Let's write about Hawaiins in Las Vegas

Echo essay On and Off the Menu published in The New Yorker magazine:

The Decades-Long Romance of Las Vegas and Hawaii
The city is home to a great number of transplants from the islands—and to dozens of restaurants serving plate lunches and poke.

Thank you Hormel Foods!😃*

Yup! Aloha! You can enjoy SPAM and gamble too!
In fact, fans of the SPAM® Brand Come Together to Support Maui Relief Efforts.

Late one recent evening at the California Hotel and Casino, in downtown Las Vegas, a few miles north of the Strip, I tried my luck at a slot machine for the very first time. Fifteen minutes later, I was down by twenty bucks or so—thirty if you count the exorbitant A.T.M. fee I’d been determined to win back—and feeling defeated. No matter; it was time for a vastly surer bet, the real reason I was here. Every night, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., the hotel’s twenty-four-hour restaurant, the Market Street Café, serves one of Vegas’s most iconic dishes. 

Minutes after I’d been seated at the counter, next to an eighty-seven-year-old woman in oversized sunglasses, a server presented me with a large bowl of Hawaii-style oxtail soup, a glistening, fragrant broth brimming with carrots, celery, and hunks of oxtail bone, from which supple shreds of purple meat loosened easily. It came with a scoop of rice and a hefty pinch of pounded ginger and fresh cilantro. Had I been sick—with a head cold or a longing for Hawaii, or both—I imagine it would have cured me.

If an oxtail soup from Hawaii seems an unlikely thing to eat in Las Vegas, you have a lot to learn about both places, as I did, and still do. Census data from 2020, showed that Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, was the U.S. county with the largest population of native Hawaiians outside of Hawaii, a statistic that tells onlypart of the story. 

Actually, the word “Hawaiian” typically applies to the islands’ Indigenous population, the descendants of the Polynesians who first settled Hawaii, between 1000 and 1200 A.D., and who were nearly eradicated by the arrival of Europeans, in the late eighteenth century. 

Other people born and raised on the islands—many of them the descendants of migrant laborers from Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Portugal, and Puerto Rico, who came to work on sugarcane and pineapple plantations—are known as kamaaina (residents), “Hawaii people,” or “locals.” The last of these terms applies even in Vegas, where there are so many Hawaii people that they’ve given the city an affectionate nickname: the Ninth Island.

The California Hotel—the Cal, to regulars—has played a central role in the Hawaii-to-Vegas pipeline. Opened in 1975 by Sam Boyd, an Oklahoma-born entrepreneur, it was the first property in what would become Boyd Gaming, one ofthe largest casino-management corporations in the country. According to William Boyd, Sam’s son, who wrote the foreword for a book about the hotel from 2008, the Cal was named for its original intended audience, gamblers from California. But, a year in, “we were struggling,” William wrote. “One day [my dad] said to me, ‘You know, we’re going to need a niche market here and that’s going to be Hawai‘i.’ ”

After living and working in Honolulu for several years, Sam Boyd had developed an affinity for the islands and their people, whom he found to be “industrious” and who seemed to love gambling, which has always been illegal there. The Cal lured guests from Hawaii with promotions that included discounted airfare, free rooms, and credits for meals at a restaurant called Aloha Specialties, which is still part of the hotel today. The answer to where you vacation when you live in paradise was, apparently, Las Vegas. Gamblers from Hawaii were “unlike anything the Vegas market had experienced,” according to one of the 2008 book’s authors, Dennis M. Ogawa, a professor emeritus of American studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Not only did they spend much more money per day than the average tourist, Ogawa writes, but they’d also “arrive in groups, laden with luggage they had filled with gifts for the staff: fresh pineapples, Maui onions, Kona coffee, and boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.”

When I arrived at the Cal on a sunny Monday afternoon, a down-on-his-luck man, slumped in a tree bed on the sidewalk outside, looked up at me with a grin and said, “Aloha.” The Cal, and downtown Vegas more broadly, has seen more glamorous days, but, inside, a wholesome sense of nostalgia hung in the air, along with the scent of cigarette smoke. The carpeted floor of the casino was patterned with enormous hibiscus flowers; outside the Ohana conference room, I met a man wearing a midnight-blue T-shirt printed with the word “spam” in the brand’s signature yellow font—a show of support, he explained, for Spam’s parent company, Hormel Foods, which had helped to rehabilitate Maui after the devastating wildfires in 2023. “I thought maybe you were a Spam fanatic,” I said. The man, whose name was Gene, laughed and said, “Well, isn’t everyone from Hawaii a Spam fanatic?”

Gene was at the Cal for the sort of event that has become commonplace there over the years: a reunion for a high school in Hawaii, in this case Hilo High, class of 1955. (The Maui High class of ’53 was meeting on the same dates.) SPAM (Hormel Foods) was introduced to the islands when Gene was a child. Originally served to G.I.s stationed there during the Second World War, it became a staple of the local diet, incorporated into everything from musubi—Hawaii’s version of onigiri—to saimin, a dashi-based noodle soup. In general, the Cal’s clientele seemed to skew elderly; at check-in, the young woman behind the front desk greeted guests in line ahead of me as Auntie and Uncle.

Better jobs and plentiful real estate beckoned, oasis-like, from the Mojave; in Vegas, Vergara and her husband, who have two kids, are employed as nurses and own a three-bedroom home.

Perhaps nothing so clearly reflects this ongoing exodus as the city’s landscape of restaurants. It would be easy to define the food in Vegas by the offerings at its lavish casinos and hotels, many of them pandering to the tastes of high-rolling tourists, all caviar and king crab and Wagyu. But, off the Strip, there are hundreds of humbler, family-run, counter-service establishments, a strip-mall ecosystem reminiscent of greater Los Angeles. From the airport, I drove to a restaurant called 2 Scoops of Aloha, which shares a shopping plaza with two insurance offices, an acne clinic, and an iPhone repair store. There, I ordered what’s known in Hawaii as a plate lunch. Born of the hearty appetites of plantation laborers, a plate lunch usually includes two scoops of rice and one of macaroni salad, plus meat or fish. I opted for fried chicken two ways—one portion smothered in a garlicky gravy, the other slicked in a sweet-spicy Korean-style glaze—and a side of poi, a Polynesian dish of boiled taro, pounded into a viscous paste.

The meal illustrated the infusion inherent in the islands’ cuisine, a collision of cultures that don’t cohere so much as happily coexist. Johnathan Wright, a restaurant reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal who was raised in Honolulu, defined the cuisine as “whatever I grew up eating”: galbi (Korean short ribs), Cantonese roast duck, manapuas (Hawaii’s take on baos), Spam. Jeremy Cho, a Korean American professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was born in Hawaii, told me that he’d been surprised by the city’s abundance of Hawaii-style Korean food, distinct from the Korean food you’d encounter in L.A. or Fort Lee, New Jersey. In Vegas, as in his home state, it was easy to find a plate lunch featuring what’s known in Hawaii as meat jun, a pancake made of egg-battered beef.

Beyond the hotel, I found a vibrant, multigenerational world of Hawaii people. In the decades after the casino opened, the appeal of Vegas grew as not only a place to vacation but also a place to live. In 1992, the Hawaii-born playwright Edward Sakamoto published a play called “Aloha Las Vegas,” about a widower named Wally who is weighing a move from Honolulu. An old friend named Harry, who has already relocated, urges him to do the same. “Aeh, it’s a mass exodus to Vegas,” Harry says, in Hawaii pidgin. “Lodda people in Hawai‘i house-rich and cash-poor.” Thirty years later, the line holds up. When I asked Jennifer Vergara, a forty-two-year-old transplant from Honolulu, why so many Hawaii people of her generation had left home, she replied matter-of-factly: “Gentrification. Developers. Inflation.” 

In Honolulu, most of her friends—schoolteachers, policemen—were struggling, and in many cases living with their parents, even after having kids of their own. Better jobs and plentiful real estate beckoned, oasis-like, from the Mojave; in Vegas, Vergara and her husband, who have two kids, are employed as nurses and own a three-bedroom home.

Some people visit Las Vegas in order to feel as though they’re somewhere else entirely: Venice, Paris, a post-apocalyptic Earth imagined by Darren Aronofsky. Eating poke in a strip mall, I couldn’t help but think about how much better it would taste if I were near the ocean, a salty breeze blowing off the waters where the fish had been caught. But eating poke at ‘Ai Pono Cafe, in the high-gloss food court of a brand-new casino called Durango, is transportive, an experience that delivers on the city’s promise. 

Gene Villiatora, ‘Ai Pono’s chef and owner, moved to Vegas from Hawaii in 1993, “the same night as the grand opening of the MGM Grand,” he told me, and worked as a dishwasher at Aloha Specialties, in the Cal, before bouncing around some of the Strip’s toniest kitchens and then competing on “Top Chef,” in 2008. 

At Durango, ‘Ai Pono’s storefront mimics a cartoonish beach shack. Inside, Villiatora serves what he calls “Hawaii street food”: a refined spin on a Korean-inspired plate lunch, featuring a strip of tender galbi and a meat jun, griddled golden and crisp; a spectacular fried chicken thigh shellacked in a chili-pepper-guava glaze that tastes strikingly of the juicy fruit. A dozen yards away, on the casino floor, animated bison stampede across the screens of digital slot machines, a game called Buffalo Ascension promising gold. ♦

*The SPAM® brand team cherishes its special relationship with the people of Hawaii, a community that consumes more than 7 million cans of SPAM® products every year, more than any other U.S. state. The genesis of the islanders’ love for SPAM® products dates back to World War II, when the luncheon meat was served to GIs. By the end of the war, SPAM® products were a part of the local culture and today remain a popular comfort food.

Let's write about war photography

 The Civil War Photographers Before Kirsten Dunst

Check my Maine Writer Vietnam war history photo in this blog.

After a century and a half, the Civil War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive to light and air, have been carefully stored. 

The Still Picture Branch of the National Archives contains the glass-plate negatives of the real Civil War, including those by the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan.
Echo essay published in The New Yorker, by Robert Sullivan

Alex Garland’s new film, “Civil War,” follows two war photographers on a road trip from New York to Washington, D.C., via the blue highways of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. 

The more experienced photographer, played by Kirsten Dunst, uses a Sony digital camera, while her apprentice, played by Cailee Spaeny, shoots a Nikon and makes old-school film negatives of a fictional civil war. 

A real-life road trip to Washington, D.C., via I-95, brings you past the National Archives campus in College Park, Maryland, where the archivists in the Still Picture Branch manage the actual photos of the actual Civil War and the negatives from which they were printed. Like Spaeny’s character, actual Civil War photographers developed images in the field, theirs made on glass plates coated with collodion, a syrupy chemical compound that was also used by Civil War-era surgeons as a liquid bandage.

After a century and a half, the Civil War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive to light and air, have been carefully stored. 

One of the very few people who have come in contact with them during the past two decades is Billy Wade, the Still Picture Branch’s supervisory archivist. There are roughly nine thousand plates from the war and subsequent Western surveys, which ended in the eighteen-seventies. The cabinets that house the plates are sky blue. Each shelf holds about a hundred, all in a NASA-level climate-­controlled room. 

Wade told a visitor, “The other day, I was in there, and I thought, I wonder if anybody will ever ask what they look like, so I took a picture with my phone.” In the image he made, the cabinets have a nineteen-sixties computer-lab vibe: the rows of plates in flapped enclosures could be powerful servers that fuel the national memory bank.

“I’ve got some things pulled,” Wade said. He went away and returned pushing a cart holding prints made by Alexander Gardner, a Scottish photographer who started the war working for the better-­known Mathew Brady, then went out on his own. 

All the photographs were made for what is often called the first photo book, “Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War.” At the center of Gardner’s book is one of the archive’s most frequently requested photos of the time, made by his partner Timothy O’Sullivan, at Gettysburg, after the battle. Gardner titled it “A Harvest of Death,” and it is fascinating for the way the details of the dead are in sharp focus, while the living are like ghosts. 

After the war, O’Sullivan went West with scientists and soldiers and made what is probably the archive’s most requested survey photograph—a sand dune, about three miles long, in Nevada. That picture features the army ambulance that O’Sullivan converted into a travelling darkroom. The photo of the sand dune, creamy and smooth, is an albumen print, made with an antique process that uses egg whites. (Photographic journals at the time featured cheesecake recipes.)

@LHeureux  www.mainewriter.com Richard LHeureux PN1, USN, Vietnam fox hole Chu Lai MCB 71, in 1967. 
A Maine Writer war history photograph.

Among the fourteen million unique analog photos at the Still Picture Branch are images from every war that has been photographed. It is common for veterans to visit; the parking lot is often dotted with cars bearing Vietnam War insignia. “We’ve had war photographers come in here and say they remember making these pictures,” Wade said.

Recently, Dennis Fisher, a Marine combat photographer now in his seventies, stopped in to see negatives that he had developed in Vietnam, in 1967, and 1968. He was assisted by Cecilia Figliuolo, an archivist with an interest in combat photography, who spoke to him about the photos he had made twenty-eight years before she was born. “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘This is the first time I’ve held these negatives since I was 20 or 21,’ ” she wrote in “The Unwritten Record,” one of the archive’s blogs. Sitting with the veteran, Figliuolo learned details that the archivists could only have guessed at. As Fisher studied a picture of two men firing mortars in May, 1968—part of a U.S. operation to clear land south of Da Nang—he told Figliuolo that he had brought a tape recorder along on the mission, to record the sonic chaos. “Did you take your recorder out with you every time?” she asked.

“No, I took it out once, and it was such a pain in the ass to lug around I never took it out again,” he said.

When Fisher returned home from the archive, he phoned Figliuolo, and played her the cassette tape, but what she remembered long after his visit was that, when he had stared at the battle scenes in the archive, it was as if that audiotape were playing in his head. “In that moment, I could tell that he could hear it,” she said. “He remembered everything.” 

Published in the print edition of the May 6, 2024, issue, with the headline “War Stories on Film.”

Let's write about high end art collectors

This strange report describes how the valuable paintings are treated like family photographs. Surreal!

A Matisse by the Tool Drawer (...or the Picasso under the piano)

Phyllis Hattis, who lived with the late moma curator William Rubin in art-crammed adjoining apartments (his was rent-controlled), gives a tour, hammer in hand. Published in The New Yorker "A Matisse by the Tool Drawer" written by Zach Helfand.

Phyllis Hattis, who lived with the late moma curator William Rubin in art-crammed adjoining apartments (his was rent-controlled), gives a tour, hammer in hand.

Phyllis Hattis and William Rubin preferred living separately for the first twenty-four years of their twenty-six-year courtship. Hattis was an art adviser. Rubin, who died in 2006, was the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture—maybe the world’s most powerful curator. She liked her independence. He liked his (subsidized😔😨) rental. 

Indeed, he lived at the top of a forty-eight-story building on the Upper East Side, where he kept his personal art collection. “He was proud to tell me that he had the highest salary of any curator,” Hattis said recently. “But it was still low enough to need rent control (❓) ❗” Eventually, in 1990, the other portion of the penthouse came up for sale. Hattis relented, and pulled some cash together to buy it. So, she said “I sold a Picasso”. 

Their conjoined apartment—specifically the art they continued collecting in it—is the subject of a new book by Hattis, “Masterpieces: The William Rubin Collection—Dialogue of the Tribal and the Modern.” The book presents the works via a tour of the apartment: Picasso above the piano, Matisse by the tool drawer, tribal masks on the windowsill. (There are also personal notes from Frank Stella and Richard Serra.) The other day, Hattis offered a real-life trip through the penthouse.

“So, we had a little disaster yesterday,” Hattis said, emerging from the kitchen. She was wearing green corduroy pants, a gray sweater, and a gray scarf, and was carrying a carved mask. “We had a sculpture fall on the floor,” she went on. Her Pomeranian-Siberian husky, Banksy, was lobbying for a belly scratch. “We opened the door to the balcony so he could go pee. A gust of wind blew it forward.”

She walked into a living room. The square footage was ample. The carpet was a little worn. Buzzy lights, modernist furniture. “Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Mies van der Rohe,” Hattis said, pointing to couches and tables.

She stopped in front of a Picasso over a daybed, flanked by a headdress from the Baga people of Guinea and a mask from the Songye, in Congo. 

“These are the big guns,” she said. Rubin bought the headdress from a collector, with a briefcase full of cash. “A masterpiece,” Hattis said. The Picasso depicted the artist Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s lover, bent over a drawing. Hattis once asked Gilot about two medallions on her apron, in the place of breasts. “She said, jokingly, ‘He used to tell me that my tits were drooping after we had two children,’ ” Hattis said.

Rubin became friends with Picasso when he acquired his Cubist sculpture of a guitar for moma, in 1971. After Picasso died, Jacqueline Roque, the artist’s wife, came to the opening of one of Rubin’s moma shows. “She got to the door, and the guard said, ‘I’m sorry, the museum is closed,’ ” Hattis recalled. “She said, ‘But I’m Jacqueline Picasso.’ And he said, ‘And I’m Jesus Christ.’ ”

Rubin started his collection with some money from his father, who owned textile mills. He eventually got a loft in lower Manhattan and filled it with Abstract Expressionists. Hattis pulled out some photographs of the space. “This is Rothko,” she said. “This is Motherwell. That’s Frankenthaler. This is Larry Poons. He sold the Pollock to build a house in the South of France.”

After Rubin moved uptown, and Hattis bought the neighboring unit, he proposed combining apartments. “I said, ‘We can have an adjoining door,’ ” Hattis said. At one point, they almost split up. “So we closed the door,” she said. “That lasted a couple of weeks or something. Then we opened the door.”

She continued into another wing, opening a heavy door. The old bachelor pad. Banksy trotted with her. They turned a corner, coming to a wall-size Stella color-field mural, near a Stella relief painting. Hattis isn’t particularly interested in selling. (“To be an investor collector, where the art is stored in warehouses and in free ports to avoid taxes, I’m not that,” she said. “That’s a shame.”) But the bigger pieces, like the relief painting, required some sacrifices. “I could’ve put a television screen there for movies!” she said.

Onward: an Arp, a Matisse, a Warhol inspired by a Matisse. Near a desk by the balcony were two kafigeledjo figures from the Senufo people of West Africa. “These two guys are my buddies,” she said. She calls one Max, for Max Ernst, and one Jean, for Jean Dubuffet.

There were some actual Dubuffets, too. One was in a box under the big Picasso. It used to be on the wall, but she hadn’t found the right spot to rehang it. “I miss it,” she said. There was open wall space right next to little Jean, if she shifted over a Matisse. “Let’s just do it,” she said. She produced a hammer and began whacking. “What do you think?” She stepped back to appraise, and furrowed her brow. “Let’s live with it for a while,” she said. Published in the print edition of the March 25, 2024, issue, with the headline “The Picasso Over the Couch.”

Let's write about how to predict fashion trends! What every fashionista wants to know!

I found this weirdly fascinating short fashion echo essay in The New Yorker, reported by Lauren Collins.

Maine Writer:  So, fashionista trends are reduced to dull data entries? Let me get this right?  If wearing sneakers on a fashion runway is determined to be trending down by 34 percent, this means the women who dare to wear ankle length cocktail dresses should not also wear sneakers at the same time?  I don't get it.  Haha.....I am of the age when the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor and Lauren Bacall were the data trendies.

Tagwalk Takes on the Hemline Index

The cerulean sleeve and the smoky eye have long been the province of whim, but Alexandra Van Houtte (the catwalk’s Bill James) is changing all that with fashion-data analysis.

Fashion is an emphatically subjective industry. “Pink is the navy blue of India” (Diana Vreeland). “There is a famine of beauty, honey” (André Leon Talley). “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat” (Karl Lagerfeld). “An evening dress that reveals a woman’s ankles while walking is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen” (Valentino). A whim or a feeling can seal the fate of a cerulean sweater, a smoky eye, or a mutton sleeve.

Yet, just as sabermetrics transformed baseball, data is coming for fashion, supplementing the hemline index—the theory that skirt lengths rise and fall with the stock market—with data lakes, traffic-share analyses, and lots of graphs. The other day, Alexandra Van Houtte, the Bill James of the catwalk, was sitting in a conference room in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris. Her company, Tagwalk, is known as “Google for fashion.” But, instead of typing “weird rash” or “post office hours” into its free search engine, you can search every runway look by season, city, designer, color, model, and trend. “People are always scared of data, but data is inspiring to creativity,” Van Houtte said.

Van Houtte—in Chloé sneakers, soft black pants, and a long black coat embroidered with frangipani and chrysanthemums—founded the company in 2016. At the time, she was assisting a stylist, who was preparing for a shoot with Angelina Jolie and needed to see black dresses: every single one on the market. Van Houtte got to work, clicking through slide shows, screenshotting looks, compiling them into PDFs, and compressing the documents, then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. “It was massive torture,” she recalled. Now a buyer or a designer or an editor can enter “black dress” into Tagwalk and, within seconds, find seventeen thousand four hundred and ninety-seven of them, from a 2019 fish-net number by Dolce & Gabbana to a one-shouldered mini from Balenciaga’s recent show in L.A.

Tagwalk’s business model relies on two sources of revenue: smaller brands can pay to have their images appear on the site, while big brands buy trend reports that tell them who’s looking at what where. “I don’t care who’s cool, and it’s not my place to care,” Van Houtte said. The day’s order of business was to finalize a book—the first volume in a series—of takeaways from the Spring/Summer 2024 collections, which had concluded in Paris just a few days earlier. Van Houtte and a trio of analysts gathered around a table and opened their laptops.

“You have these other trend reports that are, like, ‘Orange is the color. We think leopard’s going to be a really big thing,’ ” Van Houtte said. “There’s this thing where data’s becoming cool, so sometimes people are just throwing numbers everywhere, like, ‘Data, but make it fashion!’ ” She pulled up an Instagram post, which claimed that a certain brand had enjoyed “140% more press” during Paris Fashion Week. “Compared to what? Compared to when?” Van Houtte said. “I really do not know how this was calculated.”

A draft of the book appeared on a wall-mounted screen. “O.K., let’s go!” she said.

A slide ranking the “20 Hottest Brands” according to Tagwalk users’ searches filled the screen. Miu Miu was No. 1, followed by Chanel, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Valentino. The team moved on to trends, which the site tracks using descriptive tags. Each look can have up to thirty, including americana, androgynous, babydoll, bantu knot, chapka, chelsea boots, dominatrix, earmuffs, equestrian, face jewels, gavroche cap, minaudiere, nomadic, oceanic, pastoral, polka dot, rave, round buckle, schoolgirl, spaghetti strap, taupe, visible underwear, and zig zag.

Van Houtte’s team cycled through a series of slides. glittery was surging (+783 per cent), as were ladylike (+235 per cent) and skirt (+30 per cent), while technical, animal print, bodycon, and pink were all trending down. Next came a pie graph (N.B.: it’s called a “Camembert” in French), which examined the colors of the season.

“There’s no more green!” she exclaimed. “It’s crazy.”

A two-page spread dealt with accessories, but she thought it needed more of a narrative.“If I was to buy this book, I’d be, like, ‘I spent this money, but you’re telling me that models carry bags and wear jewelry, which isn’t really groundbreaking information,’ ” Van Houtte said. They decided to go more granular. “O.K., a hundred and fifty per cent more bags were carried by hand?” she said. “That’s interesting.”

She had a hunch that she’d seen fewer sneakers on the runway, but she wanted to know whether the data bore it out. The team went searching in their spreadsheets, and a few minutes later returned with confirmation: sneakers were down thirty-two per cent.

Van Houtte looked at them excitedly. “Guys, this is like gold!” ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 1 & 8, 2024, issue, with the headline “Designer Data.”

Let's write about "who writes the songs!"

Echo essay by by Sarah Larson published in the The New Yorker Magazine:

Lyrics and music by Bruce Johnston

I've been alive forever
And I wrote the very first song
I put the words and the melodies together
I am music and I write the songs

[Chorus]🎵🎵
I write the songs that make the whole world sing
I write the songs of love and special things
I write the songs that make the young girls cry
I write the songs, I write the songs

Barry Manilow Digs New York

To mark the opening of “Harmony,” his musical about the Weimar-era* sextet the Comedian Harmonists, the singer went back home to Williamsburg and poked around.

In his youth, Barry Manilow lived on a street called Broadway in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and though he’s lived in Palm Springs for decades, he’s always considered himself a New Yorker. (“The city rhythms all undo me / So sue me!” he sings in “I Dig New York,” on his 2017 album, “This Is My Town.”) This month, his musical “Harmony,” co-written with Bruce Sussman, opens at the Barrymore—on the other Broadway. On a recent rainy Tuesday, Manilow took a spin around the old neighborhood, peering at the strange and the familiar from the back of an S.U.V.

“We didn’t know we were poor,” Manilow, a youthful-looking eighty, said. He wore a black coat, spoke in a quiet, raspy voice, and took occasional drags from a vape pen. He waved it toward a young Orthodox woman who was opening the front door of a bustling prewar building where his family had lived. “The Mayflower—that’s where I hung out most of the time.” (He released “Here at the Mayflower,” an album imagining the lives of the building’s residents, in 2001.) He lived in an apartment with his grandparents and his divorced mother. As his 1983, memoir, “Sweet Life,” begins, he’s a shy eleven-year-old glumly returning from the orthodontist, passing Sal’s Shoe Repair and Kleiner’s Grocery and despairing about his braces. At home, his grandmother comforts him, saying, “Hello tatteleh, have some milk and cookies and then you’ll practice your accordion.” He didn’t mind the accordion: “I wasn’t bad at it, and I learned to read music.” 

Then his mother remarried, to a music enthusiast. “He changed my life,” Manilow said. “We moved to the Keap Street apartment, and he threw out the accordion and got me a spinet piano. Everything changed.” He addressed the chauffeur: “Mark, take us to Keap Street.”

Mark drove to Keap Street and stopped in front of a small tenement. “The family that owned the building—to get to the top floor, you would go through their living room,” Manilow said. “See that air-conditioner on the very top window? There’s my old room. It was an old closet. So I was in the closet for all those years.” (Manilow married his longtime partner and business manager, Garry Kief, in 2014; they have been together since 1978.) Manilow mastered the spinet, then taught himself arranging: “Arranging is the thing that I love—taking the song, slipping out a facet, finding a different facet.” Mark drove by a Satmar girls’ school, the former Eastern District High School. “This is my old high school,” Manilow said. Any memories? “Horror,” he said. “Nothing but terror. I did have good friends. And I was part of the band—first clarinet. Can you imagine the second clarinet? I wasn’t very good. But I kept getting better and better at the piano.” He went on to the New York College of Music, jingle writing (“Like a Good Neighbor,” “Stuck on Band-Aid”), and pop megastardom (“Mandy,” “Copacabana”), which has endured.

“This has been the biggest year of my career, I think,” he said. “They did a tribute to me at Carnegie Hall—wonderful Broadway singers, the New York Pops.” That was in May. “Then five nights at Radio City, sold out.” In September, in Las Vegas, he was given the key to the Strip after breaking Elvis Presley’s record for most performances at the International Theatre (six hundred and thirty-seven). “Now ‘Harmony.’ ”

“Harmony” tells the story of the Comedian Harmonists, a real-life Weimar-era vocal sextet in Berlin, whose fizzy performances of close-harmonizing comedic songs (“Der Onkel Bumba aus Kalumba Tanzt Nur Rumba,” “Mein Kleiner Grüner Kaktus”) made them an international sensation. “They were the Manhattan Transfer of their day,” Manilow said. “But they were the Marx Brothers, too—slapstick comics who did complicated harmonies. The Nazis destroyed everything they had done, because three of them were Jews.” (The group dispersed before the war; all six survived.) Harry Frommermann, the founder, “was the arranger. He came up with some of the most inventive part-writing and ideas. So Harry’s the guy that I connect with the most.” Composing the score, “I was in heaven.”

In the Comedian Harmonists’ repertoire, “every song was a different style of music, and I love that. All of my albums have different styles of music—there’s either a big-band cut or a novelty cut or big ballads or little jazz songs—and the same thing with this musical.”

Sussman and Manilow wrote an early version of “Harmony” in 1997. Regional productions followed; a big one fell through; time passed. Last year, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Manhattan, mounted this new production, directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle. “I mean, can you think of a more perfect place?” Manilow said. It has transferred intact. “Bruce and I never gave up on this show. We just wanted people to remember these people. We didn’t want them to disappear. These six geniuses.”

He’d thought about popping over to Carnegie Hall, where his grandfather started Manilow’s first standing ovation in 1971, and where a key scene in “Harmony” takes place, but pivoted toward lunch: “Mark, take us to Peter Luger Steak House (Brooklyn).” Any final local observations? “No,” he said, laughing. “Get me out of here!” ♦

*German Reich, was a historical period of Germany from 9 November 1918 to 23 March 1933.

Let's Write about actors who portray the role of Jesus

The Way
Jesus Walks Into a Deli echo report published in The New Yorker July 31, 2023.

Jonathan Roumie, who stars as Christ on “The Chosen,” a (SAG-AFTRA-approved: In other words, as of 08/07/2023, end of business day), this list includes productions that are signed to agreements within the scope of the strike order, but have signed Interim Agreements allowing them to resume.) TV series about the New Testament, charms some acolytes over pastrami sandwiches.  

Jonathan Roumie, the forty-nine-year-old actor who plays Jesus Christ in “The Chosen,” a popular crowdfunded TV series about the New Testament’s protagonist, ascended the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral for noon Mass. 

But, before he could make it through the sanctuary’s nine-ton bronze doors, he was spotted by fans. “We just want a picture with Jesus!” one woman said.

Roumie politely obliged. The fan, it turned out, was among the thousands of pilgrims who’d travelled to Texas a few summers ago to be extras in Season 2’s Sermon on the Mount episode.

“Oh, my heavens, my husband is going to just die,” she said, posing with Roumie.

“You have touched our hearts in ways they have never been touched before,” her friend added.

Roumie headed for the pews. The son of an Egyptian father and an Irish mother, he is olive-skinned and bearded, and his brown hair grazed the shoulders of his leather jacket. He searched his pockets for a hair tie. “I’m going to put it up in a ponytail,” he said. “It helps a bit.”

Born in Hell’s Kitchen*—God has a sense of humor 😇—and baptized Greek Orthodox, Roumie and his family began attending a Catholic church after moving to the suburbs. His faith deepened in May, 2018, following an incident that has become gospel to his fans. After two decades struggling in the industry (bit parts on “All My Children,” sitcoms, and video games), Roumie was broke. He fell to his knees in his tiny apartment, surrendered to God, and had a mystical experience. Unburdened, he spent his last twenty dollars on a big breakfast, and, when he got home, he found in his mailbox four unexpected checks. A few months later, he got a call from Dallas Jenkins, the director and co-writer of “The Chosen.”


Jenkins’s father, Jerry, is the co-author of the best-selling Rapture-pulp novels in the “Left Behind” series. Jenkins cites “Friday Night Lights,” “The Wire,” and “The West Wing” as inspirations for “The Chosen.” The show, which now has licensing deals with Netflix, Amazon, and Peacock, has been streamed more than five hundred million times. Earlier this month, when the series had to stop filming its fourth season because of the sag-aftra strike, fans launched a social-media prayer campaign to lobby for an exemption. (“Satan is working overtime to stop production of this show”; “Father . . . please change the hearts of those who have the authority, which You gave, to approve the exemption.”) The union allowed the series to resume production.

In St. Patrick’s, the ponytail gambit had failed. As the priest gave his concluding blessing, a small queue formed near where Roumie knelt. He gave the acolytes his own brief blessings, then set off on foot for Sarge’s Deli, in Murray Hill.

He ordered the Skyscraper Deluxe, essentially a cheeseburger topped with pastrami, but he asked for lettuce instead of a bun. After saying grace, he tackled the sandwich, relieved that his fellow-diners were leaving him be. “I never wanted to lose my anonymity,” he said. “God had other plans.”

Roumie is an introvert. He has to push himself to be available to fans (who often address him as Jesus), and to make eye contact while listening. He remembers how, back before he was famous, he once approached a celebrity who treated his admiration as a nuisance.

His efforts to be openhearted are a matter of faith as well: What would Jesus do? “Jesus is the only character who I would hope to stay in character as all the time,” he said. The Method meets theology. “But some people want a spiritual encounter, and that can be hard to live up to. I’m not Jesus.”

More than other actors that played the role of Jesus, like Robert Powell, Willem Dafoe, Jim Caviezel, or other actors who have worn the big sandals, Roumie channels the Saviour offscreen, as a Christian influencer. On a Catholic meditation app called Hallow, worshippers can offer a novena accompanied by his image, or pray using a rosary made by Ghirelli, an Italian jewelry brand that he partners with.

The idea of being typecast doesn’t bother him. He recently played a lead role in a bio-pic about the charismatic nineteen-seventies “hippie preacher” Lonnie Frisbee, called “Jesus Revolution.” In one scene, he says, “People tell me I’m trying to look like Jesus or something. I tell them, I can’t think of anybody else I’d rather look like.”

Roumie asked for the bill. The server grinned and said that someone had already paid it. “It’s like every step of the way I get these little reminders that He’s got my back,” he said. Outside, the couple who’d paid were waiting for a photo. ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 7, 2023, issue, with the headline “Role of a Lifetime.”

*Hell's Kitchen is a beloved New York City neighborhood with a little grit. Named for the notorious 19th century motorcycle gang, “Hell's Kitchen” was once a part of town where few New Yorkers thought to live. Its gritty reputation and far-west location kept it under the radar.

Let's write about General Mark Milley's unsent letter of resignation

 General Mark Milley's unsent letter of resignation:

Read more about this letter at Katie Couric media site here.

General Mark Milley Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 

An excerpt from the book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, calls attention to the tension that was brewing between Donald Trump and the military generals.

Things hit a breaking point on June 1, 2020, when the nation was still reeling from the terrors of George Floyd’s death, and Black Lives Matter protestors were violently removed from Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Square. A few minutes later, Trump walked into the Square for a photo op, and Milley stood behind him in his military uniform. The pictures were meant to show the President’s forceful response to the protests, but were met with severe criticism.

From General Mark Milley:

I regret to inform you that I intend to resign as your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

Thank you for the honor of appointing me as senior ranking officer. The events of the last couple weeks have caused me to do deep soul-searching, and I can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.

Second, you are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people—and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people. The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.

Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal. All men and women are created equal, no matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or something in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose not to believe. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve.

And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.

General Milley's letter was dated June 8th, a full week after the Lafayette Square debacle.

Let's write about the definition of hush money!

An revealing echo essay published in The New Yorker titled "You Don't Say", Department. By Zach Helfand

When Donald Paid Stormy: A History of Hush Money

Buying silence is as old as Genesis. Among the hushers: Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Bette Davis, and a U.S. President with a special friend called Jerry the Penis.

Is it a stretch to submit that Donald Trump is served a looming indictment for mishandling a payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels, and not, say, for inciting an insurrection, because the Stormy Daniels case has an obvious tagline? 

Donald Trump paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels with laundered money he used from his campaign funds, giving the dough to Michael Cohen as payment for legal services, who then paid it out to Stormy.  Obviously, Trump was cheap. Clearly, tRrump did not pay Stormy nearly enough and his underhanded illegal deal is now exposed for what it was- bribery for sex (and, by the way, while his wife Melania was pregnant and giving birth to their son!)

Pick any news outlet—Times, Fox, Breitbart. It’s always the “hush-money case.” Here’s a concept you can sell. Epsteins, Weinsteins, Charlie Sheens. It’s easily comprehensible, onomatopoeic. Hush.  (Okay - "onomaopoeic"?  In other words, nearly universally understood because "hush" is a stand alone word, in describing itself.)

Indeed, the term is sultry, lubricious; typically what’s being hushed is evidence of sex. Unlike the confidential legal settlement or the corporate N.D.A., hush money carries a whiff of the entrepreneurial. When Joseph Addison and Richard Steele started The Tatler, in 1709, they courted it. “I expect hush-money to be regularly sent for every folly or vice any one commits in this whole town,” Steele wrote. He was the first to employ the term but not the practice; for about as long as people have been saying stuff, others have been paying them not to. In Genesis, the King of Gerar tries to seduce Abraham’s wife, then pays him off with sheep, oxen, and servants. The King calls it “a covering of the eyes.” See nothing, say nothing.

What’s the going rate these days for silence? Inflation doesn’t compute precisely for sheep and oxen. Michael Jackson paid two hundred million. Bill Cosby paid three and a half, Bill O’Reilly forty-five. The sum depends on what you’re trying to hush up. 

When Bette Davis’s husband recorded her in bed with Howard Hughes, she paid him seventy-five thousand dollars to keep it private. Jerry Falwell, Jr., provided the pool boy, whom Falwell liked to watch in bed with his own wife, with around two million. (Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer, helped broker a deal.) Rudy Giuliani, in his capacity as Trump’s lawyer, once offered a mathematical model. “I never thought a hundred thirty thousand was a real payment,” he said, of the sum Trump paid to Daniels. “It’s a nuisance payment. When I settle it as real or a real possibility, it’s a couple million dollars.”

“That’s a preposterous statement,” the victims’-rights lawyer Gloria Allred said last week, when solicited for an expert opinion. “It’s not like buying a car.” A few years ago, Allred was criticized in the Times for negotiating a confidentiality settlement between a client and Harvey Weinstein. In response, she noted that the settlement didn’t preclude criminal charges; it was just a modicum of justice. She thought “hush money” conveyed the wrong message. “It’s a negative term,” she said. (William Safire called it “always strongly pejorative.”) “There’s nothing inherently wrong, and there’s a lot that’s right, when two people want to settle a matter.”

Through the ages, hush money has nevertheless been associated with dirty dealing. Thucydides hinted at it disapprovingly, Dickens scorned the payee more than the payer, Dostoyevsky viewed it as a transaction on the road to Hell. Sweeney Todd was hit up for hush money by his tonsorial rival; he slit the guy’s throat instead.

In the real world, the power dynamics are often lopsided. An alarming number of silencers are Presidents and their ilk: Hamilton, Jefferson, John Edwards. J.F.K. paid hush money of sorts, in the form of political capital, to J. Edgar Hoover, who’d discovered one of his affairs. Warren Harding sent hush money every year to a spurned mistress in possession of his love letters, which featured recurring characters that included Jerry the Penis. “Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry,” Harding wrote in one. “Wonderful spot.”

On the Watergate tapes, discussing the burglars, Nixon may have uttered the phrase “hush money” to his adviser Charles W. Colson, or maybe just something that sounded like it. (“Shush, honey”?) Decades later, Trump was recorded discussing a different mistress with Cohen. Was that Trump saying “Pay with cash”? Giuliani, never one to self-hush, argued on Fox News that Trump actually said, “Don’t pay with cash.” Giuliani explained that he had experience with surreptitious recordings: “How about four thousand hours of Mafia people on tape? I know how to listen to them, I know how to transcribe them. I’ve dealt with much worse tapes than this.” Folly, vice. Cover thine eyes.

What’s a wrongdoer to do? A call was placed to Eric Dezenhall, a crisis-management specialist who has advised such clients as the Sacklers and ExxonMobil and who has consulted on scores of secret settlements. “One of the things you hear is, It’s the coverup that gets you,” Dezenhall said. “That’s not true! This shouldn’t be taken as something I advise or support, but coverups work all the time.”

Of course, they work only if the public doesn’t hear about them. “Twenty years ago, if you wrote somebody a check to stay quiet, it would stay quiet,” Dezenhall said. “The problem today is people take your money, and then they go on TV anyway.” Not all of them, though. Who knows what Dezenhall’s clients—billionaires, celebrities—have kept hushed up? 

Dezenhall does, but he couldn’t possibly say. 

Let's write about cave painters

Sometimes, a cliché is the best way to summarize an essay echo:

In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose “ – the more things change, the more they stay the same… " Turbulent changes do not affect reality....

Storytelling Across the Ages echo essay by Adam Gopnik* published in The New Yorker:

Let's learn a new word:  Therianthropes

Identifying Therianthropes in a Sulawesi cave

From our earliest times of uncertainty, it seems, we have searched for a happy ending.

All times seem, to those within them, to be uniquely miserable.

Even, supposedly, halcyon historical moments were horrible if you had to live through them: the eighteen-nineties in London, which now seem a time of wit and Café Royal luxury, were mostly seen then as decadent, if you were no fan of Oscar Wilde’s, or as dark and disgraceful, if you were. The allegedly placid American nineteen-fifties were regarded, at the time, as a decade of frightening conformity and approaching apocalypse.

But this does not mean that some moments can’t be uniquely miserable. Ours surely is, with the recent collapse of progressive Britain following on the constitutional crisis of liberal America, with so many people around the world caught between political polarities, and with the planet warming daily. No one has ever improved on Yeats’s expression of indignation after the Great War: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity; though in our time the best often share the passionate intensity but can’t be heard, because the worst have a smartphone with a Twitter app.

In the midst of such unease, we tend to seek out moments of cheer or just consolation, and suddenly we have found one, in a cave. The cave is in Indonesia—the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, on the island of Sulawesi, to be precise—and it was occupied, according to recent findings, more than forty thousand years ago, by early modern humans. Inside it for all that time has been a fourteen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, painted in dark-red pigment, depicting about eight tiny bipedal figures, bearing what look to be spears and ropes, bravely hunting the local wild pigs and buffalo. The discoverers of its antiquity, a team of archeologists at Griffith University, in Australia, including Maxime Aubert, the chief author of an article about the painting in Nature, call it “to our knowledge, currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.”

The very first storytelling picture! The first narrative, and it tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast. What’s more, the hunters appear to be what people whose business it is to decipher cave paintings call therianthropes, humans with animal elements, like heads. These eight, then, are the earliest known examples of this mysteriously durable manner of mythical depiction, which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and, for that matter, to modern animation. 

Therianthropes, it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is, for the first time, a startup.

The detailed resolution of the images in the Nature article is at first disappointing. Though the buffalo, called anoa, are distinct enough, one of the human figures, we’re told, has “a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles the lower half of a lizard or crocodile. It is thus possible that [the therianthrope] represents a composite of at least three different kinds of animals: a human, an anoa and a quadrupedal reptile.” To this chimerical composite, one might add the trained eye of an Australian archeologist, which seems necessary to ascertain the full effect.

And yet it’s impossible not to feel a shudder of communion with these ancient beings, recounting their hopeful stories of abundance in a time that was, certainly, even more unstable than our own. (We worry daily about the next good leader; they worried daily about the next good meal.) Nor would the storytelling have been the product of a merely male hierarchy of hunting. The patriarchy had little place in caves. A study sponsored by the National Geographic Society in 2013 suggests that three-quarters of the hand stencils found on the walls of dozens of European caves were made by women, and that the paintings alongside them likely were as well. 

Early man may have thrown the spears, but early woman made the pictures telling how.

Significant scientific discoveries do two things at once: advance the narrow field of fact and extend the imaginative field of wonder. Thinking of those images unspooling in the dark of a cave brings to mind many metaphors, among them intimations of modern movies. Indeed, the cave painting could be entered as evidence into a key aesthetic and storytelling argument of today—the debate between the paladins of American film, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and their Marvel Cinematic Universe contemporaries. Scorsese recently wrote, in the Times, that the superhero genre, whatever charms it may have, is degrading cinema by pulling it away from the real world of ambiguity, from the “complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” Coppola agreed, telling reporters that the Marvel-franchise movies are “despicable” for failing to supply their audience with “some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration.”

Yet our oldest picture story seems to belong, whether we want it to or not, more to the Marvel universe than to Marty Scorsese’s. The therianthropes, with their composite identities, are really the first superheroes, X-Men united on the wall for a fight. A human with the strength of a bull! Another with the guile of a crocodile! Perhaps the deeper truth is that Scorsese and Coppola are right, in that it takes a huge effort of the disciplined imagination to turn human attention away from daydreams of magical powers to the truth of our contradictory natures. Still, there is no denying our collective relief when the therianthropes arrive to save the day.

Our oldest stories are like our newest; we look for explanation and hope for a happy ending. People, then and now, tell tales about the brave things they are about to do, or just did, or are thinking of doing, or thought they might do, if they were not the people they are but had the superpowers we all wish we had. Our enterprises vary; our entertainments do not. Plans to bring down the hunt and bring home the anoa bacon change; our hopes of getting it done will never alter. It seems a good moral to take us through these difficult days and into the next decade. ♦

*Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.

Let's write about earthquakes!

 Predicting the Earthquake That Could Wreck New York

A geologist heads to the hills to study precariously perched boulders, which could provide clues to the frequency of the rare major quakes that shake the region. An echo report published in The New Yorker by Ben McGrath.


Every now and then, the ground trembles, in some places more often and more dramatically than in others. New York is no California. Still, Brooklyn chimneys toppled and windows shattered in the summer of 1884, when a quake struck near Coney Island: magnitude 5, or thereabouts. (Seismometers were not then in wide circulation.) Anything larger, amid today’s infrastructure, would cause quite a bit of damage. But we have scant records about how frequently such a quake occurs. “Every thousand years, every ten thousand years, every million years?,” William Menke, a seismologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty observatory, wondered recently, with the potential destruction of the metropolitan region in mind. “It makes a difference!” Many major earthquakes have occurred on the East Coast, he explained. We just don’t know when.

Menke was hiking up a mountain in Harriman State Park, beside the Ramapo Fault, to try to fill in the gaps. He was in search of rocks whose shape and placement gave him a sense of existential comfort instead of dread. “That was the one that started me thinking about this,” he said, arriving at a bobsled-size boulder perched near the edge of a shallow cliff. “That must say something important about the amount of shaking that occurred since it was put up there. If there was a lot of shaking, it would have fallen.” A hiking companion couldn’t resist a futile push. The boulder was deposited there, of course, by a glacier. “Everything here reeks of the Ice Age,” Menke said. The last of the glaciers melted in these parts around fifteen thousand years ago. Auspicious.

The two continued climbing, in search of ever more precariously perched boulders. Some were too small to rule out human intervention. “You can see somebody moved those hefty rocks into a bench configuration,” Menke noted of one arrangement, near the remains of a campfire. Another boulder, intriguingly top-heavy, sat in a crack, making it harder to dislodge, and therefore unworthy of scrutiny. Menke crouched beside others to sketch their contours in a notebook and measure the slopes of the underlying bedrock, using a carpenter’s level and an inclinometer, for which he’d paid eight dollars at Lowe’s. “Most of the stuff I do is pretty low tech,” he said. “I have occasionally lost things in the field and then found them six months later, a little rusty.”

Earthquakes happen every day all over the world, along both tectonic plate edges and interiors. Earthquakes occur along faults, which are fractures between blocks of rock that allow the blocks to move relative to one another.

Menke’s gray hair was untrimmed and, like some of the stones he examined, in seeming defiance of gravity. His fixation on the geology was such that he failed to notice a buck galloping past, though he called attention to a small discoloration in the bedrock at one point. “See the surface here? Something was protecting this from erosion. Was there a boulder there that rolled off? Where is it?” Using some back-of-the-envelope physics, he estimated the amount of gravitational acceleration required to send various candidates in his notebook sliding downhill. “The last one we did was on a more gentle slope, and it was about point three of gravity,” he said. “So that would be about a seven-and-a-half magnitude.” By contrast, a giant sea-turtle-shaped rock on a steeper slope seemed likely to ski with a magnitude 7. “So that, actually, is an interesting number,” Menke said. “If you can rule out that there have been any earthquakes of magnitude 7 since the end of the Ice Age, that actually is pretty important in terms of New York’s seismic risk.”


Proper science would require his following up with sophisticated camera technology, for photogrammetry and 3-D computer modelling. “I’ll tell you a funny story about a Greek dude,” Menke said, referring to the astronomer Aristarchus, who attempted to estimate the distance from the earth to the sun. “He did a pretty good job, but there was a critical piece of info he needed to know, and that was the angular diameter of the sun. It’s half a degree, and he guessed that it was two degrees. Had he been careful to measure things, he would have gotten the right number.” 

For now, though, Menke took comfort in what the naked eye was telling him. Then again, a magnitude 7 earthquake is a thousand times more powerful than a magnitude 5. Think of Haiti in 2010, instead of Coney Island in 1884.

Pausing for a water break before beginning his descent, Menke ran his hand over another boulder and broke off a piece of crusty rock tripe, or lichen. “Very low nutritional value,” he said. “But if faced with a choice between eating rock tripe and dying, you eat rock tripe.” 

Medical ethics journalism

Let's write about Sheri Fink's investigative documentary in the best selling Five Days at Memorial.

Echo essay by Amanda Schafer, published in The New Yorker on September 12, 2013, in the Annals of Technology.

Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans was heavily damaged when Hurricane Katrina struck  on August 29, 2005.

A study guide can accompany the reading of this documentary and the link to purchase is at this site here.

In the aftermath of the storm, while the building had no electricity and went through catastrophic flooding after the levees failed, Dr. Anna Pou, along with other doctors and nurses, attempted to continue caring for patients. 

On Wednesday, August 31, United States Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt reassured the public that 2,500 patients would be evacuated from hospitals in Orleans Parish, although it wasn't clear at first where they would be moved to.

On September 11, 45 bodies were recovered from Memorial Medical Center, about five of whom had died before the disaster (originally thought to be eleven). Out of an estimated 215, bodies found in nursing homes and hospitals in New Orleans, Memorial had the largest number.

In July 2006, a Louisiana judge found probable cause to order the arrest of Dr. Pou and two nurses for second degree murder in the deaths of several of the patients, following a nearly year-long investigation by the office of Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti.

Nevertheless, a grand jury in Orleans Parish refused to indict Pou on any of the counts. Eventually, the charges were expunged and the State of Louisiana paid Pou's legal fees.

The Moral Dilemmas of Doctors During a Disaster

Before and after Katrina: Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans (Tuscon.com): Parts of the New Orleans Memorial have not yet reopened, post 2005, Hurricane Katrina.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana- In the late summer of 2005, the waters loosed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina laid siege to New Orleans. 

At the city's hisoric Memorial Medical Center, the power and then the backup generators failed, creating a silence one doctor described as the “sickest sound” of his life. 

Doctors and nurses, at times in darkness, struggled to take care of patients without life-saving machines, air conditioning, or functioning toilets. After several days of desperation, some allegedly euthanized critically ill patients, even as large-scale evacuations of the hospital began. 

Sheri Fink, a doctor and journalist, published a meticulous investigation of these deaths in the New York Times Magazine and on the Web site of ProPublica, in 2009.

Sheri Fink's work won her a Pulitzer Prize.

In “Five Days at Memorial,” the contours of the Katrinia story remained the same, yet Fink imbued them with far more narrative richness, making the doctors seem both more sympathetic and more culpable. Fink also expanded on the ethical conundrums, which  festered over time and seemed to gain fresh urgency whenever the angry winds of the Katrina hurricane crashed against New Orleans. 

Which patients should receive priority in a disaster? Should doctors abandon the critically ill? What should they do if they believe those patients will suffer? Should they receive legal immunity for decisions made under duress? To a disturbing degree, the best answers seem to run counter to what key players at Memorial did and what at least one of them has advocated for since.

As the waters surged toward Memorial, hospital leaders began by acting with familiar priorities: they chose to evacuate the sickest patients and those who relied on ventilators or other devices first. But then the medical chairman decided that patients with do-not-resuscitate orders should get lowest priority, later saying he thought they had the “least to lose.” As the staff scrambled to move patients down from the upper floors, other factors played a role. One doctor worried that a patient who weighed more than three hundred pounds might slow the evacuation line; he was moved to another area to wait, rather than joining the queue. Some patients on the seventh floor seemed to get even lower priority, in part because their treatment was overseen by LifeCare, a health-care company that leased space within Memorial. As the days passed and doctors soldiered on without electricity, running water, sleep, or outside help, they flipped their moral scale upside down. Now the sickest patients—whom they designated threes on a one-to-three scale—would wait, and the healthiest would go first. This reflected “a sense among the doctors that they would not be able to save everyone,” writes Fink, citing the head-and-neck surgeon Anna Pou.

Setting the right triage priorities is one thing. But then something darker began to happen. Four days into the ordeal, Dr. Ewing Cook, who’d previously survived two heart attacks, struggled to reach the eighth-floor intensive-care unit, where he examined a patient with advanced cancer. Convinced that she was close to death and that he couldn’t possibly make it up the stairs again, he asked the nurse to raise her dosage of morphine. “There’s no question I hastened her demise,” he later said. 

Workers move patients up the stairs from the parking garage to the helipad to be evacuated from Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, Brad Loper)

Cook allegedly spoke with Pou about injecting patients with morphine and the sedative Versed, and she wrote prescriptions for substantial amounts of morphine, which, despite the chaos, were filled by the hospital pharmacy. (Whether her intent was to relieve pain or end life remains in dispute.) 

Meanwhile, the pulmonologist John Thiele apparently injected several category-three patients with morphine and Versed. Knowing that he would soon evacuate, he felt he could not “justify hanging a morphine drip and praying it didn’t run out after everyone left and before the patient died,” Fink reports.

There are moments when doctors face genuinely tough calls about whether to let someone live or die: a soldier on a battlefield, say, who begs a doctor not to leave him behind alive. But this isn’t the way Fink describes the scene at Memorial. Some of the patients whose bodies contained high levels of morphine or Versed were apparently not on the verge of death or even in terrible pain, according to details of the investigation. A three-hundred-eighty-pound paraplegic named Emmett Everett had eaten tuna fish, crackers, and relish for breakfast. “I knew he was sick,” one staff member later said, “but, um, you know, he could talk and everything.” In fact, he told one of his nurses, “Cindy, don’t let them leave me behind.” 

Then, a doctor allegedly ended his life—without his consent. Even after the earthquake in Haiti, physicians from a field hospital said they did not amputate survivors’ limbs without consent, regardless of how urgently they thought patients needed the procedure. Ultimately, over twenty of the bodies found at Memorial contained either morphine and Versed or both. Multiple forensic experts determined that eight or nine of these deaths were homicides. Pou was arrested, but a sympathetic grand jury, which for political reasons was not privy to all of the forensic evidence, failed to indict her. No other doctors or nurses were held to be criminally responsible.

The more gritty detail Fink offers, the harder it is not to feel sympathy for the doctors and nurses. Yet much of what they did—especially the euthanasia but also the triage priorities—sets an awful example for future disasters. For starters, a D.N.R. order simply means that “a patient whose heartbeat or breathing had stopped should not be revived,” Fink writes. It reflects that patient’s wishes for the future; it does not necessarily indicate how sick he is now, or how close to death. Using D.N.R. orders in triage also risks penalizing individuals who plan for scenarios that may not occur. 

At Memorial, the early reliance on these orders meant that some patients were never carried down from the seventh floor to the staging area for evacuation. This made it harder to include them later on, even as more helicopters arrived.

A triage plan that puts the most vulnerable last is also troubling. Doctors may reason that the very sick are too fragile or too heavy to transport or don’t have long to live. But they’re the ones who are most likely to die if left in the hospitals as conditions get worse. A system that prioritizes the healthy—or the unhealthy—should also be looked at with humility. Death is unpredictable, and experts aren’t necessarily good at differentiating among critical patients. Indeed, in a small exercise designed to plan for pandemic flu, researchers asked doctors to assess the likely survival of I.C.U. patients with the H1N1 virus who were on ventilators. Their predictions, as Fink notes in her epilogue, were largely wrong.

Some doctors have been criticized for leaving Memorial, even when food, water, and pain medication were still plentiful. But with gunshots in the distance and rumors of violence and martial law, it seems reasonable that some of them chose to evacuate. “They are not the Secret Service,” the bioethicist Arthur Caplan told me. It also makes sense that they would try to lessen their patients’ pain beforehand, even if the drugs they used risked hastening death. If their intent was to end suffering forever, though, this crosses a line, Caplan and others argue. After all, who can know whether some unforeseen rescue might have materialized at the eleventh hour, however unlikely it seemed?

Pou and her team have argued that we should not second-guess doctors and should instead grant them broad legal immunity for their work during disasters. But this is neither necessary nor wise. Doctors are already judged according to the resources available and the circumstances, as George Annas of Boston University told me. The standard of care is what “a reasonable physician would do in that disaster, not in a fully equipped O.R. in New York.” And the last message we should want crisis workers to receive is that anything goes.

Terrified, weary doctors should not abandon ethical standards; they should cling to the norms of medicine, beyond when it feels reasonable to do so. This means talking to patients and respecting their autonomy, even under awful conditions. It also means making every effort to evacuate the sickest and most dependent patients first. The original—deeply reasonable—triage plan at Memorial prioritized babies, I.C.U. patients, those who required dialysis, and those who had received bone-marrow transplants (and therefore had compromised immune systems). If hospital leaders had been forced to choose some of these patients over others, it would have been reasonable to send babies over the elderly, since infants arguably have the most life ahead of them. (Alternatively, some ethicists propose simply drawing straws.)

But the grim hypotheticals risk obscuring another issue: medical workers under siege can easily lose perspective.

Although it is startling, medical workers can start to make decisions based on their own dark fears rather than the changing facts on the ground. “For heavens sake,” one of the forensic experts cited by Fink said, “Memorial wasn’t on a goddamn battlefield with enemy shells coming in. This was New Orleans, and there were helicopters and boats. And really, were they saying they couldn’t get patients off the seventh floor?”

In any disaster, medical teams must re-evaluate patients’ conditions and the available resources frequently, as Fink argues, “maintaining the ability to ‘see’ in the midst of a crisis.” This, along with better backup generators, is what may ultimately save the most lives.

Amanda Schaffer is a science and medical columnist for Slate and a freelance science writer.

Above: The former Memorial Medical Center, parts of which have not reopened since Hurricane Katrina, in 2009. Photograph by