Some say I'm Not Here to Make Friends is oversexualised but fans have called out double standards.

In his office overlooking Sixth Avenue in Helena, Montana, Wilmot Collins leans back in a chair at his conference table and recounts all of the ways his being here, as a Liberian refugee who in 2018 became the first Black mayor of any city in Montana since the state joined the union, was unlikely to happen.

Perhaps it all traces back to April 12, 1980, when a faction of armed militants in Liberia, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, entered the executive mansion in Monrovia, the nation’s capital, and murdered President William Tolbert. They dumped his body into a mass grave with those of 27 of his colleagues—members of the West African nation’s single-party leadership—ushering in a new era of military rule. Collins was a senior at Carroll High School in Yekepa then, and he remembers the string of killings and atrocities that began shortly after the start of Doe’s rule. “Things were bad,” he told me. They soon got worse. Those years started Collins’s thinking about political systems and how they could be made better—what they might look like if they worked.

[Read: The new Southern strategy]

After high school, he attended the University of Liberia, where his interest in politics deepened. Specifically, he was fascinated by America’s system. “Professor [D. Elwood] Dunn taught American government; that’s where we learned about Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education; and the system of government intrigued all of us,” he told me. Liberia had a three-branch federal system as well, but studying the clear divisions of power in America captivated him; he imagined a better Liberia.“We had the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary—but the executive was always meddling into every other branch … But then to see that working,” he said, “we had hope.”

Nearly 10 years on, in 1989, his country was on the verge of a second coup. Charles Taylor and his rebel army had been training in Libya and entered Liberia through the Ivory Coast—gaining support along the way from people who had felt left behind by the ever more ruthless military dictatorship. “When Taylor came in with his rebels promising honey and gold,” he said, people thought, This is who we want. But Taylor was a warlord, an ethnic conflict broke out, and Collins eventually fled to the United States.

Collins took some basic lessons from the destabilization of his home nation: the importance of a peaceful, functioning government and the dangers of despotism. It’s wisdom he wishes was not so hard-won, and wisdom he gained only in hindsight. His concern at the time, of course, was escaping.

Twenty-five years after moving to Helena, Collins was serving his first term as the city’s mayor and had eyes on running for statewide office. But then he learned a few more lessons, ones that received only passing mentions in textbooks on American government in the 1980s: that the party system has tremendous influence on who prevails politically. That gatekeeping can exclude candidates who lack the right connections. That hopefuls can have their campaigns smothered by their opponents’ cash.

Collins learned those lessons in his own bid for Senate, a race he was elbowed out of when a candidate backed by the Democratic Party establishment jumped in, only to then lose to the Republican. To Collins, the whole experience was dispiriting. “When the establishment is not in your corner, you will struggle, and struggle raising money,” Collins told me. “I was pissed; I was angry because I didn’t get the support.”

But he still thinks he has a path ahead. He cites a colloquial definition of insanity: “to do the same thing over and over hoping for a different result.” But he hopes that here in Montana he can get a different result.

Liberia began as an idea: that Black people might better prosper in Africa than in the United States. The American Colonization Society sent more than 13,000 free Black people to the west coast of Africa—and though some believed it to be a potential remedy to slavery, it was also a mass exile.

By the time Collins was born, in 1963, Liberia had grown into an independent state. His father was a civil engineer; his mother was the superintendent of schools. “Growing up in Liberia was calm,” he told me. “We grew up just like [in America] basically.” He went to school, played baseball and tennis. Then the first coup happened, then the second. “And life ceased as we knew it.”

On December 24, 1989, the First Liberian Civil War began. Food supplies grew scarce. Each day, Collins or one of his siblings would leave the house to find food, which was concentrated in rebel-held areas. In October 1990, when it was his turn to venture out, he and his fiancée, Maddie Muna, were able to find only a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste.

[From the December 1992 issue: Liberia]

“They say hunger is the best sauce,” he told me, explaining how he guzzled down half the tube before sharing the other half with Maddie. He furrowed his brow as he related the story, but allowed himself to laugh. “I’m not kidding you, that thing tasted like, Oh wow!” His speech slowed down a little again as he remembered how they were almost killed.

On their way back to his family, they were stopped at a checkpoint by rebel troops. The armed men called Maddie over for questioning first. “Where are you from?” he recalled them asking. “What do you do?” Then they pointed at Collins, who had been standing quietly to the side. “Who’s that? Is that your man?” “Yes,” she replied. “You are very lucky. I’m done killing for the day,” the rebel told her.

They sprinted away. “We ran until we got home; we didn’t stop,” he told me. “I’m talking about three, four miles.” That’s when they decided to leave. “We will die,” he remembers thinking. “We didn’t have any food; we’ve been threatened. We’ve gotta get out of here.” But they didn’t know how difficult getting out would be.

A peacekeeping force, led by Nigeria, was helping Liberians escape on cargo vessels, but the lines were staggeringly long. He and Maddie queued at 9 o’clock in the morning on a Friday later that October—only leaving their spot, in shifts, in order to use the bathroom. Almost three days later, on Sunday, at about 10 o’clock at night, they boarded. Three more days passed before they arrived in Ghana—it had been nearly a full week since they had eaten. “Imagine,” he told me, his eyes welling up, “seven days without food and water, barely drinking. And no change of clothes. Nothing.”

He eventually got a job in Ghana, working for SOS Children’s Villages as a teacher—the same job he’d held in Liberia before the war began. But after a few months, he and Maddie, who’d married at the start of 1991, were still struggling to make ends meet, and Maddie offered a suggestion: They should move to America.

“How are we supposed to do that? We don’t have any money,” he responded. “We’ll go to Montana,” Maddie said. Years earlier she had been an exchange student at a high school in the state, and she thought her host family might be able to help.

She wrote a letter to the family, who contacted Montana’s congressional delegation, including Senator Max Baucus. The best way for Maddie to get back to the United States would be on a student visa. With the delegation’s help, the family reached out to a Catholic institution, Carroll College, in Helena, where they lived. Soon after, she was awarded a full scholarship to study nursing at Carroll. She would once again live with the family that had hosted her. But getting to the States would prove a little more difficult for Wilmot. Two weeks before Maddie left for Montana, the couple learned that she was pregnant; they resolved that Maddie should go ahead. It would take two more years before Wilmot would be able to join his family.

“Welcome to Helena, it’s sunny and warm at 32 degrees,” the pilot said over the intercom on February 17, 1994, as Wilmot’s flight from Salt Lake City descended. He was the last one off the plane, and as he walked into the terminal he spotted a sign that read Welcome home, Wilmot. Carroll College faculty and the institution’s president were waiting for him—there to support his wife and child. “I saw my wife for the first time holding my daughter up, and she put her down and said, ‘There’s Daddy, go to Daddy,’” he recalled. The tears start again as he remembers that day. “So my daughter started to walk towards me … and then she just started to run and I just fell on the ground and grabbed … ”

He stops. It’s still fresh.

“I started screaming, calling my wife. ‘Maddie, Maddie, she came to me! She came to me!’”

They moved into low-income housing around the corner from Helena High School, which Maddie had attended as an exchange student, and began their life in America.

Each day, he’d get dressed, leave their eggshell-white townhome, and turn onto North Montana Avenue—both in search of a job and to acquaint himself with his new home. One day, he explored a bit farther than normal and stumbled upon the state capitol.

He walked inside and was immediately struck by the marble columns and grand rotunda. He marched up the stairs and saw the governor’s office. “And I decided to go meet the governor,” he told me, matter-of-factly. The governor’s scheduler stopped him. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked. When he shook his head, she asked if he’d like to make one and took his information. Then a man came up behind him.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“No, I’m here to meet the governor,” Collins responded.

“Well, I am the governor, Marc Racicot,” the man responded.

Collins was floored. He explained that he’d just come from Africa—that he was a Liberian refugee—and that he was looking for work. He handed the governor his paper résumé, and Racicot quickly phoned his educational adviser, who in turn realized that her daughter and Collins’s wife had a few classes together at Carroll College. Racicot and his adviser told Collins to apply for a job at Intermountain Children’s Home, a mental- and behavioral-health facility for young people, and to list both of them as his references. By March 31—a month and a half after arriving in the United States—he had work. Soon after, he joined the Army National Guard as well.

Over the course of two years, Collins told me, he saw the best of America. Yes, his visa application and resettlement paperwork were held up in bureaucracy, but his application process was helped along by Senator Baucus, a Democrat, and he’d found work through Racicot, a Republican. He saw a system functioning without violence or corruption, and he saw what could happen when politicians tried to help someone.

Collins told me he later realized that not everything was as idyllic as he had wanted to believe—something Racicot’s own trajectory would soon demonstrate. The rising star in the Republican Party was praised by both liberals and conservatives for his hawkish approach to budgeting and his personal touch, and he was so popular that one pollster jokingly suggested he “could run for king.” But just a few years after helping Collins, he was deemed too moderate by the Bush administration to be considered for attorney general. Harsher undercurrents were at work.

Still, Montana proved a soft landing ground for Collins, and the assistance he received from Racicot and Baucus helped solidify the raw idea about American politics that he’d had in Liberia. They were models of the kind of leader he was starting to think he might one day become.

The Montana state capitol building, in Helena, Montana (William Campbell / Corbis / Getty)

On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama traveled to Springfield, Illinois, to announce, on the steps of the building where Abraham Lincoln began his political career, that he would be running for president of the United States. He spoke of Lincoln’s fortitude. “He tells us that there is power in conviction,” Obama told the crowd of 17,000. “That beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people. He tells us that there is power in hope.”

[Read: My president was black]

Ten days later, Wilmot Collins awoke to the words KKK: Go back to Africa scrawled across the side of his house in spray paint. He was scheduled to testify at the state capitol that day about a bill that would have expanded the definition of hate crimes in the state. His mailbox had been destroyed before; his car had been set on fire. According to a report from The Great Falls Tribune, his then-14-year-old daughter regularly heard racial slurs; and his 10-year-old son, Bliss, no longer wanted to go to school. “They shouldn’t have to go through that,” he told lawmakers at the time. “Please, for decency’s sake, let’s do something now.” But he was heartened by how his neighbors had rallied around him each time something like that happened. He had seen Helena at its worst; but he’d seen his neighbors at their best.

In 2016, as he was staring down retirement from the National Guard, he began to look around for what to do next. His son, then a junior at the University of Montana, was visiting home from school and asked what Wilmot might do with all of the free time he would soon have. “I’ll never have free time, because your mom will make me work,” he told me he joked at the time. “But why are you asking?” Bliss suggested that he enter politics. “Dad, I know you. You know a lot of people; a lot of people know you—I think you’re ready.”

Eventually, Collins was persuaded. The first order of business was to figure out what his platform would be. He began knocking on doors. He needed to introduce himself to people in the community, but he also needed to hear what they were most concerned about in Helena. In those early conversations, three things came up repeatedly: funding essential services such as firefighters, EMTs, and police officers; increasing affordable housing; and curbing teenage and veteran homelessness. Those became his campaign planks. “I always call my issues ‘human issues.’ I don’t call them ‘political issues,’” he told me—a common refrain for Democrats in red states. The mayor’s office is nominally nonpartisan, and a broadly appealing platform was important not only to being elected, but to properly serving his community.

Many Black politicians would find Collins’s goals familiar—a strategy political scientists call “targeted universalism.” In a city like Helena, which is more than 90 percent white, candidates like Collins need to find ways to appeal to a broad swath of the public. When candidates travel to the rural outskirts—or the wealthier suburbs—of their district or city to campaign, they have to align their messages to the interests of those communities. But that does not have to mean compromising a candidate’s own beliefs. Instead, as Ravi K. Perry, a political scientist at Howard University, explained to me, targeted universalism is the practice of making clear to those voters why the candidate’s policies—such as a large increase in low-income housing—would benefit the entire community. Even if a person is not experiencing homelessness themselves, or is not in need of low-income housing, many people can understand the ways material improvements to housing and roads in areas that need them can boost the city’s bond rating and may—down the road—contribute to lower taxes, or other opportunities across the city.

Collins also knew that there was power in alliances. He and a pair of city-commission candidates, Andres Haladay and Heather K. O’Loughlin, decided that it would be best to run as a unified bloc—billed in local newspapers as the progressive ticket whose ideas were to the left of the incumbent mayor’s more conservative stances on issues such as Medicaid expansion and public-works projects like fixing roads.

As Election Day 2017 approached, polls had Collins running within a point of Mayor Jim Smith. As votes were tallied, Collins eked out a marginal victory—earning 51 percent of the vote to Smith’s 48 percent—to become the first Black mayor since Montana joined the union. (The election of a Black barber by the name of E. T. Johnson, in 1873, continues to be the subject of some debate among local historians.) Haladay and O’Loughlin won their races, for city commission, as well.

National outlets seized on the story, lumping Collins’s victory together with other elections that they cast as a repudiation of President Donald Trump’s first year in office. But Collins had campaigned on local issues, and he kept his focus on Helena. Alongside the city’s commissioners and manager, his administration began improving roads, provided greater funding to the fire and parks departments to help limit the spread of wildfires, and broke ground on new affordable-housing developments.

Collins had built some momentum: He’d defeated a popular incumbent with an upstart campaign that had generated national interest. His was a story that people could believe in. And he’d never felt more like a Montanan. Perhaps, he thought, a statewide campaign might someday be in order.

He’d learned that the hardest part of running for office was fundraising. “Calling people and begging them, writing people letters—it was hard for me,” he said. “I did that when I was homeless; I didn’t want to do that when I was not homeless.” Without a personal network of wealthy donors, he knew he’d have to get started early. And so, in 2019, nearly three decades after fleeing Liberia, Collins announced that he would be running to unseat Republican Steve Daines in Montana’s 2020 U.S. Senate election.

Wilmot Collins visits with a colleague during his first month in office. (William Campbell / Corbis / Getty)

in July 2019, standing before a group of Democrats assembled for the state party’s rules convention at the Colonial Hotel in Helena, Wilmot Collins wanted to talk about division. “It’s not about Democrat or Republican,” he told those in the ballroom. “That’s what we need to bring this state back to. We’re divided. If I’m representing you, I’ll represent all of you.”

There was no need to explain who he was; by that point, Collins was a known quantity in the state—and nationally. What he really wanted to highlight in his brief remarks was that he intended to be the kind of political leader who cared about people—like those who had helped him come to Montana and get a job to support his family.

But he also wanted to talk about money. “I am you,” he told them. “We’re not rich.” He was painting a contrast between himself and his would-be opponent were he to become the official nominee. In 2018, Daines had a reported net worth of more than $30 million. “Not only the rich should be able to govern,” Collins told the Montana Free Press.

He may have felt personally aggrieved as well. Prior to announcing his candidacy, Collins had met with Montana’s then-governor, Steve Bullock—a Democrat who had launched a presidential campaign—and asked for his blessing to run for office. But, according to Collins, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was convinced that the governor would ultimately run for the Senate seat if his bid for the White House was unsuccessful. “They tried to dissuade me and discourage me from announcing—and I announced anyway, so I didn’t have any support from them,” he told me. (The DSCC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Of course, parties are risk-averse and rally behind their perceived best bets all the time. But that tendency can have the unfortunate side effect of limiting, rather than deepening, the party’s bench, and party leaders’ instincts for who will succeed with voters are not always right. For example, when Jon Tester—Montana’s senior senator—first wanted to run for his seat, the party wasn’t interested, preferring John Morrison, then the state auditor, whose father had been a state-supreme-court justice. “A lot of Democrats tried to dissuade him as well, including people like Max [Baucus], [Chuck] Schumer, and Harry Reid,” Bill Lombardi, who ran Tester’s primary campaign in 2006, told me. But Tester, a farmer who was in his first term as State Senate president, managed to win the primary anyway, and has been popular with voters since, having won his seat three times now. Democrats are hoping he will run again in 2024, in what is expected to be a tough race for the party.

Collins’s appearance before the Democrats in Helena in 2019 was brief, but he laid out the ideas that would underpin his campaign as well as the primary obstacle he would face. Alongside his small team, he began traveling the state to raise money—a difficult task in the fourth-largest state, but a necessary one for a candidate without party funding. He often played to small crowds, even if they weren’t small for the area. “We went to Fort Benton,” he told me, a two-hour drive, minimum, from Helena. “And when we got to the hall, there were 50 people—and I turned to my campaign manager and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’” (A local Democrat later explained that it was the most people that that corner of Montana had seen turn out for someone in their party in a long time.) People would donate $5, $10, $20—anything that might gas up his tank to get him and his team to the next city to continue campaigning. “I raised $350, $400 from that crowd [in Fort Benton], but it really showed me what grassroots campaigning is.”

Over the next several months, Collins raised nearly $300,000. But in December, Bullock dropped out of the presidential race. And in early March, just as America began to implement restrictions to stem the coming surge of COVID-19 cases, the governor called Collins and asked for a meeting. They met at the governor’s mansion for lunch. “He told me, ‘Things have changed. I’m planning to get back in the race.’” In the 24 hours after he made his announcement, on March 9, Bullock raised $1.2 million; quadruple the amount that Collins had raised in nearly six months.

Bullock was someone whom party bosses were excited about. He had already won statewide office, and he was the kind of centrist that Democrats believed Montanans could get behind. But that wasn’t enough—he lost by 10 percentage points, sending Daines to the Senate.

Was Montana destined to vote for Daines regardless of who was on the Democratic ticket? Or, in a year when Democrats won the White House, retained control of the House, and got to 50 seats in the Senate, could a different candidate have earned a different result? If not for gatekeeping, would a candidate like Collins, a refugee who had served in the military for two decades before ascending to the mayor’s office in a city where only a handful of people look like him, have won? Bill Lombardi isn’t sure. “There aren’t a lot [of Democratic candidates] rising to the top who can bridge the rural-urban divide” in the state as well as energize Montanans who have simply soured on the Democrats’ brand, he told me. Candidates need to be able to show they’re willing to buck the party, and party favorites may not be the people most likely to do just that.

Both Collins and Lombardi agree on one thing: Democrats in Montana need more future leaders. “I’ve been asking people, in traveling around the state at different events, ‘Who are the candidates who can reach across the aisle?’ and people are stumped because they can’t think of anyone on our statewide bench,” Lombardi told me.

Collins worries that a lot of young Democrats have been cowed by the party’s rigidity. “I see a lot of prominent, young Dems who want to get into politics who don’t know how—they’re scared,” he told me. If the party does not start training and encouraging them instead of going “back to the same old people who are still losing,” those young Democrats will run away.

A late-summer evening in Helena is unnerving in its beauty. The walking mall down Sixth Street is bustling; patrons sit outside one of the several breweries; remnants of the Pride rally—the largest in Montana’s history—still line the street. On a bench, Collins sips his beer and holds court. Not officially, but everyone here seems to know him.

In 2021, Collins was close to running unopposed for reelection—in fact, in some ways, his tenure has been marked by very little friction, though there are things that residents hope can be improved. Homelessness is still a major issue—one Collins has taken to saying can’t be solved by Helena alone; he has begun calling on surrounding cities for help. On the day before campaign filing closed, he received a challenger, Sonda Gaub. “I wanted a choice, and no one was stepping up,” Gaub told a local television station after her announcement.

[From the August 1866 issue: A year in Montana]

Gaub, like others in the city, worried about Helena’s unhoused population. And she sought greater transparency in local government, though, as the Independent Record noted, she conceded that a lot of that transparency work—publicly available meetings where the community could hear directly what went into decision making—was already happening.

Though it was her first foray into politics, her husband, Darin, had run for public office in 2020, and has since become deeply involved in Republican politics in the state. “Here in my small town of Helena, Montana, we’ve got a mayor and a commission that constantly puts us in debt over things we don’t need,” Darin, the chair of the Lewis and Clark County Republican Central Committee, said on a podcast in August, on which he also made several references to disbelieving the 2020 presidential-election results. (Neither of the Gaubs responded to multiple requests for comment.)

Ultimately, though, a majority of voters thought Collins had done enough to serve a second term, and he was reelected—this time with more than 60 percent of the vote. His campaign was still built around issues that residents felt were most important: fixing roads, making housing affordable, improving wastewater treatment and snowplowing, expanding trails to allow for e-bikes. He’s open to seeking statewide office again, but right now he’s focused on helping train young Montanans to run for office; building a bench for the future through the coalition approach he used to get elected.

After more than 20,000 miles crisscrossing Montana with the hope of a Senate election, he’s back where he feels most comfortable: in Helena. He’s still the guy who fell in love with American democracy in Liberia, and who has had to learn, over and over again, the ways it falls short. But even if he never wins statewide office, he’s part of that system now, and what could be a better testament to its ideals than that?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Scientists tried to break cuddling. Instead, they broke 30 years of research. The weight-loss-drug revolution is a miracle—and a menace. What to read when you’re expecting The Culture Survey: Clint Smith

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’m very late to it, but I’ve been really enjoying Ramy. It’s a thoughtful, funny, and oftentimes incredibly sincere exploration of what coming-of-age as a Muslim American Millennial looks like. [Related: Ramy isn’t a travel show, but it could be]

An actor I would watch in anything: Mahershala Ali. The man is a genius. [Related: Green Book: A flimsy tale elevated by two great performances]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: The best novel I’ve read recently is When We Were Sisters, by Fatimah Asghar. I’ve known Fatimah for years now. We came up together in the slam-poetry scene in our early 20s, but they have always been someone who worked across genres and disciplines. Their debut novel is a gorgeous, lyrical meditation on the relationship among three sisters who lose their parents and are forced to raise one another in a world rife with uncertainty. It’s a beautiful novel that you can read in just a few sittings. [Related: All the brown girls on TV]

The best book of nonfiction I’ve read recently is Life on Delay, by my colleague here at The Atlantic John Hendrickson. I can’t remember the last time I read a book so human. Life on Delay brims with empathy and honesty. It is a book about family, complicated relationships, and how we come to understand who we are in the world. It moved me in ways that I haven’t experienced before. It’s fantastic. [Related: Why I dread saying my own name]

An author I will read anything by: Living today, Jhumpa Lahiri. From the past, Frederick Douglass.

A song I’ll always dance to: “If It Isn’t Love,” by New Edition

My go-to karaoke song: “Candy Rain,” by Soul for Real

My favorite sad song: “Pass You By,” by Boyz II Men

"[My favorite sad song is] 'Pass You By,' by Boyz II Men," says Clint. Above: The group perform at the 62nd annual Grammy Awards on January 26, 2020 (Kevin Winter / Getty)

An album that means a lot to me: Lupe Fiasco’s 2007 album, The Cool, was so formative for me during my college years because it expanded my understanding of the relationship between music and literature. It is an incredible literary document.

A visual artist that I cherish: Growing up, we had prints of the painter Jacob Lawrence’s work on our walls. I’m filled with nostalgia anytime I see his work.

Something I treasured as a teenager: My VHS tape of every goal in the 2002 World Cup. I watched it every night.

Something I recently revisited: Not a reread or a rewatch but a re-eat. I was obsessed with Lunchables when I was a kid. I recently had one for the first time in a long time and, man … it did not taste the same at all. Not sure what was going on with my elementary-school taste buds. [Related: The 30-year reign of Lunchables]

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: I don’t know that it changed my perspective so much as expanded it, but I recently read Nadja Drost’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize– and Michael Kelly Award–winning story “When Can We Really Rest?” about migrants from all over the world crossing the Colombia-Panama border to try and make it to the U.S. It blew me away.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Gotta be Ta-Nehisi’s “The Case for Reparations.”

Something delightful introduced to me by kids in my life: I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, and one of our favorite things to do on weekends is watch nature documentaries when we wake up. Shout out to David Attenborough. [Related: Blue Planet II is the greatest nature series of all time]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with John Hendrickson, Gal Beckerman, Kate Lindsay, Xochitl Gonzalez, Spencer Kornhaber, Jenisha Watts, David French, Shirley Li, David Sims, Lenika Cruz, Jordan Calhoun, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert.

The Week Ahead Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, a frank portrait of cobalt-mining abuses by the modern-slavery scholar Siddharth Kara (on shelves Tuesday)   Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, a documentary inspired by the work of the Atlantic senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II (begins streaming on Peacock on Thursday) 80 for Brady, a comedy that joins the screen legends Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field with the NFL star Tom Brady (in theaters Friday) Essay (Derek White / Getty)

Sam Smith’s Radical Centrism

By Spencer Kornhaber

Sam Smith’s music defines the word inoffensive—so why does the singer inspire so many arguments? For more than a decade, Smith’s distinctive voice has soaked through the collective consciousness like the syrup in a rum cake. But that success has also triggered annoyance from across the cultural spectrum. As a nonbinary person, Smith has been treated as a punch line by right-wing media. Earlier in their career, they also ticked off the queer commentariat by misstating gay history and tsk-tsking about Grindr. All along, critics have made sport of Smith for formulaic songwriting, mannered vocals, and a tendency to hire church choirs as if they’re available on Taskrabbit to install soul on demand.

Read the full article.

More in Culture The Oscar nominations are in, and a few big trends are out. A courtroom drama with an indecipherable culprit Poker Face has a sting in its tail. The meme that defined a decade Catch Up on The Atlantic The cognitive dissonance of the Monterey Park shooting An Asian American grief The NHL is gutless. Photo Album (Yannick Gouguenheim / Ocean Art)

Dip into the majestic depths of selected snapshots from the 2022 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest, whose winners were announced earlier this month.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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Sam Smith’s music defines the word inoffensive—so why does the singer inspire so many arguments? For more than a decade, Smith’s distinctive voice has soaked through the collective consciousness like the syrup in a rum cake. But that success has also triggered annoyance from across the cultural spectrum. As a nonbinary person, Smith has been treated as a punch line by right-wing media. Earlier in their career, they also ticked off the queer commentariat by misstating gay history and tsk-tsking about Grindr. All along, critics have made sport of Smith for formulaic songwriting, mannered vocals, and a tendency to hire church choirs as if they’re available on Taskrabbit to install soul on demand.

The latest round of sniping against Smith has been particularly vicious, and telling. Late last year, Smith donned two very standard pop-star outfits: a sparkly bodysuit at a concert, and a skimpy bathing suit for a series of Instagram photos taken on a boat. Whereas the Harry Styleses of the world had been ogled for doing the same, Smith received waves of mockery on social media for how they looked. That nastiness, Smith’s defenders quickly noted, provided an example of the double standards that queer people face. But it also demonstrated the ridiculous body standards that basically everyone, in one way or another, must navigate. After all, Smith had been singled out for flaunting proportions more common than those of a slender Styles or a sculptural Kardashian.

Here is the paradox, and appeal, of Sam Smith: One of the world’s most prominent queer entertainers is also a normie, both in style and in sound. Though they’re equipped with special vocal talent, and have made a gutsy journey with gender while in the public eye—see the mammoth pink frills they sported last weekend on SNL—Smith thrives at playing to the middle. Their new album, Gloria, which is out tomorrow, is a reminder that oft-disrespected figures of commerce and compromise can, in their way, nudge society along.

When Smith first drew attention in the early 2010s, their voice seemed genuinely unusual in its contemporary context. Tacking and billowing like the curvaceous sail of a yacht, Smith’s singing had a fluctuating beauty that contrasted with the explosiveness of an Adele and the conversationality of an Ed Sheeran. Really, the closest vocal contemporary was Anohni, a legend of 21st-century art pop. But while Anohni made experimental music about gender dysphoria and imperialism, Smith found global fame with a love ballad that echoed a famous Tom Petty melody. On other hits, Smith sang over retro-chic dance beats. Smith’s remarkable voice, it became clear, would be used not to disrupt pop but rather to provide variations on mass-market flavors.

Smith’s latest smash, “Unholy,” is a fascinating example of such flavor-tweaking. With a chorus that brings to mind a monastery choir and a beat made up of robotic buzzes and clangs, the song sounds not quite like anything else on the Billboard Hot 100. But that is not to say it came out of nowhere: The track pulls from the style known as hyperpop, an underground, queer-dominated brew that has percolated for years without bubbling into the mainstream. The song presumably took off thanks to Smith’s preexisting fame as well as the nagging familiarity of the chorus, which sounds like Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” as covered in a Verdi opera.

The lyrics of “Unholy”—celebrating a dirty “Daddy” stepping out on “Mummy”—are debatably subversive, and likely hit different listeners in different ways. People tuned into hyperpop will hear the song’s Sophie-inspired beat, recognize the featured vocalist Kim Petras—a trans singer beloved in gay bars for years now—and imagine that the song is about queer sex. But the words can also be received in a more vanilla light. At Vulture, Jason P. Frank complained, “The most ‘unholy’ act that two queer artists could come up with is a straight man cheating on his wife.”

That’s the Smith trick, though: irritating the edges, lightly stirring the middle. Gloria—Smith’s fourth studio album—is a similarly mild statement piece. Many of the songs are mid-tempo fare recycling various radio fads of the past 10 years: tropical pop, nu disco, The Weeknd–style R&B. Smith gasps and pants about lust and liberation, and one track samples RuPaul delivering his famous slogan: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” No one who’s browsed T-shirts at Target during a Pride month in recent years will have their mind blown by any of this. But at a time of anti-queer backlash in the U.S. and abroad, who can doubt that some listeners will continue finding Smith’s music a lifeline?

Perhaps the best song on Gloria is the final and sappiest one, a duet with Sheeran, called “Who We Love.” With a gentle melody that moves in the manner of meditation breathing, the track casts a potently sentimental spell. Sheeran’s verse references the most familiar kind of happily ever after: a wedding. Smith, meanwhile, lays out a more modest dream, the kind that many queer people still cannot take for granted: “holding hands in the street, no need to be discreet.” Perhaps years from now, as the song drifts across the food courts and school dances of a more enlightened era, listeners may wonder what need for discretion Smith was singing about. Or perhaps they’ll notice nothing about the song, other than that it was pleasant.

At some point this year, perhaps as soon as this month, the former president of the United States may be charged with a serious crime. After a years-long elaborate dance with the law in which he usually stayed just one step ahead, Donald Trump now faces at least three serious investigations that could produce criminal charges. He denies wrongdoing in all cases, but many legal experts think that prosecutors have grounds to charge him and will. Others believe that Trump shouldn’t be charged, or that prosecutors might choose not to charge him even if they can.

What actually will happen is unpredictable. We don’t know what pieces of evidence—or even what investigations—might exist that aren’t public, we don’t know how prosecutors will wield the discretion the law affords them, and, of course, we don’t know how a jury might fall on any charges that end up being tried. But the mountains of evidence already before the public—about Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, about his handling of government documents, and about his previous interactions with the justice system—suggest a fierce conflict to come. “He has learned that due process is the Achilles’ heel of liberal democracy,” Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor, told me. “He’s weaponized the court systems all of his life.”

[Read: The inevitable indictment of Donald Trump]

Despite all of the uncertainty, the information already available makes it possible to know what to watch for, or perhaps where to watch. Here is a field guide to the potential indictments of Donald Trump.

Fulton County

The first movement might come from an investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, which includes part of Atlanta. A special grand jury there conducted a lengthy investigation that began in June 2022 and concluded earlier this month. District Attorney Fani Willis requested the panel after audio emerged in January 2021 of Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” in the state, enough to surpass Joe Biden’s tally. The grand jury’s work is secret, but it has reportedly interviewed dozens of people, including Senator Lindsey Graham and the former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Willis appears to be interested not only in Trump’s pressure campaign against Raffensperger but also in a slate of fake electors who gathered in Georgia, and in various claims that Trump allies made about supposed election fraud.

The special grand jury, unlike a normal grand jury, cannot bring indictments; instead, it makes recommendations, and Willis would have to seek indictments from a normal grand jury. When the special grand jury completed its work, it requested that a judge make its report public. Judge Robert McBurney has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow, January 24, on that question, and opinions differ as to whether he is effectively required to release the report or might have discretion on timing. The report is expected to include recommendations for indictments and to reveal much of the scope of the investigation, so its possible release means that Willis is likely to seek charges soon, if she is not doing so already.

Willis would seem to have a wide range of charges she could bring against a range of defendants, but any charges against Trump would likely center on the Raffensperger call. “The tape is the tape and it’s pretty darn compelling by itself, and it looks like it would be the centerpiece of any charges,” Rosenzweig told me. Trump often speaks elliptically and avoids clearly implicating himself, but Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former U.S. attorney, told me that the recording of the call, combined with evidence turned up by the House January 6 committee showing that Trump knew claims of fraud were false, provides both a clear act of wrongdoing and proof of criminal intent.

[David French: Georgia has a very strong case against Trump]

If Willis does want to charge Trump, she’ll have to decide whether to pursue discrete cases against individuals or a large racketeering case against many. She’s shown a fondness for the latter, most recently in a case against the rapper Young Thug, but a big case would be more complicated and messy, and it would require a huge investment of resources for a county prosecutor’s office. “The only thing worse than not prosecuting would be to bring charges and then to lose,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, told me.

But the seriousness of the misconduct might push Willis toward charges despite the risk, and her approach so far suggests an eagerness for both the national spotlight and tough fights. It has also set public expectations. “She has to go up and answer to the voters of Fulton County, and if she doesn’t charge some of these folks for patent violations of Georgia law, she better have a damn good reason,” Kreis said.

Mar-a-Lago Documents

On paper—no pun intended—the probe into Donald Trump’s removal of documents from the White House should be much simpler than the Fulton County case as a matter of law and thus more straightforwardly likely to result in charges against him by the U.S. Department of Justice. It’s not just that Trump removed documents, including classified material; it’s that he repeatedly defied requests to return them and seems to have obstructed the government’s attempts to recover them. From public evidence, many experts view the case as cut-and-dried—legally, at least. “It certainly seems like the law is clear,” Rosenzweig told me. “There’s a relatively narrow, confined set of facts. Prosecutors tend to like small cases, not big cases.”

[David A. Graham: Trump opened Pandora’s prosecutorial box]

The simplicity of the law doesn’t mean the politics aren’t complicated. Charging a former president—and current presidential candidate—is always going to be more delicate than a typical criminal case. The case would likely have to be brought in Florida, where a jury might be more sympathetic to Trump than in Washington, D.C. Trump might also seek to shift blame to his lawyers, who represented to the government that all documents were returned, and he might succeed. These are all considerations for Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed as special counsel in November to oversee the documents investigation as well as the January 6 probes.

And Smith’s considerations just got more complicated in recent weeks with the revelation that classified documents were found at Biden’s home in Delaware and his think tank at the University of Pennsylvania. Trump has already begun arguing that he is being persecuted for something that Biden also did. Factually, that’s wrong: We don’t know as much about the Biden documents, but there’s no sign of obstruction so far. Garland has appointed a separate special counsel to handle the Biden case, so any decision to charge or not charge him will be somewhat independent. “The cases are completely dissimilar,” Rosenzweig. “That would be stupid, but all you need is one stupid juror. Trials are stories, and there are no slam dunks.”

Charges, or even a conviction, against Trump on the documents case would be somewhat ironic. A man who has publicly committed far more egregious acts—including the two for which he was impeached—getting busted for stolen documents would be a little bit like Al Capone’s conviction for tax evasion. Still, a case would send the message that Trump is not above the law.

January 6

The most interesting case, and perhaps the most consequential for American democracy, involves Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election—something often shorthanded as “January 6” but that includes not just the riot that day but also the weeks-long paperwork coup that preceded it. Though Willis’s investigation captures one slice of that, her purview is also restricted to one state among the several where Trump tried to interfere with results. A federal case has the potential to really capture much of the scope of the former president’s plot against American democracy.

Delivering on that potential will not be easy. The scope is enormous: fake electors, the Justice Department mutiny, the actual January 6 riot, the pressure campaign against Mike Pence, and more, all united by the goal of keeping Trump in power despite the outcome of the election in Biden’s favor. Although the House committee uncovered a great deal of evidence, some of it is hearsay and thus not admissible in court, and although in common parlance Trump is clearly to blame, securing a conviction is still tough. “Even if in your heart of hearts you think he is guilty, can you get 12 strangers to agree?” McQuade asked.

[Read: The biggest takeaway from the January 6 report]

If Smith decides that charges are merited, he could try for a sweeping case—the better to punish the scope of the behavior—or go for something more targeted, which might feel less cathartic but be more likely to end with a conviction. He also has to consider the possible risks of a federal prosecution. “If you ask my opinion, I would say the substantial federal interest in protecting the lawful transfer of presidential power exceeds any collateral consequence,” McQuade said. “How egregious does it have to be before you charge a former president? I would draw the line somewhere before inciting an insurrection.”

Smith also has to watch the clock. On January 20, 2025, a new president could take office—possibly a Republican, perhaps even Trump—which would likely spell the end of any case against him. But Rosenzweig said Trump’s continued presence amplifies the need for accountability too. “If Trump had gone away and faded from the scene, we’d probably let him get away. The specter of indicting a former president is just too terrible,” he said. “But he and his party have made January 6 a rallying cry, and that is going to make it harder to say no.”

Manhattan

One enigma is an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney. That office recently obtained a conviction of the Trump Organization for tax fraud and other crimes. Previously, it had been investigating other allegations, including claims that the company paid hush money to a porn actor who said she had sex with Trump. That investigation appeared moribund—and its lead prosecutors left the office—but it has recently shown signs of life, including an interview with the estranged Trump fixer Michael Cohen and a warning to a former prosecutor that his book could hurt the probe. Little is clear about what charges, if any, could result, or when.

The Next Steps

Say one of these prosecutors does indict the former president of the United States. What happens next? Some answers are pretty clear; the really big ones are not.

If Trump is indicted, he’ll have to be booked and fingerprinted like any other defendant, whether that’s at the Fulton County jail or some federal courthouse. Don’t expect a dramatic perp walk with windbreakered FBI agents leading him, though. Trump’s lawyers would likely arrange a time for him to come in, and bail conditions would be agreed upon ahead of time, but he’d have to appear before a judge. Then would come a seemingly endless slog of procedural motions, legal maneuvers, and discovery—all elongated as much as possible by the defense to run out the clock, exhaust the government, or find weaknesses, and all appealed as often and as high as possible.

[David A. Graham: The tragedy of the Congress]

If a prosecutor actually managed to get to trial, they would then have the huge task of convicting Trump. Few will bring cases they don’t think they can win, but nothing is a sure bet. Even something as plain Trump’s call to Raffensperger might play differently in court, Titus Nichols, a defense attorney and former prosecutor in Georgia who represented the whistleblower Reality Winner, told me. “If a regular person had done that, they’d be indicted, no question,” he said. “When you’re a person with resources or you’re famous, then everyone wants to give you the benefit of the doubt.” Prosecutors might also manage to convict some lower-level players but not Trump.

If Trump is indicted and convicted, the charges are ones that could very well lead to incarceration, as Willis herself has noted. “If someone were convicted of one of these serious crimes, a prison sentence would be likely,” McQuade told me. But other observers think it’s doubtful that Trump will ever see the inside of a jail cell, given the complications and the length of probable appeals.

All of these considerations make for nearly impossible decisions for prosecutors. When I joked to Rosenzweig that he didn’t sound like he envied Jack Smith, he quickly corrected me. “I do envy him, in that he’s got a really exciting and interesting job, but I would not want to be him or Merrick Garland,” he said. “They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Trump has broken the system, and there are no good choices.” For Garland and Smith—and Willis, too—the task is to find the least bad option, and then pursue it with care.

Liverpool's Liam Smith says he is willing to fight Chris Eubank Jr again but is also intrigued by a bout with Kell Brook.

Liam Smith stops Chris Eubank Jr in four rounds to win their middleweight fight in Manchester.

On October 21, 1970, Truman Capote went to jail. Considering he’d spent much of his life fascinated by crime, it nevertheless came as a shock, to him and others, when he was sentenced to three days on a contempt-of-court charge. “I've been in thirty or forty jails and prisons, but this is the first time I’ll ever be in one as a prisoner,” Capote told reporters at the time, his bravado a substitute, according to his biographer Gerald Clarke, for the “stark terror” he was actually feeling.

Every true-crime writer has to contend with Capote. In Cold Blood, his rapturously received “nonfiction novel” (as Capote termed it) about a Kansas family’s homicide in 1959, is embedded in the DNA of every book in the genre. As Justin St. Germain wrote in his critical reexamination, “Capote spiked a vein, and out came a stream of imitators, a whole bloody genre, one of the most popular forms of American nonfiction: true crime.” (I’m no exception, as Capote ended up a minor character in my own recent nonfiction book, Scoundrel.)

The sheer glut of recently released books and films about Capote—the past few years alone brought forth Capote’s Women, by Laurence Leamer; the documentary film The Capote Tapes; and, at the end of last year, Roseanne Montillo’s Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire’s Wife, and the Murder of the Century—seem less interested in Capote’s relationship to true crime than in his obsessive social striving. The two parts of his identity were not completely separate—the smash success of his Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in November 1966 was built, after all, on the back of In Cold Blood’s runaway popularity. But surely there must be something new to discover about Capote’s relationship to criminality? If so, uncovering how he came to spend time (however brief) among the incarcerated may yield some clues.

When he went to jail in 1970, Capote wasn’t far removed from his heights as one of America’s most celebrated writers. He had also, improbably, become a go-to pundit on criminal-justice matters, opining about criminal cases on popular programs such as The Tonight Show and Firing Line, and spending years interviewing death-row prisoners for various projects.

Perhaps it’s no accident that Capote’s career and personal free fall began in earnest after his time in jail, a surprisingly little-reported episode that raises larger questions about his own attraction to true crime, and the ethical compromises involved in doing this sort of writing. Understanding how and why this happened requires a look back at Capote’s troubled youth, which foreshadowed an adulthood marked by secrets and lies.

Capote’s biological father, Arch Persons, was a con man whose wife, Lillie Mae, summarily abandoned him when she realized he couldn’t deliver on the financial promises he’d made her. Reinventing herself as Nina, she took up with her second husband, Joe Capote, a Cuban émigré who had a taste for the finer things, even if it meant spending more money than he made. Nina and Joe lived an extravagant lifestyle in New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut. But according to Clarke’s biography as well as George Plimpton’s 1997 oral history, its demands led to Joe’s arrest for embezzlement, a guilty plea, and a year-long stint in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in 1955. By that time, Nina was dead of a Seconal overdose.

Capote’s relationship with his mother was ambivalent at best, tortured at worst—he often described his earliest memory, from around the age of 2, as being abandoned in a hotel room. Even after Nina and Joe married, young Truman spent the bulk of his childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, living with his cousins. There, he befriended not only Harper Lee—who would serve as his co-reporter and amanuensis for what would become In Cold Blood—but also Martha Seabrook, an older girl who’d landed in Monroeville from Milton, Florida, and who lived across the street.

[Read: In search of the real Truman Capote]

Sometime during the summer of 1934 or 1935, either Capote or Seabrook got the notion to run away to Evergreen, Alabama, where Seabrook’s uncle owned a hotel. Their journey lasted a single night before they had to return to Monroeville. That fall, Capote went back to New York to join his mother and stepfather, and Seabrook’s family moved away. They never saw each other again.

Years later, Capote learned what had happened to Seabrook. As Martha Beck, she took up with Raymond Fernandez, and their poisonous alchemy led to multiple murders, mostly of women who answered “lonely hearts” ads. Both Fernandez and Beck were executed at Sing Sing in 1951. “I didn’t even realize it was the same person until years later all my relatives in that town said: ‘Oh, that’s the girl who was here that summer. She’s the one you ran away with,’” Capote told an interviewer.

Eight years after Beck’s execution and four years after his stepfather’s imprisonment in the same correctional institution, Capote infamously alighted on a wire story about the Clutter family’s homicide in Holcomb, Kansas. He would tell more grandiose and authoritative versions of In Cold Blood’s origin story. He minimized Lee’s pivotal role as a researcher and fellow journalist on the project; obfuscated the truth about his relationship with Perry Smith, one of the murderers; grew petulant about the lack of resolution when Smith and Dick Hickok’s execution dates kept getting postponed; and fabricated incidents when it suited his narrative, including the book’s final scene (in which the lead investigator visits the Clutter family’s graves with the daughter’s best friend).

Chronicling and identifying with the ultimate transgressors—murderers—became Capote’s career calling card. Doing so was a way of empathizing with society’s underclass, yes, but it also gave Capote the opportunity to bend stories to his will, because readers would be more inclined to trust his version over the murderers’. Playing fast and loose with the truth might have been accepted at the time in literary and high-society circles, but when Capote was faced with the stringencies of the legal system and the consequences of actual jail time, his storytelling instincts would prove to be his undoing.

Truman Capote interviewing prisoners for the late-night special “Truman Capote at San Quentin,” in San Quentin, California, 1973 (Disney General Entertainment Content / Getty)

From 1967 to 1968, Capote interviewed more than two dozen prisoners housed in three different death-row facilities: Oregon and Colorado State Penitentiaries and San Quentin State Prison. He did so at the behest of ABC, which had commissioned Capote to create and host a documentary that would, in the executives’ minds, be a natural follow-up to In Cold Blood.

Most of the murderers who would appear on camera in Death Row, U.S.A. (and be quoted in print in the accompanying October 1968 Esquire story) were incarcerated at San Quentin, which Capote visited on several occasions. There, he met and spoke with Joseph Morse. Morse was originally sentenced to death for the murders of his mother and disabled younger sister in 1962, but his conviction was overturned on a technicality. While awaiting a new trial, Morse killed a fellow prisoner after a dispute over cigarettes, resulting in yet another death sentence that would eventually be overturned (both times, Morse was resentenced to life imprisonment).

“My problem is I’m a case afflicted with severe sociopathy. I can’t change because I can’t benefit by experience. Experience teaches me nothing,” Capote quoted Morse as saying in the Esquire article. But it was Morse’s next series of quoted comments that landed Capote in hot water in the fall of 1970: “If I were to get out of here tomorrow, I’d probably kill again. Do it without any thought of the death penalty. Even though I’ve already spent five years on Death Row and know full well what it means.”

The Orange County prosecutor tasked with resentencing Morse to death wanted Capote to testify about these comments. Capote had no intention of doing so, “believing, like any other honorable reporter, that interviews are confidential,” according to Clarke, his biographer. Capote fled to New York as his lawyers tried and failed to work things out. The judge, exasperated by all the goings-on, finally had enough and gave Capote his jail sentence.

Back at his bungalow in Bel-Air, Capote took several pills, retreated to bed, and ordered one of his lawyers, Alan Schwartz, to “call Ronald Reagan!” But even the then-governor of California couldn’t help. Capote went to jail, though his sentence would be reduced to a mere 18 hours because of ill health. Schwartz told Clarke that Capote, after his release, seemed “as if he had been raped, rolled, and beaten up.” (Capote, meanwhile, never described the ordeal in any detail beyond saying “It was very uncomfortable in there” and “I don’t advise anybody to go there to write a book.”)

[Read: The new true crime]

Perhaps there would have been greater dignity in this episode if Death Row, U.S.A. had had some impact. But the documentary for which Capote had interviewed Morse never aired. By 1968, the ABC executive (a friend of Capote’s) who had green-lit the project had left the network, and the new man in charge judged it “too grim” and refused to broadcast it. (Capote, furious, later retorted, “Well, what were you expecting, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?”)

Capote tried to brush off the failed documentary as proof that he should stick to books. Still, it had to be devastating to see a project begun with the best of intentions killed before it could even reach an audience. Save for a single theatrical screening at a theater in Manhattan—an event organized and funded by Capote himself—Death Row, U.S.A. has never been shown.

Capote made several more attempts to recapture the In Cold Blood magic, including Truman Capote Behind Prison Walls in 1972, another ill-fated documentary for ABC about the life of the incarcerated (although this program actually aired, the critical reception and ratings were poor). Then came “Handcarved Coffins,” the centerpiece of Capote’s 1980 collection, Music for Chameleons; the story purported to chronicle a number of unsolved murders that bordered on the bizarre. Because Capote still had lingering credibility as a criminal-justice expert, readers and critics took the story at face value, believing it to be a true and accurate account.

Yet the investigating “homespun” detective, Clarke wrote, “was not a real person, but a composite of several lawmen [Capote] had known.” And a 1992 Sunday Times story, published eight years after Capote’s death, offered even more proof that “Handcarved Coffins” was pure fiction. Once again, Capote had chosen story over the truth. And if one takes the word of Morse, the murderer whose published comments legally imperiled the author, making things up was also the reason Capote went to jail in 1970.

Morse wrote and edited for the San Quentin News during his long incarceration there, several stints over nearly 30 years. (He died in 2009 in a different correctional facility.) When the Behind Prison Walls documentary aired in December 1972, the editor of the satirical anti-establishment magazine The Realist wrote to Morse soliciting his opinion of the program.

Morse was withering in his assessment of what he called “this fiasco,” a distortion of life at San Quentin. (“If asked to ‘review’ this film, I would say it was one of the best rip-offs I have seen in quite a while,” he said.) Morse also told his version of what had happened with the contempt-of-court case. During Morse’s conversation with Capote back in 1968, the writer had asked him, “If you were to get out right now do you think you could kill again?”

Morse took his time answering. He knew that if he got out, “I would revert to being a smack freak—which would engender a need for money,” which might then necessitate a need to murder somebody. When Morse finally replied, he reported that he’d said “Probably” without elaborating. But his “terse, one-word reply” had been embellished in Capote’s magazine article.

This put Capote in a bind. “He could testify that I did make the statement, but then he would have to try to explain why the transcription of the interview contained no such quote,” Morse wrote. “The transcription would have really fucked him, and he had only one alternative. He would have to tell the truth and admit that my answer was, simply, ‘Probably.’ This, too, would have fucked him because he would then have to admit that he lied to Esquire (and the public). He was fucked either way. As a result, he split and ignored the subpoena.”

There’s no way to know if Capote ever saw Morse’s comments in The Realist; he never disputed or confirmed them. If Morse was correct, testifying in open court would have put Capote’s credibility on the line at a time when he had maximum goodwill and authority. Not doing so, however, set Capote up to make poor decision after poor decision, and the blurred lines between fiction and reality destroyed friendships, wrecked his writing and health, and ruined his credibility after all.

The costs of Capote’s repeated inability to contend with factuality weren’t felt only by him; they also permeated throughout the genre he’d redefined almost single-handedly with In Cold Blood. As the crime journalist Jack Olsen once said, “That book did two things. It made true crime an interesting, successful, commercial genre, but it also began the process of tearing it down.” The past few years in particular have made us question whose crime stories get credence and attention. Infusing the genre with greater meaning—and possibly even rectifying some of these past inequalities—might mean coming to terms with Capote’s messy, convoluted, and fabulist relationship with the darkest parts of life and crime.

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