New York Review of Books - 25 February 2016

8/15/2019 New York Review of Books - 25 February 2016

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Thomas Piketty: A New Deal for Europe

The I Ching Explained!

Elizabeth Drew:The US Is Breaking Down

Joseph Lelyveld:Outcast Father Bush

Arlene Croce:The Tap Dance Genius

Lorrie Moore: Wisconsin’s Shame on TV

The PsychologistsTake Overby Tamsin Shaw

Jacob Weisberg: We’re All Hooked!

February 25, 2016 / Volume LXIII, Number 3


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Contents4 Thomas Piketty A New Deal for Europe

4 Anne Carson Poem

6 Jacob Weisberg Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

by Sherry TurkleReading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web

by Joseph M. Reagle Jr.Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover

10 Lorrie Moore Making a Murderer a Netflix documentary seriesdirected by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos

13 Joseph Lelyveld Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bushby Jon Meacham

15 Arlene Croce What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing by Brian Seibert America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk by Megan Pugh

18 Neal Ascherson Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War by Ian Buruma

20 Eliot Weinberger I Ching: The Book of Change translated from the Chinese by David Hinton I Ching (Yijing): The Book of Change translated from the Chinese

with an introduction and commentary by John Minford

25 Robert O. Paxton Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance by Robert GildeaHistoire de la Résistance, 1940–1945 by Olivier Wieviorka

28 Geoffrey O’Brien Les Pêcheurs de Perles an opera by Georges Bizet, produced by Penny Woolcock,at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City

29 John Ashbery Poem

30 Elizabeth Drew 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure by the American Society of Civil EngineersRust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead by Rosabeth Moss Kanter The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure by Henry Petroski Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath by Ted Koppel

33 Geoffrey Wheatcroft Horace Walpole’s Description of the Villa at Strawberry-Hill: A Facsimile of the CopyExtra-illustrated for Charles Bedford in the Collection of Lord Waldegraveof North Hill with an introduction by William Waldegrave

A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir by William WaldegraveThe Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence edited by W. S. Lewis and others

and six other books about Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill

36 Christian Caryl Star Wars: The Force Awakens a film di rected by J. J. Abrams

38 Tamsin Shaw The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven PinkerMoral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene

and five other reports, articles, and books about psychology

41 Steven Weinberg Whig History: An Exchange with Arthur M. Silverstein

41 Letters from Dominic Sisti, Ezekiel Emanuel, Jeremy Bernstein, Aryeh Neier, and David J. Rothman

NEAL ASCHERSON is the author of The Struggles for Po-and, Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He

s an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, Uni-versity College London.

JOHN ASHBERY’s most recent collection of poems isBreezeway.

ANNE CARSON is a poet who was born in Canada and teachesancient Greek, sometimes at NYU. She will publish a collectionof prose and poetry, Float , in October.

CHRISTIAN CARYL is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum In-titute and the editor of Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab web-ite. His latest book is Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the

Twenty-first Century.

ARLENE CROCE is the former dance critic forThe New Yorker and the author of The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book.

ELIZABETH DREW is a regular contributor to The NewYork Review and the author, most recently, of WashingtonJournal: Repor ting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall .

JOSEPH LELYVELD is a former correspondent and editor ofThe New York Times. His new book, His Final Battle: The LastMonths of Franklin Roosevelt , will be published in September.

LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Profes-or of English at Vanderbilt and the author of four story collec-ions and three novels. Her most recent novel is A Gate at the

Stairs and her most recent collection of stories is Bark.

GEOFFREY O’BRIEN is Editor in Chief of the Library ofAmerica. His seventh collection of poetry, In a Mist , was pub-

lished last March.ROBERT O. PAXTON is Mellon Professor Emeritus of So-cial Science at Columbia and the author of, among other works,Vichy France and The Anatomy of Fascism.

THOMAS PIKETTY is Professor of Economics at the ParisSchool of Economics. He is the author ofCapital in the Twenty-firstCentury. An earlier version of his art icle appeared in Le Monde.ANTONY SHUGAAR is a translator and a contributing editorat Asymptote journal. His translation of Not All Bastards Are

from Vienna by Andrea Molesini wil l be published in February.

TAMSIN SHAW is Associate Professor of European and Med-iterranean Studies and Philosophy at NYU and the author ofNietzsche’s Political Skepticism.

ELIOT WEI NBERGER is the editor of the Calligrams seriespublished by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press andNew York Review Books and the literary editor of the MurtyClassical Library of India. Among his books of essays are AnElemental Thing and the forthcoming The Ghosts of Birds.

JACOB WEISBERG is Chairman of the Slate Group and the

author of The Bush Tragedy, among other books. His biographyof Ronald Reagan in the American Presidents Series was pub-lished in January.

GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT is the author of The Contro-versy of Zion, The Strange Death of Tory England , and Yo,Blair! He lives in Bath.

CONTRIBUTORS

Editor: Robert B. Silversenior Editors: Michael Shae, Hugh Eakin, Eve Bowen, Jana Prikryl

Contributing Editor: Ann KjellbergAssistant Editors: Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Christopher Carroll,

Madeleine Schwartz

Founding Co-editor: Barbara Epstein (1928–200 6)Publisher: Rea S. HedermanAssociate Publisher: Catherine TiceBusiness Manager: Raymond ShapiroAdvertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen

Online comment from New York Review contributors at nybooks.com/daily

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4/444 The New York Review

A New Deal for EuropeThomas Piketty

The far right has surged in just a fewyears from 15 percent to 30 percent ofthe vote in France, and now has thesupport of up to 40 percent in a numberof districts. Many factors conspired toproduce this result: rising unemploy-ment and xenophobia, a deep disap-pointment over the left’s record in

running the government, the feelingthat we’ve tried everything and it’s timeto experiment with something new.These are the consequences of the di-sastrous handling of the financial melt-down that began in the United Statesin 2008, a meltdown that we in Europetransformed by our own actions intoa lasting European crisis. The blamefor that belongs to institutions andpolicies that proved wholly inadequate,particularly in the eurozone, consist-ing of nineteen countries. We have asingle currency with nineteen differ-ent public debts, nineteen interest ratesupon which the financial markets arecompletely free to speculate, nineteen

corporate tax rates in unbridled com-petition with one another, without acommon social safety net or sharededucational standards—this cannotpossibly work, and never will.

Only a genuine social and demo-cratic refounding of the eurozone,designed to encourage growth and em-ployment, arrayed around a small coreof countries willing to lead by exampleand develop their own new political in-stitutions, will be sufficient to counterthe hateful nationalistic impulses thatnow threaten all Europe. Last summer,in the aftermath of the Greek fiasco,French President François Hollandehad begun to revive on his own initia-tive the idea of a new parliament for the

eurozone. Now France must present aspecific proposal for such a parliamentto its leading partners and reach a com-promise. Otherwise the agenda is goingto be monopolized by the countriesthat have opted for national isolation-ism—the United Kingdom and Polandamong them.

Just for starters, it would be im-portant for European leaders—theFrench and Germans in particular—to acknowledge their errors. We candebate endlessly all sorts of reforms,both small and large, that ought to becarried out in various eurozone coun-tries: changed opening hours for shops,more effective labor markets, different

standards for retirement, and so on.Some of these are useful, others lessso. Whatever the case, however, thefailures to make such reforms are notenough to explain the sudden plungein GDP in the eurozone from 2011 to2013, even as the US economy was inrecovery. There can be no questionnow that the recovery in Europe wasthrottled by the attempt to cut deficitstoo quickly between 2011 and 2013—and particularly by tax hikes that werefar too sharp in France. Such applica-tion of tight budgetary rules ensuredthat the eurozone’s GDP still, in 2015,hasn’t recovered to its 2007 levels.

Important changes did take place as aresult of the belated interventions of the

European Central Bank and the agree-ment on the new budget treaty of 2012—the European Fiscal Compact, whichcreated the European Stability Mecha-nism with a budget of 700 billion euros.

These developments made it possibleto move ahead toward debt mutualiza-tion, by which the debts of all eurozonecountries would be jointly guaranteed.Such policies have finally managed tostop the decline, but without solvingthe underlying problems. The recov-ery remains timid at best; the crisisof confidence in the eurozone persists.

What is to be done now? We shouldput together a conference of eurozone

nations on debt—just like those thatwere held in the postwar years, to thenotable benefit of Germany. The objec-tive would be to reduce public debt as awhole, starting with a system of alloca-tion of payments based on the increasesin debt that have occurred since the cri-sis began. In an early phase, we couldplace all public debts greater than 60percent of GDP in a common fund, witha moratorium on repayment until each

country has regained a trajectory of ro-bust growth in comparison with 2007.

All historical experience points in thisdirection: above a certain threshold,it makes no sense to repay debts fordecades. It’s more advisable to openlyreduce debts in order to invest ingrowth, even from the creditors’ pointof view.

Such a process demands a new form

of democratic governance, one thatcan assure that such disasters are notallowed to recur. In concrete terms,the interests of taxpayers and nationalbudgets demand the establishment ofa eurozone parliament composed ofmembers drawn from the national par-liaments, proportionate to each coun-try’s population. (Such a parliament,of course, would be different from thecurrent parliament of the EU, whichincludes EU members that are notpart of the eurozone and is relativelypowerless.)

We should also entrust each nationalparliament of eurozone members witha vote on a common eurozone corpo-

rate tax, otherwise the outcome willstill—inevitably—be fiscal dumpingand scandals like that of LuxLeaks, inwhich leaked documents revealed theuse of Luxembourg in tax-avoidanceschemes. Such a common corporatetax would make it possible to financeinvestments in infrastructure and inuniversities. To take one emblematicexample, the Erasmus education pro-gram—which provides opportunitiesfor students and teachers to study andtrain abroad—is ridiculously under-funded. It has a budget of two billioneuros annually, against the 200 bil-lion euros set aside every year for in-terest on eurozone debt. We ought tobe investing heavily in innovation and

young people. Europe has every rightand every capacity to be able to offerthe finest model of social welfare onearth: we must stop squandering ouropportunities!

In the future, the choice of whatlevel of public deficit the eurozone na-tions should carry will also need to bemade in this new setting of joint ac-tion. There are many in Germany whowould fear being placed in a minorityin such a new parliament, and theywould prefer to stick to the logic of au-tomatic budgetary criteria. But it wasthe hindrance of eurozone-wide de-mocracy by a set of rigid rules that ledus to the brink of the abyss in the first

place, and it’s time to be done with thatapproach.If France, Italy, and Spain (roughly

50 percent of the eurozone’s popula-tion and GDP, as against Germany,with scarcely more than 25 percent)were to put forth a specific proposal fora new and effective parliament, somecompromise would have to be found.And if Germany stubbornly contin-ues to refuse, which seems unlikely,then the argument against the euro asa common currency becomes very dif-ficult to counter. Currently, a Plan Binvolving the abandonment of the eurois being touted by the far right, a policythat is increasingly tempting to the farleft. Why don’t we start by actually giv-

ing a chance to genuine reforms thatwould make the eurozone work for thecommon good?

—Translated from the Frenchby Antony Shugaar

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollandeat a summit of the European Union, Brussels, February 2013

WHAT TO SAY OFTHE ENTIRETY

What to say of the entirety. The entirety should be smaller.

Small enough to say something about. Humans. What if

the guy you’re hanging up by his thumbs already has a

razorplague of painapples roaming his chest inside. Do you

regard that as his own fault? Do you really need to make it

worse? Do you think of yourself as a well-loved person? Of

course these are separate questions. Like dead salmon andcoppermine tailings, separate. So these separations, this

anesthesia, we should ponder a bit. Humans. What can you

control? Wrong question. Can you treat everything as an

emergency without losing the reality of time, which contin-

ues to drip, laughtear by laughtear? Where to start? Start in

the middle (and why?) so as not to end up there, where for

example the torture report ended up after all those years

of work. You have to know what you want, know what you

think, know where to go. New York City actually. Here

we are. Trucks crash by. Or was that another row of doors

slammed by gods? They’re soaked, the gods, they’ve tucked

their toes up on their thrones as if they don’t know why this

is happening. Poor old coxcombs.

—Anne Carson

T h i e r r y M o n a s s

e / X i n h u a / E y e v i n e / R e d u x


5/44February 25, 2016 5

Fraenkel Gallery 19, 20, & 21

49 415.981.2661

Around the House / 2016 $40 .

, , , 1981



We Are Hopelessly HookedJacob Weisberg

Reclaiming Conversation:The Power of Talk in a Digital Ageby Sherry Turkle.Penguin, 436 pp., $27.95

Alone Together:Why We Expect More

from Technology andLess from Each Otherby Sherry Turkle.Basic Books, 360 pp., $17.99 (paper)

Reading the Comments:Likers, Haters, and Manipulatorsat the Bottom of the Webby Joseph M. Reagle Jr.MIT Press, 228 pp., $27.95

Hooked:How to BuildHabit-Forming Productsby Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover.Portfolio, 242 pp., $25.95

1.“As smoking gives us something todo with our hands when we aren’tusing them, Time gives us somethingto do with our minds when we aren’tthinking,” Dwight Macdonald wrotein 1957. With smartphones, the issuenever arises. Hands and mind are con-tinuously occupied texting, e-mailing,liking, tweeting, watching YouTubevideos, and playing Candy Crush.

Americans spend an average of fiveand a half hours a day with digitalmedia, more than half of that time onmobile devices, according to the re-search firm eMarketer. Among some

groups, the numbers range muchhigher. In one recent survey, femalestudents at Baylor University reportedusing their cell phones an average often hours a day. Three quarters ofeighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds saythat they reach for their phones imme-diately upon waking up in the morning.Once out of bed, we check our phones221 times a day—an average of every4.3 minutes—according to a UK study.This number actually may be too low,since people tend to underestimatetheir own mobile usage. In a 2015 Gal-lup survey, 61 percent of people saidthey checked their phones less fre-quently than others they knew.

Our transformation into device peo-ple has happened with unprecedentedsuddenness. The first touchscreen-operated iPhones went on sale in June2007, followed by the first Android-powered phones the following year.Smartphones went from 10 percent to40 percent market penetration fasterthan any other consumer technology inhistory. In the United States, adoptionhit 50 percent only three years ago. Yettoday, not carrying a smartphone indi-cates eccentricity, social marginaliza-tion, or old age.

What does it mean to shift overnightfrom a society in which people walkdown the street looking around to one inwhich people walk down the street look-

ing at machines? We wouldn’t be alwaysclutching smartphones if we didn’t be-lieve they made us safer, more produc-tive, less bored, and were useful in al l ofthe ways that a computer in your pocket

can be useful. At the same time, smart-phone owners describe feeling “frus-trated” and “distracted.” In a 2015 Pewsurvey, 70 percent of respondents saidtheir phones made them feel freer, while30 percent said they felt like a leash.Nearly half of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-

year-olds said they used their phones to“avoid others around you.”

2.It is the troubling aspects of social andmobile media that Sherry Turkle at-

tends to in her wise and observant newbook, Reclaiming Conversation. A clin-ical psychologist and sociologist whoteaches at MIT, Turkle is by no meansantitechnology. But after a career ex-amining relations between people andcomputers, she blends her descriptionwith advocacy. She presents a powerfulcase that a new commun ication revolu-tion is degrading the quality of humanrelationships—with family and friends,as well as colleagues and romanticpartners. The picture she paints is bothfamiliar and heartbreaking: parents

who are constantly distracted on theplayground and at the dinner table;children who are frustrated that theycan’t get their parents’ undivided atten-tion; gatherings where friends who arepresent vie for attention with virtualfriends; classrooms where professorsgaze out at a sea of semiengaged mul-titaskers; and a dating culture in whichinfinite choice undermines the abilityto make emotional commitments.

Turkle finds the roots of the problemin the failure of young people absorbedin their devices to develop fully inde-pendent selves, a topic she began toexplore in Alone Together (2011). Inthat book, she examined the way in-teraction with robotic toys and “always

on” connections affect adolescent de-velopment. She argued that phones andtexting disrupt the ability to separatefrom one’s parents, and raise other ob-stacles to adulthood. Curating a Face-

book profile alters the presentation ofself. Absorption in a gaming avatar canbecome a flight from the difficulties ofreal life. Young people face new anxiet-ies around the loss of privacy and thepersistence of online data.

In her new book, she expresses a ver-

sion of those concerns that is as muchphilosophic as psychiatric. Becausethey aren’t learning how to be alone,she contends, young people are losingtheir ability to empathize. “It’s the ca-pacity for solitude that allows you toreach out to others and see them as sep-arate and independent,” Turkle writes.

Without an ability to look inward,those locked into the virtual worlds ofsocial media develop a sensibility of “Ishare, therefore I am,” crafting theiridentities for others. Continuous digitalperformance leaves teenagers experi-encing what ought to be the satisfac-tions of solitude only as “disconnectionanxiety.”

As in her earlier work, Turkle con-siders this loss of empathy as both a cl i-nician and an ethnographer. She cullsfrom hundreds of interviews she hasdone since 2008, the first year many

high school and college students be-came armed with smartphones. Un-happy teachers at one private middleschool in upstate New York describestudents who don’t make eye contactor respond to body language, who havetrouble listening and talking to teach-ers, and can’t see things from another’spoint of view, recognize when they’vehurt someone, or form friendshipsbased on trust. “It is as though theyall have some signs of being on an As-perger’s spectrum,” one teacher tellsher. Turkle even seeks to quantify thedamage, repeatedly citing a study thatshows a 40 percent decline in empathyamong college students over the pasttwenty years as measured by standard

psychological tests.For young people, she observes,

the art of friendship is increasinglythe art of dividing your attention suc-cessfully. Speaking to someone who

isn’t fully present is irritating, but it’sincreasingly the norm. Turkle has al-ready noticed considerable evolution in“friendship technologies.” At first, shesaw kids investing effort into enhancingtheir profiles on Facebook. More re-cently, they’ve come to prefer Snapchat,

known for its messages that vanish afterbeing viewed, and Instagram, whereusers engage with one another around astream of shared photos, usually takenby phone. Both of these platforms com-bine asynchronicity with ephemerality,allowing you to compose your self-presentation, while looking more causaland spontaneous than on a Facebookprofile. It’s not the indelible record thatSnapchat’s teenage users fear. It’s thesin of premeditated curating—lookinglike you’re trying too hard.

More worrying to Turkle is that socialmedia offer respite from the awkward-ness of unmediated human relation-ships. Apple’s FaceTime feature hasn’t

taken off because, as one college se-nior explains, “You have to hold it [thephone] in front of your face with yourarm; you can’t do anything else.” Thenagain some younger teens, presumablywith an ordinary number of arms, areusing FaceTime as an alternative tospending time with one another in per-son. The advantage is that “you can al-ways leave” and “you can do other thingson social media at the same time.”

The thing young people never do ontheir smartphones is actually speak toone another. Their comments aboutlive conversation are telling: “I neverreally learned how to do a good job

with talking in person.” “Even whenI’m with my friends, I’ll go online tomake a point.. . . I’m more at home.” AnIvy league–bound high school studentworries that college is going to require“a fair amount of on-the-spot talking.”Collectively, teens “make it clear thatthe back-and-forth of unrehearsed‘real-time’ conversation is somethingthat makes you ‘unnecessarily’ vulner-able,” Turkle writes. Reading these ac-counts, one is caught between dismayat the flight from personal contact andadmiration for human ingenuity in de-vising new modes of communication.One group of students explains thatwhen they get together physical ly, they

“layer” online conversations on top offace-to-face ones, with people who arein the same room.

Family relations are evolving newdigital modes and mores as well. Con-flict has in many cases evolved intowhat Turkle calls “fighting by text.”One of the stories she tells is about ayoung man she calls Colin, who is atodds with his parents about his and hissiblings’ failure to meet their expecta-tions. He finds that moving the conflictto Gchat “makes things smoother.”

But when he pauses to ask if some-thing might be lost, a question asmuch directed to himself as to me,Colin responds with a business

metaphor: “What would be thevalue proposition of disagreeingwith each other face-to-face?”

He can’t think of an answer.His family takes care of conflict

Photograph by Eric Pickersgill from his series ‘Removed,’ in which he shows his subjects’

attachment to their cell phones and other handheld devices by asking them to ‘hold their stare an d posture’ a s he removes the devices from the ir hands and then take s their por trait

E r i c P i c k e r s g i l l


7/44February 25, 2016 7

FEBRUARY 5–MAY 3

Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Morton International

Exhibition Fund and t he Kemper Educational and Charitable Fund. Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions is provided by the Exhibitions Trust:

Kenneth Griffin, Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy, Thomas and Margot Pritzker, Betsy Bergman Rosenfield and Andrew M. Rosenfield, the Earl and

Brenda Shapiro Foundation, and the Woman’s Board.

Martin Puryear. Face Down, 2008. Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. Photography by Jamie Stukenberg,

Professional Graphics.



by cooling it down online. Colinthinks they are now more “produc-tive” as a family.

Needless to say, Turkle the psycho-therapist does not see “productivity”as a healthy way to think about one’sfamily. Parents choose to manage con-flict digitally in order to control theiremotions, to get rid of the “messy andirrational” parts of fighting. “But to sayto a child, partner, or spouse, ‘I chooseto absent myself from you in order to

talk to you,’ suggests many things thatmay do their own damage,” she writes.

Being able to be enough in controlof our feelings to listen to anotherperson is a requirement for em-pathy. If a parent doesn’t modelthis—if you go directly to a text oremail—a child isn’t going to learnit, or see it as a value.

The application of texting and chatas a romantic buffer seems just as per-nicious. Turkle devotes several pages tothe story of Adam, a thirty-six-year-oldarchitect who can’t get over the end ofa long-term relationship. Adam feels he

was able to be his “better self” with hisgirlfr iend Tessa, the more open and lessdefensive man that she needed him tobe. Communicating with her throughelectronic messaging rather than thephone gave him a chance to “pause andget it right” in their exchanges. He re-mains obsessed with the digital archiveof the romance, dozens of texts a daysent over a period of three years:

He pulls up a text he sent Tessaafter a fight. Adam says that afterthis quarrel he was frightened,afraid of what would happen next.But in his text he lessened the ten-sion by sending a photo of his feet,beneath which he wrote, “Try to

control your sexual passion in see-ing me in Crocs and socks.” In per-son, Adam says that his anxietywould have led him to try to cornerTessa into forgiving him. His panicwould have made things worse.Online, he used humor to signalconfidence in their enduring con-nection. So what the text commu-nicated is not the “real” Adam; it’sthe Adam he wants to be.

In the Spike Jonze film Her , the ro-mantic partner constituted through ar-tificial intelligence provides emotionalsupport without the demands of a realperson. Here, the real person thinks

that the modulated self he presentsin disembodied conversation is moreappealing. This turns the goal of af-fective computing on its head; insteadof getting machines to seem more likepeople, it’s something closer to a manimitating a robot. Turkle commentsthat digital media put people in a “com-fort zone,” where they believe they canshare “just the right amount” of them-selves. But this feeling of control is anillusion—a “Goldilocks fallacy.” In aromantic relationship, there is no idealdistance to be maintained over time.As she sums up her case: “Technologymakes us forget what we know aboutlife.”

3.Why might too much digital participa-tion be corroding empathy, whether

online or offline? Turkle is at her weak-est on this connection, which sendsher scurrying to Thoreau for homiliesabout the value of solitude. For a betteranswer, it makes sense to consider howhumans interact in their purely digitalrelations. That is the implicit concernof Joseph M. Reagle Jr., a communica-tions professor at Northeastern Uni-versity. In Reading the Comments, hefocuses on the way people relate toone another through the digital genrethat he defines as social, reactive,

short, asynchronous, and pervasive.To him, this “bottom of the Web” in-cludes everything from Facebook shar-ing to bulletin board systems (BBS)to user-generated product reviews onAmazon.

Reagle surveys this varied landscapein pursuit of a goal he calls “intimate

serendipity,” his term for successfu l on-line communities, places where peopleare able to express themselves elec-

tronically in a civilized way. He findsconstructive criticism in a few surpris-ing places, such as “beta readers” whooffer feedback on one another’s fanfiction—composition in the mode ofa favorite writer. He also finds somegems of crowd-wisdom culture, such asthe Amazon review of a carbon mon-oxide detector headed “Saved our son’slife—4/5 stars.” But in the main, theWeb conversation Reagle considerssuffers from tendencies similar to theones Turkle identifies: narcissism, dis-inhibition, and the failure to care aboutthe feelings of others. It’s a world de-void of empathy.

Anonymous comments are the worst,

leading to vicious mob behavior. Butflamers, cyberbullies, and trolls (whoall rely on insults) ruin even identity-based, moderated conversation. Noone has figured out how to prevent theoperation of Godwin’s law, which saysthat online debates always devolve intocomparisons to the Nazis. Worse stillis the hate and harassment that attendany discussion of feminism, or just ex-pressions by women. Menacing phe-nomena include “doxing,” exposing thepersonal information of anonymoususers, like someone’s home address orchildren’s photos, in order to intimi-date them. Another form of abuse is“image-based harassment and visualmisogyny,” which involves manipulat-

ing photos and pornographic imagesin a threatening way. Threats of rapeand violence may arrive at the rate offifty an hour with the formation of a“trollplex,” which Reagle defines as an

uncoordinated attack on a target in adigital venue.

He diagnoses this casual cruelty asstemming in part from a male urge toquantify female attractiveness, remind-ing us that the origin of Facebook wasMark Zuckerberg’s dorm-room projectFacemash, created as a way to rate Har-vard students on their hotness. Twitterhas been no better. “We suck at dealingwith abuse and trolls on the platformand we’ve sucked at it for years,” DickCostolo wrote in an internal company

forum last year, shortly before he waspushed out as the company’s CEO. Anewer, campus-based social platformcalled Yik Yak seems purposefully de-signed for students to denigrate theirteachers anonymously and share bul-lying gossip. But despite all of the ug-liness he documents, Reagle doesn’t

want to abandon comments, as publi-cations including Reuters, Tablet , andUSA Today’s online sports section

have done recently. “Comment is withus, and we must find ways to use it ef-fectively,” he writes.

Reagle is right that to give up on freecomment means abandoning the dem-ocratic promise of the Web. Yet his al-ternative that we “find ways to developa robust self-esteem that can handleubiquitous comment” is no solution.We can’t just deal with the emotionaltoll of brutality on the Web by tough-ening up. We need a Web that is lesscorrosive to our humanity.

4.

If so much of what we do on the In-ternet is harmful to us, and harmfulto one another, perhaps we should doless of it. But that turns out to be notso simple. There’s no clear boundarybetween a hard-to-quit behavior and acompulsive one. The idea of “Internetaddiction disorder” first surfaced in aparody of an academic article in 1995.A year later, it was seriously proposedfor inclusion in the DSM- IV . At thatstage, compulsive digital behavior re-quired you to be attached to a desk orlaptop, which was a limiting factor. Inthe late 1990s, however, the combina-tion of e-mail and mobile technologymade an immoderate relationship withtechnology as familiar as the seductive

blinking light of the Blackberry at thebedside.

The further combination of mobiletechnology and social media has madedigital excess more familiar to people

Museumgoers taking photographs of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, Paris, 2012

M a r t i n P a r r / M a g n u m P h o t o s

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oo young for Blackberries and un-empted by e-mail. The simplest habit-

ual activities are checking for updates inone’s social streams and affirming thecontributions posted by friends. Youdo this by tapping on various permuta-ions of the “like” button that Facebookaunched in 2009: they include +1s on

Google+, pins on Pinterest, hearts onnstagram, first stars, then hearts too

on Twitter. The most successful mobileapps create distinctive, repetitive handmovements, like swiping on Tinder (left

o reject), double-tapping on Instagramto indicate approval), pressing down to

view imploding doodles on Snapchat,and stroking down to catapult angrybirds on Angry Birds.

When Turkle writes that “the Neteaches us to need it,” she is speaking

metaphorically. But while the Inter-net itself may lack intentions, thosedesigning our interactions with it havea purpose very much like the one shedescribes. Twenty years ago, the hot-est jobs for college graduates were

at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stan-ey. Today, students at Stanford and

CalTech and Harvard aspire to workn product management or design at

ocial media companies. The disci-plines that prepare you for such a ca-eer are software architecture, applied

psychology, and behavioral econom-cs—using what we know about human

vulnerabilities in order to engineercompulsion.

Some of Silicon Valley’s most suc-cessful app designers are alumni ofhe Persuasive Technology Lab at

Stanford, a branch of the university’sHuman Sciences and Technologies Ad-vanced Research Institute. The lab wasounded in 1998 by B.J. Fogg, whose

graduate work “used methods f rom ex-perimental psychology to demonstratehat computers can change people’shoughts and behaviors in predict-

able ways,” according to the center’swebsite. Fogg teaches undergraduatesand runs “persuasion boot camps” forech companies. He calls the field heounded “captology,” a term derivedrom an acronym for “computers as

persuasive technology.” It’s an aptname for the discipline of capturingpeople’s attention and making it hardor them to escape. Fogg’s behavior

model involves building habits throughhe use of what he calls “hot triggers,”ike the links and photos in Facebook’s

newsfeed, made up largely of posts byone’s Facebook friends.

One of Fogg’s students, Nir Eyal,offers a practical guide in his bookHooked: How to Build Habit-FormingProducts. A former game designer andprofessor of “applied consumer psy-chology” at Stanford’s Graduate Schoolof Business, Eyal explains why applica-ions like Facebook are so effective.

A successful app, he writes, createsa “persistent routine” or behavioraloop. The app both triggers a need and

provides the momentary solution to it.“Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frus-ration, confusion, and indecisiveness

often instigate a slight pain or irritationand prompt an almost instantaneousand often mindless action to quell thenegative sensation,” he writes. “Gradu-

ally, these bonds cement into a habit asusers turn to your product when experi-encing certain internal triggers.”

The financial value of an app isargely determined by how much time

consumers spend using it, on the as-sumption that usage translates intoadvertising revenue. For US users ofFacebook, the average “time spent” fig-ure is an extraordinary forty minutes aday. What compels this level of immer-sion? As Eyal writes, Facebook’s trig-ger is FOMO, fear of missing out. Thesocial network relieves this apprehen-sion with feelings of connectedness andvalidation, allowing users to summonrecognition. On Facebook, one assertsone’s social status and quantifies its in-

crease through numbers of likes, com-ments, and friends. According to Eyal,checking in delivers a hit of dopamineto the brain, along with the craving foranother hit. The designers are apply-ing basic slot machine psychology. Thevariability of the “reward”—what youget when you check in—is crucial to theenthrallment.

Eyal thinks the photo-sharing appInstagram is an even itchier trigger.“Instagram is an example [of the work]of an enterprising team—conversant inpsychology as much as technology—that unleashed a habit-forming producton users who subsequently made it partof their daily routines,” he writes. Its

genius, in his view, is moving beyondgeneralized FOMO to create angstaround “the fear of losing a special mo-ment.” Posting a photo to Instagramassuages that unease. Facebook’s 2012acquisition of Instagram, a startupwith thirteen employees, for the bar-gain price of $1 billion, “demonstratesthe increasing power of—and immensemonetary value created by—habit- forming technology.” In other words,Instagram was so damned addictivethat Facebook had to have it.

Of course, posting to Facebookor Instagram also contributes to theglobal accumulation of FOMO. WhatEyal describes, without seeming fullyto appreciate it in human terms, is a

closed cycle of anxiety creation and al-leviation. What are others doing? Whatdo they think of me? What do I thinkof them? In the last part of his book,Eyal raises ethical considerations andsays developers ought to peddle onlyproducts that they believe in. But in themain, his book reads like one of thosetobacco industry documents about ma-nipulating nicotine levels in cigarettes.Designers can hook users through theapplication of psychological phenom-ena such as investment bias—onceyou’ve put time into personalizing atool, you’re more likely to use it. Butan app, Eyal writes, should ask for in-vestment only after offering rewards,

such as tidbits of interesting informa-tion. Another tool is rationalization,the feeling that if one is spending a lotof time doing something, it must bevaluable.

Turkle argues against using theterm “addiction” because it impliesthat “you have to discard the addict-ing substance,” and we aren’t very well“going to ‘get rid’ of the Internet.” Butin describing what they’re doing, manyof her subjects fall naturally into thelanguage of substance abuse, absten-tion, and recovery. People colloquiallydescribe sessions online as getting afix, or refer to disconnection from so-cial media as detoxing or going coldturkey. The industry can’t help talk-

ing that way either, about “users” and“devices.” The toll of technology isemotional rather than physical. Butthe more you read about it, the moreyou may come to feel that we’re in the

middle of a new Opium War, in whichmarketers have adopted addiction asan explicit commercial strategy. Thistime the pushers come bearing candy-colored apps.

5.Despite the picture she paints of digi-tal damage to nearly every kind ofhuman relationship, Turkle remainsoptimistic that we can gain control of

technology or, as her book’s title hasit, reclaim conversation. Even teenag-ers who don’t remember a time beforesocial media express nostalgia for lifewithout it. One place they still experi-ence friendship without divided atten-tion is at device-free summer camps,where they return after six weeksmore thoughtful and empathetic—only to plunge back into the “machinezone.”

How can we enjoy the pleasures andbenefits of mobile and social mediawhile countering its self-depleting andantisocial aspects? Turkle keeps herdiscussion of remedy general, perhapsbecause there aren’t many good solu-

tions at the moment. She thinks weshould consciously unitask, cultivateface-to-face conversation, and set lim-its on ourselves, like keeping devicesaway from the family dinner table. Shesuggests reading Walden.

As consumers, we can also pressuretechnology companies to engineerapps that are less distracting. If productdesign has a conscience at the moment,it may be Tristan Harr is, a former B. J.Fogg student at Stanford who workeduntil recently as an engineer at Google.

In several lectures available on You-Tube, Harris argues that an “attentioneconomy” is pushing us all to spendtime in ways we recognize as unpro-ductive and unsatisfying, but that wehave limited capacity to control. Techcompanies are engaged in “a race tothe bottom of the brain stem,” in whichrewards go not to those that help usspend our time wisely, but to those thatkeep us mindlessly pulling the lever atthe casino.

Harris wants engineers to consider

human values like the notion of “timewell spent” in the design of consumertechnology. Most of his proposals are“nudge”-style tweaks and signals toencourage more conscious choices. Forexample, Gmail or Facebook mightbegin a session by asking you how muchtime you want to spend with it thatday, and reminding you when you’renearing the limit. Messaging appsmight be reengineered to privilege at-tention over interruption. iTunes coulddowngrade games that are frequentlydeleted because users find them tooaddictive.

These are helpful suggestions—morethoughtful apps, and apps to control

our apps. They also seem wildly inad-equate to the problem. Aspirations forhumanistic digital design have beenoverwhelmed so far by the impera-tives of the startup economy. As longas software engineers are able to de-liver free, addictive products directly tochildren, parents who are themselvescompulsive users have little hope ofasserting control. We can’t defend our-selves against the disciples of captol-ogy by asking nicely for less enticingslot machines.

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TV: The Shame of WisconsinLorrie Moore

Making a Murderera Netflix documentary series directedby Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos

Wisconsin is probably the most beau-tiful of the midwestern farm states.Its often dramatic terrain, repletewith unglaciated driftless areas, bor-

ders not just the Mississippi River buttwo great inland seas whose oppositeshores are so far away they cannot beglimpsed standing at water’s edge.The world across the waves looks dis-tant to nonexistent, and the oceaniclakes stretch and disappear into hazeand sky, though one can take a ferryout of a town called Manitowoc andin four hours get to Michigan. Amidthis somewhat lonely serenity, thereare the mythic shipwrecks, blizzards,tornadoes, vagaries of agriculturallife, industrial boom and bust, and aburgeoning prison economy; all havecontributed to a local temperament ofcheerful stoicism.

Nonetheless, a feeling of overlooked-ness and isolation can be said to persistin America’s dairyland, and the idea thatno one is watching can create a sense ofinvisibility that leads to the secrets andlabors that the unseen are prone to: de-viance and corruption as well as utopianprojects, untested idealism, daydream-ing, provincial grandiosity, meekness,flight, far-fetched yard decor, and sext-ing. Al Capone famously hid out inWisconsin, even as Robert La Follette’sProgressive Party was getting under-way. Arguably, Wisconsin can boast thethree greatest American creative ge-niuses of the twentieth century: FrankLloyd Wright, Orson Welles, and Geor-gia O’Keeffe, though all three quickly

left, first for Chicago, then for warmerclimes. (The state tourism board’s cam-paign “Escape to Wisconsin” has oftenbeen tampered with by bumper stickervandals who eliminate the preposition.)

More recently, Wisconsin is start-ing to become known less for itsever-struggling left-wing politics orartistic figures—Thornton Wilder,Laura Ingalls Wi lder—than for its ever-wilder murderers. The famous late-nineteenth-century “Wisconsin DeathTrip,” by which madness and mayhemestablished the legend that the placewas a frigid frontier where inexplicablygruesome things occurred—perhapsdue to mind-wrecking weather—has

in recent decades seemingly spawneda cast of killers that includes Ed Gein(the inspiration for Psycho), the serialmurderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dah-mer, and the two Waukesha girls whoin 2014 stabbed a friend of theirs tohonor their idol, the Internet anima-tion Slender Man.

The new documentary Making aMurderer , directed and written byLaura Ricciardi and Moira Demos,former film students from New York,is about the case of a Wisconsin manwho served eighteen years in prison forsexual assault, after which he was ex-onerated with DNA evidence. He thenbecame a poster boy for the InnocenceProject, had his picture taken with the

governor, had a justice commissionbegun in his name—only to be bookedagain, this time for murder.

Ricciardi and Demos’s rendition ofhis story will not help rehabilitate Wis-

consin’s reputation for the weird. Butit will make heroes of two impressive

defense attorneys as well as the film-makers themselves. A long-form docu-mentary in ten parts, aired on Netflix,the ambitious series looks at socialclass, community consensus and con-formity, the limits of trials by jury, andthe agonizing stupidities of a legal sys-tem descending on more or less unde-fended individuals (the poor). The filmis immersive and vérité—that is, it ap-pears to unspool somewhat in real andspontaneous time, taking the viewerwith the camera in unplanned fashion,discovering things as the filmmakersdiscover them (an illusion, of course,that editing did not muck up). It is riv-eting and dogged work.

The film centers on the Avery fam-ily of Manitowoc County, home tothe aforementioned ferry to Michi-gan. Even though the lake current haseroded some of the beach, causing thesand to migrate clockwise to the Michi-gan dunes, and the eastern Wisconsinlakeshore has begun to fill forlornlywith weeds, it is still a picturesque sec-tion of the state. The local denizens,whether lawyers or farmers, speak withthe flat a’s, throatily hooted o’s, andincorrect past participles (“had went”)of the region. There is a bit of Norwayand Canada in the accent, which is es-pecially strong in Wisconsin’s rural

areas and only sometimes changes witheducation.

The Avery family are the proprietorsof Avery’s Auto Salvage, and their prop-erty—a junkyard—on the eponymous

Avery Road is vast and filled with overa thousand wrecked automobiles. It is

a business not unlike farming in thatin winter everything is buried in snowand unharvestable. The grandparents,two children, and some grandchildrenlive—or used to—on an abutting com-pound that consists of a small house, atrailer, a garage, a car crusher, a barn, avegetable garden, and a fire pit.

In 1985 Steven Avery, the twenty-three-year-old son of Dolores andAllan Avery, was arrested and con-victed of a sexual assault he did notcommit. There was no forensic tech-nology for DNA testing in 1985, and hehad the misfortune to look much likethe actual rapist—blond and young—and the traumatized victim, influenced

by the county investigators who hadthe whole Avery family on their radar,identified him in a line-up as her at-tacker. Despite having sixteen alibi wit-nesses, he was found guilty. The actualrapist was allowed to roam free.

After the Wisconsin Innocence Proj-ect took on his case, Avery was finallyexonerated in 2003. DNA tests showedhe was not guilty and that the real at-tacker was now serving time for an-other rape. Avery then hired lawyersand sued Manitowoc County and thestate of Wisconsin for wrongful im-prisonment and for denying his 1995appeal (a time during which DNA evi-dence might have set him free), whichthe state had mishandled, causing him

to serve eight more years.Days after Avery’s release, Mani-

towoc law enforcement was feelingvulnerable about the 1995 appeal andwriting memos, redocumenting the

case from eight years earlier. The civilsuit was making headway, and only thesettlement amount remained to be de-termined; it was going to be large andwould come out of Manitowoc Coun-ty’s own budget, since the insurancecompany had denied the county cover-age on the claim.

Then, in November 2005, just as cru-cial depositions were both scheduledand proceeding and Avery stood to re-ceive his money, he was suddenly andsensationally arrested for the murderof a freelance photographer named Te-resa Halbach, who had come to Avery’sAuto Salvage on Halloween to photo-graph a truck for an auto magazine,and whose SUV had been found on theAvery property, as eventually were herscattered and charred remains. Averyhad two quasi alibis—his fiancée, towhom he’d spoken at length on thephone the afternoon of Halbach’s dis-appearance, and his sixteen-year-oldnephew, Brendan Dassey, who had just

come home from school.No one but Steven Avery ever cameunder suspicion, and county investiga-tors circled in strategically. After get-ting nowhere with the fiancée, theyfocused on the nephew, who was gen-tle, learning-disabled, and in the tenthgrade; they illegally interrogated himand suggested he was an accomplice.They took a defense witness and turnedhim into one for the prosecution.

Brendan was then charged with thesame crimes as Avery: kidnapping, ho-micide, mutilation of a corpse. Proddedand bewildered, Brendan had made upa gruesome story about stabbing Hal-bach and slitting her throat in Avery’strailer (the victim’s blood and DNA

were never found on the premises), a fic-tional scenario that came, he later said,from the James Patterson novel Kissthe Girls. When asked why he’d saidthe things he said, he told his mother itwas how he always got through school,by guessing what adults wanted himto say, then saying it. In an especiallyheartbreaking moment during the vid-eotaped interrogation included in thedocumentary, and after he has givenhis questioners the brutal murder talethey themselves have prompted andhelped tell, Brendan asks them howmuch longer this is going to take, sincehe has “a project due sixth hour.”

It is a crazy story. And the film’sdouble-edged title pays tribute to itsambiguity. Either Steven Avery wasframed in a vendetta by ManitowocCounty or the years of angry prisontime turned him into the killer he hadnot been before. But the title aside, thedocumentary is pretty unambiguous inits siding with Avery and his appealingdefense team, Jerry Buting and DeanStrang, who are hired with his settle-ment money as well as money his par-ents, Dolores and Allan, put up fromthe family business.

One cannot watch this film withoutthinking of the adage that law is to

justice what medicine is to immorta l-

ity. The path of each is a little crookedand always winds up wide of the mark.Moreover, nothing is as vain and self-regarding as the law. In Wisconsin pris-oners will not get their parole unless

Steven Avery after his arrest in 1985 for a cr ime he did not commit,

and for which he spent eighteen years in prison; from Making a Murderer

N e t fl i x


11/44February 25, 2016 11

John Cage

1989,

38-1/2 x 26-1/2”, Ed. 15

Allison V. Smith

, 2008

Chromogenic color photograph, 40 x 40”, Ed. 3

Joseph Havel

, 2014

Graphite and oil stick on paper, 30 x 22 1/2”

Tony Feher , 2000

Mixed media paper collage, 17 1/4 x 17 3/8”

Damien Hirst , 2010

Woodcut, 36 x 36”, Ed. 24

Sherrie Levine

, 1986

Photogravure with aquatint, 31 x 22 1/2”, Ed. 25

Terrell James , 2002

Oil on vellum, 20 x 16”

Richard Serra , 1999

Etching, 47 3/4 x 57”, Ed. 33

Coltrane © 1999 Richard Serra and Gemini G.E.L. LLC

Donald Judd , 1991-94

Suite of four woodcuts, 26 1/4 x 38 1/2”, Ed. 15 Aquatint on two sheets of br own smoked pape r,



they sign formal admissions of guiltand regret. (This kept Steven Averyfrom his own release when he wasyounger; he clung to his innocence.)These exacting corrections proceduresare almost religious and certainly Or-wellian in their desire to purge the lastcontrarian part from the human spirit.Any contempt for the law—even by alawyer in court—will not go unpun-ished. And if one has the further temer-ity to use the law against itself—filinga lawsuit against law enforcement, for

instance—one should be fearful. Espe-cially in Manitowoc. Or so say many ofthe locals in front of Demos’s camera.

As portrayed in Making a Murderer ,however, the law is not so vain that itdoesn’t point out the low IQs of thedefendants (an IQ test, it could be as-serted, largely measures the desire fora high IQ) while omitting the fact thatin Wisconsin most lawyers are practic-ing law without ever having taken a barexam. (If someone has attended lawschool in the state, the bar exam is notrequired to practice there—a peculiar-ity of Wisconsin.)

If the film does not do a good job inpositing an alternative theory of the

murder—surely it does not believethe sheriff’s department killed TeresaHalbach, or does it?—this is becausethe filmmakers are busy followingthe charismatic Buting and Strangin their courtroom defense and pre-trial investigation. These are men ofthe finest skepticism. In their skilledand righteous run at the state theyalso seem the only ones in the film inpossession of cool, deep, permanentmental health, and thus these ordinary-looking men suddenly resemble moviestars. A Twitter love-fest has sprung uparound them, beginning soon after thedocumentary first aired, and their faceshave been posted online accompaniedby girlish hearts and declarations of

love.But handsome is as handsome does,

and Buting and Strang are not allowedto suggest that others might have com-mitted the crime—due to a Wiscon-sin law involving third-party liability.And thus everyone’s hands are tied.The trial must proceed as one that isabout police corruption and reason-able doubt. Nonetheless we see anynumber of suspicious civilians with oddaffects who may or may not have hadthe means, motive, and opportunity formurder.

Halbach’s killing is largely presentedas a motiveless crime, though herbrother, her ex-boyfriend, and a couple

of Avery family members are seen oncamera with odd expressions and be-wildering utterances. (“Odd Affect”could be the film’s subtitle and wouldcertainly describe the demeanor ofmany of the court-appointed attorneysas well.) Halbach’s roommate did notreport her missing for almost four days.Her former boyfriend is never asked foran alibi, and can’t remember preciselywhen he last saw her. Was it morningor afternoon? He can’t recall. Nonethe-less he was put in charge of the searchparty that was combing the area nearthe Avery property in the days after shewas finally reported missing.

So who did this? Possibly StevenAvery. But it looks like a crime that cannever be properly solved. The story Av-ery’s defense team tells of law enforce-ment planting evidence is completely

convincing, and such conduct is hardlyunprecedented in tales of true crime.The Averys were not allowed on theirown property for eight days while po-lice roamed and rooted around, afterwhich the scattered cremains, Avery’sblood in the victim’s car, and the vic-tim’s spare car key were all “discov-ered.” Blood taken from Avery in 1995was also found to have been tamperedwith in police storage.

But showing that there was police-planted evidence does not solve the

crime; it only underscores its NotProven status for purposes of a court-room defense. And so the filmmakers’story—if it is a crime story, a humanstory—is missing parts. One may bestruck by the complete absenceof drugs and drug business in aneck of the woods where suchactivities often feature promi-nently. The victim’s personallife is almost completely miss-ing and so she seems a tragiccipher.

And although she and herscarcely seen boyfriend are bro-ken up, he still figures out howto hack into her cell phone ac-

count and attempts with anx-ious nonchalance to explain oncamera and on the stand how hedid so, though it seems to havebeen done with some extremelylucky guessing involving her sis-ters’ birth dates. Messages arefound deleted. This seems moredamning than the three callsAvery himself made to Hal-bach, returning a call from herthe day she disappeared. Thefact of Avery’s calls to Halbachwas left out of the film (thoughit was offered as evidence inthe trial), as if the filmmakersthemselves were unreasonably,narratively afraid of it.

Early on, because of Avery’s civilsuit, Manitowoc investigators were or-dered by the state to allow neighbor-ing Calumet County to do the primaryinvestigation into the murder: conflictof interest, due to the wrongful impris-onment civil suit, was recognized fromthe start. But this was not enforced andManitowoc sheriffs did not stay away,and the opportunities for evidence-planting were myriad. The prosecutorand even the judges are seen to proceedwith bias, professional self-interest, vis-ible boredom, and lack of curiosity. Atone point the special prosecutor is seenin the courtroom staring off into themiddle distance, playing with a rubber

band.The story one does see clearly hereis really a story of small-town malice.The label “white trash,” not only dehu-manizing but classist and racist—theterm presumes trash is not ordinarilywhite—is never heard in this documen-tary. Perhaps the phrase is too south-ern in its origins. But it is everywhereimplied. T he Averys are referred to re-peatedly by others in their communityas “those people” and those “kind ofpeople.” “You did not choose your par-ents,” says an interrogator, trying to plyanswers out of sixteen-year-old Bren-dan, though his parents are irrelevantto the examination and are not beingcriminally accused of anything.

Yet the entire family is socially ac-cused: outsiders, troublemakers, feisty,and a little dim. What one hears amidthe chorus of accusers is the malice ofthe village. Village malice toward its

own fringes has been dramatized pow-erfully in literary and film narrative—from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to theMichael Haneke film The White Rib-bon to Suzanne Collins’s The HungerGames. Trimming the raggedy edgesis how a village stays a village, how itremains itself. Contemporary shun-ning and cleansing may take new anddifferent forms but they always retainthe same heartlessness, the unacknowl-edged violence, the vaguely genocidal

thinking. An investigator ostensibly onBrendan’s defense team speaks openlyof his distaste for the Avery family treeand says, “Someone said to me we needto end the gene pool here.”

The German word Mitläufer comesto mind: going along to get along, in amanner that does not avoid misdeeds—one of the many banalities of evil. Cer-tainly one feels that frightened herdmentality among the Manitowoc lawenforcement as well as members of the

jury, the majority of whom were initiallyreasonably doubtful but who, swayed bya persuasive minority, soon unified to aunanimous vote of gui lty. Even the juryin Brendan’s trial did not question thenature of the defendant’s several andcontradictory confessions, such wastheir prejudice against the boy.

It may or may not be useful to recallthat early German settlers of Wiscon-sin, escaping the nineteenth-centurymilitary autocracy in Europe, oncebelieved that the American CivilWar would break up the Union, pro-ducing some independent states thatcould then come under German rule.These ordinary German citizens didnot get their own state, of course, andin fact had to share it with Scandina-vians, Poles, and even Bulgarian andCornish miners, but certain stereo-typical German burgher traits—fromrule-boundedness to tidiness to anti-Semitism—are sometimes said to havepersisted in Wisconsin life. (A shock-ing number of Nazi sympathizers once

resided in Milwaukee.) A reputationfor niceness may obscure rather thanexpress the midwestern character.

When watching two New Yorkersconstruct a film about the sketchy Wis-

consin legal system one may overreachfor cultural memes. (Cogent thesis-making is not this film’s strong point,or its mission, and so a viewer is likelyto veer off independently. Thus the In-ternet and media are full of armchairsleuths and amateur psychologists inthe growing discussion of the film.)But conformity and silence on the jobare elements in this tale, and they aretimely subjects. Businesswoman andamateur social scientist Margaret Hef-fernan has recently been publicizing

the results of her workplace survey of“willful blindness.” According to Hef-fernan, 85 percent of people know thereis something wrong at work but willnot come forward to report or discuss

it. When she consulted withGermans they said, “Oh, yes.This is the German disease.”But when she consulted withthe Swiss she was told, “This isa uniquely Swiss problem.” Inthe UK: “The British are reallybad at this.” And so on. Will-ful blindness is everywhere,though touched on only glanc-ingly in the film.

And so it comes as something

of a surprise that what the doc-umentary does linger over mostsingle-mindedly—either delib-erately or unconsciously—is thetheme of mother love (perhapsnot unrelated to willful blind-ness on the job). It is not justBrendan’s mother Barb who isher son’s impressively fierce de-fender. Barb is described by herson’s lawyer as a bulldog, andclearly the lawyer is afraid ofher. In her close protectivenesstoward Brendan she quicklyunderstands that he is ill-servedby the court-appointed defense.

But the filmmakers’ story isalso of Steven Avery’s aging

and devoted mother Dolores, whopacks up boxes of photocopied let-ters and transcripts and sends themeverywhere—from Sixty Minutes to 20 /20—hoping to get some journal-ists interested in her son’s case. Theeffect of the media is a fraught one inthis film—local TV news influencedmany of the jurors, and the prosecutionoften used the press to communicatein unethical ways. Making a Murderer has invited parallels to the podcast Se-rial , which has recently, and intrusively,played a role in getting a convictedmurderer a new hearing, though the ev-idence in that case was much more sub-stantial: a crime of passion by a jealous

and brokenhearted boy. The TeresaHalbach case is more mystifying.Meanwhile, short and lame and

chewing on her lips, Dolores Avery vis-its her son in three different prisons inWisconsin and one in Tennessee. Shespeaks to him on the phone regularlyand optimistically. In her fruit-printedhousedresses and floral shirts she facesthe camera and conducts calm tiradesagainst the legal system that has takenher son away. The filmmakers give hermore screen time than anyone wouldordinarily expect—and she and herhusband close the documentary with asense of domestic resilience. Their sonand grandson are in prison for murder.Their business has gone under. Yet

they will continue. Arm in arm! A veg-etable garden of kohlrabis! A smile offaith and hope! The film is in the gripof its own sentimental awe. But thereare worse things in the world.


13/44February 25, 2016 13

Prophet and Outcast BushJoseph Lelyveld

Destiny and Power:The American Odyssey ofGeorge Herbert Walker Bushby Jon Meacham.Random House, 836 pp., $35.00

n his active years as a politician, the

orty-first president was pleased to beknown as plain George Bush. Nowwe’re reintroduced to him as GeorgeHerbert Walker Bush, often shortenedo George H.W. Bush. The starchier

monikers serve not only to distinguishhe father from his eldest son. They fur-

nish a pedestal on which to place thismonument to him as a figure in history.

If the son variously known as GeorgeW. and Bush 43 had remained in Dal-as as managing partner of the Texas

Rangers baseball franchise, his father’sone-term presidency might have re-ceded even further in our memories.Jon Meacham then might not havebeen inspired to pack a fluffy word like

“destiny” into the title of this affection-ate, sometimes gushy treatment of thefirst President Bush. In the case of theBushes, “destiny” points to dynasty. Aswe’ve seen, it can be star-crossed.

George W. plunged into politics,declaring for governor of Texas theame year George the first retreatedo Houston. Eventually sheer com-

parison would make his father an ob-ect of nostalgia and regard. But by the

political world’s usual measurements,George W. proved the more discipl inedand successful politician, twice winningtatewide office where the elder Bush

had twice struck out, then being re-elected president, serving eight years,compared to his father’s four (though

his victory in 2000 was shadowed by hisailure to get a plural ity of the vote, ex-

cept on the Supreme Court).By his own performance in office, the

on highlighted the more cautious, pru-dential side of his father’s leadership.There’s the Oedipal rub. The secondBush’s swaggering quest for weapons ofmass destruction and al-Qaeda in Iraq,with all that ensued, eventually left ourmost recent Republican president avirtual outcast in his party—so dimin-shed a figure that he wasn’t welcome

at the 2008 Republican convention (ex-cept in a televised message, on the edgeof prime time).

More recently, the promise of yet

another Bush, a prospective Bush 45,quickly flashed and then even morequickly dimmed. The latest chip offhe old dynasty—George W.’s younger

brother Jeb (sometimes spelled Jeb!)—hasn’t been able to keep up with thedark currents churning the party heeeks to calm and lead. There’s a spi-al here. The way George W. made the

progenitor look good, Jeb’s campaignmisfortunes have reminded some Re-publicans that for all his failings in of-fice, George W. was a winner.

In the tenth presidential cycle sinceMeacham’s subject bent his knee andpromised full fealty to Ronald Reagan,igning on as the running mate of his

erstwhile rival, there are still legions

of self-declared Reagan Republicansamong potential delegates and office-holders. Leftover Bush Republicanswould appear to be mostly peoplenamed Bush. Faded shibboleths like

“a kinder, gentler nation,” “a thousandpoints of light,” “new world order,”or Bush 43’s “compassionate conser-vatism” aren’t stitched into anyone’sbanners, even their own. That’s their“American Odyssey.”

The chief virtue of this latest biogra-phy of the first President Bush is thatit charts his usually astute, steadynavigation through a period of remark-able turbulence and lurking dangers.The Berlin Wall was breached in hisfirst year in office and the Soviet bloc

started to break up. China’s stabil-ity and future course were called intoquestion by the military suppressionof the Tiananmen demonstrations.Then it was the Soviet Union itselfthat came apart, a slew of its suppos-edly autonomous states becoming trulyautonomous; independent, in fact. Itwas George Bush, not Ronald Rea-gan, who had to surf these waves, whotook the call from Mikhail Gorbachevon Christmas Day 1991 declaring theCommunist state—and with it the coldwar—to be over, finished. Reagan hadbeen out of office for three years at thatpoint. Americans of a rightist inclina-tion gave him the credit. The following

year, when Bush faced reelection, allthis was old news. The president didn’tknow how to make a case for the parthe had played. His early support forGerman reunification might win hima few lines in future histories. It wasn’tgoing to win him many votes.

On the campaign trail, Bush theelder always had a problem of self-definition. A New Englander born andbred into privilege, he became a Texanoilman. Son of a moderate Republicansenator from Connecticut—his father,Prescott Bush, distinguished himselfby condemning Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting—he entered Texas politics as aGoldwater Republican. ConservativeRepublicans sometimes gave him the

benefit of the doubt but never quite be-lieved he was speaking from the heart.

His sense of duty, rather than anyset of political beliefs, was what movedhim; that, Meacham argues, and an

unremitting ambition, partly veiled bya polite demeanor that only now andthen turned openly assertive (as in hisboast after his 1984 debate with Geral-dine Ferraro that he’d tried “to kick alittle ass”).

At eighteen, in 1942, he’d rushed from

prep school to the navy, flying fif ty-eightcombat missions off carriers in the Pa-cific, delivering bombs to his target onthe very first, only to be shot down inSeptember 1944. He managed to para-chute out of the burning plane, landingin the Pacific off an island called Chichi-Jima; his two crewmen didn’t, which

rendered the memory painful ever after.Yale was the inevitable first stop after

the war but then, instead of followinghis father and maternal grandfather toWall Street, he veered south and westto Midland, Texas. Years later, whenhe plunged into politics, he still had toovercompensate for his Yankee heri-tage. One way to do this was to opposethe 1964 Civil Rights Act. Everyoneseemed to understand, then and later,that such gestures to the right wereprompted by the politics of his time andplace, not deep conviction. What he fa-mously called “the vision thing” wasa blind spot from the start. Meachamwrites of “his inability to project great

conviction.” He was at once decent andmalleable; or, in a view this biographerascribes to Richard Nixon, “both re-spectable and manageable.”

Three times he was considered aplausible vice-presidential candidate(by Nixon in 1968 and 1973, by Ford in1974) before Ronald Reagan overcamehis aversion to the idea, aggravated byhis doubts about the man, and settledon him at the last possible moment atthe 1980 Republican convention. So itwasn’t “destiny” that got him where heearly on meant to go. It was Reagan’sneed for a supposedly “moderate” run-ning mate with experience in foreignaffairs who could compensate for hisown perceived deficits with undecided

independent voters.

Between 1971 (following his secondfailed run at a Senate seat) and 1976

(when Jimmy Carter ejected GeraldFord from the White House), Bush hadbounced among a series of relativelybrief appointive assignments, adding tohis résumé but obscuring his politicalallegiances: ambassador to the UnitedNations, head of the first American

diplomatic mission to Beijing, direc-tor of central intelligence for barely ayear. Along the way, he’d accomplishedthe thankless task, as chairman of theRepublican National Committee, ofstanding up for Richard Nixon duringthe Watergate scandal, almost but notquite all the way to the end. He did so,it was felt, without disgracing himself.That showed party loyalty, not ideolog-ical commitment. He offended Reaganin their 1980 contest for the nominationby calling attention to his rival’s age—underscoring his own fitness by hewingto a strenuous jogging schedule—andby scoffing at the “voodoo economics”Reagan peddled.

In his late-night phone call to Bushabout the second spot on the ticket,Reagan still needed to be convinced.He asked whether Bush had any reser-vations about the Republican platform.Bush knew this was a loaded questiontouching on its “pro-life” planks. He’dsupported Planned Parenthood (as hadhis father) and once, as a congressman,called for the creation of a federal de-partment that would encourage familyplanning. In an instant, the call fromthe head of the ticket inspired a secu-lar epiphany, a moment of conversion:Bush looked into himself and found noreservations worth mentioning. Fromthen on, set on a path that could leadto the White House, he’d be loyally and

faithfully pro-life.Meacham lays out such moments

when this genteel, plausible opportun-ist found it expedient to change course,without delving into the actual issues atstake. Compared to Reagan, he tells us,Bush was a “moderate” on abortion,whatever that means. “He saw politicsmore in terms of consensus than of ide-ology,” Meacham explains.

One ran for office—and did whatpartisanship required to win elec-tions—in order to amass power toserve the larger good. For Bush,the work of government was lessabout radical reform than it was

about careful stewardship.

When his subject reins in his convic-tions for the sake of a political gain , thebiographer finds a rationalization. Op-position to the Civil Rights Act didn’tcome easily to him, we’re assured: Bush“struggled to reconcile the impulses ofa good heart with the demands of thepolitics of 1964.” The politics of 1964—in particular, the politics of white Texasvoters then—won out. “Did I go too farright?” the former president asks in oneof his conversations with Meacham.“Maybe,” he concedes.

Author and subject obviously iden-tify with each other as likable men,recognize one another’s charm. They

had countless interviews—at leastMeacham doesn’t count them—overfive or so years. Each in his ownway is generous: Bush in giving thewriter seemingly complete access

George H.W. Bush shown on a television screen during his 1988 presidential campaign

E r i c h

H a r t m a n n / M a g n u m P h o t o s


14/44


15/44February 25, 2016 15

What the Eye Hears:A History of Tap Dancingby Brian Seibert.Farrar, Straus and Giroux,612 pp., $35.00

America Dancing:From the Cakewalko the Moonwalk

by Megan Pugh.Yale University Press,398 pp., $32.00

Probably the first dance any-one ever did was a tap dance.Beating the feet on theground was elementary com-munication; doing it in timewas a pleasure. The tribaldances of sub-Saharan Af-ica amazed Europeans withheir rhythmic exactness

as long ago as the eleventh

century. The dancing wasmonitored by the beating ofdrums, a practice that sur-vives in modern-day perfor-mances in which dancer anddrummer exchange signalsand rhythms. In these purelypercussive conversations the art has itsmost refined, most radical expression. Ionce watched Baby Laurence for nearlywenty minutes dance deeper and

deeper into literally radical territory.Between the dancer and the drummer,he human root of jazz lay exposed.

There is no one tap dance style.diom feeds on idiosyncrasy. In liveap dance performances the sonic ex-

perience is more various and discur-ive and often more alluring than theoptical one. This is the theme of BrianSeibert’s What the Eye Hears, the firstauthoritative book on the subject sinceMarshall and Jean Stearns publishedheir classic study Jazz Dance: The

Story of American Vernacular Dance n 1968. Seibert is far less concerned

with the legitimacy of the art than theStearnses, far more disposed to inter-ogate it. He doesn’t take up the story

where they left off; he begins wherehey began, in Africa. It is a remark-

able story no matter how often it is told,and it is an American story.

American tap dance had anotherpoint of origin besides Africa. In the

British Isles, wooden clogs could makegratifying noises. According to the oralhistory quoted by Seibert, during thendustrial revolution millworkers rat-led their feet to the beat of machinery

“and were pleased by the sound. Dur-ing breaks, they held competitions onthe cobblestones, folding in jigs andmorris dances.” The African drumdance began to merge with the horn-pipe, the Irish jig, and the Lancashireclog on the way to America.

The passage was through the lowestsocial strata; Irish POWs were deportedby the British in the tens of thousands

to the Caribbean or to Virginia, andon the slave ships, Seibert writes, “onthose cursed vessels, on those woodendecks, English and Irish ways of danc-ing met African ones.” British slaveowners outnumbered other nation-alities in the colonies, and inevita-bly slaves and slave masters mingled,compared traditions, and shared steps.Though the question of who borrowedwhat from whom can still start argu-ments, it doesn’t interest Seibert asmuch as the way the borrowings werechanged. But this, too, is impossible totrace with certainty when whites wereimitating blacks who were imitating,or satirizing, whites. The white imita-tions—of black music and dance, black

behavior, black humor—coalesced inthe blackface minstrel show.

The institution of blackface min-strelsy lasted more than a hundredyears, with thousands of troupes play-

ing all over the country and touringabroad. Another level of ambiguitywas added with black blackface min-strelsy. Negro performers painted theirfaces blacker and added the full redlips and wool wigs of the standard min-strel mask. And a mask may have beenall it was. After seeing a performanceby black minstrels in 1849, FrederickDouglass wrote that they “had recourse

to the burnt cork and lamp black, thebetter to express their characters, andto produce uniformity of complexion.”

If minstrelsy was, as James WeldonJohnson declared, the “only completelyoriginal contribution America hasmade to the theater,” how much moreoriginal was black minstrelsy? Authen-ticity was its great selling point, and thepublic, white as well as black, was eagerto buy, because the black minstrelswere not only the real thing but, it wasgenerally agreed, much better than thewhites. That aside, questions remain.Although Seibert is not primarily a so-cial historian, he is bound to considerthe convolutions beneath the surface:

That the [white] imitators alteredthe dances can be presumed, butwith what mix of mimicry and mock-ery, distortion and invention? Thequestions are important, because

it was through minstrelsythat the dances called jigs,

juba, shuffles, and break-downs became theater. Itwas through minstrelsy

that they became tap.

The dance called “cake-walk” was a step dance, nottap; its showoffy signaturestep—prancing with the legskicking up and out—made ita perfect vehicle for social at-titudinizing both satirical andstraight by partygoers bothblack and white. Danced ingroups traveling in a circle,it was a kind of Americancounterpart to the Europeanpolonaise—a picture of so-ciety enjoying itself. MeganPugh analyzes the cakewalkfantasy as she does all of the

subjects of America Danc-ing, in depth and detail. Whatshe says about cakewalkingtypifies her own approach todance history: “In the puffed-up chest of the imagineddandy, the circular path of

society on parade, layers of admirationand satire pile on top of one another likesediments from geological eras.”

Pugh’s layers pile dance on top ofliterary, social, and cultural criticism.This works in some cases to illuminatea dance that is already concerned withthings outside its own life, but it is lesseffectively used on self-referential cho-reography created between the 1950s

and 1980s, the most intensively her-metic period in dance history. Pugh’s“outing” of Paul Taylor’s Esplanade (1975) is based on his presumed an-tipathy to ballet, but her suggestionthat Taylor is “picking a fight” withthe opening sequence of George Bal-anchine’s Serenade hasn’t far to gowhen one considers Taylor’s choice ofmusic, which includes Bach’s DoubleViolin Concerto, the same music Bal-anchine used for another masterwork.If Taylor is picking a fight, surely it’swith Concerto Barocco. As for thecakewalk, Pugh again leaves off thetopmost layer of her critique in herreadiness to provide novel, not to saypreposterous, interpretations. Her view

of the cakewalk is of a dance literallyhaunted by the use to which it was putin a fictional newspaper story of 1907about skeleton ghosts rising out oftheir graves and dancing. For Pugh, the

Tap: Pure and BeautifulArlene Croce

ered Iraq, Saddam accepted UnitedNations terms and Bush called a cease-fire. His approval ratings then soaredo just under 90 percent (higher than

Truman’s after V-E Day).In November 1992, seeking re-

election, he would get just 37 percentof the vote. The country had alreadygone into recession at the time of thevictory over Saddam. And the presi-dent himself had sl id into despondency.“I want out,” he dictated to his diaryat the time of Saddam’s capitulation.

“I want to go back to the real world. . . .

I’ve lost heart for a lot of the gut politi-cal fighting, as a result of trying to leadthis country and br ing it together in theGulf. It’s strange but true.”

Partly, it turned out, he was sufferingfrom a thyroid deficiency that sappedhis energy. But partly he was also suf-fering from a sense of anticlimax. He’dhalf-expected Iraqis to rise up and oustSaddam. Those who tried in responseto his call to do so were slaughtered.Years later, in a 1998 book he was cred-ited with having coauthored with Brent

Scowcroft, he explained why he hadn’t

sent US forces to Baghdad to topplethe dictator: “To occupy Iraq wouldinstantly shatter our coalition, turningthe whole Arab world against us, andmake a broken tyrant into a latter-dayArab hero.” It would also condemnyoung soldiers to “what would be anunwinnable urban guerrilla war” and“plunge that part of the world into evergreater instability,” destroying “thecredibility we were working so hard toreestablish.”

That was more than an explanation.

It was a prophecy. In the aftermath

of September 11, George W. Bush lis-tened to Vice President Cheney andhis father’s old rival, Donald Rums-feld, and failed to heed what his fa-ther had predicted. “I don’t like whathe [Rumsfeld

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New York Review of Books - 25 February 2016