2019-08-01_The_Atlantic

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OF NO PARTY OR CLIQUE CONTENTS | AUGUST 2019 VOL. 324–NO. 2 Features 62 Raj Chetty’s American Dream BY GARETH COOK The economist whose work dispelled the myth of social mobility in the U.S. has a plan to make it a reality. 42 The True-Crime Writer in Cellblock B4 BY RACHEL MONROE Matthew Cox was a master of mortgage fraud, spinning tales and scamming his way into millions of dollars. Now he’s got a new game: selling stories that are true. 52 Carry Me Back BY DREW GILPIN FAUST Race, history, and memories of a Virginia girlhood COVER STORY 72 An Epidemic of Disbelief BY BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch them Raj Chetty’s research exposed just how stagnant Americans’ economic prospects can be from genera- tion to generation. But he’s convinced that what can be measured can be manipulated—and now he’s trying to use Big Data to revive the American dream. Photograph by CARLOS CHAVARRÍA THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 3

CONTENTS VOL. 324–NO. 2 08 . 19 Dispatches Departments 13 H E A LT H ANIMAL KINGDOM 8 The Conversation Measles as Metaphor 22 Long Live 96 The Big Question the Albatross BY PETER BEINART What was the greatest BY OLIVIA JUDSON debate in history? What the disease’s return tells us about America’s ailing culture The bird is a literary symbol, a natural wonder—and a harbinger of our own future. SOCIETY 24 The Metamorphosis BY HENRY A. KISSINGER, E R I C S C H M I DT, A N D DANIEL HUTTENLOCHER AI will bring many wonders. It may also destabilize everything from nuclear détente to human friend- ships. We need to think much harder about how to adapt. BUSINESS 27 The Stock- Buyback Swindle BY JERRY USEEM American corporations are spending trillions of dollars to repurchase their own stock. The practice is enriching CEOs—at the expense of everyone else. TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION On the Cover 18 Wait a Minute 20 The Radical BIG IN ... NEW ZEALAND Case for Teaching BY JONATHAN RAUCH Kids Stuff 29 DIY Coffins Instantaneous communica- BY NATALIE WEXLER BY RENE CHUN tion can be destructive. We need to tweak our digital In the early grades, U.S. For the nearly departed, platforms to make time for schools value reading- a new bucket-list entry: extra eyes, cooler heads, and comprehension skills over “Build my casket” second thoughts. knowledge. The results are devastating, especially for poor kids. Paul Spella/Katie Martin 4 AUGUST 2019 THE ATLANTIC



CONTENTS VOL. 324–NO. 2 08 . 19 The Culture File Poetry 33 B O O KS 35 8 Moons The Students of Sex and Culture BY SHARON OLDS BY ALISON GOPNIK Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston—spurred on by Franz Boas—revolutionized the way we think about humanity. Fiction 86 Wolves of Karelia BY ARNA BONTEMPS H E M E N WAY The story of a Finnish sniper in the grueling Winter War of 1939–40, and the fellow soldier who changed his life. THE OMNIVORE THEATER BOOKS 30 The Original 36 Sam Shepard 39 How Walking Huckster Saw It All Coming Became Pedestrian BY JAMES PARKER BY GRAEME WOOD BY MICHAEL LAPOINTE P. T. Barnum taught us to The family battles he Glorified for its creative love spectacle, fake news, described foreshadowed our benefits, the pastime and a good hoax. A century current national crisis. has become yet another and a half later, the show goal-driven pursuit. has escaped the tent. 6 AUGUST 2019 THE ATLANTIC



RESPONSES & REVERBERATIONS a hierarchy modeled more closely on the servant-leaders and martyrs described in the Acts of the Apostles. Turning self-satisfied masters back into servants will take an indepen- dently appointed watchdog arm of the Church, peopled by laity and endowed with real authority to adjudicate grievances and assign penalties to miscreant clergy—and, of course, to hand them over to secular authorities whenever civil laws are violated. Eric Brende ST. LOUIS, MO. • THE CONVERSATION The problem is not the priest- hood; the problem is clericalism, To Save the Church, that malign brand of theology Dismantle the Priesthood and spirituality that says that priests are more important Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy, James Carroll than laypeople, that a priest’s argued in June—and take the faith back into their own hands. or bishop’s word is more trust- worthy than that of victims (or Thank you, James Carroll, for In one respect, James Carroll’s as a rhetorical provocation, victims’ parents) and that the MENDELSUND/MUNDAY your article. I, too, am fasting scathing critique of the Catholic Carroll is living in a fantasy- very selves of priests are more from Mass and my commit- hierarchy doesn’t go far land. Even pre-Romanized valuable than those of laypeople. ment to the Catholic Church. enough. The indecent liber- Christianity was far from egali- Catholic theology is sometimes I cannot bear to hear how the ties taken by clergy who are tarian in its governance. Jesus used to support this kind of vulnerable continue to be shielded by their “ontologically was willing to give his life for supremacism. At his ordination emotionally and physically superior” position include a far his flock, but he never took a a priest is said to undergo an mistreated by some clerical wider swath of personal sins straw poll before handing down “ontological” change, a change men and women—and yet we than sex abuse or the ignoring a teaching. A more realistic and in his very being. The belief that must not live in darkness. Arti- thereof—they include sins like desirable solution to clerical- this change makes him “better” cles like yours have made me pride and cruelty. ism is implied in Carroll’s than the layperson lies at the wake up to how far the Church own formulation that today’s heart of clericalism and much has strayed from its origins. In another area, however, Church structure “owes more of the abuse crisis. Carroll goes too far. Dismantle to emperors than to apostles.” DeeDee Chang the priesthood altogether? Just flip the terms: We need On this, then, I would agree Unless this is intended merely completely with Mr. Carroll, ATTLEBORO, MASS. who knows his theology. And I certainly understand his anger and anguish over the abuse crisis, which I share. The problem, however, is that his article consistently conflates the priesthood with clerical- ism. Basically, he is engaging in a stereotype. In short, not all priests are “clerical.” Not even most of them. James Martin, S.J. EXCERPT FROM AN ARTICLE ON A M E R I C A M AGA Z I N E .O R G James Carroll diagnoses the Church with the disease of clericalism, by which he really 8 AUGUST 2019 THE ATLANTIC

means hierarchicalism. What and deeper inside Christian calls “clericalism,” and by the inspired by the idea of Catho- Carroll fails to recognize is that tradition than compulsory hypocrisy. The UUs welcomed lics rejecting the trappings of clericalism and hierarchical- celibacy or imperial power, it me with open arms. earthly power; if Catholics can ism are not synonymous. The need not be eternal. The work- instead focus on their long prideful ambition of clericalism ings of the Catholic clergy have James Carroll’s piece is tradition of service to the poor is a poison within the Church, changed deeply and repeatedly; revitalizing for me. My UU and oppressed as well as meet- true, but the Church hierar- Mr. Carroll should take heart sisters and brothers have ing together for the Eucharist, chy was instituted by Christ that they can change again. encouraged me to resume my then there will be much for himself, has existed since the lay-led Eucharist celebrations the rest of us to admire about earliest days of Christianity, Adam M. Schor for those liberal Catholics Catholicism. I am confident and is a necessary component who long for that. Carroll has that you can retain a specific for most of Catholic theol- UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA strengthened my resolve to Catholicism while giving up ogy. To propose abolishing the COLUMBIA, S.C. do it. the power structures that have priesthood in order to root out poisoned your traditions. “Test clericalism is akin to demolish- We all know that people in Kathleen Henry everything; hold fast to what ing a house in order to put out a power like to stay in power. is good.” And reach out to us kitchen fire—you’ve put out the Since that is never going to MILTON, MASS. if you need support. We are all fire, but what are you left with? change, what’s the point of members of the Body. blowing up the clerical system Thank you so much for this James J. Mello of the Church today so that it excellent analysis of the Catho- Lauren Bickel can be replaced by a laity from lic Church’s clericalism. I was STEUBENVILLE, OHIO which will rise new people disappointed by your failure LEBANON, TENN. seeking power who might then to mention that new ways of As a professor of ancient also abuse it? being a priest are happening all The author may have quit history, I research the making around us, including in commu- the priesthood with good of early Christian leadership. My vote is to keep pushing, nities led by Roman Catholic intentions—and good for I thus read James Carroll’s demanding change within the womenpriests. These groups him—but it seems he is unwill- article with heightened profes- structure we have. It’s hard, and the women (and a few ing to quit the special club of sional interest. thankless work, and our present men) who lead them are creat- Catholicism altogether. He pope has, to date, dropped the ing a new priest paradigm— rationalizes this reticence by Mr. Carroll blames the ball on the hideous pedophile collaborative, nonhierarchical, praising the fellowship and fourth-century Roman empire scandal, but plenty of priests democratic, deeply spiritual, good deeds that flow from the for “clericalism.” In fact, hier- are appalled and ashamed and inclusive, in continuity with the Church. Fellowship is a fair archical clerics started claiming are speaking out about this. traditions of the early Church, point; we all need a tribe. But special powers from the divine Pressing on within the present and nonclerical. an objective look at the sordid within their small religious system, I say, is the more likely history of Catholicism reveals movement very early, long way to eliminate the misogyny, Helen Weber-McReynolds that it has done much more before they won support from the ban against priests marry- harm than good (Inquisi- Emperor Constantine. ing, and the Augustinian INDIANAPOLIS, IND. tions and holy wars, genocide, concept of sexual repression. complicity with the Nazis, the For centuries, Christians As an Episcopalian and a Irish orphanages, rampant have argued about the right Janice Billingsley member of the Anglican sexual predation, etc.). His form of Church leadership, Communion supporting cleri- tribe of internal exiles can find often by trying to discern the NEW YORK, N.Y. cal marriage and the ordina- many great secular venues for habits of early Christians. It tion of women, I say, “Come doing charitable work without may be encouraging to think I was called forth—“ordained”— join us, sisters and brothers!” this shameful baggage. that the distinct, powerful by my house worship commu- We haven’t forgotten that we clergy is an idea imposed on nity in 1992. Since then we share our roots with you. I am Christianity by empire. But have continued to celebrate an ecumenicalist, and I am early Christianity was no the Eucharist together at least utopia; it dealt with the same once a year. I have also married A NOTE TO OUR READERS human problems that affect people, offered prayers at any community of knowledge funeral services, led naming In recent years, The Atlantic has published a single that produces experts who ceremonies for babies. But July/August summer issue. This year, we are pleased relate hierarchically. about eight years ago I joined to offer an extra issue, featuring a mix of argument, the Unitarian Universalists. I investigative reporting, true-crime narrative, And yet, while the notion of a was exhausted by the enormity personal essay, and fiction. We hope you enjoy it. superior clerical rank runs older of what Carroll so rightly EDITORIAL OFFICES & CORRESPONDENCE The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column. Manuscripts will not be returned. For instructions on sending manuscripts via email, see theatlantic.com/faq. By submitting a letter, you agree to let us use it, as well your full name, city, and state, in our magazine and/ or on our website. We may edit for clarity. 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. 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As the rising tempest of the As a practicing Jew, I belong THE BIG QUESTION priest sex-abuse scandal howls to a congregation in Newton, at the Vatican’s door, when will Massachusetts, that started On Twitter, we asked people to pick their favorite responses to July’s Big Catholics say enough is enough? in someone’s basement more Question. Here’s how they voted. than 30 years ago. We have no Dennis Slifer permanent space, no paid staff, Q: What lost treasure would no rabbi, no cantor, no hier- you most like to find? LEXINGTON, VA. archy of any sort. All tasks and roles are fulfilled by members 78% James Carroll recommends on an active volunteer basis. that Roman Catholics abolish The Library of Alexandria the priesthood and be served James Carroll’s article by laypeople, gathering on reinforced my belief that this 9% an equal basis. The Religious approach is the model for Society of Friends (Quakers) the exercise of faith in the A fifth Gospel has been doing this since 1652, modern era. when George Fox preached that 8% every person could commu- Alexander Chelminsky nicate with the Divine Spirit Genghis Khan’s treasure without need of an intermedi- NEWTON, MASS. ary minister or priest. The laity 5% were the ministers, and from James Carroll asks: “If, down the beginning of Quakerism, through the ages, it was appro- Vermeer’s The Concert women and men, and children priate for the Church to take too, shared spoken ministry on the political structures of on Caesar’s imperial court? shall be your servant,” he was with their group. The Friends the broader culture—imperial Would a Church based on the presenting a model that is as far stopped using titles (sir, my Rome, feudal Europe—then liberal-democratic process by from liberal democracy as it is lord, etc.) and wore simple, why shouldn’t Catholicism now which Brett Kavanaugh was from imperialism or feudalism. undecorated clothes, so as to absorb the ethos and form of confirmed as a Supreme Court rid themselves of the marks of liberal democracy?” I agree that justice necessarily bring an It was never appropriate for class inequality. They called such a future for the Church is end to the male dominance the Church to take on the politi- themselves “Friends” because possible, but I cannot share his so far perpetrated in the cal structures of the broader Jesus said to his apostles, “I call optimism that this would be a Church’s imperial and feudal culture; doing so was an act of you not servants … but I have good thing. history? Would a bishop who apostasy that has only harmed called you friends.” The Friends wears a suit and acts the part and burdened the Church. By sought to follow the example If the Church has suffered of a government bureaucrat or absorbing and making its own of Jesus: feeding the hungry, from abandoning its original corporate CEO represent Jesus the “ethos and form of liberal caring for the poor, visiting the and egalitarian tradition, how the servant to the Church more democracy” now, the Church sick, striving for justice. It has can we assume that liberal faithfully than the bishop who would only be rejecting once worked for Friends for more democracy will bring us wears watered silk and ermine more, perhaps for the last and than 350 years. And it could any closer to what Jesus had and who rules from a throne? final time, the community of work for Catholics. in mind? Would a Church love that Jesus calls it to be. modeled on President Donald When Jesus said, “You know Maida Follini Trump’s Cabinet “have more that the rulers of the Gentiles Brian Terrell in common with ancient lord it over them, and the great HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA tradition” than one modeled ones make their authority over MALOY, IOWA them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever To contribute to The OLIVER MUNDAY wishes to be great among you Conversation, please email [email protected]. Include your full name, city, and state. 10 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

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Wandering albatrosses are slow to reach maturity, and breed slowly once they do. The effort to raise a chick is so long and strenuous that, after doing so, both parents take a sabbatical year that they spend entirely at sea. — Olivia Judson, p. 22 D I S PAT C H E S IDEAS & PROVOCATIONS AUGUST 2019 • HEALTH MEASLES AS METAPHOR What the disease’s return tells us about America’s ailing culture BY PETER BEINART IN T WO E SSAYS, “Illness as Metaphor” in 1978 and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” in 1988, the critic Susan Sontag observed that you can learn a lot about a society from the metaphors it uses to describe disease. She also suggested that disease itself can serve as a metaphor—a reflec- tion of the society through which it travels. Illustrations by EDMON DE HARO THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 13

D I S PAT C H E S In other words, the way certain illnesses which raised tariffs on 20,000 foreign internet age, so much so that “in arenas as spread reveals something not just about products—prompting other countries to diverse as medicine, mental health, law, a nation’s physiological health but also retaliate, deepening the Great Depres- education, business, and food, self-help about its cultural and political health. For sion, and helping to elect Adolf Hitler. or do-it-yourself movements encourage instance, AIDS would not have ravaged But fewer and fewer people remember individuals to reject expert advice or fol- America as fully as it did without institu- the last global trade war. Similarly, as low it selectively.” Autodidacticism can tionalized homophobia, which inclined memories of Nazism fade across Europe be valuable. But it’s one thing to Google a many Americans to see the disease as ret- and the United States, anti-Semitism food to see whether it’s healthy. It’s quite ribution for gay sex. is rising. Technology may improve; sci- another to dismiss decades of studies on ence may advance. But the fading of les- the benefits of vaccines because you’ve Now another virus is offering insights sons that once seemed obvious should watched a couple of YouTube videos. into the country’s psychic and civic condi- tion. Two decades ago, mea- give pause to those who believe history In an interview, Reich told sles was declared eliminated naturally bends toward progress. me that some anti-vaccine in the U.S. Yet in the first five activists describe them- months of this year, the Cen- Declining vaccination rates not only selves as “researchers,” thus ters for Disease Control and reflect a great forgetting; they also reveal equating their scouring of Prevention recorded 1,000 a population that suffers from over- the internet on behalf of cases—more than occurred confidence in its own amateur knowledge. their families with the work from 2000 to 2010. In her book Calling the Shots: Why Parents of scientists who publish in Reject Vaccines, the University of Colo- peer-reviewed journals. The straightforward rado at Denver’s Jennifer Reich notes explanation for measles’ that starting in the 1970s, alternative- In many ways, the post- return is that fewer Ameri- health movements “repositioned exper- 1960s emphasis on auton- cans are receiving vaccines. tise as residing within the individual.” omy and personal choice Since the turn of the century, This ethos has grown dramatically in the has been liberating. But it the share of American chil- can threaten public health. dren under the age of 2 who Considered solely in terms go unvaccinated has quadru- of the benefits to one’s own pled. But why are a growing child, the case for vaccinat- number of American par- ing against measles may not ents refusing vaccines—in be obvious. Yes, the vaccine the process welcoming back poses little risk to healthy a disease that decades ago children, but measles isn’t killed hundreds of people a necessarily that dangerous year and hospitalized close to them either. The problem to 50,000? is that for others in society— such as children with a One answer is that con- compromised immune temporary America suffers system—measles may be from a dangerous lack of his- deadly. By vaccinating their torical memory. Most of the own children, and thus parents who are today skip- ensuring that they don’t ping or delaying their chil- spread the disease, par- dren’s combined measles, ents contribute to the “herd mumps, and rubella (MMR) immunity” that protects the vaccine don’t remember life vulnerable. But this requires with measles, much less that thinking more about the col- it used to kill more children lective and less about one’s own child. than drowning does today. Nor do they And this mentality is growing rarer in an recall how other diseases stamped out by era of what Reich calls “individualist par- vaccines—most prominently smallpox and enting,” in which well-off parents spend polio—took lives and disfigured bodies. “immense time and energy strategizing how to keep their children healthy while Our amnesia about vaccines is part of often ignoring the larger, harder-to-solve a broader forgetting. Prior generations questions around them.” of Americans understood the danger of zero-sum economic nationalism, for H  ISTORICAL AMNE SIA and indi- instance, because its results remained vidualism have contributed to a visible in their lifetimes. When Al Gore third cultural condition, one that is more debated Ross Perot about NAFTA in 1993, obvious but also, perhaps, more central he reminded the Texan businessman of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, 14 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

• HEALTH to measles’ return and at least as worry- But with autism rates rising in vaccines than liberals are, a 2014 study ing for society overall: diminished trust in government. For earlier generations the United States, Wakefield found found that distrust of government was of Americans, faith in mass vaccines derived in large part from the campaign followers on the Republican Party’s anti- correlated with distrust of vaccines to eradicate polio, in the 1950s—a time when the country’s victory in World government fringe. In 2002, Representa- among both Republicans and Democrats. War II and the subsequent postwar boom had boosted the public’s belief in its lead- tive Dan Burton, who in the 1990s had Indeed, the best predictor of someone’s ers. This faith made it easy to convince Americans to accept the polio vaccine, repeatedly implied that the Clintons were view of vaccines is not their political ide- and the vaccine’s success in turn boosted confidence in the officials who protected involved in the death of Deputy White ology, but their trust in government and public health. So popular was the vac- cine’s inventor, Jonas Salk, that in 1955 House Counsel Vince Foster, invited their openness to conspiracy theories. officials in New York offered to throw him a ticker-tape parade. the disgraced doctor to testify before his It’s not surprising, therefore, that a In the 1960s, the Johnson administra- committee. Burton—whose grandson has plunge in the percentage of Americans tion made mass inoculation one compo- nent of the ambitious assault on poverty, autism—went on to hold at least 20 hear- who trust Washington to do the right ignorance, and disease known as the Great Society. In 1964—a year in which ings, suggesting that government sci- thing most or all of the time—which 77 percent of Americans told pollsters they trusted government to do the right entists were covering up a link between hovered around 40 percent at the turn thing most or all of the time—the surgeon general established a committee to deter- vaccines and autism. of the century and since the 2008 finan- mine how states should administer vac- cines. There was little public resistance. Burton was a harbinger. After a Repub- cial crisis has regularly dipped below By 1968, half the states required children to be vaccinated to attend school, and the lican presidential debate in 2011, one 20 percent—has coincided with a decline rest soon followed. of the candidates, Michele Bachmann, in vaccination rates. In 2001, 0.3 percent As Reich details, today’s skepticism of vaccines has its roots in the alternative- claimed that the HPV vaccine, which pro- of American toddlers had received no medicine and self-help movements of the 1970s, which encouraged people to tects against cervical can- question established medical authority. This questioning coincided with a post- cer, causes mental retar- Watergate, post-Vietnam disillusionment with government that Ronald Reagan dation. While running for exploited when he declared in his 1981 inaugural address that “government is president in 2015, Senator Contributing to herd not the solution to our problem; govern- Rand Paul—a physician— immunity requires ment is the problem.” argued against mandatory thinking more about the vaccinations by assert- As distrust of government has grown, so too has distrust of vaccines. The anti- ing that there are “many collective and less about vaccination movement’s Rosetta stone is tragic cases of walking, one’s own child. a 1998 paper in the British medical jour- talking, normal children nal The Lancet that linked the MMR vac- cine to autism. As is well established, the who wound up with pro- paper was a fraud. Its lead author, the phy- sician Andrew Wakefield, falsified data found mental disorders and received money from lawyers who were suing vaccine makers. The Lancet after vaccines.” And from later retracted the study, and Wakefield lost his medical license. Twenty-one sub- 2012 to 2014, while Donald Trump was vaccinations. By 2017, that figure had sequent studies—including a Danish one involving more than 650,000 children— claiming that President Barack Obama jumped more than fourfold. Studies also have found no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. hadn’t been born in the United States, he show a marked uptick in families request- also tweeted more than 30 times about ing philosophical exemptions from vac- the supposed dangers of vaccines. cines, which are permitted in 16 states. Yet it’s not only conservatives who This surge reflects the ease with which translate their suspicion of government conspiracy theories can spread, and not into suspicion of vaccines. Many liberals only via social media. Anti-vaccination distrust the large drug companies that activists have enjoyed particular success both produce vaccines and help fund the in communities whose cultural isolation Food and Drug Administration, which is makes them easy prey for misinforma- supposed to regulate them. The former tion. In 2010 and 2011, Wakefield—who Green Party presidential candidate Jill now lives in the U.S.—reportedly visited Stein has suggested that “widespread the Somali community in Minnesota distrust” of what she describes as the three times, and his supporters distrib- medical-industrial complex is under- uted pamphlets at community events. As standable because “regulatory agen- of 2014, the local childhood MMR vac- cies are routinely packed with corporate cination rate—which had been 92 per- lobbyists and CEOs.” The environmen- cent in 2004—had fallen to 42 percent. tal activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims By 2017, children of Somali descent that thimerosal, a preservative formerly accounted for a majority of America’s used in some vaccines, harms children. measles cases. Bright-blue counties in Northern Cali- The epicenter of this year’s outbreak fornia, Washington State, and Oregon has been the ultra-Orthodox Jewish com- have some of the lowest vaccination munities in and around New York City. rates in the country. Here too, anti-vaccine activists have run Although polls suggest that conser- laps around government and media gate- vatives are slightly less accepting of keepers, who have struggled to keep pace THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 15

D I S PAT C H E S • HEALTH with anti-vaccination misinformation. the norm of near-universal vaccination and Johns Hopkins found that parents who In May, Wakefield addressed an anti- that existed in the late 20th century. But viewed their doctors as reliable sources of vaccination rally in New York’s heavily there’s nothing inevitable about this trend. information were less likely to search for ultra-Orthodox Rockland County, and If vaccination rates can fall, they can also material about vaccines online. The prob- anti-vaccination messages produced by a rise. The key is determined, deliberate lem, as Reich told me, is that pediatricians supporter have been featured on an influ- action to turn the tide. spend less time with patients than they ential ultra-Orthodox parenting hotline. did decades ago. Changing insurance Since conspiracy theorists thrive when companies’ reimbursement practices This year’s measles outbreak appears government is corrupt and opaque, Ameri- to reward doctors for taking the time to to have started with people who traveled cans can rebuild faith in vaccines by mak- reassure patients that vaccines are safe to Ukraine, where infection rates are ing their approval process more indepen- could push vaccination rates back up. high. Which points to a broader prob- dent and transparent. Congress should lem: Unvaccinated Americans face a provide the FDA with enough funding The implications of all of this go far growing risk of infection because vacci- to review vaccines and other drugs in a beyond one disease. Although measles nation rates are declining in Europe too, timely manner without taking Big Phar- may be the most vivid medical manifes- for largely the same reasons. Many of ma’s money. And it should prevent former tation of America’s political and cultural Europe’s political insurgents—including bureaucrats from going to work for the ailments, it won’t be the last. If Americans the German Green Party on the left, and drug companies they used to regulate. won’t take expert advice about something Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France as scientifically proven as the benefits of and Italy’s Northern League on the right— Stopping measles also requires vaccinating their children, what other life- oppose mandatory vaccinations. And a empowering doctors. A 2011 Washington and-death advice will they ignore? 2019 study of western-European voting State law that required parents to talk with patterns in the European Journal of Public a doctor before getting a vaccine exemp- Peter Beinart is an Atlantic contributing Health found “a highly significant positive tion reduced exemptions by 40 percent. writer. association between the percentage of And a 2012 study by researchers at Emory people in a country who voted for populist parties and [the percentage] who believe • VERY SHORT BOOK EXCERPT that vaccines are not important.” Your Brain on Smog O F C OU R S E , some skepticism toward official information— • Adapted from Choked: Life O N T H E G R OW I N G L I S T of maladies pegged including information from the inter- and Breath in the Age of Air to dirty air, the most unsettling may be brain meshed corporate, scientific, and Pollution, by Beth Gardiner, damage. A particularly vivid bit of evidence that governmental establishments that regu- published by the University pollution triggers dementia came in 2002 from late public health—is worthwhile. Nei- of Chicago Press in April a team of scientists who examined the brains of ther the drug companies that produce puppies from Mexico City, known at the time vaccines nor the public-health officials for its awful air. The markers they found— who regulate them are infallible. Even degenerating neurons, twisted protein fibers, during the campaign against polio, one of plaque deposits—were the same telltale signs America’s great public-health triumphs, doctors use to diagnose Alzheimer’s in humans. a laboratory in California manufactured That pointed not just to a link between dirty air defective batches of the vaccine, which and a dreaded ailment, but to the troubling possi- ended up paralyzing 164 people and kill- bility that the path toward dementia might be laid ing 10. And some Americans have legiti- out in youth, not old age. That likelihood grew mate concerns about the influence that stronger still when the neuropathologist who led drug companies wield today over the the dog study conducted autopsies on children regulators who are tasked with keeping and young adults killed in accidents and found their vaccines safe. But there’s a crucial early markers of Alzheimer’s in 40 percent of difference between wanting to insulate those who’d lived with high levels of pollution, America’s regulators from corporate but none in those who had breathed clean air. influence and believing that the CDC, the She saw, too, in the brains of young people the FDA, the National Academy of Medicine, red flags of Parkinson’s, along with inflammation, and the American Academy of Pediatrics impaired blood flow, and genetic changes, all are perpetrating a massive conspiracy to frightening harbingers of neurological decline. maim children. A follow-up study found immediate effects on children’s function, too. Kids who lived in the Given America’s crises of memory, most polluted places and also carried a gene expertise, and institutional trust, one linked to Alzheimer’s had short-term memory loss might despairingly conclude that, just as and IQs 10 points lower than their peers’. America will never restore its now bat- tered political norms, it will never restore 16 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by JOE MCKENDRY

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D I S PAT C H E S • TECHNOLOGY naturally assumed that faster must be bet- ter; slowness was a vestige of a bygone age, WAIT A MINUTE a technological hurdle to be overcome. What they missed is that human institu- Instantaneous communication can be destructive. tions and intermediaries often impose We need to tweak our digital platforms to make time for slowness on purpose. Slowness is a social technology in its own right, one that pro- extra eyes, cooler heads, and second thoughts. tects humans from themselves. BY JONATHAN RAUCH Take, for example, old-media pub- lications such as The Atlantic, The New A S A S H O O T E R in Christchurch, well beyond the threats he discussed. Yorker, and The New York Times. The digi- New Zealand, set about massacring Despite the Christchurch video, YouTube tal operations of all three are speedy. But dozens of worshippers at two mosques (reports The Economist) is not about to almost nothing goes online without first on March 15, his body cam beamed live rethink the premise that “people around being vetted by at least one pair of edito- footage to social media. Soon after, Susan the world should have the right to upload rial eyeballs. That costs money and slows Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, learned and view content instantly.” But YouTube down the content flow, of course, and for that it was being uploaded to the platform. should rethink that premise, and so should a time, many old-media types wondered The company put thousands of human the rest of us. Instanticity, if you will, is whether our cumbersome, expensive beings and a pile of algorithms to work turning out to be a bug of online life and bureaucracies were on their way to being finding and removing the snuff footage. internet architecture, not a feature. obsolete. After all, social media promised It was already too late. As The Economist to unleash millions of on-scene, real-time recounted not long ago, “Before she went For a long time, through the inter- reporters, while allowing readers to curate to bed at 1am Ms Wojcicki was still able net’s first and second generations, people their own news feeds and allowing experts to find the video.” And no wonder: It was to weigh in without being filtered by jour- being uploaded as often as once every nalists. Who needed professional editors? second, a dispersal “unprecedented both in scale and speed,” as a YouTube spokes- But old media’s premises turned out person told The Guardian. Facebook, also to be anything but obsolete. As a group, scrambling, removed the video from consumers are terrible editors. Many users’ pages 1.5 million times in the first are poorly informed, inaccurate, biased, 24 hours after the shooting. Yet nearly manipulable, sloppy, impulsive, or self- two months later, CNN reported still find- serving. And even though some are not, ing it on Facebook. the bad can quickly drive away the good. I am not suggesting that social media Not long before the attack, Justin Koss- lyn, who was then an executive at Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by Google, had published an article on Vice.com called “The Internet Needs More Fric- tion.” The internet, he argued, was built for instantaneous communication, but the absence of even brief delays in transmis- sion had proved a boon to disinformation, malware, phishing, and other security threats. “It’s time to bring friction back,” he wrote. “Friction buys time, and time reduces systemic risk.” Kosslyn was onto something— something whose implications extend 18 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by TYLER COMRIE

should be edited in the style of a news- live, the waiting period itself would called “hot letters,” splenetic missives paper circa 1983. Even if old-style editing of, say, Facebook’s more than 1 billion daily offer an important advantage. It would that vented anger but were never mailed. posts were feasible, it would not be desir- able; that degree of friction would defeat allow thought. (Usually. One of Truman’s rants escaped social media’s self-expressive purpose. and threatened a Washington Post writer Still, the lessons of old media remain relevant. Social-media companies do, H  U M A N S H AV E N O T O N E but with a black eye.) after all, practice a certain kind of edit- two cognitive systems. In his book On social media, no publisher or postal ing. They have rules that promote some types of content and prohibit other types, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize– worker forces a pause. In 2013, a public- and they maintain systems to delete or demote violations. Facebook deploys winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman relations executive posted a tasteless and both artificial intelligence and thousands of human beings to identify and remove calls them System 1 and System 2. System 1 apparently racist joke on Twitter, intend- 18 types of content, such as material that glorifies violence or celebrates suffering. is intuitive, automatic, and impulsive. It ing (she later said) to satirize bigotry, not So editing is happening. It’s just happen- ing after publication, instead of before, makes snap judgments about dangers endorse it. Then she boarded an 11-hour partly because instanticity allows no time for prior vetting—even by the user herself. such as predators or opportunities such flight. By the time she disembarked, she Imagine a simple change. A user cre- as food, and it delivers them to our aware- was world-famous, and not in a good ates a post or video on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or wherever. She presses the but- ness without conscious thought. It is also way. She lost her job and became a pariah. ton to post it. And then … she waits. Only after an interval does her post go live. The often wrong. It is biased and emotional. What if Twitter had required her to pause interval might be 10 minutes, or it might be an hour, or it might be user-selected. It overreacts and under- During that interval, something reacts. System 2, by con- might happen. The user might receive a warning that a factual claim in her trast, is slower and involves post had been disputed by leading fact- checkers. Facebook already provides wearying cognitive labor. It What if Twitter had such warnings, offering fact-checkers’ gathers facts, consults evi- required her to pause, appraisals and asking users whether dence, weighs arguments, they wish to proceed anyway. Or, if she chose, her post might be routed to a and makes reasoned judg- then asked her handful of trusted friends, who might advise her that she was about to tweet ments. It protects us from whether she was sure herself out of a job. Or, toward the end the errors and impulsivity about her tweet? of the interval, she might be required of System 1. to view a screen displaying her post and asking, “Are you sure you’re ready We need both sys- to share this with the world? Remem- ber, it will be out there forever.” Mean- tems, especially if we care while, algorithms and humans could ensure that she isn’t posting a snuff video. about anger management. The point is not the particulars. There Arthur C. Brooks, a social scientist and the for a while, and then asked her whether is no single right way to introduce slowth. The point, rather, is this: Strategically author of the recent book Love Your Ene- she was sure about her tweet? We’ll never introduced friction gives platforms and users time to vet content in whatever way mies: How Decent People Can Save America know, but time to reflect might very well they deem appropriate. It might reduce the velocity of something like the Christ- From the Culture of Contempt, told me in an have improved her judgment. church video enough to give platforms’ monitors a fighting chance. email that one of the most effective ways to Recently, an acquaintance of mine Even if nothing at all—no checking tone down social hostility is to “put some found himself compelled to apologize for or vetting or reviewing—were done in the interval before a post or video went cognitive space between stimulus and tweeting profanely. I asked him: Would response when you are in a hot hedonic a cooling-off period have made a differ- state—or, as everyone’s mom used to put ence? He replied that he would still have it, ‘When you’re mad, count to ten before shared his thoughts, but more temperately. you answer.’ ” Slowing ourselves down And, he added, if Twitter offered a setting gives time for System 2 to kick in. requiring users to take 10 before tweeting, Offline, our lives are hemmed in by he would turn it on. institutions that force us to engage Sys- Instanticity is hard to walk away from. tem 2, even when we are disinclined Social-media companies are addicted to. Children are taught to wait their to addictiveness, and some might resist turn before talking; grown-ups are fre- any curtailment of profitable impul- quently required to wait before marry- sivity. Some users might also reject a ing, divorcing, buying a gun. No matter cooling-off interval, or abandon a plat- how sure they may feel, scientists face form that imposed one. Yet many other peer review, lawyers face adversarial pro- people are already trying to count to 10 ceedings, and so forth. Also, back in the before they tweet, and would welcome day, before instanticity, technology itself help. And many tech-industry leaders slowed us down. Printing and distribut- are looking for ways to dial back internet- ing words required several distinct stages enabled pathologies. Rethinking instan- and often multiple people; even a trip to ticity would help us put our better selves the mailbox or a wait for the mail car- forward, perhaps often enough to make rier afforded time for second thoughts. social media more sociable. Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, and Winston Churchill were among the many Jonathan Rauch is an Atlantic contrib- public figures who wrote what Lincoln uting writer. THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 19

D I S PAT C H E S • EDUCATION idea, making inferences, making predic- tions. The girl was pointing to the phrase THE RADICAL CASE draw conclusions. She was supposed to be FOR TEACHING KIDS STUFF making inferences and drawing conclu- sions about a dense article describing In the early grades, U.S. schools value reading- Brazil, which was lying facedown on her comprehension skills over knowledge. The results desk. But she was unaware that the text was there until I turned it over. More to are devastating, especially for poor kids. the point, she had never heard of Brazil and was unable to read the word. BY NATALIE WEXLER That girl’s assignment was merely one A T FIRST GLANCE, the classroom I of human figures, and was busy coloring example, albeit an egregious one, of a was visiting at a high-poverty school them yellow. standard pedagogical approach. American in Washington, D.C., seemed like a elementary education has been shaped model of industriousness. The teacher sat I knelt next to her and asked, “What by a theory that goes like this: Reading— at a desk in the corner, going over student are you drawing?” a term used to mean not just matching work, while the first graders quietly filled letters to sounds but also comprehension— out a worksheet intended to develop their “Clowns,” she answered confidently. can be taught in a manner completely dis- reading skills. “Why are you drawing clowns?” connected from content. Use simple texts “Because it says right here, ‘Draw to teach children how to find the main As I looked around, I noticed a small clowns,’ ” she explained. idea, make inferences, draw conclusions, girl drawing on a piece of paper. Ten Running down the left side of and so on, and eventually they’ll be able minutes later, she had sketched a string the worksheet was a list of reading- to apply those skills to grasp the meaning comprehension skills: finding the main of anything put in front of them. In the meantime, what children are reading doesn’t really matter—it’s better for them to acquire skills that will enable them to discover knowledge for them- selves later on than for them to be given information directly, or so the thinking goes. That is, they need to spend their time “learning to read” before “reading to learn.” Science can wait; history, which is considered too abstract for young minds to grasp, must wait. Reading time is filled, instead, with a variety of short books and passages unconnected to one another except by the “comprehension skills” they’re meant to teach. As far back as 1977, early-elementary teachers spent more than twice as much time on reading as on science and social studies combined. But since 2001, when the federal No Child Left Behind legis- lation made standardized reading and math scores the yardstick for measur- ing progress, the time devoted to both subjects has only grown. In turn, the amount of time spent on social studies and science has plummeted—especially in schools where test scores are low. And yet, despite the enormous expen- diture of time and resources on reading, American children haven’t become better readers. For the past 20 years, only about a third of students have scored at or above the “proficient” level on national tests. For low-income and minority kids, the picture is especially bleak: Their average 20 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by JUSTYNA STASIK

test scores are far below those of their About 25 years later, a variation on block” and a “reading block,” the latter of more affluent, largely white peers—a phenomenon usually referred to as the the baseball study shed further light on which consumes anywhere from 90 min- achievement gap. As this gap has grown wider, America’s standing in international the relationship between knowledge and utes to three hours. literacy rankings, already mediocre, has fallen. “We seem to be declining as other comprehension. This team of research- In perhaps half of all elementary systems improve,” a federal official who oversees the administration of such tests ers focused on preschoolers from a vari- schools, teachers are supposed to use a told Education Week. ety of socioeconomic backgrounds. First reading textbook that includes a variety All of which raises a disturbing ques- tion: What if the medicine we have been they read them a book about birds, a of passages, discussion questions, and a prescribing is only making matters worse, particularly for poor children? What if the subject they had determined the higher- teacher guide. In other schools, teachers best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to income children knew more about than are left to their own devices to figure out teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized—including the lower-income ones. When they how to teach reading, and rely on com- history, science, and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabu- tested comprehension, the researchers mercially available children’s books. In lary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them? found that the wealthier kids did signifi- either case, when it comes to teaching I  N THE LATE 1980s, two researchers cantly better. But then they read a story comprehension, the emphasis is on skills. in Wisconsin, Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie, designed an ingenious experiment involving a subject neither group knew And the overwhelming majority of teach- to try to determine the extent to which a child’s reading comprehension depends anything about: made-up animals called ers turn to the internet to supplement on her prior knowledge of a topic. To this end, they constructed a miniature baseball “wugs.” When the kids’ prior knowledge these materials, despite not having been field and peopled it with wooden baseball players. Then they brought in 64 seventh was equal, their compre- and eighth graders who had been tested both for their reading ability and their hension was essentially knowledge of baseball. the same. In other words, Recht and Leslie chose baseball because they figured lots of kids who the gap in comprehension In elementary-school weren’t great readers nevertheless knew a wasn’t a gap in skills. It classrooms, the time fair amount about the game. Each student was a gap in knowledge. was asked to first read a description of a fictional baseball inning and then move For a number of rea- spent on social studies and the wooden figures to reenact it. (For sons, children from better- science has plummeted. example: “Churniak swings and hits a slow educated families—which bouncing ball toward the shortstop. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but also tend to have higher too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is incomes—arrive at school Whitcomb, the Cougars’ left-fielder.”) with more knowledge and It turned out that prior knowledge of baseball made a huge difference in vocabulary. In the early grades, teachers trained in curriculum design. One Rand students’ ability to understand the text— more so than their supposed reading level. have told me, children from less educated Corporation survey of teachers found that The kids who knew little about baseball, including the “good” readers, all did families may not know basic words like 95 percent of elementary-school teachers poorly. And all those who knew a lot about baseball, whether they were “good” or behind; I watched one first grader struggle resort to Google for materials and lesson “bad” readers, did well. In fact, the “bad” readers who knew a lot about baseball out- with a simple math problem because he plans; 86 percent turn to Pinterest. performed the “good” readers who didn’t. didn’t know the meaning of before. As the Typically, a teacher will focus on a years go by, children of educated parents “skill of the week,” reading aloud books continue to acquire more knowledge and or passages chosen not for their content vocabularyoutsideschool,makingiteasier but for how well they lend themselves for them to gain even more knowledge— to demonstrating a given skill. The dem- because, like Velcro, knowledge sticks best onstration of that skill may not involve to other, related knowledge. reading at all, however. A common way Meanwhile, their less fortunate peers of modeling the skill of “comparing and fall further and further behind, espe- contrasting,” for example, is to bring two cially if their schools aren’t providing children to the front of the room and lead them with knowledge. This snowballing a discussion on the similarities and differ- has been dubbed “the Matthew effect,” ences in what they’re wearing. after the passage in the Gospel according Then students will practice the skill to Matthew about the rich getting richer on their own or in small groups under and the poor getting poorer. Every year a teacher’s guidance, reading books that the Matthew effect is allowed to con- determined to be at their individual tinue, it becomes harder to reverse. So reading level, which may be far below the earlier we start building children’s their grade level. Again, the books don’t knowledge, the better our chances of cohere around any particular topic; many narrowing the gap. are simple fiction. The theory is that if students just read enough, and spend W H I L E I N S O M E R E S P E C T S enough time practicing comprehension American schools vary tremen- skills, eventually they’ll be able to under- dously, in nearly all elementary class- stand more complex texts. rooms you will find the same basic Many teachers have told me that structure. The day is divided into a “math they’d like to spend more time on social THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 21

D I S PAT C H E S studies and science, because their stu- another, kindergartners spend months aren’t limited to the simple concepts dents clearly enjoy learning actual content. learning about trees, and first graders and vocabulary they can access through But they’ve been informed that teaching explore birds. Children usually find these their own reading. Teachers tend to be skills is the way to boost reading compre- topics—including and perhaps especially amazed at how quickly children absorb hension. Education policy makers and the historical ones—far more engaging sophisticated vocabulary (like fertile and reformers have generally not questioned than a steady diet of skills. opponent) and learn to make connections this approach and in fact, by elevating the between different topics. importance of reading scores, have inten- At schools using these new curricula, sified it. Parents, like teachers, may object all students grapple with the same texts, As promising as some of the early to the emphasis on “test prep,” but they some of which are read aloud by teach- results are, it seems reasonable to ask: haven’t focused on the more fundamental ers. Children also spend time every day With inequality increasing and a grow- problem. If students lack the knowledge reading independently, at varying levels ing share of American students com- and vocabulary to understand the pas- of complexity. But struggling readers ing from low-income families, can any sages on reading tests, they won’t have an opportunity to demonstrate their skill • ANIMAL KINGDOM with “terrible burden.” in making inferences or finding the main “I remember the first idea. And if they arrive at high school Long Live the Albatross without having been exposed to history or albatross I ever saw,” says science, as is the case for many students The bird is a literary symbol, the narrator of Herman from low-income families, they won’t be a natural wonder—and a Melville’s Moby-Dick. “It able to read and understand high-school- harbinger of our own future. was during a prolonged level materials. gale, in waters hard upon BY OLIVIA JUDSON the Antarctic Seas.” He The Common Core literacy standards, goes on to relate that the which since 2010 have influenced class- I  REMEMBER the first by stories then reaching bird was captured “with room practice in most states, have in albatross I ever saw. I Europe, which told how a treacherous hook and many ways made a bad situation worse. was on a small boat a the huge birds—the larg- line.” Happily, it was soon In an effort to expand children’s knowl- few miles off the coast of est can have a wingspan released, albeit—in a sly edge, the standards call for elementary- New Zealand. As the bird of nearly 12 feet—would inversion of Coleridge— school teachers to expose all students sailed past, gliding on the sometimes fly alongside bearing a leather strap to more complex writing and more wind, it skimmed low over ships struggling through around its neck listing the nonfiction. This may seem like a step in the waves, the tip of one the tempests of the south- ship’s time and place. the right direction, but nonfiction gen- wing so close to the water ern seas. erally assumes even more background that I thought it must T HESE DAYS, cer- knowledge and vocabulary than fiction touch. But it never did. One of these accounts tainly, albatrosses does. When nonfiction is combined with certainly inspired the are burdened by humans the skills-focused approach—as it has I no longer know which Romantic poet Samuel more often than the other been in the majority of classrooms—the species it was—there are Taylor Coleridge. In The way around. In 1989, six results can be disastrous. Teachers may 20 or so, and the encoun- Rime of the Ancient members of the species put impenetrable text in front of kids ter was years ago—but I Mariner, published in 1798, Diomedea exulans, also and just let them struggle. Or, perhaps, remember my excitement Coleridge describes an known as the wandering draw clowns. at seeing a bird at once albatross following a ship albatross, became the majestic and mythic. Carl in a storm. On impulse, first birds ever success- I  N A S M A L L N U M B E R of Ameri- Linnaeus, the Swede one of the sailors shoots fully fitted with satellite can schools, things are beginning to who, in the 18th century, the bird. This turns out to trackers. The devices change. A few years ago, there was no invented the system of be a crime against nature, showed that the birds such thing as an elementary literacy cur- Latin names by which and is met with divine ret- ranged farther, and trav- riculum that focused on building knowl- different species are ribution. As the first install- eled faster, than anyone edge. Now there are several, including known, called the group ment of his penance, the had thought: In one a few available online at no cost. Some Diomedea, a reference sailor explains, “Instead of 33-day trip, an individual have been adopted by entire school to the Greek legend in the cross, the Albatross / covered more than 9,000 districts—including high-poverty ones which the companions of About my neck was hung.” miles, reaching speeds of such as Baltimore and Detroit—while the warrior Diomedes are Henceforth, the name of 50 miles an hour. Subse- others are being implemented by charter transformed into birds. this magnificent creature quent research has shown networks or individual schools. Perhaps he was inspired would be synonymous that over the course of their long lives—the birds The curricula vary in their particulars, can live for more than but all are organized by themes or top- 50 years—wandering ics rather than skills. In one, first graders albatrosses may travel learn about ancient Mesopotamia and more than 5.2 million second graders study Greek myths. In 22 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

• EDUCATION curriculum truly level the playing field? an unintentional experiment conducted skills such as “critical thinking” and The relatively few schools that have in France. As E. D. Hirsch Jr. explains in “learning to learn.” The results were dra- adopted knowledge-building elemen- his book Why Knowledge Matters, until matic. Over the next 20 years, achieve- tary curricula may have trouble using 1989, all French schools were required ment levels decreased sharply for all test scores to prove that the approach to adhere to a detailed, content-focused students—and the drop was greatest can work, because it could take years for national curriculum. If a child from a low- among the neediest. low-income students to acquire enough income family started public preschool at general knowledge to perform as well as age 2, by age 10, she would have almost The United States can’t simply adopt their more affluent peers. caught up to a highly advantaged child the kind of comprehensive national cur- who had started at age 4. Then a new law riculum that France once had (and that And yet, there is evidence—on a large encouraged elementary schools to adopt countries outperforming us on inter- scale—that this kind of elementary cur- the American approach, foregrounding national tests still have). By American law riculum can reduce inequality, thanks to and custom, curriculum is determined at the local level. Still, much can be done miles, which is about his “treacherous hook birds have an important by individual schools and districts—and 11 round trips to the moon. and line,” Melville was cultural dimension; if they even states—to help build the knowledge They cover almost all this prescient: For wandering vanish, a tangible part of that all children need to thrive. distance by soaring effort- albatrosses, as well as human culture vanishes lessly upon the wind. several related species, too. More generally, if A couple of years ago, in a low-income longline fisheries are one we lose these marvelous suburb of Dayton, Ohio, a fourth-grade Wandering albatrosses of the main causes of and beautiful organisms, teacher named Sarah Webb decided are slow to reach matu- death. The birds take the which have evolved over to try out a new content-focused cur- rity, and breed slowly bait, get caught on the such a long period and riculum that her district was considering once they do. In a given hooks, and drown. More- which have never existed adopting. The adjustment from a skills breeding attempt, the over, because they live anywhere else in our focus wasn’t easy, but soon Webb could female lays a single egg, so long and prey on fish cosmos and never will, see that students at all levels of reading which the parents take and squid, albatrosses we erode our capacity for ability were flourishing. They wanted to turns incubating until, are among the birds most wonder, knowledge, and know more about certain topics featured more than two and a half contaminated with mer- inspiration, and diminish in the curriculum, so Webb took books months later, it hatches. cury. In many ways, they the planet for those who out from the public library to satisfy their If all goes well, the chick are mirrors of the ways come after us. curiosity. She told me that after the unit will fledge about nine that humans treat the sea. on “What Makes a Great Heart?” one girl months after that. The But it is not too late; “talked about plasma all year long.” This effort to raise a chick is While I don’t believe in the albatross is not gone was the way Webb had always wanted to so long and strenuous divine punishment, I do yet. Efforts to protect teach, but she’d never been able to make that, after doing so, both read The Rime as a warn- the birds are under way, it happen. parents take a sabbatical ing against ecological and an international year, which they spend destruction. If, through treaty (the Agreement Like other teachers I’ve spoken with, entirely at sea. our actions, the albatross on the Conservation of she said kids who were previously con- were to pass entirely into Albatrosses and Petrels) sidered low achievers were particularly Like so many other legend, we would have is in force. As a result, a enthralled. She remembers a sweet kid life-forms now, almost diminished the rich- number of fisheries have I’ll call Matt, who had a history of read- half of all albatross spe- ness not only of nature started setting bait at ing difficulty. As the year went on, Matt cies are endangered, but of ourselves. These night, using weighted found himself keenly interested in every- some critically. With hooks, and flying thing the class was studying and became streamers that scare the a leader in class discussions. He wrote birds away. All of these an entire paragraph about Clara Barton— measures reduce the more than he’d ever written before— number of birds caught, which he proudly read to his parents. and suggest a way to His mother said she’d never seen him so create more general enthusiastic about school. mechanisms of planetary care. We still have time Before, Webb says, Matt felt perma- to stop the ransacking of nently consigned to what kids see as “the nature and ensure that, dumb group.” But at the end of the year, he for generations to come, wrote Webb a thank-you note. Reading, he people will be able to told her, “was not a struggle anymore.” exclaim with delight and awe, “I remember the first Natalie Wexler is the author of The albatross I ever saw!” Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System— And How to Fix It, from which this article is adapted. Illustration by ESTHER AARTS THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 23

D I S PAT C H E S • SOCIETY from the past. Having been taught the rules of the game, AlphaZero trained THE METAMORPHOSIS itself entirely by self-play and, in less than 24 hours, became the best chess player in AI will bring many wonders. It may also the world—better than grand masters destabilize everything from nuclear détente and, until then, the most sophisticated chess-playing computer program in the to human friendships. We need world. It did so by playing like neither to think much harder about how to adapt. a grand master nor a preexisting pro- gram. It conceived and executed moves BY HENRY A. KISSINGER, that both humans and human-trained E R I C S C H M I DT, A N D DA N I E L H U T T E N LO C H E R machines found counterintuitive, if not simply wrong. The founder of the com- H human perception, cognition, and inter- pany that created AlphaZero called its U M A NI T Y IS AT the action? What will be its impact on our cul- performance “chess from another dimen- edge of a revolution driven by artificial ture and, in the end, our history? sion” and proof that sophisticated AI “is intelligence. It has the potential to be one no longer constrained by the limits of of the most significant and far-reaching Such questions brought together the human knowledge.” revolutions in history, yet it has devel- three authors of this article: a historian oped out of disparate efforts to solve and sometime policy maker; a former Now established chess experts are specific practical problems rather than a chief executive of a major technology studying AlphaZero’s moves, hoping to comprehensive plan. Ironically, the ulti- company; and the dean of a principal incorporate its knowledge into their own mate effect of this case-by-case problem technology-oriented academic institu- play. These studies are practical, but larger solving may be the transformation of tion. We have been meeting for three philosophical questions also emerge. human reasoning and decision making. years to try to understand these issues Among those that are currently unanswer- This revolution is unstoppable. and their associated riddles. Each of us able: How can we explain AlphaZero’s Attempts to halt it would cede the future is convinced of our inability, within the capacity to invent a new approach to chess to that element of humanity more coura- confines of our respective fields of exper- on the basis of a very brief learning period? geous in facing the implications of its own tise, to fully analyze a future in which What was the reality it explored? Will AI inventiveness. Instead, we should accept machines help guide their own evolution, lead to an as-yet-unimaginable expansion that AI is bound to become increasingly improving themselves to better solve the of familiar reality? sophisticated and ubiquitous, and ask problems for which they were designed. ourselves: How will its evolution affect So as a starting point—and, we hope, a We can expect comparable discov- springboard for wider discussion—we eries by AI in other fields. Some will are engaged in framing a more detailed upend conventional wisdom and stan- set of questions about the significance of dard practices; others will merely tweak AI’s development for human civilization. them. Nearly all will leave us struggling to understand. Consider the conduct of THE ALPHAZERO PARADOX driverless cars stopped at a traffic light. When cars driven by people inch forward Last December, the developers of Alpha- to try to beat the traffic, some driverless Zero published their explanation of the cars occasionally join them, though process by which the program mas- nothing in the rules of driving given to tered chess—a process, it turns out, that them suggests that they should do so. If ignored human chess strategies devel- this inching-forward has been learned, oped over centuries and classic games how and for what purpose? How is it different from what people are taught and learn about waiting at traffic lights? What else might AI learn that it is not “telling” us (because AI does not or can- not explain)? By enabling a process of self-learning for inanimate objects, we do not yet know what we are starting, but we need to find out. THE NATURE OF THE REVOLUTION Heretofore, digital evolution has relied on human beings to create the soft- ware and analyze the data that are so profoundly affecting our lives. Recent advances have recast this process. AI 24 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

has made it possible to automate an for quandaries people find difficult and AI, GRAND STRATEGY, AND SECURITY extraordinary range of tasks, and has perhaps impossible. This process creates done so by enabling machines to play a new forms of automation and in time In the nuclear age, strategy evolved role—an increasingly decisive role—in might yield entirely new ways of thinking. around the concept of deterrence. Deter- drawing conclusions from data and then rence is predicated on the rationality of taking action. AI draws lessons from its Yet AI systems today, and perhaps parties, and the premise that stability can own experience, unlike traditional soft- inherently, struggle to teach or to explain be ensured by nuclear and other military ware, which can only support human how they arrive at their solutions or why deployments that can be neutralized reasoning. The growing transfer of judg- those solutions are superior. It is up to only by deliberate acts leading to self- ment from human beings to machines human beings to decipher the signifi- destruction; the likelihood of retaliation denotes the revolutionary aspect of AI, as cance of what AI systems are doing and deters attack. Arms-control agreements described last year in these pages (“How to develop interpretations. In some ways, with monitoring systems were developed the Enlightenment Ends,” June 2018). AI is comparable to the classical oracle in large part to avoid challenges from of Delphi, which left to human beings rogue states or false signals that might That said, the word intelligence does the interpretation of its cryptic messages trigger a catastrophic response. not adequately explain what is occurring, about human destiny. and ascribing anthropomorphic qualities Hardly any of these strategic verities to AI is out of order. AI is neither mali- If AI improves constantly—and there can be applied to a world in which AI plays cious nor kind; it does not have indepen- is no reason to think it will not—the a significant role in national security. If AI dently developed intent or goals; it does changes it will impose on human life develops new weapons, strategies, and tac- not engage in self-reflection. What AI will be transformative. Here are but two tics by simulation and other clandestine can do is to perform well-specified tasks illustrations: a macro-example from the methods, control becomes elusive, if not to help discover associations between field of global and national security, and a impossible. The premises of arms control data and actions, providing solutions micro-example dealing with the potential based on disclosure will alter: Adversaries’ role of AI in human relationships. ignorance of AI-developed configurations will become a strategic advantage—an advantage that would be sacrificed at a negotiating table where transparency as to capabilities is a prerequisite. The opac- ity (and also the speed) of the cyberworld may overwhelm current planning models. The evolution of the arms-control regime taught us that grand strategy requires an understanding of the capabili- ties and military deployments of poten- tial adversaries. But if more and more intelligence becomes opaque, how will policy makers understand the views and abilities of their adversaries and perhaps even allies? Will many different internets emerge or, in the end, only one? What will be the implications for cooperation? For confrontation? As AI becomes ubiq- uitous, new concepts for its security need to emerge. One of them is the capability to disconnect from the network on which it operates. More pointed—and potentially more worrisome—issues loom. Does the existence of weapons of unknowable potency increase or decrease the likeli- hood of future conflict? In the face of the unknown, will fear increase the ten- dency to preempt? The incentives will be for opacity, which could mean absolute insecurity. In these circumstances, how will norms and rules for guiding and restraining strategy be established? The need to develop strategic concepts rel- evant to this new and inevitable technol- ogy has become overwhelming. Illustration by GEOFFROY DE CRÉCY THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 25

D I S PAT C H E S • SOCIETY HUMAN CONTACT this quest can, in the name of harmony, reality. AI’s truth is more contingent and Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa are become a slippery slope. Balancing the ambiguous; it modifies itself as it acquires digital assistants already installed in mil- lions of homes and designed for daily risks of aberrant behavior against limits and analyzes data. conversation: They answer queries and offer advice that, especially to children, on personal freedom—or even defining How should we respond to the inevi- may seem intelligent, even wise. And they can become a solution to the abiding aberrant—will be a crucial challenge of table evolution it will impose on our loneliness of the elderly, many of whom interact with these devices as friends. the AI era. understanding of truth and reality? The The more data AI gathers and ana- three of us have discussed many ideas: lyzes, the more precise it becomes, so devices such as these will learn their THE FUTURE programming digital assistants to refuse owners’ preferences and take them into account in shaping their answers. And Many public projections of AI have the to answer philosophical questions, espe- as they get “smarter,” they will become more intimate companions. As a result, attributes of science fiction. But in the cially about the bounds of reality; requir- AI could induce humans to feel toward it emotions it is incapable of reciprocating. real world, there are many hopeful trends. ing human involvement in high-stakes Already, people rank their smart- AI will make fundamental positive con- pattern recognition, such as the read- phones as their most important posses- sion. They name their Roombas, and tributions in vital areas such as health, ing of X-rays; developing simulations in attribute intent to them where none exists. What happens when these devices safety, and longevity. which AI can practice defining for itself become even more sophisticated? Will people become as attached to their digi- Still, there remain areas of worrisome ambiguous human values—what is ethi- tal pets as to their dogs—or perhaps even more so? impact: in diminished inquisitiveness cal? reasonable? does no harm?—in various Societies will adopt these devices in as humans entrust AI with an increas- situations; “auditing” AI and correcting it ways most compatible with their cultures, in some cases accentuating cultural dif- ing share of the quest for ferences. In Japan, for example, as a result of both an aging population and Shinto- knowledge; in diminished ism (which considers inanimate objects to have spirits not unlike humans’), AI trust via inauthentic news companions may become even more widespread than in the West. and videos; in the new AI creates an possibilities it opens for unprecedented ability Given these developments, it is pos- terrorism; in weakened sible that in many parts of the world, from early childhood onward the primary democratic systems due to constrain or shape the sources of interaction and knowledge will to AI manipulation; and diffusion of information. be not parents, family members, friends, perhaps in a reduction of or teachers, but rather digital compan- ions, whose constantly available inter- opportunities for human action will yield both a learning bonanza and a privacy challenge. AI algorithms work due to automation. will help open new frontiers of knowl- edge, while at the same time narrowing As AI becomes ubiqui- information choices and enhancing the capacity to suppress new or challenging tous, how will it be regulated? Monitored? when it inaccurately emulates our values; ideas. AI is able to remove obstacles of language and many inhibitions of culture. As we enter a world where people are establishing a new field, an “AI ethics,” to But the same technology also creates an unprecedented ability to constrain or taught by AI, will there be the AI equiva- facilitate thinking about the responsible shape the diffusion of information. The technological capacity of governments lent of “approved” school textbooks? administration of AI, the way bioethics to monitor the behavior and movements of tens or hundreds of millions is like- The challenge of absorbing this new has facilitated thinking about the respon- wise unprecedented. Even in the West, technology into the values and practices sible administration of biology and medi- of the existing culture has no precedent. cine. Importantly, all such efforts must be The most comparable event was the tran- undertaken according to three time hori- sition from the medieval to the modern zons: what we already know, what we are period. In the medieval period, people sure to discover in the near future, and interpreted the universe as a creation what we are likely to discover when AI of the divine and all its manifestations becomes widespread. as emanations of divine will. When the The three of us differ in the extent to unity of the Christian Church was bro- which we are optimists about AI. But we ken, the question of what unifying con- agree that it is changing human knowl- cept could replace it arose. The answer edge, perception, and reality—and, in so finally emerged in what we now call the doing, changing the course of human his- Age of Enlightenment; great philoso- tory. We seek to understand it and its con- phers replaced divine inspiration with sequences, and encourage others across reason, experimentation, and a prag- disciplines to do the same. matic approach. Other interpretations followed: philosophy of history; socio- Henry A. Kissinger served as national logical interpretations of reality. But the security adviser and secretary of state to phenomenon of a machine that assists— Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald or possibly surpasses—humans in mental Ford. Eric Schmidt is the former CEO labor and helps to both predict and shape and chairman of Alphabet. Daniel outcomes is unique in human history. The Huttenlocher is the founder and former Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech and Kant ascribed truth to the impact of the the current dean of the MIT Schwarzman structure of the human mind on observed College of Computing. 26 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

D I S PAT C H E S • BUSINESS started to, it was typically a defensive move intended to fend off raiders, who THE STOCK-BUYBACK SWINDLE were drawn to cash piles on a company’s balance sheet. By contrast, according to American corporations are spending trillions of dollars Federal Reserve data compiled by Gold- to repurchase their own stock. The practice is man Sachs, over the past nine years, cor- porations have put more money into their enriching CEOs—at the expense of everyone else. own stocks—an astonishing $3.8 trillion— than every other type of investor (indi- BY JERRY USEEM viduals, mutual funds, pension funds, foreign investors) combined. I  N T H E E A R LY 1 9 8 0 s , a group of Or so it seemed. Today, another effort menacing outsiders arrived at the gates is under way to raid corporate assets at Corporations describe the practice of American corporations. The “raiders,” the expense of employees, investors, and as an efficient way to return money to as these outsiders were called, were crude taxpayers. But this time, the attack isn’t shareholders. By reducing the number in method and purpose. After buying up coming from the outside. It’s coming from of shares outstanding in the market, a controlling shares in a corporation, they inside the citadel, perpetrated by the very buyback lifts the price of each remain- aimed to extract a quick profit by dethron- chieftains who are supposed to protect the ing share. But that spike is often short- ing its “underperforming” CEO and sell- place. And it’s happening under the most lived: A study by the research firm ing off its assets. Managers—many of innocuous of names: stock buybacks. Fortuna Advisors found that, five whom, to be fair, had grown complacent— years out, the stocks of companies that rushed to protect their institutions, craft- You’ve seen the phrase. It glazes the engaged in heavy buybacks performed ing new defensive measures and lodging eyes, numbs the soul, makes you wonder worse for shareholders than the stocks appeals in state courts. In the end, the what’s for dinner. The practice sounds of companies that didn’t. raiders were driven off and their money- deeply normal, like the regularly sched- man, Michael Milken, was thrown in uled maintenance on your car. One class of shareholder, however, prison. Thus ended a colorful chapter in has benefited greatly from the tempo- American business history. It is anything but normal. Before the rary price jumps: the managers who initi- 1980s, corporations rarely repurchased ate buybacks and are privy to their exact shares of their own stock. When they scope and timing. Last year, SEC Com- missioner Robert Jackson Jr. instructed his staff to “take a look at how buybacks affect how much skin executives keep in the game.” This analysis revealed that in the eight days following a buyback announcement, executives on average sold five times as much stock as they had Illustration by MATT CHASE THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 27

D I S PAT C H E S • BUSINESS on an ordinary day. “Thus,” Jackson said, The shift in compensation was is going to start eating your lunch,” the “executives personally capture the benefit of the short-term stock-price pop created intended to encourage CEOs to max- shareholder activist Nell Minow told me. by the buyback announcement.” imize returns for shareholders. In prac- Then there’s Merck. The pharmaceuti- This extractive behavior has rightly been decried for worsening income tice, something else happened. The rise cal company was a paragon of corporate inequality. Some politicians on the left—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth War- of stock incentives coincided with a loos- excellence through the second half of the ren, Chuck Schumer—have lately gotten around to opposing buybacks on these ening of SEC rules governing stock buy- 20th century. “Medicine is for people, not grounds. But even the staunchest free- market capitalist should be concerned, backs. Three times before (in 1967, ’70, for profits,” George Merck II declared on too. The proliferation of stock buybacks is more than just another way of feather- and ’73), the agency had considered such the cover of Time in 1952. “And if we have ing executives’ nests. By systematically draining capital from America’s pub- a rule change, and each lic companies, the habit threatens the competitive prospects of American time it had deemed the industry—and corrupts the underpin- nings of corporate capitalism itself. dangers of insider “market T  H E R I S E O F the stock buyback manipulation” too great. It In 2018, Merck spent began during the heyday of corpo- relented just before CEOs $10 billion on R&D—and rate raiders. In the early 1980s, an econo- began acquiring ever $14 billion on share repur- mist named Michael C. Jensen presented greater portfolios of their a paper titled “Reflections on the Corpo- ration as a Social Invention.” It attacked own corporate stock, mak- chases and dividends. the conception of corporations that had ing such manipulation that prevailed since roughly the 1920s—that they existed to serve a variety of constit- much more tantalizing. uencies, including employees, custom- ers, stockholders, and even the public Too tantalizing for interest. Instead, Jensen asserted a new ideology that would become known as CEOs to resist. Today, the abuse of stock remembered that, the profits have never “shareholder value.” Corporate managers had one job, and one job alone: to increase buybacks is so widespread that naming failed to appear.” In the late 1980s, then- the short-term share price of the firm. abusers is a bit like singling out snow- CEO Roy Vagelos, rather than sit on a drug The philosophy had immediate appeal to the raiders, who used it to give flakes for ruining the driveway. But some- that could cure river blindness in Africa their depredations a fig leaf of legitimacy. And though the raiders were eventually body needs to be called out. but that no one could pay for, persuaded turned back, the idea of shareholder value proved harder to dispel. To ward So take Craig Menear, the chairman his board of directors to manufacture off hostile takeovers, boards started fir- ing CEOs who didn’t deliver near-term and CEO of Home Depot. On a confer- and distribute the drug for free—which, stock-price gains. The rolling of a few big heads—including General Motors’ Rob- ence call with investors in February 2018, as Vagelos later noted in his memoir, cost ert Stempel in 1992 and IBM’s John Akers in 1993—drove home the point to CEOs: he and his team mentioned their “plan the company more than $200 million. They had better start thinking about shareholder value. to repurchase approximately $4 billion More recently, Merck has been using its If their conversion to the enemy faith of outstanding shares during the year.” massive earnings (its net income for 2018 was at first grudging, CEOs soon found a reason to love it. One of the main tenets That day, he sold 113,687 shares, net- was $6.2 billion) to repurchase shares of shareholder value is that managers’ interests should be aligned with share- ting $18 million. The following day, he of its own stock. A study by the econo- holders’ interests. To accomplish this goal, boards began granting CEOs large blocks was granted 38,689 new shares, and mists William Lazonick and Öner Tulum of company stock and stock options. promptly unloaded 24,286 shares for a showed that from 2008 to 2017 the com- profit of $4.5 million. Though Menear’s pany distributed 133 percent of its prof- stated compensation in SEC filings was its, through buybacks and dividends, $11.4 million for 2018, stock sales helped to shareholders—including CEO Ken- him earn an additional $30 million for neth Frazier, who has sold $54.8 million the year. in stock since last July. How is this sus- By contrast, the median worker pay tainable? “It’s not,” Lazonick says. Merck at Home Depot is $23,000 a year. If the insists it must keep drug prices high to money spent on buybacks had been used fund new research. In 2018, the company to boost salaries, the Roosevelt Insti- spent $10 billion on R&D—and $14 bil- tute and the National Employment Law lion on share repurchases and dividends. Project calculated, each worker would Finally, consider the executives have made an additional $18,000 a year. at Applied Materials, a maker of But buybacks are more than just unfair. semiconductor-manufacturing equip- They’re myopic. Amazon (which hasn’t ment. As is the case at many companies, repurchased a share in seven years) is its CEO receives incentive pay based presently making the sort of investments on certain metrics. One is earnings per in people, technology, and products that share, or EPS, a widely used barometer could eventually make Home Depot of corporate performance. Normally, irrelevant. When that happens, Home EPS is lifted by improving earnings. But Depot will probably wish it hadn’t spent EPS can be easily manipulated through all those billions to buy back 35 percent a stock buyback, which simply reduces of its shares. “When you’ve got a mature the denominator—the number of out- company, when everything seems to be standing shares. At Applied Materials, going smoothly, that’s the exact moment earnings declined 3.5 percent last year. Yet you need to start worrying Jeff Bezos the company still managed to eke out EPS 28 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

growth of 1.9 percent. How? In part, by • BIG IN … NEW ZEALAND Soon, coffin clubs were taking more than 10 percent of its shares popping up elsewhere off the market via buybacks. That move DIY Coffins in New Zealand. The five- helped executives unlock more incentive year-old Katikati Coffin compensation—which, these days, usually For the nearly departed, a new Club, which today boasts comes in the form of stock or stock options. bucket-list entry: “Build my casket” a robust membership of 213 (16 former members Corporations offer a variety of justifi- BY RENE CHUN are deceased), meets cations for the practice of repurchasing every Wednesday morning. stock. One is that buybacks are a more T HERE ARE coffins, revival). Next, the measur- More than a woodworking “flexible” way of returning money to and then there is ing and sawing of wood class, more than a therapy shareholders than dividends, which (it’s the Batesville Z94, begins (MDF—think IKEA group for people suffering true) once raised are very hard to reduce. better known as the furniture—is common). from existential dread, the Another argument: Some companies just Promethean. This bronze After gluing and drilling club is also a lively social make more money than they can possibly sarcophagus weighs comes the decision about hub, insists its treasurer, put to good use. This likewise has a smid- 310 pounds; trimmings how basic or elaborate John Russell. “We had a TV gen of truth. Apple may not have $1 billion include gold-plated hard- the exterior should be crew come to film one of worth of good bets to make or companies ware, “Rumba Red” velvet (themes have ranged our meetings thinking it it wants to acquire. Though, if this were upholstery, and a finish so from hand-painted nature would be formal, but they the real reason companies are repurchas- shiny that pallbearers will scenes to Elvis). were astonished to see ing stock, it would imply that biotechnol- be able to see their reflec- that it was a cuppa and a ogy, banking, and big retail—sectors that tions. Price: up to $45,000, The trend started in biscuit,” he told me. “We hold some of the biggest practitioners of depending on the retailer. the town of Rotorua, on chat about everything but buybacks—are nearing a dead end, idea- Remember Aretha Frank- New Zealand’s North death and dying—it’s a wise. CEOs will also sometimes make the lin’s golden casket? That Island. With its eerie great atmosphere.” case that their stock is undervalued, and was a Promethean. volcanic landscapes and that repurchases represent an opportunity pungent sulfur odor (a Copycats have since to buy low. But in reality, notes Fortuna’s Now imagine a dif- consequence of its gey- begun launching in Gregory Milano, companies tend to buy ferent type of casket: a sers and hot springs), it is Australia, the U.K., and the their stock high, when they’re flush with humble wooden box built perhaps as fitting a place U.S. The Cleveland Com- cash. The 10th year of a bull market is alongside a small com- as any to contemplate munity Coffin Club, which hardly a time for bargain-hunting. munity of like-minded one’s mortality. According is scheduled to open later souls who are choosing to its mission statement, this year, already has a C A P I TA L I S M TA K E S many forms. to embrace life by pre- the Kiwi Coffin Club, waiting list; applicants But the variant that propelled Amer- paring for death, board established there in 2010, range from curious ica through the 20th century was, at its by board. That’s what’s provides an “environment 16-year-olds to octogenar- heart, a means of pooling resources toward happening at various in which issues of death ians. “We have become a common endeavor, whether that was “coffin clubs” founded in and loss can be raised, death-phobic in our daily building railroads, developing new drugs, New Zealand in recent addressed, understood living,” its founder, Adaire or making microwave ovens. There used years. Members start by and accepted through dis- Petrichor, told me. “This to be a healthy debate about which of their selecting a coffin style cussion, support and the is a way for people to be stakeholders corporations ought to serve— (the classic “toe pincher” activity of painting and useful while exploring our employees, stockholders, customers—and seems to be enjoying a lining your own coffins.” greatest fear.” inwhat order. Butnoone,notevenMichael Jensen, ever suggested that a corporation David Giffels, a writer should exist solely to serve the interests of based in Akron, Ohio, the people entrusted to run it. thinks coffin-making can demystify the final Many early stock certificates bore passage. In his 2018 book, an image—a factory, a car, a canal— Furnishing Eternity, he representing the purpose of the corpora- chronicles the five-year tion that issued them. It was a reminder journey of making his own that the financial instrument was being pine coffin with help from put to productive use. Corporations that his father. It now stands plow their profits into buybacks would sentry in the hallway next be hard-pressed to put an image on their to his bedroom, offering stock certificate today, other than, per- a constant reminder that haps, the visage of their CEO. life is finite. He has tried it on for size. “When you put Jerry Useem is an Atlantic yourself in that space, you contributing writer. realize how small you are— not just physically, but in relation to the universe,” he told me. “All of us are just something that ends up in a box someday.” Illustration by RAMI NIEMI THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 29

THE C U LT U R E FILE BOOKS, ARTS, AND ENTERTAINMENT THE OMNIVORE The Original Huckster P. T. Barnum taught us to love He was a great galumphing racist. He was an unscrupling exploiter of chil- spectacle, fake news, and a good hoax. dren, animals, and the disabled. He was a caterer to base appetites; his medium was the mob, its whims and its fevers. He was a scammer. Do you sense the A century and a half later, approach of a but …? There is no but. Barnum was Barnum, not to be apologized the show has escaped the tent. for. Rather there is a series of ands … And he became a devout abolitionist. And he was a generous man who was eulogized at his funeral as “a born fighter for BY JAMES PARKER the weak against the strong.” And he entertained millions with his circuses and his American Museum, and with General Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind T HERE’S NO GET TING your (the “Swedish Nightingale”), and with his endless caperings in the press. And arms around P. T. Barnum, he had a transcendently disruptive sense of humor, of the sort that cannot help no safe space in the cultural but interrogate, unhinge, and finally overturn the established order. imagination for this guy. With his jolly bulb of a nose So if there’s a slightly tense, withholding feel to Robert Wilson’s Barnum: and his limitless energy—that An American Life—if it reads, in a word, rather un-Barnumesquely—it’s not really the author’s fault. A Barnum biographer in 2019 is heavy with demonic, write-two-lectures- consciousness. He feels concern for the people off whom Barnum made his fortune. He is stylistically constrained: “From the perspective of our own before-breakfast 19th-century energy, historically time, it seems clear that Barnum crossed the line numerous times.” Or: “This is one of those places in Barnum’s story where a modern sensibility must entitled and unimpeded by neurosis—the great struggle to understand him.” Wilson is not being mealymouthed. He just can’t go full Barnum. The evolution of human relations and the temper of showman grows trickier and more tricksterish the hour will not allow it. with every passing year. And full Barnum is—what? A heavy-metal montage of huge people, tiny people, woolly horses, automatons, jeering crowds, hoops of fire, and whiskey-drinking elephants headbutting oncoming trains, with lighting by 30 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by ARMANDO VEVE

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David Lynch and dialogue by Monty Python. It’s THE OMNIVORE a (naturally) limited time only to the American an education in deceit: the buzz of the put-on, of public. Roll up! Roll up! being hoaxed and knowing you’re being hoaxed “The Ameri- and loving it. Being in some dimension flattered can people Barnum was a pioneer of news as entertainment. by it. Barnum’s word for his art was humbug. like to be In 1864, when a group of Native American chiefs humbugged.” went to Washington to parley with President Abra- To begin at the beginning: Ivy Island. As a young What are ham Lincoln, Barnum somehow commandeered boy in the village of Bethel, Connecticut, where he we to do the entire delegation and detoured it to the Lecture was born in 1810, Phineas Taylor Barnum could with this, Hall of his American Museum, in Manhattan, where muse complacently upon the riches that would one Barnum’s for several days, in the most bombastic and san- day be his. His fortune was assured. At his christen- primordial guinary terms, he presented the chiefs to a packed ing his grandfather had given him a tract of farm- insight? house. “This little Indian, ladies and gentlemen, is land, somewhere near Bethel, called Ivy Island. It Yellow Bear, chief of the Kiowas. He has killed, no was a place of great abundance, wonderfully fertile, doubt, scores of white persons, and he is probably almost priceless. “My father and mother,” Barnum the meanest blackhearted rascal that lives in the wrote in his autobiography, “frequently reminded far West.” None of the chiefs spoke English. “Bar- me of my wealth and hoped I would do something num would pat Yellow Bear on the head,” writes for the family when I attained my majority. The Irving Wallace in his 1959 biography, The Fabulous neighbors professed to fear that I might refuse to Showman, “and Yellow Bear would stroke his arm, play with their children because I had inherited so pleased to have a champion. Then Barnum would large a property.” resume: ‘If the bloodthirsty little villain understood what I was saying, he would kill me in a moment.’ ” For years, Barnum begged to visit the as-yet- (One of these chiefs, White Bull, nephew of Sitting unseen inheritance; eventually, his father relented, Bull, would later fight at the Battle of the Little and with some ceremony, an expedition to Ivy Bighorn—some believe he killed Custer himself.) Island was mounted. Away from Bethel and out into the country went the little party, sweating through The American Museum, which burned down thickets and across bogs, perforated by brambles twice, was an analog version of the internet—it and alarmed by hornets, until it reached the spot. had everything in it, most of which wasn’t true. The young Barnum was stunned. “I saw nothing but (“Model artists, model babies,” recorded one a few stunted ivies and straggling trees. The truth contemporary visitor, “cockneys, cockades, cock- flashed upon me. I had been the laughing-stock of roaches, cocktails, scalps, Thomashawks, Noah’s the family and neighborhood for years.” Ark, Paganini’s fiddle …”) There Barnum expressed himself in the fullness of his personality. Alongside The long-range pranking—the epically sus- his humbuggery, his surprisingly vigorous and tained and somewhat fiendish practical joke polemical streak of piety was showcased with long played on Barnum by his family—is one thing. The runs of the temperance play The Drunkard and revelation, the moment of anti-vision, is quite bowdlerized productions of Shakespeare. another. Xanadu is shrunk in an instant to a stub of ugly woodland, the paucity and inadequacy of “The American people like to be humbugged.” reality exposed in the horror of its dullness. Bar- What are we to do with this, Barnum’s primordial num would spend most of his professional life—his insight, now that Barnum-ness has irrupted into life as a showman—seeking to reverse this process. our politics? Now that a trumpeting fraudulence has become one of the modes of power, and the Around something forlorn he would build a mega-real has colonized reality? The great show- floating fantasy palace, a palace in the air. He man would be irked, I think, by the current dispen- would be a serial disruptor of scale, unable to sation, by the loose rhinoceros trampling across resist anything that was too tall or too short, too the special imaginative arena he so lovingly cre- old or too new, too fat or too thin—anything that ated. Above all he would be offended by its humor- bent or tested the boundaries of the ordinary in lessness, and the crudeness and greediness of its some way, anything that reached up into the realm demands upon our credulity. Sloppy stuff. When he of the mega-real. A rambling, toothless old lady was training young Charley Stratton, working day with a penchant for singing hymns—this was Joice and night to turn him into General Tom Thumb, an Heth, George Washington’s nurse, and she was act fit for the stages of the world and the courts of 161 years old. A shriveled and discredited article Europe, he was grateful (so he later wrote) for the of taxidermy—the head and torso of a monkey tiny boy’s “intense love of the ludicrous.” There’s sewn to the tail of a fish, three feet long, very ugly, an eros to old-school humbuggery, the way Bar- pure Ivy Island—this was the Fejee Mermaid, an num did it: a tingle, a mutuality. You’re not going oceanic marvel. She was on her way to New York. to be left with Ivy Island. You’re not going to be left The press was full of it: Dr. Griffin (fictional), rep- with nothing. resenting London’s Lyceum of Natural History (also fictional), had acquired “a most remark- James Parker is an Atlantic staff writer. able curiosity” and was coming to present it, for 32 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

BOOKS and walking stick, after all, was the most famous anthropologist in the world. And, sure enough, in The Students of the brief but glorious five minutes between the pill Sex and Culture and AIDS, I grew up to be free and fearless and sexually adventurous. I also grew up, naturally and Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale effortlessly, to become a scientist and a writer. The Hurston—spurred on by Franz Boas— visions came true—the possibilities were real. revolutionized the way we think about humanity. But is that actually what happened? In light of the #MeToo movement, I ask myself whether BY ALISON GOPNIK I have simply edited the threats and slights and misogyny of hippie culture out of my memories. I N 1968, WHEN I WAS 13, I read Coming of Age in Samoa, by Mar- Did I really escape the sexism of academia? I can garet Mead. Her landmark 1928 study of adolescence had just been easily call up moments that contradict my version reissued as a 95-cent paperback for the counterculture generation. of my past, even if at the time I dismissed them The book offered a vision of how to be a teenage girl. I could be the (that radical-leftist mentor, for instance, who seductive young woman on the cover in a red sarong with a blossom explained to me that women could never belong in her hair—free, fearless, and lighthearted, especially about sex. It also offered to the philosophy-department faculty, because a vision of how to be an intellectual woman. Mead, with her signature cape they were too distracting). And if I’m not sure that I understand my own experience and culture, how could Mead understand the unfamiliar experience and culture of the girls she observed in Samoa? The project of anthropology has always been to study people who seem very different from the anthro- pologists themselves. Is that project even possible? And is it worth doing? In Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, Charles King, a professor of international affairs and government at George- town, makes the case for anthropology in a thought- ful, deeply intelligent, and immensely readable and entertaining way. The book is a joint biography of the people who created anthropology at the turn of the last century: Franz Boas, the father of the field, and the women who were among his most influen- tial students, especially Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Mead. Boas was a German Jew born in Westphalia in 1858, and he was a generation older than his stu- dents (and had fearsome dueling scars from his days at the University of Heidelberg). He was a pathbreaking explorer—at 25, he sailed to Baffin Island, where he recorded the lives of the Inuit— and an exceptional teacher. He was also rather touchy and grumpy, with an obsessive dedication to collecting facts. Benedict, 29 years younger than Boas, was the deepest thinker of the group; her book Patterns of Culture (1934) is still an important text in anthropology. She is also an elusive figure, perhaps because the life of a lesbian university pro- fessor in the early 20th century required a certain amount of evasion. Hurston’s story is remarkable and heartbreaking. Being an intellectual woman in the 1920s was difficult enough. Being an intellec- tual black woman was much harder. Hurston died in 1960 at 69, neglected and penniless, and her work was rediscovered only decades later. In King’s book, Margaret Mead is the magnetic center of attention, as she was in life, although she I l lu s t ratio n by E M I LY H AAS C H THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 33

never had a tenured faculty position, and she was BOOKS again and again—is rather likely to conclude that small and fragile—the stylish walking stick was a polyamory is natural and jealousy is cultural, while necessity. She was only 23 when she went to Samoa, Mead’s work the folks at the other two vertices are more likely to not much more than a teenager herself. Though she was attacked argue the opposite view. had already been married for two years, she spent in a way that the long train journey to the West Coast, where the now seems More broadly, the history of feminism has seen boat voyage began, talking about ideas and mak- transparently a pendulum swing between libertine and puritan ing passionate love to Ruth Benedict, her teacher, sexist and impulses. A hundred years earlier, another great who was also married. Then Mead spent the long ideologically feminist anthropologist working closer to home ship journey back talking about ideas and making motivated. carefully studied how adolescent village girls came passionate love to Reo Fortune, who became her of age. But Jane Austen concluded that resisting second husband. (Airplane travel has clearly been male pressure and seduction was the route to terrible for romance.) On the next trip she met empowerment, a view that may resonate more now- Gregory Bateson, who became her third husband adays than Mead’s free love under the palm trees. after several steamy months, literally and figu- ratively, of sharing a hut with her and Fortune in Still, the back-and-forth doesn’t mean that noth- Papua New Guinea. All this time, she wrote long, ing changes, or that the project of cultural expansion analytic letters to Benedict, trying to understand it is doomed. (I doubt that my granddaughter will fig- all. For Mead, sex and ideas were inextricable. ure out sex entirely either, but she’ll be a lot further along than Shelley or Austen—or Mead.) Neither The romantic intrigue makes for irresistible read- Mead nor Benedict could fully envision the best ing, but it’s also central to the book’s argument. The example of 20th-century cultural transformation. anthropologists had a revolutionary new idea, which They pointed out that homosexuality was accepted they called “cultural relativity.” The phrase is a bit in other cultures and came under fire for saying it, misleading, because it implies there is no truth to be even from other anthropologists. Edward Sapir was found, but Boas and his students didn’t think that. another famous Boas student (and another ex-lover Instead, they argued that all societies face the same of Mead’s), and he argued that gay sex was not just basic problems—love and death, work and children, unnatural but pathological. hierarchy and community—but that different soci- eties could find different, and equally valuable, ways Benedict was the most stable and satisfying love of solving them. Anthropologists set out to discover of Margaret Mead’s early life, and another anthro- those ways. pologist, Rhoda Métraux, was Mead’s partner for more than 20 years. And yet the fearless, transgres- T HE DILEMMA S OF sex and gender and sive public intellectual never openly identified her- the tensions between autonomy and jeal- self as bisexual or lesbian. Even in the 1960s, when ousy, adventure and commitment, iden- I was reading Coming of Age, romantic love with a tity and attraction, were especially vivid to young woman was still far outside my personal realm of women of the 1920s like Mead, Benedict, and Hur- possibilities—35 years passed before I discovered it. ston. If the 1960s felt like a cultural watershed, the period pales in comparison with the decade when In 2019, it’s easy to imagine Benedict and Mead these women were coming of age. Virginia Woolf settling into a happy academic marriage with a big said that around December 1910, human character house and kids and dogs. In 1919, it was impossible. changed, and you can feel the reverberations of that But the anthropologists who showed how sexual change in these stories. patterns and expectations could vary and change helped make that kind of marriage a reality. Looking at how other cultures resolved those dilemmas was a way of expanding the possibil- The very word culture, and the idea that people in ities of their own culture. The culture of Samoa one culture can learn from people in others, is taken was actually more complicated and contradictory for granted now. But King shows how revolutionary than it seems in Mead’s book. But her core idea those concepts were at a time when scientists clas- was right: In other places, there were better paths sified people as savage, barbarian, or civilized, and through adolescence than the tormented, repres- three-quarters of American universities offered sive American one. courses in eugenics. In the 1920s, as King vividly conveys, ideas about biologically based racial, eth- As you read about Mead and her lovers, you nic, and gender superiority were considered scien- can’t help remarking on a recurrent tragicomic tific, modern, and progressive. (In some quarters hopelessness about brilliant young women’s they still are.) When the Nazis looked for examples efforts to figure out sex. That’s true whether the of a science that justified racial discrimination, and protagonist is Mary Shelley in the 1820s, Margaret a government that wrote racial categories into law, Mead in the 1920s, or a polyamorist today. You also they turned to the United States. can’t help remarking that the person at the apex of a love triangle—the position Mead found herself in Boas heroically led the charge against the pseudoscience of race, and his students followed, combining their academic work with public action. Hurston made her mark by her very existence as 34 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

an African American woman graduate student at important innate trait. Human beings are uniquely, Columbia. Boas, Benedict, and Mead also dedi- biologically gifted at imagining new ways that peo- cated themselves to fighting the forces of populist ple and the world could be, and transmitting those xenophobia before and during World War II. Even new possibilities to the next generation. Human more striking, after the war, Benedict’s famous imagination and cultural transformation go hand in book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of hand. Some of the most important current work in Japanese Culture (1946) was an explicit attempt to anthropology, biology, and psychology looks at the combat anti-Japanese bias. mechanisms that allow cultural transmission and change across generations. Children’s brains are A T THE END of the 20th century, anthro- GODS OF THE biologically adapted both to innovate and to learn pology went through an intellectual and UPPER AIR: HOW from their elders, and teenagers, in particular, are moral crisis. The malign influence of post- often at the cutting edge of cultural change. Mead’s modernism, which actually did advocate a profound A CIRCLE OF focus on childhood and adolescence was prescient. relativism, played a part. Yet the crisis was also an RENEGADE appropriate reaction to a real problem—privileged ANTHROPOLOGISTS The girls of Samoa showed Mead that there members of one culture were parachuting in to REINVENTED RACE, was a different way to grow up, a different way to study the threatened and oppressed members of SEX, AND GENDER become a woman. Mead’s book passed on that other cultures. The result was a kind of paralysis. IN THE TWENTIETH sense of other possibilities to me. The early anthro- If people from one culture couldn’t say anything CENTURY pologists made us realize just how many ways there about people from another, for both political and CHARLES KING are to be human. philosophical reasons, why do anthropology at all? Doubleday Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and Another development, from the opposite direc- philosophy at UC Berkeley. She is the author of tion, also made anthropology problematic. The late Sharon Olds’s most The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, 20th century saw the rise of sociobiology and evolu- recent collection and The Gardener and the Carpenter. tionary psychology, which largely rejected the very is Odes (2016). She idea that cultural difference and change were impor- received the 2013 8 MOONS tant. Mead’s work was attacked, in a way that now Pulitzer Prize for her seems transparently sexist and ideologically moti- collection Stag’s Leap. An atom bomb—does it reduce everything vated, and the unfair charge that she fabricated her data still lingers in the public imagination. Her meth- to atoms—to a mist the size of the moon? ods, as she herself recognized, were not as careful and rigorous as later anthropologists’—she and the And the hydrogen bomb—is there water in it? other pioneers were more or less making them up as they went along—but there is no doubt that her When you drop it, does the mushroom above it observations of Samoa were genuine and accurate. look like a splash, as if you’d dropped More recently, anthropology has revived itself by interacting with other disciplines. Inspired by the moon onto the ocean? If you dropped evolutionary biology, behavioral ecologists such as Sarah Hrdy of UC Davis study how basic biological the moon onto the Pacific, would the moon’s imperatives—child care, for example—play out in different societies. Inspired by cognitive science, circumference fit? Some say the equators of cognitive anthropologists such as Rita Astuti of the London School of Economics study how intuitive 8 moons dropped onto the surface theories of kinship and death develop in different cultures. Stanford’s T. M. Luhrmann, and other of the Pacific would fit on it. anthropologists of religion, study how different cul- tural models of the mind configure religious experi- We can’t imagine the length of time ence. (Women are still exceptionally prominent in the field—an important legacy of those early fig- it took to make the universe. ures.) Psychologists and economists are also start- ing to appreciate the need to study cultures beyond And the death of the Earth—for most of us, what are known as the WEIRD (Western-educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) ones. unimaginable, and therefore Our very conceptions of biology and culture are inevitable. As if each parent, changing, and the new ideas redeem the vision of the anthropological pioneers. The old distinctions at the same moment, will see our offspring between biology and culture, nature and nurture, just don’t work. Today, it’s clear that culture is atomized, our species’ clouds our nature, and the ability to change is our most lifting off the globe, the huge, childless atom. — Sharon Olds Illustration by MELINDA JOSIE THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 35

T H E AT E R and Heath Ledger, disguising Carradine’s death as CHAD BATKA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX autoerotic asphyxia and Ledger’s as an accidental Sam Shepard overdose.) The Quaids then spent years in Canada Saw It All Coming seeking refuge from these imagined stalkers and their partners in the United States government. The family battles he described But now, in the photo, Randy looked to be in a state foreshadowed our current national crisis. of enviable bucolic calm, like a bear snoring after a salmon lunch. Next to him was a computer tablet, BY GRAEME WOOD a big knife, a bottle of Perrier, and—splayed out on the sun-warmed stone, like Quaid himself—a copy L AST AUGUST, THE ACTOR Randy Quaid tweeted a photo of Seven Plays, by Sam Shepard. The book appeared of himself, stripped to his bike shorts and pretending to be to be open to True West, the play in which he and passed out next to a body of water, probably in his adopted his real-life younger brother, Dennis, starred as the home state of Vermont. Quaid had not worked regularly since quarreling brothers Lee and Austin off-Broadway an apparent psychotic break in 2010, when he announced, 35 years ago. looking agitated at a press conference in Vancouver, that a con- spiracy of assassins called the “Star Whackers” intended to murder him and Many of Shepard’s plays feel like journeys into his wife, Evi. (He said the Star Whackers had already killed David Carradine psychosis, so it seems appropriate that Quaid would reach for Shepard as a guide to his own crack-up. That Shepard is starting to feel like a guide for the rest of us is more surprising. He died two years ago, at the age of 73, and although the valedictions from the dramatic world were respect- ful, few suggested that his work was acutely rele- vant. Some hinted that he represented the classic Western, a genre whose exhaustion Shepard him- self had lampooned. Obituaries noted the good looks (described as “rugged,” although only his teeth were craggy) that helped make him a movie star, and his status as the “paragon playwright of the American West” (Los Angeles Times). Shepard, one might be forgiven for thinking, chronicled a cowboy world that is no more, and that indeed ceased to live in the American collective imagina- tion sometime between the last episode of Bonanza and John Travolta’s dismount from the mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy. But Shepard plays are back in season, and they are neither antiquarian nor regional. They are modern—even visionary—and disturbingly uni- versal. The best of the plays have all enjoyed reviv- als, most prominently a Broadway production of True West that ran through March of this year, with Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano in the roles of Lee and Austin. The plays’ dominant notes are now darkly political. Critics have always thought of the family strife in Shepard’s dramas as representing deeper American strife. But now it’s clear that the nerves Shepard vivisected for five decades are precisely the ones that the past several years of political dysfunction have exposed: red America and blue, blended into a violent purple; the failure of the for- tunate to respect the wretched; the consequences when the wretched seek their reckoning. Quaid’s life went the way of a Shepard script a decade ago, transforming into a self-devouring, hallucinatory version of itself. He was just a few years ahead of us. For someone who became typecast as the “strong, silent type”(many of his obituaries succumb to that cliché, or strain to avoid it), Shepard 36 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

produced a huge number of words, starting with a T H E AT E R to call, patronizingly, forgotten America. Pull over series of experimental plays in the 1960s New York between towns, or sometimes even into one, and theater scene. His dramatic work reached matu- only the coyotes can hear you scream. In a 2009 rity in the late 1970s with Curse of the Starving Class short story, a Shepard-like narrator overhears ca- (which recently finished an off-Broadway run), the ble news on in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Indiana, Pulitzer Prize–winning Buried Child, and True West. and complains that a Wolf Blitzer clone is He kept a journal while touring with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and in 1986, he co-wrote parading back and forth in front of a huge elec- the song “Brownsville Girl.” At 11 minutes, it is tronic map of the United States, magically touch- either one of Dylan’s longest songs or Shepard’s ing it and brushing it in different areas, causing it shortest play. Sample lyric: “Strange how people to light up red in the South, blue in the North, giv- who suffer together have stronger connections ing the impression that the whole damn country than people who are most content.” Dylan, he later is a cartoon show, divided up like apple pie, and wrote, was chronicling “the whacked out corridors / no one actually lives here. of broken-off America.” Shepard devoted most of his life to a similar project: a never-ending tour of If Shepard’s characters at all resemble the peo- the American interior. Many of his settings are rural, ple who live in these places, the American interior remote, and ungoverned places whose inhabitants is troubled indeed. Starting with his appearance are sometimes left alone to stagger down paths to in The Right Stuff, in 1983, Shepard’s most famous self-annihilation. characters began bifurcating, into the ones in his plays and the ones he played as an actor in Holly- A NYONE WHO HA S driven off the inter- wood films. The characters in the plays exist to be state through Nevada or Texas knows unraveled and undone, usually by forces at first these places. Shepard kept returning invisible and, by the final act, inevitable. But his there, to the troubled backwaters that in the past best-known movie roles show us Shepard as an four years nearly everyone on the coasts has come American hero: Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, Diane Keaton’s amused country boyfriend in Baby P L AY B I L L Boom (1987), General William F. Garrison in Black Hawk Down (2001). These roles are a fantasy of American power and masculinity, self-possessed whether at the edge of outer space, in love, or at war. As Garri- son, he watches stoically from his command post while 18 American soldiers are killed and muti- lated. Shepard’s last scene has Garrison on his knees, swabbing the pooled blood of his men in a field hospital. A title card at the film’s close states that Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the Somali warlord who was Garrison’s adversary, was assassinated on August 2, 1996, and that Garrison retired the following day. Did Shepard take these roles to shame his own characters—or did he write his characters to atone for the fantasies he created on-screen? The Shepard-written characters who start out most composed end up most deranged. We learn that the seeds of their derangement had germinated long before their entrance. Shepard plays do not just lack happy endings. The happy beginnings are all false, too. The characters with composure think they have escaped what afflicts everyone else onstage. They are naive, and are punished. Shep- ard’s insight is that Chuck Yeager shares a country with, say, Randy Quaid—and as long as one of the two is jinxed, both are doomed. True West has long been known as Shepard’s funniest play, but only now does it feel like political allegory. Instead of sharing a country, the brothers Lee and Austin are stuck together in their mother’s THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 37

kitchen, somewhere in suburban Los Angeles. The T H E AT E R Shepard understood Lee’s frustration: “Do plot is simple: Austin is an Ivy League–educated you actually think I chose to live out in the middle screenwriter on the make, typing out a script at Shepard kept a’ nowhere?” Lee asks. “Ya’ think it’s some kinda’ the kitchen table and preparing to close a sale to a returning to philosophical decision I took or somethin’? I’m major studio. His older brother, Lee, is a petty thief, the troubled livin’ out there ’cause I can’t make it here!” Shep- uncomfortable in civilization after three months backwaters ard also appreciated how his resentment gives alone in the Mojave Desert. It takes a few scenes that nearly him tremendous inner resources. Like a mother for the features of the dysfunction to emerge: everyone on who lifts a car off her child, a dim-witted brother alcoholism, latent or full-blown; Austin’s insecu- the coasts proves suddenly, preternaturally capable. He rity and fear of his brother; Lee’s loathing of Austin has lately becomes a genius at manipulation—a psychopath and drive to see him debased. Lee needles Austin come to call, with a vendetta—to make his brother regret his into saying something haughty, thereby giving Lee patronizingly, disdain. This hillbilly elegy is a song of revenge. a pretext to strike. “I’m not botherin’ you, am I?” forgotten Lee croaks, interrupting Austin at his typewriter. America. S HEPARD NEVER OFFERED a way out of “I don’t wanna break into yer—uh, concentration these messes, and I don’t see any counsel or nothin’.” The play ends violently. Fate drives in these revivals either, other than despair. everything, and it’s hard to believe simultane- That is perhaps because he saw all sins as original ously that Lee and Austin’s relationship has gone sins, or at least as preexisting conditions. Buried so catastrophically wrong and that the relationship Child begins with its main character’s visit to his could have gone any other way. Long before blows family’s homestead, whose dirt-farm dysfunctions land, the audience is taking inventory of the props, he seems to have escaped. But some family secrets assessing which could be used by one brother to cannot be escaped or ignored, and the backyard brain or strangle the other. evidence of incest and infanticide is a curse that no act of will or heroism can break. Contrast that Previous revivals of True West have empha- with Shepard the actor: His parachute always opens, sized the brothers’ similarity. In the legendary his kisses are always reciprocated, his enemy is Broadway production, in 2000, Philip Seymour always slain. Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated roles, flip- ping a coin before each performance. The tension Shepard himself came from a family that was was psychological: We are not so different, you and more Shepard-playwright than Shepard–movie I. In the Hawke-Dano version, the duality most star. His own father, a drunk, was “extremely vio- noticeable was the one endlessly autopsied after lent,” he told an interviewer, and likely trauma- the 2016 election, between the prosperous, edu- tized by the experience of having burned civilians cated, liberal elite and the unlettered, scrounging, alive as a bombardier in the Second World War. embittered working class. What stands out is not When Shepard made his politics apparent, they the similarity of the characters—although that is usually came down to opposition to war: La Tur- still there—but their captivity together, and the ista (1968) is seen as an anti–Vietnam War play; mutual mauling it ensures. The God of Hell (which debuted in 2004, with Randy Quaid in the lead) takes aim at the poli- As Austin, Dano stressed that he came in from cies of George W. Bush. But the despair is more “up north,” with the liberal arrogance expected profound. A title like Curse of the Starving Class of the Bay Area. At 48, Hawke was dissolute, his looks Brechtian—rid us of the capitalists, and our pretty-boy charm replaced with the bullish aggres- liberation will be at hand—but Shepard realized sion of paunchy middle age. When I had seen True that Brecht had things backwards. The torments West before, I had imagined whiffs of body odor of family life are not the fault of politics. The tor- and whiskey wafting from Lee. In 2019, he reeked ments of politics are the fault of family life, with of meth, the modern scourge of inland California. all its resentments and inborn (or inbred) rivalries, Meth knows no political party (or if it does, pity projected onto a political scale. the pollster who has to ring doorbells to find out which), but it is absolutely a bringer of misery. Shepard does not map directly to American politics, of course: Lee is not a Trump supporter, With this minor transposition of circumstances, and Austin is not a Bernie bro. But all the impulses True West is a story of a meth (or opioid) zombie, are there, and with them the prospect that in com- who has come to extract a sacrifice from his more bination they are fatal. I confess I am unsettled by prosperous sibling. Dano played Austin in a panic, the possibility that Sam Shepard is dead but his as he realizes that he is trapped in a room with a greatest plays have converged on a single sequel. wild animal. Liberal condescension works about We are living in it. as well as you’d expect. He tries to domesticate Lee, to buy him off with comforts (“You could come up Graeme Wood is a staff writer for The Atlantic and north with me, you know … I’ve got an extra room”). the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encoun- But Lee wants respect—or, more than respect, he ters With the Islamic State. wants proof that Austin, too, is feral. 38 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

BOOKS do not lose your desire to walk,” Søren Kierkegaard advised, and I’m hardly the only writer who has How Walking Became heeded the call, putting one foot before the other Pedestrian in search of fresh insights and breakthroughs in knotty arguments. Glorified for its creative benefits, the pastime has become yet another goal-driven pursuit. Before the advent of scientific evidence and philosophical guidance on the subject, literary BY MICHAEL LAPOINTE odes to the creative and health benefits of walk- ing flourished. No one has been more tireless in L I F E S PA N, A M A K E R of fitness equipment, claims that reviving the history of exhortations to join the a treadmill desk will boost my creativity. The company’s “Order of Walkers” than the British editor and website, where I can purchase its basic model for $1,099, BBC producer Duncan Minshull. Back in 2000, features an inspirational quote from Nietzsche: “All truly he co-edited The Vintage Book of Walking: A Glo- great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Researchers rious, Funny and Indispensable Collection, which agree on the connection between an acute mind and legs could also boast of being the most comprehensive anthology of such proselytizing, spanning fiction in motion. Studies have shown that we do better on tests of and nonfiction. It was reissued in 2014 as While Wandering: A Walking Companion. memory and attention during or after exercise. Studies have also shown that a Minshull has now followed up with the consid- walker’s mental meandering is unusually conducive to innovation. “Above all, erably trimmer Beneath My Feet: Writers On Walk- ing, which gathers 36 testimonies to walking’s invigorating literary power in particular. Writers from Petrarch to Franz Kafka to Will Self have recorded their enthusiasm for, in Minshull’s words, “ambling, rambling, tramping, trekking, stomping and striding.” Higher-quality endorsements of the creative value of walking than these would be hard to find. Yet the more I read, the more ques- tions this 21st-century renaissance of pedestrian evangelism raised in my mind. No, I haven’t lost my desire, Kierkegaard, but I think about my desire differently—and wish I didn’t. Illustration by OLIVER MUNDAY THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 39

Beneath My Feet, though it reaches back to BOOKS follows Solnit in highlighting the political implica- the 14th century, hits its stride in the Romantic tions of walking. Not that his kind of walk remotely period. That’s when walking and writing became BENEATH MY FEET: resembles “doing nothing.” Kagge is the first per- inextricably entwined. In a 1902 essay, the critic WRITERS ON WALKING son to have completed the Three Poles Challenge and biographer (and Virginia Woolf ’s father) (North, South, and Mount Everest) on foot. He’s Leslie Stephen argues that Romanticism, with EDITED BY traversed the New York City sewer system, culti- its sublime visions of the natural world, “was DUNCAN MINSHULL vating “inner silence” along his grueling way and obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the enjoying the familiar litany of inspirational bene- renewed practice of walking.” It’s easy to picture Notting Hill Editions fits. He celebrates “a healthy stretch of [the] legs, William Wordsworth—who wrote in his preface to a kick of endorphins,” which evoke meditations Lyrical Ballads that “the essential passions of the WALKING: ONE STEP unavailable to nonwalkers, who also “don’t notice heart find a better soil” in a rustic environment— AT A TIME the wind, the smells, the weather, nor the shifting stomping out The Prelude, his legs serving as his light” from within their cars. While walking, he metronome. In an 1822 essay, William Hazlitt ERLING KAGGE feels his thoughts freeing up, “a bubbling between writes of how Samuel Taylor Coleridge could Pantheon my ears, new solutions to questions that have been “convert a landscape into a didactic poem or a plaguing me.” Pindaric ode.” Putting boots on the ground was a way of pledging allegiance to a poetic freedom What Kagge wants to stress, though, is that he available only in open space. writes in reaction to the modern menaces of high speed and convenience that threaten inner silence. Even among writers who soon exchanged the “Sitting is about the desire of those in power that we country for the city, the Romantic conception should participate in growing the GDP,” he writes, of walking as the essential literary act persisted. “as well as the corporate desire that we should con- The figure of the flaneur, whom Charles Baude- sume as much as possible and rest whenever we laire defined as a “passionate spectator” of the aren’t doing so.” To walk is to strike out against the urban scene, emerged in late-19th-century Paris culture: “It is among the most radical things you and produced a literature that turned its back on can do.” nature, immersed instead in grime and city steam. Wordsworth aspired to an unshackled imagina- B U T JUST HOW RADICAL is the writer- tive vision, Baudelaire to a voluptuous delirium, walker resurgence that Minshull hoped but they shared the physical mechanics of literary for 20 years ago and has watched come to production: walk, observe, write. pass? Like protesting, walking ought to be among the most democratic of activities. Look closely at The image of the writer-walker was well enough the genre, though, and you’ll find that the writer- entrenched by the 20th century that a walk could walker has a way of claiming a surprisingly exclu- be consciously undertaken as a literary apprentice- sive status. ship. In a 1975 reminiscence about New York, the novelist and essayist Edward Hoagland recalls Henry David Thoreau—whom Kagge salutes how he stalked the streets of his hometown, first as “one of the most central proponents of walking” “to smell the yeasty redolence of the Nabisco fac- and whom Minshull grants plenty of space in both tory” and then “to West Twelfth Street to sniff the of his anthologies—makes a lyrical companion as police stables.” The author was inhaling the raw he strolls beneath the “pure elastic heaven” of a stuff that would fuel creativity: “I knew that every wintry sky. But dipping further into Minshull’s mile I walked, the better writer I’d be.” excerpt of his essay “A Winter’s Walk,” I found the “traveller,” as Thoreau calls himself, not quite as Literary walking took on a new political energy inclusive as I had thought. In the “wild scenes” of at the turn of the 21st century. “Thinking is gener- nature, Thoreau comes upon a group of poor labor- ally thought of as doing nothing in a production- ers out in the open air. He pauses to observe how orientated culture,” Rebecca Solnit writes in an one of the men “does not make the scenery less excerpt from her book Wanderlust: A History of wild, more than the jays and muskrats, but stands Walking (2001), “and doing nothing is hard to do … there as a part of it”—more natural backdrop than the something closest to doing nothing is walk- fellow traveler. Even as Thoreau grants that the ing.” Viewed from this perspective, a walk is not man “too is a worshiper of the unseen,” he sug- just good creative exercise. It’s a form of protest gests the writer-wanderer is a type apart. against buying and selling, against goal-directed busyness. It’s an autonomous march in opposition Minshull nods to the fact that this restless, cre- to the stream of conformity. And like the slow- ative adventuring isn’t available to all. An excerpt food movement, slow-transport literature posits from the writer Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse (2016) walking as an important part of imagining a more points out that the feminine form of flaneur doesn’t sustainable future. even appear in most French dictionaries. To walk alone in 19th-century Paris, George Sand had to In his new book, Walking: One Step at a Time, disguise herself in men’s clothing. The costume the Norwegian writer and explorer Erling Kagge 40 AUGUST 2019 THE ATLANTIC

gave her a freedom that activated her imagination: I began to meant to be marching against. The hazard was “I could create a whole novel going from one end of feel uneasy always there. William Hazlitt gestures toward it town to another.” Very briefly, Virginia Woolf looks about the in his entry in Beneath My Feet. “When I am in the as though she will be the heroic exception, as we proselytizing country,” he writes, “I wish to vegetate like the see her stepping out alone into “the champagne mission. Is country.” If he begins to feel that he has to pro- brightness of the air” to relish “darkness and lamp- membership duce a piece of writing from his walks, like “my light.” And yet, she tells us, this daring nocturnal in the “Order old friend Coleridge,” then he’s “making a toil of stroll takes place between 4 and 6 p.m. of Walkers” a pleasure.” quite the The Pakistani British novelist Kamila Shamsie’s liberation it Solnit champions something like Hazlitt’s veg- words remain true: “A woman walking alone after seems? etating when she writes that walking “produces midnight is always too conscious of being alone nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.” And to properly inhabit that space which is solitude.” yet again and again in the literature of walking, a In a similar vein, the writer Garnette Cadogan’s stroll is portrayed as a working method. Minshull “Walking While Black”—which you won’t find in tempts us with the possibility that while walking, Minshull’s recent anthology—describes the “cop- “thoughts are stirred, which leads to creativity, to proof wardrobe” that enables safe public walking: a verse or a paragraph,” so how can a writer ever “Light-colored oxford shirt. V-neck sweater. Khaki walk for walking’s sake? Even Hazlitt, who sug- pants. Chukkas. Sweatshirt or T-shirt with my uni- gests what it might mean to vegetate, made an versity insignia.” His essay asks us to consider how excellent piece of writing from the idea. Solnit, too, a literary creation can germinate on a stroll when put her thoughts, experiences, and arrivals to use “the sidewalk [is] a minefield.” in her book. A S I SAMPLED THE GENRE, as well Much of this essay was conceived while I was as countless articles and ads attesting to walking. Sometimes I would deliberately set the creative effects of walking, I began out to inhabit solitude, hoping my ideas would to feel uneasy about the proselytizing mission. Is cohere. At other times, I found myself mulling over membership in the “Order of Walkers” quite the paragraphs like this one as I went about my day— liberation it seems? Even those lucky enough strolling to the coffee shop or grocery store. Some- to belong to its ranks might ask themselves how where along the way, I realized that as a writer, I undistracted solitude and untethered mind- never walk without working. On Wordsworth’s wandering can prosper when walking is constantly better soil, I’ve built an office. In Kagge’s inner justified in terms of productivity. The 21st-century silence, my keyboard chatters away. I don’t need walking revival may have begun as a political cri- to buy anything from LifeSpan, because I already tique, but it has found itself co-opted by the very walk upon an invisible treadmill desk, constantly forces it seeks to resist. channeling the powers beneath my feet into the next paycheck. What would it mean, for once, sim- The more conscious writers become of its ply to walk and say nothing about it? creative benefits, the more walking takes on the quality of goal-driven labor, the very thing we are Michael LaPointe is a writer and critic in Toronto. COVER TO COVER crisis is as propulsive well-off parents. What can be saved. She as it is disorienting, happened that night often speaks as a “we,” Machine subverting expecta- down at the dock bound in corrosive inti- tions at every turn. where the privileged macy to another girl SUSAN STEINBERG summer kids get as they navigate the Machine’s plot trashed? When and predatory peer scene. G R AY W O L F outline suggests a how is the parental When the “I” detaches gripping beach read. infidelity going to herself, her voice is FICTION WRITERS, vowed she never During a summer at be exposed? by turns incantatory, Susan Steinberg has would. She has now the shore (location meditative, vengeful— always told her stu- broken this rule and, unspecified), teen- Yet from the start, lyrical yet bitter. Sum- dents, shouldn’t feel in the process, many agers (unnamed) run Steinberg’s daring mer uplift, this is not: they have to produce others, too—not that wild. The risk-avid cru- experiments with The epiphany she fears a novel. The author of she needs to apol- elty among the girls style and perspec- is that the soul is just three unconventional ogize. Her slim nar- and guys spools out tive make clear that “some scared thing story collections, she rative of adolescent in the shadow of two such stock suspense that leaves the body traumas—the drown- isn’t the point. The when the body needs ing of a local girl narrator’s real quest is it most.” and the breakup of to discover whether a the female narrator’s soul—hers, if it exists— — Ann Hulbert THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 41

TRU W CEL

THE E-CRIME RITER IN LBLOCK BY RACHEL MONROE THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 43

LAST In The Associates, which was never published, a confident young Tampa mortgage broker named APRIL, Christian Locke starts out fudging numbers before eventually expanding to tax evasion, wire fraud, and I received an odd email from a man named Matthew Cox. “I am an inmate at bank fraud. In trouble with both the feds and some the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida,” he wrote. “I’m also gangsters, Locke escapes to the Cayman Islands on a true crime writer.” He had one year left on his sentence and was “attempt- a cruise ship. ing to develop a body of work that will allow me to exit prison with a new career.” He included a story about a fellow inmate who’d been ensnared As he wrote the novel, Cox’s bills piled up. He’d in a complicated currency-trading scam, hoping that I’d write about it for sold his mortgage business to a friend, who hired him The Atlantic. on as a consultant. But his income was radically cur- tailed, and he owed thousands of dollars a month in “This is fascinating,” I replied. I didn’t mean the currency-trading scam, child support for his toddler son. (He and his wife had which was too procedural for my tastes, but Cox’s own trajectory. He split up just before he was busted.) The responsible described himself as “an infamous con man writing his fellow inmates’ true thing to do would have been to declare bankruptcy crime stories while immersed in federal prison.” I’d never had a possible and move back in with his parents while he looked subject pitch his own tale so aptly. I wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing. for legal ways to make money. Instead, Cox began behaving more like the protagonist of his novel, dou- C O X ’ S P A T H T O becoming a prison true-crime writer began in the heady bling down on fraud. He started inventing borrowers. days of the new millennium, when the housing bubble looked like it might just inflate forever. Cox owned a mortgage business in Tampa, Florida, and Cox would show up at the Social Security office he did some shady things. “A broker would come in and say, ‘Look, this guy playing the part of a sleep-deprived new dad. My son makes $65,000. If he made $75,000, I could get him a loan.’ And I’d say, was born 10 months ago at home with a midwife, and ‘Bring me his W2s and his pay stubs and I’ll change this and I’ll change that,’ ” the pediatrician never filled out the paperwork, he’d tell Cox told me. “I hate to use the word light fraud—there’s really no distinction— the clerk apologetically. Then he’d provide a birth but in comparison to what I ultimately started doing, it was definitely light.” certificate and an immunization record—both fake, of course; Cox had attended art school and proved to be In 2001, when Cox was 32, he faked an appraisal that got sent to the man a skilled forger. He amused himself with the names whose name he’d forged—an appraiser who, as it happened, was also a for- he made up for his fake babies: Brandon Green, James mer deputy sheriff. Soon Cox was facing federal and state charges for mort- Redd, Michael White, Lee Black. With his freshly gage fraud. He ended up avoiding jail time but lost his brokerage license and issued Social Security numbers, he’d start signing up was put on probation for 42 months. for credit cards. Six months later, he’d have a perfect, synthetic individual with a credit score of 750. He Cox distracted himself from his troubles by writing a novel. In the thrill- rented post-office boxes and juggled half a dozen ers he loved to read, and in the heist movies he loved to watch, people were cellphones. He created fake companies to give his always playing at the edges of the system, seeing what they could get away fake people fake pay stubs. He even invented his own with. As a kid, Cox had struggled with dyslexia; a school counselor once told banks—the Bank of Ybor, the Southern Exchange him that he would probably be a construction worker, that he could never get Bank of Clarksville—to verify assets in nonexistent a job that relied on his brain. As an adult, his height—5 foot 6—put him at a accounts. Cox says that at least a dozen colleagues disadvantage in South Florida’s macho pecking order. But in these stories, knew, to varying degrees, what he was up to, but as swagger and savvy were what counted most. “I remember thinking, If John long as the money was flowing, they looked the other Grisham can write about lawyers and make it sound good, sound exciting, maybe way. Some joined in. I can write about mortgage brokers,” he said. Cox came up with a lucrative template for his schemes. “Mr. Green” would buy properties in a run-down part of the city. Cox would then create fake appraisals for more than double their worth, and take out loans against the invented value. When he stopped making payments a few months later, collec- tion agents would start calling. He’d find a newspaper article about a car accident and retype it, switching out the actual victim’s name for Green’s. Then he’d send the article to the bank, along with a letter from a fake sister: My brother Brandon Green is in a coma and may never wake up. The bank would usually give up and move the property into foreclosure. Cox and his associates repeated the scam dozens of times; all told, his business was responsible for at least $12 mil- lion in bad loans. A woman who worked with Cox and became an accomplice remembers him as charming and arro- gant, less motivated by money than by the thrill of outsmarting the system. “He was really in love with creating a story. The way he would talk about things, I used to feel like we were living in a movie,” she told 44 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

me. His dishonesty in business didn’t spill over into to pin down. Cox socialized with city-council members and other Tampa VIPs his private life, she said—he didn’t lie about his past even as he kept making money off fraudulent mortgages. It wouldn’t have or inflate his accomplishments. “He was a pretty taken much digging to uncover Cox’s deceit; on at least three occasions, he straight guy in that way,” one of his exes told me. says, mortgage underwriters did figure it out, but they let the matter drop once “And it wasn’t about the money, because he would he agreed to make them whole: “They would suspend you, then you’d take easily give it away. He would say, ‘I’m going to prove the underwriter out to lunch, send the manager some gift cards, and they’d to the world that I’m better than they think I am.’ ” take you off suspension. You know I sent you fraudulent loans. You know that a couple million in bad loans are out there. But they accept the lie eventually It was a good time to be in the scam business, with and start sending us loans again. So you feel like everybody’s kind of in on it.” everything airy and inflated and valuations impossible (The illustrations in this article are fictitious renderings, not real books.) ILLUSTRATIONS BY MENDELSUND/MUNDAY; PHOTO RENDERINGS BY PATRICK WHITE

In December 2003, Cox got tipped off In November 2006, Cox stood in a bookstore in Nashville with his latest that federal agents and a local reporter were girlfriend, reading an article about himself in Fortune magazine. It called asking questions about him. He decided Cox and Hauck “the Bonnie and Clyde of mortgage fraud,” deemed Cox to go fugitive, along with his girlfriend of “a master con artist,” and detailed his and Hauck’s “six-state crime spree.” a few weeks, Rebecca Hauck. They lived As he read on, the story grew uglier. One of the people whose identity he’d under assumed names for a couple of years, stolen, Theresa Knight, was described as “a wheelchair-bound former office running real-estate scams in Atlanta; Tal- manager.” Another victim was said to be “crushed by the entire ordeal.” A lahassee; and Columbia, South Carolina, couple with a sick child had wanted to sell their house so they could move skipping town whenever they worried that close to where their son was hospitalized, but instead they found themselves someone was onto them. They used their tied up in a legal and financial nightmare of Cox’s making, needing to hire fake names even when they were alone, lawyers to sort out the tangled title. even in the middle of screaming fights. Cox’s girlfriend kept shooting him dirty looks as she flipped the pages. “I On the road, they sometimes found it had no idea that lady was in a wheelchair. I never met her!” he protested. As easier to steal the identities of real people soon as he heard himself say it, he knew it was a flimsy excuse. than to invent fictional ones. Cox would put ads in the paper—Home Loans Available. Soon after, someone recognized Cox from a Most Wanted list and phoned Good/Bad Credit, No Problem. It was amaz- in a tip; he was arrested on November 16. One year later, he wept as a judge ing how people would just give up informa- sentenced him to 26 years in federal prison. His attorney cried too. Bridget tion about themselves to a stranger on the Brown, one of Cox’s victims, was surprised by the severity of the punishment. phone. Cox would also pretend to be a Red “Given the sentences you hear for people that have committed violent acts, it Cross worker taking a survey and steal the seemed high. But I was okay with it,” she told me. “I heard all the stories of identities of homeless people. He’d use the the other people he had defrauded. We were most upset when we saw that information he gathered to get copies of he expressed that he felt that it was a victimless crime.” people’s voter-registration cards, birth cer- tificates, and Social Security cards, which he then used to obtain driver’s licenses and passports, so he could take out home loans in their names. Cox convinced himself that he wasn’t really hurting anyone. Wasn’t this exactly why title insurance existed? In the early 2000s, mortgage fraud was the fastest- growing form of white-collar crime, and it was easy to pretend that everyone involved was a greedy player in a greedy game. Cox had grown up in a family with upper-crust aspirations; his father was an insurance manager who always drove a current-model BMW. He’d absorbed the lesson that there was a right place to buy your tailored suits (Wolf Brothers) and a wrong place (everywhere else). Cox spent his money on hair grafts, a face-lift, liposuction, an Audi, vaca- tions to Jamaica, a couple of Rolexes. Hauck got breast implants, liposuction, designer handbags. “Fraud on the run, it’s not a full-time job,” Cox told me. “You’re working five or 10 hours a week maintaining some scam, and your life just turns into rock climbing and skydiving and going on vacation.” But by 2005, the Secret Service—the agency responsible for maintaining the integrity of the U.S. financial infrastructure—was narrowing in on Cox and Hauck. In Houston, after yet another fight, the couple broke up. She took a duffel bag full of cash and enrolled in cosmetology school under a fake name, hoping for a fresh start. A year later, she was styling a mannequin’s hair when five Secret Service agents came in to arrest her. She pleaded guilty to mortgage- fraud conspiracy and bank fraud. Cox was charged in absentia with 42 counts of aggravated identity theft, money laundering, and various kinds of fraud. “The scope, complexity and nefariousness of Cox’s fraud are breathtaking,” the judge later wrote. 46 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

calls from his time on the lam. He worried about the quality of his writing, but felt confident that at least he had an amazing story. “This is an amazing story,” Cox remembers Reback saying when he called a few days later. (Reback died in 2017.) “But in the end, when you got sentenced to 26 years,” Reback went on, “I thought, Good! Fuck WHEN him. You come off as a complete sociopath.” There was no introspection, Reback complained, no hint of the psychological motives for why Cox had commit- ted millions of dollars’ worth of mortgage fraud. This wasn’t easy feedback to receive. Cox had never really thought about why he’d committed his crimes. He began writing scenes of his early life, try- THEY ing to understand himself better. He spent a long time thinking about his father. “He wasn’t brutal. He was belittling,” Cox told me. He was also an alcoholic who spent lavishly to establish himself as a big shot. Because of his learning disability, Cox believes, his parents never expected him to graduate from high school. Once, when he called his mother from Cole- man, he mentioned that he was a GED tutor for other were on the run, Cox and Hauck liked to watch a TV show about elaborate prisoners. He heard his father pipe up in the back- criminal operations called Masterminds. “Someday I’m going to be on that ground: But he can’t even read! The years when he’d program,” Cox once joked. Hauck rolled her eyes: “You realize those guys run a successful mortgage business were “the first are all in prison, right?” time they were really proud of me,” Cox said. Cox’s story did make for appealing television, and both Dateline and Putting all of this down on paper wasn’t fun, as American Greed produced episodes about him after his arrest. What came recounting his exploits had been. Sometimes, Cox later—the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the partial collapse of the would find himself crying as he wrote. None of this U.S. and global economies—was a more unwieldy narrative, one with enor- excused all the damage he’d done, and he seemed to mous, institutional villains. Cox’s crimes were easier to boil down to 45 fast- feel more sorry for himself than for his victims. But paced minutes. Plus, the bad guy got caught and was given a hefty sentence. his story started to make a little more sense. Cox was sent to Coleman Federal Correctional Institution, 70 miles Cox knew he wasn’t the only one in Coleman northeast of Tampa, where his fellow inmates assured him their circum- with an amazing story. The low-security prison held stances weren’t that bad, at least compared with state prison: Not all the mostly nonviolent offenders; in the mess hall, you guards were sadistic, and on holidays they got snow cones. This didn’t make could spot white-collar criminals, drug traffickers, Cox feel better. “I was extremely depressed,” he told me. “I’m somebody and money launderers. There was a pill-mill doctor who’s always doing something.” and a cartel boss. There was Efraim Diveroli, whose Outside, the mortgage industry was in free fall. Florida went from story of transforming from a pot-smoking high- having 80,000 licensed mortgage brokers to 4,000 in just a few years. school dropout into an international arms dealer had Cox met with an FBI agent and gave up information about sketchy real- been written about in Rolling Stone and was being estate agents, appraisers, and title agents. He shuffled through documents, made into a movie, War Dogs, starring Bradley Coo- pointing out the ones that appeared to have been forged. Look at the 1’s and 7’s, per and Jonah Hill. There was Marcus Schrenker, the he advised. If some are crisper than others, that’s an indication that parts of corrupt financial adviser who’d become briefly noto- the document have been photocopied multiple times. rious for attempting to fake his own death by para- Cox also connected with an acquaintance named Ross Reback, who had chuting out of an airplane before it crashed. acted as an agent for shock jocks At Reback’s urging, Cox took on a and helped produce radio pro- second writing project: co-authoring grams starring Hooters wait- Diveroli’s memoir. The self-published resses and the psychic Gary COX HAD FOUND A book, Once a Gun Runner, has been Spivey. Reback told Cox he the subject of protracted legal battles could probably sell his memoir, NICHE. THERE among all three men, with Cox suing maybe even get the movie rights WERE JAILHOUSE Diveroli and Reback, Reback and optioned. Cox pored over The Diveroli suing Cox, and all of them Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writ- LAWYERS AND suing Warner Bros. (The cases against ing Nonfiction and books about JAILHOUSE Warner Bros. were dismissed.) Cox the craft of memoir writing. A PERSONAL CHEFS; believes Reback wanted to use Diver- few months later, he had a draft oli’s book—which was published a few ready to send to Reback, one that HE WAS THE months before War Dogs came out—as detailed his schemes, his inge- JAILHOUSE TRUE- an excuse to file copyright-infringement nious methods for creating syn- lawsuits, hoping for a hefty settlement thetic people, and all the close CRIME WRITER. from the production company. THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 47