Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 356

Show Me a Hero: Home at Last

Each week following Show Me a Hero, Brentin Mock, Lenika Cruz, and David Sims discuss the controversial efforts to build low-income housing in Yonkers in the ’80s, as depicted in HBO’s six-part miniseries.

Brentin Mock: Show Me a Hero ended with the suicide of Nick Wasicsko, the dethroned figure who helped usher the city toward court-ordered housing desegregation. But before his suicide were scenes depicting the hard work of neighborhood integration that came after the city finally relented. Public-housing families are selected by lottery to inhabit the new subsidized townhomes built in the unwelcoming white neighborhood. Doreen is drug-free now and tries to organize her new neighbors into a tenants association. It’s a heroic effort, but it can’t quite seem to catch fire.

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Show Me a Hero Breaks Ground

The closest thing to a hero in this story was Mary Dorman, who evolved from housing integration’s fiercest enemy to one of its best allies. When funds dry up for a community organizing group placed there to help smooth out the integration transition, Dorman vows to continue helping the new black and Latino families in her neighborhood. Those families meanwhile, are made to prove that they can act civilized, per a series of infantilizing rules governing the tenants of the subsidized townhomes. Nothing is in place, though, to civilize the white residents, who coldly stare down the black residents and allow their dogs to foul the new families’ properties, as well as stage drive-bys in which they scream the word “nigger.”

Before this show, here’s what I knew about Yonkers: Mary J. Blige, DMX, and The Lox. And a song from Tyler, The Creator that apparently has nothing to do with the city. Blige grew up in the Schlobohm Houses—known in Yonkers as “Slow Bomb”—a high-rise built in 1952 that by the ’90s became the poster boy for everything wrong with public housing. Meaning, the real-life Yonkers councilman Nick Longo made a commercial where he juxtaposed photos of the worst parts of Schlobohm—vandalized walls, crack vials on the ground, broken windows—against Pollyannaish photos of homes in the white neighborhoods of east Yonkers. It helped him get reelected.

As a teen, Blige dropped out of high school and fell into partying and drug abuse, much like some of the young black women in Show Me a Hero. Blige would grow up to become the “Queen of Hip-Hop Soul.” Her songs about pain and yearning for a better life mirror many of the songs from the Yonkers rapper DMX. In his autobiography, DMX describes Yonkers as something of a harlequin community unrecognized by its masters. “Yonkers was filled with white people,” he writes, “but you would never know it if you didn’t go to their side of the world.” On his side of the world, he “always thought there was a black cloud over Yonkers. A big curse that attached itself to anyone who grew up there, because somehow any ghetto I’ve seen anywhere in the world reminds me of a place in Y-O.”

The Lox are known popularly for songs about loyalty to the hood, the projects, and the streets. Throughout the HBO series, I couldn’t help but wonder what Lox rappers Jadakiss or Styles P. would have done—or did—when they found out that the projects era was ending and the city would now be placing low-income housing in that side of the world that DMX tells us was off limits. We know that Styles P. did leave the hood, because he mentioned it in his letter to the public this past July, announcing that his teenage daughter had committed suicide.

I’m somehow more saddened by her suicide than Wasicsko’s; I feel like I recognize her story better. I know that few young black women grow up to become Mary J. Blige. Too many end up like Sandra Bland, dead under reportedly self-inflicted and questionable circumstances.

Show Me a Hero didn’t help me totally understand Wasicsko’s suicide, though—a death I don’t mean to trivialize since it happened in real life. This was a young man, only 34, who had clearly met some of life’s challenges. The political suicide he committed in taking up housing integration certainly sank him some. But he floated back up. He had his dream house. He had a wife who stuck by him, even as he threw her under the bus as he became more obsessed with regaining power. He lost a couple of elections and became the target of an investigation. Maybe these were dark clouds, but not the kind DMX talked about. Not the kind Nas described when he said, “I need a new nigga, for this black cloud to follow, ‘cause while it’s over me, it’s too dark to see tomorrow.”

If Wasicsko could only envision a tomorrow where he was mayor, then that’s very difficult to sympathize with. By the last episode, Wacisko began acting as if he were entitled to the mayor’s office, simply because he came down on the right side of history. When it comes to racism, white men shouldn’t be coronated for simply doing the right thing. Wasicsko’s suicide is the end of the story for David Simon and HBO, but it couldn’t have been for the families of color living in the new neighborhoods. Did this trigger white flight? Did they all live happily ever after? We know historically from other cities that have attempted this that white flight is usually the end of the story, because there are no policy corks to stick in the exit valves to keep integration sealed.

Oscar Newman, the developer responsible for bringing the low-income townhomes to the white east Yonkers neighborhood, once said of the white families: “If they start panic selling, property values will go down. They will fulfill their own prophecy.” Still, nothing drives down property values like concentrated poverty and segregation, but that hardly matters if the only properties valued are white-owned. If the show causes white viewers to confront and begin to unscramble their own bigotries, that’s great. But since we never learn how Yonkers got in this position to begin with, I fear many viewers might not see how this story applies to them. I hope David Simon’s next project is a TV show based on DMX’s autobiography.  

David and Lenika, what were your takeaways?

Lenika Cruz: Two things. First: I would absolutely watch a Simon series based on DMX’s autobiography, Brentin. Second, and more importantly: I thought these last two episodes were the best of the series, but they also left me utterly confused about the final intentions of the show. How could it be a tribute to Nick Wasicsko—a story of the man as a hero—when episodes five and six painted him in such an unflattering light? Heroes are selfless, self-sacrificing, ostensibly devoted to a higher cause beyond themselves. And yet, his own wife asks him as he struggles through a series of failed power plays at the end of his political career: “Do you even believe in anything other than yourself?” Similarly, his former chief of staff tells him, “Courage isn’t the kind of word you can use to describe yourself, even if it’s true. It only works when other people say it.”

Maybe the better wording, at least for this show, would be “Write me a tragedy, and I’ll show you a hero.”

And yet HBO is saying it, despite evidence to the contrary. The show says it in the framing, in the show’s title, in Oscar Isaac’s casting, in the dramatic way the show intersperses scenes from Wasicsko’s funeral with shots of the other character’s lives and notes about their futures. To me, Wasicsko was an ultimately interesting, complex, deeply flawed man who toward the end seemed obsessed with the anti-housing project only as it related to his own image as a man in power, as a man with the power to cut deals in back rooms, to buy votes, to be recognized as a savior. As played by Isaac, Wasicsko was relentlessly compelling to watch, but he was also somehow the most pathetic of the series by far. Not because he killed himself (I’m loath to ever view suicide as a form of weakness), but because of how he recklessly betrayed everyone around him in hopes of resuscitating his career.

I know viewers were meant to root pretty unambiguously toward the end for Mary Dorman, but to me the truly heroic characters were Doreen and Pat. Doreen’s arc from a single, drug-addicted mom to a community advocate felt organic (not like a forced, pull-up-your-bootstraps story) and respectful (not implying that every woman in her situation has the support or means to do the same). Both she and Doreen championed others, but they also helped give those others the confidence to champion themselves.

Maybe (and this is a big maybe, but it’s the interpretation I prefer), Show Me a Hero is a slight subversion of Fitzgerald’s line about heroes and tragedies going hand in hand. Maybe Wasicsko’s insatiable need to play the hero—not the fact of his heroism—is what led to his death, a kind of recontextualization of Newman’s words about a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe the better wording, at least for this show, would be “Write me a tragedy, and I’ll show you a hero.” Both Pat and Doreen (and Carmen and Billy) endured trauma and loss in their lives: poverty, addiction, illness, death, as well as racism, classism, and sexism of all kinds. And yet, they emerged heroic, even if they don’t have awards or fancy victory parties to show for it. They, I think, wouldn’t confuse votes with love.

Still, the show very clearly feels that Wasicsko is some sort of martyr, even if he comes off onscreen as an unwilling one who had no other real choice. Like you Brentin, I didn’t totally understand Wasicsko’s suicide, but suicide is often incomprehensible, so I can’t completely blame the show for not “explaining” it. I just wish we had more than a beautiful, bokeh-dappled shot of Wasicsko weeping alone in his attic to sympathize with his pain toward the end.

While I was confused by its radically ambivalent view of Wasicsko (one that doesn’t even fall into antihero territory), at least the show managed to avoid overly romanticizing him. As it did with Mary Dorman. As it did with Billy and Norma and Carmen and Pat and Doreen. I would’ve liked a longer epilogue that offered some modern context for the series and hinted at the work that still has yet to be done.  For all Show Me a Hero’s relative lack of historical grounding, the series pulled off an impressive degree of emotional and sociocultural complexity in its short span. I found the ending satisfying, if not all rosy. Wasicsko had a major hand in getting the public housing built, but—and the show makes this clear—his was just one of many.

David, did you enjoy these last couple episodes as much as I did? What, or who, makes a hero, in the eyes of this series? And did Billy and Doreen’s first nights trying to sleep in their new townhomes terrify you as much as they did for me?

David Sims: I’m glad you mentioned that, Lenika—those scenes were remarkably well done in how the biggest threat was silence (aside from occasional car noises), the “sound” of a community being absent. Not that the noise of life in the projects was always reassuring, of course, but that silence confirms the fear these new residents have: They’re not wanted, and the white residents of east Yonkers aren’t being asked to learn how to be good neighbors. I feared that something truly awful would happen—like that pipe bomb left when the houses were still under construction. Thank God that isn’t in the historical record, of course, but I was happy the final episodes of the show focused mostly on that transition to the new townhouse life, and the complications therein.

So much of Newman’s emphasis in building the townhouses was emphasizing personal ownership for the residents, and that’s what takes hold, sometimes more powerfully than others. Doreen’s story is, of course, a particularly moving one, whereas residents like Norma are older and less interested in setting down roots, but maybe the simplest and most powerful image was Carmen unpacking her floral dishware when she gets to move in to one of the houses, feeling that she’s finally in a place she can take pride in as her own. Brentin, you asked about the future, and whether other problems (and things like white flight) set in, but I think the consultant Bob Mayhawk (played by Clarke Peters) was addressing that openendedness when he said that at a certain point, the work is in the hands of the neighborhood, rather than the government.

It’s one thing to hate the nebulous prospect of new housing, but it’s quite another to hate a person inviting you into their home.

The story of people like Mary is also inspiring, although I appreciated that the show didn’t make it seem as if her turnaround was entirely self-motivated. Bob identified protesters like her—people who weren’t ideologues, but were motivated by very petty prejudice, and fear of the unknown, and sought to allay those fears in the simplest ways. It’s one thing to hate the nebulous prospect of new housing, new neighbors, and a community one doesn’t interact with past lurid news reports, but it’s quite another to hate a person inviting you into their home.

Those stories were for the most part uplifting (even with upsetting moments like the drive-by screaming of epithets), and necessary, considering the sad and pointless spiral of Nick Wasicsko’s life. Show Me a Hero’s biggest challenge is depicting that arc in a way that makes sense, since it seems everyone agrees that while Nick’s suicide had some external motivations (lost elections, the city investigations), he doesn’t come across as a particularly depressed or volatile person in earlier episodes, someone who might be prone to such a drastic decision. I understood the roots of his depression, and the foolish political choices he made that dug him into a professional hole, but more than that, I understood his loss of pride in himself, even if his need to take credit for the housing was somewhat foolish (as you noted, Brentin, most of the work was done before he became Mayor, and his real heroism was just refusing to capitulate to public pressure).

What I loved was how Nick just seemed like a ghost in the final episode, wandering around the townhouses looking for some kind of kudos, sitting at the back of the housing lottery but failing to draw real pleasure from the new residents’ joy. More than anything, he was a politician, and that’s a life that is thoroughly unrewarding if you aren’t behind a dais drawing applause from local residents. Nick had a legacy to point to, and reason to take some personal pride in the housing units, even though he was just one actor in their construction. But those facts weren’t enough—he needed plaudits, too, and as he sought them with implausible runs for office (ruining his friendship with Vinni Restiano in the process), he got further and further away from them.

It’s a simple equation, but still a powerful one, as senseless as Nick’s loss is. It feels easily avoided, but so many horrible things that happened during this saga felt equally easy to avoid, yet nonetheless fated—simple prejudices rooted in decades of complex history. David Simon and Bill Zorzi’s achievement is that they took that history and made something that didn’t feel entirely fatalistic, that was optimistic and pessimistic, that didn’t feel like a university lecture, but a complicated examination of the good and bad in a story that, in someone else’s hands, would be so easy to simplify.

The Oliver Sacks Reading List

Oliver Sacks always seemed propelled by joyful curiosity. The neurologist’s writing is infused with this quality—equal parts buoyancy and diligence, the exuberant asking of difficult questions.

More specifically, Sacks had a fascination with ways of seeing and hearing and thinking. Which is another way of exploring experiences of living. He focused on modes of perception that are delightful not only because they are subjective, but precisely because they are very often faulty.

To say Sacks had a gift for this method of exploration is an understatement. He was a master at connecting curiosity to observation, and observation to emotion. Sacks died on Sunday after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis earlier this year. He was 82.

Over the course of his life’s work, Sacks approached his many questions with rigorous intellect and, above all, empathy. The best word for this, maybe, is grace. And it’s everywhere in the elegant body of work he left behind—his many books, but also his shorter essays and interviews.

Here’s a small sampling of some of Sacks’s great conversations and shorter reflections.

* * *

“Sabbath,” The New York Times, 2015

Sacks reflects on what it means to live a good and worthwhile life — and what it took for him to achieve “a sense of peace within oneself.”

Almost unconsciously, I became a storyteller at a time when medical narrative was almost extinct. This did not dissuade me, for I felt my roots lay in the great neurological case histories of the 19th century (and I was encouraged here by the great Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria). It was a lonely but deeply satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.

* * *

“Seeing God in the Third Millennium,” The Atlantic, 2012

Sacks explores how the brain creates out-of-body experiences and religious epiphanies.

The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others. For those who are religiously inclined, [a near-death experience] may seem to offer "proof of heaven," as Eben Alexander puts it.

Some religious people come to experience their proof of heaven by another route—the route of prayer, as the anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann has explored in her book When God Talks Back. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. Luhrmann wondered how, in the face of this lack of evidence, God becomes a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith.

* * *

Fresh Air interview, 1987

Oliver Sacks talks to NPR’s Terry Gross about the relationship between the body and the mind—especially among patients whose ability to connect the two is altered.

The ‘absolutely other’ always seems uncanny and horrible and obscene and unholy and godforsaken. Words like this, or concepts like this, will be used by every patient,  irrespective of background of intelligence of education. The alienation is almost intrinsically in the area of subjectivity is sort of felt as anti-poetic, anti-religious. And by the same token, when it comes back, there’s the feeling, to quote Dante, of the “holy  and glorious flesh.” The body, in health, is always sort of felt as beautiful and holy, although one may not appreciate this until it is taken away.

* * *

“Altered States,” New Yorker, 2012

Sacks describes his experimentation with drugs, the resultant hallucinations, and how book-writing replaced his amphetamine habit.

I went back into the house and put on the kettle for another cup of tea, when my attention was caught by a spider on the kitchen wall. As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, “Hello!” It did not seem at all strange to me that a spider should say hello (any more than it seemed strange to Alice when the White Rabbit spoke). I said, “Hello, yourself,” and with this we started a conversation, mostly on rather technical matters of analytic philosophy. Perhaps this direction was suggested by the spider’s opening comment: did I think that Bertrand Russell had exploded Frege’s paradox? Or perhaps it was its voice—pointed, incisive, and just like Russell’s voice, which I had heard on the radio. (Decades later, I mentioned the spider’s Russellian tendencies to my friend Tom Eisner, an entomologist; he nodded sagely and said, “Yes, I know the species.”)

* * *

“This Year, Change Your Mind,” The New York Times, 2010

Sacks explores the extent to which a person’s brain can—and should—be “re-wired,” especially in old age.

To what extent are we shaped by, and to what degree do we shape, our own brains? And can the brain’s ability to change be harnessed to give us greater cognitive powers? The experiences of many people suggest that it can.

* * *

“My Own Life,” The New York Times, 2015

Sacks’s essay about learning of his terminal cancer.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

* * *

“My Periodic Table,” The New York Times, 2015

Reflections on the years of life and their corresponding elements from the periodic table.

A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky “powdered with stars” (in Milton’s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.

...

And now, at this juncture, when death is no longer an abstract concept, but a presence — an all-too-close, not-to-be-denied presence — I am again surrounding myself, as I did when I was a boy, with metals and minerals, little emblems of eternity. At one end of my writing table, I have element 81 in a charming box, sent to me by element-friends in England: It says, “Happy Thallium Birthday,”a souvenir of my 81st birthday last July; then, a realm devoted to lead, element 82, for my just celebrated 82nd birthday earlier this month. Here, too, is a little lead casket, containing element 90, thorium, crystalline thorium, as beautiful as diamonds, and, of course, radioactive — hence the lead casket.

* * *

“Strangers in the Mirror,” Radiolab, 2010

A conversation between Sacks, the artist Chuck Close, and the Radiolab host Robert Krulwich about what it's like to live with Face Blindness—a condition that Sacks and Close both have.

Several times I have started apologizing to large, clumsy, bearded people and realize that it's a mirror. But it's even gone a stage further than that. Fairly recently, I was in a cafe in Chelsea Market with tables outside and while I was waiting for my food I was doing what people with beards often do: I started to preen myself and then I realized that my reflection was not doing the same thing. And that inside there was a man with a beard, possibly you, who wondered why I was sort of making faces at him.

* * *

“Mishearings,” The New  York Times, 2015

Sacks on finding delight in aberrations in hearing, and the strange concoctions that come from mishearing someone.

Every mishearing is a novel concoction. The hundredth mishearing is as fresh and as surprising as the first. … Mishearings are not hallucinations, but like hallucinations they utilize the usual pathways of perception and pose as reality — it does not occur to one to question them. But since all of our perceptions must be constructed by the brain, from often meager and ambiguous sensory data, the possibility of error or deception is always present. Indeed, it is a marvel that our perceptions are so often correct, given the rapidity, the near instantaneity, with which they are constructed.

* * *

“Doctors Talk About Their Writing,” The New York Times, 1986

Sacks describes how “The Case of George Dedlow,” a short story about a Union army doctor published in The Atlantic in 1866, influenced his approach to writing.

So Silas Weir Mitchell, a young neurologist of rising reputation, opened “The Case of George Dedlow,” which he published, with some hesitation, in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1866.

This case, mildly fictionalized but based on one personally known to him, was distinguished by a minuteness of clinical description, a degree of empathy, a brilliance of language and a boldness of imagination he had never dared show in his medical articles. It kindled the imagination of the public and the annoyance of his colleagues.

I cannot help identifying with Mitchell's predicament, his equivocal position between medicine and literature - though, unlike Mitchell, who wrote many novels later, I have no literary aspirations whatever, only the desire to report clinical reality in all its richness.

* * *

Q&A with The Economist, 2010

I always wanted to get people's stories and access to their lives. I feel I'm at the interface of biography and biology, person and person-hood. I remember one man with Tourettes, who wrote and said that he had 'a tourettised soul', it affects one and one affects it—there's a liaison of a sort. A condition is sometimes a collusion, and sometimes a compromise.

Although it's up to me as a neurologist to diagnose the disease and to think in therapeutic terms, I always want to address the person as much as the disease, and I'm very glad my own doctor feels similarly. I'm not just a case to him, I'm a person responding to the situation. So I somehow sit between the biology and the humanist point of view.

* * *

Q&A with Wired, 2009

Well, [my hallucinations] are rather dull by comparison. I don’t see any images. I tend to see things like capital letters and numbers all jumbled up and moving rapidly. It’s almost like a sort of Rosetta Stone. I can’t actually read anything. All I see are isolated letters and sometimes strings of letters. These flicker and are faint and easily ignored…. They’re black and white. I also see chessboards, which again are black and white…. Geometrical patterns go with activity [in] the primary visual cortex.

* * *

TED talk, 2009

Sacks describes his research into blindness and geometrical hallucinations, and wonders whether cave art may have been derived from them.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our inscapes. We've lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations are completely different. They don't seem to be of our creation. They don't seem to be under our control. They seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception.

* * *

“The Joy of Old Age,” The New York Times, 2013

At 80, Sacks reflects on what it's like to feel as though life is still just beginning.

One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60.

The Village That Will Be Swept Away

NEWTOK, Alaska—Two decades ago, the people of this tiny village came to terms with what had become increasingly obvious: They could no longer fight back the rising waters.

Their homes perched on a low-lying, treeless tuft of land between two rivers on Alaska’s west coast, residents saw the water creeping closer every year, gobbling up fields where they used to pick berries and hunt moose. Paul and Teresa Charles watched from their blue home on stilts on Newtok’s southern side as the Ninglick River inched closer and closer, bringing with it the salt waters of the Bering Sea.

“Sometimes, we lose 100 feet a year,” Paul Charles told me, over a bowl of moose soup.

Many communities across the world are trying to stay put as the climate changes, installing expensive levees and dikes and pumps, but not Newtok, a settlement of about 350 members of the Yupik people. In 1996, the village decided that fighting Mother Nature was fruitless, and they voted to move to a new piece of land nine miles away, elevated on bedrock.

It wasn’t an easy decision, to leave behind the place where many of them were born, and where most have memories of following their parents and grandparents out on the tundra to hunt and fish. But villagers could see the water creeping closer to their homes and school, which the Army Corps of Engineers said could be underwater as soon as 2017.

Alana Semuels

Newtok is eroding in part because it sits on permafrost, a once-permanently frozen sublayer of soil found in Arctic region. As temperatures increase in Alaska, that permafrost is melting, leading to rapid erosion. Snow is melting earlier in the spring in Alaska, sea ice is disappearing and the ocean temperature is increasing. Alaska is warming at a rate two to three times faster than the mainland United States, and the average winter temperature has risen 6.3 degrees over the past 50 years.

Alaska sits on the front lines of climate change. But the rest of the nation is getting warmer, too, and so communities across the country may soon have to face some of the same problems. That’s one reason President Obama is visiting the region this week.

“What’s happening in Alaska isn’t just a preview of what will happen to the rest of us if we don’t take action,” Obama said in a video previewing his visit. “It’s our wakeup call.”

But many of the nation’s climate change policies are focused on helping victims rebuild in place after a disaster. There’s little funding or political will to spend money on moving communities away from disaster-prone zones to prevent tragedies from happening, perhaps because policymakers don’t want to believe the dire predictions about what will happen to many of the nation’s coastal villages and towns.

But the experience of Alaska shows that failing to take action could be costly. A  2003 report from the Government Accountability Office found that most of Alaska’s 200-plus native villages are affected by erosion and flooding, and that four were in “imminent danger.” By 2009, the GAO said 31 villages were in imminent danger.

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As of this year, though, only a few of those villages are making immediate plans to move. Newtok is the furthest along of these four villages in its relocation efforts, and the scariest part is that it isn’t very far along at all.

* * *

Newtok is an isolated village. There are no roads that lead there—the only way a visitor can get in or out is by a propeller plane that stops by a few times each day, except in inclement weather. There are no roads in Newtok, either— boardwalks run between the homes and the school and the post office, and just about every family has a small boat that is its primary mode of transportation.

It wasn’t that long ago that Yupik communities like this one were nomadic, traveling to the rivers to catch salmon and to higher ground when the waters rose. But between 1900 and 1950, as missionaries in Alaska tried to “civilize” native Alaskans, the Yupik began to settle in villages, in part because of legislation that required all children of a certain age to attend school. One group of people ended up in the place where Newtok now stands in part because a federal-government barge carrying a new school building could only reach this far up the Newtok River before getting stuck.

The river is fast approaching Newtok’s series of boardwalks. (Alana Semuels)

Villagers did not abandon their lifestyle just because they began living in a town with a post office and electricity. This is still a place built on a subsistence system, where residents survive off moose, seals, fish, berries, and other local plants all year round. The homes, small wooden boxes on stilts, often have pelts from a musk ox hanging on their porches, or moose antlers stacked alongside the snowmobiles and ATVs in the yard. As Canadian geese caw overhead, different breeds of dogs run throughout the village, a reminder of the dog teams that used to help villagers travel through snow. Just about every house has a small shelter out back where residents hang the moose, seal, and fish they’ve caught to dry.

As I wandered around town, I encountered Zenia Andy, who was watching her son Paiton disembowel a seal he had hunted. His hands stained red with blood, he gutted the creature with  an ulu, a sharp rounded blade attached to a handle. He separated the ribs, the heart, the flippers, the head, carefully saving every part.

Americans are still focused on responding to climate-related disasters, not preventing them.

The dedication to this subsistence lifestyle could have made it difficult for residents to pick up and move, since most Alaska Natives want to continue to be close to traditional hunting grounds but high enough off the land that the rising tides will not displace them ever again. Kivalina and Shismaref, two of the other threatened Alaska Native villages, have struggled to find a place to relocate that is within reach of their traditional hunting grounds and can also withstand decades of melting permafrost, Robin Bronen, the executive director of the Alaska Immigration Justice Project, told me.

But Newtok was lucky. Villagers had once spent summers nine miles from Newtok on a place called Nelson Island, part of a vast stretch of land on Alaska’s western coast that sits on volcanic bedrock elevated from the river. Villagers voted to move there, to a piece of land they call Mertarvik, which in Yupik means “getting water from the stream.”

In 1996, the Newtok Native Corporation, which was then the village’s governing body, passed a resolution allowing leaders to negotiate with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which managed the land where Mertarvik sits. Newtok had to hire a lobbyist to prod Congress for eight years to get title to the land, Bronen said, and in exchange they offered to relent their claim to their current land and allow the government to turn it into a wildlife refuge. This shouldn’t have been a difficult swap—fly over Mertarvik or Newtok by plane, and all you can see is vast stretches of land and water with no development (or trees) whatsoever. The trade was finally approved in 2003.

But it’s been 12 years since then and not a whole lot has happened since, despite two massive flooding incidents in 2004 and 2005, one of which temporarily turned Newtok into an island. Three homes have been constructed in Mertarvik, but no one lives there year round. There’s a half-completed evacuation center next to piles of pipes and Dura-base flooring.

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Alaska’s Climate Refugees

“We’ve been waiting so long. I don’t know. I’m beginning to lose a little bit of hope,” Newtok resident Jimmy Charles told me as he stopped by the one-room post office to pick up his mail.

The difficulty of relocating Newtok was evident from the beginning. Most villages can’t find funding for relocation projects because the costs often outweigh the expected benefits, according to the 2003 GAO report. Money to build new runways is usually only available after the old runways have been flooded or eroded, not to prevent such flooding from happening. It’s expensive to bring in materials and labor to remote villages, and the Army Corps of Engineers requires villages to pay up to half of the costs of these projects—“funding that many of them do not have,” according to the report. Dave Williams, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project manager in Alaska, told me his group had been approved to build a road and community building at the new site. Newtok would be required to pay 35 percent of the costs, but has not followed through on the necessary paperwork, he said. The Corps estimated that moving Newtok could cost $130 million in total.

The whole effort to move a village feels a bit like a giant Catch-22: The school district won’t build a new school at the new site until 25 families live there, but no families want to live there without a school. The FAA won’t fund the design and construction of the Newtok airport until there is power generation at Mertarvik to provide runway lighting, but without an airport, it’s difficult to get a power source there. Mail service requires at least 25 families and regularly scheduled transportation to the community, which doesn’t exist without an airport.

Paiton Andy gets help from friends gutting a seal. (Alana Semuels)

Newtok’s experience demonstrates that decades after the nation first became familiar with climate change, Americans are still focused on responding to climate-related disasters, not preventing them.

“In almost every disaster event in America, from Hurricane Sandy to tornadoes in Oklahoma, the rally cry of ‘we will rebuild’ and FEMA’s support of rebuilding in place exemplifies the hazard-centric idea that disasters are one-off aberrations of normal conditions and that increased warning infrastructure, response plans, and technological interventions can prevent the next disaster,” writes Elizabeth Marino, an anthropologist who has studied Shismaref and has a book coming out about the town’s efforts to move. “Rebuilding in the same way, in the same place leaves no space for reconsidering our relationship with the environment.”  

In Kivalina, for example, the U.S. government completed a $2.5 million sea wall to protect the village from the sea in 2006 to great fanfare. The wall was partially destroyed in a storm surge the same year, according to Bronen. In 1900, Galveston, Texas, was destroyed by a hurricane that killed 6,000 people, but the city rebuilt, only to be damaged repeatedly by storms, including Hurricane Ike in 2008. The city is now considering building an “Ike Dike,” which would cost billions.  

Still, no matter how compelling it might be to try and move Newtok, neither the state nor federal government has the authority or the funding to spearhead the move.

“There has not been any formal direction on how to proceed on all of this,” Sally Russell Cox, a planner with Alaska’s Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development, told me. “While I can advise and assist and provide resources, it’s really the community that’s supposed to be relocating themselves.”

I was referred to Cox by a number of different governmental agencies when I asked for a name of a point person on the move. Yet Cox told me she was never asked to formally lead any sort of relocation project, it’s just fallen to her because she heads her department’s division of community and rural affairs.

To be sure, there are problems inherent in having a state or federal agency step in and move a Native community, but the village voted to move itself, and needs assistance and funding to carry out those plans. Yet there is nowhere the village could apply on the state level to get the funding they need to move, said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

“To my knowledge, there is no mechanism within any of the departments of state government that could wholly fund the move of Newtok to Mertarvik,” he told me.

Funds are even tighter now that Alaska is facing a $3.7 billion budget deficit because of the declining price of oil. The state gets almost 90 percent of its revenues from oil taxes and royalties.

The river is eroding whole chunks of land near homes. (Alana Semuels)

While it has waited for funding, erosion has made Newtok even more isolated.  In 1996, the Newtok river was captured by the Ninglick River, creating more powerful tides on the smaller river, and in 2005, a raging storm temporarily turned the village into an island. A 2013 storm destroyed the barge landing where the town gets most of its supplies. The barge now drops off goods at a makeshift landing on ground that is continuing to erode.

“It’s getting closer each year,” Zenia Andy told me, as her son gutted the seal. She glanced up at the river, which is now just a few hundred feet from her house. “It used to be so far away.”

The community members in 2006 partnered with state and federal agencies to create the Newtok Planning Group, which meets a few times a year to coordinate efforts. But the group comes with no funding mandate, nor does it have much authority. Four homes close to the Ninglick River need to be moved, but when the group asked the Natural Resources Conservation Service for funding to do so, they were told the move would not meet the program’s criteria. Funds designated by Congress to move communities like Newtok were instead used to study the feasibility of a move, Bronen told me.

The villagers’ biggest hope for funding is now FEMA, thanks to the 2013 storm and the subsequent flooding, which allowed Newtok to apply for $4 million of FEMA funds through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. That money, if it is approved, will be used to relocate 12 homes and buy out five homeowners in Newtok, who can use that money to build a new house in Mertarvik. But that application was submitted in July and funds won’t be available for another year.

The two decades the village has been trying to move seem especially long when compared to the amount of time it took the village of Pattonsburg, Missouri, to move after the Great Flood of 1993. The community had experienced floods for years, but the Great Flood buried homes and businesses under 20 feet of water. That year, the village voted to move, and by 1994, the town of New Pattonsburg had been established on higher ground. All it took was a disaster.

* * *

Nine miles may sound close to people accustomed to paved roads, highways, and dense cities. But the nine-mile-long ride from Newtok to Mertarvik is 50 minutes on a bumpy boat across a river so wide it looks like the sea. In the winter, villagers go back and forth by snowmobile once the river freezes up, and they say that freeze-up is happening later and later. Boat and snowmobile are the only way to get between the two sites.

I visited Mertarvik with Tom John, a tribal administrator, and his wife Bernice, on a recent August afternoon. We had to wait for high tide, since the Newtok river is now too shallow during low tide for boats. As the motor coughed up mud, we headed out to the wider waters of the Ninglick River. We passed land sloughing off into the sea and signs of erosion everywhere, as if someone had taken a guillotine and chopped the Earth away. Though it was summer, typically an easy time to get across, the air was cold and the water bumpy, and the journey felt long.

Andrew Burton / Getty images

We arrived in Mertarvik, parked the boat at a small dirt beach there, and walked up a steep ramp of road made from Dura-base—mats that are easier and faster to install than roads—laid by the military as part of the Defense Department’s Innovative Readiness Training program, which seeks to deploy military personnel to help civilian communities as part of war preparation. (The soldiers have since left.)

In addition to the Dura-base road and three tan houses on the hillside, there are the beginnings of a massive evacuation center, funded by Alaska’s state legislature, but so far, only the foundation has been completed. Nails are falling out of the stairway leading to the elevated evacuation center, which had been considered a top priority because the village needs somewhere to house families while their homes are being transported between the two sites. (A 2013 audit of the evacuation center found that the group in charge of building the center, the Newtok Traditional Council, failed to inspect the workmanship and the materials. That council has been replaced by the Newtok Village Council, which employs Tom John.)

It was spitting rain and windy the day we visited Mertarvik, weather that will become more common through the fall months, the Johns told me. The wet weather only made the urgency of the move more evident to them as they stood on this high mountain, looking out over the water towards their village, which this fall will be threatened with floods every time it rains.

“We have to get it right this time,” Tom John told me, standing on the platform of the rickety evaluation center as his grandson played on nearby abandoned construction vehicles.

“The whole world is watching us,” Bernice added, and then she headed off to a nearby field to pick salmon berries and blackberries.

Bernice and Tom John in the half-completed evacuation center in Mertarvik. (Alana Semuels)

Much of the move is out of their hands, though. Without a major influx of new homes and an airport it will be difficult to convince anyone to live in Mertarvik. And without more money—a lot more money—the town can’t build anything.

Lisa and Jeff Charles and their five children moved to one of the three new homes in Mertarvik in the summer of 2012. There was no electricity or running water, so the experience felt like camping, but they enjoyed the quiet, Lisa Charles told me. But their children needed to go to school, so the family couldn’t stay in Mertarvik during the school year.

When Lisa got pregnant, she didn’t want to be a 50-minute boat ride from medical care. Though they could survive on the food they caught, the Charles’ have loans to pay, for the snowmobiles and ATV that allow them to subsistence hunt. To pay those loans, they needed jobs back in the village. After the summer, they returned home to Newtok, and the tribal council gave the Mertarvik home to someone else.

* * *

While the village waits to move to Mertarvik, Newtok is falling apart. State agencies have been hesitant to invest in the town, since it is supposed to be moving soon. The boardwalks connecting the homes are rotted, their nails falling out, pieces of wood surrendered to the mud. A small spit of land runs between the air strip and the village, but the boardwalk connecting the two has gaping holes, making the ride over it in a four-wheeler harrowing.

Without running water or toilets, villagers use “honey buckets” for waste, which they dump into the river, but high waters sometimes bring waste back into the village. The dump site was lost to erosion, and the new dump is only accessible during high tide by boat. “Do not burn your trash here,” one sign reads on the banks of the Ninglick River.

The village’s water supply, a freshwater lake, is just a few hundred feet from the saltwater river—in a severe storm, it could be compromised by the saltwater. A rickety series of pipes, held up on stilts, connects the lake to a shed where villagers collect tap water, where the boardwalk is nearly always covered in mud and trash.

The deterioration is taking a toll on public health. Between 1994 and 2009, more than one-quarter of infants in Newtok were hospitalized with lower respiratory tract infections, which meant Newtok had one of the highest rates of infection in the state. Public health professionals in 2006 found that inadequate levels of drinking water and high levels of contamination from honey bucket waste could be contributing to the infections.

Lisa Charles raised two of her children in Anchorage, and the rest in Newtok. Her infants had no health problems in Anchorage, but in Newtok, two of her babies came down with fevers and respiratory infections, she told me.

With little progress on Mertarvik and the water continuing to rise, it’s unclear how much longer the villagers will wait. If they leave and head to a bigger city, the centuries-old traditions and culture that they’ve preserved could disappear.

“My kids’ education comes first,” Zenia Andy told me, when I asked her whether she planned to move. If the school begins to lose teachers and students, she may move her family somewhere else.

The waters could reach Newtok’s school by 2017. (Alana Semuels)

Another resident, Jimmy Charles, told me that his children didn’t want to stay in Newtok because of the frequent floods.

Lisa and Jeff Charles have stuck around despite the floods and the health scares because they think Newtok is a good place to raise their children, and they want their kids to have the same experiences they did, trapping muskrats in the winter and fishing in the summer for survival. But Lisa Charles is beginning to worry for their safety. During the 2013 storm, she and her family watched as the water got higher and higher, eventually reaching 20 feet from their house. Charles eventually evacuated her grandmother and children to the school to be safe.

She wants to stay and relocate the nine miles across the water to Mertarvik, but she’s been waiting a long time.

“If it gets too dangerous, I have to get my kids out,” she told me.

Over the past few weeks, the fall rains have started, once again threatening to flood her hometown.

‘Like the Fishes and the Loaves’

When Tricia Bliler came out of her front door after the winds and surge of Hurricane Katrina finally passed, she saw a police car washed up like driftwood against the building across the street. It was the first of many bad signs.

Bliler had perched on her kitchen counter and watched the clock as the storm surge washed through her apartment in the beachfront town of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The water rose for half an hour, remained for an hour or so, then fell for the next half hour. Once it receded, she set off walking the ruined streets of the town, to see how bad it was and to figure out what to do.

At first she saw no one, only wrecked houses, fallen trees, overturned boats, and downed power lines. Eventually, she passed the police cruiser a second time and noticed that someone had removed one of its wheels. The next time she passed, another wheel was missing, and then another. By the time she got back to the apartment all four had disappeared. Bliler has no idea who took the wheels or why, nor how long she wandered the town.

She doesn’t know why she felt compelled to hide behind a tree, later that night, from the probing beam of a helicopter. Everything was just so confusing and surreal. A moment of clarity came after she saw a man wandering alone in a tuxedo. She figured he’d lost everything in the flood and found some dry clothes at the wrecked formalwear store nearby. Surveying the anarchy, she says, “I thought: It’s official—everybody’s crazy but me, and that’s the way I’m gonna play it.” And so her personal transformation began.

“I felt like people were being assigned roles in a play, and I wasn’t there when they were doing that. And I just got this role.”

On a recent balmy summer day in Bay St. Louis, 10 years after the fact, Bliler sat in a coffee shop recalling how she was transformed from a waitress at the Good Life bar to the leader of the closest thing in contemporary America to a post-apocalyptic tribe. She had not expected that to happen, it just did, she said. She became the person everyone turns to when it all goes to pieces.

Bliler did not evacuate before the storm because her closest friends had decided not to leave. As she puts it, “George wanted to stay and Wanda didn’t want to leave him and Loretta wanted to stay because Wanda was staying,” and so on. The group had spent the first night after the storm in her sodden apartment. But the water was contaminated by all manner of chemicals and pathogens, and if they remained they would almost certainly get sick. So they set off in search of a dry place and eventually climbed through a broken window in the 2nd Street Elementary School, which was situated on slightly higher ground. “I looked at it like the biggest camping trip ever,” she says. “It was in for a penny, in for a pound.”

They were deliberating about what to do when the local fire chief showed up on foot. The city’s fire stations and emergency-response vehicles had been destroyed or rendered unusable by the storm. Seeing Bliler and her friends outside the school, he asked who was in charge. “No one answered,” Bliler says. “They’re all looking at me. I said, ‘Okay,’ and I stepped forward and said, ‘I am.’”

Though Bliler did not know it at the time, a similar scenario was playing out across the bay. Beyond the collapsed highway bridge, in the community of DeLisle, a woman from a very different background, Martha Murphy, was leading her own version of a post-apocalyptic tribe. Murphy had likewise not expected to take the helm. As she later put it, “I felt like people were being assigned roles in a play, and I wasn’t there when they were doing that. And I just got this role.”

Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, on August 31, 2005 (Frank Polich / Reuters)

When I arrived in Mississippi 10 years ago to cover Katrina’s aftermath, the media’s attention was focused on New Orleans. Many Americans were only peripherally aware of the cataclysm that had occurred—and was still occurring—on the Gulf Coast. New Orleans had been hit by hurricane-force winds, but the greatest loss of life had been caused by flooding. Most of the buildings along the low-lying coast had been simply obliterated.

In Bay St. Louis, a town of about 8,000 an hour east of New Orleans, I found wrecked sailboats and overturned cars blocking the streets. Downed power lines crisscrossed everything. Broken buildings straddled violently twisted railroad tracks. The few old beachfront mansions that were still standing could be heard groaning in slow collapse as timbers gave way. Dishes and glass shattered. Dogs wandered the beaches and streets in search of missing owners. Survivors had gone days without adequate food and water, cars, electricity, phones, or medical care. They were looking for loved ones and possessions and sleeping fitfully on porches, atop sodden mattresses, in ruined cars, or on the beach. The smell of death and decay permeated the humid air.

Asking around, I was told that even after the Red Cross, the National Guard, and FEMA had arrived, Tricia Bliler was the person to talk to. This turned out to be true, but it appeared to be a source of some discomfort for government officials who were deliberating what to do about her unauthorized shelter.

At the time, Bliler—a diminutive, attractive woman—was 32 years old. Before Katrina’s 30-foot tidal surge and 120-mph winds devastated Bay St. Louis, she’d eked out a living waiting tables and spent almost all of her time within four or five square blocks of what is locally known as Old Town. Immediately after the storm, she found herself unexpectedly in charge of … basically, all of it.

After they climbed in the school window, Bliler says, she and her friends found a barbecue grill and started cooking food from her refrigerator that would otherwise have spoiled. As other survivors began emerging from their houses, they saw her cooking, realized that they, too, had food that was going to spoil, and added theirs to the mix. Then the fire chief showed up, and he asked if she had heard about the chaos in New Orleans. She told him she had, on her battery-powered radio. “Then you know it’s flooding and it’s about to get bad,” he said, and advised her to make use of the stockpiles of food in the school cafeteria—which was then still locked up—for her rapidly expanding group of refugees.

So they broke into the cafeteria, and when they saw how much food was there, he said, “Don’t tell anyone, or you’ll cause a riot,” Bliler recalls. Bliler cooked on the wood-fired grill well into the night. “People kept coming. It was like the fishes and the loaves,” she says. “A boy came who hadn’t had any food, and when I gave him something he cried. And it just went from there. It just kept getting bigger.”

She went through a lone bus parked outside and retrieved the first aid kits that she knew were kept under the seats, which was a good thing because afterward someone hot-wired and stole the bus. “The next day ambulances started dropping people off at the school,” she says. “It just started happening on its own. I remember one day, around dark-thirty, I had this feeling like I was outside my body, watching everything. I had the feeling that everything that’s ever happened to me, all the jobs that didn’t work out, all the triples and doubles and hard work and the babysitting drunks, all the failed relationships, was preparing me for this. It was building up to this.”

A week later, she was cooking 300 meals a day for a growing tribe of storm victims who had lost everything and for whom no official relief had yet come. At one point, she noticed a girl signing in and recognized her as the daughter of Andy Grass, the cook at the Good Life bar. “I said, ‘Tell him to get his ass down here,’ and she did, and he came and brought another cook and Bonnie, another waitress there.”

By the time I arrived at the 2nd Street School, the shelter’s frenzied volunteers were scrambling to help the evacuees, cook and serve meals, and unload truckloads of donated items from all over the United States. Red Cross worker Liz Goodburn, hovering nearby with a notepad, asked how many meals Bliler was serving, and Bliler responded, “I’ve got three cooks. Talk to Andy. He’s the one with the less stress.” Then she was on to something else. Behind her, stacked in the school cafeteria, were cases of Germ-X disinfectant soap, disposable diapers, bottled water, and canned food, all free for the taking. The day was suffocatingly hot and humid, indoors and out; the only source of electricity was one small generator, and everyone was soaked with sweat.

“All you have to do is watch Tricia for five minutes, and if she asks you to do something, by God, you do it.”

I watched as a volunteer spoke to Bliler and she immediately sat down at her police radio and sent out a call for an ambulance. “I’ve got a diabetic who hasn’t had insulin since the hurricane and he needs to go to the hospital,” she said into the mouthpiece.

There was no response. She repeated the request. Still no reply. Then she looked up at the group standing nearby: a sunburned National Guardsman, two Red Cross workers and a FEMA representative in spotless agency logo shirts, and me. “Does anybody have a vehicle?” she asked. “We’ve got to get this guy to the hospital.”

Each of us waited for someone else to respond.

“I need a vehicle to take this guy to the hospital,” she repeated.

Finally there was nothing to do but volunteer. “I’ve got a vehicle.”

“Will you take him?” Bliler asked, and a minute later the diabetic and I were off to a MASH unit on the grounds of the hospital, which had flooded and was out of commission. A representative of a bureaucratic government agency might have needed clearance before transporting a sick or injured person to a hospital. With Bliler, things worked differently. As one volunteer later said, “All you have to do is watch Tricia for five minutes, and if she asks you to do something, by God, you do it.”

Martha Murphy looks through the window of a building she built near her makeshift shelter in DeLisle, Mississippi. (Laura Lyons)

Across the bay, in the small community of DeLisle, that person was Martha Murphy. Until that moment, Murphy’s life had been markedly different from Bliler’s. She was comparatively wealthy and well connected. But when I began telling her about Bliler finding the barbecue grill, she interrupted to finish the sentence: “And then she was cooking for everyone.” She knew because the same thing had happened to her.

Murphy had evacuated before the storm and returned late the next night in a caravan of vehicles bearing donated supplies. Her family’s long-time home in nearby Henderson Point had been reduced to a concrete slab, and in the darkness of a wrecked church she found a group of frightened, soaked survivors, most of whom had had to swim out of inundated buildings the day before.

“Everyone was hot, wet,” she recalled as she sat in a comfortable chair in her Uptown New Orleans home, where she now lives. “They had only dim lights because the batteries were running out. I had brought batteries and water. There was a man who was having to ration his oxygen. I had oxygen in the car.” No one was in charge in DeLisle, and there was no official disaster center, so she found herself taking control. “You want to think there’s somebody behind the curtain, making sure everything works. We all need help. But in this case, I’m elected, because my clothes are dry.”

“One day you’ve got this fully developed life, and the next day, nothing. You had to rethink everything about your existence.”

Like Bliler, Murphy broke into the damaged local school with her friends and set up a relief base. Like Bliler, she found a grill and started cooking. Soon, she found herself marshaling resources and taking unilateral action. At one point, she felled a tree with her chainsaw to make space for a relief helicopter to land—then watched in disbelief as aid workers tossed out supplies while a guard held a gun on the storm victims to keep them at bay.

On one of the rare occasions when she was able to get cell service, Murphy recalls, she enlisted the help of friends and family to send equipment to set up water wells. They sent 17 trucks and set up three wells. At the time, Murphy was living out of her car, and when she was able to communicate with volunteers who were headed her way, she told them, “You need to think of going on a hunting trip with no lodge. We have nothing. Bring everything. We’ve got to step forward to reach the Stone Age. We’re primitive people hoping for fire. We’re not even hunter-gatherers yet.”

Murphy helped funnel supplies and financial assistance to storm victims, including contributions from writer John Grisham and his wife, Renee, who showed up at the DeLisle school within days of the storm. By the second weekend, donated medical supplies began to arrive, and a stranger from Michigan showed up and asked how he could help. Murphy asked him, “What do you do in the other world?” and he told her he was a surgeon. “He said, ‘You’ve got $5 million worth of medical supplies here. I can help.’” Soon victims were lining up for surgery on the cafeteria table.

“One guy left me with an ice chest of full of tetanus syringes,” Murphy says. “There was no agency there, so he just gave them to us. I said, ‘I’ve never given anyone a tetanus shot,’ and he said, ‘You’ll figure it out.’” Though she found a nurse to help, Murphy also ended up administering the shots. “Basically, we operated a medical clinic without liability,” she says. She later walked to the ruins of the county health-department building and left a note in a baggy, duct taped to a door, explaining that she was operating a clinic without a license and needed help. They got word to her to keep at it. Eventually, the University of Alabama Medical School sent people to assist her.

“The administrative structures no long existed,” she says. “You had to have the ability to adjust. One day you’ve got this fully developed life, and the next day, nothing. You had to rethink everything about your existence. Our lives were ordered before. Then it was utter chaos. Trying to make sense of the chaos was comforting. Organizing things. A sense of order and dignity was important.”

Like Bliler, Murphy found that she was oddly prepared to assume a leadership role. What she was unprepared for was the official reaction. She recalls seeing a relief helicopter hovering over the site, shining its lights on the primitive DeLisle encampment, and says, “They came to arrest me the next day.”

When the Homeland Security agents arrived, Murphy says, she was standing outside the DeLisle school, dressed in dirty, sweat-stained clothes. By then her group had accumulated so many supplies, “the theory was that either we were profiteering or looting.” The agents had heard that she was storing gasoline, which was in short supply. When they asked her where she was keeping it, she refused to tell them. She says the agents bound her hands in snap-tie cuffs and prepared to take her away. But the local police chief intervened: His headquarters and vehicles had been destroyed by the hurricane, and Murphy had been sharing her fuel supply with him. She was released, but she says she lost count of the number of times the agents returned, threatening to arrest her.

“I learned so much about the mechanics of prejudice,” Murphy says. “The people who had the least were the most sharing, but they [the authorities] thought we were savages because we didn’t have clean clothes.” Whatever financial or social status Murphy had enjoyed before the storm no longer mattered.

At the 2nd Street School, Bliler was also setting up a drinking-water supply, using a water purification system brought by a volunteer group from Oxford, Mississippi. She set up a sign-in area where survivors logged their names, where they had been during the storm, and where they were going. “I was thinking people would be trying to find people,” she says. “I was also thinking the Red Cross will be here soon and I’ll be out of here. It didn’t work out that way.”

When trucks began to arrive with supplies donated by church groups, businesses, and other volunteers from across the country, the drivers inevitably found their way to the 2nd Street School. National Guardsmen from Florida helped her clean out the building, but the Red Cross declined to help because the shelter was unauthorized. At one point, Bliler says, she needed a break and handed the keys to the school to a Red Cross representative. The representative immediately threw them back at her. When FEMA personnel showed up, Bliler recalls, they were using poorly detailed tourism maps to organize their response. “So I said, ‘You can get better maps in the back of a phone book,’ and I found some and tore the maps out and gave them to them.”

Bliler says she doesn’t blame the government agents. “They were in just as much shock as we were,” she says. Still, she was dismayed when the FEMA members left without warning. “ I was trying to keep up with everything, walking around, and I saw the FEMA guys packing up to leave in the middle of the night.” She says the officials didn’t offer her, or anyone else, an explanation for their sudden exit. “The next day people were asking me what happened to the FEMA guys and that’s the only time I lied to them. I said they had to go to a regional meeting. The Red Cross just left, too.” So she continued on her own. When one Army guy showed up at the school, she says, “He said, ‘You’re in pretty deep, aren’t you?’ and I said, ‘I am.’”

For the next two months, Bliler provided cots for the homeless and adopted stray pets whose owners had vanished. She stockpiled and distributed clothes, medicine, and other staples, gave whatever guidance she could to families looking for help getting their kids back in school, somewhere. In general, she offered every kind of aid and comfort she could muster.

Eventually, Bliler says, school officials asked her to leave and put a church group in charge. She’d been spending her nights at the shelter, and when she returned to her apartment, she says she found all her possessions piled up on the curb. The landlord was getting ready to repair the building and, according to Bliler, evicted everyone out without notice. A local policeman, standing guard, refused to let her retrieve anything. After she told him she needed important papers, the policeman told her that he got off work at 2 a.m. and if she came back after that, she could get them. “So at 2 a.m., I drove up and he drove away, and I got what was left.”

Bliler showed me a memento: a Florida Army National Guard certificate of appreciation from the 3rd battalion of the 124th infantry. But after the shelter closed down, she herself was deemed ineligible for disaster aid. She managed to get a waitressing job in another city, but she says that when people asked what she had done during the storm, she lied and said she had evacuated. She didn’t want to go over it all. The soldier who’d been helping at the school had warned that there could be negative repercussions for what she had done. “He said once the money started coming in, people would be saying money got stolen, there’d be name-calling. ‘I don’t want you to be here anymore.’” After that, she says, “I kind of went underground.”

In the long aftermath of the storm, two of Bliler’s friends who helped at the 2nd Street School died, and she watched a lot of people fall apart. “The police were run ragged,” she says. “So many drugs, divorces, suicides.” Today, Bliler is back waiting tables in Bay St. Louis and staying with a friend while she looks for an apartment of her own, or perhaps a house that she can afford to buy.

Murphy, meanwhile, voluntarily shut down her relief center after three months. By then, she says, the official response was well underway. “There were enough cans of corn. It was time to rebuild.” She began working with a nonprofit, Hope Enterprise Corporation, to rebuild houses for lower-income storm victims.

After living in a tent for three months and in a FEMA trailer for a little over a year, Murphy says she’s surprised at how easy it is to get over losing things. “Over time, the sharpness of the pain goes away, but …” She paused for a moment, then added, “I’m just now, 10 years later, looking at how radically and dramatically my life changed.” But what she most remembers about Katrina, she says, is that, “People are good. Genuinely good.”

A Rock-Star Myth, Now Available for EDM

“Sounds have souls,” the wise DJ James (Wes Bentley) tells his apprentice, Cole (Zac Efron), midway through the surprisingly watchable new drama We Are Your Friends. He says this not to assert the soulfulness of the computerized whooshing and burbling and thumping sounds that power the electronic dance music that the movie chronicles, but to argue, rather, that some sounds have more soul than others. A real human’s handclap, an acoustic piano note, percussion created by a stick hitting a drum—all noises supposedly preferable to the ones making up the tracks that Cole uses to amp up Silver Lake clubs on Thursday nights. “Get your head out of that laptop,” James counsels.

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It’s a surprising suggestion from a film attempting to tap into the new American dream that all you need is a Macbook and some ingenuity to achieve greatness. Cole and his club-promoting buddies in the San Fernando Valley scheme about ways to strike rich, idealizing the Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, who sold his little company for a billion dollars. Electronic dance music, of course, offers a particularly attractive vision of self-made superwealth. As plenty of people have observed in the past few years, the startup costs for aspiring to rockstardom are lower than ever. So at first it seems weird that, in We Are Your Friends, an elder statesman of the genre says that if you’re going to be a bedroom musician, you’d better have some instruments in the bedroom.

Though the movie takes plenty of detours into predictable subplots associated with pretty young things partying—a romance between Cole and Jeff’s assistant Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski), day jobs at a shady real-estate company, drugs as glamor and then drugs as tragedy—its core is a musical journey. Cole starts out as a mere entertainer, able to amp up a crowd by following a near-scientific recipe regarding bass and beats per minute, helpfully explained with voiceovers and animations. But taking things to the next level means crafting one exquisite hit. Until then, the music he makes is just, in the words of Jeff, “fine”—too derivative to conquer the world.

Here’s a spoiler so obvious that the trailer didn’t even try to hide it: Cole does, in fact, get his head out of his laptop, incorporating non-synthetic sounds into his music and thereby opening the door to fame. On an angsty jog three-quarters of the way through the movie, his iPhone dies, and suddenly he notices a world of found sounds ripe for the sampling. The results enrapture a festival audience and his mentor, even though the movie audience will note that it pretty much sounds the same as the knock-off dubstep he was making before, except with more staple guns and wistful voicemail recordings.

In EDM as in rock, there are visionaries who connect to the masses by expressing individuality, defeating the “fake” with the “real.”

No matter. One of the big problems facing movies about music is that the original songs that are supposed to be genius probably aren’t actually going to be, because genius can’t be conjured by Hollywood whim. The point stands that Cole had to move from generic to specific, from imitating trends to trying to create new ones. That he achieves it by turning away from the computer is fitting, if not quite true to life. For all that it embraces Millennial stereotypes and fads, We Are Your Friends is an effort to show that electronic dance music can contain the same narratives—visionaries who connect to the masses by expressing individuality, defeating the “fake” with the “real”—that established styles from classical music to rock and roll do. In the recent movie Love and Mercy, Brian Wilson was depicted creating Pet Sounds by listening to voices in his head and giving bewildering, unprecedented instructions to session players. We Are Your Friends says the rules are basically the same for DJs like Cole.

And why wouldn’t they be? If the supposedly transcendent final jam of the movie doesn’t actually break sonic barriers, there are always real-world examples of EDM as art. The latest came this past week, when the New York Times published an immersive look into the creation of "Where Are Ü Now," the summer hit by Diplo and Skrillex, featuring Justin Bieber. It’s one of the weirdest and surprisingly moving songs to chart in a long while, and the Times video features the producers talking about how they tried to manipulate Ableton, the software the rest of the dance world uses, to do things no one had heard before. A lot of people have assumed that the song’s signature sonic element, the so-called “dolphin” noise, comes from an acoustic instrument, like a violin or a flute. But it turns out that it’s actually an extreme digital distortion of Bieber, unrecognizable yet still emotionally triggering. Whatever you call it, it’s a sound with soul.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Vacuum

“I think panic is the operative mode for the Democratic Party,” David Axelrod, who has been on the receiving end of panic mode many times over the years, told me this week. I had asked Obama’s political guru how bad the current panic was for Hillary Clinton—bad enough for the party to seek an alternative? Bad enough, perhaps, to create an opening for Joe Biden?

Axelrod didn’t think so. “I think it’s indisputable she’s had a rocky few months,” he said. “But if you look at her support among Democrats, and the resources she brings, she’s still very strong—I think she’s going to be the nominee.”

Not everyone is so sure. Public opinion has turned starkly negative on Clinton in recent months, as she has struggled to put the scandal over her use of email as secretary of state to rest. In a poll released this week, the word most commonly summoned when people were asked about her was “liar.”

Clinton’s troubles have profoundly alarmed Democrats—and highlighted the party’s utter lack of backup plan. It is in this context that the boomlet for Biden, the 72-year-old vice president, has blossomed. That same recent poll found that, before even launching a campaign, he already has the support of 18 percent of Democratic primary voters, and would do better than Clinton against Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio in a general election.

Since the rumor that Biden was taking a close look at the race was planted earlier this month, speculation has swirled, some of it even holding that he was on the brink of announcing a candidacy. But several people close to the vice president told me he has not made a decision. When he told a conference call of Democratic National Committee members, on Wednesday, that he wasn’t sure he had the “emotional fuel” for a run, most Biden confidants believed he wasn’t spinning to buy time, but being honest about the calculation he’s weighing.

“I don’t think he’s made up his mind, and those who say he has probably don’t know what they’re talking about,” one longtime Biden friend told me. This person was skeptical that Biden would end up running, but pointed out that poll numbers and conventional wisdom had never been the lodestar for a brash political prodigy who defeated an incumbent senator at age 29: “He’s not afraid of being a long shot.”

Biden’s calculation is threefold: emotional, political, and logistical. Amid the continuing toll of his son Beau’s untimely death, hurling himself into a campaign promises more trouble and hurt. But saying “no” would entail its own grieving process, as the lifelong pol closed the door for good on his political career, without having achieved his life’s goal.

Most Democrats believe it would be logistically difficult to form an organization to compete with Clinton at this point; she has the backing of most of the party establishment and donors. “It's likely too late for a meaningful operation,” particularly in Iowa, one unaligned strategist told me. But Biden backers point to Barack Obama as precedent for passion and personality beating supposed inevitability; more than one told me of a flood of calls and emails from potential Biden backers, many of them nominally committed to Clinton.

“A lot of former staffers have held back, hoping this would happen,” Ronni Council, a Nevada Democratic operative who directed Biden’s campaign in the early-voting state in 2008, told me. (Biden, who dropped out after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, never made it to the Nevada contest, and Council went on to work for Clinton.) On the other hand, Bob Osterhaus, a former state representative in Anamosa, Iowa, who endorsed Obama in 2008 but has not committed to a candidate for 2016, told me he could not detect any buzz for Biden on the ground there.

But if what Democrats need is a backup plan for a possible Clinton collapse—someone to turn to if things get worse, not better, for the frontrunner’s joyless juggernaut—is Biden really the man for the job? The ideal Clinton alternative might be a fresh-faced liberal from outside the Beltway; Biden is an aging establishmentarian. Despite a buzzed-about recent meeting with liberal darling Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, Biden established a reputation during his decades in the Senate as a pragmatist, not a crusader. “His heart is very much in it,” another former Biden aide told me, “but the rest of it is very hard to figure out.”

Biden’s boosters point to the rise of Donald Trump on the Republican side as a sign Americans are currently looking for straight-shooting authenticity. “At a moment where, frankly, I don’t think this country can handle another eight years of bitter divisions, Joe Biden has the potential to be a unifying leader,” Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic operative who ran Obama’s 2012 campaign in the state, told me.

Schale was laid up with a broken leg a couple of weeks ago and emailing with a reporter for the New York Times. When the Times published his idle expression of enthusiasm for Biden, he found himself recruited to the Draft Biden super PAC, where he now holds the title of senior adviser. It’s a rather perfect distillation of the Biden boomlet, which has to a degree been spun out of thin air by bored reporters and underemployed Democratic operatives in the August dead zone of presidential politics.

Schale cited Biden’s personality, his work as vice president, and his blue-collar appeal as arguments for his candidacy. “I worry that, as much as the GOP is a clown car, they also are largely dictating the debate at this point,” he told me. “There’s just not a lot of interest in our side.” For Schale, a Biden candidiacy wasn’t some great calculation: “I just like the guy,” he said. “If he’s going to run, I want to be a part of it.” And if Biden runs, the rationale for his candidacy may be just that simple.

The Life and Death of the American Lawn

The hashtag #droughtshaming—which primarily exists, as its name suggests, to publicly decry people who have failed to do their part to conserve water during California’s water crisis—has claimed many victims. Anonymous lawn-waterers. Anonymous sidewalk-washers. The city of Beverly Hills. The tag’s most high-profile shamee thus far, however, was the actor Tom Selleck. Who was sued earlier this summer by Ventura County’s Calleguas Municipal Water District for the alleged theft of hydrant water, supposedly used to nourish his 60-acre ranch. Which includes a lawn and—this being California—an avocado farm.

The case was settled out of court on terms that remain undisclosed. Everyone has moved on with their lives. What’s remarkable about it, though—well, besides the fact that Magnum P.I. has apparently become, in his semi-retirement, a gentleman farmer—is how much of a shift all the Selleck-shaming represents when compared to lawns’ traditional moral mandates. For much of American history, the healthy lawn—green, lush, neatly shorn—has been a symbol not just of prosperity, individual and communal, but of something deeper: civic ideals, collective responsibility, the assorted conveniences of conformity. Lawns, originally designed to connect homes even as they enforced the distance between them, are shared domestic spaces. They are also socially regulated spaces. “When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country,” Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the fathers of American landscaping, put it, “we know that order and culture are established.”

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That idea remains, and it means that, even today, the failure to maintain a “smiling lawn” can have decidedly unhappy consequences. Section 119-3 of the county code of Fairfax County, Virginia—a section representative of similar ones on the books in jurisdictions across the country—stipulates that “it is unlawful for any owner of any occupied residential lot or parcel which is less than one-half acre (21,780 square feet) to permit the growth of any grass or lawn area to reach more than twelve (12) inches in height/length.” And while Fairfax County sensibly advises that matters of grass length are best adjudicated among neighbors, it adds, sternly, that if the property in question “is vacant or the resident doesn’t seem to care, you can report the property to the county.”

That reporting can result in much more than fines. In 2008, Joe Prudente—a retiree in Florida whose lawn, despite several re-soddings and waterings and weedings, contained some unsightly brown patches—was jailed for “failing to properly maintain his lawn to community standards.” Earlier this year, Rick Yoes, a resident of Grand Prairie, Texas, also spent time behind bars—for the crime, in this case, of the ownership of an overgrown yard. Gerry Suttle, a woman in her mid-70s, recently had a warrant issued for her arrest—she had failed to mow the grass on a lot she owned across the street from her house—until four boys living near her in her Texas neighborhood heard of her plight in a news report, came over, and mowed the thing themselves.

This kind of lawn-based rogue-going is, apparently, quite common. The environmental science professor Paul Robbins’s book, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are, is full of stories of people asking their neighbors, with concern ranging from the fully earnest to the fully passive-aggressive, whether a broken mower might account for an overgrown yard, and of others surreptitiously mowing other people’s lawns when they’re away on vacation. The Great Gatsby’s titular character exhibits a similar case of what we might call FOMOW: So troubled is Jay by Nick’s failure to maintain his lawn—a lawn that abuts Gatsby’s—that he ends up sending his own gardener to do the sheering, thereby restoring order to their shared pastoral space.

Lawns, long before Tom Selleck came along, have doubled as sweeping, sodded outgrowths of the Protestant ethic.

The existence, in the world beyond West Egg, of apps like DroughtShame—which promises to help its users “capture geotagged photo proof of disregard for California’s water restrictions”—is an extension of that ethos. Lawns are private tracts that are, by law and by social fiat, shared. Their proper maintenance is part of the compact we make with each other, the logic goes, not just in the name of “order and culture,” but in the name of civilization itself. And in the name, too, of that fuzzy, fizzy ideal that we shorthand as “the American dream.” Land—“This Land,” your land, my land—transcends, at its most ideal and idyllic, anthropological divisions of race and class. It is “too important to our identity as Americans,” Michael Pollan put it, “to simply allow everyone to have his own way with it. And once we decide that the land should serve as a vehicle of consensus, rather than an arena of self-expression, the American lawn—collective, national, ritualized, and plain—begins to look inevitable.”

Which is all to say that lawns, long before Tom Selleck came along, have doubled as sweeping, sodded outgrowths of the Protestant ethic. The tapis vert, or “green carpet”—a concept Americans borrowed not just from French gardens and English estates, but from fantastical Italian paintings that imagined modern lawns into existence—became, modified for early American purposes, a sign that the new country could match Europe in, among other things, elitism. (Lawns, in Europe, were an early form of conspicuous consumption, signals that their owners could afford to dedicate grounds to aesthetic, rather than agricultural, purposes—and signals, too, that their owners, in the days before lawnmowers lessened the burden, could afford to pay scythe-wielding servants to do the grass-cutting.)

Thomas Jefferson, being Thomas Jefferson, surrounded Monticello not just with neatly rowed crops, but with rolling fields of grass that served no purpose but to send a message—about Jefferson himself, and about the ambitions of a newly formed country.

As that country developed, its landscape architects would sharpen the message about lawns as symbols of collectivity, and civic virtue, and democracy itself. “It is unchristian,” the landscaper Frank J. Scott wrote in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, “to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.” He added, confidently, that “the beauty obtained by throwing front grounds open together, is of that excellent quality which enriches all who take part in the exchange, and makes no man poorer.” Lawns became aesthetic extensions of Manifest Destiny, symbols of American entitlement and triumph, of the soft and verdant rewards that result when man’s ongoing battles against nature are won. A well-maintained lawn—luxurious in its open space, implying leisure if not always allowing it—came, too, to represent a triumph of another kind: the order of suburbia over the squalor of the city. A neat expanse of green, clipped blades flowing from neighbor to neighbor, became, as Roman Mars notes, the “anti-broken window.”

In the century so influenced by the engineerings of Scott and the Fredericks Jackson Downing and Law Olmstead, suburbs gave order to the American landscape. And the lawn—its cause furthered by the Levittown model and the introduction of the motorized lawnmower and the Haber-Bosch fertilizing process and the mid-century’s faith in the easy virtues of conformity—spread. It was relatively cheap to install—see the seeds nicknamed “contractor’s mix” for their popularity among developers as a quick-and-easy way to landscape. A verdant metaphor for the new national highway system, it unified the country, visually if not politically. And symbolically if not actually. During a time of upheaval, the lawn suggested a sense of structure, and calm.

So troubled is Jay Gatsby by Nick’s failure to maintain his lawn that he sends his own gardener to restore order to their shared pastoral space.

It also suggested an order of another kind: the neat division of domestic labor. Lawnmowers were marketed to men, as tools for maintaining their outdoor domiciles—the masculine equivalent, the logic went, of the wifely spaces that were the kitchen and the living room and the bedroom. The front yard—where kids play, where dogs play, where fun is had and jungles are gymed and meat is grilled upon flames—became portrayed, commercially, as semi-wild domestic spaces whose wildness needed to be tamed by men. Which is an idea that carries on in pretty much every Father’s Day-timed ad for Home Depot and Lowe’s and John Deere. A few years ago, Yankee Candle took the unusual step of marketing a candle to men. Its scent was evocative of freshly cut grass, and its name was “Riding Mower.”

The ads make clear how continuous the messaging has been between the past century and this one. Today, still, lawn’s pleasures are partly performative; their leisures are largely laborious. They are gendered. They are expensive. They emit not just oxygen, but also the whiff of ritualized self-sacrifice. Americans, as of 2009, were spending about $20 billion a year on lawn care. And that’s because grass is stubborn stuff, and living stuff, and its encoded impulses—to grow tall, to strive sunward, to reproduce—run generally contrary to our own desires. (As Paul Robbins notes, “We don’t let grass get tall enough to go to seed, but we also water and fertilize it to keep it from going formant. We don’t let it die, but we also don’t let it reproduce.”) Growing and mowing, animal against vegetable, cyclical and Sisyphean: There is a ceaselessness to the whole thing that is both Zen-like and very much not.

The seeds for most of the turf grasses that carpet the surface of the U.S.—your Kentucky blues (originally, actually, from Europe and northern Asia), your Bermudas (originally from Africa), your Zoysias (originally from East Asia), your hybrids thereof—are generally not native to the U.S. Which means that, while the grasses can certainly survive here, they generally take some cajoling to thrive in the bright, soft, reliable way we demand of them. A lawn of American Dream Perma-Green requires, generally, more water than natural rainfall provides. It requires soil whose nutrients content is plumped up by fertilizer. It requires, in some cases, pesticides. And yet symbiosis is on the turf’s side, despite and because of all that, because we need the grasses as much as they need us. We spend our money and our natural resources and our time cultivating our carpets of green not just because we want to, but because we are expected to. It is the fealty we pay to our fellow Americans, the rough equivalent of taxes and immunizations and coughing into our arms rather than into the air. To maintain a lawn is—or, more specifically, has been—to perform a kind of fealty to the future we are forging, together.

* * *

Which brings us back—as most things will, probably, in the end—to Tom Selleck. Whose water-shaming represents a notable and sharp shift away from all that, if you will, deeply rooted symbolism. Selleck’s crime, after all, was pretty much the opposite of the “crimes” committed by Joe Prudente and Gerry Suttle and Nick Carraway. All he was doing, in his blithe, rich-person way, was keeping up what until very recently would have been his end of the cultural bargain: maintaining his grounds, maintaining his green, keeping his little section of the national carpeting from drying out.

What he ignored, of course, was the transformation the #droughtshaming hashtag suggests: That the virtues and vices of our stewardship of the natural world have now switched places, making the civic thing to do—the communal thing, the responsible thing, the respectable thing—to ignore the lawn.

The ground beneath Selleck’s feet had shifted. And that ground, his critics raged, was far too green.

The shift, of course, took place most immediately because of California’s years-long drought, and because grass, per the EPA’s estimate, requires 9 billion—that’s not a typo; billion with a b—gallons a day to keep green. But it also took place, just as likely, because of anti-lawn sentiment that has been long-simmering among environmentalists, among journalists, and among activists. Michael Pollan, before turning his attention to the food economy, wrote an entire book—two of them, actually, making the case against lawns. So did Sara Stein. So did, if perhaps unwittingly, Rachel Carson: Silent Spring, in its tracing of the path of pesticides through the American environment, repeatedly implicated the suburban backyard. Lorrie Otto, who founded the anti-grass movement that became known as “Wild Ones,” condemned lawns as “sterile,” “monotonous,” “flagrantly wasteful,” and, in all, “really evil.” The web, more recently, has given rise to shorter, even angrier screeds against lawns. (Two recent, representative examples: Harvard Magazine’s “When Grass Isn’t Greener,” which quotes a botanist calling lawns “horrible,” and the Washington Post’s declaration that “Lawns Are a Soul-Crushing Timesuck and Most of Us Would Be Better Off Without Them.”)

We have a new environmentalism that is rapidly shifting from the stuff of hippie morality to the stuff, more simply and more urgently, of survival. These warnings, until recently, have gone largely ignored. California, drought notwithstanding, remained home stretches of imported greenery—around homes, around malls, atop golf courses dotting the desert with their false oases. A 2005 NASA study derived from satellite imaging—the most recent such study available—found that turf grasses took up nearly 2 percent of the entire surface of the continental U.S. And that was including the vast stretches of land that remained undeveloped. Broken out by state, some 20 percent of the total land area of Massachusetts and New Jersey was covered in lawn. Delaware was 10 percent turf. There were in all, per that same NASA satellite study, around 40 million acres of lawn in the contiguous U.S. Which meant that turf grasses took up take up roughly three times as much area as irrigated corn. Corn!

As of 2005, in other words, turf grasses—vegetables that nobody eats—were the single largest irrigated crop in the country.

Which is, in practical terms, fairly absurd. And yet it is the situation—it is our situation—for roughly the same reason that Joe Prudente went to jail for unsightly brown spots: Lawns mean something to Americans, symbolically and psychically and maybe even spiritually. They speak to our values, our aspirations, our hopes both feasible and foolish.

We could do what so many environmentalists and journalists have been begging us to do, for so long: to get rid of our lawns, replacing our languid, laborious expanses of grass with artificial turf, or re-landscaping with native plants, or xeriscaping (landscaping that reduces or eliminates the need for supplemental watering). We could do what governments of Western states—California, Arizona, Nevada—have tried: paying people to get ride of their lawns, at prices ranging from $1 to $4 per square foot. We could. We probably should. The problem is, though, that culture changes as gradually as grass grows quickly. Iconography is much harder to uproot than grass, with nothing but thin blades to cling to the soil below. To give up our lawns would be, in some sense, to concede a kind of defeat—to nature, to the march of time, to our own ultimate impotence. And it would, in its recognition of the ecosystemic realities of the latest century, require us to do something Americans have not traditionally been very good at: acknowledging our own limitations.

* * *

Now, though, we don’t just have drought. We also have Priuses and Leafs and Teslas that have become mobile status symbols. We have “organic” and “local” and “sustainable” being tossed around not just in the kitchens of Chez Panisse and Blue Hill, but on the Food Network and in the aisles of Wal-Mart produce sections. We have online quizzes offering to help us determine our personal carbon footprints. We have a new environmentalism that is rapidly shifting from the stuff of hippie morality to the stuff, more simply and more urgently, of survival.

We have Courthouse News Service analyzing an aerial photo of Tom Selleck’s compound and reporting, with a sense of both surprise and relief, that the ranch features “plenty of brown grass.”

Earlier this year, the California Governor Jerry Brown—the name will prove either deeply ironic or deeply fitting—issued an executive order mandating that citizens across the state reduce their water consumption by 25 percent. This was in response, of course, to the drought. But it was also in response to a broader shift in the way we humans think about our natural resources, in the way we relate to the world around us. “We’re in a new era,” Brown explained. “The idea of nicely green grass fed by water every day—that’s going to be a thing of the past.”

Maybe we really are in a new era. Maybe it will signal the end of our love affair with lawns. Maybe the new national landscape—a shared vision that inspires and enforces collective responsibility for a shared world—will be brown, not green. Maybe, as the billboards dotting California’s highways cheerily insist, “Brown Is the New Green.” Maybe the yard of the future will feature wildflowers and native grasses and succulent greenery, all jumbled together in assuring asymmetry. Maybe we will come to find all that chaos beautiful. Maybe we will come to shape our little slices of land, if we’re lucky enough to have them, in a way that pays tribute to the America that once was, rather than the one we once willed.

Narcos: Pablo Escobar by Way of Ken Burns

Netflix’s new series Narcos is possibly arriving at the wrong time: The doldrums of summer aren’t really the ideal moment for a narratively dense, documentary-like look at the rise and fall of the Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Narrated in voiceover by DEA Agent Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook), the early hours of Narcos feel like a history lesson, though an visually sumptuous one.

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As Netflix continues to expand its streaming empire, it’s making a concerted effort to appeal to worldwide audiences, and Narcos fits neatly into that plan, alongside last year’s expensive critical flop Marco Polo. Narcos was shot on location in Colombia and stars the acclaimed Brazilian actor Wagner Moura as Escobar. It takes full advantage of its setting, loaded with sweeping helicopter shots of the Colombian jungle where Escobar founded his cocaine empire, filling a power vacuum left by various political upheavals in late-’70s South America.

The Escobar story is complex enough to fill 10 episodes of television, for sure, and Narcos spares no attention to detail. But that methodical approach comes at the cost of any real drama or engaging side-characters. As Holbrook’s narration explains every step in the rise of Escobar’s cartel, the effect is more like a Ken Burns documentary than an engaging serialized drama.

As with every Netflix show, the pace does eventually pick up. At first, Escobar is the only character who can remotely hold the audience’s attention, even though his plotline is the most formulaic. The show gives him an air of total authority from minute one, so viewers know he’s going to successfully stare down every police official and wipe out every criminal rival he runs into. Still, Moura plays him with bristling, commanding energy. Escobar starts out as a chubby, disheveled small-time smuggler, but from his opening scenes, Moura invests the character with intelligence and ruthlessness.

In short, Moura is doing Escobar right, and the set dressings around him are spectacular. But everything else is 100 percent paint-by-numbers. The narration is straight out of Goodfellas (or a million other Scorsese knock-offs), mixing pure exposition with half-baked musings on magical realism or Reagan-era realpolitik. Murphy introduces himself as a DEA flunky chasing down pot-dealing hippies before the war on drugs exploded; later, he’s catapulted into the hunt for Escobar and the futile war against the vast cocaine industry. Some narrative diversions, like a look at the drug mules (all women, some pregnant) smuggling bags of cocaine into the country inside their stomachs, add to the story, but others feel unnecessary.

The narration is straight out of Goodfellas, mixing pure exposition with half-baked musings on magical realism or Reagan-era realpolitik.

The introduction of the Mexican DEA agent Javier Pena (Pedro Pascal) livens things up a little, but Narcos takes its time in building momentum. As The Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan discussed most recently, Netflix has helped popularize “binge watching” and yet its own shows can be tough to binge on—each season functions more like a novel than a well-paced episodic serial. Shows like Bloodline, House of Cards, and Sense8 take more than half their running time for their plots to really kick into high gear, and Narcos is no exception. It has engaging performances and a fully realized aesthetic, but is that enough to draw the viewer in for hour after hour of slow-moving exposition?

Perhaps. The Netflix model, of course, isn’t weighed to deliver immediate ratings success but to keep viewers on the hook for months, and the studio’s willingness to indulge TV creators who want to take a while to get to the meat of their stories is laudable. But unless you’re extremely interested in the history of the Colombian drug trade or want the kind of Escobar story that only a thick, well-researched biography could deliver, it’s hard to pinpoint what in the early episodes of Narcos would keep viewers from giving up.

Even as a gangster show, it doesn’t feel particularly original. The tense standoffs and tragic double-crosses of Escobar’s world are well-trafficked (no pun intended) dramatic territory, and the DEA side of things is even less engaging, mostly because Holbrook’s narrator character is lackluster when he’s actually on-screen. Narcos avoids feeling exploitative and doesn’t come across as a lazy effort, but it directs what energy it does have to all the wrong places—real-world detail, a painstakingly slow story, a frequently redundant voice-over that drops in often just to tell viewers what’s happening on screen. It’s a worthy effort, to be sure, but worthy doesn’t always equal entertaining.

The Weeknd: Beauty Behind the Branding

Here it is, the unlikeliest contender for Christian rock song of the year: “Angel” by The Weeknd. Over piano chords with all the uplift of a hymn, guitars in soft-rock reverie, and the kind of thudding drum sounds that kill on megachurch stages, Abel Tesfaye asks the heavenly figure of the song title to redeem him, to “bring the light.” For the song’s finale—the closing moments of the 25-year-old Toronto R&B artist’s new album, Beauty Behind the Madness—he and the singer Maty Noyes harmonize with what sounds like a children’s choir, proclaiming, over and over, “I hope you find somebody to love.”

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That this song hasn’t already led to mocking memes placing Tesfaye’s big, knotted updo in 700 Club promos is largely a testament to the power of branding. A song like “Angel,” as cheesy and beautiful as it is, can’t be evaluated outside of the persona created by the rest of Tesfaye’s music—that of a dead-eyed hedonist, so addicted to cocaine and meaningless sex that neither is even fun anymore. No fan of The Weeknd really believes he’s getting salvation. The plea is poignant because it’s futile.

Though he isn’t yet a household name, Tesfaye has in the past few years demonstrated the same kind of PR savvy usually associated with Marvel movie rollouts and Taylor Swift. When his mixtapes of depraved, depressing, and gorgeous R&B hit the Internet in 2011, he kept his face and identity hidden even as the acclaim piled up, thereby building his mystique. After a largely ignored major-label debut, he told his new and powerful bosses that he wanted to become the biggest pop star in the world—but also maintain his old fan base. Voila: There he was, with a Rated-R verse on the latest hit from the normally PG Ariana Grande. There he was, offering a sneakily catchy waltz for the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack. There he was, on stage at the Apple Music debut, performing a Max Martin-produced single about druggy lust.

That single, “Can’t Feel My Face,” is an undeniably delightful Michael Jackson ripoff targeted at dance floors and the number-one slot on the Hot 100, both of which it has now conquered. It is also, contrary to some common expectations about pop-crossover albums, an anomaly on Beauty Behind the Madness. Most of the record is mid-tempo and atmospherically spooky, R&B rendered in modern hip-hop textures, just like The Weeknd has always been. After a few warning-siren-like guitar stabs, the album kicks off with Tesfaye crooning, “Tell ’em this boy wasn’t mean’t for lovin’,” and most of the rest of the songs explicitly or implicitly return to that thesis statement. The complete seriousness with which Tesfaye insists he has no soul is, at times, unintentionally hilarious; one attempt to avoid the L word has him crooning, “Girl, I'm so glad we’re”—what’s the word?—“acquainted.” But you can’t say the act isn’t convincing. When the spry “Can’t Feel My Face” kicks in at track seven, it feels like momentary flirtation with straight society’s ideals about romance, and even then Tesfaye can only confess to loving a sensation, not a person.

The complete seriousness with which Tesfaye insists he has no soul is, at times, unintentionally hilarious.

Even with his recent commercial success, the album doesn't make it inevitable that Tesfaye will, in fact, become the biggest star in the world; at some point, most human bodies must reject his nightlife-vampire shtick as surely as they’d reject the gift of one of his organs. “In the Night,” Martin’s other contribution to the album and—probably not coincidentally—the only other song you can imagine exciting lawyers at Neverland Ranch, is no doubt meant to be The Weeknd’s next big hit. But Tesfaye sounds more whiny than passionate on the song’s chorus, and it’s hard to love lyrics that tie a stripper’s appeal to her childhood abuse (really: “dollar bills and tears keep falling down her face”). Another somber earworm, “Prisoner,” features Lana Del Rey, who mostly serves to remind that fastidiously constructed sad/glamorous pop stars benefit from laughing with the audience sometimes. (Tesfaye could also learn this lesson from his buddy Drake.)

Without fail, the best Beauty Behind the Madness moments come when his producers try to break through the gloom. “Losers” is literally about being too cool for school, but what’s actually transgressive is how it periodically erupts with bright piano and horns (Martin isn’t credited on the track, but I hear an echo of “Baby One More Time”). “As You Are” is a smooth synthetic jam that recalls Phil Collins, with gentle, comforting melodies that could fit in with the recent wave of female-fronted pop albums mining ‘80s cheese. And “Shameless” is a sturdy work of campfire strumming, on which Tesfaye kindly obliges a booty caller’s desperation. “I’ll always be there for you, girl, I have no shame,” he sings, offering the only promise of devotion anyone’s ever likely to get from him.

Donald Trump and the Hispanic Vote

With Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush running for president, many Republicans hoped 2016 would be the year when the GOP won its biggest ever share of the Hispanic vote. Now Donald Trump is the frontrunner. And if he hangs on to win the nomination, the GOP will almost certainly do worse among Hispanic voters than ever before. Earlier this week, Gallup released an extraordinary poll about how Hispanics view the Republican candidates. Jeb Bush is easily the most popular. Ted Cruz is least popular among the traditional choices. Nearly everyone else fits in between them in a range so narrow that the 5 percent margin of error could scramble their order.

But not Trump, who is wildly, staggeringly unpopular among Hispanics:

Those numbers reflect Hispanic opinion before Trump had a public clash with Jorge Ramos of Univision, one of the most popular journalists among the demographic. While overblown and not entirely Trump’s fault––the journalist was blatantly interrupting as Trump tried to call on a different reporter while fielding questions––the incident is likely to make Trump even less liked among Hispanic voters.

Of course, the election is a long way off. And so far, Hispanics aren’t holding their dislike of the Republican frontrunner against the GOP generally. Even so, Trump’s presence is forcing some of the other candidate into increasingly thorny dilemmas.

Jeb Bush’s experience is illustrative.  

The former Florida governor, whose father and brother both expressed compassion toward immigrants, is well-positioned to compete for Hispanic voters in a general election, perhaps with his Mexican-born wife at his side during important moments.

After a Wednesday rally in Pensacola, Florida, he was asked about Trump’s clash with Ramos, and said, “I think people with the press ought to be treated with a little more respect and dignity.” The political logic of that statement is straightforward: It dings a rival and signals Hispanics that their dignity is respected.

Here’s what happened next:

RushLimbaugh.com [image error] Breitbart.com [image error] TheGatewayPundit.com Opinion leaders on the populist right immediately cast the incident as Jeb Bush betraying their tribe. Here is what Limbaugh said Thursday on his talk radio show:[image error]

This is so hard ... I mean, I don't know a person who does not admire the Bush family.  I clearly do.  The Bush family has been so good to me and our family.  But, man, that's why it's tough. Folks, it's why it’s tough getting to know these people that you end up talking about.  I try not to, for that reason. But Jeb Bush has come out and sided with Jorge Ramos over Donald Trump.

Jeb Bush says that Jorge Ramos or however he pronounces his name ... You know, I shouldn't mention this. I know it's bad form to mention, but this guy is so tiny, I can't ... Every time I see the guy he get tinier and tinier. He's dwarfed by everybody, which doesn't mean anything. I mean, it's just an observance. Sorry. At any rate, Jeb is out there, and he says that Jorge Ramos deserves a little more respect; that Donald Trump had no business treating Jorge Ramos that way. And I'm sorry, that is exactly what is wrong. Jorge Ramos was out to destroy Donald Trump. That's what he's tried to, and he'll try to destroy Jeb Bush at some point.

No matter what Jeb thinks, if Jeb is the nominee, he's gonna be destroyed by all these people that he's urging us to be nice to. And I don't know what it is. Is it the effort to differentiate himself from Trump? What it is it’s an illustration of how behind the times and out of it this entire Republican establishment is. I mean, how obtuse do you have to be to believe that where we are right now in 2015, the route to Republican victory requires that we appease Democrats and the media?  You think...? How in the world do you think you're gonna attract a majority of voters?

Limbaugh went on to say that that Republicans like Jeb “are wedded to the idea that they have somehow got to disprove what they think people think of them. And the way they're gonna disprove all that—meaning Republican branding as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, uncooperative, partisan—is they've gotta be uber-polite, soft-spoken, and promise to work with everybody ... It's clear as a bell.”

That last bit sums things up: Republicans like Jeb Bush look at America’s demographics and Trump’s numbers and conclude that in order for the GOP to succeed, it has to persuade Hispanics that it isn’t a party that is hateful toward them.

And Limbaugh and his ilk regard that very project as a heresy.

Thus the GOP’s problem. Given the views of the talk-radio base, on the one hand, and Hispanic voters, on the other, it is conceivable that there is no Republican candidate who can both win the 2016 GOP primary and the 2016 presidential election. At best, it’s a much trickier needle than anything Democrats have to thread:

Could the Republicans lose Hispanics big and still win the election? In 2016, maybe. Beyond that, the trick will get harder to pull off with every election. And if Trump improbably wins the presidency, he’ll either abandon his immigration promises (my bet) or try mass deportation and thereby guarantee that the GOP will lose Hispanics for a generation or more.