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.

What makes a good spy? To celebrate the paperback launch of 

, Rachel Kushner joined PW Director of Publishing Joshua Jelly-Schapiro for a conversation on power, seduction, and her dazzling new noir. The novel follows “Sadie Smith”—an American agent of ruthless tactics and clean beauty—dispatched to France for dirty work. Kushner is one of today’s most influential writers, known for her singular works spanning art, motorcycles, politics, and prisons. Her cherished books have traveled from Cuba to California, from Italy's  Red Guards to ancient caves and anarchist collectives. ♦

What makes a good spy? To celebrate the paperback launch of Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner joined PW Director of Publishing Joshua Jelly-Schapiro for a conversation on power, seduction, and her dazzling new noir.

Rachel Kushner on What Makes a Good Spy

Most visitors in the dim room on the first floor of the American Museum of Natural History are there to look at the 21,000-pound fluorescent blue whale model suspended from the ceiling, but when the writer Anelise Chen and I visited in October, she headed straight for the walls lined with smaller crustaceous creatures. “That one is probably a nautilus,” she said, pointing at a sinuous shape sitting inside a display case. “And that one’s the clam.” There were other animal specimens she couldn’t identify: small pinkish shells, smooth beige shells, bumpy shells, shells with spiky edges, shells whose swirls resembled the tops of cinnamon rolls. Shrouded in the pale yellow light of the museum display, some of these shapes looked entirely out of place, somehow not belonging in the same world as the French tourists standing behind us, the carpet beneath our feet. Others, however, like the clam, looked entirely mundane. “Isn’t it crazy that this is from 70 million years ago and it’s still recognizable to us?” Chen said.

Chen had never given much thought to these creatures, until one afternoon in 2016, when, recently divorced, she received a text from her mother warning her not to be too dramatic after crashing her bike. The accident had been caused by “momentary inattentiveness and conditions of reduced visibility (sobbing while cycling).” “Clam down,” the message read. 

, she thought to herself. Her mother had, of course, meant to say, “Calm down.” She’d made the same typo before. But Chen took her advice to heart as written: she began to wonder what life would look like if she metamorphosed into a mollusk. “At the time, I didn’t know anything about them at all and just imagined myself in this clam outfit with my legs sticking out,” Chen told me, crossing her arms in a knitted sweater that bunched around her shoulders. “In my first Google searches, I was just trying to figure out basic things: Are they alive? Are they happy?”

, is a memoir written in the “third-person clam.” Chen’s first novel, 

, combined elements of sports writing and memoir in a style resembling 

, the ancient Greek form that coaxes narrative out of a writer’s “notes to the self.” With its Kafkaesque premise and various shifts in perspective, 

takes this genre-bending tradition a step further.

Mollusks burrow. They create shells around themselves. They hide. And sometimes, people do too. Chen writes about the pleasures and perils of a life spent inward, but her aperture is never narrow. She mines stories from the worlds of art, science, and literature to consider why people retreat during challenging times, consulting the likes of Charles Darwin, Italo Calvino, Georgia O’Keefe, Agnes Martin, and others. As she connects the dots of her clam genealogy, her shell seems to open, little by little. “These survival strategies that we learn to cope with pain, it’s not like we just invent them,” she said. “They’re passed down to us.” Chen’s book reframes withdrawal not as escape, but as a kind of inheritance—a way of making sense and safety in an often inscrutable and dividing world—and as the main necessity for creating art. The challenge is turning reclusion into revelation without letting hiding become habit. How do you build a shell that protects without trapping you, cut off from others, inside its walls?

As it turns out, Chen’s crustacean roots run even closer to home. Her family moved to California from Taiwan when she was young, and her father spent her childhood in a self-imposed exile, going back and forth between the two. First, he left to create a

mysterious software package aptly named Shell Computing, and later he finished a PhD program in digital learning. In 

, Chen attempts to understand the effect his prolonged absences had on her. “I started looking at my parents and realized I was not the original clam,” she writes, recognizing their tendency to shut down during conflict as a defensive mechanism against racism, xenophobia, and more general alienation. “In fact, they are clams too and they have all these clam-like coping mechanisms because they’re immigrants.” Shifting between her parents’ perspectives, Chen moves in and out of the rhythms of their accented English. She pays careful attention to the linguistic and cultural barriers between people to illuminate the miscommunications inevitable to spoken word. These observations poke fun at the comforting, if misguided, illusion that we can grasp the full extent of what others are trying to tell us. “Human communication 

, after trying and failing to find the words to say to a man she thought she was in love with. Yet, rather than abandoning language altogether, she gathers all of her own clammed-up misinterpretations and experiments with form and voice to write her way toward the spiraling question—and in this pursuit, she skirts her own “I.”

Mollusks burrow. They create shells around themselves. They hide. And sometimes, people do too. 

Chen is far from the first writer to use the third person to talk about herself. J.M. Coetzee’s memoir 

 comes to mind, as does Salmon Rushdie’s 

. Unlike Rushdie and Coetzee, however, Chen also makes use of the first person in 

, occasionally writing in her mother’s and father’s voices, but never her own. Glitches in communication appear most salient with her parents. “Why must we fight every time we see each other?” Her father asks at one point in the book. “What did I say wrong? Why, when I am only trying to prevent the suffering I experienced, do my children say I am the one hurting them?” Here, he seems to reach across the generational and cultural chasm, where intention and interpretation seldom align. Yet despite this room for error, 

 prioritizes the relational self, and ultimately hints at the idea that it is very hard to understand oneself separate from the encounter with others.

This anxiety-producing tug between looking inward and looking outward is a conflict central to 

. “The question again. To speak or not to speak?” Chen asks. “Her research rectified a misconception. As a child, she mistakenly believed that the clams that stayed shut even after their counterparts had been steamed to death were the ones worthy of emulation. In fact, those were the dead ones, the ones you were supposed to throw away. She did not know, not then, that clams spend much of their lives with their mouths slightly ajar, like undersea mouth breathers.” Like humans, they need to open their mouths to live.

On the C train home from the museum that day, I began to see everything and everyone as clam-like: the women crossing their legs, the men wearing headphones, all of us curving into ourselves, hunching over our phones, cut off from the rest of the world in a tubular vessel some 100 feet underground. Here we were enclosed from the world, exposed to each other. We looked like the dancers in Martha Graham’s 

, contorting and curling our spines into crescent shapes, folding inward. Like shells, we sealed ourselves off, disappearing our soft parts to protect them.

The train sped into the dark, grumbling as it slid along the tracks, and I listened in the same way I’d listen to the coming and going of the ocean, or the oscillations inside a seashell pressed against the ear. At the museum, Chen and I had talked about the sound and I’d mentioned Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” which describes this strange hum.

A shell’s echo suggests something like movement, presence, but to hear it you have to listen alone. Only one ear can enter the spiral at a time, and it must be enclosed within the shell’s opening, enveloped in its curves and undulations, to hear anything at all. Chen writes from a similar place of solitude, with an ear ever-held to the opening of experience. Her approach isn’t isolation for isolation’s sake. It’s a better way to listen. And that’s what allows her shell to become less a shield than an archive: a container for memory and meaning. I hadn’t remembered Joni’s lyrics at the time, but in that moment her line returned to me in its entirety:

“She calls that noise a ‘sigh, a foggy lullaby,’” I wrote Chen in an email, then slipped my phone inside my bag and waited for my stop.

A few weeks later, I visited Chen’s apartment: a bright, airy space she shares with her husband, a horticulturalist, and their toddler, Henry, in New Haven. That afternoon, the dining room table was covered in a blanket of crumbs, the living room couch in toys and drawings. Warm orange rays shone through the windows, carving soft shadows around the room. Henry was sitting in his booster seat, learning how to crush apple slices with his hands to create a sticky, mushy paste. “Juice!” he proclaimed, clearly delighted, his fingers shiny. “Juice!” Chen stood off to the side, grinning as her child learned to speak through touch and taste and mess.

Chen has a knack for putting the banal in its proper context, treating the histories of inanimate objects as seriously as she does the biographies of human beings. People carry baggage and history, but so do clothes and cobblestones, rocks and shells. Objects, too, keep time and witness, perhaps more diligently than we can. In his essay “Always Returning,” Teju Cole learns from a colleague that the writer W.G. Sebald always wore two watches, one on each wrist. “Was it something to do with the mystical properties of different metals? Was it some strange sense of time that demanded simultaneous witness?” he writes. “Or was it simply [his] dry sense of humor? And were the watches even set to the same time zone, or was one testifying to past time, the way his writing did?”

Chen writes like she owns a second watch. 

 may not sit in an atemporal space, but it still weaves together multiple chronological threads. And her sentences, like Sebald’s, take on a meandering form. She glides between past, present, and future as though to ask: What if? What then? What now?

“Every decision you make has a lasting consequence, think about that, she thought as she walked down the narrow alleys shadowed by stark rows of Haussmann-era buildings,” Chen writes in 

, recalling a trip to France. “The buildings were made of Lutetian limestone, the stone that built Paris, quarried right here since Roman times.” It dawned on her that these materials had undergone 40 million years of sedimentation and pressure. “Excised from the subterranean depths and lifted up to the surface, Paris forced you to look at all this memory in the eye, at street-level,” she continues. “That was why she couldn’t stop remembering.”

People carry baggage and history, but so do clothes and cobblestones, rocks and shells. Objects, too, keep time and witness, perhaps more diligently than we can.

One Sunday in late October, Chen and I walked up East Rock in New Haven, a wrinkly, red-faced ridge that overlooks the city. She takes this walk every day, usually around 4:00 in the afternoon when she’s too tired to keep thinking. That day the ground felt dry and crumbly, the atmosphere hazy. It had scarcely rained that October and we could both feel it in the thinness of the dusty air. On the way up, we passed people walking in athleisure and small birds and parents with toddlers in tow. Chen and I didn’t make eye contact as we walked, our conversation taking on a more natural, less structured form. By the time we reached the top, I had nearly forgotten where we were going.

“What would you be if you were at this spot 22,000 years ago?” asked a sign on the summit ledge near a pile of dried autumn leaves. “From evidence that you can see at many places in East Rock Park,” it continues, “the answer is cold, VERY cold—you would be buried under a half-mile of ice.” The rocks one sees today appeared only after the ice melted away, exposing layers of sediment. On the way down, we stopped to look at the skeletons of beech trees on the other side of the city’s Mill River. Their branches and trunks were sad, barren, and greyish on account of the microscopic parasite that has been ravaging Connecticut’s forests for years now. Chen doesn’t know why they haven’t been chopped down yet, though she is glad they’re still there. She told me that the word beech and book have the same root because people used to write on tree bark, then corrected herself: “used to” is probably the wrong thing to say. “Just look at the graffiti on the trees,” she clarified, pointing at the white clouds of spray paint decorating their trunks—to say nothing of where paper comes from.

A few months after Chen and I met in New Haven, I was back in New York when I walked past a lumpy boulder, 30 feet high, sandwiched between two apartment buildings in Morningside Heights. The rock was locked up behind an iron fence, its surface smooth, black, and rain-soaked. A scrawny branch sprouted from one of its many grooves. Later that day, I found out that this boulder, part of the city’s ancient bedrock, is nearly 450 million years old. I started thinking about time again. The rock pointed to something truer in the landscape, and suddenly it seemed more genuine than the surrounding man-made buildings. Both rocks and shells are made of minerals; both have seen and touched more than most of us ever will in our lifetimes. “The mind reaches for geologic metaphor when thinking of generations,” Chen writes in 

. “Misery was sedimentary matter. Layer upon layer of accumulation. Uplift, erosion, compression. Each generation minutely altered, living, dying, and drifting down to build upon the faults of the old.”

There’s a moment in an Italo Calvino story when the narrator—a mollusk marooned on a rock somewhere—states that it wanted to make something that would mark its presence in the world. “So I began to make the first thing that occurred to me,” Calvino wrote, “and that was a shell.” Chen crafts 

 as that mollusk instructs. She peers out from her self-made enclosure at the sprawl of time, text, and space, twisting together fragments from within and beyond her. Estranged from her own story and species, she writes with the perspective, humor, and armor that distance provides. Back in the museum, Chen said that “in the moment of building, or making, you have no idea what you’re creating—you’re just in the mud, in the dark, but by the end of it all you end up with this beautiful, twisty form you can display.”

In this way, books are a kind of sedimentary process, a sort of shell-building, formations of thought and time that we slip into, grow within, and eventually shed. Chen told me her deepest satisfaction comes from seeing the spiral completed, the form made whole and ready for others to inhabit. “Absenting myself from the shell,” she called it. “And letting others come in and experience it for themselves.” ♦

Carolina Abbott Galvão is a Brazilian writer and editor based in New York.  Her work has appeared in 

mus-eckmannpsych

What Kind of Clam Are You?

My Ballroom Story

Garth Greenwell Is Too Much

“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved,” Albert Einstein famously remarked, “science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form.”

I’ve long believed he was right. I can point to many moments in my career as a theoretical physicist when I’ve been guided as much by aesthetic intuition in engaging our deepest dilemmas about the behavior of subatomic particles, space, time, and the nature of reality, as I have been by mathematical logic. Aesthetics is always present in theoretical physics, in sometimes inarticulable and undepictable ways. But never have the mathematical and aesthetic aspects of my work found such striking synthesis as in the geometric objects that my colleagues and I came to call “adinkras.”

Adinkras are geometric objects whose underlying principles, and forms, have bolstered our understanding of the mathematical description of physical law. Lending visual form to some of the hardest problems in mathematical and theoretical physics, they’ve proved hugely useful in helping us understand relationships in the microscopic world according to the precepts of quantum theory and “supersymmetry,” the aspect of string theory to which I’ve devoted most of my career (and about which, more in a moment). But more than that, adinkras have shaped an understanding of subatomic physics in ways that transcend the specific questions they were created to help us see.

Human brains, as neuroscientists tell us, are often better at understanding problems we can visualize. And so it has proven to be the case with these adinkras. The laws of physics are typically represented in equations that are opaque to anyone who has not devoted their life to their interpretation. Adinkras are visualizations that represent the language of mathematics in a geometric object. The story of adinkras and of our discovery of them earlier this century, like many advances in mathematics, reaches back decades—and runs, for me, back to my first days as a student at MIT, where I arrived as an undergraduate in 1969.

As the first member of my family to attend college, I was what you could call a DEI kid from the wrong side of the tracks. As a teenager, I’d grown up in Orlando, Florida, in an area of that southern city—the so-called Parramore District—which from the 1890s was designated as the place where “colored people” were permitted to live, west of downtown and across a set of north-south railroad tracks that bisect the city. Jones High School, then the only secondary school in Orlando that Black students could attend, wasn’t a well-funded or well-supported institution. But I had some wonderfully committed and capable teachers. And at age 14, I learned from a TV program about the existence of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It became my dream to go there—a dream that came true when M.I.T. decided to let in 50 African American students in the fall of 1969, the first time the university admitted more than a handful of students from outside its traditional feeder schools and elite networks worldwide.

I was fortunate to be one of those students, and gratified to thrive so much as an undergrad that I earned two B.S. degrees in four years, one in mathematics and one in physics. I stayed in Cambridge for graduate school. As a PhD student, I undertook and then defended M.I.T.’s first-ever thesis on the topic of “supersymmetry.” In 1977, this wasn’t a topic that anyone else—faculty, researchers, graduate students––knew anything about. Through my sense of aesthetics, I was convinced that it represented a vital new strain of inquiry in theoretical physics. I was proven right in the decades that followed, and we’re still wrestling with the profound possible implications of supersymmetry today.

The putative discovery of antimatter, which dates from the 1920s, revealed a world of opposites. For almost every kind of particle, there exists an antiparticle: its exact, perfect opposite. If an electron spirals to the left, in a magnetic field, a positron will spiral to the right. If an electron is repelled from a source, a positron is attracted to it. This wasn’t science fiction. Antimatter could be created, and annihilated in the laboratory, and in nature. Supersymmetry took this deeper. It posits that for every particle, there is also a supersymmetric partner that interchanges the most inviolable quantum characteristics of matter—that for every boson, as one fundamental kind of subatomic particle is called, there exists a partner particle, a fermion, with different spin properties.

Supersymmetry is also known by the sobriquet SUSY; it grew from what was, in the 1970s, the still-novel field of string theory, which suggests that the subatomic world is composed of vibrating loops. This idea was profoundly unifying. There wasn’t a zoo of disconnected particles—just different notes on the same kind of fundamental string. In the unification was a hope for a theory of everything. Supersymmetry, by positing how elementary particles correspond and relate, suggested how such theories could be shaped.

By 1995, when I began working with a graduate student named Lubna Rana, many more people in our field were thinking about supersymmetry. Lubna, with whom I went on to publish several papers in this field, also happened to be my first female grad student in physics. I began our work together, as one does with any tyro student, by giving her a sort of starter problem—a task to test a student’s preparation and will to be successful in the difficult field of mathematical and theoretical physics. And so it was in Lubna’s case that I gave her a problem relating to the history and implications of various supersymmetric field theories.

What if reality itself is a computer simulation? 

One of the most beautiful things about mathematical-enabled research is that one can arrive at conclusions without knowing others have done the same beforehand. And in looking into the origins of supersymmetric field theories, we were struck to discover precursors to these theories in the work of mathematicians working on both sides of the divide between the Soviet Union and Western Europe during the Cold War. Though separated by the Iron Curtain, we could share ideas. We built on theirs to explore the mathematical structures undergirding supersymmetry. As I guided Lubna’s thesis to its completion, we wrote a series of papers about these mathematical models. We uncovered more and more interesting properties about the subatomic realm. Without quite realizing it, I had taken a giant step to realize my unexpressed dream––to find an intricate piece of hidden mathematics that accurately described something equally hidden in nature.

Expressing the mathematical structures and making them useful, however, involved a further step—as I found at a conference in France, at Luminy outside Marseille, in 2006. At that gathering of mathematicians, the nearby Calanques National Park was magnificent, but my presentation was not. The talk was a total failure that left me with a sharp sense that I needed a better way to communicate what we already knew across the language gap separating mathematics and physics. Luckily, by then I had begun to develop a way to bridge this gap.

A couple of summers before, I was in the republic of Georgia, visiting that nation's capital of Tbilisi, when I engaged in a typical morning habit of theoretical physicists around the world: I opened my laptop and looked at the website called “

,” a digital portal that chronicles evolving innovations across many scientific fields in near real-time—including physics, biology, economics, computer science, electrical engineering, quantitative finance, mathematics, and statistics. There, I happened upon an interesting paper on supersymmetry, whose authors included a researcher in New York named Michael Faux, to whom I wrote an email which commenced several weeks of intense correspondence. This correspondence quickly morphed, as I continued my travels, into elaborating diagrams for which we realized we needed a name. As we rushed to finish a research paper on these symbols, I was in the West African country of Benin. Perhaps inspired by my location at the time, Michael suggested the name “adinkra,” which he explained originated among the Akan peoples of West Africa, who have long used similarly-named symbols to convey abstract and weighty concepts with beautiful designs, like learning from the past, the omnipotence of God, and unity of life. The name “adinkras,” to me, seemed apt. Thus was born the name for our paper, "Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory." And thus began our adventures with these symbols, which were technically graphs in the realm of mathematics that encoded data in two-dimensional systems about the behavior of equations in higher dimensions. Like the sublime insights described by the same title, and as I found when I began discussing adinkra diagrams at gatherings like that conference near Marseille, our findings proved even more useful and revelatory than I hoped.

Adinkras choreograph the relationships between particles and make it possible to bring our visual and geometric intuitions to bear on the domain of supersymmetry. But more than that, by translating the essence of our discoveries into other realms of mathematics, they widen the net of mathematicians and scientists who can readily appreciate their findings and potentially contribute to them. These diagrams are more than mere pictures: they can lead to new understandings of what is being studied.

I had taken a giant step to realize my unexpressed dream––to find an intricate piece of hidden mathematics that accurately described something equally hidden in nature. 

For example, we found that some adinkras could be broken up into two smaller parts, both of which were also adinkras—and that by folding, compressing, and coalescing the dots and links of one adinkra, another adinkra could be formed. Though not all such manipulations of adinkra result in new adinkra, by assigning binary words to the dots in an adinkra and following a specific process of transformation, its SUSY properties can be reliably preserved. From this discovery, we noted that the equations which adinkras represent exhibit properties held by a specific class of error-correcting codes used in computer communications.

About the latter mind-blowing idea, I’ve been asked often to speak in public, over the past couple of decades and especially after 

 films came out: What if reality itself is a computer simulation? It should be noted that this question itself is not a scientific one—and it is prompted not from studying equations directly, but from exploring their representations as adinkras, visual objects that continue to yield unexpected payoffs.

Now 20 years after their discovery, I’m only more convinced that when we found these adinkras, we stepped onto a new mathematical continent. The verification of supersymmetry in nature remains on the proverbial bucket list for theoretical physicists, who were thrilled by the once-unthinkable discovery, a decade ago and at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, of the Higgs boson. The discovery of supersymmetry may occur decades or centuries from now. That is how progress, and our understanding of the nature of reality, works: Mother nature doesn’t care if I’m alive or dead when supersymmetry is found. But there’s great satisfaction in being part of the process we call progress. And I take great pleasure in being tagged to find, with the help of these adinkras, truths no one else has. ♦

Sylvester James Gates, Jr. is an American theoretical physicist who works on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.

sci-cirgeos

Picture This: Adinkras

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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.

Rachel Kushner on What Makes a Good Spy

What Kind of Clam Are You?

My Ballroom Story

Garth Greenwell Is Too Much

Picture This: Adinkras

Picture This: Adinkras

Sister Inquiry

Sister Inquiry

Rule of Threes

Rule of Threes

First Love

Playing God

Swamp Dogg: If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It

The Perfect Orgasm

Picture This: Atoms of Aroma

Picture This: Atoms of Aroma