God Save Meghan Markle Craig Brown on - magzDB

God Save Meghan MarkleCraig Brown on the (doomed?) royal marriage. p.8

Sheila Heti Debates Babies p.66 / Paranormal Zachary Quinto p.63 / Cy Vance vs. The Poorp.16

The Last Slave Zora Neale Hurston’s Long-Lost Manuscriptp.32

Roy Cohn, Donald Trump, and the New York Establishment

cesspool that created them.By Frank Rich

The Worst Human Being Who Ever Lived

p.50

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3Photograph by Bobby Doherty

features

Autumn, 14months, in aDolce &Gabbanaonesie. See“The Cut,”p. 40.

april 30 may 13 , 2018

The Original Donald Trump

New York society will ignore unscrupulous, vicious acts

to serve its interests—just look at the case of Roy Cohn.

By Frank Rich20

Stacey vs. StaceyGeorgia’s Democratic governor

primary comes down to race, Hope, and first names.

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The Last SlaveNine decades after Zora

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32

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6 Comments90 New York Crossword,

by Matt Gaffney92 The Approval Matrix

the culture pages

63

The Closet, RevisitedZachary Quinto

leads an all-queer cast in the Boys in the

Band revival By Amy Larocca

66

Should Sheila Heti Have a Baby?

In life and in fiction, the author struggles to

find the answerBy Molly Fischer

intelligencer

8

CouplesModern royal marriage is an oxymoronBy Craig Brown

16

The CityDoes Cy Vance go too easy on the rich and too hard on the poor?By Tom Robbins

the cut

40

Don’t Spill!The consequences of dressing a child in designer apparelPhotographs by Bobby Doherty

strategist

47

Best BetsGifts for grads; Nolita’smenswear district

49

Look BookThe retiree aginggracefully in Gucci

50

Microdosing’sMicromomentMoreandmorepeopleareusingminusculeamountsofLSD(andketamine,andpot,andothers)By Simone Kitchens

58FoodPlatt on Ferris;Neapolitan pizza is out,Roman style is in

a p r i l 3 0 – m ay 1 3 , 2 0 1 8

on the cover: Roy Cohnon Madison Avenue, 1963.this page: Micropot.Photograph by Bobby Doherty.

4 n e w y o r k | nymag.com

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She’s the SeagullSaoirse Ronan

considers her place in Chekhov’s

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Criticstheater

by Sara Holdren Shows to see, and avoid,

as Broadway’s spring season ends

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Party Lines

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To Do25 picks for the next two weeks

6 new york | apr i l 30–may 13 , 2018

LSend correspondence to [email protected] go to nymag.com to respond to individual stories.

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P A I N T I N G S O F N A K E D W O M E N , U S U A L L Y B Y C L O T H E D M E N ,

A R E S U D D E N L Y S I T T I N G V E R Y U N C O M F O R T A B L Y O N G A L L E R Y W A L L S

Undress ng 2015jansson stegner

Salad Lover 2016robin f williams N U DE?

CynthiaNixon

Running forGovernorMay Seem

Like aParody of a

New YorkCover Story

Yet she is aserious candidate—

and could win.by jessica pressler

Architects of our dig talhellscape on wherethey went wrong p 26

The A-List of Z-Listers / Can a Man Still Paint a Female Nude? / Chait on the Never-Democrats

April 16 29 2018®

We’re Sorry! Love, the Internet

ART &

DESIGN:home

museums

By Wendy Goodman

Comments

1 New York’s latest cover featuredJessica Pressler’s profile of Cynthia

Nixon, whose insurgent run for governorhas pushed Andrew Cuomo to the left (“Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won,” April16–29). Politico’s Albany-bureau chief,Jimmy Vielkind, wrote of it, “If you neededany evidence of how @ CynthiaNixon’s runfor #nygov has more heft than @Zephyr-Teachout’s in 2014, look at the cover ofNew York Magazine this week … probablythe most comprehensive dive on Nixon’spolitical biography done so far.” VershaSharma responded, “The only thing miss-ing in this excellent Cynthia Nixon pro-file … is an explanation of New York’scrazy closed primary rules, and unrea-sonable voter registration deadlines,which work in Cuomo’s … favor.” JenniferKeishin Armstrong, author of the forth-coming Sex and the City and Us, was, forone, thrilled by Nixon’s run: “My bookdocuments the ways male-driven Holly-wood refused to take the show seriouslyand repeatedly underestimated its signifi-cance. The same is happening when itcomes to Nixon’s run, even though activismhas been a major part of her life for nearly20 years.” But not all readers were con-vinced of Nixon’s viability as a candidate.Dion Rabouin tweeted, “Anyone whothinks Cynthia Nixon can become gover-nor of New York state by running on aplatform to improve [the] MTA has liter-ally never been north of Westchester.”Nixon fNew ,whoseler’s story highlights how, in just a month,Cynthia’s bold progressive stances have

forced Cuomo to quickly take action onissues he’s resisted for two terms: unifyingDemocrats in the State Senate, restoringvoting rights to paroled felons, banningplastic bags, investing more in renewableenergy, and shifting his formerly hard-lineposition on marijuana.” Her campaign, headded, “is changing the debate about whatis acceptable in our progressive New York.”

2 Michael Slenske asked whether it isartistically justifiable for a man to

paint a naked woman in the age of #MeToo(“Who’s Afraid of the Female Nude?”April 16–29). British artist Cathy Readresponded, “I don’t have a problem witha man painting a female nude, as long asthere is a sense of a person, identity, andrespect. It’s objectification, degrada-tion, disembodied torsos, and the likethat make me cringe.” And ColumbiaUniversity psychiatry professor David V.Forrest, who interviewed nude models forhis study Beyond Eden: The Other Lives ofFine Arts Models and the Meaning ofMedical Disrobing, responded: “The arti-cle touches upon many sensitivities, but toadd another perspective, my interviewswith nude models revealed that they onlypartly pose for the money, and that theyfeel proud, appreciated, and not exploited.They agree it enhances their self-esteemand body image, despite being physicallydemanding. They insist it is not sexual.”

3 ethi clearly gone wrongthe et, and in interviews

wit h Ku ome architects of ourdigital world reflected on how we endedup here (“The Internet Apologizes,”

April 16–29). @briecode tweeted, “This series of critiques of the internet by inter-net creators is really well put together. I suggest reading them all, and starting to think of how things could be different.” And @jimaley added, “Simultaneously horrifying and exhilarating. Brilliant work.” Anthony Citrano wrote, “There’s some very very thoughtful discussion here. But I am duty-bound to point out that none of these people (with the possible exception of Stallman, but even that’s a stretch) are even remotely ‘architects who built’ the Internet.” Leah Pearlman, the creator of Facebook’s like button, observed, “We haven’t always had Like counts, but we’ve always found ways to gauge our likability. Social media may be simplifying the process, or amplifying the experience, but it’s not creating it … I’ve been dodging the ‘What do you think about social media?’ question for years, perhaps because I’ve been conflicted. Now I realize, it’s okay to be conflicted. There are many sides to this story, all valid, all personal, and all changing all the time.”

4 Jerry Saltz, New York’s art critic since 2007, received this year’s Pulitzer

Prize in criticism for, in the committee’s words, “a canny and often daring per-spective on visual art in America, encom-passing the personal, the political, the pure and the profane.” Although Jerry has been a finalist for the award twice in the past, this is his first win (and New York’s as well). We are delighted and congratu-late him.

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8 n e w y o r k | a p r i l 3 0 – m a y 1 3 , 2 0 1 8

inside: Cy Vance’s war on the poor

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Couples: Craig Brown

Can This Marriage Be Saved?A real actor joins the longest-running soap opera in history.

How long do you give it? ¶ Conversations about Harry and Meghan are among the most popular in the U.K., jostling for the number-one slot with conversations about (a) Trump and (b) Brexit. There is talk of Trump, but no debate. He is a unifying subject, like the

weather. A right-wing Conservative MP told me recently that he could think of no British politician, in any party, who would have voted for Trump. So, in Britain, if you want to feel the warm glow of solidarity, you have only to say the word Trump and everyone starts singing from the same song sheet. ¶ But Meghan Markle, like Brexit, seems to divide

Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow

people. Some argue that she will have a rejuvenating influence on the House of Windsor, dragging it into the easygoing, classless, color-blind world of the 21st century. When the engagement was announced, a friend of mine, a veteran royal biographer, was dubious. But he has since been won over. “I got my first glimpse of the bride at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday night,” he emailed me, having seen her at a concert to mark the queen’s 92nd birthday. “Wow—the surge of excitement from the entire audience when Harry and Meghan came in. I was amazed … The whole hall erupted with one of those loud ripples of approval, with a few cheers … I haven’t met her but those who have say she is delightful—and she is very lithe and beautiful. And bright.”

Others, like Germaine Greer, adopt a more skeptical line. “Why would a girl born in poverty marry a man worth 53 million quid?” she asked on Australian television in April. She went on to make a prediction. Referring to the royal life’s cre-ating “vistas of boredom that are unbeliev-able,” she added, “I think she will bolt.” Of course, in recent years Greer has become

a p r i l 3 0 – m a y 1 3 , 2 0 1 8 | n e w y o r k 9


How strange, then, that this most out-wardly unremarkable of women should have such an electrifying effect on those with whom she comes into contact. It has been said of her that she must think that the world smells of new paint, because redecoration so often precedes her arrival.

But the people she meets are altered, too: “Before the royal arrival, there is a height-ened sense of expectation: nervous laughter from those due to be presented, repeated checking of watches, self- conscious straightening of ties, last-minute visits to the loo,” writes Gyles Brandreth. “When theroyal party appears, a sudden hush descends, the atmosphere a mixture of excitement and awkwardness, interrupted by sudden bursts of laughter. When the queen says to a hospital orderly, ‘You work here full-time? Really?,’ for no good reason we all fall about with merriment. In the presence of Her Majesty, nobody behaves naturally. And the moment the royal visit is over, the relief is intense.” Brandreth goes on to quote one royal observer who noted, “When royalty leaves the room, it’s like get-ting a seed out of your tooth.”

This is the world that Meghan Markle is joining. Even though Prince Harry is a member of a more relaxed and open gen-eration, he retains a strong sense of the

royal family as a team, dedicated, above all, to its own survival. It is interesting to compare the vocabulary used by Harry and Meghan in the BBC television inter-view to mark their engagement.

Meghan uses the soft language of Cali-fornian mindfulness: She speaks of a “learning curve,” and “nurturing our rela-tionship,” and being “focused on who we are as a couple.” Describing their first meeting, she says, “So for both of us, it was just a really authentic and organic way to get to know each other.” Later, “when we realized we were going to com-mit to each other … we knew we had to invest in the time and the energy and whatever it took to make that happen.”

Harry, on the other hand, speaks of Meghan’s entrance into his family almost as though it were some sort of military operation, a successful call for reinforce-ments. “For me, it’s an added member of the family,” says Harry. “It’s another team player as part of the bigger team, and you know for all of us, what we want to do is to be able to carry out the right engage-ments, carry out our work, and try and encourage others in the younger genera-tion to be able to see the world in the cor-rect sense.”

But the world is moving Meghan-ward. While countless other royal families—French, Russian, Iranian, Italian, etc.—have fossilized and then fallen, the British royal family has survived by constantly adapting to the demands of the modern age. Back in 2002, the queen’s Golden Jubi-lee was marked by a so-called Party at the Palace, which kicked off with Brian May of Queen playing “God Save the Queen” on his electric guitar on the roof, and continued with Her Majesty enjoying—or at least enduring—performances by, among many others, Brian Wilson, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, Paul McCartney, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

This is one reason why the royal family has welcomed Markle with such enthusi-asm. From her blog and her tweets and her interviews, it is clear that Thoroughly Modern Meghan makes no distinction between networking and philanthropy, humanitarianism and self-promotion, each skill shading into the other. This is the way the world is going, and the royals are, as ever, anxious to remain onboard. She is media-savvy, maneuvering deftly between old and new, between the profes-sional and the private. In June 2016, she spent an afternoon at Wimbledon, watch-ing her friend Serena Williams playing tennis. During that trip (she was still liv-ing in Toronto at the time), she had con-tacted the media blabbermouth Piers

a sort of human jukebox of random opin-ions, whether on Proust (“Time wasted”) or cuddly toys (“Truly hideous, beyond kitsch”). But there are many who share her suspicions about Meghan Markle.

Jan Moir, a columnist at the Daily Mail, thinks that she should learn restraint. “It seems far, far too early for Meghan to go into full Diana mode and unfurl any fondly imagined royal super-powers. Or to start believing that she can change the lives of troubled citizens merely by bequeathing a megawatt smile and a consolation hug around their luck-less shoulders … Perhaps she doesn’t mean to, but in public she frequently slips into glutinous actress mode, as if she were rather hammily playing herself in some future episode of TV’s The Crown … Too many layers of the custard of compassion on this particular royal trifle is going to make us all feel a little bit sick.”

Will their cynicism prove justified? There are, it must be said, clear cultural differences between the Markles and the Windsors. “I was born and raised in Los Angeles,” Markle once blogged, “a Califor-nia girl who lives by the ethos that most things can be cured with either yoga, the beach or a few avocados.” This is a long way from the worldview of Her Majesty the Queen, who would probably treat an avocado with deep suspicion, prefers tramping in the wind and the rain through the gorse of the Scottish High-lands to basking on a beach, and has never been spotted in a yoga leotard. Many of the royal family only really come alive in the company of horses. “If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she’s not inter-ested,” Prince Philip once said of their only daughter, Princess Anne.

Her Majesty has never confused being famous with being interesting. In 92 years, she has never appeared on a chat show or talked about herself to an inter-viewer. Some time ago, she was speaking to two members of the public when the woman’s mobile phone began to ring. “You’d better answer that,” the queen said. “It might be someone important.” Thecharm of this story lies in the fact that sheprobably wasn’t joking.

There is an almost Andy Warhol–styleblankness about her. Her age, energy, andposition in life probably mean that she hasbeen introduced to a greater number ofpeople than anyone else who ever lived, butfew can remember a single word she hasever said. It is almost as though her conver-sation was written in disappearing ink. Shetends to ask questions (“Do you livenearby?”“Have you been involved for long?”) andthen reply “Really?” before moving on.

intell igencer

Her Majesty has never confused being famous with being interesting.


knew that, in public, she was playing a role. “Her engagements, whether private or public, were like performances,” observed her biographer Hugo Vickers. “Privately, there was less going on, since between these performances she rested.”

Problems begin to arise when they con-fuse their private and their public lives and start to think that the public is inter-ested in them for who they really are, rather than what they represent. Then things go really haywire when they go off-script and start to perform the lead role in their own psychodramas. The most obvi-ous example is Princess Diana. Originally cast as Mary Poppins, after a few years she instead took on the role of a free-form Hedda Gabler. Others of her generation of royal brides have also come a cropper, not least the Duchess of York. Six years after her “fairy tale” wedding to the queen’s second son, Sarah Ferguson was staying at Balmoral when a newspaper carried photographs of her having her toes sucked by her “financial adviser.” Oddly enough, her subsequent fall from grace has served only to boost her self-absorption. Her books of wisdom include What I Know Now, Reinventing Yourself With the Duchess of York, Dining With the Duchess, and Dieting With the Duchess.

Latest among a stream of autobiogra-phies is Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Jour-ney to Find Herself, which includes a checklist of pieces of “Wisdom From the Duchess.” One of them is “Listen to Your Heart,” another “Free Your Mind and Your Bottom Will Follow.”

The queen was the last mem-ber of the royal family to marry another royal: She and her hus-band, Prince Philip, are cousins,

both being great- great- grand children of Queen Victoria. The next generation spread their nets a little wider, but both Diana Spencer and Sarah Ferguson had definite royal connections: Diana’s grand-mother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a close friend of the queen mother and, for over 30 years, a Woman of the Bedchamber; Sarah’s father, Major Ron, was the Prince of Wales’s polo manager.

Both marriages ended in tears. Small wonder that today’s generation has decided to ditch royal tradition and look further afield. Meghan Markle’s biogra-pher Andrew Morton describes her as “the first divorced biracial American to take her place in the House of Windsor,” which is true as far as it goes, though few Britons seem to regard any of these characteristics as a hindrance. After all, in 2004, Prince Harry’s cousin Lady Davina Windsor, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, married a Maori former sheep-shearer called Gary, who had an 11-year-old son from a previous relationship, and no one batted an eyelid.

People seem much more suspicious of Markle’s success as an actual actor, wor-rying that it calls her authenticity into question. When she looks so lovingly at Harry on television, how can we tell she isn’t acting? On television, hasn’t she just walked down the aisle with another man, looking every bit as adoring?

In the early ’80s, Harry’s uncle Andrew courted another actress, Koo Stark, and may well have been allowed to marry her had she not made the mistake of appear-ing topless in a shower scene in the low-budget film Emily.

Markle has certainly taken on some sexy roles—she appeared in 90210 as a girl who had just given a young man oral sex in a car, and she snogged Russell Brand in Get Him to the Greek. She also played a serial killer in a crime show and pretended to snort coke in a TV comedy. YouTube carries a handy medley of her sexiest moments on Suits. In one, she is straddled between filing shelves, aban-doning herself to an eager colleague. But, miraculously, she keeps her bra on. Her

Morgan, with whom she had corresponded on Twitter, and arranged to have a drink with him at a bar in Kensington. He recalls that they spoke of Suits, gun control, and women’s rights. She was, he concluded, “fabulous, warm, funny, intelligent and highly entertaining.”

And, he failed to add, discreet: As they said good-bye, Meghan neglected to tell him that she’d also be visiting a smart pri-vate members club for her first meeting with Prince Harry.

There has recently been a lotof talk in Britain about the Unin-vited. Every day, it seems that new members of the Markle family

pop up to complain that they haven’t had an invitation to the Wedding. Meghan’s uncle Michael and her uncle Fred have both been left off the guest list, and so has her uncle Joseph. “We as a family are very saddened that we won’t be there to wit-ness her beautiful celebration,” said her first cousin Trish Gallop.

Meghan’s half-brother Tom Markle Jr. is furious not to have been invited. “She’s torn our entire family apart. She’s clearly forgotten her roots … Meg likes to portray herself as a humanitarian, a people’s per-son and a charitable person, but she is none of those things to her family.” Mean-while, Meghan’s half-sister Samantha produces fresh grievances on Twitter regularly, calling her “selfish” and a “social climber.” She is currently touting an auto-biographical book to publishers. Its title is The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister. (It should be noted that Samantha has also fallen out with her mother, her brother, and her former husband.)

Far from being put off by such feuding, it is likely that the royal family will treat it as valuable experience. After all, at any one time half of them are on non-speakswith the others. Writing my new biogra-phy of the queen’s difficult sister, Princess Margaret, I discovered that the princess never once addressed a word to her cous-in’s wife, Princess Michael, even thoughthey lived in the same building.

In most important respects, the royalfamily is a branch of show business, cov-ered by the media as such. “You couldequate it to a soap opera, really,” said Prin-cess Diana, in her controversial secretinterview with the BBC. “It goes on andon and on, and the story never changes.”

All members of the royal family areplaying a part. They are actors in a pag-eant, a sort of historical re-creation, inwhich they are expected to submergetheir own characters beneath traditionalroles. Like an actor, the queen mother

intell igencer

Things go haywire when they go off-script and perform the lead role in their own psychodramas.


If mankind remains riveted by a princely marriage, it is as much for its jeopardy as for its brilliance. In the old days, it was only royal insiders who were party to the possible pitfalls in a royal engagement, and they would dutifully keep the information to themselves. For instance, the royal expert Hugo Vickers concluded the Charles-and-Diana tie-in Debrett’s Book of the Royal Wedding (1981) with the judgment that Prince Charles was “indeed fortunate to have found in Lady Diana Spencer somebody who is, in his words, ‘pretty special.’ ” Yetnearly a quarter of a century on, in his 2005 biography of the queen mother, he revealed that he had recorded his misgiv-ings about their compatibility in his pri-vate diary. “The Royal Wedding,” he wrote, “is no more romantic than a picnic amid the wasps.”

Recent history has taught the queen’s subjects to be more savvy. After all, the queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, married Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960; they divorced in 1978. The queen’s daughter, Princess Anne, married Cap-tain Mark Phillips in 1973; they divorced in 1992. The queen’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981; they divorced in 1996. The queen’s

second son, Prince Andrew, married Sarah Ferguson in 1986; they, too, divorced in 1996. And so today’s royal-wedding conversations keep returning to that question: How long do you give it?

In years to come, Markle may look back on her wedding day as the high point of her life as a royal. At the moment, she imagines that she will then be in a position to espouse causes close to her heart. Interviewed by the BBC, she said that one of the first things she and Harry ever talked about “was just the different things that we wanted to do in the world and how passionate we were about seeing change.” But the royal family maintains its position by keeping well away from politics or anything remotely radical. This is not the life for someone who dreams of changing the world.

Furthermore, as the years roll by, Harry and Meghan will become increasingly marginalized. With the birth of Prince Louis at the end of April, Harry dropped from fifth to sixth in the royal succession. If Prince William’s three babies all have three babies of their own, he will drop a further nine places. For younger siblings and their spouses, the royal progress tends to be downhill all the way.

Soon after the announcement that Princess Grace was to be star-ring in Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock was asked by a reporter if there

would be any love scenes. “Passionate and unusual love scenes,” he replied. He added that the sex appeal of the princess was “the finest in the world.”

Monaco went into meltdown. The Monégasques did not like the idea of their princess being filmed kissing another man—little did they know that Hitchcock also had plans for him to rape her. Grace’s mother-in law led the outcry, scoffing, disdainfully, “C’est une américaine!”

Princess Grace stopped eating and had trouble sleeping. Even the announcement that she would be donating her $800,000 fee to Monaco charities did nothing to appease her opponents. Eventually, she was obliged to announce that she was dropping out of the film.

“It was heartbreaking for me to have to leave the picture,” she confessed in June 1962 in a letter to Hitchcock.

“Yes, it was sad, wasn’t it?” replied Hitchcock. But, on reflection, he consid-ered it all for the best.

“After all,” he told her, “it was only a movie.” ■

caution paid off: Actresses hoping to fol-low in her footsteps should remember to keep their tops on at all times.

It ’s important to note that Meghan Markle is not the first actress to turn royal. On the day of her wedding to Prince Rainier in

April 1956, Grace Kelly turned, as if by magic, into the most titled woman in the world: twice a princess, four times a duchess, eight times a countess, and nine times a baroness. But she was soon to find that, for all its pomp, her new role had itslimitations, not least its insufferable dull-ness. At only 500 acres, the entire country of Monaco would fit comfortably into Central Park. Moreover, her stocky, mus-tachioed husband lacked a certain spar-kle: When he proposed to her over a pud-ding of pears poached in wine, he passed her a pictorial history of his family with the words “If you are to be at my side, then you may need this.”

Stifled by the clammy, claustrophobic atmosphere of the court of Monaco, Grace had begun to pine for her Holly-wood days. So when Alfred Hitchcock—who had directed her in To Catch a Thief—suggested she should return to acting, offering her the title role in Mar-nie, she was tempted.

“Princess Grace has accepted an offer to appear during her summer vacation in a motion picture for Mister Alfred Hitch-cock, to be made in the United States,” ran a palace announcement issued on March 18, 1962. “It is understood that Prince Rain-ier will most likely be present during part of the filmmaking depending on his schedule and that Princess Grace will return to Monaco with her family in November.”

Five years from now, will Meghan Mar-kle feel the same sort of tug? Or will life as the Duchess of Somewhere-or-Other hold sufficient appeal? Will she be content unveiling commemorative plaques at schools and hospitals, smiling through welcoming pageants in national costume offered by C-list countries, engaging in polite conversation with foreign dignitariesof a similar status at Buckingham Palace?Or will she yearn for something less doggedand dutiful, something with more zip?

“A princely marriage,” said WalterBagehot, the Victorian constitutional his-torian, “is the brilliant edition of a univer-sal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.”He wrote this in 1863, the same year thefuture King Edward VII wed PrincessAlexandra of Denmark at St George’sChapel, Windsor Castle, where PrinceHarry and Meghan Markle are also due tobe married.

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Markle may look back on her wedding day as the high point of her life as a royal.

Craig Brown’s Ninety-nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret will be published in August by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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The City:Tom Robbins

Cy Vance’s Unequal JusticeThink the Manhattan DA goes easy on the rich?Take a look at how he prosecutes the poor.

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to hear the media tell it, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is soft on white-collar crime. First came the news that an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had ar-ranged a fund-raiser for Vance after he refused to prosecute them for fraud. Then there was Vance’s decision not to file sexual-assault charges against Harvey Weinstein, even though police had caught the Hollywood mogul on tape confessing to the crime. Last month, spurred by a story in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the state attorney general to investigate Vance’s handling of the case. The incidents have cost the DA: During his uncontested election for a third term in November, 10 percent of voters were so fed up with him that they went to the trouble of writing in someone whose name wasn’t Cy Vance.

This story is a partnership between New York and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the criminal- justice system.

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The answer is no,” he says hotly. Any such suggestion is “offensive,” he adds, pointing to two recent cases prosecuted by his office: “Ask the two young white men just convicted of rape, both from wealthy families.”

In Weinstein’s case, Vance says, his office’s sex-crimes prosecutor decided the charges were unprovable. “A judgment was made—that I could not disagree with—that we wouldn’t go forward with that case,” he says. “It was a B misdemeanor at the time,” he adds dismissively.

That comparison, however, serves only to underscore the way Vance’s office takes adifferent approach to the poor. Ordinary misdemeanors like the one Weinstein faced usually don’t merit personal attention from the DA—and usually wind up with the ac-cused being prosecuted. “We see a lot of complaints drawn up with a lot less evi-dence,” says Edward McCarthy, a Legal Aid supervisor who has two decades of experi-ence in Manhattan’s criminal courts. Jona-than Oberman, a professor who trains pub-lic defenders at Cardozo Law School, also scoffs at Vance’s reasoning. “There are con-flicting stories from a witness?” he says. “Okay—then just apply the same standard to poor and low-income people and let them derive the same benefit.”

Such criticisms are especially awkward for Vance, who prides himself on being at the forefront of progressive reform. In 2010, Vance became the first DA in the state to create a special unit to address wrongful convictions—but ever since, he has refused to disclose whether the unit has actually exonerated anyone. During our interview, however, Vance reverses himself and provides me with a list of seven names. “I was told you’d asked for this, and I said we should provide it,” he tells me. He had previously kept the cases

secret, he explained, because “generally speaking, there’s a view that these people want the cases behind them.”

On closer scrutiny, though, it turns out that one of the defendants on Vance’s list was convicted after a retrial, while another was released only after he pleaded guilty to lesser charges. All told, after eight years, Vance’s unit has exonerated only five defen-dants who were wrongly convicted—com-pared to two dozen in Brooklyn. Vance’s office is “much more interested in preserv-ing convictions than in taking a fresh, objec-tive look at all the evidence,” says Robert Gottlieb, a former member of Vance’s tran-sition committee who has been seeking to win exoneration for a defendant named Jon-Adrian Velazquez since 2011. “I call it the conviction-rejustification unit,” adds Ron Kuby, who has won several wrongful-conviction claims on behalf of clients in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. “Their method is to collect evidence to attack your witnesses and your argument.”

In recent months, seeking to bolster his image as a reformer, Vance announced that his office will no longer demand bail for most misdemeanor charges. He has re-duced penalties for marijuana possession and reinforced a vow he made last year not to prosecute most cases of fare evasion. He proudly displays a chart showing that his office has reduced the number of misde-meanors it prosecutes by 26 percent since 2014. Prosecutions for smaller-time of-fenses, like unlicensed vending or taking up more than one seat on the subway, have plunged by 87 percent.

But critics say Vance is taking credit for broader trends he has no influence over. “The reason marijuana arrests went down was because of political pressure,” says Issa Kohler-Hausmann, a Yale Law School pro-fessor and the author of Misdemeanorland. “There was a massive campaign against low-level arrests that targeted blacks and Hispanics. It had nothing to do with Cy Vance being a good guy.”

Lawyers for the poor, meanwhile, say that Vance has failed to enforce many of his much-heralded reforms. “We’re still getting bail requested on people who are not a flight risk charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies,” says Tina Luongo, chief attorney for criminal defense at the Legal Aid Society. “The entire nation is talk-ing about not setting bail for these groups of people, but somehow he can’t inspire or motivate his staff to do it. It’s frustrating to hear somebody boast themselves to be about reform and not recognize that they are running almost two separate shops of prosecution—one for people with access and influence and one for poor people.” ■

But all the attention on Vance’s treatment of the rich and powerful has obscured a more surprising aspect of his record: The DA, who styles himself a progressive re-former, is actually far more punitive toward poor and minority defendants than his counterparts in other boroughs. According to a report issued last year by a special com-mission on Rikers Island, Vance’s office was responsible for almost 38 percent of the city’s jail population in 2016, even though it handled just 29 percent of all criminal cases in New York. “No other borough comes close,” the report concluded. Brooklyn—de-spite having a million more residents than Manhattan—accounted for only 22 percent of those behind bars.

Vance’s selectively tough approach to law and order continued last year. Even as the DA supported the growing movement to close Rikers, his office continued to fill the jail at a far higher rate than other boroughs’ DAs. As of December, according to data published by the Department of Correction, a third of the city’s inmates— including 2,251 at Rikers—had been sent there from Manhattan.

That parade of imprisonment is com-pounded by Vance’s onerous demands for bail. In 2016, the DA’s own statistics show, his office detained 17 percent of those it charged with misdemeanors or minor infractions—anything from smoking a joint to jumping a turnstile. Only Staten Island, with one-seventh as many petty crimes as Manhattan, matched that level of incarceration.

Then there’s Vance’s notoriously stingy approach to providing defense attorneys with the police reports and witness state-ments they need to defend their clients. While most of the city’s other DAs have moved toward the practice of “open file dis-covery,” releasing crucial records shortly after arraignment, Vance pursues what de-fense attorneys call “trial by ambush,” using the narrow requirements in the state’s law on pretrial disclosure— considered one of the most restrictive in the nation—to with-hold vital evidence from indigent defen-dants until the last possible moment. As a result, public defenders say, poor clients in Brooklyn can easily obtain evidence that is denied to those accused of similar crimes in Manhattan. “It’s two boroughs divided by a river,” says Bill Gibney, a veteran of the Le-gal Aid Society, the city’s oldest and largest public defense organization. “Different poli-cies, different results.”

In a lengthy interview, the usually mild-mannered Vance bristles at any suggestion that his office takes a different approach to justice based on class or race. “Do we treat the wealthy different than others purposely?

Vance locks up more poor people than any otherborough’s DA—especially for petty crimes.

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Frank Rich

No behavior is too appalling to sophisticated New Yorkers as long as you are skilled at trading

power and influence. Roy Cohn knew this. And he taught it to his longtime client only too well.

amid the aftershocks of donald Trump’s firing of James Comey last May, I went to see Angels in America at the same theater in London, the National, where I’d first seen it as a New York Times drama critic some 25 years earlier. The play didn’t transport me quite as far from the lamen-table present as I’d hoped. The new produc-tion, now on Broadway, doesn’t radically depart in tone or quality (high) from the first. But the play’s center of gravity had shifted. While Tony Kushner’s epic had been

seared into my memory by the frail figure of Prior Walter, a young gay man fighting aids with almost the entire world aligned against him, this time it was Roy Cohn who domi-nated: a closeted, homophobic, middle-aged gay man also battling aids but who, unlike the fictional Prior, was a real-life Über- villain of America’s 20th century. “The pole-star of human evil,” as one character describes him. “The worst human being who ever lived … the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54.”

Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark

ORIGINAL DONALDTRUMP

THE

Cohn in 1986, a few months before he died.


What has changed is not Angels but America. Even if you hadn’tknown that Cohn had been Trump’s mentor and hadn’t read theelection-year journalistic retrospectives on their toxic commontactics (counterpunch viciously, deny everything, stiff your credi-tors, manipulate the tabloids), you’d see and hear the current presi-dent in Cohn’s ruthless bullying and profane braggadocio. Thatisn’t because Nathan Lane, a Cohn for the ages, is doing a Trumpimpersonation. The uncanny overlap between these two figures isall there in the writing. “Was it legal? Fuck legal,” Cohn rants at onepoint, about having privately lobbied the judge Irving Kaufman tosend Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. “Am I a nice man? Fucknice. They say terrible things about me in the Nation. Fuck theNation. You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective?” It turnsout that in his rendering of Cohn a quarter-century ago, Kushnerhad identified an enduring strain of political evil that is as malig-nant in its way as the aids virus, just as dangerous to the nation,and just as difficult to eradicate.

Cohn, after all, was supposed to have been washed up in 1954,after he and his superior in witch-hunting, Joe McCarthy, implodedin the televised Army- McCarthy hearings. McCarthy drank him-self to death, and Cohn fled Washington a pariah, his brief career in government service in ruins. Yet as Kushner accurately picks up the story three decades later, Cohn had reinvented him-self as a power broker after returning to his hometown of New York, and he would remain so right up until disbarment and aids finally leveled him in 1986. How could that be? Sure, the right-wing resurgence of the 1980s gave him a late-in-life boost. Cohn’s juice with Ronnieand Nancy, as Kushner drama-tizes, gained him access to the experimental medication AZTdenied most everyone else. (Hemay have been the only aidspatient the Reagan WhiteHouse lifted a finger to help.)But the question of how Cohnboth survived and flourished asa Manhattan eminence in the quarter-century between McCarthyand Reagan is beyond the play’s already-considerable scope.

It’s an ellipsis that gnawed at me because the same questionapplies to Trump. Cohn thrived throughout a New York second actrife with indictments and scandals that included accusations ofmultiple bank- and securities-law violations, perennial tax evasion,bribery, extortion, theft, and even precipitating the death of a youngman in a suspicious fire. Trump may never have been suspected ofmanslaughter, but he also flourished for decades despite being ashameless lawbreaker, tax evader, liar, racist,bankruptcy aficionado,and hypocrite notorious for his mob connections, transactionalsexual promiscuity, and utter disregard for rules, scruples, and morals. Indeed, Trump triumphed despite having all of Cohn’s debits, wartime draft dodging included, but none of his assets—legal cunning, erudition, a sense of humor, brainpower, and loyalty.(The putz-cum-fixer Michael Cohen, who is to Cohn what DanQuayle was to Jack Kennedy, boasts none of these attributes either.)And Trump, like Cohn, got away with it all under the ostensiblypitiless magnifying glass of New York. Much as one hates to concedeit, it’s no small achievement that he succeeded where so many ofhis betters failed in becoming the first New Yorker to catapult


PHOTOGRAPH:BETTMANN/G

ETTY

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himself to the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt.The story of Trump’s ascent complicates the equation for those

who want to believe that it was exclusively a product of his genius for publicity, or his B-stardom in a long-running reality show in NBC’s prime time, or a vast right-wing conspiracy abetted by deplorable voters like those in Wisconsin who sent McCarthy to the Senate in 1946 and helped Trump take the Electoral College in 2016. Nor is Trump’s New York backstory comforting to those of us in the habit of quarantining the blame for his unlikely victory to Russian and/or Comey’s interference, the ineptitude of the Clin-ton campaign, the Fox News–Breitbart complex, and the cynical, feckless Vichy Republicans who stood by as Trump subverted every principle they once claimed to have held dear.

There are Vichy Democrats too. From the mid-1970s to the turn of the century, well before Trump debuted on The Apprentice or flirted more than glancingly with politics, he gained power and consolidated it with the help of allies among the elites of New York’s often nominally Democratic and liberal Establishment—some of them literally the same allies who boosted Cohn. Like Cohn (a reg-istered Democrat until he died) and Trump (an off-and-on Demo-

crat for years), their enablers were not committed to any party or ideology. Their priority was raw personal power that could be leveraged for their own enrichment, privilege, and celebrity. Cohn’s biographer Nicholas von Hoffman described what he called the “Roy Cohn Barter and Swap Exchange”: It specialized in “deals, favors, hand washings, and reciprocities of all kinds.” And while Cohn is gone, the exchange never shut down. Its unofficial legislative body is the floating quid pro quo Favor Bank that has always made New York tick at its highest levels, however corruptly, since Tam-many Hall. It’s a realm where everyone has his (or her) price, and clout is always valued higher than any civic good. All

that matters is the next transaction. Since time immemorial, those who find it unsavory are invariably dismissed as naïve.

The more I’ve looked back at the entanglements of Trump, Cohn, and their overlapping circles and modi operandi, the more I think the crux of their political culture could be best captured if Edward Sorel were to create a raucous mural depicting the Friday night in February 1979 when Cohn celebrated his 52nd birthday at Studio 54. That sprawling midtown Valhalla of the disco era, a nexus for boldface names, omnivorous drug consumption, anonymous sex, and managerial larceny, was owned by Cohn’s clients (and soon-to-be-imprisoned felons) Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. The guest list? “If you’re indicted, you’re invited,” went the comedian Joey Adams’s oft-repeated joke about Cohn’s soirées. Among the (all-white) Democratic revelers joining Republican and Conservative party leaders at Cohn’s black-tie testimonial were the borough presidents of Queens (Donald Manes), Brooklyn (Howard Golden), and Manhattan (Andrew Stein), not to mention the former Demo-cratic mayor Abe Beame and a bevy of judges, including the chief of the U.S. District Court. The investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who covered the scrum from the sidewalk for the Village Voice, noted that, among the usual Warhol celebrity crowd, politicians,

Cohn at a press conference with Trump, 1984.

ANNOTATIONSand fixers, was a “surprise” attendee—“newcomer Chuck Schumer, a ‘reform’ assemblyman from Brooklyn who insisted he was just the date of a gossip columnist.” Also in attendance, less surprisingly, and camera-ready for the paparazzi, was the 32-year-old Trump, who by then had been in Cohn’s orbit for six years.

Like the other developers on hand, Trump had sought and won favors from some of the older, more powerful Demo-crats who were present. With Cohn’s impri-matur, Trump gained easy access to the ostensibly nonpartisan press Establishment as well. Si Newhouse, the chairman ofCondé Nast magazines and Cohn’s bestfriend since their high-school days at Hor-ace Mann, showed up for the Studio 54blast. Earlier in the day, Abe Rosenthal, theexecutive editor of the Times, had broughthis companion, Katharine Balfour, to payhomage to Cohn over lunch at the ‘21’ Club.In years to come, Rosenthal would enjoyTrump’s hospitality at Mar-a-Lago.

Neither the Newhouse magazine-and-newspaper empire nor Rosenthal’s Timeswas in those days conspicuous for pryingtoo deeply into the shadows surroundingCohn or Trump. Some journalistic big gunspreferred to be behind velvet ropes withMcCarthy’s former henchman than out onthe pavement casing the joint like Barrett.A few months after the Studio 54 baccha-nal, Morley Safer would front a soft 60Minutes Cohn profile in which, amongother euphemisms, viewers were informedthat Cohn had never tied the knot with hisoft-rumored fiancée Barbara Walters because “he’s just not the marrying kind.” In its effort to be “balanced,” the piece came off as a free ad for Cohn’s supposed legal wiz-ardry and cast him as something of a victim. (Intriguingly, this 60 Minutes segment can-not be found on YouTube, while a tougher, if tardy, Mike Wallace profile, made as Cohn was dying seven years later, can be.) By that point, Walters had long since delivered for her platonic fiancé with her first promo-tional profile of his shiny young protégé forABC’s 60 Minutes rival 20/20. Titled “TheMan Who Has Everything,” it was, in theTrump biographer Michael D’Antonio’sdescription, “wealth pornography.” Amongother superlatives, it floated the dubiousclaim (for the 1970s) that “the Trumps are treated like American royalty.”

For years it’s been a parlor game for Americans to wonder how history might have turned out if someone had stopped Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot JFK. One might be tempted—just as fruit-lessly—to speculate on what might have happened if more of New York’s elites had intervened back then, nonviolently, to block or seriously challenge Trump’s path

ËMARYANNE

TRUMP BARRY

(Donald Trump’s sister):Roy got the White House togive her her judgeship. Roywas out and the call camein to tell her she got it. Itook the call and called herto tell her. Ten minuteslater, Donald called to saythank you.

Ë ROGER

STONE: Workedwith Roy veryheavily beforeand after elections. He was

the one, with Roy, to find out the dirt

on [Geraldine] Ferraro. Roger did not like Donald Trump or Si Newhouse—told me they were losers—but if Roy used them, he would, too. His wife’s name is Bitsy. Roy called them Itsy and Bitsy. Roy was very fond of Roger, and I think he saw a little of himself when he was younger. [Reached for comment, Stone denied all of this. “I never said Trump was a loser. Why would I say that?”]

Ë ED ROLLINS (Reagan campaign adviser) and LYN NOFZIGER (White House adviser): Whenever Roy needed anap he WhiteHo hecalled. Roy was in constant touch with these twoduring both elections.

ËGEORGE

STEINBRENNER:

He got snotty whenyou didn’t recognizehis voice immediately.So what was one todo? I always asked,“Who’s calling, please?”and listened to himscream.

ËCHARLES WICK

(director of U.S.Information Agency): Royput Barbara Walters intouch with him, and that’show she was introducedto the White House crowd.

Ë STEVE RUBELL:

When he and Ian[Schrager] were in jail,Steve would call me athome—collect—and sinceI had a conference phone … I would connect Steve to whoever he wanted to

talk to. Once he called Liza Minnelli,

who was staying at Halston’s house out on L.I., and they were talking about her song “New

York, New York” and how she was furious

with Frank Sinatra. “Mine is so much better” … With Steve calling me every night I had to laugh because … there was an article in New York Magazine about Steve calling people and the A-, B-, and C-list. Which list was everyone on? I certainly was on the A-plus-list—I connected him to these people.

ËRUPERT

MURDOCH:

WheneverRoy wanteda story stopped,

item put in, orstory exploited—

i.e., Ferraro and herfamily—Roy calledMurdoch. Roy was alsoRupert’s attorney.

Ë PAUL LAXALT

(senator from Nevada):60 Minutes was going tobe doing a story on him, not favorable … Roy called the producer of 60 Minutes and had it taken out of their schedule.

Ë GLORIA

VANDERBILT: One day, she called me [looking for] the attorney Tom Andrews. She said, “This is Gloria Vanderbilt.” I said, “Tom isn’t in—may I please take a message?” She again repeated, “This is Gloria Vanderbilt,” so my dander got up, and I said, “How do you spell that?” … She slammed the phone down and I later heard she demanded that I be fired. Roy just laughed. He loved it when you gave them what they deserved.

Ë THE KENNEDYS: Roy hated them … but Roy was going to finally get even when Aristotle Onassis came to see him to handle his divorce from Jackie. But he died before anything could be done.

Illustrations by Tony Millionaire

source: marcus baram

a teller at the favor bank

From the personal notebooks of Christine Seymour, a switchboard operator in the office of Roy Cohn from the late 1960s until his death. Seymour died in 1994.


to power. They had plenty of provocation and opportunities to do so. Trump practiced bigotry on a grand scale, was a world-class liar, and ripped off customers, investors, and the city itself. Yet for many among New York’s upper register, there was no horror he could commit that would merit his excommunication. As with Cohn before him, the more outrageously and reprehensibly Trump behaved, the more the top rungs of society were titillated by him. They could cop out of any moral judgments or actions by rationalizing him as an entertaining con man: a cheesy, cynical, dumbed-down Gatsby who fit the city’s tacky 1980s Gilded Age much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more romantic prototype had the soigné Jazz Age of the 1920s. And so most of those who might have stopped Trump gawked like the rest of us as he scrambled up the city’s ladder, grabbing anything that wasn’t nailed down.

It was democrats in New York who taught both Cohn and Trump that they could buy off politi-cians and try to get away with anything. Cohn’s father, Al, was a Bronx and then New York State Supreme Court judge. The elder Cohn’s roots in the party’s machine were hardwired into his son: Young Roy figured out how to pull strings to fix a parking ticket for a teacher while still in high school. Trump grew up with a father who had been intertwined with the Brooklyn Democratic machine while building his residential-real-estate empire. By the time the clubhouse hack Beame

arrived in City Hall in 1974 after the reform mayoralty of John Lindsay, Fred Trump had known him for 30 years. The new mayor immediately gave both Trumps a license to steal by declaring that “whatever Donald and Fred want, they have my complete backing.” Never mind, as the Trump biographers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher observed, that Donald Trump didn’t have the financing to snag the real-estate prize he then sought, the properties of the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. The Beame deputy mayor Stanley Friedman pushed through an enormous 40-year, $400 million tax abatement—this at the city’s bankrupt nadir—and in his waning weeks in office fast-tracked the agency approvals Trump needed to rebuild the decrepit old Commodore Hotel as the Grand Hyatt, his first big deal. Roy Cohn served as the closer: The day after the Beame administration was succeeded by Ed Koch’s in 1978, Friedman was paid off for his Trump handiwork with a new job as a part-ner in Cohn’s law firm. (It was not enough to save Friedman from federal prison a decade later, when he was convicted in unrelated kickback scandals the year after Cohn’s death.)

Trump’s other major political ally as he erected a new, Manhat-tan real-estate empire on top of his father’s outer-borough fiefdom was the Democratic governor Hugh Carey. Trump engineered a brazen conflict-of-interest that you’d be tempted to call mind-boggling were its contours not being replicated on a far grander scale within the current White House. In the 1970s, Trump hired as his lobbyist Carey’s chief political fund-raiser, Louise Sunshine, even as he and his father were the second-biggest contributors to Carey’s 1978 reelection campaign (only a Carey brother, an oil-man, gave more). “He’ll do anything for a developer who gives him a campaign contribution,” said Trump of Carey. And so he did. Trump was unstoppable, though he kept writing checks to other useful Democrats, including a record $270,000 (for a Board of Estimate election) to the Cohn crony Andrew Stein, who served as Manhattan borough president and then New York City Council president from 1978 to 1994 and “whose varied public perfor-mances for Trump were a metaphor for gutter government,” in

Wayne Barrett’s estimation. (Stein would years later plead guilty to un-Trump-related tax evasion.) Trump would also give to (among others) Schumer, Eliot Spitzer, and Andrew Cuomo, who took Trump as a client even as his father was governor and Trump was conniving to develop the West Side yards and build a domed football stadium in Queens.

Unlike Trump, Cohn had no interest in building anything. He wanted to tear down institutions and people for fun and profit. To shield him from repercussions, legal or otherwise, he didn’t have just a retinue of politicians from both parties in his pocket but a client list whose breadth was no doubt aspirational to the young Trump—the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the self-described “boss of bosses” Carmine “Lilo” Galante, and the city’s reigning real-estate titans (the Helmsleys, LeFraks, et al.), as well as the Newhouse publishing empire and Studio 54. This coterie either looked the other way or gave Cohn cover during transgression after transgression, some of them proto-Trump financial flimflams in which he looted banks or companies; oth-ers involving unpaid bills to creditors as varied as the IRS, Dun-hill Tailors, and a local locksmith; still others more sensational. In the late 1960s, Cohn took a loan of $100,000 from a client for whom he negotiated a suspiciously parsimonious divorce settle-ment from a billionaire, and fought paying it back until the case threatened his law license in the early 1980s. In the 1970s, a Florida court ruled that Cohn had pushed an elderly friend in mental decline, Lewis Rosenstiel, the founder of the Schenley liquor empire, into signing a will that made Cohn a trustee of his estate. It was in 1973, the year he met Trump, that perhaps the most sinister of the Cohn horror stories of his post-McCarthy career unfolded. A yacht leased by a shell company Cohn con-trolled was sent to sea despite having been judged in dire disre-pair by its previous captain. A suspicious fire broke out, the yacht sank, a crew member died, and Cohn collected both legal fees and a back-channel insurance payout.

Some of these escapades would figure in the disbarment pro-ceedings that finally ended Cohn’s legal career in 1986, though in truth it was over anyway, since aids would finish him off six weeks later. But until then he was often protected by the press. Through a fluke, he had friendships dating back to childhood with Gen-eroso Pope Jr., the owner of the very same National Enquirer whose current CEO, David Pecker, now tries to protect Trump, and Richard Berlin, the CEO of Hearst, as well as Si Newhouse. Before he joined McCarthy in Washington, the young Cohn had been an acolyte of and tipster for the mighty Hearst gossip colum-nist Walter Winchell, who demonstrated by example how the press could be enlisted into the Favor Bank of the powerful. As Thomas Maier writes in the 1994 biography Newhouse, Cohn used his influence in the early ’80s to secure favors for himself and Mob clients in Newhouse publications—even writing an IRS-trashing cover story in its national Sunday-newspaper supplement, Parade. After Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post in 1976, Cohn wielded the paper as his personal shiv, slipping tips about friends and enemies to “Page Six.” His own ensuing image reha-bilitation was at least as effective as his many face-lifts. “For younger people,” Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in the 1980s, Roy Cohn was no longer the McCarthy smear artist but “another name for a très smart lawyer, for Disco Dan, for the international, I-go-by-private-plane man.” The journalist Ken Auletta, in an unflinch-ing 1978 dissection for Esquire, tried to puncture Cohn’s make-over, and was invited by 60 Minutes to be the contrarian in Safer’s sanitizing profile. Nonetheless, CBS’s piece ended with a generous summation, read onscreen by Dan Rather, that firmly humanized him: “Roy Cohn is not an enigma. He’s simply a man who is seen differently by different people. If you engaged in amateur analysis, you might say that Roy Cohn was the kid on the block that all the


bullies beat up on. And so, when Roy Marcus Cohn was growing up, he was determined to get rich, and get even, and he has.” Tick tick tick tick.

During his steady rise in New York from the 1970s into the 1990s, Trump was tracked by some Aulettas of his own in addition to the Voice’s Barrett, from Neil Bar-sky at the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal and Daily News to the dedicated Trump-baiting magazine Spy.

But these journalists, like many to come, could be outshouted and bulldozed by Trump’s relentless lies and self- mythologizing. With the aid of Cohn’s own compliant press pool and the contacts he courted at the television networks, Trump would continue to pro-mote himself on his own terms in the pre-digital media era. Maga-zines, New York prominent among them, grabbed the commercial rewards of exploiting his latest stunts as glossily as possible. The most powerful news organizations and media barons often let Trump have his way. In a scathing editorial this month, the Times observed that “Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks.” While the Times would start covering his corruption in earnest in the 2000s after Timothy L. O’Brien, the author of the hard-hitting 2005 book TrumpNation, was hired, the paper’s coverage was anything but aggressive during the crucial decades when Trump was amassing his power.

Exhibit A of the Times’ credulousness is the puffy feature that put him on the media map in 1976. “He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford,” read the lead. At this early date, Trump had only proposed ambitious projects, not built them or closed any of the requi-site deals, but the profile christened him “New York’s No. 1 real estate promoter of the mid-1970’s” nonetheless. The article accepted Trump’s word that he was of Swedish descent, “publicity shy,” ranked first in his class at Wharton, made mil-lions in unspecified land deals in Califor-nia, was worth $200 million, and with his father owned 22,000 apartment units. None of this was remotely true, but the sexy brew of hyperbole and outright fantasy, having been certified by the paper of record, set the tone for much that was to come.

In 1981, for instance, the Times could be found quoting an unnamed “real-estate official” (John Barron, perhaps?) furthering the implausible notion that Prince Charles and Diana were consid-ering the purchase of a 21-room condo in Trump Tower for $5 million—a useful bit of free false advertising as the develop-ment’s condos went on the market for a 1983 opening. A 1984 Times Magazine profile christened Trump “the man of the hour” just as he was embarking on his financially reckless (and ultimately catastrophic) expansion into Atlantic City. Along the way, Trump continued to inflate his net worth. He was so obsessed with the Forbes annual list ranking the wealthiest Americans that he had Cohn muscle the magazine to fix it, a tale recently recounted in full by a former Forbes staffer, Jonathan Greenberg, in the Washington Post. By the 1990s, no less a television personage than ABC’s Diane Sawyer courted an exclusive PrimeTime Live interview with Marla Maples, complete with a best-sex-you-ever-had question, to facili-tate the promotion of the Trump brand—“one of the low points in television journalism history,” in the judgment of the PBS anchor

Robert MacNeil. The ultimate result of such fake news retailed by real-news outlets, as Michael D’Antonio would conclude just before Trump’s presidential run, is that “no one in the world of business—not Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffett—has been as famous for as long.” And one might add: No one as famous in busi-ness has been famous for a portfolio of low-rent businesses that included the likes of Trump University and Trump Steaks.

Trump knew he could get away with snookering the ostensibly liberal press Establishment because he’d seen Cohn do so. One of the most memorable examples occurred on Sunday, November 17, 1985—the same day that Trump was the subject of his own first Mike Wallace 60 Minutes profile. That morning’s Times contained a gentle, reflective interview with the dying Cohn at a “Washington-area hospital” in which it was stated as fact that he was “fighting liver cancer”—a fiction Cohn vehemently maintained, much as Trump now tells staff members that the Access Hollywood tape is a hoax. The unnamed Washington-area hospital was the National Institutes of Health, where the Reagans had helped him cut to the front of the line for aids treatment. It was a given under Rosenthal’s editorship that the Times would bring up none of this to protect the criminally

hypocritical Cohn, who had threatened closeted gay government officials with exposure in the McCarthy era and loudly fought gay rights ever since. Meanwhile, the star Times columnist William Safire had joined William Buckley Jr. and Bar-bara Walters among the three dozen cel-ebrated character witnesses opposing Cohn’s disbarment. Trump, however, had distanced himself from his dying mentor, for a while dropping him altogether. “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,” Cohn said. “Donald pisses ice water.” With the help of a new young factotum, Roger Stone, Cohn’s last favor for Trump may have been securing his sister Maryanne Trump Barry a federal judgeship from the Reagan administration in 1983 despite her having received the tepid Bar Associa-tion rating of “qualified.”

Eventually, the Times’ coddling of Cohn and its institutional homophobia before and during the aids epidemic

would be aired thoroughly—a process facilitated by Larry Kram-er’s landmark 1985 play The Normal Heart, Rosenthal’s retirement in 1986, and Kushner’s portrayal of Cohn in Angels. But much of the similarly embarrassing history of media collusion with Trump has been either forgotten or whitewashed. Look back no further than the obituaries and eulogies in the Times, The Wall Street Jour-nal, and Condé Nast magazines that followed Si Newhouse’s death last October at the age of 89. Not only was his history with Cohn omitted but, more pertinently in 2017, so was his considerable role in transforming Trump from a local celebrity into a national figure. After he added Random House to his family’s holdings, it was Newhouse, having met Trump through Cohn, who had the idea of signing up the book that became The Art of the Deal, an often- fictional exercise in self-promotion billed as an autobiography. At the time the book was published, in 1987, Trump was so vaguely known outside of the tri-state area that publishing insiders wor-ried whether Random House would get back its investment. They hadn’t reckoned, as Newhouse had, that Trump had the ability to market himself with a zeal beyond the imagination of authors who write their own books. The press ate it up. “Mr. Trump makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again,” enthused the Times’s daily book reviewer.

HAD COHN NOT BEEN STRUCK DOWN BY AIDS, TRUMP MIGHT HAVE ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON FAR FASTER.

(Continued on page 85)


The dueling Democratic candidates in Georgia’s strangely pivotal governor’s race agree

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Right now, Democrats have not one but two really good candi-dates running for governor in the state. Abrams, the “black Stacey”—disconcertingly common shorthand in a race straining under the weight of identity politics in unpredictable ways—is basing her cam-paign largely on a message of minority empowerment. Evans, the“white Stacey,” is pledging to restore to its former glory a state grantcalled the Hope scholarship, an emotionally freighted programfounded to offer free public-college tuition to any high-school stu-dent with at least a 3.0 average. In 2011, when the Staceys were bothserving in the Georgia House of Representatives, they clashed whenRepublicanswentafter thescholarship;EvanschargesthatAbrams,as the House minority leader, allowed the other party to gut it. Thissplit turned out to be the drip that led to the stream that formed themuddy river of a two-Stacey race for the Democratic nomination.

“It’s like 2008, Hillary versus Obama, down here,” says AmyMorton, chair of Better Georgia, a progressive nonprofit.“Friends versus friends on who they are supporting. Sometimesthey stop speaking to each other.” In other ways, the race is moreBernie versus Hillary—though, in the complicated world ofGeorgia politics, it can be difficult to tell who’s the insurgent andwho’s the Establishment favorite.

In fact, both candidates are significantly further to the left thanmost of the Democratic figures who are endorsing them. Abramssells herself as the progressive firebrand with a national fan base(she was endorsed by emily’s List, where she’s been a favorite foryears) who can galvanize tens of thousands of African-Americansto go to the polls for the first time. Yet she served in the GeorgiaHouse for 11 years, seven of them as minority leader, and has areputation as a pragmatist willing to do deals with the Republi-cans who’ve controlled state politics for almost two decades.Between February 1 and March 31, the latest campaign-finance-reporting period, she outraised her opponent three to one.

Evans, who has the support of much of the state party’s rulingclass, is a color-inside-the-lines consensus builder. “I see myself as achampion for common sense,” she says. “Sometimes that makes memoderate, sometimes that makes me liberal. Maybe every now andthen it makes me a conservative.” Yet Evans is almost exclusivelybasing her campaign on an all-out defense of the Hope scholarship,themostprogressiveentitlementprogramthestatehaseverenacted.

Abrams led Evans in the most recent poll by 18 points, but amonth before the primary, more thanhalfof likely voters remainedundecided. On the surface, you’ll hear that the dueling candidaciesof these two accomplished women are “a high-class problem” forGeorgia Democrats, as Paul Begala, the strategist for both Clin-tons and former Georgia governor Zell Miller, puts it.

ualifying day in Georgia: the day when anyone running for an office in the state has to trek to the Capitol Building in Atlanta—the Gold Dome, as it’s known—to fill out some paper-work, shake some hands, and be offi-cially recognized as a candidate. It’s anecessary nonevent.

On this day, March 6, StaceyAbrams is qualifying as a Democraticcandidate for governor of Georgia. Asis always the case with Abrams, whose

voluble, Bill Clinton–esque intelligence and ambition have wonher national press and big checks from out-of-state donors,today is anything but a nonevent. About 40 peoplesweep in to watch her register—supporters instacey abrams: governor T-shirts, a film crewfrom a local TV station, energized activists,Abrams’s senior staff, members of her large family.Wearing a conservative cobalt-blue dress and astring of pearls, she arrives last and is surprised byher elderly parents, Carolyn and Robert Abrams,who’ve driven over from Hattiesburg, Mississippi,to watch their second-oldest daughter make historyas the first black woman to formalize her run forgovernor of Georgia.

Abrams’s rival in the primary, Stacey Evans, 39,just did the same thing—also, it must be noted, incobalt blue, but with much less hoopla. With herwas her mother, Kim Godfrey, who had Evans whenshe was 17, and Evans’s husband, Andrew, clutchingthe hand of their 6-year-old daughter, Ashley. Keith Godfrey,who adopted Stacey more than 30 years ago, was there too. Herparents, who divorced long ago, have logged so many hourstogether on the campaign in the past year that they’ve starteddating. Evans offered a perfectly deadpan delivery: “This cam-paign is already bringing people together.” She and her momexchanged a hug. It’s like they couldn’t believe how far they’dcome from their humble beginnings. “I wasn’t supposed to behere,” Evans has said repeatedly.

It’s the exact line Abrams, 44, uses: “I wasn’t supposed to behere.” She means that she grew up poor and black—her parents,who ultimately studied divinity at Emory University, raised sixchildren on Carolyn’s librarian salary and Robert’s dockworkerwages—and that because of how our system hobbles people withbrown skin and meager resources, Abrams’s chances of reachingthis moment were in serious doubt. When I ask her motherabout this, she starts to tell a story. “When Stacey was 12, she wasselected to go to a Girl Scout convention in Arizona. She was theonly black child, and she was left at the gate—” But then we’reinterrupted by the candidate, who’s come over to hug her par-ents, and they all head off together and leave me wondering: Shewas left at the gate? What?

A DISRUPTIVE RACE-AND-GENDER nail-biter with national impli-cations is currently unfolding among Georgia Democrats.Geor-giaDemocrats—rarely has an expression been more closely asso-ciated with longing and loss. “Here’s what I know: I’ve workedin Democratic politics for a long time. It is hard for Democratsto win statewide in Georgia,” says Stephanie Schriock, presidentof emily’s List. “We’ve had some really good candidates, butDemocrats keep losing because they’re short 200,000 votes.”

Abrams has a Bill Clinton–esque intelligence and

ambition that have won hermajor national support.

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But dig deeper: There’s unease in the air. In Georgia elections, “race is a factor that sits in the corner of the room all the time,” says Davis Fox, a political analyst in DeKalb County, one of the Atlanta suburbs gradually undergoing a shift to the left. “I’m very worried that this is a bitter train wreck between a black and a white.”

Jim Galloway, a longtime political reporter and columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says that the choice is between “im-mediate gratification and fundamental realignment” of the Demo-cratic Party. Will Democrats make the safer bet and go with Evans, who many think has a better shot in the general election because of her embrace of Trump-disaffected moderate Republicans and rural whites? Or will they tap Abrams as their homegrown Obama?

“I’ve talked to white Democrats and black Democrats—they’re very unsettled by Abrams,” Galloway says. Then he adds, unset-tling me, “She’s not just female, she’s unmarried. That’s an issue.”

STACEY EVANS IS SOFT-SPOKEN, to the point of sometimes seem-ing bland. “People underestimate her all the time,” says Morton, the chair of Better Georgia. But Evans comes alive at the Union Baptist Church in Macon one afternoon in early April, where she is giving a stump speech to a group of influential ministers and political leaders. We’re in Middle Georgia, which is home to one of the largest concentrations of African-Americans in the state. Evans is funny: “I was baptized in a really cold creek. Why does it always have to be a cold creek?” She knows how to read the room: “My family wasn’t looking for the government to do every-thing for them. In Georgia, families aren’t looking for that either. But they want to see their government working for them. Because they see it working for other people.” Lots of mmm-hmms as the 50 or so mostly black men in attendance tuck into a lunch of insanely good fried chicken and sweet tea and ponder whether to throw their political muscle behind Evans.

The race is splitting the state’s African-American politicians down the middle. Abrams has the support of Vernon Jordan and

U.S. congressmen John Lewis and David Scott. In the Evans camp are Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador Andrew Young, and Elaine Lucas, half of Georgia’s most venerable black political power couple. Her hus-band, David, the longest-serving member in the Georgia General Assembly, tangled with Abrams over a project she started to regis-ter new voters in the state. Today in the church, Elaine, a longtime Macon commissioner, gives a powerful endorsement for Evans. “I used to just support black candidat y were black? They were okay,” she says. “I have matured, y’a pporting Stacey Evans. E-V-A-N-S, because there’s another Stacey … Abrams. They’ll be right there on the ballot, together, so we don’t need any mistakes.”

Back in January, Evans made a mistake with the black commu-nity: a boneheaded video filmed in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in which her face and Martin Luther King Jr’s. meld for a moment. The campaign released the ad near MLK Day, and the resulting fracas probably cost Evans several points in the polls: How dare white Stacey appropriate the image of Martin Luther King?

“That video went through seven sets of eyes on our campaign, only two of which were white. Nobody thought anything about it,” protests Seth Clark, Evans’s harried young spokesperson.

Since then, Evans seems to have recovered her footing. On the way in to the lunch, I meet Floyd Griffin, a former state senator and mayor of Milledgeville, who endorsed Evans a few weeks ago: “I looked her in the eyes and said, ‘You are going to have people of color in your administration?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Since we’re talking about skin color, does he think that because Evans is white she has the best shot at winning the general?

Griffin smiles. “Anybody can win a primary,” he says. “She can win the general. That’s all I’m going to say.”

EVANS’S LASER FOCUS on the Hope scholarship at first seems overly simplistic. But it may be brilliant. Begala, who’s endorsed her, thinks it is: “In this unbelievably clustered media environment, very little cuts through. So far, what cuts through in the last cycle is hateful and divided. I love the idea of the universality of Hope. A message that self- consciously says that we lift up everything.”

The grant, beloved by Georgia families of both parties, was the brainchild of Zell Miller. In 1993, then–Governor Miller created a state lottery to fund the scholarship, and it became a vector of upward mobility and economic development crossing class and race lines. Because of Hope, many smart, driven students were no longer leaving the state for UNC or UVA and, after college, they settled in Georgia. Evans was one of them.

She grew up dirt-poor, born to a single mother who moved her and her younger brother at least 16 times in and around the

North Georgia town of Ringgold. (Her most effective campaign ad is called “16 Homes”; it’s literally a tour of her difficult childhood.)

Sitting in a conference room in her unassuming cam-paign headquarters, Evans shares a story from her high-school days. She’s dressed in a slim black sweater dress with ruffled shoulders, a poised Atlanta professional. “I was running for student council, and I misspelled secretary —I used an a instead of an e,” she says. “So I made an e and taped it on the poster. I remember some people snickering about it. There was a teacher—I won’t call her name because she ended up being a good influ-ence in my life—but I found out that another girl had asked her for guidance about what to run for, and the teacher advised her to run for secretary. And so I thought, I guess this teacher thought I’d be the easiest one to beat.”

Evans won the race, her first election. While other people were poor in Ringgold, she says, “I already knew my place. I knew my station.” Another teacher at the school told her about the Hope scholarship, and because of it, she was able to attend the University of Georgia in Athens, then applied to law school there. But “I didn’t have the lsat scores,” she says. She was wait-listed. Similar pattern: She dug in her heels, got in, and ultimately made law review. After graduation, she went to work for a big Atlanta law firm.

The next time the Hope scholarship intersected with her life was when she was first elected to the Georgia House in 2010. “I walk in the place, and that was the bill. That was the bill of the year.” She’s referring to the 2011 legislation to cut funding for the

A substantial part of the black political Establishment is on Evans’s side.


scholarship. Georgia was in a recession, the lottery was throwingoff less money to pay for the grant, and the Republican-dominated assembly proposed to shrink the program by requir-ing an SAT score of 1200 for a full ride to college and a 3.0 aver-age for discounted tuition at technical schools.

At first, Evans worked with Abrams on the negotiations. Butshe turned against the deal when Abrams agreed to changes thatlimited the number of high-school students eligible for the schol-arship, seemingly in return for a Republican concession to retainfull-day, full-week pre-K programs. “Democrats are not aboutcutting off access,” Evans says. “It’s an important distinction between us.”

“It was a bipartisan solution to a terrible prob-lem,” Abrams counters. “I was unwilling to simply say no and let thousands lose access to education.” She says that while Evans didn’t agree with the final result, she “complimented me” on the negotiations. “She said it was the best deal we could get,” Abrams says. “So her framing of this as ‘gutting’ is completely at odds with her contemporaneous acceptance.”

Evans spent the next six years trying to restore parts of Hope. During an evening legislative ses-sion in 2015, a bill she’d authored was torpedoed because, she was told, “there are some folks who are concerned that you may want to run for something higher, and they’re just not going to write a campaign commercial for you tonight.” Infact, Evans says she wasn’t really thinking aboutrunning for governor—until then. “I realized I’mnot here to wear a badge, I’m here to get stuffdone. If that bill had passed that night,” she adds,“I don’t think we’d be sitting here now.”

Thanks largely to a $324 million Medicare fraudcase she helped win while in private practice, Evansis now wealthy enough that she could lend her owncampaign more than $1.2 million and donate$500,000 to her alma mater. She and her husband,with their young daughter, live in affluent EastCobb County, just north of the city. “Things have gone very well inmy life,” she concedes, “but you are who you are, and you come fromwhere you come from. That lingering doubt that I’m not supposedto be here has never really left me.” She debated whether to runbecause Abrams’s intentions were well known, but she decided togo for it: “Just because she thought of it first doesn’t make it hers.”

PEEVED LOCAL DEMS COMPLAIN that the national party and pacsdon’t pay enough attention to Georgia. (Note to emily’s List: “Youmade the wrong call in Georgia,” says Morton about the group’sbacking of Abrams, “because you didn’t make any phone calls inGeorgia.” Evans says that when she decided to throw her hat inthe ring, emily’s List sent someone down to Atlanta to havebreakfast with her. The organization would be happy to supporther, she was informed later, if she’d just run for another office.)

But the national party and pacs should take heed of what’s hap-pening in Georgia now, because it mirrors what’s happening else-where in the country: Racial demographics are shifting, while atthe same time enraged anti-Trump voters are flooding the field onthe left—many of them women—and enraged retrenching whitevoters are doing the same on the rig ording to Melita Easters,founder of Georgia’s win List, a lo on of emily’s List, thereare 40 percent more female state- candidates and 25 per-cent more female House candidates on the ballot than in 2016.

win List has endorsed a “Dynamic Dozen” women for state office and is backing others in down-ballot contests. The Republican woman who beat Jon Ossoff in the most expensive House race ever, Karen Handel, is being challenged by Democrat Lucy McBath.

Among old-boy, old-school Democrats, there’s a whiff of con-descension toward this feminizing of politics. Over the summer, when Evans and Abrams had just announced their candidacies, Journal-Constitution columnist Galloway actually wrote, “Next year’s Democratic race for governor in Georgia could have the feel of a feud between Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.”

How might this primary have been covered if, say, the Staceys were named Steve? Abrams purses her lips, narrows her eyes. “Everyone would be calling us by our last names, and that would be it,” she says. As for Evans, she looks annoyed at the question, too. “There’s two guys named Ken running for the Court of Appeals right now.” Pause. “Then again, it’s the Court of Appeals.” Pause. “But I suspect it’s because we’re women.”

Last fall, Pave It Blue, a female-only grassroots movement born in the wake of Donald Trump’s win, hosted meet-and-greets for the two rivals in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. Abrams “requested a green room and brought 30 people with her, ready to work the crowd,” says Leah Fuhr, a white elementary-school teacher turned political consultant for progressive candidates. I think I know where Fuhr is going here—a few weeks earlier, a political operative grumbled to me, “Abrams travels with an entourage wherever she goes. They travel first class. I mean, Jimmy Carter travels coach to New York.”

But I’m wrong. Fuhr’s beef is with Evans: “She came in with no literature, no flyers. Her big fail was that she came with nothing.” We’re at a breakfast spot in a Cobb County strip mall. At the table are five female activists, three white, two black, from No Safe Seats, an organization that spun off from Pave It Blue. To them, Evans’s approach to the forum seemed not folksy but disrespectful.

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As for Abrams’s traveling with a pack of aides and supporters? “She has to do that. She has no choice,” says Marla Cureton, who is black. At the table, Nina Durham, who is also African -American, nods in agreement.

What they’re saying, of course, is that as a black woman, Abrams has to do ten times more than her opponent. But then, does her “degree of melanin,” as Abrams likes to say, coupled with her minority-empowerment message, make it impossible for suburban white ladies and rural white carpet-factory workers to relate to her? Because Abrams will need them, too, to win the general—remember Schriock’s 200,000 missing Democratic votes. Abrams herself tells a story about visiting a church in a poor white town in North Geor-gia (a town she was advised to be out of before nightfall) to answer questions about how to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid: “One gentleman who came up to me, he said, ‘Now, you know there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna vote for you. But I won’t vote against you.’ ”

Her blackness—and the way she uses it—is the issue that looms over this campaign. It gets nibbled at in all kinds of ways. Local African-American political analyst Robert Patillo recently dissed her in a local TV interview for daring to harness “the power of black-girl magic.” One person who’s followed the careers of both Evans and Abrams says, “People are really pushing back against this idea that Abrams is running as ‘I’ll be the first black woman governor.’ That she’s playing the race thing. That is making a lot

of people mad, black and white, because Evans has probably halfthe black legislature with her, for reasons of personality.”

Those who don’t think Abrams should be the governor ofGeorgia have commented on, among other things: how muchshe’s paid herself in her various endeavors (too much); hernational ambitions (overweening); her personal fiscal sloppiness(she owed the IRS $50,000, which she is paying off, and carries$170,000 in student-loan and credit-card debt); her lack oftransparency (one of her companies had a contract with the stategovernment that she didn’t reveal to her colleagues during the

Hope- scholarship negotiations, leading critics to wonder if she made a deal with the Republicans to line her own pockets).

Her campaign is rooted in the voter-registration drive she started, which in 2014 raised $3.6 million, much of it from out-of-state donors. Abrams says the initiative, called the New Geor-gia Project, has submitted 200,000 new voter applications. But Secretary of State Brian Kemp, one of the five Republican candi-dates for governor, and various members of Abrams’s own party have accused her of exaggerating NGP’s numbers; Abrams lobbed back that the state mishandled or suppressed the applications her group collected. State Senator Lucas, a longtime voter- registration advocate who distrusted Abrams’s NGP work, told Atlanta maga-zine in 2015, “We were kept in the dark, period. [We didn’t know] how much money was raised, who they paid to go out to do the work. We literally didn’t know anything.” Kemp, who has a repu-tation as a Georgia vote-suppressor par excellence, investigated NGP, but nothing official came of the inquiry.

As the primary grows closer, the attacks have intensified. On April 19, a watchdog group filed an ethics complaint against Abrams with the Georgia campaign-finance commission, charging that she inadequately detailed the nature of $83,000 in reimburse-ments to her from her campaign. She denies any impropriety.

What does it all amount to? I’m trying to keep the word uppity out of this story—but there it is, it’s on the page now—because while

Abrams has been the subject of two complaints, numerous whisper campaigns, and swipes from the Georgia press, she’s never been fined for or formally charged with malfeasance.

All she seems to be guilty of, at least so far, is lack of clarity about the finances of her multiple nonprofits, making mistakes with her own taxes, and daring to openly wield power—and to want more of it. She still prefers to be called “Leader Abrams.” She likes to show off her intel-ligence, and she has a witty line that does this: “I went to UT Austin, Spelman College, and Yale Law School. I amassed an extraordinary amount of debt and knowledge. And I’ve been able to keep both.” She worked “de minimis issue,” “suborning lies,” and “it went beyond the gentry and allowed the plebeians access” into a ten-minute speech to a bunch of volunteers in a public library in Columbus.

Indeed, she is a dazzling candidate whose command of policy is impressive and whose cha-risma on the stage is undeniable. While she served in the general assembly, she wrote romance novels under a nom de plume (Selena Montgomery) and an autobiography, just out(MinorityLeader:HowtoLeadFromtheOutsideand Make Real Change). She spoke at the 2016Democratic convention, and among her endors-

ers are MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, and Senator Cory Booker.At her campaign headquarters in Atlanta’s gentrifying Kirkwood

neighborhood—buzzing with the activity of dozens of young staffersand volunteers—I remember that I wanted to ask about the storyher mother started to tell at the Gold Dome back on Qualifying Day.

“Yes, so, I was 12, the only African-American girl elected to thisdelegation from Mississippi, and they were not pleased by my selec-tion,” Abrams recalls. “They took a different flight and didn’t tell us.Wegottotheairport,andtheyweregone.Mymomwaslike, ‘Doyoustill want to go?’ I’d never flown before.

Stacey Evans at church on Martin Luther King Day in January.

(Continued on page 87)

I N 1931 ,

Z O R A N E A L E H U R S T O N

S O U G H T T O P U B L I S H A N

I M P O R T A N T P I E C E O F A M E R I C A N H I S T O R Y —

T H E S T O R Y O F

C U D J O L E W I S ,T H E O N L Y L I V I N G S U R V I V O R O F

T H E F I N A L S L AV E S H I P T O L A N D I N A M E R I C A .

I N S T E A D , T H A T O R A L H I S T O R Y

L A N G U I S H E D I N A V A U L T .

U N T I L N O W.


A B O V E : zora neale hurston in the early 1930s, around the time she interviewed

cudjo lewis. O P P O S I T E P A G E : lewis outside his home in alabama in the 1930s.

L A S T S L A V E


Six years earlier, Hurston had tried to publish another bookin dialect, this one a work of nonfiction calledBarracoon.Beforeshe turned to writing novels, she’d trained as a cultural anthro-pologist at Barnard under the famed father of the field, FranzBoas. He sent his student back south to interview people of Afri-can descent. (Hurston was raised in Eatonville, Florida, whichwasn’t the “black backside” of a white town, she once observed,but a place wholly inhabited and run by black people—her fatherwas a three-term mayor.) She proved adept at the task, but, asshe noted in her collection of folklore, Mules and Men, the jobwasn’t always straightforward: “The best source is where thereare the least outside influences and these people, usually under-privileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times toreveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of hisopen-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularlyevasive … The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance, that is, welet the probe enter, but it never comes out.”Barracoon is testament to her patient fieldwork. The book is

based on three months of periodic interviews with a man namedCudjo Lewis—or Kossula, his original name—the last survivorof the last slave ship to land on American shores. Plying him withpeaches and Virginia hams, watermelon and Bee Brand insectpowder, Hurston drew out his story. Kossula had been capturedat age 19 in an area now known as the country Benin by warriorsfrom the neighboring Dahomian tribe, then marched to a stock-ade, or barracoon, on the West African coast. There, he and some120 others were purchased and herded onto the Clotilda, cap-tained by William Foster and commissioned by three Alabamabrothers to make the 1860 voyage.

After surviving the Middle Passage, the captives were smug-gled into Mobile under cover of darkness. By this time, the inter-national slave trade had been illegal in the United States for 50years, and the venture was rumored to have been inspired whenone of the brothers, Timothy Meaher, bet he could pull it offwithout being “hanged.” (Indeed, no one was ever punished.)Cudjo worked as a slave on the docks of the Alabama Riverbefore being freed in 1865 and living for another 70 years:through Reconstruction, the resurgent oppression of Jim Crowrule, the beginning of the Depression.

When Hurston tried to get Barracoon published in 1931, shecouldn’t find a taker. There was concern among “black intellectu-als and political leaders” that the book laid uncomfortably bareAfricans’ involvement in the slave trade, according to novelistAlice Walker’s foreword to the book, which is finally being pub-lished in May. Walker is responsible for reintroducing the world

to a forgotten Zora Neale Hurston, who’d died penniless andalone in 1960, in a 1975 Ms.-magazine essay. As Walker writes,“Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, howAfrican chiefs deliberately set out to capture Africans from neigh-boring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in order to capture forthe slave trade. This is, make no mistake, a harrowing read.”

One publisher, Viking Press, did say it would be happy toaccept the book, on the condition that Hurston rewrote it “inlanguage rather than dialect.” She refused. Boas had impressedupon her the importance of meticulous transcription, andwhile her contemporaries—and authors of 19th-century slavenarratives—believed “you had to strip away all the vernacularto prove black humanity,” says Salamishah Tillet, an Englishprofessor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hurston was of theexact opposite opinion.

In any event, a dejected Hurston moved on to other projects,and the manuscript for Barracoon ended up languishing in herarchives at Howard University. Until a few years ago, that is, whenthe Zora Neale Hurston Trust acquired new literary representa-tion: Had any unpublished treasures been left in the vault? theagents wondered.

It may have taken 87 years forBarracoon to see the light of day,but Valerie Boyd, who wrote a well-regarded biography of Hur-ston calledWrapped inRainbows in 2003, believes the timing isperfect for a writer “whose life’s work was to document and cele-brate the lives of ordinary black folk.” “We’ve got an open bigot inthe White House,” Boyd says. “We’re much more engaged withracial issues, with the resistance movement. A book like Barra-coon says, ‘Yeah, black lives matter. They’ve always mattered.’”

Hurston seemed to assume that anyone deluded enough notto realize that would wake up if African-Americans wereallowed to tell their own stories. (In one of her great quotes, shewrote that she always felt “astonished” when people discrimi-nated against her: “How can they deny themselves the pleasureof my company? It’s beyond me.”) Here’s a scene of one of herearly conversations with Kossula:

“I want to know who you are and how you came to be aslave; and towhat part of Africa do you belong, and howyoufared as a slave, and how you havemanaged as a freeman?”His head was bowed for a time. Then he lifted his wet face:

“Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tel-lee somebodywho I is, somaybe dey go in deAfficky soil someday and callee my name and somebody dere say, ‘Yeah, Iknow Kossula.’ ”

their eyes were watching god is required reading in high schools and colleges and cited as a formative influence by Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. It’s been can-onized by Harold Bloom—even credited for inspiring the tableau in Lemonade where Beyoncé and a clutch of other women regally occupy a wooden porch—but Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel was eviscerated by critics when it was published in 1937. The hater-in-chief was no less than Richard Wright, who recoiled as much at the book’s depiction of lush female sexuality and (supposedly) apolitical themes as its use of black dialect, “the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.”

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CAPTURE

de king of dahomey, you know, he got very rich ketchin slaves. He keep his army all de time making raids to grabee people to sell. One traitor from Takkoi (Cudjo’s vil-lage), he a very bad man and he go straight in de Dahomey and say to de king, “I show you how to takee Takkoi.” He tellee dem de secret of de gates. (The town had eight gates, intended to provide various escaperoutes in the event of an attack.)

Derefore, dey come make war, but we doan know dey come fight us. Dey march all night long and we in de bed sleep. It bout daybreak when de people of Dahomey breakee de Great Gate. I not woke yet. I hear de yell from de soldiers while dey choppee de gate. Derefore I jump out de bed and lookee. I see de great many soldiers wid French gun in de hand and de big knife. Dey got de women soldiers too and dey run

wid de big knife and dey ketch people and saw de neck wid de knife den dey twist de head so it come off de neck. Oh Lor’, Lor’! I see de people gittee kill so fast!

Everybody dey run to de gates so dey kin hide deyself in de bush, you unnerstand me. I runnee fast to de gate but some de men from Dahomey dey dere too. I runnee to de nexy gate but dey dere too. Dey surround de whole town. One gate lookee lak nobody dere so I make haste and runnee towards de bush. But soon as I out de gate dey grabee me, and tie de wrist. I beg dem, please lemme go back to my mama, but dey don’t pay whut I say no ’tenshun.

While dey ketchin’ me, de king of my country (Akia’on) he come out de gate, and dey grabee him. Dey take him in de bush where de king of Dahomey wait wid some chiefs. When he see our king, he say to his soldiers, “Bring me de word- changer” (interpreter). When de word-changer came he say, “Astee dis man why he put his weak-ness agin’ de Lion of Dahomey?” Akia’on say to de Dahomey king, “Why don’t you

I N AFR I C A

y f a t h e r h e n a m eO-lo-loo-ay. He not a rich man. He havethree wives. My mama she name Ny-fond-lo-loo. She de second wife. My mama haveone son befo’ me so I her second child. Shehave four mo’ chillun after me, but dat ain’all de chillun my father got. He got nine byde first wife and three by de third wife.

In de compound I play games wid all dechillun. We wrassle wid one ’nother. Wesee which one kin run de fastest. We clamde palm tree wid coconut on it and weeatee dat, we go in de woods and hunt depineapple and banana.

One day de chief send word to de com-pound. He want see all de boys dat done seefourteen rainy seasons. Dat makee me very happy because I think he goin’ send me to de army. But in de Affica soil dey teachee de boys long time befo’ dey go in de army. First de fathers (elders) takee de boys on journey to hunt. Dey got to learn de step on de ground (tracks). De fathers teachee us toknow a place for de house (camp site). Weshoot de arrows from de bow. We chunkeespear. We kill de beastes and fetchee demhome wid us.

I so glad I goin’ be a man and fight in dearmy lak my big brothers. Every year deyteachee us mo’ war. But de king, Akia’on,say he doan go make no war. He make usstrong so nobody doan make war on us.Four, five rainy seasons it keep on lak dat,den I grow tall and big. I kin run in de bushall day and not be tired.

BARRACOONby zora neale hurston

M

mobile, al

benin

t h e m i d d l e pa s s a g e

Map by Joe McKendry

Excerpt from Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” by Zora Neale Hurston. Published by Amistad Press. Copyright © 2018 by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust.

arrival

After the ship reached shore, the slave owner,

Timothy Meaher, had it burned to destroy

all the evidence.capture

Around age 19, Cudjo was captured and

sold by a neighboring tribe in modern-day

Benin.

journey

The trip through the Atlantic likely took 45 days, but under

the horrid conditions—oppressive heat,

minimal drinking water—Cudjo thought

it was almost twice that long.


fight lak men? Why you doan come in de daytime so dat we could meet face to face?”

Den de king of Dahomey say, “Git in line to go to Dahomey so de nations kin see I conquer you.”

Akia’on say, “I ain’ goin’ to Dahomey. I born a king in Takkoi where my father and his fathers rule. I not be no slave.”

De king of Dahomey askee him, “You not goin’ to Dahomey?”

He tell him, “No, I ain’ goin’. ”De king of Dahomey doan say no mo’.

One woman soldier step up wid de machete and chop off de head of de king, and pick it off de ground and hand it to de king of Dahomey. When I think ’bout dat time I try not to cry no mo’. My eyes dey stop cryin’ but de tears runnee down inside me all de time. I no see none my family.

All day dey make us walk. De sun so hot. De king of Dahomey, he ride in de ham-mock and de chiefs wid him dey got ham-mock too. Dey tie us in de line so nobody run off. In dey hand dey got de head of de people dey kill in Takkoi. Some got two, three head. Oh Lor’ I wish dey bury dem! I doan lak see my people head in de soldier hands; and de smell makee me so sick.

After a three-day forced march, the party arrived at the coast; Cudjo had never seen the ocean before.

When we git in de place dey put us in a

barracoon behind a big white house and dey feed us some rice. We see many ships in de sea, but we cain see so good ’cause de white house, it ’tween us and de sea. But Cudjo see de white men, and dass somethin’ he ain’ never seen befo’.

De barracoon we in ain’ de only slave pen at the place. Sometime we holler back and forth and find out where each other come from. But each nation in a barracoon by itself. We not so sad now, and we all young folks so we play game and clam up de side de barracoon so we see whut goin’ on outside.

When we dere three weeks a white mancome in de barracoon wid two men of deDahomey. Dey make everybody stand in aring. Den de white man lookee and lookee.He lookee hard at de skin and de feet and delegs and in de mouth. Den he choose. Everytime he choose a man he choose a woman.He take sixty-five men wid a woman foreach man. Den de white man go way. But depeople of Dahomey come bring us lot ofgrub for us to eatee ’cause dey say we goin’leave dere. We eatee de big feast. Den wecry, we sad ’cause we doan want to leave therest of our people in de barracoon. We alllonesome for our home. We doan knowwhut goin’ become of us.

MIDDLE PAS S AGE

dey come and tie us in de line andlead us round de big white house. Den wesee so many ships. We see de white mandat buy us. I in de last boat go out. Deyalmost leavee me on de shore.

As the slaves were being rowed out to theClotilda, the ship’s captain began to sus-pect that the Dahomey were going to trick

him and try to recapture the people he’djust bought, so he gave orders to “abandonthe cargo not already on board, and to sailaway with all speed.”

When I see my friend Keebie in deboat I want go wid him. So I holler anddey turn round and takee me. When weready to leave and go in de ship, deysnatch our country cloth off us. Dey say,“You get plenty clothes where you goin’.”Oh Lor’, I so shame! We come in de ’Mer-ica soil naked and de people say wenaked savage. P

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Soon we git in de ship dey make us laydown in de dark. Dey doan give us muchto eat. Me so thirst! Dey give us a little bitof water twice a day. De water taste sour.(Vinegarwasusually added to thewater toprevent scurvy.)Ondethirteenthdaydey fetcheeusonde

deck.We so weak we ain’ able to walk our-selves, so de crew take each one and walk’round de deck till we git so we kin walkourselves.We lookeeand lookeeand lookeeand we doan see nothin’ but water. Wherewe come from, we doan know. Where wegoin, we doan know. Cudjo suffer so in dat

ship. I so skeered on de sea! De water, youunnerstandme, itmakee somuchnoise! Itgrowl lak de thousand beastes in de bush.De wind got so much voice on de water.Sometime de ship way up in de sky. Some-times it way down in de bottom of de sea.Dey sayde seawas calm.Cudjodoanknow,seem lak itmove all de time.

When the Clotilda arrived on theAlabama Gulf Coast, Cudjo and his fellowcaptives were ordered to stay below deck;they were taken ashore after dark andmade to hide in a swamp for several days.

S L AVERY

cap’n tim meaher, he tookee thirty-two of us. Cap’n Burns Meaher he tookeeten couples. Some dey sell up de river.Cap’n Bill Foster he tookee de eight cou-ples and Cap’n Jim Meaher he gittee derest. We very sorry to be parted from one’nother. We seventy days cross de waterfrom de Affica soil, and now dey part usfrom one ’nother. Derefore we cry. Our

Lewis in his home in the 1930s.


After the slaves were freed, Cudjo asked their formerowner to give them land to build homes. “Fool,” he replied.“I tookee good keer my slaves. I doan owe dem nothin’. ”

grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. Ithink maybe I die in my sleep when Idream about my mama.

Cap’n Jim he tookee me. Dey doan putus to work right away ’cause we doanunnerstand what dey say and how dey do.But de others show us how dey raisee decrop in de field. Cap’n Tim and Cap’nBurns Meaher workee dey folks hard. Deygot overseer wid de whip. One man trywhippee one my country women and deyall jump on him and takee de whip ’wayfrom him and lashee him wid it. He doannever try whip Affican women no mo’.

We doan know why we be bring ’wayfrom our country to work lak dis. Every-body lookee at us strange. We want totalk wid de udder colored folkses but deydoan know whut we say. Some makee defun at us.

Cudjo’s owner, Jim, ran a shipping business on the Alabama River betweenMobile and Montgomery, and Cudjo waseventually enlisted to “tote freight” on andoff the boats.

Every time de boat stopee at de landing,

you unnerstand me, de overseer, he godown de gangplank and standee on deground. De whip stickee in his belt. Heholler, “Hurry up, dere, you! Runnee fast!Can’t you runnee no faster dan dat? Hurryup!” He cutee you wid de whip if you ain’run fast ’nough to please him. If you doangit a big load, he hitee you too.

De war commences but we doan know’bout it when it start. Den somebody tellme de folkses way up in de North make dewar so dey free us. I lak hear dat. But wewait and wait, we heard de guns shooteesometime but nobody don’t come tell uswe free. So we think maybe dey fight ’boutsomething else.

Know how we gittee free? Cudjo telleeyou dat. De boat I on, it in de Mobile. Weall on dere to go in de Montgomery, butCap’n Jim Meaher, he not on de boat datday. It April 12, 1865. De Yankee soldiersdey come down to de boat and eatee demulberries off de trees. Den dey see us andsay, “Y’all can’t stay dere no mo’. You free,you doan b’long to nobody no mo.’”

Oh, Lor’! I so glad. We astee de soldierswhere we goin’? Dey say dey doan know.Dey told us to go where we feel lak goin’, weain’ no mo’ slave.

FREEDOM

after dey free us, we so glad, wemakee de drum and beat it lak in de Afficasoil. We glad we free, but we cain stay widde folks what own us no mo’. Where wegoin’ live, we doan know.

We want buildee de houses for our-selves, but we ain’ got no lan’. We meettogether and we talk. We say we fromcross de water so we go back where wecome from. So we say we work in slaveryfive year and de six months for nothin’,now we work for money and gittee in deship and go back to our country. We thinkCap’n Meaher dey ought take us backhome. But we think we save money andbuy de ticket ourselves. So we tell dewomen, “Now we all want go back home.Derefo’ we got to work hard and save demoney. You see fine clothes, you must notwish for dem.” De women tell us dey doall dey kin to get back, and dey tellee us,“You see fine clothes, don’t you wish fordem neither.”

But it too much money we need. So wethink we stay here. We see we ain’ got noruler, no chief lak in de Affica. Dey tell usnobody doan have no king in ’Merica soil.Derefo’ we make Gumpa de head. He anobleman back in Dahomey. We ain’ madwid him ’cause de king of Dahomey ’stroyour king and sell us to de white man. Hedidn’t do nothin’ ’ginst us. We join our-selves together to live.

Because Cudjo “always talkee good,” theAfricans selected him to approach their for-mer owners and ask for land in exchangefor their years of free labor.

One day not long after dey tell me tospeakee, Cudjo cuttin’ timber for de mill.Cap’n Tim Meaher come sit on de treeCudjo just choppee down. I say, now is detime for Cudjo to speakee for his people.

We want lan’ so much I almost cry and derefo’ I stoppee work and lookee and loo-kee at Cap’n Tim. He set on de tree chop-pin splinters wid his pocket knife. When he doan hear de axe on de tree no mo’ he look up and astee me,

“Cudjo, what make you so sad?”I tell him, “Cap’n Tim, I grieve for my

home.”He say, “But you got a good home, Cudjo.”Cudjo say, “Cap’n Tim, how big is de

Mobile?”“I doan know, Cudjo, I’ve never been to

de four corners.”“Well, if you give Cudjo all de Mobile,

dat railroad, and all de banks, Cudjo doan want it ’cause it ain’ home. Cap’n Tim, you brought us from our country where we had lan’. You made us slave. Now dey make us free but we ain’ got no country and we ain’ got no lan’! Why doan you give us piece dis land so we kin buildee ourself a home?”

Cap’n jump on his feet and say, “Fool do you think I goin’ give you property on top of property? I tookee good keer my slaves and derefo’ I doan owe dem nothin.”

Cudjo tell de people whut Cap’n Tim say. Dey say, “Well, we buy ourself a piece of lan’. ” We workee hard and save, and eat molassee and bread and buy de land from de Meaher. Dey doan take off one five cent from de price for us.

We make Gumpa de head and Jaybee and Keebie de judges. Den we make laws how to behave ourselves. When anybody do wrong we make him ’pear befo’ de judges and dey tellee him he got to stop doin’ lak dat ’cause it doan look nice. We doan want nobody to steal, neither gittee drunk, neither hurtee nobody.

We call our village Affican Town.

FAMILY

abila, she a woman, you unnerstand me, from cross de water. Dey call her Seely in Americky soil. I want dis woman to be my wife. Whut did Cudjo say so dat dis womanknow he want to marry her? I tellee you detruth how it was. One day Cudjo say to her,“I likee you to be my wife. I ain’ got nobody.”


Garry lumbers,61, was back inMobile, Alabama,this year for

Mardi Gras. For the big partyon Tuesday night, he and hisrelatives staked out a spot atKazoola, a bar named afterCudjo Lewis that openeddowntown in 2016. Astranger in his 30s walked upand pointed to Lumbers’sT-shirt: It had a photo ofCudjo Lewis and his two great-granddaughters, Mary and Martha, taken in 1927.

“Yo, man,” the guy asked. “Where can I buy that shirt?”

“I had it made,” Lumbers said. “One is my mom”—Mary—“and one is my aunt.”

“Oh, man, I was ready to give up $30 for one of those.”

These days, Lumbers says, people in the Mobile area tend to know about the origins of Africatown (also called Plateau)—and about his great-great-grandfather Cudjo, who helped found it a few years after the Civil War—but they seem surprised to realize the family has living descendants. “The churches tell the kids the story duringBlack History Month, butthey don’t know us,” he says.

Lumbers estimates thatabout 30 of Cudjo’srelations—all descendants ofhis son Aleck—still live in the60 acres of Africatown, but Ican attest that nobody seemsaware of them. I called localministers, governmentofficials, and assorted othersfor several weeks before Itracked down Lumbers withhelp from a genealogist. Oncein town, thanks to Lumbers’sdriving directions, I found hisdistant cousin Tyrone Lewis,who lives in Magazine Point,where, he says, Cudjo and hisf first took

re freed.I arrived at Lewis’s after dark,and stray cats slunk aroundmy legs as I walked up to the

small, wood-frame house andpounded on the door.

“Cudjo practically raisedmy dad,” Lewis tells me afterhis wife, Lana, invites me in.“He used to tell us how theywere treated on the ship,how they’d made their lifeand built their land here.”

Lewis cleans floors for aliving and preaches at anearby church. But he andLumbers say the lack of jobopportunities has driven many family members away: some to Birmingham andMontgomery, others to Detroit and Chicago. Lumbers himself left in 2000

to join his mother, Mary, andsister in a bedroomcommunity of Philadelphia,where he works in shippingand receiving.

Mary and her twin were intheir early teens when Cudjodied, in 1935. Lumbers andLewis were born more than20 years later, but duringtheir childhoods in the 1960sand ’70s, Africatownremained more of Cudjo’stime than theirs. Becausethere was no indoorplumbing, they bathed inclaw-foot tubs and heatedwater on the stove. Lumbersgrew up in the house whereCudjo lived most his life as a

free man—originally a one-room log cabin, later expanded to four rooms.

Most of the descendants attended Union Missionary Baptist Church, which Cudjo and the other former slaves had founded in 1872 and named in honor of the soldiers who’d let Cudjo know he was free. There was also an extra home in the community called the “big house,” where any family could stay who’d fallen on hard times, Lumbers says. “It wasn’t really that big, but it had a big front yard,” where several times a year his cousins, aunts, and uncles would gather for a barbecue.

Africatown once had a main commercial district—including a grocery store, post office, nightclub, and hotel—but it was bulldozed in the early 1980s to build a highway. The middle school is in danger of shuttering owing to low enrollment.

The land that Cudjo and his fellow Africans bought from their former owners to build a settlement is now encircled by factories that locals believe have polluted the area, causing cancer and other illnesses. Last year, an Alabama law firm sued International Paper, which for many years had the largest footprint there, for releasing dangerous chemicals in violation of EPA rules.

Lumbers is returning to his birthplace after he retires next year. “I’m going to get that piece of land, near the church, and I’m going to build a family house. For all my kids”—he has six—“and my kids’ kids”—there are 21—“and anybody that needs help. As long as you’re not doing drugs or acting a fool, you’ll be able to stay there until you get back on your feet. The big house. We’ll do it just like we used to.” ■

C UDJO’S

DE SCE NDAN TS by nick tabor

She say, “Whut you want wid me?”“I wantee marry you.”“You think if I be yo’ wife you kin take

keer me?”“Yeah, I kin work for you. I ain’ goin’ to

beat you.” I didn’t say no more. We got married one month after we ’gree ’tween ourselves. We didn’t had no wedding. Whether it was March or Christmas day, I doan remember now. We live together and we do all we kin to make happiness. After me and my wife ’gree ’tween our-selves, we seekee religion and got con-verted. Den in de church dey tell us we got to marry by license. In de Afficky soil, we ain’ got no license. So den we gittee married by de license, but I doan love my wife no mo’ wid de license than befo’ de license. She a good woman and I love her all de time.

Me and my wife we have de six chillun together. Five boys and one girl. Oh, Lor’! Oh, Lor’! We so happy. We been married ten months when we have our first baby. We call him Yah-Jimmy, just de same lak we was in de Afficky soil. For Americky wecall him Aleck.

So you unnerstand me, we give our chillun two names. One name because we not furgit our home; den another name for de Americky soil so it won’t be too crooked to call. All de time de chillun growin’ de American folks dey picks at dem. Dey callee my chillun ig’nant savage and make out dey kin to monkey. Derefo’, my boys dey fight. Dey got to fight all de time. Me and dey mama doan lak to hear our chillun call savage. It hurtee dey feel-ings. When dey whip de other boys, dey folks come to our house and tellee us, “Yo’ boys mighty bad, Cudjo. We ’fraid they goin’ kill somebody.”

Cudjo meetee de people at de gate andtellee dem, “You see de rattlesnake in dewoods?” Dey say, “Yeah.” I say, “If you botherwid him, he bite you. Same way wid myboys, you unnerstand me.” But dey keep on.

We Afficans try raise our chillun right.We Afficky men doan wait lak de other col-ored people till de white folks gittee ready tobuild us a school. We build one for ourselfden astee de county to send us de teacher.Oh, Lor’! I love my chillun so much! I try sohard be good to our chillun.

Cudjo’s wife died about 20 years beforeHurston interviewed him, and all six ofhis children were gone by then, too. Threedied of illnesses, his only daughter at age15; his youngest son was shot and killed;another died in an accident; and anotherleft home one day to go fishing and nevercame back. ■

Garry Lumbers, Lewis’s great-great-grandson.

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Dolce & Gabbana cotton onesie, bib, and hat set,

$395 at dolcegabbana.com.

→

Photographs by BOBBY DOHERT Y Styling by Diana Tsui

Don’t Spill!

Luxury brands are going after the under-10 set more than

ever. But no matter what you dress them in, kids will

always be kids.


→A I DA N , age 2,

and DY L A N , age 4

Young Versace poplin shirt, $265, and jeans, $300,

at versace.com; Young Versace silk dress, $540 at versace.com.


G R E Y D O N , age 5

Burberry reversible cotton jacket, $850

at burberry.com.

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S H I LO H , age 5

Burberry reversible cotton jacket, $850

at burberry.com.

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Z E L L A , age 7

Balenciaga cotton hoodie, $350, and cotton

sweatpants, $250, at balenciaga.com;

Balenciaga knit sneakers, $295 at Bergdorf

Goodman, 754 Fifth Ave.

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JAY LY N , age 9

Gucci nylon-tulle dress, $1,850 at Bergdorf

Goodman, 754 Fifth Ave.

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grad gifts they ’l ’s day clusters . . .

. . . . . look boo crodosing moment

. . . platt on fe izza revival . . .

the

best

bet

47Photograph by Bobby Doherty

the goal: Find arelaxing and rejuvenatingnear-universal giftthat mothers, fathers,and recent grads canall get behind.the verdict: Since itsdebut last winter, SojoSpa Club’s 90-minutePremium Koreanbodyscrub ($135 at 660 RiverRd., Edgewater, N.J.) isdrawing New Yorkers across the Hudson, willingly. The treatment (unique to Sojo) begins with a hot-tub soak, followed by a full-body exfoliation during which an attendant uses specialized mitts to vigorously scrub every inch of you, sloughing away dead skin and unclogging pores. Part two is a wet massage with lavender oil and moisturizing milk, finished with a cucumber facial and hair wash. For those wary of the Edgewater address, there’s a free 40- minute shuttle bus from Times Square, and the skyline views from the spa’s outdoor infinity pool alone are worth the trip.


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Edited by Katy Schneider

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and se s.”

A EAM: “Menu’sta ($200) will help

a grad’s apartment moreisticated—the integrateder is great for ambience.”

Lauren Snyder, the PrimaryEssentials: “These tumblers

($6) are handsome and multi-purpose—they can hold water,

booze, even toothbrushes.”

He n:“ ycool-loo ywere desi se

Bethany Vogel, Home of theBrave: “When the city is beingtough, crawling into luxurious

bedding like our cotton blanket($398) is very comforting.”

Five shop owners on their top gifts for graduates, from a glass tumbler to a leather folio case.

top five

In February, low-key-menswear shop Corridor(209 Mott St.) joined Nolita’s hip-dad-duds district.

On May 22, Saks will launch Beauty 2.0, a full floorwith 120 brands and 15 treatment rooms. Chief

merchant Tracy Margolies talks the best gifts for newmoms (611 Fifth Ave., second fl.).

On May 1, Williamsburg kitchenwares shop Whisk will open in the former Cook’s Companion location

(197 Atlantic Ave.). Marketing manager Tux Loerzel shares the best gift for a cooking-obsessed parent.

cluster

In late March, heirloom-inspired customizable-jewelry brand Foundrae(52 Lispenard St.) opened in northeast Tribeca’s designer-gem division.

cluster

ask a shop clerk

moving in

Baldwin NY (199 Mott St.): Khaki,water-resistant mid-length trenchcoat ($395); camo anorak ($295);raw selvage-denim jeans ($225).

Ted Muehling (52 White St.): Amethyst drop earrings

($160); brushed-gold-plate earrings ($220); a simple rose-gold bracelet ($500). “We recently began selling the Proenza Schouler Arizona

fragrance ( from $100), but I think the nicest gift wouldbe a bunch of treatments: a lash extensionat Blink Browbar (from $165), anappointment at the fragrance-personalizationbar ( from $365), a guided-meditationmanicure ($30), a ‘remodelage’ massage meantto slim your body ($220). Nails, brows, lashes,massage: sounds like a perfect day to me.”

“For a parent, I’d go with our soapstone pots ($68). They’re from Brazil, and they have a copper band along the outside. Like a Dutch oven—which we have plenty of as well, from $85 Lodges to pricier $340 Le Creusets—they’re great for making soups, stews, deep-fries, bread, or pots of beans. The stone is made of talc and magnesite, which means it can hold heat and cold temperatures longer than regular cookware, but it’s also just very impressive-looking. When people walk into the store, they often say, ‘What the hell is that? It’s so pretty.’ ”

Foundrae: Cigar bands printed with symbols like a lion for strength

($2,850) or an 8 for karma ($2,850); a gold-fly earring post ($895).

Gillian Conroy (368 Broadway): A black-diamond engagement ring ($2,350); a Tahitian-pearl

bracelet ($4,800).

Gurhan (160 FranklinSt.): A dark-blue evil-

eye ring ($1,250);gold-and-champagne-diamond tassel-dropearrings ($18,950).

Buck Mason (235 Elizabeth St.): Gray French-terry sweatpants ($88); short-sleeve henley ($45); long-sleeve

denim shirt ($105).

Corridor: Cerulean-blue linenbutton-up ($198); slightly faded

herringbone khaki chinos ($195);a skinny, polka-dot, handmade-

in-Brooklyn tie ($75).

Noah (195 Mulberry St.):Tricolor suede oxfords

($298); striped rugby tee($118); Italian-made pinkseersucker jacket ($448).

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GIFTS FOR MOMS, DADS, AND

DISCERNING GRADS


the look book

Photograph by Bobby Doherty

lightning round

From: Spring Lake, New Jersey.

Neighborhood: Nomad.

Kids: Two sons. Key to a long and happy marriage: “It’s important to

have a balance of independent

interests and shared activities.” Favorite

restaurant: Via Carota. Currently reading: The Ninth Hour.

Currently watching: The Looming Tower.

PATRICIA LOEB

Retired Clinical Psychologist

When did you retire? A few years ago, and now I volunteer a few times a week with victims of domestic violence at a homeless shelter. The other days are a little more fluid. I handleour finances, which takes up a lot of time—my husband still works.

What does he do? He’s a plastic surgeon. Doctor Thomas W. Loeb.

Has he ever done any work on you? Yes, I’ve had a blepharoplasty and a face-lift. But I still look like me! My husband has a light touch, a natural aesthetic. Good plastic surgery doesn’t stick out.

Where’s the suit from? Gucci. I have eclectic taste; I like things from Pas de Calais and Zara to Dries and Dior. I also have a big collection of vintage clothes. I’m still the same size I was 38 years ago—I hope this photo comes out well, because I do look good for 65! interview by alexis swerdloff


Microdosing’s Micromoment

the everything guide to:

As o f o n e m o n t h a g o , I knew of just one friend whomicrodosed; my friend, who is a musician, said he was tak-ing 0.1 grams of mushrooms a few mornings a week so hecould finish up an album that had been taking him years.

Then, a few weeks later, I was at a different friend’s house when hewalked into his kitchen, took a teeny-tiny, shriveled-up mushroomstem out of the freezer, snapped off a minuscule amount, andpopped it into his mouth, a thing he now does regularly to feel “moreopen” while on the many work calls he has throughout the day.


This was while telling me about another friend, who’s devised a way to, as precisely as possible, dilute liquid LSD into 10-micro-gram doses. That guy uses it for painting.

It’s been quiet but also quick: Micro-dosing, which usually means taking tiny amounts of psychedelics (one-20th to one-tenth of a recreational dose) has spread from San Francisco to New York and around the country. People say they are using it not to escape their everyday lives but to enhance them: If you’re microdosing, you might even forget you’re doing drugs in the first place. The amounts are sub-perceptual, without the seeing-stuff side effects. They’re still themselves, users say, only a little better.

Recent reports show that millennials are drinking less and less interested in drugs like cocaine. But in a strange turn of events, they’ve taken up LSD and mushrooms in the way someone else might pop an Adder-all. The most common self-reported bene-fits include improved mood, better eating and sleeping habits, and less of a need for caffeine. And, really, what could be more millennial than rebranding some of the most potent drugs out there as illegal vita-mins that combine the feel- good-ness of self-care with the possibility of gaining a competitive edge on colleagues?

Drug dealers I surveyed have reported an uptick in microdosing requests: “Maybe

10 to 15 percent of my clients plan on mi-crodosing, which is definitely up from when I first started selling mushrooms,”says one Brooklyn dealer. Another says that while she’s noticed more people buying mushrooms and LSD, return customers are consuming them more slowly. One dealer even brings around his scale for micro dosers who want to measure out smaller amounts; another creates tinctures of diluted LSD. And a growing number of posts on Reddit devoted to the subject in-dicates that people are microdosing all sorts of things, from ketamine (for depres-sion) to cannabis (for pain management).

Between 2010 and 2013, microdosing began to gain steam in Silicon Valley coder circles, thanks in part to the preachings of LSD researcher James Fadiman. The appeal of a drug regimen that allows for hours of uninterrupted focus and concentration was not lost on this crowd. Fadiman thinks mi-crodosing caught on so quickly because “it has a small positive effect and it’s not scary,” though, as is the case with all drugs, fear is subjective. Particularly because microdos-ing is both highly unresearched and incred-ibly imprecise, and therefore prone to all kinds of dosage mix-ups and unintended trips. In fact, there have been zero controlled clinical trials related to microdosing. In England, Amanda Feilding of the Beckley

Foundation is close to beginning a study that will involve hooking up microdosers to an EEG while they play the strategy game Go in an attempt to measure both creativity and cognitive function. For now, that’s it.

Anecdotal accounts already suggest that microdosing is not for everyone. For those who have any sort of bipolar or psychosis history, there is the possibility of overstim-ulation. It also doesn’t seem to agree with those with existing anxiety, says Fadiman. And, of course, it is illegal.

Yet the curiosity only grows, in part be-cause of renewed interest in the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics taken in traditional doses. In Michael Pollan’s new book on the subject, How to Change Your Mind, out in May, he goes deep on the science from professionally guided, feder-ally approved studies that looked at the effects of psilocybin (that’s the psychoac-tive part of mushrooms) on cancer patients in significantly lessening signs of anxiety and depression.

Which is why some people are ignoring the risks and microdosing to get in on some of the reported benefits. “Eventually, people take things into their own hands,” says Dr. Michael Mithoefer, a Charleston psychia-trist involved in MDMA-assisted psycho-therapy for the treatment of PTSD. “Cer-tainly not the ideal way to do it, but that’s one of the problems that happens when the regulatory and scientific community isn’t responding to the need for better medi-cines.” And perhaps the science will catch up with the culture. “It’s a very plausible question whether microdosing has anti-depressant activity,” says Matthew W. John-son, a Johns Hopkins psychologist who has published psilocybin studies. “If that was true, that could be a novel treatment to one of the world’s biggest medical disorders.”

Consuming crumb-size amounts of psychedelics— not to get high but to feel more focused and creative and present—

has moved a tiny bit mainstream. BY SIMONE KITCHENS


the everything guide to microdosing

LSD: “A couple of yearsback, I was quittingantidepressants. It was

iet

It was much more effectivethan any antidepressantI’d ever taken. I took smalldoses a couple times aweek for a few months, andI found that my focus,mood, energy, and creative

ing all improved nothe day of, but the

days following as well.”Mushrooms: “Like LSD,it makes me feel in themoment, and my day-to-day feels fresher and lessstale. The main difference isthat it’s shorter and lessenergizing. It makes me feelmore ‘go with the flow’ and

less analytical and sharp.”CBD: “I take CBD—thenon-psychoactive elementof cannabis—every day tohelp calm my mind andbody. I microdose Mr.Moxey’s Mints when I needa little kick or I get stuck ina bad thought loop at work.

What Is a Microdose?

MushroomsWhat it is: “Magicalmushrooms” contain thepsychoactive compoundpsilocybin. They canbe eaten, brewed into tea,or coated with chocolate.How microdosing it feels:About an hour or twoafter ingesting themicrodose, people noticean increase in focus andenergy. Many users findthat it helps with weaningoff—and staying off—anti-depressants. It canhelp lessen the side effectsof withdrawal and evenmitigate depression.Many speak to the drug’sability to increaseempathy, too.

TheGuyWho’sMicrodosedIt All (Or a Lot of It)

LSDWhat it is: A drugmanufactured from lysergicacid, which is found in thefungus that grows on rye.It is taken in tablets,capsules, gelatin squares,or pieces of paper.How microdosing it feels:Users describe experiencinga boost in energy, focus, andthe feeling that life ismeaningful. A propermicrodose, according tousers of the drug, is like a dayin which you’ve “gottenenough sleep and eaten well.”It’s often used to help kickaddictions, from cigarettesto heroin. Many LSDmicrodosers find that it’smade it easier to lose weight,stop drinking, and even cutback on playing video games.

The Big Seven:What Out There Is Being Microdosed

CannabisWhat it is: Cannabis isa psychoactive drug fromthe cannabis plant. It’seither smoked, vaporized,or taken in tincturesor edibles.How microdosing it feels:Cannabis in microdoseform has been found to behelpful for a wide varietyof physical ailments: chronic pain, nausea, inflammation, indigestion, fibromyalgia, PTSD-associated insomnia, even nightmares. But it also helps with mood: It can boost interest in one’s surroundings, creativity, happiness, and focus, while also combating stress.

DMTWhat it is: The activehallucinogenic compoundin ayahuasca. It is mostoften smoked in powderform or consumed ina brew.How microdosing it feels:DMT has a faster onsetthan any of the drugs onthis list—it can kick inseconds after use, and itsacute effects last onlyabout a half-hour. It brings users to a place of introspection and, as one frequent microdoser put it, “cuts out anything that isn’t serving me in the present moment, so I can just enjoy being.”

AyahuascaWhat it is: An Amazonianplant mixture thatcontains the psychoactivesubstance DMT.It’s generally consumedin a tea.How microdosing it feels: Microdosing ayahuasca can increase sensitivity and openness in users—many feel their boundaries and defenses dissolve.It is not optimal for work,as it can make physicaland mental tasks slightlymore strenuous and canmake users feel passive—“It made it hard to answeremails, write queries,research,” said one.

In the absence of clinical trials and studies, we created this chart by going straight to the source: lots of individual microdosers. We shared our findings with two experts in the field of psychedelics—psychologist James Fadiman and psychiatrist Julie Holland—who confirmed that what we learned meshed with the anecdotal evidence they’ve accumulated over the years. Note: Many of these drugs have serious associated risks, so do not use this as a guide. by katy schneider

Cooper M., 23,

department lead

at a cannabis start-up,

Seattle

Illustrations by Mark Nerys

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It’s less impactful perdose than LSD, but I owebeing able to functionin a 40-hour workweekto them.”DMT: “I’ve also tried DMT.It onsets within secondscompared to oralpsychedelics that can take

A microdose is generally considered to be one-20th to one-tenth of a recreational

dose. If someone’s seeing things, he or she has taken too much. Most people microdose

mushrooms or LSD, but other drugs have also become popular of late.

*Why Does EveryoneKeepBringing UpJames Fadiman?

Up until a few years ago, thelongtime LSD researcher whopublished The PsychedelicExplorer’s Guide in 2011 wasindividually responding to

any would-be microdoser’s questions asto suggested dosage or possible side effectsthrough his personal Gmail. He createda protocol based on his many emailed-inreports from users that’s pretty muchbecome the microdosing standard. NowFadiman is working with fellow researcherSophia Korb as they embark on the largestnonclinical microdosing study to date(59 countries and over 400 participants).

Some Unexpected Side Effects

May Include …Five findings from James Fadiman’s*

email in-box.

Period relief “A number of women who have had difficult

periods report that their periods are now normal. We got a note from a woman in her

20s who said that during the month she

microdosed, her periods, which are

usually extraordinarily difficult and painful,

were now normal. Others say they

microdose before their period and their

periods are now fine. We don’t know

much, but we’re hoping to get much

more conventionalresearch going.”

Better sex“Just a few reports of

this, but one example:Married 15 years, male,

38. ‘Sex is great withmicrodosing … myattention is at 100percent in the bed,

easily expressed in ourlovemaking and

sensual touching.There is no hurry and

no wait.’ ”

Decreasedcoffee consumption“The most common

comment is ‘I just don’tfeel the need.’ ”

More anxiety“We do not know if

anxiety goes up or if theyare more aware of their

anxiety, but in either casewe feel microdosing is

not beneficial.”

Better first drafts“I never reveal my

sources (especially ifthey are drug-using

journalists).”

What Happens to the BrainThe science that exists is exclusive to therapeutic trips.When not on psychedelics, variousnetworks of the brain operate mostlyindependent of one another. But whenyou’re tripping, those areas start talking toeach other: Brain-imaging scans froman Imperial College London study showedthat psilocybin caused increased newconnections all across the brain in a smallsample of patients with depression. Thisrerouting can lead to visual and sensorychanges like hallucinations, but also mayresult in new ways of thinking, whichis why there are reports of transcendence,being able to think outside the box,and increased empathy after large-dose-psychedelic-led therapy sessions.

What that does (and mostly doesn’t)tell us about microdosing.No researcher will definitively comment onwhat microdosing does to the brain (andthey were extremely wary about speculating),because there is literally no science to pointto. Since researchers do agree that psilocybinand LSD may cause increased connectionsthroughout the rest of the brain, it couldbe that this is happening on a smallerscale. One thing that scientists will say is thatwhile therapeutic trips can have benefitsthat last many months, microdosing’s effectsdisappear after a few days.

IbogaWhat it is: A rarely microdosed, difficult-to-get perennial rainforest shrub, some take it in premade TA (total alkaloid) powder.How microdosing it feels: Iboga in small doses can promote introspection, clarity, thoughtfulness, and a feeling of connectedness to people and the world. One user reported feeling “too introspective. I was often lost in thought,” she said, “and had no interest in conversing with others, because small talk seemed too tedious and unimportant.” It’s also been known, in large doses, to reset opiate receptors and therefore help curb cravings.

KetamineWhat it is: Ketamine is a medication used for maintaining anesthesia. It is typically snorted, though occasionally injected.How microdosing it feels: Some users report feeling a physical high and a decrease in physical sensation. “If you have pain in your knees,” says one user, “you’re not going to feel that on a microdose of ketamine.” It also eases stress and depression. With larger doses, users report that those anti-depressive effects can last for days, weeks, or even a month.

an hour to set in. This allows me to very quickly reach the thoughtful, centering mental space I’m looking for but also not feel stuck in it for too long if I take too much. ” k.s.



The Microdoser’s Tool Kit

A grinderDried mushroomsare quite fragile,

but a grinder (somelike a mortar

and pestle, others usecoffee grinders) willyield a fine powderthat microdoserswill sprinkle intovarious ingestible

things, evensmoothies.

How Do People Who Do It, Do It?

DAY 1

Dose DayDAY 2

No DoseDAY 3

No DoseDAY 4

Dose Day

The Pretty-Much-Agreed-Upon RegimenAccording to the Fadiman approach, people generally microdose once every three days for

about a month—one day on, two days off. But why space it out? “After reading a lot of reportsand talking to a lot of people, the effects were lasting for up to two days,” Fadiman says.

“The psychedelics are actually gone within a few hours, but you have the same kind of feeling—functioning better—for two days.” There’s another reason to space it out:

Psychedelics, while nonaddictive, can cause a tolerance to build. The most important thingto keep in mind: Fadiman advises taking a microdose before 10 a.m. “Taking it later

may make it harder to fall asleep. From there, people should keep to their daily schedule:work, leisure, meals, medications, exercise.” After the month, Fadiman found that

most people continued to microdose only occasionally, on an as-needed basis—for an exam,a presentation. Plus, like with most things, it’s good to take a break.

A dealerIn New York,some dealers

are adjusting to thespike in microdoserclients by creatingdiluted liquid-LSD

tinctures; others areoffering use of their

scales to helpweigh mushrooms.

Gel caps“Strongly earthy”is one way dried

mushrooms have beendescribed. Weighing

them, grindingthem into powderform, and putting

them into gel capsulesis a way to makemeasured-out

microdoses and avoidtheir polarizing taste.

A scaleOne that registers

a thousandth of a gram helps people start

as small as possible.

Or this starter pack

The Third Wave, a start-up dedicated to “responsible psychedelic use” founded

by Paul Austin, offers both online guides

to microdosing various substances and a $47 LSD starter pack that includes a sterilized amber bottle

with distilled water for diluting, scissors for cutting off tabs of LSD,

a sterile syringe for measuring out microdoses, and an

LSD-testing kit (to make sure it really is LSD).

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A Doser’s Diary

Tao Lin, whose book Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and

Change comes out May 1,has dabbled in microdosing.

Anticipating questionshe thought he’d get on

the topic while on tour, he dida trial run.

Microtripping Nine to FiveWhat it’s like to be high and functioning on the job.

A Blueberry Edible Before a Meeting“I take chocolate-covered blueberry edibles, which are about 5 mg. each

of THC—the psychoactive part of cannabis—on the way to work. It’s about a 45-minute commute, so by the time I’m at my desk, it’s starting to

work. During meetings, I feel more lucid in my thoughts and confident sharing ideas that I may have thought were too radical before. I find myself

making more jokes, laughing more. Before, I think I was always trying to say the right thing, playing it safe in a way. It worked, but it was

also sort of boring.” —Anonymous animator

A Sliver of LSD Before Talking to the Boss“When I microdosed LSD a couple of times before work, it was a mixed bag: When talking to my boss—who I never had problems with—I felt much more anxiety. I was more in my head, nervous about what I was

going to say. On the other hand, I had much more empathy—which was a big deal, because I wasn’t very fond of my co-workers. It also made it

much easier to do boring, heads-down work. Time kind of flew by— my job was basically ‘spreadsheet farming,’ and I was able to do that a lot

more efficiently.” —Anonymous recruiter for a financial-services firm

A Sip of Iboga Before Visiting Patients“I work in palliative care. All my patients are dying. Since I started taking

50 mg. of iboga TA powder in the morning, pain- and symptom-management visits are filled with much more laughter and happiness. Before, I was prone

to burnout from these visits—I was tired and sluggish and often only able to provide the necessary care to my patients. I missed small subtleties in

their physical and emotional state. This doesn’t happen as often when I’ve taken iboga. I am able to sit with a grieving family, feel their pain, and be

present, without allowing it to shatter me.” —Anonymous nurse k.s.

D AY 1

10 A.M.

Used one-sixthof a tab of 100micrograms ofLSD—a brandcalled Aztec Xtal,which may or maynot be LSD or 100micrograms.

11:58 A.M. Havemore of a senseof humor and lessdespair thannormal, smilingsometimes.

12:35 P.M. Feeldistracted by theworld insteadof my thoughts,which are a lighteryet morecontrollableoverlay thannormal.

12:55 P.M.

Half-consciouslyand pleasurablyand unexpectedlybiked from 25thto 3rd Street.

4:52 P.M.

Attention spanbecame lowerthan normal;feeling the lackof what I gainedearlier.

10 P.M.

Continuedworking—reading,writing—aftertemporary loss ofattention. Feel likeI had a day likewhen I used to useAdderall but withless underlyingdespair.

D AY 2

10 A.M. Four days later, used one-sixth of a tab again. I’d planned on three days, but I was meeting my editor and wanted to be in a more familiar mental space.

11:41 A.M. Have greater ability to end undesirable thoughts.

11:54 A.M. Instead of blankly gazing at nothing, as can happen normally, my focus is flitting somewhat randomly around, scanning. My memory images seem stronger.

10:38 P.M. In bed. Had another almost continuously productive day—doing a phone interview, reading, writing, drawing.

D AY 3

10 A.M. Two days later. Used one-12th of a tab—half as much.

4:11 P.M. Time has passed fast. The half-dose seems preferable. One-sixth felt sometimes overwhelming and disruptive to my normal routine, but this amount seems good to use occasionally and strategically.

NORMAL MICRODOSING



But What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

“Okay, I Guess I’m Trippingat 8 a.m. on aTuesday”

It took a few tries before this Brooklyn musician landed on his ideal dose.

One of the biggest dangers of microdosing is accidentally macrodosing.

Sara Gael, director of harm reduction at the MAPS Zendo Project,

an organization committed to

supporting people going through

bad psychedelic trips, on the best ways to

ride it out.

Move the body

“Qi Gong, yoga,stretches like that can

be helpful; they getenergy moving. When

we’re really stuck inour head, feeling

comfortable in ourbody can help.”

Eat something

“This can instantlyhelp you

feel grounded.”

Go outside

“Being in natureis a big one. Go to thepark; it doesn’t haveto be in the middleof nowhere, though

still try to avoid a tonof people.”

Put on some music

“Something instrumental—classical, piano,guitar; mellow

is key.”

“The first time I did it, I took 0.2 grams of mushrooms at 8 a.m. It’s whatI thought was a very small amount, so I was like, Okay, I’ll take that and

I can up it from there. Maybe 20 minutes later I was in the park walking mydog, and I looked up at the trees, and I was like, Huh, that looks weird.

Then I looked down at my hands, which is always the test: Do my hands look trippy? And I was like, Oh, yeah, they’re trippy. The grass beneath them was

super-vibrant, moving in a weird way. I was like, Okay, I guess I’m tripping at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. I tried to go home and work, and I was not okay to work,

so I lay down, put headphones on, and listened to music in my bed in the dark for like an hour. So after that I started doing .07 grams, which is really

small, then slowly worked my way up to .1 gram. Sometimes I’ll do .08 grams if it’s a day I know I’m going to be doing a lot of phone calls. There’s

no impairment, but if I’m doing 0.1 or 0.125, I definitely feel a little extra something. When I hit the ideal dosage, it helps me get into a flow state.

It’s a feeling you can totally have without doing drugs, it’s just one that I rarely achieve. If you’re working on something, you have a feeling that you

can do no wrong, and because you have that feeling, it kind of comes true.”

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MICRODOSING TRIPPING

MICRODOSING GONE WRONG


“Did we get all these people to be in a clinical trial that we’re going to realize, one day,was a bad idea?”

Some microdosing early-adopters look back.

Ayelet Waldman, the mom who microdosed In 2017, Waldman introduced many to microdosing with her memoir, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. What does she think about it now?

“I was writing about microdosing psychedelics, but at the heart of it, I was writing about taking

responsibility for mental illness and finding a way out of your deepest darkest place, and when you write about that, you have to take responsibility for your reader. That’s why I’m much less interested in people who have a more jokey approach to it. Look, I did it as an ad hoc personal experiment. I obviously don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, as long as people are very aware of what they’re getting into and they understand the neuroscience, the therapeutic elements, the history, the criminal-justice ramifications. We spend too much time in this country taking really strong drugs without thought; people are gobbling up Paxil without anybody considering how incredibly difficult it can be to get off them. We’ve just been swallowing thoughtlessly, both legal and illegal, so if you’re going to microdose, I want you to really do your homework, or at least just read my book. One of the beauties of microdosing is that there isn’t a Sackler family forcing you to become addicted—there’s no advertising dollars [behind it]—so you can have a more thoughtful decision-making process.”

Reply All, the podcast that got things going On November 5, 2015, the Gimlet Media podcast Reply All aired a show on which one of its co-hosts, PJ Vogt, secretly took small portions of acid and recorded what happened. (Vogt ended up panicking and ditching the experiment.) It’s become one of its most listened-to episodes. Vogt and Gimlet co-founder Matt Lieber reflect on how the episode’s aged since.

PJ VOGT: One of the things I didn’t predict would happen is that everybody now tells me when they’re

microdosing. They’ll say, “Hey, remember when you did that episode where you took acid?” And it always goes the same way: It’s them grinning and going, “Well, I’m trying it right now.” It happened two mornings ago in the elevator.

MATT LIEBER: I remembertelling you that I was prettysure you were going toinspire many people—

hundreds or even thousands—to tryacid. People that otherwise wouldn’t. If you ask me how I feel about it … I feel very conflicted, actually.PJV: Sometimes I wonder, Did we get all these people to be in a clinical trial that we’re going to realize, one day, was a bad idea? But most people who’ve talked to me had good experiences, and I think they feel that they’re in a secret society. ML: Have you done it since then? PJV: No, oh my God, no. No. It’s worth reiterating: I messed up the dose and did not enjoy my experience. But I have the rest of the acid in this Orbit-gum box on okshelf. It feels like Chekh n in my apartment. margaret rhodes

How Illegal Is It?Psychedelics are Schedule 1 drugs. Though laws vary by state, if you’re caught possessing or selling even a small amount of psychedelics in New York State as a first-time offender, you could face jail time—anywhere from less than a year to up to nine years. New Mexico is unique in that it is legal to grow mushrooms there, while a Florida loophole lets people off the hook who don’t realize the mushrooms they are in possession of are magic ones. Meanwhile, current decriminalization efforts in California and Colorado could show up on ballot measures later this year.

And now, a naysayer.Richard A. Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry and director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, thinks microdosers should hold out for more-conclusive science.

“The problem is that the large-dose therapeutic studies that have been done so far—the NYU and JohnsHopkins ones in particular—areflawed, I think, so we don’t really know how safe or effective it is. For example, niacin, which was used in the NYU study as a placebo, doesn’t really have a psychedelic effect, so my objection is that it’s just a weak study. And then there’s the sample: Who raises their hand and does a hallucinogen? Thosepeople might be more psychologicallyhardy and drawn to novel experiences.With microdosing, if you’re going to posit x or y about it, then go studyit and get good data. Otherwise everybody thinks it’s perfectly safe, but there are people who are going to do it who are at risk for various psychiatric problems like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe depression,or who have a genetic loading for psychotic disorders and could unleasha latent illness. That’s who I worry about. Claims that are made based on anecdotes and individual stories are interesting but not conclusive, and they need to be subjected to the same rig stu rugcompany wan drug on the market.”


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Freewheeling FerrisThe hotel restaurant that doesn’t know it is one.

by adam platt

These are not the best of times for restless, innovative cooks in the big city, especially in Manhattan, where it takes about as much cash to open

a restaurant as it does to run for Congress or mount a decent-size Broadway show. If you’re Greg Proechel, who made a bit of a splash a few years back cooking a slightly elevated, off-center brand of cuisine at a trendy Lower East Side bistro called Le Turtle, maybe you’ll decide to leave the rat race behind after your initial success and open that neighbor-hood joint you’ve always dreamed about. Or you could cash in at a high-profile, but much more for-mulaic, brasserie-style kitchen uptown. Or maybe you’ll find a modest space somewhere in the city, pos-sibly in a boutique hotel with a decent budget and a built-in audience, where it’s possible to hunker down, away from the nattering crowd, and conduct your culi-nary experiments in relative peace.

Proechel’s new venture is called Ferris, and if you didn’t know it was an actual restaurant, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a bunker of some kind, or maybe

the officers’ mess of a trendy new class of Nordic submarine. If there’s a sign out-side, I didn’t see it, and to get to the entrance, underneath the lobby of an anonymous-looking structure on West 29th Street called the Made Hotel, you descend a flight of concrete steps. There are 40 seats in the snug wood-paneled room below, half of them set up at the kind of tall counter-style tables you see in the bars at airports or railway stations.

There’s a bar facing the open kitchen, and with its impressive spirits list (14 Scotch whiskeys, 21 rums) and tightly packed tables, the convivial little space feels like it’s been designed more for hard pub-style drinking than for seri-

ous eating, especially on a cold, wind-blown early-spring evening.

Proechel was known at Le Turtle for his elegant takes on earthy, rib-sticking Con-tinental classics like wine-braised wheels of oxtail, and a famous version of whole chicken for two, which was delivered to the table in a nest of gently smoking hay. When I first visited Ferris several months ago, the cooking seemed to skew in that

same classically informed direction. There were helpings of boudin noir crumbled on the plate with cinnamon and choppings of grilled dates, and a smooth, properly boozy chicken-liver mousse stuck with curls of crunchy fried pork-skin “chips” for dipping. The trophy-size centerpiece of our dinner was a cut of côte de boeuf, over-aged according to current fashion (I think the number was 60 days) and dressed with novel things like black-garlic jam and another frothy dip made with onions and whipped buttermilk.

Many of these dishes survive in their original form on the ever-evolving menu at Ferris, but in the past month or two, entic-ing images have been popping up on assorted websites and Instagram feeds hinting at a new, Asian-themed direction. When I dropped in for dinner a couple of weeks ago, there were triangles of flash-fried “lobster toast,” sprinkled with bits of Japanese kombu, and tea-size Japanese “sandos” made with fried cutlets of Ibérico pork pressed between slices of toast that tasted like they’d been transported from a tonkatsu shop in Tokyo by way of, say, Barcelona. There were freshly grilled Vietnamese duck sausages folded in little envelopes of wilted cabbage, and an extravagantly aged beef carpaccio scat-tered with spoonfuls of uni and served with a thick crust of fried sourdough bread.

“This place reminds me of eating in Aus-tralia,” one of my world-weary guests said as we perched on our tiny stools at the bar and

++

Ferris

44 W. 29th St., nr. Sixth Ave. 212-213-4420 ferrisnyc.com

Ferris

foodEdited by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

+++++�ethereal ++++�exceptional +++�excellent ++�very good +�good NO STARS not recommended

59

the dish

“Fried Chicken But Cold”

That’s right. The fried chicken at Dave Chang’s new à la carte annex to Momofuku Ko proper is served by the piece and straight from the fridge, and listed on the handwritten menu as “Fried Chicken But Cold.” Undoubtedly smart alecks will take issue with this. They’ll say, “What, no ‘Bread But Stale’? No ‘French Fries But Leftover’?” Yet just as the English like their beer tepid, some folks prefer their fried chicken with a little chill on it. Executive chef Sean Gray, who’s also “a cold-pizza person,” notes that piping-hot or evenmoderately hot food inhibits flavor, though foodscientists don’t really know why. Another reasoncold fried chicken might be better than hot: no waitfor it to cool off before you take a bite. r.r & r.p.

watched the bearded, Viking-size chef throw together all sorts of unlikely ingredi-ents drawn, like in the trendy restaurants of Sydney or Melbourne, from Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. The lobster I’d ordered on my first visit was plated, seasonally but not very successfully, with squash and pumpkinseeds; now it rests on a bed of juli-enned hearts of palm, among other things, all mingled together with crushed macada-mia nuts and a tangy white curry. In addi-tion to the big-ticket côte de boeuf option, you can now order a beautifully cooked crown of duck for two, which consists of two crispy-skinned duck breasts dusted with a housemade five-spice powder and brought to the table, in familiar Korean bo ssäm style, with bowls of dipping sauce (whipped egg yolk, a version of hoisin) and fronds of pickled cabbage.

Like other members of this two-fisted, umami-obsessed generation of cooks, Proech el has a tendency to push a little too hard on the heavy-flavor-bomb combina-tions. My grilled bok choy was drowned in a soggy flood of brown butter and anchovy-heavy bagna cauda, and the chunk of hake I ordered one evening was obscured in a similarly brackish puddle of clam broth. You’ll find plenty of indigestion relief on co-owner Charles Seich’s beverage list (in addition to all the whiskeys and rums, I counted 13 amari and diges-tifs), and the desserts have clearly been designed with a kind of commu-nal palliative smoothness in mind. Our rich, milky chocolate mousse was stuck here and there with slivers of jasmine- flavored meringue, and the warm carda-mom pound cake was obscured by a great cloud of whipped cream. For maximum relief, however, call for the yuzu frozen yogurt, which the chef finishes with olive oil and slices of green, baby-size Waka Momo peaches flown in from Japan.


scratchpad

The quarters are snug, and it can be hard to hear yourself think above the din, but two hearty stars for the drinks and the best of the satisfying, inventive cooking.

bites

IDEAL MEAL: Pork “sando,” lobster toast, Vietnamese duck sausage and/or blood sausage, lobster or duck crown for two, yuzu frozen yogurt. NOTE: There are rumors circ ous wh y few weeks as a menu special. OPEN: Dinner nightly. PRICES: Appetizers, $9 to $16; entrées, $24 to $82 (côte de boeuf $5.25 per ounce).

After the final fry, the chicken is

glazed in a mixture of green Tabasco, mirin, and yuzu juice.

There’s beerand vodka in

the batter, theoretically to enhance crispness,

lightness, and savoriness.

The cutvaries day to

day; youeither get twowings or one

thigh ordrumstick.

The chicken is battered and

fried four times, which mightexplain its remarkablecrunch evenwhen cold.

On the menu at Momofuku Ko Bar; $7;

8 Extra Pl., nr. 1st St.;

212-203-8095.


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1. PIZZA BIANCAWhat:Flatbread baked with sea salt and olive oil, which, inits raw-dough state, gets scrunched, then unscrunched likean accordion when shoved into the oven, only to emergemiraculously as a six-foot plank of golden bubbly goodness.

Where: Sullivan Street Bakery (multiple locations).

2. PIZZA AL TAGLIOWhat:Pizza baked in steel pans and sold by the square slice.(Al taglio means “by the cut.”) The trend today is towardthickish pan pizza made from long-fermented dough.Also trendy: Deluxe toppings à la Gabriele Bonci’s Piz-zarium in Rome. Where: PQR (1631 Second Ave.), Maniin Pasta (multiple locations), My Pie (multiple locations).

3. TEGLIATeglia means baking pan and also refers to the food thatgets cooked in it, such as, yes, pizza, sold whole or al taglio,by the slice. In other words, you get your pizza al taglio afterit’s been cooked in teglia.

4. PIZZA TONDAWhat: The anti-Neapolitan pizza in that its crust is roundbut rolled out extra-thin, emerging from the oven cracker-crisp with little air, no droop, and nary a cornicione insight. Traditionally eaten for seated dinner, versus day-time’s al taglio on the go. Where: Gnocco (337 E. 10thSt.), Emporio (231 Mott St.), Martina (198 E. 11th St.).

5. PIZZA ALLA PALAWhat: Similar to Roman pan pizza but baked directly onthe oven floor, then cut into squares and sold al taglio. Palarefers to the wooden peels used to shovel the pizza into andout of the oven. Where: Farinella (multiple locations),Eataly Downtown (101 Liberty St.).

6. PINSAWhat: Depending on which Italian-food-marketing Sven-gali you’re talking to, either (a) an ancient flatbread usedby peasants as an edible plate, (b) a term derived from theL ere, which describes the act of pressing down onso such as a ball of dough, (c) a modern, healthieral e to pizza defined by the mix of flours used tomake it: soy, wheat, rice, corn, etc., or (d) all of the above.

Where: Camillo (1146 Nostrand Ave., Prospect LeffertsGardens), Mani in Pasta (multiple locations).

craze

Pizza, Roman StyleNot since Sullivan Street Bakery’s Jim Lahey popularized six-foot slabs of pizza

bianca in the 1990s has Roman-style pizza been such a hot topic. New styles, new shops, and even new flour mixes are reshaping New York’s pizzascape, putting a post-Neapolitan

focus on lightness, airiness, and above all, crunch. robin raisfeld and rob patronite

taxonomy

How to Tell Your Taglios and Teglias From Your Tondas

Mani in pasta is the name. Translation: “hands in the dough,” and that is where Giuseppe Manco’s mitts have been most of

his 31 years. Manco runs this five-month-old East Village pizza restaurant, and his dough-making credentials are pretty impressive. The Neapolitan expat got started early at the family-run trattoria in Naples, where under the tutelage of assorted aunts and uncles he made his first Margherita D.O.C. at the ripe old age of 6. His parents had hoped he’d become an accountant, but after that formative experience, it was too late. What really must have vexed his mom and dad, though, was that while their son was working at a Neapolitan pizzeria in Rome, he fell in love with Roman-style pizza in teglia (or pan pizza), and he switched teams. We mean he went over to the other side. He became a Roman-pizza specialist. Manco embraced the stuff with such fervor, in fact, he eventually won an award for his version at the 2017 International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas.

Now you can get the same blue-ribbon pan pizza at Mani in Pasta in the East Village, and it is a knockout—the crust dark and crackly around the edges, the tender crumb boasting the kind ofwebby, widely inscribed holes that hint of high-percentage hydration and long fermentation.

Toppings fall on the spectrum somewhere between Neapolitan restraint and modern-Roman-pizza-maker whimsy. In addition to pan pizza, there’s the so-called pinsa, made with the same crunchy dough but pressed thinner and shaped and sized like a Neapolitan pie with a pro-nounced cornicione. If you like the idea of Nea-politan pizza, but not its soft and often soggy tex-ture, this is the pie for you.

underground gourmet quick bite

Mani in Pasta245 E. 14th St.; 646-891-0174

7.

FOCACCIA

What: The Italian flatbread that’s oiled and salted, often thickish and bready, and sometimes split in half and used for sandwiches. Why, you ask, is it in a guide to Roman-pizza styles? Because the focaccia that former Lincoln and Per Se chef Jonathan Benno will introduce next month at his Leonelli Focacceria e Pasticceria at Nomad’s Evelyn hotel, where he’s also building two sit-down restaurants, is greatly influenced by some of Rome’s most distinguished pizzerias. Chief among them is Pizzarium, the gastrotourist mecca and leading light of Rome’s artisanal pizza al taglio movement, where baker Gabriele Bonci tops his naturally leavened crusts with an inspired array of fresh, seasonal toppings. “I thought someone should really do something like that in New York,” says Benno. He aims to incorporate that style’s open crumb structure, flavorful dough, and bountiful toppings (he’ll also make sandwiches with it). Whatever you call it, Benno’s focaccia is serious bread—75 percent Italian 00 flour, 25 percent a blend of house-ground whole wheat, rye, and spelt—baked, like pizza al taglio, in steel pans in an electric oven. He intends to serve it as he has enjoyed it in Rome: at room temperature. But upon request, he’ll happily heat up slices decked with combos like burrata, tomato, and basil, or squash with arugula, mint, and ricotta (pictured). Even for a chef of Benno’s stature, culinary convention has its limits. “I’m not going to tell New Yorkers how to eat pizza,” he says. Orfocaccia. Where: Leonelli Focacceria e

Pasticceria (7 E. 27th St.); June.

New York

May 3–6, 2018

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— Frank O’Hara

The CULTURE PAGESs h e i l a h e t i / s a o i r s e r o n a n / c r i t i c s / p a r t i e s / t o d o

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The Closet, Revisited

In The Boys in the Band, Zachary Quinto leads an all-star cast of openly gay actors back to the days when being out was career suicide. By Amy Larocca

63


T h e C U LT U R E PAGE S

It’s a very confusing conversation, butQuinto is steady. The interview is beingfilmed for In Search Of, a History Channelshow of which Quinto is both the executiveproducer and the host. (This particular epi-sode is about mind control.) “Are they stillfollowing you?” Quinto asks. His heavy,famous brow is furrowed. Quinto definitelyhas sci-fi chops—he was personallyapproved by Leonard Nimoy to revive therole of Spock in the J.J. Abrams remakes.He played a serial killer with superpowerson Heroes and had roles on two seasons ofAmerican Horror Story. He’s exactly theperson a midwestern contractor whobelieves he’s been the victim of brain tam-pering would trust to take him seriously.

“They are following me,” says the man.“I saw them on my flight.” Quinto leansforward. He nods. “I believe you.”

In Search Of is a reboot of a show of thesame name that ran from 1977 to 1982,hosted by Nimoy. Nimoy’s version wasabout phenomena that seem a little quaintnow: yetis, the Bermuda Triangle, aliens.Quinto’s show expands to explore theinterference of technology in a format hedescribes as “less turtlenecks and blazers,more Anthony Bourdain.”

It’s been a heady few months of produc-tion, but variety has always been what’sreally set Quinto apart. So a few weeksafter we meet, the minute he wrapped InSearch Of, he flew to Los Angeles to beginrehearsals for a revival of a cultural relic ofa different sort: The Boys in the Band, the1968 Off Broadway play by Mart Crowleythat is widely considered the first main-stream American play to deal openlywith male homosexuality. The charactersmeet in an Upper East Side apartment to celebrate a birthday. They are drunk, they are funny, they are mean. The over-whelming sense is that they are hidden. The damage that this double life causes is palpable, painful, sad.

The revival is stuffed with blockbusternames—all of whom, in a conscious moveby the producers, are gay. It’s produced byRyan Murphy, directed by Joe Mantello,and Quinto’s co-stars include Jim Parsons,Andrew Rannells, and Matt Bomer. Buteven with all the attention that such ahigh-wattage project will bring, Quintotook some convincing to come aboard.

“Historically, the play has been reallystigmatized,” he says. It’s after the In SearchOf shoot, and Quinto’s eating a salad at theLibrary bar at the Public Theater, near theapartment he shares with his boyfriend, theactor and artist Miles McMillan. “When it

appeared in 1968, it was revolutionary. Noone had seen anything like it,” he says.“Then the movie came out in 1970, and inthat period of time, Stonewall had hap-pened, and this play became backward-looking, reductive, and stereotypical. It wasa thing for the gay-rights liberation move-ment to say, This is exactly what we are notanymore. We are not these men who have tosneak around and make up stories.”

Quinto, in fact, had always thought of theplay that way himself. Since coming out in a2011 interview in this magazine, he’s been careful to pursue a varied career—he’s the action and science- fiction star with the healthy New York stage credentials. He co-founded a production company, as his friend Sarah Paulson (who once had to breastfeed

him on American Horror Story) puts it, “before I even got a computer.” She points out that he was having big commercial- film success when he committed to doing The Glass Menagerie, which ultimately came to Broadway but began its run in Boston. “I can guarantee you his agents weren’t jumping for joy,” Paulson says, “but it ended up being wonderful, and I remember noting for myself that these things could exist simulta-neously. You can have commercial success and take the power of that and use it to feed yourself artistically.”

“He’s one of the most versatile actors out there,” says J. J. Abrams. “He’s limit-lessly capable.”

As for The Boys in the Band, which begins previews at Broadway’s Booth Theatre on April 30, “I’ve worked really hard to carve out a career that is separate from my identity as a gay man,” Quinto says. “And there was a part of me that was just like, I want to go in a different direction.” A July workshop con-vinced him that Boys would. “I think what this production does is go in the face of how far we’ve come,” he says, “and holds a mirror up to the audience and asks them to evaluate how far we still have to go. It’s incredibly rel-evant that a cast of accomplished, successful, authentic gay men are standing up and giv-ing this seminal work a Broadway produc-tion. We’ve all been able to build diverse and satisfying careers for ourselves. The original cast of the play really struggled.” Even just having played gay men, they had limited opportunities as a result of being in the play.

The question of whether Quinto’s com-ing out on the eve of his breakthrough role changed the guardrails of his career is not hugely interesting to him. “Look,” he says, cocking an eyebrow, “I don’t think I would have been James Bond anyway.” (He says it as a joke, but it doesn’t seem the hugest stretch.) “There are people who feel that preserving that aspect of their identity will generate better opportunities,” he says. “I wasn’t capable of any kind of lie about my authentic self.”

When The Boys in the Band finishes its 15-week run, Quinto’s not sure what’s next. He’s thinking of shifting his base of opera-tions back to L.A., where he can focus on his production company. And while it seems like there are already many Zach Quintos out there—the deadpanning, sci-fi Quinto, the heartbreaking-and-honest stage Quinto, the curious-businessman Quinto—there’s still more. He wants to do episodic television, he wants to do comedy (“I mean, I’m hilarious,” he says), he wants to continue wrestling with the obscure. “What did you think of that guy?” he asks later in the afternoon. “I mean, I feel like I have a lot more I want to ask.” ■

n a bright, cold Saturday morning in a squat, unmarked building in Brooklyn, the actor Zachary Quinto is sitting at a card table while a man from Kansas City explains that he was, 14 years ago, drugged and subsequently implanted with a series of microwave chips by a (former) friend who wanted to zap him into giving up the rights to a hygienic soda-can cover that both men were convinced would, eventually, make them millions of dollars.

“I wasn’t capable of any

kind of lie about my

authentic self.”

IFC’S BROCKMIRE SEASON 2 PREMIERE

Vulture partnered with IFC’s comedy series Brockmire on

April 18 for its season two premiere, followed by an exclusive

Q&A with Hank Azaria, Tyrel Jackson Williams, and Joel

Church-Cooper, moderated by Bob Costas. After the

screening, guests followed Sugartone Brass Band through

Lincoln Center to a party on The Empire Hotel rooftop.

Keeping in theme with New Orleans, guests enjoyed

beignets and jambalaya while sipping on whiskey and rum.

ifc.com/shows/brockmire

HOW I GET IT DONE, IN CONVERSATION

The Cut launched its first live event for the editorial series,

How I Get It Done, at NeueHouse on April 11. The spirited

night featured The Cut’s President & Editor in Chief, Stella

Bugbee, in conversation with the inspiring: Zerlina Maxwell,

Senior Director of Progressive Programming at SiriusXM,

Linda Wells, Chief Creative Officer at Revlon, and Karen

Wong, Deputy Director of the New Museum.

thecut.com

ADVERTISEMENT

P ROM OTI ONS . EVENTS .

FOOD. SHOP P I NG .

ENTERTAINMENT. ART.

Follow @NYFYI on Twitter for exclusive reports from NYC and beyond— curated by

the Creative Services team at New York magazine and our brand partners.

EVENTS

GET OUT THE VOTE: ONE BOOK, ONE NEW YORK

On April 2, the NYC Mayor’s Offi ce of Media and

Entertainment and New York Magazine announced

the return of One Book, One New York, a citywide

reading initiative that encourages New Yorkers to

vote for one book they all want to read together.

In celebration of the program, PEN World Voices

literary festival hosted a panel discussion on April 19

at The New School moderated by Jennifer Boylan,

featuring four of the authors in contention:

Esmeralda Santiago - When I was Puerto Rican,

Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers, Hari Kunzru -

White Tears, Jennifer Egan - Manhattan Beach,

and director Barry Jenkins, who is making a fi lm

of the late James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could

Talk. New York Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss and

Commissioner of the NYC Mayor’s Offi ce of Media

and Entertainment Julie Menin were in attendance.

Vote now at nyc.gov/onebook

BOOKS

EVENTS


T h e C U LT U R E PAGE S

ShouldSheilaHetiHave aBaby?In her new novel Motherhood,the author confronts an eternal femalecrossroads. By Molly Fischer

motherhood will be published by Henry Holt on May 1.

Photograph by Steph Martyniuk

Why have a baby? For a woman in her 20s or 30s who’s accustomed to living independently, who feels no religious or familial obligation to bear children, the answer comes down to the vagaries of desire: Do you want it, does the other person, how badly?

The simpler question might be Why not have a baby? Here, the obvi-ous practical issues—money, time—are easier to weigh. How to pay for the baby, who will watch the baby, where to put the baby, will the baby get in the way of everything else? And this assumes a partner on hand; without one, challenges multiply. There’s also the prospect of impend-ing climate apocalypse, which at least one woman I know has cited as reason enough not to procreate.

Practical matters, however, do not concern the writer Sheila Heti, who takes up the problem of whether to have a baby in her engrossing new autobiographical novel, Motherhood. “I lived only in the greyish, insen-sate world of my mind,” she writes, and in this setting, the question is something more like this: What does it mean to have a baby? From there, a cascade—does a baby make you happy, what kind of woman has a baby, what kind of woman doesn’t have a baby, how does a baby change you, is having a baby selfish or is it selfless, is not having a baby a way to avoid real work, real meaning, real life … or is that what having a baby does?

Motherhood dwells within this uncertainty to an extent that will exasper-ate some readers as surely as it will animate others. I am only one reader, and yet I’ve found myself in both camps: I read it the first time and felt profoundly, irresistibly annoyed; I wanted to keep thinking about it enough that I wanted to read it again. The second time I felt startled and embar-rassed by the things I’d missed the first. In the months that followed, I began waving it under friends’ noses like smelling salts, eager to observe the reactions it provoked. Moms of small children loved it, and moms of

small children rolled their eyes. People who couldn’t get through Heti’s last novel devoured this one. A friend in her late 30s, navigating the same straits Heti describes, didn’t want to go anywhere near it. Then she did, and said how glad she was to have changed her mind. She’d been feeling so alone in her uncertainty—Motherhood was “the friend that I wanted to talk to.”

In April, I met Heti at the Lakeview Res-taurant in Toronto; I had a beer and she ordered a double Scotch. The Lake view is a 24-hour diner Heti chose for its enclosed, quiet booths. They turned out not to be quite as enclosed as she’d remembered but still provided a suggestion of privacy—womblike, that is, but not too womblike. Bruce Springsteen was playing.

Heti is a Canadian writer who first attracted widespread attention in the United States with her 2012 novel How Should a Person Be? The book incorpo-rated real emails and tape-recorded con-versations as well as first-person narration from a character named Sheila, a writer, focusing on her friendship with a painter named Margaux. The book was polariz-ing—in The New Yorker, James Wood called it “hideously narcissistic”—but also found prominent admirers. In March, when the New York Times anointed a “new vanguard” of 15 female writers “steering literature in new directions,” it included Heti. In the accompanying note about How Should a Person Be?, critic Dwight Garner praised her ability to write prose “that feels like actual, flickering, unmedi-ated, sometimes humiliating thought.”

Women in Clothes, the 2014 book Heti edited with Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton, drew together hundreds of wom-en’s responses to a survey about what they wear and why, compiling an encyclopedia of female self-presentation. It also gave Heti’s interest in intimate observation an outlet more accessible than her novels and went on to become a best seller.

“One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like,” Heti wrote in How Should a Person Be? This was sort of a joke, as she had to explain to a credulous interviewer at the time: “The next line is, ‘It could be me.’ ” But one good thing about this view of female genius is the way it proposes seeing gender: not as a basis for oppression but as a source of possibility.

Motherhood joins How Should a Person Be? and Women in Clothes to form what might be read as a field guide to woman-hood in a particular literary-bohemian milieu. Heti started the book after entering her 30s, when her uncertainty about moth-erhood had begun to feel like limbo. She


remembers a conversation in this periodwith the writer Sarah Manguso, whobecame a mother in the course of theirfriendship and whose 2015 memoir, Ongo-ingness, deals with the early days of parent-hood. Manguso told her that actually hav-ing a baby felt like a relief after the long timeof wondering whether she’d have a baby. “Iremember thinking consciously, Oh, I needto stay here longer,” Heti told me. “This is aplace to write about.”

when i spilled beer on my phone dur-ing my lunch with Heti, she worried aboutwhether it was one of the waterproof ones(hers is not) and wiped up my mess with anapkin. In the course of our time together,she also worried that I might be hungryafter traveling (she recommended the pou-tine), advised me on the best time to call acab (earlier than I thought), and urged meto use my umbrella, since I lacked a hat inthe rain. That evening, in the bathroom ofthe suburban public library where she wasgiving a lecture, she offered me a Clif Barfrom her purse. I accepted.

“I’m surprised that I’ve written threebooks about or for mainly women,”Hetisaidover the poutine. Gender can be a source ofpossibility, but it can also be limiting whenit becomes the only lens through whichpeople see your work. While certain readersapplauded How Should a Person Be? forchampioning “female friendship,” this wasnot something Heti especially set out to do.One of her inspirations for the book was MyDinner With Andre, but all anyone everwanted to ask her about was Girls. “Twofriends talking for a long time about art?”she said of the 1981 Louis Malle classic.“Like, why did that not once come up?”

The Lakeview Restaurant is a ten-min-ute walk from Heti’s apartment, where shelives with her boyfriend and her Rottweiler,Feldman (puppyish, but with a name thatmakes him sound “like an old Jewish man”).Two big brown rabbits, Bun and Bun-Bun,occupy the front yard. Heti has lived inToronto her whole life, save for two shortstints in Montreal, and in her writing, thecity often sounds like a place where govern-ment health care has fostered the fantasyversion of college life: where friends all livecheaply nearby and run into each other,drink, go on long walks, have long talks, andundertake projects. At 41, Heti herself—fairand faintly elfin, with overgrown bangs—could pass for a grad student. The commu-nity she describes combines artistic serious-ness with a playful sense of humor and aconstant appetite for conversation, argu-ment, and collaboration.

“I think that part of the reason I like col-laboration so much is because it’s some-

thing unexpected coming in, and you haveto stretch yourself to absorb it,” she told me.In writing the new book, she wanted to bemore alone than she’d been when she wasworking on How Should a Person Be? andtape-recording her friends. “But I didn’twant to be that alone. I didn’t want to be soalone that there was no surprise, youknow?” Motherhood’s unnamed narratorbegins by asking questions while she flipsthree coins—two or three heads, yes; two orthree tails, no—in a modified version of theI Ching. “Is this book a good idea?” shebegins. “Yes,” say the coins, daring thereader to disagree. Her character’s encoun-ters with a tarot reader and a psychic are asimilar intrusion of the unexpected, thoughHeti also hopes they provide a sense of des-peration. “You don’t go to tarot readers orpsychics when everything’s going well,” shesaid. “It’s always evidence of rock-bottom.”

At first, Motherhood was supposed tolook something like Women in Clothes. Hetiimagined a collection of interviews withwomen about having children, or not.(There was also a time, once she’d reimag-ined the book as a novel, when she thought

it might incorporate the comments onDaily Mail articles about mothers; she readthem obsessively.) In the book’s final form—fragmentary, cyclical, a collection of scrapsand dreams—conversations still echothroughout. The narrator talks about moth-erhood with other women inexhaustibly:younger women, older women, women herage, women with babies, women with fro-zen eggs, women with regrets. Miles, thenarrator’s boyfriend, seems surprisinglyperipheral to all this. He has a daughterfrom a previous relationship and tells herhe’ll have a child with her if she wants—butit’s her decision and she has to be sure.Motherhood, in this book, exists most of allas a force that shapes women’s lives andtheir relationships with one another.

Heti approaches the subject with anobserver’s curiosity more than a deliber-ate agenda. Growing up, she remembersfeeling distant from the received versionof femininity: The word mother, forexample, seemed to refer to a way of beingfemale “that just I never identified with.”

One of the women the narrator speaks with in the novel, an American writer, tells her that whenever she meets women their age, the first thing she wants to know is whether they have children, and if not, whether they plan to—“It’s like a civil war: Which side are you on?” Yet this sense of the trenches transcends “mommy wars” cliché. The experience of childbirth and new motherhood—even just the question of motherhood—comes to look like a female proving ground; something like what war has been to male writers. (Reviews have compared Rachel Cusk’smotherhood memoir A Life’s Work to “a war diary” and Elisa Albert’s motherhood novel After Birth to The Red Badge of Courage.) Life-or-not-life stakes loom. “Like soldiers nudging each other into battle, we nudge each other into relation-ships,” the narrator reflects at one point. “Stay there, we say. Don’t run from the front lines.” The encounter with human life in extremis gives rise to a kind of camaraderie, but it’s a dark one, and she’s contemplating it from the outside. “I feel like a draft dodger from the army in which so many of my friends are serving,” says the narrator, “just lolling about in the country they are making, cowering at home, a coward.”

Foremost among the women the narra-tor contemplates is her mother, a Hungar-ian immigrant and a doctor who, in her daughter’s memory, is always working and always crying. As in Heti’s own life, the nar-rator’s father handled the bulk of child rear-ing. Growing up with this particular mother has left her uncertain whether children can ever be a pleasure rather than a source of pain. The inherited focus on work (“My mother works hard, and I work hard, too,” she writes) means that a particular concern is how having a child might affect her life as a writer. She goes to dinner with a pregnant friend who’s anxious that the narrator is progressing in her work while she falls behind in her own: “Stop making things!” this friend says in a panic. But, on the other hand, the narrator wonders, “Could I ever hope to be a good enough writer—capture on the page what being human felt like—if I had not experienced motherhood?”

In the meantime, as she scrutinizes the tea leaves of her mood, she finds herself increasingly isolated. “I had always thought my friends and I were moving into the same land together, a childless land where we would just do a million things together forever,” she thinks. Instead, “one by one, the ice floe on which we were all standing was broken and made smaller, leaving me alone on just the tiniest piece of ice, which I had thought would remain

T h e C U L T U R E P A G E S

“I feel like a draft dodger from the army in which so

many of my friends are serving.”


vast … It never occurred to me that I’d bethe only one left here.”

if the novel has aclimax, itarriveswhenthe Sheila stand-in shows her manuscriptabout motherhood to her mother and getsto hear her response. This fulfills the narra-tor’s emerging sense that “motherhood,” forher, might be bound up more in her rela-tionship to her mother and grandmotherthan in producing some future child.

I found myself curious what my ownmother might make of the book—as awoman who wasn’t sure she’d be a mombut then was, as a woman currently cam-paigning for grandchildren. I sent her aPDF to read on her iPad. She called meafter she’d finished.

“You’re not going to like this,” my momwarned me when I asked what she thought.“But why didn’t she go on the drugs sooner?”

Ah, yes: the drugs. Midway through thebook, thenarratorbeginstorecognizeacon-nection between her moods and her men-strual cycle. There’s a pattern, it turns out, tothe violent internal weather systems she’sendured, and online she finds a communityof women whose experiences mirror herown. In some cases, these women take anti-depressants toalleviate theirsymptoms.Shegets a prescription herself. Everythingchanges. “How was it possible that antide-pressants were legal?” she wonders, experi-encing free-floating joy on her walk homefrom the grocery store. “Did half the countrywalk around feeling this way—sparklingwith ease and light?”

This happens near the book’s end, andwhile the remaining 40 pages aren’t neces-sarily nonstop sparkle, things do get a loteasier. Previous moments—“Outrun your

tears like an athlete every day,” she oncetold herself—appear in a new light. Werethey signs of existential struggle or werethey symptoms?

My mother’s personal approach to moth-erhood dictates treating symptoms when-ever possible. But, in answer to herquestion,the delay—on the part of the character orthe author—seems understandable. If youare accustomed to using your own thoughtsand emotions to make sense of the world (if,for example, you are a novelist whose workmines autobiography), what could be moreunnerving than the suggestion that yourthoughts and emotions can’t be trusted—that you might be an unreliable narrator ofyour own life? This, perhaps more than anycoin toss or collaborative partnership, iscause to wrestle with the unexpected. Nearthe end of Motherhood, the narrator won-ders what it means for a story to hinge onchemical intervention: “I don’t know whatkind of story it is.”

From one angle, Heti’s resistance to clearanswers can look like a cop-out; fromanother, like a novelist taking full advantageof her medium—of fiction’s right to be slip-pery. (The fact that Heti’s fiction draws sodirectly on her life can make this possibilityeasy to miss.) Or maybe Motherhood foilsmy abilities as a critic: I like the book as acatalyst for thought, and admire its ability towithstand sustained consideration.

Heti hesitated to include the drugs in thebook. “I kept putting it in and taking it out,”she said. She did not want to end the bookwith a pharmaceutical deus ex machina, inwhich “antidepressants fly in like Super-man.” The critic Dave Hickey, a friend, con-vinced her she should: “You gotta put themin, because it’s true,” she remembers him

Nicolas Cage was close to playing the villain in the Seth Rogen–produced 2011 superhero comedy The GreenHornet.

HOW NOT TO AUDITION FOR SETH ROGEN

Rogen: Really close. In retrospect, maybe what he’d wanted to do wouldn’t have been anyworse—the movie didn’t turn out so great. Sony was like, “We want you to cast Nicolas Cage.”

So we talk to him and he tells us he wants to do the movie, but he wants to play the character as, like, a whiteBahamian or Jamaican. Which to us was a little worrisome—it seemed perhaps insensitive. Wewere going to have dinner with him at Amy Pascal’s house to talk about the movie. I remember driv-ing there and saying, “If he does the white-Bahamian thing at dinner, I’m going to lose it. I can’t deal with being face-to-face with Nicolas Cage as he’s doing a Bahamian accent.” Within 20 minutes of getting to the dinner, he’s fully doing it. I think he could so viscerally tell that we didn’t like the idea that he just left right in the middle of dinner. He was just like, “I gotta go.” Then he called me two days after that and said, “I’m getting the sense that you don’t want me in this movie.” But God bless Nicolas Cage. I’m a huge fan. david marchese

saying. “Oh, okay,” she thought. “That makes it really simple.” She’d fixated anx-iously on the question of motherhood, but relinquishing her relentless anxiety did not make the question less real. “It sort of lets the end of the book happen,” Heti said.

Throughout Motherhood, in her wariness of motherhood, the narrator is on guard: against the possibility that a baby could change her, or that her body could have an agenda at odds with her own. Acquiescing to the mysteries of hormones and brain chemistry doesn’t persuade her to have a baby, but she does find herself accepting the inevitable helplessness of life with a body—of being something besides a grayish, insen-sate mind. A baby changes everything, but so do SSRIs, and so does the passage of time.

“When I was writing the end of the book, it felt very clear to me that the question was solved,” Heti said—in the book, she does not have a baby. “And then as soon as the book was done, I was back in the nonfictional world.” In the non fictional world, the ques-tion remained. She started the book when she was 33; now she was 41. She had lived seven more years without a baby, and her life was fine: She was happy. “When I was younger, I think that I felt like I could only live one way, and I had to figure out which of those one ways it was going to be,” she said. She now felt she could live either way and be fine. “I have no anxiety about mak-ing the wrong decision.”

“There’s also something about every year getting closer to death,” she said and laughed. “It’s not like I have to live through eternity with whatever decision I make. It’s only another 30 years … It’s just until you die, and that’s not that far away. It’s a bit of a lighter feeling, somehow.” ■



She’s the Seagull Saoirse Ronan self-destructs, Chekhov style.

the seagull opens May 11.

in michael mayer’s new movie adapta-tion of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Saoirse Ronan stars as tragic heroine Nina, a young aspiring actress who gets drawn into the tangled orbit of her famous neighbor Irina (Annette Ben-ing); dumps her well-meaning playwright boyfriend, Konstantin (Billy Howle), for Irina’s novelist lover, Boris (Corey Stoll); then pays a steep price. “It becomes self-sabotage,” says Ronan, photographed on the set of the film for New York by Brigitte Lacombe. “Nina wants to have this wonder-

ful life filled with excitement. She’s so full of hope and innocence and youth, and you pretty rapidly see this young girl become quite broken and lost.” Which character does Ronan relate to most? “Probably Konstan-tin,” she says. “You are definitely putting your-self out there when you’re an actor, but you’re still able to hide behind someone else—whereas with your own writing, it’s solely coming from you. I think Konstantin is just sort of striving to do something that feels real to him. Not Nina!” hunter harris

Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe


Sara Holdren on My Fair Lady, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, Travesties, Saint Joan, and The Iceman Cometh.


CRITICS

MY FAIR LADY

vivian beaumont theater

from the very first momentof the My Fair Lady now sweep-

ing across the Vivian Beaumont stage, it’sblessedly clear that we’re not in for a retro-gressive reach-me-down. Director BartlettSher and his team know what they’re mak-ing and when they’re making it. They knowthat for all Henry Higgins’s “words, words,

theater

Yeargan’s dynamic set, always makes us feelas if events—educational and emotional—are rushing forward.

That performance starts small, thengrows and grows. In Ambrose’s first scene,I felt a little thrown by her reserve—I stillhad Audrey Hepburn in my head. Butgradually I realized how carefully she’s cal-culated Eliza’s arc. She’s building a realawakening for the girl raised by a drunkenfather who’s taken his belt to her, as sheturns into a woman who means every wordof it when she sings later that she “can dobloody well” without Higgins, or anyone.Her voice is sheer loveliness from the start,and when she lets it soar at the climax of“I Could Have Danced All Night,” the hairon my arms stood up. It’s not really abouthim (it never is, guys). It’s about her owndesire to keep feeling, keep learning, keepdiscovering the world and herself in it.

What adds bittersweet nuance to My

Wizards andDisco,Stoppard andO’Neill

The spring season’s final week.

THEATER / SARA HOLDREN

PHOTOGRAPH:JOAN

MARCUS

words,” the story belongs to Eliza Doolittle,and the production continuously andthrillingly reminds us that, to quote LaurenAmbrose, this is a show “about a womanwho comes into her powers.” She arrives atHiggins’s house after he brags that “in sixmonths [he] could pass her off as a duchessat an Embassy Ball” by transforming theflower girl’s “curbstone English” into “prop-er” speech. Ambrose’s beautifully calibrat-ed performance, supported by Michael

Lauren Ambrose as Eliza Doolittle.


PHOTOGRAPH:BONEAU/B

RYAN-B

ROW

N

Fair Lady, though, is that Higgins is also a fantastic character. Whatever does exist between him and Eliza is probably best described in Facebook parlance: It’s com-plicated. And in this production, it’s almost heartbreaking. Harry Hadden-Paton is closer in age to Ambrose than most previ-ous pairings (he’s actually three years younger than she), and that lets us see Hig-gins for exactly what he is: a very smart, very spoiled grown-up little boy, charging through the world on the force of charis-matic intellect and a misguided belief in his own unconventionality—a man whose first impulse when things go wrong is to bellow for his mother. (She’s brought to life with fitting amounts of lofty side-eye by Dame Diana Rigg.) When he makes it to that final problematic line (“Where the devil are my slippers?”), he’s overcome by feeling and simultaneously unable to do anything but fall back on his snide flippancy. Hadden-Paton almost whispers the words—he can hear himself making the mistake and can’t stop. I won’t spoil Ambrose’s gorgeous response, but suffice to say that Sher’s final gesture preserves the play’s rich ambiguity, while also clearly leaving Higgins in the shadows of 1913 as Eliza strides confidently into the 21st century.

HARRY POTTER AND

THE CURSED CHILD lyric theatre

“My geekness is a-quiverin’!” a teenage wiz-ard named Scorpius yelps in excitement somewhere around hour five, and he’s not the only excited nerd at the two-part, almost-six-hour-long, record-breakingly extravagant, and extravagantly entertaining Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Packed with plot twists, charming performances, mind-bending spectacle, and, perhaps more surprisingly, moments of theatrical whimsy that feel, amid the high-tech sor-cery, delightfully simple, The Cursed Child is a fitting addition to the Potter canon. It effectively weaves serious themes with bouncy adventure narrative, it’s heartfelt and hugely imaginative and a touch hokey, and you’re willing to forgive its shortcom-ings as it sweeps you along.

Which it certainly does: J. K. Rowling devoted a full novel to each year her teenage hero spent at Hogwarts School of Witch-craft and Wizardry, whereas in The Cursed Child that hero’s son speeds through the first three years at his dad’s alma mater within 15 minutes. Harry’s boy is namedAlbus Severus, and fast-forwarding him toage 15 is only the first of the tricks theshow plays with time. Most of the play takesplace 22 years after the final book ends, and

Harry’s now a 40-something Ministry forMagic official with three kids. His boss, theMinister of Magic—his eternally type-Abuddy, Hermione Granger, who else?—wants him to clear his desk of paperwork.His former rival, Draco Malfoy, wants Harry to help quell the nasty rumors that Draco’s son, Scorpius, is actually the bas-tard child of the Dark Lord, Voldemort.And Harry’s wife, Ginny, wants him to tryto connect with his brooding middle child.Albus is a classic misfit teen struggling tolive up to his father’s fame, and Sam Clem-mett is believably teenagerish with histensed-up shoulders, furrowed brow, andcoiled, simmering energy.

But, like the young Harry, Albus isn’t nec-essarily the most vivid character—he’s enliv-ened by a funnier, quirkier sidekick. That’sthe homework-loving, candy-hoardingcrown prince of nerds, Scorpius Malfoy,and the tremendously talented AnthonyBoyle carries a huge portion of the show onhis skinny shoulders. Channeling a youngRowan Atkinson in a chlorine-blond wig,Boyle is all gangly, awkward gestures, burstsof enthusiasm that come out somewherebetween a snort and a shriek, and expertcomic timing of the hopelessly uncool-guy variety. He’s also—and this is criticalif you’re an actor in a Rowling-based universe—incredibly skilled at convertinglarge passages of exposition into dramaticaction through energetic delivery.

Without venturing into spoiler territory,I can say that at the end of Part One, theshow’s visual sorcery spills out of the pro-scenium and takes over the room. Is thesudden immersive effect Las Vegas–y? Forsure. But it’s also pretty thrilling. Andwhat makes The Cursed Child a continu-ous delight is that for every million-dollareffect (and there are plenty), there’s a pieceof lovable lo-fi stage magic. Watching thetowering Brian Abraham—a humanembodiment of the Sorting Hat—pluck his

bowler out of the air, where it seems to be floating unsupported; or seeing him sprin-kle a handful of paper snow in anticipation of a flurry falling from the flies; or watch-ing the cast ingeniously enact the effects of a transmogrifying potion: Moments like these keep the show’s makers, and we its watchers, honest.

SUMMER: THE DONNA

SUMMER MUSICAL lunt-fontanne theatre

I’m inherently skeptical of jukebox musi-cals. So many of them are painfully con-trived: like a meal on one of those cooking shows where you have to work with a basket full of tricky, predetermined ingredients. Here! Turkish delight, frozen waffles, and sea urchin! Now make a delicious entrée! Yet those ingredients do matter, and being surrounded by genuine excitement in a Broadway theater does a body good. Thanks to the swift, smart construction of Summer, which neither overburdens its material nor overstays its welcome, the show is frequent-ly a pretty damn good time.

Co-written by Colman Domingo, Robert Cary, and the production’s director, Des McAnuff, Summer’s book is sometimes predictable and sometimes sentimental, and every so often it pushes unsubtly on its central image (the idea of “fragments” of a life, which influences both scenic design and storytelling). But it’s also up-tempo, fluently interwoven with the show’s more than 20 songs, and often genuinely funny: Early on, an ensemble member playing the Italian producer Giorgio Moroder has a phone conversation with Neil Bogart (a swaggering Aaron Krohn), an American record executive who’s hooked on young Donna Summer’s sensuous early single “Love to Love You Baby.” As the song moans in the background, Bogart tells

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child


Moroder how much his L.A. club friends love it: “I want you to make me a 25-minute mix,” he demands. “Are you on drugs?” asks Giorgio. Neil’s immediate, nonchalant answer: “Of course.” It’s the ’70s, y’all.

Summer is a bio-musical with a major women’s-empowerment theme—a wiser decision by its creators than hanging the Queen of Disco’s hits around some fictional plot would have been. They’ve also cast three actors, with three immense voices, to embody her. There’s the feisty Storm Lever as “Duckling Donna,” the youngest version of the singer, who feels awkward (that’sDuckling as in Ugly) unless she’s perform-ing. There’s Ariana DeBose, a fierce danceras well as a singer who can both belt andmurmur beautifully, as “Disco Donna,” the20-something-year-oldsingerwhosedance-club hits made her a spangly superstar. Andthen there’s the majestic LaChanze as thesinger’s mature incarnation, “Diva Donna.”LaChanze—whose voice might in fact beable to bring plaster down from theceiling—is our guide through the show.She welcomes us at the beginning (“Whatare y’all doin’ way up there? Is it that muchcheaper?” she calls to the balcony), and shereemerges throughout to offer perspectiveon the story her younger selves are living.Shealsosingsupastorm,andit’snosurprisethat the greatest pleasure of Summer is lis-teningto its leads—especiallyLaChanzeandDeBose—make the walls quake.

Summer has its dips. It’s creepy to hearthe mournful “Pandora’s Box” in the con-text of young Donna’s abuse by her child-hood preacher, and there’s a corny sequencewhen Disco Donna is facing depression(not to mention an addiction to Marplan)and her sisters show up to encourage her totalk “to Mary.” Yet the story line does well atmoving us through both the bright anddark spots in its hero’s life without stoppingto dwell. Yes, it might feel odd at first totouch on subjects as heavy as cancer andabuse without really dropping a dramaticplumb line down. But McAnuff keeps theshow straightforward and aware of its ownlimits. It’s easy to condescend to, but pop isa powerful thing.

TRAVESTIESamerican airlines theatre

Patrick Marber, now directing Tom Stop-pard’s Travesties, first encountered theplay as a 14-year-old. I was 15, and if I’mhonest, I’ve been waiting to see its whirl-wind of highbrow showmanship againever since. And here it is, now at theRoundabout in Marber’s knock-the-wind-out-of-you magnificent revival from Lon-don’s Menier Chocolate Factory. I was hop-

ing for a fun time—what I didn’t necessarilyexpect was the startling degree to whichthis rambunctious, pinprick-sharp pro-duction would feel eerily relevant. Underits fizzy surface, Travesties interrogatesideas of artistic genius and artistic respon-sibility, and it casts a shadow on the cur-rently fashionable notion that—so says theplay’s own excited Leninist librarian—“Artis a critique of society or it is nothing!”

The play takes place largely in the self-aggrandizing memory of Henry WilfredCarr, a (real-life) minor official in the BritishConsulate in neutral Zurich during WorldWar I, now an old man in a grubby dressinggown and a tattered straw boater. JamesJoyceandVladimirLeninandTristanTzara,widely known as the father of Dada, all flitthrough Old Carr’s reminiscences, whichfrequently rattle off the tracks as Travestiesstops and starts and repeats and reshuffles.As Old Carr attempts to recount—and,hilariously, to title—his memoirs (“JamesJoyce As I Knew Him … The Lenin I Knew …Memories of Dada by a Consular Friend ofthe Famous in Old Zurich: A Sketch”), hisdigressions pinch their dramatic structurefrom Oscar Wilde.

The entire eight-person ensemble under-stands the mix of precision and animationcalled for to make the comic lines dance.Patrick Kerr is a wonderfully droll Bennett,Carr’s possibly Communist manservant. AsTzara—the artistic gadabout who was post-before there was even modernism—SethNumrich is a physically and facially elastic,impish delight. Scarlett Strallen and SaraTopham—Carr’sJoyce-acolytesisterandtheLenin-loving librarian respectively—arelikewise excellent, with an unfailing sensefor the flights of surrealism on which Trav-esties periodically takes off. And as HenryCarr, theplay’s infirmcenter,TomHollanderis a marvel, bouncing between drifty garru-lous old man and the insouciant version of

his younger self that his mind has built. He’soneof themostunderappreciatedactorsoutthere: He can be deliciously shameless(check out his mock-edgy Scottish auteur inthe 2000 British comedy Maybe Baby), andhe can be heartbreaking (if you can get holdof the 2001 indie flick Lawless Heart, do it).

After two and a half hours of laughter thatleaves you facially sore, Hollander’s Carrmanages to pull the emotional rug out fromunder you in the final three minutes. Hisphysical embodiment of senility is suddenlyand deliberately truer, more devastatingthan it was at the play’s beginning. Like theplay as a whole, Carr’s (and Stoppard’s) fare-well is both a mischievous bon mot and aserious theory of art as a celebration, an exal-tation, a spell, a dance, a feast, and a farce.And far too important to be taken seriously.

SAINT JOANsamuel j. friedman theatre

Theater artists who take on Joan of Arcoften seem to do so with the facile under-standing of her story as an inspirationalone. That’s “inspirational”—to borrow fromDavid Foster Wallace—in “its ad-clichésense, one basically equivalent to heart-warming, or feel-good, or even (God for-bid) triumphant.” It’s a sentimental, flat-tening approach that renders Joan dead inthe water before she ever reaches the fire,and it’s the one that’s currently onstage inDaniel Sullivan’s inert revival of GeorgeBernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, starring a dis-appointingly soft Condola Rashad.

The trouble starts even before the showdoes, with Scott Pask’s set, which resem-bles the innards of a massive golden pipeorgan and screams “Epic!” Shaw’s playbegins with a comic debate: Joan is anenthusiastic 17-year-old, a sharp, persis-tent Pollyanna who just wants a horse so P

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she can go save France. It’s bright, sly social comedy, not self-serious historical epic, but Pask’s set gives us the end of the story, not its beginning. It traps Joan inside the gild-ed cage of her saintliness, making it as dif-ficult for her to move as the clunky plate armor with which costume designer Jane Greenwood loads down the actors.

More frustrating still is Bill Frisell’s trea-cly original music, which combines with Christopher Ash’s sparkly projection design to push Saint Joan into maximum mawk-ishness. Beneath this schmaltz, Sullivan has mostly anesthetized the action. For all its energy and wit, Saint Joan is overwritten, so someone needs to light a fire underneath its excess verbiage. But Sullivan isn’t help-ing his ensemble get things crackling. Scenes coast where they should roller-coast and snooze where they should snap, and actors are constantly dropping punch lines. And at the center of it all, the sometimes exquisite Rashad is surprisingly edgeless. Shaw’s Joan is energetic and quick—her head isn’t so much in the clouds that she doesn’t know a joke when she hears one. But Rashad plays Joan gentle and straight, and in her big defiant moments, though she plants her feet and gets serious, she achieves only about a quarter of the wallop these pas-sages are capable of packing.

As for the other actors, the lackluster staging often seems to obey the rule that, whenever one person is talking, no one else can move. The play is a keen study of human hypocrisy—how we crush the dreamer under our heel and then memori-alize her—and on the page, it’s brimming with bright, argumentative life. After this dispiriting production, I’m still waiting to see it resurrected.

THE ICEMAN COMETH bernard b. jacobs theatre

Eugene O’Neill had three Pulitzers by the time The Iceman Cometh premiered in 1946, but the New York Post’s assessment was brutal: “Action draggeth, dialogue reeketh, play stinketh.” Indeed, Iceman is an infernal beast, painfully long-winded and often—despite O’Neill’s insistence that “the first act is hilarious comedy”—a self-serious emotional slog, and in George C. Wolfe’s lumbering new production, its issues feel exacerbated rather than addressed. Uncut, the play is close to five hours in length, and here it clocks in at just under four. Yet it feels like eight, and, in between the intermissionsand awkward pauses, Wolfe doesn’t seem tohave anything specific to say about the play.

Consider that Iceman hangs its entireemotional arc on the violence done to twowomen by men who claim to love them and

are in fact driven by festering hatred. Is there a way to channel Iceman’s deep, deep rage into something revelatory, not an enactment of the delusional, infantile anger (specifically anger at women) of disappointed American men but a piercing commentary upon it? If there is, this production doesn’t find it.

It also fails to vivify the play’s dense, voicey language. Like many attempts on O’Neill, Wolfe’s interpretation insists on treating his dialogue as naturalism. But it isn’t natural, and playing his gnarly, spiky, repetitive texts as “normal” speech leaves the show feeling stalled before its engines get a chance to rev. Wolfe has his actors grind through each monologue with broadly accented verisimilitude, and it ren-ders the artificiality all the more pro-nounced. Real drunks don’t snooze in a convenient lineup, awaiting their turn to wake up and rhapsodize for a bit.

The sodden, sanguine monotony is all set up to have a wrench thrown into it, and one drops in near the end of O’Neill’s first act in the form of Theodore Hickman, a traveling hardware salesman known fond-ly as Hickey to his friends. Hickey’s intro-duced as a sunny reform evangelist, gone off the bottle. But, in fact, he’s an angel of death, and with his coming, the play should feel alive and dangerous. The role has a his-tory of going to charismatic showmen, from Jason Robards to Nathan Lane, but it’s a monster in a mensch’s clothing. The actor playing Hickey must make a simmer-ing, step-by-step descent into the pit under the smiling surface. Denzel Washington’s eyes twinkle and his smile is winning, but he often seems static and impenetrable, his veneer allowing no flashes of the sickness underneath. And Wolfe hinders Washing-ton by giving him the full celebrity treat-ment for his climactic, monolithic speech: He has him pick up a chair, carry it down-stage center, plunk it down with the entire

company behind him, and sit and deliver. There’s something else causing a tricky

hiccup in Washington’s performance, and it’s not his fault. Like James Earl Jones before him, Washington is a black actor playing a white Irishman who’s referred to by one of the deadbeats as a “flannel-mouth, flatfoot Mick.” The world of Wolfe’s play seems weirdly blind when it comes to Wash-ington’s race. It’s jarring because the charac-ter O’Neill actually wrote as black, Joe Mott (Michael Potts, dousing Joe’s anger in glad-handing tipsiness), is the brunt of all sorts of racism, even drawing a knife on the two bartenders, Chuck and Rocky, who throw unrepeatable slurs at him. What are we to make of a world that acknowledges—and denigrates—Joe’s race but seemingly can’t see Hickey’s? I don’t know how James Earl Jones handled that question, and I can’t imagine that Wolfe and Washington have given it no thought. They must have, but I can’t see the results onstage.

It’s a major bummer to find that Iceman

is building up to the emotional explosions of two different men who had to commit hei-nous crimes in order to be able to do what they really wanted to do all along: call a woman a bitch. The women onstage in Ice-

man are all “tarts,” played bravely but stereo-typically here by Tammy Blanchard, Nina Grollman, and Carolyn Braver. The women offstage are the fulcrum of the play’s dra-matic action, and their fates reveal that, if you’ve got a vagina in this world, you’re screwed, one way or another. Though I’m willing (barely) to believe that there’s a pro-duction out there that reveals their abusers as the delusional man-children they are while also still granting them their pathos, I haven’t seen it. Wolfe’s revival feels full of unmet challenges and untapped dramatic energy. As Rocky the bartender says of the night following Hickey’s arrival: “Jeez, what a funeral!” ■

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PREMIERE OF FOCUS FEATURES’ TULLY

REGAL CINEMAS L.A. LIVE. APRIL 18.

What parenting responsibility or adult choredoyouwish you could delegate?

VULTURE’S SCREENING OF IFC’S SEASON-TWO

PREMIERE OF BROCKMIRE

LINCOLN CENTER’S WALTER READE THEATER. APRIL 18.

“I started doing Brockmire’svoice as a teenager. WhenI was in college, I got a mic andsaid, ‘Welcome to the TuftsUniversity obstacle course.’And whenever we playedpinball, I would spew nonsensein that voice. My cousin namedhim years later, when I wasaround 40. ‘Hey, that guy’sname is Jim Brockmire.’I’m like, ‘Okay, I buy that.’ ”—Hank Azaria

SEASON-TWO PREMIERE OF HBO’S WESTWORLD

ARCLIGHT HOLLYWOOD. APRIL 16.

PARTY LINES Edited by Stacey Wilson Hunt

Reporting by Scott Huver and Nicole Weaver

Photographs by Patrick McMullan

DiabloCody

“I’m not a cook. I’m not acleaner. I’m like a sloppy gross

raccoon, and I have tofight against that instinctevery single day of my life.”

JasonReitman

“Oh my God: taxes.”

RonLivingston

“Braiding my kids’ hair. My thumbs are

the size of avocados.”

MackenzieDavis

“We have to get our fencefixed right now, and I find it

so annoying and boring.”

“My character is three differentcharacters this season, but she’s still

the Dolores we know and love.”—Evan Rachel Wood

“I loveLost,and if people see thatin our show, that’s great. But I like to

think what we do is a little less PG thanwhat you can do on broadcast TV!”

—Lisa Joy

“I’m a little concerned about technology andthe future of AI and that we’re all gonna beobsolete at some point. But if Siri still can’t

tell me the capital of Minnesota when there’sa little extra noise going on behind me,

I’m not too worried just yet.”—James Marsde

JonathanNolan

AngelaSarafyan

J.J.Abrams

Shannon Woodward

Luke Hemsworth

Thandie Newton

Jeffrey Wright

Jimmi Simpson

Clifton Collins Jr.

Hank Azaria

BobCostas Tyrel

JacksonWilliamsBecky Ann

Baker

Katie Finneran

OliverPlatt

Laura Michelle

Kelly

Jaime Cepero Kea

Ho

Simon Quarterman

Rodrigo Santoro


M A Y 2 – 1 6

TV

1. Watch Being SerenaG.O.A.T.

HBO, May 2.

This five-part docuseries focuses on Serena Wil-liams at a crucial personal and professional mo-ment: as she grapples with the early stages ofmotherhood—she gave birth to her daughter,Alexis Olympia, in September—and attempts toget back into tennis-champion shape. Considerthis series a warm-up to watching her compete inthe French Open, which starts at the end of May.

ART

2. See Hours and PlacesRoom to breathe.

Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street, through May 6.

This smart group show from artists Wojciech Ba-kowski, Erica Baum, and Constance DeJong slowsus down with thoughtful drawings, constructedsculptures, layered text, and sound pieces thattake us off the whizzing merry-go-round and letus sink back into our own autonomous selves. jerry saltz

POP

3. Listen to 7Dive in.

Sub Pop, May 11.

The Brooklyn indie-rock duo Beach House makesdream pop drenched in hazy atmospherics that’sbeen sampled by everyone from Crystal Castlesand Dan to Kend and theWeeknd. album, bath inkeyboard and guitar player Alex Scally’s expressiveplaying and singer-songwriter Victoria Legrand’sethereal vocals, this time with help from Space-men 3’s Sonic Boom. craig jenkins

To

Twenty-fivethings to see,hear, watch,and read.


For full listings of movies, theater, music, restaurants, and much more, see nymag.com/agenda.

MOVIES

4. See I Feel PrettyTaking the fall.

In theaters now.

Ignore the prerelease backlash against this AmySchumer comedy and enjoy funny, deft farce inwhich a woman with painfully low self-esteemgets bonked on the head and suddenly sees herselfas madly attractive. Though Schumer didn’t writethe film, it fits beautifully into her history of chal-lenging men on their donkey-boy aesthetics andwomen on their acceptance of male standards ofbeauty. Rory Scovel is her inspired straight man. david edelstein

THEATER

5. See The BirdsIt’s all Greek to me.

St. Ann’s Warehouse, May 2–13.

Director Nikos Karathanos brings this vibrantadaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy to St. Ann’sWarehouse following its sold-out world premiereat the theater of Epidaurus in Greece. Ancient andprescient, the rollicking satire follows humanity’ssearch for a new utopia in the face of mass dis-satisfaction with this messed-up world and itsmessed-up gods. sara holdren

TV

6. Watch Cobra KaiStill sweeping the leg.

YouTube Red, May 2.

If yo n wa a Karate Kid follow-upthat s wh y Lawrence and DanielLaRusso are up to in middle age, it’s your luckyday. This YouTube Red series not only brings backBilly Zabka and Ralph Macchio to reprise theirroles from the 1980s classic about waxing on as P

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well as off, it places them at odds again after Zab-ka’s Johnny reopens the Cobra Kai karate dojo. Will a leg get swept? Oh, it better.

POP

7. Go to Red Bull Music FestivalNew York rocks.

Various locations, May 3–25.

The innovative festival returns for the sixth year with a lineup as diverse as the city itself, from a performance by cult musician John Maus at the Coney Island Wonder Wheel (May 4) to Swedish experimentalist Fever Ray’s first U.S. shows in almost a decade (May 12 and 13) to an in-depth conversation with Harry Belafonte (May 5).

BOOKS

8. Read WarlightAcross the pond.

Knopf, May 8.

In the 25 years since Michael Ondaatje published The English Patient, which won a Booker and spawned an Oscar-winning film, he’s written three equally good novels but lost some fair-weather readers. This one returns to World War II, the terrain of his greatest hit, albeit on the London home front. A brother and sister are taken in by a strange group of grown-ups after their parents leave for an unexplained trip to Sin-gapore—one of many mysteries that will take a dozen years to unravel. boris kachka

OPERA

9. See BambinOChild’s play.

Metropolitan Opera, through May 5.

The opera Establishment, which fears aging and death with more intensity than Woody Allen, is making a play for young audiences—really young audiences. The Met’s latest production, a 40-min-ute opus by Lliam Paterson, features a cast of two, a versatile orchestra of two, and a participatory audience of babies ages 6 to 18 months (plus one accompanying adult each). justin davidson

POP

10. See King KruleStoned and emotional.

Hammerstein Ballroom, May 4.

Over just three albums, British singer, writer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer King Krule has grown into a formidable architect of songs about fleeting joy and haunting pain. Watch him fold rock, jazz, hip-hop, and dance music into his own beguiling blend. c.j.

ART

11. See Emilio Bianchic:Ooh La LaThis little piggy.

Postmasters, 54 Franklin Street, through May 12.

This storied 33-year-old outpost of vanguardexperimentalism and irascible art is currentlythe site of a joyous gallop through the videos ofthe Uruguay-born artist Emilio Bianchic. His

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long-toenailed feet perform morality plays, sing-ing, dancing, and canoodling with other feet. It adds up to his own private, politically charged Mardi Gras. j.s.

TV

12. Watch A Little Help With Carol BurnettKids give the darndest advice.

Netflix, May 4.

Carol Burnett hosts this celebrity-filled twist on Kids Say the Darndest Things and Little BigShots, inviting guests like Taraji P. Henson, Wan-da Sykes, and DJ Khaled to lay out a personaldilemma to a group of elementary-schoolers,who then offer advice about how to solve it. Be-cause, as the Bible says, “A little child shall leadDJ Khaled.”

THEATER

13. See Long Day’s JourneyInto NightBack at home with the Tyrones.

BAM, May 8–27.

Sir Richard Eyre’s acclaimed production of Eu-gene O’Neill’s piercing, sprawling autobiographi-cal family saga comes to BAM from Bristol OldVic, led by Jeremy Irons as boozy paterfamiliasJames Tyrone and Lesley Manville as the mor-phine-addicted matriarch, Mary. s.h.

TV

14. Watch Dear White People Vol. 2Campus intrigue.

Netflix, May 4.

The second season of Justin Simien’s dramedy,inspired by his film of the same name, picks upwhere it left off, with the main characters jugglingthe usual academic and love-life problems whiledealing with a rise in alt-right rhetoric.

“‘Facing down a bear is like facing down a drunk:You just have to bluff,’ [said my guide, David].I stood next to David, waving, clapping, andscreaming … The bear left my tent and ambledin the direction of the kayak. [David] startedscreaming … ‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROMMY KAYAK, YOU FUCKING BEAR!’ … ‘Wehave two days’ extra food … ’ David explained,

‘but only one kayak’ … I remember this vividly,because I underlined it in my notebook …

‘Are you taking notes?’ David asked, his armswaving … ‘This is my job, dude,’ I said … ‘Gottaget this stuff down while it’s hot.’”

THE 30-SECOND BOOK EXCERPT

SOME DAYS YOU GET THE BEAR, PART I

From Tip of the Iceberg, by Mark Adams (Dutton, May 15)

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CLASSICAL MUSIC

15. Hear Sol GabettaHumane sensitivity.

Alice Tully Hall, May 12.

I first learned of the Argentine cellist Sol Gabettathrough Michel van der Aa’s work for cello, en-semble, and film, Up-close, in which she performsan exhilarating and tragic duet with an onscreenalter ego many years older than she. That same

theatrical intensity infuses her performances ofmusic like Chopin’s G-minor Sonata, which an-chors her Lincoln Center program. j.d.

MOVIES

16. See The Rachel DivideDigging through the layers.

In theaters and on Netflix now.

Laura Brownson’s nuanced, intimate doc centerson Rachel Dolezal, dreadlocked head of the Spo-kane branch of the NAACP who became a laugh-ingstock—and drew African-American ire—whenshe was revealed to be white and then maintainedthat “race is not real.” Brownson talks to fierce andarticulatecritics,butonceyouunderstandDolezal’spast—particularly her devotion to her adoptedblack siblings, who were allegedly abused—you’llfeel there’s more to her than a mere nutcase. d.e.

TV

17. Watch SweetbitterWaiting games.

Starz, May 6.

Ella Purnell (Churchill, Miss Peregrine’s Homefor Peculiar Children) stars in this adaptation ofStephanie Danler’s novel about a New York Citynewbie attempting to navigate her life and job ina high-end restaurant.

BOOKS

18. Read The Mars RoomInvigorating and urgent.

Scribner.

Rachel Kushner’s last novel, The Flamethrowers, crisply brought to life the radical art and politics of the 1970s through the eyes of a passive, albeit very observant, female witness. The author’s roving po-litical awareness now alights on the American prison system. From another writer it might sound lurid or, worse, like homework. But Kushner’s writing and thinking are always precise. b.k.

POP

19. Listen to OThe gang’s all here.

DERO Arcade, May 11.

SSION (“shun”) is the multimedia project of mu-sical-visual artist Cody Critcheloe. His songwriting is versatile enough to fit aspects of noise rock, house music, and easy listening into the same frame, and forward-thinking enough to make Mos-chino creative director Jeremy Scott a fan. O’s wild guest list includes Royal Trux screamer Jennifer Herrema, pop darling Sky Ferreira, folkie Deven-dra Banhart, and indie rocker Ariel Pink. c.j.

TV

20. Watch The 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction CeremonyThe stars turn out at night.

HBO, May 5.

Sure, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a littlebogus, but the annual ceremony always ends upbeing a good show. Watch Howard Stern use salty

“‘There’sabear,’andIthinkwhataninappropriatejoke,andI lookup,andthere isone. Ihadso longimagined the moment that it feels like a keptpromise. It is a grizzly … Ursus arctos horribilis.The day hones in upon it. It is on its hind legs, astall as the willows, perhaps six feet high, or eight,and with furrowed features, it peers myopicallytowards us … As one, [we] raise our hands andmake some unplanned, primal noise … It dropsto all fours, turns, cocks its head back at us, andcanters off into the scrub … A goose honks, andthen another. We reek of fear.”

THE 30-SECOND BOOK EXCERPT

SOME DAYS YOU GET THE BEAR, PART II

From Kings of the Yukon, by Adam Weymouth (Little, Brown, May 15)

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Turn one lunchinto a bunch.

$15 helps make 60 happy tummies.

May 14-18, be a part of Skip Lunch Fight Hunger. Donate the cost of your lunch and joinr

thousands of New Yorkers helping to fuel City Harvest’s work delivering fresh, nutritious

food to the nearly 365,000 children facing hunger in NYC.

Help us feed NYC’s children. Donate at CityHarvest.org/SkipLunch

language while inducting Bon Jovi into the Rock Hall, see the Cars perform some of their greatest hits, and let Mary J. Blige and Lauryn Hill be your guides to the greatness that was Nina Simone.

THEATER

21. See Paradise BlueA stranger in Paradise.

Signature Theatre, through June 10.

In 1949, the Paradise Club sits at the center of De-troit’s rapidly gentrifying Blackbottom neighbor-hood. Blue, a trumpet player and the club’s owner, is wrestling with whether to flee the neighborhoodand his memories there, when a mysterious wom-an arrives to complicate matters. Obie-winningplaywright Dominique Morisseau begins her Sig-nature residency with this story of troubled pastsin a changing city. s.h.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

22. See London Symphony OrchestraWhatever suits your fancy.

David Geffen Hall, May 4, 6, and 7.

Whether you’re feeling irrationally okay about theworld or marinating in a self-pitying funk,Mahler’s three final works put it all in perspective.The Ninth Symphony and his orchestral song cycleDas Lied von der Erde cover the emotional spec-trum from giddy bliss to bone-crushing sorrow,and the Tenth is his unfinished tombstone. j.d.

MOVIES

23. See Paul Schrader x 4Taking stock.

Metrograph, May 4–6.

The ever-provocative director-screenwriter PaulSchrader gets a mini-retrospective ahead of therelease of his latest film, First Reformed. This quar-tet exemplifies what Schrader has called his “manin a room” films—a lonely-guy group of thrillersconsisting of Taxi Driver (directed by MartinScorsese), the fashion-setting American Gigolo,The Walker, and the underseen Light Sleeper, fea-turing Willem Dafoe as a tortured drug dealer.Schrader will be at the first three screenings. d.e.

TV

24. Watch Little WomenNever too much Louisa May Alcott.

PBS, May 13.

The BBC and PBS’s Masterpiece teamed up toproduce this three-part mini-series about theMarch girls, featuring an impressive cast: EmilyWatson as Marmee, Angela Lansbury as AuntMarch, Maya Hawke as Jo, and Kathryn New-ton (Big Little Lies, Blockers) as Amy.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

25. Hear Shai WosnerSounds of the wee hours.

92nd Street Y, May 4 and 11.

Schubert’s late piano sonatas are midnight music,best heard when your defenses are down andthere’s time for leisurely, roundabout thoughts.That being an impractical time for a public con-cert, Shai Wosner divides them up between twoone-hour concerts at 9 p.m., just late enough forthe music to resonate into the night. j.d.

SOLUTION TO LAST ISSUE’S PUZZLE

P A T I N A S L I N K S B L E S S M E

A S H R A M I O D I N E R E L A T E D

S C R A B B L E T I L E X U N I T A R Y

T O E L O T T O L E F T S R V S

A T E A L I V E T I L D E E T T E

N O N E Y I N B A S E H I T S

I P A D S S H U C K C O R N R E N A L

D E W Y B E A R A D I N M A T T E

T A R L E A D I N G R O L E X R O A D

A L I A L T A O H A R E R A M S

G E N E S I S S C A M S C A L Y P S O

K A T E K E A N E M A T E A W W

M I L T F U N E R A L P Y R E X C O N

O D E O N T O M B E S T D M E R E

O L I V E I T S S O L A T E M A X E D

G E N E R A L S W E T D E A N

T R O T U P S E T B O X L U N C H

I C I R I P U P S C I F I O L E

R U M O R E D M A Y O R O F T A M P A X

I R E F U S E P R E F E R E N S U R E

S E X T E T S S E T F E E D O N N A S

SUMMER

TRAVELGUID

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Spring FlingsThaw out this spring at some of the world’s most exciting vacation destinations. Fromsun-drenched Amelia Island to the historically rich capital of the nation, DC, these seasonallyripe gems are brimming with cultural treasures, relaxing and invigorating activities, andirresistible fare.

This section’s online

directory can be found at

nymag.com/

summertravel

This Island

Is Your Island

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AMELIA ISLAND, an enchanting barrier

island off Florida’s northeastern coast,

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voted a top island destination in North

America, the island offers a perfect

balance of natural beauty complemented

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collection of award-winning independent

restaurants, luxurious spas, outdoor

adventures, and superlative golf courses.

Amelia Island provides a prize-winning

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from home. Just thirty minutes from

Jacksonville International Airport, Amelia

has consistently welcomed generations

of fun-loving families looking to make

memories to last a lifetime.

The fun at Amelia Island doesn’t

stop at the close of the summer

either. Plan for a fall trip, too, chock-

full of amazing island activities. Relax

at the Amelia Island Wellness Festival

(Nov. 9-11), a three-day health-focused

retreat renewing the mind, body,

and soul. Hosted at The Ritz-Carlton,

it offers attendees educational and

inspirational sessions with acclaimed

names in yoga, meditation, and fitness

(AmeliaIslandwellnessfestival.com).

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Open (Nov. 9-11), the largest pétanque

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drawn carriage rides and period

vendors, themed characters and

entertainers, along with festive lights,

charming decor, and holiday tastes

(AmeliaIsland.com/Christmas).

Photo courtesy of AmeliaIsland.com

WITH ROBUST offerings in museums

and on stages, DC’s arts and culture

scene shines in summertime. Explore

the creative side of the nation’s capital.

Through Jan. 21, 2019, the Renwick

Gallery hosts No Spectators: The Art

of Burning Man, an exhibit dedicated

to the Nevada festival that consists

of room-size installations in the

gallery and sculptures throughout

the surrounding neighborhood. The

National Portrait Gallery dives deep

into an understudied art form with

Black Out: Silhouettes Then and

Now (May 11 – March 10, 2019),

while the Phillips Collection highlights

Aboriginal Australian women artists in

Marking the Infinite (June 2 – Sept. 9),

challenging viewers to connect with

the natural world.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, one

of Broadway’s most innovative

and successful productions, comes

to the Kennedy Center from June

12 – Sept. 16. In addition to the musical,

various museums,hotels,andattractions

throughout the area are hosting their

own exhibits and experiences related

to Alexander Hamilton. Arena Stage

hosts world premiere musical The Snow

Child through May 20, based on

Eowyn Ivey’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated

novel. The Color Purple comes to the

KennedyCenter from July 21 to Aug. 26,

while Shakespeare Theatre Company

stagesCamelot at Sidney Harman Hall,

May 22 – July 1. The Woolly Mammoth

Theater hosts Botticelli in the Fire,

May 28 – June 24, about an artist

and mentor of Da Vinci navigating a

populist revolution.

DC’s summer festival slate includes

Capital Pride (June 7-10), which

celebrates the LGBTQ community

with street happenings, concerts, and

a parade. DC Jazz Festival (June

8-17) brings the world’s best jazz

musicians to venues all over the city.

WASHINGTON, DC888.301.7001 | washington.org

Explore the Creative Side of DC

DC Jazz Festival, Photo Credit: Jati Lindsay

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Lincoln Memorial

By the People Festival (June 21-24),

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Giant National Capital Barbecue Battle

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fi nest pit masters and live music. The

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honor the cultures of Africa, Armenia,

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The actual author of The Art of the Deal,Tony Schwartz, is the rare prominent col-laborator in the burnishing of the Trumpmyth in those pre-Apprentice decades whohas expressed public remorse at having put“lipstick on a pig,” and he tried to makeamends by trolling Trump in 2016. “This isthe most perilous moment in modernAmerican history,” tweeted Richard Haass,the president of the Council of ForeignRelations, in March of this year, as theTrump presidency careered into danger onnearly every front. “And it has been largelybrought about by ourselves, not events.” Youdon’t hear many others in such circles on the Upper East or West Sides assuming any responsibility. It’s all someone else’s fault.

During his campaign, Trump made a cause out of the corrup-tion intrinsic to pay-for-play political donations like those he

used to give. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he claimed, “which is why I alone can fix it.” The second half of that sentence was a lie, but the first was true. As he’d elaborate in pitch-perfect Cohn-speak, he gave to “everybody” because “when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass.” At the first Repub-lican presidential debate in August 2015, he fine-tuned his target: “Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wed-ding. You know why? She had no choice, because I gave.”

He was referring to the fact that either he or his “foundation” gave at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. He could have added that between 2002 and 2009, he had also contributed six times to Hillary Clinton’s political war chest. And that he had given Bill Clinton, whom he met with to discuss fund-raising as far back as 1994, free access to his northern-Westchester club, Trump National, and on occasion played golf with him there. Even without that degree of incriminating detail, Trump’s accusation of a quid pro quo stung Hillary Clinton—so much so that after her defeat, she felt compelled to revisit Trump’s wed-ding invitation, sort of, in the opening pages of her postelection self-autopsy,

What Happened. “He was a fixture of the New York scene when I was a senator—like a lot of big-shot real-estate guys of the city, only more flamboyant and self-promoting,” she writes of Trump. “In 2005 he invited us to his wedding to Melania in Palm Beach, Florida. We weren’t friends, so I assume he wanted as much star power as you can get. Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend, so we decided to go. Why not? I thought it would be a fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle, and I was right.”

Let’s posit that Clinton is telling the truth when she says that she attended the wed-ding only because “Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend” and she wanted to take in a campy spectacle—an explanation that clears her of Trump’s charge that his contributions compelled her to turn up. Let’s also give her a pass for choosing not to regurgitate her and Bill’s financial history with Trump. Even so, everything else about this breezy and disin-genuous paragraph epitomizes the honor-among-celebrities ethos of the bipartisan New York Establishment that helped Trump get where he was by 2005. To say that Trump was typical of “big-shot real-estate guys of the city” but merely “more flamboyant and self-promoting” is tanta-mount to saying that Robert Durst was typical of the big-shot real-estate guys in the Durst family but more prone to being accused of murder. The Clintons had to know that there was a more malevolent side to Trump’s so-called flamboyance than his boorishness, vulgar properties, television stardom, tawdry tabloid antics, and even his brazen destruction of bas-relief sculp-tures he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum when demolishing Bonwit Teller for Trump Tower. None of it was secret. If the Clintons didn’t know, it’s because they didn’t want to know.

After all, it had been front-page news, including in the Times, when the federal government sued the Trumps under the Fair Housing Act in 1973 for refusing to rent apartments to black applicants (whose paperwork they coded “C” for “colored”). This suit was filed just after Trump had met Cohn, who took on the case and filed a frivolous countersuit demanding $100 mil-lion from the government for “defamation.” The Trumps retreated two years later by signing a consent decree—and soon vio-lated that, too, forcing the Department of Justice to file new complaints of racial dis-crimination in 1978. The Clintons might have also heard how in 1989 Trump, run-ning amok in a trademark rage, tried to help toss the city into turmoil by taking out a full-page racist ad in the four daily papers demanding a reinstitution of the death penalty for “roving bands of wild criminals”

after five black male teenagers were charged (erroneously, as DNA would con-firm in 2002) in the rape of a white female Central Park jogger. The Clintons may have even encountered the news, as did most Americans, that Ivana Trump had accused her husband of rape in a sworn divorce deposition uncovered by Harry Hurt III for his 1993 Trump biography.

So to return to Hillary Clinton’s flip rhe-torical question: Why not go to the Trump-Melania wedding in 2005? These incidents are just a few of the many reasons why a former president and sitting United States senator with presidential ambitions should not have gone to this particular “fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle” in Palm Beach. But they just couldn’t stop themselves, any more than so many Democratic leaders of a quarter-century earlier couldn’t resist dressing up for Cohn’s fun, gaudy, over-the-top birthday gala at Studio 54. In the bipar-tisan New York political culture that nur-tured Cohn and Trump, the statute of limitations for nearly every crime or out-rage lasts about 48 hours. Nothing sticks; even repeated racist bygones can be bygones. Whether Hillary Clinton attended the wedding (Bill showed solely for the reception) because she’d taken Trump’s money, or because she wanted to be in the mix of power and celebrity no matter how tacky, or because she hoped there might be more favors to extract from Trump or someone else in the wedding party, doesn’t matter. Whatever the explanation, the then–New York senator, sitting in a reserved seat in the front row, lent a touch of civic legitimacy to Trump that the other glitzy celebrities on hand could not. He got what he’d paid for. He had written his checks knowing that the Clintons could be counted on not to bite the small hand that fed them—at least not until their own self-interest was threatened in 2016.

In an aside that’s tucked into the Oval Office pyrotechnics of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff offers a glimpse into a representative back channel in

the bipartisan Barter and Swap Exchanges of the Trump era: He points out that it was the flack Matthew Hiltzik, “an active Demo-crat who had worked for Hillary Clinton” and who “also represented Ivanka Trump’s fashion line,” who gave Trump’s prized aide Hope Hicks her start in public relations. Wolff also helpfully (and accurately) reports that Hiltzik had represented Harvey Wein-stein, another major New York player in Democratic politics (and a Trump-wedding attendee), during those years when Hiltzik and his staff were expected to “protect him” from accusations of sexual harassment and abuse. Weinstein was further protected by

The Original Donald Trump

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 2 5


his contributions to Democrats, led by those to the Clintons. Everyone in New York who had professional dealings with him knew he was a pig and a bully, much as they knew about Trump. But the parties, screenings, and star schmoozing were too much fun for Democratic politicians to resist. It’s because Weinstein had good reason to believe that his political donations and liberal bona fides would serve as a get-out-of-jail-free card for even criminal behavior that he released that bizarre statement vowing to turn his “full attention” to fighting the NRA after the Times and The New Yorker uncovered his history of sexual assaults.

Wolff might have added that Hiltzik’s résumé featured stints as deputy executive director of the New York State Democratic Committee, as a consultant on Middle East issues for Kirsten Gillibrand and “Jewish outreach” for Clinton, and as a shill for Jared Kushner’s real-estate company. In December 2016, Hiltzik took on a month’s employment for David Pecker’s American Media Inc. at a time when its flagship, The National Enquirer, was dealing with the aftermath of its coverage (and suppression) of the alleged affair between Trump and the Playboy model Karen McDougal. Hiltzik is also a “longtime friend” of Bill de Blasio, according to the Washington Post, but what are conflicts of interest or politics among clients and friends in pursuit of power? The same strange bedfellows may be useful to de Blasio should he try to pursue Trump’s New York path to the White House.

As Cohn says in Angels, the questions that count are not matters of principle but “Who will pick up the phone when I call? Who owes me favors?” Cohn’s Favor Bank was such that he even gained access to the floor of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and briefly sat in the unoccu-pied box of the liberal Eugene McCarthy. His extended circle included figures as diverse as Cardinal Francis Spellman, vari-ous members of the Gambino crime fam-ily, Norman Mailer, George Steinbrenner, and the inevitable Alan Dershowitz, who had requested and received Cohn’s help in gaining entrée into Studio 54. Cohn even became pals with the CBS News executive Fred Friendly, who decades before had produced the legendary Edward R. Mur-row special that helped rid America of Joe McCarthy. Had Cohn not been struck down by aids, Trump might have arrived in Washington far faster.

Some of the rich, connected, and power-ful New Yorkers who failed to stand up to Trump before it was too late tried to cover their tracks once the music stopped and he had won the Republican nomination for president. When in April 2016 The Holly-wood Reporter called 89 guests who had

been at his 2005 wedding to request a com-ment, it did not receive a single response. One attendee who did speak up during the election year was the novelist Joseph O’Neill, who had attended as the plus-one of an invited Vogue editor. Writing in The New Yorker, he suggested that “a revisionist remembrance” was called for given Trump’s “metamorphosis into a would-be dictator.” A wedding that he had viewed ever since as “an anomalous and trivial item of personal recollection” now struck him “as the stuff of historic testimony,” perhaps to be reviewed “in the spirit of a Hannah Arendt or a Vic-tor Klemperer.”

I was not at Trump’s wedding, but O’Neill’s perspective resonated with me because of another wedding, one that I attended in 2012—indeed the largest and most lavish wedding I’ve ever been to. It, too, calls for a revisionist remembrance. The two men getting married, acquain-tances of mine from show business, held their ceremony in a large Broadway house, followed by a vast seated dinner in the old Roseland Ballroom a few blocks away. The mother of one of the grooms was a theater producer who had co-produced a Broad-way revival of The Normal Heart a year earlier. Larry Kramer was there, and so were celebrities like Barbara Walters and such politicians as Christine Quinn, the out Speaker of the New York City Council, and her spouse. Quinn was then collecting chits for what would be her unsuccessful Democratic mayoral campaign.

There was premium seating at the cer-emony, as it happened. Just before it began, the congregants were treated to the spectacle of Donald and Melania Trump swooping down the aisle to their seats down front. The Trumps were no doubt there because the father of one of the grooms and the host of the wedding was Steven Roth, a far more successful New York real-estate titan than Trump. Roth has also been in business with the scandal-and-debt-plagued real-estate family of Trump’s son-in-law, the (non-Tony) Kushners, themselves profuse Democratic donors until the family patriarch, Charles, went to prison for multiple felonies in 2005.

Three and a half years after this wed-ding, in February 2016, Trump appointed Steven Roth to his campaign’s economic-advisory team. Once Trump took office, Roth would remain a visible supplicant, appearing with the president at a public event in Ohio to lend credence to his bogus infrastructure initiative. By then, Trump was piling up the most aggressive of record assaulting LGBTQ rights since the era of Reagan and Cohn. His Justice Depart-ment would soon file a brief at the Supreme Court supporting the case of the Colorado

baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding like the one Roth hosted and Trump attended for Roth’s son.

It’s easy for me, and I imagine a fair number of this wedding’s other attendees, to say that we would never drink a glass of Roth’s Champagne again. But then, we’re not looking for any invitations, favors, or money from him. There’s no sign, however, that Roth is being shunned by the city’s most powerful elites, including those who practice a showy rhetorical liberalism that is a somewhat lower priority than advanc-ing their own social and financial interests. So what if Trump is translating homopho-bia into federal law at every opportunity, from the transgender military ban to the en masse elevation of gay-rights oppo-nents to the federal bench to the creation of a federal “religious freedom” office to defend health workers who don’t want to treat gay patients? The wedding was fabu-lous! Let’s move on.

Contrast the Vichy passivity of New York’s elites with the mind-set of the citizenry of Abington, Pennsylvania. As the Times reported this month, this Philadelphia sub-urb was outraged to learn that another bil-lionaire Trump economic adviser, the New York financier Stephen Schwarzman, had purchased the naming rights of its public high school, his alma mater, in exchange for a $25 million gift. As one horrified Abington graduate put it to the Times, if the school’s name can be auctioned off, “what else is for sale?” The local protests were so loud that the school district rescinded the renaming. Needless to say, no such questions or qualms prevented Schwarzman’s name from being plastered all over the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street flagship in exchange for a gift of $100 million.

In Angels in America, Prior Walter, these nights embodied by Andrew Garfield, declares that “the world only spins forward.” It can also spin in circles, as it turns out: Steven Roth’s son, married at a gay wedding attended by Roy Cohn’s protégé, is a co-producer of the current Broadway revival. Cohn is dead at the end of Angels, as is the Cold War in which he first thrived, but Prior is still standing, frail but determined, an apostle of hope. Yet the specter of Donald Trump casts a pall over this eight-hour epic, as it does over nearly everything else in America. Watching Angels now, you can’t help but be struck by how the strain of evil that Kushner identified a quarter-century ago has only metastasized in both political parties, albeit in different degrees and in different ways, ever since. Nor can we escape the realization that the cancer now consuming Washington was incubated not in that city’s notorious swamp but in the loftiest Zip Codes of New York. ■


StaceyVs. Stacey

CONT I NU ED F ROM PAGE 3 1

“They put me on a plane, and it got diverted to Milwaukee because of engine trouble. My mother started calling the gate agent every 30 minutes—the gate agent got to know my mother very well. When it became clear they weren’t going to be able to get me on another plane, they put me in a hotel overnight. I had to stay in a hotel and get myself to the air-port the next morning.” A day after the other delegates had arrived, Abrams showed up in Scottsdale. And when she got there?

“I was unhappy. But I’m very good at working with people even when I’m not happy with them.” What about those other Mississippi delegates? “I hung out with kids from other troops.”

The story cuts to a couple of essential truths about Abrams. She sees herself as a victim of her minority status: “I’ve been a minority for a very long time. I’m really good at it. And one thing you learn about being a minority is that you don’t get everything you want.” Yet she also sees her-self as triumphant in her workarounds. People don’t like her? Fine, she’ll find other, more simpatico people. In grown-up terms, that has meant cultivating a national stage, national financial backers, and the idea that she could build a new-voter infrastructure in Georgia where oth-ers have tried and failed.

Abrams isn’t blind to the discomfort that her ferocious confidence and self- possession engender: “My intensity and intentionality for those that do not share it is off- putting. That’s the level of intensity I intend to bring to the governor’s mansion.”

What she doesn’t bring is a husband or children. “I’d have plenty of time to focus on the job,” she says one friend told her. Many women reading those words are nodding their heads yes. But per Jim Galloway’s remark, is being single and childless a lia-bility in Georgia, especially because she’s black? Although attitudes are definitely changing, it’s no secret that black churches, and African-Americans in general, have been less supportive of gay rights than other groups. And several people I inter-viewed said, not for attribution, that they thought Abrams was probably gay.

Georgia has elected gay candidates to its general assembly. In 2016, Atlantans chose a queer, 24-year-old African- American woman, Park Cannon, to repre-sent them in the statehouse; more black women serve in its general assembly than in any other state legislature in the coun-try. But it’s the statewide offices where the ceiling remains. Georgia has elected only two African-Americans, both of them men, to statewide office.

So I get Abrams back on the phone to ask about what I’m hearing, that a single black female can’t be governor in Geor-gia, and that there’s a line out there that she’s a lesbian.

After such a long pause that I think she’s hung up on me, Abrams replies. “I’m trying to think exactly how I’m going to answer this,” she says. “I am proud of who I am. I do not believe my race or my gen-der or my marital status are disqualify-ing. I am a very strong LGBTQ ally. I am personally heterosexual.”

She calls the gay rumors “pseudo wor-ries, signals of internal fears” among peo-ple who harbor “deep disquiet with the change that my candidacy represents.”

While we’re on that subject: Can a black woman in 2018 Georgia win the general election for governor?

“I believe there’s a progressive Georgia lying just below the red patina that has covered the state for years,” she says. “I’m afraid that we’ve for so long ignored the opportunity that, absent an ambitious and innovative campaign like mine, we will miss it again. There is a clear path to vic-tory. It’s a hard one, but it’s clear.”

We come to the end of this story asking the question: Despite the best efforts of the Staceys, does the governor’s

race end in tragedy for Georgia Democrats yet again? As of the end of March, Abrams had raised a total of $3.3 million and Evans $2.6 million. But the leading Republican contender, Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle, had raked in $6.8 million.

And this question, too: If there’s a blue wave sweeping the nation, is it going to wash over Georgia, or will it skip the state, as has been the case in the past? “The blue wave may be more like a thunderstorm, because there are places that are not ready to elect Democrats in the state of Georgia,” win List’s Melita Easters says. Some of that is because of gerrymandering, which has been brutally effective against Demo-crats in Georgia after nearly 20 years of Republican domination of the legislature and the governor’s office. To be somewhat reductive, the Ossoff campaign was hurt by the weight of its own national symbol-

ism. But he also lost because he was run-ning in a gerrymandered district, where the previous congressman, Tom Price (he of the late, brief stint as Health and Human Services secretary), “used to win with Joseph Stalin numbers,” says political analyst Fox. It’s a reason both Staceys give for wanting to be governor, as opposed to running for another office: The governor can rewrite the voting districts in the state.

The fact that Ossoff came within 4 per-centage points of winning is a testament to the state’s changing demographics: Moder-ate white women and growing minority populations in suburban Atlanta are begin-ning to have an impact on elections. It really is game on, says Michael Owens, Demo-cratic Party chair in Cobb County, the state’s third-largest county and a hotbed of suburban- mom political activity. “I mean, here I am, I’m an African-American male, and I was out there with the liberal moms from day one, out there protesting,” Owens says. “But this is a 2024 story that we’re try-ing to make happen in 2016, 2018, and 2020. I think we’re pushing this three cycles prior to where the demographics would start to really take over.”

Which brings us to what is both the first and last question in this race: Will white men vote for a woman, let alone a black woman, in the general election? The Atlanta metro area and its ever-bluer 2.9 million voters aren’t quite enough to guar-antee a Democrat victory in a state with 6 million registered voters. In the most opti-mistic nonpartisan scenario for Abrams I read, from georgiapol.com, if she “gets black turnout up to 56 percent (which is possible considering she would be Geor-gia’s first black governor) and gets His-panic and Asian turnout to 40 percent each, she will win 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent.” That’s a lot of ifs and just a sliver of a victory. The Democratic candidate must get white votes, and Evans has been going hard for them.

Abrams has started going for them too. In a mid-April ad called “Guys Like Me,” three men—one black and two white, all of them big, beefy dudes who definitely were not styled for the camera—tell us why they’re for Stacey Abrams. “She’s tough,” says one of the white men, as country chords twang. “She’s fighting against tax hikes that’s gonna hurt guys like me that get up at the crack of dawn to go work long hours.” At the very end of the ad, in what feels like an outtake added back in, he says, with a laugh, “What’d you think I’d say?”

In other words: Don’t assume because I look and talk the way I do that I’m not for the black lady. Are there enough guys like him out there to put her in the gov-ernor’s mansion? ■


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crossword

Across

1 ___ Chancellor (address forAngela Merkel)

6 Posh resorts10 Tapped on, as a cigar15 Dells, e.g.18 Bradbury category19 Where a padlock goes20 Peace in the Middle East?22 100%23 It may say rodgers or

favre on the back (colors ofthe rainbow)

27 Skater Rippon 28 JFK’s prep school 29 Word on receipts 30 “Abstraction White Rose”

painter, 1927 (states admitted to the Union)

35 Thin and dry 36 Pretend 37 Invalidate 38 Carnegie or Evans 39 Spectrum creator 41 Yank (on) 43 Carnation containers 46 Secret recipients get them 50 Have an inkling about 53 You can see the Flatiron Build-

ing from it (U.S. presidents) 56 Wedding-day role 58 In a ___ (troubled)

59 Citified60 St. Cloud’s state (abbr.)63 Small battery65 Continue66 Bunch component67 Before, poetically68 Time to have your guard up

(months)71 Brooklyn hoopster72 Becomes edible74 Narrow opening75 Suárez of soccer76 Put together77 “Wicked Game” singer Chris

78 Viewed to be 80 First, in Florence 82 Its slogan is “Keep Climbing”

(Greek alphabet) 85 Mysterious puzzles 89 Condition of sale at a yard sale 90 “Law & Order” episodes 91 Bring flowers to, e.g. 93 Small business? 94 Per ___ (allowance) 96 Old-timey “OMG!” 99 Common dinner hour, on a

grandfather clock 100 Strips with humorous effect 103 1987 Sue Grafton novel

(English alphabet) 109 Miss Scarlett’s surname 110 Secret location?

111 “Night” author Wiesel112 Amusing phrase spoken on

one day in early spring—or my wish for solvers on this puzzle, considering the first word of each theme entry

119 To’s counterpart120 “___ That in a Garden Ever

Grew” (Edna St. Vincent Millay poem)

121 Funny Bombeck122 Clinton’s choice123 “Indubitably!”124 “Affliction” Oscar nominee 125 Highly suggestive 126 Queen ___ lace

Down

1 One of its letters stands for “sodium”

2 Unlike this answer (abbr.) 3 Risk roller 4 Have ___ of flying 5 Psychological warfare 6 Mysterious healer 7 Cough up 8 Snake in Shakespeare 9 Room 10 Request from 11 Wheat amount 12 Bret who chronicled the

California Gold Rush

13 Other than that 14 The AG in DC heads it 15 Art class adhesive 16 Delete all information from 17 In an underhanded way 21 Bronze, silver, or gold 24 Conrad of “Diff ’rent Strokes” 25 Michael of “SNL” 26 Tug-of-war injury 30 Areas between outfielders 31 Hosiery shade 32 Name seen in elevators 33 Away from the office 34 Lovely Heidi 35 Say “No thanks” 38 Contradict 40 Took a turn on “Wheel of

Fortune” 42 Chit-chat 43 YouTube feature 44 Too 45 Gets lathery 47 Structure by a pool 48 Stretched (one’s neck) 49 Ted Cruz’s body 51 Fellows 52 Cheek drop 54 Word after North or South 55 Wharf 57 Hell-___ (they party hard) 60 Largest city in the Yucatán

Peninsula 61 Colored parts of the eye 62 Language spoken in

Kathmandu 64 Mutated gene 66 Bowl for washing 68 “Put Your Head on My

Shoulder” singer 69 “C’est tout!” 70 Desperate 73 Suffers humiliation 76 Biblical trio 78 Royal ___ (Thai restaurant in

Chelsea) 79 Work from a pattern, maybe 81 He coached Da Bears 83 They may have a red A 84 Nice evening 86 “Scoot over!” 87 It borders three oceans 88 Playlet 92 Former 95 Financier Carl 97 Flexibility 98 Island with many yoga retreats 100 Snug 101 Touchdown site in Illinois 102 White spreads 103 Salivate 104 “There’s no other option for me” 105 Binge 106 Ready for a 10k, say 107 Different 108 “The Quare Fellow”

playwright 110 Lionel Richie used to sport one 113 A billion years 114 Curvy Kate product 115 Letters in Einstein’s equation 116 Womanly half 117 “First of all …” 118 It borders Central Park, briefly

The solution to last week’s puzzle appears on page 81.

Episode IVNew York Crossword by Matt Gaffney

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39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

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Honoring 25 years of World Press Freedom Day.

Don’t just read

Read The Atlantic.

Read The Wall Street Journal.

Read The New York Times.

Read the Financial Times.

Read The Guardian.

Read The Economist.

Read USA Today.

Read National Review.

Read BBC News.

Read the Los Angeles Times.

Read The New Yorker.

Read the Chicago Tribune.

Read The Baltimore Sun.

Read the New York Daily News.

Read more.

Listen more.

Understand more.

It all starts with a free press.

THE APPROVAL MATRIX Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies.


lowbrow

despic

able

highbrow

PH

OT

OG

RA

PH

S:

MC

KM

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VA

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YO

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/TW

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(M

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PA

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MC

MU

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(M

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); C

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JO

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The NEA tried to ban Allan Monga,a refugee from Zambia, from

representing Maine in the PoetryOut Loud national finals because

he is not a citizen.

A collector accuses Jeff Koons and his dealer, Gagosian Gallery,

of not delivering three monumental sculptures—even

after he paid millions for them.

Simcha Felder, the State SenateDemocrat who persists in

caucusing with the Republicans.

A judge ruled that Madonna’s ex–artadviser was within her rights toauction the singer’s hairbrush,

underwear, and a breakup letterfrom rapper Tupac Shakur.

Mick Mulvaney,pay-to-playa.

Maybe the president should have gotten a second opinion on Dr. Ronny L. Jackson.

RIP, super-chic dead-stockvintage shop Rue St.-Denis.The Kushner

Companies wereslapped with a

federal subpoenaregarding rent-

regulatedproperties.

A federal judge rules that “DACA’s rescission was

arbitrary and capricious.”

Sir Antony Sher’s fiercely precise King Lear at BAM.

Matthew Broderick’s devil-as-a-bit-of-an-aesthete in

The Seafarer at the Irish Rep.

The immersive night-on-the-savannah sound design and

live music accompanyingMlima’s Tale at the Public.

Carousel’s “Blow High, BlowLow”: the best dance number

on Broadway in years.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’snovel Spring, his most

insightful andsuspenseful since the

early My Struggle books.

The best, worst, right, and left of America’s ideologies mash up in The Optimistic Decade,

Heather Abel’s Cliven Bundy–inspired debut novel.

Will Doig’s zippy tourof Chinese soft power

in Southeast Asia,High-Speed Empire.

Choo-choo!

The variety of African-American

dreams and disappointments in

Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man.

The Met hosts LACMA’sfascinating “Painted in

Mexico” show.

… But we’ll watch itanyway just to savor

Maeve’s demurerobo-ruthlessness.

44/876: The cheese in Stingrecognized the cheese in Shaggy,and the two made fondue, baby.

Mossylist’s adorableYouTube stop-motion

lullaby “Sun Went Down,Moon Came Up.”

The Handmaid’s Tale returns to remind

us not to forget to vote in the midterms …

… Related, somehow: Janelle Monáe’s sexy Handmaid’s-themed “I Like That” video.

Well, somebodyaround there had to

wear a white hat.

MTA experimenting withdouble-decker buses. Whosays tourists should get

all the upstairs fun?

City Councilconsiders resident-

only parkingspaces. Who saystourists shouldget all the spots?

Nine years after moving to San Francisco, Una Pizza

Napoletana returns to the Lower East Side.

Fox has fullfaith in Sean

Hannity.

Kanye is back onTwitter. Boy, is he ever

back on Twitter. The MTA spent $158million to bring back theunnecessary Cortlandt

Street subway stop.

Amazon plans to follow youaround with eavesdropping

Alexabots for your home.

Burrito-size super-rats areterrorizing Brooklyn Heights,

and neighbors blame Chipotle.

The sad-sack sToronto was

radicalized on 4 ”message boards.

Ugly dad sneakers areback in anti-style …

Will Westworld’s portentous, time-shifty narrative add up to anything that makes much sense in the end?Seems rather unlikely …

bril

lia

nt

Art hegemon Frieze New York puts on a

tribute to Feature Inc. gallery and its ahead-

of-his-time owner, Hudson, “For Your

Infotainment.”

… Of course, likeeverything, they

look ugly-cute onyou—if you’re 23.

Avengers: InfinityWar’s often-corny

CGI hash …

… Nonetheless will get our fannish

obeisance.

“And our Justice Department—which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won’t …”

Emmanuel Macron’s not-so-subtle shots at

Trump before Congress (but after their mutual presidential foreplay).“Pavé Parisien”—a

cobblestone-size Sonia Rykiel handbag inspired by

the May ’68 tumult in France, the same year she opened a

store in St.-Germain-des-Prés.

Jimmy Buffett is opening a Margaritaville hotel in Times

Square. If you lose your shaker of salt, the one in

the mini-bar is $27.

The plot to label coffee as

cancer-causing.

STRICTLY LIMITED BROADWAY ENGAGEMENT • 15 WEEKS ONLYOBOOTH THEATRE • BoysInTheBand.com

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