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Summer Marjani Walker is an R&B singer and song writer and guitarist who is signed to Love Renaissance, Interscope Records, LVRN Records.She is 24 years old with 3 albums and won the R&B Female Artist award From Billboard Music Awards in 2020.

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As it turns out, fan speculation about a bun in the oven for R&B singer Summer Walker appears to be true.

The singer-songwriter seemingly confirmed the big news Friday night in an Instagram post that showed off her baby bump. The photo shows Walker in a bodycon dress as she's smiling ear to ear with her hand on her stomach. She captioned the post with a series of angel emojis but hasn't yet provided further details about her pregnancy.

Walker has been in a long-term relationship with producer London on da Track since the onset of her career. Though there have been whispers of a split, the two have been posting Instagram photos together as recently as this week.

The confirmation comes just weeks after London's baby mama Eboni Ivorii claimed Walker was pregnant with London's child.

Walker denied any pregnancy in an Instagram story last month, claiming she was simply "bloated."

"Y'all weirdos," she wrote. "Who demands a stranger to tell you if [they're] pregnant. Lol and what kinda creep wants someone else to have a baby that they will never meet or help them raise. & the answer is no b*tch I'm bloated but y'all weird."

Walker has been very critical about the lack of privacy that often comes with fame, so it's understandable that she'd readily share such personal news right away. Nevertheless, congratulations are in order to the mother-to-be and her family.

This week, Walker also celebrated the first anniversary of her debut album with Over It: Complete Set. The release features the original 18-song tracklist as well as a second disc with bonus material, including instrumentals and live renditions of her standout records.

The Over It: Complete Set is available now on all major platforms.

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Summer Walker Appears To Confirm Pregnancy With First Look at Her Baby Bump

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As it turns out, fan speculation about a bun in the oven for R&B singer Summer Walker appears to be true. The singer-songwriter seemingly confirmed the big news Friday night in an Instagram post that showed off her baby bump. The photo shows Walker in a bodycon dress as she's smiling ear to ear with her hand on her stomach.

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Beyonce is a singer, song writer, actor, director, clothing designer, activist and the list goes on. Not only does she sing but she mentors and signs upcoming artist. She also has won many awards for her amazing albums and even for her acting. She's currently still a striving artist. Shes making big moves and doesn't plan on stopping any time soon!

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It's not enough to make list after list. The Turning the Tables project seeks to suggest alternatives to the traditional popular music canon, and to do more than that, too: to stimulate conversation about how hierarchies emerge and endure. This year, Turning the Tables considers how women and non-binary artists are shaping music in our moment, from the pop mainstream to the sinecures of jazz and contemporary classical music. Our list of the 200 Greatest Songs By Women+ offers a soundtrack to a new century. This series of essays takes on another task. The 25 arguments writers make in these pieces challenge the usual definitions of influence. Some rethink the building legacies of popular artists; others celebrate those who create within subcultures, their innovations rippling outward over time. As always, women forge new pathways in sound; today, they also make waves under the surface of culture by confronting, in their music, the increased fluidity of "woman" itself. What is a woman? It's a timeless question on the surface, but one deeply engaged with whatever historical moment in which it is asked. Our 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century illuminate its complexities. -Ann Powers
Bey Hive, forgive me, for I have sinned: I used to despise Beyoncé.

But it's complicated. She's been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I was all of 8 years old when she made her official debut as the lead singer of Destiny's Child in 1997, with the single "No, No, No." It was unobtrusive, a song that was catchy enough to bop along to while listening to the radio, but not quite a Billboard Hot 100 topper. (It did get close, peaking at No. 3.) As the frontwoman, Bey sparkled, but she wasn't fully illuminated - even so, it was clear as day that a star was on the horizon.

Thus began the thesis for Beyoncé's career: She's always held an inordinate amount of potential, and she's held that wealth close to the chest. Only Bey herself has been aware of the full possibilities that lay in front of her, and she's used that almost secret stash of promise to stun the world at every turn. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the beginning, it almost felt like Bey held back. As a member of a teen R&B/pop group, she didn't seem focused on rocking the boat. She was merely hoping to be welcomed into the industry. And she was, much to my chagrin. Which brings me back to my sin.

Beyoncé and I come from the same state, Texas, but our cities of origin couldn't be more different. She's from Houston, with all of its culture and influence and many shades of characters; I'm from a small town, Seguin, hundreds of miles away, with its simplistic, vanilla existence and striking similarities to a black hole.

Coming from a place that had a Walmart as its central point of entertainment, my main escape was television. Seeing Bey's face on the TV screen within Destiny's Child was easy enough to roll along with. To be frank: She was a black woman singing pop songs for the masses. Nothing could be more appealing to a young black girl. It was inspiring.

It was obvious to me where Bey was headed, and why. She was surrounded by dark-skinned faces - LaTavia, Kelly Rowland - plus the medium-toned LeToya Luckett and eventually Michelle Williams. But Bey was always in the middle, always the lead. It wasn't lost on me that this central figure passed the brown paper bag test, and the others around her did not. I, myself, did not. Because no matter how well you sing, no matter how beautiful you are, if you're not of a certain color, a certain skin tone, there's a commercial barrier that you just can't climb over. So when Bey stepped out to go solo, it was expected. I saw it as the closest chance a black woman had to being an international pop star.

As exciting as the thought of that possibility was, it wasn't enough to make me roll with Beyoncé into this new stage of her career. Instead, I hated, mightily, from afar. It seemed like this feeling emerged out of nowhere, but it had always lived just beneath my skin. Going through puberty while Beyoncé was in the midst of her glo-up was... trying. Mostly because the town I grew up in didn't exactly lift up dark-skinned black girls, like me, in their beauty. Bey was #goals, before #goals was a thing. She was like a fair-skinned princess in the fairytale of life, the kind that would get rescued by the perfect prince charming. There was just one issue: She was so badass that she didn't need rescuing.

I felt like I did. I was the youngest of three, raised on Section 8 by a disabled single mother. To say that money was tight was a severe understatement. Meanwhile, Bey - one of two children raised in a two-parent, upper middle-class home - was making her own money, paving her own path in both music and pop culture. On top of her otherworldly beauty, her light skin and blonde hair, I felt like it was simply unfair comparing her life to mine. So I shifted my personal frustrations onto her. Anytime anyone tried to exalt her in my presence, I was quick to shoot them down. With an eye-roll, I'd ask: "Is she really that talented? Or is she just light-skinned and good enough?"

The honest truth is, I disliked Beyoncé because I wanted to be her, flaws and all. It would take years before I understood the internalized colorism that affected my perspective of Beyoncé. And it was Bey herself who would teach me this lesson.

The first breakdown of my wall against Bey came through her embrace of women while preparing for her 2007 The Beyoncé Experience tour. The year prior, she put out a call for musicians to try out for her all-female band. Ten women eventually made the cut after a grueling audition process, becoming an essential part of Bey's intricate and demanding live experiences. At the time of this grand undertaking, I felt myself morphing from adolescent to young woman, and with that conversion came a more cemented understanding of the dynamics between men and women in any given occupation - in this instance, the dominant presence men held over women in the music industry. With this experiment, Bey was deliberating stepping beyond the lines of normalcy, in pursuit of a woman-focused future - at least in her own orbit.

Seven years later, during the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour and at the 2014 MTV VMAs, Bey would stand in front of the word "FEMINIST" emblazoned on a large screen in all caps. But she was my introduction to feminism before I even knew the word existed. For the majority of her career, she has expressed this advocacy through her actions; by the time she arrived at the Mrs. Carter era, her message was crystal clear. Her dedication to female empowerment became more apparent the deeper she progressed into her career. It is a fervor that has vibrated consistently, just below the surface of her lyrics, filling up her songs over more than 20 years. From "Upgrade U" to "Irreplaceable" to "Run the World (Girls)," Beyoncé has continuously spoken direct words of encouragement to women and maintained a strength that she's sought to pass off to her fans. She's been patient with her messaging; she knows that not everyone will come aboard her train of feminism at the same time, or begin from the same starting point. There's zero frustration in her intimations - there's only understanding.

Since her Destiny's Child days, Bey's ability to project understanding has penetrated and advanced her development as an artist. With this skill anchoring her career, she has been able to nudge her listeners toward the concept of intersectional feminism. Every moment she's been in the spotlight has been spent refining the infrastructure of her fanbase. With a careful hand, she has taught her listeners how to love not just her, but also love and understand people who aren't like them. Love - of others, but most importantly of the self - has been a consistent theme in Bey's repertoire, even in songs that ostensibly sound like club bops. When Beyoncé sings, it sounds like she has a word of advice that she genuinely feels could change your life, if only you took heed. Bey has always spoken and sang with a humble but undeniable confidence; for more than two decades, her delivery has been more impassioned than the pop princesses that surrounded her.

She built a voice that was sellable to every radio station, every TV channel, every market - and she found a way to cater to audiences across the board. Her music never strikes directly in any genre, but she has made it a point to move closer and closer to her black audience. Closer to me.

The latest version of Bey that we've seen is the wife of hip-hop god Jay-Z, on their joint album Everything Is Love. There, she raps - well - and it seems like she's light years away from her beginnings. Beyoncé has gone from making benign pop songs about bills and bugaboos to laying down her most private, s***-stirring thoughts over trap beats. She's actually been dropping bread crumbs of this evolution for a minute now. Similar to her exploration of feminism, it was subtle at first, then more direct. As an early performer, she collaborated with influential hip-hop figures like Houston hometown heroes Bun B and Slim Thug, and even earlier with New Orleans rap mogul Master P, who would later appear as an astute cultural narrator on her sister Solange's black experience-heavy opus A Seat At The Table. In particular, the past two to three years have illustrated a most obvious prioritizing of Bey's blackness; it came to a head with "Formation" in 2016, with lyrics like "I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils" and visuals that notably featured black women dancers wearing Afros, and Bey herself in waist-grazing cornrows.

With Lemonade, for which "Formation" was the lead single, she reclaimed genres birthed by black people - rock with "Don't Hurt Yourself" and country music with "Daddy Lessons" - and presented us with a 21st century black female perspective.

Beyoncé stepped up and called attention to the life of a person of color with Lemonade; after all, she made a song called "Freedom." But the visual album in particular centered black women and their lack of visibility. It was made especially clear when she included an excerpt from a 1962 speech from Malcolm X: "The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman." In that moment, I felt seen. In that moment, it felt like my sister and my aunts and cousins and friends were seen. The veil of separation between me and Bey was lifted and I realized (or perhaps remembered) that no other popular artist on Beyoncé's scale had ever positioned us as a priority.

The visual album was a major statement from an artist of Bey's stature - and it was unmistakably specific. As such, it stood out prominently against every other message of empowerment she had put forth thus far.

Embedded on the Lemonade album itself was one small detail that stood out as one of the most significant steps toward centering blackness she's taken thus far as a pop artist. On the album's second single, "Sorry," she delightfully says, "I ain't sorry / N****, nah." She says it casually, as if it's the most-used word in her vocabulary. This is a global superstar with millions of fans, many of them non-black. This is a person who has built her brand on inclusivity. And yet here she is, using this very particular piece of exclusively Black slang. It's a word that has long frolicked in her husband's lexicon, but had seldom presented itself via Bey herself. The context of "Sorry," about Bey going out to spite Jay, heightened this usage to a moment of conscious liberation.

Bey's ability to have laser-focused attention on the black experience didn't happen overnight: It took years for her to amass a following first. She then constructed a platform strong enough from which to make such bold statements. And since Lemonade, Bey has continued to make a concerted effort to put black bodies in her visuals, and call attention to the importance of black women and black love. The album cover for Everything Is Love, for example - a photo of her black dancers, Jasmine Harper and Nicholas 'Slick' Stewart, in the midst of an intimate hair maintenance session in the Louvre - is an intentional decision. It's not for fun; it's to make a statement that putting her own spotlight on blackness is her foremost goal with her career at this point.

With the release of each work, Beyoncé is speaking her truth louder and louder. An event as recent as #Beychella established her undistracted focus on the black experience. By invoking an invented HBCU campus, complete with a backing marching band, Bey literally stepped her way into strongly identifying with her black fans. She even went so far as to sing the Black National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

On "Salud," the Tidal-only bonus track from Everything Is Love, Bey says, "Lord knows it takes hella patience / When your name is a verb and these comments absurd / And they swear they know you better than you know yourself." After two decades of indirect but enlightening, demonstrative actions, she is showing us that there are more levels to her artistry than we could have imagined. And she's using those levels - the ones we don't yet have access to - to break down why it's important to acknowledge the existence of every kind of black woman. On the surface, Bey might seem like the closest thing we've had to a perfect pop star. By all means, she appears to be the hardest-working entertainer alive, judging by the set parameters of the industry. Instead, while we've been praising her songs and singing her praises, she has widened her creative stance, occupying considerably more space than she was given at the start of her career. The title "pop star" doesn't fit anymore: Bey has weaved together an entirely new matrix of celebrity. With a status like that, she still finds new ways to surprise listeners of every variety, from stans to casual fans - and even haters. She surprises us in the literal sense, with new material, but she continues to catch us off-guard by putting her foot down and delving further into her personalized elevation of black people, and black women specifically. Our issues have become her issues. She represents me, us. Her arrival at this point was a slow build. And it's given us all time to recognize that belonging to the Bey Hive means accepting Beyoncé's journey to the heart of what it means to be black in 2018.

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Beyoncé Is The 21st Century's Master Of Leveling Up

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It's not enough to make list after list. The Turning the Tables project seeks to suggest alternatives to the traditional popular music canon, and to do more than that, too: to stimulate conversation about how hierarchies emerge and endure.

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beyonce is a si

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The Los Angeles Lakers' Anthony Davis has sculpted features and wings for arms. He is, by any measure, and by every account, one of the most gifted players in the N.B.A. He can bully big men in the paint, splash long jump shots, deliver deft passes. He is uncommonly quick and strong and intelligent. There is no good way to stop him. During these playoffs, the Houston Rockets tried to swarm him with smaller defenders, and the larger Denver Nuggets tried to keep him out of the paint. Davis calmly and efficiently rained down points on both teams. And, on the other end of the floor, he is one of the top two or three defenders in the league.

Davis is sometimes described as a " unicorn," a nickname for big men with great guard skills. Davis might be the rarest of them. In the playoffs, he's already got the better of Nikola Jokić, another variation of the breed. He is a more complete player than the 76ers' Joel Embiid, and he posts similar statlines to Giannis Antetokounmpo, while possessing a better jump shot. He does all this coolly, almost casually. Davis is universally admired; he is not, as superstars go, especially adored. He doesn't thrill with the almost unharnessed power of Antetokounmpo; he doesn't have Jokić's sense of humor with the ball, or Embiid's impish charm. He is more reserved. When he hit a game-winner to beat the Nuggets, in Game Two of the Conference Finals, he yelled, "Kobe!," in homage to the late Lakers legend. But, for all his obvious competitiveness, Davis doesn't show the almost cruel killer instinct that characterized Bryant on the court. Watching him during these N.B.A. Finals, I find myself thinking of a different mythical beast. Davis is more sphinx than unicorn: body of a lion, wings of an eagle, head of a mysterious human being. He's the spitting image of the Sphinx of Giza-just knock off his nose.

Davis has quietly loomed over the landscape of the league ever since rumors of his discontent with the New Orleans Pelicans-which drafted him as the first pick, in 2012-arose two years ago. And yet he can seem oddly overlooked. The machinations that led him to the Lakers last summer-a move that the ESPN analyst Zach Lowe described as "the single most important trade of an NBA veteran since the Lakers acquired Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Milwaukee in 1975"-was the biggest story line of its season, but it was one in which Davis himself often appeared to play a passive part. At the end of the Pelicans' dismal season, when everyone knew that Davis was as good as gone, he showed up in a Looney Tunes T-shirt emblazoned with the words "That's All, Folks!" Pressed to explain this uncharacteristic bit of trolling, he said that someone else had chosen his clothes for him. It was an obvious metaphor. No one doubted his desire to go to Los Angeles, which he made plain. But, for all the talk of player empowerment, the one flexing the power in Davis's move seemed to be LeBron James, who had joined the Lakers a season before. And that impression hasn't gone away. After the Lakers won the Conference Finals, James, sitting on the court, exultant, his shoes off and confetti swirling around his head, reflected on Davis's resplendent performance in the series. "This is the reason I wanted to be his teammate, and why I brought him here," he said, during a post-game press conference.

In the first two games of the Finals, between the Lakers and the Miami Heat, Davis established himself as the best player on a floor that included James at something like his peak. Which is to say that Davis looked, comfortably, like one of the greatest players in the game's history. In Game Two, a ten-point Laker win, he scored thirty-two points-hitting seventy-five per cent of his shots-and grabbed fourteen rebounds. Then, in Game Three, he played horrendously; he was dunked on by the Heat's Jimmy Butler early, and got pestered into serious foul trouble. By the end of the first quarter, he had four turnovers and had yet to take a shot. He was better in Game Four-he hit a crucial three-point shot with less than forty seconds left, to put the game, if not the series, out of reach.

What struck me afterward, though, was how indistinct he still remained in my mind, through his best performances and his worst. When I picture most great athletes, I tend to think of them in motion, outstretched or airborne. When I think of Davis, I see him at rest. I see his long face, his silent gaze, his dangling arms.

The Sphinx poses a riddle. Davis poses two. The first is: How do you stop him? So far, during these playoffs, the only good answer has been to get him to stop himself, through disengagement, turnovers, or fouls. The second riddle may be harder to answer: What happens when arguably the league's best player is more inward than inspiring? Maybe it makes for a little less excitement. But basketball is a team game, and charismatic performances are not the point. Davis is not jealous of James, which goes a long way toward explaining why they work so well together, as James noted after Game Two. And the younger man is evidently unafraid to challenge James, which also seems crucial. "Teammates were taken aback at first to hear Davis pointing out LeBron's mistakes in practices, urging him to get it right next time," Lowe reported last week, in a piece about Davis's arrival in Los Angeles. We tend to celebrate people who do great things alone. But there is something strangely impressive, and even heartening, about Davis's ability to be the very best without becoming the center of attention.

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Pondering Anthony Davis, the Lakers' Oddly Enigmatic Star

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The Los Angeles Lakers' Anthony Davis has sculpted features and wings for arms. He is, by any measure, and by every account, one of the most gifted players in the N.B.A. He can bully big men in the paint, splash long jump shots, deliver deft passes. He is uncommonly quick and strong and intelligent.

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At the time, it would not have been rash to assume that Get Some, Snot’s riotous 1997 debut album, had signalled the arrival of nu metal’s next big thing. Bristling with the bare-knuckled pugnacity of frontman Lynn Strait, its enthralling blend of funk, nu metal and hardcore breathed renewed vitality into the era’s generic alt- rock stagnancy. A vast and auspicious career opened wide before them, but 20 years later, Get Some stands as both a debut and a swansong, their meteoric ascent cut tragically short with Lynn’s death in 1998 along a nasty stretch of Southern California highway.

These days we take it for granted that a new album can reach millions of people instantly thanks to Spotify, YouTube and social media, but in the mid-90s, the Internet remained a remote and exotic vista for many fans. Word-of-mouth was a slow-burning process sparked by mainstream radio exposure, relentless touring and 🤬-tons of tape-trading among fans.

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Robyn Rihanna Fenty is an singer song writer, beauty physician, actor and much more. Her career as an all around star started when she was discovered around the age of 16 and everything else is history. Originally from the Islands, she has now made a name for herself all around the world.

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From singing into a hairbrush to selling millions of albums worldwide, Rihanna's story is a mixed bag of strength, luck, and perseverance.

Now thriving as a fashion icon and music idol, she often refers to her childhood struggles as the driving force behind her many ventures. Her life wasn't always about making headlines and performing concerts. On the contrary, Rihanna's story begins on a small island with a drug-addicted father and a producer who didn't think she could sing.
Growing up in a troubled home
Robyn Rihanna Fenty was born on February 20th in 1988, in Saint Michael Parish on the island of Barbados. She was the eldest child born to humble parents. Her mother worked as an accountant and her father was a warehouse supervisor.

Rihanna grew up in a small bungalow along with her two younger brothers. Money was always low throughout her childhood. Yet her father would come home drunk having spent half his paycheck on alcohol and crack. His addictions put tremendous strain on the family and his drug-induced tempers would often turn physical. While her mother was the primary target, on one occasion he turned on Rihanna after she asked to stay 10 more minutes at the beach.

When her father lost his job, everything got worse. Food became scarce, the house was littered with drug paraphernalia, and Rihanna would walk in on her father smoking crack. She closed herself off and would barely speak to anyone. It became so stressful that she suffered from intense headaches, which led to countless exams and the belief that she had a tumor.

At school, things weren't much better. Rihanna was a bright student, particularly in math and chemistry, but her grades began to decline. She was constantly bullied over her light complexion - due to her father's Irish descendence. But Rihanna had been toughened by her father's behavior and would settle the tauntings with her fists.

At seven years old, Rihanna found an escape from her life's chaos. She'd turn on the radio and sing into a hairbrush along with her idols Madonna, Mariah Carey, and Janet Jackson. During these short-lived moments of happiness, Rihanna felt like she belonged. She knew in her heart that her future was in music - although it seemed unlikely to happen while on the small island.

A teen with a dream

At 14, her parents divorced and she was finally free from her crippling headaches. But now her mother had to work full-time, meaning Rihanna had to grow up fast. She helped make ends meet by working a cash register and selling clothes in a stall on the street.

Rihanna was now the primary caretaker of her youngest brother, but she also nurtured her love of music. She drew inspiration from reggae legend Bob Marley, who she considered an example to follow for aspiring artists in the Caribbean.

As time passed, Rihanna couldn't shake the feeling that she could become a star if only the right person heard her sing. So she raised her chances by singing at the beach, at social gatherings, and at her high school talent show - which she won after singing Mariah Carey's "Hero".

Although becoming a singing sensation wasn't her only aspiration at the time. Growing up with brothers also gave her the need to prove she was tough. She embraced a tomboy dress sense and became a cadet, rising to the rank of corporal. After years of bullying and witnessing her father's abusive behavior, Rihanna refused to appear vulnerable to anyone - an attitude she upholds to this day.

First big break

At 15, Rihanna formed a musical trio with her classmates. They performed at every possible venue, mostly covering songs by Destiny's Child. One day, Rihanna's friend revealed that her mother was acquainted with the record producer Evan Rogers, who just happened to be on holiday in Barbados with his wife. Rihanna jumped at the opportunity and asked her friend to set up an audition. The trio had no band name or formal training, but she couldn't miss the chance to be heard.

Soon after, the group arrived at Evan Rogers' hotel suite and waited nervously in the lobby. Rihanna fidgeted while deeply regretting her fashion choice of pink capris with a pink shirt. She hoped her makeup looked passable, considering her mother had never allowed her to wear makeup before.

Finally, the three girls were called in. As soon as Rihanna stepped inside, Evan was instantly taken by her Bajan beauty. Her fierce, green eyes and carefully applied makeup graced her with a presence that made him forget the two other girls existed. However, from experience, Evan suspected "the pretty one" of the group couldn't sing.

He was wrong. The group performed two songs, and it was clear to Evan that Rihanna was meant for music. The audition ended, he thanked the girls and sent them on their way. It was unclear whether he would follow up or not, but Rihanna clung to the hope that he would.

Soon enough, Evan called and requested that Rihanna and her mother fly over to the United States for a demo recording. Rihanna was over the moon, and after a few visits, she gained her mother's permission to move to Connecticut and live with Evan and his wife while she recorded her very first album.

You may never be good enough for everybody, but you will always be the best for somebody.

The debut that topped the charts

Over the next year, 16-year-old Rihanna recorded four tracks, including a bubbly dancehall jam called " Pon de Replay". The demo was sent out to various labels, one being Def Jam Recordings, where rapper Jay Z was just appointed as CEO. The rapper was impressed but considered the songs were 'too big' for the girl singing them. Nevertheless, Jay Z asked her to audition for him so he could see for himself.

Rihanna was now 17 and already on her way to audition for her first record label. She had spent the entire night choosing an outfit and was shaking at the thought of singing in front of Jay Z. Although the moment she began to sing Whitney Housten's "For the Love of You", Jay Z was sold. He could tell by the resolute look in her eyes that she was going to be a star - with or without him. So he asked her to sign with his label. They ended up staying until 3 am sifting through all the details of the contract. But Rihanna didn't mind, her life-long dream was officially afoot.

Over the following month, Rihanna happily worked with various producers to complete her debut album. She chose her favorite track "Pon de Replay" as the lead single and in May 2005, it came second on the US Billboard and was among the top five hits worldwide. Rihanna was now on the map and quickly became a recognized name in the music industry.

Only eight months later, Rihanna released her second album A Girl Like Me, which launched two more hits. The track "SOS" became her first number one single and went Platinum. But before the glitz and glam of fame swept Rihanna away, Jay Z gave her a few words of advice which she still follows today,

Don't change who you are, never forget where you came from, and always stay humble.

Good girl gone bad

At only 19 years old, Rihanna was topping the charts and living the dream. She continued to work with Jay Z and released the smash hit "Umbrella", which won Rihanna her very first Grammy Award.

For her next albums, Rihanna assumed creative control and reinvented her music. As someone who quickly grows bored of the same things, she decided it was time to transform her cutesy image into something risque and sexy. Her music videos became more suggestive and controversial, but her fanbase grew along with her worldwide acclaim.

At 21 years old, her fame gained a different kind of attention. Rihanna began dating Chris Brown, a rapper from an equally turbulent childhood. The relationship was rocky, and on the night before her performance at the 51st Grammy Awards, Rihanna found suspicious texts on his phone. She promptly confronted him while they drove home, only to discover he had cheated on her with a former employee. The argument became heated and Chris threw the first punch. Rihanna, a tough woman with military training, fought back. It became a full-on battle inside the car, where she emerged severely cut and bruised - with marks of strangulation around her neck.

The traumatic event ensued in a media firestorm. But just like she did back in her teens, Rihanna put up her guard and refused to show herself as a vulnerable victim. Instead, she chose to use this experience as another step in her success story. Rihanna became a spokesperson and collaborated with artists such as Eminem and Kanye West in songs about domestic violence.

However, her familiarity with abusive men made it hard for her to leave the relationship completely. After the restraining order was reduced to enable a professional relationship, Rihanna became involved with Chris once again. Although it didn't take long before she finally decided enough was enough and left him for good.

Sure, you wish you did some things differently. But there is no sense in becoming burdened with regret over things you have no power to change.

Business ventures and influencing generations

Despite her young age, Rihanna's dream of getting her music out into the world falls short of her current reality. Within a decade, she has become a best-selling songwriter, singer, and actress. She has sold over 540 million albums worldwide, won countless awards, and is the youngest solo artist to score 14 Billboard music hits. She has appeared in Hollywood blockbusters, named a major cultural influencer, and even has a national holiday under her name in Barbados.

But Rihanna has never been one to settle. She has also established herself as an edgy entrepreneur in the realms of fashion and beauty. Her latest business venture being her new cosmetic company Fenty Beauty, the first makeup line to offer a largely diverse variety of skin shades.

For all the wealth and fame she has gathered since her debut, Rihanna is eager to put her influence to good use. At only 18, she created Believe Foundation to help terminally ill children. From then on, she has funded countless charity ventures for causes ranging from cancer research to medical supplies for disaster victims. Former President Barack Obama has personally praised her work, stating "You've become a powerful force in the fight to give people dignity."

With a headstrong character and a heart of gold, Rihanna is in a league of her own. She maintains a tenacious resolve to live her life on her own terms while helping others and inspiring upcoming generations to do more. Regardless of the bumps along the way, Rihanna is proud to say she always follows her heart, and encourages you to do the same.

When you follow the things that feel great to you, you can never lose.

Jenny is a freelance writer in the areas of tech and productivity. She also enjoys writing unusual stories of success and giving tips to new freelance writers. You can read her useful ramblings on Medium. or find her on Twitter @JenMedWrites.

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[VIDEO] Rihanna's Life Story: From Island Tomboy to Platinum Pop Sensation

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From singing into a hairbrush to selling millions of albums worldwide, Rihanna's story is a mixed bag of strength, luck, and perseverance. Now thriving as a fashion icon and music idol, she often refers to her childhood struggles as the driving force behind her many ventures.

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Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman is an American actress and singer. She began her career as a child model and backup dancer, before gaining prominence for her role as Rocky Blue on the Disney Channel sitcom Shake It Up.

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Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman ( zən-DAY-ə; born September 1, 1996) is an American actress and singer. Known mononymously as Zendaya, she has received various accolades, including two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.

Born and raised in Oakland, California, Zendaya began her career as a child model and backup dancer. She made her television debut as Rocky Blue on the Disney Channel sitcom (2010-2013) and starred as the titular character in the channel's sitcom K.C. Undercover (2015-2018). Her feature film debut came in 2017 with the superhero film Spider-Man: Homecoming, and she later starred in its sequels. Zendaya's role as Rue Bennett, a struggling drug-addicted teenager, in the HBO teen drama series (2019-present) made her the youngest recipient of the Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, which she won twice. Her other film roles include the musical The Greatest Showman (2017), the romantic drama Malcolm & Marie (2021), and the science fiction epic (2021).

In addition to her acting career, Zendaya has ventured into music. In 2011, she released the singles " Swag It Out" and " Watch Me", the latter a collaboration with Bella Thorne. She signed with Hollywood Records in 2012. Her eponymous debut studio album (2013) was released to moderate success. The album's lead single, " Replay", reached the top 40 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Zendaya's biggest commercial success as a musician came with her Zac Efron collaboration, " Rewrite the Stars", from The Greatest Showman soundtrack in 2017. The single reached within the top 20 of several record charts and has received multi-platinum sales certifications globally. Zendaya has also written and performed several songs for Euphoria.

Zendaya was born on September 1, 1996, in Oakland, California, to teachers Claire Stoermer and Kazembe Ajamu Coleman. Her father is African-American, with Nigerian ancestry; her mother has German and Scottish ancestry. Zendaya, whose name derives from the Shona name (meaning "to give thanks"), has five older siblings. She attended Fruitvale Elementary School, where her mother taught for two decades. At age six, she and two friends from the school performed a play there for Black History Month. At age 8, Zendaya joined a hip-hop dance troupe called Future Shock Oakland and was a member for three years. She also spent two years dancing hula with the Academy of Hawaiian Arts. Zendaya grew as a performer in part at the nearby California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda, California, where her mother worked a summer job as the house manager. Zendaya helped her seat patrons, sold fundraising tickets, and was finally inspired to pursue acting by the theatrical performances.

Zendaya attended Oakland School for the Arts and, while still a student, was cast in several roles in area theaters. At the Berkeley Playhouse, she played Little Ti Moune in Once on This Island, and in the TheaterWorks' production in Palo Alto, she played a character originally written as male, Joe, in Caroline, or Change. Reviewing the latter, Keith Kreitman of San Mateo Daily Journal called the 11-year-old Zendaya's performance "a pure delight". She studied at the CalShakes Conservatory program and at the American Conservatory Theater.

Her stage credits include performances in several of William Shakespeare's plays. She played Lady Anne in Richard III, Celia in As You Like It, and took part in a production of Twelfth Night. When Zendaya was in seventh grade, the family moved to Los Angeles. In 2015, while pursuing an acting career, she graduated from Oak Park High School.

2009-2016: Early career with Disney

Zendaya began her career working as a fashion model for Macy's, Mervyns, and Old Navy. She was featured in an toys ad. She also appeared as a back-up dancer in a Sears commercial featuring Disney star Selena Gomez. In 2009, she was a featured performer in the Kidz Bop music video for its cover of the song " Hot n Cold" by Katy Perry, which was released on . In November 2009, she auditioned for the role of CeCe Jones in the Disney sitcom (titled Dance Dance Chicago at the time). For her audition, she performed Michael Jackson's " Leave Me Alone". She was selected to play Rocky Blue. Shake It Up premiered on November 7, 2010, and was watched by 6.2 million viewers, becoming Disney Channel's second highest-rated premiere in Disney Channel's 27-year history.

Zendaya hosting the Make Your Mark: Ultimate Dance Off event in 2011

In 2011, Zendaya released " Swag It Out", a promotional independent single. She also starred in the book trailer for "From Bad To Cursed" by Katie Alender. In June of the same year, she released " Watch Me", performing with Bella Thorne. The song peaked at 86 on the Billboard Hot 100. The second season of Shake It Up premiered on September 18, 2011. Zendaya hosted Make Your Mark: Ultimate Dance Off 2011 on Disney Channel. In 2011, Target stores began selling D-Signed, a line of clothing inspired by the clothes worn by Zendaya and other cast members of Shake It Up.

Zendaya's first film role was in (2012), a Disney Channel Original Movie. On February 29, 2012, " Something to Dance For" was released as promotional single for Live 2 Dance. For the soundtrack, Zendaya also recorded three other songs: "Made In Japan", "Same Heart", and "Fashion Is My Kryptonite", released as promotional single. In June 2012, Shake It Up was renewed for a third and final season. On September 2, 2012, she signed to Hollywood Records. In October, she performed at the Teen Music Festival and at the Operation Smile benefit. Zendaya was as one of the celebrities who would compete on season 16 of Dancing with the Stars. At 16, she was the youngest contestant ever to participate on the show, before Willow Shields succeeded her at 14 on season 20. She was partnered up with professional dancer Valentin Chmerkovskiy. In May, the couple finished as runners-up behind Kellie Pickler and Derek Hough.

Zendaya's self-titled debut album was released on September 17, 2013. It was preceded by the single " Replay", released on July 16, 2013, written by Tiffany Fred and Paul "Phamous" Shelton. In August 2013, she was cast as 16-year-old Zoey Stevens, the lead character in the Disney Channel Original Movie , whose "smart phone begins to somehow control all the boys around her". In November 2013, Zendaya was selected as Elvis Duran's Artist of the Month and was featured on NBC's , where she performed live her single "Replay". That same month, she was cast as the lead in a Disney Channel pilot called Super Awesome Katy. It was ordered to series by Disney Channel in May 2014, with the series now under the title K.C. Undercover, and with Zendaya's character now named K.C. Cooper rather than Katy Cooper. Zendaya exerted influence over the renaming of her character and the retitling of the series, also deciding several key elements of the character's personality. K.C. Undercover premiered on Disney Channel on January 18, 2015, and was renewed for a second season in May 2015.

In 2014, Zendaya was a guest judge on an episode of Project Runway: Under the Gunn. In the episode, the contestant designers were given the challenge of creating an outfit for Zendaya to wear in an upcoming concert performance. In February 2015, after a joke made by Giuliana Rancic concerning Zendaya, in reference to her hair smelling of "patchouli oil" and "weed" at the 87th Academy Awards, Zendaya promptly took to Instagram to address the remark and point out that many successful people have "locs," a hairstyle that has nothing to do with drugs. Mattel honored Zendaya with her own Barbie, replicating her Oscars look. The doll belongs to Mattel's Barbie "Sheroes" project, which honors inspirational living women.

The following month, musician Timbaland confirmed that he was working with Zendaya on her second album, following her switching record labels from Disney to Republic. " Something New", featuring Chris Brown was released on February 5 via Hollywood Records and Republic Records. The song also marks it as her first official release since signing to Republic Records. In August 2016, she appeared in the music video for the song " Versace on the Floor" by Bruno Mars. In December 2016, Zendaya appeared as a guest judge in the season finale of the 15th season of the reality television series Project Runway.

2017-present: Film breakthrough, Euphoria, and transition to adult roles

Zendaya at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con promoting Spider-Man: Homecoming

She made her feature film debut as Michelle in the superhero film Spider-Man: Homecoming, which was released in July 2017. Zendaya wore no makeup to her screen test, a decision that was carried through in production, and "add[ed] her own embellishments to the role, such as carrying around a mug of herbal tea". Zendaya described the character as "very dry, awkward, intellectual". She added that it was "refreshing" that Michelle was weird and different, feeling that "a lot of young people-especially young women-can relate to that." The film grossed $117 million in its first weekend, ranking number one at the box office. John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter praised her as a "scene stealer", while David Ehrlich of called her the film's " MVP", despite her brief screen time.

In December 2017, Zendaya co-starred in the original musical film The Greatest Showman. She portrayed a trapeze artist who falls in love with Zac Efron's character at a time when interracial romance was taboo. Owen Gleiberman of praised her chemistry with Efron. The Hollywood Reporter praised Zendaya for "[registering] strongest, bringing touching sensitivity to her handful of scenes". She appeared on three tracks of the film's soundtrack, including " Rewrite the Stars". The film met mixed reception but became the third-highest grossing live-action musical ever released. In September 2018, Warner Bros. released the animated film , in which Zendaya voiced the yeti Meechee. She also sang two songs for the soundtrack. The film received positive reviews.

In 2019, Zendaya began starring in the HBO drama series , an adaptation of the Israeli series of the same name, as Rue, a 17-year-old drug addict and the narrator of the series. The series premiered on June 16, 2019 to positive critical reception, with her performance receiving acclaim: Rebecca Nicholson of The Guardian wrote that "Zendaya is reinvented as the self-destructive, self-loathing Rue, in what is a truly astonishing, mesmerising performance, upending every expectation of what she could do"; Doreen St. Felix of The New Yorker echoed the sentiment writing: "It becomes difficult, and then absolutely silly, to recall the pink outlines of her early career on the Disney Channel, so grandly does she inhabit this dark new role. She understands the neediness of her character: that Rue, at heart, wants nothing more than to be loved; that her chemical cravings work in service of a spiritual one". At the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, Zendaya won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, becoming the youngest winner of the award. Also in 2019, she reprised her role as MJ in Spider-Man: Far from Home. Critic Christy Lemire called Zendaya's portrayal "darkly alluring" and praised her "humorous, deadpan charm". The film was a commercial success, becoming the fourth highest-grossing release of the year.

Zendaya at the premiere of Spider-Man: Far from Home in 2019

In 2021, Zendaya starred in Malcolm & Marie, which was filmed during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The production complied with extensive safety protocols and had a lean crew to minimize health risks. The film co-stars John David Washington, and was directed by Sam Levinson, who also created Euphoria. Zendaya allocated shares to the film to everyone involved in its making, as a way of offering a financial bonus when the movie was sold. Part of the proceeds was shared with Feeding America. The film had a mixed reception but Zendaya's performance was positively reviewed. Brian Truitt of described her as "luminous" and "absolute fire", Richard Brody called her performance "the movie's only redeeming quality", and 's Peter Debruge praised her for "wear[ing] Marie's fragility on the surface, only to reveal the character's strength through reaction shots and silence".

She next voiced the character of Lola Bunny in Space Jam: A New Legacy. Zendaya accepted Coogler's offer to star in the film because of her interest in working with Coogler and being a fan of the original film. Growing up with the first film since childhood, Zendaya drew on her experiences with her family's love of basketball for the role. Zendaya then played Chani in Denis Villeneuve's science fiction film , the first part of a two-part adaptation of the 1965 novel of the same name. Critic Glenn Kenny dubbed her portrayal "better than apt", while Brian Lowry of noted that her role was limited to "gauzy images" in the protagonist's visions. Zendaya reprised her role as MJ for the third time in Spider-Man: No Way Home. RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico praised Zendaya and Tom Holland's chemistry as well as her execution of MJ's "emotional final beats".

Having already collaborated with Labrinth on the song " All for Us" for Euphoria's first season, in 2022 Zendaya co-wrote two songs (" I'm Tired" and " Elliot's Song") for the second season, also performing as a vocalist on the former. Receiving continued acclaim for her performance as Rue, the second season of Euphoria earned her four Emmy nominations. Nominated for Lead Actress in a Drama for the second time, she became the youngest two-time nominee in Emmy history, while her nomination as an executive producer for Outstanding Drama Series made her the youngest woman ever nominated for producing. She also received two nominations for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for her lyrical contributions to the show's soundtrack. Zendaya then made an appearance in the Elvis Mitchell's documentary Is That Black Enough For You?!?

In 2023, Zendaya won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Television Series Drama at the 80th Golden Globe Awards and received a Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination. During the second weekend of Coachella 2023, she joined Labrinth in a surprise performance of "All for Us" and "I'm Tired", which marked her return to the stage in 8 years. She was featured on the opening song "The Feels" of Labrinth's third album Ends & Begins. Zendaya next appeared in the documentary film Invisible Beauty, based on work of American fashion model and activist Bethann Hardison.

Zendaya is set star in and produce Challengers, a sports drama directed by Luca Guadagnino. She will also reprise her role as Chani in the sequel Dune: Part Two.

Other ventures

Fashion and business

Zendaya was the face of Beats Electronics, X-Out, Material Girl, CoverGirl, and Chi Hair Care. She has also modeled for Michael Kors and Dolce & Gabbana. In August 2013, she released her debut book, Between U and Me: How to Rock Your Tween Years with Style and Confidence to "help girls through the tougher parts of the tween years". In August 2015, she introduced a shoe collection called Daya, which was her childhood nickname. In November 2016, Zendaya's clothing line Daya by Zendaya went on sale. The second collection was gender-fluid and included full range of sizes. In October 2018, she became Tommy Hilfiger brand's ambassador and co-designed Tommy x Zendaya capsule collections. She took inspiration from the '70s, namely the decade's "strong, iconic women", and her runway shows at Paris Fashion Week and New York Fashion Week have been praised for celebrating diversity and inclusivity including women of color, plus-size models, and models aged up to 70. The shows were a tribute to the pioneering model icons. In 2019, Zendaya became a spokesmodel for Lancôme, and in the following year for Bulgari and Valentino. In June 2022, she was announced as the global brand ambassador of Glaceau SmartWater. She become an ambassador for Louis Vuitton in 2023.

Zendaya was ranked one of the best-dressed women in 2018 by fashion website Net-a-Porter. For the September 2020 issue she and her stylist, Law Roach, chose to use all black designers, artists, and creatives. In October 2020, she won the Visionary Award at the CNMI Green Carpet Fashion Awards for "promoting diversity and inclusion in fashion and film". The following year in November, she become the youngest person to ever win the CFDA Fashion Icon award at the CFDA Fashion Awards.

Philanthropy and activism

Zendaya has lent her support to several charities and causes. In 2012, she became an ambassador for Convoy of Hope and encouraged fans to support Hurricane Sandy response efforts. The following year, she promoted other relief efforts. In 2014, Zendaya recorded John Legend's song " All of Me" with a portion of the proceeds going to the organization. The same year, she celebrated her 18th birthday with a campaign to help feed at least 150 hungry children in Haiti, Tanzania and the Philippines through feedONE, and in 2016, she celebrated her 20th birthday with a campaign to raise $50,000 to support Convoy's Women's Empowerment Initiative. In October 2012, Zendaya performed at the medical Operation Smile benefit. She was UNICEF's Trick-or-Treat 2014 campaign spokesperson. In July 2015, she visited South Africa with UNAIDS, the United Nations programme dedicated to preventing and creating access to treatment for HIV and AIDS. Then she also held a fundraiser with CrowdRise, with proceeds going to non-profit, community based, Ikageng charity in Soweto for a family of AIDS orphans. When Malcolm & Marie, filmed during the pandemic, was sold in September 2020, a portion of the proceeds was shared with Feeding America.

Zendaya supports campaigns to raise awareness about underserved communities, underprivileged schools and to financially support schools. In September 2017, she partnered with Verizon Foundation as a spokesperson for their national #WeNeedMore initiative to bring technology, access and learning opportunities to children. She was also empowering them to pursue careers in STEM. In March 2018, Zendaya teamed up with Google.org to give back to students at community school in Oakland funding an innovative computer science curriculum.

Zendaya is a feminist. In January 2017, she attended the Women's March on Washington to showcase her support of women's rights. She has previously discussed her experience as a black female in Hollywood. She uses her social platforms to address racial justice, voting, body shaming, and bullying. She has been showing support for the Black Lives Matter movement on her social media accounts for years; she took part in the George Floyd protests in June 2020 and temporarily lent her Instagram account to Patrisse Cullors to share anti-racism resources and media. Zendaya has been an advocate for voting over the years. In October 2016, she was one of the celebrities to participate in "Vote Your Future" initiative and appeared in a campaign video. In September 2020, she encouraged her fans with Michelle Obama, and her "When We All Vote" nonpartisan[citation needed ] organization, to check their voter registration ahead of elections. The next month, she shared a video while casting her vote to remind about voting again. In October 2013, she took part in P&G's movement called Mean Stinks, and co-hosted the nationwide live-streamed assembly joined by almost 500 schools. In September 2017, she was fronting, along with her Spider-Man: Homecoming costars, a PSA for awareness campaign Stomp Out Bullying.

Zendaya also supported American Heart Association, City Year, Communities in Schools, DonorsChoose.org, Children Mending Hearts, Toys for Tots, Friends for Change and Donate My Dress, among others.

Awards and recognition

Zendaya at the 2018 MTV Movie & TV Awards

In 2016, Zendaya was featured on Forbes' 30 under 30 list. She was included on magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022; Dune director Denis Villeneuve wrote of her saying, "She is an autonomous creative force herself. A cultural icon in the making. A person driven by pure inspiration, empathy, and respect for her craft, who uses authenticity as a new superpower [...] Zendaya is the future. And there is nothing more comforting to me. This is only the beginning". In that same year, ranked her on its list of the 500 most influential figures in global media.

In 2020, at age 24, Zendaya became the youngest recipient of the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, winning for her role as Rue Bennett in the HBO drama series . After winning the award again at the 2022 Primetime Emmy Awards, she became the youngest two-time acting winner. Zendaya received the CinemaCon Star of the Year Award in 2023.

Personal life

Zendaya owns a home in Los Angeles and a condo in Brooklyn. She is a vegetarian, saying, "My main reason for being a vegetarian is that I'm an animal lover-definitely not because I love vegetables". As of November 2021, Zendaya has been in a relationship with her Spider-Man co-star Tom Holland.

Filmography

Television

Music videos

As lead artist

As featured artist

As guest appearance

Discography

Concert tours

References

External links

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Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman ( zən-DAY-ə ; born September 1, 1996) is an American actress and singer. Known mononymously as Zendaya, she has received various accolades, including two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.

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Johnny Depp is an American Actor, producer, and musician. He is regarded as one of the most notable film stars. He has been nominated for ten golden globe awards winning for Best actor in his performance of the title role in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

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Johnny Ashmore: A loving and caring individual with an intriguing, yet beautiful past. His story starts when he was born prematurely to his mother,  weighing only 2 1/2 pounds, his small stature provided doctors with a concern to keep him under hospital care, which lasted for several months. During that time, Johnny was placed within a incubator, which caused him to lose much of his eyesight due to the high concentrations of oxygen levels present within the incubator. However, despite that neglectful setback, Johnny would go on to live a humbling and enjoyable life; being the town's most popular person, everyone in Greenville knew of him, and he knew them. Johnny spent much of time getting to know the folks in  town, and had established a large presence there from his father and grandfather's job of being on the Greenville County Supervisors. And Johnny's premonence didn't stop just in Greenville, people from Spartanburg to Anderson knew about him, as well as his personality and job professions. Johnny bounced between various jobs, from working at "Baby" Bi-Lo to 8 O'Clock; but no matter where he went, or what house he lived, or street he walked, Johnny always treated people with care and respect, which is the reason why so many people know him, and why he's so well liked.

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Local Personality Profile: Johnny Ashmore

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If you shop at the Eight O’Clock Superette, you know John Ashmore. And chances are, Johnny knows you, too. “I’ve always tried to treat people the way I’d like to be treated,” he says. “That’s proba…

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Tracy Morgan a stand up comedian turns his dramas in life into a comedy. After being in a car crash he received enough money from a settlement that he would never have to work again. He soon later came out with a TV series The Last OG that talks about the life of a man who went to prison for 15 year from a drug charge. After he got released from prison he started working again and got a job at the coffee shop.

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Tracy Morgan a stand up comedian turns his dramas in life into a comedy. After being in a near-fatal car crash he received enough money from a settlement that he would never have to work.  He soon came out with a TV series The Last OG that shows the life of a man who went to prison for 15 year from a drug charge.  Before going off to prison he got his girlfriend pregnant but he never knew about it. After being released from prison he began to show his interest in being in his twins life and started a job at a coffee shop.

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After a near-fatal car crash, the actor got enough money from a settlement that he no longer has to work. But, with his own TV series and a return to standup, he has become even more ambitious.

In a long alleyway in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not far from the East River, Tracy Morgan sat on a director's chair, his feet dangling high off the ground. He was surrounded by a languid swarm of crew members, who brought him water, fussed over the orange jumpsuit that was his costume for the day, and kept him shaded from the sun. Morgan has a plush love seat for a nose and a protrusive mouth that tugs the rest of his face forward, but his eyes are the key to his knack for physical comedy-he controls their focus with gonzo precision. Sometimes he looks upward and grins, mimicking the innocent gaze of a child; at other times, he tucks in his chin and offers a stare that lands about a yard beyond the ostensible object of his attention. Now he looked restless.

It was a September scorcher, cloudless at noon, and Morgan was working himself into a muddled but intense emotional state-jokey, sentimental, triumphant, pissed-in order to film a climactic scene from the second-season finale of his TBS sitcom, "The Last O.G." (Season 2 premièred in April.) Morgan plays Tray Barker, a man who has returned to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn after fifteen years in prison on a drug charge. Just before his arrest, Tray unknowingly impregnated his girlfriend, Shay, played by Tiffany Haddish, best known for the torrent of ribaldry that she brought to the movie "Girls Trip." With Tray out of her life, Shay became a successful designer and married a white man, with whom she is raising Tray's twins. In the first season, Tray, desperate to earn a place in his children's lives, takes a job at a Starbucks-like coffee shop, one of many signs of local gentrification. In the second season, he tries to launch a business venture that draws on his experience and also suits the neighborhood's changing demographics: a prison-themed food truck.

Morgan, who was born in the Bronx and brought up mainly in Brooklyn, got his first big break in 1996, when he was cast on "Saturday Night Live," where he went on to spend seven seasons. Ten years later, Tina Fey, a former colleague at "S.N.L.," wrote a part for him on "30 Rock," a backstage sitcom set at an "S.N.L."-style sketch show called "T.G.S." Morgan tends to play characters who, like him, speak in energetic, irreproducible rhythms, jumping from one topic to the next along logical grooves that are not always apparent to his interlocutors. "The Last O.G." is a comedy, but it often plays the heaviness of its material straight, and the finale of Season 2 required Morgan to summon all the calamity, regret, and striving that had characterized Tray's life thus far. He pumped himself up by speaking Tray's inner truths, and his own, aloud, to whoever happened to be listening. "Everything I went through," he said. "All that time, all that work! "

Morgan's voice is thick and textured, almost syrupy on longer syllables, with an old-school black Brooklyn accent. He erodes consonants, turns simple vowels into unpredictable diphthongs, and takes each new sentence as an opportunity for rococo improvisation. "What are we here?" he asked a crew member, who had no clue what he was talking about until Morgan fixed his lips to form a word that clearly started with the letter "F." "Oh, a family," the crew member said.

Morgan called more people over, asking variations of the same question and looking over at me each time he got the answer he wanted. "Everybody came over here and said 'family,' " he told me, when he was satisfied with the survey. "I ain't tell them to say that!" Morgan is proud of the collaborative tone that he has fostered on set. "I'm Tracy Morgan, I know that, but I love you," he told me at one point, explaining, I think, his democratic approach. "When 'The Last O.G.' appeared, you said, 'What is this?' " he continued. "And now you're here, writing about it. That's how different it is. This is not a show about the community. This is a show starring the community." Then, pointing at me with one of his short, solid arms: "Print that!"

Given the show's affection for Morgan's Brooklyn, and certain biographical overlaps between character and actor-Morgan grew up mostly in housing projects, and he sold crack for a brief time in his teens before he started doing standup-a viewer might deduce that Tray is Morgan, barely disguised. "I don't think he's acting," the rapper and actor Method Man, who has a part in Season 2, told me. Method Man's character, Green Eyes, is based on an old friend of Morgan's. The series' head writer, Saladin Patterson, who was a writer and a producer on "The Bernie Mac Show," "Psych," and "The Big Bang Theory," told me that, when he was working on the narrative arc of "The Last O.G.," Morgan "would just call and share stories about people from his real-life past," because he wanted Patterson "to sprinkle those people, those characters, those relationships throughout." Method Man said, of Morgan, "This is his life. He's just living."

On "S.N.L.," Morgan was best known for goofy, high-concept characters-most famously Brian Fellow, a vain and vaguely effeminate naturalist who engaged in intense, one-sided feuds with the animals that appeared on his daytime TV show. But, since then, he has usually played fictionalized versions of himself. First, starting in 2003, there was the short-lived NBC sitcom "The Tracy Morgan Show," based loosely on Morgan's life and his standup routines. Then, there was "30 Rock," on which Morgan played an immensely popular and benignly out-to-lunch comedian named Tracy Jordan, whose arrival at "T.G.S." was a kind of cataclysm. Morgan was riveting in the part, which fixed a popular perception of him that he has alternately relished and chafed under ever since. "30 Rock" ended its run in 2013, but people still call out the name Tracy Jordan when they see Morgan on the street.

In June, 2014, Morgan was in a limo bus on the New Jersey Turnpike, headed home after a standup date in Delaware, with several other comedians-including one of Morgan's best and oldest friends, James McNair, better known by his stage name, Jimmy Mack-when a Walmart tractor trailer slammed into the vehicle. McNair, who was sixty-two, died in the crash; Morgan fell into a coma that lasted for eight days. When he awoke, he had to relearn how to walk and talk. He sued Walmart, and the company settled. The terms are confidential, but Morgan has said that he now has enough money that he no longer needs to work. Even so, he has, if anything, become more ambitious.

"Tracy was primed for a comeback," the actor and filmmaker Jordan Peele, who is an executive producer on "The Last O.G.," told me. During his rehab, Morgan watched a lot of Peele's sketch-comedy series "Key & Peele," and after he recovered he met with Peele, who, at the time, was working on his directorial début, "Get Out." Morgan and Peele came up with the premise for "The Last O.G.," and began developing it for FX, which passed, before TBS picked it up. Although Tray's return to civilian life has echoes of Morgan's return to show business after the highway crash, the character can be better understood as a counterfactual exercise: Tray is who Morgan might have been, given a bad-or, given the details of Morgan's fairly tumultuous life, a worse-break.

Morgan often speaks in maxims. When I asked him whether he was nervous about the new season of the show, he said, "I don't feel pressure-I apply pressure." He envisages a long future for "The Last O.G." in syndication, he told me. "I want Nick at Nite," he said. "Keep all the trophies! I want Nick at Nite. I want my grandkids to see this." Somewhere near the middle of the word "grandkids"-which he had protracted into a lengthy and lavishly vowelled production-he began to cry. The tears fell freely; Morgan didn't wipe them away.

"Any more questions?" he asked. We'd been talking for maybe ten minutes. "Or are you caught up in the rapture? Soaking it all in?"

By the time the sun had dried the lines of moisture from his face, Morgan was shouting out to another crew member about his recent diet: "I told you-I been on some flounder shit for the past four days!"

When I had Morgan's attention again, I asked whether he followed any method in his acting. The trick is to "rest your soul," he said. "You wanna know how it is to act? Rest your soul!"

He'd insisted, earlier, that I accept a bottle of water from one of his assistants ("Stay hydrated," he'd said, gesturing toward the sun), and that I accept some help in cooling down. ("Put some ice on his neck," he'd told somebody. Then, to me, as the ice was applied: "Now tell me that shit don't feel good.") He looked at me as if he were ready to offer more assistance, this time of a spiritual kind.

"You know how to rest your soul?" he asked. I didn't, and I told him so. "Take a breath," he said. "You know how to relax? Or did you forget?" I had. "Sure you did. Relax. If you're around me, relax." Now he looked more deeply into my eyes, despite my effort to break the stare.

"Look at me. Relax."

Then, diagnostically, and a bit impatiently, he said, "The problem with you? You don't know how to keep it simple." We'd known each other for not quite half an hour. He wasn't wrong. "You complicate your fucking life-with things." He said the word "things" with ascetic disdain. "Stop doing that."

He called out to another crew member, this time to bring over his wireless speaker. He pressed a button on his phone, and "Human Nature," by Michael Jackson, came flooding out. "Wanna hear me sing?" he asked. He began yowling along, tacking his versions of Jackson's famous grunts and falsettos into the space between each phrase: "If they say why, why, tell 'em that it's human nature! Why, why does he do me that way?"

"The Last O.G." employs, then contravenes, the familiar beats of a family sitcom. In an early episode, Tray shows up at the fancy private school that his son and his daughter, Shazad and Amira, attend, and takes them to the housing project where he and Shay grew up. "Me and your mother had a proper Brooklyn love story," he says, before telling them about the time Shay threw a brick through a police car's windshield to prove her love for him. ("And then she turned around and said, 'Fuck the police, Tray,' " he recalls.) "I think it's time for me to take y'all back to where y'all come from," he says. He leads the kids to a cemetery and points to a grassy spot. "That's where me and your mother made you," he says. "I can't believe you all had sex in a cemetery," Amira replies. "Let me tell you something, Amira," Tray says. "The cemetery is like the ghetto itself, full of sadness and death. But it's also full of life."

The scene is one instance of the show's directly borrowing from Morgan's own life. In " I Am the New Black," a memoir he published in 2009, he describes how his father, Jimmy-a musician and a Vietnam veteran who split with Morgan's mother, Alice, when Morgan was six years old-took him for a walk through East New York, in Brooklyn, when Morgan was a teen-ager. Jimmy took Tracy to the metal bleachers by the side of the field at a local high school:

"You see these, son?" he asked.

"Yeah, Dad."

"This is where I busted a nut inside your mother and made you," he said.

"Oh, yeah?"

"We were right under here. I had your mother doggy-style and gave it to her good too. You came right out of me right here under these stands, little man."

"Dad?"

"Yeah, son?"

"I really didn't need to know that shit."

"Well, it's true. A man should know his roots."

Morgan adds, "My dad taught me how to tell a story."

Morgan was born in 1968, and he spent much of his childhood in the Tompkins Houses, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Jimmy and Alice grew up in the Tompkins Houses, too, and knew each other as kids. Alice was from a family of strict Jehovah's Witnesses. After they got together, Jimmy served multiple tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, and he returned hooked on heroin. Two years later, Alice discovered her oldest son, Jim, playing with a needle he'd found on the floor, and asked Jimmy to leave. He ended up moving to the Bronx.

"I Am the New Black" is raunchy and funny, but it is also sometimes startlingly dark; its overriding theme is trauma, though Morgan never uses that word. His brother Jim contracted spinal meningitis as a toddler, and lost the use of his legs. (Jim's childhood nickname was Reality.) When Morgan was eight, he writes, a fourteen-year-old babysitter, whom he doesn't name, had "real sex" with him and with Jim. "I don't think that girl molested us," Morgan says now. "She was just inquisitive. She was a good person." In the memoir, he describes crying afterward, and explains that the girl "gave me a stack of Oreo cookies to keep me quiet. It wasn't the only time it happened either," he writes. "Damn. Memories."

Morgan started having sex with some frequency at the age of twelve, and says that he has been obsessed with sex ever since. (One of his favorite ways to warm up a standup crowd is to shout-less as braggadocio than as a matter of inevitable, shrugged-at fact-that he's "going to get somebody pregnant tonight." ) Alice had three more kids after Jim and Tracy, and she struggled to raise the five of them alone. At thirteen, Morgan left home, determined to live with his dad. For two nights, he says, he slept in subway cars, riding between Brooklyn and the South Bronx, unsure how his father would react if he appeared. He showed up at his father's doorstep "smelling like ass," he writes. "Just a confused teenage son who'd left his mother's home two hours away in Coney Island with no plan." Morgan lived with his father for the next two years. His mother kept him in school in Brooklyn, so he spent hours commuting each day. Eventually, there was a custody hearing. Morgan describes the judge, "this old white man," inviting him and two of his younger siblings, Paris and Asia, into his chambers, and asking them which parent they wanted to live with. They said that they wanted to live with their dad. When the judge informed the parents of his verdict, Alice "yelled that they were taking her babies away, and she cried like I'd never seen her do before or since," Morgan writes. Later, he and his mother stopped speaking, and they went years without seeing each other. In the memoir, he writes, "Everything I've done in my career is because I wanted my mother's love."

Morgan reads the audio version of "I Am the New Black," and he ad-libs and elaborates throughout, veering into extemporaneous rumination on his experiences. At one point, he says, almost casually, "Another devastating day in my life was when I learned my father had AIDS." Jimmy died when Morgan was nineteen years old. (His father's brother-in-law Alvin, who played football in college and was Morgan's childhood sports idol, also died of AIDS.) By then, many of Morgan's friends had entered the drug trade, and he decided to try his hand at it, too. Among his haunts was the old Yankee Stadium, where he scalped tickets and sold cocaine and souvenirs. On a spring day in 1987, as the Yankees played the Minnesota Twins, Morgan saw "this bomb-ass chick on a pay phone," he writes. He tells a friend, "I could pull her like a hamstring." He struck up a conversation with the woman, whose name was Sabina, and they soon became an item. She was four years older than Morgan, and had two young children, Malcolm and Benji. They moved in together, had another child, Tracy, Jr., and married a few years later. Morgan eventually adopted Sabina's kids and raised them as his own.

He had already started to question his drug dealing: he was so bad at it, he writes, that he had to work fast-food jobs at the same time to keep money in his pocket. Eventually, after two of his friends and fellow-dealers were shot and killed, he gave it up for good. Morgan, who had always been able to make people laugh, was urged by friends to try standup. When he told Sabina he was going to do it, she said, "I've got you, but you've got to keep at this no matter how hard it gets." (Morgan and Sabina divorced in 2009.)

"I got funny to survive," Morgan writes. And, indeed, the rhythm of his life seems to be this: macabre lows followed quickly by the kind of triumph that feels like a joke. He explained himself similarly to me. "Three things kept us"-poor black people-"from killing ourselves: jokes, music, and fucking," he said. "Why you think I became a comedian? I got funny 'cause it kept my mind away from being poor. Those hunger pains hurt, so I got funny. I'm hungry funny. That's what separated me from a lot of motherfuckers in my generation. That hunger."

In November, Morgan celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a standup show at the Beacon Theatre, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The show was part of the annual New York Comedy Festival. For Morgan, it was the culmination of a kind of comeback tour. The first season of "The Last O.G." had received good ratings and solid reviews, and he'd been doing standup with arguably more rigor and consistency than he had in the years before the crash. Earlier that week, in a ceremony at Brooklyn Borough Hall, he'd been given a key to the borough. Everywhere he went, people seemed happy just to see him.

His S.U.V. pulled up outside the stage door at the Beacon, and he hustled from the car through a metal detector-it beeped but went unheeded-and onto a narrow escalator that took him up a few floors, to the green room. He was accompanied by the model Megan Wollover, whom he married in 2015; their five-year-old daughter, Maven; and Tracy, Jr. Morgan wore a do-rag that looked to be made of velvet, and a champagne-colored Gucci sweatsuit. Several friends were waiting for him in the green room. "Happy birthday!" they shouted, popping a bottle of Martinelli's apple cider. Morgan used to drink before going onstage, but the habit became unmanageable during his years on "S.N.L.," and he got sober about a decade ago. A tray of mini-cupcakes sat on a low wooden table.

Somebody produced the wireless speaker I'd seen on the "Last O.G." set, and Morgan put on a mix that began with Faith Evans's "You Used to Love Me." As the music went on, the tracks got funkier and stretched further into the past. Morgan sat on a ratty-looking couch, cracking jokes and going over bits from his set with the comedian Jeff Stilson, a longtime standup with a friendly, weathered face. Stilson was a writer on the "Late Show with David Letterman" and "The Chris Rock Show," and now writes for "The Last O.G." and helps generate standup material for Morgan. He held a piece of printer paper with an outline of the night's routine and walked Morgan through the order of the jokes, jogging his memory about the contours of stuff he hadn't performed in a while.

Shortly after Morgan got into standup, in the late eighties, he began attending a workshop held on Wednesdays at the Uptown Comedy Club, on 133rd Street, in Harlem. There he learned the fundamentals of the craft. "I hate to see a comedian fucking around with the mike stand," he told me. "Take the mike out, put the stand away, and get going!" Within a couple of weeks, Morgan started getting regular slots at the club. In 1992, a television show featuring Uptown Comedy performers onstage began airing on local networks, and Morgan was chosen as a cast member. Method Man, who was a guest on the show several times as part of the Wu-Tang Clan, saw hints then, he told me, of Morgan's mature style. Method Man grew up on Staten Island and on Long Island; Morgan "was more New York, more ghetto" than other comedians, he said, adding, "I could tell he was from my era." One evening, when the comedian Chris Tucker couldn't make it, Morgan headlined the show. He did a bit that he called "fat Michael Jackson," telling the crowd that he was a distant cousin of the King of Pop, putting a dirty white sock on one of his hands, and doing a poor imitation of the moonwalk. He also did a routine about "a little boy from the ghetto named Biscuit," who wears a beanie with a propeller and is "angry at everybody because his daddy left the family." (Morgan, in his memoir, notes that his "favorite bit was when Biscuit got so mad about his dad leaving his mom that he beat up Barney," the purple dinosaur.)

A year later, Morgan got a slot on HBO's "Def Comedy Jam," which was hosted by Martin Lawrence, who, at the time, also had his own sitcom, "Martin," on Fox. You can find the set on YouTube. Lawrence introduces Morgan in what looks like a state of astonishment. "You're gonna enjoy him, because the boy is bugged out," he says. "And he's from Brooklyn, New York, straight from the motherfuckin' projects." Morgan bounds onstage wearing a beanie with a food stamp taped to its front, and a baggy white dress shirt buttoned up to only the bottom of his sternum, his broad, upholstered-looking chest poking out. He acts as a sort of aggrieved emissary from a comic underclass, musing about a new public-housing-themed cologne called Back Stairway and complaining about Puerto Rican neighbors, with their music and the smells of their garlic and adobo. He spits out "adobo" almost combatively, directing it with senseless annoyance at a Latina woman in the audience. The word's three syllables-with a hard, hoarse emphasis on the "do"-are a marvel of facial and tonal slapstick, hacky as text but brilliant as performance.

The set shows his nearness in tone to contemporaries like Lawrence, Robin Harris, and Bernie Mac-big physicality, exuberant profanity, a preference for the stuff of daily life rather than for politics and social commentary-but it also points backward. Morgan, like every comic, has watched a lot of Richard Pryor, and his standup, like Pryor's, dwells on the viscera of working-class existence. He talks about blown-off limbs, drug-embattled uncles, dark nipples, genital funk, and crud of all rude kinds. Over the years, his presentation has sharpened; the register of blunt, set-stopping anger is still available to him, but he usually cloaks it in bafflement at the outer world, rather than in exasperation at the particular corner of it that he comes from. Since the crash, he has tended to steer his comedy in a positive direction.

Morgan's real debt is to the generation of performers who preceded Pryor. "I would study Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett," he told me. When he and Peele first talked about "The Last O.G.," he mentioned that he'd like to play a character like Gleason's Ralph Kramden, from "The Honeymooners"-cantankerous and somewhat overmatched by the changing times, but ultimately sympathetic.

Morgan especially brings to mind the posture and the milieu of Redd Foxx, who became famous, in the fifties, for his "party records"-LPs that captured his profane night-club acts which people could put on in their living rooms, to re-create that exotic late-night atmosphere for their families and friends. Foxx went on to star in the sitcom "Sanford and Son," which premièred in 1972, and brought an entire attitude out of the night-club scene and gained it worldwide public attention. (Morgan was approached a few years ago about playing Foxx in a long-planned Pryor bio-pic, but the movie has yet to be made; a photograph of Foxx hangs in the halfway house where Tray lives on "The Last O.G.") To listen to the old records, with their jokes about bodies and faces and the ongoing problem of achieving orgasm, is to revel in Foxx's flouting of speech codes, and to visit a largely black world of comedy and entertainment that wouldn't enjoy mass viewership until the eighties and nineties, with the arrival of shows like "Def Comedy Jam" and BET's "ComicView." These shows helped introduce comedians like Morgan, Sommore, and Bruce Bruce, whose early popularity depended on a large audience of viewers whose experiences and vocal styles had not yet been spun upward into popular art.

These performers did not adopt the ironic stance of the comic as outsider-in contrast to Pryor, who, at the start of his career, worked to mimic mainstream comics like Bill Cosby and Johnny Carson, and whose raunchier, "realer" mid-career style was in fact a canny melding of street cadence, ardent confession, and the cool, Catskills-descended presentation of those earlier models. Rather, they acted as emotional conduits, channelling, through vocal and physical mimicry, familiar types: your auntie, your cousin, the neighborhood storefront preacher. (Pryor could do those kinds of routines, too; but, then, he could do it all.) When they mentioned race, it was less often to lament or point out racism than to describe, almost lovingly, a set of intimate, in-group experiences. The result was the kind of gut-busting laughter that commentator comics, however clever, often fail to elicit. Chris Rock has told the story of trying to follow Martin Lawrence, who was serving as his opening act, after some time away from standup-Rock had done a short, frustrating stint on "S.N.L."-and being intimidated by the raucous laughter and foot stomping that he heard while waiting backstage. "It was like watching somebody fuck your wife with a bigger dick," Rock said.

Backstage at the Beacon, as showtime approached, Stilson brought up an old bit that Morgan hadn't done in a while. "About your grandmother?" he said.

Morgan grunted in recognition. " Wife's grandmother," he said.

But neither of them could remember the bit all the way through. Other people started to huddle around, trying to reconstruct the specific wording of the joke and the vocal inflections that made it funny.

Morgan's friend Marc Theobald, a frequent opener on Morgan's standup tours and another writer for "The Last O.G.," walked in, wearing a shiny gold blazer, a gift from Morgan. He got some friendly shit for the getup.

"Marc, how did I do that joke about when I was visiting my wife's grandmother?" Morgan asked.

" White grandmother," Stilson said.

" 'You're scared your grandmother's gonna call me a nigger,' " Morgan said, trying to jog Theobald's memory and his own.

No, no, Theobald corrected, above some crosstalk. The joke, he explained, was that his wife was nervous that her mother "was gonna call you a nigger because she'd just called somebody a nigger the day before!"

"Yeah," Morgan said, remembering. " 'We went to go visit her grandmother down South . . .' "

"That's what it was," Stilson said. " 'But he was a nice . . .' " Stilson did not say "nigger." Stilson is white.

"That's a great joke," Morgan said.

"A great joke," Stilson said, pointing at his printout. "And it fits right in here!"

The music had turned to Al Green's "Call Me." Stilson said, nostalgically, "Tracy, explain to me-why don't they use horns anymore?" It sounded like a prompt for fresh material.

"The studios don't wanna pay for the backup singers and they don't wanna pay for groups!" Morgan said, as though he'd been holding back this complaint for a while. "Why would they, when you can just lay tracks behind somebody. All they need is one person. I told you: entertainment is going to Wall Street. It's all going to Wall Street. Nowadays there are no more Robert Redfords. Nowadays the movie is the star. You look at 'Star Wars' and you don't know anybody in there!"

Morgan looked offended to the point of befuddled pain. "Because of Instagram, there's a lot of celebrities," he went on. "There are very few stars. Very few! Denzel's probably the last one that's active. Cruise, maybe. They're not trying to pay nobody ten million a movie anymore."

At the mention of Washington and Cruise, people started chiming in with other names. Wasn't Michael B. Jordan, from "Black Panther" and the new "Creed" franchise, gearing up for the old-school star treatment?

"Very few," Morgan said, settling the matter. " I'm probably the last star out."

He looked over at me, grinning. "I was joking. Don't fucking quote me on that. I'm just doing my thing."

Early in 1994, after Morgan had made a second appearance on "Def Comedy Jam," Lawrence gave him a small recurring role on "Martin." He played Hustle Man, a guy who's always trying to turn somebody else's throwaway items into a buck or two for himself. It was his first part on a scripted show. Then Morgan's agent at the time, Barry Katz, got him an audition for "Saturday Night Live." Morgan says that he felt loyal to Lawrence, but he knew that "Martin" wouldn't be around forever. When he mentioned "S.N.L." to Sabina, she said, "That's where Eddie comes from," as in Murphy. "Wow," Morgan said. He did his Biscuit routine at the tryout, and he got the job. "Choosing me for the cast was like giving white America a dose of BET," Morgan writes in the memoir, adding, "I knew the score; this was a white show and I was the token black guy. That didn't bother me." (Morgan overlapped with a handful of other black performers on the show, including Tim Meadows and, more briefly, Finesse Mitchell.)

Some standups without a background in the collaborative work of sketch performance have struggled on "S.N.L." Morgan found success early on, perhaps because he has none of the stereotypical standup comedian's hangups about performing material that other people have written. As he reminded me, the source of his uniqueness as a performer isn't the content of his jokes. "It's not about material," he said. "It's just being funny. Anybody can get material, but you're either funny or you're not."

Tina Fey told me, "I remember early on realizing that, the kind of funny Tracy is-just, you can't teach it, and you can't buy it." Fey arrived at "S.N.L.," as a writer, a year after Morgan. Some of the actors, she noticed, were sticklers about each beat of the sketches in which they appeared. But Morgan "just kind of breezed in and charmed the room," she said. "I don't think his hands have ever typed a sketch on a keyboard. When he would say something at the table, or when he would roll out in front of the audience, you could feel that they were predisposed to like him." She added, "Some people have that, and the rest of us-it takes years for us to build the audience's trust that we're allowed to be talking. You could just feel people sit up and be, like, 'Ah! This is gonna be funny!' "

"Tracy's not someone you go to for precision, necessarily," Fey continued. "It's not race-based," she added, tacitly acknowledging how easily these stylistic categories might slide into racial observation. "There's a lot of white actors that I would also not go to for precision-they're more visceral, they're more . . . they feel it in the moment."

One of the first things that Fey worked on with Morgan was a sketch in which he played the TV personality Star Jones, who is best known for her work on "The View." "It's not a great source of pride that one of my most successful things I did with him was put him in drag," Fey said. "There should have been a female African-American-or three or four-there to do it." Morgan didn't have a Star Jones impression. The sight of him in a dress just made people laugh.

Morgan threw parties after the after-parties that "S.N.L." has long been famous for. "They were sometimes in, like, a makeshift illegal casino, in an empty loft, and there were women there, serving drinks-women in thongs," Fey said. "He'd be, like, 'You gotta come to my party!' " By then, Morgan writes in the memoir, he had begun rolling with a rather large entourage. "I had this felon named Young God around me, I had Pumpkin, I had motherfuckers named Guilty all around me." He felt less comfortable around his castmates. "I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to 'S.N.L.' those motherfuckers just felt bad for me," he writes.

After Fey left "S.N.L.," she pitched a TV show to Kevin Reilly, then the president of NBC's entertainment division-and now, incidentally, the president of TBS, home to "The Last O.G." The concept was for a sitcom set at a cable-news channel which played the tension between a liberal producer and a conservative pundit for laughs. Reilly suggested that she write something set at a place like "S.N.L." instead, and, almost immediately, Fey thought of Morgan. Adding a "rich movie-star version" of her former co-worker could, she realized, make for a more complex arrangement of non-convergent world views. On "30 Rock," Fey played Liz Lemon, the put-upon head writer of "T.G.S.," alongside Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy, the semi-sociopathic NBC executive who is Lemon's boss, and Morgan as the hammy and self-centered Tracy Jordan, whom Donaghy hires as the new face of Lemon's show-led, to that point, by a pretty, blond star, played by Jane Krakowski.

"I was just young enough-just by a minute young enough and foolish enough-to not realize how potentially insulting that could be," Fey said, of her characterization of the over-the-top Tracy Jordan, which skimmed perilously close to her perceptions of Morgan. The character was also based, in part, on other black comedians, like Lawrence and Murphy, who had gone from doing standup to being movie stars, and then had embarrassing public episodes that called into question not only their fitness for the spotlight but also our culture's ability to accommodate rare talent in black artists. The first episode of "30 Rock" features a quick montage of Tracy's recent erratic behavior, including a clip of him walking through traffic in nothing but briefs, brandishing a toy lightsabre and screaming, "I am a Jedi!" It was an obvious echo of a 1996 incident in which Lawrence ran onto Ventura Boulevard, in Sherman Oaks, California, carrying a handgun in his pocket and shouting, "Fight the establishment!"

When critics pointed out the resemblance, Morgan worried that he might have offended his friend, and he went to Fey. "He was right to be concerned," she told me. "When you come out of 'S.N.L.,' and you're just used to doing whatever you want all the time, you're just, like, 'Yeah, listen, I think it's gonna be fine.' " Lawrence had joked about the incident, too: on his widely praised standup special "Runteldat," from 2002, he admitted that he was on drugs at the time. "I was smoking that ooh-wee! " he says. "What kind of shit has the dope man sold me?!" Morgan went to Lawrence, who, he says, told him, "If it's funny, do it." It was Lawrence, Morgan added, who got him "to see that the court jester was the noblest person in the court. He was the only one allowed to tell the truth."

Morgan has never had a problem with jokes that use his own persona as the punch line. During his first season on "S.N.L.," he woke up one morning unable to see. He was given a diagnosis of diabetes, but he continued to eat and drink heavily. In 2004, after the cancellation of "The Tracy Morgan Show," he went on the road to do standup, and the drinking worsened-twice, he almost slipped into a diabetic coma. He was arrested for drunk driving in December, 2005, and sentenced to three years' probation; then, a month after the "30 Rock" première, in the fall of 2006, he got another D.U.I. During the show's second season, he was using insulin whenever he felt sick. His immune system finally gave way, and he was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. His doctors told him that he should have been dead. "We would be shooting, and between takes someone would come into his dressing room and take part of his foot off," Fey said. He shot much of that season wearing a court-ordered ankle bracelet, on account of the drunk-driving convictions. "And, to his credit, he was, like, 'Yeah, fine, write jokes about it,' " Fey said. She hadn't planned for the character to share a first name with Morgan, but he had insisted. " 'I'm gonna get famous doing this,' " Fey remembers him saying. " 'I don't want people yelling at me on the street going, like, "Hey Chickie!" ' He wanted that Jerry Seinfeld mold of 'Just call me Jerry if you see me on the street.' "

The role not only artfully transmuted Morgan's persona but also used the unique unction of his performance to comment on the entanglement of race and comedy. The show's eighth episode, "The Break-Up," featured a secondary plot about the relationship between Tracy Jordan and a "T.G.S." staff writer nicknamed Toofer-as in "twofer," because he is, as one character puts it, both "a black guy" and "a Harvard guy." Toofer, played by Keith Powell, is a parody of the kind of highly educated, quasi-intellectual black person who might view broad humor like Tracy's-and Morgan's-as embarrassing to the race. Tracy is cast in a "T.G.S." skit as a woman named Shamanda, and Toofer objects. " I just think it's demeaning for a black man to do drag," he says, adding, "Chris Rock doesn't do it. Dr. Cosby doesn't do it." Tracy decides he won't do it, either; then the bit is a smash with a white castmate in the part. Tracy, regretful, angrily regales Toofer with a counter-canon: "Eddie does it, Martin does it-Jamie Foxx, Flip Wilson!" The exchange pinpoints a tension between divergent styles in black comedy-a divide that has to do not only with personal sensibility but with how much a given comic cares about how white people view his work. It calls to mind a routine from Murphy's standup special "Raw," in which he describes getting an out-of-the-blue phone call from Cosby, who, he says, demanded that Murphy refrain from all the "filth-flarn-filth" in his act.

In another first-season episode of "30 Rock," the Black Crusaders, a group of celebrities led by Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, agitate to end Tracy's career, because they regard him as a discredit to the race. The story line was inspired by a conspiracy theory that arose after the comedian Dave Chappelle abruptly quit his popular sketch-comedy series, "Chappelle's Show," in early 2005. Several months later, Chappelle explained, on "Oprah," why he'd actually left. He'd been taping a sketch, he said, and a white person on set had laughed in a way that made him worry about the nature of his comedy. "I know the difference of people laughing with me and people laughing at me," he said. Chappelle also spoke to Oprah about his sense that white executives in Hollywood exploit black performers: "When I see that they put every black man in the movies in a dress at some point in their career, I start connecting the dots."

When I first watched "The Break-Up," I found that it articulated, and then mocked, my own reservations about how white audiences-and even, to some extent, the white writers on "30 Rock"-understood their appreciation for a performer like Tracy Morgan. (Donald Glover, who went on to create and star in "Atlanta," about a black Princeton dropout, wrote for "30 Rock," but he tended to pitch stories that centered on Kenneth, the white network page played by Jack McBrayer, who, like Glover, is from Georgia.) It's one thing to hear Martin Lawrence call Morgan "bugged out" and connect that to his being from "the projects"-it's another to hear a white person say something similar. But the message of "The Break-Up" might be that, if Morgan doesn't care, I shouldn't, either. The point of comedy-at least, of Morgan's kind of comedy-is that it's an opportunity to take a break. Relax.

Fey told me that the "30 Rock" writers often threw random lines at Morgan which they thought would be funny to hear him say, and he'd deliver one bonkers interpretation after another, making bouquets of oddball actorly choices. She remembered one, verbatim, echoing Morgan's intonation perfectly: "I once saw a baby give another baby a tattoo. They were very drunk! "

The line appears in a fourth-season episode of "30 Rock," in which Tracy declares his intention to win an Oscar, then finds that he can't do the emotional work necessary to deliver a performance dramatic enough to win the award. He's forgotten most of his childhood. "From '75 to '82 is just a blur," he says. Tracy's bodyguard Dot Com (Kevin Brown, the former business manager of the Uptown Comedy Club) and Kenneth, the page, take Tracy to his old neighborhood, and the painful memories come pouring hilariously forth.

"It's all coming back to me!" Tracy says, tearing up. "Oh, my God! I slept on an old dog bed stuffed with wigs! I watched a prostitute stab a clown! Our basketball hoop was a rib cage. A rib cage! Why did you bring me here? I blocked all this stuff out for a reason. Oh, Lord! Some guy with dreads electrocuted my fish!"

"The Last O.G." allows Morgan to revisit his past in a more grounded, and even slightly sentimental, way. It's what he's wanted to do on TV for a long time. "The Tracy Morgan Show" was supposed to draw on his early experiences. "I wanted to tell a story about the ghetto," he writes, in "I Am the New Black." But the show's creators, he says, "turned it into a false idea of what it's like to be a black family," and it became "a modernized Cosby Show." In addition to Haddish, who, like Morgan, got an early TV break on "Def Comedy Jam," "The Last O.G." features Cedric the Entertainer, who helped to popularize "Def Jam"-style comedy on the "Original Kings of Comedy" tour. The show, which has not yet been renewed for a third season, revels in the kind of comedy that made Morgan feel like an outsider on the set of "S.N.L.," and it sometimes struggles to balance the excitement of that mode with its more dramatic moments. Tray, on occasion, behaves ridiculously, but he's not primarily the object of fun. Rather than a novelty, he's an Everyman, surrounded by people who share his values. "He's a very smart guy, and the characters that he's played in the past are sort of crazy, in a way," Peele told me. "I was really taken with the depth of Tracy Morgan-I hadn't seen that." There are many differences between "The Last O.G." and Morgan's work on network television, but one of the most striking is that "The Last O.G." does not seem to have been made primarily with white viewers in mind.

Recently, I went to see Morgan at the house he built after the Walmart settlement, a brick-sheathed mansion in Alpine, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York. There's a machine next to the huge front door which Saran-Wraps the bottoms of your shoes, so that you don't track dirt onto the shiny white tiled floors. Morgan's office, near the back of the house, is styled after Vito Corleone's, in "The Godfather," with black leather, gold drapes, and an oversized desk, covered in awards. Morgan has always loved fish, and the office, in a departure from Coppola's vision, contains two extremely large fish tanks, each of them florid with neon plants and dangerous-looking creatures slipping around in dark water. "I've got some of the most poisonous fish in the world in there," Morgan said. A guy named John, shortish and smiley in a red cap and a drab uniform, cleaned the glass and tended to the fish as we talked.

Morgan, dressed in a white sweatsuit with black stripes, reminisced about an evening in the mid-nineties, shortly after he was cast in "Martin." He was at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles with Lawrence. "Guess who rolled in," Morgan said. "He was already in a wheelchair: Richard. I started crying." He looked like he might do so again right then. "I got his autograph on a piece of paper, and I kept it in my wallet for twelve years."

Keeping relics like these is a lifelong habit of Morgan's. He tends to hold on for as long as he can. "Lemme show you something deep," he said. He produced a Fendi wallet from one of his pockets and pulled out what looked like an enormous ball of lint matted against a crumpled piece of paper. He held it out, close to my face.

"Do you know what that is?"

My guess, some schmutz and a forgotten receipt, didn't seem appropriate to say. I told him I didn't know.

"It's cotton from Africa," he said. "Pure cotton-Bora Bora! Or, not Bora Bora. I think it was St. Martin. One of them saint islands. This is where they got the cotton seeds to plant in America. Cotton! Our ancestors! This keeps me grounded! " His face had gone stoic and his eyes looked meaningfully into mine.

"You know what that is, attached to it?" he asked, indicating the piece of paper. "That's a food stamp." The same food stamp, he explained, that he had stuck, like Yankee Doodle's feather, onto the beanie that he wore when he débuted on "Def Comedy Jam," initiating his path to stardom.

He led me away from the office and into a separate building on the property, just across from an outdoor pool. He wanted to watch as John, the fish guy, continued his work. Most of the pool house was occupied by a huge aquarium. This is where Morgan keeps his sharks. We sat on a little couch in a viewing area, and had to crane our necks to see the higher regions of the tank. Caked up against the wide pane of glass that we looked through were, here and there, a few ripples of dark-green algae. "Why is that there?" Morgan asked John. Apparently, it had something to do with the sun coming through the doors of the building. John said he would clean it off, but that it would inevitably grow back. Anyway, it did no harm to the sharks. They swam silently, carving pathways around mounds of coral and slowly waving seaweed.

"I want to try and go to Mecca to say a prayer for the world," Morgan said, apropos of nothing in particular. "Look where we're at!" he added. "Somebody's gotta do it."

I took him to be lamenting the general state of things, and I tried to commiserate. "It's pretty bad," I said.

"No, it ain't," he said. "Stop lying."

He didn't think that the world seemed to be in a rough state these days?

"No," he said, looking genuinely irritated. "Are you here?"

"I am," I said. "And that's great, but-"

"Did you wake up this morning?"

I had.

"So you just said bad and great all in one sentence, sir! How is it bad and great?" His voice was rising. "Did you wake up this morning?" he asked, apparently unsatisfied with my earlier affirmation. Again, I said that I had.

"So He"-God, about whom Morgan speaks often and easily, without reference to any particular creed, but with total and obvious reverence and belief-"spared your life. It's a beautiful place to be." The world, that is; now I wondered why, if everything was so beautiful, he wanted to travel for so long to say that prayer, but I couldn't bring myself to ask and get scolded again. "With all these broken dreams, and drudgery, and shams"-he elongated "shams" into an imprecatory, two-beat knife of a word-"it's still a wonderful place to be. 'Cause when you're in that fucking box, young man, you're in that box. Enjoy it. Stop looking at the fucking news."

He went on, "If you just watched the news, you'd be miserable." My gloomy outlook had reminded him of his sense that, these days, comedians are overly harried and audiences are too worried about real-world troubles to mind the deeper imperative to sit back and laugh. "That was sacred ground on the stage," he said. "Now you gotta watch what you say! It's: freedom of speech, but watch what you say."

The key to Morgan's comedy, Peele told me, is its "fabulous exploration of all the shit you're not supposed to say." A comedian with Morgan's skill and feel for an audience can generally find his way toward jokes suited to the tastes of any political attitude or moment in time. In his most recent special, "Staying Alive," on Netflix, Morgan luxuriates in characteristically silly images: a penis singing Donna Summer, a new flavor of Ben & Jerry's called Titty Milk and Splenda. When a woman in the audience cries out, "I love you Tracy!" he says, "I love you, too!" and then, seemingly as a reflex, asks her to lift up her shirt. He also talks about the crash as a point of division between his old life and a new one. "Before the accident, I could've sworn it was three Kardashians-Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney," he says. "After I came out the coma, it was six of them motherfuckers. And one of them won the decathlon in 1976!" This joke, about his surprise at Caitlyn Jenner's gender transition, then takes a turn. "Caitlyn is a hot MILF," he says. "I'd fuck the shit out of her." When he keeps going, getting into the scatology of that imagined encounter, it almost-almost-feels like a gesture of inclusion.

Not long before my visit, another black comedian, Kevin Hart, had lost his job as the host of the Oscars after people dug up comments he had made on Twitter which were full of gay slurs. One of Hart's old jokes, about his fear that his son would be gay, had been considered in a new light. I asked Morgan what he thought of the incident.

"What did I think about it?" he said. "I went through it!"

In 2011, Morgan was onstage in Nashville, Tennessee, and talked about how he would react if his son told him that he was gay. That might be O.K., Morgan reportedly said, but his son better tell him "like a man and not in a gay voice, or I'll pull out a knife and stab that little nigga to death." Discomfort with homosexuality has popped up in Morgan's act from the beginning, but the violence of the comment was unusual for him, and disturbing. He ended up going back to Nashville to visit with gay youth and to give a tearful, apologetic press conference.

What were his feelings about this experience now, years later?

"Just jokes," he said. "I talk about everybody!"

Earlier, he'd told me a story about one of his first standup gigs, in a community center on Webster Avenue, in the Bronx. Back then, he said, he didn't have any jokes; he'd just get onstage and poke fun at members of the audience. One night, he called out "this Puerto Rican girl" at random, made fun of her, and moved on, thinking little of it. "All I knew how to do was attack," he said. After the show, he saw her crying in the parking lot. He resolved never to use his comedy as "a bully pulpit," he said-only to help, to edify. "I said I'd never use the microphone to hurt anybody." Comedy was supposed to be a tonic.

Now, though, he was indulging anger at the cultural moment. "P.C. taught us how to lie," he said. "Instead of telling a motherfucker his breath stink, you wanna offer him some gum. You're around him every day. You gotta deal with this shit-you love him!-but his breath smell like shit. His breath smell like eight cans of orca shit. Sixteen cases of camel shit!"

He'd worked himself into a state of agitation. His assistant, Lucas, appeared, and, as he stepped into the room, may have closed the door a little loudly. "Don't slam my door!" Morgan said. "You'll scare my sharks." Lucas looked confused but unlikely to protest. "Please," Morgan went on. "I don't need them running into nothing. Don't do that. Ease the door closed like this "-he opened and shut it with incredible delicacy-"because otherwise you scare my sharks, and they hit the sides, then they die. Don't ever do that again, Luke."

He turned back to me. "Politics ain't nothing but poli- tricks," he said. "I don't give a fuck-I ain't never voted in my life! I don't give a fuck about Presidents and all that other shit. You know why? I'm down with the fucking King. I don't give a fuck who you voted for. When your room's ready, your room is ready. When He's ready to meet you, He's gonna meet you. You ain't gotta get hit by no truck. You ain't gotta get shot. You ain't gotta get stabbed. Just simply lay down in your bed and not wake up! It happens every day!

"So your best bet is to run your fucking race. White, black, male, female, straight, gay-I love you, motherfucker, and ain't shit you can do about it. Only thing you can do about it is love me back."

Since the crash and the coma, Morgan has been going to therapy. "You take a bump on the head like that, you gotta go talk to somebody," he said. We'd finished in the pool house and gone back to the office. It has taken work for Morgan to forgive the driver of the Walmart truck, and to grieve for his friend. It's taken work, too, to forgive himself. Under other circumstances, his wife and young daughter might have been in the car with him. Maven was only ten months old at the time of the accident; Megan had kept her home because she was teething.

"My doctor tries to tell me not to beat up on myself, but, if you must beat yourself up, don't use a bat-use a feather," he said.

It was reported while Morgan was in a coma that his mother, having learned about the crash from TV news, had come to see him in the hospital and had been told to leave. Morgan said that she was turned away only because no visitors were being allowed at that time. She came back the next day, and was able to spend a few minutes at his bedside, but he was not yet conscious. When he woke up, their estrangement continued.

Recently, though, his mother fell sick, and his brother called to tell him. He sat with the knowledge for a while, then headed into Manhattan for a session with his therapist, a black man named Henry McCurtis. "We're very close," Morgan said, of McCurtis. "We had a session, and I told him what was going on with my mom. At first, he didn't say anything-just looked at me. He listened, just like you. Piercing eyes." They left the topic and discussed other things. But then, toward the end of the session, McCurtis leaned in, a bit closer to Morgan's face. Morgan recalled him saying, "Yo, what kind of son would you be if you let your mom go out like that?"

"From his office, on Central Park West, all the way until I got on the bridge, I was crying, crying, crying, crying," Morgan went on. "My brother gave me my mother's number; I called her. She said, 'Hello.' I said, 'Hey, Ma.' She said, 'Who's this?' I said, 'Your son Tracy.' She dropped the phone and started screaming. I couldn't take that, so I hung up. I called her back a half hour later and we started talking. I told her, 'Thank you, Mommy.' 'For what?' 'For having me.' "

Before I arrived at his house, Morgan had queued up a scene for me to watch from the movie "First Sunday," a 2008 comedy that was directed by the black playwright and filmmaker David E. Talbert and mostly starred black actors. Morgan had a leading role, opposite the rapper and actor Ice Cube. He pressed Play, and we saw LeeJohn, Morgan's character, talking to a kindly church lady named Sister Doris, a sort of mother figure, played by Loretta Devine. They shared a meal, and LeeJohn told Sister Doris how sad he'd been as a kid never to have had a birthday party. He'd been a foster child. "This is one of my favorite scenes from my career," Morgan told me. "This right here is when I knew I could act-knew I had chops."

Onscreen, LeeJohn began to cry. "Most actors can't eat and cry at the same time," Morgan said. Sister Doris started to sing to LeeJohn. "Look at me!" Morgan said. "I'm already in a dark place. I'm already in pieces. Thinking! In a dark place in my life." LeeJohn kept crying, and, watching himself, Morgan started to cry, too.

"This movie was so fucking underrated," he said, just before he turned it off. ♦

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Tracy Morgan Turns the Drama of His Life Into Comedy

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After a near-fatal car crash, the actor got enough money from a settlement that he no longer has to work. But, with his own TV series and a return to standup, he has become even more ambitious.

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For those navigating the challenges of reëntry, it can help to have a tough-minded guide with lived experience.

"Don't answer! When you come home and someone says, 'How ya doing?' it's not a question. You just say fine. Every New Yorker knows that. If someone says, 'How ya doing?' and you start telling someone how you are, you might as well be wearing a big sign saying 'I Have No Idea Where I Am.' So. How ya doing?" Sam Rivera laughed, and his audience wasn't quite sure whether to laugh with him or not. It was six o'clock on a Thursday evening last fall at the Castle, at 140th Street and Riverside Drive, and the weekly meeting was just beginning.

The Castle is the main residential wing of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization that has been helping people cope with the aftermath of incarceration since its founding, by the Broadway press agent David Rothenberg, more than fifty years ago. "Thursday meeting" is a mandatory, semi-sacred gathering of the Castle's eighty or so residents, all of whom have been incarcerated, some as recently as earlier in the week, along with people who once lived there or who would like to live there. Various guests may appear, too, ranging from John Edward Wetzel, the secretary of corrections for the State of Pennsylvania, to Luann de Lesseps, the "Real Housewives of New York" star who once spent a night in jail. (Lesseps arranged a beauty day for the women of the Castle, which was broadcast on "Housewives.")

Much of the language of the meeting is specific to the world of those who have been locked up. "I'm a reluctant veteran of the short bid," someone might say gloomily-a short bid being a brief sentence. A language of elaborate indirection fills the room. "Justice involved" means that someone was arrested for or convicted of a crime; "been upstate" means imprisoned at northern-county places like Attica or Auburn (where license plates are made) or at Sing Sing (where the electric chair Old Sparky once stood). The catchall phrase for the totality is "lived experience," the term having migrated here to mean, simply, "I've done time." Either people have lived experience or they don't.

Partly through the osmosis that teaches all of us our dialects-nobody has to tell a quarterback to say "It was a team victory"; he absorbs the words when he starts playing football-the residents use many cautious voices and tenses to narrate their movement through a hostile world. "I got involved in a bad situation" or "I found myself in a circumstance in which someone got hurt" segues into the first-person active: "I'm putting my life together and reconnecting with my family now."

Sooner or later, though, the complicated language settles, for a newcomer, into a basic formula of introduction: "I've been away. I've come home." At the Thursday meeting last fall, when a recent arrival said that he had been away-perhaps for ten or twenty or thirty years-there was a round of applause, and Rivera, officially the associate vice-president of housing at Fortune but in truth its resident guru and presiding demiurge, was there to say, gently, "Welcome home, brother."

Rivera is a big man. Of Native American and Puerto Rican parentage, he has the build of the fullback he once was. With a shaved head and an earring in each ear, he had led the meeting for about two years, with good humor and discipline-like one's ideal of a staff sergeant, who creates maximum morale but with minimal opportunity for goofing off. As a young man, in the eighties, he was arrested on gun and drug charges, and acknowledges significant lived experience himself.

The first-floor room where the Thursday meeting takes place is decorated with a plush rug and photographs of the Castle from back when it was a Catholic girls' school, and a poster-size Times article about the Fortune kitchen, which has a reputation for seriously good cooking. Week after week, the same seats are almost always occupied by the same people. A longtime resident called E., a formidable Jamaican with the voice, and the authority, of Laurence Fishburne, sits in the far-left corner. ("The computer room is not a place to come to hang out," he announced as one meeting began. "If that's what you want, to hang out-that's not the place for that." After E. speaks, it would be a brave visitor to the computer room who tried to make it the place for that.) To the right, a line of older residents, looking a little worn out and a little wise, fill the chairs. One Thursday, Shawnta Montgomery, who loves to tease Rivera for his sincerity and self-seriousness, was on the right, too, closer up. An older resident, Ervin Hunt, known to all as Easy, sat in the rear, to the left. Lined up beside Rivera at the front of the room, facing the residents and guests, were Stanley Richards, the Fortune Society's executive vice-president, and David Rothenberg, its eighty-seven-year-old founder. Upstairs, there are comfortable bedrooms for more than eighty residents, but at the moment they were, by the society's rule, empty. Everyone has to come to the Thursday meeting.

The ostensible point of the meeting is to share announcements, discuss the events of the week, create new rules, and greet new arrivals. But its real point, Rivera confided, is "to conduct a group-therapy session for seventy-five people, which they say you can't do." His goal was to get the people in the room, having come home, to stay home.

Rivera can keep the room buoyant with a joke-usually at the expense of Rothenberg, who, as the household saint, can afford to have a few jokes told at his expense (and whose aura is very different from Rivera's: small, high-strung, gay, and Jewish). Rivera and Rothenberg were like a couple who had been working in a hardware store for too many decades; they enjoyed each other and gibed at each other, and by now the enjoyment had become the gibing. "David's idea of a whisper is putting his hands over his mouth and then yelling," Rivera said in the middle of a meeting, after Rothenberg, doing just that, had urged him to move on from some stalled subject. "My kids do that," Rivera said.

Rivera soberly restores order, often in response to an excess of "poetry" that the meeting has allowed itself. ("If you call someone's bullshit 'poetry,' they won't be that offended, even if you're telling them you don't want to hear it.") On this evening, for instance, someone used a formula familiar from twelve-step programs: "You have to hit bottom before you can come back up." This sentiment went around the room with echoing fervor. But Rivera let twenty minutes or so pass before he intervened.

"You know, I just want to come back to something that the brother was saying before," he said. "About how you have to hit bottom to come back up. Now, I don't believe that's true. What's bottom? Where's bottom? How do you know you've hit bottom? There may be a bottom below the bottom you've hit already! There may be a thousand bottoms you could hit if you let yourself. So-say that this, wherever you are, is your bottom. You're going to declare that it's as low as you're going to let yourself go. Then come back up. Don't wait to hit bottom before you start working your way back up. Call this bottom the bottom."

The crowd, including the original speaker, laughed at Rivera's earnest repetition of "bottom," but he had made his point: they couldn't afford the indulgence of self-dramatization. Creating a certain kind of double rhythm was essential to his work: a difficult truth was followed by self-deprecating laughter. A balloon filled with the helium of unrealistic hope was emptied, and then refilled with the warm air of actuality.

On another occasion, Shawnta Montgomery mentioned meeting someone who had worked with Rivera in the past: "He said, 'Sam tried to fix me, but he couldn't.' But he sends his regards."

"I couldn't fix him?" Rivera said, with some vehemence. "I can't fix him. I can't fix you. I can't fix anyone. Nobody fixes you but you. That's why I say, If you're going around me-to smoke or get high or whatever-you're not fooling me. I'll accept you any way you are. The only person you're fooling is you." Rivera emphasizes that change happens only hour by hour and day by day-and that, nonetheless, you can wake up one day and find that the hours of work have accumulated into months and then years. "That's the only way it happens. You're always coming home."

He has a favorite aphorism about those whom he always calls his "clients," which on another afternoon he stressed more fiercely than his usually equable tone allows. "The quote is mine, so I'm gonna own it," he said. " 'The crime is not who you are, it's what you did.' David said once, to a journalist who asked, 'How can you work with these violent criminals?,' 'Well, how would you like to be identified for your entire life by the one worst thing you've ever done? If your editor made you put at the top of every column you ever wrote, Written by Tom the Bed-Wetter. Or by Tom, Who Drove Under the Influence.' I've worked in D.C., where people identify themselves by their degrees-'I went to this school'-and that's what it's about. And sometimes people of color introduce themselves that way-'I was in prison.' But that's not you! The crime is what you did. The crime is not who you are."

Like anyone who is naturally good at something, Sam Rivera got to be naturally good at his work by thinking constantly about his performance and being acutely aware of what he is doing as he does it.

"Part of what I have is the contradiction of my appearance," he explained one evening. "I'm a big man, and I can look intimidating." He crossed his arms and looked out at an imagined audience. "So, when I'm there, like this"-he became the man he is in meetings, hands relaxed by his sides, a half smile on his face-"then I'm sending the message that you can be both, a tough guy who is open and not frightened. 'If Sam is like that, then I can be like that.' It's about me taking control of what my own experience is. I had a mentor once, and I was telling him everything I was doing, and he said, 'Where is Sam in this?' That was hugely helpful to me. Seeing yourself from outside."

Rivera was sitting over dinner at Trufa, an eclectic little restaurant at Broadway and 140th Street. The neighborhood, which had been poverty-stricken, filled with abandoned buildings, and therefore affordable when the Fortune Society salvaged the place, in the late nineteen-nineties, is now, as Columbia University pushes north and west, an ever more desirable area, dotted with restaurants and the inevitable espresso joints. The former convent school would be unaffordable now.

"There's an architecture of the room that I rely on-E. being firm in the corner, Easy kibbitzing from the side," Rivera went on. What had seemed an accidental weekly arrangement was purposeful. "You can't emphasize enough things that may seem superficial. The look of a room, the kind of food we serve, which doesn't look or taste like institutional food. Remember, a lot of our residents are people who went from eating institutional food in school to eating institutional food in prison and that's all they know. No one's ever spoken to them empathetically. No one's ever asked them how they feel."

Rivera grew up on the Lower East Side. "My mother had me when she was fifteen," he said. "But we were always working poor. My parents always had jobs." He speaks with the ancient, "r"-less, broad-vowel speech of a New York working class. In prison, Rivera recalled, he helped care for sick inmates during the height of the AIDS crisis, and he has done the same sort of work ever since. Rivera first visited Fortune as a client, in 1991, and then began a career in various post-prison and advocacy groups, including a long stint at Exponents, a leading drug-rehab organization in New York. Since then, he has been back and forth between Fortune and another nonprofit. "I'm a four-time recidivist here," he has joked. He lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, and has two teen-age sons and a daughter in her twenties.

"That you've got to hit the rock-bottom moment?" he said, reflectively. "It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. I've looked at programs that were created around recovery protocols, and the theory was: If there was ten per cent left of your rock bottom, they would intentionally bring you down to that zero, and then build you back up. My view is just the opposite. If you still have ten per cent after being through prison and abuse of many kinds, then we can start.

"So, I tell the story. I was with my boys, watching a show where they're imploding a casino, and I'm kind of into it. It's all dramatic, and they hit the thing-old school!-you know, the box with the plunger? And at about the third floor it caved in and the guy said, 'Wow! With all the dynamite we used to destroy this building, the foundation was so strong that it wouldn't go down.' And I'm, like, 'That's it! ' If we can find your foundation, you won't fall. You'll lean! You'll trip, but you won't fall. So that's my work, finding the foundation that remains. Let's not make it about the dynamite. Let's work on your foundation-what will keep you standing, even if you start to use drugs again, even if you went back to prison. So that's the only bottom I want to hit. That foundation that's still there."

David Rothenberg founded the Fortune Society almost by accident. In the late nineteen-sixties, at the peak of his career as an extremely successful Broadway publicist, working with the likes of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, he produced a Canadian play about rape in prison called "Fortune and Men's Eyes," and realized that the men who were most stirred by the play were ex-cons, as they were called then. Almost as an afterthought, he began a help line for such people-"Really, only an extra desk in the office"-and watched it blossom into a lifetime's work. Yet he remains spiritually on both sides of the doorway. This makes his conversation a singular braid of show-biz anecdotes and social-activist exhortations. Holding out his right arm, he might say, "This is the arm that Liz Taylor cried on at the opening night of Dick Burton's 'Hamlet' in 1964," and then avow, "The mistake you make is thinking that they're ever honest about crime numbers. The city will bring them up and down as they want, according to the politics of the moment."

The turning point, for him, took place on "The David Susskind Show," in 1968. "Everyone watched Susskind on Sunday nights," Rothenberg recalled. "They always had six of a kind-six ex-alcoholics or six prostitutes or whatever was coming in sixes that year. I called the producer and said, 'Have you ever had six former prisoners?' She said, 'I want 'em but I can't get 'em.' I said, 'I can.' So we went on, and the next morning, after the show, I got call after call after call. It was overwhelming! There was an endless line of men snaking up the stairs of this theatrical building. And I began to transition from full-time press agent and part-time prison activist to full-time prison activist and part-time press agent. Well, no-time press agent."

Rothenberg takes a late lunch or an early dinner most days at Trufa. "Thursday meetings are always essential-we realized that if we had rooms and no services we were just a hotel," he said. "What Sam does at the meeting is he gets people talking who are comfortable talking, but sometimes he'll say, 'Hey, Joe-what's happening with you?' And Joe starts talking and doesn't shut up. He had never been given permission. Joe's never been asked how he is in his life!" Rothenberg chuckled.

"You know 'The Green Pastures,' the movie?" The 1936 film relates Bible stories as Black American folklore. "Yeah, there's a line, I think it's from there, that I always repeat. The Lord, who's represented as African-American, says to an angel, 'We have to take care of that planet, but don't forget the wing of the sparrow over there.' Sam is one of the people taking care of his portion of the planet by taking care of the wings of the sparrow."

Housing programs for an offender's reëntry into the community usually involve a bewildering array of bureaucracies, and often result in former inmates being placed in halfway houses and homeless shelters that replicate the conditions of prison. Almost three-quarters of the released population are arrested again within three years.

"The Castle began when we kept seeing that there was an urgent need for housing for people released who became homeless," JoAnne Page, the president and C.E.O. of the Fortune Society, explained from her office at the society's administrative headquarters, in Long Island City. "More than half the people coming out of state prison to New York City right now are being dumped in shelters. HUD defines people who are coming out of incarceration as not homeless, so no HUD-funded program can take them in. They have to be sleeping under a bridge before they can officially be classed as homeless." In the late nineteen-nineties, Page came upon the empty Catholic girls' school. "The city took it from the nuns and left it vacant, with the idea that it would become a TB hospital, but they gave up on that idea, and instead it became a magnet for drug dealing." In 1998, Fortune bought it for $1.2 million.

Page emphasizes the society's "open doors" policy. "We're bound by laws about sexual offenders and proximity to schools," she said. But applicants are screened for "current risk of violence, not a history of violence. We have some of the people with the worst records in New York City coming for active services, but no metal detectors. We offer people something they really want, and the condition is that they have to behave peaceably if they want it."

The Fortune Society holds most of its job-training and vocational-education programs at its Long Island City offices, with the Castle offering its own approach to social services. "It's valuable that Sam has lived experience," Page said. "He knows prison faces. He can tell the difference between someone who looks tough and someone who's a threat. And most of the people coming home will see somebody in that room they did time with. That changes everything."

The residents of the Castle admired Rivera for being as reliable about small things as he was about big ones. E., the longtime resident with the basso-profundo voice, put it bluntly: "Sam is the difference between leadership and leadershit. If you have leadershit, everything's going to be shit, and that's the primary reason why the shelters are such hellscapes. Sam watches the simple things that improve the outlook, improve the humanity." Hilton N. Webb, Jr., another long-term resident, sixtyish and intensely serious, who is studying for a master's degree in social work, and writing a memoir titled "Dancing in the Midst of Nothing," said, "Whatever Sam says is going to happen, it's going to happen. I remember when I was having problems with my roommate and I had to move to a single room. Sam said, 'You're going to have the same river view,' and, to make a long story short, it happened. The river view is a nice view. That it was a little thing didn't mean he thought it was nothing."

The residents recognized the difficulty of Rivera's role. "I'm aware of the stresses on him," Webb said. He described a man trying to get into the building, and screaming at Rivera. "Sam was talking back to him in this very mellow, in this Zen way," Webb went on, "but I noticed that he was holding a radio, and it was physically impossible that he could have tightened his hand on that radio any harder than he was. Knot-tight! I couldn't have stood there with this guy spitting in my face saying the things he was saying. Yet I know that Sam wasn't afraid, and he could have whipped this guy's ass. So he's, you know, the whole deal-the warrior-monk kind of guy. Sun Tzu said if you know the outcome of the fight anyway, you have no need to fight. I know and you know, so why don't we pretend the fight is over and move on?"

One critical part of transitioning is to help someone involved with the justice system get involved with the employment system. "I got my job and my apartment" is a motto of success. As the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in the nineteen-fifties, "A status, a position, a social place, it is not a material thing to be possessed and displayed"; it is "something to be enacted and portrayed." That idea is profoundly relevant to the work of the Fortune Society. Coming home means learning the language and the rituals shared by the society outside prison walls. Weekly workshops at Fortune prepare clients for job interviews, and, particularly, help them address the obvious question: Where have you been for the past four or five (or thirty) years? It is against the law in New York City to ask a job candidate about his or her criminal record, but it is legal, after a job has been offered, to run a search on the prospective hire.

People who have just come home meet interviewers in mock interviews. What is your greatest strength in a work situation? (The right answer is: "I love to work with others.") What's your greatest weakness. ("Uh, my greatest weakness? Females," one newcomer says, a candid but very wrong answer. The right answer is Clintonesque: "I try too hard to get it right.") A young man who wants to be a restaurant cook is guided through an interview in which it becomes apparent that he doesn't know much about cooking. ("You get in the good habit of bullshitting white people," Rivera remarked later. "And you start bullshitting yourself.") Interviewers like detail: about work programs upstate, about roofing or custodial work or how to operate a forklift.

Near the end of one mock interview, the questioner said, "You seem like a fine candidate for the job. I'd like to offer it to you. But, of course, I'll run a background check on you. Tell me, if I do will anything come up?" The candidate, trained in previous classes, struggled to recall the ideal answer, which is something like: "Yes, when I was younger and behaving stupidly, an unfortunate situation occurred and someone got badly hurt. This led to my becoming involved in the criminal-justice system. But I studied hard and attended several programs while I was in jail. That person I was is not who I am now." That, the interviewer explained, is a version of the perfect answer, which the residents work to adapt. Among the central skills that the Fortune Society teaches is how, in a job interview, to tell the truth while putting the best face on a previous failure.

All of us, of course, have to learn to navigate the waters of such interviews by telling the truth while putting the best face on previous failures. ("I did get a C on that Spanish test, but it was the result of some issues in my personal life and, as you can see, I pulled it right up in the following term" is what a kid raised with good fortune learns to say.) The broader task, as Rivera sees it, is to instill new habits of response among the formerly incarcerated. "You have to relearn all your reflexes," Rivera said. "When you feel threatened, don't react. If I find myself threatened by the possibility of a confrontation on the street-just a car-cutoff thing, you know; happens every day-I've found myself literally running in the other direction to remove myself from those reflexes and that risk." The aim is to learn a new language of performance in order to have a new chance at life.

The theatrical side of the Castle is self-evident to its sharper-eyed residents. "The Fortune face-that's what I call what you see in the Thursday-night performance space," E. explained. "I don't say that in a disparaging way, but that's what it is-people are auditioning for acceptance into the program and they're bringing their A-game to be accepted. And then you get to know the person, as opposed to the audition. Sometimes it's the same person. With some people, it was just a façade, a performance to get in. And those people really don't last that long. They shouldn't."

Some more radical-minded social-justice advocates don't like the idea that people who were incarcerated should be taught how to blend in with middle-class rituals and mores. Rivera considers this view the kind of luxury that only people who are not struggling to "stay home" can indulge in. "Obviously, we have to reform the system and end the problems, and put fewer people in prison," he said. "Obviously. But my job is saving lives now. If I wait for the world to be better, then the whole society would have to change, and I don't have a long enough life to wait for that to happen."

At a Thursday meeting a couple of weeks later, a recent home-comer praised another Castle client for gently urging him away from a confrontation with someone who pushed him-or whom he perceived to have pushed him-on the subway. "I almost lost it," the home-comer recounted. "I was ready to do something about it, but he told me, 'Just let it go,' and I did."

Rivera seized the moment: "What do we mean when we say we're going to lose it? I realize I hear it often, 'I was gonna lose it on this guy.' What's it mean for you?"

"Lose control," one person said.

"Rage," another said.

"Rage!" Rivera echoed. "But you're gonna lose it. You're gonna lose your housing. You're gonna lose your freedom. What causes it?"

One man tried to explain his suspicion that a bunkmate in a homeless shelter had taken money from his backpack. "It's hard coming from doing a whole lot of time. You're bunked with someone and you know you're getting robbed," he said. "And it's hard, because, if you were upstate or in another situation, you would have acted in another way. We live in our own minds. Man is mind. We first get out-we're getting that comfortability back-and it's hard to lose it, because you live in a room with it. I spent more of my life in prison than free. It's hard."

Rivera grew gentler: "Can I talk about that? Your voice changed. I heard it."

"It's hard having something taken from you. My life style-I'm not proud of it-but I was a stickup kid my whole life. I'm not used to having anyone take anything from me. There's nothing you could do."

"Here's the deal," Rivera said. "There's something you could do and you chose not to. Don't dismiss that, man! You should be, like, this should be a celebration, man. Like, for real-'I did that, and I didn't do what I would normally do.' We all know what we could do. Many of us have done it. Take the power- I chose not to do that this time." He glided into the next thought. "Was anyone around this week when I got stepped to?"

"When you got what?" Rothenberg asked.

"David needs help-what is 'step to'?"

"Someone came at him very aggressive," one person explained.

"He had a brick!" someone else added.

When a client had confronted him, Rivera hugged the man, literally, until the confrontation ended. The possibility of violence in the building had shaken everyone.

Rivera hadn't seen the brick, and was startled to learn about it: "He pulled out a brick? For real? Let's hold that, because I definitely want to know about this brick. But I want to come back to you, brother. Sometimes doing nothing is the best decision we can make, right? Someone says to me, very glum, 'I didn't do anything.' No! You did . . . nothing. That's an action. You chose to handle it. Doing nothing is doing something. Ignoring someone is reacting to them."

Afterward, Rivera looked bemused. "I'm interested in this brick. Nobody told me about the brick." He paused. "I'm glad I didn't know about the brick."

The coronavirus pandemic hit the Castle hard. Rivera was like a captain approaching a storm, battening down the boat while planning to take the waves broadside. Several residents contracted COVID-19, and the decision was made to stop accepting new residents-a painful departure from long-standing Fortune Society practice-and to shelter the entire population in place, with the positive cases self-quarantining. The Thursday meeting was moved to Zoom. To attend remotely was oddly reassuring in those first panic-stricken weeks of the pandemic in New York; having been through so much worse, and accustomed to enforced isolation, the Fortune community had a kind of unfazed gaiety unique among the difficult interactions of the moment.

Then, in late May, after the standard announcements of a Thursday meeting, Rivera said, as smoothly as he could, "So, I have an announcement. I submitted my resignation today."

There was a brief pause. "Resignation not accepted!" E. called out, cutting through his usual cool with obvious pain.

"Resignation not accepted!" Easy called out, in turn. And the cry went around the gallery: "Resignation not accepted!"

Rivera tried to quiet them. "Now listen to me, it's a decision I've made."

E. was insistent: "You can't just say this. You got to explain this shit, man."

Rivera told them that he was leaving to become the executive director of a "harm reduction" group, an organization that promotes health among drug addicts and sex workers, providing condoms, clean syringes, training in overdose reversal, and the like.

Eventually, the residents surrendered, and began to congratulate him. "I'm grateful for all you have done to help me see the world more clearly," one said.

Rivera was privately equivocal about the reasons for his departure. Although he disavowed any internal conflict, there clearly had been complicated feelings between him and some of the top people at the Fortune headquarters. "I would have loved to stay at Fortune," he said in early June. He was at home, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and sitting in front of a picture of the Buddha-an accidental but telling juxtaposition. "But our values just aren't well aligned anymore."

Rivera cited the society's response to the protests in New York and across the country. "In organizations, you have to be careful not to take a political stand-but this isn't political. And Fortune froze." He was frustrated that, even though the staff was almost fifty per cent Black, it took weeks for its leaders to speak out. ("I didn't realize how important it was to make a statement because I thought our actions spoke for themselves," Page said. "And that was a lesson learned. We're now making statements.")

Still, Rivera admitted that he had decided to leave long before the protests started. Conversations with others in the organization suggest that the issue was a familiar one, especially within nonprofits. Sam Rivera, the charismatic center of the operation, had little executive power within it, and over the years this had created some rubbed-raw feelings between him and the people who did. The same rule that holds in a small regional theatre holds in a nonprofit devoted to post-incarceration transitions: the charismatic figure wins the allegiance of his clientele, at the risk of alienating his colleagues, who, without any malice or even conscious envy, become mindful of what they see as his managerial deficits. Tension grows between the charismatic person and the administrators, who have a clear idea of the dogged and unglamorous work required to sustain the institutional structure.

Page insists that the organization will go on more or less intact. Angela Scott, an eight-year veteran of the society, has replaced Rivera. "I ran Thursday meeting for years, and then Stanley did"-the Fortune vice-president-"and then Sam," Page said. "Now it's Angela's turn."

As with anyone who has left an organization to which he was devoted, Rivera became more aware of Fortune's flaws and fissures in retrospect. "We came across as participating in the punishment," he said. "Our line was: If you smoke weed, and keep doing it, we're going to discharge you. I'm not going to expel someone for smoking marijuana. I've never met anyone who O.D.'d on marijuana." (Page said that Fortune would never force a client out just for smoking marijuana.)

Rivera returned to an image that haunted him. "I was driving by a playground once, near where I grew up. And I was with one of my mentors, watching these great little kids playing in this playground. And he said, flatly, 'Sixty per cent of those kids are going to prison.' We're still not fixing the problem or even addressing it. What we're doing now with policing, it's as if we deliberately set buildings on fire, and then installed a fire station across the street. The thing is not to let the fires get started."

David Rothenberg, who knew Rivera best, wondered if the coping mechanisms that had enabled Rivera to remake his life had been disabling to him in moments of professional friction. "Sam has gotten so adept at avoiding conflict that he avoids conflict when he needs to engage in it," he said. "I keep telling him that-you just have to accept that, wherever you go, there will be friction between you and the people you work with, and you have to work through it. It reminds me of when I was in group therapy, years ago, and I strongly disliked another member of the group. 'That's the one who will do you the most good!' the therapist said. And he was right."

In early July, Rivera paid the Castle and its residents a final visit. "I want to say goodbye," he said. He and Rothenberg drove together from Rothenberg's apartment in the Village up to 140th Street.

"So, one night Miss Peggy Lee called me at midnight and said, 'I want to do a show of Frank Loesser's music,' " Rothenberg was saying in the car. " 'And you're calling me at midnight about this because?' I said. 'Because I need the sheet music,' she said. So I called the Loesser estate. God, she was good!"

He got no response. "You know who Peggy Lee is?" he asked.

Rivera furrowed his brow, as one who, knowing exactly who Peggy Lee was, was disinclined to admit it at just that moment.

As the car pulled up to the Castle, a group of residents, all masked, were waiting on the steps. But, where in the movie version the returning local hero would be surrounded by a crowd, Rivera quickly sought out one-on-one encounters. Hilton Webb was there, and, with the stoicism that betokens great pride in accomplishment, he narrated to Sam the sequence of certificates he was pursuing.

Instead of congratulating him, Rivera exclaimed, "You gotta accept that getting one degree is enough." He reminded Webb that the point of the Castle was to get out of the Castle, and that the choice of when to leave would not always be left to the resident. "One of the issues for you is that you're a brilliant motherfucker-no, no, you are!-but you have to be more than that. I never in my life thought that I'd think that ignorance is bliss. And now I totally respect it, because there are elements in my life right now that I wish I didn't understand. There are Puerto Ricans in my life who are pro-Trump-I wish I didn't understand them." Webb was laughing. "So what I'm saying to you," he added, more softly, "is that your intellect's your intellect-you'll always have it-but you only need one degree. And then you need to move and live."

Later, sitting with Rothenberg for lunch outdoors at Trufa, Rivera said, "Anything can be an addiction, or a crutch. You can get addicted to education. You can even get addicted to recovery."

A man careered down the street, obviously high. Rivera discreetly pointed him out to Rothenberg. "Remember him? He used to come to Fortune."

"He looks bad," Rothenberg said.

Recently, controversy had arisen about the release of long-term prisoners guilty of notoriously violent crimes, and Rivera and Rothenberg began discussing the difficulties of reconciling the work at Fortune with their sense of moral order. At the Castle, you never ask anyone about the reason for his imprisonment. But no one, as Rothenberg says, goes away for thirty years for jumping a turnstile, and many people at the Castle have been away for thirty years.

"It's hard, I get it," Rothenberg said. "There was this wonderful arts editor at the Times, who was always kind to me, helped me understand what worked and what didn't. He was killed by a drunk driver on New Year's Eve. Years later, I'm at Fortune, and someone introduces me to a woman. She had just come home after doing years for a D.U.I. 'I think she killed some editor from the Times,' they said." He swallowed hard and said, "That was the moral test for me. Could I work with her? And, of course, I did."

Rivera mentioned a friend of his who had seemed in good shape, and then suddenly committed a violent act against a former girlfriend and her new lover. "We hadn't addressed his trauma adequately," he said. "We're all transitioning. You keep coming home. It's like-you know, I've been thinking a lot lately about diets. Everyone has a diet. Monday's O.K., you eat your soup and salad. Then Tuesday goes better than you hope, but then Wednesday is really hard-you're hungry. Then on Thursday you go over to Mom's and she makes fried chicken, and how can you say no? It's Mom. So then you always say, 'Well, I blew it, so I'll start again on Monday.' And you spend the weekend enjoying yourself. That's the trick. You have to start again on Friday. That's all it is. Everyone backslides or has a bad day. The key is going back on the diet on Friday, after you screw up on Thursday, and not to wait till Monday to start again." He paused and waited for his food to arrive.

"Did I ever tell you about the time Edward Albee came to the Castle on a Thursday?" Rothenberg said, brightening the silence. "And one arrogant woman running for office who was there watching came up to me and said, 'What was that old con in for?' I said, 'I don't know, I guess for winning three Pulitzer Prizes?' " He smiled. "I told her, ' Never assume.' That's a line from the Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy movie 'Desk Set.' " Rothenberg paused. "People say Hepburn and Tracy. Actually, Shirley Booth did the play on Broadway."

Later that day, Hilton Webb texted Rivera, saying that he would begin to think less about education and more about independence. "I think I may have been delaying things because it's been almost fifty years since I last lived by myself," Webb explained. "Scary." Rivera forwarded the text to a friend and added a comment: "This is why I do what I do." ♦

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What Makes the Difference Between Getting Out of Prison and Staying Out?

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For those navigating the challenges of reëntry, it can help to have a tough-minded guide with lived experience. "Don't answer! When you come home and someone says, 'How ya doing?' it's not a question. You just say fine. Every New Yorker knows that. If someone says, 'How ya doing?'

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Moxie Marlinspike is the founder of the the end-to-end encrypted messaging service signal. Marlinspike is the C.E.O. of Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging service, which he launched in 2014; he is also a cryptographer, a hacker, a shipwright, and a licensed mariner. Tall and sinewy, with the build of a natural athlete who abstains from team sports, he was wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, black Teva sandals, a denim jacket, and a white N95 mask. He has blond dreadlocks, which he had tucked under a blue cap.

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Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the end-to-end encrypted messaging service Signal, is “trying to bring normality to the Internet.”

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/14/pipilotti-rists-hedonistic-expansion-of-video-art

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The Governor has been widely praised for his response to COVID. But his critics see a would-be authoritarian obsessed with settling scores.

The difference between doing the job and just appearing to do the job is rarely absolute. In the more than eight months since COVID-19 manifested in the United States, our public officials have demonstrated pretty much every gradation. Recently, President Donald Trump was ailing at Walter Reed hospital, both a victim and a symbol of his Administration's lassitude and arrogance in the face of the pandemic. He'd failed to protect the country, and now he'd failed to protect himself-not to mention his staff, his supporters, and perhaps his opponent. Even after he returned to the White House, persistent obfuscations about how long he'd had symptoms and how serious they were called only more attention to the Administration's negligence and bad faith. He continued to do nothing, and to urge the country, and Congress, to do nothing. Photographs released by the White House on October 3rd, of Trump supposedly working, depicted him using a Sharpie to sign his name on a blank sheet of paper. A boy practicing his autograph.

"It's all been exposed," Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, told me recently. "Trump was exposed. The lies are exposed. The incompetence is exposed. It's like low tide in the ocean. Now the whole shoreline is exposed. There's no question as to what was under the water." Cuomo was busy contending with some other new COVID clusters-a dozen or so, many in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in and around New York City. The onset of autumn had brought a surge in viral transmissions and had complicated the delicate task of opening up while keeping numbers down. Last week, Hasidim were out in the streets, angrily protesting the Governor's abrupt restrictions on religious gatherings in certain communities. In their eyes, he was doing too much, at least to them. Still, most New Yorkers felt that Cuomo had done a commendable and by some measures miraculous job bringing New York back from the brink. The image they'd formed of him, at the height of the pandemic, still pertained.

One can forget the terror of those weeks in the spring, and the devastation of the numbers. A Saturday in April: the confirmed death count, statewide, was five hundred and seven. The days had all started to seem the same, at least to those people fortunate enough to be able to say so. From a distance, what set one morning apart from another was its place on the curve-the tally of new COVID-19 fatalities. On Sunday, from a medical-research center in Manhasset, on Long Island, Cuomo shared this information with the media and the many citizens watching on their screens. For seven weeks, he had been delivering daily briefings, to widespread and in some circles ardent acclaim. The repetitiveness of these performances, the almost liturgical demonstrations of what seemed like good sense, was itself calming, especially in contrast with whatever fresh craziness came out of the White House each night. Cuomo, by leaning on data, brandishing logic, speaking in paragraphs, and expressing something like human feeling, had stepped into the void left by the federal government's cynical and capricious response. In the land of the incoherent, the silver-tongued man is king.

For the first time, the death rate was at an ebb. "We are on the other side of the plateau, and the numbers are coming down," Cuomo said. While Joe Biden played possum in his bunker and Trump, in spite of the carnage, maintained some viable wedge of support in the polls, Cuomo was all over TV, with his crisis-time white polo shirt and furrowed brow. He had running themes, which he enunciated with relish: the preference for facts over opinions (his elongation of "facts" giving the word almost another syllable), the idea that the virus had come to New York from Europe rather than from China (his pronunciation of "China" either eerily or mockingly similar to Trump's), and this concept of "New York tough," which, as he kept explaining, with the assistance of PowerPoint slides, meant tough not just in the hard-ass way that people might associate with the city (and with him) but also "smart, disciplined, unified, loving."

Loving! Here was a politician known as a man who doesn't much like people and whom most people don't like, at least in the way you might, say, a colleague or a friend. "He was born for social distancing," a former aide told me. When people thought of him, they pictured a calculating, very capable, somewhat grim tactician, a man of relentless and ill-concealed ambition and intrigue-a mechanic of government, it was usually said, in a nod both to his understanding of the levers of power and to his talent for tinkering with muscle cars. But now the Prince of Darkness (a tag he'd always resisted) was a self-proclaimed "cool dude in a loose mood," or, as his younger brother, Chris, the CNN correspondent, kidded him during their regular mock interviews, the Love Gov. The comedian Randy Rainbow came out as a "Cuomosexual," and a new orientation was born. The public snickered about his nipples-or even speculated about nipple rings-visible beneath his white polo, just below the state seal.

"If it were up to the women," my friend Anna wrote me, "G❤️v Cu❤️m❤️ wld be on all the time. He is, among most of my friends, 🔥." It could be the voice, which has the timbre and phrasing of his father's, the way it alights softly on certain plosives, on the letters "P" or "D," the "S"s becoming "Z"s. The way he intones "LaGuardia" as he claims credit, deservedly, for building its new terminals. Among the fans of the sound of his voice, you'd probably have to include Cuomo himself. "This is a guy who knows he has a moment, and he's not going to waste it," a former city official told me.

Throughout the crisis, the Governor, who is sixty-two, had talked a lot about his mother, Matilda, unable to see her grandchildren; about Chris, afflicted by COVID and quarantined, sort of, in his basement in the Hamptons; about his three daughters, Cara, Mariah, and Michaela, who had come to live with him during the quarantine, something he noted so often that anyone who'd been through a divorce might have wondered if he was doing it to nettle the ex-wife. The ex was Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of Bobby and Ethel. "Part of the reason women are going wild for him," a woman who was going wild for him wrote me one day, "it's the daughters. They adore him. And he seems to have saved them from the Kennedy curse. He put the iron in their souls."

On this Sunday, the day after the confirmed deaths of five hundred and seven people, Cuomo eased into one of his familial tangents: "I come from an Italian-American household where we had a great tradition on Sundays-the family had to come together at the table. . . . They called it dinner, but it started at two o'clock in the afternoon-I don't really know why they called it dinner. But everybody was at the table. Spaghetti and meatballs every Sunday." Now his daughters were home; he'd already started cooking the sauce. Can you imagine Trump stirring a sauce? Cuomo then summoned the sitcom-dad persona he'd been trying out. "Mariah brought her boyfriend," he said. "The boyfriend is very nice, and we like the boyfriend. Advice to fathers: the answer of what you think of the boyfriend is always 'I like the boyfriend.' Always."

At this point, Cuomo was, as one longtime antagonist described it to me in the spring, "the boyfriend of all America." Whether you liked the boyfriend or not, you said you liked the boyfriend. He seemed better than the other guys-the President a maniac, the Mayor a buffoon. But what would happen when people got to know the boyfriend a little better?

Six weeks later, on the final day of May, Cuomo devoted most of his daily briefing to a different subject. COVID deaths in the state had reached a new low of fifty-six, he said, "which is, in this absurd reality we live in, actually very, very good news." It was. The city was scheduled to begin opening up in a week. But augmenting the absurdity of our reality was the chaos that had broken out the previous nights in cities across the country, including New York, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. Police had beaten, maced, and mowed down demonstrators and journalists; rioters had looted stores and torched police vehicles. Another night of mayhem loomed. The day before, Cuomo had named some Black victims of police violence in the past three decades, and bemoaned the fact that nothing had changed, that our political leaders had done little to address what he agreed ("Of course!") was a crisis of systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence against people of color. "I'm with the protesters," he said.

Now Cuomo had specific fixes in mind: independent investigations of police-abuse charges, transparency with police disciplinary records. His voice had attained that higher, singsong pitch it sometimes does when he is strenuously insisting on something, in this case the failure of the political establishment to fix the relationship between the community and the police and, more broadly, the long-standing inequities between white and Black, rich and poor, in education, housing, and health services. It was an impassioned call from a mainstream Democrat for a new progressivism, which he depicted as long overdue.

These were stirring words, but, to people who'd been paying attention to Cuomo, they came with some dissonance. And not just because the next day he announced, with Mayor Bill de Blasio, a curfew for New York City, the first in seventy-five years, and a surge in the deployment of police, or because, in the nights ahead, the police went on a spree of violence against peaceful protesters. It was almost as if he were calling himself out. If Cuomo wasn't the political establishment, who was? He was approaching the midpoint of his third term; he'd been governor for almost ten years. Before that, he'd been the New York attorney general, and, well before that, in the eighties, a top adviser to his father, Mario, during his three terms as governor, and, in the nineties, Bill Clinton 's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Though Cuomo lamented that many of his progressive efforts had been undone by politics-"I am perpetually frustrated about how hard it is to get that political machine, that governmental machine, to turn. It's like a big freighter coming down the river"-he seemed to be describing an agenda that he, for most of his time as governor, had often quietly done his best to thwart. Frequently, it was he who kept the freighter steaming straight ahead.

The latest crisis drew new attention to the quandary of Cuomo: the Cuomo people see on TV and the Cuomo people contend with behind closed doors. Such incongruities are almost universal in politics and government, but there's something particularly fraught about Cuomo's contradictions-the promise that comes with such power and political skill versus the bitter fruit it can bear.

Even before the death of George Floyd (Mr. Floyd, as Cuomo almost always refers to him), the public perception of the Governor's handling of the pandemic, in many quarters, had started to adjust. As eloquent as he was, as competent as he'd seemed, his state had suffered arguably the world's worst outbreak, with a staggering number of deaths and hospitalizations. Much of this could be ascribed to the density and inequity of New York City, along with its airports, which served as the main ports of entry for flights arriving from the most infected regions of Europe. Cuomo reminded everyone that the virus had ambushed us precisely because the federal government had paid it such scant attention. But even if one allowed for the fog of war, and the pieties of hindsight, many of the moves Cuomo made in the earliest days of the pandemic were indicative of a governing style often hampered by political calculation and personal pique.

People came after him either for overreacting or for underreacting. The overreaction critique came mostly from the right, from the open-it-up-ers, who felt that a statewide shutdown, and the Governor's dire requests for forty thousand ventilators, had been excessive, a product of hysteria and a desire to undermine Trump. This was easy to parry. Cuomo credibly made the case that the ventilator and I.C.U. predictions had been based on worst-case models issued or endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and other public-health authorities. He'd deferred to the scientists, as the Trump Administration kept failing to do. And the shutdown did flatten the curve, greatly diminishing fatalities and hospital overload. In a pandemic, you hope to be accused, afterward, of having overreacted.

The underreaction critique was harder to shake. Had Cuomo's shutdown order come too late? Had his policies led to the needless deaths of thousands of nursing-home residents? At the peak of the pandemic, hospitals-especially the public ones-had been in chaos. The city was a hellscape of ambulance sirens and mobile morgues. How much of this could be left at the feet of the Governor and his health department, as opposed to the Mayor, or an inept White House, or a decrepit, jerry-rigged, money-sucking health system that was decades in the unmaking? Until something like the 9/11 Commission takes up the American response to COVID, these arguments will proceed along the lines of political allegiance and self-interest.

As much as Cuomo kept saying that his COVID response wasn't about politics, it became abundantly clear that it had to be. Declaring victory became a full-time job; admitting error was impossible. The war, as articulated by Cuomo and his staff, was one of ideas, between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise. If you asked them why they persisted with such aggressive messaging, they talked about Cuomo's commitment to demonstrating competence, so that more people might demand it. "We were reinforcing the idea that government matters," Melissa DeRosa, the secretary to the Governor, told me.

And yet, for Homo politicus, especially perhaps the subspecies Cuomo, what is life but a campaign? He insisted that he wasn't running for anything, saying over and over that his lack of any such ambition freed him up to do his job. His third term expires at the end of 2022, at which point he'd be vying-probably with a sturdy challenge from the left-for one more than his father had, a feat of one-upmanship that would gratify the son, according to people who know him. If he remained in office, it would be the longest tenure since that of the first governor, George Clinton, more than two centuries ago. Cuomo reads deeply and calls in historians for discussions about his predecessors, even if he usually does most of the talking. And what about the White House? At one point, people were suggesting, impractically, that he be drafted to replace Biden on the ticket. By 2024, perhaps many of the particulars of the COVID months will have faded from memory and one will be left with a binary judgment of Cuomo's performance, a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

One night early in the spring, on CNN, Chris Cuomo, enacting journalism, asked his brother if, in light of his recent acclaim, he'd given any thought to the Presidency.

"No, no," the Governor said.

"No, you won't answer?"

"No, I answered. The answer's no."

"No, you're not thinking about it?"

"Sometimes it's one word. I said no."

"Have you thought about it?"

"No."

"Are you open to thinking about it?"

"No."

"Might you think about it at some point?"

"No."

One can safely surmise that the Governor wasn't levelling with his brother or the audience, or even himself. Surely he'd gamed it out. He hardly slept these days-a few hours a night, mostly lying there, staring at the ceiling. What if Biden wins, what if he loses? This running mate, that one. He might have concluded that four more years of Trump, whatever the pitfalls, would enhance his chances in 2024. People who have worked with Cuomo say that he has at least considered this. Who among us, were we wired to win political races, wouldn't, however idly, do the same?

"How can you know what you might think about at some point right now?" the younger brother asked.

The older brother replied, "Because I know what I might think about and what I won't think about."

Cuomo often speaks of government as "an art form." By reputation, he's an ace-an exemplar of aptitude, thoroughness, hard work. But he's also a master of the art of politics. "He doesn't make many political mistakes," the former city official said. It is hard to think of a contemporary of Cuomo's stature who is as deeply schooled. He was thrown into it young, first as a teen-age volunteer in his father's down-ballot bids and later as his de-facto campaign manager, aged twenty-four. This was 1982, when Mario Cuomo stormed back from a distant second in the polls to upset New York's mayor, Ed Koch, in the Democratic primary for governor. Andrew had a knack for the pulleys and trapdoors, the mirrors and smoke. On the day of the state convention, in Syracuse, as Cuomo's campaign tried to bluff its way into having enough delegates to stay in the race, Andrew had a staffer charter a pleasure boat (and then have it conk out in the middle of Onondaga Lake) to sequester a bunch of Cuomo-leaning delegates, so that Koch's campaign couldn't court them.

Earlier, Koch had soundly defeated Cuomo in the 1977 mayoral race, during which signs had reportedly sprouted in the boroughs reading "Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo." Even on his deathbed, Koch blamed the Cuomo campaign for this, Andrew in particular, who was then a muscular teen who worked nights clambering lampposts to put up his father's posters and tear down Koch's. Andrew has always denied any involvement, and even the existence of the homophobic posters remains in dispute; no one has ever produced a smoking staple gun. Decades later, Andrew would become something of a gay-rights hero, for his success, as Governor, in passing a marriage-equality law-a legislative equivalent of the upset in 1982. Still, the taint of that old slogan has followed him; Cynthia Nixon, his opponent in the 2018 primary, tried the slogan "Vote for the Homo, Not the Cuomo."

Michael Shnayerson's unauthorized 2015 biography of Andrew, called " The Contender" and conceived as a portrait of a potential 2016 Presidential candidate, presents him as a restless conniver and a seductive antihero: some combination of the Thomas Cromwell of " Wolf Hall," without the delicacy or the taste, and maybe Jimmy McGill, from " Better Call Saul," without the vulnerability or the lovable charm. In spite of-and sometimes because of-his maneuverings, you want to root for him. You'd watch all six seasons. "I don't think he has any political ideology, other than to crunch his enemies and make the wheels of government turn," Shnayerson told me. "But there is something useful in that."

Here he is at his father's kitchen table appraising the Queens political bosses, or pumping out curls in his bedroom while reviewing torts at Albany Law School, or working nights driving a tow truck for AAA, or rebuilding a Corvette in his parents' driveway, or sitting stiffly on the Kennedy sailboat off Cape Cod, in fresh-bought neon swimming trunks, while the Kennedy boys snicker. In profiles through the years, his almost unsociable fastidiousness has come up again and again, even as he chain-smoked Parliaments. The furniture in his apartment was covered in clear plastic. He used Fantastik to buff his leather couch.

Cuomo has always had a chip on his shoulder, as a child of Queens and of Mario. The neighborhood was not Hollis, which was predominantly Black, or Hollis Hills, which was wealthy and white, but Holliswood, more middle class. His mother came from a Brooklyn family that owned real estate in the borough and in New Jersey. Mario, as Andrew called his boss, was the son of Italian immigrants who had a corner grocery store. Mario graduated from St. John's Law, top of the class, and, when no Manhattan firm would hire him, started out in Brooklyn; one of his clients was Fred Trump. Mario was a largely absent but highly demanding patriarch. Much has been made through the years, with little comment by Andrew himself, of Andrew's desire to please or, as time has gone by, surpass his father. "Mario was fucking brutal," a former aide told me. "Andrew was scarred." Their one-on-one basketball games, in the state-police gym in Albany, were notorious. As people can sense from watching the Cuomo brothers chirp each other, even the most lighthearted Cuomo-family trash talk comes with a tincture of grievance. Joe Klein, in " Primary Colors," depicts the Cuomos, padre e figlio, as Orlando and Jimmy Ozio, the latter a crafty political pro, "handsome in a lurky kind of way." The father-son pathology is always cited but never really spelled out; one gets the feeling that the Cuomos aren't big on therapy.

The son logged some private-sector years, as a lawyer at a firm that did work for many of the big New York real-estate families, including the Trumps, and then started a nonprofit, called HELP, that built housing for the homeless. On his first date with Kerry Kennedy, he took her to one of these facilities. Later, he asked reporters how his marriage proposal would play in the press. Before the wedding, Shnayerson writes, he decreed that there be no toasts at the reception and, in another break from Kennedy-family tradition, that no exes be allowed at Hickory Hill, the family compound in Virginia, where he and Kerry later took up residence. (Cuomo denies all this.) By then, he was at HUD, doggedly protecting an ossified agency (what Jack Kemp, a former Secretary, called "ten floors of basement") from a Republican Congress while waging war for years with HUD 's inspector general, Susan Gaffney, whose public profile, huge staff, and subpoena powers he came to resent. As Shnayerson writes, Cuomo sought to rein her in, "first by wooing her, and then when that didn't work, doing his best to destroy her." He basically created an investigative unit of his own, and used it to render her redundant. He was perhaps at his best, and his worst, when he had an enemy.

In 2000, after Al Gore lost to George W. Bush (there had been talk of Cuomo becoming Gore's chief of staff), Cuomo decided to run for governor of New York, in part, people assumed, to avenge his father's loss, six years earlier, to the Republican George Pataki. The putative Democratic nominee, popular with the Party establishment, was a courtly apparatchik named H. Carl McCall. It was McCall's turn, as Party etiquette would have it, and he was poised to be the state's first Black major-party candidate for governor. Various people, none of them exactly his allies, quoted Cuomo as having said, at the time, regarding his presumptive hold on the African-American vote, "Every Black home has three pictures: one of Jesus Christ, one of Martin Luther King, and one of either Bobby Kennedy or J.F.K."-the implication being that Cuomo's marriage to Bobby's daughter made him a Kennedy, too. (Cuomo has denied saying this.) The transitive property didn't apply. In the Times, Bob Herbert called him "arrogant, abrasive, controlling." The oft-cited self-infliction was a put-down of Pataki, after September 11th. "He stood behind the leader. He held the leader's coat," Cuomo said, meaning that all Pataki had done, as Rudy Giuliani played the hero of Ground Zero, was act as the Mayor's valet. It's difficult, amid the debased discourse of the Trump era, to imagine that such a remark could be deemed suicidally indecorous, but it was, partly because it wasn't really true, and we were all, for a while there, patriots and allies. As it happens, Bill de Blasio, a city councilman at the time who had worked under Cuomo at HUD, was one of the few Democrats who stood by him. "You could have gotten all of his supporters into a phone booth," de Blasio said some years later. After Cuomo dropped out of the race, Kerry Kennedy told him that she wanted a divorce. Cuomo foundered in the doldrums of an apparent political and personal dead end. Some friends even reported glimpses of introspection. He vowed never to let such a thing happen again.

Cuomo started over, and in 2006 he won the attorney-general seat that Eliot Spitzer was vacating to be governor. Spitzer, before doing himself in, amid a prostitution scandal, was bedevilled, from within his own party, by Cuomo, who as A.G. skillfully undermined him in his battles with the Albany establishment. Spitzer's replacement as governor, David Paterson, once said that he always felt as if Cuomo were sawing the floor out from under his feet. Soon the stage was set for Cuomo to run again-to take his father's old job, and to move back into the governor's mansion, the state's most powerful perch.

In early March, as the coronavirus took hold, Cuomo got the Legislature to grant him sweeping emergency powers, which enabled him to unilaterally make or suspend laws. The effort had started innocently, weeks before, as a request for forty million dollars, to help the state prepare for the new virus. By the time the bill came to the floor, it was also, incidentally, an authorization of absolute power. In the coming months, he issued seventy executive orders and signed some two hundred and twenty-five laws, including one granting him the right to make budget cuts. "Now is not the time for politics," he said.

In some ways, the occasion was perfect for Cuomo. "He's inclined toward tyranny," a Democratic legislator told me. "But in a crisis that's what people want. Someone who can exert command and control. This situation is tailor-made for a tactician of his abilities." An advocate for government could deploy its considerable capabilities without having to put up with its usual difficulties, which we sometimes call politics. But you can no more repress politics than you can feelings.

Later, as the state began to open up, various advocates argued that Cuomo should cede those powers. Blair Horner, of the New York Public Interest Research Group, told public radio, "What we're arguing for is a return to the American form of democracy, a system of checks and balances. If the Governor doesn't like that, of course he's entitled to his opinion, but it'd be a debate he'd have to have with Thomas Jefferson, not with us."

Monica Klein, a progressive strategist, told me that shortly before Richard Brodsky, the fourteen-term Westchester County assemblyman known as "Albany's conscience," died, in April, "the last thing he yelled at me was 'You need to tell everyone that Andrew Cuomo is an authoritarian!' "

It may be hard for someone outside the hothouse of New York politics to understand how much Cuomo is resented by the more progressive wing of his party, which his staffers disdainfully call "the professional left"-to whom he, in turn, is Quid Pro Cuomo. Members of the Cuomo team relish the resentment.

Cuomo has said, and his people insist, that he is a great progressive. They cite the accomplishments: gay marriage, marijuana decriminalization, gun control, a minimum-wage increase, paid family leave. "Every time you set up the government for failure, you're aiding and abetting the conservatives," Cuomo told me. "I'm looking at an original poster: 'Re-elect F.D.R. for Progressive Government.' It's not a new word, a new concept. It was F.D.R. and Al Smith. They were the progressives. F.D.R. was all about you get done what you can get done." Cuomo likes to say that, under his watch, New York has the most progressive record of any state in America, and believes that history will say so. "The right decision ultimately outs," he continued. "If you don't believe that the truth wins, you can't do the job. You have to believe that the right thing gets appreciated in the long run. Only the long run matters."

As a so-called Clinton Democrat, Cuomo came into office, in the wake of the financial crisis, determined to cut spending and to bring public-sector unions to heel. At the time, Republicans controlled the State Senate, a situation that had the perverse effect of helping Cuomo neutralize his left flank, which consisted mainly of New York City liberals. The city has almost half the people, and more than half the money, but the state is vast and diverse, and a governor has to triangulate.

In 2012, the G.O.P. lost its majority. A handful of mostly conservative-leaning Democrats, by many accounts at Cuomo's urging and with his strategic advice, had established the Independent Democratic Conference, which formed a coalition with the Republicans and therefore effectively negated the new Democratic majority. Democrats called it a "coup." Cuomo's office called it an "internal legislative matter" and disavowed any involvement.

In the next electoral cycle, the Working Families Party, a left-wing movement that started in New York in the late nineties, grudgingly agreed to endorse Cuomo, over his challenger, Zephyr Teachout, if he promised, among other things, to end the I.D.C. His less than enthusiastic on-camera accession to the Party's demands, in exchange for its backing (the deal was brokered by de Blasio, an early supporter of the Party), became known as the "hostage video" and was initially greeted with jeers at the W.F.P. convention. Sure enough, once Cuomo was reëlected, he failed to deliver on his promise.

In the fall of 2018, primary challengers beat six of the eight I.D.C. defectors. After Cuomo trounced the Republican candidate, Marc Molinaro, in the gubernatorial race, he started his third term having to contend for the first time with a truly liberal Democratic majority. Last year, the Legislature had its most progressive session ever: new laws were passed addressing rent control, climate change, bail reform, and driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. Cuomo, who has in private conversations expressed concern over the leftward lurch of his party, did his best to ride the wave rather than let it wash over him. Now he drove the left nuts in a new way-with, as a Democratic legislator put it recently, "his proclamation of positions that he's working hard to sabotage."

"He's still doing a good job of keeping the crazies at bay," a prominent Manhattan Democrat told me. He happened to be the kind of Davos Man constituent who Cuomo feared would abandon the city if he were subjected to a new wealth tax, which many progressives have endorsed.

"Cuomo decided years ago, partly by watching his father, that Democrats can't govern effectively, that they are a tax-and-spend juggernaut, and that any power they have in the Legislature is bad for him," Bill Lipton, a former political director of the W.F.P., told me. "The ease and consistency with which he does one thing in practice while arguing in public he's doing the exact opposite-and saying anyone who suggests he's doing this is crazy-should worry anybody who believes that executives should be transparent and accountable."

"These are institutional advocates who by their job can never say, 'It's enough,' " Cuomo told me. "A sitting governor can never satiate advocates. Otherwise, they're not advocates, by definition. I can't. My father couldn't." Cuomo and his staff, buoyed by their own internal polling and the results of his two primary challenges, contend that he is actually more popular among Democratic voters who consider themselves to be very liberal than he is among those who are closer to the center. They dismiss the W.F.P. as being representative of no one. "They're not the left," one of them said. "They don't represent anybody. They're a piece of stationery."

After winning a third term, Cuomo got to work getting back at the Working Families Party. In each of the past two years, he has sneaked a provision into his budget that would more than double the number of votes a party would need to remain on ballots. The new threshold would be a high hurdle for the W.F.P. On NY1, Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, called Cuomo's tactics "Trumpian." Lipton told reporters that the maneuver was "a power grab." Cuomo, a master of the "Who, me?" defense, dismissed such talk as "conspiracies."

In his own party, his detractors often speak of him (almost always without attribution, because they are afraid of him) as a brutal boss, a friendless bully, and a paranoid control freak. "It's not enough for him to win. Other people have to lose," one said, having lost. Yet there are often caveats. "And by the way," another told me, after carpet-bombing my notebook with slurs, "he may go down as, if not the greatest, then the most accomplished governor New York has ever had."

With the press, Cuomo has a reputation for being both exacting and adept. He makes late-night or early-morning calls to reporters-usually off the record, often genial and confiding, sometimes foulmouthed and scathing-which can seem like a gambit to seduce and cow the cadre of regulars assigned to the statehouse beat. He prefers bending an ear to pressing the flesh; the biggest impediment to any designs on the Presidency is the thought of him having to spend weeks in Iowa. Prior to the pandemic briefings, his press conferences were infrequent, his stagecraft tightly controlled. He has a small and loyal team. He is known to have, as one reporter wrote, "an elephant's long memory for slights."

I first approached Cuomo's office in the spring about spending some time with him. Various members of his staff took up the request and then let it drop. By midsummer, I'd all but given up. Rich Azzopardi, his senior adviser, laughed at my suggestion that I spend a night in the governor's mansion. In a pandemic? Then, one day in August, my phone rang: Hold for the Governor. He asked to speak off the record, and did so for more than an hour and a half. There was a strange intimacy to the conversation; his timbre was like a pheromone. It didn't sound as though he were multitasking or pulling faces with his aides. It wasn't a man just talking to himself, like Nixon at night. He seemed to have all the time in the world. I found myself laughing out loud at some of the Cuomoisms ("We created the we!"), the rhetorical repetitions and Rumsfeldian logic pretzels. I wondered, as I had before, if he was aware of his own peculiarities. For a New Yorker, shtick can be self.

A few weeks ago, there was another call, this time on background, with quotes to be used only with his later approval. He explained his rationale. "I did four hundred hours of briefings," he said. "The people can come up with their own opinions of me. They do and they did. They know me better than you know me. And, by the way, they do. They literally do. You bring baggage. They have no baggage. They know me. They know my kids. They know my mother. They know my dog. They came to their own conclusions about me. They don't need your opinion."

The first time I met Cuomo was in 2014, at Billy Joel 's house in Oyster Bay. I was writing about Joel, and he'd invited me to hang around on a morning when he and Cuomo were going out on Joel's boat for a photo op having to do with cleaning up the bay. The two are good friends. They share an interest in motorcycles and boats, and a pride in being rough-hewn street-smart outsiders vaulted, by talent and luck, into a world of high-class swells. Cuomo presided at Joel's fourth wedding and is the godfather to his young daughters.

The two men were alone in the kitchen, not-eating breakfast. Cuomo had on his in-the-field uniform: khakis, white polo shirt with state insignia, tucked in, windbreaker with insignia. They talked about wives and houses. Out on the bay, on the Argos, Joel's refitted lobster boat, Joel and Cuomo scooped up some plastic for photographers in smaller boats; then they took turns awkwardly scattering panels of oyster seed into the water, to demonstrate support for the oyster-farming operations in the bay and the clean water that they both enable and require.

Sometime later, I found myself at Joel's house, on Independence Day. Cuomo was there. Emboldened by a taste of Billy Joel's gin, I sat down next to the Governor and began to make an argument against an infrastructure project that he'd been promoting, a bridge or a tunnel across Long Island Sound, from Rye to Syosset-a very long and expensive connector between the mainland and the island, to divert traffic from the metropolitan area, that could devastate the region's shellfishery, which Cuomo and Joel had celebrated a few years earlier. I began to state the case against the project, and Cuomo interrupted and dismissed the premise that there was any oyster fishery worth considering. "They get, what, five oysters a year?" he said. (I'm quoting from memory.) He held forth, in a playfully caustic tone, about NIMBY ism, the future of John F. Kennedy Airport as an e-commerce hub, and the virtues of thinking big, in a world of small-minded people, of whom I was presumably one.

What thrills Cuomo most, to go by his reputation and the evidence, is building things-the kind of big infrastructure projects that might vex more deferential executives. The Second Avenue subway, a new LaGuardia Airport, an expansion of Pennsylvania Station, a replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, which he named for his father. Each summoned up a disregard for bureaucratic niceties which some might find refreshing, and a hands-on obsessiveness that is extremely expensive and, for bureaucrats and other hands, crazy-making. As one of those bureaucrats told me, referring to the Cuomo team, "They will slam a bureaucracy for taking too long but then spend an inordinate amount of money to rush it. He is adept at throwing money at a problem. That is a luxury that the bureaucrats don't have."

Still, the travails of the city's transit system, and of the finances of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, have beset him throughout his tenure. In 2017, soon after celebrating the opening of the Second Avenue subway, a costly project that had been delayed for decades, Cuomo was confronted by the so-called Summer of Hell-an epochal rise in delays, overcrowding, derailments, and signal malfunctions brought on by years of underinvestment and neglect. Unsuccessfully trying to deflect some of the blame and the cost onto Mayor de Blasio, Cuomo, who controls the M.T.A., declared a state of emergency and hired Andy Byford, a respected transit expert who had most recently remade Toronto's subways, to run the system. Acclaim in the press (including this magazine) for "Train Daddy" reportedly irked the Governor. After two years, Byford quit, complaining that Cuomo had undermined him, hounded his staff, and in general made it impossible for him to do his job.

Byford told Marcia Kramer, of WCBS-TV, during his only on-the-record debriefing, "I just would not accept the fact that my people were being yelled at, they were being given direction, and I was deliberately excluded from those meetings." He added, "To me, it's actually dangerous, also, that people who are not professionally qualified should give direction on operational matters." Byford, who read "The Contender," has compared his ordeal to that of the inspector general at HUD and has accused the Governor of "steamrolling" him. Now, with the M.T.A.'s finances further wrecked by an unprecedented collapse in ridership as a result of the pandemic, the prospects for the transit system, and with it the viability of the entire region, are gloomier than they were even in the dark days of the city's last major financial crisis, in the seventies. In June, Byford took over the transit system in London.

It can be instructive to go back and chart, day by day, the encroachment of COVID consciousness, its mutation in the public's mind from "just another swine flu" to an invisible menace that forever altered our lives. March 1st saw the first confirmed case in New York State, a doctor returning from Iran, and then there was a flareup in New Rochelle, outside the city-Patient Zero hadn't travelled anywhere, so COVID was here. At that point, people who went out in public wearing gloves and masks were generally considered to be paranoid. Cuomo said, on March 2nd, "Avian flu, Ebola, SARS, MERS, measles-right? So we have gone through this before."

On March 13th, Cuomo indicated that the state would defer decisions about school closures to local governments. Two days later, de Blasio, after dithering, decided to close the city's public schools. The following Tuesday, March 17th, after a weekend in which patrons unadvisedly packed the city's restaurants and bars, de Blasio, to the surprise of his own staff, floated the prospect of an order to "shelter in place." (First, though, he sneaked in one last workout at his gym in Brooklyn, to which he'd been driven by S.U.V., from Gracie Mansion, in Manhattan, most mornings throughout his mayoralty, amid almost universal derision.)

Cuomo, objecting to the language and the spirit of such a measure, overruled the Mayor. "For New York City or any city or any county to take an emergency action, the state has to approve it," he said. "And I wouldn't approve shelter in place." He added, "The fear, the panic, is a bigger problem than the virus." Freddi Goldstein, who was de Blasio's press secretary at the time, told me, "It was very, very clear we had hit a nerve and in their eyes had gone too far." According to the Wall Street Journal, a dozen public officials held a conference call with the attorney general, Letitia James, to figure out how best to get Cuomo to announce some kind of shutdown, without seeming as if he were following the Mayor.

It wasn't until March 22nd, when New York had almost six thousand confirmed cases, that Cuomo's "pause"-shelter in place by another name-went into effect. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, had ordered a shutdown on March 19th, when the state had less than a third of the number of confirmed cases that New York had. Days mattered. Columbia University epidemiologists later estimated that a week's delay in March quintupled the number of deaths in the New York metro area in the pandemic's first two months.

Cuomo, to be fair, had already closed universities, schools, theatres, barbershops, gyms, restaurants, and bars. Maybe the people weren't quite ready for quarantine, by any name. "You had to fundamentally change the behavior of nineteen million people and get a buy-in from a cynical populace," DeRosa, a top aide, told me.

Still, it's hard to find anyone who knows the two men who doesn't conclude that one of the reasons Cuomo lagged some of his peers was that he was just doing what he has often done: begrudging de Blasio any political oxygen. Cuomo didn't want to be the one holding the coat. New Yorkers have come to think of these spats as a feud, but for the most part they have been sustained by Cuomo. De Blasio has done himself few favors, however; he is a master of the unforced error. After New York's first confirmed case, de Blasio tweeted that people should get on with their lives. Cuomo had been cavalier, too, but de Blasio did it with a certain kind of flair: suggesting that New Yorkers "get out on the town despite Coronavirus," he threw in a recommendation for an Italian Mafia movie called "The Traitor."

As conditions in the state and the city deteriorated, Cuomo kept pressing de Blasio. On April 11th, de Blasio announced that the city's schools would remain shut down for the rest of the year. But he'd failed to consult with Cuomo; he alerted the Governor by text message just before his announcement. Legally speaking, the decision was Cuomo's to make. "That's his opinion," Cuomo told the press. "He didn't close them. And he can't open them."

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, tweeted, "Cut the crap." But the crap was not cut: similar episodes of rank-pulling and wrong-footing, whether about gyms or restaurants, cops or schools, cropped up again and again in the coming months. The day after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, de Blasio tweeted that he was looking into building a memorial for her. Twenty minutes later, Cuomo announced that the state had a plan for one already.

Last week, the crap kicked up again, when the Mayor, without consulting the state, announced some measures to contain new COVID hot spots in certain neighborhoods. The next day, the Governor nixed those plans, in favor of some of his own. The schools would close on Tuesday, not Wednesday. Closures would be determined by cluster zones, not Zip Codes. And so on. Whatever the merits of each approach, the petulance and the lack of coördination confused New Yorkers, and sent a portion of them into a rage. By Tuesday night, mobs of Hasidic men were running amok in the streets. "To the extent there are communities that are upset," Cuomo said on Wednesday, it is "because they weren't following the rules and the rules weren't being enforced."

In New York, through the decades, the relationship between the governor and the mayor has often been strained, especially when they have been members of the same political party. Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay, both moderate (and blue-blooded) Republicans, could hardly talk to each other. Mario Cuomo regularly undermined David Dinkins. George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani were chilly at best. Some of the tension is structural. At least where the city is concerned, the governor has the power, the mayor the responsibility. The mayor oversees a huge budget, controls the nation's biggest police department, and lives and works in the country's media capital, while the governor, stuck up in Albany, has a diffuse political base, an unruly legislature, and a state police force much smaller than the city's. Yet the mayor needs state approval for almost everything. The inevitable thumb wrestling between the two executives and their staffs requires political acumen, message discipline, and the cultivation of powerful constituencies and alliances. In these departments, Cuomo, by most accounts, is a samurai, whereas de Blasio is a schlimazel. Even members of de Blasio's administration, past and present, say that his political ineptitude is surpassed only by his self-regard.

When de Blasio was elected, in 2013, he set out to make good on a campaign promise to introduce public pre-kindergarten citywide. Though Cuomo outwardly supported the idea, he didn't like how de Blasio wanted to pay for it, with a tax on people earning more than five hundred thousand dollars a year. Cuomo was running for reëlection, and was trying to cut taxes, not raise them. De Blasio, who had won in a landslide, felt that his victory gave him the political capital not only to impose a wealth tax but also to force Cuomo's hand. "The people in the city have given me a mission," he said at City Hall.

"Pre-K drove Cuomo's people crazy," a former de Blasio aide recalled, adding that one of them told him, "We're gonna bury you, you just wait." Cuomo believed that it would be a bad idea to drive away the rich, both from the state and from the tax rolls, and maybe, as his critics would have it, from his fund-raising Rolodex. Amid the pre-K battles, he told the Times, echoing his father's famous formulation, "The way we campaign is in poetry, aspirational generalizations. We govern in prose, which is in compromise and programs. The millionaires tax is a great political theme; it's a great proposal politically. It is governmentally, currently, an impossibility." He has compared his commitment to not raising taxes with his father's steadfast opposition to capital punishment.

De Blasio began targeting charter schools, diverting funds and rescinding space. Supporters of the charter-school movement include some of Cuomo's big donors, such as the fund managers Paul Tudor Jones, Daniel Loeb, and Bruce Kovner. With Cuomo's approval, some of them launched harshly critical, multimillion-dollar ad campaigns against de Blasio-an aggressive tactic so early in a new mayor's term. Then Cuomo teamed up with the Republicans in the State Senate to kill the tax proposal and pass stronger protections for the charter schools. "Our tax package is not an advocacy statement," Cuomo said, announcing his budget. "It's not a package that has been put together to provoke. It's a package that has been put together to pass." Still, in the end, the Governor, having marked his territory, set aside money for universal pre-K. It would prove to be both one of the Mayor's signature achievements and the catalyst for ongoing rancor that would wind up being costly for de Blasio, and for the city.

The half decade since has given New Yorkers a running serial of de Blasio-Cuomo pissing contests, some almost comically trivial (a spat over euthanizing a deer in Harlem) and some not funny at all (their posturing over the pitiable state of the housing projects under the jurisdiction of the New York City Housing Authority). In 2015, de Blasio complained about Cuomo, on NY1, "If someone disagrees with him openly, some kind of revenge or vendetta follows." The V-word, as it became known, seemed to trigger Cuomo, its Mafia associations suggesting an Italian-American slur, of a kind that his family had been on guard against for decades. Rumors that Mario's father-in-law might have had connections to organized crime were never substantiated. Bill Clinton had to apologize in 1992 for his remarks, captured on a secret recording by Gennifer Flowers, that Mario Cuomo often acted like a mafioso. Then there was Chris Cuomo last summer threatening to throw a heckler down the stairs of a Shelter Island bar after the man called him Fredo, referring to the weakling Corleone in " The Godfather," which, Chris said, was "like the N-word" to Italian-Americans. Andrew, the Michael in this formulation, has said that he has seen only parts of the film, and finds it offensive.

People have described the Cuomo-de Blasio shenanigans as a beef between two Italian-American men. But their backgrounds are vastly different. De Blasio, who is from Cambridge, Massachusetts, adopted his mother's surname. His father was a Wasp and a Yale graduate who lost a leg at Okinawa. He later abandoned the family and, stricken with lung cancer, killed himself. De Blasio molded himself into a hardworking Brooklyn man of the people. "It's sort of a false identity, like the shit-kicking version of George W. Bush, whereas Andrew is who he is," the former city official said.

It was never clear if de Blasio understood how much the V-word would anger Cuomo. To govern effectively, the Mayor, whatever his share of the popular vote and his opinion of himself, needed the Governor. Cuomo avoided even mentioning de Blasio's name. Moments of détente came and went. Distractions-among them a series of federal corruption investigations into both administrations-forced the combatants to guard other fronts. De Blasio had to contend with the convictions of two financial backers for bribery. Meanwhile, Joe Percoco, Cuomo's right-hand man (whom Cuomo had referred to as "my father's third son, who I sometimes think he loved the most"), was sentenced, two years ago, to six years in prison for accepting bribes, which he and his co-conspirators had referred to, in code borrowed from "The Sopranos," as "ziti." A separate probe led to the conviction of another Cuomo ally, Alain Kaloyeros, a former president of the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, for rigging bids in Cuomo's troubled upstate development push known as the Buffalo Billion. Cuomo, like so many before him, had come to the governor's mansion with vows to clean up Albany-only to shut down the anti-corruption commission he'd appointed after it became inconvenient.

When de Blasio sought reëlection, Cuomo, unable to get anyone to run against him, had to defer to the logic, as one Democratic operative said, of "Shit, this guy's not going anywhere." The Mayor took his subsequent reëlection to be a refreshment of his mandate: the illogic of "Fuck this guy, I won."

They fell back into their designated roles: Cuomo the bully, de Blasio the bleeder. As one adviser put it, "The Mayor recognizes he can't win, that Andrew Cuomo is a shark, and that fighting with him doesn't help the city. He knows the Governor only respects political violence. But de Blasio is his own worst enemy."

Sometimes it's hard to decipher whether Cuomo is benefitting from luck or playing the long game. He allowed de Blasio to twist in the wind during the first significant crisis of his mayoralty, after Eric Garner was choked to death by a policeman, on Staten Island. A grand jury's failure to indict the officer led to protests, in the city and across the country, and then to the murder of two cops, by a man from out of town. During the protests, de Blasio, who had campaigned on police reform and who had curtailed the stop-and-frisk tactics of the previous regime, criticized the department and talked frankly about having spoken to his son, who is biracial, about the dangers of coming of age in a city where the cops routinely mistreat young Black men. Pat Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association, considering these remarks to be an attack on his members, accused de Blasio of having blood on his hands, and advised him not to attend officers' funerals. The Mayor showed up to the two cops' burials anyway, and hundreds of uniformed police turned their backs on him.

De Blasio had asked Cuomo for help in calming relations with the police unions, but the Governor demurred. (The Governor's aides deny this.) At the funeral, union leaders were seen huddling with members of Cuomo's staff. That year, Lynch's union (which recently endorsed Trump for President) named Cuomo its Man of the Year.

Soon after the death of George Floyd, and a night of looting, the police began roughing up peaceful protesters. On June 4th, Cuomo seemed unaware of all the video evidence of their tactics, and he not only defended the police but chided a reporter for asking about the incidents. "You see, it's that kind of incendiary rhetoric that is not a fact," he said. "It's not even an opinion. That is a hyper-partisan rhetorical attack." Later, perhaps having seen and been shocked by the videos and recognizing the irrefutability of the evidence, he condemned the police, while the Mayor, who needed the police on his side, stayed quiet. Five years on, the P.B.A.'s Man of the Year had outflanked the Mayor with blood on his hands.

"Why does Bill look like an idiot?" the former city official told me. "Because Bill always looks like an idiot. When shit flies around, it's gonna stick to him."

In mid-June, after a hundred and ten days, Cuomo ended his daily briefings. Deaths had dropped, from around a thousand a day to twenty-five. Hospitalizations were down more than ninety per cent. His approval rating for his handling of COVID was in the seventies. He took his place at the dais, flanked by his supporting characters, and removed his mask. Though he repeated many themes and phrases of the previous few weeks and months, his remarks had a valedictory heft that might have been keyed to a national audience. In the coming days, Cuomo still seemed to show up on TV every day, but now mostly as a talk-show guest. Clearly, it was hard to stay away.

One night, he revived the Chris-and-the-Love-Gov act with his brother, who said, "I hope you are able to appreciate what you did in your state and what it means for the rest of the country now and what it will always mean to those who love and care about you the most," adding, "I'm wowed by what you did, and, more importantly, I'm wowed by how you did it." The deployment of the past tense, this grammatical suggestion that the job was done, had sneaked into the Governor's speech as well. In terms of self-congratulation, it wasn't quite "Mission Accomplished" aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, but this rearview mirroring of the pandemic-the surge and decline, the crisis and its containment-suggested a victory lap. Cuomo had started writing a book (" American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic," which comes out this week). One day, near the end of June, he unveiled a foam sculpture of a mountain. Its contours matched the graph of the upward and downward death-rate slope he'd been displaying at his briefings. (The mountain was his long-running metaphor for the ordeal. "We don't want a mountain range," he'd kept saying.) People compared his mountain, painted Army green, to Jabba the Hutt or Richard Dreyfuss's towers of mud in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or the miniature Stonehenge in "Spinal Tap."

A couple of weeks later, Cuomo produced another work of gubernatorial folk art, this one a poster, an illustration composed of images and text in the style of political posters of the Gilded Age. It depicted a mountain-may we call it the mountain?-with various COVID milestones along the way. An image of a white-water torrent was labelled "Economy Falls." ("Get it?" Cuomo said, at the press conference. "Like Niagara Falls.") Beneath this was an image of flames ("New Rochelle Hot Spot") and one of a nose with a swab in it ("Testing, Tracing"), which brought to mind both the day the Governor, on camera, submitted to a COVID test and the ensuing bit, on CNN, with Chris, who, while joking about the size of his older brother's nose, brandished a makeshift swab the size of a toilet plunger. (If there were a Cuomo-bros poster, that big-nose gag would be the pinnacle: peak Cuomo.) In the poster, on the far side of the mountain, a young man dangled from a crag-"Boyfriend Cliff"-in such a way that it looked as if he'd been forced off the ledge by the Governor, depicted in his Pontiac GTO. Beneath the car, and above the words "111 Days of Hell," was a quote from A. J. Parkinson: "Tell the People the Truth and They Will Do the Right Thing."

The news had generally got so surreal-one day after another of things you didn't have on your 2020 bingo card-that sometimes one could lose sight of how odd Cuomo's performance was. At some point in April, he began attributing bits of wisdom to this fellow A. J. Parkinson. At first, just a few old Cuomo hands knew what was going on. Mario Cuomo had invented Parkinson almost forty years ago, as a vessel for manufactured adages. The elder Cuomo possessed, to quote his aide Tim Russert, "the world's only complete collection of Parkinson." When reporters, trying to get in on the joke, unearthed some Parkinsonisms of their own, such as "When in doubt, mull" or "Let them eat polenta," Mario chided them, "A. J. Parkinson never said those things." (The latter remark he attributed to his mother, Immaculata, one of whose actual quotes he had, in turn, attributed to Aristotle.) Now Andrew was reviving the practice, and the ghost of A. J. Parkinson: another character in the multigenerational menagerie, here to see us through the plague.

With the victory lap, and some of the goofiness that surrounded it, came renewed scrutiny of Cuomo's pandemic performance. The most stinging critique had to do with the death rate in New York's nursing homes, which are privately operated but state regulated. The Cuomo administration had issued an advisory, on March 25th, that seniors who tested positive for the coronavirus or who reported symptoms couldn't be turned away from being readmitted to nursing homes from hospitals. The rationale, as Cuomo and his health commissioner, Howard Zucker, later tried to explain, was that they needed to make hospital beds available for the predicted surge in COVID cases-which never quite materialized. Nursing-home staff were to be allowed to keep working if they tested positive but were symptom-free. In the end, the virus passed through the nursing homes like "fire through dry grass," as Cuomo himself put it. By mid-June, more than six thousand elderly nursing-home residents had died, constituting about a quarter of the state's COVID fatalities. (This number includes both confirmed and probable deaths, but does not include residents who died in hospitals.)

Nursing-home operators complained of being overwhelmed and under-provisioned, of lacking adequate access to testing. (Cuomo's office blamed the shortage on the federal government.) Critics held that the health department had focussed on the hospital system and all but ignored the nursing homes. The Cuomo administration launched inspections of the nursing homes, which some took to be an attempt to silence them, under the perceived threat of the state's decertification power.

Cuomo pointed out repeatedly that, by the metric of nursing-home deaths as a percentage of all COVID deaths, New York State ranked among the lowest nationwide, and that the original advisory had been in accordance with guidelines from the C.D.C, which were intended to protect seniors from discrimination and keep medical staff on the job. If anyone had been negligent, he said, it was the federal government. "Blame Mr. Trump," he said.

But many Democrats who blamed Trump were capable of blaming Cuomo, too. When Zucker appeared before the Legislature, State Senator Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, said, "It seems, sir, that you are choosing the information so that you can look better."

In July, Cuomo's health department released a report saying that, according to Zucker's analysis of the data, the virus had infiltrated nursing homes well before the March 25th directive-that, therefore, it was the health workers, and not readmitted residents, who'd sparked the dry grass. But, by then, the sides in the debate had hardened, and Zucker was accused by the policy's critics of taking part in a political stunt, and of scapegoating health-care workers, to cover for his own department's supposed mistakes, as well as his boss's. Meanwhile, Cuomo, at his press conferences, dismissed questions about an independent nursing-home inquiry as being politically motivated, a crusade concocted by the Post and Fox News. But even Democrats in the Legislature were now pushing for an investigation. "I don't think the health-department report was adequate or thorough," Liz Krueger, a state senator from Manhattan, said.

Bill Hammond, a senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center, in Albany (dismissed by the Governor's staff as a "shady right-wing think tank"), drawing on reporting in the Wall Street Journal, noted that a powerful industry group called the Greater New York Hospital Association had pushed for the nursing-home policy. The Association had also contributed a million dollars to the state Democratic Party in 2018, at Cuomo's request, and had lobbied the administration successfully for an increase in Medicaid reimbursements, at a time when the state was already running a multibillion-dollar deficit in its Medicaid payouts. "I get skeptical of quid-pro-quo narratives," Hammond told me. "This stuff is built into the system, and you can never prove there's a specific trade. But this one was so unusual, it felt like a specific swap."

He went on, "I'm also not in the #CuomoKilledGrandma school. But the nursing-home policy was awful, and the fact that Cuomo is unwilling to admit that it was a mistake is one of the worst things he's done." A spokesperson for the Governor said, "No contribution of any size has any influence on any government decision, period."

In August, Attorney General William Barr announced that the Department of Justice was launching an investigation into nursing-home cases in four states, all of them with Democratic governors. Cuomo again dismissed the inquiry as a political sham. "Mr. Barr cannot spell the word 'justice,' " he said. "He doesn't even feign to be impartial." Partisan hostilities could be either amplifying blunders into sins or disguising sins as blunders.

Early in the pandemic, Cuomo, who has known Trump for almost four decades, tried the chummy approach, in appealing to the White House for supplies and aid. He knew very well that, with Trump, flattery gets you everywhere. But this time it didn't. And, as New York beat back its mortality rate, the Governor's needs shifted, from supplies to money-and from help to blame. For funds, he needed Congress. For blame, he had Trump.

The pandemic cratered New York's already fragile finances. Cuomo is now contending with a budget deficit, over two years, of thirty billion dollars. A state, unlike the U.S., can't just print money. It has to tax, cut, borrow, and beg. For months, Cuomo cajoled Congress for a rescue, on the ground that New York had borne the brunt of the federal government's failure to track the virus. "If we could sue for negligence, we would win in court," Cuomo told me. But the Republicans seemed determined to compound inaction with inaction. Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, the Senate Majority Leader, dismissed such support for local and state governments as "blue state bailouts" and suggested that they consider bankruptcy instead. Cuomo called this "one of the saddest, really dumb comments of all time," and noted, repeatedly, that Kentucky receives tens of billions more from Washington each year than it contributes, whereas New York gives tens of billions more. "That's the bailout!" he fumed. While such jawboning did nothing to alter the politics on Capitol Hill or shake loose badly needed funds, it was galvanizing, at least, for many blue staters, facing budgetary Armageddon and the quadrennial Electoral College handicap, to see someone shake a fist. For years, many Democrats had pined for a tough guy of their own. Cuomo has avoided talking specifics, so as not to negotiate against himself: "I don't think you can take any dramatic action until Election Day." If Trump wins and the Senate remains in G.O.P. hands, he told me, "that is a long four years, my friend. These deficits are so large that there is no constructive way to close them."

At home, Cuomo's emphasis on Washington's indifference deflected blame for prior budget mismanagement, and for the pain of the Covid closures. Restaurants, gyms, summer camps, schools: citizens chafed as their businesses and lives withered in quarantine. Cuomo, determined to keep the Covid numbers low, stayed strict. With reports of revellers congregating outside bars, Cuomo started going after liquor licenses, dusting off an old statute requiring bars to also serve food-real food, not just peanuts or chips. Who knew? The State Liquor Authority, with local law enforcement, began citing and, in hundreds of cases, shutting down bars. "The Drinktator," the Post called Cuomo. As for the schools, he declared that they could open, then left it up to the localities to figure out how: aggregate the power, disperse the responsibility.

Without money from Washington, the pressure on Cuomo to raise taxes and make painful cuts was increasing. By now, he was accusing Trump of "actively trying to kill New York." "I think it's psychological," he said. Trump not only "caused" the virus ("That's a fact!" Cuomo said); he was also to blame for withholding previously earmarked funds for essential New York infrastructure projects, for having imposed the cap on federal deductions for local and state taxes, and for doing nothing to persuade the Senate to do right by the city that made him. Trump had even floated the ludicrous idea of cutting off federal money to Democratic cities, which he called "anarchist jurisdictions."

"This is a war on cities," Cuomo said. "It is an unsustainable position for the federal government. Either this President will figure it out or the next President will figure it out. If the Congress doesn't figure it out, there'll be mayhem in this country, and there will be a different Congress in January." The next day, once again addressing the President's hostility to his erstwhile home town, Cuomo said, "He can't have enough bodyguards to walk through New York City. Forget bodyguards-he better have an army if he thinks he's going to walk down the streets in New York." This you could classify, perhaps, as both opinion and fact.

There has been talk, lately, of New York needing a savior, a hero from the political class. In early September, a coalition of a hundred and fifty business leaders sent a letter to de Blasio, accusing him, in a roundabout way, of neglect and begging him to fix things. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Related, Vornado, JetBlue: the power élite had observed that, as the letter said, "there is widespread anxiety over public safety, cleanliness and other quality of life issues that are contributing to deteriorating conditions in commercial districts and neighborhoods across the five boroughs." The signatories, many of them supporters of Cuomo, had been rounded up by an ally, Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, who told the Times, "It's all a chicken-and-egg problem. Until the people come back, the streets aren't safe. If the streets aren't safe, the people don't come back. So somebody's got to break the egg."

The egg-breaking aspirants, past and present, made for a sad array. Cuomo's predecessor, David Paterson, showed up at a bar in Hell's Kitchen, to perform some covers on guitar accompanied by his teacher, whose flyers-"Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar"-have for decades been ubiquitous all over town. Another former governor, George Pataki, he who'd held the coat, said, on Fox News, "The Mayor is a catastrophe," while Rudy Giuliani, he whose coat had been held, went on CNN to tell Chris Cuomo, referring to either the Governor or the Mayor, or both, "I think what they're doing to this city could be fatal." Giuliani's son, Andrew, an aide to Trump, revealed that he was considering a run for City Hall. Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former mayoral hopeful, resurfaced as the new C.E.O. of a kitchen-countertop company specializing in the use of broken glass. If you listened closely, you could hear the sawing under the floor. Or maybe it was just the sound of New York, arguing with itself, as it went to pieces. ♦
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described a provision that would raise the number of votes needed by a party to remain on ballots in New York.
More on the Coronavirus

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The Governor has been widely praised for his response to COVID. But his critics see a would-be authoritarian obsessed with settling scores. The difference between doing the job and just appearing to do the job is rarely absolute. In the more than eight months since COVID-19 manifested in the United States, our public officials have demonstrated pretty much every gradation.

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Many years ago, N.K. Jemisin, a fantasy and science-fiction author had a dream that shook her. While she was sleeping, she found herself standing in a room with "...a chunk of rock shaped like a volcanic cone shaped smoking mountain. Standing before the rock was a woman filled with so much rage and anger. She was looking down at Jemisin with such anger. Jemisin did not know what caused her anger but she knew she had to move because the woman was about the throw the rock at her. After that, Jemisin awoke in a sweat and wrote down everything she had remembered. Jemisin started to work very hard to understand why she had such a dream.

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The sci-fi writer's inventive, intricate novels have defied convention and sold millions of copies.

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Several years ago, N. K. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating in the distance. "It was a chunk of rock shaped like a volcanic cone-a cone-shaped smoking mountain," she recalled. Standing before the formation was a black woman in her mid-forties, with dreadlocks, who appeared to be holding the volcano aloft with her mind. She was glaring down at Jemisin and radiating anger. Jemisin did not know how she had triggered the woman's fury, but she believed that, if she did not ameliorate it quickly, the woman would hurl the smoldering massif at her.

Jemisin awoke in a sweat and jotted down what she had seen. "I need to know how that person became who she is-a woman so angry that she was willing to move mountains," she told me. "She was angry in a slow burn, with the kind of anger that is righteous, enough to change a planet. That's a person who has been through so much shit that she has been pushed into becoming a leader. That's an M.L.K. I needed to build a world that would explain her."

Jemisin's writing process often begins with dreams: imagery vivid enough to hang on into wakefulness. She does not so much mine them for insight as treat them as portals to hidden worlds. Her tendency is to interrogate what she sees with if/then questions, until her field of vision widens enough for her to glimpse a landscape that can hold a narrative. The inspiration for her début novel, "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" (2010), was a dream vision of two gods. One had dark-as-night hair that contained a starry cosmos of infinite depth; the other, in a child's body, manipulated planets like toys. From these images, Jemisin spun out a four-hundred-page story about an empire that enslaves its deities. The book established her as a prominent new voice.

Jemisin is black, in her mid-forties, and wears her hair in dreadlocks. In her author photo, she gazes sternly at the camera, as if ready for literary combat. In person, she is much warmer, but she likes the picture. Typically, at the center of her fiction, there is a character with coiled strength. Jemisin, who has a degree in psychology, is interested in power and in systems of subjugation. In her books, the oppressed often possess an enormous capacity for agency-a supernatural ability, even, that their oppressors lack-but they exist in a society that has been engineered to hold them down. Eventually, the world is reordered, often with a cataclysm.

The notes that Jemisin jotted down after her dream went into a folder on her computer where she stores "snippets, ideas, random thoughts." Some are drawn from her reading of nonfiction: Jared Diamond's "Collapse," Charles Mann's "1491," Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us." Eventually, she told me, "this fragment pairs up with that fragment, and they form a Voltron, and become a story." (Voltron is an anime "super robot" that emerges when other machines combine-an artifact of eighties television that Jemisin enjoyed as a girl.)

Another file in the folder was from 2009, when Jemisin attended a NASA-funded workshop, called Launchpad, where participants discussed what Earth might be like if it lost its moon. Some speculated that our planet's axis would tilt wildly, triggering haphazard ice ages, and that its core might lose its stability, causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The fragments in Jemisin's folder began to pair up. She imagined a planet that had lost its moon and become seismically hyperactive. Such a place, she reasoned, could sustain life, but just barely; mass extinctions would be common. If the woman in her dream inhabited that planet, she wondered, then what would her civilization look like?

J. R. R. Tolkien once argued that the creation of an imaginary world was the highest form of artistic expression, but that it was also easily undervalued. If it is done well, much of the labor remains off the page. Before Tolkien wrote "The Lord of the Rings," he invented a mythology, a history, and even languages for Middle-earth; he explained to a friend, "I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities." It annoyed him that people "stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art." He wrote about elves. He wanted to be taken seriously, too.

Jemisin has no interest in pseudo-medieval Europe, but Tolkien would have recognized her rigor. To get a firsthand feel for volcanoes, she flew to Hawaii to smell sulfur and ash. To learn how people prepared for environmental stress, she researched end-of-days survivalists, though she stopped short of going into the wilderness to meet them. ("I wasn't stupid," she told me.)

As the idea of an ever-shattering planet developed in her imagination, Jemisin drew a map of a Pangaea-like supercontinent, which she wryly called the Stillness. She reasoned that its wealth would be concentrated in an urban center near the equator, at a geological spot that seemed stable, based on fault lines that she had sketched out. She decided arbitrarily that the woman in her dream lived in the volatile hinterlands-and then began to treat that decision like a discovered fact. "I'm, like, O.K., why isn't she working to stabilize this powerful, wealthy part of society?" Jemisin told me. "Well, she must have at one point been part of that life, but somehow got away." Gradually, the contours of a story emerged. "You let intuition do whatever it is going to do," she said. "I had a sentence in mind: 'Let's start with the end of the world.' That can mean the literal end of the world, it can mean the end of a civilization, or it can mean grief. That was the point where I decided that her son had died." The grief she understood. Jemisin's mother had become ill, and would not survive the decade.

After immersing herself in the Stillness for four years, Jemisin finished "The Fifth Season." The story defied easy literary categorization. It was sweeping but intimate, multilayered but simply told. It could be read as an environmental parable, or as a study of repression, or as a meditation on race, or as a mother's post-apocalyptic quest. Jemisin wove in magical elements, but she systematized them so thoroughly that they felt like scientific principles-laws of an alternative nature. She evoked advanced technology, but made it so esoteric that it seemed like magic. (Most of her imagined machines were made of crystal. At some point, the inhabitants of the Stillness eschewed metallurgy; the word "rust" even became an expletive.)

She took stylistic chances, too. "The Fifth Season" at first appears to weave together the stories of three people, but late in the book Jemisin reveals that she has merely shattered her protagonist's story into three narratives, a formal echo of her broken world. The protagonist is an "orogene"-a term that Jemisin derived from scientific nomenclature for a mountain-forming process-who can channel energies that quell or create earthquakes, with varying degrees of control. For the dominant civilization, which enslaves the orogenes-for use as weaponry or as geological instruments-they are a reviled but necessary underclass. The protagonist's primary narrative blisters with rage and trauma. Jemisin wrote it in the second person, the voice belonging to a narrator who is not revealed until a later book. "I tried her voice in different forms," she told me. "I couldn't get too close to her-she was angry with me in the dream, she's not going to talk to me. That doesn't make sense, I know."

In a different writer's hands, the use of the second person might have registered as a gimmick, but Jemisin made the device integral to the plot, and deployed it with personality-a voice with quirks and, occasionally, a sense of immediacy. ("Look, the ash clouds are spreading already.") "The Fifth Season" attracted wide acclaim for its inventiveness, world-building, and intricate assembly. In 2016, it won a Hugo Award for Best Novel-a first for a black writer. The following year, a sequel, "The Obelisk Gate," won again. In 2018, the final book in what became the "Broken Earth" trilogy, "The Stone Sky," won, too. No author in the history of the genre had achieved that recognition. The three books sold more than two million copies worldwide. The Times called them "extraordinary." John Scalzi, the former president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, heralded Jemisin as "arguably the most important speculative writer of her generation."

Jemisin lives in a duplex apartment in Brooklyn, with an office that looks out onto a garden, which she cares for meticulously. For years, she was an urban literary nomad, working wherever she could park herself with a laptop. "I don't go to coffee shops anymore," she told me in her office, late last year. "The best-seller life has made it possible to have this." She sat at a long desk against the wall; at one end was a cluster of awards. The room also contained a plush Darth Vader and a doll of Commander Uhura, from "Star Trek." Beside a chair was a chrome lamp resembling a flying saucer; Jemisin flipped a switch, and a band of tiny red lights on the saucer glowed. She had bought it on a trip upstate. "I saw that lamp, I needed that lamp," she said. "It's corny as hell, and it doesn't light up shit. It's just for the mood, but sometimes when I am writing I want to be in that mood and summon the energies."

Jemisin immediately followed the "Broken Earth" trilogy with two other books. In 2018, she released "How Long 'til Black Future Month?," a collection of short stories. She also completed her next novel, "The City We Became," the first installment of another trilogy, which is due out this March. Submitting the novel to her editor, a few hours before midnight on New Year's Eve, she felt depleted; for more than a decade, she had been writing nearly a book a year. She resolved to take 2019 off, but she couldn't stay idle. She sketched out the new trilogy's second installment, while also navigating calls from Hollywood, speaking engagements, side gigs. Marvel Comics invited her to guest-write a series-an offer she declined, because she had already agreed with DC Comics to create a "Green Lantern" spinoff. As we sat in her office, the first issue of her comic was slated for release in a few weeks. "This is an unusual year for me," she said. "Usually, I have only one thing to concentrate on."

Above her desk she had hung family photos: glimpses of a truncated generational story. "Like most black Americans descended from slaves, it basically stops," she told me. She once wrote about this loss-not merely the erasure of a backstory but also the absence of all that a person builds upon it; as she put it, the "strange emptiness to life without myths." She had considered pursuing genealogy, "the search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche." But ultimately she decided that she had no interest in what the records might say. "They'll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I'm going. To figure that out, I make shit up."

Jemisin pointed to a photo of her father, Noah, as a young man-thin, confident, smiling-and spoke about his grandmother, a woman people called Muh Dear: "She basically made her living doing fortunes-magic, for lack of a better term." In a story that Jemisin included in "How Long 'til Black Future Month?," she envisioned Muh Dear as a shaman named Emmaline, facing down a malevolent fairy, the White Lady, who wants to take away her daughter. ("The White Lady was nearly all surface; that was the nature of her kind. That was how this meeting would go, then: an appearance of grace and gentility, covering the substance of battle.") As the two spar, the White Lady draws Emmaline into a roiling dreamscape, in which it is possible to glimpse America's future: the upheavals of the civil-rights movement; the progress and the tensions that followed. Amid the whorl of imagery, Emmaline offers to sacrifice herself in place of her child if her family is protected. The fairy accepts the gesture: "The White Lady closed the dream around Emmaline, and whisked her away."

For Muh Dear's real grandchildren, growing up in mid-century Alabama, there was no shortage of dangers. Jemisin's father was born in Birmingham, where the commissioner of public safety allowed the Ku Klux Klan to attack the Freedom Riders when their Greyhound buses arrived, in 1961. As Jemisin once recalled, her father spent part of his youth "dodging dogs and fire hoses, turned on him and other Civil Rights protestors."

Jemisin's parents met as students at Alabama State University, and married shortly after graduating. Noah wanted to devote his life to painting, so he applied to a graduate program at the University of Iowa, and the two moved to Iowa City. Jemisin's mother, Janice, pursued a degree in psychology, specializing in psychometrics; she later administered I.Q. tests.

When Jemisin was born, in Iowa, her parents named her Nora Keita. After her first birthday, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Noah strove to establish himself. For income, he taught art, and Janice taught grade-school science. (He now has a painting in the Met, an abstract called "Black Valhalla.") "We were in a beautiful little brownstone," Jemisin recalled. "We had the ground floor and the floor above. There was a gorgeous old mahogany bannister. There were grapevines in the back yard, and a squirrel named Greedy who would come seeking pecans that my grandmother would send me from her tree in Alabama."

When Jemisin was five, her parents divorced, and her mother moved to Mobile. Jemisin went with her, and hated it: the regimentation of Southern society, the quasi-suburban alienation, the racism. While she was in the fourth grade, the Klan burned a cross on the Mobile courthouse lawn, then murdered a black teen-ager named Michael Donald as he walked home from the store. They hanged his body from a tree in a mixed-race neighborhood: a lynching, in the nineteen-eighties. "Not too far from my grandmother's place, actually," Jemisin told me. In a speech in 2013, she recalled its impact on her family: "I remember my grandmother sitting in her den with a shotgun across her knees while I cracked pecans at her feet. I was maybe nine years old, had no idea what was going on. She told me the gun was just an old replica-she'd brought it out to clean it. I said, 'O.K., Grandma,' and asked whether she'd make me a pie when I was done."

Jemisin mastered an outsider's art of adaptation. Shifting between Alabama and New York, where she spent summers with her father, she adjusted to the jarring differences across the Mason-Dixon Line, both social and personal-living in one home shaped by an artist and another by a standardized-test giver. Childhood, she told me, was "a schizoid experience." In Mobile, she shifted across racial divisions, too, attending a predominantly white school that had been forced to desegregate. "I had to get up at o-dark-thirty to ride the bus for an hour," she recalled. To exchange comic books with her white friends, she met them clandestinely behind a building.

Science fiction appealed to her at a young age. Little about her real life was cohesive, but imagined worlds could be complete, self-contained, and bound by logic. "I saw 'Star Wars' when it came out, because I was a creepy, obsessed space child," she told me. Later, she mined her local library for science-fiction novels; she covered the books in paper so that she could read them in class. Jemisin also began to write, constantly. Her cousin, W. Kamau Bell, who is now a comedian with a show on CNN, told me, "I wanted to be a comic-book artist, so we would spend our days in the front of my grandmother's house, laying in the sun, writing, drawing, and talking. We bonded over the fact that we felt like aliens in Mobile."

Jemisin's mother did not understand her daughter's interest in otherworldly fantasies, or her non-stop writing. But her father did. In Brooklyn, she stayed up late with him to watch "Star Trek" and "The Twilight Zone." Noah Jemisin encouraged his daughter to explore the city, and also to create. "Dad and I would pass time, whole afternoons, not speaking to each other," she told me. "He would be working on a painting in his studio. I would be sitting on the couch, writing." In the evenings, they went on walks. "He was my first real editor," she said. "One of my favorite memories is us walking across the Williamsburg Bridge. This was before it got renovated. It had fucking holes in it. You had to be careful or you would lose a foot! I would talk over story ideas and plotlines. He would listen to all of that."

One of her first childhood stories was a fable about a fantastical prehuman era in which animals built an advanced civilization, but then destroyed it-along with their ability to speak-in a war. She told me, "I actually published that, by putting two pieces of cardboard around it, wrapping them in paper, and binding it with yarn."

On its surface, all science fiction is about change-technological, scientific, social-that brings human beings into contact with the unknown or forces a reassessment of the familiar. Nonetheless, the genre remains inextricably tied to the everyday-the biases and limitations of the writer's time. Jules Verne may have imagined the Nautilus as a futuristic steampunk submarine, but his book expresses a nineteenth-century vision, in which the natural world existed to be dominated by men.

"How Long 'til Black Future Month?" takes its name from an essay that Jemisin wrote in 2013. It begins with two memories of watching "The Jetsons": first as a girl, excitedly taking it all in, and then as an adult. "I notice something: there's nobody even slightly brown in the Jetsons' world," she wrote. "This is supposed to be the real world's future, right? Albeit in silly, humorous form. Thing is, not-white people make up most of the world's population, now as well as back in the Sixties when the show was created. So what happened to all those people, in the minds of this show's creators? Are they down beneath the clouds, where the Jetsons never go? Was there an apocalypse, or maybe a pogrom? Was there a memo?"

"The Jetsons" was far from the worst example of racial exclusion. Until 2015, despite years of protest, the World Fantasy Award was a bust of H. P. Lovecraft, a white supremacist who believed that blacks were subhuman and who openly supported Hitler. Even Tolkien's masterwork, "The Lord of the Rings," was complicated by race. He had written his orcs to be revolting, devolved, violent agents of evil. In a letter, he explained his thinking: "They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

In Mobile's public library, Jemisin read voraciously, but she almost never encountered characters who credibly represented someone like her. Black writers have been engaged in speculative fiction since at least the nineteenth century, but when Jemisin first immersed herself in the genre their work was either difficult to locate or difficult to recognize. In early pulp science fiction, it was common for writers to sell their stories using pseudonyms, making their true identities almost impossible to discern. Those few novelists who were openly recognized as black-in the early eighties, there were only four of any prominence-were often encouraged to avoid race in their work.

In 1967, a few months after the notable African-American writer Samuel Delany won a Nebula Award, he wrote to Analog magazine, seeking to serialize a daring, experimental space opera he had written, called "Nova." Analog passed. As an editor explained, Delany's protagonist was half Senegalese, and white sci-fi readers would be unable to relate. "It was all handled as though I'd happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket," Delany later recalled, in an essay on racism in science fiction. To be a black author in the genre, he noted, meant navigating paradoxical demands: editors expected his work to carry no trace of his identity, but, no matter what he put on the page, they would inevitably view it as "African-American science fiction."

"Nova," later published as a book, proved to be highly influential-a progenitor of the cyberpunk movement. Delany recalled that he was frequently invited to speak on panels with Octavia Butler, the only other black author who had achieved his kind of visibility, even though their work was very different. She, too, had to navigate the paradox. "When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read," she told the Times before her death, in 2006. "I wrote myself in."

This simple goal was surprisingly hard to communicate. Just before winning a Nebula for her tenth novel, Butler sat for an interview with Charlie Rose, who asked, "Are you trying to create a new black mythology?"

"No," she said. "I am telling stories that interest me." She spoke a little about what that meant, but Rose persisted: "What, then, is central to what you want to say about race?"

She replied, with a dismissive sting, "Do I want to say something central about race aside from 'Hey, we're here'?" She recalled a panel she had been on, in 1979, with another writer. "He thought that it wasn't really necessary to have black characters in science fiction because you could always make any racial statement you needed to make by way of extraterrestrials," she told Rose. "If he was trying to start trouble he certainly succeeded." Butler later wrote a withering response to the writer's comment, in Transmission magazine: "Science fiction reaches into the future, the past, the human mind. It reaches out to other worlds and into other dimensions. Is it really so limited, then, that it cannot reach into the lives of ordinary everyday humans who happen not to be white?"

The essay was powerful, its impact negligible. My own copy of Butler's novel "Dawn"-a brilliant, eerie, thought-provoking book-is a paperback from 1988. The cover depicts a woman resembling Sigourney Weaver in "Alien," even though the text clearly (but lightly) indicates that the protagonist is not white. It contains no author photo, no bio. Jemisin's childhood encounter with "Dawn" was the same edition. Reading it, she had no idea that Butler was black.

Hudson Yards was crawling with superheroes and villains and oddballs: people dressed like Storm Troopers, like Batman, like Godzilla, like Care Bears. It was the weekend of New York Comic Con, the Mecca of nerd culture that, every year, seems to grow bigger, more commercial, more theatrical in its costume pageantry. One attendee wore a white dress supporting feathered Pegasus wings the size of a small hang glider.

I met Jemisin outside the Javits Center. She was wearing a leather jacket, a black blouse, and jeans, with her hair pulled back. She is often invited to speak about her books at Comic Con, but, as a novelist, she is generally spared the titanic promotional machinery that surrounds the main attractions: the stars hyping Hollywood films, the pavilions hyping triple-A video games, the m.c.s hyping comic-book celebrities. Jemisin, who describes herself as "a supercharged introvert," is just fine with that.

This year, though, there was no avoiding one of the largest hype machines. Her "Green Lantern" spinoff, "Far Sector," was scheduled for release just after the convention. "All right," she said. "I've got to get to the DC publicity area. Where the hell is that?" We passed through metal detectors and into a huge atrium. Surveying the hordes, she said, "I am imagining there is a black hole under Javits sucking all the energy out of the people here." To get through the day, she promised herself an evening of recovery: first relaxing with a Lush bath bomb, then slaughtering some digital foes in Mass Effect 3.

"Far Sector" is set at the edge of the known universe, in a multispecies city-state built on a Dyson sphere-a speculative megastructure, named after Freeman Dyson, who once postulated that hyper-advanced alien civilizations would seek to harness the energy of stars by encasing them in technological shells. The story centers on Sojourner Mullein, an N.Y.P.D. cop turned Lantern, who looks as if she has been cloned from the Afrofuturist pop star Janelle Monáe. Although it is a comic book, the writing carries Jemisin's wry tone, interest in power, and unapologetic use of allegory. The series opens with Mullein surveying a murder scene, while considering an aphorism from "Things Fall Apart," Chinua Achebe's novel of colonialism: "A man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself." It lingers in her mind, but Mullein dismisses it, noting, "I'm the one causing the trouble. Just by existing."

When Jemisin was in her twenties, she believed that a career in writing fantasy was closed to her, because of who she was. Instead, she pursued a graduate degree in psychology, and later took a job as a career counsellor at a college in Springfield, Massachusetts. "God help me," she told me. "Isolated. Also cold as fuck! Nobody told me that, like, lake-effect snows happen in western Massachusetts." To keep herself sane, she kept writing, often anonymous online fan fiction. (She still writes fan fiction, using secret identities that she guards aggressively.) A few years later, she landed a position at Northeastern University, in Boston, but felt no less lost there. In 2002, when she turned thirty, she had a moment of crisis. "I was, like, Oh, God, I am in debt up to my eyeballs, I hate this town, I don't like my boyfriend," she said. "I have got to reorder this. What do I need to do to be happy? O.K., get out of debt, get out of Boston, get into writing-maybe make some money from it, maybe that can help."

Jemisin considered applying to the Clarion writers' workshop, which specializes in science fiction and fantasy; luminaries in the genre teach there. But the workshop lasted six weeks-longer than she could take off from work. Instead, she attended a one-week workshop on Martha's Vineyard. One instructor urged her to write some short stories. Jemisin at first chafed at the idea, but then relented, recognizing that the form's constraints could sharpen her sense of pacing and character. She subscribed to genre magazines to study some examples, then tried her hand.

"How Long 'til Black Future Month?" includes one of her earliest published stories, "Cloud Dragon Skies" (2005), in which an ecological disaster has caused most of humanity to abandon Earth for a ring-shaped space colony, built from crushed asteroids, beyond Mars. "Old foolishness lay at the root of it," notes the narrator, a young woman named Nahautu, one of the few who stay. The planet has rebounded, except for the atmosphere. The toxic chemicals it has absorbed combine to form a new kind of life:

One morning we awoke and the sky was a pale, blushing rose. We began to see intention in the slow, ceaseless movements of the clouds. Instead of floating, they swam spirals in the sky. They gathered in knots, trailing wisps like feet and tails. We felt them watching us.

In just a few pages, Jemisin sketched a scenario filled with ambiguities and philosophical questions. (How is nature defined? What represents progress?) The people on Earth decide to treat the animate clouds as natural-believing that, in a redemptive future, humanity must adapt to its ecosystem, not shape it. But scientists from the space colony try to neutralize the effect, and the sky reacts violently, tearing up the planet. Fleeing Earth in a coffinlike pod, Nahautu travels to the colony, an engineered world that is both better and lesser than the poisoned Earth. She is not fully at home in either place. In her new life, she becomes a storyteller.

DC Comics had a greenroom overlooking the Javits exhibition floor; after Jemisin spoke on a panel at the Comic Con main stage, a publicist ushered her there. Relaxed, she was in a joking mood. "My Twitter is full of bitch," she warned the publicist. Online, Jemisin is an active, quick-witted commentator, lacing her posts-about politics or about the writing life-with zingers and tart observations. In 2015, the Times invited her to write a column about science fiction, called "Otherworldly"; she did so for two years, proving to be a perceptive and at times unsparing critic. In 2017, she described Andy Weir's "The Martian," a surprise hit that inspired a blockbuster film, as "Robinson Crusoe in space," and his next novel, "Artemis," as "a 300-page film pitch that, like its predecessor, will probably be more appealing after it goes to Hollywood." That year, TNT announced that it was going to develop Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" into a series-an ambitious or perhaps foolhardy bid, given the book's narrative complexity and experimental style.

The DC publicist asked Jemisin, "Do you prefer to be called Nora or N.K.?" She laughed and said, "Nora is fine. Mom called me N.K. when I was in trouble as a child, so every time someone says it, I'm, like, 'What? I didn't do it!' "

Jemisin began to abbreviate her name at the start of her writing career, fearing that an association with sci-fi would interfere with her professional work. While she was at Northeastern, she imposed a strict deadline: to produce a novel within a year. Because she had a full-time job, most of the writing had to happen at night, but, she told me, "after work, my brain just couldn't make that shift." Mostly, she found herself mapping out ideas while doing the dishes or playing video games. She wrote every evening before bed, even if she knew most of it would not survive a self-edit the next day.

The novel that resulted was set in a kingdom inspired by ancient Egypt, with a belief system that drew on Eastern and Western religious ideas, as well as the Hippocratic notion of bodily humors. One of Jemisin's invented humors is a form of healing magic tied to dreams. A priestly caste, called Gatherers, harvests it from people whom a goddess judges to be corrupt; the extractive process is deadly, but the system keeps the society in balance. At the book's opening, a skilled Gatherer botches an extraction. In trying to figure out why, he learns that an assassin has been using the process to murder. "I was trying to appeal to traditional fantasy readers," Jemisin said. "It is a bog-standard fantasy quest story."

The book landed her an agent, Lucienne Diver, but no contract. Diver told me, "We got a lot of people saying, 'She's amazing, but I don't know how to fit her into the market.' " She thought that the setting, the story's complexity, the alchemy of Jemisin's various source materials-the very attributes that made her stand out-also made the book hard to position for a first-time author. Devi Pillai, then an editor at Orbit, told me that she had loved the book but thought that it had no clear sales hook. She told Diver, "If she has anything else, I want to be the first to see it."

Jemisin was convinced that the rejections, however politely stated, were code for the same editorial bigotry that Delany had faced in the sixties. (In 2012, after Jemisin had established herself, the book was published, as "The Killing Moon," and nominated for a Nebula.) "I came very close to quitting," she told me. "I had a long dark tea-time of the soul, and basically somewhere in there I realized, People are just that racist. If the only problem is that the book is full of black people-O.K., I got you. I am going to write something full of white people, but it is going to be all about how evil those white people are. 'The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms' was that book. It was me getting mad at science-fiction publishing."

Whatever Jemisin's anger with the industry, she produced a shrewd, philosophically playful page-turner that both reflected and transcended her feelings. She decided to write it in the first person-unusual for epic fantasy, which often leans on the third person to accommodate expositional detours about the imagined world. The story was no less original: it was about a warrior baroness summoned to an insular palace balanced on a pedestal, like an Eero Saarinen tabletop. The baroness is drawn into court intrigues and must solve a family mystery; eventually, she upends the society's power structure, and along the way has interstellar sex with a god. (Jemisin told me that the book could have been marketed as a romance.)

Diver shopped the manuscript, and it inspired an immediate bidding war. Devi Pillai told me, "I was, like, 'Mine!' " By then, Jemisin was working unhappily at a for-profit college in New York. "I was at some stupid-assed retreat, and I kept ducking out to take calls from my agent," she told me. Pillai won the auction, with a six-figure bid that included a commitment for two more books. "I started screaming," Jemisin told me. "People at the retreat were, like, 'Should we call somebody?' "

For the first time, Jemisin could devote herself fully to writing. When Orbit began promoting the book-comparing it to the work of Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin-she created a Web site for herself. "Do big kids squee?" she wrote. " 'Cos I think a squee is appropriate right about now. I can't see how a little squee would hurt. Are we all agreed? 'Kay? Then here goes. ::SQUEE::"

In December, I caught up with Jemisin on the steps of City Hall, where she had come to research the second installment of her new trilogy. Rather than build a fantastical world for it, she decided to use New York, a city that has always seemed a little unreal. As she told me, "Sometimes, when I am walking, the air feels a particular way, or the light comes in at a particular angle, and the moment makes me feel like the city is alive and breathing."

For the new trilogy, she had chosen to make these feelings literal, positing that any city, upon reaching the necessary urban development, could achieve sentience. New York is about to transition when it is invaded by interdimensional aliens seeking to destroy it. The story is part "Ghostbusters," part "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension." Jemisin told me that the project was a chance to relax, "an emotional palate cleanser," but it was also a coded critique of the sci-fi and fantasy genre. The aliens take on Lovecraftian form ("The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale") and are fought off by a multi-ethnic, multi-gendered posse of underdogs-people Lovecraft would have hated.

More than a decade earlier, Octavia Butler had asserted, "Hey, we're here." But, Jemisin told me, "we have to keep saying it." Recent history, she said, had made this evident. In 2009, after a white novelist posted a formula for "writing the other," many people of color in the genre erupted in frustration, triggering a contentious series of online debates, known collectively as RaceFail, that unfolded for more than a year. At a conference, Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-Canadian writer, delivered a speech titled "A Reluctant Ambassador from the Planet of Midnight," in which she tried to explain the explosion of anger to her white colleagues-making clear that Butler's sense of invisibility was still sorely felt. Jemisin told me, "One blog was, like, 'If you're a person of color who is into science fiction, speak up. We're doing a head count of how many of us exist.' And it was a huge number. I had thought we were unicorns. In fact, the post was titled 'The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-in.' "

Amid a reactionary backlash, Jemisin became a target. In 2013, she gave an impassioned speech about race in the genre, noting that a white supremacist had just run for president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Though he lost, he had secured ten per cent of the vote, prompting her to criticize the "great unmeasured mass of enablers" who had been silent. The former candidate, in turn, called her an "ignorant half-savage" in a racist screed. Jemisin told me, "That touched off a whole big foofaraw." Threats of violence poured in. She scrubbed her online presence and began to vary her commute.

Jemisin's successes were caught up in the foofaraw, too. As the cultural divide sharpened, two blocs of conservative writers began interfering with the Hugos, using a loophole to shape the list of nominees; until it was closed, two years later, people protested by selecting "No award" on ballots. "The Fifth Season" won its award just after the loophole was closed. Accepting her third Hugo, Jemisin stood at the lectern, with the rocket-shaped award beside her, and declared, "This is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers, every single mediocre, insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me could not possibly have earned such an honor, and that when they win it's 'meritocracy,' but when we win it's 'identity politics.' " Holding up the award, she added, "I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction."

In Jemisin's forthcoming New York novel, "The City We Became," she borrows from some of her experiences: the aliens induce alt-right trolls to assist them, and the protagonists gird against cyber-harassment. "Places like New York are inherently free-form," Jemisin told me. "If a bunch of fascists try to take over, New York could die." She said that she was curious to explore "the ways in which the city, and the energy of a place like this, would resist that."

In the City Council chambers, where she hoped to place a scene in her next book, Jemisin sat in a balcony and observed the rituals and the moods of Gotham politics. There was a tribute to Pakistan's founding father, and a bill to force real-estate developers to set aside apartments for the homeless. She was especially keen on the way members conferred in side chats-a narrative opportunity. "I see that they are using a modified version of Robert's Rules of Order," she noted.

After three hours, her stamina waned. "This is putting me to sleep," she whispered, and we stepped out into the cold, under a darkening sky. The night before, a snow squall had enveloped the city and then quickly receded, as if on supernatural command. To the north was the Williamsburg Bridge, which in Jemisin's new book is destroyed by an alien creature, "like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism."

The promotional material for "The City We Became" describes it as her most accessible book. "What seems to be happening, and I don't know if I want to resist this, is an effort to push me into the mainstream," Jemisin said. "I am wrestling with, Do I want to let people call me the next Atwood, or whatever? They always want you to be the next such-and-such. But I am still going to write what I am going to write." Crossing Broadway, she mentioned an idea that was unrelentingly sci-fi: people who mutate into spacecraft. "Like werewolves, but spaceships," she said, giggling. "I know, it's corny. I admit that it's corny! But it is an idea that persists in my head, and I keep wanting to explore it." ♦

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The sci-fi writer's inventive, intricate novels have defied convention and sold millions of copies. Several years ago, N. K. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating in the distance.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/david-hammons-follows-his-own-rules in the summer of 2014, a year before the Whitney Museum of American Art reopened to the public in its new, downtown quarters on Gansevoort Street, David Hammons and several other artists were invited to walk through the unfinished galleries. The Whitney curators Scott Rothkopf and Donna de Salvo were planning a sequence of exhibitions that would inaugurate the fifth floor as an open, undivided space, and Hammons was an obvious but impossible candidate: an internationally renowned African-American artist who, during the past four decades, had risen to the summit of the art world by following his own rules, one of which was to turn down invitations from leading museums. Hammons was standing near the big fifth-floor windows that overlooked the Hudson when Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, joined him.

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After a career built on incremental progress, Joe Biden is promising a Presidency of transformational change. The election will test whether his campaign can bring together a divided Party and a beleaguered country.

"Welcome to my mom's house," Joe Biden called from the bottom of the stairs, an instant before his sweep of white hair rose into view.

The former Vice-President of the United States and the Democratic nominee for President reached the second floor of a cottage at the foot of his property in Greenville, Delaware, a wooded, well-to-do suburb of Wilmington. He wore a trim blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a pen tucked between the buttons, and a bright-white N95 mask. It was ninety-nine days to the election. The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic was approaching a hundred and fifty thousand, three times as many lives as America lost in Vietnam; the economy had crumbled faster than at any other time in the nation's history; in Portland, Oregon, federal agents in unmarked uniforms were tear-gassing protesters, whom Donald Trump called "sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators." On Twitter that day, Trump warned that the demonstrators would "destroy our American cities, and worse, if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet of the Left, ever won. Markets would crash and cities would burn."

The man who stands between Americans and four more years of Trump lives with his wife, Jill, on four sloping acres that overlook a small lake. These days, the Biden place feels as solemn and secluded as an abbey. To avoid contagion, Biden's advisers had put me in a carriage house, a hundred yards from the house where the family lives. The cottage, styled in Celtic themes (green shutters, a thistle pattern on the throw pillows), doubles as a command post for the Secret Service, and large men with holstered guns stalked in and out. Biden settled into an armchair across the room from me and splayed his hands, a socially distanced salute. "The docs keep it really tight," he explained.

Later that afternoon, the Bidens were due on Capitol Hill, to pay their respects to the recently deceased John Lewis, of Georgia, a civil-rights icon who endured a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers in Selma, Alabama, before rising to the House of Representatives and becoming known as the "conscience of Congress." It would be a rare excursion. Since the Covid shutdown began, in March, Biden had circulated mostly between his back porch, where he convened fund-raisers on Zoom, a gym upstairs, and the basement rec room, where he sat for TV interviews in front of a bookcase and a folded flag. The campaign apparatus had scattered into the homes of some twenty-three hundred employees. Biden seemed pleased to have company. Before I could ask a question, he explained the origins of the cottage. When his father, Joe, Sr., fell ill, in 2002, Biden renovated the basement of the main house and moved his parents in. "God love him, he lasted for about six months," he said. "I thought my mom would stay." She had other ideas. (Biden's mother, the former Jean Finnegan, plays a formidable role in his recounting of family history. In grammar school, he recalls, a nun mocked him for stuttering, and his mother, a devout Catholic, told her, "If you ever speak to my son like that again, I'll come back and rip that bonnet off your head.")

After Jean became a widow, Biden said, she offered him a proposition: "She said, 'Joey, if you build me a house, I'll move in here.' I said, 'Honey, I don't have the money to build you a house.' She said, 'I know you don't.' She said, 'But I talked to your brothers and sister. Sell my house and build me an apartment.' " For years, Biden, who relied on his government salary, was among the least prosperous members of the United States Senate. (In the two years after he left the Vice-Presidency, the Bidens earned more than fifteen million dollars, from speeches, teaching, and book deals.) Biden renovated an old garage and his mother moved in. "I'd walk in and she'd be in that chair downstairs, facing the fireplace, watching television," he said. "There'd always be a caregiver on the stool, and she'd be hearing her confession."

Joe Biden has been a "public man," as he puts it-holding office, giving interviews, dispensing anecdotes-for five decades. I last interviewed him, mostly about foreign affairs, in 2014, when he was in the White House and Donald Trump was hosting Season 14 of "The Apprentice." Biden is seventy-seven years old, and he looks thinner than he did six years ago, but not markedly so. His verbiage is as meandering as ever. James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, once wrote that the typical Biden conversation originated in "Direction A" before "heading in Direction Z." (In December, Biden's campaign released a doctor's summary of his medical records, which pronounced him a "healthy, vigorous" man of his age.)

The implications of age, in one form or another, hover over the Presidential race. Trump took office as the oldest President in history; he is now seventy-four. To deflect questions about his mental acuity, he and his allies present Biden as senile, a theme that dominates right-wing TV and Twitter. Biden sees little of it; he doesn't look at social media. If there is something big, his staff will include a tweet in the morning roundup of news that he reads on his phone. But, he said, "I don't look at a lot of the comments. I spend the time trying to focus on the trouble people are in right now."

By the end of August, ten weeks before the election, Biden led Trump by an average of at least eight percentage points. But no earthly inhabitant expected an ordinary end to the campaign. Some polls showed the race tightening, and Trump and the G.O.P. held a persistent advantage in perceptions of their handling of the economy. "I feel good about where we are," Biden said. "But I know that it's going to get really, really ugly." As Trump disputed the legitimacy of mail-in voting, his Postmaster General was brazenly cutting service in ways that could prevent ballots from being counted. Trump's campaign was trying to deter Black voters, running commercials claiming that, as one put it, Biden had "destroyed millions of Black lives"; Republican operatives were helping Kanye West, the pro-Trump hip-hop star, get on the ballot in multiple states. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence warned that, as in 2016, Russians were working to damage Trump's opponent, this time with phone recordings edited to support the canard that Biden had used the Vice-Presidency to help his son Hunter make money in Ukraine.

For a front-runner, Biden was hardly sanguine. "I am worried about them screwing around with the election outcome," he said. "When the hell have you heard a President say, 'I'm not sure I'll accept the outcome'?"

The trials of 2020 have dismantled some of the most basic stories we Americans tell ourselves. The world's richest, most powerful country has botched even rudimentary responses to the pandemic-finding masks, making tests-and some agencies have proved to be so antiquated and starved of resources that they've used fax machines to share data. The White House offered policies that read like mock Kafka; even as people were advised against dining out, it was proposing a corporate tax break on business meals. On Fox News in April, Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law and one of the leaders of the coronavirus response, declared the Administration's effort "a great success story." Since then, at least a hundred and ten thousand more people have died. And, in the midst of the pandemic, the death of George Floyd under a policeman's knee opened a second epochal turn in American history-a reckoning with the entrenched hierarchy of power, which Isabel Wilkerson, in her new book, " Caste," calls "the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats."

Biden believes that Trump's failures of leadership, particularly in the pandemic, have become clear even to steadfast Republican advocates. "Everybody knows, even people supporting him: This is all about his self-interest. It's all about him," he told me. "It has had profound impacts on people's ability to live their life." Still, it might not suffice to change voters' minds. When Biden characterizes Trump's supporters, they are not duped or culpable or deplorable. "They think that they will be materially better off if he's President," he said. "He has gotten through, I think, to some degree-to about forty per cent-saying, 'The Democrats are socialists. They're here to take away everything you have.' "

Republicans have long accused Democrats of plotting to smuggle socialism into the United States. But levelling that charge against Biden, whose career has been distinguished mostly by careful centrism, is an awkward task. Biden entered the Democratic primaries with a narrow goal: to end the Trump Presidency. Most Americans, he argued, did not want a revolution. At an early fund-raiser in New York, he promised not to "demonize" the rich and said that "nothing would fundamentally change." (Online, people circulated mock campaign posters, in the color-block style of Obama's "Hope" picture, with the slogan "Nothing Would Fundamentally Change.") But, by the time Biden effectively clinched the nomination, in March, he had begun to describe his candidacy as a bid for systemic change on the scale of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. According to a senior aide to Bernie Sanders, Biden told Sanders, in a phone call about a possible endorsement, "I want to be the most progressive President since F.D.R."

That evolution has confounded critics on all sides. Biden was simultaneously accused of being a socialist puppet and a neoliberal shill. To his detractors on the left-especially younger, highly educated, more ideological Democrats who are active online-Biden was a creature of the ancien régime and a cheerleader of the national-security state, with such timid appetites for change that, when he won on Super Tuesday, the price of health-care stocks went up. Liberals were dismayed that the most diverse Presidential field in history had yielded a white man in his eighth decade. It was as if a waiter had returned from the kitchen with news that the specials were gone, and all that was left was oatmeal. (Of course, they always had the option of more rat poison.)

Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told me, "People said, 'Oh, this man's a hack.' He's not an ideological person, and ideology clearly matters to us. He was running a retrograde candidacy during the primary. It was all about going back to the track we were on with the Obama years." Mitchell, who is also a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, said that Biden's change of tone caught the attention of progressives: "He's recognizing that this might be a Rooseveltian moment. He's not all the way there-nobody thinks Joe Biden is a progressive star-but he can be a product of either your most cynical thinking or a product of your most optimistic thinking."

In a recent interview, I asked Barack Obama how he interprets Biden's swerve to the left. "If you look at Joe Biden's goals and Bernie Sanders's goals, they're not that different, from a forty-thousand-foot level," he argued. "They both want to make sure everybody has health care. They want to make sure everybody can get a job that pays a living wage. They want to make sure every child gets a good education." The question was one of tactics, Obama suggested. "A lot of times, the issue has to do with 'How do we go about that, and what are the coalitions we need?' " he said. "What I think the moment has done is to change some of those calculations, not because necessarily Joe's changed but because circumstances have changed."

The tensions afflicting the Democratic Party reflect a clash between liberal meliorism-the "long view" politics of Obama and Biden-and the impatient movement that Sanders calls a "revolution." The two factions claim competing virtues: one emphasizes realism, coalition-building, and practical politics, and the other the inescapable evidence that "reform" has failed to confront pervasive inequalities, the cruelties of American health care and incarceration, and ecological catastrophe.

The division is as much generational as it is ideological. Young Americans have been reared on fiascoes-the invasion of Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis -and have come to blame that record partly on gerontocracy. The median American is thirty-eight years old. The median U.S. senator is sixty-five. The current Congress is among the oldest in history. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is seventy-eight; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is eighty. The difference in age often underlies a profound difference in world view. In the words of Patrick Fisher, a Seton Hall professor who specializes in the political dynamics of age, "Demographically, politically, economically, socially and technologically, the generations are more different from each other now than at any time in living memory."

Millennials constitute the largest generation in America today, and the most diverse in the nation's history. They entered the job market during the worst recession since the nineteen-thirties. People under twenty-five have faced unemployment rates more than double those of other age groups. By 2012, a record number of adults between eighteen and thirty-one were living with their parents. In the twenty-tens, as Trumpism was germinating on the right, a rival political movement was growing on the left, driven by young people. Many had put their hopes in Obama, and concluded that if he could not marshal political parties to act then nobody could. Between 2013 and 2017, the median age of members of the Democratic Socialists of America dropped from sixty-eight to thirty-three. Many others expressed a desire for a socialism that was closer to the New Deal. In 2019, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen-ager who inspired a global climate strike, told the United Nations, "Change is coming, whether you like it or not."

When I asked Obama about the tensions in the Party, he cast them as features of "the traditional Democratic idea." He said, "You have a big-tent party. And that means that you tolerate, listen to, and embrace folks who are different than you, and try to get them in the fold. And so you work with not just liberal Democrats, but you work with conservative Democrats-and you are willing to compromise on issues." That was a gentle jab at Democrats who see compromise as a failing. In comments last year, Obama bemoaned the emergence of a "circular firing squad" in the Party. "This idea of purity, and you're never compromised, and you're always politically woke, and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly," he said.

Biden has expressed frustration with young people's tepid participation in elections. Last year, he griped that, as Trump won in 2016, "they sat home, didn't get involved." Yet, when we spoke recently, he took pains to sound more conciliatory. "This generation has really been screwed," he said. "These were really the most open, the least prejudiced, the brightest, the best-educated generation in American history. And what's happening? They end up with 9/11, they end up with a war, they end up with the Great Recession, and then they end up with this. This generation deserves help in the middle of this crisis."

In the spring, Biden began describing himself as a "transition candidate," explaining, "We have not given a bench to younger people in the Party, the opportunity to have the focus and be in focus for the rest of the country. There's an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people." Ben Rhodes, an adviser to Obama in the White House, said, "It's actually a really powerful idea. It says, 'I'm a seventy-seven-year-old white man, who was a senator for thirty years, and I understand both those limitations and the nature of this country.' Because, no matter what he does, he cannot completely understand the frustration of people in the streets. That's not a criticism. It's just a reality." A senior Obama Administration official observed that Biden's acknowledgment also contained a subtler message: "This country needs to just chill the fuck out and have a boring President."

To Varshini Prakash, a twenty-seven-year-old co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, an organization that presses for action on climate change, Biden recognized the urgency of showing more than rhetorical interest in the young left. "You have a Presidential candidate who essentially staked his career on advocating incremental solutions," she told me. "Then he finds himself at this moment where people are fed up with much of the status quo he represents-an economic system that has reigned supreme for forty years, that he was part of advocating for, but also health, climate, gun violence, immigration. All of these have reached a fever pitch. I think COVID-19 was the moment that pushed it over the edge, where he recognized if he doesn't have a way to meet his incrementalism with the level of transformative change that people are crying out for, he's going to be in deep trouble."

For the ride to Lewis's memorial, Biden boarded an armored black S.U.V. He had changed from campaign-from-home attire into mourning clothes-a crisp white shirt, dark suit and tie, and black mask. At the Capitol Rotunda, he and Jill were met by Nancy Pelosi, whom they hadn't seen since the lockdowns began. They huddled in conversation, and then the Bidens approached Lewis's flag-draped casket, which rested on the spot where Abraham Lincoln lay in state, a century and a half ago. Like others, Biden had challenged Republicans to honor Lewis by restoring the Voting Rights Act-to "protect the sacred right to vote that he was willing to die for," as Biden put it. The law had served as a check on racial discrimination at the polls from 1965 to 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled that conditions no longer required it. Since then, Republicans in many states have expanded efforts to bar voters through specious requirements; in the Senate, McConnell has blocked bills seeking to restore the act.

In the preceding days, Lewis's casket had retraced an arc of the Black freedom struggle, beginning in his home town of Troy, Alabama, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and stopping at the newly christened Black Lives Matter Plaza, near the White House. At the Capitol, Biden laid his hand on the casket and made the sign of the cross.

Trump, for his part, had skipped the memorial. Lewis once declared that he was not a "legitimate President," to which Trump responded, in an unsubtle slur, that Lewis's congressional district was "crime infested." Under pressure to say something, Trump had tweeted, on the way back from golf, that he was saddened, and that "Melania and I send our prayers to he and his family."

In the Presidential race, the upheavals of 2020 have afforded Trump abundant opportunities to look racist and inept, while sparing Biden, a famously loose-lipped campaigner, the risks of slogging through a full schedule. His aides disputed suggestions that they have been purposely allowing Trump to hog the spotlight, but, in May, Biden said frankly, "The more he talks, the better off I am."

Reticence has never been Biden's default mode. Even in Washington, the windbag Mecca, he distinguished himself. When Obama, newly elected to the Senate, heard Biden hold forth in a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee, he passed an aide a three-word note: "Shoot. Me. Now." A former longtime staffer recalled that he learned to flex his knees during the boss's speeches to avoid fainting. Biden knows his reputation and sometimes jokes about it. When his microphone once malfunctioned during a television interview, he said, "They do this to me at the White House all the time."

Biden's conspicuous appetite for human connection was likely a big factor in his primary victory. Pete Buttigieg, one of his opponents, observed Biden backstage before a debate. "Some candidates would be talking to each other," he told me. "Some candidates would be talking almost to themselves." But Biden was kibbitzing with the stagehands or trying to buck up the newcomer candidates. "I think any human being who's around is somebody that he's equally happy to engage and talk to and listen to," Buttigieg said.

Biden vacillates between embracing the image of a kindly grandfather and bridling at it. When, in 2015, the late-night host Stephen Colbert referred to him on the air as a "nice old man," Biden called him the next day, Colbert told me: "He goes, 'Listen, buddy, you call me a nice old man one more time and I will personally come down there and kick your ass.' I laughed, and he laughed. I said, 'Don't worry. I won't call you a nice old man, because clearly you're not that nice.' "

In truth, Biden's effusiveness has always disguised a prickly side. Among staff, he is known for giving support to talented people without connections, but he can also be curt and demanding, leaving the menial work of fund-raising to others. He sometimes lavishes more gratitude on strangers who want selfies than on aides who have spent years keeping him in office. Jeff Connaughton, a disenchanted former aide, once called Biden an "egomaniacal autocrat." But Connaughton, who became a lobbyist, also admired Biden's contempt for the corrupting glad-handing of Washington. "Biden never lifted a finger for me or for one of my clients," he wrote, in his book, "The Payoff." "Unlike most of Congress, he hardly ever schmoozed with the Permanent Class. He did the best he could to stay as far away from it as possible."

For all his longevity in Washington, Biden has never quite belonged to the technocratic élite. To the dominant Democrats-the Clinton and Obama circles-he was too mawkish with the Scranton Joe routine, too transparent in his ambition. Biden is the first Democratic nominee without an Ivy League degree since Walter Mondale, in 1984. In a milieu of Rhodes Scholars and former professors, he is thin-skinned about condescension, real and imagined. When Obama chose him as his running mate, he said, "I want your point of view, Joe. I just want it in ten-minute increments, not sixty-minute increments." Biden chafed, telling David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, "I still think I'd be the best President." But, after a year of observing Obama, Biden told Axelrod that he had been mistaken: "The right guy won, and I'm just really proud to be associated with him."

Biden's insecurities fed a certain openness and vulnerability. Even after decades in national office, he talked to anyone in reach, partly because he was trawling for what others knew and he did not. The senior Obama Administration official, who periodically briefed Biden, recalled, "He would talk for ninety per cent of the conversation. And yet he always picked something up. At the end, we'd get up and walk out, and he'd clap me on the back: 'Great talk.' And I'd be a bit dazed." The official added, "So the question is which Joe Biden governs: The one that is sincerely open and searching for the perspectives that will help him be more effective? Or the Joe Biden that will talk at you because he thinks he has enough words and expertise to muscle through any situation?"

In the usual telling, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is a product of the Silent Generation, the cohort of cautious Americans born between the Great Depression and the end of the Second World War, who were too young to have fought overseas and too old to lead the counterculture. To be born in America in 1942 as a white heterosexual male was, generally speaking, to win a cosmic lottery. Because of low birth rates during the Depression and the war, the generation was exceptionally small-the first in American history to be smaller than the one before it. Its members enjoyed more attention and resources from their parents, smaller class sizes, and high rates of college admission. The New Deal and the G.I. Bill gave them benefits, loans, and federal work programs, which thrust millions of white Americans into the middle class. The sociologist Elwood Carlson, assessing their fortunes in his book " The Lucky Few," described an age when American companies expanded workforces, built pensions, and distributed stock-a combination that produced "the financially luckiest generation of the twentieth century."

Their advantages shaped their ideas about government, money, race, and opportunity. They were a homogeneous lot; nearly nine out of ten were white and born in the United States. They tended, as Carlson put it, to "view their successes in life as their own achievements, rather than thinking in terms of the social context that made their success possible." In politics, their right wing included "the most conservative Republicans of any generation in the twentieth century."

Biden fit the mold in some respects and defied it in others. The eldest of four siblings, he was ten when his father, out of a job, moved the family to Delaware, where he cleaned boilers and sold used cars. Joe was a middling but popular student at Archmere Academy, a private day school; to defray his tuition, he worked on a grounds crew. While at the University of Delaware, he played football and worked one summer as a lifeguard at a public pool, where he came to know young Black men who lived in a nearby housing project. Brett Gadsden, a historian at Northwestern University who grew up near Wilmington and has written about its racial politics, describes the city as suspended between North and South-closer to New York City than to Raleigh, but still so segregated that African diplomats, driving through on the way to Washington, were sometimes denied service at rest stops. "There's probably a metaphorical lesson in the fact that Biden hails from a place that has this mythical reputation as a middle-ground state," Gadsden told me. "It's emblematic of a kind of imagined center."

Biden played bit parts in protests against segregation, including walking out of a Wilmington diner that refused to serve a Black classmate in 1961 and picketing the segregated Rialto movie theatre the following year. Later, he sometimes exaggerated his role ("I marched"), but in 2013, during a ceremony commemorating the march in Selma, Biden expressed remorse that he had not done more. "I was involved in my state, in a small way, which was still fighting the lingering vestiges of Jim Crow," Biden told the audience, "but I regret and, although it's not part of what I'm supposed to say, apologize. It took me forty-eight years to get here. I should've been here."

He attended, barely, Syracuse University's law school, where he had to repeat a course because he failed to properly footnote a paper in his first year. (He claimed to have skipped so many classes that he didn't know the rules.) He met Neilia Hunter, an English major, and, in the solemn prose of his memoir, " Promises to Keep," "I fell ass over tin cup in love." They married, Biden became a public defender, and, in 1972, after a short stint on a county council, he made an audacious run for the U.S. Senate. He was an underdog, polling thirty points behind J. Caleb Boggs, a low-energy incumbent. Biden, twenty-nine years old, played up his youth, campaigning with his photogenic family and publishing ads with the tagline "He understands what's happening today." The Wilmington Evening Journal observed that voters his age "get that 'new hero' look when Biden raps about how the old guard has bungled things." He won, by just three thousand votes.

On the afternoon of December 18th, a few weeks after the election, Biden's life came apart. Neilia was behind the wheel of the family's white Chevy station wagon, returning with their three kids from buying a Christmas tree. A tractor-trailer, loaded with corncobs, hit them broadside, leaving the road littered with campaign brochures. Neilia and Naomi, the baby, were killed. Hunter, age two, suffered a head injury; Beau, who was three, was hospitalized for weeks with broken bones.

Biden, who had lived a life of almost preposterous good fortune, thought of suicide. In " What It Takes," the classic study of the minds of politicians, Richard Ben Cramer wrote of Biden's grief about the accident: "All of it, all of them-all they'd done- did not matter. Gone." The press wanted a simple tale of a brave widower, Cramer wrote, but "Joe was so sick of it, he could puke."

Biden considered resigning his Senate seat, but was talked out of it by a Party elder, Mike Mansfield. As a single father, he took to riding the train back to Delaware each night from Washington. Ted Kaufman, one of Biden's closest aides, told me, "Six months after the accident, he would come into the office and he would be in as bad a shape as he was the day of the accident. He had one of Neilia's rings, and he'd put it on his little finger. If he came into the office with that ring on his finger-oh, boy, you knew he was really hurting."

Over the years, Biden learned tactics for coping. He kept a pen and pad beside his bed and rated each day from one to ten, to track his progress. He adopted his father's belief that fate eventually apportions each person, or each family, a balanced ledger of fortune. "The bigger the highs," he liked to say, "the deeper the troughs."

When Biden arrived in the Senate, in 1973, he focussed mainly on staying there. A freshman profile in Washingtonian magazine noted, "Senator Biden doesn't believe issues make much difference in an election-personality and presentation are the key." In office, he was careful to avoid becoming known as a liberal.

National partisan polarization was at a historic low, and voters often divided their loyalties among candidates from multiple parties. In 1974, on the basis of his support of civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam, Biden received a high rating from Americans for Democratic Action, a progressive nonprofit group. He complained about it. "Those ADA ratings get us into so much trouble that a lot of us sit around thinking up ways to vote conservative," he told a reporter. "When it comes to civil rights and civil liberties, I'm a liberal, but that's it. I'm really quite conservative on most other issues. My wife said I was the most socially conservative man she had ever known."

At a community meeting that summer, white suburbanites heckled Biden for his willingness to support court-ordered busing. He became their champion-the Democratic Party's leading anti-busing crusader. Gadsden, of Northwestern, was among the students in the Wilmington area who were bused to a mostly Black school over Biden's opposition. "Personally, I think my classmates and I benefitted greatly from the opportunity," he told me. "It is understandable, in a strict political sense, that Biden opposed busing in the early nineteen-seventies. As a matter of history, however, Biden purposefully chose to ignore a long record of violations against the constitutional rights of Black children." That put him "squarely within the liberal retreat from civil rights that dates back to the busing backlash and runs through President Clinton's politics of triangulation," he said.

As Biden rose in the Senate, he was rebuilding his family. On a blind date, in 1975, he met Jill Jacobs, an aspiring teacher from the Philadelphia suburbs. Jacobs puzzled over the man who was, as she put it, "nothing like the side-burned, bell-bottom-wearing guys I was used to dating." They married in 1977. (In their White House years, Jill Biden taught English at Northern Virginia Community College, becoming the first-known sitting Second Lady to hold a paying job.)

Biden's ambitions and insecurities periodically bedevilled him. Running for President in 1987, he took to quoting the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, then stopped mentioning Kinnock and kept using the words. Reporters linked that plagiarism-an unconscious mistake, he said-with his rejected paper in law school, and, at an event, a voter pressed him about his record. Biden seethed. "I probably have a much higher I.Q. than you do," he said, bragging that he'd received "a full academic scholarship" and "ended up in the top half of my class," neither of which was true. His race was over. (For years, he blamed the loss on opposition research and an overzealous press. But, in 2007, when he was running for President again, he put the excuses aside. "The bottom line was, I made a mistake, and it was born out of my arrogance," he told a reporter. "I didn't deserve to be president.")

In the Senate, Biden accrued a record that, to today's progressives, resembles the counts in an indictment. Overseeing the confirmation hearings of the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, he failed to insure that Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment were fairly and fully examined. He voted for the deregulation of Wall Street, the Defense of Marriage Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the war in Iraq. During the primaries, Elizabeth Warren faulted him for having legislated "on the side of the credit-card companies." Jacobin, the socialist magazine, described him in a headline as "the Forrest Gump of the Democratic Party's Rightward Turn."

Nothing in Biden's record has dogged him more than his role in drafting the 1994 crime bill, the most sweeping legislation of its kind in American history. The bill contributed to the problems of mass incarceration by creating a federal "three strikes" law, encouraging longer jail terms, and granting billions of dollars to states to build more prisons.

At the time, the bill had support from some Democrats on the left, including Bernie Sanders, and from Black political leaders, including Representative James E. Clyburn, of South Carolina. Clyburn had learned through difficult experience that many of his Black constituents were less enthusiastic than white liberals about criminal-justice reform. At a town-hall meeting in 1994, he had voiced skepticism about an initiative for stricter sentences. "I got my head handed to me in that meeting, and everybody in that meeting was Black," Clyburn told me recently. "Crack cocaine was a scourge in the Black communities. They wanted it out of those communities, and they had gotten very tough on drugs. And that's why yours truly, and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, voted for that 1994 crime bill." Clyburn, like Biden, remains proud that the bill included the Violence Against Women Act, a ban on assault weapons, and money for community policing and drug courts. In the fall of 1994, Republicans took control of the House, and Clyburn faults them for changes they instituted. "They kept all the punitive stuff and got rid of the good stuff," he said. Biden has offered similarly qualified regrets. "I know we haven't always gotten things right, but I've always tried," he said last year. "We thought we were told by the experts that crack, you never go back-that it was somehow fundamentally different. It's not different. But it has trapped an entire generation."

In " Locking Up Our Own," a Pulitzer Prize-winning study of criminal justice and racial politics, James Forman, Jr., describes mass incarceration as the consequence of "a series of small decisions, made over time, by a disparate group of actors." At bottom, they could be traced to what Forman calls the "politics of responsibility," a theory of personal discipline, consonant with the individualism of the Silent Generation and the boomers, that was voiced regularly at the top of the Democratic Party. In Bill Clinton's Inaugural Address in 1993, he vowed to "offer more opportunity to all and demand more responsibility from all." In addition to the crime bill, the politics of responsibility inspired welfare reform in 1996, which limited federal benefits for the poor, and bankruptcy legislation in 2005, supported by Biden, which made it harder for Americans to resolve their debts.

When I asked Cornell William Brooks, a Harvard professor, an activist, and a former head of the N.A.A.C.P., to assess Biden's record in Washington, he offered an image reminiscent of Biden's mental ledger of highs and lows. "People love the fact that he faithfully and well served the nation's first African-American President-and hate his leadership on the crime bill. They are troubled by his positions on busing, but they measure him as a historical whole, and by the stature of his sincerity," Brooks said. "The things which are most disquieting about Joe Biden, to the progressive wing of the Democratic base, are the very things that are most disquieting about the Democratic Party."

The Obama Presidency was supposed to mark a new chapter in the generational story of American politics, the triumph of what Stacey Abrams, the voting-rights activist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, calls the "new American majority"-a coalition of "people of color, young people, and moderate to progressive whites." In 2008, Obama won an astonishing two-thirds of millennials.

When Obama asked Biden to join the ticket, some Democrats were baffled. Biden, running as a candidate in that year's primaries, had failed to crack one per cent in the Iowa caucuses. But Obama admired his feisty debate performance, his knowledge of foreign leaders, and his connections in D.C. Biden was also, as Axelrod put it to me, "culturally and geographically well situated": he made Obama more attractive to older working-class Midwestern whites, who might not feel a natural connection to a Black former community organizer. Beneath the raw electoral calculation, Biden and Obama shared a basic belief that Americans craved unity in politics. Running for President, Obama called attention to fraying social bonds. He told an audience in 2008, "I'm talking about an empathy deficit, the inability to recognize ourselves in one another, to understand that we are our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper-and, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a 'single garment of destiny.' "

Biden's vision was less transcendent. "Look," he told me, "I never expect a foreign leader I'm dealing with, or a colleague senator, a congressperson, to voluntarily appear in the second edition of 'Profiles in Courage.' So, you got to think of what is in their interest." And yet Biden's accounting of political interests sometimes nudged him closer to progressives. In May, 2012, while Obama was weighing an endorsement of same-sex marriage, Biden beat him to it, telling an interviewer that he was "absolutely comfortable" with the idea. Obama's aides were incensed. A former Biden staffer recalled, "We were told that his public activities were going to be curtailed for the week." Many outsiders saw the moment as a typical Biden gaffe, but White House officials recognized a pattern in Biden's calculations. "He is very much a weathervane for what the center of the left is," the senior Obama Administration official told me. "He can see, 'O.K., this is where the society is moving. This is where the Democratic Party is moving, so I'm going to move.' "

As the country recovered from the financial crisis, Biden distributed stimulus funds and managed a vast array of local and state interests; later, he used his sway with Congress to help pass the Affordable Care Act. At times, though, Democrats grew irritated by Biden's belief that he could manage Republican leaders toward compromise. In the last days of 2012, Bush-era tax cuts were set to expire, which would have raised $3.7 trillion in revenue over the next decade. To try to keep the tax cuts, Republicans threatened to default on the U.S. debt for the first time in history. Biden negotiated a last-minute compromise with McConnell: they agreed to recoup six hundred billion dollars of that revenue, while allowing some tax cuts to become permanent. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, was said to be so appalled by the terms that he threw the paperwork in a fireplace. (Reid denies this.)

A few months later, Biden's personal life changed in a way that shadowed his remaining years in the White House. In the summer of 2013, his son Beau, who was the attorney general of Delaware and a father of two, was diagnosed as having glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Father and son were unusually close; Biden sometimes told friends that Beau had "all of my best qualities and none of my worst." Beau entered a gruelling regimen of surgery and experimental treatments. In a highly personal book about those years, " Promise Me, Dad," Biden recalled telling Obama that he planned to take out a second mortgage, to cover the mounting bills. "Don't do that," Obama said. "I'll give you the money. I have it. You can pay me back whenever." (Biden never took him up on it.) On May 30, 2015, Beau died, at the age of forty-six. In his diary, Biden wrote, "It happened. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy."

For years after the car crash, Biden had talked about it only occasionally; he worried how people would respond, and vulnerability clashed with the bluff style of his generation. Now aides saw a change. "The whole Beau experience just killed off the arrogant stuff," a former colleague told me.

In the fall of 2015, Biden went on "The Late Show," hosted by Stephen Colbert. They had some shared experience: when Colbert was a child, his father and two brothers died in a plane crash. Before the taping, they met alone backstage. "It was one of the most compact and affecting conversations I think I've ever had," Colbert told me. During the interview, Biden talked about mourning his son, struggling to retain his composure. Colbert, informed by his own experience, saw a purpose in putting that anguish in public view. "He expresses the loneliness of grief and makes you feel less alone," he told me.

Biden's association with pain and resilience at times puts him outside the usual bounds of retail politics. "People come up to him, and this is all they want to talk about: 'How do I get through it?' " Mike Donilon, his chief strategist, said. When Biden and Obama worked a rope line, Biden sometimes took so long that aides had to re-start the soundtrack. Reporters and operatives joked that this was Biden's timeworn shtick, lingering too long for pictures and gabbing about his team, the Phillies. People who have worked with him describe it differently. "The music will be blaring, and people will be screaming for a selfie, and some staff person will be pushing him on, and he will just stop," Donilon said. "He will sit there, and he will talk to this person."

In the summer of 2017, Biden was in semi-retirement, working to support cancer research and telling anyone in earshot that he could have beaten Trump. (He had considered running in 2016, but was still mourning his son's death. Besides, he later recalled, with evident pique, Obama was "convinced I could not beat Hillary.")

That August, after white supremacists carried torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, Biden watched as Trump spoke approvingly of the "very fine people" on both sides. "I thought, Holy God, this guy is going to be so much worse than I thought he was," Biden told me. He read " How Democracies Die," by the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and heard echoes of it in the headlines. "Look what's being done. Look what's being said. Not just by him but by his followers and some of his elected colleagues," Biden said. Trump's actions played on a reservoir of existing anger, he thought: "It didn't just happen with Trump. I'm not even sure Trump understands it."

Many of Biden's primary opponents-notably Sanders and Warren-were running forthrightly progressive campaigns: a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free public college, decriminalized borders. They were winning widespread support, especially among young people. By the end of this decade, millennials and Generation Z are on pace to constitute a majority of America's eligible voters. In 2018, twenty millennials were elected to Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Sanders supporter and a democratic socialist who upset a powerful moderate Democrat in the Bronx. But Biden believed that his peers had missed a crucial lesson of the midterm elections: forty-three House districts had moved from Republicans to Democrats, as some older, moderate voters recoiled from Trump's party. "We won by not going after the opponent but after the issues underlying what the opponent supported," he told me. "They were running against Obamacare, and all of a sudden you heard them say, 'I didn't say I was for doing away with that.' " Biden had a chance with some fed-up Trump voters, according to Samuel Popkin, a veteran pollster and the author of " Crackup," a forthcoming book on the Republican Party. "Farm bankruptcy is near the highest it's been in thirty years," Popkin said. In 2018, Trump flew to Wisconsin, promising what he called the "eighth wonder of the world"-a factory to be built for Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics company. "Foxconn barely built anything in Wisconsin," Popkin said.

In planning his campaign, Biden focussed on reforms that stopped well short of revolution. Instead of Medicare for All, he wanted to augment Obamacare, by lowering the Medicare eligibility age from sixty-five to sixty, and adding a "public option"-an idea that was considered radical a decade ago but conservative by the new standards. His campaign cited polls showing that a majority of potential Democratic-primary voters identified as moderate or conservative, and more than half were over the age of fifty. "The young left is important," Anita Dunn, a top Biden adviser, told me. "But so are older white people above the age of sixty-five, because they actually gave the election to Donald Trump last time."

In the spring of 2019, just before Biden announced his candidacy, he ran headlong into his past-and the widening gap in sensibilities between generations. Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state legislator, published an account of a public encounter with him at a 2014 rally in Las Vegas. He had smelled her hair, held her shoulders, and given her "a big slow kiss on the back of my head," she wrote. For years, journalists had written about Biden's uninvited displays of affection-bumping foreheads with women (and sometimes men), rubbing noses, whispering awkwardly in people's ears. Flores, a Democrat, described feeling "anger" and "resentment." She did not consider Biden's behavior sexual-she has distinguished it from the allegations of assault and misconduct that more than twenty women have made against Trump in recent years. (Trump has denied these allegations.) But, Flores said, Biden's habits showed "a lack of empathy for the women and young girls whose space he is invading." Biden, who had prided himself on his tactile approach to retail politics, responded in a statement that "not once-never-did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention."

At least six women added similar complaints. But others came forward to defend him, arguing that banishing Biden from a race against Trump, who bragged of grabbing women's genitals, would be an act of misguided absolutism. Issues of gender flared again later in the campaign, after Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, accused Biden of sexually assaulting her twenty-seven years earlier. She said that he pinned her to the wall in a Senate hallway, groped her, and penetrated her with his fingers. Biden emphatically denied the accusation. "It never, never happened," he said on MSNBC. Some Democrats remained unsatisfied. Biden was seeking to be the standard-bearer of a party in which rising progressives disdained not only sex abuse and harassment but also the imbalances of power that had enabled the problems to persist.

Biden began the race as the front-runner, but he seemed unfocussed and out of step. During a debate, he botched an invitation to text the campaign at "30330" and instead declared, perplexingly, "Go to Joe 30330." Rather than eliciting donations, it generated a night of Twitter memes, such as "How do you do, fellow kids?" In debates, he rarely fought back and sometimes yielded the floor with the unfortunate phrase "My time is up." Donors backed away. By February, Biden's campaign was spending less money in a month than Michael Bloomberg's spent on an average day. Kate Bedingfield, the campaign's communications director, struggled to draw attention to Biden's policy ideas. "I say the word 'achievable,' and it gets derided as 'That's not ambitious,' " she told me.

At times, Biden's disconnect looked deeper than his wobbly debate performances or his disinterest in social media. At a fund-raiser in June, 2019, he teed up an anecdote he had told for years about working with the segregationist senators Herman Talmadge, of Georgia, and James Eastland, of Mississippi. "We didn't agree on much of anything," Biden said. "We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you're the enemy." Biden added that Eastland "never called me 'boy.' He always called me 'son.' "

One of his rivals, Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, issued an immediate condemnation: "You don't joke about calling Black men 'boys.' " Booker told me that what frustrated him was not that Biden had worked with segregationists. "I work with people across the aisle who have beliefs that are offensive and that defend Confederate monuments," he said. The problem was glibly boasting about it. "I did not, at that point, believe that Joe Biden understood that when people like my father were called 'boy' at work that that would be so humiliating to them," Booker said. He admires Biden, which made it worse, he told me: "It was just one of those moments that many Black people feel, where you're just, like, ' You?' " Booker was walking out of a CNN studio when Biden called to apologize. "He was willing to show me a great degree of vulnerability and to put his imperfections on the table," Booker recalled. "I've been in politics a long time-I know when I'm being worked over. I've watched him change and be willing to wrestle with this."

Biden finished a distant fourth in Iowa, and fifth in New Hampshire. The campaign was assessing how much money it would need in order to pay staffers if it shut down. Biden turned over his senior staff, promoting Dunn to the top of the campaign, and announced a promise to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. His polls barely budged. If he had any hope of staying in the race, it would come down to South Carolina, where Black voters make up roughly sixty per cent of the Democratic-primary electorate.

No one mattered more to that process than James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress and the godfather of South Carolina Democrats. During the civil-rights movement, he and John Lewis had helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Clyburn holds some distinctly progressive positions, on alleviating poverty and expanding community health centers, but he believes in hewing to the center. When his centrism leaves younger Black activists unsatisfied-as happened recently, after he tweeted "no to defunding the police"-Clyburn points to a display of hundreds of turtle sculptures in his office, representing a belief in slow and steady progress.

Less than a week before the primary, Clyburn and Biden were at a reception aboard the U.S.S. Yorktown, a retired aircraft carrier docked near Charleston. Biden had slid to second place, far behind Sanders. Clyburn ushered him into a private room and advised him, bluntly, that he needed to tighten up. "Your speeches are senatorial," he said. "That's not the way you win an election." He continued, "You got to look at this the way my father, the fundamentalist preacher, did on Sunday mornings. He always did it in threes. This ain't the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. This is about 'you, your family, and your community.' "

His urgency reflected an unapologetic pragmatism. Biden might not excite people in New York or Silicon Valley, but in South Carolina, where a white supremacist had massacred Black parishioners just after Trump announced his candidacy, the spectre of four more years of Trump was graver than any policy dispute. On February 26th, Clyburn supplied an emotional endorsement: "I'm fearful for my daughters and their future, and their children, and their children's future." With Biden at his side, he said, "We know Joe. But, most importantly, Joe knows us."

Biden won South Carolina by twenty-nine points. With astonishing speed, his rivals dropped out and endorsed him. There were huge surges in turnout (up by nearly fifty per cent in Texas and a hundred per cent in Virginia), including many college-educated suburban independents and Republicans who had once supported candidates like Mitt Romney. On Super Tuesday, Biden won ten out of fourteen states. Sanders stayed in awhile longer, but the race was effectively over.

In barely three days, Biden had gone from the edge of oblivion to victory. He had received help not only from Clyburn but also from Warren, who swiftly dispatched Bloomberg, denouncing his derogatory comments about women. Yet Ron Klain, one of Biden's closest advisers, said that it is wrong to suggest that the turnaround was a fluke-"like he somehow lucked into all this." When Biden declined to savage his debate opponents, it was "strategic," Klain said. "If the only way to get the nomination was to destroy all these other people, he was going to inherit a party that wasn't going to win anyway."

A less soaring telling of the primary is that Biden benefitted from fear of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Once it became clear that Biden was in a two-person race, the prospect of nominating Sanders was so unappealing to moderates-including some fellow-candidates, older Black voters in places like South Carolina, and big-money donors-that they scrambled to support Biden. But Biden had also prevailed by rejecting tribalism; even as his rivals said that he was too old, too conciliatory, and too tainted by his record, he resisted responding with attack ads. His advisers believed that Biden could prevail over the "doubt in the chattering class," Bedingfield said. "We're not going to spend all day trying to win the latest Twitter war."

On June 1st, a week after the murder of George Floyd, I walked downtown from my home in D.C. to a protest in front of the White House. After a few nights of unrest in Washington, the scene had settled into a sit-in. Protesters took turns at a bullhorn.

Among the homemade signs, I noticed a strikingly skillful painting of Floyd. It was in the hands of Kandyce Baker, a thirty-one-year-old university administrator who had come to the rally from her home, in Frederick, Maryland. "I had to do something," she told me. Baker had been especially shaken by the death of Ahmaud Arbery, who in February was tailed by three white men and shot to death while he jogged in a suburb in south Georgia. As a marathoner and a Black woman, Baker had often run through neighborhoods where she felt unwelcome. I asked her about Presidential politics. "Unfortunately, I will be voting for Biden," she said. "Bernie Sanders was my candidate." She went on, "I don't have faith that Joe Biden is going to have Black issues at the forefront. I don't feel like he's going to have millennial issues at the forefront when it comes to student-loan debt. So I'm nervous."

For Biden, a rejection by young Black and Latino voters could be a disaster. When Hillary Clinton ran in 2016, Black turnout declined for the first time in two decades; in some places, such as Milwaukee, the drop-off proved critical. "I'm going to vote for him because I can't have Trump in office," Baker said. "That's literally the only reason."

A few hours after I met Baker, the intersection where we talked was swarmed by police wielding batons and tear gas; they were there to sweep away protesters, so that Trump could walk over from the White House and pose with a Bible in front of St. John's Episcopal Church. It was a pageant so roundly condemned that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly apologized for his presence. Within days, the N.F.L. reversed its position on kneeling during the national anthem. Booksellers across the country were swamped with orders for books about racism and Black history. Mississippi stripped the Confederate symbol from its flag.

Biden seized the moment. In a speech on July 4th, he urged listeners to "rip the roots" of "systemic racism" out of American life. He joined the calls for banning police choke holds, adopting a national standard for the use of force, and narrowing "qualified immunity," the legal shield that protects public officials against federal civil-rights suits. Biden's moves thrilled progressives but incensed some police. For years, he'd maintained cozy relations with the National Association of Police Organizations; now its executive director, Bill Johnson, lamented that he "used to be a stand-up guy."

Biden leapt ahead in the polls, but, as ever, he was wary of tilting too far to the left. As long as Trump was inflaming liberals by running an openly racist campaign, Biden was not going to risk turning off moderate voters. Trump was already broadcasting a commercial that featured a ringing phone in a dark, empty police station. The narrator said, "If you're calling to report a rape, please press one." The ad ended with Trump's new tagline: "You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America."

Like most establishment Democrats, Biden rejected "defunding" police, a broad term for proposals that range from abolishing departments to moving money toward mental health, education, and social services. He said, however, that police should receive federal funding only if they met "basic standards of decency and honorableness," and he proposed spending three hundred million dollars to reinvigorate a decades-old idea of "community policing." David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me that he hopes Biden adopts a newer approach to violence prevention, focussing not on communities but on small numbers of individuals at the highest risk of being involved in gun violence. Such a program, applied nationally, "could cut in half the gun violence that devastates America's minority communities, without doing the damage of traditional policing," Kennedy said.

When I spoke with Biden about the prospects for real change-to incarceration, policing, and entrenched racism-he offered an analogy to the civil-rights era, and the iconically cruel police boss of Birmingham. "When I was a kid in high school, Bull Connor sics his dogs on those elderly Black women going to church in their Sunday dress, and on little kids, with fire hoses, literally ripping their skin off," he said. "He thought he was driving a wooden stake into the heart of the civil-rights movement." Instead, images of the violence consolidated support behind Martin Luther King, Jr., and forced white leaders in Washington to take steps that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Biden's telling, white people in America were now experiencing a similar awakening, prompted by the horrific images of police violence captured by cell phones. Lifting his phone from the arm of the chair, he said, "This phone has changed a lot of things. Watching Floyd's face pinned against that curb and his nose being crushed, I mean, the vividness of it was, like, 'Holy God. That still happens today?' "

Biden said that the year's events had dismantled a myth deeply embedded in his consciousness. For years, he'd been telling a parable about the morning of Obama's Inauguration: "I called my two sons and my daughter up, and I said, 'Guys, don't tell me things can't change.' " Hunching forward in his seat, he told me that Trump had made a mockery of that parable. "I'm embarrassed to say, I thought you could defeat hate. You can't. It only hides," he said. "It crawls under the rocks, and, when given oxygen by any person in authority, it comes roaring back out. And what I realized is, the words of a President, even a lousy President, matter. They can take you to war, they can bring peace, they can make the market rise, they can make it fall. But they can also give hate oxygen."

In the usual course of a Presidential campaign, a Democrat leans left during the primary and then marches right in the general election. Biden went the opposite direction. Exit polls had revealed a stark warning: even in states where he prevailed, many voters preferred the more ambitious plans, from Sanders and Warren, on issues like the economy and health care.

Within weeks, Biden had picked up Warren's plan to ease student debt and overhaul the bankruptcy system-which entailed repealing parts of a law he helped pass. He embraced a limited version of Sanders's plan for tuition-free college, and dropped his opposition to federal funding for abortions. Almost precisely a year after assuring skittish voters that "nothing would fundamentally change," Biden said that America was due for "some revolutionary institutional changes."

Once Biden secured the nomination, Sanders endorsed him-moving far more quickly than he had in 2016. "I have a better relationship with Joe Biden than I had with Hillary Clinton," Sanders explained, candidly. To unify their platforms, Biden and Sanders set up task forces on criminal justice, economics, education, health care, immigration, and climate change. The task forces were a crucial test of whether the left and center factions of the Party could get along. Both sides were wary. Biden told me, "I had to be sure that Bernie was serious, that he wasn't going to make this an ideological jihad. I said, 'Bernie, if you want these set up in order for me to insist that I be for Medicare for All . . . this is not where it's going to go.' But I said, 'I'm open, I hear you, I'm ready to listen.' "

Biden recruited Ocasio-Cortez to chair the climate task force, alongside former Secretary of State John Kerry. Members included Varshini Prakash, of the Sunrise Movement, which during the primary had graded Biden's climate plan an F. At the first meeting, Kerry asked Prakash to speak first. The Sanders contingent wanted all-clean electricity by 2030; they were happy to settle for 2035. The biggest unresolved point of contention was fracking. "It's not like I walked out of there with Bernie's Green New Deal in hand, and I did not expect to," Prakash said. "But it was a lot more collaborative, actually, than I was anticipating."

Sean McElwee, an influential activist who co-founded the nonprofit think tank Data for Progress, criticized Biden fiercely at the outset of the campaign. He told me recently that his view had changed. "I think a lot of people who just shit on the Democratic Party haven't spent a lot of time talking to mainstream actors within the Democratic Party ecosystem," he said. "The reality is, that ecosystem is very liberal." He continued, "I think people should just take a step back and look at what Biden has done. A.O.C. is someone I like a lot. She said that she wouldn't vote for him in the primary, and that in a different country she would be in a different party from him. And he could have responded to that by being, like, 'Fuck you.' But instead he responded to that by being, like, 'How about you come in and write my climate policy?' "

On a weekday afternoon in late July, Biden was at a preschool in New Castle, Delaware, preparing to talk about economics. Schools had been closed for months, because of the virus; on the playground, the swings were coiled out of reach. Inside, Biden was holding a simulacrum of a campaign event that resembled a scene from an avant-garde play: no crowds, no rope lines, just a scattering of reporters, each of us masked and marooned in a white cardboard ring. The P.A. system was playing Alicia Keys and Beyoncé to a silent, huddled assemblage.

The economic shutdown had produced what Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, called a "level of pain that is hard to capture in words." Forty per cent of the low-income Americans who had jobs in February lost them in March and early April. Twelve years after the financial crisis, the virus had again exploded corporate America's mythology of self-reliance. Some of the largest payments in a congressional rescue package intended for small businesses went instead to the financial sector. Millions of dollars in emergency cash went to "family offices," the personal investment companies that manage fortunes for hedge-fund billionaires and other wealthy individuals.

Biden stepped to the lectern to announce a $775-billion investment in the caregiving economy, providing funds for universal preschool, in-home care for the elderly, and paid family leave, of the sort that is routine in other developed nations. The plan clearly targeted the needs of Americans who strain to balance work with caring for children and, often, aging parents. "I was a single parent for five years," Biden told the reporters. "Even though I had a lot more support than a lot of people going through tough times today, it was hard." The plan, he said, was "a moral and economic imperative." It would be funded partly by rolling back Trump-era tax breaks for real-estate investors. Ai-jen Poo, who leads the National Domestic Workers Alliance, tweeted that Biden's proposal marked the first time in twenty years that a Presidential candidate had made "investments in the care economy a core strategy in their economic agenda. Not a side issue, an add-on, or a special interest." A Trump-campaign spokesman responded to the proposal by saying that it would "remake America with socialist policies."

The caregiving plan was the latest in a series of speeches in which Biden had called for sweeping economic changes. He planned to spend seven hundred billion dollars on American products and research, to create jobs around electric cars, artificial intelligence, and other technologies, without the tariffs and the xenophobia of Trump's "America First" policy. He had announced a two-trillion-dollar clean-energy and infrastructure plan that would eliminate carbon emissions from power plants by 2035.

For all of Biden's Rooseveltian zeal, it was unclear how far he would go on the explosive issues of wealth, taxes, and corporate exploitation. At a fund-raiser in July, hosted by investors and executives, Biden said, "Corporate America has to change its ways." Then he added a comment that inflamed progressives: "It's not going to require legislation. I'm not proposing any." When we spoke, I asked what he meant. No legislation? "That is really shorthand," Biden said. As he explained it, America's corporate establishment has acknowledged the need for fundamental changes. He cited the Business Roundtable, a group of corporate C.E.O.s, which last year announced a shift away from the dominant focus on shareholder value. He said, "All those people understood that they are eating their own seed corn."

Nevertheless, he told me that he would push for legislation: a measure, proposed by Warren, to forbid companies to use excess revenues to purchase their own stock, rather than to invest in wage increases or in research. Biden said, "I've been talking with a bunch of my economists, saying, 'What are the types of legislation that require greater corporate responsibility?' That has to occur."

I sensed that Biden was straining to say as little as possible about his economic vision, which could be less a matter of tactical evasion than of ideological uncertainty. Biden is more than sentimentally attached to the working class, and he is embracing some leftist technocratic fixes that would help it. But he gives no indication that he is preparing for a bitter, costly fight to overturn the primacy of the corporate establishment. As Maurice Mitchell, of the Working Families Party, put it, "We've already put trillions of dollars into the economy with bailout after bailout. Are we propping up systems that have brought us here?"

As Trump sank in the polls, Biden reached numbers unmatched by any challenger to an incumbent since the advent of modern polling. Democrats weighed what would happen if they won. Biden said that he was seeking to "unify the nation." But what could that mean? Is the pursuit of unity just a recipe for paralysis?

The prospect of unity helped lift Obama into the White House. But the valence of the concept has changed. "Obama raised people's expectations," Michael Kazin, a historian and the co-editor of the leftist quarterly Dissent, told me. "People on the left-to use this too-aggregated term-would say, 'We like what he promised to do, but he didn't follow through.' The question is how much was his fault, how much was structural impediments, and how much was the timing and what he had to do to save the economy." Kazin went on, "Some of it is because he believed in bipartisanship. He thought too much of his own abilities, I think, to persuade people on the basis of his personality and his rhetoric."

When I spoke to Obama, he was at his house on Martha's Vineyard, laboring over his Presidential memoir. He endorsed Biden soon after Sanders dropped out, and has played a surgical public role in the campaign-appearing alongside the candidate in a video conversation and at a fund-raiser. He and Biden speak frequently by phone, though they don't draw much attention to those exchanges. Trump, after all, would love to portray a Biden Administration as a covert restoration of the Obama years.

I asked Obama about young people who are dismayed that the Democratic establishment has not achieved greater progress. He raised the example of health care. "Joe and I were both painfully aware of some of the constraints and limitations," he said. "But it's what we could get done then, and twenty-plus million people got health insurance. Missouri just expanded Medicaid, so maybe that's several hundred thousand more. And now you have an opportunity to make it that much better. So I think one response to the younger generation is, Yes, you should push harder! Because that's how progress happens."

Obama is touchy about suggestions that his Administration was too willing to compromise. "My legislative agenda, Joe's legislative agenda, was at least as bold and aggressive as many of the young people's agendas right now," he said. "If you asked Joe and I what regrets we might have, or what lessons we learned from my Administration, it's not that we were insufficiently bold in what we proposed. It's that we continued to believe in the capacity of Republicans in Congress to play by the rules, and to be willing to negotiate and compromise."

When Obama ran for reëlection, in 2012, he hoped that a victory would lead to a more amenable Congress. "The fever may break," he said at the time, "because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that." That hope is long gone. "When I speak to young people, I say to them, Look, our climate proposals were very aggressive-we just couldn't get them passed," he told me. "And the reason we couldn't get them passed was not because lobbyists and corporate donors were whispering in our ears! The reason we couldn't pass them was because we didn't have sixty votes in the Senate. And the same is true for getting a public option on health care, and getting immigration reform passed." Obama went on, "Through its actions, the Republican Party has discredited the old-style negotiations and compromises that existed in Congress when Joe first came in. And it's probably taken him a little time to let go of that, because I think he has experience of being able to get stuff done. And I think it's been painful for him, to see what's happened to institutions like the Senate."

Biden often says that America "cannot function without generating consensus." But, when he conjures the image of congressional harmony, many younger Americans think that he sounds deluded-or, worse, unwilling to join difficult fights. He was mocked last year for suggesting that members of Congress would undergo an "epiphany" after Trump was gone. To his mind, though, the prospects for bipartisanship hinge on the margin of victory. "If we win, and we pick up five or six Senate seats, I think there will be an epiphany," he told me, "because all you need then is three, or four, or five Republicans who have seen the light a little bit." He went on, "I don't think you can underestimate the impact of Trump not being there. The vindictiveness, the pettiness, the willingness to, at his own expense, go after people with vendettas, like you saw with Sessions"-Jeff Sessions, the former Attorney General, whom Trump had helped torpedo in the recent Alabama primary.

The senior Obama Administration official worries that Biden's optimism could be costly: "Does he see his role as someone who can bring in the Never Trumpers and build some bipartisan consensus? I know from experience that's a trap. We walked right into it. Your people lose faith, the Republicans never give you credit, you waste a lot of time-and you end up with the Tea Party."

Some analysts believe that Biden's reputation as a centrist could make it easier for him to achieve changes that might seem more threatening coming from a doctrinaire progressive. In McElwee's research, swing voters are more likely to support climate-change action if it is framed as a way to create good jobs and to bring down energy costs.

Mike Donilon, who has advised Biden on and off for thirty years, told me that Biden believes people in Washington often negotiate in precisely the wrong way: "Everyone immediately goes to the bottom-line absolute toughest moment in the negotiation. They're, like, 'We've got to solve this before we solve anything else.' So you don't solve that-and you don't solve anything else." He said, "It doesn't mean we compromise on principles, but you've got to at least see them."

In Obama's view, progressives will accept some flexibility if it produces results. "I don't think it is the actual items on the policy checklist that they're gonna be looking for," he said. "What they're gonna want to see is, Show us that you can make the machinery of government work to reflect what we believe in and what we care about. Show us that if the majority of Americans support doing something about climate change, that you can actually get something done, and it doesn't just get ground down to nothing by the time it gets through the U.S. Senate or the U.S. House."

If Biden is elected, his prescriptions for America's troubles will be informed by two divergent strands of his biography: the myths that undergird the politics of responsibility, and his own encounters with misfortune. In a new book, "The Tyranny of Merit," the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel writes, "Even as inequality has widened to vast proportions, the public culture has reinforced the notion that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get. . . . If we succeed, it is thanks to our own doing, and if we fail, we have no one to blame but ourselves." In the age of pandemic and systemic injustice, Sandel argues, "a lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain humility: 'There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I.' "

Biden, ever the weathervane, is betting that America wants a different politics. He understands what goes on in the minds of Congress members-the balancing, the hedging, the triangulation-and he believes that at least a few of them are ready to coöperate with him. But his image of unity puts even greater weight on a force beyond the political mechanics of Washington: the prospect of making people feel as if someone in the capital is listening.

Every day, Biden's aides try to get him on the phone with a regular person. One afternoon in April, he was patched through to Mohammad Qazzaz, in Dearborn, Michigan. Three weeks earlier, Qazzaz, who runs a coffee-roasting business, had tested positive for covid-19. When Biden called, he was quarantined in his house, trying to protect his wife and two children.

Qazzaz, who recorded the call and played it for me, told Biden that his daughter, who is two, did not understand why he would not come out of his bedroom: "She keeps telling me, 'Baba, open the door. Open the door.' " As he described his situation, his voice broke, and he tried to steady himself. "I'm sorry, Mr. Vice-President," he said.

"Don't be sorry," Biden said. "I think your emotional state is totally justified. And, as my mom would say, you have to get it out."

Biden told Qazzaz that he, too, once had children too small to understand a crisis unfolding around them. "Nothing is the same, but I have some sense of what you're going through," Biden said. He suggested that Qazzaz play a simple game with his daughter through the door, asking her to guess a number or a color. "Tell her stories about what it's going to be like when Daddy gets better," he said. They talked for a while about Qazzaz's father, who emigrated from Jerusalem. "Look, you're going to get through this," Biden said. "We are the nation we are because we're a nation of immigrants." The call was supposed to last five minutes; they talked for twenty-two.

Listening to Qazzaz's call was reminiscent of Roosevelt's famous line: "The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. . . . It is preëminently a place of moral leadership." Joe Biden's life is replete with mistakes and regrets. And, if he comes to the Presidency, he is unlikely to supply much of the exalted rhetoric that reaches into a nation's soul. But, for a people in mourning, he might offer something like solace, a language of healing.

For years, Biden has relied on a small clutch of aides, including Donilon, Klain, and Kaufman-a lineup that Politico Magazine described last year as "a lot like Biden: old and white and with long experience in Democratic party battles of a bygone era." The portrait ignores the likes of Symone Sanders, a thirty-year-old former Bernie Sanders aide who is among the most influential Black advisers in Biden's campaign. But Biden recognizes that meeting the needs of the country will require a radical expansion of the people and the experiences represented around him. "I think it's really important-really, really important-that my Administration look like the country," he said.

In August, Biden picked Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, as his running mate. She would be the first Black person, the first South Asian, and the first woman to serve as Vice-President. At Biden's side for the announcement, Harris showed a ready appetite for the fray, saying of Trump's economy, "Like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground," and hammering him for the fact that "an American dies of covid-19 every eighty seconds." Trump and his surrogates struggled to agree on a mode of attack; they mocked Harris's voice and her name, and, in an e-mail to supporters, called her "the meanest, most horrible, most disrespectful, MOST LIBERAL of anyone in the U.S. Senate."

Harris, like Biden, was never the choice of progressives. Though she has one of the Senate's most liberal voting records, progressives are uncomfortable with many of her choices as a district attorney and as California's attorney general, when she hesitated to make some police reforms and aggressively prosecuted truancy. After the announcement, I called Kandyce Baker, who had described herself as "unfortunately" supporting Biden. Baker was pleased to have a Black woman on the ticket but wary of the political calculations. "I'm all for candidates changing their position or recognizing, like, 'Hey, that was 2015, and now I have more information.' But I need Kamala to explain what happened," Baker said. "It's not enough to just say you've evolved."

When Harris spoke at the Democratic National Convention, in late August, she offered more encouragement than explanations. "I'm so inspired by a new generation," she said. "You are pushing us to realize the ideals of our nation." The Convention, like so many things these days, was confined to screens, but the constraints only accentuated the sense of personal urgency. Obama presented an appeal to Americans, especially the young, to reject cynicism and apathy. "That's how a democracy withers until it's no democracy at all, and we cannot let that happen," he said. In his telling, individualism conveyed responsibility, not license. "Do not let them take away your power," he said.

It was all a prelude to Biden's sobering case for moral decency, for reasonableness, for mourning what he called this "season of darkness." In a speech that did not mention Trump by name, Biden argued that Americans are not captive to the failures of the past and the present. "I will draw on the best of us, not the worst," he declared, and quoted Ella Baker, the icon of civil rights, who said, "Give people light and they will find a way."

One after another, ordinary people attested to enduring hardship. Kristin Urquiza, a thirty-nine-year-old from Arizona, told the story of her father, Mark Anthony Urquiza, who had voted for Trump, believed his assurances about the pandemic, and, she said, "died alone, in the I.C.U., with a nurse holding his hand." Brayden Harrington, a thirteen-year-old from New Hampshire, gave credit to Biden for telling him that they belonged to "the same club-we stutter." The official roll call, usually a banal ritual on the Convention floor, was reborn as a video parade, surveying America's diversity and vastness, from the Caribbean to the Dakotas and Alaska. The effect was strange and comforting and exhilarating, befitting an era in which Americans are waking to an unsettling conviction: a politician may give us light, or at least not obscure it, but we must find the way. ♦

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After a career built on incremental progress, Joe Biden is promising a Presidency of transformational change. The election will test whether his campaign can bring together a divided Party and a beleaguered country. "Welcome to my mom's house," Joe Biden called from the bottom of the stairs, an instant before his sweep of white hair rose into view.