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Jacob Weisberg: Reagan in the Round
Catherine Nicholson: The Radical Paradise Lost
Ben Tarnoff: Artificial Intelligence, Real Labor
Neal Ascherson: Demystifying the Nazis
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS www.press.uchicago.edu

Contents March 27, 2025

AMERICAN
6 ...................................... Neal Ascherson Ordinary Germans
Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans PARADOX
10 ......................................... Laura Marsh A Self Divided
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource
by Chris Hayes
16 ......................................... Martin Filler Build, Britannia!
Interwar: British Architecture, 1919–39 by Gavin Stamp, with a foreword
by Rosemary Hill
22 .......................................... J.T. Townley Poem
24 ...................................... Jeffrey Toobin Cases Closed
Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation
by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein,
with a preface by Robert S. Mueller III
26 .................................... Clare Bucknell Studies for His Mind
John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection
by Bruce Boucher
30 .......................................... Ben Tarnoff The Labor Theory of AI
The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence
by Matteo Pasquinelli S C O T T S P IL L M A N
32 ......................................... Fady Joudah Poem
33 ................................................... Jed Perl Echoes of Eternity MAKING SENSE
36 .................................... Nicole Eustace An Expanding Vision of America
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal
OF SLAVERY
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History America’s Long Reckoning,
by Ned Blackhawk from the Founding Era to Today
42 .................................. Jacob Weisberg The Lucky One
Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot
45 ........................ Catherine Nicholson A Milton for All Seasons “Simply amazing. A brilliant
What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of ‘Paradise Lost’
by Orlando Reade tour d’horizon of 250 years
48 .................................. David Oshinsky Vaccines at Warp Speed of American thinking and
The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets
by Thomas R. Cech writing about slavery.”
50 .............................. Nell Irvin Painter ‘This Land Is Yours’ —J A M E S T. C A M P B E L L ,
The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier author of Middle Passages
by Amy Godine
A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding
in My Dutch American Family by Debra Bruno, with an afterword
by Eleanor C. Mire “An essential book.... Spillman
52 ...................................... Michael Dirda The Chronicler of Unhappiness lucidly chronicles the long
Ford Madox Ford by Max Saunders
series of anguished and angry
55 ........................................ Sally Rooney Angles of Approach
Unbreakable by Ronnie O’Sullivan arguments that did not end
Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything a documentary film directed
by Sam Blair
with the Civil War, but moved
into the realm of historical study.”
— D AV I D A . B E L L ,
Princeton University

“Brilliant, biting, and timely.”

—KELLIE CARTER JACKSON,
author of We Refuse

“Essential reading for anyone

nybooks.com AMERICAN MELTDOWN
Quinn Slobodian: In the DOGE Tornado who hopes to come to terms
Trevor Jackson: Impunity Run Amok
Jordan Thomas: California’s Uncontrolled Burns with America’s tortured past.”
—J A M E S O A K E S ,
PLUS
Naomi Cohen: Turkey After the Quake author of The Crooked Path to Abolition
Langdon Hammer: Elizabeth Bishop’s Bible Lessons
Moira Donegan: Reading Andrea Dworkin in the Age of Trump basicbooks.com

Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews
at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at
nybooks.com/issues.

3
4 The New York Review
Contributors NEW FROM
NEW DIRECTIONS
Neal Ascherson is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, Editor
Emily Greenhouse
University College London.
Deputy Editor
Clare Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Michael Shae

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for The Washington Post Executive Editor
Jana Prikryl
and the author of several collections of essays, including Classics for Pleasure
and Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books. Senior Editor
Eve Bowen
Nicole Eustace is the Julius Silver Family Professor of History at New York Contributing Editors
University. Her book Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Justice in Early America won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History. Art Editor
Leanne Shapton
Martin Filler’s most recent book is Makers of Modern Architecture,
Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on Managing Editor
Lauren Kane
architecture in these pages.
Online Editors
Fady Joudah’s latest book of poems, [ … ], about the genocide of Gaza, was Max Nelson, Ratik Asokan
published last year. Associate Editor “The composer of a discomposing age.”
Daniel Drake
Laura Marsh is the Literary Editor at The New Republic. —JOSHUA COHEN, NYRB
Assistant Editors
Catherine Nicholson is a Professor of English at Yale and the author of Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman, Sam Needleman
Reading and Not Reading ‘The Faerie Queene’ and Uncommon Tongues: Copyeditors
Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance. Brian Ransom, Maggie McGowan

David Oshinsky is the Director of the Division of Medical Humanities at Fact-Checker

Dahlia Krutkovich
NYU Langone Health and a Professor of History at New York University. His
most recent book is Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at Editorial Interns
Mia Euceda, Stephanie Pisarevskiy
America’s Most Storied Hospital.
Special Projects
Nell Irvin Painter is the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita at Merve Emre
Princeton and the author of I Just Keep Talking, Old in Art School, and Advising Editor
The History of White People, among other books. Fintan O’Toole

Jed Perl’s most recent book is Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts. Editor-at-Large
Daniel Mendelsohn
Sally Rooney is an Irish writer. Her novel Intermezzo was published last year.
Ben Tarnoff ’s latest book is Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Publisher
Future. He works in the tech industry. Rea S. Hederman
“One of the eminent visionaries
Jeffrey Toobin is the author, most recently, of The Pardon: The Politics of Associate Publisher, Business Operations
Michael King
of the twentieth century.”
Presidential Mercy, which was published this year. —LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
Associate Publisher, Marketing and Planning
J.T. Townley is a writer, poet, and translator. He is the Director of the Janice Fellegara
Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies at Oregon State University. Advertising Director
Lara Frohlich Andersen
Jacob Weisberg is the cofounder of Pushkin Industries and the former
editor of Slate. His books include In Defense of Government, The Bush Contracts Director
Lisa Barelli
Tragedy, and Ronald Reagan.
Rights
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Production Designer
Will Simpson
Type Production
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Production
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e greatest universal poet since Dante.”
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Natàlia Pàmies: What Remains, 2025
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S I N C E 19 3 6
N D B O O K S .C O M

March 27, 2025 5

 Ordinary Germans
Neal Ascherson

ninety-page essay on Adolf Hitler, a

full, elegantly written account of the
Führer’s life that uses the new re-
search of the past few years to update
older narratives. As he does through-
out the book, he corrects some vener-
able myths and false details that have
fossilized into accepted fact. The story
that Hitler was psychologically crip-
pled in his early years by a sadistic
father and the death of his mother is
ill-founded: “He did not . . . grow up in
poverty; nor does his father Alois seem
to have been an alcoholic.” He did not
acquire his overwhelming antisemitism
in Vienna but much later in Munich,
after he emerged from World War I. It
was not “big business” that financed
and propelled him to power; many lead-
ing industrialists were repulsed by Nazi
violence and disorder in the 1930s and
backed other parties. He was not a drug
addict in his last year, which ended in
the Berlin bunker; his medication was
“conventional,” and he was a wreck
mainly because he was suffering from
Irma Grese (center), an SS officer at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen, at her trial for war crimes, Lüneburg, Germany, Parkinson’s. And Hitler was not invari-
September 1945 ably “cold” and “unemotional” or lacking
a private life. He sought the company
(though rarely more) of a series of pretty
Hitler’s People: She was “seemingly unaware that she duty, he was not punished. Since then, women, and at home with friends in the
The Faces of the Third Reich had anything to fear from the repre- as Evans shows, research has weakened Bavarian Alps he could seem jokey and
by Richard J. Evans. sentatives of the Allies.” The press some of Browning’s conclusions. The entertaining. But nothing now remains
Penguin Press, 598 pp., $35.00 went wild about her during her trial, policemen were volunteers, not con- of the myth that he possessed Napole-
creating a monster of sadistic sexual- scripts; “they were carefully selected onic military genius (the “greatest gen-
We know who they were, these men ity that went far beyond her provable according to ideological criteria. . . . eral of all time,” as the German media
and women who served Adolf Hitler. crimes of revolting cruelty and mur- Their training included heavy doses of called him). The only mystery is how
We know what they did, because the der. But Evans doesn’t diagnose her Nazi ideology and antisemitic indoctri- German armies survived to fight so long
ashes of so many millions lie under as a monster: “Grese came across . . . nation.” In short, they were not quite and so stubbornly under the disastrous
the fields and pavements of Europe, as a rather immature, simple young “ordinary men,” or a random sample. orders he screamed to his generals.
and because the words “Western Civ- woman who had little idea of why she But Evans writes later in Hitler’s Peo- Historians have held contrasting
ilization” are still too charred to read. was being demonized”—an unques- ple that the “hundreds of thousands of views on how Hitler came to exercise
The thing we don’t know is what made tioning Nazi to the end. They hanged Germans [who] committed unspeak- such absolute power after 1933. Evans
them capable of doing it. her eight months later. able atrocities” acted with free will and notes that “the conservative German
A master historian like Richard Evans, During the war, people in Allied often with enthusiasm. They “positively journalist” Joachim Fest concluded in
the author of three deservedly famous countries (and occupied ones too) enjoyed what they were doing.” That 1973 that Hitler somehow expressed
books on the Third Reich, must turn generally assumed that there was leads back toward Daniel Goldhagen’s the general disorientation of the Ger-
first to what the Nazis did and what the something deviant, aberrant, about spectacular claim in Hitler’s Willing Ex- man people. Ian Kershaw, in his two-
consequences were.1 But he evidently the Germans and their leaders—a de- ecutioners (1996) that “exterminatory” volume biography in the late 1990s,
remains tormented by the simple, non- formity, in fact. As a wartime child I antisemitism and a yearning for dicta- “portrayed Hitler as in part the cre-
academic questions that twenty-first- listened to English soldiers singing as torship had long been integral to the ation of a ‘charismatic community’ of
century people still ask. How could the they tramped past in the rain: “’Itler’s German sense of identity: the nation enthusiastic disciples whose adula-
Nazis, as members of the human spe- only got one ball. Göring’s got two but as collective monster, indeed. Evans tion pushed the Nazi leader into an
cies, have done what they did? Could ver-ee small. ’Immler . . .” and so on. (If dismisses some of Goldhagen’s argu- ever-stronger belief in himself.” The
they be explained away as freaks, moral they marched through a village, the ser- ments (“an updated version of the war- German historian Peter Longerich re-
perverts, sadistic psychopaths, or war- geant made them change to “Onward, time propaganda”) and offers a more jected this: Hitler was nobody else’s
crippled spirits driven by masochistic Christian Soldiers.”) Twenty years later, nuanced reflection: Nazi perpetrators creation, and he alone achieved his
obedience or fantasies of vengeance? before the Frankfurt “Auschwitz Trial,” and leaders were not freaks, but they total dominance. By 1940, after his con-
Evans does not waste much sym- journalists were taken to view the ac- had been brought up in a culture of quest of France and much of Central
pathy on those thoughts, which lead cused camp personnel in a dim base- rancid, self-pitying national paranoia Europe, he reached a frenzied peak of
toward an absurd guilty-but-insane ment under the Paulskirche. Seeing the after the defeat of 1918. Almost all the self-assertion, spraying Germany with
verdict. He is, of course, too young to terrible face of the torturer Wilhelm prominent Nazis came from middle- Trump-like superlatives. The invasion
have lived in Hitler’s time. But an ex- Boger—the yellow eyes and boulder class families with right-wing val- of France was “the greatest battle of
ample of what lies before his eyes as he skull—I felt for a moment that I was ues—patriotism, antisemitism, fear all time,” and the conquest of other
writes is what British soldiers saw when looking at some throwback hominin, of “Bolshevism”—for whom righteous European states was the “mightiest
they entered the concentration camp at not a twentieth-century Homo sapiens. violence seemed a sign of manliness. series of battles in world history.”
Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945: But that thought had to be shaken off. Evans is attempting, in his own Most recently scholars have grown
It was more challenging to face up to painstaking and carefully judicious way, interested in the practice by senior
Some 60,000 starving and disease- the notion that the low-level perpetra- to answer those two indelible popular Nazi officials of “working towards the
ridden inmates were found inside, tors and their commanders were just questions about Nazi leaders and per- Führer,” that is, anticipating how the
with another 13,000 lying dead and “ordinary men.” Christopher Browning’s petrators: How could they have? Were erratic Hitler might have carried out
unburied around them; 14,000 of 1992 book of that title broke the hearts they abnormal? His answers could be a policy he had left unexplained or un-
the survivors were so weak that of many who believed in humanity. It summarized as: the Nazis were not ordi- completed. It’s argued, not very con-
they died within a few weeks of showed the members of Reserve Police nary people; they were ordinary German vincingly, that this guesswork led to
liberation. Battalion 101, often middle-aged family people, living in the firestorm of hatred continual radicalizations of policy that
TR IN ITY MI RROR/ALAMY

men with no fanatical Nazi views, shoot- and delusion ignited after World War I. he might not initially have intended.
The young camp guard Irma Grese was ing naked and defenseless Jewish villag- Almost all the biographies in this
still there when the British arrived. ers and their children into pits day after book record the overwhelming impact of
1
The Coming of the Third Reich (2004), The
Third Reich in Power (2005), and The Third
day, a total of some 38,000 victims. They
were not even under compulsion. If a
man said that he had had enough and
H itler’s People is divided into
four parts: “The Leader,” “The
Paladins,” “The Enforcers,” and “The
meeting Hitler for the first time. Some
Nazis exaggerated its force, as if to ex-
cuse their subsequent crimes. Evans
Reich at War (2009). asked to be withdrawn from execution Instruments.” Evans starts with a cannot quite explain it. Part of it, we

6 The New York Review

 Yale university press

“Franklin has done a wonderful

thing here. While giving an analysis
of the obliterating phenomenon of
“A nuanced and honest addition to
‘Anne,’ she continually points back “Offers a lively discussion of what
contemporary conversation around
to the real-life girl in a way that feels companies are, and what they are for.
secularization, civic discord, and the “Change the Wallpaper is a
IUHVKDQGSHUVXDVLYHŕŐ0HJKDQ&R[ Texts about purpose in business are all
social benefits of church. Rauch is provocative, enlightening read—
Gurdon, Wall Street Journal „ Jewish WRRRIWHQZDIŵ\DQGZRUWK\0U.D\ŒV
rare in his ability to discuss complex Dasgupta’s lovely work sheds
Lives® series is admirably clear.”—The Economist
questions in clean, accessible prose. important light on the subtle biases
. . . This book is exemplary precisely that plague our society today and
because Rauch doesn’t try to claim gives a hopeful glimpse into how we
cultural Christianity for himself.” can do better. An indispensable guide
Ő%RQQLH.ULVWLDQChristianity Today for anyone ready for the challenge of
Ŵ[LQJRXUXQIDLUZRUOGŕŐ/DXULH6DQWRV
host of The Happiness Lab podcast

“Essential reading for anyone who

“Hanley masterfully reconstructs wants to understand the origin of

the fascinating life and underworld public education in this country, the “A remarkably innovative,
milieu of Wedderburn, the biracial “Extraordinary. . . . The appearance of role it plays in our democracy and sophisticated, and sumptuous
seaman, tailor, blasphemer, preacher, There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas the dangers of the current attacks on exploration of Buddhist history by one
pornographer, brothel-keeper, and is especially welcome and necessary public education and ideas labeled of the foremost scholars of Buddhism
outspoken opponent of the British at this time. . . . Ambitious and ‘controversial.’”—Becky Pringle, in the world today.”—Robert H. Sharf,
regimes of slavery and labor.”—Vincent FRPSHOOLQJŕŐ%LOO/LWWOHŴHOGArts Fuse President, National Education University of California, Berkeley
Carretta, author of Equiano, the Association

African „ Black Lives series

yalebooks.com

March 27, 2025 7

can assume, was a suppressed wish to tend his paranoia to his inner circle SS ,had committed widespread mass ian government in order to ensure the
be morally dominated by a convincing until they began to desert him in the murder and crimes against human- murder of Hungary’s Jews. The terrify-
leader. But part was tricks: Hitler’s final days of the war. ity during World War II. At the same ing Reinhard Heydrich, the expression-
use of his large eyes to drill into men’s Evans includes brief biographies time historians began to examine less Aryan “god” who was head of the
psyches; his insistence on audiences of the members of that inner circle: the choices and conduct of individ- Gestapo and the SS , was dogged by the
spread broadly around him, not facing Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, ual Wehrmacht commanders, such as false whisper that he had Jewish ances-
him lengthwise; his demagogic ora- Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Al- Leeb. Ironically enough, this had al- try. From a musical family, he played
tory (first lulling them with dull, im- bert Speer, Ernst Röhm, and Rosen- ready been done fifty years earlier but the violin beautifully. His boss Himmler
pressive “facts,” then suddenly raising berg. He omits Martin Bormann, the then concealed. The American mili- was only briefly a chicken farmer; Evans
his voice to a shout and bursting into grim careerist who rose after 1942 to tary tried fourteen German generals in shows that this man, more directly re-
rabble-rousing passion). He spread the become Hitler’s secretary and—next 1948, including Leeb, and gave eleven sponsible than anyone for the murder
crazy conspiracy theories that drove to the Führer himself—the most pow- of them heavy prison sentences, “but of millions, was intensely concerned
him—above all, the idea of the Jew- erful figure in the Reich. With very few as the Cold War got under way, the with respectability. He forced the SS
ish world conspiracy in alliance with exceptions (Göring’s antisemitism was Americans came under huge pressure into shirts and ties and smart black uni-
“Bolsheviks”—and yet he was skeptical “perfunctory and conventional,” while from West German institutions”; the forms, and in his 1943 “Posen speeches”
about mystic cultishness. Evans could Speer exploited the enslavement of West needed to revive the German to his assembled killers insisted on the
have written effectively about Hitler’s Europe’s Jews without subscribing to army, and the generals were freed. maintenance of “decency” (Anstand) as
scorn for the pseudo-archaeology of racial theorizing), Evans insists that It’s fair to say that the lives (and they shot and gassed.
the German race cooked up by Hein- most of Hitler’s paladins believed un- deaths) of most of Evans’s subjects are
rich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg. questioningly and passionately in a reasonably well known. What he adds
(It may be only a myth that he lost pa-
tience with Himmler’s excavations and
exploded: “Why do we call the whole
“Jewish world conspiracy” that was
directing the policies of foreign pow-
ers against Germany. This belief, he
is twofold: first, a scrubbing away of
false myths; second, a sharp-edged se-
ries of discussions about the changing
A few women appear in Hitler’s
People, in spite of the regime’s
“hyper-masculine ideas of toughness,
world’s attention to the fact that we implies, was the most enduring motive verdicts of historians over the eighty hardness, brutality and fanaticism”
have no past?”) for their actions and choices. years since the Reich was destroyed. and its pseudo-Germanic segrega-
Evans does not conceal his own hor- But there are other ways of looking Hess, for instance, was not mad, al- tion of gender roles. Two of them—
ror at the sheer ruthlessness of Hitlerite at Nazi beliefs. The late Erhard Eppler, though he pretended to be at his trial. Ilse Koch and Irma Grese—were
terror, a boundless hatred culminating a radical Christian who became “the He had once been a fanatical and effec- concentration camp guards, but Ger-
in the Holocaust. Perhaps inevitably conscience of the Social Democrats” tive deputy führer, and his lone flight trud Scholtz-Klink was Reich women’s
he gives only a few pages to anything in postwar West Germany, used to in- to Scotland in 1941 to find the Duke of leader, heading the huge Frauen-
worthwhile that the Nazi regime might voke the Roman fasces as the image Hamilton and make a separate peace schaft organization. Recent research
have achieved. Yet the social welfare of twentieth-century fascism: a bun- was not crazy, in the sense that it fit has shown that its members—and
programs launched by Robert Ley and dle of quite disparate rods (or poli- into the utterly distorted Nazi view of many German women who were not
the Labor Front were vast and inno- cies) held together by the strap of the how the world worked. members—were
vative, from the “Strength Through leader. When the strap is cut, the rods Evans’s chapter on Adolf Eichmann
Joy” cruises and cultural activities for scatter, and people could claim that “I becomes a “trial” of Hannah Arendt deeply involved in many aspects
workers to improved, more egalitarian agreed with Hitler about revising the and her endlessly debated concept of of the regime, even if they did not
conditions in workplaces. All this was Versailles Treaty or ‘degenerate cul- “the banality of evil.” He stoutly de- engage directly in its crimes. As
authoritarian, erected on the ruins of ture,’ but I always thought the perse- fends her: wives and mothers, they knew,
the crushed trade unions. But for the cution of the Jews a grave mistake. So and for the most part tolerated
first time the working classes could feel I never believed in the whole fasces- This phrase was widely, some- or approved of, and sometimes
that a German government, even a fas- bundle. So I was never truly a Nazi!” To times willfully misunderstood. even assisted in, the crimes of
cist tyranny, was deliberately using its which Evans’s book in effect retorts: What she meant by “the banality their menfolk.
energies in their interest. During the Third Reich, you could not of evil” was not that Eichmann was
Some of that feeling survived the pick and choose between “rods.” You a mere bureaucrat. . . . For Arendt, As for the Reich’s most famous and
collapse of the Reich. It’s worth re- either accepted or rejected the bun- he was typical of the kind of per- argued-over woman, the filmmaker
membering that parts of Germany dle as a whole. son who . . . were the executors of Leni Riefenstahl, the book includes
were scarcely affected by the bomb- General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, regimes like Hitler’s or Stalin’s: the photograph of her aghast face as
ing and battles of the war. For many commanding Army Group North in the second-rate minds, lacking the she watched German soldiers open fire
Germans, the disaster came in the two Baltic, was revolted by the SS massa- faculty of independent or creative on a crowd of Jewish civilians. Evans
years following the defeat, when mil- cres of Jews around his units but did thought. recognizes her astounding talent, but
lions suddenly found themselves lack- nothing to stop them, although he was he is unsparing about her long, inti-
ing food, heat, work, and even soap. For formally responsible for what took Evans shows that, far from being a mate friendship with Hitler and her
this shame, people were disinclined place in his region. He and his deputy faceless operative with no opinions, inestimable services to the image of
to blame Hitler. The past was seen “accepted at the very least that there Eichmann was “a deep-dyed antisem- Nazi Germany. Demolishing her efforts
through selective tunnel vision. I re- was a ‘Jewish question’ that was urgent ite” and “a man of overweening ambi- to denazify her past, Evans resurrects
member being struck speechless when enough to justify compulsory steril- tion” who “lacked any kind of moral Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fas-
an old lady in Bonn said to me, “Say ization.” In his chapter on Franz von intelligence.” Hans Frank, the Nazis’ cism,” published in these pages, which
what you like about him, but in Adolf’s Papen, the right-wing politician who favorite courtroom lawyer, suddenly demonstrated the hidden continuities
time at least there was no crime!” helped Hitler come to power in 1933, found himself ruling the “General in Riefenstahl’s work, from Nazi pro-
and in many other essays in the book, Government” of occupied Poland. He paganda in the 1930s to her postwar
Evans reminds us how widespread a is remembered now for his deliberate filming of Nuba tribesmen in Sudan.2

T he “paladins,” the leading Nazis

who formed Hitler’s “court,” were
variously explained away by their Al-
“conventional” antisemitism—no lon-
ger restricted to religious prejudice—
had become in twentieth- century
extermination of Poland’s elites (“the
Polish lands are to be changed into an
intellectual desert”) and for his cor-
He follows this by reminding read-
ers (Eppler’s fasces image again) that
“there were many Germans who were
lied conquerors. Churchill, invoking Europe. In many ways, the appalling ruption—he looted portable treasures not fanatical Nazis but supported
old American movies, called them experience of fascism has overshad- from all over Eastern Europe. Less well Nazism because it put into practice
“gangsters.” The Allied Control Com- owed the sheer nastiness of the Euro- known is Frank’s delusional attempt to a sufficient range of their desires and
mission observed unhelpfully that “so pean conservative parties it replaced: outflank his rival Himmler by preach- aspirations for them to discount the
grotesque and preposterous are the class-based, crudely patriotic, author- ing a return to the rule of law, only other aspects.” His witness for this
principal characters in this galaxy of itarian, and clerical, often with racist to be silenced by an infuriated Hitler. is the decades-long diary kept by the
clowns and crooks” that it was impos- colonial ambitions, and violently op- Evans shows no mercy for Speer, outwardly ordinary housewife Luise
sible to see how anyone “could have posed to the political expression of whose personal myth of being just a Solmitz in Hamburg. Solmitz felt pa-
taken them for rulers.” The psychia- the working class. nonpolitical technocrat who tried to triotic ecstasy when she first heard
trists appointed to observe the Nurem- The broad notion behind Hitler’s restrain the worst excesses was swal- Hitler speak in 1932 and was “drunk
berg defendants asserted that they People is that recent history requires lowed whole or in part by so many bi- with enthusiasm” when he became
were variously psychopathic: Rudolf the study of individuals. Evans is in- ographers and historians. He joins the chancellor; her only reservation was
Hess was “a self-perpetuated hysteric”; stinctively suspicious of broad-brush consensus, however, in finding no good that the Nazis might turn out to be
Julius Streicher was “paranoid”; Ley collective analyses. Writing about word to say about Ribbentrop, Hitler’s too “socialist.” She even denounced
had “frontal lobe damage” and “organic General von Leeb and the reputa- abominable ambassador to London and her brother for “disloyalty,” saying that
brain disease”; and so on. It was an tion of the Wehrmacht, he notes that later foreign minister. Absurdly crude she preferred to betray her own sibling
English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, “social-science approaches to his- and tactless, Ribbentrop greeted the rather than betray Hitler: “Like many
who compared them to Roman court- tory, dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, British king with a Sieg Heil salute other middle-class Germans, she was
iers. Evans rather agrees. It’s remark- strengthened . . . anonymizing tenden- that only just missed the royal nose. willing to accept almost any measure
able, he observes, that almost all of cies.” It was not until the 1990s that He sought to keep in Hitler’s favor by taken by the Nazis if it could be justi-
them survived to the bitter end. Unlike a traveling exhibition caused furious pushing his policies to extremes; at the fied in terms of maintaining order and
Stalin, who had most of his paladins protest in Germany by demonstrating end of the war, it was Ribbentrop who
arrested and shot, Hitler did not ex- that the Wehrmacht, and not just the organized the overthrow of the Hungar- 2
The New York Review, February 6, 1975.

8 The New York Review

 Julio Galán
March 7–April 19, 2025

LUHRING AUGUSTINE CHELSEA

531 West 24th Street, New York 516 West 20th Street, New York
luhringaugustine.com kurimanzutto.com

March 27, 2025 9

warding off the threat of revolution.” antisemitism began to tip. Somehow to feel educated but pessimistic. So intelligence to believe—or choose to
And yet she was married to a Jew. Gestapo attempts to deport Friedrich many of them came from respectable believe—in a world Jewish conspiracy,
Her husband, Friedrich Solmitz, was (to his death, they could guess) were middle-class families, were educated, or that the Duke of Hamilton could
a decorated war veteran whose family fended off by reference to his medals and played stringed instruments with pull Britain out of the war, or that
had converted to Lutheranism and had and his Aryan wife. But as the British love and skill. Is it possible that they General de Gaulle would join Himmler
lost any connection with the Jewish air offensive against Hamburg began, were not only cruel and fanatical but in a new war against Britain. All those
community. But as war approached, killing 40,000 people in a few nights of also stupid? Evans won’t have this: absurdities arose from the same stu-
restrictions on this “non-Aryan” began firestorm, Luise turned at last against “Many Nazis were neither stupid nor pidity and often willful ignorance that
to bite on the pair and on their “mixed- Hitler himself: “A great man,” she ignorant, but highly educated and well made Irma Grese expect a friendly
race” daughter Gisela, forbidden now wrote, “is only one who knows how to informed.” Well informed? It’s almost welcome from the Allied troops liber-
to matriculate or to marry an “Aryan” moderate himself.” After the dictator’s impossible now to imagine how lit- ating Bergen-Belsen. Evans concludes
German. Luise raged on Gisela’s be- suicide, she called him “the shabbiest tle nations knew about one another that Germans in that period “exer-
half and even wrote a protesting let- failure in world history.” But as Evans ninety years ago and how they filled cised their own individual will when
ter to the Führer, but she recorded notes, she always avoided identifying that void with every kind of cartoonish making the decisions they took.” But
in her diary that “we were all exhila- herself and Friedrich with the collec- stereotype. Germany, knocked sense- one of those decisions was to aban-
rated by happiness and enthusiasm” tive fate of Germany’s Jews: “Hitler’s less by military, economic, and polit- don critical reason. Gloomily, he warns

.
after Germany’s victory over France ultimate crime indeed in her view was ical disaster, was especially delusive. that the invitation to wide-eyed stu-
in 1940. Then, gradually, the balance that he betrayed Germany.” And yet the evidence about interna- pidity, ignoring evidence and com-
between her pride in Hitler’s achieve- To emerge from Evans’s long gal- tional reality was available. It took mon sense, has returned to degrade
ments and her distress over gathering lery of criminals against humanity is genuine stupidity for Nazis of normal politics today.

A Self Divided
Laura Marsh

The Sirens’ Call: Immerwahr asked in a recent skeptical

How Attention Became the World’s review of The Sirens’ Call, what about
Most Endangered Resource that “long section in Plato’s Phaedrus
by Chris Hayes. in which Socrates argues that writing
Penguin Press, 320 pp., $32.00 will wreck people’s memories?” Doesn’t
every era simply fret about the latest
Thinking, and continuing to think technology, whether it’s the printing
for any length of time, is a peculiarly press or the TikTok feed?
elusive activity. A vast self-help lit- That may be true. Still, the fractur-
erature on how to focus and a suite ing of attention in our moment has
of antidistraction devices, from Po- some distinctive features, and Hayes, a
modoro timers to Freedom software cable news anchor with a professional
that blocks the Internet, suggest that interest in getting attention, is excep-
people would like to think deeply. Yet tionally attuned to several of them.
we largely don’t or won’t: in 2023, 79 Whereas the game used to be grab-
percent of respondents to a Bureau of bing and holding someone’s attention
Labor Statistics survey reported that for some duration, he argues, it’s now
they spent no time just “relaxing or enough just to keep grabbing attention
thinking” on the average day—while for shorter and shorter periods, suck-
nearly all, or 93 percent, engaged in ing audiences into a chaotic loop of
some form of diversion, such as watch- stimulation. (Think of watching sixty
ing TV . Instagram Reels back-to-back instead
In 2014 researchers from the Uni- of a half-hour sitcom.)
versity of Virginia published a set of These assaults are more disorienting
studies of people’s willingness to sit than earlier claims on our attention,
and think. They asked participants to and more pervasive: they can grab us in
spend six to fifteen minutes alone in the moments between tasks, or while
a room without cell phones, laptops, we’re already distracted by another
or books. All they had to do was think. screen. Perhaps most importantly, they
Sixty percent reported difficulty, and tend to amplify “intensely polarizing
nearly half found the experience un- figures who seem addicted to contro-
enjoyable. In a follow-up study, the re- versy”—figures like Elon Musk, Kanye
searchers added a twist: participants Illustration by Fien Jorissen West, and Donald Trump who “seem to
were given the chance to experience compulsively feed off negative atten-
a negative sensation—a mild electric media addicts, “the idea of facing the there is a long tradition of such cri- tion.” And so while Hayes records the
shock—during the quiet time. Sixty- normal flow of time is unbearably de- tiques is often used to refute them. In familiar self-loathing that comes from
seven percent of the men and 25 per- pressing,” the journalist Richard Sey- The Shallows (2010) Nicholas Carr wor- staring at a screen too much, the most
cent of the women in the study decided mour wrote in The Twittering Machine ried about “what the Internet is doing troubling and most valuable parts of
to take it. “Simply being alone with (2019). Or as the tech critic Max Read to our brains,” and he goes further in his his book examine the warping effect
their own thoughts” was a deeply unap- has put it, “The actual point of ‘screen new book Superbloom, contemplating of scattered, easily redirected atten-
pealing prospect for many people, the time’ is the time part—the hours it al- the destabilizing effects brought about tion on public discourse and politics.
researchers found; they would “rather lows you to numbly burn up.” Hayes is by new forms of communication. Tim
do an unpleasant activity than no ac- taken aback when his phone notifies Wu chronicled the tricks that corpora-
tivity at all.”
For Chris Hayes, who cites the Vir-
ginia study in his new book The Sirens’
him that he devotes an average of five
hours and sixteen minutes to “screen
time” every day. The number doesn’t
tions have used for over a century to ex-
tract attention and profit from it in The
Attention Merchants (2016). Jonathan
C able news networks might once
have seemed to embody the dark
arts of attention seeking, with their
Call, this apparent need for distraction, seem plausible, until he realizes “it Haidt has argued more recently that barrage of flashy graphics and fast-
even unpleasant distraction, explains all passed in little ten-second incre- too much screen time has contributed talking hosts. But Hayes’s experience
a lot about our relationship with our ments.” Days slip by in meaningless to a mental health crisis among kids. hosting a show on MSNBC underlines
phones. The smartphone offers dis- and forgettable microfragments. To be And before the advent of digital media, how restrained television appears
traction so readily and abundantly that online in this way is to submit to what Neil Postman issued similar warnings compared with social media and apps.
it’s possible to spend hours every day Hayes calls “the alienating experience against the coarsening effects of televi- Even a news show that frantically
skipping from tab to tab, or from video of being divided and distracted in spite sion and movies in Amusing Ourselves skips through multiple stories in an
to video, without enjoying a moment of ourselves, to be here but not present.” to Death (1985). People have been com- hour is a single continuous broadcast,
of it—often, in fact, feeling somewhat He is far from the first to lament the plaining of shortening attention spans offering the same product to millions
drained and diminished. For social “attention crisis.” The very fact that for millennia: What’s new? As Daniel of people. By contrast, the algorithms

10 The New York Review

 HIGHLIGHTS FROM CAMBRIDGE

“…raising the challenges humans face and “In this gentle, witty, semi-memoir, Janet Todd “…a lively, highly readable story of proud city
offering clear and straightforward actions for shows us why the novels of Jane Austen dwellers adapting to a new medieval world.”
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world’s first democracy.” Robert W. Gordon, author of Taming the Past Seth Jacobs, author of Rogue Diplomats
Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge Hardback | $39.99 Hardback | $39.99
Hardback | $49.99

“This brilliant, courageous book is a “A deeply researched, fascinating, and sobering “This brilliant book captures the multi-faceted
disturbingly precise assessment of corporate look at the possibility of interstellar travel.” city for newcomers and invites seasoned
conduct in a criminal dictatorship…” Kelly Weinersmith, co-author of A City on Mars experts to rediscover it.”
Wendy Lower, author of The Ravine Hardback | $29.95 Bruno Carvalho, author of Porous City
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cambridge.org/highlights

March 27, 2025 11

of social networks can show each user much of it is cheaply produced, repet- tire world to entirely dissolve the the Web with even more thoughtless
content tailored specifically to them, itive, and sometimes blatantly decep- problem that, for a century, Hol- stuff. “Everyone labors under the
based on all the things they’ve clicked tive (see: YouTube Shorts that promise lywood executives and big pub- strain of information being cheap and
on before. (This is how Hayes loses an life hacks but turn out to be twenty lishing houses and Broadway plentiful and overwhelming,” Hayes
entire hour, one stoned evening, watch- seconds of someone flushing tennis producers have all attempted to observes. The major problem is how to
ing videos of people assembling sand- balls down the toilet). Increasingly, solve: What will hold people’s at- sift that information—how to direct
wiches and slicing them in half.) much of it is AI -generated “slop”—a tention? They don’t have to have people to the information that they
Social media can also capitalize scroll through Facebook might yield a an answer. They can simply throw want or that you want to show them.
on direct appeals to the audience by dozen fabricated images of Kate Mid- a million little interruptions at us, In other words, the thing that is now
name. One of the more intriguing facts dleton looking angelic but slightly off, track which ones grab our atten- most scarce is attention.
that Hayes cites comes from a 1959 or of uncannily faked home renovation tion, and then repeat those. The principle can be difficult to grasp
study of people’s ability to tune out before-and-afters. because it’s an entirely novel state of
background noise and conversation The old model, the TV model, is to This has another significant advan- affairs. For most of human history, in-
when they wanted to focus: “The only grab your attention and hold it; the tage over the traditional model. The formation has been hard to come by,
stimulus so far found that will break new model is just to grab your atten- broadcasters of the past had to com- and anyone who grew up before the
through,” the researchers wrote, “is the tion, and if you feel disappointed or pete for a finite amount of attention: rise of the Internet remembers the ef-
subject’s own name.” Platforms that tricked it doesn’t matter, because in there were only so many people avail- fort of tracking down a fact, or of get-
notify users each time they are “men- five seconds another video or post will able (that is, not at work, not in tran- ting a vital message to a friend if they
tioned” work on this principle; the grab your attention again, and again, sit, not out to dinner with friends, not didn’t happen to be near their home
most reliable way to draw someone in, and again. Hayes calls this the “slot taking a shower) at any given time to phone. In this setting it made sense to
even if the content on offer doesn’t machine model.” Slot machines work tune in. Getting more eyeballs meant hang on to every shred of information
particularly appeal to them, is by cre- by transfixing the player “for just a working to draw in a larger share of available, just in case: reference books,
ating the impression that other people little bit while we wait for the spin- those people, whether by luring view- yes, but also old newspaper clippings,
are talking about them. ning to stop, and then repeating that ers away from rival shows, or by tar- restaurant menus, business cards—
Some major differences between a same brief but intense process over geting wider demographics, or by the kind of information one might
TV show and a social media feed are and over.” What makes slots so addic- syndicating a show in more regions or now trust can be called up again later
that the former is highly produced by a tive, Hayes writes, drawing on Nata- countries. Social media breaks through online. And with little information at
team of professionals, is calibrated to sha Dow Schüll’s research in Addiction that limit by working itself into the hand, attention was the thing that was
be entertaining or engaging, and has by Design (2012), is “the unique atten- nooks and crannies of our lives—it can often surplus; Hayes recalls, for exam-
a strong incentive to retain the trust tional trance the machine’s gameplay be consumed in the briefest moment of ple, reading every word on the cereal
of its audience; a network show is a induces,” where the experience of a downtime; it can in fact be consumed box as a bored child over breakfast.
big investment that needs a reliable new stimulus every few seconds feels at work and in transit, during dinner The economist Herb Simon recog-
audience to sustain it. The content on more important than the actual out- with friends, and even (often, in fact) nized as early as 1971 how hard it would
social media doesn’t have to conform come of the bet. on the toilet. The smartphone can also be for most people to adapt to a new
to these rules. Some of it may be pro- The result is a world of distraction, command attention while the user is abundance of information: “Most of us
duced to professional standards, and with no need for the amusement that nominally already watching something are constitutionally unable to throw a
some of it is genuinely informative Postman thought so corrosive of the else; there’s no need for Instagram to bound volume into the wastebasket,”
(how-to videos, detailed product re- American attention span in the 1980s. feed you content so good that you’ll he noted in his lecture “Designing Or-
views) or at least novel (Hayes finds “The slot machine model,” Hayes switch off your TV and focus solely ganizations for an Information-Rich
himself entranced by videos of pro- explains, on your phone, when you can stream World.” Hayes sees this difficulty af-
fessional rug cleaners who show the the latest episode of Severance while fecting older generations with par-
viewer every stage of shampooing and allows the most powerful and scrolling “get ready with me” videos ticular severity, leaving them more
rinsing heavily soiled carpets). But profitable companies in the en- and faving a friend’s Stories. vulnerable to interruptions from their
In The Attention Merchants, Wu lik- smartphones: “Older folks’ phones all
ened these developments to another ring for every call—they are never on
kind of resource extraction. The smart- silent—and every app they have, as a
phone “appeared capable of harvesting rule, can send them notifications so
the attention that had been, as it were, that their phone is constantly going off
left on the table, rather in the way that like a fireworks display on the Fourth of
fracking would later recover vast re- July.” One might argue, conversely, that
serves of oil once considered wholly the way many younger people, born like
inaccessible.” Wu, a legal scholar who Hayes into the “teeth of the attention
has written extensively on antitrust, age,” cope is just as dysfunctional: turn-
tells this story through sketches of the ing off notifications and ignoring most
corporations that unlocked new seg- calls, at the risk of missing a message
ments of our attention. Hayes writes they might actually care about. In both
more often from the perspective of the cases, attention isn’t carefully directed:
user; the person whose mind is being it’s either open to all interruptions or
fracked feels, he remarks, “that our very locked against most of them.
interior life, the direction of our The crucial divide in the attention
thoughts, is being taken against our economy isn’t between old and young,
will.” Distraction has always been big in any case. It’s between those who
THE ROBERT B. SILVERS LECTURE business, but the immersive quality of understand that attention “is now the

TIMOTHY
digital media, in his account, makes it most important resource,” as Hayes
much more powerful and toxic. puts it, and those who don’t. The first
group is uniquely positioned to capi-
talize on the new rules of the attention

SNYDER W e may understand intuitively how game, and the way they have reshaped
unpleasant this siphoning of our everything from entertainment to po-
attention is, but we’ve failed to grasp litical debate, while the second is most
why it’s so consequential. Part of the susceptible to manipulation.
reason, Hayes argues, is that we over-
THE NEW PAGANISM: A FRAMEWORK estimate the value of information and
FOR UNDERSTANDING OUR POLITICS underestimate the value of attention.
The world’s largest tech firms, from
Microsoft to Google, process vast quan-
F or Hayes the primacy of atten-
tion over all else explains the
success of Trump and his ability to
tities of information and data; Hayes withstand almost any form of scan-
quotes a mathematician who in 2006 dal or outrage—indeed often to turn
Free Event | Tuesday, April 1 | 7 PM proposed that “data is the new oil.” it to his advantage. Traditional poli-
Hayes acknowledges that information ticians seek attention, but they do so
The New York Public Library “is vitally important,” but it’s also not as a first step in the process of gaining
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building scarce. In fact, the sheer amount of approval: make sure people know who
information available digitally is pro- you are, and then try to make them like
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street liferating so fast that it has become a you and want to vote for you. Trump
This event will also be livestreamed and recorded. burden to most people, beset by hun- defied this simple rule of campaign-
Presented in partnership with The New York Review of Books. on.nypl.org/nyrb dreds of unread e-mails, invites, and ing by skipping the later steps, Hayes
notifications—a problem that genera- argues. He has often drawn attention
tive AI is only exacerbating by flooding in ways that make him look reckless

12 The New York Review

 FROM THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF DEATH AND THE MAIDEN AND THE SUICIDE MUSEUM

ARIEL DORFMAN

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a love letter to classical music, of political revolution developing
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A historical mystery in which Mozart tries to unpack
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OTHER PRESS otherpress.com

March 27, 2025 13

or cruel or untrustworthy, and yet he immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were of his style of politics, or as Adam Ser-
has been elected president twice—and eating people’s pets. The story had no wer so memorably put it in The Atlan-
with a greater share of the popular basis in fact, and it put the city’s Hai- tic in 2018, for this constituency “the
vote in 2024 than in 2016. Hayes sug- tian community in a terrifying posi- cruelty is the point.”
gests two reasons this has worked so tion, as they became a target of hate, Add to those voters another, per-
consistently. One is that in the slot ma- with more than thirty bomb threats haps more decisive bloc: those who
chine model, all that matters is grab- against local schools, hospitals, and chose not to believe that Trump really
bing attention repeatedly; negative homes. (Even Ohio’s Republican gover- meant what he said, especially when
attention is less damaging when the nor, Mike DeWine, pointed out that the they didn’t like (or claimed they didn’t
next day (or the next hour) brings a claim was “a piece of garbage that was like) what they heard. As Trump rolled
new story, another wave of attention, simply not true.”) Yet only one month out the measures that he had promised
and another, and another. The news later, voters reported that they trusted fund managers like Bill Ackman “post- during his campaign, from tariffs to
cycle becomes a blur in which indi- Trump on immigration over Kamala ing compulsively.” It’s harder to say an executive order attempting to abol-
vidual incidents are hazy and only the Harris by a significant margin—49 what these figures have gained by tak- ish birthright citizenship, the press
unifying theme—wall-to-wall coverage percent compared with her 35 percent. ing up a megaphone, and Hayes doesn’t quoted shocked voters who thought he
of Trump—sticks out. Trump may be “the political figure go into detail. Through podcasts and had been bluffing. They hadn’t missed
Hayes’s other theory is that Trump who most fully exploited the new rules posting, yes, billionaires have personally these promises because their attention
has worked out a risky but highly re- of the attention age,” but Hayes argues fueled controversies—as in the inves- spans were fried; they heard what he
warding way to turn negative attention that he is part of a larger shift among tor David O. Sacks’s campaign to re- said and decided not to take it at face
to his benefit. Trump sensed, Hayes the rich and powerful. Musk “had call the San Francisco district attorney value, partly because of Trump’s un-
believes, that “if he drew attention to riches past all imagination,” Hayes Chesa Boudin, or Ackman’s calls for the usual ability, honed by years of playing
certain topics, even if he did it in an notes, but when he purchased Twit- then Harvard president Claudine Gay a boss on TV , to make people think he’s
alienating way, the benefits of raising ter for over $40 billion, “what Musk to resign—though it’s not clear that only acting tough when it suits them
the salience of issues where he and the did want . . .was attention.” He became Hayes’s new rules for the attention age to believe that, and partly because a
Republican Party held a polling advan- more influential as the owner of the significantly shaped their actions. Sacks credulous political press often down-
tage would outweigh the costs.” One platform even as he “boosted vile has been a polemicist since the 1990s, played the more extreme elements of
example is Trump’s rhetoric on immi- and false conspiracy theories about when he coauthored a broadside against his political project. Shortly after The
gration in the 2016 campaign, when he a savage attack on the husband of the diversity with Peter Thiel shortly after New York Times reported on the de-
“accused the Mexican government of Speaker of the House” and “mocked Sacks graduated from Stanford, a hot- tails of Project 2025 this fall, Politico
‘sending’ rapists” across the border the notion that a mass shooter with bed of old-fashioned culture war fer- assured readers that conservatives
and vowed to build a wall and make literal swastika tattoos could possibly ment. Ackman, too, has long engaged in linked to the project were on a list of
Mexico pay for it. Sixty-six percent of be a white supremacist.” His recent provocative campaigns—notably with people “banned” from staffing the new
Americans disapproved of the border efforts to dismantle the federal gov- his attempt to expose Herbalife as a administration. By the third week of
wall idea, but these antics consistently ernment double as an extraordinary pyramid scheme by shorting its stock January, Russell Vought, a prominent
directed public attention toward the case of attention seeking: the point (the subject of the flattering 2016 doc- contributor to Project 2025, was con-
issue of immigration, on which, “as a may be to slash agencies like USAID , umentary Betting on Zero). firmed as Trump’s director of the Of-
general matter, Republicans had an but it’s also to send grandiose tweets fice of Management and Budget.
advantage over Democrats.” like “USAID is a criminal organization. Distraction and misdirection are only
If Hayes had drafted his book after
the 2024 election, he might have noted
the same dynamic playing out when
Time for it to die.”
Hayes sees the “same thirsty, grasp-
ing desire for attention” among Musk’s
I t’s tempting to wonder just how con-
vincing Hayes’s arguments about
political debate in the attention age
part of the dysfunction, though they are
particularly hard to address. Sugges-
tions for reclaiming our attention range
Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, peers, from “Silicon Valley billionaires would be if Trump had not won the from the artisanal to the wan. Hayes
boosted the sensational claim that starting their own podcasts” to hedge 2024 election—if any number of con- rehearses a familiar set of solutions:
tingencies, in other words, had tipped you could leave your phone at home
the balance in Democrats’ favor: if, say, the next time you go for a walk, or sub-
inflation had not proved so intractable scribe to the print edition of a newspa-
(egg prices!); if Joe Biden had pulled per. Sales of vinyl records have picked
“Summer camp for grownups!” out of the race earlier in the year, giv- up in recent years, he reasons, and “the
ing the party time to run a competitive vinyl of the news is the physical news-
~ CAIT L. 2024 PARTICIPANT primary; if Harris had distanced her- paper”; reading accurate reporting on
self from the most unpopular parts of nonclicky subjects could be the new
Biden’s record. In that case, it might shopping at farmers’ markets. Failing
have appeared that Trump’s bids these, maybe the government should
ASSICS Seeking Truth for attention at all costs ultimately step in, he muses, legislating a cap on
CL proved self-defeating—as has been screen time. He wonders whether this
R
the case with a spate of candidates last proposal wouldn’t be considered
E

and Being
SUMM

running Trump-style campaigns in “an intolerable assault on our cherished

Human recent years. Hayes notes that “at- freedoms,” not to mention an inconve-

LIFELONG LEARNING in a New tention hounds, from Blake Masters nience to anyone who needed to answer
to Kari Lake to Doug Mastriano to an urgent e-mail after they’d used up
Technological Herschel Walker . . . ended up on the all their hours. But then he justifies
E
EG

ST L
. JO
HN’S C
OL Age wrong side of the Trump attention/ it somewhat confusingly by pointing
persuasion trade.” They made outra- out that these same arguments about
geous claims, ran alienating ads, and protecting freedom were used to strike
TIMELY AND TIMELESS WEEKLONG IN-DEPTH SEMINARS lost winnable races to more low-key down “a whole host of progressive reg-
Democratic opponents. ulations” until the New Deal era.
Socratic style Online Hayes may also be taking too sim- Like any self-help guidelines, some
discussions June 30 –July 4 ple a view of Trump’s appeal when of these actions might alleviate the
Choose from over he argues that the fact that Trump worst feelings of screen-induced alien-
St. John’s College got talked about was more important ation, for some of us. But if our phones
30 courses.
Santa Fe, New Mexico than what he talked about, however are also where many of today’s most
July 7–11 | July 14–18 | July 21–25 preposterous or offensive. Ubiquity intense and intensely disordered po-
has its advantages, but Trump did not litical contests are playing out, then
“The learning
need smartphones or social media to to disconnect is to cede the field. The
together by achieve it: he has had enormous name project of repairing our frazzled hab-
discussion is recognition for decades as a fixture its of mind shouldn’t be only soothing
extraordinary. of the tabloid press and a television or restorative or wholesome—at least
personality. And while it’s been hard not if we want a chance to wrest the
Not debating.
for many voters to keep up with the direction of debate toward honest and
Not arguing… sheer number of Trump scandals and substantive argument. What’s clear
listening and their accompanying fact checks over from Hayes’s own complaints is that
thinking.” the last ten years, it would be too the most important power over one’s
easy to conclude, as Hayes does, that attention is the ability to wield it. To
~HARRIS K. people did not take in the substance combat the haze of interruption and

.
2024 PARTICIPANT sjc.edu/summer-programs of his speeches. In the eyes of many misdirection requires a public that is
Americans, Trump’s outlandish claims more engaged, in control, and confron-
about criminal migrants did not reflect tational. It may be as well, then, not
poorly on him; they liked the harshness to log off just yet.

14 The New York Review

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March 27, 2025 15

 Build, Britannia!
Martin Filler

Ramsgate Municipal Airport, designed by David Pleydell-Bouverie, Kent, United Kingdom, 1937

Interwar: provocative, entertaining, and above named for an establishment Modernist I think, made both staff and pa-
British Architecture, 1919–39 all independent-minded, he was un- architect who cozied up to the royal tients happier—as good architec-
by Gavin Stamp, with a foreword afraid of flouting received opinion, es- family and was known as “Cash-in” ture should.
by Rosemary Hill. pecially the certitude that orthodox to his detractors—he chose works by
London: Profile, 570 pp., $55.00 Modernism was the defining, not to Richard Rogers’s techno-modernist

In 1944 the British architecture and

design writer John Gloag declared,
say inevitable, architectural expression
of the twentieth century. Instead he
insisted on examining the entirety of
firm a record four times. But Stamp
was an evenhanded castigator, and he
spared neither Pritzker Prize laureates
S tandard histories of early-twentieth-
century British architecture have
relied on the same small group of High
without much fear of contradiction, architectural production in any given nor cultish outsiders. For example, his Modernist touchstones. These greatest
that “the modern movement does not time and place, combining a masterful 1991 Casson winner was one of my fa- hits include Berthold Lubetkin’s Lon-
yet speak English.” Paradoxically, the command of the subject matter with vorite London buildings—Robert Ven- don Zoo Penguin Pool of 1934, an inge-
revolutionary design ethos that flour- moral values that transcended ideol- turi and Denise Scott Brown’s witty, nious self-supporting concrete double
ished on the European continent be- ogy. Among Stamp’s most admirable commodious, and contextual Sains- helix no longer used because it’s harm-
tween the two world wars had yet to traits was that despite his fogeyish at- bury Wing at the National Gallery, ful to the birds’ webbed feet; his High-
make much impact in the country tire and elite schooling—at London’s which he dismissed as an “elaborate point I apartment block of 1935 in the
where the Industrial Revolution began Dulwich College, followed by Gonville and expensive camp joke.” Two years city’s Highgate section, the finest resi-
and the Crystal Palace affirmed mod- and Caius College, Cambridge, where later he selected the ultrareactionary dential tower of the era; Maxwell Fry’s
ern architectural prefabrication. That he received a doctorate—he proudly revivalist Quinlan Terry’s thrustingly Sun House of 1935 in London’s Hamp-
odd disparity was apparent three years stressed his middle-class origins and bogus Maitland Robinson Library at stead, a dim reflection of the heroic Le
later in a survey titled Recent English the benefits he received from the post- Downing College, Cambridge, which he Corbusier villas it mimics; and Erich
Architecture, 1920–1940 and illustrated war welfare state’s more equitable ed- derided as “a gauche and vulgar essay Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff’s
for the most part with moderately ucation policies and funding. in misunderstood Greek Classicism.” De La Warr Pavilion of 1935 in Bexhill-
modernistic buildings interspersed Staunchly nondoctrinaire, he could Stamp may not have converted many on-Sea, a streamlined public pleasure
with a few advanced schemes. Gavin be quite unpredictable. For nearly forty confirmed modernists to his point of dome. But the constant citation of these
Stamp, the fiercely principled British years he wrote the Nooks and Corners view, but he was more concerned with gleaming white anomalies and their ilk
architectural historian, critic, educa- architecture column in the satirical how architecture is actually lived in gives a skewed impression of the gen-
tor, and preservation activist who died fortnightly Private Eye, which orig- than with how it looks. He also had eral tenor of British building activity
in 2017 at age sixty-nine, reconsidered inated with John Betjeman, another no qualms about reversing himself in the twenty years before the Blitz. Al-
many of the examples included in that passionate preservationist. Stamp when he felt his assessments had been though they are all in Interwar, it also
book and came to a much different set signed those articles with the pseud- wrong. Writing in the humor maga- contains a far broader range of designs,
of conclusions in Interwar: British Ar- onym Piloti, a sly choice given his dis- zine The Oldie three months before some of which would have been thought
DE LL & WAIN WR IG HT/ RI BA C OLL EC TIONS

chitecture, 1919–39. dain for Le Corbusier, who popularized his death from prostate cancer, he beneath contempt by midcentury archi-
Seamlessly edited by his widow, the the slender piloti column. Although he described the Guy’s Hospital Cancer tectural historians.
historian Rosemary Hill (author of a championed positions unpopular in Centre in London, where he was un- To some extent, Britain’s standing in
brilliant biography of the ardent Vic- some quarters, he gained a wide read- dergoing chemotherapy, as the international architectural hierar-
torian Gothicist A.W. N. Pugin), who ership that savored his impertinent chy can be gauged by its buildings at
worked from his unfinished manu- drollery, respected his flair for argu- a sympathetic building which, to the world’s fairs and specialized theme
script and retained his distinctive ment, and admired his basic decency. my surprise, was designed by Rog- expositions that proliferated during
voice, Interwar seals Stamp’s rep- I never met him but sorely wish I had. ers Stirk Harbour & Partners; that the twentieth century. Nations vied
utation as an eloquent exponent of During the thirty-five years when is, by the firm of Milord [Richard] to put their best architectural foot
humane design, which he saw as a Private Eye bestowed Stamp’s annual Rogers of Riverside about whom forward with pavilions by their most
necessary prerequisite for a civil so- Sir Hugh Casson Award on the worst I have long been very rude. But it talented designers. The 1939 New York
ciety. Unfailingly erudite, articulate, new British building—a spoof honor is a building that works, and has, World’s Fair included schemes by such

16 The New York Review

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important Modernists as Alvar Aalto does his best to make sense of a mad telephone booths. Doubters insisted
and Aino Marsio-Aalto (Finland), Sven farrago that that she must have been helped by her
Markelius (Sweden), Oscar Niemeyer male employer at a London architec-
and Lúcio Costa (Brazil), and Henry combined an attenuated Swedish tural firm, though as Stamp writes, he
van de Velde (Belgium). Britain’s entry Baroque with the plain walling of “disclaimed ‘any share whatever in the
was a Stripped Classical mediocrity by Spanish Colonial; some arches successful design.’”
the firm of Stanley Hall, Easton and were elliptical, some were poly-
Robertson. Yet not even a big name gonal, while part of the interior
could guarantee success. The pavil-
ion created for the 1930 Antwerp ex-
position by Britain’s reigning master
of the pavilion was decorated like
a Gothic church. . . . The French
were, on the whole, astonished:
H appily, Stamp shared my enthu-
siasm for an idiosyncratic build-
ing by a little-remembered Modernist,
builder of the period, Edwin Lutyens, “Why the motley-coloured plaster, David Pleydell-Bouverie, a precocious
was among his rare duds: a sprawling the glass steeple with the galleon aristocrat who as a twenty-one-year-
Mannerist assemblage surmounted by perched on it like a weathercock? old in 1932 established a practice with
a huge Mughal dome modeled after Is this all old Albion can bring us? the much older Wells Coates, best
the one on his Viceroy’s House in New A fantasy created in an opium den known for his white-painted concrete
Delhi, then nearing completion. Co- by a retired colonel?” Isokon apartment block of 1929–1934
lonialism never looked more out of in Hampstead (yet another staple of
place, nor a Lutyens composition so Although Interwar features the work standard histories). Together they de-
ill-proportioned. of many competent if unexciting prac- signed the Sunspan series of compact
For design professionals, the most titioners I’d never heard of, I was dis- tween four equidistant, outwardly Streamline Moderne houses meant
consequential fair of the century was appointed not to find a discussion of curved, and elongated bays, Mendel- for mass production, but fewer than
the Exposition Internationale des the worthy German émigré architect sohn’s signature motif. Horizontal twenty were built. They split after four
Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Mod- Ernst Freud, who fled to London the strip windows set off by stone string years, when Pleydell-Bouverie created
ernes, held in Paris in 1925 and best year Hitler rose to power. Now over- courses impart a dynamic, streamlined a minor masterpiece, Ramsgate Aero-
remembered for giving its name to shadowed as the son of Sigmund and quality redolent of the 1930s. (Fittingly drome of 1936–1937 in Kent. This re-
the Art Deco style. At the very fore- father of Lucian, he is mentioned enough, the apartment complex was gional airport terminal was about the
front of innovation there were Le Cor- but once in passing and is Oedipally developed as rental housing for Jews size of a large passenger aircraft of
busier’s modular Pavillon de l’Esprit indexed under “Freud, Sigmund.” It who had recently arrived from Nazi the period and resembled one with its
Nouveau (though not an official part of would have added to Stamp’s insis- Germany. However, Ernst Freud’s symmetrical, outstretched, tapering
the show, it was erected by its media- tence that Modernism can be warm own family lived in a Georgian ter- wings with concrete roofs. These ex-
savvy architect just outside the ex- and inviting had he included, for in- race house he lightly remodeled in the tended above transparent glass walls
hibition’s perimeter) and Konstantin stance, Freud’s Belvedere Court of St. John’s Wood section of the city.) that seemed to vanish, and a cockpit-
Melnikov’s USSR Pavilion, a thrillingly 1937–1938 in the North London bor- Belvedere Court, which comprises like control room with a curving wind-
angular Russian Constructivist gem ough of Barnet. This handsome four- fifty-six flats, has aged quite grace- shield was elevated at the center. A
that one philistine English critic lik- story redbrick apartment complex fully, unlike so much other early Mod- textbook example of architecture par-
ened to “an aeroplane falling through a owes a large debt to the underappre- ernist architecture in damp northern lante—a structure that “speaks” of
garage.” ciated German master Erich Mendel- regions where the International Style’s its function directly—it anticipated
Easton and Robertson’s bizarre Brit- sohn (who took refuge in the UK before preferred concrete (or the stucco that Eero Saarinen’s birdlike TWA terminal
ish Pavilion at the 1925 Paris expo- moving to British Palestine and ulti- imitates it) is subject to climatic dam- at JFK Airport by more than two de-
sition suggests the confusion among mately the US). age. And although the curving portions cades. Stamp reports that “this most
the country’s leading architects about The building’s principal elevation of its long elevations are flat-roofed in stylish and elegant building disap-
what new direction to follow. Stamp features three horizontal blocks be- approved Modernist fashion, the top peared at the end of the 1960s,” but
story of each straight-walled segment a photograph of it taken from under
between them has very slightly angled the wing of a parked airliner “survives
mansard roofing, a concession to local as one of the most telling and arrest-
PULITZER PRIZE convention that does not seriously un- ing images of British architecture
NOMINEE 2024 dermine this overlooked landmark. of the time.” (Alas, it is not included
The relative paucity of female archi- in the otherwise well-illustrated
tects in Interwar reflects the dearth volume.)
of them during that period. However, Late in his life I got to know David
Winner of: Stamp is careful to give credit for Bouverie (which he went by after he
INTERNATIONAL the design of Kensal House of 1933– immigrated to the US in 1937 and re-
IMPACT BOOK AWARD 1936—a midrise International Style invented himself as a Sonoma Valley
NORTH AMERICAN apartment block with sixty-eight flats landowner, conservationist, and social-
BOOK AWARD for working-class families in London’s ite). He told me that when he won the
INTERNATIONAL
Ladbroke Grove—to both Maxwell Fry Ramsgate commission he had no idea
FIREBIRD AWARD and the social housing expert Eliza- how to proceed, so he cold-called the
beth Denby. And he devotes several Berlin office of the architect Emil Fah-
NY BIG BOOK AWARD
pages to the most important commis- renkamp, renowned for his pioneering
sion given to a woman in Britain be- use of concrete, to ask his advice. Fah-
A richly woven tapestry of the Impressionists, tween the two world wars, Elisabeth renkamp warned him to be careful about
Vincent van Gogh and Sigmund Freud. Scott’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre using metal reinforcing bars, which he
of 1928–1932 in Stratford-upon-Avon. worried might interfere with radio sig-
AMAZON REVIEWS U.S. This flat-roofed redbrick assem- nals, a conversation that indicates just
“A stunning historical novel set in Paris during the infancy of neurology, psychology, and the blage (which was substantially remod- how small and cooperative the interna-
difficult birth of Impressionism. Stunning in the level of detail and the literary style . . .” eled and expanded by Rab Bennetts tional confraternity of Modernists still
“The Dream Collector is a beautifully written and impressively researched literary novel . . . Set in from 2007 to 2010) is romantically was during the interwar years.
Paris in 1886, the author has created a marvellous tapestry of the Impressionist artists, writers sited on the tree-shaded banks of the I also share Stamp’s fondness for
and leading figures in science and medicine.” River Avon in Shakespeare’s home- the designs of another insufficiently
“. . . an absolute treasure! . . . I was floored by the beautiful detail to the point of going to the web to town. It exudes a mildly Art Deco air esteemed twentieth-century archi-
view every painting mentioned so I could immerse myself in the detail. This is truly a must-read!” (though less so since Bennetts gut- tect, the Dutch master builder Willem
“I was spellbound and couldn’t put it down. What a page turner—such amazing research and ted Scott’s auditorium in favor of a Marinus Dudok, whose influence was
thought went into writing this book. My favorite part was the visit to Monet and Renoir at quasi-Elizabethan update) but is free strongly felt in interwar Britain. Along
Giverny.” of the style’s jazzy ornamental effects with Erich Mendelsohn, Dudok chose
“Not only does Meek expertly analyze their techniques but dares to explore their dreams. . . . a and ranks among the better British a congenial third way that avoided pu-
truly marvelous creation.” buildings of its time. Scott won the nitive reductivism on one extreme and
AMAZON REVIEWS U.K. blind competition for this prestigious derivative historicism on the other.
“For lovers of art and psychology, this is an amazing book that combines both worlds so job from among seventy-one other en- Like Mendelsohn, his favorite mate-
effortlessly and allows us to see the connection between mental illness and creativity.” trants when she was just twenty-nine. rial was red brick, which he used in
“I found this book an absolute joy and pleasure to read. The amount of research that the author But as Stamp reports, incredulous sex- a simpler manner than members of
must have done to write this book is astounding.” ists could not believe that a woman the Amsterdam School, whose early-
“The central characters were beautifully written… Having Dr. Freud as a key character gave the had done it, despite her being a rel- twentieth-century schemes for social
story a great book.” ative of the Victorian master builder housing and public buildings in and
George Gilbert Scott and his grand- around the Dutch metropolis had a
son Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of the pronounced Expressionist inflection.
Available at book retailers and Amazon ronmeekauthor.com
Cambridge University Library of 1931– During his busy quarter-century as
1934 as well as Britain’s famous red municipal architect for the midsize

18 The New York Review

 Connecting Ideas for a Better World

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March 27, 2025 19

city of Hilversum, about halfway be- stead were the pared-down Baroque ment, Lancaster offered hilarious yet Christopher Wren,” which enjoyed a
tween Amsterdam and Utrecht, Dudok and Gustavian Classical forms then perceptive visual and verbal commen- notable resurgence between 1923, the
developed a personal but aesthetically popular among middle-of-the-road tary on the immense changes that bicentennial of his death, and 1932,
cohesive style that combined tradi- Swedish architects who dispensed were transforming architecture and the tercentenary of his birth. A con-
tional massing (sometimes featuring with fussy ornamentation but retained urbanism. temporary British architect and critic,
enormous pitched roofs) with minimal familiar outlines thought to be more He was equally clever at coining Harry Goodhart-Rendel, wryly noted
decorative detailing. Most conspicuous suitable and less threatening than the names for the plethora of bastard- that while the extravagantly overrated
of Dudok’s works was his Hilversum mechanical imagery so typical of High ized substyles that proliferated during Wren was considered a great archi-
Town Hall of 1924–1931, a striking de- Modernism. the interwar British building boom. tect by “practically all Englishmen and
parture from the surroundings with its Britain’s official acceptance of this Among those designations was Pseu- practically no foreigners,” he occupied
yellow brick cladding, flat rooflines, imported style was signified by the dish, a Mediterranean-cum-Cape Dutch a high place in the hearts of his coun-
bold Cubist geometries, and a sleek Royal Institute of British Architects’ mishmash favored by nouveau riche trymen because “his buildings have
fifteen-story-high clock tower that Stripped Classical headquarters of sorts like the music hall singer Gra- that inestimable quality of lovable-
serves as the symbolic cynosure of 1932–1934 in London by G. Grey Wor- cie Fields, whose twee 1934 house in ness which . . .we can recognize but not
an otherwise low-rise community on num. Its Portland stone façade is Hampstead by C. H. Lay was a prime define.” However, apart from spirited
flat terrain, much as a church steeple centered by a three-story-high entry specimen. American tendencies were riffs on the old master’s designs that
would have done in the Netherlands portal flanked by stylized figurative detectable in midrise office buildings the pun-prone Lutyens termed his
during the age of faith. “ Wrenaissance,” this was one of the
Hilversum’s secular civic centerpiece least interesting aspects of interwar
served as inspiration for several of the British architecture.
new town halls erected soon there-
after in Britain, including municipal
buildings for the London boroughs of
Hornsey (1935) and Greenwich (1939),
although they lack the volumetric com-
A great irony of World War I’s after-
math was that the main beneficia-
ries of the new architecture were not
plexity of the Dutch prototype. There the citizens of victorious Britain but
was even commercial trickle-down, as rather those of the vanquished Central
seen in faint variations on Dudok’s Powers, thanks to the unprecedented
tower at the Odeon Cinema on Lon- workers’ housing reform programs in-
don’s Leicester Square (1937) and the stituted by social democratic govern-
Granada Cinema in the city’s Woolwich ments in Germany and Austria. Britain
section (1937). would not achieve anything remotely
Another major template for British similar—and never as good architec-
seats of local government was Rag- turally—until the election of its first
nar Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall of Labour government in 1945. Writing
1911–1923, which figured prominently after a trip to Germany in 1930, the
in early accounts of twentieth-century British designer Oliver P. Bernard was
architecture but is now little remem- struck by the contrast:
bered outside Sweden. (Glimpses of
it can be caught in news coverage Country houses for gentlemen,
of the Nobel Prize ceremonies held and more palatial premises for
there each year.) This vast and impos- bankers, are still an architectural
ing structure, which brings to mind obsession in little Britain, where
a fairy-tale fortress, is grander than hundreds of thousands of families
some national capitols. It was also a lack adequate space, light, and air
European rarity during and after the to live in. Those who explore the
devastation of World War I as an ambi- domestic development of Berlin,
tious showpiece scheme made possible Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, and even
by Sweden’s neutrality and resultant Vienna, may discover that the
prosperity. Stamp rated Östberg’s in- cities of defeated Empires have
ventive reinterpretation of medieval triumphed by their examples of
forms, which is enriched by countless progress in living. Art, design, and
handcrafted details, as “arguably the craft, and their professional dis-
finest Arts and Crafts building in the tinctions, are worthless until every
world, a realization of the dreams of man, woman, and child is allotted
William Morris” in its comprehensive an adequate minimum of living
integration of architectural and dec- accommodation.
orative elements.
One can’t disagree with that assess- The closest Britain came to satis-
ment; more questionable is the high fying the demand for new housing
opinion held by both Stamp and the Gavin Stamp, London, 1980; photograph by Derry Moore between the world wars was the sub-
doyen of interwar British architec- urbanization of the English country-
tural historians, Nikolaus Pevsner, sculptures atop a pair of freestanding like Sir John Burnet, Tait and Lorne’s side, but that was only within reach
about one adaptation of the Stock- columns, a suave scheme that would eleven-story Adelaide House of 1925 of the middle, not the working, class.
holm Town Hall formula: C. H. James have been right at home in Stockholm. in the City of London, which utilized Although the turn-of-the-century Gar-
and S. Rowland Pierce’s Norwich It drew so clearly on recent Swedish emphatic vertical striping to imitate den City Movement advocated the
City Hall of 1936–1938. Both redbrick designs—including Gunnar Asplund’s New York skyscrapers. (In 1924 the rational development of rural land
buildings have a lantern-topped four- much-admired Stockholm Public Li- London County Council imposed an to minimize suburban sprawl, unan-
square clock tower at one end of an brary of 1922–1928, a free reinterpre- eighty-foot maximum height on build- ticipated demographic shifts caused
elongated rectangular façade, but the tation of Neoclassicism that appeared ings within its jurisdiction, a restric- by the Great War’s horrendous death
anemic Neoclassicism and infelicitous modern in its simplicity—that one tion that was relaxed only after World toll affected hereditary land owner-
proportions of the etiolated Norwich British architect likened it to “a gen- War II.) Even Hollywood movies had an ship along with so much else. Stamp
clone hardly merit Pevsner’s predic- tleman dressed in clothes that were influence on modes such as Bankers explains:
tion, which Stamp seconded, that “in not bought in England” (perish the Georgian, which, as Lancaster wrote,
spite of its frankly admitted depen- thought). “preserves something of the air of a The old aristocracy withdrew from
dence on Sweden, the Norwich City In explaining how such foreign Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of many country seats partly because
Hall is likely to go down in history as trends were received in Britain, the School for Scandal.” of the dreadful attrition of male
the foremost English public building Stamp cites the British architec- But at least some of those improba- heirs during the war but mostly
of between the wars.” tural gadfly Osbert Lancaster, whose ble hybrids possessed a certain vital- because of high taxation and death
inimitable satirical drawings were ity, unlike much of what is dutifully duties. Many peers seem to have
published in a series of popular mid- included in Interwar, with page after given up their country houses—

I nterwar reminds us what a strong

effect contemporary Swedish ar-
chitecture had on concurrent develop-
century books, including Pillar to
Post, or The Pocket-Lamp of Architec-
ture (1938). Stamp, who never shrank
page of competent but boring Classical
buildings of the kind that might catch
your eye from a London black cab but
and their grand town houses—
without much regret, exchanging
them for a modern flat.
DE RRY MOORE

ments in Britain, though not through from bestowing superlatives, reck- then be immediately forgotten. Many
the austere Functionalism that was oned it “one of the most influential of those routine regurgitations can The sudden plentitude of hitherto
the Scandinavian version of the In- books on architecture ever published.” be attributed to what Stamp calls unavailable greenfield building sites
ternational Style. What took hold in- Though that’s rather an overstate- “the continuing national cult of Sir on the market resulted in a rush of

20 The New York Review

 America in the Arctic The Creative Self
Foreign Policy and Competition Beyond Individualism
The Politics of Sorrow Unstable Ground
in the Melting North MARI RUTI The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives
Unity and Allegiance
MARY THOMPSON-JONES AND GAIL M. NEWMAN of Gold in South Africa
Across Tibetan Exile
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TSERING WANGMO DHOMPA
strengthened by her years of personal—at once a dialogue and a
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and the gold mining at its core
The Politics of Sorrow delves into America in the Arctic especially its subject: the human conditions
unlike any you have encountered.
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Enriched by two and a half decades
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national identity amid the challenges
—Rebecca Pincus, director of the Traveling Through Time many registers: poetical and lyrical,
of displacement, Dhompa chronicles
Polar Institute at the Wilson Center geological, legal, philosophical,
Tibetans’ arduous pursuit of building
technical, sociological, and much
a nation in exile and invites readers
more. The result is sumptuously
to witness a community’s journey to
layered, each page shimmering
discover its voice.”
with insight and a delight to read.”
—Tsering Shakya, author of
—Isabel Hofmeyr, author of
The Dragon in the Land of Snows
Dockside Reading
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

In Our Interest The Yoga of Power

How Democracies Can Make Yoga as Political Thought
Immigration Popular Association and Practice in India
for Asian
ALEXANDER KUSTOV Studies
SUNILA S. KALÉ AND
“[A] highly rigorous and insightful CHRISTIAN LEE NOVETZKE
analysis of general public attitudes “This brilliant work reveals a new
toward immigration in affluent The War for Chinese Building the Worlds way of understanding yoga that
democracies ... Kustov’s makes sense of a hugely important
cross-national approach and his
Talent in America That Kill Us
but hitherto overlooked aspect of
use of experimental data are The Politics of Technology and Disease, Death, and Inequality in its history. It is essential reading for
particularly illuminating.” Knowledge in Sino-U.S. Relations American History students and scholars of yoga.”
—Wayne A. Cornelius, DAVID ZWEIG DAVID ROSNER AND —Jim Mallinson, coauthor of
coeditor of Controlling Immigration: GERALD MARKOWITZ Roots of Yoga
A Global Perspective “[The book] addresses the critical
and timely topic of the intensifying “This hard-hitting exposé will
cross-border mobility of Chinese change how readers think about
talent, which carries significant the nature of disease.”
implications for the evolving global —Publishers Weekly
landscape of science and education.”
—China Quarterly

March 27, 2025 21

consumer-oriented construction. To perfect building must be the fac- Thus an overarching theme of Inter- level is the bronze figure of a dead sol-
meet the pent-up demand, contrac- tory, because that is built to house war is how the catastrophic war ex- dier, his head obscured by a tarpaulin
tors went into overdrive—Britain’s machines, not men.” erted a deadening effect on British from which his hands and feet discon-
interwar population grew by 10 per- society and hence its architecture, certingly protrude, and on which his
cent, but new housing units increased a caesura that marked the true be- now useless flat-brimmed Brodie hel-
by 30 percent. Often devised without
architects, the predominant styles of
these speculative developments played
T he opening chapter of Interwar is
devoted to an all-consuming archi-
tectural preoccupation of the British
ginning of the country’s seemingly
irreversible decline. Often that slip-
page has been attributed to economic
met rests. Stamp writes:

There is no idealisation here; just

to the British self-image, as Lancaster public at the time: the memorialization factors—the dissolution of Britain’s truthful, brilliantly modeled re-
noted with Stockbrokers Tudor, typi- of the recent war dead. Virtually every colonial empire and loss of captive alism about the brutal nature of
fied by sham half-timbering, and By- family had at least one member killed in markets, crushing debt incurred conflict. . . . This feature met with
pass Variegated, which drew on several the conflict, sometimes several, and al- during World War II, excessive cold opposition, but Jagger believed
Ye Olde Englysshe clichés for the semi- though other belligerent countries also war defense spending after it ceased that a memorial should tell the
detached middle-class bungalows that sustained appalling casualties and duly to be a world power, and the gradual public about the horror and ter-
characterized outer London’s so-called honored them, David Cannadine has demise of its heavy industries, has- ror of war, and he paid for this part
Metroland (areas served by the Metro- pointed out that “interwar Britain was tened by overreaching trade unions of the work himself.
politan Railway), of which Stamp was a probably more obsessed with death than and then globalization. These were
self-proclaimed product. Yet his abid- any other period of modern history.” all undeniable factors, but Stamp In a fiery eulogy delivered at Stamp’s
ing fondness for the comforting tradi- This, Stamp explains, was because also understood the psychic toll of church funeral (he was a devout An-
tionalism of those snug little dwellings for the first time in British history the the carnage: “During the decade after glican), the writer Jonathan Meades
was more than nostalgia for the scenes brunt of battle was borne not by the the Armistice, British architecture averred that “Gavin was, among much
of his childhood: career military but by hastily trained was often conservative and unin- else, a political writer—a political
civilians: spired, reflecting a society which was writer in disguise, but a supremely
It is in the ordinary suburban damaged and exhausted by four years political writer.” This is self-evident
house, built in its millions, that In the Great War, parliamentary of war.” to anyone who has read his master-
the power of the Tudor architec- governments, as well as autocra- Awareness of that national post- work, The Memorial to the Missing of
tural ideal was strongest—hence cies, committed their populations traumatic stress disorder suffuses the Somme (2006), the definitive study
the unceasing abuse of it by the to the struggle with a ruthlessness Interwar from the outset. One of its of Lutyens’s gut-wrenching funerary
architectural profession. . . . The inconceivable in earlier centuries. first photographic images shows the monument of 1928–1932 in Thiepval,
spec-built suburban house, with The British Expeditionary Force architect Lionel Pearson’s controver- France. That towering redbrick-and-
its neo-Tudor details, its false of 1914 consisted of professional sial Royal Artillery War Memorial of limestone structure commemorates
half-timbering, tile-hung gables, soldiers, but those who went over 1925 on London’s Hyde Park Corner. the Great War’s bloodiest battle—
bay-windows and rough-cast walls, the top at the Somme in 1916 were This full-size rendering in Portland there were more than a million killed
represented an image of home, of largely volunteers, while by 1918 stone of a 9.2-inch howitzer is raised and wounded on both sides—and fully
freedom and domesticity, for mil- Douglas Haig was command- atop a matching plinth, on three sides justifies Stamp’s estimation of it as
lions of families able and willing ing a huge army of conscripted of which stand larger-than-life-size
to afford a down payment and the soldiers. The patriotic character bronze statues of artillerymen by the the greatest British work of ar-
mortgage installments. of the war and the unprecedented sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger. On chitecture of the interwar years,
scale of casualties sustained by the far rear end of the monument, un- arguably of the whole century: an
This validation of the populist ver- ordinary citizens demanded that seen as one first confronts the com- intellectually distinguished cre-
nacular—akin to Venturi and Scott every individual sacrifice be position, comes an unexpected shock. ation by an architect of rare genius
Brown’s famous dictum that “Main commemorated. Lying supine on a slab at visitors’ eye that represents its time power-
Street is almost all right”—paralleled fully, and painfully.*
similar reassessments of post–World
War II American suburbanization, His Somme book stands among
which have addressed mass-produced the great antiwar texts of our time,
developer housing with the same seri- so ringing is its denunciation of the
ousness once reserved for high-style infamous battle’s officially sanctioned
architecture. In England this vari- slaughter. With mounting indignation
ance was made even sharper by the that reaches an outraged crescendo,
country’s deeply ingrained class con- he presents an irrefutable indict-
sciousness, which caused some to see Ocracoke ment of mechanized martial barba-
the suburban semis of the sort Stamp rism. After all, the “Missing” in the
grew up in—“on the Orpington bypass” memorial’s title does not refer to sol-
in Kent, he used to specify—as irre- On Ocracoke I sit in the sand & smoke, diers who somehow wandered away
deemably “non-U” (not upper class, in Sipping an okra Coke. Only in the South, on the battlefield and could never be
Nancy Mitford’s snobbish parlance). I say, missing my mouth. At least I don’t choke located. Rather, it euphemizes the
A visceral distrust of European 73,357 (among the more than 400,000
Modernism—emblematic of British On the flavor, cough syrup meets candied moth. British dead) whose remains were un-
xenophobia in general—is captured Stupefying as clustered houses on stilts, identifiable before the advent of DNA
in Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Decline Collapsing at water’s edge, sea-surge no sloth testing.
and Fall (1928), which revolves around As Stamp approached death, this
the destruction of an unrestored But time’s expedient. Whole villages melt inveterate campaigner directed that
sixteenth-century Hampshire country Into the sea from spit islands thin he be buried wearing a “ BUGGER
house called King’s Thursday, deemed As a beanpole’s waist. Wild ponies, svelte BREXIT ” lapel pin. This characteris-
“the finest piece of domestic Tudor in tic parting gesture signified his con-
England.” At its new owner’s behest, & savage, graze in dune grasses, whinny, yawn. viction that Britain could no more
this fictive landmark is torn down and Dwarf palmettos, yuccas, & palms dot the shore. cut itself off from Europe politically
replaced by a soulless International What will happen when there’s no sand to stand on? than its architecture could reject for-
Style house designed by Professor Otto eign influences, which began with the
Friedrich Silenus, a German Modern- This languor expands in the velvety air. Norman (if not the Roman) conquest,
ist architect transparently based on Gale-force winds, hurricanes, & erosion wreck accelerated during the age of Palla-
Walter Gropius, the chilly and officious These islands every season. They don’t have a prayer, dio, recurred when William and Mary
founder of the Bauhaus. Silenus com- brought Dutch styles with them from
plies with the patron’s vague request Though maybe I’m just a bore getting sunstroke. Holland, and ranged ever wider as the
for “something clean and square,” but Palms & palmettos quiver in the warm wind. British Empire expanded. Although
before it is completed, he delivers a I sit in the sand & smoke on Ocracoke. Gavin Stamp was a quintessential old-
cartoonish screed that echoes Waugh’s school Englishman, he harbored no
deep-seated antipathy to the new: —J.T. Townley illusions about Britain’s diminishing
place in world affairs and its concom-
“The problem of architecture as itant need to remain part of the Eu-

.
I see it,” he told a journalist who ropean Union, which made those last
had come to report on the prog- words of protest consistent with his
ress of his surprising creation of embracing but cautionary vision of
ferroconcrete and aluminium, “is the building art.
the problem of all art—the elimi-
nation of the human element from *See my “The Charms of Edwin Lutyens,”
the consideration of form. The only The New York Review, December 4, 2014.

22 The New York Review

 MAR 17 10/9C

WATCH TRAILER

March 27, 2025 23

 Cases Closed
Jeffrey Toobin

ernment hackers launched attacks on

the Clinton team’s e-mail accounts.
On June 3, 2016, Rob Goldstone, a
British publicist with ties to a Rus-
sian oligarch, e-mailed Donald Trump
Jr. with an offer of

some official documents and infor-

mation that would incriminate Hil-
lary [Clinton] and her dealings with
Russia and be very useful to your fa-
ther. . . . This is obviously very high
level and sensitive information but
is part of Russia and its govern-
ment’s support for Mr. Trump.

Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I

love it especially later in the summer.”
A few days later he and campaign of-
ficials met with a Russian lawyer, but
nothing seemed to come of it. In all,
Mueller failed to identify a “meeting of
the minds,” or collaborative actions, be-
tween Trump’s team and the Russians
and thus had no criminal conspiracy to
prosecute.
The more legally consequential part
of Mueller’s work examined Trump’s
efforts, once he became president, to
obstruct the investigation of his con-
nections to Russia. “It’s not the crime,
it’s the cover-up” is more than a Wash-
ington cliché; it has been true of most
Robert Mueller after delivering a statement at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., May 29, 2019 presidential scandals at least since
Watergate. Like other investigators of
presidential misconduct, Mueller sought
Interference: The Inside Story decades, that forbids the indictment of Clinton. Quoting the Mueller report, the to determine whether and how Trump
of Trump, Russia, and the a sitting president. But that policy also authors write, “The Russian government used the power of his office to stymie
Mueller Investigation states, as the authors of Interference interfered in our democracy in sweeping the investigation. This is the kind of
by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, write, that a sitting president “could and systematic fashion.” Working out investigation most threatened by the
and Andrew Goldstein, with be investigated during his presidency of a building in St. Petersburg, Russian decision in Trump v. United States.
a preface by Robert S. Mueller III. and could be indicted when he is no agents created fake campaign materials. Consider, for example, one important
Simon and Schuster, 259 pp., $28.99 longer president.” Accordingly, Muel- Largely using Facebook, they part of Mueller’s probe. On May 9, 2017,
ler and his team labored to determine Trump fired James Comey, the direc-
The scandal involving Russian attempts whether Trump committed crimes not planned and advertised rallies to tor of the FBI. As summarized in the
to help Donald Trump win the 2016 just during his first campaign but also support Trump at specific US loca- Mueller report:
presidential election never acquired a once he was in office. And it is on this tions, invited Americans to attend,
catchy nickname or defining detail, and subject—the investigation and conse- provided banners for Americans to The day after firing Comey, the
that may be one reason the story faded quences of presidential criminality in wave, and then handed off logistical President told Russian officials
so quickly from public consciousness. office—that Interference is most nota- responsibilities to real Americans. that he had “faced great pressure
The words “Watergate” and “Monica ble, because it may stand as the final because of Russia,” which had been
Lewinsky” immediately summon spe- chapter of a vanished era. Even more consequentially, Russian mil- “taken off” by Comey’s firing. The
cific facts and images, but the first scan- Trump has returned to the White itary intelligence operatives hacked into next day, the President acknowl-
dal of the first Trump presidency, to the House with still greater disdain for the e-mail accounts belonging to Clinton’s edged in a television interview that
extent it’s remembered today, is proba- norms and perhaps even the laws that advisers and then made the contents he was going to fire Comey regard-
bly best known for the man who led the limit the executive branch. But this public in order to embarrass Clinton and less of the Department of Justice’s
investigation of it. For a time, many of time, unlike in his first term, Trump bolster Trump. These e-mails, many of recommendation and that when he
Trump’s critics regarded Robert Muel- will enjoy the protections established which were laundered for distribution “decided to just do it,” he was think-
ler as a potential savior, but at least as by the Supreme Court’s decision last through WikiLeaks, generated an enor- ing that “this thing with Trump and
far as the president was concerned, the year in Trump v. United States.* Muel- mous amount of negative attention for Russia is a made-up story.”
prosecutor’s case fizzled and then, for ler conducted his investigation, and Clinton, especially in the final weeks of
the most part, disappeared. Interference was written, before the the campaign, even though in retrospect The question for Mueller, then, was
Three of the top prosecutors on Muel- Court rewrote the rules of presiden- their content was not especially sensa- whether Trump fired Comey to inter-
ler’s team, Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, tial accountability. Implicitly, and cer- tional or incriminating. fere with the Russia investigation and
and Andrew Goldstein, have written an tainly unknowingly, the authors raise Mueller’s principal investigative in- thus committed the crime of obstruc-
account of their work, and it comes with the question of how the Mueller in- terest was whether Trump or anyone tion of justice. Because of the Depart-
a brief preface by Mueller, so it’s fair vestigation—or any investigation of around him participated in the Rus- ment of Justice policy against indicting
to say that Interference stands as the presidential misconduct—would have sian efforts. There is no federal crime sitting presidents, Mueller did not have
ANDRE W HARRE R/ BLOOMBER G/ G ETT Y IMAG ES

authorized record of the investigation. unfolded if the Trump decision had called “collusion,” but that was how the the option of charging Trump. But he
It’s an earnest, serious chronicle and a been in effect. The answer is chilling. question was usually described at the did examine this and other possible
useful supplement to the 448-page re- time. If the Trump forces had assisted acts of obstruction in detail to see
port that Mueller delivered to Attorney the Russians, they might have joined an whether Trump had committed the
General William Barr in March 2019.
The Mueller report disclosed what in-
vestigators discovered about Trump and
M ueller’s investigation covered two
broad areas. The first concerned
Russia’s involvement in the 2016 cam-
unlawful conspiracy, but neither Mueller
nor anyone else was ever able to find
evidence of that. There is little doubt
crime and could be prosecuted for it
after he left office. In the end, Muel-
ler offered a convoluted summation of
Russia; Interference describes how they paign. Interference offers a bracing that Trump appreciated the Russian this part of his investigation: “While
made those discoveries and brought reminder of just how hard Vladimir Pu- initiatives on his behalf, as familiar ex- this report does not conclude that the
some prosecutions in court. tin’s government worked to elect Trump amples from the period demonstrate. President committed a crime, it also
From the beginning, Mueller, whose and, more to the point, defeat Hillary At a press conference on July 27, 2016, does not exonerate him.” In more direct
title was special counsel, was bound by he implored “Russia, if you’re listening,” words, Mueller decided that Trump, as
a Department of Justice policy, estab- *See Sean Wilentz, “The ‘Dred Scott’ of Our to find Clinton’s purportedly “missing” president, might well have committed
lished in 1973 and ratified in subsequent Time,” The New York Review, August 15, 2024. e-mails. Five hours later Russian gov- obstruction of justice.

24 The New York Review

M ueller conducted his probe on the
assumption that Trump’s legal
immunity would last only as long as
The implications of this are stagger-
ing. The issue of intent is central to
the investigation of virtually all white-
tion to include Trump’s business and
financial ties to Russia, a defensible
choice in light of the absence of prom-
handle the release of the report at all.
Even in the authors’ recounting, Barr
made no commitment; he just asked
his term in office. But the decision in collar crime, including in the White ising leads. Still, despite years of ex- a question. Yet Zebley heard what he
Trump v. United States dramatically House. Examinations of presidential perience in the capital, including more wanted to hear from the attorney gen-
expanded the scope of presidential im- misconduct have always required pros- than a decade as FBI director, Muel- eral. As it turned out, Barr did not re-
munity from prosecution to include the ecutors to “inspect the President’s mo- ler displayed little Washington savvy lease Mueller’s executive summaries
time after a president leaves office. In tivations for his official actions.” But as special counsel. Indeed, two of the after receiving the report. Instead he
his opinion for the Court, Chief Jus- that is now off-limits. As a result of major set pieces in the book leave the distributed his own four-page sum-
tice John Roberts created a new set the Trump decision, presidents may impression that the prosecutors were mary that spun the report in the most
of rules for when and whether former now refuse to provide most evidence thoroughly bamboozled by Trump and favorable way for Trump. Unlike Muel-
presidents can be prosecuted, based to criminal investigators. The evidence his allies. ler’s summaries, which were highly
on a purported distinction between that turned Richard Nixon’s last con- The first concerns Mueller’s efforts critical of Trump’s behavior, Barr
official and unofficial conduct in of- gressional supporters against him and to obtain an interview with Trump. As said that Mueller left it to the attor-
fice. According to Roberts, a president sealed his fate was the release of the the authors put it, in characteristic ney general to determine “whether
can be prosecuted for actions taken in “smoking gun” White House tape of deadpan, “The more we learned during the conduct described in the report
an “unofficial capacity” but should be June 23, 1972, which recorded a conver- the investigation, the clearer it became constitutes a crime.” Barr then added
immune from prosecution in the ap- sation that took place one week after that we would want to speak with the his own conclusion that “the evidence
plication of his official powers. That the break-in at Democratic National president directly, even if securing an developed during the Special Coun-
immunity is “absolute” when it comes Committee headquarters in the Wa- interview would prove challenging.” sel’s investigation is not sufficient to
to the “exercise of his core constitu- tergate office complex. In that con- When prosecutors want to interview establish that the President commit-
tional powers,” and even outside that versation Nixon approved a plan for someone, they usually do it by issuing a ted an obstruction-of-justice offense.”
core area, he should enjoy a “presump- H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, to subpoena to testify before a grand jury. In other words, the only initial public
tion” of immunity. Much of Roberts’s instruct the CIA to tell the FBI to cur- But Mueller and his staff dithered. summary of the report amounted to
opinion is devoted to outlining what tail its investigation of the break-in They didn’t want the immediate con- an exoneration of Trump, which was
behavior falls into each of these three on spurious national security grounds. frontation of a subpoena, which they not what Mueller intended or what the
categories—“core” official functions, Under Trump v. United States, Nixon’s knew Trump’s lawyers would challenge report said.
other official functions, and unofficial statement would not amount to ob- in court, so they spent months negoti- Barr also said that the report would
actions. struction of justice because it related ating for a voluntary interview, which have to be analyzed to see whether it
One of the “core” powers is espe- to the president’s official duties—that was clearly never going to happen. The included classified information or any-
cially relevant to the firing of Comey. is, supervising the FBI and the CIA . In- subjects of criminal investigations thing else inappropriate for release.
Quoting an earlier Supreme Court deed, prosecutors may not have been rarely want to talk to prosecutors, Thus several weeks passed before he
opinion, Roberts wrote, “The Pres- allowed to examine the Watergate and considering Trump’s history of released it, with the executive sum-
ident’s power to remove—and thus cover-up at all because that would be to pervasive dishonesty, it would have maries, by which time the impression
supervise—those who wield execu- “second-guess” the propriety of pres- been madness for his lawyers to expose had taken hold in the public that the
tive power on his behalf . . . follows from idential decision-making on “official” him to Mueller and his team. report exonerated the president. The
the text of Article II.” As a result, the matters. In the absence of a subpoena, Trump’s report did no such thing, but Barr had
courts may not lawyers strung Mueller along until they succeeded in outmaneuvering Mueller
effectively ran out the clock. By the to portray it as a victory for Trump.
adjudicate a criminal prosecution
that examines such Presidential
actions. The Court thus concludes
T rump used the tools at his dis-
posal to stymie Mueller’s investi-
gation, including at one point telling
time the prosecutor’s patience was ex-
hausted, a subpoena would have meant
waiting many months for the resolu-
Mueller and his team stewed in frus-
tration, feeling “shock and anger” at
Barr’s behavior. In light of the great
that the President is absolutely his White House counsel, Don McGahn, tion of litigation, which might have public interest in his work and Barr’s
immune from criminal prosecution to arrange for the firing of the spe- wound up before the Supreme Court. promise of transparency about the re-
for conduct within his exclusive cial counsel. McGahn refused to do so, And Trump, on the advice of his law- port, Mueller had significant leverage
sphere of constitutional authority. and this formed the basis of another yers, might have taken the Fifth and to negotiate with Barr about the way
part of Mueller’s investigation of the declined to answer questions anyway. So it was released. But he didn’t even try.
It is clear that the president has the president for obstruction of justice. As Mueller settled for presenting written
power to supervise and remove the FBI with Comey’s dismissal, any putative questions, which predictably produced
director, so firing Comey, according
to Roberts, could not under any cir-
cumstances be the basis for a crim-
case based on Trump’s instruction to
McGahn would probably also be fore-
closed by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
heavily lawyered, nearly useless answers
from the president.
The second story makes Mueller
A s Trump begins his second term
in the White House, he has taken
steps to insulate himself from the
inal charge against Trump. Indeed, Trump’s other attempts to frustrate look even worse. As special counsel, scrutiny he received in his first. Pam
even if Mueller found evidence that Mueller included publicly denouncing he was required to file a final report Bondi, the former Florida attorney
Trump had dismissed Comey entirely the prosecutor, offering minimal or summarizing his findings. Because he general who now leads the Justice
for corrupt reasons—for example, nonexistent cooperation with demands could not indict the president, the con- Department, was a fierce critic of
solely to save himself from an inves- for documents, and discouraging wit- clusions in his report about Trump’s the Russia investigation; she even
tigation that might find him guilty of nesses from cooperating by dangling conduct would obviously be extremely denounced Mueller and his team as
other crimes—he could still not be the possibility of presidential pardons. important and newsworthy. But the “corrupt.” She almost certainly will re-
prosecuted. Much of Interference is devoted to special counsel was obligated first ject any call to appoint an outsider,
But Roberts’s opinion extended the Mueller team’s efforts to respond to turn over his report to the attor- like a special counsel, to investigate
presidential immunity even further. to Trump’s tactics. In discussing Muel- ney general, William Barr. Barr had anything about Trump that might
The chief justice stated that a prose- ler himself, the three authors are never promised to display “transparency” arise. Both houses of Congress are
cutor may “point to the public record” less than reverential. They do not ad- with the report, but he never spelled in Republican hands, and legislators
to establish certain facts—that Trump dress his apparent physical and men- out how or when he would release it, are even more deferential to Trump
fired Comey, for example. But in per- tal decline, which drew a great deal of or in what form. than their counterparts were in 2017.
haps the most extraordinary passage attention after his testimony before Interference describes a meeting At least until the midterm elections,
of the Trump opinion, Roberts wrote: Congress on July 24, 2019, when he was Mueller and Aaron Zebley (one of the congressional oversight of the execu-
seventy-four. (His anemic two-page authors of the book) had with Barr and tive branch will be minimal.
What the prosecutor may not do, preface to Interference doesn’t add to his staff shortly before Mueller turned But these changes pale in compari-
however, is admit testimony or pri- the case for his acuity.) To be sure, over the report. The account includes son with the Supreme Court’s transfor-
vate records of the President or his Mueller had some successes. He won an astonishing exchange. At the end of mation of the standards of presidential
advisers probing the official act it- cases against Michael Flynn, Trump’s the session, Barr asked Mueller: accountability. Everything that a pres-
self. Allowing that sort of evidence first national security adviser, for lying ident does of any importance, for good
would invite the jury to inspect the to the FBI ; Paul Manafort, Trump’s “Will the report have an executive or ill, is an “official” action, and those
President’s motivations for his of- onetime campaign chairman, for summary?” actions are now off-limits for pros-
ficial actions and to second-guess committing fraud; and Roger Stone, “Yes,” Bob responded. Aaron ecution or even, potentially, for ex-
their propriety. As we have ex- Trump’s longtime adviser, for lying breathed a sigh of relief. He took amination by law enforcement. This
plained, such inspection would be to Congress and tampering with wit- Barr’s question to mean that if immunity would appear to extend,
“highly intrusive” and would “seri- nesses. Shortly before the end of his Barr were to release anything in as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in
ously cripple” the President’s exer- first term Trump, as he had signaled the short term, then it would be her dissent, to a president who “or-
cise of his official duties. he would, pardoned all three. our executive summaries. ders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assas-
Notwithstanding Trump’s taunt- sinate a political rival.” Thanks to the
In other words, not only are pros- ing, Mueller and his team conducted But, incredibly, neither Mueller nor decision in Trump v. United States, we

.
ecutors forbidden from charging a themselves honorably and, it seems, Zebley ever followed up to ask Barr may have reached the end of the era
president with a crime for his official didn’t miss any smoking-gun evidence directly if he would release the sum- of the presidential scandal investiga-
actions; they are banned even from against him or anyone else. Mueller maries—there were two, one for each tion—though not, to be sure, of the
investigating the action at all. decided not to expand his investiga- volume of the report—or how he would presidential scandal.

March 27, 2025 25

 Studies for His Mind
Clare Bucknell

and museum. Since the 1780s British

and French antiquaries had experi-
mented with turning their homes into
monuments to the past. Abbotsford,
Walter Scott’s country house in Scot-
land, “represented his imagination in
three-dimensional form,” the historian
Rosemary Hill writes in Time’s Wit-
ness: History in the Age of Romanticism
(2021). It was fitted with oak paneling,
an armory, stained glass, and a faux-
medieval well that Scott fashioned out
of “broken stones” from the nearby
ruin of Melrose Abbey. (“It makes a
tolerable deception and looks at least
300 years old,” he wrote to a friend.)
At Goodrich Court, a mock-medie-
val castle in Herefordshire, Samuel
Meyrick displayed weaponry used
at the recent Chartist riots at New-
port in 1839 and wooden horses with
dead animals’ salvaged manes. Soane,
with similar magpie-like instincts,
decorated his Monk’s Parlour with
stained glass that had been “removed”
from a convent during the French
Revolution.
Unlike the antiquaries’ castles and
cottages, however, his house was not
primarily a means of exploring his
relationship to history. Antiquarian
interiors, Hill shows, were made first
and foremost “to be lived in”—some-
times, “if the occupant so chose, in
complete privacy, in communion with
the past.” From the beginning, Soane’s
collecting was a public-facing activity,
inseparable from his professional am-
bition. He designed No. 13 to show-
case his architectural abilities, display
his gentlemanly tastes, and forge alli-
A section view of the Dome area and breakfast room in Sir John Soane’s Museum, London; painting by Frank Copland, 1817 ances with the painters and sculptors
whose work he purchased. From 1812
he opened his house periodically to
John Soane’s Cabinet The lighting was dim; the layout was here to his often-baffling specifica- students at the Royal Academy, where
of Curiosities: Reflections labyrinthine; nothing was displayed tions. Unlike other private collections he was professor of architecture, to
on an Architect and His Collection in a way that made sense. How was a of the period, typically sold off or dis- enable them to consult his drawings,
by Bruce Boucher. scholar supposed to do his work? “I persed, Soane’s was protected by an act plaster casts, and antique fragments.
Yale University Press, 224 pp., $45.00 am . . . not sure whether I have been of Parliament in 1833 that bequeathed His great hope, with an eye on the fu-
fortunate enough to discover the prin- it to the public in perpetuity. It rep- ture of the Soane line, was that his
In 1877 the German classicist Adolf Mi- cipal examples during my repeated resents the rare survival of a collection house-museum would become a kind
chaelis had almost completed the re- searches through all the rooms,” Mi- that was more like an early modern of “national academy” of architectural
search for his catalog of ancient Greek chaelis wrote acidly. “It is not too cabinet of curiosities—flamboyant, history and practice, maintained by
and Roman sculpture held in British much to say that some of the better overflowing, full of anomalies—than his sons and grandsons.
collections. It was “irksome, mosaic- specimens can only be seen from the a nineteenth-century institution. Houses are like palimpsests. Over
like work,” he reported—poring over back.” In the present-day museum, which the years they acquire the traces of
the contents of museums and private John Soane, a distinguished archi- receives more than 100,000 visitors human intentions, changing situa-
houses, trying not to miss something tect known for his work at the Bank a year, the “Dome” area (an arched, tions, decisions made and reversed.
important, at every moment likely to of England, had been very clear about top-lit space on the ground floor) fea- Bruce Boucher’s John Soane’s Cabinet
be “disturbed by the impatient noise his vision for the collection. In the tures a marble capital from the orig- of Curiosities, the first monograph on
of the housekeeper’s keys.” One of the last decade of his life he produced inal attic of the Pantheon in Rome, Soane’s collecting as opposed to his
final collections on his list was Sir John three versions of A Description of the early-nineteenth-century statuettes architectural career, studies the ob-
Soane’s Museum, a former private House and Museum on the North Side of Michelangelo and Raphael, and a sessions that shaped his transforma-
townhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in of Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, the Residence grand bust of the collector himself. tion of No. 13. According to Boucher,
London. It was not the kind of place of John Soane, Architect (1830–1835), a Downstairs in the basement, in a neo- an art historian and former director of
GE RE MY BUT LE R/ S IR JOHN S OAN E’ S MUS EU M, L OND ON

to lift his spirits: visitors’ guide to No. 13 that was also Gothic chamber known as the Monk’s the Soane Museum, the house in Lin-
designed to freeze it in time. The Parlour, is a desk that might once have coln’s Inn Fields was “autobiographi-
The collection, . . . consisting of roughly 40,000 items that made up his belonged to Sir Robert Walpole, a col- cal” in a distinctive way: it recorded,
the most heterogeneous curios- collection needed to remain exactly lection of pre-Columbian Peruvian with a single-mindedness bordering
ities and objects of art that can where he had left them, he explained: pottery, and a seventeenth-century on masochism, Soane’s misfortunes,
be conceived, is distributed over the overcrowded rooms and narrow German crossbow. disappointments, and failures, all
the rooms of the house, which are passages that Michaelis deplored were the things he hoped and worked for
mostly very small and connected choreographed as tightly as a ballet. that did not come to fruition. In 1815,
with one another in a strange
way. A number of very narrow
passages, very dark corners, and
There was no systematic curation
by historical period or segregation of
objects according to provenance. In-
F rom 1813 until his death, No. 13
Lincoln’s Inn Fields was Soane’s
family home, the place where he
just two years after the family’s move
into No. 13, Eliza Soane died. The loss
drove his collecting: it became com-
the like, impedes a steady inves- stead Soane’s groupings formed what lived with his wife, Eliza, and their pulsive, compensatory, “dictated by
tigation equally with the over- he called “studies for my own mind,” two sons, entertained guests, taught an emotional hunger,” in Boucher’s
crowding of the rooms and the expressions of or aids to an idiosyn- his architectural pupils. He was not words. “I hope it will be long before
incredibly inconvenient mode in cratic understanding of the world. alone among Romantic-period col- you are satisfied,” his friend John Tay-
which a great part of the contents Since his death in 1837, the house’s lectors in living in a space that was lor wrote of one of his acquisitions
are arranged. curators have done their best to ad- a strange amalgam of private house in 1821. “The pursuit weans you from

26 The New York Review

 Saluting the Sloan Authors Whose Books Were Published in 2024

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March 27, 2025 27

thoughts of a very different nature.” jealous environment of the Royal Acad- to chew over and relitigate years of been expensively remodeled by John
His sons, John and George, were an- emy in particular, much of the work lay perceived unfairnesses and slights. Its Nash, George IV’s architect and one
other disappointment, both unsuited in becoming known. The academician façade, which he redesigned and com- of Soane’s loathed rivals. The novelist
and unwilling in their different ways Joseph Farington, purveyor of gos- pleted in 1813, projected over a meter Barbara Hofland, a friend of Soane’s
to carry on his architectural practice. sip par excellence, first bothered to beyond those of the other houses in enlisted to pad out his commentary in
After John’s early death in 1823 at the mention Soane in his diary less than the terrace, in a manner that the dis- the 1835 Description, was huffily out-
age of thirty-seven, Soane’s program a week after he and Eliza had moved trict surveyor claimed was illegal. It raged on his behalf. “What that unfor-
of collecting and redesigning acceler- into their Lincoln’s Inn Fields town- was clearly visible from the opposite tunate pile of building has cost, and
ated. He imagined his house as a kind house. Soane, for his part, knew the side of the square, which happened to must cost, before . . . it is rendered a
of monument to past hopes, “his me- importance of being talked about. In be the site of the new headquarters of dwelling for a king—(a suitable one
morial and a symbol of his individual 1802 he purchased—with much fan- the Royal College of Surgeons, a build- it never will be)—it is perhaps better
achievement,” in the words of his bi- fare—the eight paintings in Hogarth’s ing that Dance had been working on that we should never know.”
ographer, Gillian Darley: a dead site A Rake’s Progress (1733–1735) series at since 1800. Dance and Soane had fallen
rather than a living one. auction, then organized a dinner party out dramatically: Dance, stung by the
for a select group of academicians to
show them off.
disloyal manner in which Soane had
intrigued to replace him as professor I n his Royal Academy lectures, which
he gave between 1809 and 1832,

S oane, born in 1753, was the young-

est surviving child of John Soan, a
bricklayer or builder from the village
Objects, to him, were inextricably
linked with people. As he saw it, the
Hogarth paintings weren’t just Ho-
of architecture in 1805, would no lon-
ger work with him. Soane, character-
istically, felt he ought to have been
Soane dwelled on the spectacular side
of his art. He was fascinated by “the
splendid effects of architecture, and
of Goring-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. garths, they were also the former given the Royal College of Surgeons its power to affect the mind,” the way a
In adult life, he avoided mentioning property of the eccentric Gothic nov- commission. building or interior could “dazzle,” “sur-
his beginnings or did his best to hide elist and collector William Beckford. On top of his façade, he mounted a prise,” or “tire” a beholder. He admired
them. (Around the time of his mar- A work’s provenance, in Soane’s col- pair of stone caryatids in draped Gre- the medieval architecture of Westmin-
riage, he added an improving e to his lection, counted for almost as much cian dress, which mocked the male fig- ster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral for
surname.) Little is known about his as its antiquity or aesthetic qualities: ures in tunics—he called them “two its “blaze of effect,” the “delirium” it
childhood; Darley has suggested that he seemed to see everything he pos- old men with Greek names on their was calculated to produce in specta-
there may have been a period of pre- sessed as if it had an invisible name skirts”—on the portico of Dance’s tors. He was particularly interested
carity or “sudden downturn” in his fa- tag attached. Some of the notes in building opposite. There was a sug- in what light, or its absence, could do
ther’s fortunes, which left its traces in his Description of the House and Mu- gestion that one of the female figures in a building, noting the “aweful and
the “terror of debt” Soane exhibited seum read like entries from the society was supposed to be Dance. After the pleasing gloom” of sacred spaces, their
later in life. pages: “To the right and left are two front was finished, he instructed his way of “admitting light as it were by
From the age of eight he attended beautiful China Jars, given to me by longtime collaborator, the artist Jo- stealth.” At Pitzhanger Manor in Eal-
a local school (his fees perhaps subsi- the late Viscount Bridport.” He tar- seph Michael Gandy, to produce a wa- ing, the country house he owned until
dized by the schoolmaster), where he geted objects that had been owned tercolor of Nos. 13, 14, and 15. In the 1809, the long gallery was, he wrote,
learned mathematics and Latin and by or were associated with his heroes. picture, all three houses—two of which ideally to be “seen by moonlight,” its
developed a love of reading. He was He kept a strand of Napoleon’s hair were not his—feature the same auda- urns, statues, and vines “producing a
employed briefly as a hod carrier for coiled in one of his rings; he had the cious, caryatid-splashed façade. succession of beautiful effects.”
his brother, William, a bricklayer; then, celebrity actor John Philip Kemble’s Inside there were more pointed ref- The lighting at No. 13 was theatri-
in a fantastic stroke of luck, an ac- copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio; he erences. The Monk’s Yard, next to the cally choreographed. Its purpose was
quaintance introduced him to George splashed out for Hogarth’s The Hu- Monk’s Parlour, featured a curated dis- to make successive spaces distinct
Dance, a rising City of London archi- mours of an Election series (1754–1755), play of medieval masonry taken from from one another: dark and bright,
tect, who took him on as an errand boy formerly the property of another ce- the Houses of Parliament, where claustrophobic and open. On the
in 1768. A year later, aged fifteen or lebrity actor, David Garrick. (He would Soane had lobbied unsuccessfully to ground floor the dimly lit, “solemn”
sixteen, he was helping Dance with the stretch a point for anything Garrick- lead renovations since the 1790s. It Colonnade opened unexpectedly into
remodeling of a country villa. In 1771 related, once purchasing a presenta- was as if he’d chosen to frame his job the bright, sky-lit Dome, where Soane
he won a place to study architecture tion copy of Hogarth’s prints that had rejections. (He was finally given a proj- assembled some of his most significant
at the Royal Academy schools. been owned by Garrick’s doctor.) The ect at the Palace of Westminster in classical fragments. Downstairs, the
Soane was preternaturally ambi- fact that another version of a Reyn- 1820, after the accession of George IV.) atmospheric Monk’s Parlour was kept
tious. His humble start in life, Darley olds painting he wanted was in the In the dining room, hanging promi- in partial shadow, a yellow-tinted sky-
writes, “made him precipitate, as if he collection of Prince Potemkin was an nently opposite each other, were two light filtering light down from above;
had less time to achieve what others irresistible attraction. Gandy watercolors, Public and Private the color lent what Hofland called a
could take by virtue of their social po- An astute networker, he could also Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane “mellow lustre” to Soane’s Gothic rel-
sition.” In 1776 he won the academy’s be his own worst enemy. “He was ir- (1818) and the elaborately titled Archi- ics and manuscripts. In the library and
biennial gold medal, awarded to the ritable, impetuous and untractable— tectural Visions of Early Fancy in the breakfast room, there was mirror glass
best senior architecture student on he could not bear contradiction—and Gay Morning of Youth and Dreams in laid ingeniously into recesses, inside
the basis of a design competition. The opposition induced in him the idea of the Evening of Life (1820). Public and sliding shutters, behind vases, between
medal made him eligible for a Grand personal hostility,” Thomas Leverton Private Buildings depicts completed bookshelves. Small convex mirrors in
Tour–style traveling studentship, in Donaldson, president of the Institute works of Soane’s: the remodeled Bank the ceiling distorted portions of the
the gift of the king. The usual proce- of British Architects, remarked in an of England, the Dulwich Picture Gal- floor, creating what Soane called “fan-
dure was for the academicians to hold unusually frank obituary address. His lery, Eliza Soane’s monumental tomb. ciful effects.” The result, Darley has
a formal election to decide who should instinct under provocation was to take Architectural Visions, by contrast, is observed, was a different kind of space
receive the studentship; Soane didn’t people to court, as he did unsuccess- like a photographic negative. In an from the fashionable mirrored draw-
want to wait and corralled Sir William fully in 1799, after a rival circulated unreal, dreamlike landscape, it fea- ing rooms designed by Robert Adam,
Chambers, the king’s architect, into a poem calling his pilasters at the tures large-scale public projects—a which reflected Georgian society bril-
showing his portfolio to George III Bank of England “scor’d like loins of new British senate, a royal palace— liantly back to itself. Soane’s mirroring
personally. pork.” (At the trial the poem was read that Soane designed, labored over, so- was more complex and self-involved:
On his return, after two years study- aloud “to general amusement.”) In 1810 licited, but was never invited to build. “unsettling, illusionistic,” like a three-
ing classical ruins in Italy, he courted he was so vicious in a public lecture In the Picture Room, an ingenious dimensional trompe l’oeil.
aristocratic and commercial patrons about the work of one of his former gallery that he constructed on the The dramas of his house were nar-
and was rewarded with an “explosion pupils that he had to step down tem- ground floor in 1824, Soane showed rative as well as visual. On the library
of work,” necessitating long journeys porarily as professor of architecture. drawings of the imaginary palace, “a ceiling, a set of paintings by the artist
“by bone-rattling mail coach” up and (“One can never be prepared for the Triumphal Arch, forming the entrance Henry Howard depicted, with gloomy
down the country. When, in 1784, he insanity of such venomous malignity,” into Downing Street,” and a “grand symbolism, the story of Pandora’s box.
married Eliza Smith, niece and heir the academician Thomas Lawrence Western Entrance into the Metropo- (“In the midst, Jupiter, attended by
of George Wyatt, a prosperous City remarked.) He was, he wrote of him- lis,” also never commissioned. It was Victory and Nemesis, holds the fatal
developer, Eliza must have known self in the third person in an auto- his way, Boucher argues, of shadow- vase, fraught with so much mischief to
she would barely see her husband. biographical fragment, “a mere child ing his career with visions of what mankind,” Soane wrote lugubriously.)
Any spare time that he had he spent in the world,” terminally “indiscreet,” might, or ought to, have been. “This In the Monk’s Parlour he constructed
tearing down and redeveloping No. 12 driven by a pure love of his art to speak palace was proposed to have been con- a stylized, faux-medieval interior of
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the house that his mind, “until at last he had raised structed on a most elevated and salu- the kind that his contemporaries
the couple purchased in 1792 after Wy- a nest of wasps about him sufficient brious spot,” he wrote of his design in would have recognized from potboiler
att’s death. to sting the strongest man to death.” the Description of the House and Mu- Gothic novels: stained glass, escutch-
seum. “It is worthy of remark, that the eons, carved stone grotesques. He had
basement would have been above the experimented with Gothic scenery

E arly on, as an apprentice in

Dance’s office, Soane had rec-
ognized that the architectural world
N o. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which
he purchased in 1807, was a kind
of architectural act of revenge. In its
level of the attics in the palace since
erected at Pimlico.” This was a smack
at Buckingham Palace, formerly plain
before—there was a Monk’s Dining
Room in the basement of Pitzhanger
Manor—but this was on a larger scale
turned on connections. In the small, design and curation, Soane found ways old Buckingham House, which had and in a more self-conscious style.

28 The New York Review

 At Pitzhanger, for theatrical effect, the house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in a ungrateful, viperish children. In the act of self-dramatization. Few could
he had pretended to his dinner guests manner that was bitterly personal. “It Description, when he touched on How- have missed the message: everything
that a nameless mythical “hermit” looks like a record of the departed,” ard’s picture, he quoted the old king’s he made and was, he feared, would end
dwelled in the underground rooms. George wrote. “Considering himself lament (“Howl, howl, howl, howl! . . ./O! up this way, as “baseless” and “insub-
(Presumably the hermit disappeared [Soane] as defunct in that better part she is gone for ever!”) as if it had been stantial” as Prospero’s vision.
at mealtimes.) For No. 13 he invented of humanity—the mind and its affec- written to be chiseled into his wife’s Ruins held a particular fascina-
a fully fleshed-out character, a medi- tions—he has reared this mausoleum tomb. tion for Soane. In the grounds at
eval monk called Padre Giovanni who for the enshrinement of his body.” Eliza Pitzhanger, he built a semicircular
served as a kind of occasional alter read the pieces and remarked, “Those “ruined” colonnade and a miniature
ego. The Description instructed visi-
tors to picture the padre as they en-
tered “his” apartments. He was a man
are George’s doing. He has given me my
death blow.” Shortly after her funeral,
Soane framed them, titled them Death
P rospero, the magus in The Tem-
pest, appears twice in the imagery
of the Recess. Soane often identified
archway, half-sunk in the earth as
if in the early stages of excavation.
His Monk’s Yard at No. 13 featured
of great piety and mysterious sorrows, Blows Given by George Soane, and hung himself, Boucher observes, with “in- part of a cloister, supposed to be the
Hofland wrote, who had “retired from them in his drawing room as a form of dividualistic creative spirits,” vision- fictional padre’s former home, with
a world he was fitted to adorn” for a perverse interior decor. He preserved ary, magical figures in particular. In pointed Gothic arches in disrepair. In-
life of prayer and reflection. His sub- her bedroom intact for almost twenty 1832 he showed Architectural Ruins: side, as Michaelis observed, the house
terranean suite, meticulously arranged was jam-packed with fragments of an-
by Soane over a period of years, was cient and medieval architecture, as
like a permanent stage set. The Cell, well as cork models of famous ruins
his austere little bedroom, featured (Pompeii, the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli)
a crucifix and a vessel for holy water and fantastic images of ruins by the
(the room doubled, handily, as sleeping eighteenth-century artists Piranesi
quarters for one of Soane’s servants); and Clérisseau.
next door was his parlor, teeming with Those who took pleasure in ruins
Gothic props. were drawn to them because of their
Outside, in the Monk’s Yard, Soane incompleteness. The sublimity of
built the padre a tomb. “All things fade a ruin lay in its disintegration, the
away—even the creatures of our day- space it left for imaginative conjecture.
dreams, and poor Padre Giovanni is no “Imperfection and obscurity are their
more,” Hofland wrote, in an attempt properties; and to carry the imagina-
to explain Soane’s having made his tion to something greater than is seen,
alter ego both alive and dead. The tomb their effect,” wrote Thomas Whately
was a macabre labor of love: to frame in Observations on Modern Gardening
it, Soane constructed impressionistic (1770), a book Soane owned. The poet
monastic “ruins” and an intricate, tes- Susan Stewart has called them archi-
sellated pavement, supposed to have tectural “non sequiturs,” forms that
been laid piecemeal by the monk him- seem to cry out for “the supplement
self. In 1820 it became a real tomb, of further reading, further syntax.”* In
containing the bones of Eliza Soane’s Soane’s hands, they could be the oppo-
favorite lapdog, Fanny. site: there was something fated, antic-
ipatory, about the way he approached
the idea of ruination, imagining it al-

S oane had long been fascinated by

the architecture of death. When he
visited Pompeii as a student, he made
ways on the horizon, as in the view of
the Rotunda in Architectural Ruins. In
1830 he exhibited another ruins water-
a beeline for the Via delle Tombe. He color of Gandy’s, A Bird’s-Eye View of
mounted sarcophagi on the perimeter the Bank of England, in which much of
wall of the Bank of England and tried the bank site is roofless, its columns
to convince aristocrats to let him build missing their capitals, its arches like
them private mausoleums on their es- fragile loops, an uncanny, spectral light
tates. In 1824, during the frantic year falling and separating it from the liv-
of collecting that followed the death of ing city beyond.
his elder son, John, he purchased—for Encoded in all his achievements
the fantastic sum of £2,000, or about was a morbid sense of their tempo-
$285,000 today—the giant sarcoph- rariness. As early as 1812, before he
agus of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I, and his family moved into No. 13 Lin-
which he maneuvered into No. 13 by coln’s Inn Fields, he was imagining his
bashing a hole in the rear wall. Ben- new home in ruins. In “Crude Hints
jamin Robert Haydon, the painter and Towards an History of My House,” an
diarist, gleefully described the three- unpublished narrative fragment that
day party that Soane held in March he scribbled in three weeks that Sep-
1825 to celebrate its installation in tember, he adopted the persona of a
the basement. The cream of London puzzled future scholar studying the
society, Haydon wrote, was plunged site of No. 13 decades hence. The old
into a ghoulish, candlelit underworld: A bust of Sir John Soane in the Dome area of Sir John Soane’s Museum, sculpted by Sir house, the scholar tells us, has become
Francis Chantrey, 1830 a “picture of frightful dilapidation,” a
It was the finest fun imaginable mess of nineteenth-century masonry
to see the people come into the years; at the dinner table, he made sure A Vision (1798), one of Gandy’s early and salvaged fragments of ancient
Library after wandering about to keep a vacant chair for her. watercolors, at the annual Royal Acad- sculpture. Observers are nonplussed
below, amidst tombs and capi- He found echoes of his tragic sit- emy exhibition. Below the listing in by it: “various conjectures” are made
tals, . . . with a sort of expression uation in literature. Throughout the the catalog, for the benefit of hun- about what it might originally have
of delighted relief at finding them- house, there were references to and dreds of visitors, he quoted lines from been, but nothing seems to add up.
DE RRY MO OR E/ S IR JOH N SOAN E’ S M US EU M, L ON DON

selves among the living, and with objects associated with Shakespeare, Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” Could it have been a heathen tem-
coffee and cake. Fancy delicate whose plays he had loved since he was speech in Act Four: “The cloud-capt ple, a convent, a necromancer’s pal-
ladies of fashion dipping their a young man. On a small angled land- towers, the gorgeous palaces,/The sol- ace? Even the most curated collection,
pretty heads into an old mouldy, ing leading up from the ground floor emn temples, the great globe itself,/ Soane knew, if displaced or misunder-
fusty hierogliphicked coffin. Soane constructed what he called his Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve.” stood, could be taken for a jumble: a
Shakespeare Recess, a kind of secular Architectural Ruins depicts the Ro- “strange and mixed assemblage of an-
When Eliza Soane died in Novem- shrine, displaying a plaster cast of the tunda of the Bank of England, one of cient works,” little more than a pile
ber 1815, No. 13 became bound up bust on Shakespeare’s funerary mon- Soane’s great early achievements, as of stones. His great fear was that the

.
with death in a more private way. Two ument in Stratford-upon-Avon and a if in a hundred or five hundred years’ work of which he was proudest would
months earlier, George, Soane’s un- painting by Howard of Lear cradling time. Under a dark sky, the building come to be impossible to interpret,
stable, estranged younger son, whom the dead body of Cordelia. King Lear sits cracked open like an egg, its shape the end of the line rather than the
he had refused to save from debtors’ was Soane’s favorite tragedy, princi- just legible, broken masonry protrud- beginning.
prison in 1814, had published a pair pally because he saw himself in it. Like ing and vines snaking out of the gaps.
of articles on architecture. They were Lear, he had lost the person who loved By 1832 Soane was an old man on the *See Robyn Creswell’s review of Stewart’s
anonymous, but Soane knew at once him most in the world; like Lear, he verge of retirement. Exhibiting Gan- The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in
who was behind them: they attacked had been betrayed (as he saw it) by dy’s watercolor was an extraordinary Western Culture in these pages, July 2, 2020.

March 27, 2025 29

 The Labor Theory of AI
Ben Tarnoff

plays. Nobody doubts that there is

money to be made from selling com-
panies the paraphernalia they need to
use generative AI. The real question is
whether generative AI helps those com-
panies make any money themselves.
Skeptics point out that the high cost
of creating and running generative AI
software is a potential obstacle. This
negates the traditional advantage of
digital technology: its low marginal
costs. Starting an online bookstore
worked for Amazon because it was
cheaper than going the brick-and-
mortar route, as Jim Covello, head
of global equity research at Goldman
Sachs, noted in a June 2024 report.
AI , by contrast, is not cheap—which
means “AI applications must solve
extremely complex and important
problems for enterprises to earn an
appropriate return on investment.”
Covello, for one, doubts that they will.
Yet companies, like people, are not
entirely rational. When a firm decides
to adopt a new technology, it rarely does
so on the basis of economic consider-
ations alone. “Such decisions are more
often than not grounded upon hunches,
faith, ego, delight, and deals,” observes
the historian David Noble. Looking at
American factories after World War
II, Noble identified a number of rea-
sons for their shift to “numerical con-
trol” technology: a “fascination with
automation,” a devotion to the idea of
technological progress, an urge to be
associated with the prestige of the cut-
ting edge, and a “fear of falling behind
Illustration by George Wylesol the competition,” among others.1
Noble does, however, put special em-
phasis on one motivation that is at least
The Eye of the Master: icans had decided to stop worrying Then, on November 30, 2022, OpenAI partly rooted in economic rationality:
A Social History of about the virus and were happily re- released ChatGPT . A powerful AI sys- labor discipline. By mechanizing the
Artificial Intelligence suming their offline activities. Mean- tem paired with an affable conversa- production process, managers could
by Matteo Pasquinelli. while the Fed began hiking interest tional interface, it let anyone ask a more fully master the workers within
Verso, 264 pp., $24.95 (paper) rates in response to rising inflation. question and get an impressively hu- it. The philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli
It would be a mistake to overstate manoid (though not always correct) takes a similar view in his recent book
Silicon Valley runs on novelty. It is sus- the severity of the “tech downturn” response. By January 2023 the chatbot The Eye of the Master: A Social History
tained by the pursuit of what Michael that followed. Despite mass layoffs had amassed 100 million users, making of Artificial Intelligence. In the introduc-
Lewis once called the “new new thing.” and declining revenue, the big firms it the fastest-growing Web application tion, Pasquinelli, a professor at the Ca’
The Internet, the smartphone, social remained larger and more profitable ever. It was storybook Silicon Valley: Foscari University of Venice, explains
media: the new new thing cannot be than they had been before the pan- OpenAI , which at the time had only a that he won’t be offering a “linear his-
a modest tweak at the edges. It has to demic. Nonetheless a certain malaise few hundred employees, caught ev- tory of mathematical achievements.”
transform the human race. The eco- had set in. The industry needed a daz- eryone by surprise and, virtually over- Rather, he wants to provide a “social
nomic incentives are clear: a firm that zling new invention that could attract night, established “generative AI ”—the genealogy” that treats AI not merely
popularizes a paradigm-shattering in- billions of consumers and send capital category of software to which ChatGPT as a technological pursuit but “as a
vention can make a lot of money. But markets into a froth. belongs—as the new master concept vision of the world.” The centerpiece
there is also something larger at stake. One candidate was Web3, a proposal of the entire industry. The tech giants of this vision is the automation—and
If Silicon Valley doesn’t keep deliver- for rebuilding the Internet around rushed to respond, setting off a stam- domination—of labor. Contemporary
ing new new things, it loses its priv- blockchain, the accounting technology pede. Everything from search engines AI is best understood, he believes, as
ileged status as the place where the underlying Bitcoin and other crypto- to e-mail clients began sprouting gen- the latest in a long line of efforts to
future is made. currencies. Championed in particular erative AI features. In 2023 the Nasdaq increase the power of the boss.
In 2022 the industry was having a by venture capitalists, who hoped that climbed 55 percent, its best perfor-
bad year. After a lucrative pandemic— it would enrich them by empowering mance since 1999. The new new thing
the five most valuable tech companies
added more than $2.6 trillion to their
combined market capitalization in
a new generation of start-ups to un-
seat the big firms, Web3 never proved
useful for anything except speculation,
had been found.
I n The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
famously argued that the manufac-
ture of pins could be made more ef-
2020 and nearly the same amount in
2021—the sector suffered one of its
sharpest-ever contractions. Amazon
and even the speculators got soaked as
various schemes imploded under the
pressure of high interest rates. An-
I t’s too soon to know whether gen-
erative AI will prove to be a pot of
gold or a blast of hot air. Opinions are
ficient through the division of labor.
Instead of having a single pinmaker
do everything, you could break the job
lost almost half of its value, Meta close other possibility was the metaverse, divided. Some companies have done down into several distinct tasks and
to two thirds. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of an immer- fabulously well: Nvidia, the boom’s distribute them to make pins more
fell 33 percent, its worst performance sive Internet experienced through a VR breakout star, is raking it in, since quickly. This is the canonical princi-
since the 2008 financial crisis. headset. It, too, struggled to demon- its chips are the basic infrastructure ple of capitalist production and the
The reasons were straightforward strate any practical advantage. Worse, on which generative AI is built. The one that automation epitomizes and
enough. At the onset of the Covid-19 it was unpleasant: a glitchy simula- cloud divisions of Microsoft, Google, enforces. First you make work more
pandemic, the Federal Reserve slashed crum of a postapocalyptic shopping and Amazon have also grown consider- mechanical, then you delegate it to
interest rates to zero, and people mall as designed by David Lynch, ably, which their executives attribute machines.
stayed home, where they spent more where fish-eyed avatars with no legs to increased demand for AI services.
time and money online. By 2022 both floated through sparsely populated But these are, in the parlance of the 1
Forces of Production: A Social History of
trends were in reverse. Most Amer- cartoon worlds. financial press, “picks and shovels” Industrial Automation (Knopf, 1984).

30 The New York Review

 An important popularizer of this inated the autonomy of the artisan. able the remote surveillance and super- undercooked quality. The Eye of the
principle was Charles Babbage, a Now management brought workers vision of office employees, Uber drivers, Master is, if anything, overcooked:
central figure in Pasquinelli’s book. together under a single roof, which and long-haul truckers. But to argue there is an enormous amount of think-
Originally a mathematician, Bab- meant they could be told what to do that such uses are the raison d’être ing compressed into its pages. Pas-
bage became what we would now and watched while they did it. of digital technology, as Pasquinelli quinelli’s omnivorous intellect often
call a “thought leader” among the Pasquinelli believes that Babbage’s seems to, is to overstate the case. mesmerizes. Nonetheless, I sometimes
nineteenth-century British bourgeoi- engines, originating as they did in a Labor discipline is one use to which found myself wishing he would slow
sie. Today he is better known as one “project to mechanize the division computers can be put; there are many down to scaffold his provocations with
of the inventors of the computer. His of mental labor,” were driven by the others. And it was not central to the more evidence.
work on computation began with the same managerial imperatives. They technology’s development: the core
observation that the division of labor were, he writes, “an implementation innovations of computing arose in re-
could be “applied with equal success to
mental as to mechanical operations,”
as he stated in an influential 1832
of the analytical eye of the factory’s
master,” a sort of mechanical represen-
tation of the watchful, despotic boss.
sponse to military prerogatives, not
economic ones. The desires to crack
enemy cryptography, calculate the cor-
T he fact that Babbage drew from
the playbook of industrial man-
agement in designing his proto-
treatise. The same method of indus- Pasquinelli goes so far as to call them rect angles for aiming artillery, and computers is an interesting piece
trial management then remolding the “cousins” of Jeremy Bentham’s noto- perform the math necessary for mak- of history. But its relevance to later
British worker could be transported rious panopticon. ing the hydrogen bomb were a few of developments, or even just its reso-
outside of the factory and applied to But these imperatives presumably the motivations for building computers nance with them, can be determined
a very different kind of labor, Babbage remained latent, since the gadgets in the 1940s. The US government be- only by looking closely at how com-
believed: mathematical calculation. never worked as designed. Babbage came infatuated with the technology puters actually transformed work in
He took inspiration from Gaspard de tried to use mechanical gears to repre- and spent millions on research and the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
Prony, a French mathematician who sent decimal numbers, which meant he procurement in the subsequent de- ries, which Pasquinelli does not do.
came up with a scheme for stream- struggled with the problem of how to cades. Computers would prove integral Instead he takes a sharp turn half-
lining the creation of logarithmic ta- automate the “carryover”—the process to a variety of imperial pursuits, from way through the book, pivoting from
bles by reducing most of the work whereby one column resets to zero and assembling intercontinental missiles nineteenth-century industrial Brit-
to a series of simple additions and the next column increases by one— capable of (precisely) incinerating mil- ain to the early AI researchers of mid-
subtractions. In de Prony’s arrange- when a digit reaches 10. It would take lions of Soviets to storing and analyz- twentieth-century America, focusing
ment, a handful of experts and man- the simplifications of the binary sys- ing intercepts sourced from listening in particular on the field’s “connec-
agers planned the job and did the more tem, the invention of electronics, and stations around the world. American tionist” school.
difficult calculations while an army of the many advances bankrolled by the corporations followed behind, adapt- Connectionism, as Pasquinelli
menial number crunchers did lots of ample military budgets of World War ing the contraptions cooked up by the notes, departed in significant ways
basic arithmetic. II to make automatic computation fi- security state to various commercial from the automatic computation of
If the poor grunts at the bottom of nally feasible in the 1940s. ends. Babbage. For Babbage the soul of the
this pyramid were basically automa- By then capitalism had become a Still, if Pasquinelli’s claims do not computer was the algorithm, a step-
tons, why not automate them? In the more international affair, which made always convince, there is much to learn by-step procedure that traditionally
factory the division of labor went hand the matter of managing workers more from the material he presents. Publish- makes up the principal ingredient
in hand with automation. In fact, ac- complicated. “The more the division ers have inundated readers with books of a computer program. When Alan
cording to Babbage, it was precisely of labor extended into a globalized about AI in recent years—enough to Turing, John von Neumann, and oth-
the simplification of the labor pro- world,” Pasquinelli writes, “the more fill a small bookstore.2 Most have an ers created the modern computer in
cess that made it possible to intro- troublesome its management became,” the twentieth century, what they cre-
duce machinery. “When each process as “the ‘intelligence’ of the factory’s 2
See Sue Halpern, “The Coming Tech Au- ated was a device for executing algo-
has been reduced to the use of some master could no longer survey the tocracy,” The New York Review, November 7, rithms. The programmer writes a set
simple tool,” he wrote, “the union of entire production process in a single 2024. of rules for transforming an input
all these tools, actuated by one moving glance.” Thus, he contends, the need
power, constitutes a machine.” for “infrastructures of communication”
In 1819 he began designing what he that “could achieve this role of super-
called the Difference Engine, which vision and quantification.”
automated the labor of arithmetic The modern computer, in the de-
with three rotating cylinders and was cades following its arrival in the 1940s,
powered by a steam engine. Babbage’s helped satisfy this need. Computers
ambition was enormous. He wanted to extended the “eye of the master”
“establish the business of calculation at across space, Pasquinelli argues, en-
an industrial scale,” Pasquinelli writes, abling capitalists to coordinate the
by harnessing the same energy source increasingly cumbersome logistics of
that was revolutionizing British indus-
try. The mass production of error-free
logarithmic tables would also make for
industrial production. If Babbage had
wanted to construct a prosthesis with
which to project managerial power, as
London Book Fair 2025
a profitable business, because such ta- Pasquinelli suggests, then computa-
bles allowed the United Kingdom’s for- tion’s triumph in the twentieth cen- During the London Book Fair, at Olympia London
midable mercantile and military fleets tury as the indispensable instrument
to determine their position at sea. The of capitalist globalization should be
from March 11–13, 2025,
British government, recognizing the understood as a fulfillment of the tech- copies of this March 27, 2025 issue of
economic and geopolitical value of nology’s founding spirit.
Babbage’s venture, provided funding. Moreover, this spirit appears to have
The investment failed. Babbage intensified as computers continued to
managed to construct a small proto- evolve. “Since the end of the twentieth
type, but the full design proved too century,” Pasquinelli writes,
complicated to implement. In 1842
the government pulled its support, the management of labor has will be available gratis at
by which point Babbage had begun turned all of society into a “digital
dreaming of an even less buildable factory” and has taken the form of
machine: the Analytical Engine. De- the software of search engines, on-
signed with the help of the mathema- line maps, messaging apps, social
tician Ada Lovelace, this extraordinary networks, gig-economy platforms,
mechanism would have been the first mobility services, and ultimately
general-purpose computer, able to be AI algorithms. Stand 7E60
programmed to perform any calcula-
tion. Thus, amid the smog and soot of AI ,
he concludes, is accelerating this
Victorian England, the idea of soft- transformation.
ware was born.

T he division of labor was never just

about efficiency; it was also about
T here is no doubt that computers
are often used to the advantage of
employers, from the scheduling soft-
control. By fragmenting craft produc- ware that reduces labor costs by sad-
tion—picture a shoemaker making a dling retail and restaurant workers
pair of shoes—into a set of modular with unpredictable schedules to the
routines, the division of labor elim- several species of “bossware” that en-

March 27, 2025 31

into an output, and the computer a system that eluded control. He had tory, data was expensive to store and Michael Barbaro calls its “original
obeys. a special kind of control in mind: difficult to transmit. By the second sin”: copyrighted material is among
This ethos also guided “symbolic AI ,” economic planning. In his view, the decade of the twenty-first century, the information ingested. The New
the philosophy that came to dominate brainlike complexity and distributed both barriers had dissolved. Plummet- York Times has sued OpenAI for copy-
the first generation of AI research. Its architecture of the market meant that ing storage costs, combined with the right infringement; so has the Authors
adherents believed that by program- socialism could never work. Thus the birth and growth of the Web, meant Guild, alongside Jonathan Franzen,
ming a computer to follow a series of need for neoliberal policies that, in the that a mountain of words, photos, and George Saunders, and several other
rules they could turn a machine into words of the historian Quinn Slobo- videos was accessible to anyone with writers. While OpenAI and the other
a mind. This method had its limits. dian, would “encase the unknowable an Internet connection. Researchers major “model creators” do not dis-
Formalizing an activity as a logical economy,” protecting it from gov- used this information to train neural close the details of their training data,
sequence works fine if the activity is ernment interference.3 Nonetheless, networks. The abundance of train- OpenAI has conceded that copyrighted
relatively simple. As it becomes more Hayek and the other connectionists ing data, along with new techniques works are included—yet maintains
complex, however, hard-coded instruc- were very much on the same team. and more powerful hardware, led to that this falls under fair use. Mean-
tions are less useful. I could give you Rosenblatt and his colleagues were swift progress in fields like natural while the demand for training data
an exact set of directions for driving able to secure funding for their re- language processing and computer keeps growing, compelling tech com-
from my house to yours, but I couldn’t search because the US government vision. Today AI based on neural net- panies to find new ways of obtaining it.
use the same technique to tell you how believed their ideas could help defeat works is ubiquitous, at work in every- OpenAI , Meta, and others have struck
to drive. socialist armies. Hayek was in the thing from Siri to self-driving cars licensing deals with publishers such
An alternative approach emerged business of defeating socialist ideas. to the algorithms that curate social as Reuters, Axel Springer, and the As-
from cybernetics, a postwar intellec- media feeds. sociated Press, and they are exploring
tual movement with extremely eclectic Neural networks also underpin gen- similar arrangements with Hollywood
interests. Among these was the aspi-
ration to create automata with the
adaptability of living things. “Rather
A t first, connectionism failed to
fulfill its promise. By the early
1970s it had fallen out of favor in the
erative AI systems like ChatGPT . Such
systems are particularly large—mean-
ing they are composed of many layers
studios.
For Pasquinelli there is a lesson
here. Contemporary AI ’s reliance on
than imitating the rules of human AI world. Still, neural networks con- of neural networks—and their appe- our aggregated contributions proves
reasoning,” Pasquinelli writes, the tinued to develop quietly over the tite for data is immense. The reason that intelligence is a “social process by
cyberneticians “aimed at imitating subsequent decades, enjoying some that ChatGPT sounds so lifelike and constitution.” It is communal, emer-
the rules by which organisms orga- breakthroughs in the 1980s and 1990s. seems to know so many things about gent, diffuse—and thus a perfect
nize themselves and adapt to the en- Then, in the 2010s, came connection- the world is that the “large language match for the connectionist paradigm.
vironment.” These efforts led to the ism’s quantum leap. model” inside it has been trained on “It comes as no surprise that the most
invention of the artificial neural net- Training a neural network, as terabytes of text drawn from the In- successful AI technique, namely arti-
work, a data-processing architecture Rosenblatt once pointed out, re- ternet, including millions of websites, ficial neural networks, is the one that
loosely modeled on the brain. By using quires “exposure to a large sample Wikipedia articles, and full-length can best mirror, and therefore best
such networks to perceive patterns in of stimuli.” Size matters: since neu- books. This is what Pasquinelli means capture, social cooperation,” he writes.
data, computers can train themselves ral networks learn by studying data, when he writes that the neural net- There is a Marxist coloring to this
in a particular task. A neural network how much they can learn depends in works of contemporary AI are “not a argument: intelligence resides in the
learns to do things not by simplifying part on the quantity of data available model of the biological brain but of the creativity of the masses. But it is also
a process into a procedure but by ob- to them. For much of computing’s his- collective mind,” a social endeavor to an argument that could have been
serving a process—again and again which many people have contributed. made by the profoundly anti-Marxist
and again—and drawing statistical re- 3
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Not everyone is pleased by this fact. Hayek. The old Austrian would be grat-
lationships across the many examples. Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Generative AI ’s voraciousness is re- ified to know that the “intellect” of the
One of connectionism’s progenitors Press, 2018). sponsible for what the podcast host most sophisticated software in history
was Friedrich Hayek, the subject of is sourced from the unplanned activi-
Pasquinelli’s most intriguing chap- ties of a multitude. He would have been
ter. Hayek is best known as a lead- further tickled by the fact that such
ing theorist of neoliberalism, but as a software is, like his beloved market,
young man he developed an interest fundamentally unknowable.
in the brain while working in the Zu- The strangeness at the heart of
rich lab of the famous neuropathol- the generative AI boom is that no-
ogist Constantin von Monakow. For body really knows how the technol-
Hayek the mind was like a market: ogy works. We know how the large
Barzakh
he saw both as self-organizing enti- language models within ChatGPT and
ties from which a spontaneous order its counterparts are trained, even if we
arises through the decentralized in- You scrub from my throat the darkness that sticks to songs don’t always know which data they’re
teraction of their components. These traveling at the speed of light. The songs you play being trained on: they are asked to pre-
ideas would help influence the devel- dict the next string of characters in a
opment of artificial neural networks, are all I hear. With our morning sequence. But exactly how they arrive
which in fact function much like the coffee and kitchen hours. at any given prediction is a mystery.
market mind of the Hayekian imagi- Gone are my industrial sorrows. I am back The computations that occur inside
nation. When a psychologist named the model are simply too intricate for
Frank Rosenblatt implemented the to the blue Arabic note, any human to comprehend. You can’t
first neural network with the help of the astonishment of love just pop the hood and watch the gears
a navy grant in 1957, he acknowledged as an astonishment of loss click away.
his debt to Hayek. that shakes the world off its tail. In the absence of direct observa-
But Hayek also diverged from the tion, one is left with a more oblique
cyberneticians in important respects. I am singing in the shower. method: interpretation. An entire tech-
Cybernetics, as the philosopher Nor- Are you with me? nical field has sprung up around AI
bert Wiener defined it in his epony- Are we face-to-face “interpretability” or “explainability,”
mous 1948 book, involved the scientific or spooning, swaying, swallowing, breathing with the goal of puzzling out how such
study of “control and communication systems work. Its practitioners across
in the animal and the machine.” The within lidless glass? Do we still give thanks academia and industry talk in scien-
term, coined by Wiener, was derived the gas and electric power tistic terms, but their endeavor has a
from the ancient Greek word for the that make space for our safe space? devotional quality, not unlike the ex-
steersman of a ship, which shares the egesis of holy texts or of the entrails
same root as the word for government. We don’t think hope, of freshly sacrificed sheep.
The cyberneticians wanted to create the only tyranny There is a limit to how much mean-
technological systems that could gov- we’ll never overthrow, ing can be made. Mortals must con-
ern themselves—a prospect that ap- will ever run dry. tent themselves with partial truths.
pealed to a Pentagon looking for ways If today’s “AI monopolies” represent
to gain a military advantage in the cold —Fady Joudah “the new ‘eye of the master,’” as Pas-
war. The navy funded Rosenblatt in the quinelli believes, it is an eye with a
hopes that his neural network could limited field of vision. The factories of
assist in “the automation of target Babbage’s day were zones of visibility:
classification,” Pasquinelli explains, by concentrating work and workers,

.
by using its powers of pattern recog- they put the labor process in full view.
nition to detect enemy vessels. Contemporary AI is the opposite. Its
For Hayek, by contrast, connec- casing is stubbornly opaque. Not even
tionism offered a way to think about the master can see inside.

32 The New York Review

 Echoes of Eternity
Jed Perl

How does an artist give timeless val-

ues a timely form? This is the essen-
tial question that Arlene Croce, the
dance critic who died in December at
the age of ninety, never stopped asking.
I don’t think anybody who cares about
the arts hasn’t asked the same ques-
tion. It doesn’t matter whether your
fundamental concern is the musical, vi-
sual, literary, or theatrical arts. A frozen
academicism is almost inevitably the
result when the timeless overtakes the
timely. When the timely overwhelms
the timeless, all you’re left with is a fad.
Croce explored these perilous pos-
sibilities with clarity and honesty for
some fifty years. She believed that
dance, for all its fragility, carried some
echo of eternity. In the sparkling re-
views of theatrical events that she
published in The New Yorker in the
1970s and 1980s, she found her answer
in the urgency that a great choreog-
rapher, George Balanchine, and great
dancers, especially Suzanne Farrell,
brought to ballet steps and sequences
of steps that were centuries old. Equally
important for Croce was the reimag-
ining of all kinds of movement—from
the simplest walking steps to the elab-
orate conventions of flamenco or ball- Arlene Croce and George Balanchine at the Russian Tea Room, New York City, 1981; photograph by Dominique Nabokov
room dancing—in the modern dance
works of Merce Cunningham, Paul
Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and Mark Mor- tradition and innovation. Croce, while Croce found sympathetic, was not only says and reviews, once said to me, partly
ris. Although she spent most of her by no means the only writer to focus a commentator but also a participant in jest, that the only reason Croce ever
career as a journalistic critic covering on these issues, pursued them with in this cultural drama: he brought Bal- wrote about anything other than New
the events of the day, I wouldn’t want an energy and insistence all her own. anchine to America and spearheaded York City Ballet was to remind readers
her death to pass without recognizing Arlene and I became friends some- the founding of New York City Ballet. As of the broad perspectives she brought
the deeper ideas—and overarching time in the 1980s. I had seen many of for Denby, who was trained as a modern to her exploration of Balanchine’s ge-
unity of thought—that informed ev- the dance events she’d been writing dancer in Europe and much admired as nius. Certainly it was in some of her
erything from her generous-spirited about and had read everything she’d a poet, his writings about dance, mostly writing about New York City Ballet that
early writings to some of her later work, published. What I hadn’t known was published between the 1930s and the she came closest to defining what she
in which the prose became less seduc- that she had taken an interest in some 1960s, form a diptych with Croce’s work saw as the limitless potential of dance.
tive, at times almost clinical, and the of my writing about the visual arts. from the 1970s onward. In the 1970s, In one of her most widely admired es-
bleak conclusions provoked bewilder- As our friendship deepened, we often inscribing a volume of his poems to says, “Free and More Than Equal,” she
ment and even controversy. found ourselves discussing, along with her, he wrote, “For Arlene—the best described a 1975 performance by Su-
By the time Croce began publish- the particulars of one or another art, the dance critic of all of us.” zanne Farrell in “Diamonds,” the cli-
ing in The New Yorker in 1973 she more general principles—the aesthetic What joined these three writers was mactic third act of the evening-long
was nearly forty and had already been principles—that shape all the arts and what Croce, in a long essay occasioned ballet Jewels. As Farrell danced—the
writing about the arts for many years. their relationship with society. As the by Kirstein’s memoir Mosaic (1994), music is from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony
While her presence at the premiere of writer Elizabeth Kendall observed in referred to as “the realism-idealism No. 3 in D Major—Croce marveled at
Agon in 1957 marked the beginning of a beautiful reminiscence published in equation.” All three were interested how her extraordinary virtuosity ex-
a lifelong devotion to Balanchine’s art, The New York Times, Croce believed in modern dance, even Kirstein, who ecuting classical steps released her
for a long time her allegiances were “that writing about one art meant en- was glad to have Martha Graham and from the traditional dependence on
divided between movies and dance, gaging with all the arts.” When on one Paul Taylor involved, at least tempo- her partner, in this instance the great
enthusiasms united in The Fred As- of my last visits I asked her what she’d rarily, with New York City Ballet. But Jacques d’Amboise. She wrote about
taire and Ginger Rogers Book, which been reading, I wasn’t surprised that ballet held a special, exalted place for the “off-center balances maintained
received considerable attention when it was a couple of books by Edmund these writers, as the theatrical enter- with light support or no support at
it was published in 1972. Meanwhile Wilson—not the predictable titles like prise in which life’s unruliness and art’s all” and the “long, supported adagio
Ballet Review, the magazine she helped Axel’s Castle or To the Finland Station orderliness could best be knit together. the point of which is to let us see how
found and almost single-handedly ed- but Europe Without Baedeker, his ac- In a salute to Denby after his death little support she actually needs.” “Far-
ited and published beginning in 1965, count of Europe after World War II, in 1983, Croce singled out her friend’s rell’s style,” she continued, “is based
became a forum where critics and his- and one of his very last books, A Win- way of describing that dynamic: “Art on risk; she is almost always off bal-
torians, many at the beginning of dis- dow on Russia, with its reflections on takes what in life is an accidental plea- ance and always secure.” Croce saw
tinguished careers, brought scholarly Pushkin and Tolstoy. “He’s a genius” sure and tries to repeat and prolong a thrilling reimagining of the role of
reach and theoretical depth to the was how she summed up Wilson, an it.” Croce knew there was no aspect the ballerina, which some observers
study of dance. (An added bonus was American original who during a long of a choreographer’s or a dancer’s life by the 1970s regarded as a throw-
the drawings that Croce’s friend Ed- career tackled an extraordinary range that couldn’t influence their work. She back: “In the finale [d’Amboise] is only
ward Gorey contributed for some cov- of subjects. also believed—this was holy writ with there to stop her. She slips like a fish
ers.) Writing for a range of publications her—that nothing about an artist’s life through his hands. She doesn’t stop,
before going to The New Yorker—Danc- had any place in the work unless it had doesn’t wait, doesn’t depend, and she
ing Times, Harper’s, Playbill, Ballet Re-
view—Croce sounded the themes she
would explore all her life: the critic’s
C roce was another American origi-
nal. She was one of a triumvirate,
along with Lincoln Kirstein and Edwin
been reimagined as art. “Classical and
Modern,” Croce wrote in one of the hun-
dreds of manuscript pages she left in
can’t fall.” Farrell, Croce concluded,
had created “a riveting spectacle about
the freest woman alive.”
responsibility as truth teller; the chal- Denby, who explained how an extraordi- her study at the time of her death, “are If Croce found in classical ballet,
lenge of reimagining old choreography nary dance culture, much of it grounded not antithetical. Throughout its history, especially Balanchine’s, timeless val-
DOMI NIQU E NAB OKOV

for new times; the discovery of fresh in ancient principles and practices, classical ballet has incorporated the ues in a timely form, she looked to
dance experiences; the tensions and flourished amid the disorderly magnif- modern; if it had not done so, it could modern dance for a process almost ex-
cross-fertilizations between classical icence of America’s pluralistic democ- not have remained classical. We would actly the reverse: timely values taking
ballet and modern dance; the central- racy. Kirstein, whose book Movement have had to call it ‘antique’ dance.” on a timeless form. That’s the gist of
ity of Balanchine’s New York City Bal- and Metaphor (1970) offered an analyt- David Daniel, a dear friend of hers another defining essay, “Mark Morris
let in the ongoing struggle to reconcile ical approach to matters of style that and the author of some memorable es- Comes to Town” (1984), which helped

March 27, 2025 33

establish the choreographer, still in form tragedy but had to be more than ographical, sometimes helplessly tation of quotations from the master
his twenties, as the new face of mod- mere transcription. Even observers in- so. We sense that in some inscru- when in fact it was a daring attempt to
ern dance. Croce began by discussing clined to agree with her about Jones’s table way Balanchine is personally rethink the nature of tradition. Croce
everything about Morris that epito- work still sometimes wonder why she present. He’s everywhere, but he began with Balanchine’s famous com-
mized the time in which he was liv- wouldn’t at least go and see Still/Here doesn’t block our view of things ment that he was “a cloud in trousers,”
ing: his “curly-haired, androgynously before publishing her critique. I think we enjoy to the point of ecstasy. which he’d borrowed from the Rus-
handsome” looks and what she referred the answer is that Croce, after decades sian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. She
to as his “transsexual chic.” But that as a member of the audience who was For Croce great art was in some myste- then proceeded to argue that much of
was only the beginning: “He’s commit- willing to sit through whatever a dancer rious way transparent, personality not what Balanchine had said was based
ted to his time and place, he seizes on had to offer, felt she was being con- denied so much as dispersed, infused in on things that others had said earlier.
the theatricality of it, but he doesn’t fronted with a kind of guerrilla theater the matter of the medium. She was awe- “Don’t think, dear, do” she credited to
try to be anything more than a good that she could only deal with by adopt- struck by the ability of certain dancers Paul Valéry’s “Danse, cher corps. . . . Ne
choreographer and a completely sin- ing her own guerrilla tactics. Croce has to become something other, much more pense pas!”
cere theatre artist.” For Croce that rarely if ever been called a radical, but than themselves when they were on- In discussing Balanchine’s attitude
was everything. Morris had what she whether she said it or not, I believe stage, and that admiration led to some toward the past, Croce cited T. S. El-
called “the raw gift of choreography.” she felt that Jones’s radical gesture of the most important friendships of iot’s famous essay “Tradition and the
This, she wrote, was “a kind of sanctu- demanded a radical response. her later years, especially with Maria Individual Talent,” in which he argued
ary.” And this sanctuary—the choreo- Writing in The New Yorker, Croce ar- Calegari, Bart Cook, and Edward Villella. that classicism involved “an escape
graphic gift—made it possible for any gued that Jones, by including in Still/ from personality.” This wasn’t entirely
material to become riveting theatri- Here videos of what she described as different from her ideas about Bal-
cal art, even material that on its own
terms didn’t necessarily interest her.
people “who are terminally ill and talk
about it,” had “crossed the line between
theatre and reality.” “In theatre,” she
W hat obsessed Croce more and
more in her last decades—it
was the central theme of the book
anchine’s classicism, but her emphasis
on the choreographer’s conversation
helps us better understand his rela-
wrote, “one chooses what one will be.” on Balanchine she never managed to tionship with the past. While Eliot be-

C roce’s telepathic gift for turning

theatrical events into scintillat-
ing prose left readers eager for more.
This was the crux of her response to ev-
erything that she’d heard about Jones’s
dance event. It reflected her most fun-
complete—was the process by which
a lived experience becomes a fulfilled
work of art. She wanted to dig deep into
lieved that the artist couldn’t reach the
“impersonality” at the heart of tra-
dition “without surrendering himself
Even her eviscerations—of the mod- damental beliefs about the theatrical this question, moving beyond the work wholly to the work to be done,” Croce
ern dance choreographer Pina Bausch arts and art more generally, which al- that had made her famous and that, suggested that for Balanchine the re-
or some fossilized revival of a classic ways involve the transformation of raw in one of her late manuscripts, she re- vitalization of tradition involved per-
by American Ballet Theatre—could experience into aesthetic experience. ferred to as the “reviewer’s Rorschach- sonalizing the past, bringing one’s own
inspire glee, because they so obviously Croce was perfectly willing to go to the blot readings.” In some of her later stresses and accents to older values
reflected another side of her avidity. theater and witness the most agonizing essays in The New Yorker—on the idea and ideas: “As a quotationist, he fre-
What kicked off more ambivalent emo- scenes of pain, suffering, and death, but of the muse, on a painting by Degas, quently succeeded in obliterating the
tions were her efforts, increasingly ur- only with the understanding that the and on Balanchine’s conversation— ‘originator’ of the quote.” A living tradi-
gent in the 1980s and 1990s, to warn “realism-idealism equation” was en- she rejected the intricate exposition of tion necessitated saying things again,
readers that the catalytic relationship gaged, that real life had in some way particular performances and perform- but in your own voice, the old thing
between the timely and the timeless been transformed. She was insisting ers that had endeared her to readers in the new voice becoming altogether
was extraordinarily fragile. Always ad- that art is a part of life that is in some in favor of deep dives into the myths, new. Balanchine “recycled verbal nug-
mired as a truth teller, Croce found critical way apart from life—and there- symbols, and persistent patterns that gets,” she wrote, “in the same spirit in
herself offering some truths that even fore all the more sacred. In “Multicul- she believed fueled the imaginative pro- which he revivified the art of ballet.”
her friends found difficult to absorb. tural Theatre,” another essay from the cess. Writing about Degas’s painting
In some ways the most challenging 1990s, she concluded, “Without the the- of the dancer Eugénie Fiocre, Croce
position she ever took involved her
clear-eyed assessment of New York
City Ballet’s creative collapse in the
atre, dance isn’t a medium; it’s the pre-
serve of anthropologists, not of artists.”
You can disagree with Croce, but to do
argued that the composition included
representations of the five senses
and suggested, with an epigrammatic
C roce retired from regular review-
ing at The New Yorker in 1996 so
she could devote all her energies to
years after Balanchine’s death in 1983. so you must argue that art is little more twist characteristic of her later prose, her book about Balanchine’s ballets.
Writing in 1993, she complained that than a frame through which to observe that what the late-nineteenth-century The years passed, and the book didn’t
the company was wasting hours of re- the lives we’re living—or to launch theo- “symbolists were aiming at” was in fact appear. I’ve heard it said that the
hearsal on “straightening the lines, ries or even polemics about the meaning “realism—actual contact with the problem was that Croce was an essay
getting the dancers to keep together,” of our lives. That’s the position of the complex life of the senses.” This was writer, not a book writer. But a few
while for Balanchine the point had social realists who dominated Soviet precisely the kind of paradoxical idea years ago, when she allowed me to see
never been that the dancers “move as culture through the Stalinist years and that came to fascinate her. parts of the manuscript—and since
one” but that “they moved.” As the imag- of some in the arts community today, Part of the challenge Croce faced her death I’ve seen more—I came to
inative heights generated by the cho- but Croce didn’t see it as a plausible ap- was convincing her friends and a wider believe that the problem wasn’t so
reographer’s day-by-day involvement proach for either an artist or an audience audience that modern art was on an much that she couldn’t produce an
with his dancers faded, Croce docu- in a free society. A few months ago, when unbroken continuum not only with extended work of prose but that ev-
mented the company’s descent into Still/Here was revived at the Brooklyn older art but with older mythological erything she was learning was pushing
bland academicism. For anyone who Academy of Music, some speculated that and symbolic ways of thinking. After her toward a philosophical and some-
shared her admiration for Balanchine’s Croce might have changed her mind. her piece about Degas appeared in The times even hermetic way of writing
towering art, this was a bitter pill, the At the time she couldn’t respond. She New Yorker, the director of the Detroit that involved reimagining her already
truth nobody wanted to face. Some was in rehab, trying to recover from the Institute of Arts wrote to complain fully formed literary style. In the hun-
accused her of exaggeration or a mis- stroke that eventually led to her death. that Degas would never have been dreds of pages—some containing only
placed nostalgia. Croce’s unsparing What caused speculation were some “attracted to the hackneyed concept a sentence or two—that she left at
critique of the company was in some remarks she had made in the introduc- of the five senses.” Although Croce’s her death, I believe there’s much that
sense a family argument, painful for tion to her last essay collection about friends tended to remain silent, at should see the light of day. Some will
passionate students of Balanchine’s art, her struggle as she worked on the essay least in public, I think many of them dismiss this work as cloudy, but be-
while the wider world remained and ap- occasioned by Still/Here. Yet these re- shared the feeling that her thinking fore doing so they might remember
parently remains loyal to the company. marks, anything but a retraction, were was becoming overly generalized. Peo- that her subject was a man who said
The situation was very different only a forthright writer’s account of the ple in the dance world pride them- he was a cloud in trousers.
when she took another challenging difficulties that literary composition selves on their extraordinarily detailed Croce doesn’t so much state as sug-
stand, refusing in 1994 to even attend entails. knowledge of an art form that is by gest. Here are a few of these allusive
a performance of the choreographer I would go so far as to say that for nature ephemeral. Croce herself had an observations. Their power has every-
Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here. The essay she anybody who shared Croce’s profound encyclopedic familiarity with perform- thing to do with provoking further
wrote about that became and contin- admiration for Balanchine, her re- ers and performance practices, and she thought:
ues to be a cultural flash point, even sponse to Still/Here had a certain in- encouraged research into those ques-
among observers with a fairly casual evitability. His ballets, as she saw it, tions when she edited Ballet Review. Even if they do not enact a story,
relationship to the dance world. It are suffused with both the personal- But she came to feel that there were [Balanchine’s] dancers inhabit a
has occasionally been suggested that ities of his dancers and his own pas- bigger questions. It may be strange story-world.
prejudice of some kind shaped Croce’s sions and obsessions, but all of this has to say, but her ultimate commitment
resistance to Still/Here—Jones’s part- been reshaped through the vitality of wasn’t necessarily to dance. Dance, her As a spectacle, ballet’s Renais-
ner, the dancer Arnie Zane, had died a creative imagination. In a passage great passion, the art she responded sance beauty of proportion is
of AIDS —but if anything it was her from her later writings on Balanchine, to most completely, was for her the enhanced by the continual defi-
unwavering awareness of a plague that published in Dance Index in 2023, she medium through which to understand ance of gravity—the force that
had ravaged the dance community she made precisely this point: Balanchine art more generally. shapes the cosmos. Thus ballet’s
knew and loved that pushed her to re- “Balanchine Said,” an essay she pub- appeal has about it a kind of cos-
affirm the freestanding nature of art, didn’t use personal material. And lished in The New Yorker in 2009, was mic heroism. This is repeatedly
which in her view could mirror or trans- yet every ballet of his is autobi- mistaken by some as a mere regurgi- demonstrated in Balanchine’s

34 The New York Review

 

  
A CURRENT LISTING
Alexandre Helicline Fine Art Yossi Milo
(DVWUG6WUHHW1HZ<RUN1<UG)ORRU  KHOOR#KHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRPKHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRP 7HQWK$YHQXH1HZ<RUN1<
DOH[DQGUHJDOOHU\FRP 0LGWRZQ0DQKDWWDQ3ULYDWH'HDOHUE\DSSRLQWPHQW  LQIR#\RVVLPLORFRP
7XHVGD\WKURXJK6DWXUGD\AM –5:30PM
Featuring a selection of American and European paintings, sculptures Sarah Anne Johnson: A Mountain and a Forest
Gallery Selections and works on paper. Through April 26, 2025
And American Art including works by Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove,
Marsden Hartley, and John Marin.
Through March.

Sarah Anne Johnson

6XQ%XUVW &HGDU)RUHVW , 2025
pigment print with oil paint
and holographic tape
Sybil Andrews CPE (British/Canadian, 1898–1992), 7KH1HZ&DEOH 59-3/4" × 39-15/16" (151 × 102 cm)
Tom Uttech, Ojichaagebiishin, 2024, oil on linen ðFRORUOLQRFXWVLJQHGWLWOHGLQVFULEHG¶6HFRQG6WDWH· © Sarah Anne Johnson
ðLQFOXGLQJDUWLVW·VKDQGSDLQWHGIUDPH and numbered 13/60 in pencil upper left courtesy Yossi Milo, New York

LewAllen Galleries Edward T Pollack Fine Arts The John David Mooney Foundation
3DVHRGH3HUDOWD6DQWD)H10 14 Maine Street, #025, Brunswick, ME 04011; (617) 610-7173 :HVW.LQ]LH6WUHHW&KLFDJR,/
(505) 988-3250 ZZZHGSROODFNÀQHDUWVFRP*DOOHU\KRXUVE\DSSRLQWPHQWRQO\  PRRQH\IRXQGDWLRQRUJ
FRQWDFW#OHZDOOHQJDOOHULHVFRPZZZOHZDOOHQJDOOHULHVFRP 0RQGD\WKURXJK)ULGD\AM –6PM; 6DWXUGD\ 6XQGD\E\DSSRLQWPHQW
Fine Prints, Drawings, and Photographs of the 19th–21st Centuries
CHICAGO—Lennart Anderson: A Retrospective opens at the
Jaune John David Mooney Foundation, March 27, and will be on view until
Quick-to-See May 2, 2025. Lennart Anderson (1928–2015) was an American painter
Smith (1940–2025) renowned for his mastery of tone, color and composition. Opening
was a citizen of reception Thursday, March 27, 5:30–7:30pm.
the Confederated
Salish and Kootenai
Nation, whose recent
retrospective at the
Whitney Museum
of American Art
illustrates her
powerful and
thought-provoking
artwork blending
Native imagery with
American modernism.

Jaune Quick-to-See
Smith (1940–2025) David Hockney
&KDUOR, 1982 &(/,$2%6(59,1*
pastel on Fabriano paper etching and aquatint in Lennart Anderson, "Street Scene" (1961), oil on canvas, 77" × 99", collection of
30" × 22" colors, 1976 BNY. © Estate of Lennart Anderson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Museum at FIT

6HYHQWK$YHQXHDWWK6WUHHW1HZ<RUN1<
 ZZZÀWQ\FHGXPXVHXP
:HGQHVGD\WKURXJK)ULGD\PM –8PM; 6DWXUGD\ 6XQGD\AM –5PM

The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology presents



Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of CuriositiesWKHÀUVWLQGHSWK
exploration of the fascinating connections between fashion and
wunderkammern. Featuring nearly 200 rare garments and
accessories, the exhibition presents fashion through the lens of


creativity, collecting and craftsmanship. On view through April 20.
)UHHDGPLVVLRQZZZÀWQ\FHGXPXVHXP   
A collection of notable art and
exhibitions from around the world.
Christian Dior,
OHRSDUGIXUFRDW,
early 1960s.
Gift of Mrs.
If you would like to know more about the listing,
Sylvia Slifka.
Background
image: engraving
please contact [email protected] or (212) 293-1630
of 2OH:RUP·V
FDELQHWRI
curiosities, 1655

March 27, 2025 35

 work—think of the finale of his of styles and periods, and on its alizing that Porter was one of the writ- She regarded Ship of Fools as a major
Swan Lake. origins—most especially on its ers she admired most. She told me that achievement. Days later it occurred to
origins. in 1952 she’d heard Porter speak at the me that she might have seen Porter’s
Dance: the art that names nothing women’s college she was attending in endless labors on what many consid-
and says everything. There is no more methodology to North Carolina; a treasured possession ered an unfinishable project as the
dancing [Balanchine] than there was a volume the writer had inscribed model for her own.
No greater exponent of Horace’s is to playing Bach. to her. Arlene had high praise for Por- Once, when asked about the state
“utile dulci”—poetic sweetness ter’s collected letters, which I hadn’t of the Balanchine book, Croce said
and useful truth—existed than The task of the Balanchine scholar read and which are indeed a kind of it was “done but not finished.” In the
Balanchine. His dances pleasured is much the same as that of the masterpiece. Then our talk turned to arts nothing can ever really be fin-
and instructed audiences as well Leonardo scholar: the deteriora- Ship of Fools, the long novel that Porter ished, at least not if tradition has any
as dancers. tion and mutilation of the work worked on for decades. When it finally chance of remaining alive. In one of
make speculation and second- appeared it became a huge best seller, her last essays about the collapse of
[Balanchine’s repertory] was from guessing inevitable. although many of Porter’s admirers New York City Ballet, Croce worried

.
one standpoint a philosophical dis- believed and still believe it’s among that classical ballet couldn’t “survive
course on ballet, on its merits as During a visit with Arlene a couple her weakest work. When I mentioned the contradictions of stasis and stale
both popular entertainment and of years ago I mentioned that I’d been the widespread criticism of Ship of imitation.” Her work was never static,
cultivated art form, on its range reading Katherine Anne Porter, not re- Fools, Arlene jumped in to disagree. never stale.

An Expanding Vision of America

Nicole Eustace
Yet “expansion” is a euphemism for
imperialism, and “migration” has often
meant violent incursion. In California
in 1849, some 150,000 Indigenous peo-
ple—from Miwoks in the north to Chu-
mash people in the south and hundreds
of communities in between—lived
alongside a limited number of Spanish
missionaries. They were the survivors
of the first waves of colonialism in the
area, tens of thousands of Native peo-
ple having died in and around Spanish
mission towns after their first estab-
lishment in 1769. Worse was soon to
come. Before the 1849 gold rush, many
of those living outside the Spanish pre-
sidios still managed to maintain their
traditional lifeways largely indepen-
dent of the nonnative world. By 1870,
after some 300,000 US whites had
rushed into the region hoping to find
gold, about 120,000 more of the origi-
nal inhabitants had died, leaving just
30,000. Rather than filling a vacuum,
settlers aggressively invaded, stole Na-
tive lands, and nearly annihilated Na-
tive Californians.2
However reluctant white Americans
have been to confront the full history
of US expansion in North America,
Native people have never not known
‘Defeat of the Iroquois at Lake Champlain’; engraving after a drawing by Samuel de Champlain depicting Champlain leading about it. In 1920 the publishers of a
his Algonquin, Huron, and Montagnais allies in an attack on an Iroquois fort, 1613 book by the Oneida historian Laura
Cornelius Kellogg, Our Democracy and
Native Nations: est way to get from the East Coast of white men, dressed in knee boots the American Indian, admitted that
A Millennium in North America to the West Coast—a tedious thirty- and frock coats and wielding pickaxes “for four centuries the white man has
by Kathleen DuVal. day journey by boat down one side of and shovels, push one another off a put off the day of reckoning with the
Random House, 718 pp., $38.00 the continent, across the Isthmus of wharf in their haste to board a ship American Indian.” It has now been five
Panama by land, then back up the Pa- that is sailing away, while in the op- centuries. Though academic specialists
Indigenous Continent: cific—announced that he had arrived posite corner an airship puffs along, have started to speak of “American
The Epic Contest at a fantastical solution. Three years its passengers seated under a balloon genocide” in monographs published
for North America before the French aeronautical en- bearing the line “Each Passenger must by university presses, popular myth
by Pekka Hämäläinen. gineer Henri Giffard introduced the provide a boy to hold his hair on.” has continued to promote the idea of
Liveright, 571 pp., $22.00 (paper) world to the dirigible, the world’s first There’s little in Currier’s frolicsome the US as a benign nation animated
steerable airship, Porter entered New scene that suggests serious violence, by benevolent ideals.
The Rediscovery of America: York’s Tabernacle Church in March which is fitting, since many Americans Now, more than a century after
Native Peoples 1849 carrying “an operating model of a have regarded the pursuit of prosperity Kellogg tried to complicate that story,
and the Unmaking of US History flying machine constructed to navigate and the westward “expansion” of the we may finally be at a historical and
by Ned Blackhawk. the air.” The newspaper Niles’ National United States as simple processes of moral turning point. Major new books
Yale University Press, Register proclaimed, “The possibility progress—the gradual rise of civili- written by eminent scholars for gen-
596 pp., $35.00; $22.00 (paper) of going to California in one of these zation on a largely empty continent. eral readers about the peoples who
vessels, in the short space of five days Even today leading American history lived in North America for millen-
When prospectors in California re- is asserted.” textbooks offer airy chronicles of “the
BRI DG E MAN I MAGE S

ported finding gold in 1849, hundreds Nathaniel Currier, the lithographer nation’s founding and its expansion 2
See Benjamin Madley, An American Geno-
of thousands of people from across soon to become famous as one half of through migration, immigration, war, cide: The United States and the California
the United States frantically traveled the celebrated duo Currier and Ives, and invention.”1 Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (Yale Uni-
there to stake a claim to fortune. In created a cartoon lampooning Porter’s versity Press, 2016), and Ed Vulliamy, “Re-
New York, Rufus Porter, an inventor invention entitled “The Way They Go 1
Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the claiming Native Identity in California,” The
impatient with what was then the fast- to California.” In one corner, a group United States (Norton, 2018), p. xviii. New York Review, June 22, 2023.

36 The New York Review

nia before the arrival of Europeans be places of suffering and hardship. repeated messages that being Na- East Coast (where they had ready ac-
promise to reshape the history of the Turning away from cities and choos- tive was backward and wrong. cess to Atlantic trade), to argue that
continent. They include Kathleen Du- ing to live in smaller communities this fact should somehow lessen the
Val’s Native Nations: A Millennium in allowed them to elaborate economic Nevertheless, she ends the book on significance of the mass destruction
North America, Pekka Hämäläinen’s systems based on reciprocity and the a triumphant note with the words of Pequots at the hands of settler col-
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Con- sharing of resources, as well as gov- of the Comanche scholar Paul Chaat onists is perplexing, to say the least.
test for North America, and Ned Black- ernance structures that promoted Smith, who affirms that “our survival Hämäläinen fails to note that the
hawk’s National Book Award–winning democracy and prevented dictatorial against desperate odds is worthy of a Pequot Nation comprised some eight
The Rediscovery of America: Native leadership. The principle of balance celebration.” thousand people in 1633, but its num-
Peoples and the Unmaking of US defined Indigenous ideals of political bers quickly fell to about four thou-
History. power and material gain alike. DuVal sand after a settler-borne smallpox
quotes traditional teachings and con-
temporary Native scholarship from the P ekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Con-
tinent also foregrounds the Native
epidemic began that year and raged
through 1634; the Pequots were then

N ative Nations is a magisterial over-

view of a thousand years of Na-
tive American history “inspired and
Tohono O’odham of the Southwest to
the Haudenosaunee of the Northeast
on these ideals, noting, for example,
presence in North America in opposition
to the myth of Native absence. Offering
a broad overview of North America from
so aggressively attacked by Massachu-
setts Bay that by 1638 only a few hun-
dred had not been killed or enslaved.
informed” by Native scholars, artists, that the O’odham base their lives on the precontact period to the nineteenth Other historians note that the earliest
and activists. Starting many sections a core value they call himdag, or “re- century, he aims, like DuVal, to present efforts by English colonists to system-
with descriptions of her visits to con- lations between people, the land, and a vision of the continent’s history that ize slavery through the creation of for-
temporary Native American museums, all creation.” treats Native people as central rather mal legal regulations came with the
cultural centers, and historic sites, and Native people’s interest in creating than peripheral and “reveals a world captivity and sale of Pequots, not of
describing countless conversations she sustainable ways of life stood in stark that remained overwhelmingly Indige- Africans. Pequots themselves warned
has had with Indigenous experts, DuVal contrast to the interests of Europeans. nous well into the nineteenth century.” as early as 1636 that “the English were
foregrounds Native perspectives, Native DuVal laments that Proposing that his book “might be best minded to destroy all Indians.” Skip-
purposes, and the enduring strength of described as a biography of power,” he ping over those inconvenient truths to
Native nations, which maintained con- British colonists could have lived asserts that for centuries after the first celebrate “Indigenous power” obscures
trol of most of North America until well side by side with Native nations, colonial contacts, more than it reveals.3
into the nineteenth century. continuing to ally and trade in Hämäläinen’s overemphasis on Na-
DuVal’s title telegraphs her central mutually beneficial ways. . . . But Indians controlled most of North tive resilience in the era of the Pequot
interpretive claim: Indigenous people generally their search for profits America, and often they did not War exemplifies his basic approach. He
live, and have always lived, as nations— combined with their fear of Native know about the exploits of the consistently recounts confrontations
sovereign polities that effectively gov- power to create a desire to be free Europeans beyond their borders. between colonists and Indigenous peo-
ern communities. Recognizing Native of Native nations. And if they did, they did not care. ples as exciting “contests” in which
collectives as nations—not as “bands,” Instead, the Indigenous peoples the Indigenous side prevailed more
or “tribes,” or “clans,” or any of the other She never loses sight of the fact that were interested in the ambitions often than not. By the time he reaches
anthropological condescensions with time after time, from the Pequot and experiences of other Indige- the late-nineteenth-century reserva-
which they have often been labeled— Nation to the Cherokee Nation, the nous peoples. tion era and proclaims that “Native
means acknowledging the legitimacy of Kiowa Nation, the Comanches, and reservations were a sign of American
their right to govern their own societ- the Plains Apaches, Europeans and This point is too easily lost in tra- weakness, not strength,” because their
ies, organize their own economies, and Euro-Americans denied and disre- ditional portrayals of the rise of the establishment proved that “the United
define and defend their own territories garded Native sovereignty and treated United States as inevitable and un- States simply lacked the capacity to
according to the traditions and princi- Native peoples not as nations but as stoppable, or even as a divinely fore- defeat and domesticate the Indians,”
ples they find most fitting. disorganized populations subject to ordained matter of “Manifest Destiny.” the full impact of his narrative strat-
Take DuVal’s reflections on the rise domination. Hämäläinen’s subtitle signals the egy emerges. Hämäläinen means to
and fall of Cahokia, the four-thousand- As her story reaches through the distinctive element of his approach: in offer recognition of Native peoples’
acre site near present-day St. Louis twentieth century to the present, his muscular version of events, clashes achievements in retaining some rem-
where Mississippian peoples con- DuVal shows the increasingly deter- between colonists and Native nations nants of territory even after enduring
structed some 120 earthwork “mounds,” mined efforts of Native nations to represented an “epic contest” that can centuries of displacement and even-
or terraced elevated platforms, from reassert their status and exercise sov- best be understood from the perspec- tual confinement to geographical areas
the ninth through the fourteenth cen- ereign rights in the modern world, as tive of military history. Briskly written only a tiny fraction of the size of their
turies. By the time Europeans first well as the always intense opposition chapters describe one armed conflict original distant homelands. Yet his ap-
viewed the city, it had been abandoned to Indigenous independence by settler after another, but although Hämäläinen proach can lead him to trivialize the
for hundreds of years. The newcomers colonists: believes that Indigenous history mat- vicious hostilities he dramatizes.
immediately began describing Cahokia ters in its own right, he generally nar- In focusing on the spectacle of victo-
as the lost city of a fallen empire, nar- While . . . Europeans for a long rates it through the eyes of European ries and defeats, we risk losing sight of
rating a story of mythic decline and time had less power over North and Euro-American witnesses as they the asymmetries of these contests. In-
reversion to primitivism. America than they claimed . . .when confront Indigenous antagonists and digenous nations fought defensively for
DuVal rebukes such depictions: they ran up against the realities experience a series of wins and losses. survival, whereas invaders often sought
“Ruins . . . tend to conjure images of of their own limited power . . . Eu- Thus, despite his laudable intention outright to destroy them. Over time the
collapse and a tragic loss of a golden ropeans often unleashed violence to radically recenter Native history, intensity of white racism could amplify
age, but the generations that followed far beyond most societies’ norms, Hämäläinen’s account hews more aggression to the point that it became
the cities’ fall generally described what including their own. closely to traditional history than not. genocidal, a concept captured in the term
came later as better.” Far from evi- Furthermore, though he takes great “settler colonialism,” as employed by the
dence of tragedy, the abandoned city Ultimately DuVal’s portrait of Native pains to ensure we know where his Australian historian Patrick Wolfe.4 To
of Cahokia demonstrates that after North America emphasizes “a com- sympathies lie, Hämäläinen’s insis- be clear, at the book’s end Hämäläinen
experiencing the effects of centraliza- bination of victimhood and survival,” tence on paying respect to Native minces no words in saying that by the
tion—the concentration and polariza- laying bare the depth and endurance prowess can have the unintended con- Civil War, “the United States had be-
tion of wealth, the imposition of social of Native nations and cultures even sequence of underplaying the grav- come a genocidal regime” in relation
hierarchy as a means of maintaining as she depicts Indigenous history as a ity of Euro-American violations. For to the Native population. Nevertheless,
order, the crowded conditions and san- perilous story of unrelenting struggle example, when describing the Pequot
itation challenges of urban life—Indig- that continues today. War of 1636–1638, which pitted that 3
Population estimates vary; the approxima-
enous people rejected this system and One satisfaction in reading DuVal’s Native nation against colonists from
tion of eight thousand in 1633 is referenced
decided to follow a different model. Ar- account comes from her effort “to live New England, he claims that historical
by members of the Mashantucket (West-
chaeological records and oral histories up to the call of Shawnee Tribe Chief accounts that overemphasize “the infa-
ern) Pequot Tribal Nation today. On Pequot
alike indicate that although people re- Benjamin J. Barnes for scholars to mous massacres of Pequots . . . distort
enslavement, see Margaret Ellen Newell,
mained spread across the Mississippi ‘work with not on indigenous com- the historical reality” in an “elemental
Brethren by Nature: New England Indians,
region, they left cities, allowed their for- munities.’” Throughout the book, she way: they make the colonies seem more
Colonists, and the Origins of American Slav-
tified palisades to gradually fall into dis- brings in the voices of contemporary powerful than they actually were.” To
ery (Cornell University Press, 2015). For the
repair, and moved over far wider areas Indigenous researchers, writers, and the contrary, Hämäläinen stresses that
phrase “minded to destroy all Indians,” re-
into small agricultural communities. leaders who give a vivid sense of the “curbed by Indigenous power, the En-
ported by the Puritan critic Roger Williams
DuVal emphasizes that this was a situ- vitality of the Native present. DuVal glish colonists had spread up and down
in 1636, see Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Geno-
ation not of mass flight amid crisis but emphasizes that along the Atlantic coast . . . managing
cide: Native Nations and the United States
rather of slow and deliberate dispersal. only fleeting inroads into the conti-
from the American Revolution to Bleeding
Whereas Europeans regarded cities Native Americans today live with nent’s interior.” While it is certainly
Kansas (Yale University Press, 2019), p. 20.
as the essence of civility—DuVal notes the loss and trauma echoing true that as of 1650, just twenty years
that both words share the Latin root from nineteenth- and twentieth- after the establishment of Massachu- 4
“Settler Colonialism and the Elimination
civis—Native peoples of North Amer- century attempts to destroy them, setts Bay, the still-small English pop- of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research,
ica more often found urban centers to through both physical violence and ulation remained clustered along the Vol. 8, No. 4 (December 2006).

March 27, 2025 37

in the effort to valorize Native peoples documentary power flows from assert their claims to their land and teenth century to the present. It was
and offer an “epic” narrative of their each land cession. people—from the first efforts of Pe- invoked as recently as 2005 to deny the
resistance and endurance, he some- quots to arm against colonial Mas- land claims of Native nations bringing
times inadvertently minimizes Indig- No less than the forced labor and com- sachusetts; to the diplomatic efforts suits before the Court. In City of Sher-
enous suffering. modification of Africans, thefts of the of eminent Native negotiators in the rill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York
Depicting catastrophic conflicts be- lands and people of Native America eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, (2005), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
tween the Indigenous peoples of North helped to finance the formation of from the Six Nations in the Hudson quoted a 1974 decision explaining that,
America and the European and Euro- the United States. The force of Black- Valley across to the Northwestern Con- according to the Doctrine of Discovery,
American settler colonists as an epic hawk’s analysis comes through his me- federacy of the Great Lakes and the
contest also allows military events ticulous demonstration that in every Ohio Valley, to retain control of land; fee title to the lands occupied by
to overshadow other aspects of their era of American history, both dreams to the urgent efforts of early-to-mid- Indians when the colonists arrived
confrontation. Hämäläinen doesn’t of democratic self- sufficiency for twentieth-century activists to oppose became vested in the sovereign—
always linger on the underlying mo- whites and nightmares of enslavement the termination of tribal rights and first the discovering European na-
tivations or overarching implications for Africans and African Americans force the recognition of tribal sover- tion and later the original States
of events. In the book’s introduction, played out on Indigenous homelands. eignty—takes on added significance. and the United States.
he explains that Blackhawk shows that at each The final section of the book, which
point in the development of the po- details Indigenous rights activism in Blackhawk’s book demands that we ask
power is defined as the ability of litical economy of the British colonies the twentieth and twenty-first cen- a crucial question: If Europeans and
people and their communities to and the United States, exploitation turies, provides a revealing exam- their descendants claimed the conti-
control space and resources, to in- of Native peoples, expropriation of ination of the significance of Native nents of America by right of “discov-
fluence the actions and percep- Native land, and extraction of Native sovereignty—the successful insistence ery,” what new rights might emerge
tions of others, to hold enemies at resources fueled Euro-American ad- of Native people that they be recog- from the “rediscovery” of America
bay, to muster otherworldly beings, vancement. When Puritans weren’t nized as citizens of Native nations, not today?
and to initiate and resist change. celebrating the “plagues” that depop- merely as inhabitants of reservations. Europeans sailed to lands they had
ulated Native farmlands, they were It is here that he introduces Laura never seen before, where they encoun-
In this long list of the elements of warring to seize and enslave Native Cornelius Kellogg and makes clear tered peoples they had never known
power, only the word “resources” even people. Revolutionary patriots includ- just how long Indigenous intellectu- before. The year 1492 marked a trans-
begins to hint at the economic incen- ing George Washington joined land als have been trying to reshape ac- formative era in world history, one that
tives of Euro-American settler colo- investment companies and engaged counts of US political and economic brought a new awareness of the shape
nialism in North America. Hämäläinen in property speculation schemes on history. In Kellogg’s spirit, Blackhawk and size of the globe and catalyzed a
does say toward the end of the book Native territory. Jacksonian-era south- never lets us forget that his book is series of novel contacts between cul-
that “the United States’ expansion- ern planters decried the supposedly not a work of “Indigenous history” tures and societies on a scale never
ist burst—mightily boosted by rising childlike incompetence of Cherokees but rather one of American history. He previously imagined. However, though
capitalism—was a dark moment for as they eyed gold mines in Georgia and eloquently argues that “the enduring Europeans named and claimed Amer-
many Native Americans in the West,” cotton lands across the Native South. sovereignty of Native communities” ica, it was not an empty continent
which captures some of the suffering Railroad companies in the antebellum must be recognized “as a defining waiting to be defined but one teem-
inflicted by US imperialism. Yet it West routed their tracks through Na- thread of US politics.” Maintaining ing with people living in flourishing
makes it seem as if the capital that tive nations and drained Native wa- sovereignty, not simply achieving bare nations. The only way any European
funded expansion appeared from no- terways to cool their locomotives. By survival on shrunken territory, is the empire could assert that its people
where, rather than from strategic and the nuclear era, uranium-mining com- real source of Native power. As an en- were the “first” to find the lands of
sustained appropriations of Native panies were enriching themselves on rolled member of the Te-Moak Tribe of the Americas was to ignore the real-
lands and lives that began at least lands of the Dakota. Indeed, Blackhawk Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada, ity—the very humanity—of those who
as far back as the enslavement of the contends that the Civil War and Re- Blackhawk brings experience to bear were already there.
Pequots. construction era must be understood on his account. The expansion of the United States,
not only as a conflict over slavery but far from being accomplished by virtu-
also as a cascading settler revolution ous farmers and liberty-loving patri-

T he California gold rush lampooned

by Nathaniel Currier was only the
most dramatic instance in which US
against Indigenous territorial rights.
Both the Union and the Confederacy
marshaled troops against Native na-
I n calling for a “rediscovery of Amer-
ica,” Blackhawk draws a through line
from the earliest days of colonial con-
ots somehow able to float above the
sordid history of imperialism, relied
on remarkable levels of rhetorical and
citizens sought to profit from Indig- tions even as they squared off against tact to our present political moment. physical violence. Blackhawk insists
enous riches. To learn in detail about each other. Blackhawk concludes: The phrase inverts and ultimately re- that we must reckon with the fact that
the economics of empire and how vi- futes the “Doctrine of Discovery” that no sooner did Europeans set foot in
olence was integral to the creation of To claim the Civil War was solely first set American settler colonialism in America than they began systemati-
capital, readers must turn to the work a conflict between the North and motion. Developed within two years of cally despoiling the continent and its
of Ned Blackhawk. The Rediscovery South is to miss this settler revo- the first voyage of Christopher Colum- peoples. At every critical point in the
of America explicitly aims to present lution and its transformative vio- bus in 1492, this doctrine was created subsequent political and economic de-
a history of the United States of lence. Viewing the era as a conflict by Pope Alexander VI of Spain when he velopment of the United States, pur-
America as much as a study of Na- defined by “slavery” versus “free- issued a papal bull dividing the newly loined Native resources proved pivotal.
tive America. Blackhawk begins from dom” also erases multiple cam- “discovered” lands of the Americas be- Together with the forced labor of en-
the deceptively simple premise that paigns of dispossession, removal, tween the Catholic kingdoms of Portu- slaved peoples of Africa and the Amer-
“focus upon Native American history and even genocide. gal and Spain on the theory that there icas, stolen lands and resources made
must be an essential practice of Amer- could be no true exercise of sovereignty possible the creation of the world’s first
ican historical inquiry.” Exasperated Blackhawk insists that we not allow by people ignorant of Christianity. Not modern constitutional democracy.6
by the fact that popular histories con- the celebration of abolitionism to ob- to be outdone, King Henry VII of En- Reconciling the reality of mass
tinue to describe the nation’s past as scure the endurance of imperialism. gland issued a royal proclamation in thievery, enslavement, suffering, and
a story of black and white, slavery and At every turn, violence brought In- 1496 granting John Cabot the author- death with more familiar and comfort-
freedom, without reference to Indige- digenous immiseration and Euro- ity “to find, discover and investigate able stories of the spread of liberty,
nous experience, he calls for rejecting American enrichment. Even when the whatsoever islands, countries, regions prosperity, civility, and law is an enor-
binary conceptions of American his- federal government began negotiating or provinces of heathens and infidels, mously difficult task. Yet only by con-
tory in favor of a multiracial approach. treaties with Native nations that paid in whatsoever part of the world placed, fronting the complicated facts of our
Moreover he demands that we consider implicit and even explicit respect to which before this time were unknown collective past may the United States
US history over a five-hundred-year Indigenous sovereignty, states and to all Christians,” and take them in the today move toward greater truths, to-
span that reaches into the present, the individual settlers abrogated these name of England.5 ward new forms of redress for Indige-
better to understand how hostilities agreements with impunity. And yet Before there were armies, there were nous peoples and descendants of the
between Native peoples and settler such egregious violations were never announcements: ritual proclamations enslaved, and toward the recuperation
colonists have metastasized over time. acknowledged as such. From the begin- that Europeans regarded as almost su- of the nation’s finest values—freedom,
Settler colonists engaged in system- ning, Blackhawk explains, racist “ideas pernatural incantations of divine au- equality, and opportunity. There are no
atic violence not in an abstract con- of immutable difference” provided “the thority to claim America. We might be shortcuts and no fairy-tale flying ma-
test over power but rather in concrete ideological mortar” for the structures amused by the absurdity and arrogance chines to take us there, but there are

.
and concerted efforts to seize Native of settler colonialism. From assertions of it all, if not for the fact that the US strongly researched and written books
lands along with people and natural of difference came predictions of im- Supreme Court has relied on the Doc- of history that may help us begin to
resources. Blackhawk writes: minent disappearance. Whites spread trine of Discovery from the early nine- work toward the realization of Amer-
the myth that Indigenous people sim- ica’s most lofty promises.
Unlike the myths of American his- ply failed to thrive, rather than the re- 5
On the history of the papal bulls estab-
tory, Indian land transfers and ality that whites systematically sought lishing the Doctrine of Discovery, see 6
See Martin Loughlin, “The Contemporary
economic challenges occurred at to deprive them of every form of rights. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Crisis of Constitutional Democracy,” Ox-
actual times and places. . . . An Against this backdrop, Blackhawk’s Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 ford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2
archive of both knowledge and account of Natives’ determination to (Yale University Press, 2006), p. 68. (2019), pp. 435–454.

38 The New York Review

 

 

 
 

  
 





  


 

 
 

 



  
 
  

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March 27, 2025 41

 The Lucky One
Jacob Weisberg

Reagan: His Life and Legend away completely, resurfacing recently

by Max Boot. in the laughably awful biopic Reagan
Liveright, 836 pp., $45.00 (2024), starring Dennis Quaid. In real-
ity, the Communists didn’t control the
Inauguration Day 1981 dawned with CSU , and there was never a Kremlin
a message from the White House. At plan to turn Hollywood into a propa-
6:47 AM Jimmy Carter phoned Ronald ganda factory.
Reagan, the president-elect, who was But Reagan’s self-serving revision-
staying across Pennsylvania Avenue at ism didn’t stop there. Though he helped
Blair House, to update him on negoti- implement the Hollywood blacklist
ations to free the fifty-two American at SAG , enforcing loyalty oaths and
hostages held in Iran. Carter, who had “clearing” actors suspected of Com-
been up the previous two nights work- munist ties, he insisted for years af-
ing on the deal, was appalled that Rea- terward that there had never been a
gan was still asleep and didn’t return blacklist. This was despite the McCar-
his call for almost two hours. thyite meet-cute story behind his con-
It set a chilly tone for their joint nection with Nancy Davis, a contract
ride to the Capitol in the presiden- performer at MGM who came to him
tial limousine—a tradition that en- to clear herself after being confused
dured until 2021, when Donald Trump with a blacklisted actress of the same
declined to attend his successor Joe name. Swiftly and blissfully remarried
Biden’s swearing-in. On the drive, Rea- in 1952, Reagan continued his political
gan tried in his accustomed way to cut pilgrim’s progress. A “Democrat for Ei-
the tension with jokes and old Holly- senhower” in that year’s presidential
wood stories. “He kept talking about election, he spent much of the decade
Jack Warner,” Carter complained to an traveling the country as a spokesman
aide. “Who’s Jack Warner?” for General Electric, talking about so-
That anecdote, recounted in Max cialism coming to America on little
Boot’s definitive and fair-minded bi- cat’s paws. By 1960, he later wrote,
ography, Reagan: His Life and Legend, he had “completed the process of
tells you a lot about the man who be- self-conversion” to conservatism.
came the most important figure in That process carried him beyond
postwar conservatism. Unlike Carter, even Barry Goldwater into the wider
Reagan wasn’t going to be up nights orbit of the John Birch Society. Rea-
sweating the details. During his first gan’s GE speeches drew on fake quo-
term, the fine points of management tations he had picked up from Birch
fell to a capable troika of trusted literature. He was still citing a pam-
aides who ran the White House: James phlet entitled “The Ten Command-
Baker, his silkily effective chief of ments of Nikolai Lenin” at a press
staff, and two trusted California hands, conference in 1983. His unintentionally
Edwin Meese, who handled policy and Ronald Reagan; illustration by Yann Kebbi ironic message was that Communists
appointments, and Michael Deaver, were willing to tell any lie to advance
who managed the media and PR . In dacy for governor of California in 1966, tional Alliance of Theatrical and Stage their cause. “It would not matter if
contrast to his beleaguered predeces- Warner was said to have quipped, “No, Employees (IATSE ) and the Confer- three-fourths of the human race per-
sor, Reagan time and again showed Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronnie ence of Studio Unions (CSU ). IATSE was ished, the important thing is that the
himself to be uncannily lucky. The Reagan for best friend.” larger and more powerful but mobbed remaining one-fourth be Communist,”
hostages were released in the first Reagan’s film career fizzled after up and corrupt. The smaller but more Reagan claimed “Nicoloi” Lenin said.
minutes of his presidency—too late World War II as his first wife Jane militant CSU was led by the set painter Needless to say, no Lenin of any first
to help Carter but ideally timed to con- Wyman’s took off, a factor in the and former boxer Herbert K. Sorrell, name ever did. A version of the quote
fer an aura of strength on the incom- dissolution of their marriage. While who welcomed Communist support but is stenciled on a wall at the Reagan
ing administration. he remained on the Warner payroll was not a party member himself. The Library in Simi Valley, correctly mis-
For all his confrontational rhetoric, until 1952 and continued to work as studios preferred to deal with IATSE attributed to Vladimir Ilych Lenin.
the new president loathed personal an actor into the 1960s, he left his because it included movie projection- Some of Reagan’s emerging views
conflict and would, in moments of real mark on Hollywood not as a per- ists, and they feared its power to shut about the Soviets were downright
stress or awkwardness, escape into former but as a union official, elected down not just production but theaters peculiar—not just at odds with his
a dreamworld filled with old actors an unprecedented six times as presi- around the country. In March 1945, be- friends on the right but embarrass-
and cinematic plotlines. Who was dent of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG ). fore the war was even over, more than ingly naive. In a statement from the
Jack Warner? Jack Warner was the Labor politics was a primary driver 10,000 CSU members went on strike early 1960s, he predicted that the So-
vulgar and ruthless mogul who ran of Reagan’s shift from Roosevelt- over recognition, halting several pro- viet leaders might just throw in the
Warner Bros. and launched Reagan’s admiring New Deal liberal to hard- ductions. SAG ’s decision to cross the towel once they recognized that “in
movie career when he signed him line anti-Communist and right-wing picket line, which Reagan advocated an all out race our system is stronger.”
to a $200-a-week contract in 1937. voice within the GOP . (Another fac- at a pivotal union meeting, provoked To prompt them to concede, he sug-
Reagan regarded Warner as the all- tor was the 94 percent marginal tax a new round of violence in Hollywood. gested in a 1977 radio commentary, the
powerful god of Hollywood, bestowing rate he was theoretically subject to He later claimed he was threatened United States might consider dropping
success when he smiled and bringing on income above $200,000, though in with an acid attack and on the ad- millions of mail-order catalogs on So-
ruin when he glowered. It was Warner reality Reagan, like other actors, was vice of studio security began carry- viet cities. This, too, was an imagined
who turned the “hick radio announcer” able to pay a 25 percent capital gains ing a handgun. movie scene. If only the Russian peo-
from Des Moines into a bona fide star. rate by receiving his earnings from With a disregard for truth that would ple could see Sears’s latest range of
Reagan gave Warner no headaches, “temporary corporations” set up for become his trademark, Reagan ro- dishwashers and tumble dryers, they
unlike the rake Errol Flynn, who would each movie.) manticized the defeat of the CSU as would all run out to vote for Jimmy
turn up on set late and hungover, for- a triumphant victory over commu- Stewart. Still, Reagan turned out to be
get his lines, and refuse to work past nism. By 1961 he was giving a regu- more correct than his neoconservative
afternoon. Reagan, who was cast op-
posite Flynn in Santa Fe Trail (1940),
believed dependability always beat ge-
R eagan the politician was formed by
the Red Scare, when unions were
riven by intense battles over accusa-
lar stump speech that turned it into
both legend and lesson: “Ugly reality
came to our town on direct orders of
advisers in forecasting that commu-
nism was bound to collapse from its
internal contradictions.
nius. Acting was a job like any other: it tions of Communist ties. He emerged the Kremlin. Hard core party organiz- Reagan’s views on communism were
demanded that you show up on time, as a leader of his fellow actors during ers infiltrated our business,” Reagan a strange passel of incongruities. The
know your lines, hit your marks, and one of the first of the strikes that over- said. “The aim was to gain economic Soviets were bent on world domination
be pleasant to deal with. Politics was took the movie industry in 1945 and control of our industry and then sub- (more faux Lenin: “The last bastion of
not so different. Warner, though, mis- 1946. In Hollywood two unions wanted vert our screens to the dissemination Capitalism will not have to be taken.
judged him as an eternal supporting to lead the painters, carpenters, and of Communist propaganda.” This was It will fall into our outstretched hands
man. When Reagan declared his candi- other backstage workers: the Interna- pure mythology, and it has never gone like overripe fruit”), but they were also

42 The New York Review

 on their last legs, selling rat meat in ghanistan, Reagan missed the diplo- dutifully fact-checks many of the tall
the markets. It was necessary to con- matic opening and went right back to tales that the press at the time let A NEW CRIME NOVEL FROM
front and challenge them everywhere his talking points denouncing the So- slide, a flow of falsehoods unrivaled
JEAN ECHENOZ
but also to engage, make peace, and viet invasion. in the White House until 2017. Reagan’s
be friends. Victory would be a long More than one biographer has de- moral fables emphasized American vir-
and arduous struggle but also, like spaired of finding the “real” Reagan tue and his own, and he sometimes
quashing communism in Hollywood, behind the carapace of vagueness, self- conflated scenes from World War II
not that hard. delusion, and contradiction. Edmund movies with actual events from the war.
Morris had the most catastrophic fail- A significant part of his self-
ure. Given unprecedented access to mythology involved casting himself as

I n his first term, Reagan’s rubbish

quotes and orations about defeat-
ing communism helped to escalate nu-
the president while he was in office,
he discovered that it was of little use:
private Reagan was the same as public
Ronald Reagan, Friend to Black Peo-
ple. He included in this repertoire a
likely true story from his Illinois days
clear tensions to their most dangerous Reagan. Morris spent a decade flailing about inviting two Black teammates
point since the Cuban missile crisis. before concluding that there was noth- on the Eureka College football squad
This upset and frustrated him deeply. ing beneath the surface. He novelized to sleep at his house after they were
How, he asked his aides, could Soviet long stretches of Dutch (1999) in the turned away at a hotel. More dubious
leaders misunderstand his heartfelt voice of an imaginary friend. was his claim to have opposed segre-
desire for peace and disarmament? Yet Boot, a Russian-born military histo- gation in baseball during his time as
listening to him, how could they not? rian and conservative apostate, tells a sports announcer. (There’s no evi-
Horrified by an awareness that he the life without reaching for an over- dence he ever did until after it had
was increasing the risk of nuclear arching thesis. His own political shift ended.) Upset by Supreme Court Jus-
war, Reagan decisively tacked toward from Reagan Republican to centrist tice Thurgood Marshall criticizing his
détente in his second term. Guided liberal has helped him make sense of civil rights record, he invited him to
by Secretary of State George Shultz, Reagan’s evolution in the opposite the White House to hear this farrago.
he sought engagement. British prime direction. Boot appreciates that one “I think I made a friend,” Reagan wrote In Command Performance, Jean Echenoz,
minister Margaret Thatcher told him doesn’t simply swap one worldview in his diary afterward. one of France’s most respected contem-
that Mikhail Gorbachev, expected to for another. Residues of the earlier That same Ronald Reagan opposed porary writers, toys with the tropes of
become the next Soviet leader, was politics inevitably remain. He finds the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the genre fiction and high literature, display-
Voting Rights Act of 1965, and some- ing the twists of plot and turns of phrase
times told racist jokes—including one, that have become his signature.
told to the Black Republican senator
“Fans of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s
Edward Brooke, about African can-
deadpan irony will appreciate
nibals. Boot makes clear that Reagan
Echenoz’s vibrant, playful homage to
fully understood the symbolism of
the hard-boiled genre, which plays
launching his campaign as the 1980
a bit like The Big Lebowski on the
GOP presidential nominee in Phila-
Seine. This is a good bet for crime
delphia, Mississippi, near the spot fiction fans seeking something off the
where the civil rights workers James beaten path.” —Publishers Weekly
Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mi-
chael Schwerner had been murdered “[T]he never-predictable French author
by Ku Klux Klan members sixteen turns to crime with the story of a
years earlier. Reagan may never have sacked flight attendant who sets up
made explicitly racist statements, but his own investigation agency . . . . It’s a
he expressed a belief in states’ rights hectic tale, but keeping up with the
that let nostalgic segregationists know breakneck pace is all part of the fun.”
he was on their side. —John Self, The Guardian

“Mark Polizzotti. . . has delivered here

President Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump at a reception in the White House,
Washington, D.C., 1987
T he gap between Reagan’s words
and deeds was the culmination of
a lifelong practice of using his imagi-
an English version with the original
brio intact. . . if a whip-smart escape
is what you’re looking for—along with
nation to remodel intolerable realities. some tips on how to dress—you won’t
a man they could do business with, no difficulty in continuing to admire His whoppers reflected the rich fan- want to miss Command Performance.”
though dangerously charming. Reagan Reagan the man while castigating his tasy life of a poor boy dragged from —Kai Maristed, World Literature Today
couldn’t wait to make friends and tell troubled relationship with reality and home to home by an alcoholic father.
Gorbachev about his great vision: the
total elimination of nuclear weapons,
a management style that he aptly de-
scribes as behaving “as if he were a
Early on he developed idealization as a
coping skill. His was not the fine mind
COMMAND
starting with intermediate-range mis- bystander in his own administration.” that could hold opposing thoughts si- PERFORMANCE
siles in Europe. Even for Democrats in Congress and multaneously and still function; it was Jean Echenoz
Boot takes advantage of declassi- others who saw him as dangerous, Rea- the politician’s mind, good at believing Translated by Mark Polizzotti
fied documents from the Reagan– gan was awfully hard to dislike. Along that which serves and ignoring con- Paperback • $16.95
Gorbachev summits that have been with Lincoln and FDR, he was one of tradictory evidence. This didn’t end On sale March 11th
published in the last decade.1 These America’s few spontaneously funny with his triumph over Hollywood com-
verbatim transcripts provide a some- presidents. In Santa Cruz a bearded munism or his fight against racism. It Command Performance is the May 2025
times comical picture of their meet- demonstrator shouted, “We are the fu- included the belief that he and Nancy selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club.
ings. At the 1985 Geneva Summit, ture!” at the governor’s limousine. Rea- were raising a happy family. (Three of To join the club, please call 1-800-354-
Reagan proposed a stroll in the woods. gan scribbled a quick reply and held it his four children wrote memoirs about 0500 or visit www.nyrb.com.
(It had all been prearranged of course.) up to the window: “I’ll sell my bonds.” how miserable they had been.)
Reagan told Gorbachev that he should In the White House, he was in on the The hazards of his wishful think-
inform the Soviet experts on the US joke about his nodding off at work ing became clear with the confessions NEW YORK CITY LAUNCH EVENT
that he had made “not only grade-B (most embarrassingly at the Vatican of his budget director David Stock-
Tuesday, March 11th, 7pm
movies, but also a few good ones.” Well- with John Paul II): “I have left orders man, published in a 1981 article in
with Mark Polizzotti and
prepped about the performance Rea- to be awakened at any time in case of The Atlantic Monthly. Reagan’s eco-
Christian Lorentzen
gan thought was his finest, Gorbachev national emergency—even if I’m in a nomic goals—an enormous tax cut,
Community Bookstore
said that he had seen Kings Row and cabinet meeting.” While distant and an increase in military spending, and
143 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn
“had liked it very much.” But if Gor- remote with his own children, Reagan serious deficit reduction—were in-
RSVPs requested for this free event
bachev found some of Reagan’s eroge- was endearing to staff and strangers. compatible without what Stockman
Visit communtybookstore.net
nous zones, he was frustrated that the He spent time each day answering wanted: “a frontal assault on the Amer-
W HI TE HOUSE / GE TT Y I MAGE S

major concession he offered didn’t cut letters, often enclosing a personal ican welfare state,” as he later wrote. It
through Reagan’s fog. When Gorbachev check when touched by a hard-luck was time to choose, but Stockman’s at-
proposed pulling his troops out of Af- story. Cast as a gangster in his final tempts to get Reagan to acknowledge
film, The Killers (1964), he fell flat— the need for choices were unavailing.
1
See Gorbachev and Reagan: The Last Su- he just didn’t have any nasty in him. While he only eliminated one federal
perpower Summits—Conversations That At the same time, his baloney could program (revenue sharing with states
Ended the Cold War compiled by Svetlana drive you bonkers. (Faux Marx: the best and localities) and did not significantly
Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton (Central way to impose socialism is “to tax the reduce the tax burden overall, Rea- Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com

European University Press, 2020). middle class out of existence.”) Boot gan preferred to believe that he had

March 27, 2025 43

 stopped the rise of socialist big gov- told an aide. This produced a raft of core beliefs and those of his white
ernment. Nor could he face the fact bipartisan legislation and an unex- working-class supporters. His popu-
that an aide had betrayed him. After pectedly moderate record. Reagan lism reverses Reaganism on free trade,
the article came out, Reagan made a inveighed against the state univer- immigration, international alliances,
show of punishing Stockman, quickly sity system and doubled its budget. foreign intervention, and the role of
forgave him, and blamed the whole He criticized environmental regulation government. Despite Elon Musk’s
mess on the press. while protecting rivers, augmenting DOGE rampage, Trump doesn’t share
With the Iran-contra affair, the aging the state park system, and implement- Reagan’s philosophical aversion to
president’s idealism ramped up to a ing the country’s strictest emissions big government. He simply wants to
kind of dissociation from reality. The standards. He raised taxes and signed control it, the way other strongmen
diary he assiduously kept was always a bill in 1967 that effectively legalized around the world do. Beyond the calcu-
numbingly literal. (“Back to the of- abortion in California, pointing the lations of the cold war, Reagan didn’t
GLASS DOME MAGNIFIER fice—some desk work, mainly catching way to Roe v. Wade. The Golden State feel any kinship with authoritarianism
All the essential features of an ideal reading up with Photo signings. Then a hair- political situation explains many po- or authoritarians.
tool have been brought together in this excep- cut & upstairs. Exercise & shower. And sitions of Reagan’s that today would But these differences in outlook
tional magnifier. The optical glass provides 4x now it’s dinner time.”) On November be laughed out of a Republican con- conceal real-world continuities. Like
magnification without distortion (400% is 22, 1985, the president recorded that vention. He supported gun control Reagan, Trump pursues incoherent
considered the most comfortable magnification an undercover operation was going to because the Black Panthers were run- economic policies that fuel inequal-
for reading small print). Not handheld, the get American hostages held in Lebanon ning around with weapons (and later ity and tilt the playing field in favor
2½" dome is placed directly on the reading freed. A few pages later, he was de- to honor James Brady, his spokesman of the wealthy. Trump’s huge 2017 tax
matter and effortlessly slides along the surface. nouncing this same arms-for-hostages who was gravely wounded when John cut without offsetting spending reduc-
#05-GD626 • $22.95 trade he had just referred to as a “wild” Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassi- tions was firmly in the Reagan mold.
and “unfounded” story. Confronted nate Reagan in 1981). He supported His latest budget proposals—not only
with the evidence that he had approved amnesty for undocumented migrants extending his 2017 tax cuts but fur-
and encouraged Oliver North’s Iranian both out of natural sympathy and be- ther reducing the corporate rate while
gambit, he was flummoxed. “I just don’t cause farmers needed them to pick eliminating taxes on Social Security
understand why they don’t believe me,” fruit and vegetables. benefits, tips, and overtime—amount
he told his spokesman Marlin Fitz- This practical politician’s mindset to Reaganomics without even a linger-
water. “I wasn’t trying to trade arms.” is at odds with our image of Reagan ing care for fiscal responsibility. An-
One of the most poignant moments in the ideologue. Yet it explains his major other through line is the GOP ’s political
Reagan’s presidency was his nation- accomplishments in domestic and for- bargain with the Christian right, ce-
WEARABLE LED READING LIGHT ally televised apology. “A few days ago, eign policy—the tax cut in 1981; the mented by judicial appointments and
The New York Times Wirecutter chose this as I told the American people I did not restructuring of the Social Security the long fight to repeal Roe v. Wade.
the #1 pick for a wearable reading light. It’s trade arms for hostages,” he said. “My system in 1982; tax and immigration The rise and triumph of the Federalist
comfortable, hands free, and rechargeable. heart and my best intentions tell me reform in 1986; and the Intermediate- Society spans the two presidencies.
The light beam is restricted to the target area; that was true, but the facts and the range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. Boot traces their commonalities to
it can be bright enough for you and at the same evidence tell me it is not.” No longer These successes were made possible by Barry Goldwater and the hard right
time dim enough to not disturb others nearby. allowed to believe the best about him- his half-a-loaf mindset and through co- turn of the Republican Party in 1964.
Among its many technical virtues: self, he retreated into his shell, hurt operation with Democratic congressio- Reagan followed Goldwater in de-
•Three color temperature modes: yellow and confused. nal leaders who mostly shared it. When picting expansive government as a
(general reading), warm white (knitting Reagan said he could not be moved, Hayekian “road to serfdom.” Trump
and sewing), and cool white (for repairs). that was just a negotiating posture. (His frames the federal bureaucracy as a
Three dimmable brightness levels.
•

Each of the two light heads has an T he core quality Boot rightly empha-
sizes as enabling Reagan’s success
was his pragmatism, in many respects
commitment to the Strategic Defense
Initiative, the missile defense system
he announced in 1983, which after more
“deep state” conspiracy against him.
Both versions have racial underpin-
nings: white voters’ suspicion that fed-
independent switch to adjust these settings.
• Rechargeable battery (up to 80 hours) akin to that of his early political hero than forty years is still more concept eral programs exist for the benefit of
Franklin Roosevelt. As far back as a than reality, stands as an exception.) minorities. In 1980 backlash politics
Each box includes: 1 Glocusent LED Neck
student strike at Eureka College, Reagan kept theory and practice in sep- took advantage of the reaction to inte-
Light, 1 USB Type-C Cable (24"), 1 User
Reagan was posturing to audiences arate, airtight compartments. That’s gration, busing, and affirmation action.
Manual, and 1 Bookmark
about standing up for principle while how the archfoe of communism made With Trump, the backlash manifests as
#05-WLDRL • $24.95 angling for compromise in private. On peace with the Soviets and the man antiwokeism, defamation of migrants,
screen and facing the public, he was a who would never trade arms for hos- and vengeance against political oppo-
conviction politician. But behind the tages sent antitank missiles to Iran. nents. We are going to find out whether
scenes—as with the arms for hos- It’s how the most antitax and antigov- Trump’s version, in its second itera-
tages trading—the bazaar was open ernment president of the modern era tion, is substantively more severe than
for business. raised taxes more times than he cut Reagan’s or merely nastier and noisier.
Reagan’s image of compromise came them and increased the size of the fed- In other ways, too, Trumpism can
in large part from the strike and settle- eral government. As in California, there be interpreted as Reaganism without
ment he led at SAG , when he returned were vast wildernesses between what restraint, conscience, or taste. The old
in 1959 for his sixth term as president. he said, what he did, and what he later laments about the B movie star bring-
The issue was residuals for old movies believed he had done. ing Hollywood stagecraft to the presi-
that were being shown on television.2 dency now seem snobbish and quaint.
Reagan ended the six-week strike by Where Reagan employed communica-
getting the studios to agree to resid-
uals for future films and to pay into
an actors’ pension fund to compensate
T he theories if not the practices of
Ronald Reagan continued to guide
Republicans after the cold war and until
tion skills he first developed as a radio
announcer, Trump the reality TV star
has reframed the president’s job as a
for the pre-1960 productions. Even the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump, nonstop competition for ratings. The
his friend Bob Hope thought it was a who seemed to take the party in a radi- one was a disciplined performer, the
lousy deal, but for Reagan it became a cally different direction. But a historical other is a cynic and charlatan.
totem of successful negotiation. One question hovers over Boot’s book: Does Admiration for Reagan remains a rare
RECHARGEABLE HAND-HELD of his favorite lessons—recounted in Trumpism represent the repudiation of point of agreement between Trump fol-
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his pre-presidential autobiography, Reaganism or its fulfillment? lowers and the remaining never-Trump
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44 The New York Review

 A Milton for All Seasons
Catherine Nicholson

What in Me Is Dark:
The Revolutionary Afterlife
of Paradise Lost
by Orlando Reade.
Astra House, 260 pp., $28.00

John Milton wrote The Readie and

Easie Way to Establish a Free Com-
monwealth in early February 1660, in
a final, furious attempt to persuade
Parliament not to end England’s tur-
bulent, eleven-year experiment in self-
governance. By the time it appeared in
print, at month’s end, its failure was
all but guaranteed; General George
Monck, commander of the English
forces in Scotland, had forced the re-
turn of Parliament’s deposed Royalist
members, and the new assembly was
preparing the legislative ground for
the return of Charles II, the exiled Stu-
art heir to the throne. The pamphlet’s
opening lines, added just before it went
to press, are a master class in under-
statement. “Although since the writ-
ing of this treatise, the face of things
hath had som change,” Milton begins,
“I thought best not to suppress what I
had written, hoping that it may now be
of much more use and concernment.”
Addressing himself directly to “those
who are in power,” he urges them not to
act in haste or “to refuse counsel from
any in a time of public deliberation.”
Then the mask of equanimity slips, re-
vealing the bitterness beneath: “If thir
absolute determination be to enthrall
us, before so long a Lent of Servitude,
they may permitt us a little Shroving-
time first, wherin to speak freely, and
take our leaves of Libertie.”
Indeed, apart from its title, this last
published work of Milton’s prose—
the capstone to two decades of bold,
often scandalous advocacy on behalf of
freedom from the tyrannies of church
and state—expresses little faith in the
ease of securing liberty or the read-
iness of any of the constituencies to John Milton; illustration by Laura Breiling
which it appeals: not Parliament, not
the army, and certainly not the English
people, who, having “justly and mag- On evil dayes though fall’n, and dom fighters, abolitionists, feminists, were motivated and led by the
nanimously abolished” monarchy, were evil tongues; Black radicals, Communists, and anti- devil, or the personification of the
now evidently content “to fall back or In darkness, and with dangers fascists alongside white supremacists, devil. So Milton and Mr. Elijah Mu-
rather to creep back . . . to thir once ab- compast round, Hells Angels, and reactionary gurus of hammad were actually saying the
jur’d and detested thraldom of King- And solitude; yet not alone, while the alt-right—testifies to the force and same thing.
ship.” But he permits himself a flicker thou appeal of Milton’s creation, and to the
of optimism in the final lines: “I trust I Visit’st my slumbers Nightly, or inherent instability of his cause. True In this swift summation, Reade ob-
shall have spoken perswasion to abun- when Morn liberty entails the freedom to be wrong. serves, the author of The Autobiogra-
dance of sensible and ingenuous men Purples the East: still govern thou phy of Malcolm X offers “an astonishing
[and] to som perhaps whom God may my Song, interpretation of a Christian poem
raise of these stones to become chil-
dren of reviving libertie.” It’s an evoc-
ative image, compounded of scriptural
Urania, and fit audience find,
though few. R eade begins with one of the more
inspiring cases—and one of the
few in which a reader does not assume
written three centuries earlier,” seiz-
ing Paradise Lost to diagnose and an-
swer “the radical needs of the present.”
reference (the dry bones raised to new The invocation of Urania irresist- that Milton was, in William Blake’s for- Certainly, as a critic, one can marvel
life by the prophet Ezekiel), classical ibly—if misleadingly—identifies the mulation, “of the Devil’s party without at the confidence and concision of that
allusion (the army bred from dragon’s poet with his doomed antihero, since knowing it.” On the contrary, in 1948, reading. On the other hand, brief as it
teeth by Cadmus, the stones raised it comes just after Milton has fin- when a young inmate of the Norfolk is, there’s plenty in it to quibble with.
by the music of Amphion’s lyre), and ished recounting the saga of the war Prison Colony in Massachusetts, a re- For starters, as Merve Emre recently
a strong dose of messianic fervor—a in heaven, which ends with Satan’s cent convert to the Nation of Islam, pointed out in her review of Reade’s
hint, to those with ears to hear, of rebellious forces hurling themselves found a copy of Paradise Lost in the book in The New Yorker, Milton’s poem
where Milton was headed next. down “to the bottomless pit.” And as prison library, in “either volume 43 or isn’t in volume 43 or volume 44 of the
Seven years later the first edition of Orlando Reade’s new study of the “rev- 44 of The Harvard Classics,” he recog- Harvard Classics. (It’s in volume 4.)
Paradise Lost appeared in print. At the olutionary afterlife” of Paradise Lost nized the poem’s villain at a glance: More seriously, Paradise is Adam and
midpoint of his epic poem on the fall suggests, more than a few readers have Eve’s lost home, not Satan’s; Milton
of man, Milton channels the defiant been eager to join them there. What in The devil, kicked out of Paradise, mentions knights only to tell us not to
tones of The Readie and Easie Way, Me Is Dark tracks the poem’s recep- was trying to regain possession. look for them in his epic, and Richard
summoning his muse tion by dissidents, rebels, reformers, He was using the forces of Europe, the Lionheart doesn’t appear at all.
and actual and would-be outlaws of all personified by the Popes, Charle- For Emre, such forcing of the poem
with mortal voice, unchang’d stripes, from the eighteenth century magne, Richard the Lionhearted, to fit the reader’s own agenda, how-
To hoarce or mute, though fall’n to the present. The motleyness of the and other knights. I interpreted ever worthy, leaches it of its properly
on evil dayes crew—which includes anticolonial free- this to show that the Europeans revolutionary power. “Perhaps a more

March 27, 2025 45

authentically radical way to read Par- as wide as Creation.” When Thomas That will forget thee; thou hast fore the beginning of time itself. Mil-
adise Lost,” she writes, “is to insist on Paine sought to stiffen the spines of great allies; ton’s God cannot help knowing what
the scandal of its strangeness, to yield the American colonists in their re- Thy friends are exultations, will happen to Adam and Eve. (For that
to its alien vision”—in short, and not bellion against the crown, he cribbed agonies, matter, neither can Milton’s readers.)
to put too fine a point on it, to read from Milton’s Satan: “Never can true And love, and man’s But he insists that his foreknowledge
Paradise Lost. Fair enough. reconcilement grow where wounds unconquerable mind. is no constraint on their free will; it
But I wouldn’t be so quick to claim of deadly hate have pierced so deep.” “had no influence on their fault.”
close reading as the real radicalism, or Ben Franklin’s unorthodox private lit- As Reade points out, Milton’s Satan And Milton—pace Wordsworth, pace
to dismiss the value of motivated (or, urgy included a prayer said by Milton’s supplies the poem’s penultimate word, Blake—is on God’s side in the end.
indeed, accidental) misreading. After Adam and Eve. And Thomas Jefferson lending Wordsworth’s calm certainty a There is, from his perspective, a tragic
all, Malcolm X knew he was a partial copied into his commonplace book an defiant subtext. “What though the field grandeur in God’s predicament, bur-
reader of Paradise Lost; that was the array of passages from Paradise Lost, be lost?” Satan demands of Beelzebub, dened by awareness of all that is to
whole point of the encounter, which including Adam’s pointed question to come and bound by his own liberty-
he cites as evidence of his determi- God: “Among Unequals what Society/ All is not lost; the unconquerable loving nature not to interfere: were
nation to gain, “with every additional Can sort, what Harmony or true De- Will, it not for the Son’s self-sacrificing
book that I read, a little bit more sen- light?” Reade notes that the question And study of revenge, immortal intervention, freedom would mean
sitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and was “grimly significant for Jefferson,” hate, letting Satan win. Baron de Vastey
blindness that was afflicting the black whose sexual relationship with Sally And courage never to submit or seems to have responded to this de-
race in America.” The fact that Mil- Hemings likely began when she was a yield: manding strain in the poem. “Hail to
ton would have had other things on young teenager and his property under And what is else not to be thee, happy land! Land of my choice!
his mind didn’t give him pause. American law. overcome? Hail to thee, Hayti, my country!” he
This is the paradoxical strength of The hypocrisy of those who fought writes in his Reflexions. “Sole asylum
Reade’s approach, too. It’s unusual, for freedom on their own behalf while The implied identification—anti- of liberty where the black man can lift
and instructive, to encounter a work enslaving others was plain to some: colonial Black liberator with venge- his head to behold and participate in
of criticism so at ease with the idea at a dinner in Oxford in 1777, the year ful fallen angel—is vexed, to say the the bounties dispensed by the univer-
that its cherished object might, at best, after the signing of the Declaration of least; one of Louverture’s successors sal Father of Man.” There’s an echo of
be useful to its readers—answerable Independence, Samuel Johnson raised rejected it outright. In an 1817 pam- Satan here, to be sure—“hail horrours,
to their needs and their purposes. And his glass “to the next insurrection phlet entitled Reflexions on the Blacks hail/Infernal world”—but in hymning
if Reade cannot always manage the of the negroes in the West Indies.” and Whites, Baron de Vastey, a “free the happiness of choice, liberty, and
tension between his desire to attend Johnson’s critique of the American man of color” appointed as secre- participation, come what may, Vastey
to those needs and purposes and his revolutionaries strongly resembled tary to King Henri Christophe, then is singing Milton’s song.
attachment to the actual poem, that his critique of Milton himself, whose ruler of the northern part of Haiti,
struggle itself reveals the contradic- great poem he reluctantly admired and summoned the intellects of the Eu-
tory impulses of deference and resis-
tance, attention, appropriation, and
misapprehension that sustain the life
whose advocacy for the ostensibly re-
publican, often authoritarian regime
of Oliver Cromwell he despised: “They
ropean Enlightenment to defend Hai-
tian sovereignty against the French.
Marveling at the stubbornness of the
O ver the course of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, Milton’s
radicalism was gradually eclipsed by
of any work of art. who most loudly clamour for liberty do “Beelzebub colonist[s],” Vastey likens his reputation for greatness. Para-
A bigger problem with the book is not most liberally grant it.” them to Milton’s fallen angels, who, dise Lost became a classic: Coleridge
its structure. What in Me Is Dark is That irony was, of course, abundantly “though vanquished, thunderstruck, placed it alongside Shakespeare’s plays
divided into twelve chapters, each fo- evident to those who were themselves and precipitated into the abyss, still on “one of the two glory-smitten sum-
cusing on one reader or community of enslaved. In his autobiography, the ab- struggle by every method their villainy mits on the poetic mountain.” By the
readers and one book of Paradise Lost. olitionist Olaudah Equiano recalled his can suggest to recover the empire of early twentieth century, the overween-
But the reception history of the poem first glimpse of the island of Montser- which a just and retributive God has ing specter of literary mastery—what
doesn’t neatly track with its narrative rat as a child captive on a slave ship for ever deprived them.” The powers Virginia Woolf dubbed “Milton’s bogey”
unfolding. Lots of readers are galva- bound from West Africa to the Carib- that work for freedom are necessar- —could be conjured simply by utter-
nized by the Satan of the early books; bean, with a reference to Milton’s Hell: ily divine; Satan and his followers are ing the poem’s name. In a 1918 diary
no one is particularly excited about merely thwarted imperialists. entry Woolf reports that her “intellec-
the potted biblical history in Books Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, This is, inarguably, the right reading tual snobbishness was chastened this
11 and 12. So Reade’s bifocal approach where peace of Paradise Lost, which was written, morning by hearing from Janet [Case, a
works best early on, when he connects And rest can never dwell, hope as Milton declares, to “justify the ways friend and Woolf’s former tutor in an-
the soaring rhetoric of Milton’s fallen never comes of God to men.” But throughout the cient Greek] that she reads Don Quixote
angel-in-chief to the libertarian ideals That comes to all, but torture poem’s history it remains something & Paradise Lost.” Spurred to emulation,
and moral hypocrisies of figures like without end of a minority view. The difficulty, fa- Woolf wrote, “Though I am not the only
Thomas Jefferson and William Words- Still urges. . . . mously, is Milton’s God, whose cranky person in Sussex who reads Milton, I
worth. It works less well in later chap- omniscience is, as Reade puts it, “a mean to write down my impressions
ters, where he strains to connect, say, Slavery was hell, but enslaved and problem both for the plot and for Mil- of Paradise Lost while I am about it.”
Hannah Arendt’s fraught relationship formerly enslaved readers of Para- ton’s theology.” Anticipating in Book Those impressions were mixed. On the
with Martin Heidegger to the post- dise Lost did not tend to follow the 3 the Fall of man, thousands of lines one hand: “How smooth, strong and
lapsarian Adam and Eve. Romantics in identifying with Satan: before it occurs in Book 9, God sounds elaborate it all is! What poetry!” On
It isn’t just that Arendt’s ideas in like the young Malcolm X, they saw irritated to the point of exasperation the other: “I get no help in judging
The Human Condition about work, the devil in the guise of their white with his new creation: life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived
forgiveness, and starting anew are, oppressors. or knew men and women.”
as she insists, “strictly secular,” how- Whose fault? Perhaps for this very reason, be-
ever much they have in common with Whose but his own? Ingrate, he cause the poem is so eager to explain
the teachings of Jesus; it’s also that
the two mentions of Paradise Lost in
that book are both citations not of the
I n 1791 the enslaved people of Saint-
Domingue, the most lucrative of the
French Atlantic colonies, rose up in
had of me
All he could have; I made him just
and right,
them and only intermittently invested
in knowing them, women have been
among the most cautious, skeptical,
poem but of Karl Marx’s enigmatic armed revolt under the leadership of Sufficient to have stood, though and insightful critics of Paradise Lost.
pronouncement that Milton wrote it Toussaint Louverture, a former slave free to fall. They are revolutionary readers whose
“for the same reason that a silkworm who cast himself as heir to the rev- rebellious impulses are directed in
produces silk,” because “it was his na- olutionary spirit of the Enlighten- Verb tenses are a grammar alien to no small part against the poem’s au-
ture.” Whatever Marx meant by this— ment. The English were torn between an eternal being: we haven’t yet met thor, whom Woolf called “the first of
something to do with the subsumption schadenfreude and fear: first they tried Adam and Eve, but for God they al- the masculinists.” (“Milton was great,”
of labor by profit in the unnatural re- to seize the colony for themselves; ready exist in disappointing retrospect. muses the eponymous heroine of Char-
gime of capital?—Arendt disagreed then, having fought to a humiliating “Many readers find it difficult to like lotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley, “but
with him. Yet it isn’t clear that she draw, they negotiated a peace; finally, this intemperate God,” Reade observes; was he good?”) When Adam asks God
disagreed with him about the meaning they righteously denounced Louver- within the poem, even his only begotten for a companion equal to him, Mary
of Paradise Lost—or that she (or Marx, ture’s capture by Napoleon’s army. Son seems to find him trying. Wollstonecraft was pleased to note,
for that matter) read the poem at all. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet for the As Reade argues, the God of Para- “Milton seem[ed] to coincide” with
imprisoned hero, in which he channels dise Lost is perpetually on the defen- the argument of her own Vindication
the grand style and spacious line of sive because “he doesn’t want to be of the Rights of Woman (1792). On bal-

R eade is on firmer ground when

charting the influence of Paradise
Lost on the architects of the American
Paradise Lost:

Thou hast left behind

mistaken for a Calvinist.” That is, he—
like Milton—wants to preserve the
essential zone of human freedom fore-
ance, however, she found Milton’s Eve,
“our first frail mother,” an uninspiring
type: “When he tells us that women
and Haitian Revolutions. John Adams Powers that will work for thee; air, closed by the doctrine of double pre- are formed for softness and sweet at-
wrote of reading Milton’s poem on a earth, and skies; destination, according to which some tractive grace, I cannot comprehend
“hazy, dull Day” in 1756: “That mans There’s not a breathing of the souls are saved, the rest are damned, his meaning.” Contemplating the “par-
Soul, it seems to me, was distended common wind and all of this was decided by God be- adisiacal happiness” of the unfallen

46 The New York Review

couple, she observes in a stinging foot- sacrifice herself on the altar of an in- segregationists who found in Milton’s he says, by teaching Paradise Lost in
note, “instead of envying the lovely telligence as peevish, obstinate, and poem a repertoire of images sanctify- a youth correctional facility and a New
pair, I have, with conscious dignity, or self-regarding as that of Johnson’s Mil- ing their racial hatred. Jersey state prison during a stretch of
Satanic pride, turned to hell for sub- ton. “She felt sure that she would have Indeed, throughout the middle sec- years when he was trying, and mostly
limer objects.” accepted the judicious Hooker,” Eliot tions of Reade’s book, as the age of En- failing, to write a dissertation on Re-
Wollstonecraft’s daughter wasn’t so writes, “if she had been born in time to lightenment and revolution gives way naissance poetry. He is careful not to
sure. She was still a teenager when save him from that wretched mistake to the age of the American Civil War, sentimentalize his incarcerated stu-
she married yet another Satan-smitten he made in matrimony”—according to Reconstruction, and industrial capital- dents or their responses to his teach-
Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, who Izaak Walton’s biography of Richard ism, the liberatory potential of Para- ing. “The role of education programmes
regarded “Milton’s Devil as a moral Hooker, the eminent divine’s chief “af- dise Lost proves harder for readers to in America’s prison system is compli-
being . . . far superior to his God.” The fliction” was his marriage to his land- grasp. Assimilated into the edifice of cated, to say the least,” as he observes.
being created by the title character lady’s drippy daughter, who expected tradition, the poem and its author ap- But reading Paradise Lost with them
of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; him to do household chores and help pear as distilled emblems of authority forced him to shed some of his anxious
or The Modern Prometheus (1818) is no mind the children—“or John Milton itself. Milton was a fool, in Friedrich deference to the poem, attuning him
such paragon; he is, as Reade notes, when his blindness had come on; or Nietzsche’s judgment, “enamoured of to its imperfections and—what may
“both Adam and Satan,” a creature who any of the other great men whose hab- a moral monster”—the desire “to be amount to the same thing—its vital-
yearns for a mate and comes to resent its it would have been glorious piety more than an artist . . . the moral awak- ity. Unlike Jordan Peterson, the self-
his existence, cursing his creator. He to endure.” ener of his nation.” “Paradise Lost is appointed dean of the manosphere,
is also a monster and—in a brilliant In the event, Dorothea plights her not the less an eternal monument be- who has claimed Paradise Lost is “a
metafictional touch—a reader of Par- troth to the dried-up Casaubon, whose cause it is a monument to dead ideas,” prophecy” of modern spiritual de-
adise Lost. “I read it . . . as a true his- pedantry she mistakes for genius. The wrote an early-twentieth-century biog- cline, “rationality . . . ascendant from
tory,” the monster recalls of his first spell fades quickly: Casaubon is cranky rapher in half-hearted defense. “Milton the ashes of Christianity,” and whose
encounter with Milton’s poem. and crankish; “Dorothea had thought is the worst sort of poison,” declared nutty self-identification with Satan
that she could have been patient with Ezra Pound. supplies Reade with his book’s final,
I often remarked the several situa- John Milton, but she had never imag- One could argue that the fascist cautionary interlude, Reade himself
tions, as their similarity struck me ined him behaving in this way.” Casau- Pound’s dislike proves Milton’s radical has no totalizing vision of the poem
to my own. Like Adam, I was cre- bon himself is more perceptive. Early in bona fides, but Reade is more careful or its politics. They are both, he says,
ated, apparently united by no link their courtship, Dorothea asks him how than that. He sees that modernism’s for readers to make “sense of in their
to any other being in existence. . . . she might prepare herself “to be more mistrust of Milton was grounded on own ungovernable ways.”
[But] I considered Satan as the useful” to him in his studies: “Could I some legitimate reservations, not only It is a modest conclusion, at inter-
fitter emblem of my condition; for not learn to read Latin and Greek aloud about the aesthetic and political agen- esting odds with the book’s subtitle on
often, like him, when I viewed the das in which Paradise Lost had been the poem’s “revolutionary afterlife.”
bliss of my protectors, the bitter enlisted but also about the poet’s own But not every reader of Paradise Lost
gall of envy rose within me. towering ambition and achievement. is radicalized by the experience; a good
Milton’s poem “deals in horror & im- many, by Reade’s own account, have
Far from becoming a champion of mensity & squalor & sublimity, but found in Milton’s vision of fallen human
human freedom, as does the tragic pro- never in the passions of the human nature fodder for conservatism, cau-
tagonist of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus heart,” wrote Woolf in her diary. “Has tious liberalism, nihilism, or outright
Unbound (1820), Mary Shelley’s mon- to you, as Milton’s daughters did to their any great poem ever let in so little light authoritarianism. This is what fallen-
ster converts his envy, incel-like, into father, without understanding what they upon one’s own joys & sorrows?” ness means: what is dark in Paradise
a spree of violence culminating in the read?” He wryly reminds her of the con- It is, of course, a manuscript of Mil- Lost—its rage and disillusionment with
murder of Frankenstein’s bride. clusion to that particular anecdote: “If I ton’s verse that the protagonist of A the benighted masses, its misogyny, its
Milton’s own relationships with remember rightly, the young women you Room of One’s Own hopes to see when totalitarian impulses and apocalyptic
women were less strained, but not by have mentioned regarded that exercise she requests—and is politely, regret- cravings—cannot be extricated from
much: his first wife fled his home for in unknown tongues as a ground for re- fully, firmly denied—access to the li- its generous, humane, and liberatory
three years just after they were mar- bellion against the poet.” (According to brary of an unnamed Oxbridge college: qualities, the splendor of its images,
ried, and his grown daughters came to Milton’s nephew and first biographer, “Ladies are only admitted . . . if accom- or the beauty of its verse. Nor, if they
resent him bitterly, possibly because Edward Phillips, they regarded it as “a panied by a Fellow of the College or could be, would the poem necessarily be
he made them serve as his unpaid Tryal of Patience, almost beyond en- furnished with a letter of introduc- better for it. Edmund Burke, no friend
secretarial staff. Those difficult ties durance,” and, as a maidservant later tion.” The “kindly gentleman” deliv- to revolutions, described Paradise Lost
served as a template for one of the reported, “made away some of his books ering the message appears to Woolf’s as “uncertain, confused, terrible, and
great unhappy marriages in the his- and would have sold the rest . . . to the narrator “like a guardian angel barring sublime to the last degree.” He meant
tory of the English novel, the union dunghill women.”) the way”; this postlapsarian Eden is it at least partly as a compliment.
of Dorothea Brooke and Edward Ca- Casaubon’s allusion to Milton’s fa- for male readers only. Of all the writ- There is also this: one underrated
saubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch milial strife, exposed to public scru- ers whose strengths and shortcom- benefit of becoming a classic—the
(1871–1872). Reade’s claim that when tiny at the proving of his will, lends ings Woolf confidently appraised in kind of book “everybody talks about . . .
the twenty-eight-year-old Eliot called him a touching hint of self-awareness her diary, the feminist literary scholar and nobody reads,” as Reade reports
Ralph Waldo Emerson “the first man I and shades Dorothea’s idealism with Susan Gilbert notes in an indispens- an anonymous nineteenth-century wit
have seen” she was imagining herself irony. Reade describes the first half of able 1978 essay on women readers and saying of Paradise Lost—is that read-
as Milton’s Eve is a bit far-fetched, Middlemarch as “a horror story about Paradise Lost, Milton alone left Woolf ers who expect to be bored or dutifully
as is his speculation that her sympa- the waste of women’s potential,” but “feeling puzzled, excluded, inferior, impressed can find themselves utterly
thy for Milton’s indigestion was ani- it might also be described as a tragi- and a little guilty”—in a word, fallen.* bowled over. At some point in the late
mated by her identification with his comedy of gendered expectations, male He has that effect on a girl. 1960s, Freewheelin’ Frank Reynolds of
marital woes. But Reade’s account of author and female helpmeet clutched But Woolf got her revenge. Among the San Francisco Hells Angels took a
Eliot’s crafting of Middlemarch as an in awkward and mutually unsatisfying the guests at Clarissa Dalloway’s party large dose of LSD and picked up a copy
extended rejoinder to Paradise Lost, embrace. is a Milton scholar, “a very queer fish,” of Milton’s poem: “Wowowowowow!
and to the mythic figure of Milton him- “George Eliot was no revolution- whom she scrutinizes, in Reade’s Dig, this book gave me such a rhythm
self, makes for one of his book’s most ary,” Reade admits; on the contrary, nice image, “as a naturalist cata- of words of my inborn instincts which
enjoyable chapters. her satirical sense nudged her away logues a rare species.” First Clarissa gives me the flourish of mind of being
from radical causes. Still, she provides notes “his prodigious learning and reborn.” And at a 1966 lecture on trade
a glorious new way to interpret Para- timidity; his wintry charm without unions the Trinidadian writer and ac-

W hen she began writing Middle-

march, in 1870, Eliot and her
partner, George Henry Lewes, were
dise Lost. The same can’t be said for
all of Reade’s case studies; more than
a few are neither revolutionary nor es-
cordiality; his innocence blent with
snobbery”; then, seeing he is bent on
picking a quarrel with a fellow guest,
tivist C. L. R. James likened Stalinism
to the English Republic under the in-
creasingly dictatorial rule of Oliver
reading Paradise Lost aloud to each pecially insightful readers of Milton. a young poet, she glides over to inter- Cromwell. In fact, he digressed, “I be-
other in the evenings, and as she was James Redpath, a white editor, news- vene, introducing and eviscerating him lieve that Milton, in Paradise Lost, was
finishing the novel, in 1872, Eliot wrote paper owner, and abolitionist who had in one stroke: “He knows everything in saying, ‘Look here boys. This man of
to a friend to congratulate her on doing immigrated to the US from England, the whole world about Milton!” great power and authority, Cromwell,
the same: “Glad you are reading my fancied himself a radical but alienated upsets the regime.’ He had been with
demigod Milton!” She and Lewes had his Black collaborators by his eager- Cromwell all the time but in the end
moved on to Samuel Johnson’s Lives
of the Poets, she adds, “which I read
aloud in my old age with a delicious
ness to speak for them in the pages of
his Weekly Anglo-African, including in
an editorial that channeled the rousing
S uch knowledge can be deadening.
(That, I suppose, is one way of sum-
marizing Paradise Lost.) Reade’s own
he was doubtful.” Satan, James specu-
lated, “was derived from his knowledge
of Cromwell”; autocracy is humani-
revival of girlish impressions.” Reade cadences of Paradise Lost to champion relation to Milton was reinvigorated, ty’s great antagonist. “That is what

.
argues that those girlish impressions the “voluntary emigration” of fugitive I think. I cannot prove that,” he con-
contained the seeds of Eliot’s charac- slaves to Haiti. And the founding mem- *Sandra M. Gilbert, “Patriarchal Poetry and cluded. “But somewhere I am going to
terization of young Dorothea Brooke, bers of the Mistick Krewe of Comus Women Readers: Reflections on Milton’s write that down so that it will be left
whose highest aspiration in life is to were frankly reactionary New Orleans Bogey,” PMLA , Vol. 93, No. 3 (May 1978). for somebody to take up.”

March 27, 2025 47

 Vaccines at Warp Speed
David Oshinsky

C oronaviruses take their name from

the spike proteins that crown their
surface. Known for causing mild re-
spiratory infections akin to the com-
mon cold in mammals and birds, they
attracted little attention until 2002,
when a variant causing more serious
disease, severe acute respiratory syn-
drome (SARS ), appeared in China, fol-
lowed a decade later by Middle East
respiratory syndrome (MERS ) in Saudi
Arabia. Both viruses are believed to
have originated in bats, and both ap-
peared to have an intermediate host—
civets for SARS , camels for MERS . More
than eight thousand SARS cases were
confirmed worldwide, with a fatality
rate of 9.5 percent. MERS infected
fewer victims but killed a staggering
number of them—nearly 35 percent.
Though vaccines were developed for
SARS and MERS , none made it to mar-
ket. One reason was that vigorous pub-
lic health measures—contact tracing,
mask wearing, quarantines—brought
both outbreaks to an end. Another was
that the vaccines didn’t seem prom-
ising enough to warrant serious in-
vestment, and why spend large sums
on small-scale diseases that might
never return?
It’s a fair question. Vaccination re-
mains the most powerful means of
preventing the spread of infectious
disease, aside from clean water. The
most successful vaccines work so well
that they have turned deadly illnesses
into distant memories. A four-dose
Illustration by Oliver Munday regimen of the inactivated polio vac-
cine offers close to 100 percent pro-
tection, while a two-dose regimen
The Catalyst: which was hardly the case in the spring It turned out that the information of the measles, mumps, and rubella
RNA and the Quest to Unlock of 2020. And yet, while the world is carried by RNA . Over time scien- (MMR ) vaccine is 97 percent effective
Life’s Deepest Secrets seemed paralyzed by Covid-19 and tists discovered several types of this against measles and 88 percent ef-
by Thomas R. Cech. Americans were badly divided over workhorse molecule: messenger RNA fective against mumps. By contrast,
Norton, 292 pp., $28.99 masking rules and school closings, (mRNA ), which copies and transmits the annual flu vaccine rarely reaches
Operation Warp Speed helped tame DNA ’s genetic instructions for creating 50 percent efficacy because the viral
It is likely to be remembered as the the worst pandemic since the Great proteins; transfer RNA (tRNA ), which strains are constantly mutating, and
high point of Donald Trump’s tu- Influenza of 1918. In the process, an translates these instructions until they HIV presents even greater difficulties
multuous first presidency. On May obscure scientific acronym entered the are fully decoded; and ribosomal RNA because the virus destroys the im-
15, 2020, joined by cabinet members, popular vocabulary: RNA . (rRNA ), which forms the ribosomes, or mune cells that a vaccine is designed
public health experts, and military of- Why was it not better known? The structural machinery, where protein to stimulate. In 1984 the US Depart-
ficials, he announced Operation Warp answer, according to the Nobel Prize– synthesis occurs. Think of DNA as an ment of Health and Human Services
Speed, a “momentous medical initia- winning chemist Thomas Cech in The archive and RNA as a scanner, notes announced a campaign to develop a
tive” to develop, manufacture, and Catalyst, a superb and timely history the National Institutes of Health’s successful AIDS vaccine within two
distribute a successful coronavirus of research into RNA (ribonucleic acid), Human Genome Research Institute: years; the world is still waiting.
vaccine by year’s end, if not sooner. lies in the discovery of the double helix “The DNA stores all the necessary in- It’s true, moreover, that vaccines add
The event had all the trappings of a structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic formation for an organism, and the little to a drug company’s ledger. In
campaign rally. “Your vision,” gushed acid) by Francis Crick and James Wat- RNA replicates and distributes pieces 2002, when SARS emerged, they con-
Health and Human Services Secretary son in 1953. From that point forward, of this information as needed.” stituted less than 2 percent of phar-
Alex Azar, “will be one of the great DNA research dominated the rapidly In the 1950s and 1960s researchers maceutical sales worldwide, paling
scientific and humanitarian accom- emerging field of genetics, relegating developed the means to synthesize in comparison with the statins and
plishments in human history.” Only RNA to the role of “biochemical backup RNA in vitro—outside a living organ- antidepressants that are consumed
four of those flanking Trump in the singer, slaving away in the shadow of ism—which allowed it to be studied by millions of people every day. And
Rose Garden that day—the physicians the diva.” and manipulated in a laboratory. That they’re extremely expensive to pro-
Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Fran- Life depends on proteins, strings offered the promise of creating innova- duce. The average vaccine today costs
cis Collins, and Moncef Slaoui—wore of amino acids that guide the critical tive vaccines and therapies on a larger $888.6 million in research and devel-
masks, although 86,000 Covid-related functions of our cells. “Some proteins scale at a lower cost. But a major ob- opment alone. Fewer than 10 percent
deaths had already been reported in form structures such as muscle fibers, stacle remained: synthetic mRNA must make it to market, and those that do
the United States. (“You guys, take skin, and hair,” Cech explains. Oth- be shielded from the body’s formida- have taken eight to fifteen years to be
your masks off, you hear me?” the ers break down our food, clear waste, ble immune defenses as it travels to approved for use.
president warned the others before protect the shape of cells, aid chem- the cells. Otherwise it will be chopped Between 1957 and 2004 the num-
stepping onstage.) This was Trump’s ical reactions, and fight off invad- to pieces by RNA -destroying enzymes ber of companies producing childhood
show, and no one dared to challenge ing germs. When Crick and Watson before it reaches its destination. vaccines for the American market
his improbable timeline, not even showed how DNA encodes informa- The solution, still a work in prog- dropped from twenty-six to four, with
Fauci, who had warned Congress three tion for making these proteins and ress, made the current Covid vaccines just two, Merck and Wyeth, headquar-
days before that “there’s no guaran- passes it from one generation to the feasible. Researchers designed a de- tered in the United States. The wave
tee a vaccine is actually going to be next, questions naturally arose about livery system that encases mRNA in of mergers sweeping Big Pharma in
effective.” how this information gets from the fat bubbles known as lipid nanoparti- those years clearly had an effect. But
There was reason for concern. Vac- cell’s nucleus, where DNA is found, to cles (LNP s) to prevent its degradation. so, too, did dwindling profits, injury
cines are difficult and time-consuming the cell’s cytoplasm, where protein Some compare LNP s to the capsule lawsuits, and a growing antivaccine
to make in the best of circumstances, synthesis occurs. that takes astronauts into space. movement. “Pharmaceutical compa-

48 The New York Review

nies are businesses, not public health ous at the leak, Chinese officials chose therapies for diseases that defied Trump naturally viewed the vaccines
agencies,” wrote the infectious disease to spin Zhang’s sequence as an exam- conventional treatment, such as can- as a political lifeline, but only if one
specialist Paul Offit in 2005. They’re ple of the nation’s scientific prowess cer and autoimmune disorders. But or more could win FDA approval be-
under no obligation to manufacture and transparency while simultaneously it changed course, as did BioNTech, fore the 2020 presidential election.
unprofitable goods. The best way for- punishing him as a warning to others. after discovering that mRNA tech- Operation Warp Speed fast-tracked
ward, he and others believed, was some President Trump, consumed by his nology worked better with vaccines the process by getting the vaccine
form of public–private partnership Senate impeachment trial, didn’t re- than with treatments requiring fre- makers to test and manufacture their
that encouraged vaccine production ceive a full briefing on the Wuhan out- quent use over an extended period. products simultaneously, something
by sharing the financial risks. break until January 28, 2020, when his Moderna didn’t have a drug giant as a they wouldn’t have dared to do on their
top public health and national security partner—or, for that matter, a single own. If the vaccine failed, the com-
advisers warned him of a brewing ca- product approved by the FDA . What it pany lost nothing, because Operation

H ad there been no Covid-19 pan-

demic, vaccines based on mRNA
might have taken years to reach the
tastrophe. “Don’t think SARS 2003,” one
of them had been told by a Chinese ex-
pert. “Think influenza pandemic 1918.”
did have was the attention of venture
capitalists and government scientists
intrigued by its potential.
Warp Speed footed the bill. If it suc-
ceeded, the company got to market a
subsidized product—and to keep the
public. Big Pharma saw them as a mod- On March 2, Trump, Fauci, Vice Pres- As Cech makes clear, the path to a profits for itself.
est advance in a largely unprofitable ident Mike Pence, and other officials successful Covid vaccine in 2020 was Only Pfizer turned down federal
field, and federal officials were more met with drug company executives in less about breaking new ground than funding. “I wanted to liberate our
worried about bioterrorism, a legacy preparation for Operation Warp Speed. about “assembling the puzzle pieces” scientists from any bureaucracy,” its
of September 11, than about unantici- A video of the event shows the pres- that already existed. Researchers had CEO , Albert Bourla, explained. Pfizer
pated naturally occurring health emer- ident fully engaged and occasionally could afford to be fussy. The genetic
gencies. In 2019, perhaps unknown to confused. Will the current influenza deciphered the genetic code, so technology for its mRNA vaccine had
Trump, the Department of Health and vaccine work against SARS -CoV-2? anyone could read Yong-Zhen come from BioNTech, which received
Human Services ran an eerily prescient he asks. Probably not, Fauci replies. Zhang’s SARS -CoV-2 sequence a $445 million grant from the German
exercise, code-named Crimson Conta- Can a Covid vaccine be ready in a few and understand how to make the government, and the Trump adminis-
gion, in which government agencies months? Hard to know, says Fauci, who Spike protein. They had shown tration had agreed to buy 100 million
were tasked with containing an influ- gently explains the difference between that they could in fact use mRNA doses if the vaccine proved successful,
enza of “high transmissibility and clin- a vaccine in clinical trials and one au- to make enough protein to elicit an not to mention the separate deals that
ical severity” originating in China with thorized for public use. There’s a sur- immune response, central to vac- Pfizer had signed with other countries.
the capacity to cause 110 million ill- real quality to the meeting: Trump was cine development. They had devel- In a world of seven billion unvacci-
nesses, 7.7 million hospitalizations, and imploring representatives from an in- oped a powerhouse technique for nated people needing multiple shots,
586,000 deaths in the United States. dustry he routinely bashed for price copying DNA into gobs of mRNA . the financial prospects were dazzling.
The results were hardly reassuring. The gouging to fast-track a product he was As were the resources. Trump in-
nation’s Strategic National Stockpile, widely believed to distrust. And they had figured out how to safely voked the rarely used Defense Pro-
a favorite target of Republican budget What is often overlooked, however, encase the brew in protective lipid duction Act of 1950 to assure that the
hawks, lacked both the medicines and is that Trump had shed some of his nanoparticles as it traveled to the cells. vaccine makers and their suppliers got
the protective equipment to contain antivaccine views before the pandemic Each step made things simpler, access to the raw materials they re-
the virus, the exercise suggested, and began, making it simpler for him to faster, and safer. There was no need, quired. Then he invoked the even more
US companies lacked the capacity to pursue Operation Warp Speed. He had as with earlier vaccines, to grow, at- obscure PREP Act of 2005, which pro-
replenish the supply. Five months later long been influenced by the disgraced tenuate, and purify large amounts of vides close to ironclad immunity for
came word of a mysterious respiratory British physician Andrew Wakefield, virus—in this case SARS -CoV-2—in companies manufacturing “epidemic
virus circulating in Wuhan, China. whose false claims in 1998 linking au- a laboratory, because the vaccine no and pandemic products” during a “pub-
The Beijing government is not tism to the MMR vaccine helped launch longer contains it. Instead, synthetic lic health emergency.” That stopped
known for sharing bad news. It took the modern antivaccine movement. mRNA instructs the cells to create a potential injury lawsuits in their
months for details of the SARS out- During a GOP presidential debate in harmless fragment of SARS -CoV-2 that tracks. The final step left the intel-
break to emerge in 2002; before 2015, Trump told the unlikely story of will trigger the immune system to rec- lectual property rights largely in the
that, in 1997, there was H 5N 1, a vir- a “beautiful child” he knew who was ognize and destroy the virus when it hands of the vaccine makers, despite
ulent avian flu that killed dozens of vaccinated “just the other day . . . got appears. Put simply, the body becomes the assistance of government scien-
bird handlers in the following years very, very sick, and now is autistic.” the factory. tists and the enormous federal sub-
and forced neighboring countries to Antivaxxers flocked to his campaign; sidies—more than $30 billion. There
slaughter millions of chickens and Trump returned the favor by inviting simply wasn’t time to haggle over the
ducks. H 5N 1 proved to be one of the
most lethal viruses known to human-
kind, with a fatality rate approaching
Wakefield to one of his inaugural balls.
But with the 2016 election behind
him, Trump dialed down his doubts.
F irst dubbed MP 2 after the Manhat-
tan Project, which developed the
atomic bomb, Operation Warp Speed
contracts, the White House explained.
How well would an mRNA vaccine
have to work against SARS -CoV-2 to
60 percent, but it showed almost no The first sign appeared when Rob- took its name from the faster-than- win regulatory approval? The FDA
ability to jump from person to person, ert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading vaccine light propulsion system in Star Trek, chose 50 percent efficacy in the belief
which prevented it from becoming an conspiracist, announced that the new a favorite among scientists working that a higher figure might be unobtain-
epidemic. In January the US recorded president had asked him to chair a on the vaccine. Some worried, how- able, while a lower one would discourage
its first (and thus far only) confirmed commission on “vaccine safety and ever, that the name sent the wrong people from getting vaccinated. Fauci
death from H 5N 1—an elderly Louisi- scientific integrity.” Trump remained hoped for 70–75 percent effectiveness,
ana resident with underlying condi- mum; the idea was likely quashed by but Moncef Slaoui, the former drug
tions who had been directly exposed nervous advisers. As president, he company executive who directed Op-
to flocks of wild birds. Although the reluctantly got a flu shot and then eration Warp Speed, shot for the stars.
federal government recently partnered endorsed a childhood vaccination cam- “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s in the 90
with several drug companies to pro- paign against measles. “This is really percent [range],” he predicted.
duce an mRNA -based bird flu vaccine going around,” he told reporters. “They Slaoui’s hunch was right. The Mod-
for humans in case H 5N 1 mutates into have to get the shot.” erna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines
a more contagious form, it’s still in the The March 2 meeting offered a were found to be about 95 percent ef-
development stage. glimpse as well into the future of fective against the original SARS -CoV-2
How and where the Covid-19 pan- immunology. Two of the companies virus in randomized, double-blind tri-
demic began remains a mystery. The represented that day—Pfizer and message by appearing to prioritize a als that compared the experimental
CIA now asserts, with admittedly Moderna—were already at work on rushed product over a fully tested one. shots with a placebo. There were some
“low confidence,” that the virus likely mRNA vaccines and therapies for other “It’s a terrible name,” warned Peter minor differences. Pfizer’s two shots
emerged from an accidental leak at diseases. Pfizer, founded in 1849, led Hotez, a leading virologist, “and it’s were spaced twenty-one days apart,
a government facility in Wuhan, not the world in pharmaceutical sales, at going to cause some damage.” Moderna’s twenty-eight. Pfizer’s shot
from naturally infected animals in a just over $50 billion annually. But it It didn’t cause much, as best one can contained thirty micrograms of vac-
local market. What is known is that wasn’t until 2009, following its acqui- tell, but it did become part of the lit- cine, Moderna’s one hundred. (There
emergency room doctors in Wuhan sition of its rival Wyeth, whose port- any of ills associated with the Trump wasn’t enough time to determine the
began exchanging messages in Decem- folio included Prevnar 13, the hugely administration’s handling of the pan- lowest dose required for adequate
ber 2019 about a puzzling cluster of successful pneumococcal shot primar- demic, from the CDC ’s badly botched protection.) Pfizer’s vaccine needed
pneumonia cases and that days passed ily for infants, that Pfizer became a testing procedures, to the president’s special freezers set at subarctic tem-
before Chinese authorities reported force in vaccines. In 2018 it signed a endorsement of bleach and the malaria peratures for cold-chain storage,
the outbreak to the World Health Or- $425 million agreement with a German drug hydroxychloroquine as cures, to while Moderna’s required only sim-
ganization. In Shanghai, meanwhile, start-up, BioNTech, to collaborate on the mixed public health messages that ple refrigeration.
a distinguished Chinese virologist, an mRNA flu vaccine, and in March left people confused—first about the Both mRNA vaccines won emergency
Yong-Zhen Zhang, sequenced the ge- 2020 it reconnected with BioNTech efficacy of masking and later about use authorization from the FDA a mere
nome of the circulating virus, SARS - to partner on a Covid vaccine. whether the vaccines prevented Covid seven months after Trump made his
CoV-2, and sent it to a collaborator in Massachusetts-based Moderna was entirely or simply mitigated its most Rose Garden announcement, but too
Australia, who posted it online. Furi- created in 2010 to design mRNA -based dangerous symptoms. late to assist his failed reelection

March 27, 2025 49

bid. Still, whatever one may think of $1 billion in private equity funds was next generation of pharmaceuticals, the more traditional “curiosity-driven”
Trump’s handling of the pandemic, invested in biotechnology start-ups to which will move beyond infectious dis- research so vital to scientific advance-
wrote Fauci in his memoir On Call: explore new frontiers in RNA research.” eases to those caused by a “missing ment? Is it possible to agree upon
A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service The Catalyst was published before or mutated protein,” such as muscu- “what’s allowable” regarding RNA -
(2024), “Operation Warp Speed was a Trump’s stunning nomination, and the lar dystrophy, and numerous cancers guided gene editing? It’s one thing to
transformational program, a public- Senate’s razor-thin confirmation, of caused by “normal cellular processes compensate for harmful mutations and
private partnership about which [his] Kennedy as secretary of health and gone awry.” The key to this progress quite another to create offspring who
administration should be justly proud.” human services, the department that is CRISPR technology, a revolutionary are taller and faster, with light-colored
Its success dramatically recast the oversees the NIH , the CDC , and the gene-editing system that “derives its eyes and other “enhancements” that
importance of RNA . Patent applica- FDA , among other agencies. Reports unprecedented power from RNA ,” he could turn the process into “a danger-
tions for products related to mRNA surfaced recently that Kennedy had writes—specifically the customized ous tool for eugenics.”
diagnosis and therapy have quadru- petitioned the FDA to withdraw its ap- “guide RNA ” that allows scientists to Wondrous gains are rarely devoid of
pled in recent years. The 2023 Nobel proval of all existing Covid-19 vaccines “precisely direct CRISPR ’s scissors to ethical concerns. The challenge, says
Prize in Physiology or Medicine was in 2021, at the height of the pandemic. cut any genetic sequence.” Cech, is to find a balance between risk
awarded for breakthroughs in mRNA And he has advocated spending larger Much like his former postdoctoral and reward that the public, or much of
vaccines, and the 2024 prize honored proportions of HHS ’s enormous budget student Jennifer Doudna, a corecipient it, can accept—one that will encour-
the discovery of tiny RNA molecules on “alternative and holistic approaches of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry age responsible long-term research
involved in gene regulation. “There to health,” which could dramatically for her work on CRISPR , Cech is con- in a field whose surface we’ve barely

.
are more than 400 RNA -based drugs affect the federal government’s med- cerned about the guardrails accom- scratched. “The twenty-first century
in some stage of development, beyond ical research priorities. panying RNA ’s seemingly unlimited is already standing out as the age of
the ones that are already in use,” Cech Still, it is almost a given, as Cech potential. Will this growing focus on RNA ,” he adds, “and this century still
notes. “And in 2022 alone, more than makes clear, that RNA will power the “disease-driven research” overshadow has a long way to go.”

‘This Land Is Yours’

Nell Irvin Painter

The Van Bergen Overmantel, depicting the Van Bergen family, two Native Americans, indentured servants, and enslaved people on the Van Bergen farm in Leeds, New York;
painting attributed to John Heaton, circa 1728–1738

The Black Woods: near Glens Falls, I repeat my complaint thup, the abolitionist author of Twelve ington, D.C. Her father’s family were
Pursuing Racial Justice in vain. Years a Slave. He moved south to exit Italian immigrants; growing up in Ath-
on the Adirondack Frontier There is something sinister about 15, Saratoga Springs, to make a living ens, near Coxsackie, in the 1960s and
by Amy Godine. this presentation that, I fear, encour- before he was kidnapped in Washing- 1970s, she thought of herself as Italian
Three Hills/Cornell University Press, ages White visitors to look askance at ton, D.C., and trafficked to Louisiana, American and was only vaguely aware
488 pp., $35.95 non-White visitors—or worse. I take losing his freedom and nearly his life. of her mother’s deep Hudson Valley
the video personally. I’ve been com- (In February what is believed to be the Dutch heritage. Ignorant of the region’s
A Hudson Valley Reckoning: ing upstate for twenty years, since my first public sculpture of Northup was social and political history, she took
Discovering the Forgotten friend and Princeton colleague Rus- unveiled in Marksville, Louisiana.) its Whiteness for granted and did not
History of Slaveholding sell Banks, aware of my need for cool think to question the commonplace
in My Dutch American Family weather and quiet, invited my husband that slavery and Black people belonged
by Debra Bruno, with
an afterword by Eleanor C. Mire.
Three Hills/Cornell University Press,
and me to the Adirondacks.
Two recent books, Amy Godine’s
The Black Woods and Debra Bruno’s A
G odine, a scholar and lecturer based
in Saratoga Springs, has been writ-
ing social histories of New York’s North
to the South. But late in the 2010s, her
genealogical research on Ancestry.com
revealed more than a quaint, bucolic
287 pp., $32.95 Hudson Valley Reckoning, take my side. Country for more than three decades. In saga of wholesome farmers.
They belong to a harvest of books pub- The Black Woods she recounts the White It took Bruno about a decade to dis- FE NI MOR E ART MUS E UM , CO OPE RSTOW N, N EW YORK / RICHARD WAL KER
Leaving home in Essex County, New lished since the late twentieth century, abolitionist Gerrit Smith’s plan, hatched cover the history of slavery in Ulster and
Jersey, I drive north from the metro- initially written by scholars like A. J. in 1846, to offer 120,000 acres of unde- Greene Counties: exit 18, New Paltz; exit
politan region. On the New York State Williams-Myers of SUNY New Paltz, veloped Adirondack land to some three 19, Kingston; exit 21, Catskill; exit 21B,
Thruway, I-87, I stop just beyond exit that show that places assumed to be thousand Black New Yorkers. In Smith’s Coxsackie. Through a Facebook group
21B, Coxsackie and Ravena, at the Cap- only and always White were not. This vision, these parcels of land, valued at called I’ve Traced My Enslaved Ances-
ital Region Welcome Center. I pee, understanding is now reaching a much $250 or more, would allow Black men to tors and Their Owners, she connected
eat a hulking Taste NY sandwich, and wider audience, challenging the de- meet the state’s property requirements with Eleanor Mire of Malden, Massa-
watch a video on a giant screen touting lusion of New York state as a land of for voting, imposed in 1821. chusetts, a descendant of the people
the region’s glories. On-screen I see freedom far removed from the Amer- Smith’s gifts did not come ready- Bruno’s ancestors had enslaved.
only White people. Only White people ican original sin of slavery. made. The plots had to be cleared and Bruno and Mire learned that their
paddling pristine lakes in impressive In downtown Newark, near my home improved, daunting tasks for families seventeenth-century ancestors were
kayaks. Only White people in appro- in New Jersey, a monument of Harriet otherwise unable to meet the property part of an economy largely based on
priate footwear climbing picturesque Tubman now graces a park formerly qualification. Perhaps two hundred in- barter. Purchases, loans, and collat-
mountains and peering into stunning named for George Washington. In Cen- trepid Black settlers moved north from eral were accounted for in measures of
valleys. Only grinning White people tral Park a newish statue commemorat- different parts of New York state and meat, wheat, oats, peas, tobacco, and
drinking craft beer and reenacting the ing nineteenth-century women’s rights the South. They established farms in human beings. People held as chattel
region’s history. At the “comments” seats Sojourner Truth with Susan B. the three counties at the far north- represented a substantial part of the
kiosk I complain about the video for Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. eastern corner of the state—Essex, region’s population and wealth. The
fortifying the erroneous, harmful as- But today I’m driving north. As I con- Franklin, and Clinton—that endured 1796 last will and testament of Bru-
sumption that New York state north tinue past Albany on I-87—now the into the late nineteenth century. no’s five-times-great-grandfather Isaac
of the city is for White people only. Adirondack Northway—I pass exit 26, Bruno, a journalist originally from Collier bequeathed to family heirs “one
At the Adirondacks Welcome Center, Minerva, the birthplace of Solomon Nor- the Hudson Valley, now lives in Wash- other Feather Bed, one Negro Boy

50 The New York Review

 named Will and my sorrel mare and National Convention of Colored Cit- ery mission called him to battle pro- records of a multiracial past disap-
sorrel stallion, one waggon & harrow,” izens in Buffalo, when the abolition slavery settlers in Kansas in the 1850s peared in the nineteenth and twentieth
and “my negro wench named marie.” of slavery seemed beyond the reach and to lead his raid on the federal ar- centuries, as non-White people were
Bruno was devastated to find this. of political action, Garnet issued his mory in Virginia. Brown, his son, and scrubbed from historical exhibitions.
“They all owned slaves,” she writes. “Address to the Slaves” urging en- his Harpers Ferry comrades are buried The painting was hidden away, first in
“And they too were all my kin.” slaved people to seize their own free- on the North Elba farm, but his widow private hands, then in museum stor-
Only in 1799, more than a century dom by force if necessary. The White sold the property in the mid-1860s and age, only rarely to be publicly exhibited.
and a half after the first enslaved per- abolitionist John Brown, a confirmed moved with her surviving children to The restoration of northern New
son arrived in New York, did the state believer in armed direct action who California. Although the farm changed York’s history continues at the hands
pass an act “for the gradual abolition of would soon establish his own farm on private hands in the years that followed, of local historical societies. The Crags-
slavery,” meaning it remained a slave Gerrit Smith’s land, supported Gar- many pilgrims visited the site to honor moor Historical Society in Ulster
state well into the nineteenth century. net’s statement, which other aboli- Brown’s antislavery memory. County, founded in 1996, has been es-
Children born to enslaved mothers tionists, including Frederick Douglass, New York state acquired the farm in pecially effective. Its widely honored
after July 4, 1799, were declared free dismissed as too radical. 1896. In the 1920s, Black John Brown 2018 documentary Where Slavery Died
but forced to work as indentured ser- Garnet, an early promoter of Smith’s devotees in Philadelphia began organiz- Hard: The Forgotten History of Ulster
vants until age twenty-five if female or land grant, was a thoroughgoing ad- ing annual visits that grew throughout County and the Shawangunk Mountain
twenty-eight if male. A law passed in vocate of Black self-sufficiency. Smith the twentieth century. Godine chron- Region, made in collaboration with the
1817 changed the age to twenty-one. All owned and paid taxes on more Adiron- icles the fascinating, prickly visits of archaeologists Wendy E. Harris and
enslaved people were to be free after dack land than he could exploit, and Black John Brown pilgrims to Lake Arnold Pickman, presents textual and
July 4, 1827, leaving only the indentured when he proposed his grants in 1846 Placid, whose main developer, Melvil photographic evidence of the intensity
children to complete their terms of ser- he knew that Black New Yorkers, many Dewey (of Dewey Decimal fame), was of slavery in Ulster County over some
vitude. In 1820 in Greene County, 128 formerly enslaved, had no other way of an ardent Anglo-Saxonist intolerant two hundred years.
people were still bound to service. Go- accumulating $250 in property. Garnet even of White Catholics. In 1999 Mar- Closer to New York City, the Philips-
dine’s rich history begins in this post- was one of several landowners seek- tha Swan, with the encouragement of burg Manor in Westchester County was
emancipation period, when slavery was ing to persuade people in New York, Russell Banks, the author of the John the state’s largest eighteenth-century
fading but voting restrictions crippled Albany, Troy, and other cities to move Brown–themed novel Cloudsplitter slave plantation. Long after it became
Black New Yorkers’ citizenship. into the mountain wilderness, clear (1998), founded the antiracist organi- a National Historic Landmark in 1961,
forested land, and improve it. zation John Brown Lives!, to which I the manor’s educational materials por-
Smith and Garnet hoped to draw belong. The organization hosts a variety trayed it as a nice place to work. For

B ecause Godine’s and Bruno’s books

are in large part about contempo-
rary revisions of the eighteenth and
three thousand families to the North
Country, but most Black families
lacked the money needed to make the
decades it celebrated Pinkster, a hol-
iday celebrated by Black New Yorkers
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
nineteenth centuries, historiography move. Those who did accept the offer centuries, as charmingly White and
plays a large part in each story. Willis created new neighborhoods of their quintessentially Dutch, with tulips and
Augustus Hodges, a cofounder of the own, such as Freeman’s Home, Tim- wooden shoes. In the 1990s the empha-
antislavery newspaper The Ram’s Horn, buctoo, Blacksville, and Negro Brook. sis finally began to shift. Philipsburg
wrote about the Adirondack story in About seventy families persevered into Manor has now returned Pinkster to
his memoir, Free Man of Color, which later decades. When the Fifteenth the history of Black New Yorkers; the
he completed in Franklin County in Amendment abolished discrimina- annual festival includes Black drum-
1849. (The memoir was serialized post- tory property qualification for voting ming, dancing, and storytelling. Con
humously in The Indianapolis Free- in 1870, many of the Smith grantees Edison boasts of having supported
man in 1896, but it wasn’t published gave up their land and moved to West- Pinkster for more than thirty years.
in book form until 1982.) The project port, Elizabethtown, and other points Bruno ends her book with a chapter
of revising Adirondack history began south, where they were more likely to on historical “repair” and “reparation,”
in 1989, when Katherine Butler Jones find paid employment. John Thomas, an effort of which her book is a part.
discovered a nineteenth-century mar- a fugitive from Maryland, stayed on She leaves the final pages to Mire, who
riage certificate that she recognized until his death in 1894. At the end of writes about her research before meet-
as a document of not just personal but the nineteenth century, while scores ing Bruno and then after, as they filled
regional importance. of Black Adirondackers lived in the in the gaps of Hudson Valley history
Jones, who was a professor of African region and up and down the Hudson together. Bruno and Mire discovered
American history at Simmons College Valley, only one Black family among that a woman named Mary Vanderzee
in Boston, found the document, dated the Smith grantees remained in place. connects them. (A Hudson Valley Reck-
October 30, 1843, while visiting her wid- Lyman Epps, born in 1815, had settled Mary Vanderzee on her one hundredth oning is dedicated to her.) Vanderzee,
owed mother in Harlem. Signed by the his family near John Brown’s farm in birthday, New Baltimore, New York, 1902 who was born in 1802 and lived for over
Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, it North Elba, where Epps cultivated a century, was owned by Bruno’s an-
V EDDE R RE SE ARCH L IBRARY PHOTO G RAPHIC C OL LEC TION/ G RE EN E COUN TY H ISTOR ICA L S O CI ETY, N EW YOR K

legalized the marriage of Hannah corn, rye, peas, and turnips and owned of human rights events and celebrates cestors. Mire explains that Vanderzee
Dimond and Edward Weeks, Jones’s several cows and sheep. The death of Black history, including an annual John family lore had held—comfortingly but
great-grandparents, who lived in West- his son Lyman Jr. in 1942 closed the Brown Day. In 2001, Godine, who is also incorrectly—that they had never been
port, a small town on Lake Champlain. Smith grantees’ chapter. involved with John Brown Lives!, cu- enslaved. But their intersecting lines
“I held a piece of history in my hands,” Even though the Smith grantees rated “Dreaming of Timbuctoo,” an ex- of physical and legal kinship inspired
Jones wrote in “They Called It Tim- proved just as mobile as other Amer- hibition inspired by Jones’s essay that Mire’s joke that soon there would be
bucto,” an essay in Orion magazine in icans, Godine grasps the profound sig- toured the region before its permanent Black cousins at every family gather-
which she detailed her findings. nificance of their initial settlement installation in the barn at John Brown ing. While learning of her slave-owning
Garnet was born enslaved in 1815 in to the region’s history. “Ground was Farm. Both the exhibition and the farm ancestry had initially disturbed Bruno,
Kent County, Maryland, and escaped gained,” she writes, through “imper- that now hosts it are models of Adiron- Mire discouraged her feelings of shame.
with his family in 1824, ultimately to fect, rangy, and adaptive” strategies of dack desegregation. “I believe we are only responsible for
New York City. A student at the African coexistence across the American color Godine begins The Black Woods with ourselves and what we do,” Mire writes,
Free School in New York City, Noyes line. The cohort of grantees inspired the antisegregation activist and en- “not for our ancestors.”
Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, the creation of more Black settlements vironmentalist Brother Yusuf Abdul- Bruno’s personal account com-
and the Oneida Institute near Utica, in Vermont, Maine, Indiana, Oregon, Wasi Burgess of Albany. Until his death plements Godine’s meticulously re-
Garnet was unusually well-educated and California. in 2013, Brother Yusuf took teenagers searched history; together they
for an American of his time, particu- of color camping in the Adirondacks demonstrate how the writing and
larly a Black American. Lacking em- every year on a mission to let them exhibiting of history have changed
ployment commensurate with his
education, Garnet worked at sea be-
fore being ordained in 1842 and tak-
O ur twenty-first-century rediscovery
of Black Adirondackers owes much
not only to Katherine Butler Jones’s re-
feel at home in the mountains. The
trips always included a visit to John
Brown Farm. “You don’t have to buy
in our time. Published amid the in-
tensification of the war on histories
of race and racism in America, they
ing over Liberty Street Presbyterian search but to the fame of John Brown. this story,” he would tell them. “You may, unfortunately, come to repre-
Church in Troy, across the Hudson Today John Brown Farm, a state his- own it. You’re stakeholders. This land sent the culmination of local Black
from Albany. There he published the toric site in North Elba on the outskirts is my land. This land is yours.” histories. My fear now is that Donald
short-lived newspaper The National of Lake Placid, exploits Brown’s his- Bruno’s book includes a similar ex- Trump’s second presidential term and
Watchman and was active in the Black tory for the sake of the region’s anti- ample of a contemporary embrace of the campaign against diversity, equity,
convention movement. slavery bona fides. Brown had visited the North’s long-ignored Black pres- and inclusion and so-called wokeism, a
From the 1830s through the 1890s, Smith in 1848, and the two agreed that ence. In the Fenimore Art Museum in campaign threatening to resegregate
before and after legal emancipation, as a sheep and cattle farmer, Brown Cooperstown, she and Mire saw the Van American public life, will succeed in

.
the Black convention movement gath- could advise settlers on Smith’s Adiron- Bergen Overmantel (circa 1728–1738), a reverting American history to the lily-
ered Black men—women were not wel- dack grants. Brown moved his family painting that depicts a working farm Whiteness that Debra Bruno grew up
come—to discuss politics and means to North Elba, but his residence there in the Catskills and its people, Black, with. So much will have been lost—
of attaining social justice. At the 1843 was only intermittent, as his antislav- Indigenous, and White. Such visual again.

March 27, 2025 51

 The Chronicler of Unhappiness
Michael Dirda

Ford Madox Ford ings and reversals, double entendres,

by Max Saunders. and much else.
Reaktion, 213 pp., $22.00 (paper) In particular, the novel’s surface
text, reliant on ambiguity, foregrounds
Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel, The Good the untrustworthiness of first impres-
Soldier, opens with one of the most ar- sions. Dowell’s wife, for example, likes
resting first sentences in twentieth- instructing people about European
century fiction: “This is the saddest history, so it’s only later that one be-
story I have ever heard.” The paragraph gins to wonder about the statement
that follows, however, almost imme- “At that time the Captain was quite
diately undercuts it with a series of evidently enjoying being educated by
irresolute, contradictory statements: Florence.”
Or consider that subtitle, “A Tale of
We had known the Ashburnhams Passion,” the last word of which de-
for nine seasons of the town of notes both erotic desire and intense
Nauheim with an extreme inti- suffering. Here they are deftly in-
macy—or rather, with an acquain- tertwined. The supposedly libertine
tance as loose and easy and yet as Ashburnham weeps over shopgirl ro-
close as a good glove’s with your mances and typically seeks soulful
hand. My wife and I knew Captain conversation more than sex in his re-
and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as lationships with young women: “What
it was possible to know anybody really made him feel good in life was
and yet, in another sense, we knew to comfort somebody who would be
nothing at all about them. This is, I darkly and mysteriously mournful.” In-
believe, a state of things only pos- secure and sentimental, he yearns for
sible with English people of whom, “assurance of his own worth” and to be
till today, when I sit down to puzzle “looked upon as a sort of Lohengrin.”
out what I know of this sad affair, I Anyone who has read, or better still
knew nothing whatever. Six months reread, The Good Soldier will likely sec-
ago I had never been to England ond the judgment of the critic Martin
and, certainly, I had never sounded Seymour-Smith: “There is no more for-
the depths of an English heart. I mally perfect novel in the language.”
had known the shallows. That said, Ford Madox Ford deserves
attention for more than a single mas-
Notice the narrator’s confiding tone terpiece. By the time of his death at
as he seesaws between declaration and age sixty-six, he had produced eighty-
denial, past impression and later knowl- one books, thirty-two of them novels.
edge. Phrases like “or rather,” “and yet,” He also wrote art criticism, biog-
and “in another sense” suggest dither- raphies, sociological commentary,
ing confusion and uncertainty, while memoirs and reminiscences, liter-
the assertion of “extreme intimacy” ary histories, poetry, and World War
is refuted by the conclusion that the I propaganda.
narrator—he is an American named Nearly all of those books draw,
John Dowell—and his wife really knew Ford Madox Ford; illustration by Grant Shaffer sometimes closely, on Ford’s rich and
nothing at all of the Ashburnhams. This muddled life, and it helps to know
turns out to be only partially true: Flor- this case, Ford ramps up those little discount strong hints of sexual impo- something about it, which is why Max
ence Dowell knew Edward and Leonora jolts into seismic events until the very tence, homosexual impulses, and pos- Saunders’s concise Ford Madox Ford,
Ashburnham very well indeed. ground we stand on rocks beneath our sible incest. No wonder that each of published in Reaktion’s Critical Lives
As one reads on, it grows clear that feet, then gives way. the novel’s characters, at one point or series, is so valuable. Earlier in his ca-
this fretful, Prufrockian narrator is suf- another, yearns for a little peace. reer, Saunders—a professor of English
fering from emotional strain and ex- Above all, though, Ford almost bra- at the University of Birmingham—
haustion. Nonetheless, there are hints
that his hesitation and backtracking
aren’t entirely the result of some over-
B ut first we need to be better ac-
quainted with these two odd cou-
ples. Because Florence and the captain
zenly contrives to keep every element
in the narrative flickeringly uncer-
tain, labile, open to multiple interpre-
brought out the two-volume Ford
Madox Ford: A Dual Life (1996), a formi-
dably learned (and unobtrusively witty)
whelming psychological trauma. Could both suffer from “heart” trouble, the tations. As he declared in a 1914 essay critical biography intended for schol-
Dowell, in truth, be subtly controlling Dowells and Ashburnhams regularly written when he was at work on The ars and researchers. Consequently, or-
the narrative for reasons that escape visit the German health spa of Nauheim. Good Soldier: dinary readers wanting to know more
us? He hasn’t simply heard about this The two wives are both around thirty, about the author of The Good Soldier
sad story; he witnessed it, played a sig- give or take a year or two, and the men In a rightly constructed novel turned instead to Alan Judd’s lively
nificant part in it. Consider how casu- slightly older. The Dowells are expatri- every word is a preparation for Ford Madox Ford (1990) or to introduc-
ally, almost parenthetically, we soon ate Americans, Protestant, leisured, and the final effect, but there are many tory works by Sondra Stang and Frank
learn that Dowell’s wife and Captain comfortably well off. Captain Ashburn- words, and, since it is the func- MacShane. With this new book, how-
Ashburnham are both dead and that ham is English, Anglican, and a deco- tion of art to conceal the artifice, ever, our leading Ford scholar distills
something terrible has befallen an as rated soldier, as well as a conscientious many of the words will possibly be a lifetime of close reading and study
yet unidentified girl. landowner who takes seriously his re- misleading. into two hundred pages. By so doing,
So much for suspense, you might sponsibilities to his tenants. The cap- he has produced the essential Ford
think. But what might seem inept tain’s wife is Irish, Catholic, and careful “Conceal” and “mislead” are the oper- primer, the best short overview of a
spoilers actually signal Ford’s almost about money, partly to counter what she ating terms of The Good Soldier. What writer championed by, among many
show-offy confidence in his storytell- sees as her generous husband’s finan- energizes the novel isn’t what we know others, Graham Greene, A. S. Byatt,
ing skill: Look, he seems to be saying, cial extravagance. Both couples pass about its characters but, tantalizingly, Ruth Rendell, and Julian Barnes.
even when you know what will happen as model examples of their respective what we don’t know and may never
to these characters, I’ll keep you turn- national types. know.
ing the pages. In fact the narrative’s
grip will grow increasingly tighter as
one short, sharp shock follows another.
In short order, however, suspicion
leads to conviction that this presen-
tation of Edwardian gentility and the
In truth, for relentless and lay-
ered tricksiness, only Nabokov’s Lo-
lita and Pale Fire can rival The Good
B orn in 1873, Ford Hermann Hueffer
(usually pronounced “Hoofer”)—
who would later call himself Ford
Ford learned this technique from Jo- douceur de vivre of spa life masks a Soldier. It employs the entire mod- Madox Ford—grew up in a distin-
seph Conrad. “If you read Conrad sen- Southern Gothic reality of erotic tur- ernist playbook—a carefully orches- guished late-nineteenth-century ar-
tence by sentence with minute care,” moil. As the guileless—or guileful?— trated, almost fugue-like unfolding tistic and intellectual family. His
he wrote, “you will see that each sen- Dowell proceeds with his story, we are of the action, multiple time-shifts, a German-born father was the chief
tence is a mosaic of little crepitations treated to multiple betrayals, gallows limited narrator, symbolic historical music critic of The Times, Wagner’s
of surprise and that practically every humor, religious zealotry, brutal heart- allusions, the speeding up and slowing champion in Victorian England, and
paragraph contains its little jolt.” In break, and eventual madness, not to down of narrative pace, foreshadow- an authority on Provençal poetry;

52 The New York Review

his mother was the daughter of the a collected edition of his work. Oddly of making unwelcome advances toward mean-spirited Hemingway would repay
Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox enough, he passed over the now highly her. When that effort failed, she res- Ford’s kindness with mockery, going
Brown. That’s just for starters. The regarded trilogy about Henry VIII and olutely denied Ford a divorce. Mean- so far as to say the man smelled.) In
family chose Swinburne to be little Catherine Howard, consisting of The while, the illicit lovers tried various Paris, Ford hosted parties, grew stout,
Fordie’s godfather, Liszt once dandled Fifth Queen (1906), Privy Seal (1907), ways, all unsuccessful, to legalize their told stories about the writers he had
the infant, and Ford himself remem- and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908). relationship, only to enflame Elsie’s known, and, when Stella gave birth to
bered pulling out a chair for Turgenev. Together the three novels chart the un- righteous anger when a newspaper a daughter, persuaded Joyce to act as
The multitalented Dante Gabriel Ros- successful attempt by Katharine—as identified Hunt as Mrs. Ford Madox Julia’s godfather. He also embarked
setti was an uncle and the poet Chris- Ford spells her first name—to bring Hueffer. A libel suit and court battle on his most ambitious work of fiction.
tina Rossetti an aunt. her royal consort back into the Roman followed, resulting in further social
At age seventeen, when his peers Catholic faith. obloquy and near bankruptcy for the
were carousing at Oxford, Ford H.
Madox Hueffer brought out his first
book, The Brown Owl (1891), a still-
Particularly admired for its style by
William H. Gass, The Fifth Queen trilo-
gy—“slow, intense, pictorial, and oper-
errant husband.
At this low point, as he entered his
forties, Ford sat down to write—or
I n 1922 Marcel Proust died, and Ford
attended the funeral. The English
writer had once considered translating
delightful fairy tale about a princess atic,” as Gass describes it—chronicles rather to dictate, then revise—The the first volume of À la recherche du
protected after her father’s death by a the death of chivalry and faith before Good Soldier. He called it his first temps perdu, but nothing came of this
huge owl. Besides this benignant crea- the ruthless onslaught of deceit, Ma- true “novel,” his earlier fiction being project—except, apparently, a desire to
ture, the story features a villainous chiavellianism, and moral relativism. unjustly demoted to pastiches or pot- emulate Proust’s overall achievement.
chancellor, a valiant and handsome A. S. Byatt neatly sums up its atmo- boilers. The story of the Ashburnhams Like the French writer’s roman-fleuve,
emperor of India, a giant, a dwarf, a sphere of paranoia: and the Dowells, we can now see, re- Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy charts the
witch, a shapeshifter, and a dragon. As jiggered aspects of Ford’s own recent breakdown of an elegant, self-confident
Ford later recalled, somewhat ruefully, The world of this novel is largely life and marital travails. Marwood, for society in which long-standing tradi-
“it sold many thousands more copies an indoor world, dark, artificially example, provided a partial model for tions crumble during the upheaval of
than any other book I ever wrote . . . and lit, a world of staircases, spyholes, Ashburnham (and would later do the World War I. Both masterpieces probe
keeps on selling to this day.” hangings that conceal listeners, same for Christopher Tietjens in the the ramifications of class, the torments
Even now, modern collections of Vic- alleys where men lurk with knives, Parade’s End tetralogy). of jealousy and sexual obsession, the
torian fairy tales seldom leave out The walls that close people in. Because The Good Soldier appeared workings of memory, a pervasive rot-
Brown Owl, unless they prefer Ford’s just after World War I broke out, the tenness at the heart of high society, the
subsequent, even better entry into the While Thomas Cromwell does ap- unnerving book was largely buried by solace afforded by art and literature,
genre, The Queen Who Flew (1894). In it, pear, there is little overlap with Hilary world events. Though middle-aged, the and, most of all, the gradual changes in
an orphaned and very young queen— Mantel’s Wolf Hall and its successors. patriotic Ford dutifully enlisted in the the main character’s self-understanding.
she’s really just a teenage girl—escapes Overall, Ford depicts the king as a tor- British Army, receiving a commission Both are also funny, sometimes confus-
both the marital attentions of the re- mented, tragic figure, temperamentally as a second lieutenant with the Welch ing because of dated period references
gent, Lord Blackjowl, and the confines suspicious and jealous. Henceforth Regiment. In France, he was shelled at and slang, full of improbabilities, and
of the royal palace by acquiring aerial most of his best fiction would deal with the Battle of the Somme, gassed, and marked by occasional longueurs.
powers from a grouchy bat. Once out in sexual passion and its attendant angst rendered amnesiac for three days. His The protagonist of Parade’s End,
the world, the queen encounters both and confusions. lungs were so badly affected that he Christopher Tietjens, is a younger scion
kindness and cruelty, eventually mar- huffed and wheezed and spoke softly of the house of Groby and a brilliant
rying a young farmer whose blindness for the rest of his life. statistician in an important government
she cures by sacrificing her ability to fly.
At not quite twenty-one the preco-
cious Ford eloped with seventeen-year-
I n 1908, at thirty-five, Ford launched
The English Review, which during
his editorial tenure—an all-too-brief
Worse still, a traumatized Ford felt
himself to be washed up as a writer.
After separating from a brokenhearted
department, but also something of a
saintly simpleton whose talents and
generosity are repeatedly exploited by
old Elsie Martindale. The newlyweds year or so—he made the best literary Hunt, he took up with an Australian the careerists around him. Though phys-
eventually settled in the vicinity of magazine of its time. The offices, as painter named Stella Bowen, twenty ically plain himself and often likened to
Romney Marsh, where the neighbors the assistant editor, Douglas Goldring, years his junior, and retired to the an elephantine meal-sack, he is none-
included Joseph Conrad, Henry James recalled, “consisted of three floors theless the husband of the beautiful
(who would use Ford as a partial model above a poulterer’s and fishmonger’s Sylvia, who tricked him into marriage
for Merton Densher in The Wings of shop,” and to reach them you passed by to cover her affair with another man.
the Dove), the American expatriate Ste- “suspended carcases of rabbits, fowls, As Some Do Not . . . (1924) begins,
phen Crane (in Ford’s view “the best of and game birds.” In the very first issue Sylvia has run off to France with a
all short-story writers in English”), and Ford printed Thomas Hardy’s contro- new lover named Perowne, though few
H. G. Wells. Ford quickly joined this versial poem “A Sunday Morning Trag- people know of her infidelity. As Ford
“ring of conspirators” bent on over- edy” (abortion gone wrong), Constance writes, “English people of good po-
throwing British fiction. Between 1898 Garnett’s translation of Tolstoy’s “The sition consider that the basis of all
and 1908 he and Conrad collaborated Raid,” Henry James’s spooky “The Jolly marital unions or disunions is the
on three so-so novels: The Inheritors Corner,” the opening of H. G. Wells’s maxim: No scenes.” Shortly thereaf-
(1901), Romance (1903), and The Na- Tono-Bungay, and some of Conrad’s ter, Christopher encounters the viva-
ture of a Crime (eventually published reminiscences. Later the magazine cious suffragette Valentine Wannop,
in 1924). When the older writer was ill showcased work by Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the two fall in love. While Valen-
and on deadline, Ford even stepped in and E. M. Forster and helped launch tine quietly confesses that “I know I’m
to draft one of the chapters for the the careers of D. H. Lawrence and all right with you,” Christopher soon
serialized version of Nostromo (1904) Wyndham Lewis. Ford paid his writers recognizes that “she was the only soul
and later supplied the plot for The Se- well, perhaps remembering the mantra in the world with whom he could talk.”
cret Agent (1907). of his grandfather Ford Madox Brown: But will the pair act on their sexual
In the twenty-five years leading “Beggar yourself rather than refuse attraction? After all, some people do
up to World War I, the industrious assistance to anyone whose genius you and some do not.
F. M. Hueffer brought out some forty think shows promise of being greater Before long, however, the gossip
books, ranging from biographies of than your own.” mills start grinding. The jealous Sylvia
Ford Madox Brown and Hans Hol- Unfortunately, besides promoting country to raise vegetables and pigs. spreads the rumor that Christopher is
bein to sociological studies of British good writing, Ford also started dallying It was only now that he changed his a philandering rake and Valentine his
culture and history such as The Soul with his wife’s sister. Elsie was willing name to Ford Madox Ford, partly to shameless mistress and the mother of
of London (1905) and The Heart of the to overlook this familial infidelity but signal a new start in life, partly so an illegitimate child. None of this is
Country (1906) to collections of po- not her husband’s subsequent infatu- that Stella could be referred to as Mrs. true, but rather than defend himself,
etry and a dozen novels, among them ation with Violet Hunt, a well-known Ford. There were, after all, two other Christopher exhibits an almost sheep-
a time-travel romance to counter Mark novelist a decade Ford’s senior (now women claiming to be Mrs. Hueffer. like forbearance. As for divorce, well, a
Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King chiefly remembered for her eerie 1911 In the early 1920s the again rest- gentleman simply doesn’t, and Sylvia,
Arthur’s Court. Called Ladies Whose collection Tales of the Uneasy). By this less Ford moved to Paris with Bowen, being a Catholic, simply won’t. In fact
Bright Eyes (1911), it seems to have time in her life, Hunt hungered for se- where he relaunched his editorial ca- she persecutes her rather insufferably
been the book a young T. S. Eliot gave curity, having in earlier years turned reer by founding The Transatlantic high-minded husband only because of
his friend Alain-Fournier, who found down a half-facetious marriage pro- Review. In its pages he published sec- his indifference and neglect:
in it “so much feverish emotion and posal from Oscar Wilde and enjoyed tions of James Joyce’s “Work in Prog-
heart-rending beauty”—which is say- short affairs with Wells and Somerset ress,” i.e., Finnegans Wake, as well as “If,” Sylvia went on with her de-
ing something coming from the author Maugham. work by Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cum- nunciation, “you had once in our
of that achingly dreamlike novel of lost In what may have been a last-ditch mings, and the young Ernest Heming- lives said to me: ‘You whore! You
love, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913). attempt to recapture her husband’s way, “the best writer in America at this bitch! You killed my mother. May
Years later, Ford listed this “admi- affection, Elsie accused Arthur Mar- moment . . . the most conscientious, the you rot in hell for it . . .’ If you’d only
rable unappreciated novel”—Eliot’s wood, Ford’s close friend and the chief most master of his craft, the most con- said something like it . . . about the
phrase—among his top dozen titles for financial backer of The English Review, summate.” (In A Moveable Feast, the child! About Perowne! . . .you might

March 27, 2025 53

 have done something to bring us pher’s older brother Mark, who lies par- any other English novel.” Nearly every- of any kind tends to bring on muscu-
together.” alyzed and speechless after a stroke. thing worth knowing about the art of lar convulsions. What is there to live
The household itself is overseen by fiction, he maintains, can be learned for? “Means of escape,” he explains,
Despite being inveterately flirta- Mark’s no-nonsense French wife and from attentive study of Flaubert’s Ma- “The world’s full of them. Only one is
tious, Sylvia concedes that her own former mistress, Marie-Léonie, argu- dame Bovary and Sentimental Educa- genuine.”
love affairs leave her feeling “bored . . . ably the most sheerly likable character tion. Turgenev was “the greatest poet
bored . . . bored!” As she reflects, in the entire tetralogy. Christopher, in prose who ever used the novel as the

taking up with a man was like

reading a book you had read when
looking tragic, only appears toward
the very end.
Its love-in-a-cottage setting not-
vehicle for his self-expression.”
Most surprisingly, Ford points to
W. H. Hudson as “the unapproached
I n Ford’s life and fiction, Max Saun-
ders points out, one finds multiple
instances of “homo duplex”—a man
you had forgotten you had read it. withstanding, Last Post is hardly a pas- master of the English tongue.” He par- divided between the opposing forces
You had not been ten minutes in toral idyll. When not worrying about ticularly extols Hudson’s nature writ- of physical appetite and moral or soci-
any sort of intimacy with a man her own unborn baby, Valentine, like ing but also notes that Green Mansions etal restraint. So what happens next in
before you said: “But I’ve read all Leonora in The Good Soldier, frets (1904) is virtually unrivaled as “Anglo- The Rash Act is easily guessed: Henry,
this before.” about her husband’s blithe inatten- Saxondom’s only rendering of hopeless, failing to carry through on his own
tion to money. Her last words in the of aching passion.” That the author of suicide, discovers the body of Hugh,
As it does here, the tetralogy regularly novel are a cri de coeur: “How are we The Good Soldier could say this under- who has shot himself. In a daze, Henry
depicts the world as a sad and desper- to live?” Thus the tetralogy closes with scores Ford’s unstinting and almost trades identification papers with the
ate comedy, especially when satirizing the future of Christopher and Valen- instinctual generosity and selflessness dead man and becomes Hugh Monck-
the unctuous hypocrisies of ambitious tine, and even Sylvia, still shrouded in praising the work of other writers. ton. Wanting to be someone else, he
social climbers. in uncertainty. tells himself, was fundamentally “a de-
In the next two books, No More Pa- sire for salvation.” Naturally, though,
rades (1925) and A Man Could Stand
Up— (1926), Ford takes Christopher
into the Great War, where he suffers— B esides fiction, in the 1920s and
1930s Ford began to publish a
A s Ford entered the last third of
his life, he wasn’t just an “old man
mad about writing,” as he described
complications ensue from this other
kind of rash act, mainly involving
money and two sisterly whores (one
as his creator did—a traumatic head series of memoirs and critical works. himself. In Paris, he shepherded the of whom guesses the truth).
injury, one so severe that for a while These rambling, gossipy, highly divert- early career of Jean Rhys, but also Told entirely through Henry’s stream
he can’t even remember his own name. ing volumes include Thus to Revisit embarked on a brief affair with her of consciousness, The Rash Act neatly
Soon, though, he is back in France (1921), in which he reminisces about (darkly fictionalized in Rhys’s 1928 preserves the classical unities of time,
with his troop of “small drapers, rate- some of the “prosateurs” he knew and novel Postures, aka Quartet). It sig- place, and action. While initially in-
collectors’ clerks, gas inspectors. There admired; Joseph Conrad: A Personal naled the approaching end of his de- tended to open a trilogy that would do
were even three music-hall perform- Remembrance (1924), which Sinclair cade with Bowen, who was succeeded for the Great Depression what Parade’s
ers, two scene shifters and several Lewis called “the one great book on by an even younger painter, Janice End had done for World War I, it is now
milkmen,” but also a Latin-spouting the technique of writing a novel that Biala, with whom Ford remained for more often enjoyed as a stand-alone
subaltern who is going insane and a I have ever read”; Return to Yester- the rest of his life. novel. Reading it, I was alternately re-
financially strapped colonel who is day (1931), which covers Ford’s life be- The new couple spent more and minded of Buried Alive (1908), Arnold
slowly dying from cancer. fore the war; It Was the Nightingale more time in Provence. Already in Bennett’s deliciously comic take on the
In these pages, Ford dramatically The Good Soldier, Dowell had long- same theme, and Cyril Connolly’s brit-
recreates the psychological strains of ingly wondered, tle comedy of drunken expatriates on
war, as soldiers—half-inured to the the Côte d’Azur, The Rock Pool (1936).
constant shelling—anxiously brood Is there then any terrestrial par- All three books deserve rediscovery.
over what’s happening back home. adise where, amidst the whisper- When not in France, Ford and Biala
At one point, Christopher denies a ing of the olive-leaves, people can regularly visited the United States,
dispatch-runner’s request for a leave be with whom they like and have once riding a Greyhound bus from
because he knows the man will con- what they like and take their ease Washington, D.C., to Tennessee to visit
front and likely be killed by his wife’s in shadows and in coolness? Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. As
lover, a prizefighter. On that same day always, Ford promoted young writers,
this very soldier is struck by shrap- In the 1914 poem “On Heaven”—much now welcoming the early work of Rob-
nel and dies, Pietà-like, in the now admired by Ezra Pound—Ford de- ert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, Jean
guilt-ridden Christopher’s arms. Ev- scribed the celestial paradise as a small Stafford, and Eudora Welty. Still, he
erything seems so futile. Later in the town rather like Aix or Arles. Twenty was feeling his age. The old walrus—
war, Christopher will himself undergo years later, Provence: From Minstrels to sick with cardiac trouble, needing
symbolic death and resurrection when the Machine (1935) contended that only money, eager for appreciation—ac-
a German shell buries him alive under by fostering a Provençal spirit—one cepted a teaching job at Olivet Col-
mounds of dirt and debris. that emphasized an appreciation of the lege in Michigan, where he completed
Originally, Ford meant to end the se- arts, a simple diet, and a healthy sen- his last book, The March of Literature:
quence with the raucous and drunken suousness—could the world be saved From Confucius’ Day to Our Own (1938).
celebration of Armistice Day. By then, from barbarism, indigestion, and heavy This is a garrulous, idiosyncratic paean
Christopher understands that “feudal- industry. As Ford once said—and it’s to the great writers of world literature,
ism was finished” and that the war “had tempting to agree—there are only marred by editors who cut many of the
coarsened him and hardened him.” He “two earthly paradises. The one is in quotations. Soon thereafter, Ford fell
determines to be with Valentine, no Provence. . . . The other is the Read- ill on a return trip to France and died
matter what, just as Valentine, who has ing Room of the British Museum.” In in 1939, worn out at just sixty-six.
been working as a phys ed teacher at a London, though, he complained that Will Ford Madox Ford ever be more
girls’ school, vows that “she was never his prose drooped “as backboneless than a coterie author? As he himself
going to show respect for anyone ever as a waterhose,” but “when I get back plaintively acknowledged, only a few
again. She had been through the mill: (1933), which covers the years after; to Provence . . . I shall write little crisp people bought his books no matter how
the whole world had been through the and Mightier Than the Sword (aka sentences like silver fish jumping out enthusiastic the reviews. To me, Ford
mill! No more respect!” The last pages Portraits from Life, 1937), which col- of streams.” is one of those prodigious writing en-
of A Man Could Stand Up— reveal a lects short biographical essays about Something of the same sensuous- gines, like Trollope or Wodehouse, who
tipsy Christopher and Valentine danc- Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, The- ness and vitality animates the best of published so much that he seems in-
ing in each other’s arms, about to set odore Dreiser, and other literary em- Ford’s late novels, The Rash Act (1933). exhaustible. His nonfiction glories in
out on a life together. inences. While these books may be Set in a little town on the Mediterra- being quirky and self-indulgent, while
But what kind of life? A friend wrote structurally slapdash and factually nean, it focuses on Henry Martin, an remaining great fun as well as insight-
to Ford demanding to know what hap- unreliable, Ford always insisted that American in his mid-thirties whose life ful, even prescient: “The characteristic
pened to the couple—and to Sylvia they were faithful to his impressions has reached a dead end. Completely of modern life that is most appalling is
and all the others—in postwar En- of those times and the people he knew. broke, he has resolved to commit sui- its inability to sustain any protracted
gland. In Last Post (1928) we learn that Reading them, as well as such re- cide by going out sailing and, Hart train of thought.”
the lovers are now living together in lated books as The English Novel (1929), Crane–like, drowning himself. How- As for his best fiction, Graham
the country, Christopher eking out The Critical Attitude (1911), and The ever, on the night before this rash act, Greene had no doubt about its sin-
a small income as an old furniture March of Literature (1938), one can al- Henry encounters the immensely rich gular merit, declaring that “there is
dealer, Valentine pregnant, and the most hear Ford talking about books, and dashing Hugh Monckton. no novelist of this century more likely
ancestral house of Groby rented by Syl- art, writing. He castigates Dickens for The two men look much alike, and to live than Ford Madox Ford.” Is that
via to a vulgar American woman who breaking novelistic illusion with autho- Hugh, the reader soon grasps, is also wishful thinking? Perhaps. A more per-

.
high-handedly orders a centuries-old rial intrusions, even as he praises Aus- planning to commit suicide. His film- suasive recommendation might well be
oak cut down because it blocks the ten’s consummate artistry. Among his star lover has dumped him, a head this quieter one from William Trevor:
light. Much of the novel reproduces “private preferences,” he ranks Trol- injury from the war causes almost “I remember the novels and their peo-
the thoughts and memories of Christo- lope’s Framley Parsonage “higher than constant pain, and drinking alcohol ple as one remembers life.”

54 The New York Review

 Angles of Approach
Sally Rooney

Unbreakable
by Ronnie O’Sullivan.
London: Seven Dials,
262 pp., $19.99 (paper)

Ronnie O’Sullivan:
The Edge of Everything
a documentary film directed
by Sam Blair

Ask almost any snooker fan to name

the greatest player in the history of the
sport, and they will tell you it’s Ronnie
O’Sullivan. This isn’t really a matter
of facts and figures, although O’Sul-
livan, whose professional career has
now spanned over thirty years, does
indeed come out on top by almost any
statistical measure. If you really want
to know why he’s considered the great-
est, you have to watch him play the
game.
Snooker is related to, but distinct
from, other cue games like billiards
and eight-ball pool. One key differ-
ence between snooker and pool is
that snooker tables are bigger. A lot
bigger. Two reasonably tall men could
lie down end to end along the length
of a snooker table and still not reach
the corners. A standard pool table has
a total playing area of about twenty-
seven feet; a snooker table’s surface is
about seventy-two square feet. What’s Jacqueline de Jong: Gitane, coup de force, 1978
more, the pockets on a snooker table
are actually smaller—about three and
a half inches wide. children. Think soccer, tennis, bas- match and take home the title. He pots variable, some pretty complex differ-
But the basic premise of the game ketball. Snooker declines to lend it- a red, then the black, then another red, ential equations, and a lot of calculat-
is simple. A player uses a cue to strike self so readily to the amusement of and everything lands precisely the way ing time. O’Sullivan lines up that shot
the white ball in such a way that it will dilettantes. The cultural status of the he wants it: immaculate, mesmerizing, and plays it in the space of about six
make contact with one of the fifteen game stems therefore not from mass miraculously controlled. seconds. A lucky guess? It would be
red balls, causing the red to roll into a participation but from mass viewer- The last remaining red ball is stranded lucky to make a guess like that once
pocket, which earns the player a single ship. Bad snooker would be painful up by the cushion on the right-hand in a lifetime. He’s been doing this sort
point. Then they do the same again, to watch; mediocre snooker is noto- side, and the cue ball rolls to a halt just of thing for thirty years.
but this time aiming for one of six riously boring; but great snooker is left of the middle right-hand pocket. What then? If he’s not calculating,
other colored balls, each worth a differ- sublime. And it is generally agreed that The angle is tight, awkward, both white and he’s not guessing, what is Ronnie
ent number of points—yellow, green, even among those legends of the game and red lined up inches away from the O’Sullivan doing? Why does the ques-
brown, blue, pink, or the highest-value who have astonished and delighted cushion. O’Sullivan surveys the position, tion seem so strange? And why doesn’t
black ball at seven points. Then it’s the viewing public, one player stands nonchalantly switches hands, and pots anybody know the answer?
back to red. Any time the player fails alone. the red ball left-handed. The cue ball
to make a pot, the break comes to an At his best, Ronnie O’Sullivan con- hits the top cushion, rolls back down
end, and their opponent gets a turn at
the table. When either player racks up
a sufficient number of points so that
ducts his games with something like
orchestral splendor, arranging and re-
arranging the balls across the table’s
over the table, and comes to a stop, as
if on command, to line up the next shot
on the black. O’Sullivan could scarcely
O ’Sullivan first entered public life
under almost unbelievably sen-
sational circumstances. Born in the
their opponent can no longer draw surface in hypnotically precise pas- have chosen a better spot if he had West Midlands in 1975, he had grown
level, they win the frame; the match sages of play. Each frame becomes a picked the cue ball up in his hand and up outside London and played snooker
ends when one player has won a cer- kind of logic puzzle, an intricate ques- put it there. The crowd erupts: elation since his early childhood; his father
PRI VAT E COLLE CTION/JACQU E LIN E DE JONG FOU NDATION/ GA LER IE ALL EN, PA RI S

tain number of frames—best of three, tion with a thrillingly simple answer, mingled with disbelief. At the end of and mentor, Ron Sr., used to refer to
best of seven, or, in the case of the an answer only one person can see. the frame, when only the black remains the snooker hall as his “crèche.” Then,
World Snooker Championship final, An apparently chaotic jumble slowly on the table, he switches hands again, after turning professional in 1992, he
best of thirty-five. reveals its hidden form: the cue ball seemingly just for fun, and makes the immediately went on a historic win-
If this all sounds feasible, or even charts a single path, from red to color final shot with his left. The black drops ning streak, taking seventy-four of his
fun, then I’m afraid my description has and back again, spinning, swerving, ric- down into the pocket, completing what first seventy-six snooker matches, in-
been misleading. Faced with a real-life ocheting, or stopping dead as required, is known in snooker as a maximum cluding a record-breaking thirty-eight
snooker table—unless you’ve already until everything is neatly cleared away. break: the feat of potting every ball consecutive wins. He began appear-
had years of practice—you probably No, no, you think, it isn’t possible— on the table in perfect order to attain ing regularly on television, his image
wouldn’t be able to do almost any of and then, rebounding from the right- the highest possible total of 147 points. beamed directly into millions of house-
the things I’ve just described. Your cue hand cushion, the red sails over the Watch a little of this sort of thing holds. That same year his father was
would slip; the cue ball, moving over colossal width of the table and slots and it’s hugely entertaining. Watch a sentenced to life in prison for stab-
the gigantic surface of the table, would down neatly, inevitably, into the mi- lot and you might start to ask your- bing a man to death. At the time of
strike the wrong object or nothing at nuscule middle left pocket. self strange questions. For instance: these events, Ronnie O’Sullivan was
all; the object ball would careen off in Take the last frame of the 2014 Welsh In that particular frame, after pot- sixteen years old.
the wrong direction. And of course, Open final. The footage is available on- ting that last red, how did O’Sullivan In the years that followed, O’Sullivan
when you finally managed to make a line, courtesy of Eurosport Snooker: know that the cue ball would come went on to produce some of the fin-
single pot, the cue ball would end up if you like, you can watch O’Sullivan, back down the table that way and est snooker ever played. He also—as
in such an awkward position afterward then in his late thirties, circling the land precisely where he wanted it? Of he details in his recent memoir Un-
that you wouldn’t stand a chance of table, chalking his cue without taking course it was only obeying the laws of breakable—struggled with severe de-
making another. his eyes from the baize. He’s leading physics. But if you wanted to calcu- pression, developed substance abuse
Most mainstream sports, while awe- his opponent, Ding Junhui—then at late the trajectory of a cue ball coming problems, and spent time in a psychi-
inspiring at the professional level, also number three in the world snooker off an object ball and then a cushion atric hospital and rehab. During the
tend to serve as fun and accessible rankings—by eight frames to three, using Newtonian physics, you’d need 2005 World Snooker Championship,
pastimes for amateurs, even young needing only one more to win the an accurate measurement of every returning as the defending champion,

March 27, 2025 55

 A 2025 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
he shaved his head mid-tournament,
climbed onto the furniture, clawed
at his face with his fingernails, and
W hat goes through your mind when
you throw a ball at a target? I
mean the question literally. You’ve
LONGLIST NOMINEE crashed out of a quarterfinal after los- picked up a ball, you’re holding it in
“Perfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely ing eleven of his last fourteen frames. your hand, looking at the target, and
cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling The Independent described his perfor- now you’re throwing. Maybe you suc-
at its heart. Vincenzo Latronico is the mance at the tournament as “public ceed, or maybe not. But in your mind,
finest of writers.” —Lauren Groff emotional disintegration.” He told the in that moment, holding the ball, and
press that he could not go on playing then not holding it anymore, watch-
Perfection is a scathing novel about contemporary snooker professionally for much lon- ing it move through the air: What are
existence, a tale of two people gradually waking ger. “Physically and mentally,” he said, you thinking? Are you thinking at all?
up to find themselves in various traps, wondering “I will probably end up killing myself.” Maybe you believe the answer is no.
how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, Twenty years later, he’s still playing. We’ve all probably had the experience
or were they just born too late?
Recently—in his book, in the 2023 doc- of catching something without think-
“One of Europe’s most talented young writers, umentary film Ronnie O’Sullivan: The ing: a reflex action, done before we
Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we’ve Edge of Everything, and in the related even know we’re doing it. So we know
all been waiting for.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus publicity—he has tried to present this kind of thing—action without
himself as an older and wiser person, thought—is possible. But throwing
“The book artfully lays out detail upon detail of an addict on the long road to recovery. a ball at a target is different. You’re
Anna and Tom’s quotidian existence in forensic, He says that he has learned to stop consciously performing a specific task.
deadpan style. . . But where is reality, Latronico chasing perfection; that he’s no longer You weigh the ball in your hand, you
asks in this sharp, deliciously pessimistic novel. worried about winning or losing; that assess your distance from the tar-
PERFECTION Anna and Tom can’t seem to escape a feeling that
it’s always out of reach. . . . [A]lienation from the
he continues playing snooker only for get, you consider angles and speed.
Vincenzo Latronico the love of the game. But this appar- If you were asleep or drugged, unable
self is at the hollow, restless heart of Anna and ent transition to wise elder has been, to think, you couldn’t do any of that;
Translated by Sophie Hughes Tom’s lives: constantly yearning, empty of meaning. at least, inconsistent. Just this Janu- anything that interfered with your
Paperback • $15.95 Latronico’s thought-provoking book is anything ary, visibly frustrated with his perfor- mental clarity would interfere with
On sale on March 18th but.” —Thomas McMullan, The Guardian mance in an invitational tournament, the accuracy of your throw. But, you
“Perfection is a defining picture of a generation. . . . he slammed his cue against the table might protest, that doesn’t mean you
EVENTS WITH VINCENZO LATRONICO
[A] curious and compelling read—like staring into and later walked out of the competi- think about the throw, in the way that
Thursday, April 10th, 6:30pm
a mirror for the first time, unsure whether to be tion. On various occasions, including you would think about a mathematical
Italian Cultural Institute
686 Park Avenue, New York, NY struck by wonder or terror. Whichever it was, I very recently, he has described snooker problem or a word puzzle. You feel the
couldn’t look away.” —Chris Allnutt, Financial Times as a “bad sport”; openly derided the weight of the ball, you see your dis-
Friday, April 11th, 7pm abilities of younger players; claimed tance from the target. But what dis-
with Merve Emre
“Perfection is a short, sly, scathing satire abou that he only continues playing for the tinguishes feeling from thinking? Can
Community Bookstore
dissatisfied millennials. . . . Latronico’s piercing money; and dissuaded would-be en- seeing be a kind of thinking? And what
143 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
RSVPs requested for this free event irony is translated with great care and dexterity thusiasts from getting involved in the about the throw itself?
Visit communtybookstore.net by Sophie Hughes, meaning it all feels painfully game. His Twitter bio used to include When you pick up a ball and throw
familiar. . . . Latronico has written one of the most the line “I have a degree in snooker it, some process undoubtedly takes
brilliantly controlled works of social realism I’ve and I am a genius.. haha.” place in your brain. Maybe that process
read in a while.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday In the UK and Ireland, O’Sullivan is doesn’t feel to you like thinking. But
Times (UK) a very famous man. People who have is there a better name for it? You saw
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
never even watched a game of snooker where you wanted the ball to go, and
profess strong opinions about his life then you moved your arm to make it go
and personality: he’s arrogant, he’s there. Who knows how many millions
obsessive, he’s actually a really nice of nerve endings were sending you in-
Two picture books with stories by Clarice Lispector guy. Part of what makes him such a formation about the ball, about the
compelling figure is that, despite his target; who knows how many muscles
Almost True is about a talking dog named Ulisses, his notorious habit of contradicting him- in your shoulder, arm, and hand were
owner Clarice, the rooster Evidio, the hen Edissea, and
self, he always seems to believe what activated when you made the throw.
a greedy fig tree. Ulisses’s story gets started when the
he is saying at any given time. On April Like remembering a song and then
witch Exelia floats into town disguised as a black cloud.
The fig tree wants to get rich quick and with the witch’s
23 last year, asked about his purported singing it. You don’t need to make any
help, she hatches a dark plan to make Edissea and her status as the greatest snooker player mental calculations about the reso-
fellow hens lay eggs all night. But the plan backfires ever, he told the press, “I don’t re- nance frequencies of your vocal cords.
when the birds cluck and crow in protest, and the fig gard myself as the greatest. I’m one The song comes into your head, and
tree get distracted. of them, maybe.” A mere two days later you can sing it, or maybe you can’t.
he felt differently. “I’ve had the great- You see the target, you throw the
est career of any snooker player. . . . I ball. It’s so simple, it doesn’t seem
ALMOST TRUE have to really give myself a pat on the worth thinking about. Until you try to
Illustrated by Carla Irusta back because I don’t, I am hard on my- think about it: and then maybe it does.
Translated from the Portuguese self. Nobody has achieved what I have
by Benjamin Moser
Hardcover • $19.95 • For ages 5–9
achieved on a table statistically.” For
On sale April 8th what it’s worth, I think he was right
the second time.
The British media have been report-
I n the 1980s snooker was a major cul-
tural phenomenon in Britain and
Ireland. Top players were household
ing on O’Sullivan’s emotional instabil- names, and their rivalries were the sub-
ity for decades, sometimes calling in ject of national conversation. In the
Ideas come to rabbits when they scrunch and unscrunch
their noses, but as anyone who has seen a rabbit knows,
psychological experts to opine on his decades since, however, the sport has
they do this nonstop. In order to sniff out one single state of mind. The turbulence of his been in decline. Viewership has plum-
idea, they have to scrunch their noses 15,000 times. An family life—a few years after his fa- meted, and when O’Sullivan isn’t at the
ordinary rabbit named Joãozinho finally figures out how ther was convicted, his mother went table, it drops even further. There are
to escape from his rabbit hutch in order to find more to jail for tax evasion, leaving twenty- signs of a rebirth for the game in East
food. Soon he becomes an escape artist—but how does year-old Ronnie to take care of his Asia—competitions there attract big-
he do it? That’s a mystery he dares you to solve. young sister—has been picked over ger and younger audiences—but as yet
in detail. (“He is desperate to prove the majority of top players are still Brit-
something and also make psycholog- ish. Outside these regions, not many
ical recompense for what his parents people watch or play snooker, or even
THE MYSTERY did,” according to one Professor Cary really know what it is. In the course
OF THE Cooper.) But O’Sullivan’s extreme vol- of writing this essay, I spoke to var-
THINKING RABBIT atility has always seemed to exceed ious friends and strangers in the UK
Illustrated by Kammal João mere circumstance. The mercurial and Ireland about its subject: each and
Translated from the Portuguese
temperament, the absurd talent, the every one of them had heard of Ronnie
by Benjamin Moser
Hardcover • $19.95 • For ages 5–9
lurching highs and lows: it all just goes O’Sullivan, and many wanted to tell me
On sale April 8th together. Even when he plays badly, precisely what they thought of him. My
there’s something wild and demented North American friends, by contrast,
about his approach to the game; and had no idea who I was talking about.
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
when he’s at his best, he looks like the The specificity of snooker is not
favorite of heaven. only geographic but, visibly, socio-

56 The New York Review

 economic. In terms of both its play- impression of luxury or high living, complete his record-breaking tenth like to accomplish—where they want
ers and its viewership, professional nor of boisterous fun and friendship, maximum break. the ball to go, what kind of shot they
snooker has always been a working- nor even of freshness and good health. Days of controversy and discussion want to make. In response to a given
class game. Sports like tennis and There is something gloomy about the ensued. Would he really have left that task, our minds will give us all the
golf, with their wealthy international game’s kinetic glamour, all that dark- final black on the table if Verhaas same instructions: athletes can just
fan bases and high-end brand part- ness, all that solitude, the watching hadn’t stepped in? Was he obliged to obey those instructions more quickly,
nerships, convey in their on-screen and waiting. “Snooker’s just a really, attempt the shot, or did he have every efficiently, and precisely than the rest
presence an atmosphere of rarefied really tough sport,” O’Sullivan said in right to leave it behind if he wanted? of us.
luxury. The World Snooker Champion- 2021. “Stuck indoors, no natural light, Was this a protest about prize money, In certain cases, sure. When it comes
ship, on the other hand, is sponsored draw the curtains, in there for five or or something else? Barry Hearn, then to competing in a sprint, for instance,
by an online used-car dealership. Tour- six hours, you don’t talk to anyone. chairman of the World Snooker Tour, it’s fair to say that we all know what
naments take place in darkened leisure That’s not healthy. That’s not a good said O’Sullivan would have faced dis- we would like to do—that is, to run
centers and theaters, the tables bathed way to spend your life.” ciplinary action had he not potted faster than anyone else—but our bod-
from above in a uniform glare of ar- the black ball. In response, O’Sullivan ies can’t necessarily follow suit. And al-
tificial light. At some competitions, told Hearn, “If you like, this is my last most all sports involve some testing of
players are still required to wear the
traditional bow tie and waistcoat; at
others, they sport black polo shirts,
I n 2010, at the World Open in
Glasgow, O’Sullivan stops play at
the beginning of a frame to ask the
frame of snooker ever. I’m quite happy
to walk away.”
This was a conversation about what
these hard physical limitations: speed,
strength, balance, and so on. But now
let’s imagine you’re just holding a
shiny and synthetic, emblazoned with referee, Jan Verhaas, a question. In a gifted individual owes to the public. ball again. You try to make a throw,
the logos of betting companies or response Verhaas nods his head, and With only the black left to pot, the and you miss your target. Do you
local hardware suppliers in provincial then turns to another official and mur- frame and match were already over: feel that you somehow got the throw
British towns. right in your mind but that your arm
There’s also the specificity of gen- went wrong? Sometimes I suppose
der. Women do play snooker—the you might feel that way—if the ball
World Women’s Snooker Champion- slipped out of your hand, for instance.
ship takes place every year, and all But most of the time, it probably just
tournaments are theoretically open feels like you missed the target. Right?
to women participants—but men You, your brain, and also your arm and
continue to dominate the game. A hand, at the same moment, in the same
female player has never broken the way: you just missed.
top fifty of the overall world rankings. That we find ourselves discussing a
Televised snooker thus offers up the distinction here at all is evidence of a
spectacle of a particular kind of mas- certain way of thinking about cognition.
culinity. But what kind? Unlike team We have the brain, which takes in data
games, with each player a model citi- and administers decisions and com-
zen of a real or imagined nation-state, mands; and we have the body, which
snooker evinces no sense of camara- conveys data to the brain and then
derie, no collective spirit. And unlike carries out its orders. This is the pre-
solo sports—tennis, swimming, gym- dominant model of human conscious-
nastics—it presents the viewer with ness, the metaphor that structures our
no exemplary body at which to gaze in thinking about thought. And the param-
envy or longing. It’s not really a sport eters of this model seem to require us
in that sense. Professional players to decide, more or less, where athletic
are visually indistinguishable from Ronnie O’Sullivan after his seventh World Snooker Championship title, Sheffield, talent is located. In the brain, or in the
ordinary people, except that almost England, May 2022 body? Well, when you put it like that,
all of them are men. the question is easy. Mathematicians
The closest cultural neighbor of murs, “Can you find out what a max O’Sullivan had won. In other sports, and physicists have cognitive gifts; ath-
snooker is probably the game of darts. pays?” O’Sullivan stops and waits to the sphere of play is coterminous with letes have physical gifts.
Both are British, male-dominated, tra- find out what the prize money will be the sphere of competition—players But when you throw that ball, you’re
ditionally working-class pursuits, and if he completes a maximum break. At are not obliged to do anything in ex- not setting yourself a difficult physical
both have some relation to what are this point in the frame, he has potted cess of trying to win matches. But challenge. The ball isn’t heavy, the tar-
called “pub games.” But as televisual only two balls. snooker is different. Professionals are get isn’t far away, and you don’t need to
displays, the two could hardly be more The commentators—former pro- expected to continue past the point of throw very fast or hard. You just need to
different. At darts tournaments, the fessionals John Virgo and Dennis competitive advantage, until the inter- run the calculation and make the cor-
actual gameplay is mostly secondary Taylor—are audibly baffled, laugh- nal logic of the frame itself has been rect throw. And at that moment, doesn’t
to the raucous party atmosphere. The ing, but the laughter is uneasy. Tay- exhausted, and the table has no more it feel as if running the calculation is
crowd jeers and chants continuously; lor describes O’Sullivan’s behavior as to give. All maximum breaks—indeed making the throw? The calculation hap-
some sections jeer other sections for “bizarre.” Virgo says, “I’ve seen some all breaks over seventy-five or eighty— pens in the brain of course: but also,
not jeering enough. Female dancers things in the game of snooker, but I’ve have this quality of aesthetic excess, somehow, in the arm. The throw is itself
in cheerleader costumes are brought never seen anything quite like this.” of formal purity, snooker for snooker’s the calculation. Maybe you imagined,
on to entertain the audience during Most professional players might make sake. O’Sullivan had already gone far maybe you thought about it in advance,
breaks. Snooker is, by comparison, a a handful of maximum breaks in an past mere competition by getting down but the final decision was the action.
cerebral and restrained affair. Play entire career; some never make any. At to the final black. In walking away, or The brain is, after all, part of the body:
takes place in strictly enforced silence the time, O’Sullivan had already made trying to, he seemed to be asserting and could it be that the body is also
and stillness. Applause may break out nine, a world record he shared with his right to decide how far past that part of the brain?
between shots, but quiet is inevitably Stephen Hendry. To predict a maxi- point he wanted to go. In a 2015 New Yorker profile, Ronnie
restored with a single gesture of the mum, publicly, after potting only two But what was missing from the re- O’Sullivan was compared to “a savant,
referee’s white-gloved hand. If a darts balls, is ludicrous; to ask about the sulting furor was a simple question. able to perceive mathematical solutions
tournament has the atmosphere of a prize money seems almost obscene. How on earth did O’Sullivan know, with without knowing how or why.” In the
chaotic lager-fueled party, a snooker “Well, we’ll try and find out for him nineteen balls still on the table, that he London Review of Books last year, Jon
tournament has something more like when he gets down to the last black,” was going to make a maximum break? Day wrote, “Part of Ronnie’s charm is
the atmosphere of a classical concert Taylor jokes indulgently. Could he see the sequence already, the his complete inability to explain how he
hall, with the soloists in formal dress, O’Sullivan does, of course, get down way the cue ball would move around does what he does.” But it surely takes
aloof, unspeaking. to that last black. By then, the tone of the table, each red, each black, each nothing away from O’Sullivan’s consid-
Ultimately, the theatrics of snooker the commentary has shifted consid- pocket? Did it flash before his mind’s erable charm to point out that nobody
have no precise equivalent elsewhere. erably. “We’re watching, what has to eye all at once? Was it just instinct? else can explain what he does either.
The neuroticism of high-level pro- be said, a genius at work,” says Taylor. What was going on in his head? Indeed, it would be strange if any
fessional play, its fussy perfection- O’Sullivan has since been informed athlete in any sport could really ex-
ism—players asking for an apparently that there is no special reward for plain what they do. Certainly we don’t
ZHAI Z HE NG / XIN HUA/ALAM Y

spotless ball to be recleaned by the

referee, or refusing to take a shot if
a single audience member is mov-
making a maximum, beyond the £4,000
highest break prize. So, with the final
black still on the table, he shakes his
I n the course of writing this essay,
I asked quite a few people to try
and describe what goes on inside their
expect them to start theorizing the
conservation of angular momentum.
And yet we also don’t tend to describe
ing—is not, as in other sports, off- opponent’s hand and goes to leave the minds when carrying out perceptual- most sportspeople as “savants.” Why
set by any compensatory display of auditorium. The referee intervenes, ap- motor tasks like catching or throwing. not? Perhaps because their abilities—
physical strength and vigor. Snooker proaching O’Sullivan and saying, “You And some told me that the answer was: throwing, jumping, catching—basi-
dramatizes obsession in a very pure want to knock it in for the fans? Come nothing important. When presented cally strike us as exaggerations of our
form, hyperfixation made visible. Its on.” Only then, apparently relenting, with a given physical task, anyone can own. Watching someone like O’Sullivan
televised matches do not convey any does O’Sullivan pot the final black and see, just by looking, what they would just feels different. What he can do

March 27, 2025 57

no longer reminds us of what we can with a perfectly accurate robotic arm, engine instantly models whether and That question being: How does Ron-
do. His abilities just seem to demand it would first have to calculate how ex- how the dishes might fall, without re- nie O’Sullivan do what he does? The
an explanation. But what would such actly to strike the cue ball. And to do sorting to any conscious calculation. kind of problem that mathematicians
an explanation even consist of? What that, it would need access to a model The researchers who first proposed and engineers have to labor over with
field of study could articulate the an- or engine that could simulate the real- this framework took care to stipulate differential equations—the kind of
swer—physics, cognitive science, psy- world physics of the table and balls that the human brain’s physics engine, problem complex enough to make a
chology, philosophy of mind? and predict precisely the result of any if indeed it exists, must have major laptop overheat and crash—simply
given shot. That would take quite a limitations. The engine would have to discloses itself to him at a glance. The
bit more computing power than your sacrifice accuracy in favor of “speed, puzzle presents itself in the form of

A ccording to convention, all the

greatest snooker players fall
into one of two camps. First, the con-
phone can provide.
Pool and snooker simulations do
exist—various video games depend
generality, and the ability to make
predictions that are good enough for
the purposes of everyday activities.”
its own solution, a task that, in the act
of calculation, completes itself. The
calculation is there in the gesture of
summate professional: levelheaded, on them, including the now-defunct Like game consoles, our brains only his arm; and the gesture becomes the
consistent, technically polished, emo- World Snooker Championship series— have so much computing power avail- shot, the tap, the click, the ball rolling
tionally restrained. Exemplars of this but the underlying physics engines rely able, so our physics engines must be neatly into the pocket.
type include Ray Reardon in the 1970s, on simplified models. When a snooker correspondingly rough and simplified. Ludwig Wittgenstein posed the
Steve Davis in the 1980s, and Stephen ball hits a cushion, for instance, how The outcomes are nowhere near as ac- same question another way: “Calcu-
Hendry in the 1990s. The second vari- does the simulation know what’s going curate as real mathematical calcula- lating prodigies who get the right an-
ety is what might be called the chaotic to happen next? Well, it doesn’t. Even tions would be, but they are (usually) swer but cannot say how. Are we to say
type: enthralling but erratic, on and off complex models of the ball–cushion accurate enough for the demands of that they do not calculate?”
the table. Into this category we can sort interaction have to assume that the everyday life.
the “Hurricane” Alex Higgins and the This picture seems to make some
“Whirlwind” Jimmy White, players
whose dazzling style went hand in
hand with unpredictable behavior. Tra-
sense. In fast-paced sports like soc-
cer, accuracy is important, but speed is
king. The ball is a lot smaller than the
I n 2016, at the Welsh Open, O’Sulli-
van finally did decline a maximum
break on purpose. With the black ball
ditionally, the first type of player won goal, after all, so minor errors in tra- available, he deliberately potted the
trophies—Reardon and Davis took jectory are unlikely to make a critical pink instead, for a total of 146 instead
home the world title six times each difference most of the time. It makes of the maximum 147 points. That time,
and Hendry a record seven times—but sense to think of a footballer using the prize for a maximum was £10,000.
the second type won hearts and minds. a quick, rough mental simulation of Afterward, O’Sullivan said the money
There’s always been something the ball and goal in order to make a wasn’t good enough. But then, as so
obliquely political about the distinc- split-second decision on the pitch. In often, he appeared to change his mind.
tion. At its height, during the Thatcher slower-paced mental games like clas- “When you get to forty, and you’ve
era, the world of snooker could be seen sical chess, on the other hand, while been doing this for twenty-five years,
to project a certain image of social speed is still a factor, accuracy is a you kind of have to start to enjoy it
mobility: working-class boys making bigger one. For a chess player, no rough at some point,” he said on television
big money through decent, respect- estimate can compete with good old- the following day. “You know, I used
able hard work. Sometimes the poli- fashioned calculation, the intentional to make 140s in practice and delib-
tics weren’t so oblique. In 1983 Steve consideration of an array of possible erately not pot the black, because I
Davis actually made an appearance moves. just—” Here he struggled to complete
at a Conservative Party rally. Against Snooker players are a different case. his thought. “It was like, more—it was
that backdrop, players like Higgins Speed is not much use in snooker, ex- more impressive to do that.” The host
and White—brilliant, unreliable, never collision between ball and cushion is cept psychologically, since the game pointed out that others had described
quite living up to their potential— instantaneous, which it isn’t, and that imposes no formal time restrictions. his 146 break as disrespectful. “If it’s
seemed to express a little rebellion the cushion won’t compress signifi- Players can in theory take as long as disrespectful,” O’Sullivan answered,
against the cult of respectability and cantly on impact, which, as any snooker they like to make a shot: twenty sec- “then if anyone else can go and put in
hard work. fan knows, it can. And the best exist- onds, thirty seconds, a minute, two. a performance like that, there’s my cue,
O’Sullivan alone has managed to ing formulas are still too complex to Precision—which is to say, predictive there’s my chalk, there’s my waistcoat.
take both paths. At first, with his de- be useful for a video game simulation. validity—is all that matters. And yet, Tell them to go and do it.”
fiant attitude and stylish, fast-paced For the moment, any computer that unlike chess players, snooker profes- Naturally, no one could, or can. De-
play, he must have seemed a natural wants to play snooker has to rely on sionals do not and cannot consciously spite the deliberate miss, O’Sullivan
successor to Alex Higgins. But in time, a more simplistic model with less ac- calculate their moves. The mathemat- still holds the record for most maxi-
his talent showed itself to be of an- curate results. ics would, as we’ve established, be too mum breaks ever completed: fifteen.
other order. He has enjoyed record- From a mathematical perspective, complex; but it is also very possible Maybe if the prize money had been
breaking success, equaling Hendry’s then, snooker presents a much harder that the mathematics would not be suf- higher at the 2016 Welsh Open, that
seven world titles, but his fans go on problem than chess, involving more ficiently precise. If it’s a case of trying record would be sixteen. But £10,000
rooting for him as if he’s the underdog. difficult calculations and many more to strike a cue ball in a certain way to isn’t nothing. And throwing it away—
And you won’t spot him canvassing for variables. But that just brings us back achieve a certain outcome, and Ron- for no reason, just out of mischief, just
the Conservatives. O’Sullivan joined to our first question: If the physics of nie O’Sullivan is competing against a because you’re the only person in the
the Labour Party under Jeremy Cor- snooker is so complicated, why should physicist with a calculator, my money world who can—that isn’t nothing ei-
byn’s leadership and now appears to human beings be able to play it better is on Ronnie every time. ther. Watch the frame back and you can
have left again over the party’s support than computers can? And relatedly: But the point isn’t so much that see O’Sullivan smiling. He really looks
for Israel’s war on Gaza. His perennial How is it possible for a snooker player snooker is special, or even that O’Sul- happy. What he can do, no one else on
conflicts—with snooker’s governing to predict the outcomes of complex in- livan is. The point is that in trying to earth has ever been able to do. And no
bodies, with the media, with referees, teractions in physics, with millimeter- explain the apparently extraordinary, one can even explain how he does it.
with other players—are of a piece with level precision—without appearing to we quickly reach the limits of what we What other word could suffice? We’re
his broader isolation, in snooker and perform any calculations at all? can explain about ourselves, about the in the presence of genius.
in British public life. There just isn’t ordinary human mind. The theory of O’Sullivan was forty then; this year,
anybody quite like him. the mental physics engine seems use- he’ll turn fifty. After an exceptional

L et’s say you’re throwing that ball

again. Scientists have some theo-
ful at first, because it explains how we
might roughly simulate simple prob-
performance last season, he’s strug-
gled to find form in recent months and

A nother question: Why can com-

puters beat human beings at
chess, but not (yet) at snooker? This
ries about that. In 2013 a team at MIT
proposed that the human brain intu-
itively runs something quite like the
lems like throwing a ball at a target.
But it only makes sense if the simu-
lation uses less computing power and
pulled out of multiple tournaments,
prompting concerns that he might be
nearing retirement. Maybe, maybe not.
time there’s an answer. In computa- physics engine that runs in the back- outputs less accurate results than a I hope not. In any case, in the course
tional terms, snooker is simply a lot ground of a video game. Inside our more laborious mathematical solution. of his career so far, he has delivered
more difficult than chess. An ordinary minds, all the time, without knowing If the physics engine in our heads can more captivating performances, more
phone or laptop has more than enough it, we are simulating real-world con- solve problems just as accurately as a technical perfection, and more sheer

.
computing power to find an optimal ditions and using our simulations to Newtonian formula, then the idea of formal beauty than most artists ever
chess move in almost any given posi- predict the results of complex interac- the engine explains nothing. It’s just manage. I want to write books the way
tion within a few seconds or less. But tions. When you see an unstable stack a conceptual curtain over the same he plays snooker. I know I never will.
for a computer to play snooker, even of dishes, for instance, your intuitive unanswered question. But even just wanting to is enough.

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