JULY/AUGUST 2022

[Link]

How Animals
Understand
the World
By Ed Yong
Plus:
Jennifer Senior
Reports From
Inside Steve
Bannon’s Head
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O F N O PA R T Y O R C L I Q U E
VOL. 330–NO. 1 JULY/AUGUST 2022 CONTENTS

Features

38
Back to Chagos
Half a century ago, 2,000 people
were forcibly removed from a
remote string of islands in the
Indian Ocean. This year, a group
of them set sail for home.
By Cullen Murphy

50
A Mad Hunt for
Civil War Treasure
Did the FBI steal the gold
of Dents Run?
By Chris Heath

62
COVER STORY
Our Blinding, Blaring World
By flooding the environment with
light and sound, we’re confounding
the senses of countless animals.
But we can still save the quiet and
preserve the dark.
By Ed Yong

22
American Rasputin
By Jennifer Senior
Steve Bannon is still scheming.
And he’s still a threat to democracy.
Steve Bannon in Washington, D.C., in May

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS BUCK FOR THE ATLANTIC 3

JULY/AUGUST 2022

Front Culture & Critics Back

6
Editor’s Note
76
OMNIVORE
82
BOOKS
90
ESSAY
The Book That Never A White Author Fails The Vindication
Stops Changing Her Black Characters of Jack White

8
The Commons
What I’ve learned about
Dublin, and myself, in a
Geraldine Brooks has
sympathy for her protagonists.
An obsessive protector of
rock’s past could hold the
lifetime of reading Ulysses That’s not enough. key to its future.
Discussion & Debate By Fintan O’Toole By Jordan Kisner By Spencer Kornhaber

Dispatches
79
BOOKS
85
Invitation
100
Ode to My Thesaurus

11
OPENING ARGUMENT
Beach Bummer
The world is burning.
Have another piña colada.
A poem by Jane Hirshfield By James Parker

We Have No
Nuclear Strategy
By Lauren Groff
86
The U.S. can’t keep ignoring BOOKS

the threat these weapons pose. Why Is Dad So Mad?

By Tom Nichols A father dares to
explore his rage.
By Daniel Engber

16
FIRST PERSON
My Family’s Doll Test
Toys can reflect racial
attitudes—and shape them.
By Ibram X. Kendi

On the Cover

PHOTOGRAPH BY
SHAYAN ASGHARNIA
FOR THE ATLANTIC

4 JULY/AUGUST 2022
"N*SFBEZ
for a constantly
changing world?
Does my strategy embrace it?
"OENZQPSUGPMJPSFŗFDUJU

For some of life’s questions, you’re not alone.

5PHFUIFSXFDBOÎOEBOBOTXFS

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EDITOR’S NOTE

AGAINST LABELS

Dear Reader, Why do I care so much? Because The Our print covers—which, even in the
Sometimes I write to you about the Atlantic has reached new heights of artistic internet age, remain the face of The Atlan-
parlous state of our democracy, other times sophistication over the past several years, tic—were a special focus for Peter, Oliver,
about the travails of the pandemic. This and I want to share this sophistication with and crew. I asked them to make our covers
month, I write to you about a matter of the world. Yes, I know, the baker shouldn’t uncluttered and elegant, and to design
absolutely no importance to the future praise his own bread, but this isn’t really them in such a way as to make the words
of the republic. My subject is peel-off my bread at all. Our appearance—in print, inside impossible to ignore.
magazine mailing labels. on your laptop, on your phone—is the This month’s cover, featuring gorgeous
Please stay with me here. First, take work of an extraordinary team of designers, photography directed by Luise Stauss and
a look at the cover of your magazine. artists, and photography editors, a group Christine Walsh, is one of my favorites,
You will find, in the lower right corner, I credit with making this 165-year-old only partially because of our perspica-
a mailing label. (Obviously, this message is magazine look as fresh, to borrow from cious and knowing owl. It is also a favorite
directed to our subscribers. If you are not Emerson, as a trickling rainbow in July. because it features stories by two of our
already a subscriber, I know of a solution Over the generations, The Atlantic’s most gifted writers, Ed Yong and Jennifer
to this problem.) Until recently, your mail- enthusiasm for aesthetics has waxed and Senior. It is a coincidence of timing that
ing address was printed directly onto the waned. This was, and is, a magazine of Ed, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year
cover of the magazine, inside a big white words, and some past editors have felt that for his work explaining the coronavirus
box. Many of us found this aesthetically the words were enough. This approach was pandemic, and Jen, who won a Pulitzer
irritating, because the big white box was sometimes prompted by a specific sort Prize this May for her cover story about
laid over a portion of our cover, obscur- of Yankee self-abnegation, sometimes by a family traumatized by the 9/11 attacks,
ing both its beauty and its message. We a feeling of superiority directed at now- are appearing together on the cover. This
put a lot of time and energy into making long-gone New York–based illustrated coincidence allows me to brag about their
our covers, and I believe that they are magazines. To be fair, many periods in achievements, and to note that it is the
exquisite. They should certainly not be The Atlantic’s history were marked by work of writers and creative thinkers like
subjected to defacement by the needs of careful and elegant design, and, several Ed and Jen, Peter and Oliver, Luise and
the United States Postal Service. years ago, when I asked the design team Christine, that helped The Atlantic win
So I griped. Griping isn’t seemly, but it of Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday the 2022 National Magazine Award for
is one of the more effective tools available to reimagine The Atlantic’s aesthetic, they General Excellence, the top award of the
to editors. Late last year, my grumbling looked directly to the past. Peter puts it American Society of Magazine Editors.
bore fruit, and we switched to a glued- this way: “We returned to first principles, Self-abnegation, as I suggested before,
on, easily peeled-off mailing label. This meaning that we turned to the magazine’s is embedded in The Atlantic’s DNA, and
was an important victory for the cause design source code—Issue No. 1, from so I apologize for the crowing, but these
of beauty, but a victory only partially November 1857. What we found was a awards, combined with the complicated,
realized, because not all of you have yet visual system reflecting our editorial ethos, sophisticated stories our team produces
discovered that these labels are indeed an ethos built in part on rigor, clarity, daily, and combined as well with our
removable. I know this because even candor, and principles of the enlighten- unusually successful design aesthetic, make
some of my own friends weren’t remov- ment. What this meant for our brand it a thrilling time to be at The Atlantic.
ing these labels. (On several occasions I’ve was a return to more classical typogra- Nothing is as thrilling, of course, as
done it for them, but our readers are too phy and grids, and a ruthless scrubbing peeling off a mailing label. So what are
geographically dispersed for me to take of unnecessary visual elements that had you waiting for?
on this task alone.) accreted over the past 162 years.” — Jeffrey Goldberg

6 JULY/AUGUST 2022
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B e h i n d t h e C o v e r : This issue’s cover story, by Ed Yong animals the same way he would a human being. His cover

THE
(p. 62), includes photographs of 10 different animals portrait of Mowgli, an eight-inch-tall eastern screech owl
that are variously affected by noise or light pollution. The (animal No. 11), draws our attention to the owl’s eyes,
photographer Shayan Asgharnia is known for his celebrity prompting us to consider what it’s like to experience the
portraiture—his previous subjects include Kristen Stewart world from another creature’s perspective.
and Lin-Manuel Miranda, among others. He approaches — Christine Walsh, Senior Photo Editor

media to amplify their bigot-

ries and conspiracies without
facing consequences; Father
Coughlin and Joseph McCar-
thy effectively used radio and
early television, respectively,
to spread hatred and divide
Americans. Our societal con-
flicts arise more from the mes-
In May, Jonathan sengers than from the medium.
After Haidt wrote about
how social media
Eliot Brenowitz
Seattle, Wash.

Babel dissolved the mortar Professor Haidt presents an accu-

rate, and somewhat horrifying,
of society. take on the impact of social
media on the “mortar of society.”
Allow me to offer a counterpoint.
Social media exhibits our
worst behaviors, with polariza-
tion fueled by politicians and
propagandists. But in many
areas, we have learned to do
better. The answer is not, as
Letters Haidt suggests, to regulate
social media. Rather, I suggest
thoughtful step-by-step summa- The antipathy toward experts that what’s called for is a change

F
tion of the “who, what, when, and institutions that Haidt in mindset, a return to an atti-
where, why” has given my taxed describes is not simply “the tur- tude of finding ways to collabo-
brain some level of peace and bulency and weakness of unruly rate, rather than things to take
understanding. passions,” as James Madison offense at. Clarity of thinking,
Patti Kapp called it. Rather, it is the inevi- critical analysis, seeking intent
St. Joseph, Mich. table retaliation against a system rather than taking offense at
that disenfranchises its constitu- imprecise language—these are
Mr. Haidt’s conclusion is too ents and perpetuates inequality. a lot harder to accomplish than
alarmist. The republic has sur- Alex Milgroom imposing regulations, but ulti-
vived much greater stresses than Brooklyn, N.Y. mately more productive.
social media, such as the Civil Miles Richard Fidelman
War, the Great Depression, and Jonathan Haidt believes that Acton, Mass.
the Vietnam War, and it will over the past decade, social
continue on its bumpy way into media has broken America Jonathan Haidt has it right in
For the past several years I’ve the 22nd century. into irreconcilable factions. his concern for the develop-
racked my brain trying to pin- Great cacophony is the Yet what is Twitter but the dig- ment of today’s generation of
point exactly what has brought nature of democracy. Dictators ital descendant of radio call-in children. They need the space
our country to the brink of take it for vulnerability when it shows, minus the host? Isn’t to get outside and negotiate
civil war, knowing the causes is in fact the key to perpetuity. Facebook the modern version interactions with peers, in the
were many, multilayered, and J. R. Campbell of gossip around the water- process developing the collab-
complicated. Jonathan Haidt’s Odessa, Texas cooler? Vile people use social orative social skills and sense

8 JULY/AUGUST 2022
C OM MONS
DISCUSSION

&
DEBATE

of agency and autonomy they Jonathan Haidt’s urgent analysis First Amendment. This is not taxes, lifting environmen-
will need in social interactions of the havoc unleashed by social free expression; these are weap- tal regulations, undermining
as adults. But social skills by media has prompted some seri- ons of destruction. unions). The left has plenty of
themselves are not enough. ous soul-searching on my part Mick Stern dart throwers of its own, and
Kids also need to develop and about my attitude toward the New York, N.Y. some examples of individu-
practice the intellectual skills First Amendment. als being “canceled” on social
entailed in reasoned discourse Like many staunch liberals, Jonathan Haidt’s article com- media. But the left has barely
about important ideas. This I have always been a free-speech pletely mischaracterized the gotten anywhere with actual
doesn’t happen by itself. This is absolutist. That is, I would left and failed to describe the policy change. Haidt admits
where educators come in, creat- rather defend the right of repug- real-world effects of the right’s that “often the moderates win.”
ing the contexts and reinforcing nant ideas to be heard than to side of things. On the right, the In fact, on the left, the moder-
the values needed to pave the accept the slightest censorship. dart-throwing on social media ates always win.
way for engaged citizenship in But armies of bots and trolls has bolstered actual policy Josette Akresh-Gonzales
a democracy. now flood the internet with change at the local, state, and Waltham, Mass.
Deanna Kuhn disinformation. Campaigns national levels, with new laws
Research Professor of designed by foreign intelligence restricting individual rights
Psychology and Education services stir up hatred and (abortion, voting), censoring To respond to Atlantic articles or submit
Teachers College, author questions to The Commons, please
Columbia University violence. This stuff no longer speech, and hurting working email letters@[Link]. Include
Bronxville, N.Y. deserves the protection of the people (lowering corporate your full name, city, and state.

Jonathan Haidt asks the right

questions about the current era States not participating in trade with smaller
of stupidity in America: How
did this happen? What does this
portend? But where Haidt—and
Q • & • A autocracies (such as Saudi Arabia) will only lead
to those states further associating with larger
threats like China and Russia? I agree that if we
many authors, academics, and Unless democracies defend themselves, are to oppose the autocratic threat, then we ought
activists—comes up short is in Anne Applebaum argued in May, the forces to remain consistent. Nevertheless, would there
offering ideas for how to prepare of autocracy will destroy them (“There Is be value in engaging such autocracies so as to not
the next generation. No Liberal World Order”). Here, Applebaum inadvertently support larger threats?
As a mother of two who answers a reader’s question about her article. — Norman Grunder, Phoenix, Ariz.
could hardly send her kids to
the local 7-Eleven for a Slurpee Q : Anne Applebaum’s article succinctly yet A : I don’t imagine the world dividing into
without inviting well-meaning passionately presents the historic realities of the blocs, “autocracy versus democracy,” and I wasn’t
criticism, I appreciate Haidt’s West’s global ignorance around autocratic states, suggesting that we not conduct diplomacy or trade
calls for unsupervised play. But and provides ideas for how we may evolve our with smaller dictatorships. We need to have a
the challenges ahead of the next foreign policy to combat corruption and tyranny. wide range of relationships with a lot of countries.
generation—challenges largely However, one part of Applebaum’s article that My point was rather about the oil and gas that
created by the current cohort remains unclear to me comes when she claims make possible petro-dictatorships, societies in
of middle-aged and Boomer that “the billions of dollars we have sent to which one tiny group of people controls all of the
adults—require much more Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have resources and everything else. A dramatic shift
proactive problem-solving. promoted some of the worst and most corrupt away from carbon fuels would put an end to those
Nan Noble dictators in the world.” Is this statement not monopolies and perhaps help millions of people
Seattle, Wash. self-contradicting, in the sense that the United transition to something better.

editorial offices & correspondence The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column. Manuscripts will not be returned. For instructions on sending
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9
New from Princeton University Press

Solving the global climate crisis A fascinating account of the How social status shapes our
through local partnerships and growing “Yes in My Backyard” dreams of the future and inhibits
experimentation urban movement the lives we envision for ourselves

How new parents in low-wage Enduring lessons from the desert A double portrait of two of America’s
jobs juggle the demands of soundscapes that shaped the most influential writers that reveals
work and childcare, and the Christian monastic tradition the surprising connections between
easy ways employers can help them—and their uncanny relevance
to our age of crisis
D I S PAT C H E S
OPE NING A RGU M E N T

W E H AV E N O
NUCLEAR
S T R AT E G Y
The U.S. can’t keep ignoring
the threat these weapons pose.
BY TOM NICHOLS

A
Americans have had a long respite from
thinking about nuclear war. The Cold War
eended more than 30 years ago, when the
SSoviet Union was dismantled and replaced
bby the Russian Federation and more than
a dozen other countries. China at the time
was not yet a significant nuclear power. A
w
North Korean bomb was purely a notional
N
threat. The fear of a large war in Europe
th
escalating into a nuclear conflict faded
from the public’s mind.
fr
Today, the Chinese nuclear arsenal could
destroy most of the United States. The
destr
North Koreans have a stockpile of bombs.

11
Dispatches

And the Russian Federation, defense in 1981. When ABC, nuclear war and concentrated charts and graphs. Millions
which inherited the Soviet in 1983, aired the movie The mostly on keeping nuclear of Americans watched. But in
nuclear arsenal, has launched a Day After—about the conse- weapons out of the “wrong 2015, when Donald Trump
major war against Ukraine. As quences of a global nuclear war hands,” which reflected the was asked during the Repub-
the war began, Russian Presi- for a small town in Kansas— American preoccupation lican Party primary debates
dent Vladimir Putin ordered his it did so as much to perform with rogue states and terror- about U.S. nuclear forces, he
nation’s nuclear forces to go on a public service as to achieve ists after 9/11. This change could only say, “With nuclear,
heightened alert and warned a ratings bonanza. Even Presi- in emphasis had worrisome the power, the devastation is
the West that any interference dent Ronald Reagan watched side effects. In 2008, a blue- very important to me.” Such
with the invasion would have the movie. (In his diary, he ribbon commission headed by an answer would once have
“consequences that you have noted that The Day After was a former secretary of defense, been disqualifying for any can-
never experienced in your his- James Schlesinger, sounded didate. This time, millions of
tory.” Suddenly, the unthink- the alarm: A new generation Americans shrugged.
able seems possible again. of nuclear-weapons person-
There was a time when nel in the Air Force and Navy I t wa s pe r h a p s inevitable
citizens of the United States did not understand its own after the Cold War that serious
cared about nuclear weapons. mission. In 2010, the chair- thinking about nuclear weap-
The reality of nuclear war was man of the Joint Chiefs of ons would be stashed away, in
I REMEMBER
constantly present in their lives; AN AIR FORCE
Staff, Admiral Michael Mul- the words of a NATO nuclear
nuclear conflict took on apoca- MAJOR COMING len, warned that American planner some years ago, like
lyptic meaning and entered the UP TO ME AFTER defense institutions were no “the crazy aunt in the attic.”
American consciousness not CLASS AND longer minting nuclear strate- But the end of the Cold War
only through the news and TELLING ME HE’D gists. “We don’t have anybody did not resolve the most cru-
politics, but through popular NEVER HEARD in our military that does that cial question that has plagued
culture as well. Movie audi- OF “MUTUAL anymore,” Mullen said. nuclear strategists since 1945:
ASSURED
ences in 1964 laughed while DESTRUCTION.”
I saw this firsthand at the What do nuclear weapons
watching Peter Sellers play Naval War College, a gradu- actually do for those who have
a president and his sinister ate school for mid-level and them? The American security
adviser in Dr. Strangelove, bum- senior U.S. military officers, analyst Bernard Brodie declared
bling their way to nuclear war; where I taught for more than in the mid-1950s that nuclear
a few months later, they were 25 years. Nuclear issues fell weapons represented the “end
horrified as Henry Fonda’s fic- out of the curriculum almost of strategy,” because no politi-
tional president ordered the immediately after the Cold cal goal could justify unleashing
sacrificial immolation of New “very effective” and had left him War ended. I remember an Air their apocalyptically destruc-
York City in Fail-Safe. Nuclear “greatly depressed.”) Force major coming up to me tive power. In the 1980s, the
war and its terminology— I was among those who after class and telling me he’d political scientist and nuclear-
overkill, first strike, fallout— cared a lot about nuclear never heard of “mutual assured deterrence scholar Robert Jer-
were soon constant themes in weapons. In the early days of destruction”—the concept that vis amplified the point, noting
every form of entertainment. my career, I was a Russian- underlies nuclear deterrence— that “a rational strategy for the
We not only knew about speaking “Soviet ologist” until my lecture that day. employment of nuclear weap-
nuclear war; we expected one. working in think tanks and Voters no longer cared ons is a contradiction in terms.”
But during the Cold War with government agencies either. During the Cold War, American leaders, how-
there was also thoughtful to pry open the black box of regardless of what other issues ever, didn’t have the luxury
engagement with the nuclear the Kremlin’s strategy and might be raised, every presi- of declaring nuclear war to be
threat. Academics, politicians, intentions. The work could dential election was shadowed insanity and then ignoring the
and activists argued on televi- be unsettling. Once, during a by worry over whose finger subject. The dawn of the Cold
sion and in op-ed pages about discussion of various nuclear would be on “the button.” War and the birth of the Bomb
whether we were safer with scenarios, a colleague observed In 1983, Reagan—hardly a occurred almost exactly at the
more or fewer nuclear weap- matter-of-factly, “Yes, in that detail-oriented president or same time. The Soviet Union,
ons. The media presented one, we only lose 40 million.” master policy wonk—asked for once our ally, was now our foe,
analyses of complicated issues He meant 40 million people. an uninterrupted half hour of and soon its nuclear arsenal was
relating to nuclear weapons. The end of the Cold War, television during prime time to pointed at us, just as ours was
CBS, for example, broadcast however, led to an era of nat- discuss his defense budget and pointed right back. Someone
an unprecedented five-part ional inattentiveness toward his plans for a national missile- had to think about what might
documentary series on national nuclear issues. We forgot about defense system, replete with come next.

12 JULY/AUGUST 2022
OPE NING A RGU M E N T

When contemplating the might begin somewhere else— Soviet leaders. The leadership with larger and longer-range
outbreak of nuclear war, the maybe the Caribbean, maybe declined the defense minis- weapons, hoping to bring the
British strategist Michael How- the Middle East—but war ter’s advice, and the episode Soviets to a halt. Again, the
ard always asked: What would itself would move to Germany was kept secret for decades. Soviets would respond. With
such a war be about? Why and then spiral into a global But the Kremlin and its high so many nuclear weapons in
would it happen at all? catastrophe. American strate- command continued to plan play, and with chaos and panic
History supplies an answer, gists tried to think through for defeating NATO quickly enveloping national leaders,
and reminds us that the per- the possibility of “limited” and decisively in Germany, one side or the other might
ils of the past remain with us nuclear wars in various regions, no matter where a crisis might fear a larger attack and give in
today. The American nuclear but as Schlesinger later admit- begin. They knew it was their to the temptation to launch a
arsenal was constructed as ted to Congress, none of the best option, and so did we. preemptive strike against stra-
the United States dealt with a tegic nuclear weapons in the
series of postwar crises. From American or Soviet heartland.
the Berlin blockade to a hot All-out nuclear war would fol-
war in Korea, Communist low. Millions would die imme-
dangers seemed to be spread- diately. Millions more would
ing unchecked across the perish later.
planet. By 1950, the Com- The U.S. and NATO not
munist bloc extended from the only expected this nuclear esca-
Gulf of Finland to the South lation but threatened to be the
China Sea. With America and ones to initiate it. There was a
its allies outnumbered and terrifying but elegant logic to
outgunned, nuclear weapons this policy. In effect, the West
and the threat of their use told the Kremlin that the use of
seemed to be the only West- nuclear weapons would occur
ern recourse. not because some unhinged
Nuclear planning in this U.S. president might wish it,
period was shaped by the ines- but because Soviet successes
capable dictates of geography. on the battlefield would make
The Soviet Union straddled it an inescapable choice.
two continents and spanned By the 1960s, the march of
11 time zones. The United technology had allowed both
States was relatively safe in its East and West to develop a
North American fortress from “triad” of bombers, submarine-
anything but an outright Soviet launched missiles, and land-
nuclear attack. But how could based intercontinental mis-
Washington protect NATO in siles. Arsenals on both sides
Europe and its other allies scat- soon numbered in the tens
tered around the world? With of thousands. At these levels,
Germany a divided nation even the most aggressive Cold
and Berlin a divided city, any scenarios stayed limited for Once war moved to Cen- War hawks knew that, in a full
future conflict in Europe would long. Everything came back tral Europe, events would cas- exchange, mutual obliteration
always favor the Soviets and to escalation in Europe. cade with a brutal inevitabil- was inevitable. Detailed and
their tanks, which could roll This was not an idle fear. ity. The only way the United exacting war plans would col-
across the plains almost at will. In 1965, for example, when States could stop such an attack lapse in days—or even hours—
This set up the basic struc- the United States began would be to resort to the imme- into what the nuclear strategist
ture of some future World bombing North Vietnam, the diate use of small, short-range Herman Kahn called “spasm”
War III in a way that every Soviet General Staff proposed nuclear arms on the battlefield. or “insensate” war, with much
American of that period a “military demonstration” of As Soviet forces advanced, of the Northern Hemisphere
could understand: No matter an unspecified nature aimed we would strike them—on reduced to a sea of glass and ash.
how or where East and West at Berlin and West Germany. NATO’s own territory—with The reality that nuclear war
might come into significant “We do not fear approach- these “tactical” weapons. The meant complete devastation
military conflict, the Soviets ing the risk of war,” the Soviets would respond in kind. for both sides led to the con-
were certain to move the con- Soviet defense minister told We would then hit more tar- cept of mutual assured destruc-
frontation to Europe. A crisis Leonid Brezhnev and other gets throughout Eastern Europe tion, or MAD, a term coined

IL LUSTRATION BY DANIELLE DEL PLATO 13

Dispatches OPE NING A RGU M E N T

by American war planners. the number of nations under Biden to use American mili- forces and go back to relying
MAD was at first not so much NATO’s nuclear guarantee. tary force against Russia. on nuclear weapons as a battle-
a policy as a simple fact. In the We have talked about drawing These demands ignore the field equalizer, then the public
early 1970s, the United States down forces in places such as reality, as the Harvard profes- should know it and think about
proposed that both sides turn South Korea and shied away sor Graham Allison wrote ear- it. If the U.S. nuclear arsenal
the fact into a defined policy: from expensive decisions about lier this year, that in the event exists solely to deter the use of
The superpowers would rec- increasing our naval power in of a hot war between nuclear enemy nuclear weapons, then
ognize that they had enough the Pacific—all because we superpowers, “the escalation it is time to say so and spell out
weapons and it was time to set think that nuclear weapons ladder from there to the ulti- the consequences.
limits. The Soviets, with some will remedy im balances in mate global catastrophe of Every presidential adminis-
reservations, agreed. The race conventional weapons and that tration since 1994 has released
to oblivion was put on pause. the mere existence of nuclear a “nuclear posture review” that
Today, MAD remains at weapons will somehow stabilize supposedly answers the ques-
the core of strategic deterrence. these unstable situations. Wor- tion of why, exactly, America
The United States and Russia rying about whether this broad has a nuclear arsenal. Is it to
have taken some weapons off reliance on nuclear deterrence fight nuclear wars or to deter
their quick triggers, but many risks escalation and nuclear war a nuclear attack? And every
remain ready to launch in a seems outdated to many. Mem- administration has fudged the
matter of minutes. By treaty, ories of the Cold War, a young IF THE U.S. response by saying, essentially,
NUCLEAR
Washington and Moscow scholar once said to me, are a ARSENAL EXISTS it’s a little of both. This is not
have limited themselves to form of “baggage” that inhibits SOLELY TO a serious answer. And it avoids
1,550 warheads apiece. The the making of bold policy. DETER THE the deeper question: If we do
basic idea is that these num- This brings us, of course, to USE OF ENEMY not in fact wish to use nuclear
bers deny either side the ability Ukraine. The war there could NUCLEAR weapons, then what must we
to take out the other’s arsenal put four nuclear-armed pow- WEAPONS, do to ensure that our conven-
in a first strike, while still pre- ers—Russia, the United States, THEN IT tional capabilities match our
IS TIME TO
serving the ability to destroy at the United Kingdom, and SAY SO. international commitments?
least 150 urban centers in each France—onto the same battle- We have accepted evasions
country. This, in the world of field, and yet arguments over from our leaders because we
nuclear weapons, is progress. the U.S. and NATO response take strategic nuclear deterrence
to the Russian invasion have for granted—as something that
T h e f a l l o f the Soviet sometimes taken place in a exists around us almost inde-
Union changed many things, nuclear void. President Joe pendently, like gravity or the
but in nuclear matters it Biden has rallied a global coali- weather. But deterrence relies
changed almost nothing. The tion against Moscow while on human psychology and on
missiles and their warheads remaining determined to avoid nuclear war can be surprisingly the agency and decisions of
remained where they were. a direct military conflict with short.” Allison’s warning is actual people, who must con-
They continue to wait in silent Russia. He wisely declined to especially relevant today, when tinually manage it.
service. The crews in silos, sub- raise U.S. nuclear readiness to Russia and NATO have effec- Decades of denial have
marines, and bombers now match Putin’s nuclear alert. tively switched places: Russia is left Americans ill-prepared to
consist of the grandchildren But he has had to steer this now the inferior conventional think about the many choices
and great- grandchildren of careful path while buffeted power, and is threatening a that keep the nuclear peace.
the people who built the first by demands from people who first use of nuclear weapons if Effective deterrence, even in a
nuclear weapons and created seem unmoved (or untouched) faced with a regime-threaten- post–Cold War world, requires
the plans for their use. And yet by memories of the Cold War. ing defeat on the battlefield. the capacity to face the reality
for years we have conducted Calls for a more aggressive Our collective amnesia— of nuclear war squarely. And
international politics as if confrontation with Russia, our nuclear Great Forgetting— it means understanding once
we have somehow solved the including demands for a no- undermines American national again what it would feel like
problem of nuclear war. fly zone over Ukraine, backed security. American political to hear the sirens—and to
Nuclear weapons are a by American power, have been leaders have a responsibility to wonder whether they are only
crutch we have leaned on to advanced by a range of promi- educate the public about how, a drill.
avoid thinking about the true nent figures. Republican Rep- and how much, the United
needs and costs of defense. resentative Adam Kinzinger States relies on nuclear weap-
With hardly any debate, over a even introduced a congres- ons for its security. If we mean Tom Nichols is a contributing
period of 30 years we doubled sional resolution authorizing to reduce U.S. conventional writer at The Atlantic.

14 JULY/AUGUST 2022
L I V E R I G H T P U B L I S H I N G
H I S T O R Y I N T H E M A K I N G

“[Jack E. Davis] makes clear in his rollicking, “Sanders is not well known on the granular “Like reading a great tragicomic Irish novel,
poetic, wise new book that cultural and level…. Into that vacuum comes Ari Rabin-Havt’s rich in memoir and record,
political history are engaging memoir of the 2020 Sanders campaign.” calamity and critique.”
an integral part of this natural history.” —Janet Hook, New York Times Book Review —James Wood, The New Yorker
—Vicki Constantine Croke,
New York Times Book Review

“A rare achievement— “My most anticipated book of 2022….

a definitive statement about an emerging Filled with some of the most beautiful
“The bestselling maritime historian returns phenomenon that could shape the digital world, language and deepest insights on activism,
with a study of privateering…. A thrilling, the global economy, and the very experience of love, and belonging that I’ve read in years,
unique contribution to the literature on the human consciousness.” Boys and Oil is essential reading.”
American Revolution.” —Kirkus Reviews —Derek Thompson, Atlantic staff writer —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

“Maria, Maria is a collection and a “Here is Lincoln in the Bardo—for real. “The most comprehensive and best
cosmology…. Beguiling and playful, You couldn’t make it up—necromancers, account of resistance I have read …
Marytza K. Rubio’s writing is endlessly mad actors, frauds, true believers, and, it is marvelous to read a study of such breadth
enjoyable to read.” in the middle, the greatest President.” and depth, which reaches balanced judgments.”
—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown —Sidney Blumenthal, author of —Max Hastings, Sunday Times (UK)
The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln

Liveright Publishing Corporation • An imprint of W. W. Norton & Company • Independent Publishers Since 1923 • [Link] •
FIRST PERSON

M Y F A M I LY ’ S D O L L T E S T
Toys can reflect racial attitudes—and shape them.
BY IBR A M X. K ENDI

noticed. I didn’t day four as she held on firmly this time, and many of them

I make much of it.

The day care was
closing. I walked
over to Imani, took
the blue-eyed white doll out of
to the doll, not wanting to
go home.
Sadiqa and I were prob-
ably unduly sensitive about the
whole situation. But we won-
exploited racist tropes. Con-
sider the mechanical banks
then popular among children.
The kids who played with the
“Always Did ’Spise a Mule”
her hands, picked her up off dered if our Black child’s attach- mechanical bank could push
the carpet, and raised her high. ment to a white doll could a button and make a Black
She frowned. I smiled. Her mean she had already breathed man fly off a mule face-first,
frown turned to a smile. in what the psychologist Bev- a simulation of racial violence
It was the summer of 2017. erly Daniel Tatum has called the presented, during the lynching
My partner, Sadiqa, and I “smog” of white superiority. era, as a game. Playing with the
had just moved to Washing- Maybe our minds were “Shamrock Bank,” later nick-
ton, D.C. We’d selected our sounding a false alarm. Maybe named “Paddy and the Pig,”
neighbor hood, Columbia the eye and skin color and hair children pulled a lever to make
Heights, because we liked its texture of the doll had no bear- a pig kick a penny into an Irish-
walkability, access to public tran- ing on why Imani had become man’s mouth. The “Reclining
sit, and racial diversity. We had attached. I did not know. No Chinaman” mechanical bank
enrolled Imani, our 1-year-old one knew. But I did know why featured a Chinese man flash-
daughter, in a day care about 10 the alarm was ringing. ing a handful of aces with a rat
minutes from our new home. In 1897, the father of at his feet. The cards suggested
The next day, when Sadiqa American child psychology, a deceitful competitive advan-
picked Imani up, she, too, G. Stanley Hall, published his tage, evoking the idea, widely
noticed our daughter play- influential A Study of Dolls with held at the time, that Chinese
ing with the white doll. We Alexander Caswell Ellis. They immigrants were stealing work
laughed it off. We expected found that white dolls with “fair from white people.
Imani to start playing with a hair and blue eyes are the favor- What lessons did these toys
different doll or toy soon. ites.” Children who played with teach the children who played In 1947, the
But she didn’t. Her frown nonwhite dolls, Hall and Ellis with them? For the social scien- photographer Gordon
on day one turned into a sharp posited, often did so because the tist Mamie Phipps, such racist Parks documented one
“No!” on day two, when Sadiqa dolls’ appearance made them caricatures were anything but of Kenneth and Mamie
tried to take the doll out of her “‘funny’ or exceptional.” humorous. Growing up in seg- Clark’s doll tests for
hands, which turned into a car Mass-produced toys of regated Arkansas in the 1920s, Ebony magazine.
ride of whining on day three, all kinds had begun to enter Phipps lived in the shadow of
and into an all-out tantrum on American homes around that racism. “You had to have

16 JULY/AUGUST 2022
Dispatches

PHOTOGRAPH BY GORDON PARKS 17

Dispatches

Barbie and Ken dolls, 1961 psychologists, and sociologists

co-signed its conclusion: Rac-
ism and segregation “poten-
tially damage the personality
gave them a white doll. When of all children.”
they prompted the children to On May 17, 1954, the
“give me the doll that is a nice Court issued a unanimous rul-
doll” or “the doll that is a nice ing, written by Chief Justice
color,” most of the children
again gave them a white doll.
As Kenneth Clark later wrote,
the doll study showed “that at
an early age Negro children are
affected by the prejudices, dis- THE COURT HAD
STRUCK DOWN
crimination, and segregation SEGREGATED
to which the larger society SCHOOLS, BUT
subjected them.” IT HAD NOT
Social scientists suspected STRUCK DOWN
that segregation had negative THE RACIST
effects on white children too, IDEA THAT THE
even if they lacked the data WHITER THE
SCHOOL, THE
to prove it empirically (more BETTER.
recent research has born this
out). In 1948, the psycholo-
gists Max Deutscher and Isidor
Chein surveyed 517 social sci-
entists. Ninety percent, they
a certain kind of protective Bruno Lasker had demon- found, thought that segrega- Earl Warren, striking down
armor about you, all the time,” strated that “race prejudice,” as tion had detrimental effects the “separate but equal” doc-
she later said. he called it, was not an inborn on the “segregated” group, trine. “Segregation of white
In 1934, Phipps enrolled trait but the result of acquired and 83 percent thought that and colored children in public
at Howard University, where habits—habits that even chil- it had negative effects on the schools has a detrimental effect
she met a psychology mas- dren as young as 5 years old “segregating” group as well. upon the colored children,”
ter’s student named Kenneth could develop. “Enforced segregation builds Warren wrote. But the deci-

PREVIOUS SPREAD: GORDON PARKS / COURTESY OF THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION.

Clark. He encouraged her to Starting in 1940, the up attitudes of superiority not sion overlooked the experts’
major in psychology; the two Clarks surveyed 253 Black based on achievement but argument about segregation’s
later married. children ranging in age from upon definitions which can- effects on white children.
The Clarks entered a dis- 3 to 7. Their goal was to deter- not be supported when sub- The Court had struck down seg-
cipline dominated by eugen- mine whether the children jected to reality testing,” one regated schools, but it had not
icists determined to prove, had a concept of racial differ- psychologist explained. struck down the racist idea that
scientifically, the superiority ence, and if so, whether they In 1950, Kenneth Clark the whiter the school, the better.
of the white race. But some expressed racial preference. A presented the doll research, Some Americans saw school
social scientists, at least, had little more than half of the chil- along with Deutscher and integration as a chance to facili-
come to recognize the dan- dren attended segregated nurs- Chein’s survey results, at the tate Black assimilation into
gers of eugenicists’ work. These ery schools and public elemen- Mid-century White House white American culture. In the
researchers wanted to use social tary schools in Arkansas, while Conference on Children and ’40s and ’50s, Italian, Jewish,
science, instead, to understand the rest went to integrated Youth. The following year, and Irish immigrants had been
LEFT: HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY.

the origins of racist sentiment. schools in Massachusetts. Each as the NAACP mounted the assimilated or were assimilating
Were humans born prejudiced child was shown two dolls with legal challenge to school seg- into the broader racial category
or were they socialized to be yellow hair and white skin, regation that would become of “white.” But the newly capa-
that way? This question turned and two with black hair and Brown v. Board of Educa- cious white American identity
scholarly attention to the racial dark-brown skin. “Give me tion, its lawyers asked Clark still had no room for Blackness.
attitudes of children. the doll you like to play with,” to submit a similar report. You can follow this history
Research in the late 1920s the Clarks instructed the chil- Thirty-two of the era’s leading through the evolution of Amer-
by the social worker and writer dren. Most of the children anthropologists, psychiatrists, ican toys. By mid-century, toy

18 JULY/AUGUST 2022
FIRST PERSON

makers had mostly stopped Mattel introduced the Barbie Things star ted to inspired the Red Power, Brown
producing the toys that ridi- doll at the American Inter- change in the ’60s. By 1968, Power, and Yellow Power
culed purported ethnic and national Toy Fair as a white James Brown was singing movements in the late ’60s
racial differences; instead, “Teen-age Fashion Model.” the anthem of a new anti- and the ’70s.
they ignored these differences. White children continued to assimilation consciousness: This environment com-
Popular games like Chutes and play Cowboys and Indians, but “Say it loud—I’m Black pelled at least some compa-
Ladders and Candy Land pre- in the world of manufactured and I’m proud.” Black had nies to produce a more diverse
sented white children on their toys, people of color virtually become beautiful during the assortment of toys . Mattel
boxes and boards. In 1959, ceased to exist. Black Power movement, which released its first explicitly Black
Barbie in 1968, and Remco’s
line of Black dolls appeared
that same year. These dolls,
though, were mostly marketed
to Black children.
Not until the 1980s were
nonwhite characters marketed
to a wide audience, and then
only gradually. A Hispanic Bar-
bie and an Asian Barbie (called
“Oriental Barbie”) arrived in
that decade; though Hasbro
had released a Black G.I. Joe
in 1965, it didn’t make an
explicitly Hispanic G.I. Joe
doll until 2001. Still, by 2019,
55 percent of all Mattel dolls
sold globally depicted a his-
torically marginalized group
in some way, in terms of either
race, ethnicity, religion, gender
expression, or body type.
The toy market was coming
closer to reflecting America’s
diversity. But had children’s
attitudes shifted since the
Clarks’ era? In 2010, CNN
commissioned the child psy-
chologist Margaret Beale Spen-
cer to design an updated ver-
sion of the doll test. Her team
interviewed 133 kids, ages 4,
5, 9, or 10, hailing from both
majority-white and majority-
Black schools in the New York
City and Atlanta areas.
The Clarks had not studied
white children, but Spencer
did. She found that they dis-
played a high rate of “white
bias,” identifying lighter skin
EVE ARNOLD / MAGNUM

Remco began producing Black

dolls in 1968.

19
Dispatches FIRST PERSON

Mattel launched a line of gender- demonstrated that even at 1 At home, Imani had a wide Imani had been going here for
neutral dolls in 2019. year old, our children notice array of diverse toys. But Sadiqa several weeks, and not once did
different skin colors. We can and I hadn’t thought about their I examine the toy chests.
impress upon children the presence at Imani’s day care. Imani did not choose
equality of dark and light colors. On day five, Sadiqa and I to play with the white doll
tones with positive attributes At this age, books are a key arrived at the day care together. over dolls of color, I realized;
and darker hues with nega- tool. Among Imani’s favorites Imani loved when both of she hadn’t had another
tive ones. As the Clarks had were Matthew A. Cherry’s Hair us picked her up. When we option. After all these years,
found 70 years earlier, Black Love, which shows children the walked in, she tossed the white how many children still
children, too, displayed some beauty of different hair textures, doll aside and ran to hug us. don’t have another option in
white bias—but far less than and Joanna Ho’s majestic Eyes “Group hug!” Sadiqa shouted, their toy chests, libraries, or
their white peers. The reason, That Kiss in the Corners, which widening her arms as I did the schools? What does the over-
Spencer suggested, is because emphasizes the equality of dif- same. Imani buried her face representation of white dolls
Black parents actively work ferently shaped eyes. between our legs. Sadiqa and tell children about who their
to protect their children from Dolls, too, can make a great I made eye contact. caregivers think is important?
bias by “reframing messages teaching tool. We can use dolls Doll 4, Parents 1. We told the owner about
that children get from society” to acknowledge difference in When Imani released her the white dolls before leaving
about racial preference. By con- skin color but dismiss the rac- grip, I walked around the day for the day. Changes came. But
trast, Spencer posited, white ist notions that the darker, the care and found the large toy I had failed my doll test.
parents “don’t have to engage worse. A diverse assortment of chests. I rummaged through
in that level of parenting.” toys in general can “open dia- the toys and did not come
Regardless of your race, logue around prejudice and across a single doll that looked Ibram X. Kendi is a
it’s never too early to consider enable discussion and empa- Asian, Native, Latino, Middle contributing writer at
the messages a child is receiv- thy,” the psychologist Sian Eastern, or Black. Every single The Atlantic and the
ANGIE SMITH

ing from the world around Jones has written. “If such toys doll I saw looked white. author of How to Raise an
them. Color blindness is are not there, the opportunity Anger overtook me. Not at Antiracist, from which
not an option. Research has for this discussion is lost.” the day care’s owner—at myself. this essay has been adapted.

20 JULY/AUGUST 2022
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AMERICAN
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
CHRIS BUCK

STEVE
BANNON
IS
STILL
SCHEMING.
AND
HE’S
STILL
A THREAT
TO
DEMOCRACY.

BY JENNIFER
RASPUTIN

SENIOR 23
Standby
And so it went that day: The work before
us is to weaponize this vote. Twice he used this
word, weaponize, in talking about his plan to
flip Senate seats in Nevada and Arizona—

I SOMETIMES LOOK AT adding, I can clearly see how to win.

There were times when my text interac-
tions with Bannon felt like one prolonged

THE LONG RIBBONS Turing test. There were times when he

almost resembled a regular human. He
would talk about missing his father, who
OF TEXTS I’VE GOTTEN died in January at 100, and how strange it
was to be in his childhood home alone. (Just

FROM STEVE BANNON sat in the family room for hours.) He would
fret about his weight and express pleasure
when a newspaper used a photo that did

AND WONDER not, for once, make him look god-awful,

like some deranged incel by way of Mau-
rice Sendak.
WHETHER THEY I’m impressed by my photo!!
Innnnnnnnnnnnteresting, I wrote.
Why?
COULDN’T TELL THE Can u see the photo?
Yup

WHOLE STORY ALL You don’t like it?

I’ve never seen it before now
I want to know why you like it

ON THEIR OWN. I don’t look so (Covid 19) UNKEMPT

Does this mean you have actual feelings?
Of course it doesn’t!
But it still pleases you to look nice.
Stop
One day he called my colleague Anne
Applebaum a fucking KLOWN. (He had
There are certainly enough of them. He says who believe, as I do, that he’s attempting to previously referred to her work as “bril-
he has five phones, two encrypted, and he’s insert a lit bomb into the mouth of Ameri- liant,” but something she’d just said about
forever pecking away, issuing pronuncia- can democracy. Hunter Biden’s laptop didn’t agree with
mentos with incontinent abandon—after March 28, 9:49 a.m. him.) Later, while reflecting on this com-
midnight; during commercial breaks for I’m taking out Murkowski today and ment, I asked him: Who’s been his most
his show, War Room; sometimes while the forcing her to vote NO on judge Jackson worthy intellectual sparring partner so far?
broadcast is still live. He’s talking about the Senate con- You’ve watched the debates
You can discern much of Bannon’s firmation vote on Ketanji Brown Jack- I destroy folks except I always pull back
mad character and contradictions in these son’s Supreme Court nomination, and to not be obnoxious
exchanges. The chaos and the focus, the uncertainty about whether Lisa Murkowski, Did he care to name names?
pugnacity and the enthusiasm, the trans- the senior Republican senator from Alaska, Henry Levi in Athens.
parency and the industrial-grade bullshit. will vote yes. I tell him I’ll be interested to Blood on the floor.
Also, the mania: logomania, arithmomania, see if Murkowski responds. Bernard-Henri Lévy, he meant, the
monomania (he’d likely cop to all of these, After today she’s a NO famous French intellectual.
especially that last one—he’s the first to say Murkowski did not vote no. I sent him Biggest disappointment of my life
that one of the features of his show is “wash a New York Times story on April 4 to tweak Made him eat this
rinse repeat”). Garden-variety hypermania him. Wasn’t your show supposed to flip her? He sent me a picture of Lévy’s book
(with a generous assist from espressos). And I asked. The Empire and the Five Kings.
last of all, perhaps above all else, straight-up Please I watched that debate. This was not
megalomania, which even those who pro- Goalposts. They’re always movable. at all my impression. But winning is cer-
fess affection for the man can see, though This is a huge issue that I’m about to tainly an all-consuming preoccupation for
it appears to be a problem only for those make toxic Bannon, just as it is for his former boss.

24 JULY/AUGUST 2022
Winning debates. Winning elections— displaying a gold-framed picture of Jesus And how, specifically, does Bannon pro-
in France, in Hungary, in South Texas, and a black-and-white poster saying There pose that his audience use its agency? By tak-
where Hispanic voters are migrating into are no conspiracies, but there are NO ing back their government from the ground
the R column with impressive speed. One coincidences. — Stephen K Bannon. up—as election inspectors, as school-board
night, as I was reading in bed, I heard the But since January 8, 2021, when You- members, and, most practically of all, as
ping of my phone: Bannon had sent me Tube pulled his show for spreading false- precinct-committee members. Bannon
a story from a Rio Grande Valley web- hoods about the 2020 election, viewing may be the country’s biggest exponent of
site, reporting that Republican turnout at War Room has become harder to do. It’s still the “precinct strategy,” first developed by
early-voting polls was up up up. available in the far-right online ecosphere, the Republican lawyer Dan Schultz, which
Kaboom and it’s streamable on various TV platforms, encourages interested citizens to sign up for
And good night including Channel 240 of Pluto TV, but the grunt work of elections, because it can
It was 11:37 p.m. Never too late to that seems like its own sad metaphor— lead to the big stuff, like helping decide
own the libs. War Room as a small, demoted planetoid, who oversees them. War Room regularly
available mainly in the icier regions of the features citizen activists who have figured
broadcast cosmos. The whole operation out how to work the system. After each
has an amusing shoestring quality to it. segment, Bannon asks: “How can people
ONE OF THE surest ways to get under The audio occasionally cuts out or sounds get to you? How do they find out more
Bannon’s skin is to call War Room a pod- like it’s bubbling through a fish tank; two about what you’re doing?” And they pro-
cast. It is not a podcast, he is always telling of Bannon’s phones buzz throughout the vide Twitter and Gettr handles, websites,
me; it is a TV show, with tons of visual show; the segment openers aren’t always on occasion even a cellphone number.
components that listeners-only miss—the ready when he needs them. It’s a bit like Why do you do that? I once asked him.
charts explaining economics, the montages Father Coughlin stumbled into Wayne and “It’s a force multiplier,” he answered.
of news clips that form his cold opens, the Garth’s basement. Right right right.
live shots of his correspondents. He broad- Bannon started War Room in Octo- This is the Democratic Party’s night-
casts from the ground floor of a Washing- ber 2019, initially to fight Donald Trump’s mare scenario, the hobgoblin that visits
ton, D.C., townhouse, and there are cam- first impeachment; in January 2020, the at 4 a.m.: The infrastructure of civil ser-
eras, bright lights, a backdrop that devoted show morphed into War Room: Pandemic. vants on the state level, which barely held
viewers know well: a fireplace mantel But over time, the show became a guided the United States together in the after-
tour through Bannon’s gallery of obsessions: math of the 2020 election, comes entirely
the stolen election, the Biden-family syn- undone through democratic means. As
dicate, the invaders at the southern border, it is, the Republicans are poised in the
the evil Chinese Communist Party, the sto- 2022 midterms to take back the House
len election, draconian COVID mandates, in a potential rout, a prospect that fills
the folly of Modern Monetary Theory, the Bannon with inexpressible glee, and for
stolen election. which he seems to take partial credit. He’s
But Bannon is more than just a broad- hoping for a 60-, 70-, 80-seat loss for the
caster. He’s a televangelist, an Iago, a canny Democrats—something that will set the
political operative with activist machina- party back for generations.
tions. With almost every episode, he hopes “The left in the media … they’re all about
to transform his audience into an army of democracy?” he ranted to me one day. Then

This is the the righteous—one that will undo the

“illegitimate Biden regime” and replace the
he broke into a smile. “On November 8,
the War Room and the War Room posse and

Democratic current GOP infrastructure, still riddled

with institutionalist RINO pushovers, with
all the little people at the school boards and
things—we’re gonna give you democracy

Party’s adamantine Trumpists who believe that

2020 rightfully belonged to them. “The
shoved up your ass. Okay? We’re gonna give
you a democracy suppository.”

nightmare show’s not about entertainment,” he told

his audience in one of his typical pep talks.
All bluster, you might say. Showmanship.
Bannon is merely jumping on bandwagons

scenario, the “That’s not us. This is for the hard-cores,

okay? … The people who say, ‘No no no
that were already rolling. Murkowski hardly
seemed moved by his efforts.

hobgoblin no no, not on our watch.’” He goads his

followers into action with a combination of
“Bannon? Please,” says John Podho-
retz, the old-school conservative editor of

that visits praise, flattery, and drill-sergeant phrases he

repeats like a catechism: Put your shoulder
Commentary. “He was a third-rate banker
who got a tiny slice of an enormous pie.”

at 4 a.m. to the wheel! Be a force multiplier! And espe-

cially: Use your agency!
He’s referring to the piece of Seinfeld
profits that Bannon got when he helped

25
orchestrate a deal between Ted Turner and 2000s, when he was working for Internet day of work. And then they expressed
Castle Rock Entertainment. “He ended Gaming Entertainment. He notes how outrage—and utter incredulity—when
up taking over Breitbart because Andrew stunned he was to discover how many they got carted away.
Breitbart suddenly died. If Paul Manafort people played multiplayer online games, The fantasy and the reality had become
weren’t a criminal, he and Kellyanne Con- and how intensely they played them. But one and the same.
way wouldn’t have taken over the Trump then he breaks it down for Morris, using
campaign. He’s not an emperor and he the example of a theoretical man named
has no clothes.” Dave in Accounts Payable who one day
Bannon, according to this theory, is a drops dead. A FEW HOURS into my first interview
fundamentally unsuccessful guy who has “Some preacher from a church or with Bannon, he tells me the story of
failed ever upward—one of those strange some guy from a funeral home who’s how he became a father of two more kids
id creatures who’s come to sudden prom- never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, than he’d planned. It was the mid-’90s,
inence in this id-favorable internet age, says a few prayers,” Bannon says. “And and he was already a once-divorced dad
but is too undisciplined to hang on to that’s Dave.” of a little girl, when he began to casu-
any power for very long. He lasted in the But that’s offline Dave. Online Dave is ally date a “knockout” he met at a photo
White House for, what, seven months? a whole other story. “Dave in the game is shoot. At the time, he had his own bou-
The problem is, there’s now loads of Ajax,” Bannon continues. “And Ajax is, tique investment bank, Bannon & Co., in
room for those id creatures in American like, the man.” Ajax gets a caisson when Beverly Hills, but in April 1994, he went
politics and culture, and they can accumu- he dies and is carried off to a raging off to Arizona to manage the quixotic
late considerable influence. Last Septem- funeral pyre. The rival group comes out eco-experiment Biosphere 2—one of the
ber, ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in and attacks. “There’s literally thousands odder aspects of Bannon’s already unlikely
65 key counties around the country and of people there,” Bannon says. “People are biography (but typical in that it resulted
discovered that 41 of them “reported an home playing the game, and guys are not in a lawsuit)—and decided one weekend
unusual increase in sign-ups since Ban- going to work. And women are not going to have her come visit. She flew in, she
non’s campaign began,” with at least 8,500 to work. Because it’s Ajax.” flew out, and he assumed that that was
new precinct officers joining their ranks. “Now, who’s more real?” Bannon asks. that. But a month or two later, he says,
And Bannon is now on Axios’s list of the Dave in Accounting? Or Ajax? she contacted him, asking if they could get
Republicans’ new kingmakers, compiled Ajax, Bannon realized. Some people— together when he was next in L.A.
this year based on interviews with top particularly disaffected men—actively pre- “So we go to a restaurant and we’re
GOP consultants and operatives around fer and better identify with the online ver- having a great conversation,” he tells me.
the country, in part because his show is “a sions of themselves. He kept this top of “I’m just kind of in listen mode, because
goldmine” for primary candidates who are mind when he took over Breitbart News she had a tendency to go into talk mode.”
fundraising online. in 2012 and decided to build out the Bannon himself is in storytelling mode—
Reports of Bannon’s influence would comments section. “This became more relaxed, sunny, nothing at all like the
be far less alarming if his show were a reli- of a community than the city they live tightly wound belligerent howling into
able source of news and information. But in, the town they live in, the old bowling the mic. “Finally, because I had to go
an analysis by the Brookings Institution league,” he tells Morris. “The key to these to another meeting, I said, ‘You know,
found that War Room had more episodes sites was the comment section. This could I gotta bounce.’ And she goes, ‘Um, can
containing falsehoods about election fraud be weaponized at some point in time. The we order a couple of espressos or some
than any other popular political podcast angry voices, properly directed, have latent coffee?’ ” He sensed exactly where the
in the months leading up to January 6. political power.” discussion was headed. “And my heart’s
And January 6 is the stench that hangs I mentioned this moment to Bannon like”—he starts pounding his chest—
over this discussion, is it not? Not that the second time we spoke. On War Room, “boom boom boom.”
he necessarily coordinated the logistics of he frequently talks about three levels of She was pregnant. With twins. “I
that day in any significant way (he’s such participation: the posse, the cadre, and the knocked her up at the Biosphere,” he
a dervish of chaos that I wouldn’t trust vanguard. It sounded to me like the gami- says, shaking his head. “We were watch-
him to organize so much as a birthday fication of politics. Yes, he told me. That’s ing … who was that old crazy guy with
party). But the energy behind January 6? just it: “I want Dave in Accounting to be the TV show?”
CHRIS BUCK FOR THE ATLANTIC

Especially given the size and commitment Ajax in his life.” John McLaughlin?
of his citizen army, and how relentless he is But that’s precisely what happened “John McLaughlin. It was whatever
in firing up his troops? That he does seem on January 6. The angry, howling hordes show he hosted.”
to have helped marshal. arrived as real-life avatars, cosplaying the That would be The McLaughlin Group.
There’s a scene I keep looping back role of rebels in face paint and fur. They Was there ever any question of not marry-
to in Errol Morris’s 2018 documentary stormed the Capitol while an enemy army ing her?
about Bannon, American Dharma. Ban- tried to beat them away. They carried their “No. I had to. Knowing my mom,
non is recalling his Hong Kong days in the own versions of caissons. They skipped a there was just no chance. The girls could

26 JULY/AUGUST 2022
not be illegitimate. I retained a lawyer and No one disputes that Bannon is very Administration,” wrote yet another for-
we had a prenup.” smart. He sweeps in information quickly, mer White House colleague, and not a
Somehow, this story came up a few has a file-cabinet memory, can keep mul- low-ranking one, in an email when I sent
weeks later, when I was chatting on the tiple tabs open in his brain. It’s how he a query about Bannon.
phone with one of Bannon’s former col- uses his brain that horrifies people—and Care to elaborate? I wrote back. The
leagues. I heard an audible scoff. “He’s I’m talking not just about Democrats, but reply:
using you. He knows that story makes him about many of his former colleagues, who
look good. Like he’s responsible.” see in him a disordered, nefarious kind He immersed himself in an office cov-
He’s using you. It’s a refrain I will hear of brilliance. Stephanie Grisham, who ered, literally wall-to-wall, with white-
over and over again on this strange odys- worked both on the Trump campaign boards filled with his various musings
sey. Bannon’s the guy with a perpetual and in the Trump White House in vari- and plans and accomplishments—which
meta-motive, always working an angle. ous press jobs (including nearly a year as I found just bizarre. In conversations with
He’s extremely skilled at getting others to communications director), called him a him, I got the very distinct impression
do what he wants them to do. He speaks con man when we chatted on the phone. that he was a very ends-justify-the-means
openly, almost exuberantly, about his tal- “Your subject is a very sick megaloma- kind of person. And way too many con-
ent for thought-puppetry. When I asked niac,” wrote Anthony Scaramucci, who versations ended with “then we burn it all
him why Democrats are terrible at talk for a brief 11 days was also Trump’s com- down … just burn it down.” It was never
radio, he had an immediate reply: Demo- munications director, when I emailed and clear as to what “it” was. Congress? The
crats are masters of the cool mediums, like asked him about Bannon. “Study Ullrich, “establishment?” DC? The country as he
TV. “But radio is theater of the mind,” he a great biographer (Hitler). We have seen perceived it? The “world order?”
said. “Hot and theater of the mind. I can his sinister form before. We are ready.”
fuck with your mind so badly if you’re just “Steve may well be mentally unsta- A con man, a cancer, Hitler. Did peo-
hearing my voice, right? It’s a much more ble, in a frightening, disturbing kind of ple speak about even Richard Nixon in
powerful medium.” way. He was certainly a cancer in the this way?

27
Yet here’s the dirty secret about Ban- “I have a very big soft spot for Steve,” The first afternoon I visit, Bannon is
non: Many liberals who have met him a former colleague and senior politi- doing segment Tetris, shuffling his A, B,
are disarmed by how charming he is. cal operative tells me. “I really think he C, and D blocks for the afternoon show.
(He’s using you.) When Bannon isn’t in believes he’s fighting for the greater good. Though he has a handful of employees
full gladiatorial mode, he is upbeat, good But I definitely get frustrated with him cycling through his home, he does an
company, almost clubbable. “He’s a lot sometimes, and I definitely disagree with awful lot by himself, often on the fly,
like his mother,” his old friend and Navy him sometimes”—particularly about his including many preinterviews.
pal Sonny Masso told me. “Never met a unflagging, crackbrained message to his “Senator, thank you for doing this …
stranger.” He called me “ma’am” and “kid.” audience that the election was stolen. “I Did you file this today?” It’s minutes
White House reporters were fond of think it’s very dangerous for democracy. before showtime, and he’s talking with
him. In a leaky White House, Bannon was And I’ve said this to Steve.” Jake Corman, the president pro tempore
a gusher. (And often with the dirtiest dish.) What does he say back? of the Pennsylvania Senate, who’s just filed
He’s quite capable of code-switching into “He just starts talking about Confucius a letter urging impeachment proceedings
the patois and patter of the coastal elite, and Alexander and all this fucking shit.” against the Democratic district attorney
probably because he’s a card-carrying mem- “His old life, as he knows it, is gone,” of Philadelphia, based on a spike in crime.
ber, whether he likes it or not: an alumnus says Grisham, who recently wrote a mem- This kind of shit-stirring, norm-shattering,
of Harvard Business School, Georgetown oir about her chaotic time in the White institution-weakening exercise is right up
School of Foreign Service, Goldman Sachs, House, I’ll Take Your Questions Now. “He Bannon’s alley. Crime is up, so … what
Hollywood. But his actual beliefs are hard has gone in sooooo deep on the Big Lie of the hell, let’s impeach someone.
to discern. Michael Wolff’s entertaining this election being stolen—he’s not gonna Bannon hangs up and describes the
anthology, Too Famous, includes an astute go back to, I don’t know, doing whatever “order of battle” to his producer Cameron, a
essay about Bannon, noting that he “could it was he did before.” She points out that young fellow with an unflappable demeanor
seem like a person both professing quite an very few former aides can achieve the and a Phish sticker on his laptop. “I’ll go
extraordinary level of bullshit, and yet, as escape velocity required to make it out of right to Corman, I’ll do a Pillows read”—
dramatically, not believing any of it at all.” Trump’s world. They’re stuck in low orbit. MyPillow, one of his sponsors—“I’ll go to
He is Schrödinger’s bullshitter, at once of “The tragedy of Steve Bannon,” Nun- Tina.” That’s Tina Peters, a Mesa County,
his nonsense and above it. berg tells me, “is that when he leaves the Colorado, clerk, whom he describes as his
This ambiguity—this doubleness— White House, he’s known as the great show’s Joan of Arc. “Let me have Tina?”
extends to the Big Lie, the notion that manipulator, the intellectual heavy of the Peters will eventually be indicted by
the 2020 election was stolen from Don- international populist uprising. But still a grand jury for a long and impressive
ald Trump. The number of people who he ends up in the fetal position at Donald list of allegations concerning election-
know Bannon and say he doesn’t believe it Trump’s feet.” security breaches, including aiding an
is surprising. But think about it, many of Is that on the record? I ask. unauthorized individual in making cop-
them say: Did he really have a choice? Just “Fuck yeah.” ies of Dominion’s voting-machine hard
months before the election, Bannon was drives. A judge will also rule that she can-
arrested for allegedly defrauding investors not oversee the 2022 elections. (Peters has
in “We Build the Wall,” a crowdsourced denied wrongdoing, and insists the inves-
project to erect a barrier on the southern THE BOTTOM FLOOR of the so-called tigation of her was politically motivated.)
border. Faced with a potential future in Breitbart embassy, former home of Breit- At a disinformation conference at Stan-
orange pajamas, Bannon insinuated him- bart News and now home of War Room, ford in April, Barack Obama told an audi-
self back in Trumpworld, helping the pres- is part man cave, part grad-student flop- ence: “People like Putin—and Steve Ban-
ident sell his message that the election was house, and part devil’s lair. Books cover non, for that matter—understand it’s not
stolen—and that he had to fight back by every surface. Two framed pictures of Ban- necessary for people to believe disinforma-
any means possible. “Steve was in on the non sit on the floor, unhung. An anti– tion in order to weaken democratic insti-
joke,” says Sam Nunberg, one of the first Hillary Clinton poster glares from a wall in tutions. You just have to flood a country’s
hires of the 2016 Trump campaign, now the living room; anti–Joe Biden mugs lurk public square with enough raw sewage.”
a political consultant. “He never believed in the kitchen cupboard. His fridge is a cry This was an echo of what Bannon had told
that the election would be overturned. for help, a Stonehenge of takeout cartons the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, that
Steve needed a pardon.” and bagged carrots. The toilet seat in his his preferred media strategy was to “flood
“That’s absurd,” Bannon says. I tell bathroom is always up. His living room is the zone with shit.”
him many people he knows are convinced dominated by a giant leather couch and a Roughly 2,000 episodes in, Ban-
that he sells this dangerous message for flatscreen TV that runs MSNBC all day non’s show has produced a mighty river
sport. He waves it off. “ ’Cause they don’t long. Bannon loves hating on MSNBC. of ordure. Every state official, no matter
believe it,” he says. “Doesn’t mean I don’t But he also thinks its shows, Rachel Mad- how marginal or ostracized (or indicted),
believe it. I absolutely believe it, to the core dow’s in particular, set the gold standard gets a chance to recite what they deem
of my being.” for production values and narrative verve. evidence of a stolen election—harvested

28 JULY/AUGUST 2022
that allows his viewers to embrace a con- “You know why? ’Cause you don’t give
He is spiracy without calling it a conspiracy, to a shit.”
believe a lie while claiming it isn’t one. His The target of his pique is one of his
Schrödinger’s show positively burbles with conspiracies, employees. I will later feel terrible about
or at least darkly hints at doings within this and apologize. He is yelling at the
bullshitter, doings, grimy wheels within wheels. Before employee based on a mistake I made—
the Olympics in China, Bannon suggested I’d been pestering Bannon about a bizarre
at once that something was terribly suspicious newsletter that I thought was issued by
about the lockdowns happening there—it War Room but in fact came from a fan
of his couldn’t just be Omicron that was spook- site. Bannon thought the employee was
ing the Chinese government. to blame.
nonsense So what’s your theory? I asked. “If I didn’t give a shit, I wouldn’t be
“Some people think it’s a combina- here doing this stuff,” the employee replies.
and tion of Ebola and hemorrhagic fever,” he “Bullshit,” Bannon says. “You’re doing
answered. “I don’t know.” this for a fucking paycheck. Go fuck your-
above it. That would mean China successfully self.” He then calmly turns to Cameron,
concealed an Ebola outbreak. the producer. “Do we have Ben at the
Early in the Ukraine conflict, Bannon border?” Suddenly the tantrum has the
took Vladimir Putin’s latest propaganda quality of WWE wrestling—dialed up for
out for a spin, repeating more than any my benefit, a performance.
other far-right broadcast (again, according Was it for my benefit? I ask the
to Brookings) that Ukraine was developing employee.
bioweapons with funding from the United He shakes his head. No. He stares at his
States. Even his own expert, the virolo- computer, grim-faced.
gist Steven Hatfill, slapped him down on Bannon’s blood is still up about half
the air for repeating that one: “Russia’s the an hour later, when I ask him why he
one with a biological-weapons program thinks his Apple podcast rankings dipped
in this area.” shortly after the start of the Ukraine inva-
And don’t get Bannon started on the sion. They did not dip, he says, and starts
ballots! hinky machines! lapses in signature COVID vaccines. They’re an experimen- punching his phone, this time to yell at
matches!—and other assorted crimes com- tal gene therapy! Shots that kill 15 people his publicist. “Why did you not send her
mitted by Democrats. His show is ground for every person they might save! (Well, the Chartable chart every day?”
zero for epistemological warfare, and he he didn’t say that. A guest did—Steve I get it every day, I interrupt.
recruits all kinds of fringe combatants to Kirsch, the head of something called the “Stop,” he snaps at me. “Am I ask-
the cause, including the Mos Eisley Can- Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.) ing you?”
tina caucus of Congress (Matt Gaetz, Mo Naomi Wolf, who suggested on Twitter No, I say.
Brooks, and, for a long while, with alarm- (before getting kicked off) that COVID He continues giving a heated lecture to
ing regularity, Marjorie Taylor Greene). vaccines were a “software platform that can his publicist. “Are we the No. 1 or 2 pod-
And if they say something truly off-the- receive uploads,” is one of his most popu- cast every day in politics on Chartable?”
wall, even by War Room standards, well … lar regulars. He insists on calling her Doc- Pause. “Have we had any dips since the
there’s always plausible deniability. Bannon tor Naomi Wolf every time she comes on war started?” Pause. “Thank you. All 30
wasn’t doing the talking. He only hands his the show, pausing and then leaning hard days you send me, I want you to send her,
guests the mic, right? How could he know on the word Doctor. I point out that this and I want you to copy me on it.”
they were lousy at karaoke? is rather deceptive. I get it later. The chart shows a clear
I will say that the War Room is, in its “She’s a Ph.D. from Yale, isn’t she?” dip—with the show sliding to third,
own frantic way, more varied and ambi- Oxford, I say. In philosophy. fourth, fifth place in the politics category—
tious than the other shows of its kind, “I rest my case. It’s good enough for me.” around the beginning of the war.
lurching between republic-endangering Bannon gets off the phone, perfectly
lies and granular wonkery, especially when cheerful.
it comes to polls and economics. (There’s When you were married, I ask, did you
a lot of talk about wage-price spirals and “YOU ALLOWED IT to happen, you stu- yell at your wives like this?
quantitative easing.) pid motherfucker!” “Was I yelling?”
But the motto that sits on Bannon’s This is what Bannon sounds like Yes, I tell him. What would his ex-wives
mantel—There are no conspiracies, but when he loses it. I had heard about his say about him?
there are NO coincidences—is quite famous temper, but had yet to witness it “They’d say, ‘Another day at the Ban-
apt. It’s perfect doublespeak, a formula in real time. non ranch.’”

29
Did any of his ex-wives ever drag him conversation. Bannon turns around. He’s Turning. That’s the title of one of Bannon’s
to therapy? thrilled. “Ask David Frum how it was to favorite texts, published in 1997. The
“Stop.” He starts laughing. get crushed,” he tells me. “You heard the authors, Neil Howe and William Strauss,
Look, if you want to stay married— story of how I destroyed him in Toronto?” take a cyclical view of history, stipulating
“Marriage to me was therapy.” He’s referring to the debate the two had that we go through four cycles every 80 to
But did any of them ever take him to in 2018. It drew lots of publicity at the 100 years: a High (characterized by order),
a shrink? time. I did, in fact, watch it, and David followed by an Awakening (characterized
“Never mentioned it. Are you nuts? I’m did not, in fact, get crushed. According by questioning, consciousness-raising),
an Irishman.” to the audience meter, the debate was a followed by an Unraveling (marked by
I know, I say. Famously unanalyz- draw, the attendees unbudging in their pessimism, selfish pursuits), which culmi-
able. Still, your personality is not garden- final views—which overwhelmingly cor- nates in a Crisis (marked by destruction,
variety— responded with David’s, by a 44-point possibly war).
“That’s so not true.” margin. (David had argued that the future At some point I ask Bannon: If you
But of course it is true. The charisma, belonged to liberals, in the broad sense of use your show to sow doubts about every
the quick temper, the overt delight in the term; Bannon had argued it belonged institution there is—
manipulating people … to populists.) David wrote about the expe- “That’s good!”
… And again, the majestically unreli- rience for The Atlantic. About our media—
able narration. A few weeks later, I con- “It was full-spectrum dominance.” “That’s good!”
sulted a report from the Santa Monica Full-spectrum dominance. It’s a staple Then what replaces them?
Police Department filed on New Year’s in Bannon’s pantry of war cries. We will “People are gonna come in to reju-
Day 1996, following a 911 call. It said show full-spectrum dominance in Novem- venate these things. It’s the cycle! It’s a
that Bannon’s second wife—the mother ber. We will run the tables on those feckless natural process that has to happen. That’s
of the twins—had had an argument with Democrats; we will fieldstrip these clowns. where Donald Trump comes up.”
Bannon so intense that she followed him Trump was the tip of the spear, an armor- He trusts Donald Trump to re-sow the
out to the car, where he’d already climbed piercing shell. soil and build everything back?
into the driver’s seat, and spat on him; he Navy speak, basically, with extra “Donald Trump is an armor-piercing
reached through the open window and habanero. shell.”
grabbed her by the wrist and neck, leav- A streak of machismo definitely runs Which is to say: There is no plan. The
ing red marks. through War Room. Bannon crows about plan is to leave a smoldering crater where
I remembered the story well, having the new “muscular, ascendant Republican our institutions once were. Others will
read it in Politico when it first broke, in Party.” He despises “emotionalism.” He’s eventually fill it.
2016. Bannon was charged with misde- bellicose when it comes to the culture wars, It must be so intoxicating to be the one
meanor domestic assault, battery, and possessed of unerring instincts about what in the crane with the wrecking ball.
dissuading a witness. When the story will inflame and polarize. Demagoguing
came out, Bannon told Politico through a critical race theory? Here for it. Just hours
spokesperson that he’d never been inter- before the invasion of Ukraine, he declared:
viewed by the police about the incident. “Putin ain’t woke.” The undocumented EARLY ON IN my acquaintance with
He pleaded not guilty to the charges. The immigrants streaming over the border? Bannon, his father died. Our original plan
case was later dismissed. “An invasion,” the real invasion, the one had been for me to meet Marty Bannon—
But as I reread the grim police report, Americans should care about, as opposed Steve had dinner with him most weekends
something else caught my eye. It was the part to what’s happening in Ukraine. in Richmond—and we’d even gone some
that said, They have been going to counseling. Come next January, Bannon hopes the way toward coordinating the logistics. But
He had been dragged to a therapist. new Republican majority will impeach then I got a text saying he’d died. I went to
“That’s not therapy,” Bannon says, President Biden for this so-called invasion. Martin Bannon’s funeral instead.
when I mention this to him a few weeks The notion strikes me as insane. But he You could say that this was one hell
later. “That’s marriage counseling.” talks about it with metronomic regularity of a brazen PR move, having a reporter
I do wonder what that counselor had on his show. tag along to your dad’s funeral—and an
to say. “His ability to see the crack, create the insensitive guerrilla stunt to pull on your
wedge, and then deliver a message with family, too.
emotional impact is second to none,” Brad And on some level, it was. (He’s using you.)
Parscale, a senior campaign manager for But the Bannons barely blinked when
I’VE GOTTEN USED to this strange Trump in both 2016 and 2020, told me. I told them what I was doing there. They
house. Bannon and I are mid-conversation “I’ve seen him do it in real time.” seemed to be used to this type of thing
when my colleague David Frum appears But Bannon also has a darker, more from Steve, and basically shrugged it off.
on the flatscreen in the living room. oracular message to impart: We are at a (“Anything Steve says, you have to cut in
Is that David? I ask, interrupting our historic inflection point. It’s The Fourth half and divide by two,” one of them said.)

30 JULY/AUGUST 2022
His first wife was there, and she seemed But that was the only way he stood out. This hardly seems an accident. Anti-
to be on pleasant terms with him. His That was the biggest revelation over those Semitism is the mother of all conspiracy
brother Chris, who went out of his way two days at Marty’s funeral: Bannon basi- theories. Jews: They’ve rigged everything.
to make sure I didn’t feel marooned or cally recedes when he’s in the bosom of “You cannot possibly—you cannot
awkward, was especially helpful when I his family. No one treats him like a celeb- possibly, possibly watch the War Room
phoned some weeks later, telling me that rity. There’s no gravitational shift when and think it’s in any way anti-Semitic,”
Steve had always been a reader and a con- he enters the room. His eulogy was brief, Bannon says to me when I ask him about
trol freak and “the most competitive guy affectionate, appropriate—focused on the this. Give me an example of a show seg-
on the planet.” living, how the accomplishments of the ment that’s anti-Semitic, he tells me.
Marty’s story plays a key role in Steve grandkids had made Marty so proud. In But it’s never as straightforward as that.
Bannon’s own political transformation. He this setting, anyway, Bannon never once For starters, it’s the people he brings on
was a father of five, a man who worked for stole the show. his show. Like Marjorie Taylor Greene, one
the phone company his entire life, only to of his most ubiquitous guests, whom he cast
panic and sell off most of what remained aside only after she spoke at a February con-
of his savings when the market crashed in ference where the organizer, Nick Fuentes,
2008. That was Steve’s true moment of ZELENSKY … JUST another degenerate cheerfully praised Hitler. Her beliefs were
conversion on the road to Damascus, or Jew. These Jews keep showing up when soci- hardly a secret before that. In 2018, she
so he says—what made him embrace the eties collapse. shared on Facebook a video claiming that
cause of the forgotten deplorable. “The The Wuhan Lab was a Zionist Lab (Yves “Zionist supremacists” were trying to dis-
civic society in our country is predicated Levi, Rothschild) place white Europeans with immigrants
upon Marty Bannons,” he told me. “The I will say that Bannon tried to warn me. (in other words, the “Great Replacement”
world depends upon the Marty Bannons. Nothing burger with Jew sauce theory); she also posted a hypothesis that
And they’re always getting the shit end of Jews hate anyone that goes against the the California wildfires may have been
the stick.” world financial machine. caused by lasers controlled, in part, by a
Steve was the sole member of his family He knew I was Jewish. So when I asked vice chairman at “Rothschild Inc, interna-
not to take Communion. (He has a beef him about War Room chat rooms, he told tional investment banking firm.”
with the current pope: “He’s a Marxist.”) me that some of them got “a little spicy.” Jewish space lasers, I say to him.
Only a matter of time until the Jews “I haven’t really seen that,” he tells me.
destroying this country get noticed and expelled But the War Room regular who truly
At first, I didn’t understand what he gives me the creeps is Jack Posobiec.
meant. Spicy? “Are you saying Posobiec’s an anti-
There was a long pause. “How much Semite?” he asks. “Show me any evidence
do you drill down on the, on the right?” at all that he’s an anti-Semite.”
he finally replied. “Not the conservatives. I’m uncertain how to reply to this.
People who are considered far-right or Hatewatch, a blog of the Southern Pov-
populist or nationalist. How familiar are erty Law Center, published a detailed
you with this ecosphere?” account of Posobiec’s anti-Semitic post-
I told him getting more so, but not very. ings on social media. (Posobiec called
“Look, it’s freedom of expression,” he Hatewatch’s findings “disinformation”
There is said, “and they’re pretty blunt about what and claimed to have filed an FBI report
they’re saying.” about it.) The crudest evidence was once
no plan. Jews to the left, Jews to the right, stuck in on Twitter. According to the SPLC, he
the middle of Jews. was part of the crusade to identify Jewish
The plan These comments—all from different users with three sets of parentheses—the
handles, by the way—are on Rumble, “echoes meme,” as it became known—so
is to leave a which carries Bannon’s show live, and that they could be targeted and harassed
usually has tens of thousands of viewers by white supremacists online. He erased
smoldering in real time. (I didn’t even venture onto those tweets, but some are still archived.
Telegram, where I knew the commen- “Surrounded by (((them))) at Peter
crater tary would be fouler still.) I got used to Thiel press conference,” Posobiec tweeted
it after a while. I also came to expect it: in October 2016, accompanied by a
where our Anti-Semitic rhetoric was the most abun- selfie with people who I gather are Jews
dant form of ugliness I saw from com- in the background.
institutions menters during his broadcast, even more “(((WOLF))),” he tweeted in July 2016
abundant than anything floridly racist or above another person’s tweet complaining
once were. anti-immigrant. about Wolf Blitzer’s behavior in a restaurant.

31
On a January 13 segment of Bannon’s sump collects with anti-Semitic sludge. Can I prove, absolutely, that my
show, Posobiec mentioned Ron Klain. The commenters love to dump on him. conversation with Navarro—one of his
Klain is the White House chief of staff. Boris the vaccinated J-E-W. Boris is a staunchest allies, with whom he is in
His name comes up a zillion times a day Mossad double agent. constant communication—is what made
on the news. It’s Klain, rhymes with rain; “On Boris?” Bannon catch himself, mid-sentence? I
everyone knows how it’s pronounced. Yes. cannot. But I can’t disprove it either, and
Posobiec said his name correctly the first He pauses. “There’s a little bit. Yup. Navarro just happened to be his next
time in the segment. He pronounced it There’s no doubt.” guest. There are no conspiracies, but there
correctly the second time too. But then he Anti-Semitism isn’t only about revul- are no coincidences.
quickly revised his pronunciation. “Ron- sion. It’s a belief system. Bannon and his
ald Klein,” he said. guests are always invoking George Soros.
In case there was any doubt about what Soros-backed district attorneys. Soros and
sort of fellow was pulling the strings. the mega-donors. It’s code, by now— ON JANUARY 6, 2021, Maureen Ban-
Or, hey, maybe he just misspoke. well-known code for a sinister theory non, Steve’s oldest child, was at the presi-
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, about who’s really in control. I note that dent’s rally on the Ellipse, seated in the
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, every time he says “Soros,” the anti-Semitic second row of the section for VVIPs.
no, no, no, no,” Bannon says when I press commenters come out, as if on cue. (Not a misprint: VVIP means “very very
this point. “You can’t. You can’t throw this “They say Soros?” important person.”) Her plan was to spend
charge out there. It’s a horrible charge. I As if he doesn’t know. most of the day taking photographs for
consider myself one of the leaders in Yes, I say. And the Rothschilds, also the conservative influencer and War Room
crushing anti-Semitism in this country.” invoked on his show. favorite Maggie McCarthy, better known
He says I should talk to all the Jews “That’s the Breitbart comments sec- as Fog City Midge, who was conduct-
with whom he’s worked and done busi- tion,” he says dismissively. ing interviews on the Mall. But around
ness. And it’s true, there are a fair number; But that’s just it: He told Errol Morris 1:50 p.m., Maureen says she got a call
not one has told me he’s said anything that that the Breitbart comments section could from Arizona State Representative Mark
offended them or betrayed any revulsion. be “weaponized at some point in time.” Finchem, another War Room regular (cur-
(Though in court filings made during their Inflaming anti-Semitism is a great way to rently leading the charge to decertify his
divorce proceedings, his second ex-wife organize revolts. state’s election results, also running for Ari-
claimed that Bannon said outright that he “I’m gonna continue to say Soros.” zona’s secretary of state), telling her and
didn’t like Jews, and didn’t want his kids Bannon lectures me that his side is not her crew to turn around.
attending a school with so many of them, the problem. Mine is. “The Democratic “He was like, ‘Do not come near
because “they raise their kids to be ‘whiny Party is an anti-Semitic party,” he says. the Capitol,’ ” she told me. From where
brats.’ ” His response is adamant. “That’s “The progressive left is virulently anti- Finchem was, he could already see it: chaos.
a bald-faced lie,” he says, noting that he Israel.” But that’s changing the focus of this Maureen and her gang made their way
sent his kids to the school in question.) discussion; we’re talking about his rhetoric. back to the Breitbart embassy, where she
During our conversation, Bannon Peter Navarro, another former Trump started calling family while watching the
is almost clumsily eager to show that White House staffer who is a regular on events unfold on the giant TV adjacent
he likes Jews. One evening, he told me War Room, was much more honest about to the War Room studio. Her father was
that two things shocked him when liv- this problem. When I asked him about between shows. (He stops broadcasting at
ing in London: “the anti-Semitism and the rivers of anti-Semitic slime I saw, he noon and resumes at five.)
the drinking.” A few minutes later, he laughed for a moment. Then: “Yeah. You The final time I visit Bannon, I ask him
mentioned how much he missed his doc- know. It’s a big tent.” what he was doing during the insurrection.
tors in Los Angeles. “They’re all Persian A few days after my conversation with “Watching what was going on.”
Jewish. They all look like movie stars. Navarro, Bannon was on another tear Where?
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these about Ukraine on War Room, fuming once “Downstairs,” he says. We are, for
guys. They’re like the most perfect people again that the United States has always once, on the parlor floor of the Breitbart
you’ve ever seen.” been fighting Europe’s wars and bailing embassy, which is much more grand,
“You should talk to Boris,” he now tells it out. Then he brought up Emmanuel much more Washington. “In the war
me, meaning Boris Epshteyn, a former Macron. “He’s a great guy. You know, the room. Basically the whole time.”
Trump aide who is a regular fixture on former Rothschild’s banker—” The problem with this story is that
War Room. (I did. “Any notion that Steve But then Bannon seemed to catch him- Maureen had told me otherwise. “He
Bannon is anything but a great friend to self. “Hey, that’s not a code word,” he said. was upstairs,” she said to me. “And I was
the Jewish people and the state of Israel is “That’s where he worked. He worked at downstairs, in the studio area. We weren’t
a woke liberal lie.”) Rothschild & Company.” around each other until close to show-
I point out that frequently, when Which is true. But there was no com- time.” She’d only briefly gone upstairs, to
Epshteyn is on-screen on Rumble, a little pelling reason for Bannon to say so. assure her dad that she was okay.

32 JULY/AUGUST 2022
just reported it, along with the news that
more than seven hours of White House
phone logs—which happened to encom-
pass the window of the insurrection—
were missing. I ask Bannon what might
account for the gap.
“During the working day, I don’t
think Trump takes a lot of calls on the
cellphone.”
Except we already know that the
president tried to reach Senator Tommy
Tuberville and accidentally got Senator
Mike Lee, I say.
So he really never talked to Trump?
“Talking to Donald J. Trump was not a
priority in those hours. What was a prior-
ity,” he says, was getting all dozen Repub-
lican senators who’d originally agreed
to reject the election results to stay the
course. He was “livid” that some of them
backed off their objections after the Capi-
tol was breached.
This was not a response I had anticipated.
You wanted to stay the course, I say,
even while men in horns and fur were
storming the Senate floor? Even though
a woman got shot?
“I assume that the Capitol Police,
they’re gonna get good order and disci-
pline, but yes,” he says. “As bad as that
looks, you still have your duty to do …
And we failed that day. And the failure is
on McConnell, and Schumer and Pelosi,
and McCarthy, and all of them that wet
themselves that day.”
Forget about the physical insurrection.
He was furious that the legislative insur-
rection hadn’t taken place.
This is what he was talking about with
Trump, he says, on the evening phone call.
And look: I didn’t expect Steve Bannon But knowing my dad, I believe that he did He told Trump it was over. “We had our
to be honest about this. He’s already been tell Trump … that he needed to put out a shot,” he says, summarizing his message
charged with two counts of criminal con- statement telling them to stop.” to the president. “What we now have is:
tempt of Congress for failing to respond “She’s very sweet,” Bannon tells me You can have a state legislature go back
to a subpoena from the January 6 com- when I relay this to him. after the fact and decertify. And then you’re
mittee. His first attempt to get the charge So you’re going to tell me you didn’t kind of in uncharted territory. But the pro-
dismissed, based on the bizarre claim of call Trump? cess to take the presidency” before it got
executive privilege, didn’t work. His trial He coyly rolls his eyes. “I don’t certified was over.
CHRIS BUCK FOR THE ATLANTIC

starts July 18. remember.” It is hard to know what to make of

When I asked Maureen what she What? this, the thinking is so outlandish, and so
thought her father was doing upstairs, she “Hey, if they come up with it, I’ll have utterly estranged from the realities on the
told me she wasn’t sure, but she believed to rethink it, but I don’t think I did.” ground. True, Bannon had been at the
he was on the phone with the president, I did it if they find it. Willard Hotel on January 5, along with a
urging him to tell the protesters to stand He’s quick to note that he did phone ragtag group of misfit lawyers and advisers,
down. “I can’t say with absolute certainty, Trump that morning and evening, which helping cook up a political and messaging
because I did not hear him on the phone. of course I know, because the papers have strategy to overturn the election.

33
But he was now fuming over the failure THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR to the Breit- and assault, according to The Washington
to act on an interpretation of the 1887 bart embassy is Bannon’s now. Purchased Post, and that Kwok is wanted by the Chi-
Electoral Count Act, one that would have for $2.3 million, according to public nese government for fraud, as well as brib-
allowed the vice president to refuse to records. He hopes it will one day be the ery and money-laundering, charges he has
accept states’ electoral votes. It’s a danger- headquarters of the nationalist populist denied. And that Kwok not long ago filed
ous interpretation. To embrace it would movement. “We’re gonna have all the for bankruptcy, suggesting that his assets
give our democracy the means to die by its lectures here, all the talks, all the cocktail are between $50,001 and $100,000 while
own hand. And introducing it as a viable parties,” he says as he walks me through it. his liabilities are between $100 million and
concept in the run-up to January 6, 2021, It’s a lovely wedding cake of a place, with $500 million.
is what led to literal deaths—and had the ornate molding and twinkly chandeliers. Bannon does have some monastic hab-
Secret Service frantically trying to protect I ask if he sees any irony in its grandeur. its. He’s seldom seen around town. He
Vice President Mike Pence from grave “In revolutionary France, didn’t they never discusses his girlfriend—or is she an
physical harm. have the nicest salons?” ex?—and her daughter, who live several
Yet Bannon bitterly claims that Pence True, but didn’t Robespierre eventu- states away. He says the last time he had
himself was the problem. Which is pre- ally find his own head in the cradle of the a fancy meal in D.C. was 10 years ago, at
sumably what the guys with the hang- guillotine? Cafe Milano, where the food was merely
man’s noose also thought. “As a gutless “I didn’t say it worked that well for “fleet average.”
coward—and he is a gutless coward— everyone individually.” But Bannon is still the king of the side
he dropped a thermonuclear weapon Bannon may have styled himself as the hustle. He is now dabbling in crypto-
on a city that was obviously on edge,” leader of the nationalist populist move- currency. (FJB coin. JB stands for “Joe
he insists, speaking of Pence’s failure to ment. But he’s completely at home in Biden.”) He’s partnered with Birch Gold,
reject states’ electors. “He’s responsible. the system he despises. After leaving the a sponsor of his show, writing a pamphlet
One thousand percent.” White House, when he was trying to on the demise of the dollar. Most impor-
This is the world according to Bannon: build a continent-wide clearinghouse for tant, he’s partnered with Kwok in ways
Mike Pence is to blame for January 6. the populist movement in Europe, he was both conspicuous and obscure: He received
So what most upset you about that day, partial to staying in luxury hotels. When $1 million from Guo Media in 2018 to
I ask, was that your legislative machinations federal agents came to arrest Bannon in serve as a consultant to the company, which
were not fully carried out, even though they August 2020 for allegedly defrauding is dedicated in equal measure to savaging
were never going to succeed? investors in “We Build the Wall,” they the Chinese government and spreading dis-
“We would’ve lost,” he says. “Definitely had to pull him off the yacht of his latest information in America; he was identified
lost. But you would’ve had it in an offi- patron, Guo Wengui (also known as Miles in 2020 as one of the directors of GTV, an
cial record, right? That could be debated Kwok), where he’d been living for weeks. alternative news and social-media platform
later on.” “This guy stumbled into the MAGA also linked to Kwok.
Moving the Overton window—the movement as a way to make money and Last fall, GTV and the other media
spectrum of political and cultural ideas to get fame and fortune,” says another companies connected to Kwok were fined
that a society is willing to countenance— ex-colleague. “He lives off other people’s $539 million for illegally selling shares. (The
is very important to Bannon. But getting money—Andrew Breitbart, Bob Mercer, companies neither admitted nor denied any
the American public to accept the idea that a Chinese billionaire. How is he any dif- wrongdoing; GTV has since shut down.)
the vice president can reject the results of ferent from a kept woman? He’s a 68-year- This spring, two of Bannon’s co-defendants
a free and fair election—that’s more than old kept woman.” in “We Build the Wall” pleaded guilty to
shifting the window. That’s installing a Bannon has answers to this litany, of defrauding donors of hundreds of thou-
new one. course, which he’s heard some version of sands. The fourth co-defendant has pleaded
So whom did Bannon call that day? many times before. His stint at Goldman not guilty, and is calling Bannon as a wit-
There’s a five-second pause. “I have gave him a glimpse inside the beast, how it ness. Bannon says his arrest was politically
to think about that. But we worked the fed off the little guy. His assorted collabo- motivated. “This was 1,000 percent to keep
phones in the afternoon—where I was rations with the billionaire Mercer family me off the Trump campaign in 2020.”
told, in no uncertain terms, This is over.” also served the cause, whether those were For all his big talk, it is unclear how
So whom did you talk to? I repeat. creating Cambridge Analytica, the data much Bannon is worth or what, in fact,
“I gotta remember,” he says. firm that fed the Trump campaign, or the truly belongs to him. The Breitbart embassy
I stare at him. Government Accountability Institute, is owned by Moustafa El-Gindy, a former
“I blocked that whole thing out … I whose president wrote the book Clinton member of the Egyptian Parliament. This
was worked up.” Cash. His current association with the beautiful new house is owned by an LLC
He does say one thing: He wasn’t in media mogul Robert Sigg and Miles Kwok based in Delaware, but there’s no way to
touch with Ginni Thomas. (I asked.) has served War Room. tell if that LLC is his.
That, at least, is something. If you can We will set aside, for now, that Sigg has I ask Bannon when he last flew com-
believe it. If you can believe anything. a criminal record that includes bank fraud mercial.

34 JULY/AUGUST 2022
“He’s a local elections. What was already a frenetic
schedule got even zanier; a Red Bull habit,
man. He’s a showman. And ultimately, he’s
a dangerous man,” says yet another for-

smart man,” which he’d quit, was back.

Bannon and I were originally going to
mer colleague. And a vindictive man: “He
commands a little army of terrifying peo-

says a former fly out to Arizona for this story. He recently

purchased a home there too, and he says its
ple who can make life really difficult if you
cross him.” Which explains why so many

colleague. broadcast studio is an exact replica of the

one in D.C., so that viewers won’t notice
people in this story asked for anonymity.
In this person’s estimation, it would not

“He’s a crafty the difference. His plan had been to spend

the winter and spring out there.
be giving Bannon too much credit to say
that he’s built the ideological foundation for

man. He’s a But we never made it. It may have been

because his father died, throwing his life
Trumpism in this country. “And frankly, I
think that that foundation has formed the

showman. into temporary disarray. But I kept won-

dering if the real reason was something
basis of the mainstreaming of conspiracy
theories, a spike in political violence, and a

And else, possibly financial trouble—maybe

that’s why he added a fourth hour of pro-
deep and continuous damage to our demo-
cratic institutions.”

ultimately, gramming to his load. But no, he tells me.

“The War Room is a cash machine because
On April 25, my phone dinged at
8:39 p.m. A text from Bannon, this time

he’s a it costs nothing to produce.” In fact, he

says, he needed that fourth hour to accom-
containing a link to a story in Axios. It said
that 133 House Republicans had sent a

dangerous modate all of his sponsors.

What’s really tying him to Washing-
letter to Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s sec-
retary of homeland security, that essen-

man.” ton, he explains, is a furious desire to keep

the momentum going on his show. He’s
tially laid the groundwork for Mayorkas’s
impeachment. “Enthusiasm for impeach-
on a roll. There’s so much energy now in ing top Biden officials has spread from the
the MAGA movement. Inflation is soar- fringes of the House Republican confer-
ing; Biden is tanking. “The largest voting ence to its mainstream,” read the lede.
bloc in this nation is non-college-educated And you doubted WarRoom!!! Bannon
whites,” he tells me. “I have 52/48 of men texted.
and I have 50/50 of women that believe I don’t know if War Room was respon-
He grins. “Oh, years ago.” he’s illegitimate, okay?” sible. The Axios authors never mentioned it.
How many years? Note the use of the pronoun I. He But Bannon has, as I’ve said, been banging
He reconsiders. “Commercial overseas, really does see this as his movement. The on about impeaching Biden for the south-
I’ve flown a bunch. But commercial domes- nearer we get to 2024, the more he seems ern “invasion” for months. To borrow his
tic? Hasn’t been since before I took over to feel compelled to stick around. former colleague’s term, he has helped
the Trump campaign.” And you can see it. How this will mainstream this treacherous idea. And now
He continues his tour, explaining where finally be Bannon’s moment, when the here is a version of it, embraced by more
and how the two houses will become one. nationalist populist movement at last than half of the House Republicans.
There are at least some walls he’s in favor takes wing, and he’ll be at the center of This is going to be so fucking epic.
of removing. it all, hosting his salons. Two-thirds of House Republicans voted
But will he? to reject the result of the 2020 election.
I mean: Is this guy Lenin in Zurich, How long before it’s three-quarters, four-
patiently biding his time? Or is he some fifths, nine-tenths? How long before one of
“CAN I SAY SOMETHING?” Bannon asks Estonian anti-Communist émigré from a these people becomes speaker?
me during our final hours together. “There’s Le Carré novel, waiting to die in a lonely Why, I ruefully asked, was he so relentless
not a more sophisticated show on all televi- bedsit in London? with his pronunciamentos?
sion than War Room.” Matthew C. MacWilliams, a public- Because like a Kafka novel one can never
I don’t know about that. He’s certainly opinion strategist and the author of On escape.
working very hard at it. Fascism, is guessing the latter. “Trump Watch me, I wrote. I’m going down-
But where, exactly, is the line between threw him out. The Europeans kicked stairs and doing a load of laundry.
mania and desperation? him to the curb. His empire crashed and And I did. But my phone still lights up
When I first met Bannon, he was he ended up with a podcast,” he says. most nights. Bannon is still texting.
already podcasting three hours per week- “He’s a parasite. A talker. Rasputin with
day and two hours on Saturdays. In March, a digital show. Rasputin was knifed.”
he added a fourth hour to his weekday But others still think he has plenty of
load, War Room: Battleground, to focus on influence. “He’s a smart man. He’s a crafty Jennifer Senior is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

35
16 4 8
Back to
By
CULLEN MURPHY

38
ChagosJULY/AUGUST 2022
by Oliver Munday
Photo illustrations
HALF A CENTURY AGO, 2,000 PEOPLE
WERE FORCIBLY REMOVED FROM
A REMOTE STRING OF ISLANDS IN THE
MIDDLE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN.

THIS YEAR, A GROUP OF THEM

SET SAIL FOR HOME.

39
I.I.I.
coconuts and they fished. They had churches of stone. Mossy grave-
stones go back many generations. But a world away, in the offices
of Whitehall and the clubs of St. James’s, this was a technicality.
That the islanders involved were Black made decisions even easier.
The conversations might reasonably be imagined, but they don’t
have to be. Foreign and Colonial Office documents from the period
state that, for official purposes, people living in Chagos were to be
referred to as transitory “contract laborers.” The archipelago was
Victoria, Seychelles described as having “no indigenous population except seagulls.”
When Olivier Bancoult boarded the ship that was to take him
Internal documents freely admitted that all of this was a “fiction.” A
1,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to the Chagos Archipelago—
few years before Alfred Olivier Elysé was laid to rest in the Catholic
his childhood home, from which he and his fellow islanders had
cemetery on Île du Coin, one of the Chagos islands, a comment
been expelled 50 years earlier—he carried five wrought-iron
scrawled on a British document by an official named Denis Green-
crosses. Most of them bore a short inscription, hand-lettered in
hill captured the government’s outlook: “Along with the Birds go
white paint, memorializing the return of Chagossians to their
some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.”
birthplace. The crosses were to be driven into the ground of Peros
One thing at least was true: Governmental fiat had the power to
Banhos and Salomon, two of the archipelago’s once-inhabited
turn fable into fact. For reasons of state, the permanent inhabitants
atolls. But one cross was different.
It was inscribed with the name
of Bancoult’s grandfather Alfred
Olivier Elysé, and it was destined
for an island cemetery. Elysé had
died in 1969, as expulsions from
the archipelago were under way.
The expulsions were part of
an international bargain, though
not one that the 2,000 people of
Chagos had any say in. The short
version: For many years, the archi-
pelago was a faraway administrative
appendage of the British colony of
Mauritius, an island off the coast
of Africa. When Mauritius sought
independence, in the mid-1960s,
Britain decided to keep Chagos for
itself. It did so primarily to seques-
ter one of the atolls, Diego Garcia,
for use by the United States—part
of a global American ambition,
at the height of the Cold War,
to establish military outposts in
strategic places. Chagos itself was
nowhere, but it was equidistant
GALLO IMAGES / GETTY; ED HABERSHON / BBC

from everywhere: Draw a long line

from Madagascar to Indonesia, and
another from India to Antarctica,
and stick a pin in the blue at the
intersection. The catch for Britain
was that under international law,
the archipelago could be separated
from Mauritius only if it had no
PREVIOUS PAGE: THE RUINS OF A CHAGOSSIAN CHURCH ON BODDAM ISLAND.
“permanent population.”
ABOVE: OLIVIER BANCOULT HAS LED EFFORTS TO SECURE HIS
Chagos did have a permanent PEOPLE’S RIGHT OF RETURN TO THEIR HOME ISLANDS, INCLUDING
population—it had had one for cen- DIEGO GARCIA, NOW THE SITE OF A U.S. MILITARY BASE.
turies. The Chagossians harvested

40 JULY/AUGUST 2022
of the archipelago were removed, often with little warning, and to the United Nations, was aboard the Bleu de Nîmes; he smiled
typically allowed to bring only a single bag or suitcase or wooden diplomatically when someone referred to him as a “human shield.”
box. The United States, which wanted and endorsed the expulsions, We had departed from the Seychelles; typhoons made depar-
built its military base. The archipelago as a whole—Diego Garcia ture from Mauritius impossible. The ship slipped past the mega-
and some 60 other islands, mainly in the Peros Banhos and Salo- yachts of oligarchs, anchored off Victoria. Mountains receded, then
mon atolls—was reconstituted into a colonial entity known as the disappeared. Between the Seychelles and Chagos lies nothing but
British Indian Ocean Territory, within which Diego Garcia could open sea, sometimes rough. Five full days elapsed before the first
nest. Having been detached from Mauritius, BIOT would become hint of land—shorebirds diving for fish. A few hours later, the
both the newest British colony in Africa and the last remaining one. Bleu de Nîmes reached Peros Banhos, anchoring in its lagoon. Like
Uprooted and desperately poor, the Chagossians formed small every atoll, Peros Banhos is the rim of an extinct volcano, this one
communities in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom, about 10 miles in diameter. In places the rim emerges sufficiently
with little support from any of those countries. As a remembrance, above water to create a necklace of tiny islands, linked by reefs.
many kept sand from Chagos in small bowls in their home. On the The Chagossians took a launch to Île du Coin, where three of
balance scale of Cold War morality, the sand didn’t count for much. the group had been born, and waded onto the smooth, coralline
But the Chagossians never forgot where they’d come from—or, sand. The island is narrow and slightly curved, about a mile and
given that half a century has now elapsed, where their parents and a half long. The white beach was alive with small crabs. Coconuts
grandparents had come from. Some hoped to return to Chagos, bobbed in the surf. The Chagossians bent to their knees and kissed
or at least to have that right. Some wanted a path to citizenship in the sand, leaving a splay of palm prints. They stood and joined
Britain. Most wanted compensation commensurate with their loss. hands, closing their eyes and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Kreol, the
Bancoult, who makes his living as an electrician in Mauri- French-based language of the islands. They concluded the prayer
tius, is the president of the Chagos Refugees Group. He left Île and planted the first of the wrought-iron crosses.
du Coin, in Peros Banhos, on March 30, 1968, at the age of 4, Then they ventured into the dense vegetation—coconut trees
taking a small boat from the jetty to a bigger boat anchored in heavy with green fruit, flame trees that bloom a brilliant red—to
the lagoon. He has an islander’s way of using on rather than in seek the remains of their civilization.
to refer to where he comes from: “on my birthplace.” Bancoult

II.
is a large man with a large personality. He is friendly and he is
forceful. In the register of his voice, the calm vivisection of Brit-
ish actions can mount by degrees into the more insistent tones
of a man who has truth on his side.
Over the years, Bancoult has pressed the Chagossian cause with
the Congressional Black Caucus and the pope. Starting in the
1990s, he began looking for cracks to exploit in the edifice of Brit-
ish law. Future historians sifting through musty files in the Public
Record Office will find an impressive volume of litigation bearing The fate of the Chagos Archipelago has rested for centuries in the
the name Bancoult. The documents point the way to a tangle of hands of the Great Powers, whether those powers were moving in,
episodes—in British tribunals as well as the International Court of moving out, or just trying to hold on—“to get some rocks which
Justice (or World Court) and the United Nations General Assembly. will remain ours,” as Sir Paul Gore-Booth, the permanent under-
In 2019, to the surprise of many, the UN confirmed a finding by secretary at the Foreign Office, described his country’s intentions
OPENING SPREAD: BRITISH LIBRARY / ALAMY; ED HABERSHON / BBC

the World Court: The creation of the British Indian Ocean Terri- in the 1960s. The Chagos Archipelago spreads out across 250,000
tory had been illegal. The archipelago belonged to Mauritius. The square miles, an area the size of Texas; taken together, the islands
Chagos islanders could turn their eyes toward home. have a landmass the size of Manhattan. In two weeks at sea, travel-
Which is why, earlier this year, Bancoult and a group of other ing to, from, and among them, we did not see another ship. The
Chagossians found themselves on a converted British minesweeper, recorded history of the archipelago has chiefly been scientific and
now a private vessel named the Bleu de Nîmes, with those five geopolitical rather than cultural or social. Charles Darwin sailed
homemade crosses. They’d also brought bouquets of flowers, ask- through in 1836, during the voyage of the Beagle, but his interest lay
ing the crew to keep them cooled. The five Chagossians on the in coral. For all but one of the islands, there is no longer any human
ship were guests of the government of Mauritius, which had an history to record: Everyone is gone. The exception, Diego Garcia,
additional agenda of its own for this voyage: to assert its sover- is inhabited by 2,500 American-military personnel and temporary
eignty over the archipelago—to, quite literally, plant a flag. The foreign workers, mostly Filipino. That tiny atoll, a single V-shaped
voyage was hopeful, if uncertain. The World Court and UN not- island with a central lagoon, is strictly off-limits. Those who have
withstanding, Mauritian sovereignty is something that London been stationed there describe a place that would resemble the base
has yet to concede; for all anyone aboard knew, the British might at Guantánamo Bay—gyms, fast food, television, snorkeling—if
seek to impede the trip in some fashion. Just out of sight, a Brit- Guantánamo were on the moon and the moon were an ocean.
ish patrol vessel shadowed the Bleu de Nîmes when it entered Until their expulsion, more than 1,000 Chagossians lived on Diego
Chagossian waters. Jagdish Koonjul, the ambassador of Mauritius Garcia. Many accounts of the island by Americans stationed there

41
I

n
n

d a

i e
a c
n O

mention signs of previous habitation: a ruined house here, a crum- copra—the dried kernel of a coconut—along with the oil pressed
bling church there, a handful of graveyards. Diego Garcia’s runway from it. The Chagossians had created a distinctive society. They had
and “downtown” lie atop two village sites. their own houses, their own boats, their own gardens. Their form
Chagos was chanced upon by Portuguese navigators in the 16th of sega music provided the soundtrack for our time at sea.
century. They mapped the islands and gave some of them, such as One evening on board the ship, Bancoult spread out half a dozen
Peros Banhos, the names they retain. The Dutch came next, but well-creased nautical charts, pointing to key features of the archi-
didn’t stay. Chagos eventually came into the possession of France, pelago. Starting from the far north: Blenheim Reef, a treacherous
as did Mauritius and Réunion. The French gave names to more of marine structure about 20 miles in circumference that has caused
the islands. They imported enslaved workers from Madagascar and the destruction of scores of ships; below that, Salomon atoll, with
Mozambique, and later brought indentured workers from southern a dozen small islands around its rim; to the west of Salomon, the
India, to labor in coconut plantations. After the defeat of Napoleon, larger Peros Banhos atoll, with about 30 small islands; and finally,
Great Britain acquired Chagos and Mauritius. at the bottom, Diego Garcia, some 150 miles south of Blenheim
Little changed for the people of the islands, who by then num- Reef. Bancoult pointed to where the Chagossians on the ship, all
bered in the several hundreds. In time, after abolition, slavery was now living in Mauritius, had been born. Suzelle Baptiste was from
replaced completely by indentured servitude; in the 20th century, Diego Garcia. Rosemonde Bertin was from Salomon. Lisbey Elysé,
indentured servitude became low-wage employment by corporate Marcel Humbert, and Bancoult himself were from Peros Banhos.
planters. The language of the people remained Kreol. The main When Chagossians look back at the life they recall, or the life
religion was Catholicism. Cargo ships provided an occasional con- they’ve heard about, they conjure an idyll—Garden of Eden meets
nection to Mauritius—at most, four times a year. In the 1960s, as Shangri-la. They use the word paradise. They talk of “la vie facile.”
Mauritius negotiated its independence, the Chagos islanders were People ate fish from the sea and shared with one another. There
working for a single company, Chagos-Agalega Ltd., which exported was enough of everything to go around. Could it have been that

42 ILLUSTRATION BY LA TIGRE
good? Once, on deck, still a day out from Peros Banhos, I heard This approach had the When Chagossians
two of the Chagossians talking about the remoteness of island desired effect. Mauritius became
life, and how remoteness can produce contentment: “What you independent. Chagos was look back at the
see is all you know.” “detached.” Because the U.S. life they recall,
The plantation company paid workers both in cash and in food wanted no one nearby, the peo-
and supplies. It provided small pensions after retirement. There was ple of Chagos—who did not they conjure
a certain amount of infrastructure, including electricity in a few officially exist—were forced to an idyll—Garden
places. A Catholic priest traveled among the atolls. A number of leave. The entire population of
islanders learned to read and write; others signed documents with Diego Garcia had been removed of Eden meets
a thumbprint. Photographs of special occasions from a century ago by the end of 1971. A military Shangri-la. Could
show people of the archipelago wearing dresses and suits. base had to be constructed,
The islands are certainly beautiful—thickly wooded atolls in and the Americans needed the it have been
a turquoise sea as pure as anywhere on Earth. The most startling island “sanitized” and “swept,” a that good?
creature is the coconut crab, which grows to the size of a cat and task that fell to the British. The
may drop suddenly from trees. Its claws can take off a finger. people expelled from Diego
They are not a problem, Bancoult explained, “if you know how Garcia were not permitted to
to pick them up,” and they are good to eat. Still, the work of take their animals; about 1,000
the islanders was hard. The rows of tiny stone rectangles in the pet dogs had to be left behind.
cemeteries of Chagos tell a story of death at an early age. And as Many followed their owners
events would show, the existence of the Chagossians as a people to the beaches. In his meticu-
was at the mercy of forces beyond their control. lous book about Diego Garcia,
Island of Shame, the anthropolo-

III.
gist David Vine describes how,
at the direction of Sir Bruce
Greatbatch, an order came down to eliminate the dogs. Animals
that could not be easily poisoned or shot were lured with meat into
a copra-drying shed and then gassed with motor-vehicle exhaust.
Bob Hope arrived on the first jet to land on the runway, in
1972, using Diego Garcia to stage one of his Christmas shows for
American troops. He flew in with Redd Foxx and Belinda Green,
The deal between the United Kingdom and the United States was Miss World that year. A British naval officer remains nominally
worked out in secret against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, in charge of Diego Garcia and commands a small complement
which Britain had declined to support. As if to make amends, the of Royal Marines. But the island is leased to the U.S. through
government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson sought to accom- 2036. Vehicles drive on the right.
modate Washington’s desire for a foothold in the Indian Ocean. As for the Chagossians who’d lived there, many were
In diplomatic memorandums, officials avoided the term military transported to Mauritius—crowded under tarpaulins on the mer-
base; the preferred locution was joint communications facility. chant ship Nordvaer, or packed into the ship’s sweltering hold
Diego Garcia seemed ideal. The atoll’s lagoon could shelter a small along with the copra and coconut oil—and more or less left
navy. The ribbon of land on the western side had room for miles on the docks to fend for themselves. Others made their way to
of runway—an unsinkable aircraft carrier. The U.S. naval com- Peros Banhos or Salomon, until an ongoing campaign of attrition
mander in the Pacific, Admiral John McCain, father of the future made life on those atolls untenable. The plantation company was
senator, described the atoll as the Malta of the Indian Ocean. bought out by the British government and ultimately shut down.
At the time, Britain was engaged in negotiations over Mauri- Supplies of rice and flour were curtailed. Anyone who made the
tian independence. Decolonization was occurring worldwide, mistake of leaving Chagos—to visit relatives, to see a doctor—
and the United Nations had adopted rules—which Britain had would discover, without warning, that going home was prohib-
endorsed—about “self-determination” and “territorial integrity.” ited. Bancoult had traveled with his parents, Rita and Julien, and
When it came to Chagos, Britain finessed the self-determination his sister Noellie to Mauritius; Noellie needed urgent medical
argument through its claim that the islands had no permanent attention after her foot had been run over by the wheel of a cart
inhabitants, only a “floating population” of migrant workers. It and she’d developed gangrene. The medical care came too late,
finessed the territorial-integrity argument by inducing negotia- and Noellie died. The family prepared to return to Peros Banhos,
tors from Mauritius, meeting in London, to accept dismember- but were prevented from doing so. Nor could they communicate
ment. As the release of a Downing Street document later revealed, with people back home: Mail delivery had been halted. Rita did
the idea, in dealing with the chief Mauritian negotiator, was to not learn of the death of her father, still in Chagos, for several
“frighten him with hope”: Independence could be had, but only years. In 1973, those who’d clung to Salomon and Peros Banhos
if the Mauritians relinquished Chagos. were rounded up. People had as little as a day to pack a bag.

43
The Chagos Archipelago, meanwhile, began its new chapter “Tarzans or Men Fridays,” nor
as the British Indian Ocean Territory. Rather than opening with is it generous with them now.
In 1973, those
something along the lines of “We the people,” the territory’s con- Those who had been expelled who’d clung
stitution declares, “No person has the right of abode.” Accompa- from Chagos did become
nied by British military personnel, small groups of Chagossians citizens of Mauritius, if that’s
to the islands
have in recent years been allowed brief “heritage visits” to some where they went, though it were rounded
of the islands. A larger group, also under military escort, made a didn’t feel like home. In time,
pilgrimage in 2006. On their visits, the Chagossians have used many also came to hold British
up. They had
the limited time on each island—never overnight—to clear veg- Dependent Territories Citizen- as little as a day
etation from the decaying churches and restore the crumbling ship, which entitled the bearer
graves of their loved ones. They have cleaned inscriptions. They to the vague condition of Brit-
to pack. Chagos
have left flowers. And then they have had to depart. ish “subject” and to a passport, began its new
The British Indian Ocean Territory came to possess all the out- but not the right to live in Brit-
ward trappings of a colony. Its head of state is Queen Elizabeth. ain (or, in this case, to live in
chapter as the
It has a commissioner, in London, who also oversees the British the dependent territory). British Indian
Antarctic Territory. There is a flag. Coins have been issued: The silver Only in 2002, after much
50-pence coin displays the Queen on one side and an orange anem- agitation, did people born on
Ocean Territory,
onefish, like Nemo, on the other. The coins are legal tender within the islands (along with their where “no person
the territory, though there is really no place to spend them. British children, but not their grand-
Indian Ocean Territory stamps have been designed and printed— children) get the right to apply
has the right
for collectors, or for use at the post office on Diego Garcia. The for full British citizenship. of abode.”
territory has the internet country code .io—for “Indian Ocean”— Nothing about the status of
created by an entrepreneur and used extensively by internet start-ups Chagossians today is uniform:
and online-gambling operations. Signs have been posted on some It varies from person to per-
of the islands by the BIOT government. They signal to the very few son, generation to generation,
visitors—mostly owners of mega-yachts—that they have stepped place to place. In March, the
foot on British territory. Visitors are asked to refrain from littering. British government accepted
an amendment to proposed

IV.
legislation—which recently
became law—that would streamline the citizenship process for
anyone of Chagossian heritage, despite fears voiced by some about
precedent. (The author of the amendment, Baroness Lister of Burt-
ersett, responded, “We are not setting a precedent because I assume
we are not planning to evict anybody else.”)
When Bancoult surveyed the domains of the Chagossians
with his nautical charts, he left out Crawley, in West Sussex. A
All told, some 2,000 people were displaced from the Chagos Archi- quarter century after the expulsion, many Chagossians decided
pelago. At U.S. insistence, the islanders were even barred from that life in Britain, unfamiliar as it was, might be better than life
working on Diego Garcia; instead, foreign laborers were brought anywhere else. The first small groups arrived on flights from Port
in. The Chagossians had been promised housing and various kinds Louis to Gatwick Airport, south of London, in 2002. There were
of assistance, but the promises were not kept. Some settled in the no resettlement officials to meet them, no gift baskets of Marmite
Seychelles, at the time still a British colony, where hundreds were and Major Grey’s. Not knowing what else to do, they camped out
lodged at first in a prison. Those who found themselves in Mauri- in the airport arrival lounge, for days and even weeks. Gatwick
tius settled mainly in Port Louis, the capital. The Chagossians were is adjacent to Crawley, and the Chagossians began moving into
treated badly—unwanted newcomers, and culturally different from town after the local council grudgingly found some housing.
everyone else. They were shunted into the worst urban districts, With great persistence, the Chagossians in Crawley put down
near garbage dumps and in neighborhoods with high crime. They roots. Others followed. Today, the number of people in Crawley
had skills, but none that were highly valued. Drug use, prostitu- whose ancestry can be traced to Chagos is about 3,000. Chagossians
tion, suicide—all became serious problems, reflected in sega lyrics can still be found at Gatwick—they are a mainstay of the service
and oral histories. The Chagossians were referred to collectively, infrastructure that makes the airport possible, from handling bag-
and pejoratively, as les Îlois—“the islanders.” gage at the terminals to making beds at the hotels. But joblessness
Were they citizens of any nation? They seem to have thought is high, as is the incidence of depression and other challenges.
so. Many of the poorest Chagossian homes in Mauritius displayed Chagossians use a word with the Kreol spelling dérasiné to describe
a pressed-tin portrait of the Queen. But the United Kingdom in the experience of being cut off from the past. They use another
the early 1970s was not generous with passports, especially for word, sagren, to capture a deep, wasting sorrow. The term may not

44 JULY/AUGUST 2022
appear in medical journals, but it is a diagnosis I heard more than Though I’d be tempted to include the football jerseys. In
once from Chagossians talking about friends, or about themselves. 2014, a soccer team representing the Chagos diaspora became
During a recent trip to London, I took a train down to Craw- a member of Conifa, the Confederation of Independent Foot-
ley to meet members of the Chagos community, which extends ball Associations—a version of FIFA for soccer teams not affili-
two and even three generations beyond the one expelled from ated with that body. Many of Conifa’s members have a claim to
the archipelago. The town is not the kind of place one sees on national distinctiveness. The Roma people field a team. South
tourist posters. Crawley grew quickly both because of Gatwick Ossetia, Kashmir, Kurdistan, Tibet, Cornwall, and Western Sahara
and because the government chose to build tracts of new housing each field a team. The Chagossian team draws on local players.
there after the Second World War. The architecture is repetitive In recent years, it has twice qualified for the Conifa World Cup.
and nondescript. The heart of the town is the County Mall Shop- When I met him in Crawley, Cedric Joseph, the very young
ping Centre, not some holy well or Norman keep. goalkeeper—he is 19—showed me his gloves, painted with the
The Chagossians in Crawley present no unanimity of opinion orange, black, and blue of the Chagossian flag. Three people
about Chagos and their future. Some have been more interested jumped in to explain the symbolism. The cross talk boiled down
in rights and compensation than in resettlement, and in any case to this: Orange is for the plantations and the sun; black is for
don’t harbor warm feelings toward Mauritius. This point of view is the dark times; blue is for the sea and the future. Joseph’s grand-
articulated on the U.K.-based website Chagossian Voices. Others mother was born in Chagos; he said he felt sometimes that he
in Crawley share the same desire for recognition and support, but was representing her. But really, it was great just to get out there
their views are more in line with those of the Chagos Refugees and play. And the team was good. And so was he. He made fun
Group. They are drawn emotionally to the idea of resettlement— of himself, slipping into a parody of a sports announcer’s voice:
even if not necessarily for themselves—and believe it could hap- “The best, youngest goalkeeper in south England.”
pen. They would like to set foot on the archipelago one day.

V.V.V.
If Chagos possesses anything like a National Archives, it would
be the iPhone of Evelyna Bancoult, one of Olivier’s daughters.
She lives in Crawley with her two young children. Evelyna’s sister,
Jessica, a mother of three, lives in Crawley as well. So do many
relatives. When I came to visit, people converged on the home of
a cousin of Evelyna’s to talk about their memories. On her phone,
Evelyna pulled up black-and-white historical photos, grainy vid-
eos, and recent family pictures. Her grandmother, now deceased,
spoke to the room from the phone. In soundless footage, military Olivier Bancoult has been to Crawley many times, to visit his
officers watched Chagossians descend a gangplank—the fading daughters and to advance the interests of the Chagos Refugees
record of a heritage visit. Evelyna’s quick fingers found news Group. The lawsuits he has filed on behalf of his people have
reports, documentaries, press conferences, music. Children play- almost all been brought in British courts. Search the internet for
ing in the room paused to lean on her shoulder as she sat on a the name Olivier Bancoult, and you will scroll through a long list
couch, pointing when they saw someone they knew. of entries that commence with the tagline Bancoult v. For brevity’s
The scene was enthusiastic but also serious. The people there sake, lawyers refer to the various cases by the order in which they
felt that few in Britain had their interests in mind. They denounced were filed: Bancoult 2, Bancoult 4.
xenophobic dithering in Parliament over immigration. Fingers What Britain did to Chagos provoked legal challenges along
jabbed toward my knee for emphasis. Then, calmly, more than one two broad tracks. The first—the Bancoult track—began in the
of those in the room brought up the subject of history—history in 1990s. Whatever their private opinions, Bancoult and his lawyers
a narrow sense (our history) but also in a larger sense: the respon- have never sought to contest British sovereignty before the courts
sibility of nations to face their failures. of England. Their focus is human rights under British law. They
The Chagossians do not live in any single neighborhood of have contended that the Chagossians were wrongly evicted from
Crawley—and there are Chagossians in Manchester, Leeds, and their homes and that they have a right to return to their islands.
other cities—but you cannot miss the glimmerings of shared Bancoult’s first lawsuit went so far as to invoke the Magna Carta,
identity. They cook from recipes handed down by their mothers which prohibits forcible expulsion without what today would be
and grandmothers, though certain ingredients are hard to find. called due process. In the face of stiff headwinds, and to general
They draw on extended family networks. The adults have been astonishment, he won the case, in 2000. Britain’s foreign secretary
in England for years, most of them, and speak with a variety of at the time, Robin Cook, announced that he would accept the
London-area accents, but a cadence of elsewhere is unmistakable. High Court’s decision on the right of return.
In their homes, what you do not see, because the Chagossians But then, less than a year later, came 9/11. Tony Blair’s
were expelled so suddenly and allowed to bring so little with government—and a new, more compliant foreign secretary—
them, are mementos of life on the archipelago. If Evelyna loses had no desire to disturb the status quo on Diego Garcia or any of
her cellphone, the only physical evidence of the community’s the other islands. The military base was being used as a waypoint
origins may be chromosomes and grains of sand. for extraordinary rendition—and by some reports, as a detention

45
and interrogation site—while have to fall. He did not use the word quixotic. Over time, he
“We boarded the War on Terror ramped up. assembled a legal team from Mauritius, Belgium, India, Ukraine,
the ship in Bombing campaigns against and the United States.
Afghanistan and, later, Iraq The legal battle for Chagos lacks the drama of Inherit the Wind
the dark so that would be launched from there. or Twelve Angry Men. The dominoes fell, but in slow motion, one
we could not In 2004, the British govern- every few years. In accordance with the Convention on the Law of
ment used a device called an the Sea, Mauritius brought its case before a tribunal of international
see our island,” Order in Council—an archaic arbiters. The government argued that Britain had no standing to
Elysé said in procedure allowing ministers create the marine protected area; Chagos had been illegally detached
to bypass Parliament and from Mauritius, and Britain was therefore not the relevant “coastal
her testimony wield regal powers that the state.” The arbitrators agreed unanimously that creation of the
before the monarch herself can no lon- protected area was “not in accordance” with the provisions of the
ger exercise, but to which she Law of the Sea convention but kicked the sovereignty question to
World Court. must assent—to quash Ban- the UN General Assembly, which then weighed in with a lopsided
“People were coult’s victory. None of his vote: Let’s see what the World Court has to say about whether the
subsequent legal actions has detachment of the archipelago was legal in the first place.
dying of sadness been able to restore the right None of this involved the fate of the Chagossians—not
in that ship.” of return. But his follow-on directly—but many of them believed that if Britain’s sovereignty
cases have achieved something were upended, their efforts could be aided. Mauritius had not
else: Through the process of barred them from their homeland; Great Britain had done that.
discovery, they’ve dredged up And the Mauritian government had indicated receptivity to the
a mass of historical documents Chagossian cause. The World Court heard the case in Septem-
that confirm the cynicism and ber 2018, and it began by looking at the “factual circumstances”
lies of the government’s inner behind detachment and expulsion. Lisbey Elysé, expelled from
councils. Henceforward, Brit- Chagos when she was not yet 20, gave testimony before the jus-
ish officials would have to tices. She was a little overwhelmed, she told me, and ever mindful
preface remarks about Chagos of the fact that she had been chosen to represent all Chagossians.
with a throat-clearing admission that the government’s behavior Fearful that she might be nervous speaking directly to the court,
had of course been “shameful and wrong.” she asked for and was granted permission to present a video. It
The second track was the international one: the attempt by was three minutes and 53 seconds long. Elysé, then 65, spoke in
Mauritius to get Chagos back from Britain, alleging that detach- Kreol. Seated next to Sands, she watched from a front-row seat
ment had been agreed to under duress. Early efforts got little in a black suit as the video, with English subtitles, flickered in
traction. But then the British government made a mistake. In the Great Hall of Justice.
2010, Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced that the
British Indian Ocean Territory would be turned into a “marine We boarded the ship in the dark so that we could not see our
protected area” and placed off-limits to habitation and commerce island. And when we boarded the ship, conditions in the hull of
(but not to U.S. military operations). Miliband’s decision was the ship were bad. We were like animals and slaves in that ship.
cheered by many environmental organizations. The archipelago People were dying of sadness in that ship. And as for me, I was
encompasses the largest coral atoll structure on the planet—the four months pregnant at that time. The ship took four days to
Great Chagos Bank. Turtles and sharks abound. Fork-tailed frigate reach Mauritius. After our arrival, my child was born and died …
birds, among the fastest on Earth, skim by overhead. But Britain I maintain I must return to the island where I was born and I
wasn’t thinking about a National Geographic documentary. A must die there and where my grandparents have been buried. In
cable to Washington from the U.S. embassy in London quoted the place where I took birth, and in my native island.
a British diplomat stating that “no human footprints” or “Man
Fridays”—that language again—would be permitted within the In the end, the World Court declared that Britain was in
protected area, and admitting privately that the move would “put the wrong—the detachment of Chagos had indeed been illegal
paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents.” because “this detachment was not based on the free and genu-
The marine protected area may have been intended as a clever ine expression of the will of the people concerned.” The court’s
way to cauterize all pending legal disputes involving a right of opinion was ultimately affirmed by the UN General Assembly,
return, but it in fact gave Mauritius a new, if seemingly unlikely, with only six votes in opposition. The Mauritian case was strong.
line of attack through the United Nations Convention on the Law Jagdish Koonjul, its ambassador, made it well. The United King-
of the Sea. The government enlisted the assistance of a prominent dom’s European allies were nowhere to be seen—Britain’s hasty,
international and human-rights lawyer named Philippe Sands. messy exit from the European Union had made sure of that.
Sands is a longtime friend; when he first explained the case to The World Court’s opinion was advisory, and the U.K. has so far
me, a decade ago, he described all of the dominoes that would done its best to ignore it. A Royal Navy officer continues to serve as

46 JULY/AUGUST 2022
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author of On Fire

[Link]
the titular commandant of Diego Garcia. Yachts wishing to transit Chagossians. If the British were no longer in charge, then the prohi-
the marine protected area are still directed to obtain permission from bition against “right of abode” was a dead letter. For the first time in
the colonial administration. The United Kingdom’s BIOT website 50 years, the Chagossians could go home without asking permission.
is unflappably vague: “We remain open to dialogue on all shared

VI.
issues of mutual interest.” A strategic rationale for the British position
has not been advanced, other than the open-ended one that defense
of the realm requires it. The psychological rationale is obvious—
shedding the last bits of empire is hard to contemplate. It is the
remote-island dynamic in reverse: “What you see is all that’s left.”
But Mauritius can now claim international recognition of its
sovereignty over Chagos. As Sands, the Chagossians’ lead attor-
ney, maintains in a forthcoming book, the British position is
eroding, in small steps that may lead to larger ones. Citing the The islands of Peros Banhos—5.3333° S, 71.8500° E—encircle
UN’s decision, the Universal Postal Union, which governs mail a crystalline lagoon. From a distance they are low, green smudges
service among nations, has withdrawn recognition of Britain’s that a swell can hide from view. Waves crash on submerged reefs
BIOT stamps. The .io domain name is under legal challenge, between them. On February 12, as the Bleu de Nîmes sailed
and the government of Mauritius has asked Google to relabel its through a single open channel into the lagoon, Olivier Bancoult
maps. It seems inevitable that the International Civil Aviation stood at the gunwales and began to name the bits of land. For
Organization, which coordinates a variety of essential protocols, once he seemed a little uncertain. He grabbed Marcel Humbert, a
will recognize Mauritian control of the airspace over Chagos. The fisherman, to confirm the names. Humbert pointed to each island
United States still takes Britain’s side; it is convenient to have an as he began turning in a circle: “Grande Soeur, Petite Soeur, Île
absentee landlord who allows almost anything. But there is a dif- Poule, Île Monpâtre, Île Anglaise, Île du Coin ...” The shore of
ficulty. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has argued forcefully Île Monpâtre was marked by a dull-red oblong, the overturned
that Beijing must accept a “rules-based order” when it comes to hull of a yacht, beached and bleached for decades. Bancoult had
the South China Sea. Beijing has a ready response: What about started the day wearing the bright home-field jersey of the Cha-
Chagos? Ultimately, American wishes may not need to become gos soccer team, but by now he and others from the islands had
an issue. Mauritius has stated repeatedly that it has no objec- changed into simple white T-shirts bearing words in black letters:
tion to the use of Diego Garcia as a U.S. military base. There Everyone has the right to live on his birthplace.
would have to be a “status of forces” agreement, as there is for The Chagossians knelt on the sand as they came off the launch
any base on foreign soil, which would set the rules and the rent. that had brought them to Île du Coin. Some of them held up
An agreement might even accommodate a partial resettlement birth certificates—destroyed in the course of a riot, they’d been
of Diego Garcia itself; foreign nationals live close to other U.S. told by British authorities, until Bancoult tracked the records
bases, sometimes in great numbers. down. The jetty many of them had walked when they left Île du
The time will come when Britain throws in the towel, and it Coin was now in ruins; only a small-gauge rail track, once used
may come soon. When the government of Mauritius decided in to transport barrels of coconut oil, held the concrete together. A
February to send a ship into Chagossian waters under its own pair of rusted wheels, joined by an axle, remained on the rails.
flag—the ship I traveled on—London’s response was annoyed The Chagossians led the way inland with a rhythmic whack
but restrained. It would not fight the Mauritians on the beaches; of machetes. The air was humid and earthy, the ground every-
it would not fight them on the landing grounds. The BIOT where an ankle-turning carpet of fallen coconuts. We came to a
patrol vessel that shadowed the Bleu de Nîmes kept its distance, place where a village had been. I had seen a photograph from the
though it was visible on radar. We never learned whether the 1960s of the island administrator’s house—whitewashed walls,
loss of internet service, which started when the ship entered the cool verandas, a monumental stone staircase ascending from a
BIOT zone, had anything to do with its presence. One purpose prim English garden. All that was left was the staircase, rising to
of the voyage—an oceanic survey of Blenheim Reef, relating to a nothing and held fast in a tangle of banyan roots, like a temple
boundary dispute with the Maldives—was a deliberate challenge: at Angkor Wat. The roofless stone church held a congregation of
Mauritius shares a boundary with the Maldives only if the Chagos palm trees and coconut crabs. The Chagossians labored to clear
Archipelago is Mauritian territory. Mauritian officials also took the building—it remained a sacred space. Several of them had
the opportunity to pour some concrete, plant some flagpoles, and been baptized within its walls.
run up the Mauritian colors on Salomon and Peros Banhos. There We put in the next day at Salomon atoll, this time on an
were no statues to topple, but someone unbolted and took away island called Boddam, roughly the same size as Île du Coin. The
a metal sign warning of arrest and imprisonment by the “BIOT ruins here were even more extensive—tin roofs rusted and col-
government” for various infractions, such as overnight camping lapsed; stone walls dank with moss and mold; trees and vines
and “possession of crabs, dead or alive.” sprouting from windows and doors. From one beam a pair of
For Mauritius, asserting a claim to Chagos was a main reason for recently discarded buoys dangled above broken liquor bottles.
this expedition. But that assertion dovetailed with the desires of the Crudely painted on the buoys were the names Olga and Ivan.

48 JULY/AUGUST 2022
OLIVIER BANCOULT, MARCEL HUMBERT, AND ROSEMONDE BERTIN WERE AMONG THE GROUP OF FIVE CHAGOSSIANS
WHO THIS YEAR, FOR THE FIRST TIME, COULD RETURN TO THE ISLANDS WITHOUT BRITISH PERMISSION.

The Chagossians again made their way to a roofless church. They thousands. On our way to the graveyard on Boddam, a storm
cleared it of vegetation. In one chancel window, a few panes of blew in with impressive speed, and it rained heavily for half an
colored glass had somehow survived unbroken, gleaming in a hour. Sheltering under a tree, machete in hand, Bancoult com-
wooden lattice. Next door, in what had been a clinic, Rosemonde mented, “The British said there was not enough water.”
Bertin, born on Boddam, pushed through the foliage and found I don’t know how realistic any plans may be for Chagos. The
the dark, damp corner where she had given birth to her first child, Mauritian government has pledged to assist, but has avoided specif-
in 1972—shortly before she and her family were forced to leave. ics. It’s easy to imagine some form of World Heritage Site coexisting
Later, half a mile away, in the island cemetery, Bertin poured with some form of modest development. I do know this: With
water on an inscription and wiped it with leaves to bring out the every encounter, the Chagossians have sought to take the fate of the
name: Mme. Yvon Dyson, née Denise Rose. Denise Rose was islands back into their hands—to possess the islands by word and
the midwife who’d brought Bertin into the world; she herself deed. They have spent the few hours of every heritage visit tending
died in childbirth not long afterward. The cemetery occupied a graves and cleaning churches. On the extended trip in February,
full acre. Bertin, Bancoult, and others splashed water on more when Chagossians could at last travel freely and do whatever they
of the weathered slabs to reveal the inscriptions. From 1880: Ici wished, they did the same. They also trapped crabs and fished for
repose Dookie—just that single name, once known to every- red snapper and drank milk from coconuts. As if bouncing on a
one, now a cipher. seesaw, Lisbey Elysé sat on the trunk of a coconut tree jutting out
BRITISH LIBRARY / ALAMY; ED HABERSHON / BBC

Is a repopulation of Chagos even possible at this point? The over the water. The Chagossians remembered old names and told
grandchildren in Crawley, watching Young Sheldon and read- old stories. As they talked, the rusting wheels on the jetty became
ing Roald Dahl, may not see a path to the future that leads a wagon again, rolling back on its track toward the oil press and
through Peros Banhos. A study conducted by the British in 2002 the drying sheds and a world that was alive.
concluded that significant development of the islands would be Mauritius raised flags over islands on this voyage; anthems
impractical for a variety of reasons, including a possible insuffi- were sung. The moments were moving: a legal and moral victory,
ciency of fresh groundwater. (The study did not consider rainfall.) even as Britain harrumphed. But the embrace of the islands by
A second study, in 2015, came to a different conclusion, sug- the Chagossians was something different. It had the intimate
gesting that an economy based on coconuts, fish, and a limited physicality of love.
amount of tourism could be sustainable. History, of course, has
already conducted its own experiment: Although climate change
is unpredictable, these islands once supported a population of Cullen Murphy is an Atlantic editor at large.

49
50 JULY/AUGUST 2022
51
he FBI was excited. [Link], where people interested In Kem’s telling, it happened like magic.

T
That much seemed evi- in buried treasure gather to share theories “Mr. Getler says, ‘Give me a day or two;
dent from the affidavit and discoveries, and to subject themselves I’ll have you in the FBI office,’ ” Kem
the agency lodged on to one another’s enthusiasm and scorn. recalls. “Sure enough, within a day or two,
March 9, 2018, asking That day something caught Getler’s eye: he calls back: ‘I got you in the FBI office
a court for permission a post by Parada, who identified himself headquarters, a meeting.’ And we’re like,
to dig up a Pennsylva- as the head of a small Pennsylvania-based ‘Holy shit.’”
nia hillside in search of treasure-hunting group called Finders On Friday, January 26, 2018, the Para-
Civil War gold. Keepers. Getler was convinced that they das walked with Getler into the United
The affidavit related needed to talk. States Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia.
a story from a docu- Getler wasn’t interested in just any They met with Assistant U.S. Attorney
ment titled “The Lost treasure. His focus was on a Confederate- K. T. Newton and two agents from the
Gold Ingot Treasure,” aligned organization called the Knights of FBI’s Art Crime team, Jake Archer and
which had been found the Golden Circle, or KGC. The existence Sarah Cardone. The following account
in the archives at the Military History Insti- of the KGC is an established part of Civil of the meeting, and of their subsequent
tute, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The tale, in War history, but the depth of influence talks with the FBI, is based on the treasure
its barest bones, was this: In June 1863, a Getler believes it had, and its continued hunters’ descriptions. (The FBI declined
caravan of Union soldiers transporting a secret operation, is not. Getler believes multiple requests to comment on the
shipment of gold through the mountains that the KGC hid hundreds of caches of details of these interactions.)
became lost. Three men were sent to get gold from the South up to Canada, and The treasure hunters had a hard time
help and eventually one returned with a that a significant number remain undis- reading the room. Their government hosts
rescue party, which located the group’s covered. He co-wrote a book on this sub- were attentive, but didn’t necessarily seem
abandoned wagons but no men, no gold. ject, published by Simon & Schuster: Rebel receptive. There was one moment, how-
Teams from the Pinkerton detective agency Gold: One Man’s Quest to Crack the Code ever, that would later come to seem signifi-
scoured the hills. In 1865, two and a half Behind the Secret Treasure of the Confederacy. cant. Archer, they say, declared that should
buried ingots were found, and, later, the Since then, he has continued to look for gold be found, the government would of
bones of three to five human skeletons. evidence, and in the Dents Run story he course be taking it, slamming his hand
The rest of the gold remains missing. thought he could spot clues and symbols down on the table to emphasize his point.
The affidavit also laid out how this that, to those who knew how to read them, Dennis slammed down his hand, too, and
story had come to the FBI’s attention. were telltale signs of KGC involvement. declared that they would be fighting for a
A treasure hunter named Dennis Parada Dennis says that he was skeptical when finder’s fee. At this, Dennis recalls, Archer
had heard folklore alluding to the lost gold Getler approached him. He’d never heard responded, “Fair enough.”
“since he was a child,” and had spent “over of the KGC. “We’re thinking this guy was Not long after, Archer called Dennis
forty years” searching for it. Now he and a nut job,” he told me. “I don’t know what and made arrangements to visit the site
a team including his son, Kem, believed the hell he’s talking about … I don’t believe the following Wednesday. The FBI team—
they had finally located it, in the inacces- in this shit.” Still, the men kept speaking Archer, Cardone, and five colleagues—
sible recesses of a “turtle-shaped cave” near and soon found common ground. arrived on Tuesday, and everyone had din-
the community of Dents Run. FBI agents Dennis explained to Getler the impasse ner together at a pub in DuBois. “It was
had visited the site twice and ordered geo- that Finders Keepers had reached. The jovial,” recalls Getler, who flew in from
physical surveys that had detected some- gold they believed they had located was Washington, D.C. “We were so high. I
thing underground—something “with a on state land, so they needed the coopera- believed that we were going to pull up this
density of 19.5g/cm³ (the density of gold) tion of Pennsylvania’s Department of Con- big KGC cache together.”
and consistent with a mass having a weight servation and Natural Resources (DCNR) The next morning, January 31, the 10
of approximately 8½ to 9 tons.” to act further. But DCNR and the Paradas of them hiked up to a level piece of ground
In other words, the FBI believed it had a long, complicated history and were about 15 minutes above Dents Run. This
knew where an enormous hoard of gold currently at loggerheads. was the place. The FBI used a metal detec-
was, and as soon as they could get their There was, however, a possible way for- tor, which indicated a three-by-five-foot
hands on a warrant, federal agents were ward. If the gold could be shown to have area of buried metal. The Paradas used
coming to get it. been federal property, as the narrative in their own Ground Penetrating Locator
the historical documentation seemed to machine to demonstrate what they’d pre-
D e n n i s a n d K e m P a r a d a had been suggest, then the FBI could step in and viously found at the site. “Got gold read-
connected with the FBI several weeks ear- claim it for the United States government. ings right off the bat,” Kem recalls.
lier by a middleman. One day in Novem- So far, Dennis had failed to get the fed- “Everybody’s yelling and screaming,”
ber 2017, Warren Getler, a former Wall eral authorities interested. Getler offered Dennis says, “because it’s solid gold.” He
Street Journal reporter, was browsing to handle that. told the FBI that, in his estimate, there

52 JULY/AUGUST 2022
must be two and a half tons just below
them. A find like that could be worth
$100 million, or even more.
Now the FBI agents were clearly inter-
ested. Over the following days, emails and
texts flew back and forth as the govern-
ment team solicited all the potentially rel-
evant historical documentation.
The FBI commissioned its own more
sophisticated geophysical study. Archer
called Getler with the results.
This is how Getler remembers that
conversation: “I said, ‘What was the vol-
ume? What was the size?’ He said, ‘Seven
to nine tons.’ I went, ‘You got to be fuck-
ing kidding.’ My heart’s going boom boom
boom … I literally jumped out of my face.”
This is Dennis’s summary: “Archer
says, ‘Yes, we got the results. Well,’ he says,
‘Denny, you’re wrong at two and a half
tons … It was over nine tons of gold.’”

W h e n t h i n g s s ta r t g o i n g aw r y
in this story—and they will—you may
start to doubt every wrinkle of the treasure
hunters’ account. You may be tempted to
ask whether it bears any relation to the
truth as it exists in the world of dreary,
not-all-that-glitters actuality.
When that happens, remember the
affidavit. The FBI has declined to fill in
its side of the story, but that document
isn’t some vaguely speculative memo. It’s
29 pages of apparently rigorous detail,
assertively laying out the whole “Lost
Kem and Dennis Parada stand above the cave at
Gold Ingot Treasure” narrative alongside
Dents Run with a metal detector in May.
the geophysical surveys and the wider his-
torical and mineralogical research that the
FBI did. What was written in those pages to prove this network exists,” Getler told city up there … They had outhouses; they
served its purpose: A judge signed off on me. “I actually said to him, ‘Dad, I’m had a big tent. They had guards, too. I
a warrant giving the FBI 14 days to seize going because I know you would want mean, they had them in bulletproof vests.”
“approximately one or more tons of gold me to do this.’” When the treasure hunters arrived, Jake
belonging to, and stolen from, the United The night before, Getler stayed at Den- Archer came to greet them at their car. He
States Mint, and located on the Dents Run nis’s house; in the morning the Paradas told them that it was crowded up on the
Site, in Elks County, Pennsylvania.” and Getler drove together to Dents Run. hill, and that they should wait down here
A dig was scheduled to begin on It was only when they arrived that they for now. So they waited. And waited.
the morning of March 13. The treasure got a sense of the scale of the operation Six hours passed before they were
JINGYU LIN FOR THE ATLANTIC

hunters were told that no press would be they had triggered. Perhaps their estimates escorted up to the snow-covered dig site,
allowed. But they insist they were told that were a little hyperbolic—“70 FBI agents, where a backhoe was removing soil. The
they could watch the dig as it progressed. military and stuff”; “70-some vehicles”— hole was several feet deep, and nothing of
At the time, Getler’s father was on his but a Dents Run local, Cheryl Elder, note had yet been discovered, when, an
deathbed, but Getler decided to come any- who lives at the bottom of the hill, also hour or two later, Archer stopped the pro-
way. “I’ve been waiting for 22 years to see remembers a lot of vehicles: “At first there ceedings. As Kem remembers it, he said,
a touchstone treasure of the Knights of the was, like, 38. The next day there was, like, “It’s 4 o’clock, we’ve been up here all day,
Golden Circle … come out of the ground 40-some.” She told me, “It looked like a we’re cold, and we’re hungry. We’re going

53
to pack it up for the night. Everybody go the one they had left the afternoon before. grew, the FBI issued a brief statement,
home … Come back up here at 8 a.m. Inside it? Dennis answered: “Nothing.” declaring that “nothing was found.”
tomorrow morning. We’ll all come back As a parting indignity, the Paradas were But the Paradas and Getler weren’t sat-
up this hill together; we’ll start digging given an armful of copper rods that they isfied. As they chewed over the details, and
right here where we left off.” had driven into the ground years earlier to as they learned more about what had taken
When the treasure hunters returned the facilitate their geophysical readings, and place that week, they came to what felt
next day, they expected to be taken straight that had been dug up during the excava- like an inescapable conclusion: that, right
up the mountain. That did not happen. tion. As though to say: Get out of here, and under their noses, the FBI had dug up and
There was “a water delay,” Archer told take your trash with you. stolen away the buried gold of Dents Run.
them; the hole had filled up. This might Back at their car, they recall, Archer The treasure hunters’ narrative of what
take a while to sort out, he said, and they lectured them not to say a word about this they believe happened is a sprawling one,
should stay in the car, keep warm. to anybody. He told the Paradas that they in which every snippet of conversation,
So they did. Once more, they waited. should change the name of their company, every incidental moment, reveals itself as
As the hours passed, Dennis’s frustra- because it’d be embarrassing after this, and evidence of the FBI’s dastardly plan. But
tion grew. “I says, ‘Things ain’t going on maybe they should all just go on a holiday in essence, they became convinced that
right … something’s going on here.’” to Disney World. the FBI removed nine tons of gold from
Finally, after about six hours, they were The next morning, Getler received the Dents Run after they left on the first day
allowed up. Dennis’s creeping disquiet call that his father had died. of the dig, in an excavation that secretly
notwithstanding, they still imagined they restarted that evening and continued
were walking toward a moment of majestic N e w s o f w h at h a d —or hadn’t— through the night.
triumph. At the excavation site, the FBI happened at Dents Run began to spread. Through this prism, so many of the
crew parted to allow them through. When a local TV-news crew, alerted to surrounding events started to make sense
“There,” Archer told them. “Look in the hubbub, had turned up during the to them. That was why, when they arrived
the hole. What do you see?” dig, the FBI’s only comment was that it at Dents Run at 8:15 a.m. on the second
Dennis looked down. The hole was was conducting “court-authorized law- day—15 minutes behind schedule—Archer
now considerably deeper and wider than enforcement activity.” As media interest had seemed irritated. They couldn’t under-
stand this back then, but they now saw how
their late arrival threatened to throw off
Warren Getler at home in Washington, D.C. the choreographed movements of vehicles
removing evidence. (The treasure hunters
have found multiple witnesses who believe
they saw armored trucks in this period,
either parked for hours in nearby commu-
nities or traveling in convoys along nearby
routes, and there were also periodic closures
of the main route in and out of Dents Run.
The FBI denies using armored trucks.)
That was also why, they say, Archer had
a cut on the back of his hand on that sec-
ond day, and why there was dirt and mud
on his knees, and why they logged him vis-
iting a porta-potty five times—indicative
of someone who had been up drinking
coffee all night. That was why they were
told the water-in-the-hole story. (The trea-
sure hunters note that when they were
finally allowed to see the hole, there was
JINGYU LIN FOR THE ATLANTIC

no sign of any water at the bottom, nor

was there any indication that water had
been pumped out onto the surrounding
snow-covered area.) That was why Getler
had heard Archer muttering, “I hate this
case.” (Because Archer—who generally
seemed like a good guy—was uncomfort-
able with the deception he was obliged to

54 JULY/AUGUST 2022
“THERE, ” THE AGENT TOLD THEM. “LOOK IN THE HOLE. WHAT DO YOU SEE?”
stage-manage.) And, of course, all of this Russia, pretended it had been dug out of the evidence, or lack of it, with their own
was why they had been permitted to see a Russian gold mine, and brought it back eyes—would easily accept this outcome? If
so little of the actual excavation. into North America. Nine tons of gold so, they have since learned otherwise. For
The treasure hunters propose this nar- disappeared from Dents Run, Dennis four years now, in articles and documenta-
rative, which has many offshoots, with a said, “and within 48 hours, an airplane in ries and podcasts, the treasure hunters have
mixture of great conviction and Well, what Russia dropped nine tons of gold on the berated and accused the FBI, and weapon-
else could this all have meant? beseeching. runway.” Absurd? Probably. But the run- ized the agency’s silence as a sign of guilt.
Parts of what they argue might sound way incident is a real one. On March 15, The treasure hunters have also bom-
compelling. Others feel like a stretch. For 2018, two days after the dig began, a plane barded the government with legal motions
instance, Getler explained to me that he in Siberia lost 3.4 tons of its nine-ton cargo and Freedom of Information Act requests.
had been chatting with another FBI agent of gold and silver when the cargo door acci- In August 2019, the FBI acknowledged to
who stiffly used the same phrase as Archer dentally opened soon after takeoff. There the Finders Keepers’ attorney that it has
had, about “a water delay.” To Getler, this is is video on YouTube of the bars scattered approximately 2,378 pages and 17 CDs of
a giveaway that the agent was hewing to a across the runway. For a coincidence, it’s a video files “of potentially responsive media.”
script. Possible, I suppose, but isn’t it more remarkable one. But it asserted that producing such a large
likely that two agents used the same phrase Most problematic has been the FBI’s volume of materials requires an average of
not because it was the approved language reluctance to clarify anything. Maybe the 47 months. The Associated Press and The
of a cover story, but because it was the agents don’t consider themselves to be in Philadelphia Inquirer have also filed FOIA
phrase that described how something was? the explaining business. But in the space lawsuits—one result being the release in
The funny thing is, though, even some created by their silence, at a time when 2021 of the FBI affidavit making clear just
of the treasure hunters’ most far-fetched people are primed to embrace any sugges- how comprehensively the agency had once
flourishes can’t be summarily dismissed. On tion of government malfeasance, the trea- argued for the presence of this gold.
a February 2020 episode of the TV series sure hunters’ version of events is the one The treasure hunters have continued to
American Mystery, Dennis mentioned one that has been heard. The FBI’s decision fight in the courts for expedited access to the
scenario that sounded pretty out there. “If to keep them away from the excavation withheld material. In May, the FBI released
somebody in the United States wants to seems to have been a spectacular misjudg- the first 1,035 pages, which included some
make our gold disappear,” he proposed, ment. Did the agents really imagine that historical research, the data from the prom-
they could have secretly shipped it to these were people who—without seeing ising geophysical scan, and many, many
photos from the excavation. The images of
bare trees against the snowy hilltop are sur-
prisingly artful; revelatory, they are not—
though one series does show a puddle of
water in the bottom of the hole. The balance
of the documents is due over the following
months, though the government has filed
a series of perplexingly convoluted petitions
to delay releasing any video evidence until
ERIK CARTER FOR THE ATLANTIC

August, and thereafter only at a rate of 15

minutes’ worth a month.
Even the greatest skeptics, who see noth-
ing suspicious in the FBI’s apparent intran-
sigence, and who find the treasure hunters’
other arguments unpersuasive, must be puz-
zled by lingering questions. For instance: If
nothing at all was there, under the ground,

55
what explained the FBI’s geophysical read- revealed by whatever traces show them- $60,000 on the Dents Run search, and
ings? (The Paradas have rescanned the dig selves to him in the present day; whether plenty more on a location in Nova Scotia
area; they now detect nothing.) And what it is a blessing or a curse, Dennis has where Finders Keepers believe they have
about the suggestion that the FBI worked at an almost supernatural ability to weave detected a network of ancient tunnels. At
the site through Tuesday night? It could be together an intricate narrative from a few Dents Run, the money has mostly gone
just a convenient theory, except that there slender and sometimes tentative facts. “I’m toward geophysical scans, equipment, legal
is a witness: Cheryl Elder, again. living the dream of a little kid wishing to fees, and hired labor.
She told me that she started hear- be on a treasure hunt with a pirate ship Finally, for Dennis, this is a fight about
ing noises—“beep-beep and, like, when they grow up, or something like principle, and honor, and who will get the
hammering”—at about 10 or 11 that that,” he told me. “I’ve been having fun.” last word. “I want to get my credibility
night. After a while, she went outside to Certainly, if this project is a mercenary back,” he told me. “I have a lot of friends
see what was going on. “And that moun- one, so far it hasn’t been a success. Sitting who laugh at me. They go, ‘Oh, Denny,
tain was lit—they had a lot of lights up in their office, Dennis and Kem told me did you find any gold this week? How are
there. You could see the whole sky lit up.” that a 10 percent finder’s fee from what you and the FBI doing?’ Laughing at my
The noise, it carried on and on, “the they believe was at Dents Run would work back.” Now he says he’ll do whatever it
hammer and the backhoe,” she said. It was out “at the low end” to about $60 million. takes to get the truth out. “I’m going to
so loud that she couldn’t sleep. Eventu- “I’m not backing down,” Dennis said. “If find out what the hell the FBI did and I’m
ally, she telephoned her husband. He was they offer me money, I already told my going to expose it to the world.”
away—he works in natural gas and was attorney, anything below 20 million—
on an overnight job down by Smithburg, hang up on them and tell them to kiss O n m y t h i rd d ay in town, we drove
pigging pipelines. your ass. We’re going to court.” to Dents Run. Kem couldn’t make it—his
“She called me middle of the damn But when I asked how much money daughter had a fever—but Dennis and I
night,” he told me, recounting their con- Finders Keepers had earned over the years were joined by two other members of Find-
versation: “ ‘I can’t sleep.’ ‘What do you from finder’s fees, they laughed. ers Keepers, Dwayne Kelly and Brian Shull.
mean, you can’t sleep?’ ‘There’s all kinds of “Nothing,” Kem said. He gestured We parked at the bottom of the hill
racket up there … Lights everywhere.’ It around him: “Have you seen the house?” and hiked up to a flat section. Dennis
was lit up like the Fourth of July up there.” “I’m still cleaning commodes out back pointed at the ground beneath his feet
as a janitor, okay?” Dennis said. with the branch he had been using as a
A t t h e e n d of October 2021, I visited In fact, the only money in motion has walking stick.
the Paradas in Clearfield, Pennsylvania— flowed in the opposite direction. Over the “A lot of memories here, buddy,” he
about an hour from Dents Run. The Find- years, Dennis reckons he has spent about said. “A lot of memories here.”
ers Keepers office is on the ground floor
of the house where Dennis lives with his
elderly mother.
This is also the center of what might
be called his property empire. He earns
his living from the 18 rental apartments
he owns, 11 of them in a large building
around the back of his house. He told me
the building cost him “475”; I waited a
moment for this sentence to be completed
before realizing that it already had been. (I
dug up the records to confirm it: In 1982,
Dennis purchased the property for $475.)
Rent is now $300 a month—“the cheap-
est in town.” But lately he’s gotten tired of
rentals, he told me. After 40 years, he’d like
ERIK CARTER FOR THE ATLANTIC

to get out of the landlord business, if he

can just “get some money from the FBI.”
But I don’t really believe that the prin-
cipal motivation behind Dennis’s treasure
hunting is a mercenary one. He likes the
stories he finds out in the world, and he
likes the stories he finds in his head, spin-
ning grand tales of the past that he sees

56 JULY/AUGUST 2022
Dennis had first been told that trea- three-quarter-inch drill bit, they saw on its Treasure” document referred to in the FBI
sure lay in this area by a stranger in the tip a shiny golden smear. If there was too affidavit. Whereas Gardner and Dixon hew
1970s—I’ll come back to that—but after little to sample or save, it hardly mattered, closely to this source—at times Dixon sim-
a few sorties came up cold, he abandoned Dennis felt: “We had hit gold.” ply reprints whole paragraphs—Sculley’s
the search for 30 years. Now and then, he’d But DCNR did not always agree with article is more impressionistic, weaving in
talk about the gold. Kem, who cherished them about what they were discovering— extra details. But I suspect this indicates less
the tale as a bedtime story, was always say- artifacts that they felt sure were from the that he had further sources, and more that
ing they should go look for it, but Dennis Civil War era were examined by DCNR he was a pro nimbly riffing on a theme.
would demur. There were rattlesnakes and and pronounced “hunting camp debris,” What of “The Lost Gold Ingot Trea-
copperheads; there might be abandoned with “no cultural or historic significance.” sure” itself? It is typewritten, its pages num-
mine shafts. But in 2004, Dennis told the In April 2012, DCNR forbade Finders bered 98 to 109, apparently taken from a
story to one of his tenants, Scott Farrell, Keepers from conducting further “treasure larger work, and its author is unknown.
and Farrell persuaded him to take another hunting activity” at the site. This wasn’t the If the signpost in its first sentence (“This
look. It was Farrell who found the cave. first time they had been told something is the centennial anniversary of the Civil
The thin strip of the cave’s mouth is similar—a DCNR document from back in War …”) can be trusted, it dates from
impossible to see without clambering down June 2005 states, “Mr. Parada was banned 1965. In its descriptions of the Union sol-
next to it. The roof of the entrance is just from all further excavation” and had been diers’ mission—how, on their way toward
high enough for a person to crawl through “informed that removal of any possible his- Pittsburgh to rendezvous with a steamboat
on their belly. We peered inside, and Kelly toric material from State Forest lands may called the River Queen, the soldiers and
caught a salamander. Dennis says there’s constitute a crime,” though Dennis implies two wagons secretly loaded with 26 ingots
loads of those in the cave, and cave crick- that this situation was smoothed over. As of gold disappeared somewhere in these
ets, too: “They’re huge and they’re comical. for the 2012 order, Dennis saw loopholes. mountains—the document is an impres-
They’ve got big black eyeballs, and they run “We kept going back,” he told me. sively, and puzzlingly, rich account. How,
like little groups of bad guys.” Occasionally, in our conversations, his 102 years after the events described, did
Back in 2004, when Dennis and Farrell, frustration with the government bubbled such knowledge spring forth?
joined by Kem, began to explore the cave, it over. “Just because I don’t have a Ph.D., The document mentions two firsthand
was a slow and difficult process. Aside from they treat us like amateurs. I have 40 years testimonies: a written account of the jour-
the cramped environment, and the wet and of experience in the woods,” he said. “We’re ney that its leader, Castleton, gave to a man
the mud, and the cave crickets, there were on the ground. We get right down into the named Conners—conveniently, the group’s
spiders and crayfish and porcupines. But dirt. These bookworms who sit back and only survivor—and an inquest statement
they identified what they thought were clear call themselves archaeologists and stuff—I given by Conners. It also alludes to a series
signs of human occupation: charcoal burn get really pissed off at this shit.” of investigations in the years that followed.
marks on the ceiling, presumably from I asked him what those people think But nobody has turned up these docu-
torches. About 15 feet in, they found what they have that he doesn’t. ments or any previous reference to them,
seemed to be a man-made wall, which they “Intelligence,” he scoffed. “They think or any earlier accounts of the lost gold
managed to remove. For five years they’d they know more than us.” itself. I have looked and looked, but I have
go up there maybe twice a week, pushing unearthed no specific reference to the story
farther and farther back. When they had A f t e r l e av i n g D e n t s R u n , I in the 100 years before “The Lost Gold
rocks to remove, they’d load them into a found myself puzzling over the gold’s ori- Ingot Treasure.” Search for mentions of
turkey-roasting pan, which they’d pull out gin story, so I went searching for written Dents Run before the 1960s, and you’ll
of the cave by a rope. accounts. I found two that had circulated find a lot about mining and fishing, a cer-
“I loved every minute of it,” Dennis told widely in treasure-hunting circles: San- tain amount about botany, and the unveri-
me. “I didn’t care if I got anything back out. dra Gardner’s “26 Missing Pennsylvania fied tale of the time, in 1882, when a local
I just wanted to see something happen.” Gold Ingots,” from the July 1974 issue of resident named Fred Murray is supposed
He says that they regularly reported Treasure magazine, and Francis X. Scul- to have seen, passing overhead, a flock of
to the state authority, the Department ley’s “Pennsylvania’s Lost Gold Ingots,” buzzardlike birds with wingspans of more
of Conservation and Natural Resources, from the August 1974 issue of True Trea- than 16 feet. But about gold in them thar
what they were doing: “pictures, drawing sure magazine. I also tracked down a more hills, nothing.
records, all the readings.” When it became obscure example in a 1973 issue of The What about the local folklore, the
clear that the cave was unstable, and that Elk Horn, a local history magazine pub- tales of lost gold that have been the talk
the three men were at risk of being bur- lished by the Elk County Historical Soci- of Dents Run for as long as anyone can
ied in a collapse, it was actually a DCNR ety: Mary Morgan Dixon’s “Thar’s Gold remember? Cheryl Elder told me, “I used
engineer, they say, who suggested a new in Them Thar Hills?” to sit at the bar and they’d talk about the
approach: drilling from above. So that’s All three accounts appear to draw gold … the old-timers.” Garrett Osche,
what they did, until one day, pulling up a directly from the “Lost Gold Ingot who lives in a Dents Run house that his

57
parents bought back in 1942, remembers will direct those in the know to the hid- looked upward, eyes to the ceiling, as he
reading about the gold in the Pittsburgh den gold, banked to finance the KGC’s brought the pen down onto the page.
Post-Gazette when he was 18. agenda—which was, at least originally, the “The pen hit,” Dennis says, “and he
The thing is, these old-timers’ memo- creation of an alliance of slave-owning ter- looked right at me. And he goes, ‘Denny’—
ries aren’t so very old. Osche was 18 in ritories that would include areas in Mexico I don’t know how he knew my name. He
1967. Elder is about a decade younger. and elsewhere. goes, ‘Denny, I want you to go to this
Nothing in their accounts undermines the But surely the central mystery remains: spot’ … And it was Dents Run.”
possibility that the legend of Dents Run Whether the document is a real histori- Malley instructed him to gather five
emerged, fully formed, in 1965. cal narrative or a coded waybill, how and dirt samples. He was to scoop the dirt
Furthermore, the provenance of “The why did this story surface in the 1960s, up with a wooden spoon and keep each
Lost Gold Ingot Treasure” is murkier than and where had the information on which sample in a plastic container—“no metal
the FBI affidavit suggests. It did technically it was based been hidden for the previous objects allowed.” Malley would tell him
come “from the archives of the Army Heri- 100 years? which one had been collected from the
tage and Education Center at the Military area closest to the gold.
History Institute in Carlisle, Pa.” Dennis W h e n t r y i n g t o a s s e s s what to So that’s what Dennis did. He and a col-
obtained a photocopy of the document in believe, some people may want to take into league went up to Dents Run, taking five
2008 from that institute’s retired historical- account the story of how Dennis Parada soil samples at various points up and down
reference chief, John Slonaker. But that came to be searching for gold at Dents the mountain. To mess things up a bit, he
implies a credibility it may not have. Run to begin with. also took three samples from his stepfather’s
“What I can tell you is very little,” It was 1974. Parada was 22. He sold fur- yard, then drove in his white ’69 Corvette
Slonaker told me when I called him. “Not niture at a department store, W. T. Grant, to meet Malley. Malley instantly set aside
that I don’t remember, but that I never did where the big impress-the-customers stunt the three that weren’t from Dents Run,
know very much. We would occasionally was to shoot an arrow into a sofa to prove then selected sample No. 5.
get queries from treasure hunters, looking how durable the fabric was. Sometimes Malley said to look for a cave within
for official documents, and we never found management would hold more formal 500 feet of where this soil had been taken.
any in the war-department records. But events to entice shoppers. On this particu- And that is how Dennis Parada came to
over the years, as these queries mounted, I lar day, there was a demonstration by a man believe that there was gold at Dents Run.
began to keep a file of the information that billed as Professor Michael G. Malley—an
people would send me. They would say, expert in “extrasensory perception.” W h e n D e n n i s f i n a l ly found the
‘Here’s some evidence I found—what can This was, Dennis insists, of mini- cave in 2004, he decided to track Malley
you do to add to that? Or to corroborate?’ mal interest to him: “What a bunch of down, to share the news. (Dennis told me
And so I would just keep that evidence bullshit.” During a break, though, Mal- that when he cold-called after 30 years and
that they sent in a file marked Lost Trea- ley sat down with Dennis and some of said his name, Malley immediately replied:
sure, or something like that.” his co-workers. Somebody happened to “I know—the guy with the white Cor-
That, he said, is where any document have a copy of the 1974 Treasure maga- vette.”) They haven’t met in person since
he sent Dennis came from. zine with the Sandra Gardner story. (A 1974, but they’ve stayed in touch: Dennis
“I can’t tell you the source of any of mistake in the FBI affidavit: Dennis had still periodically solicits Malley’s insights
those documents other than that patrons, not heard the lost-gold story “since he about Dents Run and other sites. “This guy,
people directing the inquiries to us over was a child”—this day was the first he everything is 100 percent correct,” he says.
the years, would sometimes send us mate- learned of it.) As a result, he has promised Malley 25 per-
rial. We just collected it. It doesn’t come Someone asked Malley if he could cent of any proceeds from these searches.
from the Army’s archive.” do treasure hunts, and suggested he look Naturally, I tell Dennis and Kem that I
Warren Getler has his own idea about at Gardner’s article. Malley appeared to would like to talk with Malley. They seem
the origins of “The Lost Gold Ingot Trea- speed-read it, entered a kind of trance, dubious. Malley has never spoken to any-
sure.” He has never believed that it’s a lit- and started talking in voices that were not one about this, they tell me. I keep ask-
eral historical document. He thinks it’s a his own. “At least three different voices,” ing anyway; Dennis keeps prevaricating.
“waybill”—a symbolic tale crafted by the Dennis recalls. “It was the soldiers talk- But on the evening after we returned from
Knights of the Golden Circle, one that ing about their experience, something like Dents Run, I tried again, and for some
intertwines facts with references to KGC that. They’re hungry. Lost. I don’t know. reason, Dennis seemed to feel differently.
motifs like copperheads (northerners It’s about 10, 15 minutes I’m hearing all He allowed that maybe we could just call
sympathetic to the South) and tree mark- this … thinking, Bullshit, bullshit.” Malley now and ask.
ings. The names of soldiers in the story Then Malley asked for an atlas that When Malley answered—he was on
(Castleton and O’Rourke) supposedly was sitting on the table, and for a pen. speakerphone—Dennis first updated him
represent units within the KGC (“castles” With the atlas open to the general area on the progress his attorney was making
and “rooks”). All of these are clues that described in Gardner’s article, Malley with their FOIA filings.

58 JULY/AUGUST 2022
“It’s going to be exciting, Dennis,” Malley stared at him—“he had a gray-cast as you are slant was for a pair of ears like
Malley said. look on his face”—and said, “Sir, you’re mine. It began to nag at me: Had I been
Then Dennis introduced me. Malley going to die in two weeks.” The man expertly played by an 81-year-old psychic?
told me he’d be glad to talk, and explained laughed it off and handed him his money. I wanted to know more about who
that he had just come back from the But six months later, when he went by he was—the man at the beginning of it
personal-care home where his wife had the restaurant again, he was told that the all—and over the next few days, I tried
recently moved. “Today was a fair day,” owner was dead: “Beaten, pistol-whipped to unearth what I could. Not much came
he said. “Two days ago was miraculous, but to death two weeks after you left.” readily to hand, beyond a few newspaper
I guess I have no right to expect miraculous Malley said he was so shaken up that he interviews and advertisements for perfor-
every day. She’s clearly going downhill fast.” couldn’t eat for a week or more. “Nothing. mances, mostly from the 1970s. In these
At first, when I asked Malley about I drank some liquid water. But that was he is usually referred to as either “Michael
that visit to W. T. Grant 47 years ago, he it. I mean, that tore me up so bad, I can’t G. Malley” or “Prof. Michael G. Malley,”
seemed a little hazy. “This is quite a while put it into words.” though in the earliest, from the late 1960s,
ago, my friend,” he said. “I’m 81.” he is “The Rev. Michael G. Malley,” a
But then he began to talk about the T h i n k i n g b ac k o v e r this conversa- “Catholic priest of the Byzantine Rite.”
otherworldly moments when, once in a tion, I was struck by how perfectly pitched From more recent times, I stum-
while, he would be in the middle of a per- Mike Malley’s Aw shucks, I’m as skeptical bled upon references to Malley’s other
formance and “something takes place that
is not simply show business.”
What, I asked, would he say to peo- Mike Malley at home in Portage, Pennsylvania
ple who think that this doesn’t make any
sense, that you can’t predict information
about things like this?
“Believe me, I’m about as skeptical
about this as skeptical could get,” he said.
“And yet, it’s happening.” He said that he
found Dennis’s faith in him “frighten-
ing.” In fact, he’d tried to talk Dennis out
of pursuing the gold over the years. But
his wife’s care costs more than $5,000 a
month—if the gold is real, he could really
use his cut of the money.
Malley no longer performs, and I asked
whether he missed it.
“Yes. The little boy in me never grew
up. So I miss being onstage. But no, I do
not miss what I did with Dennis at all—
that tore me up inside when I did it. But
I shouldn’t say ‘when I did it.’ When it
happened. It was more happening than a
doing. It wasn’t something [where] I said,
‘Oh, you know, I’ll do this today.’ It just
happens, period. Just happens. I didn’t
have an explanation for it then. I don’t
have an explanation for it now.”
I asked if he remembered the first time
it had happened.
JINGYU LIN FOR THE ATLANTIC

“Yes!” he exclaimed, with what seemed

like a strange kind of glee. “It was in
Bakersfield, California.” He said he’d done
a series of shows at a restaurant there, but
when it was time to get paid, the owner
told him, “Mike, I will only give you the
check if you tell me something person-
ally about myself that nobody else knows.”

59
career—selling life insurance—and two Keepers, or how he’d been promised a handheld metal rods are believed to rotate
letters he published in a local newspaper, share of any rewards. It’s not that I found in response to buried objects, and that
one recommending the use of shampoo Keith’s account unconvincing. But I was they talk freely of vortexes and ley lines?
on grease stains, the other arguing fiercely uncomfortable at the thought that I might Or if I detailed some of Dennis’s inven-
in favor of Bill Clinton’s impeachment. I be feeding Keith information that could tions, including, in his basement, an
could find no other traces. Until, in the somehow be used against his father, as engine that “makes energy” by utilizing
unlikeliest of places, I did. though that would be taking sides in a the way magnets reverse polarity as an
Keith and the Girl is a long-running situation where I had no standing to do so. iron bar moves back and forth between
podcast made by two comedians in (For the record, when asked for comment, them? (When I pointed out that if this
Queens. They recorded their first episode Mike Malley described his son’s accusa- were truly creating energy, it would be a
in March 2005 and since then have done tions as “vicious lies.”) much bigger deal than finding millions
about 3,500 more, something they claim is There’s one other thing I didn’t mention of dollars in gold—it could solve climate
a record. Though episodes typically revolve to Keith, partly, I guess, because I didn’t change and rewrite the laws of physics—
around banter and current events, their know what, if anything, I would have Parada brushed this off as if it were some-
mission—“Keith and his ex-girlfriend talk meant by telling it—just one more loop how beside the point.)
shit”—is broad enough to allow all kinds within a loop that could signify as much or Likewise, I could expand upon Warren
of weirdness. Regular listeners are well as little as you want it to. But in the spring Getler’s beliefs about the Knights of the
aware of one recurrent theme: the failings of 1974, within a few weeks of the day Golden Circle—for instance, that Jesse
of Keith’s father. The portrait painted of when Mike Malley first set Dennis Parada James was a key KGC money-gatherer and
this man is of a pompous blowhard and chasing hopes up a Pennsylvania moun- strategist who tended to its gold caches
bully, a self-deluded manipulator, a life- tain, Malley appeared in his local newspa- long after his faked death, and that John
long fraud who has always talked big and per for a different reason. It was just a few Wilkes Booth was KGC-financed. Getler
achieved little. “He’s just so full of lies and words—“Mr. and Mrs. Michael Malley, suggests that the FBI absconded with the
garbage,” Keith will say. Or: “My dad is Somerset RD 4, boy”—marking the arrival Dents Run treasure because it knows that
a psychopath, without any exaggeration.” of the son they would name Keith. there’s “tens of billions” of dollars’ worth
In a series of shows devoted solely to this of hidden gold out there, and considers
subject—“Daddy Issues”—Keith’s younger I c o u l d t e l l y o u things that might the caches a matter of national security.
brother Ken joins in, hour after brutal hour. make you doubt the Paradas more. Might On the other side of the ledger, what
As you doubtless will have guessed, it shift your view if I described how of the FBI? Why, if all of this is gossa-
their father is Mike Malley. the Finders Keepers men have become mer fantasy, can’t the agency just set the
Dennis Parada’s Mike Malley, the keen proponents of dowsing, in which record straight?
so-called psychic, almost never appears
in Keith’s accounts of his father’s many
schemes and forestalled careers. And when
I called Keith, he seemed surprised to hear
of the context in which I had spoken with
his father. He had no memory of his dad
even hinting at anything to do with trea-
sure hunting. “I remember as a kid, I had
to dig little holes as punishment,” he said, a
bit wryly. “I wonder if I was burying gold.”
Sometimes, he said, his dad would
allude to psychic capabilities. I asked
whether his father truly believed those
powers were real.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he did,”
Keith told me. “He does believe, for exam-
ERIK CARTER FOR THE ATLANTIC

ple, that God talks to him and he hears

God’s literal voice … A lot of these stories
with my dad, who knows? So I guess I’ll
never know—the end. That’s how I live.”
I found myself being strangely care-
ful when I spoke with Keith Malley. For
instance, I didn’t make clear just how
involved his father still was with Finders

60 JULY/AUGUST 2022
WHAT OF THE FBI? WHY, IF ALL OF THIS IS GOSSAMER FANTASY,
CAN’T THE AGENCY JUST SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT?
Early in my reporting, I emailed Jake A spokesperson later added that the that there may be a lot more treasure hunt-
Archer asking whether he could help me “excavated dirt was visually inspected and ing out there than actual treasure, perhaps
understand what had happened. He never scanned with metal detectors,” and clari- to a hugely disproportionate degree. This
replied directly, but less than two hours fied a few incidental details. But beyond community feels like a group feeding hun-
later, I was contacted by the FBI’s public- this, the FBI would say nothing more, grily on its own collective belief, creating
affairs office in Philadelphia. which baffled me. At the very least, why a kind of circular logic: If so many people
In the discussions that followed, wouldn’t it have tried to square the geo- are chasing so much, so assiduously, and
the FBI implied that it might engage. physical results with what was actually finding what seem like so many promis-
At one juncture, there was a sugges- under the ground, if only for future cases? ing leads, then at least a good amount of
tion that key people might be willing to But then I began to wonder whether what they are searching for must be out
meet and discuss the whole operation, my assumption that the FBI had con- there, right? And yet. If there really were
though it wasn’t clear how much would ducted some thorough post hoc analysis, so many grand treasure hoards, wouldn’t
be on the record, and the idea was soon and was declining to share the results, more of them have been discovered by
withdrawn. I was then told that the FBI might be wrong. Maybe it doesn’t work now, both by chance, as we churn up the
might answer written questions, so I sent like that. Maybe the reality is some- land beneath us, and by use of all the mod-
a list. I asked what had or hadn’t been thing flatter and more indifferent—that ern technologies that those who buried
found at the site, whether anything had the agents do a job and don’t look back, the treasure could never have imagined?
been removed, whether anything had because there are more important things to I know someone like Warren Getler
been tested or analyzed, what steps had think about. That all the rest—this Find- might rebut this by saying that some
been taken to understand any discrep- ers Keepers hullabaloo and questions like large hauls have been found, but that the
ancies between the geophysical surveys mine—is just a nuisance. An embarrass- government has covered them up—read
and whatever had or hadn’t been found, ing nuisance. the stories about Victorio Peak, in New
and what conclusions had been drawn. Could it be as simple as this: The FBI Mexico, if you want to explore this kind
I asked if the FBI had any response to staged a large and costly operation that left of thinking. I’d so like to believe, but I just
the treasure hunters’ theories, and their it feeling foolish? Archer and his colleagues, can’t quite get there.
accusation that the agency had deceived after all, would not have been the first Still, the dream of treasure relies on
both them and the public. people in history to get a little overexcited possibility, and in the case of Dents Run,
Six weeks later, the FBI responded, and ahead of themselves at the thought of possibility remains. Plenty of people—
in part: “No work took place at the site some gold. Maybe they’re doing all they maybe with a gleam in their eye and a
after hours; the only nighttime activity can not to draw any more attention to this. spring in their step—will glimpse enough
was conducted by FBI Police personnel (Though, as already noted, if this is their in this story that just doesn’t make sense
who secured the site around the clock for strategy—not going too well.) The trea- to make them suspect that the gold was
the duration of the excavation … Nothing sure hunters won’t see it this way, but it’s real. We may not have seen it yet. But we
was found in the excavation … The only not difficult to recast some of what they will. And if some of us are drawn to a
items the FBI removed from the site were describe—Archer saying he hates this case, different conclusion—say, that a psychic
the equipment and supplies brought in for for example—as what someone might say talking to a furniture salesman triggered
the dig. No gold or other items of evidence if it’s dawning on him that he got carried a wild goose chase that, 44 years later, led
were located or collected.” away, as the words of a man annoyed both dozens of FBI agents to dig up a snow-
The statement concluded: “While infor- with himself and with those who fed his covered Pennsylvania mountainside where
mation had suggested a potential cultural wrongheaded optimism. nothing ever was—then that is, doubly,
heritage site at Dents Run, that possibility Picking my way through this strange our loss.
was not borne out by the excavation. The tale’s tendrils, I found myself thinking a
FBI continues to unequivocally reject any lot about treasure and treasure hunts. I
claims or speculation to the contrary.” couldn’t shake the disconcerting feeling Chris Heath is a longtime magazine writer.

61
Our By
Blinding, Ed Yong
Blaring
World

Photographs by
Shayan Asgharnia
62 JULY/AUGUST 2022
By flooding the
environment with
light and sound,
we’re confounding
the senses of
countless animals.
But we can still
save the quiet
and preserve
the dark.

63
The bat is unleashing a stream of short, Echolocation’s main weakness is its
ultrasonic pulses from its mouth, which short range: Some bats can detect small
are too high-pitched for me to hear. Bats, moths from about six to nine yards away.
however, can hear ultrasound, and by lis- But they can do so in darkness so total that
tening for the returning echoes, they can vision simply doesn’t work. Even in pitch-
detect and locate objects around them. blackness, bats can skirt around branches
Echolocation is the primary means and pluck minuscule insects from the sky.
through which most bats navigate and Of course, bats are not the only animals
hunt. Only two animal groups are known that hunt nocturnally. In the Tetons, as I
to have perfected the ability: toothed watch Barber tagging bats, mosquitoes
whales (such as dolphins, orcas, and sperm bite me through my shirt, attracted by
whales) and bats. Echolocation differs the smell of the carbon dioxide on my
from human senses because it involves breath. While I itch, an owl flies overhead,
putting energy into the environment. tracking its prey using a radar dish of stiff
Within the 310,000 acres of Wyoming’s Eyes scan, noses sniff, and fingers press, facial feathers that funnel sound toward
Grand Teton National Park, one of the but these sense organs are always picking its ears. These creatures have all evolved
largest parking lots is in the village of Col- up stimuli that already exist in the wider senses that allow them to thrive in the
ter Bay. Beyond the lot’s far edge, nestled world. By contrast, an echolocating bat dark. But the dark is disappearing.
among some trees, is a foul-smelling creates the stimulus that it later detects. Barber is one of a growing number of
sewage-pumping station that Jesse Barber, Echolocation is a way of tricking your sur- sensory biologists who fear that humans
a sensory ecologist at Boise State Univer- roundings into revealing themselves. A bat are polluting the world with too much
sity, calls the Shiterator. On this particu- says “Marco,” and its surroundings can’t light, to the detriment of other species.
lar night, sitting quietly within a crevice help but say “Polo.” Even here, in the middle of a national park,
beneath the building’s metal awning and The basic process seems straight- light from human technology intrudes
illuminated by Barber’s flashlight, is a lit- forward, but its details are extraordi- upon the darkness. It spews forth from
tle brown bat. A white device the size of nary. High-pitched sounds quickly the headlights of passing vehicles, from
a rice grain is attached to the bat’s back. lose energy in air, so bats must scream the fluorescent bulbs of the visitor center,
“That’s the radio tag,” Barber tells me. to make calls that are strong enough to and from the lampposts encircling the
He’d previously affixed it to the bat so return audible echoes. To avoid deafen- parked cars. “The parking lot is lit up like
that he could track its movements, and ing themselves, bats contract the mus- a Walmart because no one thought about
tonight he has returned to tag a few more. cles in their ears in time with their calls, the implications for wildlife,” Barber says.
From inside the Shiterator, I can hear desensitizing their hearing with every Many flying insects are fatally
the chirps of other roosting bats. As the shout and restoring it in time for the attracted to streetlights, mistaking them
sun sets, they start to emerge. A few echo. Each echo provides a snapshot for celestial lights and hovering below
become entangled in the large net Barber in time, so bats must update their calls them until they succumb to exhaustion.
has strung between two trees. He frees quickly to track fast-moving insects; Some bats exploit their confusion, feast-
a bat, and Hunter Cole, one of his stu- fortunately, their vocal muscles are the ing on the disoriented swarms. Other,
dents, carefully examines it to check that fastest known muscles in any mammal, slower-moving species, including the
it’s healthy and heavy enough to carry a releasing up to 200 pulses a second. A little brown bats that Barber tagged,
tag. Once satisfied, Cole daubs a spot bat’s nervous system is so sensitive that stay clear of the light, perhaps because it
of surgical cement between its shoulder it can detect differences in echo delay of makes them easier prey for owls. Lights
blades and attaches the tiny device. “It’s just one- or two-millionths of a second, reshape animal communities, drawing
a little bit of an art project, the tagging of which translates to a physical distance some in and pushing others away, with
a bat,” Barber tells me. After a few min- of less than a millimeter. A bat thus consequences that are hard to predict.
utes, Cole places the bat on the trunk gauges the distance to an insect with To determine the effect of light on the
of the nearest tree. It crawls upward and far more precision than humans can. bats of Grand Teton, Barber persuaded
takes off, carrying $175 worth of radio
equipment into the woods.
I watch as the team examines another Previous spread: A sea turtle’s hatchlings can be diverted away from
bat, which opens its mouth and exposes the sea by artificial lights. For mice, human-made noise
its surprisingly long teeth. This isn’t an can mask the sounds of predators. Opposite page: A big brown bat’s
aggressive display; it only looks like one. ability to echolocate allows it to thrive in the dark.

64 JULY/AUGUST 2022
Every animal is enclosed
the National Park Service to let him try
an unusual experiment. In 2019, he
within its own sensory bubble,
refitted all 32 streetlights in the Colter
Bay parking lot with special bulbs that
can change color. They can produce
perceiving but a tiny sliver
either white light, which strongly affects
the behavior of insects and bats, or red of an immense world.
light, which doesn’t seem to. Every few
days during my visit, Barber’s team flips
their color. Funnel-shaped traps hang-
ing below the lamps collect the gath-
ering insects, while radio transponders
pick up the signals from the tagged bats.
These data should reveal how normal
white lights affect the local animals, and as if we have stepped into a horror movie. fewer insects seem to be gathered beneath
whether red lights can help rewild the But as my eyes adjust, the red hues feel the lamps. I look up even farther and
night sky. less dramatic and become almost pleas- see the stripe of the Milky Way cutting
Cole gives me a little demonstration ant. It is amazing how much we can still across the sky. It’s an achingly beautiful
by flipping the lights to red. At first, the see. The cars and the surrounding foliage sight, one I have never seen before in the
parking lot looks disquietingly infernal, are all visible. I look up and notice that Northern Hemisphere.

E v e r y a n i m a l i s enclosed within
its own sensory bubble, perceiving but a
tiny sliver of an immense world. There is a
wonderful word for this sensory bubble—
Umwelt. It was defined and popularized
by the Baltic German zoologist Jakob von
Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the
German word for “environment,” but
Uexküll didn’t use it to refer to an ani-
mal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is
specifically the part of those surroundings
that an animal can sense and experience—
its perceptual world. A tick, questing for
mammalian blood, cares about body
heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of
butyric acid that emanates from skin. It
doesn’t care about other stimuli, and prob-
ably doesn’t know that they exist. Every
Umwelt is limited; it just doesn’t feel that
way. Each one feels all-encompassing to
those who experience it. Our Umwelt is
all we know, and so we easily mistake it
SHAYAN ASGHARNIA FOR THE ATLANTIC

for all there is to know. This is an illusion

that every creature shares.
Humans, however, possess the unique
capacity to appreciate the Umwelten of
other species, and through centuries of
effort, we have learned much about those
sensory worlds. But in the time it took
us to accumulate that knowledge, we
have radically remolded those worlds.

65
only to be washed out in the last billionth
of a second by the glow from the nearest
strip mall depresses me to no end,” the
visual ecologist Sönke Johnsen once wrote.
At Colter Bay, Cole flips the lights
from red back to white and I wince.
The extra illumination feels harsh and
unpleasant. The stars seem fainter now.
Sensory pollution is the pollution of dis-
connection. It detaches us from the cos-
mos. It drowns out the stimuli that link
animals to their surroundings and to one
another. In making the planet brighter
and louder, we have endangered sensory
environments for countless species in ways
that are less viscerally galling than clear-cut
rain forests and bleached coral reefs but no
less tragic. That must now change. We can
still save the quiet and preserve the dark.

E v e r y y e a r o n September 11, the

sky above New York City is pierced by two
columns of intense blue light. This annual
art installation, known as Tribute in Light,
commemorates the terrorist attacks of
2001, with the ascending beams standing
in for the fallen Twin Towers. Each is pro-
Much of the devastation that we have calculated that two-thirds of the world’s duced by 44 xenon bulbs with 7,000-watt
wrought is by now familiar. We have population lived in light-polluted areas, intensities. Their light can be seen from
changed the climate and acidified the where the nights were at least 10 percent 60 miles away. From closer up, onlookers
oceans. We have shuffled wildlife across brighter than natural darkness. About often notice small flecks, dancing amid the
continents, replacing indigenous species 40 percent of humankind is perma- beams like gentle flurries of snow. Those
with invasive ones. We have instigated nently bathed in the equivalent of per- flecks are birds. Thousands of them.
what some scientists have called an era petual moonlight, and about 25 percent This annual ritual unfortunately
of “biological annihilation,” comparable constantly experiences an artificial twi- occurs during the autumn migratory
to the five great mass-extinction events light that exceeds the illumination of a season, when billions of small songbirds
of prehistory. But we have also filled the full moon. “‘Night’ never really comes undertake long flights through North
silence with noise and the night with for them,” the researchers wrote. In American skies. Navigating under cover
light. This often ignored phenomenon is 2016, when the team updated the atlas, of darkness, they fly in such large num-
called sensory pollution—human-made it found that the problem had become bers that they show up on radar. By
stimuli that interfere with the senses of even worse. By then, about 83 percent analyzing meteorological radar images,
other species. By barraging different ani- of people—including more than 99 per- Benjamin Van Doren showed that Trib-
mals with stimuli of our own making, we cent of Americans and Europeans—were ute in Light, across seven nights of opera-
have forced them to live in our Umwelt. under light-polluted skies. More than a tion, waylaid about 1.1 million birds.
We have distracted them from what they third of humanity, and almost 80 percent The beams reach so high that even at
actually need to sense, drowned out the of North Americans, can no longer see the altitudes of several miles, passing birds
cues they depend upon, and lured them Milky Way. “The thought of light travel- are drawn into them. Warblers and other
into sensory traps. All of this is capable ing billions of years from distant galaxies small species congregate within the light
of doing catastrophic damage.
In 2001, the astronomer Pierantonio
Cinzano and his colleagues created the Female crickets struggle to find the best mates when
first global atlas of light pollution. They noise pollution masks the males’ songs.

66 JULY/AUGUST 2022
Manatee whiskers can detect currents in the water, but not quickly enough to dodge loud, fast boats.
SHAYAN ASGHARNIA FOR THE ATLANTIC

67
at up to 150 times their normal density remained largely inviolate throughout humans, even though our eyes are usually
levels. They circle slowly, as if trapped in all of evolutionary time—a 4-billion- too slow to detect these changes; what,
an incorporeal cage. They call frequently year streak that began to falter in the then, do they do to animals with faster
and intensely. They occasionally crash 19th century. vision, like insects and small birds?
into nearby buildings. When sea-turtle hatchlings emerge Colors matter, too. Red is better for
Migrations are grueling affairs that from their nests, they crawl away from bats and insects but can waylay migrat-
push small birds to their physiological the dark shapes of dune vegetation toward ing birds. Yellow doesn’t bother turtles
limit. Even a night-long detour can sap the brighter oceanic horizon. But lit roads or most insects but can disrupt salaman-
their energy reserves to fatal effect. So and beach resorts can steer them in the ders. No wavelength is perfect, Longcore
whenever 1,000 or more birds are caught wrong direction, where they are easily says, but blue and white are worst of all.
within Tribute in Light, the bulbs are picked off by predators or squashed by Blue light interferes with body clocks and
turned off for 20 minutes to let the birds vehicles. In Florida alone, artificial lights strongly attracts insects. It is also easily
regain their bearing. But that’s just one kill baby turtles in the thousands every scattered, increasing the spread of light
source of light among many, and though year. They’ve wandered into a baseball pollution. It is, however, cheap and effi-
intense and vertical, it shines only once game and, more horrifying, abandoned cient to produce. The new generation of
a year. At other times, light pours out of beach fires. The caretaker of one property energy-efficient white LEDs contain a lot
sports stadiums and tourist attractions, oil in Melbourne Beach found hundreds of of blue light, and the world might switch
rigs and office buildings. It pushes back dead hatchlings piled beneath a single to them from traditional yellow-orange
the dark and pulls in migrating birds. mercury-vapor lamp. sodium lights. In energy terms, that
In 1886, shortly after Thomas Edi- Artificial lights can also fatally attract would be an environmental win. But it
son commercialized the electric light insects, contributing to their alarming would also increase the amount of global
bulb, about 1,000 birds died after col- global declines. A single streetlamp can light pollution by two or three times.
liding with illuminated towers in Deca- lure moths from 25 yards away, and a well- After talking with Longcore, I head
tur, Illinois. More than a century later, lit road might as well be a prison. Many of home to Washington, D.C., on a red-
the environmental scientist Travis Long- the insects that gather around streetlamps eye flight. As the plane takes off, I peer
core and his colleagues calculated that will likely be eaten or dead from exhaus- out the window at Los Angeles. The
almost 7 million birds die each year in tion by sunrise. Those that zoom toward twinkling grid of lights stirs the same
the United States and Canada after flying vehicle headlights will probably be gone primordial awe that comes from watch-
into communication towers. The lights of even sooner. The consequences of these ing a starry sky or a moonlit sea. But
those towers are meant to warn aircraft losses can ripple across ecosystems. In as the illuminated city recedes beneath
pilots, but they also disrupt the orienta- 2014, as part of an experiment, the ecol- my window, that amazement is tinged
tion of nocturnal avian fliers, which then ogist Eva Knop installed streetlamps in with unease. Light pollution is no lon-
veer into wires or each other. Many of seven Swiss meadows. After sunset, she ger just an urban problem. Light travels,
these deaths could be avoided simply by prowled these fields with night-vision encroaching even into places that are oth-
replacing steady lights with blinking ones. goggles, peering into flowers to search erwise untouched by human influence.
“We too quickly forget that we don’t for moths and other pollinators. By com- The light from Los Angeles reaches Death
perceive the world in the same way as paring these sites to others that had been Valley, one of the largest national parks in
other species, and consequently, we kept dark, Knop showed that the illu- the United States, more than 150 miles
ignore impacts that we shouldn’t,” Long- minated flowers received 62 percent away. True darkness is hard to find.
core tells me in his Los Angeles office. fewer visits from pollinating insects.
Our eyes are among the sharpest in the One plant produced 13 percent less fruit So is true silence.
animal kingdom, but their high resolu- even though it was visited by a day shift It’s a sunny April morning in Boul-
tion comes with the cost of low sensi- of bees and butterflies. der, Colorado, and I’ve hiked up to a
tivity. Unlike most other mammals, our The presence of light isn’t the only fac- rocky hillside, about 6,000 feet above sea
vision fails us at night, so we crave more tor that matters; so does its nature. Insects level. The world feels wider here, not just
nocturnal illumination, not less. with aquatic larvae, such as mayflies and because of the panoramic view over coni-
The idea of light as a pollutant is dragonflies, will fruitlessly lay their eggs on fer forests but also because it is blissfully
jarring to us, but it becomes one when wet roads, windows, and car roofs, because quiet. Away from urban ruckus, quieter
it creeps into places where it doesn’t these reflect horizontally polarized light sounds become audible over greater dis-
belong. Widespread light at night is a in the same way bodies of water do. Rap- tances. On the hillside, a chipmunk is
uniquely anthropogenic force. The daily idly flickering light bulbs can cause head- rustling. Grasshoppers snap their wings
and seasonal rhythms of bright and dark aches and other neurological problems in together as they fly. A woodpecker

68 JULY/AUGUST 2022
Busy roads may drown out the alarm calls of songbirds like the tufted titmouse.

protected spaces like national parks, and

increases them tenfold in 21 percent. In
the latter places, “if you could have heard
something 100 feet away, now you can
only hear it 10 feet away,” Rachel Buxton,
a former National Park Service research
fellow, told me. Aircraft and roads are the
main culprits, but so are industries like oil
and gas extraction, mining, and forestry,
which fill the air with drilling, explosions,
engine noises, and the thud of heavy tires.
Even the most heavily protected areas are
under acoustic siege.
In towns and cities, the problem is
worse, and not just in the United States.
In 2005, two-thirds of Europeans were
immersed in ambient noise equivalent to
perpetual rainfall. Such conditions are dif-
ficult for the many animals that commu-
nicate through calls and songs. Scientists
have found that noisy neighborhoods
in Leiden, in the Netherlands, compel
great tits to sing at higher frequencies
so that their notes don’t get masked by
the city’s low-pitched hubbub. Nightin-
gales in Berlin are forced to belt out their
tunes more loudly to be heard over the
surrounding din. Urban and industrial
noise can also change the timing of birds’
songs, suppress the complexity of their
calls, and prevent them from finding
mates. Noise pollution masks not only
the sounds that animals deliberately make
but also the “web of unintended sounds
pounds its beak against a nearby trunk. end of the hike, if they heard any aircraft,” that ties communities together,” Fristrup
Wind rushes past. The longer I sit, the he tells me. “People will say they remem- says. He means the gentle rustles that tell
more I seem to hear. ber one or two. And I’ll say there were 23 owls where their prey is, or the faint flaps
Two men puncture the tranquility. I jets and two helicopters.” that warn mice about impending doom.
can’t see them, but they’re somewhere on Before he retired, Fristrup was a scien- In 2012, Jesse Barber and his col-
the trail below, intent on broadcasting tist at the National Park Service’s Natu- leagues Heidi Ware Carlisle and Chris-
their opinions to all of Colorado. Then ral Sounds and Night Skies Division, a topher McClure built a phantom road.
I realize I can also hear faraway vehicles group that works to safeguard (among On a ridge in Idaho that acts as a stop-
zooming along a highway beyond the other things) the United States’ natural over for migrating birds, the team set
SHAYAN ASGHARNIA FOR THE ATLANTIC

trees. Denver hums in the distance, an soundscapes. To protect them, the team up a half-mile corridor of speakers that
ambient backdrop that I had all but first had to map them, and sound, unlike played looped recordings of passing cars.
blocked out. I notice the roaring engines light, can’t be detected by satellites. Fris- A third of the usual birds stayed away.
of a plane flying overhead. After my hike, I trup and his colleagues spent years lug- Many of those that didn’t paid a price for
meet up with Kurt Fristrup, who says he’s ging recording equipment to almost persisting. With tires and horns drown-
been backpacking since the mid-1960s. In 500 sites around the country, capturing ing out the sounds of predators, the birds
that time, aircraft emissions have increased nearly 1.5 million audio samples. They spent more time looking for danger and
nearly sevenfold. “One of my favorite par- found that human activity doubles the less time looking for food. They put on
lor tricks when friends visit is to ask, at the background-noise levels in 63 percent of less weight and were weaker during their

69
arduous migrations. The phantom-road hum, cod grunt, and bearded seals trill. global shipping fleet more than tripled,
experiment was pivotal in showing that Thousands of snapping shrimp, which and began moving 10 times more cargo
wildlife could be deterred by noise and stun passing fish with the shock waves at higher speeds. And in the past 50
noise alone, detached from the sight of produced by their large claws, fill coral years, shipping vessels have multiplied
vehicles or the stench of exhaust. Hun- reefs with sounds similar to sizzling bacon the levels of low-frequency noise in the
dreds of studies have come to similar or Rice Krispies popping in milk. Some oceans 32-fold—a 15-decibel increase
conclusions. In noisy conditions, prai- of this soundscape has been muted as over levels that Hildebrand suspects were
rie dogs spend more time underground. humans have netted, hooked, and har- already 10 to 15 decibels louder than in
Owls flub their attacks. Parasitic Ormia pooned the oceans’ residents. Other natu- pre-propeller seas. Because giant whales
flies struggle to find their cricket hosts. ral noises have been drowned out by the can live for a century or more, there are
Sounds can travel over long distances, ones we added: the scrapes of nets that likely whales alive today that have person-
at all times of day, and through solid trawl the seafloor; the staccato beats of ally experienced this growing underwater
obstacles. These qualities make them seismic charges used to scout for oil and racket and now can hear only a small frac-
excellent stimuli for animals but also pol- gas; the pings of military sonar; and, as a tion of their former range. As ships pass
lutants par excellence. Noise can degrade ubiquitous backing track for all this com- in the night, humpback whales stop sing-
habitats that look idyllic and make other- motion, the sounds of ships. ing, orcas stop foraging, and right whales
wise livable places unlivable. And where “Think about where your shoes come become stressed. Crabs stop feeding, cut-
will animals go? In 2003, 83 percent of from,” the marine-mammal expert John tlefish change colors, damselfish are more
the contiguous United States lay within Hildebrand tells me. I look; unsurpris- easily caught. “If I said that I’m going to
about a kilometer of a road. ingly, the answer is China. Some tanker increase the noise level in your office by
Even the seas can’t offer silence. carried my shoes across the Pacific, leav- 30 decibels, OSHA would come in and
Although Jacques Cousteau once described ing behind a wake of sound that radi- say you’d need to wear earplugs,” Hil-
the ocean as a silent world, it is anything ated for miles. From 1945 to 2008, the debrand tells me. “We’re conducting an
ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

but. It teems with the sounds of break-

ing waves and blowing winds, bubbling
hydrothermal vents and calving icebergs, Above: As babies, clown fish use sounds to find their way to
all of which carry farther and travel faster the safety of a coral reef. To avoid excessive noise, prairie dogs
underwater than in air. Marine animals spend more time underground. Opposite page: The body clock of
the barred tiger salamander is disrupted by artificial light at night.
are noisy, too. Whales sing, toadfish

70 JULY/AUGUST 2022
experiment on marine animals by expos-
ing them to these high levels of noise, and
it’s not an experiment we’d allow to be
conducted on ourselves.”

B e c a u s e o f t h e way we have
upended the worlds of other animals,
senses that have served their owners well
for millions of years are now liabilities.
Smooth vertical surfaces, which don’t
exist in nature, return echoes that sound
like open air; perhaps that’s why bats
so often crash into windows. Dimethyl
sulfide, the seaweedy-smelling chemical
that once reliably guided seabirds to food,
now also guides them to the millions of
tons of plastic waste that humans have
dumped into the oceans; perhaps that’s
one reason an estimated 90 percent of
seabirds eventually swallow plastic. Mana-
tees can detect the currents produced by
objects moving in the water with whisker-
like hairs found all over their body, but
not with enough notice to avoid a loud,
fast-moving speedboat; boat collisions are
responsible for at least a fifth of deaths
among Florida’s manatees. Odorants in
river water can guide salmon back to their
stream of birth, but not if pesticides in
that same water blunt their sense of smell.
Weak electric fields at the bottom of the levels of light and noise pollution that partly because of light. In deeper parts
sea can guide sharks to buried prey, but double every few decades. Creatures that of the lake, light tends to be yellow or
also to high-voltage cables. have already been confined to narrow cor- orange, while blue is more plentiful
Some animals have come to toler- ners of shrinking habitats can’t just up and in shallower waters. These differences
ate the sights and sounds of modernity. leave. Those that rely on specialized senses affected the eyes of the local cichlids
Others even flourish among them. Some can’t just retune their entire Umwelt. and, in turn, their mating choices. The
urban moths have evolved to become Our influence is not inherently evolutionary biologist Ole Seehausen
less attracted to light. Some urban spi- destructive, but it is often homogeniz- found that female cichlids from deeper
ders have gone in the opposite direction, ing. In pushing out species that cannot waters prefer redder males, while those
spinning webs beneath streetlights and abide our sensory onslaughts, we leave in the shallows are drawn to bluer ones.
feasting on the attracted insects. In some behind smaller and less diverse com- These diverging penchants acted like
Panama towns, nighttime lights drive munities. And beyond polluting the physical barriers, splitting the cichlids
frog-eating bats away, allowing male tún- world with unwanted sensory stimuli, into differently colored forms. Diversity
TK ATLANTIC

gara frogs to load their songs with sexy we’re also removing natural stimuli that in light helped create diversity in vision,
flourishes that would normally attract animals have come to depend on, flat- in color, and in species. But over the past
predators as well as mates. Animals can tening the undulating sensescapes that century, runoff from farms, mines, and
FOR THE

adapt, by changing their behavior over have generated the wondrous variety of sewage filled the lake with nutrients that
PHOTO CREDIT

an individual lifetime and by evolving animal Umwelten. spurred the growth of clouding, choking
ART /ASGHARNIA

new behaviors over many generations. Consider Lake Victoria, in East algae. The old light gradients flattened
But adaptation is not always possible. Africa. It is home to more than 500 spe- in some places, the cichlids’ colors and
Species that mature and breed slowly can’t cies of cichlid fish that are found nowhere visual proclivities no longer mattered,
SHAYAN

evolve quickly enough to keep pace with else. That extraordinary diversity arose and the number of species collapsed. By

71
With every creature that
vanishes, we lose a way of they were bleached. Natural sensescapes
still exist. There is still time to preserve

interpreting the world. and restore them before the last echo of
the last reef fades into memory. And in
most cases, the work ahead of us is con-
siderably simpler. Instead of adding stim-
uli that we have removed, we can simply
remove those that we added. Radioactive
waste can take millennia to degrade. Per-
sistent chemicals like the pesticide DDT
can thread through the bodies of animals
long after they are banned. Plastics will
turning off the light in the lake, humans for his doctorate. Lamont should have continue to despoil the oceans even if all
also switched off the sensory engine of spent months swimming amid the cor- plastic production halts tomorrow. But
diversity, contributing to what Seehausen als’ vivid splendor. Instead, a heat wave light pollution ceases as soon as lights are
has called “the fastest large-scale extinc- had forced the corals to expel the sym- turned off. Noise pollution abates once
tion event ever observed.” biotic algae that give them nutrients and engines and propellers wind down. Sen-
As those species go extinct, so too do colors. Without these partners, the cor- sory pollution is an ecological gimme—
their Umwelten. With every creature that als starved and whitened in the worst a rare example of a planetary problem
vanishes, we lose a way of interpreting the bleaching event on record, and the first that can be immediately and effectively
world. Our sensory bubbles shield us from of several to come. Snorkeling through addressed. And in the spring of 2020,
the knowledge of those losses. But they the rubble, Lamont found that the reefs the world did unknowingly address it.
don’t protect us from the consequences. had been not only bleached but also
In the woodlands of New Mexico, the silenced. Snapping shrimp no longer A s t h e co ro n av i r u s spread, public
ecologists Clinton Francis and Cath- snapped. Parrotfish no longer crunched. spaces closed. Flights were grounded.
erine Ortega found that the Woodhouse’s Those sounds normally help guide baby Cars stayed parked. Cruise ships stayed
scrub-jay avoids the noise of compressors fish back to the reef after their first vul- docked. About 4.5 billion people—almost
used in extracting natural gas. The scrub- nerable months out at sea. Soundless three-fifths of the world’s population—
jay spreads the seeds of piñon pine trees, reefs were much less attractive. were told or encouraged to stay home.
and a single bird can bury thousands of Lamont feared that if fish avoided the As a result, many places became sub-
pine seeds a year. They are so important to degraded reefs, the seaweed they nor- stantially darker and quieter. With fewer
the forests that, in quiet areas where they mally eat would run amok, overgrow- planes and cars on the move, the night
still thrive, pine seedlings are four times ing the bleached corals and preventing skies around Berlin were half as bright
more common than in noisy areas they them from rebounding. He and his col- as normal. Alaska’s Glacier Bay, a sanc-
have abandoned, Francis and colleagues leagues set up loudspeakers that continu- tuary for humpback whales, was half as
found in a later study. ously played recordings of healthy reefs loud as the previous year, as were cities
Piñon pines are the foundation of the over patches of coral rubble. The team and rural areas throughout California,
ecosystem around them—a single spe- would dive every few days to survey the New York, Florida, and Texas. Sounds
cies that provides food and shelter for local animals. After 40 days, he ran the that would normally be muffled became
hundreds of others, including Indigenous numbers and saw that the acoustically clearer. City dwellers around the world
Americans. To lose three-quarters of enriched reefs had twice as many young suddenly noticed singing birds.
them would be disastrous. And because fish as silent ones and 50 percent more In a multitude of ways, the pan-
they grow slowly, “noise might have species. They had not only been attracted demic showed that sensory pollution
hundred-plus-year consequences for the by the sounds but stayed and formed a can be reduced if people are sufficiently
entire ecosystem,” Francis tells me. community. “It was a lovely experiment motivated—and such reductions are
A better understanding of other to do,” Lamont says. It showed what con- possible without the debilitating con-
creatures’ senses can show us how we’re servationists can accomplish by “seeing sequences of a global lockdown. In the
defiling the natural world—and can the world through the perceptions of the summer of 2007, Kurt Fristrup and his
also point to ways of saving it. In 2016, animals you’re trying to protect.” National Park Service colleagues did
the marine biologist Tim Lamont (for- Lamont’s experiment was possible a simple experiment at Muir Woods
merly Tim Gordon) traveled to Austra- only because the team managed to record National Monument, in California. On a
lia’s Great Barrier Reef to begin work the sounds of the healthy reefs before random schedule, they stuck up signs that

72 JULY/AUGUST 2022
Barn owls track prey using stiff facial feathers that funnel sound toward their ears.
SHAYAN ASGHARNIA FOR THE ATLANTIC

73
To perceive the world through
declared one of the most popular parts
of the park a quiet zone and encouraged
others’ senses is to find
visitors to silence their phones and lower
their voices. These simple steps, with no
accompanying enforcement, reduced the
splendor in familiarity, and the
noise levels in the park by three decibels,
equivalent to 1,200 fewer visitors.
To truly make a dent in sensory pol-
sacred in the mundane.
lution, bigger steps are needed. Lights
can be dimmed or switched off when
buildings and streets are not in use. They
can be shielded so that they stop shining
above the horizon. LEDs can be changed
from blue or white to red. Quiet pave-
ments with porous surfaces can absorb a flower’s electric fields, leafhoppers send needs, the senses sort through an infin-
the noise from passing vehicles. Sound- vibrational melodies through the stems ity of stimuli, allowing through only
absorbing barriers, including berms on of plants, and birds behold the hidden what is relevant. To learn about the rest
land and air-bubble curtains in the water, palettes of ultraviolet colors on their is a choice. The ability to dip into other
can soften the din of traffic and industry. flock-mates’ feathers. Wilderness is not Umwelten is our greatest sensory skill.
Vehicles can be diverted from important distant. We are continually immersed in A moth will never know what a zebra
areas of wilderness, or they can be forced it. It is there for us to imagine, to savor, finch hears in its song, a zebra finch will
to slow down: In 2007, when commer- and to protect. never feel the electric buzz of a black
cial ships in the Mediterranean began In 1934, after considering the senses ghost knifefish, a knifefish will never see
slowing down by just 12 percent, which of ticks, dogs, jackdaws, and wasps, Jakob through the eyes of a mantis shrimp, a
saves fuel and reduces emissions, they von Uexküll wrote about the Umwelt of mantis shrimp will never smell the way a
produced half as much noise. Such ves- the astronomer. “Through gigantic opti- dog can, and a dog will never understand
sels can also be fitted with quieter hulls cal aids,” he wrote, this unique creature what it is like to be a bat. We will never
and propellers, which are already used to has eyes that “are capable of penetrating fully do any of these things either, but we
muffle military ships (and would make outer space as far as the most distant stars. are the only animal that can try. Through
commercial ones more fuel-efficient). In its Umwelt, suns and planets circle at patient observation, through the technol-
We could regulate industries causing a solemn pace.” The tools of astronomy ogies at our disposal, through the scien-
sensory pollution, but there’s not enough can capture stimuli that no animal can tific method, and, above all else, through
societal will. “Plastic pollution in the sea naturally sense—X-rays, radio waves, our curiosity and imagination, we can try
looks hideous and everyone is worried, gravitational waves from colliding black to step into perspectives outside our own.
but noise pollution in the sea is some- holes. They extend the human Umwelt This is a profound gift, which comes with
thing we don’t experience so directly, so across the universe and back to its very a heavy responsibility. As the only spe-
no one’s up in arms about it,” Lamont beginning. The tools of biologists are cies that can come close to understand-
says. And as we desecrate sensory envi- more modest in scale, but they, too, offer ing other Umwelten, but also the species
ronments, we grow accustomed to the a glimpse into the infinite. Scientists have most responsible for destroying those sen-
results. Our blinding, blaring world used night-vision goggles to show that sory realms, it falls on us to marshal all
becomes normal, and pristine wilderness nocturnal bees can see in extreme dark- of our empathy and ingenuity to protect
feels more distant. ness, clip-on microphones to eavesdrop other creatures, and their unique ways of
But the majesty of nature is not on the vibrational songs of leafhoppers, experiencing our shared world.
restricted to canyons and moun- and electrodes to listen in on the pulses of
tains. It can be found in the wilds of electric fish. With microscopes, cameras,
perception—the sensory spaces that lie speakers, satellites, and recorders, people
outside our Umwelt and within those have explored other sensory worlds. We Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic
of other animals. To perceive the world have used technology to make the invis- and the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize
through others’ senses is to find splen- ible visible and the inaudible audible. for explanatory reporting. This article has
dor in familiarity, and the sacred in the No creature could possibly sense been adapted from his latest book, An
mundane. Wonders exist in a backyard everything, and no creature needs to. Immense World: How Animal Senses
garden, where bees take the measure of Evolving according to their owner’s Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

74 JULY/AUGUST 2022

UNDERWRITTEN BY
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76 ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY
O M NIVOR E should be—a thrillingly strange and dirty book, full
of provocations and subversions. I came to an episode
in which the author’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is
passing Nelson’s Pillar with some other men. He tries
to impress them with a story about two middle-aged
Dublin women who save their money for a day out.
They buy a lot of plums and climb the pillar. Then
“they put the bag of plums between them and eat the
plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with
their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out
of their mouths and spitting the plumstones slowly
out between the railings.”
The Book That Never Reading this took me back to my childhood and
explained an incident that was both vivid in my
Stops Changing memory and oddly obscure. Now I knew what my
father and Vincent were joking about and why we
were eating plums way up there above the streets
What I’ve learned about Dublin, and of Dublin. The book was in their heads, and they
myself, in a lifetime of reading Ulysses were inhabiting simultaneously Joyce’s comic par-
able and the present-day city. But if the passage in
By Fintan O’Toole Ulysses illuminated a moment in my own past, I still
could not understand Stephen Dedalus’s story. Why
were those apparently respectable women spitting
When I was a kid, the axis around which Dublin Back when the hard pits of a fruit down onto the heads of their
revolved was a huge Doric column that had stood I first read fellow citizens?
at the center of the city since 1809. On the top What I wanted to do then was go back and climb
was a statue of the English naval hero Vice Admi- Ulysses, it was the pillar again. Surely the best way to grasp what
ral Horatio Lord Nelson. Even to a child, his pres- still—as it the women were doing was to retrace their steadily
ence seemed anomalous. It was as if Washington, should be— mounting steps. This was the great privilege of reading
D.C., were dominated by a giant memorial to King a thrillingly Ulysses as a native of the city it has immortalized: The
George III. fictional world of the book mapped onto the physical
One day, when I was 8 years old, my father and strange and reality of the streets and buildings, so that each could
his cousin Vincent led me and my brother up the dirty book. radiate into the other.
168 steps that wound through the hollow interior of Except that, by the time I was reading Joyce, the
the monument we Dubliners called Nelson’s Pillar. I pillar had vanished. In 1966, not long after our family
had never before seen the city from a vantage point adventure with the plums, some members of an Irish
so high that you could take in the whole place, the Republican Army splinter group had planted a bomb
bay to the outlying mountains. under Nelson’s statue that blew it off its plinth and
But there was, for me, an edge of unease. Vin- shattered the top part of the column. The sad stump
cent had bought half a dozen plums in a fruit shop. was then demolished by the authorities.
When we got to the top of the pillar, he opened the The bombers very deliberately erased one kind of
brown paper bag and gave us each one. He and my memory—the idea of Dublin as a British city, visu-
father started laughing about how they could spit ally dominated by a very English hero. But they also
the stones down on the people below. I found this obliterated an important part of Joyce’s city.
deeply unsettling because I did not know my father In Ulysses, the pillar is described as the “heart of
could be like that, that he could joke about some- the Hibernian metropolis.” That heart was ripped out.
thing I was sure would get us into big trouble. It was From that moment, a very specific experience became
also darkly mysterious. The adults clearly thought impossible—a visual and spatial sensation of hauling
there was some meaning in all of this—but what did your bones up through the dark interior of a huge
plums have to do with Nelson? stone tube, emerging into the light and then seeing
More than a decade later, I found out. I was read- the city and its hinterland in every direction. Joyce
ing, for the first time, James Joyce’s Ulysses. The cen- undoubtedly did that, and the topography imprinted
tenary of the novel’s publication is being marked itself on his imagination. I had been lucky enough
in Dublin with official enthusiasm climaxing on to do it once, but I was painfully aware that no one
Bloomsday, June 16. But back then it was still—as it could ever do it again.

JULY/AUGUST 2022 77
Culture & Critics O M NIVOR E

O n ly m u c h l at e r, reading Ulysses for a second his brother John Howard Parnell. (“There he is: the
time, did I realize that in the book itself there is also brother. Image of him. Haunting face.”)
an absent monument. If you know Dublin, you will Joyce embeds in Ulysses a complex set of thoughts
be familiar with the obelisk just a few hundred yards and feelings about these two monuments—what’s
up O’Connell Street from where Nelson’s Pillar had there and not there, what is imposed on Ireland as
stood. It commemorates a much more appropriately official British memory and what has yet to be prop-
Irish hero: Charles Stewart Parnell, who drove the erly remembered at all. And all of this had become
cause of Irish Home Rule to the very center of Brit- mixed up for me with my own memories of my family
ish politics in the 1880s. The statue of Parnell is the and my hometown. Nelson’s now nonexistent pillar,
only monument by the great sculptor Augustus Saint- that paradoxical monument to oblivion, was, for me,
Gaudens in the artist’s native city. For Joyce, it would an image of both the evanescence of the past and the
have had a special significance—at the age of 9, he way that odd parts of it linger and persist—an image,
wrote a poem in praise of Parnell, his first published too, that had a beautiful color and a sharp taste: plum.
work; his proud father had it printed up as a broad- I still didn’t know, however, what Stephen Deda-
side. The fall of the leader of Irish nationalism in the lus’s parable was about. In the bizarre but very Joy-
late 19th century, brought down by a scandal over cean logic of association that makes Ulysses such a
his adulterous liaison with a married woman, was for constantly changing book, the meaning came to me
him the most embittering event in recent Irish his- from an apparently unrelated source. The chapter in
tory. “ ’Twas Irish humour, wet and dry,” Joyce wrote which the parable is told is largely about rhetoric, and
later, “Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye.” the conversation that precedes it recalls a speech by
The foundation stone for Parnell’s monument was a 19th-century Dublin lawyer that alludes to Moses
laid in 1899, but by 1904, when Ulysses is set, it had leading the Jews out of Egypt. While I was rereading
still not been built. Joyce saw this failure as emblem-
Charles the section, I also read Martin Luther King Jr.’s stag-
atic of what he called the paralysis of Irish life. In a Stewart gering final oration, on the eve of his assassination,
lecture in 1907, he noted sardonically that “in logical Parnell, who in Memphis: “I’ve been to the mountaintop … And
and serious countries, it is customary to finish the championed I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I
monument in a decent manner … but in Ireland, a may not get there with you.” King transforms himself
country destined by God to be the eternal caricature
the cause of into Moses, who gets to see Israel from the top of a
of the serious world … they rarely get beyond the Irish Home mountain but at the same time is told by God that
laying of the foundation stone.” Rule, is the he himself will not live to enter it.
In Ulysses, on the morning of June 16, 1904, as unquiet ghost If I had read my Bible, which I had not, I would
the protagonist Leopold Bloom is riding in a carriage have known that the name of the mountain is Pis-
to Glasnevin Cemetery for the burial of the hard-
who haunts gah. In Ulysses, Stephen calls his odd story “A Pisgah
drinking Paddy Dignam, he passes an empty plinth the book. Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums.” If I’d
at the top of O’Connell Street. His silent thought is: had one of the many annotated editions of the novel
“Foundation stone for Parnell. Breakdown. Heart.” that have since appeared, or if the internet had been
This is the other heart of the Hibernian metropolis, invented, I would have understood the allusion. But I
the broken one. It marks a place so sunk in lassitude thought that Pisgah was just a Joycean invention—it
that it cannot even honor its lost leader. does, in my defense, sound like a plausible vulgar
The sour irony is that Nelson, too, had an affair expression of disgust that might have been current
with a married woman. Stephen Dedalus calls him the in 1904.
“onehandled adulterer.” (Nelson had lost his right arm Stephen’s acrid joke is that the Moses who was sup-
in battle.) Nelson’s sexual transgression does not pre- posed to lead Ireland to its promised land—Parnell—
vent him from being immortalized in Dublin—while is unremembered; meanwhile, despite the expansive
Parnell’s similar sin still clouds his memory. Because view, no Irish future can be seen from the top of the
Parnell has not been properly memorialized, it is, in very British monument to Nelson. The women who
Ulysses, as if he has not been laid to rest at all. He is take such trouble to climb it will not even be granted
the unquiet ghost that haunts the book. a sight of a new Ireland, let alone get to live in it.
When Bloom is in the cemetery, one of his com- And why plums? Maybe just because they have the
panions points to Parnell’s tomb: “With awe Mr Pow- bittersweet tang of memory.
er’s blank voice spoke:—Some say he is not in that
grave at all. That the coffin was filled with stones. That
one day he will come again.” This notion is made all
the more real because at various points during the Fintan O’Toole is the author of We Don’t Know
day, we encounter Parnell’s living doppelgänger, Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.

78 JULY/AUGUST 2022
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I hate the beach. My skin burns and

blisters as soon as the sun touches it,
I dislike sweating without exercising,
and sand makes no sense at all to me—
it’s just hot and gritty dirt that other
people apparently enjoy rolling around
in. I was raised by parents whose idea
of leisure is cutting miles of trails in the
woods and painting an entire house
by hand, so the prospect of enforced
idleness makes me panicky. Plus, the
ocean itself, while aesthetically pleas-
ing, is terrifyingly untrustworthy, with
its riptides and hurricanes and tsuna-
mis and sharks and microplastics and
slithering monsters of the deep. It has
just too many sneaky ways to kill you.
When I have gone on beach vaca-
tions, it’s been under duress. I mar-
ried into a family of generous people
who are also horrifying extroverts, and
whose notion of a good time is a nice,
boozy, mostly reclined stay on some
tropical island together. But for cata-
strophists like me, the luxury beach
resort raises a whole new set of psycho-
logical torments on top of those pro-
vided by more ordinary beaches. The
entire time that we’re in our ostensible
paradise, I’m busy obsessing over the
unintended consequences of our stay,
such as the environmental degradation
caused by bringing wasteful tourists to
delicate ecosystems and the racist and
classist issues of displacement. The Sit-
uationists, as usual, said it best in Paris
in the spring of 1968, when, in pro-
test of capitalism, they scrawled graffiti
BO OKS
reading Club Med: a cheap holiday
in other people’s misery.
I’ve gleefully stored away this fac-
toid about the Situationists, along
with many others that come from
Sarah Stodola’s new book, The Last
Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit,
and Peril at the Beach, a sharp and
exhaustive examination of the history
and pitfalls of luxury beach resorts
Beach Bummer all over the world. Stodola tells us
that “the world’s first known seaside
The world is burning. Have another piña colada. resort” was Baiae, near Naples, where
Romans from the first to fourth cen-
turies created an opulent and wild
By Lauren Groff party town that the philosopher Sen-
eca called “a hostelry of vices.” There,

ILLUSTRATION BY MARÍA JESÚS CONTRERAS 79

Culture & Critics

Stodola goes scuba diving to explore the submerged into the public consciousness as a tropical wonderland
half of the ancient city, with its intricately decorated of sea and surf and fruit and floral shirts—truly began
geothermal baths and saunas and a nymphaeum, in Hawaii, not long after a bunch of greedy Ameri-
which she describes as “a sanctuary room dedicated can businessmen effected a coup d’état that removed
to water.” During its heyday, Baiae was a debauched the Hawaiian monarchy and claimed the archipelago
playground for emperors; it was, in fact, where the for the United States in 1898. The deposed Queen
emperor Nero tried to murder his own mother, Lili’uokalani lived by a breeze-swept bay called
Agrippina, by putting her on a boat designed to Waikiki, on the island of Oahu, where one of the
self-destruct beneath her as it floated off. When first major resorts was built, the Moana.
she survived by swimming away, he had one of his Later, in 1927, a fever dream of a resort hotel
henchmen finish the botched job later that night. opened, the Royal Hawaiian, a great pink hulk that
For a long time after the Romans, the concept of ushered in the beach glamour and exoticism that we
the luxury beach resort disappeared, resurfacing in associate with luxury resorts today (where Joan Didion
altered form when the English upper classes, grown once fled, as she wrote in an essay, “in lieu of filing
weary of their inland spas, began to be seduced for divorce”). What was good for the economy of the
by the curative properties of cold ocean water. In gorgeous locale, however, was bad for its ecology—a
1753 a doctor named Richard Russell moved to the trade-off that, though glaring, not surprisingly went
old Saxon town of Brighton, on the south coast of ignored. The new buildings of Waikiki were con-
England, and built a guesthouse for himself and his structed so close to the shore that they impeded the
patients, setting off a little craze that spread across natural flow of sand, and the once-abundant beaches
the channel to places like Trouville and Cabourg washed away. A tourist now sees sand that is replen-
(which Marcel Proust reinvented in his fiction as
Vice was ished by machines and held in place by man-made
Balbec). But these attempts at the beach resort were Monaco’s barriers that stop its natural movement, which serves
somewhat unpleasant and chilly. They offered very true draw, only to erode beaches farther down the current.
little luxury and relaxation, and encouraged drink- no longer
ing a great deal of seawater to purge bodily ills and S t o d o l a i s , like me, skeptical about the beach
leaping frequently into the frigid waves from horse-
just a sport idyll, constantly seeing the darker forces of environ-
drawn bathing machines. of the idle mental and cultural degradation amid all the luxury
A more decadent understanding of seaside enter- rich, but an she describes. She is at her most incisive when she
tainment caught on in the mid-19th century, when aspirational calmly, clearly lists what is lost when beach resorts
the tiny principality of Monaco was nearly bankrupt, take over a place. For instance, she describes the
and Princess Caroline, the enterprising wife of the
avocation Fijian village of Vatuolalai, where two clans used
hapless Prince Florestan, of the ruling Grimaldi clan, for the to live as equals, one owning the beach where they
had an idea. Amid rumors that gambling might soon middle class. fished, the other the acres inland where they grew
be outlawed in the landlocked spa towns of Germany crops such as taro, coexisting according to solesol-
(as it had been for years elsewhere in Europe), she evaki, which means that “everyone in a community
persuaded her husband to legalize it, and they hur- is obliged to work together toward common ends.”
riedly built a casino in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile, Then, in the 1970s, the resort developers crept in,
they took a different cue from the French Riviera, renting the land from the beach owners, who now
which for a time had been attracting the rich with had the funds to buy nontraditional foods and
the promise that the warm and salubrious Mediter- goods. The Polynesian chestnut trees were ripped out
ranean airs would cure such ailments as “consump- and non-native coconut palms put in. Fiddler crabs
tion, weak nerves, obstructed perspiration, languid and the golden plovers that ate them disappeared;
circulation, scurvy, chest pain, general weakness, turtle-nesting on the beach became rare. Silt built
faintness, low spirits, fever, and loss of appetite.” up in the local river and blocked the trevally fish
Though the cover was health, vice was the true draw, from swimming and spawning there, and the coral
no longer just a sport of the idle rich, but an aspi- reefs were damaged first by river silt flowing into
rational avocation for ambitious men of the middle the bay and then by the fertilizer runoff from the
class. Monaco was soon thriving, and a new age of golf course, as well as by the sunblock that washes
hedonism at the seashore had begun. off tourist bodies.
In the United States, summer resorts had been Diminished coral reefs meant far fewer fish. Faced
thickly established along the coasts of the Northeast with scarcity, Vatuolalai’s inhabitants started working
since the early 19th century; Long Branch, New Jersey, for themselves, not for the collective good. Ninety-
was even touted as the “American Monte Carlo.” But two percent of them became involved in tourism. The
the beach resort in its most romantic form—seared knowledge of how to make oil and traps and mats was

80 JULY/AUGUST 2022
BO OKS

lost, as were traditional dances, supplanted by those waters. High-end ecotouristic enterprises already make
from other nations in the Pacific, which young people sustainability part of their enlightened allure—at a
performed for tourists. The provisions that since time price, of course—but Stodola optimistically imagines
immemorial had been saved up in case of emergency the spreading appeal of basking not just in the sun
were no longer there for the villagers. When Cyclone but in conscientious stewardship, even as sea levels
Kina hit in 1993, the residents had to rely on the inexorably rise.
government to survive, instead of on their own stores.
Diabetes became endemic, the result of a new diet I a m g l a d that The Last Resort exists, because it
of processed foods. Stodola watches happy families gives me ammunition to shoot down the next island-
from Australia in the resort’s pools, the adults bellied vacation proposal. (Let’s do a family hike! Better yet, a
up to the bars set into the water, and feels certain that staycation where we all read books in separate rooms!)
none of them sees any of the trade-offs that went into At the same time, I am afraid that I am the book’s
making the resort they’re enjoying. custom-built audience, given my wariness of beaches.
Stodola’s careful critique of the invasive species The people who might most benefit from this book—
that is the luxury resort helped clarify my beach-hat- those who have bought into the myth of paradise with
er’s reflexive outrage. And yet, as she piled on her pro- an ocean view, deleterious impact be damned, and
files of resorts all over the world—and Tulum blended have the means to regularly experience a version of
into Sumba, which blended into Barbados, which it—don’t want their illusions destroyed. If they were
blended into Bali, which blended into Acapulco, their to receive The Last Resort as, say, a (passive-aggressive)
high-priced cocktails and corrosive effects becoming birthday gift, they might well immediately fling it into
a repetitive blur—I felt dizzy and exhausted. Luxury the giveaway bin.
can swiftly glut. I also felt morally queasy about her I don’t say this to condemn those who hesitate to
pursuit. Her travels officially counted as research, I listen to the climate Cassandras among us, or who at
understood. But I began to wonder how someone THE LAST any rate fail to act on warnings to desist from this or
R E S O RT:
so perceptive, intelligent, and ethical could so stu- A C H RO N I C L E
that treasured activity. I also choose to ignore many
diously anatomize the pervasive harm wreaked by O F PA R A D I S E , inconvenient truths, and the sacrifices that they should
P R O F I T, A N D
these places, and yet take long-haul flights around the P E R I L AT
inspire but that would dampen my own pleasure in
globe to spend time at many (many!) more of them THE BEACH living: Forswearing fancy beach resorts just happens
than nailing her argument required. She recognizes to be no skin off my sun-blistered back. If I can’t help
the ways in which she is complicit—she makes that S a ra h S t o d o l a feeling that Stodola tries to have it both ways, which
clear in The Last Resort—and still she kept choosing I read as a kind of hypocrisy, the reason I find it hard
to be complicit. ECCO to swallow is that I so often do the same.
Is it enough of an excuse that Stodola overindulged Or, rather, we all share in the hypocrisy, save for
in luxury with the aim of writing this book? I’m not those few Earth angels who live off the grid and use no
sure. I recognize that part of her point is to convey the plastics. If we all paid attention to what is happening
mad hedonism of the resort world. Still, I felt better to the planet in the Anthropocene, we’d be running
on arriving at her penultimate chapter, in which she around with our heads on fire. Instead, we churn on
brings the purpose of the book back into focus by sug- in our lives, ordering stuff for next-day delivery when
gesting ways to rethink the luxury resort. Stodola gath- we could shop locally, driving to the grocery store only
ers a slate of proposals from environmentally minded half a mile away instead of biking, and flipping the
people she meets during her travels, and does her best radio dial when another instance of extreme weather
to stick to the practical, mostly avoiding the sweep- strikes, because we just can’t bear what another fire
ingly wishful. or hurricane portends. All the while, we’re nagged
Among the items on her list are regrowing man- by conscience, which slowly drags our spirits down.
groves to protect coastlines from erosion and high Perhaps we need a nice beach vacation to recover!
winds; getting resorts to discourage long-haul flights And so we go on, with our tidal cycles of unbearable
by offering discounts to visitors who avoid them, guilt and panicked complicity, in and out, just like
thus nudging people toward more regional travel; the ocean, where we sit and watch the sunset in our
serving local cuisine and drink instead of wastefully near-nakedness, drinking mai tais, in order to forget
importing goods from afar; making resorts respon- all the ways we are failing the Earth, in our vicious
sible for maintaining their beaches (which, in one circularity, in our infinite regress.
case that especially inspires her, involves a machine
that turns discarded beer bottles into sand); building
more wisely and limiting tourist numbers; and saving
the coral reefs that ensure the health of the resorts’ Lauren Groff is the author, most recently, of Matrix.

81
Culture & Critics

It’s 2019 in Washington, D.C., and Theo

BO OKS
is changing his art-history dissertation after
finding a painting of a horse in his neigh-
bor’s giveaway pile. He is 26 years old, a
Black Londoner (his mother is Yoruba,
his father Californian) and a former star
polo player. He left the sport for academia
because of relentless racist harassment, and
now studies stereotypes of Africans in Brit-
ish painting. The working title for his dis-
sertation is Sambo, Othello, and Uncle Tom:
A White Author Fails Caricature, Exoticization, Subalternization,
1700–1900. He jogs with his dog for
Her Black Characters exercise, careful to wear his Georgetown
shirt because “his favorite run took him
through lily-white Northwest Washing-
Geraldine Brooks has sympathy for ton and Daniel, his best friend at Yale, had
her protagonists. That’s not enough. instructed him that a Black man, running,
should dress defensively.” Because he’s from
the U.K., he may not understand all the
By Jordan Kisner nuances of American racism, but he under-
stands enough. When the lady across the

82 ILLUSTRATION BY JAMIEL LAW

street, from whom he got the horse painting, flinches of heated articles. Some pointed out that immigrants
as he approaches to help her, he feels “the usual gust of remain under-published and underpaid for their own
anger” and takes a deep breath, saying to himself: “Just stories in the American media market; others objected
a White woman, White-womaning.” to the implication that any identity-based limits should
Theo might be chagrined to find himself a protago- be placed on a fiction writer’s license.
nist in Horse, Geraldine Brooks’s latest work of historical In putting Douglass’s argument so early in the
fiction, which braids his story with the narrative of Jar- book—on page 57—Brooks signals to us that she enters
ret, an enslaved groom of the horse in the 19th-century her latest project knowingly. She’s read up on the Dis-
painting Theo finds. For one, Theo is skeptical of white course. A gauntlet has been thrown—white artists can’t
artists taking on Black subjects. The original hypothesis do justice to Black subjects—and she will take it up.
of his dissertation is that the Africans in British por- Despite her evident efforts, the book does not turn
traits were rendered less as people than as objects: “His out to be the counterexample she might have hoped.
argument mirrored Frederick Douglass’s caustic essay,
arguing that no true portraits of Africans by White H O R S E s ta r t e d with a real horse: Lexington, who
artists existed; that White artists couldn’t see past their was one of the great racehorses of the 19th century
own ingrained stereotypes of Blackness.” and a prolific sire. When Lexington died, his skel-
This is a self-conscious—and bold—inclusion for a eton became an exhibit but was later forgotten in
novel with not one but two young Black male protago- the attic of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
nists written by a 66-year-old white Australian woman. Natural History. Brooks, a horsewoman herself, grew
Brooks is a skilled journalist and an acclaimed novel- fascinated with the painter Thomas J. Scott, who did
ist, and Horse is not her first foray into historical fic- several portraits of Lexington, and she was especially
tion set in part during the American Civil War. Her Brooks signals curious about one of Scott’s portraits that remains
novel March is narrated primarily by the father in Little missing. A description of that painting in a July
Women, and tells the story of Mr. March’s years as a
that she 1870 issue of Harper’s magazine describes Lexington
chaplain for the Union Army. That novel won the Pulit- enters her being led by “black Jarret, his groom.” Nothing else
zer Prize in 2006. Neither is this her first time writing latest project is known about the real Jarret, and Horse grew out of
across cultural divides. Her first nonfiction book, Nine knowingly. Brooks’s imaginings of the life he might have lived.
Parts of Desire (1994), was about the “hidden world She had wanted to write about horses, she admits in
of Islamic women.” Her 2011 novel, Caleb’s Crossing,
A gauntlet has her afterword. But as she researched horse racing in
is about a young white Puritan girl’s friendship with been thrown, the antebellum South, “it became clear to me that this
Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a character inspired by a and she will novel could not merely be about a racehorse; it would
Wampanoag man of the same name who was the first take it up. also need to be about race.”
Native American to graduate from Harvard, in 1665. The structure of the novel is poly-vocal, occupying
This kind of venture has become trickier in the a loose, floating third person as its short chapters jump
past 10 years. The publishing world has been racked among its cast of characters. The story is bounded his-
by overdue debate about cultural appropriation and torically by 2020 in Washington, D.C., where Theo’s
whether and how white authors should write characters find is identified as a lost 19th-century portrait of
from other racial or ethnic backgrounds. Five years after Lexington, and the 1850s at several southern horse-
Brooks published Caleb’s Crossing, the white American breeding farms, where Jarret, a gifted and reserved
writer Lionel Shriver gave a notorious keynote speech— young horse trainer, develops a spiritual, even psychic
briefly donning a sombrero—at a Brisbane literary festi- connection with a newborn foal named Darley, who
val, ranting about the “clamorous world of identity poli- will later become famous as Lexington. The boy and
tics” and the threat she felt it posed to literature: “The the horse become best friends and deeply bonded part-
kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is in danger of ners. “That horse about the only one thing I care for,”
becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, Jarret declares. Though his father, also a horse trainer,
that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne has bought his own freedom, Jarret remains enslaved,
drivel to begin with.” Retorts and replies followed. “It and his story line is fraught with vulnerability: Jarret
is possible to write about others not like oneself, if one and Lexington are sold together from one wealthy
understands that this is not simply an act of culture landowner to another, to another.
and free speech, but one that is enmeshed in a compli- Occasionally, the book swerves to the 1950s in
cated, painful history of ownership and division,” the New York, where Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner
novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen observed. More recently, make an appearance: Their friend, an art dealer named
the blockbuster turned critical conflagration American Martha Jackson, acquires one of the lost Lexington
Dirt (a novel about migrant trauma, for which its white paintings from her maid, who seems to have inherited
author was paid a seven-figure advance) set off months it from an ancestor connected to Jarret. (This third

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Culture & Critics

era’s plot, which is also based in historical fact, is nota- like a caricature: “He was his own man long before
bly less developed than the other two.) Sometimes any of his peers even realized that was an option. He’d
Jarret’s perspective dominates in the novel; other times embraced life as a rootless loner, at home in the world
Scott’s or Theo’s vantage prevails—or that of Jess, a but belonging nowhere in particular. Comfortable
young white Australian woman who’s pursuing her with a wide range of people, close to very few.” He
fascination with zoological research at the Smithso- remains angry but patient, smart, gentlemanly, and
nian in 2019; or that of Mary, the young daughter gentle to the end.
of the white emancipationist Cassius Clay and a fre- Jarret, the most rounded of the many characters
quent presence at the Meadows, the farm where Jar- who take turns narrating Horse, changes less than you
ret and his father work. Intermittently, Brooks serves would expect given that the story tracks him from
up a mix of multiple viewpoints over the course of adolescence into his late 30s. His spiritual evolution is
a single chapter. condensed into two formative episodes. In the first, he
But in spirit, the book belongs to Jarret and Theo, is saved by Mary and her father from an ill-conceived
with complementary foils in the form of the two young escape attempt, and he learns thereafter to control his
white women. (While there are several Black female anger and work within the constraints of his enslave-
characters in the book, none is granted complex interi- ment. The second leap forward—which is presented as
ority.) In 2019, Theo begins to date Jess, despite some his real moral maturation—comes when he is briefly
ambivalence. In 1850, Mary likes to hang around the forbidden to care for Lexington and is sent to labor
barns and talk to Jarret (who is two years older) while in the fields, where he is whipped.
he works. Brooks has taken pains to make both women Startlingly, this is framed as a blessing:
flawed: Whereas Jarret and Theo are carefully dressed,
meticulous, and possessed of “impeccable manners,” He conceived, in those hard days, a renewed grati-
these women are often careless, unkempt, emotionally tude toward his father, who had endured hardship
fragile—and racist without quite knowing it. Jess and to rise to a measure of dignity that had extended its
Theo meet because she assumes he’s stealing her bike. protective cloak over Jarret’s childhood. He learned,
She’s then so embarrassed by her behavior that she HORSE
in those fields, what he had been spared. He felt a
tells him she found the incident traumatic. (“Typical, new understanding for the folk who bore it, and an
Theo thought. He’d been accused, yet she was trau- G e ra l d i n e B r o o k s admiration for those brave enough to risk everything
matized.”) When Mary is angry, she reminds Jarret to run away from such a life. An empathy grew in
that he’s enslaved, and then feels hurt later when she him. He began to watch people with the sensitive
tells him that she considers them friends and he is too attention he’d only ever accorded his horses … Even
incredulous at the idea to reciprocate. VIKING as his world contracted and pressed in upon him, in
equal measure his heart expanded.
B r o o k s c l e a r ly at t e m p t s to demonstrate
self-awareness, to preemptively deflect any criticism When Jarret finally reunites with Lexington and leaves
that she has favored the characters whose life experi- that plantation, he reflects that “he wasn’t sorry to have
ence most resembles her own—but the dynamic she seen what he’d seen, and learned what he learned. Not
creates between Theo and Jess and between Jarret and just the book learning. He felt larger in spirit. There
Mary flattens all the characters. Theo and Jarret are was a space in his soul for the suffering of people.
described, at every turn, as exemplary, socially and He resolved to take account of their lives, the heavy
spiritually. They are handsome, tall, gifted, and edu- burdens they carried.”
cated (Jarret takes an opportunity to learn how to These passages call to mind the history of white
read). Animals instinctively trust them (Theo and his people insisting that whippings under chattel slavery
dog are exquisitely attuned). They are constantly swal- were an experience of moral training upon which the
lowing their rage. They are always patiently explaining enslaved might reflect with sanguine gratitude—a his-
something. Where others stumble, they are steady. tory that Brooks is aware of but nevertheless echoes
Theo tells Jess at one point that he wants to help his here. Jarret, an emotional teenager who doesn’t seem
old-lady neighbor even if she’s racist, because “ ‘what- to lack empathy in the first place, is turned into a
ever she might be, it doesn’t mean that I won’t do what saint, floating somewhat above the action.
I know to be right.’ Jess sighed, defeated, and smiled I keep thinking about Parul Sehgal’s elegant pan-
at him. ‘You’re just a better person than me, I guess.’” ning of American Dirt, in which she joins the novelist
Theo is a better person than Jess, no doubt, but Hari Kunzru in arguing that “imagining ourselves into
Brooks grants Jess something that she denies Theo— other lives and other subjectives is an act of ethical
and to a degree Jarret. Jess gets to fail; Jess gets to urgency.” Transracial authorial imagining, she writes,
change. By contrast, Theo is static. Sometimes he reads is a profound undertaking. “The caveat is to do this

84 JULY/AUGUST 2022
BO OKS

work of representation responsibly, and well.” Brooks’s

attempt is made earnestly, but not well. In keeping
with the character construction, the plot itself veers
toward formula. Horse relies on ungainly cliff-hangers
to pull the reader from chapter to chapter. (In one, Jess
inspects Lexington’s skeleton in 2019 and concludes,
“Something had happened to this horse when it was
alive. Something dreadful.”) The romance is bland.
(“Was it the wine, or was she becoming infatuated
with this man?”) The details occasionally inspire a
flinch (describing an enslaved young man as a “dusky Invitation
youth”), and the moments when Brooks addresses By Jane Hirshfield
racism more directly can read as self-conscious and
pedantic. (“Look. It’s not your fault you get to move
easy in the world,” Theo’s friend Daniel tells Jess after It was not given me to write in the primary colors.
an act of violence. “We just can’t afford to.”)
Brooks is an accomplished writer, and many of her I did not recognize the 350,000 species of beetle.
gifts are evident amid the clumsiness of the overall
effort. The relationship between Jarret and Lexington I loved what was spare but could not draw it.
is intimate and compelling. When they are briefly My luck and errors equally mostly escaped me.
separated, the uncertainty of their reunion feels like
an existential crisis. Brooks has a talent and passion My eyes faltered, but found their way to different windows.
for research that is fully expressed here—she writes
beautifully about the anatomy of horses and the deli- The fate-souk bartered my shapes and sounds between stalls.
cate work of “articulating” their skeletons, arranging
every bone in its proper place. The descriptions of When the keyboard offered an incomprehensible symbol,
19th-century horse racing, when the animals were I reached my hand out, as if to a Ouija board’s invitation
bred differently and raced much longer tracks, are
thrilling. Brooks has attended with equal care to the or a stair’s polished handrail—because it was
quotidian details of each era (corn pone in the antebel-
lum South, bebop for Jackson Pollock, mid-century- incomprehensible,
modern furniture for Theo).
I read to the end wanting Horse to right itself, to be because my hand could add its own oils to that railing.
one of those books that achieve the creative and ethi-
cal intersubjectivity that signals great fiction. Brooks
gives Jarret and Theo just enough spark to make us
wish she’d also given them a more deeply imagined, Jane Hirshfield’s most recent collection is Ledger
nuanced, and substantial portrayal. Each ends as a (2020). Her New & Selected Poems is expected to
trope: one a man who triumphs against all odds, the appear next year.
other a martyr. Brooks’s sympathies are evidently with
them, and so are ours. But sympathy seems like an
inadequate achievement in a project like this, which
takes as its subject the worst consequences of white
Americans’ failure to recognize the full humanity of
Black people. Sympathy has a way of falling short,
aesthetically as well as politically—it is a frail sub-
stitute for the knotty, vital insight that can emerge
from sustained immersion in another psyche, another
soul. If readers feel sorry for Theo and Jarret without
really needing to believe in them as whole beings, what
exactly do their portraits accomplish?

Jordan Kisner, an Atlantic contributing writer, is the

author of Thin Places: Essays From In Between.

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Culture & Critics

86
86 ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO DELCAN AND RÍO DELCAN LA ROCCA
BO OKS to Fatherly a few years later. “What it is to be a man
now is in flux, and I think that’s unsettling to a lot of
men.” Indeed, modern dads were left to flounder in a
half-developed masculinity: Their roles were changing,
but their roles hadn’t fully changed.
A Pew Research Center survey, carried out the
autumn after dad-bod fever, found that men cared
just as much about their parental identity as moms did
about theirs (57 percent described it as being “extremely
important,” versus 58 percent of women). But all of that
Why Is Dad So Mad? caring served as fuel for newfound insecurity: Most of
the moms surveyed—51 percent—said they did “a very
A father dares to explore his rage. good job” of raising their children; among the dads, just
39 percent said the same.
Fatherly tried to help with this conundrum. The
By Daniel Engber lack of clear-cut standards for successful masculinity,
Harbin said, “causes a lot of dissatisfaction that gets
expressed as anger.” Men who defined themselves as
For dads, 2015 was a clarifying year. A glorifying modern fathers, more nurturing than their own dads
year. [Link]—a website described in The New had been, could be flummoxed by that rage. An early
York Times as a father-focused mashup of Vice and series on the site, called “Why I Yelled,” interviewed a
BuzzFeed—came online in April with a plan to serve different father for each installment about a time he’d
men at the most “blindly inquisitive and acquisitive lost his temper. Many columns ended with the man’s
moment of their lives.” Celebrities were getting in on regrets. “I instantly felt like the world’s biggest asshole
daddy culture, too. Ashton Kutcher pushed his audience and just about started crying,” one father said. “Here I
of millions to agitate for diaper-changing stations in am losing my shit when my little girl is just having some
men’s rooms. Jimmy Fallon came out with a best-selling, anxiety issues about starting first grade.” Another dad,
father-forward picture book, Your Baby’s First Word Will whose son had hit him in the shoulder with a baseball,
Be DADA. And a klatch of daddy bloggers was trying said he’d yelled “because sometimes it needs to happen,”
to cajole the nation’s leading online retailer into making then ended up apologizing. The injury wasn’t that bad,
its parent-discount program more inclusive for men. By he admitted. “Honestly, I was being a bit of a pussy.”
year’s end, Amazon Mom had become Amazon Family. Fatherly had promised from the start to expand
But 2015’s most telling fatherhood trend was the one its readers’ minds and maybe turn them into “super-
that captured dads’ confusion. In the spring, just before dads.” One of the site’s first-ever featured super-dads—
the launch of Fatherly, a Clemson University student’s an al-Qaeda-fighting former Navy SEAL—offered his
viral essay introduced the world to the phrase and image advice: “To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, who you
of the dad bod: “a nice balance between a beer gut and are will speak more loudly to your children than anything
working out,” as she put it. Soon dad bod was the sub- you say.” But as a tip for dads, this shirked the hardest
ject of hundreds of newspaper stories, including five in question. Who are they, really? Nurturers, enforcers, role
The Washington Post alone. But as the phrase’s popularity models? Or are they somehow all of those at once?
increased, so did debates about its meaning. Was the dad A father’s superpower, it emerged, would be self-
bod hard or soft? Was it imposing or forgiving? Was it just knowledge. Dr. Spock once reassured mothers with his
a state of mind, or was it—as Men’s Health suggested—a famous mantra: “Trust yourself. You know more than
dangerous reality? (“Face it: The dad bod is just a pre- you think you do.” Now Fatherly does the same for
cursor to dead bod,” the magazine’s editor proclaimed.) dads. “Don’t sweat what you don’t know,” the site’s edi-
In its partial lack of definition, the dad bod could tors wrote in Fatherhood, their omnibus of dad advice,
stand in for dads’ self-image on the whole. Everybody published last year, “because if you know yourself, you
knew that dads used to earn a living; that they used to know fatherhood.”
love their children from afar; and that when the need
arose, they used to be the ones who doled out punish- I n 2 0 1 5 , the journalist and novelist Keith Gessen had
ment. But what were dads supposed to do today? “In a son. His memoir of early parenthood, Raising Raffi:
former times, the definition of a man was you went to The First Five Years, starts off as so many dad books
work every day, you worked with your muscles, you do—with a nod to parenting’s great transition, and dads’
brought home a paycheck, and that was about it,” the uncertain duties. “I was part of the first generation of
clinical psychologist Thomas J. Harbin would explain men who, for various reasons, were spending more time

JULY/AUGUST 2022 87
Culture & Critics

with their kids than previous generations,” Gessen writes Naturally, that country’s language is the one Gessen
in the introduction. “That seemed notable to me.” uses when he’s blowing up. “I turned out to be more
But his book proceeds as so many dad books don’t: of a yeller in Russian than I was in English,” he writes.
with a father’s careful, piercing introspection, and a deep
analysis of anger. “You’re a bad dada and I’m never going I found I had a register in Russian that I don’t in Eng-
to listen to you again!” his 3-year-old son says to him lish, wherein I made my voice deep and threatening
in one scene, after getting yelled at during bedtime. “I and told Raffi that if he didn’t right away choose which
felt he was right,” Gessen says. “I was not a good dada. shirt he was going to wear that morning, I was going
But I didn’t know what else to do.” to choose it for him.
I didn’t know, I don’t know, I still don’t know—these are
the modern dad’s refrains, and the subject of the book. That self-splitting has some benefits. Whenever Gessen
“You don’t know anything about yourself until your baby fumes at Raffi somewhere near their home in Brooklyn,
gets older,” Gessen writes. Parenting is self-discovery. he knows he’ll have some privacy. “At least I did it in
On that principle, Raising Raffi and Fatherly agree. But Russian,” he writes, in reference to a bout of yelling
in Gessen’s case, self-discovery can be a brutal process, in the park.
revealed not just through intense engagement in the work It must be nice to have a secret channel for your angry
of child-rearing but also, more particularly, through the self, hidden even from your wife. To Raffi, though, Ges-
bouts of rage that a child may inspire. “You don’t know sen’s Russian rages seem duplicitous. “Dada,” he says
anything about yourself until the day your adorable little astutely at one point, “if people understood Russian, they
boy looks you in the eye, notices that your face is right would say, ‘That guy is not nice.’” Then Raffi calls his dad
up close to him, and punches you in the nose.” a liar, for claiming that he won’t get mad, and for always
Gessen writes about his temperamental, trying son As a father, getting mad again anyway. “This was true,” Gessen says. “I
with a depth that can only come from years of loving I’m concerned did promise that, and then I always broke that promise.”
observation. But his son is watching, too. Again and The memoir ends as Fatherly suggests, with Dada at
again, Raffi tests his father’s temper—pinching, kick-
less about the last confronting his identity. One day at the playground,
ing, scratching, throwing—and then provides his own sound of Gessen spots a kind and patient man over by the jungle
assessments. “Dada’s not nice,” he says. And: “Dada, I yelling than its gym, whose daughter is in the process of losing her mind.
love you even when you do something bad to me.” And: spirit—what “The entire time I thought that the father was doing a
“Dada, superheroes never get mad.” When Raffi gets a remarkable job of staying calm, of not yelling, of not
sticker chart, at one point, to encourage good behavior,
the yelling asserting his authority,” Gessen says. “I envied his patience.
he insists on making another for his parents. Theirs has means, where But I could not do what he was doing—and, I suddenly
fields for getting dressed, for eating dinner, and for “not the yelling realized … I would not want to. It wasn’t in me to do.”
hitting” him. (Those are Raffi’s words, not Gessen’s.) might end up.
If knowledge comes, in part, through Raffi’s provo- W h e n m y d a u g h t e r was born (not long after
cations, Gessen pays them close attention. “I would find Gessen’s son), and for most of the next three years, I
myself yelling or hissing or reprimanding,” he observes, marveled at the fact that she didn’t make me angry. How
like a clinician making rounds. Elsewhere he says he could she make me angry? The idea was just absurd. I’d
keeps a diary of incidents in which he’s lost control. In never felt so beset and (I’ll admit it) bored by daily life—
one, he finds his tempest veer from simple yelling into and yet I’d also never felt so placid. The baby needed
slapping Raffi’s wrist; in another, a push turns into an almost everything that I could give, and she seemed to
unintentional rap on the head. “These were the low need it all the time. But nothing was her fault.
points,” he says. “But scarier to me were the times when In those early, foggy days of fatherhood, I pitched a
Raffi drove me so out of my mind with anger that I podcast to my editor. It would be called When Will I Get
would imagine hitting him for real.” Angry at My Daughter?, and it would explore the cognitive
Gessen’s tendency to lose control reappears through- and moral development of infants and toddlers, as well as
out the book. In a chapter on whether Raffi should be the philosophy of moral agency and culpable ignorance.
raised bilingual, the father’s fury folds into a question In other words, I was scared of yelling at my daughter,
of identity. Gessen himself was born in Russia, and and I tried to quarantine that fear inside a shell of wonder
immigrated to the U.S. when he was 6. Teaching Raffi and abstraction. But the anger would be coming just the
to speak Russian would tie him to his past, but also to same, as it does for every parent at some time. My parents
“a culture and a history,” as Gessen puts it, “that most had been mad at me, sometimes spanking mad. Their
of us, for various reasons, had wanted to escape.” He parents had been mad at them. I knew that fathers, in
wonders whether he could or would ever bring Raffi particular, could be very angry, and that angry fathers, in
on a trip to “Putin’s Russia,” the aggressive fatherland, particular, could be very scary. And I didn’t like to think
to help him learn the language. that one day soon I’d lose my temper, too.

88 JULY/AUGUST 2022
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“Yelling turns out to be a pretty gendered issue,” Memoirs of fatherhood are rarely so honest or so
reports an article in Fatherly’s official “Guide to Anger blunt. Chabon gestures at the same horrible potential—
Management.” If testosterone can help you throw a father as destroyer—but sublimates it in theatrics.
baseball harder, a child psychiatrist says, then it can also Other dad books hide behind an image of bumbling
make you “hurl your voice” with greater volume and befuddlement, as if a modern father couldn’t break his
velocity, which is “extra scary” for a kid. “It’s not that kids if he wanted to. Even Fatherly, today’s proponent
moms don’t yell, it’s that fathers yell with more force.” of “Father, know thyself,” turned out to be an acci-
As a father, though, I’m concerned less about the dental billboard for toxic masculinity. When the site
sound of yelling than its spirit—what the yelling means, debuted with counsel from the former Navy SEAL,
where the yelling might end up. Some fathers are afraid that dad was Eric Greitens. Greitens, who went on to
of being angry. Others are afraid of being stony. We’re all serve as governor of Missouri, has been accused by his
afraid of causing pain to our children or, much worse, former hairdresser of sexual assault, and by his ex-wife
giving them a lasting wound. Michael Chabon, in his of physical abuse. In a sworn affidavit, the latter told
memoir Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, laments his “latent a judge that he’d hit their 3-year-old son and yanked
dickitude” around the house. The book describes one the boy around by the hair. (Greitens has denied all of
time when Chabon’s 14-year-old daughter had just got- these allegations, and was not formally charged with
ten a new haircut and looked to him for approval. His assault; the article about him is no longer on Fatherly.)
mind was somewhere else and he failed to muster a I don’t mean to say that every dad has darkness in
response. “For a moment her eyes went wide with fear his soul, but rather that the darkness now hangs above
and doubt,” he writes, before turning the narration on us all, shading a father’s quest for self-discovery with
himself: “What a dick!” dread. My daughter was born into an atmosphere of
The harm that he’s inflicted can’t be more than subtle male aggression. I bottle-fed her through Election Night
disappointment. (I fail tests like these several times a in 2016. The Harvey Weinstein story broke around the
week.) But Chabon’s fretting is unhinged. “She had time she turned 1. At her second-birthday party, the
a crack in her now, fine as a hair but like all cracks kids ate cupcakes while the parents whispered about
RAISING RAFFI:
irreversible,” he writes. THE FIRST FIVE
Christine Blasey Ford’s congressional testimony. By the
YEARS time she turned 3, Bill Cosby—“America’s Dad,” and
I was shocked by my own thoughtlessness, and the author of an early book on what it means to be a
Keith Gessen
ashamed of it, but the thing I felt most of all was modern father—was appealing his conviction on three
horror. Horror is the only fit response when you are counts of aggravated indecent assault. (His conviction
confronted by the full extent of your power to break was overturned last year.)
another human being. VIKING “If you know yourself, you know fatherhood,” Father-
ly’s advice book says. But for me, and perhaps for Gessen
It’s unhinged, but relatable—parenthood unhinges and the other fathers of our micro-generation, this prom-
people. I’m sure that every mom and dad has known the ise comes off as a threat. We were told, not so long ago,
fear of messing up their kid. That tension isn’t gendered. that dads had reached the cusp of something new—that
But a father’s fear of power—his sense that he might cause they could start “embracing what they’ve become,” as
some catastrophic damage—may have its own distinctive Fatherly suggested in 2015, without “giving up on who
vibration, one that tweaks the limbic nerve. (Perhaps he they are.” It feels as though evidence against this claim has
worries that, however hard he tries, he’ll never match a been mounting ever since. What if I don’t want to know
mother’s skill at patching wounds.) “I felt this possibility the ways my identity will be inflicted on my children?
inside me. I was capable of doing it,” Gessen writes of Near the end of Raising Raffi, Gessen offers up a route
hitting Raffi, really hitting him. This fantasy of transfor- around this snare of anger and self-doubt. A father’s
mation, from dad bod to the Hulk, elevates the stakes. journey with his child, he observes, involves “pass[ing]
Discipline used to be the dad’s domain—his solid through a terrible struggle” for independence and con-
ground, the site of male authority at home. Now it’s nection, which ends only when he’s no longer needed.
just the opposite: a quicksand of confusing implications, This is the “tragedy of parenthood,” he says: To know
where the angry dad exerts control but also loses it. Ges- yourself as a father is to understand the limits of your role.
sen’s book maps out this terrain. In a scene outside a “You succeed when you make yourself irrelevant, when
restaurant, where Raffi has spilled his water and thrown you erase yourself. Parents who fail to do that have failed.”
his hot dog on the floor, Gessen ends up shaking his son So embrace what you’ve become. But then you have
upside down, to make the boy stop hitting him. Raffi to learn to let it go.
cries and whines and then dissolves into fearful, desper-
ate peals of laughter. “I was angry—and he was scared,”
Gessen writes. Surely the converse was also true. Daniel Engber is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

89
ESSAY Something preposterous
was happening the night I
The Vindication
of Jack White
visited Third Man Records
An obsessive protector
in Nashville. The label and
of rock’s past could hold
the key to its future. cultural center founded by
By Spencer Jack White, of the White
Kornhaber
Stripes, generally strives
for a freak-show vibe; you
can pay 25 cents to watch
animatronic monkeys play
punk rock in the record
store, and a taxidermied
elephant adorns the night-
club. On the March night
when I showed up, Bob
Weir of the Grateful Dead
was performing. Through
90 JULY/AUGUST 2022
PHOTOG RAPHS BY ERIK TANNER FOR THE ATLANTIC 91
a pane of blue-tinted glass at the back of and interference instead become selling (liner notes, audio quality) are subordi-
the stage, another curiosity in White’s points—evidence of a recording’s authen- nated by the new: algorithmic curation,
menagerie could be glimpsed: a 74-year- ticity. “People who know, audiophiles— which invites endless listening but not
old audio engineer in a lab coat who calls they see ‘live to acetate,’ they know the active engagement. This may seem like
himself Dr. Groove. circumstances under which it was made, the way of the future, our tastes intuited
In a narrow room behind the stage, and it’s exciting,” White said. “There were and satisfied by strings of code. But while
Dr. Groove—his real name is George no overdubs on that guitar. That solo really the medium continues to attract new users,
A. Ingram—stooped over a needle that happened at that moment.” A sticker on some listeners are showing signs of stream-
was etching Weir’s music into a black, one acetate-derived record for sale in Third ing burnout.
lacquer-coated disc called an acetate. Man’s store, by the dance-punk band Adult, One way to measure this sentiment is
This is the first step in an obsolete process promises “such detail in this live recording, by looking at the popularity of the physical
for producing a vinyl record. The lathe you can even hear the fog machine!” media that White has long championed—
he used was the very same one that cut White is the sort of listener who and that ought, in a streaming-enabled
James Brown’s early singles, in the 1950s. appreciates such detail. This spring, a clip world, to have gone extinct. After lan-
Observing this process intently was made the rounds online in which White guishing for years, vinyl sales began a steady
White himself. Thanks to the endurance demonst rated his uncanny ability to climb around 2007 and then exploded dur-
of early-2000s White Stripes hits such as identify any song in the Beatles’ catalog ing the pandemic. Last year’s 41.7-million-
“Seven Nation Army” and “Fell in Love in one second or less. This keen sense of unit, $1 billion gross for the medium rep-
With a Girl,” the guitarist and singer is one the past helped the White Stripes—the resented 61 percent year-over-year growth,
of the few undisputed rock gods to emerge Detroit band he formed in 1997 with his and this after a 28 percent spike in 2020.
in the 21st century. On this evening, White, then-wife, Meg White—revive classic-rock Limited-edition records—sold for upwards
now 46, wore half-rim glasses and flannel, rawness in an era of plastic pop and space- of $30 a pop at retailers such as Target and
the only hint of rock coming from the age hip-hop. After the band’s breakup, in Amazon—have become integral to release
Gatorade-blue tinge of his hair. 2011, his solo records earned consistent strategies for the likes of Taylor Swift and
Listeners generally want a record to if narrower acclaim. Lately, though, his Adele, who last year sold 318,000 vinyl cop-
sound as loud as possible, White told me obsession with the antique has made him ies of her most recent album within two
as Dr. Groove continued his work. But an unlikely power broker in what was sup- months of its release. The same direct-to-
“you can have a mellow song like this”— posed to be the digital age. acetate ritual Weir and Dr. Groove per-
the Dead’s downbeat “New Speedway Streaming, the cheap and convenient formed at Third Man’s shrine to music past
Boogie” drifted in the air—and then, format that came to rule the industry in also produced the first live album by Billie
all of a sudden, the drummer hits the the past decade, has begun to grate on a Eilish, the 20-year-old Gen Z phenomenon
effects pedal and pumps up his volume. diverse range of artists and listeners. Musi- known to eat spiders on YouTube. Maybe
If Dr. Groove isn’t prepared, “the needle cians’ foremost gripe is about money: Spo- White had been onto something.
will literally pop out of the groove from tify, the dominant platform, reportedly
the jolt,” rendering the recording useless. pays a fraction of a cent whenever a song W h i t e ’s T h i r d M a n label got seri-
For so finicky an operation to take place is played. When, more or less overnight, ous about reviving vinyl in 2009. Even his
in 2022 is, from one point of view, absurd. the pandemic made touring impossible, friends wrote it off as a vanity project in
The music industry largely stopped cutting the difficulty for most acts to make a liv- keeping with his other willfully retro larks,
performances directly to disc 70 years ago, ing from such an arrangement became such as his upholstery hobby (don’t throw
with the advent of magnetic tape. A few painfully clear. away the old; make it new) and his co-
minutes before taking the stage at Third The virus also spurred a public reckon- ownership of a company that manufactures
Man, Weir—a septuagenarian cowboy ing with Spotify earlier this year. A number baseball bats (“Built to spec … for the ath-
who spoke in a low mutter—had visited of artists, including Neil Young and Joni lete that competes with a warrior’s mental-
the back room and marveled that not even Mitchell, pulled their catalogs from the plat- ity”). He was full of grand pronouncements
the Grateful Dead, those ancient gods of form to protest its exclusive deal with the in defense of the old, hard ways of doing
concert documentation, had captured a podcaster Joe Rogan, who had aired mislead- things. “Technology is a big destroyer of
show in this fashion. “Cat Stevens said the ing information about COVID-19 vaccines emotion and truth,” he declared in the
same thing,” White told me. on his show. In the eyes of those dissenters, 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud.
Ever since White installed a lathe at Spotify’s unwillingness to remove Rogan Today, in conversation, White has
Third Man, a stream of acts has come reinforced the idea that it views music as an innocent, almost surfer-dude affect,
to teleport to the time before Pro Tools. just another offering in a buffet of content. though his appetite for discussing out-
Unlike a recording made with contem- The devaluing of music as an art form, moded forms of technology has hardly
porary equipment, a performance etched many artists worry, is hardwired into the waned. While we were hanging out with
into an acetate can’t be easily remixed streaming format. The old ways of build- audio engineers, he proposed a guessing
or otherwise reengineered. Flubs, flaws, ing relationships between act and audience game about when 8-track cartridges were

92 JULY/AUGUST 2022
last on the market. (White doesn’t own a bands, Pearl Jam. Still, he acknowledged superstars—including Jay-Z, Beyoncé,
smartphone, so a member of Weir’s entou- that Third Man had played an outsize role. and Madonna—with an ownership stake
rage looked it up. The answer, per Wiki- At first, the company focused on kooky in the Spotify competitor Tidal. A press
pedia, was late 1988, vindicating White’s innovations, including records that pro- conference about the virtues of an artist-
memories of seeing such tapes as a teen jected 3-D images when spun. (Disney driven platform was met with skepticism.
at Harmony House Records in Detroit.) borrowed the same hologram artist for a Tidal was, specifically and flagrantly, a
Later, in Third Man’s lounge, he described 2016 Star Wars soundtrack, which shot up celebrity-driven platform. The service
waiting months to see Paul Thomas Ander- an image of a TIE fighter or the Millen- did tout higher audio quality and better
son’s The Master on 70 mm, only to have nium Falcon.) “I never minded the gim- payouts to artists than competitors, but
the experience ruined by a screaming baby micks,” White said. “If it turns a kid on to user sign-ups were slow, and the service
in the row in front of him. The point of music that they would have never gotten never found its footing. White, who was
the story wasn’t that someone had brought into, then whatever.” not involved with running the company,
an infant to a psychosexual thriller about a Today, Third Man has the makings of said the backlash was eye-opening. “I don’t
cult leader—it was that White had really an old-media empire. Divisions in Nash- think [Tidal] was promoted properly from
wanted to enjoy the movie on celluloid. ville and Detroit master music, publish the get-go,” he said. “It quickly became a
I’ll admit that I arrived in Nashville books and rock-focused magazines, and lesson: Maybe people don’t like it when
skeptical of White’s nostalgist views. Some the artists own the art gallery … It sort of
of my most crucial music memories include gets to ‘Eat the rich’ kind of stuff.”
pirating Green Day on Napster and spacing White winced when I asked about an
out to Sufjan Stevens through Bluetooth even more contentious attempt at revo-
speakers. Analog obsessives, I’ve found, can lution in the music world: non-fungible
be dismissive of the powerful relationships tokens, or NFTs. As the pandemic wore
that streamers form all the time with new on, some record-industry figures argued
artists. And some vinyl heads treat music Day and night, that giving fans the ability to purchase dig-
mainly as an acquisitive hobby, like sneaker White’s record- ital assets—interactive album art, or even
collecting. The records remain safely in processing plant ownership rights to a song—would fulfill
their sleeves, lest their value as commodities the same yearning for collectibility that
be diminished by taking them out to play.
whirs along, filling has helped drive the vinyl boom. Others—
But White is less doctrinaire about these contract orders from White now among them—see NFTs as a
matters than I feared. With Third Man now behemoths such as way to get listeners to pay for things they
a cultural fixture, he seems less like a strident Paul McCartney, can generally get for free. “It gives off a
iconoclast than a peacemaker between the vibe of ‘Well, if people are stupid enough
streaming economy and the stuff economy.
BTS, and Beyoncé. to give me money for this, I’ll take it.’”
He insists that he never wanted to stop the But in 2021, the White Stripes—
march of progress; he only wanted to make a legacy brand more than a band at this
sure the past didn’t get torched along the point—hawked some NFTs, animations
way. As he put it, “It’s hard to inspire only tied to a 10-year-old EDM remix of “Seven
with one set of ways—only with the digital Nation Army.” White said that those had
part, only with the vinyl part.” been pushed by the defunct band’s manage-
White told me he listens to 90 percent develop photography. Last year, the com- ment. “I don’t want to come out and say
of his music digitally. He appreciates the pany opened its third record store/rock ‘I had nothing to do with this,’ ” he told
way that streaming helps new acts find wide club/wonder emporium, in London. But me. “It is my band. We allowed it to hap-
audiences. (Olivia Rodrigo, whose debut Third Man’s greatest source of influence pen. But it didn’t really interest me. It’s not
single made a swift transit to No. 1 thanks may be the record-processing plant White something we’ll be doing very much of.”
to Spotify, is one of the young pop artists opened in Detroit in 2017, which has What does interest White is the inter-
he admires—which is cute because she her- tripled its manufacturing capacity since net’s broader music landscape—despite the
self is a White Stripes obsessive.) “I know then. Day and night, the facility whirs fact that he isn’t the most fluent participant
it’s not amazing money on streaming, but along, not only pressing Third Man’s in it. He appreciates how underground
if vinyl hadn’t blown up over the last few work—such as the record that will result scenes and subcultures, which might
years, it would be a lot more dire,” he said. from Weir’s gig—but also filling con- seem like logical casualties of streaming,
I gave White the chance to take a vic- tract orders from behemoths such as Paul haven’t quite died out: “You almost get a
tory lap for saving vinyl from what seemed McCartney, BTS, and Beyoncé. neighborhood feel in the TikToks and—
like certain doom, but he was quick to White’s forays into the future haven’t what is it?—the Bandcamps and Sound-
credit the figures who sustained the format always been as successful as his treks to Clouds,” he said. (Witness the recent wave
in the ’90s and 2000s: house DJs, punk the past. In 2015, he joined a group of of chatty, droll post-punk bands such as

93
Left: The lathe at
Third Man Records
in Nashville.

Right: The Third

Man store.

Wet Leg, a favorite new find of White’s.) did something he’d rarely done: He played naturally (he knitted his fingers), the loud
He even had a kind word for social-media all the parts on his songs. This in turn songs and the soft ones now seemed to
platforms such as Twitter and Snapchat, required another previously unthinkable repel each other (his fingers then made a
not that he uses them. In their character step: using software to arrange drums, crosshatch). The muse was pushing him
counts and time limits, he sees proof of one guitars, keyboards, and even samples into toward two separate albums—though not
of his favorite theories: Constraint is the a coherent whole. Once, the enfant ter- a double album, which he knows screams
mother of creativity. “There’s inspiration rible of the White Stripes had routinely filler. (“People even say that about The
to be taken from all of that stuff,” he said. denounced computers for their deaden- White Album, which seems shocking.”)
ing effects on rock. But the technology Both the mosh-worthy Fear of the
W h i t e h a s always thrived within con- has improved since Nickelback’s heyday, Dawn and the brunch-friendly Entering
straints, many of them self-imposed. The and White now believes that, in the right Heaven Alive are among the best albums
White Stripes famously had no bassist, and hands, it can stoke the life of a song rather of White’s solo career. The lead single
White originally composed his 2018 solo than sap it. “It’s like, CGI in movies is on Fear of the Dawn, “Taking Me Back”
album, Boarding House Reach, with the so much better than it was in the early (which spent a few weeks at No. 1 on rock
same reel-to-reel recorder he used when 2000s,” he said. radio), has guitar jolts so menacing that
he was 14 years old. For the two records As social distancing loosened up they almost trigger a fight-or-flight reflex.
he’s released this year, April’s Fear of the and White brought in other musicians White likes that the title phrase can be
Dawn and July’s Entering Heaven Alive, to record the songs he’d been writing, heard a few different ways. “Maybe the
ERIK TANNER FOR THE ATLANTIC

White didn’t need to dream up new limi- the resulting work fell into two catego- pandemic has made everybody ask the
tations. The pandemic did that for him. ries: thrashing, Deep Purple–inspired world, ‘Will you take me back as we
When the coronavirus made studio rock and roll, and sweet, “Maybe I’m emerge from our caves?’” he told me. The
sessions with other instrumentalists a Amazed”–style love songs. His past solo lyric is also a way for White, the father of
risk, White, a consummate collaborator albums had been mishmashes of styles, two teenagers, to link his generation to
(besides the White Stripes, he has formed and he had assumed that this time he’d end the next. “When you kids do that,” went
two other successful bands over his career, up with another eclectic collection. But, White’s alternative reading, “it takes me
the Dead Weather and the Raconteurs), he explained, instead of fitting together back to when I was a kid.”

94 JULY/AUGUST 2022
A r e n e w e d a p p r e c i at i o n for the and Warner—to build their own factories.
tangible should be a boon for musicians Vinyl is “no longer a fad,” he said, stand-
who have struggled in the streaming era, a ing amid the hazmat-yellow equipment of
period in which rising profits for the indus- his pressing plant. “As the MC5 once said,
try as a whole have only incrementally ben-
It’s the sort of paradox you’re either part of the problem or part of
efited most individual artists. But demand that has animated the solution.”
for vinyl now exceeds manufacturing White’s entire career In the meantime, artists are stymied by
capacity by astonishing margins. A record as a songwriter and scarcity. Some commentators in the music
that would have once taken three months industry see this as a sign that musicians
to go from recording to the shelves today
businessman: romance need to focus on reforming streaming ser-
requires eight months or a year. Even White leading to frustration, vices or advocating a return to paid down-
has been a victim of the lags; he’d originally frustration leading loads. Others say that less unwieldy formats,
considered releasing his new albums on the to romance. such as the humble cassette tape, would be
same day, but with his plant at capacity, he a more sustainable medium for collectors
decided to stagger them. He has dubbed (sales of tapes have indeed begun rebound-
his present concert series the Supply Chain ing recently). White has always wanted all
Issues Tour. As he tries to expand produc- of the above. When he launched Third
tion at his Detroit factory, White finds him- Man’s first store, he had dreams of iPads
self more and more preoccupied by “regular pressing capacity would need to at least packed with MP3s next to 1940s recording
manufacturing-plant kind of problems,” he double to meet present demand for vinyl. booths, and of customers accessing both a
said. “How many shifts do we have? Once Some indie figures blame the bottleneck record-of-the-month club and an online
you start the machines, how many hours on the pop stars who have bought up time streaming library of live music. While not
do you keep them going?” at small pressing facilities. The real prob- all such plans have come to fruition, when I
But Third Man can only do so much: lem, White argues, is a lack of manufac- visited the Nashville location, I was amused
In 2021, an unnamed industry execu- turers. He recently filmed a plea for the to find a rotating rack displaying CDs for
tive speculated to Billboard that global three major record labels—Universal, Sony, sale, as if at a Tower Records in 2005.

95
Yet there is no doubt that the very things
that make vinyl a chore to replicate—the
bulkiness, the frameable album art, the
fingerprint-like grooves that differentiate
one record from the next—are part of why
vinyl is surging right now. It’s the sort of
paradox that has animated White’s entire
career as a songwriter and businessman:
romance leading to frustration, frustration
leading to romance.

I n t h e B lu e R o o m , Third Man’s con-

cert venue, Weir and his band Wolf Bros
preached between songs. The bassist, Don
Was, who is also the head of the legendary
jazz label Blue Note Records, gave a spiel
about the glory of “authentic,” Auto-Tune-
free music. Weir recalled his teenage vinyl
experiences. “You’d go to a friend’s house,
and you’d put records on and you’d listen
Third Man’s record-pressing plant, in Detroit. White recently filmed a plea for the three
to music all night,” he said. “People don’t
major record labels to build their own factories. Vinyl is “no longer a fad,” he said.
do that anymore, because you can’t. You
can’t listen to digital music for very long,
because it makes your brain tired.”
The crowd whooped, but I felt a defen- hoodies and hats faster than they can man- Weir wasn’t finished playing, though.
sive pang. We all fetishize our formative ufacture them. Even in the slick, futuristic As his encore of “China Cat Sunflower”
listening experiences—whether they were world of K-pop, fans express their devotion and “I Know You Rider” stretched past
dancing to jug bands on vinyl ’til sunup by snapping up CD bundles laden with the 10-minute mark, Third Man’s reel-
or vibing to Frank Ocean on an iPhone such delights as key chains and postcards. to-reel recorder—striped red and white
while riding the subway. Still, maybe Weir Fans download and stream, but they still in the White Stripes’ classic aesthetic—
was right: Whose brain doesn’t feel tired thirst for a connection with artists that isn’t ran out of material with which to record
these days? What if I’ve been addicted to mediated through a screen. backup. Loose tape flapped and jangled.
musical fast food since first downloading I circled backstage to find White “This machine was not built for this type
MP3s at age 11? What if entire genera- hanging out with staff. As we watched of jamming,” Bill Skibbe, White’s long-
tions have been? Dr. Groove gingerly turn over an acetate, time audio engineer, said. Someone sug-
Looking around at the audience offered White described the layers of quality control gested ripping the rest of the show from
a less declinist narrative. Many of Weir’s fol- in the process of making Weir’s record. “You YouTube, but audiences at Third Man
lowers were 20-somethings in flannel; they know that show How It’s Made?” he asked. are typically asked not to film concerts.
twirled alongside a few grizzled, Merlin- “I get so jealous: Oh, they make razor blades, White prefers that the only glow come
looking guys who no doubt had been how hard! They just build the machine and from the electric candles that flicker from
attending shows like this one for decades. it pumps it out. But we have to make some- wall sconces, not iPhones held aloft. The
The legendary, highly physical subculture thing that sounds good when you put it on encore would not be lost, however. White’s
of the Dead—an ecosystem of bootleg your turntable. There’s magic dust in there.” team had yet another device capturing the
recordings, concert tailgates, and tie-dye Weir finished up “Saint of Cir- show for posterity: a digital recorder.
merch—appears to still be going strong. cumstance,” the last of the songs that
Indeed, it has provided a model that many Dr. Groove had planned to capture.
of today’s acts are embracing. Live ticket His assistant marked the record with a pen,
sales have surged in recent months. Rappers and then placed it into a cardboard con- Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at
and indie singers alike are moving branded tainer. “Vinyl is final!” White shouted. The Atlantic.
JIM WEST / ALAMY

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You’re a shamanic trip into the
essence of words: a shimmering,
unfolding, occasionally scarify-
ing million-petaled experience,
a miraculous nest of emergent
relationships, and the writer
who abuses your nature, who
exploits your abundance, will
pay. He will pick the wrong
word, and he won’t sound clever
at all. He’ll sound like an ass.
He’ll sound like a silly Billy, a
twerp, a stooge.
A thesaurus—here it comes—
is for increasing one’s aliveness to
words. Nothing more and noth-
They’ve got you ing less. By going into the buzz-
ing and jostling hive of words
all wrong. around a word, we get a purer

ODE
sense of the word itself: its col-
oration, its interior, its traces
of meaning. I looked up the
verb excite just now and found
the word in its affective (touch,
move) and mechanical (electrify,
galvanize) aspects. Which gets at
who we are, as humans, doesn’t
it? Feelings and circuitry. to
Lewis Carroll made up chor-
tle, and you absorbed it, placing
it snugly between chuckle (benign
and big-bellied) and cackle MY THESAURUS
They think you’re a trick, a cheat (witchy and weird). Ken Dodd,
sheet for fancy words, a way of the great English comedian, made
counterfeiting cleverness. (And up tattifilarious. (“Now,” he told
Americans are fatally awed by an interviewer as an old man,
cleverness. This acclaimed young “now is reality. And it’s wonder-
author/tweeter/whatever is always ful. By Jove, it’s tattifilarious!”)
“whip smart.” That drunk guy is You have not, as yet, absorbed By James Parker
always shouting “Think you’re that. I’d float it in there some-
smarter than me? HUH?”) where between bittersweet and
Or they’ll treat you as a mere custard-pie.
lexical resource. A vocabulary As for you, blessed Mr. Roget,
expander. A ThighMaster for they say you had OCD. Of
out-of-condition prose. I mean, course you did. You were
we’ve all done it. Reached for you, hooked, hung up, haunted by the
that is, when the words arriving hidden life of words: their selves,
in our forebrain, from the charred their stories, as told by the words
and private little glossary that we they are closest to. You gave us a
keep in our backbrain, seem … great gift. May you rest eternally
insufficient. Don’t say “in a shitty among your synonyms.
mood.” Say “captious.”
But that’s not how, or when,
to use you. That’s not who you James Parker is a staff writer at
are. You, my friend, are a vision. The Atlantic.

10 0 JULY/AUGUST 2022
FROM POVERTY
TO POWER
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Women in the Sagarmatha Cooperative in Banke, Nepal

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