May 22, 2025 Dispatch The Matter of Martin By Lora Kelley Martin Amis poses for a photo in his North London home on Oct. 18, 2005. Courtesy of Writer Pictures/Graham Jepson, via AP Images. “They’re waiting for an autograph from Salman Rushdie,” the man behind me explained. After everything he’s been through. People were gathering behind a barricade at a door of the 92nd Street Y, down the block from the one where I stood waiting for “A Celebration of Martin Amis.” A couple of minutes passed, during which time the man behind me also decided to tell me that he thought the attempt on Donald Trump’s life seemed staged. Then the actual Salman Rushdie arrived at our door, wearing a tan Yankees cap, and walked right in, unbothered by fans. Suspicious of my line mate’s sense of the nature of the assassination attempt and his suggestion that the crowd was there for a novelist, I excused myself and went to investigate. A woman at the barricade said they were there for Murderbot. (This, I gathered from Google later, is an action-comedy TV series.) A literary writer in 2025 may not pull throngs of fans hanging off a barricade the way an action comedy TV series can. But the crowd passing through the lobby of the 92nd Street Y, there to hear a set of distinguished writers talk about Amis, was indeed soon in the hundreds. Martin Amis, whom Geoff Dyer once called the “Mick Jagger of literature,” was among our last great literary celebrities. Along with his crew of London writer friends—which included Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Rushdie—Amis moved like a star, back when writers (I’m told) commanded that kind of public attention. In the lobby, some attendees self-identified as Amis diehards: Paige McGreevy, who works at the United Nations, remembered being eighteen in Barcelona, staying out until six in the morning, sleeping all day in her blackout-shaded room, and then waking up and inhaling Money in bed. The novelist Julian Tepper recalled with a cringe the time he approached Amis at a PEN gala and did the whole “Mr. Amis, I just wanted to say—” thing. Another Money fan, Emilie Meyer, who said she was a friend of the Amis family’s, marveled at the way its protagonist combines piggishness with a nimble, pixielike wit. Meyer is a bookseller at Aeon Bookstore, and she often recommends Amis’s work to people who come in seeking books for a vacation—that way, she explained, they will always remember it as the trip when they read Amis. Read More
March 11, 2025 Dispatch The Prom of the Colorado River By Meg Bernhard Photograph by Meg Bernhard. Alfalfa smells warm and earthy and sort of sweet, like socks after a long hike, but not in a bad way. It is soft, with oblong green leaves the size of a pinkie nail. I know this because on a chilly February afternoon I drove a hundred and forty miles to the Imperial Valley, one of the state’s largest farming regions, pulled over to an unattended field, and ripped up a clump. It was a brown day; the wind turbines in Palm Springs were spinning and a dust storm was brewing. The air was more humid than normal. Alfalfa grows everywhere around the West, but it’s peculiar to see vast green fields in this place—a low, dry desert where vegetation is scarce and water even scarcer. But the Imperial Valley, home to an accidental salt lake and a mountain made of multicolored painted adobe clay, is one of California’s weirder places. The Salton Sea’s gunky shoreline takes off-road vehicles prisoner. A roving mud puddle eats at the highway. Roughly a hundred and fifty thousand acres of alfalfa grow in a place that sees fewer than three inches of rain a year. People love to hate alfalfa. It’s become the Southwest’s boogeyman, chief offender in the megadrought. Farmers use alfalfa for cattle feed because it’s high in protein, but the crop, a perennial, requires a lot of water—by one estimate five acre-feet per acre in the Imperial Valley. By comparison, Imperial Valley lettuce uses about three acre-feet per acre, while, on average, grapes across the state use about 2.85. (An acre-foot is about enough to cover a football field in water a foot deep; alfalfa, then, requires five of those per acre.) I think about alfalfa a lot, but only in the abstract, as a crop that uses too much water and enables the existence of more cows, which burp methane and make the climate crisis worse. I wanted to see it up close, and I also wanted to speak with one of the West’s most fervent students, and defenders, of alfalfa. His name is John Brooks Hamby, and he’s the vice chairman of the board of directors for the Colorado River’s largest single user, the Imperial Irrigation District, also called IID. Unlike alfalfa farther north, which may see a couple of harvests a year, Imperial Valley alfalfa enjoys a long season, he told me when I arrived at a sterile IID office in El Centro decorated with photos of canals and footbridges. “We can get ten-plus cuttings here,” he said. “Really thick, dense stands.” Alfalfa is not the valley’s only crop; when I was visiting, lettuce was in season, as was celery. I’d apparently just missed the carrot festival in Holtville, where sixteen-year-old Ailenna Salorio was named the 2025 carrot queen. There are dates and lemons and broccoli and spinach and onions too. But alfalfa is king. Read More
January 13, 2025 Dispatch The Tickling of the Bulls: A Rodeo at Madison Square Garden By Jasper Nathaniel Photograph by Austin Aughinbaugh. Courtesy of Studio Augie. A 1,650-pound American bucking bull named Man Hater paused at the entrance to the Madison Square Garden floor and fixed me with his dark, soulful eyes. “Hi, puppy,” I said. A bearded wrangler scoffed. “That’s no puppy.” Before opening night of the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden, on January 3—the eighteenth annual such event and first to sell out all three days—a small press corps had gathered by the tunnel to watch the athletes arrive. Not the human athletes but their bovine counterparts, which plodded up the corridor, chased by a mounted cowboy chanting in a low voice. The bulls advanced with the sheepish dignity of prizefighters in ill-fitting suits. In a few hours, these animals would try to buck their riders, who would try desperately to stay on for eight seconds—the basic drama of a rodeo. A popular myth claims rodeo bulls are compelled to buck by a strap wrapped around their testicles, but as any spectator can observe, these are clearly swinging free. “Take a rope, tie it around yours, and pull it up tight—and see how high you can jump,” says Chad Berger, a livestock contractor, in a Professional Bull Riders (PBR) promotional video meant to dispel this misconception. The real instigator is a strap wrapped around the bull’s flank—an annoyance that provokes an animalistic urgency to get it off, a response I know well, having once attempted to put pants on my dog for Halloween. “It’s basically like if I tickle your armpits—that’s about what it does to them bulls,” Berger says. Madison Square Garden’s three-day Monster Energy Buck Off, I learned, would be fueled by a tickling of the bulls. Read More
September 19, 2024 Dispatch An Opera on Little Island By Helen Rouner Photograph by Helen Rouner. The evening is balmy on Little Island. Already, I’ve forgotten that there’s a highway just on the other side of the slope, beyond which programmers are riding scooters home from the Google offices and tourists are taking selfies with a globally migrating installation of rattan elephants meant to symbolize “coexistence.” The carefully overgrown flora, maximalist and faintly tropical, is still lush here in early September, and it’s been a long time since the Meatpacking District felt more like a neighborhood than a novelty. It’s an impression, I’m learning anew, that gets stranger with repetition. I’m standing in the same place I was last night when the authorities canceled the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s The Marriage of Figaro for a rainstorm that never quite materialized. The crowd then had exhibited all five stages of grief at the news: The Marriage of Figaro is sold out for the entirety of its nearly four-week run, and there is no rain date. Returning to the pier tonight, having been granted a reserved seat by the gracious staff, I have a vague sense of traumatic reenactment, that retracing my steps like this and expecting a different outcome might be a sign of my impending insanity. Read More
August 29, 2024 Dispatch Le Bloc: An Account of a Squat in Paris By Jacqueline Feldman The squat. Photograph courtesy of Benoit Méry. People stood out front as if waiting: smoking, talking. Of consecutive sets of doors, the first one bore a monogram in stenciled capitals: B-L-O-C. A grille resisted lifting, sticking. Just inside was a foyer, at the back of which stretched a crescent-shaped desk referred to by squatters as the Accueil, “reception.” Watch was kept. Behind that desk a crank could operate the grille. “This is a building of the people,” the squatter Dominique, who had worked construction, told me, referring to its history as a public health agency and its suitability for heavy use. Hard floors swept clean. Banks of cabinets, their material a blond composite, lined the halls, which at rhythms of their own let onto rooms that had been government workers’ offices. These doors, green frosted glass, shut with a clang. They kept in the warmth of space heaters. Open, they let smoke and music circulate; they aired disputes. A squatter who was a woman—women were a minority at Le Bloc—drew my attention to gaps in the fabric or paper stuck up to cover certain doors. People liked to see feet coming in the hallway, company, warning. Each door wore a padlock. Living quarters in this way took up the aboveground stories, thirty to thirty-five offices a floor. Into bathrooms, which variously came with pairs or rows of sinks, sitting or squat toilets, and mirrors, squatters had built showers. At least one room per floor served as a kitchen, but all did not have kitchen fixtures. The kitchen on the second floor, though it was much used, lacked a sink. A squatter who lived on the third floor told me they’d had, on that floor, to padlock the kitchen. Reputedly clean, it attracted the messier residents of other floors. After they finished making messes on their floors, they came and made a mess on the third floor. Though he characterized the padlock as a necessity, it embarrassed him, as the proper role for a squat, by which he seemed to mean its default action, the direction of motion within, was to open, he said, not close. Read More
August 22, 2024 Dispatch Death Is Very Close: A Champagne Reception for Philippe Petit By Patrick McGraw Photograph by Sean Zanni/PMC. There was an air of subdued anticipation at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine as we waited for Philippe Petit to take the stage. A clarinetist roved through the church improvising variations on Gershwin in spurts, making it hard to tell if the event, which was being held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, had begun. Eventually, the lights dimmed and we were told to turn off our phones, as even a single lit screen in the audience might cause Petit to fall from his tightrope. Music started, but so quietly that it seemed like it was being played from a phone, while a candlelit procession made its way down the nave. Large boards were set up, on which footage of the Twin Towers being constructed was projected. A group of child dancers imitated Petit’s walk along the ground, and were followed by a professional whistler. After we were shuffled through this sequence that felt like a performed version of ADHD, Petit finally appeared and began walking, first meekly, then quickly, to Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” wearing a white jacket laced with gold. The original Twin Towers walk took place on the morning of August 7, 1974, after Petit and a group of conspirators broke into the World Trade Center while it was still partially under construction, and used a bow and arrow to span a tightrope between the towers. Petit walked, ran, lay down, and knelt on the wire, a quarter of a mile in the air, as the city looked on from below. It had taken more than eight months of meticulous planning to carry out the performance, including creating a mock-up of the distance between the Towers on a field in France, studying their engineering, and using various disguises and fake IDs to gain access to them. These heist-like aspects (it is referred to as “the coup”) have made it ripe material for movies including Man on Wire and The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit and featuring CGI Twin Towers. Read More