The New York Times Magazine - 04.10.2026 — 2026-10-04

The New York

October 4, 2026

A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter's education that I hoped would challenge New York City's separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I was wrong.

By Nikole

Hannah-Jones

An Impossible Choice

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20 How Everything Became Gambling By Max Read

24

In Fighting for Every

Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

32

My Dying Father's Descent

Into Medical Misinformation

By Trisha Thadani

38

The Unbearable Secret

Behind Sebastian Barry's Novels

By Giles Harvey

4 The Context Why we can't stop predicting doom. By David Wallace-Wells

On Language

The culture industry is marketing the spontaneity of “whimsy.”

By Mitch Therieau

10 The Interview Sylvester Stallone comes clean. By Lulu Garcia-Navarro

14

I Ate It

The charm and

convenience of tinned fish.

By Amy X. Wang

16 The Ethicist My sister-in-law makes vacations a nightmare. Can we exclude her? By Kwame Anthony Appiah Plus: Judge John Hodgman

18 Machine Learnings What A.I. is doing to your brain. By Juliana Castro Varón and Dylan Freedman

Special Section!

55 Culture Digest A monthly roundup from the Culture, Styles, Books and Dining desks of The New York Times

Puzzles

64,72 Variety Puzzles & Answers

74 Crossword

On the Cover

Photograph by Wayne Lawrence

for The New York Times

WHAT CAN CLIMATE CHANGE AND COVID TEACH US ABOUT A.I.?

When an unknown A.I. researcher named Jacob Coxon published his very first post to X on Sept. 8, warning that “the people building A.I. earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wasn’t just the newest refugee from the frontier companies to be speaking out about the terrifying risks to come. He was also the latest in a remarkable recent line of apocalyptic alarm-raisers, beginning perhaps with Greta Thunberg, who have terrified and mesmerized Americans for what feels like a full microgeneration — one existential panic following another.

Climate alarm, Covid and artificial intelligence. In recent years, these have loomed as the most conspicuous peaks along the apocalyptic ridgeline of our culture. But the mountain range is punctuated by a number of other forms of existential dread: the fertility crisis, the mental health crisis, the smartphone theory of intellectual and social decline, border chaos and the “woke mind virus,” the fall of American democracy. Cast your eyes down into the foothills and you might see some more marginal conspiracy theories: 5G, the “great replacement.”

Conspiracy theory gets the facts wrong but the feelings right, as the activist-writer Naomi Klein likes to say. And the feeling that all these visions share is the drop-in-your-stomach sensation of contemplating a sudden and overwhelming loss of control. The drop is partly about the crises themselves. But it also reflects where we start — the expectation that we should remain in control in the face of them, with our lives stable, our institutions secure, our view of the future unperturbed. When that promise looks less sure, panic ensues.

One thread of climate alarm was the way it cast industrialization as a morality play with warming as a kind of comeuppance. (I've written in this spirit myself.) But it was the intuitive dioramas of runaway warming that gave the story its apocalyptic power — the way we pictured the planet racing past tipping points and spinning off its familiar axis as unpredictably as a top cast out into the void.

In the early days of Covid, billions of people around the globe retreated to their homes, but the disease kept spreading, and it wasn't hard to picture the risk landscape as an overwhelming sandstorm destined to cover us all.

With A.I., the fear comes prepackaged from science fiction and news events each week, it seems. Barack Obama, among others, has called for redlines on truly autonomous and self-improving L.L.M. agents; and the most unsettling episodes in an unnerving A.I. summer were the transcripts of so-called rogue agents communicating with one another (and the chilling possibility that, pretty soon, we probably won't find those transcripts even legible anymore).

In time, some of these panics will prove more prescient than others. But this is one risk of the apocalyptic style: You draw an upward sloping line and call it the possible destiny of all mankind, and even if your purpose is avoiding that fate at all costs, your warnings look instead like prophecy. Each of those prophecies ignores an awful lot of complicated human reality. And the person racing forward as he warns of what's ahead? He looks like a madman.

Coxon was far from the first. A.I. researchers have been warning about the existential risks of runaway machine intelligence for decades now, though the pace has picked up in the years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Six months ago, the A.I. entrepreneur Matt Shumer published his own viral warning. It was called “Something Big Is Happening.” It began, “Think back to February 2020.”

The early days of the pandemic are a familiar point of comparison with A.I. panic, presumably because they remind us of the vertigo of exponential growth. Perhaps we forget, looking back, that Covid didn't actually continue to grow exponentially for very long.

We may remember the early pandemic response as shambolic, full of contradictory guidance and sometimes baseless panic. In many ways, that's right. But by February 2020, China had already begun military-style lockdowns, American policymakers had already implemented stringent travel restrictions, and American researchers had already designed the mRNA vaccine which would bring the emergency phase of the pandemic to an end at historic speed.

In the following months, a huge percentage of humanity was pulled into a kind of improvised health solidarity out of some mix of fear and duty. The world's governments shifted into a remarkable policy alignment. With time came resentment, distrust and combative skepticism. But those efforts did flatten the curve, as they were intended to. The line did not keep going up.

Mitigation didn't end Covid, as the deaths of many millions that followed can attest. But it did mean that in the United States, and across most of the wealthy world, we got relatively manageable waves of infection — not a pandemic apocalypse, just an uncomfortably brutal experience of infectious disease. By the time mass vaccination began in earnest that December, only one-third of Americans had been infected, largely because of everything we scrambled to do to keep that number so low. Most Americans look back on the pandemic and think, at best, the country muddled through. But it was the first time in human history that vaccination had won a race against the global spread of a novel infectious disease.

The charts sketched by A.I. doomers are, if anything, more vertiginous than those plotted in the early months of Covid. Perhaps more unnervingly, many of their previous forecasts of mind-bending progress have proved eerily accurate. The basic pattern matches that of early climate warnings, which tended to sketch the course of temperature decades into the future quite precisely, predict specific impacts somewhat less accurately and only belatedly inspire haphazard action to bend the curve downward.

In some cases, A.I. progress has come much faster than almost anyone expected. As recently as 2024, for instance, forecasters didn't expect A.I. capable of solving a so-called millennium problem in mathematics until 2035 — though the reported solution to the Navier-Stokes problem remains disputed, and some mathematicians have begun to ask whether the model was even responding to the right aspect of the challenge.

In other areas, A.I. soothsayers have had to return to the whiteboard and sheepishly wipe away their simple extrapolations. A decade after the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton warned that A.I. would finish off radiology as a profession, there are more radiologists than ever working in the United States. Last year, Dario Amodei of Anthropic predicted unemployment rates could rise up to 20 percent in the next several years, but today joblessness rates are at record lows and you have to squint to see any A.I. effect in even the most affected sectors. Leopold Aschenbrenner of Situational Awareness suggested A.I. could bring 30 percent G.D.P. growth this decade, and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind has estimated it could one day deliver 10 times as much change as the Industrial Revolution at 10 times the speed — implying about 50 percent growth year on year. But so far, in 2026 the United States is ticking along below 2 percent. Even the productivity gains are hard to spot.

Perhaps this is just lag — a problem of the boy who cried robot takeover. We may still be on the great upslope of an exponential curve, as epidemiologists warned early in the pandemic and some of those most panicked about climate feedback loops worry today.

But for now the mismatch is explained by a simple rule of thumb. Forecasters have been prescient about exponential growth within rule-bound systems, like coding and mathematics. They have been much less accurate, and far too aggressive, in projecting change outside those boundaries, where even superintelligence runs into complexities and obstacles, bureaucracies and material challenges and various forms of politics. Across Silicon Valley, the mismatch has become a kind of koan: Intelligence is not the bottleneck. Presumably, that goes not just for the possibility of spectacular A.I. abundance but for the prospect of doom as well.

Is this any comfort? A.I. may be metastasizing relatively slowly through our messy human systems, but the effects are already alarming. Artificial intelligence played a role in selecting the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School for the double-tap strike that killed more than a hundred schoolchildren on the first day of the war in Iran. This summer, swarms of OpenAI agents undergoing testing found their way onto the internet and began leaving unnerving messages to one another — and their future selves — in a jury-rigged message board they'd secretly built. A cybersecurity firm announced that it had used A.I. to develop a worm that could easily establish remote control over cellphones via WeChat, the world's most popular messaging app. And last month, CNN reported that an A.I. hallucination in a U.S. intelligence report initiated military preparation for a strike against a Chinese ship in the Middle East.

Early in the Covid pandemic, billions of people were pulled into a kind of improvised health solidarity out of some mix of fear and duty.

These are not exactly scenarios of x-risk, in the arcane language of A.I. researchers and their cousins in the world of effective altruism — a hugely influential and well-funded school of practical philosophy preoccupied with preventing species-scale catastrophe (and now spread across the leading labs more conspicuously than Scientology ever was in Hollywood). But even well short of extinction, and far from the science fiction scenarios of Skynet or the Matrix, these incidents illustrate something profound about the way we've come to process futures we casually call apocalyptic (forgetting, perhaps, that apocalypse means not the end times but a revelation).

That lesson is familiar from climate and Covid, too. We don't just get ahead of ourselves by projecting exponential growth of disaster. We also expect — even demand — exponential solutions. The curve should go down, we think, just as steeply as it went up. And when it doesn't we tend to judge it a dispiriting failure rather than an encouraging partial success. Sometimes, we call that disappointment “doom.”

Covid proved much better than it might have been and much worse than it needed to be, for instance. The planet is still racing past terrifying temperature thresholds, but because of decarbonization truly catastrophic outcomes look a lot less likely. And A.I.? The window in which we might've avoided serious disruptions has probably already closed. But we're still a bit too ready to call the future we see through that window a simple story of inevitable catastrophe.

In May, Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, offered an unnerving glimpse into the world he expects to see. "We're going to find that ideology will not survive the nature of this technology," he declared, imagining a near future in which the contestations of politics — over resource allocation, public policy, the proper structure of social hierarchy and status — would be resolved by superintelligence so satisfactorily that humans would look back on the age of democratic debate as a time of human ignorance.

For anyone who has so much as glimpsed at world history, this is unmistakably naïve. It is also the political logic of the exponential curve, that at some point soon humans would willingly hand over all social judgment to machines and trust in its recommendations. But imagine A.I. as an all-knowing political oracle and you might wonder, What is the appropriate ideological response to the prospect of doom? How much risk should we tolerate, in the name of progress, and how much should we defer to widespread panic about it? And how much should that backlash change our projections of the near future?

The behavior of A.I. firms gives a pretty unsettling answer. Researchers reported an average 18 percent chance of near-term human extinction, company leaders talk routinely about the real possibility of catastrophic outcomes, and yet the technology and the industry races full speed ahead, dumping more investment into technological acceleration every quarter, as though a future machine god was trying to drown the whistle-blowers in cash.

But then there are those complexities and obstacles. Again and again, polling finds that the public is not exactly on board. Americans support a ban on superintelligence by more than 2 to 1. Those who are more concerned than excited about A.I. outnumber those who are more excited by roughly 5 to 1. And those who think the technology is progressing too quickly outnumber those who believe it is moving too slowly by more than 30 to 1. These are the kinds of margins you rarely see in democratic systems. The question is whether, when it comes to technology, we're still really living in one — or whether, by letting the pace of progress outrace oversight, we've already relinquished control.

Whimsy (noun): everyday magic to cure modern ills, now packaged and dosed out by the culture industry

One story we often tell ourselves is that the modern world has made miracles impossible. Once, the story goes, the world was filled with inexplicable wonders — dragons, dog saints, flying monks. Then the gods absconded, or were evicted. Now nothing is unknowable; every phenomenon has a rational scientific explanation. No sooner did people sense the leeching of mystery from everyday life than did they start trying, somehow, to put it back. Every advance in disenchantment has its re-enchanting flip side: hence Romanticism following on the heels of Enlightenment; hence Victorian spirit photography; hence the rise of New Age after the Nixon years.

Re-enchanters tend to have a word for the lost quality of magic that they seek to bring back into modern life. For the Romantics it was the “sublime”; for the Victorians it was “spirit”; for the New Agers it was “energy.” Recently another word seems to be gathering a similar charge: “whimsy.” “According to The Internet, 2026 is The Year Of Whimsy,” one commentator declares on Substack. Social media, as you may have noticed, is currently full of instructional content on “how I add whimsy into everyday life,” “6 rules for a more whimsical life,” “free ways to whimsy-fy your life.” To do these things, you might eat dessert before dinner, deck your room out in fairy lights or buy yourself a little treat, just because. Whimsy is a foreign substance that introduces “curiosity, playfulness and a bit of magic” into the greige everyday. It’s even a medicinal substance: “Whimsy,” one poster testifies, “saved my life.”

“Whimsy” is a word with uncertain origins. The first related word — “whim-wham,” meaning either a “fantastic notion” or, figuratively, a “fantastic object” — appeared in 1529; the Oxford English Dictionary speculates that it might be a “symbolic” word, a silly verbal fancy created in an effort to find frivolous sounds to denote frivolous things. “Whimsy” followed in the early 17th century, and then “whim” a few decades behind it. At first, both of these words mostly referred to trivial stuff, impulsive ideas, rash actions. But as the 18th century gathered steam, a curious new branch of meanings appeared. In these years, “whim” and “whimsy” came also to mean a specific kind of device: a rotating drum or capstan, attached to a rope, that could lower and raise materials into and out of a mine. In a process that words like “engine” also underwent, the innate human capacities that “whim” and “whimsy” originally described were transferred outward to a technology. A power became an object; the fantastical became mechanical.

You don't hear much about the mine-shaft variety of “whimsy” anymore. The first branch of meanings came to dominate after all: Whimsy became something we see in Andy Warhol's drawings, Diana Wynne Jones's fantasy novels, high-stepping Italian Greyhounds. This was whimsy as childlike playfulness, openness to new experiences, an improvisational attitude toward life. Whimsy's more recent evangelists say that these are qualities we need now more than ever. Isn't life today a bit too mechanical? Aren't we treating ourselves too much like machines? One moment, we're eating some kind of goop to optimize our nutritional stack; the next, we're having a computer write emails for us while we vacantly scroll our feed, letting an algorithm remote-control our attention. "Everyone is a little burnt out," observes a pink graphic on Instagram adorned with little stars and charms, using one of the master "body as machine" metaphors of our time. "Maybe the answer is whimsy."

If whimsy is really the answer to our ills, it's understandable that people would want more and more of it. There has been a lot of talk online lately of something called whimsymaxxing, a paradoxical microtrend where people try to optimize their lives for all the things that resist optimization. While perhaps incoherent in theory, in practice, whimsymaxxing has a specific look. Mostly it seems to involve affixing plastic gems, charms and shiny stickers to everyday objects, often but not always disposable cups. It's all the more fitting that the whimsymaxxer immediately throws away the gem-studded cup. Whimsy is a kind of profligacy, a revolt against efficiency.

Landfills swell and oceans choke with the detritus of re-enchantment.

In a shift that seems part meme language, part sheer accident and part unintentional revival of a valid old usage, people are now even using “whimsy” as an adjective: “ways to be whimsy,” “have a whimsy and productive week.” Maybe this is on some level a consequence of whimsy’s hardening from a quality of spontaneity into a bunch of consumer objects. When whimsy takes on a tangible, concrete form, perhaps the more abstract “whimsical” starts to evaporate out of usage.

But there is also a ghostly residue of whimsy's other, mechanical meaning in all this. We know by now that anything that can be “-maxxed” is something that a significant portion of our culture sees as quantifiable — truly measurable things, like protein, but also the ineffable, as with a character's stats in a video game: looks, personality, style. Whimsymaxxers talk about bringing out the magic in the everyday, but increasingly that magic is seen as something to be measured and harnessed. It is no surprise, then, that whimsy slots so comfortably into the jargon of our wellness-saturated culture. One social media guru breaks whimsy down into a series of salutary “microhabits”; another speaks of whimsy as a means of maximizing the return on investment of one's “inner child.” Whimsymaxxing is presented as part of a “low-cortisol morning” routine. A medical spa shows off a bedazzled box of Botox vials.

Whimsy here starts to look less like magic and more like the mining device, turning in circles, working on the self, dredging some things up from its depths and shuttling others down from the surface. Buy yourself a little treat. Invest in your inner child. Let your impulses drive. "Fun is a medicinal bath," as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it more than 80 years ago. "The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it."

Sylvester Stallone

Hid His Struggles

For Decades.

At 80, He's Coming Clean.

Sylvester Stallone has loomed large in our popular imagination for 50 years, ever since he exploded onto the screen playing the iconic underdog boxer Rocky Balboa in a film he wrote and that won the best picture Oscar. Many more “Rocky” films came after that, and also another franchise, “Rambo,” which heralded a new era of action movies in which Stallone modeled a very specific type of masculinity: physically imposing, morally unambiguous and emotionally aloof.

Now 80, and with a new memoir, titled "The Steps" (a nod to the Philadelphia Museum of Art stairs he famously scaled in "Rocky"), Stallone is ready to examine his own life, his work and the impact it has had on our culture. As he told me in our candid and at times shocking conversations, he can "make a castle out of regrets" for what his drive and fame did to his mind and his body. He also explained how his very difficult childhood, with abusive and neglectful parents, motivated the tough-guy image he showed the world.

You wrote in “The Steps” that at difficult moments in your life, you told yourself to put those memories “away in a box” and avoid them, just move forward. What was it like to go back and revisit some of these things for this book? It was some mixed emotion. There were some tears, some laughter, some anger and bitterness. And then I thought, Maybe that was the motivation to do something extraordinary as opposed to having no angst inside of me. It’s like, The guy punched you in your mouth, but did he do you a favor?

How you came into the world was, in many ways, how you have inhabited it, with a lot of turmoil and drama. Can you tell me about the day you were born? My mother also came from a lot of turmoil, and she really wasn't mother material. She had grandiose plans for her life, so her pregnancy with me was a big-time interruption. I don't think she wanted to believe it was happening, even though it was in the ninth month. She was finally on a bus and she goes into labor. It was bad. She just happened to be near a medical center, you might call it, like a charity ward.

And the people who delivered you used forceps and partially paralyzed your face. It was a terrible thing growing up because I slurred and I mumbled. It was like 10 times worse than Rocky.

In the book you seem to suggest that both your parents saw your arrival as having ruined their ambitions in some way. You wrote, "Can you really make people proud who never wanted you in the first place?" And when you were very little, you were sent to go live in a boardinghouse, and your parents only visited you once a month. How did you understand that as a kid? I don't know if there was some blockage from being completely abandoned, but I was just raised by strangers and it became a natural environment. My parents were never nurturing, so this was actually a bonus compared to where I was living.

Your parents had this very hostile and violent marriage, and they divorced when you were about 11 years old. You end up living with your dad. That didn't sound like a great time, either. It would be these constant bombastic explosions and then total silence. If he and I were talking and I said, "I don't know if I agree with that," he'd start spinning his fork and suck his teeth, and you knew what was coming. The next thing you know, wham! He had very big hands. You learn to duck. I didn't put a lot of stuff in the book because I didn't want a pity party, but it was insane. For example, before we go to church he said, "Go to the store and buy some bread." I bring home sandwich spread, not bread, and he kicked me in the stomach, laid me out, got in the car and went to church. I'm there in the street with mayonnaise.

Your dad was not only abusive, but he was competitive with you. He often tried to one-up you, humiliate you. You became a very good polo player, and at a polo match, he dragged you off the horse and beat you up in front of everyone. Why do you think he was that way with you? I don't know. His father was like this. They say a fly sitting on a ton of cow [expletive] thinks himself a king. He had this sort of imperiousness, and he was cold as hell, and so my father was very, very cold and tough. There was a cat making noise outside the house. He went out, got the cat, took it into the laundry room, shot it and left it in the wash tub. I think he did that to impress me. Like, You'll never be as tough as your old man. And I won't. There is no chance.

You keep using the word "tough." But I don't hear tough. I hear messed up. You know, you're right. I'm using "tough" as a masculine banner for something much more perverse and weird.

You end up in New York City in your 20s. You wanted to become an actor, and you take a job as an usher at a movie theater. You start writing down dialogue from your favorite films. What were you trying to do there? I said, I'm nonexistent. I put on this monkey suit and people don't even see you, but I can see what the audience reacts to, where they laugh, where they don't. You listen and talk about the film. And then I started to write it down. I'd sit on my bed and I'd have these old Traffic and Blood, Sweat and Tears albums, and those were my desk. And I would just translate notes. You had an apartment with blacked-out windows, where you would write scripts for days on end. In this period, you were getting into altercations. But you're also spending your days not only writing but going to MoMA. You wrote in the book, "At my core, there is this simmering cauldron of emotion that can overflow with volatility, but can also be directed toward deep artistic purpose." Do you think you ever learned how to control that cauldron? It's very, very explosive. At the end of "First Blood," there's a nervous breakdown. It wasn't written that way, but it came out. I said, "This is coming from that cauldron." It's the self-indignation of being run down, dismissed, because that's the way I felt. You can call me ugly, you call me short, just don't call me stupid. Because that is what my father used to say. And literally, it would turn me into a maniac to prove I'm not stupid.

That scene in "First Blood" is just iconic. I was just watching it again yesterday. You are filled with rage and grief. The way it was written was, I'm supposed to commit suicide in a very cool manner. I said, Wait a minute, there are thousands and thousands of men missing parts of their bodies who actually thought they were doing something worthwhile, and then when they came back they're looked at as aberrations, Frankenstein, monsters. Then I started to identify, that's what I felt like growing up. And this rage that they must feel, that not their parents but their country is scorning them — their real parents, the ones they literally lost blood and friends and died for — I really identified with this dismissive attitude that I grew up with all the time. And boy, when I look at that footage, I look distorted. I was gone for a few seconds.

To come back to this period when you were in your apartment with the blacked-out windows: You're trying to make it as an actor. You get a lot of rejections because of the way you look. And you write "Rocky" for yourself. It's a well-known story that the studio tried to pay you more and more money not to be in the film. They wanted James Caan or Ryan O'Neal, but they give it to you because you held out. Was this because you had a sense that this was your last chance? I had less than a hundred bucks in the bank, and I don't know if it was spiritual, but I said, "God, I know in my heart that I will regret this for the rest of my life, and I will be more of a broken man than if I had never done this in the first place." I don't know why I knew this, because I had had no success. I was green, and they had every right not to want to use me. If someone came to me and did the same thing and looked like me and slurred, I'd go: "Come on, man. You're not acceptable to a lot of different people in this country." But I just knew that this is the crossroad. This is the bridge. And if you don't cross it, then jump off it.

Can I ask you just about this thing that happened during “Rocky?” This is your big break. Everything’s riding on the movie. And you cast your dad as the timekeeper who rings the bell in the climactic boxing match. Why did you let him back in? It was like: I just want you to love me for a little bit. Like, look what I did! Share it with me. I know you thought I was a fool my whole life, but here we are. He didn’t ring the bell properly. Everything’s choreographed. It’s one, two, three, four, bell. Not six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Carl Weathers is like, “What’s going on?” And of course it ended up in an altercation by the end. A really bad Italian drama. But for a moment I thought, Jesus, he’d be proud.

Later you end up inviting your mom to the Oscars for “Rocky” and she blows you off. And then in the 1990s she becomes a celebrity psychic. How did you manage the dynamics when she sees proximity to your fame as a financial opportunity? It was very hard. She had been married three more times, and then I saw her posing as a psychic with a turban and rhinestones and this buffoonery. Or she would go on "Howard Stern" and mock my father and call him terrible things and then they'd get on the phone. And I had my father and mother fighting on "Howard Stern"! What other guy has to go through this?

Yeah, this was 1992. They had this horrible on-air argument. It's unbelievable. Why would you go on and humiliate yourself? Why are you humiliating me, my children? I'll never forget. I asked her: "Have you ever done anything wrong? Do you have any regrets?" She goes, "No, why?" Wow. I live on regrets. I can make a castle out of regrets.

Did you go to therapy later in your life? No. It's not going to help, because this doesn't go away. You cover it all with subterfuge and ideology and intellectual this and that and breathing and meditation until that moment, late at night, poor. You're right back there, and now you're in anxiety. You ever have anxiety?

Oh, yeah. All that anxiety everyone has, it's coming from something that's so deep-rooted.

"Rocky" ended up winning best picture. And you end up capturing the public's imagination. I'm very interested in you looking back at this transition, from struggling actor to suddenly becoming the hottest star in Hollywood. Did you look at fame like: This isn't going to change me? Because fame breaks some people. It didn't break me. It made me combative. It made me very I told you so revengeful. Spiteful. I was so insufferable. Even with The New York Times, I was like, "Oh, 'Madame Bovary,' anyone could write that." I became a petulant child. Years later, I despised myself. I'm surprised I'm still here. I managed to alienate the entire press and people who believed in me. There was no humility whatsoever. Again, it's just childhood eruptions coming to the surface at the most inopportune time.

I want to ask you about your body. Well, now you're getting personal.

At several points in your career you were exceptionally muscular, which wasn't your build before "Rocky." How has your relationship with your body changed over time? It became very intimate, you might say. It was my armor. It became an obsession. Really bad. It got to the point where I became bulimic. You heard it here first. I got down to 2.6 percent body fat when I was doing “Rocky III,” and I couldn’t hold anything down. Or I didn’t want to keep it down because I became so obsessed with staying at that point of fitness, literally an obsessive body-worship kind of thing. And nobody does it without additives and drugs, period. I don’t care what they say. It isn’t as though you’re a junkie, but if you’re going to work out and try to stay in shape for six months straight, and you’re eating yogurt and pudding, it’s not happening.

So you were taking steroids, you're saying? Oh, my god, you have to. But you do it in a sensitive way — six weeks on, six weeks off. People go, "Oh, you don't get that way naturally." No, you don't. But that also took a terrible toll. It wasn't until I did "Cop Land," when I had to play the weakest guy in the room — partially deaf, overweight — that I felt somewhat liberated. But yeah, I've abused my body. If I could do it over again, I would say, "Let someone else carry the banner and don't do your own stunts." I don't know what it was about hurting myself all the time.

Was it masochistic? Very masochistic. And this is all going back to dad and back there in the polo field: No, you're not going to break me. But you do get broken a little bit — physically, not mentally.

You said something earlier about regrets, and that you don't get to be your age in your career without a mountain of them. It's horrible. It's the fog of war, the war of trying to succeed, and you can blame it on that or on petty self-absorption, and wow it is painful. But yesterday is dead. Do you forgive yourself for being a bastard? No, you just regret. You denied people your love, but you also did worse to yourself.

Have you forgiven your parents? [Pause]

I've accepted that they are who they are. I guess you could say, yeah, I do. It's definitely a delicate peace treaty, but what are we going to do? Walk around yelling at ghosts? Come back here! We're not finished! No, I can't. All I can do is cherish every second, because let's face it, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. A longer version is online at nytimes.com/theinterview or as an episode of our podcast “The Interview.”

To eat tinned fish for innumerable days and nights in a row, as I have, is to undergo sensory overload. There's the jiggly tofu silhouette encasing the tender crack-crunch of vertebrae, the briny aroma about as subtle as a house on fire. Salt-slick density melting on the tongue to umami mush.

Like many of our cleverest inventions — duct tape, computers, hair spray — this came out of a war. In the late 1700s, France was troubled by costly military skirmishes and offered a cash prize to citizens who could figure out how to cheaply prevent food from spoiling. An enterprising man named Nicolas Appert sealed cooked fish into glass jars and boiled them, eventually winning 12,000 francs and the kudos of Napoleon Bonaparte. Later, in Britain, the merchant Peter Durand swapped Appert's jars for tin-plated cans. Fast-forward 200 years and now we're all swimming happily in a \$15 billion global market of shelf-stable seafoods that can last for years and years.

But what drove the ichthyic pioneers of the 19th century were matters of practicality; I do not think Appert and Durand would easily understand how, today, tinned fish is as much a sensible grocery item as it is a status symbol, a viral “hot girl food,” a borderline luxury good. I think it would probably take a long time to explain to the two of them why you can buy limited-edition tinned fish at concerts and why there is coveted merch for sale about tinned fish and why a store exists in New York City called the Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine where a single-serving tin of said fantastic sardine can cost \$44.

I think if you tried to tell them about "sardinemaxxing," they would be confused.

I'm confused, myself.

Because \$44 feels like a small price to pay for a sociological education, I spent some weeks recently sampling as much of this genre as I could. I ate not just sardines but also smoked salmon marinated in chili oil, small-batch mussels in sweet pepper and garlic, various types of trout, anchovies and an enormous amount of $t^{*}$ — so much $t^{*}$ that I refuse to look at the word anymore and you cannot make me spell it out — and what I learned is that most of it tastes kind of just ... OK?

The genesis of the modern tinned-fish fervor was the Covid-19 lockdown. During that time, otherwise rational human beings suddenly dropped unspeakable amounts of cash on rare plants, industrial kitchen gadgets, “loungewear” and, yes, \$10-to-\$80-a-pop artisanal preserved fish meats in whimsical boxes. (What’s that saying about shooting fish in a barrel?) The year 2020 birthed not one but two buzzy direct-to-consumer tinned-fish start-ups, one of which became a hit on (what else) “Shark Tank.” Yet even after the pandemic eased and consumers ditched their sweatpants, they kept buying tinned fish.

One theory I've heard about the lasting craze is that it's a way to feel the thrill of travel without needing to go anywhere; getting anchovies shipped in from popular tourist destinations like Portugal and Spain can stand in for the time-intensive experience of traversing Portugal or Spain. I've also read that tinned fish feeds right into health and wellness zeal, that it scratches the paranoid, conspiracy-minded itch for "bunker food" and that it might simply be about affordability — epicurean brands aside, you can get a supermarket can for \$2 or \$3 — which would take tinned fish all the way back to its roots as a balm in a time of financial crisis.

Credible arguments, to be sure. But as I “made dinner” after work every night, i.e. nibbled t\*\*\* straight out of the package like a raccoon (tinned-fish cookbooks do exist, but if you are someone who enjoys defaulting to the lowest common denominator of effort available, you, too, might be a secret raccoon), a different idea occurred to me.

My prefabricated meals were immensely satisfying not because they were convenient or cheap or hyperefficient panaceas to hunger — although they were all those things — but because they were entirely impossible to mess up. You cannot fail at tinned fish! Slap it onto a cracker, if you're too dignified to self-spoon-feed the way I do. Scramble it into a broader vision like a pasta or a sandwich if you must. But you can never go wrong with the cookery here the way you definitely can with, say, raw fish. This certitude is a great pleasure. This is the bone-deep comfort and joy of having life's weighty demands taken care of, of having everything planned out by somebody else. Here you go, decisions ready made. Eating tinned fish feels like being handed a scrunched paper bag on your way out the door by a warm, authoritative, parental hand — which of course you deserve.

Adult Lunchables are already everywhere in this world. Sophisticate versions of juvenile favorites include: tropical cocktails (grown-up Capri-Suns), burrata (string cheese), any dessert (candy wearing pants), smoothies (basically actual baby food). Tinned fish is a funny one, though, because no kid would actually choose to eat tinned fish. It's an acquired taste, funky and fusty and a little bit offensive, merely presented in a kid way. And so in that way it's maybe more like whatever's going on with all these bows on adult women's clothing.

Right around the time of my piscivore experiment, Fishwife, the “Shark Tank” direct-to-consumer darling, launched a limited-run summer nicoise salad in collaboration with the national chain Sweetgreen. A friend and I were both curious to try this ingenious branding bonanza — but by the time we got around to putting a date into our busy calendars, the collaboration had ended.

So we gathered the ingredients posted to the company's website and assembled the dish ourselves. I spent far too long roasting the recipe's "peak-season vegetables" and chopping three types of greens and hard-boiling the eggs, only to realize the eggs were supposed to be "jammy soft-boiled." Neither of us remembered to bring "crispy onions, for topping." We looked at each other, two 30-somethings eating our effortful, lukewarm, half-correctly assembled salads, and figured that next time, we should probably just go to a restaurant.

My Sister-in-Law Makes Family Vacations a Nightmare. Can We Stop Inviting Her?

I married into a large, extended close-knit family almost 20 years ago. We get along very well and have stayed close despite several of us living in different corners of the country.

Almost four decades ago, the family established an annual weeklong vacation that is precious to many of us. Depending on the year, between 30 and 40 people join the trip. It is a rare time that the family is able to escape everyday grinds, be together and allow our children to play and bond.

Despite her efforts, my brother-in-law's wife does not fit in with the group. She wants to be liked and included, but her behavior is often a combination of confrontational and defensive. And it is exacerbated when she drinks alcohol. Every year she has big, vocal fights with her husband, her daughter or another member of the family. Most of us have responded by ignoring or avoiding her. When she is around, we are walking on eggshells.

I know that my feelings about my sister-in-law's behavior are shared with many others in the family because it is a frequent subject of conversation. Last year, three of us had a conversation with her directly to address our concerns, including asking her to consider curtailing the drinking. On this year's vacation, we saw little to no improvement. Three of our six nights together were tainted by her behavior.

We love her husband and their two daughters. Is it appropriate to ask her, and her alone, not to attend these family gatherings any longer?

— Name Withheld

She “does not fit in with the group”: I’m struck that this is the first thing you say about her. Social exclusion is a deeply human habit. There’s a reason the “voted off the island” trope, from the TV show “Survivor,” has embedded itself in the culture. In certain workplaces, someone is always in the process of being fired; in certain

BONUS ADVICE FROM JUDGE JOHN HODGMAN

Josh writes: My wife and I watched the original "Star Wars" movies early in our relationship. She now insists that she has never seen them. I specifically remember her reaction to them! It makes me feel crazy. Who's right?

I used to openly mock my mom for forgetting whole novels she read. Now I'm her age, and while I absolutely recall seeing "Star Wars" in 1977 (my dad fell asleep!), I routinely discover that I watched two episodes of a TV show the night before that my addled brain has simply erased by morning. Which is to say: Good news! Your wife might not be lying to you for her own sick amusement. As we age, we don't need Jedi — the mind tricks itself. Maybe she was distracted, or maybe she was just pretending to like movies for your sake, or maybe your own memory is wrong. I can only order you to watch them together again. It's the only way to be sure your wife has seen "Star Wars" so that, presumably, you can remain married to her.

John Hodgman is the host of the “Judge John Hodgman” podcast.

families, someone (not necessarily the same someone) is always in the doghouse.

Family vacations call for some measure of forbearance; not everyone will be equally easy to be around. Still, if your sister-in-law's conduct is as bad as you say, a response is warranted. It can be awfully wearing to have to spend time with someone whose volatile temper gets worse when she drinks. Do bear in mind, though, that she's almost certainly part of a package. If her husband is made to choose between her and the rest of you, he's very likely to choose the person with whom he shares his daily life. Which means his daughters won't get to see as much of their cousins. You'd be down four. That's a big move. There's also the question of who speaks for these 30 or 40 vacationers. Any such conversation should come from people who can fairly claim to speak for a consensus view.

If the family has reached that point, the question is how to protect the vacation without resorting to permanent exclusion. The philosopher Linda Radzik works on social punishment, and one thing she stresses is that sanctions should leave room for the wrongdoer to make amends and rejoin the community. Voting your sister-in-law off the vacation island doesn't do that. (What troubles Radzik about talk of “canceling” is its finality: Cancellation shouldn't rule out renewal.)

There's a difference between banishing your sister-in-law — declaring that “you're no longer one of us” — and telling your sister-in-law that she can join the gathering next year but will have to leave the disruptive behavior behind or sit out the following one. So don't just have the conversation; be specific about what has to change and what will happen if it doesn't. And leave a way open for her return.

Given that loud arguments often involve two people, your brother-in-law might consider couples counseling; his wife could be encouraged to get help with what sounds like a problem with alcohol. But you don't need to fix their lives to deal with the vacation. You're entitled to protect a cherished family gathering. Just be sure you're drawing the line at behavior rather than deciding who belongs in the tribe.

My partner and I have been together since 2022, and we started living together six months ago. We're still recovering financially from renovating and furnishing our apartment, so having children isn't something we can afford to consider right now. In Italy, where we live, people often wait until 35 to become parents. I'm 32, so it still feels "early."

The problem is that I know my partner wants to become a father someday, while I simply don't know whether I want to become a mother. I raised my brother and enjoyed spending time with him when he was little, but otherwise I have never felt the delight that some people show around children. Instead, they leave me indifferent or even annoyed.

I'm also afraid of the changes that parenting would require of me. I tolerate my current job only because it pays the bills, and I worry about the distractions that children would bring; right now, finding work that I love and feeling fulfilled matter more to me.

I'm also in therapy for anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I'm scared of how my mind might react to something as significant as motherhood. My partner knows that I have a difficult family history that traumatized me. I don't want to become a grumpy, unfulfilled parent or pass my own problems on to an innocent child.

I've decided to give myself a few years and see how I feel. But do I have to tell my partner now that I'm unsure about something he hopes for? If I do, I give him the chance either to find someone else with whom to build a family or to stay with me despite the uncertainty. I'm scared he won't choose me.

At the same time, if I still don't want children in five years, will I have wasted years of his life while he waited for me to feel ready? — Name Withheld

The foolish man, in Matthew 7, “built his house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” If you allow your partner to believe that you share his expectations about raising a family, you would be building a relationship on a foundation of dishonesty, which is scarcely more secure. You say that you’re worried that letting your partner know now that you may not want to have children will lead him to break up with you. But why do you think it will go over any better a few years down the road?

To submit a query: Send an email to ethicist@nytimes.com. Want The Ethicist directly in your inbox? Subscribe to our newsletter at nytimes.com/ethicist.

Your partner has been upfront about his hopes that you'll have children. You owe it to him to be equally upfront about your uncertainty. You seem open to the possibility that you'll want children someday. You can tell him that too. What's needed here is honesty about where you are now.

Many of the spats that couples get into are about nothing very much: accidental slights seized on as evidence of character flaws, two mammals briefly getting on each other's nerves and growling. But some disagreements go to the heart of things, and whether to have children is one of them, because it concerns the shape of the lives you want to lead. Whatever shape those lives take, I hope they'll be characterized by candor about the things that matter most.

DOES A.I. MAKE YOUR BRAIN LAZY?

Artificial intelligence is changing the world, and the humans in it, in ways we don't yet understand. People are increasingly worried that if we rely on chatbots for thinking, our brains will become slower and less engaged. Is A.I. making us stupider? Scientists, too, want to know.

First: text-based problems that students could easily copy into a chatbot.

A team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and the education company McGraw Hill examined a decade of data from a popular online learning tool by McGraw Hill, starting in 2015. Across millions of math sessions by a group that ranged from fifth graders to college students, the researchers compared performance from before 2022, when ChatGPT first came out, with the work that followed its arrival.

To analyze the results, they split the questions into two types.

And next: visual, interactive or multistep questions that were harder for a chatbot.

Machine Learnings is a column examining what the latest scientific studies reveal about our increasingly complex relationship with artificial intelligence.

Researchers found that after 2022, the time students spent mulling over online test questions dropped precipitously on the questions readily handled by chatbots, while their performance improved.

But when the students were given proctored tests away from their computers, their results were worse than they had been before A.I.

Sina Rismanchian, a Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Irvine and one of the lead authors of the preliminary study, noted that A.I. lets students offload the process required to solve a mathematical problem.

Green compares the brain's tendency to conserve effort to calorie retention.

A.I. tools condition people to expect immediate responses and deny them the experience of working through challenges, the authors say, which is crucial for skill development and one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.

"Whatever you could do that exerted the least calories but didn't kill you was the best thing to do evolutionarily," he says.

Another multi-institutional study, prepared for the forthcoming Conference on Language Modeling and cited by Rismanchian and his co-authors, shows that when people (in this experiment, adults) become accustomed to skipping the productive struggle of logical and analytical tasks and having the process automated, they are more likely to give up on hard questions that they could otherwise figure out.

“Part of how A.I. is making us dumber,” says Dr. Adam Green, a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University, is “undercutting the development of learning how to think in younger people that now have an alternative.”

But all is not lost. Studies suggest that — for the brain — there are better ways to use A.I.

In July, professors at Middlebury College released a preprint study in which more than 200 undergraduates were asked to write an essay and take a proctored multiple-choice test.

One group of students had access to A.I. to research a topic and write the essay. The other group didn't. The researchers found that the A.I.-enabled group wrote longer and slightly higher-quality essays. Their test scores were also higher.

A week later, the participants returned for a similar test, but now both groups worked unassisted. The authors broke down the students' second-round performance based on how A.I. was used in the first round.

Experimental evidence suggests that using A.I. not as a full shortcut, but as a means to exercise what they were supposed to learn, allowed them to outperform the remaining participants in the A.I. group and those who hadn't used A.I. at all.

The students who relied on A.I. to draft their entire essays in the first round floundered. Their test scores decreased.

But the students who had used A.I. more like a tutor, to explain complex concepts or clarify ideas, not only retained high test scores in the second round, but their essays were higher quality as well.

In other words, these studies so far agree: Artificial intelligence is affecting how people, especially the young, learn and remember. Whether we will be dumber as a result might depend on how — not if — we use A.I. ◆

GOING ALL IN

How the logic of gambling took over Silicon Valley — and invaded our lives.

“Computer,” one can imagine asking many years from now, in some kind of futuristic, robotic retirement home, “remind me: What was the deal with Drake and the ‘goth baddie’?”

In this future your A.I. companion will whir and hum, calculate and infer, and spit out something like this: That's a great question — and you've really hit on a load-bearing 21st-century event. In September 2026, the Canadian singer and rapper Drake released a music video in which he was seen receiving an emo-goth makeover from the OnlyFans model and streamer Pinkchyu, whom he had purportedly met and become smitten with while shooting an internet dating show released earlier that month. Historians believe the popular viral videos, which started a number of discourse cycles on social media, were most likely stunts arranged to promote Drake's video project, "Fear of Missing Out."

This is not a bad answer to the question. You will be reminded of Drake, of Pinkchyu and of the viral cycle of promotion that accompanied “FOMO.” But if you set aside a little bit more money in retirement for the slightly better A.I. companion, you might learn of a third player in the Drake-Goth Baddie romance: an Australian online casino, registered in Curaçao, called Stake.

Stake, which entered the gambling business in 2017, has long been a leader in aggressive and somewhat underhanded digital-first marketing; it's notorious for paying spammy social media accounts to swipe already-viral images and memes and repackage them with the Stake logo. Since 2022, however, it has been best known as the money behind Kick, the edgy video-streaming platform rival to Twitch, and the home of unpleasant but unavoidable figures like Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular; Adin Ross, a right-wing Zoomer shock jock; and ChudTheBuilder, who is perhaps best known for yelling racial slurs at strangers. Following years of regular appearances with popular streamers like Ross, during which the pair would gamble on

Max Read is the author of the Read Max newsletter. Illustration by Luca Schenardi

Stake — winning, Bloomberg reported in February, at mathematically improbable rates — Drake debuted his own new Kick stream in August, which is where the dating show with Pinkchyu took place. The occasion: Stake's ninth anniversary.

For most of my life as a consumer of the stupid promotional nonsense that surrounds major album and film releases, these rollouts have taken place on MTV or magazines, in blogs or, eventually, on Instagram. But here, Drake, probably the most shameless student of popularity in the 21st century, has spurned them all for an apparently much higher-leverage channel: an online casino and the social media apparatus built around it.

But why should we be surprised? Traditional gambling — casinos, lotteries and sports betting — is a \$643 billion global industry, according to the market research firm Statista; last year, about a third of that revenue came from the United States, where online gambling in particular has soared in the years since the pandemic. Depending on how you count, this makes gambling almost twice as large as the global music, video game and film industries combined.

It's hard not to see the traces of gambling money everywhere you turn these days: in sports broadcasts now blanketed with odds and sports-book branding, in a podcast ecosystem underwritten by DraftKings and FanDuel ad money and, yes, in the influencer freaks rocketing to fame thanks to canny marketing spending by offshore casinos. The success of casino capital has given it an outsize weight in producing and disseminating culture, especially as older and more reliable sources of revenue for media and entertainment — advertising in particular — dry up or are captured by tech platforms.

But focusing on gambling alone only tells part of the story of this strange new development in culture. We are living through a kind of postpandemic gamified speculative-trading apocalypse of which traditional gambling is only one horseman. There's also crypto, now an enormous industry still searching for a nonspeculative use; stock trading apps like Robinhood, which popularized high-risk, leveraged options trading among retail investors; and, most recently, prediction markets, which saw \$60 billion in trading volume last year. Soon, it won't make much sense to distinguish among these categories, as the apps converge on a multi-offering model featuring some combination of sportsbook, prediction market, options trading and crypto, if not all of the above.

What underwrites this emerging industry — besides an excellent business model and billions of dollars of revenue from suckers and billions of dollars of investment from the smart-money set — is a shared vision of a world built around gambling and the calculated risks that accompany it. The influencers, livestreamers, podcasters and aggregators (not to mention rappers and comedians and athletes) who have reoriented their output around the imperatives of betting capital not only work in service of what you might call the speculative sector but operate according to its logic as well. What is social media, after all, but a venue where you can wager your reputation and stake high-risk claims — and, perhaps, trigger a lavish (if infrequent) payout? All while enjoying the addictive satisfactions of endless nondeterministic push-button stimulus.

Gambling, in other words, is not simply paying for the culture. It is the culture.

No one knows this better than sports fans. Every major sports league and sports broadcast has a sportsbook partner or sponsor, and nearly every broadcast now prominently features betting lines and parlay suggestions. Leagues that once undertook damnatio memoriae on athletes who gambled now promote stars with exclusive branded sportsbook deals; dozens of major-league stadiums feature internal betting windows. Every major sports league is now a sub-sector of the gambling industry, rather than the other way around.

Perhaps this is not worth mourning: Professional sports are, in some sense, a kind of entertainment. But even if you don't take sports seriously, consider if the same forces were to take hold of news media in general. Kalshi, an app that allows enterprising consumers of news to bet on elections, awards, invasions and the like, has partnered with CNN, CNBC and Fox News to provide them with prediction-market data; its rival Polymarket has its own agreements with Dow Jones and X. Right now, these deals offer in data what the sportsbooks partnerships offer in money: a new source for an essential material that has lately been scarce. In an era in which polling is “broken,” prediction-market odds can potentially help take the temperature of the electorate.

But if the prediction-market business keeps growing as quickly, the partnerships might expand beyond the pure provision of data, and Kalshi and Polymarket could become the same kind of reliable sources of funding to cable news that DraftKings and MGM are to sports media. It's not hard from here to imagine a future in which CNN anchors promote their electoral “Locks of the Week” and Fox News analysts offer up branded parlay bets. (At least ratings would be up, as fans stay up late even during blowouts to see if the Republicans cover the spread.)

This may seem far-fetched, but when speculative capital enters an ecosystem, it has a way of completely reorienting all the players. The gambling-oriented sports-entertainment complex has created a new type of fan, less a devoted adherent to a particular team or player than an omnivorous and avaricious consumer of scorelines. What kind of citizen does a prediction markets-oriented news media give us? The hopeful answer here, such as it is — the answer provided by the marketing materials for the various wagering apps — is that we all become daring superforecasters.

In his recent book, “On the Edge,” the hybrid journalist-pollster-professional gambler Nate Silver proposes an anthropological distinction between groups he calls the Village and the River. The Village is “people who work in government, in much of the media and in parts of academia” — in Silver’s telling, epistemically cautious, methodically conservative and socially conformist. The River is an “ecosystem” of people, among them tech-aligned entrepreneurs, investors, thinkers, literal gamblers and, I suppose, Drake, who “speak one language with terms such as expected value, Nash equilibrium and Bayesian priors.” The Village is staid, outdated, cautious; the River is cool and fun.

It might be helpful to think of the River less as a temperament or subculture than as the militant vanguard of what the philosopher Ian Hacking called “the probabilistic revolution,” the slow displacement of determinism and strict causality with a new mode of thinking rooted in uncertainty and statistical inference. This style of reasoning understands the world in terms of distributions rather than particularities; its laws are observed relations rather than causal accounts. “Chance,” it suggests, isn’t a function of human ignorance but a property that could be measured, governed and put to profitable use.

In fact, statistics has its roots in gambling. The discipline was born when French mathematicians tried to settle a debate about the odds of a given dice roll. But it flourished in the 19th century, as modern states began producing large data sets about their populations: censuses, marriage statistics, mortality rates. The application of statistical methods to these data sets revealed that certain “laws” could hold true on the population level without anyone really needing to know or care why.

If the defining statistical apparatus of the 19th century belonged to

European states, that of our century is the property of a few dozen companies in Northern California, where the statistical style rules. Venture capital, the investment philosophy that built Silicon Valley, is a method less for picking companies than for constructing exposure to a distribution: If most investments go to zero, and your returns are concentrated in enormous outliers, the smart move is to construct broad exposure, rather than to try to determine winners in advance.

At the same time the software systems that govern our lives are also built on probabilities, not particularities: The recommendation algorithm serving up a video has no clue what the video contains and does not know you, your preferences, your desires; it simply estimates a conditional probability. The user interface you interact with is as much a product of repeated statistical experiments — A/B testing — as it is of considered judgments or design principles. And the advertising auctions funding everything online estimate the odds that you will click or install, and price your attention accordingly, several billion times a day.

Large language models, the foundation of the systems we now broadly refer to as “A.I.” and the apotheosis of tech-industry innovation, might be the purest expression of the statistical style. They have no beliefs and know no facts; they’re conditional probability distributions over fragments of text. And the thing is, they work: L.L.M.s produce astonishingly lucid, fluid and plausible text. Indeed, what makes the statistical style so powerful and attractive is that it works across the board. Venture investing, advertising auctions, A/B testing, recommendation algorithms and other practices derived from the probabilistic framework have made the tech industry and its stars fabulously wealthy.

Its success, in turn, justifies its spread. Increasingly the tech industry seems determined to go further, fully surrendering everyday judgment and even personality to the statistical approach: “I’m updating my priors on Thai food,” you might hear an engineer say; or, from a V.C., “Going for a walk is +EV.” (Translation: “I was wrong about Thai food” and “Going for a walk is nice.”) At Silicon Valley parties, or so I’ve read, everyone talks about their “p(doom)”: a cutesy expression of probability to describe your relative confidence that an artificial intelligence will kill the human race. The implication here is that, just as people in the past understood their minds to function like clockwork, hydraulics, steam engines and eventually computers, the people at the forefront of innovation see their minds as an even more cutting-edge technology: stochastic models and inference engines.

It's unsurprising that the wealthy whiz-kids of Silicon Valley, habituated as they are to data collection, inference and speculative investment, would turn to prediction markets. But why does anyone else? One popular explanation is what the podcaster Demetri Kofinas calls “financial nihilism”: a sense that all other pathways to wealth and stability have been cut off, and therefore that the only option is to turn to crypto, day trading, gambling and perhaps streaming yourself doing one or all of the above. At the dawn of an era when A.I. may entirely restructure the job market, this is the message most consistently broadcast to young men online by Silicon Valley and its gambling subsectors: Avoid the permanent underclass.

But what if the apparent affection for high-risk endeavor is less a product of nihilistic recklessness and more a considered adoption of the statistical style (or a vulgar version thereof) in personal finance, social interaction, health and romance? The kids, in this story, embrace gambling not so much for the thrill but because they've been conditioned by the world around them to seek exposure across a range of investments, just like a venture capitalist.

Last year, I called a Kick streamer named Mike Smalls Jr. to ask him about the time he livestreamed a hurricane. In October 2024, as Hurricane Milton was bearing down on Tampa, Fla., Smalls heard that the streamer Adin Ross was offering \$70,000 to anyone who streamed the hurricane. "So I went out there with an air mattress," he told me, "at a nearby pond." For the first hour or so, Smalls, sitting on his air mattress, tried to control his umbrella while bantering with viewers. Eventually, the water rose over the banks of the pond, and Smalls, who can't swim, found himself clinging to a tree. At some point, Ross himself joined the chat, and had to break it to Smalls that the \$70,000 offer wasn't legitimate. Smalls, still streaming, indefatigable, managed to wheedle \$10,000 out of him.

Every major sports league is now a subsector of the gambling industry, rather than the other way around.

I'd been struck by the story of a guy gambling his life against a jackpot, and I was expecting to talk to an inveterate risk-taker, a new man who saw his life in terms of odds and probabilities. But Smalls didn't see the stream as a gamble, and he doesn't gamble much himself. (Though he used to on Kick, with bankrolls provided by Stake.) "Gambling can be very addictive," he told me, "so I don't want to brand myself too much as a gambling guy." He struck me not so much as a risk-on oddsmaker but as a fairly methodical and thoughtful self-starter — one for whom his volatile streaming career was an investment on par with his college education.

But even those of us who have never livestreamed are similarly exposed. The health and bodybuilding content young men consume is couched in the language of risk and odds — reducing your “all-cause mortality” — derived from the huge amounts of data you can gather from your Oura rings and Whoop bands. Once you’ve maxxed your looks, you can enter the dating-app casino, increasing your odds of a payout with better photos and captions; if you get lucky and find a partner to have (Continued on Page 65)

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A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter's education that I hoped would challenge New York City's separate and unequal school system.

Now 16, she thinks I was wrong.

I could feel her looking at me.

Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Naiya, from middle school, she'd tumble into the car and bombard me with the day's escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she'd aced despite thinking she'd failed it. But not this day.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.

As they neared the end of her seventh-grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation's top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City's highest ranked public high schools.

Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city's deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.

By dismissal time, Najya's shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me.

I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.

I've lost count of how many times I have written some version of this sentence: Nationally, a Black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced, and to be offered rigorous and college-prep curriculum, to have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernized facilities.

In New York, a combination of housing segregation and “academic” sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students — even middle-class ones — are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive \$23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.

New York City is a diverse school system — there is no racial majority among its student body — and yet Black children remain the most segregated of all student groups. As the U.C.L.A. Civil Rights Project describes it, New York “is a four-race city where white and Asian students, on average, attend middle-class, predominantly white and Asian schools and Black and Latino students are increasingly going to school with each other in schools where poverty is the norm.”

My husband and I had largely avoided segregated schools like these. He and his siblings attended integrated schools that served the military bases where their family lived. Starting when I was in second grade, my parents enrolled me in a school-integration busing program that allowed a limited number of Black students to leave their segregated neighborhood schools for white ones on the other side of town.

Being given access to the most resourced public schools in my hometown allowed me to flourish academically, and I am convinced that the integrated education my husband and I received set the foundation that has allowed us to become the successful upper-middle-class family that my daughter was born into.

We are both beneficiaries of educational opportunities that were forced into existence by generations of Black parents willing to put their most personal stake — their own children — in the fight for school equality for all Black children.

Black parents put their children forth as plaintiffs in lawsuits argued by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that ultimately ended legal segregation in the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. When the federal government refused to enforce the new law of the land, Black parents sent their children to wade through white mobs to enter white-only schools, pushing their doors open for the rest of us.

And yet decades later, integration now exists for a minority of Black children — usually those born to families like ours who have the money to pay for private schools or live in tonier ZIP codes zoned to heavily white public schools, or who can pay for tutoring that allows their children, from a very young age, to test into programs for “gifted” students. Most Black students, however, languish in the type of schools that the law was supposed to have eradicated.

So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation's most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city's schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.

That may appear paradoxical, but only if we forget that the battle for school integration wasn't catalyzed by the desire to put Black students next to white students but by an effort to ensure that Black children received access to equal educational resources.

We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.

After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn.

I hadn't intended at first to write about our decision. But a few months into the academic year, P.S. 307 became embroiled in an integration battle when parents protested the reassignment of their children from a wealthy and predominantly white school to ours. It felt impossible for me not to weigh in.

Page 25: Najya Hannah-Jones, 16, the writer's daughter. Above: Najya being dropped off for kindergarten by her father, Faraji Hannah-Jones, at P.S. 307 in Brooklyn in 2016

In 2016, I wrote an essay in this magazine called “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” about our experience in a system in which educational inequality was widely accepted. Our daughter, then a kindergartner with Afro puffs, a plaid school uniform and Jordan-clad feet, appeared on the cover.

The piece struck a chord in a way I could not have predicted. Readers flooded my inbox and posted hundreds of comments. Producers invited me for interviews, book publishers came calling and I was asked to speak all over the country by communities and institutions grappling with the issue of school segregation. The essay spurred community meetings in places near and far; and in New York City, it helped ignite parent and student activism around a subject that had largely disappeared from public discourse. Even a decade later, parents still share with me how my essay led them to make similar educational decisions for their children.

In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor. And yet that day, under the withering glare of my daughter, the words that I was formulating sounded hollow to my ears even before they passed my lips.

"Your school is not bad," I told her, modulating my voice. "What are you talking about?"

Najya grew agitated. “You know what I am talking about. We looked up our school! We saw the test scores. We saw the ratings.” She ticked off the school’s below-state average reading and math scores, and that it ranked poorly on a popular school-rating website. I said I was aware of her school’s academic rankings, but that test scores alone do not define a school.

Glancing between her and the road, I told her everything that I had said a hundred times on stages, in interviews, in discussions since I had made her a symbol of how the choices we make can help sustain — or dismantle — educational inequality. I talked about the deep inequality in New York's schools and how, like those Black families who came before us, we had an obligation to be part of the struggle of our larger community. Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I'd accomplished by not choosing the "best" school for her. And the honest answer is, I don't know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

I did not, when we chose P.S. 307, go into this with naïveté. I understood exactly what we would face, could cite studies and statistics by heart. But when I wrote my essay, we were in the propitious years, with Najya just a kindergartner with two caring and astute co-teachers.

The district had placed one of its new universal pre-K programs at Najya's school, and it had attracted other well-off families who enrolled their children the year we did, and many had stayed for kindergarten. Najya adored school and seemed to be reading and doing math on grade level. She was also developing a strong sense of herself as a Black girl in a classroom that, unlike the rest of the school, was multicultural and economically diverse, a reflection of the city and the world. At the start of each year, the students created self-portraits, and I chuckled with my husband when our light-skinned child chose to draw herself with the chestnut-colored crayon and not the beige one because that is how she saw herself.

But this did not, I suppose could not, last. The dynamic, exceptional principal who headed the school when we enrolled Najya into pre-K, a woman who had herself grown up in the public housing across the street and had turned this high-poverty school into a vibrant learning community, retired at the end of the year. It was soon clear that the new principal was not up to the task of sustaining the work of the veteran educator she had replaced.

Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn't like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya's class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher's aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.

Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren't being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, "It's always like this, and that's why I don't want to go to this school."

It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults. Students respond to the high or low expectations of institutions and the grown-ups who operate them, and it was clear that these children were getting the message.

After lunch, I headed straight to the principal's office to meet with her. Afterward, I sent a lengthy email about what I had witnessed and demanded the unsafe lunchroom conditions be addressed. In what had become a pattern when we raised concerns, it took several days before the principal responded and several more weeks of emails and calls before she announced a plan to address the lunchtime issues.

My husband and I were frustrated and worried but remained committed. By then, all but one of the white children and nearly all the middle-class children who had started pre-K with Najya had left P.S. 307. We felt we could not abandon the school and our convictions at the moment we experienced the dysfunction we knew defined so many of the segregated schools serving poor Black children. We had to stay and fight for the students who did not have options, and so we started to become a thorn in the principal's side.

While much is said about the chronic absenteeism of low-income

Najya on the cover of the magazine in 2016, for an article that spurred conversation nationwide about segregation in schools.

The New York Times Magazine students, there is often a parallel among staff members at these schools. Najya's principal regularly wouldn't engage with us or wasn't in the building at all. In Najya's third-grade year, her teacher missed a significant number of days, leading Najya to complain about the substitute teachers who rarely taught and how sometimes there was no substitute at all. On those days she and other students would be sent to the second-grade or sometimes the kindergarten class, where they would be made to work on their own, and I would have to once again call the principal only to wait for days for a response.

But fourth grade was the worst year. At the first parent-teacher conference in November 2019, Najya's teachers told us that she was not performing on grade-level in any of her academic subjects and that her assessment given at the start of the school year had shown she was not a proficient reader. We were perplexed. Najya was always a good student, and her past reading assessments were always at or above grade level.

When we got home that night, I emailed her teachers and copied the principal. We needed to understand why our daughter was suddenly floundering. I told them that we wanted to see Najya's reading assessment and all her graded classroom work so we could determine what she didn't understand and get her tutoring. I was trying to signal that we were active and involved parents, that we wanted to be partners with them in our daughter's success.

Neither of Najya's teachers nor the principal bothered to respond. What followed was a series of emails and phone calls and meetings trying to get basic items — copies of Najya's graded work, her reading assessment, her test results — and receiving nothing.

Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school's literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya's teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya's teacher had most likely never performed the school's mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.

Finally, a few days before school let out for winter break, I received a folder in Najya's backpack with the math assignments I had been requesting since our conference. Once I tucked her into bed, I sat at my dining room table and scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking Najya's work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya's writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.

I sat there silently for several minutes, conjuring the image of my little girl thinking she was soaring in class when she was failing, and my devastation morphed into hot rage.

The day school reopened, Faraji and I went to the principal's office and sat there until she found time to meet with us. That's when the principal finally began to take us seriously and, some days later, mandated a system for assessing students and communicating with parents. By then, we had already started private tutoring for Najya, and we also got the superintendent of our district involved. He promised remediation for the entire class, including adding an additional teacher for daily small-group instruction. Still, with half the academic year over, it all felt like too little, too late.

There was nothing exceptional about what I witnessed at P.S. 307. I had observed and reported on similar educational malfeasance in Detroit, in Durham, in St. Louis, in Tuscaloosa, in Birmingham. But I was no longer a mere observer of this system wreaking havoc on other people's children. Now I was experiencing it with my own.

And then Najya came home despondent one day in February. She told us that her teachers had stopped calling on her. She'd become so frustrated that, waving her hand furiously, she began to blurt out the answers. But that got her in trouble. Wrapping Najya in my arms, I reassured her she was bright and doing nothing wrong. "We will address it," we told her, projecting confidence. But that night, after I tucked Najya into bed, I sat across from Faraji in our living room and broke down in sobs. Should we consider leaving the school? In truth, we felt utterly stuck. Our child was suffering, but all these children were — they were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach.

What would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had?

I knew the consequences of this educational neglect would follow them throughout their lives, as the failures here would be passed on to the next grade and the next. And then our society would blame their academic limitations on the dysfunctional culture and poor choices of their marginalized families, because blaming poor families is more convenient than calling for the dismantling of segregation.

But our experience at P.S. 307 exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers. Here we were, this upper-middle-class, educated, highly involved family with a house brimming with books. Najya's principal and her teachers knew that I worked for The New York Times reporting on school inequality and that Faraji served on the P.T.A. and the school leadership team. And yet with all the power and resources at our disposal, we left Najya's elementary school at the end of fifth grade feeling wholly defeated by a system of inequality that may begin outside the school walls but is magnified within them.

Even though our elementary school experience left us battered and chastened, we remained determined to send Najya to a neighborhood middle school that enrolled all students who wanted to attend. But this time we needed to find a school that would also nurture Najya academically and emotionally. Under the city's so-called school-choice system, most of the highest-performing public middle (and high) schools use what are called academic screens — a combination of grades, interviews, portfolios and standardized tests that determines admission — to allot access to public schools that most public-school children can't get into.

This systemic sorting of worthy and unworthy children is justified by saying that our “brightest” students deserve and demand more rigor. While many of the city’s Asian students have benefited from these screens, in reality the screens are part of a tawdry bargain to keep a dwindling number of white and wealthier parents from exiting the public school system.

We ultimately chose the Urban Assembly Unison School, which is part of a cohort of themed public schools created to advance the economic and social mobility of low-income students and students of color through rigorous instruction and a focus on social-emotional learning.

Unison is headed by a gifted and compassionate principal named Emily Paige. A masterful fund-raiser and school advocate, she ensured that the opportunities available to her students mirrored those at wealthier schools. The school has a hydroponics lab, and Najya became a member of its food-justice club. The students took overnight field trips to Philadelphia and Washington and saw "Hamilton" on Broadway. There were Black History Month assemblies and spirit weeks. And we were happy to pitch in wherever we could, helping to cover field-trip costs, or purchase sports uniforms, or clear teachers' GoFundMe lists.

To our relief, Najya appeared to be thriving academically. She earned A's with some B's and was placed in honors math and science. The teachers readily communicated with parents, and I could go online daily to view her grades and test scores.

Above, from top: Naiya and the writer at an academic honors breakfast during her eighth-grade year, which the school's principal credited to Naiya's advocacy for high-achieving students; Naiya as a third-grader, in a shirt she chose herself; Naiya on the steps of her Brooklyn home on the day of her graduation from middle school.

But before long Najya started coming home with familiar complaints. Just like at her elementary school, her teachers did not assign homework, and that troubled her, and us. She'd bemoan how the less experienced teachers struggled to manage their classrooms and would expend so much attention on the small number of kids acting out that they'd be unable to complete their lessons or help a student stuck on a problem. There were occasionally fights in the hallway.

Unlike at Najya's elementary school, Paige always responded immediately when we raised a concern and did her best to address it. But she was trying to perform an impossible balancing act thrust upon educators at schools with extreme proportions of students living in poverty, which often also serve a disproportionate number of students diagnosed with learning disabilities. Schools like hers tend to rely on a zero-tolerance disciplinary playbook and often simply remove misbehaving students from classrooms, depriving them of precious educational time they cannot afford to miss. But at Unison, teachers constantly worked to refocus students and mitigate conflict. This is good educational practice, but kids like Najya, who were just trying to do their work, saw this treatment as deeply unfair.

We decided to set up a meeting with Paige so Najya could express her concerns. She told Paige that her teachers often rewarded, in her words, the “problem” students for doing the littlest things right; meanwhile, the students who always did what they were supposed to went unrecognized.

Paige sat across from us, listening intently. When Najya finished, her principal apologized to her and promised she would work on it.

A few weeks later Unison held a schoolwide honor-roll breakfast and award ceremony in the school cafeteria. During the event, Paige credited Najya's advocacy for this new tradition. As I watched parents proudly snapping photos of their children holding honor-roll certificates, and Najya giggling with her girlfriends over eggs and pancakes, it felt right: This was why we were here.

By the second half of Naiya's seventh-grade year, she announced that she and some of her friends had decided to enroll in an after-school tutoring program for top students at Unison to help them prepare for the exam for the city's eight prestigious specialized high schools. Because these public schools admit students based on a single entrance test, Faraji and I have long opposed them, and as a result we had not once discussed them with Naiya. But when she told me she had signed up, I thought about her trying to push herself academically and couldn't see how I could discourage her from doing so.

By then we'd had the confrontation in the car, but Naiya knew she was a top student and still believed she was capable of getting into one of the test-in schools. In researching which specialized high schools they might want to attend if they scored high enough, however, she and her friends discovered the many news articles about how few Black or Latino students gain admission to these schools. (Although a majority of New York City public-school students are Black and Latino, this year they make up just 10 percent of the students who scored high enough on the exam to attend a specialized high school; only three Black students in the nation's largest school district were admitted to Stuyvesant, the most prestigious of these schools.) Confronted with this reality, her friends had decided the tutoring was a waste of time and decided to drop out. Naiya wanted to drop out, too.

"Look at our school, Mom," Najya told me with a resigned shrug. "We know we're not going to get in."

I thought of all the times I had witnessed students in segregated schools make similar calculations, including one whip-smart, funny ninth grader I followed for several months some years ago in Detroit named Aabiana. The day of the state tests, I met up with Aabiana after school to see how she felt she did. She just rolled her eyes and laughed, telling me she had randomly filled in the bubbles. The test for her was a setup. In 10 years of public education, she had never attended a school that had not been labeled failing by the state. She'd gone her entire freshman year without a math teacher but now was being tested to prove that her math acumen was on par with other ninth graders.

Reflecting on her path through New York's school system, Najya said, "I never really got the education I wanted."

Aabiana refused to participate in a state test that did not take into account the substandard education that same state had allowed her to receive. She could not be labeled a failure if she did not try. It was hard to deny Aabiana's logic. Somehow, she was expected to value an education for herself when it was clear no one else did.

As for Najya, because she'd signed up for the specialized high school exam, I made her take it. But she was right. Neither she, nor any of the other

Black kids she knew at her school, scored high enough to get into any of those schools.

By the start of Najya's eighth-grade year, she had lost the roundness of her baby face and had taken to wearing glamorous braids that cascaded down her back, and as with all middle schoolers, everything required

She chose the kind of school I had spent my career arguing against.

debate — bedtimes, chores, dinner options and especially our choice of her middle school.

I explained our decision over and over, but my answers never satisfied her. "But what did it do?" she'd ask. "Putting me in this school didn't change anything. I was not trying to be in this type of environment. It makes no sense."

It was draining, but I respected her growing independence and admired the way she was advocating for herself. Yet it also unsettled me. Her adamance started to seed a fear that if I continued to force her to live my values, it could haunt our relationship far past her school-aged years. That concern led me to a wrenching decision. I waited until the next time she brought it up, and then I told her I was going to let her choose her own high school.

"Really?" Najya seemed incredulous, even suspicious maybe, peering at me from the corners of her eyes.

I laid out what it meant. I had made the choices for her education based on my values. She was old enough now to decide what her own values would be. I would give her absolute autonomy, with the exception that she had to choose a public school. She would research them, she would decide which ones she wanted us to visit and she would choose where she applied.

A few days later, Najya handed me a list. Her top schools were heavily white and screened their students, the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against.

But the link between race and educational opportunity was clear to my child. “Td never been in a school with white kids and don’t think I really wanted that,” Najya later admitted. “But I thought, If you are looking at the top schools, they’re majority white. So I kind of just, like, knew that’s what I had to do.”

We visited several, and in the end, Najya was admitted to her first choice, one of the city's hardest public high schools to get into. She was proud of herself, and I was proud of her, too: She had done her research, set a goal and achieved it.

I knew her new school well. Located in a wealthy, gentrified neighborhood, it shares space in its building with three lower-income, predominantly Black high schools. By letting Najya make the decision, I was allowing my child to attend a school that was a beneficiary of the inequality that defined the city's educational landscape.

How could I spare myself the judgment I had meted out to others when they justified why they — despite believing in integration — sent their own children to schools that entrenched segregation? Across the country, I'd lectured about how educational inequality is systemic, but that this fact did not absolve each of us of our individual choices. And in the end, I could not even sustain the cause within my own family.

Najya seemed, in her decision, to reject my every belief about public education and our family's obligation to our community. But in entering the other side of public education in New York City, Najya would soon learn what I had long known: When it comes to the education of Black children in this country, there is nearly always going to be a struggle. It's just a matter of which one.

Najya started ninth grade buzzing with freshman nerves, excitement and high hopes. But just two weeks later she came home distraught, asking if she could transfer to Banneker, a rigorous predominantly Black high school in Brooklyn.

She was experiencing culture shock. My daughter had never been part of a minority in a school, and now she sat in classrooms where some classmates casually tossed around racial slurs as if it were cool. In her Black schools, there was not a doubt among her peers that one could be Black and smart. But in this predominantly white and Asian school, some of her classmates now made comments that demeaned her or the other Black kids enrolled in the schools they shared the building with. Najya would call me during lunch upset because one of them had insinuated she wasn't that intelligent or made a joke about her being "ghetto."

I had tried to prepare Najya for this — this educational experience I knew intimately. While the majority-white schools I went to provided me the best public education my small town offered, they had often been socially isolating and rife with racial tension. Long before I started reporting on school segregation, I decided I would never want my child to experience being one of a small number of Black kids in a school. Yet this is exactly what she'd chosen for herself.

I listened to Najya pour out her distress, then told her sympathetically but firmly that she had made her decision, that life was never going to be easy and that successful people do not give up when things get hard. She'd have to stay.

But Najya's cultural struggles were soon overtaken by academic ones. The first semester for Najya felt like drowning. She had homework for the first time, and she was suddenly inundated with pages of nightly reading for her classes. She did not know how to manage the crush of assignments, and the effort that used to earn her A's no longer cut it. Najya had never been taught the skills of independent study, and suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up.

Algebra, she thought, was the one exception — this was a subject she believed she knew. She had taken it in eighth grade but had to retake it because she hadn't passed the statewide exam. At the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A's in the class I assumed she didn't pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests. When she had to take the course again, I thought that the concepts would be familiar to her. One night early in the semester as we were eating dinner, Najya gushed about how easy the test had been. "I know I got an A, or at least a B," she said smiling. A few days later, she came into the house, ran to her room without speaking, slammed the door and sunk to her floor, sobbing. She'd failed it.

This became an unbearable pattern. She'd come home glowing about an algebra exam because she "really knew the material this time" and my stomach (Continued on Page 71)

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FALSE MY DY LIKE S CANCI WASPERSUAI TENS OF THO UNPROVEN T

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EHOPE HOW YING FATHER, O MANY BYTRISHA THADANI ER PATIENTS, DED TO SPEND DUSANDS ON TREATMENTS.

M

y mom was making lunch when she heard a thump come from the bedroom. She ran upstairs and found my dad face down on the carpet, blood seeping from a gash under his eye.

For days, he had been feeling light-headed and fatigued since receiving a round of chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He was sitting on the edge of the bed when suddenly, he told my mom, everything went black. Thump. As my mom struggled to lift him from the ground, he vowed that he was done — done with Western doctors, who he said were “crooks” and “quacks”; done with “poisons” coursing through his body; done with sickening treatments he didn’t believe in.

"I'm going to die if I keep doing this," he told her.

That evening, with a bruised eye and a stiff neck, my dad decided to book a flight from New Jersey to Arizona so he could check out a clinic he had found on the internet. On its website at the time, the clinic, Envita Medical Centers, said that its unique protocol had helped patients “outperform other renowned cancer centers for nearly two decades.” Its “proprietary” chemotherapy treatment was “so gentle,” it said, “that many patients report being able to hike and exercise" during care. My dad believed this outpatient clinic — which cost nearly \$10,000 a week — could save him from the Stage 4 lung cancer ravaging his body.

In many ways, this was a predictable development. Long before the cancer, my father, Rajeev, who was 63, avoided conventional medicine with an intensity that bordered on phobia. He loathed the sterile waiting rooms, the detached doctors, the pricey medications. A sharp and successful entrepreneur, he created a small business that helped doctors submit insurance claims — an experience that he often said gave him an unfiltered look at the medical industry.

The modern medical system reminded him of all he learned to fear from his own father, an Indian homeopath, who worked at an alternative-medicine practice in Midtown Manhattan. Patients traveled from across the country to see my grandfather after finding him through televised interviews and a lecture series, where he disseminated his views that vaccines are dangerous and American children overmedicated. He also taught his audience about the healing power of homeopathy, an unproven alternative medical practice developed in the late 1700s.

While I always found my father's fixation against modern medicine to be extreme, it was hard not to see things from his perspective as all the little indignities added up in the early days of his diagnosis. A brusque surgeon. A nurse who never looked up from her computer. Hours wasted in waiting rooms, treatment plans with no end in sight.

My mom, brother and I each took turns trying to persuade my dad not to go to Arizona. Memorial Sloan Kettering — ranked one of the best cancer hospitals in the world — seemed like the obvious choice, the only choice. Any deviation from the standard of care felt like a reckless gamble with death. I dug up a bad review about Envita's treatments and high prices and read it to my dad; my brother researched holistic doctors in New Jersey who could complement his standard chemotherapy; my mom begged him to stay close to home.

But my dad was fixated on Envita's online testimonials from patients who claimed to have beaten aggressive cancers with the clinic's help. There was a woman who said a painful and "angry looking" tumor in her breast disappeared with Envita's help; another who said she left the clinic "completely cancer free." He would rather spend his money at Envita, he said, than line the pockets of a pharmaceutical industry that makes billions each year on cancer treatments.

As this unfolded in the fall of 2019, I dismissed my dad's choices as an

This page: The author with her father and brother on her third birthday. Opening pages: Rajeev Thadani in November 2014, years before his cancer diagnosis.

extreme reaction by someone who had long preferred natural remedies and didn't like going to the doctor. But that was before the pandemic eroded trust in the medical system and the Make America Healthy Again movement elevated such skepticism into the federal government. Now I look back on my dad's aversion to conventional medicine and realize it was more than just personal eccentricity; it was also an intimate preview of an ideology that was on the brink of going mainstream.

As my dad was, patients today are inundated with misinformation spread by alternative-medicine practitioners, social media influencers and public figures. They are willing to experiment with unproven therapies, often at great physical or financial risk, in part because they want more personalized and empathetic care — an antidote to the famously harsh aspects of traditional medicine.

It's one thing for a doctor to inform you of all the clinical trials, the rigorous scientific evidence, the percentage chance of one therapy working over the other. But it's another to be looked in the eye by another human and told that your suffering is real and that you will be OK, and to hear that there is, in fact, a secret cure, a magic bullet. Looking back on those desperate months with my father, I can see clearly how much he valued the feeling of his care above anything else.

A few days before we left for Arizona, I forced my dad on a walk through the canopy of late-October trees in our small suburban New Jersey town. I begged him one more time to stay with his current treatment plan. But with his bony arm linked with mine, he confessed what was really behind his decision.

“This is the first time in my life that I feel out of control,” he said, his raspy voice cracking. Coming across this clinic online, he said, was the only moment he had felt hope since his diagnosis. “I need to feel that.”

My dad seemed perfectly healthy in early 2019 when my mom dragged him to get his heart checked. A friend of theirs had recently told them about a CT scan that revealed he was at imminent risk for a heart attack. The friend credited the scan with saving his life, and my mom, suddenly worried at what could be lurking in their own bodies, made an appointment and forced my dad to come with her.

The scan, which cost them each \$750 out of pocket, revealed mostly healthy hearts but showed a concerning image in my dad's lungs: "interstitial lung disease prominent in the lung apices" and "a nodule of ground glass lesion in the superior segment left lower lung," according to the report. The doctor called five days later, on a Saturday morning, to implore my dad to get it checked out. "Don't ignore this," my mom remembers him saying. My dad smoked several Marlboro cigarettes a day for some 40 years, but with no symptoms at the time, he dismissed the results as unnecessary hysteria from a doctor.

It wasn't until the summer, when a deep and dry cough emerged and my dad began to feel short of breath, that he realized he might need to do something. So my dad turned where he always did when he needed health advice: our longtime family homeopath, a man he met through his father. Some of the homeopath's remedies remain family lore: a poison-oak rash all over my body erased in hours; mysterious black splotches on my brother's back gone overnight; even a remedy for our grumpy, dying cat, Boise, which supposedly helped him live another seven years.

In a series of emails and texts, my dad described his worsening symptoms to the family homeopath: red, scaly skin eruptions under his armpits; increased shortness of breath; rattling in his chest when he tried to sleep. He mentioned nothing of the scan. The homeopath (who died of Covid-19 in 2021) initially suggested that he try rubbing castor oil under his arms and also take Carbo Vegetabilis, a remedy typically used for indigestion.

Trisha Thadani in Brooklyn, with records related to her father's cancer treatment.

My dad's symptoms continued, and as the summer wore on, it became harder for him to walk up stairs without taking a break midway. "I'm getting really disheartened," he emailed the homeopath in August. "So far the remedies are not doing anything for me."

The homeopath then suggested he drink elderberry cough syrup and try mouth taping — sealing the mouth with medical-grade tape to force breathing through the nose. "You must try this therapy no matter how simple it looks," the homeopath said in an email, attributing my father's issues to mouth breathing and years of smoking.

As all of this was happening, I was 25 years old and living in San Francisco, oblivious to the crisis unfolding back home. It was only six years later, as I pored through my father's emails, texts and medical records, that I learned of his decision to ignore that scan.

It's this kind of scenario — the wasted opportunity to address an early-stage cancer, the recklessness of trying to manage it on your own — that several physicians told me ranks among their most troubling cases.

The Envita clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., where Rajeev Thadani received his treatments.

Each told me a version of the same haunting story: A patient with a treatable cancer delays standard care for an unproven alternative, only to return once the disease has metastasized.

By September 2019, my dad's breath became so strained that he relented and saw a pulmonologist, who recommended a bronchoscopy. The doctor called him back to his office two days later and told him the severity of what he found: cancerous tumors in his lungs. In the car home, my dad texted his homeopath: "So ... I have a diagnosis of lung cancer. Adenocarcinoma," he wrote. "Do you know of any alternative clinics? Before I go down the usual road of treatment."

"I'll check," the homeopath responded.

That night, two of my parents' friends came over with a bottle of wine. My dad declared that he was going to beat the cancer, one way or the other. But there was a flatness to him, my mom remembers, a deep sense of uncertainty she had never noticed in 31 years of marriage.

At 5 the next morning, my mother woke to find my dad's side of the bed empty. Horrified at what he may have done in the night, she jumped out of bed to look for him. She discovered him in his office, his face lit by his computer screen. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"What do you think I'm doing?" he responded tersely. "I'm searching for an alternative."

In the early days after his diagnosis, my dad grew more fearful, more depressed. His eyes welled up easily, and he repeatedly canceled plans with his friends. We quickly learned that the cancer had metastasized to his brain. Stunned, we asked his oncologist how long his patients tended to live with such advanced cancer — months? Years?

He declined to answer with any certainty, saying that everyone was different. But the doctor said he would prioritize my dad's quality of life and craft a chemotherapy plan that wouldn't affect his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. None of this seemed to give my dad any comfort.

"Prognosis?" my dad's best friend texted him after the appointment.

"Death. Eventually," he answered. "Drugs drugs and more drugs for now."

Each appointment at Memorial Sloan Kettering started the same volcanic fight at home: My dad would shout about how he thought the chemotherapy was going to poison him and how he would feel much safer at any of the alternative clinics he had read about online. We would counter that he was being hysterical, irrational. Then he would accuse us of the same.

"I know that I am with the best doctor," he said of the hospital's oncologist during a teary argument one evening. He said he just needed to feel like he was going to survive this, even if the odds weren't in his favor. "Why don't you guys get it that I'm not feeling the power?" he said.

"I think you're just saying that you're scared," my brother said.

"Yes," my dad said. "I'm scared shitless."

Was there something else the oncologist could have said to make him feel better without stretching the truth? I'm not sure. What I do know is that after leaving these appointments, I, too, felt a sense of despair. The idea of my dad's enduring intense treatments and sickening side effects for the rest of his life was dreadful. Hopeless.

It was three against one in every conversation with my dad, and we initially succeeded in getting him to Memorial Sloan Kettering for his early intake appointments and even a round of chemotherapy. But we started to lose ground the more he went online and the more he was flooded with ads for all the seemingly better alternatives: spalike clinics with vitamin infusions, naturopathic doctors and detox diets.

Of course, those ads weren't reaching him by accident. Researchers have found that alternative cancer-treatment clinics in the United States and Mexico pay to target cancer patients like my dad, who search for phrases like “Stage 4 cancer survival rate” and “chemotherapy side effects.” In some cases, they have found, these alternative clinics have paid to appear above search results for cancer hospitals, like MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Mayo Clinic.

Through his emails and texts, I can now see how rapidly my dad was drawn into a world of misinformation and alternative cancer clinics. He came across a blog run by an author known for his conspiracy theories about cancer treatment and vaccines and signed up for the mailing list. He then considered a clinic in California that claimed, on its website, that it was internationally recognized for its “remarkable rate” of helping terminal patients into “long-term remissions.” Its treatment program cost \$8,500 a week and another \$28,500 for an inpatient stay at a hospital in Tijuana, Mexico, according to a price breakdown emailed to him.

My dad booked a plane ticket, but a cousin, helping with his research, alerted him to the history of the founder, who was sentenced to a year of prison in the 1960s after three cancer patients died under his care. (That conviction was later overturned.) “Thank you!” my dad emailed her back. “This is the kind of stuff I need, since I am desperate and grasping at straws.” He canceled his flight.

Thadani during his treatment regimen at Envita in January 2020.

He then connected with a clinic in Florida whose treatment plan of “nontoxic” alternatives cost \$4,000 to \$5,000 a week. (The clinic’s lead doctor would later have multiple complaints filed against him, beginning in 2021, for therapies he provided to several patients. His license was revoked in 2025.)

But it was Envita, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., that he was most taken with. On its website, the clinic said that it employed doctors “from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds,” which included those with standard medical licensing and naturopaths. In an email, a patient coordinator told my dad that the clinic was “strategically” located in Arizona because the state “has the largest scope of practice for integrative medicine.” The clinic also claimed to have helped “thousands” of patients from around the world.

My dad's cousin happened to know a friend of a friend who went there for late-stage cancer, and my dad was able to call him. He told my father that before he went to Envita, he was emaciated from his cancer and sure he was going to die. But now, he said, he was golfing, boating and enjoying time with his children.

After that conversation, it was settled: My father knew that Arizona was where he needed to be.

When we arrived in Scottsdale, my dad — whose face was still bruised from his fall — said the city felt like somewhere he could heal. The air was fresh and temperate, a welcome reprieve from the late fall chill that was settling into the East Coast. Arid, rolling hills, dotted with saguaro cactuses, sat beneath the large blue sky. I could imagine all the hiking and biking my dad would do here if he got better.

Envita was in an unassuming office park, between a luxury-homes business and a gastroenterologist. The inside was bathed in natural light, with clean wood floors and comfortable brown leather couches. Cheery receptionists greeted us at the front desk.

A provider, who was licensed as a naturopathic medical doctor, brought us into an office and sat with us for an initial consultation that lasted nearly four hours (and which cost \$450). After learning about my dad's medical history, he told us what to expect while at Envita. He emphasized that the clinic was integrative, which meant it combined both conventional cancer therapies — like chemotherapy, immunotherapy and radiation — with alternative therapies like vitamin infusions and supplements.

The naturopath turned to a white-board behind him to explain Envita's "proprietary" chemotherapy regimen (\$2,315 per treatment), which included lowering my dad's blood sugar with insulin and delivering low doses of chemotherapy into his body. The side effects would be minimal, he said, far less than what my father felt with standard chemotherapy. Envita would also send him to a clinic it operated in Mexico to receive a cell therapy (\$125,000) that the naturopath said would help his body fight off whatever cancer cells remained.

While I was sitting in his office, a nagging thought emerged: What if Envita actually had the secret cure for my dad? Its treatment seemed sophisticated, thoughtful and promising. The naturopath said his own father was successfully treated at Envita — evidence of how much he trusted the protocol that he was recommending for mine.

Those are the things that I remember, at least. Now, looking through my dad's medical records, I can also see that his treatment plan came with a battery of what Envita calls “supportive” therapies. Many of them had little to no clinical evidence supporting their use in cancer care. They included infusions of hydrogen peroxide (\$215 per infusion); a therapy that included adding medical-grade ozone gas, a known toxin, to his blood (also \$215 per infusion); and coffee enemas, which carry side effects such as rectal burns and severe infections. If the naturopath told us about these specific therapies with the risks clearly outlined, I didn't hear it. By that point, my skepticism had largely fallen away, and I heard what I desperately wanted: that the clinic was safe and effective.

After the consultation, I looked at my dad and said he should commit. I texted my brother, who was home in New Jersey, and said I was “pretty sold.”

Later, I sent my best friend a voice memo and said I left Envita feeling "good and supported and trusting in what they were doing." For the first time, I told her, I felt hopeful about my father's chances.

That weekend I helped my dad get situated in a rental house, while my mom flew home to prepare for the long-term move. When my dad and I returned to the clinic for his first round of treatment a few days later, a receptionist handed him a thick stack of forms to sign. He started by diligently reading the first few pages, but then laughed and nodded his head as he quickly flipped through the rest. "Who knows what I'm signing," he said. He handed the papers back to the receptionist and gave her two credit cards to pay for the treatment, instructing her to split the payments so he wouldn't max out either account.

A nurse took us to the infusion room, a comfortable space with leather recliners and several patients sitting with IV drips. I sat next to my dad as they connected him to an IV and the first infusions dripped into him.

Over the next few days, as my dad prepared for the long haul, we went to Target to stock the rental house with everyday items. I slept in his bed just in case he needed anything in the middle of night, and we fell asleep watching episodes of "Friends." At some point each night, I would wake up to his deep, wheezing cough. I remember comforting myself with the thought that soon his cough wouldn't be so bad.

My mom came later that week, and I returned to San Francisco. Life then seemed to settle into a rhythm. My parents went to the clinic for several hours every day for my dad's treatments, and when he felt well enough, they went on walks at a nearby park and sat in the sun near the water fountain. He wore a fedora hat and T-shirts that exposed his skinny arms. Ten of his closest friends came to visit one weekend, and they went to dinner, played cards and worked on a puzzle of the San Francisco skyline.

I visited Scottsdale every few weeks and was pleasantly surprised each visit at (Continued on Page 66)

The Last Secret

The Irish novelist Sebastian Barry has made a career of mining his family history. But there was one story he kept buried.

By Giles Harvey

Photographs by Gareth McConnell

In late May 2021,

toward the end of Ireland's third Covid lockdown, the novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry, often mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate, gave an unusual public lecture from his dining room in Wicklow. The occasion was a Dublin literary festival, or its online incarnation, and hundreds had signed up to hear Barry speak. His subject that day, as it often tends to be, was family — both his own troubled clan and the wider human fold. "The good news is, we are all the same family," as one of his characters says about the discovery of DNA. "The bad news is, we are all the same family."

At 65, Barry had spent the past four decades furiously shaking his crooked family tree. The fruit of this effort was an extraordinary sequence of novels and plays inspired by Barry's real-life ancestors. Collectively — which is how he intends them to be read — they amount to a kind of Irish “War and Peace,” in which the country's violent 20th century upends the lives of two ill-fated households, the Dunnes and the McNultys. Now, as Barry loomed behind a music stand with a gooseneck lamp clipped to one side and a microphone protruding from the other, it seemed that he was going to speak plainly about the flesh-and-blood people he'd transfigured into fiction — as well as his more immediate kin.

Announcing his title, "The Fog of Family," Barry began to describe the time his older sister shattered his nose by pushing him down the steps of their house in the Dublin suburb of Monkstown. He was $1 \frac{1}{2}$ . "Then it duly healed and then she pushed me out a window," Barry went on, the light flashing off his rectangular spectacles and imparting a sheen to his tousled gray hair. "But it was the ground floor and it merely served to break my nose again."

Army, exclaimed after reading it, having summoned Barry to his Dublin flat. "To hear that out of my grandfather's mouth was shocking," Barry once said of the fraught conversation, the last they ever had. "He kept asking me how I knew all these things."

The answer turned up in Barry's lecture. “He told me everything about his life except the (myriad) bad things,” Barry informed his digital audience, which “would have worked even better if my mother had not specialized, usually in another part of the flat, in telling me all his secrets anyway.” These secrets included runaway alcoholism and gambling debts that drained his wife’s inheritance. He also used to beat Joan’s sister in the days of their childhood, a reason she may have wanted to expose him, if only to her son. Whatever the case, her example clearly stuck. Barry has been telling secrets ever since.

His father's secrets proved harder to elicit. Francis Barry, who went by Frank, was a charismatic architect and also wrote poetry and fiction on the side. "He was a man with many hidden things all his life," Barry said in the lecture, "including his chin." He was referring to his father's "rich red beard," which, as a boy, he would reach out longingly to touch. "He was cloaked in a raiment of gold," Barry has said of Frank, or of his worshipful child's-eye view of him, even if he could be remote and inaccessible. "I missed his company even as I enjoyed it," Barry remarked in the lecture, groping the air with his large, restless hands. This made his following words all the more striking: "By the time I was in my early 30s, various family troubles had separated us permanently." The declaration seemed to set the table for a feast of disclosure.

Yet Barry didn't sit down to it. Instead of divulging the source of these “troubles,” he moved on to other recollections of other family members. When he returned to his parents later, his tone remained cryptic: “I didn’t know them, I mistook them, and they didn’t know themselves, to a tragic degree, and if they did, hid what they knew, from us, and just as tragically from themselves. Their narratives were menaced by a foggy disarray.” But so was Barry’s lecture, which never explained what it was his parents knew or why their evasion came at such cost.

When Frank died the following January, at the age of 91, it seemed as if Barry might finally unburden himself. In an interview at a literary festival later that

His sister, Barry was keen to emphasize, was “not a murderer, she was a child consumed by a powerful emotion.” Until recently, she’d been the only child. “Then, the interloper arrived.” Another early memory, he continued, as though he’d just discerned it through the haze, “was me smearing the contents of my nappy on the wall behind my cot, to the distress of my sister, who shared the room — maybe she had a motive for murder after all — but which my mother interpreted as an early sign of artistic ability.” When he was only 2 weeks old, she put a pencil in his hand, enjoining him to write or draw.

If she had known the havoc he would wreak with it, it's possible that his mother, Joan O'Hara, a celebrated actress, would have hesitated to arm him. As the nappy-smearing episode seems slyly to signal, Barry would become, at least in the eyes of some of his detractors, a befouler of Irishness. At the time of the lecture, Barry was in his final year as the Laureate for Irish Fiction, heralded both at home and overseas, but for much of his career he had courted outrage by humanizing the villains of the Irish national story, from the country's Protestant minority to former servants of the British crown.

Among the outraged were members of his own family. The cursed marriage of his maternal grandparents served as the basis for an early novella, “Time Out of Mind” (1983). “You fucker,” his grandfather, a widowed veteran of the British year, he said that his next novel was going to center on his parents' marriage. The book would be the 10th and last in the series about his complicated forebears, which stretches from the mid-19th century to the turn of the millennium. This was how he'd always imagined the sequence would conclude, and now that both his parents were gone, his mother having died in 2007, the way ahead seemed clear. "I felt, just in the grace of time and in his mysterious way, he might have given me a sort of gentle permission," Barry said of his father. "Not that I had seen him for 10 years," he clarified. "I'm just reading that into it."

After stumbling across the interview online, I wrote to Barry to suggest the new book might serve as the occasion for a career-spanning profile. He replied enthusiastically, promising to keep me abreast of his progress. It was then mid-January 2024. His aim was to finish by the following spring. "But the gods," he added, "will have something to say about this, I am sure."

Barry and I corresponded for the next year and a half, during which the novel appeared to be on course. Then, in July of last year, he sent me a surprising email. Something had happened in the time since his father died, Barry explained. "Where there was once a great need to proclaim aloud," he wrote — neglecting to specify just what it was he'd felt the need to proclaim — Barry now found himself in a different state of mind. "A matter I thought so urgent and in need of

Barry in London at the announcement of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which his book "A Long Long Way" was shortlisted for.

saying" had come to seem better served by a "strange new beneficent silence."

Instead of tackling his parents' marriage, he was writing what seemed — on its face, at least — a very different kind of book. "The Newer World," which came out last week, tells the story of Tennyson Bouguereau, a Black freedman making his way in the post-bellum South. Bouguereau appeared in two earlier novels. The first of these, "Days Without End," which won a 2016 Costa prize, is narrated, in a wonderfully crooked English, by Thomas McNulty, a figure based on one of Barry's ancestors who fled Ireland for America during the Great Famine (1845-52) and ended up fighting in the so-called Indian Wars. McNulty, a victim of colonial violence, has mixed feelings about inflicting violence on another native group. "When that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland, he said he would leave nothing alive," McNulty muses on the English conquest of the mid-17th century. "Said the Irish were vermin and devils. Clean out the country for good people to step into. Make a paradise. Now we make this American paradise, I guess."

In a strange way, however, McNulty really does make an American paradise amid all this horror. Early in his time as an innocent abroad, he falls in love with another down-and-outer, a New England youth named John Cole. Together they find employment dressing up as girls to titillate the patrons of a mining-town saloon before joining the army for want of other work. When their service is completed, they settle on a farm in Paris, Tenn., with a group of other social undesirable. Among them are a Lakota girl, Winona, the adopted child of McNulty and Cole; as well as Bouguereau, a tireless farmhand; and his sister Rosalee, the household cook. In paraphrase, it may sound like a salad of diversity tropes, but Barry's extraordinary prose — demotic yet precise, lyrically compacted yet anti-sentimental — provides the crucial binding agent.

The characters in Barry's Irish books are often cast out by their families of origin. In his American books, those outcasts form families of choice, which offer them refuge from the storm of history. That refuge, though, is hardly impregnable. Early in "The Newer World," shortly after the Civil War breaks out, a group of Confederate troops drops by the farm, having heard that its owner has joined the Union Army. After the men seize the farm's horses, one of them, a local dignitary named Tim Petrie, asks if Rosalee has been "bred." ("The young butternut laughed like he'd said the best thing since the Bible," Bouguereau tells us.) A nightmare scene unfolds, as Petrie hauls Rosalee into a nearby shed and, as the others listen on, rapes her. "No one can measure the shame of it," Bouguereau says. "Rosalee screaming and then not screaming. The Petrie boy coming out of the dark door and fastening his belt like he had just pissed."

For all their gore and mayhem, it can sometimes seem as though writing his American novels offers Barry a respite from writing his Irish ones. "It took a little bit of self-possession to communicate to you — to confess to you — that I had written another book," Barry told me one mid-May afternoon.

That morning he'd met me at Dublin Airport in his Land Rover Discovery, since, as he put it in an email, "transportation is in its infancy in Wicklow and will remain ever so." We were now en route to the converted rectory where Barry has lived for the past 30 years.

"I did feel a responsibility toward you," he went on, as we wound our way up a narrow lane whose verges were frothing with Queen Anne's Lace. Barry, a rangy man with a graying goatee who can sometimes lose track of mundane goings-on, had just taken a wrong turn.

"I've never been up here in my life," he said, squinting through the windshield. "I hope I didn't throw you off," I replied.

“No, not at all,” he answered rather breezily.

"I mean with the book, not the driving," I clarified.

"Oh, no," he said, cottoning on. "No, no."

To hear Barry tell it, the decision was entirely out of his hands. He speaks of his characters dictating their stories, and himself as merely an inundated scribe. "It would probably shock you, the degree to which I believe that these are living-present persons, that Tennyson Bouguereau has been in my work room with me for a year and a half," he said.

On our way to Wicklow, he told me he remained unsure if he would eventually return to the novel about his parents. One of his closest friends, the Irish historian Roy Foster, once urged him to steer clear of the subject. "It's the creative wound from which so much has come," Foster said to me. "And I think to cauterize it in a novel might stop the process." Barry, for his part, was "thrilled" that Bouguereau had taken his attention. "It meant I could postpone that discussion with my soul."

During my time with Barry, I seemed to overhear that dialogue of self and soul. One moment, he appeared to be on the cusp of revelation; the next, he would retreat, change the subject, crack a joke. “The modern habit is to tell everything, isn’t it,” he said one day over lunch in an unrelaxed tone. “Let’s start a new fashion of people not communicating their central despair!”

As a child, Barry was incorrigibly “pass-remarkable,” as the Irish idiom has it. “If a lady went by who had a mustache, I would just say so out loud,” he admitted. “Writing novels is like pass-remarkability on an enormous scale. It’s just saying the thing. And it’s been so bred into us as Irish people never to say anything that to say something is very thrilling.” Except there were clearly things he wasn’t saying about his own past.

Barry had a confusing childhood; the fog, it seems, was there from the start. For a long time, he assumed all mothers were like his, disappearing in the morning and returning late at night. When he was 8, he went to see her perform for the first time. The play was “Cathleen ni Houlihan” (1902), a nationalistic allegory by Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. As the lights went down,

Barry grew perplexed. Normally when you went into a room, you turned the lights on. His bafflement increased when his mother appeared onstage, transformed into a frail old woman — the title figure, a personification of Ireland. Barry, horrified, assumed the change was permanent.

"We'd come in on the bus from Monkstown, and my first thought was: How are we going to get home now?" he told me at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, where his portrait (fur-trimmed parka, impassive gaze) now hangs in the stairwell alongside those of Gregory and Yeats.

When she wasn't at work, his mother could be an enchanting

companion. Visits to the beach or mushroom-picking outings were imbued with what Barry called an “urgent poetic necessity.” But the work of mothering, the daily round of care, never seemed to interest her. (At the end of her life, as she lay dying, a doctor told Barry she was bipolar.) His father, meanwhile, was even more disengaged. “My mother ran an enormous P.R. agency for him,” Barry said. She was always telling her children how much their father loved them; it wasn’t something he made clear on his own. In Barry’s phrase, Frank was a “Sartrean nihilist” who believed that, in the wake of the Second World War, “everything was over,” including love and family. Which, Barry said, “was not very convenient if you happened to be his child.” Paternal neglect bred sibling solidarity. “My sister was like an extension of my body,” he told me. “We were the same person, in a way.” (Barry also has a brother who is 12 years younger.)

If nothing really mattered, their father seemed to reason, then everything was allowed. In 1969, he published a collection of verse, “In Dante’s Wood,” subtitled “Love Poems,” though the love they celebrate is clearly not uxorious. “Young girls with vermilion muffs are/semi-precious, implode the mind,” one poem swoons. Another seems to describe a mistress’s love letter. Barry’s mother, who remained with Frank until the late 1990s, was endowed with what he called a “defensive obliviousness.”

So, too, was Barry, at least for a time. While visiting London in his mid-20s, he ran into his father outside a tube station, accompanied by a woman whom Barry didn't recognize. "This is my mistress," Frank explained. "You won't tell your mother now, will you. I know you're a man of the world." On holiday in Greece a few years later, Barry confronted him. If Frank would only "put down his weapons" — his adultery and drinking — then he and Joan, Barry said, could still make a go of it. His father was unreceptive. "Young girls are attracted to me," he replied, "and I'll never give them up." It was a crushing moment, and yet Barry seemed unable to stop hoping he might change. His first book, "The Water-Colorist," a collection of poems, came out soon after, in 1983. It is dedicated to his father.

In 1987, Barry published his first full-length novel, “The Engine of Owl-Light,” now long out of print. The book, which owes more than a little to Flann O’Brien, the ludic Irish modernist, braids together six different stories, which range in setting from medieval Ireland to the present-day U.S. In one, a young man recalls his unusual childhood in a highly stylized, impressionistic manner. He has a loving mother, a distant yet terrifying father and an older sister who twice broke his nose. He accuses his father of multiple failings — emotional absenteeism, neglect of his wife, even wishing his own son dead — but when Frank Barry read the book, he objected to a charge the narrator doesn't make. In one chapter, in what seems like a throwaway line, the family's pet cat is likened to the father, in that both tend to go missing when you want them. Some 40 pages later, during a description of their bedtime ritual, the narrator says, in another seemingly innocuous sentence, "The black cat gets into the sister's bed at night, and burrows down where it can't breathe."

This barely noticeable conjuncture provoked in Frank an extraordinary response. After reading the passage, he went straight to his barrister to complain he'd been libeled as a child molester. He wanted to bring charges against his son. The barrister, an old friend, managed to persuade him this would

---

'It is all memory, half-memory and even absence of memory, when we are too young to register what is happening.'

not be in his interest. When Barry learned what his father had said, he was stunned. He had intended no such imputation. “I had to sit there for hours,” Barry told me, “just trying to think what it was he could be talking about.”

In the end, it was Barry's wife, the actor and screenwriter Alison Deegan, who provided him — and eventually me, during my visit — with the answer.

The two of them met in Dublin in 1985. Deegan already knew Barry's mother from the Abbey Theater's acting company, and they would later appear in several of his plays together. Deegan gave birth to twins, Coral and Merlin, in 1992. It would prove to be a destabilizing period. The first time Barry bathed his children, he was overcome with “an extraordinary and almost out-of-body distress,” a reaction he found hard to explain.

Things soon grew stranger. One day, when the twins were not yet 1, Joan came by their home in central Dublin to take them for a walk. When Deegan asked where she intended to go, her mother-in-law grew shifty. At once, Deegan realized what Joan had in mind: to show the twins to Frank, who still hadn't met them. In distress, she went to speak to Barry and told him that Frank must never see their children. When he asked her why, she replied, "I'm going to tell you something now, and it's going to be a huge shock."

One evening in the late 1980s, Deegan said, she and Barry's sister went out for a drink. Barry's sister was going through a difficult divorce, but that was not the only thing troubling her. She told Deegan that her father had sexually abused her when she was a young girl, insisting Frank had done it only once and that he had been drunk, as though this were somehow a mitigating factor. She also asked Deegan to keep it a secret.

On some level, Barry had always known that his sister was unhappy, that there was something off about her relationship with Frank, who used to buy her outfits that seemed far too precocious for a prepubescent girl. What he learned from Deegan made appalling sense. "It was as if something had happened to you in Hebrew, and now you were being told about it in English," said Barry, who has never spoken publicly about the abuse. (Through Barry, his sister declined to be interviewed, but she gave him her blessing to tell me what occurred.)

Barry at once rang his sister, who confirmed everything that Deegan had told him. At his suggestion, she began to see a therapist. Slowly it emerged that what his sister claimed was a one-off incident had in fact happened repeatedly over the course of many years. She (Continued on Page 68)

BEST of LUXURY HOMES

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HAWTHORN PARK UPPER WEST SIDE

Overlooking Lincoln Center at 160 West 62nd Street in Manhattan, Hawthorn Park is one of four Glenwood Management rental properties centrally located in Lincoln Square. The 54-story Upper West Side luxury rental tower is two blocks from Central Park, Riverside Park and the upscale Shops at Columbus Circle. It offers a mix of studio to four-bedroom apartments, many with stunning views that extend far beyond Lincoln Center, Damrosch Park and Central Park to the Hudson River, George Washington Bridge, and, from some vantage points, even as far south as the tip of Manhattan.

Built in 2014, each of the building's 338 residences come with bamboo plank floors, nine- to 12-foot ceilings, oversized marble bathrooms, custom-designed closets and full-size washers and vented dryers. Open-plan designer kitchens are outfitted with GE Café Series stainless steel appliances, French-door refrigerators, Insinkerator garbage disposals, mosaic marble backsplashes, Jet Mist granite kitchen counters and white-glass Scavolini cabinetry. Amenities include a 55-foot indoor lap pool with an adjacent outdoor sun terrace, a fully equipped fitness center with men's and women's locker rooms and a sauna, a residents' only lounge, an intergalactic-themed children's playroom with a flying saucer and a private park.

Built to LEED-certified standards, the building's sleek John Saladino-designed triple-height lobby leads to an outdoor fountain. Indoor parking for Glenwood residents is available at two nearby garages. The building also offers bike and luggage storage rooms.

"It's the location that makes the difference for most of our renters — many of whom have lived in Glenwood buildings for many years," said Nancy Albertson, director of leasing for

Hawthorn Park. "It's the condo-level finishes that we have here that keep our tenants happy. We're right in the middle of everything — from Lincoln Center to Jazz at Lincoln Center and the nearby parks. And then restaurants, Broadway, and so many cultural institutions — they are all very close. We're known for our attentive staff, with an on-site management office, a valet, 24-hour doormen, dry cleaning and housekeeping services. It's a very safe, convenient and calming community to live or work, with amazing park and river views. From the upper floors, you can even see the planes taking off and landing at the new La-Guardia Airport."

Monthly rents start at \$4,000 for studios, \$6,000 for one-bedrooms, \$8,800 for two-bedrooms, \$15,000 for three-bedrooms and \$26,000 for four-bedrooms. For more information, visit glenwoodnyc.com, or call Glenwood Management at 212-535-0500.

Above: Hawthorn Park in New York City

Image: Glenwood Management

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VILLA MIAMI MIAMI, FLA.

Developed through a partnership between Terra, One Thousand Group and Major Food Group, the 650-foot-tall, 56-story waterfront condominium is poised to become a new and unique architectural landmark along Biscayne Bay. Designed by ODP Architects, the building features a distinctive copper-colored exoskeleton and a rooftop helipad. This bold architecture will be paired with five-star hospitality led by Major Food Group in Miami's low-density, rapidly growing Edgewater neighborhood.

Atop the tower is one of the most ambitious residences ever brought to market in the city. The 15,000-square-foot, three-story penthouse is on track for delivery in late 2027, and is conceptualized by acclaimed interior designer Vicky Charles of Charles & Co. A former chief designer for Soho House and AD100 honoree, Charles has designed homes for several high-profile clients, including the Beckhams, the Clooneys, and Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. For Villa, her first-ever Miami condo tower project, Charles drew inspiration from midcentury Italian villas and Biscayne Bay, bringing a signature sense of warmth and depth to the interiors.

Priced at \$55 million, the fully finished and furnished three-story triplex will span 12,752 square feet of interior space and 2,069 square feet across four private terraces. The residence features five bedrooms, five bathrooms, two powder rooms and two full kitchens, along with a private pool, a gym, a sauna, a steam room, a massage room, an office, staff quarters, a private elevator and two laundry rooms. A 185-square-foot private entry foyer completes the estate-scale residence elevated high above Biscayne Bay.

The project marks the first branded residential real estate development by Major Food Group, the acclaimed hospitality group behind Carbone, ZZ's Club and Dirty French. The group has curated all aspects of the resident experience, from the tower's culinary programming to the operation of a ground-floor waterfront restaurant where residents will receive VIP access and priority seating.

At the heart of the tower is The Copper Club, a three-level private amenity suite with private dining, lounges, a screening room, a salon, wellness facilities with the rooftop helipad above it all.

"Vicky Charles is behind some of the world's most elegant private estates, and she brings a level of sophistication rarely seen in Miami," said David Martin, C.E.O. of Terra. "Her design for this residence is unlike anything else in the city. It delivers the scale of a single-family home across three floors in the sky."

Prices for the rest of Villa Miami start at \$6.5 million. The sales gallery is located nearby at 2742 Biscayne Boulevard. For more information, call 786-408-7645, or visit villamiami.com.

Above: Villa Miami in Florida

Image: Binyan Studios

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NEW HOME, OLD-WORLD HOSPITALITY

Imagine all the things you love about Major Food Group Restaurants. Now imagine them all in one place, an elevator ride from your front door. A lifestyle defined by precision, where even the smallest details are managed with quiet intention—seamlessly, behind the scenes.

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THE SIGNATURE RESIDENCES AT THE ST. REGIS RESIDENCES, MIAMI MIAMI, FLA.

On a stretch of Biscayne Bay where South Brickell meets the water, The Signature Residences within The St.

Regis Residences, Miami draws on more than a century of the brand's iconic look and feel to create a residential address defined by service and architecture. Conceived as a collection of bespoke homes, the property pairs expansive waterfront residences with spaces for dining, wellness and gathering that blur the line between a private retreat and a five-star hotel.

Developed by Related Group and Integra Investments, The Residences mark the first residential project in Miami by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, with interiors by Rockwell Group and landscape architecture by Enea Garden Design. Inspired by the elegance of the golden age of ocean liners, the 152-residence tower is distinguished by sweeping curves, generous terraces and light-filled interiors overlooking Biscayne Bay. More than 50,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor amenities include a private marina, wellness facilities, butler service, the St. Regis Tea Room and a residents-only restaurant by Michelin-starred chef Fabio Trabocchi.

The development is now revealing its most coveted offering: The Signature Residences. Limited to six homes, the collection includes two standalone villas, three multilevel sky villas and one full-floor penthouse. Set apart from the main tower, the standalone villa blends the intimacy of a single-family home, with enclosed two-car garages, with interiors that unfold across multiple levels with ceilings exceeding 11 feet, and connected by a sculptural staircase. Residents will receive personalized experiences and curated amenities that define the St. Regis brand, including private elevators that lead to the rooftop with a pool, a spa, an outdoor kitchen and landscaped lounges.

Positioned high within the tower, the three multi-level sky villas feature double-height great rooms, expansive terraces and sweeping views across the bay.

The collection culminates at the crown of the tower, with two full-floor penthouses representing the pinnacle of life at The Residences. Only one remains on the market. The home encompasses an entire floor devoted to exceptional privacy topped by a private rooftop terrace with a summer kitchen and pool offering a vantage point few residences can rival.

"Our goal was to create a truly remarkable lifestyle, fully reflecting the caliber of effortless luxury and best-in-class service synonymous with the St. Regis brand," said Nick Pérez, president of Related Group's Condominium Development Division. "These residences are one-of-a-kind, offering buyers the rare opportunity to own property in a tower that combines sanctuary, prestige and architectural distinction on Miami's sparkling waterfront."

Pricing for The Signature Residences begins at \$25.5 million, with first occupancy anticipated in late 2027. For more information about The St. Regis Residences, Miami, call 786-713-3562 or visit miamisrr.com.

Above: The Signature Residences at The St. Regis Residences, Miami in Florida

Image: Binyan Studios

The Signature Residences

A New Era of Waterfront Elegance

The Signature Residences are the most exclusive offering within The St. Regis Residences, Miami—a rare selection of multi-floor Villas, Sky Villas, and Penthouses, with private pools in select homes. Architecture by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and design by Rockwell Group unite sweeping bayfront vistas with elegant interiors of timeless sophistication. Complemented by curated wellness programming and enriched by the legendary St. Regis tradition—from anticipatory Butler Service to bespoke in-residence experiences—this is a collection without equal, created for those who appreciate the truly exceptional.

Now Under Construction

1809 Brickell Avenue, Miami, Florida 33129

Schedule an Appointment 786 713 3445 MiamiSRR.com

RELATED Integra RELATED DEVELOPER SALES

ORAL REPRESENTATIONS CANNOT BE RELIED CORRECT REPRESENTATIONS, MAKE REFERENCE FLORIDA STATUTES, TO BE FURNISHED BY A DEV

1809 Brickell Property Owner, LLC is the device such an offering is prohibited. The St. Regis the accuracy of any of the statements or report precise view from each Unit. Consult the Devi Unit dimensions and method for Unit calculate to change and do not include optional feature Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Sale offeror at File No. CP23-0071. WARNING TO This advertisement is a solicitation for the sale

CTLY STATING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DEVELOPER. FOR ARE AND TO THE DOCUMENTS REQUIRED BY SECTION 718.503, OR LESSEE.

stand this offering, the what is included with miums for upgrades. I complete offering ter The California Departn indominium N.J. Regis

ing is not intended for any resident of a jurisdiction where international, Inc. or its affiliates, which has not confirmed and not exact reflections of the finished product nor the proposed budgets, terms, conditions, fees, specifications, payment of regular assessments. All prices are subject to it has been registered with the Massachusetts Board of residents are in a CPS-12 application available from the 1980s has not inspected, examined, or qualified this offering. 0009. 1809 Brickell Property Owner, LLC 2026.

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ROSEWOOD RESIDENCES HILLSBORO BEACH HILLSBORO BEACH, FLA.

A new collection of ultra-luxury penthouses along South Florida's iconic Millionaire's Mile is set to debut atop Rosewood Residences Hillsboro Beach, the area's only hospitality-branded premium residences. Developed by The Related Group and Dezer Development, the new development is located along a coveted oceanfront corridor between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean. It offers residents an exclusive residential experience in an area long known for luxury estates and private waterfront living, now complemented by Rosewood's signature hospitality.

Comprising a 10-story oceanfront tower and a three-story Intracoastal-facing building, the property occupies one of the last remaining ocean-to-Intracoastal sites along Hillsboro Mile. Residents will have access to an extensive collection of indoor and outdoor amenities, including a private marina, oceanfront and sunset pools, a wellness center, racquet sports courts and curated dining by award-winning chef Bradley Kilgore. Together, the amenities create a lifestyle centered on wellness, recreation and effortless coastal living.

Crowning the community is a collection of 15 penthouses, with prices starting at \$16.5 million. Six oceanfront and nine Intracoastal residences are designed to embrace Hillsboro Beach's rare dual-waterfront setting. Each features a private rooftop retreat with a plunge pool, a summer kitchen, a lounge and open-air dining areas.

The light-filled homes range from 3,200 to 6,400 square feet, with three- to five-bedroom floor plans, expansive entertaining spaces and sweeping waterfront views. Across both collections, 10-foot ceilings, herringbone wood flooring, sculpted European wood detailing, Italian kitchens and spa-inspired primary suites reflect an understated approach to coastal luxury.

Rosewood's signature hospitality further elevates the experience with residential butlers, a house car, in-residence dining, catering, home management and personalized services tailored to each homeowner.

Hillsboro Beach has long occupied a distinctive place among South Florida's most coveted coastal enclaves. More intimate than its neighboring communities yet equally sought after, the barrier island is defined by its effortless connection to the water, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Intracoastal Waterway. "It is here that Rosewood Residences Hillsboro Beach brings a new expression of waterfront luxury to one of the region's most exclusive addresses," said Nick Pérez, principal of Related Group's Condominium Division. "Hillsboro Beach is one of the rare places where both ocean and Intracoastal living coexist, making ownership opportunities of this kind exceptionally uncommon. By partnering with Rosewood, we've created a collection of premium penthouse residences that allows buyers to choose their preferred waterfront lifestyle."

Rosewood Residences Hillsboro Beach celebrated its topping-off earlier this year, with the first penthouse closings anticipated later this year. For more information or to arrange a tour, visit residenceshillsborobeach.com or call 754-812-3292.

Above: Rosewood Residences Hillsboro Beach in Florida

Image:VanDerPas

ROSEWOOD

RESIDENCES

HILLSBORO BEACH

INSPIRED BY PLACE

Exquisite Oceanfront & Intracoastal Residences

on Hillsboro Mile

RESIDENCESHILLSBOROBEACH.COM

INQUIRE 754 812 3345

1180 Hillsboro Mile, Hillsboro Beach, FL 33062

Info@ResidencesHillsboroBeach.com

RELATED

DEZER

Owners & Developments

RELATED DEVELOPER SALES

ORAL REPRESENTATIONS CANNOT BE RELIED UPON AS CORRECTLY STATING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DEVELOPER. FOR CORRECT REPRESENTATIONS, MAKE REFERENCE TO THIS BROCHURE AND THE DOCUMENTS REQUIRED BY SECTION 718.503, FLORIDA STATUTES, TO BE FURNISHED BY A DEVELOPER TO A BUYER OR LESSEE.

New York Residents: THE COMPLETE OFFERING TERMS ARE FOUND IN A CPS-12

APPLICATION AVAILABLE FROM THE OFFEROR. FILE NO CP23-0067.

WARNING: THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF REAL ESTATE HAS NOT INSPECTED, EXAMINED, OR QUALIFIED THIS OFFERING.

1180 HILLSBORO MILE CONDOMINIUM (the "Condominium") is marketed as Rosewood Residences Hillsboro Beach and is developed by Hillsboro Mile Property Owner, LLC ("Developer"), which uses the marks of The Related Group, Dezer Development, and of Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, LLC under license agreements. Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, LLC is not the offeror and makes no representations with respect to any aspect of the Consult the Prospectus of Developer to understand the amenities, proposed budget, terms, conditions, specifications, fees, Unit dimensions, site plans, and to learn what is included with purchase and by payment of regular condominium assessments. 2026 © HILLSBORO MILE PROPERTY OWNER, LLC, with all rights reserved.

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MR. C RESIDENCES BOCA RATON BOCA RATON, FLA.

A new residential address is taking shape in downtown Boca Raton, bringing one of hospitality's most recognizable names to the city's evolving luxury residential landscape. Mr. C Residences Boca Raton marks the hospitality brand's debut in the area, combining Mr. C's legacy with a contemporary residential offering designed for modern South Florida living.

Founded by brothers Ignazio and Maggio Cipriani, fourth-generation members of the Cipriani family, Mr. C has established an international presence spanning hotels, restaurants and residences. In Boca Raton, that experience is translated into a 12-story residential development designed by Arquitectonica, with interiors by 1508 London. Residences range from 1,522 to 2,869 square feet, with two- and three-bedroom layouts centered on generous living spaces and open kitchens featuring custom Italian cabinetry, natural stone countertops and premium Wolf and Sub-Zero appliances. Expansive private terraces extend the living spaces outdoors, while a grand lobby, curated artwork and a landscaped porte-cochère create a refined experience upon arrival.

Bellini Restaurant will soon become the heart of the property. The famed Italian dining destination will be open to the public and serve as a signature amenity for residents and their guests. A residents-only rooftop resort deck will feature an infinity pool with panoramic city views, private cabanas, an open-air cinema, outdoor grilling and dining areas, and dedicated lounge spaces. A full floor devoted to wellness will include a holistic spa, a hammam, an infrared sauna, a steam room, a sound dome, a Technogym-equipped fitness center, a yoga studio, a meditation lawn, a lap pool, and hot and cold plunge pools. Additional amenities include a pickleball court, social lounge, golf simulator, Little C's playroom and EV charging stations.

The goal is to provide buyers with the privacy of homeownership, personalized service and premium signature dining in a well-situated, amenity-rich urban setting, explained Inigo Ardid, co-president of Key International, co-developer of the property. "With Mr. C Residences Boca Raton, we set out to create a property that goes beyond the traditional luxury residential experience, with generous living spaces, expansive private terraces and amenities that become part of how residents use and enjoy the property," he said. "The focus extends from wellness and recreation to signature dining and social spaces, while still preserving the privacy and comfort of home. What truly sets the project apart is Mr. C itself, bringing the brand's signature hospitality and highly personalized approach to service to a residential setting – giving the property an identity that is distinctly its own."

Prices start at \$2.2 million. The sales gallery is located in Boca Raton at 36 SE 3rd Street. For more information on Mr. C Residences Boca Raton, call 561-486-5826 or visit MrCResidencesBocaRaton.com.

Above: Mr. C Residences Boca Raton in Florida

Image: Binyan Studios

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Mr. C RESIDENCES Boca Raton, FL

ARTIST'S CONCEPTUAL RENDERING

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COME HOME TO MR. C

An elevated residential lifestyle defined by signature hospitality, dining, wellness, and resort-style amenities in South Florida's most vibrant neighborhood

Elegantly Curated Two- and Three-Bedroom Residences, Priced from \$2.2M

KEY INTERNATIONAL

WREI

SALES GALLERY NOW OPEN

36 SE 3rd Street, Boca Raton, FL 33432

DouglasElliman Development Marketing

561.330.5803

MrCResidencesBocaRaton.com

ORAL REPRESENTATIONS CANNOT BE RELIED UPON AS CORRECTLY STATING THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DEVELOPER. FOR CORRECT REPRESENTATIONS, MAKE REFERENCE TO THIS BROCHURE AND TO THE DOCUMENTS REQUIRED BY SECTION 718.503, FLORIDA STATUTES, TO BE FURNISHED BY A DEVELOPER TO A BUYER OR LESSEE. This is not intended to be an offer to sell, or solicitation to buy, condominium units to residents of any jurisdiction where prohibited by law, and your eligibility for purchase will depend upon your state of residency. Such an offering shall only be made pursuant to the prospectus (offering circular) for the condominium and no statements should be relied upon unless made in the prospectus or in the applicable purchase agreement. This project is being developed by KW SE 4th Street Boca LLC, a Delaware limited liability company ("Developer"), which has a limited right to use the trademarked names and logos of Mr. C. "Mr. C is not a partner, affiliate or otherwise related to the Developer. Additionally, Developer has a right to use the trade names, marks, and logos of licensors: (1) Key International ("Key"); and (2) Wexford Real Estate Investments ("WREI"). Any and all statements, disclosures and/or representations shall be deemed made by Developer and not by Key, WREI or any of its or their aff lllates or by Mr. C and any purchaser agrees to look solely to Developer with respect to any and all matters relating to the marketing and/or development of the Condominium and with respect to the sales of units in the Condominium. All images and designs, plans, features and amenities depicted herein are based upon preliminary development plans and are subject to change without notice in the manner provided in the offering documents. THE COMPLETE OFFERING TERMS ARE IN A CPS-12 APPLICATION AVAILABLE FROM THE OFFEROR. FILE NO. CP26-0054

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The New York Times Picture Digest GENZ'S BOOGEYMAN Murder Mysteries OVERSIZE: IN OR OUT 4 Must-See Art Show YO-YO MAAT 70 NEW MUSIC! Vol 7 October 4, 2026

Vol.7 ..... October 4, 2026

INTRODUCTION

The New York Times features so much criticism and culture coverage each month that it's easy to miss some of the best. Here you'll find condensed and curated articles from Arts, Styles, Food and the Book Review

MOVIES

FOR GEN Z, THE GREATEST HORROR VILLAIN IS ... STAGNATION

When the arts and culture critic Maya Phillips took a look at some of this year's breakout horror movies, she noticed an interesting pattern: Instead of featuring deranged killers or otherworldly ghouls, this year's movies are rooted in a deep fear of droning, endless monotony.

Being trapped is a reliable trope in horror films and psychological thrillers, with good reason. It's a primal fear. But in the past year, it appears to have become an especially relevant metaphor for a younger generation that has surged back into theaters.

In the director Alexander Ullom's "It Ends," four recent college graduates find themselves stuck on an endless road. The first part of the film reads as recognizable horror: Panic

begins when the driver realizes that the view outside is a never-changing backdrop. And when the friends stop the car, hordes of people — young ones, mirroring the main characters — erupt from the woods, screaming and rushing the vehicle like zombies. The movie takes a more novel approach to terror when its protagonists settle into the monotony of endless driving: The climbing numbers of the odometer, marker scribbles on the inner car doors and windows. Everywhere we see evidence of the ceaseless rituals of their days.

The 20-somethings in “It Ends” are in a transitional phase: They’re trying to cross into adulthood and figure out the rest of their lives. But as they first get on the road together and discuss their plans for the future, it’s clear they’re less than thrilled about what awaits them. The most cynical one of the group, who has mapped out his entire life, seems lost in a kind of existential malaise. Another reveals that she recently attempted suicide. If the reality these young graduates have grown up in at all resembles ours, then they've been raised in a world teeming with anxieties, one of pandemics, A.I. and climate change. Of course, then, they may think the future is bleak. Their journey contemplates how long a lost generation can tolerate staying lost.

Some of the dread the film captures clearly recalls the anxieties of Covid-19 quarantines. (The film's director was a senior in college the year the pandemic started.) That Covid moment is echoed in "The Last House," a recent Netflix film that follows a family's struggle to survive a world in which everyone is trapped in their homes. The protagonists see their elderly neighbors die, and children are forced to develop in isolation. The home, and their daily household habits, keeps them safe and relatively sane, at least for a while. But after they've been stuck for years, those surroundings become suffocating.

Then there is the breakout hit “Backrooms,” (pictured left) something of a definitive Gen Z text. The story centers on Clark, a middle-aged man whose marriage is falling apart and whose furniture store is floundering. When he discovers a labyrinthine, liminal space behind the store’s walls called the Backrooms, he’s confronted with a monstrous version of himself — an otherworldly embodiment of his stasis in life, which chases him through miles of unchanging hallways.

Most of these films conclude with their characters either overtaken by their circumstances or doomed to soldier on. “It Ends” is a bit more optimistic. When the final passenger in the cursed car reaches the end of the road to find nothing but abandoned vehicles and a sign that just reads “Road Ends,” he seems broken by this revelation at first. But he gets back into the car, turns around and heads back down the road, taking one of the languid characters from the side of the road along with him. As he drives, his new passenger seems to gradually revive — suggesting that, at the very least, there is some power in enduring.

In the Amplifier newsletter, the pop music critic Lindsay Zoladz recommends themed playlists. Here she highlights tracks from new and forthcoming albums. Below, other recent roundups.

WISHY

'All the Rage'

I was a big fan of “Triple Seven,” the 2024 debut album by Wishy, but everything I’ve heard so far from their new album, “Nature’s Pill,” suggests that the band has leveled up. They are clearly ace students of indie rock, the kind of sweetly distorted jangle-pop made by the ‘90s underground heroes Velocity Girl, but their sound is too exuberantly executed to be dismissed as pastiche. Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites trade lead vocals throughout this up-tempo single; “Now that you’re gone / Can’t turn the TV on / Just can’t find motivation,” they sing in harmony, making heartbroken sluggishness sound suspiciously fun.

Tinashe

'Melatonin'

In recent years, Tinashe, who broke out in 2014, has been experimenting with kinetic, club-ready dance music — see: "No Broke Boys," her 2025 hit collaboration with the D.J. Disco Lines. The highly caffeinated "Melatonin," her latest single, suggests that her eighth album, "Popstar," will continue — and accelerate — in this lane. "You so melatonin," she taunts a rival in a pitched-down voice. Just when the hypnotic track has drawn you in, Tinashe shifts gears by introducing another infectious hook.

'Get Away From Me (I Think I'll Love You Soon)'

"The Gem," the fourth LP from the observant Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin, is named for one of her favorite bars in Melbourne. She and her band recorded the album in a rented room upstairs — an atmospheric extension of Jacklin's desire, on "The Gem," to get back to her roots. This lead single, about the push and pull of intimacy, showcases Jacklin's easy way with melody and the plain-spoken charms of her lyrics.

REMI WOLF

'Bottle'

On her two personality-packed albums, “Juno” and “Big Ideas,” the California singer-songwriter Remi Wolf had the air of a quirky, colorfully drawn cartoon character moving through surreal landscapes. But “Bottle,” the wrenching lead track from her upcoming album, “Mud,” feels grounded and direct: “I can’t get the bottle if I don’t get up,” she sings, turning a candid tale of struggling with sobriety into an invitingly catchy tune. Wolf has said that making “Mud,” set for release on Oct. 9, “really felt like a cleansing.” It also features the cathartic first single “Twiggy,” and “Moon So High,” a duet with one of her favorite musicians, John Mayer.

The Avalanches

'Together'

It took the Avalanches — the beloved, long-running Australian electronic-music group — an astounding 16 years to follow up their landmark 2000 debut album, “Since I Left You,” a dense and brilliantly composed musical tapestry of obscure samples. Since returning in 2016 with the LP “Wildflower,” the group has settled into a pattern of releasing a new album every five years. Right on time, on Oct. 16 they’ll release “No Bad Memories,” a 31-track project centered loosely on a concept of digital nostalgia. On “Together,” they sample an old Nokia sound effect to create a song that is at once neon-bright and slightly melancholy. Fellow electronic artists Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza and Prentiss join them on the track.

CAMERON WINTER

'Love Takes Miles'

I have struggled to describe exactly what I experienced last December when I witnessed the singer-songwriter Cameron Winter play an utterly magical solo set at Carnegie Hall. After Oct. 9, though, I will no longer have to try and explain it, since Winter's aptly titled album "Live at Carnegie Hall" will exist, accompanied later by a limited-release performance film. Like his work fronting the rock band Geese, Winter's solo music tends to be polarizing, but the Carnegie performance's sparse piano arrangements of his meandering folk songs illuminate another side of his talent. Winter has not yet released any live tracks ahead of the album, so enjoy this studio version of the aching "Love Takes Miles," from his 2024 instant cult classic LP "Heavy Metal." The version he played at Carnegie Hall made me cry.

BOOKS 26 NEW BOOKS WE LOVE

Every week, critics and editors at The New York Times Book Review pick the most notable new releases.

The Breakup by Kurt Andersen (Literary fiction) “Violent, admonitory and cathartically terrible” imagining of 2045 America, split in two The Black Shield by Wilbert L. Cooper (Memoir) “Evocative” memoir by a Marshall Project reporter descended from a long line of Black Cleveland cops Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier (Thriller) Tale of a killer, a recanted confession and an amusement park from a “master of claustrophobia” Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea by Emily Wilson (Essays) Accessible, authoritative pieces from “the world’s most famous living classicist” The Tailor by Tim Sullivan (Mystery) The “irascible, brilliant, neurodivergent” Detective Superintendent Cross solves the murder of a man in a bespoke suit The Recovery Run by Melissa Whitney (Romance) A visually impaired woman falls for her running guide in a story that treats disability as “a concrete reality, not a curse” The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani (Literary fiction) Prizewinning Italian best seller about a marriage “ravaged by abuse and malice” Up on Cove Mountain by Earl Swift (Memoir) The author revisits his 1990 near miss with a killer on a hiking trail Agrippa by Robert Harris (Historical fiction) The imagined life of Roman emperor Augustus’s right-hand man, told with “trademark propulsive prose and whip-smart dialogue” The Disappearers by Marlon James (Literary fiction) “Unflinching” “maximalist” masterpiece about murderous homophobia in Jamaica and its reverberations American Scoundrel by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark (Biography) “Dishy, disturbing and deeply reported” look at Roy Cohn The Secret Dinner by Raphael Montes (Thriller)

by Brinda Charry (Historical fiction) person “can still be endangered by the er (Fantasy) “Engrossing,” “deliciously (Literary fiction) An American student in

A handsome Indian magician in “enlightened” 1816 Boston discovers a color of his skin “The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones by Lex Crouch-witty” tale of magical haves and have-nots Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang Taiwan’s “everyday dramas,” written by a wildly successful fantasy author

chilling cruelty that churned inside American slave owners" fiction) "Marvelous" and "quite funny" tale of three sisters navi-

All the Presidents' Wars by Peter Bergen (World affairs)

of the "war on terror" from a veteran journalist Switzy by

welling

study of the “high-minded sympathy and Body Language by Meg Howrey (Literary gating their mother’s desire to “die with dignity” “Damning and meticulously researched” chronicle Emma Cline (Literary fiction) Tale of a stoic businessman

nity” Redwood by Ben Macintyre (History) The allies and enemies of post-revolutionary Iran, from an author of “thrilling spy histories par excellence” Dressing the Queen by Kate Strasdin (History) “Illuminating study” of the many hands that have costumed British queens Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel (Dystopian fiction) “Interlocking mystery” of doppelgängers and disappearances in 2031 True North by Paul Theroux (Travelogue) Final installment of a road-trip trilogy on “what Canada is and what it means to the people who live there” The Rouse by China Miéville (Speculative fiction) “Dazzling, decade-spanning epic” of a secret British military unit trying to raise the dead.

RESTAURANTS ALITTLE FREAKINESS IS ON THE MENU IN MONTECITO

Don't let the soft interiors fool you: The Times critic Tejal Rao wrote that Little Mountain's precise cooking was "genuinely dreamy," with just a hint of a wild streak.

Little Mountain is in a strip mall — but have you ever been to Montecito? This is a place where a soft breeze carries the scent of wood smoke and wild fennel, the kind where you could see a Nancy Meyers protagonist in a cream-colored cashmere set rushing in to pick up a bottle of wine, having weirdly good chemistry with the shop owner. It is all understated beauty and elegance. It's why I was so delighted to find, among the tasteful stucco archways and antique terra cotta of Little Mountain, just a ripple of freakiness.

Nothing is as straightforward as it appears on the menu, not even the crowd-pleasing rainbow trout. To make it, the chef Diego Moya neatly pulls apart meat and skin so he can cook them separately — the meat gently and slowly, the skin evenly crisped. The fish is covered in a smoky mix of wild mushrooms before its skin is balanced back on top like a witchy sandwich, flooded with a smooth and airy beurre blanc made with various infused vinegars.

Born in Chile, Moya grew up making red sauce at his parents' Long Island pizzeria and started cooking professionally in the early 2000s, in Paris and New York. He was recently at the New York wine bar Racines, and before that Hemlock, a low-key vegetable-obsessed restaurant he opened on the Lower East Side in 2017. Much of the food at Little Mountain edits and expands on those early ideas, but with a bigger budget, better lighting and year-round access to Santa Barbara's farmers' markets. The results can be genuinely dreamy.

Moya seems enamored with California produce. He ferments Sun-gold tomatoes, peppers, cabbages and sea lettuces for a rotating lacto-fermented pickle plate. Plates tend to be juicy and bright, layered with fruits, vegetables and herbs, finished with flower petals and infused oils, and composed in such a way that no two bites are exactly the same.

You can learn a lot about a restaurant from its beans, which lately have been creamy cocos, hidden under thin ribbons of pickled onion and fresh basil, just a fairy dusting of salsa seca. A thickened corn juice clings to some bites, tiny pieces of roasted squash brought texture and sweetness, and it took a moment to realize this was a version of the three sisters, a dish that knows Santa Barbara used to be Mexico.

Service is warm, sunny and totally unobtrusive, but with a fine-dining sensibility. The menu is à la carte, but doesn't just arrive as it's ready. Servers consult with you, then explain exactly how they plan to cluster dishes together.

I brought my toddler daughter along to one of my dinners. Though she usually loves going out to eat with me, on this night — surprise! — she insisted she wasn't hungry at all and just wanted to dance maniacally outside and show me how fast she could run. When she fell and bumped her knee, I realized I was on the verge of tears, too: The evening was not unfolding like a Nancy Meyers movie; it was unraveling. But just when I thought it might be time for us to apologize, pay and run, a server appeared outside with a tiny scoop of ice cream for her.

Just as much as the yellowtail with chiles and pluots, the small, sweet gesture made my night.

Little Mountain / ★★★ / \$\$\$ / 516 San Ysidro Road, Montecito, Calif.

MOVIES

MOVIES CRITICS' PICKS: FAMOUS RIVALS

'Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger'

Of all the famed rock 'n' roll fallouts and melodramas, perhaps none is as soap-operatic as the disintegration of Oasis. In 2009, minutes before brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher were set to go onstage in Paris, their long-simmering resentments broke into a fistfight. The band broke up, and the brothers refused to speak to each other for over a decade. But while other documentaries have trod this ground, writes Glenn Kenny, "Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger" brings a new beat to the story: reconciliation. The film is "energetic and uplifting" as it follows the band's "triumphant reunion" and 2025 world tour. Viewers witness not just the love between brothers but with their multigenerational audience they meet on the road. "It's hard not to get emotional watching Liam turn the singing of 'Live Forever' over to a stadium crowd," Kenny wrote. The result is both "a headbanger and a tear-jerker."

'Coyote vs. Acme'

The Looney Tunes flick “Coyote vs. Acme” establishes a new rivalry in the cartoon universe: between Wile E. Coyote and Acme Corporation, the conglomerate that keeps selling him faulty products. It’s been 77 years since the canid started his Sisyphean pursuit of the roadrunner, and the movie finds him downtrodden and fed up — and ready to hire a lawyer. It’s a “terrificially daffy film,” wrote Alissa Wilkinson, “laced with the wacky, ever-so-slightly sadistic humor that characterizes the Looney Tunes universe.” And while once these cartoons hummed with “Cold War-era suspicion of everything,” Wilkinson wrote, these same sensibilities have been delightfully reapplied in a story of “the little guy against the faceless, careless corporation.” The movie “lovingly expands the lore without trying to make it too contemporary.”

MUSIC AT 70, YO-YO MA IS STILL ASKING QUESTIONS

Joshua Barone followed the famed cellist's concerts and events over eight months, in Boston, Nashville, Los Angeles and Denver.

It isn't easy to interview Yo-Yo Ma. Not because he is one of the most famous musicians alive, a cellist who has been playing for world leaders since he was 7. Nor because he tends to answer questions with long stories. The challenge is that he would rather be talking about you.

"There's nobody that's not interesting," he said during a recent interview at his hotel while performing in Denver. The night before, he had played Dvorak's Cello Concerto with the Colorado Symphony for thousands of people at Red Rocks. I had been sent there to report on his life at 70 and how he is reconciling age with ambition. But as

President Barack Obama once said of Ma, "For every question you ask him, he asks you two in return."

You could imagine a much different version of Ma: the child prodigy who, after growing up in the monastic world of music school, would still be a star but not such a people person. Born in France to Chinese immigrants, Ma first visited the United States as a 7-year-old and quickly impressed the great cellist Pablo Casals. Soon he was performing for President John F. Kennedy at a concert hosted by Leonard Bernstein.

But when he was 15 and studying at Juilliard, it occurred to Ma that the world didn't need another cellist. He would prepare a recital program, then present it in concert and realize halfway through that he was bored. "We live in a world of people saying, 'I need to achieve, achieve, achieve,' Ma said. "But I've never felt like achieving something does anything more than give you a blip of pleasure." So instead he earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Harvard.

In a way, he never left that field. In his decades-long career, he has hung out with Elmo and Mr. Rogers, sold millions of albums, accumulated shelves' worth of Grammy

Awards and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But he has also channeled his interest into humanitarian projects, including the ensemble now called Silkroad, an enduring relic of the multicultural '90s; the Bach Project, which introduced him to strangers around the world; and Our Common Nature, a more recent outdoorsy effort to bring people together.

A Yo-Yo Ma concert is rarely just a concert. At a recital of Bach's complete cello suites performed at Symphony Hall in Boston last fall, Ma put on a marathon performance: more than two hours of music, padded with spoken interludes; a prompt to everyone to write what they want for their communities in 2050; and an encore duet with Michelle Wu, Boston's piano-playing mayor. Around 10 p.m., a trickling audience exodus began. "I know, it's too much cello for a lot of you," Ma said from the stage. "I agree. But it's all I've got."

He has his critics: There are ways in which his extra-musical work can seem like a Pollyannaish vestige of multiculturalism's golden age. His community programming sometimes raises the hackles of locals. But even when his concerts aren't a knockout, like an autobiographical, quasi-theatrical recital that he tried at the Grand Ole Opry this spring, he can win over an audience. The evening's format was stiff and lacked a sense of purpose, but by the end, Ma was playing Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" while a man waved his cowboy hat as if hearing a Dolly Parton ballad.

At 70, Ma's technique has become temperamental. There were slips of intonation and bow control in those Bach suites, and he made adjustments in bowing and tempo to the Dvorak concerto in Denver. His own daughter gives him a hard time whenever he plays out of tune. So why, at an age when musicians wind down their careers, is he expanding his reach?

Despite maintaining a full performance calendar, Ma has a running joke that he is retired, and that “when you’re retired, you only do what you want to do.” The truth is that his brain may not be wired for a life at rest. “I hope,” he said, “that I will stay curious until I die.”

BOOKS ICELAND'S MURDER RATE IS OFF THE CHARTS (AT LEAST, IN ITS BOOKS)

While reporting this story, Amelia Nierenberg read multiple Icelandic crime novels — which gave her “the most wonderful, craggy nightmares.”

Iceland is astonishingly safe. So safe, in fact, that it was national news in this Nordic country of under 400,000 people when the murder tally reached eight in 2024. It is, according to several surveys, the safest country in the world.

But you'd never know that from the bookstores. On the shelves, at least, murder is everywhere.

"There are more fictional murders in Iceland every year than real," said Katrin Jakobsdottir, a former prime minister who has co-written two crime novels. "Which is good," she added, laughing.

In the past few decades, crime has become Iceland's favorite literary genre. The explosion of detective stories is part of the region's broader Nordic noir tradition. But nearby countries like Sweden, with its gang violence, and Finland, with its shared border with Russia, actually live with the threat of real violence. In Iceland, where few people even lock their cars outside the capital, that sense of safety is a challenge for authors.

"We still struggle with this believability issue," said Yrsa Sigurdardottir, one of Iceland's top crime writers, who is also organizing a crime fiction festival this fall. "The typical Icelandic murder was two drunk guys in a kitchen. One picks up a knife, they're arguing, the police arrive and the murderer is standing there with a knife." Instead, writers often get creative with buried secrets and mysterious disappearances.

"We can't have books that have very brutal murders," said Eva Bjorg Aegis-dottir, whose novel came out last year and follows the disappearance of a

teenage girl. "It's more the idea of someone hiding something." Margret Ann Thors's "Freyja," which came out in August, follows a child's disappearance off the coast. Ragnar Jonasson's "The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer" even plays on this trope, as a detective investigates whether a famous author is dead or simply got lost on a hike.

If this tiny nation's obsession seems a little out of place, Jonasson has one working theory: the Icelandic sagas, written in the 13th and 14th centuries. Once referred to as “Icelanders’ second Bible,” these stories deal in Norse blood feuds and thorny love triangles, and brim with revenge, deception and killing. “They’re about outlaws and they’re about justice and revenge,” Jonasson said. They’re taught to high schoolers and are the source for many popular first names in the country.

And they may explain some of the nation's thirst for blood. Literary blood, that is. "Writing is in our DNA," Jonasson said. "Everyone in Iceland is a storyteller."

RESTAURANTS

3 MORE BRIEF

REVIEWS

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Zoli

American, Seafood / ★★/ \$\$\$ /

312 Maujer St., East Williamsburg

“Zoli is a bit of an oddball, which makes it immediately more interesting than most restaurants,” Ligaya Mishan wrote in a recent review. Housed in a contemporary art complex on “a tumbleweed block of warehouses in East Williamsburg,” the restaurant mainly features seafood that is “familiar, until it’s not,” cooked up by the fisherman-chef Ned Baldwin. Biting into a smoked-oyster beignet, “the world slipped ever so slightly off its hinges,” Mishan wrote, the oyster inside “stunning and alien, as if magicked out of salt-skimmed waves and a midnight beach bonfire.” Almost every dish is “slightly, captivatingly askew.” Dehydrated, pulverized kimchi punches up a red shrimp tartare; a bracing aguachile of surf clam tastes meaty and sweet up front before fading into a marine imprint on the tongue. Not everything is perfect — a jerk lobster leaned aluminic, roast chicken arrived dry — but there’s an appealing sense of playfulness. “I felt unmoored, and the happier for it,” Mishan wrote, “and I watched and waited for what might happen next.”

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Indienne

Indian / ★★ / \$\$\$\$/ Midtown West

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Somssi

European, Asian / ★ / \$\$ / Greenwich Village

TELEVISION 4 NEW SHOWS TO STREAM

Mike Hale previewed 47 new series to watch this fall. These are four standouts.

'EAST OF EDEN'

Zoe Kazan wrote this mini-series based on the 1952 John Steinbeck novel that transposes the story of Cain and Abel to a California farm. (Her grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the 1955 film adaptation that starred James Dean.) This version, which puts Cathy at the center of the story, stars Florence Pugh. Netflix, Oct. 1

A prequel to “Friday the 13th” might seem like, if you’ll pardon the expression, overkill. But Linda Cardellini plays the grieving mother Pamela Voorhees, so bring on the bloody axes! Peacock, Oct. 15

'SMALL PROPHETS'

Mackenzie Crook, whose tart but gentle comedy “Detectorists” played subversive games with the notion of twee, created this series about a British store clerk, Michael (Pearce Quigley), whose life is shadowed by the disappearance of his girlfriend. The Monty Python alum Michael Palin plays Michael's father, who helps him use alchemy to try to find her. Apple TV, Oct. 7

'CUPERTINO'

Robert and Michelle King (the powerhouse duo behind “The Good Wife,” “The Good Fight” and “Evil”) return to several of their abiding interests in this series: lawyers, faith, show tunes, the moral failings of the tech industry. It stars Mike Colter and Rachel Keller as lawyers fired by an A.I. start-up. CBS, Oct. 8

FASHION ASK VANESSA: WHY IS EVERYTHING SO OVERSIZE?

In her advice column, the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman answers readers' burning style questions. Have an inquiry of your own? Submit it to openthread@nytimes.com.

I love a big jacket as much as the next woman, but lately almost everything except workout wear (and even some of that too) seems oversize. It's almost impossible to find a shirt, sweater or jacket that is not wide enough for several people. What is going on, and how do I manage it? — Diane, New York City

Oversize clothing has been a fashion trope since at least the 1920s, when the flappers first loosed their stays and dropped their waists. Since then, it has waxed and waned in popularity, and it is currently, as you have observed, having something of a renaissance.

According to Lyst, a fashion search engine, demand for oversize silhouettes was up 12 percent between 2025 and 2026. Fortune Business Insights reports that the oversize-apparel market is projected to be worth \$136.74 billion in 2026. And even if oversize has reached a peak, it's not going away entirely.

As to why...well, all that fabric is full of history and associations. It was an assertion of cultural identity and arrival for the pioneers of hip-hop and rap, of subversive rebellion for the acolytes of grunge and of challenging old-style shibboleths and gender stereotypes for high fashion's deconstructionists like Comme des Garçons and Martin Margiela. It was a uniform for Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent and David Byrne — and made red-carpet history in 1990 when Julia Roberts showed up at the Golden Globes in a slouchy Armani men's suit. It can be challenging, insistent and protective. It allows you to both occupy space and disappear. Not to mention it's also pretty comfortable.

The current revival has something to do with the coronavirus pandemic, which got everyone accustomed to clothing that didn't pinch, bind or otherwise constrict; something to do with the revival of all things 1990s and a nostalgia for a time before social media and artificial intelligence; and something to do with a general sense of being besieged by current events. (Oversize can be the wearable equivalent of disappearing under a blanket.)

All that said, going big is not as simple as throwing on a giant suit and walking out the door. Proportion matters and can make the difference between looking like a girl who raids her mother's closet and someone out to effectively navigate the world. Laura Kim, a co-founder of Monse, said that balance was crucial to making over-size seem modern. "If you have very wide pants, opt for a narrower top," she said. Or try tailored trousers that puddle at the ankle with a voluminous top, rather than leggings or skinny jeans, which have an overly retro vibe.

It's not just about big and small. It's also about navigating cli-

chés of masculinity and femininity. The designer Joseph Altuzarra likes the contrast between

“an oversize blazer that looks like your husband's or boyfriend's thing and a little slip dress or skirt,” he said.

Finally, Stuart Vevers of Coach, who showed lots of oversize suiting in his recent New York Fashion Week show (inspired by the city in the '90s), said that updating an oversize look could be as simple as accessorizing. "You need some sharpness," he said, even if it's merely in the form of well-polished leather shoes and a streamlined bag. He also pointed out that fabric matters. The bigger the garment, he said, the lighter the material should be. (Think jersey and washed silk.) That way, even if it seems substantive, it won't weigh you down.

ART 4 ART SHOWS TO SEE THIS FALL

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'Officer and Laughing Girl' by Kent Monkman at the Frick Collection Opening Nov. 12

The Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman will be displaying new pieces at the Frick, “an institution that has rarely shown such transgressive work,” wrote Zachary Small. The artist is best known for two paintings that were displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019, one of which placed his “mischievous, gender-fluid alter ego” — the scantily clad and stilettoed Miss Chief — into “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Now the artist is turning his eye toward the Frick’s collections for inspiration, including a 17th-century Vermeer that shares the exhibit’s name. New paintings place Miss Chief “face to face with white authority figures through the centuries,” from General Custer to a man who resembles Jeff Bezos. “Monkman has turned the canvas into a time machine,” Small wrote, “borrowing the composition for a standoff through the centuries between Native groups and white settlers.” He is the first Native artist to have an exhibition at the Frick.

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'Yayoi Kusama' at the Stedelijk Museum Through Jan. 17

Weeks before a landmark retrospective of Yayoi Kusama's work was scheduled to open in Amsterdam, the show became a posthumous tribute, reported Emily LaBarge. The Japanese artist died in August at age 97, making the show the last she worked on in her lifetime. It includes fan favorites, such as her immersive mirrored “infinity rooms” and patterned motifs. But “most significantly — and now rather movingly,” LaBarge wrote, “the show traces the incredibly wide-ranging and pioneering trajectory of her art, far beyond the ubiquitous, much-selfied works for which she is now best known.” This includes “delicate, surprising and sometimes haunting” art from her early years, referencing the aftermath of the atomic bombings; her “dazzling” “infinity net paintings,” covered edge to edge with monochrome lattices; and her larger-scale more familiar art that’s “no less arresting in its maniacal focus on replicative polka dots and nets.”

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'Roy Lichtenstein: Like New' at the Whitney Museum of American Art Opening Oct. 11

When it came time to curate a retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein, wrote Aruna D'Souza, the Whitney faced an interesting question: How could it convey such ubiquitous work — seen on T-shirts and postage stamps — in a way that shows just how “topical and funny and new” it was back in the 1950s and ’60s? The answer came via Alex Da Corte, a vibrant artist tapped to helm the endeavor along with the Whitney curator Meg Onli. “The show moves away from a narrow view of Lichtenstein's status as a Pop artist,” wrote D'Souza, and instead offers up “a picture of how he was equally inspired by more conceptual approaches.” It features a replica of Lichtenstein's 1962 debut exhibition (down to the original lighting), recreations of temporary murals made for the World's Fair, and a video in which Da Corte, dressed up in prosthetic makeup, plays the artist's influential professor, Hoyt Sherman.

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'Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony' at the New Museum Through Jan. 3

Earlier this year, The Times's co-chief art critic Holland Cotter visited Arthur Jafa's studio in Los Angeles while the artist was still mocking up his two-floor-plus installation at the New Museum. Jafa achieved widespread acclaim for his 2016 film, "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death," a "turbocharged visual accompaniment to the Black Lives Matter movement." Since then, his work "has grown ever more insistent in its exploration of Blackness from an aesthetic, political and existential perspective." Visitors can expect to experience a multimedia extravaganza of films, sculpture, painting, photographs and even wallpaper. "Marquee exhibitions this fall dealing with liberationist themes around race or gender will, judging by advance schedules, be few," Cotter wrote. "Which automatically gives the New Museum's survey of work by the artist-filmmaker hot-button status."

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KENKEN

Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box. A 5x5 grid will use the digits 1–5. A 7x7 grid will use 1–7.

KenKen $^{®}$ is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2026 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

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Answers to Puzzles of 9.27.26

THE FULL 12 ROUNDS

KENKEN

PUNS & ANAGRAMS

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CIRCULAR REASONING

1. Erratic (c), recital (cc)

2. Outsiders (c), discourse (cc)

3. Protested (c), torpedoes (cc)

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RAILROAD TRACKS

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Answers to Puzzle on Page 72

include them in your score.

SPELLING BEE

Honeywell, September (3 points each), Also: Happyy, Hyphen, opportent, Penea, Penny, Peony, Peppy, Petty, Poyote, Phone, phono, Phony, Photoy, Photo, Photon, Pointon, Poppy, Patent, polyt, Polyphon, Tapepe (or teerepe), Uphyoon. If you found other legitimate dictionary words in the debitive, feel free to a kid with, a start-up called Orchid can give you "polygenic risk scores" for your future children.

Your job, at this point, may well have a reward structure not all that different from a slot machine: Maybe you're a start-up employee taking a significant portion of pay in equity, or maybe you're a "creator" (which is to say a journalist, musician, actor, illustrator) hoping to end up on the right side of the winner-take-all economy, or maybe you're driving an Uber and gambling that surge pricing will hit the evening you have the car.

Even politics has become quite obviously perverted by this logic. Former Representative Sean Patrick Maloney recently complained that “being a social media influencer” is now typical behavior for legislators. His frustration may be heartfelt, but pumping out potentially viral videos (rather than producing complex bipartisan legislation) is a statistically rational exercise in Congress, where attention is currency. Even the online-phobic head-down legislators are unavoidably roped in thanks to Kalshi and Polymarket, which have made tradable assets of nearly every component of their job, the most absurd being “mentions markets,” which pay out not for some political outcome but when a politician or spokesperson uses a word or phrase. What predictions and statistical calculation threaten to corrupt in this case isn’t just causality and particularity but the meaning of citizenship in a democracy: A vote is a singular commitment; on Kalshi, you can hedge.

For some people — denizens of the River — this world might be ideal, or close to it: a place to maximize your wealth and prestige by expertly playing odds across all spheres of your existence. I can see its appeal, too: I remember reading Emily Oster's best seller "Expecting Better" when my wife was pregnant and appreciating a book that allowed her to make her own decisions about, say, diet, based on her own tolerance for risk, instead of operating according to the one-size-fits-all rules of the medical establishment.

But I also remember standing in front of the deli counter trying to figure out how comfortable with Listeria risk we really were versus how much she really wanted some prosciutto, and ultimately finding the freedom of individuated risk as enervating in its own way as the restrictions of blanket recommendations. I don't think I'm alone. For those of us who aren't accustomed to the particular habits of mind and styles of reason of Silicon Valley, the world of casinos and prediction markets and financialized opinions is exhausting: calculating your individual risk profile at all hours of the day, hedging every bet, avoiding all commitments in order to keep your options open.

This doesn't have to be the inevitable endpoint of the probabilistic revolution, or of institutions designed to account for chance. Among the earliest innovations to take advantage of the science of

Your job, at this point, may well have a reward structure not all that different from a slot machine.

ELEVATE YOUR LOVE LIFE

statistics and probability was insurance, which is a way to collectively pool risk. The offloading of probabilistic calculation away from institutional bodies and onto individuals — the shift from “insuring” or “investing” to “betting,” put crudely — is a more recent innovation.

But it's the individual gambler that Silicon Valley can make the most use of. Casinos need marks. Crypto needs bag holders. Prediction markets need dumb money. And L.L.M.s need information.

In an October 2025 article for the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's blog, the company's editor at large, Alex Danco, surveys a future in which "intelligent machines are conceiving, driving and implementing a lot of our material progress." With A.I. doing all the important stuff, what's left for the rest of us? The answer Danco lands on is speculation: "Predictions," in the machine-led future, "give us something to do." Someone, after all, has to produce new information to be absorbed and weighted by A.I.; to Danco, this is "our purpose." Maybe this sounds grim or demeaning, or at least unusual, to you. It doesn't to Danco. In fact, he ends on a hopeful note: "I couldn't imagine something more optimistic if I tried."

Easy for him to say; he already made all the right bets.

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Cancer Continued from Page 37

how much better my dad looked. His shortness of breath improved, his cough no longer sounded as intense, and he was getting large doses of steroids from Envita that improved his energy. But most important, he finally believed in his treatment plan. He had confidence, support, hope. Taken together, those things can have a real effect on the body.

Our hours at Envita were pleasant — a sharp contrast with our agonizing appointments at Memorial Sloan Kettering. The nurses and doctors were kind and personable and asked me about my life and work in San Francisco. They had inside jokes with my dad, and he befriended a few fellow patients, who gave him a sense of community, a feeling that he was no longer alone.

At some point, the hope he was feeling morphed into actual belief. My dad emailed his uncle to say he was doing well and that he may just beat the “dismal” odds of Stage 4 lung cancer. He also texted a former co-worker that he should be “cancer free” by the end of February. “I’m fully intending to recover!” he wrote.

Shortly before Christmas, and about one month into his treatment, Envita sent my dad to Hermosillo, Mexico, for the first part of his cell therapy, a “proprietary” treatment that the clinic was not authorized to perform in the United States. Envita arranged the flights, the hotel and transport to and from the airport.

Over two days, my dad sat in the bare clinic for hours hooked up to an IV. Envita told him they were extracting cells that would then be trained to destroy his cancerous ones. The plan was for him to return to the clinic a few weeks later so they could infuse the cells back into his body to eat up the bad ones — “my little Pac-Mans,” my dad called them.

But things started to unravel after he got back to Arizona. His shortness of breath returned, and his appetite diminished. His nose bled frequently, and his whole body regularly erupted into sudden, violent bouts of chills. The fatigue consumed his days. His cough increased, along with a rattling sound when he breathed. He had lost so much weight since beginning treatments at Envita — 20 pounds, in addition to the 24 he had lost before he arrived at the clinic — that he found it painful to sit on a chair without a cushion. His hair also started falling out so rapidly that one evening we went to the barber so he could shave it all off. When we got home, I saw him quietly tear up as he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

I scroll through pictures from this time and see a man so unrecognizable that they are difficult to look at: a skeletal face with sharp cheekbones and sunken eyes; shoulder bones protruding through his sweater; skin darkened from the radiation.

Privately, my dad started to acknowledge to himself that he was going to die. But the only person he admitted this to was his best friend, who came to visit him around the holidays. Still, day by day, my dad went back to Envita for treatments, hanging on to the hope that maybe he was wrong.

At this point, the costs were staggering: around \$200,000 since moving to Arizona, a price that mostly included invoices from Envita. There were also scans and outside therapies the clinic recommended, like “colon hydrotherapy,” a treatment that supposedly cleansed toxins from his body (though there’s little scientific evidence to support it). This accounting does not include all the supplements he needed to take, which at one point was 14 different pills, twice a day.

His Envita medical records from this time detail his lethargy, his cough and his precipitous drop in weight. At certain points, the records show, Envita's doctors referred my dad to the emergency room or to an outside pulmonologist when his symptoms got particularly bad. But there were also a few bits of good news that my dad clung to. In January, he was told that there were some signs of improvement in his lungs and that the lesions in his brain — which were being treated by an outside radiation oncologist — were disappearing.

Any positive news contrasted with the person we were seeing — a man suffering and shrinking, a husband and father wasting away. My mom, desperate to return to her support system in New Jersey and horrified by my dad's rapid decline, suggested that they go back to Memorial Sloan Kettering — or, at the very least, call the oncologist for a second opinion. But my dad refused, saying that Envita's treatments were just running their course.

At the clinic one day, a fellow patient noticed my dad was struggling and suggested he read up on fenbendazole, an antiparasitic typically given to animals. Its use had been going viral online. My dad found the blog of a man who claimed to cure his Stage 4 lung cancer with a regimen of fenbendazole, a miraculous recovery that stumped his oncologists. There were Facebook pages, articles and YouTube videos from other patients who claimed similar results. He ordered the powder on Amazon. When it arrived the next day, he mixed it into some yogurt and ate it with a spoon.

But a few days later, my dad sank into the couch as his oxygen level dipped dangerously low. He refused to let my mom call an ambulance, for fear of having to go to a hospital.

"Please, Rajeev," she said. "You are going to die on this couch." She ignored his resistance and called 911.

I arrived in Scottsdale that evening and went straight to the hospital. My dad, breathing through an oxygen mask, looked more gaunt than when I saw him a few weeks earlier.

When a doctor in the I.C.U. asked us where my dad was being treated for his cancer, he wasn't surprised by the answer. The hospital, he said, receives patients from such clinics in the area all the time, and they always come to him "like this." He gestured toward my father, gasping for air.

"You wasted your money," he said.

It was a callous remark to a family that was scared, that was far from home, that already knew they had spent a lot of money. What a jerk, I remember thinking of the I.C.U. doctor. Where was the bedside manner, the empathy?

But what I didn't know then was just how much history Envita had with both state and federal officials. The medical center was founded in 2001 by a man named Santo Dino Prato, who once said that he had a “God-given gift of serving people and transforming the broken health care system in America.” Prato has a naturopathic license in several states but has never held one in Arizona.

As Envita grew in its early years, the clinic repeatedly came under scrutiny. In 2006, for example, the Food and Drug Administration sent Envita a warning letter for providing a cell therapy that it did not have the approval to perform in the United States. Instead of pursuing a formal drug study under the F.D.A., Envita sidestepped U.S. regulators and established the clinic in Hermosillo — the same place where my father was flown for treatment.

Then, in a 58-page report compiled by the F.D.A.'s Office of Criminal Investigations in 2015 — which I obtained through a public-records request this year — the agency wrote out a long list of “questionable activity” reportedly conducted at Envita. Those issues included selling treatments “at a high cost to desperate subjects” and administering unapproved drugs to vulnerable, end-state cancer patients. The report notes that a member of the Arizona Naturopathic Physicians Medical Board also told federal investigators that Envita had been the “target of complaints” by patients and their families for issues including its high prices and experimental treatments.

Nothing ever came of the investigation. The case was closed, according to the F.D.A., because of “a lack of interest by the U.S. attorney’s office” in Phoenix. In the years following, a doctor working at Envita had his license temporarily suspended for “gross negligence” in the treatment of several pediatric cancer patients. Then, the family of a cancer patient who woke up paralyzed after a procedure at Envita sued her doctor and the clinic, accusing it of creating a “false impression that the health care services it offered were actually above the standard of care for cancer treatment.” Envita denied those claims, and the case was settled last year.

"This is the first time in my life that I feel out of control," my father said. The clinic he found online had given him hope. "I need to feel that."

In August, I emailed Envita a long list of questions about its history and my father's care. Envita answered through a spokesman — and also sent me a letter from its lawyer, threatening a defamation action against this publication. In its lengthy response, Envita said that it does not guarantee outcomes and that patients, including my father, sign consent and disclosure forms that include the proposed treatment, potential risks and anticipated costs.

The clinic said it “wholly” rejects the “unsubstantiated claims” in the 2015 F.D.A. report and that Prato “does not practice clinically.” Envita said the physician whose license was temporarily suspended no longer works for the clinic and that the case “should not be represented as evidence” concerning Envita’s current staff. The clinic said the case involving the paralysis of a patient “was resolved without any admission of wrongdoing or adjudicated finding” and “is not representative of Envita’s overall clinical experience.” The physician, who still works for Envita, was temporarily put on probation by the Arizona Medical Board last year.

“Any organization that has operated for over two decades in health care is going to face challenges,” the clinic said, adding that its policy is to comply with “all applicable F.D.A. and other regulatory requirements.”

Envita, I learned, is not unique. I also found dozens of similar businesses around the country that provide cancer patients with costly, unproven treatments. I spent months trying to figure out what kind of oversight exists for such clinics, only to discover a confusing patchwork of laws that vary from state to state. What's more, many of the clinics I found were affiliated with practitioners with long disciplinary histories that included allegations of improper diagnoses, botched operations and patient deaths.

Alternative treatment protocols like the one my dad received at Envita are often not covered by insurance and can cost families tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of dollars. My parents were able to shoulder the expense, but there are many whose decision to seek care drives them into serious debt. I came across hundreds of GoFundMe pages of people asking their communities for help and spoke to several families whose loved ones sold off assets or ran through their small savings to afford such treatments. Some claimed they were betrayed or misled by their clinics but felt their only recourse was to write a bad online review. (I would also later leave Envita a one-star review online.)

As I pored through my dad's Envita records this year, I tried to understand what, exactly, my family spent so much money on. Envita told me that my dad came to them with an “extraordinarily serious and complex medical condition” and that they only selectively take on such cases. They said his protocol was based on his “specific clinical circumstances” and other factors including the severity of his disease. But when I asked several oncologists across the country to take a look at his records from Envita, they were stunned. One told me that he struggled “to identify a biologically plausible or mechanistically coherent rationale” for much of my dad’s treatment plan. Reading the records, he said, made him “sick.” Another wrote back, in all caps: “OH DEAR.”

What has been the hardest for me to learn, though, is just how doomed my dad was from the moment he was diagnosed. I recently spoke to my dad's oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Mark G. Kris, who said sticking with a conventional regimen of chemotherapy may have eventually improved my dad's quality of life. Still, no matter what he did, his chance of long-term survival was slim. I have racked my brain to pinpoint a moment when this futility was made clear. But I cannot find one.

Kris did not remember my father; it has been almost seven years, and he was his patient for only about a month. But when I explained my dad's decision to abandon conventional oncology and asked what he thought, his answer surprised me: "I could not promise him his life back," he said. "So in that context, he needed to decide how he felt best to fight it." Kris said he supports patients' doing whatever they need to feel hope, particularly when they're as sick as my dad. But, he cautioned, the only thing worse than no hope "is false hope."

It strikes me, only now as I revisit these moments, that all the conversations about my dad's illness centered around what he could and should do. It was never, as far as I can remember, about what he — what we all — actually wanted out of the time he had left.

Back then it felt as if there were two options: treatment at any cost or death. I cannot remember a moment when the third option — acceptance — even crossed our minds.

As my dad rapidly deteriorated in the Scottsdale I.C.U., we frantically tried to get him back home to New Jersey so he could be closer to friends and family. But he was too fragile and could barely breathe on his own. After he was intubated, the doctors ran some tests that determined his disease had progressed significantly in the last month.

Eventually, after nearly a week in the hospital, my mom, brother and I decided it was time to pull him from the breathing machine. The I.C.U. doctors told us my dad would last 30, maybe 60 minutes without it. But as the hours passed with him still alive, they moved us into a large, sunny room to accommodate all the family that was pouring in to say their goodbyes. The room was full of chatter as we shared stories about my dad while he lay there with a morphine drip.

I thought he was sleeping when, suddenly, a sound came from his bed: "Dog!" he gasped. "Yogurt!" — a breathless plea for the dog-deworming powder he had bought. My mom, brother and I told him that the cancer had spread too far; the powder was not going to save him. But the more we refused, the more indignant he became that we were squandering his last chance at survival. "You're killing me!" he croaked.

We asked everyone to leave the room as he continued to groan for the powder. The next moment is the one that still haunts me. Instead of sitting at my father's bedside while he remained alert and saying everything I wanted to say (that I loved him, that I would look for him in the birds), instead of hearing all that I wanted to hear (that I was a good daughter, that he was proud), I walked to the grocery store to buy the yogurt. When I returned, my mom poured the powder into the yogurt and fed it to him with a plastic spoon. The yellow color from the fenbendazole stained his white goatee.

He somehow hung on for another day, barely conscious, waiting for a miracle as my mom and I slept on hard recliners in his hospital room. That night I heard him rustle in his bed, and I walked over to see if he needed anything. "I don't think I'm going to make it, Trishi," he whispered. A quiet, final surrender. "It's OK," I said gently, careful not to wake my mom. "We will be OK."

By the next afternoon, he was gone — no miracle, no secret cure. Just precious, final moments lost to something he read online. ◆

later wrote to Frank to say that she forgave him. He never replied.

Barry's sister did not want to bring charges or for the matter to become public, and her family respected these wishes. Unlike other Irish sex offenders brought low in the 1990s, when the scale of child abuse within the Catholic Church first became known, Frank retained his freedom and reputation. But Barry, who'd already been drifting away from him, cut off contact altogether. Oftentimes, when he saw his father coming down the street, he would simply run in the opposite direction. "I was frightened of him, like a child," he explained. "I never lost that."

Many writers need an inciting obstruction. For Henry James, it was his own sexuality. For Nabokov, it was a homeland to which he could never return. For Barry, it has been a family secret that it was not his place to speak of. Learning about his father's offense was the hinge of his life as well as his career. All he'd written up to this point, in his own harsh assessment, were mere apprentice pieces. In the next few years, he came into his own with a series of works in which a palpable desire, as he put it in his email, "to proclaim aloud" keeps running up against the necessity of silence. Barry's great breakthrough lay not in writing nakedly about his family of origin, in the vein of Philip Roth or Karl Ove Knausgaard, but in finding ways to hide them in his deeper family history — and in the history of Ireland.

The work that made his name as a playwright, "The Steward of Christendom" (1995), is based on the life of his paternal great-grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the pre-independence Dublin police force, of whom Barry knew nothing until his late 30s. The man he would portray as Thomas Dunne was supposed to have ordered a charge on striking workers in 1913, leaving several men dead. The existence of this relative was another shameful family secret. Following the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule, which sparked the war that led to independence, those who didn't fit the romantic narrative of national struggle, like Protestants and former Crown servants, were pushed to the margins of Irish public life. Barry, who was born in 1955, had absorbed that narrative himself. He began the play believing he was writing about a textbook traitor. Only as it evolved did he come to see Dunne as simply a man.

One engine of the play's emotional drama is Thomas's conflict with his devoted son, Willie. Thomas effectively disowns the boy when he shows qualified sympathy for the 1916 rebels, then spends the rest of his life regretting it after Willie is killed while fighting for the British in the First World War. "What big, loud talking fools are fathers sometimes," he says to Willie's hallucinated presence from the county home in Wicklow where he is living out his days. "Why do we not love our sons simply and be done with it?" Barry's mother always believed that the play was about his relationship with Frank. It is certainly possible to see it as Barry's effort to imagine his way into his father's mind following their rift. It is also possible to see the play as a poignant piece of wish fulfillment. If only his father were suffering like this, there might be hope for his renewal, or even, in the future, a reconciliation.

While many lauded Barry's depiction of a man undone by political upheaval and the sudden reversal in status it entails, others saw it as an attempted whitewash. "If Thomas Dunne or his real-life counterpart broke the skulls of working men who were desperate to earn a living, then he should not have done," wrote the British Marxist Terry Eagleton, who has Irish Catholic roots, in The London Review of Books. Barry's claim, in an introduction to the play, that his ancestor was only doing his duty, or what he took to be his duty, was, Eagleton said, "an excuse with a particularly unsavory history." The suggestion seemed clear: Barry was a traitor to the republican cause, cut from the same cloth as his forebear.

Clearly in no rush to dispel this impression, Barry spent the coming years composing what would eventually amount to a loser's history of 20th-century Ireland. Though given to flights of rhapsodic lyricism, the books vibrate with a sublimated anger. Again and again, Barry writes characters rejected by their families and society at large, victims of unspeakable injustice who must mutely bear the wrong they've been done. "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty" (1998), the first of his novels about the Barry family tree, was inspired by the life of a maternal great-uncle, another policeman, who was forced to flee Ireland during the Civil War (1922-23) after receiving a death threat from a nationalist enforcer. Like Virgil's hero, Barry's Eneas spends years in exile, dutifully weathering trial after trial — as a sailor in Northern England, as a soldier at the Battle of Dunkirk, as a canal-digger in postcolonial Nigeria — but he doesn't found a city, just a poky hotel for destitute sailors on London's Isle of Dogs. "All our founding myths in Ireland have been based on revolutions and new beginnings, and I suppose I wanted to write a book that had as its shadow the reverse of that, a kind of unfounding myth," Barry has said.

The novels that followed, which hopscotch between the McNultys and the Dunnes, are likewise stories of men and women whose lives were written in invisible ink. “Annie Dunne” (2002) is based on a paternal great-aunt, the daughter of the police superintendent whom Barry quarried in “The Steward of Christendom.” Annie (her real name) had a privileged childhood in Dublin Castle, the center of British rule — poor preparation for the long littleness of life in post-independence Ireland. Born with a hunchback that rendered her unmarriageable, she washed up on a subsistence farm in rural Wicklow. Her brother, depicted as Willie in “The Steward of Christendom,” was another source of grief. He didn’t just die fighting for the British Empire in World War I, at the very moment Ireland was rising up against it — the subject of a later novel, “A Long Long Way” (2015), one of Barry’s greatest. His sacrifice, like those of the war’s 200,000 Irish veterans, was met, for many decades, by a conspiracy of silence.

"Annie Dunne" evokes a crucial episode from Barry's childhood when he and his sister, aged 4 and 6, spent nine months living with their great-aunt on the farm in Wicklow while their parents looked for work in London. Barry and his sister were like the children she never had, late blossoms in a desiccated life. For them, she proved to be "a very philosopher and almost inventor of mothering," as Barry once said, yet his novel portrays her without sentimentality. His Annie is rugged and resourceful as well as brittle and aloof, stung by her family's precipitous decline: milking cows and mucking out manure are not how she'd imagined spending her old age. But her life is not in vain, Barry movingly suggests, for she makes all the difference in the lives of her two charges. "Will they remember anything of these days?" she wonders of the children.

If the novel seems to offer a resounding affirmation, one startling episode complicates the picture. On a bright summer morning, Annie goes to wake the children and finds them lying naked together in the same bed. "The boy is huddled between her legs, his face down near where her body joins at the center, near that special place that should be foreign to all eyes." As their aunt stands there unobserved, the girl tells her brother to "give it little licks." What Annie has witnessed puzzles her intermittently for the rest of the book. Was it just a game? Or was it a sign of something more troubling? At one point, while she lies sleepless in bed, "a strange thought" occurs to her. "The thought was but a shadow, a hint. Something about Trevor" — the children's father — and "the little girl, a notion I could not make clear to myself." Hamstrung by modesty, she is unable to raise the subject with the children, or with anybody else.

After speaking to his sister, Barry tried to tell his mother what had happened to her, but it was, he said, a “thankless task.” Though Joan heard him out as he recounted the details, she would later speak as though she had no memory of them. Barry suspects this selective amnesia was a strategy she learned from her own traumatic childhood.

In moments of lucidity, Joan insisted she'd known nothing of the abuse, which Barry wanted desperately to believe. In reality, this was highly unlikely. When the family was living in London in the early 1960s, Joan had spent a few weeks in Cork performing in a play. Later, after she was told what Frank had done, she said of this period, “I knew I shouldn't have left.”

Barry seems to have taken the remark as grist for “Old God’s Time” (2023), a raw-nerved meditation on memory, truth and the problem of evil nested within what appears to be a crime novel. It features an actress who goes by her maiden name, Miss McNulty, and her young son, Jesse. She is in flight from her husband, whom she suspects (but cannot prove) is somehow responsible for their daughter’s recent death. In one scene, she recounts the trauma to her next-door neighbor, a retired detective who is the novel’s main character:

“First she had noticed problems with her daughter's body. She had brought her to the doctor in London because there was blood in her rectum — the child was only a little girl of 6, and she had no idea what was wrong. The only thing she could think of was colitis, something like that. The doctor was in his 50s and not very concerned, and indeed the bleeding stopped for a good long while. But after she'd been away in Ireland working for a few weeks down in Cork, she discovered the bleeding again when she came back. She had not the slightest clue what was causing it.”

In light of what Barry had learned, he began to reflect on the distress he'd felt while bathing his children. "In these ancient cases, there are no proofs possible," he told me. "It is all memory, half-memory and even absence of memory, when we are too young to register what is happening." And yet, he went on, "I could in no way guarantee that my father didn't do something to me." In the late 1990s, Barry suffered a nervous breakdown. Around the same time, he and Deegan bought a 19th-century rectory in southwest Wicklow. The place was an unsightly wreck — roughcast exterior, hideous double-glazing. They spent two years restoring it, a therapeutic task. "He found a moat and pulled up the drawbridge and got on with his work," said the Irish novelist Colm Toibin, one of Barry's closest friends. "But there were demons that could not be got rid of."

He tried to confront them in 2010, when he wrote Frank a letter about the abuse, a subject they had never discussed. It contained a forensic list of everything Frank had done to his daughter, from the actual violation to his refusal to acknowledge it. "Thank you for your very civilized letter," Frank wrote in his response, which contained an invitation to meet for lunch. He promised to explain why his son was mistaken. Barry agreed, but when Deegan heard about the plan, she told him not to go, fearing for his well-being. So Barry rang his father to cancel.

A year or so later, Barry got word that his father had Alzheimer's and called him to ask if they could meet in Dublin. They eventually agreed to have lunch at a hotel. Barry's son Merlin volunteered to go with him. The conversation was awkward from the start. As Barry was describing his mother's last illness, through which he had nursed her a few years before, Frank rose to his feet and began pacing the room. Sitting back down again, he extended his arms to reveal his wrists, which were crosshatched with scars. His father, Barry realized, had tried to kill himself. "I don't want to play the blame game," Frank declared to his son, "but this was because of your letter."

Merlin, aghast, said it was time for them to leave. Barry and his father would never speak again.

One afternoon during my stay, Barry, Deegan and their third child, Toby, who was visiting from Dublin, sat drinking tea in the blossoming garden outside the rectory. Like the heather-flushed hills it looks out on, the Georgian house is built stoutly of granite. Sunlight strained through a gray lid of cloud, as the couple's seven dogs yipped at their feet. "Silencio!" Barry commanded, to no obvious effect.

Barry's response to having Frank as a father was to raise his children in the opposite manner, to give them what he's called "the bounty of safety," which he and his sister were painfully denied. Toby, who came out to his parents in 2015, shortly before Ireland's referendum on gay marriage, said he had always felt that bounty. "Even before I told them," he said, "I knew it was going to be OK." "Days Without End," the first novel in Barry's loose American trilogy, was partially inspired by Toby, to whom the book is dedicated.

Barry is no stranger to the United States; he has spent stretches of time there since holding a fellowship at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-1980s. "I have a sort of citizenship of America that no American government, especially the current one, would recognize," he said, speaking of the vast trans-Atlantic Irish diaspora. Barry learned about his ancestor Thomas McNulty, who fled to the States in the 1840s never to return, from his maternal grandfather, the prolific talker. This unfinished story was an imaginative goad, but Barry also did plenty of research, reading hundreds of books on American history.

Some of this research was brought to bear on a lengthy first chapter about McNulty's Irish childhood and the death of his family in the Great Famine. After nine months of work, Barry came to realize that the chapter wasn't right. These were the very last things that McNulty would want to talk about. The episode was cut from 30 pages to three paragraphs. "And that's the end of that, I say, I don't want to say no more," McNulty announces at the end of them, sealing the subject into the past.

Except the past is never so easily sequestered. "I only say it because without saying it I don't think anything can be properly understood," he goes on a moment later, alluding to the violence he seems fated to commit. In one horrific scene, a massacre of American Indians is couched in uncomfortably domestic terms when McNulty and his comrades dig a pair of mass graves for the innocents they've slaughtered. "When all the bodies were in," he reports, "we covered over the pits with the soil we had left, like we were putting pastry tops on two enormous pies."

Though Barry appreciates that it can be “a perilous business” for a white male novelist to write across differences of gender and race, as he does in the American trilogy, the alternative strikes him as worse. “When it comes to people saying you can’t write characters that aren’t the same as you, that’s the end of literature,” he told me. “It is the deepest form of love to try to imagine your way into somebody else’s condition.” The terror and sense of vulnerability his father inspired in him seems to find an objective correlative in the violent frontier, especially as it was experienced by its nonwhite inhabitants.

One of the great achievements of the books is how distinct its three narrators sound from one another, how rightly they are fitted with their own persuasive idiolect. Thomas McNulty, who would have grown up speaking Irish, like a majority of his countrymen before the Great Famine, is powerfully estranged from the English language, a tool of British colonial oppression, even as he wields it with a reckless incandescence. Winona, upgraded to narrator in the second novel, “A Thousand Moons,” is given to a more “proper” style of expression. Her literacy and numeracy are her means of livelihood (she works as a clerk in the local law office), but her command of words also sharpens her sense of how coercive they can be. When a suitor sends her a comically bloodless proposal letter (“I hereby and to thee declare that my wish and love remain intacter”), she feels she must marry him not because she wants to but because of “the official terms I had been addressed with, like a treaty paper between Washington and the Sioux.”

Bouguereau, meanwhile, receives an education at a newly founded college for the formerly enslaved in nearby Nashville, and it shows in his speech. If English, for the Irish, was an unmotherly tongue imposed from above, for the Black bondsman it was a means of freedom, and acquiring it a subversive act: as Frederick Douglass's owner put it, literacy would “forever unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass, who toured Ireland in the mid-1840s and drew parallels between the Black and Irish freedom struggles, wrote an ornate, Ciceronian prose that implicitly defied racist beliefs about the expressive powers of African Americans. Barry read Douglass closely while preparing to write “The Newer World,” but he told me that a closer model for Bouguereau’s voice was Henry Ossian Flipper’s “The Colored Cadet at West Point” (1878), whose style is more relaxed, less overtly rhetorical.

In “The Newer World,” Bouguereau’s desire for revenge against Petrie, his sister’s violator, continues unabated through his remarkable life, which takes him from the concert halls of Britain, where he performs as a member of a celebrated Black choir, to the bloodied plains of the American West. Late in the book, he gets his chance when, during a visit to Tennessee, he spots Petrie on horseback, singing to himself on a deserted country road. He has the man in the sights of his rifle, which was given to him by his former enslaver. Yet he can't pull the trigger. "Why I did it I hardly knew, but I threw old Luther's sacred gift into the trees."

The decision is mysterious to the reader as well. Is it a pragmatic calculation? A principled refusal to answer violence with violence? Or is it a case of a white author reluctant to make his characters of color as vividly ruthless or aggressive as his pale ones, for fear of perpetuating baleful stereotypes? One thought I shared with Barry was that Bouguereau's gesture and, in a way, the whole book, read almost like an allegory of his decision not to write about his parents. "I'm trying to throw my rifle down," he told me, speaking of his father. "Even if they don't exist, I don't want him committed to the flames of hell."

If Barry has spent his life telling secrets, he is a large-souled gossip, a writer who forgives people behind their backs. “No man is beyond redemption,” Thomas Dunne says in “The Steward of Christendom,” and it’s clear that Barry, a longtime agnostic, devoutly believes this. For all their sins and dubious allegiances, his characters are intensely lovable — precisely what Eagleton so disapproved of. That Barry, who was once considered suspiciously un-Irish, is now embraced in his homeland is in part a reflection of how much Ireland has changed in recent decades. Foster, the historian, told me that his friend's work has helped to bring that change about, loosening the grip of nationalist dogma and “allowing for a much more complex sense of the identities available to Irish people.”

More than any social legacy, Barry considers the family he has built with Deegan as the thing he's most proud of. "This will be our monument to the brief time we've spent in the world," he said — though his characters are family as well, and in more than one sense. His aunt Annie Dunne died many years ago, but Barry thinks about her almost every day. "And similarly, I feel that Thomas McNulty is always around somewhere," he told me in his garden, with its willow and its hawthorn, where the leaden clouds had briefly given way. "Or that I could be within a whisper of Tennyson, just sitting in the sunlight here. They are what give me my share of happiness — my children, my wife, some of my friends and the characters in my books."

In 2021, when Barry was planning his lecture, "The Fog of Family," he decided it was time to speak plainly about what he and his sister, who had long since remarried and was living abroad, had been through. When he sent her a draft, however, she grew alarmed. Her fear, as Barry remembers, was that Frank would try to kill himself again. At his sister's request, Barry made redactions, removing any mention of what she had suffered.

This is what accounts for the lecture's strange tone, what might be called its evasive candor. “I fear the fog I have tried to describe can never clear, except briefly,” Barry said at the end. “The door opens onto clear country, it closes again.” Even now, nearly five years after his father’s death, he seems unable to bring him into focus. While it was clear how completely he believes his sister’s story, he sometimes spoke as though he hoped Frank might be innocent.

His father, he said, could be extremely generous, often lending money to friends who were in need. In his younger days, he was widely beloved in certain Dublin circles, celebrated for his wit and conversation. He even had a group of what Barry called “disciples.” One of them, an artist, painted him as Christ, to whom he was said to bear a resemblance. Barry keeps the portrait in his office, where it is turned to face the wall.

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One easy way to make hiking a walk in the park

would tie into knots. A few days later, I'd trail her upstairs to find her crumpled on her bed. "I studied so hard. I just feel so dumb."

My child's confidence wilted like an unwatered plant. She started to develop an almost debilitating anxiety around taking tests. She became sullen at school and began to act out. For the first time ever, I got messages from teachers about Najya's behavior.

I enrolled Najya in algebra tutoring. After an assessment, the center's director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions. The intervention would need to be intense, but Najya was smart, she assured me, and with the proper support would catch up.

And she was right. That first year, we were in constant contact with Najya's teachers. We explained to them the type of schools Najya had gone to and that she did not have the same academic preparation as her peers. Her humanities teacher took the lead, working with Najya's other teachers to get her the academic help she needed. Her biology class was taught by two dynamic and compassionate Black women, who opened their classroom to her if she needed a break and helped her adapt culturally to the school.

Between that and the tutoring, Najya quickly found her emotional and academic footing. By the semester's end, she was earning nearly all A's and B's. And at the end of the school year, she passed her state algebra exam.

Having now experienced both sides of our segregated system, I wanted to talk to Najya's middle school principal, Emily Paige. I wanted to understand how it could be that Najya had gotten A's in algebra but knew hardly any of it, and how despite being an honors student at Unison, she wasn't prepared for the rigors of her high school.

It's easy to look at these things and indict Unison. But I also understood that a school like Unison is tasked with working miracles to overcome the years of educational morass they have inherited from schools like P.S. 307.

The way Najya was able to catch up and thrive in high school was possible because her teachers there were dealing with just a few students with educational gaps — not an entire classroom, not an entire school. Paige's middle school, on the other hand, does not screen for students who are already highly academically successful; it enrolls all children who show up at its doors, regardless of what they know or don't know. As we sat in Paige's office in the final weeks of the school year, I asked her if I could play her a snippet of Najya describing her Unison experience.

Najya's voice through my computer sounded matter of fact. She talked about how she and her friends felt the school was too easy and that they weren't being challenged. “I complained to my friends,” she said: “We don't get anything. We're not getting any homework. We're not getting anything.” When asked if she had wanted homework, Najya responded: “We did. We did. We honestly did want to get more things. We knew that we weren't learning enough. We didn't know anything.”

As I stopped the recording, Paige sat still, tears welling in her eyes, her face beginning to flush.

Many educators land at a school like this because they cannot get hired at a “better” school. But I’ve met so many people like Paige who joined the profession precisely because they want to serve a place like Unison. Born to factory workers in upstate New York, Paige barely made it out of high school herself and understood the necessity of a system of education that doesn’t write off its children because they founder academically.

But the stark educational apartheid of New York City schools subverts, and sometimes perverts, the efforts of even the most dedicated educators.

“None of this surprises me,” Paige said, regaining her voice. “This is the reality of a segregated system, and it’s not just segregation by race and class, it’s by ability. This is the reality of school-choice systems.”

Most New York City public elementary students attend a school zoned to their neighborhood — children in wealthy white neighborhoods attend wealthy white schools, and poor Black children attend poor Black schools. But if affluent parents move to a gentrifying neighborhood, they can exercise “school choice” and send their children elsewhere. There are schools in neighborhoods like Harlem, Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I live, where about a quarter of the kindergarten students zoned for those attend them, according to a 2018 report by the Center for New York City Affairs. By middle school and high school, a majority of students take part in the school-choice attendance system, but most kids cannot get into selective schools and instead find themselves in schools that have no enrollment criteria.

That leaves schools like Unison with few students from affluent families and a disproportionate number of students who are low income and diagnosed with learning disabilities. While more than one-third of Unison students have learning disabilities, 17 percent of students at Najya's high school do.

Because they serve students who have been educationally neglected long before they arrive at their doors, schools like Unison are often faced with no good choices. Unison had eliminated homework because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement, and that assigning it often sets up for failure students who are so academically behind that they cannot do the work on their own. Under the Unison system, students completed their assignments during class time where a teacher could guide and help if they got stuck. But for students like Najya, this practice proved absolutely harmful.

"Having a lot of homework, it's almost like a proxy for 'This is a good school.'" Paige said. "I remember Najya sitting here in my office and saying, 'What about us?' It feels, to me — the way that I understand when the kids are asking that is, 'Will you honor my academic self?' That's what she's asking. And I think in not giving homework, we didn't honor their academic selves. And that's where I could cry, because it's just awful."

She paused. I could see the pain of this admission etched in her face. "It is important to not, in our pursuit of being antiracist, lower expectations," she told me. "Because this is what happens, right? It's racism under the guise of antiracism."

But the opposite approach also hadn't worked. Even as Unison eliminated homework, it also adopted an initiative called "Algebra for All," which Najya took part in. Algebra for eighth graders is considered a college gateway course. As a result, it's mostly available at affluent and whiter schools, and nationally it has become another marker of inequality. The idea behind the initiative is that students should not be deprived of advanced academic opportunities because in the past they attended schools that did not properly educate them. Doing so just accumulates the disadvantage of these students.

But how do you successfully teach higher-level math to a classroom of middle-school students like Najya who have substantial gaps in the building blocks of mathematical knowledge? This would have proved a gargantuan task for even the most experienced educator. The chances of success for Najya and her classmates in math were further reduced by the fact they were taught each year not by a master teacher but by a novice, a common circumstance at high-poverty schools.

Najya had performed better than most of the students in her grade, but she was not performing on grade level, either. Because so many students arrived with educational deficiencies, the school focused more on growth than mastery and essentially graded students on a curve. Since then, Paige has made adjustments, including reinstating homework, but of course, these are mere patches that can't address the systemic inequality that has robbed these students of educational opportunities their entire lives.

"It's very, very hard," Paige told me. "There's no model out there for holding all of these truths, these complex truths, all at once. We are working within the system that we know is not working, while trying to recreate and (Continued on Page 73)

SPELLING BEE

By Frank Longo

How many common words of 5 or more letters can you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer must use the center letter at least once. Letters may be reused in a word. At least one word will use all 7 letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points for a word that uses all 7 letters.

Rating: 8 = good; 15 = excellent; 22 = genius

Our list of words, worth 28 points, appears with last week's answers.

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BLOSSOM By Eric Berlin

Enter the answers to the Rows clues A - F across their respective lines in the grid. Use these words to help place the six-letter "blooms," which can start anywhere in a given flower and read clockwise or counterclockwise.

---

ROWS

A. Understand B. Long, short-legged dog C. Places to go when you have to go D. A typical one is 3" x 5" (2 wds.) E. Animal with quills F. Playfully shy

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BLOOMS

Cerebral \_\_\_\_ (brain part) • Core military groups

• "Oh, brother!" • Raised spots for pitchers • Showered

• Take up, as a space • Visit unannounced (2 wds.)

RAILROAD TRACKS

By Prasanna Seshadri

Draw a loop that passes through the centers of all the cells, crossing itself only at the given intersections. The loop must pass straight through each cell with a number, proceeding in ascending order from 1 to the highest number, returning to 1 at the end.

Ex. | 7 | + | + | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 6 |

---

ACROSTIC

By David Balton & Jane Stewart | 1 | A | 2 | M | 3 | G | 4 | K | 5 | F | 6 | O | 7 | W | 8 | P | 9 | A | 10 | O | 11 | E | 12 | B | 13 | L | 14 | U | 15 | H | 16 | E | 17 | R | 18 | D | 19 | H | 20 | W | 21 | H | 22 | B | 23 | J | 24 | L | 25 | R | 26 | V | 27 | T | 28 | P | 29 | I | 30 | L | 31 | R | 32 | G | 33 | D | 34 | A | 35 | W | 36 | R | 37 | U | 38 | P | 39 | O | 40 | F | 41 | G | 42 | V | 43 | G | 44 | H | 45 | N | 46 | W | 47 | K | 48 | P | 49 | J | 50 | T | 51 | O | 52 | A | 53 | H | 54 | V | 55 | E | 56 | X | 57 | I | 58 | Q | 59 | K | 60 | G | 61 | O | 62 | N | 63 | K | 64 | S | 65 | I | 66 | Q | 67 | S | 68 | J | 69 | Q | 70 | R | 71 | L | 72 | J | 73 | A | 74 | W | 75 | S | 76 | E | 77 | G | 78 | F | 79 | P | 80 | Q | 81 | A | 82 | K | 83 | E | 84 | C | 85 | F | 86 | D | 87 | W | 88 | B | 89 | S | 90 | E | 91 | Q | 92 | B | 93 | N | 94 | L | 95 | E | 96 | P | 97 | T | 98 | C | 99 | N | 100 | J | 101 | R | 102 | A | 103 | H | 104 | B | 105 | J | 106 | P | 107 | K | 108 | X | 109 | G | 110 | B | 111 | C | 112 | M | 113 | O | 114 | U | 115 | N | 116 | U | 117 | C | 118 | X | 119 | R | 120 | D | 121 | I | 122 | V | 123 | L | 124 | G | 125 | X | 126 | V | 127 | X | 128 | F | 129 | W | 130 | T | 131 | N | 132 | J | 133 | Q | 134 | V | 135 | J | 136 | N | 137 | I | 138 | S | 139 | R | 140 | G | 141 | D | 142 | A | 143 | E | 144 | K | 145 | S | 146 | I | 147 | T | 148 | G | 149 | F | 150 | O | 151 | M | 152 | U | 153 | F | 154 | R | 155 | W | 156 | S | 157 | E | 158 | C | 159 | K | 160 | H | 161 | M | 162 | D | 163 | W | 164 | L | 165 | A | 166 | F | 167 | M | 168 | A | 169 | J | 170 | P | 171 | K | 172 | H | 173 | V | 174 | F | 175 | C | 176 | B | Guess the words defined below and write them over their numbered dashes. Then transfer each letter to the correspondingly numbered square in the pattern. Black squares indicate word endings. The filled pattern will contain a quotation reading from left to right. The first letters of the guessed words will form an acrostic giving the author's name and the title of the work.

A. "He got muddy water, he one \_\_," gobbledegook Beatles lyric (2 wds.)

B. Zeroes, in Britain; rappers' improv performances

c. Ill-humored, tetchy

D. In the neighborhood of Barnard College in Manhattan

E. “\_Kill,” first Bond film shot entirely outside the U.K. (2 wds.)

157 90 83 95 76 16 11 55 143 F. They cover overtime pay (2 wds.)

153 166 149 40 78 128 5 174 85

G. Medical specialty that treats adults as well as children, despite its etymology

3 41 124 43 148 109 32 77 60 140

H. Removes oneself from a course at Oxford, say

103 15 53 172 44 160 19 21

I. What can expand indefinitely

137 57 29 65 121 146

J. Approximate width of a standard bed pillow in a flat (2 wds.)

105 100 132 49 135 68 72 169 23

K. Stretch at Rate Field for the White Sox, say

63 171 4 107 59 159 82 144 47 L. Put in, set up

123 94 13 71 30 164 24

M. Result of a mower's pass 161 167 151 112 2

N. Space with fly systems and wings

62 99 45 136 131 93 115

0. What might comprise hitting and stealing

39 113 10 51 61 6 150

P. Shared a judgment on after sampling 106 8 96 48 28 38 79 170

Q. Emitted long, loud cries 58 66 80 69 133 91

R. Inspired by, fashioned after (2 wds.)

31 17 36 154 25 70 101 119 139

S. Possible consequence of iron deficiency, per the N.H.S.

75 156 145 64 67 138 89

T. Check kiting or shoplifting 147 27 97 50 130

U. Proscribed, verboten

37 116 152 114 14

V. Manipulate, as fiber into yarn

173 54 42 122 134 126 26

W. Wag's response to an inquiry 35 163 7 155 129 87 20 46 74

X. Eye-catching; oozing glamour

108 125 127 56 118

How could I spare myself the judgment I meted out to others when they sent their children to schools that entrenched segregation?

Daughter Continued from Page 71

reimagine a new system, while working with young people who have all this potential, who've not been given the opportunities for that potential to thrive and be unleashed. And they understand all of it, and they understand none of it, all at once."

One day in June as I was immersed in writing this essay, my phone rang. It was Najya. She's now 16 and was finishing the final weeks of her sophomore year. She was making her daily call for lunch money, a ritual I created to force her to check in with me once during the school day.

"Hello, Babycakes!" I tried to sound cheery. I failed.

"What's wrong, Mommy?" she asked immediately.

I'd been making my way through pages and pages of email exchanges with Najya's principals and teachers, and this had jostled loose a truth I could no longer suppress. For years, I had been defending my decision to Najya, trying hard to balance empathy for her with the justification of her father's and my choices. I wanted my child to see it my way, to see the struggles she was having as part of a lineage and a mandate, to understand the tremendous privilege that I believed inoculated her against the worst consequences of the dysfunction and at times educational malpractice that she and her classmates experienced.

But now I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.

I almost cannot type the words. Because when I do, an image of her in her blue school uniform, her hair in beaded cornrows that clicked when she swung them, with her sweet, baby-toothed smile springs to mind, and the tears come.

On the phone, I knew if I tried to brush off Najya's question, she would simply keep asking. She's like me in that way: relentless. So I told her that I'd been reading through the old emails and that I was feeling really sad that she had gone through so much and that I had not listened more to her. "I feel like you got cheated," I said. "And I'm sorry for that."

For a moment, Najya said nothing. Then she told me, "Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted."

This is when I would have normally responded with something like “I did think of you, and I knew you’d be OK” or “You are doing just fine at your selective high school.” But not this time. I just said, simply, "I acknowledge to you that I didn't do the best for you, and I am so sorry."

The line grew silent again. Then, “I am kind of happy that you are seeing this.”

She then said she was glad she had not spent her early years in a white environment as many of the Black students at her high school had, because she'd developed a strong sense of her identity and had the confidence to speak up against the casual racism they sometimes experienced. Najya said that spending the last two years in classrooms full of privileged kids had taught her that these students weren't smarter or even necessarily better behaved than the kids she had gone to school with before; they just had more.

My contrition, it seemed, had shifted something in my daughter. I realized what she'd been yearning for most was my acknowledgment that she had borne the cost not only of our unjust society but also of my ideals. In this, Najya had become part of a long, unwanted tradition in Black communities. One that it feels as if we will never be free of.

As I hung up the phone, my mind raced. The segregation we were battling in 2026 was supposed to have been banished by the sacrifices of Black children nearly seven decades ago, when their parents sent them to integrate their local schools to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 prohibition on school segregation after the government did not.

I kept thinking about one of those children, named Leona Tate, now in her 70s, whom I met a few months earlier.

In November 1960, a 6-year-old Tate, along with Tessie Prevost, Gail Etienne and, famously, Ruby Bridges, became the first Black children to desegregate white elementary schools in the Deep South.

We tell this as a triumphal story. One in which these Black children suffered, yes, but in the end, integration prevailed and America was transformed. But when Tate was sent to McDonogh 19 Elementary School, integration did not even last until the end of the day. By 3 p.m., all the white parents pulled their children out of school.

Her parents later sent her to desegregate another white elementary school. And then a white middle school, and then a white high school. Society benefited from their dismantling of Jim Crow, but Leona Tate and the other girls wore the scars of our “advancement.” They were threatened by white strangers, hit and spit upon by white classmates and emotionally abused by white teachers. They never got the education they deserved in hopes that future generations would. “It wasn’t easy for us,” Tate told me, “but we had to.”

I asked Tate if she felt resentment toward her parents, if she wished they had made another choice, doing what was best for her and not the country. "Noh-oh," she said, her sweet New Orleans accent melting the word into two syllables. "I think it was a hard decision, a courageous decision, to put your children on the front line like that. And I probably would do the same thing. I'm glad I did what I did when I did it. Somebody had to do it."

Maybe my own child would also come to appreciate what she experienced one day, or at least, why we did what we did.

But like Tate's, my daughter's sacrifice could not transform a system that those who hold the most power refuse to change. These days, the outcry and efforts my story helped provoke 10 years ago have mostly gone silent. Black children in New York's schools, and this nation's, are as segregated now as they were a decade ago, two decades ago, three. And in profound ways, we've actually moved backward, with a federal government that no longer gives even lip service to integration but instead is weaponized against it.

We desire to be let off the hook by these realities — that we tried and we failed; by the shamble of decades of halfhearted efforts; by how insoluble it is to achieve equality in a nation with our history. Instead of fortifying our determination to fight for integration, we have instead chosen to succumb to a collective apathy in the face of a system so devastatingly unequal that it puts at odds trying to be a good person with trying to be a good parent.

But for all of our justifications, including mine, an undeniable verity remains. As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people's children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.

10-4 By Kathryn Bale

Kathryn Bale, of Walnut Grove, British Columbia, is a postdoctoral researcher on graph theory at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. This is her first published crossword. She says: "I wanted to build a crossword with just two entry lengths. '10-4' was a lucky and beautiful justification for the grid." — W.S.

ACROSS

1 Neglect to mention

5 "Oh, and ..."

9 Other sock

13 Not much, as of lotion

17 Prefix with technology

18 You'll pay for this!

19 Finishes off

20 Liver's output

21 "10-4"

24 Profiteroles, by another name

27 Fit perfectly

28 Dieter's choice

29 "\_\_ the One" (song on Springsteen's "Born to Run")

30 Tow job, maybe

33 Hurt all over

34 Philippine currency

35 Certain graphical shapes

36 Russian ruler of old

37 One may be teen or false

39 High-powered but lightweight racers

45 Diminutive for "Elizabeth"

48 "Most definitely," in Mexico City

49 "That's my preference as well"

50 Crushing on

51 "\_\_\_\_ there!"

52 "The 12 Days of Christmas" bird

53 Ring

54 Component of wine or vinegar

55 No-nos for many high-profile actors

58 Epoch conclusion?

61 Titanic

62 Central

63 \_\_Nublar, fictional setting of "Jurassic Park"

64 Pizzicato's opposite, musically

65 Summer cookout dish

71 Classic brand with the slogan "When it rains it pours"

77 Fair

78 Org. created in response to 67-Down

79 Electronic musician Steve

80 Stench

81 Oversupply

82 Takes to task

85 \_\_cake

86 Son of Adam and Eve

87 Message about a suspicious login, e.g.

88 Mimicked

89 Hawaiian goose

92 Sections of pre-K days

93 Defense in a snowball fight

95 Wedding vows

96 Doc who might screen for HPV

97 Deets

98 Source of the Mississippi River

103 Behaves as if one were going to fail

109 At sea

110 10/4 celebration ... as suggested by this grid, which is made up entirely of 10- and 4-letter answers

111 Noun-forming suffix

112 "Ammunition" for a bubble gun

113 Lewis who wrote "The Taste of Country Cooking"

114 Morass

115 "Yuck!"

116 Both digits on Groundhog Day

117 Nails will do it, but not teeth

118 Texting button

DOWN

1 Weight to bear

2 Ginóbili in the Basketball Hall of Fame

3 Busy with something else

4 Conform

5 “\_\_girl!”

6 Pillager's plunder

7 Blackthorn berry

8 Drawback to a brownstone

9 What gets a lot of viral views?

10 About 75% of a football field

11 Angry, with “off”

12 Son of Isaac and Rebekah

13 Resident of a Mideast capital

14 Result of 10 – 4, e.g.

15 \_\_Romeo

16 Tops

22 Ways to go: Abbr.

23 OK

25 Seven-plus-hour exam with a lunch break, in brief

26 Neighbors of delts

31 German article

32 Furry friends

37 Library ID

38 Victor Hugo's religious epic poem

39 Oblique look

40 Ring around the doze-y?

41 Wander

42 Egyptian god of the sun disk

43 Reflective post

44 Beyoncé or Harry Styles, now

46 Agitate

47 Scotch's partner

56 Like most Iranians

57 Say "\$%&!" say

59 Kind of score between 300 and 850

60 Ever's partner

65 Dowels, e.g.

66 Wheel support

67 Pioneering satellite launched 10/4/57

68 How some duels are fought

69 Home to a majority of people

70 Downloads that pair with your smartphone?

71 Post office post

72 Move like mud

73 Large photovoltaic arrays

74 Maxim about surviving in a rapidly changing world

75 Cause of "that butterfly feeling"

76 Prefix with "wife" for some influencers

83 "Now me down to sleep"

84 Title for Horatio Magellan Crunch

90 Femme-fatale-filled genre

91 Approx.

93 Hall of Fame catcher Carlton

94 Start of a fairy tale

98 Gentle soul

99 Son of Adam and Eve

100 Rank of some profs: Abbr.

101 Spectacle

102 "See ya!"

104 Language written from right to left

105 Sisters

106 Style of singing on Louis Armstrong's "Heebie Jeebies"

107 Make

108 Like denim fabric, typically

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