March 23rd 2026

Goings On

The Talk of the Town

Reporting & Essays

Shouts & Murmurs

Fiction

The Critics

Poems

Cartoons

Puzzles & Games

The Mail

优质App推荐

英阅阅读器 - 让您轻松阅读英语书, 高效查词、句子翻译、背单词、AI学英语、第三方图书源等一应俱全! 点击下载

Duolingo - 快乐、高效学外语, 带你玩转听说读写! 点击下载

Notability - 高效、便捷的PDF笔记App, 随时记录你的想法! 点击下载

Goings On

“The Wild Party” Returns

Martin Parr’s Eye for Human Folly

Goings On

“The Wild Party” Returns

Also: FKA twigs, “Mother Russia,” Caravaggio, and more.

By Dan Stahl,Brian Seibert,Sheldon Pearce,Rhoda Feng,Hilton Als,Jane Bua,Rachel Syme March 13, 2026

A night of dancing, drinking, and crazed debauchery in N.Y.C.? No, not next Saturday at Knockdown Center—it’s “The Wild Party,” Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s musicalization of a 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March, revived this month in New York City Center’s Encores! series (March 18-29). Set during the Roaring Twenties, the show takes place at the Manhattan apartment of Queenie (Jasmine Amy Rogers), a vaudeville bombshell, and her man of the moment, the comedian Burrs (Jordan Donica). Guests include a former prizefighter, a pair of piano-playing twins, an “ambisextrous” playboy, a stage diva past her prime, and someone’s kid sister from Poughkeepsie. Oh, there’s also Queenie’s frenemy Kate (Adrienne Warren), who brings along a hunky plus-one with a roving eye (Jelani Alladin). (Fidelity is so nineteen-tens.)

“The Wild Party” premièred on Broadway in 2000 and ran for an underwhelming two months, despite seven Tony nominations and a cast that included Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin, and Eartha Kitt. It is not to be confused with Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party,” a musical adaptation of the same poem that also premièred in 2000 and also received an Encores! revival, a 2015 staging starring Sutton Foster. That March’s poem is the basis for not one but two musicals is perhaps unsurprising—it offers the seemingly endless allure of a Jazz Age milieu, rendered with a luridness that makes F. Scott Fitzgerald look like Mother Goose.

From the dissonance of the orchestra’s opening peal of brass, LaChiusa’s version signals its allegiance to his source’s snarling tone and, in fact, incorporates many of March’s lines directly into the songs, as in the number introducing its antiheroine: “She liked her lovers violent, and vicious: / Queenie was sexually ambitious.” These are unhappy hedonists, boozing and fornicating for lack of fulfillment. A century on, the party crowd’s arsenal of intoxicants has expanded, and sex has never been more accessible. But fulfillment remains as elusive as ever.—Dan Stahl

About Town

Off Broadway

Anna Ziegler’s “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)” reimagines Sophocles’ authority-defying heroine (Susannah Perkins) as a young woman seeking an abortion. The procedure has been outlawed by Antigone’s newly coronated uncle, Creon (Tony Shalhoub), who presides over a playfully anachronistic Thebes, in which the palace gate is a walk-through metal detector manned by a befuddled security officer (Dave Quay, a slapstick virtuoso). Ziegler’s humor and sympathy for her characters—including Creon, who desperately wants to do right by everyone—saves the conflict between individual and state from heavy-handedness. Arresting performances by Perkins, Shalhoub, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, as a one-woman chorus, are anchored by a set that, under Tyne Rafaeli’s slick direction, keeps surprising with its inventiveness.—Dan Stahl (Public Theatre; through April 5.)

Dance

The first “Motion/Matter: All-Styles Dance Battle,” at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, in 2024, was the culmination of a festival of street-dance productions. In the past two years, the festival has fallen away, leaving the essential core of battle-culture dance intact: the competition in which soloists define themselves ever more clearly as they rise to the challenge set by other contenders. This year’s panel of judges (including the Litefeet trailblazer Chrybaby Cozie) isn’t quite as starry as the inaugural jury, but the battle, hosted by the comically manic Cebo and the elegant Nubian Néné, should still serve as a concentrated sample of the state of the art.—Brian Seibert (PAC NYC; March 21.)

Electronic

The experimental singer-producer FKA twigs, for most of her career, has made cerebral electronic music intent on synchronizing the mind and body. A transformative discography—her intimacy-focussed début,“LP1” (2014); her operatic breakup record, “Magdalene” (2019); and her border-hopping pandemic mixtape, “Caprisongs” (2022)—made her a revolutionary figure in both pop and avant-garde spheres. But last year, across two LPs, twigs broke even her own paradigm. “Eusexua,” inspired by the techno scene in Prague, sought music for a euphoric out-of-body experience. Its continuation, “Eusexua Afterglow,” released ten months later, was the score for a blissful post-rave comedown. Together, the albums create a vision of the club as a sanctuary where one can completely detach from the self.—Sheldon Pearce (Madison Square Garden; March 21.)

Off Broadway

A shakedown opens Lauren Yee’s “Mother Russia,” directed by Teddy Bergman. Evgeny (Adam Chanler-Berat), deputized by his fixer father, arrives at a St. Petersburg shop to extract money from its proprietor, Dmitri Petrovich (Steven Boyer). A gun is raised, then lowered; boyhood recognition floods in. Soon, the childhood acquaintances are embarking on a surveillance caper, eavesdropping on a dissident pop star (Rebecca Naomi Jones). Yee stretches the comedy in each scene like taffy, but she keeps a scalpel up her sleeve: Mother Russia (David Turner), who embodies the weary soul of her country, hilariously relates the saga of a nation forever ricocheting between tsars and strongmen, purges and pageants.—Rhoda Feng (Pershing Square Signature Center; through March 22.)

Art

Like many of the outstanding shows that the Morgan puts on, this exhibition, centered on the early Caravaggio masterpiece “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” (c. 1595), is given a fantastic context, the better for the viewer to understand the artist, his methods, and why the work continues to resonate. Caravaggio, born and trained in Lombardy, had a creative boldness based on confronting reality. Also included here are brilliant examples of how other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters provided samples from the natural world—among them Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in his still scary “Four Seasons in One Head” (c. 1590). It’s a treasure trove of a show, with a lot of emphasis on pleasure.—Hilton Als (Morgan Library & Museum; through April 19.)

Classical

The philosopher Adam Smith, in his 1776 text, “The Wealth of Nations,” wrote that musicians have “some of the most frivolous professions.” He would perhaps shudder to learn that, two hundred and fifty years later, his classical-economics opus would be rendered into frivolity by the Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang. Lang’s oratorio of the same name draws lines from Smith’s treatise, and also from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Edith Wharton—all synthesized to ask, What does it mean to value something? The piece, performed by the Singaporean-British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and the New York Philharmonic Chorus, has its world première under the baton of the orchestra’s soon-to-be director Gustavo Dudamel. Frivolous? I think not.—Jane Bua (David Geffen Hall; March 19-22.)

On and Off the Avenue

Rachel Syme explores a Japanese stationer-café.

In 2019, a teeny sliver of a store, specializing in Japanese stationery, opened on Tenth Street in the East Village. The button-size shop, called niconeco zakkaya (fashioned, purposefully, in all lower case), was founded by a paper-goods obsessive named Siming Vautin, who had spent about a decade living in Japan; it had grown out of a successful Etsy store that trafficked in all things kawaii (the Japanese term for cute, or, more specifically, heart-squeezingly adorable). Niconeco zakkaya sells a neatly curated selection of precious little items, including washi tape printed with cats and ladybugs, pastel pencil pouches, diminutive watercolor palettes, rubber stamps of teapots and paper cranes, green-tea-infused writing paper, handmade scented candles, and many more irresistible, if self-consciously twee, impulse purchases. But the shop, which I started visiting regularly a few years ago as a surefire Sunday comfort activity, can quickly become so crowded with human traffic jams that one can barely move through it. Fortunately, last summer, Vautin opened a brand-new outpost in Williamsburg, Loaf on Paper by niconeco zakkaya (64 Grand St.), which is four times the size of the original location. The front half of Loaf on Paper serves as an all-day café, where customers can sip black-sesame lattes, post up reading a novel, and purchase a variety of upscale foods (artisanal berry jams, Brightland olive oil, dark-chocolate-covered medjool dates). The back half of the store, however, is where the fun really begins. Vautin has created a true stationery smorgasbord, stuffed with creamy notebooks, wax seals, fountain pens and inks, wee porcelain bowls, mini-colored-pencil sets, gift wrap, highlighter pens, Hobonichi planners, a bounty of illustrated stickers, and washi-tape rolls by the dozen. I find it impossible to leave empty-handed.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

Is it really here?

The party to top them all

Esther Perel’s turn on the couch

Photo Booth

Martin Parr’s Eye for Human Folly

The British photographer spent his career examining appetites and the contradictions they engender.

By Lauren Collins March 03, 2026

Martin Parr, who died in December, at the age of seventy-three, had a specific paint color in mind for the first room of “Global Warning,” a retrospective of his photographs that’s currently on display at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. The show’s curator, Quentin Bajac, had suggested that they go with something classic—i.e., white—but Parr was very clear that he wanted a more exuberant hue. The one he chose might commonly be called bubblegum, but anyone who’s visited the show may be inclined to think of it forever after as Parr Pink: the pink of a hibiscus on a garishly printed bikini bottom, of bootleg perfume bottles, of diaper packages and cookie icing; the pink of slack mouths and dangling uvulas and nostrils shown so close up that you can see every last busted blood vessel, suggesting a lifetime of excess in a world of overconsumption.

Parr spent his career examining human appetites and the contradictions they engender, but his approach wasn’t always so frontal. One of the strengths of the Jeu de Paume show is that it comprises some hundred and eighty photographs made in the course of fifty years, not just instantly recognizable works such as Parr’s hyper-saturated portraits of oiled-up working-class vacationers at resorts in New Brighton or Benidorm.

In the early nineteen-eighties, for instance, Parr drove around the west coast of Ireland in a Morris Minor, documenting other, abandoned Morris Minors that dotted the landscape. Shot in black-and-white, the resulting photos have an elegiac quality and suggest the eventual mortality of any innovation or craze—ashes to ashes, rack-and-pinion steering to rack-and-pinion steering. They also make the case that Parr had a stronger conceptual bent than he is commonly given credit for: according to the rules he set for himself, anytime he saw a Morris he had to stop and shoot.

Parr went electric in 1983, inspired by John Hinde’s postcard photography and the pungent colors coming out of America in the work of Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. An image from Salford, England—I think it’s his masterpiece—shows a pair of women backed up against the pebble-dash wall of a supermarket, gripping the handles of their stuffed shopping carts. They look like racecar drivers getting ready to do battle on the homestretch. Behold the competition, pride, and preening aggression that Parr detects in our eternal need to prove ourselves through the things we buy!

Food is one of his favorite thunderdomes, and it’s interesting to compare his images of cakes and meats and popsicles to those of someone like the American painter Wayne Thiebaud. The artists share an attraction to the gleaming counters and alluring rows of postwar consumer culture, but Parr holds his gaze longer, seeking the nausea after the binge. At the Jeu de Paume, forty-two photographs from Parr’s “Common Sense” series are hung together in a grid. Wedged in among phallic pastries and slabs of iridescent ham is a portrait of a priest, cropped so tightly that practically all you see is a collar and a chin. Stray threads protrude from his cassock; the fabric looks so cheap you can practically hear it squeaking. It’s unclear whether we’re looking at a holy man or some dude who ordered a Halloween costume on Amazon.

Parr had to fight to get into Magnum, the prestigious photographic coöperative. Henri Cartier-Bresson, a co-founder of the agency, considered Parr’s work cruel and garish, reportedly telling him, “We’re from two different solar systems.” Parr thrust back: “I acknowledge there is a large gap between your celebration of life and my implied criticism of it. . . . What I would query with you is, Why shoot the messenger?” Eventually, the men reconciled and Parr became a Magnum man, sneaking in with just enough votes.

Despite his reputation for levity, he was a social photographer in his own way, a photographe de rue who stretched the purview of street photography to the realms of mass tourism and trash culture, where the high-minded humanists of yore deigned not go. A photograph of a towering woman gassing up a zippy little car and wearing a plaid skirt and a T-shirt that reads, incongruously, “I’d Rather Be Truckin’ ” brings to mind a Quentin Blake illustration: Miss Trunchbull for the age of fossil fuels.

Parr’s humor is also detectably British, with a poking quality that only rarely verges into outright peevishness. Some of his japes have dulled with age—a series of tourists wielding selfie sticks doesn’t pack the punch it might have when the technology, and the narcissism that it implied, seemed like a novel development. But works like a postcard-like shot of a postcard rack parked in the middle of a ski path in the Swiss Alps are undiminished in their power to make you laugh while wondering, fondly, what the hell is wrong with people. And his images of royal-kitsch grotesqueries—an abandoned Prince William mask amid the ketchup-and-vodka detritus of a street party celebrating his wedding—seem particularly apt as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to sully the House of Windsor. The Jeu de Paume show has been mobbed, to the point that the museum has added extended hours to accommodate the demand. You have to wonder what Parr would have made of his fans, queuing up in ponchos in the February drizzle. Would he have shot them as pilgrims or as chumps?

What sets Parr’s jokes apart is that they’re not just visual. The conceptual intelligence of his early work—as in, say, a picture showing a grouping of stuffed animals arranged in front of the lace-curtained front window of a modest house in Ireland, rendering it a shadowbox theatre, carried through his œuvre. In one picture from 1995, a tourist in Paris maneuvers for the perfect shot of Notre-Dame’s spire. Parr has photographed him from behind, so that we see the world through his eyes without knowing his identity. All we can make out is his backward-facing baseball cap, reading, “New York Yankees.” It’s a wicked take on the persistence of human folly. Wherever you go, there’s Martin Parr.

The Talk of the Town

Trump’s Mass-Detention Campaign

Doctor Mike’s Internet Medicine

Wendy Red Star Gets Her Bag

Junior LaBeija, Master of Ceremonies

How to Be Your Own Super

Comment

Trump’s Mass-Detention Campaign

Even with Kristi Noem gone, the Administration’s immigration agenda shows no signs of flagging—in fact, it is leading toward a new humanitarian and legal crisis.

By Jonathan Blitzer March 15, 2026

For those in Donald Trump’s orbit, great power often comes with great dispensability. Take Kristi Noem, who, as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, was in charge of the President’s top domestic priority of carrying out mass deportations, until she wasn’t. She became the first Cabinet secretary to be fired in Trump’s second term earlier this month, when he announced that he would replace her with Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma senator and a former mixed-martial-arts fighter. Noem, who’d been willing to do virtually anything in the role to boost her standing, was a product of the White House agenda, never a shaper of it. Stephen Miller is the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, and there’s little reason to think that Noem’s ouster will change Miller’s approach. It may even serve to embolden it, by giving him fresh cover. The department has temporarily paused large-scale arrest operations in the wake of a national outcry over abuses in Minnesota, and it is in the midst of a partial shutdown owing to opposition from congressional Democrats. The Administration’s bigger ambitions show no signs of flagging, however. In fact, they are leading toward a new humanitarian and legal crisis.

D.H.S. is now detaining some seventy thousand people in jails across the country, more than at any other point since the department was founded, in 2002. Twenty-three immigrants have already died in custody in the current fiscal year, putting it on pace to surpass the previous one, which had the highest number of deaths in immigration detention in decades. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the Administration has opened new facilities, repurposed others closed by previous Administrations, and converted temporary holding cells at federal buildings in cities such as Los Angeles and New York into spaces for longer-term detention.

Overcrowding, abuse, and neglect have made conditions far worse, and basic agency oversight has been gutted. The government has also detained at least four thousand children, sending many of them to a notoriously grim facility in South Texas called Dilley. A legal settlement in place since the late nineteen-nineties is supposed to bar the government from keeping minors in immigration custody for more than twenty days, but ICE has routinely flouted that rule. “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” a fourteen-year-old girl from Honduras, who has lived in New York for seven years, told ProPublica; by then, she’d been in custody for forty-five days while waiting to be deported.

The largest detention site in the country, holding three thousand people, is a tent camp called East Montana, on a military base in El Paso. It was put up in less than two months, but started housing people two weeks after construction began. “Dust comes in through holes in the vents,” a detainee said in a sworn declaration to the A.C.L.U. A confidential ICE report, obtained by the Washington Post, showed more than sixty code violations in fifty days, including inadequate medical care and an absence of phones, which made it impossible for detainees, eighty per cent of whom have no criminal records, to speak with lawyers or family members. Three people died at the facility in a six-week period this winter, including a fifty-five-year-old Cuban man named Geraldo Lunas Campos, who the government claimed had been “in distress.” (After an El Paso County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, ICE tried to expedite the deportation of witnesses who had observed an altercation between Lunas Campos and a group of guards.) There have been outbreaks of tuberculosis and measles at the site, and ICE officers have used the dangerously subpar conditions to pressure detainees to sign papers authorizing their deportation.

Last summer, the Republican-controlled Congress gave D.H.S. forty-five billion dollars to build more jails. The appropriation, which came as part of the President’s domestic-spending bill, has kept ICE flush with cash during the shutdown. The Administration has used the money, in part, to begin to create a network of bigger facilities, investing thirty-eight billion dollars to buy up large warehouses across the country and retrofit them. One of them, near Camp East Montana, in a small city called Socorro, is expected to hold eighty-five hundred people. So is another, in Social Circle, Georgia, which, according to the Times, would be “larger than any single jail or prison building in America.”

A major reason that so many immigrants are being locked up is a government policy to deny them bond. Last July, the acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, issued a memo in which he claimed, in a radical and dubious reinterpretation of a twenty-nine-year-old statute, that the agency can automatically detain people who are in the country unlawfully and keep them in detention while they fight their cases. Ordinarily, unless a detained person had very recently entered the U.S., he could post bond if an immigration judge found that he didn’t pose a threat to public safety or represent a flight risk. This was the policy during the previous five Administrations, including during Trump’s first term.

But early last year Trump shrank the size of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the top appellate body overseeing the immigration courts, which are run out of the Department of Justice. Two months after the Lyons memo, the board issued a ruling instructing immigration judges to deny bond to anyone in detention with a legal case pending who had at some point entered the U.S. without inspection. The result has been a flood of habeas-corpus petitions filed in federal courts—more than fifteen thousand in the past two months alone. Most of the people submitting these requests have no criminal record, and many have lived in the U.S. for decades.

The question of whether the Administration’s bond policy is lawful will almost certainly reach the Supreme Court, but in the meantime hundreds of federal judges have taken issue with it. Frequently, they have given explicit orders for the government to release people from custody. The Administration has responded by attacking those judges—some of whom were appointed by Republicans—as “activist” and “rogue” jurists. At this point, the federal government is regularly ignoring or slow-walking judges’ orders.

In January, D.H.S. launched an arrest campaign in West Virginia, called Operation Country Roads, which was largely eclipsed by the situation in Minnesota. Drivers were targeted on state roadways, then held for extended periods without criminal charges. A federal judge wrote late last month that armed agents in unmarked cars who did not have warrants were “seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them.” He added that the practice was “deliberate” in its “elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force.” Such warnings should be impossible to ignore. ♦

Dept. of Debunking

Doctor Mike’s Internet Medicine

Mikhail Varshavski, People’s “sexiest doctor,” has a medical degree—and millions of fans on YouTube, where he debunks R.F.K., Jr., interviews Kamala Harris, and analyzes “The Pitt.”

By Andrew Trunsky March 16, 2026

Awoman was wheeled into the E.R. with a hectic red rash on her leg, painful to the touch. Dr. Mikhail Varshavski looked it over. “If it continues to spread past the demarcation that we usually draw using a skin marker—we say Sharpie, but it’s a skin marker—we say that this is spreading,” he commented. Diagnosis: possible sepsis.

Varshavski was not talking to the patient or to nursing staff. He was not even in a hospital. He was speaking into a camera in a two-bedroom apartment on the fifty-sixth floor of a building in Hell’s Kitchen, in a makeshift studio where he records videos and his popular podcast, “The Checkup with Doctor Mike.” He had on form-fitting royal-blue scrubs and no shoes. The “patient” he was observing wasn’t a patient at all but an actor on Season 2 of “The Pitt.”

As the episode continued and other patients appeared—a mother with metastatic cancer, a badly beaten prisoner, a Gen Z-er burned by dry ice from a botched branding—Varshavski periodically hit Pause and explained the medical lingo and the treatments, drawn from his own experience as a family-medicine physician. At one point, he tsk-tsked at the way the onscreen doctors were revealing their own “interpersonal conflict” in front of a patient. And when a “Pitt” doctor touted an A.I. app that charts patients’ medical info, Varshavski grimaced. “I’m always very sus about these,” he said. “But I’m opening up to them.”

Color commentary on TV hospital shows is only a small slice of what Varshavski, known to his nearly fifteen million YouTube subscribers as Dr. Mike, puts out into the world. He makes videos of himself clarifying basic medical misconceptions and debunking cranks—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a common target, as are influencers hawking dodgy supplements. He also interviews prominent doctors, celebrities (Noah Wyle), and powerful politicians (Chuck Schumer and Kamala Harris).

When planning his content, he bows to the algorithm. “We need to do silly videos, because then we’re in viewers’ watch history,” he said. If they see a video he makes with his dogs, chances are they’ll see a video he makes about how vaccines eradicated smallpox.

Varshavski has been posting videos for nearly a decade, but these days, with R.F.K., Jr., running the Department of Health and Human Services, measles spreading, and the “wellness” industry endorsing pseudoscience, the doctor is especially eager to engage viewers who are misinformed—as well as the people who are doing the misinforming. He appears on Fox News; he has debated groups of vaccine skeptics and MAHA true believers. Communication, he likes to say, is as critical online as it is in an examination room. “People say, ‘Dr. Mike, you’re a great doctor, but my doctor sucks,’ ” he said. “That could be true!”

Varshavski was born in the U.S.S.R. three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and moved to New York City when he was six. He picked up boxing during medical school and still trains. Two days a week, he sees patients at a health center in Chatham, New Jersey; he donates his salary back to the center.

In 2015, People magazine named Varshavski “the sexiest doctor alive.” He’s aware of the legacy of famous media doctors who preceded him and is wary of relaxing his standards in order to stay in the spotlight. “That’s why a show like ‘The Dr. Oz Show,’ which initially started off with providing really good evidence about exercise and the benefits of eating a well-rounded diet, devolved into saying how your zodiac sign impacts your health,” he said.

MAHA, Varshavski believes, has become its own worst enemy. “It is a fractured movement,” he said. “It started off with the idea that we want Americans to be healthy, and it’s been co-opted to be an agenda to make a certain proportion of the population very wealthy at the expense of science, at the expense of children getting sick.”

In his immaculate kitchen, looking out at views spreading from Central Park to Brooklyn, he sat down to a plate of takeout chicken and vegetables. (There was no ultra-processed food in sight, although a bar cart held bottles of Clase Azul and Johnnie Walker Blue.) When asked what he considers to be his unhealthiest habit, he thought for a moment. “I used to say poor sleep,” he said. (He now tries to get at least seven hours a night.) “But my cholesterol is really bad.” A few bites later, he added, “Another unhealthy thing I do is box.” ♦

World on a String

Wendy Red Star Gets Her Bag

The artist, whose new show centers on the history of trade beads, shops for a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag on Canal Street and ruminates on authenticity.

By Emma Allen March 16, 2026

Most everything has a price—eggs, gas, art, empire—but how arbitrary is it, and who pays? The other day, at Sargent’s Daughters gallery, in Tribeca, the forty-four-year-old Apsáalooke multimedia artist Wendy Red Star held out one of her large-scale (melon-size) blown-glass replicas of trade beads—the regular-sized versions of which traversed the globe for centuries, used for bartering in Africa and the Americas. “Feel that, it’s so awesome,” she said, caressing the “Manhattan Bead” (white, with red and blue stripes, $5,000).

Red Star, who grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation in southern Montana and is now based in Oregon, worked with gaffers to create the glasswork for her show, titled “One Blue Bead,” which also features grids of watercolors of, yes, beads. The gallery, on Broadway, is situated along a historic Native trade thoroughfare, near where the Dutch “purchased” Manhattan from Lenape Indians for an apocryphal “handful of beads,” in 1626.

“I started off with the Dutch Moon Bead,” Red Star said. “I looked into it and the Dutch didn’t make these, they only became synonymous with the Dutch because the Dutch would take them to Africa.” She noted that her art usually involves “some kind of nerd research project” into archives and census records. In the diaries of Lewis and Clark, she’d read that the duo stocked up on a type of faceted red trade bead, “because they thought it would just fly off the shelves, but it wasn’t popular at all.” Bright-blue beads, in fact, were the hot commodity; their shade is now referred to as Bodmer blue, after the illustrator Karl Bodmer’s nineteenth-century portraits of Native people.

Red Star’s big beads lay on the floor of the gallery, on top of vintage Hudson’s Bay point blankets, so named because they feature a number of “points,” or short black lines, along one side. “When they were displayed for sale, that would tell you how many beaver pelts you’d need to buy the blanket,” she explained. “What you see in photos of different Native delegations is that people will have point blankets wrapped around them with the points facing out, like a baseball cap with the sticker still on it.”

Plotting the installation, she’d thought about the knockoff designer handbags sold on Canal Street, around the corner, “and how we, as humans, want to be a part of that—O.K., so we can’t get the actual one, we get the fake one, and walk around hoping that it will appear as if it’s real,” she said.

“Do they do, like, Venmo?” Red Star asked her gallerist Allegra LaViola, on the way out, in a faux-fur coat, to shop for a bag for her luxury-loving sister.

LaViola laughed: “I think they do cold, hard cash.”

On Canal, Red Star encountered throngs of jostling venders standing over bags arranged on the sidewalk. She homed in on a Takashi Murakami Louis Vuitton number (the real thing goes for more than two thousand dollars). Asking price: $130; final bid: $100.

Police sirens blared, and the venders scooped up their wares and disappeared. Earlier this year, after ICE raided Canal Street, some Tribeca gallerists came under fire for holding a meeting about how to disperse venders outside their spaces; last week, a bill backed by Mayor Mamdani went into effect which basically decriminalized vending without a license.

Walking back, Red Star discussed the cost of actual antique trade beads. “A string can sometimes be five hundred or a thousand, but you can find individual ones for maybe eight dollars,” she said. “I go to Etsy and eBay, or, if I’m near a reservation, a lot of times pawnshops will have them.”

LaViola greeted her at the door. “Did you get a bag?”

“Yes! It was very exciting,” Red Star said. “And then to see them all pack up—it was really impressive. That’s why the bags are on sheets, but they also had little wagons.”

“How much?” LaViola asked.

“Well, they wanted one-thirty,” Red Star said, presenting the bag.

LaViola scoffed. “I would’ve gotten them down to, like, twenty-five bucks. Well, maybe sixty. This is terrible. Look at this workmanship! Also, it’s upside down.” Indeed, the rainbow “LV” logos were printed the wrong way up.

“Your problem is, you had the artist go out and negotiate,” Red Star said.

“Your sister will burn this on a pyre,” LaViola replied. She reminisced about being in L.A. with Red Star, at a Murakami show at the Broad. “Wendy’s sister was there and she wanted Murakami to sign a bag she’d brought with her, and he was, like, ‘I’m not giving autographs.’ ”

They tracked him down outside later and he signed the purse. “He actually drew some cherries on it,” Red Star recalled. Might that make the bag too valuable to use as a bag?

“It’s a collector’s item now,” LaViola said. ♦

The Boards

Junior LaBeija, Master of Ceremonies

As the ballroom legend makes their Broadway début in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” they reflect on accessorizing with raw chicken and dressing like Al Capone.

By Michael Schulman March 16, 2026

“Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.” So begins T. S. Eliot’s poem “Gus: The Theatre Cat,” from his 1939 volume “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which originated as letters to his friends’ children and which became, four decades later, the basis of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Cats.” Gus, who appears at the top of Act II, is said to be shabby of coat, with a palsy that makes his paw shake, and he reminisces about the great roles he played in his prime. In the garish 2019 movie version, Gus was played, with incongruous poise, by Sir Ian McKellen. Next month, a reimagining, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” opens on Broadway, after a rapturous run downtown. It recasts the musical as a queer ballroom competition, the kind that flourished underground in Harlem in the eighties, while “Cats” prowled on Broadway. Fittingly, Gus is played by a veteran of the ballroom scene, Junior LaBeija, of the Royal House of LaBeija.

At nine o’clock one recent evening, LaBeija, who is sixty-eight and gender-nonconforming, sat in a booth at 3 Dollar Bill, a night club in East Williamsburg, where the group Open to All hosts biweekly ballroom nights. This one was to be a Jellicle Ball, featuring members of the cast. LaBeija’s coat was far from shabby; it was a Blackglama mink (slogan: “What becomes a Legend most?”), which they removed, with unhurried majesty, along with three fur stoles. They wore cherry-red boots and had a salt-and-pepper beard and long, pearly nails that they flashed like claws.

“I have thoughts about being forever young,” LaBeija said, when asked what they had in common with Gus. They spoke with declamatory grandeur, as if issuing a decree. “Old Deuteronomy”—the “Cats” patriarch—“has the power to restore me back to my youth, and I get to reconstruct, revise, revisit all the things that I experienced. I don’t want to be considered aged. I don’t want to experience loneliness, isolation. So, I choose to stay mentally young and, through visualization, I create a mystique through fashion that allows me to revisit every era that I was prominent in during my youth. That’s what the audience gets to see.”

LaBeija was born James L. Goode, Jr., in Harlem. Their mother raised them as a Jehovah’s Witness. At fifteen, after a violent dispute with a sibling, LaBeija recalled, they gained legal emancipation and moved into single-room-occupancy housing alongside substance abusers and sex workers. They were, as they put it, an “F.I.T.: fag-in-training.” By 1974, they’d been adopted by the House of LaBeija, the oldest of the ballroom houses, founded by the trans pageant queen Crystal LaBeija and her friend Lottie LaBeija, as an alternative to the white-dominated drag circuit. “My mother’s name was Gigi LaBeija. My father’s name was Butch-Stephanie LaBeija. And I, therefore, became Junior LaBeija,” they said. At their first ball, they walked in the category Nostalgia, in thrift-store regalia. “I came as the Black Al Capone: the hat, the overcoat, the pin-striped suit.” They won.

In 1982, the year that “Cats” opened on Broadway, LaBeija began doing drag at Andre’s, a gay bar on Eighth Avenue. “I already had a reputation as a whimsical, clever butch queen,” they recalled. “My extended family taught me all of the tricks of the trade: hair-removal cream, eyebrows, lashes. A water balloon or a chicken breast wrapped in a sandwich bag for flesh. Teased hair, gorgeous earrings. Jewelry like I’m Elizabeth Taylor.” Their best outfit was a knockoff Jacqueline de Ribes ruffled black-satin evening gown, with black gloves and a chestnut wig. “It wasn’t about being a sex kitten, because I didn’t have the tits,” they went on. “But I had the ingenuity of knowing how to hit the light.”

In “Cats,” Gus sings of his greatest part, Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell. LaBeija’s signature role was master of ceremonies; by 1975, they were calling out the ballroom categories, with the authority they’d learned ministering door to door. “When people heard me, they saw that I had the ability to evoke in another individual, ‘Yeah, I’m sexy. Yeah, I’m beautiful. Look at me,’ ” they said.

The filmmaker Jennie Livingston captured the underground ballroom scene in the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning”; in one scene, LaBeija hollers, “O-p-u-l-e-n-c-e!” The movie, which came out just as Madonna’s “Vogue” was ushering ballroom into the mainstream, later inspired the Ryan Murphy series “Pose,” with Billy Porter as an m.c. clearly based on LaBeija.

At 3 Dollar Bill, revellers arrived in fabulous coats and hairdos. LaBeija received air kisses from the younger members of the house, including Pepsi LaBeija, Marcus LaBeija, and the N.Y.C. chapter mother, Samil LaBeija. The crowd gathered under a disco ball, and an m.c. announced the first category: Face. LaBeija surveyed the scene at a royal remove. “On Valentine’s Day, I didn’t have a date,” they said. “I was in rehearsal. But I remember Valentine’s Day when I had men in the bed, with a rose between their legs, sleeping.” ♦

D.I.Y. Dept.

How to Be Your Own Super

Doorknob troubles? No sweat—an Upper West Side handyman is helping the helpless, with a beginner’s class on how to fix your (many) apartment problems.

By Diego Lasarte March 16, 2026

Many New Yorkers have a relationship with their building superintendent that could be described as a war of attrition. Chronic leaks, misaligned schedules—resentments can build quickly. Recently, Vladimir Srdoč (pronounced “sir-doch”), a live-in handyman on the Upper West Side, decided to do something about this: he would lead a workshop to teach renters how to fix stuff themselves.

Srdoč, a forty-three-year-old immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, is a quintessential odd-jobber. Fast-talking, with a powerful build and a sloped brow, he’s seen a lot. “I’ve probably done work in eighteen thousand apartments,” he said. “And, once the job was done, there was always a list of more problems: the doorknobs are loose, cabinet doors need to be fixed.”

His girlfriend posted a message in a neighborhood Facebook group advertising “a beginner handy man workshop.” On the appointed evening, six students showed up in the basement of Srdoč’s building, meeting in a space adjoining a bike storage/laundry room.

“Can I get anyone a beer?” Srdoč asked, in greeting, as he gestured to a spread of melon cubes and microwaved popcorn. (One took him up on the offer.) In exchange for two hundred and twenty-five dollars, each student was temporarily issued a stocked plastic toolbox, two power drills, assorted screws, and a bright-red carpenter pencil, which a few instinctively stuck behind their ears.

Srdoč began with a lesson on the art of hanging things up. First point: know your wall. Wood is porous; plaster often crumbles; drywall is soft enough to be punctured with a thumbtack but is a no-go for nails. He brought out an array of hangable homeware. “I just picked some random stuff,” he said, holding up a stabilizing shower bar, designed for elderly bathers. “These things end up being really important later on,” he told the group of mostly thirtysomethings. Then he brandished a metal toilet-paper holder: “This one is a pain in the ass to install.” He had given each student a board of Sheetrock to practice on, and showed them all how to drill.

“I’ve hung one to two thousand televisions in the city,” he said. “And the only one that has ever fallen down was our own.”

One student, a baker, was paying close attention. “I tried to put up a shelf in my kitchen, and I ended up putting the biggest hole in my wall,” she said. “The shelf has been sitting on the floor for two weeks, because I’m too scared to put it back up.” She was hoping that Srdoč’s class could make her more self-reliant. “My building’s maintenance staff is too flirty,” she said. “And they expect tips. I’d rather just do it myself.”

Doorknobs were next. Srdoč had made a series of miniature doors, each with a hole in it, to teach the knob-installation process. As the students wielded their screwdrivers, he said, “Every doorknob works on the same system. Some are just more of a pain.”

A married couple named Matt and Jessica Fondacaro were flummoxed; their knob was missing a piece of hardware. Srdoč improvised a solution: he unscrewed the knob on the only entrance to the room. “We’ll still be able to get out,” he reassured everyone.

The Fondacaros, who were expecting their first child, had signed up for the workshop after struggling to assemble a changing table. “I mean, I work in real estate,” Matt said sheepishly, gripping his drill.

Jessica corrected him: “Well, not real estate. He works in private equity, specializing in real estate.”

Matt added, “For our projects, we hire people to do this stuff.”

As his pupils worked, Srdoč told his story. “I grew up on a farm in Yugoslavia. We were driving tractors by the time we were six,” he said. When he moved to New York to work in maintenance, he felt an awkward distance from his clients. “There’s never a calm feeling about a blue-collar person coming in,” he went on. “You’re invading someone’s apartment for an hour, and I’ve seen horrible experiences of how guys walk in. They come in grumpy. I always came in smiling.”

“My landlord is insane,” the baker said.

It was time for some electrical work. Red, black, and white wires poked menacingly out of several outlet-mounting boxes. “The chance of electricity causing a fire is slim to none,” Srdoč reassured the class, handing around dimmer switches. “The worst-case scenario is you trip a breaker.”

He began stripping wire. His main goal, he stressed, was encouraging people to at least try tackling a problem before calling a pro. “It costs, like, four hundred bucks for an electrician to install a dimmer, and a dimmer costs, like, thirty bucks,” he said.

Matt Fondacaro successfully wired his switch. Jessica grinned. Then she asked Srdoč, “We have an annoying outlet that only works when a light switch is on. Would that be an easy thing to change?”

“Uh, no,” Srdoč said. “For that, you should get an electrician.” ♦

Reporting & Essays

What’s Behind Trump’s New World Disorder?

How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour

Lisa Kudrow Is Back—Again

How Zac Posen Went from Making Ball Gowns to Remaking the Gap

Annals of War

What’s Behind Trump’s New World Disorder?

A foreign policy freed of liberal pretenses and imperial ambitions could lead to restraint—or, as the Iran attack shows, simply license hit-and-run belligerence.

By Daniel Immerwahr March 16, 2026

If you’ve ever wondered what three billion dollars buys in bombs and missiles, wonder no more. In the first hundred hours of Operation Epic Fury, the United States flung munitions costing about that much at Iran, striking nearly two thousand targets. This won the U.S. and Israel nearly “complete control” of Iran’s airspace, allowing them to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, crowed. “We are punching them while they’re down.”

Why is this happening? That is a reasonable question (and, per Google Trends, a popular one in the United States). But the United States has been freaking out about Iran since 1979. That was the year revolutionaries overthrew the U.S.-backed monarch, established an Islamic republic, and took dozens of people hostage inside the U.S. Embassy. The two countries have since been locked in a standoff that has lasted longer than the Cold War. Perhaps the real question is: Why is this only happening now?

American Presidents have had Iran in their sights for decades. When Bill Clinton warned of “rogue states” in the nineteen-nineties, Iran was the first example he gave. When George W. Bush spoke of a three-country “axis of evil” in 2002, Iran was in it. In 2019, Donald Trump designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time another country’s military had been thus classified. Nor is it clear that Kamala Harris would have reversed that designation had she won the 2024 election. When asked to name the United States’ greatest adversary, she replied that the answer was “obvious.” Iran, she explained, has “American blood” on its hands.

Whatever has held back the dogs of war, it hasn’t been a lack of American ability. The current conflict shows how wildly mismatched the two powers are: the U.S. picking off targets at will, Iran unable to land missiles anywhere near North America. “This was never meant to be a fair fight,” Hegseth observed. That isn’t new, though. U.S. planes could have rained hell down on Iran anytime in the past decades.

That possibility has lurked deep in the national subconscious. During the hostage crisis, it spilled out in song. “We’re gonna push the big button,” the Baritone Dwarfs sang. Dick Allen’s “Go to Hell Ayatollah” addressed Iran’s new Supreme Leader directly: “When we get through with your nation, son, ain’t gonna be nothing left but the sand.” The most enduring song, “Bomb Iran,” is set to the tune of the doo-wop classic “Barbara-Ann.” Several versions exist, one of which advocates turning Iran “into a parking lot.” In 2007, a voter asked the Presidential candidate John McCain when the United States would give up diplomacy and finally send an “airmail message to Tehran.” McCain chuckled and started singing “Bomb Iran.”

But this was a childish joke, the stuff of novelty songs. The United States had not, until Trump, bombed Iran. Nor had Iran directly attacked the United States. A close brush came in 1988, when, during some sea skirmishes between the two countries, a U.S. missile cruiser shot down an Iran Air flight carrying two hundred and ninety passengers and crew members. That was an accident, though, and President Ronald Reagan sent Iran’s leaders a note expressing “deep regret.” In nearly half a century of bombastic threats, the United States and Iran had never actually fought a war.

The reasons for that are becoming clearer. Since the end of the Second World War, in 1945, the United States sought to oversee world affairs. This involved interpreting U.S. interests broadly, so that nearly anything, anywhere, could be seen as relevant to national security. As the 9/11 Commission Report put it, “The American homeland is the planet.”

That global mission, in turn, has required justification, of the sort that allies could accept. “The world does not organize itself,” Joe Biden offered. It needs the United States “at the head of the table” to enforce the rules. No other country can effectively champion freedom, democracy, and human rights.

The hubris of all this became especially clear when George W. Bush, pursuing what he called a “freedom agenda,” invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. It was against such crusading that Donald Trump campaigned. He promised to put America first, and to take the fallen world as it was. Intervention was warranted only if there was a “direct threat to our national interests,” he maintained, and, even then, “we’d better have an airtight plan to win and get out.” Until this year, it was possible to argue that this shrunken sense of mission made Trump less likely to start wars.

Not anymore. For all the Bush-style recklessness that U.S. hegemony engendered, it also imposed limits. Past Presidents held back on attacking Iran for fear of damaging America’s legitimacy or its interests, broadly construed. Trump, caring little for either, has entered a major conflict with astonishing blitheness; the White House press secretary explained that Trump acted on a “feeling” that Iran would attack. His minimal commitments, rather than yielding a restrained foreign policy, have lowered the barrier to war.

Peter Beinart, writing in the Times, recently described Trump’s foreign policy as “imperialism.” Yet imperialism strives for empire—for control. Classic imperialism sought to bind disparate places together under a vast administrative structure, animated by a civilizing mission. It’s not hard to pin the “empire” charge on Trump’s predecessors, who have jealously guarded U.S. custody of the world system. But what’s striking about Trump is his shrugging indifference to overseas outcomes. You could call this regime-change nihilism; you can’t call it imperialism.

When the United States attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities in June of last year, Trump posted a video of bombers releasing their payloads to the tune of “Bomb Iran.” In starting this war, Trump has not only wreaked enormous havoc; he’s also liberated himself from the burdens of empire.

Although enmity between Washington and Tehran sprang up in 1979, the seeds were planted in the nineteen-fifties. That was when Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, made headlines by nationalizing Iran’s oil, reclaiming profits that had flowed overwhelmingly to Britain. In 1952, Time named Mosaddegh its Man of the Year.

The British wanted Mosaddegh removed. But President Dwight Eisenhower saw Mosaddegh—a popular, Western-educated liberal who was friendly to the U.S.—as a hopeful figure. “I would like to give the guy ten million bucks,” he told Britain’s Foreign Secretary.

It was only by appealing to wider concerns, to the global chessboard, that the British brought Eisenhower around. Fearing that Mosaddegh might inadvertently destabilize Iran, which would then provide the Soviets an opening, Eisenhower O.K.’d a coup in 1953. The C.I.A. planted negative stories, hired false-flag actors, and persuaded the constitutional monarch of Iran, the Shah, to arrest Mosaddegh and reassert his own royal power. The operation went off like fireworks. “I owe my throne to my God, my people, my Army, and to you!” the elated Shah told his C.I.A. handler.

This was the C.I.A.’s breakout performance. The United States had just fought a bloody, expensive, and inconclusive war to beat back Communism in Korea. Ousting Mosaddegh, by contrast, was a crisp victory for just a few sacks of cash. The agency went on a spree. The political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke has counted sixty-four occasions when the U.S. sought to secretly oust a government or tilt an election during the Cold War. More than two-thirds of these attempts were, like the Iran coup, in support of authoritarians.

It was crucial that this all be done in the dark. If the C.I.A.’s acts in Iran were to come to light, Eisenhower noted, the U.S. would be “embarrassed” in the Middle East, and its ability to cheaply sculpt the region’s politics “would almost totally disappear.” Secrecy was the price of legitimacy, in other words. And legitimacy was the precondition for U.S. primacy.

Initially, this seemed to work. Even as U.S. meddling stoked anger abroad, the Shah stood firm and kept selling oil. The trouble was that this stance unbalanced him at home. His most nettlesome critic, an ayatollah named Ruhollah Khomeini, derided the “American Shah.” Iranian intellectuals condemned their country’s “Westoxification,” its intoxication by the West. In 1979, when this bubbling dissent finally boiled over, millions of Iranians joined the anti-Shah revolution. Khomeini seized power and denounced the United States as the “Great Satan.”

Khomeini’s theology was novel, but his grievance was old. After Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, one of them told a captured diplomat, “You have no right to complain. You took our whole country hostage in 1953.”

In 2000, the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, publicly acknowledged that the United States had “played a significant role” in overthrowing Mosaddegh. It had done so for “strategic reasons,” but perhaps not good ones, in hindsight. “It is easy to see now,” Albright said, “why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention.”

The world is large, and it is possible for two hostile countries to coexist within it. Yet U.S. Presidents have not found the Islamic Republic easy to circumvent. One after another, they’ve barked their shins on it, cursing all the while.

For Jimmy Carter, Iran was agony. The final year of his Presidency—an election year—was consumed by the hostage crisis, which played out nightly on the news. Carter knew that he “could have wiped Iran off the map,” and faced pressure to do so, but he feared the consequences, including for the hostages. He instead tried an ill-fated rescue mission. Its failure forced him to negotiate, an interminable process that he believed cost him the election. In a final humiliation, news of the hostages’ release didn’t arrive until partway through the Inaugural Address of his successor, Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan Administration took a hard line with Iran. To Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, its leaders were “fanatical terrorists whose principal platform is vitriolic and unreasoning hostility to America.” Yet, when the Iran-connected Hezbollah organization seized U.S. captives in the Lebanese civil war, even Reagan’s men could take the broader view. They tried a complex chess combination whereby arms would go to the Islamic Republic, hostages would return home, and funds would find their way to the Contras, right-wing insurgents battling the Nicaraguan government. When these illegal maneuvers were exposed, Reagan’s poll numbers collapsed. “It was a dark and hurtful time,” Nancy Reagan remembered. “The entire government seemed to grind to a halt.”

Reagan and his Vice-President, George H. W. Bush, ultimately dodged much of the blame. Still, the Iran-Contra scandal scorched the lower ranks of the Administration, including several officials who would become principals in the George W. Bush Administration. The lesson they learned, according to the journalist James Mann’s “Rise of the Vulcans” (2004), was to shun back-channel deals. Dictators must be openly confronted.

The result, George W. Bush’s War on Terror, was a bellicose version of U.S. hegemony that eschewed short-term stability for long-term transformation. For the neoconservatives whose thought informed the Bush approach, remaking the Middle East was the aim, and Iran was the pinnacle. Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, Norman Podhoretz, and Richard Perle all advised overthrowing the Islamic Republic. High-ranking Administration officials also saw this as the stretch goal, it appears. After Jay Garner returned from overseeing the Iraq occupation, Bush reportedly asked him, “You want to do Iran for the next one?”

Bush was often criticized as lawless. In the glare of recent years, though, what stands out is how consumed with law, with process, his Administration was. The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq involved an intense public debate over reasons and evidence. Officials seeking the forceful interrogation of terror suspects scoured the globe and scanned law books to determine exactly the places and ways in which detainees could, in theory, be legally tormented. That members of the Administration lied about the war only underlines the point. To feel the need to lie is, in a perverse way, to respect the process.

Bush rationalized his way into invading Iraq. But his determination to be seen as acting within bounds appears to have checked his Iran ambitions. He regarded the Islamic Republic as an existential threat and considered military strikes. (“The president made it very clear that all options were on the table,” his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, wrote.) Yet Bush recalled worrying that attacking Iran might create “serious problems” for Iraq, which he was struggling to pacify. Then came the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, which, having collected the work of sixteen agencies, concluded with “high confidence” that Iran had halted its nuclear program years ago. This had a “big impact—and not a good one,” Bush fumed. It “tied my hands on the military side,” and made bombing Iran impossible to justify.

Bush also lacked the resources to invade. He was already heavily engaged in Iraq, where, obeying what members of his Cabinet called the “Pottery Barn rule”—you break it, you own it—he kept extending the exhausting occupation. Trump, watching from the sidelines, couldn’t understand why Bush was intent on imposing order on a faltering Iraq. Bush should just “declare victory and leave,” Trump huffed in 2007. “I think Bush is probably the worst President in the history of the United States.”

Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, had little taste for Bush’s adventurism. But this wasn’t a retreat from hegemony so much as a preference for a more calmly managed form of it. “America must always lead on the world stage,” he insisted. “If we don’t, no one else will.”

It was partly to regain squandered influence that, twelve and a half minutes into his first Inaugural Address, Obama turned to “the Muslim world.” In a message aimed at Tehran, he said, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Two months later, Obama released a video celebrating the Persian New Year, in which he expressed hope for “mutual respect” with the “Islamic Republic of Iran.” As John Ghazvinian notes in his absorbing history “America and Iran” (2021), this was the first time a U.S. President had been willing to use the country’s official name.

The needle appeared to move. While giving a speech, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, quieted his audience during its ritual chant of “Death to America.” “We do not have any experience with this new American President,” he explained. “We will observe and judge.” He had a message for Obama, too: “You change, and our behavior will change as well.” To an outsider, this might have sounded piddling. But, Ghazvinian writes, “for anyone who had followed Iran closely over the past thirty years, it was nothing short of a historic opening.”

If Obama was hoping for a Nixon-in-China moment, however, he’d have to fight the U.S. political establishment. Even his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented engagement with Tehran to Congress as mainly a pretext that would place Washington on “much stronger international footing,” presuming talks fell through, to impose “crippling sanctions.” Under enormous political pressure, including from supporters of Israel, Obama let the broad negotiations he’d envisaged shrink into a brusque take-it-or-leave-it proposition regarding Iran’s uranium stockpile.

As Clinton had anticipated, the talks fell through. The Administration then orchestrated what Vice-President Joe Biden trumpeted as “the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period.” Ghazvinian explains that Iran’s oil production cratered, its currency tanked, and doctors scrambled to provide care with expired drugs and faltering equipment.

Obama tried negotiations again in his second term, with a more enthusiastic Secretary of State, John Kerry. Still, he was paddling upstream. As a deal took shape that would lift some sanctions in exchange for limits on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, a skeptical Congress invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to speak against it. The deal would legitimatize Iran’s nuclear program and, by alleviating sanctions, help a “genocidal” country flourish, Netanyahu believed. “We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation, and terror,” he said to applause.

Obama secured the accord, in 2015, only by threatening to veto Congress. The Iran deal was the “Obamacare of foreign policy,” the political scientist Dalia Dassa Kaye writes in her new book, “Enduring Hostility,” and it left the same bitter aftertaste. It was the “worst deal ever,” Trump insisted. And Obama was “perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States.”

Trump, running for office, promised to rip up the deal. If so, then Iran would set fire to it, Ayatollah Khamenei responded. It seemed, Kaye writes, that the only force holding the omnidirectionally imperilled deal together after Trump’s 2016 election was the so-called axis of adults in his White House: National-Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. John Bolton, brought in to help fight that axis, remembered the Iran deal being the “most palpable manifestation” of the Administration’s internal divisions. The adults won the first round, but the fight wasn’t finished. “I’m never signing one of these certifications again,” Trump seethed, after endorsing one of the accord’s routine documents. “I can’t believe I’m signing this one.”

In retrospect, it’s impressive that Trump made it to 2018 before abandoning the accord. Ripping up deals was his hallmark. The most fundamental deal—that the United States should govern world affairs—looked no better to him. “We are in countries most people haven’t even heard of. Frankly, it’s ridiculous,” he complained, in a speech to service members in Iraq. “The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world.” To rally the troops, he offered this: “We’re no longer the suckers, folks.”

It was a sharp turn. In place of global hegemony, Trump offered narrow self-interest. In place of principles, threats. Asked to define the Trump Doctrine, a senior Administration official put it curtly: “We’re America, bitches.”

Having rejected the need to carry allies along, Trump saw little point in concealing U.S. power. In 2019, he tweeted a detailed photo of an Iranian missile launchpad, demonstrably taken by an advanced U.S. spy satellite. When officials rushed to redact the classified details, Trump protested, “That’s the sexy part.” His aides learned to steer sensitive materials around him.

Trump also dispensed with the notion that U.S. interests were everywhere at stake. He floated allowing Japan and South Korea to develop nuclear arsenals to wean them from U.S. protection. And if this triggered war between Japan and North Korea? “If they do, they do,” he said. “Good luck, folks. Enjoy yourself.”

Perhaps they would. Iran, under renewed sanctions and no longer feeling fully bound by the nuclear deal, began enriching uranium at a higher level, closer to the point of developing nuclear weapons. Although Joe Biden promised to reverse this with a “longer and stronger” deal, he delayed and eventually did nothing. Instead, “Iran essentially became a nuclear threshold state,” Kaye writes. And then Trump was reëlected.

Could he abide the Islamic Republic? In June, 2025, Trump joined an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Yet the attack did not flare into a wider war, and Trump’s National Security Strategy, released months later, suggested that it might never. The document railed against the “foreign policy elites” who had “convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interest of our country.” With Iran’s nuclear program knocked back by the air strikes, “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy” were “thankfully over.”

This was the promise of Trump’s outlook: that indifference might bring peace. But the other possibility lingered: that indifference might remove guardrails. At a National Security Council meeting in his first term, John Bolton recounted, Trump was asked by aides about his tolerance for risk in foreign affairs. “I have an almost unbelievable capacity for risk,” Trump answered. “Risk is good.” He then proposed ousting Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to take the country’s oil.

Early this year, U.S. planes opened fire on Venezuelan targets while commandos captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Trump made desultory mention of ideals (“peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela”) but within moments started speaking of oil markets. It sounded like George W. Bush without the pretense, though Trump’s speech also lacked Bush’s sweeping ambitions. Maduro had trafficked “gigantic amounts of illegal drugs” and sent “savage and murderous gangs” into the United States, Trump claimed, but his Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, was “quite gracious,” so perhaps she could stay.

In fact, she did. “Everybody’s kept their job except for two people,” a satisfied Trump explained. It was as if this had been an episode of “The Apprentice”: not a military strike so much as a round of layoffs.

It’s not clear how long Delcy Rodríguez, now Venezuela’s Acting President, will be able to both meet U.S. demands and ward off internal opposition. The Shah managed that balancing act, though not forever. Still, in the short run, Venezuela put gas in Trump’s tank, and he has sped headlong into war with Iran. This is “going to work very easily,” he assured CNN. “It’s going to work like in Venezuela.”

That confidence has a familiar ring. Writing in the Times, Ross Douthat has argued that the spirit of Bush “broods over the Trump administration.” Yet what’s missing, as Douthat acknowledges, is any vision for controlling the Middle East. The Bush Administration’s names for two of its major actions in the region, Operation New Dawn and Operation Enduring Freedom, evoked wide horizons and deep transformations, ones that might secure U.S. influence for generations. Compare those with the names of Trump’s Iran actions: Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Epic Fury.

The difference between dawn and midnight, between freedom and fury, is hegemonic aspiration—or the lack thereof. It’s not just that Trump is rash and reckless. It’s that he has rejected the overarching systematic concerns that both pushed his predecessors forward and at times held them back. The world’s most powerful military exists in his hands not to impose order but to lash out. This isn’t hegemony; it’s a hit-and-run.

Having helped Israel kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, Trump has only the vaguest notion of what should come next. Perhaps the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps should hand over its weapons and “surrender to the people,” or perhaps the Corps and the people should make a revolution together. Alternatively, the defanged Islamic Republic could remain intact and Trump could choose a leader from its ranks. He mentioned “three very good choices,” though it now seems that these candidates may have been killed. “Everybody that seems to want to be a leader, they end up dead,” Trump mused, with unconcealed relish. Iran’s government, meanwhile, has made its own choice: Mojtaba Khamenei, the dead Ayatollah’s son, who was himself reportedly wounded by the air strikes. Trump called this choice “unacceptable” and warned the new Supreme Leader that he would not last long without Washington’s approval. Which is to say, Trump has no plan but reserves the right to reject everyone else’s.

Past Presidents, for all their destructive crusades and covert actions, stopped short of invading Iran out of regard for the global chessboard. They worried about Iran blocking oil flows, attacking allies, or imploding and sending refugees streaming through the region. Trump has unburdened himself of such concerns. He’s not playing chess and doesn’t ultimately mind if pieces are captured.

After Trump seized Maduro, Defense Secretary Hegseth summed up Maduro’s story: “He effed around and he found out.” In a larger sense, though, it’s Trump who effs around. His life has been an unbroken string of outrageous “what if?” experiments. What if I stiff this contractor? Pocket this cash? Reject this election?

Or bomb this country? Trump effed around, and we’re all finding out. He has shrugged off the imperial mantle, the force that propelled his predecessors into ruinous meddling. From another President, that could have been welcome, but from a wrathful tyrant like Trump it’s terrifying. Because the quest for global control was never just a compulsion. It was also, in hindsight, a constraint. ♦

Dispatches

How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour

Poodle crossbreeds have grown overwhelmingly popular, sparking controversy in dog parks and kennel clubs alike.

By John Seabrook March 16, 2026

Meet the Breeds, the American Kennel Club’s annual showcase of purebred dogs, took place over two eye-wateringly cold days in early February at the Javits Center, in Manhattan. About a hundred and fifty of the two hundred and five varieties recognized as official breeds by the A.K.C., the long-standing authority in the U.S. dog world, were in attendance for the public to ogle, fondle, and coo “So cute!” to, including the basset fauve de Bretagne, a hunting hound from France that’s one of three newly recognized breeds recently allowed into the purebred pantheon. Some of the dogs had competed in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show earlier in the week, and past champions had their ribbons on display.

In spite of the frigid weather, pavilions hosting the more popular breeds—the pug, the Doberman pinscher, the Great Dane, the St. Bernard—were packed. Lesser-known varieties, such as the saluki, the Löwchen, and the Lapponian herder, drew sparser crowds. (The fifty top A.K.C. breeds make up around half of all purebred registrations.) There were exhibition spaces for each breed, and on the back walls were three adjectives supposedly describing that particular type of dog’s temperament. There is, in fact, no evidence that temperament is consistent within a breed, but the idea is deeply rooted in dogdom. I stopped to caress the velvety ear leather of a pharaoh hound (“Friendly, Smart, Noble”), a sprinting breed once used to hunt rabbits in Malta; accept kisses from a Portuguese water dog, bred to assist with retrieving tackle (“Affectionate, Adventurous, Athletic”); and have my photograph taken with a Leonberger, a German breed from the town of Leonberg, in southwest Germany (“Friendly, Gentle, Playful”). No one was supposed to be openly selling dogs, but, if you asked, the breeders would share their information.

Excluding what are known as companion dogs, like the Leonberger, most of the animals at the show were designed for a purpose that is no longer required of them. Dachshunds don’t hunt badgers, for the most part; schnauzers don’t rat. In Great Britain, foxhounds are legally barred from chasing foxes. Herding dogs, lacking flocks to shepherd, nip at kids’ heels in the park. Consider the fate of the otterhound, an ancient variety with a noble heritage which was once used in the U.K. to hunt river otters, which were prized for their thick fur and disliked by wealthy landowners because they ate fish in their stocked ponds. Otterhounds did their jobs well; as a result of hunting and environmental factors, otters were placed on a protected-species list in 1978. Now otterhounds are rarer than giant pandas. An otterhound named Fergus, whom I got down on the floor to hug, is one of only eight hundred left in the world. In this sense, Meet the Breeds was like a career fair for skilled workers whose skills aren’t needed in the modern era. One of the few dogs I met with an actual job was Flecka, a black Lab who is being trained by the N.Y.C. Department of Correction to sniff out contraband, including illicit electronics and narcotics, at juvenile-detention centers.

As a dog-lover, I was delighted to commune with fellow-fanciers in the vast, echoey hall. Inevitably, however, the vibe-killing question would arise—“So what kind of dog do you have?”—and I would be forced to admit (or not) that I have a goldendoodle, a pariah in the purebred world.

Even if you aren’t one of the fifty-six million American households with a dog in the family (ninety-five per cent of dog owners consider their pet to be a family member), you’ve probably seen a doodle. Neither ladies nor tramps, first-generation doodles are intentionally bred crosses between two A.K.C.-recognized breeds, one of which is always a poodle. In the past three decades, Labradoodles (Labrador-poodles), Bernedoodles (Bernese mountain dog-poodles), and, perhaps most common of all, goldendoodles (golden retriever-poodles), among many other variants of so-called “designer dogs,” have taken over public spaces across the country, in red states and blue states, on the coasts and in the heartland.

Collectively, doodles have disrupted a long-standing upstairs-downstairs hierarchy of purebreds and mutts that emerged during the Victorian era and has governed canine culture ever since. Their growing popularity—the doodle industry, which didn’t exist thirty years ago, is now a billion-dollar business, according to Bloomberg Businessweek—tracks closely with the decline of purebred registrations. These fell by sixty-three per cent from their peak, in 1992, to 2010, the last year in which the A.K.C. published detailed data about total annual registrations. Doodles come in different colors and sizes—petite, miniature, medium, and standard—but most have fleecy coats, Teddy-bear faces, and question-mark-shaped tails that seem to pose the doodle’s existential dilemma: Am I an emerging breed, a pricey mutt, or some new category of dog altogether? There are also schnoodles (schnauzer-poodles), whoodles (wheaten terrier-poodles), and Great Danoodles (Great Dane-poodles), not to mention Cavapoos (Cavalier King Charles spaniel-poodles), cockapoos (cocker spaniel-poodles; “cockadoodle” was apparently a bit too on the noodle), Yorkipoos (Yorkshire terrier-poodles), Maltipoos (Maltese-poodles), and Peekapoos (Pekingese-poodles).

“At least you don’t have a sheepadoodle,” a breeder staffing the Old-English-sheepdog pavilion said, when I fessed up.

There was no doodle pavilion at Meet the Breeds. That’s because the A.K.C. doesn’t recognize any of the doodle varieties as breeds. Doodles aren’t permitted to compete in the conformation events—the main contests—at dog shows, such as the Westminster Kennel Club show, that the A.K.C. oversees. They are allowed into agility competitions, but most people only pay attention to the beauty events. Although the A.K.C. doesn’t “comment specifically on ‘doodles,’ ” a spokesperson, Brandi Hunter Munden, said, the organization isn’t “anti-doodle.” She added, “In fact, through our Canine Partners program, mixed-breed dogs, including doodles, are eligible to enroll and participate in almost all A.K.C. sports and events.”

The poodle community is particularly snappish about doodles. Doodle breeders help themselves to the poodle’s brain and its low-shedding, hypoallergenic coat, temper the poodle’s supposedly high-strung personality with a mellower breed, and then sell their hybrids for twice as much as poodles go for. At the Javits Center, there were flyers at the poodle pavilion, printed by the Poodle Club of America, that read “Just Say ‘No’ to Designer Dogs!” Another leaflet showed poodles without fancy show-dog cuts, looking identical to doodles. (“Poodles can have any haircut! No need to buy a Doodle.”)

Cautiously, I struck up a conversation with a poodle owner whose Grand Champion miniature, sporting a “lion cut”—long mane in front, shaved hindquarters—sat on a table between us. When I pulled my phone out of my coat to take a picture of the poodle, I inadvertently caught the end of a roll of dog-poop bags, and the entire thing unravelled as it fell to the floor.

As I knelt to pick up the bags, I strategized about how I would respond to the inevitable question. Should I just say that I have a mutt, which would be technically true? But I slunk away before it came.

From Penny, the Best in Show-winning Doberman at this year’s Westminster dog show, to feral street dogs, all domestic dogs descend from a now extinct subspecies of wolf that, according to one theory, scavenged the refuse around hunter-gatherer encampments and, perhaps as far back as thirty thousand years ago, became the first animal to be domesticated. Over generations, ancient humans and these first dogs developed an increasingly multifaceted partnership, with dogs serving different, mostly work-related functions. “Very early on, we see dogs acting as hunting companions, pulling sleds or travois, acting as herding managers or guards, and keeping us company,” Carly Ameen, an archeological scientist at the University of Exeter, told me in an e-mail. “The Romans write prolifically about the characteristics that make a good dog, distinguishing between guard dogs (which should be black, and always kept hungry), and companion dogs (small, curly haired, and white).” Ancient humans sometimes buried their dogs near family members; this has made it possible to identify prehistoric domesticated canines and to study their intact skulls and skeletons. In a recent paper in Science, Ameen and a group of co-authors concluded, after studying more than six hundred canine remains, that fully half of the total amount of variation seen in modern breeds was already present by the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (roughly 10,000 to 4000 B.C.E.).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, this long, fluid history of selecting dogs for different tasks was fixed and categorized by Victorian-era breeders, many of them landed aristocrats. All purebred golden retrievers, for example, are supposedly descended from a foundational pair of dogs: a yellow retriever named Nous and a Tweed water spaniel named Belle, who were crossbred to create a superior hunting dog by Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, first Baron Tweedmouth, on his estate in the Scottish Highlands, in 1868. Likewise, in the late nineteenth century, Max von Stephanitz, a German cavalry officer, bred Horand von Grafrath, the foundational German-shepherd stud, to create the ultimate dog to herd and guard sheep.

The breeds were eventually divided into categories such as sporting, non-sporting, hound, working, terrier, toy, and herding. Dog shows were designed to attract the best breeding stock; winning dogs were bred to their relatives for “the betterment of breed.” Fanciers formed breed clubs. The Royal Kennel Club, founded in Britain in 1873, and the A.K.C., which began in 1884, are two of the überclubs that oversee the individual-breed groups.

For a dog variety to be considered a breed, there must be a published standard: a written document describing in fetishistic detail the ideal dog of that type, whose body, appearance, and temperament are best suited to its traditional role and heritage. The A.K.C.’s official standard for a golden retriever’s ears and nose reads: “Ears rather short with front edge attached well behind and just above the eye and falling close to cheek. When pulled forward, tip of ear should just cover the eye. Low, hound-like ear set to be faulted. Nose black or brownish black, though fading to a lighter shade in cold weather not serious. . . . Pink nose or one seriously lacking in pigmentation to be faulted.” Once the foundational generations were established, a breed’s “stud book” was almost always closed, meaning that, today, only dogs that have ancestral links to the founders can be registered as purebreds. Nineteenth-century notions about good breeding, purity of blood, and “mongrel races,” which were discredited long ago when applied to human racial identity, continue to haunt the dog world; we can’t quite quit them. “Behind casual claims to breed superiority—loyalty, intelligence, trainability, beauty—is the kind of talk that’s illegal in some places if the subjects are human,” Michael Brandow writes in his book “A Matter of Breeding,” from 2015.

Over time, the betterment of the breed has often proved to be detrimental to the health of the dog. Generations of inbreeding—the practice of mating exceptional dogs with close relatives, including parents and siblings, to keep the blood pure and produce prize-winning offspring—has reduced genetic diversity, making purebred dogs vulnerable to inherited disorders. A 2009 study of British dogs found three hundred and ninety-six inherited diseases among the top fifty most popular dog breeds. These include syringomyelia in Cavalier King Charles spaniels, an agonizing neurological disorder that results from breeding dogs whose skulls are too small for their brains. (The spaniels’ brains protrude into their spinal columns, forming fluid-filled cysts.) All French bulldogs—now the most popular breed in the U.S., according to kennel-club registrations—are brachycephalic, or short-headed; they can’t breathe properly because, in breeding for flat, squished faces, the dogs’ soft tissues get pushed into their airways, blocking them. In addition, some suffer from spine and joint problems; have eye, ear, skin, and digestive issues; are prone to heatstroke; and can give birth only via C-sections. Alexander Trees, a veterinary surgeon in the U.K. and a member of the House of Lords, is a co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare. Trees says that, in his country, breeding dogs to meet extreme conformation standards is “arguably the most chronic and prevalent welfare issue in dogs, yet it persists in plain sight in a nation of animal lovers.”

To understand the doodle phenomenon, it helps to know its shaggy-dog origin story. In 1989, Wally Conron, a breeding manager for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia, was asked to train a Seeing Eye dog for a blind woman in Hawaii whose husband was allergic to the fur of golden retrievers and Labs, the breeds most commonly used for such work. In place of fur, poodles have hair, a single layer of wiry fibres that grows continuously, sheds lightly, and produces little dander. (Bichons frisés and Afghan hounds also have hair coats.)

Conron attempted to train thirty-three different poodles, but the breed’s nervy temperament and health issues proved disqualifying. After three years of failure, he bred his boss’s standard poodle with one of the association’s Labradors. He sent hair clippings and saliva from the three puppies in the litter—Sheik, Simon, and Sultan—to the woman in Hawaii; only Sultan’s provoked no allergic reaction in her husband. Sultan was easy to train and became a successful guide dog. The other two puppies were put up for adoption. The organization had a waiting list of people who wanted to adopt purebred puppies that weren’t selected as guide dogs, but no one wanted the two crossbreeds.

“I went to our P.R. team and said, ‘Go to the press and tell them we’ve invented a new dog, the Labradoodle,’ ” Conron told the author and dog expert Stanley Coren in an interview published in Psychology Today. The intriguing-sounding name—was it a dog or a cookie?—and the idea of a “special” hypoallergenic guide-dog breed were irresistible. Suddenly, everyone wanted one, Conron said: “It was a gimmick, and it went worldwide.” During the weeks that followed, he added, the association’s “switchboard was inundated with calls from potential dog-fostering homes, other guide-dog centers, vision-impaired people, and people allergic to dog hair who wanted to know more about this wonder dog.”

In the early nineties, Judy Hahn, a breeder and a 4-H Club leader in Highland, Maryland, heard from a friend who’d read an article about a new type of dog that was all the rage Down Under. She began breeding Labradors and poodles, and also called them Labradoodles. (It was subsequently shown, with DNA testing, that the Australian Labradoodle was part cocker spaniel, too.) Later, the Obamas considered getting one, before settling on a Portuguese water dog.

In the mid-nineties, Hahn asked one of her 4-H Club protégés, Amy Lane, to help market a litter of golden-retriever-poodle crosses; following the labradoodles’ naming pattern, they should have been called “goldenoodles,” but the moniker wasn’t sticking. “We had to give them a name when asked about them,” Lane recalled when I visited her breeding business, Fox Creek Farm, in West Virginia. “I scrambled and blurted out, ‘They’re goldendoodles!’ ” In 2001, Lane bred a goldendoodle and a miniature poodle, creating a litter of mini doodles, a more manageable version than the standard size. Miniature goldendoodles are now the best-selling variety of goldendoodle.

The first dog in my life was Tash, my father’s standard poodle. Then came Tamerlane the Earthshaker, the first of several Dalmatians we’d own; all of them had hearing problems, a common defect believed to be related to breeding for the dogs’ piebald coloration. (The genetics are linked to deafness.) The next dog, a mutt called Willie P. Wilmington, took to killing lambs on a neighbor’s farm; after he killed a calf, the neighbor killed him.

The following Christmas, Santa brought Nicky, a miniature poodle with wicked smarts. Poor Nicky, my beloved friend, died horribly when his snout was crushed under the wheel of a horse-drawn carriage my father was driving, his teeth scattered over the asphalt road. Then came another mutt, Mach, who ran away, followed by our genial golden retriever, Kubla (embarrassingly named by me), who had hip dysplasia, a developmental disease some have linked to breeding dogs for conformation standards.

In 2006, my wife, Lisa, and I adopted Foxy from an organization in Larchmont that rescues dogs from high-kill shelters in the South and brings them north. Thanks to a dog-DNA test, a novelty back then, when asked about Foxy’s heritage, I could say she was a bulldog-Pomeranian-Labrador-Mexican-hairless cross. A rare breed, indeed. She was the family dog for sixteen years, until her liver failed and we had her euthanized at home in Vermont, in August, 2022. A long dogless period followed that dreadful day. I missed having a buddy, but Lisa wasn’t ready.

Then one day, in the summer of 2024, as Lisa was browsing the classifieds in the Vermont Standard, she said, “There’s an ad here for goldendoodle puppies.” I looked at her. Had the mourning period finally ended?

The ad gave a phone number for the breeder, who was in Bethel, twenty minutes away. “No harm in looking,” I said, disingenuously. “We could take the kids and make a family outing of it.”

The puppies were first-generation crosses between the breeder’s own dogs—a golden retriever named Amy and a standard poodle named Bumper. First-generation, or F1, doodles combine equal parts of their parents’ DNA in a random combination. Some get the low-shedding genes; some don’t. Second-generation (F2) doodles, which are doodle-to-doodle crosses, are even more of a crapshoot: some littermates may have poodle coats, others retriever coats. Many breeders backcross their F1 doodles with an unrelated poodle or a “multi-gen” doodle, to get puppies with the preferred doodle coat. Some now use DNA testing to select for the favored coat traits. Eventually, through selective breeding, you get multi-gen-doodle-to-multi-gen-doodle crosses that result in relatively predictable-looking offspring.

Our decision, if there ever was one, was made the moment we saw the litter. The goldendoodle puppy has been designed for maximum cuteness. No standard-English word comes close to encapsulating the feeling of seeing one; thankfully, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “gigil” (pronounced “ghee-gill”) last year. In Philippine English, “gigil” signifies “a feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable,” according to an O.E.D. bulletin.

I picked up a puppy with slightly redder fur than the others, and tightened my grip a bit. Lisa captured the moment with her phone; the photo is now her lock screen. She says it’s the happiest she’s ever seen me.

The “creature,” as we sometimes refer to him, joined our family in the fall of 2024, as a nine-week-old puppy. After much debate, we named him Herman (as in Munster, not Melville). He quickly grew much larger than either of his parents, topping out at seventy-five pounds. He looks like a retriever and a poodle were disassembled and put back together carelessly. His coat, made of soft, wavy curls, is like a poodle cake with retriever frosting. He has retriever ears and a poodle’s pointy occiput, topped by a mushroom cap of blond curls with a reddish tinge that jiggle daftly when he moves. His sinewy poodle legs end in retriever’s feet, with webbed toes, and his beaky poodle snout is partly hidden by his splendid “furnishings”: the eyebrow-mustache-and-beard combo that signals that a doodle carries at least one copy of the RSPO2 gene, which results in reduced shedding. Herman has proved to be remarkably “biddable”—that is, keen to take instruction, and almost always eager to please—but with a mysterious aloofness and a dignified reserve. From an early age, he developed extraordinary social skills with other dogs, and he is unfailingly gentle with people of all ages. I have learned his vocabulary of whines, yawns, growls, barks. Because he comes from highly active dogs on both sides, Herman (“Proud, Goofy, Too Smart by Half”) requires three hours of exercise a day, or else he gets bored, and you don’t want that. His strong food drive, combined with his size and his intelligence, makes him a hazard in the kitchen. If counter surfing were a sport, he’d be an Olympian. He once ate seven enchiladas that had been left out on the kitchen counter, without disturbing the Pyrex casserole dish they were in; we thought our son had wolfed them all until we found a pinto bean on Herman’s elbow.

Dogs have always served as a sort of emotional prosthetic for me, allowing me to voice feelings to them that I am too shy or embarrassed to say to people. But with Herman I went deep: I fell in love with our doodle. He felt like the answer to a personal ad I hadn’t known I’d placed. Me: a sixty-seven-year-old man facing an empty nest, working from home, needing to get his ten thousand steps a day, living part time in Brooklyn and part time in Vermont, with a five-hour drive in between, looking for a companion. You: a dog that would be as happy running through deep snow in the woods as he would be socializing with a hundred other dogs in the city, tolerates long car rides, will keep my feet warm during Zoom calls. Us: mutual joy.

The morning after my visit to Meet the Breeds, I took Herman to Fort Greene Park, in Brooklyn, where dogs can run off leash until 9 A.M. The disconnect between traditional dogdom, as represented by Meet the Breeds, and the everyday world of dogs was striking. Meet the Crossbreeds would be the more appropriate rubric for parks and sidewalks across the U.S. In Fort Greene, there are roughly ten doodles for every poodle, which was once the most popular breed in America, as measured by A.K.C. registrations; poodles ruled for more than two decades, beginning in 1960, just a few years after teens were wearing poodle skirts to sock hops. Now there are so many poodle-ized versions of heritage breeds in the park that it’s a surprise to occasionally see the real thing.

Trendiness alone can’t explain the doodle phenomenon. Labradoodles and goldendoodles have been around for more than thirty years, well beyond a fad’s shelf life; Cavapoos were first bred as early as the fifties. And it’s not as if the purebred world is immune to fashion. Films such as “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” “Lady and the Tramp,” and “Marley & Me” caused registrations of Dalmatians, cocker spaniels, and Labradors, respectively, to spike. In any case, no major Hollywood film has ever starred a doodle. Their medium is social media, where their adorable features are the canine equivalent of Instagram face. Just as Rin Tin Tin, the German-shepherd silent-film star, symbolized perseverance and grit in the face of war and the Great Depression, and Lassie, the heroic collie, featured in books, films, and the eponymous nineteen-fifties TV series, stood for Eisenhower-era optimism and the safety of the herd, doodles represent the curation of personal identity through consumerism and the rejection of traditional gatekeepers.

Because many doodles are first- or second-generation, each one looks a little different. That’s part of their appeal for me, at least, but it’s also why an F1 or F2 doodle could probably never be an A.K.C. breed. The essence of a breed is conforming to a standard, and early-generation doodles are genetically nonconformist, allowing their owners to feel nonconformist, too, while also having a dog that comes from fancy bloodlines on both sides. Instead of an F1 breed standard, there is a TikTok algorithm that connects doodle people with videos of doodles that share strikingly similar behavioral quirks: the spread-eagle sleeping style, the Velcro-like attachment to their people, the creepily human side-eye looks.

Status-wise, doodles are a mixed bag. The rescue movement—which gained momentum in the eighties in Northern California and soon swept through dog culture, borne on the wings of “Angels,” the Sarah McLachlan song that accompanied heartrending A.S.P.C.A. commercials about dogs in need of homes—has scrambled the social order of purebreds and mutts. The highest status in dog parks these days belongs, rightfully, to the people who foster dogs rescued from kill shelters or abusive situations—middle-aged pit bulls, retired greyhounds, dogs with three legs. (There’s a hilarious Amy Schumer sketch, titled “Doggy Daycare,” in which conspicuously conscientious dog folks attempt to one-up each other in bragging about the defects of their rescued dogs; the winner’s pet is actually dead.) After fosterers come people who adopt from shelters rather than purchasing from breeders. Then come the purebred owners.

The doodle people generally make up the lowest rung, although it depends on where the dogs come from: a growing number are from shelters. A lot of the people who got a doodle during the pandemic were first-time dog owners. On finding that keeping their doodle amused and groomed was a major and expensive commitment, they “surrendered” the dog. This has created another set of issues. Doodles usually get adopted first, so other dogs stay in shelters for longer, Tori Fugate, of the organization Shelter Animals Count, told me. To underscore this problem, the Animal Care Centers of N.Y.C. posted a video last year in which rescues, such as Miss Buttercup, a pit bull that had languished in the shelter for four months, wore doodle wigs. Miss Buttercup was adopted three days later.

Embark is a DNA-testing service for dogs co-founded by Adam Boyko, a canine geneticist at Cornell. I swabbed Herman and, when the results came back, Boyko and I went over them together. He noted that Herman tested clear for two hundred and seventy-one possible health risks, and carries a nondominant gene for three others (copper toxicosis, which can affect the liver; ichthyosis, a skin disorder; and low alanine-aminotransferase activity, which can lead to misinterpretations of test results), all of which would be a concern only if we bred him. (He is, in fact, neutered. Sorry, pal.)

Herman also has a one-per-cent coefficient of inbreeding, or C.O.I., a formula for measuring how inbred a dog is; purebred poodles and golden retrievers both have, on average, a twenty-per-cent C.O.I. Boyko explained to me that the higher the C.O.I., the greater “the probability that a dog that has a harmful mutation in its genome will inherit two copies of that mutation, leading to expression of the harmful effect.” In classic Mendelian theory, first-generation crosses of genetically distinct parent lines should exhibit “hybrid vigor,” as measured by increased fertility, body mass, and disease resistance, when compared with both parents. But, in reality, hybrid vigor isn’t guaranteed. Nationwide, one of the largest pet-insurance providers in the U.S., studied cancer claims from the owners of more than a million and a half dogs over a six-year period, 2015 to 2021, and found that owners of golden retrievers and of standard poodles were nearly four times more likely to file cancer claims than owners of goldendoodles were. However, a 2024 research paper, “The Doodle Dilemma”—which studied Cavapoos, cockapoos, and Labradoodles in the U.K. and compared them with their purebred progenitors—found “limited differences in overall health status . . . challenging widespread beliefs in positive hybrid vigour effects for health in this emerging designer-crossbreed demographic.” Doodles, after all, still come from two inbred lines.

Herman’s bestie, Beanie, is an unfurnished goldendoodle—she doesn’t have the eyebrow-mustache-beard combination, and didn’t inherit the low-shedding gene. Moose, another friend of Herman’s, in Brooklyn, is referred to by his owner as a “Nordstrom Rack” Labradoodle because he got him from a shelter for a fraction of the price one from a breeder costs. Then he found out why: Moose was nuts. “He would chew the walls when we were gone,” his owner said. Two years and fifteen thousand dollars of therapy and daytime boarding later, Moose is a great dog, as long as he takes his Prozac. He’s not the only dog in the park on antidepressants.

Dan O’Neill, a vet and a professor at Britain’s Royal Veterinary College, suggested to me that, instead of thinking of dogs as breeds and then categorizing them as purebreds, crossbreeds, or mutts, we could think of a dog breed as something defined by our human emotion. “Say, for example, I’ve got a rescue dog,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. ‘Rescue’ is my breed. In the U.K., we get a lot of dogs brought in from Romania. Romanian rescues have now become ‘Rommies,’ and that’s a new breed, because the breed is defined by emotion. You could argue that Labradoodles, cockapoos, and Cavapoos are part of that human emotional process, too. They’ve not been inbred for long enough to have a guarantee that they’ll look alike. When someone buys one of these newly invented breeds, they’re buying into an ethos, a culture of freedom, of crossing, of naturalness.”

Online, doodles stir darker emotions. “I love all dogs and own the best dog in the world. But my god I hate those fuckers,” one Reddit commenter said of doodles. “We have one in my close family and I’ve never met a more neurotic dog.” Many object to the prices that doodles command; Much Ado About Doodles, for example, a Virginia-based breeding business, sells pretrained goldendoodle puppies for some fifteen thousand dollars each. “Family member spent a stupid amount of money for a mini bernadoodle,” another Reddit commenter noted. “My AKC registered dog was way cheaper and came from champion bloodlines.” Vets cite skin diseases, digestive issues, and separation anxiety as common problems they see in goldendoodles. Groomers complain about owners who, instead of troubling themselves with the daily brushing and regular cuts that low-shedding coats require, allow their dog’s coat to develop painful mats that have to be shaved off, then yell at the groomer for denuding their fur baby. A common clarification in anti-doodle discourse is “It’s not the doodles I hate, it’s the people who own them.”

Wally Conron, the doodle dogfather, has apologized for his creation. “I opened a Pandora’s box, that’s what I did,” he said in his interview with Stanley Coren. “I released a Frankenstein. So many people are just breeding for the money. So many of these dogs have physical problems, and a lot of them are just crazy.” He added, “I’ve done so much harm to pure breeding and made many charlatans quite rich. I wonder, in my retirement, whether we bred a designer dog—or a disaster!” In 2019, in “Sum of All Parts,” an Australian podcast, he called the Labradoodle his life’s regret. (Conron, now in his mid-nineties, couldn’t be reached for comment.)

The marketing of Labradoodles and goldendoodles as low-maintenance family pets is misleading, but, when given sufficient love and attention, they do live up to their reputation as calm, intelligent, light-shedding super-dogs, with temperaments that balance the best qualities of the original breeds. They make great therapy animals. Victor McShan, a goldendoodle breeder in Louisiana and a U.S. Army veteran, told me about how his doodles work with veterans suffering from P.T.S.D. “If they have trouble going into a dark house, they can train the dog to go in and turn the lights on,” he said. “You can say, ‘Clear the house.’ If you’re walking or running, you can train the dog to go ahead and sniff out debris on your path so that you don’t think that it’s an I.E.D. It can be trained to wake you up if you’re having a nightmare.”

The emergence of doodles also showed that it was possible to breed and sell expensive pups without participating in the institutional framework of the purebred-dog world, with its breed clubs and old-world manners and the cheesy formality of the dog shows. Traditional purebred breeders are more likely than doodle breeders to sell by word of mouth, and to have no online presence at all. Gina Bryson, a twenty-six-year-old researcher with the Royal Veterinary College, told me that the doodle phenomenon was related to the ease with which they can be purchased online: “Especially for my generation, if we want it, we kind of want it now. Rather than, say, there’s an Irish-wolfhound breeder who lives within a hundred miles, and maybe they’ll have a litter next year, you can go online and there’s lots of doodle litters in a lot of locations.” On Gumtree, the U.K. equivalent of Craigslist, “you can be scrolling, and next to someone selling their used dumbbells you have someone selling a litter of cockapoo puppies,” she said.

A well-bred and health-tested doodle puppy can cost around thirty-five hundred dollars; nonetheless, there are numerous dodgy breeders who cut corners and sell for less. In the U.S., anyone can breed dogs. The kennel clubs try to police themselves and provide a gatekeeping function that attempts to screen out unscrupulous breeders. There are few such gatekeepers in the doodle world; it’s the Wild West. So-called puppy mills mass-produce doodles and purebred dogs. Breeding females are stacked in cramped, dirty cages, sitting in their own waste, and are bred with no recovery time between litters. Puppy mills and brokers exploit the anonymity of online transactions, creating charming websites full of beguiling, instantly available young doodles; potential buyers are never invited to visit the breeder and see the puppies’ parents, as we did when we got Herman. In 2023, in a facility in Iowa which went by the name Paris Puppies Paradise, an animal-rescue group found about a hundred goldendoodles “living in their own feces and urine, including some pregnant mamas and newborn puppies.” A recent British documentary, “Dogspiracy,” follows the “puppy pipeline” to Amish puppy mills in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which turn out dogs by the thousands for pet stores and online sales. Many are licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2025, the U.S.D.A. documented more than six hundred and eighty animal-welfare violations among licensed dog breeders, but in all cases took no punitive action, according to the A.S.P.C.A. New York is one of several states, including California, that have banned the sale of commercially bred puppies (and kittens and rabbits) in pet stores, in an effort to break up the puppy pipeline.

In late February, the annual conference of the Goldendoodle Association of North America (GANA) took place on the seventh floor of the Hyatt House, in Charlotte, North Carolina. At Meet the Breeds, I felt like a heretic at a papal conclave, but at Doodle Con, as I thought of it, I wallowed in O.D.D.—obsessive doodle disorder—with other doodle-lovers, like Joe and Beth Robles, a pair of breeders who own Beechwood Goldendoodles, in Culpeper, Virginia. “Look at him—he’s adorable!” Beth exclaimed as I showed her a few of my phone’s hundreds of pictures of Herman, his hopeful brown eyes staring out from his furnishings.

Fox Creek Farm’s Amy Lane was a driving force behind the founding of GANA. She wanted to save the breed from puppy mills and quick-buck operators by creating ethical standards for breeders. But she also wanted to differentiate the organization from the A.K.C. by requiring its member-breeders—there are some hundred and fifty of them now, representing a tiny fraction of the industry—to comply with a strict regime of health and genetic testing. Breeders also sign an ethics code, pledging to not use any relatives closer than third cousins.

In the dog-show world of purebreds, “You can breed a father to a daughter or a mother to a son,” Lane told me when I met her in West Virginia last fall. (The A.K.C., for its part, discourages mating with parents and siblings, but the offspring of such unions can still be registered and compete in shows.) “None of that matters to them, because that particular look won in the show ring.” She added, “One of my original goals with GANA was that we needed to have a pedigree service to track these dogs and their lineage to make sure we weren’t breeding related dogs.”

All the breeders I met at Doodle Con were selling multi-gen goldendoodles. Clients prefer the certainty that the dogs will have the furnishing genes and will closely resemble the parents, like purebred dogs. The days of dogs like Herman, Beanie, and Moose, all totally unique in their doodleness, could fade away; the most popular doodle types may become as standardized as any other breed.

I thought of something that Dan O’Neill, of the Royal Veterinary College, had told me: “The dog world is just a cycle. And what we’re going through now with these newly invented breeds arriving is just what happened in the late eighteen-hundreds. In Victorian England, rich people had their kennels. Now there’s a new phase of breeding with the Labradoodles and cockapoos. In the future, new cycles of breed invention will happen.” Human nature being what it is, O’Neill continued, “it is inevitable that people will want to say, ‘I have a purebred goldendoodle.’ Because, remember, this is always about people.”

In Australia, Conron’s original Labradoodles have been crossed again, with Irish soft-coated wheaten terriers (and a few other breeds, too), and rebranded as Australian cobberdogs. (“Cobber” is Aussie slang for “friend.”) In 2012, the cobberdog was accepted as a “pure breed in development” by Master Dog Breeders and Associates, a lesser-known international purebred registry.

But Amy Lane told me that she has no interest in goldendoodles becoming an A.K.C.-recognized breed. “As long as I have any say or pull with goldendoodles, it’ll be over my dead body,” she said.

The purebred world doesn’t like to acknowledge the business side of breeding, but at Doodle Con marketing was front and center. I learned about branding strategies, what website colors and fonts are most appealing to buyers, and the edict “We don’t sell puppies, we sell the life style they provide.” The idea that Herman, completely original and impossible to duplicate, was just a marketing category I fit into stung a little, I’ll admit.

After the presentations ended, there was a chance to socialize. I sat with a goldendoodle breeder and GANA stalwart named Cindy Niske, who wrote the goldendoodle standard that’s published on the GANA website. As with the A.K.C.’s golden-retriever standard, hound ears are frowned upon. “Low set or low hanging ears, as in that of the Hound set, are not desirable,” the GANA standard reads. But when it comes to noses, anything goes: “All colors and combinations are acceptable.”

Niske explained that she and her husband had spent more than twenty years breeding a line of A.K.C.-registered Great Danes that won top prizes at the big shows. But she kept losing dogs she bred to spondylosis of the spine, a disorder that can be heritable. Finally, when she had to put down Strom, her A.K.C. Grand Champion Great Dane, at seven years old, “I lay there on the floor next to him, and said to my husband, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ ” she told me. After learning about GANA, she added, “I just about jumped out of my skin when I saw they require genetic-health testing!”

The Niskes started Seventh Heaven Goldendoodles in 2017. The couple had been popular in the purebred world, but, “when the word got out on social media that we had gotten into goldendoodles, I was called every name in the book,” Niske said. “To my face. I was told I was probably going to burn in Hell.”

Before I left, Niske gave me a Seventh Heaven Goldendoodles puppy calendar, which had the words “Live. Laugh. Bark.” printed on the front. Looking at the puppy pictures inside, I felt a twinge of gigil. Uh-oh. Were we ready for a double-doodle life? ♦

Profiles

Lisa Kudrow Is Back—Again

Twenty-two years after the end of “Friends,” the actress returns with a new installment of “The Comeback.”

By Michael Schulman March 16, 2026

A visitor to Stage 24 on the Warner Bros. lot, in Burbank, last November could be forgiven for thinking that the television show being filmed there was a sitcom called “How’s That?!” The parking spaces outside were marked with “How’s That?!” signs. Inside, director’s chairs with the “How’s That?!” logo were arranged around video monitors. The set—a New England bed-and-breakfast, with kitschy floral wallpaper—was surrounded by sitcom cameras and buzzing crew members wearing headsets. A studio audience filed into the bleachers, and a warmup comic urged them to “shake those funny bones.” Then, with mounting gusto, he introduced the star of “How’s That?!”: “Here she is . . . the one and only . . . the living legend . . . Valerie Cherish!”

She emerged to applause, in a potter’s smock, wavy red hair under a bandanna, looking like a cross between Lucy Ricardo and Mrs. Garrett from “The Facts of Life.” Although Valerie Cherish has a long TV résumé, she is not, strictly speaking, real. Neither is “How’s That?!” It’s a fictitious show within a show, in the third season of “The Comeback,” the HBO series starring Lisa Kudrow, who plays Valerie, an over-the-hill sitcom actress with a plastered-on smile and a bottomless desperation to please.

“The Comeback,” which Kudrow created with Michael Patrick King, the “Sex and the City” impresario, premièred in 2005. The first season found Valerie attempting to revive her career in a lame new sitcom called “Room and Bored,” while reality-TV cameras captured her every humiliation. What we see is the raw footage from Valerie’s reality show. Kudrow’s portrayal was unflinching, an early version of cringe comedy. The more Valerie clung to her square inch of fame, the more Hollywood heaped indignities upon her. After auditioning to be one of the “sexy singles” on “Room and Bored,” she’s relegated to playing Aunt Sassy, a dowdy sidekick in a tracksuit. The season peaked with Valerie throwing up while wearing a cupcake costume. The series was a hilariously merciless show-biz sendup, often excruciating to watch. It was cancelled after one season.

But then, as sometimes happens with Hollywood flops, “The Comeback” developed a cult following; true believers passed it around on DVD. In 2014, HBO revived it for a belated second season, about Valerie’s next attempt at a comeback, starring in a prestige HBO dramedy, based on the events of Season 1. Now, twelve years later, Valerie is back for a third and (Kudrow insists) final season, which débuts this month, on HBO. Like cicadas, the series pops up every decade or so, each time casting a satirical eye on what Kudrow calls “the television landscape through the lens of an insecure actress.” “How’s That?!” is Valerie’s latest fictional bid for relevance, but it comes with a 2026 twist: it’s meant to be the first sitcom written by artificial intelligence.

“You’re going to see TV magic made before your very eyes!” the warmup guy told the audience (hired extras). In the scene, Valerie, playing the B. and B.’s owner, Beth, has to reshoot a flaccid punch line in the “How’s That?!” pilot, using “alts” cooked up by the A.I. program.

King, who was directing this episode of “The Comeback,” described “How’s That?!” to me as “ ‘Fawlty Towers’ meets ‘Newhart.’ ” He went on, “A.I. put together two sitcoms that people liked and created a new one, and then it looked for a recognizable female star.”

Making the proceedings even more meta, a plaque near the entrance indicated that Stage 24 is “The Friends Stage,” where, for a decade, Kudrow played Phoebe Buffay, the dippy, guitar-strumming massage therapist, on the sitcom that made her a star in the nineties. Unlike her “Friends” colleagues, Kudrow came out of the Groundlings, the Los Angeles comedy group, and she approached playing Phoebe with the arm’s-length specificity of a sketch comedian. In her off-kilter character work, Kudrow is both the scientist looking into the microscope and the wriggling organism on the slide. Of all the “Friends” stars, she’s had the most unorthodox postshow career, creating a menagerie of oddballs, among them the pretentious shrink Fiona Wallice, from her original Showtime series, “Web Therapy.”

“She plays an outsider so well,” Dan Bucatinsky, Kudrow’s longtime producing partner (he also plays Valerie’s inept publicist turned manager in “The Comeback”), said. “Lisa connects, like some kind of silent satellite dish, with the parts of herself that feel misunderstood.”

Valerie Cherish is Kudrow’s finest creation: a poor man’s Shelley Long, oozing queasy contradictions. Valerie regards herself as a loosey-goosey funny girl, but she’s as tightly wound as a Rolex. She’s addicted to the glare of reality TV, yet she buries any authentic emotion behind a schmaltzy, camera-ready front. Her show-biz instincts, like her hair style, are stuck in the nineteen-eighties, and nothing makes her prouder than her one People’s Choice Award (because it’s “from the people”).

At Stage 24, Kudrow as Valerie as Beth stepped onto the B. and B. set and delivered the new A.I.-generated punch line: “Well, I guess those ants were termites!” King cut the next take short to work out a camera problem, and during the delay Kudrow herself briefly surfaced from her nesting doll of personae. “Sorry,” she told the extras in the bleachers. “Well, it’s not my fault. Just as a human, sorry for the inconvenience.”

During a break, I asked her how it felt to shoot a fake sitcom on the “Friends” stage. She thought for a moment and said, “I’m trying to think of a word that’s not ‘mindfucky.’ ” It had been eleven years since she’d last summoned Valerie Cherish. “But she’s the same,” Kudrow reported. “Maybe not as desperate. I feel like every ten years she’s kind of becoming more of an intact grownup.” She smiled and added, “She’s a good person. She wants what she wants.”

Two months later, I met Kudrow in L.A. and hopped into her Tesla. At sixty-two, she exudes a curious combination of discernment and discombobulation. As she maneuvered out of a tricky parking space and nearly crashed into a hedge, she apologized for not thinking straight. Her dog, Emma, had died four days earlier. “She kept me company—I didn’t realize how much,” she said.

To cheer her up, I told her that when “Friends” débuted, in 1994, I was in eighth grade and idolized Phoebe. The first website I ever visited was a fan site called Phoebe’s Songbook, which I read about in Entertainment Weekly and pored over in my school’s computer lab. I even started talking like Phoebe, until my friends called me out on it in the cafeteria.

Kudrow asked why I was so obsessed. I said that it was probably my way of feeling unconventional, even though “Friends” was as mainstream as it got. But it was also her delivery, which had a syncopated rhythm all her own. Kudrow described it to me as a form of “echolocation.”

We drove to Soho House in West Hollywood, where Kudrow pointed to a grand piano and said, “You know what I just found out? That piano was our piano.” (She and her husband had sold it to a dealer.) Mila Kunis was leaving the dining room as we walked in, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson greeted Kudrow with Valerie Cherish’s trademark “Hello, hello, hello!” “Is it Celebrity Day?” she cracked, as if every day at Soho House wasn’t Celebrity Day. We sat at a table where she had recently filmed a scene for “The Comeback,” with a sweeping view of L.A.

“The Comeback” was born in 2004, when Kudrow’s agents set her up on a lunch date with King at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Kudrow was forty and fresh off of “Friends”; King had just finished being the showrunner for “Sex and the City.” Moving on after a hit sitcom can be perilous for an actor; you’re fixed in the public imagination as Monica or Joey or Mork or Opie. Warner Bros. had given Kudrow a vanity production deal, a common ploy to keep stars on the lot, and she’d set up a company, Is or Isn’t Entertainment, with Bucatinsky, whom she had met through his partner, the filmmaker Don Roos. But she wasn’t eager to jump into another series. “I was, like, I’m going to go from independent movie to independent movie. I’m not doing a sitcom,” she recalled.

Over their lunch, King asked Kudrow if she had any projects in mind. “I do have this one idea,” she told him. Around 1989, she had created a character at the Groundlings called Your Favorite Actress on a Talk Show. Kudrow had always cracked up at the way some actors seemed so phony on late-night shows. “They had these Continental accents, and I knew they were, like, from the Valley,” she told me. “And then sometimes just the bullshit of pretending they cared about certain causes.” In the monologue she did at the Groundlings, the character sits in the “Tonight Show” guest chair, talking to an unseen Johnny Carson. “This was my favorite part of it,” Kudrow said, slipping effortlessly into Valerie. “She looks out at the audience and says, ‘The environment’s so important to me. Please, please, let’s save the planet, as a favor to me!’ ”

Kudrow did the bit for King at lunch. “The minute she opened her mouth, it was the timbre and tone and weird sound of Valerie,” King recalled. “She was so self-important and behind the curve.” But he knew that a series would need more “machinery.” Kudrow had been enthralled—and appalled—by the reality-TV boom since the first season of “Survivor,” in 2000, which ended with a victory for the conniving Richard Hatch. “I thought, That’s a bad sign for humanity, that the reward goes to the most devious, untrustworthy one,” she told me. She was similarly disturbed by an episode of “The Amazing Race” in which a man urges on his wife as she force-feeds herself a painfully spicy soup. “Her husband is screaming, ‘Keep going! They’re ahead of us!’ And she’s crying, eating, and vomiting. I went, This is the end of civilization.”

Washed-up C-list celebrities had also started moving into the reality realm, with “The Osbournes” and “The Anna Nicole Show,” in which the addled former Playboy Playmate flounced around her mansion with her toy poodle. Kudrow found it “heartbreaking.” She was a fan of the British version of “The Office,” which adapted the mockumentary format for TV. These trends would lead to “Real Housewives,” the Kardashians, and “Parks and Recreation,” but, in 2004, Kudrow and King realized that they were the perfect frame for Your Favorite Actress, who became Valerie Cherish. Kudrow gave Valerie a slight Southern twang, inspired by George W. Bush’s efforts to be folksy.

They pitched the idea to the HBO executive Carolyn Strauss, who told them, “I’m not sure what this is, but why don’t you just write it?” Kudrow wanted Valerie to be happily married and financially secure so that viewers would know that her lunge toward reality TV was motivated by ego, not family or money problems. Kudrow and King particularly enjoyed concocting the fake sitcoms. Within their fun-house-mirror Hollywood, Valerie’s original claim to fame was “I’m It!,” a workplace comedy that had aired for four seasons in the “Murphy Brown” era. “It was maybe serviceable, but not great,” Kudrow said, explaining the concept. King—who had worked on the nineties sitcoms “Good Advice” and “Cybill”—was inspired by slapsticky shows built around actresses who “all had perms, and they were always getting tangled up in their computer cords,” he said. He based “Room and Bored” on bad Fox sitcoms set at beach houses, with fake ocean backdrops that never moved.

Sitcoms had evolved between “I’m It!” and “Room and Bored,” in part because of “Friends,” which created the template for “sexy” comedies that chased a Gen X cool factor and revolved around romantically enmeshed twentysomethings. But Kudrow wanted to make sure that “The Comeback” didn’t seem like a roman à clef of her own life. In the first installment, Valerie’s nemesis was Paulie G. (Lance Barber), the hipstery co-creator of “Room and Bored,” whose smug nihilism was a foil for her ingratiating perkiness. Although Valerie was the butt of the joke, the show made it clear that she was a victim of Hollywood misogyny and ageism. In one episode, she tries to win over the male writers with a late-night cookie delivery, but, when she looks through a window into the writers’ room, she finds them pantomiming graphic sex with her, roaring with laughter.

In 2002, a former assistant in the “Friends” writers’ room, Amaani Lyle, had filed a complaint after she was fired from the show, claiming that the writers had made her listen to their lewd fantasies about Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox. (A court later dismissed the suit.) “When that happened, I really did feel, like, Yeah, they’re going to say vulgar, mean, terrible things. What do I care, if I don’t have to hear it?” Kudrow told me. “But it actually did make other people who had to be in the room uncomfortable, and that is an issue.” Both Kudrow and King waved away the idea that “The Comeback” drew directly on Lyle’s case, because that sort of jokey, crude behavior was so common in writers’ rooms that everyone on staff had a horror story.

Midway through shooting the first season, King confessed to Kudrow, “Sometimes I wonder if we’re too far ahead of the curve. People don’t have a point of reference for a woman character in this position.” Kudrow shrugged off his concern. “Well, they do now,” she told him. Cable shows were packed with antiheroes—Tony Soprano, Larry David—but it would be years before the comic antiheroines of “Veep” and “Girls” made their entrances. When “The Comeback” aired, in the summer of 2005, there were hopeful signs; David Bowie called HBO to request screeners, because he was travelling and didn’t want to miss any episodes. In 2006, Kudrow and King were each nominated for a Primetime Emmy. After both lost, HBO informed them that it wasn’t renewing the show. “I wasn’t devastated,” Kudrow said. “It didn’t compute, because our ratings were as good as ‘Entourage’ ’s ratings their first season.” King reasoned, “On some level, the studio might have been expecting ‘Friends’-meets-‘Sex and the City’ numbers. I think they wanted Phoebe in Manolos.”

Kudrow moved on to other projects, including “Web Therapy,” her show about an unlicensed shrink who offers three-minute online sessions, which was also produced through Is or Isn’t Entertainment. Meanwhile, fans of “The Comeback” quietly multiplied. (King recalled becoming aware of a “very big swell in New York.”) After nearly a decade, HBO indicated that it was open to a second season. Kudrow and King came up with the idea that Paulie G. was making a single-camera HBO dramedy and Valerie gets cast as a thinly veiled version of herself. The second season riffed on a new slew of television trends, among them toxic cable auteurs (Matthew Weiner, Louis C.K.) and “sexposition,” the tendency on such shows as “Game of Thrones” to dress up plot exposition with gratuitous nudity.

Season 2 came with a tragic hurdle: Robert Michael Morris, the actor who played Valerie’s loyal hair stylist, Mickey, was battling Stage IV melanoma. Kudrow and King wrote his illness into the show, and Morris (who had been King’s college drama teacher) made it through the shoot. When he died, in 2017, Kudrow couldn’t imagine continuing the series, but she and King kept batting around ideas—what if Valerie starred in a Broadway show? Nothing felt big enough. After the 2023 actors’ and writers’ strikes, in which A.I. became a heated point of contention, King had a brainstorm: Valerie gets offered the lead on a sitcom, but it’s written by A.I. Like Valerie, “The Comeback” had become an underdog, barely clinging to the fringes of the HBO lineup. The third season would catch up with Hollywood’s bleak new era of corporate consolidation, second-screen content, and technical upheaval. As King told me, “Now everybody’s as desperate as Valerie was.”

One morning, Kudrow met me at a coffee shop in Tarzana, the San Fernando Valley neighborhood where she grew up. (It’s named for Tarzan; Edgar Rice Burroughs had a ranch there.) She was incognito, in a floppy sun hat and oversized sunglasses. The place had a comfy brown couch in the back, but it was no Central Perk—rather than gossiping with friends over cappuccinos, the patrons were all sitting alone with laptops. We drove to her childhood home, a four-bedroom house on a bright cul-de-sac. The front gate, framed by bougainvillea, had a forbidding “No Admittance” sign, so we stayed in the car. She pointed to a neighbor’s house. “See this long, steep driveway? We would walk our bikes up and then just fly down,” she said, recalling her tomboy years.

Kudrow had an early knack for mimicry, according to her brother David, a neurologist. “There was a Barbra Streisand album called ‘My Name Is Barbra,’ and she would listen to it over and over again, start to finish, and then she would start singing the songs,” he told me. “She had this incredible gift for capturing the most subtle characteristics of somebody.” She loved Bob Newhart and Lucille Ball, and in elementary school she would imitate Lily Tomlin’s pipsqueak character Edith Ann. “I was always offering, ‘I could perform this for the other classes. Might be a treat,’ ” she said. “That’s where Valerie Cherish comes from: ‘I’m a delight! ’”

The Kudrows were secular Jews. Once, when her grandmother was babysitting, Kudrow asked her, “Don’t you miss your parents?” “She started crying, and she said”—Kudrow put on a thick Russian accent—“ ‘They’re dead. They’re all dead. Hitler killed them!’ I said, ‘Who’s Hitler?’ I thought, Was he a serial killer?” Decades later, she executive-produced the genealogy docuseries “Who Do You Think You Are?,” in which celebrities uncover their roots. For her own episode, she travelled to the Belarusian village where her grandmother’s family had been killed by Nazis.

Her father, Lee, who is now ninety-two, grew up poor in Brooklyn, and came to California when he was seventeen. Lee suffered from debilitating cluster headaches. “He told me that, in medical school one time, he banged his head against the pavement to try to knock himself out, because it hurt so much,” Kudrow recalled. He became a prominent cluster-headache specialist. When Lisa was born, in 1963, the family was living in Canoga Park; they moved to Tarzana when she was two. Her mother, Nedra, who died in 2020, worked as a travel agent after Lisa’s two older siblings, David and Helene, were grown. (Lisa also has a half brother, with whom she didn’t grow up.)

Kudrow described her childhood as a happy, upper-middle-class haven—until she hit adolescence. We drove past Portola Junior High, which she attended in the seventies, during the rise of the Valley Girl. One of her classmates was Pamela Skaist, the future co-founder of Juicy Couture. “It felt like Opposite Day every day,” Kudrow recalled. “Popular was not nice people. I didn’t understand that. It wasn’t the smartest. I didn’t understand that. It wasn’t even the prettiest, always. I didn’t understand that. They were mean. Some of them were terrible people. Not Pam Skaist—she was actually nice. But nothing made sense.”

Kudrow pulled out an old photo of herself: stringy brown hair, beaky nose. “Believe me, boys would say, ‘Why are you so ugly?’ ” she recalled. A summer foray into theatre, for which she wrote her own comic sketches, was “the only thing that saved me.” She looked up to her brother David’s best friend, Jon Lovitz, a fixture at the Kudrow home. “I was at their house more than my own,” Lovitz told me. “Mrs. Kudrow, she was such a wonderful woman. I like cookies, so she goes, ‘Jon, I have a drawer for you in the kitchen,’ and she filled it with cookies.” He gave Lisa a book about acting, which he signed, “To my fellow thespian.”

Before high school, Kudrow got a nose job, which gave her face the sleekness of a Brancusi bird. “But I still couldn’t find a boyfriend,” she said. “My father would tell me, ‘You gotta be light and flirty like your sister is.’ I just went, Oh, then it’s not going to happen.” She gave up theatre for biology, thinking she’d become a doctor like her father and her brother, who was in medical school. When she arrived at Vassar College, in upstate New York, she was elated to be among East Coast intellectuals. “Everyone thought I was an idiot, because I was smiling all the time like a California ditz,” she said. She spent her days hunched over lab equipment, and her comedic instincts went dormant. A tough organic-chemistry class knocked her off the premed track, but she took an interest in evolutionary biology, a subject that still fascinates her. As we drove around Tarzana, she lit up talking about CRISPR technology and gene mutations and a study she once read on fossilized birds in Georgia.

But something else was nagging at her. On trips home from Vassar, she’d see actors on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and note how dumb and phony they sounded—the same observation that would later give rise to Valerie Cherish. “All of a sudden, the thought was, O.K., Lisa, when you’re on ‘Letterman,’ just be yourself,” she recalled. “That would blurt into my head, and then I’d think, Wait, why would I be on ‘Letterman’? For an evolutionary-theory idea?” She’d hear ads for sitcoms on the car radio and recoil at the actors’ cornball delivery, imagining herself underplaying the jokes instead. “Lisa, remember to throw it away more,” she recalled thinking. “Wait, why would I need to throw it away? I’m going to pursue evolutionary biology!”

After graduating from Vassar, in 1985, she moved back home, planning to apply to grad school, and started working in her father’s clinic. She held down a job there for eight years, during which she assisted on a study of whether certain headache types correspond to hemispheric dominance in the brain. Earlier research had suggested that sufferers of cluster headaches were more likely to be left-handed; Kudrow’s data disproved this. The results were published in the headache journal Cephalalgia in February, 1994—seven months before “Friends” premièred—under four bylines, including L. V. Kudrow. (Yes, her middle name is Valerie.)

In the meantime, the voice in her head was urging her toward comedy. In 1985, Lovitz was cast on “Saturday Night Live,” and Kudrow’s new proximity to show business intrigued her. She was twenty-two. “I just thought, I don’t want to have any regrets later,” she said. She called Lovitz for advice. He told her, “Go to the Groundlings,” where he had been a member.

When Kudrow informed her parents that she wanted to try acting, she recalled, “they went, ‘Thank God! Maybe this’ll lighten you up, and then you can meet someone.’ ” But when she telephoned the Groundlings, which has a theatre and a comedy school on Melrose Avenue, she was asked when she had last performed and answered, “Junior high.” They sent her to an improv class taught by a woman named Cynthia Szigeti. The first day, Szigeti told everyone to mime lifting a heavy disk and getting angry. “I saw some of these people just indicating anger, like, Grrr,” Kudrow said. “I went, Nuh-uh, that’s horrible. And Cynthia was, like, ‘Great!’ ” Kudrow forced herself to return for the second class, where she spotted a tall red-haired guy doing the disk exercise. “He’s not making a meal out of it—he’s just doing it,” she recalled. “I go, Oh, that’s what commitment is. He’s being it. He’s not overdoing it. So, when that exercise is over, I make a beeline to this guy.” It was Conan O’Brien.

Kudrow credits O’Brien with unlocking comedy for her—at least the comedy she wanted to do, which was smarter and weirder and rooted in truth. “I wouldn’t have made it if not for him,” she told me. (They briefly dated and have remained close friends. When O’Brien had his unlikely audition to replace Letterman, in 1993, he didn’t own a suit jacket, so Kudrow took him to Fred Segal and helped him buy one.) Eventually, she got into the main troupe, alongside Kathy Griffin and Julia Sweeney. “I was not a crowd-pleaser at the Groundlings, because I didn’t do extremely broad, blackened-tooth characters,” Kudrow said. “But I didn’t care. If they were dumb enough to let me in, I was going to do what I liked doing.” Her characters, besides Your Favorite Actress on a Talk Show, included a biology teacher who cracks nerdy jokes about deoxyribonucleic acid, and an old Jewish lady who complains about getting stuck in traffic during the Rodney King riots. Michael Patrick King remembered seeing Kudrow in a sketch called “Audrey Hepburn on a Fishing Show.” “It was her with two rural fishermen, and the point was that she was nothing like Audrey Hepburn,” he said. “It was this offbeat thing, but she was completely unique in her rhythm.”

Another Groundlings member, Robin Schiff, had written a play called “Ladies’ Room,” about women in a bathroom at a pickup bar. The comic relief was a pair of gal pals dressed in “ultra-trendy slutwear,” inspired by the club girls Schiff would see outside the restaurant Nicky Blair’s, on the Sunset Strip. She asked Kudrow and another Groundling, Christie Mellor, to read the roles—Kudrow remembered them as Airhead No. 1 and Airhead No. 2, but they became Romy and Michele—at a backer’s audition for Aaron Spelling. It was Kudrow’s first audition. In one scene, Romy (Mellor) remarks, “I hate throwing up in public,” and Michele responds, “Me, too.” Kudrow delivered it with a burst of enthusiasm, as if delighted to find evidence that they’re soul mates. “I was, like, That girl’s a genius,” Schiff told me. “She showed me what I’d written. So I went through the whole play and looked at all the ways I could bring back ‘Me, too!’ ‘This underwear is riding up my butt crack.’ ‘Me, too!’ Stuff like that.”

“Ladies’ Room” opened at the Tiffany Theatre, in West Hollywood, in 1988, and ran for eight months. Romy and Michele stole the show, eventually becoming the heroines of the 1997 movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” starring Kudrow and Mira Sorvino. (A sequel is in the works, with the film’s original actors.) The play brought Kudrow a guest spot on “Cheers,” and Schiff wrote Romy and Michele into a pilot called “Just Temporary,” in which the pair work at a temp agency. Kudrow and Mellor also appeared on “Newhart,” as Long Island variations of Romy and Michele. This was the legendary series finale, in which Newhart’s character wakes up next to Suzanne Pleshette, who played his wife on his previous sitcom, “The Bob Newhart Show,” and realizes that “Newhart” has all been a dream. On set, Newhart introduced himself to Kudrow, and she made a mental note that it was possible to be a huge sitcom star and also be nice.

In 1993, Kudrow booked what seemed like her breakthrough role: Roz, a deadpan radio producer, on “Frasier.” She’d been neck and neck with Peri Gilpin. But something was off. “Before we started, I broke out in hives,” Kudrow recalled. “I kept going, Why is this happening right now? And then, sure enough, it just wasn’t working, from the table read on.” She remembered James Burrows, the “Cheers” veteran who was directing the pilot, telling her that Roz was coming off as too mean to Frasier. Burrows’s recollection is different. “Lisa was playing quirky, which she does brilliantly,” he told me. “And we felt we needed somebody who could go toe-to-toe with Frasier.”

Days before the pilot began filming, Kudrow was replaced with Gilpin. “They were so nice about firing me,” she said. “They sent flowers.” Still, she was upset. She took long walks, and all the time in the sun lightened her hair; she then told her salon to make her a full blonde. An agent had advised her that she needed to be gorgeous to land a sitcom, which she chafed at—wasn’t being funny enough? “I went, O.K., maybe I’m not one of those people who gets to work in this business,” she said.

Soon after the “Frasier” debacle, Kudrow got a last-minute offer to play a waitress on an episode of another NBC sitcom, “Mad About You.” Her agent considered it a step down, but she couldn’t afford to pass. “I drove there not knowing what I was going to do,” she said, “and just went, O.K. Listen, respond, and make funny. That’s it. And I did.” The show offered her five more episodes—her rent for the year—and the absent-minded waitress became a recurring character named Ursula.

One of the “Mad About You” producers was dating David Crane, who was casting his own sitcom, tentatively titled “Friends Like Us.” Kudrow had a choice between two pilot auditions, for Crane’s sitcom and for a Fox show, and chose Crane’s because it was on NBC and wouldn’t conflict with “Mad About You.” Her audition monologue was a glimpse into Phoebe’s troubled past:

I remember when I first came to this city. I was fourteen. My mom had just killed herself, and my stepdad was back in prison. And I got here, and I didn’t know anybody. And I ended up living with this albino guy who was, like, cleaning windshields outside Port Authority. And then he killed himself, and then I found aromatherapy!

Instead of investing every misfortune with emotion, she underplayed them: she threw it away, as if describing a series of minor inconveniences. That was Phoebe’s peculiar magic; her world view may have been beamed in from Mars, but it all made perfect sense to her. In preparing for the audition, Kudrow drew partly on a Vassar classmate who’d had to leave school and work at a nursing home. “She’d come visit and tell us stories as if she was having the best time, and she wasn’t faking it,” she recalled.

NBC brought Kudrow in to see Burrows, who was directing the “Friends” pilot. She thought, Oh, no, the guy who fired me from “Frasier.” She performed the speech again, and he said, cryptically, “No notes.” “I left, going, ‘No notes’? Either that’s ‘Yep, she’s hopeless, just like I thought’ or ‘Nothing to change.’ ” It was the latter. “She was right in her wheelhouse,” Burrows told me. “That’s a character she knows somewhere in her past or present.” (Burrows plays himself in “The Comeback,” an industry sage who gives Valerie advice that she’s too self-involved to hear.) When all six leads had been cast, Burrows flew the actors to Las Vegas for some bonding; he handed them gambling money and said, “This is your last shot at anonymity.”

Though “Friends” was about people in their twenties, Kudrow was already thirty-one, the oldest of the cast. Courteney Cox, who had the biggest name (she’d played Michael J. Fox’s girlfriend on “Family Ties”), was struck by her confidence. “My first memory of her was the way she would talk to the producers and be able to articulate what did work and what didn’t work for any particular scene,” Cox told me. “It was fascinating to watch, because she commands respect. She doesn’t come off as defensive. She’s just clear. And then she plays this character who is very airy, yet wise.”

In the pilot, which aired on September 22, 1994, Phoebe attempts to cleanse Ross’s aura; she was something of a New Age cliché, a human version of Fruitopia. But, as the show continued, she became less a ditz than a bohemian freethinker. “On a cosmic level, a certain piece of her is somewhere else and exploring other things,” Kudrow said. By the third season, she was worried that she was getting lazy. “Matt LeBlanc, who’s so fucking smart, went, ‘What’s going on with you?’ I went, ‘I’m not doing the work. I know what it took to justify my lines, and I’m not doing it this year.’ He said, ‘Because you don’t have to. You can relax. She’s in you.’ ”

By then, the six castmates were wildly famous. “The thing that prepared me was that I had been with a really good therapist,” Kudrow told me. “I got pretty centered around boundaries.” But she struggled with body image. “Courteney and Jennifer were smaller and thinner,” she said. “So clothes didn’t fit me the same.” She asked for more flattering costumes, and her self-consciousness got even worse when she had to appear in a bra in “Romy and Michele.” To lose weight, she binged weight-loss teas containing senna, a natural laxative. “That was bad, that stuff,” she said. “I think it messed me up for a while, like, my whole system.”

The “Friends” juggernaut gave the cast an entrée to movies. While Cox did the “Scream” franchise and Aniston became a rom-com queen, Kudrow used her hiatuses between “Friends” seasons to make independent movies, including “Clockwatchers,” with Parker Posey and Toni Collette, and “The Opposite of Sex,” Don Roos’s gay drama in which Kudrow plays a repressed woman mourning her brother’s death from AIDS—a stark contrast to Phoebe. For that film, she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress, beating Judi Dench in “Shakespeare in Love.” “She’s not interested in career-climbing and choosing the next big commercial project,” Roos said. “She just has a very high level of taste.”

As “Friends” got bigger, the cast banded together for a series of well-publicized contract negotiations. They knew that the ensemble’s chemistry was the show’s strength, and that gave them leverage. Their collective bargaining made waves in the industry. Dick Wolf, the “Law & Order” creator, later remarked that the network should have tamed the cast by firing LeBlanc. (“Easy for you to say,” Kudrow said. “The star of your show is a formula.”) In 2000, the press reported a rumor that Kudrow was the cast’s lead negotiator, which she denied. “My team went, ‘We’re going to find out who fucking did this,’ ” she recalled. “I was, like, ‘Why is that a bad thing, that people think I’m smart?’ I didn’t realize: because it makes you a problem.”

At a certain point, it looked as if the standoff might prematurely end the show. “I was driving home one night and thought, O.K., that was it, maybe,” Kudrow recalled. “And I cried my way home. I’m going to miss Phoebe! I like her!” But the gambit worked. By the final season, each “Friends” star was making more than a million dollars per episode, plus a percentage of syndication. “Friends” has never gone out of style—for Gen Z, it represents a pre-smartphone Eden—and the show remains a billion-dollar property. Still, Kudrow told me that reports of the actors regularly making twenty million dollars a year in passive income were overblown. (“Not even close.”)

Only six people in the world have known what it was like to be a Friend. The number is now down to five. Matthew Perry had battled addiction for decades before his death, in 2023, from a ketamine overdose. I asked Kudrow if she’d been worried about him over the years. “How could I not be?” she replied. “Every single time I saw paparazzi, I thought, Is this about Matthew? Are they about to tell me something bad?” After he died, she comforted herself by watching “Friends” reruns; there were entire seasons she’d never seen. She told me that, in the days since her dog had died, she’d been watching the show again. “I guess it’s my grief companion,” she said, with a sad laugh.

On our last day together, I formulated a Unified Theory of Lisa Kudrow: each of her characters has a missing puzzle piece, and their personalities warp around its absence. But each missing piece is different; Phoebe’s floatiness is nothing like Valerie’s self-absorption. “That’s what’s funny to me—like, the smartest person is missing something that’s hilarious, and they don’t realize it,” Kudrow said. “There’s something they can’t sense. It’s how I feel.”

Her own missing puzzle piece, she said, has to do with her “emotional attachment to things.” She didn’t want me to see her home office because it was cluttered with piles of mementos. Kudrow lives in Beverly Hills with her husband, Michel Stern, a retired ad executive from France. She met him in 1987, when he was dating her roommate. “I opened the door and saw him, and I went, I think he’s for me,” she recalled. “Beautiful—which was out of my league. He looked like someone who stepped out of a Merchant Ivory movie.” Six years later, they ran into each other at a party and arranged a tennis date. “We wouldn’t have been ready for each other six years earlier,” Kudrow said.

They married after the first season of “Friends” and had a son, Julian, after Season 4; the pregnancy was written into the show. Kudrow was the first Friend to get married and to have a child. “I had a five-year-old by the time we finished. That was a big battle for me,” she said. Julian’s kindergarten art show was on the day that the cast was set to appear on “Leno” to promote the series finale. Kudrow tried to pull out; the teacher offered to arrange a special viewing. Some years later, Julian was struggling in school while Kudrow was shooting a movie in New York. “They were, like, ‘Put him on medication,’ ” she recalled. “He’s not a plant! He’s a human being! His mom’s away! I thought, I need to be home. He needs an advocate.”

For many years, she and Bucatinsky worked out of a rented house in West Hollywood, along with Bucatinsky’s husband, Roos, who directed the first season of “Web Therapy” from the garage before they moved to a soundstage in Van Nuys. The trio has a tradition of getting together for game nights: Boggle, Shanghai rummy. “Lisa introduced me and Don to Mexican Train dominoes, which had been taught to her by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who were a couple at the time,” Bucatinsky said. In 2018, their company adapted an out-of-print board game, 25 Words or Less, into a syndicated game show, hosted by Meredith Vieira, which is now entering its eighth season.

On the new season of “The Comeback,” Valerie and Bucatinsky’s character, Billy, are executive producers of “How’s That?!,” the A.I. sitcom. One morning, I met Kudrow in a conference room in Beverly Hills. She was in producer mode, wearing a blazer and glasses, reviewing dailies from the season première on a laptop. She popped a piece of nicotine gum and pulled up a scene in which Valerie is hosting a new podcast called “Cherish the Time.” Grasping for material, Valerie babbles about catching “The Goodbye Girl” on TV, as her Gen Z social-media assistant (played by Ella Stiller, the daughter of Ben) watches blankly. “I don’t like this take,” Kudrow said, clicking around. There was a great take in which Stiller had stifled a yawn, she remembered—but where was it? “That’s the one!” Kudrow said. “Did you see that? So subtle and good.”

To bone up on A.I., she had talked to her nephews who work in tech. On her phone, she showed me an A.I. clip that someone had sent her, of Phoebe and Kurt Cobain playing a grunge version of Phoebe’s signature tune, “Smelly Cat.” “I’m a little creeped out,” she said. “I hope nobody thinks there was some point in time when we were all sitting around with Kurt Cobain. He died before we even started! That’s the part that feels so dangerous to me, that we can’t trust anything that we see.”

She moved on to a scene in which Valerie gets stunt-cast as the lead in “Chicago” on Broadway. She scribbled notes on a pad, chuckling at Valerie’s cheery obliviousness, then closed her laptop. Saying goodbye to the character was difficult. When she recalled shooting the final scene, tears welled up. “That was hard,” she said. “Because I do love her now.” Ridiculous as Valerie Cherish is, she and Kudrow have lived parallel lives: both are sitcom stars turned producers, still weathering the cruel demands of show business into their sixties. “She’s always taken care of herself, whether it looks like it or not,” Kudrow said, of her alter ego. “She knew what the rules and limitations were for her and would work around them. And wouldn’t stop. And didn’t care. Throw however many pies in her face as you want.” ♦

The World of Fashion

How Zac Posen Went from Making Ball Gowns to Remaking the Gap

The fashion designer was brought on as Gap Inc.’s creative director to help restore the company’s cultural relevance. Has the Gapaissance arrived?

By Rachel Syme March 16, 2026

In 2010, the American fashion designer Zac Posen was promoting a new line of garments that he’d designed for Target when a reporter asked him about catering to a mass market. “I don’t like the word ‘mass,’ ” Posen responded. “I think of animals, of livestock.” As a more palatable alternative, he offered his own coinage, a glitzy (if somewhat unwieldy) portmanteau that he proudly embraces as a mantra to this day: “fashiontainment,” the kind of clothing that manages to infiltrate popular culture. Posen’s penchant for fashiontaining has been evident from his earliest years as a wunderkind luxury designer in early-two-thousands New York City. He founded his own label, House of Z, in 2001, at the age of twenty, outfitting movie starlets and downtown It Girls in Old Hollywood-style gowns. His designs earned him a reputation for precocious craftsmanship—the late Vogue editor André Leon Talley, a Posen champion, compared him to the master American couturier Charles James—but his status as a boy prince of the fashion world was achieved through a combination of charisma, social ambition, and a publicist’s instinct for, as he likes to put it, dressing the “right girl in the right dress at the right time.” Posen, a onetime judge on the reality show “Project Runway,” told me recently that his biggest heroes are not only fellow-designers but impresarios of the stage and screen, such as Walt Disney and Florenz Ziegfeld. “I’m a producer at heart,” he explained. “I like to put on a good show.”

Posen ran House of Z for nearly two decades, putting out runway collections under a self-named label. Then, in 2019, he was forced to abruptly shutter the company after his investors tried and failed to find a buyer. The loss of his brand capped a series of professional bruisings in the twenty-tens, as his business scrambled for new revenue streams, and he was cast as a cautionary figure who’d perhaps flagged under the weight of his own hype. During the pandemic, he considered leaving fashion altogether. Instead, in late 2023, he announced that he was taking a job as executive vice-president and creative director of Gap Inc., the retail conglomerate that includes the Gap and its sister brands, Athleta, Banana Republic, and Old Navy (where he also holds the title of chief creative officer). His appointment, by Gap Inc.’s new C.E.O., Richard Dickson, marked the first time that a single figure would oversee creative decisions across the entire enterprise. The fashion world, for the most part, reacted with perplexity. Why would a designer known for red-carpet looks and business woes be the best fit to steer a multibillion-dollar empire of denim and basic tees? Lauren Sherman, a fashion reporter for Puck, wrote, of the news, “No one—no one!—could have imagined.”

Posen’s hiring came at a moment when both he and the Gap stood to benefit from a reinvention. In the nineties, under the C.E.O. Mickey Drexler, the Gap was considered the go-to outfit of the stylish Everyperson. Ubiquitous TV commercials featuring young people swing dancing in khakis or lip-synching to “Mellow Yellow” gave the brand a sheen of fresh-faced relevance. Gap print ads were shot by Annie Leibovitz and Herb Ritts. The “Friends” cast wore the Gap. Sharon Stone wore Gap tops to the Oscars—twice. But sales peaked in 2000, and in 2002, after a seventeen-year tenure, Drexler was fired amid slumping profits. He went on to revitalize J. Crew. Gap Inc., meanwhile, struggled to adapt to a retail landscape increasingly dominated by e-commerce and fast-fashion competitors such as H&M and Uniqlo.

Posen saw in the company an opportunity to exploit his instinct for spectacle at a time when even so-called heritage brands were under pressure to compete in the attention economy. “Consumers don’t just want clothes anymore,” he said. “A brand needs to be a storyteller. That’s what Gap was in its heyday, and what it can be again.” But the Gap in its heyday was still just a retail clothing chain. Today, to get bodies into stores, the shopping experience must be theatrical, Instagrammable, gamified. Under Posen’s creative direction, Gap Inc. is attempting to become a sprawling hub of cultural production, with forays into high fashion, entertainment, and even food and drink—the Gap, but make it a café. His job takes place partly on the earthly plane of mass merchandise—Old Navy body mists, Banana Republic linens—and partly in the newfangled realm of, in the corporate-strategy parlance that he now throws around, “visioning” what more the brands can be.

On the day of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (C.F.D.A.) awards, a starry annual gala, last November, Posen was crouching in a carpeted hallway at Fouquet’s hotel, in Tribeca, fluffing out the train of a custom denim gown worn by Ejae, the mononymous Korean pop star who sang the lead role in the Netflix animated film “KPop Demon Hunters.” The garment was branded Zac Posen for GapStudio, the name of an atelier, launched by Posen last spring under the Gap umbrella, that specializes in gowns for celebrity clients which he “Gap-ifies” by using denim, khaki, white cotton shirting, and other sartorial “codes” associated with the brand. Ejae’s gown had a skintight halter top and a triangular bodice that was mitred at the center—a favored Posen technique, whereby two pieces of fabric are joined at a forty-five-degree angle to create a slimming illusion. Vertical stripes of denim had been intricately hand-distressed using Dremels, a process that took fifteen artisans more than ninety hours. The finished portions of fabric had the texture of spun sugar, with thousands of fine white threads protruding from the bluejean casings.

“It’s a real moment, isn’t it?” Posen said of the dress, popping off the floor with spring-coiled energy. In his youth, Posen’s strong eyebrows and curly dark hair, which he often slicked back, gave him a striking resemblance to Rudolph Valentino. Now forty-five, he has accrued a few crinkles in the corners of his eyes, though his cheeks are still taut and cherubically rosy. “Let’s make some content!” he said, blowing a kiss at videographers who were on hand to capture the preparations for social media.

One of Posen’s early custom-Gap successes, before the official launch of GapStudio, was a button-up shirtdress made of crisp white poplin which Anne Hathaway wore to a jewelry launch party thrown by Bulgari, in Rome, in 2024. She styled it inside out, so that the seams showed, and left it partially unbuttoned, so that one of its sleeves drooped insouciantly off her shoulder, accentuating a lavish diamond necklace around her throat. Photos of the look—part Italian countess, part American coed on spring break—went viral. At Posen’s urging, the Gap quickly put a version of the dress up on its website, for a hundred and fifty-eight dollars. It sold out within two hours.

Today, GapStudio makes both one-off custom designs for celebrities and limited-edition retail collections marketed at a slightly higher price point than typical Gap fare. Last year, Posen persuaded Apple Martin, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of his longtime client Gwyneth Paltrow, to appear, alongside her mother, in a GapStudio promotional campaign, wearing designs such as a double-breasted car coat ($278) and a vegan-patent-leather minidress ($148). It was one of several recent notable Gap ads—including throwback dance videos featuring Parker Posey and the global girl group Katseye—that have helped generate new buzz around the brand, prompting headlines heralding a “Gapaissance.” At the turn of the millennium, Gap Inc.’s market capitalization was forty billion dollars. Now it’s around a quarter of that, but during Posen’s tenure net sales have crept steadily upward. In January, the credit-rating agency Moody’s revised Gap Inc.’s status from “stable” to “positive.”

Posen speaks about design with an eager grandiloquence that over the years has alternately charmed and chafed observers in the fashion world. (When he was in his twenties, the critic Cathy Horyn described him as “a little bit adorable and a little bit awful.”) Riding with Ejae in a black car to the C.F.D.A.s, at the American Museum of Natural History, he delivered a disquisition on the properties of wool, at one point fingering a coil of an employee’s curly hair to demonstrate the elastic quality of natural fibres. But he is equally likely to hold forth on maritime lore, African dance, Stephen Sondheim, the history of the Radio City Rockettes, the filmography of Vincente Minnelli, or the Muppets (whose most glamorous member, Miss Piggy, he dressed for the Oscars in 2012). His conversational fluency is matched by his talent for Rolodex-building. He told me, of his first C.F.D.A. gala, in 2002, “I was sitting at the Swarovski table, and I met Helmut Swarovski, the O.G. of the company. That was the start of a relationship where he co-underwrote my shows.” Posen’s name-dropping has a flowchart momentum, each acquaintance branching off into subsequent friendships, projects, parties. He went on, “We did a show at the Four Seasons where we filled planters with crystals, and my life-of-the-party girlfriends just dove in, literally swimming in them. Years later, I did these amazing stockings covered with Swarovski crystals with Wolford, in Austria. That was my period of thinking about schnapps, schnitzel, and pantyhose.”

Many designers who dress celebrities do a couple of polite fittings and then ship the final pieces to their clients. Posen often chaperones his famous customers—Zac-ettes, he sometimes calls them—expertly schmoozing arm in arm on red carpets. He treats some looks as live productions, with himself as ringmaster. In 2016, for a technology-themed Met Gala, he dressed Claire Danes, a longtime friend and a fellow child of SoHo artists, in a fibre-optics-laced organza gown that glowed like a jellyfish, courtesy of thirty battery packs concealed within a capacious cupcake skirt. To accommodate the oversized creation, Posen chartered a Sprinter van to take them to the event, and asked the Met to saw the arms off of Danes’s dinner chair, so that she could fit into her seat. (“Uma Thurman had to help me pee,” Danes recalled. “I just appreciate how generally unafraid and audacious Zac is.”)

Ejae was not, like Danes or Natalie Portman or many of Posen’s past clients—Thurman, Molly Ringwald, Cynthia Erivo, Katie Holmes, Karen Elson—a friend from outside of work. The plan to dress her had been devised, for maximum pop-cultural impact, by Patty Chong, Gap Inc.’s senior head of celebrity and entertainment relations, a position that Posen helped to create soon after joining the company. He seemed to be working to generate rapport.

“There’s no corset in there!” he said of the dress. “I made it so she can breathe. A performer needs to perform!”

“I could even sing ‘Golden’ in this,” Ejae said, referring to a hit “Demon Hunters” song.

“Oh, please sing it!” Posen said.

“Gonna be, gonna be golden,” Ejae warbled. A makeup artist was powdering her face by the gleam of a portable ring light. An assistant asked if Ejae wanted a square of Dubai chocolate. She puckered her lips, considering, then said, “Later.” I asked Posen if he might put a version of Ejae’s dress on the market, as he had with Hathaway’s. He shook his head and said, “It took too much work.” But then he looked back at the dress and cocked his head. “O.K., but maybe,” he said, the retail gears in his brain beginning to turn. “We could take a photo of the shredded denim and print it on a voile or crêpe T-shirt, like trompe-l’oeil.”

In recent years, a wave of Y2K nostalgia among members of Gen Z has revived certain style hallmarks of the time. Ugg boots are back in. So are hair claws, spaghetti straps, and, against better judgment, boot-cut jeans. On Instagram, a popular account called @gapplaylists shares soundtracks that Gap piped into its stores in the nineties and two-thousands, a mix of classics and chart-toppers of the day—Lauryn Hill, Counting Crows, Avril Lavigne. American teen culture back then revolved largely around loitering at the mall, and the Gap was more or less the king of the shopping center, with some twenty-five hundred U.S. stores. (There are currently fewer than four hundred.) Many fans of Gap-store playlists on social media were in diapers during that era, but, as Posen puts it, “they romanticize the idea of it.”

Posen is late Gen X, born in 1980, but he never really knew mall culture firsthand. He grew up in a loft on Spring Street, in a milieu that he recalls as an ur-bohemian “cultural smorgasbord.” His father, Stephen, is a Yale-trained painter and photographer. His mother, Susan, began her career in book publishing, though by the time Zac, the couple’s second child, was born she had gone to law school and was supporting the family as an associate at a Wall Street firm. Posen remembers selling lemonade to gallerygoers on Spring Street, and a fashion show thrown by a “high-end kimono store” next door. His best friend, who lived upstairs, was the son of a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian. “So you’d hear Native American chanting from the elevator,” Posen said.

Creativity in the Posen house was a religion, though not always a communal one. The front half of the family loft was Stephen’s studio, which Posen was taught to think of as “a sacred space, not to be disturbed.” Posen, his mother, and his older sister, Alexandra, entered the apartment via a side entrance, and for a time Stephen kept a fortune-cookie message pinned to the studio door which read, “An open door is not always an invitation to come in.” Last spring, Posen took me to visit the loft. His parents weren’t there—they still own the place but live year-round at a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—so we entered through the studio, which had high tin ceilings and smelled heavily of turpentine. “It’s still weird, after all these years, to come in his way,” Posen said.

What Posen did see of his father’s work had a formative effect. Stephen went through a phase of stretching textiles over cardboard boxes to create 3-D shapes on jumbo canvases. “That was the first time I saw draping in action,” Posen told me. Father and son would collect fabric that had been discarded on the street by local clothing factories. At the age of four, Posen made a miniature dress, using the wire and cork from a champagne bottle as a base, and started outfitting a She-Ra doll in custom clothes. Susan, whose grandmother was a seamstress, taught him how to use a sewing machine when he was six. Alexandra recalled, “He was making things all the time: sketching, sewing, sculpting, using tinfoil, yarmulkes, leather cutouts, fabric remnants, whatever.”

By middle school, Posen was experimenting with his own personal style, wearing dandyish ensembles of capes and old-fashioned jodhpurs or sailor pants. In ninth grade, he enrolled at St. Ann’s, a Brooklyn private school known for attracting the children of the creative élite. He showed up on his first day dressed like Charlie Chaplin and caught the eye of Lola Schnabel, a daughter of the artist Julian Schnabel and the designer Jacqueline Beaurang. Lola invited him over to her mom’s West Village brownstone, and the two became inseparable. She recalled, “I’d been surrounded all my life by interesting homosexuals, and I told him right away that I knew he was gay, and that it was wonderful.” (This wasn’t news to Posen—he had come out the previous summer, at a drama camp.)

Posen’s own parents were not, as he put it, “part of any scene,” but through Lola he was initiated into a world of influential downtown figures. The Vogue editor Grace Coddington was a neighbor of Beaurang’s, and the artist Rene Ricard, who’d been a fixture at Andy Warhol’s Factory, was her regular dinner guest. Posen began going out to night clubs and wearing increasingly eccentric outfits that he described as “vampiric-tribal-dandy-punk-romantic bricolage”—lime-green platform shoes, satin neck ruffs, a homemade faux-raccoon coat, a vintage muff. (“The muff was a little much,” his father told me.) During a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute when he was sixteen, Posen chatted up Richard Martin, then the institute’s head curator. Martin offered him an internship. “I remember the first time I got to see a Madeleine Vionnet up close,” Posen said, referring to the French designer who popularized the bias-cut gown. “I laid down right under it, and it totally changed my life.” Posen began making garments for his girlfriends, including what he called “morning-of dresses,” stitched in a single day for the recipient to wear dancing the same night. The writer and director Lena Dunham was a St. Ann’s student five years below Posen, and for a time Posen worked as her babysitter. She recalled him as “the couturier of our high school. He was doing exactly what he does now for the Met Gala, except for all the cool girls going to prom.” He attended graduation dressed as the Pope.

In 1999, Posen was accepted into the prestigious Central Saint Martins fashion school, in London. He experimented with more avant-garde designs there, including transparent jumpsuits made out of parachute material. One of his pieces, an elaborate leather corset dress, was selected from a student showcase to be in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s permanent collection. But Posen’s biggest break involved a combination of happenstance and copious social connections. One day during his first year in London, when Lola Schnabel was living with him, she wore a bias-cut cocktail dress that he’d made, and her friend Naomi Campbell, the supermodel, asked where she could get one. Campbell soon became a devoted early customer. When Posen returned to New York over Christmas, he brought a flamenco-style pink cocktail dress that he’d made as a sample for Campbell and lent it to his St. Ann’s friend Paz de la Huerta—a daughter of Spanish nobility and a budding indie actress—to wear to a holiday party at the home of another friend, the future “Girls” star Jemima Kirke. At the party, de la Huerta danced while brandishing the gown’s frilly skirt like a matador’s cape. The journalist Daisy Garnett, who was in attendance, was so captivated that she wrote a story for the Times in which she deemed Posen’s creation “the best dress in the world.”

The breathless writeup kick-started Posen’s career. He returned to school for the spring semester, but in New York, he recalled, “things were taking off for me, and really rapidly.” That summer, buyers for the department store Henri Bendel asked to see Posen’s designs, so he converted his family’s living room into a makeshift atelier, hiring a cutter and a seamstress. Marc Bagutta, the owner of an influential SoHo boutique, proposed going into business together. Posen asked his mother for legal advice, and she began to manage his career. She told me, “I had enough of a business background to be sensible and sometimes a little outrageous, and it worked.” They turned down Bagutta’s offer and, flouting industry convention, insisted that Bendel pay for Posen’s garments up front.

That September, the Twin Towers fell, only a mile from Posen’s childhood home, and he felt a decisive pull toward remaining in New York. He dropped out of fashion school and launched House of Z, with his mother as C.E.O. and his sister as creative director. New York City hadn’t produced a homegrown fashion star since Marc Jacobs, in the early nineties, and in the months after 9/11 the fashion world was eager to tout its resilience by anointing Posen, a native son, as its next heir apparent. High-profile allies swarmed. Mary Loving, the first of multiple powerful publicists to work for Posen for free, helped him organize his first big solo runway show, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. Guests included the formidable British fashion editor Isabella Blow and Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, who attended at the request of her son, another friend of Posen’s. John Frusciante, the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was dating Lola Schnabel’s sister, Stella, composed an original score for the show, and Posen cast several of his own friends as models. The clothing was polished, but the mood was loose. Jemima Kirke wiggled down the runway in a powder-pink midi dress, looking like a tipsy flapper. Wintour (who is now the global chief content officer of Condé Nast) told me, “We had very few young designers who could go up against the big guns.” She added, “You went to one of Zac’s shows and you just felt this generational shift.”

Designers often appear briefly on the catwalk at the end of their shows to wave to the crowd. Posen walked the full runway, wearing a tuxedo with tails, and took an exaggerated bow. Some saw the display as a welcome departure from the industry’s stuffy decorum. At the very least, it reflected an unbashful approach to self-promotion which served Posen well as an up-and-comer. He told Horyn, the critic, “I’m definitely planning ahead for a brand that spans the universe, a Zac Posen universe.” Belinda Luscombe, writing in Time, noted that most fashion designers grow more market-conscious in the course of their careers, as they bend to the pressures of maintaining a business. Posen, with his flattering gowns and showmanlike personality, “seems to have been born commercial,” she wrote, adding, “Maybe when he’s forty-five, he’ll be the most radical designer around.”

The lobby of the Gap Inc. headquarters, in San Francisco’s financial district, features a large black-and-white photograph of the Gap’s co-founders, the late husband-and-wife team Donald and Doris Fisher, standing in front of the first Gap store. It opened, in the San Francisco neighborhood of Ingleside, in 1969, selling only LPs, cassettes, and Levi’s. The name was a reference to “the generation gap”—however wide the cultural chasms between American youth and their elders, the Fishers figured that Americans of all ages could agree upon jeans. One morning last June, Posen met me at Gap Inc. wearing sunglasses indoors, Anna Wintour style. “Forgive the eyewear,” he said. “I scratched my cornea. But it’s kind of a fetching look, no?” We walked through the building’s soaring atrium, which houses a coffee shop called Fisher Brew and a hulking Richard Serra sculpture from the Fishers’ extensive art collection. A floor display for Old Navy activewear featured Lindsay Lohan, a fellow emblem of millennial pop culture who has been engineering something of a comeback. “That badass girl once hijacked a gown of mine, I think from Rachel Zoe’s closet, and wore it to the Met Gala,” Posen said. “She’s also, by the way, one of the most professional people I’ve ever worked with.”

Posen knew little about Gap’s history before starting the job. Now, he said, he’s “obsessed.” His lodestar is Drexler, the former C.E.O., who transformed the Gap from a domestic denim emporium into a global force in merchandising. In addition to more entrepreneurial accomplishments—such as founding Old Navy, the company’s most lucrative label, in 1994—Drexler refined the Gap’s branding toward an uncluttered, Scandinavian-lite aesthetic. In business correspondence, Posen likes to use a blue Sharpie whose ink matches the hue of a Gap logo that Drexler introduced in 1988, featuring a white serif font against a navy square. (Drexler told me, by phone, that he admires Posen’s “innate ability to get attention,” but added, “He still has quite a challenge ahead of him to get Gap back to its important place in American style.”)

Posen technically still lives in New York, with his fiancé, the ballet dancer and choreographer Harrison Ball, in an Upper East Side duplex decorated in the kind of high-boho style that suggests both exacting taste and the means to pursue it—velvet settees, mismatched Persian rugs, vases of fresh flowers that he grows in a terrace garden. But he now spends at least half of his time in a rental house in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, a onetime artistic enclave that has become crowded with Silicon Valley executives. Posen estimates that he made more than forty cross-country trips last year. “I redesigned Delta’s uniforms in 2018, so they treat me like royalty,” he said.

The Gap’s two preceding creative directors, Patrick Robinson and Rebekka Bay, were corporate-world veterans with little name recognition, and both struggled to make an imprint on the brand. Robinson held the position for four years; Bay lasted only two. After Bay’s departure, in 2015, Gap Inc.’s C.E.O. at the time, Art Peck, chose not to replace her, calling creative directors “false messiahs.” In 2020, seeking a flashier partnership, Gap Inc. collaborated with Kanye West on a line that was projected to generate more than a billion dollars in sales over ten years. Two years later, West pulled out of the deal.

Richard Dickson arrived at Gap Inc., in the summer of 2023, as the fourth in a series of short-lived C.E.O.s. He had first crossed paths with Posen several years before, when Dickson was the president and chief operating officer at Mattel; Posen had pitched him the idea of an American Boy Doll, who would be an aspiring fashion designer. When Dickson joined the Gap, it “arguably had revenue, but we didn’t have relevance,” he said. “We needed to symbolically show that design and creativity is going to matter.” He initially approached Posen about a job as the creative director of Old Navy only. To Posen, the idea seemed far-fetched. “I hadn’t been inside an Old Navy in probably fifteen years,” he said.

But in October of 2023, they met in New York, over fries at Balthazar, and had what Posen described as a “cosmic moment” of joint visioning. Posen brainstormed ideas for making over each brand in Gap Inc.’s portfolio. Athleta, the company’s fitness-focussed label, should embed itself more visibly in the world of professional sports. Banana Republic, long criticized for its colonial iconography, should shift its narrative to emphasize “the modern explorer.” Old Navy should introduce designer collaborations and sleeker accessories to offset its reputation as bargain-basement. And the Gap, the “jewel” of the company, should drive the culture in fashion and beyond. Posen had been in talks with several historic French fashion houses about creative-director jobs. He came close to accepting one position (it was rumored to be either Lanvin or Givenchy, and he told me, winkingly, “It’s not Lanvin”), and he and Ball had begun planning a move to Paris. But he’d also met with Hollywood producers, thinking that he might like to start his own film studio, and in Dickson, who at Mattel had helped oversee the “Barbie”-movie phenomenon, he found a like-minded partner in fashiontainment. Soon after Posen got the job, Gap Inc. trademarked the term, which is now peppered throughout its press releases.

In Posen’s telling, the corporate grind is just another creative odyssey. Business meetings, he insisted, can be a “kind of art form.” At headquarters, we sat in a conference room as a phalanx of Gap-clad employees discussed the use of A.I. in merchandise design. Posen nodded along while doodling in a notebook with his blue Sharpie. (He was diagnosed with A.D.D. as a kid, he told me, and keeping his hands occupied helps him focus.) One employee demonstrated a program that could generate a garment pattern based on ChatGPT-like prompts—“girl in a pink tutu,” “woman in a khaki trench.” Posen looked intrigued.

“How culturally intelligent can the prompts be?” he asked. “Could I say, ‘Let’s make the camel coat more Carolyn Bessette’?”

A program engineer with an Eastern European accent, speaking via video chat, assured him that he could do that and much more: “You can say you want to get it in the style of the ‘Tron’ movie. You know the ‘Tron’ movie? And you’ll get something glowing in neon.”

From there, Posen flitted among meetings with the other brands, doling out opinionated enthusiasm. At Athleta, he inspected an upcoming collection of cross-back sports bras, whose straps he deemed admirably stretchy. At Old Navy, he strode around with a slouchy black tote from the brand’s new Bag Shop slung over his shoulder. (The actress Jenna Ortega, who has been known to carry a hundred-thousand-dollar Aupen purse, would soon be spotted carrying the tote. Retail price: thirty-six dollars.) At a “visual merchandising” meeting at Banana Republic, he perused window-display props that included cardboard cutouts of zebras and a rotating plane propeller. “These are a little Jonathan Adler,” he said of a stack of white books with a large white plaster egg perched on top. “I think it’s better when we lean more toward a Brancusi vibe.”

Gen Z-ers don’t just want to buy things; they want TikTok-able “experiences,” and many retail brands have diversified accordingly: a Ralph Lauren coffee truck in Rockefeller Center draws lines that often snake around the block; at Skims, on Fifth Avenue, the elevators are equipped with mirrored doors and halo lighting to encourage selfie-snapping. In January, Gap Inc. hired a former Paramount executive as its first chief entertainment officer, to oversee licensing and partnerships in “music, TV, film, sports, gaming and more.” One wall in Posen’s office was covered with vision boards outlining potential “retailtainment” ideas—Gap-branded photo booths, an in-store skate park, cafés serving gazpacho-flavored Gap popsicles. In the meantime, there has been Gap x Sushi Club, a collaboration with the celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa involving a T-shirt, a hoodie, and a trucker hat whose Gap logos feature a pair of crossed chopsticks in lieu of the “A.” Posen described a forthcoming Old Navy flagship store in Herald Square, in rhapsodic corporate-speak, as a kind of theme park, “very much in the spirit of Walt Disney’s belief in ‘creating happiness for people of all ages, everywhere.’ ”

There is a photo on Posen’s phone which was taken at a low moment, in 2021, after the closing of House of Z. He’d been dressing up and going out, extravagantly, his entire adult life. Now, during a trip to Malibu to clear his head, he sat alone on the beach in loose jeans and a plain white Gap T-shirt. L.A. listlessness can be spun as its own kind of glamour—Posen prefers to think of that time as his “Joan Didion moment”—but unfussy personal style was still a foreign concept to him. He said, of the Gap tee, “I don’t even know how that shirt ended up in my world.”

Even at the height of Posen’s black-tie era, his brand operated in a state of financial precarity. “There was no hidden daddy or mommy money,” he said. “I put on the tux and went out every night because that’s what I had to do to sell it. Then I would come back to the studio and drape through the night and sleep on the couch.” He hawked his wares on the trunk-show circuit, a sort of designer pop-up tour. During an early show in L.A., he recalled, “suddenly, all these Rolls-Royces came down from the Hills, like Norma Desmond in her limousine.” The hustle was productive but exhausting—“Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, and Coral Gables, every season, for fifteen years.”

In 2003, on the night of the C.F.D.A. awards, Posen struck up a conversation with the music mogul Sean Combs. Combs, who is now serving more than four years in prison for prostitution-related crimes, had achieved success with a streetwear brand, Sean John, and was looking to make inroads into high fashion. He offered to supply Posen with capital in exchange for a fifty-per-cent stake in the business. The partnership thrust Posen deeper into the entertainment world. “I’d be in the studio with Pharrell, or there when Missy Elliott was, like, finalizing her album,” he recalled. He and Combs co-hosted a 2004 C.F.D.A. after-party that was attended by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. (Alluding to the notorious sex-and-drug-fuelled “freak-offs” that became a subject of the criminal case against Combs, Posen said, “I never, ever went to one of Sean’s parties, thank God.”) Posen began making glitzier ready-to-wear, embellished with fur, flowers, and feathers, and putting on bombastic runway shows that drew a high-low spectrum of famous faces—Chuck Close, Liza Minnelli, Rihanna, Jenna and Barbara Bush. “I took a lot of shit for focussing so much on dressing people for the red carpet,” he told me. “Now every fashion brand has their own celebrity-relations department.”

When the 2008 recession hit, the millennial decadence that Posen represented began to seem out of step with the times. In 2009, New York Fashion Week shuffled its calendar, and Posen, who for years had enjoyed prime evening billing, ended up with an unfashionably early Monday-morning slot. Not long afterward, the Times Style section published a piece titled “The Trials of a Former Boy Wonder,” detailing Posen’s financial struggles and calling him a fashion-world Icarus who’d gone “too far, too fast.” The article noted that he had gained a reputation for diva-ish petulance, lashing out in response to negative media coverage and complaining to the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar about a photo shoot that would have featured him alongside characters from “Sesame Street”—he’d been denied more serious spreads, he claimed, because his company couldn’t afford to be a print advertiser.

In the fall of 2010, Posen decided to pull his namesake label from New York Fashion Week and stage a “renegade runway show” at Paris Fashion Week instead. For his venue, he chose a ballroom where Yves Saint Laurent had débuted many lauded couture collections, but Posen’s collection was heavy on pink feathers, black lace, and other flirtations with “Moulin Rouge” kitsch. The show got a cool reception. Christina Binkley, who panned the looks in the Wall Street Journal as “boudoir games,” told me, “I think he got in his head.”

House of Z’s setbacks exacerbated growing tensions in Posen’s working relationship with his mother and his sister. As C.E.O., Susan had concocted creative solutions to help the company’s bottom line, including having the pasta-sauce brand Bertolli sponsor a fashion-show after-party. “I was angry about that,” Posen recalled. “I felt that she was trying to sell me cheap.” He wasn’t above going strategically down-market, however. In 2010, following the example of so-called diffusion lines such as Marc Jacobs’s Marc by Marc and Donna Karan’s DKNY, he launched a sub-brand, Z Spoke, in partnership with Saks Fifth Avenue. But it failed to take off, and his one brick-and-mortar store, a tiny Z Spoke in the meatpacking district, was short-lived. He developed a fragrance—a single hit perfume can keep a designer in the black indefinitely—but the firm he was working with folded before the scent could launch. Susan had begun to feel that her son’s company was outgrowing her expertise. “I think she stayed to protect me and this family of employees we built,” Posen said. In the end, though, his Paris gambit proved to be a breaking point: “I pushed everyone hard, and it was distressing.”

A month after the show, Susan stepped down as C.E.O. She was replaced by an executive from Scoop, a fashion brand funded by Yucaipa, a corporation owned by the billionaire supermarket mogul Ron Burkle, who’d taken over Combs’s investment after buying a stake in Sean John. Posen’s sister had also resigned. “It was a really lonely and confusing time,” he said. “There was an article that came out around then, ‘Everybody Hates Zac Posen.’ There were rumors that I was a drug addict, which was totally outrageous. I felt that everyone who supported me had gone away.” One day in June, during a visit with Posen to his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, Susan told me that, after she left the company, “Zac and I took some space, where we had to untangle the part of me that was working with him and the part of me that was his mom.” In 2022, she was diagnosed with metastatic bladder cancer, and the disease has recently advanced; in early March, she estimated that she had only weeks to live. Posen told me that they’ve “completely repaired” their relationship. “I don’t want to curse, but I want to say she did a fucking incredible job, O.K.?” he said. “I think that blood is stronger than anything.”

Under the new C.E.O., Posen pivoted his runway collections to focus almost exclusively on evening wear. In the fall of 2011, he staged a “New York comeback show” at Lincoln Center, featuring a parade of exquisite ball gowns. He found a niche clientele of aristocrats from as far away as Dubai, but as Binkley, the critic, put it, “Even Oscar de la Renta could not survive on gowns alone.” To underwrite his opulent designs, he went on a mass-market licensing spree, lending the Zac Posen name to sunglasses, high heels, costume jewelry, and wedding gowns for David’s Bridal. He also took on a side gig, as the creative director of women’s wear for Brooks Brothers, and the role on “Project Runway.”

Fashion has always been a business of patronage, with artists vulnerable to the whims of wealthy backers, and hindsight has proved that the fashion and entertainment industries of the millennial era were magnets for unsavory moneymen. Posen’s “Project Runway” job was brokered by Harvey Weinstein, the now disgraced sex offender who was then an executive producer on the show and, along with Sean Combs, a close associate of Ron Burkle’s. (More recently, Burkle’s name surfaced on the flight logs for Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, although Burkle reportedly found Epstein “creepy” after a one-way trip and flew commercial home. According to Vanity Fair, Burkle’s aides used to refer to his own private plane, on which he took frequent trips with his friend Bill Clinton, as Air Fuck One. Burkle has not been accused of wrongdoing.)

When I asked about his own association with Combs and Weinstein, he told me that they “were at the center of the culture” at the time, and that he had no knowledge of the “abhorrent behaviors that have since been exposed.” Weinstein had asked Posen to join “Project Runway” when it was first in development. “I didn’t do that, so he was really furious,” Posen said. “He told me I wouldn’t dress anybody in Hollywood ever again, and stomped his fist on a table, Louis B. Mayer style, and didn’t talk to me for ten years.” (A representative for Weinstein said that this “isn’t true from Harvey’s recollection” and that he and Posen “got along very well.”) Posen at first worried that doing reality TV would undermine his standing in the fashion world, but he grew into a “Project Runway” evangelist—the show, he said, is “the ultimate fashiontainment.”

Judging “Project Runway” had made Posen’s predecessor on the show, Michael Kors, an industry giant—in 2011, his namesake brand had one of the biggest fashion I.P.O.s to date—but the job did more for Posen’s name recognition than for his bottom line. By early 2019, Burkle’s Yucaipa was trying to sell House of Z. Posen travelled to Asia in search of a buyer, but ultimately, he said, “the patience for a sale ran out.” That October, the board of managers decided to cease business operations, effective immediately. “It was, like, ‘Needles down, pack up your office.’ I had to let sixty employees go, some I’d been working with since I was twenty, with less than an hour’s notice,” Posen said. “I remember going home and sitting by my fireplace for two days straight, just staring. ” In the legal fallout, Burkle won the rights both to Posen’s name and to his archive of thousands of runway designs. His name was sold off to Centric Brands, a holding company known for snapping up troubled I.P. To this day, his garments remain in Yucaipa’s custody, with Posen granted only visitation rights. Still, Posen wanted it known that he is “deeply grateful” to Burkle for having funded the business in the first place.

In March, 2020, COVID-19 brought the fashion industry to a standstill. Designers who kept their ateliers open resorted to making masks. Brooks Brothers filed for Chapter 11, and Posen quietly departed, leaving him fully unemployed for the first time in two decades. He had, by then, met Ball, who was a rising star at the New York City Ballet. “I understood Zac and what he was going through, because we were both basically child performers with prodigy syndrome,” Ball told me. Many designers get rich selling their trademarks, and Ball recalls people congratulating Posen on his early retirement. “Everyone thought that he cashed out, like how Donna Karan got ninety million dollars or whatever,” Ball said. “But that was not the case at all.” On the contrary, Posen was suddenly cash-strapped. He said, “I was fielding calls from people requesting clothing, the whole alphabet of stars and stylists, and it was wonderful to be wanted, and also kind of tragic to not be able to deliver, because I simply could not afford to do a free one-of-a-kind piece. ”

In the fall of 2020, with Fashion Week cancelled because of the pandemic, Posen staged a public draping session in Central Park, creating impromptu looks on dress forms while a crowd observed from a safe distance. He used architectural folds of beige silk and surgical mesh—and, in one case, as an homage to a beleaguered New York City, built a bodice out of a “Thank You for Shopping” plastic bag. In the following years, he took one-off costuming gigs—bias slip dresses for a ballet performance that Ball choreographed; peacocking mid-century gowns for Ryan Murphy’s TV show “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”—working out of his parents’ empty loft with just one assistant. “I was going around to fabric shops, like I did as a teen-ager,” he recalled. “It was kind of like the feeling of putting on my first collection again.”

Posen said that this comparatively quiet period brought him closer to his father. In Pennsylvania, Stephen took us out to a large stone barn that serves as his studio, where painted canvases were stacked along the walls. He estimated that some two thousand of his pieces have never been publicly seen, and he invoked a saying attributed to the artist John Cage, about working in one’s studio “completely alone,” free of “the past, your friends, enemies, the art world.” Stephen added, “My whole history has been about fighting for that space.”

I wondered if Posen had ever felt judged by his father for his own commercial impulses. He said no. “That’s not what my dad values,” he told me. “But there’s a vulnerability in putting my work out there in the world. I think it takes a certain fortitude to be in that kind of continuous, ongoing cultural dialogue.” Lately, Posen has been wearing his dad’s old fedoras paired with outfits from the Gap or Banana Republic. The latter’s flagship location is just around the corner from the Posen family’s loft. During a recent redesign of the store, Posen hung several of Stephen’s paintings on the walls. Stephen, for his part, chooses to see Posen’s Gap Inc. work as an exercise in creative constraint. “Bluejeans aren’t going to change radically,” he said. “So the question becomes: How are you going to tweak them, within your limitations?”

Posen has dressed stars for the Met Gala almost every year since 2004. He first went to the event in 1997, at the age of sixteen, when he was a Costume Institute intern. Even when he was out of work in 2022, Anna Wintour let him attend as a guest for free (though he had to go stag). Designing custom gowns for the Gap wasn’t part of his original brief, but, several months into the job, Met Gala season came around, and he went to Dickson with an idea. The actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph had asked him for a dress to wear to the 2024 Academy Awards, and he’d had to turn her down. What if he went back to Randolph—now a newly minted Oscar winner, for her role in “The Holdovers”—and offered to make her a Gap-branded look for that year’s Gala? He designed Randolph a stately denim corset number: the first Gap-ified Posen design.

GapStudio now makes around twenty red-carpet looks per year, plus four small-scale retail collections, out of the company’s offices in Tribeca. Posen likes to refer to the studio as his “laboratory,” a place to coax denims and cottons into unfamiliar new states. At a secondhand store in San Francisco, I’d watched him buy a worn T-shirt off the proprietor’s back, hoping to replicate its diaphanous, striated texture. One of his innovations is a proprietary material he calls “liquid denim,” a slippery acid-washed synthetic blend. He encouraged me to buy a liquid-denim shirtdress, which had a surprisingly lightweight quality and mother-of-pearl snap buttons, a subtle upgrade from the standard Gap fastenings. Other recent GapStudio pieces are less obviously wearable—a midriff-baring tuxedo vest, a “shrunken cardigan” cropped just underneath the bustline, a boxy men’s satin suit based on an outfit that Posen made for Timothée Chalamet. GapStudio items are not meant to compete with luxury clothes. “Our customers don’t want the Row from us,” Posen said. The goal is to put a designer spin on mass-market items: instead of Posen gowns that have been Gap-ified, they’re Gap clothes that have been “Zac-ified.” The company declined to share production or sales numbers with me, but the collections’ commercial success seems to matter less than ample publicity and an artisanal aura. Dickson told me, of GapStudio, “It haloes the entire brand.”

In November, Gap Inc.’s third-quarter fiscal report revealed that earnings for 2025 had increased five per cent compared with the year before, continuing a positive trend that’s now run for eight quarters straight. Gap Inc.’s current trajectory is no guarantee of the future—J. Crew had a similar reputational turnaround in the mid-two-thousands, only to declare bankruptcy in 2020—but it has contributed to a sense that Posen’s imprimatur has paid off. During a November earnings call with investors, Dickson shouted out Posen for bringing attention to the brand both “on the runway” and “on Main Street.” Afterward, a friend of Posen’s in finance texted to say that an earnings-call mention was “the equivalent in business of getting an Oscar.”

Around the same time, Posen moved offices, from a space on the Old Navy floor to an executive-level suite just across the hall from Dickson’s. It includes a draping station, complete with a wall of mirrors, like Halston once had, so that between meetings Posen can, as he put it, “get my hands wet in clay” designing for GapStudio. He wears kneepads when working on hems, and a pincushion wrist bracelet; when he’s done, he fastens his pieces directly onto their mannequins and ships them in refrigerator-size boxes back to the atelier in New York. For this year’s Oscars, he dressed the “Euphoria” star Barbie Ferreira in a blue silk moiré gown whose skirt resembled a Gap button-down shirt.

During several visits to the atelier last year, I saw one-of-a-kind looks in various stages of development: a denim pants suit and ruffled blouse, for Uma Thurman; a “custom Athleta” dress in sequinned spandex, for Simone Biles; and an ivory Met Gala ensemble, for the up-and-coming actress and model Laura Harrier. Last fall, the actress Zoey Deutch, Posen’s longtime friend and client, asked him for a garment to wear to the Academy Museum Gala, in L.A. She envisioned a princess gown in cherry red—a look that Posen admitted was more “Zac coded than Gap coded.” He decided to take the job anyway, as an exception for a Zac-ette. In a bit of prepositional gymnastics, the dress was branded not “Zac Posen for GapStudio” but “Zac Posen Made in GapStudio.” It had a V-shaped halter neckline that plunged almost to Deutch’s navel; the skirt billowed voluminously, like a giant upside-down poppy in bloom. The next day, Gap was flooded with calls from celebrity publicists requesting similar looks. The director of Gap Studio, Sonia Traikia, who also worked for Posen during the height of his evening-wear phase, told me, “My team can make a corset with our eyes closed. It’s making T-shirts and jeans that has been a bit of a learning curve.” ♦

Shouts & Murmurs

Rolling Out Our New A.I. Tools

Shouts & Murmurs

Rolling Out Our New A.I. Tools

By Lizzie Widdicombe,Paige Ferrari March 16, 2026

Attention: Team Acme
We’re thrilled to announce a new company-wide initiative. This week, we’ll be rolling out a robust suite of new A.I. tools, designed to future-proof our workflows and insure that we remain best in class when it comes to employing the very biggest tools in the white-collar workforce.

As part of this rollout, you can expect enhanced collaboration with a range of newly A.I.-optimized losers and douche bags. Some of these tools may feel familiar, but please note that they have undergone a meaningful transformation in the past six months, and are now fully agentic when it comes to annoying you.

Please begin working with these tools immediately. At the end of the quarter, we’ll be circling back to assess key performance indicators.

Management, Acme Enterprises

James
Works in marketing. Last year, he was a crypto tool, making frequent references to the “on-chain community.” After a brief pivot to brewing mushroom coffee in the office kitchen as part of his “cognitive stack,” he has reëmerged as the company’s Chief A.I. Growth Architect, a role that appears to consist mostly of coming up with novel ways to spam people.

Tara
Known for her capable client-facing presence, Tara has begun leveraging generative A.I. to scale her personal brand as a “female founder.” A recent LinkedIn post opens with a vulnerable story about her pet iguana’s heat-lamp preferences and concludes with the revelation that “the real moat isn’t efficiency. It’s warmth.”

Matthias
Seemed normal, until a breakup caused him to spend an entire long weekend lurking on Moltbook. Was reborn as an “A.I. Doomer.” Begins Slack messages with “In eighteen months, none of this will matter.” Has replaced his profile photo with a picture of a crumbling statue.

Preston
Now talks openly about his poetry degree from Bard instead of saying he “went to college on the East Coast.” Has started wearing scarves and spending company time writing sonnets, which—in two years, when we’re unshackled from capitalism—he knows will be Earth’s primary currency.

Bryan
Relentless self-explorer who has started feeding transcripts of his interactions with every woman in the office to his A.I. agent, and tasked it with forming a strategy for getting him laid. So far he’s had zero sex but generated substantial training data. His agent notes a particular brick wall when it comes to macking on Emily.

Emily
Previously the office social secretary, Emily has quietly declared it a feminist move to outsource all emotional labor to L.L.M.s. Her Slack messages wishing you a happy birthday and offering condolences after the death of your dog are suspiciously bullet-pointed. ♦

Fiction

My Balenciaga

Fiction

My Balenciaga

By Han Ong March 15, 2026

My mother and I were living on the Upper West Side in New York, with my aunt Fely, who was at work—she was the chief thoracic surgeon at Mount Sinai—when I heard that the film star Nora Aunor had passed.

I knew that my mother had brushed elbows with Nora at a few movie premières in Manila in the seventies, so I delayed telling her the bad news. When I finally did, she went completely silent. She was already seated, but her rib cage sank into her hips.

We forwent social media. We knew that the sites would be overflowing with tributes and condolences from various Filipino expat communities. Ours was only a small sorrow, because it had been decades since we’d seen one of Nora’s films, and we were grieving more for ourselves—our individual vanished youths, during each of which Nora had been a big, big light—than for the deceased performer. Eventually, my mother remarked that seventy-one was far too young to be making an exit from life. She herself was only four years older than Nora had been, and Aunt Fely two years older than my mother. She clutched my hand. But we all understand that Nora had her troubles, she said.

Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.

Softly, she spoke of Nora’s beauty, which, to her, needed no qualification. She had the most exquisite face, my mother said. To think that some Filipinos were forever debating her looks! She shook her head. We really are a nation that doesn’t deserve anything good. Dark skin this, mukhang-achay that—what a country of self-loathers! Thank God I got you out of there, Lucy.

Here I could be excused for thinking that my mother was really using Nora to talk about herself.

My mother knew from beauty. On a trip to Rome with her parents when she was fifteen—undertaken so that my grandmother could secretly ask God, at a church in the Vatican, to compel her husband to reform his cheating ways—a strange man who turned out to be a modelling scout had stopped my mother to hand her his card. Imagine my mother’s surprise when my grandfather had encouraged her to turn up at the address on the card the next day. By the late sixties, she had been in Dior’s stable of models, and her crowning achievement had been her anointment as one of the in-house favorites at Saint Laurent, in the seventies, the designer’s most hectic decade.

Because the American market had deemed my mother “exotic”—a label that did not have commercially positive implications until many decades later—she’d worked only in Europe. In Manila’s inner circles, my mother’s beauty, just like Nora’s, had been put between quotation marks by some snipers in the gossip columns and, most distressingly for her, by the film-studio heads, who couldn’t see her either as the star’s love interest or as the female villain—the only two paths for an attractive woman in film in those days.

My mother was a smiler, a cackler. But I was worried that the death of Nora, the most lachrymose of movie actresses, would have the power to reveal—if only for a short stretch—the shadow slivers of her otherwise well-curated self: the worrier, the weeper.

Not having inherited my mother’s looks, I had grown used to a certain calibre of so-called compliments—from Aunt Fely, who cooed them, and from my mother, whose sense that I needed consolation was clear: what a “pleasant,” “comforting,” “reassuring” face Lucy had! More or less the same pitying remarks had been offered by the teachers at the Catholic schools my mother sent me to, first in Manila, and then in far-flung places like Spain and Italy, from which, to everyone’s surprise, I had emerged as a girl who loved books, whose future was in writing.

Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Han Ong read “My Balenciaga.”

It had been the singular luck of my life to have a mother who waylaid strangers at parties with the tireless subject of her “great novelist daughter.” She told anyone who would listen that I had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (not true); this was later amended to two Pulitzers! Of course, these people had never heard of me, and though I underwent some initial embarrassment, I soon joined her in these, to me, harmless impostures. Once, I expected a friendly woman to contradict my mother’s claim that I had been “short-listed for the Nobel Prize,” but the woman’s mouth opened in awe and admiration, instead of in anger. My two novels had been only modestly successful—in sales, in critical praise—but I suspected that among the reasons my mother was proud of them was that there was a character in each book who was clearly based on her: a great beauty who, in old age, maintained the convictions of her reckless youth.

My mother had raised me on her own, with my Aunt Fely’s help, financial and otherwise. It was like having two mothers. This had caused great dismay for my grandparents—my grandfather in particular. In the last years of his life, he’d grown overly solicitous with my grandmother, hoping to make up for his past indiscretions, and I once overheard my grandmother telling my mother that she wished he would exhaust his energies on other women so that she could be left in peace by “this arthritic pest.”

Here was the great triumph of my mother’s life: she had run circles around her authoritarian father, baffling him so much—and perhaps even scaring him—that he’d expended all his vigilance on his other daughter, Fely, who, under his stern eye, he’d been sure, would become the most esteemed lawyer or doctor, and whose success in life would redound to him.

For many years, the identity of my own father was unknown to me, though I was never especially eager to find out. My mother was two parents in one, both male (decisive and withholding) and female (melodramatic and fanciful) at the same time.

And then, one day, she asked to speak with me alone in her bedroom in the old family house in Pasay, to which we had returned for the last months of my grandmother’s life. This had required another of the frequent uprootings of my growing up—from a Swiss boarding school, in this instance. My grandfather had died the year before.

My mother said, I suppose you want to know about your father. (I didn’t.) He is a famous Italian movie director. And then she told me his name. (This man was not Fellini but could be considered “famous,” in the same way that I could now be considered a “great” novelist: we were respected in our circles.)

I was not moved to contact my father. All I did with the knowledge was to confirm my suspicions that I was the result of my mother’s partner’s ugly features: image searches at the libraries vindicated me with many pictures of a jowly, long-nosed man, whose eyes were almost always shielded by sunglasses.

My mother said, Your father saved me, for a time.

She meant that, when they met, she was at a low ebb financially, and their arrangement was that he would pay for her living expenses. In other words, she was a kept woman. This did not shock me. In a way, I had been raised to be my mother’s most trusted confidante. She thought nothing of telling me that, before her full-time employment at Dior, when the days between modelling gigs sometimes stretched into nail-biting months, she’d slept with men to pay the rent, to buy groceries and new clothes, and to maintain her hairdo. Her regrets, if she’d had any, had, I supposed, been sanded down in the many revisions of her self-narration. She later said that this means of earning money had continued intermittently even into her successful modelling run—and, not to excuse herself, but many of her peers, all of whom knew that they would not be young and good-looking forever, had done the same thing. Their clients were from a higher economic and social bracket—aristocrats, industrialists, movie directors, record moguls, rock stars.

I loved having such a character for a mother. Perhaps my approbation was unusual, but I didn’t know any other way.

From the time I turned eighteen until I was twenty-four, my mother made many energetic efforts on behalf of my romantic future. She never failed to introduce me to the sons of her friends, and she encouraged me to make good use of matchmaking services. But, in recent years, she’d finally admitted her relief that I was, in my early forties, still single, for who else would be willing to devote their life to taking her to doctor’s appointments, escorting her to church services (when fear of death turned her penitent), and going with her to the opera? This last obligation was the most unpleasant, because I was unnerved by the sounds the singers made, and, though I loved melodrama, the plots in these operas were in a category of foolishness that I could not abide. But I understood what I was actually there for: at no other time would I be witness to this woman’s free-flowing tears, ostensibly inspired by the onstage tragedy, but perhaps really, secretly, shed for herself, out of a self-pity that she knew to be unwarranted but that, as a Filipina (perhaps under the guiding star of such figureheads as Nora Aunor), it was her duty to indulge.

Aunt Fely clutched her chest when my mother told her of Nora’s death.

Was she ill? Aunt Fely asked.

I told Lucy not to read that part of her obituary, my mother said. She turned to me. You are not going to speak about it in my presence.

Aunt Fely looked at me and rolled her eyes in sympathy. She asked my mother, You knew her, didn’t you?

Only in passing. Every six months or so, we sat next to each other on a talk show.

There are also pictures of you two together, Aunt Fely reminded her. At Imelda’s film festival, for example.

That couldn’t be, because the festival was in the eighties, when I was no longer living in Manila. That was during my international phase—Hong Kong, the Riviera, Venice, London, Berlin.

You were never in Berlin, Aunt Fely said.

In my imagination, I was.

This was another glory of my mother’s: not only did I not mind having a fantasist for a parent, I counted on her romantic fabrications to enliven our days together. (Was I too forgiving? Perhaps. But only for the things that didn’t matter.)

Aunt Fely said, Nora was always my favorite. She was also Mama’s favorite.

And Lucy’s, too.

Is that true? But you’re far too young, Luce!

I said, Her old movies were always on TV. I wanted to be Nora when I grew up.

I didn’t know you wanted to be an actress.

Thank God you’re not! my mother said.

Not an actress. But I used to lock myself in the bathroom and practice crying in front of the mirror. Like Nora, I could do it without moving any part of my face except my lips.

When was the last time you cried, Lucy? my mother asked.

I never cry.

I’ve trained you well. It’s like having a son for a daughter, my mother said approvingly.

That’s not healthy, Lucy.

Of course I cry, I told Aunt Fely, humorously reversing myself.

At movies? my mother said. That doesn’t count.

Of course at movies. When else? In life, I’m either laughing or clenching my fists.

Don’t lie, Lucy. I’ve never seen you angry. You are the Buddha. You are the Virgin Mary. My mother took only the slightest pause. Emphasis on virgin! She burst out laughing, slapping her thigh to emphasize her maniacal cheer.

Lucy has men, Aunt Fely said.

I do not, I replied.

She does not, my mother said.

Aunt Fely turned to me. You’re not a Perez for nothing. You’re an attractive girl.

I will forever be a “girl” to both my aunt and my mother.

What if I tell you that I don’t have men but I have women?

I didn’t know where this courage was coming from, but I had “joked” about my sexual orientation enough times over the years for me to consider that I had said something without having to say it.

As lovers? my mother asked.

Is this a confession? Aunt Fely asked. Always, the two women acted as if this were the first time I’d mentioned the subject.

I’ve been waiting for this very day! my mother said. Tell me if you are a lesbian! Tell me about your girlfriend!

Finally, here was a downside to being my mother’s daughter: it was impossible to faze her, to throw her off balance.

If I have men or women—I’m not telling either of you, that’s for sure.

You know we don’t judge in this family, right? Aunt Fely said.

You judge all the time! I replied. To hear you tell it, all of your co-workers are morons and incompetents!

We don’t judge about the important things. So is this really true? Are you a lesbian?

Of course not!

My cowardice did, and didn’t, astound me. More than anything, it gave the lie to how old I was. Acquaintances often put my physical age at thirty. Emotionally, in daring and in spirit, I was much younger even than that.

Love is love, Aunt Fely said.

You should sew that on a pillowcase, my mother teased.

Thank you, Gertrude Stein, I chimed in.

Let’s watch a Nora movie tonight! Aunt Fely said.

Of course, there would be tears during the movie—waterfalls! Many of Nora’s weepies were festivals of suffering, cherished by millions. The plots seldom made sense, until you realized that the whole point was to get Nora to cry, and then cry some more. But, in the back of my mind, I was afraid I’d discover that the foundational love of my childhood was erroneous, simply poor taste. Thankfully, the movie we watched that night, “Bona,” by the director Lino Brocka, did not let me down. How well it held up! Nora debased herself for love of an action-movie bit player, who used her as a servant, while tomcatting not only behind her back but right in front of her face.

My mother disavowed her first tears. How embarrassing, she said. She, too, was afraid to come face to face with the entertainments we had once fallen for, now that we had grown so much more sophisticated. These days she wept for a higher level of kitsch—her operas. But tonight her sorrow flowed freely and she stopped wiping her tears away.

I knew that my mother was not crying for some man in her past, but I also knew that she had secret griefs, and that it must have been a pleasure to be able to weep openly for Nora—the onscreen as well as the dead figure—while being the star of her own private soap opera. As for me, I wept for all the times my classmates had called me ugly—which had been all the more painful because I had a mother who was considered the “Sophia Loren of the Orient.” I wept for all the times my mother hadn’t shown up when she was supposed to, and for Aunt Fely’s spinsterhood (but, oddly, not for my own). But, mostly, I wept for Nora’s death—which was also the death of part of my childhood. As for Aunt Fely’s tears—I could not even begin to guess for what or for whom they were being shed.

For the occasion, my mother had put on her Balenciaga, a black dress with two wide shoulder straps, a firm bodice, a full skirt that ended a few inches above the ankles, and the illusion of an underskirt supplied by a band of taffeta ruffles, also black, that peeked out from beneath the hem. A perfect festive mourning costume. It had supposedly been made in the nineteen-forties, for an Italian countess or an English lady, then scrapped, and afterward either smuggled out of the workroom by a starry-eyed seamstress or, with the atelier head’s approval, given to one of the in-house models. It ended up in the hands of another model, who bartered it with my mother for something precious that my mother couldn’t remember—some days, it was a carton of Marlboros, on others a cannister of expensive Chinese tea. The designer’s label was not stitched inside the garment, which was to be expected of a discard, although so few “failures,” if any, were allowed to leave the Balenciaga workroom that no one could know for sure if that was indeed one of the house protocols.

It was my mother’s opera outfit, and, each time she put it on, she crowed that she still had the figure for it—until about two years ago, when she no longer did. The dry cleaner who’d kept the dress immaculate over the years made a joke when my mother took it in to be altered—“Someone’s enjoying life a little too much, huh?”—and, on the spot, my mother changed her mind and took the garment back, and she never patronized that dry cleaner again.

For Nora Aunor night, the dress was zipped only halfway up my mother’s back. She also wore a napkin around her neck so that her tears would not spoil the dress (a shawl served the same purpose at the opera). She meant for me to inherit it after her death, although lately she had been bugging me to try it on and wear it “on a date” or to one of my book events. She made no secret of wanting to live vicariously through my girlish-boyish figure.

There had once been talk of selling it and spending the proceeds on a cruise for both of us, but, as I mentioned, there was the matter of the absence of any label, and to authenticate it might mean, as I understood it, taking it apart, and, more crucially, where would we get the money to pay the experts? (I believed my mother when she said that it was a Balenciaga. I did not think that this was an instance of her taking baroque liberties with the truth. What reason did she have to lie? In her closet were seven Ungaros, three Rykiels, a Kamali bathing suit and a Kamali sleeping-bag coat, five Kenzo dresses, two pieces from the Ballets Russes collection of Saint Laurent—all of which were trades or payments in kind, none of them mothballed, but instead worn ostentatiously and often. To my mother’s credit, she owned no Chanels, having refused several gifts. She took every opportunity to remind anyone who would listen that the Frenchwoman had been the lover of a German military-intelligence officer during the Second World War. Who was this high-principled priestess? She was, because of such stances and suaveness, the love of my life.)

Sad Mom was the version of her I liked the least, and Cackling Comedian my fave. Maybe it was a mistake to watch “Bona” that night, because, over the next few days, she grew introspective.

Seventy-one is too young to die, she repeated to me.

When I didn’t say anything, she continued, Of course, drugs will do that to you.

Nora was on drugs? Though I understood that Nora had been only playing characters who were martyrs and moral exemplars, in no other country’s film industry was there a greater effort to conflate an actor’s onscreen life with her real one.

You know, when I go, it will not be because of drugs or drink.

It was true—my mother was a kind of adept of the principle of refusal. And yet, despite that, there had been the weight gain, just enough for the zipper on the Balenciaga to become her sworn enemy.

How is your new novel going? I never see you staying in your room for long these days.

I’m twiddling my thumbs.

What is the book about?

You know I won’t say anything, so why do you ask each time?

I’m hoping, not for myself but for you, that you’ll publish soon. I know how unhappy having to teach makes you. Living with you while you teach is a chore.

I know that’s not true, I told my mother. You love hearing me complain. It confirms your bad view of the world and of young people.

I don’t believe their writing is really as terrible as you say.

You’re not going to get me to read from their work. I’m not turning their awfulness into your personal entertainment.

You’re so discreet, my mother said, clearly intending to wound me. Where did you get that trait from? Certainly not from me! You know what the two most useless qualities in life are? She didn’t wait for me to reply. Discretion and dignity.

Also, no matter how many times you bring up my love life, the answer is not going to change! Actually, have you ever thought that if you left me alone, I might be able to find somebody?

I don’t like this game of Blame the Mother. I ask about your love life just so we can have some contrast in our days! Three women living together—what are we, a Chekhov play? Just have a fling—but tell me all about it!

Why do you never bother Aunt Fely about her love life?

Fely has always lived under the shadow of my beauty. She will always consider herself a runner-up, not good enough for love.

What about your love life?

Ha! my mother said. None of the first, and barely the second!

Nora Aunor’s death would continue to send ripples out into our consciousnesses. I didn’t know this when I went to the hair salon, but, when I came back to the apartment with my newly shorn head, my mother opened her mouth wide and pointed at me. Just like Nora! Nora Two! She is back in our lives.

It was true. I had, without realizing it, asked for Nora’s famous haircut, which, on her, did not produce a gamine effect but rather that of a tomboy. Though this was a Filipino slang word for butch, for lesbian-adjacent—another way in which Nora had been disrespected by the gossipmongers—I meant it in the conventional sense of an outdoorsy adolescent, whose long hair could only get in the way.

On me? I didn’t know quite how to think of my new look or what had driven me to request it.

You look so beautiful! Aunt Fely said.

The word shocked me, but I didn’t say anything.

My mother advocated once again for me to put on the Balenciaga. She would not relent, and, perhaps because I was still stunned from having been characterized as “beautiful,” I gave in. Five minutes later, I walked into the living room in the dress. It fit perfectly—it did not wrinkle or gap or pinch anywhere.

Model! Model! My mother was clapping her hands.

Of course, I could not take my mother’s instructions seriously and had to exaggerate my catwalk march.

Hold it, Aunt Fely said, and I posed for her phone. This will be my new lock-screen pic, she said.

Happy now? I asked my mother.

You know that photographer from Vogue? my mother began.

Alfonso? Among my friends there were successful and not so successful artists, photographers, filmmakers, many of them diasporic or second-generation Filipinos, Alfonso being one of the latter. (You could say that my mother’s decision to move us to New York City, more than twenty years earlier, had been made on my behalf, with a perfect understanding of the kind of ecosystem I would need in order to thrive. She would not have to worry about me after her death, and there was also the not insignificant fact that New York was Aunt Fely’s home—her true love.)

Tell him that I will commission a picture of you with the hair, in the dress, my mother said.

Alfonso would gladly do it for free, I replied.

At least let him know that I will take him out to dinner. We are not “La Bohème.”

Aunt Fely was beaming. Lucy, I can already see your new book-jacket photo.

I refrained from saying that I would never endorse a professional version of myself as a mid-century society hostess or starlet.

The commission was carried out a few days later. Alfonso was even more excited to see me in the dress than my mother and Aunt Fely had been. I left his studio that afternoon with a print of the best frame in hand, and Alfonso’s hundreds of shots sent as a single zip file to my e-mail.

I could not say that the marriage of the new haircut and the Balenciaga had worked a kind of alchemy (I was still so, so recognizably myself), but there might have been the stirrings of some approaching, numinous change. The short hair made me look neither gamine nor butch but, instead, courageous, as if I were daring the world to look at my naked face. It transformed my plainness into confidence.

And the Balenciaga, surprisingly, did not come across as a costume. On me, it somehow evoked a nun’s habit—this was because of the heaviness of the dress’s construction, and also because of the generous touch of chiaroscuro in Alfonso’s black-and-white photography.

The genes are alive! my mother trilled when I presented Alfonso’s print to her, meaning, I supposed, that I wasn’t a model’s child for nothing.

You are beautiful, Aunt Fely said again.

At least my mother was more honest. Very jolie laide, she said, with satisfaction.

Of course, I had transported the dress with me on the subway, and put it on only once I was at Alfonso’s studio, and the first thing I did upon returning home, even before presenting my mother with the prize from the afternoon’s excursion, was to restore the Balenciaga to her closet, as if to say that my relationship with it had been brief and that it had ended.

The next time I had dinner with Alfonso and our circle of artist friends, at a midtown restaurant, he passed around a dozen prints from our session. If I had known how many compliments my short haircut would elicit, would I still have chosen to have it done? Yes. I loved my new no-muss, no-fuss morning routine. But I would have made myself less available for social occasions. I did not want people talking about my face or my hair—two of the more inconsequential things about me, or about anyone, really.

Chloe, one of the friends at the dinner, was an assistant curator at the Met. Though her remit was not fashion history, she was swift with her opinion on the dress. Could your mother be mistaken? she asked. The dress did not look like any Balenciaga that she had ever seen. After studying my portrait once again, she remarked that the dress looked more like a Givenchy than a Balenciaga. She added that since Givenchy was mentored by Balenciaga, the dress could be viewed as a Balenciaga-by-patrimony, so my mother might not be far off. Alternately, it could have been an experiment by the master. An early draft. A failed caprice. Or it could have been the sum of a series of weary capitulations to a client’s requests, happily nixed. All of which would make it even more valuable, she said.

I asked her if she knew how I would go about authenticating a Balenciaga.

She called me a few days later and said that she was friendly with a researcher in Paris who had just been granted access to the archives at the Balenciaga Museum, which was in Spain, in the master’s home town. She said that the researcher would need to take a look at the dress firsthand, in Paris, before taking it to Spain, to have experts at the museum examine it as well.

Here were the risks: although Balenciaga was known to be a meticulous record keeper, he was a perfectionist and considered his botched efforts akin to criminal evidence, so if that was how he’d thought of this dress he would have understandably kept any trace of it out of the official history. Also, God forbid, but the examining team might need to unstitch a section of the dress, and there was just the slightest chance that it wouldn’t be put back exactly as it had been received. Also, of course, there was always the danger of damage in transit, of human carelessness. The dress would need to be insured, but the damages that I could recoup, if it came to that, would not be of the value of an archival Balenciaga. And the greatest risk of all: the dress might not be a Balenciaga, or even a Givenchy, but instead the handiwork of an unknown tailor with an out-of-the-way shop in Rome, London, or Paris, to whom my mother had taken photographs, asking for a copy to be made that would help her maintain a model’s occupational chic on the tightest of budgets. (The garment was clearly a product of genius. Still, a genius with no name might as well be no genius at all.)

The total fee required to launch my mother’s dress on this byzantine odyssey was seven thousand five hundred dollars. And that, Chloe said, was a “discount.”

I told Chloe that I would get back to her.

Meanwhile, she wanted to know if I would go on a date with her.

I said yes, without having to think twice. Although Chloe was ten years younger than me, she gave off a far worldlier air.

Our date, a week later, ended with a kiss, at her apartment. She was not the first, second, or third woman I had ever kissed. The week after that, I was taking off my top so she could play with my breasts, so she could kiss them. At some point, I signalled with a shiver that I could not go any further than that. And she said the most beautiful thing to me. Nodding, she said, Steps.

Maybe it was Chloe, whom I kept a secret from my mother and from Aunt Fely, or maybe it was the “moral” of Nora’s premature death—Seize life, while you still have it—that made me start working on my novel again. Maybe it was also Alfonso’s photograph of me, which I push-pinned to the wall in front of my writing desk, though not directly in my line of sight. I did not want to fail that woman, a creature I called Laide-Laide, proudly, defiantly ugly. I tacked a photo of Nora right next to mine. Unhappy with the conventional portrait, I made a new Nora by Xeroxing my photographed Balenciaga, cutting it out, and pasting it over her body. Now we had matching dresses and matching haircuts.

My evident happiness was catching, and my mother, too, was lifted out of her depression. I took her to Central Park. I took her to “Aida” at the Met, and then, two weeks later, to “Salome.” She loved the hoary classics—she lived for the arias. She was not a swooner, but was instead someone who got quiet and extra alert at the moments of most profound emotion in her operas.

Her replacement outfit was an Alber Elbaz Lanvin pleated knee-length—black and funerary, like the Balenciaga, but much more forgiving.

My mother’s tears were never about the loss of true love. I knew she was not that kind of woman. They may have been for her own mother, who was devoted to her, but only so long as she was allowed to keep silent on a vast swath of her daughter’s life, her “wrong” turns and decisions. It was a love that was conditional on a fantasy that was best left undisturbed.

Our subsequent Nora movie nights had to be spaced apart because a pall descended and lingered for days after them. We were hypnotized once again by Nora’s constant suffering, and yet, at the same time, we couldn’t bear it. Our Nora sorrow was no longer so small. We had been fully reconciled to our pasts, to our many wasted opportunities.

Still, three weeping women arrayed before a giant flat-screen TV: I pictured one wall of our apartment being sheared off so that our updated production of “Three Sisters” could regale West End Avenue! This was the truest Filipina spirit: crying was pleasure! Authentic sorrow fed on the performance of sorrow, in a never-ending loop.

That fall, I took a teaching job at a local university that paid double the fashion researcher’s fee, for a single semester. This was a windfall for an adjunct, so rare as to be stupid—you just had to smile and not peer too closely.

I finally told my mother about Chloe. I was now spending at least one night a week at her apartment, and my mother and Aunt Fely had been afflicted by a rare tact, though, in my mind’s eye, I saw them giggling at dinner when I wasn’t there.

I asked Chloe to put me in touch with the fashion researcher, who estimated that the process of authentication would take two months.

I told my mother that I had been wearing the Balenciaga on outings with Chloe—to the theatre, to openings at the Metropolitan Museum, to the nuptials of our straight and gay friends—and so could I hang the dress in Chloe’s closet, for a while? This was a lie, of course. My mother gave me her blessing. Surprisingly, she did not ask a single question about Chloe.

I shipped the dress to Paris. I made sure to tell the fashion researcher that I wanted the results to be sent to me via regular mail—nothing over e-mail. I did not want to be pestered, on the same screen where my novel was forming, by the accusatory bold type of yet another unopened e-mail.

Sometimes I pictured a gang of Balenciaga experts gathered around a table, slapping it in hilarity over the fact that someone had been gullible enough to waste so much time and money, when one look at the garment was enough to dispel the idea that it had been touched by the master’s hand. But I didn’t linger too long in these self-recriminations.

Eventually, the day came when I received the envelope with the results. I had asked Chloe to keep mum on the subject, in case she had touched base with the researcher. Chloe promised to lay off any questions—about whether I’d opened the envelope, about what was in the report. And she kept her word.

The Balenciaga was back in my mother’s closet, and when she put it on for our next Nora movie viewing, I kept looking to see if she could tell that it had been interfered with and poked at by so many hands, but she said nothing; she made no adjustments to the way the dress fit all evening long.

I did not open the envelope.

I continued to entertain my mother and Aunt Fely by complaining about my students’ poor compositional efforts. For six straight weeks, the stories and novel chapters handed in for my creative-writing class were predictably grim, and then, out of nowhere, a student revealed herself to be a true writer. Her previous story had offered no reason to expect this seismic turn of events! I rejoiced. I told Chloe.

Chloe introduced me to her mother, and then to her father. (They had been divorced for two decades.) To meet her father, I had to travel to Chicago. Chloe had to ask me twice before I finally arranged an introductory brunch with her and my mother and Aunt Fely. My mother was unusually quiet, not cold toward Chloe but certainly cool. Perhaps, now that my theoretical love life was upon all of us, my mother was having second thoughts about the value of my happiness.

What I had taken to calling the “French packet” sat unopened on my writing desk, day after day. I thought about unsealing it every so often, and then just as quickly decided against it.

I’d begun by being overwhelmingly certain that the Balenciaga was a Balenciaga; I would not have paid for the research otherwise. And then time and silence did their work, and I slowly, slowly came to the opposite belief, but I did not call off the researcher’s efforts. I was afraid, yes, but I was also strangely exhilarated. For years, I had delighted in my mother’s sunlike quality, and then a stray cloud—of doubt, when I began to question the harmlessness of her inventions and exaggerations, centered on, of all things, a costume, on pieces of fabric—had come between us, and I had wanted to extend that moment for a little longer, and longer after that. But could that be what I still wanted? Did I have the courage to see my treasonous impulses through to their logical end point?

Still, I understood my torture to be self-inflicted, because there was an equal, if not greater, chance that my mother would be vindicated. I might even open the envelope to find a ticklish new dilemma: Would I sell the authentic, one-of-a-kind dress to the museum? What if the researcher had lined up her own buyer? Meanwhile, I sent an e-mail informing her that I would not be reading the results for a while, and asking her to wait for me to contact her, instead of reaching out herself.

My mother spent a few days in the hospital, following some chest pains, but she made a quick recovery. I still had not opened the envelope. It began to seem to me that one thing was linked to the other, that her fantastic turnaround was due to the French packet staying sealed.

Then it was my aunt’s turn to visit the hospital, this time for a dizzy spell, but she did not have to stay overnight.

To please my mother, I was soon trading the dress back and forth with her. This happened at home, in the evenings. My mother wore it when we rewatched our handful of Nora movies, always with the half-zipped back, with the napkin bib, and with a rotating complement of designer heels: Louboutins, Ferragamos, Manolos. I wore the dress at my writing desk. That first time I put it on for this, I witnessed once again my mother’s immense satisfaction at the dress’s fit on my figure. How little it cost me—relatively speaking, since putting on the dress was still more of an imposition than otherwise—to provide her that thrill! And how mysterious that the locus of someone’s entire happiness could rest on the narrow runway of a smooth, fully closed zipper. Also, the novel I was writing was turning into a comic affair of a kind I had never written before, with misunderstandings between characters taken to semi-farcical but good-natured ends. Alfonso’s nun in her Balenciaga stared out at me dolled up in mine. My laide-ness had finally found the armor that completed it.

My mother’s and my domestic cosplay drew great amusement from Aunt Fely, of course, but she never, not once, volunteered to take her turn inside the Balenciaga.

Then one day I took the bold step of wearing the dress outside the apartment, to accompany my mother, on a walk around the lower of the two paths that encircled the Central Park reservoir. She made only one comment about my unexpected and bizarre—you could even say operatic—extravagance, my rare extroversion. I take it your writing is going well? she said. Or that your student crush’s is? She could just as easily have asked about my love life, but she did not.

Walking was a good sign for her health; she was ready again for “vigorous” exercise. It was the most beautiful winter morning, after many days of rain and having to live indoors. The whole city, it seemed, was out for a walk.

My hair was still short. A wool capelet kept the cold from my shoulders, and I was also wearing the ugliest but most comfortable pair of Hoka running shoes. On this subject, it took tremendous self-control for my mother to hold her tongue.

I’d never before had to move much in the dress; when I made small turns the lining would swoosh against my hips and legs, giving me a sensation of fluidity and ease. Now came the surprise of my effortful steps, the shock of how unyielding the dress’s shell was, as if I were being held in place by a firm hand. It seemed as though I had played a joke on myself, leaving the house in a cardboard box. I would never be like my mother, with her model’s understanding of punishment as a ritual of refinement—a woman who thought nothing of stiffening her neck and shoulders to best show off the dresses assigned to her, walking on her fashion calvary. Poor dress, I thought, downgraded to my drab spirit, my lack of fire. Still, I was happy. The dress’s true severity had been made clear. Of course, the dress was by Balenciaga, the master of the manipulated female form.

Take a picture and send it to Fely, my mother ordered, and I complied.

Aunt Fely’s response was instant. Where are you?

We gave our location. We would be close to her office in fifteen minutes.

Aunt Fely said that she would meet us behind the Metropolitan Museum. Lunch break! her cheery message declared.

My mother did not let the number of heads that were turning our way go unremarked upon. You’re the subject of many whispers, she said. And then she added, lampooningly, Who could she possibly be? Who does she think she is? But, before I could exercise the wit that my mother loved so much, she continued. You’re the empress in exile, she said. You’re the Italian Nora Aunor. How about, I asked, the Filipina Anna Magnani? Even better, my mother said. She asked me to walk ahead of her, so she could have a view of my back in the dress. But no funny business, she added. Do it straight.

I felt like a plank—a stiff line up and down, with no hips and no boobs. But I remembered my mother’s lessons. I held my arms akimbo on my waist and tilted my chin just slightly north of where it usually hung, to better expose my face to the light. I swayed my hips more than I normally would, but—because of the dress and by personal inclination—the motion was still comfortably minimalist. After a minute of modelling, I turned around and stopped, allowing her to catch up to me. She looped her arm around mine. That Señor Balenciaga really understood the pain of being a woman, she told me.

What do you mean? I was alarmed at the sudden intrusion of dark clouds into our cheerful excursion. And not very pleased to be reminded that the inheritance of the dress might be one of sorrow. There were not going to be any tears at my writing desk.

Don’t worry, my mother said. I’m really happy. And when I remained unconvinced, she swung our entwined arms back and forth. Only, from behind, you remind me of my early years. But as soon as you turned around—poof!

Poof, I echoed quietly, as if it were an incantation.

The best thing about you, Lucy? Is that you are not me.

I am, too.

Not like me and not like your father. I’m sure Mr. Balenciaga wanted the wearer to exert self-control, to feel like crying but to hold it in. I’m sure I was a disappointment to him at the opera, but you? He would take one look and be completely mystified.

I regret to inform you that there will be nothing whatsoever to hold in. I will not be crying in this dress, I said.

That’s what I’m saying. You’ll be frowning, but only because you are thinking of your sentences. And, mostly, you’ll be laughing and laughing. I live for that sound, she said. After a silence, she said it again. Aunt Fely, with her compliments and her contrived umbrage at the theatricality of my sartorial gesture, was only a minute away. ♦

The Critics

How Arsenio Hall Shook Up Late Night

Briefly Noted

Who Bankrolled the American Revolution?

Can Psychoanalysis Help You Get the Life You Want?

What Egon Schiele Saw at the Hospital

Two Playwrights Tackle Father Figures

“Project Hail Mary”: In Space, No One Should Hear Your Glib Jokes

A Critic at Large

How Arsenio Hall Shook Up Late Night

His show became the epicenter of early-nineties cool, with the decade’s biggest names, from Tom Cruise to Bill Clinton, stopping by to earn street cred.

By Jennifer Wilson March 16, 2026

There’s a scene in “Pretty Woman” in which Julia Roberts, as Vivian, a sex worker hired by a “corporate raider” played by Richard Gere, attends a polo match dressed in a demure polka-dot sundress and a boater hat. She almost blends in—until a player makes an impressive shot and she starts pumping her fist, chanting, “Woof! Woof! Woof!” Moviegoers in 1990 would have clocked the reference: Vivian was tuned in to “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Its host, the eponymous Black comedian, would make his entrance as a rowdy section of his audience called the “dog pound” barked on cue.

“The Arsenio Hall Show” premièred on January 3, 1989, and in the course of the next six seasons became the epicenter of early-nineties cool; even the logo had color blocking. Hall wore flashy suits and streetwear and eschewed the traditional host’s desk in order to sit closer to his guests, even if it meant risking a contact high from a seemingly stoned Tupac Shakur. The show had the energy, and the soundtrack, of a night club. With musical guests such as A Tribe Called Quest and Salt-N-Pepa, it was the unofficial late-night home of hip-hop. When Fred Rogers, of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” came on, Hall gifted him a colorful leather jacket to match his own and exclaimed, “This gives new meaning to boys in the hood!”

The biggest names of the nineties stopped by to earn street cred: Tom Cruise appeared to promote “Interview with the Vampire”—and to dap Hall. In 1992, the Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton joined the show’s band to play “Heartbreak Hotel” on the saxophone; afterward, he joked with Hall about having smoked pot, claiming that he really did try to inhale.

Hall’s interview style was loose and bawdy, part of a countercultural posture—embodied by musicians like Prince and Madonna (of assless pants and cone-bra infamy, respectively)—that rejected the sexual puritanism sparked by the AIDS crisis. In 1991, the singer Sinéad O’Connor appeared on Hall’s show after boycotting the Grammys, citing the music industry’s “false and destructive materialistic values.” Referring to news reports that a British d.j. had suggested that O’Connor needed a spanking, Hall jokingly offered his services. “What are you doing later?” she replied with a smirk.

When Hall took on the topic of race, he did so in a newly proud, confrontational register. In the early nineties, Black culture was adopting the anti-assimilation tenor of Spike Lee movies and of albums like Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet.” African Americans weren’t trying to move on up so much as force mainstream America to prove that it could be down. Robert Matthew Van Winkle, better known as Vanilla Ice, also appeared on Hall’s show in 1991. His début single, “Ice Ice Baby,” had become the first hip-hop song to hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Hall asked Van Winkle about rumors that his “street” persona was a ruse. “I am from the streets,” Van Winkle pushed back, “and if you can’t see that I’m from the streets then you’re blind, because the majority of white people, you know, cannot dance.” Van Winkle had brought Flavor Flav along, prompting Hall to ask, “Is that to show that you have a Black supporter?”

“The Arsenio Hall Show,” in its first week on the air, came in second in the ratings, after Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”—but Hall trounced Carson in the highly coveted under-thirty-five demographic. Two years later, “Saturday Night Live” aired a sketch in which a desperate late-night host named Carsenio (Dana Carvey) dons an oversized red suit and adopts Hall’s risqué, race-conscious style of humor in an attempt to appear hip. “Have you ever noticed how white guys hold themselves down there?” he says, reaching for his groin. “What are they holding down there, anyway?”

In “Arsenio” (Simon & Schuster), a forthcoming memoir written by Hall with Alan Eisenstock, a co-author of “Hang Time: My Life in Basketball,” by Elgin Baylor, and other celebrity memoirs, the late-night host describes that “S.N.L.” moment as surreal. Growing up in Ohio, Hall had dreamed of being Carson: “When most kids in Cleveland wanted to be football stars like Jim Brown, I wanted to be an old white man with a talk show.” Six decades later, the job of telling corny jokes to a studio audience of Midwestern tourists still belongs largely to white men—one of the many reasons that Hall’s book, though essentially a chronicle of early-nineties cultural politics and his place within it, feels well timed.

Late night these days has lost its after-hours edge, with publicist-friendly interview questions and political “satire” that reads like something off a teleprompter at the D.N.C. Today’s late-night hosts have faced censorship nonetheless. Jimmy Kimmel’s show was briefly placed on hiatus after he called out the right wing’s rush to judgment about the motives of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” on CBS, was cancelled three days after Colbert criticized the network’s decision to settle a lawsuit with Donald Trump. But these examples are more symptoms of the Administration’s thin skin than signs of actual bite. (George Cheeks, the chair of TV media at Paramount, has said that the decision to cancel Colbert was a financial one.)

Late night’s self-muting hasn’t gone unnoticed. In March, Vanity Fair ran a story on “The New Late Night.” What struck me, besides the fact that none of the ten featured hosts occupies a late spot—they’re YouTubers and podcasters—was how many of them have made forbidden speech their brand. The comedian Ziwe Fumudoh got her start with the web series “Baited with Ziwe,” which brought on “cancelled” celebrities in a kind of public-shaming ritual; the comic Kareem Rahma, of “Subway Takes,” invites his guests to offer contentious opinions while riding public transit. (Rahma told my colleague Andrew Marantz that Kamala Harris’s team wouldn’t let her express her actual take—that people shouldn’t remove their shoes on planes—for fear of offending barefoot-leaning voters.) Oddly missing from the article was Adam Friedland, the edgelord comedian who recently hosted Gavin Newsom on his show. The California Governor had just told CNN that the Democrats should focus less on “pronouns” and be more “culturally normal.” Friedland advised Newsom that the next time the right complained about a Black Little Mermaid, his party should instead double down: “Say, ‘Pardon me. You’re a pussy, and that’s a baby movie.’ ” Newsom chuckled nervously. In an era in which politicians are focus-grouped to the point of parody, the exchange felt like samizdat smuggled across the borders of liberal piety.

Late night isn’t just a time slot. It’s a concept, a temporal metaphor for what we can get away with under the cloak of night, when the kids are asleep, when we can claim innocence—nothing else was on! Like the “late-night” dissidents of YouTube, Hall rose to popularity by talking up the verboten. In his day, when the term “inner city” circulated as a racist bogeyman, Hall brought the soundscape of “the hood” into people’s living rooms. When promiscuity had been branded a public-health crisis by the religious right, he asked Madonna about the stamina of her boyfriend and “Dick Tracy” co-star, Warren Beatty. “Joan Collins once called him sexually insatiable,” Hall offered. Madonna begged to differ: “I would say that he’s satiable.”

In 1988, the year before his show premièred, Hall starred in “Coming to America,” a romantic comedy about an African prince (Eddie Murphy) who travels to Queens, New York, along with his aide (Hall), to find a bride. They make a stop at the Jackson Heights Y.M.C.A., where a Miss Black Awareness pageant is taking place. A reverend, also played by Hall, launches into a spirited sermon about the bikini-clad contestants: “Man cannot make it like this! Larry Flynt! Hugh Hefner! They can take the picture, but you can’t make it! Only God above, the Hugh Hefner on high, can make it for ya!”

Hall later told Howard Stern that he’d based the character, in part, on his father, Fred Hall, whom he calls, in his memoir, a “strict, conservative Baptist preacher.” Not so conservative—at sixty-five, he married Annie Martin, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a church deacon. Hall was born to the odd couple in 1956 in Cleveland. (The “dog pound” is a reference to a raucous fan section in the city’s football stadium.) In his book, Hall describes their union as an opposites-attract situation. Fred listened to Mahalia Jackson spirituals, while Annie preferred Elvis and Ray Charles—what Fred called “hip-slapping music.” Nonetheless, Hall identifies a sensuality in his father’s sermonizing which would inspire his own late-night persona. “He doesn’t just preach,” Hall writes. “He puts on a show. With handkerchief in hand, he prowls the pulpit, he gesticulates, he growls, he shouts, he whispers.”

When Hall was five, his mother moved out, taking him with her. She worked long hours and got him a babysitter—an Emerson TV set, on which he would watch Carson, Merv Griffin, and Dinah Shore. “I get hooked on Dinah!, not what you would expect from a Black kid living in the ghetto,” he observes. Then again, representation was scarce—Jet magazine ran a column called “Television” that listed every Black person who was going to appear that week. But to the young Hall the color line wasn’t the biggest hurdle—bedtime was. He was in grade school, and Carson came on at 11:30 P.M. He writes, “I turn the sound way down, then crawl so close to the TV screen that I feel as if I’m practically inside The Tonight Show set, sitting next to Johnny.” He hosted the first “Arsenio Hall Show” in his basement. His musical guest, “Junior Brown from down the street,” sang the Temptations’ “Get Ready” on a Mattel Show’N Tell.

Fred Hall had hoped that his son would join the clergy, but Hall dreamed of becoming a magician, just like his idol, Johnny Carson. Hall’s book is in some ways a magician’s memoir of making it, capturing a working-class kid who pulls opportunities out of a hat. A teen-age cousin of Hall’s, who came to live with him and his mother after becoming pregnant, brought a book called “Magic for Beginners” home from the library. Hall taught himself tricks, sprinkling jokes into his performance: “I know all the white magicians say abracadabra. I say collard greens.”

Hall is frequently described as the first Black late-night talk-show host, but his memoir corrects the record. That honor belongs to Ellis Haizlip, the host of “Soul!,” which aired on PBS from 1968 to 1973, with guests including Toni Morrison, Al Greene, Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael—and a fifteen-year-old magician named Arsenio Hall. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, the celebrated griot active in the Black Arts Movement, had seen Hall performing magic at Karamu House, a historic African American theatre in Cleveland, and passed along his card to a producer at “Soul!” Soon, Hall was on a plane to New York to make his first TV appearance. (Hall would later invite young talent on his show, including a six-year-old Elvis impersonator from Hawaii named Bruno Mars.)

Hall pivoted to comedy when he realized that he was getting bigger cheers for his one-liners than for his card tricks. He began listening to the records of the standup comedian Redd Foxx. Foxx had come out of the Chitlin’ Circuit, a national vaudeville-esque network of venues for Black performers which emerged during Jim Crow. Foxx and his mentor, Moms Mabley, blended folklore, political commentary, and a subversive style of blue humor. Moms Mabley used the erotic to challenge the image of the desexed mammy; Foxx, conversely, played into the stereotype of the oversexed Black male, influencing later comedians such as Richard Pryor and Chris Rock. In 1993, when Hall received the Richard Pryor Award at the Soul Train Comedy Awards, he brought Pryor, then on a mobility scooter, onstage. The pair received a standing ovation, and a woman in the balcony shouted, “I love you, Richard!” Pryor shouted back, “Well, suck my dick then!”

The history of late night is a kind of dialectic between the traditional and the transgressive, the adult in the room and the kid who refuses to be tucked in. For a time, those parts were played by Ed Sullivan, the host of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and the upstart Steve Allen, a former radio host who, in 1954, created and hosted the “Tonight Show.” In “Inventing Late Night,” a 2005 history of the original “Tonight Show,” the writer Ben Alba muses, “It all seems so simple: the home base desk, the opening monologue, the announcer/sidekick, the horsing around with the bandleader, the breezy celebrity chats, the wacky stunts, the comedy sketches. . . . Five nights a week.” But, he notes, “this formula did not exist before Steve Allen.”

As a radio jockey, Allen had his staff pick up “kooks” off the street whom he’d interview on the air. He brought the same audaciousness to late night. But his approach wasn’t just structurally unconventional. When Sullivan refused to have Ingrid Bergman on because she’d had an affair with the married director Roberto Rossellini, Allen booked her on his new Sunday-night show. He invited on the boundary-pushing political comedian Lenny Bruce and devoted an entire episode to McCarthyism.

Allen eventually ceded his seat to Jack Paar. Then, in 1962, Johnny Carson—acerbic but amiable—took over, transforming the “Tonight Show” into a national landmark. When Carson retired, in 1992, Bob Hope compared it to “a head falling off Mt. Rushmore.” But, after living through the cultural turbulence and the political disappointments of the seventies, baby boomers were eager to topple institutions. Enter David Letterman, a late-night host who often broke the fourth wall to mock the very act of television-making. In an episode from 1986, he joked, “Most Friday afternoons, we tape a piece for our program on the streets of New York City. Now, this, of course, takes planning, meticulous preparation, and a lot of hard work, so it was only a matter of time before we said to hell with it.” He then followed a pair of tourists from Louisville around for the afternoon, nudging them to Trump Tower and, eventually, to the inside of Trump’s office. “We’ll do a couple real-estate deals in Louisville,” the future President offered.

By the early eighties, Hall, who had moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Kent State, was a regular on the standup-comedy circuit, performing at such venues as the Comedy Store and Hollywood Improv and befriending comics including Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy. Hall never got his chance to appear on the “Tonight Show” with his idol behind the desk—Carson’s booker told him he wasn’t a “Johnny guy”—but, in 1983, Letterman had him on. Hall introduced himself: “My name is Arsenio. It’s a very unique name for a Black man. In Greek, it means Leroy.”

Hall once described himself as “the talk-show host for the MTV generation,” and his show did possess, from the start, the kinetic glamour of a music video. In 1988, after Hall had a successful stint guest-hosting Joan Rivers’s short-lived “Late Show,” Paramount offered him his own hour. He made music a centerpiece of the new endeavor, even penning his own theme song, “It’s Hall or Nothing.” His first week, he booked the R. & B. bad boy Bobby Brown for two songs, including a five-minute version of “My Prerogative.” Lucie Salhany, the president of TV at Paramount, objected: “Carson does one song and never more than three minutes.” But when the ratings for the show’s first week, propelled by Brown’s pelvic thrusts, came in, Salhany “practically screams,” Hall writes. Time magazine put Hall on the cover later that year, proclaiming, “We are seeing the future of the TV talk show, and it is, well, funky.”

Forty per cent of the local affiliates that picked up “The Arsenio Hall Show” belonged to a network that had launched a little more than two years earlier—Fox. The new channel soon became home to the largest number of Black-produced shows on a single network in the history of television, including the sketch-comedy show “In Living Color,” sometimes called the Black “S.N.L.,” and the sitcoms “Living Single” and “Martin.” A Nielsen survey from November, 1990, revealed that Black households watched forty-eight per cent more TV than other audiences did. (White audiences, with more disposable income, had begun diverting their eyeballs to cable.) In “Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television,” the scholar Kristal Brent Zook writes that Fox engaged in “ ‘narrowcasting’ or targeting a specific black viewership.” (Zook notes that Pam Veasey, the head writer on “In Living Color,” “cynically referred to it as the ‘Nike and Doritos audience.’ ”)

In the ambitious new book “Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy from Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms” (HarperCollins), the journalist Geoff Bennett argues that the nineties Nielsen surveys “transformed the career trajectory” of Black comedians. NBC premièred shows like “A Different World,” a “Cosby Show” spinoff set at a fictional H.B.C.U. called Hillman College. Hall spurred this revolution in TV programming by booking its stars, among them Martin Lawrence, of “Martin,” and Lisa Bonet, whose “Cosby Show” character, Denise, attends Hillman. His greenroom became a hangout spot, and an accidental boardroom, for Black Hollywood. “People make connections, pitch shows, propose deals,” Hall writes. “Will Smith and Quincy Jones discuss doing a sitcom about a Black teenager from a poor neighborhood who moves in with a wealthy Beverly Hills family.”

But, as a late-night show designed for a general, cross-racial audience, “The Arsenio Hall Show” also allowed viewers to see how white celebrities, and by extension white people, interacted with Black culture and its makers. The Time profile described “The Arsenio Hall Show” as a “melting pot,” a term that’s as much of a throwback as MC Hammer’s parachute pants. (The rapper first performed “U Can’t Touch This” on Hall’s show.) At a time when mainstream media was warning its audience about “the inner city,” Hall’s show proved that “the street” and its culture—from Reebok high-tops to gangster rap—were objects of white fascination and longing. Hall even made comedic fodder out of the desire for proximity to Black culture. An episode with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen opens with Hall teaching the pint-size twins to shoot dice.

Revisiting the culture wars of the late eighties and early nineties, I gathered that the only thing scarier to Middle America than the word “urban” was sex that occurred outside the confines of heterosexual marriage. The AIDS crisis had inspired a wave of conservative backlash against the gains of the women’s and queer-liberation movements. The disease was painted as punishment for a sexually liberated life style. In response, a slew of artists embraced a kind of baroque eroticism. At the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, which Hall hosted, Prince performed a seven-minute version of “Gett Off” surrounded by dancers simulating an orgy. A year later, Madonna released “Sex,” a coffee-table book that depicted the Material Girl in ménage-à-trois and B.D.S.M. encounters. When Magic Johnson decided to do a sit-down interview about his H.I.V. diagnosis, he chose Hall’s show. Hall suggested that he go on a more serious program, like “Nightline” or “Larry King,” but Johnson replied, “I have to go where I’m comfortable.”

It was in this context that Hall became late night’s most flirtatious host. In 2026, watching a male host encourage a female guest to perch on his lap—as Hall jokingly did with Whitney Houston—might not, shall we say, sit well. (Houston, for her part, plunked down and wrapped her arms around him.) But, back then, Hall’s touchy-feeliness could have had another valence. As he eyed up his ex-girlfriend Emma Samms, an actress on “Dynasty,” when she came on his show, he was flaunting interracial, premarital escapades. One forgets that interracial dating was still considered illicit in the nineties—Spike Lee made the contentious topic the subject of his 1991 film, “Jungle Fever.”

But some thought that Hall wasn’t doing enough boundary-breaking for those most affected by the AIDS crisis. In 1991, activists from Queer Nation interrupted a taping to protest the show’s lack of L.G.B.T.Q. guests. Hall got heated and defensive. “You think I haven’t had somebody on the show because they’re gay?” he yelled. “I’m Black, man. I’m the biggest minority you know about.” In his memoir, he blames the limitations of the era: “What do you expect me to say? Put your hands together for that well-known balladeer and homosexual, Luther Vandross?”

On April 29, 1992, Los Angeles was ablaze. Four policemen who had been captured on video brutally beating an African American man named Rodney King were acquitted of ten of eleven state charges, leading to riots across the city. On the second night of unrest, Hall devoted a show to the verdict. Paramount had safety concerns, but Hall pleaded his case, saying, “Sean Penn already said he’ll come.” (Penn joined Mayor Tom Bradley and the actor Edward James Olmos.) Not long afterward, some music equipment went missing. Hall reported it, and that night a security guard stopped Hall and his assistant as they were driving off the Paramount lot, asking to check the trunk. Hall lost it: “Did you search Ted Danson’s car when he left?” (“Cheers” was shot on the same lot.) Hall’s assistant got out and broke the wooden gate, and the pair drove off. “I’m not proud that we broke the Paramount gate,” Hall writes. “I’m less proud of the anger I feel constantly, coiled inside me like a live electrical wire.”

The atmosphere in Hollywood was shifting. (By 1994, Fox had cancelled its Black sitcoms following Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of N.F.L. distribution rights.) In Hall’s third year, Salhany had called him into her office—his ratings were dipping. “The show is very . . . Black,” she said, noting that he had referred to a guest as “brother” that week. “Mark Wahlberg,” Hall replied, puzzled. Then, in 1993, CBS announced that the “Late Show with David Letterman” would air in Hall’s usual time slot. Hall knew that Letterman would siphon off younger viewers and told his manager that he was writing a letter of resignation. In February of 1994, Hall interviewed Louis Farrakhan, the notoriously antisemitic and misogynist leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan, who was planning the Million Man March, was set to appear on the cover of Time and was slated to be on “20/20” with Barbara Walters that spring. In April, Hall resigned, but when Paramount announced his departure many had the impression that he had been fired for booking Farrakhan. Hall is adamant in the memoir that he told executives in advance of his plans to leave, therein refuting the idea that he had been the victim of Jewish censorship.

Since the final broadcast of Hall’s show, in 1994, his presence in popular culture has been sporadic. He was the first Black winner of “Celebrity Apprentice,” in 2012, beating out Clay Aiken and raising two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Magic Johnson Foundation. In 2013, Hall staged a comeback, relaunching his show on CBS; it was cancelled after one season, owing to poor ratings. Hall recognized that the landscape had changed. He told TV Guide that he didn’t foresee any interviews like the one he’d had with Brooke Shields in 1989, in which he asked her how losing her virginity was going: “We’re in this world now where publicists control this so much, I don’t know if I can have conversations like that.”

There’s an odd dearth of autobiographies by late-night hosts. Carson never wrote one, and neither has Letterman. Fallon and Kimmel have published children’s books. The “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime” focusses on his experiences growing up mixed race in apartheid South Africa. The only real corollary to “Arsenio” is Jay Leno’s “Leading with My Chin,” from 1996. Perhaps Hall, in writing his memoir, sensed that the culture needed a reminder of what “it’s a night thing”—one of his slogans—means.

In the book, Hall writes about a time he took Prince to an “after-hours joint.” “It’s where people go to dance after they finish working. Strippers, pimps, you know, night folks,” Hall explained to the singer. At a makeshift speakeasy in a Los Angeles living room, the legendary musician sat on a barstool, watching intently. He told Hall, “I’m looking at what these girls dance to at three in the morning. What moves them. What makes them put down their drink and dance.” Great late night asks the same questions. Its jokes are for people who stay up late to steal back time for themselves. Being in bed doesn’t mean you’re ready for sleep, and night folks won’t abide hosts who turn their own volume down. ♦

Books

Briefly Noted

“On Morrison,” “Scale Boy,” “Sisters in Yellow,” and “White River Crossing.”

March 16, 2026

On Morrison, by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth). This collection of essays, by a novelist and literary scholar, considers the writer Toni Morrison’s varied body of work. Serpell homes in on its challenging qualities—including its unique orchestration of voice, unconventional chronologies, and layered metaphors—unearthing fresh insights about Morrison’s themes and craft. In a close reading of Morrison’s famed story “Recitatif,” for example, Serpell examines the ways that “race, often relegated to a visual regime, fundamentally works through language.” Enriching her research with letters, draft manuscripts, and other sources, Serpell captures Morrison’s “masterful difficulty” without sanding down its edges.

Scale Boy, by Patrice Nganang (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this unhurried, lyrical memoir, a novelist remembers his youth in Cameroon in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Anchored by Nganang’s years as a “scale boy”—weighing people and products for a small fee—the narrative wends through anecdotes that depict a young man discovering his artistic and intellectual powers along with his nation’s colonial history. Reflecting on the meaning of the scale as an object, Nganang draws an ominous historical line from the present to the past, noting that “the scale was the very last instrument Black people stepped onto before boarding the slave ships, before entering the soul-wrenching and dreaded institution of their despair.”

What We’re Reading

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Sisters in Yellow, by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (Knopf). This engrossing novel follows a teen-age girl coming of age in working-class Tokyo as she desperately tries to achieve financial stability. At the novel’s outset, Hana lives in a cramped apartment with her mother, a sweet but hapless bar waitress, and longs to escape from a home life that her bullies condemn as “not normal.” Then she meets a charismatic friend of her mother’s, and the two begin running a bar; together with two other girls who become Hana’s friends, they soon form a kind of makeshift happy family. But, when a series of events threatens their ability to earn, Hana discovers how difficult class ascension really is. “I’m trying so hard,” she says at one point. “But I always wind up back here.”

White River Crossing, by Ian McGuire (Crown). Set in 1766, this harrowing novel centers on an expedition organized by the head of a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, in Canada, who dispatches a group to secretly search for a gold deposit on remote lands inhabited by Indigenous tribes. Led by Inuit guides, the three white men in the party form an uneasy mix of personalities. There is the trading-post head’s “scrawny” young nephew; his deputy, “an oaf and a scoundrel”; and a former aspiring minister who has lost his faith. Briskly paced, immersive, and often violent, McGuire’s novel depicts the destructive and corrupting effects of the colonists’ gold lust on themselves and the Native people in their path. As one of the guides, Keasik, observes, this greed “leaves behind, like a falling tide, a tangled wrack of wariness and fear.”

Books

Who Bankrolled the American Revolution?

Our history too often sidesteps the question of finances. But sonorous ideals don’t keep an army supplied with uniforms, guns, and grub.

By Adam Gopnik March 16, 2026

“Money makes the world go round,” the cynical old maxim, and Broadway show tune, runs. “Follow the money,” a maxim minted in the film “All the President’s Men,” has become just as familiar. Yet in practice we rarely follow the money far enough to discover how it actually moved, or who set it in motion. The financing of the material conditions of history—how buses are hired for a great march; who pays for the guerrillas’ guns and grub—mostly remains opaque in our chronicles. When we look at the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, the last question we ask is the first one we should: Who paid for the boat?

One reason for this absence is that economic history seems boring when compared with military history, and that economic forces are hard to dissolve into a stream of stirring, distinct individual choices. Money flows more than it leaps; that’s why we follow economic change in charts, with slow, incremental movements up and down, and arrows telling us what is really going on behind the jumpy shadow puppets of politics. Who won the battle? can be simplified, dramatically, into strategic decisions and pivotal moments. Who paid for the soldiers to get there?—and thus made it possible for the battle to be fought at all—usually involves a long-distance jumble of government bonds, loans, and guarantees complex enough to send us back to the battle itself. “One if by land, and two if by sea” is a memorable phrase as we picture Paul Revere on his midnight ride; learning that the British were coming by sea because, so to speak, shifts in Amsterdam bond markets affected British decisions about financing ships feels too remote and intricate to capture our attention.

Any number of good books and studies aim to remedy this gap in our understanding, and one of the best ways of doing it, paradoxically, is to fix complicated impersonal finances into a figure of a single person who can be thought to have made military-style strategic decisions. In Richard Vague’s new book, “The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731-1821” (Polity), we have a hero worthy of the enterprise. Indeed, it is telling that Willing’s name is presented only in the subtitle, on the understandable ground that, without giving the role he played top billing, his name would mean nothing.

Willing, it turns out, was the very model of a successful Colonial merchant. Born in Philadelphia but trained in law at the Inns of Court in London, he returned home in the late seventeen-forties to become a leading citizen in what was then the unquestioned capital city of the new continent. Philadelphia was founded by the Quakers as a utopian project, but thrived as a commercial port—as a city of merchants, printers, bankers, and speculators. Willing, an Anglican, kept a sharp, cool mind sheathed in a convivial exterior, and moved easily between commerce and politics. He was readily elected mayor in 1763, and took pains to insure that he and his family intermarried with the other stalwarts of his class.

Like Antonio in “The Merchant of Venice,” however, Willing had all his fortune out upon the water. Along with his younger partner, Robert Morris, he traded in wheat and sugar and rum and, occasionally, enslaved Africans. Though the business appeared to be a simple exchange of hard goods for hard money—wheat delivered from America in return for pounds paid in England—the shipping trade was, in fact, the cradle of the market in financial “paper.” The long voyage from home port to market created seemingly endless intervals of uncertainty, often stretching to months and sometimes years. With your goods out on the water, you had to wait ages to be paid and to take your profit. The ocean is an illiquid place.

And so merchants like Willing would draw up what were, in effect, I.O.U.s anticipating their sale. These “bills of exchange” turned goods still on the water into paper that could be traded and discounted as investments in their own right. Like the banks that treat bundles of mortgages as assets to be sliced, parlayed, and traded independently of the condition of the underlying loans, Philadelphia’s maritime merchants could transform cargo at sea—and conceivably already beneath it—into financial instruments with a speculative life of their own. This was, of course, highly risky: there was no guarantee that the goods would ever arrive; if the ships didn’t sink, they could be taken by “privateers,” semi-official pirates licensed by rival European powers. That risk, in turn, generated a parallel market in maritime-insurance policies, which eventually acquired as remote a connection to the actual cargo as the bills of exchange themselves. “Derivatives” were the lifeblood of American commerce from the very beginning.

Willing, though in one sense a cold-blooded, high-stakes gambler, played a cautious, centrist part in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania politics. And those politics prove far more intricate than the patriotic, tricornered-hat history a child growing up in Philadelphia today might encounter in the ubiquitous sound-and-light shows outside Independence Hall. Quakers still held a special role in the city’s and the colony’s politics, yet they had mainly been crowded out of power by a new merchant élite, largely Anglican or Presbyterian, and by the ascendant farming class in western Pennsylvania. The Quakers, though they would become the beating heart of the American abolitionist movement and, later, the civil-rights movement, were fiercely anti-patriotic; their principled ban on violence of any kind made them wary of even implicit military fervor. Libertarian in their quietist way—people should be free to think their own thoughts—they were not about to pick up a gun for any cause, however estimable.

The farmers and small merchants of western Pennsylvania, meanwhile, were egalitarian in affect, at least, but also, shaped by their evangelical faith, far more religiously conservative than the often British-educated Philadelphians, whose Anglicanism could tilt toward an abstract Enlightenment deism. The Pennsylvania farmers and pioneers wanted to be free from domination by condescending city people; the city people wanted to be free to make money and speak their minds without the farmers’ prejudices. The populist farmers believed in equality and called it liberty; the educated élite believed in liberty and called it equality. It was a divide that would never really end.

Vague is especially good at explaining why the British demanded the notorious “taxation without representation,” and why the colonists responded so furiously. British banks—and, with them, the British government—had, after fighting wars in Europe, sunk into an almost absurd level of debt, producing bank failures and, in 1772, something like a Great Recession at home. In effect, the mother country turned to its thriving colonies to pay the bill for its European wars. The so-called Intolerable Acts, as well as the Stamp Act and the tax on tea that enraged Boston’s patriots, were efforts by the British government to claw back money from the colonies to cover the imperial deficit. The colonists shrieked at being asked to pay in ways they never had before, but the British believed that this was precisely the point of having colonies: like dutiful children, they were meant to acquire, in maturity, the ability to settle accounts when the parents faltered. As Samuel Johnson, a paid propagandist for imperial authority, put it, “We do not put a calf into the plow; we wait till he is an ox.”

This ox was gored, or felt itself to be. Yet the proper response was endlessly debated, with agrarian radicals pressing for immediate independence, city-bound conservatives searching for ways to placate London without surrendering Colonial rights or money, and a smaller group remaining loyal to the King. Vague makes much of the inherent civil conflict within Pennsylvania. Perhaps he makes too much of it. What is impressive is not that the American Revolution in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, was more divided than later patriotic histories and pageants suggest—what else would one expect?—but that, unlike the coming French Revolution, or indeed the earlier English one, it somehow avoided sliding into a mutual massacre or an authoritarian party seizing control. Sectarian disputes were annealed by cultural habits of consensus-building and grudging coexistence, possibly rooted in the thinness of Colonial society and the brevity of its history, with the brutal frontier and the Indigenous “enemy” a constant presence.

So the real political question was whether maritime merchants like Willing—outraged by British bullying but with little appetite for political revolution—would ultimately throw in their lot with the radicals and the idealists. Vague is clear that Willing was unwilling. A reluctant delegate to the Continental Congress in 1775 and 1776, he voted against the Declaration of Independence and then retreated into private life in Philadelphia. And yet, over the next several years, he and his firm continued to play a central role in financing the rebels, even while cagily keeping their distance from the revolutionary cause. When the British invaded Philadelphia during the war, most patriots fled; Willing stayed behind, negotiating—and even working closely—with the occupying British authorities.

Yet even as he played it close to the vest he was throwing tricorne hats to the Army. Willing and Morris could ship goods in demand—tobacco, flour, rice—to Europe on consignment, while converting the anticipated profits of those voyages into bills of exchange, the proceeds of which they passed on to George Washington to buy uniforms, guns, and horses for his army. Throughout the war, the good word of Willing and Morris was enough to keep the system afloat.

How did this work? It is startling for a reader to discover that, fully fifteen years ago, the late California journalist Charles Rappleye wrote a biography of Morris that essentially claimed for him the role Vague reserves for Willing—as the “financier of the American Revolution,” to use the earlier book’s subtitle. Although Rappleye & Vague sounds like a Colonial law firm dreamed up by Henry James, it is nonetheless odd that two books about two conjoined partners should make such different cases. Nor does Vague—himself a career financier and once the secretary of banking and securities for Pennsylvania—mount any assault on Rappleye’s interpretation. Apart from one cryptic aside noting that Morris was always in a subordinate role, Vague simply tells his own story, without contesting the truth of the earlier one.

It would appear, in synthesis and to borrow a pleasing opposition of human types from John Milton, that Morris was the active Allegro principle of the firm, while Willing was the more withdrawn but vigilant Penseroso. Morris evidently took the lead during the war in supplying Washington’s troops; Willing remained the presiding presence and, not surprisingly, emerged financially intact, even as Morris ended up in bankruptcy.

What exactly did they do? The answer seems to be that they took advantage of their reputation as solid conservative men of business to finance a radical cause. Scaling up the established practice of issuing lines of credit for ships out on the water, they took bills of exchange, payable in the ports of France and Amsterdam, and sold them, or borrowed against them, in the colonies, to pay for uniforms, guns, and horses. They basically took the credit they held abroad—Amsterdam being the Hong Kong of the period—and redeployed it locally to support Washington’s army.

The paradox was that their credit as merchants was sounder than the new country’s credit as a state. Morris later began issuing what amounted to a private currency: personal notes, denominated in sums of twenty, fifty, and eighty dollars. “My personal credit,” he explained, “has been substituted for that the country has lost.” And in the back of the minds of all wide-awake merchants was the shared understanding that the King of France, England’s great enemy, would ultimately stand behind the bills of exchange, even if the ships were sunk or the bills themselves went unpaid. Under the combined pressure of Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy and the sympathies of Enlightenment-minded French courtiers, he did.

Yet one need not imagine Willing and Morris as proto–Bruce Wayne figures, secret radicals in conservative clothing. It seems more likely that they were making a complicated, coolheaded hedge on the outcome of the war. Even if the conflict appeared to favor British arms and the Royal Navy, it must have been clear that this David, though armed only with a slingshot, stood a real chance of felling Goliath, however large he loomed.

What gave weight to the slingshot, in this case, were two realities. First was the simple fact, common to all Colonial conflicts, that the colonized were in the colonies, while the colonizer was not, or at least not in sufficient numbers. The war, financed by the Americans on hope and a shoestring, was even more unaffordable for the British. Franklin made the grisly point in his correspondence with the London radical Joseph Priestley that the cost of killing an American soldier ran to some twenty thousand pounds per Yankee. Even if the British had prevailed in the immediate fighting, some form of national independence was bound to follow: there was no army large enough to pacify the rebels permanently.

And Willing and Morris must have known that, if the rebels lost, it was extremely unlikely that the British—whatever they did to military or political leaders—could, or would, hang or banish the merchants who had backed the rebels. Life, and business, would go on. And if the rebels won? Then the rewards would be immense for those who had financed the victory. When Philadelphia’s merchants finally banded together to form the Pennsylvania Bank, consolidating their credit, as Morris had earlier done on behalf of the new country, it was because they had come to see this as a sound wager. James Madison wrote that “our greatest hopes are founded on a patriotic scheme of the opulent merchants of this city.” Patriotic it was, but, by 1780, with Washington still in the field, having weathered even the loss of Charleston, the war’s worst defeat, it was also shrewd. This was the greatest consolidated special-purpose vehicle in American history: “opulent merchants” pooling their credit to take a chance on a high-risk new startup, the United States.

Both Vague and Rappleye, despite much research, have a hard time giving us an idea of what the daily lives and inner conflicts of their heroes were like. The usual material of political biography—the turbulent whirlpools these men survived, the emotional crises they surmounted—is largely absent. We learn of dynastic marriages, marooned brothers, house purchases, and expanded properties, but we never quite feel for our heroes as they struggle.

This is partly because neither man left behind intimate diaries or much by way of personal correspondence—but one reason they did not is that shrewd bankers and speculators tend toward a necessary caution and conformism, reserving their daring for their ledgers rather than their letters. To be a good poet or pamphleteer, like Thomas Paine or Samuel Johnson, requires a kind of day-to-day daring, with triumphs made in conversation and correspondence; a good banker or stockbroker makes his in columns of numbers. Money is earned by sensing where the collective mind will be six months from now, not by imagining what the world might look like in sixty years. The men who guessed right about “the big short,” in 2008, did not profit because they possessed a grand theory of capitalist collapse; they profited because they bet on November rather than on the following April. On this point, Ayn Rand could not have been more wrong. The successful men of money are not those who refuse to run with the herd but those who run just alongside it, alert to where it is likely to turn next.

Though many enterprising merchants can fairly be cast as corsairs or buccaneers, a surprising number are, as people, curiously pallid. J. P. Morgan and August Belmont are surrounded by drama, yet remain, in their own lives, as hooded as cobras. It is telling that the most successful speculator of our time, Warren Buffett, insists on his own drab normalcy (and attributes his fortune primarily to luck), and that the books about him, even when they strain to puncture this modesty, mostly confirm it. Like Gustave Flaubert’s ideal artist, who lives as a dull bourgeois in order to be radical on the page, great merchant bankers and speculators of this sort tend to keep their secrets hidden, becoming radical only on their own pages, those of their account books. The fruits of finance are not boring, but the facts of finance often are, involving fewer bold visions of posterity than subtle gradations of possibility.

It was after the war that Willing became central as an agent of the Hamiltonian vision. He and the Treasury Secretary became close allies, with Willing serving as the first chief of the Bank of North America, briefly conceived as a national bank. And, where Willing had stood off from the Continental Congress that produced the Declaration of Independence, he played an active, superintending role at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Vague reads the Constitution as a businessman’s document above all, only lightly amended by a last-minute agrarian-derived individualism; it’s a charter drawn up with a merchant’s hopeful gleam, uneasily matched by a farmer’s doubtful frown. The Bill of Rights, Vague reminds us, was tacked on at the end as a kind of grumbling, Southern, libertarian insurance policy against the centralizing, capitalist drift of the rest. It is Vague’s aim, as the book’s subtitle suggests, to show how the pro-business side produced a “financial aristocracy,” though the language of aristocracy made the new Constitution seem more monolithic than it was. Vague calls this a “counter-revolution,” but it looks less like a reversal than like a continuation of the Revolution’s own divided, grudgingly conciliatory spirit, carried forward by other means. The same uneasy coalition of democratic egalitarians and libertarian élites that made the Revolution also sustained it afterward, and remained in place, until our own time.

Both Vague and Rappleye do the good work of reminding readers of the financial current flowing into an ideological revolution. It is astounding to see that the habits of finance which we think of as recent and decadent—all that paper, all that venture capital, all that uninsured risk—were present at the creation. There is even a scent of crypto in the ease with which Willing and Morris circulated paper currency backed by nothing more than their backing.

Yet one comes away, in the end, more inclined than ever to respect the ideas that drove the interest rates more than the interest rates that drove the ideas. To say that the big question is who could afford to pay for the guns is to be reminded that the guns are where the power lies. Alexander Hamilton insisted that “tis by order of our finances—by restoring public credit—not by gaining battles, that we are finally to gain our object,” but finances mattered chiefly because they helped sew uniforms and supply arms, not because they made men fight. One reason we do not always follow the money is that it isn’t always decisive. Washington’s army remained a makeshift force, supported by matériel but sustained by morale.

It is true that bankruptcy can break a country on the battlefield—but almost invariably the battlefield defeat comes first, with the recognition of bankruptcy following in its wake. That was the pattern in France’s defeat by Prussia, in 1871, and in Russia against Germany in 1917: military collapse forced a belated reckoning with the depth of national debt. Even absolute immiseration has ambiguous effects. As W. H. Auden, one of the members of the American mission sent to assess the consequences of Allied bombing after the Second World War, discovered, the unimaginably brutal air campaign did little to erode German faith in the Third Reich. Communal commitment, national myth, shared passions—all the things we group under the heading of “ideology”—often prove more powerful than narrowly defined material “interests.” Washington seems to have grasped this intuitively. As long as he avoided outright defeat and kept his men sufficiently inspired to carry on, while waiting for the French Navy to arrive, he and his new country could survive.

For it turns out that the question of who rented the boat has an easy, if surprising, answer: nobody. Washington simply took it. He commandeered small crafts along the Delaware, seizing them under the claim of military necessity, and so won a “battle” at Trenton that was scarcely more than a skirmish but could be advertised as a victory. Once he had his men in camp, he neither paid nor clothed them particularly well, but he had Paine’s latest pamphlet read aloud to keep their spirits up. Willing and Morris helped to pay for horses and uniforms. Yet these were worthless unless the men on the horses and inside the uniforms believed that they were fighting for one another and for an ideal. They might grumble about the lack of boots and beer, but they stayed because they recognized the uncommon sense of “Common Sense.” It takes money to pay for uniforms, but it takes belief to keep them buttoned.

In reality, those American money maxims contain only partial truths. “Follow the money” was a poor guide to understanding Watergate, which arose not from motives of recognizable greed but to the still puzzling paranoia of a popular President who could not accept that he was popular. Interests may be downstream of ideology, but money is downstream of both. Bankers can rationally gamble on the consequences of events, but the events themselves are shaped by mysterious and often irrational forces—which is why the speculator needs to stay so close to the fine turnings. That old song may face the wrong way: the world goes round, and makes money go around it. ♦

Books

Can Psychoanalysis Help You Get the Life You Want?

In a new book, Adam Phillips wages a playful war on the strictures of traditional talk therapy.

By Katy Waldman March 16, 2026

In “Monogamy,” a collection of a hundred and twenty-one aphorisms on coupling and uncoupling, the psychoanalyst and prolific writer Adam Phillips suggests that the faithful and the promiscuous aren’t so different. Both are “idealists,” he writes, “deranged by hope, in awe of reassurance, impressed by their pleasures.” The book criticizes monogamy as “a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to a minimum,” but it doesn’t exactly defend infidelity. Phillips’s real target may be monotony, the offspring of rote rule-following. “We take monogamy for granted,” he writes, and “treat it as the norm,” sleepwalking into a future without considering whether it actually satisfies us. Ironically, Phillips’s strongest defense of sexual exclusivity is that a steadfast union might offer the same turnabouts and dramas, the same incandescences and crashing disappointments, that you’d normally pursue via cheating. “Perhaps we value monogamy because it lets us have it both ways,” he writes—novelty and continuity, enchantment and disillusion, the lives we live and those we merely visit in our dreams.

What do we want from the lives that we secretly imagine for ourselves? “A difficult mixture of the all too familiar and the experimental, the mostly reassuring and the partly disinhibited,” Phillips contends in “The Life You Want” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his latest book. When we were children, he continues, our parents recognized some parts of us and not others (athleticism but not musicality, for instance, or cheerfulness but not guile); now we go around both upholding and rebelling against those received regimes. We alternately display and downplay our encouraged aspects, hide and flaunt our uncountenanced ones. “Haunted by the versions of ourselves” that remain unembodied, Phillips writes, we wish to be who we are and also who we aren’t, splitting the difference even in fantasy.

Admen and bad romance novelists would like us to think that wanting is straightforward—indivisible, intuitive, and perhaps best remedied by credit card. For Phillips, however, wanting isn’t so simple; it has byways and switchbacks, weight and depth. What if we want something forbidden? What if the objects of our longing are socially acceptable but undermine who we’d like to be? What if we try to attain our aims and fail? What if we succeed and are disappointed, or the intensity of our delectation causes us to lose ourselves? And then, Phillips warns, there is the scandalous origin of our wanting: “our helplessness, our abjection . . . and our dependence.” We cannot satisfy ourselves; we must make demands on others; worse, others make demands on us. Interacting with one’s peers “is never exactly what one was hoping for,” Phillips observes wryly in “Missing Out,” a book from 2012 “in praise of the unlived life.” Socializing involves no fewer than “three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of the fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction.” And that, he adds, is when everything goes well.

Yet “it is only in states of frustration that we can begin to imagine—to elaborate, to envision—our desire,” Phillips writes. He’s articulating the traditional Freudian account of fantasy guiding us toward our best-case scenario: the “ordinary unhappiness” of reality, or what Phillips calls “the possibility of a more realistic satisfaction.” But one also feels his work pulling in a less orthodox direction, toward the pleasure of longing itself. For Freud, wishful thinking was an abandonment of reality. For Phillips, it’s an information source, one we jettison too quickly in our quest to be cured. “The Life You Want” finds Phillips chafing at his field’s prescriptiveness and dismayed by our inclination to submit to other people’s preëmptive conclusions about what we want. “Old-fashioned psychoanalysis always had a known destination,” he observes. There’s a risk that the patient gets up from the couch having discovered not her druthers but what Melanie Klein or Jacques Lacan or Sigmund Freud thought her druthers should be. “Describing the life we want,” Phillips cautions, “can sometimes be the most compliant—i.e., defensive—thing we ever do.”

Phillips is a figure for our therapy-soaked era, even if, for him, therapy feeds into and enables life, whereas we often seem to view life as feeding into and enabling therapy. He’s spent decades translating specialized concepts for general audiences—demystifying transference and projection, peeking under the hood of everyday occupations such as tickling and being bored, drawing on classic works of literature to illustrate the relevance of his field to ordinary experience. A shaman of the psychoanalytic Slate pitch, he often adopts an impish persona, issuing counterintuitive pronouncements about the benefits of quitting, pessimism, or shame. He once told The Paris Review that his adolescent study of English literature prepared him “to ironize the ambitions of grand theory.” Elsewhere, he has remarked with an unmistakable air of indulgence on how much of human endeavor—from art and prayer to political activity—is explicable as a form of attention-seeking.

In his published writing, which extends to more than twenty books, Phillips shows a love of mischief and tomfoolery. His wordplay is sporadically self-delighted; his pose of guileless receptivity caused Joan Acocella to compare him, in this magazine, to a child wondering what would happen if he pushed a pencil up his nose. He believes that we are incorrigibly self-defeating, that we constantly obstruct our own knowledge because we fear being in a position to sate our wayward desires. Hence, perhaps, the contrarianism, a commitment to reversing whatever expectation the reader might be imagined to hold, in an attempt to disarm and deprogram, possibly even cure her.

Phillips is a Freudian, but a selective and partial one, preferring to emphasize his predecessor’s sensitive, more literary aspects. The Austrian doctor was interested “in sentences, in the fact that language is evocative as well as informative,” Phillips told an interviewer, after he was tapped to edit a volume of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud. In “Becoming Freud,” a slender, circumlocutory biography, Phillips conjures a “champion” for patients, “someone who, like a good parent, or a good art critic, could appreciate what they were up to.”

He can be flippant about psychoanalysis, in one essay describing the analyst’s interpretation of the analysand as a “sophisticated form of interruption” undertaken to make the analyst feel “important.” In “Irreverence,” an essay from the new book, he depicts the titular concept as a way of testing authority (whether your target can withstand such shot-taking) and also a love test (whether your target will want to remain on reasonably good terms with you). If “the irreverent are wholly dependent on those they mock,” he writes, irreverence is also, potentially, “a sign of growing up.”

By that standard, the most recent work, animated by the question of what therapy should be and how it might help you get the life you want, is pretty mature. With nose-thumbing insouciance, Phillips recruits the pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty—or an imagined version of him—to vocalize his discontent with the strictures of his discipline. Rorty used the phrase “God terms” for ideas, such as human nature or objective reality, that alienate us from our agency by appealing to a higher truth. Phillips, a Londoner, takes him as a stand-in for American optimism about the power of positive thinking. “The Life You Want” sets out to shape Freud into a more amenable ancestor, someone better suited to Phillips’s purposes. It’s what Rorty would call a creative “redescription” of the goals of psychoanalysis, redescription being the quintessential pragmatic activity, a flexible trying out of different stories or perspectives until you find one that works for you. As Phillips freely admits, this redescription—and perhaps redescription in general—might be naïvely wishful, not a bending of reality but a flight from it.

Freud’s biggest contribution to psychoanalytic thought might be his portrait of a persecutory, enigmatic, and disturbing unconscious. For Rorty, the Freudian id is another God term, a bad-faith bid to “delegate and outsource our purposes and our imagination and our intelligence to something beyond ourselves,” as Phillips puts it. Rorty, he writes, prefers to envision the unconscious as a team of partners or interlocutors, all of them “really useful, helpful and informed.” The prospect delights Phillips, but he’s skeptical: Does pragmatism’s redescription merely baffle our efforts to understand and transform our darker impulses? It’s when we refuse to face what we really want, he worries, that we grow pliant and manipulable, vulnerable to the lure of instant gratification and denied the chance to make something tonic out of our frustration.

Freud theorized that our lives are a project of tempering and downgrading desire, an ongoing compromise between fantasy and reality. By contrast, Phillips writes that the Rortian seeks “the most inclusive conversation possible” with our unconscious selves, one that “will further and proliferate our purposes and increase our sense of autonomy.” Strikingly, we should try to “proliferate” our purposes, not just advance them. If the father of talk therapy aimed to mitigate our wanting’s intensity, Rorty sought to intervene in its monomania. Phillips lays this out in “Too Bad, or On Seeing the Worst,” a chapter about an essay, by the Romanian author Emil Cioran, speculating that our elemental self, our “daimon,” might never have wanted to have been born in the first place. A Freudian might ask, lugubriously, how we might endure such pain. Phillips seizes the opportunity to wonder what we might gain from expressing a permanently unattainable desire. (“Having been born,” he writes, “is the one problem we can never solve.”) Perhaps, he offers, a loosening is possible—some breathing room, some permission to look around at what else might appeal. Via Rorty, he invites us to consider that we can desire many things and to live in a way that tests this hypothesis, releasing ourselves from the stranglehold of our single-minded obsessions.

“We have ourselves put the authorities deep down inside us,” Phillips writes in “The Life You Want.” In “Against Self-Criticism,” a 2015 essay for the London Review of Books, he picks a fight with the Freudian superego, whose ceaseless opprobrium, he claims, objectifies the rest of the psyche, reducing it to a single blameworthy victim. In fact, he writes, there is more to our inner ensemble than convict and executioner, or prisoner and despot. Each of us contains a “repressed repertoire” of “fragmentary alternative selves,” Phillips proposes. “Where judgment is, there conversation should be. Where there is dogma there is an uncompleted experiment.” Instead of letting your superego browbeat the other dramatis personae into submission, Phillips intimates, you should emulate a podcast host, moderating a respectful discussion among your mental parts.

His ideal of the psyche, in which all self-fragments get a hearing, can be extrapolated onto a society whose members are free to debate one another as they decide their paths forward. In his book “Equals,” he writes that “being listened to can enable one to bear—and even to enjoy—listening to oneself and others; which democracy itself depends on.” Psychoanalysis is misnamed as a “talking cure,” he submits. Really, it is a “listening cure.” Unsurprisingly, one of the political forms he’s most interested in is the relationship between analyst and analysand.

Self-criticism, Phillips writes in his L.R.B. essay, is “our most unpleasant—our most sadomasochistic—way of loving ourselves,” an attempt to win over the authorities when we fear we can’t otherwise live up to their expectations. In his telling, the patient often wants to comply with the heroic, omniscient analyst in order to avoid thinking for herself; the analyst must guard against this dynamic and against his own desire to dominate the patient. For Phillips, analysis is meant to help us “with our idealizations, with our craving for authority, our wish to idolize and be controlled.” The threat is that the analyst instead comes to resemble the superego, a “boring and vicious soliloquist with an audience of one.”

In “The Life You Want,” Phillips’s anti-authoritarian tendencies motivate him to rescue the idea of resistance, which in psychoanalysis refers to the conscious and unconscious strategies that patients use to impede the therapeutic process. “Resistance,” the volume’s culminating essay, notes that the analysand may have healthy reasons for evading her desires—she may be hoping to preserve a cherished value, for example—and that resistance can prolong and thus enrich the work of the cure.

This last argument enacts a familiar rhetorical move. Phillips often takes something apparently undesirable, such as guilt, and reframes it as a prelude or a precondition, a way station in a necessary developmental process. (Recall how he creatively redescribed frustration as the midwife to “realistic satisfaction.”) But his defense of resistance ultimately settles into a different shape and leaves him opposing the priorities of traditional psychotherapy. Phillips does not, finally, claim that recalcitrance on the couch crystallizes a patient’s understanding, thereby reducing her suffering. Resistance may not reduce her suffering at all. Rather, it demonstrates that she will proceed on her own terms and in her own time. Resistance “is integral to our singularity,” Phillips writes; the opposite of “defeatedness,” it’s a step toward “following one’s inclination and curiosity and refusing to be intimidated.” Here, departing from Freud, he casts freedom as more curative than the truth.

What do we need psychoanalysis for, then? For Phillips, the answer comes back to the intricate turnings and archeological layers of desire. Rorty believes “that we are good at knowing what we want,” Phillips writes, a contention that erases our ambivalence and underestimates our “need for safety.” Moreover, he claims, the Rortian vision of desire is informed by a shallow and too innocent view of the unconscious. Insensible to our Stygian instincts, pragmatism is always threatening to shade into permissiveness, a “kind of capricious, impulsive egotism.” It’s true that, without Rorty, Freud can appear “omniscient and impoverishing.” But without Freud, Phillips suggests, Rorty can’t surface the sunken richness of our wanting, its destructiveness, its haunting strangeness. Pragmatism fails to listen to desire. As a result, an essential texture of life escapes its grasp.

Like monogamy and infidelity, or our lived and unlived lives, psychoanalysis and pragmatism need each other. The plenitude, variety, and pluralism that are the highest values of liberal democracy require the force and insight of the psychoanalytic tradition, and vice versa. It’s unclear, though, that any of these pairs can be fully reconciled. The best case, Phillips implies, might be a conversation—not the idealized sort that results in unanimity or even acceptance, but a realistic one that grants the participants their full difficulty and irrationality and acknowledges that alignment might remain out of reach.

Still, the fantasy of a more perfect union persists. In one chapter of “The Life You Want,” Phillips describes the Freudian dream work. During the day, he explains, “we unconsciously pick things out that will be used in the making of our night’s dream.” This idea, that our unconscious gathers material during the day to dream with at night, suggests that what Rorty wants for us—to proliferate our purposes, to look around at what else we might want—is, in Phillips’s reading of Freud, already ours. By subjecting our inner worlds to such devoted scrutiny, the author of “The Interpretation of Dreams” emphasizes, in Phillips’s words, “the sheer scale of our interests,” the possible lives we formulate even when we don’t realize we’re doing so. “The Life You Want” is itself a sort of dream work, which synthesizes opposing elements into a poetic, if wishful, whole. ♦

The Art World

What Egon Schiele Saw at the Hospital

At the Neue Galerie, a show suggests that the artist’s raw, contorted depictions of the body were influenced by a formative relationship with a doctor.

By Zachary Fine March 16, 2026

How did Egon Schiele arrive at his particular vision of the human body? This has always puzzled me. If you go back and review his influences, such as Gustav Klimt and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, or survey the ambient intellectual milieu of fin-de-siècle Vienna—from Freud to the anatomist Josef Hyrtl—Schiele’s wiry creatures, all bone and sinew, still seem to come out of nowhere. In drawings and paintings, he disfigured men, women, and children. Flesh often seems bruised. Limbs are weirdly bent or over-rotated. Faces have a regurgitated aspect. Sometimes Schiele randomly lopped off part of a leg, or used bloody coloring to imply a flayed corpse. All of this occurred to him before the carnage of the First World War and continued mostly unabated until he died, in 1918, at the age of twenty-eight.

A new show at the Neue Galerie points to one possible source for Schiele’s bodies. The centerpiece is a 1910 portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, a physician at a women’s clinic in Vienna, who gave Schiele direct access to patients: newborns, pregnant women, and the infirm. Although Schiele is remembered as a sort of high-art pornographer, his paintings an endless parade of genitals and splayed legs, the results are rarely pornographic. Perverse, unsettling, and morally suspect, yes—but erotic, not so much. There is a clinical quality that interferes. Schiele’s favorite trick was to surgically carve his subjects out of their environment and lay them on a blank page. Without the context of a studio or a bourgeois interior, there are only people made to look etherized, agitated, or ill, suspended in some empty and sterile place between life and death. You could argue that the closest thing to an implied setting is a hospital.

Before meeting Graff and his patients, Schiele made art that was largely derivative. He had studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts with mixed results, and landed a few pieces at a major international exhibition in 1909, but his style was still Klimtian and Jugendstil, full of decorative froth and languorous, dreamy bodies. Fast-forward a year, and everything had changed. His work was suddenly a rogues’ gallery of ghoulish figures with keyed-up colors and unnaturally shrunken or engorged body parts. Even Schiele knew it: “I went through Klimt until March,” he wrote in a letter. “Today I believe I am someone completely different.”

The cocktail of influences piped into Schiele’s brain around 1910 had a few key elements. He was repeatedly exposed to the looser brushwork of Max Oppenheimer and Oskar Kokoschka; newly enthusiastic about Javanese shadow puppets; and charmed by a wacky friend, Erwin Osen, a mime, an artist, and a cabaret performer, who drew Schiele’s attention to the body language of the mentally ill. There was also a flock of patrons around to puff up his confidence and provide some income. Heinrich Benesch, a railroad inspector, was so obsessed with Schiele that he begged him never to discard or burn any sketches, but to hand them over. “Please,” Benesch said, “write the following equation in crayon on your stove: ‘stove=Benesch.’ ” Schiele’s work was too crude for aristocratic tastes, unlike Klimt’s, but was well suited to a particular slice of the educated middle class with a penchant for bodily oddity: doctors. One of Schiele’s most devoted supporters was a physician named Oskar Reichel. Another was Erwin von Graff.

In the portrait from 1910, Graff looks like a nervous chimney sweep. His face and arms are mysteriously darkened, as if powdered with soot, but somehow—and this is the first of a dozen quirks in the painting—his white shirt is in near-mint condition. The exhibition catalogue puts forward the idea of radiodermatitis, suggesting that Graff’s frequent use of X-rays damaged his skin, which is plausible for his hands but might not explain what’s happened to his head: a swirl of black, sienna, and green, with white slits for eyes and teeth. The peculiar way he holds his arms, as if he’s about to sing the national anthem, is supposedly a surgeon’s hygienic pose. But there are too many stray details that cut against the grain of his professionalism, giving the painting an almost comic air. The most obvious is the little bandage wedged on his fingertip, like a pat of butter. Then there’s the shy pinky tucked behind his forearm, the torched eyebrows, and the crooked smile. Graff seems to be returning from Hell and having a chuckle about it.

Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.

Doctors and painters both study the human body, but one does so with an eye to improving its condition, while the other turns it into an image. This inspires more jealousy than you would think. The choice of Goya and Eakins to put themselves in their paintings of doctors—regardless of how matter-of-factly or admiringly the doctors are rendered—is telling. The artist is there to remind you that, like the doctor, he has the power to give life and to take it away. But my guess is that Schiele wasn’t all that fussed about proving his social worth. Whether or not a painter had the importance of a physician, he could still exert his will on the world of appearances.

When Graff and Schiele met, in early 1910, the doctor was thirty-one and the artist was nineteen. How exactly Graff provided access to pregnant women and newborns, we don’t know. It’s possible that he recommended his patients to Schiele, and paid them a small fee, or that Schiele cosplayed as a doctor, following Graff on his rounds. There’s also a passing chance that Graff turned Schiele on to journals—produced at the Salpêtrière hospital, in Paris, originally under the guidance of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot—that featured photographs of patients with all manner of pathologies, from hysteria to macrodactyly, a condition that involves enlarged fingers and toes. Schiele painted the picture of Graff as repayment, after the doctor treated a love interest, Liliana Amon. It’s a bizarre thank-you gift, less a professional portrait than an impersonal experiment. Schiele doesn’t seem to want to flatter or injure Graff; he just wants to please himself.

To call Schiele an Austrian Expressionist, like Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl, is to imply that his art moves from inside to outside: a molten core of angst and psychological tension canalized through the limbs, into a brush, and then released onto the canvas. This squares nicely with the Freudian world view of repressed thoughts welling up, in dreams or in slips of the tongue. But what makes the relationship with Graff a clever lens is that it reverses this reading. The Schiele of the hospital starts with surfaces. Once he’s put a subject on the blank page, he can turn the exterior of the body into an arena for all kinds of play, psychological and somatic. In one self-portrait, he gives himself blue hair; in another, he disappears his penis. There’s even one piece in the show where Schiele presents himself thrice: as snarling enfant terrible, in a caftan; as smiley angelic bystander; and as tight-lipped bureaucrat. He always seems to be palpating his sense of self, testing its variety with a little smirk—not bursting onto the page with emotion.

The exhibition has about thirty paintings, watercolors, and drawings, many of them from 1910; the curators, Renée Price and Janis Staggs, have smartly dilated this moment in Schiele’s development. Once the hospital entered his work, it never left. In “Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings” (1910), the sitter spreads her legs and tries to cover her naked torso with a bony, oversized left hand. Her pose seems adopted from a gynecological exam, but we know the person depicting her isn’t a licensed physician. In the reddish and purple “Newborn Baby” (1910), crinkly as the paper it’s drawn on, the flesh is bruised and raw, with no ounce of cherubic sweetness. It’s quite like a fresh newborn, in fact. We don’t think of Schiele as a realist, but his attention to skin that was inflamed, racy, or visually taboo is more honest than what most realists will show you. His work isn’t just uncensored but unflinching, aesthetically and emotionally. He cut everything close to the bone.

As Schiele was dying, from influenza, Graff gave him a final injection to ease his pain. The Neue has a photo of Schiele on his deathbed, along with a plaster death mask. It’s likely at this moment in the show—all of which is squeezed into a single room—that you’ll notice a certain analogy at work, which is that this room, like that of Schiele’s paintings, like that of a hospital, contains birth and life, sickness and death. It’s a room we all know, and generally want to avoid. Schiele gives us a few perverse reasons to stick around. ♦

The Theatre

Two Playwrights Tackle Father Figures

Clare Barron’s “You Got Older” is a rare play about a good dad. Wallace Shawn’s “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” is defiantly tender about an amoral one.

By Emily Nussbaum March 12, 2026

If you’ve been going to the theatre lately, you’ve seen plenty of what I’ve started to think of as “piñata plays.” In this sort of story, a big family gets together and there are a lot of secrets. For most of the evening, the mood is darkly funny and a little ominous, as the siblings take undermining jabs and the in-laws roll their eyes. Then, in the final act, there’s a hugely satisfying, usually drunken throwdown in which every single person gets to take a whack at the piñata. All the secrets pour out, the revelations of infidelity and addiction and so on, as the group gives vent to the stuff that’s previously been unsayable—not to fix anything, mind you, since some things can’t be fixed.

These plays are often brilliant, and even lesser variants are fun to watch, because piñata-whacking itself is a naughty thrill, a cathartic fantasy for anyone with a family and/or a secret. But there’s something equally pleasurable—and more rare—about a play that pulls off the opposite trick, that revels in the way family members can love one another, can stay connected and build instead of destroying, even amid loss and uncertainty. It’s a hard thing to make dramatic and an easy thing to make corny, but it’s as authentic a theme as dysfunction. In the buoyant revival of Clare Barron’s 2014 father-daughter play, “You Got Older,” which is running under A24’s new management at the Cherry Lane Theatre, the creators find glory in something ordinary: an adult child and an aging parent trying their best.

The story is simple: Mae (Alia Shawkat), a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, newly single and unemployed (she’d been dating her boss), has come home to rural Washington to stay with her widowed father, who’s being treated for a “weird, mysterious cancer.” Her mom died of cancer, too, years earlier. She’s trying to be responsible, to behave like a grownup, but being home makes her keyed-up, antsy, and she retreats into her sexual imagination for comfort. The play consists of a series of sharp, realistic dialogues broken up with bursts of surreality: Mae and her dad talking awkwardly in the garden; Mae at a local bar, sporting bright-red short shorts and showing a near-stranger her rash; and, now and then, a fantasy cowboy, who keeps threatening to tie Mae up, whether she likes it or not.

Shawkat, with her warm, amused eyes and her mop of curls, is a perfect carrier for Mae’s air of abjection, flopping around her bed like a horny, gloomy Raggedy Ann. She is particularly adroit at playing charmers whom people forgive, sometimes too easily, like the millennial trickster Dory on the TV series “Search Party.” But the whole production is smartly allied with that openhearted sensibility, down to Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple, homey scenic design, in which wood-panelled walls glide around to suggest a garden, a bar, a hospital, a Midwestern bedroom. Directed by Anne Kauffman, the show trusts its audience not to need much guidance: when the set abruptly shifts to reveal Mae’s three siblings, it’s thrilling how instantly believable their teasing bond is.

Still, the most remarkable performance at the Cherry Lane is by Peter Friedman, who plays the kind of father you rarely see in art: a good one. It’s a hard sort of acting to describe, a spectacle of humility and self-awareness, unshowy and confident. A businessman with a genial, chatty energy, Mae’s father, facing mortality, is eager to help his daughter to know him better, not as a child but as an adult, to create a closeness that she clearly craves but is frightened of. As she raises walls, he builds bridges—and she scrambles across, absorbing bits of wisdom, a few of which feel tied to her secret thoughts about control. At one point, he startles her by explaining that, unlike her, he’s not terrified of feeling helpless: “Like going to the dentist. I love that. You just lie back and open your mouth. What can you do?”

Late in the show, Friedman’s character plays his daughter the song “Firewood,” by Regina Spektor, a songwriter whose work—droll and ardent—shares a lot with Barron’s play. It’s his cancer theme song, he explains; her mom had also had one. “You guys were weird,” she tells him—it’s Mae’s reflex word, her way of shooing away excess feeling. “Some of the lyrics are a little overdramatic, but I think it’s a pretty good song,” he adds, excitedly; he wants her to listen. She is reluctant to do it, but then she does it anyway, absorbing the song’s rapturous optimism. The audience does, too: we listen to that song all the way through, feeling the time pass.

Wallace Shawn’s haunting “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” directed by his long-term creative partner, André Gregory, is less a piñata play than it is a public autopsy, in which a family of erudite, self-possessed medical examiners stand over the corpse of their own legacy, poking it gently. There are four people implicated in the crime: Dick (Josh Hamilton), a rich, famous, charming, and extroverted New York novelist; Elle (Maria Dizzia), his saintly but quietly furious public-school-teacher wife, whom he fell for when he was sixteen; Tim, their squirrelly pervert of a son (played with the worst mustache in history by the delightful John Early), and Elaine (Hope Davis), Dick’s lover, a misanthrope with a clear-eyed understanding of her own choices.

It’s explosive material that, in a different artist’s hands, might have inspired a third-act screaming match over an Upper East Side dinner table, with snifters flying. Instead, Shawn stages his story as a panel of intimate testimonies, confided to us alone. The four characters sit on chairs, facing the audience. Sometimes they hold mugs. As the spotlight settles on each of them, that person unspools a monologue, a candid account of their origins, their desires and dreams, their galaxy of excuses and explanations. These stories slowly form a cracked family portrait, like a jigsaw puzzle. Are the characters speaking to us from beyond the grave? Perhaps. Overhead, images of moths float by—a reference to “moth day,” which, Dick confides, with a nostalgic smile, is the phrase he invented as a small child to describe the day we die, guided to the grave, “vaguely and flutteringly,” by blind moths. Then he tells us how it felt to die.

Going in, I’d assumed that “Moth Days” would be Shawn’s first whack at his own family piñata, one that involves this magazine. Shawn’s father was William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, referred to by the staff, worshipfully, as Mr. Shawn; after his death, at eighty-five, Lillian Ross, one of his star reporters, wrote a memoir revealing their decades-long affair. “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” is, it’s true, a play about an adult son who is wrestling with his famous father’s secret life. A key story is strikingly similar to a story from Ross’s memoir: Elaine rushes to Elle’s apartment after Dick’s death, then meets Tim at the door, as if she were a vampire requesting permission to enter. But the parallels aren’t precise; they’re more like images in a mirror that’s slyly tilted to disorient the viewer. Dick, played by Hamilton with a boyish glee, is a chipper, gregarious sybarite, while Mr. Shawn was an introvert’s introvert. Similarly, Early’s dissolute failson feels less like a self-portrait than like a darkly comic deflection, a gargoyle-ish stand-in for his creator’s anxieties. (I was reminded of the rule that, when you write a roman à clef, you should give your enemy a small penis, since he’ll never say that it’s him.)

Instead of an attack, the play offers something more unsettling, a meditation on the allure of a bad life and the trap of a good one. Hamilton’s cheerful Dick tells a story out of Eden, or maybe “A Star Is Born”: by his account, he was an unconfident nobody until he met his decent, dazzling catch of a wife—and then, as he bloomed, she faded. While she buried herself in lonely motherhood, untouched glamour, and the martyrdom of do-gooder work, Dick went morally bankrupt—gradually, then suddenly. “Well, I’ve written these things, and people really like them, and I think I deserve a little reward for that,” he explains, beaming, in a hypnotic homage to cocktails, parties with famous strangers, the louche pleasures of Manhattan night clubs, freedoms available only among wicked, clever peers.

It should feel damning. Wallace Shawn’s own artistic path began with the O.G. piñata play, one in which children reproach parents for their lies, selfishness, and neglect: at thirteen, long before he learned the truth about his father, he attended Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” then insisted that his parents see it, too. His early plays were finger-pointing confrontations with the audience, and in “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” from 1985, “The Designated Mourner,” from 1996, and the 1990 monologue “The Fever”—which Shawn has been delivering twice a week at the same venue—he built a reputation as a caustic moralist, slicing through bourgeois hypocrisies. “Moth Days,” however, doesn’t take sides. It’s defiantly tender. Hamilton—playing a narcissist who radiates innocence even when he describes betrayal—is easy to love. So is Dizzia, as Dick’s wife, the dark cello to his bright violin, particularly when her eyes narrow and she unleashes her truest, rudest, strangest feelings. Davis is dryly funny as a cynic who introduces herself as someone who had “never been the sort of person about whom people would say, ‘You can always count on her in an emergency.’ ” Early, as the family’s dented nepo baby, is a peculiar fount of profane insight, twisted but touchingly damaged. As I watched, the word “seduction” kept coming to mind: even at their worst (incest fantasies, grooming), you want to listen to this quartet forever, which is a good thing, since the play is three hours long. Could it be shorter? Sure—the second and third acts could have been combined. But I was never bored, and more often was swept away by the text’s candor and depth, its merciless generosity.

A single scene late in the play breaks the spell of Shawn’s structure, when two characters turn to each other and acknowledge, with relief, the quality they share: an honest sleaziness, not a false decency. It’s an observation that feels like the creator’s most penetrating one—the idea that, looking back on life, it may mean more to be understood than to be virtuous. Dick’s life leaves scars, which don’t heal. But the love between cruel people is a real love, too. ♦

The Current Cinema

“Project Hail Mary”: In Space, No One Should Hear Your Glib Jokes

In Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel, Ryan Gosling’s star power fuels an unlikely tale of far-flung friendship.

By Justin Chang March 13, 2026

In 2006, Ryan Gosling, then in his twenties, starred in a tough-minded, low-budget drama called “Half Nelson,” in which he played a middle-school teacher hobbled by a crack addiction. Years later, the actor, now a fully fledged star, blasted off into space; the film was the Neil Armstrong drama “First Man” (2018), and it climaxed with a weepy reconstruction of the 1969 moon landing. Now, in “Project Hail Mary,” Gosling has come full circle: he is Ryland Grace, a middle-school teacher who blasts off into space. There are differences, to be sure. Grace’s destination is the star Tau Ceti, roughly 11.9 light-years from Earth. No crack is smoked; an astronaut’s life has enough highs. (There’s also an onboard vodka stash that doesn’t last long.) Weeping, though, you can count on. Gosling is a beautiful crier, and his character’s journey seems destined to end in tears.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes. Early on, Grace finds himself mourning his two crewmates, Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub), who have perished mid-journey, leaving him all alone. Grim stuff—or it would be, if not for a vein of humor that throbs here and elsewhere, keeping the full sting of loss at bay. Grace, you see, has just emerged from a years-long induced coma. Looking like the Unabomber, he bumbles and flails about, barely able to remember his name, his mission, or his late colleagues. He delivers patchy eulogies that feel half sad, half jokey, and more than a little half-hearted. Consider Claire Denis’s rather chillier space opera, “High Life” (2018), in which another astronaut (Robert Pattinson) jettisoned his dead crewmates with far less ceremony. He knew he was alone. Not so Grace, who always seems aware of an audience on the other side of the movie screen, waiting to be entertained.

“Project Hail Mary” is the most exasperatingly insistent crowd-pleaser I’ve seen in a while. It serves up an elaborate science-fiction plot in easily digestible bites, often with a juicy one-liner or a side order of pratfall. Both the title and the quippy-wonky tone come from an Andy Weir novel, from 2021, and, like the book, the film uses Grace’s temporary amnesia as a structuring device. We are jerked between past and present as his backstory gets filled in, one jogged memory at a time. Early on, we flash back to Earth, where Grace is teaching junior-high science; his latest lesson is about sound frequencies, and you can rest assured that it will appear on the film’s midterm exam. There’s a pre-apocalyptic chill in the air. The sun is being devoured by energy-hungry microbes, called Astrophage, and the resulting cooling threatens to wipe out much of Earth’s population. This isn’t just a local problem; the Astrophage are eating stars everywhere, like ants at an intergalactic picnic. Lights out for the universe.

Enter Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a government official with a barbed half smile and a will of iron, who drags Grace back to the world of top-flight science, which he left behind years before, after flaming out of academia. Stratt is the head of Project Hail Mary, a global rescue effort to stop the star-eaters before it’s too late. (One of the film’s most casually poignant touches is its matter-of-fact vision of international coöperation and competent leadership. Talk about science fiction.) A crew will be sent to study Tau Ceti, a star that seems resistant to Astrophage infection. Stratt needs the world’s best minds at her disposal, and Grace is one of them. But he’s reluctant to get involved, and flashbacks reveal the long, improbable arc of how he relents—how this stubborn, self-deprecating oddball, with a doctorate in molecular biology but no astronaut experience, wound up lost in space, with the fate of the world in his nervous grip.

Mercifully, in writing the novel, Weir realized that his Grace was not sufficient for us. And so, not far from Tau Ceti, an enormous alien spacecraft looms into view. In Lord and Miller’s adaptation, it’s an impressively elongated affair—made from a substance called xenonite, though I’d have guessed dry spaghetti noodles—and you can discern, in the aliens’ handiwork, the same whimsical sense of play that animated Lord and Miller’s “Lego Movie” (2014). A bridge extends from ship to ship, and Grace meets a squat, faceless, many-legged creature, like a crustacean made of sandstone. Their first encounter occurs on opposite sides of a transparent wall, and all it takes is an impromptu Marx Brothers routine—Grace gently dances, the alien follows suit—to confirm that they mean each other no harm.

The creature’s language consists largely of gentle, high-pitched squeals, difficult but not impossible to decode, and Grace, using a laptop, manages to fashion a rudimentary system of communication. At last, the alien—brought wonderfully to life, with an amusingly robotic voice and skittery movements, by the puppeteer James Ortiz—can tell his story. He is an engineer from the planet Erid, which is also threatened by Astrophage, and, like Grace, he is the lone survivor of his mission. And so begins a beautiful friendship, one that might save both their planets. “I’m gonna call you Rocky,” Grace says. Presumably, E.T. would have been too obvious.

Nearly every cinematic space voyage, however far flung, brushes up against familiar terrain. If this one reminds you of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (2014), that’s no surprise: “Project Hail Mary” is nowhere near as mind-bending, but it has its share of Nolan-esque centrifugal set pieces and conceptual paradoxes. (One nicely circular irony: Grace’s ship is powered by Astrophage. The agent of Earth’s destruction is also the engine of its salvation.) Even more obvious are the echoes of “The Martian” (2015), another wryly funny tale of an astronaut cast adrift that was adapted by Goddard from a Weir novel. But the director there was Ridley Scott, and his streamlined professionalism kept the comic and the cosmic judiciously in check.

Lord and Miller are boisterous funnymen, with a flair for the exaggerated and the outlandish that feels born of their frequent work in animation. (They wrote and directed “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” from 2009, and co-produced the hugely successful “Spider-Verse” franchise.) Even within the live-action spectacle of “Project Hail Mary,” the directors aim for uncharted realms of goofball grandeur, as if they were bent on dramatizing the most serious human enterprise in the least serious manner possible. When Rocky temporarily moves into the earthling ship—unable to handle the new atmosphere, he shields himself inside a dodecahedron-shaped “ball”—he disdains Grace’s untidy habits and other human shortcomings. Grace, in turn, grouses about his new roomie in a series of video diaries, which will be sent back to Earth. “He’s growing on me,” Grace eventually admits, adding, “At least he’s not growing in me.” His companion expresses a more succinct version of the sentiment: “Rocky happy not alone.”

And so we find ourselves in an interspecies buddy comedy: “Smart and Smarter.” The buddies’ plan involves the retrieval of amoeba specimens from a celestial body orbiting Tau Ceti. This planet is a striking piece of production design, with a nicely retro matte-style finish, though it does have a gaseous swirl of pink and green that looks a bit like Planet “Wicked.” Lord and Miller, working with the cinematographer Greig Fraser, avoid the conventional visual language of the prestige space epic, with its sterile surfaces and zero-gravity tracking shots. When Grace first awakens on his ship, the film cuts hectically around, above, and below him, as if to approximate his mental and physical disorientation. But even after the grogginess wears off, there’s little sense of flow to the images; they don’t build or move hypnotically from one to the next, and they suggest a curious reluctance, on the part of the filmmakers, to maximize the possibilities of the big screen. Even their vision of outer space seldom imparts the sense of a terrifying, unknowable vastness.

As obstacles, reversals, and near-death experiences accumulate, the film balloons to two and a half hours—hardly overlong, you might think, for an epic of looming planetary destruction. But the audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of “Project Hail Mary” expends it recklessly. All the more reason to be grateful for Sandra Hüller as Stratt, who keeps pulling the proceedings back to Earth in the best possible way. Hüller’s bone-dry reserve is effortlessly amusing, in a way that Gosling’s more strained antics are not, and Stratt’s prickly bond with Grace, brusque but not unkind, seems to foreshadow his future interactions with Rocky: they, too, must learn to speak the same language. There’s a fleeting yet sublime moment of connection one night, when Stratt, lowering her guard at a bar with her colleagues, croons a gorgeous cover of Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times.” You have to wonder if the filmmakers were inspired by the actor’s great performance in “Toni Erdmann” (2016), in which she similarly turned a karaoke moment into the stuff of emotional revelation. “We gotta get away from here,” Hüller sings, and rightly so. She’s out of this world. ♦

Poems

Réservoir

Then

Poems

Réservoir

By Tova Gannana March 16, 2026

Mimi telling stories of her father happily
smashing furniture in his bathrobe.

Mimi on the road with her horses
and cigarettes, her good looks and wit.

She said shhhhh here’s another one
and words came out of her mouth like smoke.

We’d all jump in the lake, swim for the other side.
Mimi on the shore later went in as ashes.

This is the season of crushing elder box leaves with our feet.
She said her father stood on a platform

in Paris, his notebook still on his seat, watching the train go
back in its tracks.

Poems

Then

By Jorie Graham March 16, 2026

Then the full
moon rose
& filled the
windows

and I put my arm
around you
as you slept
& I slept

alongside you
for a while.
All around us the world.
And in it us

neither large nor
small. This
is the poem
where the moonlight

will whiten everything & I
will let go
of the world
as it was

once. It was probably
never that way
I will think,
but its cage

wasn’t visible then
& we thought we were
free, we thought
there was history

in the world—
but it was an
illusion, wasn’t it, it
must have been,

because otherwise how
could it have
disappeared
so suddenly.

But the whiteness
is whitening the panes
beyond us
ever brighter

as you sleep,
& your sleep, yr kind
sleep says no, no,
it is all true here

in the poem,
says I won’t tell you
there’s freedom
anywhere

but look
at what you hold
in your arms
for free

as the moon
rises
over the fields
without us,

as it rises in the eyes

of all the watchers
in their dens
on their
branches in the hollows of

what were once
the sun-warmed furrows
farmers cut
into the earth

when there were farmers.

This is drawn from “Killing Spree.”

Puzzles & Games

The Crossword: Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Crossword

The Crossword: Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Today’s theme: Fashion spread.

By Chandi Deitmer March 10, 2026

The Mail

Letters from Our Readers

The Mail

Letters from Our Readers

Readers respond to Burkhard Bilger’s piece about turbulence, Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s article on Anthropic, Ava Kofman’s story concerning surrogacy, and Katy Waldman’s essay about fawning.

March 16, 2026

High and Low

Burkhard Bilger’s recent story about aviation turbulence opens with a dramatic account of a Singapore Airlines flight, SQ321, in May, 2024 (“Buckle Up,” March 9th). The plane hit clear-air turbulence over Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River, causing it to drop almost two hundred feet in an instant. During the Second World War, U.S. Army Air Forces transport planes confronted the same weather system. Flying from northeast India, over “the Hump” of intervening mountain ranges, to southwestern China, pilots routinely encountered turbulence that dropped and lifted their aircraft not hundreds of feet but thousands. U.S.A.A.F. records, diaries, and memoirs are filled with details of these flights. The C-46 pilot Thomas M. Sykes, for example, wrote that while travelling over the Salween River, near the Myanmar-China border, he experienced “extreme turbulence that caused altitude variations of 2,000ft up and down.”

The purpose of these transport flights was to supply China by air, and by doing so insure a close alliance between the U.S. and a Nationalist China run by Chiang Kai-shek. Given how that plan turned out, it is unsurprising that the remarkable service of these pilots, and the extraordinary theatre of war in which they operated, is little studied or known today. What pilots dubbed the Aluminum Trail of aircraft wreckage, however, remains strewn across the mountains and jungles of their old route.

Caroline Alexander
Northeast Harbor, Maine

Hard to Compute

I was fascinated by Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s piece about the A.I. company Anthropic and its employees’ attempts to understand their large language model, Claude (“I, Claudius,” February 16th & 23rd). I noted that many of the figures in the piece casually equate selfhood to a matter of, as Lewis-Kraus puts it, “neurons and narratives.” That fact put me in mind of philosophers, including Søren Kierkegaard and William James, who held that the self is precisely what no list of simple attributes can exhaust. To me, the interesting question isn’t whether Claude’s ability to communicate suggests selfhood but why we so readily accept that ours could be captured this way.

Lauri Pietinalho
New York City

By the time I finished Lewis-Kraus’s article, I felt physically ill. Reading about Anthropic’s staff and their experiments, I wondered whether these people had any idea of the real-life mayhem that’s unfolding because of the A.I. race. I live in Appalachia—rural southern Ohio, to be exact. Landowners here are being offered anywhere from fifty thousand to three hundred thousand dollars an acre by developers trying to build data centers on our farmland—data centers that will eventually gulp our water and buy our cheap gas. Those of us who understand the consequences of these sales are organizing against people and corporations whose net worth is in the trillions, and who, in many cases, have regulators in their pockets. Recently, the Ohio E.P.A.—a lapdog to business interests—dropped a draft proposal to let data centers in Ohio dump cooling waste in any waterway in the state. Just like fracking brine, that waste can be saturated with PFAS. I’d like to read a deeply researched piece about this rapidly encroaching environmental disaster.

Barbara Stewart
Marietta, Ohio

Duty of Care

Ava Kofman’s riveting article about a Chinese couple living in California who had dozens of children via surrogates underscores the fact that our country needs better regulations to protect children (“The Brood,” February 16th & 23rd). This was especially apparent to me as someone who adopted a child from China twenty-eight years ago. At that time, the Chinese government required that my husband and I provide birth and marriage certificates, proof of employment, financial statements, medical-exam reports, and criminal-background checks. In addition, we had to have a home study performed by a licensed social worker. There were age requirements for the adoptive parents. By contrast, all that seems to have mattered in the case Kofman discusses were the interests of the parties with the financial resources to enforce parental rights, not the interests of the children. China was not prosperous when we adopted. Yet it made ample requirements to insure the welfare of the children in its care.

Adele England
Plano, Texas

Fawning, Over

I enjoyed Katy Waldman’s review of two new books on the so-called fawn response, a term popularized on social media to describe “various forms of ingratiating, people-pleasing behavior” (Books, January 19th). Fawning represents a new chapter in a longer story: America’s habit of treating closeness as something to recover from. Again, our attachments to others are labelled the problem, and self-containment prescribed as the cure.

The remedy for such habits always seems to be greater individuation—an unsurprising response, as Waldman notes, in an era of eroding social safety nets—but that prescription risks cutting out not just the dysfunction but also the connective tissue of human life. Fawning is a real trauma response, but not all care is fawning. Taken to its logical end, what one author calls the “unfawning” project would require leaving one another behind to arrive, alone, at wholeness. The more rewarding work is to stay embedded in relationships. Instead of glorifying hyper-independence, our culture should move toward the ideal of a self that’s sturdy enough to participate meaningfully in collective life.

Kristen Mashikian
Brooklyn, N.Y.

•

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.