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- Between the spreadsheets

- The friendly Mr Wu

- The rise of PTSD

- Inside the box

Between the spreadsheets

Alice Hines

Once upon a time, there was a man who thought love was a maths problem.

“Love is a capricious spark, a miraculous whirlwind,” one of his blog posts began, sarcastically. “It is found by following ancient prophecies, embarking on dangerous quests...Something like that, who knows. Anyway, it sounds like finding a girlfriend was crazy hard before computers!”

The man’s name was Jacob. He is currently 32 and works in finance, creating software that helps banks comply with regulations. He has dark curly hair and a beard, a left eyebrow that’s often raised and, in his own words, a “dad bod”. His self-deprecating streak is tempered by optimism. “Growth mindset” is one of his favourite phrases. As in “I’m still not bisexual, but, you know, growth mindset.”

For most of his life Jacob dated only when he’d received clear signs of encouragement from one of the many women he found beautiful or fascinating. In 2013 he moved to New York from North Carolina. Thanks to the volume of people using dating apps, it was suddenly possible to spend each night of the week with a different woman who was already intrigued by his online persona. There was the cheesemaker. The fashion designer. Three different med-school students. Jacob liked them all. On each date, he holidayed in another person’s world and learned something new.

But cumulatively, the experience was overwhelming. Jacob knew he wanted to get serious with someone, but he found it hard to weigh the merits of each of these potential partners against each other. So he did what he knew best: he made a spreadsheet. He called it “How to Choose a Goddess”. When he described this to me, some of the calculations lay beyond my comprehension. But my more quantitatively minded friends seemed impressed when I rattled them off.

Jacob wanted to work out which of the women he’d met online would make the best life partner. He started by listing ideal qualities for a girlfriend, then weighted them as objectively as possible. Great sex, for instance, was worth roughly a third of great conversation, since people typically spend less time doing it. Other categories were peculiar to him. Jacob outlined 15 attributes in total, hoping that by isolating his requirements he could compare them in a systematic way. “Status – friends admire her”, “Will be smart, dedicated mom”, and “Emotional crush” were worth 5, 9 and 6 points respectively. But Jacob still didn’t know if his back-of-the-envelope estimates were right.

At one point he considered using pairwise ranking to assess his hierarchy of priorities and advanced statistics to determine the relative importance of Goddess Qualities. He’d learned these tricks in a business-school class about pricing goods. Ultimately Jacob chose a simpler approach. “A guesstimated number is better than not using numbers at all”, was his motto.

He then scored each woman attribute by attribute, multiplied those numbers by their weights and added the results to get a final score. But there was a problem: Jacob didn’t know what counted as a high enough score to indicate that he should stop dating and settle down. So he devised his own spin on the “Secretary Problem” – an equation typically used to decide what percentage of potential candidates a person should interview for a job. (The classic solution: the greater the size of the pool, the closer the answer tends towards roughly 37%.)

It was strange, but I envied him. All the wine-fuzzy conversations, the uncertainty and speculation, the obsessive close-reading of text messages had been reduced to neat digits. Jacob wasn’t objectifying women by rating their looks, as a pick-up artist might. His scores measured compatibility. And he wasn’t claiming that his system was perfect. The measures in one category, weighted very highly (15!), were entirely speculative – Jacob’s estimate of how much his dates admired him. But despite these imperfections, data were a better guide to ending up with a good match than the conventional wisdom: follow your heart, stick it out when things get tough, love will endure. Emotions were just mysterious cocktails of oxytocin and pheromones, Jacob believed, that could leave you on cloud nine or in jail depending on the luck of the draw.

Jacob is just one of a growing number of people seeking inspiration from business schools rather than poetry in the quest to find the right partner. This hard-headed attitude is evident in the practical turn that romance’s ardent lexicon has taken in recent years. We look for partners, not soulmates. We avoid deal-breakers. “Are you in the right headspace to receive information that might hurt you?” reads a recent meme, advising people to ask loved ones for consent before making demands on their emotional labour.

As Carolyn Yates, a writer and editor in Los Angeles, recently told me, romance is “figuring out in an efficient manner what works between people, just as much as being swept away in feelings”. Yates is polyamorous, queer and takes the pronouns they/them. Their relationships often shift fluidly between romantic, platonic and sexual and they go on a lot of first dates. With partners new and old, Yates takes copious notes in a planner on everything from conversation topics to what they ate and whether the date entailed sex or bondage. The note-taking does feel a bit like work, says Yates, but they reckon it makes them more considerate.

Yates is not the only one who has found that a business-like approach to relationships has made them kinder. Take the polycule – that’s a relationship constellation of three or more people – near Chicago, which recently used Excel to plan an orgy. The day before, participants entered their pronouns, likes, dislikes, boundaries, hard stops, aspirations for the orgy, std status and sexual preferences. This clarity made the experience that followed more “comfortable”, according to one participant.

One New Zealand couple deployed Agile, a project-management system that companies such as Microsoft and Lockheed Martin use to streamline processes across teams, in their marriage. The goal was continuous improvement. They held monthly retrospective meetings, where they reviewed personal successes and failures and set “action points” for the next month-long sprint.

All these people are trying to optimise the process of acquiring a partner and maintaining a relationship. Optimisation grew out of attempts to solve real-world problems with mathematical techniques. People are most likely to have experienced the effects of optimisation in their workplace. Management consultants, for example, used statistics to help companies perform better. In order to maximise a variable, such as profit, they manipulated different inputs, such as the costs of inventory and number of employees. Today, optimisation is regularly applied closer to home in exercise, sleep and diet. If these can now be tracked, quantified and streamlined, perhaps love and sex can be too. Aren’t relationships simply interactions that, with tweaking, could become more efficient and less prone to friction? In other words, aren’t they just a business problem?

For centuries marriage was an economic transaction, a means to exchange property and secure its transmission across generations through the creation of legitimate heirs. In some parts of the world it still is. In the West, love was the domain of pre- or extra-marital affairs: unrequited, temporary, romantic. This last word entered common usage in the Middle Ages in stories about chivalric heroes on quests to woo attractive maidens they encountered on their journeys and then abandoned as the plot moved on. It later became associated with novels (which, in some quarters, were considered a danger to impressionable women). It was only during the Industrial Revolution that romance was injected into marriage. Before then, marriage was essentially a contract between two families. With the rise of wage labour and an industrial economy based outside the home, the domestic sphere was annexed for romance. In some countries this transition happened much later. Love has been allowed to play a larger part in marriage choices of people in China only in the past 40 years. In India, arranged marriages are still the norm, although young people increasingly make the final determination.

The current trend for maximising returns in love, then, is a reversion to the original pragmatic approach. Models of corporate efficiency now govern large swathes of romantic life. About 65% of same-sex couples and 39% of heterosexual couples who got together in America in 2017 met on dating apps, which use algorithms to match them. Jacob was simply taking matters into his own hands. Some, of course, hated this approach. “Can you see why reducing human connection down to a single real number 1-10 is bad? Look in their eyes. Sing songs together. Dance,” commented one person, after reading about the spreadsheet on Jacob’s blog.

People who use spreadsheets, charts and planners to manage their love lives are different from the majority only in their conscious embrace of a fundamental truth – that relationships are transactions, and the work involved in creating and maintaining them is a form of labour. It’s a surprisingly democratic position, much like work itself. The relationship optimisers I interviewed have little in common with each other – they were secular and religious, writers and engineers. Or rather, they often had only one thing in common: they ended up wondering whether more than one relationship was optimal for modern life.

The traditional nuclear family has begun to look dated for many young people. Marriage rates have declined 8% in America in the last ten years (lots of couples no longer bother with a ceremony). Home-ownership is increasingly out of reach for millennials and rent becomes more manageable when split multiple ways. Raising kids often takes more than two people, whether the additional help comes in the form of nannies or relatives. Is co-parenting in a throuple (a relationship involving three partners) really so different? Some 5% of American relationships are consensually non-monogamous, according to research published in 2014 by Chapman University and the University of Michigan. In 2017 the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy noted that one-fifth of Americans reported engaging in consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lifetime. This proportion was higher among the LGBTQ population, but was otherwise constant across age, education level, income, religion, region, political affiliation and race.

Jacob was standing in the stairwell outside an apartment, half naked and holding his clothes, when he first considered dating two people at once. A few minutes before that he’d been in the flat of a classmate on his MBA programme at the University of North Carolina. She had invited him over to work on a project, then walked out of her bedroom in her underwear. Jacob was startled. His first impulse was to undress, too. Then he remembered that, in a more sober frame of mind, he’d weighed the pros and cons of cheating and decided against it. Grabbing his clothes in a panic, Jacob fled.

At that point Jacob had been dating a woman for two years who lived thousands of miles away. He met Natasha – this is not her real name and she declined to comment for this article – in Israel, where Jacob’s parents live, when she was visiting from Russia. Jacob says he knew he was in love when they stayed up one night solving probability problems in their underwear. Natasha was on track to becoming a hedge-fund quant. Jacob was applying to business school. Both wanted marriage and kids and to move to America.

Jacob knew that cheating was wrong because lying was wrong. Nonetheless, the situation he found himself in with his business-school classmate seemed perverse – he was rejecting a beautiful and interesting human being who had improbably chosen him, in order to date someone whom he could see only occasionally. A solution dawned on him. The next time he and Natasha met up, Jacob popped the question: what about an open relationship? As it turned out, she had been planning to ask him the same thing.

After graduation, Jacob and Natasha both got finance jobs in New York. They moved in together, signing a lease on a one-bedroom, 18th-floor apartment in a glass tower. They decided to stay open, dating others while loving each other.

The American utopians who coined the phrase “free love” in the 19th century saw their collective approach to sex as part of a political programme that would result in the destruction of capitalism. With non-monogamy, “the frost and ice of selfishness and exclusiveness melted,” wrote one member of the utopian Oneida community, which was established in upstate New York in 1848. (Mormonism had been founded not far away only 18 years earlier.) The community believed that “complex marriage” was divinely ordained. Everyone slept with whomever they liked, but if any pair became too attached, a council of their peers intervened to prevent possessiveness. Child-rearing was collective too. Children were educated never to say “me” or “my” but always “we” and “ours”.

More than a century later, a subsequent generation of free-love advocates – hippies, radical feminists and gay liberationists – drew inspiration from Oneida. These groups believed that monogamy produced individualistic family units, in which unequal gender roles reflected inequality in society at large. Love without limits, it was argued, would dismantle patriarchy along with capitalism.

By the time Jacob opened up his relationship, many of these communities had drifted away from their utopian principles. Today Oneida exists as a manufacturer of high-end homeware. By the 1980s Kerista, a polyamorous commune founded in 1971 in San Francisco, had become a thriving distributor of personal computers.

Today, critics of monogamy rarely argue that it is too individualistic. On the contrary, monogamy is considered insufficiently tailored to the pursuit of personal happiness. “We spend longer than ever selecting the right partner and tie up ever more of our hopes, dreams and identity in the partnership,” Jacob wrote in one blog post. “Almost inevitably, the relationship fails to fulfil its promise.” Monogamy was a conformist approach to love that pre-supposed sacrifice and compromise when perhaps none was required. Non-monogamy, on the other hand, allowed participants to fulfil their needs for romance, friendship, professional support and sexual excitement with different partners. Experimenting with different forms of relationships allowed individuals to discover what worked for them and to customise their ideal arrangement.

The current emphasis on non-monogamy as an expression of personal choice has attracted criticism from some of its historic advocates, who argue that polyamory and other alternative relationship styles should be used to build community and subvert existing power structures. According to Eleanor Wilkinson, a feminist academic, non-monogamy is often presented as a “watered-down, apolitical vision”. Optimising relationships is just another facet of capitalist individualism.

New forms of relationship necessarily make inventive use of the materials that society provides them with, so perhaps it’s inevitable that they have certain corporate overtones. Because non-monogamous relationships also lack legal protections – group marriage is illegal in many countries, and in America you can face legal employment discrimination on the basis of relationship style – participants have to get creative. One option in America is for groups of two or more people to establish a business structure, such as a Limited Liability Company (LLC) or a Small Business Corporation (S-Corp), as an alternative to marriage. These enable a throuple, for example, to own property jointly.

Some non-monogamous clients shrink from the “business flavour” of such arrangements, says Ora Prochovnick, a lawyer in San Francisco, whose specialities include contracts and estate planning for non-traditional families. Others find that they spice things up.

Meet Evin, Bunny, Katie and Madeline. Katie (bisexual, she/her) dates Evin (pansexual, he/him) and Bunny (straight, they/them). Evin also dates Madeline (queer, she/her). Neither Evin and Bunny nor Madeline and Katie date, but it’s possible that some of the other people they’ve dated have dated each other. Confused? That’s OK. They sometimes are too, which is why they plan everything.

“At one point, I was literally asking every partner on the same day every week to tell me what days they were available, and which they preferred,” Evin told me. We met last winter at a Christmas bar crawl organised by his local Burning Man group. As a blizzard howled outside, people in Santa outfits passed out home-made toys with playfully demented appendages – a Barbie with a phallic third arm, and stuffed farm animals with several Smurfs emerging out of their sides and rectums.

“I then gave everyone a row in a spreadsheet,” continued Evin, “and each day of the week a column, and coloured the cells in green, yellow and red based on their availability to try to create an optimal schedule wherein I would see each partner the desired number of times.” Evin works as a project manager and took inspiration from work. “It can certainly be seen as a businesslike way to look at things, but the objective is quite the opposite. Scheduling is a significant part of how I try to make sure partners feel respected.”

Planning can be sexy too. Evin and Madeline have a dominant/submissive dynamic in the bedroom, which they extend into everyday life via a productivity app. This pair employ it to reinforce a playful exchange of power whereby Madeline is told by Evin to complete her daily to-do list – taking her psychiatric medication, cleaning her room – in exchange for points and rewards, like a 20-minute back massage or a vacation together. Evin designed the system, but it was Madeline’s idea originally, and she has found it far more helpful than paper planners or other tools she previously tried to help her organise her life. “It makes little everyday things more exciting,” she told me.

Perhaps the most novel technique they employ is a weekly relationship check-in they conceived and dubbed the Six Questions. Every week, Madeline and Evin, and Evin and Katie, enter into Google Docs the answers to six questions about how their relationships have felt in the past week and their goals for the week ahead. Then they discuss their answers, usually over text but sometimes in person.

“What can I do this week to make you feel loved and appreciated?” Evin read from his phone one Sunday afternoon. Then he read his response: “I would like to spend some time aligning on schedules.”

Madeline’s anxieties – question 5 – were around dating other people. “I’ve been trying to get more comfortable doing it,” she said. (One of their protocols is that when Madeline is getting ready for a date, she texts Evin pictures of potential outfits, so he can choose the best one, and implicitly show approval of her choices.)

They reassured each other with tactful familiarity. It was a DIY version of couples therapy by way of a performance review. Before her relationship with Evin, Madeline often felt anxious in unfamiliar situations. On days that were especially frazzling, she sometimes didn’t take her medication, which made things even harder to handle. Running her relationships more procedurally has solved most of those problems. It’s also helped her explore her sexuality; for years, Madeline thought she was straight.

One weekend last winter, Evin came home late at night after meeting a Tinder date. He fed their cat, sorted the kitchen rubbish in the exact manner that Madeline liked it and updated his answers to the Six Questions in the Google Doc. Then he went upstairs, saw “up for kisses” written on the whiteboard on her door and knocked. Everything was in its place and Madeline had never seemed happier.

Jacob and Natasha knew that jealousy was the main obstacle to the success of their open relationship. Jacob believed that the emotion was a residual by-product of human evolution, the animalistic fear that a rival’s genes might supplant one’s own. This fear made less sense in a world furnished with DNA testing, contraception and limitless sexual options an app-swipe away, a world in which people regularly raised children who were not their own and had sex more often for pleasure than procreation. But the tricky thing about emotions was that they didn’t always listen to reason. You could not make sharing people as seamless as sharing rides.

There was one group of thinkers who had the tools Jacob needed: proponents of a new philosophy known to its adherents as rationality. These nerdy internet-users were preoccupied with recognising cognitive bias, applying the lessons of biology and statistics to everything from AI research to fan fiction, and modifying their emotions and desires to achieve their goals. While companies were abuzz with ways to “hack” growth and hiring, rationalists believed that they could hack their own minds – jealousy included.

Rationalists also had a reputation for polyamory. Hannah Blume, a writer in the San Francisco Bay area, wrote an essay about how she hacked herself to “become polyamorous over (admittedly weak) natural monogamous inclinations”. She wanted to modify her “factory settings” and get back together with an ex who had declared himself to be polyamorous. Blume reasoned that if she could convince herself intellectually that polyamory was the right decision, her emotions would inevitably follow. For any doubters who might see the process as evidence of painful self-manipulation on behalf of a partner, Blume declared “I haven’t suffered a hiccup of drama or a twinge of jealousy to speak of.”

When Jacob opened up his relationship, he hadn’t yet discovered the rationalist community, but in many ways, he was already primed for it. He had previously talked himself out of gut reactions with calm, critical thinking, such as when he decided not to cheat on Natasha with his classmate. Surely jealousy would be as easy to circumvent? Jealousy had triggers as well as symptoms. If these were catalogued and avoided, perhaps the monster could be contained.

The first few times that Jacob started feeling jealous about Natasha’s other partners, he distracted himself by playing video games. Eventually he grew accustomed to the feeling, which became less acute as a result. They adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that helped them avoid it altogether.

That approach could be used to hack other emotions too, he realised. Whenever Jacob felt himself getting angry with Natasha, he’d search for another angle from which to view the situation. When she failed to keep an appointment he was able to transform his thought from “she doesn’t respect my time” into “she probably got stuck somewhere and feels really bad she’s running late!” If their relationship was going to run the course then conquering such feelings was not just compassionate but pragmatic.

It’s fair to say that Natasha took to the approach less than Jacob. On his birthday, Jacob had plans to see a woman he’d met on Tinder. Afterwards, Natasha was angry. She told him she couldn’t believe that he’d chosen to spend his birthday with someone else. “Why didn’t you tell me ahead of time?” he asked. “You should have known,” she replied.

Less than a year after they moved in together, Natasha broke up with Jacob. He was surprised. Just weeks earlier, the couple had just signed a lease on their apartment for another year. Though Jacob knew they were having problems, he’d thought they were minor: she was working too much; he was absent minded. She had become an exercise fanatic and installed a dancing pole in their apartment. He was gaining weight. And he was also terrible at reading her emotional signals. After all, he’d been doing everything he could to banish anything irksome from his mind.

He responded as only he could: by applying logic to the situation. He set out to get over Natasha by looking harshly at her behaviour, where once he had forced himself to be indulgent towards it. He reminded himself of her flaws. He distracted himself with dating apps. Natasha had flown to the west coast to be with one of the people she had met while they were in an open relationship. Now Natasha and the man were monogamous.

Jacob began to wonder if he had been deceiving himself in his belief that he could transform his own feelings. Maybe he and Natasha weren’t made for each other? At first these thoughts made him despondent. But soon Jacob recognised that he could turn this realisation to practical advantage.

When Natasha came back to New York a month after the break-up, Jacob suggested she move back in. “Your boyfriend is in a different state. I think we could be great roommates.” All they’d have to do was sleep on different sides of the bed without touching. Natasha readily agreed and, for a while, things went well. Soon, she asked if her fiancé could move in with them too.

Jacob saw no pitfalls. “Living in this fantastic apartment and paying one-third of the rent,” he recalls thinking. “They’ve got the bedroom. I move a bed to be just by the window in the living room. Wake up to an amazing view.” Meanwhile, he’d date whomever he wanted.

Jacob still isn’t fully clear about how things went wrong, but he knows this: one evening Natasha’s fiancé stormed out of their bedroom to scold Jacob and a date for laughing (it was rude to laugh when someone else is in a bad mood, the fiancé said). Soon after, he confronted Jacob about using his kitchen knife. Jacob made a joke that was misinterpreted as a threat and Natasha’s fiancé was about to call the cops before Natasha managed to calm things down. Soon after, Natasha and her fiancé moved out. A month after that, they broke off their engagement.

Natasha no longer speaks to Jacob. This makes him sad and confused. Jacob takes a sip of tea as he recalls the most recent email from her: a request that he take down or untag photos on Facebook of them together in some of their happiest moments, on a trip to Israel and at a flash mob in New York. She’s monogamous now, he thinks, and wants to leave him and that period of her life behind.

Jacob doesn’t blame rationality for what happened. If he had understood its principles earlier on, it would have saved them strife, he told me. In fact, Jacob now believes he fell victim to cognitive bias, a cardinal sin of rationality, by assuming that other people thought in the same way that he did. “I don’t think it ever crossed my mind that overriding my emotions and convincing myself that Natasha and I were perfect for each other could be bad for me,” he said.

At one point, before their breakup, Jacob suggested that Natasha try his approach to emotional control. She replied, “it’s impossible.” She thought emotions could be repressed but never reconfigured. Moreover, feelings in the raw – messy, overpowering, often stubborn – were actually useful guides for making choices in love. Natasha was incredulous that romance could ever be hacked by Jacob or anyone else.

On a recent evening in Brooklyn I met Stephanie, a biologist in the final year of her PhD. She is the woman that Jacob’s Goddess Spreadsheet advised him to marry. Stephanie is pale and classically beautiful. Though initially shy, she opens up over time. She speaks in careful, grammatically complete sentences while her fingers flick each other under the table. I saw why she would have an advantage in a schema that forces its deviser to extrapolate swathes of personality from a limited set of conversations.

According to Jacob’s spreadsheet, Stephanie attained high marks in “Can talk at my level about science, rationality, big issues” and “Openness” (Stephanie had discovered non-monogamy during a prior long-distance relationship). She was also darkly funny. When Jacob and Stephanie were matched on OKCupid, she explained the day-to-day of her research on fruit flies: “[I] rip their butts off, squeeze the fat off like a tube of toothpaste, and turn them inside out like a sock.”

Still, the final spreadsheet results surprised Jacob. He’d expected a woman with whom he had more immediate chemistry to get the top score. Jacob was also an unexpected choice for Stephanie. Typically, the men she falls hard for are more sensitive. “If I was entirely following my heart, I probably wouldn’t be with him,” she told me.

A sign that they had made the right choice came when Jacob told Stephanie about the spreadsheet. She smiled and asked a question about his algorithm design. Stephanie and Jacob got married in 2017. Their relationship has always been open, save for a few months at the very beginning and, more recently, a stretch during which they worked on their bond.

Stephanie isn’t a rationalist, and she understands the backlash against Jacob’s methodology: “‘Oh, like this guy is such a catch, chooses a girl with a spreadsheet’,” she quips. “But I felt like everyone sort of does something like that…what are the pros and cons to being with this person?”

Her reaction confirmed a theory of mine: spreadsheets and other corporate analyses of sentiment function in much the same way as older tools – personality quizzes on OKCupid, psychoanalysis, even astrology. All these systems provide structure to the murky depths of our feelings. They may seem arbitrary but they help to make our contradictory and fluctuating desires comprehensible and communicable.

Today, Jacob tries to remain aware of which of his emotions contain useful information. They’re another data point to consider. “If all you care about is forming true beliefs about the world, listening to and understanding your emotions is a big part of it, because all you have is your brain. And a big chunk of what your brain does is make you feel stuff.”

“Love is still mysterious. Sex is mysterious,” he concluded. “I’m just trying to shine a small light in the darkness.”•

The friendly Mr Wu

Mara Hvistendahl

When Candace Claiborne arrived in Beijing in November 2009 to work for the US State Department, her employer was already on edge. The American embassy had just moved from a building at the heart of the city’s diplomatic district to a ten-acre walled compound farther from the centre, a $434m fortress that projected both power and fear. The complex featured shatterproof glass, multiple checkpoints and a moat. To prevent Chinese agents from bugging offices, whole sections of the building had been shipped in from America, a tactic used previously when several floors of the US embassy in Moscow had to be razed following a breach in the 1980s. Even with all the safeguards, it turned out that two American construction workers had passed details about the building to China’s intelligence services. The news rattled policymakers in Washington, DC, who were watching China’s rapid economic and political rise with trepidation. The work environment that Claiborne would inhabit for the next three years included frequent security briefings and warnings about the cunning of China’s intelligence services. “I always tell the men, ‘Go look in the mirror. No beautiful woman, attractive woman, goes up to 50-year-old men,’” said one State Department official.

Though the embassy’s security staff had much to worry about, Claiborne was not an obvious source of concern. A 53-year-old mother of four grown children, Claiborne had the poise and manner of someone used to disciplined work. As a young woman she had dreamed of becoming a ballerina, and worked toward this goal with such dedication that she was admitted to the prestigious Washington School of Ballet. She came from a family committed to service – one brother went into the air force and another into the FBI – but Claiborne decided to follow her dream, and packed up her leotards to move to New York. She had some small victories, but the dance world was cut-throat and sustained success eluded her. After an ill-fated marriage, Claiborne ended up following her siblings into the family business. She became one of the hundreds of unlauded but vital administrators trained by the State Department to keep diplomats’ calendars, prepare agendas for meetings and take notes. Claiborne worked in the part of the embassy that handled classified information, and had top-secret security clearance.

She had lived in Beijing on an earlier tour, following it up with a posting to Shanghai. Normally, the State Department caps employees at two tours in a single country and additional stints require a special waiver. The department’s intelligence officers worry that if a person spends too long in one place, he or she might adopt a casual attitude toward potential security threats. But it was hard to persuade people to go to China, and Claiborne, who didn’t have so much as a parking ticket to her name, passed her security reviews easily. She did have one glaring vulnerability, however, which the State Department apparently overlooked.

As she prepared for her move back to Beijing, Claiborne was worried about Jamal, a pseudonym used here for a man described in court documents only as “Co-Conspirator A”. Excerpts from their communications make it clear that Claiborne and Jamal were close. He lived with her at times and often depended on her for money. Their messages and phone calls hint at a relationship marked by moments of petulance and immaturity on one side, and indulgence and anxiety on the other. In “Chinese Communist Espionage”, a book published last year, Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil write that Co-Conspirator A is Claiborne’s son. (Claiborne did not respond to an interview request sent to her prison. Her lawyer declined to be interviewed about the case and did not reply to an invitation to comment on Claiborne’s behalf. Jamal did not respond to a request for an interview or comment on the story.)

Jamal had recently graduated from Salisbury University in Maryland and was living in Washington, DC, doing a string of entry-level jobs. A skilled painter, he wanted to become a fashion designer but as court documents later revealed, he had debts from university and no money to pay for further study. Claiborne was also financially stretched. But she saw a solution.

Jamal had accompanied Claiborne on her first tour of Beijing, enrolling at an international high school. He had enjoyed living in China, and he and Claiborne had befriended a number of local Chinese. State Department employees are required to report all recurring contacts with foreign nationals, and few of them manage to make lasting friendships with locals. It is unclear how Claiborne first met a middle-aged man with babyish cheeks and a slight paunch referred to here as Mr Wu (court records withhold his real name). Mr Wu owned an import-export company and spa in Shanghai. There is no indication that he and Claiborne were romantically involved, but they were familiar enough for Claiborne to write to him before her third tour in Beijing asking whether Jamal might be able to continue his studies in China: “He needs a place to stay and he needs possible airfare…any suggestions?”

We don’t know exactly what Claiborne intended by her request. She may have been asking for an introduction to a workplace or a school, rather than cash. In any case, Mr Wu replied saying he would help. As Claiborne set herself up in Beijing, Mr Wu explored various options for Jamal, who was still in America, to study or work in China. When Jamal wanted beads a few months later, Mr Wu sent them to him. Mr Wu was so helpful that, over time, Claiborne became ever more dependent on him. Eventually his real purpose would be uncovered by American investigators: Mr Wu was a Chinese government spy.

Media coverage has recently homed in on the possibility that China’s advanced software could be exported around the world, potentially giving the Chinese state back doors into foreign telecommunications networks. But the Claiborne case illustrates that threats to America’s security can take far humbler forms. When her case came before a judge in 2017, it hit the headlines for a few days and was then quickly forgotten. She was ultimately convicted of defrauding the American government, a relatively light offence compared with some of the more attention-grabbing cases involving Chinese espionage. But intelligence experts in America viewed Claiborne’s case with alarm. “What it illustrates is that the Chinese intelligence services will dedicate years and significant resources to recruit even an office-management specialist,” said Ryan Gaynor, a supervisory special agent in the FBI, who investigated Claiborne’s case.

Claiborne left an extensive trail of communications with her Chinese contacts and her story offers unusually detailed insights into the patience and guile of Chinese intelligence services, challenging received wisdom about Chinese espionage. At the heart of the case is a critical question: how did an ordinary, hard-working woman sent to do public service abroad end up in the thrall of an enemy agent?

Claiborne grew up in Maryland, in a loving African-American family, the youngest of seven children. When she eventually relinquished her childhood dream of becoming a ballerina, she turned in a different direction: she married a devout Muslim, converted to Islam and had four children. Friends know little about this period of her life. One said that Claiborne settled with her then-husband in New York state in a community of members of the Nation of Islam, an African-American religious organisation.

When the marriage ended some years later, her exit was hurried and undignified. She stuffed her belongings into bin bags and moved to Baltimore. “She called our parents and asked if she could come home to start her life over,” her brother Kevin wrote in a letter to the court. From a world of tutus and pointe shoes, he said, she would “begin reconstructing a life with no appreciable job skills, no work experience, no professional education”.

She got a break when she was offered a low-level job with the US Comptroller of the Currency, a banking watchdog. She eventually moved to Washington, DC, and bought a duplex in a middle-class area near Howard University. A pillar of her community, Claiborne babysat for family members, organised outings to museums and volunteered to feed the homeless. Only rarely, at tai chi or yoga classes, did she devote time to herself.

The family home was sparse but orderly and stable. “There was very little comfortable furniture but there was a long study table and a computer for use by the children,” a former US civil servant who mentored one of her sons wrote in a letter to the court. Ensuring a good education for her children became Claiborne’s new dream, according to her brother, and she pursued it with the same dedication she had shown as a ballet dancer, scouring the internet for cheap or free online courses. But sending her children to college would require real money. Her first shot at getting it came in 1999, with a steady job at the State Department.

The State Department has a famously competitive entry process for foreign-service officers. Administrative jobs are less prestigious but dependable. Staff change posts every two to three years – housing and travel allowances make the frequent moves worthwhile. To boost her salary and save up for her children’s education, Claiborne volunteered for hardship postings: jobs in countries where conditions were tough, that pay an additional 15-35%. Typically, employees do one or two before requesting less arduous locations. Claiborne would go on to do five in a row, including Baghdad.

The first of these was in Beijing, which qualified as a hardship station because the Chinese government was less than friendly and pollutants gave the air the consistency of pea soup. Claiborne moved there in 2000, following it up with a post in Shanghai in 2003. At some point during these tours she met Mr Wu, who spoke good English, and by 2007 they were in regular email contact.

China is governed by a network of complex exchanges in which favours are tendered as currency, and Westerners living there frequently encounter businesspeople who offer unsolicited assistance. “As a foreigner in China, I was often treated to generous opportunities and left wondering what motivated the generosity,” said Sean Dahlen, who taught Claiborne yoga in China and struck up a friendship with her. “More often than not, it was harmless expressions of friendship. Sometimes it was clear later that they wanted something in return.” He recalled that Claiborne had a “tangible” kindness.

There is no evidence in the court papers that Mr Wu asked Claiborne for anything during the early years of their friendship. But if she ever thought that he was merely a benevolent businessman, it would have been clear to her by 2011 that there was more to the story. According to the court papers, in April of that year, Claiborne received a transfer for $2,480 from a Hong Kong company called Delta Shipping Co Ltd, along with a note saying the money was for Jamal. She didn’t report it. The following month, Chinese officials flew to America to meet Joe Biden, the vice-president, and Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, for the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a series of high-level meetings between the two countries. After the summit, Mr Wu asked Claiborne for the State Department’s internal assessment of the dialogue. In particular, he wanted to know what the United States might do if China didn’t stick to the agreed timetable for revaluing the yuan.

Claiborne sent him a response with general information, some apparently drawn from public sources. “Was the stuff I sent useful?” she later asked Mr Wu by email.

“It is useful but it is also on the internet,” he responded dryly. “What they are looking for is what they cannot find on the internet.”

This was a crucial turning point, said Robert David Booth, a former deputy-director of counterintelligence for the State Department and author of “State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies”. “The light had to go on,” he said. “I don’t care how naive she was and what she was trying to do. She finally had to stop deluding herself.”

The incident did apparently spook her. When Mr Wu next wrote to Claiborne asking if she had anything else for him, she sent him away. “To tell you the truth, I really don’t want to spend time on this kind of stuff,” she wrote. “I’m sorry, I don’t have the time or the energy.”

Mr Wu had plenty of time to devote to the relationship, however. He was what intelligence experts call a “cutout” an operative with a credible cover working for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). Based in Beijing with bureaus throughout the country, the MSS is a cross between the FBI and the CIA, dealing with international intelligence as well as domestic security. Over the preceding years, the MSS had shown its prowess, recruiting assets through imaginative campaigns and staging dramatic cyber-attacks.

During the cold war, Western spies fretted over the ingenuity and ruthlessness of their KGB adversaries, but tended to downplay China’s intelligence capabilities. If there was a threat, it was said to come from the sheer number of people, primarily ethnic Chinese, that the Chinese Communist Party could harness to work in intelligence operations – what was called a “thousand grains of sand” or “vacuum cleaner” approach to spying. This revealed as much about Western assumptions and prejudices as it did about China’s tactics. In truth, Chinese intelligence services have long used approaches both creative and classic to turn agents or siphon off classified information.

A pivotal case came in 2003, when a Japanese code clerk in Japan’s Shanghai consulate had an affair with a local woman who worked at a karaoke bar. The Shanghai branch of the MSS used the relationship to push the man into giving up personal information on his colleagues, as well as the schedule for taking diplomatic pouches to Tokyo. The encounter culminated in a single desperate moment. Alone in the consulate, the code clerk hung himself.

In 2004 the Shanghai branch of the MSS recruited an American graduate, Glenn Duffie Shriver, using a novel ruse: a call for essays on US-China relations. Officers told Shriver, who was living in Shanghai, that he’d written the winning essay. They then groomed him to join the State Department, paying him $70,000 for his loyalty. Shriver flunked the foreign-service exam, and by the time he applied to the CIA, American operatives were on to him. But the incident alarmed the overseas intelligence community because of the sheer time and resources China’s spy services were willing to commit to a single asset who might not even end up doing a useful job. “The MSS is as patient and good as any service I’ve ever dealt with,” said Booth.

And so it was with Claiborne. Mr Wu, who also worked for the Shanghai branch of the MSS, pushed Claiborne only lightly when she dodged his requests for inside information. Perhaps he calculated that her concerns about Jamal would send her calling again soon. Two months after saying she didn’t have time to help, Claiborne had lunch with Mr Wu. Two days later, she sent what seems to have been a follow-up request for funds.

“I feel bad about asking for money,” she wrote to him. “You are always helping me.” She added that she would try to get some more details about sentiment in her office on the value of the yuan.

“I will help your kids, and also you, to make money in China,” he said, an assurance later read out in court.

“Sounds good,” she replied. Two days later, he wired her $580.

Jamal moved in with Claiborne in Beijing in January 2012 as she was entering the third year of her third tour. The move increased her concern about being dependent on Mr Wu. Soon after, she had a bad dream. “I really don’t want my neck or your neck in a noose,” she told Jamal. But her involvement with the MSS would only deepen with the young man in China.

In February Claiborne looked into whether Jamal could go to Raffles Design Institute in Shanghai. A three-year degree cost 301,500 yuan ($48,000), she told Jamal, then followed up with another message warning him that she didn’t want to accept any more handouts. “While I want you to go to school to fulfil your dream, I would like for you to enter the school on your own accord,” she wrote. She asked him not to send a “blast email” to Mr Wu.

Jamal was annoyed. “Stop worrying about owing Mr Wu,” he wrote back. He told Claiborne that he intended to use all the connections he had. “It takes support to push through to success.” Then he did exactly the thing that she had asked him not to: he emailed Mr Wu and told him everything. “One moment she gives you the green light to help me,” he complained. “The next moment, she doesn’t want you to move forward with helping me.” He said that he would do what he liked, no matter what Claiborne said. “I feel as a man that it is important to develop a relationship with you apart from her because you are extending your hand to help me.”

The Chinese agent replied that he would try to convince Claiborne. Soon after, according to court filings, he took over the task of enrolling Jamal at Raffles, covering his school fees and getting him settled in Shanghai.

That spring Jamal leaned on Mr Wu more and more. The Chinese operative arranged for him to travel from Beijing to Yiwu, a large city outside Shanghai where vendors hawk craft supplies. Jamal then took a trip to Shanghai with two friends, and Mr Wu paid for their tickets. When the young man finally moved from Beijing to start fashion school in Shanghai, Mr Wu found him an apartment, covered the rent and gave him a monthly stipend of 3,000 yuan. Whenever Jamal needed something, he asked Mr Wu: a shaver, a sewing machine, a trip to Thailand.

Jamal grew close enough to Mr Wu to involve him in his birthday celebration, which took place on a terrace of a fancy hotel overlooking Shanghai’s Huangpu river. Claiborne flew to Shanghai for the occasion, and they snapped a photo together, the city unfolding behind them. A new contact joined for the event: a man named Mr Zhang (another pseudonym), who was one of Mr Wu’s colleagues at the Shanghai branch of the MSS. Mr Wu had the cover of being a businessman, but his partner gave no pretence of being anything but a spy. It is not unusual for MSS agents to work in pairs, to prevent graft and ensure that sources actually exist. Mr Zhang quickly became as involved in Claiborne’s and Jamal’s lives as Mr Wu. In a note to Jamal one day, he told the young man not to worry about making money. “You should focus on the school,” he wrote. “Me and Mr Wu will try our best to cover the expenses.”

While Jamal was burning through money sent by Mr Wu, the MSS was staging its biggest intelligence coup to date: penetrating the secret communications system of the CIA. Beginning in 2010, CIA sources in China started disappearing or dying at an alarming clip. In one case, a source who worked for a Chinese government ministry was shot in broad daylight in front of his colleagues.

Claiborne probably knew nothing of this, but she was growing increasingly skittish about her own situation. In September 2012, shortly after Jamal’s birthday celebration, she told an acquaintance that she was deleting her Facebook account, explaining that the site made it easy for people to collect personal details and other information. As her tour in Beijing drew to a close, court documents show that she lied on a State Department exit-interview form that asked her to list all interactions she’d had with foreign nationals, writing “none”.

Claiborne’s next posting was to Khartoum in Sudan. After leaving China, she urged Jamal to take a more responsible attitude to the unearned largesse he was enjoying there. “You are there on someone else’s dime…and because of someone else’s sacrifices,” she reminded him. But still she indulged him, asking Mr Wu for help sending him on holiday between school terms. “I think it would be good if he could go home for that time…it will do him good,” she wrote to Mr Wu. “Is there some way you can make that happen?”

As a parting gift, Mr Wu and Mr Zhang gave Claiborne an iPhone and a MacBook, devices that they may have used to track her from halfway around the world.

The emails, text messages and photos obtained by the FBI don’t explain everything about Claiborne’s relationship with Mr Wu. One August, when the temperature in Beijing soared to the high 20s, Claiborne emailed him saying that her feet were cold and she needed slippers – an odd request that suggests she was talking about something other than her feet. The court documents show that the Chinese intelligence officers gave gifts and payments worth tens of thousands of dollars to Claiborne and Jamal, but reveal little about what happened when they met in person. After Claiborne left China she seemed to veer between efforts to distance herself from her Chinese contacts and friendly correspondence with them.

Mr Wu and Mr Zhang were apparently unfazed by Claiborne’s move to Khartoum and her attempts to pull away. There is no known example of MSS operatives ending a relationship. According to court documents, Claiborne had been in Sudan only weeks when she heard, in August 2013, that Jamal had been accused of a crime in China. (A source close to the case called it a “personal indiscretion”.) Mr Zhang offered his assistance. He and Mr Wu had intervened on Jamal’s behalf and convinced the police not to prosecute, he told Claiborne, but the authorities had insisted on cancelling Jamal’s student visa. Jamal had just days to leave the country. Ever obliging, the agents booked the young man a one-way ticket to Washington, DC.

If it was all a setup, it was a curious move. The Chinese agents exerted control over Claiborne through Jamal. Once he was out of China, they would have less immediate leverage. On the other hand, the event left Claiborne even more beholden to them. Afterwards, she urged Jamal to cut off communication with Mr Wu and Mr Zhang, saying, “This has been too much for me from the beginning and I want to be free of this.” She added that she didn’t want to be indebted “to anyone but God”. A few months later, Mr Zhang wrote to Claiborne saying that he and Mr Wu were planning a tour of Africa and wanted to stop in Khartoum. She demurred. He followed up in March and Mr Wu tried in April: “If everything smooth, we should be in Africa beginning of May,” he wrote. In the response detailed in court filings, Claiborne said that she had taken a new position in Washington, DC, then emailed Jamal and warned him not to reveal her actual location. “As far as you know I’m in DC,” she wrote.

But Claiborne remained in their orbit. In August she sent them a warm email thanking them for the help they had given Jamal, signing the message “Kangdai”, the Chinese name she had adopted. When she was back in Washington in September 2015, she emailed Mr Wu her bank details, along with a note asking if he could help out. His response made clear that she meant with money. “Can you inform me clearly the 5k to which account?”

In the summer of 2015, the US Office of Personnel Management announced that its database had been hacked, a feat that gave the attacker access to the personal information of 21m US government employees. The attack was soon attributed to the MSS. As the intelligence community digested the implications of the breach, Claiborne’s relationship with Mr Wu finally started to catch up with her.

A few days after the exchange with Mr Wu about money, the State Department brought Claiborne in for an unexpected security review. The investigator, Patricia Crampton, started the encounter with a warning: “18 USC 1001 makes it a crime to knowingly falsify or conceal material facts related to this investigation.” Crampton went on to ask for a detailed explanation of Claiborne’s activities in China. In her response, according to the court filings, Claiborne lied about her contacts there, the gifts she had received and the extent of Jamal’s overseas travels.

After the interview, she panicked. She called Jamal from a phone booth three floors beneath her office in the State Department and urged him not to “say anything about…um…ya know”. She also called Mr Wu and told him that she’d been brought in for review, warning him not to transfer the money. “They ask oh so many questions,” she told him. “You have no idea.”

“So I can’t transfer the 5k to your that – to your account?” Mr Wu asked.

“No no no no no,” she said, her voice crackling through the pay phone. “No no no no no.” Later she added: “I just cleaned, cleaned up all my emails and stuff. You know, delete, delete, delete.”

“Good,” Mr Wu said. “Understand.”

Crampton knew Claiborne had made false statements, but investigators sat on the case for months hoping to catch her committing a more serious crime. Now that Claiborne was stationed in America, the FBI could easily watch her. Investigators installed surveillance cameras outside her home and at her office at the State Department, and they collected evidence using a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, which allows for covert “sneak-and-peek” searches and tapping of phones. In February 2016 the State Department told Claiborne that her background check was complete, then waited to see what she would do.

Claiborne became less cautious. When Mr Wu turned 50 that spring, she reminded Jamal to congratulate him. Jamal, meanwhile, planned another trip to China, undeterred by the circumstances under which he had left the country.

As his plane sat on the runway waiting to take off, he spoke to Claiborne by phone. “If you happen to talk to Mr Wu or any of them, just say Candace is working in DC,” she told him. She added, in a statement which prosecutors would later cite, “I’m sure they’ll ask. They’re spies.”

On a cold, dark evening in January 2017, several days after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, a man stood outside Claiborne’s door as she returned home from work. He introduced himself as a colleague of Mr Wu and Mr Zhang, and Claiborne ushered him inside.

The man, who was ethnically Chinese, explained that he worked for the MSS. When he offered Claiborne a chunk of cash, she refused. “Things are not the way they used to be,” she warned him. The Feds were asking too many questions, she added. She seemed unconcerned by his claim that he worked for the MSS, and when he told Claiborne that she was one of the state security ministry’s “highest regarded” friends, she didn’t correct him. In fact, Claiborne’s visitor was an FBI agent working undercover. Soon after, Claiborne was arrested at home. Jamal was named as co-conspirator, but never charged with any wrongdoing.

In April 2019 Claiborne pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to defraud the United States. Her sentencing was held in Washington’s E. Barrett Prettyman Building, the same courthouse where the warrant authorising her surveillance had been issued. In a courtroom decked out with blond wood and a green carpet, before a small audience of investigators, relatives and bystanders, Judge Randolph Moss considered her situation.

Prosecutors argued that she had passed sensitive information to the MSS, and that her actions could have damaged State Department operations, noting that the devices she accepted might have doubled as bugs. Claiborne’s lawyer, a public defender, stumbled. “She made a mistake that then turned into criminal conduct,” he said weakly.

She sat to one side of him, wearing an orange jumpsuit and a headscarf. In the time since her arrest, she had turned back to religion – she now prayed five times a day – and her dancer’s poise had degenerated into a slump. When the lawyers finished, she slid on a pair of reading glasses and read from a prepared statement. “This is not what I envisioned for my life – to be looked down upon, to be sentenced as a criminal,” Claiborne said. “To this day I still don’t know how I lost myself.” She continued: “I weep into my soul. I do not know how I lost my moral compass.” Her voice cracked.

The judge sentenced her to 40 months in prison and a $40,000 fine.

Absent from the courtroom were Mr Wu and Mr Zhang, who presumably continued their work back in China. But at the very back of the gallery, a few rows behind a cluster of Claiborne’s family members, sat a young man who resembled the photos available online for Jamal. By the time the judge adjourned the court and the observers filed out, he was gone.•

The rise of PTSD

Jesse Singal

In 2014, six weeks into her first year at university, Katie was sexually assaulted at a frat party. “It was my first exposure to sex at all,” Katie, who is now 23, told me. “I grew up in a really small conservative town, really Christian parents, and I had never even seen a man naked before.” Not long after that, she was assaulted again after going back to a fraternity brother’s room. “He did not stop when I wanted to stop, and basically said, ‘You should be grateful that I didn’t make you have sex with me’.”

Katie’s mental health began to disintegrate. “I started screaming in my sleep, not being able to sleep, waking up with mental images of very specific things happening and being truly horrified, spiralling out of control, drinking a lot,” she explained. Eventually she had a “full-blown meltdown” in front of her sister. She curled up into a ball and told her everything.

When Katie realised just how precarious her psychological state was, she began to see a therapist. Initially she felt too traumatised even to talk about what had happened. The first step, as she put it, was “talking about talking about it”. She visited a number of different therapists before she felt comfortable opening up about her experiences. “I don’t think any healing would have been possible without some sense of safety, which took distance,” she said. In the beginning, the task of confronting the assaults seemed hopeless. “It’s like a pile of rocks,” she explained. “You don’t really know where to start. You can pick one up off the top but then you still have this big pile.”

Katie began to realise that overcoming trauma wasn’t simply a matter of working through a set of steps or checking off items on a “to-do list”, as she put it. It is “incredibly interconnected…that’s the thing I’ve really learned from this: how interconnected we are within ourselves and to other people, and how lack of connection can really hinder your ability to live, or any desire to live.”

Not long ago Katie might have been encouraged to bottle up her experiences. But in the past 40 years, scientists have made strides in understanding trauma and its treatment. This change has been underpinned by a significant shift in social norms. Open discussion of trauma and its consequences has become less stigmatised with each passing year. In previous eras sufferers drew awkward silences, ridicule or even punishment. Now they elicit sympathy. Post-traumatic stress disorder, and its acronym PTSD, has entered the American vernacular. Searches for the term on Google have almost quadrupled in America since 2004, a period during which American life has become safer and less traumatic by almost every conceivable metric.

The willingness to talk about trauma, to pierce the veil of shame and embarrassment that has traditionally shrouded the subject, is a clear sign of progress. An insidious effect of PTSD is “avoidance”, the desire to stay away from stimuli that might trigger symptoms. Given what we now know about the condition, it stands to reason that you’re likely to deal with trauma better if you live in a place where open discussion of it carries little stigma.

Yet as PTSD has become better understood, psychologists have realised that discussing trauma is not inherently or automatically beneficial. Study after study shows that most people exposed to a traumatic event recover fully without therapy or medication. In some contexts talking repeatedly about a trauma, at least in certain ways, may even exacerbate the problem rather than offer solace. In the worst cases, victims come to identify so closely with their trauma that it becomes the organising feature of their lives. A growing body of evidence suggests that the way in which trauma victims talk about their experiences is as important as whether they talk about it at all.

For much of the 20th century, governments and medical institutions refused to acknowledge the sometimes crippling after-effects of trauma. During the first world war many British soldiers returned home exhibiting symptoms of what today would be labelled PTSD: some became temporarily confused, imagining themselves to be back on the battlefield; others were plagued by terrifying nightmares or hallucinations (Siegfried Sassoon, a British war poet, wrote of “dreams that drip with murder”). Men were diagnosed with one of two conditions based largely on the whim of their particular physician, notes Bessel van der Kolk in “The Body Keeps the Score”, a book on trauma. Those diagnosed with “shell shock” qualified for treatment (such as it was at the time) and a pension. The people identified as suffering from “neurasthenia”, essentially a nervous weakness, were cut off from both. As the amount of patients increased, armies on both sides of the conflict found their numbers depleted. The British armed forces published an order in 1917, stating that “in no circumstances whatever will the expression ‘shell shock’ be used verbally or be recorded in any regimental or other casualty report, or any hospital or other medical document.” Shell shock was transformed into “NYDN” – “Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous”. At a stroke, discussion of trauma and its symptoms was stifled. The Germans, according to van der Kolk, were even more punitive. They “treated shell shock as a character defect, which they managed with a variety of painful treatments, including electroshock”.

It remained culturally unacceptable for veterans to open up about their experiences in most settings throughout the second world war. “We all came out of the same army and joined the same generation of silence,” said Karl Shapiro, an American poet laureate and veteran. The men of the “Greatest Generation” were expected to be stoic – mid-century conceptions of masculinity left little room for expressions of emotional distress. “They took army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life,” said Audie Murphy, a highly decorated American army lieutenant in the second world war. “But they turned soldiers into civilians immediately and let ’em sink or swim.”

The situation changed only during the Vietnam war. American veteran groups advocated vocally for the authorities to acknowledge the ordeal that returning veterans faced (the campaign was helped by domestic opposition to the war). Many soldiers reported suffering from flashbacks, anxiety, insomnia and other psychological symptoms that made it hard to readjust to civilian life. Some ended up homeless, addicted to drugs or worse. Certain hawkish figures, President Richard Nixon foremost among them, fought to prevent full recognition of the toll of trauma, because they thought it would hamper the war effort and tarnish the reputation of the conflict’s cheerleaders. Eventually reason won out. In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder to the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, which sets the parameters for discussions of mental health in America and beyond. PTSD was defined as being the consequence of a “psychologically traumatic event that is generally outside the range of usual human experience”. This category includes proximity to death, near-death experiences, serious injury and sexual violence.

Scientists believe that PTSD occurs when the nervous responses that normally help us identify and respond to threats are over-stimulated. This can lead to nightmares, intrusive memories and sudden dissociative flashbacks to the events. PTSD often causes intense physical reactions, such as panic attacks triggered by stimuli that recall the original trauma. Sufferers recount the gruelling repetition of a traumatic incident in their mind, and the feeling of being held hostage by their own nervous system. In an interview last year Jason Kander, a politician from Missouri, spoke of “becoming hypervigilant” as he struggled with PTSD for more than a decade after serving in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer in the US army. At restaurants he was “always thinking about how many exits there were [and] having four different plans as to how you were going to get out of a situation.” He went “about 12 years without a good night’s sleep”, he said.

David Morris, a war correspondent and former marine, was once told by a psychoanalyst that “trauma destroys the fabric of time”, making it hard for an individual to escape the drag of the originating event. As he wrote in “The Evil Hours”: “After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.”

More open discussion of PTSD over the last four decades has led to the development of a number of treatments that have been shown to be effective. Katie found two of these particularly helpful. One is known as eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, whereby patients are asked to focus on the source of their trauma while following instructions from a therapist to move their eyes in particular directions. For Katie this “worked wonders”, she says, though “it’s so hard to explain what’s happening.” (Scientists don’t properly understand why it works.)

Katie also found cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) useful. This helps patients address patterns of distorted and negative thinking that tend to exacerbate their suffering. In Katie’s case, these centred on her own sense of culpability for what happened: “How in the world could I have been so stupid? How did I not know that people would hurt me? There must be something wrong with me...I must attract these types of people.” She has also worked to chip away at her belief that the whole world is chaotic and evil, a perception that became pronounced after her assaults. She realised that she had been talking at times like the Joker from the Batman films: “‘The world is chaos, people are bad’ – all these definitive statements of being traumatised that are kind of ridiculous.” The therapy helped her feel that life was more nuanced.

Not all common treatments for trauma are so useful. Critical incident stress debriefings (CISDS) are more controversial. These were developed in the 1980s by a former firefighter and paramedic with a PhD in human development, in response to a counterproductive stoicism he observed among fellow emergency-service personnel. In many parts of America the authorities now offer CISDS via private companies within 72 hours of a major incident such as a fire or car crash. Those involved are brought together in a group and encouraged to discuss their feelings in a structured manner, led by facilitators, so that they don’t keep them to themselves.

Many participants rate their experience of such groups positively, but a meta-analysis published in 2002 summing up all the relevant available research literature suggests that people who participate in CISDS suffer from worse PTSD symptoms over time than those who receive alternate treatments or no treatment at all. (Proponents of CISD disagree with the methodology used to reach these conclusions.) Some trauma researchers believe that, by exposing us to other people’s symptoms, these sessions may interfere with our natural recovery from a traumatic experience. One emergency responder I spoke to, who attended a CISD after working at the scene of a horrific bus crash in Utah, told me that he found other people’s accounts so alien he was convinced the discussion had hindered his recovery.

Talking about trauma is not an unalloyed good, in and of itself. There is mounting evidence to suggest that by priming people to view themselves as trauma sufferers, we may actually be increasing their chances of developing PTSD.

In 2011, 33 students at the University of New South Wales in Australia filed into a psychology lab one at a time to watch a disturbing ten-minute video on a MacBook. In the film, a shaky camera approached an overturned grey car on the side of a highway. Crash victims – it was not always clear who was alive and who wasn’t – were splayed out everywhere; some had apparently been violently ejected from their vehicles. Towards the end of the film, the camera fixed on the wide-eyed stare of a dead victim.

The students were participating in a study led by Adam Brown, principal investigator at the Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab at the New School for Social Research in New York, who was then at New York University. Earlier in the term each student had been given a battery of psychological tests. Prior to watching the film, some students were told that the tests revealed them to be extremely adept copers, able to recover quickly from traumatic experiences. Others were informed that they were below-average copers, lacking “control or confidence when dealing with adverse and stressful life events”.

After the film, each student was asked to “close their eyes and relax” for three minutes. When they opened their eyes, the researcher asked them to estimate the number of times the film’s sounds and images intruded on their consciousness during the interlude, and the level of distress that the film made them feel. The adept copers experienced, on average, about four and a half sensory intrusions during the three-minute interlude and rated their distress level at 5.65 on a 10-point scale. The poor copers, by contrast, experienced about 18 intrusions and rated their distress level at almost 8 – a significant difference.

In fact, the assessments of each person’s ability to cope had been fabricated. Simply telling people that they were good or bad at handling stressful events changed their response. Some students were plagued with graphic images of the accident because they expected to experience them.

The participants were informed of the ruse before they left. Even more remarkably, knowing this didn’t curtail the effects of the assessments. Twenty-four hours after the experiment, the poor copers still reported more intrusions and higher distress levels than the good copers, and recalled grisly details from the film more accurately. In a follow-up study last year, conducted on different groups, Brown and his colleagues tracked participants for a full week after they had seen the film. The results were similar.

Brown is fascinated by a concept known as self-efficacy – the extent to which an individual feels that they have control over the world, that they can affect a situation and successfully navigate their experiences. Differences in this capacity may be one reason, Brown reckons, why responses to trauma vary dramatically from person to person. Though it’s important not to extrapolate too much from these two studies, both of which took place in labs, Brown thinks that feeling helpless may be associated with prolonged suffering after some traumatic events. “‘I feel crazy, I’m never going to feel the same way I did before, there’s something permanently damaged, these symptoms will last for ever’ – I think those types of appraisals could inadvertently worsen the symptoms and elevate the levels of distress, which could affect long-term [PTSD] trajectories,” he told me. Acknowledging that distressing symptoms are normal, and that you will eventually recover from them, may be the key to building resilience.

Self-efficacy could be one of the missing links that explains a fundamental mystery about PTSD: what differentiates those who develop the condition after being exposed to trauma and those who do not. A study from 1995 found that more than 60% of American adults had been exposed to an event that the American Psychiatric Association would consider to be a “traumatic stressor”, such as assault, rape or serious accident, yet just 8% of the men and 20% of the women developed PTSD in the long term. Other studies have had similar results.

Additionally, a significant share of people will develop at least one of the symptoms of PTSD shortly after a traumatic incident, but most of those signs abate of their own accord over time. People living in the vicinity of the September 11th 2001 terror attacks provide a striking example. One researcher found that 7.5% of people in a random sample living within seven miles of the twin towers experienced symptoms of PTSD in the eight weeks after the attacks. But a follow-up survey conducted in February 2002 found the rate had declined to around 2%. Roughly 80% of the apparent cases of PTSD dissipated with time – and, given the short period after which the researchers followed up, most probably did so with little or no treatment.

There is a solid body of evidence to suggest that “traumatic stressors produce PTSD in only a minority of victims,” writes Richard McNally of Harvard University in “Remembering Trauma”, which analyses the scientific research in this area. What may make the difference, at least partially, is the meaning of an experience. McNally notes that a deep-seated sense of political righteousness has protected some torture victims. Left-wing activists arrested and tortured by the Turkish authorities experienced fewer negative psychological effects than people wrongly incarcerated or arrested for ordinary crimes. This led researchers to conclude that a positive commitment to a political cause created a buffer that may have protected them from the worst psychological after-effects of torture.

One major finding of recent research into PTSD is that, as McNally puts it, “there is no straightforward relationship between the severity of the trauma and the severity of the PTSD.” A complicated web of cognitive factors play a role in determining whether someone will develop PTSD. Some elements are beyond an individual’s control. Prior mental-health problems, low IQ and greater levels of neuroticism (a personality trait that psychologists define as one’s propensity to experience negative emotions) are all correlated with suffering from more severe PTSD, especially in the wake of less-severe traumas such as minor road accidents or verbal aggression.

There is not much that people can do to change their IQ or core personality traits. Some variables correlated with PTSD outcomes may be more malleable, which is why Brown and other researchers are so interested in self-efficacy. They believe that there may be ways to help people understand that PTSD is not an inevitable response to adverse experiences, and that they have some control over how they respond – that is, improve their self-efficacy and therefore their resilience.

Some promising early studies have already been conducted. One team tested an intervention called “7ROSES” on refugees in Amsterdam who were suffering mental-health problems relating to traumatic experiences. Rather than attend directly to their ordeal, the treatment focused on helping individuals cope and improving their belief in their ability to find a path through their problems. The treatment focused on developing skills for improving self-efficacy in a number of group sessions by, among other things, learning to identify “hopeful messages” and personal strengths. The aim, in one particular case, was “to replace a negative coping strategy (withdrawing; staying alone in his room) with a positive one (seeking social support; talking to a friend)”. Though the study was early and observational, it yielded positive if modest results: a quarter of participants saw improvements in their self-efficacy.

In another study, published in 2016, a group of health workers and social workers in America who were regularly exposed to troubling situations were given online exercises to improve their self-efficacy. They were asked to reflect on the obstacles that sapped them of psychological resilience and to develop strategies for overcoming them. These included considering their own experiences of surmounting obstacles and “identifying negative thoughts indicating self-doubts”. As in the case of the 7ROSES intervention, early results were positive – the programme appeared to improve the participants’ self-efficacy, which in turn reduced the stress induced by hearing about other people’s traumas, known as secondary traumatic stress, which care workers of all kinds are particularly vulnerable to.

Brown is gearing up to conduct another study this summer with staff in emergency departments at hospitals. Over the course of four weeks, participants will be asked to recall instances in which they overcame adversity, identify factors that allowed them to do so, imagine future stress-points that they may encounter and “think through the specifics of how they will solve [them]”, as Brown puts it. The goal is that a person who experiences a potentially traumatising event should not walk away from it feeling so helpless that they might then unravel if symptoms of PTSD arise. Believing that they have it within themselves to overcome an incident could, in itself, raise the chance of them doing so.

Societies that discourage or punish discussion of trauma exacerbate the suffering of those who have been traumatised, robbing them of access to treatment or support. Luckily it has never been easier to talk openly about traumatic experiences in many countries today. But some experts are now questioning whether certain cultural shifts have caused society to cast too wide a net in what they label as traumatic.

In an influential paper in 2016 Nick Haslam, an Australian psychologist, introduced the idea of “concept creep”. He argued that certain concepts, such as “bullying”, “addiction” and “trauma”, have become highly charged and expanded to encompass an ever wider – and at times ever milder – set of experiences.

As Haslam acknowledges, in many cases this expansion is a necessary and positive measure of progress. Rape within marriage began to be criminalised in America only in the 1970s, for example, and in many countries it is still permitted or ignored. In some spheres, however, the definition of trauma – and therefore the potential for someone to view themselves as “traumatised” – has become so broad that Haslam worries harm might ensue. “Expectancy is so powerful,” he told me. In the case of trauma, “expectations about how you’ll react, or what sort of things are overwhelming, or your views about time to recover, or whether you need third-person [help] — all those things matter. How could they not?”

A similar argument found popularity in “The Coddling of the American Mind”, a bestselling book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published in 2018. The authors wrote that “encouraging more people to use the language of therapy and mental illness [is] likely to have some negative effect”. They argued that the labels themselves become self-fulfilling prophecies. In an email to me, Lukianoff drew on his own life as an example. “I am someone who struggled with depression, but if I incorporated ‘I’m a depressive’ into my self-definition, I would always be tilting in that direction, with a sense of helplessness over it because, after all, it’s what defines me,” he wrote. As Haidt and Lukianoff point out, the solution here isn’t to revert to the old-fashioned reflex of telling people in anguish to “toughen up” (as the disparaging term “snowflake” suggests). Instead, they argue, institutions should seek to find a balance so that they are compassionate towards claims of trauma, while being alive to the potential harm that may come from magnifying an incident in one’s mind.

One obstacle to finding this balance is the currency which the status of having PTSD has now acquired, whether formally diagnosed or not. It is an important milestone in society’s progress that trauma victims can speak up and are no longer seen as malingerers, weaklings or frauds. Some people now display their mental-health status prominently as a badge of identity and a defence against verbal aggression, particularly on social media. I was particularly struck by one exchange I saw on Reddit. A child, who believed they had PTSD because of their startled response when their father called their name loudly – in itself, no evidence of PTSD – was instantly met with a chorus of validation from many on the forum.

In the cacophony of life today, identifying as a sufferer of trauma can bring with it a certain authenticity and authority, even an opportunity to be heard out respectfully. It may also help you find support, especially online, from a ready-made community of fellow sufferers. But, Haslam warns, “once it becomes part of your identity, it’s very hard to let go of. Your sense of self is wrapped up in it and your community is wrapped up in it.” And evidence emerging from trauma research suggests that strong identification with one’s trauma may prevent recovery.

In 2006 Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin, both psychologists, unveiled a measure they called the Centrality of Event Scale (CES). This was derived from a questionnaire that asked respondents to rate, on a scale from one to five, their agreement with a series of statements such as “this event has become a reference point for the way I understand new experiences,” “this event is making my life different from the life of most other people,” and “I often see connections and similarities between this event and my current relationships with other people.” After more than a decade’s research, they established that the more you view your trauma as a central event in your life, the more likely you are to suffer from prolonged PTSD symptoms and other mental-health problems.

McNally concurs. “One potential clinical implication of this is that if you see your childhood sexual abuse [or other traumatic event] as somehow central to your identity of being a victim, of a survivor of a trauma,” he told me, “it tends to [organise] how you look at life, how you see yourself, how you interpret events in the future.”

If trauma becomes a fundamental part of your identity it grows harder to treat, reckons McNally. He has personally observed this effect among a group of veterans. In the mid-1990s he performed a study on autobiographical memory with servicemen who had fought in Vietnam. He noticed that the ones whose memory was most impaired “were wearing regalia. You immediately spotted them as a Vietnam vet, they had combat stuff on, POW/MIA caps, one guy came in with a loaded gun.” For these folk, “the Vietnam war was a self-defining thing. This is 20 to 30 years after they left the service, they’re still wearing the Vietnam stuff. They’re frozen in the past.”

Structural incentives may compound the problem, McNally says. When campaigning increased to support the mental-health needs of military personnel after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he noticed that some veterans and their advocates believed it would help their cause to claim that PTSD was, in his paraphrase, a “chronic relapsing condition from which you can never recover”. Yet, given that most people exposed to trauma don’t develop the condition, and those that do often recover if they seek out treatment, this description of PTSD is inaccurate.

Many people who argue that PTSD is a chronic condition believe that they are doing the right thing for trauma sufferers. Yet McNally is concerned that this kind of framing can induce unnecessary suffering: “I wince when I see it – you’re far less likely to take steps in your life that will help you master your fears, help you overcome the symptoms and get back on track again.”

Such concerns are especially pertinent in an age when many people will seek help from online support groups long before – or entirely in place of – seeing a trained therapist. Some may mistake transient symptoms, such as the flashbacks that frequently occur in the immediate aftermath of distressing events, as evidence that they have PTSD. Ruminating over these symptoms with other people who have also diagnosed themselves may actually prolong their suffering.

I was apprehensive about discussing these concerns with Katie, the young woman who had been assaulted in college. Her trauma was clear and acute, and at her lowest points she had considered suicide. But when I broached the subject with her, I found that she had already considered the matter deeply. “I’ve been in two sexual-assault support groups, and it’s so hard because you go in there and your identity to these other people is that you are a sexual-assault survivor,” she said. “But that’s the one thing you’re trying to get away from. In the group, you’re doing work to not become this one thing, and yet that’s all you are in the group. It’s kind of this weird counterintuitive thing.”

She has experienced a range of personalities in these groups. “There are ‘I’m going to ignore this and pretend it never happened because I need to make this new person’ types at one end of the spectrum. And at the other are ‘this is all I am’ types.” Katie saw the healthiest approach for her as residing somewhere in the middle. “I’ve been trying to focus on creating a place where I can go where I’m not inhibited by that identity of being a survivor, or having to live up to that expectation,” she said, but where she is still able to discuss her trauma openly and understand how it has affected her.

Lisa, a 41-year-old New Yorker who was sexually abused by her father, expressed similar sentiments. “There are definitely times when it’s easier to lean into” the role of the victim, she told me, even though this led her to feel strangled by her past. She said that it made her feel “heroic” and “politically interesting”. She repeatedly returned to the same handful of websites that hosted discussions between abuse survivors, even though she found the stories there “emotionally triggering”. “I’d repeat the same search just to feel sorry for myself...In some weird way, reinforcing that sense that no one cared was cathartic.” She found “comfort” in “black-and-white thinking: I’m the unprivileged, others are the privileged,” she said. She also felt that this allowed her to blame the less appealing parts of her own character on the trauma. Lisa has sought help in the past, but hasn’t always found it useful when her therapists focused on her experiences. “Sometimes they’re good at delving into the past and figuring out your story,” she said. “But not everybody’s good at, ‘Okay, so this is where you are now? How do you put one foot ahead of the other?’”

People who have access to validated treatments for PTSD tend to have good outcomes. But America’s mental-health system is inadequate and struggles to provide consistent care. One study from 2017 found that over half of Americans who suffer from a mental-health condition had received no care for it in the past year. In a follow-up email to me, Lisa reflected that one reason her therapy felt ineffective was because she had been able “to see a therapist once a week at most, while I probably needed way more support than that”. That, perhaps, would have made it easier to move beyond endlessly revisiting what happened to her and to turn more assertively toward the future. “Of course, I could barely – and not always – afford once a week, let alone more.” The provision for PTSD sufferers in other countries is even more limited than in America.

Until mental-health services are more accessible to greater numbers of people, many individuals who are in distress will spend time seeking out informal advice online and try to manage their own conditions. And, if increasing numbers of people think they are being traumatised, in ways that lie far beyond the parameters recognised by medical professionals, and if social forces incentivise them to think that way, there are strong reasons for believing that many may be unwittingly doing themselves harm.

In mid-October 2019, five years after her assaults, Katie made a significant advance in her recovery when she told her parents what had happened to her. She hadn’t said anything before because she worried that their reaction would be harmful rather than helpful. Instead, “they ended up being truly, truly wonderful. Just the act of being heard kind of added this layer of – maybe my entire life doesn’t have to be a tragedy,’” she explained. “Maybe this is just one of the stories in a full book. Just a moment I’m visiting. But it’s really hard to feel that in the moment, because it truly destroys who you are.”

Despite this improvement, Katie does not yet feel safe or comfortable. She still struggles with a cycle in which she pushes people away, then feels isolated as a result. Part of that stems from the enormous gap in experience between her friends and her. As women in their early 20s, she explained, “my friends’ issues are like, what’s their Halloween costume. So I feel a little more burdened.” Having a therapist means that there is someone “who is willing to sit in the shit with me”, she told me. “We’ve recently been talking about building a boat so you don’t actually have to sit in the sea of shit – so you’re kind of floating along in a little life-raft.”

What does that life-raft look like? In our conversation, I got the sense that Katie had only just started designing it. She is concentrating on the parts of the things that bring her joy. “Today was hard, but I still really love animals. I love hiking. Focus on quality-of-life things that make life worthwhile and make living through horrible things more bearable.”•

Inside the box

Fiammetta Rocco

For centuries the giant ships that powered the Venetian republic were built in the Arsenale. Now this brick hall over 1,000 feet long, with its high ceilings and huge windows, is the launching point for a very different kind of international venture. Every two years it hosts the Venice Biennale, the world’s most significant gathering of contemporary art and artists.

In 2019 the shipyard featured everything from human figures dipped in black latex, to tartan-walled installations, a crocheted coral reef and a giant, rusting migrant boat by the dock. Amid the morass of form and colour, one installation stood out: nine television monitors, mounted in rows of three to mimic the squares of an Instagram profile. A succession of black-and-white images flashed up in each box for a second, creating a disjointed cinematic narrative.

Some pictures were simple: a girl with a black telephone to her ear; a man with a mouth organ; a newly married couple, smiling; a black woman cradling a white child. Others were unsettling. In one, a woman cradled a Kalashnikov; in another a finger twirled a revolver; yet another showed a psychiatrist’s questionnaire asking, “Have you had or are having difficulties with any of the following? Anger? Anxiety? Assault?”

This torrent of pictures was the first exhibition of art created on Instagram to appear at the Venice Biennale. Visitors stood glued to the screens, shadows flickering across their faces. At the edge of the crowd the artist, Frida Oru-pabo, stood quietly. A Norwegian-Nigerian social worker from Oslo, the 32-year-old could have been a young tourist in her linen skirt and white Keds, with her hair tied back in a scrunchy. She looked around tentatively, holding one hand to her mouth, chewing a cuticle. With the other she nervously rocked a pushchair back and forth, a movement meant to calm the toddler seated in it. Orupabo later told me she was also trying to calm herself. She had lost her phone. And it’s on her phone that she makes her art.

Facebook was launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006 and Pinterest in January 2010. But of all social-media platforms, it was Instagram – which was born in October 2010 – that really caught the imagination of the art world. A million people had signed up to the photo-sharing app within two months of its launch. Most people used it to post selfies, pictures of their cat or unexpected juxtapositions of bright colours. Artists and art lovers took to it too: at a time when visitor numbers to galleries were falling, Instagram opened up the world of art to a wider audience.

Big auction houses soon recognised the potential of Instagram as a marketing tool. In 2016 a curator at Christie’s in New York boarded a flight to Hong Kong. Just before taking off he posted an image of a yellow, red and black painting of a boxer by Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American artist who died in the 1980s. By the time the curator landed 16 hours later, three collectors had texted him about acquiring the work. Two days after that, one of them bought the painting, reportedly for $24m. It was the first important artwork to sell through Instagram, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Large commercial galleries were slower to understand the possibilities. Interns were more likely to spot rising talent on Instagram than gallery-owners. But artists started using it to market their own items. The platform allowed artists and buyers to meet without always having to go through a middle man. The kind of buzz that artists used to rely on to get their work known – being talked about by a small elite – could now be achieved without the validation or financial backing of a patron. To many the art world seems to define elitism. The democracy of Instagram, by contrast, was appealing: anyone could look and anyone could be seen.

The new medium was important for another reason too. Instagram wasn’t just a shop window but a source of inspiration. Amalia Ulman, a 30-year-old Argentine artist, staged a four-month performance piece on her Instagram feed in 2014, primping and posing in various evolving personas, first as a “cute girl” and finally a “life goddess”. In 2015 Richard Prince, an American artist already famous for re-photographing iconic images, unveiled a series of reworked studio shots presented alongside what looked like Instagram comments. “Nice. Let’s hook up next week. Lunch, Smiles R”, read the caption beneath a voluptuous young woman in a white bathing suit that revealed her nipples.

Ulman, Prince and many others leaned towards irony. Their creativity on Instagram was inspired by satirising devotees of the platform. Orupabo, by contrast, used the new platform to find her own voice.

In mid-2013 Orupabo received a Facebook message from someone in Nigeria: “Are you Julian Orupabo’s daughter?” The message turned out to be from a cousin she hadn’t known existed, and he gave her a phone number. After she dialled it, she heard her father’s voice for the first time in 25 years.

“It was like we had spoken just the day before,” she says. Her Nigerian father and Norwegian mother, both evangelical Christians, had met as students and planned to become missionaries, but instead ended up on Norway’s craggy south-east coast. Her father, an educated man, got jobs on factory floors. When there was no work he stayed home – and then, when Orupabo was three and her sister was five, he left.

Orupabo’s mother became a primary-school teacher. After her daughters came home from school each day she made them go through everything they’d learned. “Even if the teacher said we’d done it perfectly, if she thought we hadn’t, we had to do it all over again,” said Orupabo. The experience was similar to many first-generation immigrants the world over. Though the girls were Norwegian citizens, children of a Norwegian parent, and Norwegian was their first language, “I was not allowed to be really Norwegian,” says Orupabo, her voice rising.

The sisters were the only mixed-race children in town and faced constant questions: “Is that your mum?”, “Are you adopted?”, “Why is she white?”, “Why are you black?”, “You must be from somewhere else.” Orupabo remembers walking through central Oslo with her sister when she first moved there at 19. A car pulled up and the driver wound down the window. Her sister leaned in to hear what he was saying, then almost immediately gave him the finger: “I thought he wanted directions.” It turned out he presumed they were prostitutes, “just because we were black.”

Many Norwegians use the term hårsår (touchy) to brush off anyone who brings up the subject of race, says Orupabo. But the word has a subtext: “Really, it means ‘if you adjust, you can make it. You’re just sensitive’.” She learned early to be quiet about her own pain: “The huge silence almost makes you choke it’s so bad. We speak about discrimination. We don’t speak about racism.”

It was only when she started doing research for a master’s thesis on racism and gender that Orupabo began to discover how other societies dealt with the subject. She read Toni Morrison’s novels and the anthropological works of Pierre Bourdieu. Online she found stories that had never made it into her local library. She read about the surgical experiments that a 19th-century gynaecologist had conducted without anaesthetic on female slaves; about “Kongolandsbyen”, a human zoo where 80 Africans were “displayed” for five months as part of the World Fair in Oslo in 1914.

One of Orupabo’s earliest posts on Instagram showed her father at just a few months old, chubby-cheeked and laughing. Days later she put up a picture of her parents: though both are looking at the camera, the electricity between them is palpable. As she explored the history of race and racism, the pastel shades of the early posts gave way to a deluge of black-and-white photography. She put up images of the many ways in which white people have fixed their gaze on black-skinned bodies over the centuries: semi-naked Africans showing tribal scarring and filed teeth; white hands carrying out post-mortems on black bodies; black nannies holding their white charges and staring at the camera.

The Instagram feed began as an archive. Over time Oru-pabo began to put her fingerprints on the portraits. She sifted, sorted, annotated and curated them. She cropped some and added filters to others or drained them of all colour. Many are black reactions to white transgression, short passages of writing that range from angry to funny.

For Orupabo the river of images tells the story: her whole profile adds up to more than the sum of its parts. She often put up four or five shots at once, sometimes followed by a blank screen, as if the images were to be read like a line of music. In one series, Orupabo followed a picture of her own lips with a shot of curving lava forms, the round, startled eyes of an owl, the undulating arpeggios of a Chopin score, and, last, an elaborate Igbo mask with curved horns.

Over time another strand has emerged in Orupabo’s work, images that exude joy and beauty rather than segregation and random cruelty. A naked black woman smiles gently as she raises her arms to undress a man; bejewelled black fingers hold a photograph of a much-loved teenager; a delicate pointed foot shows off a narrow, gold toe-ring.

Instagram is a gaudy, technicolour world. Some critics reckon that, consciously or unconsciously, the popularity of colourful works online is influencing the output of many rising artists. One article on Artnet, a site about art, offers “tips” to artists who want to promote their work on Instagram, including posting photos of people looking at their work, and wearing outfits that match its mood or palette. Amid all this jazz, Orupabo’s raging monochrome stands out. In person Orupabo is quiet, gentle, unflappable. On Instagram she roars. The strange thing about social media is that you never quite know who is listening.

Arthur Jafa is a nightbird. When everyone else is falling asleep, the California-based artist and cinematographer taps on his phone into the wee hours, watching YouTube clips and scrolling through Instagram. Jafa’s work chronicling the African-American experience has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOCA Los Angeles, but he is always on the lookout for what he calls “interesting stuff”. In early 2014 his girlfriend told him about a new Instagram account she’d come across. The name @nemiepeba meant nothing to Jafa, but he realised that another artist friend of his had also pointed out the same feed. Jafa had no idea if @nemiepeba was a man or woman. But he was pretty certain he or she was black. He began following.

In July 2014 Jafa posted some thoughts about Instagram. “Think of it as a floor…Folks can stand on it, they can cross it, some may sit or even lie on it. Folks can fight on it, shit on it, fuck on it.” Dancing on this floor, wrote Jafa, is rare: “We name a thing ‘dance’ when the normal, the pedestrian becomes expressive or supernormal.” @nemiepeba, he said, is a “dancer”.

And @nemiepeba was, of course, Orupabo: it was her father’s childhood nickname for her. Jafa contacted Orupabo and they arranged to speak. Their first conversation lasted six hours. “We talked about everything,” says Orupabo. “Life, love, art. Actually, mostly he talked. I listened.” Jafa had recently been invited to make a film about David Bowie and Iman, a Somali model and Bowie’s wife. By the end of the call he’d asked Orupabo to be his “eye”.

Orupabo was not one to be wowed by celebrity and she knew nothing of the world Jafa inhabited, but he soon began opening doors for her. The Bowie project never took off, but not long after their first conversation Jafa asked Orupabo to take part in an exhibition with him at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

This was a big step for Orupabo. We define art as striking work created by the human imagination that appeals primarily to the visual sense. Yet if someone is to be persuaded to part with their money, such beauty must not merely exist in the eye of the beholder but in their hand in physical form. You can’t put an Instagram post on a wall and sell it. And so, to make work that would hang in a gallery, Orupabo turned back to an art form she had loved since childhood: collage.

When Orupabo moved from screen to paper, she found images taken by anthropologists who had thoughtlessly accumulated snaps of black women. She sliced and separated their limbs and then recomposed them. Orupabo’s Serpentine show promoted these women from their subservient position as slaves, helpers and models to the centre of attention. “Her subject is the fragmented black body, the violated body,” says Amira Gad, who curated the show. “She puts it back together.” As a viewer, you feel uncomfortable just looking at the works.

As soon as the show opened, Orupabo attracted a high-profile buyer in the person of David Adjaye, a Ghanaian-British architect. Jafa told his art dealer: “You don’t want to be the man who failed to sign up Aretha Franklin.” He signed her up. Since then the Guggenheim has bought her art, as well as national museums in Sweden, Norway and Finland. The price of her work nearly trebled within a year. Orupabo has had five shows in Europe in the past year.

With an exhibition in a gallery, an agent and fast-rising sale prices, Orupabo appears to have made it in the traditional art world. Now, in a small way, she is starting to change it. In early 2019 Orupabo received an email from the curator of the Venice Biennale, an event she had only vaguely heard of. She consulted her gallerist, “Is this something I need to pay attention to?” He told her that she’d better get to work if she was to exhibit at the international fiesta. “I wrote back and I said: ‘I am honoured. I want to be part of it.’”

Despite the many hours Orupabo spends curating her Instagram feed, she is conscious of her lack of formal training and doesn’t refer to herself as an artist. Some critics concur, dismissing her search for identity as hackneyed, or disdaining collage as a form. One German critic recently called her work “banal”. A right-wing reviewer of an exhibition in Oslo gave her art a casual brush-off: “She needs to discipline her emotions for her works to come across as independent pieces of art.” But few dissenters speak up openly, perhaps because her patrons are so powerful.

Orupabo has not given up her day job, as a social worker who specialises in helping prostitutes. Every Tuesday she does “night duty”, going out onto the streets of Oslo to check on these women. When I join her, her rucksack is stuffed with condoms, lubricant and leaflets with advice on health clinics and immigration law. She is protective of the sex workers she knows, and won’t point any out to me on the street. Without her cues, try as I might, I can’t see anyone I could identify as one. It’s only later that I realise the connection between Orupabo’s art and these seemingly anony-mous women on the street. In the parallel universe she has created online she also gives voice and solace to the unspoken, the unheard.

When she’s not doing night duty, Orupabo works by day at the city’s only health clinic for sex workers. At 4pm she heads home to relieve her partner, an artisanal baker whom she has known since she was 16. Once their baby is asleep, she turns to the task that increasingly consumes her attention: curating an Instagram feed that started as a personal endeavour and an escape, but which has given her a global platform.•

Fiammetta RoccoFiammetta Rocco

Upfront

- Reading “Paradise Lost” with Armando Iannucci

- The eight-year-old rapper making a mark in Uganda

- When #MeToo meets Baroque painting

- Some of our critics call us the hot-tub monks

- Fighting the scourge of “Scum Welsh”

Reading “Paradise Lost” with Armando Iannucci

Ethan Croft

The unifying factor in Armando Iannucci’s work is, in his own blunt phrase, “a fascination with evil bastards”. He found his calling for political satire in surprising circumstances: reading “Paradise Lost”, John Milton’s epic religious poem, as a student. As I take out my copy and place it on the low table between us, Iannucci leans over and says with a conspiratorial chuckle, “Satan has all the good lines.” When God is introduced, he says, “it suddenly goes almost consciously dull.” For Iannucci, Milton’s Satan is the original evil bastard of literature.

Though he abandoned his PhD on Milton long ago, Iannucci, now 56, continues to delight in the stories of scoundrels. Over the past 25 years he has become renowned as a writer and director on both sides of the Atlantic, creating a catalogue of comedic gems. These include “The Thick of It”, an outstanding satire of spin-era politics, “The Death of Stalin”, a send-up of a defining moment in Soviet history (it was banned in Russia), and “Veep”, a caustic examination of the black heart of American politics. In his latest film, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel “David Copperfield”, Iannucci’s touch is obvious in characters such as Uriah Heep, the arch-manipulator.

Milton’s “Paradise Lost” tells the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. For centuries readers have been troubled by its sympathetic – many would say enthusiastic – portrayal of Satan. Though Milton was a devout Christian, according to William Blake “he was a true poet of the Devil’s party”. “Paradise Lost” clocks in at over 10,000 lines of ornate 17th-century verse. Like many people, Iannucci assumed as a boy that the religious themes and complex language made the poem impenetrable: “Milton was up there with Shelley, Chaucer and all these other poets I hadn’t read.” He remembers the moment when he realised how dramatic the text really was, “with language so concrete and a story so cinematic”. Now, as the award-winning, smartly dressed writer in a blue blazer starts to rifle through my copy of “Paradise Lost”, I wonder whether any trace of the scruffy literature student remains.

Born in Glasgow in 1963 to Italian and Scottish parents, Iannucci went to a Jesuit school and at one point wanted to become a Catholic priest. He settled instead on a degree in English literature at Glasgow University, followed by a PhD on religious poetry at Oxford, focusing on “Paradise Lost”.

A long-dormant flame flickers as Iannucci starts to study my copy of the book. He pauses to frown at a page severely defaced by my marginalia: “What does this say, ‘nectar’?” Iannucci would have made a good academic: I feel thrown back into a university tutorial and apologise for my aimless notations. “No, no,” he says, “I find them useful, they are drawing me to old passages.”

That Iannucci never completed his PhD is one of his few failures. His vice as a doctoral student was not sex, drugs or rock ’n’ roll, but comedy. But while Iannucci spent his time writing and performing with the comic luminaries of Oxford University and the Edinburgh Fringe, the clock ticked away. His PhD “spiralled out of control. It was a mess.” Three years in, with little academic writing to show for it, Iannucci accepted that comedy had become his main occupation. “I knew it was time to give up when I noticed the opening lines of ‘Paradise Lost’ have the same rhythm as the theme tune to ‘The Flintstones’.” He gives a cheerful rendition: “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree.”

Perhaps he felt a PhD sided too much with the angels? “Well, we’re all a bit satanic,” he says with a twinkle and, still perusing my copy, points out that many of my own notations focus on Satan’s speeches. “Satan is so visceral. He has oratory and rhetoric and manipulation!” It is unsurprising, then, that in his political satire, Iannucci is more interested in people who wheedle and trick their way to influence than in omnipotent gods – we never see the all-powerful prime ministers or presidents.

He starts to read from his favourite passage – Satan’s first speech – and I am briefly treated to the inspiring lectures that might have been if Iannucci had stayed in academia. In the scene, Satan has just led the fallen angels in an unsuccessful rebellion, and is now promising that, under his guidance, they will still achieve greatness. Iannucci starts the mini-recital with a cough, but with the first line his conversational voice is replaced by a louder, declamatory tone:

Profoundest hell,

Receive thy new possessor – one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time,

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven

Though “Paradise Lost” is a dramatisation of a Bible story, for Iannucci these lines show that it is also a highly political work (politics and religion were inextricably linked in 17th-century England). Milton was a radical in the English civil war, defended the execution of King Charles I and served under the republican government of Oliver Cromwell until they fell out (Iannucci characterises his role as “Cromwell’s spin doctor”).

The language of “Paradise Lost” reflects Milton’s intimate knowledge of the power-brokers of his day, says Iannucci: “Satan takes a word and makes it the opposite, so he can say ‘I can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell’, and ‘evil be thou my good’, but actually that doesn’t make any sense.” Iannucci raises his glass of sparkling water and begins a mock pontification: “Glass be my table and table be my glass! It sounds good, but what the fuck are you talking about?” I giggle and he seems pleased that he has managed to find some humour in scholarly poetry.

Though he has found success behind the camera, I can see how he also won over audiences as a performer at the Edinburgh Fringe. His smile fades as he considers the implications of Satan’s linguistic trickery. “He takes the words used against him and turns them on his opponents. It’s like when Trump says that the one who has accused me of treason is the treasonous one.” Does he mean to say the president is Satan? “That’s right.” He laughs, then sighs.

Iannucci’s time at Oxford was not wasted. With a repertoire of comic material and plenty of performing experience, he successfully applied for a role on BBC radio in 1988. Though his mother questioned whether swapping a doctorate for a career in comedy was a wise exchange, it helped “that it was the bbc. That gave it an air of respectability.” But respectability was never Iannucci’s watchword. Compared with the cosy, family-friendly shows that dominated comedy programming at the time, Iannucci’s humour was uncensored and unrelenting. His first hit was “The Day Today”, which mocked current-affairs programming. Then came “The Thick of It”, Iannucci’s breakthrough success. The show’s depiction of the behind-closed-doors world of politics was so cutting – and, to Westminster insiders, so accurate – that it entered the lexicon of real-world politics. In 2012 “omnishambles”, a neologism coined in the show, was used in Parliament to describe the British government’s annual budget and the Oxford English Dictionary chose it as the word of the year. Its derivative “Romneyshambles” was used in the American presidential election of that year too.

In Britain, Iannucci introduced an edginess lacking in earlier shows teasing the political elite, such as “Yes Minister”. Iannucci’s biting work found success in America too, first with his confrontational film, “In The Loop”, a spoof about the Iraq war, and later in his popular series “Veep”, which was broadcast on HBO.

After his comedy career took off, with a string of radio, TV and cinema successes, Iannucci found he had little time for the books he loved. Mournful of those lost decades, he recently began to make time for literature again: “I’ve had to force myself back into reading. You realise if you don’t it can slip by. You’ve actually got to find time.”

During one lazy weekend spent reading he found inspiration for his recent film, “The Personal History of David Copperfield”, when he sat down to enjoy the Dickens classic. He set about drawing out the parts of the book most ripe for comedy, with a determination and purpose that he never achieved in his earlier literary project, the PhD.

His newest venture is a comedy about space tourism, “Avenue 5”, set 40 years in the future. But perhaps he will one day return to Milton’s masterpiece – isn’t it time for a screen adaptation? That’s unlikely, says Iannucci: the only funny part of “Paradise Lost” is “a description of angels farting”. Still, if he could pull off such a creative enterprise, Oxford would surely be obliged to give him that doctorate.•

Ethan CroftEthan Croft

The eight-year-old rapper making a mark in Uganda

What Ugandans are listening to

Nearly half of Ugandans are under the age of 15, so it’s fitting that the country’s latest musical sensation is an eight-year-old rapper. Patrick Ssenyonjo, better known as “Fresh Kid”, burst onto Uganda’s music scene last year, fighting televised rap battles with other young stars and performing as far afield as Dubai. When a Ugandan government minister suggested he spend more time at school, and tabloids gossiped about adults cashing in on his success, Ssenyonjo fired back his reply in song. “Why are you sending me back to the village?” he raps in “Bambi” (Please), describing his ambition to build a house for his parents. On the world’s youngest continent, children are not just seen, but increasingly heard.

How teens are chatting

Passing notes in class is rather last century. Teens are now using Airpods, Apple’s wireless earphones, to send covert communications in lessons. If they hide the tiny white earphones under their hair, they can type secret messages into Google Translate – which are then beamed into classmates’ ears via synced-up smartphones. This is the latest example of young people modifying tech to fit their needs: when laptops replaced notebooks, many used Google Docs, a collaborative word processor, to talk to each other in class. Louis Anslow, who shared a video of the Airpod tactic on Twitter, remembers a pupil from his school hacking a Windows PC to send his schoolmates messages back in 2004. Before then, a paper aeroplane sufficed.

What the Chinese are romanticising

One of China’s biggest internet stars is a mysterious semi-hermit who lives off the land in the misty hills of northern Sichuan. Li Ziqi shoots immaculate videos of herself picking persimmons and cooking for her grandmother, and shares them with her 22m followers on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform. The idealised version of life in the Chinese countryside that she presents is an escape for overworked urbanites. The Chinese government is also a fan: Li was chosen as an ambassador for China’s recent Festival of Intangible Cultural Heritage. She has even penetrated the other side of the Chinese firewall: Li has an adoring following on YouTube, which is blocked in China.

What Russians are wearing

Fur has long been fair game in chilly nations like Russia, but a growing number of environmentally conscious young Russians now want animal-friendly alternatives. Enter MATU (tagline: “heart made”), a fashion brand that offers teddy coats, named cheburashka after an iconic cartoon character from the 1960s, and faux shearling coats made mostly out of sheep’s wool. Though many older folk in freezing Siberia still favour real fur, MATU is targeting people under 40 and sells 90% of its products through Instagram.

Where Hong Kongers are eating

As anti-government protests raged in Hong Kong in recent months, hungry locals faced a new consideration: is the restaurant “blue” or “yellow”? Restaurants that show support for the city’s protesters, sometimes with posters and ribbons, are known as yellow. Those thought to support the police, or to be owned by people who are pro-Beijing, are blue. Various apps map the outlets by colour, helping peckish protesters support the cause.

What Mexicans are drinking

The Tzotzil, an indigenous Mayan people from southern Mexico, have been distilling pox (pronounced “posh”) since ancient times. Made from corn, spring water and sugar cane, the liquor was drunk during rituals. Once rarely found outside the Tzotzil’s homeland, pox is now served at bars in Mexico City, Mérida and across the country. A few brands sell it in America. This rival to tequila is purported to have medicinal qualities – “pox” means “cure” in Tzotzil. At 53% proof alcohol, it won’t do much to help your hangover.

When #MeToo meets Baroque painting

Tim Smith-Laing

In 1612 a court in Rome heard the testimony of Artemisia Gentileschi, a 19-year-old, in a case against a well-connected artist called Agostino Tassi. Tassi was her art tutor and her probable future husband. He was supposed to teach her about the Roman art world. Instead, he raped her. Though the court decided he was guilty, his influential patrons saw to it that he never suffered any consequences.

Gentileschi went on to have a glittering career. One of only a handful of female artists at that time, she was admired across Europe in a way that Tassi never was, picking up commissions in Florence, Genoa, Venice, Naples and London.

Yet she is often remembered primarily for that early assault, which is assumed to be the subtext of her most powerful pictures. Gentileschi was particularly adept at painting brutal scenes of objectification, violence and revenge. Their resonance in the #MeToo era is undeniable.

Nowhere is the link between the work and the painter’s own biography more tempting than in “Susanna and the Elders”, painted in 1622. It tells a story from the biblical Apocrypha in which a pair of lecherous old judges come across the young Susanna while she is bathing and try to blackmail her into having sex with them by threatening to claim that they found her committing adultery. Susanna refuses, and is saved only by the prophet Daniel, who metes out swift and unsparing justice.

The vulnerability of the naked Susanna; the vengeance that Gentileschi never quite got. It’s hard not to see the painter’s pain in there. But it’s not that simple. Susanna’s story is one that many people painted, and even the composition of this one came from another artist’s print. The picture’s dark atmosphere is pretty standard Baroque fare. It is, nonetheless, an astonishing work. Look at the fabrics, the swooping arc that takes in the heads of the old voyeurs, the ghost of Susanna’s calf beneath the water. Gentileschi succeeded not because of her backstory, but because of her brilliance.•

Artemisia is at the National Gallery in London from April 4th-July 26th

Tim Smith-LaingTim Smith-Laing

Meeting the “hot tub monks” of California

Nat Segnit

There is a fashion among the hyper-competitive young executives of Menlo Park and Cupertino for “dopamine fasting”, a practice that discourages addictive behaviour by depriving the brain’s reward system of stimulation. For a day or two, you swear off booze, food, sex, Instagram and hanging out with other billionaires. Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, complements intermittent fasting with bouts of silent meditation.

A couple of hours’ drive south of the valley lies Big Sur, an idyllic stretch of mountainous coastline, where frazzled digital disruptors can sample ancient ascetic practices at any number of New Age retreats. But take a left off Highway 1, the coastal road down to Los Angeles, and you will encounter a level of self-denial that puts the fair-weather ascetics of the tech world to shame. The New Camaldoli Hermitage sits a mile above the ocean up a switchback track. Founded in the 11th century, the Camaldolese is an order of monks that reconciles the communal style of the traditional Benedictine monastery with the older tradition of solitude. “Sit in your cell as in paradise,” St Romuald, the founder, wrote in his rule. “Put the world behind you and forget it.” The Big Sur Camaldoli hermits sleep and pray in their cinder-block cells but come together at mealtimes and for the divine offices. They are sociable solitaries, eking out a life of renunciation in one of the most luscious natural settings imaginable.

In an outhouse I catch up with Bryan who, at 36, is one of two postulants at the hermitage – candidate monks trying out life in the order before being admitted as novices. Bryan’s faith is relatively new. He grew up in a Chinese-American family in San Jose. “I was an atheist,” he explains, unloading white vestments into a laundry basket, “a non-practising Buddhist”. His first visit to the hermitage was a revelation: “It’s the silence, the solitude, that really sold me.” In the background, the monastery bell tolls a solemn invitation to prayer.

The hermits’ day begins at 5.30am, with vigils, the ancient custom of sanctifying the hours of darkness with a sequence of chanted psalms. Lauds are sung at 7, followed by the midday prayer, and vespers combined with mass at 5pm. By the standards of traditional Benedictine observance, it’s a stripped-down liturgical schedule, allowing the monks plenty of time to sit in their cells in prayerful silence or study. But they are not exclusively contemplative. The monks also teach off-site and provide spiritual guidance for lay people who come here on retreat.

“So you see what a balance it is,” says Father Cyprian Consiglio, the prior. Cerebral and genially authoritative, Cyprian recently turned 60 but seems 20 years younger as we hike up the steep mountain trail above the hermitage. His German shepherd, Aldo, bounds ahead and, like a spiritual goal, disappears at intervals. In its earliest days, observance at the hermitage was closer to the Trappist ideal of austerity and near-absolute silence. But thanks to the freedom that Benedictine monasteries have from central command, the New Camaldoli has been able to adapt to the liberalism of its Californian setting. “There’s a possibility,” says Cyprian, “that this kind of life, because of its flexibility, may be a harbour for people who still want the monastic life, still want the liturgical spirituality, but don’t necessarily want that militaristic model that you so often find in monasteries.” Still, liberalism has its limits. “The liturgy, the scripture, the ritual, the tradition, is the container that holds this life together. You start losing that, it’s a free-for-all.”

Back at the hermitage I attend mass. The monks in their white habits sit on functional wooden chairs in their starkly lit, minimalist chapel. The congregation, ten of us in our unceremonious chinos and cagoules, sit farther back, and stand along with the monks when psalms are sung. “Why do the nations say, ‘Where is their God?’” chant the monks in unison. “Our God is in heaven. He does whatever pleases him.” For the eucharist, we pass into the rotunda, lit a cooler, science-fictional blue. The congregation lines the walls as a monk swings incense. The priest raises his arms in consecration. One by one, each person steps up to receive the host.

It’s hard, witnessing the absorption of the monks in the liturgy, to imagine this pitch of observance ever fading. But, as with most monasteries across Christendom, the numbers are discouraging. Of the 15 monks remaining at the hermitage, 12 are over 60 years old. Bryan aside, new candidates are hard to come by. For Brother Bede Healey, the answer lies in greater openness. In 2017 Bede left the hermitage to become Superior of its daughter house, the Incarnation Monastery in Berkeley. “We have to stop thinking we know what young people need,” he tells me. “Whenever someone new comes, it’s this clash of time and cultures. That’s what’s creative. I think the people coming in today have even more to offer us than we have to them.”

Cyprian is more circumspect. “I’m quite open to experimenting with new ways of belonging,” he says, as long as it “doesn’t do away with the classical approach”. As it is, the leniency of the regime is controversial in some Catholic quarters. “The more conservative of our critics call us the hot-tub monks.” It’s Cyprian’s job to strike a balance between the reformists and the old guard. “The two guys who are coming in now, the two postulants, they’re getting by-the-books monastic history, monastic observance, liturgical spirituality.” It’s certainly what Bryan seems to want. Far from seeking recognition for the qualities he can offer the order, his purpose is complete renunciation of the material world. The local retreats catering to Silicon Valley executives offer a spiritual pick-me-up that is anything but renunciatory: you withdraw from the world to return better equipped to live in it. Here, withdrawal is permanent. “I have to crucify everything,” says Bryan, as we walk to midday prayers. “Die to all my desires. I have to give it all to the Lord.” Will he make it all the way to solemn vows? “I’m going to be buried here,” he says, erupting in laughter. “That’s the goal.”•

Nat Segnit

Fighting the scourge of “Scum Welsh”

Lane Greene

Scymraeg

1. Scum Welsh, or nonsensical Welsh (noun)

/skəmˈraiɡ/

“We are an actual living culture, not some mythical witch-people,” wrote Bethan Tovey-Walsh, a doctoral candidate in linguistics at Swansea University, in an outcry on Twitter at the use of Welsh in “The Witcher”, a fantasy book series and TV show. She castigated the programme’s use of Welsh words and names, as though Welsh were the secret tongue of a mystic land, rather than a modern, living language. Proponents of Welsh have worked hard to update and create new vocabulary for the scientific, technological and other innovations of 21st-century life. The number of Welsh speakers is rising. No wonder so many people bemoan the proliferation of “Scymraeg”, a word that mixes the English word “scum” and “Cymraeg” (the Welsh word for “Welsh” itself). Scymraeg describes computerised mistranslations of terms in public places, such as a “disabled parking” sign reading “Parcio i Bobi Anabl” or “park to bake the disabled”; and a sign that should say “cyclists dismount” but instead warns of a bladder disease in Welsh. Welsh tweeters use the hashtag #scymraeg to out offenders. “Witcher Welsh” and Scymraeg share the same problem: well-meaning people trying to use Welsh without taking it seriously. Welsh-users can take comfort in one thing: if they swear at those who bastardise their language, their targets won’t understand their insults.•

Lane GreeneLane Greene

Design

- Yiyun Li: My life in six objects

- The secret to a perfect brand name

- Each coin carries the weight of hundreds of hands

- Soon we might all see with sound

- The emoji is the modern hieroglyph

Yiyun Li: “I think this meat cleaver is going to have a long life with me”

My cleaver has come a long way with me

My sister bought me this cleaver when I was preparing to leave China for America in 1996. It was one of the most expensive ones available. We didn’t know what I was going to and thought I should take everything I needed for a new life in two suitcases. I even packed sanitary towels. I could certainly get a better meat cleaver in America, but this one is still good. I chop with it every day. I use it for vegetables and tofu even though you don’t need a cleaver for those. I think of myself as a domestic person – cooking means a lot to me. When I was little my father cooked for us, and he trained me to chop vegetables without looking. How to position my fingers. I think that this meat cleaver is going to have a long life with me. You get used to the weight of the knife.

“War and Peace” keeps revealing new things to me

I read it every year. Each time I see new things that I missed before. This copy has been here for 12 or 13 years. I have a lot of sticky notes and tags on the book’s margins. I used to have a system, where on one reading I would use pink tags, on the next I’d use green, and so on. Eventually I ran out of colours and then I ran out of space. I think the system is a little overwhelming even for me. I need to get a fresh copy.

I treasure the owl my son made at elementary school My son was very artistic.

This owl was not one of his prize creations but I discovered it in his closet after he died when he was 16. We have so many paintings by him in our house, but this little thing – it’s a mystery. I get obsessed looking at it. It’s a clay owl, it’s also a Cupid with wings and a bow and arrow on the back. Strangely, the owl has a sombrero on top of his head. Even stranger, he has the most pensive eyes. The sombrero and bow make him seem quite comical but when you look at his eyes he’s sad. I feel like there are a lot of paintings I can tell the story of but I don’t know what this says. It’s just a lovely object. I miss my son bitterly every day, so I have the owl next to my computer. It’s a treasure for me.

This deer antler reminds me of being carefree

When our dog was a puppy, my family would take a hike with him every Sunday out in Oakland, California, and on one of these walks he found the antler. It’s just one of those good memories – the kids were still young, the puppy was young, and my husband and I were a little younger than we are now. I think when children grow up there are so many memories, some are in our heads and some leave an object in our lives. There are lots of things that have left my life, but this one is going to stay.

This photo album is a piece of history

When my parents came to visit ten years ago they brought this photo album, which belonged to my mother, and left it with me. The earliest pictures are from the 1950s. Most of them are from my mother’s childhood in Zhejiang in eastern China. Back then it was unusual to take pictures – you’d do it once a year in a gallery or a studio. Many of the photos are of my mother’s  friends, a group who went to school together, graduated, took a picture, and then spread into different corners of China and never saw each other again. I imagine there are lots of people in that album my mother hasn’t seen since they took the photos. These people don’t know they’ve ended up in my hands.

My younger son captured an enduring image of my family

This drawing is just four figures: sticks, circles and little hands sticking out. It’s five-year-old James’s perception of the family. Something crystallised in that moment – from a child’s eyes I see us as a unit. And that’s important because though we’re three now, we’ll always be a family of four.

As told to Abigail Fielding-Smith

The secret to a perfect brand name

Tom Vanderbilt

Here’s a quiz. Take the following five names: Leesa, Purple, Nectar, Casper and Tuft & Needle. Can you spot what they have in common? (Hint: you may need to sleep on it.)

Answer: they’re all online mattress retailers. Only Tuft & Needle gives the slightest suggestion of the product. The rest could be hawking anything from single-origin espresso to electric scooters.

The earliest brand names typically followed the surnames of their founders. When an English candlemaker, William Procter, teamed up with an Irish soapmaker, James Gamble, in 19th-century America, he created a brand styling that makes up in longevity what it lacks in imagination. Today’s brand names tend to be more painstakingly contrived. The founders of Warby Parker, an online eyewear company, sifted through thousands of iterations before settling on a mashup of two characters from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”.

Some names are reached by playing around with words. The messaging company Slack, for example, made an acronym out of “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”. The name also neatly conjures up the productivity problems its technology is there to solve.

Startups want short names like Slack that stand out, yet are somehow familiar (psychologists call this sweet spot in human preference “optimal distinctiveness”). Many companies try to achieve this by using first names of the sort we might give our children. Casper, an online mattress seller,   was named for an old college friend of the founders. “We realised that having something that makes it feel like it could be a person actually kind of lets your guard down a little bit and lets you have that deeper connection,” explained Neil Parikh, one of its founders. With nearly 200 other firms in the online mattress market, consumers might also not have noticed another company with “sleep” or “rest” in its name.

We assign meanings to the aural quality of words as well as their semantic associations: Casper sounds soothing, a soft echo of “whisper”. One study has found that participants assumed an ice cream called “Frosh” would be smoother and creamier than one named “Frish”. Casper also has the combination of familiarity and novelty that makes for a fashionable baby name.

Both parents and brand creators need to be sure that the name they give their baby passes the grocery-store test – how does it sound when you call it aloud in a public place? In both cases, it should be a name they can grow into, and age gracefully with. After all, brands want us to forge with them what we have with our kids: a lifelong bond.•

Tom VanderbiltTom Vanderbilt

Each coin carries the weight of hundreds of hands

Ann Wroe

The signs of obsolescence are all around. A long queue of forlorn faces at Victoria Station in London when the card-readers are down, and cash is all the ticket-folk can accept. The sighs of shop staff, and their long pauses before they deliver change, as if they no longer remember which coins are which, or what they add up to. I enjoy the quick mental exercise of totting up what’s owed and the neat satisfaction of snapping down “the exact”. They would be far happier to hear the brisk beep of contactless on a screen. My attachment to cash, however, runs deep.

I wouldn’t miss paper money – insubstantial, springy and somehow detached from the value it claims to represent. But coins have weight: sometimes, as in the case of the British two-pence piece, more than they can possibly be worth. They have been minted, forged, proved. They can be interestingly quirky, two-coloured and multi-sided, milled or not, gouged by desperate chisellers, embossed with curious devices. As a child I treated coins like jewels. None was prettier than the sixpence, with its bouquet of national flowers, and none more impressive than the half-crown, with its solid medieval shield, like a rare stone. I even had a special purse for farthings, a red leather tube that could take around 30 of the tiny copper coins, each marked with a wren.

Farthings were already history then, but history is the joy of coins. The silver threepenny-bits, with a smudged head of Edward VII, that went into the family Christmas pudding every year. The gold sovereign I found with joy on our lawn as I pegged out washing, before I realised that it had fallen from our “museum” shelf into the laundry basket. A copper quadrans of the Emperor Nerva, spotted by my husband as we were strolling through the wasteland of the Circus Maximus in Rome: the price of a loaf of bread, possibly dropped by a hasty slave. And, most ancient and thrilling, a bronze coin of Pontius Pilate from Judea, bought from a curio shop, paper-thin but still finely legible, with an augur’s staff and an olive branch. When I look at this coin I am in Pilate’s Judea, watching the auguries taken from the flight of birds, plucking ripe olives from a leaning tree.

But then, in an almost vertiginous rush, comes another feeling: a sense of the hundreds of hands through which this coin has passed. Old coins bring in a press of ghosts; and new ones, too, evoke crowds. On my first trip to Europe after the euro came in, passing from Belgium into France and back, the identical coins seemed to flow as easily and naturally, holding peoples peaceably together.

History has been made this way, largely as fingers place coins in the palm of another. It is extraordinary, I suppose, that we are still doing so. But the habit is hanging on. Outside Victoria Station, a homeless man with a slumbering dog asks me to spare what change I can. Down in the Underground, a busker with a violin hopes for the same. They do not ask for a lot – only as much as is contained, these days, in disappearing metal discs. But those ubiquitous small carriers of value, tokens of acquiescence, motions of kindness, are the weft of our human lives. A brief beep on a machine cannot replace their consequence.•

Ann WroeAnn Wroe

Soon we might all see with sound

Kathryn Nave

Rattling around the hills of Orange County, Brian Bushway looks like any other Californian mountain biker. The steady clicking of his tongue is the only sign of something unusual. But this is no nervous tic. Bushway is an echolocator: because he is blind, he has learned to use the sound of his tongue to work out his location.

Echoes are a constant source of information about the environment around us. Though this subtly shapes our experience, it usually registers only as a vague sense of open space or claustrophobic confinement. Consciously using that information requires considerable training. Even then, most echolocators can “see” only in fuzzy resolution: objects smaller than around 10cm typically go undetected unless they’re very close by. Bats, by contrast, can detect the contours of a human hair with their high-frequency echolocation calls.

To make us more bat-like, Fernando Albertorio, a sight-impaired entrepreneur based in America, dreamed up a solution: the Sunu band. A silicone strap roughly the size of a fitness tracker emits ultrasound waves that are closer to a bat’s frequency than human tongue-clicks. It senses how far away objects are by measuring how quickly these waves bounce against them. The user receives this information through vibrations: the strap buzzes more the closer objects are.

The $299 band can detect objects the size of a coin. Albertorio hopes soon to link the device up with Google Maps data and provide vibration-based directions.

For the estimated 285m visually impaired people worldwide, Sunu offers greater independence. For the merely distracted, it may also reduce the number of smartphone-induced lamppost collisions.•

Kathryn NaveKathryn Nave

The emoji is the modern hieroglyph

Tom Standage

Thousands of years after the Egyptians wrote the first hieroglyphic scripts, the spread of emoji seems to be bringing us back to a picture-based writing system. That may look like a retrograde step to a more primitive, childish form of communication. But it isn’t, because both hieroglyphs and emoji are far more powerful than they appear.

The hieroglyph for a mouth, for example, did not simply mean “mouth”; it also meant “towards”, a different word that was pronounced the same way (like “write” and “right” in English). Crucially, it could also be read as a sound (“r”), just as a pictogram of an eye can be read in English as “i”. By combining multiple hieroglyphs with special symbols to indicate how they should be read, it was possible to write any word. Hieroglyphs were a complete writing system that could express complex ideas.

That may not be true of emoji. But while they can’t be used to accurately convey the Declaration of Independence, say, they too have a potent expressive range. Sending a heart emoji, a shrug or an eye-roll is different from writing text. What do they mean, precisely? It is often hard to say in words. Emoji are useful in part because they enact emotions, rather than stating them. Surveys show many people (including a third of American millennials) find it easier to communicate feelings with emoji than words. And unlike hieroglyphs, they can be used and understood by anyone.

Emoji also have less visible benefits. New ones are added to the global digital character set, Unicode, every few months. Nobody wants to be left behind when their friends start sprinkling their texts with lobsters, so they update their software and get the latest security patches with it. Emoji have made the internet safer.

Demand for emoji means more software is becoming Unicode compatible, allowing users to access not just new emoji but unusual alphabets such as Cherokee that are released alongside them. That can help keep endangered languages alive. The Egyptians’ use of hieroglyphs thousands of years ago meant that knowledge which would otherwise have been lost was preserved. Our use of emoji today may end up having a similar effect.•

Tom StandageTom Standage

Style

- I’ve filled my life with Swedish armchairs and $50 T-shirts

- How trainers got their bounce

- Why we all submit to leather

- My watch stopped working two days after I left my wife

When did I become family brand manager?

Pamela Druckerman

As we enter the clothes shop, my husband huddles against me like a nervous toddler. In practically any other context he’s confident bordering on arrogant. But shopping is his Achilles’ heel. We’re just minutes into our once-a-year expedition to find him a new blue blazer. I’m in my element, but he already looks panicked.

Admittedly, it’s a busy Sunday during France’s bi-annual sales. (Say what you will about Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, for me he’ll always be the author of the “Loi Macron”, which authorised shops to open on Sundays.)

“Is it the pounding music and the people?” I ask.

“And the not understanding the rules, which shops to go to, where in the shop,” he says, “and then there are all these people running around, and the judgmental shop clerks.”

The idea that I’m in charge of clothes (and household goods) took hold early on in our relationship, and seemed to spring from our differing backgrounds. My husband’s parents both had doctorates: they’d debate structuralism over dinner. He still likes saying, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

My family discussed materialism over meals: what had transpired at my mother’s clothing store that day. Shopping was literally our family business. By the standards of our household I was bookish and borderline spiritual. Though on the rare occasion that I was the smartest person in the room, I quite liked that room.

So 15 years ago, when my future husband and I drew up the gift list for our wedding, I quickly staked my claim to the material realm. He didn’t see why we needed new teaspoons or serving bowls. I prevailed. In the end, the only presents really for him were a cheese slicer and a flask.

It seemed natural that I’d set about reforming his wardrobe too. I gradually purged his ill-fitting suits and flammable sweaters, introducing him to understated cashmere and James Perse. When our kids came along, I dressed them too. Soon the whole family hummed with my entirely standard bourgeois-bohemian taste. No one could quite remember what our world looked like before I filled it with Swedish armchairs and black, $50 t-shirts.

Why did I bother acting as family brand manager? It had something to do with our decision to live in Paris, where façades are so important women don’t even reapply lipstick in public (I’m still not sure where they do this). As a foreigner, I feel even more beholden to the social codes. But I was also falling into a gendered trap. Why is Mum to blame if the child’s sweatshirt is stained or dishes are rotting in the sink? And surely by now I could trust my family to select non-hideous items on their own?

After 15 years, my husband was done having a personal stylist too. That Sunday at the boutique, I went to ask a salesman about a blazer, and when I turned back my husband was gone. Eventually I found him outside on the pavement, looking like he’d just escaped from prison.

He didn’t want to shop anymore, not even a little bit, he told me. And I was tired of trying to dress him. “What if I just take my old jacket to the tailor, to sew it up?” he pleaded.

“That’s fine,” I said. Just then, I felt a long-standing, unspoken strain between us dissolve. I hadn’t realised that it was there, until it was gone.

And then, hand in hand, we walked home.•

Pamela DruckermanPamela Druckerman

How trainers got their bounce

Ethan Croft

The rubber soles of your trainers are so comfortable you probably don’t notice them until you try to squeeze your feet into shiny Oxfords or smart heels. Rubber soles were invented in the 19th century when Charles Goodyear, a self-taught American scientist, discovered “vulcanisation”. This stopped rubber expanding in the heat and so prevented shoe soles turning gloopy and clinging to the ground.

Goodyear had spent years trying to augment natural rubber for commercial purposes. In 1839 he succeeded, heating it with sulphur over a hot stove, which made it flexible yet sturdy even in changing temperatures. An industry emerged (Goodyear gave his name to a tyre company), shoemakers perfected the recipe and shoe-buyers enjoyed a new spring in their step.

Stiffening agents applied to the sole were added to cushion the front of the foot. Later a thick wedge of rubber was added at the rear of the sole to protect the heel.

Over time came other innovations. In 1970 Bill Bowerman of Blue Ribbon Sports tried pouring hot vulcanised rubber into his wife’s waffle-maker. This was the genesis of a new, grippy “waffle” soled trainer: after it went on sale in 1974, Bowerman renamed his fast-growing company Nike.

Since vulcanised rubber soles improved athletic performance, trainers soon found a place in sporting history. Jesse Owens sprinted to victory in an early pair of Adidas shoes at the 1936 Olympics.

Athletes’ endorsements have recently proved to be more controversial. In October 2019 Eliud Kipchoge, a Kenyan runner, wore a pair of Nike’s new Alphafly trainers to complete the first marathon in under two hours. These shoes have improved their cushioning, with foam in the heel and air pods in the sole, without increasing the weight. Some athletes and sportswear firms then claimed that racing in the shoes was cheating, because it gave the wearer an unfair advantage.

Efforts to ban Alphaflys from races have come to naught. They’re now on sale to everyone, and athletes will wear them at the Tokyo Olympics this summer. Though trainer companies once courted top athletes, runners now chase sponsorship from the most innovative brands. The shoe is firmly on the other foot.•

Ethan CroftEthan Croft

Why we all submit to leather

Matthew Sweet

Some fashion materials are civilised. Not leather. Leather is prehistoric, ancestral. It is torn from the flanks of beasts and laid over ours, as if we hoped to inherit their toughness, their hunting magic. It is formed by the filth of nature. How many other fabrics, historically, have required human urine and dog faeces in their production? (Tanneries are usually located out of town.) That long, stinking backstory must be the reason why leather stirs something so deep in us, why it’s the stuff of both freedom and restraint. Leather is for the open road and the prairie – it suits libertarians, cowpokes and Hell’s Angels. (Think of Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”, sneering “what have you got?” when asked what he’s rebelling against.) But it’s also the material of authority. Police states have appropriated its power; masochists love to submit to it. And that’s conveyed through more than its tactile or visual qualities. “Taste the whip,” wails Lou Reed. “Now bleed for me.” Matthew Sweet

Sir Philip Sidney unknown artist, c.1576

Today white leather is for clubbing: miniskirts, taxi shoes and handbags you can dance around. In 1576 it furnished noblemen with slashed doublets of the sort worn here by a 21-year-old Sir Philip Sidney, Renaissance war hero and author of “Arcadia”. The dress code speaks to both his poetic and martial side. The decorative elements suggest courtliness, the shape mimics the tight-fitting carapace of the early-modern breastplate. Unwittingly it presages his fate – felled by a musket shot after lending a comrade a piece of his armour, using his last moments to select a deathbed song.

MAIN IMAGE Taking liberties with the statue

Green leather jacket, £3,425/$4,960. Gold leather top, £1,390/$2,130. Black leather skirt, £1,575/$2,410. Rope bag, £1,170/$1,525. Dove-grey brass, lacquer and blown-glass necklace, POA. All Prada

PHOTOGRAPHs theresa marx

STYLIST lewis munro

Shell’s angel

Yellow leather jacket, Paul Smith, £1,890/$2,895. Green leather T-shirt, POA. Pink leather shirt, £399/$499. Both Stand Studios. Black leather culottes, Holland & Holland, £1,140/$1,473. Water snake mules, Tods, £440/$975

Heading to come

Green leather shirt  and white under skirt by Marni, POA. Water snake mules by TOD’S, £440/ $975

Walter Model 1944

The Nazis boycotted Paris couture and put the nation in uniform. Even swimsuits came with an SS logo. Black leather – trenchcoat, cap, jackboots, worn here by Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model – was the purest expression of their violent glamour. Himmler hoped it would inspire a queasy feeling as well as admiration. The slave labourers at Hugo Boss would have agreed. So would Susan Sontag, reflecting on Fascism and fashion in the 1970s: “The material is leather…the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.” Model lived it. First he was a Panzer commander, then he co-ordinated the German retreat, then he put a bullet in his brain.

Enid Boulting wearing Yves St Laurent 1963

Yves St Laurent designed his clothes for the fully automated luxury future, for cocktail parties on the Moon base. In this assembly, cut and shaped after a brief period of National Service and a protracted nervous breakdown, he adumbrates a darker world. Tight alligator-skin boots, thick leather smock, sci-fi collar, visored helmet – Enid Boulting, a South African model who then married film director Roy Boulting, looks fit to go on a book-burning mission with the firemen of Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit 451”.

Bags heading to come

Green Hermes Trim Duo bag in calfskin evercolour, £3900/$5060. Black Chloe Darryl in small grain & smooth cowhide leather/POA

Elvis 1968

The leather jacket is a classic but it’s not entirely timeless. The black shiny creases of his comeback tour suit mark out Elvis as a figure from the cultural reliquary. (The 68-ers would not have torn up Parisian paving stones dressed like this.) But the King is still hot. You can see it in the faces of his admirers, who gladly caught the perspiration-soaked towels he threw into the crowd. You’d have felt it too if, like his costumier Bill Belew, you’d had to peel this off him after the show. Sweat cracks leather. Ask any taxi driver who doesn’t have air con.

Peter Marino 2015

In 1965 artist and activist Avery Willard wrote a piece for a gay porn mag. It was a manifesto for the nascent leather-bar culture, which hated “the over-feminised present”, loved Marlon Brando and yearned for “the thrills of the moment, for life at its highest pitch”. Peter Marino, the New York architect photographed here, demonstrates the long burn of that impulse. At the age of 50 he found himself in the doctor’s surgery, discussing mortality. Though he could no longer die young, he decided to live fast – in motorcycle boots, a codpiece and chaps. That was 20 years ago. He’s still riding.

Bikers 1950

Western biker culture seems intractably masculine. The chance to escape the world of women is the undeclared offer of Mr Harley and Mr Davidson. But look. This gear may bring Amelia Earhart to mind, but Marian Willgoes, Joan Nimlo and Gloria Crane are members of a motorcycle club in 1950s Queens – and part of a longer history of female bikers, whose scorch-marks can be tracked back to the Great War. The business with the compacts feels like a kinky joke for those thrilled by the association of lipstick, leather and motor oil. They appear to be in on it.

Heading to come

Red leather trench, Coach, £1,125/$1,465. Shirt, Holzweiler, £197/$257. Silk motif tie, Canali, £160/$195

Life’s a beach

Black leather dress, POA. White leather shoes, POA. Blue leather Cassette bag, £2,090/$2,800. All Bottega Veneta.

Run-DMC c.1980

The black leather bomber jackets worn here by Run-DMC – Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels – call back to Brando and his 1950s Wild Ones. The huge gold chains, heavy as something wrought by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, furnish a theatrical element – something to keep utility at bay. For Brando, that was supplied by the cocky angle of his leather motorcycle cap. For 1980s New York hip-hoppers, the Village People had already closed off that avenue.

PHOTOGRAPHER’S Assistant: andre vasilijev

ASSistant STYLIST: justyna kitt

HAIR: chris kurz

MAKE-UP: marie bruce

SET: amy friend

set assistant: helen zarkina

MODEL: indre aleksiuk @ MODELS.COM

Matthew SweetMatthew Sweet

Has time run out for the classic wristwatch?

Luke Leitch

Has time run out for the old-fashioned wristwatch? Apple sold 31m watches in 2019, compared with the 21m sold by the entire Swiss-watch industry. This startling figure implies that the reassuring tick-tock of a mechanical movement may be doomed to the dusty desk drawer of horological history: the soundtrack of the future will be punctuated by the irregular pings of meeting prompts and email alerts.

But the Smart Watch versus Dumb Watch debate is not really a competition. It’s a tale of two dramatically different devices that each happen to live on your wrist. I’m no watch expert but I enjoy wearing both types of gadget (rarely at the same time). Neither is a substitute for the other.

Start with the Smart. I’ve worn the Apple 3 and Apple 4 and found both thrilling. Working out how to dictate WhatsApp messages and make calls made me feel like a super-spy. Receiving heart-rate alerts when strolling to the supermarket reminded me that I was a super-slob. And firing up an app that recorded my snores and played them back on my phone in the morning made me go on a diet. But I put my Apple watch away. Why? Well the 5 had come out, so suddenly mine was no longer the latest thing. And I fancied wearing a Dumb Watch again.

I have spent more hours than I can count geeking out over what watch snobs preposterously call “timepieces”. A beautiful watch has two appealing aspects: the first is the attraction of the object itself, a handsome bracelet that is a piece of jewellery with a small clock attached. The second is the history of the watch, and the aspiration that its functionality represents. The Omega Moonwatch was worn on six lunar missions, and though I’m only ever going to moonwalk badly on the dancefloor to embarrass my kids, I find the second-hand association compelling (plus, it’s gorgeous). Wearing a watch originally engineered for deep-sea divers, military pilots or explorers adds a frisson of adventure, however dull your day is.

The pleasure of ogling Dumb Watches isn’t limited to the Swiss or the searingly expensive. These days I wear a Seiko, a brand beloved of millions of income-challenged watch lovers. It’s called an Alpinist, and because it’s been discontinued its three-figure price has more than doubled in the three years since I bought it: unlike a Smart Watch, an old Dumb one can gain in value. Oddly for a mountain-climbing-themed watch, the Alpinist is water resistant to 200 metres. I don’t plan ever to scale a peak or go deep-sea diving wearing it (I don’t even wear it in the shower), so such functionality doesn’t really matter. But it’s curiously reassuring to know that I could.

The Alpinist replaced that Apple Watch 4. The Apple before that replaced the only luxury watch I’ve ever owned, an Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra (for the yachting career I’ve yet to embark on). This was a gift from my ex-wife and it stopped working two days after I left her. For a watch to be so emotionally accurate seemed such a perfect calibration that it headed straight into the drawer (where it lives in silent retirement next to the Apples). A Smart Watch is great, but it’s more a device than a watch – one reason sales are strong is because they need replacing regularly. Find the right Dumb Watch and you might become obsolete before it does.•

Luke LeitchLuke Leitch

Food

- Moscow melt

- Plantain, the “macho banana”

- Swedish meatballs

Moscow melt: Russia’s local mozzarella-makers

Joshua Yaffa

For Russians the 20th century brought war, famine and political oppression. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, images of empty supermarket shelves and grey, state-run cafeterias were beamed around the world. But that soon changed. Two decades later, the capital’s restaurant scene resembled that of any other thriving megalopolis. The city’s middle class enjoyed oysters from the Atlantic, cheese from Italy and wines from France. Then, suddenly, much of it disappeared again.

In 2014 a number of countries imposed sanctions on Russia after it annexed Crimea, which was part of Ukraine. In August of that year, as a countermeasure, the Kremlin announced a ban of its own: an embargo on importing most types of meat, fish, dairy and vegetables from America and Europe. Sergey Nosov, a veteran chef in Moscow, says that a whole range of ingredients, “disappeared in one hour. That’s it, alternatives didn’t exist.”

Among the many imported foodstuffs that Russians had grown accustomed to eating – including pork from Ukraine and apples from Poland – one of the most popular was mozzarella, an unripened, soft, chewy cheese that originally comes from Italy. Mozzarella was immediately greeted as a welcome addition to traditional Russian cuisine, reminiscent of tvorog, a soft, spreadable cheese, and sulguni, a spongy cheese with a salty bite that melts well.

Although there were already a few pizzerias in the Soviet Union, when the first Pizza Hut opened in 1990,it marked the moment when mozzarella was introduced to the masses. International food like pizza and pasta became as commonplace as borscht and blinis. Soon there were pizzerias by the Urals and caprese salads in Siberia.

Before sanctions, a strong rouble and open trade with Europe made it cheap to import mozzarella from the Czech Republic, Finland and Poland. Only high-end restaurants and grocers carried Italian-made varieties. Several large-scale Russian dairy producers turned to making their own, but most of it was bland and elastic rather than deliciously milky.

In 2014 that began to change. It was tricky to replicate pricey cheeses such as Parmesan, an aged, hard cheese that takes time to ripen. (The odds are that the Parmesan grated over your pasta at an Italian restaurant in Moscow came into the country through the quasi-legal grey market, in a suitcase, and formally meant for “personal use”.) But mozzarella is easier to make: heated fresh milk with a dash of rennet, an enzyme found in cows’ stomachs, is moulded into warm, tender clumps.

One couple, Tata Chinchaladze, a cheerful gourmand with Georgian roots, and her Italian-born husband Donato Parisi, had been importing seven tonnes of speciality food, which included fresh cheeses, twice a week, until 2014. After their imports became contraband, they had dinner in Milan with an executive from Globus Gourmet, an upmarket Russian supermarket chain. A plan was hatched: why not make their own? Parisi comes from a small town in Campania, a part of southern Italy renowned for its mozzarella, and knew some experienced cheesemakers. Globus Gourmet had a dedicated refrigerated cheese room that was now empty. They could set up shop there.

Others did the same. Kirill Sharshukov, a food importer, feared his business would collapse after the sudden implementation of the food embargo in 2014. “Stores were telling me their shelves were going empty,” he said. Two years later he founded DolceLatte, a cheesemaker based in Lubertsy, a suburb of Moscow. Sharshukov had tools and equipment built to order for his factory, all based on Italian specifications. Other chefs, food distributors and business-people also started to produce their own cheese. A new industry was born.

The biggest challenge for Russia’s startup mozzarella-makers was milk. Although the country is a mighty dairy producer, most of its milk isn’t the naturally fatty type that makes good mozzarella. So cheesemakers had to hunt around. After experimenting with milk from a number of dairy farms, Parisi found a suitable supplier outside Moscow where the cold temperatures mean cows drink less water, leading to fattier, tastier milk. The balance of protein and fat also had to be right, and the supply needed to be regular and plentiful.

In Italy most local dairies and supermarkets make up to 30kg of mozzarella by hand each day. But Chinchaladze and Parisi now produce several hundred kilograms per day at Altagamma Food. These days, Russian-made mozzarella is produced by industrial behemoths and artisanal operations alike, and sales are growing fast. More local chefs and caterers are confident that Russian mozzarella is plentiful enough to use in their dishes. And mozzarella is increasingly influencing traditional Russian cuisine. Not long ago Parisi tried the chef’s latest creation at a Moscow restaurant his firm supplies: sturgeon, a notable Russian staple, with burrata.

Over lunch one afternoon recently, Sharshukov and I shared a lump of mozzarella the size of a tennis ball, freshly made a few feet away. It yielded to my fork with a dewy sponginess and tasted bright and grassy. The plump, juicy cheese, with its balance of creaminess and bite, reminded me of eating on a sun-drenched Roman piazza. “The embargo is, of course, a good thing for me personally,” said Sharshukov, who reckons his produce now rivals the finest in Italy. “Even without closed borders, I’d like to think my mozzarella could win in a fair fight.”•

Plantain, the “macho banana”

Niki Segnit

What do you get if you cross a banana with a potato? A Nobel prize? Plantain has a starchiness that puts it at the vegetable end of the fruit spectrum. (It’s not an actual cross, of course – it just tastes like one.) The plantain is a good deal bigger than most bananas – in some languages it’s called the “macho banana” – but as with its sweeter cousin, a lot can be read from the colour of its skin.

A green plantain will be bland and a devil to peel. A bright-yellow skin is a sure sign of sweeter, softer flesh. As the skin becomes mottled, tending to black, the inside develops a deep sweet-and-sour taste, and a fruitiness that’s reminiscent of tamarind. It’s like an edgy sweet potato.

Many recipe books insist the starchy fruit should always be cooked, but once they’ve reached the mottled stage I find them delicious raw. For a simple way to cook it, top and tail a blackening fruit, draw a knife along its length, put it on a baking tray and bake in an oven heated to 200°C for 30-40 minutes. Eat the hot, softened flesh with salted butter. A green one can be peeled, cut into 3cm-thick slices and fried in oil for a few minutes on each side until golden. Drain on paper, salt, allow to cool a bit, then flatten the pieces using a plate or tin can and fry for a further minute on each side. Eaten like chips, these popular crispy snacks are known as tostones throughout Latin America. Accompanying dips vary by country. In Puerto Rico tostones are served with a mix of ketchup, mayonnaise and garlic.•

© NIKI SEGNIT 2020

Niki SegnitNiki Segnit

How IKEA helped Swedish meatballs go global

Josie Delap

It’s hard to dress up a meatball. Be they polpette in Italy, kofta in Lebanon, faggots in Britain, kotlety in Russia or thit vien in Vietnam, meatballs are a homely food wherever they are eaten. They should be made first at your mother’s side, as the fire crackles and pans bubble, and then later to conjure up her memory.

Sweden’s köttbullar are no different. Besides mixing a blend of beef and pork with some milk and breadcrumbs, the country’s meatballs must be made with love. They are at the centre of any midsummer smorgasbord or Christmas julbord. Perched on top of mashed potato, doused in a creamy gravy and laced with lingonberry jam, they are a savoury reminder of the enduring devotion of Swedish mothers.

But Swedish meatballs are no longer just a domestic dish. They have gone global, thanks to the efforts not of Sweden’s mothers but of one giant furniture company: IKEA.

IKEA started serving meatballs more than three decades ago. Concerned that customers navigating its endless aisles of flat-pack furniture would grow faint with hunger, the company opened restaurants in its stores. Severin Sjöstedt, the chef who spent almost a year developing the original recipe for IKEA, has said that the firm wanted to make something that was easy to serve, tasty and affordable for most people.

It succeeded. The Swedish behemoth flogs more than a billion meatballs each year at its stores around the world. IKEA serves meatballs in almost every one of its restaurants and most are made to the same recipe. The sheer number that it dishes up means it can keep the price of its meatballs as competitive as that of its bookcases. Today, no trip to IKEA is complete without the purchase of several hundred unnecessary tea lights, a vicious spat with your spouse and a keenly priced plate of meatballs – served as mor used to make them.

And yet, in a shocking revelation, in 2018 Sweden admitted that its meatballs are in fact an import. Forget the Swedish mothers – köttbullar are based on a recipe that King Charles XII brought back from Turkey in the early 18th century. “My whole life has been a lie,” mourned an official Twitter account that promotes Sweden to the world. Such agonies are misplaced. The Swedes have adopted the comfort food of another country, made it their own and persuaded the rest of the world to love it too. Mother would approve.•

Josie DelapJosie Delap

Journeys

- Salsa in the synagogue

- How to talk about Oman when you’ve never been

Salsa in the synagogue: exploring Cuba’s fading Jewish community

Lara Feigel

I quickly came to love the banyan trees in Havana. The banyan is distinctive because it grows on another plant: carried by one type of wasp, it begins life as a fig seed that germinates in the crevice of another tree. Starting at the top, it eventually covers the host with its roots until they settle on the ground like snakes. For me their symbolism was unavoidable because I was in Cuba in search of my roots.

In 1950 when my father was nine he moved from Antwerp in Belgium to Havana and lived there for just over a year. Cuba was a refuge, both from the past and from a feared-for future. In 1943 my father’s parents, both Orthodox Jews, were sent to Nazi concentration camps. Throughout the war a succession of Christian families hid my father. Astonishingly, his mother returned to Belgium alive in 1945 and was reunited with her son. But, as the cold war heated up, many Jews in Europe were scared they could be in danger once again. So my father’s family fled to Cuba, hoping to end up in America where they had relatives.

This is all I really know about his past. On the few occasions I’ve probed him, my father’s brief answers suggested that, out of necessity, he had closed the door on a traumatic childhood. I didn’t know his family, because his mother cut him off when he chose to marry someone who wasn’t Jewish. I lost my extended family and our shared history, as well as the chance of having a faith.

Although my father had a strict religious upbringing, we went to synagogue together for the first time only a year ago. The time suddenly felt right. My father has remained Jewish in spirit but in practice he has found it hard to create a new kind of religious identity, knowing that the Orthodox synagogues of his childhood wouldn’t accept his daughter. Both his faith and heritage dissipated with my birth.

The one place my 78-year-old father does talk about is Cuba. “I had the nicest bedroom I’ve ever had,” he told me once, “with large windows and green shutters covered by bougainvillaea.” The boy who’d spent years hidden in dark, cramped rooms relished days drenched in sunlight, swimming in the ocean. By revisiting the flowers and the sea together, I thought we might find a way to open up his past. So together we escaped wintry London and headed to Havana.

On our first morning in the Cuban capital I noticed the banyan trees growing in the street outside Beth Shalom, Cuba’s oldest surviving synagogue. It’s a far cry from the makeshift houses my father remembers praying in. Built in 1952, two years after he lived there, Beth Shalom is an ambitious piece of post-war modernist architecture. The building’s svelte white curves are in keeping with the pastel-coloured houses that surround it.

Adela Dworin, the smiling, energetic president of this synagogue, is one of the few people here who still dresses like a European Jew, in a cream, high-necked blouse. I asked her if we could go to a service, and that Friday evening we watched a group of 19-year-olds brushing each other’s long hair before the prayers, their tanned midriffs exposed. They suddenly looked serious as they each donned a fringed prayer shawl, familiar to my father from his childhood, and then led the service as we followed along in our prayer books.

The vibrant singing of the young women marked out their Cuban heritage: the same melodious voices we heard singing in salsa bands around town now intoned the ancient prayers. The singing, dancing and ease of touch of these Cuban Jews showed they are a freer generation than the older ones, whose religious identity is bound up in far away, different cultures.

I had felt awkward when we’d been to synagogue together in London six months earlier but in Havana, where Jewishness felt more unexpected to me, it seemed easier to be in this place of worship. The community has learned to embrace those who wish to join. When the synagogue was first built, hundreds of people used to attend each service, according to Dworin, and men and women sat separately. Now everyone prays together: “Sometimes there are only ten people.”

This story is repeated as we visit Havana’s two other synagogues: an Orthodox one in Old Havana and a Sephardic one around the corner from Beth Shalom. People tell us about the energetic little enclaves that used to exist in the suburbs of this tropical city.

During the first half of the 20th century the community flourished: Jews owned factories, worked in textiles and the diamond industry. Then Cuba had 20,000 Jews. Now there are 2,000 at most, half of them in the capital. Most left after Fidel Castro launched the revolution in 1953, banned private businesses and discouraged organised religion.

Those who remained had to adapt to a different reality. Few Jews in Cuba today keep kosher. Meat is far from plentiful – even less of it has been ritually slaughtered; very few people can afford to keep two kitchens to separate milk from meat. “I have to worry about people not having enough to eat, I have to worry about not having enough medicine – surely God doesn’t want me to worry about whether the chicken is kosher,” says Mayra Levy, president of the Sephardic synagogue, when I ask about her eating habits. But Dworin sticks valiantly to a kosher diet, as does the president of the Orthodox synagogue, who learned how to slaughter animals in Israel. Every month he kills 20 cows to sell at his butcher’s shop, the one remaining Jewish shopfront amid the crumbling façades of Old Havana.

At some point during his stay in Havana, my father stopped going to school and instead would go to the beach each morning. My grandmother, who sat on a deckchair while my father swam in the sea, tended to make erratic decisions and considered the social atmosphere s formal education.

At that time there were two beach clubs in Miramar that allowed Jews in, according to Dworin. We spent a hot, sweaty afternoon driving up and down the bay looking for them. One had been taken over by the Cuban army, who refused to let us in. (Amid the frustration, I smiled to think that my father’s closely protected memories were now literally guarded by the military.)

Eventually we stumbled on La Concha, the other club, in a secluded cove, where children were doing backflips on the sand. Soon, my father’s routine of old, swimming each morning, became our new one: when we were not going to services in the various synagogues, we returned to these sparkling waters.

Driving around this bay area, I wondered what my father’s life would have been like if he had stayed here. Dworin told us about an 80-year-old man in Havana who had recently converted because he wanted to be buried in the Jewish cemetery next to his 78-year-old wife.

Since Cuba has no resident rabbis, one came from Argentina for the occasion, together with a mohel to circumcise the elderly man. I imagined my father joining him at the Sephardic synagogue’s senior club he belongs to, taking part in tai chi and bingo sessions with the elders who showed us photographs of their large families and x-rays of their wonky bones.

I may not have inherited my father’s Jewish traditions but he did pass on a love of reading. In Havana, we visited the house of Ernest Hemingway, who spent 20 years in the city. It is strange to think that in 1950 they lived only a few miles apart. As my father, who once entered a Hemingway lookalike contest, now posed for photographs by the back door, I thought of the Hemingway books he gave me when I was growing up. They too are part of our shared history.

In Hemingway’s garden, banyan trees surrounded the pool with dignified shade. As I examined them, I saw the fragility of the tree beneath the roots. I also saw that it was too late for us, my father and me, to create a new heritage. Instead we must make do with who we already are: hesitant Londoners trying out synagogues, reading and swimming together.•

How to talk about Oman when you’ve never been

Jason Goodwin

GETTING THERE Forget the Arabian Gulf. Oman is what you call a proper country, with real people, a sandy coast, high mountains and miles of desert. Your parents’ friends remember when it was just a sleepy Gulf port. Now it’s a bit sprawling, tidy and not too tall. No high-rises or shopping malls, just some of the globe’s last lonely places – only slightly less remote, thanks to dual carriageways and cheapish airfares.

GO In winter, before March, when it starts hotting up.

STAY The grandparent of Omani hyper-luxurious resorts, the Chedi Muscat, opened in 2003. But you like to get away from the 5-star hotels and go camping. Nowadays the Bedu live in breezeblock compounds but they are among the world’s most experienced tent-dwellers and Oman still allows wild camping.

The Empty Quarter is 250,000 square miles of rolling dunes, a few oases and total, bewildering, soft silence. The shifting desert sands are a myth – the ridges only ever move a few feet so the dunes stay put. For a luxury version, sip lime and mint sodas in the Wahiba Sands, followed by a dip in the oasis and a proper bed.

READ Wilfred Thesiger mapped large parts of the Empty Quarter, including the mountains, and tells his story in “Arabian Sands” (1959). Jan Morris’s “Sultan in Oman” (1957) is another classic, a royal progress through the desert. “Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs”, a modern novel by Abdulaziz Al Farsi, an oncologist from Muscat, offers a glimpse into contemporary life.

SEE Crumbling towers, villages that cling to the mountainside and the hidden pool at Wadi Shab. The mudbrick Fort Jabrin, built in the 1600s, stands at the edge of the desert south-west of Muscat: whitewashed walls, painted ceilings and a hot wind blowing through the windows.

BUY Before Chanel No. 5 there was frankincense. Hoja’i is the best-quality frankincense resin, and the world’s finest is tapped from stubby trees in the valleys of Jabal al Qamar – the Mountains of the Moon – outside Salalah.•

Jason GoodwinJason Goodwin

And finally...

- Disposing of offensive heirlooms isn’t always easy

- Do you know a good... canine life coach?

Disposing of offensive heirlooms isn’t always easy

Adrian Wooldridge

The loss of a parent or elderly relative brings a familiar set of rituals to accompany the pain of grief: reading the will, dealing with probate, paying death taxes. Now a new rite has been added to the list – testing your heirlooms against prevailing ethical standards. The list of formerly cherished things that now dismay us is a long one. What are we to make of the guns and knives that many members of the generation now passing accumulated? How about fur coats and hunting trophies? Not content with festooning walls with antlers, some people embraced a fashion for cutting off elephants’ feet to make umbrella stands. Who has a use for hand-carved pipes these days, silver cigarette and match boxes or other smoking paraphernalia?

Books can be disconcerting too. Karl Ove Knausgaard found a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” among his dead grandmother’s possessions, propelling him to write his own six-volume autobiography, which he also called “My Struggle”. I worry about this one myself: for purely scholarly purposes I have accumulated many books on eugenics, including Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race”. I shudder to think what my children will make of this Wooldridge library when my time comes.

There are some easy get-outs. Items can be re-purposed: silver cigarette cases make excellent business-card holders, thus transforming the life-shortening habit of smoking into the career-enhancing one of networking. Exotic finds may be given to museums. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford owes its magnificent collection of shrunken heads to donations.

But since our values have changed, and our belongings are many, we often have to make hard choices. I suggest some rules to negotiate the moment. If the offensive item has been in your family for generations, you are obliged to keep it (perhaps future generations will one day re-embrace taxidermy and tobacco). Consider how important the heirloom was to your loved one: if Aunt Agatha and her fox-fur jacket were inseparable then it deserves its place at the back of the cupboard (the animal, after all, will not rise from the dead). Distasteful objects that were merely part of the bric-à-brac of daily life, however, may be abandoned without thought.

But disposing of heirlooms isn’t easy. It is frowned upon to throw stuffed animals and mink coats on the pyre after a funeral. And what of the really unpalatable stuff? I once interviewed an African-American in Los Angeles who had an extensive collection of derogatory representations of black people. He told me that there’s a thriving market in the stuff but you have to be willing to mix with outright white supremacists. If you do sell such items what do you do with the profit?

The offspring of the age of woke may confront yet trickier items after their carbon-neutral funerals. What will tomorrow’s mourners make of Yoni eggs, DIY coffee-enema machines or posters of historical cranks like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders? Perhaps that is the true legacy: the embarrassment is passed to each new generation, a flame that burns on, fuelled in perpetuity by the peccadilloes of our forbears.•

Adrian WooldridgeAdrian Wooldridge

Do you know a good... canine life coach?

Catherine Nixey

Meet Tamar Geller, canine life coach. Because a dog is for life coaching, not just for Christmas.

But I don’t own a dog Don’t worry. No one does. “I don’t believe we own the dogs,” says Geller. Rather than refer to humans who follow canines around as owners, she calls them “pawrents”. It’s a good point: both dogs and children involve a prolonged period of toilet training followed by increasingly ruinous financial expenditure.

Any famous “pawrents” on her client list? Every famous pawrent. Natalie Portman and her Yorkie are fans. So too are Oprah and her “fur-children”. Not to mention Lady Gaga and her pups.

Are those euphemisms? No. And watch your tongue. Geller used to work in intelligence in the Israeli Special Forces. She “can’t really talk about” what her role was, but it was serious enough that when she left she chose to work with cute puppies instead. Admittedly via a dream in the desert that told her, “You need to work with dogs.”

Does she deal with any tougher breeds? Absolutely. Geller has also worked with Iraq veterans through General David Petraeus, who led American forces in Iraq in 2003, not to mention Rupert Murdoch and his labradoodle. “Rupert”, apparently, “is the sweetest, sweetest dog pawrent.” Dogs, Geller says, are important for celebrities because “the dogs don’t know the titles. The dogs don’t know the size of the bank account.” As Geller told Oprah, “Your dogs don’t know you’re Oprah.” And as Oprah said: “Wow.”

Rupert is a good boy then? Stop there. Geller dislikes terms such as “good boy”. And don’t even mention the phrase “a good dog”. That, in her vernacular, is “BS”:“‘Good dog’ means nothing. Ever.” Instead, she describes what is going on in an appreciative, sing-song voice: “Siiiiit.” Or “Staaay.” Or “Become the most significant media mogul of the 20th ceeeentury.” And so on.

So how does she train dogs? Geller doesn’t. She trains pawrents. To be precise, she trains pawrents to get dogs to “fall in love” with them, in part through displays of affection. She kisses her dogs, for instance. “I’m kissing their faces…Kisses, kisses, kisses. All day long.”

And if you don’t have a dog to kiss? Not a problem. This method, says Geller, is not just for dogs. “Once you practise this method of dog training, it changes your whole life.” You can, she suggests, use it on your husband, your children, your boss…Albeit probably with fewer kisses.

She says: Dogs “bring light, they bring truth, they bring purity”. They are our “best life coaches, sent to teach us how to connect to our sweet self”.

They say: Woof.•

Catherine NixeyCatherine Nixey

Table of Contents

1843

Features

Between the spreadsheets

The friendly Mr Wu

The rise of PTSD

Inside the box

Upfront

Reading “Paradise Lost” with Armando Iannucci

The eight-year-old rapper making a mark in Uganda

When #MeToo meets Baroque painting

Some of our critics call us the hot-tub monks

Fighting the scourge of “Scum Welsh”

Design

Yiyun Li: My life in six objects

The secret to a perfect brand name

Each coin carries the weight of hundreds of hands

Soon we might all see with sound

The emoji is the modern hieroglyph

Style

I’ve filled my life with Swedish armchairs and $50 T-shirts

How trainers got their bounce

Why we all submit to leather

My watch stopped working two days after I left my wife

Food

Moscow melt

Plantain, the “macho banana”

Swedish meatballs

Journeys

Salsa in the synagogue

How to talk about Oman when you’ve never been

And finally...

Disposing of offensive heirlooms isn’t always easy

Do you know a good... canine life coach?