Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears, by Harvey Mansfield (Encounter, 144 pp., $24.99)

Even the best of us occasionally finds it hard to resist saying, “I told you so.” In his latest book, Where Harvard Went Wrong, Harvey C. Mansfield says that his goal is not to claim vindication but to argue that conservative ideas deserve a more hospitable place in American universities. He has spent decades, though, standing athwart Harvard, yelling “Stop,” so one can detect a quiet note of satisfaction in the record he assembles.

Mansfield, still intellectually active at 94, recently retired from Harvard after arriving as an undergraduate in 1949 and joining its faculty in 1962. His ties to the university run deep and generational. “I have always loved [it] a little more than it deserves,” he writes.

Where Harvard Went Wrong reflects this long attachment. The book gathers selected writings and speeches on Harvard stretching back to 1975—arguments that, as he puts it, “fell on deaf ears.” Mansfield recasts, in the third person, a 1986 speech he made to the faculty, opposing the establishment of a women’s studies concentration:

Professor Mansfield said that the appearance of this proposal on the faculty floor marked a foolish and almost pitiful surrender to feminism. . . . In his thirty-seven years at Harvard, Professor Mansfield had never seen a reading list more shameless and pathetic than this one. It began in the first term with “Classics of Feminist Theory I,” and then continued in the second term, not with “Classics of Non-Feminist Theory” but rather with “Classics of Feminist Theory II.” . . . There were no classics on the reading list. . . . There were no scientific studies, there was nothing on the psychology of sex differences, and there were, of course, no conservative critics of feminism.

The reading list suggested that “women’s studies” was a misnomer. This was feminist studies—the studies of a certain group of women, claiming to speak for all women. … The worst thing [students] would learn was that education meant the elaboration of the opinions one already had, and confirmation of one’s prejudices.

The speech “was a rhetorical triumph in reverse,” Mansfield says ruefully. “When I began it there were twenty or so on my side, and when I finished I was alone.”

The passage captures Mansfield in one of his more combative moods. Yet his prose is more often urbane than pugnacious. He writes with grace and charm, and he wears his erudition lightly. At one point, however, he allows himself the word eleemosynary—as if to remind us that he could, if he wished, make things more difficult.

A recurring feature of his work is an insistence on describing realities that some prefer to soften or ignore. Two of his longest-standing concerns have been affirmative action and grade inflation, both of which, he argues, rest on “the dubious morality of telling people they are something you wish they were but know they are not.”

Affirmative action’s defenders long claimed that the practice would enrich intellectual diversity. But somehow, Mansfield quips, the more DEI we have, “the less there is diversity of opinion.” Since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023, Mansfield reports, public discussion of the issue has largely receded, “as if all those who adopted and prized it as the royal road to diversity are now ashamed of it.” That interpretation may be too sanguine. More likely, race conscious admissions will persist, even if under different terminology.

Grade inflation is another story. It eventually reached a point where almost everyone now recognizes it as untenable. A 2023 Harvard report found that 79 percent of grades in 2020–21were in the A range, up from 60 percent a decade earlier. But Mansfield began warning about the trend more than 50 years ago, at a 1975 Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting, and has never stopped. “A dean once told me that if I shut up I would get the action I wanted,” Mansfield recalls. “I tried that and it didn’t work.” Shortly after his book went to press, however, Harvard itself moved to recalibrate its grading. Henceforth, A’s at Harvard will be reserved for roughly the top fifth of students.

Being right too soon is a mixed blessing. Mansfield was also an early critic of higher education’s ideological conformity. He frequently invokes John Stuart Mill, who saw intellectual disagreement as a civic good. At a time of plummeting public trust in higher ed, Mansfield calls not for mere institutional neutrality—a low bar—but for a more genuinely pluralistic academic culture. Conservatives, he argues, “have reasons on their side and deserve to be welcomed in good cheer to America’s universities.”

Everyone who passed through Harvard the past 50 years—as I did, from 2001– 2009, in non-tenured roles—knew Mansfield by reputation. I was more left-wing then, but even so, I began noticing how readily conservative views were dismissed or ridiculed by those who prided themselves on being “inclusive.” Toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I started hosting salons in my Quincy House tutor suite, intended to promote intellectual diversity. I was pleased when they drew modest attention. Among my favorite frequent guests were sharp conservative writers from the Crimson and the Salient. In those conversations, a familiar asymmetry emerged: conservative students typically understood liberal arguments in depth, whereas many liberals and leftists had not engaged the strongest conservative opinions.

Where Harvard Went Wrong makes for congenial reading, especially for conservatives, who will find it an elegant guide for navigating contemporary academia. But liberals may discover something even more valuable: an invitation to engage arguments they have too often ignored. After all, as Mill observed, opposing views keep the mind alert—and do it good.

Reprinted from City Journal (June 26, 2026)

Reprinted with permission from UnHerd (October 24, 2026).

When I meet Freddie deBoer on a sunny Sunday afternoon in New Haven, Connecticut, at an upscale Japanese grocery market, he arrives wearing a black Sunn O))) t-shirt — a nod to one of the world’s loudest and most frightening drone-metal bands. “You gonna get food? I’m gonna get food,” he says, before I can answer. It’s a brief, almost brusque, introduction, from a polarizing writer who is known for making some feel uneasy.

In an earlier era, deBoer, 45, might have been anchored in a university department or a prestigious magazine. Today, he writes on Substack. His third nonfiction book, All in Your Head, a crisply argued analysis of modern disability culture, is out next week. Though he’s a socialist and civil libertarian, deBoer is known for his biting critiques of fashionable progressivism. That tension, between his Left-wing politics and his intellectual disposition, runs under much of what he writes.

Had deBoer been born before the advent of modern psychiatric treatment, he’d have fared much worse. He has spoken openly about living with bipolar disorder, and the wreckage brought on by its worst symptom: acute and escalating paranoia. He was first involuntarily committed in 2002, after an altercation with a neighbor. His worst psychotic break occurred in August 2017, when he publicly attacked the writer Malcolm Harris with knowing lies, accusing him of rape. Less well known is that around the same time, deBoer threatened an ex-girlfriend with violence, after he imagined she’d hacked into his bank account. She insisted that he check himself into a psychiatric institution — or else she’d call the police. DeBoer suspects the intervention prevented a jail sentence or eventual suicide.

His childhood was marked by loss and instability. His mom died of brain cancer when he was seven. His father, Fritz, a radical theater professor, died while deBoer was in high school, from hepatocellular carcinoma and hepatitis B and C. Freddie remembers him as physically imposing, rascally charming, and “incredibly loving,” but so incapacitated by alcoholism that he was unable to provide ordinary parental guidance, even on matters as basic as personal hygiene.

DeBoer built an audience blogging in the early 2010s, then earned a PhD in English at Purdue in 2015, even as he cycled in and out of manic episodes. He gives the impression of making it through grad school as a high-achieving, hard-living, cerebral party monster. He hoped to become a professor, but entered the academic job market at the worst possible moment. In the mid-2010s, the collapse in tenure-track humanities hiring had become a national story, and — it’s true — white males had an especially tough time getting hired. Yet he found an administrative position at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he oversaw assessments of student learning. He dutifully informed his new employer he had a registered disability for which he was medicated. “I told them my memory is going to suck, my focus is going to suck, and I have fatigue issues.”

DeBoer publicly apologized for l’affaire Harris in 2018 and vowed to stay off the internet; a history of bruising online disputes had made him untold other enemies. Following an aggressive regimen of medication and therapy, however, he emerged as an author in 2020 with The Cult of Smart, an argument against tying human worth to academic talent. But he lost his CUNY job that year. He was unemployed and uninsured during Covid, watching his $75,000 book advance dwindle by the month, while wondering how he would continue paying for the mental health treatment he plainly needed. Substack extended a lifeline: a $125,000 advance against future subscriptions. DeBoer soon became one of its better-known and most controversial writers.

DeBoer frequently stresses his bona fides as a former progressive organizer; a critic of US foreign policy and Israel; a pro-choice absolutist; and a supporter of trans rights — all apparently to inoculate himself against claims that, when he attacks the Left, he is carrying water for the Right. Still, he frequently expresses frustration with today’s online activist culture, which he finds annoying, performative, and culturally elitist. A good example is his 2021 epistle to the woke Left. It’s titled: “Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Terms I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.” DeBoer also maintains a savage “Good White Man Roster”, a list of progressive white men whom he regards as ostentatiously performative online. If politics provides one set of adversaries, the arts furnish another, and some sense he’s drawn to assaying writers of a certain type. Often they’re precocious or au courant: literary darlings. Admirers find him caustically funny; others call him rude. “You can cut out the middleman and just ask for pussy directly,” he admonishes showboating male feminists.

Sometimes, deBoer is called “reactionary,” though he almost never invokes the conservative canon. His work does, however, show an appreciation for the ways biology, institutions, and human nature impose constraints, something philosophical conservatives likewise emphasize. In The Cult of Smart, for instance, deBoer argues that genetics place limits on educational equality that politics cannot simply wish away. Another book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023), shows how egalitarian ideals can become warped by status competition and bureaucratic incentives. And in All in Your Head, he stresses that good intentions don’t guarantee anything; lots of genuinely well-meaning disability activists have, he says, increased the suffering of the mentally ill.

All in Your Head begins with a murder that once haunted deBoer’s hometown of Middletown, Connecticut. On 28 July 1989, David Peterson — a serially violent patient at Connecticut Valley Hospital (the same place where deBoer was confined) — found his way out of the forensic ward. He took a bus downtown, to a crowded sidewalk, and fatally stabbed a nine-year-old girl, Jessica Short, in front of her mother, sister, and stricken onlookers.

A stirring chapter in All in Your Head indicts deinstitutionalization: the process, begun in the idealistic early Sixties, of shuttering or shrinking mental health hospitals. Some facilities were, indeed, overcrowded, or unwholesome. But deBoer fumes that the era’s anti-establishment reformers took One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest far too seriously. It never made sense, he argues, to think of modern psychiatry as a tool of oppression. Deinstitutionalization only became possible thanks to the mid-Fifties success of modern psychopharmacology, which helped many patients find some functional stability, so long as they took their meds.

Since the mid-Seventies, it has been generally illegal to forcibly hold psychiatric patients long-term unless they’re likely to cause imminent harm. To many, that seems legally defensible and emotionally intuitive, though the system is imperfect since, deBoer writes, “psychiatrists are not fortune tellers.” Meanwhile, deinstitutionalization all but guaranteed that large numbers of people with schizophrenia would be left to fend for themselves on city streets, untreated or addicted, homeless, destitute, and filthy. Many such people would plainly be safer in structured therapeutic facilities but instead find themselves in jails or prisons.

DeBoer does not call for a return to the grim asylums of yore; he’d rather see patients steered toward more effective community and outpatient care. But by opening the book with Short’s murder, and stressing the harms that untreated mental illness inflicts upon neighborhoods, he arrives at points more commonly associated with conservatives.

DeBoer also traces how the discourse of mental illness has “gentrified” online: the minimally disabled hog attention and shape how disabilities are understood. Conditions such as ADHD and autism, diagnosed with increasing frequency, get folded into the anodyne language of “neurodiversity” or are even celebrated as “superpowers” — obscuring the fact that both are strongly associated with adverse life outcomes. Meanwhile, many disability activists insist that no one should question another person’s self-diagnosis, on the theory that nobody would fake a disability. The problem is, some people do lie, and the internet only makes it easier. Similarly, when someone with a psychiatric disorder does something terrible, certain online advocates insist “mental illness doesn’t do that.” Such advocates, deBoer writes, deny “the most essential protection we have for mentally ill people — the communal understanding that mental illness confuses the question of basic moral culpability.”

DeBoer stresses that these arguments owe little to partisan politics, which is narrowly true. But as Michael Oakeshott argued, small-c conservatism is less a doctrine than a disposition — a preference for the actual over the possible, the tried over the untried. A frequent theme in deBoer’s work is that we ought to be realistic about how perfect we can reasonably expect the world to be. And whenever he makes that case, he’s in good conservative company.

It is important to know that deBoer thinks my suggestion is, as he puts it, “horseshit”. He didn’t tell me directly, but anticipated it here, in 2023: “The socialist mantra is that a better world is possible, not that a perfect world is possible… If you want to insist that saying there are limits to the possible is conservative, enjoy your dream world, but leave it out of my politics. The question is pre-political.”

Dream world? DeBoer seems to think he’s drawing a boundary that shuts conservatism out of his politics. But when he stresses that some things are “pre-political” — that they are prior to, and constrain, what politics can do — he echoes Oakeshott’s formative account of the conservative temperament itself. And when he applies it to critique his own side’s naivety — for instance, when discussing progressive education policy, culture war rhetoric, or deinstitutionalization — he appears dispositionally conservative. This isn’t a strange or hostile reading. It simply speaks to his habit of reaching conclusions by scrutinizing the world and studying how people actually live.

He reminds me a bit of Theodore Dalrymple, the British psychiatrist whose critique of liberal pieties arises from first-hand knowledge. For decades, he treated criminals and unfortunates in jails and slum hospitals — roughly 10,000 of them. In Life at the Bottom (2001), he writes confidentially, against the grain, and laments the ways bad ideas circulate through elite circles. Dalrymple argues that relativism and non-judgmentalism are ideas the intelligentsia can afford as lifestyle accessories. A well-off person’s marriage or career survives their promiscuous tolerance of other people’s dumb, destructive behavior, and self-serving fantastical beliefs. But when those without money, family stability, or above-average intelligence reject bourgeois values, that usually produces poor results.

All in Your Head applies the same logic. When comfortable progressives insist upon the individual rights of psychotics — to refuse treatment, to eat from garbage cans, to soil themselves, to take refuge in cardboard shacks — it costs them little. It’s not morally courageous: their tolerance is purchased with someone else’s suffering. DeBoer, by contrast, realizes that constraints, even coercions, are sometimes necessary: whether for the greater good, or as particular forms of care. If you don’t want to call it conservative, fine: call it tragic realism. “The world is broken,” he writes. “We are obligated to cobble together the best life we can for everyone.” Exactly.

DeBoer is a quick, effusive talker, and projects complete assurance. But later, at a bar down the street, he catches me off guard. He mentions being drawn to the internet’s “impermanence”, because, he says, “I regret so much of what I say and do.”

“How so?” I ask.

“Just being the shithead. Or being ‘too much’. Not regulating myself properly. I mean, it’s like… I don’t know.”

“I get so paranoid,” he continues. “I mean, look, I’m medicated right now. I’m fine. We’re having a conversation. I might be kind of an eccentric guy, but I don’t look like I’m crazy and I’m not crazy. [But] there is never a time when I don’t have that feeling in the back of my head that someone is trying to kill me.”

“Who do you think is trying to kill you right now?”

“That’s the thing. Because I’m medicated, I know rationally that’s not true. Right? But it’s… just a sensation of: ‘I’m in danger. People around me are conspiring. If I [don’t] get them first, they’re gonna get me.’ It’s all — look — it’s all squashed down with 1,200 milligrams of lithium and who knows what else… The drugs smush it down.”

The disclosure had emerged organically from our conversation. I’m certain deBoer doesn’t intend it as a revelation, much less a skeleton key to help me wrap up my profile. But his description of living with the low-level hum of medically managed paranoia must surely inform my understanding of the person I’d been reading for years and had just spent an afternoon with. The fiercely independent, contrarian essayist was, at least in this moment, staring into his Campari and confessing to living with abiding vulnerability.

That image scarcely explains deBoer’s place in contemporary intellectual life. But perhaps it does help explain his sharper edges. It also offers a different way of understanding his politics. A man who knows firsthand how little control we sometimes have over our own minds has good reasons for doubting that goodwill, or social justice hooey, can overcome reality and nature.

“Come on,” he says, a moment later. “Let me walk you to the train.”

I’m looking at the November 1976 issue of Playboy, though with less furtive excitement than if I’d somehow acquired it during my teenage years. It’s got a fetching cover photo of Patti McGuire, coy and glamorous, but truly, I’m here for an article: its lengthy interview with then presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, which hit newsstands 50 years ago.

If you were an adult back then, you probably recall it. Carter said, “I’ve looked upon a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” He also said he wouldn’t sit in final judgement of the man who “shacks up with somebody out of wedlock,” or “screws a whole bunch of women.”

Are you astonished, shocked, or appalled? Playboy wired the transcript to roughly a thousand newsrooms, and within days it was the nation’s biggest topic. Saturday Night Live parodied it within the week. Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell denounced him from their pulpits. Some feared it’d cost Carter the election. “If I should ever decide in the future to discuss my Christian beliefs,” he said in the next debate, “I’ll use another forum besides Playboy.”

This all should have seemed silly at the time. Recall, Carter was among the most steadfastly devout politicians in modern history – literally a Sunday School teacher. Theodore White, the legendary campaign reporter, surmised that of all the presidential candidates he’d covered, he was “reasonably sure” that only three had never stepped out on their marriage: Harry Truman, George Romney, and Carter. Today, the episode seems quaint. The current occupant of the White House has certainly prospered after countless revelations that – putting it mildly – would have been unimaginably disqualifying in 1976.

There’s a better way to read the controversy: It reveals Jimmy Carter as one of our coolest former presidents.

An adolescent theory of being cool (though adults share it too) hinges on style, taste and performativity. But real cool isn’t about posturing or fitting in; it’s about being sufficiently at ease with yourself – and settled enough in your convictions – that embarrassment doesn’t frighten you into pretending to be someone you’re not.

Carter said something true and relatable. (Raise your hand if you’ve never lusted after someone.) He was sharing his lifelong belief that Jesus knows we’ll sin and loves us anyway. That’s not my faith. But Carter’s answer was cool because it wasn’t calibrated to any audience. He said what he thought, took the hit, and let people react however they reacted.

Nowadays, lots of politicians, journalists, and academics are in a pickle. Not too long ago, they said things they now appear embarrassed to defend. On the left, some advanced arguments that voters rejected as culturally extreme, and now they wish to wave them away. “Woke 1 was crazy!” On the right, some who claimed that 2020 election was stolen have learned to quickly change the subject when cameras are rolling. Of course, one can think of many more examples.

Being wrong isn’t necessarily uncool. Everyone is wrong sometimes. When people change their minds, even abruptly, that can be a healthy sign of intellectual humility – but only if they’re willing to explain it. Otherwise, it’s an evasion, a maneuver, a dodge.

What’s very uncool is saying things you don’t believe – or, if you have a stake in something, refusing to say what you do believe – because you’re so afraid of what others might think.

Carter was many things: earnest, awkward, occasionally self-righteous. He wore cardigans and smiled goofily. He saw a UFO. He was, as his campaign manager feared, vulnerable to “the weirdo factor.” Shortly after Carter’s Playboy interview, his good-natured wife, Rosalynn, allowed that perhaps he’d embarrassed himself: “Jimmy talks too much,” she quipped.

He would suffer a much greater humiliation in 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated him 489 electoral votes to 49. But again, Carter didn’t hide from it. “I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you,” he told his supporters. “So, I can’t stand here tonight and say it doesn’t hurt.”

When Carter opened his mouth to Playboy, he wasn’t smooth. But no one wondered if he’d been swept up in some fad or was just saying what everyone else was saying. Today, Carter is admired for many things – his humility, his seriousness of purpose, his post-presidential dedication to humanitarian work. But at times during his career, he also showed another special quality – an unusual tolerance for embarrassment.

Fifty years later, that may have been the coolest thing about him.

Reprinted from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (October 9, 2026).

I was excited, three months ago, to publish this essay on one of my favorite writers, Jim Harrison, in The Metropolitan Review. Thanks to Ross Barkan for letting me publish it here as well.


Toward the end of this essay, I’m going to tell you about the time 30 years ago when Jim Harrison — the singular American poet and novelist — stole my date. This happened at a literary festival in Key West when I was 25 years old. Worse, I had flown there from East Lansing, Michigan, with nearly the sole purpose of meeting Harrison, whom I idolized.

Before I get to the story, let me discuss Todd Goddard’s sweeping biography, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life. Harrison wasn’t a household name, but few writers have inspired a readership so passionate. Some of us have even made pilgrimages to the bars he loved — Dick’s Pour House, on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula; the Murray Hotel Bar, in Livingston, Montana; or the Night Before Lounge, a strip club in Lincoln, Nebraska. Years ago, I knew a successful New York-based author who discovered Harrison too late, just after his death in 2016, when for a couple of weeks fellow writers celebrated him with fond obituaries and gushing tributes. “I learned that everyone I know had apparently hung out with him at some point,” she wrote to me. “It was like how when David Carr died, I learned that he’d sent every journalist I know an encouraging email, except me.”

The easy way of describing Harrison is to say that he was driven by enormous appetites — for food, sex, booze, literature, and the natural world. The New York Times’ Dwight Garner, an admirer, called him “our poet laureate of lumbering desire.” It’s an apt characterization, though Goddard, an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University, probes more deeply. His book draws from over 100 interviews, Harrison’s vast collection of personal papers, and intimate familiarity with his work. Goddard stresses Harrison’s accomplishments in poetry — the form he most cared about — and while his portrayal is admiring, it does not shirk from his flaws. The Harrison that emerges in Devouring Time is deeply sentimental and disarmingly cerebral, but never didactic. He grappled with metaphysical questions though he resisted abstractions; he found meaning in the dying of elk, winter rivers, and the savor of food.

Harrison was born in the northern Michigan town of Grayling in 1937, which back then was rooted in the timber economy. His Swedish ancestors were hardscrabble farmers, though his father worked for a New Deal agency. When Jim was seven years old, while “playing doctor” with a girl about that age, she thrust a shard of glass into his left eye, blinding him permanently. Later in his life, when posing for photographs, he often angled his ruined eye to the side, exposing its milky sclera.

Religion was strongly present in his family. Before proudly declaring as a teenager that he would be a poet, Harrison planned — amusingly, in retrospect — to become a fundamentalist preacher. He was precocious enough that at 18 he wrote a combative letter to John Ciardi, the Saturday Review’s poetry editor, expressing his distaste for so-called “academic poetry” — and Ciardi responded. Harrison remained a lifelong skeptic of MFA programs, which he compared to “Ford Motor Plants.” An aspiring poet would be better served, he later advised, working as a “truck driver, a proctologist, a stripper, a dishwasher, a furrier, a cowboy, an unlicensed plumber.”

At Michigan State, Harrison read widely and prodigiously, though rarely for his classes. He was a distracted and spotty student, dropping out and returning several times before finally earning two degrees there. As a young man he twice sojourned to New York City, styling himself as a post-Beat bohemian while occasionally sinking into depressions.

At 19, back in Michigan, Harrison fell in love with Linda King, whom he soon married in a shotgun wedding. To observers, their relationship has long seemed vexing: he wrote voluminously about nearly everything in his life — except her, which was as she preferred. Linda also did not share Jim’s wanderlust, so he almost always traveled alone. Goddard shows they deeply loved and depended on one another, and when times were lean — as they were until middle age — his inadequacy as a family provider weighed heavily upon him, a source of guilt and shame. This, however, can be hard to square with Harrison’s lifelong, assiduous wooing of women, about which he made little secret, and which some found distasteful. He was briefly linked with the starlet Jessica Lange and unsuccessfully pursued William Styron’s wife, Rose. He had numerous dalliances, sometimes with younger women who admired him, as well as some prostitutes.

Linda was at Jim’s side when his life’s greatest tragedy struck, in 1962. A drunk driver killed his father and sister, with whom he had deep, meaningful relationships. Goddard doesn’t mention it, but in his memoir, Harrison later listed among the errata of his life his decision to glance at a police photo of their brutally mangled bodies. Afterward, Harrison plunged even deeper into his writing. “You can see it in my first book, Plain Song,” he remarked. “If people die then you better get down to business.”

He moved to Boston, where he found an enthusiastic supporter in Denise Levertov, who was the poetry advisor for W. W. Norton. Though distrustful of academics, Harrison briefly taught in the mid- to late 1960s at Stony Brook University. His biggest “accomplishment” there was to help organize a major poetry conference in 1968, which brought scores of luminaries to campus, and was so libation-fueled, raucous, and fractious that at one point Allen Ginsberg fell to his knees, chanting Buddhist peace prayers.

Around this time, Harrison struck up, initially through correspondence, a lifelong, richly textured friendship with the ineffable Thomas McGuane, who had been one of his contemporaries at Michigan State, though they barely knew each other there. Goddard quotes liberally from their decades of letters, which “ranged from the performative — literary high-wire acts — to the confessional. . . . As the years went on,” Goddard notes, “they’d write to each other with the expectation that they were doing so for posterity.”

This was so even as Harrison’s early work met little success. From his 1973 poetry collection, Letters to Yesenin: “I don’t have any medals. I feel their lack / of weight upon my chest. Years ago I was ambitious / But now it is clear that nothing will happen.”

He was drinking and smoking too much — he would never stop — nor did he cease anguishing about his terrible health habits. Among the first of an improbable number of Harrison’s wealthy friends was the poet Dan Gerber, from the family that founded the iconic baby food brand; together they traveled widely, to England, Ireland, and the Soviet Union. Harrison is often celebrated for his epicurean appetites, but on some of these trips, he would overeat compulsively, darkly, to the point of sickness.

Harrison’s autobiographical first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir (1971) sold meagerly, though it garnered a couple of prominent and enthusiastic reviews. Its first sentence — a poetically inflected marvelment — runs two pages. A knock against Harrison, perhaps, is that throughout his career, his protagonists often seemed to mirror his own darkly comic voice and thinking. While driving across a flat, colorless stretch of Nevada, his character, Swanson, muses: “I see why they test atomic bombs in this state — if they didn’t, I would, only in more central locations.”

Harrison’s next novel, 1973’s A Good Day to Die, was better plotted but likewise sold poorly. Farmer (1976) was also unsuccessful, though both are excellent. Meanwhile, he struggled through northern Michigan’s gloomy winters while laboring in near obscurity. Also from Letters to Yesenin: “Suicide. Beauty takes my courage away / this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter’s red robe / hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”

During this period, Harrison trekked regularly to Key West, where he roistered and fished with large-souled kindred spirits: McGuane, whose career was flourishing; Russell Chatham, a luminous painter of landscapes; Guy de la Valdène, a wealthy French sportsman; and the singer Jimmy Buffet, before he became famous. They collaborated on a small-budget cinéma vérité film, Tarpon, the appeal of which I’ve never quite understood — though Henry Begler approves¹ — and some fishermen consider it a classic.

McGuane, flush with cash from his novels and screenplays, bought property just south of Livingston, Montana — he named it the Raw Deal Ranch — that became the locus of an exuberant, closely knit literary community. Harrison visited frequently and got his first true big break there through a friendship he formed with the actor Jack Nicholson, who effectively underwrote Harrison’s classic novella collection, Legends of the Fall (1979). Reviewing it in The Sunday Times of London, Bernard Levin famously called Harrison “a writer with immortality in him.” The book’s success “marked a tremendous change in Jim’s life,” Goddard says, “more tied to Hollywood, screenwriting, cocaine, movie stars, and especially money.” Legends also helped concretize Harrison’s reputation as a “macho” writer, a term he despised. “I write about the preoccupations I was born and raised with, fishing and hunting in the country,” he later groused. “Why is that macho?”

Harrison reveled in his newfound success, even as it sapped his time and energy. To recalibrate, he hired a trusted family friend as a personal assistant and formed an intense relationship with a New York City psychotherapist. But in a 1982 letter to McGuane, he shared a “brutal admission”: despite earning over a million dollars in the preceding four years — roughly $4 or $5 million today — he was broke. Given his druthers, he would have focused more on his poetry, but that’s not where the money was.

His next major achievement was his 1988 novel Dalva, which broke new ground by giving voice to a female protagonist, a Nebraska woman who searches for the child she gave up at birth. Both he and his editor, Seymore Lawrence, thought that book would be the one, and perhaps it should have been. But Harrison never did win a National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize; he was not even nominated. Some suspected that was because his interests in the American hinterland were too far from the gaze and tastes of the coastal literary establishment. Late in his career, however, Harrison became far more deeply revered in France than the United States. They called him “le grizzly du nord du Michigan” and “le Mozart des grandes plaines.” His public appearances were major events and people recognized him on Paris streets.

Harrison continued producing lyrical, meditative, and comical works — novels, novellas, poems, essays, and a couple of screenplays. He wrote prolifically and would never again be poor. He was tickled when the New Yorker published his novella “The Woman Lit by Fireflies,” another impressive work. One of his memorable essays, “A Really Big Lunch,” recounted an eleven hour, 37-course meal he took in Burgundy, France, where the menu was drawn from recipes in 17th and 18th-century cookbooks and “likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon.” Many readers also loved his Brown Dog chronicles, about an unlucky, hard-drinking, half-Ojibwe trickster who drifts across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Some sensed that his later fiction did not measure up to Legends and Dalva, and that is probably true — but his poetry rarely wavered. As he aged, he wrote especially well about illness and mortality. From his 2015 collection, Dead Man’s Float:

My work piles up,
I falter with disease.
Time rushes toward me —
it has no brakes. Still,
the radishes are good this year.
Run them through butter,
add a little salt.

Harrison entered an early physical decline, and Goddard’s acute descriptions of his ailments — diabetes, gout, kidney stones, back pain, blood pressure spikes, respiratory, prostate, and bowel problems, shakiness, and various convalescences — should give pause to anyone prone to romanticizing his unruly modes of excess. He hated having to curtail his traveling and to give up his remote northern Michigan cabin: “I’d rather sell my kidneys to a republican,” he wrote to a friend. He even had to fight the State of Arizona to keep his driver’s license. There was at least some mordant humor, Goddard notes, in the image of Harrison, “a lifelong intellectual and writer,” straining with shaky hands and poor eyesight to pass the written portion of his state’s driving exam.

Harrison died in 2016, in the most fitting way — hunkered at his desk, writing a poem. “Had Jim written the secret number of birds he had counted in a lifetime on a slip of paper as he had once promised in the poem ‘Counting Birds?’” Goddard muses. “If so, he did not get to pass it to his wife and daughters from his deathbed, as he once imagined.”

____________________________________________________________________________

About that trip to Key West: I had become intoxicated by Harrison’s work in college. My enthusiasm was intense. At the time, I was working on a master’s degree in history but thought I might pursue a Ph.D. in English, and I secured a travel grant to attend a multi-day festival on American Writers and the Natural World. Harrison would be featured there, along with my second-favorite writer, McGuane, and others I admired. But the clear goal was to meet Jim.

And I did get to briefly introduce myself to him. He signed a book and posed for a picture. But the idea that he would take any special interest in me — because I was a fan, and I too was from Michigan, and knew its northern woods — well, that was of course a juvenile fantasy.

Otherwise, the conference was fine. Most of its attendees were much older than me; they seemed dilettantish and well-heeled. I purposefully dressed down in a flannel shirt. There was, however, an attractive woman there, about my age, who was also a grad student, from someplace in Florida. We hit it off a bit. The first day, we talked. The second night we kissed on a bench. For the third night (I confess) I hoped maybe we’d have sex. We’d made dinner plans, but at a late-afternoon reception she told me she wouldn’t be able to make it: Jim Harrison had invited her to a group dinner. Ugh.

We adjusted our plans and agreed to see each other afterward for late-night drinks. We set a time to meet at Sloppy Joe’s, a bar that Hemingway famously frequented, but had since devolved into a garish tourist trap. I showed up and waited for her. I continued waiting, longer than I should have. (This was before cell phones.) Eventually, two of her English professors walked in, and my heart sank when I overheard one murmur to the other: “Oh no, he’s still here.” They approached me gingerly, knowing I’d been waiting for [name forgotten]. “I’m sorry,” one said. “I don’t think she’s going to make it.” They’d just seen her boarding Jimmy Buffet’s yacht — with Jim Harrison. He was 58 then, but seemed older, and used a cane — maybe to manage his gout or possibly just to offload his massive weight. Regardless, I’d not stood a chance. About a month later, the woman I’d fancied sent me a letter apologizing; nothing sexual had happened with Jim, she stressed.

I met Jim again in 2002 at a reading outside Boston. This time, we actually got to chat a bit. I mentioned someone we knew in common and asked for his opinion of Richard Yates. Eventually, I brought up that we’d briefly met six years prior at that Key West conference, and that while he surely hadn’t known it — and of course there were obviously no hard feelings — he had poached my date.

He lit up with a giant grin. He remembered that night well, he said, not least because he’d ended up stuck with the entire $3,000 tab from the dinner party. The truly amazing thing, though, was that he’d seen her again, just the night before, on his book tour. “She came to my party at Elaine’s!” he boasted. I asked if she was still very pretty. He responded, still radiant, with a wisecrack that made me chuckle — but that was also so outrageously lewd and disarmingly specific — that I will never repeat it in print. Except to say that I am glad that Jim Harrison did not live to see the #MeToo movement.

I learned this morning that Ben Morea – a semi-legendary, mysterious, and troublesome Lower East Side activist and artist – died yesterday. Sometime around 1970, after various troubles with the law, Ben went underground, moving out west and living roughly off the land. Back when I was a grad student, studying youth culture in the 1960s, he’d piqued my curiosity, and in 2007, I tracked him down and wrote about him in a cover story for the New York Press. I was the first person to discuss him in print for perhaps 35 years. An anarchist, Ben always said that political groups shouldn’t have “leaders,” and he claimed he never wanted to be in the limelight. But privately, he was thrilled by my essay and afterward, he reemerged, showing his paintings in several gallery shows. He loved advising and sharing stories with younger activists. It appears he was the inspiration for a character in Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, and in 2016, he was warmly profiled in the New York Times. In 2024 he appeared at the pro-Palestine tent encampment at Columbia. Age was catching up with him - he spoke haltingly and seemed a bit off.

For a while, Ben and I got along – I’d visit his ramshackle loft in NYC, we shared meals, and he came to some talks I gave at Columbia and the New School. But eventually I judged him to be a nuisance. He was needy and irascible, and he wanted me to write a book about him – as if that would be a simple thing for me to do. Anyhow, this is what I said about him twenty years ago.

Ben Morea: Garbage Guerrilla (October 12, 2007).

In the late 1960s, Ben Morea was the notorious leader of an unsavory Lower East Side anarchist collective called Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. As a young historian who studies that period, I’d spent almost three years trying to locate him. All the leads I’d followed went nowhere. It was as if Morea had vanished, as thoroughly as a jet contrail.

Not that this was terribly surprising. Even in his heyday, Morea cultivated an air of mystery. In the early 60s, he was an abstract-expressionist painter who signaled his lack of compromising nuances by dressing completely in black. Later in the decade, he used to strut around St. Marks Place and Second Avenue, longhaired and bearded like any number of hippies, but instead of adorning himself in flowers and beads, he wore a leather jacket, carried a switchblade, and peddled manifestos full of cryptic poetry and angry agitprop. The Motherfuckers described themselves as a kind of politicized street gang, but in the media they were known only as “a group with a certain unprintable name.” Their attitude toward the counterculture summons to mind something Patti Smith later said about rock ‘n’ roll: “We created it; let’s take it over!”

This is a group that once carried piles of stinking, festering trash from the East Village and dumped it on the steps of Lincoln Center. (”WE PROPOSE A CULTURAL EXCHANGE,” they declared in an accompanying leaflet: “garbage for garbage.”) In 1968, they rallied in support of Valerie Solanas, the tormented feminist who shot Andy Warhol. A year later, they cut the fences at Woodstock, famously helping to turn it into a free concert for thousands.

Then they disappeared, or, some said, escaped. Morea had already been acquitted of attempted murder after allegedly stabbing a hawkish thug known for preying on hippies and draft resisters in Boston. After that came a highly publicized turf war with rock impresario Bill Graham, owner of New York’s hippest club, the Fillmore East. At issue was whether or not denizens of the East Village could have free use of the Fillmore one night each week for revelry and community organizing. After a confusing volley of words and threats, someone smashed Graham in the face with a chain, shattering his nose. Later, a superintendent who oversaw a building where the Motherfuckers were squatting was found stabbed to death.

Ben is 63 years old now, small and wiry, with a Fu Manchu moustache and jet-black hair that he combs backward. He lives in the Southwest, but still visits New York periodically. So long as we’re indoors, he politely keeps his cowboy hat on the bench beside him. For all his past reticence, he’s an effusive talker and a gifted raconteur. If he’d been born a bit earlier, I could imagine him showing up in one of Jack Kerouac’s road novels. Sometimes he recounts past exploits with the joyful, stiff-necked pride one might expect from an ex-prizefighter. He smiles easily and impishly.

Right upfront, he tells me what I already know: that but for one recent exception, he hasn’t appeared in public as “Ben Morea” in 35 years. So why the change of heart? His answer unfolds gradually and betrays genuine ambivalence. On the one hand, he’s always been reluctant to be singled out. He tells me how he made a point of avoiding the cameras when he was backstage at Woodstock, and how he once turned down an offer to play a part in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about 60s American youth culture, Zabriskie Point. But he regrets that the Motherfuckers remain obscure and poorly understood. The 1960s may be one of the most overwritten decades in American history, but the only scholarly treatment the group has ever received was a 2003 Harvard honors thesis that I advised. Repeatedly, Morea rails against how the counterculture’s values have been domesticated, sanitized and exploited.

Morea moved to New York City at the age of 10, where he hung out with black and Puerto Rican street kids in Hell’s Kitchen. As a teenager, he guttered out on heroin. While in treatment for his addiction, he was introduced to two of his longstanding passions, which were also his salvation: painting and reading. He speaks plainly and clearly, yet sprinkles his conversation with references to Michael Bakunin, Guy Debord, Franz Fanon, and that lion of New Left thought, Herbert Marcuse.

In the early 60s, Morea was befriended by the cofounders of the Living Theater, an experimental theater company whose loose and challenging performances forecast the coming countercultural style. In 1966, he helped launch Black Mask, a short-lived, crudely mimeographed arts magazine that he peddled in the East Village for a nickel. Later, he connected with artists who were likewise politicized by the antiwar and Black Power movements. Out of this mix emerged Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker, the name taken from a line in a Leroi Jones poem.

The Motherfuckers never had more than a couple dozen full-time members. Their ranks included an intellectually impressive Ivy League dropout, Osha Neumann, along with autodidacts and barely literate street people. In all the counterculture, there was nothing quite like them. Though sympathetic with the hippies, they mocked their flowery fantasies and chided them for their weakness. They had a tenuous connection to Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left’s main political organization, but recoiled from its sectarian intellectual debates, and regarded even the most militant students as cloistered and unreliable. They judged the media-obsessed Yippies as too playful and unserious. They found the Black Panthers sufficiently ferocious, but too rigidly hierarchical and doctrinaire. Probably the group that they most closely resembled was the San Francisco Diggers, an artistically inclined, utopian-minded collective who championed an ethos of maximum personal freedom and set up various “counter-institutions” around Haight-Ashbury.

Both groups had their dark sides, though there was a key difference of temperament: the Motherfuckers were tougher and angrier. “They lived like gutter rats,” Abbie Hoffman once recalled. Susan Stern, a former member of the Weather Underground, called them “the downright dirtiest, skuzziest, and loudest group of people [she’d] ever laid eyes on.” In their creepy broadsheets, which frequently ran in an underground newspaper called The Rat, they trumpeted the most extreme formulations of the counterculture cosmology. “We are the ultimate Horror Show,” read one. “Hideous Hair & Dangerous Drugs . . . Armed Love striking terror into the vacant hearts of the plastic Mother & pig-faced Father.”

After the Motherfuckers disbanded, Morea and his wife lived on horseback for five years in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, illegally hunting and gathering and constantly evading the Forest Service. Later he became a lumberjack -- a job he now admits he wasn’t well suited for, given his slight frame. Today he limps, having once sliced his leg with a chainsaw, and he’s deaf in one ear because, he smirks, he was “too macho to wear earplugs.”

We met at a diner, and as Ben was finishing his pancakes, I brought up Solanas, the radical feminist who founded her own one-woman organization, the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM). After Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, the Motherfuckers staged a raucous street performance on her behalf in Tompkins Square Park, where Ben distributed a leaflet lionizing her as a “cultural assassin -- a tough chic with a bop cap and a thirty eight.”

I put the question bluntly: “How could you rationalize supporting her?”

“Rationalize? I didn’t rationalize anything,” Ben says with a shrug. “I loved Valerie, and I loathed Andy Warhol, so that’s all there was to it.” A few seconds later he adds, “I mean, I didn’t want to shoot him.” But then he doubles back again. “Andy Warhol ruined art.”

“But let me tell you how I met her,” he says, excitedly.

“I was selling nickel copies of Black Mask on the corner of 8th St. and 5th Avenue. One day, Valerie came by and said, ‘Hey, I’d like to get one of those, [but] I don’t have a nickel.’ So I said, ‘Oh, that’s alright, you can have one, you don’t need a nickel.’ She said, ‘Wait here!’ And she ran into the bookstore, and she stole a copy of her [SCUM] manifesto -- stole it! -- and came out and said ‘Here, I wrote this,’ in exchange for the nickel paper. And see, she used to stay with me after that.”

In the 1995 film I Shot Andy Warhol, there appears a character identified in the screenplay as “Mark Motherfucker,” who, director Mary Harron tells me, was modeled after Morea. In one scene, the two are together in Morea/Mark Motherfucker’s “chaotic tenement apartment,” which is “strewn with piles of laundry, books, papers, empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays, revolutionary posters, combat gear.” They vamp around the room, mouthing militant platitudes and striking cartoonish poses with guns. When they finally collapse into bed, the screenplay calls for “Strobe cuts of more banal sex action.” Later, while Morea/Mark Motherfucker is asleep, Valerie steals his gun -- the one she uses to shoot Warhol.

Ben enjoyed the film, but he says none of that happened. “First of all, Valerie was my dearest friend, and we had guns all over the place, but she would never steal a gun from me.”

Later, Morea tells me how he once asked Valerie where he fit within her revolutionary plan to “destroy the male sex.”

“She thought about it a minute, pensive, you know, like she’d never thought about it before. And she said, ‘I’m gonna promise you something -- You’ll be the last man we kill.’ And I said to her, jokingly, ‘Can you put it in writing?’”

She did. “And I wish I had it to this day,” he muses softly.

“Yesterday I saw that Hippie book,” says Morea.

He’s referring to a slick, bestselling coffee-table book by Barry Miles, which was released this year by Sterling Publishing Co., a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble.

“And there was a picture of Jerry Rubin with a [National Liberation Front] flag wrapped around his shoulders, holding a plastic machine gun. And it’s like, ‘Wow, I have to smile.’ Our idea was, if you’re gonna pick up a machine gun, it shouldn’t be plastic.”

Later, he makes the same point again, in reference to the Motherfuckers’ existentially flavored willingness to take tremendous personal risks. “We weren’t like Jerry Rubin walking around with a plastic machine gun and a flag draped on [his] shoulder,” he groused.

He later brings up “that idiot Rubin” a third time, after describing one of the Mothefuckers’ most legendary actions. On October 21, 1967, Morea and several others broke into the Pentagon during an antiwar rally, after which they were beaten bloody by American soldiers. “It didn’t bring the world any closer to [betterment],” Ben shrugs. “We didn’t know if they would start shooting! They could have. We really thought they might.”

I used to wonder whether the Motherfuckers weren’t a bit of a put-on, proto-punks more like Ramones than Jacobins. Ben bristles at the notion.

“If you had any instinct of self-preservation you couldn’t do what we did,” he says. But for all of their pick-up-the-gun militancy and acid-fueled rhetoric, he remains proudest of their contributions to the community: providing food, comfort, and shelter to teenage runaways who flocked to the Lower East Side’s mean streets, feeding the homeless, guiding hippies through bad LSD trips, and pluckily standing up against the Ninth Precinct’s gruff Tactical Police Force.

It’s no wonder, then, that Rubin should make such a convenient foil; the Yippies’ light-hearted, media-driven antics constantly called into question the movement’s authenticity. By contrast, the Motherfuckers immunized themselves from any possibility of cooptation by virtue of their name alone. The one thing Morea seems determined to convey — through all of his boasts about his street-fighting days, his unrepentant loyalty to Valerie Solanas, and his heckling of Jerry Rubin — is the depth of his sincerity. Unlike Rubin (or for that matter, Malcolm X, Che Guevara or the Weather Underground), the Motherfuckers have thus far managed to avoid becoming an empty signifier. The flipside is that even though they played a unique role in the counterculture, they remain virtually unknown. It’s a thorny problem; one way to remedy it is by writing about them, and yet to do so is to grant them a status Ben says they never coveted.

But might he enjoy just a little recognition? Recently I walked into a Barnes & Noble and had a look at the Hippie book Ben referred to, which was prominently displayed at a table near the front of the store, alongside piles of several other self-congratulatory books on the counterculture, including The Hippie Dictionary and The Hippie Handbook (promising to teach its readers how to “tie-dye a t-shirt, flash a peace sign . . . and other essential skills for a carefree life”). To my pleasant surprise, its index indicated that “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker” was mentioned on page 282. But upon turning to that page, I discovered that the reference is not to Morea’s group, but rather to the disembodied slogan, “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” — just five words ripped from a Leroi Jones poem.

On the opposite page is a giant photograph of Jerry Rubin, an NLF flag draped around his shoulders, a toy machine gun in his hands.

If you enjoyed this essay, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Mick’s Opinions. I suck at computers and I don’t know how to add a subscribe button.

I wrote this essay in 2008, for a Harvard campus literary magazine, H-Bomb, which was excellent. But the magazine didn’t have a website, and this wasn’t widely read. So, I’m sharing it here. It was fun to write. I wouldn’t say that my qualms — lightly expressed here — have changed much.

I’m sitting uneasily on Mark Spiegler’s second-floor balcony, which overlooks a parking lot that, at the moment, holds only two of his six cars; one is a black Cadillac Escalade, the other a white custom-build Mercedes CL 500, in which he will later frighten me by roaring through San Fernando Valley’s side streets at nearly 70 mph. He says he frequently loans out his other cars – two more Mercedes, a Range Rover, and a Hummer – to his “girls.”

To an outsider, the adult entertainment industry can seem shadowy and mysterious. Although most of the world’s pornography comes from Los Angeles, the industry’s infrastructure – its offices, sets, and warehouses – is tucked away in an almost uniformly bland suburban landscape. Meanwhile, actors, directors, and even make-up artists typically use stage names and pseudonyms, and often speak elliptically. But despite running one of porn’s leading talent agencies, Spiegler is delightfully easy to get a hold of. “I get about 170 calls each day,” he tells me. “And I try to answer each one.”

Sure enough, eight minutes into our conversation, his phone rings. It’s a guy who’s coming to L.A. for two days in early January to make a film for a European production company called Private, and he’s interested in hiring some of Spiegler’s actresses.

“Okay,” Mark says, switching on his speakerphone. “Who?”

“Mya Luanna?”

“She’s available?”

“Yeah. But I mean, is it anal? Because I know Private likes anal and, uh, she don’t do it.”

“Okay, no … it doesn’t have to be anal. Um, actually, there are quite a few girls on your site that do do anal –”

“Oh yeah!”

“It may not matter one way or the other at this point whether they do anal or not, but I like Mya’s looks, so I’ll just make a note that she’s available for [January] 4, 5, and ‘No Anal.’”

“Correct.”

“And what’s her rate?”

“It’s a thousand. For boy-girl.”

“And what about for girl-girl?”

“Eight hundred. But for you? … Seven-ninety-nine!”

“[Laughing] I figured at some point in my life being a friend of [Spiegler’s buddy] Myles would get me really far! The next girl is Flower Tucci; she has a really nice, uh…”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t have either of those days.”

“She doesn’t? Well, if she’s not available, maybe the next time around. How about Sasha, uh, her name’s … Sasha – ”

“No, no, she has to get booked, like, two to three months ahead.”

“Oh, is she out of town?”

“No, she’s just booked-up all the time. She’s booked now till February.”

“Yeah, she’s really gorgeous; she’s really a beautiful girl.”

“Well she also — she does, like, everything. I mean, you could get her at the very end of January, but that’s the earliest.”

***

The “Sasha” being bandied about is Sasha Grey, a 19 year-old porn star who hails from Sacramento. In January, Sasha was crowned “Female Performer of the Year” at the AVN (Adult Video News) Awards, pornography’s equivalent of the Oscars — though it’s a silly comparison. Before that, she was interviewed on the Tyra Banks Show and profiled on The Insider. Last summer, Penthouse made her “Pet of the Month,” and recently Richard Kern, the acclaimed underground portrait artist, filmed her for VBS.TV, a sleek new website site created by Vice magazine. So far she’s appeared in about 150 adult videos, and Spiegler estimates she’s making somewhere in the vicinity of $200,000 per year.

Spiegler thinks Sasha is destined to become one of the biggest porn stars in the world. So, too, does Pete Warren, an associate editor at AVN. “I think Sasha, if she keeps going the way she’s going, will someday be considered a legend in this business,” he tells me. In November 2006 – only about eight months after her eighteenth birthday – Los Angeles magazine profiled Sasha under this portentous title:

The Teenager and the Porn Star:

Will Sasha Grey Become the Adult Film Industry’s next Jenna Jameson?

Ask anyone in the industry why Sasha stands out, and they’ll invariably make two points. First, she’s smart. “She has that brain-factor going for her,” says Pat Myne, a hardcore director. In some measure, this perception may stem from savvy marketing. She is perhaps the world’s first “self-proclaimed ‘existentialist’ porn star,” and although she attended only a single semester of community college, her MySpace page is any pseudo-intellectual’s wet dream; she professes interests in modern and postmodern design, Bauhaus and Brutalist architecture, New Wave Cinema, War and Peace, the Situationists, Carl Jung, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, the Clash, and single malt scotch. Nevertheless, she’s poised, confident and articulate in ways that defy expectations.

Second, Sasha is – in the industry’s parlance – dirty. More than most porn actresses of any age, she frequently performs rough scenes of sexual humiliation. A quick search on the Internet produces clips of her licking a toilet, crawling across the floor like a dog, getting fucked while wearing a pig-nose mask, being tied-up in a dungeon, and (in almost every scene) drooling and gagging on giant penises. “It’s really rare to find a young girl … to be into all that stuff,” says Steve Holmes, a 46 year-old Romanian-born performer who has been in more than a thousand adult films. “Really [into it], you know? She’s not playing, she’s not pretending. That’s unusual.”

***

Lately, arguments about whether or not porn is degrading to women, or harmful to those who watch it, have been surfacing on Harvard’s campus with increasing frequency. Last October, visiting law professor Catharine MacKinnon led a conversation on this topic at the Barker Center, which drew an audience of about a hundred. A longstanding anti-pornography activist, MacKinnon observed that the Abu Ghraib torture photos, which shocked much of the world in 2004, are relatively mild when compared with images that routinely occur in hardcore porn. The following month, Wheelock sociology professor Gail Dines-Levi told a large group at the Lamont Forum Room that porn has invaded our culture in ways that most people fail to recognize, and that it’s pernicious at every level: “Every time you jerk off to porn,” she maintained, “you are jerking off to some woman’s misery.”

In response to MacKinnon’s talk, the Crimson smartly observed that we would be foolish not to discuss pornography’s implications; it is, after all, a multi-billion dollar industry. The paper’s editors denied that all women who go into porn are pitiable victims, and they argued that discussions about pornography ought to avoid MacKinnon’s “language of extremes … this is an issue full of nuances.” Later, Crimson columnist Lucy Caldwell made some of these points in response to Dines-Levi’s lecture.

Then in February, pornography came to Harvard more directly, when Adams House hosted the Sex Workers’ Art Show, which featured a mélange of spoken-word, burlesque, and multimedia performances from strippers, prostitutes, burlesque dancers, and porn actress Lorelei Lee. After that, Harvard senior Matthew Di Pasquale announced his plan to launch Diamond magazine, a privately funded venture that promises to feature undergrads in nude photo spreads, like those that appear in Playboy.

Pornography is nearly as old as civilization, and it presents us with lots to think about. But as today’s adult entertainment industry grows increasingly mainstream, the debate over whether it exploits women is crucial, and this is what’s on my mind when I meet Sasha for the first time, at a Starbuck’s off of Sepulveda Avenue. She’s sitting with her boyfriend, Ian, who says nary a word while she talks frankly about her sexual awakening and her subsequent career in hard-core porn.

Growing up, she says she always thought of herself as avidly sexual, and she lost her virginity at 16. She started experimenting with rough sex play with her third boyfriend. “It was just a tit-for-tat, you know, I’d do this, and then you can do it back to me. And I really enjoyed it, we were safe about it, we talked about it, we communicated. And … I wanted to progress in it, and this person didn’t.”

Sasha hastens to point out that she was not sexually molested as a child, and to this day, she’s rankled with the Los Angeles magazine journalist who seemed to doubt her veracity on this point. I’ve no reason to disbelieve her, although a considerable body of research suggests that many women who work in the sex industry have been abused as children. Furthermore, Sasha’s gamine looks and personality telegraph the fact that she had a rough childhood. She comes from an underprivileged community, her parents are divorced, and her father is “supported by the state.” As a teenager, Sasha bounced unhappily between several high schools and quarreled frequently with her stepfather.

Sasha began actively studying pornography – the films, and the industry itself – when she was just 17. “I wanted to understand how the scenes played out,” she told another journalist. “Could I pretzel myself into those positions? Could I get fucked like that? Where were my eyes supposed to go when the camera shifted?”

Although she soon learned that the careers of porn actresses are typically measured in months, not years, on April 10, 2006 – only a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday – she sent Spiegler an email asking for entrée into the world of adult entertainment:

I am interested in the adult film scene for just mainly one reason. On average, most of the xxx I see is boring … There is [sic] only a handful of xxx stars that continue to push the boundaries of what women are supposed to be like, or be like in bed. This entices me to be one of those women, not to mention my lust for sexual creativity; I hunger for all modes of sexual perversity. I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfills everyone’s fantasies.

To this, she appended a list of activities she was willing to participate in, which, with their abbreviations spelled out, reads like this: “solo performances, still photographs, girl-girl, girl-girl-girl, boy-girl, boy-boy-girl, ass-to-mouth, anal, double-penetration, double vaginal, interracial, throat-gagging, swallowing, creampie, bondage and submission, fetish, facials, feature dancing, bachelor parties, and groups of no more than four.” This so drastically breaches the boundaries of what is considered normal sexual behavior for a 19-year-old woman – or for any woman – that I continue to wonder: where does this come from?

She glances downward at my coffee.

“Why do people like dark coffee without cream? Why do you like sugar in your coffee?”

“But these are just people’s unavoidable, everyday tastes,” I reply. “Whereas at a very early age, you’re doing things that most people never do in their lives.”

“But sexuality is also a taste. Everybody likes it with the lights on, or the lights off. Everybody likes something different. I’ve always been a sexual person.”

Okay… But doesn’t she ever worry that by performing her fetishes on camera, she’s degrading herself? Is it possible she’s being victimized in ways she doesn’t fully understand?

She bristles at the notion.

“Maybe I’m letting myself be degraded within the context of the scene, but that’s because I want to. … I’m still in control, whether it looks like it or not. It is acting,” she reminds me.

What about the longer-term ramifications of all this? Where does she see herself in five, ten, or twenty years?

She gestures toward Ian. “Luckily I have someone that I am very deeply in love with, who understands what I do, and we have an open communication. … I’m sure if I didn’t have somebody to go home to, I’d probably get a little depressed. [I’d exclaim to myself] ‘I don’t have anybody to cuddle with tonight!’”

And although she says she’s currently pleased with her career, she’s been planning her exit from porn “since day one.” “I never thought this was going to be my life,” she remarks. The next step may be for her to direct her own pornographic films, but she also plays guitar, and mentions music and mainstream film as future possibilities. For now, she’s squirreling away her money, and she expects that one day she’ll have enough to buy a home in Los Angeles.

I have many more questions, which focus largely on the hazards of pornography, and Sasha answers them gamely, despite being visibly tired. She implies that she rarely hangs out with others in the industry, and she’s not into drugs. She’s well aware of the health risks she’s taking, though she points out that all porn actors are tested monthly for STD’s. She’d like to see the industry make condoms mandatory, although paradoxically, she doesn’t often use them herself.

I find myself shyly fascinated by all this. I wouldn’t describe Sasha as warm, but she’s cooperative and temperate even in response to challenging and deeply personal questions. As the interview winds down, she flashes me a reassuring smile. “It must be very hard – no matter how great a writer you are – to write about pornography,” she says. “There’s so much to explore, especially coming from the outside…”

***

The next morning I arrive at an upscale home in Woodland Hills, where Sasha will later be doing a “gonzo” scene for a DVD called No Swallowing Allowed 13, which will be released by Diabolic. Gonzo pornography was pioneered by director John Stagliano in the early 1990s; the term describes films that acknowledge the cameraperson, and that frequently present pure, unadulterated sex, without the stupid plots, bad acting, and clichés that have been the mainstays of so many adult films.

While Sasha’s getting her makeup done, I perch myself on a kitchen stool and talk with the home’s owner, named Scooby, who regularly rents his house to porno production companies for about $100 an hour. Though this seems like easy money, it’s not without its hassles. Recently someone stained one of his expensive sofa cushions with some kind of oily lubricant, and then flipped it over, hoping no one would notice. Homeowners who let pornography be filmed on their premises often make discreet “arrangements” with their neighbors, and to be legally compliant, they need to get special insurance and apply for expensive permits. (“They’re like the mafia,” he says of the City of Los Angeles. “They see someone making money, so they think they have to make money too.”)

Later, the aforementioned German actor Steve Holmes arrives, all handshakes and smiles. When he spots Sasha in the kitchen, his face brightens even more.

“Sasha! Where are you?”

“I’m standing right in front of you.”

“I mean, how are you! Ha ha ha! English is not my first language. Come here, give me a big hug!”

Next comes Derek Hay (aka Ben English), a British-born actor with an intelligent flair, who also runs the business’s regnant talent agency, L.A. Direct Models. Then comes Pat Myne, the film’s friendly and laidback director, who, over the course of the afternoon, will find dozens of different ways of telling Sasha just how unbelievably hot he thinks she is. (Sasha mostly ignores him, although occasionally she responds with a smile or a good-natured eye roll.) James Deen arrives next. He’s an affable, good-looking, 21 year-old performer who, as far as I can tell, is having the time of his life in the adult industry.

Last to arrive is Maya Hills, a 20 year-old actress who has careened in and out of the adult industry over the past two years. If Sasha defies porno stereotypes, with her pale complexion, edgy style and intelligent mien —Maya embraces them. Originally from Florida, she’s slender, tanned, bleach-blonde and heavily made-up. She parades around the house in a t-shirt – in only a t-shirt – and loudly regales everyone with multiple obnoxious stories.

While several of us are drinking bottles of water, Sasha approaches and asks for one of her own, which she pours into a large measuring cup, and then places in the microwave for about a minute.

“You really like your water that hot?” I ask her.

“This is for my ass,” she says.

***

While Sasha gives herself an enema, I move to the backyard, crack open a beer, and join a conversation with Holmes and Deen. They’re both easygoing and disarmingly frank, and so long as I promise to keep their comments off-the-record, they’re happy to share some tricks of the porno trade with me.

When the opportunity presents itself, I ask for permission to turn on my digital recorder, and steer the conversation in a different direction. If they had to guess, what percentage of women who go into porn have been sexually abused as children?

“I have no statistics about that,” says Holmes. “I guess it’s the rare exception. I know only one girl who told me she was abused by her family when she was very young.”

Deen objects. “That’s like, personal business,” he says. “I always relate porn to any other job. If I worked at an office building and sold [let’s say] paper … I wouldn’t be asking people I work with, ‘So, were you sexually molested when you were a kid?’”

What about certain varieties of pornography that are brutally degrading to women? Does it make them uncomfortable to see women treated with abusive contempt?

Holmes mentions one director with a horrible reputation: “But he’s a particular person in our business,” he stresses. “In real life, he’s a totally different person, when you see him with his wife and his kids.” He adds that the overwhelming majority of pornographic scenes where women appear to be dominated are purely role-play. In fact, Holmes says he’d just filmed a very rough scene for a San Francisco website called Sex and Submission, and on that set everyone operated under strict guidelines. A woman might yell, “No, no, please stop,” to no avail; but she could always terminate any scene by yelling a safety word: “Red.”

Women who work in pornography “make a choice,” Deen insists. “If the girls didn’t want to do this, they’d be doing something else.”

Besides, Holmes claims, if anyone is objectified in pornography, it’s men, who are marginalized in every scene. “We’re just dicks with a heartbeat,” he says with a shrug.

***

Sasha’s scene takes place on Scooby’s upstairs balcony. She’s wearing fancy black underwear, a tutu, fishnet stockings, and ludicrous high heel platform shoes, and to me, there’s something incongruous about the daylight that pours through the flimsy lime-green curtains behind her. She starts by undulating before the camera, touching herself, breathing heavily, and whispering a few things I can’t quite make out. A few moments later, Holmes and Hay enter the room naked, their enormous dicks completely erect. They approach her from both sides, and Sasha addresses the camera: “Do you want to watch me suck dick?”

Sasha does exactly this, of course, with considerable ardor. For a while, she divides her attention between both men. “My greedy mouth wants both of your fucking cocks,” she says petulantly.

A few moments later, she lets them penetrate her simultaneously, and lots of other things go on, too. All the while, everyone gives each other lots of encouragement.

“Legs spread, and hold still!” Ben commands her.

“I like the sound of that,” Sasha replies. “Gimme what I want!”

They seem to be enjoying themselves, but at times, their performances seem so over-the-top as to veer on campy. Sasha is an inveterate dirty-talker, and she has a deep repertoire that could make any sailor blush. And sometimes when she screams orgasmically, she approaches 80 decibels: just below the point where hearing damage can set in. At the scene’s most absurd moment, Holmes tells Hay to “stuff her like a turkey,” which draw a guffaw from Myne. With several stops and starts, the whole thing takes 72 minutes to film.

Watching this all unfold at close-range, with my reporter’s notebook open, I felt a bit like an alien surveying another planet. Later, when someone asked me if I found the scene erotic, I summoned up a quote from the English caricaturist Max Beerbohn: “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

***

Sasha says she relishes these types of extreme sex scenes; the harder, the better. They’re enjoyable, and they present her with a welcome opportunity to test her limits. Bent through an unforgiving prism, her claims may sound disingenuous. But in the short time I spent with Sasha, I found no traces of sadness or rue in her personality. Reflecting on her performance, she seemed at ease.

“It was fun, because I haven’t done a DP in a while,” she mused. “For those, you always have to gear yourself up, physically and mentally. … [In these types of scenes] the guys always have to do a lot more work than usual. … For me, it’s also a little bit homosexual, so that’s why I like it.”

“You mean when they each had their dicks in your mouth at the same time?”

“Yeah,” she laughs. “But that turns me on. It’s comedic, and it turns me on at the same time. It was interesting, because I worked for [Diabolic] about a year ago, and did something similar to this, and it was pretty rough. And now they’ve changed their rules, so you can’t really do too much.”

The “rules” she’s referring to are self-imposed, in order to protect Diabolic from obscenity charges. Although Diabolic was once known for producing porn than that many would find disquieting, it has apparently put curbs on the kind of sex-play that could easily be labeled “abusive” – slapping, choking, hair-pulling, and so forth.

“It’s odd for me,” Sasha continues. “What we’re doing is pretty intense; most normal people wouldn’t do that! But for me, it’s like, ‘Huh? I’m getting my ass and my pussy stuffed up, but what? We can’t slap each other?’ It’s just a little perplexing. I kind of find it silly.”

With this, we said goodbye, and I walked toward my rental car. I was puzzled too. As Sasha had earlier suggested, the belief system that guides the pornography industry can be hard for outsiders to fathom. Some of porn’s critics argue that women who profess to enjoy their XXX-rated careers are something akin to mentally traumatized dupes; even if they feel genuinely “empowered” by their sexuality, the argument goes, this feeling may arise from low self-esteem, or (worse) a sense that being sexually abused in return for money is an improvement over simply being abused. Elsewhere in academia, it’s fashionable to heed the voices of the voiceless, or to at least take seriously the perspectives of those outside the dominant culture. And if an intelligent, well-paid and highly regarded porn star like Sasha Grey says that all things considered, she’s grateful for her career, then who’s to say otherwise?

I can see merit in both perspectives. But I hope that Sasha’s happy doing what she’s doing, and that none of this comes back to haunt her.

CHAPTER ONE

Wednesday, August 28, 1963. Much of the nation’s attention was on the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr., would stand in the shimmering sun and deliver one of the most important political speeches in American history. An estimated 50,000 New Yorkers traveled to the nation’s capital that day, mostly in chartered busses that departed in the wee hours. Janice Wylie, a young research assistant at Newsweek, had planned on making the trip – she’d even asked a work colleague to save her a seat on the bus – but she changed her mind. She was not, in truth, among the most solemn or committed civil rights activists. She fretted about the crowds, the traffic, the potential for disruption. Besides, she’d been invited to a going-away party for a work colleague that was held the night before.

The late-summer sky over Manhattan that morning was flawless. It was shaping up to be another in a series of beautiful days. Perhaps that is why Janice left her kitchen window open as she slept, naked under a blue blanket, behind fading flowered curtains in her spacious Upper East Side apartment. She was 21 years old.

An intruder entered the building’s rear-facing courtyard through a faulty door. From the top of a stairwell, he leapt to Janice’s third-floor windowsill, pulled himself up, and wiggled inside. It was a risky and improbable break-in; the window was forty feet over the ground. But Ricky Robles, a seasoned cat burglar, was highly motivated. He had one thing on his mind, initially, and it was not murder or sex. It was heroin. He was an addlepated junkie looking for something to steal.

Alas, the burglary did not go as planned. It started going awry, he later confessed to NYPD Detective David Downes, when he startled Janice in her bedroom.

Downes: “Then what happened?”

Robles: “Well, she pulled the sheet around her.”

Downes: “Then what happened?”

Robles: “She said, ‘Please don’t hurt me; take anything you want.’”

Downes: “Then what happened, Ricky?”

Robles: “I decided to hump her.”

Robles was by then holding a large kitchen knife he’d found on a counter. When he discovered that Janice was menstruating, he marched her to the bathroom. “I got some Noxzema from the medicine cabinet and I put it on her ass and I tried to fuck her in the ass,” he admitted. When that didn’t work, he settled upon a third way of raping Janice: he forced her to give him oral sex. That is when Janice’s roommate, Emily Hoffert, came home to retrieve some belongings. Janice screamed for help, and Emily tried to flee, but she wasn’t swift enough. Robles grabbed a Pepsi bottle by its neck and clubbed both women in their heads, knocking Janice unconscious, and leaving Emily dazed. Using a razor blade, he sliced a bedsheet into strips, with which he tied Janice by her wrists, and Emily by her wrists and ankles, and then the two women together by their ankles.

Downes: “What did you do then?”

Robles: “I just kept stabbing them.”

He stabbed them with such psychotic violence that he snapped the knife’s blade when it struck Emily’s rib. Then he found another kitchen knife which he used until it broke as well. He sliced Emily’s throat at the jugular. He pierced Janice’s heart and stabbed her torso so many times she was literally disemboweled. Then Robles upended the place, rifling through dresser drawers and suitcases, books, and papers, and both of their purses, finding only about $30. He washed himself, changed into his undershirt, descended the service stairs, and departed unnoticed from the front of the building.

The victims had a third roommate, Patricia Tolles, who came home that evening. She was puzzled by the ransacked apartment. She noticed the light was on in Janice’s bedroom. Then she found an eight-inch carving knife in the bathroom sink, smeared with deoxygenated blood.

Terror overcame her. She made two frantic phone calls: to the 23^rd Precinct Police, and to Janice’s father, Max, who lived just two blocks away. He arrived promptly and had the life-altering misfortune of discovering his daughter’s brutally hacked body. Later, NYPD Commissioner Michael J. Murphy surveyed the scene. Immediately afterward, he told his investigating detectives that although he knew they were professionals, they should not enter apartment 3-C if they held any doubts about their capacity “to stomach an incredible amount of gore.” John J. Lynch, a police detective, told reporters: “It’s a slaughterhouse in there. In twelve years, I’ve never seen anything like it.” A forensic examiner, Dr. Bela K. Der, was similarly shaken. “This is not the way humans should die,” he remembered murmuring at the time. “This is the way chickens are executed.”

Three days later, the New York Times ran a story: “Air of Fear Grips Sedate East Side.” Its author was Gay Talese, a promising young reporter who would later become one of his era’s most celebrated literary journalists. In the days after the murder, Talese wrote, “doors [on the Upper East Side] were opened more cautiously, locks were added, doormen seemed alert, and some single girls temporarily moved out of their apartments and into those of parents or friends. … The murder has injected fear into a neighborhood that rarely knows it, and whose residents have long paid high rents to avoid it.”

The press dubbed this most shocking and ghastly crime “the Career Girls Murders,” because the victims were young, ambitious, and well-to-do. Janice Wylie’s father, Max, was a successful writer, television producer, and advertising executive. Her uncle, Philip, was the bestselling author of numerous books, including Generation of Vipers (1943). Emily was the daughter of a prominent Minneapolis surgeon and a recent graduate of Smith College, where she double majored in Russian and English literature. Their surviving roommate, Patricia, was the progeny of Winton Tolles, a legendary dean of Hamilton College. (In 2006, Hamilton named a building after him.)

Tabloids feasted upon the story. It was uncommon, back then, for single women to cohabitate, particularly in a large city, so some reporters clucked and fussed about the victims’ modern lifestyles. Janice, who hoped to become an actress, gave off faint bohemian vibes; she hung out with the theater crowd in Greenwich Village and counted among her acquaintances a known lesbian. (Investigators found this noteworthy and pursued it as a lead.) Emily was more straightlaced – she was about to become a schoolteacher – though her literary tastes were au courant: she admired Salinger and Baldwin and obsessed over Dostoyevsky.

Another factor driving the coverage is that Janice was attractive – a “green-eyed blonde beauty,” the Daily News gushed. Her rumored sex life fired the imaginations of journalists and unduly shaped the investigation. A medical examiner gratuitously revealed that Janice did not die a virgin. Meanwhile, someone leaked that her address book contained hundreds of men. Investigators initially assumed the culprit was a sex fiend who somehow knew the victims, so they interrogated every one of them, including assorted co-workers, handymen, and delivery boys. “We were hypnotized by a dead girl’s address book,” a deputy police inspector remarked. “To all else we were blind.” The Daily News set up a tip-line and Newsweek offered a $10,000 reward for information about the killer. Eventually, a staggering 150 NYPD officers were assigned to just this one case. Some of them leaned on known criminals, looking, as one cop put it, for “somebody who owes us a favor.” Others went undercover, dressing down like bums, scouring for tips or rumors.

Tragically, the police initially nabbed the wrong suspect. George Whitmore, Jr., was a down and out 19-year-old African American with severely impaired vision. (His IQ was said to be about 70, meaning he was on the cusp of being intellectually disabled, and he had a 20/200 oversight, meaning he was legally blind.) One spring evening in 1964, he had the terrible luck to be in the vicinity of an attempted rape near Amboy Street and Sutter Avenue in Brooklyn. Cops found him suspicious. They thought they’d caught him in a lie because they wrote down his name as “George Whitman” (not Whitmore) and when they tested his alibi, they learned that nobody by the name of Whitman worked at the nearby Schoenberg Salt Company, where Whitmore told the police he was sporadically employed. The cops’ suspicion heightened when they found him carrying a photo of a comely young blonde woman. (Whitmore said he’d found it in a junkyard and kept it to impress his friends.)

Cops hauled him to the Seven-Three station house, where they threatened, cajoled, and harassed him using the “Mutt and Jeff routine” (also known as “good cop / bad cop”) while feeding him details about various crimes that were only known to investigators and the perpetrators. Without having seen a lawyer, Whitmore signed a heavily coached 61-page confession not just to the Wylie-Hoffert slayings, but to two additional crimes he didn’t commit: the unrelated murder of a 46-year-old Brownsville woman, and the aforementioned attempted rape in Brooklyn. The legal aftermath was protracted and complicated – “a numbing cycle of trials, convictions, trials overturned, retrials and appeals,” said writer T.J. English – that did not end until 1973, when Whitmore was finally exonerated and released.

Some have suggested that press accounts of the Career Girls killings contained repressive or anti-feminist messages aimed at constraining single, ambitious or free-spirited young women, almost in the style of a Theodore Dreiser novel. Others have discussed how unscrupulous police and prosecutors fanned the flames of racial resentments. Whitmore, it turned out, was the furthest thing from a black brute caricature. He was shy, gentle, and hapless. The real rapist and killer, Robles, was a drug-addicted, sociopathic white man. But he wasn’t convicted until December 1965, which was twenty months after Whitmore falsely confessed.

In at least one respect, however, the press coverage was on-point: the Career Girls Murders were terrifying to contemplate, and they occurred during a time of rising crime and jangling nerves. Janice and Emily accounted for only two of the city’s 548 homicides in that pivotal year 1963, when “the fifties were over but ‘the sixties’ hadn’t yet begun,” according to a novelist’s observation.

Virtually everyone was shocked by the terroristic violence that fall, when Klansmen planted a dynamite bomb beneath the steps of Birmingham’s 16^th Street Baptist Church, burying four black girls in rubble. Two months later, a motorcade was easing its way through Dealey Plaza when Lee Harvey Oswald used his carbine rifle to assassinate President Kennedy. Meanwhile, in neighborhoods across all five boroughs of New York City, ordinary citizens began contending with a sudden rise in predatory crime that began enveloping them. Little did they appreciate that their forebodings would be paid in full by the decade’s end, by which point violent crime had more than doubled.

I’ve written 100+ pages of this book, which is about crime and policing in New York City from 1963-2001. Still looking for an agent.

If you’re familiar with the Broken Windows theory of policing, you may have learned of it, perhaps indirectly, from Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller The Tipping Point, published 25 years ago. In the book’s most-discussed chapter, Gladwell sought to explain why New York City, in the 1990s, suddenly experienced the greatest drop in violent crime ever recorded. True, other cities saw crime declines in this period, but nowhere else did crime plunge so significantly and so swiftly. In just a few years, New York went from being one of the most dangerous and frightening big cities in America to one of the safest. Why?

Gladwell surveyed various possibilities having to do with the economy, changing demographics, and the waning of the deadly crack trade, but found them unpersuasive. The real difference-maker, he said, was the NYPD’s commitment to Broken Windows policing—the disarmingly simple idea that serious crimes are more likely to occur in disorderly environments than orderly ones. By upgrading people’s surroundings, the theory says, you can improve their behavior.

Now, however, on The Tipping Point’s silver anniversary, Gladwell says he got the crime chapter wrong. He still believes that criminal behavior can be socially contagious, but he rejects the idea that police should enforce laws against relatively minor crimes with the hope of preventing major ones. On a recent episode of his popular podcast Revisionist History, he says that Broken Windows was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive, because it pointlessly ratcheted up tensions in minority communities. “I was wrong,” Gladwell says, dolefully. “I’m sorry.”

I have good news for Gladwell: he was right the first time.

Though some progressives have attempted to discredit Broken Windows, a wealth of evidence suggests that the approach remains a powerful crime deterrent. Gladwell’s mea culpa is bound to sow confusion. Like many police critics, he mistakenly conflates Broken Windows with “stop and frisk” and “zero tolerance” policing, when in fact, these are all distinct from one another.

Let’s backtrack for a moment. Broken Windows entered the crime-control lexicon in 1982, when the social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson published an essay by that title in The Atlantic. They explored the relationship between crime and disorder with an analogy: “If a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, all of the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” they observed. “One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” Similarly, when rowdy or disorderly behavior goes unpunished in neighborhoods, law-abiding citizens will tend to avoid those areas, making them more susceptible to criminal invasion.

Gladwell overlooks two crucial things about Broken Windows (which can also be called “order-maintenance policing”). First, Broken Windows grants cops broad discretion when deciding whether to write a ticket or make an arrest. Second, Broken Windows was never meant to be imposed on communities from on high. Rather, it is an approach that asks cops to uphold basic behavioral norms, with the understanding that urban areas vary widely, and that many neighborhood “rules” are established informally.

It’s illegal to sleep on a New York City sidewalk, for example, but in most parts of the city, cops won’t rouse a homeless person who isn’t creating a disturbance. Panhandling, on the other hand, is legal in New York, but the police may intervene if it’s done menacingly, or near an ATM, or if the beggar is accosting people while they’re eating. One night many years ago, in Hell’s Kitchen, a police officer spotted me drinking a Budweiser on a sidewalk—a classic quality-of-life offense that put me in violation of Section 10-125 of the New York City Administrative Code. But it was late, few people were around, and no one seemed to mind. She looked at me quizzically, and I responded sheepishly, at which point she lifted the beer from my hand and, in one fluid motion, dropped it in a nearby trash can. “Have a good night,” she said curtly.

Put another way, Broken Windows policing, when properly implemented, is not meant to crack down aggressively on people for every possible minor offense. It is much more flexible. Its goal is simply to demonstrate that urban areas are “under control” and that various types of unconstrained disorder will not be tolerated.

In “Justice in New York”—an oral history compiled by professors at John Jay College of Criminal Justice—the late John Timoney, a high-ranking NYPD officer, justified Broken Windows on two grounds. “People deserve to have a decent quality of life, right? You shouldn’t have to watch guys drinking out in the street, pissing on the sidewalk, all of that.” And its corresponding crime reductions were significant.

Timoney offered an example: during the 1970s and 1980s, Greenwich Village on weekends was a haven for boisterous young people from New Jersey and the suburbs (the dreaded “bridge and tunnel crowd.”) They would carouse in groups, drinking openly. Late at night, while liquored up, they were prone to committing crimes, such as brawling, vandalism, or harassing gay people. In response to community complaints, cops started waiting for the interlopers at the Christopher Street PATH station at around 7 p.m. “The minute they get off the train, [if they were drinking] we confiscate their beer, give them the citation, send them home,” Timoney said. When cops started issuing tickets for quality-of-life violations in Greenwich Village, the neighborhood ceased being a mecca for rowdy behavior. “The nonsense that was going to happen at ten, eleven, twelve, later on, didn’t happen,” he observed.

Another benefit of order-maintenance policing is that it will occasionally lead to the apprehension of dangerous criminals. In 1990, when William J. Bratton led the New York City Transit Police, he began addressing the pervasive problem of turnstile jumpers on the subways, who, in addition to costing the city about $100 million annually, were a constant source of annoyance to law-abiding citizens who paid for their rides and thought others should, too. (“Token suckers” were an even greater scourge. These were down-and-out New Yorkers who would apply their mouths to jammed turnstile slots, slurp up the subway tokens, and re-sell them. It was disgusting.) When cops and MTA inspectors began honoring the desires of most citizens by finally cracking down on subway vaulters and token suckers, they found that one of every seven people they stopped had an outstanding warrant, and one in 20 was carrying a weapon.

Incoming New York mayor Rudy Giuliani saw that Bratton’s use of Broken Windows brought major crime reductions to the subways, so in 1994, his first year in office, he named Bratton NYPD commissioner, and the department implemented Broken Windows citywide. Crime plunged. In 1993, New York City had endured 1,946 murders and 86,000 reported robberies. The following year, crime fell in all seven major crime categories. By 2000, homicides had plummeted to a total of 673 (a 65 percent decline over seven years) and robberies had fallen to a total of 30,000 (also a 65 percent decline).

Broken Windows critics point out that there is no such thing as a monocausal explanation for why crime rises or falls, and that it’s impossible to know precisely which factors will facilitate or mitigate crime, or to what degree. That is true. Cities are not laboratories where researchers can control for confounding variables, and human beings are not lab rats. Millions of autonomous citizens inhabit New York, and they have complicated reasons for committing, or not committing, crimes. Still, the evidence supporting order-maintenance policing is remarkably strong.

In his podcast, Gladwell critiques Broken Windows with an anecdote. In early 2008, an African American medical student named David Floyd was on his way to school in the Bronx when he happened on a neighbor who had locked himself out of his apartment. Since Floyd’s godmother was the building’s landlord, he volunteered to help the tenant by retrieving his godmother’s heavy ring of keys, with which he tried to let the neighbor into his residence. At that moment, they were surprised by three plainclothes police officers who said there had been a rash of home invasions in the area. “We were stopped,” Floyd said. “We were of course told to put our hands up and stay where we are.”

Gladwell says this incident “reveals how the police put Broken Windows into practice,” but he’s wrong. The police who stopped Floyd were not trying to maintain public order according to the community’s desires. They were trying to prevent a possible crime in progress. Floyd is surely sincere when he says he found the ordeal “humiliating” and “scary,” but what else were the undercover police, who were out looking for burglars, supposed to do? It is not possible to police a densely packed city of 8 million people without occasional misunderstandings or hurt feelings.

In any case, Floyd was not arrested or even charged with a crime. Nevertheless, he became the face of a massive class-action lawsuit challenging the practice known as “stop and frisk”—which, incidentally, is known to police as “SQF,” for “stop, question, and frisk.” That’s because questioning is a vital step that precedes a decision to search someone. Though police need to be able to question people based on well-founded suspicions, they can obviously go too far. In 2013, in Floyd v. City of New York, a federal judge ruled that, in practice, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics violated the rights of minorities, who were stopped disproportionately and excessively. (The city appealed, but new mayor Bill de Blasio dropped the appeal in 2014.) But this had nothing to do with Broken Windows policing.

Broken Windows also differs from zero-tolerance policing, which enforces a strict adherence to all laws, with little leniency or discretion. Gladwell errantly equates the practices. In his podcast, he calls Broken Windows “a hysterical leap that sees a man urinating on a sidewalk and says, ‘we have no choice but to lock him up.’”

Since 2017, peeing in public in New York City has been a civil offense, not a criminal one, so no one is going to jail for it. More significantly, under Broken Windows, cops get to decide whether to apply certain laws based on circumstances and community priorities. No one likes public urination. But if, for example, a homeless person was found furtively doing his business in a corner, or behind some bushes, because he has nowhere else to go, one expects that a well-trained officer would let it slide.

Most people agree that in the first years of the 2000s, the NYPD was too aggressive with SQF. The police made about 5 million SQF stops between 2002 and 2011, but only about 10 percent of them led to an arrest, and by some estimates, a paltry 2 percent of the stops led to a conviction. This was misguided and unnecessary policing, because by then, violent crime had already fallen. In his 2021 book The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America, Bratton smartly analogizes cities to patients, and police commanders to doctors. “The skill of a successful police leader is the ability to look at his or her patient and develop the appropriate prescriptions and procedures to make the patient well.” In the 1990s, when crime was out of control, and New Yorkers wanted help, a more aggressive, proactive approach was warranted. By the new century, crime in New York was less worrisome. The NYPD needed to listen to its “patients,” who were saying, in effect: “I don’t feel so sick anymore; the streets are safer, and maybe other medicines will keep crime down without all these side effects.”

Gladwell gives the unfortunate impression that he’s reluctant to credit the police for doing something right. I think I know why. Broken Windows originated from conservative policymaking circles. Insofar as Broken Windows prioritizes community control over individual liberties, it is philosophically conservative. And it enjoyed its greatest success, and received wide acclaim, under Giuliani, a polarizing (and now dishonored) Republican. As Matt DeLisi observed in these pages, criminological theories with conservative undertones tend to be “shunned and pilloried,” while liberal ones are “embraced and lauded,” regardless of their effectiveness or merit.

There is no shortage of pet theories that attribute the crime decline to something other than Broken Windows. Some say crime fell in the 1990s due to reduced exposure to leaded gasoline, or because we had fewer unwanted pregnancies after Roe v. Wade. Researchers have speculated that crime fell because less cash was in circulation (since people started using debit cards) or because teens were spending more time indoors (thanks to air conditioning, or because they were playing video games or watching porn). Some think that crime declined in the 1990s because of Prozac.

But even those who claim to oppose Broken Windows understand its wisdom and logic. When I encounter Broken Windows critics, I ask them: Would you be comfortable traveling around a neighborhood where people were aggressively panhandling, nodding out on drugs, fencing stolen goods, soliciting prostitution, or playing music at ear-splitting volumes? After all, none of these are violent or especially serious crimes, right? Their answer, if they’re being honest, will be “no.” And why? Because we intuitively understand that major crimes are far more likely to occur in out-of-control areas than in supervised and orderly ones.

Gladwell should relax. When Broken Windows is thoughtfully applied by police who merely seek to uphold minimal community standards, it almost always results in a victory for public safety.

John McMillian is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University. He is writing a book about crime and policing in New York City since the 1960s.

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