Six World Leaders On Navigating Climate Change, Without The US

President William Ruto of Kenya. Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

BY DAVID GELLES

Climate debates often focus on the world’s largest economies and biggest emitters. But the work of adapting to a hotter planet is happening in countries that have contributed little to the problem but are nevertheless exposed to its consequences.

I spoke with six world leaders from these places and heard some common themes — the ravages of extreme weather, the difficulties posed by the Trump administration’s retreat. (The president withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and denies the existence of climate change.)

But the conversations, which you can see in full, also show how varied environmental predicaments can be. Some of the interviews, condensed and edited, are here:

Kenya

President William Ruto has positioned himself as Africa’s climate leader. Kenya’s energy system is powered in large part by biofuels, wind and solar power. But many African countries, including Kenya, have struggled to obtain competitive financing for clean-energy projects. Ruto’s push for climate action has not moved many voters who want improvements in government services, currency stability and living costs.

Talking to your countrymen, how do you explain your focus on something that can seem very abstract to people who are still just struggling to get by?

Droughts made millions of Kenyans go hungry. Floods just in the city of Nairobi killed over 30 people. Nobody can persuasively tell any Kenyan that climate change is abstract. It is not.

Do you feel that the effort to coordinate global climate action has been effective?

It is generally acceptable now that countries like Kenya should be considered for financing. There was a time when we said this and it looked like a joke.

Does international collaboration on climate change work if the United States is rowing in the opposite direction? 

I am very confident that the position of the United States, of China, of Europe, of Africa must come together at some point. We may disagree for a moment, we may disagree for a while, but reality is going to beat us into an agreement. The effects of climate change are in every continent. The only difference is that developed countries can cushion themselves.

Finland

This country has done something unusual: It has cut down on carbon emissions while growing its economy. Of course, it helps that the Finnish public is wildly supportive of government action on climate. Finland hopes to be carbon neutral by 2035, but it is still reliant on oil because of shipping fuel. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo describes a nation being transformed: The Arctic is warming nearly four times as fast as the global average, and arable land is moving north as remote regions thaw.

Is China becoming a more powerful partner to Finland with the retreat of the U.S. on clean energy? 

We have to be careful. We have to get rid of dangerous dependencies, because we have to be autonomous in clean-energy production.

You’ve been working on this issue for many years now. What was the moment when you felt the most personal disillusionment about the politics around climate change? 

About five to 10 years ago, there was a debate in my own country over whether climate change is true or not. And because I believe it is, and I’m deeply worried about our world and our planet, that debate was frustrating. But we won. Today we have new technologies. We can change our behavior without cutting our welfare. We just have to believe that it’s possible, and we have to continue our work.

The Marshall Islands

This country, made from islands and reefs in the Pacific Ocean, is a few feet above sea level. Each year, the challenges grow. Mosquito-borne diseases have spread because of more frequent rainfall. Tuna — an economic backbone — are leaving for cooler parts of the Pacific. The water is rising. “We will be submerged by 2050 if the world doesn’t do its part,” says President Hilda Heine, who has spent her career sounding the alarm.

What do developed nations owe countries like the Marshall Islands? 

The plan for elevating only two of our communities is projected to cost us billions. It’s a lot of money. I wish that the big emitters could step up and put money into that.

What specific steps are you taking in the Marshall Islands? 

The warming of the ocean is killing our corals, which are building blocks of atoll nations. We are currently doing research to determine species of corals that can survive the warming ocean. We are building a fleet of ships that use wind and solar power to replace our fossil-fuel-run shipping fleet.

What are some of the changes your people have had to make? 

Seven years ago, Majuro had no sea walls. Now we build sea walls to protect homes and schools. I mean, we used to be able to just walk into the lagoon. Now you have to go over sea walls to get to the lagoon side or to the ocean side. The landscape is different.

Do you think your country will survive? 

As the leader of the Marshall Islands, I cannot take the view that we cannot survive.

Bangladesh

With a young population densely packed into a low-lying delta, rising sea levels and extreme heat are major problems. Agriculture is being disrupted. Populations are being displaced. After a popular uprising last year, the country installed Muhammad Yunus as the government’s chief adviser. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for developing a way to give small loans to low-income people. He called it an example of the way small individual actions can produce widespread change, and he believes that the same is possible with climate.

How is Bangladesh experiencing climate change right now? 

We have to make use of every little space we’ve got in order to feed ourselves. But not only is our land sinking into the ocean; the water system brings saline water into the land because of the tide. And salinity eats up our cultivable land. So sum total is our land is getting squeezed. It’s not a very happy situation.

How much do you think international efforts on climate action have succeeded? 

We try to solve everything by pouring money into it. That’s not the solution. I’m saying I have to change myself. That’s how the world will change.

What do you think the developed countries that have historically been responsible for most global emissions owe a country like Bangladesh? All I can do is explain to them: “Look, this is our home. You start a fire in your part of the home, you suffer. But you do something to start a fire in my part of the house — this is not a fair thing to do. You are destroying the whole home. Our life depends on what you do.”

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Did Andy Warhol Exploit His Superstars? A New Book Says Yes.

Warhol and Edie Sedgwick in 1965. Sedgwick, our reviewer says, is “a frequent and always beguiling presence” in the book.Credit...Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

BY MARK BRAUDE

Laurence Leamer in “Warhol’s Muses” sets out to explore the lives of 10 women in the artist’s orbit whose cultural contributions, “artistic ambitions, personal struggles and occasional triumphs” have been “largely overlooked.” The veteran author has successfully carried off this kind of self-imposed rescue mission before, in well-researched books including “Hitchcock’s Blondes,” “The Kennedy Women” and “Capote’s Women,” the delicious source material for the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” anthology. On this go-round, however, the formula leaves Leamer with little to offer aside from the expected tour through the Warholian fun house of Brillo boxes, tinfoil, amphetamines, cheap glamour and high society given by so many before him.

Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick and Nico are among the first “muses” (or Superstars, as Warhol dubbed them) to be considered. None qualifies as overlooked. Tom Wolfe was looking straight at Holzer in 1964, diagnosing her in real time as a new breed of It Girl. (Leamer himself acknowledges that Wolfe’s piece on Holzer, “The Girl of the Year,” caused “a sensation” on its publication.) Jean Stein’s “Edie: American Girl,” edited by George Plimpton, a foundational work of oral history and an international best seller, took Sedgwick’s ambitions, struggles and triumphs seriously, as have, in Nico’s case, several biographies and documentaries placing the musician at the unsteady center of the zeitgeist. More recently, the transgender actress and icon Candy Darling, another of Leamer’s subjects, was the focus of Cynthia Carr’s exquisite biography. And Blake Gopnik’s “Warhol” hardly skimped on the Superstars over its more than 900 pages.

Leamer wants depth but sacrifices it for breadth. Dipping in and out of so many lives in such a slim book yields the kind of surface treatment and repetitive clichés that might work as provocation in a Warhol screen print but make for a prose style unlikely to be anyone’s cup of soup. Each woman is introduced with a few sentences: One is “sophisticated beyond her years,” another “game for almost anything,” and another the product of “decidedly humble circumstances.” Holzer has a “party pooper of a husband.” Valerie Solanas is “deadly serious” about killing Warhol. Nico is judged “statuesque” twice in the same paragraph. She is “transcendently beautiful,” and a page later trades on her “transcendent beauty.” Warhol fares no better. At a party he is “like a Roomba, constantly sweeping the room, picking up useful scraps.”

Leamer is undeniably excellent at setting a scene, especially a louche one. He knows just when to have someone wonder if he’s caught crabs from a couch or a crotch. And Leamer is very good on rich people playing at being disheveled, tuned to the comic possibilities of that particular brand of tourism. (Holzer, of Florida real estate wealth, announces after seeing the Stones for the first time that “they’re all from the lower classes. … There is no class anymore. Everyone is equal.” Leamer adds that Holzer’s “maid and butler might have disagreed.”) Nearly every page has at least one great sleazy anecdote or pinch of gossip.

The problem is that so many of these scenes, however expertly set, are variations on the same stale theme of boomers getting up to wild stuff because the times they were a-changin’. Does anyone still need reminding that “the ’60s was a decade of radical political and cultural dissent”? Or that it was once considered shocking that a high-culture figure such as Rudolf Nureyev could go straight from a performance of “Swan Lake” to dancing “to rock ’n’ roll in a nightclub wearing dungarees. Dungarees! Not a suit and tie like some uptight New York businessman”? Reading this book felt akin to being trapped in an endless Time-Life loop of jingle jangle mornings, lazy Sunday afternoons and warm San Franciscan nights, the author providing the stentorian voice-over as the usual footage rolls by: Bob Dylan “would soon emerge as the poetic troubadour of the ’60s”; Brian Jones, “addicted to drugs and sex … was on a short road to an early death”; Jim Morrison, “a troubadour of the counterculture … wrote poetic lyrics that chronicled the lives of his generation.”

Such minor sins might have been forgiven had I ultimately gleaned some deep or unforeseen insight into the lives of the book’s subjects — a group that includes Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Berlin and other Factory figures — or, failing that, into Andy Warhol’s work. But I got neither. Nor was I convinced by the whopping claim that “without his Superstars, Warhol might never have become a world-celebrated artist.”

Meeting these 10 historical actors in roughly chronological order as they enter Warhol’s life, one has a view of the artist and his milieu that actually narrows rather than widens. Warhol, a shape-shifter so manic and intense that he could slide into several personas in the span of a single season, is here reduced to a necessarily static figure so that the women can bounce off him. Which is fine as a narrative strategy, but then not much happens to the women, either. As each one flickers into view, her upbringing (often troubled) is dutifully covered before she provides some service to Warhol — as entertainment, as emotional consort, as visual material, as key holder to Park Avenue penthouses — and then fades out to make room for the next one. (Sedgwick is the exception, a frequent and always beguiling presence; Solanas, the would-be assassin, and not one of the 10 Superstars, stands out as foil rather than helpmeet, but appears only briefly.)

Rarely is there any sense of genuine collaboration or exchange. The book’s subtitle gives away the game: In the end, these women of varied backgrounds, with their respective dreams and desires, are all here to play the same passive role — to be inevitably and unsurprisingly “destroyed by the Factory fame machine.”

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Immigration Has Always Been Complex. Just Ask The People Who Built U.S. Railroads.

Americans pan for gold at the head of the Auburn Ravine in California in the 1850s.Credit...Library of Congress

BY STEVE INSKEEP

The story of Chinese Americans really gets going with one of the great early episodes of globalization. The discovery of gold in California in 1848, brought tens of thousands of fortune seekers from around the world, including some from China.

What happened next is the sort of history that many schools, states and the Trump administration have lately deemed dangerous and divisive. Chinese people and their descendants helped to build the country while also enduring generations of abuse.

But you can’t paint a complete picture of America without this story, and the New Yorker journalist Michael Luo tells it persuasively in “Strangers in the Land,” a granular account of Chinese migration to the United States. In an evenhanded style that yields neither a woke polemic nor a sanitized past, he traces the lives of immigrants to a country that actively drew them in and then tried to push them out.

Luo, a former investigative reporter for The New York Times, relentlessly accumulates facts from old newspapers, court records and immigration cases. Parts of the story are hard to uncover, even though the outlines are well known. School children can tell you, for example, that in the 1860s the builders of the first transcontinental railroad recruited Chinese men to lay tracks through the snowy Sierra Nevadas. They outworked everyone else during this high point of America’s national development. But not even the finest scholars can figure out who most of these hammer-swinging people were. While railroad bosses took pride in them, they couldn’t tell the foreigners apart, and didn’t write most of their names on the payroll.

Despite such obstacles, Luo finds an incredible number of characters. Although he describes the book as “the biography of a people,” it succeeds through its little biographies of individuals — a range of quirky and fascinating figures, both Chinese and white, who drive the narrative. We follow entrepreneurs like the “Chinese courtesan” Ah Toy, an immigrant to San Francisco who sold sex-starved prospectors the chance to “gaze on her countenance” and saved enough gold dust to go into business as a madam.

On the other side of the country, we meet Yung Wing, the first Chinese student at Yale. By the time this enthusiast for America returned to China, he had almost forgotten his native language. Then the Chinese government, eager for Western knowledge and technology, sent Yung back in the 1870s with dozens more students in tow. Americans welcomed the scholars into their homes — until China cut short Yung’s mission, fearing the students had grown too comfortable with the local customs and religion.

I read this book while covering the early moves of the second Trump administration and also while reporting in China, and kept finding parallels to current events. In the 19th century, American capitalists welcomed Chinese laborers — the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington said, “It would be all the better for us and the State if there should be a half million come over” — but many politicians described their arrival as an “invasion.”

Some constituents assumed that Chinese migration was a form of slavery. Chinese workers were stereotyped as “coolies,” controlled by the Chinese bosses who contracted out their work. Luo casts doubt on this idea, but reports that Chinese laborers were sometimes used against their white counterparts. When Massachusetts shoemakers went on strike in 1870, for instance, their boss sent an aide to California to round up Chinese replacements. Opponents of Chinese migration claimed to be taking a progressive stance for free labor.

Those opponents transformed the country’s concept of border security. In early American history there was no class of people called “illegal immigrants,” because few laws governed movement to the United States. That changed specifically for the Chinese. By the mid-1880s, only certain kinds of people — merchants, teachers and students — were allowed to disembark from the ships. Even they were barred from citizenship. As a junior at Yale, Yung had become a citizen in the 1850s, but in the harsher legal climate of 1898 the State Department decided his citizenship was invalid.

Critics said the flow of Chinese migrants abetted human trafficking. Enticed by promises of marriage, some women, especially in the 1860s and ’70s, were lured into signing contracts in China and brought to San Francisco for prostitution.

And some white citizens tried to help the victims: In 1870, Otis Gibson, a missionary, established a home to which entrapped young women could flee. Yet California authorities eventually decided to fight human trafficking by passing laws that made it hard for Asian women to come at all, threatening to send them back from the San Francisco docks after they’d traveled thousands of miles. If husbands didn’t come to pick them up, they were presumed to be prostitutes. A U.S. Supreme Court justice ultimately intervened in favor of the women, ruling that a state could not legislate immigration.

Through it all, Chinese arrivals persisted in making a home in their adopted country. In 1885 white residents of Humboldt County, Calif., rioted to expel their entire Chinese community (“Wipe Out the Plague Spots,” the local newspaper urged). It’s one of many riots and murders that this book recounts in excruciating detail. After it was over, a local business directory proudly advertised Humboldt as “the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.” But it wasn’t true: Some Chinese people remained with the support of white residents; a jack-of-all-trades named Charley Moon, who survived the pogrom, was still living in Humboldt upon his death in 1943.

The Chinese American population did not grow significantly until Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the old rules and made it possible for Chinese Americans to begin bringing over their relatives. But descendants of the earlier arrivals are among us today. Luo’s book recounts the family story of Connie Young Yu, a historian from California. Her ancestors include a railroad worker from the 1860s, a woman who was separated from her children by immigration authorities in 1924 and a veteran of World War II.

Although parts of Luo’s story have been told in other books, such as Mae Ngai’s “The Chinese Question,” Erika Lee’s “The Making of Asian America” and Gordon H. Chang’s “Ghosts of Gold Mountain,” this account introduces many fascinating details. If there’s any weakness to Luo’s work, it’s contained within that strength: He offers us so many characters that it can be hard to keep track, but readers who do are rewarded with a view on the full complexity of American immigration.

We hear from Wong Chin Foo, an exuberant, self-described “missionary from China,” who staged a public debate in a Chicago theater in 1879. Extolling the industriousness of the Chinese, he refuted the claims of a white sailor who had formed a negative opinion during a port call in Shanghai.

Other characters in this book seem to debate with themselves. In the 1870s, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field reasoned that the recently passed 14th Amendment, guaranteeing “equal protection of the laws” to “any person,” applied to immigrants. Years later, in an 1889 decision, Justice Field called the Chinese “strangers in the land” and wrote that the federal government had the right to expel them to resist “foreign aggression,” as if immigration were an act of war.

Then there is Frederick Douglass. Fresh from the fight against slavery, he proclaimed that “a new race is making its appearance within our borders, and claiming attention.” He said the Chinese newcomers had “the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race; but belongs alike to all and to all alike.”

Not everyone agreed that there was a “right of migration” then, and the concept is definitely out of style now. But as “Strangers in the Land” reminds us, immigrants have always found some way to get here.

STRANGERS IN THE LAND:

EXCLUSION, BELONGING AND THE 

EPIC STORY OF CHINESE IN AMERICA

BY MICHAEL LUO, DOUBLEDAY

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Beatlemania: A Penetrating New Book Celebrates Lennon And McCartney

BY T BONE BURNETTE

JOHN AND PAUL: A LOVE STORY IN SONGS

IAN LESLIE, CELADON

433PP

The Beatles at the press launch for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” held at the home of their manager Brian Epstein.Credit...John Downing/Getty Images

In our culture, music is most often written about in terms of sales, streams and chart positions. That is, of course, the least intelligent way to think about or talk about music.

Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs” is unconcerned with all that, but rather it explores the way two extraordinarily gifted young men combined and exchanged their gifts while inspiring, challenging, teaching and learning from each other.

In the great teams of composers before John Lennon and Paul McCartney — Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, Leiber and Stoller, Bacharach and David — one of the members wrote the music and the other wrote the lyrics. John and Paul both wrote music and both wrote lyrics, and they made a decision at the beginning of their collaboration to share the credit on all of their compositions, thereby creating a third being called Lennon and McCartney. That selfless, generous merger, as their egos shape-shifted into and out of each other, unleashed a power that took music to a height that has not since been surpassed, or I think it safe to say, even reached.

I fell in love with rock ’n’ roll music when I was 9 years old in 1957 and first heard “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” by Jerry Lee Lewis. I clearly remember rolling around on the floor laughing at the explosion of freedom and joy in that recording, and in that moment I thought that that was how I wanted to spend my life. By 1960, however, the rock ’n’ roll explosion had faded away. Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash. Elvis Presley was in the Army. Chuck Berry was in jail. Eddie Cochran died in a car wreck. Little Richard was in the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis had been canceled. Rock ’n’ roll seemed at a dead end.

Three years later, however, these two young musicians and their friends George Harrison and Ringo Starr, all from a seaport in the north of England, reinvented a style of music that had come from the backwaters of the Mississippi Delta, the highlands of the Appalachian Mountains and the mean streets of our cities. In the next five years, while absorbing and combining the art and music of the rest of the 20th century, they made music that took us all on an exquisite trip into other worlds of sound and meaning in a feat of invention that seems and is, I think, superhuman.

Though there has probably never been music that has permeated and elevated mass culture to a higher degree, this book is not interested in music as a mass commodity. This book is about soul, about grief and most of all about love — the love that two boys who lost their mothers far too soon have for each other, the courageous way they merge and the unfathomable power of that merger.

Leslie, a British journalist and author, has a deep affection for, and a penetrating understanding of, these complex characters and their unprecedented friendship — from their boyhoods in Liverpool, through the debauchery of postwar-Hamburg night life, through their lightning rise to international fame, through the remarkable string of albums with the explosive innocence of “With the Beatles” in 1963, the jubilant rockabilly of “Beatles for Sale” in 1964, the cannabis-fueled “Rubber Soul” in 1965, the epic psychedelia of “Revolver” in 1966 and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967 — which, perhaps inevitably, ended in acrimony not long thereafter. Having lived through that period of time myself, it is stunning to follow Leslie’s insights into how far and fast John and Paul traveled, how profound their preternatural alliance was, and how epic their heroic journey.

I’m sorry John isn’t here to read this book. I hope if Paul does read it he feels the depth of appreciation and gratitude and intelligence it contains. There is a passage about them being high on LSD, after recording the song “Getting Better” during the “Sgt. Pepper’s” sessions, that seems to me central to Leslie’s understanding of his subjects:


That night, John and Paul did something that the two of them practiced quite a few times during this period: They gazed intensely into each other’s eyes. They liked to put their faces close together and stare, unblinking, until they felt themselves dissolving into each other, almost obliterating any sense of themselves as distinct individuals. “There’s something disturbing about it,” recalled McCartney, much later, in his understated way. “You ask yourself, ‘How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?’ And the answer is, you don’t.”

One plus one equals two unless you are counting, say, drops of water, in which case one plus one can equal one, or it can equal a fine mist. In “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” one plus one equals eternity.

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The Archives Tried To Erase Her Family. She Tells Their Story.

In “The Trouble of Color,” Jones has done more than honor her family’s history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination. Credit...via Martha S. Jones

BY KERRI K. GREENIDGE

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

TUFFTS UNIVERSITY

THE TROUBLE OF COLOR:

AN AMERICAN FAMILY MEMOIR

BY MARTHA S. JONES

BASIC BOOKS; 314PP

When Martha S. Jones was a student at SUNY New Paltz, she took a course called “Black Sociology” with Prof. James Bowen. It was the mid-1970s, and the first Black studies department, founded at San Francisco State University at the height of 1960s student protests, was less than a decade old. As part of the first generation of African-descended young people to engage with Black culture and history in the college classroom, Jones was excited for all that Bowen’s class could offer. Despite her fair skin and “hair too limp” (her words), she relished the chance to become “sisters of the skin” with her classmates.

Rather than camaraderie, however, Jones experienced a humiliating confrontation while giving an oral presentation on Frantz Fanon’s book “A Dying Colonialism.” Looking back on the incident in her consummately readable, lyrically rendered new memoir, “The Trouble of Color,” Jones, an award-winning professor and gifted historian at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledges that her Blackness was not the same as Fanon’s. “Fanon came of age in colonized Martinique and then through military service and medical training,” she writes. “Instead, my self-discovery began in that cinder-block and linoleum upstate New York classroom.”

Anxious to please and struggling through her first attempt at public speaking, Jones gave a mechanical recitation of Fanon’s work, inciting protest from her classmates. One of the most vocal critics was Ron, a “suitably brilliant, handsome and outspokenly confident” student, who scoffed, “Enough of this. We shouldn’t have to listen to this. She doesn’t even know where the French Antilles are.”

Jones, the author of multiple, field-defining works of African American history, understands this painful moment as a consequence of adolescent racial gatekeeping, predicated on the other students’ assumptions about her Blackness. But as an 18-year-old, she attempted to deflect the accusation of racial inauthenticity by saying, “Well … the French Antilles are in France.”

She eventually befriended Ron but never forgot what he spat at her: “Who do you think you are?”

“The Trouble of Color” is an attempt to answer this question through a sophisticated analysis of race using Jones’s own family history as a prism, while implicitly arguing for the centrality of Black women scholars in the historical profession.

Jones’s paternal grandfather was David Dallas Jones (1887-1956), a North Carolina native, graduate of Wesleyan University and president of Bennett College, in Greensboro, N.C., now one of only two all-women H.B.C.U.s in the United States (Spelman College, in Atlanta, is the other). Jones knew him as “Grandy,” although he died before she was born.

The affectionate nickname belies David Jones’s significance. Under his presidency, Bennett, founded in 1873, became known as the “Vassar of the South,” a place where Black women, the children and grandchildren of enslaved people, obtained a rigorous liberal arts education in defiance of cultural expectations. Alumnae include Belinda Foster, North Carolina’s first Black woman district attorney; Carolyn Payton, the first Black woman head of the Peace Corps; and Gladys A. Robinson, a North Carolina state senator.

Martha Jones’s father, Paul M. Jones, along with his siblings and kin, grew up within the segregated yet racially proud world of Bennett College, and the stories she heard about ancestors, enslaved and free, who navigated the 20th-century color line shaped her subsequent scholarship.

“The Trouble of Color” is a pointed rebuttal to those who still insist that enslaved peoples’ histories are unknowable, or that Black people cannot be trusted as narrators of their own past. In a moving passage at the beginning of the book, Jones describes her frustration during the 1980s and ’90s when, reviewing literature in the nascent field of Black women’s history, she uncovered secondary sources that whitewashed her family’s past. One source mistook her grandfather for white, an inference presumably derived from photos depicting his light complexion.

Another source, a scholar of the civil rights movement, misspelled the name of Susie W. Jones, David Dallas Jones’s wife and Martha’s beloved grandmother Musie, whom he’d interviewed for his book — an error as grating for Jones as it is for many Black women who have routinely been misnamed or decredentialed, either deliberately or in ignorance.

As Martha Jones puts it, “I boiled with outrage, and one of Musie’s stories came immediately to mind: In the Jim Crow years, she’d battled local white people to be addressed by her preferred name — ‘Mrs. Jones’ — rather than the overly familiar ‘Susie’ or the demeaning ‘Gal.’ For people like my grandmother, what they were called mattered.”

Jones’s account of these errors is particularly poignant coming at a time when a respected scholar and the first Black woman president of Harvard University can be dismissed as an incompetent “diversity hire.” Black women’s history, Jones insists, is vital for those who want to honor the generations of Black people who paved the way for our current achievements.

Although she never says so explicitly, Jones’s compelling descriptions of reading the archives, accompanied by images from the archives themselves, make clear that she understands the central role Black women historians have played in disrupting an academy that, like much of the world, constantly demands that we prove ourselves.

At one point, Jones recounts a visit to Oxmoor Farm, in Louisville, Ky., in search of traces of her oldest known ancestor.

Here Jones is at her analytical best, as she relates her ancestor Nancy Bell Graves’s enslavement to Martha Fry Bell, the wife of a Danville, Ky., merchant. After a dogged search, Jones unearths records of Nancy and her husband, Edmund, in the papers of a white professor and enslaver, Ormond Beatty. She discovers that Nancy had at least two sisters, Tinah and Betty — their names listed in holdings at Centre College in Danville that, according to the confident local archivist, contained no traces of Jones’s family.

This find leads Jones to the Filson Historical Society in Louisville and then to Oxmoor Farm, where she is struck by the decadence of a house museum maintained on the grounds where her ancestors were possibly enslaved. Jones enters Oxmoor in a state of high emotion, but she is comforted by the words of the historian Nell Irvin Painter, who advises colleagues to “remember the blood on the page” — a mantra that Jones, in a heartbreaking scene, repeats to herself as she searches for evidence of Nancy’s kin at Oxmoor. The experience is a reminder, she writes, that “the documents I sometimes read, though neat and elegantly scripted, had their origins in brutal force.”

In “The Trouble of Color,” Jones has done more than honor her family’s history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination. On Jan. 4, Thavolia Glymph, a historian at Duke University, delivered her final address as president of the American Historical Association. Like Jones, Glymph is a towering figure in her field, part of the cadre of Black women scholars who inform so much of Jones’s work. In her speech, Glymph, the first Black woman to head the A.H.A., argued against popular assumptions, both within and outside the academy, that the stories of America’s enslaved people can never be told, and that the archive, as we have traditionally understood it, cannot be relied upon to reveal the intricacies of Black life.

“The archive of slavery is not a black hole,” Glymph said. “The desires of slaveholders are not of such density and gravity that the voices of enslaved people cannot be heard. This is not the archive of the enslaved with which I work. The archive I have, and that we have, is one in which enslaved people speak, loudly, and act with intention.”

At a time when Black history is under attack, Glymph asks us to recognize that those histories we deny or deem unknowable are everywhere in the historical record — precisely what Jones’s beautiful memoir confirms.

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What Happened When An Ohio Megachurch Decided To Tackle Racism

BY RUTH GRAHAM

Crossroads Church in Cincinnati has a style that stands out for its flash and irreverence even among its megachurch peers. At one Easter service, a production team shot confetti from the stage and presented a large cake with icing studded with communion wafers. “Jesus is alive!” they announced. “It’s a party!”

But in many other ways Crossroads is a typical American megachurch, an institutional category known for an eagerness to attract people unfamiliar or uncomfortable with traditional religion. The church is broadly conservative, but wary of stepping too noisily into political or cultural controversies.

Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, encountered Crossroads when she was researching a campaign to bring universal preschool education to Cincinnati in 2016. The ballot initiative proposed to raise taxes and direct new resources to poor, mostly Black communities. Han was curious about the initiative’s decisive victory in a rancorous election year, and she began hearing from the campaign’s leaders about one surprising source of their success: Crossroads, a mostly white evangelical church, had marshaled hundreds of volunteers to phone-bank energetically for the measure’s passage.

As Han discovered, the Crossroads volunteers had gone through a six-week workshop on racial justice called Undivided. On the surface, Undivided sounded similar to a corporate D.E.I. training program meant to propel participants to examine their own biases and commit to personal and social transformation.

The difference is that Undivided worked. At least, for certain people, and not without a lot of conflict and discomfort along the way.

But the changes are real. In “Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church,” Han follows four people involved with Undivided over the course of several years: a Black woman, a white woman, a white man and Undivided’s co-founder Chuck Mingo, a Black pastor at Crossroads. She depicts them forming friendships, asking questions, challenging one another, shifting their politics, volunteering and finding the courage to stand up to casual and systemic racism around them.

The span of Han’s research is punctuated by high-profile killings of unarmed Black men by police officers across the country, complicating her subjects’ progress with urgency and grief.

In one of the most poignant story lines, a Black Undivided participant whom Han calls Sandra, a pseudonym, sees her marriage to her white husband unravel over the course of the book. After a fight on their honeymoon about the killing of Trayvon Martin, the couple had maintained their peace by avoiding all discussions of race. As Sandra explores her own identity deeply for the first time, her husband withdraws.

Han has written and co-written previous books about volunteerism in the 2008 Obama campaign and civic participation by underprivileged Americans, among other topics. She is attuned to the subtle and unglamorous work of effecting real change. Her intimacy with her subjects shows in the way she convincingly portrays not just meetings and marches, but quiet family moments and internal wrestling. Yet she also makes clear that individual change is tenuous on its own.

Grant, a white man, begins his Undivided journey by confronting blind spots in his close relationship with his adopted Black brother. Ultimately, he leaves his job in the Ohio state prison system after realizing he can no longer stay silent about the injustices he has observed there.

People learn about race and social control in community, Han writes: “If individuals strike out on isolated journeys of antiracism, but allow the families, workplaces, faith institutions, social groups and neighborhoods they inhabit to sustain the status quo, change always remains fragile.”

The workshop itself is hardly magical. Undivided sessions open with prayer, followed by a lesson delivered on the main stage and in small-group sessions. The premise, as Han puts it, is that “antiracism was fundamental to their calling as Christians.” Most of the participants are strangers to one another — Crossroads had 22,000 weekly attendees when Han started her research — but they begin with a level of trust because of their shared faith. And the leaders plan to push beyond the kind of performative antiracism that consists of social media posts and tote bags.

Undivided launches with the church’s full support. But later, the program’s leaders begin exploring other political actions, including involvement in another ballot initiative that would have reclassified crimes like drug possession as misdemeanors. These discussions cause tension in the church, where older white members prefer messages about unity and civility. Han deftly describes a moderate, well-meaning institution lurching toward and away from substantive activism, without giving up entirely.

By implication, the book serves as a portrait in miniature of the American religious landscape. Crossroads’ top leaders, who cooperated with Han’s reporting, see Undivided as meeting a real desire in their congregation to confront racial injustice, but they are also understandably sensitive to internal blowback.

How can an institution where attendance and participation are voluntary encourage their members to grow without making them so uncomfortable that they decamp for other churches, or for the innumerable other places to spend a Sunday morning in 21st-century America? “Undivided” offers a refreshingly complex portrait of an institution and its members on the rocky path to change.

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The Church Preached Love And Tolerance. Then Racial Politics Tore It Apart.

BY DAVID FRENCH

In her new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eliza Griswold chronicles the fate of an idealistic congregation fractured by internal divisions.

When I picked up Eliza Griswold’s new book, “Circle of Hope,” I thought I was going to be reading a deeply researched story about a unique Philadelphia church. Instead, I found myself reading a story that countless millions of Americans might instantly relate to — about how political disagreements can fracture the closest friendships and break the best institutions.

Circle of Hope, the evangelical church where Griswold embedded herself, is one of the more unusual such churches in the United States. The vast majority of American evangelicals have embraced political conservatism. According to exit polls by The New York Times, Donald Trump won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016 and 76 percent in 2020. Within the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the split between Republicans and Democrats, close to even in 2008, grew to 75 percent to 21 percent in favor of Republicans in 2022.

Yet as the rest of evangelicalism was doubling down on conservatism, Circle of Hope became more progressive. The church was founded in 1996 by Rod and Gwen White, two alumni of the Jesus movement, a countercultural, free-spirited Christian movement that began in the late 1960s and fully flowered in the 1970s. Its members were sometimes called “Jesus freaks,” and their lives were very different from those of more mainstream Christians.

The Whites, for example, lived in a commune in California before they moved to Philadelphia to create a new kind of church. It was Anabaptist, a Christian sect that abhors violence and tends to shun political involvement. It focuses on service, with an emphasis on aiding the poor, demonstrating hospitality and living simply. Anabaptists are often critical of American militarism and consumerism.

Circle of Hope was no exception. Its members melted guns to turn them into garden tools. Though their church was roughly 80 percent white, they lived in diverse neighborhoods, sent their kids to the local public schools and tried to integrate themselves into the communities they served.

Griswold’s book is a story of rise and ruin. The rise is inspiring. When we first encounter Circle of Hope, it’s a thriving congregation of hundreds. The founders had ceded control of the church to their son Ben White and three others, including one pastor of color, an Egyptian American man. Each pastor led a branch of the congregation, and each demonstrated a breathtaking capacity for love and compassion.

Griswold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes often about religion, describes in detail the church’s best moments, including its members’ openness to anyone who walked in the doors and acts of grace toward addicts, the mentally ill and the gravely sick that shamed me for my own complacency and selfishness. There were times when, reading about Circle of Hope, I felt I was seeing what a church could be if it made a radical investment in loving its neighbors.

Then came 2020, the outbreak of Covid, a national racial reckoning and an ultimate crisis in the congregation.

None of the pastors was embroiled in a sexual scandal. There was no abuse, and there was no financial malfeasance. Instead, the church chose to center much of its mission on antiracism, and small ideological differences among its leaders tore it to pieces. Routine discussions about complex subjects turned into allegations of white supremacy. Tempers flared, feelings were hurt and before long the church was broken beyond repair.

The political conversations weren’t confined to the insular world of the church. Imagine my surprise when I read that one of the pastors was angry at me. As Griswold paraphrased the man’s views: I am a fundamentalist “passing as reasonable among the white liberals who read the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times.” Readers couldn’t recognize how “dangerous” my ideas were.

But what makes Griswold’s book so valuable is the way in which every combatant in the church’s internal culture war is treated with humanity and empathy. Each chapter focuses on a particular person — usually one of the four pastors — but she also writes about other key members in the congregation. As a result, you feel as though you are standing in their shoes.

Unlike much writing about 2020, “Circle of Hope” does not adopt a “woke” or “anti-woke” perspective. It’s not a book of heroes and villains. It’s instead about a collection of people who possess great conviction and endure and inflict immense hurt in the face of conflict.

Circle of Hope suffered from the same maladies I’ve seen time and again in both religious and secular organizations: With great passion can come great intolerance. Small differences create big arguments, and then the way in which people argue becomes more important than what they argue about. People can heal from disagreements over, for example, the best way for a church to respond to the history and legacy of American racism. It’s harder to heal when disagreements turn personal.

At the end of the book, Griswold writes that the four pastors “harrowed” one another, “raking one another’s souls, like fields, and freeing them to grow.” That is a positive approach to what happened when Circle of Hope collapsed. And Griswold shows that the fires kindled in the church’s last months didn’t end up consuming its pastors; they gained wisdom, as good people do when they undergo trials.

But there’s a deep sadness behind that note of hope. The tensions that drove the church apart were small, yet the pain the pastors and other members of the church inflicted on one another was profound — and profoundly unnecessary. As the American church and American society remain divided, it’s very much worth reading Griswold’s book, examining our own hearts and asking ourselves a vital question: Are our differences so great that they justify destroying relationships or institutions that are truly good?

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BOOK REVIEW: Connie Chung Signed Off, But She Isn’t Done Talking

Connie Chung

BY MARGARET SULLIVAN

In a frank and entertaining new memoir, the TV newscaster recounts how sexism, and Dan Rather, sidelined her groundbreaking career.

The day she was named co-anchor of the “ CBS Evening News” alongside Dan Rather, Connie Chung felt that she had reached the pinnacle of broadcast journalism.

“Thursday, May 14, 1993, was the best day of my professional life. … I had my dream job,” she writes in an entertaining and revealing memoir that traces the triumphs and disappointments of her prominent career.

The anchor appointment meant even more because she was a Chinese American woman, brought up by strict parents; in accordance with tradition, she lived with them until she was nearly 30, even as she was climbing the ladder — often wearing stiletto heels.

In “Connie,” Chung writes breezily and with irreverent humor about the scoops, the internal politics and the pure hustle that eventually got her to the top. She worked the Watergate beat for CBS in Washington in the 1970s and moved to Los Angeles to anchor the CBS-owned local station before her big break came — and big, it certainly was.

In her era, network newscasts ruled the airwaves, cable news was just beginning its rise and news flooding in via smartphone was more than a decade away. The evening anchors were household names.

Rather had been named the immediate successor to the revered Walter Cronkite at what was nicknamed the Tiffany Network, so the promotion of an Asian American woman to work alongside him was quite a breakthrough.

But Chung’s seat at the anchor’s desk would be short-lived.

In a chapter titled “The Ax,” she describes the life-changing, if not entirely unexpected, call from her agent just as she was about to go on the air one evening. That telecast, only two years after her appointment, would be her last on the “CBS Evening News With Dan Rather and Connie Chung.”

Rather again would anchor solo. Years later, he too would famously be ousted from the anchor chair, and eventually from CBS altogether, after his involvement in a controversial story about George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the National Guard.

As Chung persuasively maintains, sexism shadowed her career.

“Many men in television news, especially those who became anchormen, contracted a disease: big-shot-itis,” she writes. “It was characterized by a swelling of the head, an inability to stop talking, self-aggrandizing behavior, narcissistic tendencies, unrelenting hubris, delusions of grandeur and fantasies of sexual prowess.”

Network bosses stuck her with frothy reporting assignments. Instead of covering wars like the guys, she was relegated to stories like the ice-skating scandal involving Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.

Worse, though, was the network’s handling of her 1995 interview with Newt Gingrich’s mother, an incident that would become known in TV circles as “Bitchgate.” During a face-to-face exchange, the new House speaker’s mother confided to Chung, in a whisper, that her son had called Hillary Clinton a derogatory name; when CBS released a brief, out-of-context clip of the recorded interview, it gave the false impression that Chung had tricked her.

But it’s Rather who is most directly in Chung’s cross hairs. She portrays him as controlling, unwilling to share the spotlight and even as the perpetrator of a stealth campaign to TV critics and colleagues about how her journalism didn’t measure up.

After she was dumped from the evening newscast, CBS offered Chung various less prestigious roles. As she struggled with whether to accept, fate intervened. Over the years, Chung had suffered several miscarriages, and she and her husband, the well-known talk show host Maury Povich, had been trying to adopt. Only two days after she tumbled from the journalistic heights, word came that a baby boy had been born and would come to them as adoptive parents.

Approaching 50, Chung walked away from CBS News, and into life as a mother. She describes the happiness that her long marriage and new baby brought, and brings candor and vulnerability to her later efforts to revive her career.

“I succeeded in having it all, although at different stages of my life,” she reflects. “First a career, then a baby. … Surely, the topsy-turvy order is not for all.”

What sweetens the memories is that another consolation prize would come along. In 2019, she writes, a young reporter named Connie Wang got in touch. As it turned out (and was later documented in a 2023 New York Times Opinion piece, “Generation Connie”), a remarkable number of Asian American parents had proudly named their baby daughters after her.

For Chung, who felt great pressure to bring honor to the family name — she sometimes wished she were a man and thus better able to do so — this discovery had great meaning. “I had always perceived my career as rocky,” she writes. “Dare I rethink my life’s work was worthy after all?”

Chung’s heartbreaking career was also groundbreaking — not only in the moment and on the air, but in the “sisterhood of Connies” who form a living legacy.

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In ‘Lovely One,’ Ketanji Brown Jackson Credits The Mentors Who Lifted Her Up

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at NBC Studios to discuss her memoirs "Lovely One" on September 3, 2024, Image: Nathan Congleton/NBC

BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson handed down many important decisions on her way to becoming the first Black woman appointed to the nation’s highest court in 2022. But perhaps the most astute was rejecting a career in the magazine industry before anyone could see it was dying.

In a packed but fast-moving new memoir, “Lovely One,” Jackson tells how 30 years before, during a brief stint as a reporter-researcher at Time, she suggested that a top editor might want to send someone to cover Hurricane Andrew. “Oh, we don’t do weather stories,” he replied dismissively of the storm that would cause $27 billion in damage, including ripping the roofs off most homes on her parents’ street in Miami.

“Win or lose a case, the law was logical and understandable,” she writes, “whereas in journalism the criteria for one story being chosen over another seemed subjective and often somewhat arbitrary.”

Subjective? Supreme Court cases? Never.

Jackson also considered becoming a Broadway actress, teaching herself to sing for a college revue about Billie Holiday, and her book could probably be optioned for a bio-musical itself. (Imagine the big “Immunity” number!) “Lovely One” is about motivation and mentors, swooshing through a résumé without apparent flaw. It’s a great glass elevator of uplift.

The title is the translation of Jackson’s given name, Ketanji Onyika, a phrase from an untraced African dialect suggested by her Aunt Carolynn, a missionary. Ketanji was born in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 14, the same date as Constance Baker Motley, the first Black female federal judge, who became her “personal heroine and forever role model.”

Her father, Johnny, was a school-board attorney; her mother, Ellery, became a principal after teaching science, and little Ketanji was “an enthusiastic pupil, a Mama-pleasing little sponge,” whose foundational texts included “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine” and the blessedly inclusive “Schoolhouse Rock!” Her younger brother, Ketajh, was more of a risk taker; he became a drug-enforcement detective in the Baltimore unit that inspired “The Wire” and served in Operation Enduring Freedom before settling down to nice relaxing work in commercial litigation.

The family’s ancestors were enslaved on plantations across the South, and the arc from there to here is majestic. Jackson describes vividly her maternal grandfather, Horace, who got fed up with chauffeuring white customers in the Jim Crow era and started a landscaping business in Florida, and her grandmother Euzera, a housekeeper turned nurse’s aide. They moved from a community on the edge of Miami known as “Colored Town” to raise their five children in a public works project called Liberty Square, which at Christmas rang out with the sound of roller skates on asphalt.

Euzera and Ellery consistently told Ketanji that she was destined for greatness and above engaging with the prejudice that lingered after desegregation, painful and plentiful as it was. At 7 or 8, the mother of a white playmate broke up the friendship after finding her “too different.” While at Palmetto High, she was a debate star (and a few years behind Jeff Bezos) — yet followed with suspicion by a salesperson when shopping for poster materials to advertise a bake sale. At Harvard, someone hung a Confederate flag in a dorm window; Jackson took part in the subsequent protests, but also cited Toni Morrison warning against racism as a distraction. When working as an associate in corporate law — this after clerking for Justice Stephen Breyer — she was more than once mistaken for a secretary.

Since her swearing-in, Jackson has been commended for her assertiveness as a junior member of the liberal minority; in the words of one law professor, she “came to play.” But you’ll glean more about the dynamic with her fellow judges by reading Supreme Court opinions than from this book, from which Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas are entirely absent and the rest of the gang mentioned only briefly.

“Lovely One” is formally written, but quite personal. The judge unwinds her fairy-tale love story with Patrick Jackson, a Boston Brahmin surgeon she met as an undergraduate, and their challenges raising two daughters, one with autism spectrum disorder, while working long hours. There are the indignities of breastfeeding and pumping, and naps stolen in a Safeway parking lot. She explains how the trademarked Sisterlocks method has made her hair routine easier, and the statement necklaces that accent her robes, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collars. Readers disappointed by Breyer’s own recent, dry entry into the booming Supreme bookstakes, “Reading the Constitution,” will be gratified to see him pop up here in bicycle shorts, recommending French restaurants.

At a moment when the court is under intense scrutiny, Jackson goes heavier on work-life balance, lighter on the scales of justice — with some notable exceptions. One is the case of her Uncle Thomas, “a nonviolent bit player in a small-time drug scheme,” sentenced to life without parole — more than many murderers — when he was caught with 14 kilos of powder cocaine in his car after a few minor offenses. A friend took his case pro bono, and President Obama granted him clemency, but he died soon after being released from 28 years of imprisonment.

“There, but for the grace of God, go I,” Jackson has thought many times about him and other defendants; a phrase that seems to underline her thinking as much as the “progressive originalism” for which she’s been both lauded and attacked.

A footnote: If there’s any vestige of Jackson’s time at Time in this book, it’s a generous sprinkling of the magazine’s tradition of inverted syntax, famously parodied by the humorist Wolcott Gibbs (“Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind”). Or maybe lines like “Never again would I allow fear to shut me down when faced with the deep end of any circumstance” were the contribution of Jackson’s collaborator, Rosemarie Robotham. Either way, they add unnecessary starch to an otherwise billowingly triumphant American tale of early promise fulfilled.

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His Trilogy Explored The Nazi Era. Now He Looks At The People Behind It.

BY JENNIFER SZALAI

“Who Goes Nazi?” is an old essay by Dorothy Thompson that has been making the rounds over the last several years. Writing for Harper’s Magazine in 1941, Thompson suggested playing a “macabre parlor game” to figure out who would sign on to fascism “in a showdown.” (This was before the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, where Hitler’s underlings planned the “final solution.”) Decades later, Thompson’s proposal resonated with Americans who were seeking any glimmer of insight into how far-right extremism — once the marginal purview of dedicated fanatics — had gathered startling levels of popular support.

For Thompson (one of the first American journalists to be kicked out of Germany, in 1934), the crucial factor distinguishing potential fascists from those who would “never go Nazi” was not “race, color, creed or social condition.” Rather, she argued, it was “something in them.”

Such a fixation on individual character would probably irritate the eminent historian Richard J. Evans, but the question he poses in his kaleidoscopic new book, “Hitler’s People,” isn’t so different from the one that preoccupied Thompson. “Who were the Nazis?” he asks in the first sentence of his preface. Were they criminals? Psychopaths? Ordinary Germans? How did seemingly respectable citizens go from rejecting the democracy of the Weimar Republic to countenancing genocide?

Evans, whose trilogy on the Third Reich has been justifiably lauded for its elegance and its scope, previously shied away from a biographical approach to his subject. For a half-century after World War II, focusing on individual personalities was deemed “unfashionable,” he writes, an unseemly reprise of Nazi Germany’s cult of personality, which pinned so much on Hitler that it risked letting “the great mass of Germans” off the hook. But the availability of new documents, as well as the “emergence in our own time of a class of unscrupulous populist politicians,” prompted Evans to revisit a history he already knew well.

The result is a fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context. “Hitler’s People” is divided into four parts, beginning with a long section on Hitler himself, before turning to his immediate circle (the “Paladins”), the “enablers and executors” they relied on (the “Enforcers”) and, finally, the “lower-level perpetrators,” or “Instruments,” who served the regime.

Given the number of excellent biographies that have inspected every crevice of Hitler’s personality, Evans’s portrait of the Führer turns out to be the least surprising part of this book. Hitler, he says, was undeniably a singular figure — an opportunist and also an ideologue, a committed antisemite who nevertheless knew how to dial down the antisemitic ranting when it wouldn’t play well with an audience. His speeches were a form of theater, mixing frenzied declamations with long pauses that captivated a room. The other people featured in Evans’s book would swoon over Hitler’s energy and charisma.

But Hitler was “neither a political nor a military genius,” Evans writes. “He had the good fortune to enter politics at a time when public speaking, live and before vast crowds, enjoyed its greatest potency.” Hitler also benefited from the suffering caused by World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, which was later compounded by the economic calamity of the Depression. For some Germans, he was “merely the vehicle” for their fantasies of social order and national greatness. Hitler was a hateful demagogue who happened to arrive at the right place and the right time to seize power.

Larger questions of time and place come up for Evans again and again, even as he hews closely to the specific personalities and experiences of the people he writes about. There are obvious differences among them. Some, like Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, and the Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg, were already vicious, “visceral” antisemites when they joined the movement; others, like Hermann Göring, initially exhibited the kind of antisemitism that Evans calls “perfunctory and conventional.” Heinrich Himmler “did not have a lifelong obsession with the imaginary threat posed to the ‘Aryan’ race by the Jews,” but he was virulently homophobic. As one of the architects of the final solution, Himmler kept pushing Hitler to expand the scope of the Holocaust.

What Hitler’s people had in common, Evans says, was the shared trauma of total defeat in World War I. For many Germans, the Weimar Republic that followed that loss represented a period of downward social mobility. This was especially pronounced for those who came from the privileged officer class. Hitler’s endorsement of the “stab in the back” myth, which blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in the war, offered the easy lie of a noxious conspiracy theory in place of the hard truth, that Germany was incapable of defeating the Anglo-American coalition. Hitler created a “moral milieu” that selected for the cruelest, vilest behavior. Writing about Göring, whom a prison psychologist deemed a psychopath, Evans points out that “it was only in the twisted moral universe of the Third Reich that such a man could rise almost to the very summit of power.”

But Hitler would have gone nowhere if it weren’t for the conservative elites who invited him into power in the first place. Business leaders and the military may have had “misgivings” when it came to the brutal tactics of the Nazis, but they hated Weimar’s democracy even more. Evans includes a chapter on Franz von Papen, one of the establishment politicians who helped ensure Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor in 1933. The aristocratic von Papen later admitted to underestimating Hitler.

Von Papen’s “snobbery and social arrogance, in other words, self-confessedly blinded him to the possibility that a socially inferior individual such as Hitler could outmaneuver him,” Evans writes. After the Holocaust, von Papen insisted he had nobly acted as the sober adult in the room, making the preposterous claim that he had worked hard “to keep the anti-Jewish excesses of the Nazis within bounds.”

“Hitler’s People” is an unexpected book for Evans, and not only because of its biographical focus. In January 2021, not long after the rampage on the Capitol, in which Donald Trump’s supporters tried to overturn the election, Evans wrote an article criticizing those who argued that the history of fascism offered insights into what was taking place in the United States. “You can’t win the political battles of the present,” he admonished, “if you’re always stuck in the past.”

Evans ends his new book with a sentiment that is not necessarily a reversal, though it does seem like something of a departure. It is only by understanding “how Nazism exerted its baleful influence,” he writes, that “we can perhaps start to recognize the threats that democracy and the assertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter them.” I take this to be a plea for fewer polemics and more thinking. With “Hitler’s People,” Evans has provided us with just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.

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Who Is the American Jew?

BY SAM KRISS

In 2022, I visited the Palestinian city of Hebron and the Jewish settlement that’s wedged like a splinter into its ancient core. According to the settlers I talked to, they’d joyfully revitalized one of the oldest and holiest Jewish cities.

It looked like a wasteland. Ruined streets, littered with broken glass and machine-gun nests, in which the settlers had erected sterile apartment buildings, growing like alien crystals.

Every few minutes, I’d be stopped by one of the thousands of soldiers who patrol the occupied zone. They’d thumb suspiciously through my foreign passport, and then ask my religion. This is not a question I’ve ever faced from an armed official anywhere else in the world. But when I said I was Jewish, suddenly they grinned. “Jewish, good! Jewish, we like!”

When we said “Jewish,” these soldiers and I, did we mean the same thing? In the West Bank, Judaism has become a martial creed: It means that these hilltops belong to me, and I am free to do violence to whoever already lives there.

I didn’t recognize anything of my own religion in it, but my version is made from flimsier stuff. Instead of mythic certainties, I’ve got a big pile of books, a good recipe for matzo ball soup, a pair of candlesticks I never use and an overbearing mother.

Surveying the state of 21st-century American Judaism, Joshua Leifer finds a similar, sad pile of cultural detritus. “What is left of American Jewish culture has lost its distinctiveness and its bite, devolved into mere kitsch and cliché: no more Saul Bellow novels, only Seth Rogen movies.” His “Tablets Shattered” argues that American Jewry is, if not quite extinct, on its way out. He quotes the novelist Herman Wouk: “There will be no death camps in the United States. The threat of Jewish oblivion is different. It is the threat of pleasantly vanishing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-powered station wagon, with the golf clubs in the back.”

Wouk was writing in 1959. The great wave of Jewish immigrants that arrived in America from 1880 on found a country where they were (mostly) safe from violent oppression, and were suddenly encouraged to identify themselves with the national culture.

In America, everyone comes from somewhere else. One of the indexes of Jewish success was how quickly Jewish specificity — the Yiddish language, ritual observance, close-knit community — disappeared.

According to Leifer, this pleasant evaporation was halted by the Six-Day War. After Israel’s military victories in 1967, American Jews suddenly discovered Zionism. Unlike their cousins abroad, Americans didn’t emigrate. Instead, Israel functioned as an anchor for Jewish identity.

Now, however, things are looking shaky. Millennial Jews like Leifer are estranged by Israel’s brutal wars and steady drift toward the right; he describes, during his teenage years, being “asked to leave a Passover Seder for calling Israel an apartheid state.”

But when we lose that anchor, what’s left?

Last year, a group of young anti-Zionist Jews held a protest near where I live; afterward, some people speculated that they were only pretending to be Jewish, since the Hebrew on their clothes appeared to be a meaningless string of characters. In fact, it was Yiddish. Young radical Jews are returning to the Yiddishkeit their grandparents abandoned; anti-Zionist protests often involve a highly conspicuous religiosity. This year saw plenty of Seders for Palestine.

But Leifer, a veteran of these groups, is unimpressed. Ultimately, he thinks that they really are pretending to be Jewish. They performatively adopt the signifiers of pre-Zionist Judaism, but their identity is still all about Israel. “Anger, after all, is a modality of attachment.”

Leifer is similarly suspicious of attempts to preserve Judaism by adapting it to the modern world. He visits a Yom Kippur service featuring a Palestinian drummer and meditation with two gay Zen monks. “What if in trying to fit Jewish tradition into contemporary categories, something essential — its untimeliness, its inconvenience, its challenge to liberal individualism — gets lost?” But is it really still Judaism, if it’s led by the clergy of an entirely different religion?

But he’s no less critical of the ultra-Orthodox, who have, based on precisely that challenge to liberal individualism, ended up endorsing a nativist, Trumpian politics that might make their own religious subculture impossible to maintain.

Leifer concludes that the only way to preserve Judaism is to return to observance, the byzantine rituals that keep Jews apart from everyone else. He skirts around, but never confronts, the idea that, as George Steiner wrote, the true Jewish homeland is in the text. (Maybe, instead of a militarized state or a pair of tzitzis, my big pile of books was the answer all along.)

But the real weakness in “Tablets Shattered” isn’t so much what Leifer says as how he says it. Essentially, this is a jeremiad: The children of Israel have abandoned the Law, and now they must return or be annihilated. “I am full of the fury of the Lord, I am weary of containing it.” It’s a powerful form, and a deeply Jewish one to boot.

Unfortunately, the book is not written as a thundering prophecy; instead, it’s an ethnic memoir. Leifer hits all the familiar notes: his ancestors arriving from Europe, the move to the suburbs, his childhood encounters with antisemitism, the sudden feeling of not belonging.

It’s rote, but it does neatly demonstrate his thesis. A memoir in which a 20-something writer reflects on his marginalized identity: Is there anything more American?

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Why Is Autocracy Thriving? Anne Applebaum Says: It’s The Economy, Stupid.

BY SAM ADLER-BELL

Something new is happening in the world of oppression. Or so says the historian Anne Applebaum. Whereas the twilight struggle of the 20th century was waged between formal “blocs” of ideologically aligned allies, today’s autocrats are more diverse — a mix of self-described Marxists, illiberal demagogues, kleptocratic mafiosi, old-school tyrants and new-school theocrats.

Of course, they do share ideas if not ideologies, among them that liberal internationalism is an alibi for imperialism, the means by which Washington and Brussels impose their interests and decadent cultural mores (especially L.G.B.T.Q. tolerance) on the rest of the world. But today’s autocrats principally cement their bonds, Applebaum argues, “not through ideals but through deals.” Thanks in large part to the opacity of global finance, they enjoy a vibrant trade in surveillance technologies, weapons and precious minerals, laundering one another’s dirty money and colluding to evade American sanctions. This venal compact of convenience she calls “Autocracy, Inc.”

In the past decade or so, Applebaum has followed a not-unfamiliar trajectory from neoconservative Atlanticist to anti-populist Jeremiah. Her previous book, “Twilight of Democracy,” looked at why so many of her former allies on the right — Thatcher and Reaganite activists and journalists in London, Washington, Budapest and Warsaw — had abandoned classical liberalism for some species of reactionary nationalism. Why was John O’Sullivan, a former Margaret Thatcher speechwriter, propagandizing for the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban? Why was the formerly center-right sociologist Rafael Bardají working for Spain’s far-right Vox party? Applebaum’s demeanor in that volume was befuddled outrage: Why had her friends abandoned the values (“pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market”) she thought they shared? Perhaps they were always just wounded narcissists and fame-hungry liars, channeling the “authoritarian predispositions” of the masses.

To her credit, Applebaum’s new book risks a more sophisticated, and less flattering, answer: Globalization did work, only not how she and her friends assumed it would. Autocracies became more integrated with one another, while American and European trade dependence on the autocratic world — on Chinese manufacturing and Russian oil, for instance — became a weapon to be used against the West. “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states,” Applebaum writes. Nobody imagined that autocratic and illiberal ideas “would spread to the democratic world instead.”

Many readers, I imagine, will have no objection to this framing, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which hardened trade and security ties in Russia’s sphere (and between Russia and China), while reviving the vigor and moral confidence of NATO.

The trouble is, NATO’s allies don’t always behave so righteously either. Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, gets much less treatment in this volume than illiberal but functioning democracies more closely aligned with Russia. Applebaum puts Saudi Arabia in the category of autocracies that “mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world,” but it’s hard to see how a nation known for targeting and killing dissidents in more than a dozen countries doesn’t contribute significantly to an oppressive global atmosphere.

Applebaum places much of her hope for combating the autocratic world order in a stronger and more enforceable sanctions regime. She repeatedly condemns Venezuela and Iran for helping each other practice “the dark art of sanctions evasion.” Nowhere does she second-guess whether sanctions are an effective (much less humane) mechanism for spreading liberal democracy.

There is some evidence they can do the opposite. As the economist Agathe Demarais argues, sanctions can be effective when the shock is quick and the goal is concrete, like accepting curbs on a national nuclear program, but tend to be less successful when the hurt is endless and focused on something big and abstract, like political revolution. In the latter case, the population of the sanctioned country often ends up blaming the sanctioner for their suffering, and the government increases trade with other pariah states — exactly the phenomenon that Applebaum is so studiously recording. That the blood sport of global economic coercion produces strange bedfellows might be intrinsic to their operation.

In her zeal to connect the enemies of the free world, Applebaum also sometimes comes to fantastical conclusions. Autocracies, she writes, “keep track of one another’s defeats and victories, timing their own moves to create maximum chaos.” Thus, it was no coincidence, she suggests, that while Ukraine aid was being held up in the United States by MAGA Republicans and in the European Union by Viktor Orban, “hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan citizens, impoverished by Maduro’s policies, were trudging through Central America toward the U.S. border. Their unprecedented numbers were helping to fuel a populist, xenophobic backlash in the United States and boost support for the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, which was openly backing Putin in his war to destroy Ukraine.”

What can the implication of this passage possibly be? That the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro had deliberately starved his citizens and forced them out of the country to help the G.O.P.? Applebaum calls it an example of how “different autocracies have extended their influence across different political, economic, military and informational spheres,” but that notion seems absurd on its face, not least because Republicans, including the strongman-admiring Donald Trump, are some of the fiercest critics of Maduro’s socialist government.

I abhor many aspects of the regimes Applebaum singles out for ridicule. My position on liberal internationalism has always been like Gandhi’s (perhaps apocryphal) attitude toward “Western Civilization” — it would be a good idea. But Applebaum’s just-so stories make it harder for her readers to see the world clearly, to understand why some countries align with America’s enemies and some don’t.

One of the great failures of neoliberalism was to assume that all good things would go together: The West would get new markets and the East would get democracy — we’d get rich, they’d get free — no trade-offs. Applebaum’s new paradigm isn’t quite so starry-eyed. This time, there will be sacrifices. Trade wars with China will hurt consumers; Wall Street will squeal over tariffs. But the notion of Autocracy, Inc. does offer some consolations for those mourning America’s decline: What we have lost in economic hegemony, we can make up for in moral self-certainty.

We’re the leaders of the free world again; it’s just a smaller world than it used to be.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Wayne Shorter

BY MARCUS J. MOORE

This month we feature Wayne Shorter, the iconoclastic composer and tenor saxophonist whose work with Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Weather Report and through his own solo discography has influenced generations of like-minded visionaries to push the boundaries of jazz. Since his death in 2023 at 89, it’s felt like he’s still around. That’s because his music always felt so otherworldly and progressive, as if it were beamed in from outer space or somewhere deep into the future.

Shorter rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early ’60s as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, where his husky and complex sound proved a worthy complement to Blakey’s propulsive rhythms. By 1964, Miles came calling: He wanted Shorter to join his quintet — an all-star squad that included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams — but it was no easy sell. Davis “had even gone as far as telephoning Art Blakey’s backstage dressing areas to speak to the saxophonist,” the author Ian Carr wrote in his definitive Miles Davis biography. As a member of the quintet, Shorter once said, “it wasn’t the bish-bash, sock-’em-dead routine we had with Blakey, with every solo a climax. With Miles, I felt like a cello, I felt viola, I felt liquid, dot-dash … and colors started really coming.”

Shorter was thought to be a catalyst for one of Davis’s most fruitful creative periods. “All of us wrote some songs, I wrote a couple of things myself, but the main writer: Wayne,” Hancock told me over the phone recently. “If we were going to go to a recording session, Miles would ask Wayne, ‘Did you bring the book?’ Once in a while, we would play things written by Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. But most of the things we recorded were written by Wayne.” The quintet broke up in 1968; Shorter worked with Davis until 1970.

In 1971, Shorter helped pioneer jazz fusion, releasing the first album by the group Weather Report with the keyboardist Joe Zawinul. The group created a genre-bending style of music that incorporated jazz, rock, funk and improvised electronic arrangements. By the late ’80s and ’90s, Shorter’s output didn’t slow down, but his focus shifted to deeper spiritual enlightenment, which led to a deeper friendship with Hancock, who was also a practicing Buddhist. In recent years, even though they’d been collaborators for several decades, Hancock and Shorter became best friends.

“He always was a genius, just an amazing human being,” Hancock said. “Most jazz players are composers, too. But I would say that the majority of us who are still living and were around during the major part of Wayne’s life, if we had to pick someone to be No. 1, I think we all would probably pick Wayne.

“Even though I know Wayne passed away,” he continued, “he’s been in my heart for a long time and he’s still there. So in a certain way I don’t see him anymore. But he hasn’t died for me. It’s not gone forever. He’s still there.”

Below you’ll find a sampling of Shorter’s music picked by a mix of composers and critics. You can find a playlist at the end of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.

Dee Dee Bridgewater, jazz singer

“Footprints”

Wayne Shorter’s composition “Footprints,” written in 1966, has always spoken to my spirit. When compiling material for my “Red Earth” CD project in 2006, it immediately came to mind. While in Bamako, Mali, recording, I researched “Footprints” for pre-existing lyrics … none that I found were befitting to the overall theme, so I decided to try my hand. During a rehearsal session, the idea for lyrics manifested. Within 30 minutes I’d formulated my story. I hoped it was close to what had inspired Wayne in composing his beguiling instrumental.

With some trepidation, I decided to call the maestro — he answered immediately. I explained the project, and the importance of including his composition, and then shared that I’d written some lyrics. Intrigued, Wayne asked that I read them. Once finished, he said I’d come closest to what he was thinking of when composing this masterpiece. He gave me immediate permission to record the song with my new lyrics; however, he insisted I change the title to one descriptive of my narrative, which I did. For my “Red Earth: A Malian Journey” album, released in 2007 on my label, DDB Records, it became “Long Time Ago (Footprints).” The song is part of my current repertoire, performed in honor of Wayne Shorter — my humble way of paying tribute to this intrepid human being that I miss dearly.

Esperanza Spalding, musician and composer

“Pegasus”

So much of the totality of his personality is on display in this song — his creative personality, his musical personality, and his character, which, of course, are all intermingled. And to know that this man, who was already 80 when this came out, said, “Yes, that’s how I want my album to start. That is the correct entrance into the world of this album.” And I think of something that he quoted John Coltrane saying, that he wanted the music to feel like someone had opened the door to a place where all the music was already happening. So I mean, imagine how would you be traveling if you were traveling with Pegasus? Are you on Pegasus’s back? Can you also fly? Are you traveling through celestial realms?

The images in the comic book that accompanies this album have you traveling between dimensions, between worlds. And I feel that with this song, the visuals that are stimulated by this music move you through places you’ve never been before. Then again, this song is such a comprehensive portrait of all the facets of Wayne. He leads you up to a culminating solo at the end. It feels like a blues holler that somebody would’ve shouted from the back of the church. This is a song that I go to all of the time, more than anything else Wayne has done, and hope more people will do the same.

Giveton Gelin, trumpeter, composer, and educator

“Sanctuary” by Miles Davis

I first encountered this song through Dayna Stephens, and I was immediately captivated by its opening phrase, unable to stop listening, dissecting and reflecting on it. It struck me like a sorcerer’s incantation or the beginning of a hypnotic trance. The melody itself ensnares you, but it’s the interplay of the bass notes that creates this overall effect. Essentially, the essence of the opening phrase could be reproduced using only two voices — the very highest and lowest notes.

Wayne Shorter’s complete artistry has profoundly inspired me, and his compositional prowess has greatly influenced me. I chose this song because its melodic content, choice of bass notes, and motivic development represent exemplary craftsmanship. Throughout the tune, the melodic undulating patterns gradually build to a climactic moment. The song has been interpreted in many versions, each undergoing a complete transformation.

One of my favorite renditions is Miles Davis’s live performance of this song at the Newport Jazz Festival. In each rendition, Miles typically takes the climactic point of the melody up an octave and repeats the two-note phrase. In this particular version, Tony Williams’s shuffle rhythm completely transforms the song, showcasing how decisions, love, trust and inspiration naturally yield beautiful outcomes — much like how an exhale follows an inhale.

Patricia Brennan, musician

“Face of the Deep”

It’s challenging to pinpoint one specific track in Shorter’s extensive catalog, but one track in particular stands out for me: “Face of the Deep,” a striking ballad full of depth. I believe it is one of the most emotionally complex tracks on the record, “The All Seeing Eye.” It features Shorter’s genius use of space, texture and density through orchestration and improvisation as well as harmony.

It begins with an emotional piano introduction played by Herbie Hancock, accompanied by Ron Carter’s bass. They are joined by horns stating the main theme of the composition, a dense chorale charged with solemnity. This theme, which returns after the solos, is the highest-density point of the piece, featuring masterful harmonic choices.

Hancock’s solo, beautifully accompanied by Carter and Joe Chambers, is the first one featured. It’s a patiently developed statement that paints a landscape of emotions. Shorter’s solo which follows is an invitation to focus on the music happening in between the notes. He highlights the deepness of musical space and the powerful energy carried by sustained sound.

“Face of the Deep” to me represents beauty within darkness. It is charged with emotional and spiritual profundity.

Immanuel Wilkins, musician

“Over Shadow Hill Way”

“Over Shadow Hill Way” is a piece off the album “Joy Ryder,” recorded in 1988. It’s the soundtrack fit for a superhero, or an angel. The piece of music lives in the future in a way that haunts the mind and body, like it’s reaching back for you. Shadow Hill Way is a street in Beverly Hills — a 12-minute drive from the house where I visited Mr. Shorter, two months and nine days before his peaceful journey into the unknown. The view from his window overlooked all of Los Angeles — I wonder if I could see that street from there. Mr. Shorter’s improvisations come to conclusions that are inquisitive; he lives in the here and now — the veil is lifted. Each improvisation calls you to think about what it means to journey into the unknown — to embrace and surrender to the present moment. Compositionally, the song has such powerful thematic material, it becomes stuck in your head in an instant. There’s a great amount of imaginative logic in the composition, with a bass line that walks up a scale and walks down another, and a chant of chords in the melodic register that alter slightly with really close intervals moving. This piece possesses a deep power, yet is harmonically delicate. Deep funk and soul. Also some nostalgia. Maybe I’m projecting. I miss Wayne Shorter.

Rocio (Wyldeflower) Contreras, D.J.

“Witch Hunt”

The first song on an album can sometimes be a navigational tool. For me it usually tends to be one of the strongest tunes, serving as a hook to bring the listener in — a predictive sonic statement preparing you for the ride you’re about to take. Wayne Shorter’s “Witch Hunt” is the first song on the 1966 Blue Note album “Speak No Evil.” It’s an album where each song feels like a full opus, each track with a towering running time. “Witch Hunt” is a hearty eight minutes, embodying a full range of emotional states, starting off with dramatic dark horns, motivating movement, flow and highlighting the sonic conversation between Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter, one that commits to memory easily. The solos that Wayne offers on “Witch Hunt” are masterful, lush and demanding. They showcase his musical foundation and display a preview of what’s to come. The conversation continues throughout with Elvin Jones and Ron Carter holding us down, while Herbie Hancock’s keys adorn the track with gentle but direct notes. “Speak No Evil" has altered my DNA and amplified my ear with every listen. “Witch Hunt” has been my morning coffee and my midnight drive, countless times. It’s a familiar face and a grounding energy; it’s a nurturing road that you know all the twists and turns to. It’s a map to the heart.

Steph Richards, musician

“Smilin’ Through”

Here we drop the needle halfway into the track with the drummer Brian Blade setting up a ferocious undercurrent while Wayne masterfully shapes rolling tsunamis of energy, loosely interpreting this lesser-known jazz standard on soprano sax. Most know and love Wayne for his tenor sound, as dark and deep as the ocean, but the way he shapes his sound on soprano sax, in contrast, is its own kind of creature, bringing a heat that cuts right to the heart. His quartet flies and fires alongside, underneath and above; shifting meters, feels and harmonic spaces all in a free, openly evolving exchange. Blade, the bassist John Patitucci and the pianist Danilo Perez are agile, fierce and masterful counterparts. This track hails from the album “Beyond the Sound Barrier,” featuring a series of live sets recorded from 2002-04. A feeling of brilliant possibility permeates every shifting moment.

I come back to this album time and time again, drawn to the signature concision, beauty and openness of navigating compositional structure that is singular to Wayne Shorter’s playing and writing. My recent record “Power Vibe” is dedicated to Wayne, and his imprint is embedded throughout, both conceptually and sometimes literally (I quote moments from “Over Shadow Hill Way” from this album in my title track). The heart of his music speeds straight through his structures and into another dimension — if one can compose a groundwork for fantasy, freedom and exploration, as Wayne does so masterfully, the music then reveals itself. We end this clip not just on a high note, but a vulnerable one, highlighting one of my favorite aspects of Wayne Shorter: that he is willing to take us to the edge of beauty and peer beyond it into a cosmic unknown.

Marta Sanchez, pianist and composer

“Sweet Pea”

After nearly a minute of a limbo-like atmosphere, as if the band were communing with Strayhorn in his new state (the composition is Wayne’s tribute to Billy Strayhorn, nicknamed “Sweet Pea,” who died a month before Wayne wrote this piece), Wayne Shorter attacks the first note of the melody, almost like howling. That note resonates so deeply that it sends shivers down your spine, then develops into a simple, sad but hauntingly beautiful melody that seems to ache over Shorter’s unexpected harmonies.

Shorter, a transformer of challenging emotions into precious ones, elegantly converts the sorrow of death into the magic of the afterworld. Wayne takes his time, delivering each note with focused intention, and when the melody finishes, plays a few delicate improvised notes before interpreting the melody all over again. Wayne’s own rendition of his tune doesn’t feature soloists (unlike Miles Davis’s earlier version of the same piece). Just the melody played twice, but in such a deliberate way that we wouldn’t have been able to take any more.

Ambrose Akinmusire, trumpeter and bandleader

“Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum”

“Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum,” from Wayne Shorter’s 1966 album “Speak No Evil," holds a special place in my heart for its blend of simplicity and complexity. It’s my favorite song of Wayne’s to play.

I find the melody of “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum” straightforward, yet the harmonic language feels intricate and unpredictable. The composition seems simple, but it’s actually really complex. In the A sections, Wayne finds a way of weaving something really beautiful and simple through a complex landscape. And the B section is a standard blues form. The macro reflects the micro. The melody is simple, and the chord changes are complex. The A is complex and the B section is simple. It’s like the B section takes the role of the melody. I love that you can find this micro, macro structure in the craft of all his writing.

I also like the tune because of its title. Initially you think it’s about Jack and the Beanstalk, but I think he’s really paying homage to John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and you can see this in the similar harmonic motion. I love how the melody, confined to a single octave — B flat to B flat — feels expansive because of its dynamic expression and rhythmic variations. It’s like he’s squeezing the essence out of everything, out of every chord, every moment. It bypasses the intellectual stuff and gets to the essence.

It reminds me of what it was like to hang out with him and talk to him. One minute he’d be talking about quantum physics, the next he’d be talking about pop culture. I miss talking to Wayne, and playing this particular composition makes me feel like I’m continuing my conversations with him.

Giovanni Russonello, jazz critic

“House of Jade”

Fittingly, the music on “Juju,” Wayne Shorter’s second album for Blue Note, has a dark-arts energy about it. These six tracks can send you spiraling into yourself, sounding out unnamed feelings, lost — but then they’re always somehow liable to bring you back to center and confirm your strength, to leave you feeling fortified. That is partly the work of Elvin Jones’s steady drums: the loping ride cymbal; his judicious, devastating kick drum. Add Reggie Workman’s bass and McCoy Tyner’s piano, and you have a rhythm section entirely associated with Shorter’s mentor John Coltrane. But just as he had learned by now to take only what he needed from Coltrane’s style, as a composer and a soloist, Shorter bends this rhythm section around his own ear. He puts the band to work especially slyly on “House of Jade,” with a sticky and slow-moving bass line illuminating Shorter’s melody from odd angles.

When he recorded this album in August 1964, a 30-year-old Shorter was in the process of joining Miles Davis’s band, on Coltrane’s referral. With Davis’s second great quintet, Shorter would make some of the finest small-group jazz in history, but the commitment kept him from touring with his own groups. As far as hearing Shorter as a bandleader during his historic, blazing run of the mid-to-late ’60s, when he was writing and playing as well as any musician alive, all we’ve basically got is the studio records. And the first spell you should cast for yourself is “Juju.”

George Burton, composer and producer

“Aung San Suu Kyi” by Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock

As someone who’s delved deeply into Wayne Shorter’s entire catalog, the concept of space frequently arises in my thought process, particularly regarding how a musician’s career trajectory often evolves to reflect their perception of music and life. “Aung San Suu Kyi,” written and performed by Shorter, was inspired by the Burmese politician, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former leader of Myanmar, known for her long struggle for democracy and human rights. In this tune, you can hear various ideas that may correlate to an individual like her, from the simple beauty of the melody to the intense groove it leans against. It also displays a comfort in the unknown, with the notion that we are working together to present this experience.

Shorter’s ability to create beautiful melodies, as seen with “Aung San Suu Kyi,” embodies the essence of artistic expression at its highest form, weaving through the history of Black music. The tone and inflection of his horn, combined with the individualism of each player in his ensembles, demonstrate his deep understanding of sound exploration. From bands with Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones to the ensemble Weather Report, and his last band with Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade, Shorter’s music reflects an understanding of changes in not just music but life itself. His compositions are not just tunes; they are narratives that engage listeners, inviting them to explore the depths of musical and emotional landscapes.

Jahari Stampley, pianist and composer

“Infant Eyes”

Captivating. Dreamlike. Inspiring. Controlled. Free. These are some words that would describe my favorite song written by the brilliant composer Wayne Shorter — “Infant Eyes.” Released in 1966 on his album “Speak No Evil,” this revolutionary composition as well as the influential ensemble of musicians on the recording helped to nurture the beginning of my musical lineage. From my mother, who credits Wayne Shorter as being the catalyst of her musical journey as an artist, to my earliest experiences as a pianist, composer and bandleader through my mother, his musical impact has carried throughout generations.

“Infant Eyes” is arguably one of the most beautiful and mysterious jazz ballads ever written — unpredictably formed, enigmatic and melodically haunting. Shorter’s organic & captivating tone flows over each phrase, creating an incredibly emotional impact. The song was dedicated to his daughter, Miyako. And I could imagine him looking into her eyes for the first time.

His ensemble generated a magical synergy. With Herbie Hancock’s understated and skillful piano comping, Ron Carter’s subtle, supportive bass lines and Elvin Jones’s intuitive & perfectly balanced drumming, they seemed to play almost effortlessly, gracefully elevating Wayne Shorter’s melody to the forefront, but in a gentle way. “Infant Eyes”: Wayne Shorter’s timeless gift to the world.

Leo Genovese, musician

“Night Dreamer”

“Night Dreamer” was the first Wayne Shorter album I heard, when I was in Argentina in the mid-90s. In the title track, when Wayne plays you can hear his soul producing value, his sound mission and his life’s determination to be creative at all times.

He was always reaching deeper. He never stopped studying and seeing it all, and making us aware of many things the media and society try to hide or hijack. He wrote music in a magic room, next to a big window where you could see the whole downtown Los Angeles, where you could observe the sky in full form, always ready for a “visit” from something from another place. The room was populated by maybe 300 statues of magical beings, superheroes, dragons and fairies. The TV was always on. Sometimes he had on the news, or some channel with some bad energy. From his desk he was writing the antidote to all those mediocre things portrayed in the media.

He would say, “Commission yourself. Don’t wait on grants, don’t rely on anything. Do the work, just commission yourself and start.” He told me he was going to commission himself to write an orchestral piece for “Night Dreamer,” but I don’t think he got to it.

As he said, he had to go to get a new body to continue the mission.

He’ll be back.

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