The New Yorker Issue-04272020

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APRIL 27, 2020 5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Amy Davidson Sorkin on world leaders and covid-19; cosplayers get masking; Massimo goes to the market; aboard the U.S.N.S. Comfort; more than salt water. OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS Rivka Galchen 20 The Longest Shift A new doctor confronts the coronavirus crisis. SHOUTS & MURMURS Colin Stokes 27 Style Rules You Must Never Break BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT. Naomi Fry 28 Almost There Welcome to the chaotic unpredictability of Zoom life. A REPORTER AT LARGE Luke Mogelson 32 Abandoned America’s Syrian allies suffer after the U.S. withdrawal. PROFILES Amanda Petrusich 46 You Got It! The front woman of Alabama Shakes takes a solo turn. Peter Kuper COMIC STRIP 51 “Little Donald’s Sneeze” (After Winsor McCay’s “Little Sammy Sneeze”) FICTION Sarah Shun-lien Bynum 54 “Bedtime Story” Doreen St. Félix THE CRITICS ON TELEVISION 61 “Mrs. America.” Adam Gopnik BOOKS Caleb Crain 63 Reassessing our addiction to coffee. 65 Briefly Noted 67 “Wilmington’s Lie” dissects a white-supremacist coup. THE THEATRE Vinson Cunningham 72 The unproduced plays of Kathleen Collins. POEMS Campbell McGrath 24 “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium” Sophie Cabot Black 38 “The Longer Prayer” Tomer Hanuka COVER “A Chorus of Thanks” DRAWINGS Joe Dator, Sam Gross, Harry Bliss, Farley Katz, Roz Chast, Ellis Rosen, Glen Baxter, P. C. Vey, Emily Flake, Frank Cotham, David Sipress, Liana Finck, Lars Kenseth, Johnny DiNapoli, Carol Lay, Kate Curtis SPOTS Antonio Giovanni Pinna

sullivan + associates CONTRIBUTORS ARCHITECTS martha’s vineyard Luke Mogelson (“Abandoned,” p. 32), Amanda Petrusich (“ You Got It!,” p. 46) a contributor to The New Yorker since is a staff writer and the author of “Do 2013, is the author of the short-story Not Sell at Any Price.” collection “These Heroic, Happy Dead.” This piece was supported by Peter Kuper (Comic Strip, p. 51) has been the Pulitzer Center. contributing to The New Yorker since 1993. He has created more than a dozen Rivka Galchen (“The Longest Shift,” graphic novels, including “Kafkaesque” p. 20) has published four books. Her and an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s latest, the children’s novel “Rat Rule “Heart of Darkness.” 79,” came out last year. Naomi Fry (“Almost There,” p. 28) be- Nathan Heller (The Talk of the Town, came a staff writer in 2018 and writes p. 19), a staff writer since 2013, is at work about culture for newyorker.com. on a book about the Bay Area. Campbell McGrath (Poem, p. 24) pub- Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Fiction, p. 54) lished the poetry collection “Nouns & is the author of “Madeleine Is Sleep- Verbs” in 2019. His work also appears ing” and “Ms. Hempel Chronicles.” in the anthology “What Is Research?,” Her new story collection, “Likes,” will edited by Peter N. Miller. come out in September. Hannah Goldfield (Tables for Two, Tomer Hanuka (Cover) is an illustrator p. 13) is the magazine’s food critic. She who works in film and television. This has contributed to The New Yorker is his fifth cover for the magazine. since 2010. Sophie Cabot Black (Poem, p. 38) has Caleb Crain (Books, p. 67) is the author written three collections of poetry, of “American Sympathy,” “Necessary including “The Exchange.” Errors,” and “Overthrow.” THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM Wear our new official hat to show your love. 100% cotton twill. PERSONAL HISTORY OUR COLUMNISTS LEFT: WENKAI MAO; RIGHT: JAMIEL LAW Available in white and black. How does an epidemic end? In the Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the twilight of SARS, Karl Taro Greenfeld coronavirus’s disproportionate death sees a glimpse of our future. toll among black Americans. newyorkerstore.com/hats 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, APRIL 27, 2020

THE MAIL Our Members return each year HOW TO SEE VELáZQUEZ THE CURE FOR LONELINESS as faithfully as Peter Schjeldahl eloquently examines Reading Jill Lepore’s essay on loneli- the tides. how the world’s shutdown during the ness, I was taken aback by the author’s COVID-19 pandemic may lead us to view expression of skin-crawling dread at the Situated on 2,500 acres of unspoiled art and museums differently (The Art prospect of being alone (Books, April paradise, Ocean Reef provides a long list World, April 13th). His discussion of the 6th).I wouldn’t say that I’m happy under value of museums reminds me of a com- shelter-in-place orders, but I disagree of unsurpassed amenities to its ment that Holden Caulfield makes in with the assertion that solitude neces- Members including a 175-slip marina, two J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” sarily leads to intractable problems. I Holden says that the best thing about myself find deep pleasure and freedom 18-hole golf courses, tennis facilities, the Museum of Natural History was that in living alone. Many women, after a state-of-the-art medical center, “everything always stayed right where it lifetime of unsupported, unpaid, ines- was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be capable caregiving,experience relief and K-8 school, private airport and more. different. The only thing that would be self-actualization on their own. I see There are only two ways to experience different would be you.” The museum’s Lepore’s personal revulsion for alone- Ocean Reef Club’s Unique Way of Life – static environment is a comfort to Holden ness as a condemnation of the efforts as the rest of his life largely evades con- of women in this country to break their as a guest of a Member or through trol.Let us hope Schjeldahl is right when dependence on others. the pages of Living magazine. he says that,once the crisis ends,art “may Anna Sojourner even induce us to consider, however San Francisco, Calif. Visit OceanReefClubLiving.com briefly, becoming a bit better, too.” or call 305.367.5921 to request your Olga Polites In progressing from an account of the Cherry Hill, N.J. increased number of single-person complimentary copy. households to a discussion of loneli- I was disappointed by Schjeldahl’s as- ness, Lepore blurs the line between sertion that art in virtual galleries is “in- loneliness and solitude.There are many accessible,” and that virtual tours are literary testimonials to the difference “amorphous disembodiments of aes- between the two. One is from Che- thetic experience.” The idea that great khov, who wrote in his notebook, “If art can only be truly appreciated in a you are afraid of loneliness,don’t marry.” museum alienates those who, even in (Chekhov spent several of his married non-pandemic times, are unable to visit years in Yalta, more than a thousand cultural institutions. It implies that such miles from his wife, in Moscow.) Eliz- groups cannot have full aesthetic expe- abeth Cady Stanton, a married mother riences,and,by extension,that they can- of seven, wrote “Solitude of Self,”which not develop artistic taste. is among our most eloquent expres- sions of every person’s fundamental But the virtual museum is a monu- aloneness. And Marianne Moore per- mental step toward greater cultural ac- haps put it best when she wrote that cessibility—something that advocates “the cure for loneliness is solitude.” I have been trying to achieve for decades. have lived alone since my partner died As Schjeldahl says, the pandemic will of AIDS, in 1990. I enjoy solitude, and cause our relationship with art to change. feel no more or less lonely than any- That evolution should include a reëval- one else. uation of the place for art in digital Fenton Johnson space. We should not dismiss cultural Tucson, Ariz. institutions that are making a concerted effort to engage people other than those • who can literally walk through their doors. We should instead celebrate vir- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, tual art as progress, and demand even address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to more of it. [email protected]. Letters may be edited Bethany Tabor for length and clarity, and may be published in Brooklyn, N.Y. any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

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In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, New York City museums, galleries, theatres, music venues, and cinemas have closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found online and streaming. APRIL 22 – 28, 2020 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN This spring, the pianist Jeremy Denk was supposed to present a three-part series on Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”in WQXR’s Greene Space, in downtown Manhattan, but, with the city locked down, he is recording it at his home in the Catskills instead. It’s “a place where I pretend to garden and farm as best I can,”he said in the introduction to the April 7 concert, before weaving together preludes and fugues with his own perspi- cacious commentary.The next installment, on April 27, streams on Denk’s and WQXR’s Facebook pages. PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTAAN FELBER

ART ONLINE much. Young folk dallying at court provide tale composed backward from its climax— COURTESY GLADSTONE GALLERY the sole but turbulent drama in “The Progress the postwar success of Abstract Expression- For centuries, art was considered a mat- of Love,” the museum’s marvellous suite of ism—it brushes aside the prevalence, in the ter of spirit.Then, in the West, modern- Fragonard paintings. When we are again free thirties, of politically themed figurative art: ism sidelined the soul and centered the to wander museums, the objects won’t have social realism, more or less, which became secular. In the process, some mystically altered, but we will have, and the casualties ideologically toxic with the onset of the Cold inclined geniuses, especially women, of the coronavirus will accompany us spec- War. What to do with the mighty legacy of the were overlooked, including the newly trally. Until, inevitably, we begin to forget, era’s big three Mexican painters, Diego Ri- canonized Swedish painter Hilma af we will have been reminded of our oneness vera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Klint and the underappreciated Swiss throughout the world and across time with all Siqueiros? As little as possible has seemed the spiritualist Emma Kunz. The Chinese the living and the dead. (Guides to Boucher, rule, despite the seminal influence of Orozco artist Guo Fengyi didn’t begin mak- Fragonard, and Rembrandt are available on and Siqueiros on the young Jackson Pollock. ing her astonishing scrolls until 1989, the museum’s Web site.)—Peter Schjeldahl But, with some two hundred works by sixty when she was in her late forties. That (frick.org) artists and abundant documentary material, was the year of the Tiananmen massacre, the curator Barbara Haskell reweaves the but Guo wasn’t responding to world “Vida Americana” sense and sensations of the time to bring events—the mythic beings she brought it alive. Without the Mexican precedents to electrifying life (including the un- The Whitney’s thumpingly great show, sub- of amplified scale and passionate vigor, the dated “Avalokiteshvara,”seen here) came titled “Mexican Muralists Remake American development of Abstract Expressionism lacks to her in visions. A few years earlier, se- Art, 1924-1945,” picks an overdue art-histor- crucial sense. As for the politics, consider vere arthritis had forced the artist to quit ical fight. The usual story revolves around the persistently leftward tilt of American her factory job in Xi’an, where she lived young, often immigrant aesthetes striving to art culture ever since—a residual hankering, until her death, in 2010, at the age of six- absorb European modernism. A triumphalist however sotto voce, to change the world. (The ty-eight. She took up Qigong to alleviate Whitney is temporarily closed, but a selec- pain; soon she was transcribing revela- tion of the show’s works and related videos tions. She believed that her scrolls, most is online.)—P.S. (whitney.org) of which are twelve to thirty feet high, had the power to heal. Or you might Rodney McMillian think of them as monuments to uncer- tainty—“I draw because I do not know,” The heft and tactility of this Los Angeles Guo once said—making the chimeric artist’s tapestrylike pieces are not lost in the figures ideal viewing right now. You can online edition of “Recirculating Goods,” his read the Drawing Center’s richly illus- first exhibition at the Petzel gallery. Cro- trated and very insightful publication cheted blankets—some formerly owned by the “Guo Fengyi: To See from a Distance” artist’s family and friends, others purchased online (drawingcenter.org) and tour a in thrift stores—have been altered by applica- virtual exhibition of the artist’s works at tions of vibrant latex, transforming them into the Gladstone gallery’s Web site (glad- peculiarly American hybrids of landscape and Ab Ex. Some of these paintings incorporate 1stonegallery.com).—Andrea K. Scott price tags into their compositions. In “$7.99: a blue moon,” a bright-yellow tab draws the ART eye up from the textile’s earthy tangerine and rust stripes to a dark, paint-stiffened The Frick Collection expanse: a night sky looming above a small turquoise circle. Other works conjure marsh- Why does the art of what we term the Old lands, storms, and lava flows. Throughout, Masters have so much more soulful heft than McMillian makes canny formal use of the that of most moderns and nearly all of our geometric patterning of the afghans; in their contemporaries? I think the reason is a routine intimate, handcrafted aura, he finds a deft foil consciousness of mortality. An ineffably sac- to the heroics of the abstract sublime, which ramental nuance in paintings from the Dutch he both celebrates and undermines.—Johanna seventeenth century, which luxuriate in the Fateman (petzel.com) ordinary existence of ordinary people, evokes the impermanence of human contentment. Saul Steinberg Never mind the explicitness of that time’s memento mori, all the skulls and guttering Titled “Imagined Interiors,” this online ex- candles. I am talking about an awareness hibition, curated by Michaela Mohrmann, is that’s invisible, but palpable, in Rembrandt’s a subtly Zeitgeist-y delight. (Steinberg is, of nights—his fatalistic self-portrait in the Frick course, best known for his work with this mag- Collection comes to mind. The peculiarly azine.) It includes an ink drawing, from 1949, intense insouciance of a Boucher or a Frago- of an elegant woman who is all dressed up with nard—the sensuous frolics of France’s ancien nowhere to go but her drafting table, where régime—protests, in favor of life, rather too she sketches a horse as her other illustrations overflow onto the floor. Pets, those classic Steinbergian protagonists of the domestic, are portrayed in a handful of pieces; in a 1974 photograph of the artist in his studio, a black cat watches him intently. Among the charm- ing multimedia flourishes here is a recording of William Carlos Williams reading “This Is Just to Say,” which accompanies a grid of still-life images. (The poet recites, “I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox”; the artist arranges the fruit near a violin.) A quote from Steinberg compares his visual lexicon to poetry, in which “common words are used in order to explain very complicated things.”—J.F. (pacegallery.com) 6 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

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1 episode, and an expansion of the formula into tary’s elliptical form, and human suffering is a speed-dating service whereby single people, dangled before the viewer like raw meat; one TELEVISION dating blind, grope for meaning in the dark- former animal handler has a missing forearm ness.—Troy Patterson that goes, for an agonizing forty-eight min- Love Is Blind utes, unmentioned. Is the show a takedown Tiger King of the libertarian ethos, a dispatch from the An instant classic among quickie-wedding last frontier of white colonialism, a Trum- reality shows, this Netflix series is like “The The documentarians Eric Goode and Re- pian fable? Maybe. “Tiger King” is prestige Dating Game” extrapolated into a conceptual becca Chailkin tamed five years’ worth of space where the vibes from “90 Day Fiancé,” footage, new and found, into this outrageous 1trash.—Doreen St. Félix (Reviewed in our issue on TLC, resonate against those of “The Lob- and outrageously viewable seven-part true- ster,” by Yorgos Lanthimos. Contestants court crime Netflix series. The plot centers on the of 4/13/20.) without knowing what their admirers look battle between the gay zookeeper Joe Ex- like. (The dates occur in a series of “pods,” otic, an outsider artist with an ability to hold DANCE through which strangers share their hopes hostage many species—big cats, boyfriends and dreams and pleasant banalities.) After and husbands, employees and documentar- Hamburg Ballet about a business week, six affianced couples ians—and Carole Baskin, the proprietor of finally meet face to face and begin to careen Big Cat Rescue, a Florida animal sanctuary, The American choreographer John Neumeier toward the altar. At various moments, the who campaigns for the closure of Exotic’s has been based in Germany since the seven- show warrants comparison to an unfortunate G.W. Zoo. Exotic is convinced that, in the ties, first as the resident choreographer of the improv exercise, a better “S.N.L.” sketch, a nineties, Baskin murdered her husband and, Hamburg Ballet, and, since 1996, as the ballet decent bikini comedy, a Cassavetes screaming perhaps, fed him to her tigers. She denies director of the Hamburg State Opera. He’s match, a treasure trove of raw anthropological the accusations with a bemused grin while known for a serious, psychologically driven data, and a cry for help. That “Love Is Blind” pretending to tolerate her current husband, style that is more popular in Germany than is morally offensive to human dignity is key Howard, who follows her around like a needy it is in the U.S., as well as for an elegant, to its artistic success. It’s easy to imagine pet. There’s a dark comedy in the documen- spare aesthetic that feels distinctly Euro- future seasons, a “Black Mirror” crossover pean. His most famous ballet, at least in the States, is “Lady of the Camellias,” based on ON TELEVISION the Dumas novel. But this week the Hamburg Ballet, made up of an impressive group of actor-dancers, will be showing Neumeier’s 2003 work “Death in Venice” as part of a se- ries of broadcasts available on its Web site. This tale of desire, inertia, and death, inspired by the Thomas Mann novella, feels newly urgent—and Mann’s descriptions of a cholera epidemic in Venice even more so.—Marina Harss (hamburgballett.de) The exes Billy (Domhnall Gleeson) and Ruby (Merritt Wever), acting The Joyce Theatre ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHANIE F. SCHOLZ impetuously on a pact made when they were college sweethearts, exchange coded text messages and reunite as lovers on the run. He’s a life-coaching The Chelsea-based Joyce Theatre, one of the guru in flight from a pyromaniacally self-destructive career move; she’s city’s principal venues for dance, has begun a trained architect evading the constraints of the dullest yoga-mom do- streaming works by companies who have per- mesticity. In New York, they rendezvous aboard an Amtrak superliner formed there in the past or, in better circum- bound for Chicago and throw off sparks of lust, friendship, guile, bile, and stances, would have been performing there regret. That their camaraderie is grounded in improvised mischief and now. This week’s “JoyceStream,” running April prankish play helps to explain the couple’s chemistry and the impulsivity 21-26, features the Trisha Brown Dance Com- of their absconsion, as well as to justify the fantasticality of the journey’s pany, currently marking its fiftieth year. On turns.The excitement of “Run,” a half-hour series created by Vicky Jones tap is a dance by Trisha Brown, “Groove and for HBO, is in the elegance of its swift shifts from mirthful absurd caper Countermove,” from 2000. Like a free-flowing (as when the couple thuddingly struggle to disrobe in a narrow sleeping ribbon of movement, it ripples and twists car) to dreadfully absurd hard noir (as when Billy’s business partner ruth- alongside Dave Douglas’s jazzy score. (A lessly pursues her share of the spoils). It’s a nice nightmare dramatizing dancer once described the sensation of danc- a bottomless truth: you can’t run away from yourself.—Troy Patterson ing it as being “like a Sunday afternoon.”) Also showing is Burt Barr’s impressionistic thirty-minute film “Aeros,” about the creation of Brown’s 1989 piece “Astral Convertible,” in which dancers circulate within an industrial landscape conceived by Robert Rauschen- berg.—M.H. (joyce.org/engage/joycestream) PlayBAC Each week, the Baryshnikov Arts Center of- fers a different video, never before released, from an archive of performances filmed in its theatres. For April 23-28, the selection is “Interface,” an intriguing if not entirely con- vincing 2013 work, in which Rashaun Mitch- ell, joined by three other outstanding former Cunningham dancers, playfully experiments with interpersonal drama and exaggerated facial expressions. For May 7-12, the series will look back to a rare New York visit, in 2019, by Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company. Its “One. One & One” is so earthy that the dancers roll in dirt.—Brian Seibert (bacnyc.org) 8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020



HIP-HOP with two receptive players—the drummer Brian Blade and the bassist Scott Colley— Muthspiel demonstrates his artistic maturity, but he still finds moments to loosen the reins, as on the aptly titled “Ride.”—Steve Futterman The Seattle hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces revels in abstractions, unpacking Ron Sexsmith: “Hermitage” elastic rhymes over intergalactic beats with heady, modernist conviction. On the album “The Don of Diamond Dreams,” Ishmael Butler and Tendai ROCK The veteran songwriter Ron Sexsmith Maraire’s spontaneity and irreverence for rap conventions feel particularly specializes in fussy pop music that’s happily urgent; these experiments are malleable and resistant to form at a time when marooned in the sixties, but his real genre may declarative statements on the current era seem futile. Instead, the group con- be “Canadian.” Where American rock and roll tinues bludgeoning musical complacency with songs as equivocal as inkblot was coughed up in a carnivalesque vein by de- tests. “This is high art / I tear the form apart,” Butler raps on “Chocolate monic hillbillies shaking unmentionable body Souffle.” He engages in a conversation—albeit an ambiguous one—with parts, Sexsmith’s work embodies an exceedingly contemporary hip-hop on “Wet,”and dives headlong into a puddle of free well-mannered sequel that arose after the music jazz on “Reg Walks by the Looking Glass.”But the surprise is the uncharac- drifted up north. Even his breakup songs seem teristically concrete “Thanking the Girls”—an ode to Butler’s daughters that nice. All this politeness can enervate a listener, unfolds over a static-filled, beautifully off-kilter soundscape.—Julyssa Lopez yet Sexsmith’s albums have long demonstrated a writer’s attentiveness—he published a novel, (Re)Live Arts Streaming tieth anniversary at Lincoln Center, during the “Deer Life,” in 2017—and “Hermitage” benefits ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA RUPPRECHT 2016-17 season. In these unprecedented times, from an understated grace. The record, Sex- In their new online series, New York Live Arts New York’s grandest opera company has called smith’s sixteenth, finds the musician uprooted and its resident troupe, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie on dozens of its biggest names for a virtual gala, from Toronto to more countrified environs. The Zane Dance Company, have been sampling both to be live-streamed on its Web site. The perform- strongest songs lean into their pastoral setting, the theatre’s and the company’s back catalogues, ers, who are connecting via Skype, include Renée with some pointing to the nonchalant albums offering a different assortment each week. The Fleming (who’s quarantining in Virginia), Anna that Paul McCartney issued early in his solo lineup for April 23-30 includes a performance Netrebko (Vienna), Jonas Kaufmann (Munich), career and others to the wistful late-sixties work of Jones’s “The Breathing Show,” from 2000, a Bryn Terfel (Wales), and Anita Rachvelishvili of the Kinks. Both lodestars were themselves ninety-minute solo tour de force that juggles (Tbilisi, Georgia); Peter Gelb and Yannick fetishizing the past, which lends the backward dance, music, and video with the choreogra- Nézet-Séguin host this free event from their gaze of “Hermitage” a subtle twist—nostalgia pher’s rich voice, thoughts, and breath. Miguel respective homes in New York City and Mon- redux.—Jay Ruttenberg Gutierrez’s “Age & Beauty, Part 3,” from 2015, treal.—Oussama Zahr (April 25 at 1.) is a mid-career artist’s meditation on aging and Squarepusher: “Lamental” legacy. Balancing wistfulness with irreverence, Wolfgang Muthspiel: a multigenerational cast addresses anxiety by “Angular Blues” I.D.M. The composer-producer Tom Jenkinson, running in circles and hanging in the air.—B.S. who works as Squarepusher, has one of the most JAZZ They grow up so fast. It seems like just instantly recognizable styles in electronic dance 1(newyorklivearts.org) yesterday that a wave of compelling young jazz music—simultaneously airy and hyperactive, guitarists—Liberty Ellman, Kurt Rosenwin- with pretzel-like bass lines underpinning glee- MUSIC kel, and Wolfgang Muthspiel among them— fully complex tunes. The album he released in was bringing new life to the instrument. Now January, “Be Up a Hello,” balances that perfervid Metropolitan Opera: those players are middle-aged, with a new crop approach with more contemplative material; on “At-Home Gala” of nimble plectrists snapping at their heels. his new EP, “Lamental,” he focusses even more But Muthspiel’s “Angular Blues” proves that on his softer edge. The set ends with two ver- OPERA The Metropolitan Opera doesn’t draw gifted improvisers can hit their stride in their sions of the same song, “Midi Sans Frontières,” upon its deep roster of talent for any old oc- autumn years. He doesn’t let his agile fingers and the difference in tone between them—one casion; it typically saves the all-star parade for do all the thinking for him: his lines breathe is a pile driver, the other a soundtrack for star- milestones like its centennial, in 1983, and its fif- rather than pant, particularly on the first three gazing—works as a lesson in both programming tracks, which feature acoustic guitar. Partnered and arrangement.—Michaelangelo Matos thingNY: “SubtracTTTTTTTTT” OPERA In 2010, the riotously unpredictable mu- sical performance-art troupe thingNY issued its début recording, “ADDDDDDDDD,” an arresting hour-long gobstopper comprising frag- mentary stories, bawdy and beguiling melodies, fake advertisements, and occasional profanity. (Fittingly, it was accompanied by a comic-book libretto.) A tenth-anniversary revival, planned for this month, was postponed indefinitely be- cause of the pandemic. Instead, the ensemble of vocalists and instrumentalists—Gelsey Bell, Isabel Castellvi, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Dave Ruder, and Jeffrey Young—fashioned a sequel, “SubtracTTTTTTTTT,” to be presented live on the group’s Web site, thingNY.com. The new piece is designed to exploit the capacities and pitfalls of live streaming and online conferencing among distanced participants. The performances are presented jointly with the MATA Festival (whose April programming was also cancelled) as part of its “MATA Continued” initiative, which supports the further adventures of fes- tival alumni.—Steve Smith (April 24-26 at 6.) 10 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020



M. Ward: “Migration Stories” the late nineteen-sixties, the tangle and clash promise of its title. In the nineteen-sixties, of settled habits and sudden changes, into the Henry Ford II—played with gusto by Tracy FOLK On M. Ward’s tenth album, “Migration dramatic comedy’s over-all mood and striking Letts—decides to beat Ferrari at its own Stories,” the American singer-songwriter paints visual identity. It begins at an encounter ses- game by designing a car that will triumph at bucolic scenes marked by moon-filled skies, mul- sion, where a married couple—Bob (Robert the twenty-four-hour race at Le Mans. This ticolored deserts, and sun-soaked pavement. Culp), a documentary filmmaker, and Carol ludicrous plan is put into effect by Carroll The imagery reflects the folk traditions that (Natalie Wood), a stay-at-home mother— Shelby (Matt Damon), the upbeat Texan who M. Ward often evokes in his sound, but such break through their emotional repressions and oversees the project, and Ken Miles (Chris- panoramas also allow him to explore histories of unleash a storm of erotic chaos. When Bob ad- tian Bale), the lugubrious British driver be- migration and patterns of diaspora—concepts on mits to Carol that he’s had a fling with a young hind the wheel. Bright and gutsy though the this album that he says were inspired partly by colleague, the fallout also roils the marriage of racing sequences are, the movie is not really his grandfather’s move from Durango, Mexico, their best friends, Ted (Elliott Gould), an at- about automobiles; it’s a multiple-character to California decades ago. Ward goes on his own torney, and Alice (Dyan Cannon), who’s also a study that happens to barrel along at high private journeys, travelling through time to re- stay-at-home mom. Within the riotous satire, speed, and much fun is to be had from the visit past generations on the dreamy “Migration Mazursky liberates a powerful, turbulent, and clash of the various egos, fender to fender. of Souls” and finding a moment of solitude on contradictory emotionalism, finding terrifying With Caitriona Balfe as Ken’s wife, Mollie, “Real Silence.” With his sparse and expansive vulnerability in his characters’ confusion. The who, true to the spirit of the story, takes arrangements, he conveys movement at a time director guides his actors to performances of no nonsense.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in live-wire intensity; their agitated instability our issue of 11/18/19.) (Streaming on Amazon, 1when the idea seems so distant.—Julyssa Lopez and febrile uncertainty burst the boundar- iTunes, and other services.) ies of theatrical precision to suggest his own MOVIES inner conflicts.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Phyllis and Harold Amazon, Vudu, and other services.) Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice Cindy Kleine looks behind the façade of sub- Ford v Ferrari urban respectability to extract the pathos from In Paul Mazursky’s first feature, from 1969, her parents’ sixty-year marriage—and to display the director distills the complex experience of Cheerful, robust, and well oiled, the lat- her own perspective as a witness and even as an est film by James Mangold fulfills the plain accomplice. Growing up on the South Shore of WHAT TO STREAM Long Island, Cindy sensed that her parents, the New York-born children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, didn’t live in marital bliss. Her father, Harold, a dentist, lived in a comfort- able obliviousness; her mother, Phyllis, however, lived in torment, and tells the filmmaker, on camera, the reason: soon after her marriage, in the nineteen-forties, she had a five-year affair with a married man who was the love of her life. The pressure of real-time secrecy gives this documentary the tension of a thriller. In joint interviews with her parents that preserve the shattering secrets, and in separate ones that re- veal them, as well as a generous and revelatory selection of home movies and stills (Harold was a camera buff), Kleine unfolds the price of a life- time of secrecy and lies. Released in 2010.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon Prime and YouTube.) The Criterion Channel, a treasure trove of international cinema, is celebrat- Talk to Me EVERETT ing its one-year anniversary by ramping up its offerings of classic American movies with new sets of streaming releases devoted to film noir,Gary Cooper, Don Cheadle brings sharp humor and deep pas- and Jean Arthur, including Frank Capra’s romantic and didactic comedy sion to his portrayal of the Washington, D.C., “You Can’t Take It with You,” from 1938. Arthur plays Alice Sycamore, a disk jockey and talk-show host Petey Greene in secretary in a mighty investment bank, and Jimmy Stewart plays Tony Kirby, this historically vital and acute bio-pic, from the firm’s heir apparent; they fall in love and plan to marry, but the families 2007, directed by Kasi Lemmons. The action don’t mesh.Tony’s ruthless father (Edward Arnold) wants to buy twelve city begins with Petey in prison, in 1966, where he blocks to crush a competitor, and Alice’s grandfather (Lionel Barrymore), hones his skills on the public-address system and the patriarch of a clan of eccentrics, is the sole holdout. Though much of gets himself released with a bold ploy. He then the comedy blends forced gaiety with sentiment, Arthur and Stewart bring pressures Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the shivery intensity and playful intimacy to the young lovers’ ardent bond. only black executive at a radio station catering to Moreover, the Depression-era tale is a fascinating political hybrid, with its black audiences, to hire him; with his political two-pronged preference for free-spirited whimsy over the accumulation of frankness, personal candor, and scathing wit, wealth, and for cottage industries over New Deal programs.—Richard Brody Petey becomes an instant celebrity. His political commitment, as well as his civic devotion, is severely tested in the aftermath of the assassina- tion of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then, in the seventies, Dewey attempts to expand Petey’s fan base to television and to white viewers, putting their friendship—and Petey’s sense of self—at risk. Lemmons incisively dramatizes the massive media machinery that elides the painful experi- ences of black Americans—and the high price of resistance to it. With Taraji P. Henson, as Petey’s 1impulsive and insightful longtime partner.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, and other services.) For more reviews, visit newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town 12 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH RENSTROM FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE 1 a tasting menu, available for pickup or of forced European rule, but the dish had delivery, entitled “Chinese Food Is Good arrived by way of China: it was congee. TABLES FOR TWO for You,” which included chicken broth perfumed with apricot kernel and red A week later, I gnawed on pork ribs in Junzi Kitchen’s Distance Dining dates, and yams stewed in osmanthus tea. a black-bean-char-siu glaze, topped with a green mojo sauce that Sin had made Last December, well before the pan- It was the first in a series he’s calling with Junzi’s Puerto Rican culinary di- demic, a Greenwich Village restaurant “Distance Dining: A Crisis Delivery rector, Anthony Nichols. On Instagram, called Lucky Lee’s closed, after less than Pop-Up.”Before the shutdown, Sin, who Sin pointed out, excitedly, that there’s a a year in business. Its opening had been grew up in Hong Kong, had been hosting fine line between mojo, which consists followed by deserved public outrage over ticketed dinners featuring elaborate of cilantro or parsley chopped with garlic its marketing campaign—Lucky Lee’s seven-course meals that examined Chi- and salt in olive oil, and the ginger-scal- proprietor, an influencer-type nutrition- nese food culture and history. (For one, lion sauce often served with Chinese ist, claimed that the restaurant’s Chinese he re-created the famous meal that Nixon barbecue. Both chefs had grown up eat- food was different from the rest in that ate during his 1972 visit to Beijing.) The ing bread pudding, so it was an obvious it was “clean” and “healthified.” weekly “Distance Dining”dinners com- choice for dessert, soaked in coconut prise a more manageable three courses, cream and studded with golden raisins. Chinese food has long been misunder- cooked but cold—to demonstrate how stood in this country, and the coronavirus to heat each dish at home, Sin logs on to Because Junzi has investors and sup- hasn’t helped. Bigots have perpetuated Instagram Live. pliers in China, Sin and his colleagues an unsubstantiated claim that the virus saw, to some degree, what was coming. arose from a wet market in Wuhan. On a recent Friday night, I watched “After a couple of weeks,”Sin said,“people “They have these markets where they as he mixed a cocktail with gin and cal- who are ordering food go a little crazy. were eating raw bats and snakes,” said amansi-flavored sparkling water. Sin had It’s less, ‘Hey, I’m gonna help out my fa- the Fox News anchor Jesse Watters on enlisted his colleague L. J. Almendras, vorite restaurants because they’re having air. “They are very hungry people.” An- Junzi’s “food designer,”who is Filipino, to a tough time,’ and more, ‘What’s new?’ ti-Chinese sentiment is surging as our collaborate on a menu that explored the Just because there’s a crisis doesn’t mean own President has assigned the virus a culinary influence of Chinese immigrants you can’t cook creatively.”Sin was ten years nationality.This troubles Lucas Sin, the on the Philippines. I dug my chopsticks old in 2003, during the SARS epidemic, chef at Junzi Kitchen, a fast-casual mini- into a tangle of pancit palabok—chewy and the fact that his memories of the lock- chain that serves rice and noodle bowls rice noodles slick with shrimp-head sauce down in Hong Kong are hazy, and even and stuffed wraps known as bings, with and laced with tender beech mushrooms, happy, makes him optimistic. In addition three locations in Manhattan. In March, smoked herring, and chicharrónes—as to offering “Distance Dining,” plus an after New York’s restaurants were ordered Sin explained that the word pancit, à-la-carte takeout menu, Junzi is deliv- to close their dining rooms, Sin designed which means “noodle” or “noodle dish” ering daily meals to health-care workers, in Tagalog, comes from the Hokkien for funded by donations. In early March, Sin’s “convenient food.”Almendras suggested parents suggested that he fly home, where using a stovetop to heat the arroz caldo, things seemed safer.“I can’t leave,”he told a rice porridge they’d made with rooster them.“I have too much to do.”(“Distance stock, to get it boiling hot.The porridge’s Dining” dinners $28.) Spanish name is a reflection of centuries —Hannah Goldfield THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 13

Available wherever books are sold.

THE TALK OF THE TOWN COMMENT frantically scanning the globe, trying to (There are plenty of those around the WIDE WORLD see who might be getting it right. world.) In response, the minister of health, Luiz Mandetta, has played the Last week, a flurry of widely shared Some rough answers have emerged role of an unbound Anthony Fauci,back- articles noted that a number of coun- from Europe and Asia. Testing is cru- ing governors who ordered closures in tries deemed to be doing well in the cial, as South Korea has shown; so is their states. Bolsonaro fired Mandetta fight against the novel coronavirus have public trust. Social distancing flattens last Thursday, but the President is in- something in common: they are led by the curve, and, the more testing a na- creasingly unpopular; when other po- women. Whether this observation is tion does, the more options it has for litical leaders speak out, the bubble of meaningful is hard to say; the countries how to maintain that distance, from the delusion can be burst. Pandemics can in question are disproportionately small, blunt tool of lockdowns, which Italy be- have electoral consequences, too: South wealthy,Scandinavian,and,not inciden- latedly employed, to the nuanced track- Korea’s government won a resounding tally, providers of universal health care. ing that South Korea has pioneered. victory last week—and it insured that But the idea had social-media appeal: Masks help. At the same time, the pan- the turnout was large and safe,with spe- could female leaders be, as the Guard- demic seems to exacerbate national pa- cial poll hours for people in quarantine. ian put it, the world’s “secret weapon”? thologies,from Hungary’s turn from de- And,if so,why? Speculation ranged from mocracy to Egypt’s silencing of critics. The virus is only now beginning to the sociological (women have to be more Women everywhere are contending with take hold in many developing countries— competent in order to gain power) to a surge in domestic violence; France and where masks,ventilators,and even clean the dubiously gendered (they are good Spain have introduced code words that water can be desperately scarce—but at “love”). And there was some wistful- they can use to seek help. they are already feeling its economic ness: what if, at this juncture, there were effects. One is a sudden lack of remit- a woman in the White House,and Don- President Jair Bolsonaro, of Brazil, tances from nationals working abroad. ald Trump were ordering takeout while has decried distancing measures and These account for about a fifth of El socially distancing in Trump Tower? pushed coronavirus conspiracy theories. Salvador’s G.D.P. and a quarter of So- malia’s.When a waitress or a shopkeeper ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA Such notions may be more emotion- in Paris or Queens loses income,money ally satisfying than epidemiologically stops going to Senegal or Nepal. Many useful. But they speak to a longing for families in Afghanistan’s Herat Prov- leadership and for secret weapons—any ince rely on income from Iran; when weapons—against COVID-19.As a shared Iran’s economy seized up,a hundred and experience, this crisis is unmatched in fifty thousand workers crossed back into history. That is why Trump’s decision, Herat,some bringing the infection with last week,to cut off support for the World them.The fate of refugees and migrants Health Organization, despite its mis- is one of the most wrenching questions steps, is so dismaying. Coupled with his of the crisis, illustrated in images of calls,on Friday,to “liberate”certain states evicted African workers sleeping on the under stay-at-home orders, it marks an streets of Guangzhou, and in accounts abandonment of responsibility. (China of Kenyan workers returning from the has not filled the vacuum internation- Gulf States to face a curfew that has ally, in part because of questions about become an engine of police brutality. its transparency in managing the pan- demic.) So it makes sense that we are India,with a population of more than 1.3 billion, shows how the pandemic can THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 15

be a source of both unity and dangerous two hundred and fifty cases by the end response.Kerala was also helped by hav- discord.Prime Minister Narendra Modi of last week. (And, for that matter, for ing had, in effect, a rehearsal—in 2018, called for the entire nation to join to- Moscow, where, last week, there were it managed an outbreak of the Nipah gether in cheering health workers on eighteen thousand cases.) Resources mat- virus, which can attack the brain.There March 22nd, at 5 P.M.—all India is in ter, but scientists can, as yet, only hazard is a parallel story in Bangladesh, which one time zone—and it did.Yet the coun- a guess as to precisely how those coun- has been able to draw on public-health try’s early coverage of the outbreak fo- tries, and far poorer ones, will experience capacities it has built up, over several cussed on clusters in the Muslim com- COVID-19.Will the relative youth of their decades, to fight cholera. Ellen Johnson munity, against whom the B.J.P., Modi’s populations provide a buffer? Will high Sirleaf, the former President of Liberia, party, has incited violence. And, when rates of tuberculosis and H.I.V.—a par- in a call for concerted action to counter Modi effectively shut down the country, ticular factor in South Africa,where cases COVID-19, invoked the lessons that Af- migrant workers had little warning. A are rising steadily—make the toll worse? rican countries had learned from the stream of people,by many estimates hun- Ebola epidemic.As Ayres put it,“There dreds of thousands of them,began walk- Alyssa Ayres, of the Council on For- is deep expertise in places that most ing, often hundreds of miles, to their eign Relations, noted that one of the Americans aren’t thinking about.” home villages. Others remained in cit- Indian states that has had the most ies. Last week, Mumbai had at least two success in fighting COVID-19 is Kerala, That may be one of the most import- thousand confirmed cases; it is both a which is home to about thirty-five mil- ant messages from the wider world.The financial capital and a metropolis whose lion people. Kerala is not governed by struggle to control the pandemic has to slums epidemiologists view with appre- the B.J.P. but by a coalition of leftist be a joint project, as if the whole planet hension,compounded there,as elsewhere, parties,and has long been distinguished were seeking to reach the moon together. by a lack of reliable data.There are similar by its well-functioning health system. Every nation can contribute, including fears for Lagos, Nigeria, a city of more The state’s health minister,K.K.Shailaja, those whose voices are less often heard. than twenty million people, which had a woman being called the Coronavirus And no one can be left behind. Slayer, mounted an early and aggressive —Amy Davidson Sorkin PITCHING IN dressed as Princess Jasmine at Wizard “Sailor Moon” tote bags, but he repur- GOLDEN NEEDLES World Chicago in 2019,the year after her posed the fabric to make masks for Phoenix Monster costume,from the board NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.(Home- In the pandemic economy, face masks game Rising Sun, won the Golden Nee- made masks can’t substitute for dispos- are like bars of gold. Hoarders are dle Award at a gaming convention in In- able medical masks, but they can pro- hoarding them. Governors are barter- dianapolis.“It had articulated wings that long the use of medical masks if worn ing for them. Hospital workers desper- I controlled with a remote control,” she as a second layer.) “I am trying to get to ately need them. New Yorkers, ordered said.This June, she was going to dress as forty or fifty,”he said.“I’ll keep going till by Governor Cuomo last week to cover Buzz Lightyear at the Origins Game I run out of materials.” their faces in public, are repurposing Fair, in Ohio, but it has been postponed bandannas and boxer shorts. In Rosie until October.When she saw a Facebook In Washington State, the hospital the Riveter fashion, Americans with group requesting homemade medical chain Providence put out a call for masks. crafting skills—among them quilters, supplies, she recruited fellow-cosplayers. “Cosplayers picked up on it right away Broadway seamstresses,sportswear man- “Before everything closed down, I had a and were, like, ‘Boom! Let’s do this,’ ” ufacturers, origami artists, and grand- stash of cotton fabric and materials here Brian Morris, who lives in Renton, said. mothers—have sprung into action. But in my house,” she said. “I work my reg- one group has special mask-making pow- ular nine-to-five job in accounting.Right ers: cosplayers, the superfans who spe- after that, I start sewing.” cialize in making and wearing costumes. Never has the ability to whip up a Spider- One of her cosplaying friends, Bryan Man mask or a Stormtrooper helmet Martinez, said, “Cosplayers are people been so useful. with a lot of anxiety. We like to always be making things.”(He mentioned “con “Cosplayers have big hearts,”Monica crunch,” a term for the pre-convention Paprocki, a thirty-five-year-old accoun- costuming rush.) Martinez, an illustra- tant in Chicago,said.Paprocki,who runs tor who lives in the Bronx, got into cos- the fandom site Geeks A Gogo, started playing five years ago, when he went to cosplaying in 2014 and taught herself how New York Comic Con in a store-bought to sew by watching YouTube videos. She Assassin’s Creed outfit. He taught him- self to sew and returned, in 2018, as the Marvel villain Corvus Glaive, placing third in the FX competition. He was supposed to go to a convention in Phil- adelphia this month, to sell handmade 16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

Morris is the C.E.O.of KingCon North- 1 Modena. It airs nightly on Instagram. Its west, which draws some three thousand team is lean (Alexa: director, executive attendees, and runs a made-to-order- MODENA POSTCARD producer, camerawoman; also, recently costume shop called Zaklabs. “Most BÉCHAMEL HERO furloughed Maserati employee), its air- people, when they think of cosplayers, time is approximate (around 8 p.m.), and are, like, ‘Oh, those funny people who Scene: Italy,COVID-19 lockdown,Night its format is as malleable as a mound of dress up in those weird costumes,’” he One.A family outside Modena won- pizza dough. An episode can run twenty said.“But they have this incredible set of ders what to do for dinner. Mom stares minutes or forty-five,begin in Italian and skills.” He was planning to live-stream into fridge. Dad scarfs down pistachios. end in English,offer instructions on how a mask-making tutorial that night. Fun Son nukes something in microwave. to start a béchamel sauce (step one: heat patterns are a plus.Renee Spencer,a cos- Daughter looks up from phone, shakes butter and flour in a pan), or include a player from Snohomish County, had head.Lo and behold,her light-bulb mo- request for donations (to buy an ambu- planned to attend Seattle’s Emerald City ment: a cooking show for the quaran- lance for the city). The constants: food, Comic Con (now postponed),where she tined, by the quarantined. How to do it? conviviality,and a plea to viewers to wash has appeared as the Marvel heroine Jean Whom to pitch? Netflix,Apple,Disney+? their hands. Each episode garners a live Grey,but is now making masks with left- Another idea: FaceTime a focus group, audience of about three thousand (more overs from the character’s trademark yel- to test the concept. “I filmed my dad watch archived versions later); real-time low sash. “I dropped two off already to making some food,”Alexa Bottura, who feedback comes as a stream of emoji my acupuncturist,” she said. is twenty-three, said recently. The re- (mostly hearts), comments (“That’s a lot sponse: More, please. “I was, like, if my of olive oil”), and questions (“Can I be Anne Bonovich, in suburban Illinois, friends who are in their early twenties quarantined with Massimo, please?”). goes to conventions with her husband are into it—they’re bored,they don’t know and kids. “We’re a big geek family,” she what they’re doing, but they want to “It’s not a master class,it’s not a cook- said. At Star Wars Celebration last year, know what my dad is doing—I wonder ing show, it’s just us, making dinner,” in Chicago, they went as Hogwarts stu- what regular people would think.” Lara, Massimo’s wife, said. She wore a dents with Jedi lightsabres. Bonovich tan bathrobe and sat at a dining table, has converted her basement into a mask- “Kitchen Quarantine” stars Alexa’s which had just been cleared of the lat- making shop, using “Game of Thrones” dad, Massimo, the chef of the three- est episode’s spoils: tubular pasta sauced and “Star Wars” fabric, and is delivering Michelin-starred Osteria Francescana,in with heirloom tomatoes, asparagus, and masks to friends who work in emergency Luganica sausage; a cheesecake topped rooms. “There’s an elastic shortage ev- with raspberries and a balsamic-vinegar erywhere, so we’re finding alternatives,” reduction.“We’re a restaurant family.We she said. “My daughter donated forty of don’t do this.We never really know what her scrunchies.” Abi Gardner, a graphic designer and sometime Wonder Woman, “Good news—Shakespeare is using this time to write ‘King Lear,’ had plenty of elastic, she said, “because so we’ll have more stuff to binge soon.” I usually use it for bowstrings. I had a bowstring for Princess Merida, from ‘Brave.’Cons don’t let you have real bow- strings, so elastic works really well.” Under the circumstances, it seemed sensible to ask: Which superhero could best fight the coronavirus? Paprocki sug- gested the Invisible Woman, one of the Fantastic Four, whose force-field pow- ers “can shield people from the virus.” Bonovich proposed Professor Xavier, from “X-Men,”“because he can use his mind to tell everybody to stay home, wash their hands, and chill out.” Spen- cer voted for the Marvel heroine Rogue, whose powers preclude her from touch- ing people, thereby making her “the queen of social distancing.”The Atom, Morris said, could shrink himself to germ size and “fight ’em hand to hand.” Martinez chose Doctor Strange, be- cause he’s a medical professional, and because he can turn back time. —Michael Schulman

Massimo is going to cook,or what mood Alexa and Massimo Bottura and crew. “This is like adding a whole Charlie”—their nineteen-year-old son, other hospital,”Mayor Bill de Blasio de- who is autistic—“is going to be in.” She Gucci Osteria,in Beverly Hills,to a soup clared, at Pier 90, shortly after the ship added, “If you can get something out of kitchen on Skid Row.) Father and daugh- arrived. Behind him loomed the Com- it, or an inspiration to use an ingredient ter looped back to the vegetable vender fort, with enormous red crosses painted in your fridge in a different way—that’s to pick up their bags.“We’re done,”Mas- on its bright-white hull.The crosses are all we want.” But an increased kitchen simo said. Time check: thirty-four min- meant to discourage enemy fire—it’s a I.Q. couldn’t hurt. “Half a million peo- utes.They emerged into the sun.“Usually war crime to attack a hospital ship—but ple watched the video on how to make this piazza is packed,”Massimo said. “Now, they are also a symbol of rescue.De Bla- béchamel,”Massimo said.“Come on! It’s no one.” He noted two officers stationed sio said, “Help has come.” the most basic sauce you can make.” near a bell tower, to ensure “that no peo- ple are that close to each other.”He took But had it? By April 2nd, the ship’s Low on supplies, one recent Friday, in the square: pigeons, a cloudless blue fourth day in port, a mere three patients Massimo and Alexa made their weekly had been treated. (The first had boarded trip to Modena’s Mercato Albinelli,a cav- 1sky. “This is surreal,” he said. “Sur-real.” on the afternoon of April 1st: an older ernous,eighty-eight-year-old market with —Sheila Marikar woman,in acute renal distress.) The slow dozens of venders. A correspondent in start left the ship’s wards,blood bank,ra- Los Angeles joined them via WhatsApp. SHIPSHAPE diology unit, CAT scanner, and twelve “To leave the house only when you re- AFLOAT operating rooms largely unused. A local ally need to, it’s the only way to stop this hospital administrator called the Com- virus,”Massimo said.He wore a face mask The U.S.N.S. Comfort, the massive fort “a joke.” Joseph O’Brien, one of the and a Gucci scarf. Alexa said, “We had hospital ship that has been docked ship’s captains, said that expectations of the big shopping craze a couple of weeks at Pier 90 for the past three weeks, de- immediate “full capacity” were unrealis- ago. Now everyone has definitely calmed ploys only for major missions: combat tic. O’Brien, a helicopter pilot, who has down.”She wore a face mask and a white (Persian Gulf, 2002) and disaster relief also commanded humanitarian missions, hoodie. “There’s plenty of toilet paper.” (Haiti, earthquake, 2010). Between calls, noted, “It takes a little bit of time to get a small crew primes the equipment and a rhythm,to get all the processes in place.” “One, two, three,” other shoppers, monitors the expiration date on supplies. By April 6th, the Comfort had treated Massimo counted.He approached a crate The ship maintains a status of “ready forty-two patients. Governor Andrew of purple artichokes. “Look, how beau- five”—the capacity to mobilize within Cuomo asked the federal government to tiful,” he said, reaching out his hand. A five days.Several weeks ago,as New York’s allow the ship to accept COVID cases.The rubber-gloved worker reprimanded him. COVID-19 caseload ballooned into the White House granted the request, and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,”Massimo said.“I’m thousands,the city requested backup: the the crew quickly reconfigured the space, used to touching.” The worker bagged hospitals, increasingly overwhelmed, cutting the bed capacity almost in half. carrots,celery,limes,and avocados.“Peo- needed somewhere to treat patients who It helped that the Comfort was built as ple really enjoyed the guacamole we did,” were suffering from illnesses other than an oil tanker: belowdecks,its highly com- Massimo said.He and Alexa passed lem- the coronavirus.The Comfort had a thou- partmentalized design benefits the kind ons the size of footballs.“We’re going to sand beds, and a large health-care staff of isolation necessary for controlling in- buy some pancetta,glaze it with balsamic fection.The medical staff and crew move vinegar, serve it with shaved Parmigiano. among the seven main zones by walking It would be great to add—let’s get rasp- up and over,as opposed to passing through berries,” he said. Also: potatoes. “Obvi- the interior. ously,you need to have in the home some potatoes.”Mozzarella came from a cheese- Normally, the crew cleans twice a monger wearing blue rubber gloves.Mas- day; now twelve sailors are disinfecting simo sampled a ribbon of prosciutto handrails and doorknobs once an hour. proffered by another gloved hand, nod- O’Brien said, “If I see someone standing ded, paid in cash. A butcher lowered his still, they’d better have a Clorox wipe in mask to holler, “You’re Massimo!” their hand.” Before the Comfort admit- ted its first COVID patient, a crew mem- “Si!” the chef shouted back. Alexa ber tested positive for the coronavirus. watched a butcher break down a chicken Most of the medical personnel were from behind a strip of yellow caution moved off the ship and into a nearby tape. “We’re going to put the chicken in hotel. (They have no shore liberties; they the freezer and use it to make broth,” are bused to and from work.) O’Brien’s Massimo said. “Generally, the broth has stateroom had become his office. He had been from Francescana,” which, like his mounted his Cannondale CAAD10, the twelve other outposts around the world, bike that he usually rides to work,in Vir- was closed indefinitely. (The exception: ginia,onto a stationary computrainer.The his Milan refettorio,“the only soup kitchen crew—more than twelve hundred peo- open in Milan,” he said. He dispatched ple—had expected, as he put it, to “live, the employees of his newest restaurant, 18 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

eat, and breathe” on board for months. city’s normal grousing. “I loved ‘NYC: painted room,with all the curtains drawn. The last time the Comfort got an Tolerant of your beliefs, judgmental of “Hi, everybody, it’s Cory Booker,”the your shoes,’ ” Archie Gottesman, who S.O.S.from New York was on 9/11.With co-wrote the ads, said on the phone. So New Jersey senator (also down with the few survivors at the World Trade Center, when, three years ago, she left Manhat- cause), said, appearing onscreen, in a the Comfort attended to first responders. tan Mini Storage (her family’s company) kitchen. He was wearing a pin-striped For three weeks,the medical staff treated to find fresh pasture for her branding suit, the jacket buttoned at the waist, and more than a thousand people—cuts,frac- skills, it seemed natural to focus on the a red tie.“I’ve had long experience taking tures, trouble breathing, emotional dis- urbane kvetching of a different tribe. part in Passover Seders,”he went on. “This tress. Beds were provided for workers idea of escaping slavery—how powerful who had been sleeping on the street be- “I was, like, Ugh, why isn’t Judaism, it was for my ancestors who were slaves.” tween shifts at Ground Zero. Cops and this religion that’s so full of wisdom, so firefighters were invited on board for a full of smart values, selling itself better?” “Now is the time that we describe the hot breakfast.(One officer said,“We don’t she recalled. Her rebrand begat a Web- Seder plate,” said Reiner, coming on- get treated like this unless it’s Thanks- site venture, JewBelong, with its own hip screen with her daughter and her hus- giving or Christmas.”) Massage thera- sloganeering (“Imagine your cell phone band, and sitting in front of a painting pists gave more than thirteen hundred battery was on 6% and lasted 8 days.That’s of the ocean. Food had presented a chal- massages.Supply officers replaced ripped Hanukkah!”), and, for holidays such as lenge for most Zooming Jews; a Seder clothing and boots. When the Comfort Passover, do-it-yourself guidelines based requires specific items, but shop closures sailed out of New York, the ship’s Navy on Gottesman’s own,sometimes unortho- had made some hard to acquire. Reiner and Marine Corps crew lined the railings, dox practice. “They have this Fireball mixed salt water in a wineglass.“In doing wearing N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. caps. whiskey that tastes like cinnamon,and we this with intention,it becomes more than play where,every time you hear the name salt water; it becomes the memory of Nineteen years later,a new crew lined Moses, you take a shot,”she said.“It’s the sweat and tears,”she said, swirling it like the railings for the voyage in.Tom Von burning bush!”(See also: a Red Sea cen- a Cabernet. Her family walked distant Essen, the fire commissioner during terpiece made of Jell-O.) The campaign viewers through the offerings, adding 9/11, who is now an administrator for has not been without controversy, and optional signifiers.“The orange,”Reiner FEMA working on COVID, said that on last year an especially daring ad—“Even said, holding an orange, “is a symbol of his way to greet the Comfort, for the if you think kugel is an exercise for your fruitfulness and love and inclusion of our second time, he had a flashback to 9/11. vagina . . . JewBelong”—inspired a con- L.G.B.T.Q.-plus friends.” “The grief,of course,was enormous,but servative vandal to spray-paint over “for the operation seemed to get slightly bet- your vagina” on the sides of Upper West Five comedians narrated part of the ter every day,” he recalled. “With this,” Side phone kiosks. Portnoy lives. Maggid, the story of the Jews’ passage he added, “we’re not there yet.” from Egypt to Israel,in tag-team patter. The other day, as Jews of the old, (Rick Crom: “God is, like, ‘Look, first The Comfort’s patient load reached square cast broke square matzo in squar- of all, I hate to break it to you, but you’re a hundred and forty-six last week, in- ish Zoom windows, JewBelong moved a Jew.’”Judy Gold: “Matzo! Unleavened cluding ninety COVID cases.Three more its Seder operations online with an eye bread! Constipation.”) David Simon,the of the ship’s personnel had contracted to greater meshugas and scale. Fourteen creator of “The Wire,” appeared and, the virus. (All recovered.) Nineteen of hundred screens had tuned in. Gottes- sombre, helped lead a Dayenu thank- the ninety-five ventilators on board were man got two of her friends, the actress fulness prayer. Then Coles, in a red in use.The medical team had performed Alysia Reiner and the former magazine blouse and a white blazer, poured wine more than fifty surgical procedures, and editor Joanna Coles, to co-host (Reiner: for Elijah. “Elijah’s not here, so I may had used its dialysis machine for the Jewish; Coles: down with the cause),and drink his as well as my own,” she said. first time. The Comfort was learning they pulled together a highfalutin guest “We must all contribute our best talents that the fight changed constantly, a fact list. At 7:04 p.m., Gottesman appeared and energies to help fulfill Elijah’s prom- the city already knew. onscreen wearing silver hoop earrings ise of a peaceful world.” A comment and her white hair in a ponytail. “I can’t feed from viewers ran alongside the 1—Paige Williams see you guys,”she said.“But we have lots video. “I have never drunk so much so of fun in store—including Venmo cash quickly,” someone wrote. KEEP THE FAITH DEPT. prizes for finding the afikoman!” MAGGID LANTERN Offline, Gottesman explained, “We The night’s text was JewBelong’s own, really try our best not to Jewbarrass any- New Yorkers of a certain vintage a Haggadah with sans-serif type and fes- one”—her term for Jews (and non-Jews) might recall the witty Manhattan tive songs written to familiar tunes.Some being made to feel sheepish for not know- Mini Storage billboards that, appearing readings were self-recorded, then edited ing the rules. She herself had been com- in the heart of the “Sex and the City” together into a multivocal patchwork; pelled to get creative with the zeroa, the era, gave a boom-time upgrade to the others were done solo,via Webcam.Dan shank bone included in the Seder. “Al- Bucatinsky, the “Scandal” actor, started ysia found a raccoon bone in the road, with a blessing. “May everyone who and I’m, like, Perfect,” she said. “I mean, shares in a Jewish life feel welcome and this is COVID time. This is our plague, integrated,”he said,speaking from a red- but we are going to get through it.” —Nathan Heller THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 19

OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS ple don’t understand the futility of those efforts in most cases,” Zikry said. “I THE LONGEST SHIFT pushed back on him, though. Because he was only forty-five.” The man reit- In Queens, a new doctor faces the coronavirus pandemic. erated his wishes. “When he came in, he was well enough to speak in full sen- BY RIVKA GALCHEN tences,” Zikry said. “Two hours later, when he was at the point where we would Hashem Zikry specialized in emergency medicine “for times like this,” he said. have intubated him, I asked him again.” Too breathless to speak,the patient shook Early in the coronavirus crisis, before bag with your P.P.E. for the day, like it’s his head; he was resolute. Zikry called REDUX New York shut down and the schools your lunch box when you show up to the man’s wife, who said that she trusted closed,when people still shared opinions school,” Hashem Zikry, an E.R. doctor, her husband to decide.“It was a horren- about Marie Kondo and the timing of told me, adding, “It’s a little bit surreal. dous shift,” Zikry said. “So many peo- the Iowa caucuses, Elmhurst Hospital, We all have perspective for a moment ple were dying.”The man was visibly in in Queens, began rearranging its emer- on how truly insane what’s going on is. agony, as is every patient struggling for gency room.The section for less acutely That our life is picking up this P.P.E. air.Zikry and other doctors tried to help ill patients became a screening room for and changing into it, and that everyone him find positions that might let more patients with symptoms of COVID-19. out there is so sick.” air into his lungs. The man rolled and Within days, a new wall had been built. bucked; eventually, he was still. By the The critical-care area was doubled, then At the beginning of a recent shift at end of the shift,he was dead.Zikry called tripled. A triage tent soon went up out- Elmhurst, Zikry took over the care of a the wife again. She didn’t shout; she side. And the family room—where doc- forty-five-year-old man who had a wife thanked him and the other doctors and tors and families can have difficult con- and four children. Although the man nurses. “It was very hard to hear some- versations in relative privacy—was turned was on high levels of oxygen, he was one thank you for standing there and into a place for the distribution of per- short of breath. He had written out sev- watching her husband die,” Zikry said. sonal protective equipment, a transition eral paragraphs in Spanish specifying “I felt very helpless.” from a “cold zone” to a “hot zone.”“You that he did not want to be intubated or walk into your shift and are handed a resuscitated.“Normally,I don’t push back Zikry has been working as a doctor on that too much, because I think peo- for nine months.He is twenty-nine years old, an intern in the emergency-medi- cine residency program at Mount Sinai Hospital. As part of his training, he ro- tates through different hospitals and spe- cialties. In late February, he began a six- week rotation in the E.R. at Elmhurst Hospital, a place he loves and describes as the soul of medicine. The neighbor- hood around the hospital is one of the most diverse on the planet.Nearby blocks are crowded with Thai noodle shops, Colombian bakeries, and groceries that sell lotus and taro root. The neighbor- hood, which has a large working-class immigrant population, was hit earlier and harder by the pandemic than most of the rest of the city. “It’s become very clear to me what a socioeconomic dis- ease this is,”Zikry told me.“People hear that term ‘essential workers.’Short-order cooks,doormen,cleaners,deli workers— that is the patient population here.Other people were at home, but my patients were still working. A few weeks ago, when they were told to socially isolate, they still had to go back to an apartment with ten other people. Now they are in our cardiac room dying.” Zikry, whom I have spoken to regularly in the past month, has extraordinary resilience and 20 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRYAN ANSELM

good humor; on this day, he sounded much feels like a tsunami is about to hit tation equipment was on hand. Despite despondent. “After my shift, I went for us.” But, for the time being, the patient the efforts of Zikry and others, the pa- a run in Central Park, and I see these volume at Sinai was down.The non-co- tient died about fifteen minutes later. two women out in,like,full hazmat suits, rona cases—the broken bones, the belly Zikry recalled turning back toward the basically, and gloves, screaming at peo- pains, even the chest pains—were not rest of the E.R. He said,“We look back ple to keep six feet away while they’re turning up in their usual numbers.(Tele- on this sea of, like, three hundred peo- power walking. And I’m thinking, You medicine had off-loaded some of those ple that expected us to treat them im- know what, you’re not the ones who are patients, but people were also afraid of mediately, to figure out what was wrong at risk.” the hospital, as evidenced later in the with them.” This was around 3:15 a.m. dramatic increase of deaths at home.) Before Zikry went to medical school, Elmhurst Hospital,however,was already Zikry had been in the middle of a he had been in an E.R. only once. four people deep into its sick-call list for presentation—describing to a team of When he was thirteen, he shut his front staffing. It had many COVID patients, providers how a different patient was door on his left middle finger. There but they were accompanied by the usual doing, so that they could make a plan was so much blood that his mother al- load of “normal”cases.“The drunk falls, for care. “I had to pick up in the mid- most fainted, and Zikry remembers the chest pains—those numbers have dle of that conversation as if it had been going to the E.R. with his younger been inelastic here,” Zikry told me, in about a basketball game the night be- brother. An orthopedic surgeon said late March. fore,” he said. that there was nothing to be done—he would lose the finger. By then, his mom The P.P.E. bags that Elmhurst doc- That day, a headline in the Wash- had arrived, “like a mother on a mis- tors received at the start of their shifts ington Post read “In hard-hit areas, sion,”and she said,“My son is a pianist, contained a papery yellow gown, blue testing restricted to health don’t tell me there’s nothing to be done!” gloves, a face shield, and an N95 mask. care workers,hospital patients.” A plastic surgeon was brought in—Jess The mask had to suffice for a whole Anthony Fauci, the director of the Na- Ting, who had studied music at Juil- day, although as recently as February tional Institute of Allergy and Infec- liard. Zikry had never played piano in the C.D.C. recommended putting on a tious Diseases, said, “When you go in his life. He told Ting that his parents new one for each patient. An N95 mask and get tested, you are consuming per- were the worst people in the world, and fits the face more tightly than a regu- sonal protective equipment, masks and liars. (“I was very . . . hormonal.”) Zikry lar surgical mask, and has a metal strip gowns—those are high priority for the recalled, “Then Ting said to me—and on top to hold it in place. “The bridge health-care workers.” he became my mentor, he’s the one who of my nose is bleeding from wearing it kept encouraging me to go to medical all day,”Zikry told me.“I tried to Mac- But Zikry’s patients—and patients school over the years—‘Well, I’m here Gyver it with a Band-Aid, but it’s not across the country—wanted to be tested. now, let’s see if I can help.’” working.” The P.P.E. that E.R. doctors “I got yelled at a lot,” Zikry said. “I un- in New York have been wearing more derstand the anger.” The P.P.E. makes Zikry went to Hamilton College, closely resembles a poor man’s weld- communication more difficult—all that where he studied English and ran cross- ing gear than the astronaut-like outfits a patient sees is eyes behind a plastic country, before going to Mount Sinai’s seen in photos of medical workers in shield. “It’s that much more distance Icahn Medical School. He loves Jane South Korea. between patient and provider.”At Elm- Austen. He still reads before bed, and hurst, which offers translation in doz- trains for and runs marathons—his fa- When Zikry came on shift on the ens of languages, conversations often vorite is Grandma’s Marathon, in Min- evening of March 21st,one of the COVID occur through an interpreter.“The most nesota. Through the majority of the patients signed out to his team seemed difficult thing has been describing to pandemic, Zikry worked an average of not as sick as some of the others he’d patients what is going on,” Zikry said. six days a week at Elmhurst. His shifts seen. “He walked by the desk during “We ourselves are so confused and often lasted thirteen hours, an exhaust- sign-out,” Zikry told me. “He walked scared, and every day when we come on ing schedule that is typical for a first- by again fifteen minutes later. Asked us shift it seems like there’s a different pro- year physician. where the bathroom was. He was walk- tocol”—the guidance comes from the ing—that’s a great sign.Talking—that’s state Department of Health—“for who Even after New York’s schools were a great sign. These are very reassuring are we testing, who are we admitting.” closed, on March 16th, many hospitals things to a physician. I wrote down, in the city were at the eerie stage of pre- ‘Ambulatory,Conversant.’”A short time Repeatedly, Zikry had to explain to paring and waiting for a surge in COVID later,a hospital police officer approached patients that they probably did have the patients. “I would say our E.R. looks, Zikry to say that a man had collapsed coronavirus, but that there wasn’t much well, more orderly than usual,” Jolion in the bathroom. When Zikry reached the hospital could do for them—they McGreevy, who directs Mount Sinai him, the man had no pulse. He began needed to go home and take Tylenol, Hospital’s E.R.,told me,on March 18th. chest compressions. “Nothing like this and come back if they were in respira- Elaine Rabin, the head of the hospital’s had ever happened to me,” Zikry said. tory distress. “These patients are well emergency-medicine residency program, “I had seen him walking minutes be- informed,” he said. “They say we’re not recalled being an intern during 9/11, and fore.”The man was taken on a stretcher testing enough and that’s why it’s spread- said,“This is different from that. It very to the critical-care area, where resusci- ing so much, and there I am trying to explain, maybe with a video interpreter in Mandarin, the intricacies of why we THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 21

are past the point of testing,that we don’t was a more deadly disease—but it didn’t He felt well,and wanted to work.I heard have those resources.” feel like it does now.” again and again that, despite doctors’ stress and fear, they were glad to have Some patients, frustrated and fright- Egan and I went to medical school to- something to offer. When I asked Zikry ened, told Zikry that this would never gether. I was there for the classic wrong why he chose to specialize in emergency happen in another country, and that he reason: to fulfill parental expectations. medicine,he replied,“For times like this.” didn’t care about them.“That is so hard,” (I had not even been able to handle the Yvette Calderon,an E.R.doctor at Mount he said. “I often think about what mis- fertilized-egg dissection, back in fifth Sinai, who grew up in the Chelsea proj- takes I may have made, what I could do grade.) Egan was the magnificent op- ects, a few miles south of the hospital, better. But the one mistake I know I posite. “Honestly, I loved all of medical said, “This is the door to the hospital. never make is the mistake of not car- school,”he said lightly,as if it were a goofy The E.R. is what faces the community. ing.” These encounters can exacerbate attribute. He has a beautiful voice and I grew up seeing that there was a need, a sense of loneliness, one that paradox- sings in choirs, but he has a disarming and I wanted to be in the part of the ically persists alongside a heightened way of speaking like a teen-ager when it hospital that serves literally everyone.” camaraderie among E.R. doctors—all suits the situation. If our medical-school in it together, day after day. “Even co- class had had a homecoming king, it On March 24th, New York had been residents—people with the exact same would have been him. He was kind to shut down for four days. Governor lived experience—we don’t get to talk everyone, and he never complained—a Andrew Cuomo said, “We haven’t flat- to each other much,” Zikry said. “We’re popular medical-student pastime. He tened the curve, and the curve is actu- working so hard.And we’re also on quar- has loved the E.R. since he was a kid, ally increasing.” Cuomo cited estimates antine.” The residents used to meet up when his mother was an E.R. nurse. that New York State might need as many at a bar or a coffee shop.“That has com- When we were in school together, I as a hundred and forty thousand hospi- pletely dissipated. And it feels strange. thought—and still think—that if I were tal beds.The city had some twenty-three Because they are the only people who sick and scared I would want Dan to be thousand beds in use, and hospitals were know what my days are like.” my doctor. I told him that. He laughed. converting surgical and pediatric units “I don’t want this to sound strange, but into space for COVID patients.Work was After his shifts, Zikry took off his one of the things I treasure is being able beginning on a four-thousand-bed fa- P.P.E., showered at the hospital, then to communicate bad news to patients in cility at the Jacob K. Javits Convention changed his clothes completely before a compassionate and human way,” he Center to decant non-COVID patients turning off his phone and running some said. Sometimes a patient comes in with from hospitals—but even at Elmhurst six miles to the Upper East Side, where a headache, which turns out to be some- there were now very few of these. he shares an apartment with his younger thing awful.Patients come in with a rash, brother, Bassel. Bassel has kept their re- and leave with the news that they have “I’m truly exhausted,” Zikry told me frigerator stocked. That week, Zikry’s cancer. “My father died of metastatic that day, at the end of another overnight bedtime reading was “Duel in the Sun,” esophageal cancer, and I still remember shift.“I’m starting to see patients I’ve al- an account of the 1982 Boston Mara- that conversation with the oncologist,” ready seen, now in worse condition. A thon,in which Alberto Salazar and Dick Egan said. “It was so not compassion- patient who four days ago had an oxy- Beardsley had one last great race, before ate. So not humanistic. I couldn’t believe gen saturation of a hundred per cent and problems—illness, addiction—pulled it was happening in that way. I know my an O.K. chest X-ray, then two days later them down. Zikry says that his runs their saturation is low nineties and it’s home help him reach a reconciliation patients will remember these conversa- not a great chest X-ray—well,they come with the day, “which is not a peace, it’s tions, and it’s important to me that the in now with a saturation in the high different from peace.”Reading helps his human piece be there.” eighties and with horrendous chest mind change tracks.“I’m a big dreamer,” X-rays, and we need to admit them to Zikry said. “And I love sleep.” Most Egan was exposed to COVID-19 on the hospital.” Zikry knows that medical nights, he gets a break from the hospi- March 12th, and went into quarantine. language can obscure as well as explain: tal in his dreams. He did telemedicine while out, but, he “The term used for what you see on the said, he felt “almost guilty that I couldn’t X-rays is ‘ground-glass opacities.’ I have Every day in an E.R. is potentially be there to step up.” When the quaran- no idea what actual ground glass looks traumatic. Dan Egan, an E.R. phy- tine protocol for health-care providers like. I can tell you that on the X-ray it sician at New York-Presbyterian/Co- with mild symptoms was reduced, from looks like a snowed-out background, or lumbia Hospital, has been a doctor for fourteen days to seven, he returned early. like when I go out in the rain—I wear more than fifteen years.“We work with glasses—and I can’t really see, because disasters, we see horrible things all the of the water on my glasses. There are time,” he told me. “We see unexpected these patchy opacities. That’s what the deaths as part of our regular job.” Still, chest X-rays look like.” he said,colleagues were now calling him crying in fear—something that had never Each E.R.has a board that notes who happened before. “I think it’s that it’s has been seen and who remains to be unknown.I remember the time of Ebola. seen, and clearing the board constitutes Of course we were scared—and that part of E.R. doctors’ collective sense of 22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

well-being. “We never caught up on the “I miss the sunsets.” board,” Zikry told me, after a shift. “All of us were working so hard, but we were •• about forty people behind all night.” As the crisis progressed, it was taking lon- my mom and was saying I wanted to quit, “Today, we ran out of oxygen masks for ger and longer for patients to be admit- and she was in a car with my brother,and the patients to use. So much work goes ted to a ward in the hospital—and more I think he had been yelling at her, too.” into trying to locate and obtain more. critically ill patients were remaining in His mother dropped the phone acciden- We had a shortage of oxygen tanks, so the E.R. to receive care. There were tally. He called back, telling her that she we connected more than one patient to stretchers in hallways and the common didn’t care about him, and that he was larger tanks—stuff we normally wouldn’t spaces, wherever space could be found. going to quit then and there.“She said— do. Will we run out of masks entirely? and I give her so much credit—she said, People can give you answers, but they “What strikes me is the deterioration ‘Look, O.K., if you want to quit, you can are not witnessing what is happening in of what is normal,” Zikry said. Walking quit tomorrow morning.’”He didn’t quit. front of you. People can tell you it will by some stretchers, he noticed two pa- His third year of training changed his be O.K., and it is solvable, but this has tients who were not in visible distress perspective: he kept meeting physicians never happened before.” but who had oxygen saturations in the about whom he thought,That’s the kind seventies. They needed to go into the of adult I’d like to be. Physicians in other cities watched critical-care area immediately.Soon after, New York for a sense of what was headed “I hear this guy calling me by name, he’s Zikry took an Uber home from his their way. David DiBardino, a pulmon- smiling and waving,” Zikry said. “And shift that day, instead of running. That ologist at the University of Pennsylva- it’s this man—I’ve seen him three times was unusual for him, but he was unusu- nia Medical Center, described how the this week. I have friends who would be ally tired. His residency program was process of entering his hospital had so jealous of how much more time I have paying for rides for residents, as a ges- changed for employees.“We’re funnelled spent hanging out with this guy than ture of support. It was around 7:45 a.m., through an entrance that hasn’t been with them. So I was feeling amused and the beginning of a kind of day off. In- open for years,”he said.“It has this black also maybe dismissive—that I have al- terns call this a DOMA—day off, my ass. metal gate that looks so gothic. It’s like ready counselled this guy so many times He would get home around eight-thirty, a near-future dystopian scene,like some- to go home and watch his symptoms.” have breakfast with his brother, try to thing you would watch on Netflix.Some rest, and then be back at work by 7 a.m. people are trying to distance in line, but The man, to the eye, seemed un- the next day. also it’s a line,you can’t be that far away— changed.“I go ahead and order his chest so distance, but not wanting to get cut.” X-ray again, not expecting to see a Throughout the crisis, doctors have On March 26th,the third day of the new change—and it was atrocious.”The man made clear their dismay at the lack entrance policy, the line was three blocks was on the verge of crashing—of not of proper supplies—both for their own long. “Three city blocks of people in being able to breathe properly without protection and for the health of their scrubs panicking. This anesthesiologist medical assistance. “It was so scary. And patients. “The systemic frustrations are who is older saw the line and started he had looked so well.” Many doctors the most exhausting,” Zikry told me. screaming—he was anxious about how had described to me the grave contrast, in many COVID-19 cases, between a pa- tient who can sit comfortably in a chair and a chest X-ray that shows pneumo- nia in both lungs. Soon, those patients can abruptly crash. “You see the patient using the full energy of the body to breathe,” Zikry said. “Neck muscles are distending. You see the muscles around the ribs.” At around 3:45 a.m., Zikry received a text from his mother: “I’m in tears think- ing of you.” She was worried that he wouldn’t take care of himself. She said that he was the most important.The text made him laugh a little.Zikry is not much of a crier. He recalled crying only once in the past ten years, while studying for the Step One exam,a comprehensive all- day test at the end of the second year of medical school. “I just hated it so much, I wanted to quit medical school. I had composed the e-mail,”Zikry said.“I called THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 23

AT THE RUINS OF YANKEE STADIUM It is that week in April when all the lions start to shine, is meeting the love of their life for the very first time, café tables poised for selfies, windows squeegeed somebody is drinking schnapps from a paper sack and fenceposts freshly painted around Tompkins Square, discussing Monty Python with a man impersonating a priest, former haven of junkies and disgraceful pigeons someone is waiting for the bus to South Carolina today chock-full of French bulldogs and ornamental tulips to visit her sister in hospice, someone is teleconferencing superimposed atop the old, familiar, unevictable dirt. with the office back in Hartford, Antwerp, Osaka, Lying on the couch, I am drifting with the conversation someone is dust-sweeping, throat-clearing, cart-wheeling, of bees, a guttural buzz undergirding the sound knife-grinding, day-trading, paying dues, dropping a dime, from a rusty string of wind chimes hung and forgotten giving the hairy eyeball, pissing against a wall, in the overgrown beech tree marooned out back, someone is snoozing, sniffling, cavorting, nibbling, limbs shaggy with neon-green flame-tongue leaflets roistering, chiding, snuggling, confiding, forking through a blanket of white blossoms, pub-crawling, speed-dating, pump-shining, ivy-trimming, long-neglected evidence of spring at its most deluxe, tap-dancing, curb-kicking, rat-catching, tale-telling, pure exuberant fruitfulness run amok. getting lost, getting high, getting busted, breaking up, Rigorous investigation has identified two dialects breaking down, breaking loose, losing faith, buzzing through the plunder-fall, hovering black bumblebees going broke, going green, feeling blue, seeing red, and overworked honeybees neck-deep in nectar-bliss, someone is davening, busking, hobnobbing, grandstanding, as the city to us, blundering against its oversaturated anthers playing the ponies, feeding the pigeons, gull-watching, until the pollen coats our skin, as if sugar-dusted, wolf-whistling, badgering the witness, pulling down the grill as if rolled in honey and flour to bake a cake and locking up shop, writing a letter home in Pashto or for the queen, yes, she is with us, it is spring and this Xhosa, learning to play the xylophone, waiting for an Uber X, is her coronation, blossoming pear and crab-apple conspiring, patrolling, transcending, bedevilling, and cherry trees, too many pinks to properly absorb, testifying, bloviating, absolving, kibbitzing, every inch of every branch lusting after beauty. kowtowing, pinky-swearing, tarring and shingling, To this riot of stimuli, this vernal bombardment breaking and entering, delivering and carting away, of the senses, I have capitulated without a fight. enwreathing lampposts with yellow ribbons, But not the beech tree. It never falters. It is stalwart reading Apollinaire on a bench littered with fallen petals, and grounded and garlanded, a site-specific creation, waiting for an ambulance to pass before crossing First Avenue seed to rootling to this companionable giant, toward home. No wonder they fear it so intensely, tolerant and benign, how many times have I reflected the purists and isolationists in Kansas, the ideologues upon their superiority to our species, the trees of earth? in Kandahar, it is a relentless negotiation with multiplicity, Reflection, self-reflection—my job is to polish the mirror, a constant engagement with the shape-shifting mob, to amplify the echoes. Even now I am hard at work, diversely luminous as sunlight reflecting off mirrored glass researching the ineffable. I loafe and invite my soul, in puzzle pieces of apostolic light. Certainly this is not for Walt Whitman is ever my companion in New York, the Eternal City but it is certainly Imperial, certainly thronged carcass of a city in which one is never alone tyrannical, democratic, demagogic, dynastic, anarchic, and yet never un-nagged-at by loneliness, a hunger hypertrophic, hyperreal. An empire of rags and photons. as much for the otherness of others as for the much-sung self, An empire encoded in the bricks from which it was built, for something somewhere on the verge of realization, each a stamped emblem of its labor-intensive materiality, for what lies around the corner, five or six blocks uptown, hundreds of millions barged down the Hudson each year hiding out in the Bronx or across the river in Jersey. from the clay pits of Haverstraw and Kingston Somewhere on the streets of the city right now somebody after the Great Fire of 1835, a hinterland of dependencies, close people were standing in the line.” shifting.“What has really been startling DiBardino,who with his wife has three As at Elmhurst, doctors receive only is this gap between the protocols—be- children—fifteen-month-old twins and tween how we used to throw the mask a three-year-old—does not typically work one set of P.P.E. for the day.“The P.P.E. away after every procedure and the re- in the I.C.U. “As interventional pulmo- has actually been put under lock and ally difficult practical challenge of, how nologists,we are board certified in critical- key,” DiBardino said, and laughed. “I do you avoid contaminating yourself care medicine, but it’s not something we have to deal with these things with with the new conservation protocol,”he do on a daily basis.”On April 6th, that humor,because it’s all so weird and scary.” said.“It’s hilarious how tedious it is.You changed.“It’s really, personally, scary,”he In subsequent days, the line to enter the touch the back of your neck, and then said. “There’s a really good chance that hospital grew short,then long again; in- you’re, like, Is the back of my neck con- I will contract COVID-19—and I think, structions for hand hygiene, tempera- taminated now?” you know, you and I should be fine if we ture taking, and mask distribution kept 24 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

quarries and factories and arterial truck farms shots of tequila and De La Soul on the tape deck, everyone delivering serum to that muscular heart, a toiling collective dancing, everyone young and vibrant and vivacious— of Irish sandhogs and Iroquois beam walkers and Ivoirian decades later we discovered a forgotten videotape umbrella venders collecting kindling for the bonfire and our sons, watching with bemused alarm, blurted out, that has lured, like moths, the entire world to its blaze. Mom, you were so beautiful! She was. We all were, As with my tree, the hubbub of bees its exaltation. everyone except the city. The city was a wreck and then Apis, maker of honey, Bombus, the humble bumbler, it was a renovation project and now it is a playground and the tree a common American beech. It rules the yard, overawing a straggling ailanthus of privilege hard against the wall of the Con Ed substation. and soon it will be something else, liquid as a dream. Along the fence some scraggly boxwood shrubs, Empires come and go, ours will fade in turn, even the city a table collapsed into rusted segments, two piles of bricks— will retreat, step by step, as the Atlantic rises against it. what’s their story?—who made them, carted them, But water is not the end. Bricks are made of clay and sand set them as a patio, and who undid that work to create these and when they disintegrate, when they return to silt, mundane, rain-eroded monuments to human neglect? new bricks will be made by hands as competent as ours. Why does nobody tend this little garden? People will live in half-flooded tenements, people will live Undisciplined ivy scales the building in thick ropes on houseboats moored to bank pillars along Wall Street. and coils of porcelain berry vine, whose fruit will ripen It’s all going under, the entire Eastern Seaboard. to obscene brilliance come autumn, those strange berries, The capital will move to Kansas City but nobody will mourn turquoise, violet, azure . . . Ah, I’ve lost my train for Washington. Someone will invent virtual gasoline. of thought. Berries. The city. People, bricks, the past. Bees in a flowering beech tree. Symbiosis. Streams and webs Someone and permutations, viruses replicating, mutating, evolving. will write a poem called “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium” Books in a library, bricks in a wall, people in a city. which will be set to a popular tune by a media impresario A man selling old golf clubs on the corner of Ludlow Street. and people in Ohio will sing it during the seventh- A woman on the F train carefully rubbing ointment up and down her red, swollen arms. Acorns— inning stretch tossing them into the Hudson River from a bench as I did remembering, or imagining, the glory of what was. when I was Peter Stuyvesant, when I was Walt Whitman, Time is with us viscerally, idiomatically, time inhabits us when we were of the Lenape and Broadway our hunting trail. like a glass bowl filled with tap water at the kitchen sink, Then the deer vanished, the docks decayed, the towers fell. and some little pink stones, and a sunken plastic castle The African graveyard was buried beneath concrete with a child’s face etched in a slate-gray window. as the memory of slavery has been obscured by dogma Fish swim past, solemn as ghosts, and the child smiles sadly, and denial. The city speaks a hundred languages, wondering, perhaps, how bees will pollinate underwater. it straddles three rivers, it holds forty islands hostage, He seems a little melancholy. He must miss his old home, it is an archipelago of memory, essential and insubstantial a skin-honeyed hive of multifarious humankind, and evasive as the progeny of steam grates at dawn, a metropolis of stately filth doused in overrich perfume. a gathering of apparitions. The Irish have vanished The castle door swings open and the boy emerges from Washington Heights but I still see myself eating like an astronaut stepping warily onto the moon. a cold pot-roast sandwich, watching “McHale’s Navy” When he sees us, through the warping lens of the bowl, on black-and-white TV in my grandmother’s old apartment. watching him with desperate, misfocussed passion, we are I remember the parties we used to throw on Jane Street, as cartoonishly gargantuan as the past, and he as spectral as the future, raising one small hand to wave goodbye. —Campbell McGrath catch it, but whether to bring that home keep the COVID air from escaping. The and out of the room is slowed by the to my family? Should I just stay at work doors to the patients’rooms are kept shut, donning and doffing of gloves, a gown, and not come home?” and typically only one medical worker the N95 mask, and a face shield. goes in at a time, while the rest watch DiBardino was asked to lead a team through the glass. “It’s like a fishbowl,” Emergencies occur all the time in an at a neurology ward that was transformed DiBardino said. He described his first I.C.U. “An alarm seems to go off every into an I.C.U. for COVID care—a seven- day of training there: “So the nurse goes five minutes, but then only one person day tour of duty.An anesthesiologist was into the room with a wipeboard. She’ll goes into the room for the response— assigned to head one half of the ward, write,‘B.P. is super low. Max norepi?’Or it’s so weird,”DiBardino said.“It’s almost and DiBardino the other. “The rooms she’ll write, ‘I need a new I.V. bag,’ and like we’re running as fast as we can, but have this pretty loud hum to them,” he so someone runs to get it.” Coming in with one foot nailed to the ground.”Since said, because negative pressure is used to the doors of the rooms are glass, doctors THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 25

standing outside sometimes direct the showing up, something good will come If this is how it is now, and with what provider inside by writing backward on of it compounded over time.” the models are predicting for a week or the glass doors, so that the person inside two from now—it makes me really scared.” can read it. “I know this is stupid,” Di­ It had been Bassel’s birthday,so Zikry Bardino said,“but one of the first thoughts decided to try to cook spicy fish tacos, He described the barring of visitors I had was: I can’t write backward!” one of his brother’s favorite meals. At as a secondary trauma.“Families are call­ Citarella, Zikry had walked past the ing me all night for updates,”he said. As By early April, funeral homes in New mustard he wanted, then taken a few an E.R. doctor in New York, he’s accus­ York were overwhelmed, and the steps backward to get it, and in the pro­ tomed to being yelled at. The current city had deployed forty­five mobile cess bumped into someone, who started situation is not like that: “Instead, they morgues. The Javits Center switched shouting at him: How could he be walk­ are, like, Doctor, I know how busy you from serving only non­covid patients ing backward at a time like this? “I had are, I just want an update on how he’s to serving exclusively covid patients. to let that one go,” Zikry said. doing.” One young patient struck him More than six million Americans filed as the sickest person he had seen that for unemployment in one week. A mid­ In the E.R., the work had become night. “And I’m trying to relay that over life­crisis film called “Phoenix, Oregon” “sadly algorithmic.” Typically, the glory the phone to the family, who thinks he’s topped the box­office, making $2,903 of working in an E.R. is that you never at the hospital with, like,‘a little corona­ from showings on twenty­seven screens. know who will come in the door, what virus.’” The patient was on a ventilator. Half the planet was under lockdown or­ kinds of problems they will have. “We “I wanted to be honest about how sick ders. People mixed quarantinis, didn’t now presume they all have COVID,”Zikry he was, but I didn’t want to take away quite educate their children. Guidance said.“You don’t have to be Dr. House to hope.They’re asking me, ‘Will I be able on masks was still changing. My mom figure it out.” He said that he tries to to talk to him tomorrow?’ And, because wrote to my brother and me about or­ tell a patient early in the conversation, they’re not here, it’s so much more diffi­ dering tonic water, because she had read “ ‘I think you have coronavirus and you cult to explain what it means to be on a that it had quinine, which was getting need to be admitted to the hospital.’ I ventilator—that a machine is breathing talked about as a remedy. think it’s a shocking conversation for for him.” Egan wants to be empathetic, them. Especially if they’ve been waiting but he’s taking care of many patients at At Elmhurst, as at many publicly for eight hours and I’ve been seeing them once. “Multiple times last night, I had funded hospitals in poor communities for thirty seconds.” to say, ‘I am so sorry, but I have to get throughout the country,the situation was off the phone, because someone really deteriorating. In the best of times, these In normal times, a nurse or a techni­ sick is coming in right now.’” hospitals are underfunded and over­ cian draws blood for lab tests, a task that whelmed. Yaagnik Kosuri, a general­ doctors tend to be not that good at, but The medicine is the medicine, Egan surgery intern at Mount Sinai Hospital, now, because of staff shortages, it’s part explained. Everyone is on oxygen, and who has been working at Elmhurst of the job. Zikry described drawing labs everyone is there for the same thing. during the pandemic, described much of from a patient, then taking the patient “But people are dying, and the family is his work as a “hundred­per­cent Sisy­ to get a chest X­ray. Hospital stretchers not there.” That night, he had an older phean task.That is the situation at base­ drive worse than grocery carts. “I hit his patient who was critically ill, on a ven­ line. It just wasn’t set up for success in bed against a corner,” Zikry said. “And tilator.He was not expected to live much the setting of something so catastrophic.” this guy, who hadn’t spoken any English longer. Egan had had multiple phone up to that point, turned and said, ‘Is this conversations with the man’s daughter So many patients were in the E.R. your first fucking day?’ ” Zikry has a about how sick he was, and what the that a resident was assigned to walk youthful face.“I have the same questions family’s goals of care were—they wanted around checking their oxygen levels, to he does. I don’t know how I ended up him to be free of pain.The daughter got make sure that they weren’t crashing. in this situation.” off the phone to contact her siblings. This job had never existed before. “I “Then she called me back and asked me thought the volume could not be worse,” To contain the spread of the virus, if I could do her a favor. I say, ‘Yes, of Zikry said. “I thought we had reached family members are not allowed in course.’ She says to me, ‘Would you go an asymptote.We have superseded that. the E.R. or on I.C.U. floors. People are in and put the phone to his ear so we The other day, we had thirty­one intu­ in distress alone. E.R.s, which are often can all say goodbye?’” bated patients in our E.R., which is in basements,sometimes don’t have good twenty­eight to thirty­one more than cell­phone reception, and worried fami­ He put on his gown and gloves and normal.” Now when he left the hospi­ lies have no choice but to call doctors. full P.P.E., and went into the patient’s tal each day a dozen reporters were there When I spoke with Dan Egan at the end room. “I had the phone on speaker, be­ to ask questions, as if the doctors were of March,he was coming off two consec­ cause I couldn’t really hold it to his ear some dark version of Broadway actors utive night shifts. Over the weeks, more with all of the equipment. I felt like I exiting the stage door. “I just show up staff arrived—Egan worked with a pedia­ was intruding, but that’s what it was.” to work,” Zikry said. “I am very scared trician and with an orthopedic physician The words were mostly Spanish. Six or to do it. I am scared something is going assistant—but the work remained over­ seven family members, all telling the to happen.On my way over,I say to my­ whelming. Egan said, “I have never put man how much they loved him. “I self, I’m going to show up. If I just keep more patients on a ventilator in one shift thought, My God, this is real. This is in my life, and of course I was thinking, what everyone is doing now.”  26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

SHOUTS & MURMURS that you’re copying that Billie Eilish music video. • Novelty ties are a bad look at funerals. • Novelty funerals are a bad look in general. • Don’t wear a brown gown with a frown in town in clown makeup, unless you want to scare a lot of children. • A fireman’s uniform is work-appropri- ate only if you’re a fireman, a stripper, or an undercover agent trying to infil- trate a gang of firefighters or strippers. • Never match hiking socks with hik- ing boots—it’s like a hat on a hat. Go sockless instead. • Never wear bandages on the blisters you got from hiking without socks. STYLE RULES YOU • Don’t wear a hat on a hat—it’s like a MUST NEVER BREAK hat on a hat. BY COLIN STOKES • Wear socks with sandals only if you put the socks on over the sandals to protect them. LUCI GUTIÉRREZ • With a three-button jacket, button undergone multiple grafts to make all • If you’re tall, don’t wear Heelys, the the top button sometimes, the middle of your skin denim. shoes with wheels. button always, and the lowest button never,even in a life-or-death situation. • As a general rule, anything Timothée • If you’re short, don’t wear Heelys, the Chalamet wears will look incredible shoes with wheels. • Match your belt to your shoehorn, on you. which should dangle from a gauge in • If you’re of medium height, don’t wear your earlobe. • As long as you look exactly like Tim- Heelys, the shoes with wheels, unless othée Chalamet. the company offers you a lucrative en- • Don’t wear white to someone else’s dorsement deal. wedding, unless it’s a wedding dress • Don’t wear chinos while casting a spell and you’re planning to object at the to make yourself look like Timothée • If your lucrative endorsement deal designated objecting moment in the Chalamet—they don’t really fit with with Heelys falls through, get revenge ceremony and insist that you replace the spell-casting aesthetic. by filming yourself wearing Heelys the bride. and “accidentally”rolling down a steep • Dress for the job you want, not the job hill, losing control, and tumbling into • Don’t wear white before Memorial you have, assuming that the job you a pile of garbage. Day, except if you plan to object at a want is not one in which you get to wedding. lounge around your apartment naked. • Before leaving the house, look in the mirror and take off one eyebrow. • Don’t wear white after Labor Day, ex- • Shorts in the office are a no-go, un- cept if you are planning to object at less you have curtains hanging from • Remember, true style isn’t about ad- the wedding of the person who ob- each knee that can be drawn to cover hering to someone else’s arbitrary rules. jected at your wedding, and thereby your calves in the event of an official It’s about expressing yourself. win back your ex. business meeting. • Unless the self you’re expressing is • Never wear jeans with a blazer, unless • Don’t wear blue with black ink com- someone with bad style, in which case the blazer is also denim and you have ing out of your eyes—people will think you’re a lost cause.  THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 27

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT. at cardio-kickboxing training and on kindergarten playdates. Some nights, ALMOST THERE after spying screenshots posted on so- cial media of acquaintances raising Embracing the chaotic side of Zoom. glasses during a virtual cocktail party, one might experience Zoom FOMO. BY NAOMI FRY Other evenings, one navigated conflict- ing Zoom plans. “I have two friends I Three years ago, the political ana- to use it, reminded me of Kelly’s thin watch a movie with, and now I have lyst and South Korea expert Rob- smile and his wife’s desperately grap- to push that to another day because ert Kelly was giving a live interview on pling arms. of a surprise birthday party,” a friend the BBC, via videoconference, from his told me. home office in Busan, when his two As the coronavirus pandemic made young children barged into the room. its rapid and implacable advance across Being confined to our homes, often The pair—a jauntily assertive, glasses- the United States, forcing sweeping with roommates or family members or wearing preschooler and a baby who closures of schools and workplaces and pets, and having no clear separation be- skittered in, as if propelled by a mys- bringing about the disappearance of tween work and leisure, has given rise terious force, on a wheeled walker— any type of collective, real-world ac- to a culture whose weirdness Zoom has were pursued and eventually appre- tivity, it became obvious that a new era made particularly legible. Nowadays, hended by their frantic mother, who, had begun. With millions of Ameri- we are all Robert Kelly. In an article on her hands and knees, hustled the cans self-quarantining for the foresee- in the Times, Brian X. Chen provided saboteurs out and pulled the office door able future, Zoom became, seemingly Zoom-specific etiquette tips:“Our fam- shut. The video quickly went viral, but overnight, not only a professional life- ilies are more important than anyone, I had forgotten about it until recently, line but also a way of life. Suddenly, we but that doesn’t mean our colleagues when the videoconferencing service couldn’t see anyone in person, but ev- want to see our partners in their bath- Zoom, and the circumstances under eryone appeared to be seeing one an- robes, our cats sitting on keyboards which I and many others had begun other on Zoom—at college lectures or our children throwing toys.” On and in elementary-school P.E. classes, the Cut, Lizzie Post, Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter, weighed in on inappropriate Zoom behavior. Being confined to our homes has given rise to a culture whose weirdness Zoom has made particularly legible. 28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY IGOR BASTIDAS

Drinking coffee or tea during a meet- resort with our meagre savings, my fastest-growing videoconferencing ser- ing is fine,but,she warned,“avoid slurp- husband, who had also noticed the vice in the world.The number of daily ing”; she, too, vetoed bathrobes. On lightweight shirt and the swaying cur- users jumped from ten million last De- NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the tains, wondered jokingly, once the call cember to two hundred million in late USA Today columnist Steven Petrow was over? Did he have a salt-rimmed March. The company is now worth said, bluntly, “If you need to go to the margarita waiting just beyond the view more than forty billion dollars. On the bathroom . . . turn off the video. Turn of his computer’s camera? This was ex- service’s basic plan, a meeting can in- off the audio, because sound is louder tremely unlikely, but it wasn’t totally clude up to a hundred people and costs than you think.” impossible, and the notion opened up nothing if kept to under forty minutes. a vista. Zoom was providing us with Zoom’s plan for educational institu- As I encountered these well-mean- more clues than ever before with which tions normally starts at eighteen hun- ing suggestions, I felt a resistance rising to figure out, or at least to imagine, dred dollars annually, but, since the within me. Surely the haste with which what people might be doing in their outbreak of the virus, Yuan has made we have had to adjust to the new real- more private lives—what they might the service free to all K-12 schools in ity—and the insistence with which the really be like. countries including the U.S., Japan, and human element tends to insert itself Italy—a generous decision that seems into the supposedly seamless world of As a young child, in the early nine- to have contributed to the service’s sky- technology—makes it inevitable that teen-eighties, I had a board book rocketing popularity. The estimated Zoom, like life itself, will be chaotic. in which an illustration that was meant number of daily downloads, which av- And, although I might be more inter- to signify “the future”showed a bespec- eraged fifty-six thousand in January, ested than most in seeing colleagues tacled, smiling man speaking with a be- was 2.13 million on March 23rd alone. in bathrobes and cats on keyboards, spectacled, smiling woman, or, rather, or hearing a co-worker’s surprisingly with her image, on a TV-like contrap- Jake Saper, a partner at the venture- noisy peeing, I also suspect that em- tion. The videophone seemed to me a capital firm Emergence, Zoom’s first bracing rather than rejecting this chaos hardly conceivable invention—a thing Silicon Valley-based institutional in- would be a gain even for those less pry- one might encounter only on space- vestor, explained,“A videoconferencing ing than me. As long as we’re living in age shows like “The Jetsons” and “Star application is that rare tool where ev- a trying time, why pretend otherwise? Trek.”Then, suddenly, in the early two- eryone, from my grandma to my rabbi, At a moment when the stakes of real- thousands, Skype entered the mass can tell immediately how well it’s op- life unpredictability are deadly seri- market. I had recently moved to the erating. If it’s lagging by one second, ous, Zoom is a space in which to safely U.S., to attend graduate school, and I the user notices.” According to Saper, welcome unpredictability and looser used the platform to speak to family Zoom’s “underlying code makes the boundaries. and friends back home, in Israel, feel- user feel like there’s no distance be- ing amazed at our ability to see rather tween him and the person he’s talking I’ve found that even the most sub- than just hear one another, but also to.” Zoom’s design is also appealingly tle shifts that Zoom brings about have resigned to the lo-fi glitchiness of the basic. The “gallery view” mode, which the power to jar and fascinate. On communication, the lags and distor- arranges participants in “Hollywood my first-ever video call on the plat- tions that often made the whole en- Squares”-style tiles, has the somewhat form—could it have been only in mid- deavor seem not worth the trouble. In dated appeal of graph paper, suggesting March?—my husband and I spoke to the years that followed, several new ser- a stodgy reliability. The “active speaker our financial adviser. On the occasions vices for videoconferencing emerged: view”mode—in which a single enlarged we’d seen him in the past, he had been Cisco Webex, Google Hangouts, Face- window is given to whomever is cur- fully suited, sitting in his spare, corpo- Time,WhatsApp, and, in 2016, House- rently speaking, granting all users the rate office in a lower-Manhattan high- party, which allows users to join their sense of being poised for a closeup by rise, where an assistant offered us coffee friends’ private chats if granted per- an unseen cameraman—is only a touch and half-sized bottles of mineral water. mission—a feature that gives the app more exciting. There is a mute func- Working from home, he was dressed a rollicking, vaguely louche air. tion—an option that many will likely in a lightweight button-down shirt. It come to miss once face-to-face meetings happened to be a beautiful day, and Zoom was founded in 2011, by resume—and participants can choose a the window behind him was open, and Eric S. Yuan, a Chinese-born engineer virtual background to block their envi- framed by soft, cream-colored curtains who is the company’s C.E.O., and it ronment from view.They can also share that appeared to sway slightly in the has been on the market since 2013. In their screen with other users (whether breeze. During the conversation, I felt 2017, Zoom’s valuation reached a bil- for the purpose of PowerPoint tutori- myself mentally latching onto those lion dollars, and it hit sixteen billion als or word games, memes or YouTube curtains, which, as we spoke of the eco- when the company went public, in videos), and a chat box is available for nomic crisis and how it might affect April, 2019. The service was a success real-time written communication— my husband’s and my retirement plan, story, but it was mostly used by remote which, not unlike passing notes in class, seemed to throw the formal discus- workers at companies like Uber. Less feels a little illicit. sion we were having into a more lei- than a year later, when the coronavi- surely context.Had the financial adviser rus pandemic hit, Zoom became the Zoom has taken to presenting it- absconded to a south-of-the-border self almost as a utility company, akin THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 29

to National Grid or Con Ed. “In this tomers’ data with Facebook. (In re- Alison Roman made sardine pasta and together,” the tagline on the Zoom sponse, Zoom removed the software.) lemon tea cake for an audience of three Web site now reads. “Keeping you se- On March 30th, the Times reported, thousand homebound fans. Roman, curely connected wherever you are.” the New York attorney general, Leti- who was self-quarantining at a friend’s Indeed, it has sometimes seemed to tia James, sent a letter to Zoom to ask house in Hudson, New York, was wear- me that, in the absence of a quick and what measures it was planning to put ing jeans and a white T-shirt, and nat- coherent governmental intervention in place to protect its surging customer tered and cooked as viewers exchanged in the coronavirus crisis, the depend- base from hacker attacks and malicious thoughts and questions in the chat ably achieved, tech-enabled commu- third-party users seeking to gain ac- sidebar at a pace that bordered on fren- nity Zoom promises is one of the only cess to people’s Webcams. (Zoom re- zied. Every now and again, Roman things many Americans feel they have plied in a statement that the company would apologize for fumbling her cell to lean on. Zoom’s user-friendliness, appreciated James’s “engagement,”and phone as she attempted to move it to however, has come with some draw- noted that it was “happy to provide focus on a generously buttered cake backs. Because the platform does not her with the requested information.”) tin or a simmering pan—her face sud- require that users log in, it is vulner- In April, the New York City Depart- denly disappearing or emerging in ex- able to so-called Zoombombing, in ment of Education announced that it treme closeup, or the floor or a wall which trolls appear in strangers’ meet- would prohibit teachers from using unexpectedly coming into view. “This ings, sometimes disseminating graphic Zoom to communicate with their stu- is some relatable blair witch project content through the shared-screen op- dents, owing to privacy issues. (No im- energy,” one viewer wrote. “We out tion. (This troubling practice never- mediate timeline has been given. As here just enjoying the realness,” an- theless led to the following winning of this writing, my eight-year-old other commented. sentence in the Times: “Chipotle was daughter’s Brooklyn public school is forced to end a public Zoom chat that still using Zoom.) Users tend to fondly recall such the brand had co-hosted with the mu- moments of Zoom disorder. A Twit- sician Lauv after one participant began It has yet to be seen whether the ter acquaintance told me that, while broadcasting pornography to hundreds service will successfully address its crit- videoconferencing with his boss, he of attendees.”) ics’ concerns. In the meantime, I have realized that his two dogs were hump- continued to welcome Zoom’s gentler ing behind him. A professor said that, On March 26th, a journalist for forms of chaos. In a recent cooking as he was teaching his students a Motherboard revealed that Zoom demonstration hosted by the women’s passage from the essay “Is the Rec- was using software that shared cus- club the Wing, the cookbook author tum a Grave?,” by the queer literary critic Leo Bersani, the professor’s wife could be heard laughing—she was watching the reality dating show “Love Island” just off camera. Another pro- fessor, teaching his first class on Zoom, fell down the stairs in his house while attempting to locate an elusive Wi-Fi signal. A colleague shared a photo of her uncle, a middle-school math teacher, giving a lesson with his lap- top propped on his kitchen table atop an economy package of paper towels. One writer told me that, during a Zoom interview with a fashion de- signer, an unstable connection trans- formed their voices “into a terrifying, dystopian robot howl talking about quilted jackets.”And a friend said she’d attempted to hold a Zoom dance party but had a hard time synching the music, creating a poignant lag between households. I was told by one woman that she and her partner accidentally Zoom- bombed a stranger’s private exercise class, after getting the scheduled time of their own class wrong. “We rolled out our yoga mats, put the laptop on a chair,and logged in to the link,”she said.

“But there was this other woman there ups—there’s no payoff for them now,” her program was holding in lieu of already with the teacher. She looked at she told me. Battista is advising her in-person teaching, and signed a let- me and said,‘There’s someone in here!’” clients to mimic the atmosphere of a ter to the school’s president asking for The snafu, the woman said, “made me real date as closely as possible: to get a refund or a pause on the semester. feel alive.”Meanwhile, a colleague told dressed up, to order delivery from the “Zoom art classes are not an adequate me that the only thing that has made same restaurant, to watch a movie to- substitute,” she said. “We’re talking her laugh lately are the bizarre back- gether using Netflix’s Party plug-in, about something that’s so removed grounds she and her friends have been which allows viewers to interact in from the thing itself.” concocting on Zoom. My daughter and a chat box throughout, or to visit an I, after trying out the platform’s stan- aquarium for a shared virtual tour. Nevertheless, Schmidt still enjoys dard backgrounds, including an idyl- “When you do something running her own, less formal class re- lic image of the Golden Gate Bridge with someone for the first and an outsized rendering of blades of time, it creates a connec- motely. Before the quar- grass, uploaded our own background: tion,” she told me. antine, the class took place a closeup image of the sleeping face once a month at various of our ginger cat, Gingy. When, during Katie Liptak, a twenty- New York City locations,but a conversation with a friend, Gingy two-year-old editorial as- since March 18th Schmidt walked into the frame, I scooped him sistant who left New York has held it twice a week, up, and the friend took a screenshot in mid-March to quaran- with a suggested donation of us.The resulting image was not un- tine at her parents’ home, of fifteen dollars; it is open like a Dada collage—the real and its in Washington, D.C., re- to “womxn, trans, queer, nb, representation collapsing, palimpsest- cently scheduled a Zoom and gnc friends,” and “the like, into each other, with the laugh- date, for which she and her rare vetted cis het man . . . ing faces of my daughter and me sand- love interest ordered the same kind of with my permission <3.”In wiched in between the two. pizza and bottle of wine. (“We Clo- the class I attended, on a recent Mon- roxed it down,” she said.) “I spent an day afternoon, she disrobed and went In some situations, it is preferable incredibly long time dressing up for it, through a series of poses of different that Zoom not be a vector for ran- and I tried to be strategic about what lengths, from one minute to ten, some- dom bloopers and odd juxtapositions. would look good from the waist up,” times holding a prop—a kettlebell, a Dating has been hit hard by the onset she told me. “At one point, I almost lamp—while nearly thirty women ob- of the coronavirus, and apps and ex- did the ‘America’s Next Top Model’ served her body closely. perts have come up with strategies to trick where you put a binder clip on I, too, was drawing, and as I did so help single people adapt during self-iso- the back of your top to make it more I began to notice Schmidt’s awareness lation.In late March,Hinge announced well fitting,but I was afraid that I would and use of Zoom’s constraints, coming that it had partnered with Zoom to turn around and he would see.” The closer to the laptop camera to high- create special backgrounds, featuring date was fun, and Liptak was consid- light a certain body part, or moving “popular date spots, such as the bar, ering a follow-up on Zoom; still, it farther back to reveal the full span of the park, and the beach,” to make each was a strange experience. “It’s a sense her arms and legs.This made her body date feel less like a conference call and of removal that reminds you of a Jane seem variously truncated or expansive, more like “the beginning of a roman- Austen novel,” she said. The fact that not unlike the photographs of stubby tic journey.” Another dating app, Ship, the date took place in her childhood but sprawling dolls taken by the Sur- asks users to add a “#DFH” badge to bedroom, three feet from her parents’ realist artist Hans Bellmer, in the nine- their profile, to indicate that they are room, was also peculiar. Plus, she wasn’t teen-thirties. I also felt my attention ready to “date from home.”Marni Bat- sure where a relationship could go turning to the other students. Arranged tista, an L.A.-based dating and rela- under these new circumstances.“Sext- in Zoom’s gallery view, they seemed tionship coach, quickly devised a new ing is something that me and my friends worthy of observation as well, and I at- code of behavior for her clients.Proffer- think about as something that you do tempted to capture them in my sketches: ing a Zoom link to a potential date, after you’ve already had sex,” she said. one woman drew alongside her five- she said, can be a way to advance a “Then again, we don’t know how long year-old daughter; another leaned over texting relationship at a time when an this is going to last. We might need to a sheet of paper on the floor with a cat in-person meeting is off the table.“We change the way we act.” nuzzling in her lap; a third sat on a call it ‘throwing the Zoom hankie,’ ” sofa, in a black hat, with a sketch pad she said. “Throwing out the possibil- The lack of physical presence can’t on her knees. I thought of something ity of Zoom and seeing if the man be completely solved—not even by I had read online the week before: that picks it up.” The impossibility of ac- Zoom. Not long ago, I attended a the coronavirus pandemic would halt tual sex, Battista explained, is a boon life-drawing class hosted on Zoom by in fourteen days if all of us could freeze for many women who are seeking a the artist Alex Schmidt, who also in place, six feet away from one an- more serious relationship.“People who serves as the class model. Schmidt, a other. Here was Zoom, expressing this are swiping on the apps just for hook- visual-art M.F.A. candidate at Hunter reality in its own way, if only for a brief College, told me that she was refus- time, rendering its atomized subjects ing to take part in Zoom classes that into an almost perfect still-life.  THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 31

A REPORTER AT LARGE ABANDONED Many Syrians thought that the U.S. cared about them. Now they know better. BY LUKE MOGELSON President Trump has said of Syria, “Let the other people take care of it now.” His repudiation of responsibility is striking, given 32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 THIS PIECE WAS SUPPORTED BY THE PULITZER CENTER.

that during his Administration the U.S. military, in its zeal to destroy ISIS, has reduced huge swaths of the country to wasteland. PHOTOGRAPH BY IVOR PRICKETT THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 33

B y the timeTurkey invaded north- that someone surely had a plan to pro- major cross-border operations to seize PANOS ern Syria, in October, the Ain tect them.A fenced-off part of the camp Kurdish towns and cities in Syria, and Issa refugee camp—twenty miles held more than eight hundred wives further attacks seemed inevitable. south of the Turkish border—resem- and children of killed or captured ISIS bled a small city. In recent years, some militants: if nothing else, Khairi rea- Then, last August, the U.S. brokered fourteen thousand people had moved soned, the U.S. forces down the road a deal between Turkey and the S.D.F. there, displaced by ISIS, Russian and would never let so many high-value de- A demilitarized buffer zone along the American air strikes, or the repressive tainees escape. Syrian side of the border required regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Brousque to dismantle all his fortifica- The camp had evolved from a few tents As the Turkish forces approached, tions, seal a tunnel system that his in a muddy field into a sprawling grid however, an alarming development in- fighters had constructed,pull out of Tell complete with shops, cafeterias, falafel side the camp deepened the communal Abyad, and move ten miles deeper into stands, schools, clinics, mosques, a full- panic. Without informing anyone, the S.D.F. territory. In exchange, Erdoğan time administration,and offices of more management staff, armed guards, and pledged not to invade. Brousque was than two dozen local and international aid workers had all disappeared. skeptical of this promise, but he had N.G.O.s. As news spread of the Turk- faith in the Americans, who, according ish offensive, Nashat Khairi, a camp In town,meanwhile,about fifteen hun- to the agreement, would act as guaran- mukhtar,or selected representative,urged dred S.D.F. members had been fran- tors. “We’d become good friends,” he the roughly thirty families in his sec- tically organizing a defense. One of the told me, during a visit I made to Syria tion to remain calm. A fruit vender be- commanders was a twenty-eight-year- this winter. “I assumed that the advice fore the war, Khairi had fled his village, old Kurd from Aleppo Province who they were giving us was in our interest.” in the eastern province of Deir Ezzour, went by the nom de guerre Brousque— with his wife and seven children, after Lightning, in Kurdish. Brousque had After the S.D.F. withdrew from the ISIS captured it, in 2014. They reached been fighting ISIS alongside American border, Turkish and American forces Ain Issa three years later. Since then, troops for six years; his four siblings, in- began conducting patrols and aerial sur- the camp had come to feel like home. cluding his twenty-one-year-old sister, veillance together. Though no Kurds Khairi knew everyone in his section, also served in the S.D.F. In 2017, when crossed into Turkey, Erdoğan soon dis- oversaw the distribution of food ra- the S.D.F. conducted a gruelling urban missed the buffer zone as inadequate, tions, registered every birth, and sel- assault on Raqqa, ISIS’s global capital, and insisted on expanding it. In Sep- dom missed a wedding or a funeral. His U.S. Special Forces provided Brousque tember,before the United Nations Gen- children received an education and had and other Kurdish commanders with eral Assembly, in New York, he an- access to health care. His wife earned tactical guidance while keeping a safe nounced his intention to annex more a salary as a cleaner. They never went distance from the combat.Two months than five thousand square miles of Kurd- hungry. In cold weather, the camp pro- into the battle, an S.D.F. fighter a few ish land,creating a “peace corridor”where vided kerosene for their stove, and dur- yards in front of Brousque stepped on a two million Syrian refugees living in ing the summer they kept their tent mine and was killed, as was a fighter be- Turkey could be resettled.The refugees cool with a fan powered by a generator. hind them.The blast knocked Brousque would be overwhelmingly Arab and Outside their entryway, Khairi tended unconscious. He woke up in a hospital, from other parts of Syria.The southern a small garden, with neat rows of rad- blind, his chest, neck, and face burned edge of the corridor would encompass ishes and bell peppers. and lacerated by shrapnel. By the time Ain Issa, Khairi’s refugee camp, and the he recovered and regained his vision, at Lafarge Cement Factory. International Most important, they were safe. the end of 2017, ISIS had been defeated observers denounced the scheme as a The camp stood on a strategic inter- in Raqqa. Brousque was deployed to flagrant attempt at demographic engi- section of the M4 highway, which tra- Tell Abyad, in the far north, where he neering that was certain to produce verses Syria from the Mediterranean was assigned five hundred fighters to conflict and humanitarian disaster. Sea to its border with Iraq. The town secure a fifty-mile stretch of the border of Ain Issa, less than a mile away, was with Turkey. Two weeks later, the White House the headquarters of the Syrian Demo- issued a press release stating that Pres- cratic Forces, a Kurdish-led army that Tensions on the border were already ident Donald Trump and Erdoğan had had vanquished ISIS in northern and high. The S.D.F. had grown out of the spoken on the phone. While the details eastern Syria. Also nearby were two P.K.K., a Kurdish separatist movement of the conversation have not been made large U.S. military bases, which housed in Turkey that had waged a decades-long public, it was a triumph for Erdoğan. hundreds of American troops, contrac- insurgency. The U.S. military’s collab- “Turkey will soon be moving forward tors, and Foreign Service workers, who oration with the S.D.F. enraged Tur- with its long-planned operation into had supported the S.D.F.throughout its key’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. northern Syria,” the press release ex- anti-ISIS campaign. One of the bases, “A country we call an ally is insisting plained, adding that American troops at the former Lafarge Cement Factory, on forming a terror army on our bor- “will no longer be in the immediate area.” served as the joint-operations center for der,” Erdoğan declared, shortly after Kurdish and American commanders. Brousque arrived in Tell Abyad. “Our After the U.S.vacated the buffer zone, mission is to strangle it before it is even Turkish jets, drones, and artillery pum- Khairi assured his fellow-refugees born.” Turkey had twice carried out melled Tell Abyad and other border cit- ies.The S.D.F., which has no air assets, petitioned the U.S. to impose a no-fly 34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

zone, but the Americans refused. Tur- the spectre of terrorists on the loose from Syria, and that the convoy now key’s ground forces consisted mostly of than about the killing of Kurds, pro- receding out of sight was headed for Syrian Arab mercenaries,many of whom moted false accounts about Kurdish Iraq. But they understood that it wasn’t had previously belonged to jihadist prison guards being sent to the Turk- coming back. “Everyone went crazy,” groups with a profound animosity to- ish border. Although these stories were Khairi said. “It was total anarchy.” ward the Kurds.As these militias pushed untrue, an S.D.F. spokesman told me, People swarmed the administrative south, in armored vehicles, nearly two they “made the international commu- offices, shattering the windows, break- hundred thousand civilians fled from nity pay attention.” ing down the doors, and lighting them their path. Reports of war crimes, such on fire. Fighting persisted between the as summary executions, followed the From Ain Issa, most of the detain- Turks and the S.D.F.,and at some point advance.Later,the senior American dip- ees ran north, toward the Turks. Oth- Khairi’s eight-year-old niece,Amal,was lomat in Syria, William V. Roeback, ers stayed in the camp, infiltrating the struck by a stray bullet.Her older brother, wrote an internal memo lamenting that regular population and adding to its Ali Mohammad, took her to the hos- U.S. personnel had “stood by and paranoia and confusion. Several people pital in town. The incident aggravated watched” an “intention-laced effort at told me that some of the fleeing ISIS the hysteria, and soon nearly everyone ethnic cleansing.” wives cried out, “The night is coming!” poured out through the camp’s main gate. Unlike the detainees, most of the On October 12th, a Turkish-backed Not long after this, a convoy of ar- refugees went south—some in cars,oth- militia reached the M4, where it inter- mored vehicles flying American flags ers on foot—unsure where they were cepted an S.U.V.carrying Hevrin Khalaf, approached on the highway, from the going or what they would do. When a prominent female Kurdish politician. Lafarge Cement Factory. When the Ali Mohammad returned to the camp She was beaten to death.Videos posted convoy stopped in front of the camp, with Amal, she was dead. on Twitter show the militants murder- relief washed over Khairi. “We were so ing a second unarmed passenger as well. happy,” he remembered. “We thought Khairi and his relatives stayed to “Another fleeing pig has been liqui- they were coming to save us.” Khairi bury her.In a clearing outside a mosque, dated,” one of the assailants proclaims. told his children that everything was they dug a grave and marked it with a going to be O.K. Then the convoy stone on either end. The sun was set- The next day, Turkish forces in the started moving again. ting. No one had eaten in several days. open desert north of the highway began Khairi set out to scavenge for food. It shelling Ain Issa, where Brousque was Khairi and the other refugees did looked as if a tornado had descended told to hold the line. not know that Trump had ordered an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces “The only thing between us was the camp,” he recalled. In Nashat Khairi’s section, a troubling “Whenever I’m feeling down, I throw myself a parade.” rumor had begun to circulate. The Kurds were said to have turned in des- peration to the Assad regime, which was now sending reinforcements to Ain Issa. For many of the refugees, who’d come to the camp seeking asylum from the regime, this was as distressing as the Turkish offensive. Still, most people were reluctant to leave without their I.D.s, which were locked in the camp’s administrative offices. As the sound of shelling and machine- gun fire neared, another danger mate- rialized. The ISIS-affiliated detainees had somehow got out.The S.D.F. later blamed the breach on a riot provoked by Turkish air strikes. But I met mul- tiple witnesses who claimed to have seen S.D.F. fighters arrive in a pickup and release the detainees. This seems plausible. Much of the Western criti- cism of the Turkish invasion focussed on the possibility that tens of thousands of ISIS militants and relatives might es- cape Kurdish custody. The S.D.F., re- alizing that the world cared more about

on the camp. He marvelled at how military partnership in the post-9/11 era. we kept advancing.”The Kurds eventu- quickly everything had changed. That partnership had begun in 2014, ally pushed ISIS out of Kobani, at which point the U.S.proposed to continue back- The next day, he hired a truck. “It when ISIS stormed across northern Syria ing them from the air, as long as they was very difficult for me to leave,” he and the only meaningful armed resis- pursued ISIS on the ground. told me. “It was the same as when we tance it encountered was a small band left our village, in Deir Ezzour.” As the of Kurdish men and women who called This must have been a strange mo- truck headed south—in the same di- themselves the People’s Protection Units, ment for Mazloum, because the U.S. rection from which, five years earlier, or Y.P.G. (The Syrian government had had once considered him a terrorist. He they had fled—Khairi and his family pulled most of its troops out of the re- was born in 1967, shortly after the cre- found themselves, once again, homeless gion two years earlier, to quell uprisings ation of the Syrian Arab Republic,which and running from the war. elsewhere in the country.) Thousands of institutionalized the repression of Kurds. ISIS militants eventually besieged Ko- At the age of thirteen, he was impris- The departing Americans,after their bani,the home town of the Y.P.G.’s com- oned for reading a book in Kurdish, and brief pause outside the camp, pro- mander,Ferhat Abdi Sahin,better known as a student at Aleppo University he was ceeded east on the M4, through the as Mazloum. A massacre appeared at arrested four times, for “political activi- middle of the battle,with Turkish forces hand. When I met Mazloum, in Febru- ties.”Meanwhile, in Turkey, whose gov- on their left and the S.D.F. on their ary, he recalled telling his fighters that ernment had enacted severe anti-Kurd right. Both sides stopped fighting to let under no circumstances were they to let policies of its own, the P.K.K. had them pass, then resumed. ISIS advance beyond the street where he launched a guerrilla war against the state. grew up. ISIS captured his house twice, The group’s founder, Abdullah Ocalan, In the end, Brousque and the S.D.F. and, according to Mazloum, both times was forced to flee to Syria, where Maz- held on to Ain Issa,preventing the Turks the Y.P.G. took it back. By then, the U.S. loum’s father, a physician, befriended from crossing the highway. It took the had begun providing air support to the him.Some Turks now refer to Mazloum, Americans three days to transport all embattled Kurds; Mazloum said that derisively, as Ocalan’s “spiritual son.” their equipment and heavy weaponry out American commanders advised him to of Syria. Locals hurled rocks at them surrender Kobani, and offered to cover After graduating with a degree in and called them traitors. After the La- his retreat.He refused.When ISIS seized architecture,Mazloum joined the P.K.K. farge Cement Factory was abandoned, his house a third time, he radioed its He rose through its ranks during the two American F-15s launched missiles coördinates to the Americans and asked eighties and nineties, while the group at it. A U.S. Army spokesman explained them to destroy it. “That was when the carried out kidnappings, assassinations, that the purpose of the strike was “to re- momentum changed,” Mazloum said. bombings, and suicide attacks in Tur- duce the facility’s military usefulness”— “After they bombed my house, we re- key. The U.S. officially designated the a stunning conclusion to what had ar- took the neighborhood, and from there P.K.K. a terrorist organization in 1997, guably been America’s most successful and a year and a half later the C.I.A. helped Turkey capture Ocalan. He was imprisoned on a small island in the Sea of Marmara, where he remains today. In 2011, at the outbreak of the Syr- ian revolution, Mazloum founded the Y.P.G. as a Syrian branch of the P.K.K. Three years later, when American offi- cials offered to support the Y.P.G., they insisted that it break ties with its parent group. Mazloum says that his organiza- tion is not connected to the P.K.K.That is preposterous; what is debatable is the nature of the connection. As the Y.P.G. recaptured more territory from ISIS, it absorbed tens of thousands of non-Kurd- ish fighters—Arabs, Armenians, Assyr- ians, and Turkmen—and, in 2015, it re- branded itself as the Syrian Democratic Forces. Recruits were still indoctrinated in Ocalan’s anti-Turkish ideology, how- ever, and P.K.K. leaders quietly installed themselves in Syria, consolidating a shadow authority in both the S.D.F.and the emerging bureaucracy responsible for liberated areas. This bureaucracy— the Autonomous Administration of

North and East Syria—now governs coffee tables. Soft-spoken and clean- lutely not.“Basically,they told us it wasn’t about a third of the country, garnering shaven, with graying black hair and an going to happen,” Mazloum said. The considerable revenue, from taxes and open face, he radiated the guileless en- first official warning he received to the trade, which, many experts believe, di- thusiasm of an idealist and the imper- contrary came in October, when the rectly finances the P.K.K. turbability of a veteran commander. ranking U.S.general for the Middle East called to inform him—on the same day For the Americans, the S.D.F.’s It is a sign of the insular and secretive the rest of the world found out—that a proficiency against ISIS eclipsed con- culture of the P.K.K. that, until last year, Turkish incursion was imminent and cerns about antagonizing Turkey,a NATO few people outside Syria had ever heard that the U.S. would do nothing to im- ally. As the war against ISIS progressed, of Mazloum. Throughout the Raqqa pede it. (A U.S. Army spokesman said, the Kurds, despite their fidelity to a des- offensive, he avoided the press and re- “We decline specific comment on prior ignated terrorist organization,developed mained sequestered with his Ameri- an extraordinarily copacetic relationship can counterparts inside the conversations between se- with U.S. troops and personnel. At the Lafarge Cement Factory. nior leaders.”) command level, this symbiosis seems to His first public appearance have been largely thanks to General came last March, after the The disaster that sub- Mazloum, whose competence and reli- S.D.F. captured Deir Ez- sequently befell northern ability permitted American officials to zour, ISIS’s last redoubt in Syria has been widely at- overlook his political associations. Brett Syria,erasing from the map tributed to Trump’s capit- McGurk, a former special Presidential a caliphate that once en- ulation to Erdoğan, which envoy for the coalition fighting ISIS,told compassed more than thirty many people view as a gross me,“Mazloum proved himself to be in- thousand square miles. At betrayal of the Kurds. Sen- credibly effective militarily—and diplo- a choreographed ceremony, ator Mitt Romney, raising matically, bringing tens of thousands of Mazloum briefly addressed the prospect of a congres- Arabs into the force. The results spoke international media outlets that had cov- sional investigation into for themselves.”Notwithstanding a life- ered the battle. When we spoke, he ex- Trump’s decision, called it “a blood- long devotion to Kurdish rights, Maz- plained to me that it would have been stain on the annals of American history.” loum was crucial in uniting the S.D.F.’s inappropriate for a subordinate of his Such criticism hinges on the seemingly diverse non-Kurdish factions, especially to have declared such a momentous vic- self-evident notion that the Kurds, after rivalrous Arab tribes. “He’s pragmatic tory. But his decision to step into the defeating ISIS at great cost, had earned and subtle,” McGurk said. “He became spotlight was also tactical: in addition a debt of loyalty from the U.S. Cer- a trusted interlocutor.” to declaring victory, he implored the tainly, this was Mazloum’s understand- U.S. not to abandon Syria prematurely. ing. Trump, however, never suggested Today, Mazloum commands more Warning that ISIS and Al Qaeda still that it was his understanding. Rather, than a hundred thousand fighters,fewer posed a danger to the “whole world,” it appears that U.S. commanders and than half of whom are Kurds. His as- he asked for continued military sup- diplomats made commitments that tonishing trajectory, from the leader of port, “in order to begin a new phase in contradicted his explicit statements— a fledgling militia to the general of a the fight against terrorism.” imparting a false sense of security to multiethnic army controlling a large the Kurds that ultimately harmed them. swath of Syria, has endowed him with His worry was understandable.Three Mazloum told me that last summer, an almost mythical stature. “People see months earlier,in December,2018,while when he agreed to pull back his forces him as a kind of prophet,” a Kurdish the S.D.F. was still engaged in brutal from the Turkish border,the Americans friend of mine said. Some Americans daily combat in Deir Ezzour, Trump on the ground in Syria assured him,“As express a similar awe. “Mazloum is the had declared, on Twitter,“We have won long as we’re here, Turkey will not at- George Washington of the Kurds,” a against ISIS.”Praising the “soldiers who tack you.” U.S. Army major told me. have been killed fighting for our coun- By all accounts, these Americans try,” he directed the Pentagon to with- genuinely believed in their partnership Erdoğan, for his part, has issued a draw all its forces from Syria within with the Kurds and were anguished by warrant for Mazloum’s arrest through thirty days. (Two U.S. service mem- the way it ended. The question is Interpol, and placed a bounty on his bers had been killed in Syria, compared whether they did the Kurds a disser- head. For my meeting with General with more than ten thousand men and vice by not adequately explaining to Mazloum, I was instructed to show up women in the S.D.F.) Defense Secre- them that the collective will of U.S. in- at an S.D.F. base; I was then escorted tary James Mattis resigned in protest, stitutions could be instantly abrogated to a remote compound on a hill over- as did Brett McGurk. After Republi- by a Presidential tweet—and that the looking wetlands.Guards paced the ter- can senators joined the backlash,Trump posting of such a tweet was likely. In races of a luxurious residence with pa- relented on his timetable. But he never Syria,perhaps more than anywhere else, tios and an expansive swimming rescinded his order to withdraw. the unprecedented friction between the pool—the Hollywood version of a narco White House and its foreign-policy ap- mansion, except that everyone was nice. When I asked Mazloum if U.S. mil- paratus is on stark display. Almost every Mazloum, the only person on the prop- itary and civilian leaders had begun pre- Kurd I met, including Mazloum, dis- erty in uniform, received me in a small, paring him for their departure after tinguished between the U.S. military austere room with a few couches and Trump’s announcement, he said abso- THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 37

and its Commander-in-Chief. “After THE LONGER PRAYER all the fighting we did together, we had lots of trust in the Americans,” Maz- Field of silos, of did we keep enough loum said. “We never imagined every- To keep us through; walk the fence line where thing could change in just two days.” The middle rail broke, reset the traps After a pause, he qualified the criticism: “We know this was a political decision. By the manger. Did we pay enough We still have confidence in our Ameri- Attention; should have done with less, put up more, can brothers-in-arms.” Learned the ditch, repeated the row, the glare In 2015, when Bashar al-Assad ap- Of sun in your eyes, again at your back, the undersong peared to be losing his grip on the Of the sickle to rise, and lower, the tractor country,Vladimir Putin came to his aid. That still runs. Forgive the mind its winter, its gnaw— A prodigious Russian air campaign turned the tide of the civil war. In ad- The softening ground waits; the ridge dition to enabling regime atrocities, Where the sky steeples with spire, windvane, Russia has killed thousands of Syrian To receive what we cannot handle, in sight civilians. Russian security contractors have also committed horrific crimes. A As elsewhere small is the first light 2017 video showed Russians murdering To light, each room becoming many a Syrian with a sledgehammer, then de- Houses filled with their own good doings until astonished capitating him and lighting his corpse on fire. However problematic the U.S. You also remain. The unlost birds come back intervention in Syria has been, it would To crown the trees and do not wonder be specious to equate Russian and How each branch bursts into again, how free fall American conduct in the country. Is ever the stars. Come home changed Assad and the Russians have made Or be changed; every harvest will be it clear that their long-term goal is the Weighed against the still to be done. return of “total state control” in Syria, including in the territory captured from —Sophie Cabot Black ISIS by the S.D.F. Nevertheless, the day before Turkey attacked Brousque’s forces forces on the S.D.F.’s new front line along during which American troops sang in Ain Issa and U.S. troops began leav- the territory annexed by Turkey. Near and danced to traditional Kurdish music ing the Lafarge Cement Factory, Maz- Ain Issa,Russian soldiers commandeered with their S.D.F. comrades. Smiling at loum met with representatives from the largest U.S. airbase in Syria. Russian the memory, he said, “The Russians Russia and the Assad regime.The next state television broadcast video footage would never do that.” afternoon, government military units of American medical supplies, empty returned to parts of northern Syria for bunkhouses, and shipping containers Earthen berms and trenches lined the first time in seven years. In an edi- marked “PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY.” the north side of the M4. A few hun- torial in Foreign Policy, Mazloum de- dred feet beyond them were the Turk- scribed his choice as one between “pain- When I visited Ain Issa, in Febru- ish-backed militias. Before October, ful compromises” and “the genocide of ary, Russian military vehicles entered downtown Ain Issa had been a bustling our people.” and exited a former U.S. outpost on the souk. Now it was deserted. Regime sol- edge of town.A large Russian flag waved diers walked by shuttered stores, ga- During the next week, a cascade of on the roof of a former U.S.guard tower. rages, barbershops, and restaurants. events upended the strategic balance in It was visible from the building where When I introduced myself and tried to Syria and, by extension, throughout the I met with Brousque, who now coördi- ask them questions,they nervously hur- Middle East. Putin invited Erdoğan to nates with Russian soldiers instead of ried off. They wore mismatched uni- Sochi, where the two leaders signed a with U.S. Special Forces. It wasn’t the forms and tattered sneakers, and sev- treaty that halted the Turkish offensive same,Brousque said:“We fought along- eral of them looked underfed. Of the while implicitly ceding to Turkey the side the Americans. They ate with us. handful of soldiers I managed to inter- land it had already taken—nearly a thou- They laughed and joked with us. We view, all but one had been conscripted. sand square miles. (An earlier ceasefire, had the feeling that we belonged to the None was armed, and I later learned negotiated by Vice-President Mike Pence, same team. It’s not like that with the that the S.D.F. had prohibited them had been neither respected by Turkey Russians.”Brousque recalled a celebra- from carrying weapons in town. nor enforced by the U.S.) Mazloum tion at the end of a training exercise, agreed to relinquish his remaining bor- The regime forces that Mazloum al- der positions, and Russia replaced the U.S.as the neutral mediator of the buffer zone. Russian troops also joined regime 38 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

lowed back into Kurdish territory are camp had pitched tents in empty fields, were then used to fill in craters, seal ISIS restricted to the frontiers and pose lit- amid grazing livestock. Khairi told his tunnels, and reinforce levees on the Eu- tle danger to the S.D.F. By stopping the family that they would not be staying phrates River. Smaller slabs were pul- Turkish offensive,securing Russian pro- there. After a night under the stars, he verized and repurposed as cement.Thou- tection, and limiting the deployment of hitched a ride to Raqqa to look for some- sands of bodies were extracted, as were regime troops, Mazloum prevented place with a roof. tens of thousands of mines. Once the northern Syria from descending into main arteries were passable, water sta- chaos. But this emergency diplomacy He discovered a city whose utter dec- tions and basic plumbing were installed. grants only a temporary reprieve. The imation might be unique in this century. People started moving back. longer the Kurds must contend with an As a candidate, Trump had vowed to existential threat from Turkey in the “bomb the shit out of ” ISIS, and, almost “It changed from a dead city to a city north, the less able they will be to de- as soon as he entered the Oval Office, with a pulse,” Ibrahim Ibn Khalil, the fend their Arab satellites in the south— Raqqa afforded him the opportunity. By former director of the Civil Council’s re- Deir Ezzour and Raqqa—from Russia the summer of 2017, the S.D.F. had en- construction committee, told me this and Assad.This secondary effect of the circled the city, which ISIS militants pre- winter. We met in a small café in down- U.S. withdrawal has the potential to be- pared to defend with suicide bombers, town Raqqa,near the central roundabout come yet another catastrophe, for yet an elaborate tunnel system, and ubiqui- where ISIS once performed public be- another population. tous I.E.D.s. Because the S.D.F. lacked headings and crucifixions. Ibn Khalil, in heavy weaponry and armored vehicles, a wheelchair, held a hookah pipe in his To the extent that Trump has artic- the offensive relied on U.S. air strikes. left hand and a cappuccino in his right. ulated a coherent policy in Syria, it For four months,the U.S.deployed thou- In January, 2018, an assassin had entered reflects his view that the country is ir- sands of munitions, ranging from laser- his house and shot him six times in the redeemably doomed and therefore no guided Hellfire missiles to one-ton un- chest; ISIS claimed responsibility. Doc- longer our concern.“Syria was lost long guided bombs. U.S. artillery battalions tors saved Ibn Khalil’s life, but three bul- ago,” he said last year. “We’re talking complemented the barrage with more lets remain lodged in his back, and no about sand and death.” Trump is not than thirty thousand shells. An adviser hospital in Syria is equipped to take them the first President to cite the scale and to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of out. Ibn Khalil told me that the Amer- the complexity of the Syrian war as a Staff later told the Marine Corps Times, ican officials who had encouraged the justification for American inconstancy. “Every minute of every hour, we were development of the Civil Council had In 2013, when the regime killed more putting some kind of fire on ISIS in promised to secure him a visa so that he than a thousand civilians with sarin gas, Raqqa.” I was shocked, while covering could undergo surgery in the U.S. But Barack Obama, leery of being drawn the battle, by what seemed to be a strat- they never followed through. “It’s very into the conflict, backed away from pu- egy of physical annihilation applied disappointing for me,” he said. “This nitive strikes, despite having declared a against a city that still harbored a signifi- happened because I was working with “red line” on the use of chemical weap- cant civilian population. One front-line the Americans.” ons. The regime, uninhibited by a fear S.D.F.commander told me that he called of American repercussions, has since in U.S. air strikes on solitary gunmen. His personal disappointment echoes a conducted additional gas attacks and larger one.Because the U.N.respects the wantonly slaughtered tens of thousands When the last ISIS holdouts surren- sovereignty of the Syrian regime,and the of its citizens by other means.One could dered,the layout of the city was unrecog- regime does not authorize aid delivery to argue that Obama’s painstakingly con- areas controlled by the S.D.F., the U.S. sidered inaction enabled more violence nizable. Months of labor were required initially assumed the financial burden for and misery than any of Trump’s care- just to uncover the streets. The effort Raqqa’s recovery.But,seven months after lessly impulsive actions. At the same was overseen by the Raqqa Civil Coun- Ibn Khalil was shot, Trump suspended time,Trump’s repudiation of American cil, a municipal authority established by the Syria budgets of the State Depart- responsibility to Syria is harder to ra- the Kurds which currently operates under ment and the United States Agency for tionalize, given that during his time in the Autonomous Administration. The International Development. “Let the office the U.S., in its zeal to extermi- U.S. supplied excavators and paid the other people take care of it now,”he had nate ISIS,has reduced parts of the coun- salaries of more than six hundred local said. “We’re going to get back to our try to wasteland. Nowhere is this more workers. Large rig-mounted jackham- country, where we belong.” Although true than in the city of Raqqa. mers smashed the vast mountains of Gulf states and European nations made concrete into manageable pieces, which up for the shortfall,which totalled around The truck that Nashat Khairi hired two hundred and thirty million dollars— to take his family away from Ain about a quarter of what’s been raised to Issa stopped ten miles north of Raqqa. repair Notre-Dame, in Paris—the dis- Khairi, his wife, and their seven chil- ruption hampered progress, and many dren unloaded their belongings on the locals lost their jobs. Five months later, roadside: mattresses, blankets, pots and when Trump first threatened to with- pans, their fan and stove. All around draw U.S. troops from Syria, the Ameri- them, thousands of refugees from the cans advising Ibn Khalil’s team—public- health, water-sanitation, and demining THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 39

experts—were evacuated from the coun- appear to defy physics, frozen mid-fall. scavengers, and rusty freight cars con- try.Those who eventually returned were Others have been trucked away,the only verted into shelters. The room was too confined to U.S. military bases far from trace of them a square of dirt. small for his seven children, so Khairi Raqqa, and in October they left Syria installed the family’s tent outside, and for good.Rubble,bombs,and bodies still And yet, remarkably, the obliterated linked the two entrances with a tarp, litter the city—unexploded ordnance city abounds with activity.Because most thereby doubling the square footage. continues to kill and maim people every of Raqqa was wrecked from above, the Between the stakes, he planted another week, typically children—and no gov- ground levels of taller structures often garden with radishes and bell peppers. ernment has offered any support for the survived more or less intact.Many streets “This tent is dear to my heart,” he told monumental undertaking of fixing dam- are lined with shops and restaurants me when I visited. aged buildings and erecting new ones. that have reopened under multiple gut- In Ibn Khalil’s opinion, “The world has ted floors. Less obvious is where every- As we discussed what had happened betrayed the people of Raqqa.” body lives. For several days, I couldn’t in October, Khairi kept referring to a figure it out. Then one evening, while compact agenda that he kept in his The comprehensiveness of the de- we were driving around, my transla- pocket. The agenda, so old and weath- struction can be visually disorienting. tor—a friend from Iraq who’d never ered that most of its pages had detached, It’s as if the cumulative energy of the been to Raqqa before—said, “Look at contained copious notes from his years American bombardment had scram- all the people.” Although solar-pow- as a mukhtar at the Ain Issa camp: the bled the normal order of things, leav- ered L.E.D.lamps illuminate a few main names, ages, and phone numbers of ev- ing behind an Escher-like reality to boulevards, and commercial enterprises eryone in his section; the rations to which the mind needs time to adjust. run diesel generators, Raqqa is eerily which each family was entitled; the lo- Concrete staircases dangle vertically dark at night. But now I saw what he cations of tents with infants needing from twisted rebar; cars lie upside down; was talking about: scattered through- formula; dates of marriages and deaths. roofs jut at weird angles; slabs of con- out the city, dim points of light. Between the pages were battered busi- crete undulate like rumpled cloth; trees ness cards—contact information for cower from old blasts. On every surface, One of these belonged to Nashat N.G.O.s and aid workers who had long projectiles have gouged holes of differ- Khairi. Three days after his family left since quit the region. Picking up a card ent shapes and sizes; entire blocks are Ain Issa, he found a cinder-block room that had fallen out, Khairi told me it sheared off at the top. Some buildings on Raqqa’s northern outskirts,near train belonged to a doctor who used to per- tracks whose rails had been removed by form circumcisions for newborns in the camp.He carefully returned the card to its place. Khairi had found a job helping a Raqqa merchant sell secondhand blan- kets, and earned around three dollars a week. (I had first met him, by chance, while he was unfolding his wares on the sidewalk one morning.) Although he often had to choose between food and kerosene—winter temperatures fre- quently dropped below freezing—he considered himself lucky.Thousands of refugees who had fled Ain Issa were still living in the fields north of Raqqa. The former manager of the camp told me that there is no plan to help them. When my translator and I visited the makeshift settlement,a crowd of women swarmed our car,shouting,“We’re dying of hunger!”and “Why isn’t anyone com- ing?” We had to drive away when they tried to force open our doors. A villager who lived nearby later told me, “They don’t even have water. Their husbands are in Raqqa looking for work.” He added, “When it rains, these fields will all be flooded.” The reason none of these people had moved into Raqqa was that the city was already full. Around a hundred thou-

sand people are thought to live there. In • • addition to former residents returning home,and people fleeing the Turkish in- center, the stadium has a synthetic track stalled for years, and few people expect vasion,the city has been inundated with that people now jog around.) Yassin it to succeed. The Western aversion to Syrians displaced by the regime—from waved a stack of papers—his backlog durable investment in Syria more likely Aleppo, Hama, Deir Ezzour, and else- of would-be tenants seeking accommo- arises from a broad but unspoken rec- where. Every habitable niche has been dation. “It’s like that everywhere in ognition that Assad is winning the war. claimed. After a week or so, I learned to Raqqa,” he said. “It’s political,”the humanitarian officer identify signs of human life within the said. “We don’t want to do anything ruins: drying laundry,bricked-up holes, During the day, the city resonates that will eventually benefit the regime.” plastic-covered windows,and small gray with the din of banging hammers,power satellite dishes affixed to half-collapsing tools, and machinery. Wood shops fab- Even though the State Department walls. (The Civil Council sells gener- ricate furniture; boom trucks and bull- and U.S.A.I.D. no longer have person- ator-powered electricity for about two dozers clog the roads; venders hawk sal- nel in Syria, they still determine how dollars a week, and everyone, no matter vaged brick, tile, metal, and marble. But the majority of foreign funding is spent how destitute, seemed to have a tele- almost none of this industry is geared there. The U.S. government distin- vision with several hundred channels.) toward creating new structures. At a guishes between “stabilization”and “re- Sometimes tower complexes were so high school flattened by an air strike, a construction,” allowing the former and thoroughly damaged that only a single crew of workers contracted by the Civil proscribing the latter.Stabilization proj- apartment retained a modicum of struc- Council explained their work to me. As ects are subject to guidelines that for- tural integrity. One day, I noticed a man backhoes clawed through heaps of con- bid, among other things, the building sweeping debris from the roof of a three- crete, raking out gnarled rebar, laborers of load-bearing walls.In practical terms, story building whose top and bottom fed the steel rods through a straighten- this means that, if a school was mini- floors had no exterior walls; he lived in ing machine.Earthmovers then exhumed mally damaged by an American air the middle.When he invited me inside, the foundation, so that the school could strike, the U.S. can finance basic refur- I found the living room impeccably re- be resurrected on its original footprint. bishments,such as replacing doorframes stored, with plush carpets and decora- This final step,however,was merely the- or applying new paint. But if the school tive plaster molding. A polished wood- oretical: no building had occurred on was destroyed—as the vast majority of and-glass display cabinet had survived any of the sites the crew had prepared. structures in Raqqa were—the U.S., as the battle; on its shelves, porcelain figu- a matter of policy,cannot replace it.The rines and delicate teacups were arranged The U.S. and its allies have refused Europeans and the Gulf states gener- on lace doilies. to fund construction projects in Syria ally follow the same rule. as long as Assad remains in power. “It’s Most people in Raqqa live in far more become a collective consensus among For even these limited interventions, squalid and hazardous conditions.Large donors that we will not do reconstruc- only public structures are eligible. Since families are often crowded into one or tion in Syria,” a senior humanitarian the Second World War, the U.S. has two rooms with bowed ceilings and officer told me. “ ‘Reconstruction’ is a rarely paid directly for the reconstruc- bulging walls—masses of blasted con- dirty word.” The ostensible reason for tion of private homes in any conflict; crete literally pressing in on them.Given withholding such assistance is to incen- the crucial difference in Syria is the ab- the state of these apartments, I was sur- tivize the resolution of a U.N.-sponsored sence of other actors to provide such prised to discover that there are few peace process. But the process has been aid. In Iraq, the U.N. has rebuilt more squatters in Raqqa. Almost everyone I met, including Khairi, paid rent. At one of the dozens of real-estate offices downtown,Hassan Yassin,a mid- dle-aged agent wearing a kaffiyeh and traditional tribal robes, told me,“We’ve never seen such a high demand.” Yas- sin said that property owners can usu- ally be tracked down, and if they are dead, imprisoned, or abroad, relatives suffice.Prices range from about ten dol- lars a month, in the suburbs, to as much as thirty dollars a month in the popu- lar Al Firdous neighborhood. (Al Fir- dous is no less damaged than anywhere else, but it boasts the Electric Park of Raqqa, whose Ferris wheel and bumper cars withstood two air strikes, and Rashid Stadium. A former ISIS torture THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 41

“I’m hoping that once we enter the Bronze Age Khalid. She and Hamad resolved to get I’ll be able to get a better likeness of you.” out. The taxi could fit only them, their five children,and Khalid’s thirteen-year- •• old son,whom they had adopted.Hamad promised to return for Namat’s mother, than twenty-five thousand residences a giant. A sheet hung over the door- sister, nieces, and nephews.They left at that were destroyed during the war way. When my translator asked if any- night, following a rutted dirt road against ISIS, and the World Bank is one was home,a middle-aged man with through the wetlands on the edge of the funding major infrastructure projects. gray hair and a gray mustache emerged. Euphrates. Eventually, they arrived at a In Raqqa, deferring to the regime, nei- His name was Mustafa al-Hamad. We line of vehicles—other residents trying ther institution has done anything. followed him into a room with crum- to escape the city—backed up from bling walls lined with blankets and where the road disappeared into a marsh. Yassin told me that,among the build- pillows, where we were joined by his ISIS militants had blown up a levee, ings where he had placed renters, “we wife, Namat. flooding the way. estimate that at least seventy per cent of them will have to be torn down—they’re They were originally from Aleppo, About a dozen men were helping not safe.” I asked what will happen to where Hamad had managed a shoe store. people move their cars, one after an- their occupants if that happens.“They’ll In 2012, the revolution turned violent other, across several hundred feet of have to go somewhere else,” he said. in their neighborhood, and they moved water. “If we hear a plane, we have to with their four children to Raqqa. The go,” they told Hamad. The Americans, In Raqqa, you can’t walk down the war had not yet reached Raqqa, and fearing that ISIS militants were sneak- street without encountering people Namat’s family lived there. Hamad ing out of Raqqa, had dropped leaflets whose lives have been shattered by bought a taxi and began working as a threatening to bomb anyone attempt- American arms. An investigation by driver. He and Namat had another ing to ford the river. Amnesty International found that the daughter. After ISIS captured Raqqa, in U.S.-led coalition killed at least sixteen 2014, they considered fleeing—but no- When it was Hamad’s turn, he and hundred civilians in the city; locals say where they could go was significantly his two teen-age sons got out and that the actual toll is much higher. Al- safer. Two years later, the S.D.F. began pushed.Namat and her daughters waded though American officials like to claim its advance on the city, and ISIS, recog- alongside them. The water rose to that the U.S.“liberated”Raqqa, nobody nizing the need for human shields, pro- Namat’s chest; she held her infant above I met there felt liberated. hibited civilians from leaving. her head. They made it across, and the next day reached a town under the con- One afternoon, in a neighborhood In 2017, as the S.D.F. approached trol of the S.D.F. adjacent to Al Firdous, we passed a yel- Raqqa, the already ferocious deluge of low taxi parked outside a building that munitions intensified.That July, a shell Hamad did not go back for Namat’s looked as if it had been stepped on by or an air strike killed Namat’s brother, mother and sister—to do so would have been suicidal. Both women, along with four of Namat’s nieces and nephews, were later killed in an air strike. As soon as Raqqa was accessible, Hamad and Namat visited the site,hoping to recover their bodies.There was too much rubble. The day after I met Hamad, he led me and my translator to the place where he had pushed his taxi across the marsh. The dirt road was still flooded,and looked exactly as he had described it. On the way back to the city,we stopped at a small scrap yard.In a wooden shack surrounded by rusty engine parts, shutters, gears, wheels, and other refuse, we found the young owner sitting on a crate, drinking tea with one of his suppliers. While I spoke to the owner about his business— there had been a brief boom, he said, but the city was soon picked over—the sup- plier regarded me suspiciously. He was missing several teeth, and cotton spilled from holes all over his dirty coat.He grew agitated as I continued asking questions, and finally interrupted me. “During the battle, a mortar killed my wife and three 42 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

of my daughters,” he said. “Another one possibility of a COVID-19 outbreak in Dread of the regime is even more of my daughters lost her leg.” Raqqa. “We can take care of one or two acute for those who have worked, even patients,at most,”he explained.The hos- in limited capacities, with the U.S. At The man, named Hussein Ahmad, pital has two ventilators—eight were the offices of Citizenship House, a local invited me to his house, where I met his lost to air strikes. N.G.O. based in the Al Firdous neigh- ten-year-old daughter, Fatma, who is borhood,I met half a dozen women who now in a wheelchair. Fatma recalled If people in Raqqa knew the U.S.’s ra- ran democracy-education workshops cooking dinner with her mother and sis- tionale for refusing to engage in any funded by the State Department and by ters when a shell tore through their substantive reconstruction of their city— European governments. One of them, kitchen. Rima was fifteen, Amira four- because it might end up in the hands Yamam Abdulghani, told me, “To the teen, and Waffa twelve. Ahmad said he of the regime—they would no doubt regime, we’re terrorists. They accuse us had asked several N.G.O.s about get- feel even more betrayed than they do of applying a Western agenda and West- ting a prosthesis for Fatma. He’d taped now. Raqqa is an Arab city, and most ern ideologies.”When I asked what pun- his phone number to the wall, in case of its residents, unlike the Kurds, are ishment such activities might elicit, Ab- someone showed up while he was out unwilling to accept any deal with the dulghani said,“Look at Caesar’s pictures.” collecting metal. regime. While interviewing people in In 2013, a former military-police pho- Raqqa, I often heard the phrase “the tographer using the pseudonym Caesar Most civilians who were injured by devil before Assad.” When General divulged thousands of images of Syrian U.S. artillery and air strikes were treated Mazloum made his accommodation prisoners who had been tortured and at the Raqqa Public Hospital. A former with the regime, protests broke out in executed in regime detention centers. doctor from the hospital told me that the city. Some Arabs, fearing the re- by the end of the fighting only ten of gime’s return, have since fled. Hamad The workshops at Citizenship House his colleagues remained,the others hav- and Namat told me that if the regime are quintessential “stabilization” pro- ing fled or died. Amputation became comes back they, too, will leave. After grams. In contrast to humanitarian op- the default treatment for wounded limbs, they escaped Raqqa,in 2017,their daugh- erations—which are supposed to ad- the doctor said. One physician had per- ter Noor married and moved to Hama dress immediate needs—such programs formed so many amputations that ISIS Province, in western Syria; six months are designed to forestall the emergence accused him of deliberately impairing later, she was killed, along with her hus- of ISIS and other extremist movements; people. Infection and sepsis were com- band and her in-laws, in an air strike by for this reason, the U.S. and its allies mon. Fatma said that, when she woke the regime or the Russians. Hamad and will fund them. But, in Raqqa, the ab- up in one of the wards,“they were clean- Namat’s anger aside, staying would be sence of any U.S. protection against the ing my leg but I couldn’t feel anything— foolhardy: as natives of Aleppo, they regime—and of any U.S. investment in then it started to smell and they cut it.” risk meeting the same fate as the tens rebuilding—has created exactly the of thousands of Syrians whom the re- kinds of conditions in which radical Because the hospital also treated ISIS gime has disappeared since 2011.When groups like ISIS flourish. According to militants, it was a frequent target of U.S. their eldest son turned eighteen, he Abdulghani, a bellwether for such in- air strikes.(Toward the end of the offen- would be conscripted. stability in Raqqa is the current situa- sive, it also became an ISIS fighting po- tion of its women. sition.) When the current director of The partially demolished apartment the hospital, Kassar Ali, took me inside where they now live once belonged to Women’s rights are central to the po- the original facility, we had to scrabble litical philosophy of Abdullah Ocalan, through downed pipes and caved-in ceil- Namat’s mother. When they returned and the S.D.F. and the Autonomous ings, the walls and floors scorched black to Raqqa, Hamad and Namat spent ten Administration vigorously promote gen- by fire. Scattered everywhere were the days clearing out rubble and shoring up der equality. A billboard outside the remnants of medical supplies: white piles the walls. Hamad wired in electricity, Raqqa Civil Council declares, “With of cast plaster, contorted gurneys, and Namat planted vegetables in an women at the forefront of the twenty- smashed exam tables. Air strikes had empty lot outside. They even had a first century, we will end all violence destroyed all of the X-ray machines,CAT kitchen with a sink and running water. against humanity.” Moreover, before scanners, and MRI devices. Doctors If they left this place, I asked, where ISIS, few women in Raqqa wore niqabs Without Borders has financed the ren- would they go? Hamad reflected, then and veils. Yet Abdulghani was one of ovation of a new wing—which is cur- said, “Wherever the regime isn’t.” only two uncovered women I met in rently the only public-health facility in the city.The other was the Kurdish co- Raqqa—but none of this essential equip- chair of the Civil Council. Abdulghani ment has been replaced. According to said that the prevalence of niqabs and Ali, American commanders had visited veils could be attributed, in part, to the the hospital on several occasions: “Each lingering influence of ISIS. But the U.S. time, they took pictures, we had long withdrawal was a bigger factor. “Before meetings, and they promised support. October, some women had started to But so far they’ve given us nothing.” uncover,” she said. “Now it’s stopped. Since October, even the visits have Women are afraid of what’s coming.” stopped. Reached by phone recently, Ali said that he is deeply worried about the Abdulghani, who, in 2016, smuggled THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 43

herself out of Raqqa in a truckful of sofar as safeguarding it deprives ISIS of his decision to order the strike by say- goats, said that people often harass her a potential source of revenue. ing that Suleimani had “viciously on the street, calling her a prostitute wounded and murdered thousands of and warning that ISIS will soon be back. Both of these explanations feel dis- U.S. troops.” A U.S. withdrawal from “Everyone is preparing to leave,” she ingenuous. It’s true that ISIS persists Deir Ezzour could entail surrendering said. “No one feels secure. No one can around the S.D.F.-controlled oil fields U.S. bases to the Quds Force. think about tomorrow.” of Deir Ezzour Province, where U.S. Special Forces continue to carry out Another place in Syria where U.S. Two weeks after Trump ordered a counterterrorism raids. But Iran, which troops are currently stationed is also full withdrawal of the thousand or supports the Assad regime, is also active rich in oil—a Kurdish region called Ja- so U.S. troops in Syria, he decided to there. Nashat Khairi and his family, for zira. But ISIS has no presence in Jazira, send half of them back.They would not instance, can’t return to their village in and there is little need to protect its oil. be defending their Kurdish allies against Deir Ezzour because it is occupied by Most of the crude in both Jazira and Turkey, or deterring the regime from an Iranian-backed militia. Until Octo- Deir Ezzour is exported to the regime, encroaching on Raqqa. Instead,Trump ber,containing Iranian adventurism was which refines it and sells a portion back said, “we are leaving soldiers to secure a key U.S. priority in Syria, and Trump’s to the Kurds, as diesel and petroleum. the oil.”Cryptically,he went on,“Maybe “maximum pressure” approach to Iran Although the Kurds and the regime somebody else wants the oil, in which has been perhaps the most consistent fundamentally oppose each other, they case they’ll have a hell of a fight.” The feature of his foreign-policy agenda.Ira- engage in this commerce because nei- Pentagon has characterized the mission nian operations in Syria are overseen by ther could subsist without it: interna- differently: the “somebody” it is con- the Quds Force, which used to be com- tional sanctions prevent the regime from cerned about is ISIS, and American manded by Qassem Suleimani,the gen- buying sufficient oil on the global mar- troops are in Syria “for the oil” only in- eral who was assassinated in a drone ket, and the Kurds have no refineries of strike in January.Trump later defended their own. Jazira is strategically valu- able not because of its peculiar oil trade but because it is where the M4 crosses into northern Iraq—another Kurdish- governed territory.The border is a life- line for Syrian Kurds, and also a bridge between two major spheres of U.S. in- fluence. Russia is thus determined to control it. When I visited Jazira, this winter, U.S. and Russian patrols were confronting one another almost daily on the muddy roads that crisscross its barren hills. Russia has long presented itself as a preferable alternative to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, and Trump’s dis- engagement has galvanized Putin’s re- gional ambitions. The most arresting thing about the video showing the Rus- sian takeover of the U.S. airbase near Ain Issa is not the Russian helicopter touching down on an American land- ing zone, or the Russian soldiers mov- ing into American barracks; it is the Russian officer invoking timeworn American rhetoric.“We are here to de- liver humanitarian and medical aid to civilians,and to provide them with peace and security,” he says. The Kurds know that Russia, Iran, and the regime want the same thing Turkey wants: an end to their auton- omy in Syria. This is why many Kurds, despite Trump’s oft-expressed indiffer- ence to their welfare, cling to the hope of a renewed alliance with the U.S. Nearly all the Kurdish officials I inter-

viewed were so desperate to salvage allow Erdoğan to attack Kobani. But his daughter lived in the U.S. Samuel, what remained of the American com- Mazloum seems to have little confi- who is eighty, had known Abraham mitment to Syria that they refused to dence in the reassurance: I saw more since he was a child and still appeared speak on the record about the with- tunnels in his home town than any- to respect his seniority.“I love this land,” drawal. One S.D.F. commander told where else.Twenty-five miles of paved Abraham said.“I’ll never leave it.”Sam- me that, even during the Turkish inva- road connects the former U.S. airbase uel nodded in agreement. sion, he and his peers refrained from near Ain Issa to Kobani, which abuts criticizing the U.S. in the press. “We the Turkish border. The entire length After saying goodbye to Abraham discussed it, and decided to say we felt of this route is lined with small blue and Samuel, I asked the S.D.F. fighter ‘disappointed’ instead of ‘betrayed,’” he tents, spaced around sev- to show me his unit’s forwardmost po- said.Trump’s opinion of the Kurds,how- enty feet apart, each stand- ever, seems to have only deteriorated ing beside a large mound sition. We were heading since he abandoned them. In Novem- of soil. When my transla- down a hill to the north- ber, he hosted Erdoğan in the Oval tor and I pulled over and ern edge of the village when Office, where the Turkish President re- entered one of them, we I heard footsteps approach- portedly produced an iPad and showed found two teen-agers, cov- ing from behind and turned a video comparing General Mazloum ered in dirt, peering into a to see Abraham briskly fol- to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder narrow shaft. A winch was lowing us. At the end of of ISIS. Afterward,Trump thanked Er- suspended above the mouth the road, the S.D.F. fighter doğan and the Turkish military “for the of the shaft, and when the pointed to several sand- job they’ve done” in Syria. He has also boys retracted its cable a bagged foxholes outside a mused, “The Kurds, it’s very interest- man in a harness surfaced from the gated property.He gestured ing—Turkey doesn’t like them, other subterranean dark.They had been dig- toward the open expanse, people do.” ging for three weeks straight.The tun- strewn with old tractor parts, that nel, which parallels the road, was thirty stretched from where we stood: this Were Trump to remove the remain- feet underground. was the no man’s land. ing U.S. forces in Jazira and Deir Ez- When Abraham caught up to us, he zour, the S.D.F. would have to make While the Kurds are adjusting to insisted that we come to his house for additional concessions to the regime in the fact that the sky is no longer on a cup of coffee. I asked where he lived. order to secure a bulwark against Tur- their side, so are the area’s civilians. “Here,”he said, opening the gate be- key. This could include handing over West of Ain Issa on the M4, where the hind the foxholes. Raqqa. But, even if the U.S. stays in front line with the Turks cuts across Three huge dogs barked and jumped Syria, and Turkey does not renew its sweeping plains, a small Christian vil- on Abraham as he led us into the yard. offensive, the status quo appears unsus- lage called Tell Tawil sits on a low rise, Pushing them away, Abraham com- tainable. Once Russia, Iran, and the re- conspicuous from a distance because plained to the S.D.F. fighter that some- gime have defeated the final pockets of of its abundant trees. In 2015, as ISIS one had recently shot one of the dogs the Arab opposition, they will almost neared Tell Tawil, the entire popula- in the paw. We sat at a picnic table, on certainly turn their attention to the tion fled. A year later, after the S.D.F. a deck looking out toward the Turkish Kurds. Arthur Quesnay, a political sci- expelled ISIS, some people returned. front line. Abraham said that mortars entist at the Sorbonne, who recently When the Turks invaded, there was an- sometimes whistled over his roof. He co-authored a report on northern Syria, other exodus. One afternoon, as I ac- went inside and returned with whiskey told me, “It may take a couple of years, companied an S.D.F. fighter through tumblers containing espresso. Roost- but the regime will gradually return and Tell Tawil’s deserted streets, he ex- ers crowed. After a while, Samuel ap- recapture territory.” Quesnay believes plained that Turkish-backed militias peared and, without a word, took a seat that the fall of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour across the fields frequently shelled the across from Abraham. Like almost ev- will be only the beginning. If the re- village, despite the ceasefire, and Turk- eryone else from Tell Tawil, they were gime managed to take control of a few ish drones sometimes targeted it with cotton farmers. Abraham owned a six- strategic sites, such as the border cross- missiles. All the houses were empty, acre parcel across the road, but, even if ing in Jazira, it could starve the S.D.F. and the church was boarded up. peace came to Syria before he died, he of resources, precipitating its collapse. knew that he’d never work it again. ISIS, In that case, Mazloum’s army would I was therefore surprised when we the Turks, and the S.D.F. had all lit- revert to what it was before his fateful came upon two old men, sitting shoul- tered it with mines. introduction to the U.S.,in 2014: a small der to shoulder, on a stoop in the sun. As we stood to leave, I asked Abra- Kurdish militia,surrounded by enemies. Their names were David Abraham and ham what Tell Tawil had been like Khoshaba Samuel. Abraham, who is during the Second World War, when All over northern Syria, the Kurds eighty-seven years old, wore a pin- Britain and Vichy France fought for are preparing for this scenario by striped blazer over a V-neck sweater control of Syria. He said that his mem- building an extensive network of tun- and a collared shirt. He said that he ories were vague. One, however, did nels. According to Mazloum, Trump had lived in Tell Tawil since 1935. His stand out. He remembered lying flat promised him that he would never wife had died six years ago, four of his in the fields, with other children, each five sons had settled in Sweden, and time planes passed overhead.  THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 45

PROFILES YOU GOT IT! The reassurance of Brittany Howard. BY AMANDA PETRUSICH B efore Brittany Howard was paid becue, and there’s a train nearby,” she relocation, possibly to the West Coast. to make music, she bagged gro- said.“But I’d never seen a mountain be- She requires a certain amount of agi- ceries at a Kroger, sold used cars, fore. I remember seeing the desert for tation to feel inspired. “Once I start made pizzas at a Domino’s, fried eggs the first time,the West Coast,the ocean. getting comfortable, I get too comfort- at a Cracker Barrel, built custom pic- I was so excited about everything.” able. I like things to change,” she said. ture frames, sucked up trash for a com- “I like things to move.” mercial sanitation company, and deliv- Soon, Howard had attracted some ered the U.S. mail along a rural route very famous fans,including Paul McCart- “Sound & Color,”Alabama Shakes’ in northern Alabama, where she lived. ney and Barack and Michelle Obama. second record, from 2015, débuted at She practiced with her rock band, Al- “Hold On,” the album’s first single, was No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was abama Shakes, whenever she could. “I nominated for three Grammy Awards nominated for six Grammys, includ- would work thirteen hours at the post and named the best song of the year ing Album of the Year. That year, the office, get off, and rush to rehearsal,” by Rolling Stone. The track gestures to British pop singer Adele told the she told me. the band’s Southern lineage—there are Guardian that she was “obsessed”with echoes of Duane Allman and Wilson Howard: “She’s so fucking full of soul, In 2012, Alabama Shakes released Pickett ripping on “Hey Jude”at FAME overflowing, dripping, that I almost their début album, “Boys & Girls.” Studios, in Muscle Shoals, and a bit of can’t handle it.” Prince invited the Howard was twenty-three, and had Rufus and Carla Thomas singing “I Shakes to play at Paisley Park, and never travelled outside the South. Crit- Didn’t Believe” at Satellite Records, asked if he could join them onstage ics scrambled to praise the record; it in Memphis. In the pre-chorus, How- for a song. “It comes time to do ‘Give briefly seemed as if Howard,whose voice ard addresses herself: “Come on, Brit- Me All Your Love,’ and I’m getting is both burly and tender, a mixture of tany /You got to get back up!” she bel- worried, because I don’t see this dude,” Robert Plant and Marvin Gaye, might lows. It’s a small choice, using her name Howard recalled. “I step back from be able to single-handedly resuscitate like that, but it disarms me every time I the mike, and then out of nowhere he American rock and roll.“Boys & Girls,” hear it. When Howard finally delivers just pops onstage, people lose their which was loose, open, and craggy, felt the full chorus—“Yeah, you got to hold minds, and he starts shredding. Shred- momentous and aberrant. At the time, on!”—she’s singing with so much vigor ding. So I was, like,‘I’m gonna double- a good portion of the rock music played and boldness that the lyric feels less like shred with you. When else am I gonna on the radio—Imagine Dragons,Linkin a plea than like a nonnegotiable demand. get to do this?’ Now we’re double- Park—was so densely and fastidiously soloing, and it’s as sick as it sounds. It’s produced,so airless and unrelenting,that Howard wrote “Hold On”while she happening, it’s psychedelic, it’s amaz- listening to it felt like getting whopped was working for the sanitation com- ing. And then he gives me a little kiss in the face with a snowball. “Boys & pany. “I was in this little fucking truck, on the cheek, leaps like a baby fawn Girls” suggested a different way for- going to my job cleaning commercial over all the amplifiers into the dark- ward: it was not without potency, but it properties,” she said. “We made CDs ness, and I never saw him again.” drifted in like a salty breeze. of our practices, and I put a CD in, and just started singing the hook: ‘Hold When it came time for Alabama The album eventually sold more than on.’”The band had a gig booked at the Shakes to produce a third album, the a million copies in the United States. Brick Deli & Tavern, a sports bar in songs weren’t coming. On a cross- Howard spent several years on tour with Decatur, Alabama. Howard improvised country drive, Howard stared blankly the band, an experience that she de- the rest of the song onstage. When she out the window. “I was sitting there, scribed as joyful and disorienting.“Right arrived at the chorus, the crowd began silent, thinking to myself, What am place, right time, and now all of a sud- singing along as if they had heard it I gonna do? What do I want?”she told den I’m in England—I’m eating hag- before, as if it were a cover, as if they me. The safe choice—sticking around gis!” she told me. “All of a sudden, I’m had known it all their lives. Nashville and grinding it out with the in France—I’m eating a snail!”Howard band—didn’t feel right.“I’d rather make is a proud Southerner, yet she was eager Howard, who is now thirty-one, a few mistakes and still be myself than to see the rest of the world.“In the deep- splits her time between Nashville, be rich and bored,” she said. est core of me, when I go to my happy where she moved shortly after the suc- place, there are cicadas in the back- cess of “Boys & Girls,” and Taos, New In 2017, Howard left Alabama ground, the air is humid, I smell bar- Mexico. She’s considering yet another Shakes to make a solo album. “Every- one was, like, ‘No, don’t do that! You 46 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

Howard taught herself to play the guitar when she was eleven: “I had no options, and I didn’t care about anything else.” PHOTOGRAPH BY RUVEN AFANADOR THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 47

can do this on the side, but don’t can- be, like, ‘I think I want it to be like single from the album, had been nom- cel the Shakes!’”she said. She cancelled this?’”she said.“And then I’d hear some inated for Grammys for Best Rock the Shakes. It requires a particular kind song and be, like,‘No, I definitely want Performance and Best Rock Song, of bravura to untether oneself from a it to be like that.’ And then I’d hear and at the ceremony Howard would band that, to the outside world, still another song, and it’d be: ‘Well, maybe be accompanying Alicia Keys, who appeared to be on the come-up. more like this!’ ”She went into the stu- was hosting, on guitar. Howard had dio anyway. “The songs showed up,” rented a four-story glass-and-con- “Jaime,”her solo début, which came she said. crete house in Beverly Hills. One af- out last fall, does not resemble any ternoon, she showed me around the album I can think of, though it does When Howard first has an idea, she place. The toilet in the master bath- share some spiritual DNA with two likes to record directly to her laptop. room responded to voice commands. of the boldest and most stylistically in- “The fancier shit stops me from work- “Hello, toilet!” she yelled when we scrutable releases of the past century: ing fast, because I have to turn every- walked in. The lid rose expectantly. “Black Messiah,” the third album by thing on,” she said. “I’d say my first The house was built into the side of the R. & B. singer D’Angelo, and Sly three ideas are usually the ones I throw a cliff, and a steep stone path led and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot out, because I’m trying to write.” She through a bamboo grove to a koi pond Goin’ On,” a psychedelic-rock master- wrote “Georgia,” her favorite song on and a small boathouse. A pair of plas- piece from 1977. “Jaime” is deep, freaky, “Jaime,” while eating a sandwich and tic lounge chairs sat by the pool. and heartfelt. Nearly all its songs fea- reading an article about the experi- ture some sort of heavy groove, but mental R. & B. musician Georgia Anne “When I’m in L.A., dude, I need a Howard often complicates them by Muldrow: “The song’s not to her, or pool,” Howard said. She lit a cigarette, adding prickly guitar riffs at unusual about her, but I was, like, ‘Man, I wish and we cracked open the first of sev- intervals, folding in samples, or put- Georgia would work with me!’ So I’m eral million cans of White Claw, the ting an effect on her voice that makes walking around the house going,‘I just flavored alcoholic seltzer. I’d never had it sound tinny and distant, as if she’s want Georgia /To notice me.’” How- one before. “I’m gonna tell you one singing into the receiver of a rotary ard realized that the line was actually thing about them,” she said. Her voice phone. “Jaime” is familiar enough that a chorus, and choked the sandwich grew serious. “They’ll sneak up on it’s easy to like—it’s the sort of record down. “I’m hearing everything so sud- your ass!” people will immediately ask about if denly, the most important thing is you put it on during a party—but it is time,” she said. Howard was wearing black leggings, also intensely idiosyncratic, and does slip-on sandals, a green T-shirt, and a not hew to any genre constraints. At Howard made part of “Jaime” at a black plaid button-down. A gold Libra first, Howard wasn’t entirely sure what rented house in Topanga Canyon, Los medallion hung on a long chain around she wanted “Jaime” to sound like. “I’d Angeles. This past January, she re- her neck. Howard has several tattoos, turned to L.A. “History Repeats,” a including two thin black lines that ex- tend from the outside corner of her “I’m just saying it would be a mistake for you to mock this guy.” left eye, toward her ear. Most celebri- ties claim a kind of radical transpar- ency, but Howard actually appears to be constitutionally incapable of bull- shit. She laughs heartily if anyone, in- cluding herself, says something dis- honest. “I’m an open book,” she told me, flicking ash into an empty White Claw can. Howard was born on October 2, 1988, in Athens, Alabama, a city of some twenty-six thousand people, about halfway between Nashville and Birmingham. During the Civil War, Athens was briefly occupied by Union forces, and Colonel John Basil Turchin gave his troops tacit permission to ran- sack the area, telling them, “I shut my eyes for two hours, I see nothing.”Less than a century later, Athens was the birthplace of Don Black, the founder of the neo-Nazi Web site Stormfront and a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Originally a cotton town, it became a railroad town. In 1974,