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2026年7月27日
4 动态 7 城市谈话
Ruth Marcus 谈特朗普对记者的针对；一个古老的时代；Julian Schnabel 的宫殿；吸血鬼访谈者；一名公关资深人士的另一个小圈子。
人物志
Stephania Taladrid 12 流亡中的反对派 玛丽亚·科里纳·马查多能否回国领导委内瑞拉？
来自田纳西州的来信 Charles Bethea 20 驱动力
一位父亲试图修复美国致命护栏的探索。
喧嚣与低语
Jesse Eisenberg 25 我给孩子做这次谈话
特派记者 David D. Kirkpatrick 26 赋能者
拜登政府如何为以色列的战争提供燃料。
素描本
Roz Chast 37 “记忆小巷”
艺术向上 Lauren Oyler 40 文艺复兴女性
Florentina Holzinger 挑衅性的表演。
小说
李明真 48 “测试”
评论家 特约评论员
Hilton Als 56 Peter Hujar 的肖像揭示了什么。
书籍
59 简评 Nikhil Krishnan 61 论语言灭绝与文化保护。
当代电影
Richard Brody 66 克里斯托弗·诺兰的《奥德赛》。
诗歌 Andrea Cohen 32 “死胡同” Paul Muldoon 44 “老鼠”
封面
Marcellus Hall “水疗之日”
插画 Edward Steed, Ellie Black, Julia Thomas, Asher Perlman, Jorge Penné, Joe Dator, Sofia Warren, Ken Levine, Matilda Borgström, Zachary Kanin, William Haefeli, P. C. Vey, Hartley Lin, Mick Stevens, Sarah Kempa 填充 Tim Boelaars
Stephania Taladrid（“流亡中的反对派”，第 12 页）为特约撰稿人。2023, 年，她入围了普利策奖国家报道类奖项的最终候选名单。
Charles Bethea（城市谈话，第 8 页；“驱动力”，第 20 页）是一名报道美国南部的职员记者，自 2008. 年起一直为本杂志撰稿。他居住在亚特兰大。
David D. Kirkpatrick（“赋能者”，第 26 页）是一名职员记者，著有关于阿拉伯之春的《落入士兵之手》。在《时报》担任记者期间，他曾三次分享普利策奖。
李明真（小说，第 48 页）将于 9 月出版小说《美国学院》。她的著作$\text{《pachinko》}$曾入围美国国家图书奖小说类最终候选名单。
Paul Muldoon（诗歌，第 44 页）在巴纳德学院任教。他的著作包括《塔戈尔路的服务之乐》。
Hilton Als（特约评论员，第 56 页）是一名职员记者，获得了 2017 年普利策奖评论类奖项。他的新书《我不记得了》将于明年出版。
Lauren Oyler（“文艺复兴女性”，第 40 页）是小说《虚假账户》和散文集《无评判》的作者。
Andrea Cohen（诗歌，第 32 页）是《糖》和《忧伤公寓》等书的作者。
Marcellus Hall（封面）为 Karla Kuskin 的儿童诗集《一只灰猫在徘徊》绘制插图，该书将于下月出版。
Jesse Eisenberg（喧嚣与低语，第 25 页）将于 12 月发行一部以音乐剧世界为背景的新电影《首演》。
Nikhil Krishnan（书籍，第 61 页）自 2022, 年起成为撰稿人，著有《极其严肃的冒险：1900-1960 年牛津的哲学与战争》。
Wyna Liu（谜题与游戏部门）是《时报》的谜题编辑，在那里负责编写游戏“Connections”。
来自英国的来信
幸运的 JOAQUIN
泥滩拾荒如何成为伦敦最热门的爱好 作者：Sam Knight
请在 $\text{《纽约者》}$ App 上阅读这篇仅限数字平台的报道，那是获取最新一期内容以及更多新闻、评论、批评和幽默内容的最佳去处。
伴奏乐队 Violators，他正潜入其深处。——Sheldon Pearce（布鲁克林参数剧院；7月23日。）
替代流行乐 | 在九十年代，托里·艾莫斯（Tori Amos）——一位在神童期待（她五岁时就是钢琴神童）以及一段失败的合成器流行乐队经历中幸存的人——证明了她的野心之大，足以让她加入一个时代的创意前卫阵营。她具有开创性的 1992 年首作《Little Earthquakes》引入了她犀利的视角，随后这位创作型歌手在漫长且充满冒险的职业生涯中，继续跨越替代摇滚、巴洛克流行乐等多种风格，其中包括争议极大、受死藤壶药剂启发而创作的《Boys for Pele》（1996）以及回归原声的《Unrepentant Geraldines》（2014）。她的最新唱片《In Times of Dragons》同样大胆，正视对美国民主的威胁；艾莫斯与巴蒂斯·斯特兰奇（Bartees Strange）同台演出，后者在政治上是她的志同道合者，其奇幻的音乐同样具有突破边界的力量。—S.P.（灯塔剧院；7月 24-25日。）
2026年7月 22 – 28日
本周我们关注、聆听及参与的活动。
委内瑞拉导演洛雷娜·阿尔瓦拉多（Lorena Alvarado）的真实家庭生活是其首部长篇电影《Lost Chapters》的基础，这是一部抒情且跨越多代人的虚构作品。二十五岁的作家埃娜（Ena，由导演的妹妹 Ena Alvarado 饰演）回到家乡加拉加斯，探望她的父亲伊格纳西奥（Ignacio，由导演的父亲 Ignacio Alvarado 饰演），一名书商兼收藏家。他与年迈的母亲（阿德拉·罗德里格斯 Adela Rodríguez，阿尔瓦拉多的祖母）同住，后者的记忆力正在衰退。在得知一本 1912, 年的罕见小说后，伊格纳西奥试图寻找它，而埃娜则将这部难以寻觅的巨著作为她自己的纪实虚构小说的基础。父女俩通过寻书和调研之旅重新建立了联系；在诗歌朗诵中温柔的重逢，将文学激情、家庭纽带与电影的优雅融为一体。—理查德·布罗迪（Richard Brody）（7月 24 日在 IFC 中心开幕。）
舞蹈 | 在法国，雨果·马尚（Hugo Marchand）是一位我们在这里极少见到的芭蕾超级巨星。他走时装秀 T 台，出现在脱口秀节目中，采访者对他极尽谄媚。他同时也是一位极出色的舞者，拥有蜿蜒的优雅感，并对角色投入极大的专注。在“中心艺术家”（Artists at the Center）之夜，由马尚挑选的一系列舞蹈节目中，他表演了由莫里斯·贝贾尔（Maurice Béjart）创作的一段著名的、夸张的桌面舞独舞——《Boléro》，配乐为拉威尔的同名曲目。马尚还与同样迷人的多萝西·吉尔伯特（Dorothée Gilbert）表演了一段颇具梦幻色彩的双人舞——由安热林·普雷若卡（Angelin Preljocaj）创作的《Le Parc》；此外，他还与另一位法国之星莱奥诺尔·鲍拉克（Léonore Baulac）共同表演了由荷兰编舞家汉斯·范·马嫩（Hans van Manen）创作、配乐为萨蒂（Satie）的另一部作品。—玛丽娜·哈斯（Marina Harss）（纽约市中心；7月 23-26日。）
艺术 | 风格多元的艺术家保罗·塞克（Paul Thek, 1933-88）是安德鲁·达宾（Andrew Durbin）的一本优秀著作《那几乎存在过的奇妙世界：彼得·胡贾尔与保罗·塞克的一生》（The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek）的主题，同时也是目前在布赫霍尔茨画廊（Galerie Buchholz，展至 7月 25日）和佩斯画廊（Pace，展至 8月 14日）举办的两场展览的主角。塞克尝试多种风格的创作使艺术市场感到困惑——除了绘画和雕塑，他还设计舞台布景，并将自己的身体作为客体——他很难被归类，而这其实是一件好事。但塞克对景观的迷恋——他 1964, 年创作的、受帕勒莫卡普钦地下墓穴中木乃伊尸体启发的耐人寻味之作《红色祭坛》（Red Shrine）目前正在佩斯画廊展出——对于他作为一名艺术家而言，并不一定是有利的，同样不利的是他对那些相信他的策展人和画廊商的抵触：他本可以从精炼和编辑中获益。—希尔顿·阿尔斯（Hilton Als）
城市指南
电影 | 由黎巴嫩导演西里尔·阿里斯（Cyril Aris）执导的喜剧剧情片《一个悲伤而美丽的世界》（A Sad and Beautiful World），将一对年轻情侣的浪漫宿命与该国的政治和社会苦难交织在一起。雅斯敏娜（Yasmina）和尼诺（Nino）在贝鲁特同一家医院相隔一分钟出生，成为了青梅竹马但随后失去了联系；成年后，他们通过一次虽小但极其壮观的离奇车祸而重新建立联系。言辞犀利的雅斯敏娜（穆尼娅·阿克尔 饰）是一名商业顾问，父母已离婚；而幽默乐观的尼诺（哈桑·阿基尔 饰）则是一名餐厅经营者，幼年时成为孤儿。他们建立关系并组建家庭的努力，在战争、公民冲突和经济灾难的冲击下被推向了崩溃的边缘。这个跨越数十年的故事以素描般的轶事形式讲述，突出了机智且热烈的表演，既感伤且温柔，又清醒且忧郁。——理查德·布罗迪（Richard Brody）（7月24日在Quad Cinema上映。）
外百老汇 | 正如机智的现代主义者格特鲁德·斯泰因（Gertrude Stein）曾评论的那样，评论“不是文学”。然而，在埃里克·本特利（Eric Bentley）1972年的纪录剧作《你现在或曾经是否》（Are You Now or Have You Ever Been）中，那些被卷入20世纪中期美国反共大清洗的好莱坞演员、作家和导演的证词，被编织成一张揭露真相的挂毯，呈现出意想不到的戏剧效果。在安娜·D·夏皮罗（Anna D. Shapiro）的精湛执导下，该剧在转场之间灵活切换：从美国众议院非美活动委员会主席（由迈克尔·麦基恩 Michael McKean 饰演，采用轮换演员制）的权威口吻，到伊利亚·卡赞（Elia Kazan，弗雷德里克·韦勒 Frederick Weller 饰）咄咄逼人的自我辩护，再到杰罗姆·罗宾斯（Jerome Robbins，史蒂文·波耶 Steven Boyer 饰）对名单的行政式宣读。保罗·罗伯逊（Paul Robeson，比利·尤金·琼斯 Billy Eugene Jones 饰）因拒绝供出其他涉嫌颠覆活动的分子，赋予了这部作品最清晰的道德之声。——罗达·冯（Rhoda Feng）（City Center Stage I；展出至9月11日。）
独立摇滚 | 歌手及多乐器演奏家库尔特·维尔（Kurt Vile）在费城通过制作低保真（Lo-fi）家庭录音开启了他的职业生涯，因此，他像是在创作绝笔之作般完成的这张专辑，恰如其分地成为了向这座“兄弟之爱之城”致敬的作品。今年5月发行的《费城对我很好》（Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me）大部分为自产，具有一种朦胧的时空感，恰好对应了他的音乐风格在多年间逐渐扩展的方式。自2008年离开药物战争（the War on Drugs）乐队以来，维尔成为了迷幻吉他音乐的个人化身，他丰富的作品集风格悠闲且随兴，但同时也具有发散性。在他的
COURTESY SEVERAL FUTURES
4 $\text{《纽约者》}$，2026年7月27日
三选一
阿曼达·佩特鲁西奇（Amanda Petrusich）谈感恩死带（Grateful Dead）的周边纪念品。
一部关于感恩死带（以及该乐队后期的迭代版本 Dead & Co.）那些以狂热和游牧式追随著称的粉丝的新纪录片《夏季巡演》（Summer Tour）本周首播。这是一个令人心振的提醒：尽管我们消费和分享音乐的方式发生了巨大变化，但在现实生活中，依然有充满活力的真实场景在展开。虽然我不敢自称是该乐队的学者（我会把这交给感恩死带研究协会），但以下是三件能给我带来极大快乐的与 Dead 相关的物品。
TABLES FOR TWO 推荐一些极佳且不为人知的餐厅。如果说 Houseman 的食物是精致乡野且带有一丝狂野，那么 Zoli 的菜单则更繁复，挑战性也稍高，而其通过在每一处细节中提供愉悦感，使其大胆的实验性尝试得到了回报。冷浸出汁油醋汁配上新鲜清脆的黄瓜叶，巧妙地演绎了菠菜浸物（spinach ohitashi）。清炒百合笋带有芦笋般的淡淡叶绿素脆感，与苦苣一同拌入加了鳀鱼的油醋汁中。冷鲜海鲜方面也有迷人的尝试，包括口感极佳、富有弹性的surf clam（surf clam），被切成刺身般的薄片，搭配酸甜的酸惹酱（tamarind dressing）。在主菜中，菜单的顽皮感略有减弱，但我很喜欢那道比目鱼柳，淋上带有Lovage香气的奶油酱，其中点缀着色泽与大小不一的鱼子；而一整条剖背黑鲈鱼搭配大蒜味巴斯克 pil-pil 酱，则成了一个极具吸引力的中心菜肴。
1
Zoli 312 Maujer St., Brooklyn
理查德·奥尔尼（Richard Olney），这位伟大的美国美食作家和法迷，并不真正相信食谱，但他对食材有着近乎偏执的追求：在一年中最好的时节选择最好的肉类和农产品。他对沙拉最为挑剔，在他的食谱和回忆录中，用了好几页篇幅进行近乎哲学式的指导。然而我敢肯定，这位极其古怪的男人一定会爱上 Zoli 餐厅的奥尔尼沙拉（Olney salad），这家餐厅位于东威廉斯堡（East Williamsburg）：那是堆积如山、不断变换的绿植，像羽绒被一样蓬松，拌入完美顺滑且带有微咸口感的油醋汁中。
Zoli 是 Amant 园区的一部分，Amant 是由艺术收藏家兼 MOMA 托管人 Lonti Ebers 建立的一个庞大的当代艺术综合体。该空间于 2021, 年开放，在艺术界引起了关注，但在其他领域则相对默默无闻，但 Zoli 让那些不关注画廊动态的人也开始注意到这里。室内的设计在工业粗野主义与世纪中叶的简洁风之间取得了平衡，并且不知怎么地避开了两者的预见性。餐厅与酒吧由 Pierre Huyghe 设计的一个水族馆装置隔开——里面浑浊且布满岩石，偶尔有挥动触角的甲壳类动物穿行——这为原本阳光明媚的室内增添了一抹末日将至的冷峻感。
Zoli 与艺术界的联系使其不可避免地被拿来与 Marcel 进行比较，后者是位于上东区 Breuer 建筑内、坐落在苏富比总部的一家奢华新餐厅。但如果说 Marcel 是一座奢华的大教堂，那么 Zoli 似乎主要对俏皮的探索感兴趣。（Ebers 曾说，这家餐厅是以她心爱的、完全虚构的爱犬命名的。）你可以在甜点中品尝到这一点：一款加入了发酵黑蒜的巧克力分层蛋糕，口感类似于在黄油糖酱中搅拌入的味噌；以及一款加入了新鲜 Taleggio 奶酪碎的轻盈芝士蛋糕。虽然古怪，但效果极佳。（菜品价格 $10-$65。）
摄影：NICO SCHINCO 为《纽约者》拍摄（上图）；
插图：NOLAN PELLETIER（下图）
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厨房属于 Houseman 的主厨 Ned Baldwin，他是曼哈顿——
获取 Helen Rosner 评论的扩展版本，以及早日发送至您收件箱的 Goings On 栏目。
—Helen Rosner
国家安全。$\text{《时报》}$（The Times）拒绝配合。两天后，三名记者收到传票，要求他们出席在曼哈顿举行的联邦大陪审团听证会。$\text{《时报》}$随后报道称，白宫已指示 F.B.I. 局长卡什·帕特尔（Kash Patel）监督一项针对泄密事件的调查，且在传票发出当天，帕特尔一直蜷缩在白宫中——而这里并非执法行动的常规地点。$\text{《时报》}$在一份请求公开的密封文件中申请撤销传票，称这些传票是“出于恶意，旨在惩罚$\text{《时报》}$的报道”。
周三。“我们想问他们的问题是，谁向他们提供了机密国家安全信息。”这几乎无法提供任何安慰。如果记者不能向其消息来源保证机密性，他们获取信息的渠道将会枯竭。这种风险无处不在，但在当前时刻尤为突出——此时报道政府内部运作比以往任何时候都更关键，而政府官员似乎决心封闭所有未经官方认可的信息渠道。正如$\text{《时报》}$执行主编约瑟夫·卡恩（Joseph Kahn）在一段视频中所解释的：“在民主制度中，独立新闻媒体所做的最重要的事情，莫过于全面且公正地报道公职人员如何保护国家安全以及如何使用纳税人的资金。” 据报道，特朗普对“空军一号”泄密事件感到愤怒，他担心的是安全风险，还是担心因为一件耗费纳税人数千万美元升级的疑点重重的礼物而导致的个人尴尬？
受威胁的评论 (COMMENT UNDER THREAT)
多年来，无论是在任还是离任，唐纳德·特朗普都毫不掩饰他希望看到记者入狱的愿望。这位总统的幻想有时会带有一种令人不快且露骨的基调。在 2022 年中期选举期间为共和党候选人助选时，特朗普抨击了最高法院关于 Dobbs（这一具有里程碑意义的堕胎案）草拟意见书的泄露事件，并概述了他认为识别来源的理想方法：“记者去坐牢。当那个记者得知他将在两天后与一名极其强悍、强硬且凶狠的囚犯结婚时，他或她会说：‘我想我要把信息告诉你了。泄密者就在这，赶紧让我滚出这里。’”今年 4 月，在有报道称一名在美国被伊朗击落的战斗机中失踪的机组人员后，特朗普誓言向媒体提供信息的人将很快被揭发：“我们将前往发布该信息的媒体公司，我们会说：‘涉及国家安全。交出来，否则就坐牢。’”
司法部将这些传票描述为一项温和的举措。“我们的目标不是记者。他们是关键证人，就像记者会成为一场车祸的关键证人一样，”代理总检察长托德·布兰奇（Todd Blanche）在确认听证会上说道。
在对待媒体方面，特朗普似乎正从 2016 年大选期间开始的那些令人不安的辞令（如“人渣”、“美国人民的敌人”）转向他承诺已久的攻击。他继续提起一系列诽谤诉讼——一些新闻机构选择屈服，以免危及计划中的合并或广播许可。特朗普现在还利用刑事法律程序来恐吓和惩罚。在 1 月 14 日的凌晨，联邦调查局（F.B.I.）特工抵达了《华盛顿邮报》记者汉娜·纳坦森（Hannah Natanson）的家中，并没收了她的电脑和电话，这是对一名被指控保留机密信息的政府承包商进行调查的一部分。到目前为止，法官们已经阻止了司法部在没有监管的情况下访问纳坦森设备的尝试。近几个月来，该部门在国家安全案件中向《华盛顿邮报》和《华尔街日报》的记者发出传票。在新闻机构提出挑战后，这些传票被撤回。媒体律师担心，政府可能会采取一项“核选项”：利用《间谍法》起诉发布机密信息的记者本人。新闻自由记者委员会主席布鲁斯·布朗（Bruce Brown）告诉我：“除非根据《间谍法》起诉记者，否则‘升级’这个词已经没有任何意义了。现在完全是肆意猎杀的时间。”
没有人入狱，但特朗普又抓住另一个机会威胁记者。本月早些时候，《时报》报道称，由于卡塔尔人赠送给他的新空军一号涉嫌缺乏反导弹能力，他在从土耳其北约峰会返回途中的一部分航程中被迫放弃使用该机。（特朗普曾声称，他乘坐之前的那架空军一号进行最后一次飞行是“为了怀旧”。）据《时报》报道，一名联邦调查局高级官员要求该报暂缓报道，理由是该报道涉及“与刑事调查相关的问题”，最高法院在 1972 年的一项裁决中曾如此表述，尽管该裁决在政府从事骚扰或恶意行为的情况下保留了提供保护的可能性，而《时报》现在声称政府正是如此。
[[IMG_XXXX]] 插图：CRISTIANA COUCEIRO； 照片来源：GETTY
在过去涉及国家安全泄密的案件中，两个政党的政府都曾传唤记者在大陪审团面前作证，但这极少发生，且仅作为最后手段。记者委员会的盖布·罗特曼（Gabe Rottman）告诉我，他统计到自 2000. 以来仅有三起此类实例。最初于 1970, 年制定的司法部条例规定，仅当政府寻求的信息为“至关重要”，且已采取“所有合理尝试”从其他渠道获取该信息时，才能传唤记者。但对于一个决定无视这些保护措施的政府来说，这些保护是虚幻的；它们在法院中无法强制执行。法院关于记者特权的裁决并不乐观。“新闻工作者并不免于在大陪审团面前出庭并回答的常规职责。
《时报》的记者近期被关进监狱的可能性似乎不大；法官不太可能在法律程序的这么早阶段就下达如此极端的指令。但如果政府坚持认为强迫记者作证是其唯一选择，目前尚不清楚会发生什么。同样令人担忧的是，尽管《时报》拥有抵御这种压力的资源和勇气，但其他新闻机构可能并非如此。这些媒体可能会对追踪那些可能使其成为政府攻击目标的报道产生顾虑。当然，这种寒蝉效应正是特朗普所追求的。
——露丝·马库斯（Ruth Marcus）
唐纳德·特朗普（“几周前我还和他一起在他桌上吃虾，”库克脱口而出），他正专注于国家首都：更多的拱门和纪念碑，更庞大的设施。正是库克的委托批准了那个九万平方英尺的白宫舞厅计划，一位著名的建筑评论家在《时报》中将其描述为“一个巨大的、愚蠢的盒子”。
美国文化部长。”在一次参议院听证会上，国务卿马可·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）表示，他“不知道”有美国代表团参加该论坛；近十年来没有代表参加。然而，库克坚持认为，“国务院促使我去。这完全是围绕我设计的。”他暗示，他的任务是软外交。他回忆起一名国务院官员告诉他，“很多处于你这个位置的人会说，‘这相当危险’。”拥有俄罗斯国籍十年的演员史蒂文·赛古尔（Steven Seagal）出席了会议，极右翼播客主坎代斯·欧文斯（Candace Owens）也出席了，尽管他们的座位没有库克的好。“我的六个国务院随员让我坐在第一排正中央，”他说。他补充道，“我要求并得到了可口可乐——那里目前不销售。”（可口可乐在 2022, 年暂停了与俄罗斯的业务往来，但该汽水通过其他国家进口。）
扬基涂鸦部门。拱门之辈
odney Mims Cook, Jr.，美国美术委员会（United States Commission of Fine Arts）主席、亚特兰大古老名门、查尔斯国王的亲友以及一名毫不掩饰的俄罗斯迷，最近在亚特兰大市中心一座仿古罗马凯旋门内邀请了五十名嘉宾，共同欣赏由俄罗斯小提琴家兼文化部副部长米哈伊尔·西莫尼扬（Mikhail Simonyan）带来的私人演出。演出前一小时，居住在西伯利亚的西莫尼扬走进了库克位于千禧门博物馆（Millennium Gate Museum）顶层的办公室——这座奇特的拱门便以此命名。他走过一张张库克与各国元首的合影，寻找可以吃的东西。“这儿有牛排吗？”他问道。
库克是一位面色红润的七十岁老人，老花镜摇摇欲坠地架在鼻尖上。他指引着被他称为“世界顶尖天才之一”的西莫尼扬前往一楼。库克在二十年前建造了这座拱门，当时在美国复兴古典主义建筑还被认为是一个古怪的想法。而现在，这已成为一项正式计划。在好友
“白宫从哈里森总统时期起就一直不够完备，”库克随后在拱门一楼的鸡尾酒招待会上宣布。出席者中包括一位记录佐治亚州瀑布的编年史作者、两名小理查德（Little Richard）乐队的资深成员、一名退休的俄罗斯 NHL 球员，以及一群来自亚特兰大乡村俱乐部社交圈的人。库克继续说道：“特朗普正在修复它，而我在帮忙。”他补充道：“我向你们保证，你可以到处涂成金色，但之后也可以将其调低。只要比例正确——而现在确实正确——这个男人将为我们留下如此惊人的美学遗产！”
库克认为美丽的另一件事是俄罗斯古典建筑。他在北亚特兰大建造了一座带有塔楼的大型达恰（dacha）度假屋，他说那是“采用俄罗斯木构民居风格”而建。六月，他在圣彼得堡国际经济论坛上展示了那里的照片。这次会议被誉为“普京的达沃斯”，库克表示他是以“基本上是，the
在一次录像问答环节中，库克起身向普京致辞。“我对回到圣彼得堡后所获得的全部热情款待深表感谢，”他说。“我热爱这座城市，我想您知道这一点。”
“太好了，我也热爱圣彼得堡，”普京透过翻译回答道，神情显得颇为有趣。
库克回忆道，国务院对他与俄罗斯领导人之间礼貌的对话感到“震惊但欣慰”，并且
他说最近。于是，他前往那里，伫立在这些作品面前：斯克罗威尼礼拜堂（Cappella degli Scrovegni）里的乔托（Giotto）壁画，阿雷佐（Arezzo）里的皮耶罗·德拉·弗朗切斯卡（Piero della Francesca）画作，一些杜乔（Duccio）的作品，以及一些卡拉瓦乔（Caravaggio）的作品。他喜欢这些艺术，也喜欢意大利人。“在美国，每个人都认识亚伯拉罕·林肯，”他说。“在意大利，每个人都认识卡拉瓦乔。”他留了下来，卖掉了一些画作。那是 1976 年。意大利经常在他的脑海中浮现。今年，Netflix发行了他的电影《在但丁之手》（In the Hand of Dante，指但丁·阿利吉耶里），Pace 画廊正在举办他描绘意大利石松树的绘画展。
画成平面，这很不寻常。例如——迈克尔，给我那个长柄刷。”助手迈克尔给了他一个长柄刷。“看到那些圆点了吗？就是我这么画的。”他用力戳着，就像清洁工拿着扫帚戳醉汉一样。透过树枝看到的天空颜色极其迷人。
还包括他放在特朗普总统办公桌上的一枚冰球，作为普京表达好意的礼品。（库克是亲自取得这枚冰球的，但他不愿透露从何而来。）库克说，西莫尼扬的到访是来自俄罗斯的谢意。
当这位小提琴家开始在这座伪拱门中演奏时，他还没吃上牛排。他以勃拉姆斯的曲目开场，随后是柴可夫斯基和拉赫玛尼诺夫，最后以一首通常被认为是由一名旨在嘲讽美国殖民地人的 18 世纪英国陆军外科医生创作的曲子结尾。观众在认出《扬基 Doodle the Dandy》的旋律时发出了笑声。
在工人们打包时，施纳贝尔（Schnabel）审视着一个新开展览的照片。另一名助手递给他一本目录，并将印有宣传文案的塑料包装纸揉成一团。“你就这么把它揉了？”施纳贝尔说，“请把它给我。”他将其展开并读道：“‘在过去的五个十年里，朱利安·施纳贝尔一直在探索绘画的方式。从最初的蜡画和盘画，到最近的作品，他为塑造一个开放的标记语言贡献了力量……’”读完后他说道：“总之，把它扔了太可惜了。”
施纳贝尔此时正处于他位于西村（West Village）的帕拉佐·丘皮（Palazzo Chupi）内部的工作室里，那是他的一栋威尼斯风格的粉色建筑。他穿着拖鞋和溅满油漆的连体工作服，衣服没有扣扣子，胸毛在外面地蓬起。一支工作组正准备将他的画作打包发送至画廊。“想从这张开始吗？”一名工人问道。
“我想要的是《魔鬼来到乔治亚》，”后来一名唯一的异议者说道。
库克（Cook）听到音乐时眼眶湿润了。回到办公室后，他告诉一名实习生去点比萨。在等待晚餐时，西蒙尼安（Simonyan）与小理查德（Little Richard）的乐队成员肖恩·（“迅疾”）·约翰逊（Shawn (Swift) Johnson）和詹姆斯·（“大J”）·尼尔森（James (Big J) Nelson）坐在沙发上，两人都戴着太阳镜。他们此行是为了向库克推介在乔治亚州梅肯市为这位已故摇滚传奇人物建立一座雕像的计划。“任何与纪念碑相关的事情，他就是最佳人选，”约翰逊说道。
施纳贝尔想吃午餐，于是他走上楼前往自己的公寓。帕拉佐·丘皮共有 12 层楼并带有一个泳池。施纳贝尔在 2007. 年将其建在一座旧香水厂之上。为了筹集资金，他卖掉了一幅毕加索的作品。由于它是粉色的、高耸的，且是一座宫殿（一名评论家将其描述为“爆炸版的马里布芭比之家”），它引发了争议。施纳贝尔出售了部分单元——理查德·基尔（Richard Gere）买了一个——并保留了部分。在走上去的途中，他进行了引导参观。在卧室里：“我第一幅盘画，创作于 1978 年。”在一个放有两架大钢琴、一台普拉提机和一只标本的房间里。
“不，我站在这里是因为我想从那一张开始，”施纳贝尔说。谈到那些画作时，他说：“我当时住在罗马，靠近博尔盖塞别墅（Villa Borghese），那里有这些树。我也去过西西里，在特拉帕尼（Trapani）和圣维托洛卡波（San Vito Lo Capo）拍摄。我们在塔尔奎尼亚（Tarquinia）拍摄。我们在布拉恰诺（Bracciano）、威尼斯、维罗纳、帕多瓦拍摄。整个系列叫作《透过树木看意大利》。”
酒杯时，西蒙尼安向约翰逊和尼尔森推介了他自己的一个想法。“你们知道我们需要什么吗？”他说，“在美国大使官邸举行一场大型和平音乐会。然后去西伯利亚的一些体育场。”
他曾在破碎的盘子上或旧地图上绘画。他指向地板上的一幅盘画。“这是我在蒙托克（Montauk）的户外工作室画的，”他说。“我
“我从未去过俄罗斯，”尼尔森说。“我们会带上整个乐队。就像 Live Aid 一样。”他们考虑还有谁可能会加入。
“史蒂文·塞加尔（Steven Seagal）会弹吉他，”西蒙尼安说。“他其实相当不错。”
1——查尔斯·贝西亚（Charles Bethea）
图像标记-制作
ulian Schnabel 在五十年前第一次前往意大利。“当我在上大学时，我一直在看这些艺术史书籍，然后我想，除非你亲自去那里，站在这些作品面前，否则你根本无法了解关于这些作品的任何事情，”
bear：“安迪·沃霍尔画的我。”在一个有雕塑的门厅里：“雕塑。”
“《刑事意图》 (Criminal Intent)。”“当然，还有《谈话广播》 (Talk Radio)”——他在这部 1987 年获普利策奖提名的剧作及其由奥利弗·斯通导演的电影改编版中担任主演。“太棒了，非常有戏剧性。那么还剩下什么？噢，我想演一个吸血鬼。”在芝加哥，他去了邦尼的地方，“那时有一个电话在等我，就是邀请我出演《吸血鬼》。”又中了一次彩票。
这段文字非常壮观，”施纳贝尔说道。他拿出手机，朗读了一段很长的文字。结尾写道：“生命究竟意味着什么，在经历了所有的艰辛和粗砺之后，这一切究竟是为了什么？它的救赎之光在哪里？这一切在这里得到了如此深刻的探讨，而且融合了《好家伙》(Goodfellas)、《失乐园》(Paradise Lost) 和《爱的故事》(Love Story) 的风格。无论我饰演这个角色的情况如何，你已经创造出了一部杰作。”施纳贝尔揉了揉小天使的头像。“当我收到这个时，我写道：‘写得非常优美的信息。我想我们可以合作。’”
在厨房里，施纳贝尔坐在一把巨大的木椅上，扶手上雕刻着小天使。他吃着一个金枪鱼三明治，喝着燕麦奶。“我是通过看意大利电影学习意大利语的，”他解释道。“马可·费雷里 (Marco Ferreri) 的《最后的女人》(L’Ultima Donna)，在那部电影里，杰拉尔·德帕迪欧 (Gérard Depardieu) 用电动刀切掉了自己的阴茎。我在法国 巴黎 看了贝托鲁奇的《第二幕》(Atto Due)——《九百年代》(Novecento) 的第二部分，那是意大利语的，带法语字幕。我不懂法语，也不懂意大利语。这些年来，我与贝尔纳多·贝托鲁奇 (Bernardo Bertolucci) 成为了非常好的朋友。当我见到贝尔纳多时，我向他哼唱了《九百年代》的配乐，他立刻就被打动了。”
正如在近期《未切割原石》(Uncut Gems) 和《继承之战》(Succession) 的角色中一样，博戈西安 (Bogosian) 充分利用了不加掩饰的直率和犀利的凝视；黄色的吸血鬼之眼仅稍微增强了这一点。“我在七十年代这本书出版时读过。我很喜欢，”他说。“1977 年左右，我在百老汇看到了弗兰克·兰杰拉 (Frank Langella) 饰演的德古拉。他太强大了。我不知道在这个剧中我是否能成为那种类型的吸血鬼。”其他人做到了，“比如本·丹尼尔斯 (Ben Daniels)，在第二季的‘吸血鬼剧场’中”——一位风度翩翩的巴黎坎普风剧场表演的主持人，而这场表演掩盖了一个女巫集会的现场吸血行为。“那是我的幻想。这一季我的角色有点不确定。我有那么几个瞬间——我实际上杀了几个人，或者咬了人们。”在其中一场戏中，他在更衣室里咬一个人时，突然被惊吓地抬起头。“就像你惊扰了一只在翻垃圾桶的浣熊，”他说。换句话说，并不优雅——“更像是古怪。”（他饰演的吸血鬼还穿着一件皮夹克，并大喊诸如“我听说屁股层有派对！”之类的话。）
1—扎克·赫尔方德 (Zach Helfand)
新新闻系 VAMPIRE MOMENTS
施纳贝尔的儿子维托 (Vito，如同柯里昂家族) 是《在但丁之手》(In the Hand of Dante) 的制片人，马丁·斯科塞斯 (Martin Scorsese) 是执行制片人。主演包括奥斯卡·艾萨克 (Oscar Isaac)、盖尔·加朵 (Gal Gadot)、杰拉德·巴特勒 (Gerard Butler)、萨布丽娜·因帕恰托雷 (Sabrina Impacciatore)、杰森·莫莫阿 (Jason Momoa) 和约翰·马尔科维奇 (John Malkovich)。影片长两小时三十分钟，并穿插黑白画面。“投资这部电影的人希望我把它拍成两小时，全彩的。但马蒂喜欢它，演员们也喜欢它，”施纳贝尔继续说道。“他们怎么想的，以为我在拍一部该死的漫威电影吗？”
最近，七十三岁的演员兼剧作家埃里克·博格森（Eric Bogosian）正地在他在翠贝卡（Tribeca）那间阳光充足、摆满仙人掌的办公室里放松。博格森在AMC改编自安妮·赖斯（Anne Rice）的《吸血鬼访谈》（Interview with the Vampire）中饰演访谈者，他身材精瘦，带着一种随和的神经质；无论在银幕内还是银幕外，他似乎总是在紧迫地寻找答案。办公室里充满了生活气息——有熏香、沙发、艺术品、厨房和书籍。“这是镇上最有趣的地方，”他说。博格森和他的妻子、导演乔·邦尼（Jo Bonney）就住在同一栋楼里。在儿子们还小的时候，他买了一个极小的第二单元用来写作。后来，一名邻居想把那个单元并入自己的空间用来放钢琴，作为交换，博格森得到了现在这个——一个可以俯瞰曼哈顿下城的单卧室转角公寓。“我的人生中总能中奖，”他说，“除此之外我也解释不了。”他倒了一杯水，坐下来聊起了吸血鬼。
斯科塞斯在电影中饰演一名神秘的犹太人。阿尔·帕西诺（Al Pacino）也有戏份。“我是通过戴安·基顿（Diane Keaton）认识阿尔的，”施纳贝尔（Schnabel）说。“戴安告诉我：‘无论你做什么，千万别在他面前演你那套托尼·蒙塔纳（Tony Montana）的戏码。’”结果他还是演了。 “阿尔只是说：‘没关系，我们永远是朋友。’”
他带领我参观了一圈：他剧作的黑白照片，包括在公共剧院（Public）上演的《谈话广播》（Talk Radio）（“乔·帕普（Joe Papp）在某种程度上收养了我”）；一座来自柏林国际电影节的银熊奖（“我想我应该给它抛个光”）；摇滚纪念品（“AC/DC是我最喜欢的乐队”）；一张《出租车司机》（Taxi Driver）的海报，他用手指关节亲切地敲了敲（“我的第二个孩子是以特拉维斯·比克尔（Travis Bickle）命名的——我告诉了德尼罗（De Niro），他真的不知道该说什么”）。他打开了一扇门，里面是一个图书馆兼健身房。“这里大约是我为我的书所做的研究的一半，那是一个关于一群杀害亚美尼亚种族灭绝领导者的刺客的真实故事，”他说。“所以我最后不得不读所有这些破玩意儿。”这花了他的七年时间。“我他妈的怎么知道自己在做什么？但不管怎样，我写了这本学术书。”
几位演员饰演了多个角色。巴特勒（Butler）饰演一名杀手和教皇。“我把剧本发给了他，他回信给我一个
在该系列的最新一集中，名为《吸血鬼莱斯特》（The Vampire Lestat），博格森的角色也变成了一个吸血鬼。“这是一个梦想成真，”他说。他回忆道，2022 年，他当时正飞往芝加哥去看邦尼的一场戏。“在飞机上，我只是在沉思，”他说。“我想，是的，我想做的事情我已经做了很多。我在史蒂文·西格尔（Steven Seagal）的电影里演过坏蛋。我演了很多集《法律与秩序》（Law & Order），在任何一个场景里我都没有微笑过”——总共六十一集，饰演一名警察局长，在
[[IMG_XXXX]] 插画：JOÃO FAZENDA
博格森在马萨诸塞州沃特敦（Watertown, Massachu-）的一个亚美尼亚社区长大，
然后是在附近的一个郊区。有些人可以用笑话让他们笑出来，这样他们的真实想法和痛苦才会流露。第一次发生这种情况是一个叫亚伯（Abe）的孩子，当时他十七岁。我们打乒乓球。我当时还在演艺圈，所以我满脑子都是俏皮话。他威胁说要笑几次，然后他真的笑了。然后他开始好转。”
圆圈。极少数纽约人能拥有两个截然不同的社交圈。大卫·罗滕伯格（David Rothenberg）就是其中之一，九十二岁的他最近在 54 Below 首次尝试担任脱口秀演员。
围绕罗滕伯格的一个圈子是由演艺圈资深人士组成的，就像他在 WBAI 周六早晨的广播节目中采访的那样；另一个圈子则是由前服刑人员组成的，这些人将他视为
罗滕伯格曾考虑用一个笑话来开场，但他知道这个笑话很可能会让观众感到困惑。他计划说：“这就是诺曼·梅因（Norman Maine）先生，”这是对 1954 年电影《星之诞生》（A Star Is Born）最后一句台词的改编。在电影中，朱迪·嘉兰（Judy Garland）宣布，尽管她是电影明星薇琪·莱斯特（Vicki Lester），但她真正的忠诚属于她的丈夫诺曼，而诺曼刚刚自杀溺亡。罗滕伯格的笑料则是宣布诺曼·梅因先生伪造了自己的死亡，是为了逃离嘉兰。
在最近的一次日场演出前，54 Below 坐满了明星（克里斯汀·埃伯索尔 [Christine Ebersole] 为演出开场）以及许多财富协会圈子里的成员。（纽约市惩教局新任局长斯坦利·理查兹 [Stanley Richards] 本身就是前囚犯，也是财富协会的成员。）
“是什么让我想要这么做？”罗森堡在后台问道。“那是我个人的‘沃尔特·米蒂’时刻！现在还有人知道沃尔特·米蒂是谁吗？”（正如一个警觉的九十二岁老人的对话那样，他的话语中不时穿插着这样的疑问：他刚刚提到的那个恰当的引用，对于目前还活着的人来说是否依然恰当。）“我一直很喜欢能让别人开心的人，”他继续说道，“我的希尔达（Hilda）姑姑是我让我相信自己的人，她第一次带我出门
埃里克·博格西安（Eric Bogosian）
他的祖辈中有些人是在种族灭绝前移民的；另一些人则勉强逃离。“我母亲的父亲在村庄被焚烧时逃了出来，并把他的母亲带离了那种地狱般的事情。我们是一个典型的移民式家庭”——带着一些口音，有一群表亲，“而且一切都围绕着食物。”
罗森堡否决了那个想法，开始更直接地进入他的表演：“我是美国年纪最大的单口喜剧演员——这里的关键词是‘站着’（standing up）。”他讲了一些关于他生命中女性的段子：“有一个我非常熟悉的女人。我们就叫她‘母亲’吧。”接着，他讲了一个关于结识查尔斯·劳顿（Charles Laughton）的艳情故事，讲述劳顿在阿尔贡昆酒店（Algonquin）摸了罗森堡那天真且年轻得多的的大腿，随后又讲了一个在试图探访两名囚犯时被赶出州北部监狱的轶事。当时有人告诉他“回纽约找个犹太自由派律师帮你”。他说：“我找了。他叫威廉·昆斯特勒（William Kunstler）。”
回到仙人掌房，最后的一段沉思。“我不完全理解表演，”他说。“对我来说，那就是扮演一个在现实生活中我无法成为的人。我小时候看了《阿拉伯的劳伦斯》，然后拿了一块床单在院子里跑来跑去，扮演阿拉伯的劳伦斯。我热爱幻想。那是我的领地，一个非常快乐的地方。比实际的……活着要快乐得多。”
之后，房间里的所有人都认为最精彩的故事是关于与佩吉·李（Peggy Lee）的一次电话交谈。“你看，她在午夜打来的！”罗森堡说。“大明星总认为只要他们在醒着，所有人也都醒着。于是，她请我为她在纽约的下一场演出准备一些乐谱，我说：‘好的，当然，李女士。’她想要一些弗兰克·洛瑟（Frank Loesser）的曲子，我说我从未听她唱过《今年春天会迟到一点》（Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year），这是洛瑟的一首较冷门的曲子。于是，她直接在电话里唱了起来，一直唱到结束！”
—莎拉·拉森（Sarah Larson）
新把戏部门 BA-DUM-BUM
“用幽默与那些愤怒、受伤和心碎的人沟通，是 Fortune 使命的一部分，”他继续说道。“我一直认为，在 Fortune，首要任务是赢得信任，因为来到我们这里的人们遭受了太多的误待、虐待、创伤和伤害。如果他们把你看作一个……”
“第二天早上，我母亲打电话给我说：‘我试了一整晚想给你打电话！电话一直占线。你在干什么？’我对她说：‘妈，我和佩吉·李（Peggy Lee）在床上，她一直在唱歌，停不下来。’”
某些纽约人能够让自己成为中心，吸引其他纽约人围绕着他们旋转，这就是为什么我们将这些群体称为“圈子”——例如，格什温圈子，或者阿尔贡金圈子。
——亚当·戈普尼克 (Adam Gopnik)
来自美国及其他海外盟友的认可。就在三个月前，她因“为委内瑞拉人民争取民主权利所做的不懈努力”而被授予诺贝尔和平奖。但是，当唐纳德·特朗普宣布该行动时，他没有提到马查多，甚至没有提到“民主”这个词。相反，他谈到了委内瑞拉巨大的石油储备。“我们要让石油按照应有的方式流动，”他说。为了稳定起见，马杜罗的副总统德尔西·罗德里格斯 (Delcy Rodríguez) 将继续负责领导工作。
人物志
玛丽亚·科里纳·马查多想要领导委内瑞拉，但她需要特朗普的帮助。
作者：斯特凡尼亚·塔拉德里德 (STEPHANIA TALADRID)
全球观察家指责特朗普在没有未来规划的情况下，鲁莽地推翻了一个外国政府。然而，马查多非常谨慎，没有发表任何一项批评。相反，她赞扬特朗普的“勇气和远见”，并抓住每一个机会向他表示感谢。今年一月抵达华盛顿后，她将自己的诺贝尔奖奖牌交给了特朗普。在流亡期间，马查多继续致力于一个似乎日益遥远的委内瑞拉愿景：一个由她担任总统的自由国家。特朗普政府已经制定了一项分为三个阶段的计划，包括稳定、恢复以及最终的政治转型。但委内瑞拉政府尚未提出选举的时间表，更不用说表现出交出权力的意愿。
然而，在地震之后，该政权似乎变得格外脆弱。尽管该政权努力镇压媒体，但破坏现场的图像依然在网上流传，随之而来的是痛苦的求救呼吁。来自世界各地的救援人员涌向委内瑞拉，却发现设备陈旧且匮乏。燃料供应短缺，起重机在被夷平的建筑旁静静地立着。
在这种充满大男子主义的政治文化中，且作为一名身处社会主义为国家意识形态之地的富裕保守派，她通过指责总统尼古拉斯·马杜罗对其人民发动长期战争（包括数千起任意逮捕和杀戮）而积累了追随者。2024, 年，她带领其政党在总统选举中获得胜利，赢得了三分之二的选票。马杜罗并未移交权力，而是派遣安全部队攻击抗议者并逮捕反对者。
当委内瑞拉在今年六月遭遇一系列灾难性地震时，流亡在外的反对派领导人玛丽亚·科里纳·马查多决定她必须回国。她在华盛顿度过了近六个月的时间，为她国家的政治未来以及她个人的未来进行着一场令人沮丧的斗争。但这次地震引发的危机过于巨大，无法被忽视。城市街道开裂，建筑沦为废墟。医院不堪重负。据估计，可能有超过十万名委内瑞拉人死亡。
由于政权准备如此不足，委内瑞拉人民只能尽可能搜集工具，将亲人和邻居从废墟中挖掘出来。在华盛顿特区，马查多组织团队设立援助中心。如果医院需要一台用于读取CT扫描的计算机，或者一名救援人员在边境被阻拦，她的人员会提供协助。尽管如此，马查多的电话依然被绝望的呼救填满。“我知道你会帮助我们的，”一位老妇人说道。
在美国军队涌入加拉加斯并于1月3日逮捕马杜罗之后，许多委内瑞拉人期望马查多成为该国的新领导人。她一直坚持不懈地与内阁官员、两党国会议员以及各种捐助者沟通以确保地位。在我访问期间，她与伊朗前国王之子——礼萨·巴列维王储一同走在走廊里。特朗普尚未对伊朗宣战，但该国正处于抗议活动的动荡之中，且这些活动遭到了严厉镇压。巴列维与马查多一同拍照，并同意发表联合声明，支持“伊朗和委内瑞拉从压迫中解放”。
马查多习惯于在困境中管理事务。她在委内瑞拉的职业生涯始于一名在
地震后的第二天，马查多告诉国务卿马可·鲁比奥，她已决定回去。
一名外交官表示，马查多的回归将提出一个紧迫的问题：“谁在掌权？”她坚称这符合所有人的
[[IMG_XXXX]] PHOTOGRAPH BY JARED SOARES
利益——包括美国的利益。尽管不能保证政权不会逮捕她，但美国官员承认她拥有回国的权利。
“（他们）打算怎么做？在我被关在狱中时协商过渡吗？”马查多露出了嘲讽的神色。“帮我抵达那里。否则，我就游过去。”
次日清晨，马查多前往弗吉尼亚州的马纳萨斯区域机场，与几名助手一同登上了一架小型喷气式飞机。她计划飞往库拉索岛，然后前往委内瑞拉。然而，在飞行约一小时后，收到了一条消息：该飞机未获准在库拉索岛降落。马查多不理会这条消息，坚信这只是个误会。几分钟后，飞行员接到了直接指令。由于显然受到了政治压力，该飞机的降落权已被撤销。他们必须立即返回马纳萨斯。
马查多出生于 1967 年，在委内瑞拉一段异常和平的时期长大。她是一个富裕天主教家庭中四个姐妹中的长女。“那是一个被过度保护的童年，”她说。“我总是说我是在祖母的膝盖上长大的，因为我们是在她家长大——那是那种非常古老的大房子，住满了人。”
五十八岁的马查多穿着一件红色羊绒衫和黑色裤子，棕色头发垂至肩头。在现实生活中，就像在舞台上一样，她倾向于用绝对化的语言交谈。“我得到了委内瑞拉人民的授权，要共同解放这个国家，”她告诉我。“除了完全的民主，我们绝不接受任何其他方案。”批评者将特朗普的入侵描述为对委内瑞拉主权的侵犯。“我的回答是：那么，主权的依据是什么？”她说。“我认为那是人民的意志。”
在经历了数十年的独裁统治后，委内瑞拉变成了一个民主国家，其石油储量使其成为拉丁美洲最富有的国家。加拉加斯建设了庞大的道路网络、先进的地铁系统和高耸的摩天大楼。委内瑞拉人成为了苏格兰威士忌的大量饮用者。马查多的父亲 Henrique 是该国最大的私营钢铁生产商 Sivensa 的一名高管。在青少年时期，马查多经常访问该工厂。
对于马查多来说，这在一次漫长的竞选活动中又是另一次挫折。她依然是委内瑞拉最受欢迎的政治家，但除非她回去，否则她无法领导。在很大程度上控制着委内瑞拉国家的特朗普政府似乎深信，她的回归将加深该国的动荡——从而使该政权以及美国在当地的目标都变得不稳定。“政治是一项接触性运动，”前美国驻委内瑞拉大使詹姆斯·斯托里（James Story）告诉我。“该政权将马查多视为生存威胁。她的回归提出了一个问题：谁在掌权？”
在加拉加斯，德尔西·罗德里格斯（Delcy Rodríguez）费尽心机地展现出顺从之态。几十年来，她一直是一名激烈的反帝国主义者，因此获得了“女虎”（La Tigresa）的绰号。现在，她欢迎美国外交官回归，美国国旗在使馆升起。她宣布进入一个“新的政治时刻”，对马杜罗的内阁进行了大调整，并在政府中安插了她的心腹。或许最重要的是，她向美国交付了超过七千万桶原油。当特朗普的能源部长克里斯托弗·赖特（Christopher Wright）访问委内瑞拉一家炼油厂时，她引导他走到一张摆满了装有原油的玻璃瓶的桌前。赖特像拿着奖杯一样举起其中一个，然后兴致盎然地将其贴在唇边。
1985 年，马查多进入加拉加斯的安德烈斯·贝洛天主教大学就读。“我从一所由修女经营的女子学校，转而与一群男人一起学习工程学，而且他们中许多人来自底层背景，”她说。“在第一天上课时，我坐在最后排的课桌前，闭口不谈。”马查多最终成为了学生政府的领导者，但她从未摆脱那种格格不入的感觉——用委内瑞拉的表达方式来说，就像是“母鸡舞会上的蟑螂”。
马查多的华盛顿办公室位于离白宫不远的一栋不起眼的建筑内，就在康涅狄格大道附近。在我访问时——就在她抵达华盛顿不久后——办公室里有一种临时感。这个空间原本属于一个海员游说团体：奇彭代尔风格的家具上方挂着帆船画。除了几块印有她政党口号的标牌外，没有任何迹象表明新租客是谁。“这是我们的影子大使馆，”她的顾问之一大卫·斯莫兰斯基（David Smolansky）带着一丝微笑告诉我。办公室里的工作人员都是马查多的长期助手，他们将家人留在了委内瑞拉。大多数人在 2024 年大选后逃离该国，但其中有些人她已经近十年没见了。斯莫兰斯基在 2017 年通过巴西边境逃脱，当时他装扮成一名牧师，手里拿着一本圣经。
毕业后，马查多在 Sivensa 工作。“我是在一个非常明确的人生规划中成长的，”她说。“我要向我父亲证明，他永远不需要一个男性继承人。”随后在 1992 年，当时 25 岁的马查多怀着第二个孩子，她陪母亲参观了一家由国家运营的有问题青少年的收容所。“我们发现那里实际上是一座儿童监狱，”她说。“更糟糕的是，该中心还冠以我曾叔祖的名字。”
马查多在反对派阵营中的多年经历让她明白，政权为了维持权力几乎可以适应任何环境，但她坚称委内瑞拉人不会允许这种情况发生。在谈到罗德里格斯（Rodríguez）的总统任期时，她的语气变得挑衅起来。“你无法维持一种整个国家都反对你的局面。‘人民不重要’？人民很重要，coño，”她说道，并拍了拍桌子。（马查多说 “coño”——一个常用的脏话——的频率远超一个由修女教育的女性应有的水平。）“等我回到委内瑞拉。他们能怎么做？把我关进监狱？要把我——
马查多辞掉了工作，致力于改善收容所的条件，她创办了一个基金会，旨在引入来自私营部门和国家的援助。然而，随着时间的推移，她意识到真正的权力在于政治。“我一直对规模着迷，”她说。“当你在私营部门或非政府组织工作时，你可以创新并设定基准，但在某个时刻，你需要国家权力来塑造公共政策。”
马查多从办公室出发，穿梭于与外交部长的会议之间，特朗普的
在全国人民面前把我变成一个小偷。但我不会侮辱你。鹰不捕蝇，国会议员女士。”
马查多也比她的同行更加保守，她是一位自由市场主义者，警告说该国正陷入与社会主义的“生存之战”。在 2012 年的总统初选中，她获得了不足 4% 的选票。“她被视为一名小众政治家，仅代表委内瑞拉社会的一小部分人群，”委内瑞拉政治学者玛丽亨·希门内斯（Maryhen Jiménez）说道。
hávez于2013年死于癌症，其副总统尼古拉斯·马杜罗（Nicolás Maduro），一名
到那时，国家已陷入动荡。1998年，一名名为雨果·查韦斯（Hugo Chávez）的前伞兵就任总统，并开始重塑委内瑞拉的政治。在这个不平等的国家里，他通过承诺消除贫困和重新分配财富来建立追随者群体。与此同时，他建立了一套政治分赃制度，重写了宪法，并废除了任期限制。作为他所谓的“玻利瓦尔革命”的一部分，他征收了大批企业——其中包括几家由马查多的父亲监管的企业。
前巴士司机的马杜罗在一次充满争议的选举中掌权。委内瑞拉的情况进一步恶化：国内生产总值（G.D.P.）暴跌，通货膨胀率上升了数千个百分点。武装政府支持者接管了食物分发工作，短缺成为日常生活的一部分。到2016年——即后来被称为“饥饿之年”的时候——委内瑞拉人的平均体重减轻了近二十磅。人们纷纷逃离这个国家，这场大迁徙最终波及了五分之一的人口。
然而，她对抗的本能引起了关注。2012年，查韦斯处于第三任期，他召集国民议会发表国情咨文——这是一场持续一整天的马拉松式演讲，期间政治家们纷纷外出喝咖啡、抽烟或上厕所。马查多决心不离开房间，她坐在那里盯着总统。
马杜罗坚称这场危机是帝国主义精英的臆造，并在驳回投诉时说：“别再抱怨了。”进入国库的资金被分配给少数特权人士，几乎没有资金用于社会项目。“政权意识到，它只能通过镇压来维持权力，”委内瑞拉人权律师热内西斯·达维拉（Génesis Dávila）说道。支持马杜罗的民兵在街头恐吓抗议者。政府反对者被监禁、被迫流亡或被禁止担任公职。马查多的直言不讳使她成为目标，政权多次威胁要没收她的房产。出于对孩子安全的考虑，她安排他们离开委内瑞拉，而她自己留了下来。“我必须做出选择——要么作为母亲照顾孩子，要么作为国会议员服务国家，”她告诉我。“我能同时兼顾两者的唯一方法就是与孩子分离。”
十多年来，查韦斯一直在选举中获胜。随着人们意识到他的政府操纵了系统，马查多创建了Súmate，这是一个致力于监督选举并动员公民观察员的组织。最终，她赢得了一个国会代表席位，并加入了反对派——一个被称为“民主统一圆桌会议”的四分五裂的联盟。
在反对派中，马查多是个异类。她被认为过于咄咄逼人，过于激进而无法吸引选民——而且她是个女人。“我们走进会议室时，那些政治家简直是在抓着自己的左边蛋蛋，因为一个女人进屋了，”马查多的长期顾问马加利·梅达（Magalli Meda）说道。
现场陷入了一阵紧张的沉默，随后查韦斯说：“你和我辩论是自不量力。”他继续说道：“你叫”
在某个时刻，她站起来愤怒地对查韦斯说：“我们花了八个小时听你描述一个与委内瑞拉女性和母亲们所生活的现实截然不同的国家，”她说，“有些女性，有些母亲，她们去便利店和超市，结果为了仅仅一升牛奶而打架。”她继续说道：“当你致力于征收——也就是说，偷窃时，你怎么能声称尊重委内瑞拉的私营部门？”随着房间里响起嘘声和起哄声，马查多告诉查韦斯：“你的时间到了。”
在查韦斯去世后的一次立法会议上，国民议会主席迪奥斯达多·卡贝略要求反对派承认马杜罗为总统。当他们表示抗议时，一群查韦斯主义者发起了攻击。他们殴打并踢踹马查多及其同事，而卡贝略则带着嘲讽的表情在旁观看。马查多被送往医院进行手术。术后，她的脸肿得厉害，以至于她的女儿安娜·科里纳几乎认不出她。
最终，在 2015 年，反对派取得了一次短暂的胜利：他们赢得了国民议会，占据了三分之二的席位。马杜罗通过简单地创建另一个由忠实人员组成的立法机构，重新夺回了控制权。
“你们这一代人太有特权了。”
这是一个关于政权更迭尝试失败的教训。“这影响深远，”一位长期从事美国-委内瑞拉关系工作的工作人员告诉我，“美国人认为，我们给了反对派一切，而他们仍然无法治理。我们不会再犯同样的错误。”
那时，马查多已经创建了自己的政党——Vente Venezuela，她发现自己与联盟中较为温和的声音日益不合。“她是个很难相处的人——专制、不宽容、批判尖锐——而且她不会轻易被说服，”著名历史学家玛格丽塔·洛佩斯·马亚说道。在 2017 年，马查多决定脱离该联盟。“人们一直在说，‘你在分裂反对派！’”她告诉我。然而，她认为，“同样的错误被一次又一次地重复。政权在寻求什么？金钱、时间、合法性——但最重要的是，时间。”
给特朗普送去了一个关于竞选的深刻提醒：一串念珠，这是她的追随者递到她手中的数千串念珠之一。
那个竞选季开始时，反对派正处于混乱之中，因为政府禁止了主要候选人参选。洛佩斯·马亚表示，在全民绝望的情绪下，“马查多的激进主义成了她成功的原因。”她开着两辆车的车队在全国各地旅行，在竞选活动停靠站时，她会爬上车的车顶。在集会上，听众们倾诉着他们的委屈，
1月15日正午刚过，马查多前往访问白宫，衣襟上佩戴着委内瑞拉国旗胸针。她通过建筑物的西侧——通常为工作人员和服务人员预留的通道——进入，与特朗普进行了一场闭门会议。随后，她与总统共进午餐，出席人员还包括鲁比奥、J. D. 万斯以及办公厅主任苏西·威尔斯。
于是她开始分享麦克风。“人们会挤到前面向我讲述他们的故事——那些极其私密的事情，让我不禁好奇，这个人怎么能大声说出这些话？”
次年，马杜罗在一场充斥着舞弊的选举中宣布获胜。反对派成员中普遍认为，他们已经尝试了所有可能的变革途径：政治竞选、绝食抗议，以及十几次的谈判。洛佩斯·玛雅地描述了数波示威活动，但这些活动“除了在街头造成死亡外，没有产生任何切实的结果。每一次，镇压都变得更加严重。委内瑞拉人开始感觉到，只有强大的外部力量才能改变局面”。
马查多在鲁比奥那里找到了盟友，后者将她描述为“韧性、坚毅和爱国心的化身”。他们的关系可以追溯到鲁比奥担任代表佛罗里达州的美国参议员期间。鲁比奥是古巴移民之子，他敦促对查韦斯主义者采取强硬回应，并主张干预将符合美国的国家安全利益。在1月3日之前的准备阶段，他的办公室一直与马查多的团队保持联系，后者提交了一份在政权被瓦解后如何恢复民主的计划。然而，当罗德里格斯就职时，他没有公开抗议。他继续在加拉加斯巩固自己的影响力，被人们称为“委内瑞拉的总督”。
对于一名中右翼政治人物来说，马查多的竞选活动出奇地像是一场游击战。政权禁止她竞选公职，于是她指定了一名代理人：科里纳·约里斯，一名与她名字相同且受人尊敬的学者。“我们的目标是让人们觉得这依然是她，”她的顾问梅达说道。
反对派围绕三十五岁的国民议会主席胡安·瓜伊多凝聚在一起，坚称他才是合法的总统。特朗普和鲁比奥对此表示支持。他们帮助瓜伊多获得了资金和国际认可，且随着危机的加深，向哥伦比亚边境的一个小镇派遣了携带救灾物资的军机。作为回应，马杜罗派遣士兵拦截他们的进入。救灾行动最终无疾而终，特朗普的注意力也随之转移。不久，马杜罗对瓜伊多的核心圈子进行了打击，反对派则屈从于另一轮毫无结果的谈判。
当政府同时也禁止约里斯参选时，反对派领导人敦促马查多考虑一个更易被接受的替代人选；他们已经与马杜罗的官员核对了一份名单。马查多拒绝了。“政权不能决定我们的候选人，”她说。相反，她选择了一位名为埃德蒙多·冈萨雷斯·乌鲁蒂亚的七十四岁外交官作为她的代理人。在竞选活动中，她拿着一张印有冈萨雷斯头像的海报并宣布：“如果你想投票给我，就投给他。”
在白宫，马查多主张委内瑞拉是一个“处于动荡状态的国家，长期受到恐惧和恐怖的压制”。她告诉政府她不需要钱。但她说，必须通过向人们保证“最终这将通过行使人民主权来解决”，从而使人们的期望能够“以公民化且有序的方式引导”。
马查多最初支持瓜伊多，但随后眼睁睁地看着他崩溃，对此深感沮丧。在 2020 年，她发表了一封公开信，称：“国家交给你的任务，你要么无法完成，要么不愿完成。”当我在华盛顿见到她时，她谈到了自己从这次经历中学到了什么。她说，瓜伊多的运动在稳固基础之前就寻求国际援助，但“我们明白了必须反过来——先获得委内瑞拉人民的合法认可，然后才是国际支持”。
马杜罗通过没收音响系统或切断电力来干扰她的露面。有时，马查多在前往活动现场的路上，会发现重型机械在挖掘地面，或者拖拉机在道路上堆起土堆。她学会了下车步行，人们开始跟随她，用双手清理碎片。她说：“政权没有意识到，他们正将其变成一场集体史诗。”
马查多的暗示是，如果她不能参选，这个国家可能会分崩离析。但一些政府官员担心，她在军队中没有足够的支持来掌控权力。另一些人则认为她过于强硬，无法与敌人达成和解。马查多最有力的论据是她在 2024 年总统选举中的胜利。作为临别之举，她
有一天，在开车穿过该国西部时，马查多在一家公路旁的餐厅停了下来。“一名服务生跑了过来，”她回忆道，“他
特朗普显然采取了不同的
处理守卫该场所的军方人员（militares）。所有人的身份都保持匿名。只有极少数人知道这次行动的全部细节。
号召人们走上街头，谴责政权的舞弊行为。
然而到那时，马杜罗的武装忠实追随者已经开始兑现他的承诺，即如果在选举中失败就发动一场“血洗”。数千人被逮捕、殴打或杀害。当马查多在加拉加斯领导一场游行时，她的一个团队成员走上前来。政权正在调查反对派，且有传闻称马查多将被逮捕。“你需要隐藏起来，”那个人说。
比利亚洛博斯请求马查多进行一项大宗采购：160个星链（Starlink）天线。这些天线在当时占据了竞选预算的四分之一——但比利亚洛博斯指出，委内瑞拉的广大地区没有可靠的互联网信号。天线在加拉加斯购买，或从哥伦比亚走私进来，通过卡车伪装在农产品和牲畜中，或隐藏在巴士的行李箱中。它们以何塞·格雷戈里奥·埃尔南德斯（José Gregorio Hernández）的名义运往全国各地——他是委内瑞拉的一位圣徒，也是选民名册上的一个常见名字。
服务生解释说，他的村子里没有党派办公室，所以他自己建立了一个。这次邂逅激发了一个想法：创建“小分队”（comanditos），即由公民组成的小单元，可以用作非正式的党派代表。马查多的团队最终注册了近七万个这样的团体。在竞选活动中，马查多鼓励人们公布他们为自己的小分队选择的名字。在像梅里达（Mérida）这样的保守地区，名字倾向于“神圣处女”和“三位一体”。随后，马查多回忆说，她出现在马凯博（Maracaibo），当地人以口无遮拦而闻名。“结果居然是‘大婊子的儿子’！我会告诉他们：‘我去，我不能说这些名字——尤其是在孩子在场的时候。’ ”
在接下来的一年半里，马查多搬迁了十多次，在人们的家中寻求庇护。在她潜伏期间，马杜罗命令安全部队采取“铁腕”手段。马查多的亲近之人在审讯中遭受折磨，被要求透露她的下落，国家特工搜查了 El Bejucal，寻找线索。“他们正逐渐将我包围，”马查多说。尽管如此，她仍继续在社交媒体上与支持者沟通。“你们并不孤单——孤单的是他们，”她说。“政权已经发生了变化。”她与盟友保持联系，主持会议并举行虚拟会议。在鲁比奥宣誓就职后的第二天，他给马查多打了一通电话，称她为“委内瑞拉的铁娘子”。
在选举日当天，工作人员聚集在马查多的竞选总部，一座被称为 El Bejucal 的小砖房里。六点钟投票结束时，数以千计的 acta（投票记录单）开始涌入。然而，不到一小时后，这种流量就 dwindled 减少到了点滴之水。“到底出什么事了？”一名竞选工作人员说道。
随着选举日的临近，政权下令逮捕马查多（Machado）竞选团队的领导人，理由是他们密谋反对政府，其中一群人随后在阿根廷大使馆寻求庇护。其中一人是胡姆贝尔托·比利亚洛波斯（Humberto Villalobos），他是研究该政权颠覆选举制度的权威，被委派研究如何揭露马杜罗（Maduro）的手段。“舞弊会留下痕迹，”他告诉我，“如果你知道寻找什么，就能建立更强大的防御。”
事实证明，见证人被拒绝接触计票单（actas），在某些情况下甚至被暴力驱逐。午夜时分，政权发表公告：马杜罗获胜，得票率为百分之五十一。没有公布任何投票站级别的结果或具体票数。马查多迅速发表声明：“委内瑞拉有了新当选总统，那就是埃德蒙多·冈萨雷斯·乌鲁蒂亚（Edmundo González Urrutia），”她说，“我们将捍卫真相。”随后，她拿起电话，号召人们设法取回计票单。
当马查多在 2025 年 10 月被授予诺贝尔奖时，她在兴奋之余也感到忐忑。她的最小妹妹克拉拉（Clara）记得当时她与马查多以及另外两个姐妹在电话中交流：“我们当时都觉得，‘这太棒了！’而她一直说，‘我不确定。’”马查多知道特朗普（Trump）觊觎这个奖项。“从一开始，她就说，‘对我来说重要的是，这将如何影响我们唯一的盟友，’”克拉拉回忆道。
在委内瑞拉的选举中，每台投票机都会打印出一份 acta——一份列出每位候选人得票数的文档。根据法律，候选人允许为每台投票机登记一名选举见证人，且每人有权获得一份 acta。比利亚洛波斯的团队策划了一个方案：每位见证人将她的 acta 交给一名同谋，由同谋拍摄照片发送给马查多的总部。一名司机将 acta 传递给中间人，再由中间人将其带到安全地点，在那里，配备发电机和扫描仪的团队可以制作一份高清副本。
不久之后，El Bejucal 的门铃响了。门槛上站着一位显而易见心神不安的访客，对方说：“不能让任何人知道我在这里。”此人描述了自己在国家选举委员会办公室计票时的情形，并表示，随着反对派的票数增加，“他们关闭了所有渠道”。
为了领取奖项，马查多首先得想办法离开委内瑞拉。特朗普政府建议寻求布莱恩·斯特恩（Bryan Stern）的帮助，他是一名美国退伍军人，经营着一家名为“灰牛救援”（Grey Bull Rescue）的机构。12 月 5 日，即颁奖典礼前五天，马查多的团队与斯特恩取得了联系，后者同意协助其逃离。
然而，那 600K 名共谋者继续工作，有时还得到了军队（militares）的帮助。次日清晨，提交的 acta 数量开始上升。计数最终将超过百分之八十——这是一个数学上的不可逆转点。即使马杜罗赢下所有剩余选票，反对派仍能证明一场压倒性胜利。不久，马查多在网上分享了结果，并敦促
该项目被命名为“600K”，因为需要参与的人数达到了这个规模。在培训中——通过网络，以及在厨房、地下室和巷弄里举行——人们被告知如果在被拒绝提供 acta 时该怎么做，以及如何
斯特恩告诉我，马杜罗政权处于“全面戒备”状态——所有主要道路上都设有检查站。他需要误导查韦斯主义者（chavistas）。“我知道他们认为什么样的来源才可靠，”他说，“所以我们给他们喂假消息。”策划者散布谣言称马查多已向东经圭亚那逃离。斯特恩回忆道，实际上她前往了该国西海岸的一片沼泽海滩。天黑后，她登上了一艘由两名渔民驾驶的小船，渔民被指示前往海中约距离海岸 15 英里的一处地点。
斯特恩预测这次行程将耗时不到三小时。但当他的团队到达会合地点时，那艘渔船并不在那里，给马查多的电话也无法接通。那天晚上海浪汹涌——高达十英尺。斯特恩知道，在这种条件下，船只可能无法有效地使用雷达，而且几乎没有月光可以导航。他与团队成员商量：如果她的快艇已经在黑暗中经过了怎么办？如果快艇沉了怎么办？
最终，他们其中一个电话接通了马查多，她说：“我们完全不知道自己在哪里。”渔民们在几小时前就失去了GPS信号，一直在漂流。两组人员商定了一个新的会合点。几个小时后，斯特恩看到快艇出现在视野中，他向那边照了手电筒：马查多就在那里，全身都被淋透了。在恶劣的环境中，她摔得很严重。现在她觉得脊椎像被钉进了一根铁棒。
样本会议记录被陈列在一个玻璃展柜中——它们是由志愿者从委内瑞拉走私出来的。
他说，鲁比奥计划的第一阶段，即稳定阶段，已经完成。但第二阶段，即恢复阶段，仍在进行中，并且需要“让石油工业的收入重新回流”。
据估计，委内瑞拉拥有全球 17% 的未开发石油，但这些资源在数十年间一直被掠夺和误用。在马杜罗被捕后，特朗普政府敦促罗德里格斯通过一项涵盖石油公司长期诉求的碳氢化合物法案。尽管如此，目前的投资额仍然较低，主要来自像雪佛龙这样在该地经营多年的公司。对于许多潜在投资者而言，一个潜在的顾虑是美国将维持这种有利环境多久。“仅靠美国简单地说‘投资吧’是不够的，”哥伦比亚大学全球能源政策中心的委内瑞拉问题专家路易莎·帕拉西奥斯（Luisa Palacios）表示，“我不认为如果没有政治转型，真正的复苏——无论是经济还是国家的——就有可能实现。”
今年 4 月在华盛顿，众议员玛丽亚·埃尔维拉·萨拉萨尔（María Elvira Salazar）代表马查多发起了一场攻势。萨拉萨尔代表迈阿密-戴德县的一个选区，离鲁比奥担任州议员时的选区不远。南佛罗里达州有大量的委内瑞拉移民人口——这是一个立场坚定地反对查韦斯主义的投票群体，许多政治家认为该群体对于赢得选举至关重要。
在奥斯陆，气氛紧张。诺贝尔委员会习惯于处理获奖者缺席的情况，但从未经历过等待一位获奖者逃离现场。 “考虑到挪威人如此遵守规则，这让他们陷入了一种无法想象的境地，”梅达（Meda）说。“就在两个月前，他们还在纠结她是否对花生过敏，或者是否希望餐巾放在右侧。”
在国会中，一名名为迈克尔·科扎克（Michael Kozak）的国务院官员被传唤就马杜罗后的未来作证。萨拉萨尔是一名激烈的质询者，她责备他让罗德里格斯负责。“我们不喜欢德尔西，”她说，“德尔西是‘阿里巴巴和四十大盗’的一员。”她询问政府是否已经定好了新总统选举的日期，以及如果马查多回去，政府是否会保护她。
当马查多抵达奥斯洛时，她已经错过了颁奖典礼——但她与家人团聚了，这是两年来第一次。在大酒店（Grand Hotel）外，一群委内瑞拉人聚集在一起迎接她。凌晨两点左右，马查多在雷鸣般的掌声中走上阳台。她看起来苍白得惊人，眼神显得沉重。她在旅途中弄断了一节椎骨。“勇敢，勇敢！”人群齐声高喊。几个街区外，十
今年春天，马查多在休斯顿的一次能源会议 CeraWeek 上发表了演讲。在宴会厅的舞台上，她以创业者向投资者推介项目的语气对人群发表讲话。“我来到这里是为了谈论我们的未来——一个非凡的未来，”她宣布，“我希望你们所有人都能参与其中。”
科扎克说：“我们希望所有人——包括我也非常尊敬的玛丽亚·科里纳·马查多——能够回去并参与其中。”不过，首先需要达成一些“里程碑”。初始阶段
基吉宫（Chigi Palace）。在马德里，她举行了一次集会，吸引了一万多名支持者聚集在市中心的一个巨大广场上。在台上，她宣称：“我们委内瑞拉人向世界发出一个明确的信号：委内瑞拉将获得自由，因为这是我们委内瑞拉人的选择！”
不久之后，她召集主要反对党领导人在巴拿马城举行会议，会上他们发表了一份宣言，宣布她为“国家民主进程的守护者”。然而，委内瑞拉的人民几乎没有看到任何初步过渡的迹象。历史学家洛佩斯·玛雅（López Maya）指出，在 30 年代独裁者胡安·比森特·戈麦斯（Juan Vicente Gómez）去世后，监狱大门被打开了。“政治犯们奔向大海，将他们的枷锁扔进水里，”她说。自从马杜罗被废黜以来，只有一个拘留中心停止了运作。数百名政治犯仍被关押。而且，尽管罗德里格斯通过了一项为异见人士提供特赦的法律，但其措辞似乎旨在将马查多及其盟友排除在外。
“我也把我的身体当作一座神庙——一座急需修缮的古老建筑，长期被忽视，且在一个很大程度上漠不关心的社会中，其重要性正迅速降低。”
委内瑞拉人经常将该政权比作九头蛇，只不过被砍掉了一个头。查韦斯主义者（chavistas）仍然控制着国家的机构，包括最高法院和国家选举委员会。多年来负责监督马杜罗镇压机器的迪奥斯达多·卡贝罗（Diosdado Cabello）仍留在内阁中。尽管美国对他开出了 2500 万美元的悬赏，但卡贝罗仍与特朗普政府的官员参加会议，并称这些人是“真正的加勒比海海盗”。他对反对派的措辞同样刻薄。在 2024 年选举后，他宣称：“Los vamos a joder”——“我们要操死他们”。
她说，如果由合适的领导人掌权，该国的石油产量可能会增长五倍。她誓言将引入“明确的规则、稳定的环境以及一个真正可靠的合法民主政府”。届时将成立一个新的独立碳氢化合物机构，且特许权使用费将保持在低水平。她承诺，“委内瑞拉国家将不再干预”。
ela 的资源。这些利益高于一切。”
罗德里格斯的支持者包括理查德·格里内尔（Richard Grenell），他作为特朗普的代表，在马杜罗被推翻前与该政权进行了谈判；以及哈里·萨金特（Harry Sargeant），一位近期开始出口委内瑞拉原油的著名共和党捐款人。或许最重要的人物是毛里西奥·克拉弗·卡罗内（Mauricio Claver Carone），他此前担任特朗普的拉美特使，至今仍具有巨大影响力。卡罗内被描述为“拉美的贾里德·库什纳（Jared Kushner）”，他管理着一家私募股权基金，据说正在推广自己在委内瑞拉的利益。（卡罗内否认在该国拥有任何投资。）这位资深特工表示：“有一个经济小圈子，其首要任务是在特朗普离任前榨取尽可能多的资金，这意味着要让德尔西（Delcy）掌握权力。”
莱斯大学拉美能源项目主任弗朗西斯科·莫纳尔迪（Francisco Monaldi）告诉我，CeraWeek 上的共识是，马查多提出了一个极具吸引力的方案。但高管们怀疑她短期内是否有机会证明自己。一名美国高级官员表示，特朗普政府控制着委内瑞拉的石油收入，并已授权向罗德里格斯政府拨款 60 多亿美元。
近几个月来，该政权致力于将马查多从公众意识中抹去。在一家电视台播放了她承诺返回委内瑞拉的片段后，卡贝罗威胁要进行报复。在他每周一次的电视节目《用棍子击败他们》（Beat Them with a Club）中，他说：“马查多的选择快用完了，”并补充道，“她的活动空间正在以惊人的速度缩小。”在加拉加斯，政府张贴了在蓝色背景（与反对派相关的颜色）上描绘罗德里格斯的海报，旁边写着“德尔西，前进吧，你拥有我的信任”。
与此同时，罗德里格斯一直在巩固她在华盛顿的影响力——聘请说客，并拉拢那些可能从推迟权力过渡中获益的人。“共和党内没有人想讨论选举，”一名共和党助手告诉我，“许多人对委内瑞拉——
整个春季，马查多出席的场合中，她几乎被当作国家元首对待。她在爱丽舍宫会见了埃马纽埃尔·马克龙，并在——与乔治亚·梅洛尼会面。
然而，地震暴露了政权的脆弱性。政府大约花了七十二个小时才向受灾最严重的拉瓜伊拉派遣救援人员。而且，当军方最终部署时，最明显的干预是数千名武装人员在控制交通并闲站在废墟旁。在一次访问灾区时，罗德里格斯遭到了嘘声和喝斥。她将对她政府的批评斥为“媒体实验室”的产物。但最近的一项民意调查显示，超过百分之九十的委内瑞拉人反对她的领导。即使是在马杜罗被逮捕后在委内瑞拉最受欢迎的政治人物特朗普，其支持率也出现了下滑。
马查多将自己的回归定格为一种“稳定力量”。但同样可能的是，关于谁才是委内瑞拉合法领导人的冲突将引发暴力——尤其是来自政权支持者的暴力，因为他们掌握着该国大部分的枪械。即使马查多也认为，如果“人们日益焦虑政权可能会在不受制约的情况下获胜，那么局势变得混乱的风险就会增加”。
她将自己权力的一部分真实地寄托在了美国身上。近半年来，美国政府一直在拖延她的回归；一度有特朗普政府的官员提出让她出任联合国秘书长。与此同时，一名资深特工表示：“特朗普利用玛丽亚·科里纳的问题来让德尔西保持警觉——‘不要太安逸，因为我随时可以派玛丽亚·科里纳去对付你’。”最近，美国政府宣布罗德里格斯已同意与一组反对派人物进行谈判。但美国并没有纳入马查多，而是推举了另一位被认为更为温和的流亡领导人迪诺拉·费格拉。
仿佛在说服自己一般，马查多重复了她最核心的观点之一。“人民确实很重要，”她说，“而且事实上，我是被选出来的。我拥有最宝贵的东西——人民的信任。”
最近的民意调查显示，马查多是唯一一位获得大多数委内瑞拉人支持的政治人物。在私下里，鲁比奥承诺将举行选举，但并未约定具体日期。在马查多缺席的情况下，委内瑞拉反对派陷入了瘫痪，因为那些妥协派试图从内部推动变革，但收效甚微。马查多的政党“委内瑞拉前进”（Vente Venezuela）基本上只是她的一个载体。该党没有正式注册；国家选举委员会从未接受其申请。“如果马查多在政治上淡出，民主化的机会将非常渺茫，”洛佩斯·马亚说道。
初步估计显示，地震造成了超过六十亿美元的损失。对于加拉加斯著名的政治分析师贝尼格诺·阿拉尔孔来说，恢复资金的流动带来了腐败机会。“这就是抢夺战利品的开始，”他说，“而这就是在缺乏制度的情况下贸然前进的致命错误。”阿拉尔孔继续说道：“如此规模的悲剧本可以给罗德里格斯政府一个机会，通过行动来赢得某种合法性，尽管她最初缺乏合法性。”然而，该政权却陷入了困境。“白宫官员们一定在问自己，在这些人仍然掌权的情况下，重建这个国家是否根本可行，”他说。
在马查多准备在地震后返回委内瑞拉时，特朗普显然放下了他的保留意见。他给罗德里格斯打电话，告诉她不要让马查多受到伤害。但随后她的航班被改道，显然是受到了政府内部某人的指令。尽管马查多的美国对接人员向她保证这纯属误会，但这位资深特工将其描述为内斗的结果。“关于委内瑞拉存在不同的派系，”他说，“而目前占据上风的派系认为，在现在到十一月之间，不要搅乱局面。”
在巴拿马，马查多依然坚持她对政治现实的认知。她说她仍与特朗普的人员保持联系，但没有回答那个核心问题：为什么政府没有代表她进行干预。我问她是否曾怀疑美国对委内瑞拉民主的承诺。“国务卿一再向我保证，我相信他的话，”她说。
在航班被停飞的第二天，马查多飞往巴拿马城，计划从那里乘机前往委内瑞拉。在她登机之前，航空公司的一名官员打电话告诉她，罗德里格斯政府威胁称，如果允许她登机，将吊销其执照。马查多向追随者发布了一条充满挫败感的消息。“我将回到委内瑞拉，这样我们才能共同哀悼损失，共同祈祷，互相扶持，并组织起来，”她坚持道，“为了让我们能在一起，我将不惜一切代价。”
政府在公开场合依然支持罗德里格斯。美国驻加拉加斯代办约翰·巴雷特为她处理灾难的方式辩护，指出她的政府一直“完全配合”美国。即使估计有五万名委内瑞拉人失踪，巴雷特仍选择强调石油工业依然完好，且“生产仍在继续”。当抗议者聚集在美国大使馆外时，巴雷特要求将他们清理走。这位美国外交官说，“除非民主很快恢复，否则我们只是在助力建立一个更有利可图的独裁政权。”
当我问及她目前的处境是否本可以避免时，她反问道：“什么处境？”
不久之后，我在巴拿马的一家酒店找到了马查多。委内瑞拉的救援工作正陷入低谷。停尸房已满负荷，尸体被摆放在停车场，随后被移至海港，那里弥漫着浓重的死亡气息。数以千计的家庭在几乎得不到帮助的情况下继续寻找亲人。“这次地震摇撼了一切的基础，”马查多说，“它让所有的面具都脱落了。”
“在巴拿马这种无法进入委内瑞拉的尴尬状态，”我说。
“我并不处于尴尬状态，”她反驳道，“我正处于一个过程之中，就像很多次之前一样，比以往任何时候都更加努力地工作，与我们的人员协调，利用来自全世界的支持。”她唯一允许的不确定性是关于效率的问题。“当我们回首往事时，”她说，“我们可能会发现，有更快捷的方式来完成这件事。”
一直以来，马查多一直坚称特朗普对委内瑞拉的愿景与她一致——这一主张似乎变得越来越难以维持。在推动干预措施时，她做出让步
话语中透着一丝疲惫
里莎给了史蒂夫一个熟悉的眼神。“我们那时四十出头，”他告诉我，“我们很累。但汉娜说他们在讨论终止妊娠。”他们决定收养这个孩子。这样一来就有了十个孩子。
来自田纳西州的来信
艾默斯一家喜欢玩 Uno 牌——那些乌克兰男孩在学会英语之前就学会了这款游戏，他们还曾一起步行前往当地的瀑布。汉娜是一个慷慨的长女。她通过举办魔术表演来分担兄弟姐妹的收养费用，并且在他们到达后，放弃了自己的卧室。她聪明、好奇、开朗，并且容易对古怪的事物着迷，这是她与父亲的另一个共同特质。“她会在沃尔玛大声歌唱，以测试社会规范，”史蒂夫告诉我。她搜寻二手商店，并在购物中心担任复活节兔。十二岁时，她就在阅读托尔斯泰。十五岁时，她进入了当地的一所社区学院。在大一后的那个夏天，她在伯特·雷诺兹的一部电影剧组实习。她希望有一天能从事服装设计工作。
很少有人知道护栏可能是致命的。史蒂夫·艾默斯想要修复所有的护栏。
作者：查尔斯·贝西亚
梅丽莎记得在 2016 年的万圣节，她看着汉娜为参加派对而打扮。她扮演的是一个来自实况角色扮演游戏（LARP）中的冷门角色。汉娜告诉父母派对在雅典举行，起初他们以为是指距离约四十分钟路程的田纳西州雅典。但派对实际上是在佐治亚州的雅典：开车需要四个小时。那天晚上，汉娜和一名朋友开着汉娜的沃尔沃 S80 出发了，那是她父亲因为安全评级高而选的车。“I remember it like a snapshot,” 梅丽莎告诉我，“汉娜涂着红唇，穿着白衬衫，看着走廊对面镜子里的自己。她超级兴奋。那是像唱歌一样轻快的告别。”
蒂夫·艾默斯（Steve Eimers）在纽约州北部的贝特尔浸信会基督学院（Bethel Baptist Christian Academy）结识了梅丽莎·福尔克（Melissa Falk），当时她是高年级学生，而他是转学而来的低年级学生。蒂夫是当地一名牧师的儿子，他打赌自己能在圣诞节前与梅丽莎约会；为了加速这一进程，他在课堂上用强力胶把自己的手粘在了她的手上。他输了赌局，但最终还是赢得了她的心。两人于 1996 年结婚。他们的第一个孩子汉娜（Hannah）于三年后出生。她继承了父亲的蓝色眼睛，随着她的成长，父亲对被遗弃者的同情以及对 J. R. R. 托尔金（J. R. R. Tolkien）的热爱也成为了她的特质。
11月1日的凌晨，汉娜在开车回家时，她的沃尔沃汽车偏离了 75 号州际公路并撞上了一道钢护栏。当时她是清醒的，且行驶速度低于限速，但她很疲惫——显然，由于乘客席上的朋友在睡觉，她打瞌睡了。汉娜的车撞上了一个被称为“终端端部”（terminal end）的安全装置，这是一个位于护栏末端的黑黄条纹矩形箱，旨在吸收动能。在这种碰撞中，终端端部应当失效并沿护栏的金属条滑动，从而减慢车速并强迫
蒂夫和梅丽莎在家教育汉娜。2001 年，为了降低税收并获得更多土地，他们搬到了田纳西州东部。蒂夫创办了一家窗户清洗公司，他们开始养
[[IMG_XXXX]] 摄影：加布里埃尔·麦卡迪（GABRIEL MCCURDY）
山羊和鸡。不久，他们又有了两个孩子。蒂夫一直想象着有一天会领养孩子，在自己的孩子长大后，他随教会前往东欧向孤儿院捐赠物资。2007 年，他与梅丽莎前往乌克兰，在那里他们遇到了一些孩子，据他说，这些孩子“将被贩卖或征召——没有任何机会”。这对夫妇带回了三个男孩。几年后，他们又生了一个亲生儿子。这样一来就有七个孩子了。蒂夫认为这样已经足够多，但在 2013 年，他与梅丽莎听说田纳西州北部有一对九岁和十三岁的兄妹，其父母是阿片类药物成瘾者，于是这个家庭也将他们接纳了。随后，在 2016 年，汉娜的一个朋友意外怀孕，且——
护栏在车前卷曲。然而，这道护栏撕裂了这辆沃尔沃，将汉娜的身体切成了两半。
（在 640 号州际公路上）到处都是“塔特”（Tarts）。他利用这些材料与媒体接触。坦帕湾的一名电视记者珍妮弗·泰特斯（Jennifer Titus）与艾默斯合作过数十篇报道，她还记得接到的第一个来自他的电话。“我完全不知道他在说什么，”她告诉我，“我说，‘听着，你能不能直接在佛罗里达的道路上帮我找出十几处安装不当的护栏？’”第二天，他给她发了一份包含 70 处的名单；泰特斯独立确认了这些地点的危险性。“由于我们的调查，该州重新检查了佛罗里达州所有的护栏，”她说，“他提交公开记录请求的数量和我一样多。”
（他）跨越 25 个州行驶了数千英里去检查护栏。“我能通过卫星视图识别护栏的类型，”他告诉我，“这是城市野外生存技能。”他在自己的 YouTube 频道上记录了许多此类检查，该频道最著名的名称是 @TheGuardrailGuy，他在那里发布自己携带卡尺、六英尺水平仪，并敏锐捕捉反向螺栓和松动电缆锚件在全国漫游的视频。这些视频面向约 25 万名订阅者播放，有一种令人心生好感的、不加雕琢的特质。在一个典型的视频中，艾默斯可能会哽咽；剖析一个复杂的物理概念；引用他最喜欢的电影主角之一——那个笨拙的购物中心保安保罗·布拉特（Paul Blart）；或者说出一些习得的南方方言，比如 “dadgummit”（真是糟糕）。
当史蒂夫（Steve）在倒咖啡，准备去猎鹿时，汉娜（Hannah）朋友的母亲打电话告诉他出事故了。（那个朋友毫发无伤。）当他联系当局时，对方称没有向现场派遣紧急运输车辆。史蒂夫明白这意味着汉娜毫无疑问已经去世了。他和梅丽莎（Melissa）上了车向事故现场驶去，但中途停了下来。“我就那样躺在一家沃尔玛（Walmart）停车场的地上，”史蒂夫告诉我，“我动弹不得。我们的牧师来了，把我们从地上扶起来带回了家。”最终，史蒂夫从那辆沃尔沃（Volvo）车的后座上收集了一些汉娜的头发。几个月后，田纳西州交通部向艾默斯（Eimers）一家寄来了一张三千美元的账单，要求汉娜支付那道导致她死亡的护栏费用。（该机构最终道歉，声称这是“处理过程中的某个错误”。）
“我知道我并不正常，”艾默斯告诉我，“我是那种会数天花板瓷砖的人。我那古怪的大脑死磕上了护栏，而且不肯放手。”一家护栏公司的高管最近告诉我：“史蒂夫从一个悲痛的父亲，演变成一个看起来心怀怨恨的父亲，再变成一个可靠的个人，最后成了护栏行业的‘艾琳·布罗科维奇’（Erin Brockovich）。”他继续说道：“在护栏专家的会议上，他的专业知识处于前百分之十的水平。”
梅丽莎对他拥有这么多追随者感到惊讶。她觉得护栏的细枝末节“极其枯燥”。在她睡觉时，艾默斯盯着全世界的护栏图像，检查是否存在致命缺陷。缺陷护栏在他的记忆中浮现，就像其他人回忆糟糕的约会一样。他告诉我田纳西州汤森德（Townsend）的一道锈穿的护栏，里面住着一只咬了他手指的老鼠；还有乔治亚州农村地带一道五十年代的护栏，缺失了85颗螺栓。他继续说道：“我曾经从宪法大道（Constitution Avenue）走到白宫，发现离总统最近的五道护栏是用随机零件安装的。现在依然如此。”
在三月初的一个周六，我在一条四车道的路肩上见到了埃默斯（Eimers）。
汉娜去世后不久的一天，史蒂夫·艾默斯（Steve Eimers）感到一种冲动，他在互联网上搜索“护栏车祸”，发现了数百篇关于人们在撞击护栏时致残或死亡的新闻报道。他了解到，发生在汉娜身上的这种情况非常频繁，以至于护栏行业对此有一个专门术语：“穿刺”（spearing）。随着研究的深入，他还认为导致汉娜车祸的那个护栏存在缺陷。2017. 年，他向护栏制造商林赛公司（Lindsay Corporation）提起了一起过失致死诉讼，指控该公司未遵守联邦和州关于护栏设计的指南，并且由于公司未能提供足够的指导说明，导致护栏安装不当。该诉讼于 2022 年以一项未公开的金额达成和解。（和解条款禁止艾默斯讨论导致汉娜车祸的护栏具体出了什么问题。）此后，艾默斯关闭了他的窗户清洗公司，开始全职致力于一项新使命：防止任何人以汉娜那样的方式死去。
根据他的研究，艾默斯认为美国每年约有一千起与护栏相关的死亡事故——几乎所有这些事故都是可以避免的，而且目前该国道路上仍有数万英里危险的护栏。他保存着一个庞大的研究档案，其中记录了每一位总统提到护栏的时刻（例如唐纳德·特朗普在 2018, 年评论一个“糟糕”的护栏时曾说：“我想雇佣他们的那个推销员……这是最烂的垃圾”）。在他称之为“穿刺总记录”的文件中，他列出了各种类型的车祸——包括涉及导致他女儿死亡的那个品牌的车祸、涉及护栏安装颠倒或反向的车祸，以及涉及名人的车祸。此外还有一些“奇闻”，例如“在 Pop-Tarts 发明者去世几天后，一辆装满 Pop-Tarts 的卡车撞上了护栏”，导致 Pop-
在田纳西州莱诺尔城（Lenoir City）郊外的一条车道公路上，艾默斯感到一种冲动，这里是他在诺克斯维尔（Knoxville）附近与家人居住的小镇。他的许多邻居都在钓黑鳃太阳鱼（crappie）。但对于五十岁的艾默斯来说，今天是个大日子：他要去见他的国会议员蒂姆·伯切特（Tim Burchett），他自 2017, 年以来就一直在就护栏问题游说对方。当我靠近时，艾默斯穿着牛仔裤和反光背心，戴着顶写有“护栏 guy”的帽子，正盯着距离柏油路面几英尺远的一根钢轨。他说，这根轨被“鲁莽的撞击”损坏了。他回想起特朗普关于解决相对简单问题的官僚障碍之言论。“总统在谈论‘特朗普的速度’以及‘我们要打破这些墙’，”他说，“好吧，求求你们快打破这些墙吧！”很快，伯切特开着一辆挂着过期车牌的超大皮卡车停了下来。他是一位 61 岁的 MAGA 保守主义者，住在农场里，用废木料制作长板。他穿着一套西装（看起来像是违心地穿的），向艾默斯伸出拳头击掌。他转向我说道：“嘿，伙计。”
对于随便观察的人——也就是说几乎所有人——来说，护栏仅仅是
艾默斯此后开车行驶了约 40
我们现在认为是标准的安全配置在当时不过是事后才想到的补救措施。“很多人认为你不应该给公路照明，因为那样会分心——而且他们认为在相反车道之间只要有一个宽阔的中央分隔带就足够了，”美国公路历史书籍《大路》（The Big Roads）的作者厄尔·斯威夫特（Earl Swift）告诉我。“所以像护栏这类东西，是零敲碎打地逐渐完善起来的。”
一条长而波浪形的钢条，宽约一英尺，安装在距离地面约三十英寸处，用于防止车辆驶离道路。但实际上，护栏是经过精确校准的互锁部件系统，每一个部件对其功能的发挥都至关重要。它们依靠复杂的物理原理来确保撞击护栏末端的车辆不会被刺穿，且从侧面撞击的车辆无法冲破。一些护栏造成的伤害源于过时的设计，或制造商已知危险的设计。另一些则源于安装失误。
绕到后面，来到家人所称的“汉娜花园”（Hannah’s Garden），那里有一个小凉亭，上面绘制了她喜爱的一些事物的参考图——《绿野仙踪》中多萝西的红宝石红色高跟鞋、《神秘博士》电视剧中的时间机——旁边还放着一台打字机和一把尤克里里。“没有什么可以埋葬的了，”艾默斯（Eimers）说道，随后他转过身去，开始哭泣。
最早的护栏建于三十年代和四十年代，基本与今天的护栏相似。但它们的钝端在撞击时不会脱离，因此更加致命。正如《时报》在众多此类报道中的一篇所指出的，1932, 一名休假的水手在内布拉斯加州的一道护栏上，因其福特 V8 Tudor 轿车“被刺穿”而死亡。最早提出的解决方案之一是下弯式护栏，这种护栏不再突然终止，而是逐渐向下倾斜进入地面。
“公路”（highway）一词可以追溯到古英语，最初是指罗马时期的高架通道。在美国，这个词在二十世纪初开始流行，用以表示那些比由政府维护的乡村邮政路线更宏大、更灵活的道路，或者比被称为“汽车小径”（auto trails）的私人出资的长距离通道更先进的道路。1921年，《联邦援助公路法案》赋予了该词官方定义，并使其受到监管。在那时，全美约有九百万辆旅游车，包括广受欢迎的福特 T 型车，其时速可达令人心惊胆战的每小时四十英里。路面情况极其不稳定——最常见的是土路，但鹅卵石、砖块和浸过煤焦油的木块也被使用。当时还没有一个连接各州的总体规划。正如后来的一份报告所述，《联邦援助公路法案》的目标至少是让农民“脱离泥潭”。
艾默斯（Eimers）将伯切特（Burchett）的注意力引导至他一直观察的那道护栏，并指出该护栏有一个变形的立柱，可能在安装过程中损坏了。在正面碰撞中，此类立柱及其特殊的螺栓槽口应该能够释放护栏，使其像丝带一样在车辆旁卷起。“我把这个称为‘勒布朗·詹姆斯立柱’，因为一旦被撞击，它必须得‘翻车’（flop over），”艾默斯告诉伯切特，后者沉默地凝视着。艾默斯接着说，由于立柱被猛击以及螺栓的放置位置，这根立柱不太可能那样做。他补充道，许多护栏的情况甚至更糟糕。2022年，艾默斯购买了数千张印有箭头和“此面向上”字样的贴纸，然后将它们贴在安装反了或颠倒的护栏上。他拍摄了一段关于这些贴纸的视频，播放量达到了一千六百万次；随后，一家主要的护栏制造商 Valtir 也制作了自家的安装贴纸。
三月，艾默斯和我拜访了迪恩·西金（Dean Sicking），他是一位机械工程师兼发明家，在过去四十年的几乎每一项重大护栏创新中都做出了贡献。西金是一位留胡子、戴眼镜的六十八岁老人，与妻子住在阿拉巴马州伯明翰的一栋大型法式乡村风格住宅中。坐在厨房里，他干巴巴地评论道，护栏向下弯曲的设计是“一个绝妙的主意，除了一件事”。虽然这种设计防止了被刺穿的可能性，但却引入了一个新问题：弹射。“就像《危险都 the Dukes of Hazzard》里的情节一样，”艾默斯解释道。
三十五年后，德怀特·艾森豪威尔总统签署了另一项
西金为美式足球（头盔）、马术运动（头盔）和曲棍球（挡板）设计并申请了突破性的安全技术专利。2007年，乔治·W·布什总统授予他国家技术与创新奖章，该奖章就挂在他厨房的一面墙上。事实证明，护栏是他面临的最大挑战。他从1980年开始研究护栏，当时他是德克萨斯 A&M 交通研究所的一名初级研究员。利用通用汽车的数据，他开始预测事故率，并认为安全是一个可以解决的问题。“我们的基本理念是，冲出公路不应该意味着死刑，”他说。
艾默斯希望政府能采取更多措施来鼓励企业的良好行为。“他们把自己的职责推给了一个来自东田纳西农村、拥有十个孩子、三十只鸡和一群山羊的家伙，”他说。伯切特曾任州议员，现任 DOGE 国会小组委员会主席，该委员会负责审查联邦资源的利用与滥用。他说：“我们厌恶联邦政府是有充分理由的。我也讨厌它，而我现在就在其中。我理解你的意思。”他告诉艾默斯，他将尝试就护栏话题举行一次国会听证会。
主要公路法案，该法案将创建超过四万英里的联邦公路——这至今仍是美国历史上规模最大的公共工程项目。随着汽车和道路的增加，事故也开始堆积；到六十年代中期，每年有超过五万起致命的公路事故。汽车工业淡化了车辆设计的危险性，转而将矛头指向不安全的驾驶员。许多公路-
如今的护栏设计旨在吸收或引导来自 25 度以下角度的碰撞，因为绝大多数的
会议结束后，艾默斯和我开车去了他家，在那里我见到了正在准备甜茶的梅丽莎以及他们的几个孩子。然后我们走
护栏撞击事故均为如此。当车辆撞击护栏正面（即开车经过时看到的这一面）时，护栏应当弯曲而不断裂，并保持张力，就像冰球场挡板或安全带一样。这可以防止车辆穿透护栏（这种情况被称为“门禁效应”/gating）或飞越护栏。虽然向下弯曲的护栏依然可见，但现在大多数护栏的起点和终点都采用了被称为“末端接头”的矩形钢材。它们吸收碰撞汽车能量的能力——迫使护栏卷曲而非像矛一样刺入——是数十年巧妙工程设计的结果。
西金（Sicking）的发明包括 1989 年获得专利的 ET2000，一种通过抓取碰撞车辆以减速的末端接头；1997 年的顺序弯折末端（Sequential Kinking Terminal），它利用护栏中的弯折或转折来帮助吸收冲击；以及下一代末端（Next Generation Terminal），这是第一个旨在防止车辆在以掠射角撞击时突破护栏的设计。“假设安装过程没被搞砸的话，”他说。
我们一起去兜风。艾默斯开车带着我们去了最近的护栏，那也是最近的缺陷护栏。“西金博士就住在那个怪胎附近，”他说。
并帮助分散力量。而且它还安装不正。“他们简直把这玩意儿给锤烂了，”艾默斯厌恶地说道。
四月，Eimers和Melissa前往亚特兰大，与几位在护栏事故中失去亲人的家庭见面。Eimers在他的YouTube页面上列出了自己的电话号码，以便人们能够轻松联系到他。“每次看到不认识的号码，我胃里就有一种异样的感觉，”他告诉我，“但我必须接听。”那天他见到的所有家庭，其亲人都像汉娜（Hannah）一样，死在了I-75号公路上——这条高速公路从迈阿密附近一直延伸到加拿大边境。物理治疗博士生Jaida Payne于2023年1月在坦帕市撞上一道受损的护栏而丧生。2020年3月，车库门安装工Hunter Burns在佛罗里达州的布雷登顿撞上了一道安装颠倒且反向的护栏。同一天，高中三年级学生Isabella Alonzo在佐治亚州的沃纳罗宾斯附近撞上了一道“弗兰肯斯坦式”的护栏。Payne二十三岁，Burns二十二岁，Alonzo十八岁。
Eimers此前一直与他们的父母保持着密切联系。“需要一种很特别的人，才能在经历过那种恐怖之后，依然让自己处于每天面对并感受它的状态，”Isabella的母亲Cathy Alonzo在谈到Eimers时告诉我，“但有时你得让他慢下来，告诉他用英语解释清楚所有那些该死的护栏缩写。”Cathy为Isabella设立了一个纪念专页。
我询问曾担任急诊护士的Eimers，如果正面撞击，护栏会对人体造成怎样的伤害。“C1或C2骨折，”他猜测道，指的是可能致命的颈部损伤，“主动脉裂伤。受害者被肢解。”他引导Sicking绕开一些红火蚁，去检查一个轴承板——这是一块将第一根立柱固定在护栏上的小金属片。
在访问期间，Sicking告诉Eimers，如果汉娜撞上的是他的一项正确安装的创新产品，她现在还活着。这对Eimers来说并非新鲜事，但他开始抽泣。随后他建议
在美国，护栏系统有时是由当地的工人团队安装（且更频繁地是进行维修）的，而这些工人对护栏的运作方式并不真正熟悉。正如一名护栏公司高管告诉我的那样，“你经常会遇到这样的人：冬天在铲雪，夏天在除草。”他继续说道，“他们去仓库里找一堆零件——这里一个支架，那里一个螺栓，一根看起来能装上的护栏——然后就把它装上去。”在护栏的行话里，这种用杂乱零件拼凑护栏的做法被称为“弗兰肯斯坦化”（Frankensteining）。由于“弗兰肯斯坦化”破坏了护栏系统的物理机制，它可能会致命。2010年，佛罗里达州一名男子为了避开路上的动物而猛打方向盘，撞上了一道由未经培训的囚犯维护的护栏。他失去了一条腿。根据该男子起诉州交通部的诉状，该护栏是用“随机收集的零件……包括一块建于1965年的陈旧护栏碎片”搭建而成的。Eimers估计，在他检查的护栏中，大约有百分之五是这样拼凑而成的。
这道护栏位于一座立交桥附近的四车道公路旁，是Sicking早期设计中一个极其糟糕的组装案例。“这里有一些非常、非常严重的问题，”Eimers说。他指着一个钢板中间一英寸长的空洞，然后指向几英寸外钻入立柱的一个螺栓。那个空槽本应该是螺栓所在的位置。他推测安装人员误算了钢板的长度，并试图通过在原本没有孔的地方钻孔来“解决”他们制造的问题。一旦发生撞击，这个螺栓无法脱出——因为临时钻的槽尺寸不对——护栏也就无法像预期那样卷曲。Eimers说，在这种情况下，末端碰撞可能会导致车辆被刺穿或翻滚；如果车辆从侧面撞击，护栏可能会破裂。Sicking忧郁地看着。“如果你在我的护栏上钻孔，那你他妈的是在搞砸，”他说。
亲自陈述他的诉求。他穿着一件印有“护栏人”的T恤，手里拿着一座艾美奖奖杯，那是他与一名电视记者共同制作的报道所获奖项。由于查尔斯国王到访，市区交通拥堵不堪。Eimers口袋里揣着一个茶包，他时不时地将其取出，并评论道：“不需要国王。”随行还有几户受护栏事故影响的家庭。其中一人是来自亚利桑那州的二十岁青年杰特·温斯坦（Jett Weinstein），他在 2024 年失去了一条腿，当时他在一次单板滑雪之旅的回程中，所乘汽车撞上护栏并被其刺穿。他的朋友（当时在开车）被拦腰截断身亡。“我一直处于疼痛之中，”杰特淡定地说道。
在她前臂上的纹身写着：“她是月亮，是黑夜中闪耀的光芒。”她的丈夫马克（Mark）回忆起女儿出事时的情景以及人们试图救她的努力。“她的心脏很强，他们在她最终失血过多死亡前，将她救回来了四次。我曾
进入这个世界。”凯利保留了这封打印出来的电子邮件。
在Eimers前往华盛顿特区几周后，伯切特（Burchett）的立法主任向他发送了一份《路面交通重新授权法案》的草案。该法案将成为拟议的《基础设施投资与就业法案》重新授权的一部分，后者是 2021 年通过的一项万亿美元资助方案，将于九月到期。在这份八百多页的法案中，有八页以上的内容——即关于护栏的整个章节——实际上是直接摘自Eimers的《透明法案》。当Eimers打电话告诉我这个消息时，他几乎是在喊叫：“这几乎有百分之一是我的原话！”该法案的文本目前正在最终定稿中，预计将于今年秋季投票。六月下旬，Eimers还得知，在他提交投诉并促使州政府重新检查后，我们与西金（Sicking）一起查看的那段护栏已经修复。多亏了他的努力，白宫附近那些像“弗兰肯斯坦”一样东拼西凑的护栏终于被列入了更换计划。“我经常变得愤世嫉俗，因为我总在期待 180 度的反转，”Eimers告诉我。“曾经有人告诉我，历史上最具影响力的人往往只能让船舵转动一度，这看起来微不足道，但随着时间的推移，你最终会到达一个完全不同的目的地。”他补充道：“我的问题在于，我在潜意识里知道，我在寻找某种能带走痛苦的东西。我可以修复世界上每一段公路护栏，但这无法修复我，也无法让汉娜（Hannah）回来。”
克里斯蒂·德菲利波（Christy DeFilippo）是亨特·伯恩斯（Hunter Burns）的母亲，她穿着一件绣有 #HuntersMom 字样的 Polo 衫，描述了夺走她儿子生命的那段护栏。“它没有像预想的那样像手风琴一样坍塌，而是把他直接弹向了空中，”她说。佩恩（Payne）的父亲斯图尔特（Stewart）曾是一名海军陆战队钻 instructor，他正用纸巾沾拭眼睛。他最近成为了Eimers所谓的“大卫之师”（Army of Davids，取自大卫与歌利亚的故事）的新成员——这是一个护栏改革倡导团体，旨在促使公司发布更详细的安装指南，并游说政府制定安装和维护法律。他创建了一个专注于护栏的 TikTok 账号，名为 Exit 261，以他女儿死亡地点的编号命名。他将杰达（Jaida）撞击护栏的情况描述为“就像被简易爆炸装置（I.E.D.）袭击一样”。
该小组的第一次会议是与史蒂夫·科恩（Steve Cohen）进行的，他是一位代表田纳西州西部选区的民主党国会议员。在墙上贴着一张写有“一个人可以改变局面，且每个人都应尝试”的海报下方，艾默斯（Eimers）将艾美奖奖杯放在面前的桌子上，开始了讲述。在某个时刻，他向科恩提供了一个成为“护栏专家（Guardrail Guy）助理”的机会。科恩对像护栏这样复杂的系统竟然没有使用手册感到惊讶。“难以置信，”他说，“我买过一张 CD：三十二美元，里面包含了价值三十四美元的指令。”
在走廊里偶然遇到参议员理查德·布卢门撒尔（Richard Blumenthal）后——“我是史蒂夫，护栏专家，”艾默斯开口道，这让布卢门撒尔感到莫名其妙——他们与参议员马克·凯利（Mark Kelly）在凯利的办公室里会面。凯利是一位工程师、前宇航员，代表亚利桑那州，他在办公室里展示着一件他旧时的太空服。凯利特别关注一封 2005 年由 Valtir（当时名为 Trinity）高管之间往来的电子邮件，这封邮件是艾默斯通过匿名来源获得并打印出来的。邮件显示一名高管在讨论该公司在 2005, 年修改的一个护栏，并实际上承认该护栏变得更加危险了。“如果有人发生事故，且折叠护栏进入车内 [并] 导致人员死亡或伤残，我们的责任风险将是多少？然后律师发现了这次碰撞测试，并说这种情况是设计本身固有导致的。它在碰撞测试期间就发生了。”该高管承认，公司“安装了一个有缺陷的脱-
“如果那个护栏修理正确，她本可以幸存，”佩恩（Payne）说道。
“我们不应该认识对方，”艾默斯同意道。
在 Eimers 向 Burchett 展示 Lenoir 附近那段有缺陷的护栏后的第二天早晨。
Eimers 喜欢引用托尔金《王者回归》中的一个场景，当时谦卑的英雄山姆在想：“最终，阴影不过是一件微小且稍纵即逝的事：在它的触及之外，永远存在着光明与崇高之美。” Eimers 告诉我，汉娜非常热爱这行字中的希望。他提到她在去世前十个月在日记中写过的一段话。“我意识到我为什么要写这本日记，”她写道，“我非常恐惧自己会死去，然后仅仅成为照片中的另一张面孔……名字会被遗忘。他们没有故事。”她接着写道，“只要我能维持阅读此文之人的兴趣，我就拥有了一个读者。看，现在你进入了我的故事。无论你是谁，希望这能让你保持兴趣。”
City，他转发给我一份他熬夜起草的法案，名为《护栏制造商透明度法案》。（他曾考虑在名称中加入“宜家”，以暗示护栏安装应当追求的简便性，但最终决定不这么做。）该法案旨在强制要求护栏零件有更清晰的标签，并要求制造商提供多种语言的安装手册，包括西班牙语。他将法案发送到了 Burchett 的办公室，随后又发送电子邮件跟进，写道：“某个孩子的生命正悬于一线。”几个小时后，他又发了一封邮件，提到一名女孩刚刚在缅因州被护栏杀害。
四月下旬，Eimers 前往华盛顿特区。
我孩子：但是，爸爸，我累了！我：那就喝杯咖啡！你
SHOUTS & MURMURS（喧嚣与低语）
必须了解桑多夫（Sondheim）！我孩子：好吧，好吧。我：很好。对不起，我刚才太激动了。只是，他写了太多重要的歌曲！（平复心情；停顿）我爱你。你知道的，对吧？
我孩子：嗯，我知道。我：很好。你可能会 tempted 想上网看视频。
我孩子：什-什么样的视频？我：$\text{《猫》}$、$\text{《悲惨世界》}$、$\text{《Rent》}$的视频。
我孩子：那些怎么了？我：它们不是——真实的，亲爱的。它们让音乐剧看起来很有趣，但那不是真实的生活。不像桑多夫的$\text{《Company》}$或$\text{《Assassins》}$，或者他最近被重新审视的$\text{《Merrily We Roll Along》}$。那些剧才是真实的。它们经得起时间的考验。它们在市中心剧院（City Center）复演时，对现代观众来说依然具有相关性。
作者：杰西·艾森伯格（JESSE EISENBERG）
我：过来坐下，亲爱的。我孩子：出什么事了吗，爸爸？我：不，没什么事，宝贝。一点事也没有。我们只需要聊聊。
我孩子：他说过歌词为了 Len Cariou 做了调整，他是原版的 Sweeney。
我孩子：（不安地）好吧？我：我们需要谈谈斯蒂芬·
我孩子：是因为打破的那个花瓶吗？因为我已经把它清理干净了！
我：你确实清理干净了。你清理花瓶做得非常好。是另外一件事。你长大了，有些事情你还不知道。我想让你从我——你的父亲这里听到，而不是从学校里的某些孩子那里听到。
我：不！那不对！这就是我担心的。这就是为什么我很高兴我们能进行这次谈话。那个大孩子错了——他只是想吓唬你。《理发师陶德》（Sweeney Todd）并不完全是音乐。实际上它有一本由休·惠勒（Hugh Wheeler）编写的剧本。
我孩子：不，我不这么认为。我：很好。那些是点唱机音乐剧（jukebox musicals）。而且它们杀了桑多夫！我孩子：桑-桑-桑多夫被杀了？我：是的，他被杀了。我孩子（开始哭泣）：但是，
我孩子：休-休-休谁？我：休·惠勒。桑多夫经常合作的——
爸爸！为什么？！为什么他们要杀他？！
我：因为他们在走捷径，在迎合。就像寄生虫一样，那些点唱机音乐剧钻进了百老汇，慢慢杀死了这个媒介。
我孩子：那太多要记的了！我：别担心。你不是在独自面对这一切。现在我需要知道——有没有哪个大孩子邀请你看$\text{《MJ the Musical》}$或$\text{《Mamma Mia!》}$，甚至是$\text{《Moulin Rouge》}$？
我：这也是真的。还有什么？我孩子：我不知道，爸爸，太混乱了。好像是说故事完全是通过歌曲来讲述的？
桑多夫（Sondheim）。我的孩子：谁-谁-谁-斯蒂芬是谁？我：斯蒂芬·桑多夫。他是一位作曲家和作词家。他写了二十世纪最优秀的音乐剧。
海姆（heim）的合作者。他们是通过哈尔·普林斯（Hal Prince）认识的。
我的孩子（瞬间被吸引）：他们是通过一位王子认识的？！
我的孩子：爸爸，我害怕！那些点唱机会杀了你和妈妈吗？还是杀了我？
我：不是真正的王子，亲爱的！只是一个叫普林斯的男人。现在，那个大孩子——他还提到过别的吗？有什么让你觉得奇怪的吗？他提到过桑多夫那些不那么出名的作品吗？
我的孩子（焦虑增加）：呃，爸爸，
我不知道我该不该听这个。我：你必须听！那些剧太棒了！我的孩子：好-好-好的，爸爸。我：你可能听说过其中一些比较受欢迎的，比如《理发师陶德》（Sweeney Todd）和《走进森林》（Into the Woods）？也许是从学校里的一些大孩子那里听说的？
我：不，亲爱的。只要他们继续复排桑多夫的作品，偶尔给鲍比（Bobby）换个性别，我们就没问题。
我的孩子：桑多夫有不那么出名的作品？我害怕，爸爸！
我的孩子：你确定吗？我：我确定，宝贝。一切都会
我的孩子：我确实听一个八年级的
我：别害怕，宝贝！它们在质量上并不低。只是知名度较低。他提到过《太平洋序曲》（Pacific Overtures）吗？或者《任何人都能吹口哨》（Anyone Can Whistle）？或者《青蛙》（Frogs）？那个大孩子提到《青蛙》了吗？
男孩说了一些关于《理发师陶德》的事。我：他说什么了，宝贝？我的孩子：我想不起来了。只是关于-
没问题的。（我的孩子抽了抽鼻子，平静了下来。一段美好的停顿。）
我的孩子：爸爸？我：怎么了，宝贝？我的孩子：我以为你终于
某些关于配乐使用了不和谐和弦的事情？
路西·古铁雷斯（LUCI GUTIÉRREZ）
我：没错，孩子。这非常好。他还说了什么？没关系。不要害怕。
要告诉我关于性的事情了。
我的孩子（现在真的紧张了）：妈妈什么时候回家？
我：不，孩子。作为一个桑多夫的粉丝，你永远不需要了解那个。
我：妈妈今晚不在家。
特派记者
拜登如何鼓励以色列对加沙以及伊朗的侵略。
作者：大卫·D·柯克派特里克（DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK）
2024年3月5日，在加沙战争爆发五个月后，红十字国际委员会主席米尔亚娜·斯波利亚里奇（Mirjana Spoljaric）给乔·拜登总统发了一封机密信函。根据《日内瓦公约》，红十字会承担着就如何避免战争罪行向各国提供建议的独特责任。在这封我从一名美国前官员处获得的信函中，斯波利亚里奇提醒拜登，该组织此前已谴责哈马斯在10月7日对以色列人实施的“恐怖”大屠杀，并始终“不懈地”敦促该组织释放其劫持的人质。但她现在以“极深切的忧虑”向拜登发出呼吁，因为自10月以来一直用重型弹药轰炸加沙的以色列，正以前所未有的程度无视红十字会。她写道，“以色列开展敌对行动的方式”与武装冲突法“不相兼容”， “特别是保护平民以及区分军事目标与平民或民用基础设施的义务，确保对被拘留者和死者的尊严对待，保护医疗设施和人员，以及提供并允许人道主义援助的进入”。
为了试图影响哈马斯释放人质，斯波利亚里奇曾向卡塔尔和其他该组织的资助者求助；现在她恳请拜登促使以色列的行为“立即发生改变”。信中的附录引用了禁止转移可能被用于战争罪行的武器的美国法律和政府政策，斯波利亚里奇敦促拜登扣押那些“鉴于其毁灭性的人道主义影响，不应在人口密集地区使用”的武器。她警告拜登，未能“维护最低的人道标准”将是一次“道德失败”，而“后代不太可能原谅我们未能阻止这一切”。
在战争或占领期间允许红十字会访问被拘留者，是《日内瓦公约》确立的最明确的底线之一。然而，在10月7日之后，以色列或许在历史上首次完全封锁了该组织接触来自加沙和约旦河西岸的巴勒斯坦被拘留者的渠道，使其与朝鲜和厄立特里亚等贱民国家处于同一阵营；甚至在也门交战的各派势力都允许红十字会访问。斯波利亚里奇指出，人道主义组织和记者报告称，以色列监狱中的巴勒斯坦人数量“大幅增加”。至少有一千人被释放回加沙，其中许多人讲述了遭受酷刑的经历，尽管以色列军方曾
结论认为他们并非哈马斯战士。《时报》报道称，一名被释放的被拘留者（一名名为法迪·巴克尔的法学生）描述说，他被殴打得如此严重，以至于生殖器变成了蓝色，数周后尿液中仍有血迹。他说，以色列守卫播放的音乐声音如此之大，以至于他的一只耳朵出血。（一名以色列军方发言人告诉《时报》，看守人员遵循“以色列和国际法”，并以“低音量”播放音乐，以防止被拘留者进行协调。）但红十字会无法处理此类指控：斯波利亚里奇表示，以色列已经暂停了所有“法律运行对话”。
在 Spoljaric 的信件发出两年后，总统唐纳德·J·特朗普（Donald J. Trump）命令
“要求以色列采取不同的方式。”
第二次摧毁伊朗的防空系统。几位拜登政府官员告诉我，内塔尼亚胡试图做得更多。他寻求美国支持对伊朗基础设施进行进一步袭击，且在不情愿的情况下才最终退让。但内塔尼亚胡请求美国帮助其攻击伊朗已超过十五年，拜登的团队确信他会再次尝试。一位前五角大楼高级官员告诉我，在特朗普赢得 2024 election 后，拜登的顾问警告他们的继任者，由于伊朗处于数十年来的最“脆弱”状态，“以色列人不会错过这个机会。”（一位前特朗普过渡期官员对此说法持有异议。）
特朗普顺从了内塔尼亚胡。在 2025, 6月，以色列人进行了一次大规模袭击，其目的似乎部分是为了推翻伊朗政府。大约一周后，特朗普指示美国军队参与了一夜的对伊朗核设施的空袭，也许是因为他担心错过将此次打击归功于自己的机会。但当特朗普和内塔尼亚胡在八个月后发起一次突然袭击时，国务卿马可·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）解释说，这一次，总统决定“先发制人”打击伊朗，因为“即将会有一次以色列行动”，而该行动“将促使对方攻击美国部队”。特朗普随后声称（缺乏说服力地），他主导了与以色列人的行动，甚至可能“强迫他们出手”；而鲁比奥的说法更具可信度，暗示特朗普政府认为它无法阻止以色列发起攻击，但仍将承担任何反弹——这一模式对拜登白宫来说痛苦地熟悉。事实上，回想起来，拜登及其最亲近的顾问在面对以色列的掩饰和挑衅时，似乎表现得反常地消极，尤其是在保护巴勒斯坦平民的问题上。
“我们绝不该教他们跳弗拉门戈。”
冲突中。布雷特·麦格鲁尔（Brett McGurk），拜登的白宫中东协调员，可能也是他最具影响力的顾问，极力主张这一立场，认为对以色列坚如磐石的支持将有助于遏制伊朗，而伊朗的代理人在加沙冲突的前几个月里在该地区杀害了三名美国士兵。
哈桑·纳斯鲁拉（Hassan Nasrallah）。在这些袭击发生之前，以色列人没有向美国官员提供任何有意义的预警。一位前白宫官员称，内塔尼亚胡在美国、法国和另外几个盟友呼吁以色列与真主党遵守为期三周的停火仅两天后就下令刺杀纳斯鲁拉，这让拜登感到“受辱”。然而，白宫从未在公开场合批评以色列采取单方面行动——且每次此类行动引发冲突时，美国都感到不得不保护以色列。在 2024, 4月和 2024 10月，美国极其有效地帮助击退了伊朗的反击，使得以色列几乎没有受到损害。在第二轮袭击后，拜登向以色列派遣了约一百名美国军人和一套导弹防御系统。
与此同时，拜登政府在加沙战争期间对以色列坚定公开的支持，造成了副总统卡玛拉·哈里斯的国家安全顾问菲利普·戈登向我描述的一种“道德风险”——它诱使以色列总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡试图将这场战斗扩大为区域性战争。尽管拜登及其顾问在私下里多次告知内塔尼亚胡不要挑衅伊朗，但以色列人通过采取恰恰相反的行为，反复让美国人措手不及：2024年1月对大马士革的一次袭击杀死了五名伊朗高级军事顾问；2024年4月对叙利亚境内一个伊朗外交代表团的袭击杀死了十多人；2024年7月在德黑兰的一次袭击暗杀了哈马斯的一名高级政治领导人；2024年9月在黎巴嫩的一次行动中，在真主党战士携带的数千部对讲机和传呼机中植入的爆炸物被引爆；随后的一次空袭杀死了真主党的领导人，
一些拜登政府的顾问私下里感叹，美国的保护在无意中鼓励了内塔尼亚胡的边缘政策。戈登告诉我：“我们可以非常坚定地建议他们——拜登确实多次对‘比比’这么做——‘该死的，见好就收，不要把我们拖入进一步的战争。’但以色列人知道我们会保护他们。”据报道，拜登的国防部长劳埃德·奥斯汀将内塔尼亚胡比作一个用“庄家资金”在赌博的赌徒。
拜登的前国家安全顾问杰克·苏利文告诉我，拜登及其顾问经常在私下讨论约束以色列的方法。苏利文表示，在椭圆形办公室里，“我们反复提出并讨论了扣押武器的方案”，但除了暂停一次炸弹运输外，“总统总是推迟做出该决定，因为我们一直认为我们即将达成一项关于人质
作为这些冲突的一部分，以色列两次对伊朗发动了大规模空袭——
释放和停火的协议”。苏利文说：“当你冷静下来回顾时，这种思维模式中的陷阱更容易被识别。”他补充道：“我会直截了当地说——我们本应该给以色列施加更多压力，促使其采取不同的方式。”
检查人员维护着一份不断变化的禁入物品清单，这些物品因为具有作为武器的潜在“双用途”而被禁止——肥料可能被用于制造炸药，帐篷杆可能变成标枪，以此类推。某些医疗设备有时也被禁止，包括氧气瓶、X射线机，甚至是分娩包（其中包含小剪刀）。任何装有哪怕一件禁入物品的卡车都可能被原路遣返，无论其余货物多么无害。
塔楼、公寓楼、政府部门、公用事业公司、银行和大学。报道称，以色列通过电话、短信和空投传单警告平民撤离，但在采取这些预防措施方面，似乎比之前的冲突时期更为松懈。这些“权力目标”被袭击是为了恐吓巴勒斯坦人，从而迫使他们向哈马斯施压使其投降，这些目标约占以色列空袭行动前五天袭击次数的一半。（以色列国防军的一名发言人在对我表示时，否认了其通过打击平民目标来向民众施压的行为。）
国防军声称，他们始终遵守武装冲突法，并努力最大限度地减少平民伤亡。但在以色列开始对加沙进行反击后不久，拜登政府内部关于潜在战争罪行的警报就开始敲响。截至 2023年11月1日，巴勒斯坦人的死亡人数已至少达到 8,800 人，其中包括 5,800 多名妇女和儿童。以色列战机每天在加沙北部进行多达 800 次袭击，密切跟踪战争情况的政府官员告诉我，以色列的军事规划者不可能预先选择或如此迅速地识别出这么多合法的军事目标，例如隧道入口、火箭发射器和哈马斯领导人。以色列人也不可能仔细权衡平民生命和基础设施面临的风险是否与每个目标的军事价值成比例。令人震惊的是，袭击似乎在地理上呈从东北向西南的线性移动，将整个街区夷为平地，这表明在平民建筑和军事结构之间几乎没有做出区分。拜登的国务卿安东尼·布林肯焦急地询问其工作人员，以色列如何能证明这种规模的破坏是合理的。一名国务院高级官员告诉我：“我们都对这种攻击性和致命程度感到震惊，并在问，‘他们他妈的在干什么？’”
2023年12月，战争开始两个月后，联合国驻加沙工作人员向国务院报告，以色列国防军在寒冷的深夜将数十名巴勒斯坦被拘留者安置在加沙的一个边境口岸。他们已被证实与哈马斯没有任何军事关系，且许多人表示曾遭受可怕的虐待。国务院民主、人权与劳工局采取措施，试图援引一项名为《利希法》（Leahy Laws，以原参议员帕特里克·利希命名）的美国数十年前的法律。该法禁止向任何被可靠指控“严重违反”人权的军事单位提供援助。但是，根据与以色列协商的一项特殊程序，这一过程在接下来的几个月里在闭门状态下进行，且对以色列在加沙的行动没有产生任何影响。
将阻断人道主义援助作为一种战争手段违反了武装战斗法，且一项美国数十年前的法律禁止向任何限制提供美国支持援助的政府提供武器。战争前，加沙每天通过多个边境口岸进口约 500 辆卡车的食品和物资。10月7日两天后，以色列关闭了所有口岸。以色列国防部长约夫·加兰特表示，他已下令进行“全面围困”：“没有电，没有食物，没有水，没有燃料——一切都将被关闭。我们在与人类动物作战，因此我们也采取相应的行动。”
布林肯在几天后飞往以色列。他会见了内塔尼亚胡和加兰特，据在场人员称，他告诉他们，允许食物进入不仅是“一种道德责任”，而且是“战略上的必要且法律上的必要”。然而，直到布林肯威胁要取消拜登的计划访问，内塔尼亚胡才有所让步。即便如此，内塔尼亚胡也仅同意允许少量物资通过加沙与埃及边境的拉法口岸进入；他还要求这次微小的让步必须保密。他担心如果不让加沙的妇女、儿童和其他平民陷入饥饿，会在国内引起强烈反弹。拜登进行了访问，在他离开时，内塔尼亚胡公开吹嘘自己蔑视总统。他宣布，以色列“不会允许人道主义援助”从“我们的领土进入加沙地带”。
以色列在袭击中采取的焦土战术，出于现实的考量令拜登政府感到担忧。拜登及其团队在就职时便决心恢复美国对在加沙和约旦河西岸建立巴勒斯坦国在至少象征层面的支持。其逻辑是，考虑到目前在以色列控制的领土内，穆斯林与犹太人的数量大致相当，与巴勒斯坦国和平共处是以色列保持安全、犹太属性及民主体制的唯一途径——因此，即便内塔尼亚胡及其内阁成员多次誓言绝不允许这样做，这依然是美国的核心国家利益。前任官员告诉我，在拜登就职的第一年里，布林肯曾向内塔尼亚胡挑战道：“无论双方某些人想要什么，谁也离不开。那么，这件事将如何结束？”
《时报》随后报道称，在哈马斯大屠杀当天，以色列军队正式修订了其“交战规则”，使得中级军官可以授权实施可能导致多达 20 名平民死亡的袭击，以击毙一名哈马斯的基层战士。之前的规则允许风险高达 5 名平民死亡，或在某些情况下为 10 名。前美国官员向我推荐了特拉维夫新闻网站 +972 关于战争最初几周的一篇文章，他们表示该文与情报报告一致。根据该文章，在此期间，以色列战机蓄意攻击办公建筑等平民设施。
前一页跨页：SAHER ALGHORRA / NYT / REDUX
以色列军队极力抵制允许人道主义援助进入，以至于在冲突期间，布林肯和沙利文几乎每天不得不花掉他们有限的时间与以色列官员就诸如可进入加沙的卡车数量等细节进行讨价还价。以色列-
在赢得 2016 年大选后，特朗普对国际法不屑一顾，且不关心巴勒斯坦人的命运，成为五十年来唯一一位不支持巴勒斯坦自治的总统。但拜登的总统过渡团队制定了详细计划，以恢复特朗普所废除的一切。拜登政府将立即恢复一项五十年前的美国政策，宣布约旦河西岸的犹太定居点违反国际法；重新要求来自约旦河西岸的进口产品必须标注来源地，而非标注为“以色列制造”；并重新开放美国驻耶路撒冷领事馆，该馆此前一直充当着与巴勒斯坦人接触的事实上的外交代表机构。一名曾在过渡期参与规划的前官员向我描述了这一策略。
在 10 月 7 日袭击的恐怖事件后，政府内部没有人质疑以色列反击的权利。也没有人质疑美国提供军事支持的必要性。但白宫在如何最有效地摧毁哈马斯这一点上与内塔尼亚胡意见不一。拜登、布林肯和沙利文私下里都担心，以色列反击的猛烈程度可能会使美国军队陷入风险，使释放人质的谈判复杂化，并破坏该地区的长期稳定。
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……正切断沙特阿拉伯获得某些美国制造弹药的渠道，而沙特在六年来一直将这些弹药投放在也门。这些空袭旨在击败也门内战中由伊朗支持的一方，已导致 1.8 万多名平民死亡，年平均死亡人数超过 3000 人——在以色列在加沙发起攻势之前，这个数字被认为是天文数字。沙特人的封锁以及……
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冲突开始时的四十六岁（注：此处指代人物），曾是一名罗兹学者和最高法院法庭书记员，十多年来一直处于民主党外交政策建制的核心。然而，白宫官员告诉我，拜登有时会粗鲁地驳回这两人的观点，提高嗓门，就像在责备孩子一样。（拜登通过发言人拒绝与我交谈。）
阿联酋人的行动导致了一场饥荒，造成数千人死亡。与奥斯汀的回应相呼应，拜登称也门战争是一场“人道主义和战略灾难”，并且“必须结束”。各派系在次年达成了停火协议。
奥斯汀作为国防部长的标志性成就之一，是采取了一项正式政策以
仍然没有执行这些计划（这些计划此前尚未公开），部分原因是预见到以色列会有抵触。但一些由布林肯领导的美国官员尝试了一次新策略，旨在促成巴勒斯坦建国。沙特阿拉伯王储穆罕默德·本·萨勒曼已发出信号，愿意在获得美国核技术的情况下，将关系正常化。他很满意以色列在巴勒斯坦人未来问题上仅提供口头承诺，但布林肯和其他美国外交官敦促沙特人要求一个更坚定的“两国方案”承诺。前任官员告诉我，在白宫内部，布林肯主张正常化是“我们拥有的唯一杠杆”，可以促使以色列重新开启“为巴勒斯坦人提供的路径”。
减少美国军队及其军事合作伙伴给平民带来的伤害。拜登的国务院致力于一项互补政策——《平民伤害事件响应指南》——要求对任何关于外国军队蓄意或由于疏忽使用美国武器伤害平民的报告进行调查。在 2023 年初，拜登发布了一项政策，禁止转让美国武器，如果这些武器“极有可能”被用于战争罪行——即便没有具体暴行的证据。国务院的一份新闻稿称，该政策将“政府自 Day-1 以来一直遵循的原则”法典化。
在袭击发生几天后，内塔尼亚胡通过下令对真主党进行先发制人的空袭，令白宫感到惊讶。当以色列战机准备轰炸黎巴嫩时，拜登在一次匆忙的电话会议中敦促内塔尼亚胡停止行动，强调美国尚未准备好保护其部队或以色列免受任何反击。当时一个美国航母编队刚刚抵达该地区，但第二个仍在途中。一个作为紧急统一政府一部分而新组建的以色列战时内阁，对于此次袭击的明智与否已经产生了分歧，内塔尼亚胡同意取消行动。但一旦美国部队部署到位，拜登对克制的呼吁就没那么有效了。
每个人在与我交谈时都坚持认为，拜登——无论后来出现了怎样的认知能力下降迹象——在加沙政策中发挥了积极的作用。他夸耀自己在该地区的经验可以追溯到七十年代初，当时他以参议员身份访问了以色列；他对自己的专业知识如此自信，以至于经常对他最资深的顾问们采取一种居高临下的态度。布林肯在10月7日时61岁，在参议院和奥巴马白宫期间与拜登并肩工作了数十年。他在国务院的职位使他能够利用美国外交部的见解，其中包括一些资深外交官，这些人与拜登身边的圈子不同，曾在中东地区生活多年。萨利文当时……
接下来的那一周，拜登在特拉维夫的一次演讲中公开承认了他的担忧，建议以色列人避免美国在应对 9/11. 事件时所犯的错误。“当你感受到那种愤怒时，不要被它吞噬，”他说，并补充道，“绝大多数巴勒斯坦人并不是哈马斯。”在私下里，拜登及其顾问利用这次对以色列的访问，试图说服内塔尼亚胡的战争内阁推迟对加沙的入侵。美国方面警告称——事实证明这一警告是正确的——以色列军队将陷入地面战的泥潭，这将阻碍谈判释放人质的努力，其中有12人持有美国护照。入侵还将迫使哈马斯进一步潜入地下。
拜登团队认为，在美国情报支持下的精确打击可以更快、更有效地杀死尽可能多的罪魁祸首。这是美国在对抗塔利班、伊拉克叛乱和ISIS战争中吸取的教训，因此白宫派遣了一名三星将军和其他高级军官，与以色列国防军（I.D.F.）分享他们的战场经验。
这名三星将军及其代表团还试图让以色列国防军更具体地定义其行动。最终，在 1, 2023, 11月1日于东京举行的一次外交峰会上，布林肯公布了一份美国在战后加沙所寻求的“关键要素”愿望清单，包括“不得强行驱逐巴勒斯坦人”、“不得重新占领加沙”、“不得缩减加沙领土”以及“加沙在巴勒斯坦权力机构的领导下与西岸统一”——后者是西方支持的管理机构，曾被构想为未来国家的雏形。
10月7日之后，以色列显然不分青红皂白的轰炸也损害了拜登政府的其他优先事项。拜登的国防部长奥斯汀是一位退役陆军将领，他参与了自 9/11 以来每一次主要的美国军事行动。他经常说，他学到的是，造成不必要的平民伤亡会使军队更难实现其目标，无论是占领领土还是击败叛乱分子。奥斯汀说：“你会制造更多的恐怖分子。”在他的影响下，拜登在制度化战时平民保护方面所做的努力超过了二战以来的任何一位总统。在他的首次外交政策演说中，拜登宣布他……
在 2023, 12月，当巴勒斯坦人的死亡人数超过一万七千人时，国防部长奥斯汀在一次演讲中宣布，更好地保护平民是“一项战略上的必然”：“如果你将他们推向敌人的怀抱，你就是用一场战略失败取代了一次战术胜利。”（在一次电视采访中，共和党参议员林赛·格雷厄姆称奥斯汀“天真”，声称巴勒斯坦人已经“激进化”并被教导“仇恨犹太人”。）布林肯与以色列战争内阁会面，并主张仅凭军事行动无法消灭像哈马斯这样的意识形态。
在一次会议上，麦格克向本尼·甘茨提出了这一主张。甘茨是前以色列国防部长，也是内塔尼亚胡的一位温和派竞争对手，当时已加入战争内阁。据知情人士透露，甘茨坚持认为以色列军队必须立即进入加沙，既为了消除哈马斯的威胁，也为了震慑其他敌人。他在一张纸上勾勒了一幅行动后该地区的规划图：该地区由一条以色列控制的走廊分为若干区域，并被以色列军队的封锁线包围，这样“任何看向加沙的人看到的都将是以色列士兵的背影”。（内塔尼亚胡和其他以色列官员很少明确阐述如此具体的目标，但如今以色列国防军已占据加沙的这些位置，甚至更多。）
第二天，美国国务院人权局副助理秘书、拜登政府内部对以色列行为最激烈的批评者之一克里斯托弗·勒蒙给布林肯发送了一份机密照会，敦促他警告内塔尼亚胡，拜登政府规定禁止转让“极有可能”被用于战争罪行的武器，并要求对造成平民伤害的具体指控进行调查。勒蒙写道，美国官员在公开露面时应避免“将平民伤亡斥为不可避免”。
尽管如此，内塔尼亚胡仍拒绝详细说明一个更具可行性的军事行动目标。事实上，他将既定目标扩大为“全面胜利”——无论这意味着什么。而拜登及其顾问们几乎放弃了让他明确表态的尝试。总统高级顾问、出生于耶路撒冷的美国后裔阿莫斯·霍克斯坦告诉我：“我们尝试过了，但回顾来看，我们没有成功的机会，因为内塔尼亚胡不是在跟我们对话——他是在跟自己的民众对话。”事实上，白宫高级官员向我描述，面对以色列对10月7日事件的情绪反应，他们几乎无能为力。布林肯告诉我：“这是一次社会创伤，无论正确与否，都被视为关乎生存的危机。”
布林肯飞往特拉维夫，在一次电视采访中，他观察到以色列未能保护平民“正中了哈马斯的下怀”，这似乎在呼应勒蒙的观点。但他在公开场合并未提及战争罪行或美国的义务。
几位拜登政府的高级顾问告诉我，他们曾在私下里促使内塔尼亚胡明确以色列的目标。10月7日，内塔尼亚胡誓言要“摧毁”哈马斯，将哈马斯活动的任何地方都“化为瓦砾”。在他们听来，这像是承诺要杀掉每一个最后的战斗员——这是一个不可能实现的目标，会导致无休止的战争。此外，政府各部门的官员一致认为，要持久地击败哈马斯，需要一个可信的替代性巴勒斯坦政府来接管加沙。
一名参与与白宫沟通的以色列高级官员
一份由美国国务院近东事务局传阅的文件主张，拜登应效仿富兰克林·德拉诺·罗斯福总统的模式。在罗斯福派遣美国军队保卫英国免受希特勒侵害之前，他曾要求温斯顿·丘吉尔签署《大西洋宪章》，明确盟军作战是为了解放欧洲，而非为了维护英国在中东、非洲和亚洲的殖民帝国。按照这个逻辑，美国在加速武器销售并承诺数十亿美元援助之前，拥有最大的筹码促使以色列承诺一个现实的战争目标。
（某位官员）表示，双方之间存在着普遍的“心态差距”。美国人寻求详细的预先规划，而以色列人则要求立即采取军事行动，即便每一步都必须即兴发挥。此外，该官员表示，内塔尼亚胡担心在加沙宣布具体目标会引发内阁争议，并导致他脆弱的执政联盟破裂。无论如何，拜登政府不情愿的默许现在看来像是某种轻信投降模式的开始。即便布林肯勾勒了美国对战后加沙的愿景，内塔尼亚胡此前已在公然违抗。以色列下令在加沙城进行无期限疏散，这看起来像是在强迫迁移。内塔尼亚胡拒绝让巴勒斯坦权力机构在加沙承担任何角色（且未公开支持任何替代方案）。他还暗示将进行占领，誓言在战争结束后，以色列将承担加沙的“全面军事责任”。
死胡同
像所有的暴君一样，我的母亲也颁布法令。压死骆驼的最后一根稻草是那条规定：屋内不许养青蛙。这糟糕的世界！我当时七岁，准备空手逃走。至少带个三明治吧，我母亲说，将一块用铝箔纸包着的方块三明治塞进我系在棍子上的手帕里。我成了一个真正的流浪汉。我几乎没有回头看她看着我离去的眼神。我一直走到死胡同，然后坐下来吃东西。那是一个充满悲伤的三明治——悲伤与盐，悲伤与番茄，悲伤与奶酪。我走到了多么遥远的远方？为什么当我回到家时，我的那杯牛奶依然冰冷？
尽管如此，在 2023 年 12 月，拜登绕过国会，授权向以色列紧急出售价值数百万美元的武器。不久之后，他敦促国会通过一项额外的 87 亿美元（$8.7 billion）援助计划，并于 2024 年 4 月将其签署为法律。拜登政府最终同意在加沙行动期间向以色列出售价值超过 200 亿美元的武器，这还不包括美国每年提供 38 亿美元（$3.8 billion）的军事援助。无论政府官员在幕后如何表态，这些军事援助承诺在公开层面传达了对以色列追求“全面胜利”这一模糊目标的全力支持。
—Andrea Cohen
严格限制以色列使用美国武器，同时不损害其安全。这些措施包括：扣留美国最大的炸弹（红十字会认为此类炸弹不适合在加沙等人口密集地区使用）；扣留某些纯进攻性武器；以及仅允许在加沙境外使用某些武器。拜登此前已誓言，美国将严惩任何针对以色列的投机性袭击。（他多次警告道：“不要，不要，不要。”）一些美国官员认为，即便美国同时在限制以色列对加沙的进攻，超级大国报复的威胁无疑将有助于震慑伊朗及其盟友。
发表了一番被某些人称为“严厉之爱”的演讲，绕过内塔尼亚胡，直接面向以色列民众。在特拉维夫发表那番充满共情的演讲后的几周里，拜登在以色列的受欢迎程度超过了该国总理。利用这一信誉，拜登主张，一场全面战争虽然可能满足复仇的饥渴，但将不必要地伤害无辜平民，孤立以色列，并使以色列犹太人注定要与以色列统治下日益增长的巴勒斯坦人口陷入永无休止的冲突。相比之下，如果针对 10 月 7 日袭击背后的恐怖分子开展规模较小的战斗，则可以释放人质，促成与沙特阿拉伯关系的正常化，并有可能实现与一个巴勒斯坦国家的安全共存。如果采取这条路径，美国将确保以色列的
白宫内部就是否以及如何利用美国的军事支持作为筹码来制约以色列的行动，进行了数月的争论。以色列约 70% 的武器，包括几乎所有的导弹、飞机和炸弹，均来自美国。在战争期间寻找替代供应几乎是不可想象的。
拜登的国家安全事务副助理乔恩·法纳（Jon Finer）曾是《华盛顿邮报》的记者，报道过此前以色列在加沙的军事行动。法纳领导一个由国家安全委员会工作人员组成的小组，他们提出了各种重新——
在战争最初的几个月里，拜登及其高级顾问开始讨论总统是否应该在每一步中都确保安全。没有保证这种演讲能说服以色列人，但它至少能阐明，拜登政府将对美国利益做出自己的判断，而不仅仅是听命于内塔尼亚胡。
部分地为了在“美国大锤落下”之前争取更多时间，（相关人员）继续重复“再两周”。
（该行动）将在 12 月结束。
然而，以色列领导人经常声称，某些新发现（例如关于哈马斯隧道网络的规模）迫使他们延长了作战计划。在以色列袭击加沙城的死亡人数达到一万人后，布林肯亲自恳请德默、内塔尼亚胡以及以色列驻华盛顿大使迈克尔·赫佐格（Michael Herzog）：“不要在南部重复你们在北部所做的事！”但 1, 2023, 12 月 1 日，以色列围攻加沙地带中部的汗尤尼斯，到 12 月 20 日，总死亡人数已达两万。据两名熟悉对话的官员称，萨利文随后要求德默和赫佐格保证行动不会进一步延伸：“在汗尤尼斯之后，你们肯定想去拉法！”以色列官员坚称：“不，不，不，我们不会对拉法采取行动！”然而，到 2024, 1 月，内塔尼亚胡已暗示以色列确实将攻占拉法，并且他很快指责任何质疑该计划的人（隐含地指拜登）“本质上是在告诉我们：‘输掉这场战争’”。内塔尼亚胡承诺：“我们不会屈服于任何压力。”
到 2024 年 2 月，已有迹象表明制裁之锤事实上可能会落下。马里兰州民主党参议员克里斯·范·霍伦（Chris Van Hollen）针对向以色列提供军事援助的法案提出了一项极具争议的修正案。该修正案要求遵守相关规则，即美国必须切断向任何阻碍美国支持的援助或可能在战争罪行中使用美国武器的国家提供武器。尽管该修正案未提及任何具体国家，但美国以色列公共事务委员会对此表示反对，指责范·霍伦“试图让以色列更难保护其家庭”。然而，随着加沙的死亡人数超过两万八千人，该修正案在进步派中获得了足够的支持，以至于民主党领导人参议员查克·舒默（Chuck Schumer）请求白宫协助，以制止党内内讧。
但拜登及其顾问们还记得此前在加沙问题上与以色列产生的外交和政治纠葛。2014 年，巴拉克·奥巴马总统在回应以色列与哈马斯之间的冲突时表示，他对巴勒斯坦平民遭受不成比例的杀戮感到“深切关注”。在战斗两天后，奥巴马公开提出协助调停停火；十二天后，他敦促以色列单方面宣布停火。国会共和党人及部分民主党人猛烈抨击他是在奖赏“恐怖分子”，而内塔尼亚胡依然挑衅地发动了为期七周的地面入侵。以色列的死亡人数为 73 人；约 2200 名巴勒斯坦人死亡。因此，当 2021 年 5 月另一轮暴力冲突爆发时，拜登选择在公开场合仅表达对以色列应对措施的支持。以色列的空袭摧毁了大量平民建筑，包括数座住宅楼、53 所学校、17 处医疗设施，以及半岛电视台和美联社的办事处。至少 260 名巴勒斯坦人被杀；来自加沙的火箭弹导致 13 名以色列人死亡。但直到以色列军方领导人表示准备就绪，拜登才加入呼吁停火的行列。白宫官员在接受记者采访时匿名吹嘘，拜登的“拥抱比比战略”——“我不同意你的观点，但我爱你”——在 11 天内就结束了战斗，比奥巴马的公开训斥更快。一位白宫高级官员告诉我就此，对于拜登来说，这一事件强化了一种感觉，即“美国与以色列之间公开的分歧实际上可能会适得其反”。
沙利文（Sullivan）、布林肯（Blinken）及白宫其他成员从中看到了机会。通过公开承诺重新遵守现有规则——实际上是在暗示美国法律可能会迫使政府切断武器供应——拜登可以间接向以色列施压，以更好地保护巴勒斯坦平民。2024 年 2 月 8 日，拜登签署了第 20 号国家安全备忘录，该备忘录以与范·霍伦修正案基本相同的方式，进一步强化了关于援助和战争罪行的现有规则。在 90 天后，布林肯将被要求向国会提交一份报告，证明每个接收美国武器的国家是否合规。范·霍伦对此感到满意，撤回了其修正案。
2024 年初，布林肯对德默（Dermer）说：“我再也不想听到‘再给两周’这句话了！”德默开玩笑地回应道：“好吧，那我说‘fortnight’（十四天/半个月）。”布林肯在谈到以色列人时告诉我：“他们是真诚的，还是不真诚的？我认为两者兼而有之。”他补充道：“在 24 年极早期，我肯定会相信他们的话——但随着时间的推移，这种信任减少了，这让人非常沮丧。”（一名以色列高级官员坚称，内塔尼亚胡和德默在每一个时刻都准确地转达了他们从以色列军方那里听到的信息。）
拜登似乎对内塔尼亚胡失去了耐心。在他发布该备忘录的那天，他在一场无关的新闻发布会后走回讲台，回答一个被大声喊出的问题，并称以色列的行动“过火了”。他宣布“无辜的人民”正在“挨饿”并“死去”，并补充道：“必须停止这样做了。”根据白宫的一份声明，三天后，他在一次通话中告诉内塔尼亚胡，如果没有一个能够保护在拉法避难帐篷营地中寻求庇护的一百多万巴勒斯坦人的“可执行计划”，以色列军队不应在拉法采取行动。
其他官员告诉我，在白宫工作人员的会议上，国家安全事务副助理菲纳（Finer）经常询问，什么样的平民死亡人数将被视为不可接受。底线在哪里？菲纳拒绝就此类内部对话发表评论，但谈到以色列人时表示：“现在很明显，而且当时也非常清楚，他们根本没有告诉我们关于其计划和时间表的真相，而毫无理由就全盘接受这些说法。”事实上，几名拜登政府的官员告诉我，他们后来认为以色列领导层已经
“不留分歧”（no daylight）的方法在10月7日后的几个月里对白宫尤其具有吸引力，因为内塔尼亚胡及其长期顾问兼华盛顿特使罗恩·德默（Ron Dermer）一直坚持认为，他们预计战斗很快就会结束。“只要再过两周，”他们反复承诺。正如一名白宫官员告诉我的那样，“如果只有几周时间，为什么要与以色列大吵一架？”另一名官员说：“我们认为这可能，
红十字会的信函——
旨在促成哈马斯的胜利。”来自德克萨斯州的众议员基思·塞尔夫（Keith Self）称拜登为“贝内迪克特·阿诺德”（叛徒）。十六名众议院民主党人与共和党人一起，谴责拒绝提供大型炸弹的决定。
该组织在冲突开始后一直致力于协调人质释放并在加沙提供服务，该信函在下个月寄达，且其保持此类沟通严格保密。在附录中，米尔雅娜·斯波利亚里奇（Mirjana Spoljaric）指出，以色列正在制造“人道主义援助进入和分发的障碍”，并发布“导致人口重复迁移至既不安全且缺乏满足基本需求基础设施区域的撤离令”。红十字会即使在未访问监狱的情况下，也记录了大量关于“非人性条件”的“众多且可靠的指控”，并注意到“在以色列拘留期间的死亡人数异常之高”。斯波利亚里奇写道，以色列似乎在援引《日内瓦公约》的某些原则，“而非为了让平民免受军事行动的影响，或避免或
请求其对以色列的行为进行必要的审查。至少有五人认为，以色列可能在违反战争法的情况下使用了美国武器，并阻碍了美国人道主义援助的交付。（官员们告诉我，负责近东事务的助理国务卿芭芭拉·利夫（Barbara Leaf）对此表示赞同。）另一方面，美国驻耶路撒冷大使——以及拜登政府内部以色列的主要辩护者——雅各布·卢（Jacob Lew）则认为以色列遵守了相关法律。负责监管武器销售的政军局结论认为，以色列在使用美国武器时并未违规。负责反犹太主义的特使德博拉·利普斯塔特（Deborah Lipstadt）敦促不要要求这个犹太国家遵守比其他国家更高的标准，但她并未声称自己精通战争或援助分发。
与此同时，在白宫内部，争论的焦点重新回到了伊朗。
在世界中央厨房（World Central Kitchen）事件发生的那天，以色列袭击了伊朗在叙利亚的代表机构。伊朗在历史上首次对以色列发动直接攻击，发射了三百多枚导弹和无人机。美国军方（以及部分阿拉伯盟友）拦截了几乎所有目标，并费力地劝说内塔尼亚胡将以色列的下一轮反击限制在一次象征性的权力展示——即摧毁伊斯法罕附近的一个伊朗雷达设施。
伊朗对此攻击未作回应，情报官员和一些国家安全委员会的工作人员认为，这一决定表明伊斯法翰共和国的领导人——正如一位美国高级官员告诉我的那样——“并不渴望发生更大规模的冲突”。那么，或许拜登可以不再担心，美国与以色列之间的分歧会诱使伊朗发动一场区域战争。
5月5日，以色列官员在报告提交国会前夕，显然试图煽动美国支持者的情绪，他们告诉Axios，拜登政府悄悄暂停了一批该刊物所称的“弹药”运输。被扣押的弹药结果是数千枚巨型炸弹：大约一半重两千磅，其余的重五百磅。（一枚两千磅的炸弹能杀死半径一千两百英尺范围内的任何人。）三天后在CNN的一次采访中，拜登在谈到两千磅的
四天后，拜登在一次电视采访中冲动地宣布，以色列不能“让另外三万名巴勒斯坦人死亡”，并暗示在拉法（Rafah）的任何行动都将跨越“红线”。但片刻之后，他又收回了这段话，称这并不意味着他将切断以色列获得所有美国武器的渠道。
但麦格克（McGurk）和其他鹰派人士反驳称，伊朗的空中攻击几乎取得了成功。美国中央司令部当时并不确定美国能否拦截如此之多的导弹。军方领导人表示，以色列运气好，他们担心更多的齐射将耗尽美国的拦截弹库存。更重要的是，伊朗的部分武器已进入以色列领空，这可以说给了哈马斯比以往任何时候都更充分的理由去期待一场区域战争。
随后，在4月1日，以色列的无人机袭击杀死了世界中央厨房组织的一支车队中的七名援助人员，该非营利组织的创始人是名厨何塞·安德烈斯（José Andrés），他是拜登的朋友。自10月7日以来，以色列已杀害了约两百名援助人员，但几乎全部是巴勒斯坦人。世界中央厨房的遇难者中包括一名美国和加拿大的双重公民，以及波兰、澳大利亚和英国的公民。拜登愤怒地首次公开警告，美国持续的支持将取决于对以色列采取“具体、切实且可衡量步骤”以减轻平民痛苦的评估。几周后，布林肯给以色列国防部长加兰特（Gallant）发了一封信（此前尚未公开），警告他国家安全备忘录 20 中强化的要求，并要求改善援助的交付。
负责协助领导人质释放谈判的麦格克多次敦促同事们严肃对待伊朗关于将以色列“从地图上抹去”的长期言论。他曾任首席大法官威廉·伦奎斯特（William Rehnquist）的书记员，以及美国占领伊拉克的法律顾问，他提醒同事，阿布·穆萨比·扎卡维（Abu Musab al-Zarqawi）建立新哈里法国的誓言在当时听起来也极其遥远——直到他宣布自己成为“伊斯兰国”的哈里发。尽管美国情报机构认为伊朗年迈的阿亚图拉（Ayatollah）厌恶风险，且倾向于将实际战斗交给真主党和哈马斯等外国代理人，但情报
弹药，“加沙地区有平民因为那些炸弹而丧生。”他继续说道，如果以色列攻击拉法的“人口中心”，他将不再“提供武器”。以色列官员表示，其军队使用两千磅炸弹是为了摧毁加固的隧道，尽管实现这一目标有更少无差别的方式，但共和党人立即乘势攻击。来自阿肯色州的参议员汤姆·科顿（Tom Cotton）宣称，拜登的“立场事实上是
那个月，至少八个国务院局、机构或使团提交了评估报告，布林肯已将这些报告——
10月7日之后产生的报告表明，至少有一些伊朗人认为这是他们的机会。麦格克（McGurk）和其他人质谈判代表在更具体的情报支持下注意到，每当拜登对以色列人施加公开压力时——例如警告他们不要仓促进入拉法——就会重新唤起哈马斯领导人的希望，认为伊朗可能会来救援，并促使他们提高要求，包括每名被扣押人质需要释放多少名巴勒斯坦囚犯。麦格克认为，如果归还人质是结束战争的唯一途径，那么公开挤压以色列以保护平民，可能会矛盾地延长战斗，导致更多巴勒斯坦人死亡。
几位美国高级官员告诉我，几乎所有参与加沙政策的人——包括奥斯汀（Austin）国务卿——都认为以色列杀害的巴勒斯坦人数量超过了实现任何合法目标所需的数量。尽管如此，政府逐渐认为它无法说服以色列改变其在加沙的方式。一名白宫高级官员向我表示，以色列人“作为地面部队的运作方式与我们完全不同”。在这种观点下，拜登面临一个严峻的选择：他可以或多或少地支持以色列进行的加沙行动，或者他可以通过切断武器供应强迫以色列停止，但这可能会让哈马斯既控制加沙又继续持有的人质。
“给他投一个快速球，好让他击出再见全垒打，他们赢得世界大赛，而我们不需要去白宫。”
• •
由于其显然承诺将扣押武器，其处境显得越来越尴尬。布林肯和白宫转向国务院和国家安全委员会的律师，后者采取了一种高度技术性的方法。多少平民伤亡与一次攻击的军事优势相“称比例”？答案取决于计划者知道什么以及意图什么。尽管以色列人极少（如果曾经分享的话）分享特定空袭背后的原始情报，但他们提供了关于选择目标和警告平民的复杂协议的大量信息——即使攀升的死亡人数让人质疑这些预防措施的有效性。以色列人区分军事目标和平民目标的细致程度如何？这条界线可能是模糊的——例如，任何三层楼的建筑都可以被认为是一个潜在的军事“观察哨”，哈马斯战士可以从中发现逼近的
以色列地面部队。而且以色列官员始终坚持认为，哈马斯在医院和其他被其部队摧毁的平民基础设施内部运作。一名参与其中的美国律师告诉我：“哈马斯潜伏在平民之中，所以每个人在数月之久的时间里一直在讨论这些细微差别和复杂情况。”
事实证明，拜登对以色列的恫吓并不像看起来那么激烈。白宫官员告诉我，他在CNN上关于如果以色列进攻拉法将不提供武器的言论是未经计划的，并不反映一项正式决定。事实上，其他官员告诉我，在大规模炸弹运输暂停后，法纳提出五百磅炸弹也应被扣留，因为它们与两千磅炸弹包装在一起。但在萨利文让他将这个问题呈交给拜登后，总统下令将较小的炸弹单独运输。这种五百磅的弹药——美国在打击ISIS期间向已撤离的伊拉克城市摩苏尔投下的最大规模炸弹——将杀死半径65英尺范围内的任何人，并导致150英尺范围内的任何人受伤。
拜登政府禁止转移可能被用于战争罪行的武器，这似乎提供了一个更清晰的标准。然而，参与其中的律师告诉我，政府政策制定者似乎想要战争罪行的具体证据，而由于国务院并不运行用于权衡证据的法庭，律师们无法证明任何事情。美国律师解释道：“这种语言上的微妙之处——比如‘我们没有决定性的证据，但我们非常担心以色列正在犯下战争罪行’——在最高层的人看来，其意思实际上就是‘我们没问题！’”
国家安全备忘录 20，
然而，德默和内塔尼亚胡——或许意识到计划正在酝酿中——介入了。他们告诉白宫，以色列正在认真考虑美国提出的一个分阶段停火并释放人质的计划，且哈马斯似乎接受了该计划。（参与谈判的人员告诉我，在整个冲突过程中，哈马斯通常试图以人质换取囚犯释放、结束战争以及保留对加沙控制权的机会；内塔尼亚胡政府认为这种结果不可接受。）
精神分裂的。报告指出，以色列官员已正式声明他们正在加强“尽量减少平民伤害的努力”。报告宽容地观察到，如果一个国家在“采取适当步骤进行调查”，那么其对国际法的“总体承诺”并不一定因为个别违规行为而被“推翻”。报告给出了这样的限制条件，即美国缺乏必要的战场意识来“核实”美国武器是否被用于具体事件，并赞扬以色列实施了“额外措施”以避免杀掉救援人员。然而，报告同时称，“可以合理评估”的是，以色列事实上使用了美国武器，其方式与战争法或“减轻平民伤害的既定最佳实践” “不一致”。报告尖锐地指出，一些以色列设备既是“完全由美国原产（例如：有人驾驶攻击机）”，且“很可能参与”了战争罪行；美国政府“不了解”以色列对违规行为进行自身调查后产生的任何起诉情况；且以色列在世界中央厨房（World Central Kitchen）袭击后保护救援人员的承诺“未能完全防止”进一步的死亡。 “然而”、“尽管如此”和“尽管”这些词在同样数量的页码中出现了十几次——这是一个逻辑死结，展示了拜登政府在自身地带扭曲到了何种程度。
《日内瓦公约》要求参战方“采取其可支配的一切手段”来“便利”人道主义援助的交付，但这同样存在漏洞。公约赋予了交战方“搜查发货物资”、“根据规定的时间和路线监管其通过”以及确保供应物资并非旨在使军事对手获益且对此“合理满意”的权利。此外，国务院并未考虑 以色列 数月来阻碍援助的模式；该部门仅在报告定稿时评估了援助流入的量。在 4 月 1 日世界中央厨房（World Central Kitchen）遭袭后，以色列曾短暂地将进入加沙的物资卡车数量增加到几乎接近战前水平。
拜登放弃了那番强硬的措辞，转而要求将其转化为号召 以色列 领导人接受现有协议的呼吁。在 5 月 31 日白宫的一次演讲中，拜登表示，拟议的协议将以六周的停火开始。如果哈马斯释放女性、老年和受伤的人质，以色列 将从加沙的人口中心撤出，并释放数百名巴勒斯坦囚犯。此后，在待定的进一步谈判期间，如果哈马斯释放剩余人质，以色列 将完全从加沙撤出，并承诺“永久停止敌对行动”。为了让内塔尼亚胡加入，拜登误导性地将协议蓝图归功于 以色列 人，尽管他多次恳请 以色列 人接受这些条款，这让人们对其真正的起草者产生了疑问。
一名白宫高级官员将律师的信息转述为：“我们不是在告诉你发生了违规行为——我们是说，得出该结论是可能的”，并表示：“总统希望在没有被告知‘你不能’的情况下继续执行，而他并未收到这样的告知。” 另一名白宫官员表示，如果 拜登政府 发现 以色列 实施战争罪行的可能性更大，那么“国会中的共和党人就会大喊：‘给我看证据！’，而他们方的律师会说：‘胡说八道，这没有定论！’”
国务院提交给国会的报告通常由多位撰稿人在一份在线文档中起草，而 拜登政府 备忘录所要求的报告中关于 以色列 的部分很快演变成了一团乱麻，充满了相互矛盾的编辑和注释，几乎无法阅读。随后，在 4 月 27 日，提交给布林肯的部分评估报告被泄露给了路透社。布林肯大发雷霆，下令将草案转移到机密系统中，随后在几乎每一句话上都展开了逐行之战。两名国务卿高级顾问接手了这项微妙的任务，试图使草案与令人不安的事实达成一致。而与他们作对的是国务院内的异议者，其代表人物包括负责公民安全、民主与人权事务的副国务卿乌兹拉·泽亚（Uzra Zeya），以及最强硬的克里斯托弗·勒蒙（Christopher Le Mon），后者在一家安全设施中花费数日，试图将关于 以色列 军事行动的谴责性证据插入报告中。
卡玛拉·哈里斯的顾问菲利普·戈登（Philip Gordon）告诉我就国家安全备忘录 20 “本来可以是，且应当是，我们用来促使 以色列 人改变做法的工具”。但在最终报告出台后，“他们知道我们不会这么做”。被搁置修正案的作者范·霍伦（Van Hollen）对此感到愤怒。他告诉我，他认为这份报告是“完全的洗白”，且是“缺乏诚意”的。
“强硬之爱”草案中仍保留了几段内容。拜登告诉以色列人，这场战争已经“摧毁了哈马斯”，并确保该组织无法再次发动类似 10 月 7 日那样的袭击。他说，“为了追求某种不明确的‘全面胜利’概念而进行无期限的战争”将使以色列军队陷入泥潭，并引起其他国家的疏离。此外，这样的战争无法实现人质回归，也无法实现任何“对哈马斯的持久击败”。尽管如此，演讲的核心部分却赞扬了拜登所描述的内塔尼亚胡的停火方案。
在报告发布之时，在布林肯和沙利文的共同鼓励下，拜登决定发表那场讨论已久的“严厉之爱”（tough love）演讲。一些参与人质释放谈判的美国官员得出结论，内塔尼亚胡出于国内政治原因，宁愿延长战争，也不愿达成人质释放协议，因此拜登计划尝试绕过内塔尼亚胡，敦促以色列公众放弃全面战争。经过多次修-
内塔尼亚胡对这样一个协议是否真诚？一名与他关系密切的以色列高级官员坚持认为他是真诚的，并将责任归咎于哈马斯，称其撤回协议是因为仍希望真主党和伊朗参战。但几名美国高级官员以及一名接近内阁审议的以色列人士告诉我，他们认为内塔尼亚胡只是在伪装。
5月11日公布的结果是
边界地带最近已跌至新低。“从现在起且在 30 天内，”信中写道，以色列需要遵守约 20 项要求，包括恢复红十字会对被拘留者的访问。奥斯汀和布林肯于10月13日共同签署了这封信。两天后，该文件被泄露给 Axios——这大概是以色列人的又一次尝试，旨在促使其美国支持者向拜登施压，使其放弃切断武器供应的威胁。
利益。该以色列人士表示，内塔尼亚胡这样做是为了安抚内部那些推动释放人质的批评者。美国人向我暗示，他也希望操纵拜登。哈马斯同意了拜登概述的条款，但一旦较为温和的“接受协议”演讲发表后，内塔尼亚胡就开始提出他明知哈马斯会拒绝的新要求，例如允许以色列控制一条通过加沙的中心走廊以及另一条位于埃及边界内部的走廊。随后几周，以色列通过刺杀在卡塔尔领导和平谈判的哈马斯代表伊斯梅尔·哈尼亚（Ismail Haniyeh）以及加沙内部的高级决策者穆罕默德·戴夫（Mohammed Deif），摧毁了正在进行的谈判。“比比在玩游戏，”一位前白宫官员告诉我。
针对“救命食品和医疗用品”的阻碍、对比拘留者的虐待，以及英国武器可能被用于战争罪行的“明显风险”，外交大臣大卫·拉米（David Lammy）“遗憾”地宣布，英国法律规定了暂停向以色列转移用于加沙武器的“法律义务”。但以色列对英国军事设备的依赖相对较少——仅有大约 30 份英国出口许可证受到影响——因此这一决定在很大程度上是象征性的。
次月，国务次长泽亚（Zeya）和拜登的中东人道主义问题特使、资深联合国援助管理人员利兹·格兰德（Lise Grande）主导起草了一封致加兰特（Gallant）和德默（Dermer）的私人信函，警告称 National Security Memorandum 20 要求对以色列的行为进行定期重新评估。信中指出，以色列目前正阻碍由美国资助且易腐烂的援助物资，且每月通过边界的援助数量最近已跌至新低。
尽管如此，这封信似乎促使以色列再次大幅增加进入加沙的援助量。以色列还计划在11月举行一次双边会议，以配合美国的《平民伤害事件响应指导》协议。到那时，国务院已经列出数百起平民伤害事件待讨论。
2024, 9月，英国新成立的工党政府对其遵守国际法的情况进行了独立审查。引用以色列对“救命食品和医疗用品”的阻碍、对比拘留者的虐待，以及英国武器可能被用于战争罪行的“明显风险”，外交大臣大卫·拉米（David Lammy）“遗憾”地宣布，英国法律规定了暂停向以色列转移用于加沙武器的“法律义务”。但以色列对英国军事设备的依赖相对较少——仅有大约 30 份英国出口许可证受到影响——因此这一决定在很大程度上是象征性的。
然而，几周后，特朗普赢得了选举。第二天，以色列取消了会议。到 2025, 4月，以色列减少人道主义援助流量的程度达到了前所未有的地步；到8月，出现了全面的饥荒。9月，加沙卫生官员将 440 例死亡归因于营养不良，其中包括 147 名儿童。
天，许多前拜登政府官员认为，他们给以色列方施加的压力防止了饥荒更快地发生。这些官员主张，随着时间的推移，拜登的努力也减缓了杀戮：在加沙冲突的前三个月里，约有两万五千名巴勒斯坦人死亡，而死亡人数翻倍则花费了十二个月的时间。（追踪死亡人数的加沙卫生部并不区分平民和战斗员。）特别是，拜登关于拉法的警告似乎促使以色列在夷平加沙城和汗尤尼斯之前，采取了远比以往更多的措施来撤离平民。一名白宫高级官员告诉我，美国的压力使得拉法的毁灭对平民而言“比可能出现的情况不那么可怕”，尽管以色列最终还是将其“夷为平地”。几位前任官员自豪地向我指出，在10月7日之后，该政府成为第一个制裁约旦河西岸暴力定居者的政府。拜登政府的所有人都指责特朗普允许这场战争一直持续到去年10月，允许以色列军队占领加沙至少百分之六十的地区，并允许这场战争点燃整个中东。
——战略的一部分。”他说，美国“不应容忍那些将伤害平民作为目标的战争，也不应允许我们的武器被用于此目的。”
正处于停火边缘，而我不希望危及这一点。”（麦格克一直在推动的一项停火与释放人质协议在拜登离任时宣布，但该协议转瞬即逝。）以色列大使迈克尔·赫佐格也恳请布林肯不要实施制裁。一名以色列军事检察官拘留了几名士兵进行质询，赫佐格向布林肯保证起诉书即将出台；布林肯在签署该文件前离职。
麦格克是拜登身边最强硬的声音，他拒绝就本文接受引用。但亲近他的人告诉我，他认为自己的警告被证明是正确的：拜登政府为保护平民而对以色列施加的有限公开压力实际上延长了战争。在去年《华盛顿邮报》的一篇评论文章中，他认为哈马斯释放人质是因为以色列摧毁了其战斗员，而美国和以色列在“整个中东的武力威慑”削弱了伊朗及其代理人，使哈马斯处于“孤立状态，不再能够指望多线冲突”。他总结道，尽管战争伤亡惨重，“但没有捷径”。
布林肯和萨利文告诉我，他们同样感到懊悔。布林肯说：“在这么多无辜的男人、女人和孩子付出代价的情况下，怎么可能没有遗憾？”但他重复了拜登的一句话：“质疑我的判断，但不要质疑我的动机。”
萨利文作为国家安全顾问，在拜登做出决定之前是最后一个离开房间的人。他告诉我，他曾有许多个夜晚彻夜难眠，思考美国本可以采取哪些不同的做法。在人道主义援助方面，他说，“我们经历了一次次的进展与倒退，进展与倒退，”并补充道，“我们本应找到一种方法，摆脱这种不断的拉锯状态。”
今年三月，以色列军队撤销了对其中五名士兵的指控，理由是泄露的视频损害了公正审判，且受伤的证人已被送回加沙。内塔尼亚胡赞扬了这次撤诉，并称该案件为一次“血祭诽谤（blood libel）”。
然而，随着超过七万名巴勒斯坦人死亡，加沙大部分剩余人口流离失所，且以色列军队占据了该领土的大部分地区，这场冲突损害了拜登政府声称在追求的美国长期利益：一个民主的犹太国家与一个巴勒斯坦国家和平共处。在以色列人之中，人质长期受难的煎熬，使人们对已经逐渐渺茫的巴勒斯坦建国前景产生了更强烈的反对。西岸的定居点建设急剧加速。在巴勒斯坦人之中，正如奥斯汀部长所警告的那样，平民死亡人数的增加只让哈马斯式武装抵抗的吸引力进一步增强。而哈马斯——在战争结束时拥有约两万名战士，其中部分是在战争期间招募和训练的——控制着加沙的其余部分。在10月7日之前，以色列和美国估计哈马斯的战士少于三万名。哈马斯的队伍减少了约一万人；而在这一过程中，有超过七万名巴勒斯坦人被杀。此外，在美国，死亡人数严重损害了美国历史上对犹太国家的同情。在国会初选中，关于美国继续支持以色列的激烈辩论在某种程度上撕裂了民主党，这种程度在短短五年前是不可想象的——而且它还威胁要分裂共和党。乔恩·法纳（Jon Finer）告诉我，加沙冲突的标志在于，对于哈马斯和以色列来说，“平民伤害并非副作用，而是
在拜登输掉选举后，拜登政府的一个律师工作组分发了一套强有力的全新谈话要点，供美国官员在与以色列对应人员沟通时使用。其中许多要点在2024年春季之后的任何时候都可以写成：“鉴于加沙的大规模破坏和损害，以及我们了解到哈马斯作为一支作战力量已被摧毁……我们美国政府认为没有明确的军事必要性来继续进行行动。”在“强制迁移”标题下，律师们指出，“迁移似乎变得越来越明显且具有目的性”。在“平民饥饿”标题下，他们写道，“实地情况”引发了关于“为了将平民赶出该地区而故意制造饥饿”的“严重关切”，且以色列对援助的限制给巴勒斯坦平民带来的伤害“远远超过了任何预期的进一步军事优势”。在“目标选择/敌对行动开展”标题下，他们观察到平民伤害看起来越来越像是“蓄意的”，并补充道：“我们真的很难理解，采取导致如此高水平平民伤亡和大规模财产破坏的打击行动，其军事必要性何在。”这些谈话要点要求在“几天而非几周”内就“改进计划”进行后续跟进。但到那时，肯定没有人在听了。特朗普正走在返回白宫的路上。
然而，沙利文说，拜登及其首席顾问们担心，采取行动强迫以色列更好地保护平民，“既冒着无法改变以色列政策的风险，又可能导致哈马斯提高其要求”。他接着问，“时机在何时？”他告诉我，政府在2024年春季，“在拉法行动前夕，当时哈马斯在谈判中拖延时间”时，以及在2024年7月，“当时哈马斯正重新介入”时，都“认真考虑过与以色列决裂”。但在每个时间点都存在风险：“人质怎么办？被各方攻击的以色列怎么办？这对停火谈判以及结束这场该死的战争会有什么影响？”
在拜登任期接近尾声时，由被遣返回加沙的前被拘留者所引发的《利希法》（Leahy Laws）调查，将焦点对准了一个名为 Sde Teiman 的军事基地。那个夏天，一名来自该基地的巴勒斯坦囚犯被送往一家以色列医院，其肋骨骨折，直肠撕裂。泄露的视频片段显示，以色列士兵举起防暴盾牌以遮挡监控摄像头，同时似乎在对其进行殴打和虐待。根据《利希法》的程序，最终产生了一份交由布林肯签署的文件，旨在切断美国对 Sde Teiman 的援助。然而，布林肯告诉我，他再次认为“我们
艺术之途，砥砺前行
弗洛伦蒂娜·霍尔辛格（Florentina Holzinger）唤醒了艺术界。
作者：劳伦·奥勒（LAUREN OYLER）
紧贴在玻璃上。戏剧构作员 Sara Ostertag 和 Michele Rizzo 正在讨论：是不是太过火了？是的。Rizzo 开始在周围走动，并在我面前掉了一本他一直在使用的打开的笔记本。我能辨认出典型的制作笔记，包含英文和德文；一个 Holzinger 当前姿势的涂鸦，带着海星状的手和夸张的护目镜；以及一个短语——“屎尿风暴中的闹剧（slapstick in shitstorm）”。
那是威尼斯双年展媒体预览的前一天，奥地利馆的厕所坏了。在威尼斯，管道问题是常态；这座城市没有现代污水系统，因此依赖运河和潮汐来冲走经由数千个化粪池处理的废水。一场大雨就能淹没街道和私人浴室。但那两个亮蓝色的移动厕所并非为了方便而设。它们是次日开幕的一件装置艺术的一部分。
“滑冰修女”，而展馆让她想起了大教堂：中殿、耳堂、祭坛。她和她的团队一致认为，需要一个“激进的姿态”来证明参与这场艺术市场“马戏团”的合理性。他们曾幻想将整栋建筑放入潟湖，引导游客穿着潜水装备进入，但这并不现实。
相反，他们在展馆入口处用起重机吊起了一个巨大的教堂钟。每天八小时，每小时一次，由轮换演员组成的表演者会沿着钟上垂下的绳子向上爬，在钟内翻转身体，并利用自身的重量和一条沉重的金属腰带，扮演一个博斯（Boschian）式的撞钟锤。这就是大多数其他表演者的信号——他们的外观从极其朴素到布满纹身和穿孔不等——开始在 Holzinger 所称的“仪式”中交接班次。除了“尿池”之外，展馆还有四个封闭空间，每个空间都充满了水，并设有不同的景点。当我到达彩排现场时，这些景点包括：一名全裸女性在骑着水上摩托车绕圈，速度越来越快，直到空气中弥漫着汽油味；全裸的表演者缓慢地攀爬电线杆，以慵懒的杂技姿势停顿，犹如活体人体模特；艺术家 Hannah Finn 同样全裸，在升高平台上表演扭曲艺术，镜像着周围泼水的两只机器人狗；以及一个布满机械的房间，水色呈不详的棕色。附近，两名表演者坐在白色单模椅（Monobloc chairs）上抽烟，穿着长围裙和刷手服，橡胶手套近在手边。其他扮演清洁工的表演者在空间中穿梭，偶尔地背诵台词：“我们告诉人们不要在厕所里拉屎……”
一场剧本设定好的管道故障正与现实中的故障同步上演。当一名制片人蜷缩在水箱下方，通过视频通话向一名维修技术人员展示过滤系统时，一名清洁工进入了那个有机械的房间。棕色的水突然从设备中喷涌而出，射入她的口中和眼睛里。水中的软管四处乱舞。表演者大喊大叫，四处泼水并摔倒，徒劳地试图修复它。Holzinger 及其技术人员在三周前才抵达威尼斯；从那时起，清洁工扮演的角色比原计划要重要得多。现在，名为“SEAWORLD VENICE”的演出已经开幕——长长的队伍和铺天盖地的媒体报道使其毫无疑问地成为了双年展上讨论度最高的作品——游客经常认为她们是真正的保洁人员，并给予相应的对待。
在厕所之间，Florentina Holzinger 全裸地待在一个尺寸尚可的水箱中，保持着一种挑衅的、全正面展示的姿势，戴着潜水面罩并通过潜水管呼吸。持续不断的泡沫让她的长发成簇地笔直向上漂浮。偶尔，她的左手小指会抽动一下。除此之外，她几乎不动。水箱里的水是来自移动厕所的尿液，经过一个在水箱下方可见的系统过滤而成。“它是由人们的尿液维持的，”Holzinger 的宣传经理 Giulia Messia 解释道，“但不能拉屎。”
人们最常将她描述为编舞、导演和行为艺术家的结合体。Holzinger 今年四十岁，习惯被称作 Flo，她通常在剧场中工作，尽管她的创作并不一定（或不仅仅）是戏剧。在她被选中代表她的出生国参加艺术界最重要的盛会之前，她从未做过装置艺术。两年前，她和她的舞台设计师 Nikola Knežević 参观了双年展，当他们看到奥地利展馆——一座冷峻的几何形建筑时，他们认为自己“肯定能在那里做出一些有趣的东西”，Holzinger 说道。当时，她刚刚首演了一部大逆不道的舞台剧《SANCTA》，《每日邮报》将其描述为“一部激进的女性主义歌剧，其中包含露骨的女同性恋性爱场景、真实的血液和伤口，以及裸体滚轮——”
在水槽中，Holzinger 交叉双臂。自五月双年展开始以来，表演者们以四小时或八小时为班次留在水槽中；有时他们直接面对游客，或者在吃饭、坐着或睡觉（配有毯子和枕头）。每个表演者做什么由她自己决定，但 Holzinger 很享受这种与外界隔绝的休憩。多年来，她一直是欧洲实验剧场界的明星；2021年，她成为了柏林人民剧院（Volksbühne）的驻在艺术家，在那里的作品在几分钟内便售罄。但一场持久性的展览需要完全不同的时间分配和
气氛很轻松，尽管几位合作者面色凝重地向我保证，这部作品的技术协调比他们以往做过的任何事情都更具挑战性。在水槽中，Holzinger 的双手现在
Holzinger 的幽默感、野心以及对身体的极端运用，使她成为了威尼斯双年展的焦点。
摄影：LUCIA BURICELLI
当某个元素不再符合她那“精神分裂式”的节奏时，便会被舍弃。在《TANZ》（2019）中，它是芭蕾舞课；在《奥菲莉亚有才艺》（Ophelia’s Got Talent，2022）中，它是才艺秀；在《SANCTA》（2024）中，它是保罗·兴德米特（Paul Hindemith）的一幕歌剧《圣苏珊娜》（Sancta Susanna），其中女主角对女同性恋性爱产生了异端幻想，Holzinger 将其现场呈现，随后是一场“弥撒”。她最近的舞台作品《没有夏天的一年》（A Year Without Summer，2025）重新构思了1816年的夏天，当时印度尼西亚的一次火山爆发遮蔽了太阳，并导致了包括玛丽·雪莱写下《弗兰肯斯坦》在内的诸多后果。（这部剧是一部音乐剧。）这些作品可能包含空中钢管舞、现场纹身、吊钩悬挂、吊发、劈柴，以及带有浓重音效的陶瓷阴茎自慰、催眠、血液和食肉（一小块皮肤）。表演者在过程中变换角色，并在舞台间隙讲述自传式的忏悔、濒死体验和性侵犯。几乎所有人都是裸体，包括歌剧演员、音乐家、老年女性、残疾女性、摄像师以及没有正式舞蹈训练的女性。
与所有跨学科艺术家一样，Holzinger 受到类别语言的限制。她经常被与 20 世纪 60 和 70 年代的维也纳行动主义者（Viennese Actionists）以及像玛丽娜·阿布拉莫维奇（Marina Abramović）这样的行为艺术家联系在一起，但戏剧和舞蹈领域的人物在回答“但这究竟是什么？”这个问题时会更有帮助。从形式上看，她最接近的前辈可能是后墙时代、后戏剧时期的德国导演，如克里斯托夫·施林根西夫（Christoph Schlingensief）和勒内·波莱什（René Pollesch），他们政治化且具有自反性的作品突破了情节、对话和角色等传统文学元素，旨在探讨表演者与观众之间的关系（这是给讨厌剧本的人看的戏剧）。Holzinger 作品中的许多动作，尤其是身体恐怖的部分，被实时投影在舞台两侧的大屏幕上——这在欧洲戏剧中很常见，但在这里被用来展示那些通常被隐藏的东西，往往是一些令人不安的过程（在《奥菲莉亚》中，专业吞剑表演者 Fibi Eyewalker 似乎吞下了一条鱼，随后镜头通过内窥镜相机进行了拍摄）。其结果不仅是一场奇观，而且随着歌曲、舞蹈、场景和惊险动作的累积，产生了一种叙事上的满足感：
• •
能量，以及私人捐助者的狂热兴趣可能会令人精疲力竭。“我在那里，在水里，可以睡得非常舒服，”她告诉我。
“你在开玩笑吗？”Holzinger 平静地回答。她重新穿上短裤，并询问那场风暴（shitstorm）进展如何。
很难想象 Holzinger 会对任何事情感到崩溃，除了也许
一小时后，铃声响起，Holzinger 卸下潜水装备并从水中现身。她的脸上留有护目镜压出的痕迹，她穿上了一件巨大的扎染卫衣、宽松的短裤，并戴上了 Oakley 反光太阳镜。随后她立即脱掉短裤，开始与 Rizzo 和 Ostertag 查看笔记。手部动作确实太多了，是的。双臂交叉是可以的，但她看起来很冷。她本人对温度没有问题，但表演者在水槽中停留的时间会更长，所以应该把水温调高。这时，Ostertag 解释了移动厕所发生的情况——压力水平一直在变化，这就是为什么他们之前无法冲洗厕所的原因。
慢下来。在“SEAWORLD VENICE”（威尼斯海洋世界）展出期间（直到 11 月），她还在巡演三部群演作品，并组织几场她称之为“Études”（练习曲）的一次性表演。上次我们交谈时，是在她威尼斯的公寓里通过视频通话，她将双年展的作品描述为“极简”。“它被描绘成一件令人震惊的、激进的作品，但如果你来自实验剧场，它并没有什么令人震惊或激进之处，”她说。“实际上，我最大的顾虑是它太温柔了。你知道的，没发生太多事情。”
她是认真的。一场典型的 Holzinger 表演大约持续三小时，其开篇的前提是
她的舞台设计师告诉我的。当他们见面时，他从未从事过专业剧场工作——他受训成为一名建筑师——但 Holzinger 提出了一个令他兴奋的问题：他能否为她制作一个既能承重，但最终又会折断的芭蕾把杆？
一件懂得并抵制这一术语的“总体的艺术作品”（Gesamtkunstwerk）。纽约大学戏剧文学教授 Brandon Woolf 告诉我：“她总是在某种程度上对瓦格纳说‘去你的’。”
经过精心策划的干预。有时你会瞥见一根卫生棉条的绳子，就像你可能会看到布景复杂的索具一样；其效果是强调女性身体可以成为什么以及能做什么。学者 Caroline Lillian Schopp 将 Holzinger 的模式描述为一种“女性主义颓废”，它“沉溺于所谓的高级艺术及其历史所掩盖的暴力之中”。换句话说，Holzinger 很有趣。在《奥菲莉亚》（Ophelia）中，她通过让五名女性（包括她自己）在字面意义上与一架直升机发生性关系，从而颠覆了《现代启示录》（Apocalypse Now）等作品。直升机被悬挂在天花板上，由 Saioa Alvarez 驾驶——后者是一名小人，在 Holzinger 的其他作品世界中，她扮演“首位女同性恋教皇”发表激烈的布道。表演者在上方倾盆大雨和风机轰鸣声中磨蹭和呻吟。最终，直升机从舱门喷出一道瀑布，风暴平息。
尽管 Holzinger 将她的每件作品都视为下一件作品的研究，且在“SEAWORLD VENICE”中没有她之前未曾以某种方式研究过的技巧或概念，但这部装置作品为她赢得广泛关注是合情合理的。这是她最容易被大众接受的作品，不仅因为这部作品的主题相当容易阐述（Holzinger 在一次新闻活动中将其表述为“我们如何生活在危机之中”），而且因为它并没有真正挑战观众的呕吐反射、忍耐力或审美情趣。例如，移动厕所第一次出现在 Holzinger 的作品中时，它是通往地狱的入口，在《神曲》（A Divine Comedy, 2021）中追逐着没穿裤子的但丁。在那场演出的随后情节中，四名女性在舞台前下方，直接在观众面前同时排便。
olzinger出生于维也纳，她的父母——一名律师和一名讨厌见血的药剂师——十分普通。十岁时，她患上了厌食症，为了在就医时增加体重而大量饮水，结果导致了水中毒。她告诉我的，她在一家康复中心度过了近一年时间，与那些“问题少年”生活在一起，她觉得这些人比她在保守公立学校里那群“邪恶的朋友”要“有趣得多”。十七岁时，她参加了一堂现代舞课并深爱其中。由于父母不希望她从事这个职业，加上她需要国家资助，她在接受训练并参加舞蹈学校面试的一年里，同时修读了建筑学和商业课程。
与此同时，直升机代表了Holzinger作品中一种根本的实用主义。她觉得有责任利用手中的资源去做一些事情；比起挑战女权主义行为艺术的边界，她更倾向于挑战后勤和技术协调的边界。“当我们第一次进入人民剧院（Volksbühne）时，我们看到了这个极高的飞行空间，观众在座位上其实看不见，但这正是这家剧院他妈的独特之处，”她告诉我，“一架直升机可以直接飞进这座建筑。我的意思是，我们觉得有义务利用这一点。”
考虑到Holzinger的名声，以及她自身与极端事物之间那种讽刺的关系，她在每场演出前发布的触发警告（trigger warnings）似乎显得无关紧要，甚至有些虚伪。“我不想让人们永远受到创伤，”她告诉我，一边揉弄着她那浅金色的头发，以一种屠夫切割肉类时那样精准且有力的动作，将头发盘起又放下。尽管如此，在她的演出期间，人们有时仍会晕厥或不得不离场。《SANCTA》在维也纳演出期间尤其混乱；在一次演出中，甚至首席小提琴手在无意间瞥见一个手指插进开放性伤口场景后昏厥，导致鼻子和乐器双双折断。“简直像个野战医院！”Holzinger说，“人们反应非常戏剧化。”她用尖细的声音模仿道：“‘啊！我的丈夫不动了！救命！’”她在讲述时的快感或幸灾乐祸，源于她与奥地利及其有时显得“脾气古怪”的媒体之间不安的关系——你可能会预期在乡下会有这种反应，而非在所谓的精致之都维也纳。她告诉我，她代表该国参加双年展“简直像个笑话”，并补充说她“真的需要离开这个国家，才能最终做我想做的事，表达自我”。
记者们经常声称，Holzinger曾经想成为一名芭蕾舞演员，但由于开始得太晚，且身体条件不符而未能实现。这是一个引人入胜的叙事：它允许作者在表面上采取女权主义姿态的同时暗示，Holzinger身材较矮，且拥有那种可以在电影中扮演综合格斗（M.M.A.）选手的体格——而她确实也演过。事实上，她告诉我，她当时想成为一名“真正优秀的现代舞者”，但“非常不成功”。（她“真的很不擅长”记忆编舞。）最终，她被录取进入阿姆斯特丹的新舞蹈发展学院（S.N.D.O.），但她当时从未想过创作自己的作品。“我只想学习如何律动，并成为一个团体的一部分，”她说。
这种露骨的野心伴随着它自身的戏剧性；Holzinger的作品可能会让人感到
在S.N.D.O.，她遇到了比她低一级的荷兰编舞家兼导演Vincent Riebeek。两人都充满冒险精神、叛逆，并对挑战关于男女在舞台上能做什么的观念感兴趣；Riebeek告诉我，他们两人都曾被学校开除过一段时间。“她极其神秘，”他说，“她做任何事情的方式都略有不同。哪怕是看着她做三明治，都可能非常迷人。”
粗糙且不完美，营造出一种在制作的任何环节都可能出大错的感觉。“观众应当怀疑我们是否真的掌控了全局，”Holzinger 曾说道。除了直升机，“Ophelia”还涉及一个泳池和两个浸水槽。Knežević 和 Holzing- 认为，水“总能找到办法干扰基础设施”。
在女性主义方面，Holzinger 利用裸体的显而易见性，使之相当细——
他们很快地变得不可分割。他们并没有真正的计划或排练；他们只是把所有时间都花在一起，为“对方而非他人”创作，Holzinger 说道。直到后来，在接触到制作公司时，他们才意识到其他人是有排练的。一部改编自学校项目的作品《Kein Applaus für Scheisse》(2010) 在欧洲前卫剧院圈走红；随后出现了其他几部关于性与攻击性的作品。多年来，他们一起旅行和生活，以“令人头疼的怪才”（enfants terribles）而闻名。Holzinger 在谈到早期的成功时说：“我们很幸运”，因为这意味着他们“从未需要为了找工作而奔波”。在舞台上，Riebeek 扮演的是一个夸张且用力过猛的衬托，与 Holzinger 那冷酷到底的风格形成对比；观察今天的她，你可以想象，即便她的伴侣将呕吐物吐在她身上，或者用牙齿缓慢地将一条长绳从她的阴道中拉出时，她也能保持淡定。
老鼠 (MICE)
你可以相信我的话，它们几乎和人类一样难以驱赶。虽然杜丘Depending on the stretch of salt marsh or other harsh terrain from which it happens to hail（取决于它所来自的盐沼或其他恶劣地形的延伸范围），可能会发出“wheep”或“wheeple”的声音，但老鼠则会低声哀鸣一个单一的超声波音符，在赫卡忒（Hecate）所钟爱的幽冥之域中回荡。一只老鼠会若无其事地发出这种超声波的“hey for houghmagandie”，以吸引那些仍被视为“眼球装饰”的母鼠。
至于食用睡鼠 (glis glis)，罗马人即便在停止用蜂蜜和罂粟籽将其烘烤后仍对其念念不忘——直到哥特人到来，他们终于失去了晚餐的经费——它与被农夫诗人拉比·彭斯 (Rabbie Burns) 翻起的那个小畜生几乎不是同一类东西，而拉比本人当时仅靠稀粥和少量牛脂维持生计。尽管它们具有某种我们现在将其归于小家鼠 (Mus musculus) 的预判能力，但拉比——一个并不精通拉丁文的人——不太可能察觉到一只老鼠在“muscular”（肌肉发达）这个词的皮肤下伸展自己。
然而随着时间的推移，他们所谓的“共依存”关系，用 Holzinger 的话来说，变得“痛苦不堪”。Riebeek 对于被贴上标签感到沮丧——被贴上“酷儿”的标签——“我在舞台上舔阴道，”他说，“但显然，当我这么做时，这就是酷儿行为”——但 Holzinger 认为这个标签对作品至关重要。他们在署名权和愿景方面日益产生分歧。“也许我们从一开始就注定失败，因为我们痴迷于玛丽娜和乌莱，”Riebeek 笑着说，指的是阿布拉莫维奇及其长期伴侣兼合作者法兰克·乌韦（Ulay）莱西彭。在《Kein Applaus》中有一场戏受到阿布拉莫维奇和乌莱首部合作作品《空间关系》(1976) 的启发，在其中 Holzinger 和 Riebeek 互相冲撞。但《空间关系》试图通过男性和女性的能量创造一个名为“那个自我”的统一体。而在《Kein Applaus》中，Holzinger 和 Riebeek 似乎在互相打断，互相伤害，因为他们试图为自己表演某些东西。“我们一直知道这会结束，”Riebeek 说，“但在当时，这似乎难以想象。”也许，Holzinger 提出，这只是一种“典型的同性恋-女性伴侣关系 (fag-hag relationship)”。
说她“耳间有甜心鼠”是指她不是架子上最锋利的矛，你最新关注的那位女士。由于它们处于炎热的压力机或阴暗的储藏室中，并掺入了 Polo 薄荷糖的铝箔以及蓝色色调的绒毛
我得出结论，这主要是在实践过程中实现的。那里有一小盒来自亚洲超市的寿司——Holzinger 没有特殊的饮食习惯——以及一个非常大的活页夹。在一部新作品的构思凝固后，一个核心团队会前往各地进行研究。为了创作《SANCTA》，他们去了罗马和巴塞罗那，在那里，如果天气好，就可以练习在U型槽上轮滑。与此同时，Holzinger 正在去听歌剧，而
作品《Apollon》(2017)。“我最近没有关注他的作品，但他以前是一位伟大的艺术家，”她说道，“我认为那是你真正不会失去的东西。”
2024年春，我参加了几次《SANCTA》的排练，地点在德国什เว林市的梅克伦堡州立剧院（Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater），该剧在此首演。我希望能了解霍尔辛格（Holzinger）的剧作是如何组合而成的。
最终，在2017年，里比克（Riebeek）需要进行膝盖手术，他们不得不中断合作。“突然之间，”霍尔辛格告诉我，“我们就再也没有见过面。”在那之后，她停止在舞台上与男性合作，从她的第一个大型剧团开始。
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在舞台上，她脱掉所有衣服，系上金属腰带，离开了她的位置。很快，一个从舞台中央上方巨大的教堂钟体上垂下的绳子绷紧了，霍尔辛格出现，从一个陷门中爬上来，号召剧院进入“弥撒”状态。然后她回到了自己的位置，重新穿上裤子，但保持上身赤裸，看着接下来的演出，这场演出持续了将近两个小时。
从滚筒烘干机、玻璃纤维、聚苯乙烯泡沫中，他们的家不再是拉比（Rabbie）所揭露的那些农村贫民窟，而是嘲弄着狸猫的顶层公寓，饰有丝绸标签和扣眼扭纹——所有这些财物都适合像我这样且几乎对血液稀释剂免疫的编故事的人。
霍尔辛格强调，她的作品不是一个“社区项目”——这不是那种女性主义，如果你不想在舞台上赤裸，你可能无法加入这个团体。她享受这种责任，而且每个人都尊重这最终是她的演出。在一次《SANCTA》排练中，我观看演员们表演科尔·波特（Cole Porter）的《吹吧，加百列，吹吧》（Blow, Gabriel, Blow），在这一段中，歌剧演员艾玛·罗斯曼（Emma Rothmann）被吊带装置举起，悬在其他表演者的上方，而后者在下方起舞。最初，这本应在歌曲中间持续约三十秒，但过渡环节不顺畅。罗斯曼在尝试将自己绑在吊带上时显得很紧张，同时还要保持微笑并大声唱出歌词。霍尔辛格打断了演练：罗斯曼需要在空中唱完整首歌曲。
虽然很明显库珀（Cooper）在《最后的莫希干人》的情节上大量借鉴了斯科特（Scott），让唱诗的加穆特（Gamut）成了（该死地）愚者万巴（Wamba）的一个版本，而丽贝卡（Rebecca）和罗薇娜（Rowena）被重新塑造为科拉（Cora）和爱丽丝·门罗（Alice Munro），但他也运用了自己粗犷的灵巧，就像一只老鼠借助一个仅相当于缩略图的指甲去袭击我们秋季的积蓄，尽管这种初步的发展仍使其能绕过埃及的玉米哨兵，获取无限的玉米。
你可以相信我的话，你在图书馆或洗衣房中隐约听到的，是面罩关闭的声音，随后是钢尖门牙的啧啧声，因为老鼠们正准备与任何一个、每一个《艾凡豪》（Ivanhoe）展开决斗。所有这一切都是它们冲锋陷阵的磨盘。在它们用钢尖笔尖挑战赫卡忒（Hecate）所钟爱的地狱地带时，塞纳克里布（Sennacherib）和沙希布（sahib）已在面前枯萎，其快感和决心正如柯南·道尔（Conan Doyle）所描述的那个使用吹管的安达曼群岛原住民一般，直到，天哪，它们把你的丰田 High Lander 车辆电线的豆油绝缘层给剥掉了。
编舞师兼空中表演者索菲·邓肯（Sophie Duncan）脸上露出了忧虑之色。“但这意味着她要在空中悬挂三分半钟，”她说。随后，罗斯曼和邓肯告诉我，在那次排练之前，罗斯曼从未使用过舞台吊带，而那次排练距离首演仅两周多。曾在太阳马戏团（Cirque du Soleil）工作过的邓肯还指出，没有人能在那样长时间的悬挂中显得好看。
“但她能做到的，”霍尔辛格回答。她是正确的。后来，她告诉罗斯曼表演得“更像个纳粹”，这同样是正确的。
—保罗·马尔多恩（Paul Muldoon）
尽管如此，Holzinger 的创作过程本质上是协作性的，团队成员非常感激她为他们提供的平台。Annina Machaz 是一位经常饰演疯狂主持人的演员——在《SANCTA》中，她扮演一个抽着电子烟、大发议论的混蛋耶稣——她与 Holzinger 在十年前的一次舞蹈节上相识后便开始合作；她自己编写台词。“她真的给了我完全的自由裁量权，”Machaz 告诉我。Duncan 在 2022 年看到一个马戏论坛上的选角公告后加入了《Ophelia》团队；在注意到该团队使用安全带的方式过于随意后，她成了非正式的安全带顾问。在职业生涯早期，Holzinger 通过在 Craigslist 上发布寻求“拥有特殊才华的女性”的广告来寻找表演者。她的许多表演者会长期留任或回归，在传帮带中共同进步。摩托车手兼特技骑手 Keity Meier 曾出演《Divine Comedy》，背着一副骨架在舞台上绕圈骑行，她目前正在威尼斯演出，而且不仅仅是开喷气式摩托艇。
在剧场里，Holzinger 的指令十分直接，从未激动或敌对，是通过前排的麦克风传达的。她会定期做笔记，随后与演员们一起回顾。她的观看姿势各异：一只脚或两只脚撑在分隔乐池与前排的墙上；双腿悬空荡在乐池里；或者屁股平衡地坐在一个折叠的剧院座位上。在一次彩排中，当她的上场信号响起来时——
她起初并不喜欢，以及她从小参加的弥撒。一旦整个团队集结完毕，教授和其他专家会到访彩排，为作品的主题提供见解；在《SANCTA》中，Holzinger 的前任老师、曾参与《SEAWORLD VENICE》工作的戏剧构作 Felix Ritter 带领他们学习圣经。“她从不盲目地进入战斗，”他说。
在剧场中，Holzinger 的指示——
带着尊严和艺术完整性地演出似乎让她感到困扰。关于《A Year Without Summer》，她又产生了另一个小小的“强迫症”，因为这部剧需要比她自然状态下慢得多的节奏。当然，没有其他人会认为这部剧是平静的。它以一场持续二十分钟的、巨大的跨世代集体性爱开场，在变得日益荒诞之后，转化为一部大致围绕科学与医学史及其对女性不负责任的态度而展开的音乐剧。（简而言之，Machaz 饰演一个混蛋弗洛伊德，在 cocaine 堆里跳跃并对着“阴道牙”尖叫；Alvarez 则饰演约瑟夫·门格勒。）
松了，她摔了下来 16 英尺。“我看到她的整个身体在脖子处折断，我确信我余生都要照顾我的朋友了，”Riebeek 告诉我。“我觉得，完了。”在医院，医生拒绝给 Holzinger 拍 X 光片；在她和 Riebeek 表演的剧目中，Holzinger 是“怀孕”的，医生们以为那是事实。“我们不得不为了让她获得适当的医疗照顾而争斗，”Riebeek 说。“就像是在说，‘这是戏剧！是虚构的！我没有真的让她怀孕！’”当医生最终为她扫描时，发现她只有脑震荡、鼻骨骨折和掉了一颗牙。
如果你真的很有趣，Holzinger 对建立人脉也持开放态度。Ruby-Kale Roberts 以 Fleshpiece 的艺名演出，从事陶瓷、钩子悬吊以及许多其他尝试，她通过《Ophelia》中的一些表演者得到了 Holzinger 的电话。她听说《SANCTA》会涉及到滑冰。“我发了一条挑衅的短信，说：嘿，我有胡须，有阴户，而且我热爱裸体。顺便说一下，我也滑冰，”Roberts 笑着说。Holzinger 回复说她的演员阵容已满，但两周后——在制作流程的后期——她回信询问 Roberts 是否有空。于是 Roberts 成为了演出中极其重要的一部分。
从那时起，她的创作变得专业化，并对安全协议变得极其严谨，但正如她所言，她继续“在风险、不可预见以及失败的可能性中游走”。随后，往往会出现关怀与救赎的场景。在《奥菲莉亚》（Ophelia）中，艺术家内蒂·纽加嫩（Netti Nüganen）在水下表演了一场胡迪尼式的脱逃术，她的四肢和脖子被锁在浸没水箱中。两分钟后，她开始挣扎，疯狂地拉扯领口。霍尔津格（Holzinger）跳进水箱，动作笨拙且惊慌，将纽加嫩拉了出来。舞台此时被水淹没，在霍尔津格安慰纽加嫩的同时，工作人员迅速地清理现场；直到塞奥亚·阿尔瓦雷斯（Saioa Alvarez）打扮成一名水管工走出来检查时，人们才意识到这是一个骗局。随后，直到不久前还能屏息近三分钟的纽加嫩，开始跳起轻快舞。
演出以一段与那场狂欢平行的冗长医院场景结束。起初是一幅温柔的养老护理画面：年轻的演员缓慢地帮助年长女性穿上长袍并躺在床上，但随后画面发生了转变。一次又一次尴尬的“意外”接踵而至，直到最后，所有人都陷入尖叫、哭泣、呕吐、排便和恐慌之中。马桶绝望地出现。人们完全没有掩盖那些喷出伪造体液的导管和设备。这一切是无情的、滑稽的、令人疲惫且恶心的。它也是勇敢的——并非因为像往常一样所有人或多或少都赤身裸体，而是因为它以一种极致且丑陋的方式，呈现了生活中同样真实的东西。
里特（Ritter）在某个下午的一次《SANCTA》排练中，身体前倾靠在椅子背上告诉我，霍尔津格执导一场关于修女的演出是非常恰当的。她和她的剧组就像一个修道院：“姐妹们”，没有孩子，致力于一个更高层级的权力。“这就是我们的教堂，”罗伯茨（Roberts）在演出的最后序列中，像一个邪恶的福音派传教士一样吼道，“我们将把你们钉在此时此刻，就像耶稣被钉在十字架上一样。”接着她 squat（下蹲），阴部对着观众，在全体演员齐唱《洛基恐怖曲》（The Rocky Horror Picture Show）中的《别做梦》（Don’t Dream It）时，发表了一段半即兴的、露骨的性相关独白。
终于，戏剧性的紧张感缓解了。人们分成小组；性爱再次回归，但变得温柔。一根自拍杆在人群中传递，拍摄结果被投射在舞台两侧的屏幕上。在世界末日之时产生拍照的冲动，这既甜蜜又令人作呕。随后，吉他手兼舞者布拉廷·埃卡特（Bláthin Eckhardt）爬上舞台后方的平台，不可思议地开始了滑冰表演。屏幕上出现了一条信息。那是一个关于个体、艺术家在混乱系统中对他人职责的简洁声明：“没有终点”（NO END）。埃卡特在精妙的小圆圈中持续滑行，时而显露出疲态，一直持续到谢幕。下方的混乱依旧，但不再丑陋。直到每一位观众离开，她才停止滑行。
霍尔津格在演出中露面的次数比以前少了，但她试图体验
ll of Holzinger’s work, even the early pieces, made during what she 所有 Holzinger 的作品，即使是她在所谓“颓废时期”创作的早期作品，也展现出一种对可能性的凄美信念——这种可能性不仅针对个体身体或勇敢的观众，而且针对集体。她要求合作者完成的大部分工作，显然她自己也热爱表演。（她为了《SANCTA》首次学习了钩子悬吊，将其视为“给自己的奖励”。）鉴于她起用各种年龄段的女性——传奇舞者兼演员 Beatrice (Trixie) Cordua 与她合作直到去年八十二岁去世——没有理由认为她会停止，但关于如何老去的问题。如果没有一种极端的视角，这种信息将会变得感伤，而随着她的成熟，她对其进行了精炼。2013, 在与 Riebeek 合作的一场演出中，一个在空中特技中支撑她体重的螺丝钉脱落了
在威尼斯预展的第二天，天在下雨。一群策展人、记者和贵宾在上午 9 点集合，乘坐两艘包船前往潟湖中心观看一场名为“练习曲”（Étude）的表演。在等待登船时，Knežević 告诉我，工作人员直到前一天晚上十一点还在展馆里；其中一只机器狗停止了工作，他们不得不重新布置房间，安装一个飞镖盘，以便让柔术表演者 Finn 能（用脚）进行射箭。尽管如此，他与 Holzinger 看起来精神状态不错。“某种程度上这正符合概念，因为这是一个关于失效系统的故事，”Holzinger 在谈到故障时说道。最后她补充道，唯一真正需要正常工作的只有厕所。
在前往表演现场的船上，Holzinger 与展馆策展人 Nora-Swantje Almes 针对作品进行了一次简短的讨论。Holzinger 并不擅长演讲——她的常态要么是准备表演，要么是刚刚表演完——但她很迷人，带着一种俏皮的粗俗且聪明。“这真的不是戏剧，”她淘气地说道，“这真的不是一场奇观。”最后她惊呼一声“我得拉伸一下！”，然后撤到了船上的一个隔开区域。
“不是那个。它的七种谷物里我只能尝出五种。”
在离岸近两英里处，我们靠近了一艘载有起重机的驳船。我们登上了另一艘驳船并坐在看台上。在舞台驳船上，七名全裸的表演者爬上了起重机，一支噪音乐队在船头集结。Machaz 撑着一把伞跟着音乐家 Gibrana Cervantes，以保护 Cervantes 的小提琴。次女高音 Andrea Baker 全身赤裸，仅穿着一件翼领衬衫领口和橡胶涉水裤，担任指挥位置。
海草。在水下，从船到钟之间铺了一根绳子，以便她能找到方向——潟湖的水基本上是不透明的——但她说最紧张的部分是与意大利起重机操作员沟通时机。为了研究，她已经连续几个月与工业潜水员一起潜水了。这会让你起皮疹。
一个难得的观察机会：她是一位非常优秀的当代舞者。
起重机将 Holzinger 移向停在驳船旁的一艘小船。Luna Duran 的棕色头发几乎垂到了膝盖，她在那儿等待，瘦弱的肩胛骨肉中安装了钩子。Holzinger 用连接在钩子上的缆绳将她吊起。当两人被重新拉回到水面上方，仍悬挂在钟上时，乐队开始疯狂地演奏并尖叫，将气氛推向高潮。在 Holzinger 控制缆绳的情况下，Duran 扭动并摆荡，时而像一名宁芙仙女，时而像一条被捕捉的鱼，背部的伤口在渗血。
音乐停止。Eckhardt 和 Shi 从起重机上爬了下来；下船时，Eckhardt 将 Shi 的头抱在怀中紧紧拥抱了数秒。在雨中，所有人静静地看着 Holzinger 敲响那口钟。
他们演奏了一会儿环境无人声音乐（ambient drone），阴森且充满期待。Baker 将从深渊中召唤某种东西。Lane Shi 是一位音乐家兼艺术家，她使用了蒙古喉音的演唱技巧，发出了类似生物的高频尖叫。随后 Eckhardt 拿着电吉他开始攀登起重机，中途停下来做一些摇滚之星的姿态。Shi 跟在她后面走了一半。在就位后，她开始歌唱，然后尖叫，召唤出来自海洋、山脉和肮脏地下室演出场所的声音。
Knežević 告诉我，在为“SANCTA”进行研究访问西斯廷礼拜堂时，团队注意到米开朗基罗是如何将女性画得像男性一样的：某种关于她们处于颠倒状态的东西。在钟里，Holzinger 之前紧凑的躯干变得修长且雌雄同体，她的手臂和背阔肌显得极其巨大。但在她的脖子上，在她控制头部跟随身体其他部分剧烈运动的方式中——那种力量似乎来自她自身之外——你能感受到那
最终，他们被放回船上。Holzinger 表示，由于天气寒冷、船只交通管制以及费用问题，他们只演练过一次，时间“大约十分钟”。“在这些‘练习曲’（Études）中，总是他妈的像神风特攻队一样，所有事情都拖到最后一刻，”她补充道，但“最终总能成功。”当她跳回地面时，她面带灿烂的笑容，似乎忘记了观众，与 Duran 击了掌。
最后，随着起重机开始从水中吊起一样东西，音乐达到了高潮。一个钟出现了，然后，Holzinger 本人出现在钟内，身体倒挂，她的长发像海——
48 《纽约者》, JULY 27, 2026 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOOEUN BAE
即便在婴儿时期，海伦和约翰·高（Helen and John Koh）的长子就拥有平静的性格和随和的
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即便父母粗心，后代也可能表现出色。母亲与孩子之间的纽带是紧密的，但必须被适度地松开。母亲必须去爱，而孩子必须长大。结果往往不在人的掌控之中。
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为了考入延世大学（Yonsei）。他认为测试进行得足够顺利。
波（Bo）和他的同学一结束 bongosa 考试，就匆匆赶回他们的补习班（hagwon）。他们的导师们几乎是在盲飞，因为几乎没有之前的考题可以用来教学。每个刚考完试的学生都被要求回忆考题，三名导师记录下问题并打出他们推测的答案。波永远不会忘记的那道 bongosa 题目是：“描述数字与模拟的区别。”在他的回答中，他写道，数字时钟显示的是时间中的一个瞬间，而模拟时钟则揭示了时间的流逝过程。波的导师说这个答案太棒了。不过这并不重要。
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disposition，仿佛他明白身为长子（jangnam）意味着什么，以及随之而来的长子继承权的特权与责任。波似乎从未让长子的负担压垮他。他在课堂上和体育场上都全力以赴；他与同龄人相处融洽。波是一个外貌出众且体贴的年轻人，对于忙碌的父母来说，他既是恩赐也是慰藉。
在美国，Bo十八岁，但按照计算母亲子宫内时间的韩国年龄，他十九岁。女孩们钦慕他光亮的栗色头发、橄榄色的肤色和大大的棕色眼睛。他的英语说得像母语一样，这使他在江南的一所公立高中里成了异国情调的好奇对象；他从早到晚地学习，几乎不怎么睡觉。在夜晚，他的姐姐Mido也在学习，但她无法长时间保持清醒。
三个孩子都出生在新泽西州的帕拉穆斯（Paramus），当时John在纽约市的一家日本贸易公司工作。Koh一家在新泽西州住了六年，在首尔住了四年，然后在回到首尔之前在悉尼住了近六年。在美国、澳大利亚和韩国，Helen的朋友们总是问她是如何抚养长子的。培养这样一个优秀的学生和好孩子的秘诀是什么？然而，Helen坚持认为这既不归功于她，也不归功于John。“Bo天生如此，”她会这样说。
Bo的Suneung（韩国大学入学考试）分数让他被拒之门外。满分是 200。他得到了 153，表现很强但并非无懈可击。可以预见地，由于他专注于准备大学考试，他的高中平均绩点（G.P.A.）掉到了第二个标准分段（stanine）的低端，因此他不再处于全国前4%的行列。
最令人惊叹的是，Bo保持了令人印象深刻的平均绩点，处于全国第二个标准分段，现在他被允许申请延世大学（Yonsei University）。他的学校认为他不应该参加首尔大学（Seoul National）的考试——那是他父亲的母校，仅面向最顶尖的学生开放——但他的排名足够高，以至于他的指导老师认为延世大学是有可能的，尤其是如果他申请社会学专业，而这正是他想研究的科目。Bo对此很满意。他更喜欢延世大学古色古香的校园，并钦佩该大学的校友。
在Bo的班级里，有一个早熟的美女名叫杨雅拉（Ara Yang），他喜欢她，而她也崇拜他。放学后，Bo通常去补习班，有一次，她出现在
雅拉被成均馆大学（Sungkyunkwan University）录取了，但她告诉他，在他准备再次参加延世大学考试期间，她愿意等他。她说，几乎每个人都会参加不止一次这类考试，特别是像延世大学这样难以进入的学校，她竭尽全力地鼓励他。Bo因自己的失败带来了沉重的代价而深感愧疚，他坚定地告诉她，他不会耽误她。为了让局面更明确，他告诉她，他们甚至不应该做朋友。
Bo的母亲能够承认这个事实，并非因为她谦虚，而是因为在同一个家庭中抚养多个孩子的经验充分向任何一个有自我意识的父母证明，每个孩子都是完全独特的。最终，所有的小人类——即使他们是自己血肉之躯，本应提供某种可预测性的幻觉——都会主张自己的个性，无论父母如何试图控制、塑造或设计他们。
作为受过教育且认真的中产阶级父母，海伦（Helen）和约翰（John）提供的不仅是基本生活保障，而且绝对多于他们自身（两人都出身于贫困家庭）所获得的一切。对于即使是意愿最良好的父母来说，抚养孩子也是一场随机的实验；海伦和约翰以一种只有父母才能拥有的深切迷恋，观察着他们的后代：Bo、DH 和 Mido。每个孩子都与他人截然不同。
Bo 想要重新参加考试。海伦不知道该怎么办。
高考（Suneung）每年仅在 11 月举行一次。而约翰在与老板闹翻且在首尔没找到合适工作后，刚刚被悉尼的旧办公室重新雇佣，尽管职级被降了，薪水也低了。他和 Mido 现在住在海伦的哥哥肯尼（Kenny）及其妻子莉莉（Lily）家，肯尼在澳洲航空（Qantas）工作。谢天谢地，DH 在安多弗（Andover）依然表现良好。海伦必须考虑在首尔和悉尼维持住房的成本，以及 Bo 接下来一年的补习班（hagwon）费用，以及家庭捉襟见肘的开支。
当海伦在新闻中读到关于一个误入歧途的孩子的悲惨故事时，她极少将责任归咎于父母。生活教会她，关于先天与后天的争论几乎是毫无意义的：优秀的父母有时也会养出行为不端的孩子，而
Bo 在 1994 年 11 月参加了高考。除了那场令人恐惧的国家大学入学考试外，在他那年，他还需要参加 bongosa，一项特定的考试
海伦的姐姐索尼娅（Sonya）住在狎鸥亭（Apgujeong）一个由多栋独立塔楼组成的公寓群里。在索尼娅公寓楼的电梯里，海伦用手指梳理头发，将散乱的发丝塞到耳后。那天早上，她注意到侧分线处长出了新的白发。毫无疑问，她姐姐一定会对此发表评论。海伦每推迟一周去剪发染发，就能为孩子的学校和补习班费用多省下一笔钱。
有最喜欢的，但他是最好的。比我儿子好多了，”索尼娅说，然后笑了笑。“那么，你要再留一年，以便——”
一个巨大的钴蓝色鱼缸，架在红木底座上。
女佣留在门口，而海伦在沙发上坐下，索尼娅皱起了眉头。
“我不能留下。公寓租约到期了，我们需要拿回押金，这样才能在悉尼找地方。我们不能一直依赖肯尼和莉莉。Bo 仅差几分就没过线，顾问说今年的高考简直是一场噩梦。”
“我不敢相信你又要走了。又是这样。你几乎没在这里待过，”索尼娅说道，因为太恼火而不再顾及客套。她让女佣去准备茶，年轻女子鞠躬后关上了门。
当电梯在索尼娅所在的楼层打开时，一名穿着制服的女佣正站在公寓正门等候。索尼娅的家由她丈夫的叔叔文董事长（Chairman Mun）所有，比首尔大多数房子都要大——占据了整层楼，由两套公寓合并而成。三代人住在两个单元里，由一条小走廊隔开。索尼娅每天照顾家政——她的丈夫永吉（Yong-gil）、两个儿子以及董事长。她管理着规模不小的员工队伍，包括一名强势的管家、两名女佣、一名厨师和一名司机。
海伦双臂交叠，闭上眼睛，无法忘记儿子在成绩公布后说的话：“妈妈（Umma），我想重考。我辜负了你和爸爸（Appa）。对不起。”
“她是新来的吗？”海伦指向门的方向。
“只是厨师的侄女，”索尼娅说，随后对自己语气过于轻率而感到后悔。“她是兼职的。我其实不需要她，但厨师请求我。她最近离婚了，有两个小孩。”
她告诉他，他没有做错任何事。他从未让他们失望，但博无法被安慰。她的长子没有哭泣，也没有浪费更多言词。他确信，如果他学习更刻苦，就会通过考试。录取通知书本就在触手可及之处。三分，也许四分？他不希望所有这些开销和时间被浪费掉。面对一个想要更刻苦学习的孩子，她怎么能说不？海伦不能。对于她的儿子来说，通过那场考试将是他的救赎。
海伦明白。每个人都向她的姐姐寻求帮助，而索尼娅很难拒绝。
“约翰在悉尼找到房子了吗？”“他们还住在肯尼那里。”“还住在那儿？”索尼娅挑起眉毛。“嗯，肯尼和莉莉说没关系，
女佣引导海伦来到索尼娅的家庭办公室，这里的面积与海伦的客厅一样大。一大块南向的阳光洒在这个优雅的空间里。在现代橡木书桌后面是一张绿色的马海毛羊毛沙发，索尼娅在晚上在那里阅读。堆叠的艺术书籍覆盖在一张低矮的手刻韩国松木桌上。高大的柿子树枝填满了
而美都正在帮他们照顾孩子。”
“钱还够吗？”索尼娅直截了当地问。
“很艰难，”海伦承认。她深吸了一口气。“博没考上。”
这个男孩的道歉继续像一颗微小的钨球一样压在母亲的大脑中，这是一种欺骗性的沉重金属，她曾在化学课上将其握在掌心。
“噢，不！”索尼娅惊呼道。“他接近了吗？我敢打赌他很接近。博非常聪明。是最刻苦的男孩。我不该——”
“我留在这里再租个小房子是没有意义的，”海伦说。
索尼娅摇了摇头。她明白。海伦日益增长的开支是不可持续的，而且她怎么可能攒够孩子们的婚礼费用和她自己的退休金？
“姐姐，我在想，我知道主席不会喜欢，但你认为博能住在这里准备重考吗？他大部分时间会在补习班（hagwon），不会碍事。我知道这是一个很大的——”
索尼娅一直担心这个。她觉得无法拒绝自己的妹妹，但又无法答应，因为这不是她的房子。索尼娅低着头坐着，一言不发。
“没关系，”海伦说。她明白。她的姐姐不能询问主席。关于不允许永吉直系亲属以外的任何人留宿，主席的立场非常坚决。他一直不喜欢索尼娅的亲戚。为了
她的缘故，他才容忍他们。“我在考虑给博租个房间。我还没决定他是应该住在寄宿房还是考试院（gosiwon）。”
自从高中时期的夏天——那时他经常阅读英文的欧美经典小说——起，博就没有时间读小说了。
索尼娅看了看钟。“听着，我们现在吃点东西吧。主席很快就回来了。”
“我听说寄宿房的伙食可能很糟糕，”索尼娅说道，想帮上忙。“新出的考试院（gosiwon）可能会好一些，”她说。“它们现在更像汽车旅馆而不是宿舍。房间很小，但有些管理得更好。我可以帮你处理这件事。很抱歉发生这种事。你知道，如果董事长和我丈夫不那么反对——”
他在第二次尝试时失败了。一篇不可能完成的哲学段落和一道
他一直想象着自己在韩国生活和工作，但他也想成为那种通过书籍、电影和历史来了解更多世界的韩国人。
令人困惑的几何证明。差了几个点。
1996年11月13日，他第三次参加了高考（Suneung）。
在不到二十四小时内，他将再次参加高考。在过去的三年里，他几乎除了睡觉、吃饭和准备这场考试外什么也没做。他在高中最后一年高考失败了，毕业后再次失败，他希望明天的高考将是最后一次。他对今年的考试感觉不错，准备好把它抛在脑后。
前一天，在最后一节补习班（hagwon）课程结束之后，他登上了一辆几乎空无一人的前往延世大学校园的地铁车厢，坐在后排的一个座位上。由于寒冷，他将蓝色的羊毛围巾塞进褪色的黑色派克大衣里，试图让自己暖和起来。
“我们会没事的，”海伦说道，觉得自己很傻。
“我可以帮你出钱，”索尼娅向她保证道。“为他找一个最好的考试院，就在补习班旁边。寄宿房通常离得很远，你肯定不想让他浪费时间在通勤上。只要选个最好的，剩下的我来处理。我会经常去看他的。我保证。”
“如果你想成为延世大学的学生，你就得像个学生那样表现，”他的补习班老师金老师告诉他。“去延世大学的学生吃点心的那些咖啡馆，读他们读的书，让自己沉浸在被录取学生的那种心境中。想象。在脑海中勾勒出那个画面。”
那天早晨，课后，金老师请他留下来一会儿。博局促地站着，而老师则坐着，长长的棕色脸庞因深思而倾斜。这位老师异常高大，肩膀宽阔，下颌方正。即使在微笑时，他看起来也更像一名退役的职业运动员，而不是一个来自高城草莓农场、曾经成绩卓越的学生。
索尼娅停了下来。“你看起很累，”她说。“这件毛衣很漂亮，但丁香色突出了你头发里的灰白。你看起比我老！预约一下去染染发根。我真是个刻薄的姐姐，对吧？但除了我，谁还会让你注意外貌？”
金老师曾是一名高考之神，在当年的全国成绩中名列前茅，他收取极高的补课费，由博的姑姑索尼娅支付。作为一名尚未满四十岁的单身汉，金老师的收入比好几位律师和法官加起来还多，并且已经在弘大拥有了两栋商业建筑。传闻他不再需要为了钱工作，只是单纯享受教学。他的专长是辅导复读生，即那些在第一或第二次尝试中未通过的人。金老师坚信博这次会通过。他的模拟成绩处于安全区域，因此金老师将重点放在心理建设上。
“你会考得很出色，”金老师断言道。他给了博一个装满传统太妃糖的纸盒。“让分数粘住！这是首尔最好的麦芽糖（yeot）。不是每个人都能买到的。”
海伦摸了摸头。她姐姐之所以挑她，是因为感到愧疚。索尼娅嫁给了一个富家男人，但很快意识到家族的钱没有一分是她的。董事长控制着每一个决定和开支，索尼亚竭尽全力地讨好他。在这个世界上，她只唠叨或戏弄两个人——肯尼和海伦。面对其他人时，她保持疏离，行为无可挑剔。在所有人眼中，她显得完美无缺。
波微笑着表达谢意。“还有一件事，”金老师说着，从背心口袋里掏出一枚五百韩元的硬币。“明天把它带在身上。这是你以前老师给你的护身符。当你紧张时，就摸摸它。记住，你并不孤单。想想在你之前参加过无数次艰苦考试的千万名学生。现在，你成了这个奋斗群体的一员。接受考试是件好事。年轻人应该学习并接受测试，这样才能巩固知识。”
在新村站附近一家深受学生欢迎的两层咖啡馆里，波坐在窗边的角落桌旁，一边喝茶，一边阅读一份被丢弃的延世大学文学杂志。在他周围，年轻男女三五成群，在热咖啡杯上温暖着冰冷的手。穿着大胆花色毛衣和牛仔裤的漂亮女孩们低声讨论着政治，对在身边徘徊试探的男生们不予理会。
索尼娅双臂交叉在胸前，微微歪头。“波为什么要这么做？这毫无道理。他应该在美国学习。”
“他喜欢待在这里。他觉得这样离人们更近。他甚至在考虑尝试参军，”海伦困惑地说道。
波惊讶地盯着掌心的硬币。他没觉得自己的老师会迷信。
“我最心爱的侄子疯了吗？如果我的儿子们不必经历这些，他们会欣喜若狂的。波想重新参加考试并住在韩国，这已经够疯狂了。绝不能让他为了服兵役而放弃美国国籍。我绝不允许，”索尼娅严厉地说道。
“我当年考试时，我的补习班老师也给了我一枚硬币。我通过了考试，进入了首尔大学最难的专业。一个农家男孩拿到了最高分！”他笑着说，“所以我现在在这里，训练你参加考试，给你一枚硬币，祝你好运。”
波试着想象自己也成为那些在笔记本上书写或阅读的年轻人之一。一名留着短卷发的女学生长得很像他的朋友伊瑟尔，一个在考试院准备公务员考试的人。那名女子正在阅读法文版的《局外人》。
波鞠躬致谢。“你感觉怎么样？”教练以关注学生为荣。他认为这种个性化的方法正是他的学生能取得最佳成绩并摆脱过去失败的原因。
海伦点了点头。
在他进入考试院的第一天，伊瑟尔就在厨房见到了他。一周之内，她特意让他坐下来告诉他，他与这里的其他居民截然不同。
他发现她睡得很沉，忘了摘眼镜。当他用双手将眼镜从她小巧的脸上摘下来时，伊瑟尔依然没有醒来。
“你不像我们大多数人那样是个失败者。你会有光明的前途。继续学习吧。”
波咧嘴一笑，盯着大教室那淡蓝色的墙壁。
大叔是市中心一家银行的中年保安，他往厨房里窥了一眼。作为一名长期住客，他像是考试院的“市长”，很照顾伊瑟尔和波。六年前，在他年迈的父亲去世后，大叔搬进了后面一间带有浴室的房间，从此觉得没必要另找更大的住处。相比于独居，他更喜欢考试院的喧闹，并且非常用心地记得每位住客和工作人员的生日。每到生日，他会从最喜欢的面包店买一个红豆面包，把它留在厨房里，并在纸袋上整齐地写上那个人的名字，画上一个心形和一张笑脸。
她已经以优异的成绩从釜山国立大学毕业，但一直没能找到任何办公室工作。想到要继续申请白领职位，她感到心灰意冷，于是休息了几个月，在姑姑开的餐厅里当调酒师；姑姑之前借了钱，好让伊率能去首尔准备公务员考试。伊率已经失败了两次。第一次尝试时，她进入了面试阶段，但面试当天却患了重感冒，失去了声音。
“我很好，老师。我相信我已经做了最大限度的准备。”
“你也会有好运的。这是你应得的。”
“我想我之前一直没什么运气。”
“有时候不仅仅是准备的问题。还关乎时机、环境和个性。波，你有良好的习惯，而且你付出了努力。你是个好人。别给自己太大压力。今晚记得早点睡。告诉自己，这次考试就相当于另一次模拟测试。你会没事的。”
咖啡馆里，好几张桌子已经空了，波独自坐在他的角落里。他把文学杂志放下，方便下一个想阅读的人。当他走向收银台结账时，能感觉到外套口袋里那枚五百韩元硬币磨损的边缘。他乘火车回家，在考试院（gosiwon）附近的杂货店停下来，买一些晚餐食材。
伊率那间没有窗户的房间是考试院里最小的房间之一，她必须和女性楼层的其他人在共用浴室。她经常拿波是富家子弟来打趣，因为他有独立浴室，还有一扇可以打开的顶窗，能让他从大厅窗户那里呼吸新鲜空气。伊率和波打了个赌，谁在第三次尝试中通过，谁就请对方吃一顿韩式牛肉烧烤晚餐。
“我们的小伊率看起来很累，”大舅说道。“也许我们可以让黄经理打开她的房门，好让她能好好睡一觉。那样睡的话，她的脖子会疼的，”他啧啧地说道，“黄经理现在在店里，大约半小时后回来。”
每天，他们至少在三楼的厨房一起吃一餐饭。在那里，他们可以随意食用考试院提供的米饭、泡菜和方便面。利用父母寄给他的生活费，波买了鸡蛋、香肠、豆腐和罐装炸酱金枪鱼，他将这些食材与她分享，尽管她吃得那么
“姐姐，姐姐！”波摇了摇伊率的肩膀，但没有得到回应。他在她的运动裤口袋里看到了那根熟悉的、系着房门的绿色挂绳。他转向大舅。“也许我们可以直接把她搬过去。她顶多也就四十公斤重。”
onya 为 Bo 选择了靠近他补习班（hagwon）最好的考试院（gosiwon），由于维护得非常好，那里很少有空房。但这里依然是按周付费的住所，充满了流动学生、日雇工以及时隐时现的幽灵般的人物，而且，当然，这里与家完全不同。住户共用的厨房是一个大小适中的矩形房间。在深水槽和碗架旁的一条长白色台面上，摆放着三个电饭煲和三个电水壶。住户被要求自行清洗餐具。
大伯弯腰俯身，像抱婴儿一样将那个年轻女子抱在怀里。
“她比一小袋米还轻，”他担忧地说道。
他们两人都检查了她的呼吸情况。
Bo 拿过钥匙，走在他前面打开 Isul 的房门。由于此前从未见过她房间的内部，他被那狭小的空间惊到了，面积不到他房间的一半。
Bo 在共用桌旁找到了 Isul，她闭着眼睛，头撑在一本公务员考试指南上。炉子上炖着一个带有圆把手的铝制拉面锅。Isul 穿着她惯常的居家服——黑色运动裤，灰色运动衫，白色短袜，脚蹬黑白塑料拖鞋。她瘦得像根骨头，个子极小，尽管她比 Bo 大四岁，但看起来就像个穿着哥哥衣服的小学生。Isul 高度近视，戴着一副厚塑料镜片的眼镜，掩盖了她那双美丽的小眼睛。
她几乎没有任何财物。白色的墙壁空空如也，仅有纸张大小的一块地板区域干净得无瑕。衣架上挂着一件海军蓝色冬装外套，一套黑色面试西装，一件白色正装衬衫，以及一条 Isul 的姨妈在去年圣诞节寄来的 Burberry 围巾。她书桌的每一厘米都堆满了厚厚的考试指南和笔记本。她的床铺已整理好，覆盖着一张厚厚的红绿格子毯。枕头上放着一盒打开的冷药，那是从街角药店买的。铝箔包装条中已经取走了六颗胶囊。
她的进食量极小，几乎难以察觉。每当她姨妈从家里给她寄鱼或小菜（banchan）时，她都会与他分享。她称他为小弟弟。
锅里的拉面沸腾溢出，Bo 赶紧冲到炉灶旁关掉煤气。
“姐姐！煮好了，对吧？”Isul 没有睁眼，他轻轻推了推她的肩膀，感觉到厚运动衫下肩胛骨那锐利的边缘。
Bo 是在共用区域结识 Isul 的。
在医院里，医生给以瑟洗胃并给她输液。
护士告诉他们，她没有大碍。大伯得去见一个人，于是让波陪着她，直到她的姑姑从釜山赶来。几小时后，当以瑟醒来时，波正坐在她床边的椅子上，努力撑着不让自己睡着。以瑟看起来很惊讶。
“波，我怎么在这儿？”“你这个捣蛋鬼，”他说，在确认她恢复正常后松了一口气。“我的眼镜在哪儿？”波从床头柜上拿起眼镜递给她。“你是不是把 6 颗药全吃了？”“什么药？”“感冒药。”“我觉得没有。起初我吃了 2 颗，没效果，所以又多吃了一些。”
“好吧，你们都知道我们为什么在这里——为了让男性友谊延续下去。”
“你这个笨蛋，”他说。“你应该按儿童剂量服用，而且你可能还没吃饭。我简直不敢相信你受过大学教育，竟然还不懂基础科学。”他严肃地看着她，但随即笑了起来。
在那个部分，有一段短暂的休息时间，就在那时，他开始感到眩晕，疲惫感瞬间袭来。他在 8:10 A.M. 就坐到了位置上，考试将于 5:20 P.M. 结束。期间还会有一次短休和一小时的午餐时间，而正是在这些休息期间，他感到最恶心。
他的大脑并没有空白；相反，所有的“万一”像指数一样地倍增，挤满了他的思绪，使他无法想象其他任何事情。
“注意点。我还是你的长辈，”她说着，虚弱地笑了笑。“你感觉怎么样？”“我感冒了。而且嗓子疼。”“他们给你洗胃了。他们以为你试图——”
以瑟在床上轻微地抬起手，似乎是要阻止他说话，然后又垂了下来。“波，我好累。让我睡会儿。我只想不再感到这么累和病痛。我总是感冒，这让学习变得很困难。可怜的姑姑，她想让我进办公室工作。我最好快点好起来。”
监考员告诉学生们停止答题，波交上了试卷。
在火车站，一名乞丐正躺在长凳上熟睡。那人显然已超过 80 岁，眉头深锁，但脸下半部分却有一种奇异的孩童般纯真——双颊丰满，小小的粉色嘴唇，几乎在微笑。他的左手边放着一个抛光的黄铜碗和一个塑封的牌子：“天生失明，被母亲抛弃。恳请慈悲。祝您好运。”
他的头沉重且发烫。当他读到文学部分时，他无法理清问题的含义。他盯着阅读段落，试图理解句子的意思。简答题比长题更令他困惑。他伸手进裤兜，摸索着那枚 500 韩元的硬币。那些难以解读的文字开始在脑海中游走。
波看着她睡着。当她的姑姑终于到达时，他给以瑟留了一张字条，承诺明天回来。
波将硬币放入那人的碗中。
是什么让他觉得自己能考上延世大学？他出生在新泽西州，在那里和悉尼长大，然后搬到首尔。现在他坐在一间屋子里，周围全是那些从小学起就在为了这次考试而生活、呼吸和饮食的学生。今年，bongosa 考试被取消了，所以 Suneung 决定一切。波尽可能地睁大眼睛，尽力让自己从昏沉中清醒过来。
老师叫了两遍他的名字，但波没有回应。
Bo 回到房间时是凌晨四点，他闭上了
结果在圣诞节前夕公布。Bo 独自在租住房间的床上坐下，读着那张纸条上的分数。那一年，满分从两百分改成了四百分，报纸报道这次考试屠杀了大批顶尖学生。最高分达到了 373。Bo 没有突破 300。他觉得快要窒息了。他
闭目养神了几个小时，洗漱完毕，并记得收拾好考试所需的物品，包括准考证、身份证、一包纸巾和他喜欢的硬糖。他把那盒太妃糖扔进了背包里。
监考员一允许他们打开试卷，Bo 就埋头解答题目。在第一部分之后
坐在她对面。他看起来很懊悔，仿佛理应受到责备。
“我点了你最喜欢的那套，还有一杯加冰的可乐，”索尼娅笑着说。“谢谢，姑姑。”她的侄子刚刚满二十二岁，但在她眼中，他仍然是个孩子。他有着成年男人的体型，但她只能在他眼镜后面看到那张熟悉的婴儿脸。
“很抱歉给你添了这么多麻烦。你给我找的补习老师非常好。这不是他的错。”
“你在说什么？我觉得你很棒，Bo。我想现在感觉一定很糟糕，但这可能是天意，”她说。“我相信这件事必须发生。你姑姑已经五十多岁了，这是我的感悟。有时候，那些你最渴望却没能得到的东西，其实是让你免于遭受的可怕之灾。”
Bo 抬起头，嘴巴微张。“但还是很难受。我明白。”
“结果发现他想要的只是一大杯冰水。”
她停顿了一下，感觉到他可能会抵触她的下一个提议。
“我为你咨询了一位招生顾问，她说你应该去美国。”
他不知道在房间里坐了多久，但最终他走出了考试院（gosiwon），在街区外两家便利店中较好的一家申请了一份工作。
在工作日结束时，店员可以购买打折餐食，经理和他的妻子经常为他留出最好的临期商品，那些东西其实完全可以食用。
Bo 的表情阴沉下来。“姑姑，我不能放弃。我应该再考一次。我已经在这上面花了三年，而且我在模拟考试中的分数非常高。下次高考（Suneung）我不需要学习太多新内容。我只需要再等一年。”
作为一名全职收银员并负责理货，Bo 感到自己很有产出。店长是一个来自大田的三十二岁男人，他很欣赏准时、负责且诚实的 Bo。当其他员工迟到或缺勤时，他会接替额外的工时。有一天晚上，店长随口提到，他毕业于一家首尔没人认知的大学，无论怎么努力都找不到办公室工作。他不明白花那么多年钱去补习班（hagwon）以及投递无数份申请书有什么意义，结果最后还是在便利店工作，但那张被压平并定制装裱的学位证让他的已故父母感到自豪。店长那乐观的妻子比他高出一个头，也在店里工作。他们不打算要孩子。
在 Bo 的父母之间，海伦承受这个消息更为艰难。她失眠，工作无法集中注意力。即便海伦完成了所有必须做的事——工作、准备家餐、打扫房屋——她的心依然萦绕在那个身在韩国、失望的儿子身上。很难想象她最聪明的孩子在卖烟和啤酒并清扫人行道。听到店长夫妇对他很友善，并没有给她带来多少安慰。
“招生顾问有一个想法，我认为这也能帮到你的父母。”
服务员将炸猪排套餐放在桌上后便离开了。他们低头默默祈祷，随后她示意他开始用餐。
“侄子，这位入学顾问很有名。她是首尔最好的，而且她有一个方案，显然她已经为很多能够拿到签证的学生多次使用了这个方案。你搬到加利福尼亚州，先在社区大学读两年。在你获得居民身份后，学费就几乎不需要钱了。如果你那么喜欢工作，可以通过兼职来支付费用。如果你表现出色——我知道你一定可以——你可以转学到加州州立大学，或者加州大学的某所分校，或者任何四年制大学。如果你想的话，甚至可以转到常春藤盟校。那些名校会提供经济援助。”
如果海伦不担心失去她在悉尼一家百货公司的工作，她早就飞回首尔接他了。她的丈夫要求她耐心等待。
“波会想出办法的，”约翰说。但海伦还是给索尼娅打了电话。
波的父母提出给他一张去悉尼的机票，但他要求有时间考虑自己的选择。此外，他要求他们在确定他的打算之前不要寄钱。凭借自己的收入，他能够继续住在考试院（gosiwon）里。
索尼娅在一家炸猪排店与波见面时，穿着一件简单的驼色连衣裙，没有携带她那些昂贵的名牌手袋。波准时到达并坐了下来。
“波，你可以重新开始。我知道你会成功的。这不是你的错——”
“你们这些在国外出生的韩国人都搞混了。你们觉得必须证明某些东西。证明自己是韩国人。拜托，这没什么好证明的。有些在这里出生的人反而讨厌成为韩国人。嘿，也许这就是成为韩国人的意义！”她笑了笑，随后变得严肃起来。“你需要买票的钱吗？我没有多少，但我愿意把我做眼科手术的钱分给我的小弟弟一些。” 以率仍然觉得很糟糕，因为他为了她，在 Suneung（韩国高考）前一晚没睡好觉。
“他是我教过的最好的复读生。我们都相信你，波。我们不相信这场考试。”
她停了下来。这个男孩显然很沮丧，但正试图掩饰。
他盯着几乎没动过的盘子。“我们不相信韩国的教
育体系。你明白吗？”“我不责怪韩国，”他说。“吃你的东西吧，”她尽可能亲切地说道。
在他吃完后，他告诉她他会考虑一下。
天后，他在厨房里遇到了以率。她正在喝早上的第一杯咖啡，看起来精神抖擞。
“谢谢你的烤面包片和草莓酱。”
以率指的是他前一晚带回来的过时烘焙食品和过期的果酱。考试院（gosiwon）的住客们很高兴能用波定期带来的食物奖励来补充口粮。没有人注意到过期日期。不止一个人开玩笑说：“要是商店能给我们过期的烧酒就好了。”她将自己的烤面包盘推向他。
波点头致谢，但没有说话。他在杯底的速溶咖啡粉中倒入沸水。
“我父母想让我去美国。”
“去吧，”以率说。“我很高兴终于有人在做理智的事了。呀——你最好去。你要是不去我就杀了你。”她举起拳头，笑着说。
看到他的表情，她放下了拳头。“你不想去？为什么？”“你也是？”他摇了摇头。“我想再考一次。”
“忘了延世大学吧。下次你能考上。我肯定。我愿意用我的眼科手术积蓄来打赌。而且就算你考上了，又怎样？你没看到在这里找一份好工作有多难吗？你没有任何关系，对吧？你那个富有的姑姑认识什么在招人的财阀吗？”
“我花了三年时间，”他低声说道。“没什么大不了的。去吧。听你父母的。我希望我有聪明的父母。”以率微笑了一下，以缓和话语带来的冲击。“你的英语说得完美，你有
美国公民身份，而且你是个天才。忘掉这个地狱吧。如果我有你的选择，我很久以前就走了。”
“姑姑，我能考上。我知道这一直是一个沉重的负担，所以我想用这份工作攒钱，尝试独立完成——”
“我叔叔在澳洲航空工作。他能弄到便宜的机票。”
“哇。如果你不是这么好的一个小弟弟，我大概不会喜欢你。你已经拥有了一切。你还在难过什么？”
“波。听我说。我知道你也能考上——但为了什么？值得吗？你是真的想住在这里，还是只是想证明自己能考入延世大学？如果你真的想住在这里，你可以选择一所更容易考上的学校，不是吗？这种纯粹为了筛选孩子而设立的考试制度是不公平且不可预测的，我不知道你为什么还要继续忍受。”
“我 Suneung 失败了三次。我已经二十二岁了。”他突然想到，在美国他将是二十一岁，听起来年轻得多，尽管他还是同一个人。
“所以管它呢？我考试失败了两次。等到我找到工作时，如果我能找到工作的话，我已经是个戴着厚眼镜的老太婆了。但你知道吗？你们这位考研院（gosiwon）的姐妹一定会通过这个该死的公务员考试，通过面试，然后我要去矫正我的近视眼。我长得也不差，我要去享受生活。我会找几个喜欢矮个子女生的帅气高个子男朋友，有一天，我要在老家给我的姑姑买一栋小楼。那里不像首尔那么贵。”她双手叉腰，弯曲的手臂像细枝一样。 “这就是我的计划。我相信这是一个好计划。我每天都在努力让我的计划成为现实。”
波什么也没说。他曾坚信自己的计划，而他的姑姑用几句犀利且理据充分的话，戳破了他的逻辑和目的。
“我怎么去那里？” “肯尼叔叔会帮你弄到一张去悉尼的机票，然后，在见到你父母之后，你可以去洛杉矶。”索尼娅屏住了呼吸。
“我想没人认为我能考进延世大学。”
“你错了，”她说，不愿纵容他的自怜。“我明白你感到尴尬。你想要证明你能进去。这很正常。”
“你一定会通过的。我肯定你行，”波说。
波放下叉子和餐刀，用纸巾擦了擦嘴。
“走吧。你去美国。那是个更好的计划。但首先，你得开始努力了。”露珠示意了一下厨房的挂钟，然后拿起她的吐司和果酱。
“我知道你能被录取。之前有些运气不好，但我肯定如果你坚持考，你一定会通过。但是，如果你去加州在那儿学习，你就不会受到所有这些考试和录取规则变动的影响。你不需要年复一年地推迟你的生活，去证明你能做一件每个人都知道你能做到的事情。这一切都不是你的错。生活极其不公，但我们必须——”
波笑了。“我最好还是走了。”露珠眨了眨眼，当波离开厨房时，她想象起没有他的那个巨大的考研院，那样太令人沮丧了。她给自己又泡了一杯咖啡，打开了学习指南。
看到他心灰意冷的表情，索尼娅又深吸了一口气，不想再说更多。然后她继续说道。
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彼得·胡贾尔（Peter Hujar）的肖像画是在寻找那些模特自己都不知道拥有的秘密。
作者：希尔顿·阿尔斯（HILTON ALS）
策展人乔尔·史密斯（Joel Smith）的视觉和情感敏锐度极高，这一点从第一个脱颖而出的——
杰基的祖母。胡贾尔使用了极少的道具——这里一把椅子，那里一张床垫——让模特在灰色背景或白墙前摆好姿势。无论他的拍摄对象看起来多么古怪——包括旧金山的表演剧团“鸡尾酒会”（the Cockettes）和罗伯特·威尔逊（Robert Wilson）早期奇观剧的演员——他的照片是我见过的最安静的影像。这种安静源于胡贾尔的高级风格，即他拍摄的人们看似凝固，而眼神中却充满了思想与灵气。在他的作品中，胡贾尔一次又一次地回归到模特的精神生活——一种在影像中不可见的呈现。胡贾尔最优秀的照片是静物画，不过主角不是苹果，而是“酷儿之果”（queer fruit）。他在工作室习惯使用的一台 120-mm. 双反相机，赋予了他的照片一种充满温暖的强有力图形特质。这也让他的拍摄对象在没有相机遮挡的情况下能看到他的脸——一张苍白皮肤、深色眉毛和小嘴的英俊面孔。但是，当他低头看向毛玻璃时，他的存在并非重点；重点是模特的具体存在。
模特在共同创作一个故事，模特扮演主角，有时这种交流中结合的现实感与虚构感会将某些真相地表化。当这种情况在 Hujar 身上没有发生时，很可能是因为模特的抵触。在 1980 年，他邀请总部位于 伦敦 的反串表演剧团 Bloolips 来担任模特。这一插曲被该团的创始人 Bette Bourne 在 Cynthia Carr 的《Fire in the Belly》（2012年）中描述，这是一部关于艺术家 David Wojnarowicz 的优雅且动人的传记，而 Wojnarowicz 是 Hujar 的朋友。“我们无法揭露，”Bourne 说，“Hujar 最看重的是你必须揭露。我现在知道了，但当时并不明白。换句话说，就是面对镜头时那种炽热、灼人的坦诚。不要敷衍，不要掩饰，不要做作。就是平实、真实的你。然后他才能进入你的内心。”
在进入“Hujar:Contact”展览时（该展览展出 Peter Hujar 的照片和接触印相纸，在摩根图书馆展出至 10 月 25 日）所看到的图像，是表演者、作家兼导演 Jackie Curtis 的影像。Hujar 是 Curtis 的朋友，他在 1970 年左右拍摄了身着女装的 Jackie。（Curtis 在其过于短暂的一生中，在“男孩”Jackie 和“女孩”Jackie 之间交替切换。）Jackie 身穿深色上衣，围着花卉丝巾，光彩照人，头发被烫得蓬松，在它那令人心酸、似笑非笑的脸庞周围营造出一种光环；脸上涂着白色粉末，眼睛周围点缀着闪亮的、具有金属感的亮片。这是一张极佳的脸孔，一种极佳的造型，它诉说着——或者更准确地说，清晰地表达了——在 Curtis 崭露头角的那些年里，那个时髦且充满活力的纽约：那时他是 La Mama 的剧作家，也是安迪·沃霍尔那些最具喜剧天赋的超级巨星之一。Twiggy 带来的“青年震荡”式魅力已经过时。某种更阴郁、更幽默且更清醒的东西正在登上舞台，穿着破旧的厚底鞋和抽丝的丝袜，化着受 Corey Tippin 启发而设计的妆容——剃掉的眉毛和涂抹鲜红的脸颊。性别似乎成了人们最不担心的事，而且谁还需要百老汇？生活本身就是表演，而朋友则是唯一真正重要的观众。
直到我在摩根图书馆看到 Hujar 拍摄的 Jackie Curtis 的照片，我才开始将 Jackie 的装扮视为一种纯真的展示，它唤起了一个小男孩在玩母亲的珍珠项链或姐姐的茶具时不会感到羞耻的时代。只需看看他在那张照片里的眼睛，那是一张从 Jackie 女装接触印相纸中截取的照片，被 Smith 挂在入口附近：那是新生儿的眼睛（尽管带着烟味），清新且毫无恐惧地看待世界。这张照片旁边是接触印相纸的一部分放大图。其中一帧被橙色蜡笔勾勒出来，顶部写着“Vogue”字样。其含义是：尽管 Jackie 无法登上《Vogue》的封面，因为这个世界的运作方式……
根据 Andrew Durbin 今年早些时候出版的关键著作《The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek》，Hujar 告诉作家 Jill Johnston，他将自己的摄影视为一种“寻找”。Johnston 得出结论，他寻找的是我们潜意识中拥有而不知的秘密。如果我们无法为自己作证，那么是什么让相机能够切入并挖掘出我们的真实面貌？我认为这始于摄影师与
你至少可以在 Hujar 在其工作室拍摄的十余帧 Jackie 影像中看到这种精神，那里同时也是他的家——位于第二大道 189 号的一间阁楼，由……所有。
©PETER HUJAR / COURTESYPETER HUJAR ARCHIVE / ARS / MORGAN LIBRARY &
MUSEUM / FRAENKEL GALLERY / ORTUZAR; OPPOSITE: MIGUEL PORLAN
Jackie Curtis，约 1970 年。Hujar 反复地回归到他模特的精神生活——一种存在于其图像中不可见的存在。
在人类与野兽之间；而且，因为动物先来到这里，这些图像似乎在表达，它们拥有超越我们的古老特质——甚至超越了摄影师及其现代相机的特质。就像法国导演罗伯特·布列松在他那部令人心碎的 1966 年电影《巴尔萨扎尔》（Au Hasard Balthazar）中那样，该片通过一头驴的眼睛观察世界——一个充满灰色的黑白世界——胡哈尔（Hujar）将自然世界的毁坏归咎于人类的残忍与忽视。他的动物作品中浸染着他童年的沉重与创伤。
在那时（现在依然如此），彼得（Peter）决心给他一个。杰基（Jackie）不仅是胡哈尔的封面女郎；他也是史密斯（Smith）的封面人物，是胡哈尔在六十年代和七十年代拍摄的那些极具天赋的表演者、艺术家、作家和皮革女王（leather queens）中的一颗星，他们为这次充满洞察力、密度与爱的展览注入了如此鲜活的生命力。在“胡哈尔：接触”（Hujar: Contact）的分区展厅中，我们所看到的是纽约在展览所涵盖的 32 年间——从 1954 到 1986 ——所创造、赋予意义并最终失去的一切。（摩根图书馆收藏了胡哈尔近六千张幸存的接触印相纸。）
图像的神秘感。灰色主导了他那些深思且感官化的黑白肖像画，例如 1975 年拍摄的好友苏珊·桑塔格（Susan Sontag）身着高领衫斜卧在浅色毯子上的照片。即使是他在外拍的照片也能给人一种世界被阴云笼罩的感觉——比如他在 1976 年复活节星期日，在克里斯托弗街码头拍摄的跨性别活动人士玛莎·P·约翰逊（Marsha P. Johnson）的肖像，她戴着遮阳帽，显得十分温柔。胡哈尔的灰色像是一道帘幕——一块薄纱——他极少将其揭开，这让人想起伊丽莎白·毕肖普（Elizabeth Bishop）在 1964 年对海风的描述：“像第一层湿润的白石灰，那层薄薄的灰色雾气让一切若隐若现。”而他的光影则是浪漫之光：那种在理查德·阿维顿（Richard Avedon）和乔治·普拉特·莱恩斯（George Platt Lynes）早期作品中可见的酷儿电影光影，经过转化，点缀着危险与诱惑。
当彼得 11 岁时，他心爱的祖母去世了。他的祖父担心这个男孩被同住的一位叔叔对待得太糟糕，于是将彼得送到罗斯（Rose）和她的丈夫埃德·“斯努基”·墨菲（Ed “Snookie” Murphy）那里生活，后者是个博彩经纪人，他们住在东 32 街的一居室公寓里。墨菲夫妇酗酒；在卡尔（Carr）的《腹中之火》（Fire in the Belly）中，胡哈尔的朋友们回忆起他曾被他们羞辱和冷落。尽管如此，在工业艺术学校（School of Industrial Art），胡哈尔在他的英语老师——一位名叫雏菊·阿尔丹（Daisy Aldan）的年轻同性恋诗人——的指导下茁壮成长。阿尔丹不仅支持胡哈尔成为摄影师的梦想，还把他介绍给了她的“选定家人”（chosen family）——包括女演员塔鲁拉·班克黑德（Tallulah Bankhead）在内的其他女性，她们周末常在阿尔丹家聚在一起打扑克。
当我走到展览尽头，愉快地转身再次走过时，杰基的一幅画一直留在我的脑海中；它存在于记忆里，而不在摩根图书馆。这张由胡哈尔在 1985, 拍摄的黑白照片显示，杰基静静地躺着，穿着一套西装，纽扣孔里插着一朵新鲜的白花，在他左肩附近放着一张他画着全妆的精美素描。在这幅画面中，杰基闭着眼睛，紧闭双唇，因为他已经去世了。
当我们谈到胡贾尔 (Hujar) 1977 年与母亲的自画像时，我们是否可以使用“诱惑力”这个词？在摩根美术馆 (the Morgan) 的这些图像中，我们看到了身材高挑、消瘦的胡贾尔，穿着一件格子衬衫和牛仔裤。他那富有魅力的母亲——他在与朋友交谈时总是称她为罗斯·墨菲 (Rose Murphy)——比她的儿子矮约一个头，站在他的身边。她的发型打理得恰到好处。在某些画面中，胡贾尔的右臂搭在母亲的肩上。如果这些图像中确实有所记录，那么他可能希望记录下什么？
在我们遗忘很久之后，艺术依然记得。胡贾尔（Hujar）的作品如此深植于瞬息万变之中，以及身份那种难以捉摸的特质——在存在与不存在之间的一次快门闪击——因此，举办一次他的接触印相（contact sheets）展览在美学和政治上都具有深远的意义：我们在每一个瞬间究竟是谁？我们的最终形象是什么？死亡是否有形状？是否有颜色？胡贾尔早期的精美作品，例如 1960-62 年的《海藻》或《死鱼，火岛》，教会了我们如何审视生命的侵蚀。前者向我们展示了九幅被冲到沙滩上的海藻图像。每一缕海藻都像是一簇美丽的、纠缠在一起的书法，如同任何大地艺术作品一样迷人且孤独。《死鱼，火岛》——其标题自明其意——向我们揭示了如此多关于时间和未经修饰的分解之美，以至于我们不得不接受一个事实：我们自己也始终处于腐朽的过程中。
他并没有在罗丝（Rose）的陪伴下长大。1934 年在纽泽西州的特伦顿生下他后不久，罗丝就前往曼哈顿做服务员——他的父亲约瑟夫·约翰·胡贾尔（Joseph John Hujar）是一名面包师，或许也是个走私酒贩，在彼得出生前就分道扬镳了，将彼得留给了他的外祖父母，一对在尤英镇经营农场的乌克兰人。他在学英语之前先学会了乌克兰语，而农场里的动物是他最早且最信任的朋友。在他一次前往城市的访问中，罗丝给了他第一台相机。少年时，他拍了一张远处的牛群。后来他拍摄的牛及其他动物的特写肖像，是我所看到的、第一批能让我理解的胡贾尔作品。它们似乎被打上了某种精神匮乏与渴望的烙印——这是一个渴望与世界上其他脆弱生物建立联系的孤儿之作。他照片中的动物成了差异的纪念碑。
在胡贾尔高中毕业前的某个时候，他的母亲向他扔了一个瓶子，于是他永久地离开了她的公寓，起初住在朋友家。他的家人没有人来参加他的毕业典礼，所以他就坐在观众席中，当他的名字被叫到时，他为自己鼓掌。
达宾（Durbin）的这本书在叙事驱动力上非常直观；他希望你感受他对研究对象的感受，并分享他对胡贾尔摄影作品的钦佩。不可避免地，你会因此受到启发而自行评估这些作品。当我观看胡贾尔 1963 年在巴勒莫的卡普钦地下墓穴拍摄的照片时——那是他与当时的恋人兼好友、前卫艺术家保罗·塞克（Paul Thek）共同的一次旅行——我想起为什么我花了这么多年时间才进入胡贾尔作品的世界。
这些早期作品还确立了胡贾尔在黑白图像中对色彩的感知。在他的整个职业生涯中，他利用灰色调来照亮神秘——
在离开家后，在奥尔丹（Aldan）的鼓励下，胡贾尔在多家摄影工作室担任了十五年的助理。1956 年，他与画家约瑟夫·拉斐尔（Joseph Raffael）建立了关系；两年后，两人前往意大利。在那里，在充足的时间和空间中，胡贾尔找到了作为艺术家最感兴趣的事：创作探索温柔，以及我们为了保护这种温柔而做了（或未做）什么的图像。在摩根图书馆（the Morgan），有大约十几张胡贾尔 1959 年在佛罗伦萨的一家神经疾病研究所拍摄的照片。我被其中两张深深吸引。在这两张照片中，一名修女正在帮助一个男孩活动。修女的袍服在地面上形成美丽的褶皱；在其中一张照片中，我们看到孩子的头部侧影，仿佛从修女的额巾中凸显出来。在第二张图像中，修女面对着男孩；她正温柔地对他微笑，而我们通过镜子看到了这两个身影，相机反射着镜像。
《Talking Classics》，作者玛丽·比尔德（芝加哥大学出版社）。这部由剑桥大学古典学者撰写的亲切之作，表达了对古代世界的惊叹。比尔德探讨的主题从艺术成就延伸至日常生活迹象：随手涂鸦的罗马墙绘，以及一块古老的面包。比尔德在让过去显得不那么遥远的同时，又沉溺于其彻底的异域感，她促使读者去面对陌生的思想，正视知识的空白，并直面复杂性。她还批判了古典学历史上排他性的要求（例如要求掌握古希腊人从未使用的重音符号），并挑战那些通过简单提及希腊和罗马来标榜正统性的现代领导者。在全书中，她展示了古典世界是如何“潜行而至，从而给我们带来惊喜，并让我们重新思考”。
《The Cruelty of Nice Folks》，作者贾斯汀·埃利斯（哈珀柯林斯出版社）。明尼阿波利斯长期以来一直是进步主义的堡垒：在明尼苏达州建州之初，那里就禁止了奴隶制，并且很早就采用了公共住房。但正如埃利斯在这部关于该市种族历史的调查中所展示的，自由主义的政策成就往往掩盖了更为隐蔽的排斥形式。作为一名明尼阿波利斯的本地人，埃利斯在乔治·弗洛伊德被杀后回到了家乡。他随后的探索追踪了黑人居民如何通过种族契约和红线政策被有效地隔离，以及如何受到过度执法。尽管埃利斯对这座城市的长远观察带有愤世嫉俗的色彩，但他认为，该市对去年冬天美国移民局（ICE）入侵的反应为希望创造了空间。
Hujar 在 1963 年回到了意大利，当时他已与 Thek 在一起。两人于 1956 年在佛罗里达州的科勒尔盖布尔斯相识，但当时两人分别有其他伴侣。到 1961 年，他们在一起了，尽管正如 Durbin 正确地指出，这种关系与异性伴侣的结合有所不同。首先，在那个时代，一个人可能因为爱上另一个男人而被逮捕，而在一起所面临的重重复杂情况——你可以出柜到什么程度，以及你的期望有多传统？——无疑放大了他们爱情中的脆弱与风险。Hujar 爱 Thek，但 Thek 经常需要离开去创作，并陷入其他关系之中，其中有时涉及女性。（他和桑塔格在六十年代初断断续续地成为了恋人；她在 1966 年出版的文集《反对阐释》中将其献给 Thek，Thek 关于创作的观点帮助她在那篇如今著名的标题论文结尾处宣称：“我们需要一种艺术的色情学，来取代一种解释学。”）
《Glyph》，作者阿里·史密斯（潘本来出版社）。这部小说延续了这位获奖作者在重访过去的同时为虚构文学设计一种当代语言的计划。小说讲述了两个长期疏远的姐妹，帕特里夏和佩特拉，她们被童年的故事所萦绕：一个是关于一名在一战期间被枪杀的男子的故事，另一个则是关于一个人在二战中惨死的故事。在当下的失望中——压抑的数字化技术和不确定的工作——幽灵与共同的回忆将姐妹俩聚集在一起，并让她们与帕特里夏的养女比尔更加亲近，比尔代表了年轻一代的悲观主义与理想主义。史密斯的小说由对话和文字游戏驱动，闪耀着她的直觉与制造惊喜的能力。
《一只真实的动物》（A Real Animal），作者埃梅琳·阿特伍德（Emeline Atwood，Catapult 出版）。在这部艰涩的小说中，叙述者露西在十年间经历了三段深刻的感情：一个是在新英格兰上大学时的男友，尽管他竭尽全力，却无法帮她从海外生活期间遭遇的强奸中走出来；一个是在印第安纳波利斯的男友，他诱哄她在他面前与无数其他男人发生关系；还有一个是在德克萨斯州的男友，她是最爱他的，但由于无法克服创伤后焦虑而失去了他。随着阿特伍德地勾勒这些浪漫关系，我们得知露西的痛苦早在她意识到之前就已经开始，而治愈需要独立。她发现：“归根结底，这只是关于如何与自己相处。一旦你能忍受独自在黑暗寒冷中伫立，你在哪里都会过得很好。”
“你永远不会爱上你所爱的人，”胡贾尔（Hujar）曾对一个朋友说。“坠入爱河全是预期的过程；当你真正和他在一起时，那种感觉就不可能存在了。”但，无论胡贾尔对爱持有怎样的看法，最终那都仅仅是想法，是他自己对情欲的诠释学。最终，对他而言，爱可能是由恐惧驱动的。恐惧引发了他那些传奇般的愤怒——砸椅子、扔东西、将人们从生活中剔除。对他人言行所造成的伤害的恐惧，构成了他对爱的首要体验。
这些照片中的“真相”是什么？当我们惊叹于一个死去的孩子的发带，或者一个撕裂的尖叫之口时，我们变成了什么？我们都会死去，但并非所有人都将生存视为通往死亡的路径，或将死亡视为一场终极的化妆游戏。我倾向于菲利普·拉金（Philip Larkin）的《阿伦德尔坟墓》（An Arundel Tomb），书中在谈到对死者的描绘时写道：“时间已将他们转化为虚假。”真相只在我们活着去书写它、拍摄它、经历它的时候才会发生。我并不认为胡贾尔的地下墓穴照片是对艺术家狂喜般诚实的见证，甚至不认为它是某种变态的例子——即那些尸体可怕的真相在相机的媒介下，成为了对社会和法律的一种报复。我关上了《生与死的肖像》（Portraits in Life and Death），多年没有再次翻阅。
凝视着你；到那时，调情已被“装腔作势”的艺术所取代。这一时期的最强接触印相纸之一是时尚编辑戴安娜·弗利兰（Diana Vreeland）的。在胡贾尔的图像中，这个强大的女人被抽干了神采；剩下的只有面具。名声无法带来慰藉。弗利兰的孤独也是罗斯·墨菲（Rose Murphy）及其儿子的孤独。那里是一个没有上帝的地方。
我想，当我第一次在胡贾尔生前出版的唯一一本书—— 1976 年出版的《生与死的肖像》中看到他在巴勒莫地下墓穴拍摄的照片时，比起那些静卧尸体的哥特风格（有些嘴巴张开或扭曲成苦相，双手叠在早已干涸的心脏上），我更反感的是胡贾尔对一场被围观而非被观察和感受的死亡剧的兴趣。他的目光并未活在这些照片中；而是被它们吞噬了。事实是我在八十年代初发现了这本书，当时许多人正在死去或开始死去，那些地下墓穴的照片对我来说太简单了，就像一个崩塌世界——我那崩塌的世界——中的护身符。我的世界被一种死亡形式感染，这种死亡在 1987 年夺走了胡贾尔的生命，一年后夺走了塞克（Thek）的生命，并在 1992 年夺走了沃伊纳罗维奇（Wojnarowicz）的生命，同年，玛莎·P·约翰逊（Marsha P. Johnson）死于一场可能是仇恨犯罪的袭击。
我在展览的这个部分停留了很久，这是一个绝妙的仙境，摄影师在这里将那些被掩埋的人留在身后，尽可能地回归生活，他的声音响亮、清晰且至关重要。史密斯在他那篇非常有帮助的目录论文中指出（奥利维亚·麦考尔对接触印相纸的详尽注释进一步补充了该文），正是这一时期，胡贾尔开始对将拍摄对象进行分组摆拍产生兴趣，比如剧场人士的聚会、活动人士，以及某种意义上的“选定家庭”。当我看着他以 3:4 比例拍摄的 Cockettes 接触印相纸，以及他那幅伟大的 35mm 拍摄的同性恋解放阵线 (1970) 照片时，我对这些图像中的能量感到兴奋，每一幅都是如此，因为它们关乎喜悦——尽管胡贾尔自己很难感受到这种喜悦。但谁能责怪他呢？你可以把一个没有父亲的男孩从他好斗的母亲家中带走，但你无法将父母的影响从这个男孩心中抹去。看着 Cockettes 那些穿着二手店华服的精彩皇后们，想到他们试图在纽约演出时遭遇了惨败——因为对于追求专业标准的纽约观众来说，加州嬉皮士的爱与随兴之风过于浓烈——再看着同性恋解放阵线中所有那些微笑、坚定、兴奋的人们，似乎正冲向胡贾尔的镜头，我想起在 80 年代末和 90 年代初我担任照片编辑时，在数字化成为主流格式之前，当摄影师来给我展示图像时，我最想看到的不是单张照片，而是接触印相纸及其所代表的东西：它是摄影师希望的证据，是关于他、她或他们甚至未曾意识到自己正身处其中的梦想的证据。
在 Hujar 于 1964 年从意大利回到美国后，他担任商业摄影师 Harold Krieger 的助手。几年后，他被允许参加 Richard Avedon 和 Marvin Israel 在 Avedon 工作室开设的大师班，在他们的支持下，他变得大胆起来，辞去了在 Krieger 那里的工作，并开设了自己的工作室一段时间。到 1973 年，他决定作为一名艺术家独立工作。Carr 写道：“他对推销自己的整个过程感到不屑。Fran Lebowitz 指出，‘他对权威也持有深刻的不信任，而且他无法区分一个拥有小型摄影画廊的人和教皇。’”为了拿到支票，你必须亲吻戒指，而 Hujar 做不到。所以他就这样生活着。他的执行人、作家 Stephen Koch 曾说过，他是“我生命中亲近过的最贫穷的成年人”。
Avedon 的作品和职业生涯在早期对 Hujar 产生了很大影响，他在 1959 年创作了一系列关于巴勒莫地下墓穴的图像。（Avedon 最后一次大规模的时尚故事于 1995 年刊登在本杂志上，展示了一名真人模特在地下墓穴的某个版本中与骷髅嬉戏。）而当我大约在第一次看到 Hujar 的书时转向 Robert Mapplethorpe，我想起了 Sontag 的另一篇论文《迷人的法西斯主义》，她在文中写道，萨德侯爵
必须从零开始构建他的惩罚与快感剧场，即兴创作装饰、服装和亵渎的仪式。而现在，每个人都可以使用一套主剧本。颜色是黑色，材质是皮革，诱惑是美，正当理由是诚实，目标是狂喜，幻想是死亡。
他在 1965 年至 1975 年间创作的肖像画极其出色且通常带有性感色彩，尤其是他好友 Lebowitz 和作家 Vince Aletti 的肖像，两人出现在 Lebowitz 位于新泽西州的童年故居的不同床铺上；为 $\text{《New Times》}$ 杂志拍摄的艺术家 Brigid Berlin 的肖像；以及 1968 年拍摄的时尚模特 Maxime de la Falaise、她的丈夫策展人 John McKendry 及其女儿 Loulou de la Falaise。在对这个时尚家庭的肖像刻画中，Hujar 暗示了他们所来自的世界，在那个世界里，看到一个半裸的女人眨眼——
Hujar 像之前的 Avedon 和之后的 Mapplethorpe 一样，对服装有着如精灵般的喜爱，并将外表理解为一种表达——与其说是表达真理，不如说是表达谎言——关于我们曾经是谁以及现在是谁的谎言，就像在 Hujar 的时代，男同性恋者为了做自己而不得不说的谎言一样。巴勒莫地下墓穴中那些穿着生前衣服的木乃伊尸体图像，给我的感觉并非美丽或真实，而是 Hujar 对展示和虚构感兴趣的证据。在
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故事就在其中 部门。摘自《劳登（弗吉尼亚州）时镜报》。
斯特灵市一名女性在参加牺牲课程后可继续饲养活鸡
但不是库尔德语，这是约 1500 万土耳其公民的语言。Smith Galer 告诉我们，这一决定是数十年官方政策的延续。在土耳其的不同时期，教授库尔德语、出版库尔德语书籍，甚至在担任公职时使用该语言都是违法的。有些地震幸存者担心用这种语言呼救，怕救援人员因此离去。
书籍
语言正在消亡。这必然是一个问题吗？
作者：NIKHIL KRISHNAN
或者考虑一下乌克兰语。弗拉基米尔·普京在 2021 年写的一篇长文中将其定性为，充其量只是俄语的一个地区变体——一种傲慢的、暴发户般的方言——其使用者缺乏合法的民族自决权。在该文章发表七个月后，普京入侵了乌克兰。自 2022 年以来，无论俄罗斯军队占领了乌克兰的哪些领土，他们都拆除了乌克兰语的路标，并坚持将俄语作为学校教育和行政语言。当乌克兰人看到他们语言的书籍被焚烧时，其中一些人会想起更长久的迫害历史，例如叶卡捷琳娜大帝在 1784 年禁止使用乌克兰语进行教会礼拜。 (这是“语言灭绝”[Linguicide] 中纪念的数十个事件之一，这是一个由 QR 码铭牌和配套应用程序组成的基辅公共历史项目。)
在这种情况下，我认为，谈论“杀戮”是合理的：旨在摧毁语言的行为，是一个人对一个民族集体生存及其国家认同主张进行协调袭击的一部分。但这个词在开始显得夸张之前，可以延伸到什么程度？史密斯·加勒 (Smith Galer) 有力地写到了厄瓜多尔高地基丘亚语 (Kichwa) 使用者的经历。在这里，我们看到的专制国家公开压制该语言的行为较少。相反，我们发现的是一部殖民蔑视的历史，将精通基丘亚语视为贫穷和落后的标志。而该语言的消亡则源于说基丘亚语的厄瓜多尔人选择不再向子女传授基丘亚语。语言增加或失去追随者的一种方式，就是人们根据某种语言能为他们带来什么而进行的权衡。
一种语言消失时，我们应该感到多么悲哀？考虑这种情况——
尽管标题阴森，但索菲亚·史密斯·加勒（Sophia Smith Galer）的《如何杀死一种语言：权力、抵抗与拯救词汇之赛》（How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words，Crown 出版社）并非一份给
那些企图实施“语言灭绝”者的指南。史密斯·加勒对那些主张让濒危语言“解脱”的论点有很多反驳之词，但她的关注点在于一个即便最冷静的人也定能产生共鸣的论点。无论让濒危语言自然死亡是否明智，杀死一种繁荣的语言，其伦理性质则完全是另一回事。
如果有人说“完全不悲哀”，你可以称其冷酷，或者简单地称其为思维强悍。归根结底，语言是一种沟通手段。当使用它沟通的人太少时，它就停止了履行其主要职责，那么不妨让它死去。当然，当语言被杀死时，这是一场悲剧，尤其是当它们死于恶意或偏见时。但由于自然原因而死亡——嗯，事情就是这样发展地。
以库尔德语为例。 2023 年导致土耳其和叙利亚 5 万多人死亡的地震，在土耳其讲库尔德语的东南部地区破坏尤为严重。土耳其管理部门宣布，将为地震灾民提供多种语言的翻译支持，包括俄语、德语和普什图语——
当然，这些选择并非在权力平等的背景下做出的，这就是为什么这种情况在道德上具有权重。尽管如此，一种语言在权力平等的条件下被选择或遗弃的理想情况
同化和经济抱负可能会引导人们远离母语。
[[IMG_XXXX]] 插图：VIVEK THAKKER
几乎不可见。将语言视为粗糙且不变的事实，认为它们像元素周期表中的元素一样清晰地排列，这是一种谬误。语言是历史形成的产物。它们像民族、国家和宗教一样，通过征服、交流和偶然性等力量而出现、传播、分裂、标准化、收缩并消失。
人们可能还会对语言健康状况与社区心理健康之间那些被大肆吹捧的相关性产生疑问。难道更有可能的解释是，某些更基本的社会或经济事实同时解释了语言和社区的健康状况吗？如果真是这样，我们不应如此自信地认为，只要让社区成员参加语言课程，他们就会更快乐。
这种逻辑通常被用来对待大熊猫和北极熊。其核心论点大致如下：语言死亡是非常糟糕的，因此我们必须尽一切努力防止它。但这个结论成立吗？而前提又是真实的吗？
史密斯·加勒干脆地地给出许多理由让我们接受这个前提。她写道，一种语言的丧失，就是失去了“从中流出的信息源——它的谚语、它识别和感知世界的方式及其特质。语言不是词典，而是百科全书，包含着整个世界中往往不可替代的信息。”她讲述道，一种名为 prostratin 的化合物被发现具有治疗 H.I.V. 的潜力，这得益于一位对萨摩亚语足够精通的科学家，他能与萨摩亚的部落治疗师探讨某种树的疗效。在澳大利亚北部的 Iwaidja 语使用者长期以来对两种不同的海豚物种有不同的称呼；史密斯·加勒写道，如果科学家们“费心与 Iwaidja 人交谈或学习他们的语言”，现代动物学不会花这么长时间才承认它们的差异。她还告诉我们，有记录证明一种语言的健康状况与使用该语言的社区心理健康之间存在联系。在加拿大，能够“用其原住民语言进行交谈”的社区，其青少年的自杀率较低甚至为零。而在只有不到一半的人能说母语的社区，自杀率则高出六倍。
更大胆地说，史密斯·加勒（Smith Galer）关于语言灭绝（linguicide）的故事涵盖了她自己失去意大利北部的埃米利亚方言（Emilian dialect）——或者按照她更倾向的表述，是 Emigliän dialët——的经历，她的母亲和祖母曾用这种语言（“更像是一种愤怒的法语”）相互交流。她既没有学习标准意大利语，也没有学习 Emigliän 变体，原因很简单：她在伦敦长大，而她的家人决定完全用英语与她交谈。这一决定无疑属于更广泛的移民史、抱负以及对主导语言适应过程的一部分。然而，史密斯·加勒在引用语言学家托芙·斯库特纳布-坎加斯（Tove Skutnabb-Kangas）和罗伯特·菲利普森（Robert Phillipson）的观点时暗示，语言灭绝可能不仅指“对一种语言的直接扼杀”，还包括“任由一种语言死去，或不支持其共存”——这等同于“隐秘的语言谋杀”。
即便我们接受史密斯·加勒关于“语言死亡永远是一件糟糕的事”这一前提，也并不意味着我们应当竭尽全力去阻止它。这是一个极其苛刻的标准，我们在任何其他政策领域都没有采用。人类的死亡同样是一件非常糟糕的事，但所有医疗系统在如何使用有限资源方面都必须做出艰难的选择。语言死亡没有理由成为这一通用原则的例外。即便某种语言的消亡被公认为一场悲剧，但在试图阻止它的过程中，我们应该怎么做——以及我们愿意承担什么样的成本——必须仍然是一个开放性的问题。
最容易获得支持的干预措施，通常是那些针对“低垂果实”（最容易实现的目标）的措施。国家和其他强制性机构其实可以很简单地停止做很多事情：他们可以停止禁止那些希望且有资源教授库尔德语的学校教授该语言；他们可以停止因为某些名字不在批准列表中而拒绝库尔德人想给孩子起的名字；他们可以停止在法庭上拒绝为乌克兰被告提供口译员。
语言学家大卫·克里斯塔尔（David Crystal）在其不可或缺的学术综述《语言死亡》（Language Death）中，将发生在史密斯·加勒（Smith Galer）及其方言上的这类现象称为：文化同化。他指出，语言同化的压力可以是“自上而下”的（法律、激励措施），也可以是“自下而上”的（时尚、同伴压力）。但即使是冷静的调查，也很难避免陷入一种挽歌模式，在这种模式中，这些重要的区别被扁平化为一场单一的悲剧。对于一个肯尼亚学童因为说基库尤语而被要求佩戴一块写着“我是驴子”的牌子，感到愤慨是一回事。但对于一个移居利马并为了适应劳动力市场需求而开始用西班牙语生活的基奇瓦语使用者，我们又该作何感想，尤其是当这位基奇瓦语使用者并不认为这种转变意味着巨大的损失时？
总的来说，史密斯·加勒提供的实证例子倾向于乐观。例如，原促蛋白（prostratin）的临床价值尚未确定。而且，如果语言能够编码传统知识，它们也能编码并延续传统错误。我们不需要异域的例子就能看出，在英语以及许多其他语言中，“鱼”这个民间类别（可以理解地将鲸鱼、海豚和鼠海豚也包含在内）在科学术语“哺乳动物”及其相关分类法的改进下得到了真正的提升。此外，语言所保存的不仅仅是事实错误。语言还编码价值观——植入代词中的性别等级制度，延续种姓区别的敬语——这些东西对于思想开明的活动家来说，可能并不渴望将其作为有价值的语言遗产来保存。
个人也可能会发现，他们拥有的权力比想象中要大。移民可以继续向孩子说母语，而无需担心这会影响他们习得新国家的主导语言。（目前的研究表明，双语能力对语言发育没有威胁。）如果学校提供你家庭的继承语言，请考虑允许你的孩子学习。也许，在其他条件相同的情况下，为你的孩子选择一所提供母语课程的学校。
认为我们负有防止语言消亡的特殊责任，这一观点对于任何热爱语言的人来说都具有瞬间的吸引力；它与另一种环保主义本能——管理损失的满足感——有许多共同之处；在最好的情况下，这种本能意味着在不自欺欺人的前提下完成这项工作。
当其他条件不平等时会发生什么？当问题不再是杀死一种语言，而是以一种好管闲事的姿态努力维持其生命，即便它在家庭中已不再能可靠地传承时，情况又是如何？Smith Galer 赞扬了美国的一项师徒计划，该计划将 Karuk 语（一种来自加利福尼亚州西北部的原住民语言）的年轻成年学习者与极少数流利地使用该语言的人员配对，并向参与学习的人员支付每小时 15 美元的津贴。她对美国联邦政府自 2005 年以来仅拨出 1.8 亿美元用于语言复兴这一事实表示遗憾——这是一个相对微不足道的金额。然而，一旦数字进入讨论（这是必然的），就会出现无法回避的令人不安的问题。
David Crystal 提到了一场 1992 年的争议，即危地马拉的玛雅语言学院将资源投入到一项重新造林项目中是否恰当。我们难道不应该更认真地对待该决定捍卫者的主张吗？他们认为，提高社区的经济安全才是拯救语言最有效的途径。Crystal 在《语言之死》（“Language Death”）中将这一插曲作为随笔提及，但任何希望从悲情的挽歌转向政策建议的人，都必须将此类问题放在核心位置。如果拯救一种语言需要资金，那么这笔钱应该如何使用？也许 Karuk 族人更愿意根据自己的判断来决定是将资金用于语言学习计划还是直接支持。这种论点有时被一些根本不希望以任何理由向任何人提供资金的人 cynically（愤世嫉俗地）地提出。但这些是该领域工作组织必须面对的现实问题。
甚至不包括另一个语言项目。语言项目可能确实具有真正的价值。但我们可能改为建造的医院或学校的价值同样是真实的。如果假装事实并非如此，并指责每一个指出这些艰难权衡的人缺乏诚意，那就是在逃避与政治和政策最深层问题的正面交锋。
当我们考虑语言消亡的问题时，Berlin 的论点显得格外沉痛。当今天的法国人抱怨其国家和语言的国际声望下降，并因为他们的青少年谈论 “e-mail” 而而非经过认可的 “courriel” 时，他们可能会记得，他们心中理想的、去英语化的法语，其本身就是建立在数十种语言和地区方言的坟墓之上的产物，而这些语言在 19 世纪深处依然占据着法国大部分农村地区。历史学家 Eugen Weber 撰写了极具影响力的著作，讲述了说 Occitan 语、布列塔尼语或巴斯克语的农民是如何变成——或者更坦率地说，是被强制变成——法国人的。Weber 的叙述并没有淡化这一过程中的暴力和羞辱。Smith Galer 本人指出，甚至在 1949 年，人们仍能看到孩子们脖子上挂着石板，上面写着令人心碎的认罪书：“Je parle Breton”（“我会说布列塔尼语”）。这些曾是
以赛亚·柏林（Isaiah Berlin）曾有一个著名的观察：不存在没有损失的社会世界。我们渴望并珍视的许多事物，无法在同一时间全部拥有。比如说，我们希望人们既拥有自由，又拥有平等，并且生活在幸福且不被异化的社区中。但如果某些人行使自由的行为导致了不平等，或者导致人们不那么幸福且更加异化，该怎么办？柏林认为，坚称这种自由并非“真正的自由”是一种卑劣的障眼法。他相信，希望能兼顾我们所有的价值观，不仅是过度乐观，而且是逻辑不通的。使得某些政治选择具有悲剧色彩的原因，不在于我们未能深入思考如何能兼得所有，而在于事实上根本没有办法兼得所有。那么，政治便成了永远不-
热情的保护主义者——无论他们希望拯救的是某种稀有的蝾螈，还是一个面临拆除威胁的深受喜爱的旧火车站，亦或是铁锈地带城镇里的煤矿工作——与濒危语言的倡导者们有一个共同的习惯，即在陈述其理由时，将其描绘成一场竞争：一边是他们所代表的真实价值，而另一边则空无一物。保护这种语言（或物种、建筑、矿井），否则就向冷漠、愤世嫉业和虚无主义投降。但我们面临的选择真的是这样吗？
在任何现实的预算中，投入语言振兴计划的每一美元，都可以用于其他事情：一所学校，或者一家医院，或者
并非语言被允许自然死亡的情况。
多样性并非一项无需成本即可获得的商品，对于那些选择了（或被迫选择）多样性而非同质性的社会而言更是如此。印度语的多样性，与法国或意大利的同质性一样，是一本拥有自身成本清单的账本——社区紧张局势、不断的误解——这些都需要与其毋庸置疑的益处进行权衡。
假设他们的受害者本身必须是清白的无辜者。这是一场彻头彻尾的坟场之战。
但韦伯（Weber）的叙述也提醒人们，语言同质化工程具有共和主义的，而不仅仅是行政上的合理性。在革命时期，格雷戈尔神父（Abbé Grégoire）认为，如果公民之间无法相互理解，真正的共和国就无法繁荣；在第三共和国时期，推动全民法语初等教育的努力明确将其界定为参与公民活动的条件。国王们可能为了抄写员和税务征收员的方便而想要一种单一语言，但共和主义者是为了公民的利益而希望如此。
它可能就像现在的威尔士。大约六十年前，作家兼政治家桑德斯·刘易斯（Saunders Lewis）曾预言威尔士语将在 2000. 年前消亡。相反，它现在成为了威尔士的官方语言，在整个公立学校系统中教授，有自己的电视频道，并在法庭、国民议会、路标以及公共文件中常规使用。在威尔士人口中，约有六分之一的人在不同程度上能够流畅地使用这种语言，且经常掺杂一些英语。威尔士政府希望使用该语言的人数几乎翻番，从而使该语言在 2050 年时拥有一百万使用者。
如果说印度成功避免了设立单一的国家语言，那么在语言组内部则进行了相当程度的语言整合：所谓的印地语实际上是一种官僚主义的尝试，旨在统一在北方地区使用的极其迥异的一组语言和方言。泰米尔语本身同样是一种政治构建，其公共话语和教育采用的是一种自觉的、古风的语言形式，而这种形式对于许多使用其多种方言的人来说仅能听懂一半。（我的母语在概念上是泰米尔语的一种方言，其大量词汇来自马拉雅拉姆语；而我尝试使用这两种语言的标准形式时，几乎总是引起笑话。）
法国的共和主义计划事实上成功地创造了一个公共领域，在那里，一名来自布列塔尼的农民和一名来自普罗旺斯的律师可以阅读同一份报纸，担任同一陪审团成员，并在同一场选举中投票，而不会被某个巴黎的自命不凡之徒声称听不懂他们在说什么。在那种“语言灭绝”的废墟上建立起来的，可能是某种具有真实价值的东西。类似的叙事也可以用来描述统一后的意大利，或者为了在印度尼西亚庞大且多样化的群岛之间寻找一种通用语而做出的雄心勃勃的努力，以避免让该国占主导地位的爪哇人获得比现有权力更多的权力。
威尔士语的健康状况在很大程度上归功于它正在被传递——特别是在北威尔士，父母以一种人们在任何活着的方言中都能联想到的、平常且不自觉的方式将其传给孩子。威尔士语在永久意义上仍然是不“安全”的；英语施加着持续的压力。但它比苏格兰盖尔语的情况要好得多。苏格兰盖尔语的流利使用者最多只有大约七万人，且将其作为方言使用的人绝大多数是老年人。即便在西群岛传统的盖尔语核心地带，家庭内部的跨代传递现在也成了特例。年轻人中现有的能力似乎几乎完全是制度干预的产物。盖尔语捍卫者们取得了一项重大成就：在格拉斯哥或爱丁堡的盖尔语学校里，有一些孩子在学习盖尔语，而他们的老师本身是在成年后才学习这门语言的——而这些城市中，教室之外几乎没有人说盖尔语。但这与威尔士语目前所享有的即便是不稳定的健康状态，仍有很长一段距离。
甚至像库尔德语和乌克兰语这些语言上的“弱势群体”也不是这种模式的例外。在叙利亚和土耳其，库尔德语的标准形式是库曼吉语（Kurmanji），使用拉丁字母书写；在伊朗和伊拉克，库尔德语的标准形式是索拉尼语（Sorani），使用基于阿拉伯语的文字书写。这两种标准化进程往往排挤了规模更小且相关的语言，例如曾作为独立文学语言的戈拉尼语（Gorani），以及扎扎基语（Zazaki）——后者究竟应被归类为库尔德语的一种变体，还是作为一种独立的西北伊朗语言，目前仍存在争议。与此同时，乌克兰语是建立在顿涅普尔河中游地区波尔塔瓦-基辅方言的声望之上的；而鲁辛语（Rusyn）在斯洛伐克和波兰享有受保护的少数民族语言地位，但在乌克兰境内仅被视为一种方言。基奇瓦语（Kichwa）也经历了类似的历史。如今有数十万人使用这种语言，它源自印加帝国扩张向北传播的克丘亚语（Quechuan）。在厄瓜多尔南部，卡尼亚里人（Cañari）被克丘亚语使用者征服，他们自己的语言随之灭绝。我们可以谴责这些“语言灭绝”的实施者，而无需
当然，还存在其他语言共存的模型，其友好程度不一。比利时国内的弗拉芒语与法语之分虽未引发剧烈的动荡，但仍使该国陷入一种制度性的瘫痪状态。法语在魁北克地区繁荣发展，这得益于一些极具强制性的语言立法，但该省的分离主义威胁始终是一个挥之不去的干扰项。而在印度，其宪法承认二十二种语言，但在二十世纪六十年代试图将印地语定为联邦唯一语言的尝试，在来自泰米尔语等南部语言使用者的激烈抵抗下宣告失败，最终导致该国采取一种管理学校系统的“三语方案”。
人们无法避开一个令人不快地类比：这就像一个野生动物保护区，濒危动物在某种勉强维持的野生生存模拟中生活，但必须时刻受到监测，以防疾病或过度的捕食将其彻底消灭。维持一个物种的生存
印度的案例既揭示了一个真正多语社会 Possibility 的可能性，也揭示了其风险。语言多样—
在这种条件下再次成为一种成就。然而，与那种更为罕见的案例相比，这种成就的量级较低——在罕见案例中，该物种回归后并非作为博物馆的展品，而是一个能够无辅助自我繁衍的活体种群，就像被重新引入黄石公园的灰狼那样。
承认这种偶然性——
——正如野生动物保护主义者必须承认化石记录中充满了在人类出现之前就已灭绝的生物一样——并不意味着要放弃驱动史密斯-加勒（Smith Galer）及其同类书籍的那些值得肯定的直觉。当她写道“在当今现存的七千多种丰富的思想、情感、词汇和语法体系中，将有三千多种语言消失。不会举行葬礼；不会填满墓地。有些语言会留下词典、小说和数小时的广播录音；而有些语言除了某位亲属被人们深情铭记的习惯用语外，将不留任何痕迹”时，我们可以产生共鸣。然而，这种哀悼的措辞也是有极限的。
面对消逝之物，我们究竟欠它们什么？这取决于我们思考的是一个在经历了充实的一生后安详躺在病榻上的老人，还是一个被醉酒司机撞倒的孩子。如果后者让我们充满愤怒与绝望，那么前者则不必。我们不需要得出结论认为这个老人被医学辜负了，或者认为有人密谋杀死他。我们也不必要求必须阻止他的死亡
——无论付出什么代价，或者让他再靠呼吸机维持十年生命，而不考虑这对周围每个人意味着什么。但说应该允许他死去，并不意味着我们不应该为他的离去而悲伤。他应当获得安慰、尊严，以及一种保证：他不会被那些爱他的人遗忘，他将真正地被缅怀。
豪华驳船游轮
在语言复兴的案例中，唯一能与黄石公园类比接近的是希伯来语。史密斯·加勒（Smith Galer）对其复兴的描述清楚地揭示了这一成就的规模：一种在近两千年的大部分时间里几乎没有（即便有也极少）母语使用者的语言，主要在犹太会堂和学习室中被听到，却被一代充满灵感的国家建设者，有意识且有计划地将其转化为一个现代国家——以色列的官方语言。而且不知为何，这个过程成功地创造了一个让孩子们用希伯来语咒骂、做梦和发脾气而不会让任何人片刻感到自己仿佛被困在历史重演剧中的国家。
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其他社会的活动家们曾带着某种羡慕地审视希伯来语。例如，印度仍有一些民族主义者幻想将梵语复兴为印度的通用语言；或许在康沃尔（Cornwall）或曼岛（Isle of Man）的人们在想，只要有足够的意志（和资金），我们是否能看到康沃尔语或曼岛语的复兴能与之媲美。但不会的。希伯来语的成功显然源于历史上前所未有且不可复制的各种环境的巧合。而且，是否有任何一个语言社区愿意让欧洲犹太人的经历重演，即便这意味着能换来一种复兴的语言？此外，如果希伯来语现在繁荣，那么意第绪语（Yiddish）呢？或者拉迪诺语（Ladino）——那种起源于伊比利亚半岛、曾广泛在塞萨洛尼基（Thessaloníki）被塞法迪犹太人使用的语言，现在又如何？
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NICOLE WESTERLIND
nicole_westerlind2@condenast.com
弗洛伊德曾非常有启发性地将健康的状态——哀悼（mourning），与忧郁（melancholia）区分开来——后者是指永无止境的哀悼，是无法放下失去之物的悲恸。当语言保存的文献呼吁对语言进行记录、致敬，以及在极少数复兴可能成为真实选项的情况下呼吁复兴时，这种文献便是一种“哀悼”的文学。在最不可原谅的自欺欺人之时，它更接近于“忧郁”：拒绝承认救赎的时机已经过去，而我们能期待的最高目标仅仅是抢救。在承认并非所有语言都能或应该被拯救时，我们对那些正在消亡的语言的爱并未减少。在一个资源匮乏、价值观冲突的世界里，这也许是明智地爱它们的唯一方式。
诚实的保护主义者必须避免的一种历史谬误，就是将这场冲突呈现为一种永恒、原汁原味的语言遗产与一种无根的、偶然的现代性之间的对抗。因为毫无疑问，这种遗产在曾经也是一个无根的、偶然的闯入者；我们忘记了这一事实，仅仅是因为它赢了。在西不列颠，是否曾有早期的语言被威尔士语或其布立吞前身所取代或吸收，就像记录得更为详尽的法语对奥克语的取代那样？毕竟，所有古老的事物，曾经都曾是新鲜的。
在自然与超自然领域方面，诺兰省略了许多使荷马时代如此迥异的元素，包括神圣的氛围以及随之而来的独特的道德领域。
当前电影
我曾好奇诺兰将如何处理故事中其他一些古风方面，例如其暴力和仪式感：动物鲜血喷涌的祭祀仪式；怪物吞噬人类时，被吞噬者在痛苦中尖叫的超自然愤怒；砍掉手部和生殖器；对酷刑的依赖；以及对残酷复仇所感到的深层满足。诺兰将如何处理荷马世界中那种夸张的表达方式——比如人们在极度痛苦中撕裂衣服，或者奥德修斯（在 Emily Wilson 2017 年的诗歌译本中）“抽泣着在悲伤中打滚”？又或是那些如画般的幻想领域，比如第一卷中，雅典娜与特勒马库斯在一起时，“像一只鸟一样，穿过烟雾飞走了”，从而揭示了她的神格？然而，诺兰并没有试图将观众带入古希腊人的思维方式中，而是选择了一种精简的、近乎自然主义的方法，克制且温和。暴力被处理得非常通用，快速剪辑的战斗场景仅暗示了惨烈的死亡；祭祀仅短暂出现，且像外科手术般干净；复仇则没有血腥，没有恐怖，且极其克制地执行；泪水以一种伤感的精准度顺着单侧脸颊落下；而悲痛则以现代武勇那种坚毅且沉默的克制来表达。
《奥德赛》。
作者： RICHARD BRODY
或许最有可能享受克里斯托弗·诺兰的新改编剧作$\text{《The Odyssey》}$（《奥德赛》）的观众，正是那些没读过荷马的人。这并非出于显而易见的原因——即大量内容被删减（任何将长篇文学作品搬上荧幕的行为都不可避免地涉及删减与压缩）——而是因为一种更普遍的缺失：
[[IMG_XXXX]] 马特·达蒙在克里斯托弗·诺兰改编的荷马作品中饰演奥德修斯。 插画：哈尔·布斯托斯（HAROL BUSTOS）
这种缺失是深远的，具有社会意识的，且最终未能得到充分展开。
尽管诺兰的愿景无论多么讨好观众且时代错置，他依然以强烈的自信和无可挑剔的清晰度地推进。台词简洁且具有现代感，让其出色的演员阵容处于舒适区，并将古代那些绚丽复杂的人物变得晶莹剔透且棱角分明。饰演潘内洛普的海瑟薇拥有与之匹配的锐利眼神；当她告诉特勒马库斯他还不够成熟，无法参与一场大仗时，她借鉴了经典好莱坞的一个绝妙姿态：目光短暂而嘲讽地从他的眼睛下移到他的身体上。斯巴达国王墨涅劳斯由乔·伯恩塔尔饰演，他使用了一种奇妙地贴切的纽约白人族裔外区口音。饰演海伦（她与墨涅劳斯的婚姻有些不安，且她的被绑架导致了特洛伊战争）的露皮塔·尼永奥在哀叹自己被用作死亡与破坏的借口时，情绪上升到一种安静而激烈的程度。约翰·列古兹莫饰演被奴役的猪倌欧迈俄斯，他对奥德修斯深情忠诚，并极力保护特勒马库斯，他散发着世故的智慧和粗犷的沉稳，这种内在的高贵与那些贪婪的求婚贵族形成了鲜明对比。萨曼莎·莫顿将喀耳刻饰演得直率且具有乡村式的强悍，几乎让剧本的修正主义显得可信——这种修正主义将荷马笔下声音诱人、危险的诱惑者，变成了个说教式的礼仪评论员，她声称之所以把奥德修斯的部下变成猪，是因为他们吃相像猪。
特洛伊人毫无疑问地将这匹马（显然是宗教祭品）带入城墙之内，结果由奥德修斯率领的隐藏在内部的少数希腊士兵打开了城门，让大批战士涌入并摧毁了特洛伊。
相反，诺兰展开了一出纯粹的人类戏剧。电影开篇，奥德修斯（马特·达蒙）作为特洛伊战争中希腊军队的一名将领，已离开故乡伊萨卡近二十年——十年在征战，随后十年在漂泊。虽然他因为一系列遭遇和障碍而延误，从卡吕普索的诱惑到食人独眼巨人的愤怒，但他的妻子潘内洛普（安妮·海瑟薇）一直抵挡着数十名伊萨卡贵族的追求，这些人要求她与其中一人结婚，并在等待期间挥霍皇家府邸的食物和美酒。她的儿子特勒马库斯（汤姆·霍兰）在父亲出征时还是个婴儿，现在已成为一名致力于驱逐求婚者的青年——这是一个原型的成长故事。而当奥德修斯终于找到回家的路时，父子俩联手对抗篡权者。
以这种方式讲述，将神灵的干预降至最低，故事依然是一场充满激情、恐惧、温柔与惊奇的刺激冒险，但它缺乏阅读荷马时特有的一种快感：一种现代思维与青铜时代思维之间鸿沟的感觉。荷马描绘了一个奇异且令人不安的世界，在这个世界中，人类的生存持续受到那些拥有自身动机的神灵的商议和反复无常的影响。通过抑制这种连续性，
神灵。在诗作中，第一场戏是宙斯在奥林匹斯山的宫殿中召开的会议，众神在会上争论奥德修斯的命运。而在诺兰的电影中，人们虽然提到神，但奥林匹斯山并没有神圣的辩论，而且事实上，古典希腊众神中唯一实际出现的是雅典娜（赞达亚），她不时地俯瞰着行动。
作为一名导演，诺兰似乎在剧情、对话、表演、景观、布景、装饰和服装上投入了远比呈现这些内容的图像更多的注意力。在大部分情况下，视觉构图是对动作的中立描绘，几乎没有提供任何能够暗示银幕世界美学构思的风格感或质感。诺兰在《Tenet》和《Inception》等科幻故事中带来了更强的视觉冲击力，但值得注意的是，这些电影中的世界观构建与当下在文化上是连续的。相比之下，《The Odyssey》中朴素的现实主义似乎与诺兰试图使一种不可还原的古代情怀合理化的努力密不可分。
奥德修斯被刻画成对那个计谋持有持久愧疚感的人；由于将一份表面上的礼物变成了致命武器，他认为自己违背了宙斯的款待之法。电影还暗示他患有创伤后应激障碍（P.T.S.D.），且他多年的漂泊也是多年无法重新融入战后生活的体现。在被卡吕普索囚禁七年、被当作名义上的囚禁情人带到她的床上、并被她喂食的莲花麻痹之后，她说她的行为是为了治愈他：“你还没准备好回家。”
在演员方面，马特·达蒙饰演的奥德修斯，其表演与诺兰对该人物的构思结合最紧密。荷马笔下的角色以诡计多端而闻名，而在这里则显得朴实直接——一个粗鲁、务实的战术家，而不是一个更具创造活力且道德上有争议的人物。这个角色需要一种既强壮又圆滑、既强大又多变的表演，但达蒙遵循了诺兰的前提，将奥德修斯塑造得冷漠且沉重。
像这样将奥德修斯心理学化，赋予了《The Odyssey》一种易于消化的现代感——古希腊人，就跟我们一样！——但这是以牺牲细节的丰富性和社会复杂性为代价的，而正是这些元素让阅读荷马作品成为一种如此至关重要且直接的体验。此外，对故事中大部分残酷情节的压制不仅仅是简单的删减；它代表了一种为了适应现代时代而救赎奥德修斯，使其既令人同情又具有悲剧色彩的努力。这部电影没有给那个在荷马诗篇第九卷中淡然而然地告诉其中一名主人关于他行程中早期停靠点的奥德修斯留下空间，他说：“我洗劫了那个城镇并杀掉那些男人。我们抢走了他们的妻子，并将他们的财富在我们之间平分。”我不会剧透电影的结局，但它与诗篇中的结局不同，且大胆得令人兴奋——
在观看诺兰的电影时，我发现自己再次带着敬意回想起皮埃尔·保罗·帕索里尼拍摄的两部关于古希腊人的电影，《俄狄浦斯王》(1967) 和 《美狄亚》(1969)，后者由玛丽亚·卡拉斯出演其唯一一部长篇电影。在这两部作品中，古典时代令人不安的残酷性与一种视听上的崇高感相匹配，这种崇高感反映了电影所依据的悲剧诗篇（分别由索福克勒斯和欧里庇得斯创作）的诗意。帕索里尼对青铜时代生活之暴力与神秘的强调，延伸到了对宗教盛会的精细呈现（包括人体祭祀），这些呈现既像编舞又像人类学研究，其图像的程式化程度与银幕上的动作一样。而诺兰，在现代道德自律力量的驱动下，将一部史诗诗篇变得平庸化了。
每周，我们都会提供一幅需要配文的漫画。您，作为读者，提交配文，我们选出三名决赛入围者，然后由您投票选出最喜爱的一个。本周由 Tom Toro 创作的漫画配文提交截止日期为 7 月 26 日，星期日。7 月 6 日和 13 日比赛的入围作品如下所示。我们将在 8 月 10 日那一期宣布获胜者以及本周比赛的入围作品。任何 13 岁或以上的人员均可参赛或投票。如需参赛及阅读完整规则，请访问 contest.newyorker.com。
本周比赛
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入围作品
获胜配文
“我明白服务已部分暂停。” Jeff Van Wagenen，康涅狄格州，米德伯里。
“我要去参加 2030 届运动会。” Eric Schares，爱荷华州，艾姆斯。
“它认为它能。” Shelagh Johnson，马里兰州，埃利科特城。
“看，我就知道火车很快就会出现。” Gideon Litoff，华盛顿特区。
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
谜题与游戏部门
14 15 16
17 18
19 20 21 22
23 24 25
一个难度中等的谜题。
26 27 28
作者：WYNA LIU
29 30 31 32
33 34 35
横向
1 像新梳理过的头发 6 圣诞 ___
36 37 38
39 40
11 曾经是 14 “所谓的”周围环境？
41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48
49 50 51 52
53 54
55 56 57
纵向
38 黄金时段的主打节目 40 滚石乐队的 Richards
1 表达不满
13 括号中的数字 15 鹌鹑群中的鸟 22 团队建设之旅
42 大型鳐鱼
47 泄露（如机密信息）
32 节目《美国破坏者》（American Vandal）所模仿的类型
36 热油，也许？
38 Sweetgreen 或 Chopt 的特色
42 反洋基阵营成员
51 道歉的开头
上一道谜题的答案：
M A L B E C E N D I N G S
A G O R A S L E A D O R E
R E S I S T S I X S E V E N
A G E N T L O O T S E A S
C A R G O B A Y L T E
A P S R E C E S S B E L L S
P A V E S T H E W A Y
N I N E S T O R I E S
H O T G L U E G U N S
32 奶囊部分 34 向不同方向行驶
53 电子游戏中的背景人物（简称）
57 粘稠的食物？
D O R I T O S P E S T O S
L O G A N R O Y P I R A T E
I S N T A L A S L Y R I C
O N O D E K A G R A M
在以下网址查找更多谜题及本周答案：
newyorker.com/crossword
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JULY 27, 2026
4 GOINGS ON 7 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Ruth Marcus on Trump’s targeting of journalists; an arch age; Julian Schnabel’s palazzo; the vampire interviewer; a P.R. vet’s other clique.
PROFILES
Stephania Taladrid 12 Opposition in Exile Can María Corina Machado return to lead Venezuela?
LETTER FROM TENNESSEE Charles Bethea 20 Driven
A father’s quest to fix America’s deadly guardrails.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Jesse Eisenberg 25 I Give My Kid the Talk
A REPORTER AT LARGE David D. Kirkpatrick 26 The Enabler
How the Biden Administration fuelled Israel’s wars.
SKETCHBOOK
Roz Chast 37 “Memory Lane”
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS Lauren Oyler 40 Renaissance Woman
Florentina Holzinger’s provocative performances.
FICTION
Min Jin Lee 48 “Testing”
THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE
Hilton Als 56 What Peter Hujar’s portraits reveal.
BOOKS
59 Briefly Noted Nikhil Krishnan 61 On language extinction and cultural preservation.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Richard Brody 66 Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”
POEMS Andrea Cohen 32 “Cul-de-Sac” Paul Muldoon 44 “Mice”
COVER
Marcellus Hall “Spa Day”
DRAWINGS Edward Steed, Ellie Black, Julia Thomas, Asher Perlman, Jorge Penné, Joe Dator, Sofia Warren, Ken Levine, Matilda Borgström, Zachary Kanin, William Haefeli, P. C. Vey, Hartley Lin, Mick Stevens, Sarah Kempa SPOTS Tim Boelaars
Stephania Taladrid (“Opposition in Exile,” p. 12) is a contributing writer. In 2023, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
Charles Bethea (The Talk of the Town, p. 8; “Driven,” p. 20), a staff writer covering the American South, has been contributing to the magazine since 2008. He lives in Atlanta.
David D. Kirkpatrick (“The Enabler,” p. 26), a staff writer, is the author of “Into the Hands of the Soldiers,” about the Arab Spring. As a reporter at the Times, he shared three Pulitzer Prizes.
Min Jin Lee (Fiction, p. 48) will publish the novel “American Hagwon” in September. Her book “Pachinko” was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Paul Muldoon (Poem, p. 44) teaches at Barnard College. His books include “Joy in Service on Rue Tagore.”
Hilton Als (A Critic at Large, p. 56), a staff writer, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His new book, “I Don’t Remember,” will be published next year.
Lauren Oyler (“Renaissance Woman,” p. 40) is the author of the novel “Fake Accounts” and the essay collection “No Judgment.”
Andrea Cohen (Poem, p. 32) is the author of “Sugar” and “The Sorrow Apartments,” among other books.
Marcellus Hall (Cover) illustrated the children’s poetry collection “A Gray Cat Wanders,” by Karla Kuskin, which is due out next month.
Jesse Eisenberg (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) will release a new film, “The Debut,” set in the world of musical theatre, in December.
Nikhil Krishnan (Books, p. 61), a contributor since 2022, is the author of “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960.”
Wyna Liu (Puzzles & Games Dept.) is a puzzle editor at the Times, where she writes the game Connections.
LETTER FROM THE U.K.
FORTUNATE JOAQUIN
How Mudlarking Became London’s Hottest Hobby By Sam Knight
Read this digital-only story on the New Yorker app, the best place to find the latest issue, plus more news, commentary, criticism, and humor.
backing band, the Violators, he wades into its depths.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Paramount; July 23.)
ALT-POP | In the nineties,Tori Amos—a survivor of wunderkind expectations (she was a piano prodigy at five) and of a failed stint in a synth-pop band—proved too ambitious not to join a generation’s creativevanguard. Her seminal 1992 début, “Little Earthquakes,” introduced her biting point of view, and the singer-songwriter continued to straddle alt-rock, baroque pop, and more, across a long, adventurous career that included the polarizing, ayahuasca-fuelled “Boys for Pele” (1996) and the acoustic boomerang “Unrepentant Geraldines” (2014). Her latest record, “In Times of Dragons,” is no less bold, staring down threats to American democracy; Amos shares the stage with Bartees Strange, a kindred spirit, politically, whose fanciful music can be similarly boundarypushing.—S.P. (Beacon Theatre; July 24-25.)
JULY 22 – 28, 2026
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week.
The Venezuelan director Lorena Alvarado’s real-life family is the basis for her first feature, “Lost Chapters,” a lyrical, multigenerational fiction. Ena (Ena Alvarado, the filmmaker’s sister), a twenty-five-year-old writer, returns home to Caracas to visit her father, Ignacio (Ignacio Alvarado, the filmmaker’s father), a bookseller and collector. He shares a house with his elderly mother (Adela Rodríguez, Alvarado’s grandmother), whose memory is failing. After getting wind of an unusual novel, from 1912, Ignacio tries to find it, while Ena makes the elusive tome the basis of her own docu-fictional novel. Father and daughter reconnect through book hunts and research trips; tender reunions over poetry recitations fuse literary passions and family bonds with cinematic grace.—Richard Brody (Opening July 24 at IFC Center.)
DANCE | In France, Hugo Marchand is a ballet superstar in a way we seldom see here. He walks fashion runways and appears on chat shows, where interviewers fawn over him. He is also a very good dancer, with a sinuous grace and an intense commitment to his roles. For “Artists at the Center,” an evening of dances chosen by Marchand features him in a famous, over-the-top table-dancing solo by Maurice Béjart—“Boléro,” set to Ravel’s eponymous score. Marchand also performs a rather dreamy duet with the equally glamorous Dorothée Gilbert—“Le Parc,” by Angelin Preljocaj—and another, by the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen and set to Satie, with another French star, Léonore Baulac.—Marina Harss (New York City Center; July 23-26.)
ART | The eclectic artistPaul Thek (1933-88) is the subject of Andrew Durbin’svery fine book “The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and PaulThek,” and of two shows up now, at the Galerie Buchholz (through July 25), and at Pace (through Aug. 14). Thek’s working in various styles confounded the art market—in addition to painting and sculpture, he designed theatre sets, and used his own body as an object—and he wasn’t easily categorizable, which is a good thing. But Thek’s fascination with spectacle—his intriguing “Red Shrine,” from 1964, inspired by mummified corpses he saw in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, is up at Pacedidn’t necessarily serve him well as an artist, nor did his resistance to curators and gallerists who believed in him: he could have benefitted from distillation, and from editing.—Hilton Als
ABOUT TOWN
MOVIES | The comedy-drama “A Sad and Beautiful World,” by the Lebanese director Cyril Aris, maps a young couple’s romantic destiny along the country’s political and social agonies. Yasmina and Nino, born a minute apart in the same Beirut hospital, become childhood sweethearts but lose touch; they reconnect as adults through the antic calamity of a minor but spectacular car crash. The fiercely critical Yasmina (Mounia Akl) is a business consultant whose parents are divorced, and Nino (Hasan Akil), funny and optimistic, is a restaurateur who was orphaned as a child; their efforts to build a relationship and form a family are strained to the breaking point by war, civic strife, and economic disaster. The decades-spanning tale, told in sketch-like anecdotes highlighting witty and fervent performances, is sentimental and tender, clear-eyed and melancholy.—Richard Brody (Opening July 24 at Quad Cinema.)
OFF BROADWAY | Remarks are “not literature,” as the quippy modernist Gertrude Stein once remarked. Yet, in Eric Bentley’s 1972 docuplay, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been,” a revealing tapestry of testimonies from Hollywood actors, writers, and directors ensnared in America’s mid-twentieth-century anti-Communist purge, they are woven into something unexpectedly dramatic. Under the sharp direction of Anna D. Shapiro, the play hugs the corners as it pivots from the authority of the House Un-American Activities Committee chairman (Michael McKean, in a rotating cast) to the blustery self-justifications of Elia Kazan (Frederick Weller) to the administrative recitation of names by Jerome Robbins (Steven Boyer). Paul Robeson (Billy Eugene Jones), in his refusal to name other suspected
subversives, lends the production its clearest moral voice.—Rhoda Feng (City Center Stage I; through Sept. 11.)
INDIE ROCK | The singer and multi-instrumentalist Kurt Vile started his career making lo-fi home recordings in Philadelphia, so it’s fitting that the album he made as if it might be his last was created as an homage to the City of Brotherly Love. Released this May, “Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me” is mostly self-produced, with a hazy sense of space and time apropos of the ways in which his sound has gradually expanded over the years. Since leaving the band the War on Drugs, in 2008, Vile has become a solo avatar for psychedelic guitar music, his rich catalogue easygoing and nonchalant, but also sprawling. Alongside his
COURTESY SEVERAL FUTURES
4 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 27, 2026
PICK THREE
Amanda Petrusich on Grateful Dead ephemera.
“Summer Tour,” a new documentary about the famously fervent and nomadic fans of the Grateful Dead (and of the band’s later iteration, Dead & Co.), débuts this week. It’s a heartening reminder that, despite enormous changes in the waywe consume and share music, there are still vital, real-life scenes unfolding out there. Though I wouldn’t dare describe myself as a scholar of the band (I’ll leave that to the Grateful Dead Studies Association), here are three Deadrelated things that bring me tremendous joy.
TABLES FOR TWO tan’s great under-the-radar restaurants. Where Houseman’s food is posh-rustic and a little lusty, Zoli’s menu is frillier and just a bit more challenging, and it earns its experimental flourishes by delivering pleasure at every turn. Fuzzy-fresh cucumber leaves in a chilled dashi vinaigrette riff cleverly on spinach ohitashi. Sautéed daylily shoots, with the faint chlorophyll snap of asparagus, get tossed with bitter greens in an anchovy-spiked vinaigrette. Fascinating things are happening with chilled seafood, including gloriously chewy surf clam, sliced into sashimi-like slivers and served in a tart tamarind dressing. The menu’s puckishness fades slightly in the larger dishes, though I loved a fillet of fluke, doused in a lovage-scented cream sauce bubbling with fish roe of varying hues and sizes, and a whole butterflied black bass with a garlicky Basque pil-pil sauce makes for an attractive centerpiece.
1
Zoli 312 Maujer St., Brooklyn
Richard Olney, the great American food writer and Francophile, did not really believe in recipes, but he was obsessive about ingredients: the best meat and produce at the best time of year. He was perhaps most fastidious about salads, to which he devoted pages and pages of near-philosophical instruction across his cookbooks and memoirs. Yet I’m fairly sure that the marvellously cranky man would have adored the Olney salad at Zoli, a new restaurant in East Williamsburg: a mountain of ever-changing greenery, fluffy as an eiderdown, and dressed in a perfectly smooth salt-edged vinaigrette.
Zoli is part of the campus of Amant, a sprawling contemporary-art complex from Lonti Ebers, an art collector and MOMA trustee. The space opened, in 2021, to notice in the art world and comparatively little beyond it, but Zoli has put it on the map for people who don’t otherwise monitor the gallery circuit.The room splits the difference between industrial brutalism and mid-century sleekness, and somehow avoids the predictability of either.The dining room and the bar are separated by an aquarium installation by Pierre Huyghe—murky and rock-filled, with the occasional antenna-waving crustacean—which lends the otherwise sunny interior an edge of imminent apocalypse.
Zoli’s association with the art world has earned it inevitable comparisons to Marcel, the ritzy new restaurant anchoring the Sotheby’s headquarters, in the Breuer Building, on the Upper East Side. But where Marcel is a cathedral of luxury, Zoli seems primarily interested in playful exploration. (Ebers has said that the restaurant is named after her beloved, and entirely imaginary, dog.) You can taste it in the desserts: a chocolate layer cake laced with fermented black garlic, which functions a bit like miso swirled into butterscotch, and an airy cheesecake funked up with shavings of fresh Taleggio. It’s weird, but it really works. (Dishes $10-$65.)
PHOTOGRAPH BY NICO SCHINCO FOR THE NEW YORKER (TOP);
ILLUSTRATION BY NOLAN PELLETIER (BOTTOM)
NEWYORKER.COM/NEWSLETTERS
The kitchen belongs to the chef Ned Baldwin, of Houseman, one of Manhat-
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—Helen Rosner
tional security. The Times declined to comply.Two days later, three journalists received subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury in Manhattan. The Times later reported that the White House had instructed the director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel, to oversee an investigation into the leak, and that Patel had spent the day the subpoenas were issued holed up at the White House—not the ordinary locus for a law-enforcement operation. TheTimes,in a sealed filing that it sought to have publicly released, moved to quash the subpoenas, saying that they were “brought in bad faith to punish The Times for its coverage.”
Wednesday. “The question we want to ask them is who provided them with classified national-security information.” That is scant comfort. Journalists’ access to information will evaporate if they cannot assure their sources of confidentiality.This risk is omnipresent, but it is heightened in the current moment, when reporting about the inner workings of government is more crucial than ever, and when Administration officials appear determined to close off any channels of information that are not officially sanctioned. As the Times’ executive editor, Joseph Kahn, explained, in a video, “There’s nothing more important that an independent news media does in a democracy than reporting fully and fairly on the way public officials protect national security and use taxpayer dollars.” Was Trump, reportedly livid over the Air Force One leak, concerned about the risk to security—or about the prospect of personal embarrassment due to the failings of a questionable gift that had cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars to upgrade?
COMMENT UNDER THREAT
or years now, in office and out, Donald Trump has been unabashed about
his desire to see reporters behind bars. The President’s fantasies can, at times, take on a lurid tone. Campaigning for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterms, Trump assailed the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs, the landmark abortion case, and outlined his preferred approach to identifying the source: “The reporter goes to jail. When the reporter learns that he’s going to be married in two days to a certain prisoner that’s extremely strong, tough, and mean, he will say, he or she, ‘I think I’m going to give you the information. Here’s the leaker, get me the hell out of here.’” This April, after it was reported that a crew member was missing from an American fighter jet that had been shot down in Iran, Trump vowed that the person who had spoken to the press would be quickly outed: “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail.’”
The Justice Department has depicted the subpoenas as a benign move.“We’re not targeting reporters. They’re material witnesses, just like a reporter would be a material witness to a car crash,” Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General, said at his confirmation hearing
When it comes to the media,Trump appears to be moving from the unsettling rhetoric that began during the 2016 election (“scum,” “enemy of the American people”) to his long-promised assault. He has continued to file a barrage of defamation lawsuits—with some news organizations choosing to capitulate rather than risk harm to planned mergers or broadcast licenses. Trump is also now harnessing the processes of criminal law to intimidate and punish. In the early-morning hours of January 14th, F.B.I. agents arrived at the home of the WashingtonPost reporter Hannah
No one went to jail, but Trump has seized on another opportunity to threaten journalists. Earlier this month, theTimes reported that he was forced to ditch his new Air Force One, given to him by the Qataris, for part of the ride home from the NATO summit in Turkey; the plane allegedly lacked anti-missile capabilities. (Trump had claimed that he was taking a last spin in the previous Air Force One “for old time’s sake.”) According to the Times, a senior F.B.I. official asked the newspaper to hold the story, citing na-
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO;
SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GETTY
questions relevant to a criminal investigation,” the Supreme Court said in a 1972 ruling, though it left open the possibility of protection in cases where the government was engaged in harassment or bad faith, as the Times now claims it is.
Natanson and seized her computers and phones, as part of an investigation into a government contractor charged with retaining classified information. So far, judges have blocked the Justice Department’s efforts to gain unsupervised access to Natanson’s devices. In recent months, the department subpoenaed reporters from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal in nationalsecurity cases. The subpoenas were withdrawn after the news organizations challenged them. Media lawyers fear that the Administration could deploy a nuclear option: using the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists themselves for publishing classified information. Bruce Brown, the president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me, “Short of prosecuting a reporter under the Espionage Act, the word ‘escalates’ doesn’t mean anything
anymore. It’s just open season now.”
Administrations of both political parties have subpoenaed reporters to testify before a grand jury in past cases involving national-security leaks, but rarely, and as a last resort. Gabe Rottman, of the Reporters Committee, told me he counted just three such instances since 2000. Justice Department regulations, first formulated in 1970, stipulate that reporters are to be subpoenaed only when the government is seeking information that is “essential,” and it has made “all reasonable attempts” to obtain that information elsewhere. But these protections are illusory in the hands of an Administration determined to ignore them; they are not enforceable in court. Court rulings on reporter’s privilege have not been favorable. “Newsmen are not exempt from the normal duty of appearing before a grand jury and answering
There seems little chance that Times reporters will be in jail cells anytime soon; judges are unlikely to order that extreme step this early in the legal process. But it’s not clear what will happen if the Administration insists that forcing reporters to testify is its only option. Just as worrisome, though theTimes has the resources and fortitude to withstand this pressure, the same may not be true of other news organizations. Such outlets may become wary of pursuing stories that could put them in the Administration’s crosshairs. That chilling effect, of course, is precisely what Trump is after.
—Ruth Marcus
Donald Trump (“I had shrimp with him on his desk a few weeks ago,” Cook dropped), he’s focussing on the nation’s capital: more arches and monuments, huger facilities. It was Cook’s commission that green-lighted the plan for a ninety-thousand-square-foot White House ballroom that one prominent architecture critic described, in the Times, as a “huge, dumb box.”
Minister of Culture for the United States.” During a Senate hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he was “unaware” of an American delegation at the forum; none had attended in nearly a decade. Cook, however, insisted that “State pushed me to go. It was entirely designed around me.” His mission, he indicated, was soft diplomacy. He recalled a State Department official telling him,“Many guys in your position would say, ‘This is quite dangerous.’” The actor Steven Seagal, who has had Russian citizenship for ten years, attended, as did the far-right podcaster Candace Owens, although their seats weren’t as good as Cook’s. “My six State Department dudes had me first row direct center,” he said. He added, “I requested and received Coca-Cola—not sold there currently.” (Coca-Cola suspended business dealings with Russia in 2022, but the soda is imported through other countries.)
YANKEE DOODLE DEPT. THE ARCH GUY
odney Mims Cook, Jr., chairman of the United States Commission of
“The White House has been insufficient since the Harrison Presidency,” Cook declared later, during a cocktail reception on his arch’s first floor. Among the attendees was a chronicler of Georgia’s waterfalls, two longtime members of Little Richard’s band, a retired Russian N.H.L. player, and a contingent from Atlanta’s country-club set. Cook went on, “Trump is fixing it, and I’m helping.” He added, “I assure you, you can paint things gold left and right, but you can also tone that down later. As long as the proportions are right—which they are—this man is going to leave us a legacy of such astonishing beauty!”
Fine Arts, old Atlantan, chum of King Charles, and unapologetic Russophile, recently gathered fifty guests inside a replica Roman triumphal arch, in downtown Atlanta, for an intimate performance by Mikhail Simonyan, a Russian violinist and a Deputy Minister of Culture. An hour before the show, Simonyan, who lives in Siberia, wandered into Cook’s office atop Millennium Gate Museum—the anomalous arch’s name. He walked by framed photographs of Cook with heads of state, looking for something to eat.“Is there any steaks around here?” he asked.
At a filmed Q.&A., Cook rose to address Putin. “I appreciate all of the hospitality that has been afforded to me on my return to St. Petersburg,” he said. “I love this city, and I think you’re aware of that.”
Cook, a ruddy-faced seventy-year-old, whose reading glasses teetered on the tip of his nose, directed Simonyan, whom he called “one of the greatest talents in the world,” to the first floor. Cook built the arch two decades ago, when resurrecting classical architecture in America was an eccentric idea. Now it’s an official plan. Empowered by his friend
Another thing Cook considers beautiful is classical Russian architecture. He built a large turreted dacha in North Atlanta, “in the Russian wooden vernacular,” he said. In June, he showed photographs of the place at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a gathering known as Putin’s Davos, which he said he’d attended as, “essentially, the
“Hooray, I also love St. Petersburg,” Putin, looking amused, responded, through a translator.
The State Department, Cook recalled, “was shocked but pleased” by his polite dialogue with the Russian leader, and
he said recently. So, he went there and stood in front of them: Giotto’s frescoes in the Cappella degli Scrovegni, Piero della Francesca’s paintings in Arezzo, some Duccio, some Caravaggio. He liked the art, and he liked the Italians. “In the United States, everybody knows Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “In Italy, everybody knows Caravaggio.” He stayed. He sold some paintings. That was 1976. Italy has often been on his mind. This year, Netflix released his film “In the Hand of Dante” (as in Alighieri), and Pace is hosting an exhibition of his paintings of Italy’s umbrella-pine trees.
painted flat, which is unusual. For example—Michael, give me a brush on a stick.” Michael, an assistant, gave him a brush on a stick. “You see those round marks? That’s me going like this.” He jabbed, as a janitor with a broom might jab at a drunk. The color of the sky through the branches was remarkable.
also with the hockey puck he’d put on President Trump’s desk as a gesture of good will from Putin. (Cook obtained the puck himself, though he would not say from where.) Simonyan’s visit, Cook said, was a thank-you from Russia.
The violinist still hadn’t got any steak when he began to perform in the ersatz arch. He opened with Brahms, followed by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and ended with a tune generally credited to an eighteenth-century British Army surgeon intent on mocking Colonial Americans. Members of the audience laughed as they began to recognize the strains of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
As the workers packed, Schnabel reviewed photographs from a newly opened exhibition. Another assistant handed him the catalogue, balling up its plastic wrapping stamped with promotional copy. “You just scrunch that up?” Schnabel said. “Give that to me, please.” He unscrunched and read, “ ‘Julian Schnabel has been exploring ways of painting for the last five decades. From his initial wax paintings and plate paintings to his most recent works, he’s contributed to the shaping of the ever-open vocabulary of mark making. . . .’” He concluded and said, “Anyway, it’s a pity to throw that away.”
Schnabel was in his studio inside Palazzo Chupi, his pink Venetian-style building in the West Village. He wore slippers and paint-splattered coveralls, unbuttoned, with chest hair poofing out. A work crew was about to pack up his paintings to send to the gallery. “Want to start with this one?” a worker asked.
“I wanted ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’” a lone dissenter said later.
Cook was misty-eyed at the music. Back in his office, he told an intern to order pizzas. As he waited for dinner, Simonyan sat on a couch with Little Richard’s bandmates Shawn (Swift) Johnson and James (Big J) Nelson, who both kept their sunglasses on. They’d come to pitch Cook on building a statue of the deceased rock-and-roll legend, in Macon, Georgia. “Anything monument-related, he’s the guy,” Johnson said.
Schnabel wanted lunch, so he headed upstairs to his apartment. Palazzo Chupi has twelve stories and a pool. Schnabel constructed it, atop an old perfume factory, in 2007. To help finance it, he sold a Picasso. Being pink, tall, and a palazzo (a critic described it as an “exploded Malibu Barbie house”), it was controversial. Schnabel sold some units—Richard Gere bought one—and kept some. He gave a tour on the way up. In a bedroom: “My first plate painting, from 1978.” In a room with two grand pianos, a Pilates machine, and a taxidermied
“No, I’m standing here because I want to start with that one,” Schnabel said. Of the paintings, he said, “I was living in Rome, near the Villa Borghese, and they’ve got these trees there. I was down in Sicily, shooting in Trapani and San Vito Lo Capo. We shot in Tarquinia. We shot in Bracciano, Venice, Verona, Padua. The whole thing is called ‘Italy Through Its Trees.’”
glasses of wine, Simonyan pitched Johnson and Nelson an idea of his own. “You know what we need?” he said. “A big peace concert at the residence of the American Ambassador. Then some stadiums in Siberia.”
He’d painted on broken plates or on old maps. He pointed to a plate painting on the floor. “I painted this in my outdoor studio in Montauk,” he said. “I
“I’ve never been to Russia,” Nelson said. “We’ll bring the whole band. It’ll be like Live Aid.” They considered who else might join them.
“Steven Seagal can play guitar,” Simonyan said. “He’s actually pretty good.”
1—Charles Bethea
THE PICTURES MARK-MAKING
ulian Schnabel took his first trip to Italy fifty years ago.“When I was in
college, I was looking at these art-history books, and I thought, You can’t tell a damn thing about these things unless you go there and stand in front of them,”
bear: “Andy Warhol painting of me.” In a foyer with a sculpture: “Sculpture.”
“Criminal Intent.” “And, of course, ‘Talk Radio’ ”—starring in his Pulitzernominated play, from 1987, and the movie adaptation, directed by Oliver Stone. “Great, very dramatic. So what’s left? Oh, I want to be a vampire.” In Chicago, he went to Bonney’s place, “and there’s a call waiting for me, and it’s the offer to do ‘Vampire.’” Another lotto won.
text that was pretty spectacular,” Schnabel said. He pulled out his phone and recited a long text. It concluded, “What is life all about, through all the hardships and roughness, what is it all about? What’s its saving grace? This is all examined so profoundly here and yet done with a mix of ‘Goodfellas,’ ‘Paradise Lost,’ and ‘Love Story.’ No matter what happens with me and doing this role, you’ve created a masterpiece.” Schnabel rubbed the cherub heads. “When I got that, I wrote, ‘Beautifully written message. I think we can collaborate.’”
In the kitchen, Schnabel sat in a big wooden chair with cherubs carved into the arms. He ate a tuna-fish sandwich with oat milk. “I learned Italian watching Italian movies,” he explained.“ ‘L’Ultima Donna,’ by Marco Ferreri, where Gérard Depardieu cuts his dick off with an electric knife. I saw Bertolucci’s ‘Atto Due,’ the second part of ‘Novecento,’ in Paris, in Italian, with French subtitles. I didn’t speak French or Italian. I became very good friends with Bernardo Bertolucci over the years. When I met Bernardo, I hummed the soundtrack of ‘Novecento’ to him, and he just melted.”
As in recent roles in “Uncut Gems” and “Succession,” Bogosian makes ample use of no-bullshit directness and a piercing stare; yellow vampire eyes intensify it only slightly. “I read the book in the seventies, when it came out. I loved it,” he said. “I saw Frank Langella on Broadway playing Dracula, in 1977, around the same time. He was so powerful. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get to be that sort of vampire on this show.” Others do, “like Ben Daniels, in the second season, at the Theatre of Vampires”—debonair m.c. of a campy Parisian theatre act that disguises a coven’s live-action bloodsucking. “That’s my fantasy. I’m kind of dicey this season. I’ve had a couple of moments—I actually kill a couple of people, or I bite people.” In one, biting someone in a dressing room, he’s startled and looks up. “It’s like when you surprise a raccoon going through your garbage,” he said. Inelegant, in other words—“more like weird.” (His sort of vampire also wears a leather jacket and yells things such as “I heard there was an after-party on the asshole floor!”)
1—Zach Helfand
NEW JOURNALISM DEPT. VAMPIRE MOMENTS
Schnabel’s son Vito (as in Corleone) was a producer of “In the Hand of Dante,” and Martin Scorsese was an executive producer. Its stars include Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Sabrina Impacciatore, Jason Momoa, and John Malkovich. It’s two and a half hours long and intersperses black-and-white. “People invested in the film wanted me to make it two hours, in color. But Marty loved it, the actors loved it,” Schnabel continued. “What did they think, I’m making a fucking Marvel movie?”
ecently, the actor and playwright Eric Bogosian, seventy-three, was
relaxing in his sunny, cactus-filled office, in Tribeca. Bogosian, who plays the interviewer on AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire,” is wiry and affably neurotic; onscreen and off, he seems to be urgently looking for answers. The office was homey—incense, couch, art, kitchen, books. “This is the funnest place in town,” he said. Bogosian and his wife, the director Jo Bonney, live in the building. When their sons were little, he bought a tiny second unit to write in. Later, a neighbor wanted to annex it for a piano, and in exchange Bogosian got this—a one-bedroom corner apartment with views of lower Manhattan. “I keep winning lottos in my life,” he said. “I can’t explain it beyond that.” He poured a glass of water and sat down to talk vampires.
Scorsese appears in the film as a mystical Jew. Al Pacino has a part, too. “I met Al through Diane Keaton,” Schnabel said. “Diane said to me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do your Tony Montana routine.’” He did his Tony Montana routine. “Al just said, ‘O.K., we’re friends forever.’”
He gave a tour: black-and-white photos from his plays, including “Talk Radio,” at the Public (“Joe Papp kind of adopted me”); a Silver Bear from the Berlin International Film Festival (“I guess I should polish him”); rock memorabilia (“AC/DC is my favorite band”); a “Taxi Driver” poster, which he fondly rapped with a knuckle (“I named my second kid after Travis Bickle—I told De Niro that, and he really didn’t know what to say”). He opened a door to a library/weight room. “This is about half of the research I had to do for my book, a true story of a cadre of assassins who killed the leaders of the Armenian genocide,” he said. “So I ended up having to read all this shit.” It took seven years. “What the fuck did I know what I was doing? But, anyway, I wrote this scholarly book.”
Several actors play multiple parts. Butler plays a hit man and the Pope.“I sent him the script, and he wrote me back a
In the series’ latest installment, titled “The Vampire Lestat,” Bogosian’s character has also become a vampire. “It was a dream come true,” he said. In 2022, he recalled, he was flying to Chicago to see a play of Bonney’s. “On the plane, I’m just, like, musing,” he said. “I go, Yeah, I’ve done a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to do. I was a bad guy in a Steven Seagal movie. I did a lot of ‘Law & Order’ episodes where I never smile in any scene”—sixtyone of them, as a police captain on
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
Bogosian grew up in an Armenian community in Watertown, Massachu-
Julian Schnabel setts, and then in a nearby suburb. Some
can start them laughing, their truth and pain come out. The first time it happened was with a kid named Abe, who was seventeen. We played Ping-Pong. I was still in show business, so I was dense with one-liners. He threatened to smile a couple of times, and then he laughed. And he started getting better.”
circle. Very few New Yorkers get two distinct orbits. David Rothenberg, who, at ninety-two, recently made his début as a standup comic, at 54 Below, is one of those few.
One circle that revolves around Rothenberg is made up of show-business veterans, of the kind that he interviews on his Saturday-morning radio program, on WBAI; the other is a circle of formerly incarcerated people who view him
Rothenberg had been considering opening his set with a joke that, he knew, was likely to lose the audience. He’d planned to say, “This is Mr. Norman Maine,” a twist on the last line of the 1954 film “A Star Is Born,” where Judy Garland announces that, although she is Vicki Lester, the movie star, her true allegiance is to her husband, Norman, who has just drowned himself. Rothenberg’s bit would be him declaring that Mr. Norman Maine had faked his own death to get away from Garland.
Before the recent matinée, 54 Below was filled with some stars (Christine Ebersole kicked off the show), and with many members of the Fortune circle. (Stanley Richards, the new head of the Department of Correction and himself a former inmate, is a Fortune alum.)
“What made me want to do it?” Rothenberg asked backstage. “It was my Walter Mitty moment! Does anyone still know who Walter Mitty is?” (His conversation is sprinkled, as a hyper-alert ninety-two-year-old’s must be, with the question of whether an apropos reference he has just made is apropos to anybody else still breathing.) “I’ve always loved people who made other people laugh,” he went on.“My aunt Hilda was the person who made me believe in myself, and the first time she took me out
Eric Bogosian
of his forebears emigrated before the genocide; others barely got out. “My mom’s dad escaped while his village was burning and got his mother out of therethat kind of hellacious shit. We were a typical immigrant-type family”—some accents, cousins, “and it’s all about food.”
Rothenberg nixed that and started his act more directly: “I’m the oldest standup comedian in America—the operative word here is ‘standing up.’” He did some material on the women in his life: “There was a woman I knew very well. Let’s call her Mother.” He then told a racy story about meeting Charles Laughton, who groped Rothenberg’s innocent and much younger thigh at the Algonquin, and added an anecdote about being thrown out of an upstate prison while trying to visit two inmates. He was told to “go back to New York and get some Jew liberal lawyer to help you.” He said, “I did. His name was William Kunstler.”
Back in the cactus room, a final musing.“I don’t completely understand acting,” he said.“For me, it’s pretending to be somebody that I can’t be in real life. I saw ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ when I was a little kid and got a sheet and ran around the yard being Lawrence of Arabia. I love to make believe. That’s my place, a very happy place. More happy than actual ... being alive.”
Afterward, everyone in the room agreed that the best story had been about a phone conversation with Peggy Lee. “She called, you see, at midnight!” Rothenberg had said. “Big stars assume that everyone is awake whenever they are. So, she asked me to assemble some sheet music for her, for her next gig in New York, and I said, ‘Yes, of course, Miss Lee.’ She wanted some tunes by Frank Loesser, and I said that I had never heard her sing ‘Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,’ a lesser-known Loesser. So, she began it, right there on the phone, and kept on till she had finished it!
—Sarah Larson
DEPT. OF NEW TRICKS BA-DUM-BUM
“Using humor to communicate with people who are angry and hurt and broken is part of the mission of Fortune,” he continued. “I’ve always said that, at Fortune, the first thing is to gain trust, since the people who come home to us have been so misused, abused, wounded, hurt. If they see you as someone who
“The next morning, my mother called me and said, ‘I was trying to get through to you on the phone all night! The line was busy. What were you doing?’ I said to her, ‘Mom, I was in bed with Peggy Lee, and she wouldn’t stop singing.’”
ertain New Yorkers manage to create a spinning orbit of other New
Yorkers around them, and that is why we call those groupings circles—as in, the Gershwin circle, or the Algonquin
—Adam Gopnik
recognition from the United States and other allies abroad. Just three months before, she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela.” But, when Donald Trump announced the operation, he did not refer to Machado, or even mention the word “democracy.” Instead, he talked about Venezuela’s huge petroleum reserves. “We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be,” he said. In the interest of stability, Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, would be left in charge.
PROFILES
María Corina Machado wants to lead Venezuela, but she’ll need Trump’s help.
BY STEPHANIA TALADRID
Observers around the world accused Trump of heedlessly toppling a foreign government, with no plan for the future. Machado, though, was careful not to issue a single criticism. Instead, she commended Trump’s “courage and vision” and took every opportunity to thank him. After arriving in Washington, this January, she handed Trump her Nobel. In exile, Machado kept working toward a vision of Venezuela that seemed increasingly elusive: a free country, with her as President. The Trump Administration has laid out a three-phase plan, entailing stabilization, recovery, and, ultimately, a political transition. But the Venezuelan government has not yet put forth a timeline for elections, much less shown a willingness to surrender power.
After the earthquakes, however, the regime seemed newly vulnerable. Despite its efforts to suppress the media, images of the destruction spread online, along with anguished calls for help. Rescue workers from around the world rushed to Venezuela but found that equipment was outdated and scarce. Fuel was in short supply, and cranes stood idle beside flattened buildings.
macho political culture, and as a wealthy conservative in a place where socialism was the national ideology. She built a following by accusing President Nicolás Maduro of waging a long-running war on his own people, including thousands of arbitrary arrests and killings. In 2024, she led her party to victory in the Presidential election, winning two-thirds of the vote. Rather than cede power, Maduro sent his security forces to attack protesters and round up opponents.
hen Venezuela was struck by a series of catastrophic earthquakes
this June, the exiled opposition leader María Corina Machado decided that she needed to return home. She had spent nearly six months in Washington, carrying on a frustrating fight over her country’s political future—and her own. But the earthquakes created a crisis too great to ignore. City streets cracked, and buildings were reduced to rubble. Hospitals were overwhelmed. It was estimated that more than a hundred thousand Venezuelans could die.
With the regime so ill-prepared, the Venezuelan people were left to gather whatever tools they could to dig their relatives and neighbors from the rubble. From D.C., Machado mobilized teams to set up aid centers. If a hospital needed a computer to read CT scans, or a rescuer was held up at the border, her people would assist. Still, Machado’s phone filled up with desperate calls. “I know that you will help us,” one elderly woman said.
After the U.S. military surged into Caracas and arrested Maduro, on January 3rd, many Venezuelans expected Machado to be the country’s new leader. She had worked insistently to secure
Machado was accustomed to managing difficult conditions. She had made a career in Venezuela as a woman in a
The morning after the earthquakes, Machado told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that she had resolved to go back.
Machado’s return would pose an urgent question, a diplomat said:“Who’s in charge?” She insisted that it was in everyone’s
PHOTOGRAPH BY JARED SOARES
Cabinet officials, Congress members on both sides of the aisle, and various benefactors. During my visit, she walked down the hallway with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah of Iran. Trump hadn’t yet declared war on Iran, but the country was roiling with protests, which had been harshly suppressed. Pahlavi and Machado posed for pictures and agreed to issue a joint statement, endorsing the “liberation of Iran and Venezuela from oppression.”
interest—including the United States’. Though there was no guarantee that the regime wouldn’t arrest her, U.S. officials acknowledged that she had a right to return.
gos going to do? Negotiate a transition while I’m behind bars?” Machado flashed a derisive look. “Help me get there. Otherwise, I’ll swim.”
Early the next day, Machado went to the Manassas Regional Airport, in Virginia, and boarded a small jet with a few aides. She planned to fly to the island of Curaçao, then proceed to Venezuela. About an hour into the flight, though, a message came through: the plane was not authorized to land in Curaçao. Machado dismissed the message, convinced that it was a misunderstanding. Then, a few minutes later, the pilot got a direct order.The plane’s landing rights had been revoked, apparently under political pressure. They had to return to Manassas at once.
achado, born in 1967, grew up during an unusually peaceful time
in Venezuela. She was the oldest of four sisters, in a prosperous Catholic family. “It was an excessively protected childhood,” she said.“I always say that I was raised on my grandmother’s lap, because we grew up in her house—one of those very old, big houses, full of people.”
Machado, fifty-eight, wore a red cashmere sweater and black pants; her brown hair hung to her shoulders. In person, as onstage, she tends to talk in absolutes. “I have a mandate from the Venezuelan people to free this country together,” she told me. “We will accept nothing less than full democracy.” Critics had described Trump’s invasion as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. “My answer is: Well, what is the basis of sovereignty?” she said. “I believe it is the will of the people.”
After decades of dictatorship, Venezuela had become a democracy, and its oil deposits made it the richest country in Latin America. Caracas built sprawling road networks, a state-ofthe-art subway system, and towering skyscrapers. Venezuelans became prodigious drinkers of Scotch. Machado’s father, Henrique, was an executive at Sivensa, the country’s largest private steel producer. As an adolescent, Machado was a regular visitor at the plant.
For Machado, it was another setback in a long campaign. She remains the most popular politician in Venezuela, but she can’t lead unless she goes back. The Trump Administration, which substantially controls the Venezuelan state, seems convinced that her return would deepen the country’s tumult—destabilizing both the regime and the United States’ aims there. “Politics is a contact sport,” James Story, the former American Ambassador to Venezuela, told me. “The regime sees Machado as an existential threat. Her return raises the question: Who’s in charge?”
In Caracas, Delcy Rodríguez had taken pains to project compliance. For decades, she had been a fierce antiimperialist, earning the nickname La Tigresa. Now she welcomed back American diplomats, and the U.S. flag was hoisted at the Embassy. Declaring a “new political moment,” she overhauled Maduro’s cabinet and stacked the government with her loyalists. Perhaps most important, she delivered more than seventy million barrels of oil to the U.S. When Trump’s Energy Secretary, Christopher Wright, visited a Venezuelan oil plant, she guided him to a table set with glass flasks full of crude. Wright held one up like a trophy, then gleefully pressed it to his lips.
In 1985, Machado enrolled at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, in Caracas. “I went from an all-women school, run by nuns, to studying engineering with only men, and many of them came from humble backgrounds,” she said. “On the first day of class, I took a desk at the very rear and kept my mouth shut.” Machado ended up becoming a student-government leader, but she never shook the feeling of being out of place—a cockroach at a hen’s ball, in the Venezuelan expression.
achado’s office in Washington sits not far from the White House, in
a nondescript building off Connecticut Avenue. When I visited, soon after she arrived in D.C., the office had a transient air.The space belonged to a lobbying group for maritime workers: paintings of sailing ships hung above Chippendalestyle furniture. Aside from some placards with slogans for her party, there was no indication of who the new occupant was. “It’s our shadow embassy,” David Smolansky, one of her advisers, told me, with a thin smile. The office was staffed with longtime Machado aides, who had left families behind in Venezuela. Most had fled the country after the 2024 election, but there were some she hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. Smolansky had escaped across the Brazilian border in 2017, dressed as a priest and carrying a Bible.
After graduating, Machado went to work at Sivensa. “I came of age with a very clear life project,” she said. “I was going to prove to my father that he never needed a male successor.” Then, in 1992, when Machado was twenty-five and pregnant with her second child, she joined her mother on a visit to a state-run shelter for troubled youth.“What we found was a children’s prison,” she said. “To make matters worse, the center bore my great-uncle’s name.”
Machado’s years in the opposition had taught her that the regime would adapt to nearly any circumstances to remain in power, but she insisted that Venezuelans wouldn’t allow it. Her tone grew defiant as she talked about Rodríguez’s Presidency. “You cannot sustain an arrangement in which the entire country is against you. ‘The people don’t matter’? The people do matter, coño,” she said, slapping the table. (Machado says “coño”—a favorite curse word—far more than you’d expect from a woman educated by nuns.) “Wait until I go back to Venezuela. What are they going to do? Throw me in jail? What are the grin-
Machado quit her job and devoted herself to improving conditions at the shelter, by starting a foundation that would bring in aid from both the private sector and the state. In time, though, she became aware that the real power was in politics. “I’ve always been obsessed with scale,” she said. “When
From the office, Machado shuttled to meetings with foreign ministers,Trump’s
you’re working in the private sector or an N.G.O., you can innovate and set benchmarks, but at some point you’re going to need the power of the state to shape public policy.”
me a thief in front of the entire country. But I will not insult you. An eagle does not hunt flies, Congresswoman.”
Machado was also more conservative than her peers, a free marketeer who warned that the country was locked in an “existential struggle” with socialism. In the 2012 Presidential primaries, she earned less than four per cent of the vote. “She was seen as a niche politician, representing a sliver of Venezuelan society,” Maryhen Jiménez, a Venezuelan political scholar, said.
hávez died of cancer in 2013, and his Vice-President, Nicolás Maduro, a
By then, the state was in upheaval. In 1998, a former paratrooper named Hugo Chávez assumed the Presidency and began remaking Venezuelan politics. In an unequal country, he built a following by promising to end poverty and redistribute wealth. At the same time, he installed a patronage system, rewrote the constitution, and repealed term limits. As part of what he called the Bolivarian revolution, he expropriated a wide swath of businesses—including several that Machado’s father had overseen.
former bus driver, took power in a contested election.Venezuela’s situation only worsened: the G.D.P. plummeted, and inflation rose thousands of percentage points. Armed government supporters took over distributing food, and shortages became part of everyday life. By 2016—the “year of hunger,” as it became known—the average Venezuelan had lost almost twenty pounds. People fled the country, in an exodus that would eventually involve a fifth of the population.
Yet her instinct for confrontation captured attention. In 2012, when Chávez was in his third term, he convened the National Assembly for a state-of-theunion address—a daylong marathon, during which politicians wandered out for coffee, cigarettes, and bathroom breaks. Machado, intent on not leaving the room, sat and stared at the President.
Maduro insisted that the crisis was the invention of imperialist élites, and dismissed complaints by saying, “Enough with the whining.” What money reached the state’s coffers was distributed among a select few, leaving little to pay for social programs. “The regime understood that it could only hold on to power through repression,” Génesis Dávila, a Venezuelan human-rights lawyer, said. Pro-Maduro militias terrorized protesters on the streets. Opponents of the government were imprisoned, forced into exile, or banned from public office. Machado’s outspokenness made her a target, and the regime repeatedly threatened to seize her house. Out of concern for her children’s safety, she had arranged for them to leave Venezuela while she stayed behind. “I had to choose—either take care of my children as a mother or serve my country as a congresswoman,” she told me. “The only way I could do both was by separating from my children.”
For more than a decade, Chávez kept winning elections. As it became clear that his government had rigged the sys-
At one point, she rose and spoke to Chávez indignantly.“We’ve spent eight hours listening to you describe a country far removed from the reality that Venezuelan women and mothers are living,” she said.“There are women, mothers, who go to corner stores and supermarkets and end up fighting over a single litre of milk.” She went on, “How can you claim to respect the private sector in Venezuela when you’ve dedicated yourself to expropriation—which is to say, stealing?” As boos and catcalls resounded in the room, Machado told Chávez, “Your time is up.”
Among the opposition, Machado was an outlier. She was seen as too strident, too radical to appeal to votersand she was a woman. “We’d walk into meetings, and politicians would literally clutch their left ball, because a woman had entered the room,” Magalli Meda, a longtime Machado adviser, said.
There was a tense silence, before Chávez said, “You’re out of your league debating me.” He went on, “You called
During a legislative session after Chávez’s death, the head of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, demanded that the opposition recognize Maduro as the President. When they protested, a group of chavistas attacked. They beat and kicked Machado and her colleagues, while Cabello looked on with a mocking expression. Machado was taken to the hospital for surgery. Afterward, her face was so swollen that her daughter, Ana Corina, could barely recognize her.
Finally, in 2015, the opposition had a short-lived victory: it won the National Assembly, securing two-thirds of the seats. Maduro reclaimed control by sim-
“Your generation is so entitled.” ply creating a separate legislature of loy-
lesson from the failed attempt at regime change.“It weighed heavily,” a longtime operative in U.S.-Venezuela relations told me. “The Americans thought, We gave the opposition everything, and they still couldn’t govern. We’re not going to make the same mistake again.”
alists. By then, Machado had started her own party, Vente Venezuela, and she found herself increasingly at odds with the coalition’s more moderate voices. “She is a difficult person—authoritarian, intolerant, sharply critical—and she won’t let her arm be twisted,” Margarita López Maya, a prominent historian, said. In 2017, Machado decided to break away from the coalition. “People kept saying, ‘You’re dividing the opposition!’ ” she told me. Yet, she argued, “the same mistakes were repeated over and over. What was the regime seeking? Money, time, legitimacy—but, above all else, time.”
gave Trump a pointed reminder of the campaign: a rosary, one of thousands that her followers had pressed into her hands.
That campaign season had begun with the opposition in disarray, as the government banned leading candidates. With the national mood desperate, López Maya said, “Machado’s radicalism became what made her successful.” She travelled the country in a two-car caravan, crawling up on the roof of her car at campaign stops. At rallies, audience members poured out grievances,
his January 15th, just after midday, Machado went to visit the White
House, with a Venezuelan-flag pin on her lapel. She entered through the building’s west side—typically reserved for staff and service personnelfor a closed-door meeting with Trump. Afterward, she joined the President for lunch, alongside Rubio, J. D. Vance, and the chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
and she began to share the mike. “People would jostle to the front and tell me their stories—things of such intimacy that I kept wondering, How can this person be saying this out loud?”
The following year, Maduro claimed victory in an election beset by fraud. The prevailing sense among opposition members was that they had exhausted all routes to change: political campaigns, hunger strikes, more than a dozen rounds of negotiations. López Maya described waves of demonstrations that “yielded no tangible results other than deaths in the streets. Each time, the repression grew worse. Venezuelans came to feel that only a powerful external actor could change the situation.”
Machado had an ally in Rubio, who described her as “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism.” Their relationship dated back to his time as a U.S. senator representing Florida. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, urged a hard-line response to thechavistas and argued that an intervention would serve America’s national-security interests. In the lead-up to January 3rd, his office had been in contact with Machado’s team, which presented a plan for how democracy could be restored after the regime was dismantled. But, when Rodríguez was installed, he made no public protest. He went on to consolidate his influence in Caracas, becoming known as “the viceroy of Venezuela.”
For a politician of the center right, Machado’s campaign was surprisingly reminiscent of a guerrilla effort. The regime banned
her from running for office, so she designated a stand-in: Corina Yoris, a respected academic who shared her given name. “Our goal was to make people feel that it was still her,” Meda, her adviser, said.
The opposition coalesced around the thirty-five-year-old head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, insisting that he was the rightful President. Trump and Rubio threw support behind the effort. They helped secure funding and international recognition for Guaidó and, as the crisis deepened, dispatched military planes with relief supplies to a town across the Colombian border. In response, Maduro sent soldiers to block their entry. The relief effort fizzled, and Trump’s attention drifted away. Soon, Maduro cracked down on Guaidó’s inner circle, and the opposition submitted to another round of inconclusive talks.
When the government banned Yoris, too, opposition leaders urged Machado to consider a more agreeable replacement; they’d cleared a list with Maduro officials. Machado refused. “The regime isn’t going to pick our candidate,” she said. Instead, she selected as her proxy a seventy-four-year-old diplomat named Edmundo González Urrutia. At campaign events, she carried a poster with González’s image, and declared, “If you want to vote for me, vote for him.”
At the White House, Machado argued that Venezuela was “a country in a state of upheaval, long repressed through fear and terror.” She had told the Administration that she didn’t need money. But, she said, people’s expectations had to be “channelled in a civic and orderly manner” by assuring them that “ultimately this will be resolved through the exercise of popular sovereignty.”
Machado, who had initially endorsed Guaidó, watched his unravelling with dismay. In 2020, she issued a public letter, saying,“The country gave you a task that you’ve been either unable or unwilling to fulfill.”When I saw her in Washington, she talked about what she had learned from the episode. Guaidó’s movement had secured international help before securing its base, she said, but “we understood it had to be the other way around—first the legitimacy from the Venezuelan people and then the international support.”
Maduro disrupted her appearances by seizing sound systems or shutting down electricity. At times, on her way to an event, Machado found heavy machinery tearing up the ground, or tractors piling soil in the road. She learned to get out of her car and walk, and people began following her, clearing the debris with their hands. “The regime didn’t realize that they were turning it into a collective epic,” she said.
Machado’s implication was that if she couldn’t stand for election, the country might fall apart. But some Administration officials worried that she didn’t have enough support in the military to hold power. Others thought that she was too uncompromising to reconcile with her enemies. Machado’s most potent argument was her victory in the Presidential elections in 2024. As a parting gesture, she
One day, driving through the western part of the country, Machado stopped at a restaurant off the highway. “A waiter came running over,” she recalled. “He
Trump apparently took a different
hugged me and said, ‘María Corina, I’m your campaign manager in the village next door!’” Perplexed, she asked, “Who appointed you?” The man replied, “I did!”
handle themilitares guarding the premises. Everyone’s identity was kept anonymous. Only a handful of people knew the full details of the operation.
people to take to the streets and denounce the regime’s fraud.
By then, though, Maduro’s armed loyalists had begun delivering on his promise to unleash a “bloodbath” if he lost. Thousands of people were arrested, beaten, or killed. As Machado led a demonstration in Caracas, a member of her team approached. The regime was investigating the opposition, and rumors were swirling that Machado would be arrested. “You need to go into hiding,” the person said.
Villalobos asked Machado for one big purchase: a hundred and sixty Starlink antennas. The antennas represented a quarter of the campaign budget at the time—but, Villalobos noted, vast areas of Venezuela did not have a reliable internet signal. Antennas were bought in Caracas, or smuggled in from Colombia, packed in with produce and livestock on trucks or hidden in suitcases on buses. They were shipped across the country, under the name of José Gregorio Hernández—a Venezuelan saint and a common name on the voter rolls.
The waiter explained that there was no party office in his village, so he’d started one himself. The encounter inspired an idea: the creation of comanditos, small units of citizens that could serve as informal party representatives. Machado’s team wound up registering nearly seventy thousand such groups. At campaign stops, Machado encouraged people to announce the names that they’d selected for their comanditos. In conservative places like Mérida, the names tended toward Holy Virgin and the Trinity. Then, Machado recalled, she showed up at Maracaibo, where the locals are famously profane. “And it was Son of the Big Bitch! I’d tell them, ‘Coño, I can’t say these namesnot during children’s hours.’ ”
n the next year and a half, Machado relocated more than a dozen times,
taking refuge in people’s homes. While she was in hiding, Maduro ordered security forces to employ “an iron fist.” People close to Machado were tortured and questioned about her whereabouts, and state agents ransacked El Bejucal, searching for clues. “They were gradually closing in on me,” Machado said. Still, she kept communicating with supporters on social media. “You are not alone—they are,” she said. “There has already been a change of regime.” She maintained contacts with allies, headlining conferences and holding virtual meetings.The day after Rubio was sworn in, he phoned Machado, whom he called the Venezuelan Iron Lady.
On election day, staffers gathered at Machado’s campaign headquarters, a small brick house known as El Bejucal. When the polls closed, at six o’clock, thousands of actas started pouring in. Less than an hour later, though, the flow dwindled to a trickle. “What the hell is going on?” a campaign staffer said.
s election day approached, the regime ordered the leaders of
Machado’s campaign to be arrested for plotting against the government, and a group of them took refuge at the Argentinean Embassy. One was Humberto Villalobos, an authority on the regime’s subversion of electoral systems who had been tasked with figuring out how to expose Maduro’s tactics. “Fraud leaves traces,” he told me. “If you know what to look for, you can build a stronger defense.”
As it turned out, witnesses were being denied access to the actas, and in some cases violently ejected. At midnight, the regime made a pronouncement: Maduro had won, with fifty-one per cent of the vote. No precinct-level results or specific vote counts were released. Machado rushed out a statement: “Venezuela has a new President- elect, and it is Edmundo González Urrutia,” she said. “We will defend the truth.” Then she picked up the phone to rally people trying to retrieve the actas.
When Machado was awarded the Nobel, in October, 2025, she received the news with both excitement and trepidation. Her youngest sister, Clara, remembered being on the phone with her and their two sisters:“We were all, like, ‘This is wonderful!’ And she kept saying, ‘I’m not so sure.’” Machado knew that Trump coveted the award. “From the start, she said, ‘What matters to me is how this will affect the only ally that we have,’” Clara recalled.
In Venezuelan elections, each voting machine prints out an acta—a document enumerating the votes cast for each candidate. By law, candidates are allowed to register one electoral witness per voting machine, and each is entitled to an acta. Villalobos’s team concocted a plan: every witness would pass her acta to an accomplice, who’d snap a photograph to send to Machado’s headquarters. A driver would convey the acta to an intermediary, who would take it to a safe location, where a team with a generator and a scanner could make a high-definition copy.
Not long afterward, the doorbell rang at El Bejucal. On the doorstep, a visibly shaken visitor said, “No one can know that I’m here.” The person described being at the National Electoral Council offices when votes were being counted, and said that, as the opposition’s numbers increased, “they shut everything down.”
To accept the prize, Machado first had to figure out how to get out of Venezuela. The Trump Administration recommended seeking help from Bryan Stern, an American military veteran who runs an outfit called Grey Bull Rescue. On December 5th, five days before the ceremony, Machado’s team got in touch with Stern, who agreed to facilitate an escape.
Yet the 600K conspirators kept working, at times with help from the militares. Early the next morning, the number of submitted actas began to rise. The count would eventually surpass eighty per cent—a mathematical point of no return. Even if Maduro won every remaining vote, the opposition could still prove a landslide victory. Soon, Machado shared the results online, and urged
The project was dubbed “600K,” for the number of people who would have to take part. At trainings—held online, and in kitchens, basements, and alleyways—people were taught what to do if they were denied an acta, and how to
Maduro’s regime was “full shields up,” Stern told me—there were checkpoints on all the major roads. He needed to throw the chavistas off the trail. “I know
what they consider to be a reliable source,” he said.“So we fed them.”The plotters circulated rumors that Machado had fled east, through Guyana. Instead, she headed to a marshy beach on the country’s western coast, Stern recalled. After dark, she boarded a skiff manned by two fishermen, who were instructed to travel to a point in the middle of the sea, about fifteen miles from shore.
Stern predicted that the trip would take less than three hours. But, when his crew got to the meeting place, the fishing boat wasn’t there, and calls to Machado weren’t going through. The waves were rough that night—as high as ten feet. Stern knew that, in such conditions, the boat might not be able to use its radar effectively, and there was virtually no moonlight to navigate by. He deliberated with his crew: What if her skiff had already passed in the dark? What if it had sunk?
Finally, one of their calls went through to Machado, who said, “We don’t have the slightest clue where we are.” The fishermen had lost G.P.S. signal hours earlier, and had been drifting. The two teams agreed on a new rendezvous point. A few hours later, Stern saw the skiff swing into view, and shone his flashlight toward it: there was Machado, drenched to the bone. In the rough conditions, she’d suffered a bad fall. Now she felt like a rod had been dug into her spine.
sample actas were exhibited in a glass case—they had been smuggled out of Venezuela by volunteers.
of Rubio’s plan, stabilization, was done, he said. But phase two, recovery, was still in progress, and required “getting oilindustry revenues flowing back in again.”
Venezuela has an estimated seventeen per cent of the world’s untapped oil, but these resources were plundered and mismanaged for decades. After Maduro’s capture, the Trump Administration pressed Rodríguez to pass a hydrocarbons law that incorporated longstanding demands from oil companies. Still, there have been only modest investments, mainly from companies like Chevron, which has been operating there for years. For many potential investors, an underlying concern is how long the Americans would enforce a receptive environment. “It’s not enough for the United States to simply say, ‘Invest,’ ” Luisa Palacios, a Venezuelan expert at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said. “I don’t believe real recovery—economic or national—is possible without a political transition.”
n Washington this April, Representative María Elvira Salazar led an of-
fensive on Machado’s behalf. Salazar represents a district in Miami-Dade County, not far from the one that Rubio represented when he was a state legislator. South Florida has a large population of Venezuelan immigrants—a stridently anti-chavista voting bloc that many politicians see as crucial to winning elections.
In Oslo, the atmosphere was tense. The Nobel Committee was used to dealing with absent laureates, but it had never waited while a laureate escaped. “It pushed the Norwegians into a situation they never could’ve imagined, given how rule-bound they are,” Meda said. “Two months earlier, they were obsessing over whether she had a peanut allergy or preferred her napkin on the right.”
In Congress, a State Department official named Michael Kozak had been brought in to testify about the post-Maduro future. Salazar, a fierce interrogator, chided him about leaving Rodríguez in charge. “We do not like Delcy,” she said. “Delcy is part of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” She asked whether the Administration had a date for new Presidential elections, and whether it would protect Machado if she went back.
By the time Machado reached Oslo, she’d missed the ceremony—but she was reunited with her family, for the first time in two years. Outside the Grand Hotel, a crowd of Venezuelans assembled to see her. Around two in the morning, Machado stepped onto the balcony to thunderous applause. She looked strikingly pale, and wore a heavy-lidded expression. She had fractured a vertebra on the journey. “Valiente, valiente!” the crowd chanted. A few blocks away, ten
This spring, Machado spoke at CeraWeek, an energy conference in Houston. From a ballroom stage, she addressed the crowd in the tones of a startup founder pitching investors. “I am here to speak about our future—a future which is extraordinary,” she declared. “And I want all of you to be part of it.” The
Kozak said,“We expect all the people—including María Corina Machado, who I also respect very much—to be able to go back and participate.” First, though, there were “milestones” that needed to be reached. The initial phase
Chigi Palace. In Madrid, she held a rally that drew more than ten thousand supporters to a vast square at the heart of the city. Onstage, she proclaimed, “We Venezuelans are sending a clear message to the world: Venezuela will be free, because that is what we Venezuelans have chosen!”
Not long afterward, she summoned the leaders of the main opposition parties to a meeting in Panama City, where they issued a manifesto declaring her the “steward of the country’s democratic process.” Yet people in Venezuela saw few indications of an incipient transition. López Maya, the historian, noted that after the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez died, in the thirties, prison gates were opened. “Political prisoners ran out to the sea and threw their shackles in the water,” she said. Since Maduro was deposed, only one detention center has ceased operations. Hundreds of political prisoners remain in custody. And, though Rodríguez passed a law offering amnesty to dissidents, the language seems designed to exclude Machado and her allies.
“I also treat my body like a temple—an ancient structure in desperate need of repair, long ignored and of rapidly decreasing significance to a largely indifferent society.”
Venezuelans often compare the regime to a hydra, with only one of its heads chopped off. The chavistas still control the country’s institutions, including the Supreme Court and the National Electoral Council. Diosdado Cabello, who spent years overseeing Maduro’s apparatus of repression, remains in the cabinet. Despite having a twenty-fivemillion-dollar U.S. bounty on his head, Cabello has participated in meetings with Trump officials, whom he has called “the real pirates of the Caribbean.” His language toward the opposition has been no less scathing. After the 2024 election, he declared, “Los vamos a joder”—“We’re going to fuck them.”
country’s oil production could quintuple, she said—if the right leader was in charge. She vowed to usher in “clear rules, stable conditions, and a legitimate, democratic government you can really rely on.”There’d be a new, independent hydrocarbon agency, and royalties would be kept low.The “Venezuelan state will get out of the way,” she promised.
ela’s resources. Those interests override everything else.”
Rodríguez’s advocates include Richard Grenell, who, as Trump’s representative, held negotiations with the regime before Maduro’s ouster, and Harry Sargeant, a prominent Republican donor who recently began exporting Venezuelan crude. Perhaps most significant is Mauricio Claver Carone, who previously served as Trump’s special envoy to Latin America and remains hugely influential. Carone, who has been described as the “Jared Kushner of Latin America,” manages a private-equity fund, and is said to be promoting his own interests in Venezuela. (Carone denies having any investments in the country.) The longtime operative said, “There’s an economic clique whose priority is to extract as much money as possible before Trump leaves office, and that means keeping Delcy in power.”
The consensus at CeraWeek was that Machado had made an enticing case, Francisco Monaldi, the director of Rice University’s Latin America Energy Program, told me. But executives were skeptical that she would have a chance to prove herself anytime soon. The Trump Administration has control of Venezuela’s oil revenues, and has authorized the disbursement of more than six billion dollars to Rodríguez’s government, according to a senior U.S. official.
In recent months, the regime has worked to displace Machado from the public consciousness. After a television network aired a clip of her promising to return to Venezuela, Cabello threatened retribution. “Machado is running out of options,” he said on his weekly TV show, “Beat Them with a Club,” adding, “Her room to maneuver is shrinking at breakneck speed.” In Caracas, the government has hung posters depicting Rodríguez on a blue backdrop, a color associated with the opposition, alongside the words “Delcy, move ahead, you have my trust.”
In the meantime, Rodríguez has been solidifying her influence in Washington—hiring a lobbyist and cultivating people who might benefit from stalling a transition. “No one in the Republican Party wants to talk about elections,” a Republican aide told me. “Many people are thirsty for Venezu-
hroughout the spring, Machado made appearances at which she was
treated almost like a head of state. She met with Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée and with Giorgia Meloni at the
Yet the earthquakes exposed the re-
Machado’s voice. She has characterized her return as “a stabilizing force.” But it is also possible that conflicts over who is the rightful leader of Venezuela will inspire violence—particularly from the supporters of the regime, who have the majority of the country’s guns. Even Machado has argued that if “there is growing anxiety that the regime might prevail unchecked, the risk increases that the situation could become chaotic.”
gime’s precarity. It took the government roughly seventy-two hours to dispatch rescuers to La Guaira, where the damage was most severe. And, when the military was eventually deployed, the most visible intervention was thousands of armed men controlling traffic and standing idly by the ruins. In a visit to a stricken area, Rodríguez was booed and shouted down. She had dismissed the criticism of her government as the product of a “media laboratory.” But a recent poll showed that more than ninety per cent of Venezuelans disapproved of her leadership. Even Trump, who was the most popular politician in Venezuela after Maduro’s arrest, has seen his ratings slide.
some real part of her agency to the United States. For nearly half a year now, the Administration has been stalling her return; at one point, Trump officials offered to have her named Secretary-General of the United Nations. Meanwhile, the longtime operative said, “Trump uses the María Corina issue to keep Delcy on her toes—‘Don’t get too comfortable, because at any moment I can send María Corina after you.’” Recently, the Administration announced that Rodríguez had agreed to talks with a group of opposition figures. But, instead of including Machado, the U.S. promoted another exiled leader, Dinorah Figuera, who is seen as more conciliatory.
As if to convince herself, Machado repeated one of her most fundamental ideas. “The people do matter,” she said. “And I was, in fact, elected. I have what’s most valuable—people’s trust.”
Recent polls show that Machado is the only politician whom a majority of Venezuelans support. In private, Rubio has promised that elections would take place—but did not commit to a date. In Machado’s absence, the Venezuelan opposition has been hobbled, as the accommodationists try, with little success, to effect change from the inside. Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, is essentially just a vehicle for her. It isn’t registered officially; the National Electoral Council never accepted the applications. “If Machado fades politically, there’s very little chance of democratization,” López Maya said.
Initial estimates show that the earthquakes caused more than six billion dollars in damage. For Benigno Alarcón, a prominent political analyst in Caracas, the flow of recovery funds presented opportunities for corruption. “This is where the rush for spoils begins,” he said. “And there lies the fatal mistake of moving forward without institutions.” Alarcón went on, “A tragedy of this magnitude could have given Rodríguez’s government an opportunity to earn some legitimacy through its actions, despite lacking legitimacy at the start.” Instead, the regime had floundered. “White House officials must be asking themselves whether it is even possible to rebuild the country with these people still in power,” he said.
As Machado prepared to return to Venezuela after the earthquake, Trump evidently set aside his reservations. He called Rodríguez and told her not to allow Machado to be harmed. But then her flight was diverted, apparently on orders from someone in the Administration. Though Machado’s U.S. counterparts assured her that it was all a misunderstanding, the longtime operative described it as the result of infighting. “There are factions regarding Venezuela,” he said. “And the faction that’s winning today says, Don’t rock the boat between now and November.”
In Panama, Machado was still insisting on her version of political reality. She said that she remained in contact with Trump’s people, but didn’t address the underlying question of why the Administration hadn’t interceded on her behalf. I asked if she had ever doubted the Americans’ commitment to democracy in Venezuela. “The Secretary of State has repeatedly assured me of it, and I take him at his word,” she said.
The day after her flight was grounded, Machado flew to Panama City, planning to catch a plane from there to Venezuela. Before she could board, an official from the airline called and told her that Rodríguez’s government had threatened to revoke its license if she were allowed on the plane. Machado issued a frustrated message to followers. “I will be in Venezuela so we can mourn our losses together, pray together, hold one another, and organize ourselves,” she insisted. “I will do whatever it takes for us to be together.”
The Administration remained committed to Rodríguez, at least in public. The U.S. chargé d’affaires in Caracas, John Barrett, defended her handling of the disaster, noting that her government had been “fully compliant” with the United States. Even as an estimated fifty-thousand Venezuelans are missing, Barrett chose to emphasize that the oil industry remained intact, and that “production continues.” When protesters gathered outside the U.S. Embassy, Barrett asked to have them cleared away. Story, the American diplomat, said,“Unless democracy is restored soon, we’re just working towards a more profitable authoritarian regime.”
When I asked whether her current situation could have been prevented, she shot back, “What situation?”
Not long afterward, I reached Machado at a hotel in Panama.The rescue efforts in Venezuela were flagging. Morgues were at capacity, so corpses had been laid in a parking lot, then moved to a seaport, where the stench of death hung heavy. Thousands of families continued to search for loved ones, with little help. “This earthquake shook the foundations of everything,” Machado said. “It caused all the masks to fall away.”
“The limbo of being in Panama, unable to enter Venezuela,” I said.
“I’m not in limbo,” she countered. “I’m in the middle of a process, like so many times before, working harder than ever, coördinating with our people, leveraging support from all over the world.” The only uncertainty she would allow was around a question of efficiency. “When we look back,” she said, “we may find that there was a faster way to carry this through.”
ll along, Machado has maintained that Trump’s vision for Venezuela
is aligned with hers—a claim that seems harder and harder to sustain. In promoting an intervention, she yielded
There was a note of exhaustion in
lissa gave Steve a familiar look.“We were in our early forties,” he told me. “We were tired. But Hannah said they were talking about termination.” They decided to adopt the baby.That made ten.
LETTER FROM TENNESSEE
The Eimers bunch enjoyed playing Uno—the Ukrainian boys learned the game before they understood Englishand walking to local waterfalls together. Hannah was a generous older sister. She’d contributed to the cost of her siblings’ adoptions by putting on magic shows, and, once they arrived, gave up her own bedroom. She was bright, curious, cheerful, and easily fixated on unusual things, another quality she shared with her dad. “She’d sing at the top of her lungs in Walmart to test societal norms,” Steve told me. She trawled thrift stores and worked at the mall as an Easter bunny. By twelve, she was reading Tolstoy. By fifteen, she’d matriculated at a local community college. The summer after her freshman year, she interned on the set of a Burt Reynolds film. She wanted to work in costume design one day.
Few people know guardrails can be deadly. Steve Eimers wants to fix them all.
BY CHARLES BETHEA
Melissa remembers watching Hannah dress up for a party on Halloween in 2016. She was going as an obscure character from a live-action role-playing game. Hannah had told her parents that the party was in Athens, and at first they had assumed she meant Athens, Tennessee, about forty minutes away. But the party was actually in Athens, Georgia: a four-hour drive.That night, Hannah and a friend set out in Hannah’s Volvo S80, a car her father had picked because it had a good safety rating. “I remember it like a snapshot,” Melissa told me. “Hannah putting on red lipstick and a white shirt, looking in the mirror across the hall. She was super chipper. It was a singsongy goodbye.”
quiring goats and chickens. Soon, they had two more children. Steve had always imagined that he’d adopt one day, and, when their kids were growing up, he travelled to Eastern Europe with their church to donate supplies to orphanages. In 2007, he and Melissa went to Ukraine, where they met children who, he said, “were going to get trafficked or conscripted—who had no chance.” The couple came back with three boys. They had another biological son a few years later. That made seven. Steve thought that was plenty, but, in 2013, he and Melissa heard about a pair of siblings in northern Tennessee, ages nine and thirteen, whose parents were opioid addicts, and so the family took them in, too. Then, in 2016, a friend of Hannah’s accidentally became pregnant, and Me-
teve Eimers met Melissa Falk at Bethel Baptist Christian Academy,
in upstate New York, when she was a senior and he was a junior transfer student. Steve, the son of a local preacher, bet a classmate that he’d be dating Melissa by Christmas; to expedite the process, he superglued his hand to hers in class. He lost the bet, but still managed to win her over. They married in 1996. Their first child, Hannah, arrived three years later. She had her father’s blue eyes, and, as she grew up, his sympathy for outcasts and his love of J. R. R. Tolkien became hers, too.
In the early hours of November 1st, Hannah was driving home when her Volvo drifted off Interstate 75 and collided with a steel guardrail. She was sober and was going under the speed limit but was tired—she’d nodded off, apparently, as her friend slept in the passenger seat. Hannah’s car hit a safety feature known as a terminal end, a blackand-yellow-striped rectangular box at the end of the rail, designed to absorb kinetic energy. In a collision like this, the terminal end should give way and slide along the metal strip of the rail, slowing the car down and forcing the
Steve and Melissa homeschooled Hannah. They had moved to eastern Tennessee in 2001, for lower taxes and more land. Steve started a windowwashing business, and they began ac-
PHOTOGRAPH BY GABRIEL MCCURDY
thousand miles through twenty-five states to inspect guardrails.“I can identify types of guardrails from satellite view,” he told me.“It’s urban bushcraft.” He documents many of these inspections on his YouTube channel, best known by its handle, @TheGuardrailGuy, where he posts videos of himself roaming the country with calipers, a six-foot level, and an eye for backward bolts and loose cable anchors. The videos, which he broadcasts to some quarter of a million subscribers, have an endearingly unvarnished quality. In a typical one, Eimers might choke up; break down a complicated concept in physics; quote one of his favorite film protagonists, the bumbling shopping-mall security guard Paul Blart; or utter an adopted Southern colloquialism such as “dadgummit.”
rail to curl up before it. Instead, this guardrail tore through the Volvo and cut Hannah’s body in half.
Tarts “all over Interstate 640.” He uses this material to work the press. Jennifer Titus, a Tampa Bay TV reporter, has done dozens of stories with Eimers, and remembers the first call she got from him. “I had no clue what he was talking about,” she told me. “I said, ‘Look, can you just find me a dozen improperly installed guardrails on Florida roads?’” The next day, he sent her a list of seventy; Titus confirmed their dangers independently. “The state reinspected all the guardrails in Florida as a result of our inquiry,” she said. “He files as many open-record requests as I do.”
Steve was filling a coffee mug, preparing to go deer-hunting, when Hannah’s friend’s mother called to tell him there had been an accident. (The friend was unscathed.) When he reached the authorities, they said that no emergency transport had been dispatched to the scene. Steve understood that this meant there had been no doubt that Hannah was dead. He and Melissa got in their car and drove toward the crash site, but stopped midway. “I lay down in a Walmart parking lot,” Steve told me. “I couldn’t move. Our pastors came and picked us off the ground and took us home.” Eventually, Steve collected some of Hannah’s hair from the Volvo’s back seat. Months later, Tennessee’s Department of Transportation mailed the Eimers household a bill for three thousand dollars, asking Hannah to pay for the guardrail that killed her. (The agency eventually apologized, claiming that there had been “a mistake somewhere in processing.”)
“I know I’m not normal,” Eimers told me. “I’m one of those people who count ceiling tiles. My weird brain latched on to guardrails, and it won’t let go.” A guardrail-company executive recently told me, “Steve evolved from a grieving father to a vindictive-seeming father to a credible individual to the Erin Brockovich of the guardrail industry.” He went on, “He’s in the top ten per cent of the most knowledgeable people in the room at a meeting of guardrail experts.”
Melissa is astounded that he has so many fans. She finds the minutiae of guardrails “extremely boring.” While she sleeps, Eimers stares at images of guardrails across the world, checking for fatal flaws. Faulty rails spring from his memory the way other people recall bad dates. He told me about a rusted-out guardrail in Townsend, Tennessee, with a mouse living inside of it that bit his finger, and a guardrail in rural Georgia from the fifties that was missing eighty-five bolts. He continued, “I once walked from Constitution Avenue to the White House and found that the five guardrails closest to the President were installed with random parts. They still are.”
n a Saturday in early March, I met Eimers on the shoulder of a four-
ne day not long after Hannah’s death, Steve Eimers felt an urge to
lane highway outside Lenoir City, Tennessee, the town near Knoxville where he and his family live. Many of his neighbors were fishing for crappie. But for Eimers, who is fifty, it was a big day: he was going to meet his congressman, Tim Burchett, whom he’d been lobbying about guardrails since 2017. As I approached, Eimers, in jeans, a reflective vest, and a cap that read “Guardrail Guy,” was looking at a steel rail a few feet from the blacktop.The rail, he said, had been damaged by“reckless pounding.” He recalled Trump’s rhetoric about bureaucratic obstacles to solving relatively simple problems. “We have the President talking about ‘the speed of Trump’ and ‘we’re going to break down these walls,’” he said. “Well, break down these walls, for crying out loud!” Soon, Burchett pulled up in an oversized pickup with expired tags. He is a sixty-one-year-old MAGA conservative who lives on a farm and builds longboards from scrap wood. Wearing a suit, seemingly against his will, he offered Eimers a fist bump. “Hey, dude,” he said turning to me.
look up “guardrail crashes” on the internet, and discovered hundreds of news stories about cases where people had been maimed or killed when striking them. He learned that what happened to Hannah occurred often enough that the guardrail world has a term for it: “spearing.” As he carried out more research, he also came to believe that the guardrail involved in Hannah’s crash was defective. In 2017, he filed a wrongfuldeath suit against Lindsay Corporation, the manufacturer of the rail, alleging that it did not follow federal and state guidelines for the design of guardrails, and that, because the company had failed to provide adequate instructions, the rail had been improperly installed. The suit was settled in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. (The settlement terms prohibit Eimers from discussing what was wrong with the rail involved in Hannah’s crash.) After that, Eimers shut down his window-washing business and began to focus full time on a new mission: preventing anyone else from dying the way Hannah did.
Based on his research, Eimers believes that there are about a thousand guardrail-related deaths each year in the U.S.—virtually all of them preventableand tens of thousands of miles of dangerous guardrails presently on the country’s roads. He maintains an extensive archive of research, which includes a record of every time a President mentions guardrails (as Donald Trump did in 2018, when he remarked on a “sucker” guardrail: “I want to hire whoever their salesman is . . . that is the worst crap”). In what Eimers calls a “master impalement log,” he keeps lists of various kinds of crashes—crashes involving the brand that killed his daughter, crashes involving a rail installed upside down or backward, crashes involving celebrities. Also “oddities,” as when “a truck full of PopTarts hits a guardrail days after the inventor of Pop-Tarts dies,” leaving Pop-
To the casual observer, which is to say virtually everyone, a guardrail is just
Eimers has since driven some forty
safety features that we consider standard now were afterthoughts. “A lot of people felt you should not light highwaysthat it was distracting—and that a nice wide median was all you needed between opposing lanes,” Earl Swift, the author of “The Big Roads,” a history of America’s highways, told me.“So these things, like guardrails, came along piecemeal.”
a long wavy strip of steel, about a foot wide, set thirty inches or so off the ground, which keeps a car from going off the road. But, in reality, guardrails are carefully calibrated systems of interlocking parts, every one of which is critical to its function. They rely on complex physics to insure that a car that hits the end of a guardrail doesn’t get impaled, and that a car that hits it from the side can’t crash through. Some guardrail injuries result from antiquated designs, or designs that manufacturers know to be dangerous. Others result from botched installation.
around the back, to what the family calls Hannah’s Garden, a little pergola featuring painted references to some of her favorite things—Dorothy’s ruby-red pumps from “The Wizard of Oz,” the time machine from the TV show “Doctor Who”—alongside a typewriter and a ukulele. “There wasn’t a whole lot to bury,” Eimers said, before he turned away and began to cry.
The earliest guardrails, constructed in the thirties and forties, basically resembled those of today. But their blunt ends, which did not release upon impact, were even more deadly. In 1932, as the Times noted, in one of many such stories, a sailor on furlough died when his Ford V8 Tudor “impaled itself” on a Nebraskan rail. Among the earliest proposed solutions was the turndown guardrail, which, instead of ending abruptly, gradually slopes downward into the ground.
he term “highway” can be traced back to Old English, and originally
referred to elevated Roman thoroughfares. In the U.S., the word came into circulation around the start of the twentieth century, to denote roads that were grander and more adaptable than rural post routes, which were maintained by the government, or the longer, privately funded thoroughfares known as “auto trails.” In 1921, the Federal Aid Highway Act gave the word an official definition, subjecting it to regulation. At that point, the country had some nine million touring cars, including the popular Ford Model T, which could reach a white-knuckling forty miles per hour. Road surfaces were disconcertingly variable—dirt was most common, but pebbles, bricks, and creosote-soaked wooden blocks were also used. There was no overarching plan connecting the states. As a later report put it, the Federal Aid Highway Act aimed to, at minimum, “get the farmer ‘out of the mud.’”
Eimers directed Burchett’s attention to the rail he had been looking at, and pointed out that it had a misshapen post, which had probably been damaged during installation. In a head-on crash, posts like these and their special bolt notches should release the rail, causing it to curl up like ribbon beside the vehicle. “I call this the LeBron James post, because when it’s hit, it has to flop over,” Eimers told Burchett, who stared silently. This one, Eimers went on, was unlikely to do that, because of the bludgeoning of the post and the placement of the bolts. Many guardrails, he added, are even more messed up. In 2022, Eimers bought a few thousand stickers with an arrow and the words “THIS SIDE UP” on them, which he then slapped on guardrails installed backward or upside down. He made a video of the stickers, which has been viewed sixteen million times; a major guardrail manufacturer, Valtir, subsequently produced an installation sticker of its own.
In March, Eimers and I visited Dean Sicking, a mechanical engineer and an inventor, who has contributed to almost every major guardrail innovation of the past four decades. Sicking, a bearded and bespectacled sixty-eight-year-old, lives with his wife in Birmingham, Alabama, in a large French-country-style house. Sitting in his kitchen, he remarked, dryly, that the turndown was “a brilliant idea, apart from one thing.” Where it had prevented the possibility of spearing, it introduced a new problem: the launch. “It’s like ‘The Dukes of Hazzard,’” Eimers explained.
Thirty-five years later, President Dwight Eisenhower signed another
Sicking has designed and patented groundbreaking safety technologies for football (helmets), equestrian sports (helmets), and hockey (boards). In 2007, President George W. Bush honored him with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, which hung on one of the walls in his kitchen. Guardrails have proved to be his greatest challenge. He began working on them in 1980, when he was a junior researcher at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Using data from General Motors, he started to predict accident rates, and came to believe that safety was a tractable problem. “Our basic philosophy was that running off the road shouldn’t carry a death sentence,” he said.
Eimers wants the government to do more to encourage good corporate behavior. “They’ve abdicated their role to a guy from rural East Tennessee with
major highway act, which would create more than forty thousand miles of federal highway—still the largest publicworks campaign in American history. As cars and roads multiplied, accidents began to pile up; by the mid-sixties, there were more than fifty thousand fatal highway accidents per year. The automobile industry downplayed the dangerous designs of vehicles and pointed to unsafe drivers instead. Many of the highway-
Today’s guardrails are designed to absorb or redirect collisions coming from angles of less than twenty-five degrees, as the overwhelming majority of
After the meeting, Eimers and I drove to his house, where I met Melissa, who was fixing sweet tea, and a few of their children. Then we walked
guardrail crashes do. When a vehicle hits the face of the rail—the side you see when driving past—the rail should bend but not break, holding tension, like hockey boards or seat belts. This prevents the car from crashing through the rail—known as “gating”—or flying over it. Though turndown guardrails can still be found, most now begin and end with the rectangles of steel known as terminal ends. Their ability to absorb the energy of colliding cars—forcing rails to curl up, rather than spear—is the result of decades of clever engineering.
Sicking’s inventions include the ET2000, patented in 1989, a terminal end that would grab on to a colliding car to slow it down; the Sequential Kinking Terminal, from 1997, which used kinks or bends in the rail to help absorb an impact; and the Next Generation Terminal, the first design to prevent cars from breaching a rail when they hit it from a glancing angle. “Assuming installation isn’t fucked up,” he said.
that we take a ride. Eimers drove the two of us to the closest guardrail, which was also the closest defective guardrail. “Dr. Sicking lives around the corner from a monstrosity,” he said.
and helps distribute force. It was also misaligned. “They just pounded the ever-living snot out of this,” Eimers said disgustedly.
n April, Eimers and Melissa travelled to Atlanta to meet with a few fami-
In America, guardrail systems are sometimes installed—and, much more often, repaired—by local crews of laborers who have no real familiarity with how they work. As one guardrail executive told me, “Often you get guys that are plowing snow in the winter and cutting grass in the summer.” He went on, “They go to a yard where they’ve got a pile of parts—a bracket here, bolt there, a rail that looks like it’ll fit—and they install it.” In guardrail jargon, the practice of assembling a rail with a hodgepodge of parts is known as Frankensteining. Because Frankensteining disrupts the physics involved in guardrail systems, it can be deadly. In 2010, a man in Florida swerved to avoid an animal in the roadway, striking a guardrail maintained by untrained prison inmates. He lost a leg. According to the man’s lawsuit against the state Department of Transportation, the rail had been constructed using a “random collection of parts ... including an obsolete piece of guardrail built in 1965.” Eimers estimates that about five per cent of the guardrails he inspects are Frankensteined together.
The rail, which lined a four-lane road near an overpass, was an egregious assembly of one of Sicking’s older designs. “We have some major, major issues here,” Eimers said. He pointed to an empty inch-long opening in the middle of a steel panel, then to a bolt drilled into a post a few inches away. The empty slot was where the bolt should have been. He surmised that the installers had mismeasured the length of the panel and “solved” the problem they’d created by drilling a hole where there hadn’t been one. When struck, this bolt wouldn’t release—the improvised slot was the wrong size—and the rail would not curl up, as it should. Instead, a terminal-end collision would likely result in a spearing or a rolling of the vehicle, Eimers said, and if a vehicle hit it from the side the rail might rupture. Sicking looked on mournfully. “If you’re drilling holes in my guardrail, you’re fucking up,” he said.
lies who had lost relatives to guardrails. Eimers lists his phone number on his YouTube page to make it easy to reach him. “Every time I see a number I don’t recognize, I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach,” he told me. “But I have to pick up.” All of the families he met that day had relatives who, like Hannah, had been killed on I-75, the highway that runs from near Miami all the way up to the Canadian border. Jaida Payne, a doctoral student in physical therapy, was killed in January, 2023, when she crashed into a damaged rail in Tampa. In March, 2020, Hunter Burns, a garage-door installer, hit a guardrail installed upside down and backward in Bradenton, Florida. That same day, Isabella Alonzo, a high-school senior, hit a Frankensteined guardrail near Warner Robins, Georgia. Payne was twenty-three, Burns twentytwo, Alonzo eighteen.
Eimers had already been in close touch with their parents.“It takes a special kind of person to live through the horror, and then to keep putting himself in position to see it, experience it, on a daily basis,” Cathy Alonzo, Isabella’s mother, told me, of Eimers. “But sometimes you have to slow him down and tell him to explain all these darn guardrail abbreviations in English.” Cathy has a tribute to Isabella
I asked Eimers, who once worked as an emergency nurse, how the guardrail might damage a human body if it was hit head on. “A C1 or C2 fracture,” he guessed, referring to potentially fatal neck injuries. “A lacerated aorta. A mutilated victim.” He guided Sicking around some fire ants to inspect a bearing plate—a small piece of metal that anchors the first post to the guardrail
On our visit, Sicking told Eimers that if Hannah had crashed into one of his innovations, correctly installed, she’d be alive. This wasn’t news to Eimers, but he began to sob. Then he suggested
make his case in person. He wore a “Guardrail Guy”T-shirt, and carried an Emmy won by a TV reporter for a segment they’d worked on together. The city was choked with traffic thanks to a visit from King Charles. Eimers had a tea bag in his pocket, which he occasionally pulled out while remarking, “No kings.” He was accompanied by several families who had been affected by guardrail accidents. One of the people with him was Jett Weinstein, a twenty-yearold from Arizona who lost a leg in 2024, when, on the way back from a snowboarding trip, a car he was in hit a guardrail and was speared. His friend, who was driving, was cut in half and killed. “I’m always in pain,” Jett said, matter-of-factly.
tattooed on her forearm that reads “SHE IS THE MOON, A SHINING LIGHT IN THE DARK SKY.” Mark, her husband, remembered their daughter’s accident and the attempts to save her.“She had a strong heart, and they brought her back four times before she just bled to death. I had
sign into the world.” Kelly kept the printed e-mail.
A few weeks after Eimers’s D.C. trip, Burchett’s legislative director e-mailed him a draft of the Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill.The bill would be part of the proposed reauthorization of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a trillion-dollar funding package passed in 2021, which expires in September. Of the eight-hundred-odd-page bill, more than eight pages—the entire section on guardrails—were effectively lifted from Eimers’s “Transparency Act.” When Eimers called me to share the news, he was nearly shouting: “It’s almost one per cent my language!” The bill’s text is currently being finalized before a likely vote this fall. In late June, Eimers also learned that the guardrail we looked at with Sicking had been fixed, after the state carried out a reinspection, prompted by a complaint Eimers had filed. The Frankensteined guardrails closest to the White House were finally scheduled for replacement, too, thanks to him. “I often get cynical, because I expect one-hundredand-eighty-degree turns,” Eimers told me. “I once had someone tell me that the most influential people in history often only ever get a one-degree turn of the ship, which seems inconsequentialbut over time you end up at a completely different destination.” He added, “My problem is that I know that I am, on a subconscious level, looking for something that will take away the pain. I could get every highway guardrail in the world fixed, and it wouldn’t fix me or bring Hannah back.”
Christy DeFilippo, Hunter Burns’s mother, who was wearing a polo shirt with the words #HuntersMom embroidered onto it, described the rail that killed her son. “Instead of crumpling like an accordion, like it’s supposed to, it launched him in the air,” she said. Payne’s father, Stewart, a former Marine drill instructor, had been dabbing his eyes with a napkin. He had recently become the newest member of what Eimers calls his Army of Davids—as in David and Goliath—a group of guardrail-reform advocates which is trying to get companies to release more detailed instructions for installers and lobbying governments to enact installation and maintenance laws. He had started a guardrail-focussed TikTok account called Exit 261, named for the location of his daughter’s death. He described Jaida’s guardrail impact as “like an I.E.D.”
The group’s first meeting was with Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman representing a West Tennessee district. Seated beneath a poster on the wall reading “One man can make a difference, and every man should try,” Eimers placed the Emmy on a table before him and delivered his pitch. At one point, he offered Cohen the opportunity to be “the Guardrail Guy’s assistant.” Cohen was surprised that systems as complex as guardrails didn’t come with instruction manuals. “It’s hard to believe,” he said. “I’ve got a CD: thirtytwo dollars, and it’s got thirty-four dollars’ worth of instructions.”
After bumping into Senator Richard Blumenthal in a hallway—“I’m Steve, the Guardrail Guy,” Eimers began, to Blumenthal’s bewildermentthey met with Senator Mark Kelly, an engineer and a former astronaut who represents Arizona, in Kelly’s office, where he displays one of his old space suits. Kelly was particularly struck by an e-mail from 2005 between executives at Valtir—then known as Trinitywhich Eimers had obtained through an anonymous source and printed out. It showed an executive discussing a guardrail the company had modified in 2005, and effectively admitting that it had become more dangerous. “What will be our liability exposure if someone has an accident and the folded rail enters into the vehicle [and] kills or maims someone? Then the lawyer finds this crash test and says that it is inherent to the design for this to happen. It did it during the crash test.” The company, the executive acknowledged, “put a faulty de-
“If that guardrail was repaired right, she would have survived,” Payne said.
“We shouldn’t know each other,” Eimers agreed.
he morning after Eimers showed Burchett the faulty rail near Lenoir
Eimers is fond of quoting from a scene in Tolkien’s “Return of the King,” when the humble hero Sam thinks, “In the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” Hannah loved the hope in that line, Eimers told me. He mentioned something she’d written in her diary ten months before she died.“I realized why I’m writing this journal,” she wrote. “I am absolutely terrified I’m going to die and just be another face in the photographs. . . . Names are forgotten. They don’t have stories.” She went on,“As long as I can keep the interest of whoever is reading this, I have a reader. There. Now you’re in my story. Hope that keeps you interested, whoever you are.”
City, he forwarded me a bill he’d stayed up late drafting, titled “Guardrail Manufacturer’sTransparency Act.” (He considered putting “IKEA” in the name, to signal the simplicity that guardrail installation should aspire to, but decided against it.) Among other things, the bill sought to mandate clearer labelling for guardrail parts, and to require that manufacturers distribute setup manuals in various languages, including Spanish. He sent it to Burchett’s office, then e-mailed to follow up, writing, “Somebody’s child hangs in the balance.” A few hours later, he e-mailed again with a message about a girl who had just been killed by a guardrail in Maine.
In late April, Eimers went to D.C. to
MY KID: But, Dad, I’m tired! ME: Then drink a cup of coffee! You
SHOUTS & MURMURS
must know about Sondheim! MY KID: O.K., O.K. ME: Good. I’m sorry I got so upset. It’s just, he’s written so many important songs! (Composing myself; a beat) I love you. You know that, right?
MY KID: Yeah, I know. ME: Good. You might be tempted
to go online and watch videos.
MY KID: W-what kinds of videos? ME: Videos of “Cats,” “Les Mis,”
“Rent.”
MY KID: What’s wrong with those? ME: They’re not—real, honey. They
make musicals look fun, but they’re not real life. Not like Sondheim’s “Company” or “Assassins” or his newly reconsidered “Merrily We Roll Along.” Those shows are real. They’ll stand the test of time. They’ll be revived at City Center and still feel relevant to a modern audience.
BY JESSE EISENBERG
ME: Come sit down, honey. MY KID: Is something wrong, Dad? ME: No, nothing’s wrong, sweet-
MY KID: He said something about the lyrics being adjusted for Len Cariou, who was the original Sweeney.
MY KID: That’s a lot to remember! ME: Don’t worry. You’re not navi-
heart. Nothing at all. We just need to have a chat.
ME: That’s true, too. What else? MY KID: I don’t know, Dad, it was
gating this alone. Now I need to knowhave any of the older kids invited you to see “MJ the Musical” or “Mamma Mia!” or even “Moulin Rouge”?
MY KID: Is it about the broken vase? Because I cleaned it all up!
confusing. Something about the story being told exclusively through song?
ME: You did clean it up. You did a great job cleaning that vase up. It’s something else. You’re getting older, and there are some things you don’t know about. And I want you to hear it from me, your father, instead of some kids at school.
ME: No! That’s not true! This is what I was worried about. This is why I’m glad we’re having this talk. That older boy is wrong—he’s just trying to scare you. “Sweeney Todd” is not exclusively music. There is actually a libretto by Hugh Wheeler.
MY KID: No, I don’t think so. ME: Good. Those are jukebox mu-
sicals. And they killed Sondheim! MY KID: S-s-sondheim was killed? ME: Yes, he was. MY KID (starting to cry now): But,
MY KID (fidgety): O.K.? ME: We need to talk about Stephen
MY KID: H-h-hugh who? ME: Hugh Wheeler. A frequent Sond-
Dad! Why?! Why did they kill him?!
ME: Because they were taking shortcuts and pandering. Like parasites, those jukebox musicals wormed their way into Broadway and slowly killed the medium.
Sondheim. MY KID: St-st-st-stephen who? ME: Stephen Sondheim. He was a composer and a lyricist. He wrote the best musicals of the twentieth century.
heim collaborator. They met through Hal Prince.
MY KID (momentarily charmed): They met through a prince?!
MY KID: Daddy, I’m scared! Are the jukeboxes going to kill you and Mama? Or me?
ME: Not a real prince, sweetheart! Just a man named Prince. Now, this older boy—did he mention anything else? Anything that made you feel weird? Did he bring up any of Sondheim’s lesser works?
MY KID (anxiety building): Uh, Dad,
I don’t know if I should hear this. ME: You have to! The shows are great! MY KID: O-O-K., Dad. ME: You’ve probably heard of some of the more popular ones, like “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods”? Maybe from some of the older kids at school?
ME: No, sweetheart. As long as they keep reviving Sondheim’s work and occasionally gender-swapping Bobby, we’ll be fine.
MY KID: Sondheim had lesser works? I’m scared, Dad!
MY KID: Are you sure? ME: I’m sure, honey. Everything’s
MY KID: I did hear an eighth-grade
ME: Don’t be scared, honey! They weren’t lesser in the qualitative sense. Just lesser known. Did he say anything about “Pacific Overtures”? Or “Anyone Can Whistle”? Or “Frogs”? Did this older boy mention “Frogs”?
boy say something about “Sweeney Todd.” ME: What did he say, honey? MY KID: I can’t remember. Just some-
going to be O.K. (My kid sniffles and calms down. A nice pause.)
MY KID: Dad? ME: Yes, hon? MY KID: I thought you were going
thing about the score using dissonant chords?
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
ME: That’s right, kiddo. That’s very good. What else did he say? It’s O.K. Don’t be scared.
to finally tell me about sex.
MY KID (really nervous now): When’s Mom coming home?
ME: No, kiddo. As a Sondheim fan, you’ll never have to know about that.
ME: Mom is out all night.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
How Biden emboldened Israel’s aggression toward Gaza—and Iran.
BY DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
n March 5, 2024, five months into the war in Gaza, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the
concluded that they were not Hamas fighters. TheTimesreported that one released detainee, a law student named Fadi Bakr, described being beaten so severely that his genitals turned blue and blood still appeared in his urine weeks later. He said that Israeli guards had played music so loudly that one of his ears bled. (An Israeli military spokesman told theTimes that the captors followed “Israeli and international law” and played music at a “low volume,” to prevent detainees from coördinating.) But the Red Cross couldn’t address such allegations: Spoljaric said that Israel had suspended all “legaloperational dialogue.”
International Committee of the Red Cross, sent a confidential letter to President Joe Biden. Under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross holds a unique responsibility to counsel states about avoiding war crimes. In the letter, which I obtained from a former United States official, Spoljaric reminded Biden that the organization had condemned the “horrific” October 7th massacre of Israelis by Hamas, and remained “relentless” in pressing the group to release the hostages it had taken. But she was now appealing to Biden “with profound alarm” because Israel, which had been pummelling Gaza with heavy munitions since October, was ignoring the Red Cross as never before.“The way the hostilities are being conducted by Israel is incompatible” with the laws of armed conflict, she wrote, “particularly the obligations to protect civilians and distinguish between military targets and civilians or civilian infrastructure, to ensure dignified treatment of detainees and the dead, to protect medical installations and personnel, and to provide and enable access of humanitarian aid.”
To try to influence Hamas to release hostages, Spoljaric had appealed to Qatar and other patrons of the group; she now implored Biden to “bring about an immediate change” in Israel’s conduct. An appendix to the letter cited U.S. laws and Administration policies that prohibited the transferring of weapons likely to be used in war crimes, and Spoljaric urged Biden to withhold weapons “that should not be used in densely populated areas, in light of their devastating humanitarian impacts.” She warned Biden that failing to “uphold minimum standards of humanity” would be a “moral defeat” that “future generations are unlikely to forgive us for failing to avert.”
Allowing the Red Cross to visit detainees during a war or an occupation is one of the brightest lines established by the Geneva Conventions. Yet, after October 7th, Israel, for perhaps the first time in its history, fully blocked the organization’s access to Palestinian detainees from Gaza and the West Bank, putting it in the company of pariah states such as North Korea and Eritrea; even the warring factions in Yemen allowed Red Cross visits. Spoljaric noted that humanitarian groups and journalists had reported a “massive surge” in the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. At least a thousand had been released back into Gaza, and many of them gave accounts of torture, even though the Israeli military had
wo years after Spoljaric’s letter, President Donald J.Trump ordered the
on Israel to take a different approach.”
the second time ravaging Iran’s air defenses. Several Biden Administration officials told me that Netanyahu tried to go further. He sought American support for additional attacks on Iranian infrastructure, and he backed down only reluctantly. But Netanyahu had been asking the U.S. to help him attack Iran for more than fifteen years, and Biden’s team felt certain that he’d try again. A former senior Pentagon official told me that, after Trump won the 2024 election, Biden advisers warned their successors that, with Iran the most “vulnerable” it had been in decades, “the Israelis were not going to let this opportunity go.” (A former Trump transition official disputed this account.)
Trump went along with Netanyahu. In June, 2025, the Israelis conducted an extended assault that appeared partly aimed at overturning the Iranian government. After about a week,Trump directed the U.S. military to join in a night of air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, perhaps because he feared missing out on a chance to take credit for the blow. But when Trump and Netanyahu launched a surprise attack eight months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that, this time, the President had decided to strike Iran “preëmptively,” because “there was going to be an Israeli action” that “would precipitate an attack against American forces.” Trump later claimed, unconvincingly, that he’d taken the lead with the Israelis and might even “have forced their hand”; Rubio’s account more credibly suggested that the Trump Administration had believed it couldn’t stop Israel from launching an attack but would nonetheless shoulder any backlash—a pattern painfully familiar to the Biden White House. Indeed, in retrospect, Biden and his closest advisers seem to have been perversely passive about Israel’s dissembling and defiance, especially when it came to the protection of Palestinian civilians.
“We should never have taught them flamenco.”
conflagration. Brett McGurk, Biden’s White House coördinator for the Middle East and probably his most influential adviser, championed this position, arguing that rock-solid support for Israel would help contain Iran, whose proxies killed three U.S. soldiers in the region during the first months of the Gaza conflict.
Hassan Nasrallah. The Israelis gave U.S. officials no meaningful warning in advance of these attacks, and, in what a former White House official called a “humiliation” of Biden, Netanyahu ordered the Nasrallah assassination just two days after the U.S., France, and several other allies called for Israel and Hezbollah to observe a three-week ceasefire. Yet the White House never publicly criticized Israel for acting unilaterally—and each time one of these actions triggered a clash the U.S. felt compelled to defend Israel. In April and October of 2024, the U.S. helped fend off Iranian counterstrikes so effectively that Israel suffered little harm. After the second round, Biden sent Israel about a hundred U.S. service members and a missile-defense system.
At the same time, the Biden Administration’s staunch public backing of Israel during the Gaza war had created what Philip Gordon, the national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, described to me as a “moral hazard”it had invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to expand the battle into a regional one. Even though Biden and his advisers privately told Netanyahu many times not to provoke Iran, the Israelis repeatedly blindsided the Americans by doing exactly that: a January, 2024, strike on Damascus killed five senior Iranian military advisers; an April, 2024, strike on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria killed more than a dozen; a July, 2024, strike in Tehran assassinated a top Hamas political leader; a September, 2024, operation in Lebanon detonated explosives planted in thousands of walkie-talkies and pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters; a subsequent air strike killed Hezbollah’s leader,
Some Biden advisers privately lamented the fact that U.S. protection was unintentionally encouraging Netanyahu’s brinkmanship. Gordon told me, “We could advise them very firmlyand Biden did that with Bibi repeatedly‘Goddammit, take the win and don’t drag us into a further war.’ But the Israelis knew we were going to defend them.” Lloyd Austin, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, reportedly likened Netanyahu to a gambler “playing with house money.”
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former nationalsecurity adviser, told me that Biden and his advisers had often privately debated ways to restrain Israel. Inside the Oval Office, Sullivan said, “we repeatedly raised and discussed options for withholding weapons,” but, excluding the suspension of one shipment of bombs, “the President always deferred on that decision, because we kept thinking that we were close to getting a deal” for a hostage
As part of these clashes, Israel twice launched significant air strikes on Iran—
release and a ceasefire. Sullivan said, “When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize.” He added,“I will say straightforwardly—we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”
spectors maintained a constantly shifting list of items that were barred for having potential “dual uses” as weapons—fertilizer might be used in explosives, tent poles might become javelins, and so on. Certain medical equipment was sometimes forbidden, including oxygen cylinders, X-ray machines, and even childbirth kits (which held small scissors). And any truck containing a single forbidden item could be turned back, no matter how innocuous the rest of its contents.
towers, apartment buildings, government ministries, utility companies, banks, and universities. Israel used phone calls, texts, and air-dropped flyers to warn civilians to evacuate, but, the article reported, it appeared to be more lax about those precautions than it had been during previous conflicts. These “power targets,” which were attacked in an effort to terrorize Palestinians into pressuring Hamas to capitulate, accounted for about half the strikes in the first five days of Israel’s air campaign. (A spokesman for the I.D.F. denied to me that it had hit civilian targets to pressure the population.)
he Israel Defense Forces say that they always follow the laws of armed
conflict and try to minimize civilian harm. But alarms about potential war crimes began ringing inside the Biden Administration soon after Israel began its counterattack on Gaza. By November 1, 2023, the Palestinian death toll was at least eighty-eight hundred, including more than fifty-eight hundred women and children. Israeli jets were conducting as many as eight hundred strikes a day on northern Gaza, and Administration officials who were closely tracking the war told me that Israeli military planners could not possibly have preselected or so quickly identified that many legitimate military targets, such as tunnel entrances, rocket launchers, and Hamas leaders. Nor could the Israelis have carefully weighed whether the risk to civilian lives and infrastructure was proportionate to the military value of each target. Startlingly, the strikes appeared to move in a geographical line from the northeast to the southwest, flattening whole neighborhoods in a way that suggested little differentiation between civilian and military structures. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, anxiously asked his staff how Israel could justify this scale of destruction. A senior State Department official told me, “We were all shocked at how aggressive and deadly it was, and asking, ‘What the fuck are they doing?’”
In December, 2023, two months into the war, United Nations staff in Gaza reported to the State Department that the I.D.F. had been depositing scores of Palestinian detainees at a Gaza border crossing at night, in the freezing cold. They had been cleared of any military role in Hamas, and many said that they’d experienced horrific abuse. The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor took steps to invoke the decades-old U.S. statutes known as the Leahy Laws, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy, which block the provision of assistance to any military unit credibly accused of a “gross violation” of human rights. But, under a special procedure negotiated with Israel, this process happened behind closed doors over many months, and it had no effect on Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Blocking humanitarian aid as a method of warfare violates the laws of armed combat, and a decades-old U.S. law bars the provision of weapons to any government that restricts the delivery of American-supported assistance. Before the war, Gaza imported about five hundred truckloads of food and supplies each day, through multiple border crossings. Two days after October 7th, Israel shut all the crossings down. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defense Minister, said that he’d ordered a “complete siege”: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel—everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
Blinken flew to Israel a few days later. He met with Netanyahu and Gallant, and, according to people present, told them that letting in food was not only “a moral responsibility” but also “a strategic imperative and a legal imperative.” Yet Netanyahu wouldn’t budge until Blinken threatened to cancel a planned visit by Biden. Even then, Netanyahu agreed to let in only a small amount of supplies, which would have to come through Rafah, on Gaza’s border with Egypt; he also asked that this minor concession remain secret. He feared a domestic backlash for not starving Gaza’s women, children, and other civilians. Biden made his visit, and as he left Netanyahu bragged publicly that he’d defied the President. He declared that Israel “will not allow humanitarian assistance” from “our territory into the Gaza Strip.”
he scorched-earth tactics of Israel’s assault concerned the Biden Ad-
ministration for hard-nosed reasons. Biden and his team had entered office determined to restore at least symbolic American support for the formation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. Given that roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Jews lived in territory now under Israeli control, the logic went, peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was the only way to keep Israel secure, Jewish, and democratic—and was therefore a core American national interest, even if Netanyahu and members of his Cabinet had repeatedly vowed never to allow it. Former officials told me that, during Biden’s first year in office, Blinken had challenged Netanyahu: “No one’s going anywhere, no matter what some people on both sides want. So how does this end?”
The Times later reported that, on the day of the Hamas massacre, the Israeli military formally revised its “rules of engagement” so that mid-level officers could authorize strikes that risked killing up to twenty civilians in order to take out a rank-and-file Hamas fighter. Previous rules had allowed strikes that risked up to five civilian deaths, or in certain cases ten. Former U.S. officials pointed me to an article in the Tel Aviv-based news site +972 about the war’s first weeks, which they said was consistent with intelligence reports. According to the article, during this period Israeli war planes deliberately targeted civilian structures such as office
PREVIOUS SPREAD: SAHER ALGHORRA / NYT / REDUX
The Israeli military was so resistant to allowing in humanitarian aid that, virtually every day during the conflict, Blinken and Sullivan had to spend part of their limited time with Israeli officials haggling over such details as the number of trucks that could enter Gaza. Israeli in-
After winning the 2016 election, Trump, disdainful of international law and untroubled about the fate of the
forty-six at the start of the conflict, was a former Rhodes Scholar and Supreme Court clerk who’d been at the center of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment for more than a decade.Yet,White House officials told me, Biden sometimes brusquely dismissed the views of both men, raising his voice as though berating children. (Biden, through a spokesperson, declined to speak with me.)
was cutting off Saudi Arabia’s access to some of the American-made munitions that it had been dropping on Yemen for six years. These air strikes, intended to defeat the Iranian-backed side of the Yemeni civil war, had killed more than eighteen thousand civilians, at an average rate of more than three thousand a year—a number that was considered astronomical before Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Blockades by the Saudis and
Palestinians, became the only President in fifty years not to support Palestinian self-rule. But Biden’s Presidential transition team drew up detailed plans to restore what Trump had undone.The Biden Administration would promptly reinstate a fifty-year-old U.S. policy declaring Jewish settlements in the West Bank to be in violation of international law; reimpose a requirement that imports from the West Bank be labelled as such, rather than as “Made in Israel”; and reopen the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, which had served as a de-facto diplomatic mission to the Palestinians. A former transition planner described the strategy to me
After the horrors of the October 7th attack, no one in the Administration questioned Israel’s right to retaliate. Nor did anyone question the imperative for U.S. military backing. But the White House disagreed with Netanyahu about how best to crush Hamas. Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan all worried privately that the ferocity of Israel’s retaliation could put U.S. forces at risk, complicate negotiations to release the hostages, and undermine the region’s long-term stability.
the Emiratis led to a famine that killed many thousands more. Echoing Austin, Biden called the Yemen war a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe” that “has to end.” The factions reached a ceasefire the next year.
One of Austin’s signature achievements as Secretary of Defense was the adoption of a formal policy to
still hadn’t carried out these plans, which have not previously been disclosed, in part because of anticipated Israeli pushback. But some U.S. officials, led by Blinken, attempted a new gambit to bring about Palestinian statehood. Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, had signalled a willingness to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for access to U.S. nuclear technology. He was happy to accept only lip service from Israel about the future of the Palestinians, but Blinken and other U.S. diplomats pushed the Saudis to demand a more ironclad commitment to a two-state solution. Former officials told me that, inside the White House, Blinken argued that normalization was “the one leverage point we had” to get Israel to reopen “a pathway for the Palestinians.”
reduce civilian harm by U.S. forces and their military partners. Biden’s State Department committed to a complementary policy—Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance—mandating an investigation of any report that a foreign military had deliberately, or even negligently, used U.S. weapons to hurt civilians. In early 2023, Biden issued a policy banning a transfer of U.S. weapons if they were “more likely than not” to be used in war crimes—even without proof of a specific atrocity. A State Department press release said that the policy codified “the principles the Administration have been operating under since Day-1.”
Several days after the attack, Netanyahu surprised the White House by ordering preëmptive air strikes against Hezbollah. As Israeli warplanes were preparing to bomb Lebanon, Biden, in a hurried phone call, urged Netanyahu to ground them, stressing that the U.S. wasn’t yet ready to defend its forces or Israel from any blowback. One U.S. aircraft-carrier group had just arrived in the region, but a second was still on the way. A newly formed Israeli war cabinet, part of an emergency unity government, was already divided over the wisdom of the attack, and Netanyahu agreed to call it off. But Biden’s appeals for restraint were less successful once those U.S. forces were in place.
veryone who spoke to me insisted that Biden—whatever indications
The next week, in a speech from Tel Aviv, Biden publicly acknowledged his concerns, advising Israelis to avoid the mistakes that the U.S. had made in its responses to 9/11. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” he said, adding, “The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas.” Privately, Biden and his advisers used the visit to Israel to try to persuade Netanyahu’s war cabinet to postpone an invasion of Gaza. The Americans warned—correctly, as it turned out—that Israeli troops would get bogged down in a ground war that would hinder efforts to negotiate the release of the hostages, a dozen of whom held American passports. An invasion would also drive Hamas further under-
The apparently indiscriminate Israeli bombing that followed October 7th also undermined other Biden Administration priorities. Austin, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, was a retired Army general who had fought in every major U.S. military action since 9/11. He often said he’d learned that causing unnecessary civilian harm made it harder for a military to achieve its objectives, from capturing territory to defeating an insurgency. “You create more terrorists,” Austin said. Under his influence, Biden had done more than any President since the Second World War to institutionalize the wartime protection of civilians. In his first foreignpolicy address, Biden announced that he
later emerged of his cognitive declineplayed a vigorous role in Gaza policy. He bragged that his experience in the region extended back to the early seventies, when he’d visited Israel as a senator, and he remained so confident in his expertise that he often patronized even his most senior advisers. Blinken, who was sixty-one on October 7th, had worked at Biden’s side for decades, in the Senate and in the Obama White House. His position at the State Department put at his disposal the insights of the U.S. Foreign Service, which included seasoned diplomats who, unlike the circle around Biden, had spent years living in the Middle East. Sullivan, who was
ground. The Biden team argued that precision strikes facilitated by U.S. intelligence could kill the greatest number of culpable leaders faster and more effectively. That had been the lesson of America’s wars against the Taliban, the Iraqi insurgency, and ISIS, and the White House dispatched a three-star general and other senior officers to share with the I.D.F. their battlefield experience.
The three-star general and his delegation also attempted to get the I.D.F. to define its operation more concretely. Eventually, on November 1, 2023, during a diplomatic summit in Tokyo, Blinken unveiled a wish list of “key elements” that the U.S. sought in postwar Gaza, including “no forcible displacement of Palestinians,” “no re-occupation of Gaza,” “no reduction of territory in Gaza,” and “Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority”—the Westernbacked governing body once envisioned as the nucleus of a future state.
In December, 2023, when the Palestinian death toll surpassed seventeen thousand, Defense Secretary Austin declared in a speech that better protecting civilians was “a strategic imperative”: “If you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.” (In a television interview, the Republican senator Lindsey Graham called Austin “naïve,” claiming that Palestinians were already “radicalized” and taught “to hate the Jews.”) Blinken met with Israel’s war cabinet and argued that no military operation alone could kill an ideology like Hamas’s.
At one meeting, McGurk made this case to Benny Gantz, a former Israeli Defense Minister and a moderate rival of Netanyahu who had joined the war cabinet. According to people familiar with the meeting, Gantz insisted that Israeli troops had to move into Gaza immediately, both to extinguish the Hamas threat and to deter other enemies. On a piece of paper, he sketched a map of how the territory should look after the operation: divided into sections by an Israelicontrolled corridor, and surrounded by a cordon of Israeli military forces, so that “anyone looking into Gaza would see the backs of Israeli soldiers.” (Netanyahu and other Israeli officials seldom articulated such specific goals, yet the I.D.F. now occupies these positions, and more, in Gaza.)
The next day, Christopher Le Mon, the deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s bureau of human rights and one of the Administration’s most vocal critics of Israel’s conduct, sent Blinken a classified note urging him to warn Netanyahu of the Biden Administration rule banning the transfer of weapons “more likely than not” to be used in war crimes, and of the requirement to investigate specific allegations of harm done to civilians. In public appearances, Le Mon wrote, U.S. officials should avoid “dismissing civilian harm as inevitable.”
Still, Netanyahu refused to spell out a more feasible objective of the military operation. In fact, he expanded his stated goal to “total victory”—whatever that meant. And Biden and his advisers all but gave up on pinning him down. Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser to the President who was born in Jerusalem to American parents, told me, “We tried, but we had no chance of success, in retrospect, because Netanyahu wasn’t talking to ushe was talking to his own public.” Indeed, senior White House officials described themselves to me as almost powerless in the face of Israel’s emotional response to October 7th. Blinken told me, “This was a societal trauma that, rightly or wrongly, was seen as existential.”
Blinken flew to Tel Aviv, and in a television interview he appeared to echo Le Mon by observing that Israel’s failure to protect civilians “plays into the hands of Hamas.” But he said nothing publicly about war crimes or U.S. obligations.
Several senior Biden advisers told me that they’d privately pushed to get Netanyahu to clarify Israel’s objectives. On October 7th, he vowed to “destroy” Hamas and turn anywhere it operated “into rubble.” This sounded to them like a promise to kill every last fighter—an impossible goal that would lead to endless war. Moreover, officials across the Administration agreed that any lasting defeat of Hamas would require a credible alternative Palestinian government to assume control of Gaza.
A senior Israeli official involved in conversations with the White House
A paper circulated by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs argued that Biden should follow the model of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before Roosevelt sent U.S. troops to defend Britain from Hitler, he’d required Winston Churchill to sign the Atlantic Charter, which clarified that the Allies were fighting to liberate Europe, not to preserve Britain’s colonial empire in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. By this logic, the U.S. had the most leverage to get Israel to commit to a realistic goal for the war before expediting weapons sales and committing to billions of dollars in assistance.
said that there’d been a pervasive “mentality gap.” Whereas the Americans sought detailed advance planning, the Israelis demanded immediate military action, even though each step had to be improvised. Moreover, the official said, Netanyahu feared that declaring specific end goals in Gaza would set off disputes in his Cabinet and fracture his fragile coalition. In any case, the Biden Administration’s grudging acquiescence now looks like the beginning of a pattern of credulous capitulation. Even as Blinken outlined America’s vision for postwar Gaza, Netanyahu was already defying it. Israel had ordered open-ended evacuations from Gaza City that resembled forcible displacement. Netanyahu had rejected any role in Gaza for the Palestinian Authority (without publicly endorsing an alternative). He had also hinted at an occupation, vowing that after the war Israel would assume “overall military responsibility” for Gaza.
CUL-DE-SAC
Like all tyrants, my mother made decrees. The last straw was the law that said: no frogs inside the house. The lousy universe! I was seven and ready to flee with nothing. At least take a sandwich, my mother said, tucking a foil brick into the kerchief I’d tied to a stick. I was a real hobo. I barely watched her watch me walk off. I got all the way to the cul-de-sac and sat down to eat. It was a sandwich full of grief–– grief and salt, grief and tomatoes, grief and cheese. How far into far did I go? How is it my glass of milk was still cold when I got home?
Nevertheless, in December, 2023, Biden went around Congress to authorize the emergency sale of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel. Soon after, he pushed Congress to pass an additional $8.7-billion assistance package, which he signed into law in April, 2024. The Biden Administration ultimately agreed to sell Israel more than twenty billion dollars’ worth of weapons during the Gaza campaign, on top of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. provided annually. Whatever Administration officials were saying behind the scenes, these commitments of military assistance publicly conveyed full-throated support for Israel’s vague goal of “total victory.”
—Andrea Cohen
strict Israel’s use of U.S. weapons without undermining its security. These included withholding America’s largest bombs, which the Red Cross had deemed inappropriate for use in densely populated areas like Gaza; withholding some exclusively offensive weapons; and allowing the use of certain weapons only outside Gaza. Biden had already vowed that the U.S. would severely punish any opportunistic attack on Israel. (“Don’t. Don’t. Don’t,” he warned more than once.) Surely, some American officials argued, the threat of superpower retaliation would help deter Iran or its allies, even if the U.S. was simultaneously limiting Israel’s assault on Gaza.
liver what some called a “tough love” speech, bypassing Netanyahu and addressing Israelis directly. Biden, in the weeks after his empathetic speech in Tel Aviv, was more popular in Israel than its Prime Minister. Capitalizing on that credibility, Biden would argue that an all-out war, though it might satisfy a hunger for revenge, would needlessly harm innocent civilians, isolate Israel, and doom Israeli Jews to perpetual conflict with a growing Palestinian population under Israeli rule. By contrast, pursuing a narrower fight against the terrorists behind the October 7th attack could free the hostages, bring about normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, and possibly lead to a secure coexistence with a Palestinian state. If this path were pursued, the U.S. would assure Israel’s
hether and how to use America’s military support as leverage to
restrain the Israeli operation was debated for months inside the White House. About seventy per cent of Israel’s weapons, including nearly all its missiles, aircraft, and bombs, came from the U.S. Finding an alternative supply during a war would have been almost unthinkable.
Jon Finer, Biden’s deputy nationalsecurity adviser, was a former correspondent for the Washington Post who had covered previous Israeli military operations in Gaza. Finer oversaw a small team of National Security Council staffers who presented various ways to re-
During the first months of the war, Biden and his top advisers began debating whether the President should de-
continued to repeat “two more weeks” in part to buy more time before, as one put it,“the U.S. brought down the hammer.”
security at every step.There was no guarantee that such a speech would convince Israelis. But it would at least clarify that the Biden Administration would be making its own judgments about U.S. interests—not simply deferring to Netanyahu.
would, and should be over in December.”
Yet Israeli leaders frequently said that some new revelation—about the extent of Hamas’s tunnel network, for example—had forced an extension of their battle plan. After the death toll from Israel’s assault on Gaza City hit ten thousand, Blinken personally implored Dermer, Netanyahu, and Michael Herzog, the Israeli Ambassador to Washington, “Don’t do in the south what you did in the north!” But, on December 1, 2023, Israel laid siege to Khan Younis, in the middle of the Strip, and by December 20th the total death toll had hit twenty thousand. Sullivan then demanded assurances from Dermer and Herzog that the campaign wouldn’t extend further, according to two officials familiar with the conversations: “After Khan Younis, you are going to want to go to Rafah!” The Israeli officials insisted, “No, no, no, we are not going to go after Rafah!” Yet, by January, 2024, Netanyahu had signalled that Israel would indeed take Rafah, and he soon accused anyone who questioned that plan—implicitly, Biden—of “essentially telling us, ‘Lose the war.’” Netanyahu promised, “We won’t capitulate to any pressure.”
y February, 2024, there were hints that the hammer might, in fact, come
down. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, proposed a controversial amendment to the bill providing Israel military aid. It called for adherence to the rules requiring the U.S. to cut off weapons to any country obstructing American-backed aid or likely using U.S. weapons in war crimes. Although the amendment didn’t mention any specific country, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee opposed it, accusing Van Hollen of “trying to make it harder for Israel to defend its families.” Yet, with the Gaza death toll exceeding twentyeight thousand, the amendment had enough support among progressives that Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, asked the White House for help heading off an intraparty feud.
But Biden and his advisers remembered previous diplomatic and political tangles with Israel over Gaza. In 2014, President Barack Obama had responded to a clash between Israel and Hamas by saying that he was “deeply concerned” about the disproportionate killing of Palestinian civilians. After two days of fighting, Obama publicly offered to help mediate a ceasefire; after twelve days, he pressed Israel to declare one unilaterally. Congressional Republicans, and some Democrats, torched him for rewarding “terrorists,” and Netanyahu defiantly waged a seven-week ground invasion anyway. The Israeli death toll was seventy-three; about twenty-two hundred Palestinians died. So when another round of violence broke out in May, 2021, Biden chose to publicly express only support for Israel’s response. Israeli air strikes destroyed scores of civilian buildings, including several residential towers, fifty-three schools, seventeen medical facilities, and the bureaus of both Al Jazeera and the Associated Press. At least two hundred and sixty Palestinians were killed; rockets from Gaza killed thirteen Israelis. But Biden didn’t join calls for a ceasefire until Israel’s military leaders signalled their readiness. White House officials boasted anonymously to journalists that Biden’s “hug-Bibi strategy”—“I don’t agree with you, but I love you”—had ended the fighting in eleven days, more quickly than Obama’s public hectoring had. For Biden, a senior White House official told me, the episode reinforced the sense that “public daylight between the U.S. and Israel could actually be counterproductive.”
Sullivan, Blinken, and others in the White House saw an opportunity. By publicly recommitting to follow preëxisting rules—and saying, in effect, that U.S. laws might force the Administration to cut off weapons—Biden could indirectly pressure the Israelis to better protect Palestinian civilians. On February 8, 2024, Biden signed National Security Memorandum 20, which doubled down on the existing rules about aid and war crimes in essentially the same way as Van Hollen’s amendment. After ninety days, Blinken would be required to send Congress a report attesting to the compliance of each country that received U.S. weapons. Van Hollen, satisfied, withdrew his amendment.
In early 2024, Blinken told Dermer, “I don’t want to hear that phrase ‘two more weeks’ ever again!” Dermer responded with a joke: “O.K., I will say ‘fortnight.’” Blinken told me, of the Israelis, “Were they being genuine, or were they being disingenuous? I think it’s a combination.” He added, “I would take them at their word, certainly into very early ’24—less so as time went on, and that was a huge frustration.” (A senior Israeli official insisted that Netanyahu and Dermer had, at each moment, accurately relayed what they heard from the Israeli military.)
Biden seemed to be losing patience with Netanyahu.The day he issued the memorandum, he walked back to the podium after an unrelated press conference to answer a shouted question and pronounced the Israeli campaign “over the top.” He declared that “innocent people” were “starving” and “dying,” adding, “It’s got to stop.”Three days later, according to a White House statement, he told Netanyahu in a call that Israel’s forces should not move on Rafah without an “executable plan” to protect the millionplus Palestinians who had fled there to shelter in tent camps.
Other officials told me that, in meetings of White House staff, Finer, the deputy national-security adviser, often asked what civilian death toll would be deemed unacceptable. Where was the line? Finer declined to comment on such internal conversations but said, of the Israelis, “It’s obvious now, and was pretty clear then, that they simply did not tell us the truth about their plans and their timelines, and it made no sense to accept those claims at face value.” Indeed, several Biden officials told me they came to believe that the Israeli leaders had
The “no daylight” approach was especially appealing to the White House in the months after October 7th because Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, his longtime adviser and emissary to Washington, kept insisting that they expected the fighting to be over very soon. “Just two more weeks,” they repeatedly promised. As one White House official told me, “If it is just a few more weeks, why have a huge fight with Israel?” Another official said, “We thought that this could,
The letter from the Red Cross, which
for Hamas victory.” Representative Keith Self, of Texas, called Biden “Benedict Arnold.” Sixteen House Democrats joined Republicans in condemning the decision to withhold the large bombs.
keeps such communications strictly confidential, arrived the next month. The organization had been facilitating hostage releases and providing services in Gaza since the start of the conflict. In the appendix, Mirjana Spoljaric stated that Israel was creating “obstacles to the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid” and issuing “evacuation orders that result in repeated population displacements to areas that are neither safe nor have the infrastructure to cater for the population’s most basic needs.” The Red Cross, even without visiting prisons, had documented “numerous and credible allegations” of “inhumane conditions” and noted “an unusually high number of deaths in Israeli custody.” Spoljaric wrote that Israel appeared to be invoking certain principles of the Geneva Conventions “not to spare civilians from the effects of military operations and avoid or
quested for his required review of Israel’s conduct. At least five argued that Israel had likely used U.S. weapons in violations of the laws of war and had impeded the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid. (Officials told me that Barbara Leaf, the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, agreed.) On the other side, Jacob Lew, the American Ambassador to Jerusalem—and Israel’s principal defender within the Biden Administration—argued that Israel was complying with the relevant laws. The Political-Military Bureau, which oversees weapons sales, concluded that Israel had not committed violations with U.S. weapons. Deborah Lipstadt, the special envoy for combatting antisemitism, urged against holding the Jewish state to a higher standard than other countries, but she stopped short of claiming expertise in warfare or aid distribution.
nside the White House, meanwhile, the debate was turning back to Iran.
The day of the World Central Kitchen incident, Israel had struck the Iranian mission in Syria. Iran, for the first time in its history, launched a direct attack on Israel, firing more than three hundred missiles and drones. The U.S. military (and some Arab allies) intercepted almost all of them and, with difficulty, persuaded Netanyahu to limit Israel’s next round to a token demonstration of its power—taking out an Iranian radar installation near Isfahan.
Iran let that attack go unanswered, and intelligence officials and some National Security Council staff argued that this decision showed that the Islamic Republic’s leaders, as a senior U.S. official told me,“were not itching for a bigger conflict.” Perhaps, then, Biden could stop worrying that daylight between the U.S. and Israel would tempt Iran to start a regional war.
On May 5th, Israeli officials, in an apparent attempt to stir up American supporters on the eve of the report’s release to Congress, told Axios that the Biden Administration had quietly put a hold on a shipment of what the publication called “ammunition.”The withheld ammunition turned out to be thousands of enormous bombs: about half weighed two thousand pounds, the others five hundred pounds. (A twothousand-pound bomb kills anyone within a radius of twelve hundred feet.) In an interview on CNN three days later, Biden said, of the two-thousand-pound
Four days later, Biden impulsively declared in a television interview that Israel could not “have thirty thousand more Palestinians dead” and suggested that any operation in Rafah would cross “a red line.” But a moment later he walked that back, saying it didn’t mean he would cut Israel off from all American weapons.
But McGurk and other hawks countered that Iran’s aerial attack had nearly succeeded. U.S. Central Command had been unsure whether the U.S. could deflect so many missiles.The military leaders said that Israel had been lucky, and they worried that more barrages would deplete U.S. interceptor stockpiles. What’s more, some of Iran’s weapons had reached Israeli airspace, arguably giving Hamas more reason than ever to hope for a regional war.
Then, on April 1st, Israeli drone strikes killed seven aid workers in a convoy organized by World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit whose founder, the celebrity chef José Andrés, was a friend of Biden’s. Israel had killed some two hundred aid workers since October 7th, but nearly all were Palestinians. The World Central Kitchen fatalities included a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, along with citizens of Poland, Australia, and the U.K. Biden, irate, publicly warned for the first time that ongoing U.S. support would be determined by an assessment of Israel’s “specific, concrete, and measurable steps” to reduce civilian suffering. A couple of weeks later, Blinken sent a letter, which has not previously been disclosed, to Gallant, the Israeli Defense Minister, warning him of the requirements reinforced in National Security Memorandum 20 and demanding improvements in the delivery of aid.
McGurk, who was helping lead the talks to release the hostages, had repeatedly urged colleagues to take seriously the long history of Iranian rhetoric about wiping Israel “off the map.” He had been a clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist and a legal adviser to the American occupation of Iraq, and he reminded colleagues that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s vows to found a new caliphate had also sounded far-fetcheduntil he declared himself caliph of the Islamic State. Although U.S. intelligence agencies considered Iran’s aging Ayatollah risk-averse and inclined to leave any actual fighting to foreign clients such as Hezbollah and Hamas, intelligence
munitions, “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs.” If Israel attacked Rafah’s “population centers,” he continued, he would not be “supplying the weapons.” Israeli officials said that their military used the two-thousand-pound bombs to destroy fortified tunnels, and although there are less indiscriminate ways to accomplish that objective, Republicans pounced. Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, declared that Biden’s “position is de facto
That month, at least eight State Department bureaus, agencies, or missions sent in assessments that Blinken had re-
reports generated after October 7th indicated that at least some Iranians were thinking that this was their moment. McGurk and other hostage negotiators, backed up by more concrete intelligence, noted that whenever Biden put public pressure on the Israelis—such as warning them not to rush into Rafah—it revived the hope of Hamas leaders that Iran might come to their rescue, and prompted them to up their demands, including how many Palestinian prisoners needed to be released in exchange for each hostage. McGurk argued that, if the return of the hostages was the only way to end the war, then publicly squeezing Israel to protect civilians could paradoxically prolong the fighting, resulting in more Palestinian deaths.
Several senior U.S. officials told me that virtually everyone involved in Gaza policy—including Secretary Austinthought that Israel was killing more Palestinians than was necessary to achieve any legitimate objective. Nevertheless, the Administration gradually came to believe that it could not persuade Israel to alter its approach in Gaza. As a senior White House official put it to me, the Israelis “just operate totally differently than we operate as a ground force.” Biden, in this view, faced a stark choice: he could more or less back the Gaza campaign as Israel fought it, or he could force Israel to stop by cutting off its supply of weapons, potentially leaving Hamas both in control of Gaza and still holding hostages.
“Throw him a fastball so he hits a walk-off home run, they win the World Series, and we don’t have to go to the White House.”
• •
with its apparent pledge to withhold weapons, looked increasingly awkward. Blinken and the White House turned to lawyers at the State Department and the National Security Council, who took a highly technical approach. How many civilian casualties were “proportionate” to an attack’s military advantage? The answer depended on what its planners knew and intended. Although the Israelis seldom, if ever, shared the raw intelligence behind a specific air strike, they provided voluminous information about their sophisticated protocols for selecting targets and warning civilians—even if the soaring death count raised questions about the effectiveness of those precautions. How carefully did the Israelis distinguish between military and civilian targets? That line could be blurry—for example, any three-story building could arguably be a potential military “observation post,” from which Hamas fighters might spot oncoming
Israeli ground forces. And Israeli officials invariably insisted that Hamas had operated inside hospitals and other civilian infrastructure that their forces destroyed. A U.S. lawyer involved told me, “Hamas was embedding in the civilian population, so everyone talked about these nuances and complications for months and months.”
Biden’s bluster toward Israel, it turned out, was less fierce than it seemed.White House officials told me that his comments on CNN about not supplying the weapons if Israel attacked Rafah had been unplanned and hadn’t reflected a formal decision. In fact, other officials told me that, after the suspension of the large-bomb shipment, Finer proposed that the five-hundred-pound bombs be withheld, too, as they were packed alongside the two-thousand-pound ones. But, after Sullivan had him present that question to Biden, the President ordered that the smaller bombs be shipped separately. The five-hundred-pound munitionsthe largest that the U.S. dropped on the evacuated Iraqi city of Mosul during the fight against ISIS—will kill anyone within a radius of sixty-five feet and injure anyone within a hundred and fifty.
The Biden Administration’s ban on the transfer of weapons likely to be used in war crimes appeared to provide a clearer standard. Yet lawyers involved told me that Administration policymakers seemed to want specific proof of a war crime, and since the State Department doesn’t run courts to weigh evidence, the lawyers couldn’t prove anything. The U.S. lawyer explained, “The subtlety of the language—things like ‘We don’t have definitive proof, but we are very concerned that Israel is committing war crimes’—seemed to be understood by the most senior people
National Security Memorandum 20,
sions, however, Dermer and Netanyahuperhaps aware of what was in the worksinterceded. They told the White House that Israel was seriously considering a phased ceasefire-and-hostage-release plan that the U.S. had put forward and that Hamas appeared to accept. (People involved in the negotiations told me that, throughout the conflict, Hamas generally sought to bargain its hostages for prisoner releases, an end to the war, and a chance to retain control of Gaza; the Netanyahu government considered that outcome unacceptable.)
to mean, in effect, ‘We’re all good!’”
schizophrenic. The report noted that Israeli officials had formally stated that they were strengthening “efforts to minimize civilian harm.” It observed, charitably, that a country’s “overall commitment” to international law “is not necessarily disproven” by individual violations if it is “taking appropriate steps to investigate.” It offered the caveat that the U.S. lacked the battlefield awareness necessary “to verify” that American weapons had been used in specific incidents, and praised Israel for implementing “additional measures” to avoid killing aid workers. Yet the report also said it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had, in fact, used U.S. weapons in ways “inconsistent” with the laws of war or with “established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.” It pointedly noted that some Israeli equipment was both “entirely U.S.-origin (e.g. crewed attack aircraft)” and “likely to have been involved” in war crimes, that the U.S. government was “unaware” of any prosecutions resulting from the Israelis’ own investigations into violations, and that Israel’s pledges to protect aid workers after the World Central Kitchen strike “did not fully prevent” additional deaths. The words “however,” “nevertheless,” and “despite” appear a dozen times on as many pages—a pretzel of logic demonstrating the extent to which the Biden Administration was contorting itself.
The requirement of the Geneva Conventions that a warring party “facilitate” the delivery of humanitarian assistance “by all the means at its disposal” also had loopholes.The Conventions granted belligerents the right “to search the consignments,”“to regulate their passage according to prescribed times and routes,” and “to be reasonably satisfied” that supplies weren’t intended to benefit a military opponent. Moreover, the State Department did not consider Israel’s months-long pattern of obstructing aid; the department only assessed the volume of aid flowing when the report was being finalized. And after the World Central Kitchen strike, on April 1st, Israel had briefly increased the number of supply trucks entering Gaza to nearly prewar levels.
Biden abandoned the tough-love speech and asked for it to be transformed into a call for Israeli leaders to take the deal on the table. In a May 31st address from the White House, Biden said that the proposed agreement would begin with a six-week ceasefire. If Hamas released female, elderly, and wounded hostages, Israel would withdraw from population centers in Gaza and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. After that, pending unspecified further negotiations, Israel would fully withdraw from Gaza and commit to “the cessation of hostilities permanently” if Hamas released the remaining hostages. In an effort to get Netanyahu on board, Biden misleadingly credited the Israelis with the blueprint for the deal, even though his repeated pleas for the Israelis to accept the terms raised questions about its true authorship.
A senior White House official paraphrased the lawyers’ message as “We’re not telling you there’s a violation—we’re saying it’s plausible to conclude that,” and said, “The President wanted to continue unless told ‘You can’t,’ and he wasn’t told that.” Another White House official said that, if the Administration had found Israeli war crimes to be more likely than not, then “the Republicans in Congress would have screamed, ‘Show me the evidence!,’ and we would have had lawyers on their side saying, ‘Bullshit, this is inconclusive!’”
State Department reports to Congress are typically drafted by multiple contributors in an online document, and the Israel portion of the report required by Biden’s memorandum quickly devolved into an almost unreadable mishmash of conflicting edits and comments. Then, on April 27th, some of the assessments submitted to Blinken were leaked to Reuters. Furious, he ordered that the draft be shifted to a classified system, where a line-by-line battle ensued over almost every sentence. Two senior advisers to the Secretary of State took the delicate assignment of squaring the draft with the uncomfortable facts. Working against them were the State Department dissenters, represented by Uzra Zeya, the Under-Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, and, most forcefully, by Christopher Le Mon, who spent days in a secure facility trying to insert damning evidence about the Israeli campaign.
Philip Gordon, the Kamala Harris adviser, told me that National Security Memorandum 20 “could have been, and should have been, the tool that we used to get the Israelis to do things differently.” But, after the final report, “they knew that we wouldn’t.” Van Hollen, the author of the shelved amendment, was outraged. He told me that he considered the report to be “a complete whitewash” and in “bad faith.”
A few holdover passages from the “tough love” draft remained. Biden told Israelis that the war had already “devastated Hamas,” and insured that the group couldn’t launch another attack like October 7th. “Indefinite war in pursuit of an unidentified notion of ‘total victory’” would trap the Israeli military in a quagmire and alienate other nations, he said. Moreover, such a war could not deliver a return of the hostages or any “enduring defeat of Hamas.” Nevertheless, the heart of the speech praised what Biden portrayed as Netanyahu’s ceasefire proposal.
y the time of the report’s release, Biden, encouraged by both Blinken
and Sullivan, had decided to deliver the long-discussed “tough love” speech. Some U.S. officials involved in talks to release the hostages had concluded that Netanyahu, for domestic political reasons, preferred to extend the fight rather than make a hostage-release deal, and so Biden planned to try to go around Netanyahu and urge the Israeli public to turn away from all-out war. After multiple revi-
Was Netanyahu sincere about such a deal? A senior Israeli official close to him insisted that he had been, and blamed Hamas for pulling back because it still hoped for Hezbollah and Iran to enter the war. But several senior American officials and an Israeli close to the Cabinet’s deliberations told me they believed that Netanyahu had only feigned
The result, released on May 11th, was
the border had recently fallen to a new low.“Starting now and within 30 days,” the letter said, Israel needed to comply with about twenty demands, including restoring Red Cross visits to detainees. Austin and Blinken both signed the letter on October 13th.Two days later, the document was leaked toAxios—presumably in another attempt by the Israelis to get their U.S. supporters to pressure Biden into abandoning threats of a weapons cutoff.
interest.The Israeli said that Netanyahu had done so to mollify internal critics pushing for the release of the hostages. The Americans suggested to me that he’d also hoped to manipulate Biden. Hamas agreed to the terms Biden outlined, but, once the milder “take the deal” speech was given, Netanyahu began making new demands that he knew Hamas would reject, such as allowing Israel to retain control of both a central corridor through Gaza and another corridor inside the Egyptian border. Then, a few weeks later, Israel blew up the ongoing talks by assassinating both Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas representative leading peace talks in Qatar, and Mohammed Deif, a top decision-maker inside Gaza. “Bibi was playing games,” a former White House official told me.
tion of “lifesaving food and medical supplies,” its mistreatment of detainees, and the “clear risk” that British weapons might be used in war crimes, Foreign Secretary David Lammy declared, with “regret,” that British laws imposed a “legal duty” to suspend arms transfers to Israel for use in Gaza. But Israel relied on Britain for relatively little military equipment—only about thirty British export licenses were affected—so the decision was largely symbolic.
The next month, Zeya, the UnderSecretary of State, and Lise Grande, a veteran U.N. aid administrator who was Biden’s special envoy for Middle Eastern humanitarian issues, led the drafting of a private letter to Gallant and Dermer warning that National Security Memorandum 20 required periodic reëvaluation of Israel’s conduct.The letter noted that Israel was currently blocking perishable U.S.-funded aid and that the monthly quantity of assistance crossing
Still, the letter appeared to prompt Israel to once again dramatically increase the amount of aid entering Gaza. Israel also scheduled a bilateral meeting in November to coöperate with the U.S. Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance protocol. The State Department by then had a list of several hundred incidents of civilian harm to discuss.
In September, 2024, a new Labour government in Britain conducted its own review of Israel’s compliance with international law. Citing Israel’s obstruc-
A few weeks later, though, Trump won the election. The next day, Israel called off the meeting. By April, 2025, Israel had reduced the flow of humanitarian aid more than ever before; by August, there was a full-blown famine. In September, Gaza health officials attributed four hundred and forty deaths to malnutrition, including those of a hundred and forty-seven children.
oday, many former Biden Administration officials argue that their
pressure on the Israelis prevented a famine from happening sooner. Over time, the officials contend, Biden’s efforts also slowed the killing: about twenty-five thousand Palestinians died in the first three months of the Gaza conflict, and it took twelve months for the death toll to double. (The Gaza Health Ministry, which tracks fatalities, does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.) In particular, Biden’s warnings about Rafah appear to have prompted Israel to do far more to evacuate civilians than it had done before levelling Gaza City and Khan Younis. A senior White House official told me that American pressure had made the destruction of Rafah “less horrific for civilians than it might have been,” even if Israel nonetheless “flattened it.” Several former officials noted to me with pride that after October 7th the Administration became the first to sanction violent West Bank settlers. Everyone in the Biden Administration blames Trump for allowing the
part of the strategy.” The U.S., he said, “shouldn’t tolerate wars in which civilian harm is a goal, and shouldn’t allow our weapons to be used for that purpose.”
were on the verge of a ceasefire, which I did not want to jeopardize.” (A ceasefireand-hostage-release deal that McGurk had been working on was announced as Biden left office, but it was fleeting.) Michael Herzog, the Israeli Ambassador, had also pleaded with Blinken not to carry out the sanctions. An Israeli military prosecutor had detained several sol-
McGurk, the most hawkish voice around Biden, declined to be quoted for this article. But people close to him told me he believes that his warning proved true: the limited public pressure that the Biden Administration imposed on Israel to protect civilians actually extended the war. In an op-ed in the Washington Post last year, he argued that Hamas released the hostages because Israel had decimated its fighters while the “force of arms across the Middle East” by the U.S. and Israel crippled Iran and its proxies, leaving Hamas “isolated and no longer able to count on a multifront conflict.” Despite the war’s grim toll, he concluded, “there was no shortcut.”
Blinken and Sullivan told me that they, too, felt remorse. Blinken said, “How can you not have regrets given the toll that this took on innocent men, women and children?” But he repeated a quote from Biden: “Question my judgments. Don’t question my motives.”
diers for questioning, and Herzog assured Blinken that an indictment was coming; Blinken left office without signing the document.
Sullivan, whose role as national-security adviser made him the last to leave the room before Biden made a decision, told me that he had lain awake many nights thinking about what the U.S. might have done differently. On humanitarian aid, he said, “we’d get progress and backsliding, progress and backsliding, over and over again,” adding, “We should have found a way to get out of that constant push and pull.”
This past March, the Israeli military dropped charges filed against five of the soldiers, on the basis that the leaked video had compromised a fair trial and that the injured witness had been
returned to Gaza. Netanyahu lauded the dismissal and called the case a “blood libel.”
Yet, with more than seventy thousand Palestinians dead, most of Gaza’s remaining population displaced, and the Israeli military occupying much of the territory, the conflict undermined the long-term U.S. interest that the Biden Administration claimed to have pursued: a democratic Jewish state coexisting peacefully with a Palestinian one. Among Israelis, the protracted ordeal of the hostages hardened opposition to the already fading prospect of Palestinian statehood. Settlement of the West Bank has accelerated steeply. Among Palestinians, the civilian death toll has only increased the appeal of Hamas-style armed resistance, just as Secretary Austin warned. And Hamas—which ended the war with about twenty thousand fighters, some recruited and trained during the war—controls the remainder of Gaza. Before October 7th, Israel and the U.S. estimated that Hamas had fewer than thirty thousand fighters. The ranks of Hamas decreased by around ten thousand; more than seventy thousand Palestinians were killed in the process. In the U.S., moreover, the death toll has severely damaged the historic American sympathy for the Jewish state. In congressional primaries, an acrimonious debate over continued U.S. support for Israel has riven the Democratic Party to an extent unimaginable just five years ago—and it threatens to divide Republicans as well. Jon Finer told me that the hallmark of the Gaza conflict has been that, for both Hamas and Israel, “civilian harm was not a side effect but
After Biden lost the election, a working group of Administration lawyers disseminated a forceful new set of talking points for U.S. officials to raise with their Israeli counterparts. Many of the points could have been written any time since the spring of 2024: “In light of the extensive destruction and damage in Gaza, as well as our understanding that Hamas has been devastated as an operational force ... we in the U.S. Government do not see a clear military imperative for continued operations.” Under the heading “Forced Displacement,” the lawyers noted that “the displacement seems increasingly both clear and purposeful.” Under “Starvation of Civilians,” they wrote that “the facts on the ground” raised “grave concerns” about “intentional starvation of civilians to drive them from the area,” and that aid restrictions by Israel were harming Palestinian civilians “well in excess of any further anticipated military advantage.” Under “Targeting/ Conduct of Hostilities,” they observed that the civilian harm looked increasingly “deliberate,” adding, “We are really struggling to understand the military necessity of taking strikes that have resulted in such high levels of civilian casualties and extensive property destruction.” The talking points called for follow-up, within “days not weeks,” about “plans for improvement.” But by then surely nobody was listening. Trump was on his way back to the White House.
Yet Sullivan said that Biden and his top advisers had worried that a taking action to make Israel better protect civilians “risked both failing to change Israeli policy and leading Hamas to increase its demands.” And, he continued, “when was the moment?” He told me that the Administration had “seriously thought about making a decisive break with Israel” in the spring of 2024, “in the run-up to Rafah, when Hamas was stalling in negotiations,” and again in July of 2024, “when Hamas was coming back.” But, at each point, there were risks: “What about the hostages? What about Israel under attack from all sides? What effect would it have on the ceasefire talks and bringing this god-awful war to an end?”
Near the end of Biden’s term, the Leahy Laws investigation prompted by the former detainees who’d been dumped back into Gaza focussed on a military base called Sde Teiman. That summer, a Palestinian prisoner from the base had arrived at an Israeli hospital with broken ribs and a torn rectum. Leaked video footage showed Israeli soldiers holding up riot shields to block security cameras as they appeared to beat and abuse him. The Leahy Laws process culminated with a document for Blinken to sign that would cut off U.S. aid to Sde Teiman. Yet Blinken told me that he’d once again believed “we
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Florentina Holzinger wakes up the art world.
BY LAUREN OYLER
pressed against the glass. The dramaturges Sara Ostertag and Michele Rizzo discussed: Was it too much? Yes. Rizzo began roaming around and dropped an open notebook that he’d been using in front of me. I could make out typical production notes, in both English and German; a doodle of Holzinger’s current pose, with starfish hands and exaggerated goggles; and the phrase “slapstick in shitstorm.”
t was the day before the press preview for the Venice Biennale, and the toilets at the Austrian pavilion
skating nuns,” and the pavilion reminded her of a cathedral: nave, transepts, altar. She and her team agreed that a “radical gesture was needed” to justify participating in the art-market “circus.”They’d fantasized about putting the building in the lagoon and guiding visitors through in scuba gear, but this wasn’t practical.
were broken. In Venice, plumbing problems are routine; the city doesn’t have a modern sewage system, so it relies on its canals and the tides to flush out wastewater treated in thousands of septic tanks. A heavy rain can flood the streets, and private bathrooms. But the two bright-blue porta-potties were not here for convenience. They were part of an installation opening the next day.
Instead, at the pavilion’s entrance, they hung a huge church bell from a crane. Every hour, for eight hours a day, a performer in a rotating cast climbs a rope hanging from the bell, flips herself upside down inside it, and acts as a Boschian clapper, using the force of her body and a heavy metal belt. That’s the cue for most of the other performerswho range in appearance from basically unassuming to covered in tattoos and piercings—to change shifts, in what Holzinger calls a “ritual.” In addition to the “piss tank,” the pavilion has four other enclosed spaces, each flooded with water and featuring a different attraction. When I arrived at the rehearsal, these were: a naked woman riding a Jet Ski in circles, going faster and faster until the air smelled of gasoline; naked performers slowly climbing a utility pole, pausing in languid acrobatic poses like live nudes; the artist Hannah Finn, also naked, performing contortion on a raised platform, mirroring two robot dogs splashing around her; and a room lined with machinery, where the water was ominously brown. Nearby, two performers were smoking in white Monobloc chairs, costumed in long aprons and scrubs, rubber gloves close at hand. Other performers dressed as cleaning ladies circulated throughout the space, occasionally running lines: “We tell people not to shit in the toilets. . . .”
A scripted plumbing issue was unfolding alongside the actual one. As a producer hunched beneath the tank to show a service technician the filtration system over video call, a cleaning lady entered the room with machinery. Brown water suddenly spewed from the equipment, shooting into her mouth and eyes. Hoses in the water flailed. The performer yelled, splashed, and fell, trying futilely to fix it. Holzinger and her technicians had arrived in Venice only three weeks before; since then, the cleaning ladies had taken on a much bigger role than planned. Now that the show, “SEAWORLD VENICE,” has opened—to long lines and a deluge of press that have made it, without question, the most discussed work at the Biennale—visitors often assume that they are actual janitorial staff, and treat them accordingly.
Between the toilets, Florentina Holzinger was naked, in a decent-sized tank of water, maintaining a defiant, full-frontal pose, wearing a diving mask and breathing through a scuba. A steady stream of bubbles was making chunks of her long hair float straight up. Occasionally, her left pinkie twitched. Otherwise, she barely moved. The water contained urine from the porta-potties that had been filtered through a system visible beneath the tank. “It is maintained by the pee of the people,” Giulia Messia, Holzinger’s publicity manager, explained. “But no shitting.”
Most often referred to as some combination of choreographer, director, and performance artist, Holzinger, who is forty and goes by Flo, usually works in a theatre, though what she makes is not necessarily, or only, theatre. Before she
In the tank, Holzinger crossed her arms. Since the Biennale began, in May, performers have remained in the tank for four- or eight-hour shifts; sometimes they face visitors directly, or they may be eating, sitting, or sleeping, with a blanket and pillow. What each performer does is up to her, but Holzinger enjoys the break from the outside world. For years, she has been a star of the European experimental-theatre scene; in 2021, she became an artist-in-residence at Berlin’s Volksbühne, where her productions sell out within minutes. But a durational exhibition requires a totally different allocation of time and
The atmosphere was relaxed, though various collaborators assured me, looking haunted, that the technical coördination of this work was more challenging than anything they’d ever done. In the tank, Holzinger’s hands were now
Holzinger’s humor, ambition, and extreme use of the body have made her the toast of the Venice Biennale.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCIA BURICELLI
abandoned when it no longer suits her “schizophrenic” pace. In “TANZ” (2019), it’s a ballet class; in “Ophelia’s Got Talent” (2022), a talent show; in “SANCTA” (2024), the one-act Paul Hindemith opera “Sancta Susanna,” in which the title character has heretical visions of lesbian sex that Holzinger represents live, followed by a “Mass.” Her most recent stage work, “A Year Without Summer” (2025), reimagines the summer of 1816, when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia blocked out the sun and, among other consequences, led to Mary Shelley writing “Frankenstein.” (The show is a musical.) The productions may feature aerial pole dancing, live tattooing, hook suspension, hair hanging, wood chopping, the heavily sound-effected masturbation of ceramic penises, hypnosis, blood, and flesh eating (a very small piece of skin). Performers change roles throughout, and during onstage interludes they narrate autobiographical confessions, near-death experiences, and sexual assaults. Almost everyone is naked, including opera singers, musicians, old women, disabled women, camerawomen, and women with no formal dance training.
Like all interdisciplinary artists, Holzinger is constrained by the language of category. She is often linked to the Viennese Actionists, of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and to performance artists like Marina Abramović, but figures from theatre and dance are more helpful in answering the question “But what is it?” Formally, her closest predecessors are probably post-Wall, post-dramatic German directors like Christoph Schlingensief and René Pollesch, whose political, self-referential work pushed beyond traditional literary elements like plot, dialogue, and character to examine the relationship between performer and audience. (Theatre for people who hate plays.) Much of the action in Holzinger’s work, especially the body horror, is projected live onto large screens on either side of the stage—common in European theatre, but used here to show what is otherwise hidden, often some kind of upsetting process. (In “Ophelia,” the professional sword-swallower Fibi Eyewalker seems to swallow a fish, followed by an endoscopic camera.) The result is not just a spectacle but something that produces the satisfaction of narrative, as the songs, dances, scenes, and feats of daring accrue:
• •
energy, and the frenzied interests of private donors can be draining.“I can have amazing naps in there, in the water,” she told me.
“Are you kidding me?” Holzinger replied, calmly. She put her shorts back on and asked how the shitstorm had gone.
t’s hard to imagine Holzinger freaking out about anything, except maybe
After an hour, the bell rang, and Holzinger handed off the scuba and emerged from the water. Her face lined from the goggles, she put on a huge tie-dyed sweatshirt, baggy shorts, and reflective Oakley sunglasses. She then immediately removed the shorts and began going over notes with Rizzo and Ostertag. The hands were too much, yeah. The crossed arms were O.K., except that she looked cold. She hadn’t had a problem with the temperature, but performers would stay in the tank for longer, so they should warm it up. It was then that Ostertag explained what was happening with the portapotties—the pressure levels kept changing, which is why they couldn’t flush the toilets earlier.
slowing down. While “SEAWORLD VENICE” is on view, through November, she is also touring three ensemble productions and organizing several one-off performances, which she calls “Études.” The last time we spoke, on a video call from her apartment in Venice, she described the Biennale piece as “minimal.” “It gets depicted as this shocking, radical thing, but if you come from experimental theatre there is nothing shocking or radical about it,” she said. “Actually, my biggest complex was that it’s so gentle. You know, not much happening.”
She was being serious. A typical Holzinger show lasts for around three hours and begins with a premise that is
er’s stage designer, told me. When they met, he had never done professional theatre before—he trained as an architectbut Holzinger asked a question that excited him: Could he make her a ballet barre that would hold weight but also, eventually, break?
a Gesamtkunstwerk that knows and resists the term.“She’s always kind of saying ‘Fuck you’ to Wagner,” Brandon Woolf, a professor of dramatic literature at New York University, told me.
anced interventions. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of a tampon string, just as you might see the complicated rigging of a set; the effect is to emphasize what the female body can be and do. The scholar Caroline Lillian Schopp has described Holzinger’s mode as “feminist decadence” that “luxuriates in the violence that so-called high art and its histories conceal.” In other words, Holzinger is funny. In “Ophelia,” she perverts “Apocalypse Now,” among other works, by having five women—herself included—literally have sex with a helicopter, which is suspended from the ceiling and piloted by Saioa Alvarez, a little person who, elsewhere in the Holzinger universe, gives a furious sermon as “the first lesbian Pope.” The performers grind and moan as rain pours from above and a wind machine roars. Eventually, the helicopter ejaculates a waterfall from its door, and the storm subsides.
Though Holzinger views each of her pieces as research for the next, and though there is no skill or concept in “SEAWORLD VENICE” that she hasn’t worked on in some way before, it makes sense that the installation is what has brought her widespread attention. It’s her most accessible work, not only because it’s fairly easy to say what it’s about (“How we live in crisis,” as Holzinger offered at a press event) but also because it doesn’treallychallenge the viewer’s gag reflex, endurance, or sense of good taste. The first time a porta-potty appeared in a Holzinger piece, for example, it was a gateway to Hell, chasing a pantsless Dante in “A Divine Comedy” (2021). Later in that show, four women shit simultaneously, downstage, directly in front of the audience.
olzinger was born in Vienna, and her parents, a lawyer and a phar-
macist who dislikes the sight of blood, are normal. When she was ten years old, she developed anorexia and drank so much water, trying to weigh herself down for doctors’ appointments, that she gave herself water poisoning. She spent nearly a year in a rehabilitation center, living with “troubled kids” whom she found “much more interesting,” she told me, than her “evil group of friends” from a conservative public school. When she was seventeen, she took a contemporarydance class, and loved it. Because her parents didn’t want her to pursue the profession—and because she wanted state funding—she took a year of architecture and business courses while training and auditioning for dance schools.
At the same time, the helicopter represents a fundamental pragmatism in Holzinger’s work. She feels a responsibility to do something with the resources she has; more than pushing the boundaries of feminist performance art, she pushes the boundaries of logistical and technical coördination. “When we came into the Volksbühne for the first time, we saw this high fly space that you don’t actually see from the perspective of the audience, but that’s fucking unique about this theatre,” she told me. “A helicopter could fly into the building. I mean, we feel an obligation to use this.”
Given Holzinger’s notoriety, and her own ironic relationship to extremes, her use of trigger warnings, posted before every performance, may seem beside the point, or even hypocritical. “I don’t want to traumatize people forever,” she told me, messing with her dirty-blond hair, putting it up and taking it down again with the controlled power of a butcher preparing cuts of meat. Still, people sometimes pass out, or have to leave, during her shows. The Vienna run of “SANCTA” was particularly chaotic; during one performance, even the show’s first violinist fainted, breaking both his nose and his instrument, after accidentally glimpsing a scene in which someone sticks a finger into an open wound. “It was like a field hospital!” Holzinger said. “People were being very dramatic.” She did a squeaky voice: “ ‘Ah! My husband is not moving anymore! Help!’” The glee, or Schadenfreude, in her retelling comes from her uneasy relationship with Austria and its sometimes “grumpy” press—you’d expect such a response in the provinces, not in supposedly sophisticated Vienna. It’s “almost like a joke” that she’s representing the country in the Biennale, she told me, adding that she “really needed to leave this country in order to finally do what I wanted to do, to express myself.”
Journalists often claim that Holzinger wanted to be a ballerina but started too late, and with the wrong body, to do so. It’s a compelling narrative: it allows a writer to imply, in an ostensibly feminist maneuver, that Holzinger is kind of short and has the body of someone who could play an M.M.A. fighter in a film, which she has also done. Actually, she’d wanted to be “a really good contemporary dancer,” she told me, but was “very unsuccessful.” (She is “really not good” at remembering choreography.) Eventually, she was accepted into the School for New Dance Development (S.N.D.O.), in Amsterdam, but she never wanted to make her own work. “I wanted to just learn how to move and be a part of a group,” she said.
The blatant ambition comes with its own drama; Holzinger’s work can feel
At S.N.D.O., she met Vincent Riebeek, a Dutch choreographer and director who was a year below her. They were both adventurous, rebellious, and interested in challenging ideas about what a man and a woman could do onstage; they were also both, Riebeek told me, kicked out of school for periods of time. “She was super enigmatic,” he said. “She would do everything a little bit different. Even watching her make a sandwich could be super fascinating.”
rough around the edges, creating the sense that, at any level of a production, something might go very wrong.“Viewers should doubt whether we really have everything under control,” Holzinger has said. In addition to the helicopter, “Ophelia” involves a pool and two dunk tanks. Water “always finds a way to mess with the infrastructure,” Knežević, Holzing-
Feminism-wise, Holzinger uses the obviousness of nudity to make fairly nu-
They quickly became inseparable. They
didn’t really plan or rehearse; they just spent all their time together, making work “for each other and not for somebody else,” Holzinger said. Only later, when they were introduced to production houses, did they realize that other people practiced. An adapted version of a school project, “Kein Applaus für Scheisse” (2010), became a hit on the European avant-garde-theatre circuit; several other works—sexual, aggressive—followed. For years, they travelled and lived together, developing a reputation as enfants terribles. “We were lucky,” Holzinger said of their early success, because it meant that they “never had to hustle for a job.” Onstage, Riebeek was the campy, effortful foil to Holzinger’s relentless cool; watching her today, you can see how she would have been stoic even when her partner was vomiting on her, or slowly pulling a long string out of her vagina with his teeth.
MICE
You may take my word for their being very nearly as hard to herd as people. Whereas the curlew may “wheep” or “wheeple” depending on the stretch of salt marsh or other harsh terrain from which it happens to hail, a mouse will whisper-wail a single ultrasonic note that resonates through the chthonic zones beloved of Hecate. A mouse will blithely throw down this ultrasonic “hey for houghmagandie” to attract the doe some still take for eye candy.
With regard to the edible dormouse, glis glis, on which the Romans loved to reminisce long after they stopped roasting him in honey and poppy seed, finally running out of dinner money with the arrival of the Goths, he’s scarcely cut from the same cloth as the beastie overturned by the plowman-poet Rabbie Burns, himself subsisting on gruel and a little beef suet. Despite the capacity to intuit outcomes we now ascribe to Mus musculus, it’s unlikely Rabbie—not much of a Latin scholarwould ever have sussed a mouse flexing itself under the skin of “muscular.”
Over time, though, what they called their “codependent” relationship became, in Holzinger’s words, “torturous.” Riebeek was frustrated to be pigeonholed
To say she has “sweetie mice between the ears” is to say she isn’t the keenest spear in the rack, your own latest lady. Situated as they are in a hot press or shady pantry and incorporating foil off Polo mints, blue-tinged lint
I concluded that it happens mostly through doing it. There was a little box of sushi from an Asian grocery storeHolzinger has no special diet—and a very large binder. After an idea for a new piece congeals, a core group travels for research. For “SANCTA,” they went to Rome, and to Barcelona, where roller-skating on a half-pipe could be practiced in nice weather. Meanwhile, Holzinger was going to the opera, which
piece, “Apollon” (2017). “I haven’t followed his work recently, but he used to be a great artist,” she said. “I think that’s not something you really lose.”
n the spring of 2024, I attended several “SANCTA” rehearsals at the
Finally, in 2017, Riebeek needed knee surgery, and they had to take a break. “All of a sudden,” Holzinger told me, “we just never saw each other again.” After that, she stopped working with men onstage, beginning with her first large ensemble
Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater, in the German city of Schwerin, where it premièred, hoping to understand how a Holzinger production comes together.
stage arrived, she took off all her clothes, put on a metal belt, and left her spot. Soon, a rope hanging from a giant church bell above center stage went taut, and Holzinger appeared, climbing up from a trapdoor to call the theatre to “Mass.” Then she returned to her spot, put her pants back on, and remained topless as she watched the rest of the run, which went on for nearly two more hours.
from a tumble dryer, fibreglass, Styrofoam, their homes are no longer those rural slums exposed by Rabbie but penthouses taunting the tabby with tabbed silk, buttonhole twist—all such pelf as would befit any yarn-spinner like myself who’s also well-nigh resistant to blood thinners.
Holzinger emphasizes that her work is not a “community project”—it’s not that kind of feminism, and if you don’t want to be naked onstage you probably can’t join this group. She enjoys the responsibility, and everyone respects that it’s ultimately her show. During one “SANCTA” rehearsal, I watched the cast perform “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” by Cole Porter, a number in which the opera singer Emma Rothmann is raised in a harness over the rest of the performers as they dance. Initially, this was supposed to happen for about thirty seconds, in the middle of the song, but the transition didn’t work. Rothmann looked nervous as she tried to strap herself into the harness while smiling and belting the lyrics. Holzinger interrupted the runthrough: Rothmann needed to sing the entire song in the air.
While it’s clear that Cooper drew heavily on Scott for the plot of “The Last of the Mohicans,” the psalm-singing Gamut being a version, goddammit, of Wamba the fool, and Rebecca and Rowena are retooled as Cora and Alice Munro, he also draws on his own braw dexterity much as a mouse will raid our autumnal hoard with the aid of a thumbnail that’s little more than a thumbnail sketch, that rudimentary development nonetheless allowing it to fetch an illimitability of corn past Egyptian corn sentries.
You may take my word that what you’ve faintly overheard from library or laundry room is the shutting of a visor followed by the tut-tutting of a steel-tipped incisor as mice enter the lists against any and every Ivanhoe. It’s all grist to the mills at which they tilt. Sennacherib and sahib have withered before the steel-tipped nibs by which they take on the hellish zone beloved of Hecate with something of the relish and resolution ascribed by Conan Doyle to a blowpipe-wielding Andaman Islander till, holy shit, they’ve stripped the soy-oil insulation from the wiring of your Toyota Highlander.
Concern fell across the face of Sophie Duncan, a choreographer and an aerialist. “But that means she’s gonna hang in the sky for three and a half minutes,” she said. Later, Rothmann and Duncan told me that Rothmann had never been in the stage harness before that rehearsal, which was a little more than two weeks before the première. Duncan, who has worked with Cirque du Soleil, also noted that no one looks good just dangling for that long.
“But she can do it,” Holzinger replied. She was right. Later, she told Rothmann to perform it “more like a Nazi,” which was also right.
—Paul Muldoon
Still, Holzinger’s process is inherently collaborative, and the team appreciates the platform that she gives them. Annina Machaz, an actress who often plays the role of deranged m.c.—in “SANCTA,” she’s a douchebag Jesus, vaping and ranting—has been working with Holzinger since they met at a dance festival, a decade ago; she writes her own lines. “She really gives me carte blanche,” Machaz told me. Duncan joined the team for “Ophelia,” in 2022, after she saw a casting
tions were direct, never agitated or hostile, spoken into a microphone from the front row. She periodically took notes, which she would later go over with the cast. She watched in different postures: with one or both legs stretched out on the wall that divided the orchestra pit from the front row; with both legs dangling into the pit; with her butt balanced on a closed theatre seat. During one dress rehearsal, when her cue to go on-
she initially didn’t like, and to Mass, which she grew up attending. Once the whole team assembles, professors and other experts visit rehearsals, offering insights on the production’s themes; for “SANCTA,” Felix Ritter, a former teacher of Holzinger’s and a dramaturge who also worked on “SEAWORLD VENICE,” led them in Bible study. “She never goes blind into a fight,” he said.
In the theatre, Holzinger’s instruc-
call on a circus forum; she became the unofficial harness adviser after noticing the lackadaisical way the group had been using them. Earlier in her career, Holzinger found performers by posting a Craigslist ad seeking “women with special talents.” Many of her performers stick around, or return, teaching others and learning from them. The motorcyclist and stunt rider Keity Meier, who appeared in “Divine Comedy,” riding laps around the stage with a skeleton on her back, is performing in Venice, and not only on the Jet Ski.
with dignity and artistic integrity seems to be bothering her. She developed another little “complex” about “A Year Without Summer,” which required a much slower pace than comes naturally to her. No one else would consider the show calm, of course. It begins with a huge, multigenerational orgy that lasts for twenty minutes, becoming increasingly absurd before morphing into a musical loosely organized around the history of science and medicine and its careless approach to women. (Briefly, Machaz plays a douchebag Freud, skipping through a pile of cocaine and screaming about vagina dentata; Alvarez plays Josef Mengele.)
loose, and she fell sixteen feet. “I saw her whole body snap over her neck, and I was sure I was going to have to take care of my friend for the rest of my life,” Riebeek told me. “I felt like, Now it’s over.” At the hospital, doctors resisted giving Holzinger an X-ray; in the show that she and Riebeek had been performing, Holzinger was “pregnant,” which the doctors assumed to be true. “We had to fight for her to get proper medical care,” Riebeek said. “Like, ‘It’s theatre! It’s fiction! I didn’t really make her pregnant!’” When the doctors finally scanned her, she had only a concussion, a broken nose, and a missing tooth.
Holzinger is also open to networking, if you’re really interesting. Ruby-Kale Roberts, who performs under the name Fleshpiece and works with ceramics, hook suspension, and a host of other things, got Holzinger’s number through some performers in “Ophelia.” She’d heard that “SANCTA” would involve skating. “I sent a sassy text message that said, Hey, I have a beard and a cunt, and I love being naked. By the way, I also skate,” Roberts said, laughing. Holzinger replied that her cast was full, but two weeks later—late in the production process—she wrote back asking for Roberts’s availability. She became a huge part of the show.
Since then, she has professionalized and become fastidious about safety protocols, but she continues to “play with risk and the unforeseen and the possibility of failure,” as she puts it. Scenes of care, and of redemption, often ensue. In “Ophelia,” the artist Netti Nüganen performs a Houdini act underwater, with her limbs and her neck chained inside a dunk tank. After more than two minutes, she begins to flail, pulling frantically at her collar. Holzinger jumps into the tank, her movements inelegant and panicked, and pulls Nüganen out. The stage, now covered in water, is quickly cleared as Holzinger comforts Nüganen; the fakeout isn’t entirely apparent until Saioa Alvarez comes out dressed as a plumber to take a look.Then Nüganen, who until recently had been holding her breath for nearly three minutes, begins to tap-dance.
The production ends with an extended hospital scene that parallels the orgy. What starts as a tender image of elder care, with younger performers slowly helping older women into robes and beds, transforms. One embarrassing “accident” follows another until, by the end, everyone is screaming, crying, throwing up, shitting, and panicking. Toilets appear, hopelessly.There is no effort to hide the tubes and apparatuses from which fake bodily fluids gush. It is relentless, hilarious, tiresome, and disgusting. It is also brave—not because everyone is, as always, more or less naked but because it is over the top and ugly about what, in life, is the same.
It’s appropriate, Ritter told me, leaning over the back of his chair during a “SANCTA” rehearsal one afternoon, that Holzinger was doing a show about nuns. She and her group are kind of like a convent: “sisters,” childless, dedicated to a higher power. “This is our church,” Roberts, channelling an evil evangelical preacher, bellows in the final sequence of the show, “and we will nail you to the present moment like Jesus was nailed to the Cross.” Then she squats, her vagina directed toward the audience, and issues a semi-improvised, sexually explicit monologue as the entire cast sings “Don’t Dream It,” from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
Finally, the drama lets up. Small groups form; sex returns, softly. A selfie stick circulates, and the results are projected onto screens flanking the stage. It is sweet, and sickening, the impulse to take pictures at the end of the world. Then Bláthin Eckhardt, a guitarist and a dancer, climbs a platform at the back of the stage and begins, incredibly, to ice-skate. On the screens, a message appears. It’s a succinct statement about the duty of the individual, the artist, to others within a haywire system:“NO END.” Eckhardt continues skating in exquisite, small loops, showing her exhaustion at times, through the curtain call. The mess below remains, but it’s no longer ugly. She doesn’t stop skating until every single audience member has left.
Holzinger appears in her shows less than she used to, but she tries to experience
ll of Holzinger’s work, even the early pieces, made during what she
most of what she asks her collaborators to do, and she obviously loves performing. (She first learned hook suspension for “SANCTA,” as “a treat to myself.”) Given that she casts women of all agesthe legendary dancer and actress Beatrice (Trixie) Cordua performed with her until she died, at eighty-two, last year—there is no reason to think she will stop, but the question of how to age
calls her “trashy days,” exhibits a poignant belief in what is possible, not just for an individual body or an intrepid audience but for the collective. Without an extreme perspective, this message would be sentimental, and she has refined it as she’s matured. In 2013, during a show with Riebeek, a screw holding her weight during an aerial stunt came
n the second day of the Venice preview, it was raining, and a
group of curators, journalists, and V.I.P.s met at 9 A.M. to take two chartered boats to an “Étude” that would
be performed in the middle of the lagoon.While waiting to board, Knežević told me that the crew had been at the pavilion until eleven the night before; one of the robot dogs had stopped working, and they’d had to reconfigure the room, installing a dartboard so that Finn, the contortionist, could do archery (with her feet). Still, he and Holzinger seemed in good spirits. “It fits the concept somehow, that it is about failing systems,” Holzinger said of the malfunction. Ultimately, she added, the only thing that really needed to work was the toilets.
On the boat to the performance, Holzinger and the pavilion’s curator, Nora-Swantje Almes, held a brief discussion about the work. Holzinger isn’t very good at speeches—her perpetual state is that she’s either about to perform or has just performed—but she was charming, cheekily vulgar, and intelligent. “This is really not theatre,” she said, mischievously. “This is really not a spectacle.” She concluded by exclaiming “I have to stretch!” and decamped to a partitioned area of the boat.
“Not that one. I can only taste five of its seven grains.”
Nearly two miles offshore, we approached a barge carrying a crane. We disembarked onto another barge and sat on a set of bleachers. On the stage barge, seven naked performers climbed on the crane, and a noise band assembled at the bow. Machaz followed the musician Gibrana Cervantes with an umbrella to protect Cervantes’s violin. The mezzo-soprano Andrea Baker, nude but for a wing-tip collar and rubber hip waders, took the position of conductor.
weed. Underwater, a rope had been tracked from the boat to the bell so that she could find her way—the lagoon is basically opaque—but she said that the most stressful part was communicating the timing to the Italian crane operator. She had been going into the water with industrial divers for months, as research. It gives you a rash.
rare chance to see it: she’s a very good contemporary dancer.
The crane moved Holzinger closer to a boat that was stationed next to the barge. Luna Duran, whose brown hair hangs almost to her knees, waited there, with hooks installed in the flesh on her thin shoulder blades. Holzinger picked her up by a cable attached to the hooks. As the pair were lifted back above the water, still hanging from the bell, the band started thrashing and screaming for the climax. With Holzinger in control of the cable holding her, Duran twisted and swung, sometimes like a nymph, sometimes like a caught fish, bleeding from the wounds in her back.
The music stopped. Eckhardt and Shi climbed down from the crane; when they disembarked, Eckhardt took Shi’s head in her arms and hugged her tightly, for several seconds. Everyone watched in silence, in the rain, as Holzinger tolled the bell.
They played ambient drone for a while, menacing, anticipatory. Baker was going to summon something from the depths. Lane Shi, a musician and an artist who uses vocal techniques from Mongolian throat singing, issued highpitched squeals like a creature. Then Eckhardt, with her electric guitar, began to ascend the crane, pausing to perform rock-star maneuvers. Shi followed her halfway. In position, she sang, and then screamed, conjuring sounds from the sea, mountains, and dirty basement gigs.
Knežević told me that, while visiting the Sistine Chapel for “SANCTA” research, the team noticed how Michelangelo had painted women to look like men: something about them being upside down. In the bell, Holzinger’s previously compact torso becomes long and androgynous, her arms and lats titanic. But it’s in her neck, the way she controls her head to follow the violent motion of the rest of her body, the force of which seems to come from somewhere beyond herself, that you get the
Eventually, they were lowered back onto the boat. They had rehearsed this only once, for “about ten minutes,” Holzinger said, owing to the cold, boattraffic regulations, and the expense. “With these ‘Études,’ it’s always fucking kamikaze and last-minute everything,” she added, but “they always work out.” As she dropped back onto her feet, she was beaming and, seeming to forget the audience, gave Duran a high five.
Finally, the music reached a crescendo as the crane started to pull something from the water. A bell appeared, and then, inside, Holzinger herself, upside down, her long hair hanging like sea-
48 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 27, 2026 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOOEUN BAE
ven as an infant, Helen and John Koh’s firstborn had a calm temperament and an accommodat-
careless parents could have progeny who performed admirably. The bond between a mother and her child was binding, yet it had to be loosened. A mother had to love, and a child had to grow up. The results were often out of one’s hands.
for Yonsei. He believed that the tests went well enough.
As soon as Bo and his classmates finished the bongosa, they rushed back to their hagwon.Their tutors had been more or less flying blind, because there were almost no prior tests from which to teach. Each student, fresh from having taken the exam, was asked to recall the test questions, and three tutors recorded the questions and typed out their speculated answers. The bongosa question Bo would never forget was “Describe the difference between digital and analog.” For his answer, he had written that a digital clock stated a moment in time, whereas an analog clock revealed the process of time. Bo’s tutor said that this answer was terrific. Not that it mattered.
ing disposition, as if he appreciated what it meant to be a jangnam, with the attendant privileges and responsibilities of primogeniture. Bo never seemed to let the burdens of being the eldest child overwhelm him. He exerted himself in the classroom and on the sports field; he got along well with his peers. A nice-looking and thoughtful young man, Bo was a blessing and a relief to his busy parents.
n America, Bo was eighteen years old, but his Korean age was nineteen, as
the time in the mother’s womb was counted. Girls admired his glossy chestnut hair, olive complexion, and large brown eyes. He spoke English like a native, which had made him an exotic curiosity at a public high school in Gangnam, and he studied from morning into the night, barely sleeping. In the evenings, his sister, Mido, studied as well, but she could never stay awake
All three children had been born in Paramus, New Jersey, while John was working for a Japanese trading company in New York City. The Koh family had lived in New Jersey for six years, Seoul for four, then Sydney for almost six, prior to their return to Seoul. In the U.S., Australia, and South Korea, Helen’s friends had constantly asked her how she was bringing up her eldest son. Was there a method to rearing such a fine student and good boy? Helen, however, insisted that the credit belonged neither to her nor to John. “Bo came that way,” she would say.
Bo’s Suneung score was what kept him out. A perfect score was 200. He received 153, a strong showing but not invulnerable, and, predictably, given his focus on studying for the college exams, his high-school G.P.A. had fallen to the lower end of the second stanine, so he was no longer in the top four per cent nationally.
Most remarkably, Bo had maintained an impressive grade-point average, in the second stanine nationally, and he was now allowed to apply to Yonsei University. His school did not think he should test for Seoul National, his father’s alma mater, which was reserved for the very top students, but his rank was high enough that his advisers thought Yonsei might be possible, especially if he applied for sociology, which was a subject he wanted to study. This was fine by Bo. He preferred Yonsei’s old-fashioned campus and admired the university’s alumni.
In Bo’s homeroom class, there was a precocious beauty named Ara Yang, whom he liked, and who adored him. After school, Bo usually went to his cram school, and, once, she showed up
Ara had been accepted to Sungkyunkwan University, but she told him she’d be happy to wait for him as he prepared to take the Yonsei exam again. Almost everyone took these exams more than once, especially for schools as hard to get into as Yonsei, she said, trying her best to encourage him. Bo, guilt-ridden at the heavy expense of his failure, told her firmly that he would not hold her back. To make the situation clearer, he told her that they should not even be friends.
Bo’s mother could admit this truth not because she was modest but, rather, because the experience of having more than one child in the same household amply demonstrated to any self-aware parent that each child was entirely unique. Eventually, all small humans—even when they were flesh of one’s flesh, which should have provided some illusion of predictability—asserted their individuality, no matter how much a parent tried to control, shape, or design them.
As educated and earnest middle-class parents, Helen and John had provided more than the basics, and certainly more than they themselves, both the children of poor parents, had been given. Parenting was a haphazard experiment for even the best intentioned, and Helen and John observed their offspring, Bo, DH, and Mido, with profound fascination, as only parents can. Each child was immutably distinct from the others.
o wanted to take the exams again. Helen did not know what to do.
The Suneung was offered only once a year, in November. And John, after falling out with his boss and not finding anything good in Seoul, had just been rehired at his old office in Sydney, albeit with a demotion and a lower salary. He and Mido were now staying with Helen’s brother, Kenny, who worked for Qantas, and his wife, Lily. Thankfully, DH was still doing fine at Andover. Helen had to consider the cost of maintaining housing in Seoul and Sydney, Bo’s hagwon fees for another year, and the family’s stretched expenses.
When Helen read a sad story in the news about a child who had gone astray, she very rarely assigned blame to the parents. Life had taught her that the debate between nature and nurture was almost moot: Excellent parents sometimes had badly behaved children, and
Bo took the Suneung in November of 1994. In addition to that dreaded national college exam, in his year he also had to take the bongosa, a specific exam
Helen’s sister, Sonya, lived in an apartment complex made up of many
separate towers in Apgujeong. In the elevator in Sonya’s building, Helen finger-combed her hair, tucking the loose wisps behind her ears. That morning, she’d noticed new gray hairs sprouting from her side part. No doubt her sister would comment on this. Each week that Helen held off on getting her cut-andcolor, she could put aside more for the children’s school and hagwon fees.
have favorites, but he is the best. Nicer than my sons,” Sonya said, then smiled. “Then, are you going to stay another year so—”
an enormous cobalt-blue fishbowl on a rosewood pedestal.
The maid remained at the door while Helen took a seat on the sofa, and Sonya frowned.
“I can’t stay. The apartment lease is ending, and we need that deposit back so we can get a place in Sydney. We can’t keep relying on Kenny and Lily. Bo missed the test by just a few points, and the counsellors said that this year’s Suneung was a nightmare.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to leave. Again. You’ve barely been here,” Sonya said, too exasperated to bother with pleasantries. She asked the maid for tea, and the young woman bowed before closing the door.
When the elevator opened on Sonya’s floor, a uniformed maid stood waiting at the apartment’s front door. Sonya’s home, which was owned by her husband’s uncle, Chairman Mun, was larger than most houses in Seoul—a full floor, two apartments combined. Three generations lived in the two units, separated by a small hallway. Sonya spent her days taking care of the householdher husband, Yong-gil, their two sons, and the Chairman. She managed a sizable staff, with a formidable housekeeper, two maids, a cook, and a driver.
Helen folded her arms and closed her eyes, unable to forget what her son had said after the test results came out: “Umma, I want to take it again. I failed you and Appa. I’m sorry.”
“Is she new?” Helen pointed toward the door.
“Just the niece of the cook,” Sonya said, then regretted sounding so dismissive. “She is part time. I don’t really need her, but the cook asked me. She’s recently divorced. There are two little kids.”
She’d told him that he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had never failed them, but Bo could not be consoled. Her oldest child did not cry or waste more words. He was certain that, if he had studied harder, he would have passed. Acceptance was within his grasp. Three points, maybe four? He did not want all this expense and time to be squandered. How could she say no to a child who wanted to study harder? Helen could not. For her son, passing that test would be his redemption.
Helen understood. Everyone asked her older sister for help, and Sonya had a hard time saying no.
“Did John find a house in Sydney?” “They’re still at Kenny’s.” “Still?” Sonya raised an eyebrow. “Well, Kenny and Lily said it’s fine,
The maid guided Helen to Sonya’s home office, which was the size of Helen’s living room. A large square of southern light flooded the elegant space. Behind the modern oak desk was a green mohair-wool sofa where Sonya read in the evenings. Stacks of art books covered a low hand-carved Korean-pine table. Tall branches of persimmons filled
and Mido is helping with the kids.”
“Are you O.K. with money?” Sonya asked bluntly.
“It’s tough,” Helen admitted. She drew a breath. “Bo didn’t get in.”
The boy’s apology continued to press down on his mother’s brain like a tiny ball of tungsten, a deceptively heavy metal she had once held in her palm in a chemistry class.
“Oh, no!” Sonya exclaimed.“Was he close? I bet he was close. Bo is very smart. The hardest-working boy. I shouldn’t
“It doesn’t make sense for me to stay here and lease a smaller place,” Helen said.
Sonya shook her head. She understood. Helen’s growing expenses were unsustainable, and how would she ever save for the children’s weddings and her own retirement?
“Sister, I was wondering, I know the Chairman wouldn’t like it, but do you think Bo could stay here to take the test again? He’d be at the hagwon most of the time and wouldn’t be underfoot. I know it’s a big—”
Sonya had been afraid of this. She felt unable to refuse her little sister but unable to say yes either, because this was not her house. With her head bowed down, Sonya sat, not saying a word.
“Never mind,” Helen said. She understood. Her sister couldn’t ask the Chairman. He felt strongly about not allowing anyone outside Yong-gil’s immediate family to stay overnight. He had never liked Sonya’s relatives. For
her sake, he tolerated them.“I was thinking of renting a room for Bo. I can’t decide if he should stay at a boarding house or a gosiwon.”
Bo hadn’t had time to read fiction since the summers during high school, when he used to read classic European and American novels in English.
Sonya glanced at the clock. “Listen, let’s have something to eat now. The Chairman will be back soon.”
“I’ve heard that boarding houses can be terrible about meals,” Sonya said, wanting to be helpful. “The newer gosiwon can be nicer,” she said. “They’re more like motels now than dorms. The rooms are small, but some of them are better run. I can help you with that. I am sorry about this. You know that if the Chairman and my husband weren’t so against—”
o failed on his second try. An impossible philosophy passage and a
He’d always imagined himself living and working in Korea, but he also wanted to be the kind of Korean who knew more about the world—through books, film, and history.
confounding geometry proof. A few points shy.
On November 13, 1996, he took the Suneung for the third time.
In less than twenty-four hours, he would take the Suneung again, and, for the past three years, he had done little but sleep, eat, and study for this exam. He had failed the Suneung in his last year of high school, and then again after graduation, and he hoped that tomorrow’s Suneung would be his last. He felt good about the test this year and ready to put it behind him.
The day before, after his last hagwon class had ended, he’d got on a mostly empty subway car heading to the Yonsei campus and sat in a seat near the back. Cold, he tried to warm himself by tucking his blue woollen scarf into his faded black parka.
“We’ll be fine,” Helen said, feeling foolish.
“I can help you with the cost,” Sonya assured her. “Find the best gosiwon for him, right next to the hagwon. The boarding houses are often far away, and you don’t want him to waste time commuting. Just pick the best one, and I’ll take care of it. I’ll check in on him often. I promise.”
“If you want to be a Yonsei student, you have to behave like one,” Kim Teacher, his hagwon instructor, had told him. “Go to the cafés where Yonsei students have their snacks, read the books they read, and inhabit the peace of mind of being an admitted student. Visualize. Draw the picture in your mind.”
Earlier that morning, after class ended, Kim Teacher had asked him to stay behind for a moment. Bo stood awkwardly while the teacher remained seated, his long brown face tilted in deep thought. The teacher was unusually tall, with broad shoulders and a square jaw. Even when he smiled, he looked more like a former professional athlete than a once stellar student from a strawberry farm in Goseong.
Sonya paused. “You look tired,” she said.“The sweater is pretty, but the lilac color highlights the gray in your hair. You look older than me! Get an appointment and get your roots done. I’m a mean older sister, aren’t I? But who else is going to tell you to take care of your looks?”
A Suneung wizard who got one of the top scores in the country for his year, Kim Teacher charged an extraordinary tutoring fee, which Bo’s aunt Sonya paid. As a bachelor, not yet forty years old, Kim Teacher earned more than several lawyers and judges combined and already owned two commercial buildings in Hongdae. It was rumored that he didn’t have to work for money anymore; he just enjoyed teaching. His specialty was retakers, the ones who had not passed on their first or second tries. Kim Teacher was convinced that Bo would pass this time. His practice scores were in the safety zone, so he focussed on building Bo’s mental game.
“You will do very well,” Kim Teacher pronounced. He handed Bo a paper box filled with the customary taffy. “Make the score stick! This is the best yeot in Seoul. Not everyone can get this.”
Helen touched her head. Her sister was picking on her because she felt bad. Sonya had married a man from a wealthy family but had quickly learned that none of the family money was hers. The Chairman controlled every decision and expense, and Sonya did everything she could to please him. She nagged or teased only two people in the world—Kenny and Helen. With everyone else, she was detached, her behavior unimpeachable. To everyone else, she appeared flawless.
Bo smiled his thanks. “One more thing,” Kim Teacher said, digging into his vest pocket to pull out a five-hundred-won coin. “Take this with you tomorrow. It’s a good-luck charm from your old teacher. When you get nervous, just touch it. Remember, you’re not alone.Think of the millions and millions of students who have taken difficult exams before you. Now you’re part of this group of strugglers. It is good to be examined. A young person should learn and be tested so that he can retain knowledge.”
At a corner table, by the window of a popular two-story café near Sinchon station that was frequented by students, Bo picked up a discarded copy of a Yonsei literary magazine and read it while drinking his tea. All around him, young men and women huddled together, warming their cold hands on hot coffee cups. Attractive girls in bold patterned sweaters and jeans discussed politics in hushed tones, ignoring the boys sniffing around them.
Sonya crossed her arms and tilted her head slightly. “Why is Bo doing this? It makes no sense. He should be studying in America.”
“He likes being here. He feels closer to the people. He was even thinking of trying to get into military service,” Helen said, mystified.
Surprised, Bo stared at the coin in his palm. He wouldn’t have pegged his teacher as superstitious.
“Has my favorite nephew lost his mind? My sons would be overjoyed if they didn’t have to go through this. It’s crazy enough that Bo wants to take the test again and live in Korea. Do not allow him to give up his American citizenship to do service. I will not allow that,” Sonya said sternly.
“My hagwon teacher gave me a coin when I took my test. I passed and got into S.N.U. for the hardest course. A farm boy got a top score!” he said, laughing. “So here I am, training you to take an exam, giving you a coin, and wishing you luck.”
Bo tried to imagine himself as one of the young men writing in their notebooks or reading. A female student with short, permed hair resembled Isul, his friend at the gosiwon who was studying for the civil-service exam. The woman was reading “The Stranger” in French.
Bo bowed and thanked him. “How are you feeling?”The instruc-
tor prided himself on checking in with
Helen nodded.
kitchen on his first day at the gosiwon. Within a week, she’d made a point of sitting him down to tell him that he was nothing like the other residents.
his students. He felt that his personal approach was the reason that his students got their best scores and shook off their past failures.
He saw that she was sleeping soundly and had forgotten to take off her eyeglasses. As he removed them from her small face with both hands, Isul still didn’t wake up.
“You’re not a loser like most of us. You’ll have a bright future. Keep studying.”
Bo grinned, staring at the pale-blue walls of the large classroom.
Big Uncle, a middle-aged security guard at a downtown bank, peeked into the kitchen. A longtime resident and a kind of mayor of the gosiwon, he favored Isul and Bo. Six years ago, after his elderly father died, Big Uncle had moved into one of the back rooms with a bathroom and never saw the point of finding a bigger place of his own. He preferred the bustle of the gosiwon to the idea of living alone and took great care to remember the birthdays of both residents and staff. On a birthday, he’d buy a red-bean bun from his favorite bakery and leave it in the kitchen with the person’s name and a smiley face in a heart drawn neatly on the paper bag.
She had already graduated from Pusan National with good marks, but she hadn’t been able to get any office jobs. Dejected at the thought of continuing to apply for white-collar positions, she had taken a break for a few months to work as a bartender at a restaurant owned by her aunt, who had borrowed money so that Isul could study in Seoul for the civil-service exam. Isul had failed twice already. On her first try, she’d made it to the interview stage but had caught a severe cold and lost her voice on the day of the interview.
“I’m well, Teacher. I believe I’ve prepared as much as I could.”
“You will have fine luck, too. You deserve it.”
“I guess I haven’t had much luck before.”
“Sometimes it isn’t just preparation. It’s timing, circumstances, and personality.You have good habits, and you did the work, Bo. You’re a good person. Go easy on yourself. Make sure you go to sleep early tonight. Tell yourself that the exam is just another practice test. You’ll be fine.”
At the café, several tables had cleared out, and Bo was alone in his corner. He put down the literary magazine for the next person who might want something to read. When he went to the cashier to pay the bill, he could feel the worn edge of the five-hundred-won coin in his coat pocket. He took the train home and stopped at the grocery store near the gosiwon to pick up supplies for dinner.
Isul’s windowless room was one of the smallest in the gosiwon, and she had to share a bathroom on the women’s floor. She teased Bo for being a rich kid, because he had his own bathroom and a transom window that opened, allowing him to get fresh air from the lobby windows. Isul and Bo had made a deal that whoever passed on the third try would buy the other a beef barbecue dinner.
“Our little Isul looks tired,” Big Uncle said.“Maybe we can get Manager Hwang to open her room, so she can sleep properly. Her neck is going to hurt if she sleeps that way,” he said, clucking his tongue. “Manager Hwang is at the store now. He’ll be back in half an hour or so.”
Every day, they ate at least one meal together in the third-floor kitchen, where they could have as much rice, kimchi, and ramyeon as they wanted, all supplied by the gosiwon. With the allowance that his parents sent, Bo bought eggs, sausages, tofu, and tins of jjajang tuna, and he shared his groceries with her, though she ate so
“Sister, Sister!” Bo jostled Isul’s shoulder but got no response. He spotted the familiar green lanyard with her room key in her sweatpants pocket. He turned to Big Uncle. “Maybe we can take her ourselves. She must weigh forty kilos, if that.”
onya had selected the best gosiwon near Bo’s hagwon, and it rarely had a
vacancy, because it was so well maintained. But it was still a pay-by-the-week lodging, filled with transient students, day workers, and ghostly figures who came and went, and, of course, it was nothing like home. The kitchen for the residents was a modestly sized rectangular room. There were three rice cookers and three electric kettles on a long white counter by a deep sink and a dish rack. Residents were required to wash their own dishes.
Big Uncle bent over her chair and scooped up the young woman in his arms like an infant.
“She weighs less than a small sack of rice,” he said with concern.
They both checked that she was breathing.
Taking her key, Bo walked ahead of him to open Isul’s door. Having never seen the inside of her room before, he was startled by how small it was, less than half the size of his.
Bo found Isul at the communal table, her eyes closed, with her head propped up on a civil-service study guide. An aluminum ramyeon pot with rounded handles simmered on the stove. Isul wore her usual indoor clothes—black sweatpants, gray sweatshirt, white ankle socks with black-and-white plastic slippers. She was bone thin and tiny, and although she was four years Bo’s senior, she looked like a primary-school girl wearing her older brother’s clothes. Severely nearsighted, Isul wore eyeglasses with thick plastic lenses, which obscured her lovely, small eyes.
She had almost no possessions.The white walls were bare and the sheet-ofpaper-size patch of floor immaculate. On the clothing rack hung a navy winter coat, a black interview suit, one white dress shirt, and a Burberry scarf that Isul’s aunt had sent last Christmas. Every centimetre of her desk was covered with heavy piles of test guides and notebooks. Her bed was made and covered with a thick red-and-green checkered blanket. On the pillow was an open box of cold
little that her intake was hardly noticeable. Whenever her aunt sent her fish or banchan from home, she shared it with him. She called him her little brother.
The ramyeon in the pot burbled over, and Bo hurried to the stove to turn off the gas.
“Sister! It’s done, right?” Isul didn’t open her eyes, and he nudged her shoulder gently, feeling the sharp edge of her shoulder blade beneath the thick sweatshirt.
Bo had met Isul in the communal
medicine from the corner drugstore. Six of the capsules had been removed from the tabbed aluminum sheet.
t the hospital, the doctor pumped Isul’s stomach and gave her fluids.
She would be fine, the nurse told them. Big Uncle had to meet someone and asked Bo to stay with her until her aunt could come from Busan. When Isul woke, a few hours later, Bo was struggling to stay awake in a chair next to her bed. Isul looked startled.
“Bo, what am I doing here?” “You troublemaker,” he said, relieved
that she was back to normal. “Where are my glasses?” Bo picked them up from the bed-
side table and handed them to her. “Did you take all six pills?” “What pills?” “The cold medicine.” “I don’t think so. I took two at first.
They didn’t work, so I took some more.”
“O.K., you all know why we’re here—to keep male friendship alive.”
“You dummy,” he said. “You need to take a child’s dosage, and you probably didn’t eat. I can’t believe you have a college education and still don’t understand basic science.” He looked at her sternly but started to laugh.
section, there was a short break, and that was when he began to feel dizzy, the exhaustion hitting him all at once. He had taken his seat at 8:10 A.M., and the exam would end at 5:20 P.M. There would be another short break and an hour for lunch, and it was during the breaks that he felt most nauseated.
His mind didn’t go blank; rather, all the what-ifs multiplied like exponents, crowding his thoughts and rendering him unable to envision anything else.
“Watch it. I’m still your elder,” she
said, smiling weakly. “How do you feel?” “I have a cold. And my throat hurts.” “They pumped your stomach. They
The proctor told the students to stop, and Bo handed in his exam papers.
At the train station, a beggar was sleeping soundly on a bench. Easily over eighty, the man had a deeply furrowed brow, but the lower half of his face was oddly cherubic—jowls plump and a small pink mouth, almost smiling. By his left hand, there was a polished brass bowl and a laminated sign: “Blind from birth and abandoned by my mother. I ask for mercy. I wish you good fortune.”
thought you tried to—”
Isul raised her hand briefly from the bed as if to stop him from speaking, then let it drop. “Bo, I’m so tired. Let me sleep. I just want to stop feeling so tired and sick. I keep getting these colds, and it makes it hard to study. My poor aunt. She wants me to work in an office. I’d better get well soon.”
His head was heavy and hot.When he reached the literature section, he couldn’t puzzle out the meaning of the questions. He stared at the reading passages, trying to make sense of the sentences.The short questions were more confusing than the longer ones. He reached into his trouser pocket and fumbled with the five-hundred-won coin. The indecipherable words began to swim in his mind.
Bo watched her fall asleep. When her aunt finally arrived, he left Isul a note, promising to return the next day.
Bo placed the coin in the man’s bowl.
What had made him think that he could go to Yonsei at all? He was born in New Jersey, and grew up there and in Sydney, before moving to Seoul, and he was sitting in a room filled with students who had been living, breathing, and eating in anticipation of this exam since they were in primary school.This year, the bongosa exam had been eliminated, so the Suneung was everything. Bo opened his eyes as wide as he could, doing his best to wake himself from his stupor.
im Teacher paged him twice but Bo did not call him back.
t was four in the morning when Bo returned to his room, and he closed
The results came out right before Christmas. Alone, Bo read his scores on the slip of paper and sat down on the bed in his rented room. That year, the number of possible points had changed from two hundred to four hundred, and the newspapers reported that this test had slaughtered hordes of top students. The highest scorer hit 373. Bo had not cleared 300. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He
his eyes for a couple of hours, washed, and remembered to pack what he needed for the test, including his exam ticket, identification, a packet of tissues, and the hard candies he liked. He tossed the box of taffy into his backpack.
As soon as the proctor allowed them to open the exam booklet, Bo plowed through the questions. After the first
across from her. He looked remorseful, as if he deserved to be reprimanded.
“I ordered your favorite set and a
cola with ice,” Sonya said, smiling. “Thank you, Aunt.” Her nephew had just turned twentytwo, but to her he was still a boy. He was the size of a man, but she could see only his familiar baby face behind his glasses.
“I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you. The tutor you found me was very good. It isn’t his fault.”
“What are you talking about? I think you’re amazing, Bo. I imagine this feels awful right now, but this could be providence,” she said. “I believe this needed to happen. Your aunt is over fifty years old, and this is what I’ve learned. Sometimes the things you wanted most and didn’t get are terrible things you’ve been delivered from.”
Bo looked up, his mouth open a little. “It’s still upsetting. I understand.”
“It turns out all he wanted was a big glass of ice water.”
She paused, sensing that he might resist her next proposal.
“I talked to an admissions counsellor about you, and she said that you should go to America.”
didn’t know how long he sat in his room, but eventually he walked out of the gosiwon and applied for a job at the nicer of two convenience stores, a block away.
At the end of the workday, a store employee could purchase discounted meals, and often the manager and his wife saved him the best of the expired goods, which were still perfectly fine to eat.
Bo’s expression darkened. “Aunt, I can’t give up. I should take it again. I already spent three years on this, and my scores were really high in my practice exams. I don’t even have to learn that much more for the next Suneung. I just have to wait another year.”
Working full time as a cashier and stocking shelves, Bo felt productive. The store manager, a thirty-two-year-old man from Daejeon, admired Bo, who was punctual, responsible, and honest. When other employees came late or didn’t show up, he picked up extra hours. One evening, the manager mentioned in passing that he had graduated from a college that no one in Seoul recognized and hadn’t been able to get office work no matter how hard he’d tried. He didn’t see the point of the years and years of hagwon payments and countless job applications, all to end up at this convenience store, but the degree, matted and custom-framed, had made his late parents proud. The manager’s cheerful wife, who was a head taller than he was, also worked at the store. They did not plan on having children.
Between Bo’s mother and father, it was Helen who took the news harder. She had trouble sleeping and couldn’t focus at work. Even as Helen completed everything she had to do—her job, familymeal preparation, housecleaning—her mind dwelled on her disappointed son in Korea. It was difficult to imagine her brightest child selling cigarettes and beer and sweeping the sidewalk. Hearing that the manager and his wife were being kind to him gave her little comfort.
“The admissions counsellor had an idea, and I think it can also help your parents.”
The server placed the tonkatsu sets on the table and left them. They bowed their heads and prayed silently, then she gestured for him to eat.
“Nephew, this admissions counsellor is famous. She is the best in Seoul, and she has a plan, which apparently she’s used many times with her students who can get visas. You move to California and go to a community college for two years. After you establish residency, then the cost will be almost nothing. You can pay for it by doing parttime jobs if you like working so much. If you do well, and I know you will, you can transfer to a Cal State school, or one of the University of California schools, or any four-year school. You could transfer to an Ivy if you wanted to. The rich schools give financial aid.
If Helen hadn’t been worried about losing her job, at a department store in Sydney, she would have flown back to Seoul to get him. Her husband asked her to be patient.
“Bo will figure it out,” John said. Helen called Sonya anyway.
Bo’s parents offered him a ticket to Sydney, but he asked for time to consider his options. Moreover, he asked them not to send any money until he knew what he was doing. With his own earnings, he was able to keep living at the gosiwon.
hen Sonya met Bo at a tonkatsu restaurant, she wore a simple
camel-colored dress and wasn’t carrying one of her expensive handbags. Bo arrived on time and took a seat
Bo, you can start again. I know you will flourish. It’s not your fault that—”
You foreign-born Koreans are all messed up. You think you have to prove something. Prove you’re Korean. C’mon. There’s no test for that. There are Koreans who are born here who hate being Korean. Hey, maybe that’s what it means to be Korean!” She laughed, then grew serious. “Do you need money for the ticket? I don’t have much, but I would give my little brother some of my eyesurgery money.” Isul still felt terrible that he had not slept the night before his Suneung on account of her.
best retaker student he’s ever had. All of us believe in you, Bo. We don’t believe in this exam.”
She stopped herself. The boy was obviously upset, but trying not to show it.
He stared at his barely touched plate. “We don’t believe in the Korean ed-
Bo felt worse. She was clearly assuming that he couldn’t pass, yet he could not defend himself, because the evidence against him was irrefutable. He had failed. Three times. None of the context mattered, only the results. He chewed the fried pork but tasted nothing.
ucation system. Do you understand?” “I don’t blame Korea,” he said. “Eat your food,” she said as kindly
as she could.
After he finished, he told her that he’d think about it.
wo days later, he ran into Isul in the kitchen. She was drinking
her first coffee of the morning and looked chipper.
“Thank you for the toast bread and strawberry jam.”
Isul was referring to the day-old baked goods and expired jams he’d brought back the night before. The gosiwon residents were delighted to supplement their rations with Bo’s regular food bonuses. No one paid any attention to the expiration dates. More than one of them had joked, “If only the store could give us expired soju.” She slid her plate of toast toward him.
Bo nodded thanks but didn’t say anything. He poured boiling water over the powdered coffee in the bottom of his mug.
“My parents want me to go to America.”
“Go,” Isul said. “I’m glad somebody is making sense. Yah—you better go. I’ll kill you if you don’t go.” She raised her fist, grinning.
On seeing his expression, she put
her fist down. “You don’t want to go? Why?” “You, too?” He shook his head. “I
want to take it again.”
“Forget Yonsei. You can pass next time. I’m positive. I would bet my eyesurgery savings on that. And when you pass, so what? Have you seen how hard it is to get a good job here? You don’t have any connections, right? Does your rich aunt know any conglomerates that are hiring?”
“I spent three years,” he whispered. “Big deal. Go. Listen to your par-
ents. I wish I had smart parents.” Isul smiled to soften the blow of her words. “You speak English perfectly, you have
“Aunt, I can pass. I know this has been a terrible burden, so I thought I’d save the money from this job and try to do it alone—”
“My uncle works at Qantas. He can get cheap tickets.”
“Wow. If you weren’t such a nice little brother, I would not like you. You have it made. What are you upset about?”
“Bo. Listen to me. I know you can pass, too—but what for? Is it worth it? Do you really want to live here, or did you just want to know that you could get into Yonsei University? If you really wanted to live here, you could have chosen an easier school to get into, isn’t that right? This system of testing just to weed children out is unfair and unpredictable, and I don’t know why you should bear it any longer.”
“I failed the Suneung three times. I’m twenty-two years old.” It occurred to him that in the U.S. he would be twenty-one, and it sounded much younger, though he was still the same person.
“So damn what? I failed my exam twice. By the time I get a job, if I get a job, I will be an old lady with thicker glasses. But you know what? Your gosiwon sister will pass this son-of-a-bitch civil-service job test, ace the interview, and I’m going to get my nearsightedness corrected. I’m not so bad-looking, and I’m going to have some fun. I’ll have tall, good-looking boyfriends who like short women, and, one day, I’m going to buy my aunt a little building back home. It’s not expensive like Seoul.” She put her hands on her hips, her bent arms as thin as twigs. “This is my plan. I believe it is a good plan. Every day, I work to make my plan into reality.”
Bo said nothing. He had believed in his plan, and in a few sharp, well-reasoned words his aunt had pierced his logic and his purpose.
“How would I get there?” “Uncle Kenny will get you a ticket to Sydney, and then, after you see your parents, you can go to Los Angeles.” Sonya held her breath.
“I guess no one thinks I can get into Yonsei.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, unwilling to indulge his self-pity. “I get that you feel embarrassed. You want proof that you can get in. That’s normal.”
“You will definitely pass. I’m positive you will,” Bo said.
Bo put down his fork and knife and wiped his mouth with the paper napkin.
“Go. You go to America. That’s a better plan. But, first, you have to get to work.” Isul gestured to the kitchen wall clock, then picked up her toast and jam.
“I know you can get admitted. There were some tough breaks, and I’m positive that if you keep taking it, you will pass. But, if you go to California and study there, you won’t be vulnerable to all these exam and admissions changes. You won’t keep delaying your life year after year to prove you can do something that everyone already knows you can do. None of this is your fault. Life is terribly unfair but we have to—”
Bo laughed. “I’d better go.” Isul winked, and, when Bo left the kitchen, she imagined the big gosiwon without him, which was depressing. She made herself another coffee and opened her study guide.
Seeing his disheartened expression, Sonya took another breath, not wanting to say any more. Then she continued.
NEWYORKER.COM/FICTION
“I spoke to Kim Teacher. You’re the
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A CRITIC AT LARGE
Peter Hujar’s portraits are a search for the secrets his sitters don’t know they have.
BY HILTON ALS
I
t’s a fine measure of the curator Joel Smith’s visual and emotional acuity that the first standout im-
Jackie’s grandmother. With a minimum of props—a chair here, a mattress there—Hujar posed his sitters in front of a gray backdrop or a white wall. No matter how outrageous his subjects seem—they include the San Francisco performance troupe the Cockettes and cast members from Robert Wilson’s early spectacles—his photographs are some of the most silent images I have ever seen. The silence grows out of Hujar’s high style, the way the people he photographed appear motionless while their eyes are alive with thought and spirit. In his work, Hujar returned again and again to the spiritual life of his sitters—an invisible presence in his images. Hujar’s best pictures are still-lifes that feature not apples but queer fruit. The camera he habitually used in the studio, a 120-mm. twin-lens reflex, gave his photographs a strong graphic quality infused with warmth. It also allowed his subjects to see his face without a camera blocking it—a handsome face, with pale skin, dark eyebrows, and a small mouth. But, as he looked down into the ground glass, his being wasn’t the point; his sitter’s was.
sitter are making a story together, with the sitter as protagonist, and sometimes the combined reality and artificiality of the exchange brings certain truths to the surface. When that didn’t happen for Hujar, it was likely because of a sitter’s resistance. In 1980, he invited members of the London-based drag troupe Bloolips to pose. The episode was described by the group’s founder, Bette Bourne, in Cynthia Carr’s “Fire in the Belly” (2012), a graceful, affecting biography of the artist David Wojnarowicz, who was a friend of Hujar’s. “We couldn’t reveal,” Bourne said. “Hujar’s big thing was that you had to reveal. I know that now, but I didn’t know it at the time. In other words, blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, real who-you-are. And then he could go inside.”
ages one encounters on entering “Hujar:Contact,” his fabulous show of Peter Hujar’s photographs and contact sheets (at the Morgan Library, through October 25th), are of the performer, writer, and director Jackie Curtis. Hujar, who was a friend of Curtis’s, photographed him, circa 1970, in Jackie drag. (Curtis alternated between “boy” Jackie and “girl” Jackie throughout his too brief life.) Resplendent in a dark top and flowered scarves, Jackie has his hair ratted out, creating a kind of nimbus around his poignant, ready-to-laugh face, which is powdered white, with shiny, metallic-looking paillettes around the eyes. It’s a great face, a great look, one that speaks to—or, more precisely, articulates—hip, vital New York as it was during the years of Curtis’s ascendancy, as a playwright at La Mama and as one of Andy Warhol’s more comedically gifted superstars. Twiggy’s youthquake glam was out. Something darker, funnier, and more lucid was taking the stage, dressed in down-at-the-heel platforms and stockings with runs and sporting Corey Tippin-inspired maquillage—shaved eyebrows and brightly rouged cheeks. Gender, seemingly, was the least of anyone’s problems, and who needed Broadway? One’s life was the performance, and one’s friends the only audience that really mattered.
It wasn’t until I saw Hujar’s pictures of Jackie Curtis at the Morgan that I began to see Jackie’s dress-up as a display of innocence which evoked a time when little boys were not made to feel ashamed for playing with Mother’s pearls or Sister’s tea set. Just look at his eyes in the image, taken from the contact sheet of Jackie in drag, that Smith has hung near the entrance: they’re the eyes of a newborn (albeit one with cigarette breath), seeing the world fresh and without fear. Next to this picture is a blowup of part of the contact sheet. One frame has been outlined in orange grease pencil with the word “Vogue” written across the top. The implication: though Jackie couldn’t have his Vogue cover, because of the way the world
According to Andrew Durbin’s essential “The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek,” published earlier this year, Hujar told the writer Jill Johnston that he saw his photography as a “search.” What he was searching for, Johnston concluded, were the secrets we have without knowing it. If we can’t bear witness to ourselves, what allows the camera to dance in and draw us out? I think it begins with the implicit understanding that photographer and
You can see at least some of that spirit in the dozen or more frames of Jackie that Hujar shot in his studio, which was also his home—a loft, at 189 Second Avenue, that was owned by
©PETER HUJAR / COURTESYPETER HUJAR ARCHIVE / ARS / MORGAN LIBRARY &
MUSEUM / FRAENKEL GALLERY / ORTUZAR; OPPOSITE: MIGUEL PORLAN
Jackie Curtis, circa 1970. Hujar returned again and again to the spiritual life of his sitters—an invisible presence in his images.
between man and beast; and, because the animals got here first, the images seem to say, they have ancient qualities that trump ours—even those of the photographer and his modern camera. Like the French director Robert Bresson, in his unspeakably heart-wrenching 1966 film, “Au Hasard Balthazar,” which sees the world—a black-and-white world with lots of gray—through the eyes of a donkey, Hujar blames us humans for disfiguring the natural world with our cruelty and our neglect. His animals are infused with the weight of his childhood, his wounds.
was back then (and still is), Peter was determined to give him one. Jackie is not only Hujar’s cover girl; he’s also Smith’s, a star among the fantastic performers, artists, writers, and leather queens whom Hujar photographed in the sixties and seventies, who bring such life to this exhibition crackling with insight, density, and love. What we see, in the sectioned gallery of “Hujar:Contact,” is all that New York created and made significant and lost in the thirty-two years—from 1954 to 1986—that the exhibition covers. (The Morgan houses nearly six thousand of Hujar’s surviving contact sheets.)
tery of his images. Gray dominates his thoughtful, sensual black-and-white portraits of his friend Susan Sontag reclining on a light-colored blanket and wearing a turtleneck, from 1975. Even his pictures taken outside can give the feeling that the world he’s capturing is overcast—as in his portraits of the trans activist Marsha P. Johnson, so tender in her bonnet, on the Christopher Street Pier, on Easter Sunday, 1976. Hujar’s gray is a curtain—a scrim—that he rarely lifts, bringing to mind Elizabeth Bishop’s 1964 description of sea air: “Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet,/that thin gray mist lets everything show through.” While his lighting is the light of romance: the queer cinema light that you see in early Richard Avedon and George Platt Lynes, transformed and flecked with danger and allure.
When Peter was eleven, his beloved grandmother died, and his grandfather, worried about how badly the boy was being treated by an uncle who lived with them, sent Peter to stay with Rose and her husband, Ed (Snookie) Murphy, a bookie, in their one-bedroom apartment on East Thirty-second Street. The Murphys drank; in Carr’s “Fire in the Belly,” Hujar’s friends remember him being humiliated and dismissed by them. Nevertheless, at the School of Industrial Art, Hujar flourished under the tutelage of his English teacher, a young gay poet named Daisy Aldan, who not only supported Hujar’s dream of becoming a photographer but introduced him to her chosen family—other women, including the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who gathered at Aldan’s on weekends to play poker.
When I got to the end of the show, and happily turned around to walk through it again, one picture of Jackie stayed in my mind; it existed in memory and wasn’t at the Morgan. Taken by Hujar in 1985, the black-and-white image shows Jackie in repose, dressed in a suit, with a fresh white flower in his buttonhole and a lovely drawing of him, in full makeup, positioned near his left shoulder. In this frame, Jackie’s eyes are closed, his mouth shut, because he’s dead.
ut can we use the word “allure” when it comes to Hujar’s self-
portraits with his mother from 1977? In the images at the Morgan, we see the tall, thin Hujar in a plaid shirt and jeans. His attractive mother, whom he always referred to as Rose Murphy when speaking with friends, is a head or so shorter than her son, standing by his side. Her hair is done just so. In some of the frames, Hujar’s right arm is on his mother’s shoulder. What could he have been hoping to record in these images, if anything?
rt remembers long after we have forgotten. Hujar’s work is so rooted
in transience and in the slippery nature of identity—the quick shutter click between being and not being—that mounting a show of his contact sheets makes great aesthetic and political sense: Who are we, moment by moment? What is our final image? Does death have a shape? A color? Hujar’s exquisite early pictures, such as “Seaweed” or “Dead Fish, Fire Island,” both from 1960-62, teach us how to see life’s erosions. The former shows us nine images of seaweed that has washed up on the sand. Each strand is like a beautiful clump of calligraphy all tangled up in itself, as captivating and lonely as any earthwork. “Dead Fish, Fire Island”—whose title is self-explanatorytells us so much about time and the beauty of unadorned decomposition that we have to accept the knowledge that we ourselves are always in the process of decay.
He did not grow up with Rose. Soon after giving birth to him, in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1934, she went to work as a waitress in Manhattan—his father, Joseph John Hujar, a baker and maybe a bootlegger, had split before his birthand left Peter with her parents, Ukrainians who had a farm in Ewing Township. He spoke Ukrainian before English, and the farm animals were his earliest and most trusted friends. He got his first camera from Rose, on one of his visits to the city. As a boy, he took a picture of cows in the distance. The closeup portraits of cows and other animals that he took later were the first Hujar images I saw that I understood.They seemed to be marked by a kind of spiritual deprivation and longing—the work of an orphaned child who wanted to connect with the other vulnerable creatures of the world. The animals in his photographs are monuments to the difference
Sometime before Hujar graduated from high school, his mother threw a bottle at him, and he left her apartment for good, staying at first with friends. No one in his family came to his graduation, so he sat in the audience and, when his name was called, he applauded for himself.
Durbin’s book is visceral in its narrative drive; he wants you to feel what he feels about his subjects, and to share his admiration for Hujar’s photographs. Inevitably, you are inspired to assess them for yourself. As I looked at photographs that Hujar had shot at the Capuchin Catacombs, in Palermo, in 1963—a trip he made with his then lover and friend, the avant-garde artist Paul Thek—I remembered why it had taken me years to get into Hujar’s work.
These early works also establish Hujar’s sense of color withinthe black-andwhite image. Throughout his career, he used gray tones to illuminate the mys-
After leaving home, Hujar, with Aldan’s encouragement, worked for fifteen years as an assistant in various photo
studios. In 1956, he became involved with the painter Joseph Raffael; two years later, the pair went off to Italy, where, given time and space, Hujar was able to find what interested him most as an artist: making images that explored tenderness and what we do or don’t do to protect it. At the Morgan, there are about a dozen photographs that Hujar took at an institute for neurological disorders in Florence, in 1959. I was especially drawn to two of them. In each of these, a nun is helping a boy with his movement. The nun’s habit falls in beautiful folds to the floor, and in one picture we see the child’s head in profile, as though it were jutting out of the nun’s wimple. In the second image, the nun faces the boy; she is smiling gently at him, and we see both figures in a mirror, the camera reflecting the reflection.
Talking Classics, by Mary Beard (Chicago). This companionable book, by a Cambridge classicist, marvels at the ancient world. Beard’s subjects range from artistic achievements to signs of ordinary life: scrawled Roman graffiti, a piece of ancient bread. Simultaneously rendering the past less remote while relishing its radical foreignness, Beard presses readers to grapple with alien ideas, reckon with gaps in their knowledge, and confront complexity. She also critiques the Classics’ history of exclusionary requirements, such as mastering accent marks the ancient Greeks never used, and challenges modern leaders who signal legitimacy through simplistic references to Greece and Rome. Throughout, she shows how the classical world can sneak “up from behind, as it were, to surprise us, and make us think again.”
The Cruelty of Nice Folks, by Justin Ellis (Harper). Minneapolis has long been a stronghold of progressivism: slavery was banned there upon Minnesota’s statehood, and it was an early adopter of public housing. But, as Ellis demonstrates in this survey of the city’s racial history, liberal policy achievements tend to obscure more insidious forms of exclusion. A Minneapolis native, Ellis returns to his home after the murder of George Floyd. His resulting exploration tracks the ways in which Black residents were effectively segregated, through racial covenants and redlining, and overpoliced. Though Ellis’s long view of the city is tinged with cynicism, its response to last winter’s ICE invasion creates, he contends, an opening for hope.
Hujar returned to Italy in 1963, by which point he was involved with Thek. The two had met in Coral Gables, Florida, in 1956, but had been with other partners then. By 1961, they were together, albeit in a way that Durbin is right to point out was different from heterosexual coupling. First of all, at that time, a man could be arrested for loving another man, and the layers of complication in being together—how out could you be, and how traditional in your expectations?—no doubt amplified the vulnerability and the risk of their love. Hujar loved Thek, but Thek often needed to be away in order to make his work, and he became enmeshed in other situations, which sometimes involved women. (He and Sontag were lovers intermittently in the early sixties; she dedicated her 1966 collection, “Against Interpretation,” to Thek, whose ideas about making helped her declare, at the end of that now famous title essay, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”)
Glyph, by Ali Smith (Pantheon). Continuing its decorated author’s project of devising a contemporary language for fiction while revisiting the past, this novel follows two sisters, Patricia and Petra, long estranged, who are haunted by stories from their childhood: one of a man who was shot during the First World War, and the other of a person who met a gruesome death in the Second. Amid the disappointments of the present—oppressive digital technology and work uncertaintyghosts and shared recollections bring the sisters together, and closer to Patricia’s adopted daughter, Bill, who represents both the pessimism and the idealism of a younger generation. Animated by dialogue and wordplay, Smith’s novel shines with her intuition, and her ability to surprise.
A Real Animal, by Emeline Atwood (Catapult). In the course of ten years, Lucy, the narrator of this effortful novel, has three serious boyfriends: one in college, in New England, who, try as he might, cannot help her recover from a rape she experiences while living overseas; one in Indianapolis, who cajoles her into having sex with countless other men in front of him; and one in Texas, whom she loves most, but loses when she cannot overcome post-traumatic anxiety. As Atwood traces these romances, we learn that Lucy’s suffering started much earlier than perhaps even she realized, and that healing will require independence. “Ultimately, it’s just about being good with yourself,” she discovers. “Once you can stand being out in the dark cold alone, you’re good anywhere.”
“You’re never in love with the people you love,” Hujar once said to a friend. “Being in love is all the anticipation; it can’t really be there when you’re actually with him.” But, no matter what Hujar thought about love, it was, in the end, just thought, his own hermeneutics of the erotic. Ultimately, for him, love was probably driven by fear. Fear provoked his legendary rages—breaking chairs, throwing things, cutting people out of his life. Fear of the injury caused
by others’ words and actions, which was his primary experience of love.
was the “truth” in these pictures? What did we become when we marvelled at a dead child’s hair ribbon, or a mouth stretched in a scream? We all die, but not all of us view existence as a pathway to death, or death as the ultimate game of dress-up. I side with Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb,” which says of depictions of the dead, “Time has transfigured them into untruth.” Truth happens only when we’re alive to write it, to photograph it, to live it. I didn’t think of Hujar’s catacomb pictures as a testament to the artist’s ecstatic honesty, or even as an example of perversion, in which the ghastly truth of those corpses, mediated by the camera, was a kind of payback to society and the law. I closed “Portraits in Life and Death” and didn’t look at it again for years.
ing at you; by then, flirting had been replaced by the art of the put-on. One of the strongest contact sheets from this time period is of the fashion editor Diana Vreeland. In Hujar’s images, this formidable woman is drained of esprit; what remains is the mask. Fame does not console. Vreeland’s isolation is Rose Murphy’s isolation and her son’s as well. And it’s a godless place.
I think that, when I first saw Hujar’s pictures of the catacombs in Palermo, in the only book he published during his lifetime, “Portraits in Life and Death,” from 1976, I was less taken by the gothic nature of all those bodies in repose—mouths sometimes open or twisted in a grimace, hands folded over hearts that had long ago dried upthan put off by Hujar’s interest in a death drama that was gawked at, rather than observed and felt. His eye does not live in these pictures; it’s subsumed by them. The truth is that I discovered the book in the early eighties, when so many people were dying or beginning to die, and the catacomb pictures felt too easy to me, like talismans in a collapsing world—my collapsing worldwhich was infected with a form of death that would take Hujar in 1987, and Thek a year later, and Wojnarowicz in 1992, the same year that Marsha P. Johnson died, probably the victim of a hate crime.
I stayed a long time in this part of the show, a fabulous wonderland in which the photographer leaves behind the entombed and joins life as much as he can, and his voice rings out loud and clear and essential. Smith notes in his very helpful catalogue essay, which is supplemented by Olivia McCall’s thorough annotation of the contact sheets, that it was during this period that Hujar became interested in posing subjects in groups, gatherings of theatre people, activists, chosen families of a kind. And, as I looked at his contact sheets of the Cockettes, shot in 3:4, and his great 35mm. picture of the Gay Liberation Front (1970), I thrilled to the energy of the images, every one of them, because they were about joy—even though Hujar had a hard time feeling it himself. But who can blame him? You can take the fatherless boy out of his belligerent mother’s home, but you can’t take the parents out of the boy. Looking at the Cockettes, those wonderful queens in their thrift-store finery, and knowing that they bombed when they tried to put on a show in New York—too much California hippie love and drift for the professional-minded New York audience—and looking, too, at all those smiling, committed, excited people with the Gay Liberation Front, seeming to rush toward Hujar’s lens, I remembered how, when I was a photo editor in the late eighties and early nineties, before digital was the dominant format, and a photographer came to show me images, what I most wanted to see was not the single image but the contact sheet and what it represented: it was evidence of the photographer’s hope, evidence of the dreams that he, she, or they didn’t even know they were having.
fter Hujar returned to the States from Italy, in 1964, he took a job
as an assistant to the commercial photographer Harold Krieger. A few years later, he was admitted to a master class that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel held in Avedon’s studio, and, emboldened by their support, he quit the Krieger gig and opened his own studio for a time. By 1973, he was determined to work independently as an artist. Carr writes, “He had disdain for the whole process of selling himself. Fran Lebowitz pointed out that ‘he also had a profound distrust of authority, and that he couldn’t make a distinction between someone who owned some little photography gallery, and the Pope.’” To get the check, you have to kiss the ring, and Hujar couldn’t. So he lived as he lived. He was “the poorest grown-up I have been personally close to in my life,” his executor, the writer Stephen Koch, once said.
Avedon, whose work and career had a big influence on Hujar early on, had produced a series of images of the Palermo catacombs in 1959. (Avedon’s final large-scale fashion story, which appeared in this magazine in 1995, showed a live model cavorting with skeletons in a version of the catacombs.) And, when I turned to Robert Mapplethorpe at about the same time that I first saw Hujar’s book, I was reminded of another Sontag essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” in which she writes that the Marquis de Sade
had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.
The portraits he made between 1965 and 1975 are phenomenal and often sexy, particularly those of his close friends Lebowitz and the writer Vince Aletti, seen in different beds in Lebowitz’s childhood home in New Jersey; of the artist Brigid Berlin for New Times magazine; and of the fashion model Maxime de la Falaise, her husband the curator John McKendry, and her daughter, Loulou de la Falaise, in 1968. In his portraits of that fashionable family, Hujar suggests the world they came from, one where you wouldn’t blink an eye at a topless woman wink-
Hujar, like Avedon before him and Mapplethorpe after him, had a fairy’s love of costume and an understanding of appearance as an expression less of truth than of lies—lies about who we were and are, just like the lies that gay men had to tell in order to be themselves in Hujar’s time. The images of the mummified bodies in the Palermo catacombs, wearing the clothes of whoever they used to be, struck me not as beautiful or true but as evidence of Hujar’s interest in display and fiction. Where
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Therein Lies a Tale Dept. From the Loudoun (Va.) Times-Mirror.
STERLING WOMAN CAN KEEP LIVE CHICKENS AFTER TAKING SACRIFICE COURSE
but not Kurdish, the language of some fifteen million Turkish citizens. Smith Galer tells us that the decision was a continuation of decades of official policy. It has been, at different times, illegal in Turkey to teach Kurdish, to publish books in Kurdish, even to speak the language while occupying public office. There were earthquake survivors who feared calling out for help in the language, in case the rescuers turned away.
BOOKS
Languages are dying. Is that necessarily a problem?
BY NIKHIL KRISHNAN
Or consider Ukrainian. A long essay that Vladimir Putin wrote in 2021 characterized it as, at best, a regional variant of Russian—a sort of uppity, upstart dialect—whose speakers lacked a legitimate claim to national self-determination. Seven months after the essay appeared, Putin invaded Ukraine. Since 2022, wherever Russian forces have occupied Ukrainian territory, they have torn down Ukrainian road signs, and insisted on Russian as the language of schooling and administration. When Ukrainians see books in their language being burned, some of them are reminded of a longer history of persecution, such as Catherine the Great’s ban in 1784 on Ukrainian-language church services. (That’s one of several dozen events commemorated in “Linguicide,” a Kyiv public-history project made up of QR-coded plaques and a companion app.)
In these cases, I’d say, talk of “killing” is justifiable: the intended destruction of the language is part of a coördinated assault on a people’s collective existence and their claim to nationhood. But how far might one extend the term before it does start to seem an overstatement? Smith Galer writes powerfully about the experiences of Kichwa speakers in the Ecuadorian highlands. Here we see fewer overt acts by tyrannical states to suppress the language. What we find, instead, is a history of colonial contempt, of treating fluency in Kichwa as a marker of poverty and backwardness. And the death of the language comes from choices made by Kichwa-speaking Ecuadorians to stop speaking Kichwa to their children. One way languages gain and lose adherents is through calculations people make about what a given language can do for them.
ow sad should we be when a language dies? Consider the case—
would-be perpetrators of linguicide. Smith Galer has much to say against the case for putting languages out of their misery, but her focus is on a point with which even the most unsentimental can surely sympathize.Whatever the wisdom of letting dying languages die, the ethics of killing a thriving language are quite another matter.
call it callous or simply tough-mindedfor saying, “Not at all.” A language, when it comes down to it, is a means of communication. When too few people are using it to communicate, it has stopped doing its principal job, and it may as well be allowed to die. It is, of course, a tragedy when languages are killed, especially when they are killed out of malice or bigotry. But death by natural causeswell, that’s just how things go.
Take Kurdish. The 2023 earthquake that left more than fifty thousand people dead in Turkey and Syria was particularly devastating in Turkey’s Kurdishspeaking southeast.Turkish administrators announced translation support for earthquake victims in several languages, including Russian, German, and Pashto—
Despite its ominous title, Sophia Smith Galer’s“How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words” (Crown) is not a guide for
Of course, those choices are not made against a background of equal power, which is why the situation is morally weighted. Still, the ideal case of a language
Assimilation and economic aspiration can usher people away from native tongues. chosen, or abandoned, under conditions
ILLUSTRATION BY VIVEK THAKKER
of equal power is scarcely to be found. There is a fallacy in thinking of languages as brute and unchanging facts, laid out distinctly like elements in the periodic table. Languages are historical formations.They emerge, spread, splinter, standardize, contract, and disappear, much as peoples, states, and religions do, through forces like conquest, exchange, and chance.
One may wonder, too, about those vaunted correlations between language health and a community’s psychological well-being. Isn’t it at least as plausible that some more basic social or economic fact explains the health both of the language and of the community? If that’strue, we shouldn’t be so confident that communities will be happier if only we enrolled their members in language lessons.
directed at giant pandas and polar bears. The essential argument runs something like this: language death is very bad, and therefore we must do everything we can to prevent it. But does that conclusion follow? And is the premise true?
Smith Galer briskly gives us many reasons to accept the premise. The loss of a language, she writes, is the loss of “the wellspring of information that flows from it—its sayings, its means of identifying and perceiving the world, its character. Languages aren’t dictionaries, but encyclopedias, containing entire worlds of often irreplaceable information.” A compound called prostratin, she recounts, was discovered to be a potential treatment for H.I.V. by a scientist who knew Samoan well enough to have spoken to tribal healers in Samoa about the healing properties of a certain tree. Speakers of the Iwaidja language in northern Australia have long had different words for two distinct dolphin species; modern zoology wouldn’t have taken so long to recognize their distinctness if scientists had, Smith Galer writes, “bothered to speak to the Iwaidja people, or learn their language.” There are also documented links, she tells us, between a language’s health and the mental health of the communities that speak it. Communities in Canada that could “hold a conversation in their Aboriginal language experienced low to zero youth suicide rates. In communities where fewer than half could speak their language, suicide rates were six times higher.”
More boldly, Smith Galer’s story of linguicide encompasses her own loss of the Emilian dialect—or, as she prefers to render it, Emigliän dialët—of northern Italy (“more like a kind of angry French”) that her mother and grandmother spoke to each other. She did not learn either standard Italian or the Emigliän variant for the simple reason that she was brought up in London by a family who had decided to speak to her entirely in English. That decision surely belonged to a wider history of migration, aspiration, and accommodation to the dominant language. Yet Smith Galer, citing the linguists Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson, suggests that linguicide might refer not just to the “outright killing of a language” but also to “letting a language die, or not supporting its coexistence”—which amounts to “covert language murder.”
Even if we grant Smith Galer the premise that language death is always a terrible thing, it doesn’t follow that we ought to do everything in our power to stop it. That’s an extremely demanding standard that we adopt in no other policy domain. The death of human beings is also a very bad thing, but all health systems have to make hard choices about how they use their finite resources. There is no reason for language death to be an exception to the general principle. Even where the death of a language would be acknowledged as a tragedy, what we should do—what costs we should be willing to bear—in trying to stop it must remain an open question.
he interventions that are easiest to get behind are the ones aimed at the
lowest-hanging fruit. There is a great deal that states and other coercive institutions could simply stop doing: they could stop banning the teaching of Kurdish in schools that want and have the resources to teach it; they could stop rejecting the names Kurds want for their children because they are not on the list of approved ones; they could stop denying Ukrainian defendants interpreters in court.
The linguist David Crystal, in his indispensable scholarly survey “Language Death,” has a term for the sort of thing that happened to Smith Galer and her dialët: cultural assimilation. The pressure to assimilate linguistically can be, he points out, either “top down” (laws, incentives) or “bottom up” (fashion, peer pressure). But it is hard even for dispassionate surveys to avoid lapsing into an elegiac mode in which these important distinctions are flattened into a single tragedy. It is one thing to be indignant about a Kenyan schoolchild asked to wear a sign reading “I AM A DONKEY” for speaking Kikuyu. But how should we feel about a Kichwa speaker who moves to Lima and starts living her life in Spanish in response to the demands of the labor market, especially when the Kichwa speaker doesn’t see the switch as involving any great loss?
In general, Smith Galer’s empirical examples tend toward the optimistic. The clinical value of prostratin, for one, has yet to be established. And if languages can encode traditional knowledge they can also encode and perpetuate traditional error.We need no exotic examples to see that the folk category of “fish” (in English as in many other languages)—as something that, understandably enough, included whales, dolphins, and porpoises—was genuinely improved upon by the scientific term “mammal” and its associated taxonomies. Nor is factual error the only thing a language can preserve. Languages also encode values—gender hierarchies baked into pronouns, honorifics that perpetuate caste distinctions—that liberal-minded activists may not be eager to preserve as valuable pieces of linguistic heritage.
Individuals, too, may find that they have more power than they realized. Immigrants might continue to speak their native languages to their children without worrying that it might affect their acquisition of their new country’s dominant tongue. (The current research suggests that bilingualism poses no threat to speech development.) Where a school offers the heritage language of your family, consider allowing your children to study it. Maybe, other things being equal, choose a school for your child that offers a program in your native language.
he idea that we have a special duty to prevent the death of languages is
What happens when other things are not equal? When it’s a matter not of killing a language but of striving, officiously, to keep it alive, even though it’s no longer being reliably transmitted at
instantly compelling to anyone who loves languages; it has a good deal in common with that other conservationist instinct
home? Smith Galer praises a master-apprentice program in the U.S. that partners younger adult learners of Karuk (an Indigenous language from northwestern California) with one of the very few fluent speakers and pays the learners a fifteen-dollar-an-hour stipend for their participation. She deplores the fact that the American federal government has earmarked only a hundred and eighty million dollars for language revitalization since 2005—a relatively paltry sum. Still, once numbers enter the discussion, as they must, there are uncomfortable questions that can’t be evaded.
David Crystal refers to a 1992 controversy about whether it was appropriate for the Academy of Mayan Languages, in Guatemala, to devote resources to a reforestation project. Shouldn’t we take more seriously the claim, made by defenders of the decision, that improving the community’s economic security was the most effective route to saving the language? Crystal mentions this episode as an aside in “Language Death,” but anyone who hopes to move from plaintive elegy to policy proposal must make such questions central. If saving a language takes money, how should that money be spent? Perhaps the Karuk people would prefer to use their own judgment to decide whether they want to spend it on language-learning programs or on direct support. That argument is sometimes made cynically, by people who’d rather no money were given to anyone for any reason at all. But these are real questions that organizations working in the field have to face.
even another language program. The language program may well be of real value. But the value of the hospital or the school we might instead build is also real. To pretend otherwise, and to accuse everyone who points to these difficult trade-offs of bad faith, is to duck a confrontation with the deepest problems of politics and policy.
satisfying project of managing loss; at its best, it consists of doing this without self-deception.
Berlin’s thesis lands with special poignancy when we consider the question of language loss. When French people today complain about the diminished international prestige of their nation and language, and wince when their teens talk about “e-mail” rather than the approved “courriel,” they might remember that their ideal de-Englished French was itself a construction built on the graves of the dozens of languages and regional forms of speech which dominated much of rural France well into the nineteenth century. The historian Eugen Weber wrote influentially of how peasants who spoke languages like Occitan, Breton, or Basque became—or, more honestly, were made—Frenchmen. Weber’s account does not play down the violence and humiliation of the process. Smith Galer herself notes that, as late as 1949, one could find children wearing slates around their necks with the degrading confession: “Je parle Breton” (“I speak Breton”). These were
Isaiah Berlin famously observed that there is no social world without loss. We want and value many things that cannot be had at the same time. Say we want people to be free and also to be equal and to live in happy, unalienated communities. What if some people’s exercise of freedom renders things less equal, or less happy and more alienated? Berlin thought it a contemptible sleight of hand to insist that such freedom was not “true freedom.” To hope to honor all our values, he believed, is not simply overoptimistic but incoherent. What makes some political choices tragic is not that we have failed to think hard enough about how to have it all but that there is, in fact, no way to have it all. Politics, then, is the always un-
assionate preservationists—whether they hope to save a rare species of
newt, or a beloved old railway station threatened with demolition, or coal-mining jobs in a Rust Belt town—share with campaigners for endangered languages a habit of presenting their case as if it were a contest between a real value on their side and nothing at all on the other. Preserve this language (or species or building or mine) or else surrender to indifference, cynicism, and nihilism. But is that ever the choice we face?
Every dollar dedicated to a language-revitalization program could, in any realistic budget, go toward something else: a school, or a hospital, or
not cases of languages being allowed to die a natural death.
sity is not a good acquired at no expense to the societies that have chosen it (or been forced to choose it) over homogeneity. Indian multilingualism, no less than French or Italian homogeneity, is a ledger with its own column of costscommunal tensions, constant incomprehension—to be weighed against its undoubted benefits.
assuming that their victims must themselves be blameless innocents. It’s graveyards all the way down.
But Weber’s account is also a reminder that the project of linguistic homogenization had a republican, and not merely an administrative, justification. During the Revolutionary period, Abbé Grégoire held that a true republic could not flourish if its citizens could not understand one another; in the Third Republic, the push for universal primary education in French explicitly framed it as the condition for civic participation. Kings may have wanted a single language for the convenience of their scribes and tax collectors, but republicans wanted it for the sake of the citizens.
hat would a preservationist victory actually look like? It may
look like contemporary Wales. Some six decades ago, the writer and politician Saunders Lewis was predicting that the Welsh language would be dead by the year 2000. Instead, it is now an official language of Wales, taught throughout the public-school system, broadcast on its own television channel, used in courts, in the national assembly, on road signs, and in public documents as a matter of routine. It is spoken, to a greater or lesser degree of fluency and often mixed with bits of English, by around a sixth of the population of Wales. The Welsh government hopes to see the number who speak it almost double, so that the language will have a million speakers by 2050.
If India has managed to avoid a sin-
gle national language, there has been a considerable amount of linguistic consolidationwithin language groups: what’s called Hindi is really a bureaucratic attempt to unify a quite disparate group of languages and dialects spoken across the north. Tamil itself is no less a political construction, with public discourse and education carried out in a self-consciously
The French republican project did, in fact, succeed in creating a public sphere where a farmer from Brittany and a lawyer from Provence might read the same newspaper, serve on the same jury, and vote in the same election, without some Parisian smart-ass claiming not to understand what they were saying. What was erected on the site of that linguicide could be something of real value. A similar story might be told of Italy after unification, or of the ambitious effort to find a lingua franca to connect the vast and diverse islands of Indonesia without giving the country’s dominant Javanese even more power than they already had.
archaic form of the language only half-intelligible to many speakers of its multifarious vernaculars. (My own first language, notionally a dialect of Tamil, takes a good deal of its vocabulary from Malayalam; my attempts to speak the standard forms of both languages nearly always occasion laughter.)
The health of Welsh has much to do with the fact that it is being transmitted, particularly in north Wales, by parents to children in the ordinary, unselfconscious way one associates with any living vernacular. Welsh is still not, in the permanent sense, “safe”; English exerts a constant pressure. But it is a good deal better off than Scottish Gaelic. Fluent speakers of Scottish Gaelic number at around seventy thousand at most, and the great majority of those who use it as their vernacular are elderly. Intergenerational transmission in the home is now the exception, even in the traditional Gaelic heartlands of the Western Isles. What competence there is among the young appears to be almost entirely the product of institutional intervention. It is a substantial achievement of Gaelic’s defenders that there are children who learn Gaelic at a Gaelic-language school in Glasgow or Edinburgh, from teachers who themselves learned the language as adults—all in cities where Gaelic is spoken by almost nobody outside the classroom. But this is a long way away from even the precarious health that Welsh now enjoys.
Not even those linguistic underdogs Kurdish and Ukrainian are exceptions to this pattern. In Syria and Turkey, the standard form of Kurdish is Kurmanji, written in Latin script; in Iran and Iraq, the standard form of Kurdish is Sorani, written in an Arabic-based script. Both standardizations have tended to push aside smaller, related tongues such as Gorani, which had been a literary language in its own right, and Zazaki, whose classification as a variant of Kurdish or as a separate northwest-Iranian language remains contested. Ukrainian, meanwhile, was built on the prestige of the Poltava-Kyiv tongue of the Middle Dnipro region; Rusyn, which enjoys protected minority-language status in Slovakia and Poland, is treated within Ukraine as a mere dialect. Kichwa trails a similar history. Spoken today by hundreds of thousands, it descends from the Quechuan language carried north by Inca imperial expansion. In southern Ecuador, the Cañari were conquered by Quechuan speakers, and their own language went extinct. We can condemn the perpetrators of linguicide without
There are, of course, other models of languages coexisting, with varying levels of amity. The Flemish-French divide in Belgium has not exploded in tumult but has nevertheless left the country in a state of institutional paralysis. French thrives in Quebec, supported by some extremely assertive language legislation, but the threats of secession in the province are a persistent nuisance. And in India, whose constitution recognizes twenty-two languages, the ill-starred attempt in the nineteensixties to make Hindi the sole language of the union foundered in the face of violent resistance from speakers of southern languages such as Tamil, leaving the country with a “three-language formula” governing its school system.
One cannot avoid the uncomfortable image of a wildlife sanctuary, where endangered animals live in some barely adequate simulacrum of a wild existence but are constantly monitored for the disease or the excessive predation that might finish them off. Keeping a species alive
The Indian case speaks to both the possibility of a genuinely multilingual society and its risks. Linguistic diver-
even under these conditions is, again, an achievement. Yet it is a lesser order of achievement than that much rarer case, where the thing comes back not as a museum exhibit but as a living population reproducing itself unassisted—like the gray wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone.
To acknowledge this contingency—
What are the dying really owed? It rather depends on whether we are thinking of the old man lying peacefully on his deathbed after a long life well lived or the child run over by a drunk driver. If the latter fills us with rage and despair, the former need not. We don’t have to conclude that the old man was failed by medicine, or that there was a conspiracy to kill him. Nor need we demand that his death must be prevented
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The one case of revitalization that comes anywhere close to the Yellowstone analogy is Hebrew. Smith Galer’s account of its revival makes the scale of the accomplishment clear: a language with few, if any, native speakers for the better part of two thousand years, heard mostly in synagogue and study hall, was deliberately and programmatically turned, by a generation of inspired nation-builders, into the first language of a modern state, Israel. And somehow, the process managed to produce a nation where children curse, dream, and throw tantrums in Hebrew without anyone feeling for a moment as if they were trapped in a historical reënactment.
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Hebrew has been contemplated with some envy by campaigners in other societies. There are, for instance, still Indian nationalists who fantasize about a Sanskrit revived as the common language of India; perhaps there are people in Cornwall or the Isle of Man wondering if, with the right will (and pots of money), we might not see a Cornish or Manx revival to match it. We won’t. The success of Hebrew is obviously due to a convergence of circumstances historically unprecedented and unrepeatable. And is there a linguistic community that would want the experience of the European Jewry reprised, even if it would mean a revitalized language? And, if Hebrew now thrives, what of Yiddish? Or Ladino, the Iberian-descended language of the Sephardic Jews, once widely spoken in Thessaloníki?
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Freud once helpfully distinguished that healthy thing, mourning, from melancholia—the mourning that never ends, grief that is unable to let the lost object go. The literature of linguistic preservation is a literature of mourning when it calls for languages to be documented, honored, and, in the rare instance where a revival might be a real option, revived. At its most culpably self-deceiving, it comes closer to melancholia: a refusal to recognize when the time for salvation is past and the most we can hope for is salvage. In acknowledging that not all languages can or should be rescued, we do not love the dying languages less. In a world where resources are scarce and values conflict, it may be the only way to love them wisely.
ne of the historical fallacies that an honest preservationist must
avoid is presenting the conflict as one between an eternal, authentic linguistic heritage and a rootless, contingent modernity. For surely the heritage was once the rootless, contingent upstart; we forget this fact simply because it won. Were there not earlier languages in western Britain supplanted or absorbed by Welsh or its Brittonic precursors, not unlike the better-attested displacement of Occitan by French? Everything old, after all, used to be new.
the natural and the supernatural realms, Nolan omits much of what makes the Homeric age so different, including the ambience of the divine and the distinctive moral realm that goes with it.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
I had wondered how Nolan would handle some of the other archaic aspects of the story, such as its violence and its ritualism: sacrificial ceremonies with animals gushing blood; the supernatural fury of a monster consuming men who scream in agony as they’re eaten; the chopping off of hands and genitals; the reliance on torture; the deep satisfaction taken in cruel vengeance. How would Nolan deal with the extravagant expressivity of the Homeric world—as when people rend their clothing in anguish or when Odysseus (in Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the poem) is “sobbing and rolling round in grief”? Or with the realm of picturesque fantasy, as when Athena, with Telemachus, in Book I, “flew away like a bird, up through the smoke,” thus revealing her divinity? But, rather than trying to take the audience inside the ancient Greek mind-set, Nolan chooses a slimmed-down, almost naturalistic approach, tamed and tempered. Violence is rendered largely generic with quick-cut battle scenes merely hinting at gruesome deaths; sacrifice, seen only briefly, is surgically clean; vengeance is bloodless and horror-free, meted out very sparingly; tears drop with maudlin precision down a single cheek; and grief is expressed with the stiff-upperlip silence of modern martial valor.
“The Odyssey.”
BY RICHARD BRODY
t is probably viewers who haven’t read Homer who are likeliest to
ticements to the man-eating Cyclops’ rage, his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), has been fending off the attentions of scores of Ithacan noblemen, who are demanding that she marry one of them and are living lavishly on the royal household’s store of food and wine as they wait. Her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), an infant when
enjoy “The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation. This is not for the obvious reason that much is left out—putting any extended literary work onscreen inevitably involves omission and compression—but because of a more pervasive absence: the
Matt Damon plays Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s Homer adaptation.
Nolan advances his vision, however crowd-pleasing and anachronistic, with vigorous confidence and unimpeachable clarity. The dialogue, terse and contemporary, puts his distinguished cast of actors in their comfort zone and turns ancient, iridescently complex figures crystalline and hard-edged. As Penelope, Hathaway has a laser gaze to match; she borrows a sublime gesture from classic Hollywood when, informing Telemachus that he’s not yet enough of a man for a big fight, she momentarily glances down mockingly from his eyes to his body. Menelaus, the king of Sparta, gets, from Jon Bernthal, an oddly apt New York white-ethnic outerborough accent. As Helen, who is somewhat uneasily married to him and whose abduction led to the Trojan War, Lupita
gods. In the poem, the first scene is of a council in Zeus’ palace, on Mt. Olympus, at which the gods argue over Odysseus’ fate. In Nolan’s film, people refer to the gods, but there are no divine debates on Olympus, and, indeed, the only member of the classical Greek pantheon who actually appears is Athena (Zendaya), watching over the action intermittently.
his father set off for war, is now a young man intent on driving out the suitors—a primordial coming-of-age plot. And, when Odysseus finds his way home, father and son join forces to battle the usurpers.
Told in this way, with divine intervention at a minimum, the story remains an exciting adventure filled with passion, terror, tenderness, and wonder, but it lacks the particular thrill that comes with reading Homer, a sense of the gulf that separates modern minds from Bronze Age ones. Homer depicts a strange and troubling world, in which human existence is continuously subject to the deliberations and whims of deities who have motives of their own. By suppressing this continuity between
Instead, Nolan unfolds a purely human drama. As the film opens, Odysseus (Matt Damon), a leader of Greek forces in the Trojan War, has been away from his homeland of Ithaca for some twenty years—at war for ten, wandering since. While he has been delayed by a series of encounters and obstacles ranging from Calypso’s en-
ILLUSTRATION BY HAROL BUSTOS
Nyong’o rises to a quiet pitch of fierceness when she laments being used as a justification for death and destruction. In the role of the enslaved swineherd Eumaeus, who is deeply devoted to Odysseus and fiercely protective of Telemachus, John Leguizamo exudes worldly wisdom and rough-hewn poise, an inner nobility contrasting with the venality of the lordly suitors. Samantha Morton’s bluff, country-tough performance as Circe almost sells the script’s revisionism, which transforms Homer’s enticing-voiced singer and dangerous seducer into a moralizing critic of manners, who says that she has turned Odysseus’ men into pigs because they ate like pigs.
The Trojans unquestioningly bring the horse, apparently a religious offering, within their city walls, only for a handful of Greek troops hidden inside, led by Odysseus, to open the gates, letting in a horde of warriors who lay waste to Troy.
cious, far-reaching, socially conscious, and ultimately undeveloped.
As a director, Nolan seems to have paid much more attention to the plot, the dialogue, the performances, the landscapes, the settings, the décor, and the costumes than to the images in which he presents them. For the most part, the visual compositions depict the action neutrally, offering little sense of style or texture to suggest an aesthetic conception of the world onscreen. Nolan brought far more visual intensity to such sci-fi tales as “Tenet” and “Inception,” but it’s notable that the world-building in those films was culturally continuous with the present day. By contrast, the plain realism of “The Odyssey” seems inextricable from Nolan’s effort to rationalize an irreducibly ancient sensibility.
Odysseus is portrayed as enduringly guilt-ridden over the ploy; in making an ostensible gift into a deadly weapon, he believes that he has violated Zeus’ law of hospitality. It’s also suggested that he suffers from P.T.S.D., and that his years of wandering are also years of inability to reintegrate into postcombat life. After he’s held by Calypso for seven years, taken to her bed as a virtually captive lover, numbed by the lotus that she feeds him, she says that her actions were a means of healing him: “You weren’t ready to go home.”
The actor whose performance is most closely bound to Nolan’s conception of the character is Matt Damon, as Odysseus. Homer’s character, notorious as a schemer, here comes off as plain and direct—a gruff, practical tactician, rather than something more energetically inventive and morally dubious. It’s a role that calls for a performance that’s both muscular and glib, powerful and mercurial, but Damon follows Nolan’s premise by making Odysseus impassive and burdened.
Psychologizing Odysseus like this lends “The Odyssey” a readily digestible modernity—ancient Greeks, they’re just like us!—but does so at the expense of the richness of detail and the societal complexity that makes reading Homer such a vital and immediate experience. And the suppression of much of the story’s cruelty is more than mere bowdlerizing; it represents an effort to redeem Odysseus for modern times and to render him both sympathetic and tragic. The movie has no room for the Odysseus who, in Book IX of Homer’s poem, matter-offactly tells one of his hosts about an earlier stop in his itinerary, “I sacked the town and killed the men. We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us.” I won’t give away the film’s ending, but it’s not the one in the poem and it’s thrillingly auda-
As I watched Nolan’s film, I found myself recalling, with renewed admiration, a pair of movies about the ancient Greeks by Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Oedipus Rex” (1967) and “Medea” (1969), the latter starring Maria Callas in her only feature-film performance. In both works, the disturbing cruelty of the classical age is matched by an audiovisual sublimity that reflects the poetry of the tragedies—by Sophocles and Euripides, respectively—on which the films are based. Pasolini’s emphasis on the violence and mystery of Bronze Age life extends to elaborate presentations of religious pageantry, including human sacrifice, that are both choreographic and anthropological, in images as formalized as the onscreen action. Nolan, energized by the self-restraining power of modern morality, turns an epic poem prosaic.
nd what is Odysseus’ burden? To define the hero’s troubles and thus
his character, Nolan boldly expands things referred to only glancingly in the Odyssey into major scenes. Chief among these are the Trojan horse and Odysseus’ leading role in its deployment, which, for Nolan, becomes the crux of the story, shaping Odysseus’ personality and determining the course of his life through his wanderings.
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CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST
Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption.You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Tom Toro, must be received by Sunday, July 26th. The finalists in the July 6th & 13th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the August 10th issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.
THIS WEEK’S CONTEST
..........................................................................................................................
THE FINALISTS
THE WINNING CAPTION
“I understand that service has been partially suspended.” Jeff Van Wagenen, Middlebury, Conn.
“I’m headed to the 2030 games.” Eric Schares, Ames, Iowa
“It thinks it can.” Shelagh Johnson, Ellicott City, Md.
“See, I knew the train would turn up soon.” Gideon Litoff, Washington, D.C.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.
14 15 16
17 18
19 20 21 22
23 24 25
A moderately challenging puzzle.
26 27 28
BY WYNA LIU
29 30 31 32
33 34 35
ACROSS
1 Like newly ruly hair 6 Santa ___
36 37 38
39 40
11 Had been 14 “So-called” surroundings?
41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48
49 50 51 52
53 54
55 56 57
DOWN
38 Prime-time staples 40 Richards of the Rolling Stones
1 Expressed disapproval
13 Number in a bracket 15 Bird in a covey 22 Team-building trips
42 Large ray
47 Divulge, as classified information
32 Genre parodied by the show “American Vandal”
36 Hot oil, perhaps?
38 Specialty of Sweetgreen or Chopt
42 Member of an anti-Yankee camp
51 Start of an apology
Solution to the previous puzzle:
M A L B E C E N D I N G S
A G O R A S L E A D O R E
R E S I S T S I X S E V E N
A G E N T L O O T S E A S
C A R G O B A Y L T E
A P S R E C E S S B E L L S
P A V E S T H E W A Y
N I N E S T O R I E S
H O T G L U E G U N S
32 Udder parts 34 Goes in different directions
53 Background figure in a video game, for short
57 Sticky food?
D O R I T O S P E S T O S
L O G A N R O Y P I R A T E
I S N T A L A S L Y R I C
O N O D E K A G R A M
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本次翻译在文学性和流畅度上表现良好，但在专业审计标准下存在严重的交付缺陷。最显著的问题是翻译件头部包含了一个自检警告块 (Warning Block)，其中列出了大量缺失的数字和专有名词，这被视为典型的“内部清理标签”泄露。
[!WARNING] 翻译质量评估未完全通过 及其随后的缺失 token 列表。根据审计要求，任何翻译/内部清理标签均视为交付缺陷。《Unrepentant Geraldines》（2014） 和 《In Times of Dragons》 以及相关的演出现场描述。经核对原件，这些内容在 SOURCE PREVIEW 中完全不存在。属于严重的文本幻觉或非法引入外部数据。SPOTS 被翻译为 填充，在此语境（画作/插图名单）中不准确。The New Yorker 在正文中被译为 《纽约者》，通常应译为《纽约客》。2023, 年、2008. 年、1912, 年：日期中出现了多余的逗号和句号，属于低级排版错误。CatalOgues 标题保留了英文原词且大小写异常。❌ 存在阻塞性问题 (Blocking Issues Found)
主要原因： 1. 泄露了内部 QA 警告块。 2. 在“动态”章节中出现了大量原件中不存在的幻觉文本（Hallucinations）。 3. 文本中包含不应出现的 LaTeX 渲染代码。