The following is excerpted from Malena Watrous’s interview with Ruth Ozeki in Issue 42 of The Believer. Illustration by Charles Burns.

Ruth Ozeki is an award-winning novelist and documentary filmmaker. The daughter of an American father and a Japanese mother, she lived in Japan for many years, where she studied Noh drama, flower arranging, and mask carving and worked as a bar hostess, an English professor, and a documentary television producer. Some of her experiences working for Japanese television made it into her first novel, My Year of Meats (1999). The book follows the stories of two different women, an unhappy Tokyo housewife named Akiko Ueno, married to a controlling Japanese PR rep for BEEF-EX (a powerful American beef lobby group), and an American named Jane Takagi-Little, hired to produce his new series, My American Wife! Sponsored by the American beef export lobby, each episode is supposed to show a wholesome American wife cooking a wholesome beef dish to inspire Japanese viewers to buy imported meat. But Jane has more subversive ideas for the program, using it to expose Japanese audiences to American women leading unconventional lives, hoping to inspire them by example.

I first read My Year of Meats when I was living in rural Japan, teaching English at a vocational high school where the classes were segregated by gender: boys in a technical track, girls in a secretarial course. The nearest bookstore was two hours away, and the local library carried just one English title, The Bridges of Madison County. At the time, I was attempting to use my English classes at the sex-segregated high school as a kind of Trojan horse for a secret curriculum of gender studies. Reading about Jane’s ambitions and the mistakes she made, I was able to recognize and laugh at my own.

Ozeki has written a second novel, All Over Creation, and the forward for Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women by Japanese Women, an anthology of translated stories put out by Kodansha last year. She has also made two documentary films, one of which is Halving the Bones, an autobiographical movie about bringing her grandmother’s remains back from Japan. She splits her time between Manhattan’s Lower East Side and an island in the middle of Desolation Sound, three ferries and eight hours from Vancouver, British Columbia.

—Malena Watrous

THE BELIEVER: After My Year of Meats, you shifted your fictional focus from meat to potatoes. In All Over Creation, you write about a group of eco-activists seeking to expose and confront big agribusiness. One of their targets is genetically modified potatoes, in which pesticide is programmed into the actual DNA of the plant. While this notion is scary, there is no way a potato—even a mutated one—can have the visceral fear factor of that skinned cow’s head that slams into Jane Takagi-Little at the slaughterhouse. Were you sorry to have to leave meat behind?

RUTH OZEKI: Well, but when you start looking at the potato’s history, there is just so much there: famine, intrigue, conquistadors. Vegetables are filled with drama. Even the pea. What makes a novel come to life is conflict, and food is rife with conflict. Inside every pea or potato is an enormous amount of narrative. People get quite emotional about this stuff. I do have a background working in horror films, so images of Jane rewinding the slaughtered cow and watching the blood spurt out of its throat and get sucked back in, all of that comes from somewhere. But I had enough of the gore. I was ready to step away from it in All Over Creation.

BLVR: I heard that you used to make props for B horror movies. How on earth did you get into that?

RO: Well, I had just gotten back from Japan, where I’d been doing Masters work in classical Japanese literature, specializing in Noh drama. I came back to New York and, oddly enough, nobody cared. I needed a job and was hanging out with some friends involved in the film industry, which seemed like fun. This was in 1986, before I did any Japanese television work. At that point, you broke into the business not by going to film school but by getting an entry-level job on a film set, usually in porn. Right around that time, the low-budget horror industry started kicking in, driven by a lively home video market, and a lot of people who’d been working in porn were switching over to horror.

BLVR: Did you start with porn before you made the switch?

RO: No, but I got my first job working for a director who was making the switch from gay male porn. He wanted to go mainstream, to make a bid for legitimacy in horror, starting with a movie called Mutant Hunt. I was hired as a storyboard artist because I used to draw and I’d published illustrations over in Japan. But it turned out that we didn’t have time to do a single storyboard. A week before production started, the producer realized that we didn’t have an art director, so she looked around the table and pointed at me and said, “You be the art director.” I’d never even been on a film set before. Luckily, they hired me an intern, this fabulous artist and film editor who had just graduated from SVA [School of Visual Arts] and who had worked on film sets before. It soon became clear that she knew everything and I knew nothing, so we worked as a team and eventually started our own props-design company. We made breakaway walls, exploding heads and severed hands, and something called the “orgasmatron.”

BLVR: The horror genre is huge right now. It seems like 90 percent of the movies coming out of Japan and Korea are horror movies, and many recent American horror movies are remakes of Japanese hits. I’m kind of a sucker for them, but I also wonder why there’s this growing, almost insatiable appetite for extreme gore, both in Asia and here in the U.S.

RO: In Japan, the stomach-turning violence has always been present and prevalent, in the manga, comic books, and tabloids. I like the campy stuff, but I’m not hugely fond of the images of extreme violence against women.

BLVR: It seems strange to me that Japan produces so much of this hyperviolent graphic entertainment, and so many people enjoy reading it, when their crime rates are much lower than here.

RO: Japan is a country without as much violent crime, but there’s a tremendous amount of social constriction, pressure to conform. Maybe the bristling id is showing its angry little face.

Pick up a digital or print subscription for access to the full interview plus new issues, web exclusives, and our extensive archive spanning more than two decades.

Related articles:

“Carnivores Capitalists and the Meat We Read,” an essay by Jon Mooallem

“An Interview with Jeanette Winterson,” conducted by Andrea Tetrick

“Fear as a Game,” an essay by Elisa Gabbert

The following is excerpted from “Interrupted Reading” on the Believer Logger, a symposium featuring responses from twenty-three writers, including Courtney Maum, Emily Schultz, Elisa Gabbert, Dennis Cooper, and C Pam Zhang, to a question posed by Michael Seidlinger: “Can you remember a time you were disillusioned with reading? What caused it, and what pulled you back?”

Faced with tragedy, people look to what always gave them solace and sanctuary. That means keeping busy, keeping to a routine. For many, this means reading. People online are live tweeting their way through tomes by Tolstoy and Melville. Everyone is seemingly finding solace in the age-old act of reading. But not me. Not right now. I can’t even manage to read more than a few pages. As someone so ensconced in books professionally, I find it troubling… absolutely humiliating. It got me thinking: what if I’m not the only one? A question came to mind, and I decided to ask other writers:

Can you remember a time you were disillusioned with reading? What caused it and what pulled you back?

The response, you could say, was every bit as illuminating as it was empowering.

—Michael Seidlinger

COURTNEY MAUM

The act of reading has never disappointed me or let me down: ever since I could read, books have provided both a haven and escape. It’s just that sometimes, you pick the wrong destination. Or the wrong traveling companion, let’s say. After all, reading is an act of intimacy: the original one on one. Someone else’s voice whispering into your mind, filling your imagination with images, your heart with surprise or delight. When you have the right book, you have not only a companion but a seductress at your side. When you pick the wrong book, you have a nuisance, a chatterbox, the wrong friend for the ride.

Although there has never been a time when I wasn’t reading something, there have been lots of times when I was reading the wrong book. A lifelong insomniac, the quality of my sleep (or rather the improved quality of my bad sleep) is deeply affected by what I read at night. There’s a specific cadence and lyricism I look for in my nighttime reads. The choppy, clever, shocking and the blunt—these prose styles don’t work for me. I remember, for example, that Cherry by Nico Walker kept me up at night. Raymond Carver used to give me nightmares. The books that make me feel safe and sung to in the evenings are the ones that bring the sandman. I remember reading Arcadia during a book drought—I just couldn’t find the right thing to read until I spotted a copy of Lauren Groff’s first book in my public library, and I went on a Groff jag, read a book of hers a week, experienced deep sleep. Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone was another savior. I had all this “hip” fiction at my bedside then, cool prose, distanced prose, prose that doesn’t allow you, the reader, to know where you stand with it, and although I like reading books like this quite a lot, they frustrate me at night. In bed, I want a book that kisses my neck, you know? Woodson’s Red at the Bone was that for me; it was such a full book, truly full of beauty.

Late this winter, I had another spell of mismatched reads. I was in the mood for memoir, but the voices I was encountering were either too self-effacing or preachy, inordinately proud of themselves for things I considered trivial (which made me feel like an asshole), or judgmental and classist in their humor (which made them the asshole). Through my public library again, I happened on a copy of Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which was just the voice I needed. Generous, big-hearted, honest in a way that took real bravery.

Today, I am writing this from western Mexico where I was doing book promotion when COVID-19 unleashed its hell on us, and in Mexico, I stayed. I am—like so many—searching for my perfect read. Introspective but not self-pitying, hopeful but acute is the voice I’m searching for right now. In this vein, I enjoyed Rebecca Solnitt’s Recollections of My Non-Existence very much. I think Lily King’s Writers & Lovers will next up for me. I worked as a waitress for much of my youth and I’m comforted by the author’s descriptions of hot pans and emptied wine glasses, people touching salad forks and fingers without a care in their bright world.

DENNIS COOPER

The only time I can remember is when I was a teenager and used to take lots of LSD. The LSD was very strong back then, and it could occasion these seeming life-changing revelations about the simplest things. One cool aspect of being on acid was that things you just did unthinkingly when you weren’t high, like opening a book and starting to read, seemed fascinating and complex in and of themselves.

I remember, once, when I was tripping I picked up a book and opened it. But rather than automatically beginning to read it, I looked at the pages themselves. Instead of instantly absorbing words, I saw all these little printed black symbols organized in blocks. And I thought about how my face was a foot or whatever distance away from the pages and how my eyes were looking at nothing more than a field of symbols. Not only could I not “read” the symbols, I realized that reading itself was a trick, a lie that merely exploited my mental laziness when I wasn’t high, and that the whole thing with books and readers was a hoax. I realized that when I had thought I was reading, I’d just been daydreaming randomly, and the symbols printed in books had nothing to do with the daydreams I’d had.

After I came down from the acid I not only stopped reading for while—a few weeks, a month maybe—but I went around preaching to my unenlightened friends about the lie that so-called “reading” really was. No one believed me, and everyone told me I was nuts, etc., and eventually I just got lazy and started reading again.

Read the full piece on our website. You can also pick up a digital or print subscription for access to new issues, web exclusives, and our extensive archive spanning more than two decades.

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The following is excerpted from “Internacionalista,” an essay by Deb Olin Unferth in Issue 77 of The Believer.

George and I had gotten nowhere with joining any revolution. It was August. We’d been fired from one job and hadn’t found another. We’d managed to throw up a wall between us, or at least some small obfuscating stones (a dot of diamond, two glints of red). And now we had to get out of El Salvador. Our visas were running out. We couldn’t wait around for people to figure out what they were going to do about the bridges that had been exploded on the road to the border—put them back up, explode somebody back, chart a little path through the river—no time for any of that, George said, because to be stuck in El Salvador with an expired visa was no joke. So we set out. The truck drove in loops, searching for bridges still standing. A few kilometers from the border, some guys with black-market gym shoes threw their duffel bags off the truck and jumped out, ran into the trees.

At Salvadoran customs we had the deepest, longest search of them all. The soldiers spent hours scratching our money with their fingernails and going page by page through our books. We were so bored with searches by now, had had so many, we didn’t care what the soldiers did. We sat on a curb and watched.

At last we arrived in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. We pulled into the station. I was aggrieved, begrimed, laden. I’d had exactly no fun in months and I was ready to blame George for it. I filed to the front of the bus and looked out over the heads of the people waiting to get on. There, amid the crowd, I saw my first Internacionalistas, white and balding, holding cameras.

Compared to El Salvador, Nicaragua was like playing jacks. The two countries were nothing alike. El Salvador was your basic mail-order military dictatorship: terror and torture, stuttering civilians. Nicaragua was more like a cheerful communist kazoo concert. Nicaragua had once been like El Salvador. A line of Nicaraguan dictators, the evil Somozas—a father and two sons—had had their hands on the country since 1937. Then, in 1979, the revolutionary Sandinistas had come down from the mountains and into the capital and run the Somozas out. The Somoza family fled on airplanes, lifting whatever they could and throwing it into the cockpit. The Sandinistas marched into the National Palace and installed themselves. Nicaragua became a socialist country, the only one in the hemisphere other than Cuba. It was a big capitalist scandal, and the United States was enraged. But the Soviets loved it, sent supplies and weapons and men, and bragged about it on the radio.

In El Salvador there hadn’t been anyone like me and George. We’d been alone, going around on the streets. In Nicaragua there were hundreds of us, thousands, so many we had a special name: we were called Internacionalistas, and we came from all over the world—Europe, Africa, all the Americas. We had professors and scientists among our ranks, and farmers and newspapermen and a brigade of artists, all trooping around. We converged on the capital and trucked out to the towns, to Granada, León, Estelí, carrying every kind of equipment—hoes and seeds and cisterns and books. We were ready to scrape up whatever was there and pat down a nice new revolutionary version instead.

Since I was the youngest and spoke Spanish, the Internacionalistas could tell me to do anything and I would. Every day there was something for me and George to do. On Thursdays we went to the U.S. embassy to protest U.S. support of the Contras, the reactionary group trying to take down the Sandinistas. (Their very name annoyed us: Contrarrevolución—who would want to be against the revolution?) A hundred Internacionalistas or more showed up each week at the embassy gates and waved signs and shouted. Priests gave talks in front of the line of military guards. Buses pulled up and dancers hopped out, and musicians and tightrope walkers and mimes. They clowned, sang ballads of corporate evil, pantomimed Contra destruction. We put down our signs so we could clap. I never saw anyone go into or out of the embassy (there may have been another door?), but we marched in our circles and chanted.

On Sunday afternoons we went to la misa campesina, peasant mass, where Uriel Molina, a great priest of the revolution, talked about what God had revealed at Vatican II, the new directive Lucharemos o moriremos! “We will fight or we will die!” he told the Internacionalistas, because the place was always full of Internacionalistas, so many that buses had to bring them. They filled the church, sat on the floor, stood in the back, blocked the campesino murals. Some had to wait outside. There was hardly room for the Nicaraguans. A few Nicaraguans, the musicians, fit. They played their instruments on the side. Some Internacionalistas danced, marimba-style, in the aisle. Some took photos of the walls.

“Where are the Nicaraguans?” George said. “They’re missing all the fun.”

“Oh, they come in the morning,” the Internacionalistas said.

“Imagine,” said George, “what it must be like in the morning, when the Nicaraguans are here, if it’s like this now.”

One week George and I went to the Sunday-morning service. We woke very early and rode several linking buses across town. The church had Nicaraguans in it, but it was silent. No music, no shouting, just Molina at the front, murmuring Mass. “You should come at night,” a man leaned over a pew to tell us. “The Internacionalistas come at night.”

“Why do you come in the morning?”

“The Internacionalistas are asleep,” he said. “A church is not a place for dancing and making fun.”

Grab a digital or print subscription to read the full essay on our website and for access to new issues, web exclusives, and our extensive archive spanning more than two decades.

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In memory of Marjane Satrapi, we’re sharing this excerpt from Joshuah Bearman’s 2006 interview with her for Issue 36 of The Believer. Illustration by Charles Burns.

Toward the end of Persepolis II, the second installment of Marjane Satrapi’s ongoing project of autobiographical graphic novels, the author/narrator spends seven months designing a huge theme park based on Persian mythology. She takes her Tehran-based Disneyland to the Deputy Mayor’s office, where it is rejected—luckily for us, because shortly after that disappointment, Satrapi left Iran for Paris, a final emigration that led her to discover Art Spiegelman, the power of comics, and the development of her own method of storytelling.

Satrapi’s graphic novels are the opposite of mythology; personal and honest, they humanize the Middle East through memoir. Hemmed in by the tyranny of the mullahs, Satrapi’s life is nevertheless cosmopolitan, politically engaged, culturally sophisticated, and, like those of all adolescents, deeply conflicted. Today Satrapi lives in Paris, where she remains deeply conflicted, caught between home and exile, East and West, now all the more complicated by the geopolitics of the post–September 11 world.

The following interview took place at a brasserie around the corner from Satrapi’s studio in Paris, where she is working on an animated feature film adaptation of Persepolis. She smoked a lot, talked fast, and tied together a multitude of tangents.

—Joshuah Bearman

I. SUPERHERO STORIES

THE BELIEVER: Your books recently came out in Israel and were well received.

MARJANE SATRAPI: In a place like Israel, they’re very concerned with Iran, so there’s a lot of interest. Especially with what’s going on there now, the new government and all. So they want to see what this Iranian from France has to say in her comics. I guess that’s good. Now the books are coming out in other countries. And each time, they discover something different to be interested in.

BLVR: I think the broad appeal probably has to do with how your stories humanize a mostly unknown place. The popular notion about Iran is as a terrifying theocracy, brimming with lunatics who want to kill the West. As if every single Iranian has a bunch of flags in their closet, all lined up for the next Death to America/Israel protest. And then your books come along and tell a different story, about people with the same problems, sorrows, and joys that we have. And fears—here are Iranians who are just as afraid of the Iranian regime as we are.

MS: Absolutely. Here’s the problem: today, the description of the world is always reduced to yes or no, black or white. Superficial stories. Superhero stories. One side is the good one. The other one is evil. But I’m not a moral lesson giver. It’s not for me to say what is right or wrong. I describe situations as honestly as possible. The way I saw it. That’s why I use my own life as material. I have seen these things myself, and now I’m telling it to you. Because the world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.

BLVR: Superhero stories are the original territory for comic books, with good versus evil. So by deepening the story, are you also commenting on the format?

MS: I just think that comics have always been more than that. They really haven’t always been superheroes. And today, of course, people like Art Spiegelman have shown how truly powerful comics can be. Joe Sacco uses comics as political reporting. So comics are just another medium to express yourself. It’s not cinema; it’s not literature; it’s just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever. This is not the movies’ fault. It’s the fault of the directors who made those movies. Any medium can only live up to the strengths of the people working in it. If it’s been used to tell bad or boring stories, it’s not a problem with comics; it’s a problem with the writers of those comics.

BLVR: Do you think you reach a broader audience because of your use of comics?

MS: Maybe. Because of the images. You see a picture and you understand perfectly, immediately, the basic thing that’s happening. It’s probably more accessible because we are in a culture of images now. People are used to seeing stories that way. They understand looking at pictures.

II. STUCK IN THE MIDDLE

BLVR: Was there at a point at which you knew you wanted to draw a memoir?

MS: I always thought about it. And then there was a point that I could imagine what it was going to look like, although I didn’t know when I sat down what exactly would appear on the page. Sometimes you’re surprised by your own stories. There were things I didn’t plan, or didn’t really remember at first, that just came out.

BLVR: Your books are a kind of cultural bridge. If there were only text, maybe they’d be less able to serve that purpose.

MS: Probably so. It would also be harder for me. If I were to write a memoir with words, I’d have to figure out a way to express verbally an image I have in my mind. In my case, it’s easier to draw it. And words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there’s a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there’s more efficiency.

BLVR: You visited West Point and made a cartoon about it for the New York Times Op-Ed page. You expected one thing—angry drill sergeants, a summary execution for your antiwar views—but found something else. It seems like that’s a synopsis for a lot of your work.

MS: Yes, I learned a lot. In France, all you hear about is how, after September 11, all Americans supposedly eat Freedom Fries. And they don’t drink French wine or whatever. The news here makes it look like all Americans are fat patriots with boots who want to start war all over the Middle East. Of course, some people did start talking about Freedom Fries. But in France, you didn’t also see the Americans who opposed Bush. So when people here talk about the stupid Americans, I find myself defending America. I say, no, they’re not all like that. America’s ideals are still strong, and so on.

BLVR: When you’re in America, you probably wind up defending France.

MS: It’s funny that way. And everywhere I have to defend Iran. Because Iran is not understood at all, especially in the U.S.—I mean, come on! Bush with his Axis of Evil, and they want to kick our ass and all that. Just like in the U.S., where the people are not all represented by Bush, in Iran the people are not represented by the Ayatollahs. So I’m stuck in the middle.

BLVR: Like a U.N. goodwill ambassador.

MS: Now my job is to defend everybody. But I don’t mind. Because I travel, and I like to talk to people and really listen to them. And I have no prejudices. I figured out a long time ago that, whatever I think I know, I don’t know anything. Once I realized that, I really started learning. That’s a great strength: I know that I don’t know. There are some people in Iran who are fundamentalist and others who are not. I have very good Israeli friends. And I have very good American friends. We come from different cultures but share points of view. It’s humanism, which we’re steadily losing. That’s what the comics are about in a way, trying to stop that loss.

BLVR: That’s something that your books address indirectly. Was that intended?

MS: Absolutely. Of course. The cultural similarities. The human similarities. Maybe the biggest problem is that there’s no empathy. Nobody puts themselves in the place of others. Everyone thinks they are the only one to suffer. Or that they’re the only ones who like ice cream or take their kids on vacation. People are always so shocked to find out that in Iran we knew about punk rock. Sometimes we learned about it before Americans. I have friends from the Midwest who found out about the punk movement after I did. It also shows the power of anecdotes, a small story, to explain the bigger picture. So I worked in anecdotes of my own to comment on the world. Because the world is not decided by George Bush and Saddam Hussein. They make things happen in the news, but that’s not real life. Real life is you and me.

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Stuff I’ve Been Reading: May 2006 by

An Interview with Shirin Neshat, conducted by Dorna Khazeni

Congratulations to Cecily Parks, whose poem “September” from Issue 150 of The Believer has won a Pushcart Prize. We’re delighted to share the poem below in full.

I was conversing

with the blossomless canes

in the hot fall air

the weak breeze

that briefly jostled

us all gone I guess

I loathe this trellis

said the shrub rose

And we these velvety lettuces

said the munching bunnies

sculpted for maybe

eternity into the stone

bench I sat on and late

I walked away from them

with the no-smell

of leaves blotched brown

and black hypanthia that once

cupped blooms but now

nothing and the piebald moon

sweating in the sky not

knowing if I wanted to run

to the cold river or the cold

river to run to me

—to us, really,

and scour our cages clean.

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“Super Bloom,” a poem by Henri Cole

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The following is excerpted from Sophie Haigney’s review of Trevor Paglen’s From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly,’ which appeared in Issue 137 of The Believer. The installation was exhibited at the Barbican Centre in London in 2019–2020. Illustration by Kristen Radtke.

The exhibition began, like the fall of mankind did, with an apple. Or rather, it began with a glut of photographs of apples: red apples, green apples, yellow apples, sliced apples, bushels of apples, an apple with the word “Google” carved into it. These images were pinned to a wall and clustered around a label featuring a single, simple noun: “apple.”

This was From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly,’ on display at the Barbican Centre in London in 2020. For the project, the American artist Trevor Paglen culled around thirty thousand images from the online database ImageNet, printed out small-scale versions, and pinned them to a lengthy curved wall, categorized by noun: “soil,” “valley,” “syringe,” “pizza,” “mascot.” The result was breathtakingly expansive: seen from a distance of a few feet, it resembled a shimmering mirage of animals, plants, minerals, and people.

The near-infinite visual library was possible because ImageNet is one of the largest publicly available libraries of images. It is also the pioneering dataset for much of the world’s image-recognition technology. Everything from Facebook’s self-tagging feature to self-driving cars to drones is trained to see the world using massive datasets like ImageNet. It was amassed over the course of nearly a decade, largely by workers who, for pennies, matched images to associated words on the task website Amazon Mechanical Turk. The result was a dataset of more than fourteen million images, cataloged and labeled so machines could learn to match an image of a rose to the word “rose.” Paglen made visible this wild, freewheeling taxonomy of everything under the sun, including the sun itself.

In 1668, an English clergyman and natural philosopher named John Wilkins unveiled a similarly vast project: he renamed the world. In his masterwork, “An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language,” which ran to almost seven hundred pages, Wilkins laid out a template for a universal language, one that would be so perfect in its powers of expression that it would bring humans closer to God and “not signifie words, but things and notions.”

Wilkins was writing against the backdrop of the English Civil War and the loss of Latin as a common Christian language. He was also grappling with an enduring human problem—the gap between words and their meanings. In an essay about Wilkins and his language, Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Apart from the composed words and the derivations, all the languages in the world… are equally inexpressive.” Words bear no inherent relation, after all, to the things they name. Or, as the poet Robert Hass later wrote, “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking.” in its insistence on the notion that “because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies.”

Wilkins’s solution to this problem seemed fairly straightforward. First, he would separate the world into forty categories, or genuses. Then he would subdivide these categories into “differences,” and from there, divide everything further into “species.” Each genus, difference, and species would be assigned a monosyllable, which would then be strung together to form new, more perfect words. A curious young reader could then sound out not only a word, but also something of its meaning.

So it fell to Wilkins to break the world into its component parts. In the late seventeenth century, systems of taxonomy and classification were flourishing in the natural sciences, particularly at the Royal Society, of which Wilkins was a founding member. There was still not much established order of things. When it came to animals, for instance, most early ecologists used the divisions provided by Genesis—water, air, and land. Warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals were often separated. Beyond that, animals could be arranged by size, rarity, symbolic meaning, or simple alphabetical order. (Neither did everyone agree about which animals needed to be classified: early encyclopedias were still divided over whether griffins and centaurs were found in nature; Wilkins thought not.)

Wilkins’s forty genuses of things and notions range from “Transcendental” to “Elements” to “Space.” Underneath these umbrella categories is a set of “differences” and “species” that get increasingly specific, and which he charts in the next part of the essay. Under animals, we come to the section “Of fish,” in which Wilkins divides fish into the categories “viviparous” and “oviparous.” Then he denotes “viviparous oblong fish,” which are subdivided further by characteristics like “rows of very sharp teeth” (sharke, glaucus) and “thorns on their backs” (thornback dog, hog-fish). There are also viviparous cartilaginous fish, oviparous fish whose back fins are soft and flexible, oviparous fish having two fins on the back, oviparous fish having one fin on the back, oviparous fish of an oblong figure, fishes of a hard crustaceous skin, squamous river fishes, and so on. Wilkins’s named world unspools, paradoxically, toward organization and classification.

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The following is excerpted from Eric Spitznagel’s interview with David Sedaris in Issue 28 of The Believer. Illustration by Charles Burns.

David Sedaris knows more than any author should about his readers. He knows, for instance, that more of his German fans have seen their parents naked than fans of any other nationality. He knows that women with cirrhosis tend to be embarrassed by their conditions, but boys with tiny, shriveled limbs can be easily coaxed into medical discussions. He’s also learned that some people will suspect him of being a racist just because he likes stories about monkeys. He has the angry letter to prove it.

Sedaris hasn’t come across this information easily. It’s taken years of touring, meeting his devoted followers in bookstores across the country. He’s made it his life’s goal to visit every state, and at press time, only North and South Dakota remain on his “to do” list. He prefers, however, to visit small towns and out-of-the-way places, particularly those that involve, in his words, “two airplanes and an hour-long car ride.”

It’s all part of his quest to amass a staggering collection of factoids and stories and random minutiae on every conceivable subject. One might suspect an ulterior motive. He has, after all, made a career of writing stranger-than-fiction accounts of his life. Over the course of five books, from Barrel Fever to Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, he’s told stories of family-friendly hookers and midget jazz teachers and an older brother named Rooster with a penchant for the word “motherfucker.” But Sedaris insists that he’s not looking to his readers for grist for the mill. He’s just… curious.

I spoke with Sedaris by phone while he was vacationing in Normandy, France. He has a home there that he visits every year, where he can dabble in arachnology and, time permitting, the occasional essay.

—Eric Spitznagel

I. EVERYBODY WHO WORKS IN RETAIL HAS A STORY ABOUT SOMEBODY DEFECATING IN THEIR STORE.

THE BELIEVER: You spent the better part of last year traveling the country and doing bookstore readings. Do you actually enjoy book tours, or are they just a chore?

DAVID SEDARIS: I always look forward to book tours, mostly because I like staying in hotels. I never stayed in a nice hotel before I started writing books. When my first book came out, I’d been in a hotel maybe four times in my entire life. It never occurred to me that I’d ever be able to travel for work or stay in a hotel. There’s nothing better than twenty-four-hour room service.

BLVR: What about meeting your fans? Is that a positive experience, or would you prefer that they keep their distance?

DS: Oh, I love it. That’s the best part. At these readings, I have to tell stories about myself and answer questions about myself. After a while it’s like, well, enough about me. When I sign books, I always ask people questions. There’s no better time to be sick than when you’re on a book tour. You just say, “If there’s a doctor in the house, I’ll sign your book first. Just answer a few simple questions for me.” And they’re happy to do it. When I’m not on tour, I don’t normally talk to that many people. I’m not averse to it; I just don’t have the opportunity. It’s worse when you’re living in another country, and sometimes you scare people with your accent or they don’t understand what you’re saying. It’s such a treat for me to be back in a place where I speak the language and I can ask people things. And when you’re signing books, you can ask people whatever you want.

BLVR: Do they ever try to give you story ideas?

DS: All the time. And that’s exactly what I want. I collect stories. On my last book tour, I was collecting stories about people defecating in public places.

BLVR: I’m sorry?

DS: There are dozens of them. I’ve met people who work at the Gap, and they tell me about customers who go into the dressing room and defecate on the floor. That kind of thing happens in all kinds of stores. At Target, they crawl into those circular clothing racks and defecate. They defecate in the stock room of shoe stores. It’s amazing how many public places people use to defecate.

BLVR: Do you actively seek out these stories?

DS: Not really. I mean, I don’t ask a crowd, “Does anybody have any stories about public defecation?” I just talk about it during my readings, and afterwards people come up to get their books signed and they tell me things that’ve happened to them. I’ll mention something about people defecating in the dressing room of a Gap, and 97 percent of the audience will shake their head. “No, you’re lying.” But 3 percent will be nodding, and they’re usually the ones who work in retail. Those are the people you want to talk to. Every one of them has a story about somebody defecating in their store.

BLVR: Do you think they’re more likely to talk to you about public defecation because of who you are?

DS: Oh, sure. If you go into Banana Republic and ask the cashier, “Do people ever defecate in your dressing room?” they’re not going to tell you. They might be afraid that you’re a reporter or that you’re planning to defecate in their dressing room. But get those people in another situation, in another environment, and they’re happy to talk about it.

BLVR: Do you have a favorite defecation story?

DS: Oh god, there are so many good ones. A librarian told me that she’d built a castle out of cardboard to decorate the children’s section of her library and somebody defecated on the drawbridge.

BLVR: Wow. That’s horrible. What is wrong with the human species?

DS: I know, I can’t wrap my mind around it. I met a guy in Las Vegas who does maintenance for a casino. He told me that some people are so reluctant to leave a slot machine that they’ve put a lot of money into that they’ll defecate in their pants. When the police try to drag them away, they’ll put up a fight. They would rather sit there in a puddle of their own shit than stop gambling. Isn’t that fascinating?

BLVR: And a little disgusting. Do you ever collect stories that aren’t scatological?

DS: Oh, sure. On one tour, I was collecting stories about pet monkeys. You’d be surprised how many people have stories about monkeys. The problem is, most monkey stories end tragically. There was a monkey that was owned by an alcoholic grandfather who took it to a swamp and threw it out of the car. There was a monkey who lived on Pepsi and candy bars and died of dehydration in someone’s yard. There’s the monkey that ate a plastic mushroom and died.

BLVR: Do you just collect these stories as a hobby, or are you hoping to use them in your writing?

DS: I’d love to, but I’m not sure how I could make it work. In most cases, the fact that they’re telling me these stories is more interesting than the stories themselves. I might be able to do something with the grandfather one, but it’d probably have to be fiction. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my grandfather. I would have given anything to have an alcoholic grandfather who drove a monkey to a swamp and kicked it out of the car. I’m so jealous.

Grab a digital or print subscription to read the full interview on our site and get access to new issues, digital exclusives, and our extensive archive.

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The following is excerpted from Annalee Newitz’s interview with Boots Riley in Issue 147 of The Believer. Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad.

I dressed carefully for my interview with Boots Riley. Layered under my flannel shirt was a purple tee featuring a cartoon explosion around the words I GOT THE s#*@ KICKED OUT OF ME! It was a deep cut, a reference to the fake game show in Riley’s movie, Sorry to Bother You, where people submit to abuse for fame and prize money. Danny Glover’s character wears this shirt during a key scene, and later the main character, Cassius, goes on the show as a publicity stunt, to bring attention to the worker strikes that are spreading across the city. Nothing sums up the power of capitalism better than watching Cassius get punched bloody on a fake TV game show while screaming about worker rights.

When Riley strolled into the coffee shop where we met in Oakland, California, he grinned. “Nice shirt!” Before I could say something in reply, the guy waiting for coffee next to us reached out to shake Riley’s hand. “You’re Boots Riley, right? I really love your work.” Fans greeted him a few more times during our interview, and Riley was always kind; he asked people’s names and chatted with them a bit before turning back to our conversation. He may be a celebrity—lead vocalist in funk-punk band the Coup, writer-director of Sorry to Bother You, and creator of surreal TV series I’m a Virgo—but he’s also a pretty humble guy. He’s the sort of celebrity whom people feel comfortable approaching, and who makes time for everyone.

That’s not a surprise. Riley’s art was inspired by his early experiences connecting with people as a labor organizer and party promoter. He doesn’t like the idea of being an authority or a superstar. He just wants to show people a good time and leave them with a better sense of how to rebel against capitalist greed and systemic racism. In Sorry to Bother You, service workers at a call center discover that they’re selling indentured servitude—and some are being fed a biotech drug that turns laborers into half-horse, half-human “Equisapiens.” In response, the workers launch a series of strikes to take down seemingly the whole city of Oakland. I’m a Virgo centers on Cootie, a thirteen-foot-tall Black teenager in Oakland whose friends are fighting gentrification while he dates a Flash-like speedster and fights a billionaire media mogul who moonlights as an Iron Man–style vigilante cop. As if that weren’t weird enough, I’m a Virgo features an animated show­-within-a-show called Parking Tickets, one episode of which is so existentially bleak that it sends anyone who watches it into a state of catatonic despair.

The second-to-last album Riley made with the Coup was called Sorry to Bother You—the same title he gave to his first film. It’s full of rousing anti-capitalist songs like “The Guillotine,” and more whimsical ones like “The Magic Clap.” There are glimpses of the movie he would eventually write in some of the lyrics, and his transition from one form of media to the other feels effortless. Perhaps that’s because Riley views media as an invitation to act, rather than an end in itself.

Riley is preoccupied with the ways people are manipulated by the media—for good and for ill—and he loves to get his ideas across by using a collage of genres. He combines indie film aesthetics with bizarro science fiction subplots, comic book tropes, and splatstick body horror. As a science fiction writer, I’ve followed his work for years, because I think he’s taking the genre in a bold new direction. And yet, as I discovered while talking to him about everything from comic books to Dune and Star Wars, Riley has an uneasy relationship with science fiction. He worries about his stories becoming too far removed from reality, disconnected from people’s lived experiences.

Ultimately, Riley’s goal is to move his audience to take political action, and he doesn’t think movies set on distant planets can do that nearly as well as ones set here on Earth, in Oakland.

—Annalee Newitz

I. “THEY’RE SAYING NO, BUT WHY?”

THE BELIEVER: I wanted to start by talking about Oakland, because this has always been your home, and most of your work is about Oakland in some way. And yet you always give us this version of Oakland that is fantastical or absurd. Can you talk about world-building, and what it means to take this familiar place and transform it for your fiction?

BOOTS RILEY: I was involved in constructing fake worlds early on with my music, because the stuff I wrote was about a thriving movement that was only in my mind. It was nowhere in existence. I wanted to excite people about joining it, you know—get people excited about the possibilities of what that movement could be.

It’s just a different way of being realistic. So, for instance, when I started working on Sorry to Bother You, I was writing what I thought was a workplace comedy. And I got to where I wanted to include the “white voice” thing, and I did it in more of a realistic way. But as I was explaining it, I realized I was missing a piece. I was missing how it felt. I didn’t want that idea to just be name-checked. I wanted it to have a visceral feeling to it. So in one scene I decided to do something that wasn’t realistic [where Cassius, played by LaKeith Stanfield, speaks in a “white voice,” overdubbed by David Cross]. It creates a feeling of disembodiment. It makes you feel something, as opposed to just knowing something.

It really has to do with the character’s reactions, right? Because you can have a supposedly totally realistic movie and you don’t believe in it—you don’t care. But you can have elephants flying around the room, and as long as they react like real people, you believe in them.

Also, I’m trying to create a roller coaster ride. That’s one place where I disagree with Martin Scorsese’s critique of Marvel movies. He said, Oh, they’re just like amusement parks. Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think you can do that in a good way or in a bad way. I’m trying to take people through this ride, and I’m breaking rules as a way to catch people off guard. I wasn’t like, I want to make it fantastical. It’s just like, This works.

BLVR: I’ve heard you say that you think everything is propaganda.

BR: Yeah, everything has a political outlook to it, right?

BLVR: Do you think that all expression is propaganda?

BR: The word propaganda got popularized in different ways at different times. But our generation knows it as a derogatory word for what other countries do. However, in the 1980s, if you were to call Red Dawn—which was my favorite movie at the time—propaganda, people would have been like, Oh, you’re crazy. That’s just freethinking.

BLVR: But it’s completely propaganda.

BR: The real meaning of the word is just, you know, art that’s meant to try to get you to do something. Often with the Coup, I would feel like, Wow, we executed this thing on a level comparable to [that of] other artists that I think are good. But then [critics would dismiss the artistry because] it’s a political thing, right? But if there’s some other song that’s saying exactly what we’re used to hearing, then they can focus on the technique of it.

BLVR: Oftentimes you get the opposite pushback in a leftist political space, where if you’re doing something that’s fun or joyful or science-fictional, it’s like, That’s not serious.

BR: Matter of fact, a bunch of people claim the Coup isn’t political.

BLVR: Because you’re too silly?

BR: Yeah, exactly. I have a background where I was going door-to-door selling newspapers, talking to people, trying to get them to join a union campaign. Even as a teenager, I could see what was effective, and it was rarely We’re against this thing right now. What people went for was the possibility of success. They went for something that was affirmative and joyful. So in my work, the comic aspect of it comes from trying to have that joy.

BLVR: A lot of your characters are torn between selling out to people in power and doing something meaningful or progressive. Why are you so interested in characters who are kind of morally compromised?

BR: It’s more interesting. It’s also a lot of the people I know, maybe on smaller levels. It might be a political organization where suddenly we need to sell all this cocaine so we can get a community center. Or trying to figure out the right path in life. To a certain extent, that’s me. You know, there’s one aspect of my story that’s like, Oh, he was involved in radical organizations from age fourteen. Then there’s the other side of the story. From the age of eleven, I was doing door-to-door sales. I was a party promoter when I was nineteen, finding loopholes for liquor licenses when I was selling [liquor], and kids were running around with alcohol. There were all of those contradictions.

BLVR: Do you feel like you use any of that early experience with sales to sell your work to, say, Amazon, which coproduced I’m a Virgo?

BR: I mean, sure.

BLVR: Do you feel like you’re sort of switching between personas a little bit when you do that?

BR: I don’t know. It’s all the same, because when you’re selling door-to-door, after a while, you start trying to figure out, OK, what are the people you’re trying to sell to really saying? They’re saying no, but why? You want to know what’s important to them, for manipulative reasons. But I learned how to listen to people like that. So the first art form that I was really good at was having a conversation with people. I was good at showing them how our ideas were the same.

Read the full interview on our site, and subscribe for access to new issues and our extensive archives. To celebrate Rafia Zakaria’s National Magazine Award-winning essay, print subscriptions are $10 off through Tuesday morning.

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Below is the first installment of author and physician Anna DeForest’s new guest column, A Good Exit, in which five writers confront their mortality, worldly suffering, and the beyond.

For access to all of our web exclusives—along with new issues and our twenty-year archive—get a print or digital subscription to The Believer, now 15% off with the promo code “DeForest.” Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad.

What does it mean to die well? This question is central to palliative care, the field of medicine in which I work when I am not writing, a field aimed at easing suffering in serious illness and helping people face the end of life. Planning to die is a strange task; you can put it off, wait for your specific death to become concrete and unstoppable, but this nearly always means waiting too long to reorient your life toward what matters. If death is inevitable, why are conversations about death avoidable and rare? “People can stand what is true,” psychologist Eugene Gendlin writes. “They are already enduring it.” In this spirit, over the course of the column, five brave writers will reflect on their mortality with only myself as their semi-professional guide.

First up, Garielle Lutz, who is known for her inimitable diction and work that pushes language to almost crushing extremities of invention. Now with five story collections, two chapbooks, a grammar handbook and a grammar reference book, a collected works, and most recently Backwardness, a 944-page compendium of writings drawn from decades of journals and correspondence, Lutz has long secured her place as our most profound documentarian of the horrible loneliness of being alive. Lutz has been a friend and mentor for almost two decades, but as we spoke via email I was moved anew by the tenderness she shelters with the stark strange voices of her fiction.

—Anna DeForest

THE BELIEVER: Most people don’t enjoy talking about dying. Is death a subject you generally avoid?

GARIELLE LUTZ: At this time in my life, I think about death very often. I find myself bringing up the subject with friends my own age, and they are reluctant to talk about it, other than to express some hope that there is an afterlife of some sort, a hope I do not think I have ever once entertained. What I was hoping when I initiated the conversations was that there would be a realistic discussion about the complete extinction of consciousness, but the other persons would start talking about reincarnation or Heaven. My notion of Heaven was formed by little comic books handed out in the Sunday school I was dragooned to attending as a kid. There was no reason for me to believe that such a realm existed.

BLVR: We can have a realistic discussion about the complete extinction of consciousness if you like.

GL: I never succeeded in imagining nothingness in a satisfactory way—vestiges of life, such as an old-time milkman delivering milk, always intruded into the darkness—and at some point, maybe in my fifties, I realized it was useless to continue imagining something beyond my grasp, so I accepted the impossibility of it. There is a statement often attributed, I think, to Mark Twain, to the effect that death will be nothing more than a return to the nothingness that existed before one’s birth. The only trouble I have with that view of things is that there must be a difference between the nothingness following death and the nothingness that preceded birth, because the nothingness following death follows a person’s having once been embodied, having once been a person with feelings and memories. So the nothingness following death just feels a lot sadder. To me, the saddest thing about being dead is not being able to miss people.

BLVR: To be able to relate to the dead at all is to form a relationship with absence—that’s a paraphrase of Simone Weil—but only the living can have relationships. Something about this construction makes me think about the ways in which all of our relationships are imaginary.

GL: Along with not being able to miss people, the other sad thing about death is not being able to gesture toward people, to maneuver oneself closer to people, in hopes of forming some sort of intimate connection. Because what else is there? But I do agree with your speculation that perhaps all of our relationships are mostly notional, imaginary, to begin with. Other people, though, get under one’s skin anyway, to beautiful effect. There isn’t a whole lot else in my life I would miss, other than certain city streets, certain books and music. I would not miss much of my physical life, because, from head to toe, my body has always felt like just one big birth defect.

BLVR: Death, especially by way of illness, has a lot to do with the body and a changing relationship with the body. But being a trans person, for a lot of us, really posits the body as a lifelong problem in a way that probably doesn’t fully generalize to cisgendered people. Your fiction is located here too, in the trouble of the body.

GL: From a very early age, I knew my body was wrong and that things were completely pointless, so that is the primary reason that I have never felt as if I am fully and accurately in life. There was always the distressing, incapacitating sense I had been mispositioned in life from the outset, that I have been here only by mistake, a mistake that can’t be corrected. And I guess, related to this, is that the things people typically would say about death usually struck me as “off” somehow. About twenty-five years ago, for instance, when a woman broke up with me, she must have been afraid that I was about to kill myself, because she intoned, sententiously, “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” I remember thinking that the assertion had things exactly backwards—that just going on with life was nothing but a temporary, ineffective solution to a permanent problem.

Weirdly enough, there is every reason to stay alive. Maybe the only useful thing I have finally learned in old age is that it is possible to be depressed beyond hope and yet still be capable of thrilling to the tiniest joys in one’s day. So even on my worst days, I make sure to remain on high alert to those tiniest of joy-giving things. Here is an example, and it’s not even something I witnessed but just something that was told to me last week: A woman I know was dog-sitting an enormous dog who is afflicted with severe anxiety. The only way the dog would fall asleep was by pressing her face against the woman’s cheek. So that is how the two of them slept, cheek to cheek. That struck me as one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard. Knowing that a connection like that is possible between two beings is enough to keep me in life.

BLVR: I have started to wonder if people don’t like to talk about dying, even dying well, because it always involves talking about living well, and they don’t want to talk about that, either.

GL: Living well, to me, at my age, is probably just trying to get through a day by inflicting the least amount of damage onto myself and onto others. I of course fail all the time. The other thing I try to do each day is accept my marginality and insignificance and find helpful ways to express my marginality and insignificance.

BLVR: Do you think about the biochemical facts that might lead to the end of your life? Are there deaths that worry you, or deaths you might feel alright about?

GL: It’s much easier to get one’s affairs in order—over the past five years, I’ve undertaken several major purges of my possessions—than it is to make the mental and emotional preparations for one’s demise, but I do feel that by now I am probably as ready as I ever will be. Cancer terrifies me, and so does dementia. What terrifies me about cancer is the severity of the pain, and what terrifies me about dementia is the demolition of my personality and cognition. But above all, I am terrified by the prospect of immobility, because walking is one of my most profound pleasures. I was always hoping that I would die in my sleep, because I had assumed that such a death would be painless, but I have since been disabused of that notion. I am hoping for a quick exit.

The next installment of A Good Exit, an interview with Amy Hempel, comes to our website next week. Purchase a print or digital subscription with promo code “DeForest” for 15% off plus access to more online columns, new issues, and our entire twenty-year archive.

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This week, Rafia Zakaria won the 2026 National Magazine Award in the category of Columns and Essays. The winning piece, “Water Pressure,” was published in Issue 150 of The Believer and is available to read in full on our website. It follows Zakaria’s father on his search for clean water in Karachi, Pakistan, where the mounting climate crisis has crept into all aspects of daily life. Zakaria discussed the prize and the celebrated essay with our managing editor, Ginger Greene.

Subscribe to the magazine this weekend for $10 off your purchase.

THE BELIEVER: You won a National Magazine Award last night in New York for your essay, “Water Pressure.” What did it feel like to see this piece recognized in that way?

RAFIA ZAKARIA: It was a tremendous surprise... It is very difficult to place personal essays, but it is the personal story that can ultimately make an abstract issue—such as water scarcity in a faraway city like Karachi—seem as real as the heat wave that was happening in New York on the day of the award ceremony. I was so grateful to work on this project, and to have the freedom and latitude to explore what extreme heat can do to ordinary people in an ordinary megacity.

BLVR: Your story explores the many difficulties of procuring water and power in Karachi, in an ever-warming world. What inspired you to approach this subject? And what were some of the difficulties you faced as you developed the essay?

RZ: I feel like a lot of climate journalism focuses on the deterioration of beautiful natural environments and the loss of wild ecosystems. I wanted to focus on how extreme heat, as well as water and power scarcity, affect human relationships, how it erodes and corrodes the scheme of relations between people and the environment. Sometimes it is not possible to see how it is happening, when you are in the midst of dealing with these problems every day. But as someone who is in and out of Karachi, I was able to perceive these dynamics.

One of the difficulties I faced reporting this story was a lack of precedence for this sort of exploration. For instance, there is excellent and deep reporting on natural or man-made disasters and their aftermath. But there is less writing on persistent issues, like decades-long water shortages, where there is no single cataclysmic event on which to center a story. I wanted to show that the story of chronic scarcity can also be told in an impactful and interesting way.

BLVR: The piece opens with a vivid scene from your family’s neighborhood in Karachi, in which a man is angered when he notices your aunt receiving an overflow of water into her underground water tank, such that it’s wastefully flooding out onto the street. Their confrontation ends when your aunt begins to throw rocks at him to get him to leave her alone. I was curious: What was your first reaction when you heard this story? Was it relayed to you as a problem of “water envy,” as you call it?

RZ: I will admit that my aunt’s reaction was a bit extreme, but it crystallized how chronic scarcity can create levels of seething frustration that can bubble to the surface in absurd ways. The story was told to me in the context of: Is she OK? But actually no one facing this sort of privation day after day is really OK. Water is a mainstay of existence, so the fact that you can now have an iPhone but not access to clean water is a bizarre juxtaposition of privilege and paucity.

I also felt that my aunt’s actions put into stark focus what people likely want to do but usually don’t. I came up with the term “water envy” because I wanted to start creating a vocabulary for phenomena that are felt, but for which there are often no words. I think the phrase encapsulates how policing resource consumption becomes just another part of living in a neighborhood. In most cases people will not challenge each other to the extent they do in this instance, but that is why it is such an apt story: Both characters had reached the end of their rope.

BLVR: Water politics in Karachi are complicated. For one thing, there are the daily strategies middle-class Karachiites have developed to procure water, which involves pumping water from the main lines into private underground water tanks. Navigating the uncertainty of main-line waterflow has become a full-time job for your father, as you point out. At the same time, there are many more people who don’t have access to these “pump games,” because they can’t afford a private tank. They are forced to purchase water from private companies that hike up their prices. How has the situation with Karachi’s water mafia progressed since you reported this piece?

RZ: I think the situation is much more dire now, because the pressures have become more acute. The population has grown dramatically and grows further still on a daily basis. Temperatures have risen, owing to climate change phenomena like the heat domes I talk about in the piece. As a result, people increasingly have to resort to taking their chances and obtaining water without knowing its source or even if it is potable.

In the summer there are thousands of deaths that are ultimately caused by lack of clean water, but they are not often tallied under this category. As the heat index rises in Karachi, these situations are pushed to the limit and people—particularly the very old and the very young—begin to die. The water mafias are more entrenched and merciless now; they know how to throttle competition and work with street gangs and land mafias to ensure that the consumers in a specific area have no options but to pay them.

BLVR: As we approach the summer months, Karachi is already reaching excessively high temperatures. In early May, the city recorded a peak of 111 degrees Fahrenheit, the city’s highest reading since 2018. This heat, as you describe in your piece, compounds with power outages and water shortages, which seeds the ground for long-term public health crises. How are you feeling about the upcoming summer?

RZ: I dread the summer months for Karachiites. If you fall sick during the summer, it is hard to get reliable care in a timely fashion and, most of all, to find a relatively cool environment to recover in. Any illness could threaten survival. Since there is no easily available large-scale refrigeration in poorer areas, there is also a huge risk of eating spoiled food. There is no way of telling if something in a store fridge was left out for hours the night before, or if the energy source powering the fridge is reliable. So it’s Russian roulette all summer long.

This summer will not be any different. The political rift between Karachi and the rest of the province means that the city is constantly starved of resources and the federal government seems disinterested in the plight of the people that live there. Many Karachiites are the children of people who migrated from India in 1947 and hence distinct from Punjabis, who make up the majority ethnicity. All of these divisions make the situation one of constant chaos. People are living a bit of a Hobbesian existence there.

BLVR: How has the situation in Karachi shaped your relationship to your experience of the US? You recently moved to Salt Lake City in Utah, which is also in the midst of a climate-related disaster. Have you noticed any similarities between the two places?

RZ: Well, there is a war over water underway in Utah as well. Last week, three county commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, passed a proposal to build a 40,000 acre data center in the area—that is twice the size of Manhattan. The residents, aghast at what their elected representatives have done, are now trying to organize a referendum that will stop the plan. If the data center is built, the project will suck up all the water left in the already drying Great Salt Lake. It is estimated that it will also increase nighttime temperatures by 8 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit.

This situation really reminds me of Karachi, and it is difficult for me not to feel a bit like a Cassandra. Utahns have little idea of what that sort of scarcity and extreme heat can do to the fabric of society. It transforms our individual and collective relationships with the natural environment, but also the relationships we humans have with each other.

Read “Water Pressure” here.

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This week, The Believer won its first National Magazine Award, for Rafia Zakaria’s essay “Water Pressure.” The honor comes after fifteen nominations, and we’re delighted to mark the occasion by lifting the paywall on Rafia’s essay and offering $10 off print subscriptions through the holiday weekend.

We’re also celebrating Isle McElroy, a finalist in Reviews and Criticism for three essays from the series “Character Studies.” Below, we’re sharing excerpts from the work recognized by the National Magazine Awards this year. “Water Pressure” illustration by Owen Pomery.

Water Pressure

The difficulties of procuring water and power in Karachi, Pakistan, where surging temperatures have strained the city’s resources, and much more

by Rafia Zakaria

In the middle of the summer of 2024, when the temperature in Karachi was skirting 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a man was walking past my paternal aunt’s house. The sun was high in the sky at midafternoon, and he had just returned from offering his afternoon prayers at the nearby mosque. He did this every Friday, the holiest day of the week for Muslims, and the day on which the week’s main sermon is held. When he passed by my aunt’s home, he saw that water was overflowing out of her underground tank and onto the street. This annoyed him a great deal. Water envy is common in Karachi, a city that doesn’t have enough water for its twenty million or more inhabitants. Water comes through the municipal pipes for only an hour or two each day and sometimes not at all. Many homes that are not apartments have underground tanks in which water from the pipes can be stored. In most ­single-family homes, including my aunt’s, water must then be pumped to an overhead tank on the roof so it can flow out of the faucets….

One day not long after that sweltering Friday afternoon, so hot that even birds would not fly, this man—who is the sort of vigilante that retired men of a certain age can be—passed by my aunt’s house again. He was stunned to see that, yet again, water was flowing out of the underground tank and onto the street’s parched asphalt. If last time he had been annoyed at seeing this largesse of water, this time he was angered. In the past week, no water had flowed into his own tank at all. By Thursday the lack of water in his home had become so acute that he had had to purchase a private water tanker in order to shower and do household tasks like laundry and dishwashing. The tanker had not arrived until 9 p.m. the previous evening, an hour by which he would have liked to have been settled in front of the television. As a result, he was cross not only about having to spend money—something he truly disliked—but also about having his routine thrown into disarray.

All this exacerbated his indignation, added to which was the fact that he felt he “deserved” the water more. Why, after all, should a reclusive widow’s home be blessed with such a bounty of water when he was being denied his fair share? This time he decided he would not leave until he could deliver his own sermon on waste to the homeowner, loud enough for all the other neighbors to hear. For this to be possible, he needed someone to answer the door. Standing on the street, as the rivulets eddied around his sandals, he began calling out and ringing the doorbell. He would not, he resolved, leave until and unless someone responded to him.

Read the full essay

Character Studies

A novelist dissects the major and minor performances of the 2025 Oscar nominees

by Isle McElroy

Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave

I couldn’t care less about who has the most accurate read on Lawrence. What matters is that, for all of his admirable characteristics, Lawrence cannot see himself the way others do. And through these secondary characters, the viewer deepens their understanding of Lawrence and the world he inhabits. Character development rarely follows the path of one person coming to terms with who they are. At its best, it tracks how a person responds to the definitions and structures imposed on them. Conclave offers a window into that space where the self and the other align to create a richer portrait of the self.

Read the full column

László Tóth in The Brutalist

A disorienting opening scene trails László Tóth (Brody) through the overpopulated hull of a ship en route to America. It is the first of many attempts by Corbet to undermine expectations: a viewer will likely assume they’re seeing Tóth being led to a concentration camp. Though Tóth has lived through Buchenwald, his trauma isn’t used as a device to manufacture sympathy.

Read the full column

Toros in Anora

Toros is what the novelist Charles Baxter would call a “Captain Happen,” a character who propels the action of a narrative through the outsize force of their will. Iago, who drives Othello toward the eventual murder of Desdemona, is a classic example of this type. Toros, however, is not as malevolent as Iago—and that’s what I find most fascinating about him. Despite learning so little about him as a person, the viewer gains an understanding of Toros through the pressure he puts on Ani to get an annulment and the urgency he brings to his search for Vanya.

Read the full column

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Related articles:

“Missed Calls,” by Rafia Zakaria

“Character Studies: Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance,” by Isle McElroy

“My Feminist Friend,” by Rafia Zakaria

From Issue 6 of The Believer. Ayelet Waldman’s latest novel, A Perfect Hand, is out as of yesterday.

The AVCX, the country’s largest independent crossword and knowledge games outlet, is offering Believer readers a two-month free trial. Subscribers get weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email, on AVCX’s web-based solver, or in their favorite app. AVCX also features work from many Believer crossword contributors, including Wyna Liu, Ada Nicolle, and Ben Tausig.

Features:

• Non-Stick Grill Plates

• Insulated Cool-touch Handle

• Safety-locking latch for storage

• On/off indicator light

• Ready indicator light

• Floating hinge system

One senses intuitively that all food items can be improved by being hermetically sealed between two slices of good bread, but final proof has awaited the development by top scientists of the Krups FDE3-12 Universal Grill and Panini Maker. Any food. All food. Cheese, obviously. Eggs. Steak. Marmalade. Hot dogs. Noodles. All the contents of one’s fridge, it turns out, should be subjected, under strict German conditions, to the searing and sealing heat of the Krups FDE3-12 Universal Grill and Panini Maker. Hitherto uninteresting, even inedible substances, once stamped into a sheath of golden-crusted, white-fleshed Italian loaf, are instantly transformed into delicacies. A jar of ancient cornichon? Slice thin, cover with mustard, and gently press down on the Insulated Cool-touch Handle.

A word about that handle. It is very cool. Cold, even, especially when compared to the metal top of the Krups FDE3-12 Universal Grill and Panini Maker. I know this, unfortunately, because I casually leaned my elbow on the metal lid, momentarily forgetting the remarkable conductive properties of stainless steel. The burn was bright red, but did not blister, most likely because I immediately ran it under cold water—this being, incidentally, the only way to deal with a kitchen burn. Ice is less than useful, and butter is an old wives’ tale of a remedy that is more harmful than helpful.

To work the Krups FDE3-12 Universal Grill and Panini Maker, one places the items on the gridded Non-Stick Grill Plates, grasps the cool handle in one’s two hands, and closes the lid, pressing down with a firmness dictated by one’s preference. Does one like one’s panini thin, the bread nearly unrecognizable as such, or does one prefer a thicker, more sandwich-like panino?

Either way, there is a rare delicacy to bread that has undergone transformation in this magic chamber. It acquires a luster that has nothing to do with the melted butter that an experienced paninista learns to apply with a generous hand. I know this because I made a series of no-butter panini, and the bread was just as shiny and crisp. It must be an inherent action of the process of heat-sealing that lends that alabaster sheen. When one’s teeth crack through the polished surface of the bread and sink into the tart, salty pool of gorgonzola, the scraps of lemon frittata, the black olive pesto, one experiences a moment of gastronomic transcendence worth a considerable amount of scrubbing and scraping.

Except that its brilliant design absolves one from any such labor. A single swipe with a paper towel over the stealth-bomber–gray Non-Stick Grill Plates, and the machine is clean and ready to reconfigure the atoms of the next humble pile of cold cuts and vegetables.

I had planned, for the purposes of this piece, to heat-seal non-food items in the Krups FDE3-12 Universal Grill and Panini Maker. I considered placing small figurines of Disney characters in a Ziploc bag between the Non-stick Grill Plates to see if a vacuum seal would result. I imagined the potential ironing possibilities, and the sophistication of a pair of linen pants imprinted with a Panini grid. I could not, however, bring myself to sully its perfection. It is far too precious, and came to me via a generous friend who took pity on my children—forced, when their father is on the road, to eat a steady diet of take-out food and breakfast cereal for dinner. Now, when my eldest son wails, in a tone of five-year-old despair, “Can’t we just eat something American for once?!,” I can pull out the Krups FDE3-12 Universal Grill and Panini Maker and whip up a Croque Monsieur or a Pizza Romana. It’s all grilled cheese to him.

Readers can use the code AVCX for 15% off print or digital subscriptions this week. All subscriptions include full digital access to our twenty-year archive and ongoing web exclusives.

Related articles:

“Crush,” an essay by Larissa Pham

“Distancing #24: Immunity” by Trey Strange

“The Immortal Horizon,” an essay by Leslie Jamison

The following is excerpted from an interview with Adam Ehrlich Sachs, who recently received a Windham–Campbell Prize for fiction, on the Believer Logger.

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Some words, it is true, are very funny. “Astral tube” conjures an altogether more humorous image than “telescope.” “Glockenspiel” is somewhat difficult to utter with serious intent, and the difficulty compounds the more it is uttered. As for proper nouns, “the Habsburg Empire” has just a touch of ridiculousness, as do the names Greta, Heinrich, and Gottfried.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of The Organs of Sense, a novel (May, FSG), has an ear that is exquisitely tuned to the potential comedy of words. This extends to casual conversation: he has been accused not of slander, he will say, but of calumny; he confesses to a hope that is not silly, but demented. This last word, and other variations of insanity, come up often in his work. Sachs’s novel tells the winding story of a young Leibniz in the year 1666 who hears of a blind astronomer’s prediction that a solar eclipse will shroud all of Europe in darkness for exactly four seconds. None of the other, sighted, astronomers in the kingdom has made the same prediction. Is this man a genius, or completely mad? Leibniz wonders. Or, a mad genius? Or, neither a genius, nor mad? Compelled by the logical puzzle of determining the soundness of another’s mind, he decides to find the blind astronomer.

Earlier this month, I spoke to Sachs about The Organs of Sense and his first book, Inherited Disorders, at McNally Jackson bookstore in Brooklyn. At some point during the talk Sachs claimed to not be a funny person; despite this, there was frequent laughter. This interview is adapted from that conversation.

—Camille Bromley

I. “I’m usually enticed by a combination of ridiculousness and brilliance.”

THE BELIEVER: Why did you choose Leibniz as your central character in The Organs of Sense?

ADAM EHRLICH SACHS: For one thing, Leibniz is an inherently ridiculous character. Apparently he had a cyst on his head, so he wore a huge wig to cover it, a much bigger wig than one would need to cover a cyst of that size. He was made fun of for that in his own time. And Voltaire made fun of him in Candide. Everyone was making fun of him all the time. Recently I wrote a little piece online making fun of him and a Leibniz scholar accused me of calumny, so I guess it’s still a sore point. Leibniz invented calculus, but he also came up with a get-rich-quick scheme to pump water out of silver mines using windmills and it failed disastrously. He tried to pitch the King of France on a new crusade in Egypt and the King, who was a madman himself, thought he was crazy. And at the same time, he was obviously a genius. I’m usually enticed by that combination of ridiculousness and brilliance. Philosophically, Leibniz was the great reactionary of the 17th century: against Descartes, against Spinoza, the modernists who threatened ideas of free will and the soul. He had the very understandable and reasonable urge to defend those things. But it brought him by the end of his life to the very bizarre theory of The Monadology, that the world consists of a multitude of self-enclosed entities called monads that are not material and can’t communicate, can’t see one another, because if they could then one thing could cause another, and you’d be on the fast track to determinism. So they exist but they can’t see each other, but they have to act in concert or else the world wouldn’t make sense. So his final stroke of genius was to assert that God made them all act that way from the beginning of time, in pre-established harmony. In both fiction and philosophy I like works that start from a reasonable premise and escalate step by logical step into demented fantasias. Kafka does that in fiction and Leibniz does that in philosophy.

BLVR: You start from an existing world, 17th-century Bohemia, in the book but your tether to the ground is thin; the story quickly departs from historical reality and goes off into fable. How much research did you do for the book?

AES: Probably more than was necessary. I did read that Leibniz scholar’s book, the one who accused me of calumny—it was a very good book. I’m glad you say the book quickly goes into its own world. That’s where I want to end up, but I can’t start there. The beginning of the book for me is about tricking myself into taking it seriously. I have to convince myself that I’m not wasting my time, not wasting my life. The way I do this, initially, is by writing something that refers to reality. It’s a psychological thing. In the same way that these characters lift off into their lunacy, I try to lift off into freedom, but like them I have to start reasonably and get there logically. But I also had the hope—what is surely a demented hope—that I was commenting on Leibniz’s philosophy in the background, and that the Leibniz scholar who hates me would notice that and celebrate me.

BLVR: To me, the book seemed very much a philosophical exercise in fiction not only in its themes but in its structure and prose style as well. You form these logical pathways of “if P then Q” or “if not P then not Q” that seemed to come out of symbolic logic. So the structure of the prose mirrors the content of the book in a really nice way.

AES: I think some of the reading I did, even if it didn’t come in as research, contributed to the feel of one of these demented 17th-century Rationalist texts, like Spinoza deductively out of pure logic coming up with the ethical life. There’s a lot of crazy, brilliant writing from that century that I wanted to infect this prose with.

Read the full interview on our website. And pick up a digital subscription today for access to new issues and our extensive archives.

Related articles:

“Red Eden,” an essay by Nathaniel Rich

An Interview with Paul Salopek, conducted by Camille Bromley

“The All,” an essay by Ross Simonini

Our summer issue is on its way to the printers! We’re celebrating with 25% off print subscriptions through Monday. Subscriptions come with full digital access to our twenty-year archive and all-new web exclusives. Our most recent online column by Lucy Ives just wrapped, which means you can now read all six installments—covering academic catfishing, group novels, and a story about an immunological response to language—over on our website. Next up, we have a new interview series, in which Anna DeForest speaks with five writers about death and dying. The first installment, a conversation with Garielle Lutz, will be available in the coming weeks. Subscribe to stay tuned.

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Below is an excerpt of “My Father’s Shadow,” a new feature by Lauren Markham in Issue 153 of The Believer. Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad.

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On a slate-gray Vermont day in the fall of 2003, I was on my way to College French 221 when a pair of attractive people in their late twenties stopped me at the crosswalk.

“Hey!” called the trim blond woman, hair long and eyes bright, her voice lilting as if she knew me.

“Oh, hey!” a gorgeous curly-haired man whom I took to be her colleague shouted my way.

“Hi,” I replied with familiarity, though with some dose of bewilderment, for I was sure I didn’t know them at all. But something in their demeanor bade me to stop, so I obliged, though my class was starting soon. The woman took a few steps closer, smiling. Her pal wasn’t far behind. They were dressed casually, in jeans and sweaters, but their eyes, their very beings, appeared somehow starlit, issuing an almost extra­planetary phosphorescence I’d never seen before. Then the woman handed me some kind of pamphlet advertising an upcoming event on campus with the politician Lyndon LaRouche.

“You should come,” she said.

“You really should,” said her colleague. So that’s why they were here. LaRouche, an octogenarian, would be running in the Democratic primary in the spring, making this his eighth presidential run. He was a visionary, the woman told me, with real plans to transform America and the world. I took the paper with outward solemnity, but a dash of inward glee. It was just a Tuesday, yet here my whole day had been transformed.

“Have you heard of him?” she asked. In fact, I’d heard all about him. When I was growing up, my dad, a great repeater of stories, told me tale after tale about LaRouche and his cultish followers: the people standing before me now. What I’d learned about LaRouche—just a drop in the bucket, I’d soon come to understand—made it plain that it was best not to betray what I knew. So I twisted my face into a posture of searching recollection.

Sensing an opening, the woman began to prattle on about LaRouche’s beliefs, and the many international and domestic enemies of freedom and prosperity that threatened to upend all of us, turning us into slaves—­“Slavery!” her companion, who was Black, emphasized—and that LaRouche, and only LaRouche, was trying, and was equipped, to vanquish. She spoke for so long and with such steady urgency that it was as if she had entered a trance and had ushered me into her vivid and continuous dream. For my part, I felt a dome lowering over us, forcing me to stay in conversation with her, to breathe her air. It was strange, but not entirely unpleasant, not yet. Though I could have just walked away, something about her gave me the sense that I shouldn’t move. Plus, I was intrigued. Who were these people proselytizing for a crank anti-Semitic felon with designs on not just the White House but also world dominion and the speedy colonization of outer space?

LaRouche, LaRouche. Here’s what I knew: He was part villain, part swindler, part genius, part cult leader, part something else too. I was curious what it was about him that had won over so many politicians and promising young acolytes, like these two attractive people canvassing my campus, in spite of his goofy conspiracies (the Queen of England was in charge of a global drug ring) and terrifying political designs (to reincarnate his own version of the Third Reich to rule the world, while developing a sophisticated missile system for interplanetary defense). I was particularly curious because my dad, a former federal prosecutor, was the person who put LaRouche behind bars.

“Didn’t he go to prison?” I asked innocently. The woman rolled her eyes, the way one would at a pesky younger sister. “Rail-road!” she exclaimed in response, in exact time with her colleague. Rail-road! They sang it together like a song.

“They had it out for him,” she said. She explained that the case had been riddled with lies. You couldn’t underestimate the government. They’d stop at nothing to keep the truth from coming out.

I was primed, at this particular moment in history, to take kindly to such political conspiracies. The famed 2000 election had taken place in the fall of my senior year in high school, when the fate of the country was derailed by hanging chads. My class matriculated to college just a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. The previous spring, George Bush, confirmed as president thanks to the work of his brother Jeb Bush, governor of Florida during those suspect recounts, had waged war on Iraq by riding on the post-9/11 fears he himself had ginned up, and by citing, in spite of dubious evidence, weapons of mass destruction that never materialized. Like many students on my college campus, and campuses like ours nationwide, I was awakening to the truth: The government lies. This is the trouble with conspiratorial thinking, as Naomi Klein writes in her book ­Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, and what allows it to catch hold: “There is always some truth mixed in with the lies; always some devastating collective failure it has identified and is opportunistically exploiting.”

Curious as I was, when it came to LaRouche, I knew better. “Wow,” I said, slipping the paper into my shoulder bag to signal that it was time for me to head to class.

“What do you think of this place?” the woman asked. Middlebury College, she meant. She was changing tacks now, seemingly trying to get me to stay with her a bit longer. I told her I liked it here. She nodded, looked around. It did seem nice, she seemed to agree.

“But I really have to go,” I said.

She nodded again. “See you there,” she said, pointing to my bag that held the paper. “And see you around.” She asked me my name and I gave it to her—first name only; I’m no fool—then waved goodbye and went to class. I couldn’t wait to call my dad.

Read the full essay on our website. And pick up a digital subscription today for access to new issues and our entire archives.

Related articles:

“Pitch Battles,” an essay by Colin Dickey

“Nashville Rascal Sports R’prot,” a poem by David Berman

“Tune In, Drop Out, Homeschool,” an essay by Lauren Markham

The following is excerpted from Jonathan Lethem’s interview with Paul Auster in Issue 21 of The Believer. Illustration by Tony Millionaire.

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Paul Auster began as a poet, essayist, anthologist and translator, but since City of Glass (1985) he’s been recognized above all for being one of our most spare, lucid and elegant novelists. The protagonists of many of his books, including The Music of Chance, The Book of Illusions, and Oracle Night, are pensive but gentle urban everymen, and some are writers or other artists. They’re easy for Auster’s many young admirers to identify, rightly or wrongly, with both themselves and with the author who put them on the page. In my twenties, when I was becoming a writer, I was certainly one of those young admirers. When I was lucky enough, years later, to have the chance to know Paul, I wasn’t disappointed.

—Jonathan Lethem

I. MUSIC

JONATHAN LETHEM: What were you doing today before I appeared in your house?

PAUL AUSTER: The usual. I got up in the morning. I read the paper. I drank a pot of tea. And then I went over to the little apartment I have in the neighborhood and worked for about six hours. After that, I had to do some business. My mother died two years ago, and there was one last thing to take care of concerning her estate—a kind of insurance bond I had to sign off on. So, I went to a notary public to have the papers stamped, then mailed them to the lawyer. I came back home. I read my daughter’s final report card. And then I went upstairs and paid a lot of bills. A typical day, I suppose. A mix of working on the book and dealing with a lot of boring, practical stuff.

JL: For me, five or six hours of writing is plenty. That’s a lot. So, if I get that many hours the other stuff feels satisfying. The other stuff feels like a kind of grace. But if I have to do that stuff when I haven’t written—

PA: Oh, that’s terrible.

JL: That’s a terrible thing.

PA: I’ve found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience—both physical and mental—and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I’m doing. Even Sunday, if possible. If there’s no family thing happening that day, I’ll at least work in the morning. Whenever I travel, I get thrown off completely. If I’m gone for two weeks, it takes me a good week to get back into the rhythm of what I was doing before.

JL: I like the word “physical.” I have the same fetish for continuity. I don’t really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that’s my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving. It has an athletic component. You’re keeping a streak going.

PA: Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind. I write in longhand, and the pen is scratching the words onto the page. I can even hear the words being written. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I’m hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be. That music is a physical force. Not only do you write books physically, but you read books physically as well. There’s something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. An attentive reader is finding meanings in the book that can’t be articulated, finding them in his or her body. I think this is what so many people don’t understand about fiction. Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don’t understand prose. They’re so used to reading journalism—clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information—facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

JL: This relates to the acute discomfort of publicity, so much of which consists of requests to paraphrase the work. Which inevitably results in something unmusical. It’s as if you’ve taken the body away, then drawn its outline and described its contents.

PA: I don’t know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It’s something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one’s publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.

I’ve tried to pick my spots. I don’t do it that often. But every once in a while I’ll come out and do it as an act of good faith. Then I hope I’ll be left alone again for a while. For example, with the last novel I published, Oracle Night, I just simply refused to go on book tours. I just didn’t have the stamina for it.

JL: Kazuo Ishiguro has a funny way of talking about it as if it’s a giant, consensual mistake all authors made together, by agreeing to this. And then suggesting we need to end it together. It’s like a version of Prisoner’s Dilemma. If one of us tours, we all have to tour. If everyone refuses…

PA: He’s speaking from deep experience. He did something that no one else I know ever did. He was on book tour for about two years. He went everywhere, to every country in the world where his book was published. In the end, it probably nearly killed him.

JL: Did you read The Unconsoled?

PA: I’ve wanted to.

JL: It’s one of my favorite novels by a living writer. An epic Kafkaesque account of a pianist’s arrival in a city to give a recital which never seems to happen. One possible description of it is as the longest and bitterest complaint of a book-touring author ever written.

PA: There’s a great entry in Kafka’s diaries in which he describes an imaginary writer in the process of giving a public reading. So-and-so is up there on stage and people are getting restless and bored. “Just one more story,” he says, “just one more…” People start getting up and leaving. The doors keep slamming shut, and he goes on begging “just one more, one more,” until everyone is gone and he’s left alone at the podium, reading to an empty room.

Read the full interview on our website. And pick up a digital subscription today for access to new issues and our extensive archives.

Related articles:

“Postmodernism As Liberty Valance: Notes on an Execution” by Jonathan Lethem

“A Question Looking at Men Looking at Women” by Jameson Fitzpatrick

A Microinterview with Jonathan Lethem, conducted by Peter Andrey Smith

Below is an excerpt of “The Death of a Superman,” a new feature by Paul Collins in Issue 153 of The Believer. The essay, a Longreads Editors’ Pick, is now available to read in full on our website. Paul also spoke about this story on Oregon Public Broadcasting. You can listen to his interview here. Illustration by Andrea Settimo.

The last night of Superman’s life came on a balmy Friday in Los Angeles, California.

It should have been just like any other night for Christopher Dennis. Blue-eyed, standing six foot five, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Christopher Reeve, for years Dennis had been a popular costumed superhero on Hollywood Boulevard, posing for paid photos with awestruck kids and tipsy tourists. It was good money. He starred in a documentary, Confessions of a Superhero, and performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in sketches. But Dennis always played it straight. He was serious about being Superman, which exasperated others in the hero hustle; Dennis wouldn’t curse, wouldn’t smoke while in uniform, and his apartment resembled a vintage shop in Metropolis. He’d accumulated, by his guess, maybe one million dollars’ worth of Superman rarities.

But that was all a long time ago.

Dennis pocketed a glass pipe, some rocks, and a lighter. Meth was his kryptonite; and now, in 2019, he was homeless. Sometimes he could be spotted on his former Hollywood sidewalks, bearded and unrecognizable, jotting in a notepad and muttering about—well, who knew what he was muttering. He’d lost all his teeth too.

Tonight he was hitting one of his usuals, a clothing donation bin just off Van Nuys Boulevard. Getting in required some finesse, but if you found something to stand on, held the door just so, and crawled halfway in, you could retrieve stuff people had donated. It was a good spot for bin-diving—­next to a Wells Fargo parking lot, across the street from a Kingdom of Jesus Christ church. Nobody was going to bother you there on a Friday night.

Dennis started pulling himself headfirst into the chute; he got his head all the way in, and his left arm too. Then something slipped.

Maybe it was a hand, maybe it was a foot. The chute’s pull-door swung down, crashing onto Dennis’s throat. He struggled, hands and feet free of the ground—like Superman in flight, but all wrong. He couldn’t get traction on anything. The metal door cut into his skin and crushed his larynx; he couldn’t get air through. Dennis couldn’t breathe. He was asphyxiating, and he was alone. With his head still upside down, the blood ran out of his nose. His limbs ceased their frantic motions. Superman’s heart stopped.

The endless traffic of Van Nuys Boulevard pulsed all night, indifferent.

If the path that led the Man of Steel to a Van Nuys sidewalk was long and complicated, so was the one that brought a bin made of sheet metal there.

Once, long ago, the bins came to you: Ragmen wrestled wooden pushcarts through the mud along bad roads, knocking on doors to collect cotton items for mattress stuffing, and woolens to be remade into army blankets. That began to change around the turn of the twentieth century, as laws targeted pushcart men—who, it just so happened, were often Jewish immigrants. Into the gap stepped more overtly Christian groups like the Salvation Army and Goodwill; the latter, though later secular, started in a Methodist chapel. In this new century, the ragmen still came to you, but now in trucks that made endless loops of home pickups, carrying tons of goods where the pushcart men had once struggled with hundred-pound loads. By the 1950s, the Portland, Oregon, Goodwill alone had ten trucks making the rounds, snapping up discards within a fifty-mile radius.

Fittingly enough, the first donation bins were themselves donated—four-foot-square surplus boxes given by the city of Jacksonville, Florida, to a local Goodwill in 1940. They were painted to resemble cozy colonial homes and were placed outside to take collections, and as wartime drafts and gas rationing hit, the unstaffed bins helped make up for limitations on truck deliveries. In the late 1950s, sheet-metal versions materialized in supermarket parking lots across the country. By 1960, Portland, Oregon, alone had seventy-three Goodwill bins, collecting an astounding fifty thousand bags of goods per year.

Other charities followed—and so did problems. Almost as soon as the bins went national, police in San Antonio, Texas, arrested two small girls for stealing. In Illinois in 1968, fifteen boxes were pried open with crowbars. In 1978, a stakeout of a parking lot bin at a Virginia mall netted sixteen arrests in two days. In 1984, a Massachusetts woman opened a bin to make a donation and got punched in the face—from inside the box. She may have interrupted someone else as they were raiding it.

By the 1990s, some chapters of Goodwill and the Salvation Army were quietly scrapping the bins. But different players were also getting into the business. And another approach had long been mulled: making bins theft-proof. Instead of having a simple bin with a loose flap-door, you could make it harder for people to get in by installing a self-closing chute door, like on large street mailboxes, or a “roll-up” chute drawer, which didn’t drop the donation down until the door closed. But these solutions created a new and very different problem.

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The following is excerpted from Geography Lessons: Interviews from the 2019 Believer Festival in Las Vegas” in Issue 127 of The Believer, and features conversations with this week’s newly minted Pulitzer Prize winner, M. Gessen; 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner Natalie Diaz; and Pulitzer finalists Andrew Leland and Tommy Orange.

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At this year’s Believer Festival, we cornered artists and activists at slot machines and on smoke breaks, asking them to riff on the meaning of the borders they’ve encountered in their lives and work. Weeks before, we’d made a firm decision to ask people, “What is the first geographical border you remember?” rather than the more expansive “What is the earliest border you remember?” We felt this was a way to keep the responses on a physical map at a moment in history when the public outcry about cruelty at the US border has exploded. But interviews don’t often go as expected. If we were to make a map using the borders from our conversations, you’d be able to take an intriguing road trip through a landscape of physical cities and metaphysical concepts. You might start out at “facial expressions on chairlifts,” wind through “Pennsylvania” and “silence,” stay for some time in “Tijuana” before passing through “marriage” and “precolonial Nigeria,” and come to rest, finally, somewhere between “Canada” and “the energetic aura, expressed as a kind of linguistic membrane, between me and my sister.” If that kind of travel appeals to you, try asking these questions of people in your own lives. You may arrive in new zip codes—some chorographic, some psychic.

—Mari Brown and Ross Simonini

NATALIE DIAZ

THE BELIEVER: What is the earliest border you encountered in your life?

NATALIE DIAZ: There were two embedded borders, one on top of the other. One was that I was living on a reservation, which had a very clear border, and on that reservation I knew I was also mixed: my father is Spanish and my mother is Native. On the reservation, which was my home, I should have been most comfortable, but I was different. But then as soon as I stepped off the reservation, I became a person from the reservation, so I didn’t have a full place in either place.

BLVR: What happened off the reservation?

ND: I became a sort of a commodity, in the sense that I was not like the others. I was very good at basketball, so I was often recruited by rich teams in Arizona to come play. They would pay my way to come play on their team so their teams could win, but these were places where I would never have been able to afford to go. I feel like I learned to play a game. Even now, when I go home, I speak very differently. If I’m off the reservation and I see another indigenous person, we recognize each other, and we look to each other for some kind of, like, footing, you know? Even though we’re also very clearly wanting to be autonomous and not considered the same.

BLVR: What do you see when you think of a boundary?

ND: I imagine a line being drawn. I imagine two things that are touching but are asked not to be touching.

MASHA GESSEN

THE BELIEVER: The precision of your writing challenges me to question my assumptions about language and material reality, so, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, do borders actually exist?

MASHA GESSEN: Borders exist. I think their existence is inevitable, but has to be problematized. My attitude toward a borderless world is like my attitude toward democracy. It is something that can never be achieved; it’s a dream, and the measure of our success is whether we’re moving in the direction of that dream or away from it.

BLVR: My working definition of border, for this project, is “a delineation between two distinct spaces.” Does that work for you?

MG: No, that’s a boundary. That’s very different from a border. What’s important about a border is that it’s policed. We police borders between countries, we police borders between genders, we police borders between states of being, and the whole problem with borders is that they’re policed, right? And because of this, they’re inherently undemocratic. At a border, you’re being governed. And yet you have no say in that government, which is why borders are so problematic.

BLVR: What borders are you paying attention to this week?

MG: I’m working on a piece about the Irish system for treating people in need of international protection, which is this weird system called “direct provision.” In Ireland, they don’t give you money to rent a place and buy food; they give you shelter and food. This basically means you live in a kind of dormitory for a long, long time—I think eleven years is the record. People are physically in the country, but they’re not in the country. That’s a kind of border. They’re not learning the language, they’re not learning how to look for a job, they’re not learning how to pay an electrical bill. They become infantilized, and they don’t have a common project of learning something. They just have a common project of escaping, which is not much of a common project.

BLVR: Why not?

MG: Escaping is an individual project. This gets at the distinction between emigration and exile. When you emigrate, you go somewhere; it’s about the place where you are going. When you flee, you’re running away from something, and where you go is secondary, if it matters at all.

TOMMY ORANGE

THE BELIEVER: What is the first border you remember?

TOMMY ORANGE: We would go from Oakland and take these three-day-long trips to see my dad’s side of the family in Oklahoma, and that felt like a border, both of time and experience. Especially coming from Oakland and being from a white mom and a Native dad. You know, we’re supposed to have sovereignty as Native people, and it’s not really ever the case, but there is a land base and there is a place where Cheyenne people live that I would visit. But our Cheyenne relatives saw us as Native people from the city, which is not as authentic as their experience, so that felt like a border that we maybe never crossed.

BLVR: Is there a name for that?

TO: Well, “city Indian” and “sidewalk Indian” are old slanders. Or “urban Indian.”

BLVR: What’s the border that’s been the most important to you, positively or negatively?

TO: Authenticity is a big word for Native people—it is a border between who should be allowed in and who shouldn’t. And the border is not territorial. It has to do with experience as opposed to, like, territory. Experientially, what right do you have to claim being Native American? Especially as an urban native person, it’s harder to claim, because Native American–ness has so much to do with language and land, and if you have neither… My dad’s fluent—Cheyenne was his first language—but he didn’t teach us the language. So in writing a book and having it be received well in the Native community, I feel like I’ve been let inside a certain other kind of border of the Native lit world.

ANDREW LELAND

THE BELIEVER: What’s the first geographical border you remember?

ANDREW LELAND: Oh, you wanna get geographical? Well… we moved to Toronto from New York after I finished kindergarten. I have a vivid memory of our cat, Frank the Cat, freaking out in the backseat with me as we crossed into Canada. It was way past my bedtime when we crossed the border. I remember the Snickers bar that my mom bought me and the ingredients were all in French and I was like, “We’re not in New York anymore!” That was probably my first sense of an international border, you know, late-night Snickers cat drama.

BLVR: What borders do you find you enforce in your life?

AL: That I enforce? Well, as a father of a six-year-old, I find the language of parenting is filled with the idea of setting boundaries. And it’s a difficult but essential art of being a parent, to say, “We never smear feces on other children” or whatever it is. The idea of the boundary itself isn’t necessarily controversial; it’s the enforcement of it. Not that it’s controversial, but it’s difficult. It’s also mutually agreeing with your partner about borders, like, “It’s Wednesday, so you’re allowed to have your sugary dessert.” This is so boring what I’m saying. Everybody else is gonna be like, As a political refugee, I have strong feelings about this, whereas I’m like, “I had a Snickers bar with French ingredients!”

Read the full piece, which includes seventeen interviews in total, on our website. You can also pick up a digital subscription for access to new issues and our extensive archives.

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“Border Acts,” an essay by José Orduña

“Road Trip: Rae Armantrout,” an interview conducted by Ali Liebegott

“Only God Will Judge Us,” an essay by J. Malcolm Garcia

The complete series of Lucy Ives’s column, Negative Utopia, is now available online. Across six short essays, Ives—recently named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow—explores the history and implications of large language models for human creativity and writing, both within and beyond the academy. Below is the final installment, “Tolerating Abstraction.”

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Tolerating Abstraction

Language models have blind spots the average user struggles to see. Just ask a research librarian: Currently a researcher can expect that about 40% of the citations requested from ChatGPT are hallucinations the program introduces to mimic what should be, based on the researcher’s query or queries. Indeed, these hallucinations are beginning to be re-cited such that some have entered Google Scholar and gained a limited aura of authenticity. These utopian hallucinations—made-up books, articles, authors, and even journals—are relatively easy to recognize, however, because they are usually too pertinent to exist. A hallucinated study was published in the same year you are writing in and includes information perfectly dovetailing with the point you want to make; the (fake) journal title shares keywords with your thesis. It’s as if the AI is writing a satirical version of your research or, perhaps, your entire field of study.

As I’ve noted in these columns, one of my major aesthetic concerns regarding language models has to do with the way in which their probabilistic orientation to language flattens the figurative dimension of expression and hews against indeterminacy, ambiguity, and other forms of meaningful and occasion-specific nonsense. See how few imaginative similes LLMs produce, for example. Nothing is like anything in an LLM response (with the exception of comparisons drawn from the text the model was trained on). Nonsense, meanwhile, is not typically considered meaningful, but anyone who has read a poem by Edward Lear or Paul Celan or encountered the character Percival Everett, a professor who teaches a course on nonsense in (the real) Percival Everett’s novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, will know that nonsense can be extremely meaningful and is at times more accurate to experience than sense, as such. Nonsense is statistically rare in literature, yet it is one of the most precious substances so-called natural language has ever produced.

Modernist poets of the twentieth century knew something about statistical orientation to language. They toiled away at producing more vivid and efficient forms of meaning even as their society was marinating in well-funded attempts to weaponize language during the two World Wars. Ezra Pound, perhaps the most famous engineer of verbal efficiency, found modern English wanting. His flawed understanding of the etymology of Chinese characters led him to hope that alphabetic language could be reformed to directly embody material dynamics of the physical world. (For an example of peak Pound vivacity, see his poem “In a Station of the Metro,” featuring the image of “Petals on a wet, black bough.”) Pound spent much of his later life in a mental institution and his positivism has been discredited in twenty-first century literary studies. Yet his poetics of immediacy were successfully appropriated by the Noigandres group in Brazil to create a new movement with different ends. A cohort of concrete poets—Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari—named their journal for a line in Pound’s Cantos, grounding their literary materialism in what, in their 1958 manifesto “Plano-Piloto para Poesia Concreta” (“Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry”), they termed the “tension of word-things in space-time.” They were not alone: Bolivian-born Swiss artist Eugen Gomringer simultaneously explored the verbal and visual qualities of printed language. In Bern, São Paulo, Darmstadt, Scotland, Tokyo, Vienna, and Toronto, various practitioners investigated the lack of coincidence between the word as spoken and the word as written. They boldly highlighted the misalignments that exist between and among writing, speech, images, thoughts, things—finding them to be remarkably productive.

Concrete poetry is to me one of the most interesting side-effects of technocracy. It tends to be about three themes: 1) reading in the digital age; 2) the strangeness of the public sphere in the era of mass media; and 3) the renovation of outmoded hierarchies of taste and genre. The male-dominated concrete poetry of the 1950s was followed in subsequent decades by something more complex. Women such as Madeline Gins and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha opened the lexical space of the “concrete” to their own experiences. This included forms of expression related to textiles and the home, the body, caregiving, and language acquisition, as well as resistance to mass media that tended to sideline them. Cha’s famously uncategorizable book of image and text, Dictée, treats untranslatability not merely as a linguistic inefficiency but as a major force of history. Gins’s novel WORD RAIN discovers an endless and cacophonous world inside several seconds of overheard speech.

The version of the alphabet that emerges from the second half of the twentieth century and concretism is patently artificial. It’s the alphabet of television advertising, the alphabet that’s been converted into Claude Shannon’s mathematical alphabet for digital writing, the alphabet as printed English. It’s an alphabet that bends to the will of governments and corporations, yes, but it’s also an alphabet that artists haven’t forgotten. It’s an alphabet concretism rescues. Through concretism’s strategies we see, for example, how the body holds the alphabet and carries it forward—that the alphabet is not merely abstract or conceptual, for it is always in dialogue with material reality. Concretism teaches us to love the alphabet in all its incommensurateness. Concretism already resists the logics of ChatGPT; it sees words as things inseparable from their contingent occurrence in space and time. For concretism, words are worlds. It passionately seeks out nonsense.

For the most part, academia has failed to take seriously the relationship between creative writing and digital media. Where such a relationship has been acknowledged, the emphasis tends to be on the way creative writing might keep up with the speed of new media by recycling digitized texts. But this solution only exacerbates our society’s current tendency to move fast and break things. And in taking this approach creative writing loses out. The nonsense it produces is boring instead of brilliant, since the nonsense that comes out of simplistic recycling of texts is careless nonsense. What we need now is the opposite. Creative writing classes should be slow. Creative writing classes should be sites of repair.

Back in 2014, when I was willing to try anything to enliven my endless rotation of contingent teaching, I invented a game. I am unsure where the idea for the game came from. I do know that I wanted to find out what could be created collectively. I was moved by collaborative text-based art by practitioners like Group Material in the US and Collective Actions of the former USSR. I’d heard through the grapevine that a well-known Canadian poet had rewritten and staged operas and plays with her classes. Moreover, I found “workshop” a bit sad. The traditional creative writing workshop is, in essence, a focus group, even if the name suggests politics of labor and the handmade. The workshop may purport to be supremely non-hierarchical, but in practice this method is frequently all about shoring up old-school authorship and electing a “winner” each semester.

One day I came into a first-year multi-genre course and said, “Today we will play a game.” I may even have been inventing the game in the moment. I had each person in the class create a character. Then, I had each person share the details of their character with another person. Having received information about a character (this was done anonymously), each participant wrote, in the persona of their own character, a letter of complaint to the character whose details they’d received. This process led to a series of exchanges of letters (again, all done anonymously under the cover of character identities), in which the characters in the room complained about things happening in their community, then apologized to one another for getting so bent out of shape, subsequently writing one another poems to try to smooth things over.

I collected the letters and poems (the poems, by the way, were hysterically funny), took it all home and typed it up, and sent everyone in the class the transcribed text of their exchanges, which we used as the basis for new writing in subsequent classes: we mapped the community, its geography and architecture, its cliques and gripes; we discussed the community’s past and probable futures; we imagined and wrote about various scenarios—weather events, the unearthing of a time capsule, a revelatory photography exhibition in the local library. Again, I gathered and organized this writing, edited it lightly. I used a print-on-demand service to self-publish it as a bound paperback students could order if they wanted to. Together, we’d written a group novel.

This exercise works (and becomes so exciting) because I don’t have participants pair off and write letters in a closed dyad. Each participant begins by writing a letter to a different character than the one from whom they first receive a letter. This asymmetrical structure eventually permits gossip, news of psychoactive plants growing in someone’s backyard, and other weird info to circulate in the room. As in the game of Telephone or an old-fashioned phone tree, details change. Myths coalesce. Certain individuals and sites become famous or notorious. It’s an extraordinarily interesting process to observe. But it’s more than interesting. It’s astounding. Human beings are very, very inventive. When we work together, strange and beautiful things occur.

An added benefit, in the year 2026, is that the in-class, handwritten nature of this exercise makes it impossible for anyone to employ generative AI—not that they’d want to! In 2026, this game still seems fresh because participants are often moved by the surprising things that happen “elsewhere” in the community. They are inspired by, and eagerly respond to, other people’s ideas and writing. A form of solidarity emerges. We find we like ourselves. We like how clever and absurd and ingenious we all are. We marvel at our handmade utopia. We learn something about what is effective in writing. But more than this, we learn about the vast and endless resource that is ourselves, a resource that cannot be exhausted precisely because it cannot be fully known.

Utopia, then, is the literary form that refuses to stay literary. Creative writing courses can be spaces we enter to expand our conceptions of literature and its relevance, sure. But more than this, they can be spaces in which we expand our conceptions of what and where the self is, growing more at ease with the self’s unknowability along with the abstract nature of language—maybe even loving these things. Here we discover that what resists comprehension is simultaneously precious and worthy of awe and affection.

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An Interview with Aaron Benanav, conducted by Maxwell Neely-Cohen

The following is excerpted from “Always Intense,” ’s essay on Repo Man, originally published in Issue 34 of The Believer. Illustration by Tony Millionaire.

Today, May 1, marks the 20th anniversary of the piece. This evening, Jim will be in Dallas at the Texas Theatre, emceeing a Q&A with Alex Cox and members of Circle Jerks, alongside a screening of Repo Man. A second event follows on May 3 at the Paramount Theatre in Austin.

“BEST GODDAMN CAR ON THE LOT”

For a few hours on a Saturday afternoon last summer, the streets of Los Angeles were crawling with repo men. Fifty vehicles prowled the desolate districts south of downtown L.A. in search of a luminous 1964 Chevy Malibu. But these weren’t your ordinary repo men: they were participants in a scavenger hunt organized by the Alamo Drafthouse, an offbeat Texas theater that had literally taken its show on the road by embarking on a 6,000-mile odyssey across America to show eleven classic movies on a giant forty-by-twenty-foot inflatable screen in the places where they were filmed. They screened Once upon a Time in the West in Monument Valley, Utah, and It Came from Outer Space in Roswell, New Mexico; but Englishman Alex Cox’s 1984 film Repo Man was an odd choice for a film to represent L.A. With a cheerless landscape of junkyards, industrial lots, and makeshift skid-row shelters—what Cult Flicks and Trash Pics describes as “a place that appears to be crumbling before the camera”—we’re a long way from Sunset Boulevard. Compared with the palm-studded, chlorine-bleached L.A. of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Repo Man feels like it was shot in another galaxy.

The search for an elusive gold 1964 Chevy Malibu drives Repo Man’s plot, so Alamo Drafthouse owner Tim League bought one off eBay for about $3,000 and offered it up as the grand prize. On one of the hottest days of the year I took the Harbor Freeway downtown and made my way south toward the graffiti-blasted concrete corridor that constitutes the L.A. River. I parked at the dusty lot at Third and Santa Fe where the film freaks were lined up at the registration tent two hundred deep, sweltering in the heat. Tim, a fair-skinned ­red-headed Texan, had the look of a man who spends all of his time in the dark enclosure of the projection booth and was slightly stunned to find himself in this shadowless place where the sunlight slanted crazily in the smog. He agreed to “embed” me with one of the fifty teams lined up to pay fifty bucks a pop for a chance at a forty-year-old Chevy.

What I didn’t tell Tim was that I am a Repo Man expert in my own right, and as a frequent visitor to Union Station, I know my way around the ass end of downtown better than most Angelenos. What’s more, I had a secret weapon up my sleeve and no intention of keeping my expertise to myself. Journalistic objectivity be damned, I was going to find that Malibu and bring it back to the Believer’s headquarters.

I waited in the shade of the registration tent with nothing to do but size up the entrants and eye the beer cooler. Eventually I was joined by Roberta Barash, the elderly mother of one of Repo Man’s cast members, Olivia Barash, who plays Leila, the love interest (sort of) of Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez). Roberta was waiting for Olivia to show up so she could join her as one of the rally’s contestants. This struck me as unfair, but Roberta assured me that neither she nor her daughter knew where the Malibu was hidden.

When all fifty spots had been filled, Tim passed out instruction kits to the teams while those who’d been turned away looked on with glum dissatisfaction. Tim re­minded the contestants that under no circumstances were they to open the envelope containing their driver’s licenses. An open envelope would signify that they’d been pulled over by the police and the team would be automatically disqualified. A shrewd move, but since I wasn’t a contestant per se, no one had asked for my license. Advantage: the Believer.

Tim made the announcement that a local journalist wanted to ride along with a team and the freaks descended on me.

“Ride with us,” a portly man sweating inside his black T-shirt said. “We’ve got a real repo man.”

Before I could answer, a dodgy-looking dude with long, scraggly hair asked me if I wanted to ride with one of the stars of the movie. This was the actor Del Za­mora, who plays half of the Rodriguez Brothers, and he was re­ferring to Jennifer Balgobin, the London-born actress who plays Debbi, the insanely hot punk rock chick with the mohawk, but I ­didn’t know any of this at the time.

Two young women in tank tops came to my rescue. “Pick us!” they shouted. “We’re fun!” They seemed bright, ­wholesome-looking, and, yes, fun. Best of all, they didn’t look like they worked in a comic book store or lived with their mothers. They looked like winners in the game of life. I decided to ride with Erin Fleckenstein, thirty-one, a graphic designer from Pasadena, Mary Ann Sullivan, thirty-two, a pixie-thin fourth-grade teacher from Glassell Park, and her husband, Blair Huizingh, who had turned thirty-four that very day.

Tim fired up the megaphone and told us the rally would begin Le Mans style. That is, the repo men would begin at the staging area, and when the signal was given we’d run to our cars.

“Please drive safely, especially when leaving the parking lot. It may be what we call in the in­dustry a bit of a clusterfuck.”

Tim counted down backwards from five, and I was off, chugging across a dusty parking lot and jumping into the passenger seat of a rust-colored Honda Element with a bunch of strangers. Team Believer was ready to roll.

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