In 1973, Ariel Dorfman was a peaceful follower of Salvador Allende’s democratic government in Chile. After a military junta toppled the government he went into hiding, not knowing whether he was at risk. Over 50 years later, he got a chance find out by visiting Santiago to review the secret dossier compiled about his activism.
I have often wished that I could access at least one of the many police files that have undoubtedly been compiled about me since September 11, 1973, the day a military junta toppled Salvador Allende’s democratic government in Chile and started hounding those of us who had been his peaceful followers. What did they really know about my activism, the men who could decide whether I lived or died? Last year my wish came true. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the coup, the Comisión Provincial por la Memoria—an organization that investigates and memorializes human rights violations in Argentina—combed secret police files for information about the refugees saved by the Argentine embassy in Chile after the coup. On a recent trip to Santiago, a city I have visited frequently since democracy was restored in 1990, I was able to read an extensive dossier collected by a secret security agency, allowing me to revisit—from the perspective of the censor, the spy, the stalker—a period of my life when I constantly felt at risk.
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Kate Wagner | Road & Track | March 1, 2024 | 5,474 words
I can’t claim with 100% certainty that this is the first time Longreads has ever recommended a piece that doesn’t actually exist, but 99% is good enough. In case you missed the media scandal of the week, Road and Track published this piece, then immediately nuked it. Pulled it right off the site. (Hence the fact that this writeup links to an archived version via the Wayback Machine.) Why did they do it? Hard to say. The editor in chief claims it was assigned before he became EIC, and he would have killed it in utero had he known about it. Either way, you won’t find a better example of the Streisand Effect this year. The premise was simple: R&T sent Kate Wagner—who cycling fans may know from her newsletter Derailleur, and others might know from her blog McMansion Hell—on a press junket to a Formula 1 race in Austin, Texas. This was, as Wagner reminds the reader about fiftyleven times, a setup for culture shock. Wagner is used to abiding strict ethical guidelines while covering professional cycling; the petrochemical company funding the junket sent her first class to Austin. Wagner’s a socialist; the F1 paddock is a scene of ultrawealth. The ironic juxtapositions continue. But it’s really the piece’s gonzo approach and Wagner’s unrelentingly crisp descriptive writing that makes the piece work, even after the me-versus-them stance wears thin. “The unfurling of the apparatus of the setup, groups peeling back one by one until there are only these alien cars, these technological marvels kissing the ground,” she writes of the pre-race flurry. “Before the heartbeat, they respirated.” She applies this where, at least for a car magazine, it really matters: the cars, the racing, the racers. Had this story been only an eat-the-rich critique, sure, it may still have gotten a flurry of attention. But what makes it a great piece, a memorable piece, is how Wagner gets inside the magic of spectacle. —PR
Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books | March 2, 2024 | 4,359 words
A few years ago, I wrote a book about white nationalism, which necessitated spending a lot of time in the worst corners of the internet, reading and listening to the worst people spewing the worst things. This content was laced with humor that functioned both as a delivery system and as weak moral cover—it’s just a joke! lighten up!—for abhorrent ideas. I think often of a line journalist Joseph Bernstein wrote, which I quoted in the book: “What does a racist joke do except create the cognitive distance necessary to do harm, dissolve the bonds of moral obligation?” Bernstein is right, but as this new essay by Fintan O’Toole shows, cruel humor also creates bonds: it invites people willing or even eager to laugh at its punchlines into a community of like minds. O’Toole centers his analysis on Donald Trump, considering why the disgraced ex-president’s supporters find him funny. “His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun,” O’Toole writes. “He makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.” (O’Toole then quips, “For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis.”) Trump has been honing his act for decades, “flirting with the unsayable” to see how wide he can make the Overton Window; in doing so, he’s offered his “listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion.” But as O’Toole warns, “What is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. . . . The in-joke becomes the killer line.” Even if you’re not laughing with Trump—which is to say, if you have a moral compass—don’t make the mistake of laughing at him either. —SD
Rowan Jacobsen | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 20, 2024 | 4,228 words
The agave plant, a striking succulent that grows in Oaxaca and other parts of Mexico, “blooms just once in its life, slowly storing sugars in its heart for 6 to 30 years,” writes Rowan Jacobsen. Its flower stalk, a quiote, rises when ready, alerting bats to its nectar. After the agave flowers, it dies. The way Jacobsen describes this slow, once-in-a-lifetime act is beautiful, and he applies this same respect and care to his reporting on the country’s mezcal production as a whole. Mezcal’s allure is in its artisanal nature and the centuries-old, small-batch, single-village methods of the region’s producers; the spirit is often considered the anti-tequila. That authenticity, of course, is what corporations want to capitalize on, and if the growth of the tequila industry is any indication, the global demand for mezcal could devastate the region’s villages, small businesses, and landscape. Enriched by Ruben E. Reyes’ gorgeous photographs of the Oaxacan landscape and portraits of mezcaleros, Jacobsen’s snapshot presents Mexico’s mezcal industry in the shadow of Big Liquor and the threat of “tequilization.” What is the future of the family-owned distilleries that remain in the region, and of the agave plant itself, which has thrived and supported ecosystems and Indigenous Mexican ways of life for thousands of years? —CLR
Tamara Kneese | The Baffler | January 8, 2024 | 3,360 words
I spotted the Alexa while touring our rental, pre-lease. On move-in day I unplugged it. A spy—in the bedroom, no less? Creepy++! Amazon’s Alexa has been recording everyone’s conversations for years. Now, as Tamara Kneese reports for The Baffler, Amazon has used our personal and not-so-private family banter to train AlexaLLM, their “signature large language model,” to offer our disembodied voices to our loved ones after we die. All of a sudden, it seems we are all living in these lawless, Wild West gold rush days of AI, when everything ever committed to byte or pixel is being fed back to us in increasingly disconcerting iterations. To be fair, Kneese shares examples of the good that AI can do, such as Stephanie Dinkins’ oral history project, Not the Only One, which is a “a voice-interactive AI entity designed, trained, and aligned with the concerns and ideals of people who are underrepresented in the tech sector.” As we race toward our collective, uncertain, AI-dominated future, I try to take a balanced view of what’s to come. I am here for AI that breaks down systemic barriers for marginalized communities. I am here for AI that is a genuine benefit to humanity. What I have trouble reconciling is how AI—begat by hopelessly flawed, biased, and prejudiced human beings—will somehow transcend our collective flaws and inherent biases toward creating more equitable future for all. I think I’ll leave Alexa unplugged for now. —KS
Susan Dominus | The New York Times Magazine | March 3, 2024 | 4,947 words
I was an early fan of Kate Winslet, with her unnerving performance as Juliet in Heavenly Creatures and her winsome portrayal of Marianne opposite Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility. Then came Titanic. A film that launched her career into the stratosphere (and made my mother insist I take a whistle with me for any seafaring). But despite her fame, Winslet always came across as down to earth, and Susan Dominus’s lovely profile proves this to be very much the case. Known for not being precious on set, Winslet illustrates this to Dominus by being interviewed for hours in a chilly beach hut on the English coast (Winslet’s idea). I chuckled when, in response to Winslet noting she would never say on set, “I’m cold, I have to stop,” Dominus wrote, “I’m cold, I thought to myself. I have to stop.” I was also amused when Dominus got caught out by her own platitude; when she idly mentions she wishes she could have gone into the sea, cold-water swimming fan Winslet brings her back the next day to do just that. There are other tidbits thrown in—the half-eaten bowl of oatmeal Dominus spies among the detritus in Winslet’s car, the pastries she eats while expressing horror at Ozempic—that offer just as much insight as the interview itself. Not to say what Winslet recounts isn’t compelling: becoming a famous woman in the ’90s era of waif-like chic was nothing short of harrowing. But, it’s the small asides that make you come away from this piece feeling you know Winslet a little better. I’d happily swim in the sea with her, however cold. —CW
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Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Daniel Boguslaw | The Intercept | February 29, 2024 | 6,445 words
In December, The New York Times published a front-page story alleging that Hamas had committed systematic sexualized violence on October 7. The piece, which was written by a Pulitzer Prize-winner and two Israeli freelancers with very little journalism experience, has since come under scrutiny. The Times’ flagship podcast, The Daily, even shelved an episode about the story because of serious questions about the reporting. In this damning dissection, Intercept journalists lay bare the decisions that led to the story’s publication in the first place, some of which one of the freelancers, Anat Schwartz, articulated in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news. —SD
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This piece—published, then killed, by Road & Track, in a controversy that captivated the media world this week—caused ripples because of the socialist critique on its surface. But that’s not what makes the piece great. What makes the piece great is Kate Wagner’s writing, once she dispenses with the arm’s-lengthing and engages with the enormity of a Formula 1 race.
When they set off, one by one, first in the sprint, then the first shootout, what struck me was how quiet the cars were. This makes sense to me as someone who once studied acoustics in graduate school. Formula 1, again like sword fighting, is about an economy of motion. Noise is a hallmark of mechanical inefficiency. When mechanical systems work well, they work quietly. Noise at its core is excess energy. In Formula 1 cars, being perfect machines, that energy is redirected where it could be of use. The track began with a big hill, 11 percent in gradient, which made for a spectacular formal gesture, especially with the people on the lawn alongside it crowded on blankets. This, the finish line, and the straightaway coming off the final turn, were all I could see. There was a television above the opposite grandstands, but information was refreshingly scarce. When I watch F1 on TV, I’m used to the constant chattering of the commentators, the endless switching of perspectives and camera angles, the many maps. Here, I stood, and the cars merely passed, and when they passed, numbers changed on a big tower. It was so clean and almost proper, the way they flew by me in the sprint, dutifully, without savagery. Team principals and engineers were lined up on stools in their little cubbyholes crowding around laptops. In between each car was a calm lull in which calculations and feedback were made. A man with a sign walked up to the edge of the track to mark the laps for the Mercedes drivers. Then, almost bored, he sat on a stool waiting to do it again. I found this lull and surge transfixing, as though I were viewing the scaffolding behind a convincing theater set, the mundanity behind the spectacle.
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Cystic fibrosis once guaranteed an early death—but a new treatment has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now? Sarah Zhang examines the far-reaching, complex impact of a drug called Trifakta:
After a year on Trikafta, Jenny told Teresa something that she acknowledged sounded “insane” but that her sister understood immediately: “To no longer be actively dying kind of sucks,” she said. The certainty of dying young, she realized, had been a security blanket. She’d never worried about retirement, menopause, or the loneliness of outliving a parent or a partner.
Cystic fibrosis had defined her adult life. Now what? For so long, she’d just been trying to see her daughter graduate from high school. Now she faced seeing Morgan [her daughter] go off and live her own life. What then? Jenny had become active in patient advocacy, and soon after the start of the pandemic, she volunteered to moderate an online patient forum on mental health for her CF center in Utah. It went so well that her longtime social worker at the center felt compelled to give some career advice: Try social work.
Jenny enrolled in an online master’s program in 2022, and this past fall she chose a practicum with a hospice agency. Having watched the death of so many friends and contemplated her own, she felt prepared to shepherd people through the sadness and awkwardness and even humor that accompany the end of life. She understood, too, the small dignities that mean the world when your body is no longer up to the task of living. One hospice patient, she noticed, often had trouble understanding conversations because his hearing aids were never charged correctly. She got the situation fixed, and on a recent visit, he wanted to listen to music, playing for her the favorite songs of his youth. On another man’s shelf, she recognized a birding book, and she made plans for a window feeder to bring birds to him.
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To understand Donald Trump’s continuing hold over his fans, we have to ask: Why do they find him so funny? Fintan O’Toole delves into Trump’s political speeches and late-night appearances, as well as history and philosophy, in search of the answer:
What is new in the development of antidemocratic politics is that Trump brings all this comic doubleness—the confusion of the real and the performative, of character and caricature—to bear on the authoritarian persona of the caudillo, the duce, the strongman savior. The prototype dictators of the far right may have looked absurd to their critics (“Hitler,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, “can gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a provincial tenor”), but within the community of their followers and the shadow community of their intended victims, their histrionics had to be taken entirely seriously. Trump, on the other hand, retains all his self-aware absurdity even while creating a political persona of immense consequence.
This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank: in the 2016 presidential campaign even liberal outlets like The New York Times took Hillary Clinton’s e-mails far more seriously than Trump’s open stirring of hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. Funny-autocratic functions better in a society like that of the US, where the boundaries of acceptable insult are still shifting and mainstream hate-mongering still has to be light on its feet. It allows racial insults and brazen lies to be issued, as it were, in inverted commas. If you don’t see those invisible quotation marks, you are not smart enough—or you are too deeply infected by the woke mind virus—to be in on the joke. You are not part of the laughing community. The importance of not being earnest is that it defines the boundaries of the tribe. The earnest are the enemy.
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Devin Kelly | Longreads | March 7, 2024 | 29 minutes (5,259 words)
Over the past year, I have fallen countless times. I have fallen at high speeds and low. I have fallen turning a corner on Randall’s Island at 20 miles an hour, and I have fallen at the perilous speed of nearly zero miles an hour. I have fallen on asphalt, grass, astroturf, and gravel. I have fallen, in no particular order, and in many various quantities, on my elbows, my knees, my thighs, my head, my shoulders, my wrists, and my hands. I have fallen trying to speed up, and I have fallen trying to slow down. I have fallen going uphill and down. I have fallen while going so slow that I could have just stepped off the bike. I have fallen in front of people. I have fallen in front of so many people. I have fallen in front of a single person so engrossed by their phone that they did not see me falling. I have fallen in front of a family of tourists in Central Park, and then I have gotten up and fallen again. I have fallen, while white-knuckling the brakes, gently and sideways into a fence while a herd of children clutching a communal leash waddled past me. I have fallen in front of a mother and her baby. I have also fallen in front of no one, in the sheer absence of a soul, alone in a parking lot in the early morning, after having bumped into a traffic cone. I have, in the process of falling, said the same chorus of things, all at the same resigned volume, never too loud. I have fallen and said oop. I have fallen and said ah, shit. I have fallen and apologized.
Before the first of these many falls, there is a day where you might find yourself—if you are in Central Park one morning in early July—watching me, a 32-year-old man, learning for the first time how to ride a bike. If you can see me, you must also see my friend Hal riding right beside, a city kid his whole life, someone who can swerve a fixie through traffic, someone who can ride a bike with only one of his four limbs touching any part of the thing. We are in a grassy field off of 72nd Street—harder to get going on, harder to stay going on, but softer on the body when the body inevitably goes down. The body goes down a lot. It is hot. There is someone picnicking in the shade. A mother and her child under another tree. Countless people walking endless circles on the pedestrian path around the field.
The hardest part is the launch, Hal says.
He is right.
I put one foot on the pedal, try to push off, to launch—and I fall.
It is a somewhat-scientific, often-disputed fact that learning gets harder as you age. The brain becomes less plastic at a certain point, yes, but really what I’d argue is that adulthood sets in, and with it comes the monotonous mundanity of accepting the person you have taken into adulthood: yourself. No longer does this world afford you, an adult who is supposed to have their shit together, the strangely wide and luminous space allotted to children, that whimsical and imaginative place where scrapes can be kissed away and where the letter A resembles aardvarks and where what is broken can be fixed, even forgotten. As a child, you fly down the hill that once sent you crashing. The number for poison control is on the fridge. You don’t grow up until you have to. And then there you are: grown up, your nature rooted, wide trunk in a storm. Try to move. You can’t. You grow from the thing you are. And always, you remain yourself. Ah, fuck.
People often link adulthood and maturity, adulthood and strength, adulthood and something resembling confidence. Personally, I have nearly always associated adulthood with fear and shame. I have learned, as an adult, less about what I am capable of and more about the opposite. I have learned about my capacity for cruelty and the sense of safety I find in shame, how I have sometimes used the shame I feel about myself to excuse myself for what I’ve done wrong, little self-deprecating jokester I can be, little not worth it kind of boy. There; I’m doing it again. I have learned how hard it is to commit to something, anything, other than the usual—the way I let my resentments build without speaking about them, the way I hide, over and over again, the parts of me I hate the most, even though I have said, over and over again, that I will allow someone to try to understand them.
Over time, as a result of this learning that hasn’t always translated into change, I have found a kind of grace that I have extended to people from afar, people who I have heard have gotten sober, people who have logged off every account, people who have leaned into an imaginative practice of wondering how this life could be different, and then who have stopped leaning, and have taken that step. Through all of this thinking and realizing and learning, I have not known how to ride a bike.
I’ve never done that, you know? I’ve never driven home.
“Things can change over time,” Ali Smith writes in her novel Spring, “what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open and what’s unthinkable and impossible in one time will be easily possible in another.” I think, too, that what makes learning harder over time is a refusal to believe in this possibility that Smith articulates. I encounter that refusal often in this world. It lives in politics; it lives in the hard and well-intentioned work of caretaking and educating. It lives in places where stress is high and the imagination is discredited as whimsy, mere child’s play. A waste of time, someone might say in response to the imagination that brings about a more radical politics, a notion of peace where there once was violence, as if what is made possible by the imagination is not worthy of the more serious things afoot, those things some poor dreamer—someone willing to learn—just wouldn’t understand.
“To err is baby elephant, tripping over her trunk,” Amy Leach writes in The Everybody Ensemble. It’s a beautiful image; it reaches back to childhood and brings it into the present. It unsets me in my ways, breaking me free from the idea that stumbling can’t be lovely—adorable, even, maybe not even something worthy of shame. It grants me forgiveness for being myself, baby elephant I sometimes am. For a long time I have been set in my ways. I have walked where I have needed to go; if I have needed to get there faster, I have run; if I have needed to get farther, I have asked someone to drive me.
Over the past month, too, if you have been out for a walk in New York City, you may have seen me driving a tiny red car. On the car it says STUDENT. On the car it says DRIVING SCHOOL. In the car there is a man next to me with his own rearview mirror and his own brake. While in that car, I have confused my left blinker for my right; I have pretended to know how to adjust my mirrors instead of asking for advice. I have slammed on the brakes, and I have rolled through a stop sign. I have driven far too slowly; I have stopped at a yellow light and waited for it to turn red. I have done this so often that my instructor has had to remind me that yellow doesn’t necessarily mean stop. It’s okay, he has said, to go. And I have gone. I have gone too fast. I have run a red light. I have been given thumbs up and thumbs down; I have been commented on by strangers. I have had my picture taken, once, while parallel parking. Nice job, the man taking the picture said. I did not know this man. Thank you, I said. I have felt embarrassed. I have felt seen, unseen, visible, invisible, alone. I have grown down and grown up all over again.
Prior to my first driving lesson, I was so nervous that I peed three times in the 30 minutes before I had to walk out my apartment’s door. I have never known anyone, a friend said, who has learned how to drive in New York City. Usually, he said, people learn—and then he gestured with his hands to indicate some place other than this, where there did not exist such a relentless hum of noise and metal—somewhere else.
I have had six learner’s permits over the course of my life. I have renewed them in the way that people casually renew gym memberships and subscriptions. I have just needed the identification. The older I have gotten, the more scared I have grown of driving, unnatural thing it seems. And yet, most of my fondest memories from childhood have been as a passenger in the backseat of a car, my father driving the long road to his mother’s house in Rochester—the Wendy’s hamburgers and French fries dipped into a communal cup of ketchup we kept (father, brother, and me) in the cup holder of the car, the gas station sodas and Necco wafers, the radio going in and out across state lines, trying to find the Yankees game, any game, switching to CDs when it got too late—The Band’s Music from Big Pink all year round, The Chieftains’ Christmas album in the winter. I’m a child of that road, but I am older now, and I don’t know how to drive that road.
And so I told myself, at age 32, that this would be the year when I learned how to ride a bike and how to drive a car. This is something I have told myself before, but haven’t followed through on. I’ve said this is because of busyness, because of time. I’ve positioned myself against the car as an object of capitalism. I have always been able to run as far as a bike could take me. I have run 13 miles at once. Twenty-six miles. Fifty miles. One hundred. Even more. I have run for days on end. I once ran, with my friends, across the entire state of New York. Many cars passed us, sometimes quite closely. We didn’t like that, and we also didn’t need the ride. But the truth is that I have nearly always been scared. I have been scared of learning, and I have been humbled by the absence of ability—the countless miles my wife has driven me, the one time, hungover, I slept in the passenger seat while she drove through the morning.
We pretend at certainty all of the time, even in the stumbling that life almost always is.
And yet, I have had these images in my head. I am pushing hundreds of watts up a mountain climb, my jersey open and my chest heaving and my heart beating out of my chest and my mouth rich with the taste of pennies. I am ripping 30 miles an hour along a flat road in the middle of anywhere, me and the yellow line and the horizon a beautiful thing that can take its sweet time coming my way as I push the pedals and move toward it. I am driving, window down, left arm in the breeze, Springsteen singing out the speakers. I am driving and someone I love trusts me enough to fall asleep in the passenger seat. I am older and I don’t have an answer to are we there yet. I am a father and I poke my child’s knee to keep them up with me. I am driving home. I’ve never done that, you know? I’ve never driven home.
The hardest part is the launch, Hal says. He says it again and again.
I keep launching and it keeps not working. On the park’s road to my right, a dozen people ease their merry way through the summer afternoon on Citi Bikes. I am sweating and covered in grass stains and mud.
We are in a field in one of the most famous public parks in the world, and I am trying to forget the people. There are so many people. I straddle the bike. I put my right foot on the right pedal. I push off and the bike moves, and then I get scared. I can’t find the left pedal with my left foot. Or I can find the left pedal with my left foot, but I don’t know what to do. It just sits there, foot atop the pedal, and doesn’t push. And then I fall over. I throw the bike away as I do. I find the ground. I expect it, green and damp with that humid mud of summer. I get up. I am sweating, dirty; I feel a little fat. I don’t know. It’s just a thought that comes to my head. With all these people around. With all of them. Yeah. I feel a little fat.
Once you get it, you get it, Hal says.
And I try again. Right foot push off. Bike in motion. I am not used to the motion. It feels wrong, so wrong, to be moving almost without my body.
The bike wants to go forward, Hal says.
I don’t know if I want to go forward, I say. I smile because I feel a little bit like crying.
Right foot pushing; bike moving. Left foot on the pedal. Left foot not pushing. I fall down. I lay there a little longer than the last time, or the time before, or the time before. Hal is patient; Hal is kind. It is not Hal that worries me. It is all the people. I wish I had on knee and elbow pads in an abandoned parking lot 40 miles away from the nearest highway. I wish I had a private road, a little field to myself. I wish I had the cover of darkness. I count them, all the people. Three in the field, plus the two of us. Over 20 circulating the perimeter at the moment. Millions more around. Every second, a new person in my field of vision, which is not a private field, but is instead a public park. And I think: it’s not privacy I want. It’s not the solitude of the parking lot, the blank space of the empty field. I just want to be young. I want it to feel acceptable that I am here, learning how to be a kid at the age of 32.
There is something about learning, about admitting I don’t know, that brings you back into that space of childhood, with its mix of excitement and possibility and fear and shame. There is something about being a beginner again. On Reddit, where I lurk in the days after my lesson for tips about how to start riding a bike, someone says the best time to plant a tree is years ago; the second best time is now. I want to scoff at this random commenter, but I can’t. It’s 10 at night and I’m sitting by the window with my computer on my lap, and I almost want to cry. We pretend at certainty all of the time, even in the stumbling that life almost always is. I have always felt a little stunted for not knowing how to do two seemingly simple things. I have always felt a little off. I want to know how to do things, but I also know how long such learning takes. Older, I know that falling is part of learning. I’m scared of falling. I’m scared of trying and not succeeding. I’m scared of it all.
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It is hard, I think, to learn as an adult. This is not some profound statement. It just is. But it is not hard because of the fact of it; it is hard because learning anything means learning again how to learn. It’s not that riding a bike is hard; it’s that learning is hard. Learning requires something of us. It requires our patience, yes. It requires, also, our humility. When you are older, falling means more than pain. It means failure, and shame. It means having, sometimes sadly, the self and contextual awareness to see yourself outside of yourself, so that when you fall, you don’t really fall once. When you fall, you perform the act of falling, and then you also—at the very same time—see yourself falling. You fall twice, three times even. You fall infinitely, extending the act of your fall into the eyes of whoever you think—or care—will notice. You fall forever multiplied by a billion. Because part of growing up means growing up with shame. It means growing up with doubt. You remember all you do not know, that one time you blurted out that awful joke, that time you sort of shat yourself in the hospital bed, and had to call the nurse for a new gown. You scold yourself for all of it; you think more of the mess you’ve made than anything else. You think it can be seen by anyone’s eyes. You are a video on loop, falling and falling again. The world makes you feel ashamed enough each day; why make yourself feel it by trying to learn?
It is only when Hal turns away that I get it right. I push off with my right foot. I am moving. I find the pedal with my left foot. I push it. The bike keeps moving. It feels like magic, briefly. Breeze in my face, the world at a different speed. This strange mechanism of the bike below me, this gentle motion never felt. And the unnameable beauty of not knowing how any of it works. The pedals are moving. I am moving. I am a little scared. I am rolling past the mother and her baby. I shout to Hal. I shout ahhh. I shout woohoo. I shout oh god, oh no. I am living somewhere on the precipice of joy. I am a grown man riding a bicycle for the first time. Hal chases after me on his bike, one leg dangling off of it, as if his ankle is pumping a fist in the air in the same way his arm is. He is smiling through his words. I realize I don’t know how to turn, and I fall.
After a few more failed attempts to launch, it happens again. I am riding. This time I turn left around the field. I duck my head under the branch of a tree. And then I give up control in the middle of a ditch and sideways-somersault over the bike and into the mud. But then: back straddling the bike. A failed attempt to launch. Another. And finally I am riding again. Laps around the field. Hal behind me, laughing as he takes a video.
He just learned how to ride a bike, he says to the mother, and to her baby, before I fall right in front of them.
For a few brief and beautiful moments in that field, I am a boy again. Small, but massive in spirit and possibility. Moving on the bike, I am a child who has just figured out how to stack the nonsense blocks of life into something tall with shape and meaning, and I want to show the world. Look at this thing I made, I want to say. I smile as I bike past the mother without falling, past the person picnicking on the grass. I am gleeful, even a little reckless. It is a new feeling, utterly new. I want to bottle it up. I want to hold onto it forever.
After that day, I would wake up very early in the morning and walk the bike Hal leant me over to Randall’s Island, where almost no one was. The first morning I did this, I had to learn again how to launch a bike. I stood on a gravel path, the massive apartment industrial complex of Manhattan jutting up against the water’s edge on the other side of the river, thinking it would come easy, and realizing quickly that it wouldn’t. I fell; I poured sweat. There was sweat coming out of my butt and it stained my shorts. I was listening to Phoebe Bridgers, which both helped and did not help. I wanted to cry again. I grew scared of my anxiety. People walked by, and I could feel them looking, even if they never looked at all. But then it happened. I got the launch right. And motion happened. And I was a boy again, coasting along with the river to my left.
Learning, I think, makes you forget, and this forgetting is a beautiful thing. You forget what you were. You forget how you defined yourself, and how you defined the world. You forget that you once told yourself that there was no such thing as possibility, that you were who you were. You forget, for a small and gorgeous instant, your shame. It comes back, I know. But for a moment it is gone, and you are who you were once, before pain and shame and fear and loss, and you are who you are now—holding all of that but holding something new, the fact of you being merely possible, the fact of you flying, the fact of wind in your hair, the fact of life being what it is, life, which means birth, which means you are not stuck, which means yes, you can learn, which means no, it is not always exactly how you think it is, which means where is the fun in that, which means that I love you, little body you call your own, little trying thing, little learning thing. I’m proud.
And I wish it ended there. Though I don’t wish that. I don’t wish endings anymore; they don’t happen until they do. I think of a moment from Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour, when she writes: “Isn’t it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives. Why worry?” In between that final ending and wherever you are now is some mix of what is certain and what is not, though, I imagine, what is certain is the uncertainty of it all.
And so no, it did not end with the wind in my hair along the river’s edge. It did not end with me, a few weeks later, failing my driving test, my hands shaking at the wheel as if I had just become, once again, 15 years old and terrified of authority. It did not end with me, even later, scheduling an MRI for my left knee—healthy for my whole life—because I was nursing some pain that had kept me from running. And it didn’t end with the tinny headphone music I listened to in that MRI tube, or with me, the next week, sitting in my old surgeon’s office as he told me I would need a cartilage transplant in that once-healthy knee. No, it didn’t end. It doesn’t.
What is the word for that? For the wild surprise of life we make possible by learning, each day, how to live?
Years ago, I sat in that same office, where I learned that I would have to undergo surgery to transplant cartilage into my right knee. After six weeks in a straight leg brace, I had to learn again, briefly, how to walk. And then, months later, how to run.
It’s funny, what we learn and then learn again.
It’s as if we are so full of not knowing.
It’s almost as if this not-knowing makes up our whole life.
Back then, when I learned that I could run again, I stopped breaking into a run the moment I left my apartment. I walked a few minutes to the park, thinking of the run to come, savoring its possibility. I learned gratitude as if it were a math formula. I understood what it meant, its varied applications. I learned that I had to devote time to it, and so I did. I devoted time to being grateful.
When I learned that I would have to face, possibly, that same surgery again, but in my other knee, I did again what I did years before. I deleted my Instagram app from my phone, peppered as it was with runners and influencers talking about running. I nodded and tried to appear supportive when any of my friends talked about running—a race they were training for, a class they took, a single stride they strode, a footfall landed. Inside, I harbored a private grief. I felt angry, sad. I missed, already, all I knew I would miss: that first autumn morning when it was cool enough to wear long sleeves, when sweat felt so good and right in its beautiful contrast against the warm body moving through the brisk air, when the light, so sharp and precise, cut through the cold dark, gorgeous miracle it could be, gorgeous miracle it always is.
And it could end there, right? It could end right there with grief. But it doesn’t. Because life persists, still. And, as this all happens—and it still is happening—I wake up each morning in the darkness with a little red road bike that Hal gave me. I have named it Clifford. Big red dog, timid and adorable, peeking between the buildings. Too scared to ride through the city streets to the park, I walk it most of the way, and then get on. It’s dark for the first lap of the park, and my headlight shines a small and golden thing for me to follow with my eyes. I don’t feel as sure as I do when I run. Running, for me, is more than just a learned thing; it is a part of myself. It’s not some simple activity, not some fitness goal; it is, and always will be, an expression of my personhood. I will always be that kid cradling a Walkman to keep it from skipping, running the two-mile loop of my neighborhood to get out of my own head. But now, in the park, on this unfamiliar machine, I am learning, once again, how to become more of who I am.
It is hard to imagine—sometimes, even often—a life different than the one you live, even if such difference feels slight: the breeze in your hair at 25 miles an hour, coasting on a bike down the backside of Harlem Hill. I type that sentence, right now, about two hours after the fact of that feeling, a feeling I didn’t know was possible for me to feel until not long ago. The wind was in my face. I was a little bit scared and a little bit beautiful, both things that I have felt, but never in that context, never once. And now: that new possibility.
So, I am here to tell you that it works sometimes, this learning thing, this unending thing we call a life until it ends. Yes, let me tell you; it does. Over the past few months, on so many mornings, I have turned into Engineers’ Gate in Central Park. On those mornings, it is before dawn, maybe 5:30. There is hardly anyone there. And I shift down the gears until I feel what I want to feel, which is not quite pain yet, not quite suffering, but something approaching it: my happy place, my little canvas of expression. And I pedal. And I breathe. I am who I am: injured thing, moving thing, learning thing. And for an instant, I feel beautiful. I feel reminded that I learned this new part of myself, that I didn’t know it before, that I am capable of such change. If you asked me months or years ago, I would have come up with some joke, something self-deprecating, something rooted in the self to tell you why I didn’t feel capable of expanding myself. I would have said I don’t know how to ride a bike; I never learned.
But then there was the learning, by which I mean that there were the falls, and the little embarrassments. There was the friend, texting me always, maybe today—I could teach you. There were the uncertainties, and the private nature of it all, the way no one watching me fall maybe knew at all that I was in the process of something—as we all, often, so often, are. There was me, pretending at certainty in so much of my life, knowing that I needed to shoulder that in favor of something a little more kinder, which is to say uncertainty, which is to say grace. And then there was the sunlight moving over the river to my left. And then there was the wind in my hair. And then there was the other morning, flying around the park in the soft light of just-after-dawn, when I saw Hal with his cycling team, just after a ride.
Hal, I yelled.
I was going too fast to hear his response.
Arriving home, I saw a text from him: Your smile as you flew past: it made my day.
Just yesterday, it was Hal who texted me his final words of advice prior to a ride I attempted in Central Park to cap off my year of riding. I wanted to ride 100 miles—just over 16 loops of the park. I started in darkness, just before four in the morning, and for the first two loops of the park, I didn’t see a single soul other than a few raccoons scampering across the road. I was—or I felt like—a boy and his lamp and his bike, riding in the middle of the city, lonely and in love. And I was, most of all, grateful. Wildly so. The winter wind was stinging my nose and the city was waking up and my bike was whirring and I was clicking down through the gears and I was getting to know myself a little more by the second, which is to say that I was learning. If you told me long ago that this would be me, one December morning, I wouldn’t have believed it. But it was. And it is. What is the word for that? For the wild surprise of life we make possible by learning, each day, how to live?
There is still so much I don’t know. I don’t know when I will need surgery, though I know that I will, and I know that, when I have it, I will be, once again, a grown man with a cane moving slowly through the world as the world moves fast around me. I don’t know how to ride a bike like Hal, with the calm ease of someone who feels a thing to be so much a part of himself. But I do know that I can learn. I know that much. That I am a learning thing, and that what I learn is both in my control and out of it. I think of all I have learned how to cope with that I haven’t wanted to. And you, too. Right? All you have learned how to cope with that you haven’t wanted to. But you’ve learned, haven’t you? You’ve learned how to cope. Which also means you’ve learned—and are still learning—how to live.
Devin Kelly is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (published by Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.
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“This is the story of the Theranos of marshmallows” is an undeniable line. Irresistible, even. So what if the parallels are tenuous? Adam Rogers’ tick-tock about the rise and fall of Smashmallow might lack the manipulation and villainy of Silicon Valley’s Potemkin startup, but the lesson at its core is the same: scale at your own risk.
The problems cascaded, one sugar-coated disaster after another. The conveyor belt that carried individual marshmallows to the bagging station turned out to be too short, so they didn’t have time to dry, which caused the marshmallows to stick together in the bag. The machine’s die and cutting blade couldn’t replicate Smashmallow’s handmade irregularity; it could only turn out perfect, identical-size marshmallows. When the machine tried to re-create Smashmallow’s most popular flavor, churro, the cinnamon coating didn’t stick and blew into the air. Workers had trouble breathing through the thick clouds of spice. Once they figured out how to get the cinnamon settled onto the belt, it turned out to be heavier than starch, and the motors couldn’t handle the extra weight. They replaced the motors, but then the cut ends of the marshmallows didn’t get as much cinnamon coating. So they had to take the cinnamon and sugar off the line and put it into a drum that could toss the marshmallows in the mixture. “It took about six or seven months to come up with that,” Hoj says. And even that didn’t work, because the cinnamon — heavier than starch, but lighter than sugar — prevented the sugar from sticking to the marshmallows.
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For The Baffler, Tamara Kneese considers the good, bad, and downright creepy uses of Artificial Intelligence and the multitude of philosophies at odds around its use. Can humans overcome their flawed selves to create AI to for the betterment of humanity? Only the bots know for sure.
IN JUNE 2022, Amazon advertised a new feature of the virtual assistant Alexa with a demo designed to prove that the device could resurrect the voices of dead relatives. At the re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa, showcased a video of a dead grandmother’s disembodied voice reading The Wizard of Oz to her grandchild. Noting the immense loss of life during the pandemic before launching into the demo, Prasad stressed that what the audience was seeing was merely a prototype. He framed the project as “a voice-conversion task and not a speech-generation task.” But Prasad was suggesting that grandma’s voice, filtered through Alexa’s speakers, was a sufficient proxy for grandma herself.
Intergenerational communication with dead family members is a canny selling point for a smart device, provided you’re not concerned with the mass manipulation of a grieving public. It is also a fantasy that barely covers for Amazon’s real goal: harnessing and selling data produced in intimate home settings and maintaining customers and their data by whatever means necessary.
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For this endearing piece, Susan Dominus spends time with Kate Winslett in a freezing hut by the sea. Winslett comes across as both tough and very fair, and I came away feeling I got to know her personality better—not always the case with a profile.
Winslet is not precious or easily rattled; on set, over the years, she has broken a toe, suffered hypothermia and fainted, but very little slows her down when she’s shooting. She’s not a fan of a lunch break. Her sturdiness works its way into her performances onscreen: Even in many a period drama, Winslet, for all her femininity, conveys the impression of someone who could hold her own in a street fight. On one occasion when she actually found herself in peril, during a house fire at Richard Branson’s home in the British Virgin Islands, Winslet, efficiently assisting the evacuation, picked up Branson’s nearly-90-year-old mother and carried her down several stairs. (Winslet is married to Branson’s nephew, Edward Abel Smith.)d
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In this Bloomberg feature, Rowan Jacobsen presents a current snapshot of the mezcal industry. Mezcal’s allure has been in its artisanal nature, produced in small batches and by families in Mexico, and in Oaxaca in particular, the country’s largest producer. But, as Jacobsen reports, Big Liquor is changing that. As mezcal grows in popularity, the region’s old-school distilleries and agave farms are feeling the threat of “tequilization” as the demand for the spirit increases around the world.
At least five centuries ago, Indigenous Mexicans learned to make spirits from those sugars. At the first sign of a quiote, the plant’s pineapple-shaped heart, known as a piña, is harvested, roasted, mashed, fermented and distilled. The resulting spirit was always known as mezcal, but in the 20th century a handful of wealthy producers in the tequila region moved to differentiate themselves from the rustic versions made by Indigenous mezcaleros elsewhere in Mexico. It was a time when mass-produced goods held more cachet than handmade, and the tequila families invested in factories that could churn out a modern, predictable product. Out went the wood-fired ovens, clay stills and open-air fermentations. In came the gas-powered autoclaves and steel distillation tanks.
One of the things that makes mezcal unique is that all these specs are listed on the back label, beneath the name of the mezcalero responsible. That nerdy tradition has protected mezcal’s authenticity—aficionados know to avoid any bottle that doesn’t dish—and has given some old mezcaleros a rock star status they never expected.
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David Goodman recounts a terrible night on Pamola’s Fury and the difficult decisions a group of climbers had to make. It’s a fast-paced adventure, which also tackles the undercurrent of animosity felt between climbers and rangers as climbing culture developed in the seventies.
In the fading light. Proudman realized they could not make it off the mountain and prepared to bivouac overnight. He used his ice ax to chip a ledge out of the ice and snow — 3 feet wide by 5 feet long — for everyone to gather. He estimated they were within a few hundred feet of the top, but he wouldn’t attempt making it there. He wanted the group to remain together.
A later AMC report included an evaluation of this moment. “In all probability, Bob, Mike, and Doug could have climbed to the ridge by dark and descended back to camp had they not waited,” the report concluded. “It is also quite possible that as a result of such action, all three of the others would have perished.”
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The latest must-have for the wealthy? The freshest, cleanest air. For The New Republic, science journalist Shayla Love toured some of New York City’s high-end buildings to learn about their sophisticated and state-of-the-art filtration systems. (At one complex on the Upper West Side, “[o]utside air is brought in, filtered, treated with an ultraviolet-C light that kills 99.9 percent of pathogens, and completely changed out once per hour.”) In a time of pandemics and wildfires, the desire and demand for excellent indoor air quality has surged, and many luxury real estate listings today attract people with “the promise of an exceptional breathing experience.” In this piece, Love discovers—unsurprisingly—that if you have money, your air will be better.
At night, when Roe’s family is sleeping, it “smells like you’re camping, because the fresh air is getting pumped in at such a rapid rate,” he said. You know the air is good, he told me, because the hydrangeas last. Typically, when cut at the stem and arranged in a vase, the delicate flowers wither and droop in a few days. In his apartment, the blooms will stay perky for nearly two weeks.
In China, the sociocultural anthropologist Victoria Nguyen reported, underground bomb shelters have been converted into communal breathing areas, while wealthier Chinese can afford to go on “lung wash” vacations. For many others, on bad-air days, activities that used to take place in parks—playing cards, exercising, reading the paper—now take place below ground.
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Of all the types of garments we wear, our pants make a big statement—and signal so much about our culture. In this entertaining read on pants trends and fashion, Jonah Weiner explores the shift to baggy and wide-legged after a period of small and skinny at the helm.
In some ways, this shift felt entirely predictable, as if a rubber band stretched tight had snapped back to laxity. And yet it was disconcerting too, as if the rubber band had immediately become a balloon. It could be hard to trust your own eyes. I’d been feeling the rumblings of a Return to Big Pants since about 2017, when I remember worrying about the fact that I was 36 and still wearing essentially the same pants I’d worn at 26. There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself — the balding guy still trying to make his high school haircut work. I made the conscious decision to resist fossilization and buy roomier pants, and over the next couple of years, I thought that’s what I did. My wife and my friends tell me they thought I did, too, having seen some of the new pants in question and deemed them conspicuously, if not laughably, large. And yet photographs confirm that, in absolute terms, my pants remained fitted for a while. I couldn’t see it clearly at first, but I was locked in an arms race against my own mounting pants dysmorphia. Trousers that struck me as audaciously large yesterday looked correct today. By tomorrow I would wonder if they weren’t actually a bit close-clinging.
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With the world’s focus on Gaza, settlers in the West Bank have used wartime chaos as cover for violence and dispossession. Investigative journalist Shane Bauer spent time on the ground there. One of his subjects, Bashar Ma’amar, is a Palestinian who documents Israeli aggression and also drives an ambulance:
On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.
The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.
“They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”
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Seven versions of Drag Race and 14 Emmy Awards later, RuPaul Charles has gone from club kid to media mogul—and whether in or out of drag, is utterly comfortable in his own skin. Whether he’s comfortable being profiled is another issue, but that doesn’t stop Ronan Farrow from turning in a nuanced, knowing piece about a man who’s bigger than any box.
A few days later, RuPaul woke up and performed his morning ritual. First, he stretched. “I’m older,” he said. “I have to make sure everything is doing the thing.” Then he prayed, saying aloud the words “Dear God, thank you,” followed by things for which he is grateful. That week, the list included the roof over his head, his access to running water, and Georges, his husband, whom he met while dancing at Limelight, in New York, in the nineties. After that, he meditated, a practice that can last anywhere from forty-five seconds to fifteen minutes. He lets the ideas drift through: “Oh, there’s my father. Oh, there’s Judy Garland.” His demons are there, too, but he claims to have befriended them. He put on another black hoodie and another pair of black workout pants and walked ten minutes to the nearest Marks & Spencer to pick up an apple turnover.
Soon afterward, we sat in the living room of his rental cottage, a modest, two-story structure with neutral walls and a tiny kitchenette to which he had added, as far as I could tell, nothing but a row of identical boxes of berry-flavored Special K. “I brought this in,” he said, pointing to an LCD monitor that sat, with his laptop, on an otherwise empty white desk. “And I moved this chair. That’s about it.” Yet he was crazy about the place—he liked the flow of the floor plan, and took pictures of it, to try to replicate it in Wyoming.
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A good scammer sees opportunity everywhere, including their own downfall. In 2006, the police showed up at Gustav Daphne’s house in Beverly Hills. They had come once before, when a neighbor complained about his trash. Daphne happened to be swimming in his pool at the time, and because he is French, he came to the front door in a tiny little bathing suit. The police were appalled; they gave him a reprimand about storing his garbage more tidily and scurried away.
This time was different. The cops came straight into the house. There were a dozen of them, wearing bulletproof vests. They took him outside in handcuffs and put him in a car. Maybe he was paranoid, having built a multimillion-dollar empire on fraud and deceit, nurturing connections with international criminal rings, but at first he thought that he was being kidnapped. When he saw the jail, he was relieved.
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The feeling was short-lived. The jail was cleaner than those in Europe where he’d been held, but after a couple of hours he demanded a cigarette and was informed that smoking was prohibited. OK, he thought. There must be a way. There’s always a way. He would find the right people, negotiate the right conditions. He had to smoke! He loved to smoke. He loved it more than anything, except for women. He loved women! And smoking, and art, and shopping.
He found someone in the prison whom everyone called El Gordo, a Mexican guy who could hook people up with anything. Daphne asked for cigarettes and was given an address on the outside where he would need to have $300 delivered. This was not a problem. He didn’t crave money, but it was useful, so he accrued it. His mansion had once belonged to a silent film star; he sometimes commuted by helicopter. There wasn’t much Daphne couldn’t afford.
After Daphne’s cousin drove a Bentley to a shady neighborhood and made the cash drop on his behalf, Daphne went back to El Gordo to collect his cigarettes. El Gordo looked at him, then gave him a nicotine patch. “No smoking in prison,” El Gordo said.
By the time Daphne was extradited to Europe to face money laundering charges, which was the reason he’d been arrested in the first place, he had kicked his cigarette habit. He felt great. He was buoyant with health. He boarded a plane to Switzerland in handcuffs, was whisked to a prison near the Alps, and was put in a cell. Waiting for him there was a pouch of tobacco. He resisted for a few hours. Then he smoked the whole thing.
Eventually, Daphne was sent to a prison in France, where he could get anything he wanted: magazines, special meals, the Israeli cigarettes he preferred. His lawyer could also bring him things. So when he saw a segment on TV about climate change policy, he asked his lawyer to bring him more information about France’s plans to reduce emissions. Daphne had a preternatural ability to sniff out criminal prospects, and he’d caught a familiar whiff.
When Daphne read the materials his lawyer provided him, he learned about Europe’s carbon-emissions trading system, the first of its kind in the world. It had grown out of the Kyoto Protocol, the landmark international agreement to reduce global emissions. Sure enough, Daphne told me, he saw the blueprint for what would become his next illicit enterprise. As soon as he’d finished his time in prison, he began gaming the new emissions-trading system.
The scam would help Daphne accrue even more money, and it would make him famous. In the media he cut a dashing figure, partying with celebrities and oligarchs. He maintained his slim physique by avoiding carbohydrates like they were venom and dressed in blazers cut from blue velvet or embroidered with shimmering brocade flowers. He liked to wear a diamond-encrusted Chopard sun pendant on his partially bared chest and was rarely photographed without one of his hundreds of pairs of Tom Ford sunglasses, all aviator-style with gradient lenses. Always, it seemed, he had a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth.
Reporters dubbed Daphne the “prince of carbon,” but it wasn’t just his flamboyant charisma that elevated him to criminal royalty. So did the nature of his new fraud. Daphne was scamming the fight against climate change by exploiting a policy flaw that left billions for the taking.
No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.
No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.
Ishould say here that Gustav Daphne is a pseudonym. He remains a wanted man in France, so when I traveled to meet with him at his gated villa in Tel Aviv, he agreed to speak on the condition that I not use his name—any of his names. (He has a few aliases.) He kept saying what a bad idea it was to talk to me. He had turned over a new leaf, he insisted, and like a freshly avowed ascetic, he nurtured a few simple pleasures: taking his impeccably trained Belgian Malinois on sunset walks along the beach; going horseback riding with his daughters. He tried to steer clear of trouble, though it occasionally sought him out. A few weeks before we met, some masked guys on a motorcycle drove by firing guns at his home; when I visited, the front door was being replaced.
Still, his name is all over the French media. I warned him that, at least in some circles, a pseudonym would be a pretty weak shield for his identity. That was OK with him. He said that he wanted to put the past behind him and focus on his new ventures, like crypto investing. So, no name.
During my visit, Daphne took calls from his lawyers and asked favors of his wife and flirted with acquaintances over WhatsApp. He wore his Tom Ford sunglasses indoors and out. He showed me his art: a large Kandinsky painting in the foyer, a few Chagalls downstairs. The villa had some burly guys on staff and a cleaner from Sri Lanka who picked up after two fluffy indoor dogs that liked to avail themselves of the plush white carpets.
All this is part of Daphne’s downsized lifestyle. He used to have a bigger mansion, with a swimming pool and a tennis court, a gym and a movie theater. He once parked his yacht in the glittering harbors of the Côte d’Azur. But he has fashioned a new life for himself in Israel, which has yet to grant France’s request for his extradition.
Daphne wanted me to know that to him the carbon scam was a negligible chapter in a long and successful criminal career. It wasn’t his most lucrative scheme; it wasn’t even the first opportunity he’d pursued in the lumpish market of environmental interventions conceived by a civilization in ecological peril. Plus, he was just one of many people who ripped off the emissions-trading system.
Daphne and other scammers’ pillaging of Europe’s carbon market constitutes what the media have called “the fraud of the century”—billions of euros were stolen in a matter of months. The shadowy scheme attracted established crime rings and amateur hucksters alike, many of whom knew each other. But the scam lent itself to duplicity: No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing. Its web reached the boxing rings of Las Vegas, the offices of Germany’s biggest bank, the caves along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding, and the gilded restaurants of Paris, where it also left blood spattered on the streets. It pulled in a playboy demi-celebrity, an Afghan refugee, a flashy street hustler who couldn’t accumulate enough bling, an immaculate businessman who hobnobbed with the queen of England, the doyenne of Marseille’s underground, and a man some people called the Brain.
The Brain’s real name is Grégory Zaoui, and he claims that the entire scam was his idea. Even though the fraud sprouted across Europe, Zaoui insists that he was the only person smart enough to have planted the seed. Daphne, he says, gets far too much credit for his role in ripping off the carbon market.
Zaoui is stout and broad chinned, with thick eyebrows and a sweep of dark hair. When he was involved in the carbon scam, he took pains to remain understated. He favored dress shirts in pale blue or white. Even when he was photographed alongside some of the highest-ranking politicians in France, including a president and a prime minister, his demeanor was almost retreating. When he spent money, he did it quietly; he twice rented out an entire Hermès store in central Paris so his girlfriend could shop in privacy. Journalists described him in terms they would never use for Daphne: discreet, cerebral, analytical. Even though they grew up within miles of each other, Daphne and Zaoui couldn’t be more different.
When Zaoui was hauled in front of police, some 15 years ago now, he said that he’d been betrayed. He went into the business with the wrong person, he claimed, which meant that his scheme was doomed from the start. Someone he’d once considered among his closest friends double-crossed him so wickedly that he never really reaped the rewards he deserved for being a carbon fraudster.
Zaoui agreed to meet me in Paris last May, at a restaurant in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, the Lutetia, where a Coca-Cola costs 12 euros and an army of valets swarm the entrance. He arrived late wearing sweatpants and a raincoat, and he was in a frazzled state because he’d misplaced his card for the city’s charging stations, which he required to replenish the battery on his electric scooter. When he settled in, he wanted to set the record straight about his and Daphne’s respective roles in Europe’s carbon fraud. Until now, he told me, no one had truly understood the relationship between them. “He is the prince,” Zaoui told me. “But I am the king.”
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