A compiled list of collective nouns

 

A group of ants is called a colony.

A group of aunts is called a book club.

A group of sparrows is called a host.

A group of men named James is called late-night hosts.

A group of millennials who look different is called a marketing campaign.

A group of millennials who look the same is called a brunch.

A group of millennials who have laptops is called a co-working space.

A group of gorillas is called a troop.

A group of white men is called an improv troupe.

A group of buzzards is called a wake.

A group of liberals calls itself woke.

A group of geese is called a gaggle.

A group of crows is called a murder.

An informal gathering of members of the media by the White House press secretary used to be called a press gaggle. It is now called a press murder.

A group of murders is called a “Game of Thrones” finale.

A group of donkeys is called a drove.

A group of scenes featuring Ryan Gosling behind the wheel of a car is called “Drive.”

A group of whales is called a pod.

A group of fish is called so gross why are all these fish here?

An angry group of pedestrians is called New York.

An angry group of traffic is called Los Angeles.

An angry group of states you can’t name is called the Midwest.

A gathering of cows is called a herd.

A gathering of random strangers is called Hell.

A cancelled gathering is called sweet, sweet relief.


From The New Yorker

The voices in our heads

 

Talking to your yogurt again,” my wife, Pam, said. “And what does the yogurt say?”

She had caught me silently talking to myself as we ate breakfast. A conversation was playing in my mind, with a research colleague who questioned whether we had sufficient data to go ahead and publish. Did the experiments in the second graph need to be repeated? The results were already solid, I answered. But then, on reflection, I agreed that repetition could make the statistics more compelling.

I often have discussions with myself—tilting my head, raising my eyebrows, pursing my lips—and not only about my work. I converse with friends and family members, tell myself jokes, replay dialogue from the past. I’ve never considered why I talk to myself, and I’ve never mentioned it to anyone, except Pam. She very rarely has inner conversations; the one instance is when she reminds herself to do something, like change her e-mail password. She deliberately translates the thought into an external command, saying out loud, “Remember, change your password today.”

Verbal rehearsal of material—the shopping list you recite as you walk the aisles of a supermarket—is part of our working memory system. But for some of us talking to ourselves goes much further: it’s an essential part of the way we think. Others experience auditory hallucinations, verbal promptings from voices that are not theirs but those of loved ones, long-departed mentors, unidentified influencers, their conscience, or even God.

Charles Fernyhough, a British professor of psychology at Durham University, in England, studies such “inner speech.” At the start of “The Voices Within” (Basic), he also identifies himself as a voluble self-speaker, relating an incident where, in a crowded train on the London Underground, he suddenly became self-conscious at having just laughed out loud at a nonsensical sentence that was playing in his mind. He goes through life hearing a wide variety of voices: “My ‘voices’ often have accent and pitch; they are private and only audible to me, and yet they frequently sound like real people.”

Fernyhough has based his research on the hunch that talking to ourselves and hearing voices—phenomena that he sees as related—are not mere quirks, and that they have a deeper function. His book offers a chatty, somewhat inconclusive tour of the subject, making a case for the role of inner speech in memory, sports performance, religious revelation, psychotherapy, and literary fiction. He even coins a term, “dialogic thinking,” to describe his belief that thought itself may be considered “a voice, or voices, in the head.”

Discussing experimental work on voice-hearing, Fernyhough describes a protocol devised by Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A subject wears an earpiece and a beeper sounds at random intervals. As soon as the person hears the beep, she jots notes about what was in her mind at that moment. People in a variety of studies have reported a range of perceptions: many have experienced “inner speech,” though Fernyhough doesn’t specify what proportion. For some, it was a full back-and-forth conversation, for others a more condensed script of short phrases or keywords. The results of another study suggest that, on average, about twenty to twenty-five per cent of the waking day is spent in self-talk. But some people never experienced inner speech at all.

In his work at Durham, Fernyhough participated in an experiment in which he had an inner conversation with an old teacher of his while his brain was imaged by fMRI scanning. Naturally, the scan showed activity in parts of the left hemisphere associated with language. Among the other brain regions that were activated, however, were some associated with our interactions with other people. Fernyhough concludes that “dialogic inner speech must therefore involve some capacity to represent the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the people with whom we share our world.” This raises the fascinating possibility that when we talk to ourselves a kind of split takes place, and we become in some sense multiple: it’s not a monologue but a real dialogue.

Early in Fernyhough’s career, his mentors told him that studying inner speech would be fruitless. Experimental psychology focusses on things that can be studied in laboratory situations and can yield clear, reproducible results. Our perceptions of what goes on in our heads are too subjective to quantify, and experimental psychologists tend to steer clear of the area.

Fernyhough’s protocols go some way toward working around this difficulty, though the results can’t be considered dispositive. Being prompted to enter into an inner dialogue in an fMRI machine is not the same as spontaneously debating with oneself at the kitchen table. And, given that subjects in the beeper protocol could express their experience only in words, it’s not surprising that many of them ascribed a linguistic quality to their thinking. Fernyhough acknowledges this; in a paper published last year in Psychological Bulletin, he wrote that the interview process may both “shape and change the experiences participants report.”

More fundamentally, neither experiment can do more than provide a rough phenomenology of inner speech—a sense of where we experience inner speech neurologically and how it may operate. The experiments don’t tell us what it is. This hard truth harks back to William James, who concluded that such “introspective analysis” was like “trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.”

Nonetheless, Fernyhough has built up an interesting picture of inner speech and its functions. It certainly seems to be important in memory, and not merely the mnemonic recitation of lists, to which my wife and many others resort. I sometimes replay childhood conversations with my father, long deceased. I conjure his voice and respond to it, preserving his presence in my life. Inner speech may participate in reasoning about right and wrong by constructing point-counterpoint situations in our minds. Fernyhough writes that his most elaborate inner conversations occur when he is dealing with an ethical dilemma.

Inner speech could also serve as a safety mechanism. Negative emotions may be easier to cope with when channelled into words spoken to ourselves. In the case of people who hear alien voices, Fernyhough links the phenomenon to past trauma; people who live through horrific events often describe themselves “dissociating” during the episodes. “Splitting itself into separate parts is one of the most powerful of the mind’s defense mechanisms,” he writes. Given that his fMRI study suggested that some kind of split occurred during self-speech, the idea of a connection between these two mental processes doesn’t seem implausible. Indeed, a mainstream strategy in cognitive behavioral therapy involves purposefully articulating thoughts to oneself in order to diminish pernicious habits of mind. There is robust scientific evidence demonstrating the value of the method in coping with O.C.D., phobias, and other anxiety disorders.

Cognitive behavioral therapy also harnesses the effectiveness of verbalizing positive thoughts. Many athletes talk to themselves as a way of enhancing performance; Andy Murray yells at himself during tennis matches. The potential benefits of this have some experimental support. In 2008, Greek researchers randomly assigned tennis players to one of two groups. The first was trained in motivational and instructional self-talk (for instance, “Go,” “I can,” “Shoulder, low”). The second group got a tactical lecture on the use of particular shots. The group trained to use self-talk showed improved play and reported increased self-confidence and decreased anxiety, whereas no significant improvements were seen in the other group.

Sometimes the voices people hear are not their own, and instead are attributed to a celestial source. God’s voice figures prominently early in the Hebrew Bible. He speaks individually to Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, and Abraham. At Mt. Sinai, God’s voice, in midrash, was heard communally, but was so overwhelming that only the first letter, aleph, was sounded. But in later prophetic books the divine voice grows quieter. Elijah, on Mt. Horeb, is addressed by God (after a whirlwind, a fire, and an earthquake) in what the King James Bible called a “still small voice,” and which, in the original Hebrew (kol demamah dakah), is even more suggestive—literally, “the sound of a slender silence.” By the time we reach the Book of Esther, God’s voice is absent.

In Christianity, however, divine speech continues through the Gospels—the apostle Paul converts after hearing Jesus admonish him. Especially in evangelical traditions, it has persisted. Martin Luther King, Jr., recounted an experience of it in the early days of the bus boycott in Montgomery, in 1956. After receiving a threatening anonymous phone call, he went in despair into his kitchen and prayed. He became aware of “the quiet assurance of an inner voice” and “heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.”

Fernyhough relates some arresting instances of conversations with God and other celestial powers that occurred during the Middle Ages. In fifteenth-century France, Joan of Arc testified to hearing angels and saints tell her to lead the French Army in rescuing her country from English domination. A more intimate example is that of the famous mystic Margery Kempe, a well-to-do Englishwoman with a husband and family, who, in the early fifteenth century, reported that Christ spoke to her from a short distance, in a “sweet and gentle” voice. In “The Book of Margery Kempe,” a narrative she dictated, which is often considered the first autobiography in English, she relates how a series of domestic crises, including an episode of what she describes as madness, led her to embark on a life of pilgrimage, celibacy, and extreme fasting. The voice of Jesus gave her advice for negotiating a deal with her frustrated and worried husband. (She agreed to eat; he accepted her chastity.) Fernyhough writes imaginatively about the various registers of voice she hears. “One kind of sound she hears is like a pair of bellows blowing in her ear: it is the susurrus of the Holy Spirit. When He chooses, our Lord changes that sound into the voice of a dove, and then into a robin redbreast, tweeting merrily in her ear.”

Forty years ago, Julian Jaynes, a psychologist at Princeton, published a landmark book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” in which he proposed a biological basis for the hearing of divine voices. He argued that several thousand years ago, at the time the Iliad was written, our brains were “bicameral,” composed of two distinct chambers. The left hemisphere contained language areas, just as it does now, but the right hemisphere contributed a unique function, recruiting language-making structures that “spoke” in times of stress. People perceived the utterances of the right hemisphere as being external to them and attributed them to gods. In the tumult of attacking Troy, Jaynes believed, Achilles would have heard speech from his right hemisphere and attributed it to voices from Mt. Olympus:

The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grabs Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships. . . . It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness.

Jaynes believed that the development of nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres gradually integrated brain function. Following a theory of Homeric authorship that assumed the Odyssey to have been composed at least a century after the Iliad, he pointed out that Odysseus, who is constantly reflecting and planning, manifests a self-consciousness of mind. The poem’s emphasis on Odysseus’ cunning starts to seem like the celebration of the emergence of a new kind of consciousness. For Jaynes, hearing the voice of God was a vestige of our past neuroanatomy.

Jaynes’s book was hugely influential in its day, one of those rare specialist works whose ideas enter the culture at large. (Bicamerality is an important plot point in HBO’s “Westworld”: Dolores, an android played by Evan Rachel Wood, is led to understand that a voice she hears, which has urged her to kill other android “hosts” at the park, comes from her own head.) But Jaynes’s thesis does not stand up to what we now know about the development of our species. In evolutionary time, the few thousand years that separate us from Achilles are a blink of an eye, far too short to allow for such radical structural changes in the brain. Contemporary neurologists offer alternative explanations for hearing celestial speech. Some speculate that it represents temporal-lobe epilepsy, others schizophrenia; auditory hallucinations are common in both conditions. They are also a feature of degenerative neurological diseases. An elderly relative with Alzheimer’s recently told me that God talks to her. “Do you actually hear His voice?” I asked. She said that she does, and knows it is God because He said so.

Remarkably, Fernyhough is reluctant to call such voices hallucinations. He views the term as pejorative, and he is notably skeptical about the value of psychiatric diagnosis in voice-hearing cases:

It is no more meaningful to attempt to diagnose . . . English mystics (nor others, like Joan, from the tradition to which they belong) than it is to call Socrates a schizophrenic. . . . If Joan wasn’t schizophrenic, she had “idiopathic partial epilepsy with auditory features.” Margery’s compulsive weeping and roaring, combined with her voice-hearing, might also have been signs of temporal lobe epilepsy. The white spots that flew around her vision (and were interpreted by her as sightings of angels) could have been symptoms of migraine. . . . The medieval literary scholar Corinne Saunders points out that Margery’s experiences were strange then, in the early fifteenth century, and they seem even stranger now, when we are so distant from the interpretive framework in which Margery received them. That doesn’t make them signs of madness or neurological disease any more than similar experiences in the modern era should be automatically pathologized.

In his unwillingness to draw a clear line between normal perceptions and delusions, Fernyhough follows ideas popularized by a range of groups that have emerged in the past three decades known as the Hearing Voices Movement. In 1987, a Dutch psychiatrist, Marius Romme, was treating a patient named Patsy Hage, who heard malign voices. Romme’s initial diagnosis was that the voices were symptoms of a biomedical illness. But Hage insisted that her voice-hearing was a valid mode of thought. Not coincidentally, she was familiar with the work of Julian Jaynes. “I’m not a schizophrenic,” she told Romme. “I’m an ancient Greek!”

Romme came to sympathize with her point of view, and decided that it was vital to engage seriously with the actual content of what patients’ voices said. The pair started to publicize the condition, asking other voice-hearers to be in touch. The movement grew from there. It currently has networks in twenty-four countries, with more than a hundred and eighty groups in the United Kingdom alone, and its membership is growing in the United States. It holds meetings and conferences in which voice-hearers discuss their experiences, and it campaigns to increase public awareness of the phenomenon.

The movement’s followers reject the idea that hearing voices is a sign of mental illness. They want it to be seen as a normal variation in human nature. Their arguments are in part about who controls the interpretation of such experiences. Fernyhough quotes an advocate who says, “It is about power, and it’s about who’s got the expertise, and the authority.” The advocate characterizes cognitive behavioral therapy as “an expert doing something to” a patient, whereas the movement’s approach disrupts that hierarchy. “People with lived experience have a lot to say about it, know a lot about what it’s like to experience it, to live with it, to cope with it,” she says. “If we want to learn anything about extreme human experience, we have to listen to the people who experience it.”

Like other movements that seek to challenge the authority of psychiatry’s diagnostic categories, the Hearing Voices Movement is controversial. Critics point out that, while depathologizing voice-hearing may feel liberating for some, it entails a risk that people with serious mental illnesses will not receive appropriate care. Fernyhough does not spend much time on these criticisms, though in a footnote he does concede the scant evidentiary basis of the movement’s claims. He mentions a psychotherapist sympathetic to the Hearing Voices Movement who says that, in contrast to the ample experimental evidence for the efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy, “the organic nature of hearing voices groups” makes it hard to conduct randomized controlled trials.

Fernyhough is not only a psychologist; he also writes fiction, and in describing this work he emphasizes the role of hearing voices. “I never mistake these fictional characters for real people, but I do hear them speaking,” he writes in “The Voices Within.” “I have to get their voices right—transcribe them accurately—or they will not seem real to the people who are reading their stories.” He notes that this kind of conjuring is widespread among novelists, and cites examples including Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and Hilary Mantel.

Fernyhough and his colleagues have tried to quantify this phenomenon. Ninety-one writers attending the 2014 Edinburgh International Book Festival responded to a questionnaire; seventy per cent said that they heard characters speak. Several writers linked the speech of their characters to inner dialogues even when they are not actively writing. As for plot, some writers asserted that their characters “don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.”

The importance of voice-hearing to many writers might seem to validate the Hearing Voices Movement’s approach. If the result is great literature, it would be perverse to judge hearing voices an aberration requiring treatment rather than a precious gift. It’s not that simple, however. As Fernyhough writes, “Studies have shown a particularly high prevalence of psychiatric disorders (particularly mood disorders) in those of proven creativity.” Even leaving aside the fact that most people with mood disorders are not creative geniuses, many writers find their creative talent psychologically troublesome, and even prize an idea of themselves as, in some sense, abnormal. The novelist Jeanette Winterson has heard voices that she says put her “in the crazy category,” and the idea has a long history: Plato’s “mad poet,” Aristotle’s “melancholic genius,” and John Dryden’s dictum that “great wits are sure to madness near allied.” But, in cases where talent is accompanied by real psychological disturbance, do the creative benefits really outweigh the costs to the individual?

On a frigid night in January, 1977, while working as a young resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, I was paged to the emergency room. A patient had arrived by ambulance from McLean Hospital, a famous psychiatric institution in nearby Belmont. Sitting bolt upright, laboring to breathe, was the poet Robert Lowell. I introduced myself and performed a physical examination. Lowell was in congestive heart failure, his lungs filling with fluid. I administered diuretics and fitted an oxygen tube to his nostrils. Soon he was breathing comfortably. He seemed sullen and, to distract him from his predicament, I asked about a medallion that hung from a chain around his neck. “Achilles,” he replied, with a fleeting smile.

I’ve no idea if Lowell knew of Jaynes’s book, which had come out the year before, but Achilles was a figure of lifelong importance to him, one of many historical and mythical figures—Alexander the Great, Dante, T. S. Eliot, Christ—with whom he identified in moments of delusional grandiosity. In Achilles, Lowell seemed to find a heroic reflection of his own mental volatility. Achilles’ defining attribute—it’s the first word of the Iliad—is mēnin, usually translated as “wrath” or “rage.” But in a forthcoming book, “Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character,” the psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison points out that Lowell’s translation of the passage renders mēnin as “mania.” As it happens, mania was Lowell’s most enduring diagnosis in his many years as a psychiatric patient.

In her account of Lowell’s hospitalization, Jamison cites my case notes and those of his cardiologist in the Phillips House, a wing of Mass General where wealthy Boston Brahmin patients were typically housed. Lowell wrote a poem about his stay, “Phillips House Revisited,” in which he overlays impressions of the medical crisis I had witnessed (“I cannot entirely get my breath, / as if I were muffled in snow”) with memories of his grandfather, who had died in the same hospital, forty years earlier.

There was a long history of mental illness in Lowell’s family. Jamison digs up the records of his great-great-grandmother, who was admitted to McLean in 1845, and who, doctors noted, was “afflicted with false hearing.” Lowell, too, suffered from auditory hallucinations. Sometimes, before sleep, he would talk to the heroes from Hawthorne’s “Greek Myths.” During a hospitalization in 1954, he often chatted to Ezra Pound, who was a friend—but not actually there. Among his contemporaries, recognition of Lowell’s mental instability was inextricably bound up with awe of his talent. The intertwining of madness and genius remains an essential part of his posthumous legend, and Lowell himself saw the two as related. Jamison quotes a report by one of his doctors:

Patient’s strong emotional ties with his manic phase were very evident. Besides the feeling of well-being which was present at that time, patient felt that, “my senses were more keen than they had ever been before, and that’s what a writer needs.”

But Jamison also shows that Lowell sometimes saw his episodes of manic inspiration in a more coldly medical light. After a period of intense religious revelation, he wrote, “The mystical experiences and explosions turned out to be pathological.” Splitting the difference, Jamison suggests that his mania and his imagination were welded into great art by the discipline he exerted between his manic episodes.

Lowell was discharged from Mass General on February 9th. Jamison quotes a note that one of my colleagues wrote to the doctors at McLean: “Thank you for referring Mr. Lowell to me. He proved to be just as interesting a person and a patient as you suggested he might be.” Later that month, Lowell had recovered sufficiently to travel to New York and do a reading with Allen Ginsberg. He read “Phillips House Revisited.” That September, he died.


The New Yorker

The Story Behind the Fire That Killed Forty Teen-Age Girls

The number of teenage girls who died when a fire broke out on the morning of March 8th in a state-run home for minors on the outskirts of Guatemala City now stands at forty. Those who perished were among fifty-two girls who’d been confined to a schoolroom at Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción after a night in which they’d rioted and run away, before being captured by police and brought back to the home. Nineteen died at the scene of the schoolroom blaze, and the others in the two Guatemala City hospitals that received the injured. Almost immediately, Guatemalan and international news reports began to speculate that the girls might have been locked in the schoolroom, perhaps as punishment.

Many blamed the school’s teachers and “monitors.” A woman who lived near the children’s home told the online publication Nómada that she’d witnessed some of the riot on March 7th, and had seen girls “throwing rocks at their teachers and at the police and tauntingly shouting, ‘Rape us here, in front of everybody! Come on and rape us again here, if that’s what you want!’ “ The witness continued, “That was a girls’ rebellion. Anyone who lives around here knows that place is a hell.” In 2013, several staff members at the school were found guilty of sexual abuse. Last year, a family-court judge found that the home’s practices—which included punishments that amounted to torture—were in violation of children’s human rights, and ordered that improvements be made.

In the wake of the fire, the revelation that the Secretariat for Social Welfare had failed to respond to these orders led to widespread criticism of the department, and of Guatemala’s President, Jimmy Morales. Even before the deaths, Morales, a former television comedian, was regarded by many as the hapless head of a uniquely corrupt government. (In 2015, his predecessor, Otto Pérez Molina, went to prison on corruption charges.) Morales was particularly criticised for having named two close friends, including a former producer of his comedy show, to leadership posts in the Secretariat for Social Welfare while also slashing its funding. In a press conference the evening of the fire, the Secretary of Social Welfare, Carlos Rodas, refused to resign or to accept any blame. In his speech, he claimed that the girls had sharp weapons hidden in their hair. He said that President Morales had ordered the police to return the girls to the home after their escape attempt, and that all attempts at dialogue with the girls had been exhausted. Morales hadn’t come to the press conference, Rodas said, because “he was attending to urgent matters of state.”

I arrived in Guatemala City on Friday, March 10th, on business unrelated to the fire. My close friend, the Guatemalan journalist Claudia Méndez Arriaza, met me at the airport, and, with a few hours to spare, compelled by journalistic curiosity, we drove an hour to Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción.

The home is one of several institutions in Guatemala for youths who have been orphaned, abandoned, or turned over by parents who lack the means to support them. As recent newspaper reports revealed, some of the residents’ parents had felt that their daughters were in need of discipline; others wanted to protect them from the notorious mara street gangs that terrorize poor urban neighborhoods. The court had taken some of the girls into custody because they’d been abused by family members, or because they were living on the streets. The youths at Virgen de la Asunción were not deemed to be criminals—adolescents in Guatemala judged to be “in conflict with the law” are sent to juvenile-detention centers—although minors who’ve served their sentences are sometimes put into a safe children’s home like Virgen de la Asunción if they have nowhere else to go.

Virgen de la Asunción, meant to accommodate five hundred residents, was in fact responsible for approximately eight hundred youths, who were housed in separate areas for older girls, older boys, younger children, and those with disabilities and illnesses. The smallest area, called Princesas, was for pregnant youths awaiting transfer to another home in Quetztaltenango, the second-largest city in Guatemala. Some of the smaller children, Nómada later reported, had been born in the home to adolescent girls who may have been impregnated by the boys who were also interned there, or by staff. As we have also learned, parents who decided that they wanted to recover their daughters from the home were sometimes faced with a wall of bureaucracy, or were extorted in return for their children’s release.

When Claudia and I arrived at the home, two young policewomen, one tall and animated, one shorter and quieter, were standing outside the building. They shared what they’d seen and heard on March 8th in the manner of girls excitedly discussing a horror movie. At one point, the taller policewoman, describing the teen-aged girls as “walking like zombies,” aflame, put her own arms out and lurched from side to side. Her colleague, she said, was still traumatized by the smell of burning flesh. The fire had broken out at about nine in the morning, they explained, just as one group of policewomen was relieving those who’d been guarding the girls overnight. The taller policewoman described rushing to the windows of the schoolroom to pass plastic bags filled with water inside. The shorter policewoman then showed us photographs on her cell phone, the kind also circulating on social media—of burned and blackened bodies, many in bluejeans, amid charred wreckage. When asked why the girls hadn’t been let out, or if they knew who had held the key to the door, the policewomen fell silent.

An indigenous couple from Chimaltenango, their faces deeply lined, were also waiting out front. They’d had four children in the home and had recovered only three, but they seemed sure that their missing child wasn’t among those who’d been shut in the schoolroom. As we spoke, the home’s metal doors would occasionally open to let out small groups of teen-age boys, who were being transferred to other homes and institutions. One boy carried a large stuffed animal, a dog, under his arm. It was unclear how many children were still inside, how many had successfully escaped on the night of March 7th, or who might be missing; the home doesn’t have a computerized database.

On Sunday night, Claudia and I spoke to a judge who asked that we not name her; she said that a recent law in Guatemala forbids judges from speaking to the press. She was part of the family-court system that has jurisdiction over Guatemala’s juvenile-detention centers and children’s homes and shelters. She told us that she’d heard that sixty-two children from Virgen de la Asunción were unaccounted for. She believed that some had died, or even been murdered, before the fire. The judge also told us that the girls from the home were being prostituted, although it wasn’t clear by whom.

I was supposed to fly back to New York on Monday, March 13th, but because of a snowstorm my flight was delayed by two days. On Monday, both the Secretary and Sub-Secretary for Social Welfare, Carlos Rodas and Anahy Keller, were arrested, along with Santos Torres, the director of Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción. All three were charged with involuntary manslaughter, abuse of minors, and breach of duty. Torres insisted that it was the police who’d been in possession of the key to the schoolroom door.

It had emerged that the office of the government’s Procurator for Human Rights had received forty-five reports of abuses at the home from 2012 to 2016, and passed them on to the Public Ministry, which had not responded. In October last year, two rapporteurs of the Guatemalan Congress’s Office of Torture Prevention wrote to Attorney General Thelma Aldana; they claimed that the director of the home at that time, Brenda Chamán, had confessed to knowing that girls had been raped there. The rapporteurs asked Aldana—who, working in tandem with the U.N. Commission Against Organized Crime and Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, has carried out numerous high-profile prosecutions, including that of former President Pérez Molina—to open an investigation. She passed their request to the Public Ministry prosecutors responsible for investigating such complaints. On Monday, Aldana ordered an investigation into the prosecutors who may have received those denunciations of abuse and not responded to them, saying that if they are found guilty of negligence they will be subject to administrative and even criminal penalties.

Attorney General Aldana is a respected figure in Guatemala and internationally. Unlike, say, in Mexico, the Attorney General and Public Ministry in Guatemala are autonomous not only on paper but in practice. Last year, the United States D.E.A. discovered that organized crime, and perhaps political figures, were plotting to assassinate Aldana; she now moves around Guatemala City accompanied by a security team numbering dozens. As campaigns on social media reveal, the same political and criminal powers that have wanted to see Aldana eliminated are already using the tragedy against her, exploiting the popular outrage over the deaths to try to weaken her authority or force her resignation.

The same day the arrests were made, Claudia contacted a legal counsellor who was part of an official group that had conducted inspections of the government’s children’s homes and detention centers before the fire, and that had been carrying out independent investigations after it. That afternoon, Claudia and I found ourselves sitting in a café, leaning forward over a cell phone, hands cupped to our ears, listening to audio recordings that the legal counsellor had shared with us. The recordings were of interviews with three of the surviving girls, two aged seventeen and one eighteen, conducted in Roosevelt Hospital, in Guatemala City, on March 10th. One of the girls was in stable condition; the other two, with burns over seventy-five and eighty per cent of their bodies, were in critical condition. Within a few days, all three were moved to the United States for treatment.

The girl in the first interview, which opens with a barrage of questions, maintains the same even cadence throughout her testimony. “I’m going to tell only what I remember,” she says, describing how, following the riot, she, along with other girls and boys from the home, had run for “kilometres and kilometres,” with police in pursuit, into the hilly woods that surround Virgen de la Asunción, before the police found them. “As soon as they captured us, they beat us up,” she says. “The policeman who caught me told me to get down on my knees and to put my hands on my head. He put a pistol to my head, he said he didn’t care that I was female and a minor. They brought us back to the home, and they handcuffed us real tight.”

Instead of being returned to their dorms, the runaway girls and boys were made to wait outside. In a handwritten statement signed by more than a dozen members of the school staff on the night of the riots, the monitors, explaining why they had not returned the girls to the building, as per President Morales’s directive, wrote, “We don’t agree that they should be let back inside, given that during the short time they were outside they robbed and beat up innocent people, took drugs, and had sexual relations with each other. Their return puts the rest of the population, who decided not to take part in those events, at risk.”

The youths had tried to sleep on the grass, and then, at one in the morning, they were finally allowed back into the building. The boys returned to their dorms; the girls were taken to a schoolroom, where they were given mattresses but no blankets. The room was locked and guarded through the night by policewomen from the National Civil Police. In the morning, the injured girl explains in her interview, “they woke us and brought us breakfast, everything was calm.” But when some of the girls asked to go to the bathroom, the police refused to open the door. The girls got angry and put mattresses over the windows so that the police couldn’t see inside. She says that three girls caused the fire, and that she’s been told that one of those girls is dead. As the blaze grew, the girls asked for help from the police. “One of the police said, ‘Let these wretches suffer. They were good at escaping, now they can be good at enduring pain.’ “ She adds, “They were watching how we caught on fire, but they were not going to open the door.” The school staff tried to intervene. “We’d been mistreated by some of them before, but when they saw that the situation was serious, they began to spill their tears right there,” she says. “Tears, but why were they spilling them! Because they were scared.”

The girl in the second recording similarly describes how she had escaped, gotten lost in the woods, and been found by the police, who beat her, held a pistol to her head, and sprayed her and her companions with what might have been pepper spray. “Our eyes really stung,” she says. In the morning, “we asked the police to please take us to the bathroom, and the police didn’t want to let us out. They told us to rot.” She describes the girls having built “a little house” with mattresses “so that they could do their necessities inside.” When one of the girls set fire to one of the mattresses, which were twenty years old and made of thin cotton, the flames quickly spread. “All of us, we all began to shout to the police to let us out, that we were burning. The police told us they didn’t care, that just like we’d been good for running away, that we should be good for putting up with the fire.” She recalls seeing one girl “in flames, and she asked me for help. That’s when I fainted.” When she woke up, she recalls, “I did everything I could to get up and walk, but the police, seeing that I was burning and choking, started to hit me. They told me that I couldn’t leave, and beat me. Then some monitors threw water on me because my face was burning.”

Unlike the girl in the first two recordings, the girl in the third hadn’t rioted or run away; she had found herself in the schoolroom after trying to retrieve her little sister. Speaking in a tired, hoarse voice, she says that the riot had begun after the girls were shut in a dormitory for three days. “They wouldn’t let us out for anything,” she says. “They kept us like caged dogs.” During the riot, she recalls, girls climbed up onto the buildings’ roofs and smashed windows; boys from the San Gabriel sector of the home joined them. She also mentions that the girls locked in the schoolroom had “gasoline”—the counsellor suggested that it might have been paint thinner, used for getting high. When asked if she’s had any news of her sister, she says, “No.”

All three girls agree that it was the police who shut them in the room; the monitors only returned from attending to children in the other dorms after the fire started. But it is not yet known who decided to lock them inside, who was in possession of the key that could have saved their lives, and why, when the girls were screaming for help, nobody opened the schoolroom door. Was it malice, or homicidal intent, or some kind of accident? Why were only the girls locked up, while the boys were allowed to return to their quarters? And what, exactly, had been going on at the school that made the girls so desperate to escape?

The source who gave us the recordings told us that Virgen de la Asunción was sometimes guarded by just one person at night, and that the girls’ customary dorm area had a side door that he suspected the maras might have used to take girls out for the night. (He said that he had seen the initials “M.S.,” for Mara Salvatrucha, tattooed on the feet of two of the hospitalized girls, although the tattoos might have pre-dated the girls’ arrival at the home.)

María Eugenia Villareal, of ECPAT, an international N.G.O. that tracks and fights the sexual abuse and trafficking of minors, has been helping with the efforts to relocate hundreds of minors from Virgen de la Asunción to other homes and shelters. When I spoke to her, Villareal expressed concern that none of the surviving youths were receiving trauma counselling. She had spent the last two days testifying before various Guatemalan congressional committees about the conditions of state children’s homes, including Virgen de la Asunción. She didn’t mince her words. The monitors at the home “were abusing the girls, they sold them drugs, and they took some of them out at night to prostitute them,” she said. She mentioned an article in El Periódico that had been accompanied by a photograph of monitors who had worked at Virgen de la Asunción: men with pistols in their belts and rifles over their shoulders, some holding beers and grinning at the camera. “It doesn’t matter what the children endure, because they’re indigenous or extremely poor,” Villareal said, summing up Morales’s attitude to the deaths. “This is why so many try to migrate to the United States. It’s because they’re fleeing the violence of the state, of their communities, of their families. Every type of violence is present here.”

On Tuesday night, at the San Juan de Dios hospital, I met Dr. Edwin Bravo, who had just returned from Galveston, Texas, where he’d travelled with three of the survivors to the Shriners Hospital for Children there. He was wearing a black fleece bearing the initials “U.T.M.B.,” for the University of Texas Medical Branch, which he’d bought there to keep warm; he’d left Guatemala in just his medical scrubs. Bravo was proud of how his hospital had treated the seventeen patients it had received, explaining how his team had started to set up an emergency burn and trauma unit as soon as he’d received news of the fire at the children’s home. Most of the girls were so badly burned, not only on their skin but also in their breathing passages and lungs, that they’d had to be put into induced comas. He had reached out to colleagues at Shriners Hospital’s renowned burn unit, which had immediately offered help. At Shriners, he’d seen how teams of surgeons immediately began cleaning the girls’ wounds, preparing them to receive synthetic skins. Now he was back in Guatemala, briskly walking us through the halls of a hospital where resources were clearly far more limited. Bravo exuded competence and compassion. His last patient from Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción was leaving that night, for a hospital in Cincinnati; she would be accompanied by another Guatemalan doctor. She was unconscious, and almost entirely wrapped in gauze bandages and blue robes, but I could see patches of her brown face, her toes. Bravo knew her name but little else. Nobody had come to claim her, to visit or to ask after her. She was alone, a poor Central American girl headed to the United States to receive a new skin, and perhaps the chance of a new life.


The New Yorker

How can Greece take charge?

If there’s one message that Greece should take away from its recent confrontation with the euro zone, it’s that it will never get the help it really needs. Assuming that the deal goes through, Greece should be able to reopen the banks and keep the economy from total collapse. But, with that economy having shrunk by a quarter in five years and an unemployment rate over twenty-five per cent, it needs real stimulus spending and a much looser monetary policy. Neither is on offer. Even if Greece gets the debt relief that the I.M.F. is recommending, the next few years will be grim. As James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, who assisted the former Greek finance minister during this year’s negotiations, told me, “What’s going to happen in Greece is going to be very sad.”

So what can Greece do? It really has only one option—to make the economy more productive and, above all, to export more. It’s easy to focus on Greece’s huge pile of debt, but, according to Yannis Ioannides, an economist at Tufts University, “debt is ultimately the lesser problem. Productivity and the lack of competitive exports are the much more important ones.”

There are structural issues that make this challenging. Greece is never going to be a manufacturing powerhouse: almost half of all Greek manufacturers have fewer than fifty employees, which limits productivity and efficiency, since they don’t enjoy economies of scale. Greece also has a legal and business environment that discourages investment, particularly from abroad. Contractual disputes take more than twice as long to resolve as in the average E.U. country. Greece has been among the most difficult European countries in which to start and run a business, and it has myriad regulations designed to protect existing players from competition. All countries have rules like this, but Greece is an extreme case. Bakeries, for instance, can sell bread only in a few standardized weights. Recently, Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, had to promise that he would “liberalize the market for gyms.”

The scale of these problems makes Greece’s task sound hopeless, but simple reforms could have a big impact. Contrary to its image in Europe, Greece has already made moves in this direction: between 2013 and 2014, it jumped a hundred and eleven places in the World Bank’s “ease of starting a business” index. And reform doesn’t mean Greece needs to abandon the things that make it distinctive. In fact, in the case of exports, the country has important assets that it hasn’t taken full advantage of. Greek olive oil is often described as the best in the world. Yet sixty per cent of Greek oil is sold in bulk to Italy, which then resells it at a hefty markup. Greece should be processing and selling that oil itself, and similar stories could be told about feta cheese and yogurt; a 2012 McKinsey study suggested that food products could add billions to Greece’s G.D.P. Similarly, tourism, though it already accounts for eighteen per cent of G.D.P., has a lot more potential. Most tourists in Greece are Greek themselves, a sign that the country could do a much better job of tapping the booming global tourism market. Doing so would require major investments in improving ports and airports, and in marketing. But the upside could be huge. Greece also needs to stem its current brain drain. It produces a large number of scientists and engineers, but it spends little on research and development, so talent migrates abroad. And there are other ways that Greece could capitalize on its climate and its educated workforce; as Galbraith suggests, it’s an ideal location for research centers and branches of foreign universities.

To implement such changes, Greece will have to overcome other problems. Reforms work best when the level of trust in political institutions is high. But the Greek state has a poor reputation among citizens, who see it as a pawn of special interests. (This distrust of the government is one reason for the country’s notoriously high rate of tax evasion.) On top of this, the chief advocate of structural reform to date has been the much hated troika, whose obsession with austerity has made the mere notion of reform anathema. Opening up the Greek economy would benefit ordinary citizens, since the economy’s myriad rules and regulations serve mainly to protect the wealthy and those lucky enough to have won a sinecure. But that’s a hard sale to make at a time when people are worried about holding on to what they have.

Nonetheless, it’s a sale that Alexis Tsipras should try to make. As Ioannides told me, “We know from looking at other countries that, for reform to work, the government and the public really need to own it.” Right now, no one in Greece really owns reform. Still, Tsipras has considerable political capital. He could use that capital to spend the rest of his time in office inveighing against austerity. But Germany has made it painfully clear that that will have no effect. Instead, Tsipras should forget about what Europe isn’t going to do, and focus on what Greece can do for itself. He should make the case for why Greece needs to focus on exports; make it easier for young people to find jobs and start businesses; and even allow loaves of various weights and liberalized gyms. This isn’t the platform that Tsipras ran on. But it’s the platform that Greece needs him to govern on.


The New Yorker, originally published July 27th, 2015

A tragedy Unfords in Lesvos

In the early fall of 1922, the third year of the Greco-Turkish War, the Turkish Army entered the city of Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, after routing the Greek Army. A day later, much of the city was burned to the ground, and the Turks began massacring ethnic Greeks and Armenians. Hundreds of thousands fled, desperately trying to secure seats in small, overcrowded boats that sputtered away from the Turkish mainland. Many sailed to the northwest, to the Greek island of Lesvos. The young nation was changed forever by the arrival of these prosfyges, as they were known; Greece’s music, cooking, and urban landscapes would never be the same.

In 2015, the straits between Turkey and Lesvos are again traversed by refugees—this time from Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. They number half a million so far this year. The summer brought increasingly helpless scenes as the island filled with refugees, and the local government, already straining under the pressure of Greece’s debt crisis, was unable to help them. Alex Majoli’s stark black-and-white photographs show the refugees’ continuing struggle to register with the authorities when they arrive on the island’s rocky northern beaches. Majoli, a longtime member of Magnum Photos, was on Lesvos two weeks ago. He told me that many journalists had left the island, but the number of refugee boats arriving tripled in the days he was there. On Wednesday, the International Rescue Committee noted, sixteen thousand refugees were stuck on Lesvos, unable to move on.

Majoli’s photographs are shot digitally, with a strong flash, to create “theatre out of reality,” as he puts it. Drawing influence from the Italian absurdist Luigi Pirandello, Majoli uses his lens to capture the increasingly surreal geopolitical landscape of Europe today. Scenes of children being carried from a flimsy dinghy through the spray of the Aegean and onto the island take on the moral weight of a carefully constructed tale. An improvised cardboard sunshade, held above the head of an Afghan man who is stuck in a two-day-long line for his transit visa, evokes the masks of ancient Greek tragedy.

Greeks today still talk of the sailors on French, British, and U.S. warships who sat in the harbor watching refugees as they died on the quai at Smyrna. Majoli, who is Italian, criticizes Western Europeans for similar paralysis. “To be an individual, you need boundaries,” he said. “If you open the boundary, you lose your identity, maybe in a good way, but it changes what it means to be German, what it means to be Greek.” Just as the 1922 catastrophe transformed Greece, the 2015 influx is acting as a “detonator for a greater crisis in Europe,” where questions of identity become more fluid daily. Majoli describes the turmoil using an Italian adage that echoes an English one about chickens coming home to roost: Tutti i nodi vengono al pettine—“The knots are becoming caught in the comb.”


The New Yorker

The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

The word “ink” is a child of the Latin incaustum, which means “having been burned.” In the Middle Ages, people thought that ink burned its way into parchment, because iron-gall inks go onto the page pale, then darken. This is not what’s happening, physically, but it makes sense as a metaphor: a medieval manuscript, because it was made by hand, is necessarily an original, even when it is a copy of something else. It cannot be standardised any more than a thing can be unburned.

The Voynich Manuscript is a special kind of original. We know, thanks to carbon dating, that it was put together in the early fifteenth century. But no living person has ever, as far as we know, understood it. Nobody can decode the language the book is written in. It has no title and no author. A new facsimile, edited by Raymond Clemens and published by Yale University Press, draws attention to the way that we think about truth now: the book invites guesses, conspiracy theory, spiritualism, cryptography. The Voynich Manuscript has charisma, and charisma has lately held a monopoly on our attentions.

The manuscript is two hundred and twenty-five millimetres tall, a hundred and sixty wide, and five centimetres thick. Yale’s new facsimile is somewhat larger, as it includes wide white margins for the amateur cryptographer’s own marginalia. The manuscript’s Renaissance-era cover (it was rebound) is made of what the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Yale, calls a “limp vellum.” The book has resided at Yale’s library since 1969.

Turn the covers—as Umberto Eco once did; it was the only book in the Beinecke’s famous collection that he cared to see—and you are greeted by writing in brown ink accompanied by strange diagrams and paintings of plants. The writing will not be decipherable to you. The book was made in the ordinary medieval way, but the script—the form of its letters, the language itself—was apparently invented by whoever made it. Some call the language and its script “Voynichese.” The letters loop prettily, and the text runs from left to right, top to bottom.

The first half of the book is filled with drawings of plants; scholars call this the “herbal” section. None of the plants appear to be real, although they are made from the usual stuff (green leaves, roots, and so on; search a word like “botanical” in the British Library’s illuminated-manuscript catalogue and you’ll find several texts that are similar to this part). The next section contains circular diagrams of the kind often found in medieval zodiacal texts; scholars call this part “astrological,” which is generous. Next, the so-called “balneological” section shows “nude ladies,” in Clemens’s words, in pools of liquid, which are connected to one another via a strange system of tubular plumbing that often snakes around whole pages of text. These scenes resemble drawings in the alchemical tradition, which gave rise to a now debunked theory that the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Roger Bacon wrote the book. Then we get what appear to be instructions in the practical use of those plants from the beginning of the book, followed by pages that look roughly like recipes.

Voynich is not a word from the book but, rather, the name of an eccentric book dealer, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, who bought the manuscript, in 1912. When Voynich purchased the text, it was accompanied by a letter by Johannes Marcus Marci (1595-1667), of Prague, who claimed that the book had been “sold to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II at a reported price of 600 ducats and that it was believed to be a work by Roger Bacon.” (Voynich would later say that the seller was the occult philosopher John Dee; Clemens points out that he was nudged toward this hypothesis by a historical novel.) The book appears to have bounced around Prague for a while—in 1639, a person named Barchius described it as “a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of writing in unknown characters,” and guessed that “the whole thing is medical.” The book’s historical trail vanishes in 1670, up until the time that Voynich purchased it.

Yale’s new edition affords Voynich a profile, by Arnold Hunt, which turns out to be warranted by his strong and odd personality. Voynich was born in 1864, in Telšiai, to a Polish family. He supposedly spoke twenty languages fluently. He was arrested in Kovno, in 1885, for his membership in the Proletariat Party, a social-revolutionary group, and sentenced, without trial, to exile in Siberia for five years. He got a lot of reading done there, and then he escaped, travelling widely and ultimately bartering his waistcoat and glasses for a spot on a boat from Hamburg to England. There, he became part of the intellectual circle that surrounded the Russian agitator Sergei Kravchinsky, known as Stepniak. Once his adventuring days were over, Voynich became a book dealer—a good one, although he once accidentally (one hopes) sold a forgery to the British Museum. “Voynich in later life would sometimes point dramatically to the wounds he had received” on his youthful adventures, Hunt notes: “Here I have sword, here I have sword, here I have bullet.”

In 1903, the Jesuits decided to sell a group of texts from the Collegio Romano collection to the Vatican; the sale took nine years to complete. For reasons unknown, and under conditions of total secrecy, Voynich managed to procure some of the books before they entered the Vatican Library. One of them was the Voynich Manuscript. Voynich believed that his impenetrable book contained authentic wisdom—or, at least, he said so during publicity kicks in the States, trying to make his treasured book famous. “When the time comes,” he told the Times, “I will prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of twentieth-century science.”

Voynich never cracked the code, if one indeed exists. In “Cryptographic Attempts,” another essay that accompanies the Yale facsimile, William Sherman notes that “some of the greatest code breakers in history” attempted to unlock the manuscript’s mysteries; the impenetrability of Voynichese became a professional problem for those in the code game. William Romaine Newbold, a professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in the early part of the twentieth century, “persuaded himself that the writing used both a cipher common from Bacon’s alchemical manuscripts along with a separate—and far more complicated—system best described as an anagrammed micrographic shorthand.” This system of cypher “requires transposition (changing the order of the letters), abbreviation (using a system taken from ancient Greece), and microscopic notation (whereby individual pen strokes within a single character, when magnified, serve as shorthand symbols for other letters).” This theory was initially endorsed by the eminent medievalist John Matthews Manly, who had worked as one of the U.S. Army’s chief cryptologists during the First World War. But it did not hold up to closer scrutiny, and Manly eventually concluded that Newbold’s “decipherments were not discoveries of secrets hidden by Roger Bacon but the products of his own intense enthusiasm and his learned and ingenious subconscious.”

The next great mind to apply itself to the manuscript’s code belonged to William F. Friedman, another Army cryptographer, who was among the first people to use computers for textual analysis. In 1925, Manly connected Friedman and his wife, Elizebeth, also a cryptographer, with the manuscript, sending them photographs. They worked on the project for forty years. Friedman and his colleagues broke Japan’s code Purple during the Second World War, and Friedman became the chief cryptanalyst for the War Department and head of the Signals Intelligence Service in the forties and fifties. The historian David Kahn called him the “world’s greatest cryptologist.” By 1944, Friedman had formed the Voynich Manuscript Study Group with some colleagues.

The group never cracked the code. The Friedmans did, however, provide an enigmatic message about the manuscript in an article in Philological Quarterly, “Acrostics, Anagrams, and Chaucer,” published in 1959. The article included a long excursus on the pointlessness of looking for anagrammatic cyphers; a note revealed that the statement itself was an anagram. The authors had left the solution to the anagram in a sealed envelope with the P.Q. editor. After William died in 1970, that editor revealed the message along with a reprint of the piece: “The Voynich MS was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type.—Friedman.”

According to Sherman, the majority of those who have tried their hand at the manuscript’s code “have been amateurs, and many have more interest in conspiracy theories than cryptographic systems.” Nowadays, you can find people trying to crack the code on Reddit. There are many competing theories. Some suggest that the manuscript might be part of a “conworld,” or constructed fantasy—but then one poster responds, “I don’t see why someone would create such an expensive manuscript if this were the case.” Another Redditor asks, “Anyone else wondering if this is material from a lost Mayan codex?”

You can find serious scholarly work among the Redditors’ posts, but most of it is just fun speculation. It is interesting nonetheless, because it’s written in a voice that has shaped communal understanding in our time. Speculative knowledge flourishes in moments of uncertainty and fear. “They don’t want you to know the truth,” the speculators say to their faithful, on the left and on the right. 9/11 conspiracy theories are less frightening than the truth, which is that our lives are always in danger. Astrologers point to an invisible world, freeing its subscribers from the visible one that oppresses them. Tarot facilitates healing conversations. Whether code breaker or spiritualist or amateur historian, the Voynich speculators are linked by their common interest in the past, quasi-occult mystery, and insoluble problems of authenticity. When the book was featured in a recent episode of the Sherlock Holmes-inspired television show “Elementary,” Clemens writes, it stood in “for a mysterious but learned reference to past mysteries that somehow hold important meaning for the present.”

Readers will probably never stop forming communities based on the manuscript’s secrets. Humans are fond of weaving narratives like doilies around gaping holes, so that the holes won’t scare them. And objects from premodern history—like medieval manuscripts—are the perfect canvas on which to project our worries about the difficult and the frightening and the arcane, because these objects come from a time outside culture as we conceive of it. This single, original manuscript encourages us to sit with the concept of truth and to remember that there are ineluctable mysteries at the bottom of things whose meanings we will never know.

The New Yorker