Nominated for a National Magazine Award, our second print issue features Hilton Als on Prince's Eyes, How Adderall Changed America, Sex with Neanderthals, New Fiction by Isle McElroy, Ordering Elements, and more.

Liz Pelly, my identical twin sister, is seven minutes older than me. We've both been writing about music since we were teenagers, so I've had a front row seat to her emergence as a paradigm-shifting critic of the streaming economy. I’ve watched her make principled decisions around music and her work with remarkable consistency, from our very first jointly authored cut-and-paste zine when we were in elementary school, to our investigative music reporting for our high school newspaper, and then onto our careers as journalists.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

, with its unflinching inquiry into the origins and consequences of the streaming industry, is no exception. Drawing on over 100 interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, 

 pulls back the curtain on today’s highly consolidated record business and its impacts on artists and listeners.

At the time of this conversation, in March, Liz had done 90 interviews about

Jenn Pelly

At your book launch back in January, Max Alper asked you about your roots as a person for whom music has always had incredible social value, in addition to artistic value. I felt like you dodged his question so I want to re-ask it. Can you talk a little about your experience as a participant in music, rather than a critic?

Liz Pelly

Thanks. I really dislike talking about myself, but have agreed to make an exception for you, which will be interesting.

I think I'm a testament to how one conversation with one person can change the trajectory of your life. I have a memory from seventh grade, where at the lunch table our friend Lauren said, "Oh, you like music? Do you have Napster on your computer? You should go home and download music by The Ataris and Bright Eyes." And I went home and did that. Lauren ended up bringing us to a show in someone's garage not long after, which, as a 12-year-old, completely terrified me.

That moment definitely sticks out in my memory as an early introduction to local and underground shows. It launched a few years of our lives that revolved around pop-punk, emo, and hardcore scenes, meeting people on MySpace and LiveJournal who were interested in music. I didn’t choose for music to embed itself into my life and become the social fabric of how I knew all of my friends. It was just more interesting.

I do think there's something specific to understanding yourself as a participant in music, rather than someone who is listening and observing from the outside. When you're a participant, you have a seat at the table, you have a sense of agency. You also meet a lot of musicians. It doesn't surprise me that someone with such a rigorous critique of Spotify has also been participating in music since they were 13 years old.

I like telling that story as my key into a whole larger world of music, but it wasn't really until getting involved in college radio and booking house shows that I really started to get a sense of what punk is, and what DIY culture is.

I think participation in DIY and independent music gives you a certain sense of power analysis about the culture industry, and it really pushed me to invest in this mode of thinking about collective culture. But the book is also journalistic, and I drew on academic works around the political economy of digital music media, too.

There's this sentence in the introduction where you state very lucidly: "I've long been confounded by the expectation that we simply accept the dealings of the powerful as unexplainable." That sentence always stands out to me because I hear you so strongly in it—the totality of experience of a person who, from the time she was a kid, wholeheartedly believed that, and continues to live by her values.

I didn’t choose for music to embed itself into my life and become the social fabric of how I knew all of my friends. It was just more interesting.

I think it’s worth carrying it as far as you can in life. When you’re a kid and you start to see how big the world is, it’s exciting and also infuriating. When we were teenagers, Liz instigated a crusade against Walmart at our high school. When Walmart arrived at the mall in our town on Long Island, Liz organized a protest where we distributed pamphlets encouraging people to boycott, with information about sweatshop labor. This was in 2006. And to be clear, there were maybe five of us participating in this protest, but it’s still such a powerful memory for me.

, you write about these charged anti-globalization protests happening in Gothenburg in 2001, and how they anticipated pro-piracy groups taking root in Sweden. Activist groups that 

 piracy were asking questions about free music, and whether culture should be a public good. You write about how the normalization of piracy in Sweden paved the way for a company like Spotify to take root, because the music industry had basically given up on the idea that it could make money there. Is there a connection for you between your teenage crusade against Walmart and your criticisms of Spotify?

Definitely the seeds of hating corporations are all right there. As a teenager, I came across this book called 

 that had been put out by Verso, and it made a really big impact on me. It’s interesting to think about how a teenager in suburbia would be learning about this anti-corporate perspective, as a ripple effect of the anti-globalization protests in the late ’90s, early 2000s.

In the first chapter of my book, I talk about a group in Sweden in the mid-2000s called Piratbyrån, which consisted of organizers, hackers, ravers, and punks, some of whom had been involved in the anti-globalization protests in Stockholm at the beginning of the 2000s. At that point, the whole battle over Napster had already played out. Piratbyrån was created as a response to a Hollywood-aligned lobbying group in Stockholm called Anti-Piratbyrån, the Anti-Pirate Bureau.

It was a moment of questioning the corporate capture and consolidation of cultural industries, and people were challenging the effectiveness of copyright. At the time there were really some interesting arguments being made about music as a public good, but there weren’t strong enough labor protections for musicians to carry out the logic of that thinking. It allowed for piracy culture to be co-opted—Olof Dreijer talks about the rise of streaming as a gentrification of file-sharing—and maybe it speaks to the philosophy’s weaknesses that Spotify was able to emerge.

When we were teenagers, we had this very simple and intuitive sense of right and wrong, and Walmart fit directly into the “bad” bucket. Obviously you can't really make a clean metaphor, but Spotify is similarly profit-minded in how it exploits musicians, brings low-cost stock music to the platform, and mitigates the experience of listening for people.

In some of my early interviews around the book, I caught myself saying things like, "Obviously it's great that people have access to music. I'm not against free music, but when things are made free, there can be high costs that come with them." And I remembered that, funnily enough, that's literally the subtitle of a book about Walmart form 2005: 

, published by Harper’s in December, was a chapter on ghost artists. They’re popularly known as fake artists, but you make a distinction in the book where you refer to them as ghost artists instead.

People started using the phrase “fake artists” around 2016, 2017. But in the years I spent writing the book, a bigger conversation about generative AI music started to take hold. I needed to clarify that these tracks are not, for the most part, made using generative AI. They are musicians hired to make these tracks under unfavorable conditions, and that phenomenon was setting the stage for AI to take over in a concerning way.

When that excerpt came out, the music critic Ted Gioia made a post in his newsletter talking about how impressed he was by your reporting, particularly because as a journalist himself, he’d had his own pitches rejected by mainstream media outlets who didn't see the value in investigative journalism on streaming. He pointed out that it took an independent journalist such as yourself, to bring this story to light. Why do you think mainstream music media has tended to disregard streaming?

I don't know if it's been disregarded entirely. Certainly there's been no shortage of important coverage on streaming in music business trade publications and stuff. But what sorts of stories are being told? What Ted Gioia wrote in his newsletter resonated with me. 

I thought this would be an important story, but I knew that if I tried to pitch it to a mainstream publication, I wouldn’t be able to tell it in the way that I wanted to. The space typically afforded to these topics tends to be a hot take, or a 1200 word piece. There needs to be some clear news hook.

I was just at a talk at Brooklyn Public Library where the labor journalist, Hamilton Nolan, was talking about the difference between business stories and labor stories. He articulated labor journalism as business reporting told from the perspective of workers.

The music business should talk to musicians more often. I guess in some ways that's advocating for a more pro-labor perspective on 

music business journalism. In this book, there's as many musicians interviewed as people who work in the music business. I wanted to talk to the people who actually do the work that makes the whole scheme possible.

To some extent, I think the mainstream music business and media has shied away from this conversation over the years because it would require them to interrogate themselves and engage a political perspective about corporate consolidation. Maybe there's some reluctance to do that kind of grappling or self-reflection.

From my perspective as a music journalist, it's so hard to get a feature assigned anywhere if it’s not about a famous musician, because publications are so concerned with traffic.

Well, journalism is in crisis. This book exists because there wasn’t another way for me to conduct a seriously sourced cultural investigation into the state of music media and music technology. In some ways, my preference would be to just have a staff job at an alternative newsroom or something, but where are those?

 was in January 2024. We went upstate on a writing and editing retreat, and while we were there, the news broke that Pitchfork had been gutted by Condé Nast. I had worked for and with Pitchfork for the previous 14 years, and about a dozen of my colleagues and friends in the Pitchfork Union were fired.

It felt depressing and also really telling. I’m curious if you have any other thoughts about the relationship between streaming and the crisis of music journalism?

The decimation of journalism over the past two decades, maybe longer at this point, has had so much to do with changes in the advertising business. For better or for worse, journalistic outlets, including music magazines and music publications, largely used to exist because of advertising. And the way that digital advertising has moved in the past 20 years is directly related to the rise of the platform economy. Spotify started as an advertising platform, which I think is really important to remember when thinking about the history of this company and the rise of this model.

The original Spotify business model was about creating a library of content, and I hate the word “content,” but it’s the one they use. At first they weren't even sure if it was going to be for music. According to early employees, they'd considered video, audiobooks, and other products. They were looking for a traffic source for advertising, and music was what they landed on for a multitude of reasons. This company was started by people with backgrounds in ad tech.

So in some ways, both the rise of streaming and the decimation of journalism have been completely tied to the shifts of the digital advertising market. In seeing how journalists are trying to respond, improvise, and create new alternatives, it's obvious that they were always in a vulnerable position. Advertising never made sense as the primary source of funding for music or media.

It's horrible that there are so many people out of work, but [it feels important] that media companies are considering cooperative alternatives, nonprofit newsrooms, and membership models, and asking these big questions about the role of public subsidy in the future of journalism. It's like yeah, you wouldn't solve the problems created by a VC-funded ad tech platform by creating a new VC-funded ad tech platform that's slightly less horrible. It requires really looking at the roots of the problems and the ways we relate to culture, and advocating for and supporting people who are having these more robust conversations about ownership.

Do you think that the mechanisms of streaming are intentionally obfuscated in order to keep artists in the dark?

Yeah, definitely. Actually, I have a really vivid memory of talking about that with you, and you playing me the Laurie Anderson song

“Only an Expert.” That song captures a large part of why these companies invest in complicated systems, so that artists will have to defer to "experts" to understand them. Part of the process of demystification is putting forth this idea that it's not too complicated. We can have a greater sense of media literacy when it comes to audio culture, and actually try to wrap our heads around these things.

I also think it’s important to not underestimate readers—as Taja Cheek of L’Rain shares in the book, the music business tends to treat listeners like they're dumb. I think that applies to books too. I actually think people want to read about these tools that have become a normalized part of everyday life.

Yes totally. When you were trying to sell this book, it was rejected by one publisher who said it was too depressing, and on the same day it was rejected by a publisher who said it was too hopeful. And it's like, why can't it be both? Why can't it be dark and also hopeful at the same time? That's reality.

 came out in the beginning of January, I've gotten to watch you read in New York, Baltimore, DC and now Barcelona, Lisbon, and London. Some of these events have really felt utopian to me. At the end of the book, you suggest that a solution to beginning to confront streaming is to foster conversations within your communities about how to revalue music collectively. A lot of the events I've been to have enacted that, and I think that's really powerful. I’ve looked around in those rooms and felt hopeful to see people converging who actually care about the intersection of art and politics.

The people who wanted the book to tell them which button to press in order to be ethical consumers found it to be depressing. But those who know that imagining healthier cultural ecosystems comes from active participation were the ones who found it to be hopeful, which is interesting.

Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned since the book came out?

That's been the best part of it. As one person, you can do all the interviews in the world, but you're never going to be able to fully have the answers for people. There have been some unsatisfying moments when people want a neat answer for, "Well, what's the solution?" But the cool thing about events has been that they open up this space for more people to chime in with ideas.

Something I try to really drive home in the book is that we don't need technical solutions to these problems. We need to rethink the social and political alternatives to these systems. There are so many risks to Spotify being our archive, but what does it look like to be a responsible steward of music?

 a question that originated in a piece you wrote for the 

. When I was 18 and I first moved to New York City, I went to Fordham for a year and lived next door to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and took out CDs all the time. Some think the idea of a library streaming service is too idealistic, but people have been getting music from libraries for decades. A library-based service might not fully “solve” the streaming dilemma, but I think it would help foster intentional listening, which is part of the puzzle.

 in 2021, and it's something I remain really excited about. After that 

piece came out, I heard so many stories from other people in music about how important going to get a stack of CDs at the public library was to them as a teenager. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to end the book with the public library as a possible alternative or “solution” for digital music access.

Your book came out the first week of January, and we saw all this imagery of the president flanked by these tech oligarchs. In late January, Spotify hosted a Trump inauguration brunch, and made a $150,000 donation to the ceremony. What do you think that says about the type of power Spotify is angling for? How does it contextualize the stakes of everything we're talking about?

On one hand it is super disturbing to see a company like Spotify make this big donation to the Trump inauguration fund and host a brunch with Joe Rogan and other right-wing podcasters. It shows what they're willing to do to continue attempting to have proximity to political power.

It’s probably equally disturbing to many musicians and people in music to remember that [Spotify CEO] Daniel Ek has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a military AI company called Helsing. He sits on the board of Helsing, and has publicly advocated for expanding government contracts into AI militarism over the years. [

Note: In June, Ek led a $693.6 million investment in Helsing and became chairman.

I’m sure that the vast majority of working musicians don't want the money extracted from their music to be used for the purposes of investing in military AI technology. War Profiteers Out of Music should also include Daniel Ek, is what I'm saying.

 has completely changed the way I think about music, listen to music, buy music. It's made me want to re-engage with my music communities in different ways. The writing is very matter of fact, which is intentional because you're taking these gigantic questions and topics and making them accessible. I think it is radical to demystify corruption in music in the way you have.

It's a tricky balance. I wanted to distill complicated ideas into a book that people would actually read without underestimating the reader’s ability to grapple with them.

It helps that music industry executives and Spotify advertising people are often accidentally pretty funny. Daniel Ek once said, “we're punks.” That's hilarious. ♦

Jenn Pelly is a writer in New York and the author of 

. Her journalism and criticism have appeared in 

art-strike

Sister Inquiry

At times, the length of Edie and Marie’s friendship, a full half of their lives—the entirety, so far, of both of their adulthoods—at times it felt that knowing someone this intimately and for such a critical duration had been and may continue to be the main event of Marie’s life. Being in love and later being married had been more urgent, more time-consuming, and in some ways more intimate, but nothing had felt more central and reliable than the conversation that had been happening between the two of them, and, at least until recently, with K. This long witnessing, on even ground—unlike the angled perspective between parent and child or the concave mirror of marriage—had created an unwritten record within each of them about how the other had or had not changed, an archive of actions and habits that became more detailed and more critical with every passing year.

Marie had met K and Edie when she was 17, just shy of 18, gawkish and awkward and closeted, freshman year, still a child in her newly adult body. K and Edie, who’d spent their whole childhoods together, adopted her into their friendship as if they’d been looking for her all this time, and many years ago, though Marie could hardly stand to recall this now, K had told her that she, on her 24th birthday, was 

, a statement she would have been unable to accept from anyone else, not from a girlfriend, not from her own family, and when K’s sister used this exact phrase in her vows to Marie on their wedding day, unaware of what it echoed, Marie had blushed. She knew it was a lie.

As a girlfriend she hadn’t been easy to love, and as a wife she knew she still wouldn’t be easy to love. Marie was melancholic, indecisive, and anxious. She had insomnia so strong it was often contagious, and when she did sleep she hogged the blankets. She couldn’t cook, barely cleaned, and had a regular habit of getting drawn into long conversations with neighbors and colleagues when she should have been on her way home for dinner or carrying out an errand she promised she’d do or meeting her wife somewhere on the rare nights they went out. Above all she knew she wanted too much from romantic love, held it to impossible standards, wanted it to totally redeem her, somehow, effortlessly and constantly. But Marie did believe that she was good at friendship, easy in it, never asking anything unreasonable of the platonic, always relaxing into the human texture, the natural ebbing and flowing of her bonds with K and Edie. She gave herself up without tension into friendship, respected her friends enough to allow them to change her.

It was Edie who had, one day toward the end of their third year in college, said to Marie,

. And she didn’t have to say more than that. Marie knew exactly what Edie meant, yet it was only in hearing Edie make this observation about this change that Marie suddenly knew and felt it to be true—that tenacious streak of self-hatred, that ambiguous but inescapable sense of being a failure, the stiffened way she’d been occupying her body—for years it had been lifting but had lifted almost entirely the moment that Edie said this—

—or at least the first layer of it had lifted, and Marie knew the only reason this change had been possible was the way she’d been absorbed into K and Edie’s world—they, the pair of friends who’d come to college together, platonic prom dates, everyone said they’d be together in the end, those kind of friends. Even as children they knew they were already together in the end—it was already the end, and they were already together. K and Edie’s relationship seemed to be the most radical and rare thing to Marie—a true marriage, a marriage without marriage—and for years she’d thought herself ancillary to the two of them, a role she felt at home in, an additional person, a spare, a friendly ghost, until it was clear, all at once in the August she turned 21, that she was, a shock to herself, no less essential, just a newer element, the obvious third point of the triangle.

The three of them had lived in a crooked and cheap little apartment for a time during and after college, the soft and uncomplicated years before jobs and partners and graduate school and travel had peeled them apart, and though each of those transitions had seemed final or potentially final, none had yet proven so. The moves to other cities or other apartments in the same city seemed to signal the end of an era and the likelihood that it would never be quite like this again, that they’d never live together again, that the nature of this family was once again changing. But relationships that had seemed permanent had ruptured, jobs were lost, new moves were needed, and graduations ended in nothing but a more advanced state of the confusion that had led to grad school in the first place, and it was then that one of them always returned to one or the other or both of them, hovering for a few weeks or months in a guest room, changing their lives once more with the assurance that their conversation and their jointly held archive and their shared support may actually be the most stable thing in their lives, and though other aspects of adulthood may peak or crash, this thing between the three of them would change shape but never reach a conclusion.

It was clear that K and Edie were the axis of her life, though it seemed real adults were supposed to forge that kind of centrality elsewhere.

In fact, the possibility of a diminished potency in her relationships with K and Edie had been the only fear Marie could not even bring herself to confess to her wife in the months before the arrival of the twins. All the other fears—the medical and mortal fears, the fears of their marriage getting filleted by two babies, the financial and logistical fears, the fear of failure—they had all seemed more dismissible than the worry she felt that she might lose her friends. It was clear that K and Edie were the axis of her life, though it seemed real adults were supposed to forge that kind of centrality elsewhere.

Marie’s wife had always been certain that bearing and raising children was a central if not the sole purpose of her life, a certainty that was sometimes unsettling in its unquestioned steadiness, but Marie also knew her wife’s certainty would be the lighthouse of their family life, the velocity that kept the whole thing aloft.

Then the twins came. They had been manageably unruly, without any major or lasting problems in their behavior or health or temperament, and Marie’s transformation into a parent had not (as she had silently feared) ended her friendships with K or Edie, and it had even, in some ways, enriched them. Edie would occasionally obtain permission from her partner to visit Marie and the twins for a weekend, and she naturally became a child around the children, getting on the floor with them, inventing absurd games. When Edie looked up at Marie from the twins’ angle, each saw new dimensions in the other.

Alone with the twins, noticing how intensely they surveilled Marie from their car seats and high chairs, how they seemed to forget nothing and catalogued everything about their parents—words used in passing, momentary flickers of emotion, loose promises made then broken—Marie had often thought of and longed for the softer ways her friends had watched her, how different it was from the nonstop, existential intensity of those two little sets of eyes. Marie’s wife did not, she knew, share this irritation at being watched so closely all the time, and it was possible, Marie thought, that her wife’s innate impulse toward birth and child-raising had really been about this, all along—the desire to be witnessed with such life-or-death intensity, for her children to create hyperrealistic and micro-detailed portraits of their mother, and to live beneath them for the rest of their lives. Knowing this, knowing that these people who did not yet exist could be created and would in turn create this portrait of her—was this what Marie’s wife envisioned as she walked with determination and authority into a sperm bank, mercilessly studied the options, and made her choice without hesitation?

During the years Marie had helped raise the twins, feeding them and ferrying them around and tucking them in and waking up with them once more, she felt that though there was so much humbling clarity in these daily acts, the one-directional devotion of parenting also felt a little demented and compulsive—similar to the way, at the height of her smoking, she’d sometimes realize she was inhaling from a cigarette she had no memory of lighting, like there was a ghost inside of her that smoked without her awareness—like there was a ghost inside of her that went through the actions of parenting without her conscious participation. But she was good at it, she was told. Everyone said so.

Now that her marriage and relationship with the twins and her friendship with K had been severed in the course of a single afternoon, Marie’s relationship with Edie was the most long-lasting thing in her life—Edie, Jesus, fucked up, feral, and precious as she is—and Marie is coming close to crying now, though she’s smiling, watching Edie still talking about her exploits, remembering how Edie has always been able to give the best advice but never to take it, and how irritated Marie has always been by Edie’s tendency to disappear for months on end, then show up as if she’d been there all along.

Marie is still watching her friend recount the details of some small orgy, distantly registering the facts of the event, but mainly she is just watching Edie’s face, the wild gaze of someone newly introduced or reintroduced to the world. It’s in that faint glimmer in her skin, in her eyes, her gestures, and of course her overblown word choice, her breathless way of speaking, the way she fidgets the fray on her shorts, curling her legs unnaturally in her chair, as if she isn’t used to being alive, as if the life in her is constantly at risk of spilling out, rushing out everywhere and into everything.

and Marie says she doesn’t know, that she’s just out of it, but Edie asks again, 

Edie sits up, alert and formal as she recites an answer that seems rehearsed, how sexuality was one of the most beautiful and simple ways for a person to leave their mind and interact with the subconscious, or how sex was one of the few ways to exist directly as a body, as an animal, as a mortal and dying thing, and how sex also brought your awareness out of yourself and into the consciousness of another and how essential that was—but when Edie reaches the point in her response about the Paraclete, the soul, salvation, Marie pours another glass of mezcal and tilts it back quickly.

But she had no self-awareness sometimes, and it was true that what Edie had been through was terrible, and it was true that it was good for her now to be finding pleasure in something, regardless of how frivolous, but Edie’s recently past problems and their subsequent solutions all seemed so small right now, while Marie’s problems were ongoing, they were serious and inescapable and quite frankly they were tragic, and perhaps the most tragic problem was that she could no longer have a reasonable relationship with the twins, and maybe even worse than that she was beginning to feel that the twins were never really hers in the first place, as they had never been genetically hers—the product only of her wife’s body and the anonymous substance from the sperm bank—and though the genetics of the twins had never seemed consequential in the years she had lived with and raised them, her lack of genetic claim and her lack of domestic responsibility now amounted to the fact that though she’d once had children, she now no longer had children, and perhaps they didn’t even miss her, didn’t need her, that she had perhaps always been something like a nanny in their life, removable, extraneous, easy to send away. It had become difficult to even say the word “my” before the word “children.” 

What K saw. That you were seeing someone else.

Seeing is a weird word for it, isn’t it? Seeing—I can see you right now. I’ve seen a lot of people.

I do know what you mean. It just happens not to be a particularly simple situation, and no one knows that because no one asked me anything. K didn’t ask me anything. My wife didn’t ask me anything. You didn’t even call.

Brenda was house-sitting and tickets were cheap.

So you went to Greece for a month. Great.

It’s just that—you’re the sort of person that goes to Greece for a month, and I’m the kind of person who lives here.

But Marie doesn’t know where to start, especially with someone who felt that sex with someone she barely even knew was or even could be something sacred when, in Marie’s life, sex had mainly been something that brought people into her life or sent people out, the beginnings and endings of things.

How to tell it? She wants to tell Edie the truth, but she doesn’t trust herself to know it.

Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles. 

, Marie says, but already she was getting things wrong. It hadn’t seemed like a friendship; it had seemed, for reasons Marie could not completely discern, like a game, a series of challenges from this woman, Helena, a parent she’d met at day-care pickup years ago now, a mother with whom she’d exchanged numbers on the pretext that their kids might want to hang out, even though they could both tell that their kids didn’t like each other, a fact made painfully clear on that one playdate a week later that ended with Helena’s kid pushing one of the twins over and the other twin retaliating by taking a handful from the sandbox and forcing it into his mouth. 

, Helena said, and Marie just felt her head nodding. 

Anyway, this woman is married, and anyway, this woman is straight, and anyway, it’s nothing

, and the next time they saw each other didn’t happen until nine months later, a text from a name she’d nearly forgotten, a slow day at work anyway, an excuse to go downtown for lunch. That evening, when Marie’s wife asked her how her day had been, Marie had simply not mentioned her lunch with Helena. She didn’t tell her about how Helena had launched immediately into the most intimate conversation Marie had ever had with anyone she didn’t actually, technically, know—Helena had been thinking about the nature of desire and power and men and women and how the reasons she had gotten married just ten years ago now already seemed so retro and regrettable, almost unmentionable, but she did believe in sticking it out, in sticking around even when it seemed doomed, when it seemed like she may never again feel 

real sexual pleasure with another human body, 

 What had even been the purpose of sexual pleasure in the first place? 

she asked, undercutting the urgency with which she had just uttered the phrase “real sexual pleasure with another human body,” and Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles, but still, lately she spent a lot of time thinking about how being in a couple seemed entirely at odds with being in a family and how it might be better if all the women just took all the children away from the men and raised them collectively, without the men, men who seemed only to get in the way, men who seemed so often to be no different than children, just larger. 

Oh, but I don’t really mean it, I do love my husband, what am I even saying, he’s a good father, a great father

 And Marie had tried to reassure her that this all seemed to be normal in a long marriage, the irritation at the edges of it, though Marie did not, at least not consciously, feel any of that irritation in her own long marriage.

, she said to Helena, an observation that seemed to calm Helena, a little, but Marie also noticed the tragic little tick in Helena’s voice when she asked and rapidly answered two questions she’d pushed together into a single line:

 But you’re married right to a woman right? 

Marie paused as if she needed to remember whether she was married (right?) to a woman (right?), then she said, as if reading the phrase, 

. The lunch went on, both of them increasingly tense, overly aware of their own breath and each other’s every gesture, and at times Marie thought she was doing something wrong just by being there (though she couldn’t identify what, exactly, was wrong with it), and at other times she thought she was being presumptuous to assume anything indecent about this lunch of salade niçoise and chenin blanc with Helena, whose intentions, personal history, desires, middle name, fantasies, and current mental health status were all still to be, soon, discovered.

A month passed before they met again, a duration of time that made Marie feel that perhaps deciding not to mention the existence of this lunch with Helena to her wife (or even the existence of Helena) had been absolutely fine, as there was nothing to mention, and Marie accepted the spontaneous invitation for a coffee and a walk—

—thinking that she would, of course, tell her wife about Helena afterward, but the morning coffee spiraled into a long walk through a cemetery and a discussion of the purpose of sexual fantasy in general and the contents of their fantasies in specific, a conversation so frequently punctuated with 

 that shame itself was even worn away and nothing was taboo any longer. They touched only once that day—as they parted Marie had tried to use the vaguely formal contactless bow she’d gotten away with last time, but Helena went in for the European cheek-kiss and missed, landing on Marie’s neck, wrecking Marie’s composure for a fraction of a second, a fraction that Helena had recognized and taken in, and from that day onward their meetings became more frequent and passed with greater intensity, in stranger and stranger locations in order not to be observed, the secrecy of an affair but without any of the traditional forms of contact—without actual sex, for instance, without so much as a kiss. It was like a nineteenth-century courtship, but with conversations that verged on the pornographic; brief, one-hour meetings and occasional phone calls during which they divulged secrets, asked questions that neither had ever asked anyone, and, eventually, each woman dared the other to fuck their spouses with special assignments—positions to use, words to say, and images to imagine. But they never touched each other—not like that—not physically, and because of that lack of contact Marie began to think of her time with Helena as time she was spending alone, or time she was doing something like therapy, or as time she was reading a book, a book called Helena, a book with whom she was on speaking terms. And maybe it could have gone on like that even much longer than their three years, with many extended breaks, which they each filled with remorse, swearing the whole thing off, laughing at it privately, then giving in again, sending a quick text, meeting up immediately to continue this erotic game. Then there was the day they each confessed that this was insane, it had been years, and all their discussions and dares and disclosures had to stop—

, Marie said, and though she wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that, Helena agreed, and from there they went straight to a hotel, texted lies about work to their spouses, and stayed in that hotel until it was time to go home and tuck their children into bed. ♦

by Catherine Lacey. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels 

, which is out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

ser-martin

Rule of Threes

“Welcome to Port Authority, New York City. Please watch your belongings as you exit the bus,” the bus driver’s cheery voice announced.

I stepped through the glass doorway of the bus terminal into the sidewalks of Times Square just two weeks after my 19th birthday. It was 12:30 on a Saturday night in late September 1975. It was warm but not stifling hot like it had been in Florida. I didn’t have much of a warning for the bombardment of people, flashing lights, and signs that hit me everywhere I turned. It looked like something right out of a TV show. I was tired from the bus ride but felt a rush of energy as life gushed all around me. Across from the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue below 42nd Street was a chorus line of girls, wearing the shortest skirts and the highest heels I had ever seen, grabbing at men as they walked by. A half a block down I saw a hotel sign hanging on a hinge over the doorway. I slung my backpack on and walked across the street to the hotel. Just as I reached for the doorknob, a girl, not much older than me, with a feather boa draped around her neck, grabbed my upper arm.

“Hey, Cutie, you goin’ in there?” She surprised me. “Yeah,” I said.

She looked puzzled. “You mean you’re going in there and you don’t need a date?”

I was getting irritated. “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure it’s a hotel. But…” She paused. “But most people don’t go in there without a date.” She looked me up and down. My backpack was getting heavy. “You just get here or something?” She nodded her head to the bus station and asked, “From where?”

“You ever been to New York before?” I shook my head no.

“You know anybody here?” I shook my head no.

She smiled at me, not her working-girl smile, but more like the way my sister Lucy smiled at me just before she left me out on the highway in Florida. She pulled me close to her and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Listen, you take care, sweetheart.” She grabbed another man as he passed us by. “Hey, wanna date?” She disappeared into the river of people on the sidewalk.

It was dark inside the door of the hotel. A steep flight of stairs led up to a bulletproof window. The wooden steps creaked and moaned as I climbed to the top. The rail wobbled in my hand. A big guy with a big stomach and faded tattoos on his forearms came up to the window and looked down at me. He seemed surprised when I told him I wanted a room for the night.

I said for the second time in the last five minutes, “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, wait, hold on a minute.” He left his booth. I could hear him talking to someone. When he came back to the window he said, “20 dollars.” I thought that was kind of expensive since the night before I’d paid $17.99 at a Motel 6 just outside of DC, and it was in much better shape than this place. I pulled out my Traveler’s Checks and started to sign my name.

“You have to watch me sign this check or else it’s no good.”

“Oh shit. We don’t take Traveler’s Checks.”

“Why not?” I asked. “It’s good. You can cash them anywhere. I thought everyone took Traveler’s Checks.”

“Let me see some ID.” I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet and stuck it under the slot beneath the bulletproof glass. He looked at me and then the picture of me on my license. Then he examined my signature on the check. He had a washed-out tattoo of a heart with a knife going through it on his forearm. Blood dripped off the tip of the knife. He slid my license back to me underneath the thick glass window.

“You from Kansas City, kid? I was there once. On my way to LA. Stopped and got gas. Had some of the best damn barbecue I ever ate there.”

He stuck a clean white towel and a key with a room number scratched into it under the thick glass window, and then buzzed me in through a big beat-up metal door.

“Up one flight and down to the left.” He nodded with his head towards the staircase.

My room was big enough for a bed and an old, rusted, white porcelain sink. The window had bars over it and faced a brick wall about two feet away. I tried to open it but couldn’t because it was sealed shut with nails and layers of paint. My fingers turned black from the dust and soot on the windowsill. As I rinsed them off in the sink a roach shot out from underneath and ran up the wall. I pulled my transistor radio out of my pack and propped it up on the edge of the sink. I found a Top 40 station and stretched out on the bed. The sheets smelled like fresh laundry. Downy fresh. The mattress was lumpy. Every time I moved, the bedsprings groaned and pressed into me. An R&B song came on the radio that I knew from the Miami station. Guys singing 

 in high falsetto voices. I liked that song.

I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. It was still warm out, the middle of the night, and the streets were full of people. The sky was black but it felt like daylight because of all the storefronts, streetlights, and movie marquees. 42nd Street was lined with porno shops that had pictures of nude people having sex in their front windows. Kids about my age tried to sell me drugs, but I didn’t want any. I walked down 42nd Street from Eighth Avenue to Broadway and looked at Times Square. One thing I liked about New York was that it didn’t look like other American cities. My first disappointment from hitchhiking and traveling around the country was that almost every city looked exactly the same, only the landscape was different. There were McDonald’s, IHOPs, and Denny’s in almost every suburb across America. Once you got through the miles of ranch-style homes, shopping centers, and fast food restaurants to the heart of the city, a small cluster of skyscrapers, there was nothing to do. Downtowns were dead after 6:00 pm. Anyone out on the street after dark was a sitting duck just asking to be harassed by the police. But New York wasn’t like that. It was piled on top of itself instead of spread out. You didn’t need a car to get around. From the minute I arrived I was surrounded by the feeling of 

 everywhere. It was like I had been plopped down in the middle of a giant school of fish and had to swim fast to keep up.

I woke up early in the morning ready to get out of that hotel and go look for the Empire State Building. I threw my backpack over my shoulders and headed down Eighth Avenue to 34th Street. The city didn’t look like the same place in the daylight. It was a brownish-grey, and the streets seemed almost deserted. All the flash and excitement of the night before had disappeared. I stopped and pulled a sweatshirt out of my pack because it had cooled off during the night. No more warm tropical Miami breeze. Fall was in the air.

A tall man with a camera around his neck walked up next to me and said, “You look like you’re either lost or you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I’m looking for the Empire State Building.” He laughed and said, “Look up.”

I looked straight up and realized I was standing at the base of the Empire State Building. It was so gigantic I hadn’t recognized it close-up. The man watched me as I took off my backpack and tilted my head, looking all the way up the sleek, tan building.

“If you think that’s tall, you should see the World Trade Center. It’s twice as tall.”

This was tall enough for me. Besides, the World Trade Center was new. I wanted to see this old building that I’d heard so much about since I was a kid.

“You should go to the top to see the view.” The man pointed to a revolving brass door, so I walked over and gave it a push. It was locked. A sign in the window said tours started at 10:00 am on Sunday. It wasn’t even 9:00 yet.

“You wanna go get some coffee?” I turned and looked at him. He was big with curly dark hair. He held up his camera and snapped a picture of me. “I’m a photographer. How about you?”

“What are you up to? You look like a runaway or something with that ugly-looking pack you’re carrying around.”

“I’m not a runaway. I’m just looking.”

“Oh. Well. Do you want to get some coffee with me or not? You don’t have anything to do until the building opens anyway. Come on.” He put his arm around my shoulders and tugged at me. I shrugged his arm off. He seemed nice enough. I wasn’t getting any weird vibes from him so I gave in and followed him down the street. At 34th and Fifth Avenue he pointed to a McDonald’s. People sat looking out on the street from tables on the second floor, above the entrance. I’d never seen a two-story McDonald’s before. Yellow cabs honked as the guy ran across the street in front of oncoming traffic. We went inside and got two coffees. I ordered some hash browns, too. He took the tray and led me up the stairs to a table by the window. It felt like I was in a foreign country.

“What’s your name?” “Joe. What’s yours?” “Bud.”

We shook hands. The sudden formality made me nervous so I laughed a little.

“I don’t mean to stick my nose in your business, but what exactly are you doing wandering around with that backpack?”

“Like I said, I’m just looking around. I’m on my way back home to Missouri from Miami and thought I’d stop by to see what New York was like.”

Bud stared at me. He lit up a cigarette. I looked down on the street at the people walking by. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Why wouldn’t I be? Haven’t you ever known anyone who’s gone traveling before?” I poured two nondairy creamers into my coffee and watched the white cream swirl around.

“Sure I have, but most of the people I know want to leave New York, not come here.” He exhaled a big cloud of smoke. “You know what? I’m not doing anything today. If you want, I can show you around. I’ll be your tour guide.”

I thought about it for a while. He asked too many questions. I liked looking around by myself, but I had no idea which way to go, really. All I knew was how to get back to the hotel and that was one place I didn’t want to go.

He said he would take me on a tour, but first he needed to go by his apartment to pick up another camera. We rode in a cab over to Ninth Avenue and West 20th Street. His apartment, on the 11th floor, was small. The entryway had framed pictures of him with Bette Midler and Carol Channing and autographed covers of programs from Broadway plays. There was barely enough room in the kitchen to walk around a table that was covered with dirty dishes and The New York Times. The other room, the living room/bedroom, was as small as the kitchen. At McDonald’s he told me he had a one-bedroom apartment, so I asked him where the bedroom was. He said I was standing in it. In the daytime it was a living room. At night the couch pulled out into a bed and it was the bedroom. From the window above the couch, I could see the Empire State Building over the roofs of the Chelsea district.

He dug around in a closet and found the camera he wanted. Then, when he was ready to go, he told me I should leave my pack there. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Because that would mean I’d have to come back here later.” I figured he had ulterior motives and I wasn’t going to set myself up for another awkward situation. Men only wanted one thing.

“Okay, if you feel like carrying that thing around all day, it’s up to you. But you don’t have to.”

We took the subway down to the Staten Island Ferry and rode across for a quarter each. He paid for me and said, “My treat.” I said, “Big spender,” and he ruffled my hair. When the ferry passed the Statue of Liberty I was disappointed. I expected it to be gigantic, the size of the Empire State Building. But it was much smaller. A strong, cold wind blew across the water and into us. The skyline of Manhattan got smaller and smaller as we got closer to Staten Island. We stayed on the ferry and rode back without having to pay again. Bud knew lots of little tricks like that about the city.

After we rode on the ferry, Bud took me to Greenwich Village. We walked down Christopher Street and he explained to me the different types of homosexuals who hung out in that neighborhood. He said they preferred to be called “Gays.” “I don’t know why they chose that one,” he muttered. “There’s nothing ‘Gay’ about it, really.” This was 1975 and the Gay Liberation period was in full swing, so a lot of people were coming out of the closet and dressing flamboyantly. I saw a guy dressed as a cowboy in red leather chaps, a blue vest, and a white cowboy hat. Someone else was dressed in army fatigues, like he was a soldier. Bud pointed out a couple of men dressed head-to-toe in black leather and told me they were into “S and M.” I didn’t know what that was. He said they liked to beat each other up. He told me most guys weren’t as extreme as the ones we saw. There were lots of regular-looking guys who dressed low-key, like in blue jeans and bomber jackets. It seemed like all of them had mustaches and short hair.

Bud knew a lot of people. When he walked me through the Village, he introduced me to his friends. They were open and seemed genuinely glad to meet me. They didn’t act like it was bizarre or “wrong” for me to be traveling around by myself. No one asked me why I wasn’t in school, which was the first question I got from most of my hitchhiking rides. A few of them gave Bud a knowing wink. People were nice to me in New York. Even though I’d just arrived there, I didn’t feel weird like I did back home in Missouri. No one stared at me like on the bus in Baltimore. This city felt comfortable. Bud asked me if I wanted to go into a Gay bar. That made me uneasy. I didn’t really. He said it would be good for me to see what one was like and that it was no big deal. He walked me to one of his favorite bars called the Ninth Circle on a little side street. We stood at the bottom of the stone stairs that led up to the bar. I didn’t want to go in. I was afraid if I went in I’d turn queer and I didn’t want to be a big fag with everyone laughing at me. I didn’t want to be a lecherous old queen with a Southern drawl like that guy in Jacksonville Beach.

Bud laughed but then got serious when I told him this. He turned, facing me, putting his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Joe, what about all the guys I’ve just shown you walking around the Village? Do they look like big fags?”

He argued, “But not all of them. Right?”

I had to admit that a lot of the Gays he showed me looked fairly normal.

The beer calmed me and helped me get over my nervousness about being in a Gay bar for the first time. Now that I was inside I didn’t feel so threatened.

Inside the bar “Fly, Robin, Fly” by the Silver Convention played from the jukebox. That was another one I knew from the radio. The bar itself was long and narrow. The walls were covered with a light wood paneling. Past the bar was the jukebox and then a bench with little café tables that ran around the perimeter of the bar. There was space to stand out in the middle. Through the back door was a garden patio with people eating hamburgers at tables covered with giant umbrellas. Heads turned and guys looked us up and down as Bud and I stood in the doorway. Downstairs was a pool table. Bud said that’s where the hustlers hung out. I went down and looked around. Some guys were shooting pool and hanging out. There was nothing dangerous or sinister about them like the word “hustler” insinuated. They reminded me of my friends back in Missouri. Back upstairs, two men sat at the bar in a locked embrace, kissing. They were so engrossed they looked like they were going to tip off their stools at any moment. I tried not to stare but couldn’t help it, so I hid my face in the jukebox and read the entire list of selections. I found my song, “Sweet Sticky Thing,” and noted that it was by the Ohio Players. When I got back to Missouri I wanted to buy a copy of that record. The song that played the most was a disco tune called “Do It Any Way You Wanna.” It seemed like every other person who went up to the jukebox played it. There were no words except the title repeated over and over. The rhythm and beat of the song sank into me. I liked it. I liked the song and I liked hearing it at that bar. Bud brought me a beer in a big glass. The beer calmed me and helped me get over my nervousness about being in a Gay bar for the first time. Now that I was inside I didn’t feel so threatened. Like the song said, people were doing it whatever way they felt like. I felt a load lift off of my shoulders. Light, relieved. I started to relax.

Bud introduced me to an older guy who was dancing to the jukebox with a knit neck scarf like he was a burlesque dancer. He had a puffy face, droopy eyes, and a sweet mischievous smile. Bud told me that the guy was in some of Andy’s movies.

Bud stopped and looked at me surprised. “You really are a hick, aren’t you?”

I said, “What do you mean?” It pissed me off that all of a sudden Bud was acting superior to me. I didn’t like being called a hick. I was raised in the suburbs, not the country.

He said, “Andy. Andy Warhol. Do you know who that is?”

I got defensive. “Of course I know who that is.” Bud glanced at me sideways like he wasn’t convinced. Thinking of Andy Warhol made me think about one of my favorite meals, a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup made with milk. I wanted to have that as soon as I got home.

The man danced up to us and said in a stoned nelly voice, “Ohhhh! My Quaalude is kicking in…” He wiggled around to the music and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. I told Bud that was exactly what I did not want to turn into. Bud said I had a long way to go. There were a couple of girls sitting at a table in the corner. That was another thing. I liked girls and didn’t want to quit hanging out with them. Bud said just because he didn’t want to sleep with a woman didn’t mean that he didn’t like women. He just preferred having sex with men. That was the first that Bud referred to himself as being Gay. I tried to let that comment slip by but kept it in the back of my mind. I didn’t want him trying anything funny with me. The girls smiled at me and I went over and started talking to them. When I got close I realized that one of them was a boy with long hair and makeup. I was surprised for a little bit, but actually liked it. I thought he was brave. They seemed okay. I said hello and told them I was from Kansas City and had been out hitchhiking. They said they were from Queens, and Manhattan was as far as they’d been away from home. The guy turned to the girl and said, “Oh! You’re from Queens? I’m from normal parents!” Then they cracked up laughing. I told them they should go to Kansas City sometime, that it would do them good to get away. They asked me who I was with and I pointed out Bud to them.

The boy said, “Ooooo, better watch out. I think he likes you ‘in that way.’”

The girl winked at me. “I think your friend’s cute. I wouldn’t mind liking him in that way.”

“Are you two boyfriend and girlfriend?” I asked. They laughed even harder.

She said, “No, honey! Excuse me… What are you thinking? I’m his fag hag, not his girlfriend.”

I’d never heard the term “fag hag” before and was shocked. Why would anyone call themselves something like that? A hag? She didn’t look like a hag to me. I was slightly appalled, but figured it must have been okay because no one was calling her a hag. She was the one who said it. People told me weird stuff all the time when I was traveling. I filed this term away in that category and pretended like I didn’t hear her.

Bud and I went back to his apartment. He made spaghetti for dinner and then pulled out the couch in the living room, turning it into the bedroom. He seduced me while we watched 

 on TV. I didn’t move. I just lay as still as possible and let him give me a blow job.

I stayed there for a couple of days. The second night I loosened up. We had sex and I let him fuck me. I was on my stomach. It was kind of boring. His body was about the same size as my dad’s. Kind of big and soft, but not hairy, and his stomach wasn’t as fat as Dad’s. I enjoyed sleeping next to him with his arm and leg draped over me much more than I did having sex with him.

I wandered around the city by myself in the daytime and then met up with Bud in the evening. I ate at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on Eighth Avenue. I went there because after Miami, the Cuban was something familiar to me. But even there I had never been to a Chinese-Cuban place where the Chinese waiters and cooks spoke Spanish to each other. That was a bizarre mix to me. English was the Chinese guys’ third language. The rhythm of the city was starting to make sense to me. No matter how out of place I felt in Missouri, I felt completely normal in New York. ♦

Joe Westmoreland is the author of the novel 

, originally published in 2001 and excerpted below. He lives with his partner, the artist Charles Atlas, in New York City.

First Love

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Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin spent 21 hours and 36 minutes on the Moon—or, at least, that’s how long their lunar jaunt took on Earth. But on the Moon, time runs faster. Between touching down and taking off, Armstrong and Aldrin grew a tiny bit older than their colleagues back in Houston.

That might sound impossible, but it’s really just physics. A good clock should always tick at one second per second, but according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, “one second per second” is a matter of perspective: two observers moving relative to each other or sitting at different places in a gravitational field won’t agree on the time, even with perfect clocks. While the Apollo 11 astronauts only grew about 0.00005 second older during their stay on the moon, the tiny time difference between Earth and its natural satellite actually matters—now more than ever. If we only ever planned on sending a few lone spacecraft to the Moon, we could probably ignore relativity and keep running Moon missions on Earth time. But Earth has big plans for its natural satellite. Dozens of countries around the world are currently cooperating and competing in a new space race. In 2027, the NASA-led Artemis program is set to put astronaut boots on lunar ground for the first time since 1972. And that’s just the beginning. The goal of Artemis is not only to return to the Moon, but to stay there—to establish a permanent human presence on the lunar surface and in lunar orbit. One important step, the assembly of a lunar space station called Gateway, is set to begin in a few years.

As the Moon gets busier, its relativistic time distortion will grow from a fun fact into a serious problem. Communications and navigation technologies rely on accurate, tightly synced timekeeping; errors of just a few tens of nanoseconds are enough to muddle a message or befuddle a bearing. And that could have grave consequences for future lunar infrastructure and astronauts.

“We really need to make sure that all of the activities on the Moon are very safe,” Cheryl Gramling, lead for Position, Navigation, and Timing at NASA Space Communications and Navigation, told me. To do that, she added, we’ll eventually need a way to keep time that’s made for the Moon, not for Earth.

Space agencies are already starting to take the problem of lunar time seriously. The European Space Agency (ESA) 

 for lunar time in November 2022 as part of the ongoing international effort to create common standards for lunar communications and navigation architecture, called 

. Later, in 2024, the Biden administration 

 calling for NASA to develop a lunar time standard called Coordinated Lunar Time or LTC. And if that sounds simple, think again, says aerospace engineer Werner Enderle, who heads ESA’s Navigation Support Office.

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