Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

This essay was originally written to be released with Meshell Ndegeocello’s acclaimed 2024 LP, 

No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin 

(Blue Note). Ndegeocello has now moved on from performing Baldwin material. But we’re honored to publish this piece in homage to her work—and in anticipation of the great bassist’s 

concert at Pioneer Works on March 29, 2026

In the old days—in the way back times, way back in what the American author, James Baldwin, called "the old country," or the American South—folks carried their dead with them. Took those shadows and memories down roads and into attics, let them romp and breathe by riverbanks in Georgia, told them stories in Maryland, gossiped with them for a spell in Pensacola, and Washington, D.C. The point was you didn't let the dead stay dead: they were your legacy, and your voice, and in talking to, about, and through them, you learned how you sounded as well, where those multitude of voices sat in your own throat.

You can hear the voices the gone but not gone leave us with in Meshell Ndegeocello's altogether brilliant sonic theatre piece, 

No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin

, a work that contains a cavalcade of voices, sounds, and unique utterances around one subject: James Baldwin, whose centenary we celebrated in 2024. But is celebration really the word? In Ndegeocello's hands and hearing, Baldwin was always there, an astonishing presence whose voice—whose multitude of voices as novelist, playwright, poet, screenplay writer, and especially essayist—always talked to us, if we only listened.

Born and raised in Harlem, Baldwin's writing created a universe rooted in the real: the reality of his queerness, his race, the fecundity of his ever expanding mind and heart, and the reality of his ancestors, all the voices that came before and helped make his voice. These included Henry James, his mother Berdis Baldwin's comforting sound, the wrath, piety, and drama, in the King James Bible, gospel music, the critic Edmund Wilson —and, too, the songwriter Charles Albert Tindley. Tindley may not have been a direct influence on Baldwin. But you can hear his retroactive influence on the writer in Tindley's hymn, "Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave it There," a hymn Baldwin, the boy preacher—he preached from the time he was 14; when he was 17, he stopped—might very well have sung on one of those Harlem Sundays, his white shirt stiff with starch and his heart beating out the rhythm as he clapped his hands, flashed a tambourine:

Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
If you trust and never doubt, He will surely bring you out.
Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

But where could Baldwin leave his burden? Raised in the Christian church by a preacher father who embraced Jesus but who could not love his adopted son, Baldwin competed for his father's attention by becoming a preacher, too, an authoritative role he used, in the end, to distance himself from the terrifying complications of his own blackness and maleness in a country that did not love either. One place he could hear his complexity—the complexity of his mind and heart—was in music. "It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a proactive sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story," Baldwin wrote in his 1951 essay, "Many Thousands Gone." He goes on:

It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference. The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves. We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him—such a question merely opens the gates on chaos. What we really feel about him is involved with all that we feel about everything, about everyone, about ourselves.

If music is unadulterated storytelling—the story that tells the truest story of us, and you, too—how do we make that music? What is the story we mean to tell through sound? In 

, which Ndegeocello and her magnificent colleagues Justin Hicks, Abe Rounds, Chris Bruce, Jebin Bruni, Julius Rodriguez, Jake Sherman, Kenita Miller, and Staceyann Chin worked on for eight years, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a kind of inheritance: not only the words Baldwin left us, particularly when he published 

, his devastating report on the ways in which ideals of beauty and masculinity destroy as many lives as they hope to make, but how we, his audience, remade Baldwin, while taking some things away. Such as his queer body. His right to his sexuality and thus love. The intimacy that affects being. Did he sacrifice all that to be a voice—our voice? 

Baldwin left the U.S. to get away from racism and I believe homophobia in 1948. He had $40 and no French. The point was to learn how to write, he said once, without all those hang-ups. And to maybe learn how to love. Music helped him become the writer he meant to be. Listening to Bessie Smith records in a Swiss chalet carried him back to who he used to be, and with that he was able to finish his first novel, 

, a book about a Black church and the guilty queer boy Baldwin was in it. That book is filled with singing, with images of the "vertical saints" praying for a salvation that may never come. No God can wash them clean of their blackness, their history. Living abroad allowed Baldwin the distance to see the world he had come from. And music helped get him there. But he knew when it was time to go home. It was 1956, and he was in France. He picked up a newspaper; there was a photograph of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She was one of the first black students admitted to Harry Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, under the Pearsall Plan to Save Our Schools. Instituted in 1956, the Pearsall Plan was North Carolina's attempt to integrate their public schools following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. For many blacks, North Carolina's "moderate" approach was just more of that Faulkner jazz about "going slow,” which Baldwin analyzes in his 1956 essay, "Faulkner and Desegregation":

The Southern tradition, which is, after all, all that Faulkner is talking about, is not a tradition at all: when Faulkner evokes it, he is simply evoking a legend which contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply than it should be, is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro.

Degradation, violence, spit. "Spit was hanging from the hem of Dorothy's dress," Baldwin reports a witness saying to him; Baldwin: "One of us should have been with her." Returning to the U.S. led, of course, to his deepening friendships with Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, and it also led to him becoming a significant voice in the Civil Rights movement. But where was his voice? That interior voice all writers must draw on in order to become a self?

When James Baldwin published "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in the 

in 1962, the response was immediate. In the essay, the public self merges with the personal in order to produce a polemic that was a sermon born partly out of the heartache of leaving the church a marginalized queer boy and returning to the memory of the church as a queer man. Baldwin's essay deals, in part, with how the the faithless become just that, and how European ideals of religion and beauty crippled and then made whole and fierce, at least momentarily, the black body that ultimately rejected such specious, evil claims.

Writing "Down at the Cross" allowed Baldwin to vomit the church up, and to expose its smoke and mirrors, all designed to keep black people on their knees, sunk deep in piousness and ghetto-think. Despite its wrath, though, Baldwin's longest early piece is shot through with a kind of gay slyness and humor—he reads other people as much as he reads himself. Still, he doesn't forego the galvanizing power of black organization: What if the Nation of Islam, which he reports on and analyzes in the second half of the story, indeed has their revenge on all those white devils who wanted to (at best) keep a black man down? The once white world would be white no longer, and there would be no forgiveness for having equated one's race with power while treating all those others accordingly. Still, in all the controversy that followed his most famous work—it landed Baldwin on the cover of another magazine,

, and required him to display his oratory gifts in any number of non-literary venues—what got lost, at times, was the sheer talent and imagination that went into the thing, and how a changing universe always begins with the word.

Those words are music to Ndegeocello. Inspired by Baldwin’s most well-known essay, Ndegeocello’s piece, first staged as a church service, employed music, sermon, text, images, and movement, all of which entered into conversation with Baldwin’s monumental and delicate essay about how black bodies were perceived not only by white Americans but by blacks themselves. In the first part of the work, Baldwin wrestles with—without naming it—his homosexuality, and with the strain of being “saved,” when he knew, by virtue of his preference, that he was among the so-called “dispossessed.” And in going back to the sounds Baldwin made on the page, Ndegeocello mined those words that return Baldwin to his own body, his own voice, while creating music in her own name, too.

When I first saw the piece in 2016 at Harlem Stage, Ndegeocello’s performance put my heart in my throat. Because this was opera as a form of resistance. And music without rhetoric. “Eyes,” a song written and performed by Hicks, seemed to have been written from inside Baldwin’s body—the very body we had denied him in our veneration of him. But as Hicks sang, he gave Baldwin back to us, and oh, how we had missed him. It was not lost on many of us that afternoon that 

 was being performed not too far from where Baldwin was born and raised, those Harlem streets that made him, even as they threatened to unmake him. Some folks never left the avenue. But when he died in 1984, they gathered, remembering Jimmy, with all those sounds and words that bring him right back to us, with his poppy sized eyes, and his head in stories. What those folks on the avenue saw in him was hope, his queer Black body shot through with rainbows. 

, too. That Jimmy body dug up; the bones wrapped in rainbow flags and stars: an honoring of the dead that do not stay dead. A legacy. Dig. The music Ndegeocello’s made here lets us hear how the dreams creeping out of his head got into her head and her various musicians, all those voices raised to give Jimmy back his body, that body he was always playing hide and seek with because who wanted to really see it when he was here, see it whole, and the language that went along with it? Language is music. And the music you hear in 

 is Jimmy talking to Meshell and his words meeting the language of her sounds and then coming out again through a multitude of voices, a multitude of sounds and thoughts that bring Jimmy back and give him—finally—his whole and true self, that which he offered up, time and again, if only we knew then how to listen. ♦

since 1994, and won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017. He is

gen-brody

How You Sound?

Jeff Mills Loves to Forget

Welcome to the Quantum Universe

This poem was composed entirely from text found on garments mostly produced in China and distributed globally. The words move across bodies and landscapes, often ending up in landfills. An infinite scroll. An endless garment.

Shanzhai is the Chinese word for counterfeit or copy. The term translates literally to “mountain hamlet,” and is said to derive from the Song Dynasty tale 

, in which rebel-bandits stockpile goods stolen from the imperial center to redistribute among people living on the margins. Beyond the reach of authorities, at the edges of empire, property and authorship are redefined. Alternate forms of relation emerge.

Traditional lyric poetry expresses the feelings of a singular “I” in song-like fragments. Shanzhai lyrics, by contrast, are collectively generated, blurring individual authorship through copy, collaboration, theft, creative mistranslation, and errata. Their designs embody the tensions within globalized supply chains. With irreverent disregard for standard English, shanzhai lyrics offer a fractured language that reflects and refracts the absurdity of consumption.

The stanzas here draw from several sources: our roving physical archive of over 500 shanzhai poetry-garments, images of found t-shirts sent by readers worldwide, and poems transcribed from clothing seen in Beijing, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and in Chinatowns from Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens to Barcelona, Panama City and Luang Prabang. Many of these sequences are transcriptions of live poetry readings composed and performed from heaps of shirts, often coalescing around subjects such as empire, time, fashion, mountain, and Hamlet—itself a bootleg text composed of stolen and collaged fragments. We are not the writers of 

, but its custodians. In the poem below, excerpted from 

, we hope to slow down the pace of fast fashion enough for you to read it.

for $22. A limited edition shirt made in the spirit of the book is also

Shanzhai Lyric is a New York-based “poetic research unit” whose work is

, on view at Pioneer Works through April 12. The excerpt below is drawn from 

and which we'll launch on March 8th with a fashion show

ser-martin

Shanzhai Lyric's Endless Garment

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At a time when there are vast differences in peoples’ beliefs and perspectives—in their sounds and their art—it feels more important than ever for artist and former Pioneer Works music resident, Amirtha Kidambi, to pick up her tools and get to work.

I met the vocalist, improviser, composer, organizer, and educator while I was myself a music resident at Pioneer Works, and I felt an immediate kinship with her remarkable output. We’re both third culture musicians living in New York City, and our creative practices emphasize the important role artists play in encouraging catharsis and release in a period of unprecedented global solidarity movements. To achieve this goal herself, Kidambi needed to break down the structures controlling her own self expression. Revolution of the self is necessary before taking on the institutions that profit from hate—or, more commonly today, that virtue-signal their support for what’s good while obfuscating how much they benefit from maintaining an oppressive status quo.

 turn to ask questions. During our wide-ranging conversation, we discussed improvisation, dancing through societal collapse, how to stand firm for what’s right—and how to become the kind of people we need to be during these trying political times.

Omar Ahmad

Who is Amirtha Kidambi right now? I know from some of my reading and listening that you're a jazz, avant-garde, improvisational, and devotional vocalist. You’re a part of many projects pulling from an Indian musical background, blended with a lot more traditional Western, experimental jazz leanings. You touch upon topics of decolonialization, socioeconomic disparity, and struggles within society at large. You strike so many deeply emotional chords in a way that feels really visceral—listening to you, it’s almost like I'm in the room with you. So I would love to hear from you directly: Who are you? Where are you right now?

Amirtha Kidambi

Right now, Amirtha is tired. She is very tired. The world feels so relentless. I guess music has always been the way I process everything that’s going on. That’s what I hope my music can do for other people: help them process through catharsis. I am a vocalist. I play synthesizer, I play harmonium in my band, Elder Ones. My practice has incorporated devotional music not just from India, but Pakistan and Bangladesh and a lot of South Asian countries. I was a South Indian traditional dancer in Bharatanatyam, so it's almost like I learned it in my body instead of my voice. But I'm also a punk and DIY kid, and that’s where my formal musical training came from; so there’s a hard edge that’s noise and electronic. My music is also, like you said, jazz.

But if somebody asks me what kind of music I make, the answer is creative music. I like that term because it doesn't tell you anything about genre. It tells you more about philosophy and approach. It was coined by the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was a collective of composers, performers, and improvisers on the South Side of Chicago—so people like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell—who were asking questions and being critical; it has that Black Panther attitude of self-determination. 

Creative music is a way for me to actually describe what my practice is, which at its root is about liberation. 

I think that's why I gravitated toward free jazz and improvisation, as a way of decolonizing myself after all this Western classical music education that I, by default, stumbled into. Improvisation was such a big part of Indian music, but it's almost like I was programmed to forget about it.

Totally. It feels the closest to authenticity in motion, in the sense that it’s less about music sounding like a final product, but more the thought of, "Hey, this is what it is. It's gonna be imperfect." Even though your music still sounds pretty close to perfect.

It’s perfect in the sense that it feels connected to real feelings, not perfect in the sense that it was EQ'd to meet a certain LUFS threshold [equalized to meet a certain frequency balance] for mastering. But speaking of improvisation, so much of your music, especially the more long-form pieces, feel like it comes in parts or in stages. I was listening to 

 on the way over here, which feels like a triptych. It’s really, really gorgeous. With improvisation, it's hard to know when something is done. Maybe I'm projecting here, but I know I struggle when I do one take and wanna start making changes. How do you keep the improvisation front and center, and not let that initial feeling of yours get lost?

I was attracted to improvisation because I have a neurotic, kind of intense control freak energy. It broke me out of that. Before improvisation, I was just performing a lot of other people's music, because I was never satisfied with anything I’d written or done. I wouldn't release anything, I would just pore over it forever. In 2013, I was in a piece by one of the composers of the AACM, Muhal Richard Abrams, called "Dialogue Social." It was all improvisatory. It was also the first time I sang in Tamil, my mother tongue, because he suggested it. He was like, "Oh, if you speak any other languages, feel free to sing in them." Which nobody had ever asked me to do. He also asked me what my music was like. I hadn't made anything under my name yet. When I said I didn’t know, he told me, "Okay, well, why don't you make it and then let me know what it is."

Amirtha Kidambi, Qasim Naqvi & Rafiq Bhatia Trio | Ragas Live Festival 2023

That spirit of letting go of control and improvising as a social process was how I formed my band Elder Ones, at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event that Matana Roberts had organized in 2015 for Mike Brown's family. It ended up being a trio with various people in the New York scene. It was a way to become part of a community and develop relationships through playing. You didn't have to have a million rehearsals as a band. You just had to get together and play. I realized then that I wanted to write compositions to not only release control but to have the voices of other creative people involved. It became less about the product, and more about the process. Improvisation also blurs that separation between artist and audience. It makes them real participants, and it becomes less hierarchical, which is anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. It goes back to more indigenous practices. As an organizer, I feel like improvising is a tool to deal with a crisis that’s unfolding before your eyes. We're being surveilled all the time. How are we gonna adjust our tactics? You have to improvise. You're doing it in collaboration with other people. You're doing it in communities, in real spaces. It’s a constant process of learning—not just in relation to music, but other things as well.

During the pandemic I lived in Sunset Park. Do you know the Metropolitan Detention Center there?

I work two blocks from it, so I'm around there all the time.

It's a federal prison, and Jamel Floyd was killed there in 2020. He had asthma and he was pepper sprayed to death. They knew he couldn't breathe. So this Sunset Park advocacy group, MDC Solidarity, held a rally and vigil there every Friday, which I was going to. I started to be like, "What if we had music at these things?" If you know those buildings, there's a big space between them and there's crazy acoustics. I started to play alto saxophone—this was the beginning of the pandemic, when I had no connection to my voice anymore—and I started organizing a band for protests. We played free jazz or protest music. The incarcerated folks inside were tapping on their glass and shining their room lamps in the windows. We even organized a string quartet that played Nina Simone. I think you asked me before what my ideal venue would be. That’s an ideal venue.

I want my music to do something. I made a commitment a long time ago to advocate on stage. Sometimes that feels symbolic and sometimes it feels real. It used to be that I would talk about racism on stage. Everyone could agree and feel good about that. “Yeah, racism is bad." But Black Lives Matter was a different feeling in Europe. I thought I was preaching to the choir, but now that I think about it, I don't think that was true. And when I talk now about colonialism and imperialism and Palestine, and implicating not only the audience but myself as an American, I think it has a different feeling. I’ve been trying to work with various organizations to commit to PACBI, which is the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. And I couldn't get even one large or mid-sized organization to do it, not one in our community that espouses all these progressive, radical values around social justice.

...through their marketing and everything else too.

They’re like, "We're a community space," blah, blah, blah. But as soon as you have a material demand from them, which is that they should endorse PACBI's call, which might anger some funders or audience members, they’re all, "Oh, we're just a space, we're not political.” It was very disappointing to me, because Palestine is representative of so much beyond just Palestine: It’s all the intersecting horrors that we're dealing with. If the art world cannot disentangle itself from genocide and horrific systems of imperialism and surveillance, the same surveillance that's used in Palestine and here in New York on our own immigrants, why should I care if it continues to exist or not? 

If the art world cannot disentangle itself from genocide and horrific systems of imperialism and surveillance, the same surveillance that's used in Palestine and here in New York on our own immigrants, why should I care if it continues to exist or not?

Wouldn't the thing then be to create something that doesn't rely on those injustices?

That’s what I'm struggling to imagine right now. How do we get ourselves out of where we're at? So now I’m trying to book shows based on where their solidarity is.

It's very hard to know what building will rise in place of something that hasn't been torn down yet, so I think that there's some grace that we all need to give ourselves; it's very, very difficult to see past smoke. And right now, things are only just starting to sizzle and burn. And a lot of people are saying, "Oh my God, things are worse than they've ever been." And I'm like…

The mindfuck—for lack of a better philosophical term—is the hard thing to deal with. Hopefully, as we approach the next higher elevated form of consciousness, we'll start to be able to sift through and build something new. It might be helpful first to just do the healing before the building. You seem like such a builder, and I'm also a builder, so it's very easy for us to envision it.

Often people will call me an activist, and I used to feel really weird about that. I'd be like, "No, there are real activists doing the real work." But now I'm starting to integrate that idea, and take seriously that it’s part of the work that I do. It's interesting going back to the spiritual idea of the Kali Yuga versus the Satya Yuga. The goddess Kali is named for the goddess of destruction. She's one of the most important goddesses because you have to destroy to build up again. You have to go to the most morally depraved point for people to actually see how everything works.

This is slightly optimistic of me—I was talking to someone from Writers Against the War on Gaza [WAWOG] about this yesterday—but Zohran Mamdani winning the primary here in New York and then the mayorship has shown that this third rail of being openly pro-Palestinian, calling out genocide, didn't destroy his political career. I have my critiques of Zohran…

…but he's pro-Palestinian. Period, you know? I do feel like people's consciousness is rising.

I came across a quote by Huey P. Newton recently—who was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party—about talking to someone who you don't think is on the same side as you. It has become something of a mantra for me. He said, “I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand…I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness.”

He said the actual work of revolutionaries is to help people's consciousness expand. It stuck with me, because revolutionaries are viewed as militant, but their real mission has always been raising the consciousness of regular working people. And I feel like, as artists, art is one of those ways you can raise consciousness.

If there's anything I’m trying to do right now, and recommit myself to, it's that we, as artists, can raise consciousness. So even if we can't necessarily be out in the streets every day, getting arrested or whatnot, that's a role that we have to play as musicians, you know? We can raise consciousness. ♦

Amirtha Kidambi's 2025 Pioneer Works residency was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s inaugural

, a part of the Foundation’s The Artist Impact Initiative.

Omar Ahmad is a Palestinian-American composer, producer, DJ, and sound artist. 

Amirtha Kidambi is a musician, composer, activist, educator, and organizer. She is the creative force behind the incendiary protest group Elder Ones and a PW Music Alum. 

sci-american-typewriter

See Past the Smoke

Once, in Midtown Manhattan, you could visit a shop with a sign that read, simply, VERMONT. Its display windows presented seasonal dioramas. Evenings, the ebullient marquee of Radio City Music Hall shouted out in neon. But Vermont, its cozy neighbor, had gone to bed early. Vermont was dark and silent.

Inside Vermont, the air smelled of woodsmoke, cider, and maple syrup. Vermont boasted that it sold nothing at all, except “the virtues of Vermont.”

But Vermont’s “virtues” were in fact for sale. In the winter of 1954, the shop window was taken over by a large three-dimensional map of the state, with colored bulbs attached where the ski areas were located. It looked like a game show prop. The bulbs shone red, yellow, or green, depending on how much snow had fallen in the real Vermont, far from Midtown. Passing cars slowed as their drivers squinted to make out the map.

Cabbies felt “despair” at driving by, according to 

; their fares showed a tendency to cut short their trips, hop out, and study the display. The windows became one of the big city’s minor attractions. “There is no official count on the ‘window watchers,’” the 

 reported, “but they are believed to number in the thousands.”

Inside Manhattan’s Vermont, a staff of Vermonters, mostly young women, greeted visitors, handed out brochures, and answered the phones. Winter was the busiest season. “Between 1,000 and 1,500 queries a week are received about snow conditions,” the 

 reported. Many young men stopped in just to talk with these delightful, helpful women, who tended their serene island in a sea of noise and traffic.

“Vermont in New York: An Invitation!” read the full-page ad in 

 magazine. “Drop in and visit about our favorite State with Vermonter Mary Jean Ogden.” “Visit about” was a nice touch: a Yankee speech artifact, suggesting a whole world of front porches and shade trees, and wholesome nontransactional encounters, free of the taint of money.

Outside it was Midtown at mid-century, the world that the poet Frank O’Hara captured on his frantic lunch hour walks: workmen fed “their dirty glistening torsos” between parked cabs, while on “the avenue” women’s skirts could be seen “flipping / above heels” and blowing “above grates.”

Inside, it was another kind of poem: Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” with the despair erased, leaving only the ambience: the “snow upon the roof,” the “icicles along the wall.”

In the fall of that year, 19-year-old Larry Sanders took his little brother, Bernard, then 13, on the subway from their home in Midwood, Brooklyn, to Midtown Manhattan, a 45-minute trip, and visited “Vermont”: the Vermont Information Center.

They were not skiers. It might have been an accident: the shop was just to the right of the subway exit. But in 1954, a minor cultural draft blew down from Vermont. Everyone had heard “Moonlight in Vermont,” the popular song, beloved of crooners, each verse a woodsy haiku. Hitchcock’s 

 filmed that fall in the village of Craftsbury, where the foliage stole the spotlight from the cadaver. And Bing Crosby’s 

 minus the blackface, now set in a Vermont inn, premiered in November of that year.

Though there were bins of apples and little samplers of maple syrup on offer, the Sanders boys brought a different kind of souvenir back home to Midwood that day. A wire rack presented fliers for “Vermont land,” Bernie Sanders recalled in 2015. “We picked up the brochures and we saw farms were for sale.”

“It sounds like a made-up story,” Larry Sanders told me in the first of our interviews, “but it really happened.” On the subway home, Larry and Bernie pored over photos of “farm after farm, pages of farms.” The land was beautiful—but more importantly, “it was cheap.” “Cheapness,” frugality, thrift: these concepts come up over and over as we follow Bernie Sanders’s rise. They were yoked early to the idea of the state of Vermont.

There is something funny about two lanky Brooklyn teenagers discussing real estate with the reputable ladies of the Vermont Information Center. But the boys had been primed by attending the Ten Mile River Scout Camp, in Narrowsburg, New York, on the Pennsylvania border: a wild, wooded, “stunning place,” according to Larry.

“Bernard loved the countryside,” Larry explained. Vermont, he said, was “a fantasy—but an important fantasy.”

Larry Sanders, whose resemblance to his brother is strong but not uncanny—he is not Larry David—is the keeper of the family’s stories. Bernie has made a stand against the politics of folksy charm and personal anecdote, ever since his first races in the early 1970s. In their place he has developed a counter-charisma, an orneriness that in old age makes him seem a flinty, Yankee figure. Bernie’s cantankerousness has been very easy to sentimentalize, especially for the young. But it scalded and confused many throughout his political rise.

“The usual path is to begin with biography,” Tad Devine, a Bernie aide, told 

 in 2015. “I don’t see us going there.” While Larry very naturally faces backward, Bernie has always barreled ahead. He will not, or perhaps cannot, look back; but he is shaped thoroughly by the braided economic, medical, and emotional traumas of the first little economy he saw up close, that of his childhood home.

The elder Sanders brother has lived mostly in England since 1969, where he is now retired as a Green Party official. Many Americans met him for the first time on the night of July 26, 2016, when, as a delegate for Democrats Abroad, Larry nominated Bernie for president of the United States. The clip can be found easily online: “I want to bring before this convention the names of our parents, Eli Sanders and Dorothy Glassberg Sanders,” Larry Sanders begins, his voice breaking and tears welling. “They did not have easy lives, and they died young. They would be immensely proud of their son and his accomplishments. They loved him very much. They loved the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, and would be especially proud that Bernard is renewing that vision.”

Larry was weeping by then. Bernie had lashed himself to the mast as usual, but soon his own tears began. (I don’t believe Bernie had ever cried publicly before that night.) “It was a hectic household,” Larry told me. “My mother had a very strong temper.” Dorothy Glassberg was born on the Lower East Side in 1912. Home movies from the 1940s show a handsome, stylish woman, at home in a swagger coat and pillbox hat. She waves baby Bernie’s hand to the camera, broadly smiling.

“Cheapness,” frugality, thrift: these concepts come up over and over as we follow Bernie Sanders’s rise. They were yoked early to the idea of the state of Vermont.

But her “hectic household”—three and a half rooms in a tenement—reminded her perhaps too much of her childhood. “She wanted a house,” Larry said; she “yearned for status in the synagogue” and in the surrounding community, which came only with having a home where a woman could reciprocate her neighbors’ hospitality.

The apartment at 1525 East 26th Street had a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen/living room, and a “half room, a widened part of the hall,” which, according to Larry, served as a second bedroom. When they were both living at home, Larry and Bernie alternated, the one sleeping in the makeshift bedroom, the other on the living room couch. “They threw a bathroom in as well,” Bernie once wrote. “My memory of that one time a fish actually came up through a toilet.” The apartment “was incredibly cramped,” Larry told me. “Not only didn’t we have a room of our own, we didn’t have a room together.”

In the main room, there was a bookshelf with perhaps 20 books (including a eugenics textbook whose anatomical illustrations were “very popular” with the boys), a radio, and, from 1948 or so on, a TV. The apartment offered “no privacy at all”—no place, Larry added solemnly, that Bernie and Larry “could decorate.”

With space indoors scarce, Larry said, “the street was our second home.” The rule on the pickup basketball courts was “Make it, take it”—you score a basket, you get the ball back—a brutal capitalistic model for competition, and one that Bernie practiced in his political life, whatever his ideological commitment to the fair distribution of wealth. “We played baseball, softball, punchball, stickball, stoopball, roller hockey, variants of American football, touch football, touch tackle, basketball, marbles,” Larry said. “It was a very good way to grow up.” Bernie, he added, “might not entirely agree.”

In some marriages, the party that insists on a narrower world automatically wins, though the victory is costly. Dorothy Sanders apparently wanted a broader life.

But three and a half rooms were quite enough for Eli Sanders, who had emigrated to New York from Słopnice, Poland, in 1921, at the age of sixteen. His family in the old country sometimes went without food. “My father’s imagination, his life story, was survival,” Larry explained. Anything extra was trivial. Larry remembers his father watching a TV show about middle-class “psychological distress” and shaking his head. “But they’ve got plenty of money,” Eli Sanders muttered. “They’ve got everything they need.” Eli had an existential sense of life, drawn in part from his subsistence childhood, and augmented by the news dawning from Europe. Leafing through an old family photograph album, Eli Sanders pointed to one relative after another who’d been killed or lost— “gobbled up,” as Larry put it, in the Holocaust.

Eli Sanders was a commissioned paint salesman for the Keystone Paint and Varnish Company. He traveled up and down Long Island for his work and, according to Larry, “probably stopped at every diner along the way.” In the home movies I have seen, he is a paunchy man, and ill at ease throwing a ball to his sons. But he had a ready smile and a sweet, gregarious manner. Larry suggests that he spent a lot of his days chatting with his clients, which might have cut into his commissions. In Eli’s mind, the family had arrived. In his wife’s view, they had stalled out just on the other side of poverty.

In a story both Bernie and Larry tell, their father saw Arthur Miller’s 

 late in its Broadway run and wept for weeks after whenever he thought of Willy Loman, its thwarted protagonist. “He was devastated by it,” Larry told me. The play brought home to Eli how close his family had always been to economic collapse. Like many Americans in their precarious position, the Sanders family lived near despair. “The bottom could fall out,” as Larry put it. You might be tempted to conclude, as Willy Loman did, that “a man is worth more dead than alive.”

So Eli and Dorothy Sanders fought. They fought because they were frightened. The fights were unbearable to the boys, since, as they could plainly see, their parents were closely attached, and loved each other very much.

“My father’s thing was, you were spending too much,” Larry explained, “and my mother’s was, you’re not earning enough money.” This went round and round and “destroyed what they had.” These were “arguments that seared through a little boy’s brain, never to be forgotten,” Bernie Sanders wrote in 

Once, in the 1980s, I saw Bernie shopping at a department store in Burlington, now long gone, called Magrams. He pointed tentatively at the shirt racks, as though trying to make contact with an alien being. A few minutes later, from a second-floor window, I watched him exit the store and storm down Church Street toward city hall, empty-handed. I’ve always told it as a funny story; but when you hear the brothers discuss the anxiety that money caused them as children, it seems not funny at all.

, Bernie describes an errand he ran for his mother to buy groceries. “I went to the wrong store,” he wrote. “I went to the small shop a few blocks away, rather than the Waldbaum’s grocery store on Nostrand Avenue. I paid more than I should have. When I returned and my mother realized what I had done, the screaming was horrible.”

“The worst of it,” Larry told me, still agonizing 70 years later, “wasn’t what we didn’t have. It was the tensions. The arguments.”

I drove out to Midwood from the Upper West Side one beautiful April afternoon, across Central Park and down FDR Drive, over the Brooklyn Bridge, through a tangle of on- and off-ramps and, at last, out Ocean Avenue. How could it all work so well, said I, a Vermonter, to myself; every bolt and rivet holding as I sped through the balletic chaos of New York’s built environment?

The temperature fell several degrees as I neared Sanders’s childhood home in a mid-rise tenement on the corner of 26th Street and Kings Highway. Coney Island and Brighton Beach are nearby. You sense the beach in Midwood, in the flat, shadowless glare of the light, and in the gusts of fog that blow across the playgrounds and parks.

The food critic Mimi Sheraton, who grew up in Midwood, described an April day there in 1946. It matched what I saw nearly perfectly: mid-rise brick apartments trellised with black metal fire escapes on the avenues, and “builders’ houses, usually duplicated three or four in a row” on the side streets, “brick and stucco affairs.” Bright yellow forsythia blazed in many of those small backyards, just as she had described during this same calendar week in 1946.

It was, and is, a middle-class neighborhood with the feeling of an inner suburb. In Bernie’s day, it was an enclave of rapidly assimilating Jews within the larger neighborhood of Flatbush. Now the place has been carved out from Flatbush, and attracts a wide array of immigrant families, but especially Orthodox Jews of Russian descent. The day I was there was during Passover; a bunch of guys selling homemade matzoh on the street asked me if I was Jewish.

“Nope, Catholic,” I replied, and they waved me off with a chuckle. 1525 East 26th Street, a six-story, yellow-brick tenement, stands apart from the cheerful single-family homes. Many families in the neighborhood began their lives as renters in buildings like this one, aspiring to purchase one of the little houses at its ankles. Bernie’s parents dreamed of making that leap, but it never came. In Midwood, in the 1940s and ’50s, to own a “private house,” as Bernie’s parents called them, meant you were seen, your family was acknowledged, you were part of the neighborhood’s fabric. Once inside 1525 East 26th Street, though, you vanished.

I walked down 26th Street to James Madison High School. There they remember Bernie Sanders: in the entry hall, just beyond the metal detectors and security guards, is the Madison High School “Wall of Distinction.” Bernie Sanders ’59 is one in from the lower left corner, next to Beverly Stoll Pepper, the sculptor, who is the mother of the poet and my friend Jorie Graham. They are in distinguished company. Ruth Bader Ginsberg ’50 shares the top row with the famed environmentalist Barry Commoner ’33, Charles Schumer ’67, and Stanley H. Kaplan ’35, the founder of the test prep company. Working down the grid, we find Carole Klein King ’58, several professional athletes, four Nobel laureates, and Judith Blum Sheindlin ’60— “Judge Judy.” The roster of graduates is “more distinguished than Eton’s,” Larry Sanders told me, with a laugh.

What was the secret to the school’s success? “It was one of those schools where you felt what the old world was,” Jorie Graham told me. “The permission to get an education was an astounding gift because so many had died in Europe.”

Bernie entered Madison in the fall of 1954, around the time he and Larry picked up their Vermont brochures. Classmates recall a quiet and serious boy, not terribly political but, as his brother put it, “aware” of politics. “Jewish boys growing up in that time couldn’t but be aware just how important politics is,” Larry said. “It’s a matter of life and death.” Sanders eventually ran for student body president, finishing last among three candidates, on a platform to aid orphans of the Korean War.

But sports, and not politics, offered Bernie his first method of channeling his intensity. In a setback, Bernie, always a great pickup player on Brooklyn’s “Make it, take it” outdoor courts, was cut from the varsity basketball team. He was a “tremendous player,” Larry said. I confirmed that I had seen his game on the pickup courts in Burlington: strong ball handler, solid outside game, and, always, a complete, transforming intensity. Madison “wasn’t the skyscraper squad,” according to Larry, but they did have one of the “top-ranked teams in the city.” If only he’d been “an inch or two taller.” (Bernie stands around six feet one.)

Sanders became a standout athlete in track and cross-country, and eventually captained both teams. It baffled me, when Bernie sought to introduce himself to voters in his two presidential runs, that he did not capitalize more on his astonishing high school running career; the ads write themselves. Bernie’s best mile was 4:37, which earned him third place in New York City. That’s blazing fast, when you consider he ran in it on a cinder track, wearing primitive spikes. Even more impressive, to Larry, was his brother’s cross-country prowess. The course, way uptown in Van Cortlandt Park, “was always amazingly muddy,” he recalled. The races showed Bernie’s “tremendous stamina and dedication.” 

Practices were just getting underway when I left Madison High that afternoon, April 15, 2022; the courts and fields were filling up with students. Other kids were walking home alone, glued to their phones, or flirting in small, raucous groups. There is really nothing on earth like a high school dismissal, I thought to myself. The teachers and administrators streaming out looked almost as happy as their students, and took me for one of their own.

 describes the strong web of public projects from which the Sanders family benefited as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which Larry Sanders also invoked at the 2016 convention: it brought baskets of federal money to New York City, expertly distributed by Roosevelt’s local ally, Mayor Fiorello—the name means “little flower”—LaGuardia, who stood only five feet two. Their apartment was rent controlled; Larry guessed the rent was about “50 bucks a month,” perhaps a tenth of his father’s pay. Beginning in the 1930s, there were new roads, schools, and swimming pools, and a new campus for Brooklyn College, where Dorothy Sanders eventually organized the Hillel seder every spring.

It was “an environment where New Deal politics were quite normal,” Larry said in a 2015 interview with Vermont’s 

. “It was widely understood that government could do good things.”

And yet, anybody who has hefted Robert Caro’s 

 knows that these anonymized government works had a dark side. Larry Sanders recalls the new public library, which replaced a makeshift space attached to the fire station, a romantic, enchanting hideaway for the neighborhood’s kids. The update was a modern, spic-and-span building.

Life in the family apartment seemed alternately clenched and explosive. Outside, though, Brooklyn appeared to be blossoming and changing. Government was indeed doing “good things”: Larry points to “a comfortable environment” where the “streets were free and easy and safe.” But ordinary families had no say in their neighborhood’s transformation. Some were relocated by eminent domain if their buildings blocked construction of an exit ramp. Old homes were now mere feet from the cascading traffic; fragrant blocks were turned into dank, toxic canyons by the new highways.

And none of these grand improvements had eased the worries of Bernie’s parents in their small apartment, or altered their wearying daily pattern.

“Nobody would have chosen the new library,” Larry Sanders told me. And the concrete of the new city playground was “very destructive to arms and legs.” It was mystifying when a new building or playground suddenly materialized where another, beloved structure had been. Who made these decisions? The Midwood families themselves had played no role.

I told Larry that it reminded me of seeing Bernie for the first time on my front porch, when I was nine, as he was priming people for votes. It was a scene that played out over and over in his eight years as mayor. You’d hear about a bond issue coming before the city for some important public works project. Soon, Bernie or one of his disheveled volunteers was out on the street, or in the parks, or at your front door, looking for your support. The skinned knees kids got on those Brooklyn playgrounds stayed with him: a visitor to Burlington, Bernie once boasted, would visit its parks and say, “This is a people’s country club. You have tennis, you have swimming, you have softball.”

“Inform your parents,” Bernie would exclaim, finishing his pitch to a group of disaffected 14-year-olds.

Bernie’s politics clearly began at his parents’ breakfast table. Their scorching arguments showed him the emotional and psychological costs of being underpaid.

“The train stops somewhere in Brooklyn,” Bernie Sanders wrote in 1969, in the 

A crowd gets out, someone walks a few blocks into a 3 room apartment, family, dinner, arguments TV and sleep. Eight-thirty the next morning the train is back on 14th street.

The years come and go, suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow, death, fast death. DEATH.

The piece was published under the headline “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death.” It provides a quick montage of Bernie’s childhood, inflected by his radical politics in their embryonic, late-1960s form, heavily influenced by his reading of 

While Larry weeps when he shares his childhood stories, Bernie is mostly silent about those years. Larry told me that his brother sometimes accuses him of “minimizing” the degradations of the household. But Bernie’s politics clearly began at his parents’ breakfast table. Their scorching arguments showed him the emotional and psychological costs of being underpaid. If his hard work didn’t pay Eli Sanders enough to support their family’s modest needs, who was being paid for his father’s labor? Where did the money go? Eli and Dorothy Sanders turned those frustrations against each other. “The money question to me has always been very deep and emotional,” Bernie wrote in the 

. As Larry told me, it “ruined” the bond their parents had.

All through their childhoods, the Sanders boys carried the sense that the “bottom could fall out” of their household, as Larry put it. Dorothy and Eli Sanders saw their sons leave home; and then, almost instantly, the bottom did, in fact, fall out. The strain of raising their small family had weakened and sickened them both. Throughout the 1950s, Dorothy Sanders had treated her congenital heart condition with rest and whatever remedies the family could afford, all the while rooting for the rapid advances in open-heart surgery, widely reported in the papers, that would repair her mitral valve and save her life. But this costly, risky surgery would require more than a financial miracle for the hard-pressed Sanders household: Dorothy Sanders had a blood type of AB negative, the rarest variety. A typical open-heart procedure required at least 25 pints of fresh blood; banked blood loses oxygen in storage and could not be used.

“19 ‘Blue-Bloods’ Aid Boro Woman Battle for Life,” read the punning headline in the March 14, 1960, 

. After her condition dramatically worsened, Dorothy Sanders was rushed to a charity facility, Deborah Hospital in New Jersey, where she awaited a blood donation from the National Rare Blood Club, a Park Avenue philanthropy. The procedure would stand her “in good stead in her efforts to regain her health,” according to the paper. But on March 25, Dorothy Sanders succumbed to surgical complications at the age of 47. Bernie, a freshman at Brooklyn College, had coordinated her care and sat by her hospital bed: he was now “destroyed” and “wanted to get away from Brooklyn,” his brother said. The experience was Bernie’s first with doctors and hospitals, and it left the lasting impression that whether a person lived or died in our medical system was a function, not of the severity of a patient’s condition, but of her ability to pay. Of all the stark economic lessons Bernie learned in the family, the last days of his mother’s life struck him most powerfully.

Now alone in a silent, darkened apartment, Bernie’s father “completely fell apart” after his wife’s death, and died just two years later under tragic and strange circumstances, behind the wheel of his car, evidently of a heart attack. From news reports at the time, it can be surmised that he had tried to drive himself from Midwood to the emergency room of New York–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Eli Sanders, just 58, was found slumped over his steering wheel, having crashed his car into a bank of construction barriers outside the hospital entrance.

There is a clip that can be found online from the 

 that Bernie hosted in Vermont in the 1980s, when he was Burlington’s mayor. He’s come to Cathedral Square, the mid-rise senior living facility in downtown Burlington where, as it happens, my uncle Esau lived out his final years. Though the apartments are for elderly people on fixed incomes, many have million-dollar views across Lake Champlain. A few times I went along with my mother to bring Uncle Esau a bag of McDonald’s for his dinner. I remember baseball on Channel 11 from New York City, on Uncle Esau’s dinky TV; and behind it, ravishing purples and oranges of the sunset as it broke apart on the peaks of the Adirondacks.

Bernie is at Cathedral Square to connect with the elderly. He describes a city plan to bring seniors relief from rising taxes, then checks in on whether progress has been made on wiring Cathedral Square for cable TV. The room, I can see, is full of immigrants and children of immigrants, including many likely displaced from Burlington’s Little Italy, the thriving neighborhood razed by the city during the 1960s, and located on the very spot where Cathedral Square and the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Paul were later built.

The meeting is both funny and poignant. Sanders does not have a special personality reserved for the elderly. Sitting on the edge of a folding table, he spars with the old men and women, pushes back, cross-examines, shows a bit of exasperation and impatience. There is never a note of condescension.

“See, the beauty of the program is, it’s called ‘bulk billing,’” Sanders explains. Since you likely have heard Bernie’s voice, you know how much of Midwood, Brooklyn, enters the room with a word like beauty.

A woman interrupts. By her accent I can tell she is from St. Joseph’s Parish and grew up in Ward 3, the Old North End. She and Sanders are two working-class people from ostensibly different worlds. But they recognize each other. She begins: “It is my understanding from our meeting that they had to have a good number, not 100 percent, in order to get the low rate, otherwise we would have to pay the $10.50— ”

“—let’s say like 30 people signed up— ”

“Nope! Absolutely not! Is that what they told you?”

Grumbles, nods of assent all around; Bernie, sounding flabbergasted, makes a note, and promises to follow up. The woman seems unconvinced and irritated.

The year is 1987: if they’d lived, Eli Sanders would have been 83, Dorothy Sanders, 75. ♦

 BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: THE RISE OF THE PEOPLE'S POLITICIAN 

Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from 

Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, journalist, and the author of 

Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician

, from which the excerpt below is drawn, and which 

we'll launch at Pioneer Works on February 19

Becoming Bernie

Like its mythological namesake, the real-life Hydra

is hard to slay. These tiny animals, freshwater polyps related to jellyfish, can survive just about any encounter with a blade. Hack away one of its tentacles, and a Hydra will simply regrow the lost limb. Chop off a Hydra’s head or slice its cylindrical body in half, and within a few days you’ll have two new animals instead of one dead one.

Hydra can even regrow after being shredded to bits, centrifuged, and then smooshed back together into balls of a few hundred cells (they have no brains, so this probably isn’t as traumatic as it sounds). Each of those little balls—despite being, initially, a haphazard hodgepodge of random cells from the original, ill-fated animal—will grow into a perfectly functional Hydra. And if that weren’t enough, Hydra are so unfussy that they can even regrow from clumps of cells cobbled together from several 

 individuals. These patchwork aggregates develop into one new, united being—albeit one with a few extra heads.

“Most of the time I mix, like, 50 Hydra together,” physicist-turned-biologist Anaïs Bailles told me. “They don't care, they will actually make just one individual out of that.”

Bailles’ 50-animal aggregates derive from clonal strains that once shared the same genome. But Bailles has also mixed together two strains so different from one another that people used to think they were distinct species. Still, the animals grow perfectly well, "united again as one species," she says.

I've been thinking about Bailles' doubly mythological Hydra-Chimeras ever since talking to her about her work on Hydra development this summer. I had learned to think of biological development in machine terms, as construction according to a "genetic blueprint” or “genetic program." But faced with the Hydra, my machine metaphors failed: If a single animal can have several different genomes at once, which one is the blueprint? This might not even be the right question to ask. Because life is not constructed along pre-drawn plans. It grows.

Bailles isn’t shredding up Hydra for fun, though she does radiate with enthusiasm for these plucky polyps. At the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, Bailles studies Hydra to answer a question she originally encountered years ago as a young physicist pondering how the Big Bang spiraled outward into the universe we know today: 

 does complexity emerge in the natural world?

In cosmology, this question is sometimes stated: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The universe started out simple and became complex; scientists are still piecing together the story of how that happened. When Bailles first peered at a developing embryo under the microscope, she saw an echo of the same problem. Like the uncomplicated early universe that became our star-studded cosmos, an animal egg is far simpler than the organism it will become. Where does the complex form of the adult animal come from?

By the eighteenth century, some scientists had concluded that embryos must—somehow, somewhere—contain the full complexity of the future adult. Some imagined tiny homunculi crouching in the heads of sperm cells. Others didn’t take things quite so literally, but still believed that the embryo was, somehow, completely sculpted in advance by its parents. Growing up was simply a matter of scaling up.

This idea, called preformation, might seem unscientific to us now. But in its heyday, it was a materialist alternative to vitalism, the claim that physical forces alone could not account for life. Today, vitalism is considered magical thinking. But centuries ago, many scientists struggled to imagine that mere “matter in motion”—the only stuff of the universe, for a materialist—could organize spontaneously into a living being. Vitalists could invoke a supernatural “life force” that they believed guided the gradual emergence of new forms during development. Materialists could not. But if each new generation was entirely predetermined and engineered by the last, biological complexity would be no more mysterious than human construction. Placing parents in the role of clockmaker brought embryos into the clockwork universe—a perfect, predictable machine ruled not by the supernatural but by the laws of physics.

Now of course we know that it’s DNA, and not a preformed homunculus, that the sperm delivers to the egg. In the twentieth century, scientists identified the chromosomes as the units of inheritance. They “cracked the genetic code” by learning to read the protein messages written in DNA’s four-letter molecular alphabet—and much more. By the 1980s, scientists had counted the human chromosomes, linked sickle cell disease to a specific gene, cloned frogs, established the first genetic engineering company, and rebranded the leading embryology journal as one of developmental genetics. Researchers could now not only observe inheritance, but tinker with the “blueprint of life.”

And, very quickly, the genome was understood as just that—a blueprint. Writing in 1955, only three years after the discovery of the DNA double helix, physicist and biochemist George Gamow (who proposed the idea of the genetic code) described the cell as a factory and the chromosomes as the “filing cabinets where all the production plans and blueprints are stored.” The metaphor not only stuck, but shrunk: the genome metaphorically transformed from a filing cabinet of blueprints into 

 blueprint, singular. When the Human Genome Project completed the first full human genome sequence in 2000, President Bill Clinton described it in a White House announcement as the “working blueprint of the human race.” A quarter century later, in 2023, the announcement of the first human pangenome (a sort of collective genome accommodating human diversity) was announced as an “expanding view of humanity’s DNA blueprint.”

The blueprint is an intuitive metaphor, but Bailles and her Hydra should give us pause. When she shreds up and recombines multiple animals in a Hydra-Chimera, different patches of tissue could easily harbor distinct genomes. And yet, together, those cells become one animal. Where is its blueprint?

You can find it clutched in the tiny fist of the sperm homunculus: in other words, nowhere. The idea of the genetic blueprint is “a sort of neo-preformation,” neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchell of Ireland's Trinity College Dublin told me. Nobody is arguing anymore that dogs have puppies instead of kittens because dog embryos contain tiny, preformed dogs, Mitchell says. Nevertheless, the blueprint metaphor still asserts that, in its place, “there is a dog genome, which contains—in an inescapable, deterministic way—the outcome of development.”

Bailles studies brainless polyps; Mitchell studies brains. Specifically, he’s interested in the genetics of brain development, especially as it relates to psychiatric and neurological disorders and differences. And yet he’ll be the first to say that there is no genetic blueprint for a brain.

“The term blueprint is problematic because it suggests that one bit of the genome encodes one bit of the organism, right? There's a one-to-one mapping. You can already see in the genome the shape of the thing to come,” Mitchell explained. In a blueprint, windows stand for windows and staircases stand for staircases. But if you crack open a genome, you will not find anything that corresponds so directly and specifically to an eye, an optic nerve, or sickle-cell anemia. Genes specify the amino acid sequences of proteins, not fully formed body parts or behaviors or diseases.

Simon Fisher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands also criticized the idea of one-to-one mapping when I asked him about his problems with the genomic blueprint metaphor, which he’s vocal about on social media. Fisher studies the role of genes in language and language disorders and was on the team that, in 2001, discovered the first gene mutation associated with developmental speech and language disorders.

Genes specify the amino acid sequences of proteins, not fully formed body parts or behaviors or diseases.

“When I started working on this—on genes and language and genes and language disorders—there were people looking for a gene for grammar,” Fisher told me. “They really thought there was going to be one gene that would do an operation in the brain that would explain all of language. And there are still people who believe that.”

How You Sound?

Jeff Mills Loves to Forget

Welcome to the Quantum Universe

Shanzhai Lyric's Endless Garment

Shanzhai Lyric's Endless Garment

See Past the Smoke

See Past the Smoke

Becoming Bernie

Becoming Bernie

Myth of the Genetic Blueprint

Laura Ortman | Pioneer Live

What Day Isn’t a Headlock?

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve

Issue 03, Available Now

Issue 03, Available Now