who have vice-presidential candidate on cans more broadly had picked
been trained to see women as a Republican ticket, tried to apart her arguments, bearing,
disgusting, untamable, funda- defang her own ambition by and policy details while skating
mentally inferior to them. suggesting that she was just a over Trump’s “erratic behavior;
For all Vance and Musk hockey mom who got involved. his obvious mental decline; his
purport to worry about birth But the kind of motherhood THE OLD history as a convicted felon, a
rates, I’d argue that they now being promoted on the TERMS WE USE known slumlord, a predator
have done more to dissuade right is much more passive, and TO DESCRIBE found liable for sexual abuse.”
women from having children powerless. It’s the kind mod- SEXISM IN She also captured the stakes
than almost anyone else, by eled by the former Supreme POLITICS of the election when she said
AREN’T
enabling the radicalization and Court clerk Usha Vance, who SUFFICIENT that voters were fundamentally
isolation of Gen Z men. For stands by silently while her TO DEAL making a choice in 2024 about
thousands of years, marriage husband weakly brushes off WITH THIS “our value as women in this
was a necessity for women—a his racist fans’ attacks on his ONSLAUGHT world.” On that front, the peo-
means of financial security and family. It’s also exemplified by OF HATRED. ple have spoken. But women
social acceptance. This isn’t true the tradwives of TikTok and don’t have to play along.
anymore. Many women simply Instagram, who cater to the All his life, Trump has
aren’t willing or remotely moti- male gaze with their doe-eyed; ruined people who get close
vated to attach themselves to paisley-smock-wearing; Kinder, to him. He won’t ruin women,
men who denigrate them, or Kirche, Küche performances of but he will absolutely destroy
to stay in abusive marriages submissive domesticity. a generation of men who take
for the sake of their children, The gender dynamics of Lace—the host of a podcast his vile messaging to heart.
as Vance once seemed to sug- this moment cannot be a dedicated to fatherhood, if And, to some extent, the dam-
gest that they should. surprise to anyone. Since his you can believe it—referred age has already been done.
In my own circle of friends, arrival in politics, in 2015, to Harris on the Fox Business
I see women living contentedly Trump has made his thoughts channel as “the original Hawk
alone rather than settling for on women abundantly clear. Tuah girl,” a reference to a viral
men who don’t respect them. He’s propagated the idea that clip about oral sex. In August, Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer
I see intelligent, kind, high- those of us who don’t flatter Trump circulated a post on his at The Atlantic and the
achieving friends thriving in or agree with him are not just social-media platform, Truth author of the forthcoming Girl
their community, spending difficult but “nasty,” using the Social, that insinuated that on Girl: How Pop Culture
their own money, appreciat- language of disgust to make Harris had performed sexual Turned a Generation of
ing culture, taking care of their women seem contaminated favors to establish her career in Women Against Themselves.

JANUARY 2025 17
 POLITICS

MARAUDING
I
In his first major address as
president, Harry Truman
N AT I O N urged Americans to use their
enormous power “to serve and
In Trump’s second term, the U.S. not to dominate.”
could become a global bully. The date was April 16,
1945. Adolf Hitler was still
B Y D AV I D F R U M alive in his bunker in Ber-
lin. Americans were readying
themselves for a bloody inva-
sion of the Japanese home
islands. The atomic bomb
remained a secret.

18 ILLUSTR ATION BY BEN HICKEY

 Dispatches

Yet Truman’s thoughts were These friendships reinforce tariff wars, by each afflicted vision is not exactly isolation-
already shifting to the postwar U.S. power. By working with country’s hopeless attempt to ist. Trump’s version of “America
future. “We must now learn to the European Central Bank, rescue itself at the expense of First” is predatory.
live with other nations for our for instance, the U.S. was able its neighbors; a world war that In a midsummer interview,
mutual good. We must learn to to freeze hundreds of billions was enabled because demo- Trump demanded that Taiwan
trade more with other nations of dollars of Russian assets cratic powers would not act pay the United States directly
so that there may be, for our after the attack on Kyiv in together in time against a for defense. “I don’t think we’re
mutual advantage, increased 2022. Russia imagined those common threat. The lesson any different from an insurance
production, increased employ- assets beyond American reach; was reinforced by positive post- policy,” he said. When the pod-
ment, and better standards of they were not domiciled in the war experience: the creation of caster Joe Rogan asked Trump
living throughout the world.” global institutions to expand in October about protecting
Truman’s vision inspired trade and preserve the peace; Taiwan, Trump answered in
American world leadership the U.S.-led defeat of Soviet a more revealing way: “They
for the better part of a century. Communism and the trium- want us to protect, and they
From the Marshall Plan of the phant end of the Cold War. want protection. They don’t pay
1940s to the Trans-Pacific But in the years since, the us money for the protection,
Partner ship of the 2010s, harsh experience has faded you know? The mob makes
Americans sought to achieve into half-forgotten history; the you pay money, right?”
security and prosperity for positive experience has curdled American allies in fact make
themselves by sharing secu- TRUMP’S into regrets and doubts. large contributions to collec-
rity and prosperity with like- DEEPEST tive security. Total assistance
minded others. The United POLICY D o n a l o T r u m p is the first to Ukraine from the European
States became the center of GRIEVANCE U.S. president since 1945 to Union nearly matches that of
a network of inter national IS AGAINST reject the worldview formed the United States. South Korea
cooperation—not only on THOSE by the Great Depression, the pays for the construction and
trade and defense, but on FOREIGNERS Second World War, and the maintenance of U.S. facilities
WHO SELL
environmental concerns, law DESIRABLE Cold War. in Korea—and for the salaries
enforcement, financial regula- GOODS AT AN Trump’s vision has no of Koreans who support U.S.
tion, food and drug safety, and ATTRACTIVE place for “mutual good” or forces. But Trump wants direct
countless other issues. PRICE TO “mutual advantage.” To him, cash payments. In a speech to
By enriching and empower- WILLING every trade has a winner and a the Economic Club of Chicago
ing fellow democracies, Ameri- AMERICAN loser. One side’s success is the in October, he called for an
cans enriched and empowered BUYERS. other side’s defeat. “We don’t annual levy of $10 billion from
themselves too. The United beat China in trade,” he com- South Korea as the price of pro-
States has led and sustained plained in the first Republican tection against North Korea.
a liberal world order in part presidential-primary debate Trump seems to have his
because Americans are a gener- of 2015. “We don’t beat eye on other payments too; in
ous people—and even more so Japan … We can’t beat Mex- his first term, he collected ben-
because the liberal world order ico.” His deepest policy griev- efits for himself and members
is a great deal for Americans. ance is against those foreigners of his family. Countries that
Open international trade is who sell desirable goods and wanted favorable treatment
nearly always mutually benefi- services at an attractive price knew to book space at his
cial. Yet there is more to the United States. Yet when nec- to willing American buyers. Washington, D.C., hotel or, it
case than economics. Trade, essary, the U.S. could reach Trump regularly disparages seemed, to dispense business
mutual-protection pacts, and them thanks to its friends. U.S. allies, and threatens to favors to his children. Accord-
cooperation against corrup- Americans who lived abandon them. “We’re being ing to a 2024 report by Demo-
tion and terrorism also make through the great tumult of taken advantage of by every crats on the House Oversight
democracies more secure Truman’s era understood that country all over the world, Committee, Trump’s proper-
against authoritarian adver- the isolationist slogan “Amer- including our allies—and in ties collected at least $7.8 mil-
saries. Other great powers— ica First” meant America alone. many cases, our allies are worse lion from foreign sources dur-
China, India, Russia—face America alone meant America than our so-called enemies,” ing his first term.
suspicious and even hostile weakened. That lesson was he said at a rally this Novem- In his second term, the
coalitions of powerful ene- taught by harsh experience: a ber. But unlike the “America stream of payments may
mies. The United States is depression that was deepened First” movement before World surge into a torrent. Trump
backed by powerful friends. and prolonged by destructive War II, Trump’s “America First” owes more than half a billion

JANUARY 2025 19
Dispatches POLITICS

dollars in civil penalties for before Trump first declared This story is a fantasy. Every president puts a face
defamation and fraud. How himself a candidate for the Trump was no more success- on the abstraction that is the
will he pay? Who will help presidency. The U.S. has not ful than his predecessors at American nation, and gives
him pay? Trump’s need for entered into a new trade- stopping China from convert- words to the American creed.
funds may sway U.S. foreign liberalizing agreement since ing atolls and sandbars in the Few spoke more eloquently
policy more than any strat- the free-trade agreements with South China Sea into military than Ronald Reagan, who
egy consideration. One of his Colombia and Panama nego- bases. Chinese warships men- famously compared the United
largest donors in 2024, Elon tiated by the George W. Bush aced maritime neighbors on States to a “shining city on a
Musk, stands to benefit hugely administration and signed by Trump’s watch. In Septem- hill.” In his farewell address,
from U.S. help with govern- President Barack Obama. The ber 2018, one passed within Reagan asked, “And how stands
ment regulators in China and Trans-Pacific Partnership was the city on this winter night?”
the EU. Musk is also a major rejected by a Republican Sen- Reagan could answer his own
government contractor—and ate during Obama’s last year question in a way that made his
one with strong views about in office. The Biden admin- country proud.
U.S. foreign policy. Over the istration maintained most of The “city on a hill” image
past few years, he has emerged the protectionist measures it ultimately traces back to the
as one of the fiercest critics of inherited from Trump, then UNDER TRUMP, New Testament: “A city that is
American support for Ukraine. added more of its own. AMERICA WILL set upon a hill cannot be hid.”
On November 6, Musk joined But Trump uniquely accel- ACT MORE The visible hilltop location
Trump’s first postelection call erated America’s retreat from PROUDLY, YET imposed extra moral respon-
with Ukrainian President world markets, and will con- HAVE LESS TO sibility on the city dwellers.
BE PROUD OF.
Volodymyr Zelensky. Those tinue to do so. His first-term ITS LEADERS Now the hilltop will become
who invest in Trump— be revision of the North Ameri- WILL POCKET a height from which to exer-
they foreign agents or mercurial can Free Trade Agreement CORRUPT cise arrogant control over
billionaires—may, over the next preserved existing access to EMOLUMENTS; those who occupy the lower
four years, annex U.S. power to U.S. markets for Canada and THE NATION slopes and valleys—the domi-
reshape the world to their liking Mexico in return for raising WILL COWER nance against which Truman
and their profit. higher barriers around all three BEHIND warned. Under Trump, Amer-
TARIFF WALLS,
North American economies. DEMANDING ica will act more proudly, yet
I n 2 0 1 9 , T r u m p delivered He seems likely to reappoint TRIBUTE have less to be proud of. Its
a Fourth of July address on as U.S. trade representative INSTEAD OF leaders will pocket corrupt
the National Mall. The speech the ultra-protectionist Robert EARNING emoluments; the nation will
exulted in the fearsome lethal- Lighthizer, who held that job PARTNER SHIP. cower behind tariff walls,
ity of the U.S. military, but in Trump’s first term. The tar- demanding tribute instead of
Trump had little to say about iffs Trump desires, the protec- earning partnership. Some of
American ideals or democratic tion money he seeks, and his its citizens will delude them-
institutions. Trump has never undisguised affinity for Putin selves that the country has
accepted that the United States and other global predators become great again, while
is strengthened by its values and will weaken America’s stand- in reality it will have become
principles, by a reputation for ing with traditional allies and 45 yards of a U.S. destroyer more isolated and less secure.
trustworthiness and fair deal- new partners. How will the in international waters. In Americans have tried these
ing. The U.S., to him, should United States entice Asian and January 2020, Iran fired a mis- narrow and selfish methods
command respect because it is Pacific partners to support U.S. sile barrage against U.S. forces before. They ended in catastro-
the biggest and strongest bully security policy against China if in Iraq, inflicting 109 trau- phe. History does not repeat
on the block. When his friend they are themselves treated as matic brain injuries. During itself: The same mistakes don’t
Bill O’Reilly asked him in a threats and rivals by the makers Trump’s first presidency, the always carry the same conse-
2017 interview about Vladi- of U.S. trade policy? United States continued to quences. But the turn from
mir Putin, Trump scoffed at Trump supporters tell a fight two shooting wars, one protector nation to predator
the idea that there might be story about Trump’s leader- in Afghanistan and one against nation will carry consequences
any moral difference between ship. They describe him as a the Islamic State in Iraq and bad enough.
the U.S. and Russia. “You think figure of strength who will pre- Syria. Over those same four
our country’s so innocent?” serve world peace by force of years, the Russian forces that
Open trade and defensive personality. Potential aggres- invaded Crimea and eastern
alliances were already bumping sors will be intimidated by his Ukraine in 2014 inflicted more David Frum is a staff writer
into domestic resistance even fierce unpredictability. than 500 civilian casualties. at The Atlantic.

20 JANUARY 2025
POLITICS

T
This October, in the closing
JOE ROGAN IS days of the presidential elec-
tion, the podcaster Joe Rogan
THE MAINSTREAM said something extraordinary.
M E D I A N OW He had just hosted Don-
ald Trump for a three-hour
What happens when the outsiders conversation in his studio in
Austin, Texas, and wanted to
seize the microphone? make clear that he had dis-
cussed a similar arrangement
BY HELEN LEW IS with Kamala Harris’s cam-
paign. “They offered a date
for Tuesday, but I would have
had to travel to her and they
only wanted to do an hour,”

ILLUST RATION BY BEN HICKEY 21

Dispatches

he posted on X. “I strongly The New York Times and The Somehow, the idea that the of Trump’s 18-year-old son,
feel the best way to do it is in Wall Street Journal and televi- mainstream media is made up Barron; Ross even gave Trump
the studio in Austin.” And so sion networks such as CNN. of major corporations has per- a gold Rolex and a customized
Rogan declined to interview Everyone else who’s dissemi- sisted, even though the inter- Tesla Cybertruck during their
the vice president. nating information at scale is net, smartphones, and social livestream. (You don’t get treat-
What a diva, some people treated like a couple of hipsters media have made it possible ment like that from the Wall
said. If you’re offered an inter- running a craft brewery who for anyone to reach an audi- Street Journal editorial board.)
view with a presidential can- are valiantly competing with ence of millions. Two of the Trump’s showmanship,
didate, get off your ass and get Budweiser. most important informa- aggression, and ability to con-
on a plane! But Rogan could That’s simply not true. tion sources of this election fabulate suit this new environ-
dictate his own terms. He is Rogan is the “mainstream cycle have a job that didn’t ment. His inconsistency is not
not competing in the snake media” now. Elon Musk, too. exist even a decade ago: Acyn a problem—these interviews
pit of D.C. journalism, where In the 2024 campaign, both Torabi and Aaron Rupar, who are designed to be entertaining
sitting opposite a major candi- presidential candidates largely watch hours of political ral- and personal, not to nail down
date delivers an instant status skipped newspaper and televi- lies and TV appearances in his current position on abor-
bump. He is the most popular sion sit-downs—the tougher, order to clip them for social tion or interrogate his income-
podcaster alive, with a dedi- more focused “accountability” media. These “clippers” can tax policies. Trump has been
cated audience of right-leaning interviews—in favor of talking drive days of discussion, par- especially enthusiastic in his
men who enjoy mixed martial directly with online personali- ticularly when the context of embrace of this new media
arts, stand-up comedy, and ties. (J. D. Vance, to his credit, a remark is disputed—such as class, but the Democrats
wild speculation about aliens made a point of taking report- when Vance’s 2021 remarks also understand its power: In
(space, not illegal); they are ers’ questions at his events and characterizing Democrats as 2023, Jill Biden addressed a
not political obsessives. Rogan sat down with CNN and the “childless cat ladies” went viral. White House holiday party
knew that Harris needed him Times, among others.) The Today, the divide between for hundreds of influencers.
more than he needed her. result was that both Trump the “mainstream” and the “You’re here because you all
Nothing symbolizes the and Harris got away with outsiders is not about reach. represent the changing way
changed media landscape of reciting slogans rather than Sixty-three percent of Ameri- people receive news and infor-
this past election more than outlining policies. Trump has can adults get at least some mation,” she reportedly said.
Rogan’s casual brush-off. not outlined how his promised of their news from television, At the Democratic National
Within a week, his interview mass deportations might work 42 percent from radio, and Convention, more than 200
with Trump racked up more in practice, nor did we ever 26 percent from print publica- “content creators” were cre-
than 40 million views on You- find out if Harris still held firm tions, according to a 2024 Pew dentialed along with tradi-
Tube alone, and millions more to her previous stances, such as report. But 54 percent get at tional journalists.
on other platforms. No single the abolition of the death pen- least some of their news from Finally, the media divide
event, apart from the Harris- alty and the decriminalization social media—meaning that, is not about resources, either.
Trump debate, had a bigger of sex work. The vacuum was alongside established outlets, Although some of the legacy
audience this election cycle. filled with vibes. they’re relying on sources such outlets are still large, well-
By comparison, Harris’s con- as Infowars videos, Facebook funded companies, so are
tentious interview with Bret T h e c o n c e p t o f the memes, and posts on X. many of the upstarts. Vance,
Baier on Fox News, the most mainstream media arose in the The divide is not about Peter Thiel, and Vivek Rama-
popular of the cable networks, 20th century, when reaching a influence, either. During swamy have all invested in
drew 8 million viewers to the mass audience required infra- Trump’s victory speech in the video platform Rumble,
live broadcast, and another structure—a printing press, Florida, he invited the UFC which went public in 2022
6.5 million on YouTube. or a broadcast frequency, or boss Dana White to say a with a reported valuation of
Those figures demonstrate a physical cable into people’s few words. White thanked $2.1 billion. When The Daily
the absurdity of talking about houses—and institutions. That the streamer Adin Ross, the Wire, a right-wing online news
the “mainstream media” as reality made the media easy to podcaster Theo Von, the organization, tried to hire
many still do, especially those vilify. “The press became ‘the You Tubers known as the the internet personality Ste-
who disparage it. According media’ because the word had Nelk Boys, and the former ven Crowder, he was offered
to a 2021 Pew Research Cen- a manipulative, Madison Ave- NFL players Will Compton $50 million over four years.
ter survey, Americans with a nue, all-encompassing conno- and Taylor Lewan, as well as He rejected this, calling deals
wide range of political views tation, and the press hated it,” Rogan. During the campaign, like these “slave contracts.”
generally agree about which Richard Nixon’s speechwriter all of these men had hosted As for Rogan, he has appar-
outlets fall within this defi- William Safire wrote in his Trump for softball interviews, ently chosen to forsake fact-
nition: newspapers such as 1975 memoir. often with the encouragement checkers and lawyers in favor

22 JANUARY 2025
 POLITICS

of some guy named Jamie who would be out-of-bounds for voices complaining about the We cannot reverse the drift
looks up stuff on Google, but actual journalists. failures of “the media.” On from institutions to individu-
he doesn’t have to do that. And let’s be clear, some the eve of the election, Rogan als. Nor can the new partisan
His last deal with Spotify was influencers are very cozy indeed hosted Musk, that other great outlets be forced to adopt
reportedly worth as much as with the subjects they cover. titan of the new media, to make 20th-century norms. The
$250 million. He could hire a You may not have heard of the the case for Trump—whom Fairness Doctrine—the pol-
whole newsroom if he wanted Instagrammer and Substacker Rogan then endorsed. “The icy, repealed under Ronald
to. But Rogan has intuited, Jessica Reed Kraus, who was legacy media, the mainstream Reagan, that required broad-
correctly, that many Americans formerly a lifestyle influencer, media, is not balanced at all,” casters to reflect contrasting
no longer trust institutions. but she has more than 400,000 said Musk, who personally views—is gone for good. We
They prefer to receive their subscribers on Substack, where donated more than $100 mil- have to let go of the notion
news from trusted individuals. she boasts about her access to lion to Trump’s reelection that “mainstream media” is
efforts. “They’re just a mouth- a category reserved only for
The main beneficiary piece for the Democratic Party.” journalists guided by a profes-
of our outdated ideas about Never mind that, for example, sional code of ethics, a mission
the “mainstream media” is the CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski of public service, and an aspi-
political right. Not so long broke the single most damaging ration toward objectivity or at
ago, conservatives resented story to the Harris campaign— least fairness.
their exclusion from the that she had indeed, in Trump’s Many independent report-
MSM, because they thought it phrase, supported “transgender ers do good and important
painted them as extreme: Sarah operations on illegal aliens that work—I’m thinking of the
BEING
Palin complained about the OUTSIDE THE are in prison.” (This became a YouTuber Coffeezilla’s work
“lamestream media,” while the MAINSTREAM staple of Republican attack on crypto scams, for example,
late Rush Limbaugh preferred IS, TODAY, ads.) Nor did it matter to Musk and Jason Garcia’s investiga-
to call it the “state-controlled SEEN AS MORE that, amid his complaints about tions into Floridian politics on
media” or the “drive-by media.” AUTHENTIC, the standards of the mainstream his Substack, Seeking Rents—
But that’s changed. Being MORE IN TUNE media, he has repeatedly pro- but they are surrounded by a
outside the mainstream is, WITH REAL moted fake stories: about clamorous sea of partisans who
AMERICA.
today, seen as more authentic, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, about operate under new and differ-
more in tune with Real Amer- gangs attacking polling stations ent rules. Flaunt your bias,
ica. Trump’s constant criti- during the recent Venezuelan get cozy with your subjects,
cisms of the “fake-news media” election, and even about a dead and don’t harsh their mel-
have been enthusiastically squirrel whose euthanasia the low by asking uncomfortable
embraced by his downballot right saw as evidence of gov- questions. “You are the media
copycats. Complaints about ernment overreach. When he now,” Musk told X users as
alleged liberal media bias have is proved to be wrong—often the election results came in.
been amplified by commenta- by the same legacy media that It was the truest statement he
tors who are themselves overtly Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and he decries—he tends to delete had made in months.
partisan: Tucker Carlson, Rus- Trump. In January, she joined his posts without a correction To the folks building their
sell Brand, Dan Bongino, Kennedy on his catamaran in or an apology. own platforms, to the influ-
Megyn Kelly, Charlie Kirk, Hawaii, sipping mimosas and encers hopping on catamarans
Alex Jones. The underlying eating pineapple; she attended W h at h a p pe n s n e x t ? To with politicians, to the stream-
premise is that all media skew Trump’s Super Bowl party at me, the picture looks bleak: ers handing out Teslas to their
toward one side or another, but Mar-a-Lago. Reed Kraus is more conspiracy theories, more guests—well done on your tri-
at least these people are honest open about focusing on per- noise, more loudmouths com- umph. Welcome to the main-
about it. That allows them to sonalities, not policy. “Average plaining about other people’s stream media. Now hold your-
speak alongside Trump at ral- Americans don’t have the time bias. It’s hard to see how jour- selves to the same standards you
lies (Kelly), embrace bizarre or patience to sift through what nalistic institutions get rebuilt demand from others.
conspiracy theories (Jones), separates one candidate’s health when so many of their busi-
talk about their encounters care plan from another,” she ness models have collapsed.
with demons (Carlson), and told Semafor. “But they relate The migration of ad dollars
continue to work despite and respond to intimate aspects to Google and Meta means Helen Lewis is a staff writer
multiple allegations of sexual that speak to one’s character.” that—with few exceptions— at The Atlantic and the
assault (Brand, who has denied Often, these very same 20th-century newsrooms are author of the forthcoming
the claims)—all things that influencers are the loudest not coming back. book The Genius Myth.

23
 America’s oldest Black rodeo is back.

B y C A L E B G AY L E
Photographs by
K EN NEDI C A RT ER

24 JANUARY 2025
25
 oley is easy to miss. The flat vista of east- every year. I arrived at the grounds early on a May morn-
ern Oklahoma is briefly interrupted by ing, before the sun pierced the clouds. Karen Ekuban, the
a handful of homes and some boarded- rodeo’s promoter, had already been there for hours.
up buildings, the extent of the tiny The rodeo was in two days, and Ekuban and a small crew
town. In its heyday, Boley was a mar- of volunteers, including her children, had been busy. She
vel of the Plains, a town built by and for Black people that was obsessing over every detail. When new bleachers had
attracted visitors and media attention from across the coun- been installed a few days earlier, she’d spent so much time
try. But now its businesses are defunct, and the steady out- directing workers to ensure that the earth underneath them
flow of young people has left behind an aging population of was level, with no holes where people might trip, that she’d
only about 1,000 people. The main reminder of the town’s dozed off as she drove home that night. Instead of veering
glory days is the historical marker I passed on Route 62. into traffic, her vehicle had eased onto the shoulder, jolt-
The road took me to the wide-open fields where the Boley ing her alert. Ekuban told me the story with a giggle, as
Rodeo, hailed as the oldest Black rodeo in America, is held if nothing had happened. She was “awake now,” she said.

26
 The annual rodeo had been a Boley tradition for more silhouette of a cowboy on a bucking bull. She also brought
than 120 years, once regularly drawing crowds of thou- on Danell Tipton, a world champion bull rider, to serve as
sands, but as of late, it had become something of a glorified the rodeo’s producer.
family reunion for people with ties to Boley. Ekuban had Members of the community turned out to help. Hen-
a plan to try to turn that around. She’d sunk thousands rietta Hicks, an 89-year-old judge whom Ekuban affec-
of dollars of her own money and months of her time into tionately refers to as “Grandmother,” offered her home to
throwing what she hoped would be the best rodeo the Ekuban the night of her near accident. Other old-timers
town had ever seen. Her goal was to raise at least $200,000 and close friends stopped by to lend a hand. I watched
to help revitalize Boley, and bring back national attention as they worked up a sweat, carrying provisions that they
to the town. hoped would feed thousands of visitors. All the while,
Without much in the way of a budget, Ekuban cre- Ekuban’s phone chimed, sending a notification for each
ated a new sign to welcome the visitors she hoped would ticket bought online. As the sun set, a caravan of trailers
come for the rodeo. Ekuban’s new logo for Boley featured a carrying horses and bulls arrived.

27
 28
JANUARY 2025
ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK
Karen Ekuban, the promoter of the 2024 Boley
Rodeo, hoped that the event would help bring
her hometown back to its former glory.

E k u b u n’s u s p i r ut i o n s f o r the rodeo echo the ambitions of her forebears. In on. Even decades after Boley’s founding,
1866, a year after the Civil War ended, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation signed a treaty the allure of freedom and the ability to
with the United States. In that agreement, all Black people who had been enslaved own the land under their feet drew Black
by the Muscogee Nation were emancipated and provided with full Creek citizenship families—including Ekuban’s Mississip-
privileges, including the right to landownership. (The Muscogee Nation would later pian parents—from across the South.
redefine citizenship to exclude the descendants of those enslaved people, a decision The exact origins of the Boley Rodeo
that some descendants are challenging in court.) Abigail Barnett and her father, are lost to time, although we do know
James, a freedman of the Muscogee Nation, were deeded the land that would become that it likely arose organically from local
Boley, and many other Black Creek citizens settled nearby. After the arrival of the Fort customs that predated the town itself.
Smith and Western Railway, in 1903, J. B. Boley, a white railroad agent, helped the Rodeo, descended from practices estab-
community incorporate, a process completed in 1905. According to the historical lished by Spanish and Mexican ranchers,
marker in town, Mr. Boley had faith in the Black Man to govern himself and had been molded into its modern form
persuaded the railroad to establish a tocnsite here. through the participation of Black cow-
In those days, Oklahoma was promoted by a network of boosters as a promised boys, and Boley’s iteration formalized it
land for Black people, part of a larger movement to establish Black autonomy and self- locally as an event. Even in its early days,
governance throughout the West. Some 50 Black towns popped up across Oklahoma the Boley Rodeo regularly drew spectators
from 1865 through 1920. This movement was closely associated with the work of Edward of all races from Oklahoma and elsewhere,
McCabe, who’d risen to prominence when he became the state auditor of Kansas, the and inspired several other rodeos across the
first Black person to be elected to a statewide office in the West. McCabe moved to South and the West. One year, Joe Louis,
the Oklahoma Territory after two terms in office, hoping to make it a majority-Black the legendary boxer, made an appearance.
state. In an 1891 speech, he laid out his vision. “We will have a new party, having for its The rodeo was always an important source
purpose negro supremacy in at least one State,” he said, with “negro State and county of income for the town.
officers and negro Senators and Representatives in Washington.” Answering the sum- The 1960s marked the heyday of both
mons of McCabe and others, thousands of Black people chose to forsake the dominion Boley and its famous rodeo. According to
of Jim Crow for Oklahoma. The Black Dispatch, a newspaper in Okla-
The very existence of Boley, and other towns like it, proved what was then—in homa City, at least 10,000 people attended
many white people’s minds—a radical proposition: that Black people could thrive on the event in 1961. The rodeo that year fea-
their own. Booker T. Washington visited the town in 1905 and marveled at its two tured acts such as Billy “The Kid” Emer-
colleges, its abundance of land. Unlike in other Black communities in America at the son, a Black rock-and-roll pioneer, and a
time, many of which struggled, the original guarantee of citizenship and property rights full orchestra from Houston. In 1963, the
in Boley under the 1866 treaty gave citizens a measure of security and wealth to pass same newspaper noted the growth in the

JANUARY 2025
29
“small Negro metropolis,” marked by the five new businesses that had sprung up on
Main Street.
But as has been the trend in much of rural America—particularly Black rural
America—Boley has suffered from the loss of capital and the gravitational pull of city
life. In recent decades, many young people left in search of opportunities elsewhere,
and the elders who remained struggled to keep the memory of the old days alive. Boley’s
self-reliance had been lauded by white politicians and business executives, but when the
town struggled, they lost interest, leaving it to wither.
Over time, the rodeo faded as well. Before Ekuban pitched her plan, it seemed pos-
sible that the rodeo might disappear entirely, and that—in a state where history books
rarely mention places like Boley—the history might disappear too. Even with Ekuban’s
intervention, there are no guarantees.

E k u b u n l e f t B o l e y after high school, some 35 years ago, with no interest in

returning. But she eventually discovered that the place had a hold on her. Her mother
had taught for decades in the now-defunct school, and her father had served as super-
intendent. Ekuban remembers how sporting events were held at the local prison, one
of the town’s main employers, because there were no facilities elsewhere. When she
returned to the area, she bought a house in nearby Spencer, another majority-Black
town in Oklahoma. Ekuban started several revitalization projects, because she wanted
to cultivate the beauty she saw in her hometown. But after she learned more about
ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

Boley’s history from “Grandmother” Hicks, Ekuban’s says her desire to help took on
new significance.
She wanted to impress that significance upon the rodeo’s supporters, and to explain
just why its success was important. So, the day before the rodeo, even with plenty of setup
work left to do, Ekuban gathered a group of friends and family members. They drove
to Tulsa to visit the Greenwood Rising History Center, which commemorates Tulsa’s

30 JANUARY 2025
 Greenwood District, a neighborhood that
had been established by Black people as
part of the same wave of migration that
built Boley. Greenwood was a thriving
community that grew so prosperous, it
gained national fame under the moniker
“Black Wall Street.” But in 1921, a mob
of white assailants attacked and burned the
district, killing as many as 300 Black resi-
dents and leaving thousands more home-
less. The massacre was a tragic reminder of
the limits of the optimism of boosters like
McCabe, who believed that a Black state
could offer “equal chances with the white
man, free and independent.” But the exhi-
bition also shows that, even if only briefly,
the exertions of Black people themselves
brought McCabe’s vision to fruition.
In front of the exhibits showcasing the
golden age of Black Oklahoma, Ekuban
ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

31
told the crowd how early Boleyites had
journeyed hundreds, in some cases thou-
sands, of miles to unfamiliar territory,
and then dug, carved, and heaved their
way to independence. They built schools,
gristmills, homes, universities, churches,
and hospitals. They bore children, and
one generation passed down its story to
the next. Part of that story was the Boley
Rodeo. For more than a century, cow-
boys had sought to ride atop the bulls
and broncos as long as their will and body
would allow. They did this for money and
acclaim, yes, but also for a less tangible rea-
son: because, no matter how many times
they were knocked off their horse, dusted
up, and trampled on, trying was always
their salvation.
B y t h e m o r n i n g of the rodeo, Ekuban had sold more than 1,400 advance tickets,
and she hoped thousands more would purchase admission at the gate. She’d already
banked more than $20,000 from ticket sales.
A parade of souped-up classic cars, followed by dancing, flag-waving spectators,
opened the event. Willie Jones, a country singer who was featured on Beyoncé’s Cowboy
Carter album, performed. And then, at 7 p.m., the cowboys entered. The gates to the east
of the arena opened and the horses galloped through, kicking up huge clouds of dust.
For the first time in weeks, Ekuban breathed easy. If only for a moment, she could
return to the wonder she had experienced as a kid. But then, just 30 minutes into the
rodeo, she spoke with her husband, whom she had appointed to liaise with local police
and security. Attendance had surged to more than 5,000 people. Without enough seats,
some spectators were hanging on the white railing of the rodeo arena. Ekuban had to
tell her husband and the police officers to close the gates to the rodeo grounds.
As the sun set, young cowboys proved their mettle by riding half-wild broncos, the
muscles of both man and beast straining to prevail. When the bulls came out, the com-
petitors traded their cowboy hats for padded helmets. Away from the action, Ekuban
watched as attendees bought merchandise from stands run by her fellow Boleyites.
Finally, it was time for the centerpiece of the rodeo: the Pony Express, a relay race
on horseback, a tradition unique to Oklahoma rodeos. In the finals, the Country Boyz
faced off against newer competitors, the Yung Fly Cowboys. Four riders from each team
lined up, whispering in their horses’ ears.

JANUARY 2025 33
34
35
 The gun fired, and the competitors
took off. Riding half-ton horses, they
went around the track furiously. The Yung
Fly Cowboys finished first, unseating the
Country Boyz as champions. In a moment
that might have seemed strange at any other
rodeo, the stereo system swapped out the
country music that had been playing all day
for “Get in With Me,” by the Florida rapper
BossMan Dlow. The winning crew’s music
blared, and winners and losers alike recited
every lyric.
The rodeo was over.

T o d uy, w i t h t h e s u cc e s s of Cow-
boy Carter, with the breakthroughs of
Black country artists such as Shaboozey,
ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

with the growing prominence of Black

rodeos including Bill Pickett’s Invita-
tional, and with increased awareness of
the Greenwood District through vehicles
like the HBO miniseries Watchmen, it’s
easier than ever to see the Boley Rodeo’s

36
 legacy. In popular culture, the mélange of Westerns and cowboys and country music
that is often called “Americana” has been associated with a particular vision of lib-
erty, in which the people most entitled to the possibilities of the West are white men
who mastered the land and its inhabitants. But Boley and its rodeo helped create a
countertradition—that of the Black West. In this tradition, Black people who had
every reason to give up on America instead struck out for places like Boley and dic-
tated the terms of their belonging.
The Black West is a compilation of stories often overlooked or forgotten. As someone
from Oklahoma, I’ve long wondered why our histories—of rodeos and of the dreams of
leaders like Edward McCabe—don’t appear in many mainstream depictions of Black life.
It is our obligation to salvage and reimagine these remnants.
When it was all over, Ekuban had sold about 3,500 tickets to the revitalized rodeo, and
had raised more than $270,000 from ticket sales, donations, sponsorships, and investments.
She deemed it enough of a success to start planning the next one before the spectators had
even left. It remains unclear whether the rodeo can actually attract enough money to save
Boley, but the event undoubtedly helped spread the word about the town’s history and
culture, and that was, in itself, a kind of victory. I was surprised when Ekuban, an eternal
ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

optimist, seemed to acknowledge how quixotic her mission is. “Boley will never be what
it was,” she told me, then added: “But who says it can’t be better?”

Caleb Gayle is the author of the forthcoming book Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and
the Fight for a Black State, and a professor at Northeastern University.

37
Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment

What Seamus Heaney gave me

By Caitlin Flanagan
Photo-illustrations by Sarah Palmer

38 JANUARY 2025
 T e n y e a r s l at e r, Ellen and I were called down to the liv-
ing room of a rented house in Dublin, where we were spending
one of our father’s endless sabbatical years (I went to first, fifth,
and tenth grade in Ireland), and tersely informed that we were
going to be baptized.
We shrieked in horror. If our parents had told us they were getting
divorced, we would have taken the news with equanimity. We would
have said, “Hey, you gave it your best shot,” and recommended that
they wait until we got back to California, where theocracy would
not impede their plans. But religion? There was no explanation for

W
it; they certainly didn’t say they’d had their own conversions.
Ellen spoke for us both: “I’m not doing it!”
I echoed her: “No way!”
Our parents were up to something, and clearly our mother,
When my older sister, Ellen, was 4 or 5, she and a neighbor girl Jean, was the instigator. Tom would much later confess that the
were playing in the front yard of our Berkeley house. The friend, whole thing was a hypocritical plan that my mother had hatched
who lived across the street, was the daughter of a Lutheran min- to get us into Catholic schools (which were like private schools,
ister, who our father thought was a pompous and ridiculous but cheap) when we returned to Berkeley.
person. Suddenly, Ellen slammed through the kitchen door and Jean was unmoved by our yelps of disgust and fear. We were
pounded upstairs to our father’s study. to be whipped through the tenets of the faith via weekly lessons
“Daddy, Daddy!” she cried out in anguish. “Margaret Mumm delivered at a convent school by two nuns (one for Ellen, and one
says there’s no Santa Claus!” for me), and the event would occur early one evening in Decem-
Our father stopped typing, considered briefly what she’d told ber, in time for a drinks party afterward. The guests would be 25
him, and then said, “You tell Margaret Mumm there’s no God.” of my parents’ friends. Would we like to invite any of our own
In the Berkeley Hills, long, public staircases run between friends? We would rather be buried alive.
streets like steep sidewalks, and the minister and his family lived The first lesson was the next day, and I began my session with tea
in a house built next to one of them. So, not long after Ellen ran in a cup and saucer—very civilized—and biscuits. But no sooner
off, as my father looked through the window above his desk, he had I eaten the last Jaffa Cake on the plate than we turned to
saw the man approach like an advancing filmstrip: first the shiny Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride: the virgin birth (“What’s a virgin?” “It’s a girl
black shoes, then the black pant legs, and soon enough the whole who hasn’t even met a boy”); the Crucifixion (holy shit!); original
of him, making his way to the bottom step and crossing the street. sin; confession; the Eucharist; priests’ ability to transform ordinary
In America in the ’60s, members of the clergy were generally bread and wine into literal (this was very, very important to under-
considered moral authorities and accorded a certain measure of stand: not symbolic—literal) human blood and flesh, a tiny bit of
respect. But this particular clergyman was placing a very bad bet which we would be consuming once a week for the rest of our lives.
if he thought he could pay a visit to Tom Flanagan and tell him You can’t jump people into Roman Catholicism after the age of
the right way to talk to his children about God. reason; they have to “come to God” on their own, or be in some

THIS PAGE AND PAGE 39: SARAH PALMER; COURTESY OF CAITLIN FLANAGAN
After the inevitable knock at the door, my father descended kind of trouble. We didn’t believe any of it, and not just because
the stairs, and then there it was: American Mainline Protestantism of what our parents had always told us. It didn’t sound plausible.
face-to-face with post-Hiroshima rational thought. The minister We lay in our beds at night and fumed. At the baptism, Ellen
must have assumed that Tom would at the very least invite him and I would have to have water poured on our long hair, like a
in, but he didn’t, so the man was forced to stand on the front couple of idiots. We would have to say something about believing
porch and reduce his plaint to its elements. in God, and we would have to reject the devil and all his pomps.
“Your daughter told my daughter that there is no God,” he (Pomps: shows of magnificence, splendor. Enough said! Rejected!)
said, more in sorrow than in anger. I think it was meant to be a We took our final lesson, and a rehearsal was staged. Someone made
pastoral visit. a fruitcake with marzipan icing. In Ireland, when a woman makes
“And your daughter told my daughter that there is no Santa a fruitcake, there’s no turning back. We were fucked.
Claus,” my father replied. But then—like a dream, like a magic fish bone—word arrived
“But—there is no Santa Claus!” the minister sputtered. from Belfast that Seamus and Marie Heaney were coming down
“And there is no God.” for the event, and that Seamus would write a poem. That changed
We didn’t have any notion of God in our house, but we cer- everything for me. Anything the Heaneys were cool with, I was cool
tainly had Christmas, and with it revealed truth: the carrots on with. They were my idea of what a dazzling couple ought to be,
the front porch, eaten down to stumps! The presents piled under and they were always, always kind to us, and we needed kindness.
the tree, with our names on them! Our cosmology was just as When Seamus stood up and read the poem, “Baptism: for
considered as his. Ellen and Kate Flanagan,” I accepted everything—all of it, all at
Until all of this certainty was challenged. once: poetry, God, and myself.

40 JANUARY 2025
 For half a century, I’ve kept the piece of onionskin he typed
that poem on, so thin that it’s almost translucent. It’s a blessing
on the long, strange project of being Kate Flanagan. That winter
night in Dublin, Seamus gave me the one thing I desperately
needed growing up in that crazy family: my certificate of belong-
ing, in this world and the next.

W e f i r s t m e t the Heaneys the year before the baptism, in

1970, when I was 9 years old. Seamus, Marie, and their two
little boys, Michael and Christopher, had come to California so
that Seamus could spend the academic year in the UC Berkeley
English department. (Their daughter, Catherine Ann, was still
circling in the future, choosing her moment.) My parents were
almost 20 years older than the Heaneys, my father a professor in
the department, and they took the family under their wing as they
did for many visiting professors—Jean in her motherly way, and
Tom with his incredible erudition and merciless, legendary wit.
“Berkeley swings like a swing-boat, has all the colour of the
fairground and as much incense burning as a high altar in the
Vatican,” Seamus wrote to his editor, Rosemary Goad, shortly
after arriving. That wonderful description spent 50 years in a
folder, but now—on the tenth anniversary of his death—has been
published in the collected Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by the
poet Christopher Reid. Of course I’ve read and loved Seamus’s
poetry most of my life, but the way I actually knew him was in
person, talking with people. Every joke, kind word, and cynical
Above: Tom and Caitlin Flanagan in quip expressed in the letters—many of which mentioned or were
Dublin. Below: Caitlin with Seamus addressed to my father—made me feel that he was in a room just
Heaney in California in 1974. beyond the one where I sat reading.
One Heaney is fun. All of the Heaneys together are the best
time you’ll ever have. Marie is smart and beautiful and funny, and
the boys, then 4 and 2, were incredible, with their Northern Irish
accents, their serious first names (in America, they’d have been
Mike—even Mikey—and Chris), and their fealty to each other.
While Ellen was grinding it out in ninth grade—expectations were
higher for her, owing to birth order and the obvious fact that she
was giving education much more to work with—my mother was
blessedly eccentric about my own school attendance. I would report
mild health problems and head out with Jean and Marie and the
boys on field trips to the pumpkin patches in Half Moon Bay, my
mother fearlessly navigating our Plymouth Valiant up and down San
Francisco blocks so steep that you would feel the front tires inch-
ing across the asphalt until suddenly the center of gravity shifted,
physics took over, and for 30 seconds, your fate was anyone’s guess.
The family wasn’t in Berkeley long before Heaneymania broke
out. Berkeley in those days was an archipelago of dinner parties,
and my parents were no pikers. There were many mornings when
I’d go downstairs to watch cartoons and find Seamus asleep on
the couch—he would have driven Marie home to relieve the
babysitter and come back so he and Tom could talk and talk,
cracking each other up and also taking part in what Seamus would
later call the beginning of an ongoing tutorial. If you wanted to
discuss Irish history and literature, Tom Flanagan was your man.
Imagine being liberated from Belfast in 1970—when the
violence and terror of the Troubles ran in parallel with the most

41
narrowly defined social conventions, policed every hour of the the glinting gold wrappers of a dozen Cadbury Milks. A few
day and night by neighbors, teachers, priests, and ministers— soldiers (“They’re so young,” my mother said) watched us in a
for a year in Berkeley! The contrast was as stark as any between wary and—in the manner of all soldiers on shit deployments—
two Western cities could possibly be. This wasn’t London, where contemptuous way. The mystified officer who waved us through
King’s Road offered velvet pants, joss sticks, and a friendly attitude seemed to figure that we were creatures of extreme naivete who
toward sex between strangers as a thriving, but still circumscribed, would be dealt with, one way or another, once we were in Belfast.
performance. This was a citywide retreat from the known social The country roads were beautiful, but terrible things happened
order, with a California twist. on them. For two decades, the most frightening sound in the north
Early mornings, Seamus would sometimes drive the family was the screech of brakes preceding a bomb being thrown through
across the bay to Sam’s, in Tiburon, for pancakes and champagne, the doors of a dance hall or pub. The “proxy bomb” was created dur-
getting home in time to teach his 9 a.m. class. Their first weekend ing the conflict, such a well-designed instrument of terror that it was
in town, the family went to a Pete Seeger concert. At parties he met later deployed as far away as Colombia and Syria. Gunmen stop a
the great California poets—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder. driver on a country road and force him to get into the driver’s seat of
He and Leonard Michaels became friends. His one regret when a waiting car that has been loaded with a bomb. He will drive that car
they arrived was that he’d gotten his hair cut before leaving Ireland. into whatever target he’s told. The gunmen’s leverage is absolute: They
“It’s lotus land for the moment,” he wrote to friends—a per- have the man’s family at gunpoint back at the farm—perhaps they
fect Seamus sentence, suggesting both his ease with the sensual will remind him of what the children were wearing that morning.
experience of California and his sly, characteristic caution: for the I remember that Seamus was haunted by an incident in which
moment. All too soon, from my perspective, the year ended, and a van full of workers was stopped by masked men, who demanded
the Heaneys packed up their flat, said goodbye to champagne that everyone get out and stand in a line. The Catholics were
and pancakes, and headed home to Belfast. As Seamus would ordered to come forward. In fact, only one of the men was Catho-
SARAH PALMER; COURTESY OF CAITLIN FLANAGAN

say, “Back to porridge and gunfire.” lic. The man next to him secretly took his hand and pressed it:
Don’t do it; we’ll cover for you. But for whatever reason, habit or
W e F l a n ag a n s wouldn’t be far behind the Heaneys, because loyalty, he stepped forward—and all of the others were swiftly
my father’s sabbatical year was upon us. Once Ellen and I had machine-gunned. The ambushers were Catholics.
re-enrolled at our Dublin school and settled back into our Irish In Berkeley, one of Seamus’s Black friends once asked him to
life, we drove north to spend a week with the Heaneys in Belfast. explain what was happening in the north of Ireland, and when
Of course I knew about the Troubles, but I’d never seen a he’d finished a brief accounting, his friend said, “I don’t know
militarized border before. Tom warned us to be quiet while an the words, but I sure recognize the tune.” It was the old thing,
officer took our passports and inspected the trunk of the Morris the thing that people do to one another. And as the violence con-
Mini for weapons. Our mother was at the wheel because Tom tinued, the threads holding the tapestry together started to snap.
refused to learn to drive a car, while Ellen and I sat in the back Belfast frightened me, but once we got to 16 Ashley Avenue,
seat, staring out anxiously from beneath a welter of books and nothing bad could happen. It was like a family reunion. Ellen and

42 JANUARY 2025
 Far left: Seamus, the literary
critic F. W. Dupee, and Tom
in California in 1974.
Left: Seamus reading in New
York. Right: Seamus, Tom,
and Caitlin on Long Island
in the early 1980s.

I watched The Magic Roundabout with the boys, and every night with children going to school, women shopping, farmers walking
at dusk, Seamus and the other men on the street would unroll cows down tiny lanes to be milked, and young people’s dances
concertina wire at the ends of the block. and secret spaces, they produced a river of blood.
One evening, the adults were planning to go to a party while What did people want from Seamus Heaney at that time?
Ellen and I watched the boys—the babysitter had backed out. Everything. There was tremendous pressure for him to turn his
Ellen was extremely beautiful and getting more so by the month. poetry into a form of opinion writing and take moral command
My parents didn’t seem to care that their teenage daughter was of the situation. He would never have done anything like that. He
stuck at home, fed a constant diet of Seán Ó Riada and the Irish was a poet, not an on-call political-versification machine. More
rebellion of 1798, but Marie did. Other young people would than that, he understood that what was happening didn’t fit into
be at this party, and Marie many times said it was a shame that a neat rubric of oppression and colonial rule. This was a 14-year-
Ellen couldn’t go too. I was determined to save the night, and old headed to band practice who was abducted, hooded, and
I insisted that I would be the babysitter. Everyone thought it murdered. This was an 11-year-old on her way to school when a
was a weird idea—no one more so than the little boys—but bomb exploded in her father’s car. This wasn’t an academic debate
I’m an adamant person. Marie told me that I could call her at about the Stormont government or the British army’s casual use
the smallest hint of trouble. of rubber bullets. This was hell.
Everyone left, the boys got into their pajamas, and we hit the Seamus in the early ’70s had become very interested in the
Richard Scarry pretty hard. Soon they were asleep. I felt amazing bodies that had been discovered in the bogs that stretch across
and useful and like a teenager myself. But after about an hour, I Northern Europe. This type of bog has the perfect conditions to
started hearing noises—muffled booms, shouting. Perhaps they preserve bodies for thousands of years. The majority of those that
were the sounds of any normal city at night, but Belfast in 1972 have been found were Iron Age people, and despite their wide
wasn’t a normal city. I looked in on the little boys, and realized I geographic distribution, they tend to have commonalities: A
had taken on more than I could handle. What in the world was great number were naked, except for perhaps a ceremonial piece
I going to do if I had to get them out? In defeat, I called Marie, of clothing or jewelry; their stomachs were filled with a gruel of
and she came home. All the rest of my life, I’ve regretted doing local grains; and many had been murdered. Some had been staked
it. I could have been the hero; I could have been the Ellen! into the bog with wooden pegs, as though to protect them from
theft or interference, or even to offer them as a sort of display.
B e c uu s e w h ut wu s h u p pe n i n g in the north was so vio- In 1950, an archaeologist named P. V. Glob, who was employed
lent, because it was unfolding in an English-speaking country, by a museum in Aarhus, Denmark, oversaw the removal of a body
because it could be read as an ethnic minority’s final fight against from the village of Tollund—the astonishingly well-preserved
empire, and—perhaps most important—because it involved Ire- corpse of a man killed more than 2,000 years earlier. Glob wrote
land, a country from which millions of Americans claimed ances- a book about that find and several others, and he gave it a rivet-
try, the Troubles quickly became not just a European story but a ing title: not The Bog Bodies, but The Bog People. Who were they?
global one. And because the six counties of the north were filled What did they tell us of their beliefs and their cultures?

43
 Seamus knew bogs well; he’d cut turf on the family farm in I would still have felt at home with that ‘peat-brown head’—an
County Derry. And he knew the things that had been pulled utterly familiar countryman’s face.”
out of bogs: the skeletons of giant Irish elk, long extinct; clay Even as a global figure, Seamus never stopped being grate-
jars still filled with butter. The Bog People inspired him. Soon ful to Tom for playing what he saw as an essential role in his
after his return from Berkeley, he published “The Tollund Man,” development as an artist. In the collection of letters, I came across
a terrifying abduction of a poem that casually welcomes you one he’d written to a friend soon after Seamus had accepted the
on a short journey before grabbing hold of you and taking you Nobel Prize in Stockholm. He and Marie were in New York,
right down to the underworld. where they’d driven the two hours to my parents’ house on Long
“Some day I will go to Aarhus,” the poem begins, like an epic: Island—“a chance to see Tom and Jean Flanagan and sit with
them in gratitude and sage memory, friendship and wonder at
To see his peat-brown head, what can happen to a youth from the fields.”
The mild pods of his eye-lids, As the years went on, Seamus quietly took care of all kinds
His pointed skin cap. of needs that Tom had. One year we lived in Ireland in a rental
house that had the basics, including a set of cheaply made but
Already the poem is turning, taking you to the place in the brand-new furniture. What it didn’t have was a bookcase. Tom
bog “where they dug him out,” wanting to see the “gruel of winter was working on a novel, and his office looked like a graduate
seeds / caked in his stomach.” We are in the territory of Robert student’s squat until Seamus showed up with wood and nails and
Graves and the White Goddess: stain, and built my father a bookcase.
Near the end of Tom’s life, when he was becoming frail, my
I could risk blasphemy, parents bought another house in the Berkeley Hills, and Seamus
Consecrate the cauldron bog came out to see it. My father was anxious to show him the impres-
Our holy ground and pray sive study, which ran the length of the house in a gabled attic. It was
Him to make germinate a magnificent space but had a very steep staircase, and the second
Seamus saw it, he said my parents had to get a banister put in.
The scattered, ambushed My mother (a former nurse and essentially the breathing appa-
Flesh of labourers ratus of one Tom Flanagan) had of course been saying that since
the day they moved in, and my father (pretty much the hair shirt
Laborers, brothers, children, old men—the ambushed dead; of one Jean Flanagan) had ignored her. Each time she raised it
the missing; the disappeared. anew he would say, “Banister, banister, awk, awk,” like she was a
We’re in the underworld now, chthonic and mad, as the towns- parrot in a cage. (I’m telling you, this was one of the world’s great
people point at the Tollund Man while he is raced in a cart to his marriages crammed with enough nuclear-level rage to split the
murder. How was he chosen? How is anyone chosen? world apart like two plates.) But when Seamus said “banister,”
The famous last stanza of the poem is the answer to the ques- my father got the banister.
tion people didn’t even know how to pose about the river of blood. I used to think that my father was my ace in the hole. He had
the same handwriting as Santa Claus, who was, of course, God.
Out there in Jutland He was at absolute ease in any group of great thinkers and writers,
In the old man-killing parishes and because of him, I grew up around many remarkable people.
I will feel lost, Sometimes when we were talking, he would say, “That’s a good
Unhappy and at home. point,” or even “That’s a very good point.” He never said it to jolly
me along; he said it when I’d made a good point. To this day, if
S e u m u s o f t e n c o m pu re o his bond with Tom to the one you were to observe me thinking—while gardening or cooking
between father and son. “I suppose you’re destined to be a father- or waiting in the TSA line—you might hear me mutter, “That’s
figure of sorts to me,” he wrote to Tom in 1974. “Blooming awful.” a very good point,” and at first opportunity, I’ll go write it down.
Seamus had a father, of course, the farmer and cattle dealer Why would a girl with such a wonderful father ever need a
Patrick Heaney. But Tom was his “literary foster father.” In the second one? Because someone must have dropped Tom on his
year that Seamus arrived in California, he later told an interviewer, head as a baby. A streak of cruelty ran through him that could
his “head was still basically wired up to English Literature termi- be channeled into incredibly destructive behavior, sometimes
nals.” It was Tom, he said, who gave him a “far more charged-up directed at himself, more often at the three people he loved most:
sense of Yeats and Joyce” and the “whole Irish consequence.” my mother, my sister, and me.
Seamus was a poet in a country known for them. My father If you had caught up with me 20 years ago, or even 10, I would
often said that Seamus came early into a sense not merely of his have showered you with shocking tales. But something happens
talent, but also of the obligations that went along with it. But when you turn 60. You just let go. You finally realize there isn’t ever
he didn’t necessarily want to be a poet of the madness unfolding going to be a reward for thinking about something and talking about
in the north. Of the Tollund Man he later said: “Even if there it. And you realize (terrible truth though it may be) that, as Philip
had been no Northern Troubles, no mankilling in the parishes, Larkin—of all people!—reports, “what will survive of us is love.”

44 JANUARY 2025
O n e o f t h e m u n y t h i n g s I inherited after my father’s
death was Seamus’s loyalty. My parents died within a year of
each other. Hardly a tragedy: I was almost 40! But who has ever Baptism
been closer to their difficult parents? My position in the fam-
for Ellen and Kate Flanagan
ily was that of a suitcase to the traveler. Half of the time it’s an
unholy burden, but when you see it thundering back down the
luggage chute, you could weep with relief. I was deeply loved, I came from water through the hoop of bone
and I was never left behind. Into this cold pool in the womb of stone.
Six months after Tom died, I was suddenly diagnosed with
aggressive and life-threatening breast cancer. I felt a strong need I drowned my first mind in the font’s small well,
to keep the information contained to as small a group as possible. A new world breaking on my fontanel.
I thought it would hurt my career if people knew I was that sick,
and also, in a primitive way, I thought that the fewer people who
Again I broke the waters and again I came
knew about it, the better the chance it wasn’t real. But somehow
Wet and glistening, into my name
Seamus found out.
So many of Seamus’s letters in the collection begin in
apology—over and over again, he makes amends for being so Drowning, my life passed through me in a flash
egregiously late in responding to someone. And yet, not 10 days And I emerged, marked secretly, my sign the fish.
after the diagnosis, a letter arrived from Seamus and Marie. They
were aghast at the completely “arbitrary insult upon health and Now I have known my origin and my end
beauty.” Soon after, another letter: He’d heard I’d come through And swim towards myself in a new element,
surgery, “as valiantly and gracefully as the great spirit you are and
have been.” They would be in St. Lucia for 10 days—probably to
Marvellously single and, marvellously, a shoal
visit their friend, the poet Derek Walcott—and he told me how
to reach them if I needed them. Of all those washed in that water, salt and oil.
Everyone who knew Seamus has a story like that. He had a sense
of obligation to others that in anyone else would be incapacitat- Seamus Heaney
ing. Once, when my own children were small, I took them to visit 17th December 1971
Seamus and Marie. After tea and hugs, we climbed into the taxi,
and the driver said, “So you’ve been to see the great man.” Almost
around the corner was a billboard with his picture on it, promot-
ing a new documentary. By his later years, there was no escaping and circles the world. It was an international story, of course, but
himself, and the endless duties the role entailed. He may have in Ireland, the grief was personal, intense, self-reflective.
fantasized about ditching those duties, but he never shirked them. Whatever it means to be Irish—whatever qualities of heart and
The letters helped; the poems too. After I first got sick, and in mind, whatever generosity and love for the very earth and rocks of
the years since, I have returned often to some of his most famous that island—millions of Irish people were convinced that Seamus
lines, from The Cure at Troy, which argues for faith in an unseen Heaney embodied it. All over Ireland, the grief was not just for
future. Seamus didn’t believe in a force as mere as optimism. a storied Irishman and a great poet. The grief was for a friend.
He believed in something far greater and more powerful: hope. Two days after he died was the All-Ireland football semifinal.
Dublin versus Kerry, no kidding around, and 80,000 people packed
So hope for a great sea-change into Croke Park. Before the match, a photo of Seamus appeared
On the far side of revenge. on two giant screens, and almost unthinkingly, as though rising
Believe that a further shore for “The Soldier’s Song,” everyone in that stadium stood up. The
announcer said: “We’d like to mark the passing of one of our great-
Is reachable from here. est literary icons, the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.” And with
Believe in miracles that, the entire crowd began clapping. The announcer said that in
And cures and healing wells. addition to his great works and awards, Seamus had played under-
age football for Castledawson in Derry. The weight given to that
It was because of those lines that I started ignoring the oncolo- last fact was the same as to the first ones. It meant: He was one of
gists who insisted that I would never be cured. us. Among the sacks of letters to The Irish Times was one written by
a man called Frank Munnelly: “As a nation we are a man down.”
W h e n u p u b l i c person dies as suddenly and shockingly as The funeral was in Dublin, and the burial was in Bellaghy,
Seamus did—on an ordinary August morning in 2013, in a hos- and the roads were lined with people. Seamus had read his poetry
pital corridor on his way to surgery—before the family has an around the world, and been welcomed everywhere, but he never
hour to confront the unthinkable, the news flies out the window had any doubt about where the journey would end: in the graveyard

45
of his parish church. “We are welcoming Seamus home,” said the Erected by Patrick Heaney
parish priest, while 2,000 mourners strained to hear him. The In Memory of his son Christopher
family was there, of course: those children of the father who had Died 25th Feb. 1953 Aged three years.
never once failed them and had only and always loved them, and,
in the center of everything, always—Marie. Michael (now Mick) It jolted me in a way Seamus’s grave hadn’t. Christopher was
spoke briefly, informing the world of Seamus’s last words—a text Seamus’s little brother, who ran into the road and was struck
to Marie that read, “Noli timere”: Don’t be afraid. by a car and killed. “Mid-Term Break”—one of the first poems
My parents don’t have graves. We were a very anti-death family. people read when they discover Seamus’s work—is about Sea-
They had both suffered devastating losses when they were children, mus receiving the news at 14, when he was away at boarding
and so they tried to keep the very notion of death a secret from us school, and then coming home.
for as long as possible. When Ellen texted me, “Have you heard
about Seamus?,” I knew it could mean only one thing. But for a In the porch I met my father crying—
minute or so I stopped myself from Googling his name. I was giving He had always taken funerals in his stride—
reality a chance to sort itself out. My rational self reported that if he
was dead, then there would someday be a grave and a gravestone, Seamus hated crying—“blubbering”—and I always wondered
and I instantly decided that if that was true, I would never go see if this terrible scene was a reason for that.
them. It would be an acceptance of a fact I was fighting against.
But a few months ago, a full decade after he died, I went at last The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
to Bellaghy. My husband took me—“Stalwart Rob,” as my father When I came in, and I was embarrassed
described him in his last letter to Seamus—and we sailed over By old men standing up to shake my hand
the “invisible border,” as it’s now called. There’s no more signage
than there is crossing a state line in America—in fact, none at all. A child dead, and a sudden manhood foisted upon Seamus. His
The sky was darkening because we were late; we’d been having early poems are so familiar to me that the events they record can
lunch with Marie and Mick in Dublin and hadn’t wanted to leave. seem like the ones in fiction, the responses of the speaker those of
We arrived at St. Mary’s church under a spitting rain that would a fictional character. But there was Christopher’s grave, just as real
suddenly let up, in bursts of revelation and transfiguration, as as his brother’s, just as much a marker of a human life.
Irish rains do. Halfway down the graveyard, dark marble austere I’ve been a Catholic since my baptism, but the only Catholic
against the hard gray of the church wall, the headstone seemed tradition I remember my father handing down to me was lighting a
almost to hover a few inches off the earth because of the famous candle “for the dead of the family.” Catholicism provides you with
line carved into it: “Walk on air against your better judgement.” something no rational approach to the world ever will: a cosmology
It’s from a poem, “The Gravel Walks,” and it gives you the of intercessors, saints. It’s a religion that acknowledges, openly and
ability, the permission, to hold the full, complicated equation of from the very beginning, that faith itself is a mystery. Walking out
life lightly. I repeat it often. I’ve been sick for many years now, and of that graveyard left me with a bleakness, but I didn’t have time
whenever I get a call that explains some bad finding, I listen sto- to confront it, because I was already entering the church so that I
ically and then remind myself that I’ll walk on air despite the news. could light a candle for the dead of my family.
The words are for the world—ours and that of future We can’t escape it: losing the people we love and need the
generations—but most of all, I imagine them as a private com- most. Each death has to be countenanced as a fact, squared away
munication to Marie. The point of the entire operation was always in the record books. But there are people so well known to us,
Marie, the quarry turned way of life. so loved, that death is one more thing that can be turned to air.
I’d bought three pots of violets at SPAR market, in the village, When Tom died, Seamus wrote an obituary for him in The
and I put the flowers next to the gravestone, feeling a bit sheepish, as New York Review of Books: “Since our first meeting in 1970, he
though I was performing something I’d learned from the movies, or was like a father to me and like a typical Irish son I felt closest
television, though Seamus—and Tom, come to think of it—would at our times of greatest silence and remoteness.” He described a
have approved of SPAR market. It was the right way to go about it. few of their endless car trips and excursions; only Tom and Sea-
I was inclined to stay there forever; why else had I come? But mus would scramble down a cliff path in Antrim to see the site
it was getting cold, and Rob gently kicked at some of the gravel where Roger Casement had wanted to be buried. Let no stone
in the path between graves. be unturned, no vigil unattended. And then Seamus quoted the
“The kingdom of gravel was inside you,” the poem says. poem he’d written at the time of his own father’s death:
“Hoard and praise the verity of gravel. / Gems for the undeluded.
Milt of earth.” And yet that’s the poem that ends in air, with the And there was nothing between us there
gentle counsel to establish yourself “somewhere in between” the That might not still be happily ever after.
earth and heaven, the gravel and a song.
Then, just past where Rob was standing, I saw a much older
headstone, weathered, but its letters clearly read HEANEY. And,
in smaller print, beneath: Caitlin Flanagan is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

46 JANUARY 2025
The Fraudulent Science
of Success

48 ILLUSTRA TION BY PABLO DELCAN

 By Daniel
Engber

Business schools
are in the grips
of a scandal
that threatens to
undermine their
most influential
research—and the
credibility of an
entire field.
 or anyone who teaches at a business school, research done by Schroeder’s peers—business-school professors who
the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schro- apply the methods of behavioral research to such subjects as market-
eder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations ing, management, and decision making. In viral TED Talks and air-
when they first went up, on a Saturday in early port best sellers, on morning shows and late-night television, these
summer 2023. Schroeder teaches manage- business-school psychologists hold tremendous sway. They also have
ment and psychology at UC Berkeley’s Haas a presence in this magazine and many others: Nearly every busi-
School of Business. One of her colleagues— ness academic who is named in this story has been either quoted
a star professor at Harvard Business School or cited by The Atlantic on multiple occasions. A few, including
named Francesca Gino—had just been accused Gino, have written articles for The Atlantic themselves.
of academic fraud. The authors of the blog post, a small team of Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t
business-school researchers, had found discrepancies in four of shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim
Gino’s published papers, and they suggested that the scandal was to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It
much larger. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices,
contain fake data,” the blog post said. “Perhaps dozens.” and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy
The story was soon picked up by the mainstream press. Report- findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’
ers reveled in the irony that Gino, who had made her name as an fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at
expert on the psychology of breaking rules, may herself have bro- business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are
ken them. (“Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of at campus psychology departments, academics told me.
Fabricating Findings,” a New York Times headline read.) Harvard The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far
Business School had quietly placed Gino on administrative leave beyond the replication crisis that has plagued psychology and
just before the blog post appeared. The school had conducted its other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how
own investigation; its nearly 1,300-page internal report, which scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and
was made public only in the course of related legal proceedings, the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the
concluded that Gino “committed research misconduct inten- research literature in doubt. Many avenues of study once deemed
tionally, knowingly, or recklessly” in the four papers. (Gino has promising turned out to be dead ends. But it’s one thing to under-
steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.) stand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another
Schroeder’s interest in the scandal was more personal. Gino to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.
was one of her most consistent and important research partners. Schroeder has long been interested in trust. She’s given lectures
Their names appear together on seven peer-reviewed articles, as on “building trust-based relationships”; she’s run experiments mea-
well as 26 conference talks. If Gino were indeed a serial cheat, suring trust in colleagues. Now she was working to rebuild the sense
then all of that shared work—and a large swath of Schroeder’s of trust within her field. A lot of scholars were involved in the Many
CV—was now at risk. When a senior academic is accused of Co-Authors Project, but Schroeder’s dedication was singular. In
fraud, the reputations of her honest, less established colleagues October 2023, a former graduate student who had helped tip off
may get dragged down too. “Just think how horrible it is,” Katy the team of bloggers to Gino’s possible fraud wrote her own “post
Milkman, another of Gino’s research partners and a tenured pro- mortem” on the case. It paints Schroeder as exceptional among her
fessor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told peers: a professor who “sent a clear signal to the scientific commu-
me. “It could ruin your life.” nity that she is taking this scandal seriously.” Several others echoed
To head that off, Schroeder began her own audit of all the this assessment, saying that ever since the news broke, Schroeder has
research papers that she’d ever done with Gino, seeking out raw been relentless—heroic, even—in her efforts to correct the record.
data from each experiment and attempting to rerun the analyses. But if Schroeder planned to extinguish any doubts that
As that summer progressed, her efforts grew more ambitious. remained, she may have aimed too high. More than a year since
With the help of several colleagues, Schroeder pursued a plan to all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied. The
verify not just her own work with Gino, but a major portion of rot in business schools runs much deeper than almost anyone
Gino’s scientific résumé. The group started reaching out to every had guessed, and the blame is unnervingly widespread. In the
other researcher who had put their name on one of Gino’s 138 co- end, even Schroeder would become a suspect.
authored studies. The Many Co-Authors Project, as the self-audit
would be called, aimed to flag any additional work that might G i n o wa s a c c u s e o of faking numbers in four published
be tainted by allegations of misconduct and, more important, papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another
to absolve the rest—and Gino’s colleagues, by extension—of the paper that appeared to be affected—and it was one that she herself
wariness that now afflicted the entire field. had helped write.
That field was not tucked away in some sleepy corner of aca- The work, titled “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve
demia, but was instead a highly influential one devoted to the sci- Performance by Decreasing Anxiety,” was published in 2016,
ence of success. Perhaps you’ve heard that procrastination makes with Schroeder’s name listed second out of seven authors. Gino’s
you more creative, or that you’re better off having fewer choices, name was fourth. (The first few names on an academic paper are
or that you can buy happiness by giving things away. All of that is typically arranged in order of their contributions to the finished

50 JANUARY 2025
 work.) The research it described was pretty standard for the field: the paper, each student had their pulse measured three times: once
a set of clever studies demonstrating the value of a life hack—one at the very start, again after they were told they’d have to sing the
simple trick to nail your next presentation. The authors had tested karaoke song, and then a third time, right before the song began. I
the idea that simply following a routine—even one as arbitrary as created three graphs to illustrate the data’s peculiarities. (See pages
drawing something on a piece of paper, sprinkling salt over it, and 52 and 53.) They depict the measured heart rates for each of the
crumpling it up—could help calm a person’s nerves. “Although 167 students who are said to have participated in the experiment,
some may dismiss rituals as irrational,” presented from left to right in their num-
the authors wrote, “those who enact rit- bered order on the spreadsheet. The blue
uals may well outperform the skeptics and green lines, which depict the first
who forgo them.” and second heart-rate measurements,
In truth, the skeptics have never show those values fluctuating more or
had much purchase in business-school less as one might expect for a noisy sig-
psychology. For the better part of a nal, measured from lots of individuals.
decade, this finding had been garner- But the red line doesn’t look like this at
ing citations—about 200, per Google all: Rather, the measured heart rates form
Scholar. But when Schroeder looked a series going up, across a run of more
more closely at the work, she realized it than 100 consecutive students.
was questionable. In October 2023, she I’ve reviewed the case with several
sketched out some of her concerns on Juliana Schroeder researchers who suggested that this tidy
the Many Co-Authors Project website. run of values is indicative of fraud. “I
The paper’s first two key experiments, see absolutely no reason” the sequence
marked in the text as Studies 1a and 1b, in No. 3 “should have the order that
looked at how the salt-and-paper ritual it does,” James Heathers, a scientific-
might help students sing a karaoke ver- integrity investigator and an occasional
sion of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” Atlantic contributor, told me. The exact
in a lab setting. According to the paper, meaning of the pattern is unclear; if
Study 1a found that people who did the you were fabricating data, you certainly
ritual before they sang reported feeling wouldn’t strive for them to look like
much less anxious than people who did this. Nick Brown, a scientific-integrity
not; Study 1b confirmed that they had researcher affiliated with Linnaeus Uni-
lower heart rates, as measured with a pulse versity Sweden, guessed that the ordered
oximeter, than students who did not. values in the spreadsheet may have been
As Schroeder noted in her October Francesca Gino cooked up after the fact. In that case,
post, the original records of these stud- it might have been less important that
ies could not be found. But Schroeder they formed a natural- looking plot
did have some data spreadsheets for than that, when analyzed together, they
Studies 1a and 1b—she’d posted them matched fake statistics that had already
shortly after the paper had been pub- been reported. “Someone sat down and
lished, along with versions of the studies’ burned quite a bit of midnight oil,” he
research questionnaires—and she now proposed. I asked how sure he was that
wrote that “unexplained issues were this pattern of results was the product of
identified” in both, and that there was deliberate tampering; “100 percent, 100
“uncertainty regarding the data prov- percent,” he told me. “In my view, there
enance” for the latter. Schroeder’s post is no innocent explanation in a universe
did not elaborate, but anyone can look where fairies don’t exist.”
at the spreadsheets, and it doesn’t take a Schroeder herself would come to a
forensic expert to see that the numbers Alison Wood Brooks similar conclusion. Months later, I asked
they report are seriously amiss. her whether the data were manipulated.
The “unexplained issues” with Stud- “I think it’s very likely that they were,”
ies 1a and 1b are legion. For one thing, the figures as reported she said. In the summer of 2023, when she reported the findings
don’t appear to match the research as described in other public of her audit to her fellow authors, they all agreed that, whatever
documents. (For example, where the posted research questionnaire really happened, the work was compromised and ought to be
instructs the students to assess their level of anxiety on a five-point retracted. But they could not reach consensus on who had been
LINKEDIN

scale, the results seem to run from 2 to 8.) But the single most at fault. Gino did not appear to be responsible for either of the
suspicious pattern shows up in the heart-rate data. According to paper’s karaoke studies. Then who was?

51
 First Heart-Rate Second Heart-Rate
Measurement Measurement

DATA FROM “DON’T STOP BELIEVING: RITUALS IMPROVE PERFORMANCE BY DECREASING ANXIETY” (2016), STUDY 1B

This would not seem to be a tricky question. The published Brooks, who has published research on the value of apologies,
version of the paper has two lead authors who are listed as having and whose first book—Talk: The Science of Conversation and the
“contributed equally” to the work. One of them was Schroeder. Art of Being Ourselves—is due out from Crown in January, did
All of the co-authors agree that she handled two experiments— not respond to multiple requests for interviews or to a detailed
labeled in the text as Studies 3 and 4—in which participants list of written questions. Gino said that she “neither collected nor
solved a set of math problems. The other main contributor was analyzed the data for Study 1a or Study 1b nor was I involved
Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino’s in the data audit.”
at Harvard Business School. If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then
From the start, there was every reason to assume that Brooks Schroeder’s audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-
had run the studies that produced the fishy data. Certainly they Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino’s suspect work, and
are similar to Brooks’s prior work. The same quirky experimental quarantine it from the rest. “The goal was to protect the inno-
setup—in which students were asked to wear a pulse oximeter cent victims, and to find out what’s true about the science that
and sing a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—appears had been done,” Milkman told me. But now, to all appearances,
in her dissertation from the Wharton School in 2013, and she Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren’t
published a portion of that work in a sole-authored paper the linked to Gino. That would mean Schroeder had another col-

CHARTS BY THE ATLANTIC. BASED ON DATA POSTED TO OSF.IO.

following year. (Brooks herself is musically inclined, performing league who had contaminated her research. It would mean that
around Boston in a rock band.) her reputation—and the credibility of her entire field—was under
Yet despite all of this, Brooks told the Many Co-Authors Proj- threat from multiple directions at once.
ect that she simply wasn’t sure whether she’d had access to the raw
data for Study 1b, the one with the “no innocent explanation” A m o n g t h e f o u r re s e u rc h pu pe r s in which Gino was
pattern of results. She also said she didn’t know whether Gino accused of cheating is one about the human tendency to misre-
played a role in collecting them. On the latter point, Brooks’s port facts and figures for personal gain. Which is to say: She was
former Ph.D. adviser, Maurice Schweitzer, expressed the same accused of faking data for a study of when and how people might
uncertainty to the Many Co-Authors Project. fake data. Amazingly, a different set of data from the same paper
Plenty of evidence now suggests that this mystery was manufac- had already been flagged as the product of potential fraud, two
tured. The posted materials for Study 1b, along with administrative years before the Gino scandal came to light. The first was contrib-
records from the lab, indicate that the work was carried out at Whar- uted by Dan Ariely of Duke University—a frequent co-author
ton, where Brooks was in grad school at the time, studying under of Gino’s and, like her, a celebrated expert on the psychology of
Schweitzer and running another, very similar experiment. Also, telling lies. (Ariely has said that a Duke investigation—which the
the metadata for the oldest public version of the data spreadsheet school has not acknowledged—discovered no evidence that he
lists “Alison Wood Brooks” as the last person who saved the file. “falsified data or knowingly used falsified data.” He has also said

52 JANUARY 2025
 Third Heart-Rate
Measurement

that the investigation “determined that I should have done more most memorable, most TED Talk–able findings would go away.
to prevent faulty data from being published in the 2012 paper.”) “To use marketing lingo, we’d lose our unique value proposition.”
The existence of two apparently corrupted data sets was shocking: It’s easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating.
a keystone paper on the science of deception wasn’t just invalid, but If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then
possibly a scam twice over. But even in the face of this ignominy, the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up:
few in business academia were ready to acknowledge, in the sum- A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if
mer of 2023, that the problem might be larger still—and that their its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one
research literature might well be overrun with fantastical results. direction: Eventually, the standard tools for torturing your data
Some scholars had tried to raise alarms before. In 2019, Dennis will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now
Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results.
published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Decep- Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for
tion and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because
than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In
encountered fabricated or falsified data. Even that alarming rate this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League
may undersell the problem, Tourish told me, given all of the mis- Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats.
behavior in his discipline that gets overlooked or covered up. In the face of its own cheating scandal, MLB started screening
Anonymous surveys of various fields find that roughly 2 percent every single player for anabolic steroids. There is no equivalent in
of scholars will admit to having fabricated, falsified, or modified science, and certainly not in business academia. Uri Simonsohn, a
data at least once in their career. But business-school psychology professor at the Esade Business School in Barcelona, is a member
may be especially prone to misbehavior. For one thing, the field’s of the blogging team, called Data Colada, that caught the prob-
research standards are weaker than those for other psychologists. lems in both Gino’s and Ariely’s work. (He was also a motivating
In response to the replication crisis, campus psychology depart- force behind the Many Co-Authors Project.) Data Colada has
ments have lately taken up a raft of methodological reforms. Sta- called out other instances of sketchy work and apparent fakery
tistically suspect practices that were de rigueur a dozen years ago within the field, but its efforts at detection are highly targeted.
are now uncommon; sample sizes have gotten bigger; a study’s They’re also quite unusual. Crying foul on someone else’s bad
planned analyses are now commonly written down before the work research makes you out to be a troublemaker, or a member of the
is carried out. But this great awakening has been slower to develop notional “data police.” It can also bring a claim of defamation.
in business-school psychology, several academics told me. “No Gino filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard
one wants to kill the golden goose,” one early-career researcher in and the Data Colada team not long after the bloggers attacked
business academia said. If management and marketing professors her work. (This past September, a judge dismissed the portion of
embraced all of psychology’s reforms, he said, then many of their her claims that involved the bloggers and the defamation claim

53
against Harvard. She still has pending claims against the universitythe flaws in her own experiments and Studies 1a and 1b. “I am
for gender discrimination and breach of contract.) The risks are ashamed of helping publish this paper & how long it took to iden-
even greater for those who don’t have tenure. A junior academic tify its issues,” the thread concluded. “I am not the same scientist
who accuses someone else of fraud may antagonize the senior col- I was 10 years ago. I hold myself accountable for correcting any
leagues who serve on the boards and committees that make pub- inaccurate prior research findings and for updating my research
lishing decisions and determine funding and job appointments. practices to do better.” Her peers responded by lavishing her with
These risks for would-be critics reinforce an atmosphere of public praise. One colleague called the self-audit “exemplary” and
complacency. “It’s embarrassing how few protections we have an “act of courage.” A prominent professor at Columbia Business
against fraud and how easy it has been to fool us,” Simonsohn School congratulated Schroeder for being “a cultural heroine, a
said in a 2023 webinar. He added, “We have done nothing to role model for the rising generation.”
prevent it. Nothing.” But amid this celebration of her unusual transparency, an
important and related story had somehow gone unnoticed. In
L i k e s o m a n y other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in
had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming
and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business science fraud. And this time, she’d blown the whistle on herself.
School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social
citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors
six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred. (Har- Project website. Schroeder announced that she’d found “an issue”
vard Business School’s head of communications, Mark Cautela, with one more paper that she’d produced with Gino. This one,
declined to comment.) Her efforts to address the issue through “Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control,” came out in 2018 in
the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychol-
Research Integrity likewise seemed fruitless. ogy; its author list overlaps substantially with
(A spokesperson for the Wharton School that of the earlier “Don’t Stop Believing”
would not comment on “the existence or “It’s embarrassing how paper (though Brooks was not involved).
status of ” any investigations.) Like the first, it describes a set of studies
Retractions have a way of dragging out in few protections we that purport to show the power of the ritual
science publishing. This one was no excep- have against fraud effect. Like the first, it includes at least one
tion. Maryam Kouchaki, an expert on study for which data appear to have been
workplace ethics at Northwestern Univer-
and how easy it has altered. And like the first, its data anomalies
sity’s Kellogg School of Management and been to fool us.” have no apparent link to Gino.
co–editor in chief of the journal that pub- The basic facts are laid out in a docu-
lished the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper, had ment that Schroeder put into an online
first received the authors’ call to pull their repository, describing an internal audit that
work in August 2023. As the anniversary of that request drew near, she conducted with the help of the lead author, Allen Ding Tian.
Schroeder still had no idea how the suspect data would be handled, (Tian did not respond to requests for comment.) The paper opens
and whether Brooks—or anyone else—would be held responsible. with a field experiment on women who were trying to lose weight.
Finally, on October 1, the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper was Schroeder, then in grad school at the University of Chicago,
removed from the scientific literature. The journal’s published oversaw the work; participants were recruited at a campus gym.
notice laid out some basic conclusions from Schroeder’s audit: Half of the women were instructed to perform a ritual before
Studies 1a and 1b had indeed been run by Brooks, the raw data each meal for the next five days: They were to put their food into a
were not available, and the posted data for 1b showed “streaks of pattern on their plate. The other half were not. Then Schroeder used
heart rate ratings that were unlikely to have occurred naturally.” a diet-tracking app to tally all the food that each woman reported
Schroeder’s own contributions to the paper were also found to eating, and found that the ones in the ritual group took in about
have some flaws: Data points had been dropped from her analysis 200 fewer calories a day, on average, than the others. But in 2023,
without any explanation in the published text. (Although this when she started digging back into this research, she uncovered
practice wasn’t fully out-of-bounds given research standards at the some discrepancies. According to her study’s raw materials, nine
time, the same behavior would today be understood as a form of of the women who reported that they’d done the food-arranging
“p-hacking”—a pernicious source of false-positive results.) But ritual were listed on the data spreadsheet as being in the control
the notice did not say whether the fishy numbers from Study 1b group; six others were mislabeled in the opposite direction. When
had been fabricated, let alone by whom. Someone other than Schroeder fixed these errors for her audit, the ritual effect com-
Brooks may have handled those data before publication, it sug- pletely vanished. Now it looked as though the women who’d done
gested. “The journal could not investigate this study any further.” the food-arranging had consumed a few more calories, on average,
Two days later, Schroeder posted to X a link to her full and than the women who had not.
final audit of the paper. “It took *hundreds* of hours of work to Mistakes happen in research; sometimes data get mixed up.
complete this retraction,” she wrote, in a thread that described These errors, though, appear to be intentional. The women whose

54 JANUARY 2025
data had been swapped fit a suspicious pattern: The ones whose that I’m the one named in the retraction notice,” she said. Later in
numbers might have undermined the paper’s hypothesis were dis- our conversation, she summed up her response: “I’ve tried to trace
proportionately affected. This is not a subtle thing; among the back as best I can what happened, and just be honest.”
43 women who reported that they’d done the ritual, the six most
prolific eaters all got switched into the control group. Nick Brown A c r o s s t h e m a n y m o n t h s I spent reporting this story, I’d
and James Heathers, the scientific-integrity researchers, have each come to think of Schroeder as a paragon of scientific rigor. She has
tried to figure out the odds that anything like the study’s published led a seminar on “Experimental Design and Research Methods”
result could have been attained if the data had been switched at in a business program with a sterling reputation for its research
random. Brown’s analysis pegged the answer at one in 1 million. standards. She’d helped set up the Many Co-Authors Project,
“Data manipulation makes sense as an explanation,” he told me. and then pursued it as aggressively as anyone. (Simonsohn even
“No other explanation is immediately obvious to me.” Heathers said told me that Schroeder’s look-at-everything approach was a little
he felt “quite comfortable” in concluding that whatever went wrong “overboard.”) I also knew that she was devoted to the dreary but
with the experiment “was a directed process, not a random process.” important task of reproducing other people’s published work.
Whether or not the data alterations were intentional, their spe- As for the dieting research, Schroeder had owned the awkward
cific form—flipped conditions for a handful of participants, in a optics. “It looks weird,” she told me when we spoke in June. “It’s
way that favored the hypothesis—matches up with data issues a weird error, and it looks consistent with changing things in
raised by Harvard Business School’s investigation into Gino’s work. the direction to get a result.” But weirder still was how that error
Schroeder rejected that comparison when I brought it up, but she came to light, through a detailed data audit that she’d undertaken
was willing to accept some blame. “I couldn’t feel worse about that of her own accord. Apparently, she’d gone to great effort to call
paper and that study,” she told me. “I’m deeply ashamed of it.” attention to a damning set of facts. That alone could be taken as
Still, she said that the source of the error wasn’t her. Her a sign of her commitment to transparency.
research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; But in the months that followed, I couldn’t shake the feeling
Schroeder wonders if they got confused. She said that two RAs, that another theory also fit the facts. Schroeder’s leading expla-
both undergraduates, had recruited the women at the gym, and nation for the issues in her work—An RA must have bungled the
that the scene there was chaotic: Sometimes multiple people came data—sounded distressingly familiar. Francesca Gino had offered
up to them at once, and the undergrads may have had to make up the same defense to Harvard’s investigators. The mere repeti-
some changes on the fly, adjusting which participants were being tion of this story doesn’t mean that it’s invalid: Lab techs and
put into which group for the study. Maybe things went wrong assistants really do mishandle data on occasion, and they may of
from there, Schroeder said. One or both RAs might have gotten course engage in science fraud. But still.
ruffled as they tried to paper over inconsistencies in their record- As for Schroeder’s all-out focus on integrity, and her public
keeping. They both knew what the experiment was meant to efforts to police the scientific record, I came to understand that
show, and how the data ought to look—so it’s possible that they most of these had been adopted, all at once, in mid-2023, shortly
peeked a little at the data and reassigned the numbers in the way after the Gino scandal broke. (The version of Schroeder’s résumé
that seemed correct. (Schroeder’s audit lays out other possibilities, that was available on her webpage in the spring of 2023 does not
but describes this one as the most likely.) describe any replication projects whatsoever.) That makes sense if
Schroeder’s account is certainly plausible, but it’s not a perfect the accusations changed the way she thought about her field—
fit with all of the facts. For one thing, the posted data indicate and she did describe them to me as “a wake-up call.” But here’s
that during most days on which the study ran, the RAs had to another explanation: Maybe Schroeder saw the Gino scandal as
deal with only a handful of participants—sometimes just two. a warning that the data sleuths were on the march. Perhaps she
How could they have gotten so bewildered? figured that her own work might end up being scrutinized, and
Any further details seem unlikely to emerge. The paper was then, having gamed this out, she decided to be a data sleuth her-
formally retracted in the February issue of the journal. Schroeder self. She’d publicly commit to reexamining her colleagues’ work,
has chosen not to name the RAs who helped her with the study, doing audits of her own, and asking for corrections. This would
and she told me that she hasn’t tried to contact them. “I just didn’t be her play for amnesty during a crisis.
think it was appropriate,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it would I spoke with Schroeder for the last time on the day before
help matters at all.” By her account, neither one is currently in Halloween. She was notably composed when I confronted her
academia, and she did not discover any additional issues when she with the possibility that she’d engaged in data-tampering herself.
reviewed their other work. (I reached out to more than a dozen She repeated what she’d told me months before, that she defi-
former RAs and lab managers who were thanked in Schroeder’s nitely did not go in and change the numbers in her study. And
published papers from around this time. Five responded to my she rejected the idea that her self-audits had been strategic, that
queries; all of them denied having helped with this experiment.) she’d used them to divert attention from her own wrongdoing.
In the end, Schroeder said, she took the data at the assistants’ word. “Honestly, it’s disturbing to hear you even lay it out,” she said.
“I did not go in and change labels,” she told me. But she also said “Because I think if you were to look at my body of work and try
repeatedly that she doesn’t think her RAs should take the blame. to replicate it, I think my hit rate would be good.” She continued:
“The responsibility rests with me, right? And so it was appropriate “So to imply that I’ve actually been, I don’t know, doing a lot of

55
fraudulent stuff myself for a long time, and this was a moment to truth-seeker by vocation. I daresay the facts regarding all of these
come clean with it? I just don’t think the evidence bears that out.” cases may yet be amenable to further inquiry. The raw data from
That wasn’t really what I’d meant to imply. The story I had in Study 1b may still exist, somewhere; if so, one might compare
mind was more mundane—and in a sense more tragic. I went them with the posted spreadsheet to confirm that certain num-
through it: Perhaps she’d fudged the results for a study just once bers had been altered. And Schroeder says she has the names of
or twice early in her career, and never again. Perhaps she’d been the RAs who worked on her dieting experiment; in theory, she
committed, ever since, to proper scientific methods. And perhaps could ask those people for their recollections of what happened.
she really did intend to fix some problems in her field. If figures aren’t checked, or questions aren’t asked, it’s by choice.
Schroeder allowed that she’d been susceptible to certain What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set
research practices—excluding data, for example—that are now of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on
considered improper. So were many of her colleagues. In that administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected
sense, she’d been guilty of letting her judgment be distorted by fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be
the pressure to succeed. But I understood what she was saying: untouched. “The problem is that journal editors and institutions
This was not the same as fraud. can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than
Throughout our conversations, Schroeder had avoided stating finding out the truth,” Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex
outright that anyone in particular had committed fraud. But not Business School, told me. “It can be easier to hope that this all just
all of her colleagues had been so cautious. Just a few days earlier, goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it.”
I’d received an unexpected message from Maurice Schweitzer, Some degree of disillusionment was common among the
the senior Wharton business-school professor who oversaw Ali- academics I spoke with for this story. The early-career researcher
son Wood Brooks’s “Don’t Stop Believ- in business academia told me that he has
ing” research. Up to this point, he had not an “unhealthy hobby” of finding manipu-
responded to my request for an interview, lated data. But now, he said, he’s giving
and I figured he’d chosen not to comment “I would say that up the fight. “At least for the time being,
for this story. But he finally responded to I’m done,” he told me. “Feeling like Sisy-
a list of written questions. It was impor- distrust characterizes phus isn’t the most fulfilling experience.”
tant for me to know, his email said, that many people in A management professor who has fol-
Schroeder had “been involved in data tam- the field—it’s all lowed all of these cases very closely gave
pering.” He included a link to the retraction this assessment: “I would say that distrust
notice for her paper on rituals and eating. very depressing.” characterizes many people in the field—
When I asked Schweitzer to elaborate, he it’s all very depressing and demotivating.”
did not respond. (Schweitzer’s most recent It’s possible that no one is more depressed
academic work is focused on the damag- and demotivated, at this point, than Juli-
ing effects of gossip; one of his papers from 2024 is titled “The ana Schroeder. “To be honest with you, I’ve had some very low
Interpersonal Costs of Revealing Others’ Secrets.”) moments where I’m like, ‘Well, maybe this is not the right field
I laid this out for Schroeder on the phone. “Wow,” she said. for me, and I shouldn’t be in it,’” she said. “And to even have any
“That’s unfortunate that he would say that.” She went silent for errors in any of my papers is incredibly embarrassing, let alone one
a long time. “Yeah, I’m sad he’s saying that.” that looks like data-tampering.”
Another long silence followed. “I think that the narrative that I asked her if there was anything more she wanted to say.
you laid out, Dan, is going to have to be a possibility,” she said. “I guess I just want to advocate for empathy and transparency—
“I don’t think there’s a way I can refute it, but I know what the maybe even in that order. Scientists are imperfect people, and
truth is, and I think I did the right thing, with trying to clean we need to do better, and we can do better.” Even the Many Co-
the literature as much as I could.” Authors Project, she said, has been a huge missed opportunity.
This is all too often where these stories end: A researcher will “It was sort of like a moment where everyone could have done
say that whatever really happened must forever be obscure. Dan self-reflection. Everyone could have looked at their papers and
Ariely told Business Insider in February 2024 : “I’ve spent a big done the exercise I did. And people didn’t.”
part of the last two years trying to find out what happened. I Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, she
haven’t been able to … I decided I have to move on with my life.” said. “The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we’ll self-
Schweitzer told me that the most relevant files for the “Don’t Stop correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility.”
Believing” paper are “long gone,” and that the chain of custody “Do you believe that?” I asked.
for its data simply can’t be tracked. (The Wharton School agreed, “On my optimistic days, I believe it.”
telling me that it “does not possess the requested data” for Study “Is today an optimistic day?”
1b, “as it falls outside its current data retention period.”) And “Not really.”
now Schroeder had landed on a similar position.
It’s uncomfortable for a scientist to claim that the truth might
be unknowable, just as it would be for a journalist, or any other Daniel Engber is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

56 JANUARY 2025
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58 TK 2024
What Happens
When You Lose
Your Country?
In 1893, a U.S.-backed
coup destroyed Hawai‘i’s
sovereign government.
Some Hawaiians want
their nation back.

BY A DR I E N N E L A F R A NC E

PH O T O G R A PH S BY
B R E N DA N G E O RG E KO

59
A K
t the edge of a forest Hawai‘i passport that he and his followers eanu Sai is, today,
on the island of O‘ahu, made themselves. one of the more
through two massive But outside the gates of his compound, extreme thinkers
metal gates—if you there is not only an American state, but a about Hawaiian sov-
can convince someone crucial outpost of the United States mili- ereignty. Growing
to let you in—you will tary, which has 12 bases and installations up in Kuli‘ou‘ou,
find yourself inside the compound of the here—including the headquarters for U.S. on the east end of O‘ahu, Sai was a self-
self-appointed president of the Nation Indo-Pacific Command and the Pacific described slacker who only wanted to play
of Hawai‘i. Missile Range Facility. The military con- football. He graduated from high school
Dennis Pu‘uhonua Kanahele came to trols hundreds of thousands of acres of land in 1982 and went straight to a military
possess this particular 45-acre plot only after and untold miles of airspace in the Islands. college, then the Army.
a prolonged and extremely controversial It seems unrealistic, to say the least, to In 1990, he was at Fort Sill, in Okla-
occupation, which he led, and which put imagine that the most powerful country in homa, when Saddam Hussein invaded
him in prison for a time, more than three the world would simply give Hawai‘i back Kuwait, annexing it as Iraq’s 19th prov-
decades ago. Since then, he has built a mod- to the Hawaiians. If it really came down ince. International condemnation was
est commune on this land, in the shadow of to it, I asked, how far would Kanahele go swift; the United Nations Security Coun-
an ancient volcano, with a clutter of bun- to protect his people, his nation? That’s cil declared the annexation illegal. An
galows and brightly painted trailers. He’s a personal question, Kanahele told me. American-led coalition quickly beat back
in his 70s now, and carries himself like an “That’s your life, you know. What you’re Saddam, liberating Kuwait. “And that’s
elder statesman. I went to see him because willing to give up. Not just freedom but when I went, Wait a minute. That’s exactly
I had, for the better part of 20 years, been the possibility to be alive.” what happened” in Hawai‘i, Sai told me.
trying to find the answer to a question that I Sitting across the table from us, his “Our government was overthrown.” The
knew preoccupied both of us: What should vice president, Brandon Maka‘awa‘awa, idea radicalized him.
America do about Hawai‘i? conceded that there had, in the past, been Before Hawai‘i’s overthrow, it had
More than a century after the United moments when it would have been easy to been a full-fledged nation with diplo-
States helped orchestrate the coup that choose militancy. “We could have acted out matic relationships across the globe and a
conquered the nation of Hawai‘i, and of fear,” he said. But every time, they “acted modern form of governance (it also signed
more than 65 years since it became a state, with aloha and we got through, just like our a peace treaty with the United States in
people here have wildly different ideas queen.” He was referring to Hawai‘i’s last 1826). As a constitutional monarchy,
about what America owes the Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, who was it had elected representatives, its own
people. Many are fine with the status quo, deposed in the coup in 1893. supreme court, and a declaration of rights
and happy to call themselves American. People tend to treat this chapter in modeled after the U.S. Bill of Rights. And,
Some people even explicitly side with the U.S. foreign relations as a curiosity on as people in Hawai‘i like to remind out-
insurrectionists. Others agree that the U.S. the margins of history. This is a mistake. siders, ‘Iolani Palace had electricity before
overthrow was an unqualified historic The overthrow of Hawai‘i is what estab- the White House did.
wrong, but their views diverge from that lished the modern idea of America as a Then, in January 1893, a group of 13
point. There are those who argue that the superpower. Without this one largely for- men—mostly Americans or Hawai‘i-born
federal government should formally rec- gotten episode, the United States may businessmen descended from American
ognize Hawaiians with a government-to- never have endured an attack on Pearl missionary families, all with extensive
government relationship, similar to how Harbor, or led the Allies to victory in financial interests in the Islands—executed
the United States liaises with American World War II, or ushered in the age of a surprise coup. They did so with remark-
Indian tribes; those who prefer to seize Pax Americana—an age that, with Don- able speed and swagger, even by coup stan-
back government from within; and those ald Trump’s return to power, could be dards. The men behind the effort referred
who argue that the Kingdom of Hawai‘i coming to an end. to themselves as the Committee of Safety
never legally ceased to exist. Some Hawaiians see what is happen- (presumably in a nod to the American
Then there is Kanahele, who has wrested ing now in the United States as a book- and French Revolutions) and had good
land from the state—at least for the dura- end of sorts. In their view, the chain of reason to expect that they would succeed:
tion of his 55-year lease—and believes events that led to a coup in Hawai‘i in They had the backing of the U.S. foreign
other Hawaiians should follow his example. 1893 has finally brought us to this: the minister to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, John
Like many Hawaiians (by which I mean moment when the rise of autocracy in L. Stevens, who called up a force of more
descendants of the Islands’ first inhabit- America presents an opportunity for than 160 Marines and sailors to march
ants, who are also sometimes called Native Hawaiians to extricate themselves from on Honolulu during the confrontation
Hawaiians), Kanahele doesn’t see himself as their long entanglement with the United with the queen. Stevens later insisted that
American at all. When he travels, he carries, States, reclaim their independence, and he had done so in a panic—a coup was
along with his U.S. passport, a Nation of perhaps even resurrect their nation. unfolding! It was his duty to do whatever

60 JANUARY 2025
 Dennis Pu‘uhonua Kanahele is the self-appointed president of the Nation of Hawai‘i.

was necessary to protect American lives part, had had his eye on the Islands for one of the overthrow’s architects, boasted
and property! A good story, but not a con- decades.) Two weeks after the overthrow, in his Memoirs of the Hawaiian Revolution
vincing one. Stevens wrote to John W. Foster, Presi- that in early 1892, Harrison had encour-
Months before the coup, Stevens had dent Benjamin Harrison’s final secretary aged him, through an interlocutor, to go
written a curious letter to his friend James of state: “The Hawaiian pear is now fully forward with his plot.)
Blaine, the U.S. secretary of state, in which ripe, and this is the golden hour for the Looking back at this history nearly 100
he’d posed a bizarre and highly detailed United States to pluck it.” years later, Keanu Sai had an epiphany. “I
hypothetical: What if, Stevens had wanted Queen Lili‘uokalani had yielded imme- was in the wrong army,” he said. Sai left the
to know, the government of Hawai‘i were diately to the insurrectionists, unsure military and dove into the state archives,
to be “surprised and overturned by an whether Stevens was following orders from researching Hawai‘i’s history and his own
orderly and peaceful revolutionary move- Harrison. “This action on my part was family’s lineage prior to the arrival of haole
ment” that established its own provisional prompted by three reasons,” she wrote in (white) Europeans and Americans. He says
government to replace the queen? If that an urgent letter to Harrison: “the futility of a he traced his family’s roots to ali‘i, mem-
were to happen, Stevens pressed, just how conflict with the United States; the desire to bers of Hawai‘i’s noble class. “I started to
BRENDAN GEORGE KO FOR THE ATLANTIC

far would he and the American naval com- avoid violence, bloodshed, and the destruc- realize that the Hawaiian Kingdom that I
mander stationed nearby be permitted to tion of life and property; and the certainty was led to believe was all haole-controlled,
“deviate from established international which I feel that you and your government missionary-controlled, was all—pardon the
rules” in their response? The presence of will right whatever wrongs may have been French—bullshit,” he told me.
U.S. Marines, Stevens mused, might be inflicted on us in the premises.” That led him to develop what is prob-
the only thing that could quash such an Her faith in Harrison was misplaced; he ably the most creative, most radical, and
overthrow and maintain order. As it turned ignored her letter. In the last month of his quite possibly most ridiculous argument
out, however, Stevens and his fellow insur- presidency, he sent a treaty to the U.S. Sen- about Hawaiian independence that I’ve
rectionists used the Marines to ensure that ate to advance the annexation of Hawai‘i ever heard. Basically, it’s this: The Hawai-
their coup would succeed. (Blaine, for his to the United States. (Lorrin A. Thurston, ian Kingdom never ceased to exist.

61
 Though Sai has plenty of fans and people of Hawai‘i can reconstruct their Hawaiian independence is to restore a
admirers, several people warned me that nation. Sai has attempted to advance this nation that has been lost, then which ver-
I should be careful around him. I spoke case in the international court system. So sion of Hawai‘i, exactly, are you trying to
with some Hawaiians who expressed dis- far, he has been unsuccessful. bring back?
comfort with the implications of Sai’s At one point, Sai mused that I’d have Ancient explorers first reached the archi-
notion that the kingdom was never legally to completely rework my story based on pelago in great voyaging canoes, traveling
dissolved—not everyone wants to be a his revelations. I disagreed, but said that thousands of miles from the Marquesas
subject in a monarchy. There was also the I liked hearing from him about this pos- Islands, around the year 400 C.E. They
matter of his troubles with the law. sible path to Hawaiian independence. brought with them pigs, chickens, gourds,
In 1997, Sai took out an ad in a news- This provoked, for the first time in our taro, sugarcane, coconuts, sweet potatoes,
paper declaring himself to be a regent of several hours of conversations, a flash of bananas, and paper mulberry plants. Pre-
the Hawaiian Kingdom, a move that he anger. “This is not the ‘possible path,’ ” contact Hawai‘i was home to hundreds of
said formally entrusted him “with the Sai said. “It is the path.” thousands of Hawaiians—some scholars
vicarious administration of the Hawai- estimate that the population was as high as

T
ian government during the absence of a he island of Ni‘ihau is
Monarch.” He had started a business in just 18 miles long and
which he and his partner charged people six miles wide. Nick-
some $1,500 for land-title research going named “the forbidden
back to the mid-19th century, promising island,” it has been
to protect clients’ land from anyone who privately owned since
might claim it as their own. The business 1864, when King Kamehameha IV and As exoticized ideas
model was built on his theory of Hawai- his brother sold it for $10,000 in gold about Hawaiian
ian history, and the underlying message to a wealthy Scottish widow, Elizabeth
seemed to be: If the kingdom still exists, Sinclair, who had moved her family to culture spread,
and the state of Hawai‘i does not, maybe Hawai‘i after her husband and son were
this house you bought isn’t technically lost at sea. repackaged for tourists,
even yours. Ultimately, Sai’s business had Sinclair’s descendants still own and run
its downtown office raided; the title com- the island, which by the best estimates has Hawaiianness was
pany shut down, and he was convicted of a population of fewer than 100. It is the suppressed nearly to
felony theft. only place in the world where everyone
It struck me that, in another life, still speaks Hawaiian. No one is allowed the point of erasure.
Keanu Sai would have made a perfect to visit Ni‘ihau without a personal invita-
politician. He is charismatic and funny. A tion from Sinclair’s great-great-grandsons
decorated bullshit artist. Unquestionably Bruce and Keith Robinson, both now in
smart. Filibusters with the best of them. their 80s. Such invitations are extraordi-
(He also told me that Keanu Reeves is narily rare. (One of the two people I know
his cousin.) Although Sai’s methods may who have ever set foot on Ni‘ihau got there
be questionable, his indignation over the only after asking the Robinsons every year 1 million. There was no concept of private
autocratic overthrow of his ancestors’ for nearly 10 years.) land ownership, and Hawaiians lived under
nation is justified. The island has no paved roads, no elec- a feudal system run by ali‘i, chiefs who were
Sai says that arguments about Hawai- trical grid, no street signs, and no domestic believed to be divinely ordained. This strict
ian sovereignty tend to distort this his- water supply—drinking water comes from caste system entailed severe rules, execu-
tory. “They create the binary of colonizer- catchment water and wells. In the village tions for those who broke them, and brutal
colonized,” he said. “All of that is wrong. is a schoolhouse, a cafeteria, and a church, rituals including human sacrifice.
Hawai‘i was never a colony of the United which everyone is reportedly expected to The first British explorers moored
States. And we’re not a tribal nation similar attend. One of the main social activities their ships just off the coast of Kaua‘i in
to Native Americans. We’re nationals of an is singing. The rules for Ni‘ihau residents 1778 and immediately took interest in
occupied state.” are strict: Men cannot wear their hair long, the Islands. Captain James Cook, who led
Following this logic, Sai believes pierce their ears, or grow beards. Drinking that first expedition, was welcomed with
international courts must acknowledge and smoking are not allowed. The Robin- aloha by the Hawaiian people. But when
that America has perpetuated war crimes sons infamously bar anyone who leaves for Cook attempted to kidnap the Hawai-
against Hawai‘i’s people. After that, he even just a few weeks from returning, with ian chief Kalani‘ōpu‘u on a subsequent
says, international law should guide few exceptions. visit to the Islands, a group of Hawaiians
Hawai‘i out of its current “wartime occu- Ni‘ihau’s circumscribed mores point stabbed and bludgeoned Cook to death.
pation” by the United States, so that the to a broader question: If one goal of (Kalani‘ōpu‘u survived.)

62 JANUARY 2025
 Elizabeth Sinclair’s descendants prof-
ited greatly from the sugar they cultivated,
but they had a different view of what
Hawai‘i should be. King Kamehameha IV
is said to have sold Ni‘ihau on one condi-
tion: Its new owners had to promise to do
right by the Hawaiian people and their
culture. This is why, when the United
States did finally move to “seize and annex
the islands,” the Robinsons supported the
crown. After annexation happened any-
way, in 1898, Sinclair’s grandson closed
Ni‘ihau to visitors.
On the other islands, everything seemed
to speed up from there. Schools had already
banned the Hawaiian language, but now
many Hawaiian families started speaking
only English with their children. The sugar
and pineapple industries boomed. Matson
ships carrying visitors to Hawai‘i soon gave
way to airplanes. As exoticized ideas about
Hawaiian culture spread, repackaged for
tourists, Hawaiianness was suppressed
nearly to the point of erasure.
Through all of this, Ni‘ihau stayed
apart. History briefly intruded in 1941,
when a Japanese fighter pilot crash-
landed there hours after participating in
the attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed
an estimated 2,400 people in Honolulu.
Ni‘ihau residents knew nothing about the
mayhem of that day. They at first wel-
comed the Imperial pilot as a guest, but
Keanu Sai argues that the Kingdom of Hawai‘i never legally ceased to exist. killed him after he botched an attempt
to hold some of them hostage.
If the overthrow had marked the begin-
ning of the end of Hawaiian nationhood,
Eventually, fierce battles culminated plummeted to about 40,000 by the end the attack on Pearl Harbor finished it. It
in unification of all the Islands under of the 19th century. also kicked off a three-year period of martial
Hawai‘i’s King Kamehameha, who finally During this period, the United States law in Hawai‘i, in which the military took
conquered the archipelago’s last indepen- had begun to show open interest in control of every aspect of civilian life—
dent island in 1810. The explosion and scooping up the Sandwich Islands, as in effect converting the Islands into one
subsequent collapse of the sandalwood they were then called. In the June 1869 big internment facility. The government
trade followed, along with the construc- issue of The Atlantic, the journalist Sam- suspended habeas corpus, shut down the
tion of the first sugar plantations and uel Bowles wrote: courts, and set up its own tribunals for law
the arrival of whaling ships. Missionar- enforcement. The military imposed a strict
BRENDAN GEORGE KO FOR THE ATLANTIC

ies came too, and the introduction of We have converted their heathen, nightly curfew, rationed food and gasoline,
Christianity led, for a time, to a ban on we have occupied their sugar planta- and censored the press and other commu-
the hula—one of the Hawaiian people’s tions; we furnish the brains that carry nications. The many Japanese Americans
most sacred and enduring forms of pass- on their government, and the diseases living there were surveilled and treated
ing down history. All the while, several that are destroying their people; we as enemies—Japanese-run banks were
waves of epidemics—cholera, mumps, want the profit on their sugars and shut down, along with Japanese-language
measles, whooping cough, scarlet their tropical fruits and vegetables; schools. Everyone was required to carry
fever, smallpox, and bubonic plague— why should we not seize and annex identification cards, and those older than
ravaged the Hawaiian population, which the islands themselves? the age of 6 were fingerprinted. Telephone

63
calls and photography were restricted. in Honolulu.’” His father went on: “They In 1993, Akaka, a Democrat, spon-
Sugarcane workers who didn’t report to lowered the flag in Hilo too, on the Big sored a joint congressional resolution
their job could be tried in military court. Island, and your grandfather was there, that formally apologized to the Hawaiian
Martial law was fully lifted in 1944, and and he saw all of this.” people for the overthrow of their kingdom
in 1959, Hawai‘i became the 50th state— Waihe‘e was floored. Even nearly 70 100 years earlier and for “the deprivation
a move the Robinsons are said to have years later, he remembers the moment. To of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-
opposed. But whether they liked it or not, picture his grandfather among those watch- determination.” I’d always seen the apol-
statehood dragged Ni‘ihau along with it. The ing the kingdom in its final hours “broke ogy bill, which was signed into law by
island is technically part of Kaua‘i County, my heart,” he said. Waihe‘e had never met President Bill Clinton, as an example of
the local government that oversees the island his grandfather, but he had seen photos and the least the United States could possibly
closest to it. Still, Ni‘ihau has stayed mostly heard stories about him all his life. “He was do, mere lip service. But the more people
off-limits to the rest of Hawai‘i and the rest this big, strong Hawaiian guy. And the idea I talked with as I reported this story, the
of the world. (The Robinsons do operate of him crying was—it was unthinkable.” more I heard that it mattered—not just
a helicopter tour that takes visitors to an The image never left him. He grew up, symbolically but legally.
uninhabited beach on the far side of the Recently, I went to see Esther Kia‘āina,
island, but you can’t actually get to the vil- who was one of the key architects of the
lage or meet any residents that way.) Those apology as an aide to Akaka in Wash-
who have affection for Ni‘ihau defend it as ington, D.C., in the early 1990s. Today,
an old ranch community on a remote island Kia‘āina is a city-council member in
that’s not hurting anybody. The less gener- Honolulu. People forget, she told me,
ous view is that it’s essentially the world’s last just how hard it was to get to an apology
remaining feudal society. in the first place.
But no one is arguing that the rest of
Around 2020, for the “Prior to 1993, it was abysmal,”
Hawai‘i should be run like Ni‘ihau. After first time ever, more Kia‘āina said. There had been a federal
all, the entire goal of the sovereignty move- inquiry into the overthrow, producing a
ment, if you can even say it has a single goal, Hawaiians lived dueling pair of reports in the 1980s, one
is to confer more power on the Hawaiian of which concluded that the U.S. bore no
people, not less. The question is how best outside Hawai‘i than responsibility for what had happened to
to do that. Hawai‘i, and that Hawaiians should not
in the Islands. receive reparations as a result. Without the

J
ohn Waihe‘e’s awakening United States first admitting wrongdoing,
came the summer before he Kia‘āina said, nothing else could follow.
started seventh grade, when As she saw it, the apology was the first
he checked a book out of in a series of steps. The next would be to
the library in his home- obtain official tribal status for Hawaiians
town of Honoka‘a, on from the Department of the Interior, simi-
the Big Island, that would lar to the way the United States recognizes
change his life. In it, he read a descrip- attended law school, and eventually became hundreds of American Indian and Alaska
tion of the annexation ceremony that had Hawai‘i’s governor in 1986, the first Hawai- Native tribes. Then full-on independence.
taken place at ‘Iolani Palace in 1898, when ian ever to hold the office. In the early 2000s, Akaka began push-
Hawai‘i officially became a territory of the Waihe‘e is part of a class of political lead- ing legislation that would create a path
United States. It described the lowering ers in Hawai‘i who have chosen to work to federal recognition for Hawaiians as a
of the Hawaiian flag, and the Hawaiian within the system, rather than rail against tribe, a move that Kia‘āina enthusiastically
people who had gathered around with tears it. Another was the late Daniel Akaka, one supported. “I was Miss Fed Rec,” she said.
in their eyes. of Hawai‘i’s longest-serving U.S. senators— It wasn’t a compliment—lots of people
This was the 1950s—post–Pearl Har- a Hawaiian himself. Akaka was raised in a hated the idea.
bor and pre-statehood—and Waihe‘e had home where he was not permitted to speak The federal-recognition legislation
never even heard of the overthrow. His Hawaiian. He once told me about hear- would have made Native Hawaiians one of
parents spoke Hawaiian with each other ing a roar from above on the morning of the largest tribes in America overnight—but
at home, but never spoke it with Waihe‘e. December 7, 1941, and looking up to see a many Hawaiians didn’t want recognition
“I remember rushing back to my father gray wave of Japanese bombers with bright- from the United States at all. The debate
and telling him, ‘Dad, I didn’t know any of red dots on the wings. He grabbed his rifle created strange bedfellows. Many people
this stuff,’” Waihe‘e told me. “He looks at and ran into the hills. He was 17 then, and argued against it on the grounds that it
me, and he was very calm about it. He said, would later deploy to Saipan with the Army didn’t go far enough; they wanted their
‘You know, son, that didn’t only happen Corps of Engineers. country back, not tribal status. Meanwhile,

64 JANUARY 2025
 what you do?’ ” Kia‘āina said. Instead of
effecting change, she told me, people
playact Hawaiianness and think it will
be enough. They “slap on a Hawaiian
logo,” and “that’s your contribution to
helping the Hawaiian community.” And
in the end, nobody outside Hawai‘i is
marching in the street, protesting at the
State Department, or occupying campus
quads for Native Hawaiians.
There is no question that aware-
ness of Hawaiian history and culture
has improved since the 1970s, a period
that’s come to be known as the Hawaiian
Renaissance, when activists took steps to
restore the Hawaiian language in public
places, to teach hula more widely, and to
protect and restore other cultural practices.
But Kia‘āina told me that although the
cultural and language revival is lovely, and
essential, it can lull people into thinking
that the work is done when plainly it is
not. Especially when Hawaiians are run-
ning out of time.

S
ometime around 2020,
the Hawaiian people
crossed a terrible thresh-
old. For the first time ever,
ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY / GETTY; ERGI REBOREDO / VW PICS / UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP / GETTY

more Hawaiians lived out-

side Hawai‘i than in the
Islands. Roughly 680,000 Hawaiians live
in the United States, according to the most
recent census data; some 300,000 of them
live in Hawai‘i.
Hawaiians now make up about 20 per-
cent of the state population, a proportion
that for many inspires existential fear.
Meanwhile, outsiders are getting rich in
The volcano Diamond Head, or Lē‘ahi, in Honolulu, circa 1872 (top) and in 2015 (bottom) Hawai‘i, and rich outsiders are buying
up Hawaiian land. Larry Ellison, a co-
founder of Oracle, owns most of the island
of Lāna‘i. Facebook’s co-founder Mark
some conservatives in Hawai‘i, who tended a distraction, but Kia‘āina still believes Zuckerberg owns a property on Kaua‘i
to be least moved by calls for Hawai- that it’s the only way to bring about self- estimated to be worth about $300 mil-
ian rights, fought against the bill, argu- determination for Hawaiians. She told me lion. Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, has
ing that it was a reductionist and maybe that she sometimes despairs at what the reportedly purchased nearly $100 million
even unconstitutional attempt to codify movement has become: She sees people worth of land on the Big Island. Amazon’s
preferential treatment on the basis of race. rage against the overthrow, and against founder, Jeff Bezos, reportedly paid some
That’s how a coalition briefly formed that the continued presence of the U.S. mili- $80 million for his estate on Maui. As one
included Hawaiian nationalists and their tary in Hawai‘i, but do little else to pro- longtime Hawai‘i resident put it to me:
anti-affirmative-action neighbors. mote justice for Hawaiians. And within The sugar days may be over, but Hawai‘i
Akaka’s legislation never passed, and the government, she sees similar complacency. is still a plantation town.
senator died in 2018. Today, some people “It’s almost like ‘Are you kidding At the same time, many Hawaiians are
say the debate over federal recognition was me? We give you the baton and this is faring poorly. Few have the means to live

65
in Hawai‘i’s wealthy neighborhoods. On he said he is most focused on addressing The whole thing reminds Lind of
O‘ahu, a commute to Waikīkī for those the moment-to-moment crisis for the a fringe militia or a group of secession-
with hotel or construction jobs there can Hawaiian people. Lots of Native Hawai- ists you’d find elsewhere. “It’s so much
take hours in island traffic. Hawaiians have ians, he said, “are motivated by the same like watching the Confederacy,” he said.
among the highest rates of heart disease, set of issues that non-Native Hawaiians are “You’re watching something, a historical
hypertension, asthma, diabetes, and some motivated by. They don’t wake up every fact, you didn’t like. It wasn’t your side
types of cancer compared with other eth- morning thinking about sovereignty and that won. But governments changed. And
nic groups. They smoke and binge drink self-determination. They wake up every when our government changed here, it
at higher rates. A quarter of Hawaiian morning thinking about the price of gaso- was recognized by all the countries in the
households can’t adequately feed them- line, and traffic, and health care.” He went world very quickly. So whatever you want
selves. More than half of Hawaiians report on: “They are deeply, deeply uninterested to think about 130 years ago, how you feel
worrying about having enough money to in a bunch of abstractions. They would about that change, I just think there are so
keep a roof over their head; the average per rather have a few hundred million dollars many more things to deal with that could
capita income is less than $28,000. Only for housing than some new statute that be dealt with now realistically that people
13 percent of Hawaiians have a college purports to change the interaction between aren’t doing, because they’re hung up wav-
degree. The poverty rate among Hawai- America and Hawaiians.” ing the Confederate flag or having a new,
ians is 12 percent, the highest of the five Ian Lind, a former investigative reinstated Hawaiian Kingdom.”
largest ethnic groups in Hawai‘i. Although reporter who is himself Hawaiian, is also When you talk with people in Hawai‘i
Hawaiians make up only a small percent- critical of sovereignty discussions that about the question of sovereignty, skep-
age of the population in Hawai‘i, the share rely too much on fashionable ideologies tics will say shocking things behind closed
of homeless people on O‘ahu who identify at the expense of reality. I’ve known Lind doors, or off the record, that they’d never
as Hawaiian or Pacific Islander has hovered since my own days as a city-hall reporter say in public—I’ve encountered eye-
at about 50 percent in recent years. in Honolulu, in the early 2000s, and I rolling, a general sentiment of get over it,
Kūhiō Lewis was “very much the sta- wanted to get his thoughts on how the sov- even disparaging Queen Lili‘uokalani as
tistic Hawaiian” growing up in the 1990s, ereignty conversation had changed in the an “opium dealer”—but invoking the Lost
he told me—a high-school dropout raised intervening years. He told me that, in his Cause this way was a new one for me. I
by his grandmother. He’d struggled with view, an “incredibly robust environment asked Lind if his opinions have been well
drugs and alcohol, and became a single for charlatans and con artists” has metasta- received by his fellow Hawaiians. “No,”
father with two babies by the time he sized within Hawaiian-sovereignty circles. he said with a chuckle. “I’m totally out
was 19. Back then, Lewis was consumed There are those who invent royal lineage or of step.”
with anger over what had happened to the government titles for themselves, as well
Hawaiian people and believed that the only as ordinary scammers. rian Schatz, a Democrat,
way to get what his people deserved was to
fight, and to protest. But he lost patience
with a movement that he didn’t think was
getting anything done. Today, as the CEO
of the nonprofit Council for Native Hawai-
ian Advancement, he has a different view.
He still believes that Hawai‘i should
Even those who are merely trying to
understand—or in some cases teach—
the history have become too willing to
gloss over some subtleties, Lind told me.
It’s not so simple to say that Hawaiians
were dispossessed at the time of the over-
throw, that they suddenly lost everything,
B grew up on O‘ahu before
making a rapid ascent
in local, then national,
politics. I first met him
more than 15 years ago,
when he was coming off a stint as a state
representative. In 2021, he became the
not be part of America, but he also believes he said. Many people gave up farmlands chair of the Senate Committee on Indian
that Hawai‘i would need a leader with that had been allotted to them after the Affairs, meaning he thinks about matters
“balls of steel” to make independence hap- Great Māhele land distribution in 1848. related to Indigenous self-determination a
pen. “That’s a big ask,” he added. “That’s a “They were a burden, not an asset,” Lind lot. He’s also on the Senate Committee on
lot of personal sacrifice.” Until that person said. “People thought, I could just go get Foreign Relations, which makes sense for a
steps up, Lewis chooses to work within the a job downtown and get away from this.” person representing a region of profound
system, even if it means some Hawaiians But people bristle at the introduction strategic importance to the United States.
see him as a sellout. of nuance in the telling of this history, Because Schatz is extremely online—he
“There is a wrong that was done. And partly because they remain understand- is a bit of a puppy dog on X, not exactly
there’s no way we’ll ever let that go,” ably focused on the immensity of what restrained—I wanted to know his views
Lewis told me. “But I also believe, and Hawaiians have lost. “There’s a faction of on an observation I’ve had in recent years.
I’ve come to believe, that the best way to Hawaiians who say that absolutely noth- As young activists in Hawai‘i have focused
win this battle is going through America ing short of restoring a kingdom like we their passion on justice for Hawaiians, I’ve
rather than trying to go around America.” had before, encompassing all of Hawai‘i, sometimes wondered if they are simply
When I spoke with Brian Schatz, is going to suffice,” Lind said. “It’s like an shouting into the pixelated abyss. On the
Hawai‘i’s senior senator, in Washington, impasse that no one wants to talk about.” one hand, more awareness of historical

66 JANUARY 2025
 Portraits of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s monarchs—from King Kamehameha (top left) to Queen Lili‘uokalani (bottom right)—
hang on the wall at the nonprofit Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.

wrongs is objectively necessary and good. anything) offline, even when more people most famous—but few involve places like
On the other, as Schatz put it to me, “the than ever before seem to be paying atten- Hawai‘i. The world does not have many
internet is not a particularly constructive tion to ideas that animate those fighting for examples of what “successful” secession
place to figure out how to redress histori- Hawaiian independence. or decolonization from the United States
cal wrongs.” “There’s a newly energized cohort of looks like in practice. There is one exam-
Two recent moments in Hawaiian activ- leftists on the continent who are waking ple from elsewhere in the Pacific: In 1898,
ism sparked international attention, but up to this injustice,” Schatz said. “But, I fresh off its annexation of Hawai‘i, the
haven’t necessarily advanced the cause of mean, the truth is that there’s not a place United States moved to annex the Philip-
self-determination. In 2014, opposition to on the continental United States where pines, too. People there fought back, in a
the construction of the Thirty Meter Tele- that story wasn’t also told.” The story he’s war that led to the deaths of an estimated
scope on the Big Island led to huge protests, talking about is the separation of people 775,000 people, most of them civilians.
BRENDAN GEORGE KO FOR THE ATLANTIC

and energized the sovereignty movement. from their language, their land, their cul- The United States promised in 1916 that it
The catastrophic fires on Maui in 2023 ture, and their water sources, in order to would grant the Philippines independence,
prompted a similar burst of attention to steal that land and to make money. Yet but that didn’t happen until 1946.
Hawai‘i and the degree to which Hawai- “nobody’s talking about giving Los Angeles Hawai‘i is particularly complex,
ians have been alienated from their own back,” he said. too, because of its diverse population.
land. But many activists complained to me One of the challenges in contemplating Roughly a quarter of Hawai‘i residents
that in both cases, sustained momentum Hawaiian independence is the question of are multiracial, and there is no single
has been spotty. Instagrammed expressions historical precedent. Clearly there are blue- racial majority. So while some activists
of solidarity may feel righteous when you’re prints for decolonization—India’s indepen- are eager to apply a settler-colonialism
scrolling, but they accomplish little (if dence following British rule may be the frame to what happened in Hawai‘i, huge

67
populations of people here do not slot need in order to become self-reliant All over Moloka‘i, the knowledge
neatly into the categories of “settler” or again, I went to see Walter Ritte, one of that you are standing somewhere that
“native.” How, for example, do you deal the godfathers of modern Hawaiian activ- long predates you and will long outlast
with the non-Hawaiian descendants of ism, and someone most people know you is inescapable. If you drive all the
laborers on plantations, who immigrated simply as “Uncle Walter.” Ritte made way east, to Hālawa Valley, you find the
to the Islands from China, Japan, Portu- a name for himself in the 1970s, when overgrown ruins of sacred places—an
gal, the Philippines? Or the Pacific Island- he and others occupied the uninhabited abandoned 19th-century church, plus
ers who came to Hawai‘i more recently, island of Kaho‘olawe, protesting the U.S. remnants of heiau, or places of worship,
as part of U.S. compensation to three military’s use of the land for bombing dating back to the 600s. The desire to
tiny island nations affected by nuclear- practice. Ian Lind was part of this protest protect the island’s way of life is fierce.
weapons testing? Or the people who too; the group came to be known as the Nobody wants it to turn into O‘ahu or
count both overthrowers and Hawaiians Kaho‘olawe Nine. Maui— commodified and overrun by
among their ancestors? Schatz said that Ritte lives on Moloka‘i, among the tourists, caricatured by outsiders who
when it comes to visions of Hawaiian least populated of the Hawaiian Islands. know nothing of this place. For locals
self-determination, “I completely defer Major airlines don’t fly to Moloka‘i, and across Hawai‘i, especially the large num-
to the community.” people there like it that way. I arrived on a ber who work in the hospitality industry,
But he cautioned that without con- this reality is an ongoing source of fury.
sensus about what this should look like, As the historian Daniel Immerwahr put it
“the danger is that we spend all of our to me: “It is psychologically hard to have
time counting the number of angels on your livelihood be a performance of your
the head of a pin, and ignore the fact own subordination.”
that the injustice imposed by the United The directions Ritte had given me
States government on Native Hawaiians is “I am not an were, in essence: Fly to Moloka‘i, drive
manifesting itself on a daily basis with bad east for 12 miles, and look for my fish-
economic outcomes, not enough housing,
American. I want my pond. So I did. Eventually, I stopped at a
not enough health care.” He went on, “So family to survive. place that I thought could be his, a sprawl-
while Native Hawaiian leaders and schol- ing, grassy property with some kukui-nut
ars sort out what comes next as it relates And we’re not going to trees, a couple of sheds, and a freshwater
to Native Hawaiians and their relationship spring. No sign of Ritte. But I met a man
to the state and federal government, my survive with who introduced himself as Ua and said
job is to—bit by bit, program by program, he could take me to him. I asked Ua how
day by day—try to reverse that injustice
continental values.” long he’d been working with Uncle Walter,
with, frankly, money. and he grinned. “My whole life,” he said.
“Because you can’t live in an apology,” Walter is his father.
he added. “You have to live in a home.” Ua drove us east in his four-wheeler
through a misty rain. This particular vehi-

T
he question of how cle had a windshield but no wipers, so I
the ancient Hawai- assumed the role of leaning all the way out
ians survived—how turboprop Cessna 208, a snug little nine- of the passenger side to squeegee water off
they managed to feed seater, alongside a few guys from O‘ahu the glass.
a complex civilization heading there to do construction work for We found Ritte standing in a field
that bloomed on the a day or two. wearing dirty jeans and a black T-shirt
most isolated archipelago on the planet— Moloka‘i has no stoplights and spotty that said Kill Em’ With Aloha. Ritte is
has long been a source of fascination and cell service. Its population hovers around lean and muscular—at almost 80 years
historic inquiry. They fished; they hunted; 7,000 people. Many of its roads are still old, he has the look of someone who has
they grew taro in irrigated wetlands. unpaved and require an off-road vehicle— worked outside his whole life, which he
Hawai‘i is now terrifyingly dependent long orange-red ribbons of dirt crisscross has. We decided to head makai, back
on the global supply chain for its residents’ the island. On one particularly rough toward the ocean, so Ritte could show
survival. By the 1960s, it was importing road, I felt my rented Jeep keel so far to me his obsession.
roughly half of its food supply. Today, that one side that I was certain it would tip When we got there, he led me down
figure is closer to 90 percent. It can be over. I considered turning back but even- a short, rocky pier to a thatched-roof
easy to forget how remote Hawai‘i truly tually arrived at the Mo‘omomi Preserve, hut and pointed out toward the water.
is. But all it takes is one hurricane, war, in the northwestern corner of Moloka‘i, What we were looking at was the rebuilt
or pandemic to upset this fragile balance. where you can stand on a bluff of black structure of a massive fishpond, first con-
To understand what Hawai‘i would lava rock and look out at the Pacific. structed by ancient Hawaiians some 700

68 JANUARY 2025
BRENDAN GEORGE KO

Hawaiian activism has sparked international attention in recent years,

but hasn’t necessarily advanced the cause of self-determination.

69
years ago. Ritte has been working on it for- “There’s a whole bunch of people who These days, they are not interested in
ever, attempting to prove that the people are not happy,” he said. “There’s going to American affairs. They see anyone who
of Hawai‘i can again feed themselves. be some violence. You got guys who are works with the Americans, including Kūhiō
The mechanics of the pond are evidence really pissed. But that’s not going to make Lewis and Brian Schatz, as sellouts or worse.
of Native Hawaiian genius. A stone wall the changes that we need.” To them, the best president the United
serves as an enclosure for the muliwai, or Still, change does not always come the States ever had was Clinton, because he was
brackish, area where fresh and salt water way you expect. Ritte believes that part the one who signed the apology bill. Barack
meet. A gate in the wall, when opened, of what he’s doing on Moloka‘i is prepar- Obama may get points for being local—he
allows small fish to swim into the muliwai ing Hawai‘i for a period of tremendous was born and raised on O‘ahu—but they’re
but blocks big fish from getting out. And unrest that may come sooner rather than still waiting for him to do something, any-
when seawater starts to pour into the pond, later, as stability in the world falters and as thing, for the Hawaiian people. As it hap-
fish already in the pond swim over to it, Hawaiians are roused to the cause of inde- pens, Obama has a house about five miles
making it easy to scoop them out. “Those pendence. “All the years people said, ‘You down the road. “I still believe that he’s here
gates are the magic,” Ritte tells me. can control the Hawaiians, don’t worry; for a reason in Waimānalo,” Kanahele said,
Back when Hawai‘i was totally self- you can control them.’ But now they’re referring to this area of the island. “I believe
sustaining, feeding the population required nervous you cannot control them.” the reason is what we’re doing.”
several fishponds across the Islands. Ritte’s Outside, light rains occasionally
fishpond couldn’t provide for all of Moloka‘i, swept over the house, and chickens and
let alone all of Hawai‘i, but he does feed his cats wandered freely. Inside was cozy,
family with the fish he farms. And when Kanahele’s vision more bunker than Oval Office, with a
something goes wrong—a recent mud- rusted door swung open and walls cov-
slide resulted in a baby-fish apocalypse— for the future entails ered in papers and plans. At one end of
it teaches Ritte what his ancestors would the room was a fireplace, and over the
have known but he has had to learn. reclaiming all of mantel was a large map of the world with
That’s how his vision went from restor- Hawai‘i at the center, alongside portraits
ing the fishpond to restoring the ahupua‘a,
Hawai‘i from the of Queen Lili‘uokalani and her brother
which in ancient Hawai‘i referred to a slice United States and King Kalākaua. Below that was a large
of land extending from the mountains humpback whale carved from wood, and
down to the ocean. If the land above the reducing its economic wooden blocks bearing the names and
pond had been properly irrigated, it could titles of members of the executive branch.
have prevented the mudslide that killed all dependence on Another wall displayed a copy of the Kū‘ē
those fish. And if everyone on Moloka‘i Petitions, documents that members of
tended to their ahupua‘a the way their
tourism and defense. the Hawaiian Patriotic League hand-
ancestors did, the island might in fact be carried to Washington, D.C., in 1897
able to dramatically reduce its reliance on to oppose annexation.
imported food. Kanahele is tall, with broad shoulders

D
But over the years, Ritte said, the people uring my visit and a splatter of freckles on one cheek.
of Hawai‘i got complacent. Too many for- to Pu‘uhonua O He is thoughtful and serious, the kind
got how to work hard, how to sweat and Wa i m ā n a l o , t h e of person who quiets a room the instant
get dirty. Too few questioned what their compound that he speaks. But he’s also funny and warm.
changing way of life was doing to them. Dennis Kana- I’ve heard people describe Kanahele as
This is how they became “sitting ducks,” he hele and Brandon Kamehameha-like in his looks, and I can
told me, too willing to acclimate to a coun- Maka‘awa‘awa have designated as the see why. Kanahele told me that he is in
try that is not truly their own. “I am not headquarters for the Nation of Hawai‘i, fact descended from a relative of Kame-
an American. I want my family to survive. Maka‘awa‘awa invited me to the main hameha’s, “like, nine generations back.”
And we’re not going to survive with conti- office, a house that they use as a govern- Today, most people know him by his nick-
nental values,” he said. “Look at the govern- ment building to hatch plans and discuss name, Bumpy.
ment. Look at the guy who was president. foreign relations. Recently, Kanahele and The most animated I saw him was
And he’s going to be president again. He’s their foreign minister traveled to China on when I asked if he’d ever sat down with a
an asshole. So America has nothing that a diplomatic visit. And they’ve established descendant of the overthrowers. After all,
impresses me. I mean, why would I want peace treaties with Native American tribes it often feels like everyone knows every-
to be an American?” in the contiguous United States—the same one here, and in many cases they do, and
Ritte said he may not live to see it, kind of treaty that the United States ini- have for generations. Kanahele told me
but he believes Hawai‘i will one day tially forged with the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, the story of how, years ago, he’d had a con-
become an independent nation again. they pointed out to me. versation with Thurston Twigg-Smith, a

70 JANUARY 2025
 Kanahele and Maka‘awa‘awa aren’t
trying to bring back the monarchy. They
aren’t even trying to build a democracy.
Their way of government, outlined in
a constitution that Kanahele drafted
in 1994, is based on a family structure,
including a council of Hawaiian elders
and kānaka (Hawaiian) and non-kānaka
(non-Hawaiian) legislative branches. “It’s a
Hawaiian way of thinking of government,”
Maka‘awa‘awa said. “It’s not democracy or
communism or socialism or any of that.
It’s our own form of government.”
Kanahele’s vision for the future entails
reclaiming all of Hawai‘i from the United
States and reducing its economic depen-
dence on tourism and defense. He and
Maka‘awa‘awa are unpaid volunteers,
Maka‘awa‘awa told me. “Luckily for me
and Uncle, we have very supportive wives
who have helped support us for years.”
Maka‘awa‘awa said that they used to pay
a “ridiculous amount” in property taxes,
but thought better of it when contemplat-
ing the 65-year lease awarded in 1964 to
the U.S. military for $1 at Pōhakuloa, a
military training area covering thousands of
acres on the Big Island. So about eight years
ago, they decided to pay $1 a year. The state
is “pissed,” he told me, but he doesn’t care.
“Plus,” he added, “it’s our land.”
I had to ask: Doesn’t an independent
nation need its own military? Other than
the one that was already all around them,
that is. Some 50,000 active-duty U.S. ser-
vice members are stationed throughout
the Islands. Many of the military’s 65-year
leases in Hawai‘i are up for renewal within
the next five years, and debate over what to
Top: Esther Kia‘āina was one of the key architects of the 1993 apology bill signed into law by President Bill
Clinton. Bottom: Walter Ritte has restored an ancient Hawaiian fishpond on the island of Moloka‘i.
do with them has already begun. I thought
about our proximity to Bellows Air Force
Station, just a mile or two down the hill
from where we were sitting. Yes, Kanahele
grandson of Lorrin A. Thurston, who was that I’d read Twigg-Smith’s account of the told me. “You need one standing army,”
an architect of the overthrow. Twigg-Smith coup, in which he refers to it admiringly he said. “You got to protect your natural
BRENDAN GEORGE KO FOR THE ATLANTIC

was the publisher of the daily newspaper as “the Hawaiian Revolution.” resources—your lands and your natural
the Honolulu Advertiser, and Kanahele still Twigg-Smith told Kanahele that his resources.” Otherwise, he warned, people
remembers the room they sat in—fancy, grandfather “did the best thing he thought are “going to be taking them away.”
filled with books. “I was excited because was right at the time,” Kanahele said. When I asked them how they think about the
it was this guy, right? He was involved,” Kanahele asked, “Do you think that was Hawai‘i residents—some of whom have
Kanahele said. right?,” Twigg-Smith didn’t hesitate. Yes, been here for generations, descendants of
The experience left him with “ugly the overthrow was right, he said. Kanahele’s plantation laborers or missionaries—who
feelings,” he told me. “He called us cave- eyes widened as he recounted the exchange. are not Hawaiian. There are plenty of
men.” And Twigg-Smith defended the “He thinks his grandfather did the right non-kānaka people who say they are pro–
overthrowers. I mentioned to Kanahele thing.” (Twigg-Smith died in 2016.) Hawaiian rights, until the conversation

71
turns to whether all the non-kānaka should But there were others who fought Cleveland in his capacity as the president-
leave. “We think about that,” Kanahele against the expansionists’ notion of Amer- elect. “I beg that you will consider this
said, because of the “innocents involved. ica, arguing that the true American system matter, in which there is so much involved
The damage goes back to America and the of government depended on the consent for my people,” she wrote, “and that you
state of Hawai‘i. That’s who everybody of the governed. Many of the people argu- will give us your friendly assistance in
should be pointing the finger at.” ing this were the abolitionists who led and granting redress for a wrong which we
And it’s not like they want to take wrote for this magazine, including Mark claim has been done to us, under color
back all 4 million acres of Hawai‘i’s land, Twain and The Atlantic’s former editor of the assistance of the naval forces of the
Maka‘awa‘awa said. “Really, right now, in chief William Dean Howells, both United States in a friendly port.”
when we talk about the 1.8 million acres members of the Anti-Imperialist League. Whereas Harrison, in the twilight of his
of ceded lands”—that is, the crown and (Other anti-imperialists argued against presidency, had sent a treaty to the Sen-
government lands that were seized in expansion on racist grounds—that is, that ate to advance the annexation of Hawai‘i,
the overthrow and subsequently turned the U.S. should not invite into the country Cleveland’s first act as president was to
over to the United States in exchange for more nonwhite or non-Christian people, withdraw that treaty and order an inves-
annexation—“we’re not talking about of which there were many in Hawai‘i.) tigation of the overthrow. Members of the
private lands here. We’re talking strictly Committee of Safety and their supporters,
state lands.” Cleveland learned, had seized ‘Iolani Pal-
Kanahele calmly corrected him: “And ace as their new headquarters—they would
then we will claim all 4 million acres. We later imprison Queen Lili‘uokalani there,
claim everything.” in one of the bedrooms upstairs, for nearly
eight months—and raised the American

A
s I was reporting this America answered the flag over the main government building in
story, I kept asking peo- the palace square. Cleveland now mandated
ple: What does America “question of Hawaii” that the American flag be pulled down and
owe Hawai‘i, and the replaced with the Hawaiian flag.
Hawaiian people? A
by deciding that This set off a firestorm in Congress,
better question might its sphere of influence where Cleveland’s critics eventually com-
be: When does a nation cease to exist? pared him to a Civil War secessionist. One
When its leader is deposed? When the would not end at senator accused him of choosing “ignorant,
last of its currency is melted down? When savage, alien royalty, over American people.”
the only remaining person who can speak California, but would By then, the inquiry that Cleveland
its language dies? For years I thought of ordered had come back. As he explained
the annexation-day ceremony in 1898 as
expand ever outward. when he sent the report on to Congress, the
the moment when the nation of Hawai‘i investigation had found that the overthrow
ceased to be. One account describes the had been an “act of war,” and that the queen
final playing of Hawai‘i’s national anthem, had surrendered “not absolutely and perma-
by the Royal Hawaiian Band, whose leader nently, but temporarily and conditionally.”
began to weep as they played. After that Cleveland had dispatched his foreign
came a 21-gun salute, the final national This was the debate Americans were minister to Hawai‘i, former Representative
salute to the Hawaiian flag. Then the band having about their country’s role in the Albert S. Willis of Kentucky, to restore
played taps. Eventually all kingdoms die. world when, in March 1893, Grover the queen to power. Willis’s mission in
Empires, too. Cleveland was inaugurated as president Honolulu was to issue an ultimatum to
The overthrow of the Hawaiian King- for the second time. Cleveland, the 24th the insurrectionists to dissolve their fledg-
dom set in motion a series of events that president of the United States, had also ling government, and secure a promise
disenfranchised Hawaiians, separated been the 22nd; Benjamin Harrison’s single from Queen Lili‘uokalani that she would
them from their land and their culture, term had been sandwiched in between. pardon the usurpers. But the Provisional
and forever altered the course of his- Once he was back in the White House, Government argued that the United States
tory in Hawai‘i. It was also a moment of Cleveland immediately set to work had no right to tell it what to do.
enormous and lasting consequence for undoing the things that, in his view, Har- “We do not recognize the right of the
the United States. It solidified a world- rison had made a mess of. Primary among President of the United States to interfere in
view, famously put forth in the pages of those messes was what people had begun our domestic affairs,” wrote Sanford Dole,
this magazine by the retired naval officer to refer to as “the question of Hawaii.” the self-appointed president of Hawai‘i’s
Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890, that Amer- After writing to Harrison in Janu- new executive branch. “The Provisional
ica must turn its eyes and its borders ever ary 1893, Queen Lili‘uokalani had sent Government of the Hawaiian Islands
outward, in defense of the American idea. a letter to her “great and good friend” respectfully and unhesitatingly declines to

72 JANUARY 2025
 Queen Lili‘uokalani (left) was deposed in the January 1893 coup; the insurrectionists had support from the highest levels of the U.S. government, and help from U.S. troops (right).

entertain the proposition of the President All along, the debate over Hawai‘i was justified means to an end, is to disregard
of the United States that it should surrender not merely about the fate of an archipelago the values for which Americans have fought
its authority to the ex-Queen.” some 5,000 miles away from Washington. since the country’s founding. It was the
This was, quite obviously, outrageous. Nor is the debate over Hawai‘i’s indepen- United States’ expansion into the Pacific
Here Dole and his co-conspirators were dence today some fringe argument about that established America as a world super-
claiming to be a sovereign nation—and long-ago history. America answered the power. And it all began with the coup in
using this claim to rebuff Cleveland’s “question of Hawaii” by deciding that its Honolulu, an autocratic uprising of the sort
attempts to return power to the sovereign sphere of influence would not end at Cali- that the United States fights against today.
nation they’d just overthrown—all while fornia, but would expand ever outward. Perhaps the true lesson of history is that
having pulled off their coup with the back- Harrison took the aggressive, expansionist what seems destined in retrospect—whether
ing of American military forces and having view. Cleveland took the anti-imperialist, the election of a president or the overthrow
flown an American flag atop the govern- isolationist one. This ideological battle, of a kingdom—is often much messier and
ment building they now occupied. which Harrison ultimately won (and more uncertain as it unfolds. John Waihe‘e,
In January 1894, the American sugar later regretted, after he joined the Anti- the former governor, told me that he no
baron and longtime Hawai‘i resident Imperialist League himself), is perhaps the longer thinks about how to gain sovereignty,
Zephaniah Spalding testified before the most consequential chapter in all of U.S. but rather how Hawai‘i should begin plan-
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations foreign relations. You can draw a clear, ning for a different future—one that may
about the situation in Honolulu. “We have straight line from the overthrow of the arrive unexpectedly, and on terms we may
now as near an approach to autocratic gov- Hawaiian Kingdom to the attack on Pearl not now be considering.
ernment as anywhere,” Spalding said. “We Harbor to America’s foreign policy today, Waihe‘e is part of a group of local lead-
have a council of 15, perhaps, composed of including the idea that liberal democracy ers that has been working to map out vari-
the businessmen of Honolulu” who “exam- is worth protecting, at home and abroad. ous possible futures for Hawai‘i. The idea is
PHOTO12 / GETTY; U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

ine into the business of the country, just It’s easy to feel grateful for this ethos to take into account the most pronounced
the same as is done in a large factory or when contemplating the alternative. In challenges Hawai‘i faces: the outside wealth
on a farm.” the past century, America’s global domi- reshaping the Islands, the economic over-
The insurrectionists had, with support nance has, despite episodes of galling over- reliance on tourism, the likelihood of more
from the highest levels of the U.S. govern- reach, been an extraordinary force for good frequent climate disasters, the potential dis-
ment, successfully overthrown a nation. around the world. The country’s strategic solution of democracy in the United States.
They’d installed an autocracy in its place, position in the Pacific allowed the United One of the options is to do nothing at all, to
with Dole as president. States to win World War II (and was a big accept the status quo, which Waihe‘e feels
Americans argued about Hawai‘i for five reason the U.S. entered the war in the first certain would be disastrous.
long years after the overthrow. And once the place). The U.S. has continued to serve as a Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, another
United States officially annexed Hawai‘i in force for stability and security in the Pacific member of the group, agrees. Osorio is
1898 under President William McKinley, in a perilous new chapter. How might the the dean of the Hawai‘inuiākea School
Dole became the first governor of the world change without the United States to of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University
United States territory. Most Americans stand up to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin? of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Undoing a historic
today know his name only because of the But to treat the U.S. presence in Hawai‘i wrong may be impossible, he told me, but
pineapple empire one of his cousins started. as inevitable, or even as a shameful but you have a moral obligation to try. “If things

73
don’t change, things are going to be really that just said 1893 with a splotch of red, dismiss questions of Hawaiian independence
fucked up here,” Osorio said. “They will like blood. If you head southwest on Kaua‘i by arguing, fairly, that if the United States
continue to deteriorate.” (As for how things past Hanapēpē, and then on to Waimea, hadn’t seized the kingdom, Britain, Japan,
are going in the United States generally, he you can walk out onto the old whaling or Russia almost certainly would have. Now
put it this way: “I wouldn’t wish Trump on pier and see the exact spot where Captain people in Hawai‘i want to plan for how to
anyone, not even the Americans.”) James Cook first landed, in 1778. Not far regain—and sustain—independence if the
Osorio’s view is that Hawaiians should from there is the old smokestack from a United States loses power.
take more of a Trojan-horse approach—“a rusted-out sugar plantation. All around, Things change; Hawai‘i certainly has.
state government that essentially gets taken you can see the remnants of more than two All these years, I’ve been trying to under-
over by successive cadres of people who centuries of comings and goings. A place stand what Hawai‘i lost, what was sto-
want to see an end to military occupation, that was once completely apart from the len, and how to get it back. What I failed
who want to see an end to complete reliance world is now forever altered by outsiders. to realize, until now, is that the story of
on tourism, who see other kinds of possi- And yet the trees still spill mangoes onto the overthrow is not really the story of
bilities in terms of year-round agriculture,” the ground, and the moon still rises over Hawai‘i. It is the story of America. It is the
he told me. “Basically, being culturally and the Pacific. Hawaiians are still here. As long story of how dangerous it is to assume that
socially more and more distinct from the as they are, Hawai‘i belongs to them. anything is permanent. History teaches us
United States.” That doesn’t mean giving Over the course of my reporting, several that nothing lasts forever. Hawaiians have
up on independence; it just means taking Hawaiians speculated that Hawai‘i’s inde- learned that lesson. Americans would do
action now, thinking less about history and pendence may ultimately come not because well to remember it.
more about the future. it is granted by the United States, but
But history is still everywhere in because the United States collapses under
Hawai‘i. On the east side of Moloka‘i, I the second Trump presidency, or some other Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of
drove by a house that had a sign out front world-altering course of events. People often The Atlantic.

BRENDAN GEORGE KO

Some people in Hawai‘i now want to plan for how to regain—and sustain—independence if the United States loses power.

74 JANUARY 2025
 From the author of The Shallows,
a bracing exploration of how social media
has warped our sense of self and society.

“Carr is the rare

thinker who
understands that
technological
progress is both
essential
and worrying.”
CLAY SHIRKY,
author of Cognitive Surplus

It may be too late to change the system,

but it’s not too late to change ourselves.

NicholasCarr.com IN STORES JANUARY 28

76 ILLUSTRAT ION BY ALLIE SULLBERG
O M NIVOR E

I’m a Pizza Sicko

My quest to make the perfect pie

By Saahil Desai

In pizza heaven, it is always 950 degrees. The tempera- You want T h e t r a o i t i o n a l home oven is great for lots of
ture required to make an authentic Neapolitan pizza the pie to be things: chocolate-chip cookies, Thanksgiving turkeys,
is stupidly, unbelievably hot—more blast furnace than roasted brussels sprouts, whatever. Pizza is not one of
broiler. My backyard pizza oven can get all the way medium rare: them. Let’s consider a classic New York pie, which
there in just 15 minutes. Crank it to the max, and the the crust doesn’t require the same extreme heat as its Neapolitan
Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off should be brethren. It sounds weird, but you want the pie to be
the top of the dome. In 60 seconds, raw dough inflates crispy but still medium rare. The crust should be crispy but still pli-
into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and able, the cheese melted but not burned. The only way
a few simple ingredients become a full-fledged pizza. pliable, the to achieve that is to blast pizza dough with heat from
Violinists have the Stradivarius. Sneakerheads have cheese melted both top and bottom—about 600 degrees at the very
the Air Jordan 1. Pizza degenerates like me have the but not least, preferably 650. But nearly every kitchen range
Ooni. I got my first one three years ago and have since burned. tops out at 550 degrees. “By whatever accident of fate,
been on a singular, pointless quest to make the best pie the level of heat that’s necessary is just out of the reach
possible. Unfortunately, I am now someone who knows of a typical home oven,” Adam Ragusea, a food You-
that dough should pass the windowpane test. Do not Tuber who is helping open up a pizzeria in suburban
get me started on the pros and cons of Caputo 00 flour. Knoxville, Tennessee, told me. That temperature dis-
An at-home pizza oven is a patently absurd thing crepancy matters a lot. Try making pizza on a simple
to buy. Much to my wife’s consternation, I now own aluminum sheet tray in your home oven, and by the
two. It’s all the more ridiculous considering that I time the crust is golden brown, it’ll be brittle like a
live in New York City, where amazing pizzerias are cracker and the cheese will have puddled into grease.
about as easy to spot as rats, and space is a precious Overcoming the limitations of the reviled kitchen
commodity; this is not a town that favors single-use range has long stumped homemade pizza enthusi-
kitchen tools. These devices do one thing well (pizza) asts. Julia Child laid out tiles in her oven to soak up
and only that one thing (pizza). My 12-inch Ooni the oven’s heat and transfer it to the crust for extra
is among the cheapest and smallest high-heat pizza crispiness. That inspired the pizza stone, an oversize
ovens out there, and it still clocks in at $400 and 20 ceramic tile that you insert into your oven. At times,
pounds. You can get an 11-in-1 combination Instant the human will to make a decent pizza at home bor-
Pot and air fryer for a fraction of the cost. ders on farce. Before making pizza, some recipes sug-
But somehow, the portable-pizza-oven market gest that you should leave your oven at full heat for
is booming. Ooni makes nine different models— 45 minutes, or an hour, or even two. In the 2000s,
including a $900 indoor version that’s like a souped- one software engineer in Atlanta realized that in self-
up toaster oven—and similar products are avail- cleaning mode, ovens can hit 800 degrees—but the
able from companies including Cuisinart, Ninja, door locks. So he snipped off the safety latch with
Gozney, and Breville. Oprah included a pizza a pair of garden shears. Others have done the same,
oven in her 2023 gift guide. Florence Pugh has voiding the warranty on their oven in the name of
Instagrammed her portable-oven odysseys. better pizza.
The paradox of pizza has long been this: Ameri- Still, nothing you can do in a standard kitchen
ca’s favorite food—one that an eighth of the country competes with the tools that a pizzeria has at its dis-
eats on any given day—is difficult, if not impossible, posal. Traditional commercial pizza ovens are gigan-
to make well at home. Not anymore. We are in the tic and expensive, sometimes costing upwards of
middle of a pizza revolution; there has simply never $20,000. Some of the oldest pizzerias in the United
been a better time to make pizza at home. States still use their original ovens, manufactured

JANUARY 2025 77
Culture & Critics O M NIVOR E

nearly a century ago. Even if your oven reaches an Ooni that lets you cook three pizzas at once and
750 degrees, its walls “are not going to be as thick as remotely track the temperature from your phone. As
the walls of a commercial pizza oven,” J. Kenji López- Ragusea put it: “Men love their fucking toys.”
Alt, a chef and the author of The Food Lab: Better
Home Cooking Through Science, told me. “So there’s T o o l s a n o g a o g e t s can only take you so far.
just less heat energy trapped in there.” Even with the fanciest oven on the market, you still
Portable ovens are like the iPhones of home pizza have to learn how to stretch the dough and get it into
making: They have changed everything. The proto- the oven without creating an oblong mess. “There’s all
type for the first Ooni, launched on Kickstarter in these special techniques involved in pizza that don’t
2012, looks more like a medieval torture device than apply to any other kind of cooking,” López-Alt said. If
anything you could feasibly use to cook. It was soon you want to learn, there are pizza forums, pizza Face-
joined by the Roccbox, a stainless-steel dome that can book groups, and so, so many pizza YouTube videos.
run on either wood or gas. Newer models have gotten My first pizza, made in my kitchen oven, was so
progressively better. The ovens aren’t that complicated, oversauced that it was more like tomato soup in a
but they are genius. They are fairly inexpensive, and bread bowl. A ridiculous number of videos later, my
small enough to take on camping trips and beach pizza game has gone from JV to the big leagues. Pizza
vacations. For the home cook who isn’t making a hun- ovens beget videos on how to use them, begetting
dred pizzas in one go, “it’ll do a great job at mimicking more interest in ovens, begetting more videos. It is a
a restaurant oven,” López-Alt said. spin wheel of great pizza.
For a while, these ovens could be found in rela- Even in the Ooni, my pizzas are not better or even
tively few backyards. Then America went pizza-oven that much cheaper than what you’d find in a great
wild during the pandemic. What’s better than nur- My pizzas pizzeria, but they are mine. I get why my fellow pizza
turing a sourdough starter? Nurturing a sourdough are not better diehards gather online not only to hone their tech-
starter, topping it with sauce, and launching it into nique, but also to share their creations (even when
the flames. In 2020, Ooni sales increased by 300 per-
or even that they might give any Italian nonna a heart attack).
cent. The ovens have stayed in high demand, Joe much cheaper Candied lemon and ricotta pizza! Mexican street corn
Derochowski, an analyst at the market-research firm than what pizza! Detroit-style Chongqing-chicken pizza topped
Circana, told me. At housewares shows these days, you’ d find with green onion and sesame seeds!
he said, “you see pizza ovens all over.” Scott Wiener, The irony of the pizza revolution is that this should
a pizza expert who leads tours in New York City,
in a great be a moment for a pizza recession. Remember when
always asks his groups if they make pizza at home pizzeria, the only thing you could get delivered was pizza, and
and how they cook it. “One person will say ‘Ooni,’ but they are maybe Chinese food? When you least wanted to cook,
every time,” he told me. mine. it was pizza time: In 2011, one of the biggest days for
Perhaps part of the appeal of these home ovens is pizza eating was the day before Thanksgiving. Now you
that they satisfy the same urge that using a grill does: can DoorDash penne alla vodka or a pork banh mi. Yet
Let’s face it; fire is fun. Traditionally, though, pizza Americans have fallen even deeper in love with pizza.
has been thought of as an extension of baking ; in You can now find amazing pizza just about every-
Italy, pizza originated with bread bakers looking to sell where. Pizza pop-ups are opening using newer, larger
cheap food to workers. Many of the earliest pizzerias versions of the cheap portable ovens. “Five years ago,
in the U.S. were founded by bakers who had arrived if you wanted to open a mobile pizza company, then
from Italy. But making pizza is really a lot more like you would have to spend easily $5,000 on an oven
grilling a burger than baking bread. Let your pizza sit and a trailer,” Wiener said. “Now you can spend half
for a few seconds too long, and the flames will take of that, and get two of these ovens.”
the dough from lightly singed to fully incinerated. Still, the pizza sicko doesn’t always win. Recently,
(All pizza is better than no pizza—except when that the pizza cravings got me late one evening. I fired up
pizza is so burnt, it tastes like ash.) the Ooni, fiddled with the dough, and was ready to
Home pizza ovens represent the next generation of launch a pie when my hunger sapped my concentra-
grilling; they take those familiar, irresistible propane tion. The dough had a hole in it, and disintegrated
flames and apply them to another arena of cooking into sloppy goo in the oven. So much for that.
entirely. And as with grilling, to make good pizza, Part of getting a pizza oven is learning how to use
you need accoutrements. I slide my homemade pizza it. The other part is learning when you should just
into the Ooni using one tool, spin it around with leave it to the professionals.
another, and then monitor the heat with yet another.
Pizza ovens “echo the barbecue world and the home-
grilling world,” Wiener said. For $1,000, you can buy Saahil Desai is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

78 JANUARY 2025
Culture & Critics

GETTY

80 ILLUSTRATION BY LIZ HART

FIL M Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born

Bob Dylan’s How did he do that? How did this nobody from
nowhere, at the age of 20, contrive to sound simul-
Carnival Act taneously like the creaky religious past and the howl-
ing incoming future? It wasn’t his musicianship: As
a guitarist, he was stumpy and street-level, and his
His identity was a performance. god-awful harmonica playing now sounds like a kind
His writing was sleight of hand. of comic punctuation, the harmonica less a musical
He bamboozled his own audience. instrument than a place to put his face after delivering
an especially jagged line. But his young-old voice, with
its swoops and smears and its relentless edge, was a
By James Parker
vehicle for cutting through: The world would have to
wait for John Lydon of the Sex Pistols to hear another
Everything, as Charles Péguy said, begins in mysticism A Complete voice so crystallized with frozen wrath.
and ends in politics. Except if you’re Bob Dylan. If you’re And when his words, or his visions, reached the
Bob Dylan, you start political and go mystical. You start
Unknown, pitch of nightmare—I saw a room full of men with
as an apprentice hobo scuffing out songs of change; like all the best their hammers a-bleeding—he sounded not scared but
you become, under protest, the ordained and prophetic movies about aroused, as if by imminent and gleeful vindication.
mouthpiece for a sense of mass disturbance otherwise rock stars, is a The musician Robyn Hitchcock, listening to Dylan
known as the ’60s; and then, after some violent gestures while pent up in an English boarding school, felt the
and severances, you withdraw. You dematerialize; you
fairy tale. full revelation. As he describes it in his recent memoir,
drop it all, and you drift into the recesses of the Self. 1967, Dylan seemed “to have accessed (or created?)
Where you remain, until they give you a Nobel Prize. a world outside morality, faith, rules or superstition:
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, like all [he’d] found the sad, doomed kingdom where things
the best movies about rock stars—Sid and Nancy, simply are—for no apparent purpose—and whose
Bohemian Rhapsody, Control—is a fairy tale. It takes denizens haplessly await their fate.”
liberties: Dylanologists will scream. It dramatizes, One of the young Dylan’s foundational fibs, as he
mythicizes, elides, elasticizes, and tosses twinkling skulked and sputtered around Greenwich Village, was
magic showbiz confetti over the period between that he had learned his songcraft while traveling with a
Dylan’s absolutely unheralded arrival in New York in carnival. This is important, because I’ve begun to suspect
1961 and his honking, abrasive, ain’t-gonna-work- that a major division in American life, perhaps the major
on-Maggie’s-farm-no-more headlining appearance, division, is the one between carnies and non-carnies;
four years later, at the Newport Folk Festival, where that is, between those who understand instinctively—
his new electric sound drove the old folkies berserk animalistically, sometimes—that life is theater, that
and the crowd (at least in Mangold’s movie) bayed people will believe what they want to, and that all the
for his blood. most essential things happen in the imagination, and …
Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan, and he does it very everyone else. Carnies don’t have much respect for real-
well, with a kind of amnesiac intensity: He mooches, ity, because they know they can bend it and knock it
twitches, mumbles, makes things up, as if the young around. Non-carnies are condemned to the facts—to
Robert Zimmerman, in the ferocity of his effort to what Stanley Elkin called the “plodding sequiturs.”
shed his history and become Bob Dylan, has tempo- Was young Bob a carny? He wanted to be, and
rarily cauterized his own personality. Ed Norton, his compared with the courageous and sweetly high-
high forehead glowing with benevolence, plays Pete minded Seeger, he certainly was. His identity was a
Seeger, the folk-activist father figure whom Dylan performance. His writing was sleight of hand. He
will betray. Scoot McNairy, in an amazing wordless wowed and bamboozled his own audience. And when,
performance, plays Woody Guthrie, immobilized by in A Complete Unknown, he tries out the carnival story
Huntington’s disease at the Greystone Park Psychiatric on Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro), embroi-
Hospital, in New Jersey. Dylan makes a pilgrimage to dering it freshly with the addition of a cowboy guitar
Greystone with his guitar and fumbles through a beau- player called Wigglefoot, she looks at him and says—
tiful, uncanny bedside version of “Song to Woody”: thrillingly deadpan—“You are so completely full of
shit.” Which is exactly what you say to a carny.
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song And it was all very theatrical, very over-the-top, the
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along way they lauded him and garlanded him and made him

JANUARY 2025 81
Culture & Critics FIL M

the Voice of a Generation. (Don’t all those contempo- Timothée Chalamet the main cause of all the Newport trouble, is neither a
rary cover versions of his songs—with the exception of as Bob Dylan in A secret nor a surprise to anyone with the slightest inter-
Hendrix’s smoking “All Along the Watchtower”—now Complete Unknown est in Dylan by the time the festival begins.” (Dylan’s
sound like misunderstandings, mistranslations?) The keyboardist Al Kooper has said that “85 to 90 percent”
earnestness and humorlessness of the folkies was unbe- of the crowd was enjoying the Dylan performance.)
lievable. He had come to save us all. The line would be But so what? A Complete Unknown is a movie, and
unbroken: From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan, the a movie—or a movie like this, which in one sense is a
torch had been passed. parable of artistic ruthlessness—needs a climax. And
Except that, if you were Bob Dylan, there was no Bob Dylan, more than most rock stars, is a myth. In
torch, and no one to pass it to, anyway. So he had to all senses of the word. He made himself up, he dis-
be perverse and disruptive and ungrateful and electri- appeared himself, and in doing so, he became a lens:
fied, and make a noise that would horrify poor old Rays of otherworldly insight poured through him,
Seeger: punk rock avant la lettre. A Complete Unknown and he trained them upon us like somebody frying
makes an especial villain out of Alan Lomax, which is ants with a magnifying glass.
interesting: The venerable activist-archivist becomes, He had shimmering visions and torture chambers
in the movie, a thuggish folk enforcer, cursing Dylan in his mind; he could make God and Abraham talk
for his impurity and tussling with his manager Albert with each other like two hustlers on a street corner;
Grossman during the set at Newport. he let everybody down, ditched everybody, and then
It’s in the Newport scenes, with the crowd roar- taught them how to be exhilarated by that abandon-
MACALL POLAY / SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

ing in distress, that the movie really does some fancy ment. Something in me wants to talk about the hard
shuffling of events. History records that Lomax did rain that is falling right now, and to wonder who will
actually brawl with Grossman. But no one at Newport step up to sing about it: who will be our minstrel of
shouted “Judas!” at Bob Dylan: That wouldn’t happen the End Times; our guiding, undeceivable voice; and
until the following year, when he played the Free Trade so on. But to ask that kind of question—to think in
Hall, in Manchester, England. And Ian Bell, in his those terms—is to lapse into the great mistake, isn’t it?
Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan, makes the And here endeth the lesson of Bob Dylan.
point that most of the festivalgoers at Newport—a hip
audience, after all—would have known what to expect
from Dylan that day: “ ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ supposedly James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

82 JANUARY 2025
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Culture & Critics

BO OKS July 1977: A 105-degree afternoon in

Phoenix. I’m 17 and making deliveries in
an underpowered Chevette with “4-55”
air-conditioning (four open windows at
55 miles per hour), so I welcome the long
runs to Sun City, when I can let desert air
and American Top 40 blast through the
car. Arrival, though, always gives me the
creeps. The world’s first “active retirement
The Longevity Revolution community” is city-size (it would eventually
span more than 14 square miles and house
more than 40,000 people). The concen-
We need to radically rethink what it means to be old. tric circles of almost-identical tract houses
stretch as far as I can see. Signs and bulle-
By Jonathan Rauch tin boards announce limitless options for
entertainment, shopping, fitness, tennis,
golf, shuffleboard—every kind of amenity.
Sun City is a retirement nirvana, a sub-
urban dreamscape for a class of people who,
only a generation before, were typically iso-
lated, institutionalized, or crammed into their
kids’ overcrowded apartments. But I drive for
blocks without seeing anyone jumping rope
or playing tag (no children live here). I see no
street life, unless you count residents driving
golf carts, the preferred form of local trans-
portation. My teenage self wonders: Is this
twilight zone my eventual destiny? Is this what
it means to be old, to be retired, in America?
In its day, Sun City represented a
breakthrough in American life. When
it opened, in 1960, thousands of people
lined up their cars along Grand Avenue
to gawk at the model homes. Del Webb,
the visionary developer, understood that
the United States was ready to imagine a
whole new stage of life—the golden years,
as marketers proclaimed them.
A cultural revolution was in full swing.
Social Security and private pensions had
liberated tens of millions of older Ameri-
cans from poverty and dependency; mod-
ern medicine had given them the health to
enjoy what was then a new lifestyle: leisure.
In 1965, Medicare ameliorated the old-age
fear of medical bankruptcy. In 1972, Presi-
dent Richard Nixon and the Democratic
Congress, outbidding each other for the
senior vote, increased Social Security by
20 percent and indexed it to keep up with
inflation. With these two programs on fiscal
autopilot, the entitlement state was born,
and the elderly were its prime beneficiaries.
When I gazed at Sun City, I was seeing
the embodiment of the U.S. government’s

84 ILLUSTRATION BY BÉNÉDICTE MULLER

greatest 20th-century domestic achievement: the near identity group. The decades that followed brought
elimination of destitution among the elderly. By 1977, rapid expansion of elder benefits and programs, and
the poverty rate among those 65 and older had fallen with it a far-flung social infrastructure: senior centers
from almost 30 percent in the mid-1960s to half that and retirement communities; continuous-care and
level. In 2022, it was 10.9 percent, according to the assisted-living facilities; educational and recreational
Census Bureau, slightly below the poverty rate for opportunities, such as Osher Lifelong Learning Insti-
those ages 18 to 64 (11.7 percent)—and very sig- tutes and Elderhostel (now Road Scholar); and, not
nificantly below the poverty rate among children and least, AARP (originally the American Association of
youth (16.3 percent). Retired Persons), a marketing juggernaut and among
“The struggle chronicled in this book—the strug- the largest and most powerful lobbying groups ever.
gle to build a secure old age for all—has been in many But today, Chappel argues, progress toward a health-
ways successful,” James Chappel writes in Golden ier, more secure, and more inclusive concept of old age
Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old has stalled, largely because the U.S. government has
Age. For most seniors, life is “immeasurably better” stalled. Though private activism and inventive experi-
than it was a century ago. But he and Andrew J. Scott, ments continue, “they will always be insufficient in
the author of The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a the absence of aggressive state action.” A parsimoni-
Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our ous Congress looks for budget cuts while conservatives
Longer Lives, agree that the ’60s model of retirement push to privatize Social Security and Medicare. Just as
needs updating in the face of new demographic, fiscal, worrisome, in Chappel’s view: Older Americans have
and social realities. What comes next? embraced the idea that they are the same as younger
For clues, Chappel, a historian at Duke Univer- people, except older—a vision that blurs the distinc-
sity, looks to the past, tracing the 100-year evolution tive needs of elders and undercuts their identity-based
of Americans’ notions of aging. He proceeds from activism. What’s called for, he suggests, is an ambitious
the clarifying premise that aging is as much a social Life expectancy expansion of the welfare state to cover unmet necessi-
phenomenon as it is a biological one—perhaps even at birth was ties, such as long-term care.
more so. “There is no ‘natural’ way to age—we have to 18 years in the This raises some questions. For one, who will pay for
be taught, by our cultural and political and religious early Bronze expensive new government programs? Social Security
institutions, how to do it well.” and Medicare are rapidly headed for insolvency and
Today’s conceptions of old age and retirement are Age, 22 in the already hold the rest of the federal budget in a tighten-
modern inventions. In 19th-century America, Chap- Roman empire, ing vise. “The entire long-term deficit growth is driven
pel writes, “the presumption was that ‘old age’ was and 36 in by Social Security, Medicare, and the interest cost of
not a long phase of life that began at sixty-five, but a Massachusetts their shortfalls,” Brian Riedl, a budget analyst with the
short one that was marked by disability and decline … Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank, has writ-
Basically, older people were to seek contemplation and in 1776. ten. Chappel breezes past any such fiscal concerns.
tranquility.” In the mid-1800s, the average 30-year- Even more puzzling, he does not pause to con-
old could expect to live only about 30 more years. sider why further subsidizing the elderly should be
That began to change as the fruits of industrialization the country’s top public-policy priority. He notes in
and science ripened. As more people lived to become passing that children are poorer than seniors, but he
old, social activists mobilized for pensions, led by Civil waves away the subject of generational equity, saying
War veterans. Now forgotten, the National Ex-Slave that “security is not a scarce resource” and dismissing
Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association as “vicious” a 1988 New Republic article, by the late
argued in the 1890s for pensions as a form of repara- Henry Fairlie, arguing that to seriously address com-
tions for the formerly enslaved. No one today will be peting social priorities, “we must shake off the peculiar
surprised to learn that this group was suppressed, its notion … that old age is a time in which people are
proposals were buried, and its leader, Callie House, entitled to be rewarded.”
found herself in jail on trumped-up charges.
Still, the movement to end dependency and pen- C h a p p e l i s n o t a policy wonk; as history, his
ury in old age gathered force and triumphed with book is valuable and authoritative. Perhaps it is not
the enactment of Social Security in 1935, the crown- a historian’s job to answer philosophical questions
ing achievement of the New Deal. Although its ini- about generational equity, political questions about
tial design favored men over women, white people hard choices, or fiscal questions about affordability.
over Black, and industrial over agricultural workers, Still, one wishes he had at least teed them up, because
it laid the foundation for the concept of retirement they are unavoidable. Fortunately, Scott addresses
that made 65 officially old. Senior citizen replaced them in The Longevity Imperative. An economist at
aged in the lexicon, and seniors became a self-aware London Business School, he identifies two longevity

JANUARY 2025 85
Culture & Critics

revolutions. The first has already arrived and, for all work heaped in the middle, and leisure stuck at the end.
its multifaceted implications, is simply stated: Most Jobs need to be made more friendly to older workers
people grow old. (through measures as elaborate as shifting physical tasks
Of course, old age as such is not new, but until to robots and as simple as providing different footwear
quite recently, comparatively few people lived to see and chairs); employers need to exploit age diversity
it. Life expectancy at birth was 18 years in the early (which improves team productivity by blending older
Bronze Age, 22 in the Roman empire, and 36 in Mas- workers’ experience and skill with younger workers’
sachusetts in 1776. It’s 77.5 years in the U.S. today, creativity and drive); education and training need to be
according to the National Center for Health Statistics. available and encouraged throughout life. “The key is
Those averages include child mortality, which partly to see aging as a state of flux involving us all and not an
accounts for shorter lifespans in earlier epochs. Even event or a state that segregates one group from another,”
excluding child mortality, though, the improvements Scott writes. Accordingly, he rejects the entire premise
in longevity are astounding. Since the 1880s, so-called of age-based entitlements: “Tax breaks and other ben-
best-practice life expectancy—how long you’ll live efits should not be distributed simply because people
if you do everything right and receive good health reach a certain age.” (Henry Fairlie, call your office!)
care—has increased, on average, by two to three years Some of these changes are expensive, complex, or
every decade. By now, the average American 65-year- controversial, but Scott is right to argue that the really
old can expect to live another 18.5 years. Eighty is the big barrier lies in American culture’s relentless negativ-
new 68, inasmuch as the mortality rate of 80-year- ity about aging. “Debate about an aging society rarely
old American women in 2019 was the same as that GOLDEN YEARS: goes beyond mention of spiraling health costs, a pen-
H OW A M E R I C A N S
of 68-year-old women in 1933. An American child INVENTED AND sions crisis, dementia and care homes,” he writes. “It
REINVENTED
born today has a better-than-even chance of living to OLD AGE
is never seen as exciting, challenging or interesting.”
age 95. The first person to live to age 150 may have Reading Scott’s book together with Chappel’s
already been born. Ja m e s C h a p p e l can be whiplash-inducing, because they are in many
Yet that triumph poses a challenge. The first lon- respects antithetical. Where Chappel seeks to reinforce
gevity revolution “was about getting the majority to the country’s commitment to retirement security,
reach old age; the second will be about changes in BASIC BOOKS Scott challenges the very concept of retirement; where
how we age,” Scott writes. Will those additional years Chappel endorses age-based programs and politics,
be vigorous and healthy? Or will they be filled with Scott wants to erase age boundaries and base poli-
THE LONGEVITY
chronic illness and frailty? Will society capture the cre- I M P E R AT I V E :
cies on individuals’ needs and abilities; and where
ative and productive potential of its rapidly expanding H OW T O B U I L D Chappel sounds downbeat about aging in the United
A H E A LT H I E R
older population? Or will ageism and archaic conven- AND MORE States—emphasizing that “many older Americans are
tions waste that potential? Scott makes an optimistic P RO D U C T I V E in trouble” as they juggle the costs of medicine, hous-
SOCIET Y TO
case that the second longevity revolution presents an S U P P O RT O U R ing, and especially long-term care—Scott emphasizes
LONGER LIVES
opportunity to “rethink the way we live our whole life. the unprecedented opportunities that the longevity
Right now, though, we are not set to reap the benefit Andrew J. Scott
revolution affords.
of these longer lives.”
The core problem today, he argues, is that lifespan BASIC BOOKS T h e re i s t r u t h in both authors’ views (as they
outruns health span. In other words, not all of the years would probably agree). Supporting a rapidly growing
we add are healthy ones. The time has come for an ambi- aging population poses some daunting challenges,
tious, all-of-society effort to close that gap. Health-care most notably in improving the country’s fragmented
priorities should shift more toward prevention, which provision of long-term care. Yet Scott’s perspective is,
today receives only 3 percent of U.S. health-care spend- I think, closer to the mark. The Sun City idea of aging
ing. Public-health measures should help further reduce and retirement is no longer either affordable or desir-
smoking, alcoholism, obesity, and social isolation. More able as a template; viewing “the elderly” as an identity
research dollars should flow to slowing the biological category makes little sense at a time when living to 85
aging process, as well as treating frailty and disease. is commonplace and some 85-year-olds are as vigor-
The second longevity revolution will also require ous as many 65-year-olds. Now on the doorstep of
new institutions, expectations, and attitudes. With routine 100-year lifespans, America needs to rethink
millions of people living vigorously into their 80s and the meaning of school, work, and retirement—and
beyond, the very idea of “retirement”—the expecta- what it even means to be old.
tion that people will leave the workforce at an arbitrary I’ll propose, however, a friendly amendment to
age—makes no sense. In fact, out the window goes Scott. He envisions a world where boundaries in life
the whole three-stage structure of American life, with are decoupled from age; what matters is what you
education crammed into the first couple of decades, can do, not how old you are. But the big conceptual

86 JANUARY 2025
 BO OKS

categories of childhood, adolescence, middle age, and

old age are too deeply rooted to toss aside. We could
use a new category, one reflecting the fact that longev-
ity is inserting one, two, or even three decades between
middle age and old age.
As it happens, such a category is available: late Says the Wind
adulthood. Associated with such thinkers as the sociol- By David Baker
ogist Phyllis Moen, the psychologist Laura Carstensen,
the social entrepreneurs Chip Conley and Marc Freed-
man, and the activist and writer Ashton Applewhite, She’s got her eyes down.
the notion of late adulthood captures the reality of a He’s got his head down
new stage of life, in which many people are neither as far as he can pull it into his scarf and burly coat.
fully retired nor conventionally employed—a phase
when people can seek new pursuits, take “not so hard”
jobs, and give back to their communities, their fami- Their shoulders are pitched forward hard to cut
lies, and their God. through the city headwind. But there is no wind—
And no, this is not a pipe dream. Copious evi-
dence shows that most of what people think they
...
know about life after 50 is wrong. Aging per se
(as distinct from sickness or frailty) is not a pro-
cess of uniform decline. It brings gains, too: greater What we see of a wind is what we see
equanimity, more emotional resilience, and what of the world of things. Not wind but a chaff
Carstensen and others have called the positivity
effect, a heightened appreciation of life’s blessings.
Partly for that reason, the later decades of life are, of pollen choking in that whirl. Muster of leaves
on average, not the saddest but the happiest. Con- above in the puffed-out ash. What she says—
trary to popular belief, aging does not bring men-
tal stagnation. Older people can learn and create,
...
although their styles of learning and creativity are
different than in younger years. Emotional develop-
ment and maturation continue right through the end What we cannot hear but see on each face.
of life. And aging can bring wisdom—the ability to Now he’s walking ahead. Now he’s lost
rise above self-centered viewpoints, master turbu-
lent emotions, and solve life’s problems—a boon
not only to the wise but to everyone around them. in a fluster of subway riders shoving up
Late adulthood is a time when the prospects for out of the sudden portal. Shh says the wind—
earning diminish but the potential for grandparent-
ing, mentoring, and volunteering peaks. It is—or
...
can be—a time of reorientation and relaunch, a time
when zero-sum goals such as social competition and
personal ambition yield to positive-sum pursuits such The soul of another lies in darkness.
as building community and nurturing relationships. Now she is running and now she is calling
If anything, Scott undersells the second longevity
revolution. Right now, Americans are receiving more
than a decade of additional time in the most satisfy- into the choppy pool of people. Everyone
ing and prosocial period of life. This is potentially shoves into this wind. But there is no wind—
the greatest gift any generation of humans has ever
received. The question is whether we will grasp it.

David Baker is the author, most recently, of Whale Fall.

Jonathan Rauch is a contributing writer at The Atlantic
and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is
the author of The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets
Better After 50.

87
FICTION The children don’t look
real. It’s because of what
Zamboni
they’re wearing—it’s the
By
color of their clothes.
Honor
Jones None of the T-shirts has
any language or images—
no slogans or athletes’
names, no animals or
action figures. Color
conveying only the idea
of color. Later, she can’t
remember what she
noticed except that the
colors were very bright.
That and the fact that she
didn’t recognize any of
the children’s faces,
88 JANUARY 2025
ILLUSTRA TIONS BY KATHERINE LAM 89
though this is the playground of her own into white pieces. There was no dining glasses, with two chairs painted blue. Is
child’s school. shed here that morning; the crew must this one real? her child asks. I think so,
The children seem to be arranged in have constructed and then demolished it she says. Or no. She can’t tell.
groups of three or four. They aren’t moving. in a matter of hours. One corner of the The restaurant doesn’t open for another
Well, they move—some have rubber balls structure still stands, just solid enough to 10 minutes. She can see the waiters at the
that they hold out to other nearby children signify what it is meant to be. bar. They’re finishing their own meal in
and then retract. But they stay in position, Does this mean we won’t have to go what looks like silence; each one has a
as if stuck to a mark on the blacktop. They back to school? her child asks. white apron folded over the back of his
make no sound. They’re waiting. I’m sure they’ll be done by the time chair. She and the child could stay and
Today is the beginning of her child’s spring break is over. watch—see if anyone comes to the door,
spring break. Otherwise he’d be here now, Can I be in the movie? asks to sit outside, is guided to the blue
playing on the blacktop himself, in the Maybe, she says, which is what she chairs. But even then, how would they
jersey that he insists on wearing whenever tells him when she knows something is know for sure if the people were ordinary
it’s not in the wash. It was white once, impossible but it’s not her fault. diners? They could be movie people testing
but now it’s a pale gray-brown, a sort of She tries to get him to stand in the out the props. They could be rehearsing.
kneecap color. He’s wearing the shirt at middle of the shed and pretend that he’s Even better, she and her son could have
the gym where she booked him for a day the one who knocked it down so she can dinner here and request the table them-
of ninja/parkour camp so she could go to take a picture. Look like the Hulk, she selves. If they were given the blue chairs,
work. She and her husband had thought tells him, and flexes her arms. He won’t they would know that the table was real,
about taking a vacation somewhere, but do it. He won’t even step off the sidewalk. because they themselves were certainly
it’s not convenient for him to do that right Come on, she says, we’ll send it to Daddy. real. But her husband won’t like that. He’s
now, and they can’t afford a trip anyway. She mimes a ninja kick in the direction planning to cook tonight; he’s going to
She doesn’t mind; she likes being home of a table. But he backs away from her. be home early. She says they should come
in the neighborhood, where everything He’s worried they’ll get in trouble. She back tomorrow—tomorrow they can see
is familiar. wants to say that this is their school, their if it’s still there.
Hurrying down the block, she starts street, that the movie people are only bor- In the morning, one of the moms at
to forget about the unreal children. The rowing it. She thinks how much better school has posted an article about the
colors were probably only ordinary pinks most things would be if he would just do movie on Instagram. A famous actor
and yellows, the children, after all, only what she says. is starring in it, and it’s not a children’s
ordinary children, the kind who pass from Now one of the movie men approaches, movie, as she’d assumed—because of the
the mind as soon as they pass out of sight. fat extension cords coiled around both Zamboni and the color of the children’s
But then she notices the Zamboni. It’s the arms. He’s going to ask them to keep mov- clothes, or because of the children them-
size of a small dump truck, and the word ing, please. She pretends not to see him. selves. The article names the director,
ZAMBONI is written on the front. She can Okay, she says to the child, let’s go. who is known for black comedies and the
think of no possible explanation for what That was a Zamboni, she says. It discomfiting avant-garde, and it includes
it’s doing here. Then she sees a tent with smooths the ice at a skating rink. photos of the famous actor in his previ-
water bottles and snacks. Oh cool, she How? ous roles. But no other details have been
thinks, a movie. It melts it. released; the article says nothing of plot.
When she picks up her son that after- It melts the ice? She taps to the woman’s next post, which
noon, she tells him that they should go by Just the top layer. The ice gets scratched is about the new war: a cute photo of her
the school, there’s something happening, by all the skates. You have to melt it to daughter eating a doughnut and the words
but she won’t say what; it’s a surprise. The make the ice smooth again. She skated Another thousand murdered children. Imag-
children have disappeared, but the street often as a child but can barely remember ine if yours was one of them.
is packed with trailers. Young people are what it felt like anymore. She’s never taken
everywhere, carrying lengths of metal, her son skating. It seems like too much S p r i n g b re a k seems to go on and on;
black boxes with knobs on them, clip- effort. But he’s her child. How could any- she can’t wait for it to be over. The school
boards, garment bags. They must have thing be too much effort? gives a shape to her days. She sees the same
just finished shooting. The Zamboni has There’s a restaurant on the corner, and people at the same time. The supers sort-
moved to the other end of the block. It it’s funny to notice that just past the last ing the trash. The man carrying boxes of
has done what it came to do: It has driven bit of rubble from the movie dining shed pastries into the coffee shop—there goes
through a dining shed. is an actual dining shed. Her child stops. the baker with his tray like always. The dog
All along one side of the street are The movie chairs are pale wood. The res- people exchanging their phone numbers.
splintered pieces of wood. Chairs have taurant chairs are white metal. But right The joggers passing the speed-walking
been crushed, tables knocked sideways. between them is one table, set for dinner Orthodox. The families like hers, itera-
White plates have frisbeed and shattered with plates and silverware and two clear tion after iteration. When this routine and

90 JANUARY 2025
all its regulars are gone, she feels vaguely campaigns. She knows, vaguely, that he Then she sees that the actor is wearing
afraid, as if her child has only her and his played heartthrobs, then bad boys, and has an orthopedic boot on his right foot. The
father to depend on. aged lately into serious art. He might be boot brings her back to reality. Probably
When she sees other parents in the 50, but it’s hard to tell; the record of all it would be rude to mention it.
neighborhood now, all they talk about is Hi! she says. My kid goes here. I just
the movie. I saw the branches first, one of wanted to say we’re all so excited about
her friends says. the movie.
What does she mean, the branches? Thank you so much, the actor says.
Didn’t you see? Fake budding branches You must be almost done, right?
clamped in the trees, like garlands, filling No, no, far from.
out the gaps. They must have needed it to I just mean because spring break is
be later in the spring. ending.
Another friend has noticed the sod. Oh right. Done at the school. Yes, don’t
The scuffed-up stretch behind the black- worry, we’ll be out of your hair soon.
top is lush with new grass. Someone asked Not at all, we’ve loved having you.
the crew if they would leave the grass when Why is she speaking like some kind of
they were done, but they said no—they representative for the community? She’s
had to roll it back up again. The fake not even on the PTA.
branches, of course, will come down. Per- Walking away, she notices that she’s
haps they’re already gone, she’s not sure. not embarrassed by how awkward the
Each time she walks by, she forgets to look interaction was. She understands that the
closely at the trees. Each time she forgets
When she picks actor is a real person, but—barely. She
to look for the blue chairs. up her son that could have said anything and it wouldn’t
Today her child is on a playdate. Her afternoon, she have mattered.
husband thinks she overschedules him. tells him that
Why can’t she just let him play at home? A f e w h o u r s l ut e r, she’s deep in
But she likes to see other parents, she likes
they should go a document when her husband calls. Is
to see where they live. It makes her feel by the school, she still in the neighborhood? Would it
part of things, as if life is holding on to there’s something be terrible to ask if she could? A client, a
her with many small buckles and clasps. happening, meeting, he owes her. She’ll have to pick
Besides, it’s impossible to get enough work up her son after all.
done when her child is home; he has so
but she won’t How was the playdate? she asks him.
many things he wants to say to her— say what; it’s a Fun.
mostly, that he’s bored. surprise. What did you do?
Her husband has agreed to get their We played.
son in a few hours, so she’s free to go into What did you play?
the office; she can catch up on everything World Cup.
she’s been putting off. But she can’t seem What’s that?
to move toward the train. She always She’s boring her child, but she persists.
goes straight from the school to the sta- It’s her job to teach him manners. I ask
tion, always at the same time. This late in this, and you say that, and here you go,
the morning, without the steady flow of thank you very much—like something
people bearing her along, she finds that passed back and forth, the point being
she just can’t do it. She decides to take her less the thing itself than the transaction
laptop to a coffee shop instead. of attention, the agreement that you both
On the way, she walks by the school. exist, saying I and you and placing the
She’s so used to the film crew now that she right amount but not too much into the
almost misses him—the star of the movie other person’s hands.
himself—sitting on the front steps. It’s soccer but inside, and each time
The actor doesn’t look anything like an someone misses a goal you have to—
ordinary person; immediately he looks like his faces works on his face, on what she Unfortunately, as soon as he’s talk-
a celebrity. He is obviously more beautiful can see of it now. It’s a bit like looking at ing, she realizes she’s forgotten to listen.
than a normal person. But looking at him, her husband and son—otherwise ordinary Sounds super fun, she says.
she sees many images of him at once, all people she can see only through a sheaf of She wants to pay attention, but it’s
the movies and gossip stories and fragrance her own precious impressions. hard. Sometimes she has to force her son

91
to talk, but other times he talks just to moves on. The bell rings every 45 min-
make her listen. Can I tell you something? utes. First period, second period, like a
he’ll ask. And after she says yes, she realizes ladder through the day. But this can’t be
there was nothing he had to tell her. He real, I keep thinking. I would do anything
just wanted her to turn her face to him. to bring her back.
She can see him working to come up with Then one day the children in my
something to say. All children do this, of class begin to change. At first you think
course; sometimes her husband does it too. I’m imagining it, that they’re little flash-
Can I tell you something? She waits. Did backs maybe. But I’m not imagining it.
you know volcanoes still exist? My wife used to sing this old song when
People say he looks like his father, she thought I wasn’t listening. She’ll be
and that makes her jealous. It’s not that coming ’round the mountain when she
she wishes he had a small version of her comes. She’ll be driving six white horses
face; she just wants it to be obvious that when she comes. I thought it was some-
they belong together. She doesn’t think he thing she’d sing to our own children,
looks like anyone, really; not his father, not when we finally chose to have them. I
even himself. His face is always changing, had this image of her holding and rock-
always disorienting her. She recognizes ing and singing some child that song.
most of all his knees, his shoulders, the One day I’m walking down the hallway
circle of his belly. behind a girl and I hear her. She’s hum-
The actor is right where she left him. ming. Then she sings: Oh we’ll all go out
He’s leaning back on the steps, one leg to meet her when she comes. Oh we’ll all
bent and the other stretched flat. That’s go out to meet her when she comes. Oh
him, she tells her son from a discreet dis- we’ll all go out to meet her, we’ll all go
tance. He’s the star. out to meet her, we’ll all go out to meet
When they reach him, her son imme- her when she comes. Close-up. Tears in
diately asks: What’s on your foot? my eyes.
A boot. In class, I notice a boy is sitting just
It looks like a spaceman’s boot. like my wife did. She had this way of
Thank you, that makes it sound cooler perching on a chair, her knees pulled up
than it is. The actor squints in the sunlight; against her chest. It looked like some-
you wouldn’t think he could make that thing you’d do by a fire, in the grasslands,
face. I hear you go to school here. not at the kitchen table—like how pre-
How do you know? historic people would have sat in case a
I know your mom. predator came. It bugged me. Couldn’t
I’m in first grade. she just sit comfortably?
Super. The actor looks like he’s been Parents start coming in to tell me
polite twice to this local fan and now he they’re worried. Their child isn’t sleep-
wants the conversation to be over. ing. My wife had terrible insomnia. She
All of us have been wondering what the rarely drifted off before 1 or 2. At school,
movie is about, she says. the children look exhausted, poor guys.
We’re not supposed to say. We’ve stopped doing the coursework by
Just the briefest summary. this point. I let them nap in class.
There’s an NDA. Sometimes at night my wife would get
What if I promise not to tell anyone else? frightened and I would need to comfort
It’s not really appropriate for kids, he her. I would stand by the bed and rub her
says. back until she fell asleep. I don’t know how
She tells him not to worry, it’ll go over much it helped—it wasn’t enough, in the
her son’s head. end, to stop her from doing what she did.
I never wanted to see her in pain, but those
M y c h a r a c t e r is a teacher at the were good moments, when I was attend-
KATHERINE LAM

school who’s lost his wife. When I come ing to her fear. She got me thinking that
back to work, everyone is really nice to me. maybe there really was something bad out
My colleagues give me long hugs in the there, and she needed my protection. Or
lounge. But almost right away, everyone maybe the feeling was that nothing was

92 JANUARY 2025
93
out there, and we were the only ones, and or her, because as much as I think I made The brother and sister are in front, each
I liked that too. this happen, I have no idea how to stop bearing their own cardboard box, each
When the children get the same fright- it. I go sit in the back of the classroom brand of candy in a tidy row. They stop
ened look, I start doing it in class. I have and look at the blackboard, hoping that in front of the actor. They must have no
them put their heads down on their desks something, anything, will be written there. idea he’s a celebrity; they think he’s just
and I turn off the lights and I walk down And: credits. sitting there. Chocolate? they say.
each row, humming about her coming The actor pats his pockets, but he’s not
’round the mountain and giving them each carrying anything. Tom! He calls over a
a little pat between the shoulder blades. man on the crew, his assistant maybe, who
I can see that they’re suffering in the gives each child some cash. The man waves
same way she suffered. Worse, because off the candy.
they don’t know what’s happening, why Watching the family go, she explains
they’re being made to do and feel these to the actor and his assistant that there’s
things. I feel pretty guilty about it, but I a new shelter in the neighborhood for
can’t stop. First period, second period, the migrants. It’s one of the reasons her hus-
sound of the bell muffled as if by my own band has started talking about leaving the
hand. Shh, I think, don’t disturb them. It’s city; he says he doesn’t want their son to
like the classroom is very small and down have to see so much sadness, though she
somewhere very low, and the light comes suspects that what their son sees is mainly
through a distant hole. They can do that kids with candy.
with the camera. The other boy is wearing a jersey from
By the end, actual events start repli- the same team as her son, and socks with
cating, here inside the school. I’ll just tell flip-flops so small for him, most of his
you one. She was a competitive ice-skater heel is flat on the ground. She wonders
as a kid. One day the water freezes in the No, she thinks. Not what these children see when they look at
water fountains. The pipes burst over- my child. His face the school. The shelter must be zoned for
night, flooding the halls, and by the time a different district because, as far as she
the children come in the next morning, would be caught knows, none of the residents goes here.
smooth black ice covers the floor from the forever, expressing Perhaps this place always looks like a film
nurse’s office to the auditorium. someone else’s set to them.
She stopped skating when she was 14 feelings in someone Those kids should be in school, the
or 15, because she fell and broke her leg. assistant says.
So I slip in the hallway and break my leg. else’s story. It’s spring break, she reminds him.
She had to miss a recital as a result. It was Still, terrible to see them being used
her first big disappointment, the first thing that way.
that was taken from her. She had to sit and I don’t know, the actor says. What are
watch her friends perform in their bright they supposed to do? It’s not like they can
costumes, and then in came the Zamboni, afford nannies.
oozing like a great mechanized slug over all But making the children walk in front
traces of choreography, telling her it was like that. Because people are more likely to
over, she had missed her chance. pay attention to the hardship of children.
But worst are the children, too many Less likely to resent their suffering. More
for one man to rock and sing to, their willing to give money for it.
drooping heads, their soft faces on which What would you prefer, the actor asks,
I’m stamping this record of experience, for the parents to make them walk behind?
and all of them looking up at me, know- She thinks they both have a point:
ing how I wasted her time. The children raise the stakes of the story.
The funny thing is that, though I seem It would be dumb not to use them.
to have this power to force the children That’s a bad story, says her son. When the brother and sister get to
to embody her, I had no power over my That’s not polite, she says. the playground, they turn inside the
wife herself. I could never make her do I told you it wasn’t for kids, the actor chain-link fence while the mother waits.
what I wanted, what I thought was good says. But it’ll be beautifully shot. The movie children have filed out to the
for her. By the end, she only laughed at blacktop again to assemble in their groups
me, when she laughed at all. Eventually I F ro m ac ro s s the street come a woman of three and four. The siblings go among
begin to wonder if it’s me who’s in charge, and two children. They’re selling candy. them, proffering their candy, but they

94 JANUARY 2025
look confused—none of the other kids adds a kick, an extra twirl. Ninja moves, walkie-talkie in the other. She does as she’s
acknowledges them. There are no parents ballet moves, moves so particular to his told. She waits a minute. Two.
here; they must be realizing how strange own peculiar self, they have no name and Excuse me but how long will this take?
that is. Something is wrong with this she can think only: That’s him, there he I just need to get to the next block.
place, with these unreal children. goes. He makes no sound, and neither do Not long. Five minutes tops.
Can I be in the movie? her son asks the men, watching on the sidewalk, sur- I’m in a hurry. I have to meet my
again. prised into respect by the opacity of what family.
Bad luck, the assistant says. It’s already he’s making, its buoyancy, its gravity. We’ll get you through as quick as
been cast. When he reaches the bottom of the we can.
Can I be extra? stairs, he stops. That’s just a little dance, This is a little ridiculous. Can’t I just go
An extra, the assistant says. he says. on the other side of the street?
That’s what I said. I’m sorry, that’s not possible.
No, not possible, let’s not be rude, she S u n d ay i s the last day of spring break, How can it not be possible? Look,
starts to say, but the actor answers: You’d and her husband tells her to relax; he’ll where’s Tom? Tom knows me.
have to come all day and do whatever take their son out. She asks where, and he I don’t know who you’re talking about.
you’re told. says not to worry about it—they’re hav- You’re acting like this is some issue of
I can do that! ing father-son time. Go back to bed, he public safety, like you’re a police officer.
And you can’t talk, or play, until you’re says. She watches them get ready to leave, But you don’t have any actual power, do
told to talk and play, and then it has to be the two people she loves most. The boy you? To stop people from moving through
the right way. is talking about how he auditioned for their own neighborhood?
Please, I want to. the movie. He says he’ll show his father And yet she doesn’t push past him.
What do you think, Tom? the dance. She’s so close, she can see the restaurant;
No, she thinks. Not my child. His face Mom, he says, Dad and I are going to she can see the people at the sidewalk
would be caught forever, expressing some- talk about places we can move to. He says I tables; she can see them in the dining
one else’s feelings in someone else’s story. can use his Google when we’re on the bus. shed. They’re laughing and eating and lift-
She pictures something being stretched His Google? ing their glasses as if for the same toast.
over his head, taut as a swimming cap, So I can look up pictures. And yes, right there—that’s her family.
with that synthetic smell, that tightness Hypothetically move to, her husband Her child’s back is to her. Around the
over the brow. says. It’s just for fun. Tell her. edges of his head and shoulders, she can
The assistant shakes his head. I’m afraid Sure, their child says. For fun. see another outline, the same shape, just
we’re all set, he says. Tomorrow, she thinks, everything will taller and broader, like a prediction of the
Just put him in a scene, Tom. go back to normal. They’ll go to school, future—the shape of his father.
You know I can’t. she’ll join the people flowing to the train. She realizes they’re at the table with the
But look what I can do, her son says. She tidies and makes coffee. She gets out a blue chairs. Her son must have remem-
He runs up the school steps. At the top, book. The apartment is so quiet. By lunch- bered. But there were only two of those
he puts his palms on the railing, leans his time, she wants her family back. Her hus- chairs—where will she sit when she gets
belly against it, lifts his feet off the ground, band sends her a laughing face—she’s so there? A band of fear snaps around her, like
and hovers there. She’s embarrassed. She’s pathetic, it’s sweet. He says she can meet it’s a crisis, like she can’t just walk over and
about to tell him they need to stop bother- them at the restaurant by the school in pull up another seat. But she can’t, because
ing these grown-ups, that it’s time to go half an hour. she’s trapped here, waiting. She can’t see
home, when he jumps down. He leaps to She passes the school’s front steps; she the cameras, but she knows they must be
the side, spins, descends a step, leaps back, forgets, again, to look closely at the trees. rolling. If she starts to run, the cameras
ducks under the railing. On the other side Only one trailer is left—they’re clearing will catch her. She’ll be in the movie.
he does the same—leaps, spins, descends, out just in time. A man steps into her
leaps, ducks—and again. Back and forth path. Ma’am, he says, could you wait here
he goes, down and farther down, bowing for just a moment? We’re trying to get a
each time below the black bar that marks last shot. Honor Jones is a senior editor at The
the center. It’s like he’s knitting one side He’s holding up one hand like a cross- Atlantic. Her first novel, Sleep, will be
of the school to the other. Sometimes he ing guard, looking expectantly at the published in May.

The Atlantic (ISSN 1072-7825), recognized as the same publication under The Atlantic Monthly or Atlantic Monthly (The), is published monthly by The Atlantic Monthly Group, 610 Water Street SW, Washington, DC
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95
 CALEB’S INFERNO By Caleb
Madison

Warning: This crossword puzzle starts easy, but gets devilishly

hard as you descend into its depths. See which circle you can reach
before you abandon all hope.

ACROSS 40 “Falling asleep and she’s

calling ____” (lyric from a
1 ____ movie (flick like Killers anthem)
The Godfather or Goodfellas) 42 Saharan wind
4 Not many 46 Strain on one’s mind?
7 Pintful in a taproom, perhaps 47 Big name in dogs
8 Tool for felling timber 48 White noise?
9 Square ____ in a round hole
10 Opposite of downs D OW N
11 “Otherwise ...”
13 Skin condition sometimes 1 Diagram that might have a
treated with retinoids “You are here” arrow
15 Lost causes 2 Chant often heard
18 Customizable options at at fútbol stadiums
some breakfast buffets 3 Rookie
20 Word before shower or party 4 Mythological half-human,
21 She directed Meryl and half-goat being
Amy in Julie & Julia 5 Event with product
22 Movie star whom Welles demos, often
once called “maybe the greatest 6 Direction that’s usually left
actor who ever appeared in on a 1-Down
front of a camera” 12 Famous Buster Poindexter
24 Wealth refrain
25 Not pizzicato 13 Prior to now
26 One of the Walker Brothers 14 Grooming tool with teeth
28 Vigorous efforts 16 Given a new look
30 Chain units? 17 Looks hard
32 Future style? 19 Absolutely crush it
33 What someone who’s freaking 22 Ring setting?
out might have 23 Corner
36 Inability to speak 24 Rough talk?
37 First word of Joyce’s Ulysses 27 Some earthenware
38 Reward for waiting? 29 Marine creature that
39 OS part, briefly inspired the Alien aliens
31 Fans out
33 Star known for his
“Bucharest Backfire”
FOR HINTS A ND
S O L U T I O N S , V I S I T: 34 Professional with a lot
of contacts?
35 Community for a scrub oak
41 Show respect for, maybe
43 Strong role of 2024
44 Jagged edge, maybe?
45 W alternative

TheAtlantic.com/inferno

96 JANUARY 2025
Talk it out.
It’s not always easy,
but it helps.

Love,
 Chad 2024 © Finbarr O’Reilly/VII Photo

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