2019-05-01_The_Atlantic

GRAND ISLAND, Nebraska tνçÎÑĀŕ¥ç³½ÉíćνüŕüĀćć½¥³ÎÑçÉÛí²ˏ¥çѽá ç¹½üĀíçá½ř³íáá½É½¥ç¹æíė½¹ćí'ü¥ç¹/Āá¥ç¹ˏ Nebraska to be with her. Without a college degree, he ĀćüČÉÉá½¹ćíŕç¹¥Ûí²˙ė½çćČ¥ááĞˏ½çćü¥áíææČçÑćĞ íáá½É½ÎÑü½¹ÎÑæ¥Ā¥çÑÉÎćĀ½³ČüÑćĞíŏ³½üˏ²ČćÑćĘ¥ĀÈ¥ü Èüíæćν³¥ü½½üÑçć½³ÎçíáíÉĞνÎ¥¹íç³½½çėÑĀÑíç½¹˙ Èüѽç¹½ç³íČü¥É½¹ÎÑæćí³Î½³ÞíČććν'ííÉá½ /c]ČùùíŜVüíȽĀĀÑíç¥á½ŜÑŕ³¥ć½ -- ¥ùüíÉü¥æćÎ¥ć ùü½ù¥ü½Ā²½ÉÑçç½üĀÈíü¥ç½çćüĞ̀á½ė½áÛí²Ñç/cĀČùùíŜˏ¥ ÉüíĘÑçÉŕ½á¹ĘÑćÎɑɕɐˏɐɐɐíù½çüíá½Ā¥³üíĀĀæ½üѳ¥ɑ. tÎÑá½ĘíüÞÑçÉçÑÉÎćĀˏ¥çѽá½çüíáá½¹¥ç¹ÉíćÎÑĀ ³½ŜÑŕ³¥ć½Ñçŕė½æíçćÎĀ˙]ííç¥ř½üćÎ¥ćˏ¥çѽáÉíć¥ç ½æ¥ÑᥲíČć¥ç/cÛí²¥ć½çćü¥áíææČçÑćĞíáá½É½˙,ÑĀ 'ííÉá½³ü½¹½çćÑ¥áĀĀćíí¹íČć¥É¥ÑçĀćíćνü³¥ç¹Ñ¹¥ć½Ā ¥ç¹νÉíććνüíá½¥Ā¥ç/c]ČùùíŜ]ù½³Ñ¥áÑĀć˙DíĘ æ¥üüѽ¹ˏ¥çѽáÑĀĘíüÞÑçÉÑç¥Ûí²νáíė½Āˏ¥ç¹ćÎ¥ćá½ćĀ ÎÑæĀù½ç¹æíü½ćÑæ½ĘÑćÎÎÑĀç½ĘĘÑȽ˙ ɑ̊]Čææ¥üнæ¥ç¹¥ç¹Y½ûČÑü½æ½çćĀ²ĞJ³³Čù¥ćÑíçˏ̋=¥²íü/çĀÑÉÎć 9í²ĀˏČüçÑçÉ'á¥ĀĀc½³ÎçíáíÉѽĀ Free digital skills training, tools, and local event details can be found at google.com/grow

Is the Country Ready What Your Dentist Isn’t for Kamala Harris? Telling You B Y F E R R I S J A B R BY ELIZABETH WEIL Elegy for the American Century BY GEORGE PACKER W hat’s called the American that thing set in, and so we are talk- century was really just a lit- ing about an age gone by. It wasn’t tle more than half a century. a golden age—there was plenty of Itbeganwith theSecondWorldWarand folly and wrong—but I already miss the creative burst that followed—the it. Our feeling that we could do any- United Nations, the Atlantic alliance, thing gave us the Marshall Plan and containment, the free world—and it Vietnam, the peace at Dayton and the went through dizzying highs and lows, endless Afghan War. Our confidence until it expired the day before yester- and energy, our reach and grasp, our day. The thing that brings on doom excess and blindness—they were not to great powers—is it simple hubris, so different from Richard Holbrooke’s. or decadence and squander, a kind The American century was the span of inattention, loss of faith, or just of his life. He was our man. That’s the the passage of years? At some point reason to tell you this story. MAY 2019 T H E AT L A N T I C .C O M







OF NO PARTY OR CLIQUE CONTENTS | MAY 2019 VOL. 323–NO. 4 Features  T H E H E A L T H R E P O R T 58 The Penance of Doc O BY SAM QUINONES Lou Ortenzio was a trusted doctor who got his patients— and himself—hooked on opioids. Now he’s trying to rescue his community from an epidemic he helped start. 70 The Trouble With Dentistry BY FERRIS JABR You likely don’t need to go to the dentist every six months. Those microcavities might heal without a filling. And you may want a second opinion before getting that root canal. 46 Kamala Harris Takes Her Shot BY ELIZABETH WEIL The senator from California has always been cautious, but since announcing her candidacy she’s grown bolder. Can a black woman win the presidency today? By the late 1990s, Lou Ortenzio was one of northern West Virginia’s leading opioid prescribers. It was a sign of the times COVER STORY that he didn’t think anything was wrong with that. 82 Elegy for the Photograph by JASON FULFORD American Century BY GEORGE PACKER In the 1990s, when Richard Holbrooke ended a war in the Balkans, American influence seemed poised to reach new heights. Instead, it began to decline. What happened? THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 3

CONTENTS VOL. 323–NO. 4 05 . 19 Dispatches SKETCH Departments 15 P O L I T I C S 22 The Next 8 The Conversation George Bush Trump’s Second Term 112 The Big Question BY ELAINA PLOTT BY PAUL STARR What is the greatest act In a time of outsider politics, of courage? If it comes to pass, it will be can the ultimate insider far more consequential than his first. resurrect his family’s brand? ANIMAL KINGDOM 24 Salmon on Psychotropics BY REBECCA GIGGS Pharmaceutical pollution is altering some animals’ moods—and migratory patterns. BUSINESS 26 Stock Picks From Space BY FRANK PARTNOY Investors are using real-time satellite images to predict retailers’ sales. Is that cheating? CRIMINAL TENDENCIES LANGUAGE On the Cover Mendelsund/Munday 18 Watch Your Wallet 20 Why Young Adults Are Talking BY RENE CHUN Like 3-Year-Olds Pickpockets love our digitally BY JOHN MCWHORTER distracted age. Embracing your inner child is comforting and fun—and just might revitalize the English language. 4 MAY 2019 THE ATLANTIC

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CONTENTS VOL. 323–NO. 4 05 . 19 The Culture File Poetry 40 B O O KS 42 Waking The Death of the Pioneer Myth BY STANLEY PLUMLY BY JORDAN KISNER America’s frontier once promised freedom, but a walled border demands a reckoning with loss. Essay 100 Walt Whitman’s Guide to a Thriving Democracy BY MARK EDMUNDSON America had a mind shaped by its Founders, but the country needed the poet to discover its spirit. THE OMNIVORE BOOKS BOOKS 33 Poets in the 36 The Problem 43 Art After Press Box With High- Sexual Assault Minded Politics BY JAMES PARKER BY MERVE EMRE BY SEAN WILENTZ The underappreciated Siri Hustvedt’s new literary achievements of John Adams and John Quincy novel explores fiction’s sportswriters on deadline Adams’s virtuous disdain role in feminist for partisanship was at the consciousness-raising. root of their failures. 6 MAY 2019 THE ATLANTIC

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RESPONSES & REVERBERATIONS • THE CONVERSATION proceed, for Democrats to draft, enact, and effectively The Case for publicize legislation that their Impeachment candidates can run on in 2020. In other words, impeachment Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining would define Democrats solely American ideals, Yoni Appelbaum argued in March. as anti-Trump and deprive them of the opportunity to Yoni Appelbaum acknowl- an impeachment effort on the refrain from launching an define what they are for. edges that the impeachment Democratic Party, regarding impeachment process. of Donald Trump would both its election prospects and Second, impeachment almost certainly not result in its ability to govern post-2020. First, impeachment would would be a partisan political his removal from office, but dominate the rest of Trump’s circus, with nearly all Demo- argues that it would severely Unless a clear and over- term, sucking the oxygen crats voting for and nearly all damage his political prospects. whelming consensus emerges from discussion of any other Republicans voting against. This argument ignores the that Trump has committed substantive issues. It would Public anger at politicians and significant negative effects of major felonies, there are two prove impossible, while distrust of government would reasons the Democrats should impeachment hearings only grow, as would the likeli- hood of further gridlock and failure to address the nation’s problems, no matter who is elected next year. Nicholas Lang CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. I’m not persuaded by Appel- baum’s case that the start of impeachment hearings will sway Republicans. Given the current political polarization, I think impeachment is more likely to unite Republicans behind Trump. The process will inevitably focus the public on the actions of House Democrats like Nancy Pelosi. Faced with a choice between Team Trump and Team Pelosi, Republican voters and senators would choose the president. David Leonhardt EXCERPT FROM AN ARTICLE ON NYTIMES.COM It is astonishing that Yoni Appelbaum’s essay does not mention the person who would be the principal beneficiary of a successful impeachment: Mike Pence. This is the crucial fact that distinguishes any effort today from the attempt to impeach Andrew Johnson. Had the Radical Republi- cans succeeded in 1868, the new president would have been one of their own—the Senate president pro tempore, Benjamin Wade, someone who shared their objective 8 MAY 2019 THE ATLANTIC

of protecting the civil rights of formerly Donald Trump is indeed unable to fulfill the LOOK! enslaved people. duties of his office. The problem is that this also seems to be true of many members of An ad By contrast, making Pence president Congress. At this juncture we need states- trying to would greatly increase the likelihood men with ideals and vision, and what we get the that the Republicans will keep the White have is a collection of sorry political hacks. attention House in 2020. He would benefit from Not all, to be sure, but if I were to single out of some- the natural sympathy that almost all new one offender, it would be Mitch McConnell. one who presidents receive, particularly those who The country is being held hostage by a badly might be assume office in a crisis. If he played no behaved child having a temper tantrum, and interested affirmative role in the removal of Trump, McConnell refuses to do anything unless he in oatmilk. he would retain the loyalty of Trump’s is assured that the child will approve. Yes, we followers, who would likely turn out in need impeachment. But who is going to do it? droves to avenge Trump’s “martyrdom.” Lacking the offensive aspects of Trump’s Stephen Wellcome personality, Pence would be much more likely to retain the support of Republican BRUNSWICK, MAINE moderates and independents. Impeachment is important to pursue even Appelbaum may have intended for his if the Senate fails to remove Trump, Appel- argument to be nonpartisan; from my baum says, and Senate Majority Leader perspective, for both practical and political Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) “Republican reasons, it would be folly to try to remove majority has shown little will to break with Trump unless it is clear that 20 or more the president.” Republican senators are ready to brave Trump’s followers and vote for impeach- But doesn’t this point to an easier, ment. Even better would be a political better remedy to this debacle? Just ditch coup under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, McConnell … which would necessitate Pence’s support. Either would ensure a rupture in the True, a Republican Senate not led by Republican Party that would lead to defeat Mitch McConnell still probably wouldn’t in 2020. override Trump’s veto of a bill protect- ing America’s public lands or try to tackle James K. Genden climate change, but it might surely quash misguided trade wars, demand qualified EVANSTON, ILL. Cabinet appointees, stop Trump from pulling out of NATO or other alliances that The logic of Appelbaum’s reasoning for undergird America’s pole position in the impeachment is sound. Nevertheless, world pecking order, and prevent vanity the practicalities of doing so are fraught. government shutdowns … Should Trump be impeached and convicted prior to the expiration of his current term McConnell is up for re-election in 2020— in office, Mike Pence would take over with and Republicans can replace him as their the full authority to pardon Trump in the leader anytime they want someone a little remaining days of that term. Thus, the bolder and less deferential to Trump. Will “sooner rather than later” urgency of the they do that? Probably not, unless they article could end up being self-defeating. become convinced that he’s leading them into the political wilderness. But that’s Right now, perhaps more than at any still more likely than a two-thirds majority other time in history, serious consequences of this Senate convicting Trump of high need to be meted out, both to assuage crimes and misdemeanors. public outrage and to discourage despotic behavior in future candidates. Leaving a Peter Weber path for Trump to walk free subverts justice and is not an option. EXCERPT FROM AN ARTICLE ON THEWEEK.COM Andrew Nelson Yoni Appelbaum’s terrific piece on impeach- BEND, ORE. ment has settled my swirling mind. I now EDITORIAL OFFICES & CORRESPONDENCE The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column. Correspondence should be sent to: Editorial Department, The Atlantic, 600 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20037. Receipt of unsolicited manuscripts will be acknowledged if accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Manuscripts will not be returned. For instructions on sending manuscripts via email, see theatlantic.com/faq. CUSTOMER SERVICE & REPRINTS Please direct all subscription queries and orders to: 800-234-2411. International callers: 515-237-3670. For expedited customer service, please call between 3:30 and 11:30 p.m. ET, Tuesday through Friday. You may also write to: Atlantic Customer Care, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564. Reprint requests (100+) should be made to The YGS Group, 717-399-1900. A discount rate is available for students and educators. Please visit theatlantic.com/subscribe/academic. ADVERTISING OFFICES The Atlantic, 60 Madison Avenue, Suite 800, New York, NY 10010, 646-539-6700.

think that the day after Special to ensure that America would THE BIG QUESTION Counsel Robert Mueller makes remain a “white man’s [coun- his move, whether or not his try].” And though impeach- On Twitter, we asked people to pick their favorite reader responses to April’s report goes to the House of ment proceedings ultimately Big Question. Here’s how they voted. Representatives, impeachment failed by a single vote, they should begin. There are ample were seemingly a success: Q: What was the best sequel grounds without anything Johnson lost so much support in history? Mueller may reveal, so there that he was unable to stand for is no reason to wait once he re-election. 36% is done. The way Andrew Johnson’s impeachment seems I do not doubt either the The Godfather: Part II to foreshadow Trump’s is fasci- legal or the moral case for nating. History does rhyme. impeaching Johnson. But 35% anybody who knows a little Sandy Miley bit about the history of The Empire Strikes Back Reconstruction has reason to SHERRILL, N.Y. contest the idea that it should 18% serve as a model for our own A salient reason to begin perilous moment. For, while The Odyssey impeachment proceedings the failed attempt to impeach is that doing so would show Johnson did end his career, it 11% the world that democracy did precious little to halt the works—and, I hope, would rise of his larger project. Within The New Testament also underscore the dangers a decade of his departure from of authoritarianism, or those the White House, the vile were based on years of service. The author treated office governments listing in that aspiration for which he had The thief among the employees theft as a moral failing on the direction. Although China’s fought—the hope of reversing was the fastest welder. That part of employees. But this Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir the progress blacks had made experience convinces me that misses the bigger picture. Real Putin, the Philippines’ Rodrigo in the immediate aftermath of the increase in theft Rene Chun wages have been mostly stag- Duterte, North Korea’s Kim Jong the Civil War—had triumphed. describes is due in part to the nant for the past few decades. Un, and others are too far gone, increasing number of employ- Rather than increasing salaries, the citizens of Hungary, Turkey, There is every reason for ees who perceive themselves companies are offering more Venezuela, and others might Democrats to start hold- as unfairly compensated in this perks, such as Ping-Pong learn something by watching ing hearings into Trump’s no-raises economy. tables and occasional free food. our Constitution at work. misconduct. There is every They do this knowing that it’s reason for them to demand John Cady cheaper than just giving every- Virginia Mann his tax returns and ask him to one an adequate raise, instead testify in front of Congress. But HILLSDALE, N.Y. SAN RAFAEL, CALIF. for now, impeachment would JAMES GRAHAM; WG600 be the wrong means toward a Mr. Chun attributed the taking Abortive attempts to oust noble end: Designed to contain of supplies and food from authoritarian populists from the damage a dangerous presi- work to a sense of entitlement office have gone sour in a dent can wreak, it may turn out largely stemming from the depressingly large number to help Trumpism survive even fact that people are working of cases in recent years. In after Trump is forced to leave from home more. This doesn’t Venezuela, Hugo Chávez made the White House. explain why, at my old office— a big step toward dismantling from which I never once democracy after he narrowly Yascha Mounk worked remotely—I took pens survived a recall referendum and notepads and used the in 2004. In Turkey, Recep EXCERPT FROM A SLATE ARTICLE printers liberally for personal Tayyip Erdogan has crushed items (even to print a résumé the remaining liberties of his Raiders of the to apply for another job). opponents since an abortive Office Park coup failed to oust him in the summer of 2016. In March, Rene Chun docu- mented the rising prevalence of Even Appelbaum’s favorite workplace theft. case—that of Andrew Johnson— is hardly a story of unalloyed I once worked for a steel- success. As Appelbaum tells the fabricating company whose 12 story, Johnson deserved to be employees were mostly welders. impeached both because of his Everyone had a key to the place, authoritarian tendencies and and profits were shared. Wages because of his determination 10 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

THE CONVERSATION transferring the money saved on labor to #TWEET of the month LOOK! already wealthy executives and shareholders. “We need to end a culture Another Why shouldn’t I sometimes take a high- that protects the abusive— ad trying lighter or a few pieces of paper that cost my regardless of how much to do the employer a cent or two, when my employer they entertain or how much is systematically depriving me and my they earn for those who exact co-workers of hundreds or even thousands profit from their success. same thing of dollars a year? No matter what there is someone who doesn’t as the Justin Schweitzer assault people who can do previous your job.” WASHINGTON, D.C. ad. — @realamberheard Rene Chun replies: Actor and activist, Noncash larceny (stealing stuff at work) on “Nobody Is Going to Believe You” is frequently rationalized through the social-cognitive mechanism known as moral the school took his name down. From an disengagement: “It’s okay for me to take a box outsider’s perspective, these events may of Starbucks K-Cups home, because my boss appear to be correlated, and in the article, is such a jerk.” Although I didn’t specifically they are implied to be. This assumption, mention worker pay in the piece, low and however, is incorrect. stagnant wages are also undoubtedly high on the list of justifications people might offer The administration did not make this for moral disengagement. But proceed with change because of pressure from student caution. Here’s something that didn’t make it activists or out of respect for survivors of into the final copy: Due to the proliferation of sexual assault. It removed Bryan Singer’s video surveillance, employers frequently know name because he personally requested who is stealing at work. Some of these thefts that it do so, according to an email sent by are used as grounds for dismissal, and some of administrators to the entire student body. In these thefts are ignored. It depends on whether complying with Singer’s request, the school you’re a “high-value employee.” Think about unashamedly allied itself with a sexual that before you steal a $1,000 Aeron chair for predator, letting the community know that the home office. although it would not respond to weeks of “Nobody Is Going to Believe You” In March, Alex French and Maximillian Potter wrote about the director Bryan Singer, who has been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct for more than 20 years, largely without consequence. Alex French and Maximillian Potter’s collective action from a dedicated student article was keenly researched, empathetic, body, it would respond—immediately—to and well constructed. However, there is a powerful and influential donor. To not some misleading phrasing in the piece clarify this point when discussing the regarding a movement I was involved with matter relieves the administration of its at the University of Southern California’s complicity—a benefit that it does not deserve. School of Cinematic Arts. Emily Halaka Up until roughly a year ago, the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at USC was LOS ANGELES, CALIF. named after Bryan Singer, an alumnus and a significant donor. In November 2017, as is correctly stated in the article, I started a petition with a fellow student intended to encourage the administration to remove Singer’s name from our school. Thirty-one days later, the day after Cesar Sanchez- Guzman filed his lawsuit against Singer,

Not Just a Drill A message repeated in Behind the Art Erika Christakis’s article is There’s scant evidence that that of the low likelihood of Members of The Masthead, The Atlantic’s membership exercises to prepare students a person being involved in a program, can read exclusive stories such as the one excerpted for shootings are effective—but school shooting, a fact I will here, which provides insight into the editorial-art process. To they can be psychologically not dispute. The author states, join, visit theatlantic.com/membership/join. damaging, Erika Christakis “The scale of preparedness wrote in March. efforts is out of proportion to At the most basic level, editorial art exists to grab your the risk.” Using that rationale, attention. If the art persuades you to pause, the words The author fails to discuss a let’s examine how often our get the chance to do their job. Editorial art can signal major motivating factor in schools conduct fire drills. In an incredible array of detail. Does the story feature a the precautions schools take response to state mandates, particular person, time period, or topic? Is the tone wry, to prepare students for the most schools conduct fire somber, shocking, or uplifting? relatively rare instance of a drills regularly. I suppose a school shooter: accountabil- fire drill could be traumatic Consider Edmon de Haro’s illustration for “Not Just ity. After a tragedy occurs in depending on the participant a Drill.” De Haro quickly communicates the topic of the a school, an intensive effort and the circumstances, but it is story by using the ubiquitous school-crossing sign. Then is made to determine what a generally accepted practice he signals that something deeply familiar has become steps could have been taken because of its “value.” profoundly unsettling just by adding bulletproof vests. to protect students. Any law- The sign that once cautioned drivers (Watch out for enforcement officials, school According to the National students) now cautions children: Watch out for gunmen. administrators, or teachers Fire Protection Associa- who are perceived to have tion, the last known incident This is editorial art at its finest. De Haro not only failed in their duty to protect in which a fire caused the captures the topic and the mood, but also demonstrates students could be held crimi- death of a student at a school the writer’s argument: Our current system puts the onus nally or civilly liable. So woe occurred in 1958. So, given on children, not adults, to stay safe at school. to the school administrator that fact and all the technol- who has to explain to grieving ogy we now use to prevent Katie Martin parents that the school failed and mitigate fires, why do we to conduct lockdown drills continue to train our children ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR, THE ATLANTIC because it did not want to how to respond? Because fire cause unnecessary anxiety. drills—which are incorporated class. It was exactly as Ms. drills were with pre-K classes. EDMON DE HARO into every child’s school life— Christakis described: dark- Each time the children had Steve Thompson will inform and empower them ened room, sitting on the floor, been prepared, and each time with the knowledge of how to the principal forcefully jiggling they responded amazingly well CORAL SPRINGS, FLA. react. And because the poten- the doorknob. The other two during the drills themselves. tial for tragedy, regardless of The majority of my career its likelihood, is tremendous. has been focused on school- I believe violent-intruder train- based policing and emergency ing should be conducted for management. I’ve been in law the same reason. enforcement for 17 years. My role as a school resource offi- I do agree that the improper cer and my former position as facilitation of these drills may the deputy director of a state- be traumatic for students and wide Comprehensive School staff. Any drill conducted within Safety Program exposed me to a school needs to be thoroughly the constant evolution of poli- and thoughtfully planned. But cies and procedures related preparation and education, to how we can best keep our done the right way, are incred- students and staff safe. Addi- ibly empowering. I want those tionally, as a national instruc- tools for my community, my tor of school resource officers, school, and, most important, I am constantly communi- my children. cating with those involved in both the educational and Joey Melvin public-safety fields. I’m also the father of two elementary- GEORGETOWN, DEL. school students, whose physi- cal and mental well-being is I read this article on a Sunday. paramount to me. I had just experienced my third lockdown drill on the previous Friday, with a kindergarten 12 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

THE CONVERSATION LOOK! Experience More of in the cubbies. But how can we practice Another The Atlantic that? What next? Of course safety drills ad try- have value, but educators must protect ing to Have you registered your account both children and childhood. And every provide online yet? If you haven’t, and single day, we must earn and uphold our additional you’re already a subscriber, you’re students’ trust. support missing out on benefits such as for the audio articles, digital editions of Catherine Mallam, M.S.Ed. previous recent special issues, and more. two ads. Sign up today to receive these HAVERTOWN, PA. perks and easily manage your subscription from any device. Last year I wrote an opinion piece for JAMA Pediatrics, “The Return of Duck To get started, visit and Cover and the Imminence of Death— theatlantic.com/register-now. What It Means for Physicians,” to remind physicians that these active-shooter drills The kids commented later that the drill could have consequences, as the duck- was scary. They were right! Even staff, who and-cover drills of the 1950s and early are advised in advance of a drill, become 1960s had consequences. jumpy and nervous just at the idea of an impending drill—what you’re drilling for is Toxic stress develops in the context of that terrifying. The thought constantly runs intense and ongoing stress that activates through your head: In an actual event, we a child’s stress-response system. It occurs would not have advance warning. in situations lacking the support of parents and other caring adults and can lead to an Diane Serniak Piwinski overactive response system and increased stress hormones, which change the struc- YONKERS, N.Y. ture of the brain and affect learning, social relations, emotions, judgment, and impulse I teach 3- and 4-year-olds with special control. Could active-shooter drills, as needs, mainly autism. The stress on me currently practiced, provide a culture for as a teacher to get through these drills the growth of toxic stress in children? The is immense. I can’t imagine what the more we make people aware of the poten- stress does to young developing minds, tial consequences of these drills, the better especially to brains that already have diffi- we can protect the mental and physical culties processing the world around them. health of our children. And considering my students’ language and communication delays, debriefing Ms. Christakis writes about the “adulti- or trying to explain the “why” of these fication” of children. This includes, for things is impossible. example, the imposition on children of the adult task of disaster preparedness and Kathy Sterling response. The adultification of children is an important concept to consider; in this LIBERTY, TEXAS milieu of violence and active-shooter drills, let us also consider the traumatization of I applaud Erika Christakis’s courage our children. in writing “Not Just a Drill.” As an elementary-school counselor and a Mary E. Woesner, M.D. certified trauma practitioner, I agree that lockdown drills risk scaring and trauma- NEW YORK, N.Y. tizing children in an attempt to protect them. For 30 years, I have witnessed Story Update: the evolution of lockdown drills from nonexistent, to low-key “code reds,” to “The Fertility Doctor’s Secret,” by Sarah a post–Sandy Hook lockdown protocol Zhang (April), stated that Donald Cline so well practiced that one officer noted had fathered at least 48 children with it was “like 600 children just vanished.” his patients. In mid-March, The Atlantic Now, armed with data from other school learned that the number of biological chil- shootings, police advise even elementary- dren had grown to at least 50, confirmed school teachers to consider ways to escape by DNA tests. Some of the children are with their students or fight an intruder if advocating for a fertility-fraud bill, which necessary, and not merely to hide huddled has now passed the Indiana Senate. To contribute to The Conversation, please email [email protected]. Include your full name, city, and state.

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Waterways can contain traces of many drugs—among them ones for pain, fertility, mood, and sleeplessness. A platypus living in a contaminated stream in Melbourne is likely to ingest more than half a recommended adult dose of antidepressants every day. — Rebecca Giggs, p. 24 D I S PAT C H E S IDEAS & PROVOCATIONS MAY 2019 • POLITICS TRUMP’S SECOND TERM If it comes to pass, it will be far more consequential than his first. BY PAUL STARR O F A L L T H E Q U E S T I ON S that will be answered by the 2020 election, one matters above the others: Is Trumpism a temporary aberration or a long-term phenomenon? Put another way: Will the changes brought about by Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party fade away, or will they become entrenched? Trump’s reelection seems implausi- ble to many people, as implausible as his election did before November 2016. But despite the scandals and chaos of his pres- idency, and despite his party’s midterm Illustrations by EDMON DE HARO THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 15

D I S PAT C H E S losses, he approaches 2020 with two even many of the people who acknowl- After pulling the United States out of factors in his favor. One is incumbency: Since 1980, voters have only once denied edged the reality of climate change the Iran nuclear agreement (in so doing, an incumbent a second term. The other is a relatively strong economy (at least as of thought of it as a slow process that did badly damaging America’s reputation now). Alan Abramowitz, a political scien- tist at Emory University who weights both not demand immediate action. But today, as both an ally and a negotiating part- of those factors heavily in his election- forecasting model, gives Trump close to amid extreme weather events and wors- ner), Trump failed to secure from North an even chance of reelection, based on a projected 2 percent GDP growth rate for ening scientific forecasts, the costs of our Korea anything approaching the Iran the first half of 2020. delay are clearly mounting, as are the deal’s terms, leaving Kim Jong Un not So far, much of the concern about the long-term effects of Trump’s presidency associated dangers. To have a chance at only unchecked but with increased inter- has centered on his antidemocratic tendencies. But even if we take those off keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees national standing. Many world leaders the table—even if we assume that Trump continues to be hemmed in by other parts Celsius—the objective of the Paris climate are hoping that Trump’s presidency is a of the government and by outside institu- tions, and that he governs no more effec- agreement—the Inter- tively than he has until now—the impact of a second term would be more lasting governmental Panel on than that of the first. Climate Change says that In normal politics, the policies adopted by a president and Congress may zig one by 2030, CO2 emissions More countries may way, and those of the next president and must drop some 45 percent opt to pursue nuclear Congress may zag the other. The con- from 2010 levels. Instead weapons, especially tending parties take our system’s rules as of declining, however, they a given, and fight over what they under- stand to be reversible policies and power are rising. those in regions that have arrangements. But some situations are In his first term, Trump relied upon American not like that; a zig one way makes it hard security guarantees. to zag back. has announced plans to cancel existing climate This is one of those moments. After four years as president, Trump will have reforms, such as higher made at least two Supreme Court appoint- ments, signed into law tax cuts, and rolled fuel-efficiency standards back federal regulation of the environ- ment and the economy. Whatever you and limits on emissions think of these actions, many of them can probably be offset or entirely undone in from new coal-fired power plants, and he blip—that he will lose in 2020, and that his the future. The effects of a full eight years of Trump will be much more difficult, if has pledged to pull the United States out of successor will renew America’s commit- not impossible, to undo. the Paris Agreement. His reelection would ments to its allies and to the principles of Three areas—climate change, the risk of a renewed global arms race, and con- put off a national commitment to decar- multilateralism and nonproliferation. If trol of the Supreme Court—illustrate the historic significance of the 2020 election. bonization until at least the second half of he is reelected, however, several coun- The first two problems will become much harder to address as time goes on. The the 2020s, while encouraging other coun- tries may opt to pursue nuclear weapons, third one stands to remake our constitu- tional democracy and undermine the tries to do nothing as well. And change that especially those in regions that have relied capacity for future change. is delayed becomes more economically on American security guarantees, such as I  N S H O R T, the biggest difference between electing Trump in 2016 and and politically difficult. According to the the Middle East and Northeast Asia. reelecting Trump in 2020 would be irreversibility. Climate policy is now the Global Carbon Project, if decarbonization At stake is the global nonproliferation most obvious example. For a long time, had begun globally in 2000, an emis- regime that the United States and other sions reduction of about 2 percent a year countries have maintained over the past would have been sufficient to stay below several decades to persuade nonnuclear 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Now it will powers to stay that way. That this regime need to be approximately 5 percent a year. has largely succeeded is a tribute to a If we wait another decade, it will be about combination of tactics, including U.S. 9 percent. In the United States, the eco- bilateral and alliance-based defense nomic disruption and popular resistance commitments to nonnuclear countries, sure to arise from such an abrupt transition punishments and incentives, and pledges may be more than our political system can by the U.S. and Russia—as the world’s bear. No one knows, moreover, when the leading nuclear powers—to make dra- world might hit irreversible tipping points matic cuts to their own arsenals. such as the collapse of the West Antarctic In his first term, Trump has begun to Ice Sheet, which would likely doom us to a undermine the nonproliferation regime catastrophic sea-level rise. and dismantle the remaining arms-control The 2020 election will also determine treaties between Washington and Moscow. whether the U.S. continues on a course In October, he announced that the U.S. that all but guarantees another kind of would withdraw from the Intermediate- runaway global change—a stepped-up Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty arms race, and with it a heightened risk signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and of nuclear accidents and nuclear war. Mikhail Gorbachev. While the Russian Trump’s “America first” doctrine, attacks violations of the treaty that Trump cited on America’s alliances, and unilateral are inexcusable, he has made no effort to withdrawal from arms-control treaties hold Russia to its obligations—to the con- have made the world far more dangerous. trary, by destroying the treaty, he has let 16 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

• POLITICS Russia off the hook. What’s more, he has opportunity to replace two more justices: of Republican appointees—Sandra Day displayed no interest in extending New Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 87 at the O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and most START, which since 2011 has limited the beginning of the next presidential term, recently John Roberts—have, by occa- strategic nuclear arsenals of Russia and and Stephen Breyer will be 82. Whether sionally breaking ranks, held the Court the United States. If the treaty is allowed you regard the prospect of four Trump- back from a full-scale reversal of liberal to expire, 2021 will mark the first year since appointed justices as a good or a bad principles and precedents. With a 7–2 1972 without a legally binding agreement thing will depend on your politics and rather than a 5–4 majority, however, the in place to control and reduce the deadli- preferences—but there is no denying that Court’s conservatives could no longer be est arsenals ever created. the impact on the nation’s highest court checked by a lone swing vote. would be momentous. The prospect of a new nuclear arms Much of the public discussion about race is suddenly very real. With the end Not since Richard Nixon has a presi- the Court’s future focuses on Roe v. Wade of verifiable limits on American and Rus- dent named four new Supreme Court and other decisions expanding rights, sian nuclear weapons, both countries justices, and not since Franklin D. Roose- protecting free speech, or mandating sep- will lose the right to inspect each other’s arsenal, and velt has one had the opportunity to alter aration of Church and state. will face greater uncertainty the Court’s ideological balance so deci- Much less public attention about each other’s capabili- sively. In Nixon’s time, conservatives has been paid to conserva- ties and intentions. Already, did not approach court vacancies with a tive activists’ interest in rhetoric has taken an omi- clear conception of their judicial objec- reversing precedents that nous turn: After Trump tives or with carefully vetted candidates; since the New Deal era have suspended U.S. partici- both Nixon and Gerald Ford appointed enabled the federal govern- pation in the INF Treaty on justices who ended up on the Court’s lib- ment to regulate labor and February 2, Vladimir Putin eral wing. Since then, however, the con- the economy. In the late 19th quickly followed suit and servative movement has built a formi- and early 20th centuries, promised a “symmetrical dable legal network designed to ensure conservative justices regu- response” to new American that future judicial vacancies would not larly struck down laws and weapons. Trump replied a be squandered. regulations such as limits few days later in his State of on work hours. Only in 1937, the Union address, threat- The justices nominated by recent after ruling major New Deal ening to “outspend and out- Republican presidents reflect this shift. programs unconstitutional, innovate all others by far” in But because the Court’s conservative did the Court uphold a state weapons development. majorities have remained slim, a series minimum-wage law. In the decades that followed, the The treaties signed by Court invoked the Consti- the United States and Russia tution’s commerce clause, beginning in the 1980s have which authorizes Con- resulted in the elimination gress to regulate interstate of nearly 90 percent of their commerce, as the basis for nuclear weapons; the end of upholding laws regulat- the Cold War seemed to con- ing virtually any activity firm that those weapons had affecting the economy. A limited military utility. Now— great deal of federal law, as the U.S. and Russia aban- from labor standards to don their commitment to arms control, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to health Trump’s “America first” approach causes and environmental regulation, rests on countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia that foundation. to question the durability of U.S. security But the Court’s conservative major- guarantees—the stage is being set for ity has recently been chipping away more states to go nuclear and for the U.S. at the expansive interpretation of the and Russia to ramp up weapons develop- commerce clause, and some jurists on ment. This breathtaking historical rever- the right want to return to the pre-1937 sal would, like global warming, likely feed era, thereby sharply limiting the govern- on itself, becoming more and more diffi- ment’s regulatory powers. In 2012, the cult to undo. Court’s five conservative justices held that the Affordable Care Act’s penalty for F INALLY, A SEC OND TERM for failing to obtain insurance—the so-called Trump would entrench changes at individual mandate—was not justified by home, perhaps the most durable of which the commerce clause. In a sweeping dis- involves the Supreme Court. With a full sent from the majority’s opinion, four of eight years, he would probably have the those justices voted to strike down the THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 17

D I S PAT C H E S • CRIMINAL TENDENCIES victim from behind, lifts his wallet, and passes it to entire ACA for that reason. The law sur- Watch Your Wallet a partner. vived only because the fifth conservative, Chief Justice Roberts, held that the man- Pickpockets love our Bob Arno, a security date was a constitutional exercise of the digitally distracted age. expert who has instructed government’s taxing power. NATO counterintelligence BY RENE CHUN agencies and SEAL teams If the Court had included seven con- on what he calls “distrac- servative justices in 2012, it would almost S HERMAN “O. T.” rapid-transit system, Muni, tion theft,” suggests a few certainly have declared the ACA null Powell, a retired reported a spike last year), reasons for the crime’s per- and void. This is the fate awaiting much pickpocket who Chicago (where more sistence. First, although existing social and economic legislation honed his skills on the than 2,100 pickpocketing banks’ anti-theft algo- and regulation if Trump is reelected. And streets of New York in the reports were filed by tran- rithms have made stolen that’s to say nothing of future legislation 1980s, claims that at the sit cops in 2018, a 13 per- credit cards less lucrative such as measures to limit climate change, height of his career he cent increase over 2017), than they once were, debit which might well be struck down by a could clear up to $5,000 and Indianapolis (headline: cards can still yield a tidy Court adhering to an originalist interpre- a month (about $12,000 “Thieves Pick $2,700 From profit if a thief plans ahead. tation of our 18th-century Constitution. today, adjusting for infla- Man’s Pocket in Kroger Arno says most decent tion). But over the years, Frozen Food Section”). pickpockets know how D E MO C R AC Y I S A LWAYS a gam- his income began to fall. to “shoulder surf” (peek ble, but ordinarily the stakes involve “Around 2000, people In Manhattan, where over a mark’s shoulder at short-term wins and losses. Much more started carrying less cash, transit larcenies rose an ATM) or use binoculars hangs in the balance next year. and I got out of the game,” 15 percent last year, police to identify a PIN from a he told me. By 2010, the blame much of the bump distance. Second, people With a second term, Trump’s presi- New York Daily News on traveling pickpocket carry more cash than you dency would go from an aberration to a reported that year, only teams from Latin America. might think—it remains the turning point in American history. But it 40 “career pickpockets” The profession used to be most common method of would not usher in an era marked by sta- were left in all of Manhat- dominated by middle- payment in the U.S. bility. The effects of climate change and tan, and young thieves aged men with light fin- the risks associated with another nuclear were no longer apprentic- gers and long rap sheets, Finally, theft may be arms race are bound to be convulsive. And ing with seasoned ones, but these newer players, getting easier. Smart- Trump’s reelection would leave the coun- as had previously been who describe themselves phones may have over- try contending with both dangers under customary. Selling drugs as “whiz mobs,” tend to be taken wallets as the most the worst possible conditions, deeply was far more profitable. made up of younger men, pickpocketed item, and alienated from friends abroad and deeply “You don’t find young picks and depend more on col- even a disabled iPhone divided at home. The Supreme Court, anymore,” one cop told laboration than on manual can fetch $200 on the furthermore, would be far out of line with the News. “It’s going to dexterity. To this end, they black market (new screens public opinion and at the center of politi- die out.” rely on classic ploys like are a particularly desir- cal conflict, much as the Court was in the the “sandwich,” wherein able part). Arno says that 1930s before it relented on the key poli- Except it hasn’t. Pick- they surround a victim on snagging a phone out of a cies of the New Deal. pocketing is now on the an escalator, with a “stall” pair of slacks is “a piece of rise in many American positioned in front. When cake.” Phones not in pock- The choice Americans face in 2020 is cities, among them San the stall abruptly stops, ets may also be making life one we will not get to make again. What Francisco (where the the pick bumps into the easier for thieves, by leav- remains to be seen is whether voters will ing victims less attentive grasp the stakes before them. In 2016, to both their wallets and Hillary Clinton’s emails absorbed more their surroundings. “The media and public attention than any world provides a multitude other issue. In 2018, Trump tried to focus of distractions to a brain attention on a ragtag caravan of a few that evolved to be single- thousand Central Americans approach- minded,” says Earl Miller, ing the southern border. That effort failed, a neuroscience professor but the master of distraction will be back at MIT. “Even talking on at it next year. If we cannot focus on what the phone can use up all matters, we may sleepwalk into a truly of our cognitive capacity, perilous future. leaving little or no aware- ness of anything else.” Paul Starr is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton and a winner of Multitaskers, in other the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. words, are easy marks. His new book is Entrenchment: Wealth, “We have a brain that Power, and the Constitution of craves information,” yet Democratic Societies. we’re immersed in an envi- ronment “that provides too much of it,” Miller says. “It’s a pickpocket’s world.” 18 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by JAMES GRAHAM



D I S PAT C H E S • LANGUAGE a way of elucidating one’s case to a puck- ish refusal to do so. It helps its speaker hide WHY YOUNG ADULTS ARE behind the authority of the x—and avoid TALKING LIKE 3-YEAR-OLDS all the messiness of actual argument. In many ways, it channels the stubbornness Embracing your inner child is comforting and fun— of the little boy who asserts nothing more and just might revitalize the English language. than “Because!” when he’s asked why he scribbled on the wallpaper with a Sharpie. BY JOHN MCWHORTER Or have you noticed that, to con- I RECENTLY HAD the honor of meeting a time traveler from as recently as the vey emphasis or surprise, many young an award-winning literary sort, a man wry year 2000. women have begun appending an uh to and restrained and overall quite utterly their sentences? “No-uh!” “Move-uh!” mature, who casually referred to having Examples of kidspeak are everywhere, “It’s for you-uh!” Most adults would recog- gone through a phase in his 20s when he’d once you start to look. Take our new- nize this as a habit small children typically been “pilly”—that is, when he’d taken a fangled use of the word because, as seen outgrow by middle school, but women lot of recreational drugs. The word had in sentences such as I believe in climate have begun retaining it in adulthood— a wonderfully childish sound to it, the change because science and You’re reading one can catch it everywhere from the tacked-on y creating a new adjective in this article because procrastination. Even speaking style of the comedian Aubrey the style of happy, angry, and silly. My 10 years ago, such constructions would Plaza to the local Chipotle. That women writer-acquaintance, I recognized, was have sounded like a clear grammatical have started the trend is unsurprising, not alone in bending language this way. error from someone still learning to speak as women usually introduce new con- On the sleeper-hit sitcom Schitt’s Creek, for English; today, they have become so wide- structions into a language. Before long, instance, one of the protagonists, David, spread that the American Dialect Soci- research shows, men tend to catch on. speaks of a game night getting “yelly,” ety crowned because 2013’s Word of the while his sister describes a love interest Year. The rhetorical appeal is easy to see: Then there are exclamations like I’ve as “homelessy.” Meanwhile, back in real Stripped of its of, because transforms from had all the illnesses!, which one delight- life, one of my podcast listeners informed fully droll student of mine recently told me of a Washington, D.C., gentrifier who me after I asked why she’d missed class; declared that a neighborhood was no lon- another student told me that his father, a ger as “shooty-stabby” as it once had been. veteran bird-watcher, has seen “all the birds.” This phrasing dates back to a 2010 Pilly and its counterparts are not just comic strip by the artist Allie Brosh, in charming, one-off neologisms; they’re which her character seeks, with ingenu- signs of a broader shift in how Ameri- ous ambition and little result, to clean cans nowadays are given to putting “all the things!” It reflects the cutely nar- things. More and more, adults are sprin- row view of the child who recounts to us kling their speech with the language of children. Young kids tend to simplify language, leaving out verbs (“Daddy home!” a toddler might say as her father walks in) or using words in incorrect but intelligible ways—plurals like feets and deskses are common; my daughter, at age 3, described herself as “a talky kind of a person.” The adoption of some of these linguistic tics by adults—in the form of pilly and many other terms—has given rise to a register we might call kid- speak. It’s a new way of sounding “real,” with a prominence that would challenge 20 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by TAMARA SHOPSIN

specificities of her life, assuming that we, newly fearful of reaching adulthood, example, kidspeak refers to a “smol kitty” as adults, must be already knowledgeable about them: “At the park, we were doing agreeing more and more with statements and a “smol baby,” but not a “smol mail- the jump game and Michael told us we couldn’t take turns until the Juicy Loops such as “I wish that I could return to the box” or “smol Blu-ray player.” Smol, then, were gone!” (What’s the jump game? The Juicy whats? And who’s Michael?) security of childhood” and disagreeing is not merely a way of spelling small, but a Clearly, kidspeak affords its users cer- with ones such as “I feel happy that I am more specific term referring to diminutive tain rhetorical advantages—the way it play- fully softens blows is part of why younger not a child anymore.” Is it any wonder cuteness. Just missing out on becoming people on social media now often couch what they say to one another in the toddler- that another example of today’s kidspeak Word of the Year at the American Dialect esque. But what made bright teenagers and 20-somethings start imitating 5-year-olds is referring to grown-up activities with Society’s 2019 meeting was the mono- in the first place? And why are many older Americans following suit? the ironically distancing term adulting? syllabic yeet, seemingly meant to mimic T HE SLANG OF earlier decades offers Given the magnitude of recent social the sound of something being thrown into some clues. The 1920s gave rise to the bee’s knees, know your onions, and be your- and political unrest, not seeing the a container or through a net (and often self! (meaning “calm down”)—phrases that were less childish than jaunty, cocky, pert. upheaval reflected in The 1930s and ’40s brought “hep” slang like reet for “right” and chops for “ability.” language would have In the 1990s, veggies jumped from the lips of mothers spoon-feeding their infants to been surprising. And the menus of pricey organic restaurants. social media have only Kidspeak does not represent Perhaps no era’s slang more closely quickened the pace of a dumbing-down of English. resembles the kidspeak of today than that change. What 50 years of 1970s America—a time of linguistically jolly childishness that gave us words and ago might have been Just the opposite: We are phrases like to boogie, warm fuzzies, space cadet, and far out. The parallel isn’t so a ripple among people witnessing its enrichment. surprising when you consider the tumult in one city now per- of those times: the Vietnam War, Water- gate, stagflation, the energy crisis. After meates the nation; as an interregnum of relative prosperity and peace, gloomy sentiments have returned marvelous as Brosh’s with a new force, thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crash of “all the things!” car- 2008, the looming collapse of the environ- ment, and the rise of a dangerous super- toon is, no 1970s-era technology would pronounced with a celebratory gesture to annuated adolescent to the country’s high- est office. The horrors of the real world are have enabled a self-published comic strip that effect). One now speaks of “yeeting” enough to make a person seek the safety of childhood by any means, including lin- to attain international reach and coin a an empty can into the trash, and the word guistic ones. new idiom. has even developed an irregular past-tense Moreover, young people today are afraid in ways that generations before form, yote. We have kidspeak to thank for them were not. They’re also facing new, compounding economic hardships— A G E N E R AT I O N understandably introducing these new layers of playful- many Millennials and older members spooked by “adulting” may well ness and subtlety into our repertoire. of Gen Z depend on their parents to help cover exorbitant rents or student-loan pay- embrace the linguistic comfort food English today is arguably more fertile ments. Surveys confirm intuition here: A pair of 2016 studies led by April Smith, a of childlike language. And once estab- than it’s been since Shakespeare’s time, psychology professor at Miami Univer- sity, in Ohio, showed that over the past lished, the habit can easily make the and those itchy about the novelty of kid- few decades, young people have become jump to those of us more advanced in speak might consider that not so long ago years. After all, a kid lurks inside every pedants were insisting the proper person one of us, and few people are immune should say “bal-coh-nee” for balcony, to the sheer infectiousness of creativity. stamp out “nonwords” such as stand- Young people are the primary drivers of point, and use obnoxious to mean “ripe for language change, but even we “olds”— injury.” Their arguments failed miserably as the young are wont to put it—like to when presented to everyday speakers, change things up now and then. (We’re who tend to have good intuition about old, not dead.) As new slang creeps across how language should work. generational divides, however, it inevita- Amid today’s dreadful news cycles, bly stirs up people’s deepest linguistic the emergence of kidspeak is something anxieties. Does the new trend of kidspeak to celebrate. This new slang is a totally represent a dumbing-down of the English natural and endlessly witty collective language—and of American society as a advancement of the American idiom, whole? Just the opposite: With the rise of wielded selectively and with a funda- kidspeak, we are actually witnessing Eng- mental irony by people fully in command lish’s enrichment. of the standard language forms. It makes It has long been ordinary for one lan- for more interesting, nuanced talk. I, at guage to borrow from another (schaden- least, am glad to be living with the Eng- freude, hara-kiri), and even from a dialect lish of right now, surrounded by all the of the same language: Black English has new words. lent mainstream English words like diss and the “angry” meaning of salty. Kid- John McWhorter teaches linguistics at speak extends our word stock in exactly Columbia University, hosts the podcast the same way that Old Norse, French, Lexicon Valley, and is the author, most and Latin once did. On the internet, for recently, of Words on the Move. THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 21

D I S PAT C H E S • SKETCH “Oh!” he said once the fog of confusion lifted. “You look like you’re ready for a THE NEXT GEORGE BUSH class yourself!” In a time of outsider politics, can the It quickly became clear that Bush, who ultimate insider resurrect his family’s brand? was dressed in a black T-shirt, black mesh shorts, and a black baseball cap that read BY ELAINA PLOTT COME AND TAKE IT (a reference to the Texas Revolution), had not invited me GEORGE PRE S C OT T BU SH wants you The day before, Bush had switched up to CrossFit to work out, but to catch the to know that he is not low-energy. our meeting place from a barbecue joint, end of his own session. Once we had that where we were supposed to have lunch, sorted out, we sat down at a table near the At least, that’s the distinct impression to the gym, where I assumed we would middle of the gym, where, to a pulsing I got when I encountered Bush, the elder exercise. But when I showed up at the soundtrack featuring lyrics like I love bad son of Jeb and leading repository for the appointed time in hastily acquired work- bitches, that’s my fuckin’ problem, I asked hopes of an endangered political dynasty, out garb, Bush, who was lifting a heavy questions about his political future. one January morning at a CrossFit gym in object, looked at me like I was an alien. Austin, Texas. Being a scion of one of America’s leading political families comes with the advantage of inherited hindsight, or the ability to parse what sold (and what didn’t) in those who came before you. In this way Bush, who is 43 and goes by George P., can seem like the updated and optimized product of his forebears. He has the patrician jawline of his grand- father but (thanks to his mother, who is Mexican) the skin tone of the soon-to-be plurality of Texans. Like his father, he enjoys talking policy, but like his uncle, you might also want to grab a beer with him. And what he lacks in his uncle’s easy charm, he makes up for in solid pro- nunciation skills. Unlike any of his elders, moreover, he actually won his first race— in 2014, for Texas land commissioner, an office he was reelected to in 2018. But Bush would rather not endure com- parisons. He would prefer to prove that he is (as so many of those close to him have emphasized to me) his own man, with his own ideas. He knows that what’s in now are the underdogs, the disrupters, the fig- ures strange enough to accommodate this very strange moment. And the last presi- dential election (see Jeb’s “Please clap” moment) suggested that the Bush family was anything but. All the same, he seems to view his father’s fate in 2016 as instruc- tive rather than prophetic. George P. Bush is running. For what? Probably governor of Texas. When? It’s too soon to say. But he’s inched his way into the national consciousness in the past two years, first as the lone Bush to endorse Donald Trump for president, and more recently as the final person to eulogize George H. W. Bush before he was laid to rest. Which is to say, Bush is moving now to claim his title as Future of the GOP. But 22 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by JOHN CUNEO

will the party of Trump tolerate a can- Planned Parenthood as one point of dis- To stay relevant at this point, Aldrete didate who mirrors a past class of con- servatives in tone, in temperament, in agreement. He said other members of thinks that Bush would have to commit ideology? And even if Bush does manage to satisfy the base’s newly populist appe- his family were “pretty much in support to “reshaping and saving” his party. “You tites, can he do so without alienating the broader cross-section of voters needed to of that,” but he’s been against abortion haven’t seen that courage from him so far.” win a general election? rights his whole political career. It’s an As he struggles to reconcile these demands, Bush has wobbled. His bal- Tissue that Bush, who is Catholic, says is H E R E WA S A T I M E when Bush ancing act stands to become only more didn’t have to try so hard to distin- precarious going forward: Last year’s “core to my values.” midterms revealed a Texas just this side For Bush, endorsing Trump, however guish himself from his family. In fact, of purple, a shade that promises to deepen in the years ahead. tepidly, was a chance to add another when he was younger, he looked on track B E F O R E T H E L A S T presidential bullet point to his I’m-my-own-man list. to be one of its black sheep. election, few people were giving much thought to George P. Bush’s exis- Yes, he had the same concerns about the In 1993, when his father launched tence. That changed in August 2016. At the time, the Bush family was resolutely real-estate mogul as many other tradi- his first bid for Florida governor, Bush, #NeverTrump. But at a Texas GOP gather- ing, Bush broke ranks. He told activists that, tional Republicans did, the biggest one who was then 17, and his two younger although it was a “bitter pill to swallow,” the time had come to get behind Donald being whether he could defend Trump’s siblings found themselves suddenly in Trump in order to “stop Hillary Clinton.” character to his children. Bush told me it’s the limelight. But the happy and well- As the Texas GOP’s victory chair—the person leading the state party’s election a reservation “that I still have, honestly.” coiffed image that the extended Bush efforts—he said he didn’t have much of a choice. “I couldn’t look grassroots activ- But he managed to express his concerns family had always projected felt out of ists in the face and say, ‘Well, Trump is good enough for you, but not for me,’ ” about Trump without the holier-than- step with reality. he told me at CrossFit. He said his father understood. “To be honest with you, I thou tenor that helped tank the careers That reality included the fact that think he took it a little easier than the rest of my family … My uncle, though—that of so many other Republicans, including Bush’s 16-year-old sister, Noelle, had did require a sit-down.” He delivered the news in the library of the 43rd president’s his father. been using progressively harsher drugs home in Dallas, whereupon his uncle expressed concern that the endorse- In the lead-up to Bush’s 2018 reelection since middle school, and that Bush him- ment could be “a short-term gain for a long-term cost.” As for George W. Bush’s campaign for land commissioner, this self was struggling academically in his relationship with Trump today: He “is not going to be the one to engage in a war was smart politics: Texas favored Trump first semester at Rice University. It also of words on Twitter.” If he were asked for advice, Bush continued, the former over Clinton by a 9 percent margin. His included an episode that New Year’s Eve president would sit down with the current one and provide it. But that advice hasn’t endorsement also opened been requested, so what Bush describes as a “contentious relationship” continues. the door to a friendship Bush’s endorsement may have made with Trump’s eldest son, for awkward conversations with his family, but it served him well with other Don Jr., who agreed to However Bush adjusts his Texas Republicans. He constantly fields headline a fundraiser for tone, he’s still tied to the questions from voters about just how Bush in New York last aligned his politics are with his fam- ily’s. The biggest misconception, he said, summer, only to pull out president. This explains his is “that I’m in lockstep with them on at the last minute, after Jeb often awkward dance. everything.” He cited public funding of Bush condemned Trump’s family-separation policy as “heartless” on Twitter. “Don called me and said, ‘Look, I’m in an awkward position. I can’t in which a shirtless Bush tried to break do this.’ And I said I understood,” Bush into an ex-girlfriend’s home. Caught in the told me. (He says his father responded act by her father, according to the result- “So what?” to the fallout.) Thereafter, he ing police report, he fled—but came back tried to reassure voters that he still had his 20 minutes later with his car, in which he “own message,” distinct from his family’s. proceeded to do donuts across her 80-foot “I also have my own friendships,” he added. lawn. The family declined to press charges. Some in Texas—including those “I think that any kid growing up wants to Democrats who understood Bush’s politi- define themselves,” Bush says of those cal need to endorse Trump—wondered days. “Emotionally, I wasn’t mature.” whether, in his general silence on presi- He said he “grew into a man” after dential positions important to Texas, such his fitful first years of college. “I started as immigration, Bush was now sliding too to take life a little bit more seriously far in Trump’s direction. They were also and started to think about other people beginning to wonder whether the young instead of just myself.” He worked his Hispanic Republican’s potential to unite way onto the honor roll and recommitted Texas voters might go unrealized. himself to his Catholic faith. And over “Eight years ago, he was kind of this steak dinners at Morton’s and Tex-Mex rising star,” says James Aldrete, a Demo- at Molina’s in Houston, he began asking cratic strategist in Texas. “But Trump has his grandparents about politics. taken the party,” and Bush has decided, to Barbara Bush told him what she had his father’s embarrassment, to go along. told every member of her brood who was THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 23

D I S PAT C H E S considering elected office: Experience race. O’Rourke’s popularity, meanwhile, Party, Shahid Shafi, because he is Mus- life—and make your own mark, indepen- carried many down-ballot Democrats to lim. The group accused Shafi of follow- dent of your father’s—before you try to victory, leaving Republicans with a paltry ing Sharia law; one member declared his represent the lives of others. 18-seat margin in the state House. “If we appointment that July “a demoralizing have another night in 2020 like we did a blow to the conservative rank and file of So he did. After graduating from Rice, few months ago, we’ll lose the House,” the Republican Party.” Shafi—a surgeon he taught history at a public school in Flor- Bush told me, adding that Texas is in and city-council member—was forced to ida. He attended law school in Texas, then danger of becoming a “truly purple state.” clarify that he had never advocated for stayed in the state to practice corporate law. Sharia, and didn’t belong to “any terror- He got married and had two children. He I N AUGU ST 2018, a group of Repub- ist organization.” ran a real-estate private-equity firm. He licans began pushing to oust the vice joined the Navy, and served more than a chairman of Tarrant County’s Republican The episode brought into relief the year in Afghanistan as an intelligence offi- Texas GOP’s predicament. That local cer. Bush found his career path at once ful- filling and blessedly under the radar. Even • ANIMAL KINGDOM camouflaging habitat for his race for land commissioner, which he future hatchlings until won handily, made few headlines. Salmon on Psychotropics they themselves turn into smolts and, like their Nonetheless, a political profile was tak- Pharmaceutical pollution is altering some forebears, depart. ing shape. Bush was an ideal avatar for the animals’ moods—and migratory patterns. kind of voter the party, in the aftermath Today, another kind of the 2012 presidential election, hoped to BY REBECCA GIGGS of migration—a perni- recruit—young, pragmatic, nonwhite, flu- cious, microscopic one ent in Spanish. He was also likable. “He’s W  HAT IMPELS then back upstream, that folds together the a warm, relaxed guy,” says Will Hurd, a small salmon, onto floodplains, into private lives of humans Republican who represents a congressio- called smolts, woodlands, and higher with those of riverine nal district in southwestern Texas. “It’s out of their nursery still, to alpine lakes. En creatures—risks disrupting actually quite rare. And if people don’t brooks to the ocean? route, salmon bodies this cycle, even as it offers like you, they’re not going to listen to you.” Across thousands of miles, feed wolves, foxes, eagles, (a meager silver lining) the fish transmogrify from otters, flies, and others. insight into fish mental- Not that everyone liked Bush. Soon fingerlings into troll- Grizzlies and black bears ity and animal migration. after starting the job, he became the tar- ish adults—hook-jawed, lug the fish into the under- Pharmaceuticals are get of some of the far-right voters his party toothy, and, in the case wood, plucking the richest emitted from our bodies, hoped he might counterbalance. As land of many males, hump- organs and leaving the homes, and factories, commissioner, he announced a full-scale backed. Though revers- carcasses. Spruce forests entering waterways and renovation of the Alamo. The project ing the journey does in the Pacific Northwest accumulating in fish, bugs, might have inflamed tensions whoever not rescind their meta- have been fertilized by mollusks, crustaceans, was in charge—we’re talking about Texas morphosis, the big fish salmon: Tree rings record birds, and warm-blooded and, well, the Alamo. But when Bush famously return, waggling years of abundant fish as animals. Areas around called for moving the monument honor- against currents, vaulting well as thinner seasons. drug-manufacturing ing those who died in battle closer to their over dams, and pushing Nearly a quarter of the plants are hot spots for graves, he met with blowback from right- together, like a blade, nitrogen available to a this kind of pollution. So wing critics who (invoking the removal toward the very gravel river’s encircling wood- too are watercourses of Confederate monuments) accused beds where, years earlier, land may have been near hospitals and aging him of meddling with history. Observers they hatched. derived from dropped or sewage infrastructure. But I spoke with, including Democrats, were stranded salmon. medicinal compounds impressed that Bush held firm and man- The salmon “pulse,” as have also been detected aged to trounce a primary challenger at the some people describe this Those fish that man- in remote environments, same time. “It’s not just the Bush name— recurrent migration, is a age to get back to their imbuing surface waters there’s something more in him,” says Mus- marvel of animal tenacity. former cradle spawn; even in Antarctica. tafa Tameez, a top Democratic consultant But it matters for reasons soon after, most make in Texas. Indeed, he added, “a Bush name beyond natural spectacle. it their graveyard. Their Waterways can in the primary is not the best thing.” The fish’s life cycle draws decomposing bodies contain traces of many nutrients from forested nourish water grasses drugs—among them anti- Bush was reelected land commis- areas to the ocean and and algae, which form a fungals, antimicrobials, sioner with nearly 54 percent of the and antibacterials, as well vote, the highest share of any statewide as ones for pain, fertil- Republican candidate last year apart ity, mood, sleeplessness, from Governor Greg Abbott. But over- and neurodegenerative all, Texas Republicans were rattled by diseases. If current the election results. Former Represen- trends persist, scientists tative Beto O’Rourke came within three points of beating Ted Cruz in the Senate 24 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

• SKETCH party members had demonized Shafi’s for such a renaissance, or tries to launch know how much more I can say this to religion proved they were bigots. That one himself. my fellow leaders in the state party,” he their bigotry played out in a historically told me. “We talk in echo chambers. We red county that O’Rourke went on to Perhaps realizing this, Bush was the don’t go to college campuses. We’ve given win suggested they also had a politi- first statewide Republican official to con- up going to churches and synagogues, to cal death wish. Bush likes to say that a demn the group. “We must move towards black communities and Asian commu- “renaissance of classical conservatism” a more inclusive Republican Party and nities that hold many of our beliefs but can yet help steer Republicans back to stop tearing down our own if we are to haven’t heard the message.” He then mainstream political favor. But with little keep Texas red,” he tweeted. mentioned his own visits to the highly evidence that Trump’s grip on the party diverse county of Fort Bend, where he is loosening, Bush’s political survival Ultimately, the county party voted took part in a Chinese New Year celebra- may hinge on whether he waits passively to keep Shafi on as vice chairman, but tion and delivered a speech, which was the ordeal still weighs on Bush’s mind. translated into Chinese, about voter regis- “There’s a lot at stake in 2020, and I don’t tration and civic engagement. “Those are the types of things we need to do.” estimate, the volume of freshwater snails to peel conditions are favorable. pharmaceuticals diffusing off rocks. Drugs that The smolts do not usually But how does one sell the party of into fresh water could affect serotonin levels exhibit such gusto: In Trump to communities he’s repeatedly increase by two-thirds by in humans cause shore fact, they are frequently disparaged? On immigration, Bush claims 2050. Recent modeling crabs to exhibit “risky observed traveling tail-first, that the challenge isn’t one of substance. shows that a platypus behavior,” and female as if reluctant. It would “It’s the tone that is not working,” he said, living in a contaminated starlings to become less seem, then, that they have adding that “Texas wants the national stream in Melbourne is attractive to males (who a cognitive and perhaps government to come forward with solu- already likely to ingest in turn sing less). Dosed emotional switch that, tions,” such as “supporting Border Patrol,” more than half a recom- with Prozac, shrimp when flipped, prompts “strategically located physical structures,” mended adult dose of are more likely to swim them to strike out for and a plan to deal with people who have antidepressants every day. toward a light source—a sea. This complicates the overstayed their visas, which Bush feels is dangerous tendency, common understanding “the most overlooked issue.” Tracking medicines’ given that many preda- of migration, which holds impact in the wild is dif- tors hunt in sunlit zones. that animals are pup- But however much Bush adjusts ficult, but toxicologists petted by seasonal cues his own tone, or focuses on advancing believe their influences And Atlantic salmon and physical readiness reasonable policies, he’s still tied to the on fauna can occur at smolts exposed to (here, the adaptation of president—and he still feels he needs to low concentrations—and benzodiazepines— scales and gills to briny be. This helps explain his often awkward may be distinct from medications, such as water). Pharmaceutical dance over the past two years. How he their effects on humans. Valium and Xanax, that pollution reveals that a endorsed Trump in 2016, but rarely utters Already a variety of symp- are frequently used to psychobiological release his name. How he joined members of his toms has been observed treat anxiety—migrate may also be required—to party in denouncing the “liberal fake in lab studies. Amphet- nearly twice as quickly set off, the smolts must news,” but spoke up when they villain- amines change the timing as their unmedicated first surmount their own ized a Muslim party official. How Bush of aquatic insect develop- counterparts. Recklessly feelings of stress. repeatedly described to me significant ment. Antidepressants so, for the juvenile fish differences of opinion with Trump—he impede cuttlefish’s are likely to arrive at the We are by now called NAFTA the “most important free- learning and memory, sea in an underdeveloped accustomed to the idea trade agreement in Texas state history,” and cause marine and state and before seasonal that humans affect the and said John Kelly’s and James Mattis’s mental health of captive departures from the administration were animals. That we may a threat to its “stability”—but said he does also, inadvertently, be not support a primary challenge to Trump changing the mental “right now.” health of wildlife is an unhappy realization, Perhaps Bush’s seesaw approach to even if it expands what the president will be enough to secure is understood of animals’ his next office. Or perhaps Trump’s Texas emotional worlds. As base will continue to grow more fervent, salmon pervade their at the same time that Democrats con- environment, sustaining tinue to mobilize millions of voters. In forests, so their environ- that case, Bush’s future may be deter- ment enters into them, mined not by his ability to bridge the bringing with it evidence political chasm, but by his willingness to of our own distant inner pick a side. lives. Elaina Plott is an Atlantic staff writer. Illustration by ESTHER AARTS THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 25

D I S PAT C H E S • BUSINESS the distance. But instead of jamming, they took out their laptops. Alex pulled up more STOCK PICKS FROM SPACE images taken by DigitalGlobe’s World- View-1 satellite. Tom opened the annual Investors are using real-time satellite images reports of several publicly traded retailers. to predict retailers’ sales. Is that cheating? There is an old story about Sam Walton: BY FRANK PARTNOY In the early days of Walmart, its founder would monitor how stores were doing by O NE SUMMER DAY in 2009, Tom electric guitar. But Tom also wanted to counting the cars in the parking lot. After Diamond packed his black Infiniti talk with his brother about satellites. seeing the power of satellite imagery in his sedan with a week’s worth of clothes, factory deal, Tom had a similar idea, but his synthesizer, and his amp. He had Specifically, he couldn’t stop thinking on a scale Walton could not have imagined. just left his job as a director at a consul- about eight satellite photos Alex had sent He asked his brother, “What if we could tancy that helped financial firms moni- him a few months earlier. One of Tom’s count the cars at every Walmart?” tor their investments. He was heading clients had wanted to buy a factory in from Chicago to Buena Vista, Colorado, Malaysia, and needed proof that it was After a week together in the Rockies, to visit his brother, Alex, who worked for everything the seller had described. Tom the brothers had a plan. Alex left Digital- DigitalGlobe, a company that sells satel- used the photos as part of a presentation Globe and negotiated with the company lite imagery, mostly to the government. on the factory. Trucks, employee vehi- to sell him three years’ worth of archival cles, and stockpiles of raw materials were imagery. Tom downloaded a mouse-click The financial crisis had hurt Tom’s clearly visible on the factory site. His cli- counter, which allowed him to count the business, and he was ready for some- ent was blown away; applause erupted cars in those photos by clicking on each thing new. The trip was partly about tak- in the conference room. Tom thought, one. After a few months of scouring park- ing some time off and revisiting an old “There’s something here.” ing lots—at Home Depot, Lowe’s, McDon- hobby: playing rock arrangements of ald’s, and, yes, Walmart—the brothers had classical-music standards with Alex, who When Tom arrived at Alex’s house, a data set to back-test. Sure enough, the can shred Schubert’s “Suleika II” on the the brothers repaired to the back porch number of cars in a retailer’s parking lots to admire the view of Mount Columbia in seemed to accurately predict the compa- ny’s revenues. The Diamond brothers started their own company, called RS Metrics. (RS stands for “remote sensing.”) Their first client was a stock analyst who asked them to count cars at McDonald’s, now using real-time satellite imagery. Lowe’s hired them to keep tabs on its own stores—and on Home Depot’s, too. Their big break came in mid-2010, when Neil Currie, then an analyst at the investment bank UBS, bought parking-lot counts for 100 representative Walmart stores and 26 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by ISRAEL G. VARGAS

published the results in a quarterly earn- Today, investment firms spend hundreds The researchers also discovered, to ings preview. The number of cars in the parking lots, he wrote, suggested that of millions of dollars a year on so-called their surprise, that stock prices did not Walmart stock was undervalued. alternative data—tracking consumer adjust as sophisticated investors used the Currie’s prediction proved correct. As word spread that satellite images were a trends using everything from geolocation satellite data to profit from trading shares. reliable predictor of corporate profits, a range of investment funds began buy- to online browsing activity. Matthew Instead, during the period before earnings ing retail-traffic data from RS Metrics. In the following years, the company Granade, the chief market-intelligence reports, the information stayed within the expanded, tracking not just parked cars but solar-panel installations, lumber officer at Point72, an asset-management closed loop of those who had paid for it. inventory at sawmills, and the mining of metals worldwide. firm, told me his staff talks with more than (Economists don’t have a good explana- Today the firm, along with start-ups 1,000 vendors of such data every year. tion for why new information doesn’t such as Descartes Labs and Orbital Insight, uses a variety of aerial images and data to As the alternative-data arms race has always affect stock prices—but a lot of help investors pick stocks. When traders wanted to monitor the cars being pro- intensified, researchers have started tak- people have become billionaires because duced at Tesla’s assembly plant in Fre- mont, California, RS Metrics flew a plane ing a closer look at the collateral damage. it doesn’t.) Nor did Wall Street securities overhead. One morning last November, a train carrying 268 wagons of iron ore Some argue that today’s traders are using analysts, the supposedly well-informed derailed in the Pilbara Desert, in Western Australia. Iron-ore prices soared on the sources such as the Diamond brothers’ market watchers who regularly recom- news that the supply of a resource used in everything from furniture to paper clips satellite images to generate profits for mend stocks—and who had been among could be interrupted. But some traders carefully analyzed satellite images of the themselves—without returning much the first to embrace car counts—update accident and saw the ore piled in a flat area where it could easily be reloaded. They bet value to the market as a whole. The ques- their quarterly forecasts. Hedge funds that prices would soon decline. They were right—within a couple of weeks the panic tions these critics raise are fundamental: In that traded early based on their analysis had subsided, and they had made a fortune. a world where information is far from free, of the satellite data were right; the securi- The use of such aerial photography might seem to confer an unfair advantage how can we balance the goal of efficient ties analysts who didn’t adjust their fore- on the investors who can afford it—real- time satellite data cost tens of thousands markets against the principle of fair play? casts (either because they didn’t have, or of dollars a year, at a minimum. The prac- tice is perfectly legal, however. Back in the didn’t heed, the data) were wrong—as 1960s, there was a move by regulators and academics to enshrine in law the idea that T O ANSWER THE philosophical were the individual investors who follow all investors should have equal access to questions, it would help to address a their advice. information when trading securities. But the concept soon fell out of favor. Instead, practical one: How much advantage do Panos N. Patatoukas, one of the study’s courts have tended to interpret securities laws as prohibiting trading on information alternative-data sources actually confer co-authors, told me he thinks the use of in two kinds of cases: when you are a true insider—if, say, you are a manager and on the investors who can afford them? satellite imagery creates opportunities have access to privileged details about a company’s performance—and when you And is that advantage passed along to the for sophisticated investors at the expense “misappropriate” information, which essentially means stealing it. everyday investor? In theory, investors who seek out Recently, two ingenious methods to acquire new and useful information benefit the market as a business-school profes- whole, as their savvy trading leads to more accurate prices. But the information gap sors at UC Berkeley The number of cars in has widened considerably in recent years. (where I am a profes- the parking lots suggested sor in the law school) endeavored to find out. that Walmart stock They asked the Dia- was undervalued. mond brothers for their retail-parking-lot data. The brothers agreed to give them nearly their entire trove: daily car counts conducted of small individual investors. In a certain from 2011 to 2017 at 67,000 stores rep- sense, buying and selling stocks based resenting 44 major U.S. retailers, among on satellite data resembles insider trad- them Costco, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Tar- ing. One reason insider trading is illegal is get, Walmart, and Whole Foods. that it benefits those with superior infor- The researchers found that if, during mation and deceives outsiders who lack the weeks before a retailer reported quar- such an advantage. Sure, the number of terly earnings, you had bought its shares cars in a parking lot is technically public when parking-lot traffic increased abnor- information, but as a practical matter, few mally, and sold its shares when it declined, investors have the resources to take advan- you would have earned a return that was tage of it. “Isn’t trading based on satellite 4.7 percent higher than the typical bench- information similar to trading based on mark return. (That advantage is huge: If a material nonpublic information?” Pata- fund can reliably outperform the market toukas asked. by even a fraction of a percent, investors Predictably, Maneesh Sagar, the will throw money at it.) More cars in the CEO of RS Metrics, doesn’t see it that parking lots meant more earnings for the way. While he acknowledges that satel- quarter, and more earnings meant higher lite imagery is an expensive commodity stock prices. Car counting worked. at present, he predicts it will gradually THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 27

D I S PAT C H E S • BUSINESS become cheaper and available to a wider Of course, that’s coming from a Wall was similarly untroubled. “The delay is segment of the market, as is often the Street type who is poised to play the more of a problem for the wealthy inves- case with new technologies. “First it is game and win. But it’s not just big-shot tors than for us,” she said. “They are the expensive and no one has it,” he told investors who hold this view. I asked ones taking more risk during this time”— me. “But then it becomes cheaper, used Jill Fisch, a securities-regulation expert success isn’t guaranteed, even with the by more people. Eventually everyone at the University of Pennsylvania, what most sophisticated alternative data at will have real-time satellite access on she thought about hedge funds’ profiting hand—“and they are being compensated their phone.” At that point, presumably, from satellite imagery. She was unper- for it.” market prices will reflect the informa- turbed. The idea of equal access to infor- tion more rapidly. In the meantime, we mation, she said, is a myth: “Some people It’s unclear whether the Securities and live in a capitalist society: Brief periods always have better information, and the Exchange Commission will share this of inequity are the price we pay for what fact that they are informed actually pro- view. Its mission is to protect investors. As will ultimately be a more efficient market. tects the rest of us, because it helps make the market’s most sophisticated players market prices more accurate. We’d be come to rely on sources of information Aerial imagery is certainly becoming worse off with only uninformed traders.” that are ever more out of reach for the rest more widely available. Planet, a satel- As for the fact that there’s often a delay of us, the question regulators will have to lite company founded by three NASA between when hedge funds buy satellite answer is: Which investors? scientists, offers a product called Planet data and the release of earnings reports Explorer. I signed up for a free trial and that shift stock prices significantly, Fisch Frank Partnoy is a law professor at within minutes I was looking at photos of UC Berkeley. retailers near my house—it was like having a real-time version of Google Earth. But • VERY SHORT BOOK EXCERPT most investors can’t afford such services after the trial period expires, at least not yet. Discovering the Placebo By the time they can, the value of the • Adapted from The Magic H E N R Y B E E C H E R WA S a professor at Harvard who images may have waned. Some wealthy Feather Effect: The joined the U.S. Army during World War II and served investors told me that the advantages of Science of Alternative as a doctor on battlefields in Italy. There, in makeshift counting cars have already dissipated. The Medicine and the Surprising field hospitals, he saw countless soldiers arrive with most sophisticated investors have moved Power of Belief, by Melanie broken bones jutting through the skin, lacerations, on to strategies based on wider swaths of Warner, published by and assorted “penetrating wounds.” Despite their data. “The pictures themselves give you Scribner in January trauma, three-quarters of them reported only slight only a tiny edge,” Alex Diamond told me. to moderate pain, or none at all. Back home, where Beecher worked as the chief anesthesiologist at Hedge-fund managers now rely on Massachusetts General Hospital, he’d seen civilians machine-learning algorithms that incor- with similarly severe injuries display far greater lev- porate car counts as well as other types of els of distress. Intrigued by this discrepancy, Beecher alternative data. Thasos Group uses the reviewed his data and found that 83 percent of geolocation capabilities of mobile phones civilians requested pain relief upon arriving at the to monitor consumer behavior. Other hospital, whereas only 32 percent of soldiers did. companies track (anonymized) consumer transactions. Combining satellite images Why were soldiers so much less likely to need with analysis of spending patterns and medication? Beecher reasoned that to a soldier, the foot-traffic data provides an even richer— hospital signified an extraction from danger and and pricier—portrait of consumer behavior. distress—“a ticket to safety.” He might lose a limb, but he wasn’t going home in a flag-wrapped box. T H E MOR E PE OPL E participate in For civilians, however, hospitals marked “the begin- a market, the better that market will ning of disaster,” a menacing threshold between perform: Prices will reflect the wisdom a predictable existence and a challenging life of and instincts of a wider group of investors. uncertainty. Beecher found himself considering the But that doesn’t mean everyone ought to possibility that anytime he gave painkillers, part of open a brokerage account and start pick- the resulting relief was not from the drugs them- ing stocks. One hedge-fund manager selves, but from the patients’ conviction that they told me the lesson of the alternative- were going to feel better. Compelled by this logic, data boom is not that markets should be he set up the first program to study placebo effects regulated, but that retail investors should and in 1955 published “The Powerful Placebo.” avoid betting on individual stocks. “If He reported that in a sample of more than 1,000 average investors inevitably will be dis- patients, placebos relieved the symptoms (not only advantaged from trading, they shouldn’t pain) of a full 35 percent. do anything except buy and hold a pas- sive index fund,” he told me. If you can’t be competitive, don’t play the game. 28 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by JOE MCKENDRY

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THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN BY Repairing The current state of IT diversity percent of technology workers; even fewer the pipeline and inclusion initiatives African-American and Hispanic workers hold tech jobs, respectively accounting for only Perspectives on Most United States CIOs who participated 9 percent and 7 percent of technology work- diversity and inclusion in in the 2018 Global CIO Survey say their ers. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity information technology organizations lack key infrastructure to Commission reports that 80 percent of support diverse employees. Forty-four technology executives are men; 82 percent Leading chief information percent say they have no specific initiatives are white. officers (CIOs) in many in place to recruit, develop, or retain a diverse industries have made it workforce. And while 36 percent say their To address these challenges, a comprehen- a priority to increase the organizations aim to recruit and hire diverse sive IT D&I program typically focuses not only diversity of their workforces, employees, far fewer focus on training and on hiring, but also on: fill the leadership pipeline with development (22 percent) or retention talented women and members programs (15 percent) that can help keep • Goals, metrics, and accountability of other underrepresented talented underrepresented employees on • Inclusive IT cultures groups, and promote them board for the long term (Figure 1). • Access to career development into executive IT leadership positions. On the other hand, Even on IT teams with workplace diversity and opportunities some IT leaders are simply inclusion (D&I) programs, just 32 percent of • Engaging male supporters focused on diverse hiring, but their staff are women—only 10 percent more their progress toward closing than teams that do not provide such pro- Goals, metrics, and accountability the gaps within the leadership grams (22 percent). And CIOs who say their IT for diversity recruiting and hiring team has stalled. How are teams provide D&I programs have only 6 per- some CIOs and organizations cent more female direct reports (27 percent) Diverse recruiting and interviewing teams able to succeed in this regard than those whose teams do not provide such can proactively serve as a testament to an while others falter? programs (21 percent), as shown in Figure 2. organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Keysight VP and CIO Dan Krantz For more, visit: Although the number of women and minori- increased his company's number of female ties enrolled in tech programs is beginning applicants and hires by sending a team of deloitte.com/insights/cio-diversity to increase and many IT organizations have all-female recruiters to college job fairs. stepped up their diversity recruiting and “Qualified women technologists are out there, Follow us: hiring efforts, there is still much work to but you have to be intentional about finding be done. Women make up only about 25 them,” he says. @deloitteontech FIGURE 1 Most companies have only general talent initiatives Does your organization have initiatives in place specifically to recruit, develop, or retain a diverse IT workforce? No, we have general initiatives focused on talent 44% Yes, attracting and recruiting 36% Yes, training and development 22% Yes, retaining 15% 7% Prefer not to answer The majority of respondents say their organizations lack key infrastructure to support diverse employees. Note: N=126. Deloitte Insights | deloitte.com/insights Source: Deloitte 2018 Global CIO Survey

THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN BY Developing and publishing a FIGURE 2 formalized plan with quantifiable goals and metrics that track the IT D&I programs are missing the mark results of diversity recruiting and hiring can signal a company’s Agree or disagree: The IT function provides training programs that promote commitment to the process and diversity and inclusion in the workspace. show a willingness to be held publicly accountable. Percentage of female IT staff Percentage of female direct reports to CIO Inclusive cultures can 32% 22% 28% make room for new 27% 21% 25% ways of thinking and working Agree Disagree Neither agree nor Researchers at Deloitte define disagree inclusive cultures as those that support the diversity of thinking Note: N=118. Deloitte Insights | deloitte.com/insights that arises when companies hire Source: Deloitte 2018 Global CIO Survey employees with diverse back- grounds, experiences, and ideas. Six ways to help move the needle: Organizations with inclusive cultures are twice as likely to To create inclusive IT cultures that enable all employees to 5 meet or exceed financial targets thrive regardless of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, as those without, three times as disability, or other characteristics, consider these six leading Provide likely to be high-performing, six practices that are based on Deloitte interviews and research. professional times more likely to be innova- development tive and agile, and eight times 1 3 opportunities. more likely to achieve better business outcomes. Articulate the Pay attention to Networking, mentoring, business case. inclusion, not just or sponsoring create an Inclusive IT cultures can often diversity. environment where women eliminate many of the obstacles Research shows that and underrepresented that lead women and members diverse technology teams Organizations must minorities can easily of other underrepresented can improve operational prioritize inclusivity, access the same groups to change companies and financial performance, provide advancement and opportunities as others. or leave the workforce altoge- boost innovation, and development opportunities, ther. According to one study, more. By outlining these and remove biases that 6 organizations with inclusive benefits, CIOs can align may exist in salaries, cultures have higher rates of skeptical team members performance reviews, and Establish metrics employee retention and find it with the D&I strategy. flexible scheduling. and hold leaders easier to recruit new employees accountable. than those without. Companies 2 4 with more diverse teams have a Diversity-related data 22 percent lower turnover than Walk the talk. Enlist everyone in can help CIOs create those without. D&I initiatives. baseline measures, set Leaders set the tone. goals, compare progress To learn more about building a CIOs’ beliefs, words, and Inclusion training provides across teams and industry comprehensive IT D&I program, actions usually help employees with the tools averages, and hold IT visit www.deloitte.com/ drive IT D&I goals and to become proponents leaders accountable for insights/cio-diversity objectives. of diversity. meeting targets. Copyright (c) 2019 Deloitte Development LLC. Anjali Shaikh is a senior manager at Deloitte Consulting LLP. She is based in Costa Mesa, California. Kristi Lamar is a managing director at All rights reserved. Deloitte Consulting LLP. She is based in Denver, Colorado. Kavitha Prabhakar is a principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP. She is based in Chicago, Illinois. Caroline Brown is a senior writer at Deloitte LLP. She is based in Portland, Oregon.

Where next? Businesses chase what’s next with each sunrise—propelled by technology, globalization, and societal shifts. So we not only look at your business, we look again and use our global perspective to help you become more agile and able in the face of change. Launch what’s next at deloitte.com/makeyourimpact. Copyright © 2019 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.

THE C U LT U R E FILE BOOKS, ARTS, AND ENTERTAINMENT THE OMNIVORE Poets in the Press Box The underappreciated literary achievements of sportswriters on deadline BY JAMES PARKER it happens, earthly crowds do not roar, but at your desk or your wobbling perch in Starbucks you feel it: silent terraces of angels pumping their fists. B AP. THAT’S HOW Damon Runyon, reporting on Game 1 The surprise and delight of The Great American Sports Page, John Schulian’s of the 1923 World Series, Giants selections from a century’s worth of newspaper columns about baseball, box- versus Yankees, for the New ing, football, gymnastics, and (in one case) swimming the English Channel, York American, records the is how often it happens—how often the writers connect, how often the prose sound of Casey Stengel con- approaches the condition of flat-out poetry. The brilliant hard-boiled lyricism necting with a pitch from “Bullet Joe” Bush. Bat of Sandy Grady, in 1964, as he watches a crowd of Phillies fans after a home meets ball, the essential atomic encounter—and loss: “They hit the sidewalk with tight mouths, like people who had seen a Runyon puts the sound of it, the briefest, most train hit a car.” Or Joe Palmer, in 1951, summoning a vision of the racehorse prodigious syllable, right in the center of his col- Man o’ War in motion: “Great chunks of sod sailed up behind the lash of his umn. Everything leads to it, everything spins power.” Sailed up: The soft swell of the verb puts us into slow motion. And out of it. Bap! Writers, those nonjocks, know this the lash of his power: the conceit that Man o’ War, no doubt well acquainted moment too. Put the right word in the right place, with the ministry of the crop, is scourging the earth itself with loops of horse- make the connection, and there’s a perceptible voltage. Bap, bap, and bap again. sweetness of impact. Stadiums do not rise when Even the high bombast of Grantland Rice, who as Schulian notes “seemed to see every event he covered as the equivalent of the Trojan War,” has a ring of nobility to it, a straining for epic attainments. That stuff is largely gone now. No more the voice of the bard, doing his solo, sobbing and exalting: Sports commentary in 2019 is forensic, polyphonic, multiplatformed. Compare for example Rice’s quivering hyperbole—“There was never a ball game like this before, never a game with as many thrills and heart throbs strung together in Illustration by PATRICK LEGER THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 33

the making of drama that came near tearing away THE OMNIVORE sail fish came up out of the sun-burnished sea in a the soul to leave it limp and sagging, drawn and flapping leap. It went up straight gleaming and quiv- twisted out of shape”—with the laser-edged nitty- The brain ering and then it was gone.” W. C. Heinz in “Death gritty of a writer like Bill Barnwell, as he digs into on deadline of a Racehorse” witnesses the on-track destruction Super Bowl LIII for ESPN.com: does what- of Air Lift, “son of Bold Venture, full brother of ever it can: Assault.” His account has an ecstatic spareness to it. Teams that load up on twists often struggle to keep It improvises, Emotion is rigorously excluded, à la Hemingway— contain or leave an obvious running lane open for it compresses, which means it is everywhere, and overwhelming. the opposing quarterback, but the Patriots did an it contrives. excellent job of getting pressure against the inte- Inspiration There was a short, sharp sound and the colt top- rior of the Rams’ line (particularly guard Austin comes or pled onto his left side, his eyes staring, his legs Blythe) while simultaneously closing down Goff it doesn’t. straight out, the free legs quivering. when he bootlegged out of the pocket. THE GREAT AMERICAN ‘Aw—’ someone said. This is a different kind of poetry, generated out of SPORTS PAGE: That was all they said. the hidden matrix of a game, the deep jargon. (It A CENTURY OF uses GIFs to make its points.) Will we still be dig- The influence attenuates over the decades, but ging it in 100 years? CLASSIC COLUMNS it never goes away. Sally Jenkins, in 2001, writes FROM RING LARDNER about race-car drivers like Hemingway wrote The better and crazier writing in Schulian’s about bullfighters: “It’s beyond a philosophy, or a book—the writing that twangs loudest with idio- TO SALLY JENKINS faith, it’s simply as essential to them as breathing. syncrasy, experience, style—is indeed the oldest, JOHN SCHULIAN They are consumed to ashes with the idea that if from the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, ’40s. It’s rather thrill- Library of America you give nothing, you get nothing.” ing, actually, the extent to which these smoking, snarling, hat-tipped-back word mechanics were (Jenkins is one of just three women writers making their own rules. Ring Lardner in 1921 turns included in Schulian’s book, alongside 43 men. This in a whole column, in his personalized American- ratio may accurately reflect the gender breakdown primitive idiom, about his editor not letting him of newspaper sportswriting over the past 100 years. report on football: “I don’t want to be no kill joy But it looks ridiculous; it is ridiculous. Wouldn’t a but I can’t resist from telling you what a treat you Library of America anthology have been the perfect missed this fall namely I was going to write up some occasion to find a way to even things up?) of the big games down east but at the last minute the boss said no.” Heywood Broun, by contrast, Sport is not like life. It’s the hit, the punch, is an effortlessly glittering highbrow. At Madison the shot, the stroke, the break—the consecrated Square Garden in 1922, he finds the boxing style instant that lasts forever. Bap! As commentary of Rocky Kansas to be “as formless as the prose of disperses itself across in-game tweets and post- Gertrude Stein.” Kansas is fighting the crisply tra- game podcasts, and as our analysis of what actu- ditional Benny Leonard, an exemplary pugilist. A ally happened gets more granular, more expert, Leonard defeat, declares Broun, would give aid to less Runyon-esque, are we losing touch with the the forces of “dissonance, dadaism, creative evo- moment of contact? The clattering presses are fall- lution and bolshevism.” ing silent; the internet gapes, demanding content from every angle. (“Content,” groans the veteran And they were on deadline! We’re all on deadline, sportswriter Charles P. Pierce in his foreword to of course, at all times and in all places. The last judg- The Great American Sports Page. “Lord how I hate ment, as Kafka pointed out, “is a summary court in that goddamn word.”) So farewell, perhaps, to the perpetual session.” But a print deadline—the gallop- gymnasts of deadline prose, the ones who stuck ing clock, the smell of the editor—is a particular con- the landing. They were mighty in their day. centration of mortal tension. The brain on deadline does whatever it can: It improvises, it compresses, There’s a photo of Bob Ryan, a sports reporter it contrives, it uses the language and the ideas that for The Boston Globe, sitting at the press table at the are at hand. Inspiration comes or it doesn’t. Here the Boston Garden in the ’70s, surrounded by admiring writer is an athlete—performing under pressure and, Celtics fans. They’re all staring over his shoulder, if he or she is good, delivering on demand. at his Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, into which— grandly, performatively, a pencil between his It was Ernest Hemingway, once of The Kan- teeth—he is rolling a fresh sheet of paper. Sports- sas City Star, who turned deadline prose into a writing as public art: Ryan sits in a bubble of awe, modernist art, and Papa’s prints are all over The with a hint of the Dionysian about him. He looks, Great American Sports Page. Jimmy Cannon goes in this picture, like a better-groomed Lester Bangs. on a fishing trip with Joe DiMaggio near the end He looks artistic, and equal to the challenge before of his run with the Yankees and winds up writing, him. And the people are staring, I’ll say it again, at basically, a passage from The Old Man and the Sea. his typewriter—at what he is about to write. “Joe said: ‘Watch out. It’s going to break water.’ The James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. 34 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC



BOOKS our own. By the Adamses’ standards, Trump is not an aberration. He is an exemplar of everything in The Problem With our politics that they resisted in vain, especially the High-Minded Politics fraudulent party democracy that substitutes tribal loyalties and celebrity worship for informed debate. John Adams and John Quincy Adams’s virtuous disdain for partisanship was at the root of their failures. But this view of the past and the present is flawed, historically as well as politically. The Adamses were BY SEAN WILENTZ chiefly the victims not of undeserving charlatans but of their own political ineptitude. And the crisis that H ISTORIANS HAVE NOT YET DECIDED what to make of has given us Donald Trump has arisen not from the Donald Trump’s election, although some of us have been try- excesses of a party politics the Adamses despised, ing. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, I participated in a but from the deterioration of the parties over recent session at the American Historical Association’s annual meet- decades. Trump, the celebrity anti-politician, ing devoted in part to assessing the president-elect in histori- exploited this decline ruthlessly, winning the White cal terms. The gathering had been planned much earlier, with Hillary Clinton’s House through a hostile takeover of a badly shaken presumed presidency in mind, so we speakers had to shift gears in a hurry. The and divided Republican Party, which he has now best I could do was summarize Trump’s links to organized crime. transformed into his personal fiefdom. As it happens, my offhand remarks contained some foresight about public Trump is not a creature of the party politics revelations in store, but they hardly explained Trump’s historical significance. pioneered by Jefferson and Jackson. He is its anti- Some scholars have reached for analogies, likening Trump’s victory to the over- thesis, a would-be strongman who captured the throw of Reconstruction or to the excesses of the ensuing Gilded Age. Others presidency by demonizing party politics as a sham. have focused on the roots of Trump’s visceral appeal. Jill Lepore’s recent survey He will be stopped only if the Democrats can mount of American history, These Truths, describes Trump as buoyed by a new version a reinvigorated, disciplined party opposition. In that of a conspiratorial populist tradition that dates back to the agrarian People’s struggle, the Adamsian tradition is at best useless Party of the 1890s. In a new dual biography of John Adams and John Quincy and at worst a harmful distraction. Adams, The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality, Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein trace Trump’s origins practi- I S E N BE RG A N D BU R S T E I N greatly exag- cally to the nation’s founding. gerate the unpopularity of the Adamses among historians. Until Lin-Manuel Miranda Not that Trump’s name ever appears in their book, but the connection is rebranded the imperious Alexander Hamilton hard to miss. In a published symposium in 2017, Isenberg and Burstein, who as a hip-hop immigrant superstar, no Founding both teach at Louisiana State University, in effect affirmed Trump’s bumptious Father (except perhaps George Washington) had self-identification with Andrew Jackson. It was not a compliment. They loathe been lionized by contemporary writers as much Jackson as a savagely partisan demagogue who built on the dubious legacy of as John Adams, above all in David McCullough’s Thomas Jefferson, “tapped into the democratic id,” exploited popular resent- Pulitzer Prize–winning biography in 2001 and ment of the educated elite, and crafted a cult out of his own violent personality. the HBO series that followed. No fewer than four Jackson, in short, was the “proto-Trump.” admiring biographies of John Quincy Adams have appeared since 1997. In an era when the public’s The Problem of Democracy presents a corollary argument that by implica- regard for party politics has cratered—and a tion renders the Adamses—the presidents defeated by Jefferson and Jackson— variety of independent candidates, from John historical anti-Trumps. Isenberg and Burstein complain that credulous Anderson and Ross Perot to Ralph Nader and Jill historians have championed Jefferson and Jackson as the creators of “our mythic Stein, have played on this alienation—historians’ democracy”—in reality, they say, a sham democracy driven by personal ambi- estimation of the anti-party Adamses has soared tion, partisan corruption, and shameless pandering that disguised the powerful higher than ever. interests truly in charge. The Adamses had the nerve to point out the chicanery of this racket, and for that, the authors argue, historians have dismissed them as The Problem of Democracy does add rich detail out-of-touch, misanthropic stuffed shirts. and insight to an established pro-Adams narrative about the politics of the early republic. The book’s Isenberg and Burstein want to recover and vindicate what they describe as chief contribution is to entwine the biographies a lost “Adamsian” vision of a more elevated, virtuous, balanced, nonpartisan of father and son, deepening our appreciation of polity, so unlike the system that defeated them, the all-too-familiar forerunner of their personal and political lives. It is not always a happy tale. John Adams, a self-made political striver, could in private be difficult to abide—a gloomy, often touchy man who, as Isenberg and Burstein neatly observe, “did not encounter the sublime in the world he traversed.” John Quincy Adams, born into public service, was raised to match severe paternal expectations. (In 1794, when he momentarily postponed any political ambition, his father told him that if he failed to 36 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by JULES JULIEN

reach the head of his country, “it will be owing BOOKS animates Isenberg and Burstein. At the nation’s to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy.”) founding, they remind us, a mistrust of parties The son was afflicted all his life by what he called was widely shared. Americans feared that parties, an “over-anxious” disposition that looks today once consolidated, would inhibit “the develop- like clinical depression. He nevertheless made it ment of a national political morality,” elevate to the top of the heap—unlike his less fortunate personal ambition, and wind up enshrining either younger brothers, Charles and Thomas, both of dictatorship or oligarchy. whom fell into hard drinking, and one of whom died young of alcoholism. Such lofty ideals, though, could not withstand the clash of interests between Hamiltonian city Despite the tension—or maybe because of it— dwellers and financiers and Jeffersonian coun- John and John Quincy developed a singular bond, try yeomen and slaveholders. Those opposing a convergence of temperament and intellect that interests produced the prototypes for modern was vital to both men. They shared a love of the political parties—elite-controlled vote-gathering classics, worshipping the philosophes’ favorite contraptions that flatter the masses, slander oppo- Roman, Cicero, who combined intense political nents, and secure loyalty with a combination of activity and gravitas, his republicanism tempered personality cults and patronage. Caught between by an aristocratic disdain for passion and disorder. the designs of Hamilton and Jefferson, the high- They adhered to what Isenberg and Burstein call minded patriot John Adams was crushed in 1800. “the Adamsian credo,” blending probity, dignity, Nearly 30 years later—concluding a brief, one- erudition, and honor. Although John Quincy party Era of Good Feelings—John Quincy Adams acquired a Christian moralism unknown to his was overthrown by the demagogue slaveholder father, both men located the rising glory of Amer- Jackson and his Democratic Party of loyal news- ica in its cultivation of intellectual excellence and paper editors and wire-pullers. “Talk of democ- disinterested virtue. All of which estranged them racy,” Isenberg and Burstein write, “was the smoke from the rough-and-tumble partisan politics that screen that hid the real engine behind party pol- were emerging everywhere they looked. In time, itics”: a thirst for material gain and imperial con- they became men without a party, or more pre- quest, underwritten by the enslavement of blacks cisely, the members of a party of two. and the violent expropriation of Native Americans. Of all the elements of the lost Adamsian poli- B U T THE SE AC C OUNT S of the Adams tics, disgust for political parties most attracts and presidencies are skewed, mistaking the Adamses’ political naïveté and incompe- tence for independent virtue while eliding events that don’t conform to the authors’ own anti-party presumptions. John Adams, for example, began his presidency by retaining George Washington’s Cabinet, which included a knot of plotters under the sway of the intriguer Hamilton, who, now out- side the government, was determined to manip- ulate the administration. The scheming of these Federalist presidential advisers helped maneuver Adams into actions Isenberg and Burstein some- times acknowledge but downplay. He prepared to launch military operations against France. He approved Congress’s creation of a large land- defense force that turned into a politicized stand- ing army under Hamilton’s control. He signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which singled out immi- grants and whipped up nativism while directly attacking freedom of the press. By abetting what Jefferson called “the reign of witches,” the hapless Adams ensured that the Jeffer- sonians would contest his reelection. After detect- ing the machinations too late to regain command, he changed course, pursued peace with France, and dissolved the provisional army—only to be furiously denounced by Hamilton on the eve of the election in 1800. Adams left office dazed and embittered, inveighing against his supposed allies as well as lying THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 37

newspaper editors. He was convinced that his defeat BOOKS A F TER THE CIVIL WAR , disdain for the proved “we have no Americans in America.” grubby operations of party politics pro- The Adamses duced a distinct antipartisan style, evident John Quincy Adams was a genuine visionary, were chiefly across the political spectrum. Through subsequent with bold plans to enlarge the nation’s moral, scien- the victims generations of Mugwumps, Progressives, numer- tific, educational, and commercial capacities. But he not of ous other good-government groups, and “new poli- came to power through one of the greatest blunders undeserving tics” insurgencies, antipartisanship abetted diverse in our political history, the so-called corrupt bargain. charlatans crusades, united in the belief that, unshackled from In the four-way presidential contest in 1824, Andrew but of their party politics, enlightened democracy would thrive. Jackson claimed popular as well as Electoral Col- own political lege pluralities, yet Adams won the presidency in ineptitude. Ironically, the antipartisan style, wedded to some the House of Representatives thanks to the support of the darker impulses of our political history, has of Jackson’s nemesis, Speaker of the House Henry THE PROBLEM OF culminated in Donald Trump’s presidency. In the Clay. Days later, Adams privately announced that DEMOCRACY: long aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate, he had offered Clay the job of secretary of state, the both major parties were battered from within, insti- second-most-powerful executive post—a devastat- THE PRESIDENTS tutionally as well as ideologically. The Democrats, ing example of how the appearance of corruption ADAMS CONFRONT reeling from the traumas of the late 1960s, especially could be as damning as the real thing. the violence at their national convention in 1968, THE CULT OF deliberately reformed their national structure to Fairly or not, the bargain branded Adams from PERSONALITY reduce the power of party leaders. The result was to the start as a conniving, illegitimate president, NANCY ISENBERG turn the party into competing interest groups lacking and thereafter, his tone-deaf rectitude continu- AND ANDREW BURSTEIN clear direction. The Republicans, commandeered ally undermined his presidency. He announced after Watergate by the movement conservatives who his daring program of federal improvements with Viking championed Ronald Reagan, set in motion a process a cringe-inducing slap at the electorate, urging of radicalization personified by Newt Gingrich. The Congress not to be “palsied by the will of our con- vanguard demonized government ever more stri- stituents.” He declined to use the political tools at dently while it continually attacked a diminishing his disposal, above all patronage, to shore up his party establishment. Enter Trump, who promised to support against the emerging Jacksonian opposi- drain the swamp that the corrupt “loser” politicians tion. When supporters of his failed reelection bid had created and who vowed to put “America first,” against Jackson in 1828 circulated scurrilous attacks above everything else, including party. on Jackson’s wife as well as on the candidate himself, Adams self-righteously denied any involvement in Other elements of Trump’s ascendancy invite the slanders, offended even to be implicated. historical analogies unflattering to the Adamses. With the Alien and Sedition Acts, for example, John Unlike his father, John Quincy Adams had a sec- Adams unheroically approved the exploitation of ond act. He returned to Washington as a congress- anti-immigrant nativism while persecuting and man and became a resourceful and implacable even jailing unfriendly newspaper editors as ene- foe of the slave power and its efforts to gag debate mies of the people. His greatest act as president about slavery in national politics. Yet Isenberg and was to reverse course and put his reelection at risk Burstein ignore how Adams, upon reentering pol- once he recognized the nightmare his presidency itics, became a self-described “zealous” adher- was creating. ent of the great populist movement of the day, the Anti-Masonic Party, which in time dissolved John Quincy Adams left two divergent legacies. into the northern antislavery wing of the anti- One was of a farseeing president who disdained Jacksonian Whig Party. party politics, achieved little, and was ruined. The other, completed in an office far below the presi- Although never a conventional party man, dency, involved advancing a radical cause through Adams belatedly learned how to deploy his talents cunning maneuvers and helping to inspire what within the party framework. He stirred up both became the Republican Party. Looking to 2020, popular and congressional opinion as Old Man Elo- the best high-minded alternative to Trump would quent in the House, and plotted strategy with radical appear to be Howard Schultz, the former CEO of abolitionists as well as his antislavery House allies to the progressive Starbucks chain, who proclaims his overturn the gag rule. They finally achieved success anti-party virtue as well as his reasonable modera- in 1844. By the time Adams collapsed and died at tion. Tell that, though, to Trump’s truest and most the Capitol, four years later, he had helped pave the effective foe, a daughter as well as a veteran of dis- way for what would eventually become the Repub- honored, hard-bitten party politics: Speaker of the lican Party, the first antislavery party in history. The House Nancy Pelosi. greatest leader of that party would be an admirer of Adams—the one-term Whig congressman Abraham Sean Wilentz teaches history at Princeton and is Lincoln, a skilled and unapologetic party politician the author, most recently, of No Property in Man: who happened to be on the floor of the House at the Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. moment Adams crumpled. 38 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

“ WISE , WARM, SMART, AND FUNNY. YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK.” wtdeieltNevhoevEawilsovnipbadoeenLAdionBsnageCgsr!ioaersia —Susan Cain, author of Quiet From the Atlantic’s Dear Therapist columnist © SHLOMIT LEVY BARD “Gottlieb is an utterly compelling narrator: funny, probing, savvy, vulnerable.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering “Saturated with self- awareness and compassion, this is an irresistibly addictive tour of the human condition.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Ingenious, inspiring, tender, and funny.” —Amy Dickinson, author of Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things “This is a daring, delightful, and transformative book.” —Arianna Huffington hmhbooks.com

BOOKS home. Theirs is a pilgrimage to a kind of western Zion, fraught with peril, undertaken because it is The Death of the the only solution to an existential threat. But the Pioneer Myth migration in Lost Children Archive is constructed as an inversion of the American frontier fable—its America’s frontier once promised freedom, anti-myth, its interrogator. but a walled border demands a reckoning with loss. Luiselli’s pioneer family departs from the Bronx. BY JORDAN KISNER Unlike the old trope, in which the Anglo-Saxon family confronts a wilderness populated by “hos- L OST CHILDREN ARCHIVE opens as a family prepares for a tile” native tribes, this family is threatened by the transnational journey. The man is a sound artist; the woman’s “white supremacist something” playing over the a radio documentarian; the boy is 10; the girl, 5. The man has speakers in a Virginia gas station. They clench their announced that he has to go to Arizona on a recording quest, and teeth through an encounter with a policeman who whether he intends to come home again is not clear. The woman is scolds them about getting the girl a booster seat. opposed but eventually agrees: They will all drive west until they find what the (Luiselli never directly states the family’s racial man is looking for, and decide later whether they’re returning home together. identity, but the woman’s fluent Spanish is a clue.) If the broad details of the plot feel vaguely familiar, it’s because Valeria Lui- The threat forcing this migration is relational selli, a Mexican novelist and essayist now living in the United States, has taken rather than physical—emotional estrangement, up the American pioneer myth: A family (here named, as is traditional, “Ma” broken communication, divorce. It’s a blended and “Pa,” “the boy” and “the girl”) sets out from the relative safety of the East family—the son is the man’s by birth, the daughter Coast in a wagon (here, a station wagon) in wary but hopeful search of a new the woman’s—but one that has entirely bonded, until now. The woman, who narrates most of the book, senses that she and her husband will part ways at the end of this road trip and that the children, who have been siblings as long as they can remem- ber, will be separated. “Inside the car, although we all sit at arm’s length from one another, we are four unconnected dots,” she thinks, “each in our seat, with our private thoughts, each dealing with our varying moods and unspoken fears.” In leaving home, they have lost the “small but luminous space where we had become a family,” and without a “center of gravity,” they seem unlikely to survive as the family they once were. The man’s sound project, which inspired the road trip, is an “inventory of echoes,” an archive of the sounds of the Chiricahua Mountains, in southeastern Arizona, the heart of Chiricahua Apache country, where, he tells the children, “the last free peoples on the entire American continent lived before they had to surrender to the white- eyes.” (The Chiricahua, represented by Geronimo, were in fact the last of the free tribes to surrender to U.S. government troops, in 1886; many of the ambient events of this book are fact-checkably nonfictional.) He is out to record “the ghosts.” The woman, meanwhile, is working on an audio documentary about migrant children arriv- ing at the southern border from Central and South America and going missing—at the hands of smug- glers (known as “coyotes”) or the U.S. government. A friend from New York calls to say that her two daughters, who were migrating alone under the supervision of a coyote and had made it into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforce- ment, have suddenly vanished. Hearing reports on the car radio of missing minors, the boy and the girl start to call them “the lost children,” so the man and the woman do too. 40 MAY 2019 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by KATHERINE LAM

W HAT THEY’RE DRIVING toward BOOKS here. By combining archivist protagonists inter- isn’t so much a Zion as an absent ested in border politics and indigenous people’s monument, not the pioneer’s “free- LOST CHILDREN history, Luiselli invites a closer look at the word un- dom” or “land of possibility” but the site of the ARCHIVE documented. Being undocumented also means hav- final stroke of the genocide and enslavement those ing no proof of self to carry forward into the future. myths excused. At first it’s the man who wants VALERIA LUISELLI to reach the place where Geronimo surrendered, Knopf The woman seems dizzied by history, as if now but the children soon take an interest, imagining is the time when all eras and their energies collide— other outcomes. “They come up with possible end- THE END OF THE when the past is the present and the future is ings and counterfactual histories,” Luiselli writes. MYTH: FROM THE impenetrable and uncertain. She’s struck, she says, “What if Geronimo had never surrendered to the FRONTIER TO THE by a change in the world. white-eyes … The lost children would be the rulers BORDER WALL IN THE of Apacheria!” The woman privately comes to think MIND OF AMERICA Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of their destination (which is, in the end, a real cor- of future, because the present has become ner of Chiricahua National Monument called Echo GREG GRANDIN too overwhelming, so the future has become Canyon) as the place where the family will discover Metropolitan unimaginable. And without future, time feels which of its own possible trajectories will come to like only an accumulation. An accumulation of pass: stay together, or part. months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, I am to see to it that I do not lose you, promises the birthdays, photographs, sunrises. final line of a Walt Whitman poem that the man and the woman recited to each other at the beginning The boy’s question about where to point his cam- of their romance. This mandate haunts the book. era, the woman concludes, suggests the real prob- What happens when a person is lost to loved ones, lem: “Our ways of documenting the world have to herself, to history? Can such loss be prevented? fallen short.” Can we be retrieved? Lost Children Archive attempts its own new Both mother and son—who also narrates part form as if in answer to that challenge. The family’s of the book—are curious about the documentary story is interspersed with archival lists catalog- impulse, and anxious about whether documenta- ing the contents of each of the seven boxes they tion can shore up the world against loss. The boy re- have brought along. Luiselli inserts photographs, ceived a Polaroid camera for his birthday just before migrant-mortality reports, maps, newspaper clip- they set out on their journey, and he spends the first pings, reading lists, and an annotated photocopy part of the drive learning how to use it. His immedi- of a poem by Anne Carson, as well as sequences of ate questions aren’t so much technical as ontologi- notes on “stranger echoes,” “car echoes,” “insect cal, maybe prompted by his curiosity about what his echoes,” “leaves echoes.” There is even a second parents do. “So what does it mean, Ma, to document book within this one—the woman reads a novel stuff?” Before the woman replies, she reflects: about migrant children to the boy and the girl, and it appears chapter by chapter, as a counter- Perhaps I should say that documenting is when point to their own journey. One of Lost Children you add thing plus light, light minus thing, Archive’s pleasures is its resemblance to the kind photograph after photograph; or when you add of collection that emerges when a dedicated mind sound, plus silence, minus sound, minus silence. is at work on the same problem over the course of What you have, in the end, are all the moments years. Luiselli gives us the text and the metatext, that didn’t form part of the actual experience. A and instead of being a contrived poststructuralist sequence of interruptions, holes, missing parts, irritation, the approach feels elegant and generous. cut out from the moment in which the experi- She has left us the paper trail. ence took place … The strange thing is this: if, in the future one day, you add all those documents L U I S E L L I H A S C R E AT E D an extraordi- together again, what you have, all over again, is nary allegory of this country’s current crisis the experience. Or at least a version of the expe- of self-concept: What do America’s borders rience that replaces the lived experience, even mean now? Why are some migration (or pioneer) if what you originally documented were the stories celebrated in the nation’s history, while oth- moments cut out from it. ers are framed as intrusions to be erased from the record? The same political and existential questions What should I focus on? the boy insists. animate the historian Greg Grandin’s new book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall This is a bit heady, but the book itself is attempt- in the Mind of America. In his account, lust for the ing to solve a heady problem: how to account for the frontier has been the driving force in American past and the present at once, how to hear the people history, starting with Christopher Columbus and who remain undocumented, how to rescue what is sweeping westward to the Pacific, then imperially lost and also make sense of what and who are still THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 41

across the world, and now back home to the con- BOOKS self-authorship. In adopting the novel as her for- tested U.S.-Mexico border. Only now, he argues, mat, she suggests that their voices in particular are are the fallacies of America’s self-mythology of reachable only with the help of imagination. Some “endless becoming and ceaseless unfurling” clearly children, she admits, are simply lost. Their absence, revealed, along with their consequences. their horrible silence, is what’s left to record. “This ideal of freedom as infinity,” Grandin This silence is accented by the two tender, rowdy points out, rested on domination—first of Native children journeying in the narrator’s back seat. With Americans, African Americans, Mexican Ameri- an ethnographer’s curiosity, she records their moods, cans, and Mexicans, and then of whatever countries their games, their funny and poignant judgments U.S. forces decided to occupy. The society created on the country out the window, their various asser- through this expansionism was inevitably plagued tions of selfhood. The boy and the girl are the bright, by injustice: economic inequality, racism, national- almost painful joy of the book—and the starkest ism, political sectarianism, and violence. But the indictment of a country at whose hands children ever-receding frontier provided a safety valve for can be erased. Near the end of their journey, the boy the pressures it caused. “A constant fleeing forward and the girl stand alone at the edge of a canyon in allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning Apacheria, surveying the landscape. They begin to with its social problems.” play a hide-and-seek game of their own invention— hollering “Geronimo” when they spot each other— The logical flaw is obvious: At some point the sys- and the girl shouts so forcefully that the name comes tem is going to implode. “In a nation like the United back to them: “eronimo, onimo, onimo.” They have States,” Grandin writes, arrived at Echo Canyon. Excited, they shout Geron- imo’s name again, and then their own names, and founded on a mythical belief in a kind of spe- eventually their names mix with the lost name, un- cies immunity—less an American exceptional- til the boy is “full of thunder-feelings, my stomach, ism than exemptionism, an insistence that the and full of lightning, my head.” He calls into the void nation was exempt from nature, society, history, and his voice rings forward and backward, all around even death—the realization that it can’t go on him, like an arrival of ghosts. forever is bound to be traumatic. Jordan Kisner is a writer in New York City. He suggests that the moment of implosion has Stanley Plumly’s most crystallized in Trumpism’s rhetoric of division and recent collection is WAKING isolationism. “Expansion, in any form, can no lon- Against Sunset (2016). ger satisfy the interests, reconcile the contradictions, Sometimes, in shadowy first light, it even looks dilute the factions, or redirect the anger.” like a horse, “Something changed in the world,” Luiselli’s there at the end of the bed like an implement woman says. “Not too long ago, it changed, and we or furniture, know it … somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits.” Americans no longer enjoy the illusion of no horn at the center of its forehead, a limitless world. Now we are nose to nose with a no wings, only the right number of legs, wall. Grandin, like Luiselli, is a fan of Anne Carson, and an outline sleek with dew. whom he also cites: “To live past the end of your Then, long face to face, it looms above myth is a perilous thing.” If we have lived past ours, what (or whose) mythos will take its place? your breathing, the separation of the eyes and its own Both Grandin and Luiselli decline to imagine for- ward into the beckoning horizon of a new national deep breathing story. Instead, they reach back to retrieve the nar- meant to wake you—the animal standing there ratives of those who were dominated or eclipsed in history. Grandin’s book pays careful atten- at bedside, tion to the various peoples who were subjugated, rocking back and forth within the stall of itself, enslaved, or exterminated in the name of the Amer- its fist-size nostrils hollowed out, ican project. If Luiselli’s narrator asks whether the until, after dawn, it turns its full length around, undocumented can be retrieved, Grandin’s answer circles the bed as if it’s thinking, and walks is yes, partly—at least for the historical record. over to a wall and puts its head against it. Luiselli’s focus is narrower: the thousands of — Stanley Plumly children who have vanished trying to cross into the United States (the littlest, most vulnerable pioneers). Their saga has captured the American imagination as much as frontiersman stories did two centuries ago, and yet their stories explicitly frame the United States as a site of terrifying erasure rather than 42 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by MELINDA JOSIE

BOOKS and inviting, alive with art, music, sex, drugs, poets, punks, panhandlers—the perfect setting for S.H.’s Art After Sexual Assault transformation into a novelist. “This book is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, the artist Siri Hustvedt’s new novel explores fiction’s role who came to New York to live and to suffer and to in feminist consciousness-raising. write her mystery,” S.H. announces, lest there be any doubt that the novel is a Künstlerroman. It pro- BY MERVE EMRE ceeds to shift awkwardly between S.H.’s present-day narration and a clutter of found texts: S.H.’s jour- F EW THINGS ARE MORE EXCRUCIATING for a writer nal entries from 1978 and 1979, a draft of a novel than confronting the words written by her younger self. Her she wrote but has never finished, and delicate, tone is bound to seem stilted, her thoughts alien or insignifi- undated caricatures of people ranging from Marcel cant. Did I really think that? she wonders, aghast. Worse yet: Duchamp to Donald Trump. Did I really commit it to paper? Ensure that my words would come back to shame me in the future? As Jane Austen well knew, the A relentlessly self-aware writer, Hustvedt must know that she is stacking the deck against S.H. and real pleasure in reading one’s “Juvenilia” or “Scraps” comes herself. The novel amasses all the tired tropes of urban intellectual fiction: the single girl in the city, from measuring the distance between talent and art. At least, that is the hope. eager to convert life into fiction; her coterie of witty, intellectual friends (“the Dear Ones,” she Siri Hustvedt’s seventh novel, Memories of the Future, is a self-conscious calls them); the graduate student she dates, who, in the heady days of high theory, is too besotted exercise in juvenilia. The narrator, known to us only by her initials, S.H., and with the work of Paul de Man and Michel Foucault to appreciate either S.H.’s desire (her “low-grade her nickname, Minnesota, is moving her mother from one area in a retirement genital burn”) or her literariness; the dirty and dazzling romance of New York. As she has done home to another when she stumbles across her own journal from almost 40 in all her novels, Hustvedt indulges in lengthy metafictional meditations on art, time, and truth. years earlier. She recalls herself as she was then, a lanky blonde from Web- “Every book is a withdrawal from immediacy into reflection. Every book includes a perverse wish ster, Minnesota, who had left home for New York City to enroll in a graduate to foul up time, to cheat its inevitable pull,” S.H. thinks, and even she finds her thoughts annoying. program in comparative literature. The year was 1978. The city was severe “Blah, blah, blah, and hum-da-di-dum. What am I looking for? Where am I going?” The novel is not exactly good. Then again, a writer’s juvenilia are not supposed to be good. They are supposed to be tentative, aspirational, FLIP SCHULKE ARCHIVES; MIRRORPIX Illustration by ARSH RAZIUDDIN THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 43

incomplete—imitative and unrestrained. “The kind BOOKS to pick up speed, gain in urgency. It races through of poem I produced in those days was hardly any- Jeff ’s unwanted kiss, his menacing hiss, his shove, thing more than a sign I made of being alive, of pass- the refrain of S.H.’s “pleading, sobbing voice” after ing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through cer- he pushes her into her bookshelf. It hurtles through tain intense human emotions,” Vladimir Nabokov the lucky moment when Lucy, her neighbor, bangs wrote in Speak, Memory. Hustvedt’s novel asks us at the wall with a broom, sending Jeff running, never to forgive its ragged edges, its aggressive medioc- to be seen again. “I want to tell it exactly as I remem- rity. It invites us to sift through the disordered sheaf ber it,” S.H. writes when she wakes up, committed of papers to find sentences, pages, fragments that to uniting language with truth. Thirty-eight years testify to the author’s future greatness, her ability later, the journal entry and the narrative that follows to one day write a work of fiction as celebrated as it remain as sharp as the five-and-a-half-inch Brazil- The Blindfold—Hustvedt’s 1992 debut, also about a ian stiletto switchblade she started carrying after the young graduate student in New York, a concept then incident. “The memory hurts me—hurts me now— still fresh—or The Blazing World, Hustvedt’s previ- and that is how the past stays alive,” S.H. thinks. ous, Man Booker Prize–nominated novel, about a female artist masquerading as three different male Occurring at exactly the book’s midpoint, the artists to reveal the misogyny of the art world. arrival of “My Almost Rapist” (as S.H. refers to Jeff) is the novel’s cold, dark core, its most emotionally Y ET HU ST VEDT is also after something “I could see and ethically resonant event. To put it another way, else—a politically demanding Künstler- his gums. the best writing in the novel—taut storytelling that roman that doesn’t just chronicle the I found offers a respite from S.H.’s breathlessly labored suffering of a single, white, well-educated aspir- his mouth prose about New York and Hustvedt’s jumble of ing writer in New York, but is ultimately catalyzed ugly with its texts—is motivated by a sexual assault. But what by a generically female experience of psychic red gums.” does it mean that sexual assault operates as the nar- trauma. “Given what readers have long loved about rative hinge between immature and mature writing, Hustvedt’s work, it will come as no surprise that allowing S.H. to speak the truth about misogyny Memories of the Future has special resonance in the clearly and directly? age of #metoo, with its overdue discussions about parity, bias, and misconduct,” announces the pub- F O R H U S T V E D T, the novel’s pivotal licity letter included in review copies of the novel. scene of traumatic awakening isn’t merely The novel’s contemporaneity is indeed pointed: The personal—the liberation of a single artist’s narrative present is 2017, soon after the election of voice. Something bigger and more powerful, it Donald Trump. “I try not to think about the cruelty seems, transpires: The unconscious memories of the presidential election,” S.H. thinks. “I hear the of many victimized women are converted into a roaring spleen of the white crowd as they spit and powerful feminist awareness. The novel rides the scream at the woman. The abomination. Cast her radical currents of 1970s second-wave-feminist out. Push her hard.” thinking about rape speak-outs and consciousness- raising. It dips into 1980s trauma theory, too, which The image of women being pushed by men sought to explain how people could become emo- links individual characters, real and fictional, to tionally possessed by the horrors of the past, so that one another in a chain of misogyny. At one end of in reliving them, they could access a history they the chain is Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016; had not understood when it was happening. “When it extends back in time to S.H. on the night of May 7, you multiply the pasts and memories and ghosts of 1979, when a man named Jeff walks her to her door everyone in the room, you understand they aren’t after meeting her at a party. quiet or contained because they inevitably re- appear,” S.H. writes. When I pushed the second key into the lock of 2B, he pressed his body against my back and Whether or not Hustvedt had in mind Judy pushed me flat against the door. I felt his hips Chicago’s signature feminist art project of the move into my tailbone and then his fingers in my period, The Dinner Party, the setting in which she hair as he gently tugged at a bobby pin. Didn’t he dramatizes the triangulation of assault, mem- understand me? Now I wondered if these were ory, and authorial voice seems fitting. After the practiced gestures of seduction. They had prob- assault, Lucy’s friends Patty and Moth invite S.H. ably been successful in the past. I turned around to a dinner party with a charmingly ironic philos- abruptly and looked up at him. I could see his ophy professor at NYU named Martin Blume and gums. I found his mouth ugly with its red gums. his nervous wife, Sarah. The conversation turns to the philosophical problem of other minds, and Evoking Jeff ’s awful touch, the journal’s sen- whether a mother could ever really know her chil- tences shorten, the rhythm of the prose clarifies. The dren (a theme, as it happens, of several moving descriptive excess falls away, and the novel begins subplots in the book that explore how parents and children struggle to make their peace with “an 44 M A Y 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

intimacy that is not intimate”). Martin dismisses MEMORIES OF harm, channeling their anger into chants. “Don’t the arguments of the women at the table with THE FUTURE turn away from your gifts,” Patty tells S.H. as she contempt. “Please, no philosophies from female SIRI HUSTVEDT sees her to the door. “Don’t fear your anger either. nether regions,” he scoffs, before turning to S.H. Simon & Schuster It can be useful. And remember this: the world loves “I don’t suppose you have anything to add to this powerful men and hates powerful women. I know. venerable philosophical debate, my dear?” Believe me, I know.” When S.H. speaks, it is “as if someone other In reenacting one woman’s traumatic memo- than I, some satirical demon had taken hold of me ries, Hustvedt’s novel engages in a similarly ambi- and was giving me dictation.” Her memories min- valent act of consciousness-raising. It recalls its gle with the memories of all the mistreated women readers—most of them women, presumably—to at the table, and spur her to debunk Martin’s patri- the project of second-wave feminism at a moment archal notions of mental isolation. “If you think that when speaking out has reemerged as a forceful I am ignorant of the analogical, criteriological, and political strategy. But the novel’s magical belief in theoretical-entities arguments, you are mistaken. I the alchemy of anger also reminds us to be wary of am not,” she declares, mimicking the authoritative- counting on words, and words alone, to do the work ness of his tone to reject his logic. of dismantling patriarchy. “Wittgenstein, however, even when quoted in the original, is no help at all if a Although I see the person, watch him move, talk, man throws you into a wall of books,” S.H. observes. and yell in pain, I cannot assume that person has a mind. Apparently a mind is something that “Something is happening,” Hustvedt writes on does not belong to a body. It is distinct, separate, the final page. “Something is happening in the now and invisible: “the ghost in the machine.” Aren’t of the book. Something is beginning to happen as you asking me to produce proof that another you read this sentence … Hold out your hand. I am person is, in fact, another person? Then again, giving you the keys. One story has become another.” where does this internal mind of yours that you On the opposite page is Hustvedt’s final drawing: a feel so confident about come from, sir? woman, naked and ecstatic, soaring over the Empire State Building with a switchblade in her hand. It is a She faints at the end of her speech, depleted by perfectly ridiculous image for a perfectly ridiculous the intellectual labor of consciousness-raising. The aspiration—a naive, self-mythologizing, and imagi- scene isn’t meant to be funny—even when flagging nary view of the writer’s power to shape politics. The the speech as satirical in tone, Hustvedt remains woman’s breasts are impossibly pert. The knife is generally earnest—but it wears its comic flourishes pointed up to the sky (rather than at the president’s well: S.H.’s repeated address of Martin as “sir”; heart). But we can’t take it too seriously. Hustvedt’s her sudden lapse into German to quote Ludwig novel is only playing with the illusions of youth. Wittgenstein; and the revelation, once S.H. comes to, that Patty, Lucy, and most of the women at the Merve Emre is an associate professor of English at the dinner party are witches in a coven. They gather to University of Oxford. She is the author, most recently, cast spells that will prevent men from doing women of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. COVER TO COVER Philadelphia that “had in The Philadelphia logical turmoil, Scott survived against the Story.) He pulled off a makes the most of the The Beneficiary: odds from one gilded debonair act himself. suspense built into her Fortune, Misfortune, age into the next.” The Sent away to pedi- story. Her father, hav- and the Story mystery she probes is greed schools, he ing promised Scott in of My Father her father, entranced returned to Ardrossan her 20s that she would yet also trapped by and took up life as a inherit his many diaries, JANNY SCOTT his inheritance. lawyer, avid beagler, made her hunt long tireless bicyclist, and hard for them after RIVERHEAD The arc is classic: “naughty” womanizer, his death in 2005. The Robert Montgomery lavish host, president bequest was brilliant: JA N N Y S C OT T, Obama’s mother,” the Scott—scion of for- and chief executive of A man in unhappy a former New York subtitle of A Singular tunes made in finance the Philadelphia Mu- thrall to a place lured Times reporter, has Woman, about Stanley and railroads—was seum of Art—before his daughter further staked her claim to an Ann Dunham. This time, born in 1929 to par- succumbing, too soon, and further in—and she unusual beat: explor- Scott’s terrain is her ents who specialized to drink. escaped with priceless ing secret family lega- own family’s 800-acre in élan, not children. insight into its, and his, cies. She roamed wide- estate, Ardrossan—a (His dazzling mother Flair is in the DNA. hidden depths. ly in pursuit of “the multigenerational was reputed to be the As attentive to outré untold story of Barack compound outside model for Tracy Lord details as to psycho- — Ann Hulbert THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 45

The senator from California has always been cautious, but since announcing her candidacy she’s grown bolder. Can a black woman win the presidency today—and what compromises must she make to do so? By Elizabeth Weil

Photograph by Sasha Arutyunova Kamala Harris Takes Her Shot THE ATLANTIC MAY 2019 47