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The first—“a robot may not injure a human being or, through in action, allow a human being to come to harm”—followed from the understanding that robots would affect humans via direct int

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The Fertility Doctor’s Secret

His critics shuddered when he was

appointed national security adviser

But he may be our best hope for

saving the world from Donald

Trump’s impulses

C O V E R S T O R Y

64 How Much Immigration Is Too Much?

B Y D A V I D F R U M

We need to make hard decisions now about what will truly benefit current and future Americans

76 Witness to the Counterrevolution

B Y W I L L I A M J B U R N S

An American diplomat looks back

on a relationship gone bad

Dispatches Departments

4 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

On the Cover

6 The Conversation

96 The Big Question

What was the best sequel in history?

Illustration by Elias Klingén

S K E T C H

21 Songs of Ice and Fire

B Y S P E N C E R K O R N H A B E R

Ramin Djawadi’s score for

Game of Thrones helped

make the show a hit—and made an unlikely star of the composer

S T U D Y O F S T U D I E S

23 Bad Dreams Are Good

Under-B Y G I L L I A N Under-B W H I T E

Uniqlo has become the unofficial clothier of urban Millennials Can it catch on with the rest of America?

C R I M I N A L T E N D E N C I E S

26 Why Americans Don’t Cheat on Their Taxes

B Y R E N E C H U N

The weirdly hopeful story

of how the U.S came to be a leader in tax compliance

10 T E C H N O L O G Y

How AI Will Rewire Us

B Y N I C H O L A S A C H R I S T A K I S

For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for

altruism, love, and friendship

C O N T E N T S

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 5

38 The Heart Has Reasons

try something new But

America needs the old Ellen

more than ever before

B O O K S

30 Psychiatry’s

Incurable Hubris

B Y G A R Y G R E E N B E R G

The quest to understand

the biology of mental illness

has so far failed, but you

wouldn’t know it from

33 B O O K S

The Art of Leaving

Things Out

B Y R U T H F R A N K L I N

Amy Hempel has never embraced the term minimalism, but her best stories

show how rich spareness can be

Poetry The Culture File

84 White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots

B Y A D A M S E R W E R

Few now remember Madison Grant, who a century ago helped promote the doctrine that whites were in danger

of extinction Today, an exca vation of the man and the mission is overdue

Essay

6 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

What a relief to read

some-thing about the absurdity

of the “alphabet soup”

designation for gay people

I totally agree with Jonathan

Rauch that it has become

a symbol “for the excesses of

identity politics,” which have

fueled animosity and

intoler-ance toward homo sexuals

I’m amazed that anyone

that queer was the primary

name assigned by society to

homosexuals before gay came

into popular parlance in the

later 1960s And queer was not

descriptive in a positive way It was ugly, hateful, pejorative, demeaning, and diminishing

It is not the right word with

which to be labeled, if one must be labeled.

Julian Balfour

ASHEVILLE, N.C.

I don’t personally identify as queer, but because I had a

couple of decades when gay

was the overall descriptor whether one identified as

such or not, I’m fine with queer

being the primary descriptor for the next couple The word has long since been taken away from the haters and used

as a term of empowerment rather than degradation.

Jim Longo

NEW YORK, N.Y.

Here in rural Virginia there have always been plenty of

Q people But no one uses

LGBTQ or queer, and they

won’t use Q The entire

project of requiring names

or labels is unworkable with rural people—and with working-class people generally, wherever they live

It is primarily a project of academic elites, cultural elites, and self- interested parties in national or state

So how about we just roll back decades of progress because

it would make the powers that

Patricia McAnulty

EUGENE, ORE.

No, a thousand times, no!

Jonathan Rauch makes a valid point about the awkward-

ness of LGBTQ as a term to

represent sexual minorities,

but to substitute simply Q

would be a huge error While Rauch mentions the baggage

of the word queer (which Q

would inevitably reference),

he gives no sense of the fact

R E S P O N S E S & R E V E R B E R A T I O N S

• T H E C O N V E R S A T I O N

Don’t Call Me LGBTQ

In the January/February issue, Jonathan Rauch made the case for adopting one

overarching designation for sexual minorities He proposed using a single letter: Q.

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 7

Straight white males in

America have never had to

fight for their civil liberties;

they have been endowed with

such rights since the

concep-tion of the country The entire

pursuit of civil rights in this

country has been a game of

catch-up; women and racial,

ethnic, and sexual

minori-ties aren’t pursuing “special

rights”—the pursuit has always

been one for equal rights.

So when Rauch posits

that the LGBT+ community

should contract to include

only the “queer” classification,

he is effectively suggesting

that a nuanced and complex

community should strip its

members of each of their

respective, hard-fought

identi-ties so as to appease the very

community that would so

will-ingly dismiss and oppress the

LGBT+ community altogether

Phoebe Solomon

IRVINE, CALIF.

I was thrilled to read Jonathan

Rauch’s compelling piece I

agree emphatically with his

sentiment, one that I have had

myself for years (I research

queer people and provide

therapy to queer individuals

and couples) The critique he

makes of the ever-increasing

LGBTQ initialism, with the

continued exclusion of at

least one group (often more),

is spot-on, especially as the

quantity and diversity of

sexual and gender identities

continue to grow

I would just like to draw

attention to two shortcomings

I noted while reading Rauch’s

article First, an additional

critique of the acronym that

was omitted is that each of

the four identities subsumed

within the most ubiquitously

referenced acronym (LGBT;

or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) assumes gender and sexuality to be binary and static, which science overwhelmingly indi- cates is false As nonbinary gender identities and fluid sexual identities continue to emerge—especially among young people—there is even more reason to drop any acronym and use a term that is, as Rauch describes,

“simple and inclusive, and carries minimal baggage.”

Second, I challenge Rauch’s use of the phrase

sexual minorities in reference

to LGBT people—transgender people are not inherently sexual minorities A more representative phrase would

be sexual and gender minorities

I write to correct the misuse of

my words by Charles Duhigg.

By omitting the role hope plays in turning anger into a constructive force, Duhigg twisted my words to support his argument—which contra- dicts my views and those of the farm-worker movement I served He repeatedly purged from my comments all refer- ences to hope, which I consis- tently connected to anger.

Anger, especially when linked with fear, easily turns into the kind of hate we see far too often Duhigg makes

it seem as though organizers are simply “stoking” people’s anger, devoid of any capacity for agency or understand- ing Managing the tension between anger and hope is what organizers do.

Similarly, he misrepresents the movement, taking words

like defiant, outrage, and

revolution out of context The

songs on Chavez’s 28-day march to Sacramento during Lent were spiritual, not defi-

ant; the banners read

PERE-GRINACIÓN, PENITENCIA, REVOLUCIÓN (“Pilgrimage,

penance, revolution”), rather than simply “Celebrating revolution.” To describe Cesar Chavez as “an embodiment of all the progress that righteous anger can achieve” misses the essence of his work.

Duhigg does a deep disservice to the movement and what it can teach Its greatness was in linking anger to hope and love We know a lot about anger these days We need a deeper understanding of what it takes, in the words of Lang- ston Hughes, to realize the America “that never has been yet—and yet must be.”

Marshall Ganz

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Charles Duhigg replies:

While I was reporting for my article about anger, Marshall Ganz was a helpful source in understanding the role emotion played in the labor movement led

by Cesar Chavez, a movement Ganz witnessed Because the subject of my story was anger and its function in society, I focused

on how Chavez used anger

to organize and mobilize his followers But I also emphasized Chavez’s commitment to nonviolence and belief in self- determination, and described the measures he took—including

a 25-day fast—to inspire his followers to stand up for their rights without succumbing to acts

of retribution against the people who had exploited them.

While I appreciate that Ganz would have preferred I emphasize the feelings of hope Chavez inspired, I did not twist Ganz’s words or mis represent our conversation My account of Chavez’s movement, drawn from

my discussions with Ganz—as well as from numerous other sources—offers an accurate assessment of the role moral outrage played in advancing Chavez’s cause It also makes very clear how combustible anger can be, and the remarkable work Chavez undertook to channel his followers’ righteous discontent into an effective, nonviolent movement for justice.

Some, like Ganz, may believe

a focus on anger is inappropriate But to minimize the role of anger

is to fundamentally misdiagnose how movements like Chavez’s have found followers and effected change We should seek

to understand anger’s nature, rather than downplay its role in the past and present, so we can channel its power to do good, and avoid its dangerous pitfalls.

EDITORIAL OFFICES & CORRESPONDENCE The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column Correspondence should be sent to: Editorial Department, The Atlantic, 600 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20037 Receipt of unsolicited manuscripts will be acknowledged if accompanied by a

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8 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

THE BIG QUESTION

On Twitter, we asked people to pick their favorite reader response to March’s Big Question Here’s how they voted.

Q: What was the biggest scandal of all time?

In a crisis, the president can

invoke extraordinary authority

What might Donald Trump

do with this power?, Elizabeth

Goitein asked in the January/

February issue.

Thank heaven we have a

presi-dent who doesn’t read stuff, like

history books, the

Constitu-tion, intelligence briefings, or

articles that give a blueprint for

authoritarian government in

America Elizabeth Goitein’s

excellent piece on presidential

powers is scary no matter who

sits behind the Resolute desk in

the Oval Office.

Richard Muti

RAMSEY, N.J.

Elizabeth Goitein describes

a “parallel legal regime [that]

allows the president to

side-step many of the constraints

that normally apply.” These

little-known executive powers

need to be recognized by the

newly elected members of

Congress as among the most urgent matters facing them and the country.

Goitein states that though the use of these numerous legal executive powers might seem extreme, misuse of them has become standard as leaders gather more power for themselves More important, she describes how Trump could easily misuse these parallel executive powers by provoking

an international crisis.

In light of Trump’s actions

so far, this scenario should

be regarded as inevitable At this crucial juncture, a strate- gic intervention by Congress

is imperative.

Mary Vandezande

KINGSTON, N.Y.

Elizabeth Goitein replies:

I’ve heard from several readers who are concerned that the article provides a “blueprint for authoritarian government in America,” as Richard Muti puts

it I had similar thoughts at the outset of this project, and before deciding to publish, I consulted many former executive-branch lawyers They assured me that only the American public was in the dark The lawyers in this administration, as in all others, are well aware of these powers; indeed, agencies keep binders of them close at hand

This assessment was confirmed when Trump referred to the caravan of migrants as a national emergency shortly before the article was published.

The best hope for preventing this president—or a future one—from deploying these powers for authoritarian purposes is for the public to insist that Congress reform the legal system for emer- gency powers On February 15, Trump declared a national emergency to get around the will

of Congress and build a wall on the southern border He has now proved his willingness to abuse emergency powers We can expect more if Congress doesn’t act.

The Global Backlash Against Women

What unites Donald Trump and his ideological cousins around the world is a desire to roll back the feminist gains of the past several decades, Peter Beinart argued (January/February).

“Foster women’s equality in the home, and you may save democracy itself.”

Your solution to legitimizing women’s public power is to

increase their private power—

that is, to empower them in the home, so they can appear acceptable for public office

But I believe that the domestic revolution is the more difficult one for women to win, and that we’ll have to save democracy— and society—by giving women (or rather, by women taking) more political power Then they can foster women’s equality in the home through legislation establish- ing publicly funded home- and child-care services (since men,

as a whole, will never step in

to share that burden) Women can’t liberate one another from their domestic cages directly, but they can vote one another into public office

Shirley Kressel

PROVINCETOWN, MASS.

To contribute to The Conversation, please email

letters@theatlantic.com Include your full name, city, and state.

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10 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

F E A R S A B O U T H OW R O B O T S might transform our lives have been a staple of science fiction for decades In the 1940s, when widespread inter action between humans and artificial intelligence still seemed a distant prospect, Isaac Asimov posited his famous Three Laws of Robot-ics, which were intended to keep robots from hurting us The first—“a robot may not injure a human being or, through

in action, allow a human being to come to harm”—followed from the understanding that robots would affect humans via direct inter action, for good and for ill Think of classic sci-fi depictions: C-3PO and R2-D2 working with the Rebel Alliance to thwart

• T E C H N O L O G Y

HOW AI WILL REWIRE US

For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love,

Just about all mammals are thought to dream, as are birds, some lizards, and—unique among invertebrates—cuttlefish

The dreamiest member of the animal kingdom is the platypus, which logs up to eight hours of REM sleep a day.

— Ben Healy, p 23

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y O L I V E R M U N D A Y

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 11

In one experiment, adding

a few free-riding bots to

a team of human players converted generous people into selfish jerks.

the Empire in Star Wars, say, or HAL 9000

from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ava from

Ex Machina plotting to murder their

osten-sible masters But these imaginings were

not focused on AI’s broader and

poten-tially more significant social effects—the

ways AI could affect how we humans

inter-act with one another

Radical innovations have

previ-ously transformed the way humans live

together, of course The advent of cities

sometime between 5,000 and 10,000

years ago meant a less nomadic existence

and a higher population density We

adapted both individually and collectively

(for instance, we may have evolved

resis-tance to infections made more likely by

these new circumstances) More recently,

the invention of technologies including

the printing press, the telephone, and the

internet revolutionized how we store and

communicate information

As consequential as these innovations

were, however, they did not change the

fundamental aspects of human

behav-ior that comprise what I call the “social

suite”: a crucial set of capacities we have

evolved over hundreds of thousands of

years, including love, friendship,

coopera-tion, and teaching The basic contours of

these traits remain remarkably

consis-tent throughout the world, regardless of

whether a population is urban or rural, and

whether or not it uses modern technology

But adding artificial intelligence to

our midst could be much more disruptive

Especially as machines are made to look

and act like us and to insinuate

them-selves deeply into our lives, they may

change how loving or friendly or kind we

are—not just in our direct inter actions

with the machines in question, but in our

interactions with one another

from my lab at Yale, where my

col-leagues and I have been exploring how

such effects might play out In one, we

directed small groups of people to work

with humanoid robots to lay railroad

tracks in a virtual world Each group

con-sisted of three people and a little

blue-and-white robot sitting around a square

table, working on tablets The robot was

programmed to make occasional errors—

and to acknowledge them: “Sorry, guys, I

made the mistake this round,” it declared

perkily “I know it may be hard to believe,

but robots make mistakes too.”

As it turned out, this clumsy, sional robot helped the groups perform

confes-better— by improving communication

among the humans They became more relaxed and conversational, consoling group members who stumbled and laugh-ing together more often Compared with the control groups, whose robot made only bland statements, the groups with

a confessional robot were better able

to collaborate

In another, virtual experiment, we divided 4,000 human subjects into groups

of about 20, and assigned each individual

“friends” within the group; these ships formed a social network The groups were then assigned a task: Each person had to choose one of three

friend-colors, but no individual’s color could match that of his or her assigned friends within the social network

Unknown to the subjects, some groups contained

a few bots that were grammed to occasionally make mistakes Humans who were directly con-nected to these bots grew more flexible, and tended

pro-to avoid getting stuck in a solution that might work for a given individual but not for the group as a whole What’s more, the resulting flexibility spread throughout the network, reaching even people who were not directly connected to the bots

As a consequence, groups with prone bots consistently outperformed groups containing bots that did not make mistakes The bots helped the humans to help themselves

mistake-Both of these studies demonstrate that

in what I call “hybrid systems”—where people and robots interact socially—the right kind of AI can improve the way humans relate to one another Other find-ings reinforce this For instance, the politi-cal scientist Kevin Munger directed specific kinds of bots to intervene after people sent racist invective to other people online He showed that, under certain circumstances,

a bot that simply reminded the tors that their target was a human being, one whose feelings might get hurt, could cause that person’s use of racist speech to decline for more than a month

perpetra-But adding AI to our social ment can also make us behave less pro-ductively and less ethically In yet another

environ-experiment, this one designed to explore how AI might affect the “tragedy of the commons”—the notion that individuals’ self-centered actions may collectively damage their common interests— we gave several thousand subjects money to use over multiple rounds of an online game

In each round, subjects were told that they could either keep their money or donate some or all of it to their neighbors If they made a donation, we would match it, dou-bling the money their neighbors received Early in the game, two-thirds of players acted altruistically After all, they realized that being generous to their neighbors in one round might prompt their neighbors

to be generous to them in the next one,

establishing a norm of reciprocity From a selfish and short-term point of view, how-ever, the best outcome would be to keep

your own money and receive money from

your neighbors In this experiment, we found that by adding just a few bots (pos-ing as human players) that behaved in a selfish, free-riding way, we could drive the group to behave similarly Eventually, the human players ceased cooperating alto-gether The bots thus converted a group

of generous people into selfish jerks.Let’s pause to contemplate the implica-tions of this finding Cooperation is a key feature of our species, essential for social life And trust and generosity are crucial

in differentiating successful groups from unsuccessful ones If everyone pitches in and sacrifices in order to help the group, everyone should benefit When this behavior breaks down, however, the very notion of a public good disappears, and everyone suffers The fact that AI might meaningfully reduce our ability to work together is extremely concerning

AL R E A D Y, W E A R E ing real-world examples of how AI can corrupt human relations outside the

encounter-Kathleen Richardson, an gist at De Montfort University in the U.K., worries a lot about the latter question As the director of the Campaign Against Sex Robots—and, yes, sex robots are enough of

anthropolo-an incipient phenomenon that a campaign against them isn’t entirely premature—she warns that they will be dehumanizing and could lead users to retreat from real intimacy We might even progress from treating robots as instruments for sexual gratification to treating other people that way Other observers have suggested that robots could radically improve sex

between humans In his 2007 book, Love

and Sex With Robots, the iconoclastic

chess master turned businessman David Levy considers the positive implications

of “romantically attractive and sexually

desirable robots.” He suggests that some people will come to prefer robot mates

to human ones (a prediction borne out

by the Japanese man who “married” an artificially intelligent hologram last year)

Sex robots won’t be susceptible to ally transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies And they could provide opportunities for shame-free experimen-tation and practice— thus helping humans become “virtuoso lovers.” For these and other reasons, Levy believes that sex with robots will come to be seen as ethical, and perhaps in some cases expected

sexu-Long before most of us encounter AI dilemmas this intimate, we will wrestle with more quotidian challenges The age of driverless cars, after all, is upon us

These vehicles promise to substantially

D I S P A T C H E S • T E C H N O L O G Y

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y E D M O N D E H A R O

laboratory A study examining 5.7

mil-lion Twitter users in the run-up to the

2016 U.S presidential election found that

trolling and malicious Russian accounts—

including ones operated by bots—were

regularly retweeted in a similar manner to

other, unmalicious accounts, influencing

conservative users particularly strongly

By taking advantage of humans’

coop-erative nature and our interest in teaching

one another—both features of the social

suite—the bots affected even humans with

whom they did not interact directly,

help-ing to polarize the country’s electorate

Other social effects of simple types of

AI play out around us daily Parents,

watch-ing their children bark rude commands

at digital assistants such as Alexa or Siri,

have begun to worry that this rudeness

will leach into the way kids treat people,

or that kids’ relationships with artificially

intelligent machines will interfere with, or

even preempt, human relation ships

Chil-dren who grow up relating to AI in lieu of

people might not acquire “the equipment

for empathic connection,” Sherry Turkle,

the MIT expert on technology and society,

told The Atlantic’s Alexis C Madrigal not

long ago, after he’d bought a toy robot for

his son

As digital assistants become

ubiq-uitous, we are becoming accustomed

to talking to them as though they were

sentient; writing in these pages last year,

Judith Shulevitz described how some of

us are starting to treat them as confidants,

or even as friends and therapists

Shule-vitz herself says she confesses things to

Google Assistant that she wouldn’t tell

her husband If we grow more

comfort-able talking intimately to our devices,

what happens to our human marriages

and friendships? Thanks to commercial

imperatives, designers and

program-mers typically create devices whose

responses make us feel better—but may

not help us be self-reflective or

contem-plate painful truths As AI permeates our

lives, we must confront the possibility that

it will stunt our emotions and inhibit deep

human connections, leaving our

relation-ships with one another less reciprocal, or

shallower, or more narcissistic

All of this could end up transforming

human society in unintended ways that

we need to reckon with as a polity Do we

want machines to affect whether and how

children are kind? Do we want machines

to affect how adults have sex?

reduce the fatigue and distraction that bedevil human drivers, thereby prevent-ing accidents But what other effects might they have on people? Driving is a very modern kind of social interaction, requiring high levels of cooperation and social coordination I worry that driver-less cars, by depriving us of an occasion to exercise these abilities, could contribute

to their atrophy

Not only will these vehicles be grammed to take over driving duties and hence to usurp from humans the power

pro-to make moral judgments (for example, about which pedestrian to hit when a col-lision is inevitable), they will also affect humans with whom they’ve had no direct contact For instance, drivers who have steered awhile alongside an autonomous vehicle traveling at a steady, invariant speed might be lulled into driving less

attentively, thereby increasing their

like-lihood of accidents once they’ve moved

to a part of the highway occupied only

by human drivers Alternatively, ence may reveal that driving alongside auton omous vehicles traveling in per-fect accordance with traffic laws actually improves human performance

experi-Either way, we would be reckless to unleash new forms of AI without first tak-ing such social spillovers— or externalities,

as they’re often called—into account We must apply the same effort and ingenuity that we apply to the hardware and soft-ware that make self-driving cars possible

to managing AI’s potential ripple effects

on those outside the car After all, we date brake lights on the back of your car not just, or even primarily, for your benefit, but for the sake of the people behind you

man-IN 1 9 8 5 , S O M E F O U R D E C A D E S after Isaac Asimov introduced his laws

of robotics, he added another to his list: A robot should never do anything that could harm humanity But he struggled with how

to assess such harm “A human being is a concrete object,” he later wrote “Injury

to a person can be estimated and judged Humanity is an abstraction.”

Focusing specifically on social overs can help Spillovers in other are-nas lead to rules, laws, and demands for democratic oversight Whether we’re talking about a corporation polluting the water supply or an individual spreading secondhand smoke in an office building,

spill-as soon spill-as some people’s actions start

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 13

aff ecting other people, society may

inter-vene Because the eff ects of AI on

human-to-human interaction stand to be intense

and far-reaching, and the advances rapid

and broad, we must investigate

system-atically what second-order eff ects might

emerge, and discuss how to regulate

them on behalf of the common good

Already, a diverse group of

research-ers and practitionresearch-ers—computer

scien-tists, engineers, zoologists, and social

scientists, among others—is coming

together to develop the fi eld of “machine

behavior,” in hopes of putting our

under-standing of AI on a sounder theoretical

and technical foundation This fi eld does

not see robots merely as human-made

objects, but as a new class of social actors

The inquiry is urgent In the

not-distant future, AI-endowed machines

may, by virtue of either programming or

independent learning (a capacity we will

have given them), come to exhibit forms

of intelligence and behavior that seem

strange compared with our own We will

need to quickly diff erentiate the

behav-iors that are merely bizarre from the ones

that truly threaten us The aspects of AI

that should concern us most are the ones

that affect the core aspects of human

social life—the traits that have enabled

our species’ survival over the millennia

The Enlightenment philosopher

Thomas Hobbes argued that humans

needed a collective agreement to keep us

from being disorganized and cruel He was

wrong Long before we formed

govern-ments, evolution equipped humans with a

social suite that allowed us to live together

peacefully and eff ectively In the pre-AI

world, the genetically inherited

capaci-ties for love, friendship, cooperation, and

teaching have continued to help us to

live communally

Unfortunately, humans do not have the

time to evolve comparable innate

capaci-ties to live with robots We must therefore

take steps to ensure that they can live

non-destructively with us As AI insinuates itself

more fully into our lives, we may yet require

a new social contract—one with machines

rather than with other humans

Nicholas A Christakis, a physician

and sociologist, is the Sterling Professor

of Social and Natural Science at Yale

His new book, Blueprint: The

Evolution-ary Origins of a Good Society, was

published in March.

Monday evening

in October, a cheering crowd welcomed Ghali Amdouni back to Milan, his hometown Born

to Tunisian immigrants, Ghali, as he is known, was raised by his mother in a poor neighborhood where for a time they slept on carpets and cooked with camping stoves Tonight, she stood beside him onstage and blew kisses to the nearly 13,000 people who had come to hear him perform trap music, the originally grim variety of hip-hop that developed in 1990s Atlanta.

Ghali has in a very short time risen from obscurity to ubiquity In

2017, his debut album surpassed Ed Sheeran’s

2017 album in Spotify streams in Italy Today, the 25-year-old is everywhere:

on the radio, in ads (for Adidas and Vodafone), in video games In one sense, this is not surprising Trap

is the most influential genre of the century, its defining elements— heavy bass lines, synth, minor keys—now echoed in pop around the globe Ghali, however, is not a typical trap artist Eschewing his fellow Italian trap musi- cians’ harsh language and macho posturing (rapping about guns, for example,

in a country without much of a gun culture),

he cultivates a polished sound and an unthreaten- ing persona His unoff icial slogan is “T.V.B.”—short for

“I love you” in Italian He performs in bright- colored suits He punctuates his Instagram posts with rainbow emoji And, in a particularly Italian move,

he sings about his mother

“I always have my mom on

my mind,” Ghali told me

(When I interviewed him

to avoid talking about gion or politics publicly—

reli-yet if you listen to his lyrics, you’ll hear plenty

that’s subversive “The newspaper … talks about the foreigner as if he were

an alien,” he announces

in his most popular song,

“Cara Italia” (“Dear Italy”),

a love letter that envisions

“Wily Wily,” a song whose

chorus Italian fans delight

in joining, even though it’s in Arabic

Some wonder how much Ghali’s fans, many

of whom are children and teens, understand of his lyrics, but most observers

I spoke with feel sure that his message is seeping through A prominent Italian journalist has gone

so far as to declare one

of his songs (“Mamma”)

“perhaps the most tant text written in Italy so far on the migrant drama.” Ghali is so popular that even far-right voters are being dragged to his con- certs by their children Zandria Robinson, a sociologist at Rhodes College who studies pop culture, has examined both Ghali’s music and the broader evolution

impor-of trap with interest

“Whether you’re talking about selling drugs in Atlanta or fighting fascism

in western Europe,” son told me, “you are talk- ing about pushing against something that seems all- encompassing.” Adding to Ghali’s appeal, she says, is

Robin-“a pop, an ebullience, an eff ervescence that helps

to cut through the noise

of this political moment” and encourages “a bit of a clapback” against racism and xenophobia

“Good fascists,” she added archly, “would appropriate Ghali and figure out how to head this off at the pass.”

14 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

D I S P A T C H E S

• P O L I T I C S

GET OFF MY LAWN

How a small group of activists (our correspondent among

them) got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital

B Y J A M E S F A L L O W S

FO R A L O N G TIME I thought the

problem was all in my head When I

was growing up, I knew that a certain kind

of noise was one I needed to avoid Food

blenders in the kitchen, hair dryers in the

bathroom, a vacuum cleaner whooshing

around—all produced an intense whining sound that, given the specifi c wiring con-nections between my ears and my brain, kept me from thinking about anything but the sound itself while it was going on

Over the years I lived by this code: I used

high-performance earplugs if I needed

to write or otherwise concentrate while sitting in some place that was unusually loud I added noise-canceling head-phones on top of the earplugs in really tough cases

As time went on, the headphones protection rig became stan-dard writing gear That was because the use of gas-powered leaf blowers in my Washington, D.C., neighborhood evolved from a few hours a week during the leaf-iest stretch of autumn to most days of the week, most weeks of the year, thanks

earplugs-plus-to the advent of the “groomed” look that modern lawn crews are expected

to achieve One of my longest-running themes as a journalist has been how changes in technology force people to adapt their habits and livelihoods I thought I was doing my part, with gear that let me attend to my work while oth-ers attended to theirs There even turned out to be a bonus: As other parts of my body went into a predictable age-related descent, my hearing remained sharp.Then I learned several things that changed my thinking both about leaf blowers and, up to a point, about politics

ON E T H I N G I learned has to do with the technology of leaf blowers Their high volume, which I had long con-sidered their most salient feature, is only their second-most-unusual aspect The real marvel is the living-fossil nature of their technology And because the tech-nology is so crude and old, the level of pollution is off the charts

When people encounter engines these days, they’re generally seeing the out-come of decades of intense work toward higher effi ciency The latest models of jet-turbine engines are up to 80 percent more fuel-efficient than their 1950s counter-parts While power plants burning natu-ral gas obviously emit more carbon than wind or solar facilities, they emit about half as much as coal-fi red plants Today, the average car on America’s streets is almost 200 percent more effi cient than in

1950, and smog-causing emissions from cars are about 99 percent lower

The great outlier here is a piece of obsolete machinery Americans encoun-ter mainly in lawn-care equipment: the humble “two-stroke engine.” It’s simpler, cheaper, and lighter than the four-stroke engines of most modern

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y K A T I L A C K E R

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 15

cars, and has a better power-to-weight

ratio But it is vastly dirtier and less

fuel-efficient, because by design it sloshes

together a mixture of gasoline and oil

in the combustion chamber and then

spews out as much as one-third of that

fuel as an unburned aerosol If you’ve

seen a tuk-tuk, one of the noisy

tricycle-style taxis in places such as Bangkok and

Jakarta, with purple smoke wafting out

of its tailpipe, you’ve seen a two-stroke

engine in action

But you won’t see as many of them in

those cities anymore, because

govern-ments in Asia and elsewhere have been

banning and phasing out two-stroke

engines on anti pollution grounds In

2014 a study published in Nature

Com-munications found that VOC emissions

(a variety of carbon gases that can

pro-duce smog and harm human beings)

were on average 124 times higher from

an idling two-stroke scooter than from a

truck or a car With respect to benzene, a

carcinogenic pollutant, the group found

that each cubic meter of exhaust from

an idling two-stroke scooter contained

60,000 times the safe level of exposure

Two-stroke engines have largely

dis-appeared from the scooter, moped, and

trail-bike markets in America

Regula-tors around the world are pushing older

two-stroke engines toward extinction

Yet they remain the propulsive force

behind the 200-mph winds coming out

of many backpack leaf blowers As a

product category, this is a narrow one

But the impact of these little machines

is significant In 2017, the California

Air Resources Board issued a warning

that may seem incredible but has not

been seriously challenged: By 2020, gas-

powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and

similar equipment in the state could

pro-duce more ozone pollution than all the

millions of cars in California combined

Two-stroke engines are that dirty Cars

have become that clean

SO T H AT ’ S O N E THING I learned

about gas-powered blowers A

second thing I discovered is the

dam-age leaf blowers do to people’s hearing

The biggest worry of today’s

public-health commu nity is not, of course, leaf

blowers— it’s the opioid disaster, plus

addictions of other forms The next-

biggest worry is obesity, plus diabetes

and the other ills that flow from it But

In California, gas-powered leaf blowers and similar equipment could soon produce more ozone pollution than cars do.

use gas-powered blowers—a foot away from their ears—the most powerful can produce sounds of 100 decibels or more Meyers told me, “Each time I see these

crews, I think to myself: 10 years from now,

they’ll be on the path to premature deafness.”

I N T H E T H R E E DECADES since backpack blowers from Echo, Stihl, and other companies became popular,

at least 100 U.S cities have banned or

restricted their use Most of those ies are in California, because Califor-nia is the only state whose jurisdictions have the authority to set their own air- pollution standards With air-quality standards that were more aggressive than those in other states, California received special treatment under the Clean Air Act when it was passed in 1970

cit-In the rest of the country, the law gives standard- setting authority to the federal government, which in practice means the Environmental Protection Agency Considering the current condition

of the EPA, people wanting to regulate leaf blowers could be forgiven for throw-ing up their hands But as it happens, there is another legally and scientifically legitimate line of attack: going after gas- powered blowers not because they pollute but because they make so much noise.Starting in 2013, my wife, Deb, and

I traveled around the country to report

on local-improvement narratives, which always seemed to begin with “I won-dered why my town didn’t do _, so I decided to get involved.” We’d long been active at our kids’ schools and with their sports teams But we wondered why our town—Washington, D.C.— wasn’t doing something about the leaf-blower menace, given that an obvious solution was at hand

We joined a small neighbor hood group—barely 10 people at its peak—to try to get

coming up fast on the list is hearing loss

According to a 2017 report from the ters for Disease Control and Prevention, one-quarter of Americans ages 20 to 69 who reported good to excellent hearing actually had diminished hearing This is largely caused by rising levels of ambient urban noise—sirens, traffic, construction, leaf blowers—which can lead to a range

Cen-of disorders, from high blood pressure

to depression to heart disease “When I started out, I’d see people

in their 60s with hearing problems,” says Robert Meyers, an ENT special-ist at the University of Illi-nois at Chicago “Now I’m seeing them in their 40s.”

Leaf blowers are cially insidious Some-thing about their sound had long attracted my attention A study orga-nized by Jamie Banks, a scientist and the founder

espe-of Quiet Communities, a Boston-area nonprofit, quantified what it was Acous-tic engineers from a firm called Arup compared gas- and battery- powered blowers with equal manufacturer- rated noise levels Their analysis showed that gas-powered blowers produce far more

“sound energy” in the low- frequency range This may seem benign—who doesn’t like a nice basso profundo?—but

it has a surprising consequence High- frequency sound—a mosquito’s buzz, a dental drill—gets your attention, but it does not travel It falls off rapidly with distance and struggles to penetrate barriers If you’re in the next room, you may not hear it at all By contrast, low-frequency noise has great penetrating power: It goes through walls, cement barriers, and many kinds of hearing- protection devices The acoustic study found that in a densely settled neighbor-hood, a gas-powered blower rated at, say, 75 decibels of noisiness can affect

up to 15 times as many households as a battery-powered blower with the same 75- decibel rating

Hearing damage is cumulative When the tiny, sound-sensing hairlike cells, called stereocilia, in the inner ear are damaged—usually by extended expo-sure to sounds of 85 decibels or above—

they are generally gone for good For the landscapers (and homeowners) who

16 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

D I S P A T C H E S • P O L I T I C S

a regulatory or legisla tive change, using

noise, not pollution, as the rationale

In November 2015, we had our first

success, when our Advisory

Neighbor-hood Commission—the most local

gov-ernmental unit in the District—voted 8–1

to support phasing out gas-powered leaf

blowers (The one no vote came from a

libertarian who didn’t like regulation of

anything.) In retrospect, the resulting

request was amazingly timid We

sim-ply asked that our city-council

mem-ber, Mary Cheh, introduce legislation

for a ban She did so; the measure got

nowhere by the end of the council’s term

in 2016; she introduced a new measure

in 2017 Over the next 18 months, we

suc-cessfully encouraged more than a third

of all ANCs in D.C., representing seven

of the District’s eight wards, to endorse

council action on the bill Anyone aware

of the racial, economic, and other

divid-ing lines within Washdivid-ington can imagine

the level of organizing and explanation

necessary to achieve such broad support

In July 2018, the chair of the city

coun-cil, Phil Mendelson, convened a hearing

to consider the bill Nearly 20 witnesses

spoke in favor They included

mem-bers of our group as well as scientists, a

former regulator, an acoustic engineer,

representatives of the Sierra Club and

the Audubon Society, ordinary citizens

and residents, and landscapers who had

switched to all-battery operation On

the other side were two industry

lobby-ists, who said that market innovation

and “courteous” leaf-blower use were

the answer Council members listened

to them with visible incredulity In the

fall, the full council approved the bill

unanimously In December,

Washing-ton’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, signed it

into law On January 1, 2022, the use of

gas-powered leaf blowers will be illegal

within city limits

AF T E R S P E N D I N G D E C A D E S

writing about national politics, I’ve

come away from this experience

hav-ing learned some lessons about local

politics— obvious lessons, maybe, but

also vivid ones

To begin with: Showing up matters

Our group met in person every two or

three weeks over more than three and

a half years Perhaps our most

indefati-gable member, a lawyer, made

presen-tations at dozens of ANC meetings We

got to know the legislative directors and schedulers for many of the District’s 13 council members

Having facts also matters—yes, even

in today’s America At the beginning of the process, it felt as if 99 percent of the press coverage and online commentary was in the sneering “First World prob-

lem!” vein That has changed The

Wash-ington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Monthly,

and other publications have called tion to the leaf-blower problem, often arguing that gas-powered blowers should

atten-be banned Reflexive sneering is down to about 5 percent among people who have made time to hear the facts Noise, they have come to understand, is the second-hand smoke of this era

Technological momentum and ing matter We worried all along that the lawn-care industry would mount

tim-a mtim-ajor lobbying effort tim-agtim-ainst the bill It never did Nearly everyone in the industry knows that 10 years from now, practically all leaf blowers will be

battery-powered One of our arguments was that we were simply accelerating the inevitable

Having a champion matters At a

“meet the council member” session on a rainy Saturday morning in the fall of 2015, Mary Cheh said she’d stay with the bill—if she could rely on us to keep showing up

We did our part, and she did hers—she stayed with it to the end

Luck matters as well In its first ney through the council, starting in 2016, Cheh’s bill was assigned to a commit-tee whose chair was a council member whose approach to many bills seemed to

jour-boil down to: What’s in it for me? To

wide-spread surprise, apparently including his own, a long-shot challenger upset him in the primaries for the 2016 election

The final lesson is: Don’t get hung up

on the conventional wisdom—it’s only wise until it isn’t Everyone says nothing gets done in Washington This one time, everyone was wrong

James Fallows is an Atlantic staff writer.

• Adapted from The Age of

Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, by

David T Courtwright, to be published by Harvard University Press in May

• V E R Y S H O R T B O O K E X C E R P T

Prehistoric Happy Hour

A N T H R O P O L O G I S T S H AV E L O N G debated the causes of the Neolithic Transition, the piecemeal process of domesticating plants and animals that began more than 11,000 years ago One theory posits that humans first cultivated cereal crops less for processing into food than for making beer, a beverage at once nutritious, intoxicating, and germ- free DNA analysis shows that domesticated yeast strains are at least as old as domesticated grain, and agriculture may have been the only way to ensure a year-round supply for brewing.

The beer-before-bread hypothesis is complemented by another: competitive feasting According to this theory, would-be chieftains used alcohol to attract people to feasts that reinforced hierarchies, strengthened social bonds, and, not least, introduced new foods and technologies Equal parts political rally, fraternity bash, and product launch, the best feasts

required immense preparation As agricultural societies grew more unequal, elites found another use for alcohol: as compensation for peasant labor Alcohol fostered a craving for repeated use that induced peasants to keep producing surpluses, which fueled emergent civilizations and gave rulers the means to stay on top

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y J O E M C K E N D R Y

Where next?

Businesses chase what’s next with each

sunrise—propelled by technology, globalization, and societal shifts So we not only look at your business, we look again and use our global

perspective to help you become more agile and able in the face of change Launch what’s next

at deloitte.com/makeyourimpact.

Copyright © 2019 Deloitte Development LLC All rights reserved.

THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN BY

Disruptive forces are sharply changing how we live and work, making it essential for enterprises to adapt

(see Figure 1.)

Human Resources, Reimagined

The Three Futures That HR Must Address

A corporation’s life span

is becoming shorter, with S&P 500 companies now averaging a mere 15 years.

The Future of the Workforce

Career spans now are lasting as long as 50 years

At the same time, the life of skills has diminished

half-to between 2 and 5.5 years

The Future Of How Work Gets Done

Digitization has fundamentally changed how people work together New roles for workers have yet to be imagined.

all levels of society is vastly different

from the past As more social

enterprises emerge, businesses of all

kinds are looking beyond the balance

sheet to combine performance with

purpose, both inside their walls and

in the broader marketplace

At the same time, advanced digital

technologies are now embedded in

everyday experiences, from web-

based ridesharing to the robotics and

artificial intelligence that power

some of our most basic products

These new technologies are

changing everything from how we

commute, to the way we work, to

the tasks we perform In all of this,

HR isn’t just along for the ride; it

has a crucial role to play in helping

businesses evolve and respond

to these sweeping changes.

The

Future

of HR

FROM A SEAT AT THE TABLE

TO THE DRIVER’S SEAT:

For more, visit:

How HR can lead:

Consider shifting the company to social- enterprise status

Drive innovation and agility through workforce development.

How HR can lead:

Curate an inclusive workforce with non- traditional talent

Prioritize teamwork and productivity as key goals for workforces.

How HR can lead:

Reimagine the work with digitalization and automation

Create and instill a culture of collaboration among workers.

Copyright (c) 2019 Deloitte Development LLC

All rights reserved.

THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN BY

Fig 2

The Big Shift

Remember a few years ago, when HR

was trying to earn a coveted “seat at the table”?

When business-driven HR, speaking the

language of the business at hand, was the way

to get there? Now that HR has that seat, the rest

of the C-Suite is looking for HR leaders to drive

tangible impact as their organizations shift to

being social enterprises

The chief financial officer is asking about the

human-capital balance sheet and how to get

the most value from workforce investments

The chief information officer is driving

automation and looking for ways to achieve

digital maturity in a disruptive environment

The chief marketing officer understands that

customer brand is closely tied to employer

brand, and if workers aren’t happy, customers

will know about it, thanks to social media and

online employer reviews and ratings The chief

human resources officer is working to provide

a stellar workforce experience The CEO—

with an eye on the big picture of the social

enterprise—is asking for all of this

So, with all of these “asks” (a.k.a expectations)

to answer, HR is looking at a very different

future Traditional HR transformations that

only implement technology, or attempt to

change the way HR operates, or strictly focus

on efficiency gains are just not enough to

shift into the Future of HR The expectations

are changing so fast that by the time you’ve

finished a transformation, you’re already

behind HR has to look beyond these

point-in-time snapshots and take a more holistic

view to stay ahead of the expectation curve

How can HR lead the way?

HR organizations must shift their focus on the following measures to adapt

to this new environment This begins with planning for three different futures: the future of the enterprise, the future of the workforce, and the future of how work gets done Leadership in these futures will occur through four major shifts:

Shifts across all four of these areas will enable HR to get off the treadmill of point transformations, stay ahead of expectations, and anticipate business imperatives and demands for new skills HR must lead by driving innovation with agility, developing and nurturing a networked ecosystem of partners, and orchestrating an inclusive workforce experience with continuous learning to anticipate future capabilities in

a digitized world

While HR will drive the shifts, it will also

be influenced by its enterprise priorities,

by the competitive landscape, and by

Erica Volini is the US Human Capital leader for Deloitte Consulting LLP Arthur Mazor is the Human Capital

Digital Leader and the Global Practice Leader for HR Strategy & Employee Experience for Deloitte Consulting LLP Michael Stephan is the US and Global HR Transformation Leader for Deloitte Consulting LLP.

its imperatives and culture The distance between an HR organization’s current and desired future state will help guide the sequence and pace of bringing together all four areas and navigating the route to the future of HR

The future of HR requires professionals who drive value creation, workforce solutions, optimized rewards, diversity and inclusion, adaptability, and change The ability to lead rather than follow will help HR meet the biggest expectation of all—that it won’t just rise with the social enterprise, it will be a major force in lifting it up.

A new mindset: Adopt new traits and behaviors to thrive in the digital age.

A customer-centric focus: Drive value through the combination of quantitative (table stakes) and qualitative (workforce- centered) solutions.

A fresh lens: Reimagine work beyond organizational structure and efficiency to move toward new and digitally augmented ways for how work gets done.

Advanced-technology enablers:

Create a productive, simple, cognitive workforce experience through a unified engagement platform.

of Things

Dynamic skill requirements

Changing nature and typology of work

Fail fast but learn faster

Empowerment

Engagement Personalization

Experience

Brand

Intentional collaboration and constant disruption

Fluid

Iterative

Agility

Continuous innovation

Business value-creation

centered design Satisfaction

Workforce-Cloud/SaaS platforms

HR operational services

Networks

of agile teams

Business HR

HR leadership and governance

External ecosystem

Cognitive and AI Digital reality

(augmented and

virtual)

Democratized data and real-time advanced workforce analytics

FUTURE

OF HR

Help your workforce

see eye to AI.

The future of work is in plain sight Automation

can help workers do rote tasks faster and more

accurately AI delivers insight in real time, enabling ZRUNHUVWRIRFXVRQFUHDWLYHHRUWVDQGSUREOHP solving See what it all could mean for your company DQGSHRSOH9LVLWGHORLWWHFRPXVIXWXUHRIKU

Copyright © 2019 Deloitte Development LLC All rights reserved.

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 21

• S K E T C H

SONGS OF ICE AND FIRE

Ramin Djawadi’s score for Game of Thrones

helped make the show a hit—and made an unlikely star of the composer

B Y S P E N C E R K O R N H A B E R

Benioff and D B Weiss, decided that the ivories were too delicate for the show’s brutal realms, where even weddings tend to involve some stabbing They also

banned the flute, for fear that Thrones

would sound like a Renaissance fair

But when Djawadi sat down to soundtrack a pivotal sequence in Sea-son 6—the slow reveal that the em battled royal mother, Cersei Lannister, was about

to bomb her own kingdom’s cathedral, incinerating half a dozen regular char-acters in the process—none of the instru-ments he tried seemed right “I played the whole scene with harp, and everyone was shaking heads,” he told me “There’s

a warmth to it that the colder piano doesn’t have.”

So Djawadi fi nally brought the piano

to Westeros As one of Cersei’s minions skulked through the sewers below the cathedral, lighting fuses, the score rever-berated with haunting piano arpeggios The heretofore unheard instrument sug-gested, however subtly, that one of the series’ signature plot twists was in the making But the elegiac mood of the com-position, called “Light of the Seven,” con-veyed more: Cersei’s violent act wasn’t just a game-board-upending coup; it was

a tragedy born of malice and desperation

“It doesn’t accompany the scene,” Benioff and Weiss told me via email “It shapes the scene, as much if not more than any other creative element.”

When Thrones leaves the air this year,

its cultural legacy will include—and has been enabled by—Djawadi’s richly tex-tured music The 44-year-old German Iranian composer cemented the series’ iconic status back in 2011 with a theme song whose relentless thrum of strings catchily embodied the roiling intrigue to come Since then, he’s created a sprawl-ing sonic landscape befi tting the show’s

apocalyptic refrain: Winter is coming

Even Djawadi’s most valiant melodies carry a whiff of the ominous

I visited Djawadi in his Santa Monica studio recently, and he broke down for

me how he’d written “Light of the Seven”

to draw out the scene’s themes He tuated his piano chords with unsettling silence, employed a church organ to evoke Cersei’s torturous past with the religious cult she was attacking, and instructed two boys to sing together in such a way that they were “not out of tune, but you get that

punc-feeling of Something’s wrong.”

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y J O H N C U N E O

D I S P A T C H E S

THE ARSENAL OF instruments Ramin

Djawadi has used to score Game of

Thrones includes mournful strings, mighty

horns, and the Armenian double-reed

woodwind known as a duduk During the series’ fi rst fi ve seasons, however, he left one common weapon untouched: the piano Early on, the showrunners, David

22 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

Fans have flocked to see Djawadi in the Game of Thrones Live Concert

Experience, an arena-scale pageant of fake snowfall and musicians in tunics.

cinematic ambitions, Djawadi writes the songs and then sends the notations to an orchestra in Prague

It’s not just the quantity of the ing that makes TV a distinct challenge Whereas a film has a clear beginning, middle, and end, a series unfolds over seasons and years, its direction not always

writ-clear even to its creators On Thrones,

George R R Martin’s un finished book series provided a road map for the ram-bling story, but the showrunners had to invent new plot turns as the series began

to outpace Martin’s writing Djawadi needed to write a score capacious enough

to evolve over seven seasons, pushing the conceit of “variations on a theme” to the limit “He can think in large concepts and long arcs, which is really valuable,” Zim-mer told me “He’s thinking nine hours ahead about what is going to happen.”Take the show’s iconic dragons A high, whistled melody—like something

out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind—

played when Daenerys Targaryen’s baby beasts first showed up in Season 1 “I had

to make sure the music can do that tiny

little thing,” Djawadi said, playing an eerie jingle on his keyboard, “but also

build to that”—a stentorian French-horn

version that was heard during a recent battle involving the fire-breathers, who

by Season 7 had grown as big as airliners

As the show hurtles viewers from one intricate story line to another, Djawadi’s musical motifs also illuminate deeper transformations In the most recent sea-son, the lonely string line that accom-panied scenes shared by wary allies Daenerys and Jon Snow got lovey-dovier with each passing week, foreshadowing— and helping to establish— a romance that didn’t blossom until the finale, in a candle lit liaison between the khaleesi and the king in the North

Daisy and the pulsating orchestration of

Christopher Nolan’s 2000s oeuvre

Back when Djawadi worked at the dio as an assistant, Zimmer and his team

stu-of composers were agonizing over 2003’s

Pirates of the Caribbean Specifically, they

were stumped by Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom’s first duel, which was, for some reason, spectated by a donkey

“If you don’t get the sword fight with the donkey right, you might as well bury the movie,” Zimmer told me recently

“Very quietly, the guy who was making the coffee, who I didn’t think played a musi-cal instrument, said, ‘When you go home tonight, do you mind if I have a go at it?’ ”The guy was Djawadi, and the treat-ment he came up with was “staggeringly brilliant,” Zimmer said “He made it look

as if it was a ballet As if the music had

been written first You could tell it wasn’t

just a good musician at work, but a really good brain at work.”

Zimmer’s influence on his former protégé can be heard in the throb of the

Thrones theme song (shades of Pirates)

and the thunderous brass

brammm of its battle

scenes (Inception-esque)

But Djawadi also cites his Iranian-born father as an inspiration, and suspects that the time signatures of

the Game of Thrones and

Westworld theme songs

(6/8 and 12/8, tively) were unconsciously derived from Middle East-ern music

respec-CO M PA R E D W I T H T H E W O R K

of scoring even a long feature film, serialized television demands massive volumes of composition Consider: The

eight Star Wars films that John Williams

has overseen total more than 18 hours in running time That’s not even as long as

two seasons of Thrones.

Djawadi’s first hit TV show, Fox’s 2005

thriller Prison Break, ran up to 24 episodes

a season “I had to write 40 minutes in one week, which was insane,” he told

me “I learned how to write fast.” For

Thrones, the seasons are shorter and the

turnaround time cushier, ranging from weeks to months per episode But the pro-duction process is far more elaborate His

Prison Break scores were made entirely on

studio computers; for Thrones, with its

Thrones fans thrilled to the scene, and

to its sound Shortly after the episode

aired, “Light of the Seven” landed at

No 1 on the Spotify Viral 50, displacing

the soon-to-be-ubiquitous pop of Maggie

Rogers’s “Alaska”—an impressive feat for

a 10-minute instrumental, and evidence

of one of the more surprising twists in the

Thrones saga to date: It’s made a rock star

of its composer

OR C H E S T R A L C O M P O S I T I O N

has long competed with another

of Djawadi’s musical obsessions As a

teenager in Duisburg, Germany, he

head-banged at Anthrax concerts, shredded

guitars in bands with names like

Antago-nist, and worshipped Steve Vai and Yngwie

Malmsteen, two of the most fire-fingered

technicians to ever wear leather pants

Walking through his studio, I admired the

lutes and djembes on display, but Djawadi

was most excited to show off a

seven-string electric guitar from Vai’s

early-1990s line of instruments, patterned with

psychedelic flames “Good memories,” he

said, holding it in a mildly heroic pose

Growing up in the Rhineland,

how-ever, classical music was unavoidable

“In kinder garten, they teach you about

canons,” Djawadi told me “They put a

Mozart piece in front of you and explain

how the counterpoint is working.”

Fluency in the work of both Eddie

Van Halen and Ludwig van Beethoven

helped Djawadi develop a sound that is at

once complex and crowd-pleasing That

unlikely combination is especially

evi-dent in his compositions for HBO’s other

sexy-gory fantasia, Westworld, about

arti-ficially intelligent theme-park cowboys

gaining consciousness For that series,

he regularly arranges contemporary-pop

classics into saloon player-piano ditties

that feel native to the show’s world For

the series premiere, Djawadi remade the

Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” to

resem-ble Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.”

The stylish action scene that resulted

was very Djawadi: emotionally large and

sneakily intricate

Djawadi honed his sensibility at Hans

Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions,

where he still rents a studio today

Zim-mer, of course, is the visionary German

composer responsible for an outsize

number of the past three decades’ trends

in film music, with breakthroughs like

the all-synth score for 1989’s Driving Miss

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 23

WHAT ARE dreams

for? A handful of theories predominate

Sigmund Freud famously contended that they reveal hidden truths and

wishes. [1] More recent

research suggests that they may help us process

personal concerns [6]

Despite being largely unsupported by evidence, Freud’s view maintains a strong following around the world Researchers found that students in the U.S., South Korea, and India were much more likely to say that dreams reveal hidden truths than to endorse better-

substantiated theories. [7]

Relatedly, people put great stock in their dreams: In the same study, respon- dents said that dreaming about a plane crash would cause them more anxiety than an off icial warning about a terrorist attack.

Even if dreams can’t foretell the future, they seem to expose our

shared fascinations The majority of dreams occur during REM sleep cycles,

of which the average son has four or five a night

per-Eight percent of dreams are about sex, a rate that holds for both women and men—though women are twice as likely as men to have sexual dreams about

a public figure, while men are twice as likely to dream about multiple part-

ners. [8] Anxiety is also

rife: A study of Canadian university students found the most common dream topics, apart from sex, to

be school, falling, being chased, and arriving too

late for something. [9]

For all the ties dreams exhibit, they vary across time—people who grew up watching black-and-white TV are more likely to dream in

commonali-black and white [10]—

and culture A 1958 study determined that

compared with nese people, Americans dreamed more about being locked up, los- ing a loved one, finding money, being inap- propriately dressed or nude, or encountering an insane person Japanese people were more likely

Japa-to dream about school, trying repeatedly to do something, being para- lyzed with fear, or “wild,

violent beasts.” [11] (For

their part, beasts almost certainly have night- mares too: Just about all mammals are thought to dream, as are birds, some lizards, and—unique among invertebrates—

cuttlefish. [12] The

dreamiest member of the animal kingdom is the platypus, which logs up to eight hours of REM sleep

a day. [13] )

If human dreams sound bleak, bear in mind that even negative ones can have positive eff ects

In a study of students taking a French medical- school entrance exam,

60 percent of the dreams they had beforehand involved a problem with the exam, such as being late or leaving an answer blank But those who reported dreams about the exam, even bad ones, did better on it than those

who didn’t. [14]

So the next time you dream about an education- related sexual experience

in which you are both falling and being chased, don’t worry: It’s probably totally meaningless Then again, your brain might

be practicing so you’ll be ready if such an event ever comes to pass

jeans-and-T-shirt-wearing father of

5-year-old twins But his teen dreams of stage

glory never quite went away—and now

they’re coming true, if in a fashion the

lead guitarist of Antagonist could never

have en visioned For the past three

years, fans have fl ocked to see him in the

touring Game of Thrones Live Concert

Experience, an arena-scale pageant

of fake snowfall, musicians in tunics,

and the Iron Throne rotating onstage

as if it were a potato in a microwave

Djawadi conducts, plays instruments,

and emcees at the extravaganzas “It’s

completely diff erent from recording in

a studio,” he said “I missed having that

feeling in your stomach: What’s going to

happen tonight?”

I caught the show at the Boston

Gar-den and found it to be a staggering

testa-ment to Thrones’s popularity and music’s

role in it An arena where people more

frequently cheer for the Ariana Grandes

of the world was instead packed with

fans in various states of cosplay, rowdily

participating in an instrumental-music

concert When huge screens broadcast

Cersei Lannister’s walk of penance from

Season 5, the crowd imagined they were

her bitter subjects, shouting “Shame!”

and “Whore!” Later, they hooted as

Djawadi performed “Light of the Seven”

on the piano and organ amid licks of

green fl ames (With his gleaming smile

and dark curls, Djawadi has become

something of a heartthrob—“The

Hot-test Person in Game of Thrones Is Not

Jon Snow,” Refi nery29 reported.) For an

encore, Djawadi strapped on a guitar and

grinningly jammed with other musicians

in a rendition of a Westeros drinking song

as screens overhead displayed the faces

of all the characters who’d died in the

series thus far

Djawadi is an attentive front man,

tak-ing note of what the audience responds to

each night and altering the spectacle to

dazzle fans further In general, he’s found,

the crowd loves special eff ects On the

latest run of the tour, for example, a

vio-linist gets hoisted 30 feet in the air and

her draping dress becomes the trunk of a

mystical Weirwood tree Matter-of-factly,

Djawadi mentioned another change

he’d been working on: “We’ve gotta add

[2] Van der Helm et al., “REM Sleep

Depotentiates Amygdala Activity

to Previous Emotional Experiences”

(Current Biology, Dec 2011)

[3] Wamsley and Stickgold, “Memory,

Sleep and Dreaming: Experiencing

Consolidation” (Sleep Medicine

Clin-ics, March 2011)

[4] Hobson and McCarley, “The Brain

as a Dream State Generator” (American

Journal of Psychiatry, Dec 1977)

[5] Antti Revonsuo, “The

Reinterpre-tation of Dreams” (Behavioral and

Brain Sciences, Dec 2000)

[6] G William Domhoff , “A New

Neurocognitive Theory of Dreams”

(Dreaming, March 2001)

[7] Morewedge and Norton,

“When Dreaming Is Believing”

(Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, Feb 2009)

[8] Antonio Zadra, “Sex Dreams”

(Sleep, 2007)

[9] Nielsen et al., “The Typical Dreams

of Canadian University Students”

(Dreaming, Dec 2003)

[10] Eva Murzyn, “Do We Only Dream

in Colour?” (Consciousness and

Cognition, Dec 2008)

[11] Griff ith et al., “The Universality of

Typical Dreams” (American

Anthro-pologist, Dec 1958)

[12] Frank et al., “A Preliminary Study

of Sleep-Like States in the Cuttlefish”

(PLOS One, June 2012)

[13] Siegel et al., “Monotremes and

the Evolution of Rapid Eye Movement

Sleep” (Philosophical Transactions

of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, July 1998)

[14] Arnulf et al., “Will Students Pass

a Competitive Exam That They Failed

in Their Dreams?” (Consciousness and

Cognition, Oct 2014)

• S T U D Y O F S T U D I E SBad Dreams Are Good

How your night life prepares you for tomorrow

B Y B E N H E A LY

T H E S T U D I E S :

D I S P A T C H E S

NIQLO WAS FOUNDED

in 1984 in Hiroshima, Japan, as the

Unique Clothing Warehouse—an ironic

name for a manufacturer known for

cloth-ing that is in no way unique A person can

dress sock-to-cardigan in the company’s

wares without announcing herself as a

devotee of the brand In an industry as

label-oriented as fashion, such

anonym-ity would seem to be a detriment to

suc-cess Today, however, Uniqlo has more

than 2,000 stores in 15 countries Its

owner, Tadashi Yanai, is the richest son in Japan Its parent company, Fast Retailing, is among the five largest cloth-ing retailers in the world

per-Only a small percentage of Uniqlo’s stores are located in the United States

But for a certain segment of American shoppers— young, urban, professional, practical—Uniqlo basics have become a cornerstone of the contemporary ward-robe In America’s coastal cities, Uniq-lo’s stores—on Newbury Street in Boston,

in SoHo in New York, in San Francisco’s Union Square—are forever clotted with customers

Part of the reason is cost: Because

of its low prices—jeans retail for $40, a hoodie for $30, one of the brand’s sig-nature down jackets for $70—Uniqlo is often compared to other big brands in the fast-fashion category, such as Zara and H&M But the term fits those com-panies more snugly Zara endeavors to reproduce the latest couture trends for the masses: Balenciaga recent ly made

a platform sneaker that cost $795; a cent approximation of it can be found at Zara for $34.99 H&M is a one-stop shop for hyper- trendy items—velvet pants, a beaded sweater, a sequined halter dress—

de-at prices thde-at make them easily able when they inevitably become passé Uniqlo isn’t in the business of chasing trends Its staples—versatile black pants, reliable oxfords, crisp cotton socks—are available month after month, year af-ter year A more apt analogue would be the Gap In its 1990s heyday, the Gap revolutionized American retailing by making basics cool But the company eventually became a victim of its own success “When [the Gap] tried to go from having a certain cachet to being in every single mall in every single town in America, the brand lost its edge,” Steve Rowen, a managing partner at Retail Systems Research, told me Gap cloth-ing became the uniform of suburban moms and dads Despite the company’s efforts to make its khak is less baggy and its shirts slimmer, no one wants to fall into the Gap anymore— especially when you can get cheaper basics with cleaner lines at Uniqlo

replace-The question Uniqlo faces now is whether it can inherit the Gap’s empire without repeating its mistakes To do so,

it will have to convince shoppers across the country of a proposition that’s radical for the industry: Fashion can be afford-able without being disposable

• B U S I N E S S

UNDEREMPLOYMENT CHIC

Uniqlo has become the unofficial clothier of urban Millennials

Can it catch on with the rest of America?

 I F SUCH A THING as

American ism remains, maybe

exceptional-it can be found in this:

Despite deep IRS budget cuts, an average audit rate that has plunged in recent years to just 0.6 percent, and a president who has bragged that dodging fed- eral taxes is “smart,” most Americans still pay their income taxes every year

Even more remarkable,

most of us feel obliged to

pay To quote the findings

of a 2017 IRS survey: “The majority of Americans (88%) say it is not at all acceptable to cheat on taxes; this ethical attitude

is not changing over time.”

True, tax crooks might not confess their real feelings in an IRS survey

But other data confirm that the U.S is among the world’s leaders when it comes to what econo- mists call the voluntary compliance rate (VCR) In recent decades, Ameri- ca’s VCR has consistently hovered between 81 and

84 percent Most tries don’t calculate their VCR regularly, but when they do, they lag behind the U.S One paper that gathered what compara- tive data were available reported that Germany, the top European Union economy, had a VCR of

coun-68 percent

Other countries score worse, among them Italy (62 percent), the site of

a sprawling tax scandal

in which about 1,000

citizens were charged last year with bilking the gov- ernment out of 2.3 billion euros in tax revenue The public didn’t seem ter- ribly bothered; ex–Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was convicted of tax fraud in 2013, may have tapped a common senti- ment when he said back then that “evasion of high taxes is a God-given right.” Then there’s Greece, where economists have struggled to even calculate a VCR Accord- ing to the International Monetary Fund, more than half of Greek house- holds pay zero income tax Indeed, tax evasion

is practically a national sport Take the swimming- pool trick After the 2008 recession, the govern- ment placed a luxury tax

on private pools When only 324 residents in the ritzy suburbs of Athens admitted to having one, tax collectors knew they were being swindled—but didn’t know how badly until Google Earth photos revealed the real pool count: 16,974 It’s now common to conceal chlorinated assets with floating tiles, army nets,

• C R I M I N A L T E N D E N C I E S

Why Americans Don’t Cheat on Their Taxes

The weirdly hopeful story of how the U.S

came to be a leader in tax compliance

B Y R E N E C H U N

D I S P A T C H E S

UN I Q L O H A S P R O F I T E D from

changes in American society, some

of which might seem at first glance to be

unrelated to fashion Millennial

shop-pers entered a job market with fewer

jobs, while carrying more student debt,

which limited how much money many of

them could spend on clothes (They also

entered a workforce that was more

ame-nable than ever to casual attire; where

a suit was once called for, chinos and a

button- down—or jeans and a hoodie—

now suffice.) That austerity contributed

to a cultural shift, in which conspicuously

expensive clothing fell out of favor “We

went through a period where the logo

was dying and nobody wanted to wear a

big logo and advertise for the brand,” Jan

Rogers Kniffen, a retail consultant, told

me “That’s the Uniqlo customer.”

These shifting mores created an

open-ing in the American market, one that a

company as rooted in Japan’s aesthetic

history as Uniqlo could ably fill

“Cloth-ing in the West, it’s associated with status,

with rank,” Hiro taka Takeuchi, a

pro-fessor at Harvard Business School who

has studied the brand, told me In Japan,

clothing has traditionally been more

standardized Until the end of the 19th

century, when Western influ ence became

more prevalent, kimonos were commonly

worn by Japanese people of varying ages

and classes The garment would differ

depend ing on the wearer’s ability to afford

fine fabric or embroidery, but compared

with the West, where the wealthy

tele-graphed their status with elaborate styles

of dress, such signaling was far more

subtle Takeuchi sees Uniqlo as bringing

this old Japanese view of fashion to the

U.S market

This isn’t to say that people who shop

at Uniqlo don’t care about how they look

The company realized that its customers

might not want to pay top dollar for pants,

but they do want them to fit A pair of

Uniqlo slacks is never going to look like

a $200 pair from a high-end competitor

But because Uniqlo offers free tailoring,

the pants are probably not going to look

like you got them for $40, either The

company may be sensitive to customers’

finances, but it’s alive to their aspirations

as well It offers blouses in silk and

sweat-ers in cashmere In recent years,

Alexan-der Wang, Jun Takahashi, Tomas Maier,

and Jil Sander have all partnered with

the company on limited-edition designs,

clearly hoping to meet their next

genera-tion of devotees where it shops now For

Uniqlo, the collaborations provide a son of high fashion, a suggestion that the leading lights of couture appreciate its cheap socks and T-shirts too

fris-Quality isn’t an attribute typically asso ciated with fast fashion, but Uniqlo has also managed to build a reputation for durability Takeuchi told me the brand that reminds him most of the relative newcomer— Uniqlo opened its first U.S

stores in 2005—is an old American one:

L.L.Bean The association might seem odd, given the venerable Maine retail-er’s tradition of outfitting its customers in boxy flannels and duck boots But in terms

of philosophy, if not aesthetic, chi thinks the comparison is apt The proposition L.L.Bean has always made

Takeu-to its cusTakeu-tomers is that they are ing in items that will be with them for a lifetime Uniqlo can’t promise anything approaching that longevity, but in an era

invest-of disposable fashion, a Uniqlo garment, made from hearty materials and cut in a timeless style, can feel like an invest ment piece “In a sense, it’s L.L.Bean in modern times,” Takeuchi said

Like a mountain outfitter, Uniqlo touts the use of a number of signature technolo-gies in its clothing Puffer coats are insu-lated with “ultra-light down,” a down fill that purportedly makes jackets less bulky

26 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

and pool interiors painted

to mimic grass

What separates

Americans from Greeks or

Italians? It’s not

income-tax withholding, which the

U.S pioneered but Europe

has since copied Higher

tax rates may be one

fac-tor Illegal shadow

econo-mies, in which goods are

sold off the books for cash,

are another (Greece’s

black market is the

biggest in the eurozone,

accounting for

21.5 per-cent of its GDP.)

Economists say a third

factor, one with profound

political implications, is

tax morale This is a

catch-all term for various forces

that motivate people to pay taxes, including social norms, democratic values, civic pride, transparent government spending, and trust in leadership and fellow citizens People are more inclined to fudge (yes, economists use that word) their tax forms if they think others aren’t paying their fair share

None of this would seem to bode especially well for tax morale in the U.S., where faith in government has been dropping for decades So why are Americans still paying? One possibility

is that declining trust has been off set by reforms

that made cheating harder Since 1987, to take one example, tax filers have been required to list Social Security numbers for dependents, a change that generated almost

$3 billion in revenue, as the number of depen- dents nationwide shrank

by millions (Suspiciously, some of the disappeared had names like Fluff y.)

A more worrisome possibility is that tax morale has lagged behind declining trust, and will yet fall High- profile tax-avoidance schemes—like those detailed in the so-called

Panama Papers, or by The

New York Times’s

report-ing on the Trump family’s tax dodges—could help erode morale “Our sense

of right and wrong is matically influenced by other people,” says Dan Ariely, a professor of psy- chology and behavioral economics at Duke “If people think that the gov- ernment is corrupt and not doing the right thing,”

dra-he told me, tdra-hey may be more inclined to say, “Oh,

I don’t want to pay money

to a government that is misbehaving.”

• B U S I N E S S

brand awareness.” Many Americans have never heard of Uniqlo, or don’t know how

to pronounce it (It’s you-nee-klo.)

That could be an opportunity to make

a good first impression But as Uniqlo learned when it arrived on American shores, first impressions can be hard to manage The three original U.S stores were in New Jersey malls, where the com-pany soon encountered several hurdles, including fi t (American customers, on av-erage, are taller and fl eshier than Japanese shoppers.) It closed the stores within a year Uniqlo has continued to strug-gle in suburban markets Rowen, of Retail Systems Research, said he thinks the company should hew closely to cities, where it has found its greatest success, because that’s where its core customers are This would also help it avoid the fate

of the Gap, which traded its sense of self for growth

The Gap isn’t the only Uniqlo petitor that has faced challenges in recent years J.Crew has seen sliding sales as cus-tomers complain about strange aesthetic choices and high prices for middling quality; Old Navy (which is owned by the same parent company as the Gap) has strong sales, but its clothes are dogged

com-by a reputation for frumpiness and fl siness Uniqlo doesn’t have upwardly mobile city dwellers entire ly to itself, however Madewell and Everlane both off er a relaxed yet refi ned look, though

im-at a slightly higher price point For those with a bit more to spend, Fast Retailing’s own luxury brand, Theory, off ers simple, well-cut items that call less atten tion to themselves than do clothes from simi-larly situated brands

Given Fast Retailing’s size and national strength, it can aff ord to not rush things with Uniqlo “They can do what-ever they want,” Kniff en said “They’re

inter-a big, heinter-althy compinter-any.” Despite the under whelming performance of Uniqlo’s Ameri can stores thus far, the company’s operating income outside

of Japan grew by more than 62 percent year-over-year in 2018, while revenue grew slightly more than 25 percent From its urban outposts, Uniqlo can slowly up-end American ideas about the interplay between quality, style, and status—one basic button-down at a time

Gillian B White is a deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com.

of the total apparel market Much of the brand’s international growth in recent years has come from other countries in the region, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea

To achieve the kind of dominance in the U.S that the company enjoys closer

to home, Uniqlo will need to grow nifi cantly A few years ago, Yanai aimed

sig-to generate $10 billion in sales from 200 stores in the U.S by 2020; the company currently operates its 50 or so U.S stores

at a loss “Compared to H&M or Zara, they have been struggling a little bit in the U.S market,” says Won-Yong Oh, a pro-fessor at the University of Nevada who studies retail companies “They have less

and easier to pack, without sacrificing

warmth HEATTECH, marketed as an

inno vative insulating system, and AIRism,

which is promoted as moisture-wicking,

are woven into a variety of Uniqlo staples—

socks, underwear, camisoles, leggings,

pants—supposedly making them more

comfortable and resilient than

competi-tors’ products Not built for decades of

wear on the rocky coast of Maine, perhaps,

but more than up to the challenge of a few

seasons of service in the cubicle

 IN A S I A , U N I Q L O is everywhere

More than 800 of the brand’s stores

are in Japan—where Uniqlo, by its own

estimates, accounts for about 6.5 percent

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y J A M E S G R A H A M T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 27

Ellen DeGeneres, daytime superstar,

is itching to try something new

But America needs the old Ellen

more than ever before.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show, popularly known as just Ellen, is in its 16th

sea-son It made its debut during the reign of Bush II It effervesced in the Obama

era It has survived the internet More than survived—it has absorbed it, very

comfortable with memes, viral videos, all of that Though it operates ing to the conventional dream logic of the daytime talk show (you’re talking with Michael Bublé, then you’re cooking, then your mother appears), it pro-duces extra amounts of serotonin, extra wobbly bubbles of feel-good It pro-

accord-motes, relentlessly, the idea of being kind BE KIND says the Ellen hat BE KIND says the Ellen mug “Be kind to one another,” says Ellen herself, at the end of

every episode Be kind, goddammit!

Ellen helps people—with her show’s famous munificence, spraying out gift cards, heads of lettuce, plane tickets, wads of cash to the lucky and the strapped; and more profoundly with the mood-elevating properties of her

Ellen-ness I have friends—you probably do too—for whom an Ellen viewing

habit, at the moment of need, worked better than Zoloft (She also helps rillas, through the Ellen DeGeneres Wildlife Fund.)

go-And now she’s thinking about leaving the show behind Her contract is up

next year, and a recent interview with The New York Times found her mulling her next move Her 2018 Netflix special, Relatable, was a slightly shaky return to

 “

appreciate it,” says Ellen neres, bobbing and bowing and volleying her gaze into the screaming tiers of her studio audience “Thank you! I feel the same way about you!” Up and down, left and right, that take-no-prisoners

DeGe-soul-seeking stare, that ice-glare of empathy “I

feel like you’re not satisfied unless I look at each

and every one of you I feel like I’m trying to see all

of you and wave, and yet I can’t do it.” Neon sprig

Ellen’s appeal lies in the tension between the pluralism that is her mission and the nightclub sharpness that

is her style.

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 29

stand-up, a mishmash of not- altogether-disarming

jokes about her enormous wealth and confessions

of kindness fatigue (“I’m the ‘Be kind’ girl … I

shouldn’t even have a horn in my car There’s no

reason for me to have a horn I can’t honk, ever, at

anyone.”) The audi ence is at her mercy as always,

but the material is a work in progress She’s in flux

So in the fourth week of the federal-government

shutdown, with trash choking the national parks,

frustration silting up the system, and ordinary

re-ality beginning to fizz and flicker in its frame, I gave

Ellen my full attention

“Before you get going, can I say something?”

asks Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts, a

guest on Monday’s show “Can I say thank you

for what you bravely did more than 20 years ago?”

Roberts, openly gay since 2013, is referring of

course to Ellen’s 1997 visible-from-space coming-

out She did it in a Time cover story, and then on

Oprah (“When did you know that you were gay?

Is it something like ding-ding-ding-ding-ding—gay

bells go off?” “I didn’t hear any bells”) and on her

sitcom, Ellen Very brave, very life-giving, very

El-len Also very good for ratings

Then they dropped off ABC yanked her sitcom

in 1998, and Ellen entered (in mega- showbiz terms)

the wilderness years A place of pain and no work

Not quite no work: She played Dory in Finding Nemo

But a depression, a sense of obscurity From which

she emerged in 2003 with her daytime talk show,

her magical zone of acceptance, her Trump rally in

reverse Minorities welcome Vulnerabilities

cele-brated Thumbs-up for everyone—cancer survivors,

hurricane survivors, a survivor of the Pulse

night-club shooting (comforted by special guest Katy

Perry) Her journey to this point, her quest to live

her truth, has been an American epic, and her

peo-ple know all about it “Bless you,” says the gleaming

Roberts, and they go wild with approval

“Nobody’s paying to see a nice person.” Jerry

Seinfeld, considering the particular qualities of

Ellen as he talked with her on his show Comedi ans

in Cars Getting Coffee, was definitive Why do

peo-ple like Ellen so much? It can’t just be niceness—

humdrum, milky niceness You’re nice, I’m nice,

who cares? No, the source of her appeal lies

elsewhere: in the tension between the huggy, all-

tolerating, gorilla-preserving, mid- afternoon

plu-ralism that is the Ellen mission, and the nightclub

sharpness, the side-of-the-mouth zingers, that are

the Ellen style She came up as a comedian She’s

still a comedian When old homo phobic tweets

cost Kevin Hart his Oscars hosting gig, she rallied

to the defense of her fellow comic Her Netflix

special features a single, mildly explosive use of

the word fuck, and you can feel the recoil from the

gentle Ellen ultra- fans, the hard-core softies, in the

audience But a kind of cushioned ribaldry is part

of her thing: “I don’t know a lot about balls, Heidi,”

she once told Heidi Klum while they were making meatballs on her show Sometimes she says noth-ing at all, and that works too The point is Ellen, lis-tening: the high gleam in her eye, the energy field

of her comic intelligence

On Wednesday, Ellen makes some Trump jokes, reprising Dory’s “Just Keep Swimming” song from

Finding Nemo, but with updated lyrics: Just keep swimming Swimming, swimming, even if you don’t agree with the president And you think he might be working for the Russians Just keep swimming, swim- ming … On Thursday, she isn’t there; Goldie Hawn

and Kate Hudson guest-host the show They make

a smoothie with Gwyneth Paltrow It’s izingly anodyne Without Ellen—her brand, her buzz—it’s all fluff, deep fluff, narcotic and faintly sinister Three o’clock: the slack waistband of the day They’re out there, half-watching, the trapped American millions, the furloughed by life, the hos-pitalized and the immobilized and the incarcer-ated Give them some substance, for Christ’s sake:

mesmer-a proverb, mesmer-a fillip, mesmer-a lmesmer-augh, something

Ellen’s back on Friday—phew—and she does a monologue about the weather, because it’s been raining in L.A “We need the rain, though, we

do … It helps everything grow This is true—I’m told Sofia Vergara grew two cup sizes.” (Hoots

of illicit mirth from the audience, Ellen grinning knowingly.) “That’s how they grow, they get wa-tered.” And there, into the precincts of her forgive-ness, goes the leering and bulbous-eyed shade of Rodney Dangerfield Smut becomes soapy at her touch In a moment, Samuel L Jackson will share his holiday snaps, and Ellen will deliver $20,000

to two sisters, federal workers both, going broke during the shutdown

Ellen was snuggly with the Obamas Barack came on her show and they danced; Michelle came

on her show and they had a push-up contest Are they all gone, those cozy vibes? Is Ellen besieged,

in her Colosseum of kindness, by the snarling

poli-tics of the hour? She told the Times that she doesn’t

even read the news anymore (although her writers clearly do)—too distressing It must be tiring, be-ing a joy-delivery system in this environment Who

wouldn’t want to drop an f-bomb? For the moment,

though, her show is more important than ever fore Her rainbow wafts of diversity and acceptance are a kind of alternative news source Trump rallies

be-are about acceptance too, of course: Hey, you—you

with the anger, you with the unspeakable thoughts

We have a place for you here It’s a very American

thing, this wild invitation to be yourself But to be the good, kind, self-regulating, meatball-making version of yourself—that’s the ticket And that’s where Ellen comes in, mighty as Russell Crowe in

Gladiator At her command, unleash tolerance

James Parker is an Atlantic staff writer.

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y J U L I E N P A C A U D

30 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

B O O K S

Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris

The quest to understand the biology of mental illness has so far failed, but you wouldn’t

know it from practitioners’ claims

B Y G A R Y G R E E N B E R G

I N 1 8 8 6 , C L A R K BE L L , the editor of the journal of the Medico-

Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle

a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what

mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50-year career as a

psy-chiatrist, Earle had developed curricula to teach medical students

about mental disorders, co-founded the first professional

organi-zation of psychiatrists, and opened one of the first private psychiatric practices

in the country He had also run a couple of asylums, where he instituted novel

treatment strategies such as providing education to the mentally ill If any

American doctor was in a position to answer Bell’s query, it was Pliny Earle

Earle responded with a letter unlikely to satisfy Bell “In the present state

of our knowledge,” he wrote, “no classification can be erected upon a

patho-logical basis, for the simple reason that, with slight exceptions, the pathol ogy

of the disease is unknown.” Earle’s demurral was also a lament During his career, he had watched with excitement as medicine, once a discipline rooted in experience and tradition, became a practice based on science Doctors had treated vaguely named diseases like ague and dropsy with therapies like bloodletting and mustard plasters Now they deployed chemical agents like vaccines

to target diseases identified by their biological causes But, as Earle knew, psychiatrists could not peer into a microscope to see the biological source of their patients’ suffering, which arose, they assumed, from the brain They were stuck in

the premodern past, dependent on “the apparent

mental condition [his emphasis], as judged from

the outward manifes tations,” to devise diagnoses and treatments

The protracted attempt to usher psychiatry into medicine’s modern era is the subject of Anne

Harrington’s Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled

Search for the Biology of Mental Illness As her

sub-title indicates, this is not a story of steady progress Rather, it’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miracu lous in their day but barbaric in retrospect,

of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster

Some of the episodes Harrington recounts are familiar, such as Egas Moniz’s invention of the lobotomy, which garnered him a Nobel Prize in

1949, at just about the same time that the trist Walter Freeman was traveling the United States using a surgical tool modeled on an ice pick to per-form the operation on hapless asylum inmates She

psychia-T H E A psychia-T L A N psychia-T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 31

Even as psychiatrists prescribe

a variety of treatments, none of them can say exactly why any of these bio logical therapies work

has retrieved others from history’s dustbin In the

1930s, for example, insulin was used to render

men-tal patients comatose in hopes that they would wake

up relieved of their psychoses And in at least one

case—the deinstitutionalization of mental patients

in the 1960s and ’70s—she has given an old story a

new twist That movement, she argues convincingly,

was spearheaded not by pill-happy psychiatrists

convinced that a bit of Thorazine would restore

their patients to full functioning, but by Freudians

They saw the antipsychotic drugs invented in the

1950s as a way to render patients suitable for the

outpatient treatment that psychoanalysts were

equipped to provide

From ice baths to Prozac, each development

Harrington describes was touted by its originators

and adherents as the next great thing—and not

without reason Some people really did emerge

from an insulin coma without their delusions;

some people really are roused from profound

and disabling depressions by a round of

electro-convulsive therapy or by antidepressant drugs

But in every case, the treatment came first, often

by accident, and the explanation never came at

all The pathological basis of almost all mental

disorders remains as unknown today as it was in

1886— unsurprising, given that the brain turns out

to be one of the most complex objects in the

uni-verse Even as psychiatrists prescribe a widening

variety of treatments, none of them can say exactly

why any of these biological therapies work

It follows that psychiatrists also cannot precisely

predict for whom and under what conditions their

treatments will work That is why antipsychotic

drugs are routinely prescribed to depressed people,

for example, and antidepressants to people with

anxiety disorders Psychiatry remains an empirical

discipline, its practitioners as dependent on their

(and their colleagues’) experience to figure out what

will be effective as Pliny Earle and his colleagues

were Little wonder that the history of such a field—

reliant on the authority of scientific medicine even

in the absence of scientific findings—is a record not

only of promise and setback, but of hubris

T HAT WORD does not appear in Mind Fixers,

despite its repeated accounts of overreach

by enthusiastic doctors who are often the

last to recognize the failure of their theories As

Harrington tells us at the outset, she is committed

to restraint “Heroic origin stories and polemical

counterstories may give us momentary emotional

satisfaction,” she writes But the result—“tunnel

vision, mutual recrimination, and stalemate”—

is not very useful By presenting a just-the-facts

narrative of the attempt to find biological sources

of mental suffering, particularly in the brain, she

hopes to get the “fraught” enterprise of psychiatry

back on the path to progress

Harrington is right to sigh over what has too often proved to be a yelling match between equally deaf opponents—members of an ambi tious profes-sion convinced that psychiatry is making strides toward understanding mental illness, and critics who believe it is at best a misguided attempt to help suffering people and at worst a pseudoscience enabling social control at the expense of human dignity Indeed, since the sides first squared off, more than half a century ago, they seem to have learned little from each other

As Harrington ably documents, a series of fiascoes highlighted the profession’s continued inability to answer Clark Bell’s question Among them was the 1973 vote by the American Psychiat-ric Association declaring that homosexuality was

no longer a mental illness The obvious question—how scientific is a discipline that settles so momen-tous a problem at the ballot box?—was raised by the usual critics This time, insur ers and government bureaucrats joined in, wondering, often out loud, whether psychiatry warranted their confidence, and the money that went along with it

The association’s response was to purge its

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental orders (DSM) of the Freudian theory that had

Dis-led it to include homosexuality in the first place

When the third edition of the DSM came out, in

1980, its authors claimed that they had come up with an accurate list of mental illnesses: Shedding the preconceptions that had dominated previous taxonomies, they relied instead on atheoret ical descrip tions of symptoms But as Harring ton points out, they did have a theory— that mental illness was no more or less than a pathology of the brain In claiming not to, she argues,

they were being disingenuous They believed that biological … markers and causes would eventually be discovered for all the true mental disorders They intended the new descriptive categories to be a prelude to the research that would discover them

The DSM-3’s gesture at science proved

suffi-cient to restore the reputation of the profession, but those discoveries never followed Indeed, even

as the DSM (now in its fifth edition) remains the

backbone of clinical psychiatry— and becomes the everyday glossary of our psychic suffering— knowledge about the biology of the disorders it lists has proved so elusive that the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, in 2013, announced that

it would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

The need to dispel widespread public doubt haunts another debacle that Harrington chroni-cles: the rise of the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness, especially depression The idea was

B O O K S

32 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

B O O K S

first advanced in the early 1950s, after scientists

demonstrated the principles of chemical

neuro-transmission; it was supported by the discovery

that consciousness-altering drugs such as LSD

tar-geted serotonin and other neurotransmitters The

idea exploded into public view in the 1990s with

the advent of direct-to-consumer advertising of

prescription drugs, antidepressants in particular

Harrington documents ad campaigns for Prozac

and Zoloft that assured wary customers the new

medications were not simply treating patients’

symptoms by altering their consciousness, as

recre-ational drugs might Instead, the medications were

billed as repairing an underlying biological problem

The strategy worked brilliantly in the

market-place But there was a catch “Ironically, just as

the public was embracing the ‘serotonin im

-balance’ theory of depression,” Harrington writes,

“research ers were forming a new consensus” about

the idea behind that theory: It was “deeply flawed

and probably outright wrong.” Stymied, drug

com-panies have for now abandoned attempts to find

new treatments for mental illness, continuing to

peddle the old ones with the same claims And the

news has yet to reach, or at any rate affect,

consum-ers At last count, more than 12 percent of

Ameri-cans ages 12 and older were taking antidepressants

The chemical- imbalance theory, like the revamped

DSM, may fail as science, but as rhetoric it has

turned out to be a wild success

H A R R I N G T O N ’ S D I S PA S S I O N as she

chronicles the rise and fall of various

bio logical theories of mental illness will

make this book of value to historians of medicine It

may even allow critics and advocates of bio logical

psychiatry alike to gain a deeper appreciation of

the historical stream in which they are swimming,

and to stop trying to drown one another But her

restraint carries a risk: that she will underplay the

significance of the troubles she is reporting

Modern medicine pivots on the promise that

portraying human suffering as biological disease

will lead to insight and cures Inescapably, this

enterprise has a sociopolitical dimension To say

which of our travails can (and should) come under

medicine’s purview is, implicitly if not explic itly,

to present a vision of human agency, of the nature

of the good life, of who deserves precious social

resources like money and compassion Such

questions, of course, aren’t always pressing; the

observation that a broken leg is a problem only in

a society that requires mobility seems trivial

But by virtue of its focus on our mental lives,

and especially on our subjective experience of

the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more

directly than other medical specialties, implicates

our conception of who we are and how our lives

should be lived It raises, in short, moral questions

If you convince people that their moods are merely electro chemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend

to ease their pain

In this sense, the attempt to work out the ogy of mental illness is different from the attempt

biol-to work out the biology of cancer or cardio vascular disease The fact that the brain is necessary to conscious ness, added to the fact that the brain

is a chunk of meat bathing in a chemical broth, does not yield the fact that conscious suffering is purely biological, or even that this is the best way

to approach mental illness Those unresolved, and perhaps unanswerable, moral questions loom over the history that Harrington traces here The path she has chosen may require her to steer clear of such knotty concerns as the relationship of mind to brain or the relationship of political order to men-tal illness But her account doesn’t just skirt the polemics she decries It also overlooks the conse-quences of psychiatrists’ ignoring those questions,

or using scientific rhetoric to conceal them

At the risk of being polemical, let me suggest that

Harrington’s word disingenuous fails to describe the cynicism of Robert Spitzer, the editor of the DSM-3,

who acknowledged to me that he was responding

to the fact that “psychiatry was regarded as bogus,” and who told me that the book was a success because it “looks very scientific If you open it up,

it looks like they must know something.” Nor does

ironic accurately describe the actions of an industry

that touts its products’ power to cure biochemical imbalances that it no longer believes are the cul-prit Plain bad faith is what’s on display, sometimes

of outrageous proportion And like all bad faith, it serves more than one master: not only the wish

to help people, but also the wish to preserve and increase power and profits

Harrington ends her book with a plea that psychiatry become “more modest in focus” and train its attention on the severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, that are currently treated largely in prisons and homeless shelters—an enterprise that she thinks would require the field

“to overcome its persistent reductionist habits and commit to an ongoing dialogue with … the social sciences and even the humanities.” This

is a reasonable proposal, and it suggests avenues other than medication, such as a renewed effort

to create humane and effec tive long-term asylum treatment But no matter how evenhandedly she frames this laudable proposal, an industry that has refused to reckon with the full implications

of its ambitions or the extent of its failures is unlikely to heed it

Gary Greenberg, a practicing psychotherapist, is the author of The Book of Woe: The DSM and the

Unmaking of Psychiatry.

MIND FIXERS:

PSYCHIATRY’S TROUBLED SEARCH FOR THE BIOLOGY

OF MENTAL ILLNESS

ANNE HARRINGTON Norton

The chemical - imbalance theory of mental illness may fail as science, but

as rhetoric it has turned out to be a wild success

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y K I M R Y U T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 33

B O O K S

The Art of Leaving

Things Out

Amy Hempel has never embraced the term minimalism,

but her best stories show how rich spareness can be

B Y R U T H F R A N K L I N

A M Y H E M PE L’S I N T RODUC T ION to writing fiction was

a workshop in her late 20s with Gordon Lish at bia University Lish had recently left his post as the fiction

Colum-editor of Esquire to become an Colum-editor at Knopf in 1977

There he continued to publish many of the writers whose careers he had launched at the magazine: Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, and others For his students’ first assignment, he

instructed them to write about their worst secret: the thing they had done

that, as he put it, “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” “Everybody knew

instantly what that thing, for them, was,” Hempel recalled in an interview

with The Paris Review almost 30 years later, after three spare collections

of short stories—Reasons to Live (1985), At the Gates of the Animal

King-dom (1990), and Tumble Home (1997)—had established her as a star among

Lish’s protégés She continued: “We found out immediately that the stakes

were very high, that we were expected to say something no one else had said,

and to divulge much harder truths than we had ever told or ever thought to tell.”

The result, for Hempel, was “In the Cemetery

Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” which appeared in

Tri-Quarterly in 1983 A narrator, who may or may not

be Hempel, is visiting her dying best friend in the hospital When I first read it, I was awed by the spec-ificity with which the story—fewer than 3,000 words, many of them dialogue—conveys both the intimacy and the mundanity of the encounter: the trivia the two women discuss; their macabre jokes (“The end o’ the line,” says the patient, draping the cord of her bedside phone around her neck); their conversa-tions with doctors and nurses; the memories they share I was surprised to learn that for Hempel, the story was about failing her best friend, which was the “worst secret” she uncovered in Lish’s class The story turns on the narrator’s refusal to spend the night in the hospital with her friend, a moment described so obliquely that one might miss it But the story is also much larger—a chronicle of grief, and a testimony to the universal helplessness of the living in the face of death

One or two or three human beings navigating a situation of exquisite emotional intensity, sketched with the fewest possible words—this has become Hempel’s signature “You leave out all the right things,” another writer once told her Everything nonessential is chipped away, from dialogue mark-ers to physical descriptions, allowing the reader to home in on the dismantled self In the early story

“Pool Night,” a single line suffices to convey a age boy’s powers of attraction: “I knew girls who saved his chewed gum.” (That boy will later per-form a stunt he calls the “Fire Dive,” sprinkling his clothes with gasoline and lighting them on

teen-34 A P R I L 2 0 1 9 T H E A T L A N T I C

“Sometimes the answer

is yes when

a person asks

if it would kill you to get the mail.”

fire before diving into the pool.) The writer Rick

Moody, in his introduction to The Collected Stories

of Amy Hempel (2006), admires “her nearly

Japa-nese compaction.” In her attention to word choice

and the rhythm of her lines, she is sometimes closer

to a poet than a prose writer—two of her stories

consist of a single sentence Here’s “Housewife,”

from Tumble Home: “She would always sleep with

her husband and with another man in the course of

the same day, and then the rest of the day, for

what-ever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by

incant ing, ‘French film, French film.’ ”

T H O U G H H E M P E L’S S T Y L E places her

squarely in the camp of Carver and others

who popularized minimalism, she doesn’t

embrace the term “It came to denote what certain

reviewers felt was missing in fiction— conventional

plot or obvious emotion, for example,” she told

The Paris Review “Some of these critics had a very

limited sense of what a story could be.” Indeed,

many discussions of minimalism overlook that it’s

as much a matter of subject as of style In contrast to

a writer like Deborah Eisenberg, who has produced

a similarly spare number of stories but whose field

of vision is more broadly geo political, the work of

Hempel’s cohort is domestic and interior— Carver’s

couples sitting around a table talking about love

Hempel’s domesticity, however, isn’t as stable as

the word implies Like her previous collections, her

latest is a book of renters and house sitters; people

on a temporary leave from their lives that threatens

to become permanent, their ennui in sufficient to

spur them to action

For Hempel, a story often takes place not at the

moment of crisis but in its aftermath—a

house-keeper, for instance, trying to clean up the stain

a dying woman left on a rug (“When It’s Human

Instead of When It’s Dog”) A story is a father and

children taking a pleasant road trip during which

the threat of something ominous never plays out

(“Today Will Be a Quiet Day”) A story is a woman

who knits her way through a profound loss (“Beg,

Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep”) Even Hempel’s novella-

length pieces—“Tumble Home,” from 1997, and

“Cloudland,” in Sing to It, a new collection after

more than a decade of silence—are juxtaposed

snippets of scenes and images rather than

sus-tained narrative

The word minimalism no longer feels pejorative

To the contrary, the form has recently resurged in

the work of writers such as Rachel Cusk and Jenny

Offill, both of whom, like Hempel, construct

bare-bones fictions on the scaffolding of their lives,

using narrators who share some of their

charac-teristics Especially for a woman writer, it’s a way

to write autobiographically without appearing

self-indulgent (“The whole book is true,” Hempel

told The New York Times Book Review when Reasons

to Live came out.) The style leaves little room for

mistakes, and several stories in Sing to It misfire or

simply fail to coalesce They’re snapshots rather than collages, vignettes rather than dreamscapes But when the approach works, turning the pages is like swimming in a lake and suddenly finding the bottom drop out beneath you, leaving you to get your bearings amid unanticipated depths

Hempel’s background in journalism—she started out as a medical reporter—taught her the value of grabbing a reader from the start, of writ-ing “a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.” The opener to “I Stay With Syd,”

in Sing to It, is an instant classic: “I wasn’t the only

friend Syd’s married man hit on the time he came

to see her at the beach.” The narrator is jaded, pant: She goes home to “attend to the business end

flip-of a sleeping pill.” But—as will become a theme flip-of the volume—this survivor is also a damaged soul The bumper sticker on one character’s car reads, I BRAKE JUST LIKE A LITTLE GIRL

“The Chicane,” another highlight of Sing to It,

begins: “When the film with the French actor opened in the valley, I went to the second showing

of the night.” A convoluted backstory is packed into the next seven pages More than 30 years ago, the actor had an affair with the narrator’s Aunt Lauryn, then a college student, which resulted in an un-planned pregnancy (He remained “in character,” the narrator says wryly, and didn’t acknowledge it.) Lauryn had a miscarriage and attempted suicide by overdose Later, she married a Portuguese race-car driver and returned with him to the States, where they had a son, James But she became dissatisfied, and on a trip back to Lisbon, she overdosed again Some years later, the race-car driver told the narra-tor that the Portuguese police taped the phone call Lauryn made as she lay dying (evidently a routine practice with international calls from Lisbon)

She wanted to talk to her mother, and hear her mother tell her from thousands of miles away that James was sleeping in the guest room in his crib, and that it was hard to make out what she was saying—could she speak up?—and that she would feel better when she woke up

in the morning, and then ask her mother to stay on the line while she sang herself to sleep

A chicane is a trick, as well as a series of sharp turns on a racecourse, and another trick/turn awaits before the story ends But the poignancy of that con-versation between mother and daughter—not even

a scene, just a summary—is what lingers We don’t need to resolve the questions: why Lauryn wanted

to spend her last minutes on Earth on the phone with her mother, or why the race-car driver chose to share the existence of the tape with his dead wife’s niece, or what drove Lauryn to suicide (“When life

is easy, it’s an easy thing to take a life,” a character

B O O K S

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 35

in another story in this collection says, prompting

the narrator to wonder whether the same isn’t also

true when life is hard: “Sometimes the answer is

yes when a person asks if it would kill you to get the

mail.”) As in all her best stories, Hempel plants a

small bomb with a surprisingly powerful detonation

W H E N O T H E R S T O R I E S in this vol-ume fail to yield the same richness, it’s

because the connections that should

feel organic are instead forced or just unfulfi lled

“The Second Seating” has another perfect opener—

“The three of us were taken with the vodka fizz

made with elderfl ower and basil so we stayed on

and had the raw kale salad and heirloom

toma-toes with medal lions of halloumi”—but doesn’t

rise above its subject matter: a group honoring the

memory of a dead friend by eating at a restaurant

he had wanted to try “The Doll Tornado,” inspired

by a piece of installation art in North Carolina,

strains to draw a link to the civil-rights movement

“A Full-Service Shelter” is a polemic against

ani-mal cruelty rendered in the form of a chronicle of

volunteers at an animal shelter It’s almost saved by

the musicality of its lines—nearly every sentence

begins with “They knew me” or “They knew us”—

but fi nally strikes the same note too many times (In

the acknowledgments, Hempel thanks “my fellow

members of Compassion Care … work[ing] to save

the lives of dogs in extremis.”) I found myself

recall-ing Lish’s instructions to his fi ction students: There

is no secret shame here, no hard truth

Both seem in ample supply in the collection’s

closing novella, “Cloudland,” which returns to one

of Hempel’s perennial themes: disconnections

between mothers and daughters The narrator is a

woman who, in her youth, gave up her child at birth

in a home for unwed mothers Now middle-aged and working as a home health aide in Florida, she has spent her life adrift, anchored only by her occa sional fantasies about being with the daughter she might have had—selling Girl Scout cookies or accompany ing her on a road trip (“I keep the seat belt buckled over the empty seat”) She eventually learns from a book that unwanted babies born in that home were starved to death and buried under the apple trees in the backyard In its best moments,

as we watch the narrator painfully piece together the fragments of her life, this story is reminiscent

of “Tumble Home,” the moving novel la in which Hempel grappled with her mother’s suicide Some passages and images, though, feel spliced in from elsewhere I found myself wondering whether

“Cloudland” was an attempt to marry elements of her own story with something unrelated to it (in the acknowledgments, she thanks Chuck Palahniuk for pointing her to a book about a maternity home in Nova Scotia)

Hempel’s method of transmuting life into fi ction

is nothing if not exacting “I leave a lot out when I tell the truth The same when I write a story,” she once wrote Choosing what to let in, and how to deploy it, is even more important “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” doesn’t gain anything from the knowledge that it is based on Hempel’s secret shame That knowledge might even detract: It’s when fi ction doesn’t quite stand by itself that the reader, distracted, wanders in search of biographi-cal clues “I live in so many sentences,” Hempel has said The best of those—riveting in their precision—also take on new lives of their own

Ruth Franklin is the author of Shirley Jackson:

A Rather Haunted Life

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 35

C O V E R T O C O V E R

Becoming a Neurosurgeon

JOHN C OLAPINTO

SIMON & SCHUSTER

I’M HARDLY the

target audience for

Simon & Schuster’s

new Masters at Work

series, a collection

of slim books touted

as “the best virtual

internship you’ll ever

have” in your quest

for a vocation Nor

is a young medical student eyeing the arduous specialty of neurosurgery likely to

be a prime candidate for this particular entry in the first batch

of “narrative career guides.” Surely she’d

be too busy steeling

her nerves and honing her scalpel skills.

Except who can resist a chance to spy

on jobs they can’t really fathom? Watch- ing the chairman of Mount Sinai’s neuro- surgery department, Joshua Bederson, at work is a fascinating and informative—and awe- and cringe- inducing— experience

Peel back the scalp, drill through the skull, then probe and slice and suck away at tumors (“pebble-like growths,” mushy

sheaths, or anything in between): The enter- prise is so physical and so intricate, and

so fraught The tiniest slip in the mysterious labyrinth of the brain can spell disaster

John Colapinto, a

New Yorker staff writer,

drills down and probes very deftly himself

He has found an ideal subject in Bederson, who isn’t merely a virtuoso in the OR but also flouts the callous- egomaniac stereo- type of neurosurgeons

What a daunting

model to live up to!

We eavesdrop on one of Bederson’s chief residents, soon

to move on from Mount Sinai, as he does his last prep work for the master—parting

a patient’s hair and applying gel before exposing the “pearly jelly” of the brain “I’ll

be opening a shop,” he jokes “Doing similar stuff , just

barber-slightly less stressful.” Next up for me in the series: Kate Bolick’s

Becoming a Hair Stylist

— Ann Hulbert

SING TO IT:

NEW STORIES

AMY HEMPEL Scribner

The enigmatic celebrity death was of a piece with the life Under the pen name “L.E.L.,” Letitia Elizabeth Landon had been one of the most famous literary women of her brief pre-Victorian moment, her poetry a staple of the popular literary press for well over a decade A child of bourgeois- bohemian London, she had earned fame early on for her canny way of promising confessions that never quite materialized, lamenting all that she could not tell She was a performer whose alluring mystery— constant hints and half-revelations— was her call-ing card Was she the lovelorn maiden, virginal and yearning? The betrayed woman, experienced too soon? Was she sinner, victim, or the cynic playing

at both poses? Even her several portraits look like diff erent women

L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron” is the fi rst biography of Landon to explore

recent revelations about her life, and the literary critic Lucasta Miller’s sleuthing delivers an un-expected result The fi gure who emerges from her pages is not just a missing link in literary Romanti-cism, but a progenitor of something modern: Landon explored the art of performative self- creation in the commercial press—an art fated to become a habit in the social-media age—and she was one of the fi rst to pay its costs Neither sin-cere in a 19th-century sense nor confessional in

a 20th-century one, L.E.L.’s signature style was a curiously opaque self-obsession

She took the suff ering of love as her consistent theme, but wrote with fl uctuating tones One note was the genuineness of her longing:

Oh! say not, that for me more meet The revelry of youth;

Or that my wild heart cannot beat With deep devoted truth.

Yet this could be followed by:

He must be rich whom I could love, His fortune clear must be,

Whether in land or in the funds,

’Tis all the same to me.

These verses were published in the same magazine

on the same day in 1821, when she was 19 From the start, L.E.L projected a public form of femi-ninity by combining bold directness with a strange detachment Intimations of some dark experience lurked in her verse She seemed to crave public

T H E S T O R Y E N D E D in October 1838 in modern-day

Ghana, at Cape Coast Castle, a British commercial son and a former slave- trading post There, the recently married 36-year-old wife of the chief British official, George Maclean, was found by her maid dead on the

garri-fl oor of her dressing room, an empty prescription bottle

of highly toxic prussic acid in her hand Nearby, probably

in Accra, were the governor’s “country wife” and her several children; upon

the new wife’s arrival from the literary precincts of London, they had been

T H E A T L A N T I C A P R I L 2 0 1 9 37

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exposure and yet remained a cipher; hers was a

voice seeking to escape the claustro phobia of

sol-itude, yet prone to the agoraphobia that came of

total visibility No core self ever came into focus

This was a mode of public personality in

-separable from the commercial audience that

consumed it, and the interest of Miller’s biography

lies in watching a new form of self-presentation

being invented by an unheralded young woman

The story Miller tells suggests that this mutable

identity, scripted for mass consumption, was at its

origin bound up with female experience: Its

impe-tus, in L.E.L.’s pioneering case, was a distinctively

female secret, one that we can now join a small

group of Landon’s initial readers in knowing

S T A R T I N G I N 1 8 2 0 , Landon’s poetry

appeared in The Literary Gazette, one of a

new kind of magazine that emerged in the

aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars Less overtly

poli tical than their predecessors, these

publica-tions flaunted their voguish instincts and aimed at

mass readership They adopted a self- referential

stance of discussing the very notoriety they

spread; they offered an insider’s guide to what we

might now call celebrity culture and its secrets, in

a lightly mocking tone that hailed literary,

theatri-cal, and political notables with one hand while

knocking them down with the other

L.E.L.—revealed by an early editor’s note to be

“a lady yet in her teens”—presented an especially

fascinating mystery: How could a young female

adopt, with a precocious knowingness, the erotic

pessimism of late Romantics such as Byron, on

display in verses like these of 1823?

Twine not those red roses for me,—

Darker and sadder my wreath must be;

Mine is of flowers unkissed by the sun,

Flowers which died as the Spring begun

The blighted leaf and the cankered stem

Are what should form my diadem.

A voice like this invited both heartfelt identification

and prurient attention For readers of one kind

(gen-erally speaking, female and provincial), it conveyed

the drama of an inner life stifled by a lack of

expres-sive outlets Charlotte and Emily Brontë, in their

adolescence, were two such readers Other readers

(male, metropolitan) heard in the voice a code and

a come-on, the sly declarations of someone they

might meet, seduce, capture If the poet had

mys-teries, they could learn them; desires, they could

satisfy them Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the future

novelist, politician, colonial administrator, and peer,

was one of these He later remembered the craze of

speculation that L.E.L inspired: “Was she young?

Was she pretty? and—for there were some embryo

fortune- hunters among us—was she rich?”

Bulwer-Lytton, as it happened, ended up in don’s milieu and learned what would remain pub-licly unknown for generations to come: When the 20-year-old Landon wrote those lines in the spring

Lan-of 1823—her bankrupt father having absconded and

her family facing poverty— she was pregnant by The

Literary Gazette’s married edi tor, William Jerdan,

who had offered a financial lifeline by agreeing to publish her That secret was re discovered in 2000, when an American doctoral student named Cynthia Lawford revealed proof that Landon had given birth

to three children by Jerdan in the 1820s The dren had been given up, and went on to lead lives of varying degrees of obscurity in Australia, Trinidad, and Britain This was the shame the poetry hinted at The predatory Jerdan—Miller asserts that he fathered 23 children by multiple women—had tired

chil-of Landon by the early 1830s But he did so only after having acted as her banker as well as her edi-tor, appro priating much of her earnings in futile attempts to secure for himself an upper-bourgeois foothold He may even have leveraged Landon’s secret: Henry Colburn, Jerdan’s creditor and also

one of the Gazette’s owners, published in 1826 clever

allu sions to Landon’s pregnancies in other papers

he owned, stoking the gossip around which her poetry delicately maneuvered L.E.L was a prop-erty, and making that property pay depended on careful manip ulation of her hidden life

Continually hard up, Landon tried every kind

of commercial literary venture: not just poetry for magazines, but large amounts of verse for the newly popular “annuals”—luxe, kitschy illus trated

gift books, such as one called Fisher’s Drawing Room

Scrap Book She even wrote “silver fork” novels

about high-society life, such as 1831’s Romance and

Reality, a melodrama of hopeless love that leads her

young female protagonist from London drawing rooms to a Neapolitan convent and then to an early death Landon’s own health was poor, and her world was small by necessity Her doctor, for instance, was

the Gazette’s medical columnist, an arrangement

Jerdan may have made to reward him for his cretion As the new proprieties of the early Victo-rian period descended, the titillating knowledge of Landon’s private life turned to mockery and distaste

dis-in the very literary circles that had dis-initially fostered her celebrity Anonymous letters ended a brief 1835 engage ment to the law student and literary aspi-rant John Forster As Landon entered her 30s, the calculated ambiguity that had made her name now threatened to undo her

Finally, when the outsider Maclean entered her orbit in 1836, a network of friends and wealthy acquain tances colluded to marry her off and remove her to Africa Like everything else in Landon’s story, profit was a primary motive In dangling her before Maclean as a prospective famous spouse, one pivotal intermediary sought

L.E.L.: THE LOST LIFE AND SCANDALOUS DEATH OF LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON, THE CELEBRATED

“FEMALE BYRON”

LUCASTA MILLER Knopf

Was L.E.L

the lovelorn maiden, virginal and yearning?

The betrayed woman,

experienced too soon?