Kindle Edition, 2013 © The New Yorker

COMMENT
Adieu, DOMA!

by Jeffrey Toobin

The Supreme Court’s embrace of gay rights last week had an almost serene majesty. The obvious correctness of the Court’s judgment, its curt dismissal of a monstrous injustice, had a grandeur that requires little elaboration. Yet the decision had its roots in something prosaic and largely forgotten: the midterm elections of 1986. Until that point in Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, the loyal opposition was more loyal than opposed to the genial Californian in the White House, but Democrats came roaring back, winning control of the Senate with eight new seats. It took Reagan and his aides some time to recognize the realignment on Capitol Hill. After the resignation of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., from the Court, in 1987, Reagan nominated Robert Bork. He would have been an ideological twin to Antonin Scalia, who had been confirmed with ease the previous year. But the Democrats in the Senate, especially the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Joseph Biden, picked a fight over Bork and defeated his nomination by fifty-eight to forty-two. In response, Howard Baker, the former senator turned White House chief of staff, urged Reagan to acknowledge the new political realities and make a more moderate choice. Reagan did; he selected Anthony M. Kennedy.

In Kennedy’s twenty-five years on the Court, the Justices have handed down three major decisions vindicating the rights of gay Americans. In 1996, in Romer v. Evans, the Justices invalidated a Colorado law that preëmptively barred any attempt to protect gay rights; in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, they ruled that gay people could not be criminally prosecuted for having consensual sex; and last week, in United States v. Windsor, they declared unconstitutional the odious and ill-named Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Anthony Kennedy wrote all three opinions. There’s little evidence that Reagan cared much for gay rights, but Republican moderates—that vanished species—played an important role in his Administration, and Kennedy has reflected their libertarian kind of tolerance during his long and consequential tenure.

DOMA denied all the federal benefits of marriage to same-sex couples who were wed under state law. To a degree rare in the dusty archives of the Supreme Court, Kennedy’s opinion striking the law down is a pleasure, even a thrill, to read. He can be windy and verbose at times, but the Windsor opinion is bracingly plainspoken. “DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others,” Kennedy wrote. “The principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage.”

The Windsor case reached this happy conclusion because of the courage of the gay citizens who decided to stand up and fight, especially Edith Windsor, the widow who had been denied the federal tax benefits that surviving spouses are entitled to; because of the skillful advocacy of their lawyers, notably Roberta Kaplan, the private counsel who argued for Windsor, and Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., the Solicitor General, who put the Obama Administration on the right side of this case, and of history; and because of Kennedy and his four colleagues in the majority: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

But the real reason that Windsor, and the country, won was that Democrats won—in the eighties, when the Senate turned down Bork, and in 2008, when Barack Obama defeated John McCain. To an extent that the public and, especially, the Justices themselves rarely acknowledge, the Supreme Court is a political body. It reflects, above all, the values and the priorities of the Presidents who nominate the Justices and the senators who confirm them (or refuse to do so). There is a lingering mythology that Justices turn out to surprise the Presidents who appoint them to the Court. That was last true during the Eisenhower Administration. It is inconceivable that any modern Republican would nominate Justices in the mold of Kennedy. George W. Bush’s choices for the Court—John G. Roberts, Jr., and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., who both voted to uphold DOMA—still represent the Republican prototype. It is a similar guarantee that Obama—or, perhaps, a President Hillary Clinton—will nominate Justices who will protect and expand gay rights.

To be sure, Kennedy reflects the less salutary aspects of the Reagan legacy as well, and that side of his character was also on display last week. In Shelby County v. Holder, Kennedy joined with Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Clarence Thomas to gut the Voting Rights Act, the crowning achievement of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Like Reagan, who disgraced himself by opening his 1980 general-election campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, the scene of a notorious murder of civil-rights workers, Kennedy has a blind spot when it comes to race. Immediately after the Shelby County decision, states and counties in the South announced that they would take advantage of the ruling to jam though legal changes that will make it harder for minorities and poor people to vote. Also last week, Kennedy was at his Delphic worst in a case challenging the admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin. Kennedy criticized the university’s approach to affirmative action but suggested, vaguely, that some racial preferences might be tolerated; pity the poor admissions officers who try to make sense of the opinion. In any case, judicial restraint is not Kennedy’s style. He was the only Justice to vote to overturn both DOMA and the key provision of the Voting Rights Act, even though Congress had passed them with overwhelming support. Characteristically, too, Kennedy was the only Justice to be on the winning side in both cases.

Polls show that about fifty-five per cent of the American people now support same-sex marriage. Roughly the same percentage of the nine Justices seem to feel the same way. (The Justices rarely stray too far from public opinion.) And, as with the public, the trends on the Court are all heading in a clear direction. Twelve states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex marriage today; thanks to the Court’s decision last week in the Proposition 8 case, California will almost certainly soon join the list. The next piece of unfinished legal business is to guarantee the right to marriage equality in the rest of the country. Some states, like Oregon and Illinois (after a false start this year), will probably end their prohibitions in the next year or so. But ultimately the Supreme Court will have to step in to complete the nation’s journey on marriage equality, just as it did in Loving v. Virginia, from 1967, when the Justices rejected the last remaining bans on interracial marriage. Kennedy’s opinion in Windsor makes plain that that day is drawing ever nearer. Scalia, as it happens, saw this more clearly than anyone. “The real rationale of today’s opinion,” he wrote in his dissent, “is that DOMA is motivated by a ‘bare . . . desire to harm’ couples in same-sex marriages.” And he added, “How easy it is, indeed how inevitable, to reach the same conclusion with regard to state laws denying same-sex couples marital status.” Scalia’s declaration was meant as a threat. We should consider it a promise. ♦

UP LIFE’S LADDER
School’s Out

by Ian Frazier

In front of the Apollo Theatre, a woman was selling silvery baseball caps and heavy gold-colored pendants spelling the word “RICH,” laid out on a folding table. With one eye she watched her wares while the other was on the book she was reading, which she held open to Chapter 11: “What to Do When You Get Custody.” She did not turn around to look at the black Hyundai Equus with special light-blue license plates when it pulled up at the curb, and she paid no attention to the slim, unassuming, well-dressed man who got out. “That’s the man who’s speaking today,” said a woman waiting in line for the graduation ceremony of Democracy Prep Charter High School. Nobody else seemed to recognize His Excellency Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Accompanied by a woman and a man, he patiently made his way through the crowd. “If he’s the star, he should’ve gone to the back entrance, on 126th Street,” a man in a French-blue guayabera shirt said. “That’s what the Apollo stars usually do.”

The great old theatre filled up with family, friends, and schoolmates of Democracy Prep’s first-ever graduating class. Programs fluttered as people fanned themselves. “Pomp and Circumstance” marched the forty-four graduates onto the stage alphabetically, from Omar Mitchell Anderson, to Trey Xavier Bonaparte, to Daviene Escourse, to Ada-Alicia Cleopatra Gonzales, to Steven Freddy Medina, to Judeline Polynice, to Natasha Diona Williams. The graduates wore gowns of school-bus yellow that radiated sunlike on the stage.

Along with cheering and applauding when the speakers reached the end of rousing sentences, the audience members snapped their fingers during applause-free periods to show that they liked what they were hearing. They snapped as Seth Andrew, the founder and superintendent of Democracy Prep, in a school-bus-yellow baseball cap, told the graduates that Democracy Prep students are different, and walk, talk, and think differently, and “hold themselves to a very different bar.” Fingers clicked as Dennis Walcott, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, praised the graduates because each one had been admitted to a four-year college, and they popped some more while the Honorable Charles Rangel, Harlem’s representative in Congress for forty-two years, and a Bronze Star winner in the Korean War, marvelled at how far Ban Ki-moon must have come to lead the United Nations after growing up in such a war-ravaged country.

A student introduced Ban Ki-moon in English and in Korean; the Democracy Prep Charter High School requires all students to study Korean. Secretary-General Ban said he considers himself to be what other speakers had urged the graduates to be: a voice for the voiceless and a defender of the defenseless. “I always dreamed of appearing live at the Apollo. The problem is I really can’t sing,” Ban said. Then he showed a video of Beyoncé, singing and striking poses in the U.N. General Assembly chamber. The music on the Apollo’s sound system was rumbling, soaring, just short of earsplitting. Gigantic on the screen, Beyoncé shimmered in a tight white sequinned dress and made arm gestures that segued to clips of U.N. workers distributing supplies, rescuers throwing lines to people in floods, and a hand tilting a cup to the mouth of a child. Meanwhile, she sang a song titled “I Was Here”: “I gave my all, did my best, / Brought someone some happiness, / Left this world a little better just because / I was here!”

The video’s purpose was to promote World Humanitarian Day, which is on August 19th. Before leaving, Ban told the graduates they should think of themselves as citizens of the world, and urged them to become humanitarian workers. Then other administrators spoke, and some of them teared up. Damion Clark, the head of the school’s English department, and a recent recipient of a citywide award for outstanding teachers, told the graduates he loved them. Katie Duffy, Seth Andrew’s chief operating officer, who took over as C.E.O. when Andrew moved on this month, told the graduates she adored them. Lisa Friscia, the principal, said, “You’re more than my students—you are my heart.” Addressing her father, who was in the audience, Friscia said, “Dad, this is why you don’t have grandkids.” At the end, the graduates did not march out but stayed where they were so their families could take pictures of them in their yellow robes on the stage of the Apollo. ♦

ON WALL STREET
Tale of the Taper

by Nick Paumgarten

A bull market in bonds is a little like youth: you take it for granted and don’t appreciate it until it’s gone. One day, you look in the mirror and see sagging flesh and rising yields. You can’t go back. Re-fi ye mortgages while ye may.

The latest boom time for bonds has lasted thirty-two years, give or take a rough quarter. It began, by some measures, in March, 1981, two months into the first Reagan Administration, when Bobby Sands was fasting and Eddie Rabbitt topped the charts, and it’s provided a steady bass line—that is to say, the bulk of the financing—for an era of so many world-altering events that it would be misleading to name just a few. Many market participants and commentators, among them Bill Gross, the co-founder of PIMCO, the world’s biggest bond fund, have declared that this bull market in bonds has reached its end. The bear market in bonds that preceded it began in 1946 and lasted thirty-five years. This could be the dawn of a new era.

What makes people think so? Interest rates have started rising, after years of historic low rates. (Rising rates mean falling prices; enthusiasm for bonds lowers rates, while scorn for bonds raises them.) In the past two weeks, scorn held sway. Mortgage rates shot up. Munis, junk, thirty-year T-bills: they all got hammered. It was getting more expensive to borrow money.

There were at least two immediate catalysts: a credit crisis in China and a pronouncement by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, that if the economy continued to improve (this improvement being an arguable postulate) the Fed might begin scaling back, or “tapering,” its program of purchasing eighty-five billion dollars in bonds every month—one part of the third round of what is known as quantitative easing (or QE3). This crutch, post-financial meltdown, has helped establish relative calm: sturdy corporate profits, rising stock prices, and low interest rates, which have made it easier for companies to finance their operations, for people to buy homes, and for the government to service its ever-burgeoning debts. It has also become addictive. Scolds have called it morphine, crack, steroids, a bowl of punch. The prospect that the Fed might force the market (as well as politicians and consumers) to sober up, or at least to get by on a lower dose, precipitated a panic. Who would buy all these bonds, if not the Fed?

So, tapering: a new bugaboo entered the lexicon. Investors tried to stir it in with other variables: inflation, deflation, the euro, the yen, China, Basel, consumer spending, mortgage applications, nominal G.D.P., collateral requirements under Dodd-Frank. As hard as it is to divine what Bernanke means when he speaks, it is even harder to deduce what the markets mean when they listen.

“Let us only say that there are cross currents,” Grant’s Interest Rate Observer observed. “Your head spins trying to sort out the bond-friendly from the bond-unfriendly implications of hypothetical events entailing figures reckoned in the trillions.”

Some speculated that Bernanke had misspoken, or that he was jawboning the markets—scaring everyone on purpose, either to cool things down or to demonstrate that he was capable of cooling them down. “I don’t want to go from Wild Turkey to ‘cold turkey’ overnight,” Richard Fisher, the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, told the Financial Times, likening those who were selling based on the news to “feral hogs.” By the end of last week, several of his colleagues at the Fed had engaged in some counter-jawboning, to settle the nerves and appease the hogs. The bond market, as well as the stock market, calmed. Some surmised that the Fed would never taper, that it is doomed to provide an endless supply of punch. “QE99 here we come,” one strategist wrote.

But nothing lasts forever. Cycles sneak up on us. Those who guessed, in 1981, that we were on the verge of a thirty-two-year debt feast had a good run. In July of that year, the world was distracted by the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Thirty-two years later, it awaits the birth, any day now, of their grandchild. The bookmakers’ odds in London favor a girl called Alexandra, but the name Elizabeth is up there and has a commemorative ring to it. QE3? ♦

THE PICTURES
Go-Between

by Patrick Radden Keefe

On a recent evening in Georgetown, Rich Klein paced the red carpet (which was actually white), waiting for Jamie Foxx. It was the Washington première of Roland Emmerich’s “White House Down,” the movie in which a band of snarling mercenaries lays waste to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Klein had been hired by the filmmakers to advise on issues of accuracy. “Every room in the White House was re-created in Montreal,” Klein said. “Then every room was burned down, blown up, and turned into rubble.”

Klein, who is forty-eight, has a trimmed goatee and an earring. He served in the State Department under Bill Clinton and now works for McLarty Associates, the advisory firm run by Clinton’s former chief of staff Thomas (Mack) McLarty III. In 2006, the firm helped the director Peter Berg get access to shoot “The Kingdom” in Abu Dhabi, since Saudi Arabia was impractical. When Michael Bay wanted to film “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” at Giza, in Egypt, Klein helped make arrangements. And he is responsible for the shot, in “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol,” where Tom Cruise dangles off the side of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower.

“I was so not a movie guy,” Klein said. “I didn’t know anything about this business until getting thrown into it.”

A whoop of screaming erupted as Foxx arrived. In “White House Down,” he plays the President, who, together with an aspiring Secret Service agent, played by Channing Tatum, must save Washington and prevent World War III. As Foxx signed autographs, the movie’s screenwriter, James Vanderbilt, and its producer, Brad Fischer, joined Klein. “I did a lot of research, a lot of it online,” Vanderbilt said.

“But we couldn’t have done it without Rich,” Fischer said.

Klein counselled the filmmakers on how an evacuation of the White House would unfold. “We knew people who were in the White House on September 11th,” Klein said. “They said there was no alarm. It’s just the Secret Service running from room to room, yelling, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ ” When the producers wanted to know what kind of coffee cups White House staffers would be holding, Klein suggested M. E. Swing, the coffee shop at Seventeenth and G, and the crew arranged to have a stack of cups shipped up to Montreal. “They liked that,” he said, adding, “It’s so expensive to license Starbucks.”

Hollywood cares about verisimilitude only up to a point. When Emmerich wanted a locker stocked with guns in the White House, Klein decided that it would have been churlish to object that, as far as he knows, there isn’t one. There isn’t a motor pool in the basement, either, but the studio needed one—for a car chase.

“It’s not a documentary,” Fischer said. “The movie is supposed to be a fun ride.”

Inside the theatre, McLarty stood at a microphone and greeted his fellow former chief of staff John Podesta and Clinton’s White House spokesman Mike McCurry. “This’ll be a happy walk down memory lane for many people here,” McLarty said. “We are particularly honored that Secretary Janet Napolitano is here,” he said, nodding to the current head of Homeland Security. Napolitano, holding a bag of popcorn and slouching in her seat, smiled.

“When we came here a year ago and scouted in Washington, Brad and I had a little encounter,” Emmerich told the crowd. “We saw Henry Kissinger in the Hay-Adams. It was like, for us, for Hollywood people—Oh, my God, he exists!”

Foxx observed that, a year ago, he was playing a slave in “Django Unchained,” and that playing the President is “a lot better.” Then he gave “a shout-out to all the Presidents” and launched into a decent Ronald Reagan impersonation and a very good Barack Obama. As the lights dimmed, Channing Tatum said, somewhat ominously, “Hopefully, this will never happen in real life.”

Klein, who had not seen the finished film, sat with his wife and two kids, and his agent. Emmerich has destroyed Washington before (he directed “Independence Day”), and no expense was spared in digitally pulverizing D.C. The Capitol Building collapses in on itself like a soufflé. Secretary Napolitano’s fictional counterpart is taken hostage. During a scene in which the President opens a drawer to reveal a secret stash of Nicorette, an insidery laugh rippled through the theatre.

“That was great,” Klein said when the lights came up. He shrugged. “It’s a popcorn movie.” There was no after-party. “This is D.C.,” Klein said. “You throw a party at ten-thirty on a Friday night, nobody will come.” ♦

THE FINANCIAL PAGE
Middle-Class Militants

by James Surowiecki

When mass protests block the streets in Madrid or Athens these days, it comes as no surprise. People there have been in economic purgatory for years. But the huge demonstrations that have hit Brazil represent something unexpected: revolt in the midst of relative prosperity. Brazil has been one of the economic success stories of the past decade. The economy grew quickly and the benefits were widely shared—arguably for the first time in the country’s history. Since 2003, some forty million Brazilians have joined the middle class, and the percentage in extreme poverty has shrunk markedly. Though the economy has slowed lately, most people are better off than they were ten years ago. Yet the protests have been widespread, popular, and, most striking of all, dominated by the middle class—the very people who have benefitted from the boom.

So what’s everyone so unhappy about? The core problem is that living conditions haven’t really caught up with the improvements in people’s income. Brazil is an increasingly middle-class country that still has many of the characteristics of a poorer one. Public infrastructure is notoriously bad. The public health-care system is overcrowded, and public education, while improving, is far from good: one recent study of education quality in forty major countries ranked Brazil next-to-last. Brazilian police forces are ineffective and sometimes corrupt, so citizens don’t feel safe. And cities like São Paulo are so congested that two- or three-hour commutes are routine. The original impetus for the demonstrations was a twenty-centavo increase in bus fares; that’s just nine cents, but no one wants to pay more for a patently inadequate system.

The wealthy are able to insulate themselves from this dysfunction—Brazil has long had one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality. They have private health care and education, hired bodyguards, and so on. But such options are out of reach for most of the middle class. To make matters worse, Brazil’s economy isn’t really designed to deliver goods and services at low prices, which makes being middle class there significantly more expensive than it is in many other countries. Even by developed-country standards, Brazil is a pricey place: a recent study ranked São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro among the fourteen most expensive cities in the world—far above New York, which was thirty-third. A Big Mac costs more in São Paulo, adjusted for income, than in nearly every other country in the world. And high tariffs and less competition mean that cars, televisions, sneakers, and iPads are often two or three times more expensive than they are here. As a result, many Brazilians buy on installment plans, and high interest rates mean that Brazilians now devote a fifth of their income to servicing debt (almost twice as much as Americans do).

There’s a basic paradox of economic growth: as people do better, they are often less content, because they expect more. Brazil’s consumer-protection authority has reported that consumer complaints have soared in the past couple of years, a sign that people will no longer tolerate being messed with. Rising prosperity turns people into taxpayers—the number of Brazilians who pay income taxes rose by nearly nine million in the past decade—which has intensified the pressure on the government. Brazilians pay more than a third of their income in taxes. “The up-and-coming folks are now starting to pay more taxes, have come to expect more for them, and also realize that the public services they get are indeed horrible,” Filipe Campante, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a Rio native, told me. “As a result, these groups are very frustrated with the performance of the Brazilian state.” The sense of injustice is compounded by a public perception (far from unfounded) that corruption is routine in Brazilian politics. Small wonder that lavish government spending on new stadiums for the World Cup and the Olympics (both of which Brazil will be hosting in the next three years) has become a flashpoint for the protesters. Once people have more of a stake in the system, they also have more to lose, which explains why Brazil’s recent slowdown has engendered so much anxiety.

Middle-class agitation isn’t unique to Brazil. In developing countries, a growing middle class is often a crucial agent of political and economic change. Nancy Birdsall, of the Center for Global Development, has called it a “catalytic class.” In the past few years, middle-class protesters have taken to the streets over issues of education, corruption, and public space in Chile, India, and Turkey, among other countries. These are revolts of rising expectations, and they’re almost certainly harbingers of more upheaval to come. The ranks of the middle class are swelling around the world, especially in Asia, and the O.E.C.D. estimates that there may be almost five billion people in the “global middle class” by 2030—more than twice the current figure. Governments will be under increasing pressure to meet citizens’ demands. Higher expectations don’t guarantee change, but history suggests that the uprisings they lead to can be powerful engines of reform. In the U.S., at the turn of the twentieth century, an anxious middle class—frustrated with government corruption and inefficiency—drove the Progressive movement. The impetus gave us campaign-finance regulations, antitrust laws, food and drug legislation, direct election of senators, and, eventually, women’s suffrage. In Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff has already offered a host of reform proposals in response to the demonstrators. The stereotypical image of the middle class is that it’s dull and complacent. But when it rises, turmoil follows. ♦

PERSONAL HISTORY
The Prodigal Daughter

Writing, history, mourning.

by Jill Lepore

In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father’s old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock. She’d be out running errands, see something wonderful, pull over, and pop the trunk. I never knew anyone better prepared to meet with beauty.

“Fingers nimble, brush or thimble,” my mother’s college yearbook said about her. The cabinets in our kitchen used to be a murky green. One day, I came home from kindergarten to find that my mother had painted every cabinet sunflower yellow. “I was just so sick of that green,” she said, washing up, briskly, at the kitchen sink. She stitched quilts; she painted murals. She had one dresser drawer filled with buttons and another with crayons. She once built me a doll house out of a stack of shoeboxes. She papered the rooms with scraps of wallpaper and lit them with strings of colored Christmas-tree lights as brightly as she lit my childhood with her trapped passion.

She’d grown up in a small town in Massachusetts, a devout Catholic. After college—a Catholic school in New Rochelle—she’d wanted to go places. It was 1949: the war was over; the world was wide. She got engaged to a man named Winstanley, who had a job with the State Department; she wanted to marry him because he was about to be posted to Berlin. That fell apart. For a while, she worked as a designer for the Milton Bradley Company, in Springfield, but she couldn’t stand how, from her apartment, she could hear the keening of the polar bear in the city zoo. (“He had the smallest cage you ever saw,” she told me. “All night, he cried.”) Then she drove across the country in a jalopy and took a slow boat from San Diego to Honolulu. After that, she became a stewardess, so that she could see Europe. In 1955, she had to quit and come back home, to Massachusetts, to take care of her mother, who was dying. That’s when she met my father, a junior-high-school principal: he hired her as an art teacher. Every day, he left a poem in her mailbox in the teachers’ room. The filthiest ones are the best. (“Marjorie, Marjorie, let me park my car in your garagery.”) He told her he wanted to live in Spain. He was courting; he was lying; no one hated to go anywhere more than my father; he almost never left town. Except for during the war, he had never lived anywhere but his mother’s house.

My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity. On their honeymoon, in a cabin in Maine, for their first breakfast together, she made him blueberry pancakes. Pushing back his plate, he told her he didn’t like blueberries. In fifty-five years of marriage, she never again cooked him breakfast.

Before I was born, my parents bought a house on Franklin Street. (My mother promptly planted a blueberry bush in the back yard.) The year I learned the alphabet, the letter “J,” the fishing hook, was my favorite, except for “F.” “I am four and my mother is forty-four and my father’s name is Frank and my house is 44 Franklin Street,” I would whisper, when no one was listening: I was the youngest.

The street I grew up on was named for Benjamin Franklin. For a long time, no name was more famous. “There have been as great Souls unknown to fame as any of the most famous,” the man himself liked to say, shrugging it off.

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. He was the youngest of his father’s ten sons. His sister Jane was born in 1712. She was the youngest of their father’s seven daughters. Benny and Jenny, they were called, when they were little.

I never heard of Jane Franklin when I lived on Franklin Street. I only came across her name on a day, much later, when I sat down on the floor of a library to read the first thirty-odd volumes of Benjamin Franklin’s published papers. I pulled one volume after another off the shelf, and turned the pages, astonished. She was everywhere, threaded through his life, like a slip stitch.

We “had sildom any contention among us,” she wrote him, looking back at their childhood. “All was Harmony.”

He remembered it differently. “I think our Family were always subject to being a little Miffy.”

She took his hint. “You Introduce your Reproof of my Miffy temper so Politely,” she wrote back, slyly, “won cant a Void wishing to have conquered it as you have.”

He loved no one longer. She loved no one better. She thought of him as her “Second Self.” No two people in their family were more alike. Their lives could hardly have been more different. Boys were taught to read and write, girls to read and stitch. Three in five women in New England couldn’t even sign their names, and those who could sign usually couldn’t actually write. Signing is mechanical; writing is an art.

Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write with wit and force and style. His sister never learned how to spell. What she did learn, he taught her. It was a little cruel, in its kindness, because when he left the lessons ended.

He ran away in 1723, when he was seventeen and she was eleven. The day he turned twenty-one, he wrote her a letter—she was fourteen—beginning a correspondence that would last until his death. (He wrote more letters to her than he wrote to anyone else.) He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman. She became a wife, a mother, and a widow. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name.

He wrote the story of his life, about a boy who runs away from a life of poverty and obscurity in cramped, pious Boston to become an enlightened, independent man of the world: a free man. He meant it as an allegory about America.

“One Half the World does not know how the other Half lives,” he once wrote. Jane Franklin was his other half. If his life is an allegory, so is hers.

“Write a book about her!” my mother said, when I told her about Jane Franklin. I thought she was joking. It would be like painting a phantom.

History’s written from what can be found; what isn’t saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth. Jane kept the letters her brother sent her. But half the letters she sent him—three decades’ worth—are missing. Most likely, he threw them away. Maybe someone burned them. It hardly matters. A one-sided correspondence is a house without windows, a left shoe, a pair of spectacles, smashed.

My mother liked to command me to do things I found scary. I always wanted to stay home and read. My mother only ever wanted me to get away. She brought me with her wherever she went. She once sent me to live with my aunt in Connecticut. (“Just to see someplace different.”) One year, she saved up to send me to a week of Girl Scout camp, the most exotic adventure I had ever heard of. I got homesick, and begged her to let me come home. “Oh, stop,” she said. “And don’t you dare call me again, either.” When I was eleven, she took me to New York City, a place no one else in my family had ever been. It was the weekend of the annual gay-pride parade, on Christopher Street. “Isn’t that interesting?” she said. She took a picture of me next to five men dressed in black leather carrying a banner that read “Cocksuckers Unite”—this was 1978—so that I’d remember the existence of a world beyond Franklin Street. No one else in my family left home to go to college. My mother made sure I did. She might as well have written me a letter: “Run away, run away.” By then, I didn’t need a push.

Jane Franklin never ran away, and never wrote the story of her life. But she did once stitch four sheets of foolscap between two covers to make a little book of sixteen pages. In an archive in Boston, I held it in my hands. I pictured her making it. Her paper was made from rags, soaked and pulped and strained and dried. Her thread was made from flax, combed and spun and dyed and twisted. She dipped the nib of a pen slit from the feather of a bird into a pot of ink boiled of oil mixed with soot and, on the first page, wrote three words: “Book of Ages”—a lavish, calligraphic letter “B,” a graceful, slender, artful “A.” She would have learned this—an Italian round hand—out of a writing manual, like “The American Instructor: Or, Young Man’s Best Companion,” a book her brother printed in Philadelphia.

At the top of the next page, in a much smaller and plainer hand, she began her chronicle:

Jane Franklin Born on March 27-1712

Edward Mecom Marryed to Jane Franklin the 27th of July 1727.

The Book of Ages: her age. Born, March 27, 1712; married, July 27, 1727. Fifteen years four months. She was a child. The legal age for marriage in Massachusetts was sixteen; the average age was twenty-four, which is the age at which her brother Benjamin married and, excepting Jane, the average age at which her sisters were married.

The man she married, Edward Mecom, was twenty-two. He was poor, he was a saddler, and he was a Scot. He wore a wig and a beaver hat. She never once wrote anything about him expressing the least affection.

She added another line:

Josiah Mecom their first Born on Wednesday June the 4: 1729

She named this child, her first, for her father.

and Died May the 18-1730.

The child of her childhood died three weeks shy of his first birthday.

“A Dead Child is a sight no more surprizing than a broken Pitcher,” Cotton Mather preached, in a sermon called “Right Thoughts in Sad Hours.” One in four children died before the age of ten. The dead were wrapped in linen dipped in melted wax while a box made of pine was built and painted black. Puritans banned prayers for the dead: at the grave, there would be no sermon. Nor, ministers warned, ought there to be tears. “A Token for Mourners or, The Advice of Christ to a Distressed Mother, bewailing the Death of her Dear and Only Son” cited Luke 7:13: “Weepe not.”

What remains of a life? “Remains” means what remains of the body after death. But remains are also unpublished papers. And descendants are remains, too. The Boston Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet wrote about her children as “my little babes, my dear remains.” But Bradstreet’s poems were her children, as well: “Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain.” Her words were all that her children would, one day, have left of her. “If chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,” she told them, “kiss this paper.”

Jane didn’t know how to write a poem. She couldn’t have afforded a headstone. Instead, she went home, and wrote a book of remembrance. Kiss this paper.

College was something of a bust. It was the nineteen-eighties. On the one hand, Andrea Dworkin; on the other, Jacques Derrida. I took a job as a secretary, on the theory that it would give me more time to read what I wanted. “Is that working out?” my mother wanted to know. I wrote a graduate-school application essay about a short story of Isak Dinesen’s called “The Blank Page.” Very “A Room of One’s Own.” Very “The Madwoman in the Attic.” (“I write now in my own litle chamber,” Jane wrote, when she was sixty-four, “& nobod up in the house near me to Desturb me.” She was very happy to have that room, but not having it sooner isn’t why she didn’t write more or better.) Then, suddenly, I realized that my life plan—bashful daughter of shackled artist reads “The Yellow Wallpaper”—was narrow, hackneyed, daffy.

I was sick of silence, sick of attics and wallpaper, sick of blank pages and miniature rooms, sick of blighted girlhood. I wanted to study war. I wanted to investigate atrocity. I wanted to write about politics. Really, I wanted to write about anything but Jane Franklin.

“What about beauty?” my mother pressed. I kept making excuses. I was pregnant. (“Edward Mecom Born on Munday the 29 March 1731.”) I was too busy. (“My mind is keept in a contineual Agitation that I Dont know how to write,” Jane once apologized.) I was pregnant again. (“Benjamin Mecom Born on Fryday the 29 of December 1732.”) I was so tired. (“My litle wons are Interupting me Every miniut.”) I was pregnant again. (“Ebenezer Mecom Born on May the 2 1735.”) I felt rebuked, even by Jane herself. (“I was almost Tempted to think you had forgot me but I check those thoughts with the consideration of the dificulties you must labour under.”) I hadn’t forgotten her. I just couldn’t bear to think about her, trapped in that house.

But Benjamin Franklin: I adored him. He was funny and brilliant and generous and fortunate. Every year of his life, his world got bigger. So did mine. When he had something to say, he said it. So did I. My mother and I had got tangled up, like skeins. I wasn’t the one who identified with Jane.

The more I thought about Jane, the sadder it got. I tried to picture it. Her belly swelled, and emptied, and swelled again. Her breasts filled, and emptied, and filled again. Her days were days of flesh: the little legs and little arms, the little hands, clutched around her neck, the softness. A baby in her arms, she stared into kettles and tubs, swaying. The days passed to months, the months to years, and, in her Book of Ages, she pressed her children between the pages.

Her husband fell into debt. He may have gone mad. (Two of her sons became violently insane; they had to be locked up.) Jane and her children lived with her parents; she nursed them, in their old age. Josiah Franklin died in 1744. He was eighty-seven. In his will, he had divided his estate among his surviving children. Benjamin Franklin refused his portion: he gave it to Jane.

In 1751, Jane gave birth for the twelfth time. She was thirty-nine. She’d named her first baby for her father; she named this baby, her last, for her mother, Abiah Franklin:

Abiah mecom born augst 1st 1751.

The month Abiah Mecom was born, Benjamin Franklin took a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly. His eighty-four-year-old mother wrote him a letter, with her daughter at her side. “I am very weeke and short bretht so that I Cant set to rite much,” Abiah Franklin explained. She asked her daughter to write for her. Aside from Jane’s Book of Ages, and notes she made in books she read, this is the only writing in her hand to survive, for the first four decades of her life:

P S Mother says she an’t able and so I must tell you my self that I rejoyce with you and bles god for you in all your prosperity and doubt not but you will be grater blessings to the world as he bestows upon you grater honers.

J M

Mother says she an’t able and so I must. They’d got tangled, too.

Jane’s baby, Abiah Mecom, died within the year. So did Abiah Franklin:

my dear Mother Died May 8 1752.

She loved her; she washed her. She buried her. But it was Benjamin Franklin who paid for a gravestone, and wrote an epitaph:

Josiah Franklin

And Abiah his Wife

Lie here interred.

They lived lovingly together in Wedlock

Fifty-five Years.

. . . .

From this Instance, Reader,

Be encouraged to Diligence in thy Calling,

And distrust not Providence.

He was a pious & prudent Man,

She a discreet and virtuous Woman.

Their youngest Son,

In filial Regard to their Memory,

Places this Stone.

This book of remembrance was a monument, not to his parents but to Franklin himself: prodigal son.

“Do the right thing with Spirit,” Jane once wrote. It’s just the kind of thing my mother liked to say. One of Jane’s sons became a printer. He once printed a poem called “The Prodigal Daughter”: “She from her Mother in a Passion went, / Filling her aged Heart with Discontent.”

My mother’s heart began to fail. She had one heart attack, and then another. Surgery, and more surgery. Eventually, she had a defibrillator implanted in her chest. I’d visit her in the hospital; she’d send me away. All I wanted was to be there, with her, but that only made her remember going home to watch her mother die. “See? I’m fine,” she’d say. “Now. Please: go. You have things to do.”

I decided I had better read whatever of Jane’s letters had survived. The first is one she wrote in 1758, when she was forty-five years old, to Franklin’s wife, Deborah. This is her voice, gabby, frank, and vexed:

Dear Sister

for so I must call you come what will & If I dont Express my self proper you must Excuse it seeing I have not been acostomed to Pay my Complements to Governer & Baronets Ladys I am in the midst of a grate wash & Sarah still sick, & would gladly been Excused writing this Post but my husband says I must write & Give you Joy which we searly Joyn in; I sopose it will not be news to you, but I will tell you how I came by it, Mr Fluker Tould Cousen Williams & he Docter Perkins who Brought it to my Poor Son nedey who has a nother Relaps into Raising Blood & has not Done won stroke of work this month but was Just a going to begin when he was again taken Ill pray Pardon my Bad writing & confused composure & acept it as coming from your Ladyships affectionat Sister & most obedent

Humble Servant

Jane Mecom

She was in the middle of a great wash. One of her lodgers, Sarah, was ailing. Her poor son Edward (Neddy), who was married and a father, was sick again—weak and listless and coughing blood. But she had heard from Neddy, who heard it from her doctor, John Perkins, who heard it from Jonathan Williams, Sr., the husband of Jane’s friend Grace, who heard it from a Boston merchant, Thomas Flucker, that Benjamin Franklin had been given a baronetcy. Jane’s husband told her she must send her congratulations, “searly”—surely. She was miffed. If this ridiculous rumor was true, why, for heaven’s sake, was she the last to know about it?

“Your loving Sister,” or “Your affectionate Sister,” is how Jane usually signed off—not “your Ladyships affectionat Sister & most obedient Humble Servant.” That was a jab. Must she curtsey?

By words on a page, she wanted to be carried away—out of her house, out of Boston, out into the world. The more details the better. “The Sow has Piged,” a friend reported from Rhode Island, reminding her, “You told me to write you all.” She loved gossip. “Cousen willames Looks soon to Lyin,” she told Deborah, “she is so big I tell Her she will have two.” She once scolded her niece for writing letters that she found insufficiently chatty. “I want to know a Thousand litle Perticulars about your self yr Husband & the children such as your mother used to write me,” Jane commanded, adding, “it would be Next to Seeing the little things to hear some of there Prattle (Speaches If you Pleas) & have you Describe there persons & actions tell me who they Look like.” Stories, likenesses, characters: speeches.

My mother wasn’t much of a letter writer. If she telephoned, she would yell, “This is your mother calling!” My sisters and my brother and I got her an iPad for her birthday. “If you call here keep talking as it takes us time to get to the phone,” she e-mailed me. She had a cell phone, for emergencies; she brought it with her when she had to go to the hospital. Once, she was kept waiting on a gurney, in a hallway, for hours.

“This is your mother calling!”

“I know, Mom. Why haven’t they gotten you a room?”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” she said. “The people here in the hallway are just fascinating.” She was giggling.

“Mom. Did they give you something for the pain?”

“Oh, yes, it’s wonderful.”

“The people are interesting?”

“Oh, yes. It’s like a soap opera here.”

Jane, writing to her brother, worried that she had spelled so badly, and expressed herself so poorly—“my Blundering way of Expresing my self,” she called it—that he wouldn’t be able to understand what she meant to say. “I know I have wrote and speld this worse than I do sometimes,” she wrote him, “but I hope you will find it out.”

To “find out” a letter was to decipher it, to turn writing back into speech. Jane knew that letters weren’t supposed to be speeches written down; they were supposed to be more formal. Her brother warned her that she was too free with him. “You Long ago convinced me that there is many things Proper to convers with a Friend about that is not Proper to write,” she confessed. But, then, he scolded her, too, for not being free enough. “I was allways too Difident,” she said he had told her.

“Dont let it mortifie you that such a Scraw came from your Sister,” she begged him.

“Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased her. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for Commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.”

This was, miserably, true.

It was the diffidence that got to me. Female demurral isn’t charming. It’s maddening. Half the time, I wanted to throttle her. Could she ever, would she never, express a political opinion?

I read on. And then, in the seventeen-sixties, a decade of riots, protests, and boycotts, something changed. Jane’s whole family was sick. Her daughter Sally died; Jane took in Sally’s four young children; then two of them died, only to be followed by Jane’s husband and, not long after, by Jane’s favorite daughter. “The Lord Giveth & the Lord taketh away,” she wrote in her Book of Ages. “Oh may I never be so Rebelious as to Refuse Acquiesing & & saying from my hart Blessed be the Name of the Lord.” And then: she put down her pen. She never wrote in her Book of Ages again.

“Realy my Spirits are so much Broken with this Last Hevey Stroak of Provedenc that I am not capeble of Expresing my self,” she wrote to her brother. She did not think she could bear it. In the depth of her despair, she began to question Providence. Maybe her sons had failed not for lack of merit but because they were unable to overcome the disadvantage of an unsteadiness inherited from their father. Maybe her daughters and grandchildren had died because they were poor, and lived lives of squalor. Maybe not Providence but men in power—politics—determined the course of human events.

She wrote to her brother. She wanted to read “all the political Pieces” he had ever written. Could he please send them to her?

“I could as easily make a Collection for you of all the past Parings of my Nails,” he wrote back. He sent what he could. She read, and I read.

She left home in 1775, after the battles of Lexington and Concord, when the British occupied Boston. For a while, she lived with her brother in Philadelphia. After he left for France, she spent the war as a fugitive. “I am Grown such a Vagrant,” she wrote him. When peace came—after he helped negotiate it—he returned to Philadelphia, and she to Boston.

He gave her a house in the North End. She loved it. “I have this Spring been new planking the yard,” she one day boasted, and “am Painting the Front of the House to make it look Decent that I may not be Ashamed when any Boddy Inquiers for Dr Franklins Sister.”

She knew, for the first time, contentment. Except that she was starved for company. “I Injoy all the Agreable conversation I can come at Properly,” she wrote to her brother, “but I find Litle, very Litle, Equal to that I have a Right to by Nature but am deprived of by Provedence.”

It was a shocking thing to say: that she had a right to intelligent conversation—a natural right—but that Providence had deprived her of it. Before the war, she had favored independence from Britain. After it, she found her own kind of freedom. Once she started writing down her opinions, she could scarcely stop.

“I can not find in my Hart to be Pleasd at your Accepting the Government of the State and Therefore have not congratulated you on it,” she wrote to her brother in 1786, when he accepted yet another political appointment. “I fear it will Fatigue you two much.”

“We have all of us Wisdom enough to judge what others ought to do, or not to do in the Management of their Affairs,” he wrote back. “Tis possible I might blame you as much if you were to accept the Offer of a young Husband.”

She let that pass. “I have two favours to Ask of you,” she begged him: “your New Alphabet of the English Language, and the Petition of the Letter Z.”

“My new Alphabet is in a printed Book of my Pieces, which I will send you the first Opportunity I have,” he answered. “The Petition of Z is enclos’d.”

In “The Petition of the Letter Z,” a satire about inequality, Z complains “That he is not only plac’d at the Tail of the Alphabet, when he had as much Right as any other to be at the Head but is, by the Injustice of his Enemies totally excluded from the Word WISE, and his Place injuriously filled by a little, hissing, crooked, serpentine, venomous Letter called S.” In another essay, Franklin proposed a new alphabet. Jane found it cunning, especially since, as she explained, “I am but won of the Thousands & thousands, that write on to old Age and cant Learn.”

“You need not be concern’d in writing to me about your bad Spelling,” he wrote back, “for in my Opinion as our Alphabet now Stands, the bad Spelling, or what is call’d so, is generally the best.” To illustrate, he told her a story: A gentleman receives a note that reads, “Not finding Brown at hom, I delivered your Meseg to his yf.” When both the gentleman and his wife are unable to decipher the note, they consult their chambermaid, Betty. “Why, says she, y. f spells Wife, what else can it spell?”

Jane loved that. “I think Sir & madam were deficient in Sagasity that they could not find out y f as well as Bety,” she wrote her brother, “but some times the Betys has the Brightst understanding.”

“How’s that book about Jane Franklin coming along?” my mother asked, every time I took her out. (We’d go to art museums, mostly. I’d race her around, in a wheelchair.) “Better,” I said.

When Jane was seventy-four, she read a book called “Four Dissertations,” written by Richard Price, a Welsh clergyman and political radical. The first dissertation was called “On Providence.” One objection to the idea that everything in life is fated by Providence, Price wrote, is the failure to thrive: “Many perish in the womb,” and even more “are nipped in their bloom.” An elm produces three hundred and thirty thousand seeds a year, but very few of those seeds ever grow into trees. A spider lays as many as six hundred eggs, and yet very few grow into spiders. So, too, for humans: “Thousands of Boyles, Clarks and Newtons have probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being placed in favourable situations, and enjoying proper advantages.” No one dies for naught, Price believed, but that doesn’t mean suffering is fair, or can’t be protested.

At her desk, with Price’s “Four Dissertations” pressed open, Jane wrote a letter to her brother. “Dr Price thinks Thousand of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world,” she wrote. To this, she added an opinion of her own: “very few we know is Able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding.”

Benjamin Franklin knew, and his sister knew, that very few ever beat through. Three hundred thousand seeds to make one elm. Six hundred eggs to make one spider. Of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, how many? Very few. Nearly none. Only one. Or, possibly: two.

Benjamin Franklin died in 1790. He was eighty-four. Jane died four years later. She was eighty-three. If she ever had a gravestone, it’s long since sunken underground. She believed in one truth, above all: “The most Insignificant creature on Earth may be made some use of in the scale of Beings.”

It wasn’t until last year, sitting by my father in a room in intensive care in a hospital in the town where he’d been born eighty-seven years before, that I realized I had waited too long to write the only book my mother ever wanted me to write. From this Instance, Reader, Be encouraged to Diligence in thy Calling.

We buried my father. My mother ordered a single gravestone, engraved with both their names. I wrote as fast as I could. Meanwhile, I read my mother letters and told my mother stories. In a museum, I found a mourning ring Jane had owned; I told my mother about how, when no one was looking, I’d tried it on. (I didn’t tell her that it didn’t fit, and that I’d found this an incredible relief.) In a library not a dozen miles from Franklin Street, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane’s favorite granddaughter: another Jenny, age nine. I brought my mother a photograph. She looked, for a long time, into that little girl’s eyes. “She’s beautiful,” she said. She smiled. “I’m so glad you found her.”

“That mother of yours,” my father used to say, shaking his head, besotted. He knew he could never live without her. I never knew—never saw, never in the least suspected—that she couldn’t live without him, either. But, after his death, she didn’t last out the year. She died at home, unexpectedly, and alone. She kept her paintbrushes in glass jars in my old bedroom. She was eighty-five.

I finished the last revisions. Too late for her to read it. I wrote the dedication.

Their youngest daughter. In filial regard. Places this stone. ♦

LETTER FROM DHARAMSALA
Aflame

A wave of self-immolations sweeps Tibet.

by Jeffrey Bartholet

On January 12th, the day that Tsering Tashi set himself on fire, he didn’t seem particularly troubled. He ate an early breakfast with his wife and his parents in the house they shared in a village near Amchok, a historically Tibetan township in China’s Gansu Province. Then he took the family herd—most of the animals were dzomos, female yak-cow hybrids prized for their milk yield—to frozen grasslands nearby. He was twenty-two years old and an accomplished horseman, and his family was well respected locally. Tashi watched the animals graze for a few hours, then went home around noon, leaving the herd in the care of friends. It was a frigid, overcast day. Tashi told his mother that he wanted to wear a traditional Tibetan cloak, or chuba. “You should wear a nice thick one,” she said. She asked if Tashi would like to join her for lunch, but he said that he needed to get back to work.

Tashi stopped to see his friends and asked if they would look after his animals a little longer. “I have to go into town,” he said. “There’s something I need to do there.” He seemed to be carrying something heavy in the folds of his chuba, but they didn’t ask what it might be.

When Tashi got to the main square of Amchok, he took a container from his cloak, doused his clothes in gasoline, and set himself alight. He had wrapped wire around his limbs, apparently to insure that the fuel-soaked clothing would stay in place. As flames engulfed his body, he fell to the ground. Then he got up and ran, darting away from some Chinese police he saw on the road. Finally, he collapsed again, the flames sweeping this way and that in the wind. As his clothes turned to ash, Tashi managed to raise his arms and bring his hands together in a final gesture of Buddhist prayer. “Gyawa Tenzin Gyatso,” he called out. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama.” A thirteen-second video, apparently shot by a passerby with a phone, shows Tashi’s flaming body at the moment he raises his arms. In the background, a Tibetan woman hurries a shocked child past the blazing man.

In the past two years, well over a hundred Tibetans have immolated themselves in protest against Chinese rule. The demonstrations have spread across the Tibetan plateau, both in Chinese provinces with significant Tibetan populations—Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu—and in the Tibet Autonomous Region. In 2011, a dozen Tibetans set themselves ablaze—most of them monks or former monks of Kirti Monastery, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Sichuan. Last year, more than eighty Tibetans—monks and nuns, farmers, nomads, students, restaurant workers, and at least one writer—burned to death. The oldest was in his early sixties; the youngest was just fifteen.

Chinese security forces in Tibet quickly seal off areas where immolations occur, to block independent news coverage. Documentaries on the state-run network CCTV portray immolators as delinquents and dupes of the “Dalai Lama clique” and other outside powers, and fire extinguishers have been installed in Tiananmen Square, in case any Tibetans try to set themselves ablaze there. Financial benefits are withheld from the relatives of self-immolators, and there are large rewards for information about people who incite or abet them, an activity that can lead to a charge of “intentional homicide.” Early this year, a monk received a suspended death sentence (which in practice generally means life imprisonment) after being convicted of instigating eight immolations. A foreign-ministry spokesperson told reporters, “We hope that the international community can clearly see, via this judgment, the sinister, malicious methods used by the Dalai Lama clique.” According to the court, the man was working at the behest of monks from Kirti Monastery living in exile in India, an accusation that the monks deny.

Many of the immolations have been captured on camera, and footage and photographs circulate among Tibetan activists. On one level, the protests are a form of political theatre, designed to attract sympathetic attention to the cause of a free Tibet, but their more immediate aim is harder to pin down. There is little likelihood that Chinese policies will change significantly, or that other countries are prepared to expend much diplomatic energy on the matter. Yet, according to Robert Barnett, the director of the Modern Tibet Studies Program at Columbia University, the more oblique aspect of the protests is recognizably Tibetan—the self-expression of a people who have long been deprived of the fundamental freedom to organize and express themselves politically. He told me, “It’s a hidden politics—a politics without words, a politics of symbols, a politics of gestures.”

The tensions between China and Tibet go back more than a millennium. In the eighth century, Tibet was a sizable empire, extending into Central Asia; under the Mongols, in the thirteenth century, it was almost completely overpowered. For long periods, Tibet and China were politically linked while remaining culturally and ethnically distinct: Chinese emperors sent official representatives to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, where they served as symbols of Chinese authority. Tibet was most assertive when China was weakest. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty, in 1912, the thirteenth Dalai Lama declared Tibet independent, but in 1950, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Communists invaded a poorly defended border region and negotiated an agreement that brought Tibet all but entirely under Beijing’s control. Many Tibetans resisted the creeping military takeover, and in 1959, during a failed uprising, the Dalai Lama fled to India.

In the People’s Republic, Tibetans became one of fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minorities. James Leibold, an Australian Sinologist who specializes in China’s ethnic politics, explains that the Communists, faced with the country’s demographic diversity, created a large number of autonomous areas. In theory, minorities had the right to preserve or reform their language and customs, and their regions were given preferences in education and in development funding. But autonomy was severely compromised, in part because of the dominance of the Han Chinese, who make up more than ninety per cent of the over-all population. Leibold believes that a consensus is emerging among China’s political élite that the model of autonomous regions should be jettisoned in favor of assimilation. The pro-assimilation camp points to the breakup of the Soviet Union as a sign that autonomy undermines national unity. “They say, the problem may be bad now, but it will only get worse if you don’t reduce the identification of Tibetans with their own nationality,” Leibold said.

To promote integration, Beijing has invested heavily in infrastructure, building roads and railways across the Tibetan plateau. This has led to better standards of living, particularly for a Tibetan élite that has adopted the language and entrepreneurial outlook of the Chinese. But Tibetans maintain that locals often lack the education and the capital to participate in the boom and that the main beneficiaries have been non-Tibetan migrants, mostly Han Chinese. Furthermore, the imposition of Mandarin Chinese in schools and the settlement of nomads have diluted the Tibetan language and culture. A 2009 report by independent Chinese researchers, studying the causes of a mass Tibetan protest a year earlier, found that “the current rapid process of modernization has not given the ordinary Tibetan people any greater developmental benefits; indeed, they are becoming increasingly marginalized.” The report mentions that many employers consider Tibetans lazy and lacking in business sense. It goes on to say that “non-Tibetans control all major aspects of the local economy,” and that “Tibetans have no way of competing with non-Tibetans in the modernization process.”

Amid mass protests, including attacks on businesses owned by Han Chinese, the Dalai Lama has consistently advocated dialogue over confrontation. His position, known as “the Middle Way,” and formally adopted in the nineteen-eighties, involves renouncing the demand for independence in the hope of securing meaningful autonomy. Yet nine rounds of negotiations ended without result in 2010, and Tibetans worry that China is simply waiting for the Dalai Lama, who is seventy-seven, to die, leaving them without their most powerful symbol of national identity and international support. Lodi Gyari, who was the lead negotiator with China until he resigned last year, said that, if so, the Chinese are miscalculating. He told the Chinese delegates, “Once this Dalai Lama is either too old to be effective or, sadly, not there, then the resentment of the Tibetan people against you will be a hundred times more than what they feel now.”

The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile are based in Dharamsala, a hill town in the north of India, three hundred miles from the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region. The town is a cluster of villages, and the Dalai Lama’s residence and the main temple complex are in the village of McLeod Ganj, high up in the hills. There are several streets with shops, sidewalk stalls, and small restaurants. Tibetan monks and nuns with shaved heads and crimson robes walk among tourists bargaining over Buddha statues, jewelry, and colorful scarves. The buildings are covered with posters advertising Tibetan massage, meditation, yoga, and Hindi lessons. Larger posters and billboards commemorate self-immolations, and whenever one occurs activists organize a solemn candlelit procession.

The exiled wing of the Kirti Monastery, established by the lama Kirti Rinpoche after he fled Tibet half a century ago, is a multi-story concrete structure, a five-minute walk from the Dalai Lama’s residence. The monastery is built into the side of a hill, with a view of the valley below and snowcapped peaks above. In February, I went there to visit Kanyag Tsering, a thirty-four-year-old monk who spends most of his days and evenings collecting information about self-immolations and other activism in the region surrounding the main Kirti Monastery, on the Tibetan plateau. He fled Tibet when he was nineteen, during a period of “reëducation” campaigns, in which Tibetans were forced to pledge their loyalty to the Communist Party and denounce the Dalai Lama.

Tsering works with another monk, Lobsang Yeshe, in a storage room that has been converted into an office. Like reporters, the two monks gather tips and try to substantiate them, passing on what they find out to N.G.O.s, media outlets, and agencies of Tibet’s government-in-exile. A lot of information comes from other exiles, but they also talk to people inside Tibet, who speak in hints and codes, using unregistered cell phones. Voice messages, particularly in local dialects, are safer than text messages, which can be monitored by Chinese security agents. The two monks don’t share information about their sources, even with each other. “When we contact Tibetans inside Tibet, we’re putting their lives at risk,” Tsering explained.

Tsering and Yeshe often have difficulty collating the piecemeal information they receive. On February 4th, Tsering received a message from a Tibetan in exile. The man had heard that someone had set himself on fire near Taktsa Monastery, in Sichuan, and that the body had been taken to the monastery, but he had no further details. A day later, another monk came to Tsering’s office and told him he had heard that a Kirti monk named Lobsang Namgyal had self-immolated, but he didn’t know precisely where or when. For more than a week, Tsering and Yeshe tried to turn ambiguous hints into a coherent account, until Tsering heard from a reliable source who confirmed that the man who self-immolated was indeed Namgyal. He had set himself alight at six in the morning in front of a police station. It was the hundredth self-immolation in Tibet.

Namgyal’s death was particularly upsetting for Tsering and Yeshe, who both knew him from their days at Kirti Monastery. He had been two classes ahead of Tsering and sat across from Yeshe during prayers. Tsering remembers Namgyal as “a very simple monk, very practical,” always fingering his prayer beads. He was not an outstanding student, but he was regarded as disciplined and reliable. The monks heard that things had gone badly for Namgyal in the past year. In September, he disappeared for two weeks; it turned out that he had been in jail. Police spread word in the monastery that he had been caught consorting with prostitutes. Namgyal quietly told a few fellow-monks that this wasn’t true, that he had been interrogated about a relative living in Australia but had refused to speak. Some monks believed his account, Tsering says, but could not openly defend him. Others in the monastery, who didn’t know the full story, began harassing Namgyal for not being a “pure monk.” He felt humiliated and pressured, and eventually left the monastery. “He had nothing left but to set himself on fire,” Tsering said.

I first met Tsering last summer. In his tiny monk’s cell, which until recently doubled as his office, he sat cross-legged on a Tibetan carpet with a dragon motif. He juggled smartphones and SIM cards, surfed Web sites, and organized files on a Samsung computer. He was friendly and talkative, and I learned that he was renowned among the monks as a soccer fanatic—Chelsea is his team—and that he once circumvented the monastery’s strict rationing of television by tapping into the main cable line to watch matches. When I saw Tsering again this year, he seemed more oppressed by his work. As we discussed the burnings, he rubbed the bridge of his nose and sometimes clasped his hands over his ears as if his head might explode. His friends told me that he was suffering from depression. He said that he no longer had time to watch soccer, and that he had migraines and high blood pressure. He had been to the hospital to get checked for chest pains, and one doctor advised him to change jobs. To Tsering, that was inconceivable, because so many people relied on him for information about protests inside Tibet. “We have this responsibility,” Tsering said. “We can’t shrug it off our shoulders.”

Tsering obtained permission for me to spend a night at the monastery, and I stayed in his cell with him. The room, secured by a brown steel door with a large sliding bolt, was big enough for a mattress on a wooden platform, a metal wardrobe, two knee-high tables, and a two-burner gas stove. Small bookshelves were built into the walls. There was a photograph of Tsering’s father, mother, and three younger brothers propped on a ledge. It was a season of bone-chilling rains, but Tsering kept his window open to get fresh air. He put his mattress on the floor and offered me the wooden platform for my sleeping bag. As night fell, we could hear the patter of footsteps in the hallways, yelping dogs in the distance, a monk chanting evening prayers, metal pots being washed, and someone spitting into a communal sink. Shortly before turning in, Tsering read a message on his white iPhone and told me, “Tonight, one Tibetan self-immolated in Tibet.”

The immolations have placed exiled Tibetan leaders in an awkward position: they must pay their respects to the self-immolators without being seen to have encouraged them. Lobsang Sangay, the leader of the government-in-exile, has called for the protests to stop, while also saying it’s a “sacred duty” to honor the self-immolators. Senior lamas have mourned the loss of life, but still extoll the selfless virtues of Tibetans who give their lives to a larger purpose. “We don’t encourage people to self-immolate,” Kirti Rinpoche told me. “But it’s obvious that they have sacrificed for the Tibetan cause, and it’s our responsibility to give voice to what they have done.”

No one is more ambivalent than the Dalai Lama. Regarded by Tibetans as the embodiment of the Buddha of Compassion, he is a deeply committed pacifist. When the first Tibetan self-immolation occurred—in India, a decade before the current protests—the Dalai Lama visited the dying man in the hospital. Whispering through the gauze wrapped around the man’s head, the Dalai Lama said, “Do not pass over with hatred for the Chinese in your heart.”

During the recent wave of immolations, the Dalai Lama has avoided taking a clear stand, but many people close to him feel certain that he wants them to stop. Jeffrey Hopkins, a Tibetologist at the University of Virginia, told me, “There is no doubt he would counsel anyone not to feel hatred.” In an interview with NBC in October, the Dalai Lama said that it was difficult to judge the sacrifices: they could be seen as positive if they were done for the “well-being of the people,” but they were wrong if “carried out with full anger and hatred.” He worries that the Chinese regime will take advantage of any statement he makes. “If he calls on them to stop, and they stop, what will the Chinese say?” one of his aides asked me. “They’ll say, ‘The whole time the Dalai Lama was behind it!’ ”

The Chinese government and its supporters have argued that suicide violates Buddhist principles of nonviolence. “No killing is the first precept of Buddhism and must never be violated,” the Chinese Tibetologist Li Decheng wrote in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Tibetans tend to dismiss this line of argument as disingenuous. Several Buddhist scholars told me that the deaths were, generally speaking, a sacrifice for a higher cause, and should be viewed as different from violence against others or from suicides committed out of personal despair. Lhakdor, a monk who heads the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, said that it was important not to confuse “nonviolence with the absence of violence.” He gave the example of a mother jumping into a pit of fire to save her child as an act of pure compassion. Seen in this light, he said, sacrificing your life for the benefit of others is “not a contradiction, because your life is precious in saving others.”

The exiled Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu has written of the need for “an action-oriented tradition of Buddhism,” in contrast to what he sees as a “quietist, passive, even escapist perception of Buddhism which has gained more widespread acceptance, especially in the West.” Norbu recounted a story from Buddhist scripture in which the Buddha, in an incarnation before his enlightenment, killed a man who was planning a mass murder, thereby saving the lives of hundreds of innocents. Another story describes how the future Buddha came across a starving tigress and her newborn cubs. In an act of supreme compassion, he found a sharp piece of wood, cut himself open, and fed himself to the famished mother. Today, a monastery about forty kilometres outside Kathmandu marks the spot where this is believed to have happened. It’s a popular pilgrimage site, at which people leave offerings of money and food, hang prayer flags, and light butter lamps.

Analysts trying to explain the recent upsurge of immolations point to various possible influences. In addition to Buddhist stories of self-sacrifice, there is the famous example of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk who set himself alight in Saigon in 1963, and the more recent case of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vender whose self-immolation gave rise to the Arab Spring. Neither of these explanations seems quite adequate: Tibetan protests began before Bouazizi killed himself, and the Vietnamese example is not well known in Tibet. Robert Barnett told me that he thought one inspiration for the acts might, in fact, be Chinese. “Modern Chinese politics is all about models who die for the party or the nation,” he said. “It’s a culture where martyrdom is seen as the highest political value.” In “Red River Valley,” a popular Chinese film set during the British occupation of Tibet in 1904, a Tibetan hero lights a spreading pool of fuel to kill himself and his enemies. The film was released in 1997 and was shown widely in Tibet, as part of a policy of identifying China’s struggle against Western countries with the region’s earlier suffering at the hands of the British.

Several Tibetan self-immolators have left written statements explaining their actions. Many demand freedom, including religious freedom and the protection of Tibetan culture and language; others call more specifically for independence. The most common sentiment is an appeal for the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet. Nangdrol, an eighteen-year-old who self-immolated in February, 2012, wrote, “My requests to the Tibetans are: Be United, Be Tibetan, Dress Tibetan, and Speak Tibetan.” Sonam Wangyal, the highest-ranking monk to have immolated himself, declared, “I am giving away my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness, to free all beings from suffering, and to lead them—each of whom has been our mother in the past and yet has been led by ignorance to commit immoral acts—to the Amitabha, the Buddha of infinite light.”

When Tsering Tashi set himself on fire, his aunt, Tsering Kyi, was asleep in her apartment, in Washington, D.C. She had escaped from Tibet in 1999, when she was sixteen, walking for nearly a month through Himalayan mountain passes into Nepal, and came to the United States a decade later. She now hosts television and radio programs for Voice of America, including one called “Cyber Tibet,” which explores Tibetan political and cultural news on the Web.

At around seven o’clock in the morning, her iPhone started to vibrate, and when she answered it all she could hear was a background clamor of cries and prayers in her dialect of Tibetan. Kyi called an elderly friend from her village. “Your brother’s son has passed away,” the man said. “He set fire to himself around two-thirty, and just burned to ash.”

Her first reaction was fury at her nephew. He was his parents’ only son, and the family was devastated. Kyi had spoken on the phone with him only a few days before. He had playfully berated her for the way she dressed on Voice of America television broadcasts. “Why are you always wearing the same chuba?” he said. “You don’t have any other Tibetan dress?” She told him that it was difficult to get Tibetan clothing in the United States: “If you have time, maybe you can bring me one!”

A few hours after learning of Tashi’s death, Kyi reached his father. “He couldn’t talk much. So many people were coming to offer condolences,” she recalled later. Yet he tried to console her. “Why are you crying?” he said. “So many people die in accidents, so many die of sickness. But my son has not died without reason.”

Later that day, someone sent her the short video clip of Tashi’s last moments. Watching the footage of him folding his arms in prayer, she started to respect his fortitude. “That is a really, really strong image,” she said. “He is suffering death by putting his whole body on fire, and he’s still calling out His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s name.”

Beyond that, Tashi left no statement. Kyi suspects that Tashi’s final act was a response to the restrictions placed on Tibetan farmers and herders, the mining of Tibet’s mineral-rich land, the influx of Han Chinese. She also thinks that he may have been inspired by an ancestor, Tenpa Yarko, who, in 1958, led a local rebellion against Communist Chinese forces and shot himself rather than surrender. Yarko’s relatives came to regard him as a family deity. “We pray to him,” Kyi said. “If I talk about these things to a Westerner, it sounds like an ancient story. But it’s a reality.”

After Tashi died, Kyi told me, Chinese security forces set up roadblocks at the three entrances to his village, but local people still found ways in. A few monks came and chanted prayers, defying Chinese orders to stay away. Normally, a body must be kept for several days while astrological charts are consulted and special prayers conducted—to soothe the lingering spirit and insure a good rebirth. But Chinese officials put pressure on the leading lama in the area to make sure that Tashi’s family removed his body quickly and quietly. The second night, when there were no crowds about, men came to help Tashi’s uncle take his body across a nearby river and through the grasslands to a holy mountain. There they lit fires to work by and made preparations for a traditional “sky burial,” in which bodies are left for vultures and other scavengers.

Sky burials are still performed in some Tibetan areas where the frozen ground is too hard to dig and where, according to Buddhist precepts, the dead body is regarded as a spent vessel. The spirit of the deceased, it is thought, has already moved on and its progress will be helped by offering wild creatures a meal. The ceremony is called jhator, which means “alms for the birds.” The men cleaned Tashi’s body of ash, cut up the flesh, and broke the bones to facilitate consumption. Then Tashi’s remains were strewn about on the sacred peak. ♦

A REPORTER AT LARGE
Buried Secrets

How an Israeli billionaire wrested control of one of Africa’s biggest prizes.

by Patrick Radden Keefe

One of the world’s largest known deposits of untapped iron ore is buried inside a great, forested mountain range in the tiny West African republic of Guinea. In the country’s southeast highlands, far from any city or major roads, the Simandou Mountains stretch for seventy miles, looming over the jungle floor like a giant dinosaur spine. Some of the peaks have nicknames that were bestowed by geologists and miners who have worked in the area; one is Iron Maiden, another Metallica. Iron ore is the raw material that, once smelted, becomes steel, and the ore at Simandou is unusually rich, meaning that it can be fed into blast furnaces with minimal processing. During the past decade, as glittering mega-cities rose across China, the global price of iron soared, and investors began seeking new sources of ore. The red earth that dusts the lush vegetation around Simandou and marbles the mountain rock is worth a fortune.

Mining iron ore is complicated and requires a huge amount of capital. Simandou lies four hundred miles from the coast, in jungle so impassable that the first drill rigs had to be transported to the mountaintops with helicopters. The site has barely been developed—no ore has been excavated. Shipping it to China and other markets will require not only the construction of a mine but the building of a railroad line sturdy enough to support freight cars laden with ore. It will also be necessary to have access to a deepwater port, which Guinea lacks.

Guinea is one of the poorest countries on the planet. There is little industry and scarce electricity, and there are few navigable roads. Public institutions hardly function. More than half the population can’t read. “The level of development is equivalent to Liberia or Sierra Leone,” a government adviser in Conakry, Guinea’s ramshackle seaside capital, told me recently. “But in Guinea we haven’t had a civil war.” This dire state of affairs was not inevitable, for the country has a bounty of natural resources. In addition to the iron ore in the Simandou range, Guinea has one of the world’s largest reserves of bauxite—the ore that, twice refined, makes aluminum—and significant quantities of diamonds, gold, uranium, and, off the coast, oil.

As wealthy countries confront the prospect of rapidly depleting natural resources, they are turning, increasingly, to Africa, where oil and minerals worth trillions of dollars remain trapped in the ground. By one estimate, the continent holds thirty per cent of the world’s mineral reserves. Paul Collier, who runs the Center for the Study of African Economies, at Oxford, has suggested that “a new scramble for Africa” is under way. Bilateral trade between China and Africa, which in 2000 stood at ten billion dollars, is projected to top two hundred billion dollars this year. The U.S. now imports more oil from Africa than from the Persian Gulf.

The Western world has always thought of Africa as a continent to take things from, whether it was diamonds, rubber, or slaves. This outlook was inscribed into the very names of Guinea’s neighbor Côte d’Ivoire and of Ghana, which was known to its British masters as the Gold Coast. During the Victorian period, the exploitation of resources was especially brutal; King Leopold II, of Belgium, was so rapacious in his pursuit of rubber that ten million people in the Congo Free State died as a result. The new international stampede for African resources could become another grim story, or it could present an unprecedented opportunity for economic development. Collier, who several years ago wrote a best-seller about global poverty, “The Bottom Billion,” believes that, for countries like Guinea, the extraction of natural resources, rather than foreign aid, offers the greatest chance of economic progress. Simandou alone could potentially generate a hundred and forty billion dollars in revenue over the next quarter century, more than doubling Guinea’s gross domestic product. “The money involved will dwarf everything else,” Collier told me. Like the silver mine in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Nostromo,” the Simandou deposit holds the promise of supplying what Guinea needs most: “law, good faith, order, security.”

As with deepwater oil drilling or with missions to the moon, the export of iron ore requires so much investment and expertise that the business is limited to a few major players. In 1997, the exclusive rights to explore and develop Simandou were given to the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, which is one of the world’s biggest iron-ore producers. In early 2008, Tom Albanese, the company’s chief executive, boasted to shareholders that Simandou was, “without doubt, the top undeveloped tier-one iron-ore asset in the world.” But shortly afterward the government of Guinea declared that Rio Tinto was developing the mine too slowly, citing progress benchmarks that had been missed, and implying that the company was simply hoarding the Simandou deposit—keeping it from competitors while focussing on mines elsewhere.

In July, 2008, Rio Tinto was stripped of its license. Guinean officials then granted exploration permits for half of the deposit to a much smaller company: Beny Steinmetz Group Resources, or B.S.G.R. Beny Steinmetz is, by some estimates, the richest man in Israel; according to Bloomberg, his personal fortune amounts to some nine billion dollars. Steinmetz, who made his name in the diamond trade, hardly ever speaks to the press, and the corporate structures of his various enterprises are so convoluted that it is difficult to assess the extent of his holdings. The Simandou contract was a surprising addition to Steinmetz’s portfolio, because B.S.G.R. had no experience exporting iron ore. A mining executive in Guinea told me, “Diamonds you can carry away from the mine in your pocket. With iron ore, you need infrastructure that can last decades.”

Rio Tinto angrily protested the decision. “We are surprised that a company that has never built an iron-ore-mining operation would have been awarded an area of our concession,” a spokesman said at the time. Company officials complained to the U.S. Embassy in Conakry; one of them suggested that Steinmetz had no intention of developing the mine himself, and planned instead to flip it—“to obtain the concession and then sell it for a big profit.” Rio Tinto viewed Steinmetz, who was rumored to have extensive contacts in Israeli intelligence, as a suspicious interloper. According to a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, the general manager of Rio Tinto told the U.S. Embassy that he did not feel comfortable discussing the Simandou matter on an “unsecured” cell phone. Alan Davies, a senior executive at Rio Tinto, told me that the company had invested hundreds of millions of dollars at the site, and had been moving as expeditiously as possible on a project that would have required decades to complete. “This was quite a shocking event for the company,” he said.

In April, 2009, the Ministry of Mines in Conakry ratified the agreement with Steinmetz. A year later, he made a deal with the Brazilian mining company Vale—one of Rio Tinto’s chief competitors. Vale agreed to pay two and a half billion dollars in exchange for a fifty-one-per-cent stake in B.S.G.R.’s Simandou operations. This was an extraordinary windfall: B.S.G.R. had paid nothing up front, as is customary with exploration licenses, and at that point had invested only a hundred and sixty million dollars. In less than five years, B.S.G.R.’s investment in Simandou had become a five-billion-dollar asset. At that time, the annual budget of the government of Guinea amounted to just $1.2 billion. Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese telecom billionaire, captured the reaction of many observers when he asked, at a forum in Dakar, “Are the Guineans who did that deal idiots, or criminals, or both?”

Steinmetz was proud of the transaction. “People don’t like success,” he told the Financial Times, in a rare interview, in 2012. “It’s disturbing to people that the small David can disturb the big Goliath.” He said that it was B.S.G.R.’s strategy to pursue “opportunities in an aggressive way,” adding, “You have to get your hands dirty.”

In Conakry, there were rumors that Steinmetz had acquired the concession through bribes. According to Transparency International, Guinea is one of the most corrupt countries on earth. A Human Rights Watch report suggested that, when Steinmetz acquired his parcel of Simandou, Guinea was effectively a kleptocracy, with its leaders presiding over “an increasing criminalization of the state.” A recent report by the Africa Progress Panel, which is chaired by Kofi Annan, suggests that well-connected foreigners often purchase lucrative assets in Africa at prices far below market value, by offering inducements to predatory local élites. “Africa’s resource wealth has bypassed the vast majority of African people and built vast fortunes for a privileged few,” it says. The report highlights the billions of dollars that Vale agreed to pay Steinmetz for Simandou, noting that “the people of Guinea, who appear to have lost out as a result of the undervaluation of the concession, will not share in that gain.”

In 2010, several months after the Vale deal was announced, Guinea held its first fully democratic elections since independence, ending half a century of authoritarian rule. The new President, Alpha Condé, had run on a platform of good governance and greater transparency in the mining sector. But as he took office he faced the possibility that Guinea’s most prized mineral asset may have been traded out from under the country. He could not simply void the contract. “There is continuity of the state,” he told me recently. “I couldn’t put things back where they had been—unless I had right on my side.” B.S.G.R. denied any wrongdoing: “These allegations are false, and are a smear campaign against B.S.G.R.,” a company spokesman told me. If the Simandou license had been secured through bribery, then the deal could potentially be undone. But Condé and his advisers would have to prove it.

“I inherited a country but not a state,” Condé told me when I first met him, in January. He had come to the Swiss Alps to attend the World Economic Forum, in Davos, and we met in a hotel suite that was bathed in sunlight reflecting off the snowbanks outside. Condé is a tall man with a high forehead, and he has small eyes that light up with wry amusement when he listens. He wore a brown suit and a red tie. Lowering himself into a wingback chair, he listed slightly to the right while we talked, in a posture of heavy-lies-the-crown fatigue. At times, his elbow appeared to be propping up his whole body, like a tent pole.

When he was elected President, Condé was seventy-two years old, and he had spent much of his life in exile. He left Guinea as a boy, when it was still ruled by France, and eventually settled in Paris, where he became a leader of the pan-African student movements of the nineteen-sixties. He studied law, lectured at the University of Paris, and emerged as perhaps the most famous member of the Guinean opposition. For this distinction, he was sentenced to death, in absentia, by the first despot to rule an independent Guinea, and jailed for more than two years by the second, after he returned, in 1991, to run, unsuccessfully, for President. The 2010 election was bitter—his challenger, Cellou Dalein Diallo, had been a government minister when Condé was thrown in jail. After Condé was finally inaugurated as President, he pledged to be the Nelson Mandela of Guinea.

First, he told me, he had to confront the legacy of a decades-long “state of anarchy.” The government in Conakry had a Potemkin quality: a profusion of bureaucrats showed up for work at crumbling administrative buildings, but there was little genuine institutional capacity. “The central bank, they were printing counterfeit money,” Condé said. Yet he couldn’t fire every official; he’d have to make do with a civil service that had never known anything but graft. “Almost everybody who had any expertise was compromised,” one person who has advised Condé told me. “So he had to balance between people who were competent but compromised and people who were upstanding but inexperienced.”

Condé was defensive about the fact that he had spent so much of his life abroad; when I raised the subject, he snapped, “I know Guinea better than those who have never left.” But his outsider status meant that he was not implicated in the scandals of past administrations. And, having spent much of his life in France, he was strikingly at ease in places like Davos. The U.S. Ambassador in Conakry, Alex Laskaris, told me, “Condé has a much broader circle of contacts and advisers globally than any other African head of state I’ve dealt with.” Bernard Kouchner, the former foreign minister of France, went to high school with Condé, and is a good friend. Kouchner introduced him to George Soros, the billionaire financier, who became an informal adviser, and connected him with Paul Collier, the Oxford economist. Collier, in turn, introduced Condé to Tony Blair, who offered him assistance through an organization that he runs, the Africa Governance Initiative.

These Westerners saw in Condé an opportunity to save Guinea. Collier told me that what the country needed above all was “integrity at the top.” Condé could be ornery; he had a tendency to lecture his interlocutors as though they were students. And, after a life spent in perpetual opposition, it was not clear how well he would govern. From the start, he had difficulties. He came into office with a commitment to complete Guinea’s democratic transition by holding parliamentary elections, but he delayed them, ostensibly on procedural grounds, then delayed them again. Opposition riots broke out in Conakry, leading to a series of violent confrontations between demonstrators and government security forces.

For all the tumult, Condé’s foreign friends and advisers maintain faith in his ethics. “He is absolutely incorruptible,” Kouchner told me. “He’s not luxurious. He’s not travelling. He is having a cold potato at night!” Corinne Dufka, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, has not lost hope that Condé can succeed as a reformer. “There’s a lot of work to be done for Guinea to overcome its legacy of abusive rule,” she said. “Power remains too heavily concentrated in the executive, and, without a robust judiciary or a democratically elected parliament, there is next to no oversight, which they desperately need. But Condé has made real progress in confronting the disastrous governance and rights problems he inherited.”

It is no easy task to transform a country that is corrupt from top to bottom. During Condé’s first months in office, he performed a kind of triage. With the assistance of Revenue Watch—an organization, backed by Soros, that encourages transparency in extractive industries—Condé established a committee to inspect existing mining contracts and determine if any of them were problematic. He didn’t know Steinmetz—“I didn’t know any miners,” he said, with pride—but there were elements of the Simandou deal that appeared to warrant an investigation. “I found it a bit strange that they had invested a hundred and sixty million dollars and were going to earn billions,” Condé said. “It’s a little . . .” He smiled and gave a Gallic shrug.

Beny Steinmetz, who is fifty-six, does not seem to live anywhere in particular. He shuttles, on his private jet, between Tel Aviv (where his family lives, in one of the most expensive houses in Israel), Geneva (where he technically resides, for tax purposes), London (where the main management office of B.S.G.R. is situated), and far-flung locations connected to his diamond and mineral interests, from Macedonia to Sierra Leone. He is technically not an executive of the conglomerate that bears his name, but merely the chief beneficiary of a foundation into which the profits flow. This is a legal fig leaf. Ehud Olmert, the former Prime Minister of Israel and a friend of his, described Steinmetz as “a one-man show.” Olmert continued, “I don’t quite understand the legal aspects—just know that he can work ceaselessly and will move from one side of the globe to the other if he identifies a promising deal.” Steinmetz is very fit and exercises every day, no matter where he is. With blue eyes, tousled sandy hair, a preference for casual dress, and a deep tan, he looks more like a movie agent than like a magnate.

“I grew up in a home where diamonds were the subject,” Steinmetz has said. His father, Rubin, was a Polish diamond cutter who learned the business in Antwerp before settling in Palestine, in 1936. A family photograph from 1977 captures Beny as a young man, sitting at a cluttered table with his two older brothers and his father, who looks sternly at the camera while Beny inspects a precious stone. That year, Beny finished his military service and struck out for Antwerp, with instructions to expand the company’s international business in polished stones. According to a privately published history of the family business, “The Steinmetz Diamond Story,” Beny branched into Africa, in search of new sources of rough stones. The plan wasn’t to establish mines but, rather, to make deals with the people doing the digging.

Approximately half the diamonds in the world originate in sub-Saharan Africa, and many ambitious Westerners have followed the lead of Cecil Rhodes—the founder of De Beers—and sought fortunes on the continent. “Unfortunately, there aren’t any diamond mines in Piccadilly,” Dag Cramer, who oversees Steinmetz’s business interests, told me. “That’s not where God put the assets.”

Instead, diamonds tend to be found in countries that are plagued by underdevelopment and corruption and, often, by war. This is enough to scare off many investors, but not all; some entrepreneurs are drawn to the heady combination of political uncertainty, physical danger, and potentially astronomical rewards. Ambassador Laskaris, who has done tours in Liberia and Angola, likened the diamond trade in much of Africa to the seedy cantina in “Star Wars.” “It attracts all the rejects of the galaxy,” he said. “Low barriers to entry. It rewards corruption. It also rewards a little bit of brutality.”

Steinmetz plunged into Africa’s treacherous political waters. In the nineteen-nineties, he was the largest purchaser of diamonds from Angola; later, he became the biggest private investor in Sierra Leone. Today, Steinmetz is the largest buyer of rough diamonds from De Beers, and one of the major suppliers of Tiffany & Company. And he has diversified his holdings into real estate, minerals, oil and gas, and other fields, with interests in more than twenty countries. A Web site that Steinmetz recently set up describes him as a “visionary” who used a “network of contacts on the African continent” to build “a multi-faced empire.”

Paul Collier, however, takes a dim view of businessmen like Steinmetz, who have secured the rights to natural resources that they may not actually have the expertise to develop. “Their technical competence is a social-network map,” Collier said. “ ‘Who has the power to make the decision? Who can I reach?’ They know how to get a contract—that is their skill.” (Cramer rejected this characterization, insisting that Steinmetz makes sustainable investments wherever he operates. “B.S.G.R. is not a company that has ever been in the business of obtaining rights and flipping them,” he told me.)

Despite his great wealth, Steinmetz has maintained an exceptionally low profile. Last year, after “Hamakor,” a news program on Israeli television, devoted an episode to a battle that he was having with tax authorities in Tel Aviv, he threatened legal action and succeeded in blocking the program from being posted on the Internet. “He’s a very private guy,” Alon Pinkas, a friend of Steinmetz’s who once served as Israel’s consul-general in New York, told me. “His family is all he cares about—and his business.”

Steinmetz’s diamond business, however, has occasionally engaged in some creative publicity. The company sponsors Formula 1 events, sometimes furnishing drivers with diamond-encrusted helmets and steering wheels. At a 2004 race in Monaco, a large Steinmetz diamond was affixed to the nose of a Jaguar race car. As the vehicle tore around a hairpin curve, the driver lost control and the Jaguar slammed into a guardrail. The diamond, which was reportedly a hundred and eight carats and worth two hundred thousand dollars, was never recovered.

General Lansana Conté, the dictator who ruled Guinea before Alpha Condé became President, was famously corrupt: he referred to his ministers, not without affection, as “thieves,” and once remarked, “If we had to shoot every Guinean who had stolen from Guinea there would be no one left to kill.” By 2008, after more than two decades in power, he had become ill, and had largely stopped appearing in public; when he did, he was propped up by bodyguards and orbited by adjutants who often made a show of stooping to whisper in his ear, even when it was obvious, to a close observer, that he was asleep.

During this period, Steinmetz flew to Conakry and met with Conté. At the General’s compound, they sat and talked beneath a mango tree. Conté was aware of B.S.G.R. because it had acquired the rights to explore two small parcels of land abutting the Simandou range—places where others in the mining industry had not thought to look. In 2006, one of Steinmetz’s employees called him from the top of a mountain, using a satellite phone, and said, “Beny, you cannot believe. I’m standing on so much iron here, you have no idea.” After this success, General Conté began to entertain the idea of reapportioning the Simandou deposit. It was not long after he met Steinmetz that he stripped Rio Tinto of its claim and gave B.S.G.R. a license to explore half the Simandou range. Two weeks after General Conté signed the deal, he died.

Hours later, a military coup installed an erratic young Army captain, Moussa Dadis Camara. The junta was a nightmarish period for Guinea. In September, 2009, during an opposition rally at a stadium in Conakry, government soldiers massacred more than a hundred and fifty demonstrators. The U.S. evacuated most of its staff from the Embassy, and the International Criminal Court described the violence as a crime against humanity. But B.S.G.R. stayed put. On one occasion, Steinmetz flew in with two of his sons to meet Captain Dadis. They invited him to Israel to attend the wedding of Steinmetz’s daughter—a celebration with more than a thousand guests. (Dadis sent his regrets.)

To Steinmetz, this cultivation of the junta only proved his company’s unshakable commitment to Guinea. “We put money in the ground at a time when people thought we were crazy,” he told the Financial Times. B.S.G.R. and the junta eventually came to terms over how the company would export iron ore. It did not have to build a deepwater port or a railroad capable of carrying iron ore to Guinea’s coast. Instead, B.S.G.R. could pursue a cheaper option: exporting the ore through Liberia, which already had the necessary infrastructure. For years, the government of Guinea had resisted such a scenario when Rio Tinto had proposed it. As a concession, B.S.G.R. agreed to spend a billion dollars developing a passenger railway for Guinea.

In December, 2009, an aide shot Captain Dadis in the head. He survived, and fled the country; another interim government took over. Once again, Steinmetz weathered the chaos, and in April, 2010, he flew to Rio de Janeiro to finalize the two-and-a-half-billion-dollar deal with Vale. Afterward, he stopped at a shipyard in Chile, to check on the progress of a mega-yacht that he had commissioned to be built there.

When President Condé set out to clean up Guinea’s mining industry, he discovered a generous ally in George Soros. “I was aware of the magnitude of the problem in Guinea,” Soros told me. “I was eager to help.” He enlisted Revenue Watch to provide technical support in revising the mining code. He also suggested that Guinea hire Scott Horton, an attorney at the U.S. law firm D.L.A. Piper; Horton has conducted dozens of corruption investigations around the world.

“There was no way, going up against a guy like Steinmetz, that the Condé government could compete effectively without outside help,” Horton told me. Another difficulty was that so many government officials had held prominent roles in prior regimes. “I can’t task my gendarmerie to do the investigation,” Condé observed to his advisers. “They’ll come up with members of their own families.”

In the spring of 2011, Horton began to investigate the Simandou deal. For assistance, he turned to a man named Steven Fox, who runs a risk-assessment company, in New York, called Veracity Worldwide. When corporations want to do business in countries that suffer from political instability and corruption, Veracity can help them assess if such an investment would be prudent—and viable without breaking the law.

Fox is in his forties, with the bearing of a man who feels most comfortable in a suit. He speaks softly, enunciating each syllable. At a recent meeting at his office, in midtown Manhattan, he told me that until 2005 he had worked for the State Department, and had spent time as a foreign-service officer in Africa. According to Eamon Javers’s “Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy,” a 2011 book about the private-intelligence industry, Fox actually worked for the C.I.A. As we sat down to talk, I noted a bookshelf that was heavy on le Carré and Furst.

When Guinean government officials began looking into the Simandou contract, Fox told me, they had no evidence of malfeasance. “They only heard the rumors on the street,” he said. Fox had met Steinmetz once, in London, and had found him quiet and unassuming, but his understanding was that Steinmetz enlisted employees to pave the way for him—“pointy-end-of-the-spear forward-reconnaissance people.” Fox decided that his first essential task was to identify Steinmetz’s man in Guinea.

He soon pinpointed a candidate: Frédéric Cilins, a tanned, gregarious Frenchman, with thinning hair, who lived on the Riviera, near Cannes, but spent a lot of time in Africa. He had served as a scout for B.S.G.R. in Guinea. When I asked Fox how he had learned of Cilins, his response was enigmatic: “We knew a circle of people who knew a circle of people.”

Fox said of Cilins, “He’s an operator—that’s the best way to describe him.” His role at B.S.G.R. was to accumulate relationships and identify relevant power structures. In that respect, Fox realized, Cilins was not so different from him: they both excelled at parachuting into foreign countries and figuring out what “makes them tick.” (Cilins declined to comment for this article.)

One day in the fall of 2011, Fox flew to Paris and met with Cilins. They had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance; as Cilins understood it, Fox was working on behalf of a client who wanted to know how B.S.G.R. had secured the Simandou deal. Fox told me that, unlike some corporate-espionage outfits (and spies), Veracity does not “pretext”—employ ruses to approach a potential source. Even so, he did not acknowledge that his client was the new government of Guinea.

Fox and Cilins met in a conference room, then went to a restaurant for lunch. Cilins was affable and surprisingly candid. While Fox took notes, Cilins explained that he first visited Guinea in 2005, after a B.S.G.R. executive in Johannesburg had informed him that the company wanted to “shoot for the moon”—a phrase that Cilins took to indicate Simandou. Cilins told Fox that he spent the next six months in Conakry, staying at the Novotel, a seaside property that is popular with mining executives. He became friendly with the staff in the business center, and persuaded them to hand him copies of all incoming and outgoing faxes. In this manner, he learned details about the Conté regime’s frustration with Rio Tinto.

Each time that Cilins flew from France to Guinea, he brought gifts—MP3 players, cell phones, perfumes—which he disbursed among his contacts. They came to think of him as “Father Christmas,” he told Fox. One minister informed him that the only person who mattered in the country was General Conté—and that the way to Conté was through his four wives. (Plural marriage is tolerated in Guinea, a predominantly Muslim country.)

After further inquiries, Cilins focussed on the fourth and youngest wife, Mamadie Touré—a stout, almond-eyed woman who was still in her twenties. “She was young, and she was considered very beautiful,” Fox told me. “She’s not a rocket scientist, but she had a certain dynamism. Most important, she had the ear of the President.”

Cilins hired Touré’s brother to help promote the company’s interests in Guinea, then secured an introduction to her. Not long afterward, Cilins and several associates from the company obtained an audience with the President. At this meeting, Cilins told Fox, they gave General Conté a watch that was inlaid with Steinmetz diamonds. At another meeting, they presented the Minister of Mines with a model of a Formula 1 race car that was similarly encrusted with Steinmetz bling. Soon afterward, Touré’s brother was named the head of public relations for B.S.G.R.-Guinea.

Fox shrugged when asked why Cilins had confided in him. “There’s an element of arrogance,” he said. “Or of complete naïveté. Of believing they did what they did and there was no big deal.” Cilins seemed proud of his work in Conakry. He told Fox that, in his view, the history of Guinea would henceforth be thought of as dividing into two periods—“before and after B.S.G.R.”

To Cilins, giving gifts may have seemed simply like the cost of doing business in places like Guinea. Many countries aggressively prosecute domestic corruption but are much more permissive when it comes to bribes paid abroad. Until fairly recently, French firms that gave bribes in order to secure business in foreign countries could declare them as deductible business expenses.

In recent years, however, international norms have begun changing. The U.S. Justice Department has dramatically increased its enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; the U.K. has passed its own stringent Bribery Act; and the Organization for Economic Coöperation and Development has instituted a convention against bribery, and several dozen countries—including Israel—have signed it. Major companies, like Siemens and K.B.R., have settled corruption investigations by paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. (Rio Tinto, too, has contended with corruption; in 2010, four representatives of the company were convicted of accepting bribes in China.) Many multinational corporations have responded to the increased vigilance about graft by establishing robust internal-compliance departments that monitor employee behavior. B.S.G.R. says that it conducts itself ethically wherever it operates, and a company representative pointed out to me that neither Steinmetz nor his organization has ever been implicated in bribery. But B.S.G.R. does not have a compliance department, and it does not have a single employee whose chief responsibility is to monitor company behavior abroad.

Shortly after General Conté died, Mamadie Touré fled Guinea. Fox and his colleagues discovered that she was living in Jacksonville, Florida. The World Bank estimates that forty per cent of the private wealth in Africa is held outside the continent. In a recent civil-forfeiture proceeding against the son of the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, the Justice Department documented some of his possessions: a twelve-acre estate in Malibu, a Gulfstream jet, seven Rolls-Royces, eight Ferraris, and a white glove once worn by Michael Jackson.

Jacksonville isn’t Malibu. But, when Fox and his team investigated, they discovered that Touré had purchased a McMansion on a canal there, along with a series of smaller properties in the vicinity.

When you disembark from a plane in Conakry, the corruption hits you almost as quickly as the heat. At the airport, a uniformed officer will stop you, raising no specific objections but making it clear, with his body, that your exit from the situation will be transactional. Out on the rubble-strewn streets, which are perfumed by the garbage that clogs the city’s open sewers, the military presence is less conspicuous than in the past—security-sector reform has been a priority for Condé—but at night insouciant young soldiers position themselves at intersections, holding submachine guns; they lean into passing cars and come away with cash. In 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote of post-colonial West Africa, “Concessions are snatched up by foreigners; scandals are numerous, ministers grow rich, their wives doll themselves up, the members of parliament feather their nests and there is not a soul down to the simple policeman or the customs officer who does not join in the great procession of corruption.” This description no longer applies to the region as a whole—Ghana, for example, is a prospering democracy—but in Guinea little has changed.

One afternoon, I went to a whitewashed building in Conakry’s administrative quarter to meet Nava Touré, a former professor of engineering whom Condé had entrusted with running the technical committee on mines. Touré (no relation to Mamadie Touré, the General’s fourth wife) has a round face, a melodious voice, and a decorous, almost ethereal, manner. During the months that I spent reporting this story, Nava Touré was one of the few officials in the government about whom I never heard even a rumor of corruption. He had been charged with establishing a new mining code that would create a more equitable balance between the interests of the mining companies and the people of Guinea. In addition, he had been asked to review all existing mining contracts and recommend whether any of them should be renegotiated or rescinded. But when he turned his focus on Simandou he had no staff of trained inspectors, so he relied on D.L.A. Piper, the law firm, and Steven Fox, the investigator. “It was outsourced,” Touré told me.

Last October, he sent an incendiary letter to representatives of the joint venture between Vale and B.S.G.R., identifying “possible irregularities” in the Simandou concession. It called Frédéric Cilins “a secret proxy” for Steinmetz, raised suspicions about Cilins’s alliance with Mamadie Touré, and itemized gifts such as the diamond watch and the bejewelled model race car. The letter accused B.S.G.R. of planning all along to flip the rights to Simandou, in order “to extract immediate and substantial profits.”

Nava Touré’s accusations also implicated a man he knew: Mahmoud Thiam, who had served as the Minister of Mines under the junta that ruled Guinea after General Conté’s death. Touré had been one of Thiam’s advisers at the time. Thiam came to the job, in early 2009, with stellar credentials. After obtaining an economics degree from Cornell, he had worked as a banker at Merrill Lynch and U.B.S. Thiam was handsome, very polished, and a champion of Beny Steinmetz. In 2010, in an interview on “Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo,” on CNBC, Thiam praised the “very aggressive junior company, B.S.G.R., that came and developed that permit to the point where it made it attractive to a big player like Vale.” Simandou, Thiam said, would “catapult the country into the No. 3 iron-ore exporter in the world.” He had attended the lavish wedding of Steinmetz’s daughter in Israel, as a representative of the junta.

According to Nava Touré’s letter, Thiam not only took payoffs from B.S.G.R.; he effectively worked as the company’s paymaster, meeting a corporate jet at Conakry airport, unloading suitcases full of cash, and then distributing bribes to the junta’s leaders. Steven Fox, the American investigator, had discovered that while Thiam was minister he took to driving around Conakry in a Lamborghini. Before he left office, in 2011, he bought an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, for $1.5 million, and an estate in Dutchess County, for $3.75 million. He paid for both properties with cash.

Thiam currently lives in the U.S., running an investment-advisory firm. This spring, I visited him at his elegant office, on Madison Avenue. He denied any wrongdoing. The Manhattan apartment, he explained, was paid for with money that he had made in banking. And he had bought the country estate on behalf of a Mozambican friend who was looking to invest in the U.S. (Thiam refused to name the friend.) The Lamborghini was not a sports car but a four-wheel-drive vehicle. “You can’t serve as mining minister without being accused of corruption,” he told me. He regards the review of the B.S.G.R. contract as little more than a witch hunt, but added that he still maintains the highest respect for Nava Touré.

During our meeting in the whitewashed building, I asked Touré how it made him feel to learn of such allegations about former colleagues. He paused. “The feeling of shame,” he said at last. “Because, finally, what they have got personally—let’s say ten million U.S. dollars, twelve million U.S. dollars—what does that amount to? Compared with the lives of the whole country?” The lights in the room suddenly shut off, and the air-conditioner powered down. He didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t think that it is tolerable or acceptable from the investors,” he continued. “But I’m more shocked by the attitude and the behavior of the national decision-makers.”

When B.S.G.R. received Touré’s letter, it responded aggressively, dismissing the investigation as an effort by President Condé to expropriate its asset. The company insisted that it had never given a watch to General Conté; though the story about the miniature Formula 1 car was true, the model had a value of only a thousand dollars, and B.S.G.R. routinely gave such “gifts to companies around the world.” Frédéric Cilins had worked for the company, but “B.S.G.R. never told Mr. Cilins that it ‘asked for the moon.’ ” Cilins may have distributed gifts among his contacts in Conakry, but the company denied any knowledge of them. Oddly, B.S.G.R.’s written response insisted, more than once, that Mamadie Touré had not actually been the wife of General Conté.

B.S.G.R. faulted the Condé administration for failing to name the sources of the allegations, and noted that any payments made to public officials “would be easily identified by bank transfers, payment orders, copies of checks, etc.” Again and again, B.S.G.R. returned to “the absence of the smallest amount of supporting proof.”

But how do you prove corruption? By its nature, corruption is covert; payoffs are designed to be difficult to detect. The international financial system has evolved to accommodate a wide array of illicit activities, and shell companies and banking havens make it easy to camouflage transfers, payment orders, and copies of checks. Paul Collier argues that there are often three parties to a corrupt deal: the briber, the bribed, and the lawyers and financial facilitators who enable the secret transaction. The result, he says, is “a web of corporate opacity” that is spun largely by wealthy professionals in financial capitals like London and New York. A recent study found that the easiest country in which to establish an untraceable shell company is not a tropical banking haven but the United States.

In the spring of 2012, one of President Condé’s ministers took a trip to Paris. At the Hilton Arc de Triomphe, he was approached by a Gabonese businessman. According to an affidavit by the minister, the Gabonese man said that he had been in contact with Mamadie Touré, and that she had provided him with documents that would be interesting to President Condé. “Madame Touré was angry with Mr. Beny Steinmetz,” the Gabonese man said. She believed that “she had been taken advantage of.”

The minister was astonished by the documents. They appeared to be a series of legal contracts, complete with signatures and official seals, between officers of B.S.G.R. and Mamadie Touré. The documents contained the signature of Asher Avidan, the head of the company’s Guinea operations. Avidan was a former member of Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet. The contracts had been signed in Conakry in February, 2008—five months before General Conté took the Simandou concession away from Rio Tinto, and ten months before the northern half of that concession was given to Beny Steinmetz. The agreements stipulated that Touré would be granted a five-per-cent stake in the northern “blocks” of Simandou, in addition to “two (2) million” dollars, which would be paid through a shell company. In exchange, she committed “to do all that is necessary” to help B.S.G.R. “obtain from the authorities the signature for the obtaining of said blocks.”

An American lawyer involved in the case told me, “I’ve been involved in corporate corruption work for thirty years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. A contract for bribery that’s actually signed by a senior executive? Corporate seals?” The Gabonese man intimated that the documents were potentially worth millions of dollars. He was not going to part with such a valuable commodity for free. He was associated with an investment company, Palladino, which had loaned the Condé government twenty-five million dollars to set up a mining project. Now, in return for the documents, the Gabonese man wanted his own stake in Simandou. (Palladino acknowledges that the Paris meeting took place, but denies that the Gabonese businessman made any such demands.)

President Condé refused to make a quid-pro-quo deal for the documents, but at least the Guinean government knew of their existence. If they were genuine, they could be that rare thing: proof of corruption.

When I asked Steven Fox, the investigator, why any company would sign such a contract, he suggested that Touré may have insisted upon it. “There’s a whole Francophone-African culture of these very legalistic documents that formalize certain arrangements,” he explained. And Touré would have been concerned about securing her position. “Her sole value was that she was the wife of the President,” he said. When the contract was signed, the General’s health was in rapid decline, and “she knew that the minute he closed his eyes she would have absolutely nothing.” At first glance, it seemed odd that she had entrusted copies of the documents to the Gabonese man. But several people who have spoken to Touré suggested to me that she had grown to fear Steinmetz. The contracts—which, if exposed, could potentially imperil his position in Guinea—amounted to a form of insurance policy.

By this time, President Condé had come to fear for his safety as well. In 2011, he had narrowly survived an assassination attempt, in which soldiers bombarded his residence in Conakry with machine-gun fire and rockets. He pressed on with his efforts to reform Guinea, but his situation grew more precarious. His Treasury chief, whom Condé had charged with investigating embezzlement by government officials, was driving home from work one night when her car was cut off by another vehicle; she was shot and killed. Bernard Kouchner said of Condé, “He is really isolated.” After the attack on his residence, Condé moved into the Presidential palace, a cavernous fortress, constructed by Chinese contractors, which one diplomat referred to as “the Dim Sum Palace.” Condé is married, but at night he often ate alone, occasionally watching a soccer game to distract him from his worries. He did not discuss the matter with me, but several people who have spoken with Condé about it told me that he believes that Steinmetz is eavesdropping on his communications. (B.S.G.R. denies this.)

Condé was also contending with an unstable capital. The violence that erupted after he delayed parliamentary elections did not abate. Rival factions fought one another in the street, and protesters threw rocks at police. In several instances, Condé’s security forces fired on protesters. More than two dozen people died. To some, it looked as if Condé might replicate the sad pattern of many post-colonial African leaders who have started as reformers and then drifted into tyranny. In September, 2011, Amnesty International declared that “President Alpha Condé is resorting to exactly the same brutal methods as his predecessors.”

Ehud Olmert told me that Steinmetz “is the last guy you want as an enemy.” B.S.G.R.—sensing, perhaps, that Condé was politically vulnerable—went on the attack, labelling his government a “discredited regime” that was trying to “illegally seize” the Simandou deposit. The company also pointed out that Rio Tinto had reacquired the rights to the southern half of Simandou, eventually paying the Condé government seven hundred million dollars to secure the deal.

But was this corruption at work? Rio Tinto’s payment was, in part, a reflection of a new mining code, which levied higher taxes on international companies exporting Guinean resources. The company also granted the government up to a thirty-five-per-cent stake in the mine. In this respect, the Condé administration was trying to bring mining into line with the more equitable deals made by the oil-and-gas industry. (Dag Cramer, the executive who oversees Steinmetz’s business interests, told me, “There’s a reason Arab families own half of London today. The bulk of the profits from oil are being extracted by the host countries. This hasn’t happened yet in mining.”) The Rio Tinto deal was also transparent: the contract was published, in its entirety, on the Internet. “This is something that no other Guinean government would have done, at any point in the country’s history,” Patrick Heller, who works at Revenue Watch, told me. “It’s a huge sign of progress.” Moreover, the funds went not into numbered bank accounts but directly into the Guinean treasury.

Nevertheless, several B.S.G.R. employees suggested to me that the seven hundred million dollars amounted to a colossal bribe. They further speculated that Condé had “stolen” the election in 2010, by collaborating with wealthy South African backers to rig the results. In conversations with me, friends of Steinmetz’s likened Condé to Robert Mugabe and to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Both the Carter Center and the European Union, which monitored the election, found that, despite some procedural irregularities, Condé’s victory was “credible” and “fair.”)

In September, 2011, Condé invited Steinmetz to Conakry, to clear the air. Steinmetz arrived at the palace, and they sat in Condé’s office, speaking in French. (Steinmetz is fluent.) “Why are you against us?” Steinmetz asked. “What have we done wrong?”

“I have no personal problem with you,” Condé replied. “But I have to defend the interests of Guinea.”

Steinmetz was not placated. Cramer told me that the company had to counter the allegations as forcefully as possible, because, for Steinmetz, “the perception of him being an honest person” was crucial. “In the diamond business, a handshake is more important than a contract,” Cramer explained.

B.S.G.R. expanded its campaign against Condé, and turned to a company called F.T.I., which is based in Palm Beach but has operations throughout the world. F.T.I. practices an aggressive form of public relations, seeking not only to suppress negative media coverage about a client but also to plant unfavorable stories about the client’s adversaries. An F.T.I. spokesman blasted the Guinean government’s review process, calling it a “crude smear campaign.” The firm encouraged journalists to run negative stories about Condé; the President soon began to receive bad press about the delay in setting parliamentary elections and about several ostensibly dubious transactions made by people close to him, including his son, Alpha Mohamed Condé. It is not hard to imagine that at least some of Condé’s associates have made side deals. “I practice the watch theory of politics,” a Western diplomat in Conakry told me. “When a minister is wearing a watch that costs more than my car, I start to worry.” During my interviews with officials in Conakry, I spotted more than one conspicuously expensive watch; in the Guinean fashion, the watches hung loose on the wrist, like bracelets.

Inside F.T.I., the decision to work on behalf of Steinmetz caused discord. In 2012, the company hired a new executive to oversee some of its accounts in Africa, and when he discovered that the firm represented Steinmetz and Dan Gertler—another Israeli diamond mogul, who has been involved in controversial deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the executive protested, then resigned. Mark Malloch-Brown, the former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, is now F.T.I.’s chairman for the Middle East and Europe. He grew concerned that the company’s reputation might be damaged by its association with Steinmetz, and earlier this year he terminated the relationship. The leadership at B.S.G.R. was incensed.

As the company’s troubles accumulated, Steinmetz and his colleagues began to direct their feelings of grievance at George Soros, who had financed Condé’s initial investigation and provided seed money to D.L.A. Piper. Soros also bankrolled Revenue Watch, the organization that had been assisting Nava Touré in revising Guinea’s mining code, and supported Global Witness, an anti-corruption watchdog group that had been looking into Steinmetz’s activities in Guinea. B.S.G.R. executives became convinced that Malloch-Brown had terminated the F.T.I. contract at the behest of an old friend of his: Soros. Cramer showed me an internal document, titled “The Spider,” which depicted Soros and Condé at the center of a web of influence, and which identified Soros as “a hater of Israel.” The firm sent Soros an angry letter, saying, “We can no longer remain silent letting you ceaselessly maul our company and maliciously attempt wrecking the investment.”

Earlier this year, lawyers for Steinmetz sent a letter to Malloch-Brown, demanding that he acknowledge his “personal vendetta” against Steinmetz, sign a formal apology that they had scripted, and “clear” B.S.G.R. of any wrongdoing in Africa. When Malloch-Brown refused, B.S.G.R. sued him, along with F.T.I. The lawsuit claimed that Soros nurtured a “personal obsession” with Steinmetz; it also alleged that Soros had perpetuated a shocking rumor—that Steinmetz tried to have President Condé killed, by backing the mortar attack on his residence in 2011. (B.S.G.R. maintains that this rumor is entirely unfounded; the lawsuit was recently settled out of court, with no admission of wrongdoing by Malloch-Brown or F.T.I.)

When I asked Soros about Steinmetz, he insisted that he holds no grudge against him. A major philanthropist, Soros has long been committed to promoting transparency and curtailing corruption, and he funds numerous organizations in these fields. It is true that some of these groups have converged, lately, on the activities of Steinmetz. This may mean that Soros is obsessed with Steinmetz; or it may mean that Steinmetz is corrupt.

Soros told me that he had never met Steinmetz. When I asked Cramer about this, he said, “That’s a lie.” In 2005, the two men had attended a dinner at Davos, and spoke to each other. Presented with this account, Soros said that he has gone to many dinners at Davos over the years. If he did meet Steinmetz, he had no memory of it.

One day in April, Frédéric Cilins—the Frenchman who allegedly orchestrated the bribes in Guinea—flew to Jacksonville for an urgent rendezvous. Mamadie Touré met him at the airport. They sat in a bar-and-grill in the departures area, and she ordered a chicken-salad sandwich. Cilins was not as composed as he usually is; he suffers from high blood pressure, and as they spoke, in hushed tones, he was extremely anxious. He had come to Florida on a mission. He told Mamadie Touré that she must destroy the documents—and that he was willing to pay her to do it.

She informed him that it might already be too late: she had recently been approached by the F.B.I. “They’re going to give me a subpoena,” she said. A grand jury had been convened, and the authorities would expect her to testify and turn over “all the documents.”

“Everything must be destroyed!” Cilins said. It was “very, very urgent.”

Cilins did not realize that he had fallen into a trap. Touré was wearing a wire. She had indeed been approached by the authorities and, aware of her own legal predicament, had agreed to coöperate with the F.B.I. As she subsequently explained in an interview with Guinean authorities, Cilins and his colleagues had “one single concern,” which was “to get these documents back at any price.”

As federal agents observed from around the restaurant and the wire recorded every word, she asked Cilins what she should do if she was summoned before the grand jury. “Of course, you have to lie!” he said, according to a court filing that quotes the exchange. Cilins then suggested that she should deny that she had ever been married to General Conté.

Touré and Cilins had spoken on the phone before meeting in Jacksonville, and at one point she had asked him if the plan to buy her silence had been authorized by an individual who is identified in court documents only as “CC-1,” for “co-conspirator.” Two sources close to the investigation told me that CC-1 is Beny Steinmetz.

“Of course,” Cilins had replied. That call, too, was recorded by the F.B.I.

At the airport, Cilins said that he had seen CC-1—Steinmetz—the previous week. “I went specially to see him,” he explained. He lowered his voice to a whisper and said he had assured Steinmetz that Touré would “never betray” him, and would “never give away any documents whatsoever.”

Steinmetz’s response, according to Cilins, was “That’s good. . . . But I want you to destroy these documents.”

Touré told Cilins that the documents were in a vault, and assured him that she would destroy them. But he wasn’t satisfied, explaining that he had been instructed to watch the papers burn.

If she agreed to this plan, Cilins told her, she would be paid a million dollars. He had brought along an attestation—a legal document, in French—for her to sign. (Cilins’s comfort with formal legal agreements appears to have extended even into the realm of the coverup.) “I have never signed a single contract with B.S.G.R.,” the attestation read. “I have never received any money from B.S.G.R.” The arrangement included a possible bonus, Cilins said. If she signed the attestation, destroyed the documents, and lied to the grand jury, and if B.S.G.R. succeeded in holding on to its asset at Simandou—“if they’re still part of the project”—she would receive five million dollars.

Before Cilins could leave Jacksonville, he was arrested. This put B.S.G.R. in an awkward position. The transcript of the airport conversation looked very much like confirmation of bribery. Mamadie Touré’s documents were now in the possession of the Department of Justice. The government of Guinea had also obtained a videotape, shot during the opening of B.S.G.R.’s office in Conakry, in 2006, that seemed to further illustrate Touré’s close relationship with the company. It shows Cilins sitting next to Asher Avidan, who is addressing a crowd of Guineans. Touré then makes an entrance, resplendent in a white headdress and flowing robes, and flanked by members of the Presidential guard—implicitly conferring, by virtue of her presence, the approval of her dying husband.

When news of the arrest in Jacksonville broke, Vale released a statement saying that it was “deeply concerned about these allegations,” and committed to working with the relevant authorities. By this time, it seems safe to assume, the Brazilian company may have developed some buyer’s remorse over its iron-ore project in Guinea. When I visited the Conakry office of V.B.G.—the joint venture of Vale and the Beny Steinmetz Group—it was operating with a skeleton staff, and the project was clearly on hold, though the executives there would say nothing for the record.

“The question for Vale is: What were you thinking?” a diplomat in Conakry told me. “Did you really think you would be able to start a fifty-year project exporting iron ore in the remotest part of Guinea on the basis of a clearly dubious deal?” Having paid only half a billion dollars to B.S.G.R. so far, Vale has refused, for the moment, to make any further payments on the two billion dollars it still owes.

In mid-June, I flew to Nice, on the French Riviera, and proceeded in a taxi to Cap d’Antibes, a resort town favored by billionaires. I had spent several months trying to meet with Steinmetz, without success. I had visited the B.S.G.R. offices in London, and been told when I arrived that Steinmetz would meet me in Paris. By the time I reached Paris, he had left on his private plane for Israel. I volunteered to fly to Israel, but was told that he wouldn’t necessarily meet with me when I got there. After weeks of negotiation, I finally managed to speak to him by telephone, and after a brief conversation—in which he announced, flatly, “I don’t give interviews”—he agreed to see me.

We met at a hotel that was perched above the Mediterranean. Steinmetz was staying on one of his yachts—an Italian model. A sleek white multistory vessel, it floated regally in the distance. As I entered the lobby, I brushed past a slim, deeply tanned man wearing a blue linen shirt that was unbuttoned halfway to his navel. It was Steinmetz.

“Thank you for making the trip,” he said when I introduced myself. He seized my hand with the formidable grip of someone who puts a lot of stock in a handshake. We left the hotel and made our way up a steep hill, toward a suite of offices. Steinmetz moved almost at a trot; I had to scramble to keep up.

“I’m totally open—totally transparent,” Steinmetz told me when we sat down. “I never lie, as a principle.” He resents the idea that he is secretive, and believes that he simply protects his right to privacy. “I don’t consider myself a public person,” he said.

We talked for nearly three hours, until Steinmetz grew hoarse. He said that he felt blindsided by the controversy over Simandou. People who think that it is inherently outlandish to make billions of dollars on an investment of a hundred and sixty million simply don’t understand that the natural-resources business is a game of chance. “It’s roulette,” Steinmetz said; if you work hard, and take risks, you sometimes “get lucky.” As a small company that was comfortable with risk, B.S.G.R. made investments that the major mining companies wouldn’t. His company lost money in Tanzania. It lost money in Zambia. But in Guinea it won.

Steinmetz argued that the deal with Vale was not an effort by B.S.G.R. to sell off its asset but, rather, a partnership of the sort that is often necessary with ambitious, resource-intensive mining projects. “How did we flip?” he asked. “Why is bringing a partner in a flip?”

In our telephone call, Steinmetz had described the saga of Simandou as “a very African story,” and when we met I asked him how his company has dealt with the pervasiveness of corruption in Africa. “Very strict instructions and guidelines to people on the ground,” he said, insisting that, even in jurisdictions that are notorious for graft, the company does not pay bribes. “We manage our business like the most transparent public company,” he said.

To hear Steinmetz tell it, the former leaders of Guinea were undeserving of the widespread censure they had received. General Conté was “more honest” than President Condé. Captain Dadis, the junta leader who presided over the stadium massacre, was “an honest guy” who simply “wanted the best for his country.”

President Condé was the real villain in this story, Steinmetz said. His loathing for Condé was so palpable that, whenever he mentioned him, the tendons in his neck stood out.

Steinmetz claimed that the accusations against him were the product of a concerted smear campaign, initiated by Condé and financed by George Soros. “According to the Jewish religion, if you say somebody is guilty of something without proof, this is a very bad thing to do,” Steinmetz said. And the documents that were discussed in Jacksonville did not prove anything, he said—they were forgeries.

After failing to meet Steinmetz in Paris, I had met Asher Avidan, the head of B.S.G.R.’s Guinea operations, for a drink. When I presented him with a photograph of a signature that appeared on one of the contracts, he had acknowledged that it was identical to his own but dismissed it as “a simple Photoshop.” In Cap d’Antibes, Steinmetz elaborated on this theme, claiming that Mamadie Touré’s documents were fake, and that long before the F.B.I. investigation began she had tried to blackmail B.S.G.R., using the fraudulent contracts as leverage. “We never paid her,” Steinmetz insisted. “We never promised her anything.”

He pulled out color photocopies of the documents, and pointed at sequential notations that had supposedly been made on each contract by the notary public in Conakry. These notations, he said, ran in descending rather than ascending order—proof that they were inauthentic. I told him that I could imagine a scenario in which the documents were forgeries, and conceded that Touré was not exactly an unimpeachable witness. But the transcript of the Jacksonville conservation did not look good for Steinmetz, and I told him that there was another factor that inclined me to consider the documents real: if they were fake, why would Frédéric Cilins fly across the Atlantic and offer Touré five million dollars to destroy them? I posed the question to Steinmetz multiple times, in multiple ways, but he replied only that he would not “speculate” about Cilins while his case was before the courts.

I pressed the matter. “Cilins told Mamadie Touré, ‘I’ve spoken to Beny. He told me to do this.’ Did you?”

“I didn’t ask him to destroy these fake documents or any other documents,” Steinmetz said.

Was Cilins lying about Steinmetz’s directive, then? Or was he somehow mistaken?

Steinmetz, growing impatient, reiterated that he did not want to speculate about Cilins. He did want to talk, however, about Condé’s responsibility for the deaths of protesters in Guinea. “The guy has blood on his hands,” Steinmetz said.

“Captain Dadis had blood on his hands, too,” I observed. “And you invited him to your daughter’s wedding.”

Steinmetz stared at me for a second, then said, “I’m not going to argue or go into depth about the politics of Guinea.”

Even as we were meeting in France, the leaders of the Group of Eight had assembled in Northern Ireland. A major goal was to assess the rules governing how executives from wealthy nations conduct themselves when they venture into the developing world. Before the summit, Prime Minister David Cameron, of the U.K., published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: “We must lift the veil of secrecy that too often lets corrupt corporations and officials in some countries run rings around the law. The G-8 must move toward a global common standard for resource-extracting companies to report all payments to governments, and in turn for governments to report those revenues.”

In developing this ambitious agenda, Cameron had been closely advised by Paul Collier. “This is Africa’s big opportunity,” Collier told me. “But it’s a nonrenewable opportunity.” If companies are allowed to acquire natural resources without full transparency, the result will be plunder—or, as Collier puts it, “a tragedy of awesome proportions.” At Cameron’s invitation, President Condé travelled to London before the meeting. “If we are to fight against exploitation and bring about transparency, we are going to need the help of the G-8,” Condé said, in a speech at Chatham House, the foreign-policy think tank. “Mining companies are mostly in the West.”

Steinmetz was appalled by the lionization of Guinea’s leader. The current government, he said, is a “sophisticated” version of a corrupt regime, because “they are pretending to be honest.” He repeated a claim that some of his colleagues had made—that Condé had stolen the 2010 election by promising to strip B.S.G.R. of its Simandou license and transfer the rights to his backers. “He sold our assets to South African interests who provided him with financial support to manipulate the election,” he said. Even before Condé entered office, he had decided “that he was going to take Simandou from us.” In Steinmetz’s telling, Condé is like the title character in “Nostromo”—the “perfectly incorruptible” man who, through his own vanity and the spell of the mine, finally succumbs to corruption.

“We are the victims,” Steinmetz said. “We have done only good things for Guinea, and what we’re getting is spit in the face.” With that, he wished me well. Dusk was falling, and I descended the hill while Steinmetz headed back to his yacht for dinner.

Shortly after Frédéric Cilins was arrested in Florida, I went to Conakry and visited President Condé at the Dim Sum Palace. He wore a white suit with short sleeves—a common style in Guinea—and looked tired. The violent opposition rallies showed no sign of stopping, and it was not entirely clear that Condé would hold on to power long enough to fulfill his reform agenda. Having failed to hold parliamentary elections, he was also at risk of losing his credibility as a genuinely democratic leader. Alexis Arieff, a Guinea expert at the Congressional Research Service, told me, “He came in with a real sense of having fought for the Presidency, and deserving a free hand in how he runs the country—‘This is mine, I went to prison for this, I suffered for this.’ ” A European Union report recently blamed “Condé’s governing style” for the escalating tension in the country. Condé, for his part, felt that Steinmetz had played a role in the unrest; at Chatham House, he intimated that B.S.G.R. is funding the opposition movement. (Steinmetz told me that this was false.)

When I asked Condé if he felt vindicated when the U.S. Justice Department began investigating the Simandou deal, he refused to take the bait. It is ultimately up to him to decide—on the basis of counsel from the mining ministry—whether or not to strip B.S.G.R. and Vale of the Simandou license, and he did not want to say anything that might prejudice this process. Instead, he smiled and said, “The actions of the United States can help me advance in the struggle against corruption in Guinea.”

Cilins’s bail was set at fifteen million dollars, because of the danger that he might flee the U.S. In May, he pleaded not guilty to obstruction-of-justice charges, and it’s possible that he will decide to coöperate with authorities; in his court filings, he has not denied offering Mamadie Touré money to destroy the documents, or doing so at the behest of Steinmetz. B.S.G.R. continues to maintain that it never paid any money to Touré or signed any contracts with her. But Asher Avidan said something interesting in our conversation at the Paris bar. He repeated B.S.G.R.’s claim that Touré had not been married to General Conté when he signed over the rights to Simandou. “She was not his wife,” Avidan said. “Not even sleeping with him.” Then he added, “She is a lobbyist. Like a thousand others.”

It suddenly occurred to me why B.S.G.R. officials might be so committed to the notion that Touré had not been married to the old General. If she was not related to him, then she was merely another local influence peddler—a lobbyist. And it might be argued that, as a legal matter, paying a lobbyist is different from paying a bribe. If B.S.G.R. was ever forced to admit that it had paid Mamadie Touré, here, in embryo, was a defense.

Although the U.S. Justice Department will not comment on the case, Cilins is likely not the ultimate target of its investigation. When the grand jury in Manhattan began issuing subpoenas, earlier this year, it requested information not just on “the Simandou concession” but on Steinmetz himself. The F.B.I. recently dispatched two teams of investigators to Conakry. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Serious Fraud Office, in London, has also opened an investigation into B.S.G.R.’s activities. Because both Israel and France have been reluctant to extradite their citizens in the past, Steinmetz might never see trial in the U.S., even in the event that he was indicted. Still, Scott Horton told me, “Steinmetz’s future travel options may be limited.”

When we spoke in Cap d’Antibes, Steinmetz did not seem worried. “We have zero to hide,” he said.

Steven Fox, the investigator, told me that Steinmetz and his colleagues were “very improvisational,” adding, “They can think creatively and move fast in an uncertain situation. That’s what accounted for their success, in a lot of ways. But it will probably also account for their downfall.”

For the moment, the iron ore remains locked inside the Simandou Mountains, and the site is still cut off from the rest of Guinea. “Everyone wants Simandou,” Condé told me as we sat in the palace. “It became the obsession, literally, of everybody.”

He continued to talk, in his professorial way, but a note of bewilderment crept into his voice. “Looking at the iron ore, the grade is world-class. The quality is world-class. Yet, in so many years, we haven’t been able to benefit from any of these tremendous resources.” President Condé paused. Then he murmured something, almost to himself: “How can we be so rich and yet so poor?” ♦

ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
A Fourth State of Matter

Inside South Korea’s LCD revolution.

by Nicholson Baker

Not too long ago, I got on an airplane with a beautiful aqua-blue tail and rode it to Korea to see where they make liquid-crystal displays. It was a thirteen-hour flight, and, resolving to get something done, I typed some sentences on my computer. They appeared on a thirteen-inch liquid-crystal screen, manufactured in Korea by LG Display. Later, I read some of a book called “Soap, Science, and Flat-Screen TVs: A History of Liquid Crystals,” by David Dunmur and Tim Sluckin. The pages of the book formed themselves just below the surface of my iPod Touch, whose liquid-crystal display was also made in Korea by LG. After a dinner of roast beef and baby potatoes, as we swung in a great slow arc over northern Canada, above the Arctic Circle, I watched three movies on the liquid-crystal screen inset into the seat in front of me. Somewhere over Siberia, I got a nosebleed. A kind flight attendant, dressed in the stylish Korean Air uniform—aqua-blue jacket, tight white skirt, white neck scarf whose stiff ends poked out like little TV antennas, all designed by the late Italian couturier Gianfranco Ferré—gave me a stash of paper towels, and I went to the bathroom to clean up. After so many hours of looking at pixel-borne versions of reality, my drops of blood looked shockingly red and lifelike against the white of the paper towel.

I stood, crouching slightly, in the cool, steady gust of the bathroom vent, and waited for my nose to stop misbehaving. Why was I here? I was here because all day long I stare at screens. Even six miles up, tunnelling through the claustrophobic Arctic sky, I’m staring at them. I love them and, sometimes, I hate them. I can’t escape them; I can’t stop looking at them. The first liquid-crystal display, or LCD, I owned was the silver-gray stamp-size screen of a Casio watch, made in Japan, circa 1980. Its numbers, composed of seven throat-lozenge-shaped elements, seemed to melt in and out of existence, the colon between the hours and the minutes pulsing silently. Some years later, I bought a solar-powered LCD calculator to do my taxes, and then, in 1993, I got a laptop computer: a Toshiba, with a silver-gray monochrome LCD. It eventually died, as computers do, and was followed by a succession of color laptops, by Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., and Sony, the screens of which turned interesting prismatic hues when you looked at them from odd angles. In 2002, I acquired a digital camera, with an eye-beguiling liquid-crystal display the size of a soda cracker glued to the back—and then, somewhere around 2004, there suddenly appeared, hanging over the slumped, captive passengers in airport departure lounges, big flat-screen LCD televisions tuned to CNN. They were made by a company nobody had heard of then: LG, originally short for Lucky Goldstar.

All at once, it seemed, everybody wanted a new flat-screen computer monitor (which flickered less than tube monitors, although the colors weren’t quite as true at first), and also a new flat-screen TV for the living room: finally, movie fans could read the small-type credits as they rolled. In a Best Buy one Sunday afternoon, standing in front of the wall of TVs in the back, I thought, Just look at all these incredible screens. We take for granted that we can drive to a nearby chain store and buy a thin, luminous, elegant, unflickering dispenser of imagery that will make the world seem newly hosed clean and polyurethaned, that will melt the finely fringed nerve endings of our pleasure centers, all for several hundred dollars. The familiar brands were there at Best Buy—Samsung, LG, Sharp, Sony, Vizio, Insignia, Panasonic—plus the off-brands that license the names of defunct American companies like Polaroid and Magnavox, and even the less good TVs were very good. Any one of them would have been cheered and toasted and decked with best-in-show ribbons at an electronics convention twenty-five years ago.

At about the same time, Apple came up with its liquid-crystal iPods and iPhones and iPads. I lost my iPod Touch in the snow one winter. My daughter spotted it several months later, after a spring thaw; when it had dried out for a week, it worked perfectly. Pixel density, which had plateaued during the reign of the cathode-ray tube at roughly a hundred pixels per inch, began to increase dramatically: the iPhone 4, with its now famous Retina Display (made in Korea by LG Display), offered, beginning in 2010, a liquid-crystal image that, at three hundred and twenty-six pixels per diagonal inch, looked almost as good as a glossy printed page in an art magazine.

And yet for all those screen-staring years I hadn’t known what liquid crystal actually was. What sort of a substance was it? Was it smooth or was it crunchy? Was it an iridescent slurry of prismatic granules? Was it a marketing term that some executive had invented, like Trinitron? I had no idea, and that didn’t seem right, because the fabrication of these glass sandwiches, big and little, by the billion every year—in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and now China—might be the best, most coöperative thing that the human race is doing at the moment. Liquid crystal’s aim is basically peaceable—it wants to give eyes what eyes want to look at. To fulfill that want requires world-uniting flows of raw material and intellectual property and dollars and yen and won and euros. The liquid-crystal trade binds us together, or so it seemed to me in the Airbus bathroom. Not to know more about it seemed downright ungrateful.

With my nosebleed under control, I stood in the back of the plane for a while near the duty-free sales area, peering out at distant cloud worlds through the tiny oval window in the exit door. Then I went back to my seat and watched a documentary about the search for a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson.

In Seoul, after breakfast at the ridiculously cheap Incheon Airport Hotel Queen—rice with vegetables from a chafing dish and five miniature hot dogs—I boarded a comfortable, squeaky bus with yellow curtains. We crossed the mists of a tidal flat to Kintex, the huge conference complex northwest of the city, easy to spot from far away because one part of it has an upsweeping shape like an airplane’s tail. A scientific congress and industrial exhibit was on, the International Meeting on Information Display, part of an even bigger celebration of technological uplift, the Korea Electronics Grand Fair, whose slogan was “Smart Korea.” I signed in. My nametag bore a Roy Lichtenstein-style cartoon of a wide-eyed, amazed-looking woman. Next to her beehive hairdo, it said, in English, “WOW.”

I entered the grand fair a little early, while exhibitors were putting the final touches on their booths. The enormous, echoing hall was still fairly quiet, and it had the heady smell of recently poured concrete. A man was standing in front of a directory, with a hand truck filled with a vase of orchids, each with a violet bow, checking his smartphone to see where he was supposed to deliver them. Another man was sweeping the aisles with a three-colored broom, while a motorized floor-buffing vehicle like a Zamboni circled tightly in the corners. Corporate sales reps, mostly dressed in charcoal-gray business suits, were putting out bowls for business cards and neat piles of brochures. I walked past store-size displays for dozens of big and small companies I’d never heard of: past Taiyo Yuden, which made printed circuit boards, and the chipmaker SK Hynix, which had constructed a stunning retro World’s Fair-style booth with a dangling curtain of lit beads, past Donga Brush, which makes a line of industrial brushes. A man was up on a ladder at the booth for Kook Je Electric Korea, Ltd., mounting a banner—Kook Je makes diffusion furnaces and chemical-vapor deposition systems. Some of the booths were populated with chuffing and hissing pieces of manufacturing equipment—the various cutters and punchers and buffers and rinsers and bonders and layerers and vacuum suckers that were necessary to the making of screens. All Asian, but especially Korean, manufacturing was on display: tiny companies and huge ones—it was like a twenty-first-century carnival of steam.

The Samsung corporate area was toward the back. It was bigger than a tennis court, with blue-and-white walls and white tables, as clean and spare as the airline terminal in Kubrick’s “2001.” A slogan, “SMART,” was fixed to the wall in large capital letters. In front of the booth, a long row of Samsung women, about thirty of them, stood rehearsing their synchronized bows. They wore snappy white zippered dresses with blue belts and blue piping around the sleeves, and their stiff, sticky-outy neck scarves were almost identical to the ones the Korean Air flight attendants wore. A woman with a microphone called out instructions to them, and the women bowed, and bowed again, and again. Observers murmured and smiled. There were TVs and computers and tablets and phones and robotic vacuum cleaners and washing machines, which could be controlled by a smartphone and contained Styrofoam pellets spotlit from underneath to show off the unique “bubble wash” action.

LG’s huge corporate exhibition booth, with red-and-white walls, was right next to Samsung’s. I tried on some 3-D glasses, which were being passed around on trays, like canapés, and then I went to the separate, slightly smaller booth for Samsung LCD, the manufacturing division that makes liquid-crystal displays for other companies (and was spun off as Samsung Display last year), where I was given a glossy white shopping bag. The world’s first forty-six-inch Smart Window LCD hung on one wall, a transparent screen through which we surveyed a scale-model city of balconied high-rise buildings. The Samsung LCD women wore cream-colored outfits with shiny pale-blue trim.

The LG Display booth was also nearby—LG Display is, like Samsung Display, a partly-owned offshoot of its parent company, selling screen modules to Dell, Vizio, Sony, NEC, and Hewlett-Packard. The Kindle Fire’s screen is made by LG Display, as are Apple’s Thunderbolt Display and iMac screens. Here I was given another glossy white shopping bag, this one with a soft rope handle. It was bigger than Samsung’s bag—big enough to hold a good-sized flat-screen TV, not that they were giving any away.

A multilingual announcement came over the P.A. system: the opening ceremonies of the Korea Electronics Show would commence in five minutes in the banquet room on the third floor. I dashed up several flights of stairs and listened to some long speeches and applauded as government officials conferred neck-ribboned awards and medals on rows of engineers in gray suits. Behind them a sign said, in English, “Feel & Enjoy! Smart Life.” The ministers of technological advancement wore orchids with violet bows—the orchid deliveryman had successfully made his delivery.

Last to speak was Young-hwan Kim, a solid politico with a booming voice, who was the chairman of the Knowledge Economy Committee. A hundred and fifty years ago, Young-hwan Kim said (I was listening to a simultaneous translation through headphones), Koreans had no weapons and were the pawns of other countries. Then, in 1894, some Korean farmers started a revolution, resisting their oppressors with poles and shovels. Now Korea was the builder of many of the ships on the ocean, and Korea was one of the world’s great automakers, and Korea was a leader in the steel industry, and the preëminent supplier of liquid-crystal displays. What was missing? Software. Korea must do better with software. But congratulations, Young-hwan Kim said, Korea is a powerhouse now, and we Koreans will step up to the challenges ahead. After some enthusiastic applause and music, everyone, government officials and engineers and members of the public, trooped back downstairs to the exhibition halls, followed by TV cameras and reporters.

I wove through a distant part of the fair, where university students were showing off their jumpy robots, and when I caught up with the government delegation all the LG booth women, in white dresses with red cuffs just below the elbow, red dickey collars, red belts, and white shoes, had lined up in a V formation to greet them, their hands clasped politely at their waists. As the officials took their leave, the women bowed three low, perfect bows.

Liquid crystals, David Dunmur and Tim Sluckin explain, are a fourth state of matter. They’re sometimes pearlescent, and they shimmer, on account of peculiarities of their rotational viscosity. They’re so-called “non-Newtonian fluids,” because they don’t obey the formulas in elementary physics textbooks. They’re somewhat goopy, often—thicker than water, more like shampoo. The first person who devoted his life to them was Otto Lehmann, a scientist from Karlsruhe, Germany. Another scientist, from the German University in Prague, had been studying a kind of cholesterol derived from carrots, when he noticed some odd behavior in this liquid. “On cooling, first violet and blue colors appear,” he wrote to Otto Lehmann in 1888, “which quickly vanish, leaving the bulk turbid like milk, but fluid.” Otto Lehmann, who loved crystals and as a teen-ager had made detailed studies of the growth of snowflakes, inspected drops of the carrot cholesterol through his homemade, one-of-a-kind polarizing microscope—the lightwave-aligning polarizer back then was made of a polished chunk of a kind of rock called Iceland spar—and he was smitten. The liquid was refracting light as if it were made of solid, frangible crystals, and yet it could be poured from a beaker. “Flowing crystals!” Lehmann wrote in an ecstatic paper in The Journal of Physical Chemistry, in 1889. “The impossible here really seems to become possible.”

Lehmann and some fellow-enthusiasts began a close study of other organic fluids with similar “birefringent” properties—meaning that they were able to skew light in two directions—including the molten form of a bright-yellow, needlelike crystal called para-azoxyanisole. In 1904, Lehmann published a lavish book on liquid crystals, polymorphism, and the “plasticity of solids,” with hand-colored plates showing some of the fetching red-and-yellow patterns made by droplets of azoxyanisole when they were viewed through a heated polarizing plate: they looked like Venetian paperweights. Lehmann wrote Merck, a chemical company in Darmstadt, Germany, to ask it to begin making and selling liquid crystals for research purposes. Merck agreed, after some protests over the difficulty of achieving the requisite levels of purity, and began advertising its line of flüssige Kristalle soon afterward.

Word of Lehmann’s work spread. In 1909, he made a triumphant visit to Paris, where, despite a climate of fierce anti-Germanism, he gave two presentations, showing many color slides and a movie of his coalescing droplets before an appreciative audience of Sorbonne professors, churchmen, artillery officers, and (in the words of a newspaper account) “elegant ladies.” Out of this visit grew a learned French school of liquid-crystal science, which attempted, with the help of a dense fog of equations, to analyze the crystals’ limpid refractive qualities. A bunch of new terms grew up to describe different classes of liquid crystals, including “smectic,” meaning soapy, from the Greek smegma (yes, I know), and “nematic,” or threadlike, as in those long, thin intestinal nematodes that are parasitic in dogs.

One of Otto Lehmann’s French converts, a mineralogist named Charles-Victor Mauguin, began preparing glass microscope slides by rubbing them with paper before melting crystals of azoxyanisole and azoxyphenetole between them, so that the skeins of thin, wormlike nematic molecules would align themselves along the grain of the rubbing. Mauguin then carefully rotated the upper glass slide ninety degrees over the melted liquid, forcing its invisible molecular skeins to twist. What he discovered, in 1911, was weird and momentous: light, when passed through a polarizer, would follow this imposed helicoidal rotation. This was a liquid that could make light itself perform a pirouette.

Oh, it was an exciting time for these scientists, who felt that they were peering down the tubes of their Zeiss microscopes at a new world: not solid, not liquid but “mesomorphic.” Some of them believed that what they were studying was of purely scientific interest, with no commercial potential; others imagined that profitable businesses might evolve out of this marshy Atlantis of matter. In England in 1936, engineers at the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company patented a technique that proposed to employ a layer of liquid crystal as a shutter or “light valve” in a movie projector or a television—they used the word “television”—but no salable products came of it. Instead, after the war the cathode-ray tube entered every living room, blasting lines of excited electrons through a vacuum at a silver lining. The vacuum tubes got bigger, and they were taught how to offer color imagery, but they weren’t flat, and the bigger they got the heavier and boxier and clumsier their containers were. (Although they did give off a nice odor of baked dust when you sniffed the vents in the back.) David Sarnoff, the imperious, future-minded chairman of RCA, makers of the best console televisions, looked forward, in 1956, to a flat-screen TV that could hang on the wall. Some of RCA’s researchers took up the Marconi Company’s wild idea: they suspected, or hoped, that liquid crystals, which could magically block and unblock light when they were jolted with an electrical current, were the best way to realize Sarnoff’s fantasy of a wall-mounted TV. They quietly began a series of experiments.

An early breakthrough came in the sixties, when Richard Williams, at the Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, began working with Otto Lehmann’s old standby, para-azoxyanisole, melting it between layers of glass, just as Charles-Victor Mauguin had, and subjecting it to electrical fields to see how it would behave. Out of this secret work—by George Heilmeier, Joseph Castellano, Joel Goldmacher, Louis Zanoni, Lucian Barton, and others—came some new chemical concoctions and, finally, a wondrous prototype that functioned at room temperature: a clock. May 28, 1968, was the day of official uncloaking, and the announcement of more to come. “By using the remarkable substance called liquid crystals, Radio Corp. of America said it has developed a new means of displaying print, pictures, and changing images on thin, flat surfaces,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

But RCA stopped short. By the mid-seventies, the company had dismantled its research program, not wanting, in the end—so legend has it—to threaten the revenues that flowed from its tube-television patents. Japanese companies—Seiko, Hitachi, Sharp, and others—licensed RCA’s liquid-crystal innovations and took over further development. In 1977, as I learned from Joseph Castellano’s book, “Liquid Gold: The Story of Liquid Crystal Displays and the Creation of an Industry,” Hitachi made a six-inch black-and-white prototype LCD television. It couldn’t hang on the wall, but it was real, and it was flat.

Meanwhile, liquid-crystal watches and calculators were selling well. In 1975, a few years after leaving RCA, Joseph Castellano helped Fairchild Semiconductor set up a factory in Palo Alto, California, to produce liquid-crystal modules for watches. Fairchild made hundreds of thousands of chunkily styled, metal-band watches, some backlit with vials of phosphorescent tritium. “Then we were told it’s too expensive, the labor is too high,” Castellano recalled when I interviewed him by phone. “We were making money hand over fist, though—at that point you could get a high price for these watches. They said, ‘Eh, we have to go offshore.’ So we opened a plant in Hong Kong, and everybody in Palo Alto was shut down. And, of course, once it went to Hong Kong that was the end of it.”

The Japanese were the real risk-takers, the true pioneers of flat-screen TVs, Castellano said. Making LCDs required huge investments in automation, especially in the elimination of dust. “They had to make clean rooms, super-duper clean rooms, and equipment that would eliminate human error or human contact,” he said. “That’s what really did it. Once the Japanese developed it, the Koreans came along and copied it and improved on it. I don’t think people appreciate how really difficult it all was.”

But Japan, too, hesitated. Sony was now in RCA’s position: it didn’t want to give up the money that poured, seemingly endlessly, from its sales of Trinitron tubes. South Korea saw a chance to leap ahead of everyone else. Japanese liquid-crystal technologists, called “weekend warriors” (I learned the phrase from Robert Chen’s fine book, “Liquid Crystal Displays”), began shuttling to Korea, helping LG and Samsung design and outfit their billion-dollar flat-screen factories. Korea became the center of the liquid-crystal universe.

On the floor at Kintex, the government officials moved on, and I moved with them, and it was then that I found the Merck display. Yes, Merck, the same German chemical company that made liquid crystals for Otto Lehmann in 1905—long separated from the American pharmaceutical company of the same name—is still the biggest name in the liquid-crystal business. Merck’s booth was white and filled with light. On one outside wall was a large photograph of a smiling woman holding a television that showed a goldfish swimming through its slogan: “The Perfect Pixel.”

Merck’s liquid-crystal raw materials—called “singles”—are unthinkably pure and extremely expensive. They’re produced in Darmstadt, just as they were a hundred years ago, and shipped to Merck’s large Korean subsidiary in Seoul, where Korean engineers mix and mingle the singles in accordance with requirements coming from LG and Samsung. I asked one of Merck’s marketing men whether it was a tricky thing to supply liquid crystal to two such fierce competitors. Yes, he said, it could sometimes be sensitive to work with rivals, but that, after all, was what nondisclosure agreements were for. I bent to admire the arrangement of old-fashioned-looking screw-top brown jars containing Merck’s liquid-crystal substance, which were arranged on a shelf behind glass, as if at a museum. Below them was a shiny, chromeplated ten-kilogram industrial cannister of liquid-crystal fluid, which Merck called Licristal—enough miracle ingredient to make thousands of TVs, computer monitors, or tablets.

By 3 P.M., my feet hurt, my shopping bags were heavy with brochures and flopping like tiresome white dogs around my legs, and my overfed mind had exploded into a thousand mica fragments. I had a restful moment, however, with Ki-yung Nam, of Samsung public relations, who introduced me to several Samsung executives over coffee at the temporary Starbucks in the middle of the exhibition hall. Each of us put business cards on the table, as if we were at a poker game. O. S. Yang, at the time principal engineer of the LCD sales and marketing team, did most of the talking. He was a wry, handsome, impeccably suited man who spoke excellent English. I asked him what was the hardest thing about making liquid-crystal displays. “Everybody’s losing money these days—that’s the hardest part for us,” he said. Capital expenditures were huge, and the high-definition-TV market had reached saturation in many countries.

Was it possible, I asked Yang, to explain in very simple terms how an LCD screen works? “Oh, it’s possible,” Yang said. “You need a light source, right? A backlight. And polarizers.” A rear polarizer cuts out all the light from the backlight except rays that are vibrating in a certain direction. “And you need a switch.” The tiny electrodes of thin-film transistors—printed in a grid on the glass, like a giant circuit board—serve as the switch. And then you need a layer of liquid crystal. When the switch turns on, it makes the molecules of liquid crystal reorient themselves, under the influence of the electrical field. Each transistor controls one subpixel, and each subpixel has a color filter—red, green, or blue—layered over it. When the liquid crystals are made to twist one way, the backlight’s photons, colored by the subpixel’s filter, are able to slip out through a second, front polarizer, which is oriented perpendicularly to the rear one. When they twist another way, the light from the backlight is blocked by the front polarizer, and the subpixel is black. “It’s like printing money,” Yang concluded. “You print red first, blue next, and green later, so that if you combine all of the three layers it’s going to be in color.”

I rode the yellow-curtained 7400 bus back to the airport, where I had some extraordinary passion-fruit and apple pastries at a boulangerie called Paris Croissant. In my hotel room, I fell asleep reading technical brochures and listening to some drunk men shouting and singing in the street. That was the end of my first day in Seoul.

The second day began earlier than expected, at about 3 A.M., when a car stopped outside the hotel and blasted “Party Rock Anthem,” by LMFAO, at top volume, for the benefit of anyone who happened to be listening. “Party Rock is in the house tonight / Everybody just have a good time,” LMFAO sang. I got up and took a shower. After breakfast—sausage patties and vegetable dumplings—I returned to Kintex, staring sleepily at the misty orange sun. The bus was on time. Everything in Korea was on time. Everything worked. I felt myself becoming a fan of this ambitious, color-coded, hardworking, party-rocking country.

I had an afternoon appointment to visit LG Display’s factory in Paju, north of Seoul, but my morning was free. I spent most of it attending lectures at the scientific display conference, which was being held at Kintex II, the swoopy, airplane-shaped part of the convention center that had recently opened for business. I slipped into one of the six hushed conference rooms. The audience sat taking notes while a Korean scientist talked softly in English—English was the conference’s official language—about his work on higher-efficiency cone-shaped “deep pillar” structures in LED substrates made using a novel technique of nanoscale lithography. These nanopillars were too deep for me to comprehend, despite the accompanying PowerPoint slides, and I exited after ten minutes.

Fortifying myself at the coffee table, I weighed whether to go to a lecture by some scientists from Dresden on “cavity effects” in OLED optics—multicolored organic light-emitting diodes are the emissive (as opposed to backlit) screen technology that Samsung and others are betting will eventually displace liquid crystal—and said hello to a man from Microsoft. He said that he was there to observe trends and gather information relating to cell phones. He was spying, essentially—a perfectly reasonable thing to do, given that Asia was where the action was. I slumped in a low modernistic chair in a corner and plugged my various machines into a brand-new white wall outlet. There is something immensely comforting about finding a convenient source of electricity in a strange building. A friendly academic named Brent Wagner, who ran a research group at Georgia Tech, sat down in the chair across from me. Wagner had wistful memories of some of the early efforts in the United States to make flat-panel screens, in the years before the Asian triumph of liquid crystal. He told me about Larry Weber, a scientist who, after a close brush with bankruptcy, built a facility to make plasma screens—which use tiny glowing gas-filled bulbs to create their images—in a former apple-juice factory in Highland, New York, later bought by Panasonic. (Bernard Madoff was an early customer.) In the Atlanta airport, Wagner told me, you could, until very recently, encounter, in the shuttle train, an early, American-manufactured electroluminescent display, with yellow letters against a black background, working in the wild. “It was there in 1984, when I first moved to Atlanta,” he said, and it’s still in place. “You could see the back end, full of dust, with the wires all taped up.”

Wagner’s wires made me think of how many things had to be got right in order to make a Korean LCD screen. You needed glue with just the right kind of optically transparent properties to hold the layers of a screen together. You had to have all layers perfectly aligned, with just the right thinness of electrosensitive liquid clasped between them. The matrix of electrodes had to be deposited dustlessly, with extreme fidelity, so that there were no dead pixels. You had to have the fortitude to risk billions on the building of a single plant. You needed hundreds of small companies supplying capital equipment to the big ones. There were so many finicky variables involved that the mind reeled, I said, waving my hands excitedly. Couldn’t we put aside our injured national pride and simply feel gratitude? Was that possible?

Wagner thought for a moment, and then he laughed. “No,” he said. He himself could look beyond American interests, he said—in fact, his team at Georgia Tech had received some grants from Samsung to do research. But the Department of Defense, which was now his group’s main source of funding, was concerned, above all, with perceived peril. There was, Wagner told me, a program at the Pentagon whose mission was to worry about the risks involved in using foreign components in U.S. military hardware. A Far Eastern power—say, China—could deliberately sell something for use in an American cockpit that was unreliable, that would, for example, fail at a certain temperature.

After Wagner left, I went outside to get some fresh air and noticed that, in a hall one level below the atrium, another gigantic trade fair was in progress, a baby expo called KinBe. I registered and ambled for twenty minutes through a crowd of thousands—pregnant women and their families, who had come to inspect displays of baby strollers, baby sleep buckets (slogan: “Dream On”), and brain-enriching baby toys. Refreshed by this surge of optimistic procreation, I rode a moving sidewalk past a clump of large, recently planted trees—each bandaged with brown burlap and braced with many bamboo props and ties—back to the main entrance, where a car was waiting to take me to the big factory at Paju.

Paju is near the Imjin River, several miles from the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. LG Display’s Paju cluster, which makes display modules for large and medium-sized monitors and TVs, has three main factory structures, called P7, P8, and P9. P7, which came online in 2006, looks from a distance like a sort of strange apartment building, until you realize that the scale is all wrong. Each of its six floors, covering an area the size of eight football fields, is the height of three normal floors, built thus to accommodate the large pieces of glass, called “mother glass,” that must be manipulated without breakage and layered together before being cut down to television sizes. One P7 piece of glass can yield eight forty-two-inch TV screens, and the plant has the capacity for two hundred and two thousand pieces a month. P8, which started production in 2009, has floors the size of eleven football fields—and P9, which came online last year, is larger still. Sixteen thousand people work at LG Display Paju—more than half the display modules they make are used in LG’s own line of TVs; the others are for sale to all manner of brands of televisions and computer monitors. There are dormitories for single workers—the rent is thirty dollars a month—and there is an R. & D. building, a child-care center, an “English village,” and a man-made stream that circulates through the plants to cool them. The stream is stocked with fish—a former president of LG Display fished there once.

Standing on the steps, beaming, was the irrepressible, instantly likable Epic Kim, of Paju’s General Affairs Team. Kim led me past the bronze statue of LG’s bespectacled founder, In-hwoi Koo, which stood on a granite pedestal surrounded by white pebbles. A plaque offered an inspirational quote from Koo: “Building customer trust by providing superior product is the most important thing to remember!” Koo had made this pronouncement in 1948, back before the Korean War, when proto-LG manufactured a cosmetic face cream called Lucky Cream.

After cookies and a promotional video—“A world seen with clear eyes, a happy world for everybody,” the narrator said, accompanied by Carl Orffian music, “that’s the world of LG Display”—Kim took me through a museum of LG’s history and its coming wonders: ultra-large, ultra-high-resolution displays; curved and free-form displays; OLED television displays; and tall displays that are sometimes also mirrors. I saw screens that all but banished the Lego-block jaggies of pictorial pixelation—screens toward which we would be able to bend close, as we would to a printed page, and on which we would (almost) be able to read words the way they were meant to be read, not as stair-stepping digital approximations but as smooth, continuously curving shapes of meaning. If we are going to spend our days reading sentences on screens—and we are—we will read better, with fewer errors, more comprehendingly, more contentedly, in longer bursts, when lines of type are permitted, at last, to present us with their unblurred, crisply seriffed selves. Over and over, I said, “That’s impressive, that’s amazing, that’s wonderful,” and I meant it.

We passed a recreation area, with air hockey and video games and a restaurant, and rode the elevator up to the third level of the P7 building. At the end of a short hallway, we stopped in front of a glass viewing wall. Pictures were forbidden here. “This is it,” Kim said. We gazed through the glass at the Piranesian vastitude of one part of the factory—an ultra-clean metropolis of automated modules, silver ducts, and rectilinear interconnections, all lit by a straw-colored light, in the midst of which a multiply jointed robot the size of a tree was nimbly sliding six-foot-long slabs of almost paper-thin mother glass into and out of the narrow inlets in something that looked like a pizza oven, except much bigger. The robot arm, fitted with what seemed to be faintly hissing suction cups, never hesitated, never paused to consider its next move. Inside the pizza oven, the glass received its subpixel matrix of color filters, using a photolithographic process of masking and deposition and removal. Each glass sheet shuddered slightly as it was turned this way and that, in the impossibly fragile manner of airborne soap bubbles, and my own arms kept going out toward it, as if to save the sheet from crashing to the floor—but, of course, no glass crashed. This was the place that made all Best Buys possible.

We rode the elevator to the top of the building, to an indoor observation deck that Kim said was called the Tower of Pride. There were scale models here, and soft green chairs for corporate customers, and observation telescopes through which you could see past the guard towers and barbed wire of the DMZ into the undulant terrain of North Korea. From this height, North Korea and South Korea looked exactly alike. Reconciliation seemed not only achievable but inevitable.

As I was leaving, Epic Kim brought me a gift: an elaborate white hinged box of LG chocolates, each individually wrapped and modelled on a different size of liquid-crystal display. There were small cell-phone-proportioned chocolates, and medium-sized TV-screen chocolates, and one large fifty-five-inch display chocolate. “I thought you would like this,” Kim said. I did.

Next morning, I took the immaculate subway to the headquarters of LG, called LG Twin Towers, in Seoul’s financial district, to have lunch with a few chatty executives. We got talking about the respective corporate personalities of LG and Samsung. “People tend to perceive the two companies a little bit differently,” a vice-president, K. S. Lee, told me. “I have many friends in Samsung. We grew up together. In terms of culture, Samsung is more competitive, good at managing people. I would say they are a more cold-blooded type of people.”

“It’s more of a machine,” Ken Hong, LG’s director of global communications, said.

“Precise, but less heartful,” Lee agreed. “Based on the founder’s philosophy, or longtime history here, we tend to be more friendly, relatively. Samsung is always talking about innovation, but in LG we focus slightly more on the emotional benefit.” If you asked people to describe the differences between LG and Samsung, Lee said, they generally said that LG was a warmer company. Hence LG’s color, red, and its slogan: “Life’s Good.” “Samsung is blue, relatively cold,” Lee added, “but very smart, sharp, competitive.”

Ken Hong explained how Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and Kia—huge, family-controlled conglomerates—got to be the way they are. “They weren’t huge fifty years ago,” he said. “The government, after the war, said, ‘We’ve got to rebuild.’ They called Kia in and said, ‘You’ve got a pretty good business making bicycles—you’re going to start making cars.’ And us, we were a chemical company. Well, chemicals make plastics, so the government said, ‘You’re going to start making electronic components.’ ”

Later, as I had a second helping of curry from the buffet, Hong talked about the differences between Korea, Japan, and the United States. Hong is a pleasant-faced man in his forties who grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia and got his degree from Penn State. “We are very aware of what Japan did wrong, and we are trying to do it differently,” Hong said. “But there are a lot of similarities. For example, at this company profit is not our only motive. It’s also about creating opportunities through growth. The government sets targets each year for how much they’d like the workforce to grow, and we do what we can to accommodate. The Wall Street model, where profit and shareholder interest supersede the rights of the employees—that doesn’t work for everyone. Koreans in general don’t have a problem taking guidance from the government—it’s a factor in our success. I’d like to think that, had this peninsula never been separated, the things we could have done as a nation of seventy million would have been something spectacular.”

After lunch, I took a high-speed train south to Asan, near Crystal Valley, one of Samsung’s large liquid-crystal factory complexes. I hadn’t been given permission to enter any of the company’s display factories, but I wanted at least to see what one of its plants looked like from the outside. At the station, the cabbie looked at the circle on my map around Samsung’s Tangjeong Industry Complex (near a driving range, a foreign-language high school, and a Buddhist shrine) and took me there. Tall green fencing surrounded many of the buildings, some of it topped with rows of barbed wire. We stopped for a moment at the entrance to Samsung Corning Precision Materials, where Gorilla Glass, an American innovation, is produced, and then we turned into the main access road of Samsung LCD. Employees were leaving for the day, getting into dozens of buses to go home. A security guard in an aqua-blue suit and white gloves eyed our cab for a moment, but he didn’t tell us to leave. I took a few pictures of the factory buildings—they were blue-and-white behemoths, like something from the glory days of NASA, with catwalks connecting upper floors. The cabdriver gestured toward the buildings and said, “Samsung, LG—Koreans very proud.”

On my last morning in Korea, at the airport, I bought a goodbye pastry from Paris Croissant, whose slogan was “You Can Deserve It!” In line to board the plane home, I was startled to hear a familiar recorded voice over the P.A. system. It was the Midwestern-accented woman so often heard in American airports, bus terminals, and train stations. She was warning us, as she always did, to be on our guard against suspicious activity. “If you see something, say something,” she said. I couldn’t believe she was doing her thing in the Incheon airport. I wanted to say to her, Lady, I did see something, and it wasn’t about fear and mistrust. It was about polarized light and additive color and quivering glass and the electrified clenchings of stringy molecules. Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese engineers had learned how to make liquid crystal do what we needed it to do, on an unimaginable scale, and they deserved our admiring thanks. I flew home reading old John Cheever stories on my iPod. ♦

SHOUTS & MURMURS
Suggestions for International Diplomacy

by Cora Frazier

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft revealed the real story behind a 2005 meeting with Vladimir Putin, during which the Russian president pocketed his Super Bowl ring, worth more than $25,000.

—The Post.

You know, I don’t remember either Mr. Kraft, or the ring. . . . But if it is such a big treasure for Mr. Kraft and the team . . . I have a suggestion. . . . I will ask one of our businesses to make a really good and big thing, so everyone will see it is a luxury piece, made of quality metal and with a stone, so this piece will be passed from generation to generation in the team. . . . This would be the smartest solution partners can ever achieve while tackling such a complicated international problem.

—Vladimir Putin, on ABCNews.com.

I have never seen this Elvis suit. I don’t know of an Elvis, except that he was a fat singing American who died from his fatness. Such a suit is not my style. But if it is so important to you and your country and general international coöperation, I will make a replica of such a suit, even whiter, with even more jewelled parts, so you will know the power of Russian clothing engineering.

I don’t know what is a Model T. You tell me it is an old car, but why would I steal an old car? We have many kinds of cars in Russia, including old ones. What use do I, President of Russia, have for such a thing? It is without logic. Tell me: why would I, as you say, ride away in an old car from the Model T Ford Club of America Museum, in Richmond, Indiana? These many witnesses you have, they are American? They are large and slow and eating from bags of chips? If you like—if it is so vital to the relationships between our two countries—I am happy to give, as a gift, no charge, an old Russian car that will be even older and even fuller of history, so you will truly see why I would never want such a thing, and why I would never ride away in it with three agents, in front of a second-grade class from Aberdeen on a field trip.

Did I take the guestbook of the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom, which holds your founding documents, from the National Archives, in Washington, D.C.? I don’t know how to answer such a question. Did I walk into the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom, pick up the eleven-pound guestbook, flip through it, see entries from many people of many nationalities and ages saying what the documents in the room mean to them and other patriotic sentiments, examine the gold thread lining, say, “Nice book,” and hand it to one of my agents? It is not worthy of response. But, in the true magnanimity of diplomatic coöperation, I can offer a solution: how about I give you another book, a real luxury item, in which I have written many reasons that your documents—your Declaration and so forth—are special and important, and in much more forceful, poetic, and patriotic language than the first? This I think would be agreeable to all parties.

You say that, on an official visit to the White House to discuss the nuclear problem, I took the Obama family’s dog, which you call Bo. This does not sound like a name for a dog. I wonder: are you mistaken? Is it not some more masculine-sounding name, like Yume, which is how I call my fighting-breed dog? My critics in the press claim I said, in English, when the Obamas’ dog came into the Rose Garden, “What is this, a cat?,” and then, “You are going to kill this cat with overfeeding,” at which point, so they say, one of my agents picked up the dog and carried it away from the photography opportunity in the Rose Garden to a Russian diplomatic car. This is nonsensical. We have our own, much better and more doglike dogs in Russia. At first, the State Department saw reason and believed me. But it seems now that it is becoming an issue for the younger Obamas, and is starting to threaten international harmony. How about this: I have an idea that will please all partners. How about I give you a Russian sled dog—a real dog that will be much faster and stronger and able to pull many kilos in weight over tough terrains? This is an improvement over your cat-dog, don’t you think? If you like, I can give you a Russian cat as well. A real cat. ♦

A CRITIC AT LARGE
The Color of Law

Voting rights and the Southern way of life.

by Louis Menand

On February 18, 1965, a civil-rights worker named James Orange was arrested in Marion, Alabama, on charges of disorderly conduct and contributing to the delinquency of minors, and was thrown into the local jail. Orange had organized a march by young people (“minors”) in support of a voter-registration drive being run by several groups, including the one he worked for, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose president was Martin Luther King, Jr.

That night, four hundred people gathered in Zion’s Chapel Methodist Church, in Marion, and prepared to walk to the jail, about a block away, and sing freedom songs. They left the church at nine-thirty and ran into a police blockade. Ordered to disperse, they were attacked by fifty or more state troopers and other law-enforcement officials wielding clubs. Street lights had been turned off or shot out; white vigilantes were on the scene; reporters were attacked and cameras were smashed. No photographic record of the night survives.

As Gary May tells the story, in “Bending Toward Justice” (Basic), people still in the church, hearing the screams outside, ran out the back, chased by the troopers. One of those who fled, Cager Lee, was struck on the head, fell to the ground, and was kicked. Lee was eighty-two; he was five feet tall and weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. But he escaped, and ran into a café, where he saw his daughter Viola and two grandchildren, Emma Jean and Jimmie Lee Jackson. When troopers stormed the café and began beating people, Jackson tried to protect his mother. He was shoved up against a cigarette machine and shot twice in the stomach by a trooper named James Fowler. Jackson managed to get out of the café but was beaten over the head until he collapsed on the street. He lay there, bleeding, for thirty minutes. Eventually, after a nearby hospital was unable to treat him, he was driven by a black undertaker, in a hearse, to a hospital in Selma, thirty miles away.

Jackson was twenty-six years old, and an Army veteran. He had tried five times to register to vote, without success. While he was in the hospital, Colonel Al Lingo, the director of public safety for the state of Alabama, placed him under arrest for assault and battery with intent to murder a peace officer. But on February 26th, eight days after the shooting, Jackson died. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, generally regarded as the greatest legislative achievement of the so-called “classical phase” of the civil-rights movement—the phase that began in 1954 with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education—had three martyrs. Jimmie Lee Jackson was the first.

This is the act a key provision of which was struck down last week by the Supreme Court, in the case of Shelby v. Holder. (Other important provisions remain in effect.) The act is celebrated because it was enormously effective in giving African-Americans the vote—far more effective than Brown was in integrating schools—and because it gave African-Americans something desegregation alone could not give them: political power. After Shelby, Congress can rewrite the law, but a Congress that cannot pass a farm bill is unlikely to craft new legislation protecting minority voting rights. The moral and political will that characterized the era for which the act has stood as a prime symbol may have run its course.

At the time of Brown, securing the right of African-Americans to register to vote looked to be the most attainable goal in the campaign to overthrow Jim Crow. Both the Eisenhower and the Kennedy Administrations, wary of intervention in what they preferred to characterize as a local matter, believed that voting fell within the purview of the federal government. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, is explicit: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Even the relatively toothless Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil-rights legislation to make it through Congress since Reconstruction, gave the Justice Department authority to pursue litigation against local registrars who discriminated on the basis of race.

Something else about voting made it distinctive in the strange regime of Jim Crow: it does not necessitate interracial contact. Unlike going to school, riding a bus, sitting at a lunch counter, or playing checkers (a pastime once segregated by law in the city of Birmingham), casting a ballot is not a social activity. The argument often given in defense of segregation, which was that the races prefer it that way, does not work very well with voting. After all, one means of proving that the races prefer to be separate would have been to test the proposition in the voting booth.

Convicting Southern registrars of racial discrimination was not easy, though. One reason, as Taylor Branch explains in “Parting the Waters” (1988), the first volume of his stupendous history of the King years, was Screws. Claude Screws was a Georgia sheriff who, in 1943, arrested an African-American named Robert Hall and, with two other white men, drove him to a courthouse and beat him to death in public view. The State of Georgia declined to prosecute, but the Justice Department secured a conviction under a Reconstruction-era statute that made it a federal crime willfully to deprive someone of his civil rights under color of law.

Screws argued that his actions were not covered by the statute, because he had not killed Hall under color of law. He had killed Hall in violation of the law. It was Georgia’s business, not the federal government’s, to prosecute him for it. The Supreme Court rejected this argument, but it reversed Screws’s conviction on a theory of its own. In an opinion by Justice William O. Douglas, the Court ruled that it was not enough to show that a white sheriff had brutally murdered a handcuffed black man. The government had to prove that he did so with the willful intention of depriving the prisoner of his rights. The case was remanded, and Screws was duly retried and acquitted.

Screws v. United States was a jurisprudential tease. It said that discriminatory acts were covered by federal statute but that the government had to show intent, a state of mind notoriously difficult to prove. The shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson was perfectly analogous. If Fowler killed Jackson with the intention of depriving him of a constitutional right (the right to a fair trial) but claimed to have done so in the line of duty, then the act fell under the federal statute. But, to obtain a conviction, the government would have to establish what was in Fowler’s mind when he pulled the trigger.

In cases of voting, Southern states made things even more difficult by having registrars in suspect counties resign, so that, when the Justice Department came calling, there were no officials around to charge. Also, in some Southern counties, almost no African-Americans in the twentieth century had ever even attempted to register, so there were few cases to litigate. One goal of voter-registration drives was to build up the inventory of litigable cases.

The primary goal, though, was to provoke official reaction sufficiently violent to compel the White House to produce a voting-rights bill with enforcement bite. The provocation part proved amazingly easy. All that the protesters had to do was to walk to the courthouse and ask to register. There was nothing covert about the strategy—“We are going to bring a voting bill into being in the streets of Selma,” King proclaimed from the pulpit of Selma’s Brown Chapel—yet Southern police, troopers, sheriffs, and deputies clubbed, sicced police dogs on, blasted fire hoses at, teargassed, and shocked with cattle prods nonviolent demonstrators, many of them clergymen and children, with an indifference to national and international opinion that was almost blithe. Their tactics were encouraged, defended, and sometimes ordered by Southern city halls and statehouses.

But in Birmingham, when the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene (Bull) Connor, brought out the police dogs and fire hoses, and in Selma, when Sheriff Jim Clark socked a black minister, C. T. Vivian, in the face, reporters and cameramen were right there. Many white Americans who saw or read about the violence blamed the demonstrators, but the world blamed the American government. That got the attention of the White House.

Southern mayors and governors were playing to their electoral bases. But American Presidents were trying to run a Cold War. They could live with Jim Crow when it was an invisible regional peculiarity, but once conditions were broadcast around the world they experienced an urgent need to make the problem go away.

The pressure of world opinion was crucial to the speed with which civil-rights gains were made after 1954. It forced American Presidents to do something Presidents rarely do, which was to get out ahead of domestic opinion on the subject of race. When a bus carrying Freedom Riders was firebombed outside Anniston, Alabama, on Mother’s Day, 1961, and a photograph appeared the next day on the front page of the New York Times, John F. Kennedy was horrified. He had never heard of the Freedom Riders and had no idea what they were doing in Alabama. (They were testing the integration of interstate bus terminals pursuant to a recent Supreme Court decision. They were obliged to conclude that the decision had had little impact.)

Kennedy called the one person in the White House with a civil-rights brief, Harris Wofford. “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses?” he said. “Stop them.” Sixty-three per cent of the American public disapproved of the Freedom Riders, but American public opinion was not Kennedy’s concern. His first summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev was scheduled to take place in Vienna in three weeks, and he could see Khrushchev waving the Times in his face.

As Mary Dudziak explains in her important book “Cold War Civil Rights” (2000), the trick was to turn a failure of government into something that looked like a triumph of government. Civil rights had to become a story about how American democracy confronted an injustice and eradicated it. The nation that had liberated Europe from racist domination had gone to the rescue of another captive people. It was important to do this heroically, not apologetically. No elected official relishes having to deal with a charismatic popular leader; the usual forms of leverage are not effective. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson did not especially like dealing with King. But they needed him, because they needed a hero whose vision the democratic system could realize. The triumphalist narrative demanded it.

King understood this perfectly. He was not political in the small-“p” sense, but he had remarkable political instincts. He could read a room. He was a preacher, after all. He spent his entire life sensing exactly which words would move a congregation. He spoke a language that Kennedy and Johnson could associate themselves with. One of the key differences between King and the older generation of civil-rights leaders—A. Philip Randolph, of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; James Farmer, of the Congress of Racial Equality; Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall, of the N.A.A.C.P.—is that King rarely talked about equality. The word occurs only once in the “I Have a Dream” speech. King believed in equality as much as anyone, but in his speeches and sermons he talked about freedom. His rhetoric was an amalgam of the Book of Exodus and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—the leading of the Israelites out of bondage and the emancipation of the slaves. Liberation analogies worked in a Cold War context. The Mason-Dixon Line could be figured as a North American Iron Curtain.

After the violence in Birmingham, in the spring of 1963, followed, in June, by Governor George Wallace’s symbolic “stand in the schoolhouse door,” in Tuscaloosa, protesting the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood to the University of Alabama, Kennedy finally took the moral high ground and gave a nationally televised speech on civil rights. A week later, he delivered a civil-rights bill to Congress, and in August he welcomed to the White House the leaders of the March on Washington, organized by Randolph, King, Wilkins, and Bayard Rustin (among others) to demonstrate for the Administration’s bill. The march was covered live by all three networks and broadcast abroad via the new communications satellite, Telstar.

Less than three months later, Kennedy was dead. Lyndon Johnson was known to civil-rights leaders as the man who, when he was Senate Majority Leader, had carefully emasculated Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Bill in order to secure enough Southern votes for passage. But, as President, Johnson unexpectedly assumed the mantle of a crusader for racial justice, and he pushed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill through the longest filibuster in Senate history.

The act was signed on July 2nd. It addressed segregation in public accommodations, public places, and schools. Fulfilling a long-standing hope of Randolph and Rustin—the subject of William Jones’s “The March on Washington” (Norton)—it banned discrimination in employment and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (whose chairman would one day be Clarence Thomas, a Reagan appointee). But its voting-rights provisions did not address the use of voter-qualification tests to disenfranchise registrants on the basis of race.

Johnson recognized the need for additional voting-rights legislation, and he directed Nicholas Katzenbach, soon to be his attorney general, to draft it. “I want you to write me the goddamnest toughest voting rights act that you can devise,” is the way he put it. But then progress slowed. Johnson had the most ambitious legislative agenda of any President since F.D.R. (his idol), and he explained to King that he was worried that Southern opposition to more civil-rights legislation would drain support from the War on Poverty and hold up bills on Medicare, immigration reform, and aid to education. He asked King to wait.

King thought that if you waited for the right time for direct action (as nonviolent protests were called) you would never act. So on January 2, 1965, he went to Selma, where efforts by local activists and members of the Student Non-Violent Coördinating Committee to register African-Americans had been under way, with little success, for several years. Eight weeks later, Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed.

Integrating voting rolls was a very different kind of problem from integrating buses and lunch counters. In many Southern cities, a large percentage of the population was African-American; in some, African-Americans were in the majority. They had economic power, which direct-action protests like boycotts and sit-ins tapped. When buses were boycotted in Montgomery, in 1955 and 1956, the company complained that it was losing twenty-two cents for every mile each of its buses travelled. To help it avoid bankruptcy, the city commission granted an emergency fare increase, raising the fare by fifty per cent for the whites still riding the buses. In Nashville, African-American shoppers spent fifty million dollars a year, ten million of it in the downtown stores targeted by picketers and boycotters in 1960. Those stores soon desegregated.

Segregation made little sense from a business point of view. Integration of hotels, restaurants, movie theatres, lunch counters, and department stores was therefore relatively (though by no means entirely) frictionless after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But voting was not an economic issue or even a social issue. It was a political issue. The reason Southern officials resisted voter-registration drives with such viciousness was that the region’s whole political system was predicated on the restriction of the franchise.

Before African-Americans were disenfranchised, they were enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment. The era of Jim Crow began, around 1890, with states erecting obstacles to voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, with loopholes exempting many whites. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was constitutional; in 1898, in Mississippi v. Williams, and, in 1903, in Giles v. Harris, it upheld voting laws that operated to disenfranchise African-Americans. Those were the judicial pillars of legal segregation. Their effect was immediate. In 1896, there were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana. In 1904, there were 1,342. Estimated black turnout in Virginia and South Carolina in the 1904 Presidential election was zero.

The greatest voter suppression was often in areas where blacks were in the majority. Selma was more than fifty per cent black; in 1965, only 383 of the fifteen thousand African-Americans living there were registered to vote. Marion (where Coretta Scott King went to school) had no black voters. In nearby Lowndes County, where almost half of the lynchings in Alabama between 1880 and 1930 took place, and where stores refused to sell Marlboro cigarettes because of rumors that the company had donated to the N.A.A.C.P., four out of five residents were black. None could vote. Mississippi was almost fifty per cent black; 6.4 per cent of eligible African-Americans there could vote.

One consequence was the near-ubiquity of all-white juries—since jurors were typically drawn from the pool of registered voters. The Southern judicial system, as Claude Screws appreciated, was turned into a rubber stamp of approval for police and vigilante actions against African-Americans. The system also produced some astonishing verdicts. In 1958, a black handyman named James Wilson was convicted of stealing a dollar ninety-five in change from the white woman he worked for in Marion, and was sentenced to death. The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the sentence, but the international outcry was so intense that the governor, James (Big Jim) Folsom, commuted it.

The South became a one-party bloc, standing for one principle above all, expressed by the logo of the Alabama Democratic Party: a white rooster with a banner above it reading “White Supremacy.” It was as though the purpose of holding elected office was to perpetuate the system that made one’s election possible. Voting rights went to the very heart of the Southern “way of life.”

Officials were therefore ingenious in coming up with ways to thwart registration efforts. In response to an S.C.L.C. registration drive in Louisiana, the state reviewed voter rolls and found cause to remove ten thousand African-Americans. Mississippi cut off the distribution of federal food surpluses to two counties in the Delta: Sunflower, where 161 of 13,524 African-Americans were registered to vote, and LeFlore, where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had been lynched, in 1955. In LeFlore alone, twenty-two thousand people lost their relief. In Alabama, Circuit Court Judge James Hare enjoined virtually every civil-rights leader from gathering in groups of more than three.

And there were methods of discouragement that did not bother with the color of law—that is to say, terror. In 1963, Hartman Turnbow became the first African-American of the century to try to register to vote in Holmes County, Mississippi. A month later, his farmhouse was firebombed. Turnbow engaged in a gunfight with men surrounding the house and drove them off. When the sheriff arrived, he arrested Turnbow and charged him with bombing his own house.

The nadir was the reaction to the Mississippi Summer Project, in 1964. Thirty-five churches were burned and thirty buildings were bombed that summer in Mississippi. Eighty people were beaten, and there were at least six murders, most notoriously the lynching, by a group that included members of the Neshoba County sheriff’s office, of the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Civil-rights leaders in Selma, eight months later, had little reason to expect a complaisant response to their demands. But, if Jackson’s shooting was intended to send a message to the protesters, they rewrote the message.

The man who made Jackson into a martyr was James Bevel, a twenty-eight-year-old member of the S.C.L.C. He had come out of the Nashville sit-in movement, and had committed himself to voter registration after four little girls died in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, in Birmingham, in 1963. The afternoon Jackson died, Bevel went to see Cager Lee and Jackson’s mother and sister. They were still bandaged up. Bevel asked them what should be done. They told him the marches should continue. Bevel knew poverty—he was from the tiny town of Itta Bena, Mississippi—and he knew racial violence, recently in Birmingham, where he had organized marches that led to children being shocked with cattle prods. But after he left their house he wept.

That night, addressing a mass meeting in Brown Chapel, Bevel told the story of Esther. As Mordecai had instructed Esther to go see the king on behalf of her people, he said, they should march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, to see “the king”—George Wallace. Montgomery was fifty-four miles from Selma, and walking there meant crossing Lowndes County. But Bevel’s audience embraced the idea. A week later, King spoke at Jackson’s funeral, where more than a thousand people walked three miles in the rain to the black cemetery. “Jimmie Lee Jackson is speaking to us from the casket, and he is saying to us that we must substitute courage for caution,” King said. He endorsed the call for a march.

There were, in the end, three marches from Selma. Each was momentous. King was not present at the first, which took place on March 7, 1965—“Bloody Sunday.” Some six hundred marchers, led by John Lewis, of SNCC, and Hosea Williams, of the S.C.L.C., set off from Brown Chapel and crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge (Pettus was a Confederate general, later a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan), over the Alabama River. At the far end, they found arrayed before them more than a hundred and fifty armed men: state troopers, under Lingo’s command, and Sheriff Clark’s posse, some on horseback. Wallace had ordered Lingo to take “whatever steps necessary” to stop the march. The troopers wore gas masks and carried nightsticks; Clark’s men were armed with clubs, whips, and cattle prods. One carried a rubber hose wrapped in barbed wire. A number of white Alabamans had come out to watch the sport.

So had the press. It’s all on film. The marchers halt fifty feet from the line of troopers. They are told that they have two minutes to turn around and go back to their homes and churches, but, well before two minutes have passed, the troopers charge into the line, beating everyone in sight. They are followed by Clark’s men on horseback, then by the tear gas.

Forty tear-gas cannisters were fired that day. The marchers were chased for a mile back to Selma. Troopers fired tear gas into the Carver housing project; posse men rode their horses up the steps of Brown Chapel. That evening, forty-eight million television viewers watching “Judgment at Nuremberg” on ABC had the movie interrupted for a fifteen-minute film of the attack. There was no voice-over. The only sounds were the thuds of clubs, reports of tear-gas cannisters being fired, the rebel yells of Clark’s posse, and the constant, hysterical screams of the victims.

At least ninety marchers were wounded, and Lewis had a fractured skull, but the effect was achieved. The film left no room for hairsplitting about provocation. Unarmed men and women on a highway were set upon by uniformed men wearing gas masks and riding horses. The Pettus Bridge was a turning point in American race relations and American history. Branch calls it “the last great thrust of a movement built on patriotic idealism.” Many years later, Lewis said that Barack Obama “was what comes at the end of that bridge.”

King returned to Selma and vowed that the march would continue. Calls were put out to churches nationwide, and clergy of virtually every denomination arrived. Nearly a thousand people were prepared to cross the Pettus Bridge and march to Montgomery. Then, unexpectedly, a federal district judge, Frank Johnson, issued an injunction postponing the march until further notice.

The injunction put King in a bind. He had never violated the order of a federal judge. The federal judiciary was the movement’s friend. That had always been the position of the N.A.A.C.P., which deplored direct action, and which had been pursuing desegregation by litigation for fifty years. Judge Johnson himself was a friend of the movement. George Wallace had called him “a low-down, carpetbaggin’, scalawaggin’, race-mixin’ liar”—a pretty solid recommendation. In 1956, he was a member of a three-judge panel that ruled bus-segregation laws unconstitutional—the ruling that vindicated the Montgomery bus boycott. This time, King felt obliged to wait.

But the students in SNCC saw no difference between an unjust state court and an unjust federal order. The whole philosophy of direct action was, as King himself put it, “the right to protest for right.” SNCC had opposed even the first march (Lewis marched in defiance of his own organization), which it regarded as purely symbolic. Its members also resented King, whom they referred to privately as De Lawd. They felt that they had done the hard work, and then King had shown up and got all the attention. And they didn’t believe in leaders.

Negotiations, complicated by the requirement of state officials that they not have to deal personally with African-Americans, led to a compromise. The result was the second march, on March 9th. King led the protesters across the bridge. Again the troopers were assembled, and again the marchers were ordered to disperse. But suddenly the troopers stepped aside, inviting King to defy the judge’s order. King and Ralph Abernathy knelt and prayed. Then they turned the line around and marched back into Selma. The retreat made permanent the rift between SNCC and the S.C.L.C.

That night, three white clergymen went out to dinner in Selma. After they left the restaurant, they were attacked, and one of them, James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was clubbed on the head. Police managed to delay his transportation to a hospital, and two days later he died. He was thirty-eight years old, and the father of four.

On March 15th, Judge Johnson was shown footage of the first march. Plainly disgusted, he later ruled in King’s favor and allowed a march to Montgomery. That evening, President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress and, on national television, called for a voting-rights act. The speech was interrupted thirty-six times by applause. It was the greatest of Johnson’s Presidency. “Their cause must be our cause too,” Johnson said. “Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” It was the movement’s own slogan. A tear is said to have rolled down King’s cheek when he heard it. For Southerners, it told them the game was over. It was, as the mayor of Selma, Joseph Smitherman, put it, “a dagger in your heart.”

On March 21st, thirty-six hundred marchers, protected by Alabama National Guardsmen, set out from Selma for Montgomery. Four days later, King addressed twenty-five thousand people from the steps of the Capitol, where, in 1861, Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as President of the Confederate States of America. King delivered one of his most exhilarating speeches, the speech that works off the refrain “How long? Not long.” At the end, he recited the first and fourth verses of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

That day, Johnson sent a voting-rights bill to Congress. And that night a thirty-nine-year-old woman from Detroit, a mother of five named Viola Liuzzo, driving marchers home, was shot and killed by Klansmen on Route 80, near Montgomery. Two Northern whites had now been murdered. Few Southerners in Congress saw good reason to throw themselves in front of the train. There was some stalling in committees chaired by segregationists, but the Voting Rights Act passed the Senate by 79 to 18 and the House by 328 to 74. It was signed into law by Johnson on August 6, 1965. On August 20th, Cager Lee, whose father had been sold in a slave market, registered to vote.

Between 1965 and 1968, seven hundred and forty thousand new African-American voters were registered in the Deep South. The central pillar of Jim Crow was destroyed, and with it the regime of legal segregation that had prevailed for seventy years. The act gave the executive branch direct enforcement authority over voting rights. It suspended for five years, in covered states, the use of all devices, such as literacy tests, employed to restrict access to the voting booth. And federal examiners could go into Southern counties to register voters. Initially, six states were covered, along with counties in several more.

The act’s effectiveness was due in part to its elimination of the Screws problem. It replaced intent with effect. If the effect of a change in voting requirements was to diminish the voting power of minorities, it didn’t matter what anyone deliberately intended. The coverage formula said nothing about race, and therefore produced some anomalies: Alaska was covered, for example, although low turnout there is a function of the weather, not discrimination. But it restored the franchise to African-Americans in the South.

It was also the end of the classical phase of the civil-rights movement. (The first person to use that term to describe the decade after Brown was Bayard Rustin.) Historiography of the movement is characterized by a division of emphasis between the classical phase, also called the Second Reconstruction, and the “long” civil-rights movement, dating from the turn of the nineteenth century (and before), and including events in the North.

Of the books published in anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, two are especially useful on the politics of the movement. May’s “Bending Toward Justice” is a book of the classical phase, a lively and unabashedly partisan account of Selma and the Voting Rights Act. (The title is from a saying of the abolitionist Theodore Parker that King quoted on the steps of the Alabama statehouse: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”) Some of this material is covered in earlier books like Branch’s trilogy and David Garrow’s “Bearing the Cross” (1986), both staggering achievements of research and reporting. But May tells the story his own way, and he is able to add many details, particularly to the Jackson shooting, for which he acknowledges the help of John Fleming, a reporter for the Anniston Star who is part of the Civil Rights Cold Cases Project team. Among the parallels between Nazism and Southern racism was the difficulty of bringing to justice the perpetrators of racial violence, most of whom did little to hide their identities. In 2004, Fleming got James Fowler to admit to shooting Jackson. In 2010, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to six months.

Jones’s “The March on Washington” is distinctly a work of the second-emphasis school. It provides an alternative to the standard account by stressing the part played in the movement by unions and women’s groups. (Though many heroes of civil-rights activism, from Pauli Murray and Diane Nash to Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, were women, not a single woman was included in the three-hour official program at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.) Jones insists that the march was about more than King’s famous speech—so much so that he gives the speech less than two pages. This may be a case of overcorrecting. King understood that, without economic opportunity, racial equality didn’t mean much. After 1965, he devoted his life to the cause of economic justice.

The idea of marching on Washington dates from 1941, when Randolph planned a march to force Franklin Roosevelt to ban discrimination in employment by defense contractors and in the armed forces. Randolph cancelled the march when Roosevelt created the Fair Employment Practices Commission. But after the war Congress eliminated the commission. As Jones explains, Randolph saw the 1963 march as a resurrection of his old crusade. He agreed to incorporate King’s agenda in order to maximize participation—which is why, in photographs of the march, you see placards reading “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The jobs part was Randolph’s.

It was a source of deep annoyance in the N.A.A.C.P. that King got the media attention while the organization filed the lawsuits and paid the bills. During a meeting in 1963, Wilkins turned to King and said, “Martin, if you have desegregated anything by your efforts, kindly enlighten me.” King took the point. “I guess about the only thing I’ve desegregated so far is a few human hearts,” he said.

But the direct-action movement was not about interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment. It was about the sights and sounds, the singing and preaching of a people who were, as King liked to say, “on the move.” The fourteen-part documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” narrated by Julian Bond and shown on PBS in 1987 and 1990, is a terrific resource for those sights and sounds, as well as for its interviews with participants. The first six parts, covering the classical phase, are now finally available on DVD.

The best record, though, is the three-hour “King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis,” a brilliant piece of documentary filmmaking created by Ely Landau and shown for only one night, in 1970. It was released this January on DVD, by Kino. There is no narration. Besides the canonical events, there is footage of King in less formal mode—grinning as Mahalia Jackson sings “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” in a Chicago church, and reminiscing about the times he was most afraid.

Why did the classical phase come to an end? That is easy to answer: the fissuring of the movement over the issue of nonviolence; the challenge of addressing discrimination in places, like Chicago, that did not have Jim Crow laws, and, generally, of changing the focus from race to class; above all, Vietnam. “The war came to define America’s image abroad,” as Dudziak writes. “All other issues paled in significance.” King’s opposition to the war cost him access to the White House. And the replacement of intent with effect as the standard for determining discrimination—effect is the standard that affirmative-action programs use—contributed to a white backlash. In 1964, sixty per cent of blacks and thirty-nine per cent of whites agreed that there had been a “real change” in the position of African-Americans. In 1976, sixty-three per cent of whites agreed with that statement, but only thirty-two per cent of blacks.

A harder question is why the classical phase lasted as long as it did. The answer surely has something to do with the personality of King and the nature of his leadership. As a student at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, King had taken an interest in the Social Gospel movement and in Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence. But he does not seem to have imagined himself leading a crusade for social justice. Branch suggests that he originally expected to preach, then take an academic position.

When he was approached, in 1955, to speak at the first mass meeting of the Montgomery bus boycotters, King was twenty-six years old. He declined. He changed his mind when he was assured that he would not have to take a leadership position. King had less than half an hour to prepare that speech, which he delivered in the Holt Street Baptist Church to an overflow crowd of more than five thousand. It’s a powerful oration—“If we are wrong,” he said, “God Almighty is wrong!”—and he must have sensed, from the frenzied response, that this was work he was intended to do. And it’s all he did. He never thought of running for office. Despite being tempted, cajoled, and baited, he never abandoned his commitment to nonviolence.

The activists in SNCC were not the only ones who thought King was an opportunist. So did Marshall, the man who argued Brown before the Supreme Court. So did J. Edgar Hoover, who tried to convince Kennedy that King was a dupe of the Communists, and who suspended the F.B.I.’s practice of warning political figures of death threats in King’s case.

So, for a time, did Roger Wilkins, an assistant attorney general in Johnson’s Justice Department. Then, in 1966, Wilkins went to see King in Chicago, where, in the face of neo-Nazi violence, King was trying to get the city to address the problems of inner-city poverty. King had rented a walkup in a slum neighborhood. When Wilkins and another Justice Department lawyer got up the stairs, they found King in a small, airless room in a railroad apartment, talking to forty or fifty gang kids. He was holding a seminar on nonviolence. “For hours this went on,” Wilkins later told one of L.B.J.’s biographers. “There were no photographers there, no newsmen. There was no glory in it. He also kept two assistant attorney generals of the United States waiting for hours while he did this.” It was four o’clock in the morning when King finished. He woke Coretta and she made coffee. “We sat and we talked,” Wilkins said. “He was a great man, a great man.”

King believed that defending the voting rights of minorities was the responsibility of the executive branch. For years, while civil-rights workers were being beaten, jailed, and murdered across the South, King begged the White House to send federal authorities to protect voter-registration drives. Presidents and attorneys general always found reasons to refuse. Finally, with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress gave the executive branch the tools and the authority to enforce the law.

With the decision in Shelby v. Holder, the Supreme Court has taken much of that authority away. Claims of Fifteenth Amendment violations must again be pursued through the courts, a lengthy and expensive process that shifts the burden of proof to the plaintiffs. As Richard Pildes, a voting-rights expert at the N.Y.U. School of Law, and others have argued, some of the blame for the decision should go to Congress. In 2009, the Court sent Congress a signal, in a case called Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder, that it needed to revisit the act’s definition of which areas were covered by the requirement that they clear changes in voting regulations with the Justice Department. That provision had not been revised since the mid-nineteen-seventies. But it has been politically expedient for Congress to renew the act, rather than add places where discrimination is a problem today.

“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., said, a sentiment echoed by Justice Thomas. They could not mean that race is no longer an issue. The Times reported that one place eagerly awaiting the Court’s ruling was Beaumont, Texas, where the Justice Department has blocked several attempts by a group of white citizens to change voting regulations for the explicit purpose of unseating a black-majority school board. What’s so changed about that? ♦

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The Undivided Past

by David Cannadine (Knopf)

In this impassioned and erudite critique of historical thinking, Cannadine addresses the impulse to “sunder all the peoples of the world into belligerent collectivities.” Highlighting such group identities as religion, nation, class, gender, and race, Cannadine argues that our tendency to create binary narratives of “us versus them” paints a false portrait of history: individuals, reduced to their membership in a single group, are trapped in Manichean battles. Instead, we need to pay more attention to diversity within groups, and the overlap of groups with their putative enemies. The long history of Christianity and Islam, both of which comprise hundreds of rival sects, is one not just of conflict but also of peaceful cohabitation and collaboration. Polarized histories are useful to politicians, Cannadine writes, but rob us of our “just inheritance”—a history based on our “essential unity,” rather than on our divisions. ♦

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Liberty’s Dawn

by Emma Griffin (Yale)

Griffin counters what she calls “the dark interpretation” of the industrial revolution in a provocative study. Surveying hundreds of autobiographical accounts by people who experienced the changes firsthand, she finds that for much of the British working class “the good wages and regular work that could be found in the factories more than compensated for the clatter of the machines.” Still, the industrial revolution was clearly a double-edged sword. One William Marcroft, born in Lancashire in 1822 and forced to work from the age of six, later caught up on his education at night school and, after retirement, became active in various social and political organizations. “The same forces that had crushed his childhood schooling,” Griffin writes, “helped to create new forms of cheap or free education for adults.” Whether such opportunities were worth a lost childhood remains an open question. ♦

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Serving Victoria

by Kate Hubbard (Harper)

This entertaining history of the Victorian court centers on the “household,” those aristocrats obliged to join the royal entourage. They had lavish living quarters and generous salaries, and many had few duties beyond attending dinners and parties. But such perks didn’t make up for the unremitting tediousness of court life and a suffocating atmosphere of respectability. “Exceedingly dull” was one maid-of-honor’s verdict. Immoderate drinking, flirtation, and idle chatter were outlawed, and “peculiar” religious and cultural ideas were frowned on. Hubbard draws on a wealth of correspondence and diaries to weave an amusing “Upstairs, Upstairs” drama, one in which the servants frequently condescend to their masters. Still, even the most snobbish of Victoria’s retinue had affection for her. One wrote that the royals were “a very ordinary rather second rate family,” but that the Queen “had real distinction.” ♦

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Southwest Passage

by John Lardner (Nebraska)

Lardner, son of the sainted Ring, was a twenty-nine-year-old boxing writer and Newsweek columnist when, in 1943, he went to Australia, New Guinea, and Papua to cover the Allies’ first stirrings of resistance to sweeping early defeats by the Japanese. What keeps these ancient dispatches alive is Lardner’s terse writing and obdurate informality as he joins a B-26 bomber mission, an edgy voyage aboard an explosives-laden freighter, and countless evenings in R.A.A.F. officers’ bars. Air raids and jokes and dead Japanese pilots and precisely rendered Aussie-talk and jungle butterflies and a surprisingly affable General MacArthur and an unexpected naval victory (the Battle of the Coral Sea) turn up within the onrushing dailiness of war. But what stays in a reader’s mind is the curiosity and courage of these new-made combatants and their heartbreaking youth. ♦

ON TELEVISION
Vice Versa

Good and bad in “Orange Is the New Black” and “Ray Donovan.”

by Emily Nussbaum

Two ambitious ensemble dramas début this summer, each set in a colorful criminal milieu. Permit me to be direct: one of them is terrific. The other you’ll probably want to skip, unless you have a serious thing for Liev Schreiber cradling a baseball bat.

First, the good. “Orange Is the New Black” is the latest release from Netflix, which is quickly establishing itself as a real rival to cable. Smart, salty, and outrageous, the series falls squarely in the tradition of graphic adult cable drama; were you pitching it poolside in Beverly Hills, you might call it the love child of “Oz” and “The L Word.” Created by Jenji Kohan, the TV-maker best known for the Showtime series “Weeds,” “Orange” is adapted from a memoir by Piper Kerman, a blond, Waspy Smith graduate who served fifteen months in a Danbury prison. In her reckless early twenties, she was the girlfriend of an “impossibly stylish and cool” older woman, who also happened to be an international drug trafficker. A decade later, when the Feds showed up, Kerman was engaged to a man and living a law-abiding life as a West Village creative-class yuppie. She went off to prison with an O-magazine mind-set: with sufficient preparation and a can-do attitude, she could handle anything for a year. That didn’t last long.

In different hands, this might be a cringe-worthy premise: a vanilla cupcake wedged in among the down-and-out and the black-and-brown. But the show blows Kerman’s anxious, observant memoir wide open, presenting her perspective as merely one within a kaleidoscope of experiences. Like the book, the series is very clear about how much she benefits from her demographic rarity. When Piper arrives, black women glare and white women smile; a new friend clarifies what’s happening. “We look out for our own,” she says—then, after Piper’s glance, adds, “Oh, don’t get all P.C. on me. It’s tribal, not racist.” When there’s a vote for prison representatives, it’s done by districts: blacks, whites, Latinas, Golden Girls, and “others.” The homophobic case manager, who doesn’t know Piper’s sexual history, makes her his pet. But while the show touches on the grinding unfairness of the penal system, it’s never preachy or grim. It’s very different, in other words, from the Sundance series “Rectify” (which just completed its run), a more delicate prison-themed series that relied on poetry and philosophy. “Orange” embraces a pulpier approach, leaning into and then subverting our expectations of a “Caged Heat” melodrama, heightening (and sometimes inventing) tensions that are only suggested in the book.

Taylor Schilling gives an effective performance as Piper Chapman, a smart cookie with a striking ability to keep secrets from those she loves. But the show really begins to blossom as it explores the women she meets in prison: a tough-talking Russian chef (the terrific Kate Mulgrew), a beautiful male-to-female transsexual (Laverne Cox), an older Haitian woman who trails rumors of her crimes (Michelle Hurst), a young Latina (Dascha Polanco) whose mother is also in prison, and a horndog junkie (Natasha Lyonne). There’s also a raucous bull dyke, played by the fantastic lesbian comedian Lea DeLaria; a girl who is engaged to a man but hooking up with Lyonne’s character (what Kerman, in her memoir, calls “gay for the stay”); a nun; a yoga-teaching lefty; and a Holy Roller. It’s a truly impressive array of prisoners, played by actresses of varying ages and appearances, including types rarely shown on TV. When a more cartoonish figure appears—like the black butch called Crazy Eyes, who wants Piper to be her wife—the show has built sufficient trust that viewers can embrace the situation’s off-brand kink, with Crazy Eyes purring “Swirrrrl” at Piper, a mix of chocolate and vanilla. Less successful plots involve Piper’s friends and family, who are saintly in the book but satirical targets in the series, which often takes the snarky bent of a Styles-section feature in the Times, with easy shots at them as privileged narcissists.

Because Piper is housed at a minimum-security prison, the show, refreshingly—and accurately, judging from the memoir—is not driven by violence, the way that “Oz” was. One sequence even slyly builds up the audience’s appetite for savagery, then upends it with something graphically sexual, in a sequence that is sure to gross viewers out (no spoilers, but it struck me as a line in the sand, like some of the provocations on “Girls”). There is also one significant shift from the original story: in the show, Piper’s ex-girlfriend, Alex (the masterly deadpan Laura Prepon, from “That ’70s Show”), is in the same prison with her from the beginning. This creates a sub-rosa love triangle with Piper’s fiancé, and it makes Piper an intriguingly ambiguous figure, whose former sexual persona has as much legitimacy as the straight girl she’s become.

Sexuality is at the center of “Orange”: the creators pluck mere hints from the memoir and spin them into full, splashy plots. Sex operates as comfort, as currency, as romance, and also as punishment, with male guards using security frisks to bypass consent. But “Orange” is also smarter and subtler about the entire range of female-female dynamics than almost anything on TV, except maybe ABC Family’s “Bunheads” and the BBC’s “Call the Midwife” (or, if you’re drunk, “Real Housewives”). The women form quasi-familial tribes and wounded triangles; it’s a matriarchal subculture that, as a Seven Sisters graduate, Piper had some preparation for. There are more lesbians here—butch and femme and of every ethnicity—than in any other series on television. Viewers ravenous for representation often graded the fun, flawed “The L Word” on a curve. Though “Orange” bears a resemblance to that show, it’s the more solid of the two, at least so far.

Then there’s “Ray Donovan,” on Showtime, which was created by Ann Biderman, the showrunner behind the beloved cult cop drama “Southland,” which recently ended. From the poolside-pitch perspective, her new series sounds lively enough: it’s “Mystic River” plus “The Fighter,” set in a noirish modern Los Angeles, then spiced with an Elmore Leonard-esque assortment of colorful losers. Liev Schreiber plays Ray Donovan, a heavy-fisted “fixer” for a fancy law firm, the sort of fellow who makes scandals disappear, like a butch Olivia Pope. He comes from a dysfunctional clan that has been transplanted from Boston, including two sad-sack brothers, who hang around a boxing gym, and a Machiavellian ex-con father (Jon Voight), who tries to chisel his way back into the family. Ray struggles to keep his wife and their teen-age kids safe, and there are secrets and lies and Southie accents thick as bisque—but, from the start, there’s also a strong sense of cable contrivance.

In each episode, Ray confronts a new set of Hollywood reprobates: a closeted movie star, a predatory pop star, a womanizing athlete, a sleazy executive. Some he threatens, some he gets out of trouble, but the show makes sure to dish up regular servings of stylized ultraviolence—torture for viewers to simultaneously cluck their tongues at and get off on. Jaunty oldies play over montages of corruption, a TV cliché that should be outlawed. Ray’s wife nags him for working too much. Most of the show feels like a dose of the same dirty candy that’s dished out all over adult cable, with one exception: Ray’s brother Bunchy, who attends a sexual-abuse support group and has won a settlement from the Catholic Church. The aura of unresolved mourning that infects Ray’s family, even his devilish father, feels more authentic than anything else on “Ray Donovan,” and Dash Mihok is solid and affecting as Bunchy.

Schreiber is an excellent actor who can brood with the best of them, but his character is straight out of antihero central casting: a sinner, but smarter than everyone else. He’s more masculine, more tormented, more empathetic. Naturally, he’s catnip to women, including his sniping wife (a wasted Paula Malcomson). Yet even as he drinks, and isolates himself, rubbing his stubbly jaw, the show keeps stacking the deck in his favor. He’s surrounded by quislings and hypocrites: rich L.A. creeps (Jewish men), jocks and rappers (black men), and the many perverts and thugs who are dumber and grosser than he is. He has a soft spot for twisty dames and suffering children. He’s the only one strong enough to reject his slimy dad. The show suggests promising themes—including parallels between Hollywood, the Church, and Ray’s family—but they’re overpowered by his role as a sordid fantasy figure.

Later episodes offer more humor and surprise, but the show may simply have come out at the wrong time, at least for me: I’m sick of disgust. “Ray Donovan” is fuelled by that emotion, particularly by a rage at ugly systems. But the series exists within its own ugly system, mining the by now tired convention of the thoughtful thug—the same idea that was so brilliantly subverted by more ambitious series, such as “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad.” So far, at least, “Ray Donovan” has more in common with “House of Lies” or “Californication,” shows that have a quality I’ve come to think of as That’s So Showtime: a lurid air of exploitation that feels fungal, funky, and off-putting.

“Orange” has sordid and sad things on display, too, and it’s certainly not immune to shock value. But there’s no disgust for human weakness, it doesn’t see criminals as trash, and it doesn’t use cartoonish bad guys to prop up its protagonist’s aura of virtue and specialness. In fact, it does the opposite, using its mainstream heroine as a Trojan horse. “Orange” would likely not have been green-lighted if its central story had involved a poor black drug dealer. Even “The Wire,” one of the blackest TV crime dramas ever, had a white antihero as its lead. So did “Oz,” which shared a similar premise. (White person lands in penitentiary hell.) But “Orange” uses that premise as a lure to get us to listen to other voices. I hope it sticks around so that we can hear them all. ♦

MUSICAL EVENTS
Water Music

John Luther Adams’s “Become Ocean,” at the Seattle Symphony.

by Alex Ross

The hundredth anniversary of Stravinsky’s formerly scandalous “Rite of Spring,” on May 29th, raised the question of whether a twenty-first-century composer can produce a comparable shock. Perhaps not: the twentieth century elicited such a numbing array of shocks, both in art and in reality, that the game of “Astonish me”—Diaghilev’s famous command to Cocteau—may be temporarily played out. Still, astonishment comes in many forms. There are shocks of beauty, shocks of feeling, shocks of insight. Such were the virtues of John Luther Adams’s “Become Ocean,” a forty-two-minute piece for large orchestra, which had its première at the Seattle Symphony on June 20th. Like the sea at dawn, it presents a gorgeous surface, yet its heaving motion conveys overwhelming force. Whether orchestras will be playing it a century hence is impossible to say, but I went away reeling.

The title comes from lines that John Cage wrote in tribute to the music of his colleague Lou Harrison: “Listening to it we become ocean.” There are also environmental implications, as Adams indicates in a brief, bleak note in the score: “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.” A onetime conservation activist who moved to Alaska in the nineteen-seventies, Adams has witnessed the effects of climate change at close range, and his music often reflects what he has seen. The 2007 orchestral work “Dark Waves,” among others, evokes mighty, natural processes through the accumulation of gradually shifting patterns. “Become Ocean” is his most ambitious effort in this vein: its three huge crescendos, evenly spaced over the three-quarter-hour span, suggest a tidal surge washing over all barriers.

It may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history. Whereas “Dark Waves” builds towering dissonances from simple intervals of the perfect fifth, “Become Ocean” is more tonally centered, almost to the point of lushness. Near the start, the winds present plaintive chords of B minor, while the brass luxuriate in soft D major. A broad spectrum of triadic harmonies unfolds, many of them enriched by neighboring tones, stirring associations with late-Romantic and early-modern repertory. When the harps play glittering arpeggios above the mass, you think of Debussy’s “La Mer.” An aching suspension of D-sharp against an E-major triad recalls the final measures of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. And the low, dark choirs of brass conjure Wagner. Anyone who has secretly wished, during the swirling stasis that opens the “Ring,” that the music would go on like that forever will find much to love in “Become Ocean.”

At the same time, it is a disorienting, unsettling creation. The majestic sonorities emerge from a musical machine, an inexorable process. (“Inexorable” is, in fact, the indication at the head of the score.) There are six hundred and thirty bars of music, plus a bar of silence. The three main sections of the orchestra play sequences of varying lengths, each of which swells to a climax and then fades, and each of which reverses course at its midpoint, in the manner of a palindrome. The winds have fifteen units of forty-two bars (including rests); the brass nine units of seventy bars; the strings twenty-one units of thirty bars. At three points, the crescendos of the various groups coincide, resulting in those Debussy-like climaxes. The really confounding thing is that at Bar 316 the music begins running in reverse. The work is a gigantic palindrome, ending where it began.

Anyone who has gone down a stretch of road and then reversed course knows that a landscape does not look the same when viewed from opposite directions. One mystery of “Become Ocean” is how different the material often sounds during the second half of the palindrome. The section after the first climax is thick with minor chords, particularly in the brass. Somehow, as these chords loom again during the buildup to the final climax, they take on a heavier, more sorrowful air. There is a sense of unwinding, of subsiding, of dissolution. I thought of Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” and also of the line that the earth goddess Erda utters in the “Ring”: “Everything that is, ends.” That a piece constructed with such fanatical rigor can convey such potent emotion is the greatest mystery of all.

The Seattle Symphony, under the leadership of Ludovic Morlot, is a revitalized orchestra, avid for new music and offbeat programming. On the first half of the June 20th program, a smoldering account of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, with the young Armenian virtuoso Sergey Khachatryan, showed the ensemble playing at a high and intense level. “Become Ocean” was the main event, though, and hundreds of younger listeners materialized among the older subscribers. The score requires considerable feats of stamina from the musicians: one percussionist rolls, without pause, on an array of bass drums, timpani, cymbals, and tam-tam, and the pianist is given a continuously pulsing seven-note pattern. (Ron Johnson and Kimberly Russ were the marathoners at the première.) Morlot had little to do during the performance except to keep the beat, but in rehearsal he had fine-tuned the balances so that the sound was full and rich but never excessively loud. The orchestra will perform “Become Ocean” again next May, during the Spring for Music festival at Carnegie Hall, on a program that also includes “La Mer” and Varèse’s “Déserts.” Here is an orchestra that has earned its marketing slogan: “Listen boldly.”

In recent decades, nobody has done more for American opera than David Gockley, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. First at Houston Grand Opera, and then in his current post, Gockley has presided over no fewer than thirty-eight world premières, including “Nixon in China,” by John Adams—the other Adams, who lives in Berkeley—and “A Quiet Place,” by Leonard Bernstein. In 1998, in Houston, Gockley had a hit with Mark Adamo’s nimble, hummable adaptation of “Little Women,” which has gone on to receive hundreds of performances.

Alas, the latest offering from Gockley, Adamo’s “The Gospel of Mary Magdalene,” is a misfire, at least in its current form. The composer can’t be faulted for a lack of ambition: recasting the New Testament story in the light of the Gnostic Gospels, especially texts that hint at a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Adamo hopes to deconstruct Christian patriarchy and promote a revisionist, feminist reading of the early Church. The idea is strong, but the flesh is weak. The libretto that Adamo wrote for the occasion is a barrage of cloying verses (“This is how I lose you / This is how it ends”), and his musical voice, indebted variously to Britten, Bernstein, and Sondheim, fails to generate a sufficient charge, either sensual or spiritual. John Adams’s similarly themed dramatic oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” which the Los Angeles Philharmonic introduced last year, puts this effort deep in the shade.

A starry cast made the most of the material. Sasha Cooke lavished her big, glowing mezzo-soprano on the lead part, and William Burden brought cutting tone and clean diction to the role of Peter, here cast as Mary’s chief ideological opponent. Nathan Gunn gave a measure of nobility to Yeshua, or Jesus, although he sounded faint at times. The production, directed by Kevin Newbury, had a conventional look but got the story across; Michael Christie, in the pit, worked hard to propel the score through its lulls.

“Why bother with these damn new things?” I heard an operagoer say on the way out. “It was no ‘La Bohème.’ ” Indeed it wasn’t. But if audiences in past eras had harbored the same cynical attitude Puccini and the rest of the repertory would never have existed, and we would all still be listening to Gregorian chant. More heartening was the spirit shown by one of John Luther Adams’s listeners in Seattle: “I want to go live in the world of that piece.” No composer could ask for more. ♦

THE CURRENT CINEMA
In Transit

“The Way, Way Back” and “I’m So Excited!”

by Anthony Lane

In the opening scene of “The Way, Way Back,” our hero, Duncan (Liam James), sits in the rear of a Buick station wagon. Duncan is a fourteen-year-old human male, otherwise known as a mollusk, preferring his shell of self-absorption to the company of others. His mother, a divorcée named Pam (Toni Collette), is riding up front, but asleep; at the wheel is her boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell), who takes the opportunity to quiz Duncan about his achievements. “On a scale of one to ten, what do you think you are?” Trent asks. Duncan mumbles something about a six. “I think you’re a three,” Trent says. Nice guy.

The rest of the movie, no surprise, is devoted to ramping Duncan up to an eight, or even a nine. At first, his prospects look bleak. The summer is to be spent at the seaside, in Massachusetts (the film’s locations included Marshfield and Duxbury), where the next-door neighbor is Betty (Allison Janney), a lush with a leathery tan and a voice that can be heard by distant ships. Within minutes, she is dissing the other inhabitants: “They called me a See You Next Tuesday to my face!” she cries. (Think about it.) Betty has a daughter, the aimless Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), a little older than Duncan, and not unfriendly, but he is immune, opting to pedal off—borrowing a girl’s bike, with a little pink basket on the front—to the local water park, where nobody knows him. There he is taken up, employed, and entertained by Owen (Sam Rockwell), the happy slacker who runs the place. And so the lonely Duncan begins to bloom.

The film was written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who, with Alexander Payne, wrote the screenplay for “The Descendants” (2011), and picked up an Oscar for their pains. That movie was set in Hawaii, and it seems that Faxon and Rash have an appealing weakness for the edge of things—for those pleasure grounds where the land peters out into the sea, and where high hopes tend to crack and peel. Whether the filmmakers have the courage of their own melancholy, this time round, I’m not sure. We see the water park on a rainy day, as redundant as a sun bed in a desert, but not for long enough; we really need the camera to linger there awhile and let the pathos soak in. Another problem comes with the territory; if I’m going to see young people near a beach, on a public holiday, anywhere on the coastline from Martha’s Vineyard to Plymouth and beyond, I demand that at least one of them should be eaten by a great white shark. I’m sorry, but that’s the law. If their thighbones are still connected to their hip bones by the end of the film, I want my money back.

Does Duncan deserve to be lunched on by a fish? Maybe not, but nor does he deserve to be the spindle of the movie, around whom all the plotlines are wound. Shailene Woodley, who played George Clooney’s daughter in “The Descendants,” made a far more incisive impression than Liam James does, precisely because her character, stuck on the fringes of the action, had to shoulder her way to the foreground, just as she had to fight for her father’s attention. In “The Way, Way Back,” things are the other way round; we mooch to and fro with Duncan, who has an average case of teen-age blues, but it’s the adults who deserve further investigation. For a genial fellow, Steve Carell makes a highly successful creep, and then there’s Toni Collette, who, from “The Sixth Sense” to “Little Miss Sunshine” and, on TV, “United States of Tara,” has become the queen of mothers. If you want the anxieties of parental love laid bare, seek no further. The highlights of the new film come at low-key moments—Pam realizing that Trent is a tightass, as they play a board game on a damp afternoon, and also that he is a cheater, when she catches him lying at an evening barbecue. With other people present, she can’t make a scene, and yet the scene is made, to perfection, by the sudden fall of her face, and by her agonized efforts to crank it back up to a smile.

That is why we go to movies like “The Way, Way Back”: for minor revelations trapped on the wing, and for flashes of rare feeling that costlier films may be too grand to observe. But there’s a hitch—a clash between that nimble noticing and something more loaded, even rigged, in the film’s construction. When a group of youngsters is seen practicing dance moves at the water park, against regulations, Owen tells Duncan to go and stop them; whereupon—what do you know?—our boy is inveigled into showing off his moves, with the small mob cheering him on. Likewise, once we learn that no one has ever passed another person on the water slide, we know exactly who will be the first to ace it. As these contrivances mount, so “The Way, Way Back” loses its status as a bantamweight comedy of manners and becomes more of a guidebook to self-esteem—so much so that even Sam Rockwell, the licensed jester of the film, has to start droning like a Jedi. “You got to go your own way,” he says to Duncan, holding him close. In the final shot, Pam and her son find themselves in the Buick once again, facing backward, gazing through the window at the road behind. Hey, look—it’s like the title of the movie!

Ever prolific, Pedro Almodóvar seems to have entered a curious phase, in which he flits back and forth between extremes. A wealth of tones has always been his to command, often within a single film, but the balance has—temporarily, no doubt—deserted him. His previous movie, “The Skin I Live In,” was a leering and laughless riff on the mad-scientist genre which crept beyond perversity into nastiness; now, as if supplying a cure for that dark poison, Almodóvar has chosen to toss “I’m So Excited!” in our direction.

Most of the movie is set on a plane, flying from Spain to Mexico. Soon after takeoff, everyone in coach is fast asleep—drugged, apparently, though how this happened I never understood, and you may suspect that Almodóvar wanted the little people out of the way so that he could concentrate on the smaller, richer, and more lavishly screwed-up folk in business class. With the aircraft in trouble, they are forced to assess and, if possible, repair their lives in the face of a looming demise. Almodóvar, having kicked off the story with cameos for Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, now brings on stalwarts like Cecilia Roth, who plays a celebrity dominatrix called Norma Boss, and the smiling Lola Dueñas, in the role of Bruna, a psychic who yearns to lose her maidenhood, preferably on board. There is also the flight crew. Oh, dear.

Given the derision that would rightly greet most other directors if they offered the blinding parodies of gayness that prevail here, could, or should, Almodóvar be charged with spreading antiquated stereotypes, or does his own sexuality—and, more to the point, his inquisitive mapping of the sexual landscape in earlier, subtler films—let him off the hook? One wouldn’t mind so much if there were joy in the excess, but really: cocked wrists, a gush of catty gossip, and disco-driven lip synch, up and down the aisles to the sound of the Pointer Sisters. You don’t know where to look. To make matters higher, mescaline-spiked cocktails are served, leaving people “talkative and affectionate.” None of them were Charles Bronson to begin with, and the effect is to drag the film toward the brink of an orgy; at last, you can feel Almodóvar forswearing his jittery campness for the sake of something genuinely wild, and I half wished that, like the captain and the flight attendant, he had gone all the way.

Why, then, does “I’m So Excited!” need to be seen? First, because, in between the trills of kitsch, there are sharp glances at the conflict of our private and public selves; thanks to a glitch with the audio system, for instance, passengers’ desperate phone calls to their loved ones are broadcast through the cabin, for all to hear. And, second, because, at one point, a plane crashes—well, not crashes, but flops onto its belly as it lands. And here’s the extraordinary thing: we hear that jolt, sensing the crunch of it in our bones, but we don’t see it. What Almodóvar does is prowl the deserted spaces of an airport, which has been cleared for the emergency. The compositions here are as crisp as a Mondrian, but they are tensed, too, awaiting impact, and, when it comes, they reverberate with a deep, disturbing shudder. The scene is a masterpiece in miniature, because it rebukes the temptation, ubiquitous in an age of digital effects, to show all calamities and to make them big. In the past year alone, how many planes, alien spacecraft, and other solid bodies have exploded before our eyes? And how often have we truly believed those eyes? What Almodóvar revives and salutes is the primacy of our imagining—the pleasure that we take in not being blown away but, rather, in reading the clues to chaos, or the hints of horror, and working out the rest for ourselves. The whole sequence comes, as I say, amid a daft and dispiriting comic skit, and it lasts only a couple of minutes; sometimes, though, that is how cinema moves on. ♦

FICTION
“All Ahead of Them”

by Tobias Wolff

“It’s all a misunderstanding,” he said. “I’m just on my way somewhere. I’ll call you later. O.K.?” His mouth was so dry he could hardly get the words out, and he heard the strain in his brother’s voice as they said their goodbyes.

He closed the phone and laid it on the bedside table. The French doors were open, and he could see a slice of the harbor above the balcony railing. The mattress squeaked as he rocked to his feet. He walked outside and stood at the railing. He wanted a cigarette, but he’d promised to quit after the wedding, and had managed to keep his word so far, despite the half-full pack of Gitanes forgotten by a previous guest in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Late sunlight glittered on the water and brightened the hulls of the boats in the marina. A pair of paisley pajama bottoms hung from a clothesline on the roof across the street, the legs dancing madly in the gusty breeze. He and Arden had laughed at the spectacle barely an hour ago; now he found it unsettling, humanly desperate.

He had understood, even as he used the word “misunderstanding”—always mealy on the tongue, always prelude to an alibi—that there’d been no misunderstanding. Which meant that his wife of six days was a liar and a thief. Well.

Well, well, well.

A vein throbbed in his forehead; his tongue felt gritty. He lowered himself into one of the deck chairs and drank from the glass of water he’d left on his guidebook. The ice had melted, leaving a metallic taste. The cover of the guidebook was damp from the sweating glass. He wiped it on his pant leg and opened to the page he’d been reading. A few moments later, he shut the book; the words were swimming on the page. He lowered the back of the chair and closed his eyes, hoping to calm himself, but instead he saw himself from a distance, striking this easy pose, performing relaxation. For whom? For himself, to demonstrate how little shaken he was? The sense of being ridiculous made him sit forward sullenly, legs on either side of the chair. A Motorino whined in the street below.

Minutes ago, before the call, he had been planning tomorrow’s walk to Vernazza. It was what he and Arden had come here to do, hike the cliff-side trails from village to village, and he had almost lost himself in plotting their route, looking for good beaches, picking likely restaurants. He’d been able to make love that morning for the first time since the wedding, and could just begin to contemplate the week to come without a cramp of dread.

He’d had this trouble with Arden a few times before, but he’d assumed that it would pass once the anxieties of getting married were behind them. Arden was being O.K. about it, “understanding,” even though she didn’t understand—how could she, when he didn’t understand? He knew that she was trying to make it easier for him, but when she told him not to worry, that it happened to men “all the time,” he was not reassured. Her sympathy was withering enough, but all the time? Where did that come from? The wisdom of others, he hoped. But what sort of conversation would invite those others to make such a revelation? Would he himself become fodder for “sharing” over drinks on some girls’ night out, or during one of Arden’s cooking classes? The very thought of it unmanned him. Arden hadn’t given up, but in her attempts to rouse him he had begun to suspect something beyond concern, even beyond impatience: boredom. “It’s O.K., Bud,” she’d said last night, when all had failed. “Let’s get some sleep.”

His name was Thomas, and he liked to think of himself as Thomas, but everyone called him Bud. Not even Tom, just Bud, ever since he was a baby, apparently because an aunt of his had said that he looked just like a bud in his little green onesie. The nickname had begun to grate as time went on, especially from people who didn’t know him well, as if they’d called him Mac or Pal. Though he knew they didn’t mean to presume, it affected him that way. Arden could imbue the name with tenderness, but she could also, as on the night before, sound like a stranger turning down the offer of a drink.

Arden wasn’t her real name. She’d created it by flipping her given name backward. She had been named after her father’s mother, Nedra, who’d been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for selling marijuana to other teachers in the Buffalo high school where she taught music. This was back in the seventies, under the Rockefeller laws. She had hanged herself in her cell after three years. A beautiful woman, everyone said, a talented pianist and singer. Arden’s father had been a young boy when Nedra was taken away, and never got over it. Above the fireplace he kept an oil portrait of her, copied at some expense from a photograph. He still couldn’t talk about her without getting choked up.

So they had this in common, Arden and Bud—both of them known by names that weren’t really theirs, though of course he’d been saddled with his, and she had chosen hers. He didn’t blame her. Arden was a beautiful name, a poetic name. In fact, he had been interested in her even before they met, just from hearing some mutual friends talk about her. And when those friends brought them together for dinner she somehow was Arden, willowy, formal, old-fashioned, in a crushed-velvet dress and high boots, her heart-shaped face framed by strands of dark hair that kept escaping from the bun she wore. She had an air of innocence and sincerity that touched him. She seemed unworldly, more spirit than flesh, and he still found himself hesitant to approach her, to take her—afraid of seeming crass, hungry, merely carnal. He was careful with Arden, slow, gentle, but afterward he sometimes sensed a disappointment in her that made him feel rough and clumsy.

Arden’s change of name had hurt her father, who still insisted on calling her Nedra—even, despite the pleas of his daughter and his wife, when giving his meandering, tearful toast at the wedding reception. There had been puzzled looks on the faces of some of the guests, as if they’d wandered into the wrong party, and Thomas realized that his bride had kept her given name secret from many of them, even close friends from college and the clinic where she worked as a speech therapist. She’d been in no hurry to tell him, either. He’d found out only when going to meet her parents for the first time. She had briefed him in the car on their way to the house—the story of her name, her grandmother’s prison sentence and suicide, all accounted for in a cool, flat recital of the facts during the last few minutes of the drive. “So when Dad calls me Nedra, that’s why,” she said as he pulled to the curb. She got out of the car and waved at someone. Thomas sat there in a daze until she rapped on the roof of the car. “Come on, Bud. They’re waiting.”

Whenever they visited Arden’s family, Thomas found himself studying the portrait of her grandmother. He’d smoked some weed in high school and college. Not much—it made him unpleasantly self-conscious, tongue-tied—but he didn’t see any great harm in it, certainly not enough to lock someone up, as they used to do, just for having a few joints. But Nedra had more than a few joints when they busted her—she had a pound of the stuff, and precision scales, and special baggies, and several thousand dollars in an account hitherto unknown to her husband.

She’d been an actual dealer. An ambitious dealer, too, expanding her customer base to young professors in the local colleges, though that hadn’t come out until after her death, and the repeal of the laws. She got busted after the vice-principal of her school ran a red light after a Christmas party, and the cop saw a fat spliff roll out of the glove compartment when the poor man opened it to show his registration. Stoned, hysterical, he immediately offered up Nedra, and that was that.

The portrait fascinated Thomas. Nedra was looking down at a Siamese cat in her lap, and, yes, she was beautiful, but not in the ethereal way that Arden was beautiful. Her hair was short and blond, almost white, and her nose slightly upturned, where Arden’s was aquiline. She wore a short-sleeved shirt, and her arms were plump, rounded, both wrists circled with gold bracelets. Her lips were painted a deep red. Musician and purveyor of marijuana she might be, but there was nothing of the artistic hippie about Nedra. In fact, she looked sort of Republican, in the way of his own grandmother and his aunts and their friends, a type he’d always been attracted to—women who smoked and drank cocktails and wore glittering rings and perfume and mink coats, which he liked to hang up for them, stroking the fur that somehow brought in the cold on winter nights. Nedra was smiling down at the cat, and Thomas couldn’t help seeing something secretive in that smile, something withheld and power-giving, and maybe not so nice. And he liked that—liked knowing how different Nedra had been from what she seemed. A dealer . . . An outlaw! But he understood that he was probably reading things into the portrait.

Thomas had packed his father’s old Army Zippo. Just out of sentiment—he was definitely quitting. He fetched it, then took the pack of Gitanes from under his shirts, tapped a cigarette out, and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. It was dry, stale. He went back onto the balcony and propped his elbows on the railing. The lighter flared at the first roll of the flint. He roasted the tip of the cigarette over the tall oily flame, relishing the faint crackle of the leaves. The first drag went right to his head. He closed his eyes. He felt himself swaying a little. Oh, but it was good. He took another hit off the cigarette and opened his eyes to the astonishing sight of the pajama bottoms performing a cancan—one leg up and down, then the other, again and again. He laughed in spite of himself. His dizziness passed. He went on smoking and thinking, darkly. One last drag, and he flicked the cigarette down toward the empty lane. It landed on an awning. Metal, fortunately. That would’ve made his day, burning the hotel down. Wasn’t he the lucky one!

So, the misunderstanding. What to do? Libby, his brother’s wife, never had her fingers off the phone. She texted while doing crossword puzzles, throwing a Frisbee for their neurotic Weimaraner—even changing diapers. By now, everyone in the family probably knew. Jenny and Claire, the other bridesmaids, lived downstate, and Libby hadn’t met them before the wedding, but she could track them down. Maybe she already had. What would they think? They’d been Arden’s roommates at Skidmore, her closest friends. And Libby, tireless busybody though she was, had a good heart. She’d taken Arden under her wing, treated her like a sister—even helped her plan the wedding. But of course it was Libby who’d discovered the crime, and now she was on the warpath.

Arden had picked out the dresses for her bridesmaids at a shop Libby had recommended. The dresses cost more than five hundred dollars each, which seemed a ridiculous sum to Thomas but was apparently not out of bounds for the fancy wedding they were having. Libby and Jenny and Claire seemed to take the price in stride; they deputized Arden to buy the dresses for them and paid her back without a squeak. And the dresses were beautiful, Thomas had to admit that. In fact, the word that came to him was “stunning.” It seemed a woman’s kind of word, so he didn’t say it, but he thought it when he saw the three women together in the church, excited, weepy, glowing in emerald-green silk that rustled as they danced attendance on their cool ivory queen. He’d been happy to admire what he hadn’t had to pay for, though he knew he’d have found the dresses less appealing if they’d cost him five hundred bills.

The problem was that they hadn’t cost Arden five hundred bills, either. That was the original price, still on the tags when she sent them to Libby and Jenny and Claire, but the dresses had been marked down by half when she bought them. Libby had taken hers back to the shop after the wedding for some minor adjustment, and the chatty owner had unwittingly exposed Arden’s scam.

Two hundred and fifty each. Seven-fifty altogether. Not exactly peanuts, but hardly a killing, either. The senior partners in his law firm made that much in an hour. He wasn’t doing badly himself, and would do even better as time went on, and Arden had been given a nice bump in pay just two months ago. So why do it? It couldn’t have been about the money; it was something else, a sort of impulse, or itch. For what? The tingle of risk? Of stepping over the line? A sort of adventure, maybe. The release of something held in, perhaps her very self.

Thomas’s mother had told him of a recurrent dream, in which she woke in her own bed, in her own house, and descended the stairs to find a strange man sitting at her kitchen table; he was wearing a military uniform and bore a livid scar across one cheek. Upon seeing her in the doorway he rose, and greeted her as his wife, approaching her with arms outstretched. She’d told Thomas this story twice, both times with a bemused smile. Now he felt as if he had somehow entered such a dream himself. Who was she? Who was this woman?

It was shocking. That is, he supposed he should be shocked. But here was the fact, stipulated: he wasn’t shocked. Embarrassed, to be sure, but not shocked. That seemed odd to him. He had to wonder, Why not? And this question brought to mind the stories that Arden told when she showed up late for a dinner or a movie or just about anything—she was always late, and always had a story. Thomas accepted these often flimsy narratives as a form of apology; in his limited experience, beautiful women did not generally feel obliged to make excuses. And there was something endearing about Arden’s inventions. A woman had slipped on a patch of ice, and she’d had to wait until the ambulance came. Her office door had locked behind her, with the keys inside, while the security guard was on break. One night, having kept Thomas pacing outside a concert hall for more than half an hour, she told him that she’d had to give a client a ride home, because his car had been stolen from the clinic lot—then she repeated the excuse a few months later, in pretty much the same words. It was as if she didn’t expect him to believe her, as if it were part of a game he’d bought into—as he guessed he had, because he never called her on any of it.

No. That would have spoiled what he took to be an understanding between them: that she could spin transparent yarns and he would indulge her, would even be amused by their transparency. This arrangement afforded him the pleasure of a silent, paternal chuckle, while keeping things honest between them—with Arden weaving her tales and knowing, as she did so, that he understood them to be concoctions and would forgive her little deceptions in light of her willingness to offer him alibis. Or so he’d imagined.

But what if he’d been wrong? What if she thought that he believed her? Thomas shook out another cigarette and let it dangle unlit from the corner of his mouth. The breeze was dying, the sky darkening into evening. The pajama legs hung listless from the line, now and then giving a little ripple as if in a faint memory of the dance they’d performed.

Could she actually think he was buying her stories? He wouldn’t have thought it possible, except . . . well, except that he saw that it was possible. There was the night in April when she got her raise and insisted on taking him to dinner at Bistro Claude. Flushed with the praise she’d received from the clinic’s director, she was unusually, indelicately hungry; she kept the waitress running for this dish and that dish, a demi of Bordeaux to follow the bottle they’d drunk, dessert, coffee, brandy. He’d never seen her so voracious. They had left the restaurant and were about to cross the street when their waitress came running out and called to them. They stopped. It was cold, and the waitress, in a white silk blouse, hugged herself as she came toward them.

“Was there something wrong with the service?” she asked. Her eyes were on Arden, her face pallid under the street light. “Was the service not up to your standard?”

“The service was fine,” Arden said.

“So—fine is not worth a tip?”

Arden turned to Thomas. “You didn’t leave the tip?”

“No. I thought—” He shook his head. “My fault. What was the bill?”

The waitress named the sum, and Thomas gave her a couple of twenties—almost thirty per cent. She took them without a word and returned to the restaurant.

“I thought you left the tip,” Arden said, looking straight at him. “Doesn’t the man always do that?”

He had believed her, or, at least, had managed to think he believed her. So why did that night come back to him so vividly now? There was something there that didn’t make sense, that he’d skated over, let go, given how easy and sure she’d been, as if the mistake really had been his. But when she’d paid the bill she hadn’t told him what it came to, so how could he have known what the tip should be? It was of a piece with this dress business, and, when you got right down to it, with certain other things: the handicapped-parking sticker she’d somehow got her hands on, the years-overdue library books—little things, nothing much by themselves but making a sort of rhyme when you put them together.

Thomas was not shocked, or, in fact, surprised. He was even a little relieved, strange as that seemed. He understood that he must have known all along. Now he was free of the work of pretending to himself that he didn’t know.

So. How to explain this dress business? Because it was up to him to produce an explanation, and in such a way that the matter would be put to rest. And in a way that left Arden unaware that she’d been found out, so that she would not avoid his family or feel awkward in their presence. And she must not know that he had handled it—that he knew. She would never forgive him for knowing.

He could not risk losing her. He had pledged himself, and not only in the words of the ceremony. When he’d first met Arden, she was engaged to an art dealer, a rich man, Austrian. She had thrown all calculation aside in leaving him for Thomas, a fledgling lawyer, a former social worker. And married him! He’d wondered if he was equal to her trust in him. Well, by God, he was. He was.

He could come up with a story for Libby and the others. He could say that he himself had picked up the dresses and forgotten to mention the sale to Arden, that she had billed them according to the price still indicated on the tags. O.K., not that story, maybe, but something like it that had at least a decent possibility of being true. Whatever he came up with would be supported by the evidence of the money he’d send them. And of course he would beg them not to mention his embarrassing mistake to Arden.

He would draw the funds from his account, not yet merged with Arden’s, and then open another, at a different bank, so that he could write other such checks, as occasion required; for there would surely be other occasions as the years went on, other confusions, misunderstandings, to be explained and smoothed over and set right with a roll of the old green, generously fattened to keep things “between ourselves,” so that his wife wouldn’t find out. The mistake would be his, always his.

He could see the two of them years from now, sitting in the stands of some middle-school gym, while their son ran up and down the court on skinny legs, or their daughter’s choir sang inspirational songs. He would look at his beautiful wife and know, and be glad in his knowledge, and in her certainty of his innocence.

That bad girl. Where was she? She’d gone out to do some shopping; how long could that take? He took the cigarette from his lips, held it over the railing as if to drop it, then lit it. He paced the balcony and smoked. Nedra would come back laden with packages. She would model the clothes for him, changing in front of him, taking things off, bending over, as he watched; he would demand it. She would hear the thickness in his voice, and hesitate, and smile. He knew that smile, he could see it—his mother’s smile as she remembered the scarred stranger in her kitchen, and how she’d entered his embrace. ♦

POEMS
“Dalmatian, Jardin du Luxembourg”

by Paula Bohince

Almost Deco, this dog,

statuesque against the pastel green

of the garden, the pistachio

of the macaron his girl is eating.

Leash-less, he is almost

objet. What a beauty

they make. No slow clarinet will

dissuade their contentment.

Earlier, a man wept openly,

impressively, in a hurry, dabbing

his eyes with ivory silk,

wearing, impossibly, a tuxedo.

His pain en plein air

was an unlocked room, exposed

nightstand privacies: mother-

of-pearl cufflinks, diamond

tie pin, his medicine. To see him

was moving, that expression,

the way Jazz moves, by

surprise, black and white notes

fluttering from their pattern.

As when the dog heard his name

sing-song’ed and turned, that

expression, toward the loved one.

POEMS
“Spring, 2012”

by David Bottoms

I rub my eyes. The world is still green—

a lime dust coating the porch tiles, rocking chairs, patio, yard,

delicate as a mourning veil.

A green finch dances between the bird feeders.

I can’t breathe, my eyes water. My friend can’t breathe, either.

She’s lost her son to an I.E.D. No details yet. Routine patrol

around a dusty village far away.

Tea waits on the table between us, and two blueberry scones.

Impossible, of course, to talk about loneliness

or changing our lives. Rain today, then a cooling.

In a week or so, dogwoods flowering along the back fence.

After that, maple sap staining the hoods of our cars.

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Children of the Night

by Joan Acocella

Tod Browning’s 1931 film “Dracula,” the one with Bela Lugosi (1882-1956), was an early talkie, and therefore it didn’t have much talking. There wasn’t what you could call a score, either—just some bits of “Swan Lake” and “Die Meistersinger.” So when Universal decided to reissue the movie for home video, in 1998, the studio decided to dress it in some music, and turned to Philip Glass. The resulting score honors whatever dialogue was there. (Lugosi’s “I never drink . . . wine” has accompaniment now.) Glass, with the Kronos Quartet, toured the new version widely after the video’s release. But when the show arrived at Prospect Park for Celebrate Brooklyn!, in 2006, it was interrupted by a storm of Transylvanian grandeur—thunder, lightning, rain by the bucketful—and after fifteen minutes everybody had to go home. (Some people said this was Lugosi speaking from the other side. He liked the movie the way it was.) On July 13, the festival will try again. This time, the musicians will be the Philip Glass Ensemble, with Glass at the keyboard. ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Between the Lines

by Peter Schjeldahl

The exhibition “Hopper Drawing,” at the Whitney, lets us into the factory of hand and mind that created “Nighthawks,” “New York Movie,” “Early Sunday Morning,” “Office at Night,” and other touchstones for which “iconic” is praise too faint. Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge. Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role. The show explains the power of Edward Hopper’s compositions but leaves their spiritual pang mysterious. What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him. Also on view are masses of early work which establish Hopper’s talents, developed in Paris, as a master sketcher and an apt emulator of Post-Impressionism—gifts that he plowed under to achieve a mature style, which confronts the world not as a reflection but as a précis of soul-testing melancholy and life-saving glints of grace. ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Spree Historic

by Ben Greenman

As a singer and a guitarist in Tripping Daisy, during the nineties, Tim DeLaughter helped create a formula that updated the music of seventies psychedelic trailblazers like Pink Floyd and mirrored that of neo-psychedelic standouts like the Flaming Lips. When the band’s guitarist Wes Berggren died, of a drug overdose, in 1999, DeLaughter and his bandmates reëmerged as the Polyphonic Spree, a choir-and-symphony rock experiment whose members performed in white robes and were either earnest or earnestly ironic. David Bowie was an early backer—he invited the group to a Meltdown festival one year and had it open for him on tour—and since then the Polyphonic Spree has produced a stream of sunny, and sometimes melancholy, songs incorporating a dozen instruments and just as many voices. The band’s latest album, “Yes, It’s True,” which continues in the same vein, comes out next month, and the group, in all its unhinged onstage glory, visits the Music Hall of Williamsburg on July 9 and the Bowery Ballroom on July 10. ♦

TABLES FOR TWO
Antica Pesa

115 Berry St., Brooklyn (347-763-2635)

by Lizzie Widdicombe

The original Antica Pesa, in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood, is one of those quaint little family-owned restaurants with a celebrity following (according to press reports, Quentin Tarantino likes the cacio e pepe). At its new Williamsburg location, the décor is slick: mod white light fixtures, huge leather couches, roaring fireplace. The crowd—when it does not include Madonna and her backup dancers, who stopped by recently, according to Page Six—usually has a fair number of tourists, plus some young professionals and European party people. A jazz band sometimes plays. For the disoriented: you’re not in Rome, or a midtown hotel. This is the new new Williamsburg—of the coming Whole Foods, the megaclubs, and the glass condos on the waterfront.

The most ambitious thing about Antica Pesa may be its pricing: eighteen-dollar appetizers, twenty-eight-dollar entrées, and, on the wine list, an eleven-hundred-dollar bottle of Barbaresco. The formula resembles that of Manhattan power-lunch spots like Casa Lever, with a variation: instead of serving traditional Italian food in a modern setting, the owners have taken traditional Roman food and attempted to modernize it. The effect is not always Lever level. One night, a fifteen-dollar appetizer was billed as a “trip through the Italian countryside.” It turned out to be chunks of cheese, slices of salami, and a single breadstick draped with bresaola ham, in individual vessels that looked like ashtrays. In another appetizer, eggplant slices are fried and then wedged, vertically, into a loglike schmear of mascarpone and ricotta cheese. The effect is decadent without being especially flavorful—it tastes like cream-cheese-dipped potato chips.

Antica Pesa’s better moments come when it sticks to more traditional pastas. The cacio e pepe—Tarantino’s jam—is creamy and firm. The pasta all’Amatriciana gets an extra kick of oil, served by an attentive waiter (“You like hot sauce, ladies?”), plus hot red pepper, snipped tableside with what look like nail clippers. But things go off the rails again with the entrées. The lamb chops, which the servers keep telling you about, are refreshingly simple but a little greasy. Baccalà alla Romana (salt cod) resembles a bland fish goulash, more salt than fish. The description of the maialino porchetta e ovetto (“pork loin, slow-cooked pork belly, fluffy egg white, marinated egg yolks, and asparagus”) promises so much. The reality: a light but tasteless pile of egg whites and pork that is somehow both undercooked and a little rubbery.

There are bright spots in the service, and the blingy atmosphere is a welcome deviation from Brooklyn clichés—who needs another faux-rustic farm-to-table establishment? You could have a good, if overpriced, meal here if you stuck to wine, pasta, and gelato—try the blueberry sorbet (pure and tart). But, for the most part, the restaurant tracks pretty well with Williamsburg’s real-estate market: it may look like Manhattan—and cost almost as much—but it’s still experiencing growing pains. (Open every night for dinner. Entrées $21-$30.) ♦

CLASSICAL NOTES
True Romance

by Russell Platt

While on an autumn holiday in 1899, Arnold Schoenberg, near the beginning of a long and restless creative life, composed his gorgeous late-Romantic string sextet, “Verklärte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”), which, especially in its string-orchestra transcription, would become the composer’s only truly popular work. The inspiration for the piece came from a poem by the fin-de-siècle writer Richard Dehmel, about a couple who, while walking in the woods at night, affirm their relationship despite the woman’s revelation that she is carrying the child of another man. In response, Schoenberg created a new musical language in which the expressive liberties of Wagnerian chromatic harmony were married to Brahms’s rigorous technique of “developing variation”—in other words, a marriage of freedom and responsibility, just as in Dehmel’s poem.

In its new release, “Journeys” (Sony Classical), the Emerson String Quartet, joined by the violist Paul Neubauer and the cellist Colin Carr, present a persuasive rendition that reflects the work’s current status as a repertory staple: the pacing is firm, and the recording, which strives for a grand, somewhat recessed concert-hall acoustic, gives the performance an almost orchestral flavor. A recording led by the young Dutch violinist Janine Jansen (on Decca), however, not only confirms the work’s chamber origins but evokes its early reputation as a dangerously radical piece. The sonics have a bracing, drawing-room intimacy, and the interpretation, with its impetuous tempo changes, translucent textures, and extremes of articulation, has a raw and febrile quality; a heated, but affectionate, conversation among friends. (The ensemble, which also includes the violist Maxim Rysanov and the cellist Torleif Thedéen, based it on a live concert in Dortmund.)

The works chosen to fill up the disks play to each group’s strengths. Carr, Neubauer, and the Emersons begin their album with Tchaikovsky’s quasi-orchestral string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence,” projecting its fulsome melodies with style and force; Jansen and company conclude theirs with Schubert’s sweet but complex String Quintet in C Major, delving deeper into the Viennese musical culture that Schoenberg would so boldly transform. ♦

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
This Week

The Theatre

ROCK OF AGES

The popular “Encores!” series, which mounts concert versions of sometimes forgotten Broadway musicals, has inspired an offshoot: “Encores! Off-Center,” under the artistic direction of the composer Jeanine Tesori, will revive Off Broadway shows. The inaugural production is “The Cradle Will Rock” (1937), starring Danny Burstein, Anika Noni Rose, and Raúl Esparza; Sam Gold directs, at City Center.

Night Life

SWEET ON THEM

She & Him—the duo comprising the singer-songwriter M. Ward and the singer-songwriter and actress Zooey Deschanel—remain true to their signature sunny sixties-style pop on their latest album, “Volume 3.” The pair, who are at SummerStage, continue to make music that is coyly flirtatious and yet at the same time aloof.

Art

BOYS OF SUMMER

In the Met’s vest-pocket show “Legends of the Dead Ball Era (1900-1919),” the museum exhibits a private collection of baseball cards featuring stars of the early years of America’s pastime, among them the Hall of Famers Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, and Tris Speaker.

Classical Music

BOSTON STRONG

In winding down the all-too-brief James Levine era, Tanglewood has had to deal with more than its share of headaches. But it’s still the supreme music festival of the summer, and it begins with the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing big pieces by Mahler (the Third Symphony) and Bernstein (accompanying a screening of the film “West Side Story”), among other works.

Movies

CELEBRATE CELLULOID

BAM’s complete retrospective of films directed by John Cassavetes, with a sampling of others in which he acted, has the distinction of showing only 35-mm. prints, a rarity in the digital era.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The Theatre

OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS

Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information.

BILL W. AND DR. BOB

Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey wrote this play, set in 1929, about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. Seth Gordon directs. Previews begin July 8. Opens July 16. (SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam St. 866-811-4111.)

THE CRADLE WILL ROCK

“Encores! Off-Center,” which presents concert versions of seminal Off Broadway productions, mounts the 1937 musical by Marc Blitzstein, directed by Sam Gold and choreographed by Chase Brock. Starring Danny Burstein, Anika Noni Rose, and Raúl Esparza. July 10-13. (City Center, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.)

CYMBELINE

The Drilling Company presents Shakespeare’s romantic problem play, in a parking lot on the Lower East Side. Previews begin July 11. Opens July 13. (Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, corner of Ludlow and Broome Sts. 212-873-9050.)

THE DESIGNATED MOURNER

Andre Gregory directs the 1996 work by Wallace Shawn, in which three artists lament the fate of the increasingly conservative policies of their country. The play, starring Deborah Eisenberg, Larry Pine, and Shawn himself, is part of the Wallace Shawn–Andre Gregory Project, co-presented by Theatre for a New Audience and the Public. In previews. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)

EAST TO EDINBURGH FESTIVAL

The annual presentation of American productions heading to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe includes “Longing for Grace,” directed by Austin Pendleton, and Bill Bowers’s “It Goes Without Saying.” Opens July 9. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

FIRST DATE

This new musical, starring Zachary Levi (“Chuck”) and Krysta Rodriguez (“Smash”), follows a high-strung young man and a skeptical young woman—and the voices in their heads—as they make their way through a blind date. With music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner and a book by Austin Winsberg (“Gossip Girl”). Bill Berry directs. Previews begin July 9. (Longacre, 220 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.)

FOREVER TANGO

Luis Bravo created and directs this tango showcase, which returns after an international tour. Previews begin July 9. Opens July 14. (Walter Kerr, 219 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.)

LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES

As part of the Lincoln Center Festival, John Malkovich directs a French cast in Théâtre de l’Atelier’s production of Christopher Hampton’s play, based on the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. In French, with English supertitles. July 9-14. (Gerald W. Lynch Theatre, John Jay College, 524 W. 59th St. 212-721-6500.)

MONKEY: JOURNEY TO THE WEST

The Lincoln Center Festival begins with this musical retelling of the Chinese tale by Damon Albarn (composer) and Jamie Hewlett (visual concept, animation, and costumes), of the musical collective Gorillaz. Circus elements are combined with musical theatre to tell the story of a monk and a magical monkey who travel from China to India in search of the Buddha. Chen Shi-Zheng directs. In Mandarin, with English supertitles. Previews begin July 6. Opens July 9. (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-721-6500.)

MURDER FOR TWO

Scott Schwartz directs this farcical musical comedy revolving around a murdered novelist. Joe Kinosian wrote the music and Kellen Blair wrote the book and the lyrics. Part of Second Stage’s Theatre Uptown series. Previews begin July 10. (McGinn/Cazale, 2162 Broadway, at 76th St. 212-246-4422.)

NEW YORK MUSICAL THEATRE FESTIVAL

The annual festival, which has fostered such shows as “Chaplin,” “[title of show],” and “Next to Normal,” presents twenty-four new musicals over three weeks. Opens July 8. (Various locations. 212-352-3101.)

NOBODY LOVES YOU

Second Stage concludes its season with the New York première of a musical comedy about a philosophy graduate student who ends up as the star of a reality-TV dating show. With music and lyrics by Gaby Alter and a book and lyrics by Itamar Moses. Michelle Tattenbaum directs. In previews. (305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)

SERIOUS MONEY / THE CASTLE

PTP/NYC presents two plays in repertory. “Serious Money,” Caryl Churchill’s 1987 satire of the British stock market, directed by Cheryl Faraone, starts previews July 3 and opens July 9. “The Castle,” Howard Barker’s 1985 historical drama about Crusaders in the thirteenth century, starring Jan Maxwell and directed by Richard Romagnoli, starts previews July 4 and opens July 10. (Atlantic Stage 2, at 330 W. 16th St. 866-811-4111.)

SHUN-KIN

As part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Simon McBurney’s company Complicite, with the Setagaya Public Theatre, presents an adaptation from the writing of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, about a blind musician and her servant lover in nineteenth-century Japan. With puppetry by Blind Summit Theatre. In Japanese, with English supertitles. July 9-13. (Rose Theatre, 60th St. at Broadway. 212-721-6500.)

THIS GREAT COUNTRY

The River to River Festival includes this 600 Highwaymen production, which reimagines Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” performed in a vacant storefront. July 10-13. (Pier 17 Storefront, South Street Seaport. 212-219-9401.)

NOW PLAYING

BUYER & CELLAR

In a pre-show disclaimer, the star of this one-man play, Michael Urie (“Ugly Betty”), explains that what the audience is about to see is not based on any real events—beyond being a riff on a passage in Barbra Streisand’s 2010 vanity monograph, “My Passion for Design.” What follows is the ultra-charming Urie’s transformation into a down-and-out gay actor in L.A., who takes a job as a make-believe shopkeeper in a make-believe shopping mall in the basement of the mega-celebrity’s Malibu home. Under Stephen Brackett’s intelligent, resourceful direction, this very entertaining piece of camp, by Jonathan Tolins—packed with movie and Broadway references, gay jokes galore, and a number of nutty impersonations—strikes a nice balance between the wacky and the wonderful, resulting in a fantasy so delightful you wish it were true. (Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. 212-868-4444.)

GIBRALTAR

Terry Kinney directs Patrick Fitzgerald’s adaptation of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” in which Fitzgerald and Cara Seymour play a multitude of roles, among them Leopold and Molly Bloom. Unlike the 1958 production of “Ulysses in Nighttown” (starring Zero Mostel), in which Marjorie Barkentin adapted a single scene from the book, this play distills elements of the couple’s relationship, from their courtship in Gibraltar to Molly’s famous monologue, delivered in and around her bed, in Dublin. Fitzgerald and Seymour play some scenes together, but mostly they address the audience separately, expounding Joyce’s dense, rich language, and concentrating on the sections of the novel that led to the American publisher’s prosecution for obscenity, in 1920. The presentation will probably be more pleasing to lovers of the book than to audiences expecting an orthodox bit of stage storytelling. (Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737. Through July 14.)

ICE FACTORY 2013

The annual festival continues with Sightline’s “My Machine Is Powered by Clocks” (July 3-6), in which time travel is the norm, and the Mad Ones’ “Untitled Biopic Project” (July 10-13), about nineteen-sixties folk rockers. (New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher St. 888-596-1027.)

RANTOUL AND DIE

In the first act of Mark Roberts’s dark comedy, produced by the Amoralists, Rallis (Derek Ahonen), a depressed young schlub, won’t get off the couch, because his wife, Debbie (Sarah Lemp), who works at the local Dairy Queen, has dumped him and filed for divorce. In the second act, Rallis is still on the couch, but now he’s in a vegetative state, having shot himself in the head out of despair. Debbie, guilt-ridden and repentant, shares the job of caring for Rallis with Callie (Vanessa Vaché), a psychotic co-worker from the D.Q. The first act, under the direction of Jay Stull, offers little more than loud, childlike whining, but the performances in the second—in which Debbie and Callie reveal their dark secrets to each other—are spot on: subtle, relaxed, and inspired. (Cherry Lane, 38 Commerce St. 866-811-4111.)

THE SILVER CORD

In Sidney Howard’s 1926 melodrama, directed by Dan Wackerman, a young architect (Thomas Matthew Kelley) brings his fabulous new wife (Victoria Mack) home to meet his beloved family, including his ne’er-do-well brother (Wilson Bridges) and his brother’s innocent fiancée (Caroline Kaplan). Their mother (played, inexplicably, by a man—Dale Carman—in drag), however, is not the goddess that both brothers believe her to be; in fact, she’s a vicious and manipulative horror, romantically in love with, and overly possessive of, both of her sons. Apart from the fact that Howard wrote the screenplay for “Gone with the Wind,” it’s hard to understand why the Peccadillo Theatre Company resurrected this strange, unfunny relic. (Theatre at St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46th St. 212-352-3101. Through July 14.)

THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY

In Tennessee Williams’s 1967 chamber piece, Felice (Brad Dourif) is an aging actor fading from public view; he’s also a writer and a director, trying to get his play mounted in an unnamed town. It’s called “The Two-Character Play,” and it stars Felice and his sister, Clare (Amanda Plummer). Their money has dried up, and their manager, Fox, and the company’s other players have run off, and now Clare and Felice must perform the play alone if they are to fulfill their professional obligation. The ardent and ravenous Plummer, returning to the New York stage after a fifteen-year absence, has lost none of the gifts that made her such an astonishment when she began her career, in the late seventies. But the director, Gene David Kirk, fails to fully harness Plummer’s titanic power and vision. (Reviewed in our issue of 7/1/13.) (New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200.)

THE UNAVOIDABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF TOM DURNIN

The actor David Morse has a soft, open face and an innate decency that make you want to buy him a Father’s Day card. So it’s nice to see him mix his geniality with desperation—and a little danger—as the title character of Steven Levenson’s otherwise colorless drama, directed by Scott Ellis for the Roundabout. Tom Durnin is a financial criminal just out of minimum-security prison. He wants to re-start his life, but neither his sad-eyed son (Christopher Denham), who lets him crash on his couch, nor his ex-wife (Lisa Emery) can forgive him. The scenario seems almost rigged for redemption, and it is: despite Levenson’s tender hand with his characters, the play lacks any aesthetic or psychological surprise. (Laura Pels, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300.)

OUT OF TOWN

BARD SUMMERSCAPE

The Spiegeltent returns; guests include Sandra Bernhard (July 5) and Justin Vivian Bond (July 6). Beginning July 11, Janos Szasz directs an adaptation, by Szasz and Gideon Lester, of Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1937 novel, “The Master and Margarita.” (Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. 845-758-7900.)

BARRINGTON STAGE COMPANY

On the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage through July 13, John Rando directs the musical “On the Town,” with music by Leonard Bernstein and a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. On the St. Germain Stage through July 6, Giovanna Sardelli directs “Muckrakers,” by Zayd Dohrn. (30 Union St., Pittsfield, Mass. 413-236-8888.)

HUDSON VALLEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

The summer’s offerings, on the grounds of Boscobel, include “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “King Lear,” and Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of the Dumas novel “The Three Musketeers.” (Garrison, N.Y. 845-265-9575.)

POWERHOUSE THEATRE

Vassar and New York Stage and Film’s annual summer festival continues with “Downtown Race Riot” (through July 7), a comedy by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld, starring Annabella Sciorra, directed by Scott Elliott. July 12-14, Walter Bobbie directs a workshop production of Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s musical “Bright Star,” set in 1922 and 1945 in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. (124 Raymond Ave., Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 845-437-5599.)

WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL

On the Main Stage, Henry Wishcamper directs his adaptation of the musical based on the Marx Brothers film “Animal Crackers” (through July 13). On the Nikos Stage through July 7, Leigh Silverman directs “American Hero,” Bess Wohl’s comedic mystery set in a sandwich chain store, starring Ari Graynor; beginning July 10, Evan Yionoulis directs Tom Stoppard’s “Hapgood,” starring Kate Burton and Reed Birney. (Williamstown, Mass. 413-597-3400.)

ALSO PLAYING

THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES: Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. THE EXPLORERS CLUB: City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. FAR FROM HEAVEN: Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200. Through July 7. A KID LIKE JAKE: Claire Tow, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200. Through July 14. KINKY BOOTS: Hirschfeld, 302 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. LUCKY GUY: Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. Through July 3. MATILDA THE MUSICAL: Shubert, 225 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812: Kazino, W. 13th St. at Washington St. 866-811-4111. A PICTURE OF AUTUMN: Mint, 311 W. 43rd St. 866-811-4111. PIPPIN: Music Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA: Broadway Theatre, Broadway at 53rd St. 212-239-6200. THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL: Stephen Sondheim, 124 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200. VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE: Golden, 252 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. THE WEIR: Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Night Life

ROCK AND POP

Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.

BOWERY BALLROOM

6 Delancey St. (212-533-2111)—July 8: CSS. Although its name stands for “Cansei de ser sexy,” which is Portuguese for “I got tired of being sexy,” the Brazilian female four-piece group sounds anything but fatigued in delivering its snappy electro-pop. David Sitek, of TV on the Radio, produced the act’s latest album, “Planta.” July 10: The Polyphonic Spree (see Critic’s Notebook). July 16: In March, the legendary British art-punk group Wire revealed its thirteenth record, “Change Becomes Us,” featuring songs based on sketches and miniatures that the band performed in the late seventies and early eighties but which were never released. The group, known for innovative song structures and acerbic lyrics, reached a creative peak with its first three albums, which influenced the Minutemen, Minor Threat, and R.E.M., among many other bands. Many of the best songs from the new record, filled with angular guitar riffs and oddly catchy vocals, evoke Wire’s golden era.

CAPITOL THEATRE

149 Westchester Ave., Port Chester, N.Y. (877-435-9849)—July 12: Cyndi Lauper, the eighties pop star with the heavy Queens accent, is a Broadway diva now, having won a Tony for “Kinky Boots.” She hasn’t lost her Ozone Park touch as a performer, though. July 13: Chris Isaak’s latest album, “Beyond the Sun,” explores his love for Memphis-based rockabilly.

CELEBRATE BROOKLYN!

Prospect Park Bandshell, Prospect Park W. at 9th St. (718-683-5600)—July 6: The talented Brooklyn rapper (and occasional Solange Knowles collaborator) Theophilus London maintains a strong focus on pop melodicism, and combines it with a quirky and engaging world view. With the duo Les Nubians, French sisters who sing mellow and relaxing R. & B. July 11: A night of top-shelf indie pop to benefit this concert series, featuring Belle and Sebastian and Yo La Tengo.

CITY WINERY

155 Varick St. (212-608-0555)—July 3 and July 10: The New York folkie Suzanne Vega embarks on a summer residency here. July 5-6: A two-night record-release party for 10,000 Maniacs, in support of their new album, “Music from the Motion Picture.” July 7: The sinuous electric guitar of the Traffic founding member Dave Mason. July 12: The singer-songwriter Steve Forbert performs with a full band to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the release of his first album, “Alive on Arrival.”

IRIDIUM

1650 Broadway, at 51st St. (212-582-2121)—July 9: The Grandmothers of Invention, led by the irrepressible Napoleon Murphy Brock, on saxophone and vocals, explore the twists and turns of Frank Zappa’s sharp and forward-looking approach to twentieth-century music.

LOWDOWN HUDSON BLUES FESTIVAL

Two evenings of high-quality free music on the Hudson River, on the plaza behind Brookfield Place (formerly the World Financial Center). July 10: The sublime blues guitarist and singer B. B. King. Joining him is the James Hunter Six, led by the British singer and guitarist, who draws his inspiration from the gritty giants of R. & B., notably Wilson Pickett and Jackie Wilson. July 11: The supremely accomplished American rockers of Los Lobos. With Los Lonely Boys, who are the Garza brothers from San Angelo, Texas, and the veteran Austin-based singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo. (220 Vesey St. 212-417-7000.)

MERCURY LOUNGE

217 E. Houston St. (212-260-4700)—July 5: The noisy Philly group Bleeding Rainbow draws unabashedly on the more aggressive rock side of nineties alternative music. It’s touring with Fat Creeps, a pop-rock outfit characterized by angsty female lead vocals, memorable melodies, and blistering electric lead-guitar lines.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—July 4: The independent record store Other Music opened in the mid-nineties, across from the Tower Records hub on East 4th Street. Tower closed in 2006, but Other Music is still going strong. Last year, it expanded its operation and started a boutique record label. The first act that the label signed, the local dream-pop duo Ex Cops, perform here to open the museum’s summer music series, “MOMA Nights.”

MUSIC HALL OF WILLIAMSBURG

66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn (718-486-5400)—July 9: The Polyphonic Spree (see Critic’s Notebook).

PAPER BOX

17 Meadow St., Brooklyn (718-383-3815)—July 11: Jeremiah Lockwood, whose cantorial-tinged vocals lead the horn-driven quintet Sway Machinery, curates the first-ever Dream Past Festival, a one-day affair devoted to tradition-minded musicians. Lockwood’s group headlines the event, which also includes the soulful and lyrical desert blues of the Nigerien guitarist Abdoulaye Alhassane Toure, who will be joined by the guitarist, broadcaster, and writer Banning Eyre. The master Cameroonian percussionist and subway musician François Nnang and others are also on the bill.

(LE) POISSON ROUGE

158 Bleecker St. (212-505-3474)—July 9-10: Squarepusher (the influential Warp Records artist Tom Jenkinson) delivers multifaceted and highly nuanced acid-techno music, layering beats and harsh electronic sounds with the skill of a master composer, and employing an array of dazzling visual effects to boot.

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL

July 10: With a career stretching back to the fifties, Leon Russell—the guitarist, pianist, singer, songwriter, arranger, and producer—has enriched the records of everybody from Gary Lewis and Ray Charles to the Carpenters and George Harrison. (Rockefeller Park. rivertorivernyc.com.)

SHEA STADIUM

20 Meadow St., Brooklyn (No phone)—July 8: The garage-rock act Bass Drum of Death hails from Oxford, Mississippi, where it has roots in the scene surrounding an art-and-music collective housed in a five-thousand-square-foot former Boys & Girls Club, lovingly dubbed the Cats Purring Dude Ranch. Known for endless all-day barbecues and raucous late-night shows, the place has made northern Mississippi a destination for a certain strain of indie band. With the rough-hewn country, blues, and rock of Brooklyn’s Wild Yaks.

SILENT BARN

603 Bushwick Ave., Brooklyn (No phone)—1.21 Gigawatts is a small music-and-culture zine, based in Brooklyn and staffed by ex-interns from Paper Magazine. It recently marked its first birthday, and to celebrate it’s hosting a small festival at the Silent Barn’s new location, July 5-6. The festival features a cross-section of local bands, including the irreverent party-rockers of Team Spirit and the fuzzy lo-fi band Total Slacker. (For more information, visit gigawattsmag.com.)

SUMMERSTAGE

Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, mid-Park at 69th St. (212-360-2777)—July 6 and July 8: She & Him—the duo consisting of the singer-songwriter M. Ward and the singer-songwriter, actress, and all-around It girl Zooey Deschanel. With the Scottish pop act Camera Obscura.

WEBSTER HALL

125 E. 11th St. (212-353-1600)—July 11: Savages, a prickly British post-punk band that has mobilized the critical establishment on both sides of the pond. July 12: The singer-songwriters Kevin Devine and Andy Hull (of Manchester Orchestra) have joined forces as Bad Books to turn out melancholy pop with a snide side. With the deadpan punk pop of the Front Bottoms and the disaffected faux folk of the Wild.

JAZZ AND STANDARDS

BIRDLAND

315 W. 44th St. (212-581-3080)—July 2-4: Jackie Ryan, an experienced vocalist whose new album, “Listen Here,” draws on standards but also investigates more offbeat works from the likes of Abbey Lincoln and Dave Frishberg. July 9-13: Louis Hayes’s “Cannonball Adderley Legacy.” The masterly drummer Hayes has centered his life on Adderley’s music twice in his extensive career, first as a member of the legendary alto saxophonist’s band, from 1959 to 1965, and now as the longtime leader of this dynamic tribute ensemble.

BLUE NOTE

131 W. 3rd St. (212-475-8592)—July 2-7: Jerry Gonzalez and Fort Apache Band, now in the fifth decade of a sporadic but exceedingly significant existence, fuses Latin rhythms with hard bop and modal jazz. The result continues to be as explosive as it is influential.

CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ

29 Cornelia St. (212-989-9319)—July 6: Few jazz musicians are blessed with an artistic resurgence after the age of seventy, but the bassist and composer Mario Pavone, who is seventy-two, has recently been enjoying one as a post-bop bandleader. His septet finds room for a pair of distinctive tenor saxophonists, Ellery Eskelin and Noah Preminger. July 7: Ches Smith, the go-to drummer for daring new-jazz groups, leads a trio featuring the equally venturesome players Craig Taborn, on piano, and Matt Maneri, on viola.

54 BELOW

254 W. 54th St. (646-476-3551)—July 2: The crowd-pleasing singer-pianist Diane Schuur, who is equally at home with forties standards, R. & B., and sultry torch songs.

IRIDIUM

1650 Broadway, at 51st St. (212-582-2121)—July 5-6: Straight-ahead hard bop from an ad-hoc ensemble featuring the veterans Jimmy Cobb and Harold Mabern and younger acolytes including Peter Bernstein and Peter Washington. July 13: The Jazz Passengers, standard-bearers of the downtown jazz scene of the late eighties, never had a problem mixing mirth with musicality. They’re back, and still smiling.

“JAZZ IN JULY”

Under the stewardship of the great mainstream pianist Bill Charlap, this uptown festival has begun to broaden its horizons, but this year’s kickoff show, on July 16, focusses on the traditional. It’s a celebration of Fats Waller, whose incomparable musicianship and spirited performance style will be honored by the pianists Rossano Sportiello and Charlap himself, along with the vocalist Carol Woods, the clarinettist Anat Cohen, and the trumpeter Randy Sandke. (92nd Street Y, Lexington Ave. at 92nd St. 212-415-5500. Through July 25.)

JAZZ STANDARD

116 E. 27th St. (212-576-2232)—July 3-7: The pianist Cyrus Chestnut, who is as comfortable with gospel music as he is with bebop, leads a snapping trio. July 11-14: Chris Potter’s Underground, a jagged jazz-funk quartet led by the saxophonist Potter, has altered its instrumentation, jettisoning keyboards and adding an electric bass.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT SWING

The twenty-fifth-anniversary season of this summer favorite hits its stride. July 3: The soulful sounds of Philadelphia’s Urban Guerilla Orchestra. July 4: A battle of the big bands, with the George Gee Swing Orchestra, out of New York City, facing off against Dean Mora’s Modern Rhythmists, from Los Angeles. July 5: The d.j. Jonathan Toubin’s Soul Clap & Dance Off features live performances by the old-school R. & B. vocalist Young Jessie and King James & the Special Men, a gritty group from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans that’s making its New York City début. July 6: Salsa by way of Colombia, with La Sonora Carruseles. July 9: A night of jump blues and big-band swing with the U.K. saxophonist, singer, and bandleader Ray Gelato, who will be backed by Philadelphia’s City Rhythm Orchestra. July 10: Mambo and salsa are on tap as Arturo O’Farrill & the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, with a special guest, Tito Rodriguez, Jr., take dancers back to the Palladium of yore. July 11: Disco is the word as the Loser’s Lounge pays tribute to Donna Summer and others. July 12: New York salsa and Cuban charanga converge as Típica 73 celebrates its fortieth anniversary. July 13: The Harlem Renaissance Orchestra closes the series with its traditional tribute to Illinois Jacquet. (Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center. 212-721-6500.)

VILLAGE VANGUARD

178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. (212-255-4037)—July 2-7: The dazzling trumpeter Roy Hargrove concludes a two-week run at this venerable club. July 9-14: The veteran pianist Cedar Walton delivers authentic, straightforward hard bop with his longtime associates David Williams, on bass, and Willie Jones III, on drums.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Art

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Civil War and American Art.” Through Sept. 2. |  “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Photography and the American Civil War.” Through Sept. 2. |  “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” Through Aug. 14. |  “The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi.” Through Nov. 13. |  “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: Charting a New Empire.” Through Aug. 4. |  “Legends of the Dead Ball Era (1900–1919) in the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick.” Opens July 8. (Open daily, 9:30 to 5:30, and Friday and Saturday evenings until 9.)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store/Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing.” Through Aug. 5. |  “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes.” This exhaustive survey ends with a bang: a selection of big, turbulent drawings made during lectures by the legendary Swiss architect in 1935, as he regaled U.S. audiences with his groundbreaking views on the urban landscape. The show opens with forgettable paintings from the architect’s youth, including several portraying Istanbul, where Corbusier’s exposure to Islamic architecture was formative. In between are models and architectural drawings of projects, ranging from the unrealized Plan Voisin, a 1925 scheme to raze Paris and rebuild it as the “radiant city,” to the sensual chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, in Ronchamp, built in 1954. The show also features a broad selection of Corbusier’s paintings, made under his real name, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, cubistic works that have a surprisingly raw energy, in stark contrast to the pristine rationalism of his buildings. Through Sept. 23. |  “Bill Brandt: Shadows and Light.” Through Aug. 12. |  “XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography.” Through Jan. 6. |  “Rain Room.” Through July 28. |  “Projects 100: Akram Zaatari.” Through Sept. 23. (Open daily, 10:30 to 5:30, and Friday evenings until 8.)

MOMA PS1

22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens (718-784-2084)—“Expo 1: New York.” Through Sept. 2. (Open Thursdays through Mondays, noon to 6.)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500)—“James Turrell.” Imagine this show as air-conditioning for the eye and, if you’re gamely susceptible, the soul. Turrell, seventy, is a wizard of installations that involve illusory effects of light, both natural and artificial. For the centerpiece, Frank Lloyd Wright’s great rotunda has been fitted with six evenly spaced, concentric ovoid rings, smoothly clad in white plastic. An orchestration of slowly shifting colored light, from unseen L.E.D. fixtures, suffuses the atmosphere with one ravishing payoff after another: breathable beauty. The range of colors, from white to charcoal and from peach to plum, feels limitless: every tone, hue, and saturation that you know and some that seem minted for the occasion. Their sequence, while silent, feels musical, in the way that it flavors time, and hallucinogenic, in the way that it plays hob with spatial perception. The show’s excellence couldn’t be more timely. It satisfies two big present cravings: that of museums to attract crowds, and that of at least some in those crowds for good art. It hits an unchanging sweet spot of what we want from any museum: a place where we can go en masse and be alone. Through Sept. 25. |  “New Harmony: Abstraction Between the Wars, 1919-1939.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Fridays through Wednesdays, 10 to 5:45, and Saturday evenings until 7:45.)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

Madison Ave. at 75th St. (212-570-3600)—“Hopper Drawing.” Through Oct. 6. |  “Stewart Uoo and Jana Euler: Outside Inside Sensibility.” Through July 10. |  “David Hockney: The Jugglers.” Through Sept. 1. |  “Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light (1977).” Through Sept. 1. (Open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, 11 to 6, and Fridays, 1 to 9.)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway (718-638-5000)—“Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui.” Through Aug. 4. |  “The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001-2013.” Through Sept. 22. |  “John Singer Sargent Watercolors.” Through July 28. |  “Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories.” Through Dec. 1. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 10.)

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Central Park W. at 79th St. (212-769-5100)—“Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture.” Through Aug. 11. |  “Whales: Giants of the Deep.” Through Jan. 5. (Open daily, 10 to 5:45.)

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Columbus Ave. at 66th St. (212-595-9533)—“Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.” Through Sept. 22. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 7:30, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

BRONX MUSEUM

1040 Grand Concourse (718-681-6000)—“State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Thursdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Friday evenings until 8.)

DIA ART FOUNDATION AT THE FOREST HOUSES

Tinton Ave. between 163rd and 165th Sts., the Bronx (212-989-5566)—“Thomas Hirschhorn: Gramsci Monument.” Through Sept. 15. (Open daily, 10 to 6.)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

1133 Sixth Ave., at 43rd St. (212-857-0000)—“A Different Kind of Order: The I.C.P. Triennial.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 to 6, and Friday evenings until 8.)

JEWISH MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 92nd St. (212-423-3200)—“As It Were . . . So to Speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom.” Through Aug. 4. |  “Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh.” Through Aug. 4. |  “Jack Goldstein x 10,000.” Through Sept. 29. (Open Saturdays through Tuesdays, 11 to 5:45, Thursdays, 11 to 8, and Fridays, 11 to 4.)

MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Ave., at 36th St. (212-685-0008)—“Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney.” Through Sept. 2. (Open Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10:30 to 5, Fridays, 10:30 to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, 11 to 6.)

NEW MUSEUM

235 Bowery, at Prince St. (212-219-1222)—“Llyn Foulkes.” Think of the Los Angeles painter’s retrospective as a carnival, where the wholesome Americana is undercut by a jolt of freak show. At times, Foulkes’s work has a tough political slant, shaped by a stint in the Army, in the mid-fifties; in a 1985 portrait of Ronald Reagan, the President’s eyes are obscured by a gold-colored ruler as blood streams down his face. At others, the tone is oblique, as in the wall-mounted assemblage “Flanders,” from 1961, in which a white, lava-like plastic oozes from the center of the composition. After several years working in series (rockscapes rendered in Pop-bright pinks and blues; then, more disturbingly, figures with flaps of bloody skin hanging over their faces), Foulkes hit his stride in ambitious reliefs, many of them featuring a pioneer woman with a Mickey Mouse head—a symbolic protest against blind patriotism. The American Dream becomes a nightmare in the 1990 masterpiece “Pop,” a self-portrait of the artist at home, his eyes popping in horror as he realizes that his children have been indoctrinated into the Mickey Mouse Club. Through Sept. 1. |  “Erika Vogt: Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 9.)

GALLERIES—UPTOWN

OLIVER GAGLIANI

The California photographer, who died in 2002, at the age of eighty-five, took up the camera in the nineteen-forties after seeing exhibitions by Paul Strand and Edward Weston and was later a student of both Ansel Adams and Minor White. Their combined influence makes it difficult to appreciate Gagliani’s own accomplishments in this show of black-and-white work made primarily in the sixties and seventies. His pictures of silvery surf, misty wilderness, and weathered wooden shacks are skillful but familiar. Images of paint-splattered walls and damaged ceilings—found Abstract Expressionist compositions that bring Aaron Siskind into the mix—have more mystery and weight. Through Aug. 9. (Gitterman, 41 E. 57th St. 212-734-0868.)

JEHAD NGA

The American photojournalist has done his most memorable work in Africa, where he spent part of his childhood. But his latest pictures, which were taken in Mali, aren’t news-related—instead, Nga is observing, more absorbed by atmosphere than by incident. The most interesting pictures hint at a narrative that remains tantalizingly open-ended: sandals and a transistor radio have been left by a woven rug in the sun; a dusty jeep and scattered military gear appear freshly abandoned; a spindly table holds a wooden box whose burned interior suggests a portal no one should enter. Through July 14. (Benrubi, 41 E. 57th St. 212-888-6007.)

Short List

JOHN BALDESSARI: Marian Goodman, 24 W. 57th St. 212-977-7160. Through Aug. 23. PAUL MCCARTHY: Park Avenue Armory, Park Ave. at 66th St. 212-933-5812. Through Aug. 4. “404 E. 14TH”: De Nagy, 724 Fifth Ave., at 57th St. 212-262-5050. Through Aug. 2.

GALLERIES—CHELSEA

ANTONY

The extravagantly gifted singer, of Antony and the Johnsons, disappoints in wan, if heartfelt, sculptures, installations, drawings, and paintings that suggest the aftermath of dumpster diving at Grey Gardens. Collages made of distressed paper and found photographs—including a nineteenth-century image of a Zulu family looking uncomfortable in European dress—seem to unintentionally romanticize political oppression; sculptures involving architectural remnants, old pillowcases, and boards wrapped in white fabric are formally anemic, although the process-oriented, found-object look is certainly of the moment. Through July 12. (Sikkema Jenkins, 530 W. 22nd St. 212-929-2262.)

TAKUMA NAKAHIRA

The grainy black-and-white photographs in this Japanese photographer’s U.S. solo début were made in Paris in 1971 and originally exhibited unframed, pinned to the walls and spread out on the floor. Eighty-eight new prints, framed and installed in a dense arrangement, can’t capture the work’s original impact, but its radical spirit lives on. While he was in Paris, Nakahira photographed voraciously, and the results feel hectic and random: piles of produce, passing pedestrians, street signs, fragments of newsprint. Without attempting to make sense of the chaos, he captures the urban landscape at its most vital and unsettling. Through July 12. (Milo, 245 Tenth Ave., at 24th St. 212-414-0370.)

“UNIQUE”

Young photographers are experimenting with unconventional, accident-prone processes, both in and out of the darkroom, and this show of one-off works provides a quick survey as well as some historical perspective. Hands-on innovators, notably John Chiara, Matthew Brandt, and Curtis Mann, dispense with the camera and make images directly on photosensitive paper, turning out recognizable versions of the real world. Others, including Amanda Means and Klea McKenna, go for near-psychedelic abstraction. Elegant camera-less pictures—big photograms of figures and flora—made by the German photographer Floris Neususs, using a process he pioneered in the fifties, provide a strong jolt of twentieth-century energy. Through July 12. (Von Lintel, 520 W. 23rd St. 212-242-0599.)

Short List

RICCI ALBENDA: Kreps, 535 W. 22nd St. 212-741-8849. Through Aug. 9. ROBERT ARNESON: Zwirner, 537 W. 20th St. 212-517-8677. Opens July 8. WILLIAM DANIELS: Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th St. 212-206-9100. Through Aug. 2. SIMON FUJIWARA: Rosen, 525 W. 24th St. 212-627-6000. Through Aug. 10. RENZO PIANO: Gagosian, 522 W. 21st St. 212-741-1717. Through Aug. 2. “MIND IS OUTER SPACE”: Kaplan, 525 W. 21st St. 212-645-7335. Through Aug. 2. “ROSALIND SOLOMON: PORTRAITS IN THE TIME OF AIDS, 1988”: Silverstein, 535 W. 24th St. 212-627-3930. Through Aug. 2.

GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN

“A BROKEN INHERITANCE”

In 1944, when the French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle was thirteen and attending the Brearley School, in Manhattan, she was expelled for painting the fig leaves on white statues red. That transgression will come as no surprise to viewers of the artist’s outré 1973 film, “Daddy,” which she made in collaboration with Peter Whitehead. The baroque fever dream is a psychodramatic revenge fantasy (and unsuitable viewing for children). On the walls, fraught scenes of family dynamics by the French artist Philippe Perrot—whose figures, at times, suggest beefed-up Egon Schieles—derive their strange palette from a combination of paint and the medical disinfectant Betadine. The show’s hidden treasure continues the theme of mending wounds: a cluster of talismanic sculptures by the Swiss artist Loredana Sperini, fashioned from remnants of porcelain figurines salvaged from the rubble in postwar Berlin. Through Aug. 2. (Clifton Benevento, 515 Broadway, at Spring St. 212-431-6325.)

Short List

KEN PRICE: The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St. 212-219-2166. Through Aug. 18. “ANTIBODY”: Cooley, 107 Norfolk St. 212-680-0564. Through July 26. “CONSPICUOUS UNUSABLE”: Abreu, 36 Orchard St. 212-995-1774. Through Aug. 17. “ON THE GRID”: Lu Magnus, 55 Hester St. 212-677-6555. Through Aug. 2. “A SUNDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS”: Swiss Institute, 18 Wooster St. 212-925-2035. Opens July 3. “WORK”: Von Nichtssagend, 54 Ludlow St. 212-777-7756. Through Aug. 2.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Dance

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE

“Sleeping Beauty”—which, as Arlene Croce once wrote, “made Balanchine a choreographer, Pavlova a dancer, and Diaghilev a balletomane”—returns to the repertoire in the final week of the company’s spring season. This plodding, pastel-heavy production from 2007 preserves enough magic to justify its importance in the classical canon. Petipa’s three portraits of Princess Aurora—Rose Adagio, vision, and wedding pas de deux—reflect the balletic ideal: technical brilliance and womanly radiance. A.B.T. offers Auroras to suit every taste. The July 2 cast may be the most intriguing: Hee Seo, a new principal with gorgeous lines, débuts in the role of the slumbering princess, and Vadim Muntagirov, a guest from the English National Ballet, is the melancholy prince who breaks the spell with a kiss. Leann Underwood, a promising member of the corps, takes on the beatific role of the Lilac Princess. Another visiting artist, Alban Lendorf, of the Royal Danish Ballet, dances alongside Xiomara Reyes at the July 6 matinée. And, on July 3, Herman Cornejo—a paragon of warmth and style—partners Maria Kochetkova, a spitfire on loan from the San Francisco Ballet. (Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center. 212-362-6000. July 1-2 and July 5 at 7:30, July 3 at 2 and 7:30, and July 6 at 2 and 8.)

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL / RASHAUN MITCHELL AND SILAS RIENER

The free outdoor festival, held in spaces all over lower Manhattan, presents these two former dancers with the Merce Cunningham company, who have made a place for themselves in downtown dance. “Reveal” develops a strand of feral behavior seen earlier this year in Riener’s choreography for “Veal.” (Elevated Acre, 55 Water St. 888-391-3378. July 3 and July 5-6 at 1:30.)

FENDIKA

This group of traditional musicians and dancers from Ethiopia, last seen at Lincoln Center in 2011, returns with its remarkable lead dancer, Melaku Belay. He can roll his shoulders with finesse or isolate them with jolting speed. He vibrates his whole torso like a man wielding a jackhammer, a vision of ecstatic joy. (David Rubenstein Atrium, Broadway at 63rd St. 212-546-2656. July 4 at 7:30.)

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL / WALLY CARDONA AND JENNIFER LACEY

For each installment of their eight-part series “The Set Up,” this smart and funny pair of choreographers meet with a master artist before making a dance. The third installment, presented here, is drawn from an encounter with the French Baroque dancer Jean-Christophe Paré. (Pier 15, South St. at John St. 212-219-9401. July 9-11 at 5:30.)

PILOBOLUS

The troupe of dancer-acrobats returns for its annual monthlong romp at the Joyce, with three programs. The new work “Esc.” is a Houdini-inspired fantasy made in conjunction with the illusionists Penn & Teller, who describe the dancers’ various tussles—involving chains, ropes, and enclosed spaces—as “something midway between Nijinsky and Chippendales.” “Licks,” a playful, high-energy frolic by the imaginative filmmaker Trish Sie, is set to big-band Mexican funk. All three lineups, including the kid-friendly matinée on July 24, offer a selection of older works. See joyce.org for programs. (175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. July 9-10 and July 15-17 at 7:30, July 11-12 and July 18-19 at 8, and July 13 and July 20 at 2 and 8. Through Aug. 3.)

NEW YORK CITY TAP FESTIVAL

New York may still be the world capital of tap dancing, but the form is amazingly and amusingly global. That was the revelation of the festival’s first “Tap Internationals” evening, in 2001, and although the dozen or so participants in this year’s showcase are less far-flung, three major zones of tap activity—Brazil, Japan, and Australia—are represented by excellent dancers. In “Tap It Out,” a separate event, free and outdoors, hundreds of feet sound off in midtown. (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th St. 212-864-5400. July 11 at 7:30. “Tap It Out”: Father Duffy Square, Broadway at 45th St. 646-230-9564. July 13 at noon, 1, and 2.)

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL / SOULEYMANE BADOLO

The remarkable Burkina Fasan dancer and choreographer presents his solo “Barack.” Badolo, who has worked in the U.S. since 2009, applies the deconstructionist techniques of Western experimental dance to the vibrant ritual and storytelling traditions of West Africa. In “Barack,” set to Edith Piaf’s urgent voice and infectious Congolese Afropop, Badolo seems to fight his way from the dark interiority of remembrance into the ecstasy of self-expression. (77 Water St., at Gouverneur Ln. 212-219-9401. July 13-14 at 2 and 4.)

OUT OF TOWN

JACOB’S PILLOW

July 3-7: New York’s Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet boasts a cadre of strong technicians who throw themselves into each piece. Much of the company’s repertory reflects the dark, dystopian tendencies that currently predominate in European contemporary dance. Crystal Pite’s “Grace Engine,” filled with hurtling waves of movement and articulate bodies thrashing in the half-light, is no exception, but it also reveals Pite’s ability to carve out moments of intimacy and reflection. The company performs this work, along with a piece by Alexander Ekman and “Necessity, Again” (by the Norwegian Jo Strømgren, with text by Jacques Derrida), at the Ted Shawn Theatre. At the intimate Doris Duke Theatre, Shantala Shivalingappa presents an evening of classical Indian dance, accompanied by her superb quartet of musicians on violin, flute, and percussion. Kuchipudi, the southern Indian form in which she specializes, is a harmonious mixture of danced storytelling and graceful abstraction. Her evening-length solo “Akasha” is inspired by the idea of infinity. | July 10-14: At the Ted Shawn, Companhia Urbana de Dança comes from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro with amazing b-boys and the choreographer Sonia Destri’s poetic vision of hip-hop. “ID: Entidades” is ethereal, while “Chapa Quente” teeters on the edge between a party and a fight. At the Doris Duke, Brian Brooks Moving Company carts in a set of aluminum rods for “Big City” and the equally repetitive “Motor.” (Becket, Mass. 413-243-0745.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Classical

CONCERTS IN TOWN

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC

With its Stravinsky spectacular barely a memory, the Philharmonic segues immediately into its brief summer season, with a selection of concerts held in the first half of July. The composer-conductor-raconteur Bramwell Tovey, who is adept at putting energetic pops concerts together in a snap, leads two programs of “Summertime Classics” in his tenth year at the helm. The first, featuring a guest appearance by the U.S. Coast Guard Band, offers music by Copland, Bernstein (a suite from “Candide”), Sousa, and Tovey; the second uses pieces by John Adams, Offenbach, and Josef Strauss as a prelude to Holst’s “The Planets,” which will accompany an HD film prepared with the collaboration of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Avery Fisher Hall. 212-875-5656. July 3 at 7:30 and July 4 at 3; July 5-6 at 8 and July 7 at 3.) | Alan Gilbert reclaims the podium for the orchestra’s popular free “Concerts in the Parks” series. The tour, which will range through Central Park; Cunningham Park, in Queens; and Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, begins at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, with Dvořák’s Cello Concerto (featuring the orchestra’s principal, Carter Brey) and Tchaikovsky’s rousing Fifth Symphony. (Enter at Grand Army Plaza. July 10 at 8. For the full schedule of concerts, see nyphil.org/parks. Through July 16.)

NAUMBURG ORCHESTRAL CONCERTS: ORPHEUS

The conductorless chamber orchestra, known for its flexibility, makes an appearance in this Central Park series, a wonderful nocturnal diversion in a harried city. Music by Rossini, Beethoven, Haydn, and Tchaikovsky (the resplendent Serenade for Strings) is on the program. (Naumburg Band Shell, mid-Park, south of 72nd St. July 9 at 7:30. No tickets required.)

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL: “THE BLIND”

Unlike Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center does not take the summer off. The swirl of activity continues with this annual July festival of off-center shows, which has a healthy contemporary- classical presence this year. It begins with an a-cappella one-act opera by Lera Auerbach, a prominent young Russian composer and pianist with a sweeping, emotionally effusive style. Her subject is Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play, a close cousin in mood to “Pelleas and Melisande”; the director is John La Bouchardière. (Kaplan Penthouse, Rose Building. 212-721-6500. July 9-14 at 8.)

RITE OF SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL: BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS

There’s no better place than Governors Island to get out of town, in town. This enterprising festival, now in its third year, provides a relaxed setting for interesting music; its first concert is offered by the downtown stalwarts, who perform minimalist and post-minimalist classics by Steve Reich (“Electric Counterpoint”), Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Louis Andriessen (the raucous “Workers Union”). (Colonels’ Row. The Governors Island ferry departs from the Battery Maritime Building. July 13 at 1 and 3. No tickets required.)

METROPOLITAN OPERASUMMER RECITAL SERIES

This series is a far cry from the tour of concert-opera performances that the Met staged in the parks in decades past, but it’s welcome nonetheless as a showcase for some of the company’s young talent. The first program of arias and ensembles, given by the soprano Erin Morley, the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, and the tenor Stephen Costello, is especially inviting; Bradley Moore accompanies them. (Central Park SummerStage, Rumsey Playfield, mid-Park at 69th St. July 16 at 8. No tickets required.)

OUT OF TOWN

TANGLEWOOD

The first weeks at Boston’s musical duchy are full of attractions; here is a selection. July 5 at 8:30: Joshua Bell joins Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and the Boston Symphony Orchestra for opening night, an all-Tchaikovsky program that includes the Violin Concerto and the Fifth Symphony. | July 6 at 8:30: The blockbuster mood continues with the next concert, in which de Burgos and the B.S.O., joined by the Women of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the PALS Children’s Chorus, and the mellow-toned mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, perform Mahler’s spacious Third Symphony. | July 11 at 7:30: John Harbison’s opera “The Great Gatsby” garnered mixed reviews after its world première, at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1999, but it is still full of lyrical, exquisitely fashioned music. A devoted concert performance of a newly streamlined version of the score will be given by Harbison’s longtime colleagues in Boston’s Orchestra and Chorus of Emmanuel Music, conducted by Ryan Turner and featuring Gordon Gietz and Devon Guthrie in the roles of Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. | July 13 at 8:30: Leonard Bernstein has a special place in the history of Tanglewood, which will pay him a glorious tribute when David Newman conducts the B.S.O. in a live accompaniment to the film version of “West Side Story,” screened with the original vocals and dialogue intact. (Lenox, Mass. For tickets and complete schedule, see tanglewood.org.)

CARAMOOR

July 6 at 7:30: Owing to the energy and the scholarship of the conductor Will Crutchfield, “Bel Canto at Caramoor” has become a festival within a festival. “Verdi in Paris” is his focus this year; the first of the composer’s two French operas is “Les Vêpres Siciliennes,” with a cast headed by the superb young Met soprano Angela Meade and also featuring John Osborn, Marco Nisticò, and Burak Bilgili. | July 7 at 4:30: The gracious Westchester festival also hosts more intimate concerts, such as this program by the vital, genre-crossing quartet Brooklyn Rider, which will perform music from its new album, “A Walking Fire” (including Colin Jacobsen’s “Three Persian Miniatures” and Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2). | July 12 at 8: Jonathan Biss, a young American pianist who always displays impeccable taste and a formidable technique, excels at Beethoven; he’ll perform a clutch of sonatas (including the “Pastorale” and the “Waldstein”) in a concert at the Spanish Courtyard. (Katonah, N.Y. For tickets and full schedule, see caramoor.org.)

NORFOLK CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL

The Tokyo String Quartet, which has been one of classical music’s signature ensembles for some four decades, is disbanding, and its very last concert will take place at the Yale School of Music’s summer outpost, where its members have taught and performed since 1976. The valedictory program features two “late” works, Haydn’s Quartet in G Major, Op. 77, No. 1, and Bartók’s Quartet No. 6, as well as Debussy’s sole String Quartet, a masterpiece of his early maturity. (Norfolk, Conn. 860-542-3000. July 6 at 8.)

GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

With Francesca Zambello at the helm, the country’s leading summer opera festival mixes repertory classics with new works and revivals of favorite American musicals. July 6 at 8, July 12 at 7:30, and July 14 at 1:30: Zambello herself directs the summer’s major effort, a new production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman”; Melody Moore, Jay Hunter Morris, Ryan McKinny, and Peter Volpe lead the cast, with John Keenan on the podium. | July 13 at 8: Nathan Gunn, he of the firm baritone voice and the Pepsodent smile, is a natural when it comes to leading roles in great musicals. He’ll play Sir Lancelot in a production (directed by Gary Griffin) of Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot,” with Andriana Chuchman as Guenevere and David Pittsinger as King Arthur; James Lowe. (Cooperstown, N.Y. 607-547-2255. Through Aug. 24.)

MAVERICK CONCERTS

Two excellent ensembles bring their sounds to the warm, enveloping acoustic of the Maverick Hall in the next two weeks. The elegant Shanghai Quartet, offering music by Beethoven, Shostakovich (the nostalgic Quartet No. 6 in G Major), and Dvořák, is followed by the vibrant, up-and-coming Voxare String Quartet, which observes the Benjamin Britten centenary with the “Simple Symphony,” marks the ninetieth birthday of the lyrical master Ned Rorem with the Quartet No. 4 (composed for the Emerson String Quartet), and finishes with Tchaikovsky’s impassioned Quartet No. 3 in E-Flat Minor. (Woodstock, N.Y. maverick.org. July 7 and July 14 at 4.)

MOUNT TREMPER ARTS

This young collective, artistic pioneers in the finest tradition of the Hudson Valley, purchased an abandoned farmhouse and its land and put up a simple, sturdy hall that fits dance, music, and theatre performances well. Among this summer’s premières is “Poe,” a loosely defined music drama by the Chicago composer Marcos Balter, inspired by the gothic master’s poem “Alone”; the flutist Clare Chase (of the International Contemporary Ensemble) and the percussionist Svet Stoyanov will bring out the possibilities of the text through their voices and through acoustic and electronic manipulations of their instruments. (Mount Tremper, N.Y. mounttremperarts.org. July 12-13 at 8.)

MARLBORO MUSIC

For sixty-two years, the world’s finest instrumentalists, now headed by the pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode, have gathered in the Vermont countryside to study and perform the finest works in the chamber-music repertory with their very gifted protégés. (This year’s composer-in-residence is the eminent Krzysztof Penderecki.) Programs are announced one week in advance on marlboromusic.org. (Marlboro, Vt. July 13 at 8:30 and July 14 at 2:30.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Movies

OPENING

CRYSTAL FAIRY

Michael Cera stars in this comedy, as an American man who joins Chilean friends on a road trip in quest of a hallucinogenic cactus. Directed by Sebastián Silva. Opening July 12. (In limited release.)

FRUITVALE STATION

Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening July 12. (In limited release.)

THE LONE RANGER

Gore Verbinski directed this Western, starring Armie Hammer as the masked hero and Johnny Depp as Tonto. Opening July 3. (In wide release.)

PACIFIC RIM

A science-fiction drama, directed by Guillermo del Toro, about soldiers who combat an uprising of deep-sea monsters. Starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, and Rinko Kikuchi. Opening July 12. (In wide release.)

THE WAY, WAY BACK

Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening July 5. (In limited release.)

NOW PLAYING

LE AMICHE

In his fourth feature film, from 1955, Michelangelo Antonioni turns a glossy romantic melodrama of modern prosperity inside out to reveal the essence of modernity itself. Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago) moves to Turin to open a new branch of the high-fashion boutique that she managed in Rome. When Rosetta, the flighty bourgeoise in the adjoining hotel room, attempts suicide, Clelia takes her under her wing, joins her circle of friends, and gets caught up in their frivolous, desperate games of love. What makes this conventional drama enigmatically original is the details: the architectural contours of the film’s myriad locations seem to determine the action of the people who traverse them, and the assortment of portraits, reflections, sketches, and eye-catching clothing have more reality than the empty, miserable characters to whom they lend identities. Antonioni’s quietly audacious attempt to convey the inner workings of modern life is also a standard-issue romance—of exactly the sort that fills his heroines’ minds. In Italian.—Richard Brody (Film Forum; July 15.)

THE BLING RING

The most exquisitely crafted movie ever made about a bunch of nitwits. Drawing on Nancy Jo Sales’s reporting for a 2010 article in Vanity Fair (“The Suspects Wore Louboutins”), the writer and director, Sofia Coppola, moves swiftly and elegantly through the momentous events: in 2008 and 2009, a group of teen-agers from Calabasas, a wealthy city in the San Fernando Valley, broke into the houses of select celebrities—Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Audrina Patridge, and Orlando Bloom—and made off with three million dollars’ worth of cash, Rolex watches, Birkin bags, Alexander McQueen sunglasses, and the like, and when they were arrested they became minor celebrities themselves. Coppola pulls together the trends of the past fifteen years—reality TV, TMZ, the Internet, social media—and has dramatized how, working together, they might produce an appalling new kind of teen-ager. Emma Watson plays Nicki, the most confident of the teens, who has no self; she’s all arch, bullying presentation.—David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 6/10 & 17/13.) (In wide release.)

BYZANTIUM

Neil Jordan returns to the subject of blood-drinkers, which he previously explored in “Interview with the Vampire.” No Tom Cruise this time, no Antonio Banderas, and no Brad Pitt; instead, we get two women, restless and immortal, who use their fingernails instead of fangs and make do with squalid lodgings. Clara (Gemma Arterton) is older and sultrier, turning tricks for cash and, before long, opening a brothel in a seaside town; the other, Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), is pale and wistful, forever writing stories and preying only on the elderly, to ease them through life’s end. (One of them subsides to the sound of Janet Baker singing Schubert’s “Night and Dreams”—not a bad way to go.) The film slows and slumps as it ventures into a historical backstory, complete with a mysterious brotherhood, an ancient map, and Sam Riley in a wig worse than death. On the other hand, Jordan is never happier than in miserable conditions, and the run-down coastal backdrop, with its burned-out pier, could hardly be further from Castle Dracula. Despite the sliced heads, what attracts Jordan is not the horror of the situation, the blood and guts, but the debility—how you fight and lust against it, or whether you just give in. With Tom Hollander, as a teacher, and Caleb Landry Jones, as a leukemia sufferer in need of better blood.—Anthony Lane (In limited release.)

FAST & FURIOUS 6

The franchise that began with “The Fast and the Furious” has now been hurtling along for twelve years. Much has changed in that time, not least the momentous decision to drop definite articles from the title. The latest chapter, directed by Justin Lin, finds Toretto (Vin Diesel), O’Conner (Paul Walker), and the rest of the gang, all of whom have retired from active duty to lead lives of sumptuous ease, being summoned back by law enforcers (Dwayne Johnson and Gina Carano) and put to work. The backchat between the drivers feels slow, grinding, and cumbersome, the better to show off their quicksilver talents at the wheel. Just as the plot threatens to run out of gas, Lin rescues the film with a spate of vastly ridiculous and therefore enjoyable set pieces, most of which involve means of conveyance designed to make the cars look puny. The cast has a multiracial verve that would shame more sombre productions: Sung Kang, Michelle Rodriguez, Gal Gadot, Tyrese Gibson, and Chris (Ludacris) Bridges, plus a scowling Welshman, Luke Evans, in the role of the villain.—A.L. (6/3/13) (In wide release.)

FRUITVALE STATION

The director Ryan Coogler’s début feature brings a full and just measure of righteous outrage to the true story of Oscar Grant, a twenty-two-year-old Oakland man who, early on New Year’s Day in 2009, was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer despite being unarmed. (The officer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.) Coogler reconstructs, mainly from Grant’s perspective, the events leading up to the crime. As played with searching, cerebral energy by Michael B. Jordan, Grant—who had done jail time (seen in flashback) for a drug-related offense—was attempting to become a better father to his four-year-old daughter and a better partner for her mother, Sophina (Melonie Diaz). But the movie doesn’t turn him into a pristine hero; caught cheating on Sophina, caught lying to her about his unemployment, he comes off as a warmhearted, hot-blooded young man wrestling mightily with his demons. Coogler weaves a comforting web of family around Grant, including his mother (Octavia Spencer) and grandmother (Marjorie Crump-Shears), to show all the more poignantly the intimate devastation wrought by his death. The movie is the model of decency and respect, and does honor to a life unjustly ended; it offers few surprises but is nonetheless shocking.—R.B. (In limited release.)

GREED

“He can’t make small of me!” the burly dentist McTeague (Gibson Gowland) screams at the San Francisco saloongoers who see his best friend throw a knife at him. But McTeague’s buddy, Marcus (Jean Hersholt), can make small of him, and does. The director, Erich von Stroheim, manages to make his characters small and big simultaneously. He uncovers creatures of the id buried in these avaricious men and in a woman who starts out as Marcus’s girl and becomes McTeague’s wife: the proper, increasingly miserly Trina (ZaSu Pitts). The three friends’ twisted money lust and sexuality send them into a death spiral that ends with a nightmarish showdown in Death Valley. M-G-M’s production chief, Irving Thalberg, had von Stroheim’s epic adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 novel, “McTeague,” chopped to a quarter of its original nine-hour length, but it remains the benchmark of movie naturalism—veracious and harrowing. Silent. Released in 1924.—Michael Sragow (Museum of the Moving Image; July 6.)

THE HEAT

The fusion of a sentimental tale of friendship, a mismatched-cop buddy comedy, and a bloody crime story yields a very long movie; the many formulas never mesh, and some formidable actors stumble trying to keep pace with its out-of-synch meters. Sandra Bullock reprises her familiar shtick in the role of Sarah Ashburn, a nerdy, lonely, by-the-book F.B.I. agent; Melissa McCarthy plays Shannon Mullins, the raunchy, dishevelled, violent, street-smart cop with whom the straitlaced Sarah is forced to work on a mission to catch a psychopathic drug kingpin. The movie is smothered under a pile of clichés, not least those involving the raucous vulgarity of Boston’s white working class. McCarthy’s salty-tongued pugnacity seems routine, and her ribald edge is sheathed by the story’s homiletic drift about the importance of family and friends. A dance number that threatens to break out into joyful anarchy is quickly pushed back into the lockstep of plot, character, and message. The movie’s best joke is the work of the set decorator. With an earnest Demián Bichir, who wandered in from a meatier movie, as an agency higher-up. Directed by Paul Feig.—R.B. (In wide release.)

LAURENCE ANYWAYS

An extraordinarily ambitious, brazenly expressive melodrama, directed by Xavier Dolan, about a man from Montreal who discovers in midlife that he wants to live as a woman. Laurence Alia (Melvil Poupaud), a writer and professor, lives with Frédérique (Fred) Belair (Suzanne Clément), an assistant director, in flamboyantly giddy love, but his decision to dress and style—and identify—himself as a woman costs him the relationship and his job, and shreds his already tenuous bond with his mother (Nathalie Baye). For Dolan, the plot is, in effect, an opera libretto for which his splashily colorful, impressionistic images are the music; joined to the elbows-out, full-throttle histrionics, they evoke an intensity and a sympathy that override the director’s vague insights and skittery ideas. Dolan’s sheer energy is admirable, but his eye candy (he also designed the clothing), though pleasantly unusual, isn’t especially audacious or original; he drenches the screen with nonspecific feelings that mostly announce the empathy that he bears and shares. Nonetheless, Poupaud’s quiet moments convey a lofty, poignant introspection, and Clément erupts with grand, if scattershot, furies.—R.B. (In limited release.)

MAN OF STEEL

When Superman was first reborn in the movies, back in 1978, Mario Puzo, Robert Benton, and David Newman worked on the screenplay, and Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder played Superman and Lois Lane. All these people knew they were working on pop, and the material was edged with irony—as Superman and Lois flirted, the movie was even sexy. Thirty-five years of superhero franchises followed, saving the studios financially (while wrecking the aesthetics of big movies), and the tone of the new Superman film is now portentous and solemn. The movie is an origins myth, which turns into another war-of-the-worlds battle between Earth and the dying Krypton, with Superman on our side. Once again, Manhattan gets levelled (don’t worry: Brooklyn is spared). The movie consists of endless declamation, endless violence. With the muscular Henry Cavill, baring his chest, as Superman; Amy Adams, as Lois Lane; and Michael Shannon, as General Zod, the military chief of Krypton. Directed by Zack Snyder.—D.D. (In wide release.)

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

A new adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy, and a far cry from the hearty roistering of Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version. This time, the director is Joss Whedon, who filmed the play in his own home, in Santa Monica; one speech is delivered in a child’s bedroom, beside a doll’s house and a couple of Barbies. Most of the men, including Don Pedro (Reed Diamond), Claudio (Fran Kranz), Benedick (Alexis Denisof), and the evil Don John (Sean Maher), are hunks, of one grade or another, dressed in decent suits, and the sense that they are merely toying with the rules of love, by way of a guys’ game, is unmistakable; hence the lurch in tone, to a frowning solemnity, when the purity of Hero (Jillian Morgese), Claudio’s beloved, comes into question—often a problem, in a modern setting. Yet the movie swings along, with a grace denied to some of Whedon’s grander projects, like “The Avengers,” and the honors are shared by Amy Acker, whose Beatrice seems as self-inquiring as she is sharp at others’ expense; Nathan Fillion, who, as Dogberry, makes even the malapropisms amusing (no easy feat); and Jay Hunter, the director of photography, whose feathery black-and-white images turn the whole thing into a midsummer day’s dream.—A.L. (6/24/13) (In limited release.)

MUSEUM HOURS

A Canadian woman, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara), flies from her home town of Montreal to Vienna—her first trip to the place, and only her second to Europe. She is there to visit a cousin, who lies in a coma, in a hospital; duty keeps Anne from leaving, yet she has little to do, and money is scarce, so she wanders the wet winter city and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. There she meets a security guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer), a wry fellow who used to manage rock bands and looks a little like Václav Havel, and who takes Anne gently under his wing. Jem Cohen’s movie is barely a story at all, and he seldom lets slip a chance to digress, whether into voice-overs by Johann, lectures by a curator, or surveys of junk on the sunless streets outside; what matters as much as the mild, middle-aged friendship are the Old Masters on the walls of the gallery—notably Bruegel, whose paintings, hung together, form one of the great rooms of the world. The camera inspects them, often in closeup, always at leisure, and no one could begrudge the movie such tranquillity. It finds the time to look at looking, and to offer a slow revelation: to the lonely and the stranded, it is art that feels like home. In English and German.—A.L. (In limited release.)

OPENING NIGHT

Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands), a glorious actress in the prime of life, stars in a new play by an elder writer (Joan Blondell) but finds that the story—which is all about aging—is making her think old, seem old, and feel old, and she resists ferociously, onstage, in real time. The psychodramatic improvisations that she wreaks upon the text, and the chaos that they sow among her colleagues onstage and off, are the crux of John Cassavetes’s harrowing and profound film, from 1977. Myrtle’s co-star (Cassavetes), her director (Ben Gazzara), the producer (Paul Stewart), the playwright, and the entire crew get drawn into her turmoil as she turns the theatre into the arena of her existential combat. The story begins with the magic moment when Myrtle passes from the wings to the stage and yet never stops being herself. The familiar fascination of backstage melodrama keeps the action flowing even as the terrifying, self-excoriating antics threaten to shred the fabric of the drama or even burst through the screen. Cassavetes’s most cleverly constructed film is also a definitive lesson in the death-defying, all-consuming art of acting, proof of a madness beyond the Method.—R.B. (BAM; July 6.)

SILVER LODE

In its understated lucidity, this 1954 Western, directed by Allan Dwan, is one of the greatest. A U.S. Marshal, Fred McCarty (Dan Duryea), interrupts the Fourth of July wedding ceremony of the urbane rancher Dan Ballard (John Payne) and the well-born Rose Evans (Lizabeth Scott) to arrest Ballard for the robbery and murder of McCarty’s brother. Though Ballard asserts his innocence, the locals are cowed by the show of federal authority. He seeks mere hours to clear his name, but the mob turns against him; as the desperate suspect resorts to bribes and human shields, the bodies start piling up. In this McCarthy-era allegory, Dwan lays bare the town’s social structure, linking courthouse and whorehouse and, with a climactic battle in the telegraph office, locates its very survival in the rise of modern communications. He spans the whole town, its length and breadth, in a thrilling and relentless tracking shot, and captures in jagged diagonals the trust-rending violence that cuts through it. With brazen ambiguity, he twists the panic-stricken moralism of Ballard’s persecution into the engine of his deliverance, risks a shockingly sardonic deployment of the Stars and Stripes, and devises the best bell-tower symbolism outside of “Vertigo”; in his calmly furious view, the town’s sweet order spins into chaos through fear of disorder.—R.B. (MOMA; July 3 and July 6.)

THIS IS THE END

A noisy shindig, hosted by Seth Rogen. He and Evan Goldberg wrote and directed the film, and Rogen is in evidence from the start, welcoming his friend Jay Baruchel to Los Angeles. Both of them, like the majority of the people in the movie, play themselves; we are meant to feel a pinch of awe and gratitude at being allowed into the orbit of real stars, and that bonding feeling is only heightened by the awareness that, for our comic benefit, they are forever cutting each other down to size. Does that make the actors—Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, James Franco, Michael Cera, Emma Watson, and others—good sports, or careful guardians of their own image? Either way, the film is more guileful than it looks, even though the narrative is nuts: a celebrity-crammed party at Franco’s place that suddenly turns into the apocalypse, as Hollywood, not a moment too soon, is consumed by the fires of Hell. Throughout the movie, all mouths are foul, all bellies are yellow, all drugs are on the table, and all the guys want candy—an accurate assessment of contemporary manhood, you might say, although the casual misogyny that bedecks it feels a whole lot less amusing. As for the weird eschatology that Rogen and Goldberg appeal to in the later stages, rife with rapture and damnation, don’t even ask where that came from. Just enjoy the ride.—A.L. (6/24/13) (In wide release.)

WORLD WAR Z

The first large-scale digital spectacle in years that’s likely to have some emotional meaning for grownups. It’s just a big zombie movie, but it stirs up fears of plague and anarchy and the sense that everything is constantly accelerating; at times, it has the tone and tempo of panic. The zombies attack with lightning speed; they gather and mount on top of one another by the thousand, climbing over walls and then pouring through the streets like running water. The best scenes in the movie have a jolting strangeness. With Brad Pitt, as a U.N. troubleshooter who has the modest task of saving the world; Mireille Enos, as his wife; Fana Mokoena, as a U.N. official who is apparently the only powerful man left on earth; and Daniella Kertesz, as an Israeli soldier (“Gut up,” Pitt instructs her, after amputating her arm). Directed by Marc Forster; written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, and Damon Lindelof.—D.D. (7/1/13) (In wide release.)

ALSO PLAYING

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO: In limited release. MONSTERS UNIVERSITY: In wide release. WHITE HOUSE DOWN: In wide release.

REVIVALS, CLASSICS, ETC.

Titles with a dagger are reviewed above.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181)—“Agnès B. Selects.” July 11 at 6:45 and July 13 at 6:30: “Fahrenheit 451” (1966, François Truffaut). | July 11 at 9:15 and July 16 at 6:45: “Family Life” (1971, Ken Loach). | July 12 at 6:30: “I Live in Fear” (1955, Akira Kurosawa; in Japanese). | July 13 at 3: “Rocco and His Brothers” (1960, Luchino Visconti; in Italian). | July 13 at 9 and July 15 at 6:45: “La Chinoise” (1967, Jean-Luc Godard; in French). | July 15 at 9: “The Conformist” (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci; in Italian).

BAM CINÉMATEK

30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100)—The films of John Cassavetes. July 6 at 3, 6, and 9: “Opening Night” (+). | July 7 at 3, 6, and 9: “The Dirty Dozen” (1967, Robert Aldrich). | July 9 at 7 and 9:30: “Shadows” (1959). | July 10 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “Too Late Blues” (1961). | July 11 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “A Child Is Waiting” (1963). | July 12 at 7:30 and July 13 at 3, 6, and 9: “A Woman Under the Influence” (1975). | July 15 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “The Killers” (1964, Don Siegel).

FILM FORUM

W. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. (212-727-8110)—In revival. July 12-14 and July 16-25 at 1:30, 4:20, 7, and 9:35 and July 15 at 1:30, 4:20, and 9:35: “L’Avventura” (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni; in Italian). | July 15 at 7: “Le Amiche” (+).

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610)—New York Asian Film Festival. July 3 at 5:45 and July 11 at 1: “Mystery” (2012, Lou Ye; in Mandarin). | July 5 at 7:45: “Drug War” (2013, Johnnie To; in Mandarin). | July 5 at 11:59 and July 10 at 3:30: “The Fridge” (2012, Rico Maria Ilarde; in Filipino and Tagalog).

FRENCH INSTITUTE ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE

55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160)—Highlights of the Cannes Film Festival. July 9 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: “And the Ship Sails On” (1983, Federico Fellini; in Italian).

IFC CENTER

323 Sixth Ave., at W. 3rd St. (212-924-7771)—In revival. July 3-7 at 11 A.M.: “Young Frankenstein” (1974, Mel Brooks). | July 12-14 at 11 A.M.: “High Anxiety” (1977, Brooks).

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480)—“An Auteurist History of Film.” July 3-4 at 1:30: “Breathless” (1960, Jean-Luc Godard; in French). | July 10-12 at 1:30: “Two Daughters” (1961, Satyajit Ray; in Bengali). | The films of Allan Dwan. July 3 at 4:30 and July 5 at 8: “Tennessee’s Partner” (1955). | July 3 at 8 and July 6 at 5: “Silver Lode” (+). | July 4 at 4 and July 6 at 2: “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949). | July 4 at 7: “Around the World” (1943). | July 5 at 4:30 and July 8 at 8: “Most Dangerous Man Alive” (1961). | July 6 at 8 and July 7 at 2:30: “Slightly Scarlet” (1956). | July 7 at 5:30 and July 8 at 4:30: “Enchanted Island” (1958).

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077)—“See It Big!” July 5 at 7: “Citizen Kane” (1941, Orson Welles). | July 6 at 2: “Sunrise” (1927, F. W. Murnau; silent). | July 6 at 5: “Greed” (+). | July 7 at 2: “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940, John Ford). | July 7 at 5: “El Norte” (1983, Gregory Nava). | July 13 at 2: “Imitation of Life” (1959, Douglas Sirk). | July 13 at 4:45: “Do the Right Thing” (1989, Spike Lee).

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Readings and Talks

“BOOKS BENEATH THE BRIDGE”

On July 8, the alfresco Monday-night reading series at Brooklyn Bridge Park kicks off its season with an appearance by the artist James Gulliver Hancock, who will discuss his book, “All the Buildings in New York: That I’ve Drawn So Far.” The series continues on July 15, with readings by the poets Sharon Olds and Edward Hirsch. (Pier 1’s Granite Prospect, Old Fulton and Furman Sts. brooklynbridgepark.org. Through Aug. 12. The events start at 7.)

COMMUNITY BOOKSTORE

Cathleen Schine reads selections from her new novel, “Fin & Lady.” (143 Seventh Ave., Park Slope, Brooklyn. 718-783-3075. July 10 at 7.)

THE BELL HOUSE

Eugene Mirman and Sarah Vowell host a night of comedy to benefit the nonprofit student writing organization 826NYC, featuring the comedians Daniel Kitson, Reggie Watts, and Mike Birbiglia. (149 7th St., Brooklyn. 826nyc.org. July 10 at 7:30.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Above and Beyond

FOURTH OF JULY FIREWORKS

Macy’s lights up the night sky in spectacular fashion on Independence Day, starting at about 9:25, with more than forty thousand effects rocketing into the air over the Hudson River, from 24th Street to 42nd Street. This year, for the first time, the department store has teamed up with the singer Usher, who has created a playlist that’s synchronized with the display, which he had a hand in designing, too. Tune in to 1010 WINS or Z-100 to follow along.

ALL-STAR GAME

Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game comes to Queens on July 16 for the first time since 1964. That year, it was played during the opening season of Shea Stadium, a temple of mid-sixties design and urban planning, which was recently levelled. Citi Field, its sparkling, corporate-branded replacement, is the home this time around. In addition to the game, there are other activities planned, including a FanFest, which begins on July 12 and runs through game day, in the Javits Center, featuring appearances by past greats, and, on July 13, a concert in Central Park to benefit Hurricane Sandy relief efforts, headlined by Mariah Carey and the New York Philharmonic. Joe Torre, the former Yankees manager and onetime player-manager for the Mets, will be on hand to read “Casey at the Bat.” (allstargame.com.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
On the Horizon

CLASSICAL MUSIC

ROYAL TREATMENT

July 21-Aug. 24

Under the leadership of Francesca Zambello, the Glimmerglass Festival offers a rare chance to savor “King for a Day,” Verdi’s second opera (and his only comedy before “Falstaff”), in an English-language production directed by Christian Räth. (607-547-0700.)

THE THEATRE

LOVE ’S IN THE AIR

July 23

The Public’s Shakespeare in the Park presents its second show of the summer, “Love’s Labour’s Lost, a New Musical,” at the Delacorte, directed by Alex Timbers, with original music by Michael Friedman, both of whom collaborated on “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” (212-967-7555.)

NIGHT LIFE

DO NOT GO GENTLY

July 27

The aging rock god Robert Plant returns to the classic blues that inspired Led Zeppelin, but this time around he’s filtering it through a world-music prism. He and his latest band, the Sensational Shape Shifters, wrap up the North American leg of their tour with a benefit performance at Celebrate Brooklyn! (ticketmaster.com.)

MOVIES

MAIGRET AND MORE

Aug. 8-21

The prolific Belgian-born mystery writer Georges Simenon’s novels have inspired classic movies the world over. Anthology Film Archives presents a sampling that includes Béla Tarr’s “The Man from London,” Phil Karlson’s film noir “The Brothers Rico,” and “The Man on the Eiffel Tower,” directed by Burgess Meredith. (212-505-5181.)

ART

LISTENING POST

Aug. 10-Nov. 3

“Soundings: A Contemporary Score” is MOMA’s first show devoted entirely to audio art. A number of works incorporate field recordings, of the biosonar of bats, bells in New York City, and the ambient noise in a Taiwanese sugar factory, among other things. (212-708-9400.)

CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors

Jeffrey Toobin (Comment) is a staff writer and the author of “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court,” which is just out in paperback.

Patrick Radden Keefe (The Talk of the Town; “Buried Secrets”), a staff writer, is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the Century Foundation.

Jill Lepore (“The Prodigal Daughter”) teaches history at Harvard. “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin” will be published in October.

Paula Bohince (Poem) has written two poetry collections, “Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods” and “The Children.”

Cora Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs) is a writer and editor living in New York.

James Surowiecki (The Financial Page) writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine.

Jeffrey Bartholet (“Aflame”) is a former Newsweek editor and foreign correspondent. His work in Dharamsala, India, was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Nicholson Baker (“A Fourth State of Matter”) lives in Maine. A book of his essays, “The Way the World Works,” came out last year, and his new novel, “Traveling Sprinkler,” will be published in September.

David Bottoms (Poem) has written nine books of poetry, including “We Almost Disappear.”

Barry Blitt (Sketchbook), a regular contributor to the magazine, created the illustrations for the children’s book “The Founding Fathers,” which will be published in February.

Tobias Wolff (Fiction) teaches at Stanford. His books include “Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories” and the novel “Old School.”

Louis Menand (A Critic at Large) is a professor of English at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Metaphysical Club,” which is available in paperback.

Emily Nussbaum (On Television) writes the television column for the magazine.

Jack Hunter (Cover) is an illustrator and designer living in Phoenix, Arizona. This is his first New Yorker cover.

THE MAIL
In the Public Eye

A letter in response to Hendrik Hertzberg’s article (June 24, 2013)

Hendrik Hertzberg asserts that N.S.A. surveillance programs are “conducted lawfully” (Comment, June 24th). But many people believe that the programs violate the Fourth Amendment. The programs’ secrecy has been used to prevent legal challenges, either by using the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits or by successfully arguing that plaintiffs lack standing, a claim that, in turn, rests on the programs’ secrecy. Hertzberg writes that thus far “no citizen’s freedom of speech, expression, or association has been abridged by [the programs] in any identifiable way.” I suggest that Hertzberg examine the plaintiffs in Clapper v. Amnesty International U.S.A., where a group involved in the legal defense of foreign individuals was obliged to travel overseas because of the likelihood that the U.S. government would monitor international communications. Although they were forced to alter behaviors in onerous ways, they could not prove that surveillance had actually been applied to them. If you set up the apparatus for a police state, it is only a matter of time before it is used; that’s why our Founding Fathers insisted on checks and balances, division of powers, and provisions like the Fourth Amendment.

Kenneth D. Miller

New York City

THE MAIL
In the Public Eye

A letter in response to Jill Lepore’s article (June 24, 2013)

Jill Lepore’s study of the history of surveillance accurately asserts that renewed concern about privacy follows the emergence of new surveillance technology (“The Prism,” June 24th). Such was the case with the first digital electronic medium, the telegraph. After the first successful demonstration of the telegraph, in the eighteen-thirties, the Transcendentalist poet and writer Christopher Pearse Cranch wrote a story, “An Evening with the Telegraph-Wires,” which appeared in the September, 1858, Atlantic Monthly. He imagines potential uses for the new invention, including electronic surveillance, and goes on to describe telegraph wires in Paris built for the express purpose of spying on French citizens. Cranch presciently imagined the technology being turned against the very government that deployed it, in a manner that foreshadows WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden: “To reverse the whispering-gallery of Dionysius, and, instead of the tyrant hearing the secrets of the people, the people hearing the secrets of the tyrant!”

President Obama, by no means a tyrant, is far from the first President to be accused of circumventing the Fourth Amendment in the name of national security. On April 20, 1861, President Lincoln, fearful that the telegraph was being used to organize Confederate sympathizers nationwide, ordered U.S. Marshals to enter every major telegraph office in the North and seize copies and originals of all telegrams sent and received during the past twelve months. It was the first time that American national security would be invoked to justify government surveillance of electronic communications.

Thomas C. Jepsen

Chapel Hill, N.C.

THE MAIL
In the Public Eye

A letter in response to Jane Mayer’s “What’s the Matter with Metadata?” (June 6, 2013)

Jane Mayer’s post on newyorker.com about the N.S.A. and metadata attracted this Web comment, edited for length and clarity.

Mayer writes that the collection of metadata is more intrusive than policymakers care to admit (“What’s the Matter with Metadata?” June 6th). In the past, the very high costs of collecting and analyzing data meant that such methods could be used only sparingly, and forced the government to carefully consider whom to target. Data collection and analysis were manual. This provided multiple opportunities for the people involved to ask questions. With computers having replaced humans for most of this process, there are few opportunities to stop or report abuses.

Douglas B. Moran

Palo Alto, Calif.