New evidence on the Lucy Letby case from a panel of experts leads many of the papers.

Illustrations by Jan Robert Dünnweller

On a late summer’s day in Cambridge, England, the writer Ali Smith sat with me on a wooden bench in a patch of garden across from the brick rowhouse where she works. Her new novel, Gliff, was due out before long; she described it as a “dystopian pony book,” clearly pleased to have invented a new genre. She flashed impatience when I suggested that she frequently expresses political views both in her fiction and outside it. After a tart “Do I?” she continued, “I think I’m always in the realm of fiction.” A pause before she allowed, “Well, I’m a citizen.” At that moment, I knocked over the water glass I’d carelessly balanced on one arm of the bench. It shattered, and Smith said merrily, “See what happens when you talk politics?” I apologized, and she told me, “If you want to break another one, I’ll break one with you.”

Funny, cheerfully provocative, at once friendly and sharp-elbowed: That’s Smith in person, and also in her copious fictional output (13 novels and six story collections over the past 30 years). Her books are challenging—experimental and unabashedly literary—yet welcoming to all, eminently readable even when they’re disorienting; they engage the reader, demanding collaboration. (Her fifth novel, published in 2011, has a fill-in-the-blank title: There but for the.) Most writers with a foot in the avant-garde achieve cult status at best; Smith collects awed reviews at home and abroad, wins prizes and honors, and sells lots and lots of books to avid fans.

She breaks rules with gleeful abandon, mocking convention, asking her publisher to do things that the industry instinctively abhors. After Gliff will come Glyph—a pair of homophone titles guaranteed to trip up booksellers and buyers for years to come. (Smith adores wordplay, the quirks of language: puns, rhymes, bizarre etymologies, neologisms, contronyms—words that have developed contradictory meanings.) According to her publisher, the two books will “belong together.” Could she tell me more about Glyph ? “Absolutely not”—she hadn’t yet started writing. I backed off, reminded of a line from Artful (2012), a novel first delivered as a series of Oxford lectures, much of it literally ghostwritten (that is, written by a ghost): “Sequence will always be most of the word consequence.”

I’ve been thinking about Smith for more than 20 years. In 2006, just after her third novel, The Accidental, was named Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I reviewed it, and did a little research. I found a short essay by her fellow novelist Jeanette Winterson in which Smith asks, rhetorically, “Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?” This is what Smith does: First, she confuses you—Who’s talking? When did this happen? Where am I?—then she hooks you with a flash of storytelling genius or a dazzling formal innovation. You read on, and the world seems strange to you, and you seem strange to yourself. The flimsy illusions offered up by conventional literature seem hollow (life is stranger than fiction), as do the certainties you live by (are you yourself truly a coherent character?). You have been reskinned.

The hook sometimes looks like a gimmick. It’s not. At Smith’s behest, her obliging publisher hurried each of the four books of the Seasonal Quartet (2016 to 2020) onto bookstore shelves only about six weeks after she’d delivered each manuscript—an unthinkably quick turnaround. Smith’s ambition, from the time she conceived the project in the 1990s, had been to graft the rush of current events onto the everlasting cycle of the seasons. Soon after she finally sat down to write the first book at the end of 2015 came the United Kingdom’s Brexit crisis. Galvanized by the shock result of the referendum, she told herself as she began to write, “This book has to meet the contemporary head-on, or there’s no point to this sequence of books.” Hence the superfast schedule: Autumn appeared just four months after the vote.

[Read: Ali Smith’s Autumn is a post-Brexit masterpiece]

Although the press labeled it “the first Brexit novel,” the word Brexit is never uttered in the book. A seemingly random yet oddly menacing chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and security cameras, is erected near an ordinary English village. A woman battles bureaucracy to renew her passport at the local post office; the petty hurdles are dismaying, ominous, comical. Spanish tourists visiting England are heckled at a train station: “This isn’t Europe … Go back to Europe.” Appalled, a sympathetic witness realizes that “what was happening in that one passing incident was a fraction of something volcanic”—a compact summary of Smith’s narrative strategy.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018, Nicola Sturgeon, then first minister of Scotland, interviewed Smith onstage—since when does a nation’s leader host an experimental novelist at a literary festival?—and read aloud a passage from Autumn that for her perfectly captured the post-referendum mood:

All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland.

The echo of Dickens (the first line of Autumn is “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times”) carries on and on: 46 consecutive sentences begin with “All across the country.”

Every volume of the Seasonal Quartet was a best seller in the U.K.; the most conspicuously topical of the four, Spring (2019), tackled the “migrant crisis” and reached the top of the Sunday Times best-seller list. Migration has been one of Smith’s abiding concerns. “We’re ignoring it,” she said in an interview more than a dozen years ago. “As our countries and our world become smaller … we’re bordered, everything is about the stranger.” She eventually went to see for herself what detainees in the U.K. are put through and was shocked to find “a razor-wire fence so high and encircling such a tiny yard space that it would pass as a literal example of surreality.” In Spring, a brutal Immigration Removal Centre is described in distressing detail—but Smith also imagines a kind of underground railroad for migrants anxious to avoid the authorities.

Bad guys versus good guys? Part of Smith’s appeal is that she shows us warm-hearted progressive ideals in action, a spirit of inclusion feeding hope and healing hurt. As one character in Spring puts it, “What looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open.” But nothing in Smith’s fiction is that simple. In Winter, two sisters are mourning the death of their mother. One says, “It takes a death sometimes to make us all live a bit more.” The other thinks, “Platitude, cliché.” If your sympathy is divided, that’s because with Smith, every either/or is complicated by a both/and. A maxim from The Accidental : “The word and is a little bullet of oxygen.”

[Read: Ali Smith spins modernity into myth in Winter]

The stories she tells spill out of stories that spill out of other stories. She’s an inveterate flouter of chronology—a timeline for almost any of her books, including the quartet, would look like a manic Etch A Sketch scribble: Rather than plot or the forward sweep of the clock’s hands, it is Smith’s voice, her many voices, that propels the reader. As though on a whim, she’ll take an unexpected detour into art history or natural history or literary criticism. Finger-on-the-pulse backdrops are balanced by cultural or historical or scientific deep dives. Against the grim tidings of the day, news of pain inflicted by strangers on strangers, she pits, in Spring, the oddly charming tale of Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke spending several weeks in 1922 in the same small Swiss town—and never meeting. A hack screenwriter wants to rework that non-anecdote into an erotic TV costume drama, the two writers screwing in a swinging cable car high above a picturesque snowy valley. Appalled, the director he hopes to hire flees and ends up in the Scottish Highlands, where he crosses paths with the network of people dedicated to helping migrants.

Like every Smith novel, Spring is about human connection, how hard it is—how damned important it is—to acknowledge humanity in the other and embrace it. Yet Smith has talked about how she loves the spirit of alienation in Mansfield’s writing: “Distance, foreignness, knowing you’re out of place or in limbo … and however much you feel at home, you’re fooling yourself, and however strange you feel in the world … it’s natural, it’s the most natural thing.” Sometimes there simply is no connection. Force it, and you get schlock.

When I interviewed Smith for The Paris Review in 2017, a few years after the Scottish-independence referendum, she told me, “I like edges but not borders.” Born in Inverness in 1962 and raised by an Irish mother and an English father, she calls herself “Scottish by formation” (quoting another of her heroes, the Scottish-born Muriel Spark). “I grew up on the margins,” she said. “I inherited all the value of the margins.” Her working-class parents brought her up in council housing. She was much younger than her four siblings, and looking back, she recognized that she’d had “a remarkably lucky childhood, cosseted and bullied both in that lovely family way, with nobody following me, no rivalries.” Her parents had both won scholarships, but had been obliged to leave school to go to work. They were adamant that their children would be educated. All five graduated from university.

“I was a proficient, happy, versatile child,” Smith told me. She went to Roman Catholic primary school, then a state-run high school. She read all the time. “I thought of myself as a poet through my teens,” she confessed to another interviewer. “I was pretty dreadful.” At the University of Aberdeen, she studied English literature and language, graduating with highest honors. She then spent five years studying for a Ph.D. at Newnham College, Cambridge. Alongside her studies, she wrote plays; Sarah Wood, who became her life partner, directed five of them. The doctorate, meanwhile, never materialized. Her examiners requested changes to her dissertation on three Modernist masters (James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams); she refused. She was nevertheless offered two teaching jobs, and accepted the one at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow.

That stint lasted 18 months, cut short by a debilitating bout of chronic fatigue syndrome. At the time, the illness felt “like I’d been hit from the back with a baseball bat—after which I … went into a kind of physical breakdown.” Smith returned to Cambridge to recover, but the symptoms lingered, resurfacing intermittently. Though she found it painful to write longhand, she scratched out her first collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), which scooped up a couple of prizes. She persuaded her publisher, Virago, to take a chance on her debut novel, Like (1997), and from then on, she was a writer only.

Her second novel, Hotel World (2001), was shortlisted for both the Booker and Orange Prizes, success of the kind that heralds a major career. In The Guardian, the novelist Giles Foden wrote, “I have never seen the tenets of recent literary theory (the impossibility of the coherent subject, or substantive character, for instance) so cleverly insinuated into a novel.” It begins with the voice of a ghost. A teenage chambermaid working at a fancy hotel in a dour northern city has fallen down a dumbwaiter shaft to her death. Her ghost, itching to feel again (“What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe”), would like to know how long it took her to fall:

(and this time I’d throw myself willingly down it wooo-

hooooo and this time I’d count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that’s all it took to take me, that’s the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb—.

A classic, manically ludic Smith passage, grim and comical, pushing at the edge of too much, yet as easy to swallow as a spoonful of honey.

Having given voice to the dead, Smith takes it away; the ghost girl is losing her ability to speak, losing language. Her last message to the living:

Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf.

When I asked Smith about the legion of ghosts in her fiction, she shrugged and said, “I just don’t think death makes that much difference.” Sounding like Gertrude Stein, she elaborated: “We carry with us all the people who have made us and the people we make and the lives we make, and the world we make continues on from what we make of it.”

The realm of fiction where Smith says she “always” dwells is mostly populated by family and friends, the people we’re most comfortable with, who also drive us crazy. Often the setting is the home we long for and can’t wait to escape. The premise of The Accidental—borrowed from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film, Teorema—is the reskinning of an unhappy bourgeois family: mother, son, daughter, and stepfather. In musical notation, an “accidental” changes the pitch. In the novel, the accidental—the catalyst—is a mysterious character who rings the doorbell and announces, “Sorry I’m late. I’m Amber. Car broke down.” Though she’s very much flesh and blood (her flesh is desired by every family member, young, old, male, female), this uninvited guest might as well be a ghost, an inexplicable apparition with uncanny powers. The daughter thinks of Amber as “the kind of superheroine that can draw things to her and repel them away from her at the same time.”

Jan Robert Dünnweller

The reader watches as the family’s world disintegrates, and the idea, I believe, is that the reader molts in sympathy. The daughter, in her old skin, needs everything to be mediated, filtered, distanced. A bright, lonely 12-year-old, she’s obsessed with her video camera (and has a verbal tic, using i.e. ad nauseam). Amber drops the girl’s camera from a pedestrian bridge onto a busy highway below—deliberately. Amber does everything deliberately. In her new skin, the younger girl accepts that “her responsibility” is about “actually seeing, being there.” That may sound like a New Age mantra, but the transformation, slight and subtle, is also plausible and moving. The parents fare less well; the fractured family will never be whole again. (Smith doesn’t do happy endings.)

In my mind, the 12-year-old from The Accidental reappears, four years older and much sadder (her mother has died), in my favorite Smith book, How to be both (2014), a novel in two parts published in vice-versa editions: with the same cover, but with the order of the parts reversed—in effect, different novels packaged identically and released simultaneously. This older girl, George, is also bright and lonely, and she’s pedantically fixated on correct grammar—“a finite set of rules,” she insists. George, too, will be reskinned. Among other things, she slowly discovers her erotic love for another girl. Her evolution is watched over by the ghost of an actual Italian quattrocento painter from Ferrara, Francesco del Cossa.

One part of How to be both is narrated by the bewildered painter, who can’t comprehend 21st-century England and decides he’s in an afterlife “purgatorium,” condemned to traipse after George, whom he mistakes at first for a boy. The other part is told from George’s perspective, close third-person. She remains unaware of the ghostly observer who’s following her around. Which part you read first depends on which edition you happen to have bought, and to discover which sequence works best, you’ll have to reread. Should the tale of a 600-year-old artist, with its technical asides on the art of the fresco, come before the tale of modern-day teenage angst? Do the parts of the puzzle fit either way?

The painter’s confusion about George’s gender is an ironic echo (or foreshadowing) of the backstory Smith has invented for him: He was born a girl but disguised himself as a boy to become a painter. (“Nobody will take you for such a training wearing the clothes of a woman,” warned his father, a brickmaker.) The adventures of this talented cross-dresser make a mockery of binary ideas about gender. What the painter learned centuries ago in Ferrara, what George learns in 21st-century London, is that no finite set of rules applies.

Back on the sunny Cambridge bench, Smith told me about the origins of Gliff, which is full of characteristic quirks and revisits her abiding concerns—gender, boundaries, the importance of unmediated engagement with the world. But it’s darker fiction, with some acutely painful passages. It began as a short story written “very fast” in August 2023, a commission for an anthology: “I was supposed to write something that was tangentially Kafkaesque,” she explained, after which she turned to work on a new novel. But she was ambushed by a “horrendous” bout of insomnia, “three months of almost no sleep,” and realized that she was writing the wrong book, and that the short story “was not going away, was waiting, rather like characters do, at the back of your head.”

Where did the title come from? “I was playing about online one day thinking, Is this a nonsense word or not? And I looked up the word that sounded like glyph but was spelled differently, and found out it wasn’t a made-up word—it was actually a northern word, a Scottish word.” It has many meanings, among them a glimpse, a sudden fright, or a brief moment. It’s also the name of the horse in this dystopian pony book, but we’ll get to that.

A glyph is a mark—as Smith said, “The smallest unit of meaning,” a scratch on a cave wall, an ornamental carving on a primitive tool. In the Paris Review interview, when I asked about the building blocks of her prose, Smith explained that “the rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it—the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.” Now she’s taken the next step, training her attention on the gesture that precedes even the syllable. In Gliff, she shows us prehistoric cave art and the head of a horse carved many thousands of years ago onto a rib bone.

She also steps for the first time into the near future: A brutal totalitarian state has been rounding up, interning, and reeducating people whom the regime deems “unverifiable.” The climate is as much Orwell as Kafka: 24/7 surveillance, grotesque euphemisms, justified paranoia. Britain’s not quite there yet—but, Smith insisted, “could be.” She added, sitting up taller, “If we just raise our heads from thinking it’s not happening, we’d see that most of the book is happening right now somewhere.”

The authorities have started drawing red lines around the unwanted unverifiables—literally. They have a comically low-tech machine called a “supera bounder” that applies paint around houses, around vehicles. Demarcated houses are demolished, vehicles towed away: rapacious capitalism combining punishment and profit.

Two siblings, a young teenager and a younger sister, more or less abandoned in an empty house, find themselves on the wrong side of the red line. The older sibling—our narrator, Bri, cautious and protective—worries about the meager supply of canned food, and tries hard to lift the spirits of the younger one, who finds seven horses in a nearby field, one of which, a gray gelding, she adopts (or is adopted by). She gives him his name.

Gliff the horse is the moral center of Gliff the novel, and also the occasion of some arresting descriptions:

The grey horse’s bones were close to its skin all over it and it seemed huge even though it was quite a small horse, the smallest one in this field. It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn’t weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree …

The eye was shocking.

It was really beautiful.

You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and—what?

Five years later, in a moment of crisis, Bri realizes that the missing word is “equanimity.”

When Smith was a child in Inverness, about 4 or 5 years old, she discovered a stable behind an ice rink. “Between the age of 7 and 11,” she said, “I went every Saturday in the summer and hung out. We did do a little grooming—very small ponies in my case. What I know about horses all comes from that place at the back of the ice rink, where 12 or 13 horses lived in the field.” She paused. “You know, being on the back of a horse teaches you everything about everything.”

The writing about Gliff the horse does more than bring the living creature into focus. “His mouth was decisive without force, a soft lipped line. It made him look resigned, noncommittal, but also poised, as if waiting.” That “soft lipped line” is the antithesis of the supera bounder’s garish, excluding red. Yet Smith is in the business of complicating binaries as well as erasing boundaries; she won’t tolerate a simple dichotomy.

Which brings us back to the two siblings. The younger one is Rose, wild, fiercely loyal, fiercely stubborn. Bri, kind and caring and, like so many of Smith’s characters, obsessed with words and their meaning, is also Briar or Brice. (“Why did I myself really like having more than one name, as if I had more than one self?”) When asked, bluntly but without malice, “Are you a boy or a girl?,” the answer is, “Yes I am.”

Flash-forward five years and—a spoiler follows—Bri now serves the state. Reeducated? Lured by the promise of elevated status? Tortured? It’s not clear what has happened, but Bri is complicit in the horrors of the regime, and this lover of words has been silenced: “That’s as much of that story as I care to tell. One line about it is more than enough.” The unspoken, the unspeakable, is more frightening than anything else in the novel.

Four cats patrol the alley next to where Smith and her partner live and work. The cats came and went, occasionally pausing near our bench to lick a paw and ignore us ostentatiously. I wondered which ones were hers, and she said, approvingly, “They kind of live everywhere.”

[From the April 2023 issue: Adam Begley on why you should be reading Sebastian Barry]

I asked again about politics, suggesting mildly that sometimes she deploys her dazzling skills in the service of ideology. In Winter, she quotes Keats: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Does she agree? “Fiction’s only agenda is to be fiction,” she replied, “but lies have an agenda.” Her soft, lilting voice was buttressed by quiet conviction: “All you do is tell the story. What you do is write and write, and you tell the story that arrives—and it really is like being on the back of a horse.” But what about the wild complexity of her narratives, the abrupt swerves and unannounced excursions? As though to allow for nuance, she said, “Of course it will be political when it’s written, because everything is. But I believe deep in my own bones that story is about something that cancels division between us.” She added, “We cross those lines every time we listen to someone or are heard by someone.”

Some early reviewers of Gliff have complained that it feels too “on the nose.” The book’s horrors—climate catastrophe, internment camps, genocidal wars, high-tech surveillance—are too familiar to serve as prophecy. Is it fair to complain that the future is almost already upon us? Who needs prophecy when dystopia is now? The novel thrums with Smith’s urgent need to tell a story about where our divided present could lead us. “We cannot look away at the moment,” she said to me. “We must not look away from the darkness. And if I didn’t look at the dark, what kind of a writer would I be?”

* Lead-image sources: Lorentz Gullachsen / Contour by Getty; Leonardo Cendamo / Getty.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “The Experimentalist.”

Informal sector business owners and vendors are the backbone of South Sudan’s economy.

Should you find yourself invited to a sex party, it might be helpful to know that you are not obliged to have sex. You can listen to music or watch performances, observe your fellow guests, and, with permission, touch them. But no one will consider it rude should you leave without having sex. If you’re invited to an orgy, however, that’s a whole different ball of wax, and people will most certainly be offended if you don’t participate. Especially if you are the sixth person in the room, in which case your presence is technically crucial. An orgy requires six to 20 people. Fewer than six, and the encounter is simply categorized by the number of participants: threesomes, foursomes, and so on. More than 20, and we’re back in the terrain of the sex party.

This isn’t information that I, personally, ever felt I needed to know. Among other things, I have an aversion to crowds, especially in the bedroom. The performative aspects of sex parties that participants seem to enjoy most are, to me, a turnoff, another way that social media—and the image-driven FOMO culture it spawned—has made life into content.

But I decided to do my journalistic due diligence on sex parties because I kept reading about them in the news. For instance, New York’s former COVID czar acknowledged participating in what the New York Post called “drug-fueled sex parties”—during the first year of the pandemic, no less. (It’s probably not worth a letter to the editor, but given that he said his parties were limited to 10 people, we now know that technically the proper terminology for such a gathering is not sex party but orgy. Each participant, he says, took a COVID test before having sex. Turnoff doesn’t even begin to describe nasal-swab foreplay.)

In the course of my research, I did not—I would like to be clear here—participate in any sex parties. I think it’s wise not to get that close to your sources. I learned that “play parties” can take place in people’s homes, but many happen under the auspices of private clubs. I reached out to a number of prominent ones, wondering if the sex-club boom was real, and what actually goes on at them. One of my major findings: People, especially rich people, come up with extremely elaborate justifications for getting laid.

To be clear, these clubs are not brothels—guests have sex with one another, not with the club’s employees. Some say that they are putting on performances of “high erotic art”; others want to promote “equitable pleasure.” They all try to sell erotic experimentation less as a means of gratification than as a moral virtue. They are creating, they insist, not so much a venue for sex as a gathering space of “like-minded individuals.” People who are “liberated” from social mores. People who think differently. People for whom the normal rules don’t apply.

Snctm, a members-only sex club in Beverly Hills inspired by the movie Eyes Wide Shut, opened about a decade ago, and growth “was slow and steady” at first, Robert Artés, the club’s managing director, told me. “But the last three to four years, there’s been tremendous growth in this space.”

Snctm members pay $12,500 or more a year for access to masquerade parties that can cost upwards of $2,000 a ticket. KNKY Rabbit, a sex club in L.A., offers annual memberships that range from $10,000 for the “Fluffy Tail” level to $250,000 for the “Burrow Elite Membership.” NSFW, an exclusive sex club in New York, also has a tiered membership. The most basic, a reasonable $300, gets you access to a members’ chat group and invitations to parties. The “Tribute” and “Status” tiers can range from $750 to $2,500. Members, referred to as “lovers,” can purchase VIP-party upgrades for $1,000 a piece, or hire NSFW to create custom play experiences for themselves and their friends, starting at $5,000. Memberships are for life.

NSFW stands for New Society for Wellness, its owners say. The club claims more than 10,000 members around the world, and considers itself as much a movement as a club, dedicated, according to its mission statement, to helping members “Live Adventurously”: “We believe sex is a gift that should be explored, honored and mastered through experience and education. Knowledge gained from expanding your sexual wisdom is one path to real happiness.” Among the people seeking real happiness through such ends are CEOs, politicians, and celebrities, Daniel Saynt, the club’s founder and “chief conspirator,” told me. “We’re looking for the most creative, most interesting people. We’re trying to collect individuals who see sex as something that needs to be prioritized.” A 14-point questionnaire evaluates people on categories such as hygiene, goals for their “sexual journey,” wealth, career accolades, and travel history. An applicant must hit nine or more points of “attraction.”

This is not a key party with your schlubby neighbors. Members are not just rich and influential; they’re beautiful. Particularly the women, who at many parties are eligible for reduced-price or free admission. At clubs like KNKY Rabbit, applicants submit photos in addition to describing their sexual desires. Artés confirmed that Snctm screens “based on appearance”: “While we are inclusive of race, religion, gender identity, and everything like that, we do want a party of beautiful people.”

Snctm’s big selling point is anonymity. Artés said that its members are “affluent and prominent leaders in their field or in business, entertainment, or arts.” Some of the guests “keep their masks on all night long.” (Does a little mask over the eyes actually make a celebrity unrecognizable? Perhaps the illusion of anonymity is part of the fantasy.)

Putting on a show is essential. Guests arrive, mingle, and then take in performances—elaborate burlesque, shibari demos, flogging. NSFW exhibits highly produced erotic performances that make you feel “like you’re in a gallery,” Saynt told me. Snctm’s black-tie masquerades incorporate “erotic theater.” KNKY Rabbit combines “artistic innovation and exclusive experiences.”

Club owners say it’s just like interactive theater—except instead of giving a standing ovation at the end of the show, you can lie down and have sex with your fellow patrons of the arts. “What we do, you can’t do onstage at Lincoln Center,” Artés said.

It’s easy to draw a line from the libertines attracted to high-end sex clubs to the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley technocrats. And the kink industry is thriving in the valley. In a Medium post, the product designer Chris Messina, famous in some circles for “inventing” the hashtag, described nonmonogamy as nothing more or less than a design solution: “Out here, we’re data-positive and solution-oriented and if your product (i.e. marriage) is failing for 50% of your customers, then you need to fix it or offer something better.”

In Brotopia, Emily Chang’s 2018 book on Silicon Valley, she writes about tech bros who speak frankly and “proudly” of their frequent industry orgies—“about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule.”

A 2007 survey of individuals worth $30 million or more found that 70 percent felt like their wealth gave them a “better sex” life, and that the majority felt their sex life was more “adventurous and exotic” than other people’s. Threesomes are the most common sexual fantasy among Americans. For most people, they remain just that, but among the rich and famous, abundance is the word.

One of the things that draws people like these to sex parties is the fact that the standard rules don’t apply, that they’re places where the answer to every desire seems to be yes. These are people who are “chasing the rainbow,” as Jan Gerber, who runs Paracelsus Recovery, one of the most expensive rehab centers in the world, put it to me. Gerber has a front-row seat to the sex lives of the ultrarich because his clinic, which is based in Zurich, provides rehabilitation and psychiatric services to billionaires and the globally famous. It’s possible, he suggested, to become desensitized even to pleasure. You can do “something very exciting the first time,” he told me—whether it’s skydiving, shopping, or sex—but the brain’s “tolerance” builds. Soon “plain vanilla sex” just isn’t so “exciting anymore.” He said he sees a “higher incidence of narcissism” among “people of wealth, especially self-made ones.” They feel they deserve to be indulged.

Clay Cockrell, a therapist who specializes in working with the very wealthy, says he sees a lot of patients who feel like, “I’m bored. I’m numb.” Eventually, “you’ve flown on the private planes, eaten at the best restaurants … What else is there? Some of this then gets transferred into high-risk behavior, kink sexual behavior, because they’re bored and they want more.”

To each his own, I guess. But I can’t help but see these people’s dismissal of the simple joys of life—their insistence that monogamy is dull and middle-class—as a tragically snobby form of cynicism. In the course of my reporting, I often found the marketing of the clubs comic and absurd, but I came to see the people joining them as deeply sad.

Club managers stressed to me that even the rich and entitled have to follow the rules—that rules are in fact central to their business.

Touching other attendees requires affirmative consent. Touching paid performers is strictly forbidden. Some clubs, such as Snctm, don’t allow drugs and have strict rules for alcohol. “Whenever you have sex involved, you have consent issues,” Artés told me, “so we can’t have anybody on drugs or intoxicated.” This is not just about protecting guests; it’s also about staying in business. Performers have to sign contracts, and the club has a 38-page policy manual laying out the rules: “They cannot touch any of the guests. They cannot touch other performers because, otherwise, you could be in violation of prostitution laws.” The businesses already struggle against the biases of the financial industry, club runners told me. “We’ve had difficulty with banking, with credit-card processing,” Artés told me. “There are tax companies that have turned us down.”

Everyone I spoke with mentioned the importance of consent. Saynt told me he wanted to “create a space that feels safer than a bar … where you can walk around naked and you don’t feel like anyone’s going to harm you.” In this context, consent is not meant to be restrictive, but liberating. You can feel free because you’re told that nothing will happen to you that you don’t want to happen.

But no one stressed consent as much as Luis Cortes, at Sucia NYC. He and his wife, Morgana, started throwing their own parties after finding themselves uncomfortable in much of New York’s play-party scene, which he described as “very white,” not just in terms of demographics, but in terms of relationships to privilege and standards of beauty. They founded Sucia NYC in 2020 after the sex parties they were hosting in their own apartment got too big for the space. (“It was a lot,” he told me. “Like, we live here, right? I use the couch during the week.”) They now run the club out of a 2,200-square-foot space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and charge a relatively affordable rate—$100 to $150 per event, with a sliding scale for teachers, artists, and activists. Their Instagram account emphasizes “community” and “decolonizing your pleasure.”

Sucia, Cortes told me, aims to center “the joy and pleasure of Black and Indigenous women and Black and Indigenous LGBTQI-plus populations.” It eschews traditional beauty standards and welcomes bodies of all shapes and sizes. It doesn’t charge men more than women, a practice Cortes objects to: “If you have women coming in for free and men are paying X amount of dollars,” he said, those men are “coming expecting something.” He sees consent as especially paramount because Sucia caters to a population that has historically “had less connection with bodily autonomy”—people who haven’t always been taught that they can say no.

Cortes said he’s seen people have breakthroughs and breakdowns at parties as they process shame, religious guilt, or past sexual trauma. The club offers aftercare workshops, and brings in experts for talks about sexuality and religion and combatting heteronormativity.

Cortes was also one of the only people I spoke with who never used the word fantasy. When I brought it up myself, he seemed offended. “That is lazy,” he told me. “That is dangerous. That is some fucking, like, knight-in-white-armor bullshit. It’s like, no—this isn’t fantasy; this is real things.” Then he said it even more emphatically: “We don’t, we don’t, we don’t, we don’t sell fantasies.”

[Read: At group sex parties, strict rules make for safe spaces]

But all club runners sell something. Everyone, including Cortes, is in the “sexpitality” industry. At a Sucia party, after a talk about consent, you can listen to Afrobeat and take in a performance. Cortes shared with me a list of some of his favorite acts: “Eli the naked trumpeter. They do flogging. They do impact play”; “You know Sir Marvelous. His thing is he does forced orgasms”; “Clavel Marchito, she is a sex-workers’-rights advocate out of Chile … and she’ll come in and do fire play and some flogging and stuff”; “Selena Surreal … She walks on glass. She does a knee dive into Lego bricks.”

Yes, these acts are real. Personally, I can’t imagine enjoying watching someone walk on glass, and playing with fire sounds less erotic than a Tony Robbins retreat. But these acts seem to offer another version of what Gerber and Cockrell were talking about—a way to break through all the boredom and numbness. Rich people might go to a sex club because they’re deadened by excess and privilege. Working-class people might go because they’re tired of being ground into dust. Either way, they all want to feel something again. Whether the club is promoted as a “path to real happiness,” art appreciation, or social justice, these are all businesses finding an ideological or class-appropriate way to market the pursuit of pleasure.

For some patrons, the party may not be an excuse for the sex at all; the sex may be the excuse for the party. Saynt told me that he’s noticed that younger patrons, especially Gen Z, are mostly interested in the “performance of eroticism.” “They’re not having sex at these parties as much,” he said. “They’re just coming for the costumes.”

All of this is in contrast to many of the sex-party stories I’d been reading in the news, about events such as Sean Combs’s “freak-offs,” at which he allegedly coerced drugged women into having sex with male prostitutes. That’s not a sex party: That’s a crime. (Combs “denies as false and defamatory” claims that he drugged and sexually abused people.) Recently, The New York Times reported on a document prepared by federal investigators showing “a web of payments” among former Representative Matt Gaetz and associates “who are said to have taken part with him in drug-fueled sex parties.” Court filings also accuse Gaetz—who was briefly Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general—of having sex at one of the parties with a 17-year-old girl. Also a crime. (Gaetz denied any wrongdoing and called the allegation that he’d slept with a teenager “a false smear”; the DOJ investigation was closed without any charges.)

And yet it’s not hard to imagine someone enjoying a sex party at Snctm or KNKY Rabbit, chafing against their limits, and then going off to do their own, independent thing. Saynt described to me a benign-sounding version of this: Members might meet for the first time at a play party, hit it off, and start “going on trips and going on yachts and boats and having little sex parties everywhere.” But presumably no one’s monitoring those sex parties in the middle of the sea to make sure the sex is safe and respectful.

We’re talking, as Cockrell put it, about rich people who are in “control of every aspect of their life. Nobody’s going to tell them no. And if somebody does, they’re just going to go build a castle where no doesn’t exist.”

People do bad things in castles like that.

Sex clubs promise people that they can push the limits of sexual freedom without going too far. They sell rule-breaking sex in a rule-bound environment. They say they’re breaking barriers—not repackaging the world’s oldest profession. As in any business, their promoters are hunting for an audience and building a brand.

Speaking of branding. I learned something at the end of my reporting that seemed to highlight the thin line between the sexual freedom promised by these parties and the darker impulses that the rules of our society exist to contain. When Robert Artés shared with me Snctm’s policy manual, full of rules to ensure the safety of its employees and guests, I saw another name listed on the front: Robert Testagrossa. After going down a few rabbit holes, I learned that Artés was a pseudonym, and for good reason. In 2007, Testagrossa pleaded guilty to assault and served five years in prison for what he acknowledged to me “were serious events, for which I accepted serious consequences.” He expressed regret for choices that were “driven by misguided passion and a lapse in judgment.”

His girlfriend at the time had lured a man who had ghosted her after sex to a hotel room. There, Testagrossa and another man Tasered the victim and held him down, while the woman heated up a piece of metal that had been twisted into a four-inch letter R. She then seared it into her former lover’s skin.

You can’t do that at Lincoln Center, either.

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