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PRICE $8.99 MAR. 23, 2020 into red states into blue states into swing states into the heartland into the border towns into what’s happening into why it matters into the voices of the people into the next chapter of our history A NEW PODCAST HOSTED BY Trymaine Lee FEATURING THE JOURNALISTS OF NBC NEWS SUBSCRIBE NOW MARCH 23, 2020 As a result of the coronavirus crisis and the closing of New York City venues, Goings On About Town will not appear this week. 5 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Steve Coll on the pandemic and Trump’s provocations; a match made in quarantine; epidemic eavesdropping; millennials get Lampooned; big into gilding. AMERICAN CHRONICLES Jill Lepore 10 But Who’s Counting? This year’s census could be the last. REFLECTIONS Geoff Dyer 17 Existential Inconvenience A writer’s life in the time of coronavirus. ANNALS OF NATURE James Somers 19 Cold War Fighting avalanches with science. PROFILES Emily Nussbaum 26 Skin in the Game The raw sounds of Fiona Apple. LETTER FROM BOLIVIA Jon Lee Anderson 38 The Burnt Palace Evo Morales’s fall from power. FICTION Kate Folk 50 “Out There” THE CRITICS BOOKS Atul Gawande 59 Why Americans are dying from despair. 61 Briefly Noted THE THEATRE Alexandra Schwartz 64 “Endlings.” MUSICAL EVENTS Alex Ross 66 “The Flying Dutchman,” “Agrippina.” THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 68 “The Truth,” “The Booksellers.” POEMS Robert Pinsky 32 “Beach Glass” Kimiko Hahn 54 “To be a daughter and to have a daughter” COVER Christoph Niemann “Critical Mass” DRAWINGS Frank Cotham, Drew Dernavich, Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby, Roz Chast, Liana Finck, Zachary Kanin, Emily Flake, Brendan Loper, Harry Bliss, Lars Kenseth, Edward Koren, Matilda Borgström, Liza Donnelly SPOTS Marcellus Hall The Sunday Archive Newsletter CONTRIBUTORS Emily Nussbaum (“Skin in the Game,” Jon Lee Anderson (“The Burnt Palace,” p. 26) won the Pulitzer Prize for crit- p. 38), a staff writer, is the author of icism in 2016. She is the author of “I several books, including “Che Guevara: Like to Watch: Arguing My Way A Revolutionary Life.” Dig into Through the TV Revolution.” Jill Lepore (“But Who’s Counting?,” stories from James Somers (“Cold War,” p. 19) is a writer and a programmer based in New York. p. 10) is a professor of history at Har- vard. Later this year, she will publish “If Then: How the Simulmatics Cor- our 95-year Geoff Dyer (“Existential Inconvenience,” poration Invented the Future.” p. 17) most recently published “Broad- Christoph Niemann (Cover) is the au- archive. sword Calling Danny Boy,” which is about the film “Where Eagles Dare.” thor of several books, including “Sun- day Sketching,” “Souvenir,” and “Hopes and Dreams.” Kate Folk (Fiction, p. 50) is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford Kimiko Hahn (Poem, p. 54) teaches at University. Queens College, City University of New York. Her latest poetry collection Robert Pinsky (Poem, p. 32) edited the is “Foreign Bodies.” recent anthology “The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall.” His latest poetry collection is Peter Arkle (Sketchpad, p. 7) is an il- “At the Foundling Hospital.” lustrator based in New York. His most recent book, with Amy Goldwasser, Atul Gawande (Books, p. 59) is a surgeon, is “All Black Cats Are Not Alike.” a public-health researcher, and the C.E.O. of the health-care venture Alexandra Schwartz (The Theatre, Haven. His books include “Being Mor- p. 64), a theatre critic for the magazine, tal” and “The Checklist Manifesto.” has been a staff writer since 2016. THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM Classic New Yorker pieces, delivered to your in-box every weekend with the Sunday Archive newsletter. Sign up at newyorker.com/ LEFT: HANNAH LA FOLLETTE RYAN; RIGHT: JON HAN sundaynewsletter PHOTO BOOTH NEWS DESK Helen Rosner on Hannah La Follette Robert P. Baird on what it means to Ryan’s photos of New York City’s contain and mitigate the speed and “subway hands.” scale of the coronavirus. Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism, and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008. 2 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 THE MAIL SEEKING JUSTICE psychotherapist Tim Tate, who helped found the North Face’s “wellness initia- Reading Jennifer Gonnerman’s heart- tive” and has counselled its sponsored breaking account of Eric Smokes and athletes (“The Altitude Sickness,” March David Warren’s efforts to overturn their 2nd). North Face’s president, Arne Arens, murder convictions brings to mind two says that his company tries to make Commemorative concepts that I encounter often as an climbers’ endeavors “as safe as possible.” attorney working on wrongful convic- Through my recent research into the Cover Reprints tions (“Burden of Proof,” March 2nd). effects of corporate sponsorship on ex- Search our extensive As agents of the justice system, we must treme-sport athletes, I have found that always “get proximate” to our cases—a sponsor contracts often encourage ath- archive of weekly phrase coined by Bryan Stevenson, of letes to take dangerous risks in exchange covers dating back to “Just Mercy” fame, to describe the con- for financial rewards, because the grant- 1925 and commemorate scious act of becoming close to people ing of bonuses is tied to media popular- a milestone with a and their experiences. To understand ity. Young, inexperienced athletes are why two men would relive the trauma particularly susceptible to the pressure New Yorker cover reprint. of their wrongful convictions and de- to engage in “adventure pornography” newyorkerstore.com/covers cades in prison, one needs to under- on social media. Many sponsors—in- stand what they went through. Unfor- cluding the North Face—also don’t pro- tunately, prosecutors and judges rarely vide athletes with health or life insur- spend time in prison speaking to peo- ance, leaving them especially vulnerable ple who have been robbed of their free- when the worst occurs. Both Arens and PRICE $8.99 OCT. 24, 2016 dom. Perhaps if they had with Smokes Tate are thus players in a cynical game, and Warren, they would not have made in which sponsors contractually incen- or considered disingenuous arguments tivize athletes to court disaster. about the men’s supposed financial in- Horst Eidenmueller centive to seek exoneration. Nor would Professor of Commercial Law they have believed, based on the fact University of Oxford that Smokes and Warren accepted re- Oxford, England sponsibility before the parole board, that the men’s guilt was indisputable; Paumgarten’s insights into the allure of maintaining innocence before the board mountaineering align with my own ex- would have almost certainly resulted in periences of hiking, climbing, and ski- a denial of parole. ing in the mountains of Washington We must also be cognizant of how State. In the past thirty years, I’ve had institutional bias affects our justice sys- three close calls: during a rockfall, in tem. It will always be challenging for which I was nearly decapitated; while conviction-review units in district at- skiing over an ice cliff with a forty-foot torneys’ offices to find, and speak pub- drop onto bare rock; and while punch- licly about, wrongdoing, but that does ing through a snow-and-ice cornice, not mean that they lack the power or two thousand feet above the Stuart Gla- the motivation to try. Sadly, for Smokes cier. None of these experiences deterred and Warren, it seems that the review me, however, because everyone who en- process was as flawed as the convic- gages in risky sports makes peace with tions themselves. the possibility of death. Elizabeth Sack Felber Ira Shelton 1 Legal Aid Society Edmonds, Wash. New York City • EXTREME RISK Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to Nick Paumgarten, in his piece about the themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in thrills and grief associated with moun- any medium. We regret that owing to the volume tain climbing, features the work of the of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 3 Wealth Management Free Financial Tools How can you feel more confident in a volatile market? Make it Does market volatility have you on edge? You’re not alone. Now more than ever, it’s important to make rational decisions and think about the long-term. While we can’t control current events, we can help you take control of your finances. Personal Capital was ranked as a Top 3 Wealth Manager by RIA Channel. And if you have questions, our fiduciary advisors are here to help. Plus, you can use our award-winning financial tools to get a 360-view of your money and take proactive steps to plan your future. You can weather the storm, and we’ll be with you every step of the way. 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For more information, visit www.personalcapital.com/blog/personal-capital-news/personal-capital-named-top-wealth-managers/. THE TALK OF THE TOWN COMMENT rying into the stuff of a bad Hollywood really not geared to what we need right PRESIDENTS AND PANDEMICS pitch: Italy a sixty­million­strong de­ now. . . . It is a failing. Let’s admit it.” tention camp, the stock market in free (Last week, South Korea, with less than n late July, 2014, near Monrovia, Li­ fall, March Madness called off, Disney­ a sixth of the population of the United I beria, two Americans, Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, contracted Ebola. land shuttered. The hope that Trump might someday grow into the dignity States, administered at least ten thou­ sand novel­coronavirus tests a day, while They had been working in a missionary and gravity of his office was never real­ in this country, according to the Cen­ hospital, trying to ameliorate an out­ istic, but in this speech he put his nar­ ters for Disease Control and Prevention, break then racing across West Africa. cissism and his reflexive nativism on ex­ only some thirteen thousand tests had The Obama Administration dispatched ceptionally discordant display. “The virus been administered since January.) On an air ambulance to carry them home, will not have a chance against us,” he Wednesday, Trump advised the “vast swathed in white protective gear, for said, promising that he had put in place majority” of Americans that the risk they treatment at Emory University Hos­ “the most aggressive and comprehen­ faced was “very, very low.” Fauci had al­ pital, in Atlanta, and this touched off a sive effort to confront a foreign virus in ready testified, however, that “it’s going media spectacle. The chyron story line modern history”—as if diseases had na­ to get worse,” and that, if the response was: Ebola comes to America. (Brantly tionalities. He declared that “testing and proved to be inadequate, “many, many and Writebol soon recovered.) Donald testing capabilities are expanding rap­ millions” could be affected. Trump, who was then less than a year idly,” only to be contradicted the next Trump won the Presidency while away from announcing his run for the day by Anthony Fauci, the respected pledging to wall America off from the Presidency, weighed in on Twitter: “Stop director of the National Institute of world; the COVID­19 pandemic has re­ the EBOLA patients from entering the Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who inforced his deep­seated belief in this U.S. . . .THE UNITED STATES HAS told a House hearing, “The system is impossibility. Quarantines and travel ENOUGH PROBLEMS!” He tweeted restrictions are a necessary part of a about the epidemic dozens of times science­led approach to containing such during the next months, and called for outbreaks, because they can delay the a ban on travel from West Africa (“STOP spread of a dangerous virus, protecting THE FLIGHTS!”).The White House’s hospitals from crippling surges of pa­ Office of Digital Strategy later con­ tients and buying time for researchers to cluded that one of Trump’s tweets, to develop treatments and vaccines. Trump the two and a half million followers he often praises himself for his decision, an­ had at the time, was a “crystallizing mo­ nounced on January 31st, to limit travel ment” in the Ebola crisis, as Amy Pope, from China, a policy that public­health Obama’s deputy homeland­security ad­ officials had recommended. ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA viser, put it, and that Trump had “created Yet travel limitations are only a part a level of anxiety in the country.” of what is necessary to manage a pan­ He was just getting started, as we demic; coördinated action by govern­ now know too well. Last Wednesday, ments is at least as important. Last week, the President sought to reassure the na­ Trump blamed the European Union for tion in a prime­time address from the allowing the virus to spread on the Con­ Oval Office, as the COVID­19 outbreak tinent, and, as he announced a thirty­day was poised to morph from seriously wor­ ban on travel to the U.S. from European THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 5 countries (the United Kingdom and Ire- “Public fears are being compounded by fearmonger during the Ebola epidemic, land, among a few other countries, were pervasive lack of trust in this President.” Trump auditioned a political voice that excepted—a decision with no ground- Biden’s victory over Bernie Sanders on he now exercises in full, to extraordi- ing in science), implied that he was de- Super Tuesday was one of the great Hou- nary effect. He presides over a social- fending the nation from the epidemio- dini acts of American politics, the re- media and talk-radio ecosystem that logical equivalent of a European invasion. sult of his strong support among Afri- inspires intense devotion among his fol- He reportedly did not consult the E.U. can-Americans as well as, evidently, the lowing, even as it spreads misinforma- before announcing his restrictions, a desperate desire of many Democrats to tion that will inevitably complicate the churlish decision that will do nothing be rid of Trump by whatever means may efforts of those who seek to navigate to ease European leaders’ exasperation be the most plausible. But, in the life the pandemic by searching out reliable with him. On this, as on so much else cycle of a Presidential campaign, No- facts. On Friday, at a White House press in his foreign policy, Trump’s needless vember is a very long way off, and the conference, he declared a national emer- provocations have undermined U.S. se- role of the present crisis in the election gency—“Two very big words”—a move curity; it is absurd to suggest that the is no easier to predict than the trajec- that, he said, would free up fifty billion United States can contain this pandemic tory of the pandemic itself. The prom- dollars to fight the outbreak in this coun- behind its own borders without exten- ise of Biden’s normalcy—his respect for try. He added, “I don’t take responsibil- sive help from allies in Europe, Asia, science, knowledge of world affairs, ca- ity at all” for the slow testing rate. The and Latin America. pacity for gentleness and empathy, bor- President is steering the country through On Thursday, Joe Biden gave a speech ing social-media feeds—will surely be a challenge of yet unknown magnitude, on the crisis that sounded like the start enough for many voters, come what may. one in which honesty and accountabil- of his presumptive general-election cam- Yet it is unusual to win the White House ity will be at a premium. We know that paign to unseat the President. “This simply by not being the man who cur- he will not change. One way to survive virus laid bare the severe shortcomings rently occupies it. the pandemic may be to tune him out. of the current Administration,” he said. In 2014, as a Twitter provocateur and —Steve Coll QUARANTINES DEPT. a book with his wife, called “How to noting that, if a couple is on lockdown, COOPED UP Know If It’s Time to Go.”) Two of his it could reanimate their sex life. patients are married, and are self-quar- How about some case studies? Kath- antining together, and both have re- erine Codekas and Matt Smith, both ported trouble at home. “They’ve been fifty-seven, and both divorce lawyers, arguing more than usual because one have been married for twenty-one years. person doesn’t take precautions exactly In February, they were trapped together the way the other one wants them to,” for two weeks in a not-large suite on s millions of people in the United he explained. “ ‘You didn’t wash your board the Diamond Princess, the cruise A States begin self-quarantining, in order to prevent the spread of the new hands long enough. You took the sub- way. Don’t you care about me?’ ” (Birn- ship that was quarantined in the port of Yokohama, Japan, following a coro- coronavirus, China, the first country to bach’s wife had told him to stop touch- navirus outbreak. “We got along fa- shut down, is in the process of opening ing doorknobs.) mously,” Codekas said. “There were no back up. In Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Laura Wasser, a Los Angeles divorce outside influences to argue about. No Province, more than ten million people attorney who inspired, in part, Laura ‘You gotta get groceries’ or ‘You gotta were placed under lockdown. When re- Dern’s character in “Marriage Story,” clean the litter box.’ ” She passed the time strictions were eased, earlier this month, weighed in: “A quarantine experience, by watching “Say Yes to the Dress”— the city’s divorce rate spiked. One offi- particularly where there are underlying a show that she had never seen before, cial blamed it, in part, on the quarantine. issues of resentment and poor commu- and which she called “completely mind- “Many couples have been bound with nication, could be devastating to a mar- numbing.” Smith spent his days on so- each other at home for over a month, ital relationship.” She compared the sit- cial media, trying to contact the outside which evoked the underlying conflicts,” uation to couples who, after enduring world. Codekas’s main tip for the quar- he told the Global Times, a Chinese state- the forced togetherness of the holidays, antined: carve out a space of your own, run tabloid. Perhaps global pandemic seek divorce in January—a busy month away from your partner. “When Matt and marital strife go together; in the 2011 for matrimonial lawyers. was on Skype, I went into the closet,” film “Contagion,” Gwyneth Paltrow dies Does every quarantine scenario have she said. Think of it as a quarantine a horrible death from a virus after cheat- to resemble Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”? within a quarantine. ing on her dutiful husband, Matt Damon. Might some couples grow closer? “That Tyler and Rachel Torres were one of Lawrence Birnbach, a psychoanalyst takes couples with real empathy,” Birn- the youngest couples on the Diamond who practices in Greenwich Village and bach said, adding that that quality was Princess. Both twenty-four, they were in Westport, Connecticut, predicts that in short supply. Wasser was more optimis- on their honeymoon when they were the divorce rate will also rise in the U.S. tic. “It could be an excellent opportunity forced into quarantine. Rachel cross- as the pandemic unfolds. (He co-wrote to reconnect with your spouse,” she said, stitched a Christmas ornament; Tyler 6 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 SKETCHPAD BY PETER ARKLE HEARD ON THE STREET tried to learn how to juggle. Mostly, they seventies—heady stuff for a magazine, mings” might play. Reached by phone, just talked. “Tyler lived through Katrina, even in print-friendlier days, although Chevy Chase was skeptical. “I think it’s and we had talked a little bit about that the movie “National Lampoon’s Animal odd and silly,” he said. “ ‘Lemmings’ was before, but not as in depth as we did House” helped, too. It is also fair to say so much for its time. To steal the name— during quarantine,” Rachel said. that the Lampoon has since bankrupted if I did a movie tomorrow called ‘And “We also joked about what it would its credibility by having attached its name the Holy Grail,’ it might make people look like to escape from quarantine,” to a string of dumb, largely unseen sex come, but it doesn’t fit the time.” Tyler said. comedies like “National Lampoon’s Barely At the reading, though, more jokes Greg and Rose Yerex, a Canadian cou- Legal” and “National Lampoon Presents had landed than not. The writer, An- ple in their sixties, tested positive for the Jake’s Booty Call.” Whether there is drew Farmer, and the songwriter, Henry virus on the cruise, but they were asymp- twelve million dollars’ worth of equity Koperski, both in their thirties and with tomatic. “We felt fine,” Rose said. Still, left in the brand—that’s what PalmStar solid alternative-comedy credentials, they were put in quarantine and couldn’t Media paid in 2017 for the name and as- asked the cast for notes. Eric Lockley, leave until they each produced two neg- sets—remains an open question. who plays a washed-up rapper, said he ative tests at least twenty-four hours apart. One of those nearly fifty-year-old as- didn’t get a line about the Hardy Boys, “We learned to talk to each other again,” sets is “Lemmings,” remembered by com- those now ninety-three-year-old teen Greg said. “We’ve been married thirty- edy nerds for giving John Belushi, Chevy detectives. “I had to look them up,” he four years, and we’d drifted into some Chase, and Christopher Guest an early noted, and suggested subbing in Alex pretty serious bad habits.” He went on, platform, two years before Belushi and Mack or Shelby Woo, Nickelodeon “Being put together for twenty-four hours Chase joined the first cast of “Saturday sleuths from the nineties. On the other a day for two weeks, we wound up learn- Night Live.” The revue, which ran for end of the cultural-temporal spectrum, ing a lot about each other’s fears, hopes, ten months at the Village Gate, was a a debate broke out over a reference to and dreams.” druggy burlesque of the Woodstock fes- VSCO girls (a subspecies of teen that Despite being cleared by the Cana- tival, rebilled as Woodshuck: Three Days cropped up last year, characterized by a dian public-health agency, the Yerexes, of Love, Peace, and Death, with cutting fondness for scrunchies). who are now back home, in Port Dover, impersonations of performers such as During a break, Farmer explained Ontario, have continued quarantining— James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the show’s comedic philosophy, which voluntarily. “Greg and I decided that and Joe Cocker. “Very, very good and aligns with the National Lampoon’s new- there’s a lot of fear out in the commu- very, very funny,” Edith Oliver wrote in found desire to find an intersection be- nity and that people would feel more these pages. The evening ended with tween outrageousness and wokeness. comfortable if we quarantined for an- festival-goers committing mass sui- (The brand has been sponsoring standup other fourteen days,” Rose said. “We cide—a finale in tune with the Water- evenings with themes like “Lesbian have an acre of property. We can go out- gate era’s souring on hippie idealism, and Agenda” and “Rape Jokes by Survivors.”) side in the yard. We can wander around with the Lampoon’s sense of itself as a Farmer detailed how he and Koperski 1 the house. It’s pretty cushy.” fearless, smart-ass scourge. had revamped the show’s Ariana Grande —Tyler Foggatt But back to hopefulness: around a big number, which initially focussed on her table, the cast and creators of “Lem- dating habits. They worried that it was DEPT. OF REBOOTS mings: 21st Century” gave a new script slut-shamey and, worse, tired. They also LEMMINGS, AGAIN its first read-through. The reboot takes cut a bit poking fun at Kanye West. place at the “Downfall festival”—a “Clearly, he’s going through something,” stand-in for the likes of Coachella, Bonn- Farmer said. “And punching someone aroo, Gov Ball, and the Fyre Festival. when they’re down doesn’t feel like the There are digs at influencers, glamping, best joke at the moment.” Goop, Instagram culture, cancel culture, That was not a scruple held by the one-per-centers, long lines, and expen- mostly straight white male writers for s there anything more hopeful and sive festival cuisine, like “vegan hot dogs the old Lampoon, much of whose work, I cheery than a group of young musi- cal-comedy types gathered for the first and vegan T-bones and vegan imitation crab / Plus real-fish sashimi that we grew where it involved women, minorities, and underage sex, has not aged well. Farmer rehearsal of a new show? No, there isn’t. in a lab.” Among the performers paro- heralded the new Lampoon’s multiplicity But “hopeful” is also the word for inves- died: Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Coldplay, Lil of voices. “We’re both gay,” he said of tors trying to resurrect a once potent Nas X, Bob Dylan (again), Taylor Swift, himself and Koperski, “and I’m disabled.” but now tarnished comedy brand, and “Ariana Venti,” and “Florence and the (He has clubfeet and a condition known these two forces collided recently in a Appliance.” (Mercifully, a sketch involv- as windswept hands.) “Being handed the downtown rehearsal space where a re- ing “Justin Creeper” and “Carbi D” was mike to work with a comic institution boot of National Lampoon’s fabled 1973 cut.) Updating the original’s gloomy like this and to be lampooning culture musical revue, “Lemmings,” was getting finale for the climate-change era, the from a different perspective is a great on its feet, before a run at Joe’s Pub. new show climaxes with a Category 5 way to change what people think about It is fair to say that the National Lam- hurricane. Plus Beyoncé. National Lampoon.” poon transformed comedy in the nineteen- It was hard to tell how the new “Lem- That change will have to wait. During 8 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 the script discussion, an actor had ven- tons, cycles of boom and bust. A lot of also became friendly with the interior tured, “This might be opening a can of Boyd’s clients are big into gilding. For designer Jed Johnson, Andy Warhol’s worms, but should we be mentioning one job, he’d conveyed, by bicycle, about lover. Johnson hired them to paint fab- coronavirus?” The consensus was: wait fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold leaf, rics and wall surfaces. “We did whatever and see. “Who knows?” Farmer said. from a dealer downtown. we were asked to do,” Boyd said. “We “We may end up performing this thing “These clients are like the people who learned more as we went along.” For four under a plastic tent.” The comment built these extraordinary rooms,” Boyd decades, this has been their business. proved half prescient. Days later, it was said, gesturing toward the stairway. This “Recently, it’s been a bit more of a strug- decided to postpone the show until Au- would make him more like the anony- gle,” he said. “For forever, wealth’s taste gust. The real Coachella had already mous artisans who did all the extraor- ran back to eighteenth-century France. been pushed to October. Maybe there dinary work. He is not a representative And now it has changed dramatically.” was a new joke to be made about natu- of the ruling class. Boyd, sixty-six, was On the Cassiobury staircase, Boyd 1 ral disasters, or cancel culture. reared in New Jersey but left “as soon as had painted tromp-l’oeil wainscoting —Bruce Handy possible” to attend an experimental col- that mimicked the elaborately carved lege (now defunct) in California. For a balustrade. He’d relied on a few old AT THE MUSEUMS time, he lived on a boat on the Calaveras black-and-white photographs from TECHNIQUE River, in an eccentric art commune/squat Hertfordshire. “At first, Jim’s version was called Darrahville. He met Reath, and just too good, far too realistic,” Wolf they found work in Los Angeles hand- Burchard, a curator, said. “It was com- painting upholstery fabrics. “We painted peting with the balustrade.” on everything,” Boyd said. “Anne had For a nearby dining room taken from painted her shoes. One day, a woman an estate in Oxfordshire, Boyd had saw her on Rodeo Drive. ‘Where’d you painted three huge canvases—each sev- get those shoes?’ So we made fourteen enteen feet by nine feet—depicting the en days before the Metropolitan thousand pairs of hand-painted espa- Capability Brown-designed gardens as T Museum of Art closed its doors to the public, owing to concern over Covid- drilles. We were clueless capitalists.” They earned enough to move to Flor- they would have looked in the eigh- teenth century (in late afternoon, in late 19, it celebrated an opening, or really a ence for a few years. “That’s when I first summer). Boyd had mimicked the dusky reopening, of its British Galleries, after thought about traditional art,” he said. shading that was popular in the land- a renovation that took more than a year. In 1985, they settled in New York and scape painting of the time. (“People went The space consists of ten rooms, includ- studied with a master of classical paint- outside in tinted glasses, or with what ing three lavish interiors that were im- ing named Michael Aviano. “He taught they called a Claude glass, to make the ported from England and reassembled in the eighteenth-century style—struc- landscapes appear as dark as they looked here. In the past, these had been easy to tured palette, umber underpainting,” in Claude Lorrain’s paintings from the miss as you made your way from the Boyd said. “Here’s thousands of years of century before,” he said.) Each canvas wonders of medieval Europe to the technique passed down. Then we hit was mounted behind a window, on a armor and the American Wing. modernism and it’s all thrown away. curving surface, to enhance the illusion Not long before the reopening, an Pretty much any teacher who had tech- that one was gazing outside. artist named James Boyd was hanging nique has been dead for fifty years.”They In a third room, from a London es- around a broad stairway that had been tate, he’d painted murals of a view out transferred from Cassiobury, an estate of three large windows. As a reference, in Hertfordshire. He was preparing to Boyd had studied eighteenth-century add some varnish to a wainscot.Through- nightscapes by Abraham Pether. “Pether out the renovation, he’d been working was the Thomas Kinkade of the time,” with the curators to bring eigh- Boyd said. “The curators were pleasantly teenth-century Britain to life; which is surprised that I got into the scholarship to say, he’d been painting murals and so deeply.” At the Met, he felt immersed trompe-l’oeils by himself—twelve to in the exertions of his forebears. “There’s fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, a monastic chant murmuring through for sixteen months. “I’m total toast,” he the place,” he said. “Like voices in the said. “But it was a real sabbatical for me.” forest.” And yet, as an anonymous prac- What it was a sabbatical from was titioner of esoteric methods, he also has Boyd’s regular work, with his longtime an unromantic view of art: “It’s more like partner, Anne Reath, of decorative in- mathematics mixed with physical labor.” terior painting—murals, wall finishes, Walking out through the galleries, past wallpaper friezes, stencilling, fabric de- teapots, gaudy majolica, and ceramic sign, verre églomisé—for wealthy clients, Wally Birds, Boyd said, “The people who about whom he won’t say much. Billion- made all this stuff—these are my folks.” aires, Russians, Greenwich, the Hamp- James Boyd —Nick Paumgarten THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 9 gress. In 2018, Secretary of Commerce AMERICAN CHRONICLES Wilbur Ross sought to add a question to the 2020 U.S. census that would have BUT WHO’S COUNTING? read, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” Ross is a banker who specialized in bankruptcy before join- The coming census. ing the Trump Administration; earlier, he had handled cases involving the in- BY JILL LEPORE solvency of Donald Trump’s casinos. The Census Bureau objected to the question Ross proposed. Eighteen states, the Dis- trict of Columbia, fifteen cities and coun- ties, the United Conference of Mayors, and a coalition of non-governmental or- ganizations filed a lawsuit, alleging that the question violated the Constitution. Last year, United States District Court Judge Jesse Furman, in an opin- ion for the Southern District, found Ross’s attempt to add the citizenship question to be not only unlawful, and quite possibly unconstitutional, but also, given the way Ross went about trying to get it added to the census, an abuse of power. Furman wrote, “To conclude otherwise and let Secretary Ross’s de- cision stand would undermine the prop- osition—central to the rule of law— that ours is a ‘government of laws, and not of men.’” There is, therefore, no cit- izenship question on the 2020 census. All this, though, may be by the bye, because the census, like most other in- stitutions of democratic government, is under threat. Google and Facebook, after all, know a lot more about you, and about the population of the United States, or any other state, than does the U.S. Census Bureau or any national cen- sus agency. This year may be the last ount all people, including ba- Israel, after their families, by the house time that a census is taken door by door, “C bies,” the U.S. Census Bureau of their fathers, with the number of form by form, or even click by click. instructs Americans on the question- their names, every male by their polls,” naire that will be mailed to every house- God commands Moses in the Book of ntil ten thousand years ago, only hold by April 1, 2020, April Fool’s Day, which also happens to be National Cen- Numbers, describing a census, taken around 1500 B.C.E., that counted only U about ten million men, women, and children lived on the entire planet, and sus Day (and has been since 1930). You men “twenty years old and upward, all any given person had only ever met a can answer the door; you can answer that are able to go forth to war in Is- few dozen. (One theory holds that this by mail; for the first time, you can an- rael”—that is, potential conscripts. is why some very old languages have no swer online. Ancient rulers took censuses to mea- word for numbers.) No one could count People have been counting people sure and gather their strength: to mus- any sizable group of people until human for thousands of years. Count every- ter armies and levy taxes. Who got populations began to cluster together one, beginning with babies who have counted depended on the purpose of the and to fall under the authority of pow- teeth, decreed census-takers in China census. In the United States, which erful governments. Taking a census re- in the first millennium B.C.E., under counts “the whole number of persons in quired administrative skills, coercive force, the Zhou dynasty. “Take ye the sum of each state,” the chief purpose of the cen- and fiscal resources, which is why the all the congregation of the children of sus is to apportion representation in Con- first reliable censuses were taken by Chi- nese emperors and Roman emperors, as Like most institutions of democratic government, the census is under threat. the economist Andrew Whitby explains 10 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY TIM PEACOCK in “The Sum of the People: How the vations Concerning the Increase of sus. Then came questions that divided Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Mankind.” Franklin had every reason people into native-born and foreign- Ancient World to the Modern Age.” to want to count the people in Brit- born. By 1840, when the questionnaires Censuses abound in the Bible, in- ain’s North American colonies. He cal- were printed, rather than written by cluding one ordered by the Roman em- culated that they numbered about a hand, there were more than seventy peror Caesar Augustus and overseen by million, roughly the population of Scot- questions. Other questions, like one Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria. land, which had forty-five members in about the ages of the enslaved popu- “And it came to pass in those days, that the House of Commons and sixteen lation (lobbied for by abolitionists), there went out a decree from Caesar Au- peers in the House of Lords. How many were struck down. In the decades since, gustus, that all the world should be taxed,” had the Americans? None. questions have been added and dropped. according to the Gospel of Luke. “This To make this matter of representation Most of them have involved sorting census first took place while Quirinius mathematical, enumeration of the peo- people into categories, especially by was governing Syria.” Everyone was sup- ple, every ten years, is mandated by the race. In the eighteen-forties, South- posed to register in the place of his or U.S. Constitution. There would be no erners in Congress defeated proposals her birth. That, supposedly, was why Jo- more than one member of Congress for to record the names of people held in seph made the journey from Nazareth every thirty thousand people. The Con- bondage and their place of birth. Had to Bethlehem, “to be taxed with Mary stitution also mandates that any direct these proposals passed, the descen- his espoused wife, being great with child.” tax levied on the states must be propor- dants of those Americans would be (Quirinius’ census of Judea actually took tional to population. The federal govern- able to trace their ancestors far more place years later, but it’s a good story.) ment hardly ever levies taxes directly, easily, and the scholarship on the his- The first modern census—one that though. Instead, it’s more likely to pro- tory of the African diaspora would be counted everyone, not just men of fight- vide money and services to the states, and infinitely richer. ing age or taxpayers, and noted all their these, too, are almost always allocated in The 1850 census, the first conducted names and ages—dates to 1703, and was proportion to population. So the accu- by a new entity known as the Census taken in Iceland, where astonishingly ac- racy of the census has huge implications. Board, was also the first to record in- curate census-takers counted 50,366 peo- Wilbur Ross’s proposed citizenship ques- dividual-level rather than family data ple. (They missed only one farm.) The tion, which was expected to reduce the (except for enslaved people), the first modern census is a function of the mod- response rate in congressional districts to record an immigrant’s country of ern state, and also of the scientific revo- with large numbers of immigrants, would birth, and the first to ask about “color,” lution. Modern demography began with have reduced the size of the congressio- in column 6, a question that required the study of births and deaths recorded nal delegations from those districts, and particular instructions, as Paul Schor in parish registers and bills of mortality. choked off services to them. explains in “Counting Americans: How The Englishman John Graunt, extrapo- Under the terms of the Constitution, the U.S. Census Classified the Nation” lating from these records in the mid-sev- everyone in the United States was to be (Oxford). “Under heading 6, entitled enteenth century, worked out the popu- counted, except “Indians not taxed” (a ‘Color,’ in all cases where the person is lation of London, thereby founding the phrase that both excluded Native peo- white, leave the space blank; in all cases field that his contemporary William Petty ples from U.S. citizenship and served where the person is black, insert the let- called “political arithmetic.” Another way as a de-facto acknowledgment of the ter B; if mulatto, insert M. It is very de- to do this is to take a census. In 1753, Par- sovereignty of Native nations). Every sirable that these particulars be care- liament considered a bill for “taking and person would be counted, and there fully regarded.” registering an annual Account of the total were three kinds: “free persons”; persons The federal government had all kinds number of people” in order to “ascertain “bound to service for a term of years”; of reasons for carefully regarding these the collective strength of the nation.” This and “all other persons,” the last a sorry particulars. In 1860, the Census Board measure was almost single-handedly de- euphemism for enslaved people, who added a new “color,” for indigenous peo- feated by the parliamentarian William were to be counted as three-fifths of a ples who had become American citizens: Thornton of York, who asked, “Can it be free person. It was a compromise be- the federal government wanted more in- pretended, that by the knowledge of our tween Northern delegates (who didn’t formation about a population that it number, or our wealth, either can be in- want to count them at all, to thwart the sought to control. Although “Indians not creased?” He argued that a census would South from gaining additional seats in taxed” were still not to be counted, “the reveal to England’s enemies the very in- Congress) and Southern delegates (who families of Indians who have renounced formation England sought to conceal: wanted to count them, for the sake of tribal rule, and who under State or Ter- the size and distribution of its popula- those seats)—a compromise, that is, be- ritorial laws exercise the rights of citi- tion. Also, it violated liberty. “If any officer, tween zero and one. zens, are to be enumerated. In all such by whatever authority, should demand of cases write ‘Ind.’ Opposite their names, me an account of the number and cir- t took six hundred and fifty census- in column 6, under heading ‘Color.’ ” cumstance of my family, I would refuse it,” he announced. I takers eighteen months to enumer- ate the population in 1790. And then Americans designated as “Ind.” could “exercise the rights of citizens” but were Two years later, in Pennsylvania, Americans went census-crazy. There not, in 1860, deemed to be “white.” Benjamin Franklin published “Obser- were six questions on the first U.S. cen- The government’s interest in counting 12 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 P R O M O TI ON YeahYeahYeahs Run the Jewels Angel Olsen Sharon Van Etten The Fiery Furnaces Twin Peaks Jehnny Beth Danny Brown Deafheaven Thundercat Waxahatchee Cat Power Tim Hecker & Tierra Whack The Konoyo Ensemble BADBADNOTGOOD SOPHIE Dave Fennesz Oso Oso Hop Along Divino Niño Dehd Boy Scouts SPELLLING Ezra Collective KAINA Margaux Femdot The National Big Thief Kim Gordon Phoebe Bridgers Yaeji Caroline Polachek DJ Nate Maxo Kream Rapsody Faye Webster Mariah the Scientist Dogleg The Hecks Dustin Laurenzi’s July 17-19, 2020 • Union Park Snaketime Tickets on sale now at pitchforkmusicfestival.com Indians grew during the era of west­ derstood. The column is always to be McSweeney, who was appointed by ward expansion that followed the Civil filled.” Soon, with the rise of the late­nine­ Grover Cleveland, spent three days War, leading to the establishment of an teenth­century cult of eugenics, “M” for coming up with a different way to pre­ “Indian Division” of the census. The in­ “mulatto” disappeared for a time, and dict where an immigrant would settle, structions grew elaborate as the govern­ “color” became “color or race,” as reflected and how an immigrant would fare, by ment, pursuing remorseless military in a new set of instructions: “Color or way of a shorthand for the immigrant’s campaigns against Plains and Western race. Write ‘W’ for white; ‘B’ for black origins, a “List of Races and Peoples.” Indians, sought to subject much of the (negro or negro descent); ‘Ch’ for Chi­ McSweeney explained: Native population to U.S. rule by way nese; ‘Jp’ for Japanese; and ‘In’ for Indian, of forced assimilation. The census be­ as the case may be.” That provision cre­ This is not intended to be an ethnological classification. It is not intended as a history of came an extension of that policy, as­ ated a body of data cited by advocates the immigrant’s antecedents but as a clew to similation by classification: for the Chinese Exclusion what will be his immediate future after he had “Where persons reported Act, the first federal law re­ landed. It is merely a grouping together as far as ‘Half­breeds’ are found stricting immigration, which as it seems practicable to do so of people who residing with whites, adopt­ was passed in 1881. maintain recognized communities in various parts of the country where they settle, who ing their habits of life and The rise and influence of have the same aptitudes or industrial capaci- methods of industry, such eugenics was made possible ties or who are found here identified with cer- persons are to be treated by a growing capacity to tain occupations. as belonging to the white count people by way of ma­ population. Where, on the chines. The 1890 U.S. cen­ As Joel Perlmann points out, in “Amer­ other hand, they are found sus, the first to ask about ica Classifies the Immigrants: From in communities composed “race,” was also the first to Ellis Island to the 2020 Census” (Har­ wholly or mainly of Indi­ use the Hollerith Electric vard), McSweeney conflated four then ans, the opposite construction is taken.” Tabulating Machine, which, turning every current ideas about divisions among hu­ After the Thirteenth Amendment person into a punched card, sped up not mans: “race,” “people,” “stock,” and “na­ abolished slavery—and, with it, the only counting but also sorting, and tionality.” One of the “races” on his list three­fifths clause and the distinction cross­tabulation. (Herman Hollerith, the was “Hebrews.” between “free persons,” persons “bound census analyst and M.I.T. professor who When Congress debated an amend­ in service,” and “all other persons”—the invented the machine, founded the com­ ment to the 1910 census bill that would Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed the pany that later became I.B.M.) have mandated using McSweeney’s equal protection of the laws to “any per­ For the 1910 census—a census accel­ scheme, the strongest objection came son” within the jurisdiction of the United erated by the latest calculating machines, from the American Jewish Committee States. In 1869, preparing for the first and capable of still more elaborate tab­ in New York. “Their schedule of races post­emancipation census, the Ohio Re­ ulations and cross­tabulations—Con­ is a purely arbitrary one and will not be publican James A. Garfield, chair of the gress debated adopting an even more supported by any modern anthropolo­ House Special Subcommittee on the extensive taxonomy for “color or race,” gists,” the committee wrote to Senator Ninth Census, hoped to use the census a classification scheme initially devised Simon Guggenheim, of Colorado. to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. by Edward F. McSweeney, the assistant “American citizens are American citi­ He proposed adding a question, directed commissioner of immigration for the zens and as such their racial and reli­ to all male adults, asking whether they Port of New York. On the passenger gious affiliations are nobody’s business. were “citizens of the United States being manifests for incoming ships, immi­ There is no understanding of the mean­ twenty­one years of age, whose right grants to the United States had by the ing of the word ‘race’ which justifies the to vote is denied or abridged on other eighteen­nineties been required to pro­ investigation which it is proposed the grounds than rebellion or crime”; his vide answers to a long list of questions, Census Bureau shall undertake.” In the idea was to use the results to reduce the most of which were intended to predict Senate, Guggenheim declared, “I was congressional apportionment of South­ the likely fate of the immigrant: born in Philadelphia. Under this cen­ ern states that could be shown to have sus bill they put me down as a Hebrew, denied black men their right to vote. The full name, age, and sex; whether mar- not as an American.” The amendment This measure was not adopted. ried or single; the occupation; whether able to was defeated. Garfield’s committee did make some read or write; the nationality; the last resi- The color and racial taxonomies of changes, including adding another “color” dence; the seaport of landing; the final desti- the American census are no more ab­ nation; whether having ticket through to such category, marking out people from China, destination; who paid his passage; whether in surd than the color and racial taxono­ or those descended from people from possession of money; and if so, whether up- mies of federal­government policy, be­ China, as Chinese when, before, they’d ward of $30; whether going to join a relative; cause they have historically been an been “white.” The 1870 census issued new and if so, his name and address; whether ever instrument of that policy. In 1924, the instructions, abandoning the early if before in the United States; whether ever in Indian Citizenship Act declared all Na­ prison or an almshouse; whether under con- white, leave blank: “Color.—It must not tract to perform labor; and what is the immi- tive peoples born in the United States be assumed that, where nothing is writ­ grant’s health, mentally and physically, and to be citizens of the United States, and ten in this column, ‘White’ is to be un­ whether deformed or crippled. the federal government established the 14 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 U.S. Border Control. The 1930 census Ross was living with his father, a lawyer, as “naturalized.” Sophie Julus, born in manifested concern with the possibil- thirty-two; his mother, Agnes, twenty- Poland, a widow residing at 1145 Fourth ity that Mexicans who had entered the seven; and an uncle named Joseph Cran- Avenue with her American-born United States illegally might try to pass well, thirty-nine, at No. 1135. Their rented daughter and grandchildren, he listed as Indian. To defeat those attempts, house stood near the corner of Seventy- as an “alien.” Otto Schultz, fifty-two, the 1930 census introduced, as a race, ninth Street, about a block away from and living at 1159 Fourth Avenue, was the category of “Mexican.” (“In order a baseball diamond. born in Germany. Brennan listed him to obtain separated figures for this ra- The 1940 census asked a question as “having first papers.” It is not clear cial group, it has been decided that all about “color or race.” Brennan listed whether the census-taker asked to see persons born in Mexico, or having par- everyone on little Wilbur Ross’s stretch those papers. ents born in Mexico, who are definitely of Fourth Avenue as “white.” The 1940 Personal details recorded by census- not white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or census also asked about place of birth. takers are closed to the public—closed, Japanese, should be returned as Mexi- Ross, his parents, and Cranwell were even, to all government agencies except can.”) Six years later, an edict issued by all born in New Jersey. Most people on the Census Bureau itself—for a man- the Census Bureau (which had become Ross’s street were born in either New datory term of seventy-two years, an ac- a permanent office, under the Depart- Jersey or New York, but about a third tuarial lifetime. Until then, individu- ment of Commerce) reversed that ruling, of them were born in another country. al-level answers are strictly confidential. effective with the 1940 census: “Mexi- The 1940 census was the last U.S. cen- But Wilbur Ross is so old—he is the cans are Whites and must be classified sus to ask about the citizenship of “ev- oldest person ever to have been seated as ‘White.’ This order does not admit eryone foreign born.” Most of the peo- in a President’s Cabinet—that his first any further discussion, and must be fol- ple on Ross’s street who had been born census record is searchable. The 1940 lowed to the letter.” Mexicans, as a cat- in other countries were U.S. citizens. U.S. census, the most recent that has egory, disappeared. The exceptions included, a few doors been made available to the public, was Censuses restructure the relationship down, at 1132 Fourth Avenue, Arendt released by the National Archives on between a people and their rulers. “Be- Herland, forty-three, born in Norway. April 2, 2012, right on schedule. fore the Nazis could set about destroy- Under the category “Citizenship of the Nevertheless, long before that, the ing the Jewish race,” Whitby writes, foreign-born,” Brennan listed Herland confidentiality of the 1940 census had “they had to construct it.” This they did by taking census in the nineteen-thir- ties. “We are recording the individual characteristics of every single member of the nation onto a little card,” the head of an I.B.M. subsidiary in Germany ex- plained, in 1934. Questions on the Nazi censuses of 1938 and 1939 were those the U.S. Congress had considered, and re- jected, for Jews but had left intact for other “races and peoples”: “Were or are any of the grandparents full-Jewish by race?” Then began the deportations, the movement of people from punch cards to boxcars. ecretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross S was born in 1937. He first appeared on a U.S. census in 1940, when he was two years old, a baby with teeth. On April 1, 1940, a Monday, a census-taker named Henry H. Brennan, employed by the Department of Commerce, counted the people on Fourth Avenue in North Bergen, New Jersey, by walk- Sam Middleton, American Music, mixed media, 1965. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000. ing down the street and knocking on doors. His job was to “visit every house, African-American Fine Art April 2 building, tent, cabin, hut, or other place Nigel Freeman • nfreeman@swanngalleries.com in which any person might live or stay, to insure that no person is omitted from Preview: March 28, 12–5; March 30 to April 1, 10–6; April 2, 10–12 the enumeration.” Brennan reported 104 East 25th St, NYC • 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM that, on that day, two-year-old Wilbur THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 15 been breached. In 1942, the Senate Ju- not to be used to the detriment of any retary of State Kris Kobach’s ideas about diciary Committee added Amendment of the persons whose records are in- a possible citizenship question.” S.2208 to a new War Powers Act. It au- volved.” Those precautions became moot In June, 2019, the Supreme Court, thorized the Census Bureau to release when making the records available meant upon reading Furman’s opinion, affirmed individual-level information from the making them available online. his decision. Writing the majority, Chief 1940 U.S. census to government agen- Justice Roberts concluded that the cies. That information was to be used hen Wilbur Ross directed the Trump Administration’s explanation for chiefly by the Department of Justice, in implementing an executive order, signed W Census Bureau to add a citizen- ship question to the 2020 census, he why it wanted to add the question “ap- pears to have been contrived.” by F.D.R., that mandated the “evacu- said that he had made this decision in ation” of people living in the United response to a request from the Justice ore than a hundred and fifty coun- States who were of Japanese descent, and their imprisonment in internment Department. He was lying. The Census Bureau does not like to M tries will undertake a census in 2020. After the first U.S. census, in 1790, camps. The 1940 census, the New York add new questions. For every new ques- fifty-four nations, including Argentina, Times reported, “now a secret under law, tion, the response rate falls. If the bu- in 1853, and Canada, in 1867, adopted re- government officers believe, would be reau’s researchers do want to add a ques- quirements for a decennial census in their of material aid in mopping up those tion, they try it out first, conducting a constitutions. Attempts to reliably esti- who had eluded the general evacua- study that ordinarily takes about five mate the population of the whole world tion orders.” years. (Among the bigger changes, in began in earnest in 1911, with a count of The law didn’t have to change. In- recent decades: since 1960, Americans the population of the British Empire. By stead, government officials simply vio- have been able to self-report their race; 1964, censuses regularly counted nine- lated it. William Lane Austin, a long- since 1980, they have been asked whether ty-five per cent of the world’s popula- time head of the Census Bureau, had they are “Spanish/Hispanic”; since 2000, tion, producing tallies that led both to steadfastly resisted efforts to betray the they have been able to list more than panics about overpopulation and to the confidentiality of individual-level rec- one race.) In March, 2017, when Ross funding of population-control organi- ords. But Lane retired in 1941, and his submitted a report to Congress listing zations. The United Nations Population successor, James Clyde Capt, willingly the questions his department wanted Division predicts a total world popula- complied. on the 2020 census, he did not include tion of 7.8 billion by 2020. There were no people born in Japan, a citizenship question. A year later, he Under current laws, your answers to or whose parents were born in Japan, sent a memo to the Census Bureau di- the 2020 census cannot be seen by any- living on Fourth Avenue in North Ber- recting it to add that question, citing a one outside the Census Bureau until gen, New Jersey, on April 1, 1940. Still, December 12, 2017, letter from the Jus- April 2, 2092. But by then there is un- Otto Schultz, a German-born non-cit- tice Department requesting the ques- likely to be anything like a traditional izen, had plenty to worry about, as did tion for the purpose of enforcing the census left. In 2020, the single largest other German aliens, and Italians, too. Voting Rights Act. The Census Bureau counter of people is Facebook, which has In 1942, the War Department consid- proposed alternative means by which 2.4 billion users, a population bigger than ered proposals for the mass relocation whatever information the D.O.J. needed that of any nation. The 2020 census will of Italian and German aliens on the could be obtained, from existing data, cost the United States sixteen billion East Coast. In the end, F.D.R. dismissed and warned that adding the question dollars. Census-taking is so expensive, Italians as “a lot of opera singers,” and to the census would reduce the response and so antiquated, that the United King- determined that the relocation of Ger- rate, especially from historically under- dom tried to cancel its 2021 census. mans and Italians—the two largest for- counted populations, which include re- In the ancient world, rulers counted eign-born populations in the United cent immigrants. Ross rejected those and collected information about people States—was simply impractical. (Even alternatives. in order to make use of them, to extract so, thousands of people of German and Congress pressed him. Had “the pres- their labor or their property. Facebook Italian ancestry were interned during ident or anyone in the White House works the same way. “It was the great the war.) discussed with you or anyone on your achievement of eighteenth- and nine- Ten years later, in the aftermath of team adding a citizenship question?” teenth-century census-takers to break Japanese incarceration, the Census Bu- Representative Grace Meng asked, in a that nexus and persuade people—the reau and the National Archives together hearing before the House Appropria- public on one side and their colleagues adopted the seventy-two-year rule, clos- tions Committee. “I am not aware of in government on the other—that states ing individual-level census records for such,” Ross answered. But, as Judge Fur- could collect data on their citizens with- the length of a lifetime, after which the man documented in his opinion, dis- out using it against them,” Whitby National Archives “may disclose infor- covery during the trial produced evi- writes. It is among the tragedies of the mation contained in these records for dence that, long before the D.O.J. request, past century that this trust has been be- use in legitimate historical, genealogical Ross had been discussing a citizenship trayed. But it will be the error of the or other worth-while research, provided question with Trump advisers, includ- next if people agree to be counted by adequate precautions are taken to make ing Steve Bannon, who had asked “if he unregulated corporations, rather than sure that the information disclosed is would be willing to speak to Kansas Sec- by democratic governments.  16 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 experience of terrorism, even at its most REFLECTIONS threatening, is of radical or habitual in- convenience. At present, this means ask- EXISTENTIAL INCONVENIENCE ing ourselves if we will be able to go to X or Y and, if we go there, whether we will be able to get back. I can actually an- Life in the shadow of coronavirus. swer that quite easily. We’re not going. We’re not going to Indian Wells for the BY GEOFF DYER tennis, because it’s been cancelled, and we’re not going to Mexico, because we’ve cancelled, less owing to fears of catching the bug than to our desire to put an end to the are-we-or-aren’t-we? angst. It was a huge weight off our minds when we jumped ship (a plane, actually) so that we could stay home and contemplate the implications of existential inconvenience. The good news is that, for many of us, the virus might amount to noth- ing more inconvenient than the flu. As someone who hasn’t caught even a cold in the past five years, the flu, until re- cently, seemed a dreadful prospect, but I’d settle for it in a heartbeat now. Book an appointment, put it in the diary, get it over with, and get over it! That’s ba- sically what happened last year. After I turned sixty, my doctor suggested that I get the latest shingles vaccine. As an Englishman living in America, I’m often suspicious whether a new medical prod- uct is a genuine breakthrough or just the latest hustle from Big Pharma. So I quizzed her about the side effects and the price. Maybe a sore arm, she said, and my health insurance would cover the full cost. “Deal,” I said. “Let’s do it!” As advertised, my arm hurt a bit (couldn’t move it). I also went to bed feeling slightly under the weather. The his might be the first installment of risome thing, occupies less head space next morning, I woke with a headache, T a rewrite of “A Journal of the Plague Year,” but it will be written in real time than the most minute things. Don’t sweat the small stuff, runs the advice—and it’s a fever, and muscle aches that lasted for three days. It turns out that almost ev- rather than with the benefit of the fifty- all small stuff. Except the small stuff— eryone I know who’s had this shot has odd years of hindsight that Daniel Defoe so small it’s invisible—is the big stuff. reacted the same way. And not only was able to draw on. If all goes well—or See? We’re getting in a right old tizz, so that—you also need a follow-up shot very badly—it might also be the last in- let’s calm down and itemize our con- three months later, with similar results. stallment, because although we’re only cerns, concerns about the virus which So I scheduled that for a quiet week at the beginning of the coronavirus out- are also symptoms occasioned by it. and, right on cue, went down with this break, I’m close to the end of my tether. At the moment, the main concern is flu-ey thing again, for just two days this Physical effects lie in the future, but the inconvenience. When trains or planes time. It was both thoroughly unpleas- psychic toll is already huge—and wide- are delayed, the operators routinely “apol- ant—though a lot less unpleasant than ranging. At the top end: Am I going to ogize for any inconvenience,” as though shingles—and really quite convenient. catch it? This can be answered with a inconvenience were just a minor thing, A two-week helping of something like slight rephrasing of Philip Larkin’s fa- as opposed to an “existential threat,” for that at the time of my choosing now mous line from “Aubade”: most things example. But inconvenience is only in- sounds very appealing—if it would con- may never happen; this one probably convenient when it happens to other tent itself with being just the flu. I’ll be will. Strangely, that comes far down on people; when it happens to you, it feels sixty-two in June, and I’m enjoying the the list of worries. Dying, that most wor- threatening. For most of us, our actual perk of senior discounts while moving ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN REA THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 17 deeper into the risk demographic of say. But, having got in and washed your to pick one’s nose whenever the urge those susceptible to more-than-flu. hands, you then touch stuff you had with takes hold—which is pretty much all the None of which seemed, a week ago, you in the viral swamp of the outdoors. time. That’s got to stop. But the writer’s to concern the students at the university And although we turned on the tap with finger is vocationally programmed to go where I teach, in Los Angeles. They were a knuckle-nudge, those same knuckles up the writer’s nose. Even now, as I press blasé about the whole thing, understand- were used to touch the keypad on our these keys, a dangerous counter-gravity ably, since they’re young and, it seems, way into the apartment complex. Can is urging hand toward face, nose, nostril. permanently afflicted by the colds, coughs, flawed washing become a form of spread- Keep typing, keep pounding the keys and sniffles to which I have developed ing? And how about the keys used to (which I’m touching now, seconds after the immunity of age—which is not un- unlock our door? Should we be wash- sending a text to my tennis partner, on related to the cunning of age. It required ing them as well? Once you become con- the very same phone that I checked while surprisingly little maneuvering to make scious of the tactile chain of potential out having breakfast, before washing my sure that they were the ones opening infection, the ground rapidly gives way hands when I got back). doors so I could squeeze in or out be- beneath your feet. We’ve now got a rou- Some changes are easier to make, hind them like a fare dodger at the gates tine, have established a sort of cordon though not necessarily more effective on the London Tube. Colleagues were sanitaire, but how are we going to keep than others. My tennis partner and I less easily duped. A friend who teaches this up? Maybe we started too soon, es- have abandoned shaking hands at the Faulkner saw exactly what I was up to pecially since my hands are already rashy end of a match—but, since I’ve touched as I Englishly ushered him ahead (“Please, from the unprecedented orgy of scrub- the tennis balls that he has touched, after you, Brian”), but he stepped up and bing, soaping, and sanitizing. In spite of what’s the point? Also, like many men reached for the bug-smeared door any- evidence of panic buying, it seemed that, of my generation, I have a fondness for way. Naturally, he was up to something, in some ways, we were more freaked out paying with that filthy, contaminated too, and had taken measures to insure by the bug than were other people here. stuff called cash. (Speaking of which, that “As I Lay Dying” remained a liter- Had they unconsciously absorbed the does anyone, even in London, a city of ary rather than literal experience. He was lunatic message of the nation’s leader, proud and determined caners, still snort holding the door for me because he was that the virus will one day magically go coke through shared banknotes?) I’ve got also, in drug argot, holding. Hand sani- away? Or was it part of that uplifting to start paying with a card, but, weirdly, tizer, that is. My wife and I hadn’t stocked Californian mind-set that says one must America seems less contactless than the up on it because we wanted to be good never have—let alone express—nega- U.K.; you’re always having to touch citizens. Now we wish that we’d bought tive feelings about anything? screens, trying quickly to choose the No a couple of gallons, before panic buying Tip option while the barista is looking emptied the shelves. (A terrible sight: Is said at the outset that this account elsewhere. And why get anxious about anything more un-American than an empty shelf ?) In “The Plague” (itself I would unfold in real time, and, sure enough, the situation is constantly chang- screen touching when the cutlery has been touched, when you’re drinking out hard to find because of a sudden surge ing, and always for the worse. Certainly, of cups that have been handed to you by in what the students insist on calling re- the mood on campus shifted dramati- the hands of others? Especially when my latability), Albert Camus writes that in cally this week. Most doors have been wife points out that I’m holding the cup times of pestilence we learn that there is propped open so that no one has to touch not by the aptly named handle but with more in men to admire than to despise. them. Until at least April 14th, all teach- my fingers round the cup itself in some I want this to be true—to go back to ing will be done online using something residual affectation of or longing for the Larkin again, I want our almost-instinct called Zoom—yet another source of anx- French style of drinking coffee out of a to be almost-true—but how does that iety for older and technologically vul- bowl, as if we were back in those idyllic square with people hoarding toilet paper nerable faculty members such as myself. times before every day was spent as both and face masks in a city where, at the Who knows when we will return phys- victim and suspect in the ongoing fo- time of writing, there have been rela- ically to classrooms? On the plus side, rensic investigation into this hand-to- tively few confirmed cases? L.A., generally, is a far healthier city than mouth crime scene called life. We’ve got just one little bottle of hand New York or London. It’s more spread No wonder we’re conflicted. I say two sanitizer, which, in another potential out, and the worst thing about it—the things to my wife all the time, one piti- contradiction of Camus’s claim, I’ve made relative lack of public transportation–– ful (“What will become of us?”) and the clear that I deserve more than my wife might turn out to be one of the best other Churchillian: “Be of good cheer.” because, frankly, I paid for it. “Strictly things about it. On the minus side, I ride It cheers one up, saying this, but while speaking, it’s not ours,” I pointed out. the Expo Line train all the time—an- I’m saying it I am inwardly clutching my “It’s mine.” The soap in our apartment other reason why I need the bottle of head like Munch’s screamer. There he is, is still communal, though, so we’re al- hand sanitizer more than my wife does. stranded in the midst of a blazing pan- ways jostling at the sink, bleaching our Besides, as a writer, I am uniquely at risk. demic, gripped by the existential reali- hands like the Macbeths. And what a Although it’s a wretched life in some zation that shops are out of face masks minefield of anxiety the simple act of ways, I’ve always been heartened by the and sanitizer and—this is the killer— washing has become. Wash your hands all-redeeming advantage of spending that, while screaming, he’s also touching every time you come in the house, they one’s days writing at home: the freedom his face. Aaargh!  18 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 Forty and bearded, with tattoos on ANNALS OF NATURE his arms, Richards has the bearing of a Special Forces soldier. He wore a vest COLD WAR with a radio strapped to it and held a tin of dipping tobacco, spitting occa- sionally into the garbage can beneath Snow science against the avalanche. his desk. He objects when people say that he works in avalanche control; he BY JAMES SOMERS prefers the term “mitigation.” Sitting nearby was Jude, his English cream golden retriever, named for the patron saint of lost causes. Jonathan Morgan, the lead avalanche forecaster for the day, described the snow. He wore a flat-brimmed cap and a hoodie. “Propagation propensity’s a ques- tion mark,” he said. “Not a lot of body in the slab. . . . Dry facets, two to three mils,” he continued. “It’s running the whole gamut of crystal types—wasn’t ice, by any means. Rimy, small grains.” At ski resorts like Alta, large ava- lanches are avoided by setting off smaller ones with bombs. On the walls above the maps were dummy mortar rounds. Above Richards’s desk were binders marked “Old Explosives Inventory.” The idea, Morgan explained, was to “shoot the terrain we can’t get to.” Richards started considering their targeting plan. The ski resort is cleared from the top down: first by artillery shells, then with hand charges. Before any shots are fired, paths leading to the mountains are closed. Because not all skiers keep to groomed trails—back- country adventurers seek out remote areas—the Utah Department of Trans- portation also checks the roadside for tracks. Sometimes it scours the moun- ne night earlier this winter, the of 10 is considered moderate; at 40, the tainside with infrared cameras before O only road out of Alta, Utah, was closed down. At ski lodges, signs warned road requires the attention of a full-time avalanche forecaster. State Highway 210, giving the all-clear. “So we’ll go fourteen for Baldy?” guests to stay inside or face fines. Al- which runs down the mountain to Salt Richards said. “Doesn’t include a shot ready that season, twenty-two feet of Lake City, if left unprotected, would seventeen.” Baldy was one of the resort’s snow had fallen, and, the day before, a have an A.H.I. of 1,045. mountain faces, at which they planned storm had dropped thirty-three inches; Just before 5 a.m., a small group of to fire fourteen shells; seventeen was a another foot was predicted by morning. ski patrollers gathered at a base by the spot on its ridgeline. The most dangerous time for avalanches resort’s main lift. Dave Richards, the “Seventeen wouldn’t be the worst is after a rapid snowfall, and three-quar- head of Alta’s avalanche program, sat in idea,” Morgan concurred. “You got a ters of the buildings in Alta are threat- the control room. Maps and marked-up seven in there?” ened by a known avalanche path. A aerial photographs hung on the wall “When was Baldy shot last?” Rich- standard measure for danger on roads, next to what looked like a large EKG— ards asked. “Forty inches ago?” the Avalanche Hazard Index, computes that season’s snowfall, wind speeds, and “Yeah, Friday morning.” risk according to the size and frequency temperature data plotted by hand. Clip- Richards and Morgan repaired to the of avalanches and the number of vehi- boards on hooks were filled with ac- mess hall—dark carpet, pool table, a cles that are exposed to them. An A.H.I. counts of past avalanches. deer head on the wall—for breakfast. At five-thirty, the ski lift opened. As We think of snow as a solid mass. In reality, it’s a layer cake. Richards walked out the door, Liz Rocco, ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS DANTHONY THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 19 another ski patroller, mentioned that yelled—the elevation and the deflec- designed walls to protect vulnerable set- she had prepared some of the hand tion. Two other patrollers confirmed the tlements; the stones used to build them charges they would be using that morn- coördinates. “Ready to fire,” Richards were hauled up the mountainsides by ing. “And I will light them, and throw said. “Fire!” hundreds of men. them into the darkness,” Richards said. He pulled hard on a chain. The Around the same time, prospectors We rode the lift up in the moonlight. muzzle flashed, and a plume of acrid in the western United States began find- Snow was falling on the fir trees. Rich- smoke filled the air. There was a high- ing silver ore high in the mountains. At ards spent his childhood at Alta: his fa- pitched ringing. Alta, which began as a major silver camp, ther was a ski patroller for thirty-three It wasn’t possible to see the mountain, miners logged the alpine forests for fire- years, and his mother, who later became but Richards listened for impact and, a few wood and to reinforce their tunnels. Ac- a university administrator, worked the seconds later, yelled, “Report!” Outside, cording to legend, the avalanche danger front desk at the Rustler while the barrage contin- grew so high that women weren’t allowed Lodge. Richards started ued, a patroller named Kyle to live there in winter. Alta was aban- his career as a professional took a small cast-booster doned in 1927, when the price of silver skier, then worked as a explosive out of his pack: plummeted, but, in the nineteen-thir- heli-skiing guide, before it resembled two cans of ties, European-style ski resorts spread joining the patrol full time. beans wired together with across the American West. The first me- “The thing that makes it licorice, the cartoon ver- chanical lift appeared in Alta in 1939. for me is the snow,” he said. sion of a bomb. He pulled After the Second World War, some “Working with a natural the fuse and tossed it un- veterans of the U.S. 10th Mountain Di- material that can be—” He derhand over the cliffside. vision, who had trained for alpine com- paused. “It’s light and fluffy “That didn’t go where I bat, found themselves responsible for and soft and downy, and wanted,” he said. Ninety snow safety at the resorts. In 1945, Mont- it’s everybody’s favorite thing in the world. seconds later, it exploded into a black- gomery Atwater, a freelance writer who It’s also one of the most destructive forces and-white cloud of snow dust. had fought with the 10th, heard about a in nature. Under the right conditions, Afterward, the cleaning and stow- snow-ranger job at Alta and applied on that soft, wonderful little snowflake can ing of the guns began. When everything a whim. “That Alta was ideally conceived tear forests out of the ground, throw cars was done, it was nearly nine o’clock. by nature to become the first avalanche through the air, flatten buildings. And Richards prepared to ski back toward research center on this continent and you get to watch that.” the base. During the night, the resort that I was there to take the plunge were At the top of the lift, we started hik- had sent an alert to Alta skiers, telling mere coincidences,” he later wrote, in ing. A voice crackled over the radio. them to expect between nine and four- “The Avalanche Hunters,” from 1968. “Copy,” Richards said. “Just give me a teen inches of new snow—some of the Alta lies at the center of three storm holler when you pull the trigger.” A best skiing of the season. On the way tracks, from Canada, the Gulf of Alaska, moment later, the radio crackled again; down, the sun shone on fresh powder and the Pacific. Storm systems accumu- Richards ducked and covered his head, reaching up to Richards’s waist. Small late moisture in the Salt Lake and, as they and an explosion went off somewhere cracks shot out from his ski tips as he rise into the mountains, release about nearby. We resumed hiking. After a few descended. Piles of snow slid downslope. forty-five feet of snow each winter. Atwa- minutes, we arrived at a two-story shed. He paused and, turning his ski pole up- ter learned that although snow always be- A garage door opened onto a pair of side down, began using it as a probe. gins the same way—with a water droplet hundred-and-five-millimetre howitzer The pole slid easily into the first foot condensing around a dust mote or pollen cannons, of Second World War vintage, of snow. Feeling resistance, he pushed to form a six-pointed snowflake—it can installed on semicircular tracks. The gun harder—and broke through into a hol- take innumerable forms later. Snow acts barrels were pointed at the mountain- low. After the snow settled and drifted, like both a solid and a liquid: it flows— tops. A crew was loading bags of gun- there could be avalanches. even a blanket of snow on a hillside is powder into the undersides of artillery slowly creeping—while maintaining its shells—enormous bullets, six inches wide he project of avalanche control in structure. Scientists consider it to be and two and a half feet long. Richards wrapped a rag around a large stick and T the Alps goes back at least to 1397, in Andermatt, Switzerland, with a law “warm,” because it is always close to its melting point. This is why, before you jammed it into a gun barrel, to clean it. that prohibited logging. Swiss peasants make your first snowball of the day, it “One Sunday morning,” he began sing- had moved farther into the mountains. is hard to know how well it will pack: ing to himself. “As I went walking . . .” Their new farmhouses sat in avalanche you are working with a material that is The patrollers donned foam earplugs paths. It was soon discovered that old- about to change state. It’s like building and large over-ear headphones; Rich- growth trees anchored the snow and a bridge with red-hot steel. ards and his co-gunner walked around kept slides from gathering mass. During We think of the snow on a moun- one of the weapons, checking locks and the eighteen-seventies, Johann Coaz, the tain as a solid mass. In reality, it is a layer bolts. They turned a crank, and the bar- head of the Swiss Forest Service, made cake created by serial snowfalls, each rel swung toward its first target. records of historical avalanches. He drew layer distinctive and changeable. “The “Zero, zero, two, seven,” Richards up maps of potential disaster zones and snow cover is never in a state of repose,” 20 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 Atwater wrote. “It is continually being water; in a persistent slab, it was weak to his supervisor whether he could have pushed, pulled, pressed, bent, warmed, begin with. A soft slab, composed of pow- some artillery, for distant targets. National chilled, ventilated, churned.” The top- dery snow, tends to break where you stand; Guardsmen arrived with a First World most layer might be evaporating into a hard slab breaks above you, which is War-era French 75. (“What would ava- the night air; at the same time, radiant more perilous. Non-slab avalanches are lanche research be without war surplus?” heat from the ground, or from nearby said to be “loose.” In a dry loose ava- he later wrote.) For mid-range targets, trees, could be melting the lowest layer. lanche, powder releases in disconnected too close for artillery but too distant for When the temperature differences be- sloughs. Wet loose avalanches—por- hiking or skiing, Atwater tried rifle gre- tween the layers are small, snow tends tended by “pinwheels,” small snowballs nades, bazookas, bombs dropped from he- to sinter, or coalesce: the crystals knock that leave streaks as they roll—are slower licopters, and an air-to-air rocket known off one another’s arms, becoming rounded but stickier, and more likely to bury you if as the Mighty Mouse. These methods grains that fuse into a strong, dense snow- you get caught. Mixed avalanches, which were too costly, or unsuited to the snow; pack. When the differences are larger— start dry and get wet lower on the slope, in the end, a modified ball machine, of say, between the pack and the ground— have become increasingly common. So the sort used for batting practice, was snow vaporizes upward and refreezes, have glide avalanches, caused by melt- the most reliable delivery mechanism. creating hollow, cup-shaped crystals. The water seeping in below the snowpack. Richards’s team still uses Atwater’s “Av- result is brittle, spiky snow, called depth Students of tsunamis or volcanoes alauncher” to shoot about thirty rounds hoar. (In ice cream, a similar process cre- must wait for nature to deliver their di- each morning. ates freezer burn.) sasters, but an avalanche can be pro- Atwater worked with Ed LaCha- Neither settled snow nor weak hoar voked. In the nineteen-fifties, Atwater pelle, who had done a stint at the Swiss is dangerous in itself. The problem arises used a technique now called “ski-cut- Avalanche Institute, to create a “snow when a dense layer lies atop a weak layer ting.” Two patrollers descended danger- study plot”—a clearing where they could to which it is poorly bonded. Depth hoar ous slopes; while one looked on, ready to measure snowfall and take samples of is “the eeriest stuff on any mountain,” stage a rescue, the other skied to a safe the snowpack at regular intervals. They Atwater wrote; it grows unseen, rotting point on the far side, picking up enough tracked the snow’s rate of accumulation the snow until it is weak and potted. It speed to try and ride through any ava- and weight in water, discovering that is strong in compression but weak in lanches he might start. In theory, the weight mattered far more than depth: shear. Like a row of champagne glasses slopes that slid were safer because of it; when placed atop a layer of hoar, a foot slowly loaded with bricks, it can hold a the ones that didn’t were deemed stable of fluffy powder was less dangerous than surprising amount of weight until, with enough for everyone else. three inches of dense slush. Wind, they the slightest shove, the structure falls It wasn’t practical to ski-cut every hill. learned, could deposit many feet in just apart, creating a slab avalanche. Knowing that the Swiss used bombs to a few hours; pillows of windblown snow The word “avalanche” is too graceful combat avalanches, Atwater tapped the looked tranquil but were deadly. Study- for the phenomenon it describes. On Forest Service’s wartime supply of tetry- ing how snow settled, Atwater wrote, slopes shallow enough to accumulate tol, the high-powered explosive; he asked “We saw things going on within that snow but steep enough for it to be un- stable—the sweet spot is said to be thirty- nine degrees—the layers will separate, and the slab will crack and slide. Churn- ing violently, the snow reaches eighty miles per hour within a few seconds. A skier who avoids colliding with trees and rocks is likely to be pulled under, then pinned in place by thousands of pounds of snow that harden like concrete. Very few people can dig themselves out; most can’t even move their fingers. Within minutes, an ice mask forms around your face. You asphyxiate on your own ex- haled carbon dioxide. In his book “Staying Alive in Ava- lanche Terrain,” from 2008, Bruce Trem- per, the former director of Utah’s Ava- lanche Center, offers a taxonomy of avalanches. In slab avalanches—the most dangerous kind—an entire layer releases at once. In storm slabs or wind slabs, the releasing layer falls from above; in wet slabs, a layer lower down is weakened by “Open up for the cleaning crew.” placid-appearing mass which no man in 1942, suddenly became an institution beginning of understanding,” he said. had seen before—or even suspected.” of national import. The scientific study of snow layers has He concluded, “There are apparently Henning Löwe, the forty-six-year-old refined our understanding of avalanches. random plastic flows and currents within head of the institute’s Cold Lab, wears In 2008, a study published in Science by the snow cover whose causes and effects an earring in his right ear; before taking a group of Scottish and German mate- were unknown, and still are.” up the study of snow, he received a Ph.D. rials researchers modelled how, when one In 1805, the Irish hydrographer Sir in theoretical condensed-matter physics. part of a heavy layer of snow collapses Francis Beaufort developed a scale for Dressed in jeans, black Nikes, and a worn onto a weak layer, it can produce a wave. measuring wind speed at sea by obser- fleece shirt, he led me inside the lab, where Their model explained a curious obser- vation. Later, it was adapted for use on computers sat beside refrigerated rooms vation from the field: skiers occasionally land. In his book “Defining the Wind,” with three-inch-thick steel doors. The trigger deadly avalanches above or below from 2004, Scott Huler argues that the lab’s goal, he explained, was to find out them, even when standing on flat slopes. descriptions accompanying the scale, what the wetness or heaviness or hoari- The weak layer, it turns out, behaves like which were written anonymously, should ness of snow really meant, on the level the coils in a mattress: apply force in one count as literature. At Beaufort 0, the of its crystals. “We are connecting phys- place, and it spreads all over the bed. The wind is “calm; smoke rises vertically.” At ical properties of snow to structure,” Löwe concept is now a cornerstone of avalanche- Beaufort 3, a gentle breeze, one sees “leaves said. He picked up a palm-size cube that safety education, where it is known sim- and small twigs in constant motion.” At looked elaborately hollowed out, like a ply as “remote triggering.” Beaufort 5, a fresh breeze, “small trees in plaster mold of a termite’s nest. A twenty- Snow research also has applications leaf begin to sway; crested wavelets form millimetre-wide sample of snow had beyond avalanches. Spinning his keys on inland waters.” The poetic descrip- been taken from the crown of an ava- around a finger, Löwe led me through tions connect subjective impressions to lanche—the pit that’s left when a slab the cold rooms. In one, a humidifier gen- objective reality. A near-gale—a Beau- releases—scanned with X-rays, and then erated tiny clouds of perfect, lab-grown fort 7—is defined by “whole trees in mo- 3-D-printed in plastic, at high magnifi- powder; in another, snow from the Arc- tion; inconvenience in walking against cation: the layer cake, under a micro- tic, Finland, and Iceland had been care- wind.” See and feel those things, and you scope. The weak, bottom layer was com- fully preserved. Scientists are studying know that the wind is between thirty-two posed of what looked like large popcorn how snow’s crystal structure determines and thirty-eight miles per hour. kernels. The top layer, which had settled, its color, or “albedo,” which, in turn, Atwater devised an analogous guide was a tight tangle, like instant ramen. affects its ability to act like a giant mir- to snow. His language is evocative, but “You start to shear this thing”—Löwe ror and mitigate global warming. there’s less authority in the descriptions. made a chopping motion where the two In an upstairs office with mountain “Unstable damp snow is tacky,” he wrote. layers met—“it’s ninety-nine per cent views, Perry Bartelt, a gray-haired re- “It slithers out from underfoot and rolls sure that this will break there.” search engineer, works on Rapid Mass away in balls or slips blanketwise. . . . Snow science has come a long way Movement Simulation, or RAMMS— Well settled snow has good flotation since Atwater’s experiments at Alta. The software for simulating avalanches. The and makes a clean, sharp track.” Snow basic process by which newly fallen snow week before, an avalanche in Turkey had is less forthcoming than the wind. Its crystals sinter into a cohesive slab can killed half a dozen people; dozens more chaos hides beneath the surface. now be seen in slow motion: it resem- died during the rescue, when the moun- bles the way ice cubes in an empty glass tain avalanched a second time. Turkish ne crisp, bright morning in Febru- fuse together. The process of recrystal- researchers had rushed data from both O ary, I walked along a brook just out- side the center of Davos, toward the head- lization—the re-separating of the cubes— was more mysterious. Löwe opened a slides to Bartelt. RAMMS calculated that the first avalanche had hit the bottom quarters of the Swiss Institute for Snow closet, and pulled a cylinder from a shelf of the slope with five times the force and Avalanche Research. In Davos, the marked “Snowbreeder 3.” The device al- needed to knock down a building. Its train from the valley potters up through lows scientists to observe a snow sam- core had the density of wood. wooded hills, picking up locals in ski ple while applying varying degrees of Using a terrain map, RAMMS predicts boots; the S.L.F., as the institute is now heat and pressure. At his computer, Löwe the path and the power of an avalanche. known, occupies a squat building a few played a time-lapse video of “snow meta- Its central innovation is its ability to treat minutes from the train station. A small morphism” in the Snowbreeder. “In the an avalanche as a “granular shear flow,” exhibit in the lobby explains the history beginning, it’s typical snow, it’s round- using statistics to average out the activ- of snow and avalanches in Switzerland. grained snow, the crystals are small,” he ity of millions of interacting grains. Imag- In 1951, while Atwater was experi- said. Then heat was applied from below. ine a box of cereal, full of flakes and menting with explosives, Switzerland The lower crystals began evaporating marshmallows; now pour it out. Some experienced the worst avalanche season their moisture to the crystals above, which bits will fly straight, carried by their own in its recorded history. Ten feet of snow used it to grow downward. “We see that, momentum. Others will catch on the fell in ten days. About a hundred peo- here, a facet’s growing. There, a facet’s surface they’re sliding down. Many flakes ple were killed; villages that had sur- growing,” he said, pointing. This was will shake against one another, breaking vived avalanches for centuries were de- hoar—the snow becoming spiky, brittle, up and settling below the intact marsh- stroyed. The S.L.F., which was founded weak. “Seeing something is always the mallows. (In granular flows, small things 22 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 sink beneath bigger ones.) RAMMS seeks to predict the outcome of this churn. The software was validated on his- torical avalanches—especially on data about whether trees had been knocked down, and, if so, how old they were. “Trees are wonderful mechanical sensors,” Bar- telt said. If an avalanche takes down a seventy-year-old stand of trees, you know that the avalanche has a return period of at least seventy years. Fine-tuning the model would require more precise data, which are hard to come by. Gathering this information would require taking readings inside, or under, an avalanche. or this purpose, the S.L.F. maintains F an avalanche test site in the Vallée de la Sionne—a steep, mountainous area about two hundred miles from Davos. Hearing the phrase “test site,” one might imagine a bunny slope. Actually, it is an “If they turned off when you clapped, they probably enormous mountain, improbably re- weren’t the northern lights.” served for science. The site’s chief scientist is Betty So- villa, a hydraulics engineer. When we • • met at S.L.F., she was wearing red- framed glasses, a black cardigan, jeans, He pulled out two avalanche beacons— ing from a crack in the slab. Upslope, it and red boots. “RAMMS is a very sim- transmitters that would relay our loca- would have looked as though someone plified model,” she said. The goal of the tion to rescuers—and set them to Send. had slit the mountain’s forehead. Now its test site was to develop a more realistic We strapped them under our jackets. face was falling off; the break, nine foot- version, by correlating detailed measure- “My job before working at the S.L.F. ball fields across, was as deep as eleven ments of the snow cover with the ava- was at a salmon plant,” Huguenin said, feet in places. Blocks of snow would begin lanches it created. She was particularly as we set out. (He was an engineer there.) leaping up prettily, breaking like roiling interested in glide avalanches: there were “It was so loud.” Now we could hear the water. In the quiet, you might feel some- more of them every year, but they were river as we walked. Beneath the blue sky, thing lapping at the back of your legs be- elusive. “You cannot predict when they ours were the only tracks. After twenty fore being swept off your feet. are released,” she said. “This is really the minutes, the site came into view: a broad, The slide generated a powder cloud avalanche of the future.” bare mountainside, eight thousand feet nearly two hundred feet high. It seemed One morning, Pierre Huguenin, a high. Between two couloirs—the main to move in slow motion, like dry ice bil- forty-nine-year-old mountaineer and avalanche paths—a half-dozen chalets lowing, but it levelled the trees. Under- snow scientist, drove me to the site in huddled near a small wood. neath, the core was formed by four hun- a white Mitsubishi Pajero. “You see the “They are not allowed to live here in dred thousand tons of snow. Huguenin flakes. You see the crystals,” he said, ges- the winter,” Huguenin said. Two days asked me to visualize the test peak, two turing out the window. There had been earlier, there had been a naturally occur- kilometres distant, and the peak of the a storm the previous night. He stopped ring glide avalanche at the site. I asked mountain on which we stood as the two the car where the road ended, and we whether it had been dangerous. “You sides of a half-pipe. With a deep roar, changed into snowshoes. would be dead,” he said. “No chance.” he said, the avalanche had run through Outside, there was about a foot of The site was built in 1997; in the win- the valley like a skateboarder, with pristine powder. I stooped and ran my ter of 1999, the snow was the heaviest enough speed to climb the other side. hand through it. Bone-dry, it was the it had been since 1951—perfect condi- “It came all the way up there?” I asked, pure bright white of confectioner’s sugar, tions for an experiment. Using explosives pointing to the top of our peak, three with the texture of sea salt. Huguenin dropped from a helicopter, the S.L.F. trig- hours’ hike away. pulled out his phone. The avalanche fore- gered three avalanches in the course of a “Yup, and there is a trail there. One cast for the area had us covered in or- month. They were so massive that they of the wards was on it. The guy at that ange. “We are in the third degree,” he destroyed most of the institute’s equip- time saw a huge amount of snow jump- said—the risk category in which the most ment. If you had been skiing on the moun- ing the top here”—he motioned toward avalanche deaths occur in the Alps, equiv- tain during the last avalanche, you might the ridgeline above us—“and falling on alent to the American “considerable.” have heard a soft exhalation: air releas- the other side.” As the snow poured over THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 23 the ridge, the warden could hear tree Huguenin handed me his binoculars. grating them into uncannily specific rec- trunks snapping like matchsticks. “He Through them, I saw chest-high boul- ommendations: “It remains possible to really thought he was going to die,” Hu- ders of snow. Without them, the ava- trigger a wind slab avalanche. . . . This guenin said. The experiment, which de- lanche was a scratch on the mountainside. snow will feel upside down and stiff.” stroyed much of the forest, didn’t go Different kinds of terrain are assigned over well with the locals. ne is unlikely to encounter an av- levels of danger, on a one-to-five scale; Huguenin and I continued walking. To our left, a Soviet-looking bunker poked O alanche on the bomb-cleared trails of a ski resort like Alta. Avalanche ac- colorful diagrams with cartoon icons show which parts of the mountain— out of the hill. It was two stories tall; in cidents happen far more often in the above the treeline, say, or southern as- the 1999 experiment, it had been covered backcountry, where skiers search for pects—are to be avoided. by thirteen feet of snow. To reach the ob- what the First Nations author Richard Some experts worry that such dia- servers buried inside, a crew had to cut Wagamese called “the great white sanc- grams give skiers a false sense of secu- a vertical tunnel with a chainsaw. Near tity of winter.” In a recent survey, more rity. My sixty-seven-year-old godfather, the bunker, an array of continuous-wave than half of backcountry skiers said they Richard, happens to be the most expe- radar antennas, designed to measure the had triggered an avalanche; a quarter rienced backcountry adventurer I know; flow at the avalanche’s core, craned toward said they’d got caught in one. It’s tell- a snowboarder for decades, he has logged the peak. Huguenin pointed to “obsta- ing that the standard kit separating them more than a hundred thousand vertical cles” on the slope—pressure and veloc- from resort vacationers consists of a bea- metres in the past two years, in Kash- ity sensors mounted on concrete-and- con, a probe, and a shovel. mir, Antarctica, and other places. In the steel structures. Against the mountainside, I grew up skiing at small mountains backcountry, he relies not just on fore- the largest obstacle, a sixty-foot-tall pylon in the Laurentians, just north of Mon- casts but also on guides, to whom he at- studded with flow-measurement devices, treal. Well groomed and popular, they tributes extraordinary diagnostic pow- looked like a toothpick. were often scraped to ice. It was only a ers. Before taking a group out, a guide Avalanche country is like bear coun- few years ago that I went with a friend might dig a small column out of the try. The threat hardly ever comes, but to a large ski resort in Colorado. One slope. He’ll examine the layers, sussing it defines the place, and lends it its gran- day, we travelled to a remote part of the out weakness, assessing the look of the deur. Outside the bunker, the moun- mountain. There had been fresh snow crystal grains. Then he’ll tap the top of tains rose around us; flat clouds gath- that morning, and I whooped as I dropped the column with his hand ten times, ered in a distant valley like steam. We in, not another soul in sight. The snow bending from the wrist. If the column had lunch: bread, cheese, chocolate. The felt like a cloud underfoot; falling evoked survives, he’ll do it again, bending from snow was warming in the sun. Scoop- the childhood joy of jumping in leaves. the elbow; finally, he’ll do it from the ing it up, I found that, instead of seep- Carving slow curves, I recognized the shoulder. His interest is in when the col- ing through my fingers, it now formed feeling of discovery: I was writing my umn collapses, and how. Once, on a slope a perfect snowball—metamorphism name on the mountain. I also under- that seemed risky, a guide told Richard’s within a matter of hours. I thought of stood, for the first time, how powder and group that, whatever they did, they must how plants observed in time lapse seem silence lure skiers into the backcountry. follow, one by one, to the right of his to move with animal purpose. I imag- To some extent, backcountry skiers line. Each skier followed in turn, care- ined the crystals in this newly fallen can rely on avalanche forecasts. At the fully staying to his right. As Richard de- snow sintering and crackling with life. Utah Avalanche Center (motto: “Keep- scended, a layer of snow unsettled be- From where we were sitting, we could ing You on Top”), forecasters make daily neath him, a few feet to the left of the see the glide avalanche from two days field observations (“+” means fresh snow; guide’s tracks, and sent a wave across the earlier. It was hard to get a sense of scale. “•,” round grains; “Ʌ ,” depth hoar), inte- bowl. The slope fell like a sheet. One way to avoid avalanches is to ski shallower slopes. Slopes of around twenty-five degrees are perfectly enjoy- able; steeper ones are only marginally more fun. And yet it’s hard for skiers to hold back. “The tricky part is controlling our lust,” a forecast reads. After a stu- dent of his died in an avalanche, Jordy Hendrikx, a professor at Montana State University, shifted his focus from geo- physical research to behavioral science. (“Understanding how a crystal grows is not enough to change the current fatal- ity profile,” he told me.) In one long- running study, he had a large group of “Big mixup at the airport. I’ll tell you about backcountry skiers log their activity with it later. I see my bag waiting for me.” a G.P.S.-enabled app. He found that experts chose steeper terrain, as did all- Two skiers turned their beacons to hills, so that snow slides right over them. male groups, especially younger ones. Search, monitoring their screens. They After the winter of 1951, a party from (“Quantifying the obvious,” he has said.) assembled their tent-pole-like probes, the federal government in Bern trav- When Tremper published his book, in jamming them into the ground until they elled to St. Antönien to discuss the ques- 2008, he reported that, although a third struck the buried skier. It took more than tion of resettlement. The townspeople of those who used the backcountry in twenty-five minutes to shovel the victim wanted to stay. “The Swiss mentality is Utah were women, women accounted out. The report, which identifies “a Per- to let people live in the mountains,” Mar- for only 3.3 per cent of fatal accidents. sistent Slab avalanche problem,” is lon- greth said. Taxpayers spent millions of In the early two-thousands, when no ger than most, at pains to explain why dollars on mitigation measures; roads amount of snow science seemed to be this group—so well informed and metic- running up the mountain had to be built improving outcomes, the study of “human ulous—could still be caught. just to transport construc- factors” that contributed to avalanche ac- On my first night at tion equipment. I asked cidents became popular. Tremper lists six Alta, I stayed at one of the Margreth why people had common “heuristic traps” that lead to av- lodges. Since the road had moved to St. Antönien in alanche fatalities: doing what is famil- closed, the cheap dorms the first place. “The good iar; being committed to a goal, identity, filled up, four to a room. places had been taken,” he or belief; following an “expert”; showing One man, Bill, forty-five said, smiling. In Switzer- off when others are watching; compet- years old, took a bottom land, even the mountains ing for fresh powder; and seeking to be bunk. A week earlier, he’d are crowded. accepted by a group. The Swiss pocket been in an avalanche— A few years back, Mar- guide for backcountry skiers is full of small, he said, and soft- greth was contacted by technical information about slabs and slab. I asked him what it the emergency-programs slope angles, but it also includes the ad- was like. “Manageable, and managed,” manager and avalanche forecaster for vice “Don’t give in to temptation!” he said. He’d realized that the slope had the city of Juneau, Alaska. Several neigh- New pilots are said to be most acci- the potential to slide, but he knew what borhoods were in the runout zones of dent-prone right after their hundred- to do if that happened, so he skied it slide paths; it was probably the most and-fiftieth hour; that’s when self-confi- anyway. “I did a couple tomahawks,” he significant avalanche problem in the dence peaks. Dave Richards, the Alta said—tumbling end over end for three United States. Could anything be done? avalanche director, told me that, for many hundred feet, then standing up. Was he Even if tens of millions of dollars were skiers, danger is highest right after the shaken? He thought about it. Actually, spent on mitigation, the houses could completion of an avalanche-avoidance he said, he was serene. “Manageable, and not be completely protected; their de- course. The backcountry is what behav- managed,” he repeated, from his bed. struction was more or less inevitable. ioral scientists call a “wicked” environ- Margreth suggested that the city buy ment for learning: it gives you no neg- oward the end of my time in Swit- the owners out and keep people from ative feedback until it kills you. A database maintained by the Col- T zerland, I spent the day with Ste- fan Margreth, S.L.F.’s chief civil engi- building new homes. So far, this has proved politically impossible; the city orado Avalanche Information Center neer. Easygoing, he wore a pink-and-red of Juneau, which had already bought a contains aviation-style tick-tock accounts winter hat. At the institute, Margreth is few empty lots in the area, has invested of avalanche fatalities. In January, 2019, the spiritual descendant of Johann Coaz: in warning systems and road-protec- a group of skiers taking a backcountry he carries Switzerland’s avalanche-hazard tion protocols. avalanche course went out with their in- maps in his head. Margreth sometimes “Sometimes you need accidents,” Mar- structor for a day in the field. The ski- uses RAMMS to model avalanche risk. greth said. Atwater, in his book, suggests ers followed a methodical, rigorous plan. “It’s a great honor that he even uses the that “people need a good scare not less At predetermined waypoints, the group program,” Bartelt, its creator, said. than every three years. Otherwise they assessed the conditions; they dug a snow Many Swiss towns have building re- begin to think that avalanche hazard is pit, testing a snow column for strength. strictions based on avalanche-hazard a figment of someone’s imagination.” Their plan for the day included slope maps. “Everyone in the Swiss mountains They can seem absurd to us, these angles for all the terrain they might en- knows their red zones and blue zones,” people living at the base of steep hills. counter. But they didn’t measure the Margreth told me. We drove to St. An- Don’t they know they’re idling in the steepness in the field themselves, and tönien, a tiny farming village an hour face of disaster? The feeling was in the one particular slope that they believed outside Davos. The threat of avalanche air in Switzerland, though not because to be no more than twenty-nine degrees there is so great that, in storms, residents of avalanches. As we walked on the road was actually thirty-two degrees. As the wear beacons while tending their farms. toward the edge of town, we saw diners second of six skiers proceeded down- Margreth helped design or approve nearly enjoying themselves at sidewalk tables. ward, the other four, waiting above, side- every avalanche-mitigation measure in “It’s much too warm for a February day,” stepped in order to see his progress more town: a huge concrete wedge on the Margreth said, in the winter sun. It had clearly. The slope avalanched twice— upslope side of the elementary school; been three years since the team at the the first one remote-triggered the sec- vast lines of steel girders high in the start- test site performed an experiment. Not ond—and the second skier was buried. ing zones; houses built into the sides of enough snow had fallen.  THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 25 iona Apple was wrestling with F her dog, Mercy, the way a person might thrash, happily, in rough waves. Apple tugged on a purple toy as Mercy, a pit-bull-boxer mix, gripped it in her jaws, spinning Apple in circles. Worn out, they flopped onto two day- beds in the living room, in front of a TV that was always on. The first day that I visited, last July, it was set to MSNBC, which was airing a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book. These days, the singer-songwriter, who is forty-two, rarely leaves her tran- quil house, in Venice Beach, other than to take early-morning walks on the beach with Mercy. Five years ago, Apple stopped going to Largo, the Los Angeles venue where, since the late nineties, she’d regularly performed her thorny, emotion- ally revelatory songs. (Her song “Largo” still plays on the club’s Web site.) She’d cancelled her most recent tour, in 2012, when Janet, a pit bull she had adopted when she was twenty-two, was dying. PROFILES Still, a lot can go on without leaving home. Apple’s new album, whose com- pletion she’d been inching toward for years, was a tricky topic, and so, during SKIN IN THE GAME the week that I visited, we cycled in and Fiona Apple’s radical sensitivity. out of other subjects, among them her decision, a year earlier, to stop drinking; BY EMILY NUSSBAUM estrangements from old friends; and her memories of growing up, in Manhat- tan, as the youngest child in the “second family” of a married Broadway actor. Near the front door of Apple’s house stood a chalkboard on wheels, which was scrawled with the title of the up- coming album: “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” One afternoon, Apple’s older sister, Amber, arrived to record vocal harmo- nies. In the living room, there was an upright piano, its top piled with keep- sakes, including a stuffed toucan knit- ted by Apple’s mother and a photograph of Martha Graham doing a backbend. Apple’s friend Zelda Hallman, who had not long ago become her housemate, was in the sunny yellow kitchen, cook- ing tilapia for Mercy and for Hallman’s Bernese mountain dog, Maddie. In the back yard, there was a guesthouse, where Apple’s half brother, Bran Maggart, a carpenter, lived. (For years, he’d worked as a driver for Apple, who never got a license, and helped manage her tours.) Apple’s father, Brandon Maggart, also lives in Venice Beach; her mother, Diane Apple’s new album, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” like all her others, arrived through a 26 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 slow-drip process of creative self-interrogation that has produced, over a quarter century, a narrow but deep songbook. PHOTOGRAPH BY MALERIE MARDER McAfee, a former dancer and actress, of Apple’s projects, this one was taking neck of her turquoise leotard down and remains in New York, in the Morning- a long while to emerge, arriving through began nursing her daughter. Apple side Heights apartment building where a slow-drip process of creative self-in- looked up from GarageBand, caught Apple grew up. terrogation that has produced, over a her sister’s eye, and smiled. “It’s hap- Amber, a cabaret singer who records quarter century, a narrow but deep song- pening—it’s happening,” she said. under the name Maude Maggart, had book. Her albums are both profoundly brought along her thirteen-month-old personal—tracing her heartaches, her hen you tell people that you are baby, Winifred, who scooched across the floor, playing under the piano. Apple showdowns with her own fragility, and her fierce, phoenix-like recoveries—and W planning to meet with Fiona Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s was there when Winifred was born, and, musically audacious, growing wilder and O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t neces- as we talked about the bizarreness of stranger with each round. As her 2005 sarily obvious, however. Maybe it means childbirth, Apple told me a joke about song “Extraordinary Machine” suggests, healthy, or happy. Maybe it means cre- a lady who got pregnant with twins. whereas other artists might move fast, ating the volcanic and tender songs that Whenever people asked the lady if she grasping for fresh influences and achiev- she’s been writing since she was a child— wanted boys or girls, she said, “I don’t ing superficial novelty, Apple prides her- or maybe it doesn’t, if making music care, I just want my children to be po- self on a stickier originality, one that isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it lite!” Nine months passed, but she didn’t springs from an internal tick-tock: “I means being unhappy, but in a way that go into labor. A year went by—still noth- still only travel by foot, and by foot it’s is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s ing. “Eight, nine, twenty years!” Apple a slow climb / But I’m good at being the conundrum when someone’s art- said, her eyebrows doing a jig. “Twenty- uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing istry is tied so fully to her vulnerability, five years—and finally they’re, like, ‘We all the time.” and to the act of dwelling in and stir- have to figure out what’s going on in The new album, she said, was close ring up her most painful emotions, as there.’” When doctors peeked inside, to being finished, but, as with the twins a sort of destabilizing muse. they found “two middle-aged men going, from the joke, the due date kept getting In the nineties, Apple’s emergence ‘After youuuu! ’ ‘No, after youuuu! ’” pushed back. She was at once excited felt near-mythical. Fiona Apple McAfee- Amber was there to record one line: about these songs—composed and re- Maggart, the musically precocious, emo- a bit of harmony on “Newspaper,” one corded at home, with all production de- tionally fragile descendant of a line of of thirteen new songs on the album. cisions under her control—and appre- entertainers, was a classically trained pi- Apple, who wore a light-blue oxford hensive about some of their subject anist who began composing at seven. shirt and loose beige pants, her hair in matter, as well as their raw sound (drums, One night, at the age of sixteen, she was a low bun, stood by the piano, coaching chants, bells). She was also wary of fac- in her apartment, staring down at Riv- Amber, who sat down in a wicker rock- ing public scrutiny again. Fame has long erside Park, when she thought she heard ing chair, pulling Winifred onto her lap. been a jarring experience for Apple, who a voice telling her to record songs drawn “It’s a shame, because you and I didn’t has dealt since childhood with obses- from her notebooks, which were full of get a witness!” Apple crooned, placing sive-compulsive disorder, depression, heartbreak and sexual trauma. She flew the notes in the air with her palm. Then and anxiety. to L.A., where her father was living, the sisters sang, in harmony, “We’re the After a while, she and Amber went and with his help recorded three songs; only ones who know!” The “we’re” came into a small room—Apple’s former bed- they made seventy-eight demo tapes, out as a jaunty warble, adding ironic sub- room, where, for years, she had slept on and he told her to prepare to hustle. Yet text to the song, which was about two a futon with Janet. After the dog died, the first tape she shared was enough: women connected by their histories with she’d found herself unable to fall asleep a friend passed a copy to the music an abusive man. Apple, with her singu- there, and had turned the room into a publicist she babysat for, who gave it lar smoky contralto, modelled the com- recording studio, although it looked to Andrew Slater, a prominent record plex emotions of the line for Amber, nothing like one: it was cluttered, with producer and manager. Slater, then warming her up to record. one small window and no sound- thirty-seven, hired a band, booked a stu- “Does that work?” Apple asked Win- proofing. There was a beat-up wooden dio in L.A., and produced her début ifred, who gazed up from her mother’s desk and a computer on which Apple album, “Tidal.” It featured such sophis- lap. Abruptly, Apple bent her knees, recorded tracks, using GarageBand. ticated ballads as “Shadowboxer,” as well poked her elbows back like wings, and There was a mike stand and a Day of as the hit “Criminal,” which irresistibly swung her hips, peekabooing toward the Dead painting of a smiling female combined a hip-hop beat, rattling piano, Winifred. The baby laughed. It was si- skeleton holding a skeleton dog. Every and sinuous flute; she’d written it in multaneously a rehearsal and a playdate. surface, from the shelves to the floor, forty-five minutes, during a lunch break “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is a refer- was covered in a mulch of battered per- at the studio. The album sold 2.7 mil- ence to a scene in “The Fall,” the Brit- cussion instruments: bells, wooden lion copies. ish police procedural starring Gillian blocks, drums, metal squares. Slater also oversaw a marketing Anderson as a sex-crimes investigator; The sisters recorded the lyric over campaign that presented his new art- Anderson’s character calls out the phrase and over, with Apple at the computer ist as a sulky siren, transforming her after finding a locked door to a room and Amber standing, Winifred on her into a global star and a media target. where a girl has been tortured. Like all hip. During one take, Amber pulled the Diane McAfee remembers that time as 28 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 a “whirlwind,” recalling the day when vin Klein ads depicting teens being co- die young. I’m going to cut another her daughter received an advance for erced into making porn. When Apple’s album, and I’m going to do good things, “Tidal”—a check for a hundred thou- oldest friend, Manuela Paz, saw “Crim- help people, and then I’m going to die.” sand dollars. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, this inal,” she was unnerved, not just by the Apple’s love life was heavily covered, is unbelievable!’” McAfee told me. They sight of her friend in a lace teddy, gy- too: she dated the magician David Blaine were in their dining room, and Apple rating among passed-out models, but (who was then a member of Leonardo was “backing away, not excited.” Because also by a sense that the video, for all its DiCaprio’s “Pussy Posse”) and the film Apple was not yet eighteen, her mother male-gaze titillation, had uncannily ab- director Paul Thomas Anderson, with had to co-sign her record contract. sorbed the darker aspects of her and whom she lived for several years. While The musician Aimee Mann and her Apple’s own milieu—one of teens run- Anderson and Apple were together, he partner, the musician Michael Penn, ning around upper Manhattan with lit- released “Magnolia” and she released who was also signed with Slater at the tle oversight. “How did they know?” Paz “When the Pawn . . . ,” her flinty sec- time, remember seeing Apple perform asked herself. ond album, whose full, eighty-nine-word at the Troubadour, in West Hollywood, Apple’s unscripted acceptance speech title—a pugilistic verse written in re- at a private showcase for “Tidal,” in at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, sponse to the Spin profile—attracted its 1996. Mann glimpsed in the teen-ager in which she announced, “This world own stream of jokes. the kind of brazen, complex female mu- is bullshit,” further stoked media hos- During this period, Mark (Flanny) sicianship that she’d been longing for—a tility. The speech, which included her Flanagan, the owner of Largo, a brainy tonic in an era dominated by indie-male earnestly quoting Maya Angelou and enclave of musicians and comedians swagger. Onstage, Apple was funny and encouraging fans not to model them- within show-biz L.A., became Apple’s chatty, calling the audience “grownups.” selves on “what you think that we think friend and patron. (In an e-mail to me, After the show, she did cartwheels in is cool,” seems, in retrospect, most shock- he called her “our little champ.”) One the alley outside. Mann recalled Apple ing for how on target it is (something day, Apple visited his office, wondering introducing the song “Carrion” with a true of so many “crazy lady” scandals of what would happen if she cut off her story about how sometimes there’s a that period, like Sinéad O’Connor on fingertip—then would her management person you go back to, again and again, “Saturday Night Live,” protesting sex- let her stop touring? Flanagan, dis- who never gives you what you need, ual abuse in the Catholic Church). But, turbed, told her that she could get a “and the lesson is you don’t need them.” by 2000, when Apple had an onstage note from a shrink instead, and urged As Apple’s career accelerated, Mann meltdown at the Manhattan venue Rose- her to refuse to do anything she didn’t read a Rolling Stone profile in which land, instability had become her “brand.” want to do. Apple spoke about having been raped, She was haunted by her early interviews, As the decades passed, Apple’s rep- at twelve, by a stranger, who attacked like one in Spin, illustrated with lasciv- utation as a “difficult woman” receded. her in a stairwell as her dog barked in- ious photographs by Terry Richardson, After she left Anderson, in 2002, she side her family’s apartment. Mann said that quoted her saying, “I’m going to holed up in Venice Beach, emerging that it was unheard of, and inspiring, for a female artist to speak so frankly about sexual violence, without shame or apology. But Apple’s candor made her worry. Mann had experienced her own share of trauma; she’d also col- lapsed from exhaustion while on tour. “I was afraid of what would happen to her on the road,” she said. “It’s an un- natural way to live.” In fact, the turn of the millennium became an electric, unstable period for Apple, who was adored by her fans but also mocked, and leered at, by the male-dominated rock press, who often treated her as a tabloid curiosity—a bruised prodigy to be both ogled and pitied. Much of the press’s response was connected to the 1997 video for “Crim- inal,” whose director, Mark Romanek, has described it as a “tribute” to Nan Goldin’s photographs of her junkie demimonde—although the stronger link is to Larry Clark’s 1995 movie, “Kids,” and to the quickly banned Cal- every few years with a new album: first, bringing new songs into the world, she lyrics and wrote new ones, and hosted “Extraordinary Machine” (2005), a glo- needed to have thicker skin. But that anarchic bonding sessions with her band- rious glockenspiel of self-assertion and had never been her gift. mates. “She wanted to start from the payback; then the wise, insightful “The ground,” Garza said. “For her, the ground Idler Wheel . . .” (2012). She was in- s we talked in the studio, Apple’s is rhythm.” The band gathered percussive creasingly recognized as a singer-song- writer on the level of Joni Mitchell and A band member Amy Aileen Wood arrived, with new mixes. Wood, an indie- objects: containers wrapped with rub- ber bands, empty oilcans filled with dirt, Bob Dylan. The music of other nineties rock drummer, was one of three musi- rattling seedpods that Apple had baked icons grew dated, or panicky in its bid cians Apple had enlisted to help create in her oven. Apple even tapped on her for relevance, whereas Apple’s albums the new album; the others were the bass- dog Janet’s bones, which she kept in a felt unique and lasting. The skittering ist Sebastian Steinberg, of the nineties pretty beige box in the living room. Apple ricochets of her melodies matched the group Soul Coughing, and Davíd Garza, and the other musicians would march shrewd wit of her lyrics, which could a Latin-rock singer-songwriter and gui- around her house and chant. “Sebastian swerve from damning to generous in tarist. Wood and Apple told me that has a low, sonorous voice,” Garza said, a syllable, settling scores but also cap- their first encounter, at a recording stu- of these early meetings. “Amy’s super- turing the perversity of a brain aflame dio two decades ago, was awkward. Apple shy. I’m like Slim Whitman—we joke with sensitivity: “How can I ask any- remembered feeling intimidated by my voice is higher than Fiona’s. She has one to love me / When all I do is beg Wood and by her girlfriend, who seemed that husky beautiful timbre, and she to be left alone?” “tall and cool.” When Wood described would just . . . speak her truth. It felt Today, Apple still bridles at old cov- something as “rad,” Apple shot back, more like a sculpture being built than erage of her. Yet she remains almost help- “Did you really just say rad ?” Wood hid an album being made.” lessly transparent about her struggles— in the bathroom and cried. Steinberg told me, “We played the she’s a blurter who knows that it’s a Now Wood and her father, John way kids play or the way birds sing.” mistake to treat journalists as shrinks, Would, a sound engineer, were collabo- Wood recalled, “We would have cocktails but does so anyway. She’s conscious of rating with Apple on building mixes and jam,” adding that it took some time the multiple ironies in her image. “Ev- from hundreds of homemade takes. for her to get used to these epic “medi- eryone has always worried that people (Apple also worked with Dave Way and, tations,” which could veer into emotional are taking advantage of me,” she said. later in the process, Tchad Blake.) The chaos. Steinberg recalls “stomping on the “Even the people who take advantage earliest glimmers of “Fetch the Bolt Cut- walls, on the floor—playing her house.” of me worry that people are taking ad- ters” began in 2012, when Apple exper- Once, when Apple was upset about a re- vantage of me.” imented with a concept album about her cent breakup, with the writer Jonathan Lurking on Tumblr (where messages Venice Beach home, jokingly called Ames, she got into a drunken argument from her are sometimes posted on the “House Music.” She also considered bas- with the band members; Wood took her fan page Fiona Apple Rocks), she can ing an album on the Pando—a giant drums to a gig, which Apple misunder- see how much the culture has trans- grove of aspens, in Utah, that is consid- stood as a slight, and Apple went off and formed, becoming one shared virtual ered a single living being—creating songs wrote a bitterly rollicking song about re- notebook. Female singers like Lady that shared common roots. jection, “The Drumset Is Gone.” Gaga and Kesha now talk openly about Finally, around 2015, she pulled to- There were more stops and starts. having been raped—and, in the wake gether the band. She and Steinberg, a A three-week group visit to the Sonic of #MeToo, it’s more widely understood joyfully eccentric bassist with a long gray Ranch recording studio, in rural Texas— that sexual violence is as common as beard, had played live together for years, where some band members got stoned rain. Mental illness is less of a taboo, and had shared intense, sometimes pain- in pecan fields, Mercy accidentally ate too. In recent years, a swell of teen-age ful experiences, including an arrest, while snake poison, and Apple watched the musicians, such as Lorde and Grimes, on tour in 2012, for hashish possession. movie “Whiplash” on mushrooms—was have produced bravura albums in Ap- (Apple spent the night in a Texas jail largely a wash, despite such cool exper- ple’s tradition, while young female ac- cell, where she defiantly gave what Stein- iments as recording inside an abandoned tivists, including Greta Thunberg and berg described as “her best vocal per- water tower. But Garza praised Apple Emma González, keep announcing, to formance ever”; she also ended up on as “someone who really trusts the un- an audience more prepared to listen, TMZ.) Steinberg, who worked with known, trusting the river,” adding, “She’s that this world is bullshit. Apple on “Idler Wheel,” said that her the queen of it.” Apple knows the cliché about early new album was inspired by her fascina- Once Apple returned to Venice fame—that it freezes you at the age you tion with the potential of using a band Beach, she finally began making head- achieved it. Because she’d never had to “as an organism instead of an assem- way, rerecording and rewriting songs in toil in anonymity, and had learned her blage—something natural.” uneven intervals, often alone, in her for- craft and made her mistakes in public, The first new song that Apple re- mer bedroom. At first, she recorded she’d been perceived, as she put it to corded was “On I Go,” which was in- long, uncut takes of herself hitting in- me ruefully, as “the patron saint of men- spired by a Vipassana chant; she sang it struments against random things; she tal illness, instead of as someone who into her phone while hiking in Topanga built these files, which had names like creates things.” If she wanted to keep Canyon. Back at home, she dug out old “metal shaker,” “couch tymp,” and “bean 30 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 drums,” into a “percussion orchestra,” which she used to make songs. She yowled the vocals over and over, stretch- ing her voice into fresh shapes; like a Dogme 95 filmmaker, she rejected any digital smoothing. “She’s not afraid to let her voice be in the room and of the room,” Garza said. “Modern recording erases that.” The resulting songs are so percus- sion-heavy that they’re almost martial. Passages loop and repeat, and there are out-of-the-blue tempo changes. Stein- berg described the new numbers as closer to “Hot Knife,” an “Idler Wheel” track that pairs Andrews Sisters-style har- monies with stark timpani beats, than to her early songs, which were intri- cately orchestrated. “It’s very raw and unslick,” he said, of the new work, be- cause her “agenda has gotten wilder and a lot less concerned with what the out- side world thinks—she’s not seventeen, she’s forty, and she’s got no reason not to do exactly what she wants.” Apple had been writing songs in the same notebooks for years, scribbling new lyrics alongside older ones. At one point, as we sat on the floor near the piano, she grabbed a stack of them, hunting for some lines she’d written when she was Apple, in 1996. The press treated her as a bruised prodigy to be ogled and pitied. fifteen: “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch.” some connections to the O.C.D. rituals fancy party, “I would beg to disagree/But “My handwriting is so different,” she she’d developed as a child, like crunch- begging disagrees with me.” As frank marvelled, flipping pages. She found a ing leaves and counting breaths, or roller- as her lyrics can be, they are not easily diary entry from 1997: “I’m insecure about skating around her dining-room table decoded as pure biography. She said, of the guys in my band. I want to spend eighty-eight times—the number of keys “Rack of His,” “I started writing this more time with them! But it seems im- on a piano—while singing Bob Dylan’s song years ago about one relationship, possible to ever go out and have fun.” “Like a Rolling Stone.” and then, when I finished it, it was about Apple laughed out loud, amazed. “I can’t But Apple brightened whenever she a different relationship.” even recognize this person,” she said. “ ‘I talked about writing lyrics, speaking When I described the clever “La- want to go out and have fun!’” confidently about assonance and seren- dies”—the music of which she co-wrote “Here’s the bridge to ‘Fast as You dipity, about the joy of having the words with Steinberg—as having a vaudeville Can,’” she said, referring to a song from “glide down the back of my throat”— vibe, Apple flinched. She found the no- “When the Pawn . . . .” Then she an- as she put it, stroking her neck—when tion corny. “It’s just, like, something I’ve nounced, “Oh, here it is—‘Evil is a relay she got them exactly right. She collects got in my blood that I’m gonna need sport.’ ” She continued reading: “It words on index cards: “Angel,” “Excel,” to get rid of,” she said. Other songs felt breathes in the past and then—” She “Intel,” “Gel.” She writes the alphabet close to hip-hop, with her voice used shot me a knowing glance. “Lots of my above her drafts, searching, with puzzle- more for force and flow than for mel- writing from then is just, like, I don’t solver focus, for puns, rhymes, and ac- ody, and as a vehicle for braggadocio know how to say it: a young person try- cidental insights. and insults. There was a pungency in ing to be a writer.” Written in the mar- The new songs were full of spiky, lay- Apple’s torch-and-honey voice emit- gin was the word “Help.” ered wordplay. In “Rack of His,” Apple ting growls, shrieks, and hoots. Whenever I asked Apple how she sings, like a sideshow barker, “Check Some of the new material was strik- MARK BAKER / GETTY created melodies, she apologized for out that rack of his! / Look at that row ingly angry. The cathartic “For Her” lacking the language to describe her pro- of guitar necks / Lined up like eager fil- builds to Apple hollering, “Good cess (often with an anxious detour about lies / Outstretched like legs of Rock- mornin’! Good mornin’/You raped me not being as good a drummer as Wood). ettes.” In the darkly funny “Kick Me in the same bed your daughter was She said that her focus on rhythm had Under the Table,” she tells a man at a born in.” The song had grown out of a THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 31 recording session the band held shortly after the nomination hearings of the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; BEACH GLASS like many women, Apple felt scalded with rage about survivors of sexual vi- Who knew this too could become endangered or extinct? olence being disbelieved. The title track They gave me a little pail so I collected beach glass and shells. came to her later; a meditation on feel- Who knew the sound in a seashell wasn’t your own blood— ing ostracized, it jumps between lucid- No more than the ocean? It was the shell’s chambers breathing, ity and fury. Drumsticks clatter sparely over gentle Mellotron notes as Apple A voice of air: Not churning breakers, nor a pulse in your ear. muses, “I’ve been thinking about when In the sun’s furnace glare, the cloudy smooth gemstones I was trying to be your friend/I thought Couched an interior fire. Like shells, progeny of the beach. it was, then— / But it wasn’t, it wasn’t Back then, who knew talcum powder could ignite cancer? genuine.” Then, as she sings, “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long,” Cobalt from Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia. Emerald from Coke. her voice doubles, harmonies turning Wildroot Cream-Oil, Desert Flower, Serutan—the years into a hubbub, and there’s a sudden Eroded their pale glitter. I had a friend once who loved “meow” sound. In the final moments, Buying the water that came in plastic bottles: Nature dogs bark as Apple mutters, “Whatever happens, whatever happens.” Mastered by invention. Who knew those very bottles could Partway through, she sings, “I thought Strangle the ocean? Did their chemicals make him sick? that being blacklisted would be grist for Prone on the sand, I studied an inch from my eye the jagged the mill.” She improvised the line while Clear granules they told me were seeds of molten glass. recording; she knew that it was good, because it was embarrassing. “It sounds —Robert Pinsky bitter,” she said. The song isn’t entirely despairing, though. The next line makes an impassioned allusion to a song by “You would annoy me,” Apple said, tree with me?” Ames used to call her the Kate Bush, one of Apple’s earliest mu- with a smile. Negative Juicer, Apple said, her voice sar- sical heroines: “I need to run up that “I was annoying!” he said, laughing. donic: “I just extract the negative stuff.” hill / I will, I will, I will.” They were being so loving with each She spun this into a black aria of self- other—even about the bad times, like loathing, arguing, like a prosecutor, for ne day during my July visit, Ames, when Ames would find Apple passed the most vicious interpretation of herself: O Apple’s ex-boyfriend, stopped by, on his way to the beach. “Mercy, you out and worry that she’d stopped breath- ing—that it seemed almost mysterious “I put it in a thing and I bring out all the bad stuff. And I serve it up to everyone are so powerful!” he said, as the dog that they had broken up. Then, step by so that they’ll give me attention. And it jumped on him. “I’m waiting for her to step, the conversation hit the skids. The poisons everyone, so they only listen to get calmer, so I can give her a nice hug.” turn came when Ames started offering it when they’re in fucked-up places—and Apple had described Ames to me as her Apple advice on knee pain that was it’s a good sign when they stop listening kindest ex, and there was an easy warmth keeping her from walking Mercy—a to me, because that means that they’re between them. They took turns recall- result, she believed, of obsessive hiking. not hurting themselves on purpose.” ing their love affair, which began in 2006, He told her to read “Healing Back Pain,” Ames pushed back, alarmed. If he’d when Apple attended a performance by by John Sarno. The pain, he said, was ever called her the Negative Juicer, he Ames at the Moth, the storytelling event, repressed anger. said, he didn’t mean it as an attack on in New York. At first, Apple was open to this idea— her art—just that she could take a nice For years, Ames had written candid, or, at least, she was polite about it. But, experience and find the bad in it. Her funny columns in the New York Press when Ames kept looping back to the music had pain but also so much joy and about sex and his psychological fragil- notion, Apple went ominously quiet. redemption, he said. But Ames couldn’t ities, a history that appealed to Apple. Her eyes turned red, rimmed with tears help himself: he kept bringing up Sarno. They were together for four years, then that didn’t spill. She curled up, pulling Somehow, the conversation had be- broke up, in 2010; five years later, they sofa cushions to her chest, her back come a debate about the confessional reunited, but the relationship soon ended arched, glaring. nature of their work. Was it a good thing again, partly because of Ames’s con- It was like watching their relationship for Apple to keep digging up past suffer- cerns about Apple’s drinking. Ames re- and breakup reënacted in an hour. When ing? Was this labor both therapeutic and called to Apple that, as the relationship Ames began describing “A Hundred Years generative—a mission that could help soured, “you would yell at me and call of Solitude” in order to make the point others—or was it making her sick? Ames me stupid.” He added that he didn’t that Apple had a “Márquezian sense of said that he didn’t feel comfortable ex- have much of a temper, which became time,” she shot back, “Are you saying that posing himself that way anymore, espe- its own kind of problem. time is like thirty-seven years tied to a cially in the social-media age. “It’s a 32 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 different world!” he said. “You take one necessarily angry when I’m doing that.” school, when a tough girl told the bul- line out of context . . .” For more than a The next day, she sent me a video. lied Apple, “You have potential.” decade, Ames has been working in less “We’ve been to the beach!” she an- As a child, Apple longed to be “a pea personal modes; his noir novel “You Were nounced, panting, as Mercy ran around in a pod” with other girls, as she was, for Never Really Here” was recently made in the background. “Because it’s her birth- a while, with Manuela Paz, for whom into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix. day!” Apple had taken Ames’s advice, she she wrote her first song. But as an adult Apple said, “I haven’t wanted to drink said, and gone for a walk, behaving as if she has hung out mainly with men. She straight vodka so much in a while.” she weren’t injured. So far, her knees didn’t does have some deep female friendships, “I’m triggering you,” Ames responded. hurt. “Soooo . . . he was right all along,” including with Nalini Narayan, an emer- “You are,” she said, smiling wearily. Apple said, her eyes wide. Then she gency-room nurse, whom she met, in “It’s not your fault, Jonathan. I love you.” glanced at the camera slyly, the corner 1997, in the audience at one of her con- When Ames stepped out briefly, of her mouth pulled up. “Orrrrr . . . I just certs, and who described Apple as “an Apple said that what had frustrated her rested my knees for a while.” empath on a completely different level was the idea that “there was a way out”— than anyone I’ve met.” More recently, that her pain was her choice. pple goes to bed early; when I vis- Apple has become close with a few Zelda Hallman, Apple’s housemate, had been sitting with us, listening. She A ited, we’d end things before she drifted into a smeary, dreamy state, often younger artists. The twenty-one-year- old singer Mikaela Straus, a.k.a. King pointed out that self-help books like after smoking pot, which Hallman would Princess, who recently recorded a cover “The Secret” had the same problem: pass to her in the living room. Late one of Apple’s song “I Know,” called her “fam- they made your suffering all your fault. afternoon, Apple talked about the al- ily” and “a fucking legend.” Straus said, “Fuck ‘The Secret’!” Apple shouted. bum’s themes. She said, of the title, “Re- “You never hear a Fiona Apple line and When Ames came back and men- ally, what it’s about is not being afraid say, ‘That’s cheesy.’” The twenty-seven- tioned Sarno again, Apple interrupted to speak.” Another major theme was year-old actress Cara Delevingne is an- him: “That’s a great way to be in regu- women—specifically, her struggle to “not other friend; she visited Apple’s home lar life. But if you’re making a song? fall in love with the women who hate to record harmonies on the song “Fetch And you’re making music and there is me.” She described these songs as acts the Bolt Cutters.” (She’s the one mak- going to be passion in it and there is of confrontation with her “shadow self,” ing that kooky “meow.”) going to be anger in it?” She went on, exploring questions like “Why in the But Apple has more complicated dy- “You have to go to the myelin sheath— past have you been so socially blind to namics with a wider circle of friends, you know, to the central nervous sys- think that you could be friends with your exes, and collaborators. Starting with tem—for it to be good, I feel like. And ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend by getting her first heartbreak, at sixteen, she has if that’s not true? Then fuck me, I wasted her a gift?” At the time, she thought that repeatedly found herself in love trian- my fucking life and ruined everything.” she was being generous; now she recog- gles, sometimes as the secret partner, She recalled a day when she had been nized the impulse as less benign, a way sometimes as the deceived one. As we working on a piano riff that was down- of “campaigning not to be ousted.” talked, she stumbled on a precursor for beat but also “fluttering, soaring,” and The record dives into such conflicting this pattern: “Maybe it’s because my that reminded her of Ames. She said impulses: she empathizes with other mother was the other woman?” that he had asked her to name the re- women, rages at them, grows infatuated Apple’s parents met in 1969, during sulting song “Jonathan.” (The lovely, eerie rehearsals for “Applause,” a Broadway track, which is on “Idler Wheel,” includes musical based on “All About Eve.” Her the line “You like to captain a capsized mother, McAfee, was cast as Eve; her fa- ship.”) “No, no,” he said. “I didn’t!” As ther, Maggart, as the married playwright. Ames began telling his side of the story, Maggart was then an actor on the stage Apple said, icily, “I think that water is and on TV (he’d been on “Sesame going to get real cold real soon. You Street”); the sexy, free-spirited McAfee should probably go to the beach.” was a former June Taylor dancer. He went off to put on his bathing Throughout Apple’s childhood, she and suit. By the time he left, things had eased her sister regularly visited the home, in up. She hugged him goodbye, looking with them, and mourns their rejection, Connecticut, where Maggart’s five other tiny. After Ames was gone, she said that sometimes all at once. She roars, in children and their mother, LuJan, lived. she hated the way she sometimes acted “Newspaper,” “I wonder what lies he’s LuJan was welcoming, encouraging all with him—contemptuous, as if she’d ab- telling you about me /To make sure that the children to grow close—but Apple’s sorbed the style of her most unkind ex- we’ll never be friends!” In “Ladies,” she mother was not invited. Apple, with an boyfriend. But she also said that she describes, first with amusement, then in uneasy laugh, told me that, for all the wouldn’t have called Ames himself stu- a dark chant, “the revolving door which time she’d spent interrogating her past, pid, explaining, “He doesn’t talk the way keeps turning out more and more good this link had never crossed her mind. that I talk, and like my brother talks, and women like you /Yet another woman to Her fascination with women seemed get it all out, like, ‘What the fuck are you whom I won’t get through.” In “Shameka,” tied, too, to the female bonding of the talking about? That’s stupid!’ I’m not she celebrates a key moment in middle #MeToo era—to the desire to compare THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 33 old stories, through new eyes. In July, she sexuality, and trying to force it into what marching around on what he called my sent me a video clip of Jimi Hendrix that I thought it should be, and everything ‘determined march to nowhere.’” reminded her of a surreal aspect of the felt dirty. Going out with boys, getting The singer and the director became day she was raped: for a moment, when high, getting scared, and going home an It Couple, their work rippling with the stranger approached her, she mistook feeling like a dirty wimp was my thing.” mutual influences. She wrote a rap for him for Hendrix. During the assault, she Apple came of age in a culture that “Magnolia”; he directed videos for her willed herself to think that the man was viewed young men as potential auteurs songs. But, as Apple remembers it, the Hendrix. “It felt safer, and strangely it and young women as commodities to be romance was painful and chaotic. They hasn’t ruined Jimi Hendrix for me,” she used, then discarded. Although she had snorted cocaine and gobbled Ecstasy. said. Years later, however, she found her- only positive memories of her youthful Apple drank, heavily. Mostly, she told self hanging out with a man who was a romance with David Blaine, she was dis- me, he was coldly critical, contemptu- Hendrix fan. One night, they did mush- turbed to learn that he was listed in Jeffrey ous in a way that left her fearful and rooms at Johnny Depp’s house, in the Epstein’s black book. In high school, Apple numb. Apple’s parents remember an Hollywood Hills. Depp, who was edit- was friends with Mia Farrow’s daughter awful night when the couple took them ing a film, was sober that night; as Apple Daisy Previn, and during sleepovers at to dinner and were openly rude. (Apple recalled, he “kind of led” her and her friend Farrow’s house she used to run into backs this up: “We both attended that to a bedroom, then shut the door and Woody Allen in the kitchen. “There are dinner as little fuckers.”) In the lobby, left. “Nothing bad happened, but I felt all these unwritten but signed N.D.A.s her mother asked Anderson why Apple kind of used and uncomfortable with my all over the place,” she said, about the en- was acting this way. He snapped, “Ask friend making out with me,” she said. “I tertainment industry. “Because you’ll have yourself—you made her.” used to just let things happen. I remem- to deal with the repercussions if you talk.” Anderson had a temper. After attend- ber I wrote the bridge to ‘Fast as You She met Paul Thomas Anderson in ing the 1998 Academy Awards, he threw Can’ in the car on the way home, and he 1997, during a Rolling Stone cover shoot a chair across a room. Apple remembers was playing Jimi Hendrix, and my mind in which she floated in a pool, her hair telling herself, “Fuck this, this is not a was swirling things together.” fanning out like Ophelia’s. She was good relationship.” She took a cab to her That has always been Apple’s expe- twenty; he was twenty-seven. After she dad’s house, but returned home the next rience: the past overlapping with the climbed out of the water, her first words day. In 2000, when she was getting treat- present, just as it does in her notebooks. to him were “Do you smoke pot?” An- ment for O.C.D., her psychiatrist sug- Sometimes it recurs through painful derson followed her to Hawaii. (The pro- gested that she do volunteer work with flashbacks, sometimes as echoes to be tagonist of his film “Punch-Drunk Love” kids who had similar conditions. Apple turned into art. The evening at Depp’s makes the same impulsive journey.) was buoyant as Anderson drove her to house wasn’t a #MeToo moment, she “That’s where we solidified,” she told me. an orientation at U.C.L.A.’s occupational- added. “Johnny Depp was a nice guy, “I remember going to meet him at the therapy ward, but he was fuming. He and so was my friend. But I think that, bar at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and screeched up to the sidewalk, undid her at that time, I was struggling with my he was laughing at me because I was seat belt, and shoved her out of his car; she fell to the ground, spilling her purse in front of some nurses she was going to be working with. At parties, he’d hiss harsh words in her ear, calling her a bad partner, while behaving sweetly on the surface; she’d tear up, which, she thinks, made her look unstable to strangers. (Anderson, through his agent, declined to comment.) Anderson didn’t hit her, Apple said. He praised her as an artist. Today, he’s in a long-term relationship with the ac- tress Maya Rudolph, with whom he has four children. He directed the video for “Hot Knife,” in 2011; Apple said that by then she felt more able to hold her own—and she said that he might have changed. Yet the relationship had warped her early years, she said, in ways she still reckoned with. She’d never spoken poorly of him, because it didn’t seem “classy”; she wavered on whether to do so now. But she wanted to put an end to many fans’ nostalgia about their time together. “It’s a secret that keeps us con- penses, they said—but Hallman’s role Jeffrey Epstein and the comfort of dumb nected,” she told me. displaced, to some degree, the one Ap- TV; she held up a “cool metal instru- Apple was also briefly involved with ple’s brother had played. In addition, ment,” stamped “1932,” that she’d ordered the comedian Louis C.K. After the Hallman sat in on our interviews and from Greece. Near the end of the video, Times published an exposé of his sex- at recording sessions; she often took she wondered why she was rambling, ual misconduct, in 2017, she had faith videos, posting them online. They slept then added, “Oh—I also ate some pot. that C.K. would be the first target of on the daybeds in the living room. Apple I forgot about that. Well, knowing me, #MeToo to take responsibility for his had made it clear that anyone who ques- I’ll probably send this to you!” actions, maybe by creating subversive tioned her friend’s presence would get Apple’s lifelong instinct has been to comedy about shame and compulsion. cut out. Hallman described default to honesty, even if it When a hacky standup set of his was their dynamic as like a “Bos- costs her. In an era of slick leaked online, she sent him a warm note, ton marriage—but in the way branding, she is one of the urging him to dig deeper. that outsiders had imagined last Gen X artists: reflexively One of the women C.K. harassed Boston marriages to be.” obsessed with authenticity was Rebecca Corry, a standup come- Hallman said that she and “selling out,” disturbed dian who founded an advocacy organi- hadn’t recognized Apple by the affectlessness of teen- zation for pit bulls, Stand Up for Pits. when they met. Initially, girl “influencers” hawking Apple began working with the group, she’d mistaken the singer for sponcon and bogus uplift. and, once she got to know Corry, she someone younger, just an- (When she told an inter- started to see C.K. in a harsher light. other Venice Beach music viewer that she pitied Justin The comedy that she’d admired for its hopeful in danger of being Bieber’s thirsty request for honesty now looked “like a smoke exploited: “I felt relieved when she said fans to stream his new single as they screen,” she said. In a text, she told me she had a boyfriend in the Hills, to take slept, Beliebers spent the next day that, if C.K. wasn’t capable of more se- care of her.” rage-tweeting that Apple was a jealous vere self-scrutiny, “he’s useless.” She “Oh, my God, you were one of them!” “nobody,” while Apple’s fans mocked added, “I SHAKE when I have to think Apple said, laughing. them as ignoramuses.) and write about myself. It’s scary to go Apple told me that she didn’t listen there but I go there. He is so WEAK.” fter my July visit, Apple began to to any modern music. She chalked this At times, Apple questioned her abil- ity to be in any romantic relationship. A text me. She sent a recording of a song that she’d heard in a dream, then up to a fear of outside influences, but she had a tetchiness about younger song- Last fall, she went through another a recording describing the dream. She writers, too. She had always possessed breakup, with a man she had dated for texted about watching “8 Mile”—“do- aspects of Emily Dickinson, in the po- about a year. “This is my marriage right ing the nothing that comes before my et’s “I’m Nobody” mode: pridefulness now,” she said of her platonic intimacy little concentrated spurt of work”—and in retreat. Apple sometimes fantasized with Zelda Hallman. Apple told me that about reading a brain study about rap- about pulling a Garbo: she’d release one they’d met in a near-mystical way: while pers that made her wonder where her final album, then disappear. But she also out on a walk, she’d blown a dandelion, brain “lit up” when she sang. “I’m hop- had something that resembled a repe- wishing for a dog-friend for Mercy, then ing that I develop that ability to let my tition compulsion—she wanted to take turned a corner and saw Hallman, walk- medial prefrontal cortex blow out the all the risks of her early years, but this ing Maddie. When Apple’s second ro- lights around it!” she joked. Occasion- time have them work out right. mance with Ames was ending, she started ally, she sent a screenshot of a text from inviting Hallman to stay over. “I’d have someone else, seeking my interpretation hen I returned to Venice Beach, night terrors and stuff,” Apple recalled. “And one day I woke up and she was (a tendency that convinced me she likely did the same with my texts). W in September, the mood was different. Anxiety suffused the house. sitting in the chair—she’d sat there all In a video sent in August, she beamed, In July, Apple had been worried about night, watching me, making sure I was thrilled about new mixes that she’d been returning to public view, but she was O.K. I was feeling safer with her here.” struggling to “elevate.” “I always think also often playful and energized, tweak- Apple fantasized about a kind of retire- of myself as a half-ass person, but, if I ing mixes. Now the thought of what ment: in a few years, she and Hallman half-assed it, it still sounds really good.” she’d recorded brought on paralyzing might buy land back East “and move She added that she’d whispered into the waves of dread. there with the doggies.” bathroom mirror, “You did a good job.” To distract herself, she’d turned to other Hallman, an affable, silver-haired les- In another video—broken into three projects. She accepted a request from bian, grew up poor in Appalachia; after parts—she appeared in closeup, in a white Sarah Treem, the co-creator of the Show- studying engineering at Stanford, she tank top, free-associating. She described time series “The Affair,” to cover the Wa- worked in the California energy indus- a colorized photograph from Auschwitz terboys song “The Whole of the Moon” try. In the mid-aughts, she moved to she’d seen on Tumblr, then moved on to for the show’s finale. (Apple had also L.A. to try filmmaking, getting some the frustrations of O.C.D.—how it made written the show’s potent theme song— small credits. Each woman called their her “freak out about the littlest things, the keening “Container.”) Apple agreed relationship balanced—they split ex- like infants freak out.” She talked about to write a jokey song for the Fox cartoon THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 35