“I’m the first writer in the family,” the novelist Richard Russo once said, “but I’m not the first bullshitter in the family.” That honor belonged to his divorced father, Jim, a highway worker with no interest in books and an only intermittent interest in his son. Jim’s strongest connections were with his buddies at the bar. On summer breaks from college, Russo returned to Gloversville, in upstate New York, and his dad would get him on the road crew. When work ended, they would head home, hitting pubs along the way. At each stop, Jim would regale the regulars with a story about something that had happened on the job that day.
“He would pay attention to what worked in Roadhouse A,” Russo said in 2025, “so that when he got to Roadhouse B, he would remember what got a laugh and what didn’t, and so he would change the story.” Jim would tell the same story over many days, cutting and shaping, finding the beats. “There’s a word for that,” Russo said. “It’s called revision.”
Revision, a refined term that Jim would never have used, is a staple of M.F.A. programs, such as the one his son attended at the University of Arizona. When Russo graduated in 1980, the experimental fiction of William Gass and Kurt Vonnegut was in vogue, but he much preferred the shambling shaggy-dog novels of Twain and Dickens, whose humor arose not from formal innovation but from the foibles of flawed characters (like his dad), many of them poor and unlettered (ditto). Early on, Russo threw in his lot with Tom and Huck and Jim, with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist—characters whose humble beginnings offer a vantage from which to see the absurdity of an unjust world.
Beginning with the 1986 publication of his first novel, Mohawk, Russo has filled 10 novels, plus many essays and short stories, with portraits of men born with few gifts save their wits, making their way in an economy not set up to reward their kind. The bulk of his fiction is set in New York, in towns like Gloversville, where the good jobs have vanished (the glove-making trade there—once responsible for 90 percent of gloves sold in America—was by the 1950s already being replaced by imports). In these places, it’s unclear who is slinging more bull, the semi-employed men in bars or the educated civic “leaders,” such as mayors and bankers, promising that good times will return.
In Russo’s best work, especially his classic trilogy, set in fictional North Bath—Nobody’s Fool(1993), Everybody’s Fool (2016), and Somebody’s Fool(2023)—his characters’ banter, crude and self-knowing, reminds us that the worst effects of the modern economy are present not in the landscape but in the soulscape, the fractured lives and identities of obsolete workers. Their barroom bravado is a front, masking inner hurt, or just bewilderment. In the novelist’s business of exploring what’s inside people’s heads—the way we all think more than we can say—Russo is the peer of Jonathan Franzen and Meg Wolitzer, even if his characters think in fewer syllables.
At 77, Russo has published a new novel, Under the Falls, that at first seems to be a break with his past work. The characters are young, mostly in their mid‑30s, and the protagonist, Tyler Sinclair, is honest-to-goodness rich. After high school, he left Stone Mountain, another of Russo’s fictional upstate hamlets, riding his guitar to stardom. When he blew out of town, he left behind a toxic love triangle and a paralyzed buddy, the victim of a near drowning that many blamed Tyler for. In the years since, he has milked the town, and a Mellencamp-like image as a boy from the sticks, for songwriting material. Now Tyler has come back to a place he never wanted to see again. Stone Mountain’s denizens feel the same way about him. At his much-ballyhooed return show, he and his band are pelted with eggs. On the way out of town, the band’s limousine is mysteriously driven off the road, and during his convalescence in Stone Mountain, Tyler gets caught up in local intrigue involving dope dealing, manslaughter, and police corruption.
Under the Falls is a short potboiling book, lacking the finer-grained mind reading and social texture that Russo excels at (the acknowledgments note that it began as a TV-pilot script). Yet in the Russo tradition, it’s about a boy whose hometown has mired him in grief but also given him the stories that will lift him out of it. And tucked into its harebrained (if thoroughly enjoyable) plotting is a line that could well be Russo’s artistic credo. Tyler is relieved, and a bit amazed, to see how Doc, his paralyzed friend, has made a decent life for himself, with his own trailer, wheelchair, and car (a hearse tricked out with hand controls), funded by his “vast criminal enterprise.” “As an artist,” Russo writes, “Tyler has more than once wondered whether, under the right circumstances, or maybe the wrong ones, simply living life might qualify as art, and it occurs to him that his duty here is simple: to surrender his reservations and simply admire the man.”
Among all the hard-luck men in these hardscrabble towns, the ones who compound their bad luck with bad choices interest Russo the most. His emblematic figure is Donald “Sully” Sullivan, the star of the North Bath trilogy, a saga about one man surfing the arc of the 20th century that invites comparison to Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe books and John Updike’sRabbit quartet, also anchored by troubled male protagonists. But Sully, whom we first meet in late middle age as a handyman with a bum knee—flashbacks fill in his tortured boyhood, his high-school-football career, his World War II service, his failed marriage—is on the opposite side of the class divide from those men. Bascombe is a writer, then a real-estate agent, and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom dies rich, fat on sales from the car dealership he inherited from his father-in-law. Sully never has a penny extra until his old age, when he has some luck with the ponies and then inherits his landlady’s decaying house—and discovers how disconcerted he is by the taste of middle-class life. “He’d always suspected that life’s deck was stacked in favor of those with means,” Russo writes. Now what? For Rabbit and Bascombe, the American dream is real, or real enough. For Sully, the idea that he was “now and forevermore insulated against adversity” just doesn’t compute; it feels like a cruel joke.
And for Russo, the place that Sully inhabits is at least as interesting as the man himself—a signature of his fiction, which specializes in ensemble novels. “One of the good things about small towns,” Russo writes in his Pulitzer Prize winner, Empire Falls (2001), set in a postindustrial Maine hamlet, “was that they accommodated just about everyone; the lame and disfigured were all your neighbors, and seeing them every day meant that after a while you stopped noticing what made them different.”
The important thing is how they’re alike on the inside. In his sad-sack locales, characters face their predicaments with a mix of resilience, disappointment, and humor. They want love or connection, but they need money. Equipped with mostly meager educations and varying degrees of sophistication, they bounce off one another like bumper cars, everyone’s actions affecting everyone else’s. Gainful employment is in short supply; vices take hold, whether ugly addictions or minor gambling habits; and in Under the Falls, the criminality moves beyond small-time hustles. Russo’s townsfolk do one another the courtesy, when necessary, of pretending not to see what’s in front of them; they also fight, make up, make love, and, above all, tolerate one another.
We tend to think that, in hollowed-out towns such as the ones Russo writes about, those left behind are left behind in the apocalyptic sense: The chosen ones got raptured out, to better places with more work, more Starbucks, more Subarus. But Russo shows how anyplace is good enough if you’ve chosen it, or can tell yourself that you have. Class and cultural divides are sources of tension, but also of local cohesion, as Tyler discovers in Stone Mountain—and as Sully has known all his life. Just because Sully never went to college doesn’t mean he couldn’t have hacked it. North Bath is always suffering intruders, from downstate and especially from nearby Schuyler Springs—an obvious stand-in for Saratoga Springs, which has the college (Skidmore), the racetrack, the tourist season, and hence the money that Gloversville lacks.
Sometimes these interlopers want to buy and rehab a house, and that’s where Sully is indispensable. He and a partner do the fixing up on fixer-uppers. They just want to be paid, with money and perhaps a modicum of respect. After Miles Anderson, a university professor from downstate, keeps him waiting for an hour to talk about some repairs on his new property, Sully gets huffy, leading Anderson to ask, pissily, if Sully wants the work or not.
“ ‘Look, Mr. Anderson,’ Sully said, ‘I need the work. I’m just too old to jump up and down, okay? Inside, I’m all aflutter. Trust me.’ ” (The “aflutter” is a nice touch, hinting at the elevated vocabulary Sully can deploy when he wants to.) “ ‘Hmmm,’ Miles Anderson mused. ‘Well, I was also told you were insolent, though I suppose that’s to be expected. The gruff, frontier independence of the American blue-collar worker and all that.’ ”
The only thing worse than new wealth threatening to intrude is old wealth that has fled, leaving desolation. In Empire Falls, there are perennial rumors about what might become of the old mill—is it true that investors from Boston have plans for it? The prologue to Under the Falls features a moving paean to the long-shuttered Stone Mountain Amusement Park. “Remember what amusement parks were like before they became corporate,” Russo writes, “before there were special lines for people who have more money than you do.”
For Russo, amusement parks, with their rides and buffets and dining-room windows “left open to capture the breeze off the lake,” were once the great levelers, places where, for a day, “you’re not poor; you’re rich.” Stone Mountain Amusement Park offers an echo of the Ultimate Escape Fun Park, planned by Texas moneymen, that the town banker in Nobody’s Fool hopes to lure to North Bath. But the Texans, after flirting with North Bath, ultimately choose a more prosperous site, near Portland, Maine. It seems they were full of it all along.
Russo never intimates that his bullshitters in the roadhouse are better men than the ones in the C-suite, or the ones with tenure, or the rock stars. (He is especially withering, though, about the tenured bullshitters, the professoriat. His most beloved book may well be Straight Man, a campus satire in the tradition of Kingsley Amis and David Lodge.) There’s good and bad everywhere, and Russo is alert to self-serving delusions wherever they surface. “I made a man’s mistakes,” Sully’s absentee father, “Big Jim” (obviously named for Russo’s own father), says at the end of his life.
That has the ring of nobility, until we remember that his manly mistakes included beating his family, cheating on his wife, and drinking away his pay. Nor is it lost on the reader that he got away with his malign hijinks because, as a big man in a small town, he knew everyone, was enabled by everyone: cops, neighbors, co-workers. In Under the Falls, the town sheriff knows about, and indirectly profits from, Doc’s drug running. He doesn’t approve, but in a small town, complicity is hard to avoid.
Here’s what characters like Sully come to understand about hometowns, at least in their wiser moments, and what Tyler has to learn: Achieving escape velocity is one of those aspirations, like being “now and forevermore insulated against adversity,” that is forever out of reach. “It kind of feels like you’re on the clock,” Tyler reflects about his unexpected wealth and success. “Like any day now somebody’s going to notice there’s been a mistake, after which you’ll go back to being poor.”
Which doesn’t mean you should simply stay put. Russo found Gloversville claustrophobic, as did his eccentric mother, whose mental illness—the subject of his 2012 memoir, the aptly titled Elsewhere—was surely exacerbated by being a dreamy, literate soul in a town of Babbitts. The two of them had to get out (Russo’s overattached mom followed him to college in Arizona), only to realize that the fight was never with the town but with themselves. After years of attempting to make a life elsewhere, she returned to Gloversville. So did her son, of course. He never really left.
In the new film I Want Your Sex, characters are action figures in a staging of generational war.
On one side is Gen Z, its members portrayed as anxious little prudes. Twenty-three-year-old Elliot is bumbling and directionless. His high-achieving girlfriend is far more interested in studying than she is in him. (When he tries to initiate intimacy, she accuses him of “constantly draining my qi energy.”) His best friend, Apple, is angsty about her lack of interesting life experience—yet she almost always seems to be home, donning pimple cream and loungewear. None of them is having much sex.
Their Millennial foil is Erika Tracy: self-serving, insensitive, and ostentatiously sex-positive. She’s a visual artist who has hired a league of underpaid Zoomer assistants—including Elliot—mostly to chew gum and then affix it to a giant drawing of a vagina. She has said publicly that a one-night stand “knows you better than your mother or your best friend ever will.” And she has no problem crossing lines. Amused by Elliot’s innocent skittishness, she promptly suggests that they make their relationship sexual. Soon she’s handcuffing him and making him crawl on the ground. In the bedroom as in the office, she’s dominant and he’s submissive.
The film, directed by Gregg Araki, is hitting theaters at a time when many commentators (okay, myself included) are writing nervously about the “sex recession” and the “romance slump,” wringing their hands about why the youths aren’t getting laid. Some paint young people as coddled and fragile, too timid to put themselves out there. Meanwhile, many Zoomers point out that they’re not growing up in the same world that older cohorts did: They have plenty of valid reasons to feel inhibited (a pandemic, a housing crisis, a culture of constant digital surveillance) and plenty of other priorities (saving, studying, worrying).
Araki sketches each generation with a cartoonishly broad brush. But the caricatures help illuminate what each perspective might get a little bit right. In an era of shifting etiquette and vigilance against inappropriate behavior, the film seems to ask, can sex be liberating, transgressive, and respectful all at once?
I Want Your Sex knows that a person’s most intimate experiences can be shaped by their historical context. At first, the choice to make Erika a 30-something struck me as odd; Millennials, who’ve partnered later and less than prior generations, were the ones who kicked off the sex recession. But although they may have been having less sex in their 20s on average, they were also known as the “hookup generation.” Compared with older cohorts, Millennials were more tolerant of gay and premarital sex, and more likely to report having casual sex. And they enjoyed a culture of relative erotic frankness and optimism.
Araki, who is 66, grew into adulthood during the AIDS epidemic. In his 20s, he said in a 2023 interview, he felt as if “this black cloud of doom is hanging over you every fucking day.” By the time Millennials were coming of age, some of that darkness had lifted. The HIV pre-exposure drug Truvada was approved for use in 2012, when the median Millennial was about 24. The internet opened up access to information about sexual health and kink. Last year, Match Group’s Singles in America poll crowned Millennials “the horniest generation”: Of all the cohorts surveyed, they reported the highest levels of sexual desire and the most boredom with “vanilla sex.”
Erika is, in her way, a perfect encapsulation of the Millennial sex paradox: She has made the erotic a major part of her identity. But it’s not clear that she’s happier for it, or that she’s scratching whatever itch she has—one that might be more existential than physiological. “Sex is everything; it forges us as human beings,” she lectures Elliot. Later, when he reminds her of this, she amends that point: “Sex is everything. It’s also nothing.”
If more Zoomers are openly questioning the value of intimacy, perhaps it’s because they’ve picked up on some of that quiet ambivalence. And in the time since Millennials entered adulthood, the rules and expectations about sex have gotten even more complicated. The MeToo movement heightened people’s suspicion of uneven and potentially exploitative power dynamics—perhaps especially in the workplace, one of the primary places where romantic partners used to meet. After decades of relaxing societal norms regarding what’s appropriate to talk about and with whom, backlash arrived in the form of “boundaries”: a suddenly ubiquitous pop-psychology concept. And then COVID hit. By the time Americans emerged from isolation, many were socially rusty and fond of a good night in. The gaps between people aren’t generally getting easier to bridge.
Yet the idea of Zoomer sexlessness seems to have galvanized even just slightly older people to champion eroticism. In one slightly on-the-nose scene in the film, Erika confronts Elliot about what she sees as his age group’s failure of joie de vivre, in sex and in general. “Gen Z is all about FOMO, and yet you’re willing to miss out on the sexual prime of your life?” she asks. He replies earnestly about spending formative years amid a pandemic: “My peers have not been well served growing up in a time where nothing feels safe.” That’s what Erika thinks is the problem with his generation’s risk aversion, though. Why is feeling safe their overarching goal? “Being outside your comfort zone,” she tells him, “is the whole fucking point.”
I Want Your Sex isn’t an anti-MeToo movie; it takes manipulations and abuses seriously enough to show that Erika is, at some points, truly acting egregiously. But you also get the sense that she’s right about a few things. Elliot wants to let go of some control. He enjoys a lot of what happens between them. And what he doesn’t enjoy, the movie insinuates, he’ll learn from. Araki seems to be grieving a bygone era: one that felt a little looser, a little spicier, and perhaps more resilient. At one point, when Erika is encouraging Elliot to lighten up, she gives him a copy of Harold Robbins’s Never Love a Stranger, a raunchy novel that became the subject of an obscenity trial in 1949. Certain progressive impulses, the film suggests, somehow led the nation in a big loop—right back to a puritanical streak in which pleasure is seen as threatening enough to suppress.
In a perfect sensual landscape, everyone would feel safe and free all at once. I Want Your Sex doesn’t identify the secret to making that happen, of course—and the film arguably avoids the trickiest parts of its own debate by making Erika’s character a woman. Araki has said that the original script featured a young female intern and her male boss, but “after MeToo, I was like, I kind of don’t want to have a male dragging a female around by the hair.”
Still, by focusing on BDSM, he offers an alternative framework for navigating desire. The practice inherently involves power differences—but also a code of ethics. When I talked with Yehuda Duenyas, the film’s intimacy coordinator, he drew an analogy between kink etiquette and his own work: Having a clear permission structure and good communication from the start means that people might actually feel more able to lean into passion; they’re not worrying in the moment about what’s acceptable or desired, because they’ve already established it. His job isn’t to make people feel comfortable. It’s to foster clarity and openness.
Erika and Elliot don’t exactly model a healthy dynamic. But the film makes a point of emphasizing his agency, even at his most vulnerable. When an incident brings Elliot to an interrogation room to be questioned about his relationship with Erika—don’t ask why—he tells police that he was “way over my head” and “under her control.” And how does he feel about that? Thankful.
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Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces and stained their bodily ornaments with pigments. They tended fires, cooked food, and maybe even made their own glue. On sandstone cave walls, they etched wavy lines, dots, and other geometric designs.
After first contact, under social circumstances that we cannot possibly imagine, modern humans and Neanderthals had children together; around the same time, in Asia, our species also procreated with another species, the Denisovans. Scientists know this because they have sequenced DNA from Neanderthal and Denisovan remains, and they can see fragments of their code in our genomes to this day. Now we are learning that still more of these fusions of blood and culture may have shaped our lineage. Last week, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University published new evidence in Science suggesting that two “ghost” ancestors haunt our family tree—not Neanderthals or Denisovans, but some other hominin populations.
DNA analysis is only one of the techniques that scientists have been using to cast narrow shafts of light into the dark abyss that is the human past. Researchers from several disciplines have been collecting and reinterpreting ever smaller traces of our forebears to reimagine how they lived, what they made, and what family secrets they might still be hiding.
The ghost-ancestors paper is the most recent example. The team from UC Berkeley and Hopkins analyzed some very odd sequences of DNA in the human genome, which were discovered 20 years ago. These don’t match up with those of any ancient hominin species that have already been sequenced, and their origins have been mysterious. But now we have some suspects. One of the strange sequences appears to come from a hominin who mated with us before we ventured out of Africa. The other may come from the great wanderer Homo erectus, who left Africa nearly 2 million years ago and ranged across Asia. Homo erectus may never have encountered Homo sapiens directly, but the researchers suspect that the hominin interbred with the Denisovans before the Denisovans interbred with us. Either way, all of these people—if it is right to call them people—played a role in our species’ story of becoming, yet we are only now learning the nature of that connection.
All year, scientists from different fields have been making revisions to the human-origin story. In January, one team announced that they’d found handheld wooden tools along an ancient lakeshore in present-day Greece—a refuge between glaciers where hominins of some kind butchered elephants about 430,000 years ago. These are surely not the first wooden tools ever to be made, but they are the most ancient that we’ve managed to find—and they were used during the Stone Age. That name—“Stone Age”—is misleading. It reveals more about the limits of archaeology than about the material culture of the people who lived through the period, who may not have thought of themselves as being defined by stone tools at all. We perceive them that way only because their knapped axes of flint and obsidian are likelier to have survived to the present day than the digging sticks that our forebears smoothed and sharpened.
Beyond stone and wood, these lakeside elephant butchers likely put all kinds of natural materials to clever use. They may have employed woven twine to sew animal hides together, but we wouldn’t know it, because twine unravels into thin, disintegrating filaments, and bacteria rapidly remove hides from the world. Wood tends to rot away too. In this location, the tools had the good geological fortune to be buried quickly under mud.
Stone tools have themselves been reinterpreted. Researchers recently detected traces of poison on an ancient set of quartz arrowheads that were dug up in 1985. The weapons were found in a South African rock shelter that was used by modern humans 60,000 years ago—tens of thousands of years earlier than what had been regarded as the oldest confirmed human use of poison. The ancient South African archers retrieved the neurotoxin from a plant bulb that grows as large as a honeydew melon and dabbed it onto the cold stone of their arrowheads, knowing that it would slow down any animal that they pierced. Some scientists are now calling for a reappraisal of other ancient arrowheads to see whether they too had been sheathed in poison by people whose ingenuity had previously been underestimated by science.
Piecing together the history of our species in this way is tedious work, because the evidence is so fragmentary. The Earth’s violent, self-renewing processes erase so much. During the planet’s cold spells, its glaciers steamroll from the poles toward the equator, grinding and scraping whole landmasses clean. In its warmer, middle zones, jungles can sprout up within decades, covering human ruins in a thick and devouring layer of green.
Scientists have recently learned that the Amazon rainforest has been concealing millennia-old earthworks on an enormous scale. A team of international researchers spent weeks flying lidar-equipped planes back and forth over a swath of Amazonia. Their laser scans revealed nearly 400 immense structures that were previously unknown to science. From the sky, they saw that these systems of raised banks and deep ditches formed geometrically precise circles, octagons, and squares, and were linked to one another by remarkably straight roads. The earthworks were built 1,200 to 2,500 years ago by the Aquiry civilization. Having surveyed only one small portion of Aquiry territory, the researchers suspect that tens of thousands more of these structures may be waiting silently under the region’s trees.
One hundred thousand years from now, the Aquiry ruins might vanish altogether, and in Earth time, 100,000 years is nothing. In 10 million years, even the skyscrapers and continent-sprawling infrastructure of our own civilization will be crushed into sedimentary layers. Nearly everything that we have created will be reduced to trace elements and isotopes, but for a few specimens lucky enough to be fossilized. For all of the other details of our world to persist in human memory, science would need to get better, or civilization itself would need to keep existing, and telling its own story, from now until then.
On the first Saturday of every August, the Saint Jerome Catholic Church in the tiny town of Fancy Farm, Kentucky, hosts a picnic renowned for its mutton-and-pork barbecue. Since 1880, the scent of smoked meat has attracted people; the whiff of votes then attracted politicians. The picnic long ago morphed into the premier event in the state’s campaign season, attracting its most famous officeholders. As attendees eat sandwiches, browse for We love Jesus and BBQ too T-shirts, or try to win a hunting blind at bingo, they also encounter candidates of all parties, who share one outdoor stage and are given only a few minutes to address a rowdy, heckling crowd.
This year, however, Fancy Farm was most remarkable for who did not show up: Mitch McConnell. Now in his 42nd and final year as a senator, the Republican has been a fixture of the event, attending 30 times. As GOP leader in the Senate for 18 years, McConnell became famous for his bare-knuckled, Machiavellian approach to politics—a method grounded in gradually amassing control through unflashy strategy and exploiting leverage for partisan ends. No man has so thoroughly thwarted Democratic ambitions, which he did both by championing the filibuster and by securing a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. Despite the longtime Senate leader’s absence from Fancy Farm, the specter of McConnellism hung over the event. And it will hang over America for years, too.
On June 14, McConnell, who is not running for reelection, was hospitalized, taken by ambulance after he was found unconscious at his home in Washington, D.C. The 84-year-old has not been seen in public, let alone Congress, since. The two proof-of-life photos that his staff released have only provoked feverish speculation. Onstage at Fancy Farm, Charles Booker, the Democratic nominee to replace the senator, invoked Carmen Sandiego. “Where in the world is Mitch McConnell?” Booker asked. “What is going on with Mitch McConnell?” Supportive Democrats broke out in sporadic chants of “Where’s Mitch?”
Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, a potential presidential contender, has not shied away from stirring up suspicion. Late last month, he sent a letter urging McConnell “to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.” The implication has been that the master Republican tactician may be incapacitated, perhaps even deceased, but left instructions to hide this fact until after August 3—at which point Beshear would have severe difficulties installing a replacement. (Beshear has insisted that this deadline, now passed, has “no legal impact.”) Even in the twilight of McConnell’s influence, Democrats feared that he was capable of one last great trick.
On Thursday, however, McConnell announced that he had been discharged from a rehabilitation center and would be working from home. The explanation for his absence turned out not to involve any convoluted conspiracy. McConnell had suffered a serious fall, just as he has in the past, and contracted pneumonia. In 2023, a similar incident resulted in a concussion and a fractured rib. Then, too, his office released only sparse and cryptic details about his condition. Eventually, McConnell returned to work and to doing what he did best: stymieing the Democrats.
Recently I asked the reporter Al Cross, considered the dean of Kentucky journalism, whether McConnell had anything that could be called an ideology, or whether he was merely interested in amassing power. Without hesitating, Cross answered, “The second.” He noted that McConnell and his first wife, a feminist scholar, had had a pet named Rocky, after Nelson Rockefeller—a hero of the GOP’s now-extinct liberal wing. “He was a Rockefeller Republican,” Cross told me. “And only when the party began moving to the right did he move to the right, because he wanted to be a leader in the party. You know, this is a guy who never wanted to be anything but a politician.” McConnell’s greatest personal policy commitment seems to have been to deregulate campaign finance, which the Supreme Court eventually delivered. What most earned him both his power and the disdain of Democrats was his devotion to party above all else.
The GOP for which McConnell tirelessly worked is now firmly in the hands of Donald Trump, a man whom McConnell deeply detests and yet whose ascent he has repeatedly enabled. Had McConnell not held open a Supreme Court seat after the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia, perhaps Trump would not have gained enough support from anti-abortion voters to win that year’s presidential election. Had McConnell tried to whip votes in favor of Trump’s conviction after his supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, perhaps the party could have exorcised him. McConnell got what he wished for—the first line of his obituary will note that he was the longest-serving party leader in Senate history—but at what cost?
He and the president are intertwined in history, Scott Jennings, a former McConnell strategist turned prominent Trump defender, told me. “Twenty, 50, or 100 years from now, what will be remembered most about the era and their time together is that McConnell and his political decisions enabled Trump to win the presidency, change the Supreme Court, cut taxes, and, frankly, take a pretty firm hand on international matters,” Jennings said. McConnell did not just shatter political norms by depriving Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee of a hearing in 2016. He also pushed through Trump’s nominees and, more than any other person, influenced the selection of appellate judges who will shape America for decades.
His influence over the political system will persist in other, subtler ways. “McConnell’s people were superb at taking young Republicans under their wings and nurturing them,” Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, told me. “And those folks are spread out all over the state and also Washington, D.C.”
In his home state, McConnell commands respect. He routed huge sums of federal money to Kentucky—$65 billion, by some estimates. He personally remade state politics. McConnell also regularly intervened in local elections, from the state legislature all the way down to county clerks. Democrats dominated the state when he started his career; today, they are largely shut out of power. Beshear won the governorship only to have his vetoes routinely overturned by a Republican supermajority in the state legislature. “It’s a Mitch McConnell–constructed party, even if some of the people at the grassroots don’t like him. It’s impossible to deny that he is the architect of it,” Tres Watson, a Republican strategist, told me. That is why the state GOP headquarters, in Frankfort, carries his name.
One week after the November 2024 election, which returned Trump to the White House, I watched McConnell receive the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute. Robert Doar, AEI’s president, asked McConnell if he had any regrets. “Yeah, but I’m not going to tell you,” he replied.
Despite stating in 2021 that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for his supporters’ attack on the Capitol, McConnell said that he could not vote to convict the president in an impeachment trial, because Trump’s term had expired. Cross told me that, during that period, McConnell was convinced that Trump was doomed in the party. McConnell told Michael Tackett, his biographer, that his position differed from that of Liz Cheney—who sacrificed a promising career leading Republicans in the House of Representatives—because “I didn’t see how blowing yourself up and taking yourself off the playing field was helpful to getting the party back to where she and I probably both think it ought to be.” After the trial, McConnell and Trump did not speak again for almost four years.
McConnell gave up his leadership role right as Trump returned to power. In his final Senate term, in which he returned to being a legislative backbencher, McConnell lodged his protests against Trump by voting against several of his nominees (Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and strongly supporting Ukraine and free trade.
At Fancy Farm, McConnell’s fellow Republicans largely papered over the schism between the biggest figure in national politics and the biggest figure in state politics. In a mark of how important McConnell has been in fostering Republicans in the state, the primary race to succeed him was between three Republicans who had all worked for him previously. Nate Morris, a man who once interned for him and then made his fortune by founding a trash-and-recycling company, tried to win by repudiating him. He released an ad showing himself riding a garbage truck saying that he was a “Trump ‘America First’ conservative” who was here “to take out the trash” by dumping McConnell. This strategy did not succeed; before the primary could occur, Morris was whisked away by Trump for the prestigious post of ambassador to Colombia. Instead the victory went to Andy Barr, a McConnellite congressman from Lexington. When I asked him what McConnell’s legacy would be, he cited three things: building up the GOP in Kentucky, “opposing unconstitutional restrictions on political speech,” and “working with President Trump to deliver a conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court and a conservative, originalist federal judiciary.”
For the country as a whole, though, what McConnell’s many political victories leave behind is more dismal. His lasting contribution to the Senate is its calcification. Few people understood leverage and Senate procedure as well as McConnell; the routine use of the filibuster (which Democrats are also guilty of) has now set a precedent in which the party in power can confirm judges and pass tax bills but struggles to accomplish much else. The lack of a functional Congress has hastened the executive branch’s arrogation of the legislature’s previous responsibilities. This diminishes the separation of powers that McConnell (and his strictly constitutionalist judges) claim to be upholding.
The negative consequences for Republicans may become apparent only when Democrats have a turn at power in McConnell’s beloved chamber. Because of his specific decisions—to hold open a Supreme Court seat on the theory that it was too close to an election in 2016, before doing the exact opposite in 2020—it is now inconceivable that a Democratic-led Senate would confirm another Trump justice if a vacancy arose. McConnell’s political career is ending, but his legacy will last much longer. Unfortunately, it has left America much harder to govern.
Half a dozen years ago, Anthony Fauci was as popular as he would ever be. A respected physician and researcher for decades, he became in 2020 the public face of the pandemic response—calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. And the country turned him into a folk hero. He was on the cover of Time, named one of People magazine’s People of the Year, and played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live. Vendors sold Fauci votive candles and bobbleheads. In April of that year, Kim Kardashian convened three dozen movie stars and athletes on a private video call so he could talk to them about masks and crowds—an hour of his time, he later explained, to reach millions of their fans.
Then it all came apart.
Last week, Fauci testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Rand Paul—a fierce Fauci critic who has said that the American people want the 85-year-old retired scientist “behind bars.” Acting on his lawyer’s advice, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, citing what he called Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with him. Yesterday, the committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions.
The hearing produced an avalanche of ad hominem attacks, ludicrous claims, and accusations—most of them years old and long since answered. But two matter more than the rest, because so much of Paul’s case rests on them: (1) that Fauci funded the research that made the pandemic, and (2) that he lied to Congress about it.
Fauci ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an arm of the National Institutes of Health that hands out several billion dollars a year in research grants. One of those grants went to a New York nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, which over five years passed a total of about $600,000 to a Wuhan, China, lab studying bat coronaviruses. NIAID awards thousands of grants a year; NIH staff signed off on the Wuhan lab as a subrecipient, and an institute director does not personally review such arrangements.
More important, the bat viruses that the grant paid the lab to study are so genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2 that they could not have produced it, a point that independent virologists have made repeatedly. That disposes of the specific charge that research that Fauci’s agency funded produced the virus. It did not.
As for the origins of the virus itself, nobody has established with certainty where the pandemic began. Chinese stonewalling means that we are unlikely to ever know. No outside investigator has been given the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s records, its early samples, or the medical files of its staff.
However, the scientific evidence favors a natural origin. This includes epidemiological evidence showing that the first COVID-19 cases clustered around one corner of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where wild animals were being butchered. Environmental samples taken from that same area of the market contain, in the same swab, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence and DNA from potential intermediate hosts such as the raccoon dog.
The accusation that Fauci lied to Congress rests on his denial, in a 2021 exchange with Paul, that NIH had ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The point of such research is to learn what a virus would need to jump into humans before it does, so that vaccines and treatments can be ready.
The trouble is the term gain of function. In biology, it means research that gives an organism a new capability—engineering a bacterium to digest an oil spill is gain-of-function research. In politics, it has come to mean something narrower and more alarming: deliberately making a dangerous virus more dangerous. Federal rules use a third definition, narrower still. The federal framework adopted in 2017, after years of public debate, covers work to enhance a pathogen that is “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” It also excludes viruses, however dangerous, as they exist in nature. (The policy was revised in 2024.)
The gap between those definitions is the whole dispute, and it is why the perjury charge fails twice over. Fauci says that in 2021, he was answering Paul by using the regulatory definition of gain of function—the one that determines what NIH may and may not fund, and the only one that his answer was actually about. By that standard, NIH had reviewed the grant to the Wuhan lab before funding it and had concluded that the research fell outside the framework, on the grounds that the lab was studying wild-collected bat viruses that were not expected to produce severe disease in people. The two men meant different things by the same phrase. And even if you set that aside, perjury requires a knowingly false statement. Five years later, there’s still no evidence that Fauci said anything he believed to be untrue.
What was new last week was the discovery of a diary. Fauci kept one throughout the pandemic, and Paul—working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, which located the files on a government server—released more than 1,100 pages of it, in entries spanning from December 2019 through Fauci’s retirement, in December 2022. Paul posted on X about Fauci, “What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
But two analyses—one by FactCheck.org, the other by PolitiFact—show that in the entries Paul highlighted, Fauci’s private notes did not substantially differ from his public statements.
The senator from Kentucky has been at this for six years now, pursuing a man who led his institute for 38 years, who advised seven presidents, and whose work has saved countless lives. Accusing him of crimes and deception wasn’t enough; the release of the diary was meant to inflict public humiliation on him. And to some degree, it worked. Fauci was swept up in his own celebrity—starstruck by the famous, thrilled by his invitations to A-list parties, keeping a running tally of his appearances in the press. It was not a good look.
But this thought occurred to me as well: If three years’ worth and 1,000 pages of your diary were published tomorrow, how would you fare? Most of us would count ourselves relieved if the worst they revealed was that we had been dazzled by Hollywood stars and flattered when they called. And nowhere in his diary did Fauci confess to paying hush money to a porn star or brag that when you’re famous, you can “grab ’em by the pussy.”
Anthony Fauci spent five decades at NIH treating diseases that most often kill the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. He developed highly effective therapies that made once-fatal autoimmune conditions survivable before most Americans had heard of him. In the 1980s, he took AIDS in America seriously when many in the federal government wouldn’t. He met with, and later became friends with, Larry Kramer, an AIDS activist who had called him a “murderer.” Fauci then spearheaded a major shift that allowed patients far greater access to experimental drugs.
Two decades into the epidemic, as AIDS was killing millions in the world’s poorest countries, he was a key architect of PEPFAR—the emergency plan that President George W. Bush launched in 2003 that provided funding and medical resources to combat the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is estimated to have saved more than 25 million lives, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
When anthrax spores arrived in the mail in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Fauci led the federal research response and laid the foundations of the biodefense system that we still rely on. He was also central to the development of mRNA vaccines. In the 1990s, he helped persuade President Bill Clinton to fund the NIH Vaccine Research Center, then recruited world-class scientists to staff it. One of them was studying mRNA as a platform for a MERS vaccine when the pandemic began. Because that expertise was already in place, the design for the protein that the COVID mRNA vaccine would use was finished within 48 hours of the viral genome being published. Within roughly 11 months, the first vaccine was authorized for use. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that more than 3.2 million lives were saved as a result of the vaccination program in America from December 2020 to November 2022. The development of mRNA vaccines for COVID was a stunning medical achievement.
In 2014, Fauci managed and directed the funding for research for an Ebola vaccine. When a Dallas nurse caught the virus while she cared for a dying man, Fauci put on protective gear and went into the isolation room himself. Eight days later, he walked the nurse out in public and hugged her.
This is the man whom Paul, Kennedy, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Republicans in Congress, the MAGA movement, and Donald Trump have decided to defame and vilify, and are intent on destroying?
So what explains the rage directed at one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation? Some of it is the result of an era in which a major political party—in this case, the Republican Party—has become deranged and captive to conspiratorial thinking. It draws energy from the dark passions. Many people within the party, especially within its leadership and the right-wing ecosystem, delight in destroying institutions and individuals. Fauci has a target on his back because during the pandemic, he refused to live in the Twilight Zone. He called out those who did. And for MAGA world, that is unforgivable.
Some of the fury aimed at Fauci may also be unprocessed grief and anger about the pandemic and its painful memories. My colleague David Brooks, then at The New York Times, wrote in 2020 that pandemics—unlike some other natural catastrophes—tend to drive people apart. In the aftermath of pandemics, people either try to forget them or find others to blame for them. Viruses can’t be punished; people can. Attributing the pandemic to fate or random chance isn’t all that satisfying; a lot of people need a villain, even if, in this case, the villain is one of the men who helped end the pandemic that was ravaging the world.
In Albert Camus’ The Plague, the protagonist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, is an admirable if imperfect character. When others flee Oran, he stays. He works until he’s exhausted, even while knowing that many will die. An atheist and a humanist, he ultimately stands with victims, finding meaning through helping others. He doesn’t think of himself as a hero so much as a decent man doing his job. Neither does he pretend to understand suffering; instead, he fights against it. He is one of the “true healers.”
At the conclusion of the novel, Rieux concludes that plagues ultimately teach us that “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” There is much more to admire in Anthony Fauci than to despise. The same cannot be said of many of his critics.
When Bob Buckter, a 79-year-old housepainter who also goes by “Dr. Color,” began his career, in the 1970s, the job was a lot more fun. Acid-tripping hippies in his hometown of San Francisco wanted “wild-ass color combinations” for their facades, he told me. Armed with mustard-yellow, lime-green, and vermilion paint, Buckter happily transformed drab Victorian and Edwardian homes into vivid eye candy.
Today, almost no one seems to be looking to the hues of jelly beans for inspiration for their home—or car or couch or fridge or practically anything else. Since the late 2000s, Buckter has watched with dismay as essentially colorless colors—think white, beige, gray—have taken over. “It’s not even three shades, or four shades, of gray. It’s just one dark gray,” he said. “It’s an ignorant way to paint your house.” A study of homes in Washington, D.C., last year found a similarly sharp rise in the number of gray homes, especially in the most rapidly gentrifying wards.
Color trends used to come and go. But the color recession that began early this century has dragged on far longer than the heyday of avocado green in the 1960s or hot pink in the 1980s. “Our top color from 2000 to 2010 was ‘Pelham Beige.’ We thought that would never change,” Sue Wadden, the director of color marketing at the paint company Sherwin-Williams, told me. The next decade, she said, “gray was dominant. Like gray, gray, more gray.” Sherwin-Williams’s current list of its most popular colors for home interiors features “Ice Cube” and “Crushed Ice” (both white), and “Agreeable Gray” and “Passive” (both gray). Colors are now getting warmer again, Wadden noted hopefully, but they’re “warmer whites.” The company’s color of 2026 is “Universal Khaki”—otherwise known, unfortunately, as “greige.”
The color drought doesn’t affect just paint companies. According to Pantone, a color-technology company influential among designers and manufacturers across industries, 2026’s “Color of the Year” is “Cloud Dancer” (yes, white).
The share of new cars in grayscale colors rose from 60 percent in 2004 to 80 percent in 2023. Production of purple cars dropped 93 percent over that period, gold by 97 percent. “I don’t know how many different variants of silver and gray there could possibly be, but I think BMW and Mercedes have discovered it,” Karl Brauer, the analyst behind the report, told me.
Some color trends may look like a matter of whim. In the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, the imperious fashion editor Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep) delivered the now-famous monologue in which she berates her assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) for being “blithely unaware” of how her own cerulean-blue sweater was in fact a product of a high-fashion embrace of the hue “by the people in this room.” Twenty years on, in this year’s The Devil Wears Prada 2, Sachs is gently discouraged from wearing anything colorful. “This is quiet luxury,” Stanley Tucci’s Nigel Kipling explains while assembling a wardrobe of grays and taupes. “That,” he adds, gesturing at the pink garment in her hands, “is like a screaming guitar solo.”
What’s plain, in the Prada sequel and nearly everywhere else, is that color fads are no longer dictated from on high by style gurus. Remarkably, shoppers’ personal taste may not be much of a factor, either. Although some studies show that people tend to feel more cheerful in the company of oranges and yellows, more calm among blues and greens, and sometimes more depressed around too much gray, their spending habits say otherwise. Two decades into the color recession, the observable preferences of landlords, homeowners, car buyers, and consumers have grown detached from what people claim to like. And little evidence indicates that walls or cars or appliances in hues other than greige are coming back anytime soon.
For thousands of years, color was an aristocratic luxury. From the 14th century B.C.E. to the 15th century C.E., only Mediterranean royalty, priests, and nobles wore anything dyed Tyrian purple, because acquiring the color could involve slicing out the mucous glands of special sea snails, fermenting them in salt for days, boiling them for days more, and then pouring urine on newly dyed garments to bind the color to the fabric. (A single gram of the dye required at least 10,000 snails.) The deep red of kermes crimson in ancient Rome involved grinding dried female kermes insect corpses. By the Middle Ages, some landlords accepted the dye as rent. The lurid verdigris that adorns the dining-room walls of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate was a labor-intensive status symbol, achieved by oxidizing copper plates with vinegar vapors and then mixing the resulting patina with oil.
In 1856, after an 18-year-old English chemistry student named William Henry Perkin accidentally invented synthetic dye while trying to cure malaria, a range of colors—including his own, snail-free Tyrian purple—became widely available for textiles. Suddenly, anyone could don the color the Roman emperor Caligula allegedly killed the King of Mauretania for wearing.
Perkin’s discovery spurred other lab-made dyes, which lowered costs and applied color to a widening variety of goods. Indiscriminate demand duly followed. By the early 20th century, Sherwin-Williams’s ads were encouraging homeowners to repaint every season: warm colors for winter and cool shades in the summer. Henry Ford may have once said that buyers could get a Ford Model T in any color, “so long as it was black,” but even he succumbed. In 1927, nearly two decades after the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, Ford hoped to revive interest in his car by painting it red.
“The effects of our chromatic revolution are everywhere apparent,” a 1928 Saturday Evening Post article called “The New Age of Color” observed. “Cars are borrowing their hues from the waters of the Nile, from the sands of Arabia, the plumage of birds and the fire of gems.” The ’20s were roaring; stocks were climbing, Hitler had yet to rise to power, and the cars plying American highways bore the Day-Glo colors of tropical birds. What could be more delightful?
By mid-century, a put-together, color-coordinated lifestyle “was what it meant to be middle class,” Regina Blaszczyk, a color historian, told me. Buyers matched their shoes to their suit and hat, and their car to the exterior of their home.
Mad Men–era color oracles in high-rise offices offered industry executives predictions that promised to boost sales and solve problems. In his 1945 book, Selling With Color, the color consultant Faber Birren wrote about the value of using warm and light colors for hospital-patient rooms but a more clinical blue-green hue for operating rooms (to reduce eye fatigue by posing a contrast to the red hue of innards). Alexander Schauss, a biologist, found in 1979 that a shade of pink—known as Baker-Miller Pink or Drunk-Tank Pink—could calm inmates and reduce fights in prisons.
The postwar decades, in short, were gloriously colorful in the United States. The decline would be precipitous.
Institutional constraints on color were already starting to emerge during this period. Postwar developers, for example, worked to meet the immense demand for housing by building entire neighborhoods with a handful of floorplans and a limited palette. In the name of protecting property values, homeowner associations attached to these developments decided that “uniformity is actually a positive,” Evan McKenzie, a University of Illinois Chicago professor who studies HOAs, told me. Many mandated earth-tone palettes for home facades, and even restricted the colors of street-visible features such as mailboxes, roofs, and curtains. Instead of resenting these limits, buyers came to see greige paint as securing their investment. “You’d want a neighborhood where you can restrict your neighbor, because your neighbor might do something crazy,” McKenzie said.
Meanwhile, in the auto industry, the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 narrowed the range of financially feasible colors for cars. Roy Kerney, the head of product strategy at the car-painting company Axalta, told me that the more eco-friendly coating that replaced lacquer paints was more expensive, which raised the cost of delivering variety. Stocking neutrals, which sold reliably, was far easier and more cost-effective than testing the appeal of various hues.
Time has reinforced those constraints. Given that ever more auto sales are for used vehicles, shoppers sensibly prefer to buy cars in inoffensive colors in case they need to resell. “When it comes to car colors, it’s not just about personal preference or what makes you happiest,” Kelley Blue Book warns. “If you’re looking to retain your car’s value, it’s best to play it safe and choose neutral colors.”
Never mind that resale-market data defy this conventional wisdom. A 2024 study of 1.2 million three-year-old used cars found that yellow, orange, and green cars depreciated less than silver, gray, and white ones.
Big purchases breed risk aversion. A 2025 survey of real-estate agents by Better Homes and Gardens found that 84 percent recommend repainting house interiors in white, gray, or beige before selling—particularly if the walls are red. Yet this market-appeasing logic doesn’t always satisfy the market. One Zillow study last year found that olive-green and navy-blue walls actually boosted home prices compared with white.
Even so, Alana Cowan, a graphic designer, still found herself puzzling over the difference between “Chantilly Lace” and “Alabaster” recently while figuring out what to paint the walls of her new house, in Arkansas. “Apparently, there’s 30 shades of white,” she told me. She was too plagued by doubt to consider anything more adventurous: “What if I hate it? What if I get tired of it? What if the next buyer doesn’t like it and that’s the reason they don’t buy the house?”This logic repeats itself from one room to the next, a phenomenon some decry as “the HGTV-ification of America.” Among renovating homeowners, 72 percent choose inoffensive stainless-steel appliances, according to one recent report. White and off-white dominated kitchen-wall colors and backsplash tiles. Amy Woolf, an interior decorator and color forecaster, told me that she’s seen “cocooning”—or seeking safety in one’s purchases—solidify gray’s dominance in every product sphere. When people buy a sofa now, they “don’t want to hate it in two years, so they’re not going to go with orange,” she said.
Yet grayification isn’t as “neutral” as buyers believe. A review last year of more than 100 studies of the effect of color on emotion found that gray consistently triggered fatigue, boredom, or sadness. Stephen Westland, a professor who studies color science, attributes the rise of gray to the fact that people are “scared of using color,” he told me, even though “the use of color can make you feel happier, psychologically.”
I wish I could say that change is on the horizon—that after decades in retreat, color is making a comeback.
Here and there, some consumers are letting color back in. Amy Freed, a retired lawyer from Maryland, decided to repaint her home and hired Woolf to help pick out the best shades of gray. Freed was shocked when Woolf suggested orange for the entryway. The color seemed “too bold and aggressive, and so out of my comfort zone,” Freed told me. “I don’t like color.” Nevertheless, Woolf persuaded her to try it out, and the foyer quickly “became this incredibly fun, joyful thing for me,” Freed said.
But her experience is notable precisely because it’s unusual. Millennial Pink in the 2010s, Barbie Pink in 2023, and Brat Green in 2024 were welcome counterpoints to the color recession, but they were also short-lived. They never quite translated into real-world buying habits for most consumers.
Color experts across multiple sectors told me, with varying degrees of wistfulness, that bright shades are ill-equipped to return. The structural obstacles to color are not going away. Almost 70 percent of new single-family homes were built into HOAs in 2024, the second-highest year on record after 2020. In a data-driven car marketplace, the color recession has become self-reinforcing. The preponderance of grays ensures that there’s too little information to even gauge demand for other colors.
Color enthusiasts are now largely stuck sneaking bright hues into gray. “Color is coming back,” Nancy Lockhart, a co-director of the Inter-Society Color Council, a nonprofit professional group, assured me. “But it’s coming back so subtly that you almost don’t notice it.”
In a show of defiance, Axalta did pick “Solar Boost”—“a warm and inviting orange tone”—as its automotive color of the year. But Kerney, the company’s product-strategy head, told me that the company doesn’t actually expect many orange cars to roll off the assembly line anytime soon. The choice of Solar Boost was simply to nudge the market in a livelier direction. The hope, Kerney explained, was that “a gray car out there may be gray, but may have a slight twinge of red.”
A marginally brighter gray might not seem worth celebrating. Dr. Color, the San Francisco housepainter, certainly can’t understand why so many people are denying themselves the pleasure of vivid, kaleidoscopic hues. His house is painted in no fewer than 11: “yellows, golds, ochres, cinnamons, with touches of blues, reds, and gold leaf, and purple and green,” he said. His home, in all of its peacocking beauty, stands out on Google Maps.
His neighbors, however, are playing it safe. Their homes are painted in different shades of greige.
At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.
Doucleff arrives at this conclusion while traveling, with her then-3-year-old daughter, to meet and learn from parents in a Maya village on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico; in an Inuit town in a northern Canadian territory; and in a community of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. During her outings, she witnesses well-adjusted, drama-free kids share generously with their siblings and do chores without being asked.
She takes care to portray her subjects not as curiosities “frozen in time” but as modern-day families who have held on to invaluable child-rearing techniques that likely date back tens of thousands of years. I recently spoke with Doucleff about these techniques, and our conversation, below, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Joe Pinsker: Many American parenting strategies, you estimate, are only about 100 years old, and some of them arose more recently than that. What about American parenting sticks out to you as distinctive and particularly strange?
Michaeleen Doucleff: One of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly. When I was first working on the book, I recorded myself to see how frequently I praised my little girl, Rosy, and I noticed that I would exaggeratedly react to even her smallest accomplishments, like drawing a flower or writing a letter, with a comment like “Good job!” or “Wow! What a beautiful flower!”
This is insane if you look around the world and throughout human history. Everywhere I went, I don’t know if I ever heard a parent praise a child. Yet these kids are incredibly self-sufficient, confident, and respectful—everything we want praise to do, these kids already have it, without the praise.
It’s hard to cut back on praise, because it’s so baked in, but later on, I decided to try. It’s not that there’s no feedback, but it’s much gentler feedback—parents will smile or nod if a child is doing something they want. I started doing that, and Rosy’s behavior really improved. A lot of the attention-seeking behavior went away.
Pinsker: You visited an Inuit town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, and spent time in households where children were almost mysteriously immune to tantrums. How did the parents you met respond when kids misbehaved?
Doucleff: One night while I was there, Rosy and I were staying with a woman named Sally who was watching three of her grandchildren—so, four kids under 6 years old in this house. Sally just approached everything they did with the most calmness and composure I have ever seen. At one point, a little toddler, maybe 18 months at the time, I think he was pulling the dog's tail or something. Sally picked him up and, when she did, he scratched her face so hard that it was bleeding. I would have been irate, but Sally, I saw her kind of clench her teeth, and just say, in the calmest voice, “We don’t do this.” Then she took him and flipped him around with this playful helicopter move, and they both started laughing. Then it was over—there was no conflict around it.
If the child's energy goes high—if they get very upset—the parent’s energy goes so low. Another time on our trip, in the grocery store, Rosy started having a tantrum, and I was getting ready to yell at her to stop. But Elizabeth, our interpreter, came over to her and addressed her in the calmest voice. Immediately, Rosy just stopped—when she was around that calmness, her whole body relaxed. I was like, Okay, I’m just doing this tantrum thing completely wrong.
Pinsker: You write about how when Sally and Elizabeth see behavior like that, they think about the causes of it differently than many American parents do. What is the narrative they have for why young kids act out?
Doucleff: Yeah, this is huge—it single-handedly changed my life, and it’s something you hear in other parts of the Arctic. In the U.S., when a child calls you a name or smacks you, many parents think that the child is pushing your buttons, that they’re testing boundaries and want to manipulate you.
The Inuit parents and elders I interviewed almost laughed when I said that. One woman said something like, “She’s a kid—she doesn’t know how to manipulate like that.” Instead, what they told me is that young children are just these illogical, irrational beings who haven’t matured enough and haven’t acquired understanding or reason yet. So there’s no reason to get upset or argue back—if you do, you’re being just like the child.
This has totally shifted the way I interact with Rosy—I have so much less anger. She’s trying her best. Maybe she’s clumsy and illogical and irrational, but in her heart, she loves me, she wants to do well, and she wants to help.
Pinsker: One interesting observation in the book is that many American parents take their whole family to spaces that are expressly designed for kids, like children’s museums and indoor play places—despite the fact that these spaces are generally not very fun for parents. How do you think about these activities?
Doucleff: I think that a lot of the time, we don’t know what to do with kids. On weekends, it was sometimes like, How do we fill this time with Rosy? But the idea that parents are responsible for entertaining a child or “keeping them busy” is not present in the vast majority of cultures around the world, and definitely not throughout human history. What some of the psychologists I interviewed told me is that in these fake, childlike worlds, the child is separated from reality in some ways—they don’t learn how to behave as an adult.
There’s a lot of good scientific evidence that children have an innate instinct to cooperate and work together with their families. And child-centered activities can kind of strip away what I call their family “membership card,” the feeling that they’re a part of the family and working together as a team—not a VIP that the parents are serving. Kids want to help us and be part of our lives, and we can take that away with constant child-centered activities.
Pinsker: So if you aren’t going to the children’s museum as a family, what are you doing instead?
Doucleff: Basically, my husband and I do things that we used to do before Rosy was born, or things that we have to do, and modify them to include her. Sometimes I have to work, and she has to entertain herself. Or we go to the beach, and I sit and read for three hours, and don’t play with her—sometimes there are friends and sometimes there are not. We’ll go hiking or work in the garden or go visit friends together. And then we do chores. We do the laundry together. We clean up together. We go to the grocery store together. We just live—without a kiddie museum.
All over the world, and throughout history, parents have gone about their lives, but they’ve welcomed the kids into it. In many cultures, parents let the kids tag along, and they let the kid do what they want to do, within the boundaries of being respectful and kind. And for kids, that’s entertainment enough.
Pinsker: In the U.S., many parents find themselves essentially on their own when making sure their kids are being looked after. Could you talk about the more communal approach to raising children that you saw with the Hadzabe, the community of hunter-gatherers you visited in Tanzania?
Doucleff: I was with a group of about 15 to 20 adults and their kids—they live in small huts and work together all day. They spend enormous amounts of time with each other, but they're not all related. And when we first got there, it was hard for me to tell which toddlers belonged to which moms and dads, because everyone was helping to take care of them. The children were comfortable with all these different women and men.
If you look around the world, you'll see that in many cultures besides Western culture, and definitely in hunter-gatherer communities, there’s an enormous amount of what’s called “alloparenting.” Allo- is derived from a Greek word meaning “other,” so it just refers to caretakers in a child’s life other than the mom or dad.
These people are deeply involved in the child’s upbringing. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist, has done some amazing research where she shows that young children are basically designed to be raised by a group of people, not just two—meaning sometimes a mom or a dad is on their own doing the work of several people. So of course we feel worn down and exhausted.
Pinsker: American culture generally doesn’t encourage this approach to parenting, since there’s often an emphasis on individual parents. How do you think about transporting the spirit of those models over to an American context?
Doucleff: First of all, we do way more alloparenting than we give credit for, but often, we don't value the alloparents as much as we should: Nannies, day-care providers, teachers—those are all alloparents. Personally, I’ve been trying to value those people more and show my appreciation for them.
But there are opportunities aside from that. For one thing, a lot of alloparenting is done by children who are two, three, four, five years older than the child. I think we underestimate what children can do—there are children I met who were, like, 12 years old, making meals and taking care of younger children. It’s because they’re given opportunities all along to learn those skills.
Another thing is, we’ve built an “auntie-uncle network,” which is an idea I got from the psychological anthropologist Suzanne Gaskins. We have two other families who pick up the kids from school sometimes, and then I pick up the kids sometimes, and we trade off. The three kids get to have a sort of extended family. Rosy loves it, and we don’t have to pay for after-school care.
People tend to think of the nuclear family as traditional or ideal, but looking at the past 200,000 or so years of human history, what’s traditional is this communal model of working together to take care of a child. For me personally, this is reassuring, because I don’t want to be with Rosy, like, every moment. Really, that’s not natural.
In 1825, a royal prince of Siam (his birthright wrested from him, and his life imperilled) took refuge in a Buddhist monastery and assumed the yellow garb of a priest. His father, commonly known as Phen den-Klang, first or supreme king of Siam, had just died, leaving this prince, Chowfa Mongkut, at the age of twenty, lawful heir to the crown; for he was the eldest son of the acknowledged queen, and therefore by courtesy and honored custom, if not by absolute right, the legitimate successor to the throne of the Phra-batts (the Golden-footed). But he had an elder half-brother, who, through the intrigues of his mother, had already obtained control of the royal treasury, and now, with the connivance, if not by authority, of the Senabawdee, the Grand Council of the kingdom, proclaimed himself king, under the title of Phra-chow-Phra-sat-thong. He had the grace, however, to promise his plundered brother—such royal promises being a cheap form of propitiation in Siam—to hold the reins of government only until Chowfa Mongkut should be of years and strength and skill to manage them. But, once firmly seated on the throne, the usurper saw in his patient but proud and astute kinsman only a hindrance and a peril in the path of his own cruder and fiercer aspirations. Hence the forewarning and the flight, the cloister and the yellow robes. And so the usurper continued to reign, unchallenged by any claim from the king that should be, until March,1851, when, a mortal illness having overtaken him, he convoked the Grand Council of princes and nobles around his couch, and proposed his favorite son as his successor. Then the safe asses of the court kicked the dying lion with seven words of sententious scorn, — “The crown has already its rightful owner”; whereupon Phra-chow-Phra-sat-thong literally cursed himself to death; for it was almost in the convulsion of his chagrin and rage that he came to his end, on the 3d of April.
In Siam there is no such personage as an heir apparent to the throne, in the definite meaning and positive value which attaches to that phrase in Europe, — no prince with an absolute and exclusive title, by birth, adoption, or nomination, to succeed to the crown. And while it is true that the eldest living son of a Siamese sovereign by his queen or queen consort is recognized by all custom, ancient and modern, as the probable successor to the high seat of his royal sire, he cannot be said to have a clear and indefeasible right to it, because the question of his accession has yet to be decided by the electing voice of the Senabawdee, the Grand Council of the realm, in whose judgment he may be ineligible, by reason of certain physical, mental, or moral disabilities, — as extreme youth, effeminacy, imbecility, intemperance, profligacy. Nevertheless, the election is popularly expected to result in the choice of the eldest son of the queen, though an interregnum or a regency is a contingency by no means unusual.
It was in view of this jurisdiction of the Senabawdee, exercised in deference to a just and honored custom, that the voice of the oracle fell upon the ear of the dying monarch with a disappointing and offensive significance; for he well knew who was meant by the “rightful owner” of the crown. Hardly had he breathed his last when, in spite of the busy intrigues of his eldest son (whom we find described in the Bangkok Recorder of July 26, 1866, as “most honorable and promising”), in spite of the bitter vexation of his lordship Chow-Phya Sri Surry Wongse, so soon to be premier, the prince Chowfa Mongkut doffed his sacerdotal robes, emerged from his cloister, and was crowned, with the title of Somedtch-Phra Paramendr Maha Mongkut.1
For twenty-five years had the true heir to the throne of the Phra-batts, patiently biding his time, lain perdu in his monastery, diligently devoting himself to the study of Sanskrit, Bali, theology, history, geology, chemistry, and especially astronomy. He was a familiar visitor at the houses of the American missionaries, two of whom (Dr. House and Mr. Mattoon) were, throughout his reign and life, gratefully revered by him for that pleasant and profitable converse which helped to unlock to him the secrets of European vigor and advancement, and to make straight and easy the paths of knowledge he had started upon. Not even the essential arrogance of his Siamese nature could prevent him from accepting cordially the happy influences these good and true men inspired; and doubtless he would have gone more than half-way to meet them, but for the dazzle of the golden throne in the distance, which arrested him midway between Christianity and Buddhism, between truth and delusion, between light and darkness, between life and death.
In the Oriental tongues this progressive king was eminently proficient; and toward priests, preachers, and teachers, of all creeds, sects, and sciences, an enlightened exemplar of tolerance. It was likewise his peculiar vanity to pass for an accomplished English scholar, and to this end he maintained in his palace at Bangkok a private printing establishment, with fonts of English type, which, as may be perceived presently, he was at no loss to keep in “copy.” Perhaps it was the printing-office which suggested, quite naturally, an English governess for the elite of his wives and concubines, and their offspring, — in number amply adequate to the constitution of a royal school, and in material most attractively fresh and romantic. Happy thought! Wherefore, behold me, just after sunset on a pleasant day in April,1862 on the threshold of the outer court of the Grand Palace, accompanied by my own brave little boy, and escorted by a compatriot.
A flood of light sweeping through the spacious Hall of Audience displayed a throng of noblemen in waiting. None turned a glance, or seemingly a thought, on us, and, my child being tired and hungry, I urged Captain B to present us without delay. At once we mounted the marble steps, and entered the brilliant hall unannounced. Ranged on the carpet were many prostrate, mute, and motionless forms, over whose heads to step was a temptation as drolly natural as it was dangerous. His Majesty spied us quickly, and advanced abruptly, petulantly screaming, “Who? Who? Who?
Captain B—— (who, by the by, is a titled nobleman of Siam) introduced me as the English governess, engaged for the royal family. The king shook hands with us, and immediately proceeded to march up and down in quick step, putting one foot before the other with mathematical precision, as if under drill. “Forewarned, forearmed,” my friend whispered that I should prepare myself for a sharp cross-questioning as to my age, my husband, children, and other strictly personal concerns. Suddenly his Majesty, having cogitated sufficiently in his peculiar manner, with one long final stride halted in front of us, and, pointing straight at me with his forefinger, asked, “How old shall you be?”
Scarcely able to repress a smile at a proceeding so absurd, and with my sex’s distaste for so serious a question, I demurely replied, “One hundred and fifty years old.”
Had I made myself much younger, he might have ridiculed or assailed me; but now he stood surprised and embarrassed for a few moments, then resumed his quick march, and at last, beginning to perceive the jest, coughed, laughed, coughed again, and then in a high, sharp key asked, “In what year were you borned?”
Instantly I “struck” a mental balance, and answered, as gravely as I could, “In 1788.”
At this point the expression of his Majesty’s face was indescribably comical. Captain B slipped behind a pillar to laugh; but the king only coughed, with a significant emphasis that startled me, and addressed a few words to his prostrate courtiers, who smiled at the carpet, — all except the prime minister, who turned to look at me. But his Majesty was not to be baffled so: again he marched with vigor, and then returned to the attack with Elan.
“How many years shall you be married?”
“For several years, your Majesty.”
He fell into a brown study; then suddenly rushed at me, and demanded triumphantly—
“Ha! How many grandchildren shall you now have? Ha! ha! How many? How many? Ha! ha! ha!”
Of course we all laughed with him; but the general hilarity admitted of a variety of constructions.
Then suddenly he seized my hand, and dragged me, nolens volens, my little Louis holding fast by my skirt, through several sombre passages along which crouched duennas, shrivelled and grotesque, and many youthful women, covering their faces, as if blinded by the splendor of the passing Majesty. At length he stopped before one of the many-curtained recesses, and, drawing aside the hangings, disclosed a lovely, childlike form. He stooped and took her hand (she naively hiding her face), and placing it in mine, said: “This is my wife, the Lady T. She desires to be educated in English. She is as renowned for her talents as for her beauty, and it is our pleasure to make her a good English scholar. You shall educate her for me.”
I replied that the office would give me much pleasure; for nothing could be more eloquently winning than the modest, timid bearing of that tender young creature in the presence of her lord. She laughed low and pleasantly as he translated my sympathetic words to her, and seemed so enraptured with the graciousness of his act that I took my leave of her with a sentiment of profound pity.
He led me back by the way we had come; and now we met many children, who put my patient boy to much childish torture for the gratification of their startled curiosity.
“I have sixty-seven children,” said his Majesty, when we had returned to the Audience Hall. “You shall educate them; and as many of my wives, likewise, as may wish to learn English. And I have much correspondence in which you must assist me. And, moreover, I have much difficulty for reading and translating French letters; for French are fond of using gloomily deceiving terms. You must undertake; and you shall make all their murky sentences and gloomily deceiving propositions clear to me. And, furthermore, I have by every mail many foreign letters whose writing is not easily read by me. You shall copy on round hand, for my readily perusal thereof.”
Nil desperandum; but I began by despairing of my ability to accomplish tasks so multifarious. I simply bowed, however, and so dismissed myself for that evening.
When next I “interviewed” the king, I was accompanied by the premier’s sister, a fair and pleasant woman, whose whole stock of English was, “Good morning, sir”; and with this somewhat irrelevant greeting, a dozen times in an hour, though the hour were night, she relieved her pent-up feelings, and gave expression to her sympathy and regard for me. We found his Majesty in a less genial mood than at my first reception. He approached us coughing loudly and repeatedly, a sufficiently ominous fashion of announcing himself, which greatly discouraged my darling boy, who clung to me anxiously. He was followed by a numerous “tail” of women and children, who presently prostrated themselves around him. Shaking hands with me coldly, but remarking upon the beauty of the child’s hair, half buried in the folds of my dress, he turned to the premier’s sister, and conversed at some length with her, she apparently acquiescing in all that he had to say. He then approached me, and said, in a loud and domineering tone, —
“It is our pleasure that you shall reside within this palace with our family.”
I replied that it would be quite impossible for me to do so; that, being as yet unable to speak the language, and the gates being shut every evening, I should feel like an unhappy prisoner in the palace.
“Where do you go every evening?” he demanded.
“Not anywhere, your Majesty. I am a stranger here.”
“Then why you shall object to the gates being shut?”
“I do not clearly know,” I replied, with a secret shudder at the idea of sleeping within those walls; “but I am afraid I could not do it. I beg your Majesty will remember that in your gracious letter you promised me ‘a residence adjoining the royal palace,’ not within it.”
He turned and looked at me, his face growing almost purple with rage. “I do not know I have promised. I do not know former condition. I do not know anything but you are our servant; and it is our pleasure that you must live in this palace, and you shall obey.” Those last three words he fairly screamed.
I trembled in every limb, and for some time knew not how to reply. At length I ventured to say: “I am prepared to obey all your Majesty’s commands, within the obligation of my duty to your family; but beyond that I can promise no obedience.”
“You shall live in palace,” he roared, — “you shall live in palace. I will give woman slaves to wait on you. You shall commence royal school in this pavilion on Thursday next. That is the best day for such undertaking, in the estimation of our astrologers.”
With that, he addressed, in a frantic manner, commands, unintelligible to me, to some of the old women about the pavilion. My boy began to cry; tears filled my own eyes; and the premier’s sister, so kind but an hour before, cast fierce glances at us both. I turned and led my child toward the oval brass door. We heard voices behind us crying, “Mam! Mam!” I turned again, and saw the king beckoning and calling to me. I bowed to him profoundly, but passed on through the brass door. The prime minister’s sister rushed after us in a distraction of excitement, tugging at my cloak, shaking her finger in my face, and crying, “My di! my di!”2 All the way back, in the boat, and on the street, to the very door of my apartments, instead of her jocund “Good morning, sir,” I had nothing but my di.
But kings who are not mad have their sober second thoughts like other rational people. His Golden-footed Majesty presently repented him of his arbitrary “cantankerousness,” and in due time my ultimatum was accepted.
* * *
About a year later, when I had been permanently installed in my double office of teacher and scribe, I was one day busy with a letter from his Majesty to the Earl of Clarendon, and finding that any attempt at partial correction would but render his meaning more ambiguous, and impair the striking originality of his style, I had abandoned the effort, and set about copying it with literal exactness, only venturing to alter here and there a word, such as “I hasten with wilful pleasure to write in reply to your Lordship’s well-wishing letter,” etc. Whilst I was thus evolving from the depths of my inner consciousness a satisfactory solution to this conundrum in King’s English, his Majesty’s private secretary lolled in the sunniest corner of the room, stretching his dusky limbs and heavily nodding, in an ecstasy of ease-taking. Poor Phra-Alack! I never knew him to be otherwise than sleepy, and his sleep was always stolen. For his Majesty was the most capricious of kings as to his working moods, — busy when the average man should be sleeping, sleeping while letters, papers, despatches, messengers, mail-boats waited. More than once had we been aroused at dead of night by noisy female slaves, and dragged in hot haste and consternation to the Hall of Audience, only to find that his Majesty was, not at his last gasp, as we had feared, but simply bothered to find in Webster’s Dictionary some word that was to be found nowhere but in his own fertile brain; or perhaps in excited chase of the classical term for some trifle he was on the point of ordering from London, — and that word was sure to be a stranger to my brain.
Before my arrival in Bangkok it had been his not uncommon practice to send for a missionary at midnight, have him beguiled or abducted from his bed, and conveyed by boat to the palace, some miles up the river, to inquire if it would not be more elegant to write murky instead of obscure, or gloomily dark rather than not clearly not clearly apparent. And if the wretched man should venture to declare his honest preference for the ordinary over the extraordinary form of expression, he was forthwith dismissed with irony, arrogance, or even insult, and without a word of apology for the rude invasion of his rest.
One night, a little after twelve o’clock, as he was on the point of going to bed like any plain citizen of regular habits, his Majesty fell to thinking how most accurately to render into English the troublesome Siamese word phi, which admits of a variety of interpretations.3 After puzzling over it for more than an hour, getting himself possessed with the word as with the devil it stands for, and all to no purpose, he ordered one of his lesser state barges to be manned and despatched with all speed for the British consul. That functionary, inspired with lively alarm by so startling a summons, dressed himself with unceremonious celerity, and hurried to the palace, conjecturing on the way all imaginable possibilities of politics and diplomacy, revolution or invasion. To his vexation, not less than his surprise, he found the king seated in dishabille, with a Siamese-English vocabulary, mentally divided between “deuce” and “devil,” in the choice of an equivalent. His preposterous Majesty gravely laid the case before the consul, who, though inwardly chafing at what he termed “the confounded coolness” of the situation, had no choice but to decide with grace, and go back to bed with philosophy.
No wonder, then, that Phra-Alack experienced an access of gratitude for the privilege of napping for two hours in a snuggery of sunshine.
“Mam-Kha,”4 he murmured drowsily, “I hope that in the Chat-Nah (The next state of existence) I shall be a freed man.”
“I hope so sincerely, Phra-Alack,” said I. “I hope you’11 be an Englishman or an American, for then you’11 be sure to be independent.”
It was impossible not to pity the poor old man, — stiff with continual stooping to his task, and so subdued! — liable not only to be called at any hour of the day or night, but to be threatened, cuffed, kicked, beaten on the head, in every way abused and insulted, and the next moment to be taken into favor, confidence, bosom-friendship, even as his Majesty’s mood might veer.
Alack for Phra-Alack! though usually he bore with equal patience his greater and his lesser ills, there were occasions that sharply tried his meekness, when his weak and goaded nature revolted, and he rushed to a snug little home of his own, about forty yards from the Grand Palace, there to snatch a respite of rest and refreshment in the society of his young and lately wedded wife. Then the king would awake and send for him, whereupon he would be suddenly ill, or not at home, strategically hiding himself under a mountain of bedclothes, and detailing Mrs. Phra-Alack to reconnoitre and report. He had tried this primitive trick so often that its very staleness infuriated the king, who invariably sent officers to seize his trembling accomplice and lock her up in a dismal cell, as a hostage for the scribe’s appearance. At dusk the poor fellow would emerge, contrite and terrified, and prostrate himself at the gate of the palace. Then his Majesty (who, having spies posted in every quarter of the town, knew as well as Phra-Alack himself what the illness or the absence signified) leisurely strolled forth, and, finding the patient on the threshold, flew always into a genuine rage, and prescribed “decapitation on the spot,” and “sixty lashes on the bare back,” both in the same breath. And while the attendants flew right and left, — one for the blade, another for the thong, — the king, still raging, seized whatever came most handy, and belabored his bosom-friend on the head and shoulders. Having thus summarily relieved his mind, he despatched the royal secretary for his ink-horn and papyrus, and began inditing letters, orders, appointments, before scymitar or lash (which were ever tenderly slow on these occasions) had made its appearance. Perhaps in the very thick of his dictating he would remember the connubial accomplice, and order his people to “release her, and let her go.”
* * *
Slavery in Siam is the lot of men of a much finer intellectual type than any who have been its victims in modern times, in societies farther west. Phra-Alack had been his Majesty’s slave when they were boys together. Together they had played, studied, and entered the priesthood. At once bondman, comrade, classmate, and confidant, he was the very man to fill the office of private secretary to his royal crony. Virgil made a slave of his a poet, and Horace was the son of an emancipated slave. The Roman leech and chirurgeon were often slaves; so, too, the preceptor and the pedagogue, the reader and the player, the clerk and the amanuensis, the singer, the dancer, the wrestler, and the buffoon, the architect, the smith, the weaver, and the shoemaker; even the armiger or squire was a slave. Educated slaves exercised their talents and pursued their callings for the emolument of their masters; and thus it is to-day in Siam. Mutato nominee, de te fibula narratur, Phra-Alack.
The king’s taste for English composition had, by much exercise, developed itself into a passion. In the pursuit of it he was indefatigable, rambling, and petulant. He had “Webster Unabridged” on the brain, — an exasperating form of king’s evil. The little dingy slips that emanated freely from the palace press were as indiscriminate as they were quaint. No topic was too sublime or too ignoble for them. All was “copy” that came to those cases, — from the glory of the heavenly bodies to the nuisance of the busy-bodies, who scolded his Majesty through the columns of the Bangkok Recorder.
I have before me as I write a circular from his pen, and in the type of his private press, which, being without caption or signature, may be supposed to be addressed “to all whom it may concern.” The American missionaries had vexed his exact scholarship by their peculiar mode of representing in letters the name of a native city (Prippri, or in Sanskrit Bajrepuri). Whence this droll circular, which begins with a dogmatic line—
“None should write the name of city of Prippri thus—P’et cha poory.”
Then comes a scholarly demonstration of the derivation of the name from a compound Sanskrit word, signifying “Diamond City.” And the document concludes with a characteristic explosion of impatience, at once critical, royal, and sacerdotal: “Ah what the Romanization of American system that P’etch’ abwry will be Will whole human learned world become the pupil of their corrupted Siamese teachers? It is very far from correctness, why they did not look in journal of Royal Asiatic Society, where several words of Sanskrit and Pali were published continually? Their Siamese priestly teachers considered all Europeans as very heathen; to them far from sacred tongue and were glad to have American heathens to become their scholars or pupils; they thought they have taught sacred language to the part of heathen; in fact, they themselves are very far from sacred language, being sunk deeply in corruption of sacred and learned language, for tongue of their former Laos and Cambodian teachers, and very far from knowledge of Hindoostanee, Singhalese, and Royal Asiatic Society’s knowledge in Sanskrit, as they are considered by such the Siamese teachers, as heathen; called by them Mit ch’a thi thi, &c., &c., i.e. wrongly seer or spectator, &c., &c.”
In another slip, which is manifestly an outburst of the royal petulance, his Majesty demands, in a “displayed” paragraph: —
“Why name of Mr. Knox [Thomas George Knox, Esq., British Consul] was not published thus: Missa Nok or Nawk. If name of Chaw Phya Bhudharabhay is to be thus: P’raya P’oo t’a ra P’ie; and why the London was not published thus: Lundun or Landan, if Bejrepuri is to be published P’etch’ abury.”
In the same slip with the philological protest the following remarkable paragraphs appear: —
“What has been published in No. 25 of Bangkok Recorder thus: —
“The king of Siam, on reading from some European paper that the Pope had lately suffered the loss of some precious jewels, in consequence of a thief having got possession of his Holiness’ keys, exclaimed, ‘What a man! professing to keep the keys of Heaven, and cannot even keep his own keys!”
“The king, on perusal thereof denied that it is false. He knows nothing about his Holiness the Pope’s sustaining loss of gems, & c., and has said nothing about religious faith.”
This is curious, in that it exposes the king’s unworthy fear of the French priesthood in Siam. The fact is that he did make the rather smart remark, in precisely these words: “Ah! what a man! professing to keep the keys of Heaven, and not able to guard those of his own bureau!” and he was quite proud of his hit. But when it appeared in the Recorder, he thought it prudent to bar it with a formal denial. Hence the politic little item, which he sent to all the foreigners in Bangkok, and especially to the French priests.
His Majesty’s mode of dealing with newspaper strictures (not always just) and suggestions (not always pertinent) aimed at his administration of public affairs, or the constitution and discipline of his household, was characteristic. He snubbed them with sententious arrogance, leavened with sarcasm.
When the Recorder recommended to the king the expediency of dispersing his Solomonic harem, and abolishing polygamy in the royal family, his Majesty retorted with a verbal message to the editor, to the purport that “when the Recorder shall have dissuaded princes and noblemen from offering their daughters to the kind as concubines, the king will cease to receive contributions of women in that capacity.”
In August, 1865, an angry altercation occurred in the Royal Court of Equity (sometimes styled the International Court) between a French priest and Phya Wiset, a Siamese nobleman, of venerable years, but positive spirit and energy. The priest gave Phya Wiset the lie, and Phya Wiset gave it back to the priest, whereupon the priest became noisy. Afterward he reported the affair to his consul at Bangkok, with the embellishing statement that not only himself, but his religion had been grossly insulted. The consul, one Monsieur Aubaret, a peppery and pugnacious Frenchman, immediately made a demand upon his Majesty for the removal of Phya Wiset from office.
This despatch was sent late in the evening by the hand of Monsieur Lamarche, commanding the troops at the royal palace; and that officer had the consul’s order to present it summarily. Lamarche managed to procure admittance to the penetralia, and presented the note at two o’clock in the morning, in violation of reason and courtesy as well as of rules, excusing himself on the ground that the despatch was important and his orders peremptory. His Majesty then read the despatch, and remarked that the matter should be disposed of “to-morrow.” Lamarche replied, very presumptuously, that the affair required no investigation, as he had heard the offensive language of Phya Wiset, and that person must be deposed without ceremony. Whereupon his Majesty ordered the offensive foreigner to leave the palace.
* * *
Lamarche repaired forthwith to the consul, and reported that the king had spoken disrespectfully, not only of his Imperial Majesty’s consul, but of the Emperor himself, besides outrageously insulting a French messenger. Then the fire-eating functionary addressed another despatch to his Majesty, the purport of which was, that in expelling Lamarche from the palace, the king of Siam had been guilty of a political misdemeanor, and had rudely disturbed the friendly relations existing between France and Siam; that he should leave Bangkok for Paris, and in six weeks lay his grievance before the Emperor; but should first proceed to Saigon, and engage the French admiral there to attend to any emergency that might arise in Bangkok.
His Majesty, who knew how to confront the uproar of vulgarity and folly with the repose of wisdom and dignity, sent his own cousin, the Prince Mom Rachoday, Chief Judge of the Royal Court of Equity, to M. Aubaret, to disabuse his mind, and impart to him all the truth of the case. But the “furious Frank” seized the imposing magnate by the hair, drove him from his door, and flung his betel-box after him, — a reckless impulse of outrage as monstrous as the most ingenious and deliberate brutality could have devised. Rudely to seize a Siamese by the hair is an indignity as grave as to spit in the face of a European; and the betel-box, beside being a royal present, was an essential part of the insignia of the prince’s judicial office.
On a later occasion this same Aubaret seized the opportunity a royal procession afforded to provoke the king to an ill-timed discussion of politics, and to prefer an intemperate complaint against the Kalahome, or Prime Minister. This characteristic flourish of ill temper and bad manners, from the representative of the politest of nations, naturally excited lively indignation and disgust among all respectable dwellers, native or foreign, near the court, and a serious disturbance was imminent. But a single dose of the King’s English sufficed to soothe the spasmodic official, and reduce him to “a sense of his situation.”
“To THE HON. THE MONSIEUR AUBARET, the Consul for H.I.M.
“SIR: — The verbal insult or bad words without any step more over from lower or lowest person is considered very slight & inconsiderable.
“The person standing on the surface of the ground or floor Cannot injure the heavenly bodies or any highly hanging Lamp or glope by ejecting his spit from his mouth upward it will only injure his own face without attempting of Heavenly bodies—&c.
“The Siamese are knowing of being lower than heaven do not endeavor to injure heavenly bodies with their spit from mouth.
“A person who is known to be powerless by every one as they who have no arms or legs to move oppose or injure or deaf or blind &c. &c. Cannot be considered and said that they are our enemies even for their madness in vain—it might be considered as easily agitation or uneasiness.
“Persons under strong desires without any limit or acting under illimited anger sometimes cannot be believed at once without testimony or witness if they stated against any one verbally from such the statements of the most desirous or persons most illimitedly angry hesitation and mild enquiry is very prudent from persons of considerable rank.”
No signature.
Never were simplicity with shrewdness, and unconscious humor with pathos, and candor with irony, and political economy with the sense of an awful bore, more quaintly blended than in the following extraordinary hint, written and printed by his Majesty, and freely distributed for the snubbing of visionary or speculative adventurers: —
“NOTICE.
“When the general rumor was and is spread out from Siam, circulated among the foreigners to Siam, chiefly Europeans, Chinese, &c, in three points—
“1. That Siam is under quite absolute Monarchy. Whatever her Supreme Sovereign commanded, allowed &c, all cannot be resisted by any one of his Subjects.
“2. The Treasury of the Sovereign of Siam, was full for money, like a mountain of gold and silver; Her Sovereign most wealthy.
“3. The present reigning Monarch of Siam is shallow minded and admirer of almost everything of curiosity, and most admirer of European usages, customs, sciences, arts and literature &c, without limit. He is fond of flattering term and ambitious of honor, so that there are now many opportunities and operations to be embraced for drawing great money from Royal Treasury of Siam, &c.
“The most many foreigners being under belief of such general rum our, were endeavoring to draw money from him in various operations, as alluring him with valuable curiosities and expectations of interest, and flattering him, to be glad of them, and deceiving him in various ways; almost on every opportunity of Steamer Coming to Siam, various foreigners partly known to him and acquainted with him, and generally unknown to him, boldly wrote to him in such the term of various application and treatment, so that he can conclude that the chief object of all letters written to him, is generally to draw money from him, even unreasonable. Several instances and testimonies can be shown for being example on this subject—the foreigners letters addressed to him, come by every one steamer of Siam, and of foreign steamers visiting Siam; 10 and 12 at least and 40 at highest number, urging him in various ways; so he concluded that foreigners must consider him only as a mad king of a wild land!
“He now states that he cannot be so mad more, as he knows and observes the consideration of the foreigners towards him. Also he now became of old age, (he was sixty-two at this time) and was very sorry to lose his principal members of his family namely, his two Queens, twice, and his younger brother the late Second King, and his late second son and beloved daughter, and moreover now he fear of sickness of his eldest son, he is now unhappy and must solicit his friends in correspondence and others who please to write for the foresaid purpose, that they should know suitable reason in writing to him, and shall not urge him as they would urge a madman! And the general rumours forementioned are some exaggerated and some entirely false; they shall not believe such the rumours, deeply and ascertainedly.
“ROYAL RESIDENCE GRAND PALACE
BANGKOK 2nd JULY 1867.”
And now observe with what gracious ease this most astute and discriminating prince could fit his tone to the sense of those who, familiar with his opinions, and reconciled to his temper and his ways, however peculiar, could reciprocate the catholicity of his sympathies, and appreciate his enlightened efforts to fling off that tenacious old-man-of-the-sea custom, and extricate himself from the predicament of conflicting responsibilities. To these, on the Christian New Year’s day of 1867, he addressed this kindly greeting: —
“S. P. P. M. MONGKUT:
“Called in Siamese ‘Phra-Chomklau chao-yuhua,’ In Magadhi or language of Pali ‘Siamikanam Maha Rajah,’ In Latin ‘Rex Siamensium,’ In French ‘Le Roi de Siam,’ In English ‘The King of Siam,’ and in Malayan ‘Rajah Maha Pasah’ &c.
“Begs to present his respectful and regardful compliments and congratulations in happy lives during immediately last year, and wishes the continuing thereof during the commencing New Year, and ensuing and succeeding many years, to his foreign friends, both now in Siam namely, the functionary and acting Consuls and consular officers of various distinguished nations in Treaty Power with Siam and certain foreign persons under our salary, in service in any manner here, and several Gentlemen and Ladies who are resident in Siam in various stations: namely, the Priests, preachers of religion, Masters and Mistresses of Schools, Workmen and Merchants, &c, and now abroad in various foreign countries and ports, who are our noble and common friends, acquainted either by ever having had correspondences mutually with us some time, at any where and remaining in our friendly remembrance or mutual remembrance, and whosoever are in service to us as our Consuls, vice consuls and consular assistants, in various foreign ports. Let them know our remembrance and good wishes toward them all.
* * *
“Though we are not Christians, the forenamed King was glad to arrive this day in his valued life, as being the 22,720th day of his age, during which he was aged sixty-two years and three months, and being the 5,711th day of his reign, during which he reigned upon his kingdom 15 years and 8 months up to the current month.
“In like manner he was very glad to see & know and hope for all his Royal Family, kindred and friends of both native and foreign, living near and far to him had arrived to this very remarkable anniversary of the commencement of Solar Year in Anno Christi 1867.
“In their all being healthy and well living like himself he begs to express his royal congratulation and respect and graceful regards to all his kindred and friends both native and foreign, and hopes to receive such the congratulation and expression of good wishes toward him and members of his family in very like manner, as he trusts that the amity and grace to one another of every of human beings who are innocent, is a great merit, and is righteous and praiseworthy in religious system of all civil religion, and best civilized laws and morality, &c.
“Given at the Royal Audience Hall, ‘Anant Samagome,’ Grand Palace, Bangkok,” etc., etc.
His Majesty usually passed his mornings in study or in dictating or writing
English letters and dispatches. His breakfast, though a repast sufficiently frugal for Oriental royalty, was served with awesome forms. In an antechamber adjoining a noble hall, rich in grotesque carvings and gildings, a throng of females waited, while his Majesty sat at a long table, near which knelt twelve women before great silver trays laden with twelve varieties of viands, — soups, meats, game, poultry, fish, vegetables, cakes, jellies, preserves, sauces, fruits, and teas. Each tray, in its order, was passed by three ladies to the head wife or concubine, who removed the silver covers, and at least seemed to taste the contents of each dish; and then, advancing on her knees, she set them on the long table before the king.
But his Majesty was notably temperate in his diet, and by no means a gastronome. In his long seclusion in a Buddhist cloister he had acquired habits of severe simplicity and frugality, as a preparation for the exercise of those powers of mental concentration for which he was remarkable. At these morning repasts it was his custom to detain me in conversation, relating to some topic of interest derived from his studies, or in reading or translating. He was more systematically educated, and a more capacious devourer of books and news, than perhaps any man of equal rank in our day. But much learning had made him morally mad; his extensive reading had engendered in his mind an extreme scepticism concerning all existing religious systems. In inborn integrity and steadfast principle he had no faith whatever. He sincerely believed that every man strove to compass his own ends, per fas et nefas. The mens sibi conscia recti was to him an hallucination, for which he entertained profound contempt; and he honestly pitied the delusion that pinned its faith on human truth and virtue. He was a provoking melange of antiquarian attainments and modern scepticism. When, sometimes, I ventured to disabuse his mind of his darling scorn for motive and responsibility, I had the mortification to discover that I had but helped him to an argument against myself: it was simply “my peculiar interest to do so.” Money, money, money! that could procure anything.
But aside from the too manifest bias of his early education and experience, it is due to his memory to say that his practice was less faithless than his profession, toward those persons and principles to which he was attracted by a just regard. In many grave considerations he displayed soundness of understanding and clearness of judgment, — a genuine nobility of mind, established upon universal ethics and philosophic reason, — where his passions were not dominant; but when these broke in, between the man and the majesty, they effectually barred his advance in the direction of true greatness; beyond them he could not or would not make way.
Ah! if this man could but have cast off the cramping yoke of his intellectual egotism, and been loyal to the free government of his own true heart, what a demigod might he not have been, among the lower animals of Asiatic royalty!
When the darling of his old age, the sweet, bright little princess, Somdetch Chowfa Chandrmondol (who was so dear to me by her pet name of Fa-ying), was seized with cholera on the night of the 13th of May, 1863, his Majesty wrote to me: —
“My DEAR MAM:
“Our well-beloved daughter, your favorite pupil, is attacked with cholera, and has earnest desire to see you, and is heard much to make frequent repetition of your name. I beg that you will favor her wish. I fear her illness is mortal, as there has been three deaths since morning. She is best beloved of my children.
“I am your afflicted friend,
“S. P. P. MAHA MONGKUT.”
In a moment I was in my boat. I entreated, I flattered, I scolded, the rowers. How slow they were! How strong the opposing current! And when we did reach those heavy gates, how slowly they moved, with what suspicious caution they admitted me! I was fierce with impatience. And when at last I stood panting at the door of my Fa-ying’s chamber—too late! Even Dr. Campbell (the surgeon of the British consulate) had come too late.
There was no need to prolong that anxious wail in the ear of the deaf child, “Phra-Arahang! Phra-Arahang!”5 She would not forget her way; she would nevermore lose herself on the road to Heaven. Beyond, above the Phra-Arahang, she had soared into the eternal, tender arms of the Phra-Jesus, of whom she was wont to say in her infantine wonder and eagerness, Mam cha, chan rak Phra-Jesus mak (“Mam dear, I love your holy Jesus”)!
As I stooped to imprint a parting kiss on the little face that had been so dear to me, her kindred and slaves exchanged their appealing “Phra-Arahang” for a sudden burst of heart-rending cries.
An attendant hurried me to the king, who, reading the heavy tidings in my silence, covered his face with his hands and wept passionately. Strange and terrible were the tears of such a man, welling up from a heart from which all natural affections had seemed to be expelled, to make room for his own exacting, engrossing conceit of self.
Bitterly he bewailed his darling, calling her by such tender, touching epithets as the lips of loving Christian mothers use. What could I say? What could I do but weep with him; and then steal quietly away, and leave the king to the father?
“The moreover very sad & mournful Circular6 from His Gracious Majesty Somdetch Phra Paramendr Maha Mongkut, the reigning Supreme King of Siam, intimating the recent death of Her Celestial Royal Highness, Princess Somdetch Chaufa Chandrmondol Sobhon Baghiawati, who was His Majesty’s most affectionate & well beloved 9th Royal daughter or 16th offspring, and the second Royal child by His Majesty’s late Queen consort Rambery Bhamarabhiramy who deceased in the year 1861. Both mother and daughter have been known to many foreign friends of His Majesty.
“To all the foreign friends of His Majesty, residing or trading in Siam, or in Singapore, Malacca, Pinang, Ceylon, Batavia, Saigon, Macao, Hong-kong, & various regions in China, Europe, America, &c ...
“Her Celestial Royal Highness, having been born on the 24th April 1855, grew up in happy condition of her royal valued life, under the care of her Royal parents, as well as her elder and younger three full brothers, and on the demise if her royal mother on the fore-mentioned date, she was almost always with her Royal father everywhere day & night. All things which belonged to her late mother suitable for female use, were transferred to her as the most lawful inheritor of her late royal mother; She grew up to the age of 8 years & 20 days. On the ceremony of the funeral service of her elder late royal half brother forenamed, She accompanied her royal esteemed father & her royal brothers and sisters in customary service, cheerfully during three days of the ceremony, from the 11th to 13th May. On the night of the latter day, when she was returning from the royal funeral place to the royal residence in the same sedan with her Royal father at 10 ‘clock P.M. she yet appeared happy, but alas, on her arrival at the royal residence, she was attacked by most violent & awful cholera, and sunk rapidly before the arrival of the physicians who were called on that night for treatment. Her disease or illness of cholera increased so strong that it did not give way to the treatment of any one, or even to the Chlorodine administered to her by Doctor James Campbell the Surgeon of the British Consulate. She expired at 4 o’clock P.M. on the 14th May, when her elder royal half brother’s remains were burning at the funeral ball outside of the royal palace, according to the determined time for the assembling of the great congregation of the whole of the royalty & nobility, and native & foreign friends, before the occurrence of the unforeseen sudden misfortune or mournful event. ...
“The sudden death of the said most affectionate and lamented royal daughter has caused greater regret and sorrow to her Royal father than several losses sustained by him before, as this beloved Royal amiable daughter was brought up almost by the hands of His Majesty himself, since she was aged only 4 to 5 months, His Majesty has carried her to and fro by his hand and on the lap and placed her by his side in every one of the Royal seats, where ever he went; whatever could be done in the way of nursing His Majesty has done himself, by feeding her with milk obtained from her nurse, and sometimes with the milk of the cow, goat &c. poured in a teacup from which His Majesty fed her by means of a spoon, so this Royal daughter was as familiar with her father in her infancy, as with her nurses.
“On her being only aged six months, his Majesty took this Princess with him and went to Ayudia on affairs there, after that time when she became grown up His Majesty had the princess seated on his lap when he was in his chair at the breakfast, dinner & supper table, and fed her at the same time of breakfast &c, almost every day, except when she became sick of colds &c. until the last days of her life she always eat at same table with her father, where ever His Majesty went, this princess always accompanied her father upon the same, sedan, carriage, Royal boat, yacht &c. and on her being grown up she became more prudent than other children of the same age, she paid very affectionate attention to her affectionate and esteemed father in every thing where her ability allowed; she was well educated in the vernacular Siamese literature which she commenced to study when she was 3 years old, and in last year she commenced to study in the English School where the school-mistress, Lady L has observed that she was more skillful than the other royal Children, she pronounced & spoke English in articulate & clever manner which pleased the schoolmistress exceedingly so that the schoolmistress on the loss of this her beloved pupil, was in great sorrow and wept much.
“... But alas! her life was very short. She was only aged 8 years & 20 days, reckoning from her birth day & hour, she lived in this world 2942 days & I8 hours. But it is known that the nature of human lives is like the flames of candles lighted in open air without any protection above & every side, so it is certain that this path ought to be followed by every one of human beings in a short or long while which cannot be ascertained by prediction, Alas!
“Dated Royal Grand Palace, Bangkok, 16th May, Anno Christi, 1863.’
The remoter provinces of Siam constitute a source of continual anxiety and much expense to the government; and to his Majesty (who, very conscious of power, was proud to be able to say that the Malayan territories and rajahs—Cambodia, with her marvelous cities, palaces, and temples, once the stronghold of Siam’s most formidable and implacable foes, the Laos country, with its warlike princes and chiefs—were alike dependencies and tributaries of his crown) it was intolerably irritating to find Cambodia rebellious. So long as his government could successfully maintain its supremacy there, that country formed a sort of neutral ground between his people and the Cochin-Chinese; a geographical condition which was not without its political advantages. But now the unscrupulous French had strutted upon the scene, and with a flourish of diplomacy and a stroke of the pen appropriated to themselves the fairest portion of that most fertile province. His Majesty, though secretly longing for the intervention and protection of England, was deterred by his almost superstitious fear of the French from complaining openly. But whenever he was more than commonly annoyed by the pretensions and aggressive epistles of his Imperial Majesty’s consul, he sent for me, — thinking, like all Orientals, that, being English, my sympathy for him, and my hatred of the French, were jointly a foregone conclusion. When I would have assured him that I was utterly powerless to help him, he cut me short with a wise whisper to “consult Mr. Thomas George Knox” and when I protested that that gentleman was too honorable to engage in a secret intrigue against a colleague, even for the protection of British interests in Siam, he would rave at my indifference, the cupidity of the French, the apathy of the English, and the fatuity of all geographers in “ setting down” the form of government in Siam as an “absolute monarchy.”
“I an absolute monarch! For I have no power over French. Siam is like a mouse before an elephant! Am I an absolute monarch? What shall you consider me?”
Now as I considered him a particularly absolute and despotic king, that was a trying question; so I discreetly held my peace, fearing less to be classed with those obnoxious savans who compile geographies than to provoke him afresh.
“I have no power,” he scolded; “I am not absolute! If I point the end of my walking-stick at a man whom, being my enemy, I wish to die, he does not die, but lives on, in spite of my ‘absolute’ will to the contrary. What does Geographies mean? How can I be an absolute monarchy?”
Such a conversation we were having one day as he “assisted” at the founding of a temple; and while he reproached his fate that he was powerless to “point the end of his walking-stick” with absolute power at the peppery and presumptuous Monsieur Aubaret, he vacantly flung gold and silver coins among the work-women.
In another moment he forgot all French encroachments, and the imbecility of geographers in general, as his glance chanced to fall upon a young woman of fresh and striking beauty, and delightful piquancy of ways and expression, who with a clumsy club was pounding fragments of pottery—urns, vases, and goglets—for the foundation of the mat. Very artless and happy she seemed, and free as she was lovely; but the instant she perceived she had attracted the notice of the king, she sank down and hid her face in the earth, forgetting or disregarding the falling vessels that threatened to crush or wound her. But the king merely diverted himself with inquiring her name and parentage, which some one answered for her, and turned away.
Almost to the latest hour of his life his Majesty suffered, in his morbid egotism, various and keen annoyance by reason of his sensitiveness to the opinions of foreigners, the encroachments of foreign officials, and the strictures of the foreign press. He was agitated by a restless craving for their sympathy on the one hand, and by a futile resentment of their criticisms or their claims on the other.
An article in a Singapore paper had administered moral correction to his Majesty on the strength of a rumor that “the king has his eye upon another princess of the highest rank, with a view to constituting her a queen consort.” And the Bangkok Recorder had said: “Now, considering that he is full threescore and three years of age, that he has already scores of concubines and about fourscore sons and daughters, with several Chowfas among them, and hence eligible to the highest posts of honor in the kingdom, this rumor seems too monstrous to be credited. But the truth is, there is scarcely anything too monstrous for the royal polygamy of Siam to bring forth.” By the light of this explanation the meaning of the following extract from the postscript of a letter which the king wrote in April, 1866, will be clear to the reader, who, at the same time, in justice to me, will remember that by the death of his Majesty, on the 1st of October, 1868, the seal of secrecy was broken.
“VERY PRIVATE POST SCRIPT.
“There is a newspaper of Singapore entitled Daily News just published after last arrival of the steamer Chowphya in Singapore, in which paper, a correspondence from an Individual resident at Bangkok dated 16th March 1866 was shown. but I have none of that paper in my possession. ... I did not noticed its number & date to state to you now, but I trust such the paper must be in hand of several foreigners in Bangkok, may you have read it perhaps—other wise you can obtain the same from any one or by order to obtain from Singapore after perusal thereof you will not be able to deny my statement forementioned more over as general people both native & foreigners here seem to have less pleasure on me & my descendant, than their pleasure and hope on other amiable family to them until the present day.
“What was said there in for a princess considered by the Speaker or Writer as proper or suitable to be head on my harem (a room or part for confinement of Women of Eastern monarch) there is no least intention occurred to me even once or in my dream indeed! I think if I do so, I will die soon perhaps!
“This my hand writing or content hereof shall be kept secretly.
“I beg to remain
“Your faithful & well-wisher
“S. P. P. M. MONGKUT R. S.
“on 5441th day of reign.
“the writer here of beg to place his confidence on you alway.”
As a true friend to his Majesty, I deplore the weakness which betrayed him into so transparent a sham of virtuous indignation. The “princess of the highest rank,” whom the writer of the article plainly meant, was the Princess of Hhiengmai (or Chiengmai); but from lack of accurate information he was misled into confounding her with the Princess Tui Duany Prabha, his Majesty’s niece. The king could honestly deny any such intention on his part with regard to his niece; but, at the same time, he well knew that the writer erred only as to the individual, and not as to the main fact of the case.
Much more agreeable is it—to the reader, I doubt not, not less than to the writer—to turn from the king, in the exercise of his slavish function of training honest words to play the hypocrite for ignoble thoughts, to the gentleman, the friend, the father, giving his heart a holiday in the relaxations of simple kindness and free affection; as in the following note—
“Dated RANCHATJPURY
34th February 1865.
“To LADY L—— & HER SON LUISE,
Bangkok.
“We having very pleasant journey. ... To be here which is a township called as above named by men or republick affairs in Siam, & called by common people as ‘Parkphrieck’ where we have our stay a few days. & will take our departure from hence at dawn of next day. We thinking of you both regardfully & beg to send here with some wild aples & barriers which are delicate for tasting & some tobacco which were and are principal product of this region for your kind acceptance hoping this wild present will be acceptable to you both.
“We will be arrived at your home Bangkok on early part of March.
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If at first you don’t succeed, appeal to a higher federal court. And if you even lose at the Supreme Court … just try again anyway.
This seems to be President Trump’s approach to limiting birthright citizenship. Last year, he issued an executive order that purports to end the practice of automatically granting citizenship to babies born in the United States—as has been the norm since the late 19th century. Despite Trump visiting oral arguments in an apparent attempt to intimidate the justices, the Supreme Court struck down the order this June.
Yesterday, Trump attempted to do some of the same things via new executive orders. One is intended to deny automatic citizenship to children born to people living in the United States while working for a foreign government and children of people declared to be terrorists or adversaries of the U.S. It would also deny citizenship to people born in U.S. territories if Congress passes a proposed law allowing that, creating a new group of stateless people. The second order is intended to prevent the practice of “birth tourism,” in which people visiting the United States on tourist visas give birth to babies who are then U.S. citizens.
Legal experts and advocates say the orders are unconstitutional, and they are certain to be challenged in court. Trump’s loss at the Supreme Court seems to make these orders a long shot. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion for the Court, “children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States” satisfy the relevant conditions and thus “under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”
The language in the orders about “alien enemies” is another likely area for dispute, not because anyone is eager to welcome the children of bona fide adversaries but because this administration has made absurd claims about illegal immigration constituting an “invasion,” which makes no sense on its face and has been rejected by federal judges.
Trump’s announcement of the orders at the White House yesterday was full of fabrications, exaggerations, and lies. Trump claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment “was meant for the babies of slaves. It was—it was right after—one week or two weeks after the Civil War ended.” In fact, it passed three years later, in 1868. The presidential adviser Stephen Miller echoed the same idea, saying that the amendment “had no other meaning and purpose outside of that, and that’s been clear, obviously, since the day that it was passed.” When a politician uses the word obviously—like frankly—that’s a good sign that what follows will be neither obvious nor true. If this had been obvious since 1868, the U.S. wouldn’t have acted otherwise for more than a century, and the Supreme Court would have ruled in favor of the administration.
Trump’s claims about birth tourism were even further off base. The president isn’t making the idea up—just wildly exaggerating it. Asked by a reporter how many people are engaging in the practice, Trump said, “I can tell you right now. Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.” This number appears to be pulled out of thin air. During Supreme Court oral arguments, Solicitor General John Sauer, arguing on behalf of Trump, was asked how commonly birth tourism occurs and replied, “No one knows for sure.” In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports much stricter laws, estimated the number at between 20,000 and 26,000 births each year, out of roughly 3.6 million babies born in the United States.
By attempting to end or restrict birthright citizenship in order to address these issues, Trump is trying to use a bulldozer to achieve a task that calls for a small mallet. The law already prohibits fraudulent visa applications, and the Justice Department has prosecuted people for birth tourism in the past. Trying to undermine birthright citizenship risks jettisoning one of the fundamental bases of modern American society to deal with a minor challenge.
Trump could have tried another path. Justice Brett Kavanaugh offered the White House a potential lifeline in his concurrence in the birthright case, suggesting that despite the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress could pass a law altering birthright citizenship. The likelihood of such a bill succeeding seems very low, and pushing it through would require sustained attention from Trump. Instead, he’s trying to achieve his goals through executive orders, which are both easily reversed by a future president and have already proved unsuccessful.
But the president has a demonstrated weakness for this kind of grand, overreaching presidential gesture. Last month, after a member of the U.S. men’s national soccer team was suspended for a game in the World Cup, Trump decided to use his position to exert some pressure, calling FIFA President Gianni Infantino to try to get the suspension waived. In a direct sense, it worked—FIFA allowed the player to participate—but it may have backfired. Belgium, the American opponent, was incensed, and trounced the United States 4–1. Trump ended up looking obnoxious and corrupt, but didn’t even get a victory out of it. The player in question, by the way, was Folarin Balogun—a U.S. citizen by birth because his mother, while pregnant and visiting family, got stuck in the United States.
Senator Bill Cassidy said he will vote for Todd Blanche to be the next attorney general, giving Republicans enough support to confirm President Trump’s nominee despite opposition from GOP Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.
The U.S. economy unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July, while the Labor Department lowered May and June’s job figures by a combined 103,000, adding to signs that the labor market is weakening.
A 14-year-old student in Thailand killed his grandparents and fatally shot five teachers and staff members at a school outside Bangkok, before dying by suicide, authorities said. Twenty-three people were wounded, nine critically, and Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said the government would pursue a stricter gun law following the country’s second school shooting this year.
The human brain has evolved to learn from specific instructors. When a child hears a gentle spoken word or a soothing lullaby from another person, when their cry is responded to, their brain lights up. Nurturing interactions, or what child-development experts call “serve and return” exchanges, help shape and strengthen the 1 million new neural connections taking place in a child’s brain every single second. Every time a child cries or serves up a bid for attention and receives a caregiver’s response, that back-and-forth helps build the circuits underlying their communication, learning, and emotional well-being. No other input, not even Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, is capable of activating the neural circuitry the way human interaction does.
Watch (or skip). Netflix’s true-crime documentary Maternal Instinct tells the story of a woman who committed two murders—and what’s remarkable is how much it leaves out, Elizabeth Bruenig writes.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
“How are you on theory?” my editor asked me earlier this week. I knew what he was talking about—not my pet hypotheses about, say, the existence of cryptids, but rather a group of 20th-century French philosophers. Yet I didn’t know much else beyond that. I was familiar with Michel Foucault, partly from college coursework but largely from a popular meme that features his most famous concept, the panopticon. I know about Roland Barthes and the death of the author. I know that Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze are names that I should know.
“Not good,” I told him.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
I could read their works for myself, of course. I could pick up Foucault’s Discipline and Punish at any one of the college bookstores that serve four major universities in my city. But frankly—and I don’t think I’m alone in this—I’d rather not. My preference as a busy adult is to begin my approach to foundational, complicated ideas with the help of a particular kind of book: the intellectual biography.
The structuralists would hate this. Lynn Steger Strong makes exactly that point in an Atlantic essay published this week about a new group biography of these thinkers. I may be oversimplifying their ideas (as Strong writes, any “smooth summary inevitably sacrifices complexity”), but in general, they disregarded biography as a source of useful information about art; Barthes, especially, rejected literary criticism that drew on an author’s life to unlock the meaning of their work. “There was only the text, over which the writer had little control,” Strong explains. “Even the self was ultimately an unstable text.” This makes a biography of the cohort feel almost sacreligious. Emily Eakin’s new book, The Frenchmen, focuses on these men’s personal lives to illuminate their earthshaking writings. After finishing it, Strong wonders: “How could biography not be important?”
I agree. Important ideas don’t just come to Earth fully formed and then flow through their speakers; they’re influenced by the wider context in which they develop. Earlier this year, when I was curious about the life and work of Karl Marx, the first book I reached for wasn’t Capital. Instead, I read Francis Wheen’s 2000 biography of the man—yes, I learned, he did ask Frederich Engels for money immediately after Engels told him that his beloved partner, Mary, had died. And yes, he really did spend ages in the British Museum’s reading room trying to squeeze as much information as possible into Capital (which is not to say that he didn’t miss anything). The biography also reminded me that Marx did not invent socialism; he was building on an intellectual tradition that predated him by decades.
I encourage readers to try this out for themselves. Back in 2022, Talya Zax recommended nine group biographies that explain not only the lives of their subjects but also how those individuals influenced other people and movements. Personally, I’m on to a new topic: I’m about five chapters into Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s forthcoming biography of Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel, and the world of 20th-century New York City—an environment that incubated hundreds of famous and influential leaders, including our current president—is unfolding before me.
Illustration by The Atlantic*
How Theory Took Over the World
By Lynn Steger Strong
The French writers of the postwar era argued that the author’s life is irrelevant. Emily Eakin’s lively new book proves them wrong.
The Haçienda in Manchester was a catalyst of the U.K. acid house scene in the late ’80s, and a prophecy foretold: “The haçienda must be built,” the Situationist poet Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in 1953. Heeding these cryptic words some three decades later, the audacious (and well-read) impresario Tony Wilson opened the Haçienda together with the circle of post-punk musicians and designers involved with his label, Factory Records. Their attempt to decipher Chtcheglov’s mystical phrase lasted 15 years. Hook, the bassist for New Order, served as a kind of player-coach at the Haçienda, helping manage its madcap affairs while his band became the club’s cash cow. In this memoir of misbegotten business administration, Hook returns to the storied nights out that changed British culture even as they threatened to bankrupt him—and worse. Beset by gangs and guns, the Haçienda faltered in the ’90s despite clever-sounding schemes such as replacing the club’s security with the gangsters themselves. This is a scrapbook of utopian folly, yes, but also an insider’s look at what was, for a time, the wildest workplace on Earth. — Andrew Holter
History and aesthetics aside, Trump’s plan violates a key rule of building maintenance: Do not paint granite. Granite is a superior building facade that has been used for other distinctive structures in Washington, D.C., such as the Library of Congress and the Old Post Office. Left unpainted, granite requires little maintenance. Once granite is painted, however (and examples are rare), it requires extensive maintenance in perpetuity. Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm representing the DC Preservation League (which is suing over the project), has warned that the EEOB could become the Golden Gate Bridge of federal buildings: As soon as painting is finished on one end, it will be time to begin again on the other.
In their fledgling but fascinating career thus far, the director Jane Schoenbrun has been consumed by the pop culture that consumes us. They’ve already proved to be an urgent voice on the matter: Their first feature, the low-budgetWe’re All Going to the World’s Fair, focused on the allure of online “creepypastas” and weird YouTube rabbit holes that despondent teenagers might go down. The second, I Saw the TV Glow,examined the psychological fallout of two isolated adolescents obsessed with a cult television series. Schoenbrun’s newest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is similarly interested in nostalgia: It follows Kris (played by Hannah Einbinder), a queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting a gruesome slasher franchise from yesteryear called Camp Miasma. As she does so, the past and the cynical present blend into a transfixing dilution of Schoenbrun’s interests and fears about identity and self through the prism of mass media.
Schoenbrun’s previous films were intensely melancholic affairs, and it’s immediately clear that Camp Miasma is having a bit more fun with the same themes. It jabs at Hollywood’s impulse toward rampant intellectualization—and corporatization—of the cinematic junk food of decades past. Kris, who has a minor Sundance hit under her belt, endeavors to create a “woke” and hip take on Camp Miasma without alienating its enduring fan base. A charmingly stylized early montage establishes the franchise as akin to many 1980s VHS cult classics, garishly mixing gore, nudity, and an eerie campfire vibe. The film’s many sequels yielded diminishing returns, and the series eventually stooped to wacky concepts à la Friday the 13th—the main monster, Little Death, who carries a spear and wears a mask shaped like a cubic air vent, traveled to Manhattan, then space, and so on. At her hotel, Kris watches the original film and eagerly takes notes; during a cheesy sex scene, she scribbles DESIRE in her notepad and underlines it forcefully.
Yet Kris, despite her intent to take a cerebral approach, also comes at the project with a teen sensibility. Any movie nerd might recognize her behavior: When she stops off at a gas station on a work trip, she grabs fistfuls of candy and then lazily spins through the cheapo DVD rack, excitedly calling a friend when she finds a junky Camp Miasma installment for sale. The opportunity to visit the now-abandoned sleepaway camp where the first entry was shot is both useful to her as a director and delightful to her as a fan.
The film mostly takes place there, and Kris spends a bizarre weekend with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a reclusive actor who starred in the original Camp Miasma but refused to participate in any of its follow-ups. Billy, however, now lives at the campground with the goal of giving herself what appears to be a peculiar form of exposure therapy. Anderson, herself a towering legend of genre television and cinema, is an imperiously fun and sexy figure for Einbinder’s nervous and dorky character to bounce off of. Billy seems both enticed and exhausted by Kris, who professes her struggle to bring an academic eye to the world of Camp Miasma. Billy reminds her that the franchise’s initial appeal was straightforward: The draw was “flesh and fluids.”
As Kris spends more time with Billy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma metamorphoses from an industry satire into a dreamlike reflection on how what we watch can shape us, no matter how lowbrow. Schoenbrun renders the desolate grounds with beautiful matte-painted backgrounds; as Kris and Billy watch the old film, the fuzzy visuals and synthy score bleed away into contemporary CGI blood and carnage. Both the throwback and present-day imagery look surreal; even though Kris can identify the obvious tropes in Camp Miasma, she can’t seem to face the power that familiar scripts hold over her. And in a fantastical twist, Little Death somehow finds its way out of the Camp Miasma movies, emerging from the on-site lake.
But this is not a tale of cinema coming to life and invading the mundane real world; it’s more about two different styles of storytelling blending into one. As past and present, “fiction” and “reality” swirl together for an inscrutable final act, Schoenbrun finds a fresh way to make an incisive observation about 21st-century life: Today’s moviegoers are immersed in their screens and hungry for pop culture, to the point that a trashy flick such as Camp Miasma can feel intrinsic to Kris’s sense of self. Someone like Kris may want to interrogate that relationship over and over in search of meaning, but perhaps it’s best not to subject what we watch to endless analysis and meta-critique. Instead, we may be better off embracing how we feel.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Conversation has become optimized—but not always for the better. We send a quick text instead of making a call, react with an emoji instead of a laugh, and turn catching up into a series of efficient updates. Although staying in touch with people is easier than ever, we spend surprisingly little time talking to one another.
“No one picks up the phone anymore,” Alexis C. Madrigal wrote in 2018. That’s in part because too many faceless telemarketers have our number, and in part because more people have come to treat phone calls as something to reserve for emergencies or bad news or major life events. However, in many cases they’re the easiest way to have conversations that texting can’t quite convey—ones that meander, surprise you, and leave you feeling a little more connected than before.
Texting has made communication faster and more efficient, but not necessarily more conversational. Today’s newsletter is a reminder that you don’t need a reason or an agenda to call someone you’ve been thinking about.
On Conversation
Talk to People on the Telephone
By Amanda Mull
It’s time to start calling your friends again. (From 2019)
My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “My sense of awe for this world comes from my backyard, where a family of barred owls nests each year and produces angelic chicks that begin their lives playing among the trees,” Bonnie B. from Cordova, Tennessee, shared. “They make me believe in the magic of life.”
We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
Alarms were going off on the International Space Station. Mission control put emergency procedures into action. Up in space, astronauts were being evacuated from different modules and forced to camp out in the Russian section. The cause of all this palaver was not an alien invasion or artificial intelligence gone rogue—not even a meteor shower or sudden solar flares. No, the gremlin in the works was something mundane: a faulty sensor on an air-conditioning unit.
This all took place around breakfast time one January morning, but it might as well have been any of a string of similar incidents. Last November it was errant Freon-218 gas in the Russian Zvezda service module. The year before, an urgent software reboot was called for when one of the two thermal-control loops went down. Back in 2010, an unplanned spacewalk was conducted after a power surge blew one of the cooling pumps. Each time the problems were gleefully reported in the terrestrial press and shared on social media. And each time, the fault lay somewhere in the Space Station’s HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) systems.
It’s strangely comforting to know that even in the brave new world of space, such familiar and trivial mishaps remain a source of frustration. We’ve all been there. Ugh, the A/C’s down! Blasted thing’s got a life of its own. No wonder they’re having troubles up in space if it can’t even work properly in Orange County. Meanwhile, whatever their faults up there, air-conditioning manufacturers down here love to boast that their systems utilize NASA-developed technology on the International Space Station. The glamour of space is invulnerable.
As it turns out, air conditioning and outer space have a history that goes back further than ballpoint pens that write upside down and infrared ear thermometers. Back when artificial atmospheric-processing techniques were first unleashed on urban populations, the West was in the midst of a Martian mania which left few aspects of popular culture untouched.
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By the last quarter of the 19th century, the industrial revolution was making the air in big cities increasingly unpalatable. London was cloaked in smog that a string of public-health acts had done little to abate. The U.S., too, was hearing its first municipal ordinances against smoke emissions from mills, ships, and steam trains. In every case, the effects were at their worst during summer as the hot upper atmosphere hindered circulation. Our will to master nature had begun to make the natural environment itself less hospitable.
Utopian writers like William Morris dreamed of a world without the fog of industrial production. In his News from Nowhere of 1890, one of the first sensations the narrator experiences upon waking up in a future London seemingly returned to a mythical arable past, is “a delicious relief caused by the fresh air and pleasant breeze.” Shorn of mills and engines of all kinds, Morris’s vision of an idealized English capital finds “a fresh feeling in the air” once more.
As it turned out, the ideal for such freshness would turn out to be celestial rather than terrestrial. In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaperelli first dubbed the lines he saw on the surface of Mars “canals,” a term suggestive of possible human use and delight. Mars erupted into newspaper stories, narrative fiction, popular song—even advertisements for hand soap. As the 19th century drew to a close, the human desire for slightly cooler air found its technical acknowledgement—in a utopian dream focused on space in general and the the red planet in particular.
Few imaginary voyages to Mars took place in this period without offering up some sample of the Martian atmosphere. The spacefaring newlyweds from British author George Griffith’s Honeymoon in Space find the air on Mars so “delicious” that it’s like “breathing champagne.” The mysterious titular protagonist of Hugh MacColl’s Mr Stranger’s Sealed Packet would likewise find “the Martian air deliciously refreshing” with an “unmistakable … aromatic odour.” And in 1889, the French astronomer Camille Flammarion would imagine the inhabitants of Mars taking succor directly from the “nutritive” properties of their own atmosphere in his poetic fantasy Urania. If the air down here was increasingly rank and fetid, on Mars it was starting to sound like a three-course reception with full bar service all ready to suck up through your nostrils.
The air on Mars wasn’t just delicious—more importantly, it was cool and not too clammy. The heroes of Robert Cromie’s novel from 1890, A Plunge into Space, wake upon their first morning on Mars to praise the “delightful dryness of the air.” A vision of Mars conjured up in W.J. Colville’s almost contemporary Dashed Against the Rock notes that the air “seemed very clear, bracing.” And the communist revolutionary and science-fiction writer Alexander Bogdanov would later agree that the Martian atmosphere is “pure and clear.” Even in 1949, Robert Heinlein, who really should have known better by then, would speak of how the “thin air of Mars was chill but not really cold” as if somebody up there had got the planetary thermostat at just the right level.
Already, in the age of Flammarion, the first attempts at public air-cooling systems were being rolled out in parts of America, running cold air down a pipe from a centralized depot like gas or water. For the most part, such schemes were targeted at industrial applications. In Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, subscribers in central business districts could keep their meat lockers mechanically refrigerated for a small monthly fee. Only in St. Louis, Missouri, did the enterprising proprietor of the Ice Palace restaurant choose to turn the pipes on his customers and use the cold air for comfort in a neat marketing gimmick complete with photos from the Kane Polar Expedition and a frost-covered sign in the front window.
But air conditioning proper was never just—or even primarily—about cooling. First coined by a North Carolina textile mill engineer named Stuart Cramer in 1906, to its original practitioners “air conditioning” always meant cleaning, circulating, and controlling humidity. As far as those guys were concerned any sign on the door of your convenience store with a big polar bear promising 20º cooler was just bringing the whole industry into disrepute. As far back as 1880 a work of fiction had already explored the need for a kind of atmospheric processing beyond mere refrigeration—and it did so en route to the planet Mars.
In Cromie’s A Plunge into Space, all that was necessary to maintain a breathable onboard environment in space was that the crew forego their usual taste for pipes and cigars. Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac, however, not only coined the word “astronaut” for the first time—it also recognized the need for some serious HVAC. Greg offers a detailed description of the system of fans used to drive the air in his ship over lime-water and chlorate of potash in order to soak up the carbonic acid and re-oxygenize the air. Thus prepared, one of fiction’s very first visitors to Mars is able to allow himself “a very small cigar” after his inflight meal.
As Marsha Ackerman, author of Cool Comfort: America’s Romance with Air Conditioning, points out, the early days of the air-con game were “steeped in nineteenth century utopianism.” “Our work,” pledged Syracuse engineer Edward P. Bates to the first meeting of the American Society of Heating and Ventilating Engineers (ASHVE), “will not stop with any class; it will benefit all classes.” The promise of its marketing was nothing short of “man-made weather…to make every day a good day.” So it should come as little surprise that some of the biggest showcases for the technology in its infancy were at those ephemeral theme parks to the world of tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs.
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In 1904, the Missouri State Building at the St. Louis World’s Fair was already being artificially cooled, leaving visitors “struck with wonder,” according to the report of Ice and Refrigeration Magazine, and “unable to account for the very perceptible change felt in the temperatures.” But it was in New York in 1939 that they really went to town. Willis Carrier, one of two or three contenders for the title “father of air conditioning,” installed a huge “Igloo of Tomorrow” on the Fair site at Flushing Meadows, complete with a fake aurora borealis playing on the ceiling.
Some 1.3 million visitors popped into the Carrier Igloo in its first 100 days, cooling their feet at the “Cold Dog Stand” or learning the secrets of this seemingly semi-divine new science in the “Hall of the Weathermakers.” With the Depression coming to an end, the World’s Fair was a major push towards the mass take-up of air con—no longer just in factories, theaters, and shopping malls, but in suburban homes across the country.
By that time, everyone—save Robert Heinlein, apparently—knew that you wouldn’t find much to breathe on the surface of Mars. Surviving on another world would require specially-designed sealed habitats. But then sealed habitats were getting more and more common on Earth. If the astronauts in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 novel, The Sands of Mars, would moan about the constant need to “breathe packaged air and drink packaged water,” the plaint would sound familiar to a decade of ham sticks and cheeseburgers-in-a-can. In that first golden age of processed food, the engineers who installed domestic and industrial air-con systems were increasingly recognizing the need for a totally controlled environment. And that meant windows and doors must be kept closed.
Before Norbert Wiener published his landmark books of the late 1940s, air conditioning already represented a totally-integrated cybernetic system. Amidst an atmosphere of stiff competition as the industry grew rapidly through the first half of the twentieth century, engineers took to making guarantees about cooling power and humidity. If the air was too dry, cotton was too brittle to spin. Too damp, and chocolate turned grey and machinery jammed. Air-con salesmen promised factory bosses a dream climate—all the year round.
But they soon realized that in order to achieve it, they had to conceive of every element inside the factory as part of a dynamic system. It wasn’t just the size of the space that affected the air but the way the machinery was used, the habits of the workers. In order to meet their guarantees, the engineers demanded more and more control over aspects of the production process previously left to the dictates of management or the whims of the workers. Work patterns and production processes were fixed and locked-down. Windows and doors were to be kept shut at all times.
It was all about creating an environment as controlled and contained as a laboratory. The result was an engineer’s paradise. But it severed the final links between the manufacturing process and its surrounding natural environment. Formerly, production had retained seasonal peaks and lulls. Workers had learned to regulate the humidity affecting their materials and machinery—not to mention their own comfort—by opening or closing nearby windows. In these ways, the world and its uncertainties had entered into industrial operations, managed and tempered by the judgment of a skilled workforce. Now the factory was as hermetically sealed as a lunar base. And the same principles were steadily creeping out of the factory, into shopping malls, theaters, and homes. It was as if we were preparing to colonize and terraform our own planet.
In 1897, the Martian invaders in H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds had finally been seen off by an airborne bacterial infection. Almost immediately afterwards, air-conditioning engineers had set about making sure any such visitors would find plenty of safe spaces to roam about.
A century later and 98 percent of American cars are built with air conditioning and 83 percent of American homes have at least one air-conditioned room. We live ever more sealed-off lives. Drifting through the Mall of America or London’s Bluewater shopping centre, would it make any noticeable difference if the whole thing were transported to Mars?
Only, perhaps, when something broke down and needed fixing.
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