Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Elaine Hsieh Chou about her writing process.

Gene called them his good-day-bad-day bagels. When he was having a good day, he’d allow himself a bagel, and when he was having a bad day, he’d also allow himself a bagel. How he landed on bagels was a matter of both convenience and health: New York had no shortage of them and doughnuts upset his blood sugar. But bagels, on the other hand—they possessed an inoffensive, neutral quality. The problem was he sometimes swerved between good and bad so frequently that he ended up consuming three bagels before dinner. Though Gene believed in waiting until the end of the day before declaring it one or the other—sticking a nice, firm label beneath it—waiting defeated the purpose of an immediate, edible consequence.

Gene measured out every moment of his life into a series of punishments and rewards. If he missed the subway right when the doors pinched shut, he let himself forgo eye contact with the homeless woman jiggling her paper cup. If he skipped the subway fare because a charitable stranger had propped the door open, his punishment (awful to consider it punishment, he knew) amounted to giving her a dollar along with the eye contact.

Mentally taxing to approach life like a bank account, a nonstop escalator of fluctuating numbers, yet he found comfort in it. A system of measurements to keep himself on the straight moral path because he couldn’t always keep it straight in his mind—this was his self-prescribed treatment.

Today, the day he took the N train from Astoria and boarded the bus on East 39th and Second, he’d tallied zero ups and two downs, meaning he was allowed two ups: an everything bagel with green-onion cream cheese (he counted them separately; he didn’t like to cheat the system). At the bodega, he’d considered ordering a second bagel, because today—surely, today of all days?—he would have reason to celebrate.

He opened his brown paper bag as Napoleon sank into the seat beside him. “My doctor said I have the heart of a 60-year-old,” Napoleon said by way of hello. Given that Napoleon had turned 60 last month, Gene offered no response, instead politely listened as he denounced the toxicity of Western medicine. Napoleon interpreted Gene’s silence as a reproach. “What’s with you?”

“Nothing,” Gene lied. “My stomach hurts.”

Napoleon rummaged through his satchel, a fake Louis Vuitton, and produced a bottle of Po Chai pills. “Take two of these. With lukewarm—not cold—water.”

Gene waved him away. “I’m fine.”

“Suit yourself.” Napoleon zipped his satchel back up and eyed Gene’s paper bag. “What do you got there?” Gene reluctantly admitted to the everything bagel as Napoleon closed his eyes. “I haven’t eaten since last night. We wrapped at four in the morning. I took a nap on the 6, didn’t even have time to go home and shower—”

Gene handed the bagel over.

“You sure you don’t want any?” Napoleon said, already tearing through the wax paper.

“I’m sure.” Gene meant to ask how bagels fit into Napoleon’s anti-Western cleanse, but was distracted by a familiar face boarding the bus—a woman he’d once been paired with as a couple at a fancy Szechuan restaurant in the Lower East Side. He turned in his seat and recognized more faces before the vertigo of familiarity was heightened by a new realization: Everyone present had been selected because, from a blurred distance, they could be related.

Napoleon noticed too. “I bet you it’s a Japanese World War II movie.”

Napoleon (his parents had named him with misguided hopes) played ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT while Gene played UPSCALE LAWYER. How their respective identities factored into this casting decision (Napoleon being a little more South to Gene’s East) was understood but left unspoken by both men. Standing in line to get propped—Gene with his shiny briefcase, Napoleon with a soiled cardboard sign—Napoleon had offered to lift Gene up. Napoleon’s shortcut to making friends was lifting people up, including the 6-foot-3 man who played SECURITY GUARD, somehow stunned and satisfied each time he managed it.

Gene continued to run into Napoleon on set, not unusual when few background actors shared their narrow demographic. Without having exchanged numbers once, Gene suspected he was on more intimate terms with Napoleon’s catalog of health problems than Napoleon’s full-time friends were—one of the perks, or pits, of the job: endless hours to kill when the only weapon around was small talk. But the transitory nature of these interactions was also their beauty, which freed you up to confess more than you’d otherwise dare because after 12 consecutive hours together, you’d simply say, “Nice talking to you,” and never see each other again. You walked off with others’ confessions and they with yours, safe in the degrees of separation that stretched between you.

Gene had been doing background for two years. When asked how he’d gotten into it (a stock question extras passed around between takes), he would say he’d always been interested in acting, and wasn’t a late start better than none? That wasn’t entirely true, though. Actually, it wasn’t true at all. He’d signed up to do background because of his daughter, Athena. Like Napoleon’s parents, Gene had named her with hopes she’d achieve magnificence, and then, to his bewilderment, she did: Winner of the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Nominated for Best Narrative Feature at SXSW. Premiered at Sundance Film Festival.

He once looked up her biography: “Athena Wu is a writer and director. The daughter of immigrants, her work interrogates the intersection of race, sex, and violence. She lives in Los Angeles.”

“The daughter of immigrants.” He read the line twice to make sure he hadn’t hallucinated it. That she had taken on her mother’s maiden name was bad enough, but what had compelled her to lie? Like Athena, Gene had been born in Michigan; they’d moved to New York when she was 5. He’d grown up in an industrial town on the outskirts of Detroit, pretty painlessly, all things considered. He had plenty to be grateful for, all things considered. But Athena—she refused to acknowledge that her accomplishments, all the awards and fellowships and titles, had been made possible through an unbroken line of others’ suffering. And yet in her “body of work,” Athena never failed to adopt their suffering as her own. If such a thing as a surrogate of misery existed, that was his daughter.

How to explain he was terrified of her? Not just terrified but puzzled he’d had any involvement in her upbringing, let alone her existence. In an interview, when asked why she’d gone into filmmaking, Athena had responded, “I’ve always been interested in controlling my environment. I guess you could say it was an affect developed in childhood.” The last line had made him squint sideways at his phone.

Gene wasn’t an ambitious man himself—he looked for meaning in the hours spent clocked out of his job more than in the job itself, which was, at the moment, driving part-time for Uber. He and his cousin split custody of a slate-blue Toyota Camry; he had the weekends and his cousin, the weekdays. He rented out the second floor of a duplex from a young couple, a painful reminder he had yet to achieve the kind of financial security his daughter enjoyed.

He led a noiseless life, though it was a little lonely and monotonous, true. But doing background, he’d been a NASA scientist, a doctor, and a UN ambassador without having to train for any of it. For as long as he could remember, Gene had had trouble staying loyal to a single objective. When Athena was younger, he’d been a security-desk attendant, a truck driver for a restaurant-supplies company, and a maintenance-crew member, just to name a few. In between jobs, he’d participated in paid surveys about products he could never afford and swallowed clinical-trial pills his nonexistent health insurance could never cover. He’d had no time to tend to a “career.”

But Athena—she’d always known what she wanted. Barely in second grade and already arranging her toys in elaborate three-act stories. Other little girls wanted dolls or clothes; his daughter had coveted a Sony camcorder with infrared night vision. Other daughters were devoted to or at least tolerant of their fathers; his had abandoned him when he needed her the most.

The bus squeaked onto 495 and spat them out in Long Island, at an immense studio Gene hadn’t known existed. All these years and New York kept pulling scarves out of its hat, discount-magician-style. He could never come to grips with the city, which thrived on chaos rather than order. But maybe that was why he stayed. The city was forgiving, built on second and third and fourth chances.

In the parking lot, everyone stretched, yawned, and obediently shuffled in the direction of neon-pink signs pointing to holding—a demoralizing room with 10 fans in lieu of functioning AC. Nonunion’s breakfast was already waiting on warming trays: scrambled eggs, sausage patties, bacon, pancakes, and home fries. On an adjacent table were juice boxes and packaged snacks. The granola bars were always pocketed in seconds. Gene had forgotten this and by the time he wandered over, only unsalted peanuts greeted him.

“Decent spread.”

Gene looked up. Napoleon had sauntered in with his SAG-exclusive breakfast, served upstairs: eggs Benedict, shrimp cocktail, sliced avocado, and a salacious chocolate muffin.

“Didn’t want to eat with them,” he sneered, though Gene didn’t understand why since he never let anyone forget he was SAG. “Where’s the line for SAG?” “Sorry to cut, I’m SAG.” “Is SAG getting bused home?” Another point docked off.

Gene took a bite of flaccid pancake as the first AD swept into the room, his movements so frenetic that the NDAs fluttered in their piles on the conference tables.

Gene waited for “Janek but you can call me Jack” to speak. He did not. To Gene’s amusement, Jack waited until all the NDAs were signed and collected before opening his mouth. From that moment on, the extras were bound to silence.

“Okay, so _________ happens over the course of 24 hours. It’s made up of three vignettes, each one based around a different __________ in New York. I said vignette, not vinaigrette.”

Most of the time, nobody on set bothered to explain anything to them. Most of the time, they were herded around like blind children. On the rare occasions explanations were offered, the film was either big-budget or art-house.

“And our eyes and ears, __________, he’s the thread that connects them all. You still with me? Okay, so today we’re shooting three scenes.” Disappointment dribbled through the room. “I know, I know, it’s going to be a long day, but trust me, we want to get you out of here as fast as we can.” Translation: We don’t want to pay you a cent more than we have to.

Someone raised her hand. Jack pretended not to see.

“So in this vignette, everything takes place on a ______________. In the first scene, it’s a normal day. You’re all waiting for the _______ like it’s going to come any second. Yeah? In the next scene, it’s the same scenario but you’re getting a little __________ and you all ___ _____. In the last scene, imagine a _____ or __________ has just happened. This is when __________ starts to go haywire. He’s been ____________ throughout the day, ____ on, called a _______, and now he completely loses it. Got it?”

Gene set down his fork, his appetite diminished. Why was Athena so seduced by tragedy?

A chair screeched back against the linoleum floor. The elegant hand gripping it belonged to Hiriko, an attractive, widowed woman of undisclosed age. Gene had met her a couple of months back, when they played ND PEDESTRIANS during an alien invasion. She had a habit of bringing an enormous paperback to set, opening it up, then ignoring it for the rest of the shoot, and she kept a flask in her purse from which she stole small, satisfied sips.

“Do you know who’s playing the lead?” she asked him, twinkling.

Gene could never tell if she was flirting. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted her to flirt. He had not dated anyone in a very long time.

“That young man everyone’s talking about, ______________.”

He was said to be the next (the first?) great Asian American actor of their time, the one who’d raise them from obscurity into, well, something beyond obscurity. His résumé ran the gamut from superhero action flicks to romantic comedies, and now he was, unsurprisingly, segueing into dramas. And his daughter had nabbed him in her film’s lead role. His daughter—the words leaned forward on the edge of his tongue. He yanked them back.

“He’s dating what’s-her-name, the actress who played the last Wonder Woman,” Hiriko added.

Gene’s mind sketched a rough impression of her: blond, full-figured, legs up to here. “Isn’t that something.”

The three chewed in silence. No one said aloud the obvious thought hanging over the table, That would have never happened in my day!, because it would have conceded the world was zipping in a different direction while they felt affixed to the same spot.

The man at wardrobe took one look at Gene and asked if he’d brought a change of clothes. The question was an insult; his clothes were brand-name, from TJ Maxx. Gene did nearly all his shopping at TJ Maxx, a comfortingly neutral store.

He shook his head no without bothering to trot out an excuse, then couldn’t help but cut his eyes at Napoleon and his fake Louis Vuitton luggage. Napoleon pulled out five full sets of options as wardrobe fawned over him.

Inside a portable dressing room that refused to zip up all the way, Gene struggled to tug off his pants without knocking over the flimsy nylon contraption. He cursed himself for ignoring the wardrobe notes from last night. “No bright whites, no brand names, think grimy, interesting patterns acceptable, nothing that causes strobing, though!” Surely that warranted a subtraction of points.

At hair and makeup, his hair was combed through and spritzed. Makeup devoted more time to covering him in soot-colored powder.

“You have great eyebrows,” the makeup artist complimented him. She kissed her brush into a cake of gray and gently stabbed his forehead.

Gene twisted up to look at her. She had purple hair, a flower tattoo trailing across her neck. “Thank you,” he said tremulously. He wished he knew her name.

She looked a little put off by his sincerity. “Sure thing.”

Add three points to the day. He had great eyebrows.

She stepped away to let him review her work in the mirror: He looked poor. Poor and old.

When the availability request had popped up on his phone, it had said only “BYSTANDER for UNNAMED PROJECT.” His eyes had snagged on the text. Something about it crackled, its very nondescriptness setting it apart from other requests.

He had almost turned it down, had almost given up hope he’d ever land on one of his daughter’s sets, but then he remembered she was scheduled to be in New York. He’d read about it on a fan-run social-media account: “Athena Wu rumored to start production on her second feature in Manhattan next month.”

He’d last seen her at the Atlantic City bus terminal, seven years ago. Their goodbye had been benign, even pleasant. When she handed him the envelope of cash, she hadn’t cut any of her usual backhanded or reproachful remarks. And when they parted, she’d even gripped his arm and said, “Good luck.” Good luck, in any language, spoke of well wishes, didn’t it?

Not until weeks, then months, later—time marked by deafening silence to his calls, texts and emails—did he obsessively rewind and freeze-frame the moment. Trying hopelessly to pinpoint when in the course of an hour their relationship had soured and spoiled. When they stopped for Subway sandwiches? Waiting in line for tickets? But that was absurd. He wasn’t so naive as to believe the first thread had unraveled at the Atlantic City bus terminal. No, Athena must have decided sometime before (when?) to “estrange” herself from him. What a funny word, estrange! Gene thought it sounded unnecessarily fancy, almost French, since it called to mind escargots. But sitting smack in the middle of the word was strange, and yes, strange was the word for a part of yourself going off into the world, scaling magnificent heights, while the other part remained a distant spectator. If Gene had to describe the sensation, he’d say it was like catching a glimpse of your elbow on someone else’s arm and wondering, Now how did you end up there?

The PA charged with wrangling them like blind children was Beckett. He wore the standard PA uniform: sneakers, jeans, hoodie, and a holster slung around his hips where a walkie talkie took the place of a gun.

Gene felt paternal toward the PAs, who were invariably in their 20s and considered sleep a fun activity they’d try someday. When an unusually thoughtful PA asked, “Need anything? Everything okay? Let me know if you want water,” Gene had to stop himself from asking, “Do you need anything? Is everything okay with you? Let me know if you want water.”

Beckett, unlucky fellow, was not a PA with a natural loudspeaker built into his lungs. Gene caught the beginning half of his sentence as he crossed the room, his voicing cracking in the middle: “If you have not had your picture taken—”

“What?” Hiriko called. “What was that?”

The question went unanswered and they were transferred into the care of another overworked PA.

Tian formed the start of a line, looking serenely unbothered. Of all the people Gene had ever met on set, Tian had been doing background the longest. He never scrolled through his phone between takes or tried to negotiate sitting down in a scene. He’d never dream of sneaking off to holding, pretending he hadn’t heard his number called. In other words, he was the consummate extra.

The PA asked for their numbers.

“Two,” Tian chimed in his clear voice. Of course he was No. 2 on the call sheet.

Hiriko turned to Napoleon. “How are auditions?”

Unlike her and Gene, Napoleon was an acteur, meaning he had an agent who occasionally secured him auditions in demoralizing rooms not unlike holding.

“I just did one for a commercial,” he said, loud enough for others to hear. “A national one.” Gene and Hiriko exchanged Aren’t we special? glances. “For gastritis, which, sure, isn’t what I planned on for my acting debut, but I wouldn’t have to work for a year: $50,000 on average is what I’m hearing. And don’t forget the residuals.”

If Napoleon lucked out, he’d be guaranteed a lifelong job. Then again, he’d be forever known as the face of gastritis. Which put him out of the running for arthritis guy, ulcers guy, etc.

They shuffled back to their table.

“I hope you get it, Napoleon, I really do.” Gene mostly meant it. He pulled out the bag of peanuts, scrutinized it. Did he deserve a reward?

“You’re just—what—one voucher away from joining SAG?” Napoleon asked, though he’d asked Gene this question before.

Another point docked. “Mm-hmm.”

Hiriko’s eyeglasses slipped down her nose as she leaned forward. “You have to learn a special skill. Sign language. Playing dead. Tap dancing. You know, I once danced with Sessue Hayakawa.” She winked at Gene as he struggled to recalculate her age based on this new bit of information. He wasn’t imagining it—she was flirting. She opened her paperback and scanned Gene’s midsection. “Or just invest in an NYPD costume. You have the build.” Maybe not.

“You know what you got to do?” Napoleon teased. “Insert yourself.”

A few legendary extras had snatched up speaking roles by shouting a line so good, so flawless, they’d rendered themselves indispensable. Infamous among extra lore was the Being John Malkovich scene when a guy whips a beer can at John and hollers, “Think fast!”

Hiriko pursed her lips. “What do you mean?”

Gene recounted the anecdote, pleased as anything, as if it belonged to him and only him.

“Oh, that? That’s been debunked.” Hiriko sipped gaily from her flask. “You didn’t know?”

Gene sighed with inordinate disappointment. Now why did she have to tell him that? He preferred the false version, the better version.

By noon, Beckett’s voice had been reduced to a rasp. “Everyone, Nos. 1 to 75, follow me. We are going to set now. Leave your stuff here. No one will steal your umbrella, I promise. Yes, go to the bathroom now. Bring your IDs to get propped. I said, ‘BRING YOUR IDs.’”

Beckett led them through a tunnel of hallways leading into a massive warehouse. Rows of horizontal lights spanned the length of the walls, tricking the eye into the collective fiction that broad daylight filled the warehouse. Extraordinary, the amount of muscle and sweat poured into movie magic, Gene thought. And he did think it was extraordinary, to the point where he’d look around set and grow a little misty-eyed. I’m a part of movie magic, he’d reflect, and if I so much as step in the wrong direction, I can break the spell.

They passed by a construction area—sawing, hammering, sanding—before entering a replica of a New York City subway station. The uncanniness was surreal: Everything, down to the grimy tiles and dripping metal beams and balled-up, wet trash, had been cloned to perfection.

The set was frantic with people wrangling their respective gear: cameras, lighting, sound, hair and makeup, the person who stuck neon tape on the ground (how was he named in the credits? Gene had always wondered). He spotted Jack yapping into his headset, a different PA reprimanding Beckett, Napoleon hitting on a guy half his age, and then, and then—he saw her.

She was staring at a screen, seated in a raised folding chair. Her hair was short now, chin-length, not long as she’d always worn it. She looked tired. She looked awfully young compared with everyone around her. She was dressed like a PA. Did she need water? He could have cried.

“You.” Beckett snapped his fingers. “Here.”

He pointed to a spot a few yards away from Athena. Her outline flitted in the corner of Gene’s eye.

Napoleon nudged him. “What are you doing?”

Gene realized everyone was grudgingly lying down. “Which scene is this?”

“How the hell would I know? They never tell us shit.”

“If wardrobe says I ruined this coat, it’s not my problem,” Hiriko murmured. She took off her glasses, then looked at Gene for approval. He offered up a noncommittal noise.

As soon as Athena was preoccupied, Gene carefully lowered himself down; he couldn’t bear for her to catch him panting and fumbling, the spitting image of the old man he must have occupied in her imagination. He stared up at the enormous ceiling. The floor beneath him was cold.

The stand-in for the principal actor was shuttled off as Jack’s voice descended from above. “Okay, so this is before __________ has entered the station. Think of it as the ____ before the _______. Right now we want to create a _________ mood. Got it?” He was met with blank faces. “Lie still, but move around. Scratch something, cough—no, mime coughing—just don’t look dead. Okay?” Jack clapped his hands together.

Gene struggled to make sense of the film. Was it abstract? Athena’s first film had been abstract (an excess of neon signs at night; decadent food left uneaten on tables; opaque conversations) but at the same time the very opposite of abstract, given that 10 minutes of it were devoted to the gang rape of a girl. A girl who looked not unlike his daughter. Gene’s instinct was to flee the theater mid-film, and he might have if his body hadn’t congealed into a useless block of flesh. Afterward, he used the lobby’s free Wi-Fi to scrape the internet for information on how he was supposed to feel. However illogical, he couldn’t help but suspect Athena left signs for him in her art. If she’d baked a message into this first film, what on earth was it?

In an interview, when asked about the film’s explicit violence, Athena had answered, “I had to show the truth. This happened. We can’t look away from it,” referencing a 1985 news story out of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Gene understood this; he did. At least on an intellectual level. But who was it for? Who wanted to watch it? He certainly didn’t want to see five white men gang-rape a girl who looked not unlike his daughter. He could’ve lived his whole life without seeing it. Happily. But maybe he was a philistine. He favored comedies. Animated movies. Black-and-white classics. He was a sucker for unambiguous endings.

In the lobby, he’d put away his phone with an uneasy heart. Whenever he watched interviews of his daughter, she came across as angry. Angry and self-righteous. The combination made him profoundly sad. Wasn’t she tired? He wanted to tell her to take a break. To allow herself carefree stupidity, the birthright of anyone her age. But his daughter was on a crusade (against what?). She was terrifying. She’d always terrified him.

“Napoleon?” Gene whispered.

“Yeah?”

Napoleon’s head was positioned just above his. Tiger Balm wafted from his forehead; the man was morphing into an apothecary. “I ever tell you I have a daughter?”

“QUIET ON SET.”

The urge to toss it all out the window seized Gene. To throw a beer can and yell, “Think fast!” Gene licked his chapped lips. “She’s the director.”

Napoleon twisted around in disbelief as someone barked, “Stay in your first positions.”

“No kidding?” He fished for the miniature headshots he kept in his wallet. “Hey, introduce me.”

Gene swatted his hand away. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Gene?” Napoleon demanded, abruptly a full Staten Islander, a fact he suppressed until he couldn’t.

“HOLD THE TALK. LAST LOOKS.”

Napoleon brushed his hair back and sucked in his cheeks.

“Pictures up … Rolling … Background … Action!”

Everyone shushed.

Action! was the sacred word that recontextualized the set into a nearly religious space. Every second carried weight and they all bore it, each and every one of them, for a common purpose, and surely such collective devotion gestured at a kind of religion, didn’t it?

Gene noticed only then that the principal actor had materialized. Gene startled a little in recognition—so Hiriko had been right.

The principal actor fell to the ground, moaning and writhing, before crawling over the extras. His foot nearly grazed Gene’s chin. After a while, his wails echoed through the set. In Gene’s opinion, he was overdoing it, his drama sliding toward melodrama.

“Cut!” Athena’s voice. Gene’s heart did a jumping jack.

“RESETTING.”

For the next two hours, while the camera was moved into every conceivable position, Gene remained suspended in a state of anxiety so intense it bordered on elation. When Jack called, “Checking the gate!” his posture caved with relief.

Beckett allowed the extras to stop by the crafty truck before heading back to holding. Gene stretched and dawdled, loitering until the others had filed off set. He felt oddly light and heavy at once. He steadied himself and walked toward Athena, the calm center in a cluster of moving bodies, her headphones hanging off one ear, still staring intently at a screen monitor.

Gene kept his eyes down as he passed, but at the last minute he looked up and what do you know, she was looking right at him.

“Dad?” she said, not unkindly, not even so much in surprise.

“Athena!”

She continued to stare at him. Then she got up and hissed, “Follow me.”

From the back, she looked very thin—malnourished, practically. Her walk still listed toward the left, a flaw inherited from her mother. She led him behind the set, lights blaring synthetic daylight above them, over electrical cords and past carts stacked with bottled water, through a set of double doors into the parking lot. Outside, it was drizzling.

Gene’s hands trembled; he was on the verge of splitting apart from happiness. He’d planned out this moment hundreds of times. The apologies. The forgiveness. The reunification, like two weary countries after a civil war.

“You’re sick,” she said.

“I’ve missed you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m acting,” he smiled.

She smiled back like she wanted to run him over with a car. “I could have you arrested.”

“No, you can’t,” he said lightly, and even she looked struck by this truth.

“Please leave.”

“You look great, Athena.”

“You have no right—”

“I have every right.” His voice had lost its friendly edge.

At this, Athena laughed unconvincingly. The skin around her eyes had already started to sag. She’s only 27, he thought.

“I have no obligation to you,” she said.

“I disagree.”

“Your opinion doesn’t matter here.”

“‘Opinion?’” he repeated skeptically. “Who’s talking about opinions? You’re my daughter—”

“Stop.”

The hardness etched into the word was so startling, he took a step backwards.

“I will not engage with you on your terms. You will not cross the boundaries I’ve put up to safeguard my well-being.” She had switched to the clipped, even register of a therapist.

If she would at least scream, if she would at least cry! Anything would have been preferable to this phony wall of talk therapy. And yet he sensed the wall she’d patched together was fragile, the thinnest of paper holding back a flood. If he just pressed a little further—

“I’ll leave you alone if you give me a legitimate reason why,” Gene countered. He was convinced he’d engineered an indisputable workaround, because the contrary, leaving her alone for good, was unbearable. Instead, he stood dumbstruck as Athena fired terms at him like emotional abuse and parental neglect. As proof, she brought up the money, though she’d assured him in Atlantic City that she wanted to—what was it?—put him on the road to recovery. She told him she’d been going to Al-Anon for two years after realizing none of it was her fault.

Gene frowned. Al-Anon?

She’d always blamed herself, did he know that? As a child, she had to do everything, she had to track his purchases, his whereabouts, cover up his blunders for the sake of her mother, throw out the empty bottles, open the windows in the morning to air out the stink. Keeping their family from collapsing in on itself had fallen to her, but if she so much as asked for a packed lunch, she feared she was acting selfishly. She existed on perpetual tiptoe, afraid the slightest misstep would set him off, unable to go to bed for hours because she was waiting, she was always waiting. And yet at school, she had to pretend she had normal kid problems, make up excuses for why she fell asleep during class or why Gene had missed another parent-teacher conference. Thanks to Al-Anon, she had finally started to heal.

Heal. The word alone was a condemnation. A younger version of himself might have shouted or slammed an object against a table to tug the narrative back toward reason. But this version of himself—tired, lonely, and tired of feeling lonely—could only grab a handful of empty words. “I see.”

He couldn’t even bring himself to say sorry. He loathed himself for it. But apologizing would admit to her version of the truth.

When Gene didn’t say more, Athena blinked in surprise. “Well—yes. And I need you to respect that.” She turned and walked toward the doors.

Gene called out, “I wanted to say I’m happy for you.” The trembling in happy sickened him. He’d tried so hard to sound cheerful.

Athena slowed her steps without stopping. He started subtracting points, then lost count.

A year before they parted at the Atlantic City bus terminal, she’d been the same at her mother’s funeral. Withholding. Cold. Distant. Gene knew parents could be withholding, cold, distant. He didn’t know children could be too.

Athena made all the funeral arrangements, and for that, Gene was grateful. Well, more accurately, he felt blips of gratitude, bright buoys in the sea waving to him from afar through a haze of near-constant inebriation. From the hospital to the church, he was awash, afloat on a mixture he’d concocted of suanmeitang and whiskey, while Athena rushed around making calls, answering the door, heating up leftovers. He was inconsolable. He would have liked to drown. He couldn’t think of Bi-Ling’s wasted body sans thinking with morbid jealousy of the pain-free place she now inhabited. The few times clarity visited before a numbing headache took their place, he’d wonder, Why aren’t you inconsolable? My busy daughter. My oh-so-efficient daughter. Why have you left me flailing alone in this watery grief?

“Hi, yes, one black coffee, cheese crackers, a Rice Krispie treat, and … Sorry, what do you have back there?” He sensed the line behind him twitching with impatience. “And a granola bar. Wait, never mind—a fruit cup,” he said sagely. He hated fruit cups. The points demanded a punishment. Or a reward. He no longer knew.

Gene had conceived of the good-day-bad-day-bagel system after attending his first, and only, AA meeting. First and only because he just couldn’t look himself squarely in the eye in the light of day. If he looked at a problem aslant, it didn’t fully exist and therefore it couldn’t fully dominate his reality. Cowardly, he knew. But in his own way, he had managed. Hadn’t he?

“So you don’t want the other stuff?” The cook’s face didn’t sugarcoat his exasperation.

“No, I do,” he sighed.

Arms full, coffee sloshing onto his borrowed shoes, Gene walked back to holding and sat down. Athena’s words nagged at him. “‘Impact over intent.’ What does that mean, anyway?”

Napoleon shrugged as Hiriko turned thoughtful, flipping the pages of her book without glancing at them. “Do you have an example?” she asked.

“That’s what I’m saying—it doesn’t have any meaning. You can’t disagree with it. Like an ace card.” Gene stared suspiciously at his empty fruit cup—when had he eaten it?

“Are you okay, buddy?” Napoleon asked with unusual sympathy. As if Gene were unwell. Or worse, senile. “Did you … talk to her?”

Before Gene could answer, Beckett called them back to set. As they filed down the hallway, Hiriko held out her flask. Just by its heft in his palm, Gene knew it was half full—funny how an old instinct kicked right back in as if it had never left. He hesitated for a second, then cleared it in a single gulp. He had pinned Hiriko for a sherry drinker, but it was straight gin.

She raised an eyebrow. “One of those days?”

What Gene could not abide was being smudged away. That’s how Athena looked at him—like a smudge on the plain of her pristine life. A relic of her pre-famous past she’d never have to set eyes on again simply because she could choose not to, so low was he beneath her line of sight.

Unbelievable that she’d denied the fact of their biological relationship. Of course, she’d packaged it in different terms: chosen family and personal autonomy. Nonsense was what it was.

But Athena had always rewritten reality to match her preferences. Though her mother had died from a sickness hoarded in her genes—the Huntington’s so engulfing, it swallowed her personality—Athena claimed the disease had been triggered by Gene. The last night they spent at the hospital, she launched accusation after accusation at him: that Bi-Ling had abandoned her family and friends in Taiwan to move 8,000 miles for him based on promises he never intended to keep. That she’d lived a miserable and isolated life in this foreign country. That Gene, as self-centered and responsible as a teenager, couldn’t see it.

After Atlantic City, Gene had decided to start fresh, to become someone … fresher. He was a good man. Not a perfect man, no. He’d had a temper when he was younger, he could admit to that. And the drinking hadn’t helped (harder to admit). But he found it laughable that some people believed an instance of human error could negate, could indeed cancel out, love. His own father used to beat him, even when Gene was old enough to fight him off. And yet he’d forgiven him, in the sense that he had not known his father’s fist needed forgiving.

He’d been five years sober—until now, anyway. He’d forgotten to tell Athena in the parking lot. He’d wanted so badly to pocket her pride in him, to be able to gaze upon it anytime he wanted. He waited for something akin to momentous sorrow to wash over him, his hard-won sobriety erased in a blink, and yet the reality of what that sip portended seemed very far away.

Points lost, points gained.

He decided he would not think about it anymore and that was that; Gene had always been good at compartmentalizing. He studied his aching legs instead. He should have worn his compression socks. Or maybe the feeling was heartburn. Where was Napoleon with his Po Chai pills when you needed him?

They were shooting the last scene of the day. Two hours ago, they’d wrapped the third (or was it the first?) scene and passed into overtime, which meant a tidy $24.75 per hour, but what would Gene have given to just go home already. It was a mistake to have come. A mistake to assume knowing could ever substitute the softness, the loveliness, of not knowing.

Jack was bouncing up and down, somehow even more energetic than at the start of the day. Gene would bet money he’d been subsisting on a steady dose of Adderall.

“So in this scene, you’re all exhausted, okay?”

Napoleon snorted.

“But this is the big moment we’ve been building up to, when __________ is finally going to ________. Remember he’s been _____ on, _________, ______ around, and he’s had it up to here. It’s an emotional scene, a highly charged scene, and I want you all to feel it.”

The extras were to stumble haphazardly around the subway station—easy when everyone was floating in a fugue state at this 12th hour.

Jack moved them into their first positions. “Don’t be afraid to run into each other—I mean, don’t hurt yourself,” he quickly amended, no doubt thinking of lawsuits, “but act like you can’t see where you’re going. Okay?”

“If I ruin this coat, it won’t be my fault,” Hiriko murmured again. She looked at Gene for affirmation. He was in no mood to give it this time.

Commotion was developing farther up along the set, where the stand-ins and stunt coordinator were situated, but came to a pause when the principal actor emerged. His hair and makeup team trailed behind him, spraying and smoothing and powdering, as he carefully avoided eye contact with the background actors, then checked his phone before sliding it into his pocket.

Unbelievable, Gene scoffed.

Athena conferred with the principal actor and the stunt coordinator, the three of them speaking in agitated tones. Then the stunt coordinator called “No. 2,” and Tian walked over to join them. Gene kept his eyes on Athena, willing her to look his way. She refused. After a few minutes, Tian returned to his first position.

“Pictures up … Rolling … Background … Action!”

Gene zigzagged across the set, half blind without needing to act. The gin coursed agreeably through him. He slammed his shoulder into several people, Napoleon included, who dolled out a sorrowful look in his direction. He walked at a faster pace, everyone’s faces smearing together, then slowed his steps when he heard the principal actor’s voice. He zigzagged toward it.

The principal actor gripped Tian by the collar, then sneered a slur in his face and pushed him. He mimed kicking Tian for an excruciatingly long time. Gene looked at Hiriko—she had broken protocol and closed her eyes. The sudden violence in the scene, in the warehouse, came as a terrible intrusion. Nothing, not even Jack’s frenetic explanations, could have prepared them for it.

“Still rolling!” the second AD called. A PA rushed up to the principal actor with an unlabeled bottle and squirted milky liquid into his mouth. He leaned back, about to spit in Tian’s face. Gene’s stomach clutched.

“Stop,” Tian said flatly. “I can’t.”

A few extras stalled in their movements, unsure if this was his line, if he’d been anointed out of the background masses at long last to a speaking role.

“Cut!” Athena called. She got down from her chair and walked over. “What do you mean you can’t?” she said with a hint of annoyance. “You just agreed to a second ago.” Her hands flowered open and closed, open and closed—a nervous habit.

“I don’t understand why we’re hurting each other,” Tian frowned. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Behind Gene, two PAs were whispering.

“—thought a _____ actor was too ‘controversial’ and a _____ actor was too ‘predictable.’” The other PA whistled under his breath. “Apparently, she said the ‘safest choice’ was an all _____ cast.”

Gene couldn’t help but grimace—his daughter’s vision of society was awfully reductive. But for whatever reason, she must have derived comfort from reducing it down to manageable parts. Was it so different from his good-day-bad-day-bagel system?

“I want to call my SAG rep,” Tian continued. Not the consummate extra, after all.

The principal actor vainly suppressed an eye roll.

Another extra addressed Athena. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?”

“Abuse against _____ is on the rise and—”

“And your solution is more abuse?”

“But it’s not real,” Athena said softly, as though to herself.

Tian laughed. “Am I not real?”

The question ricocheted through the crowd of extras.

For a shameful, fleeting moment, Gene thought of calling out, “Impact over intention, Athena! Isn’t that what you said?”

She was no doubt wearing the same contemptuous mask she’d worn in the parking lot, but when he looked in her direction, her expression spelled horror. Authority leaked out of her by the second. She looked so small. She looked so young.

In elementary school, Athena used to film him and Bi-Ling with a cardboard camera constructed from toilet-paper rolls. He’d crushed it in his hands one night, hostile and drunk and then hostile because he was drunk, but the next day, he’d bought her a used Sony camcorder with that week’s paycheck, which meant he’d have to skip meals twice a day, but she’d thrown her arms around his waist and it had been worth every spasm of hunger.

When she’d asked him in her little-adult voice (terrifying, she’d been, even then) if they had enough money to afford the camera, he’d lied. “Whatever you want, I’ll get it for you” was his favorite refrain, even when Bi-Ling scolded him for turning her into a bottomless person, someone whose desires have no end.

He never told Athena about the illegal gambling that had paid off her mother’s hospital bills. About the months he spent processing fake IDs in Jackson Heights as a second source of income. About how, during her freshman year of college, after his bike was stolen and he lost his job as a deliveryman, he’d spent six dehumanizing weeks homeless. She believed what she wanted to believe. No, she believed what he’d let her believe. Maybe both were true.

He realized with sudden, achingly sweet clarity what Athena had meant in her interview. Directing brought her control over her environment because it offset the chaos he brought to it. When she zoomed in and out on her camera, perhaps she left their apartment in Astoria. Perhaps she traveled somewhere else entirely—to a safer, better place.

“I’ll do it.”

Gene walked into the heart of the commotion.

“What are you doing, buddy?” Napoleon asked, resting a hand on his sleeve. He shrugged him off.

Tian looked at Gene, shook his head slightly, then walked off set. Gene half-expected people to clap. No one did.

Gene stepped in front of the principal actor. Up close, his handsomeness seemed unearned.

“You don’t have to, Dad.” Athena spoke quietly. Everyone stared at her.

The attempt to stop him only emboldened Gene. He sat down on the ground. Strangely, it wasn’t as cold as before. “Kick me,” he said to the principal actor. “Go ahead, spit on me.”

He had done the math. This is what the points commanded.

The crew looked around at one another. After a moment, the sound guy re-hoisted the boom. The lighting team repositioned themselves. Athena walked back to her director’s chair.

Gene lay prostrate before his part-time friends, the other extras, the crew, and, though he could not see her, his daughter, who watched him from behind the camera’s unblinking eye.

Gene qualified to join SAG that day. On IMDb, he is credited as ELDERLY ASIAN MAN. A gift from his daughter; according to union laws, his silent role did not require screen credit.

After the film’s release, he read review after review, hoping to reach a verdict on his daughter’s work without experiencing it, but the reviews were as mixed as he felt. When he finally purchased a ticket at his local theater early one morning, he was one of three in the audience. He thought he’d feel detached, looking at himself pretending to be someone else, knowing exactly what tricks had been turned to tamper with the fake until it could pass as real.

But as Gene watched himself gasping and convulsing on the subway platform—his arms tucked helplessly around his stomach, his mouth limp with resignation—he felt knocked over by such exquisite grief and, to his surprise, discovered his cheeks were wet.

Which players have been the biggest hits and misses after making a move in the January transfer window?

When someone is accidentally shot and killed on a film set, who is responsible: the actor holding the gun, the person who handed it to him, or the professional charged with managing the movie’s weaponry? Last week, New Mexico prosecutors proposed an answer: all three.

The actor Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter for the fatal shooting of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer—the person who manages the set’s firearms and their related safety protocols—also faces charges. Meanwhile, Assistant Director Dave Halls, the person who reportedly handed Baldwin the gun moments before the incident, has taken a plea deal on a charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon, according to prosecutors.  Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed have denied responsibility for Hutchins’s death.  

I spoke with Thomas Pimentel, a Massachusetts-based armorer, twice over the phone about the charges, the state of the armorer position in the movie industry, and whether Hollywood should stop using guns on film sets altogether.

Our conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Just right off the bat, what did you make of these charges?

Thomas Pimentel: I’m happy about it. This never should have happened. It was definitely preventable. I am married with children, and I’m an armorer. So when I hear that someone gets killed because of negligence, and they leave a mom behind and they leave children behind, it’s horrible.

[Read: Why Hollywood can’t quit guns]

Nobody should lose their life over make-believe. They shouldn’t. You should expect a level of professionalism and safety in whatever workplace that you’re in. And it was unacceptable.

Nyce: Obviously, there are multiple people being charged here. Do you have any opinion about who’s responsible?

Pimentel: Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer, was inexperienced. There was live ammunition on the set. That’s just absurd.

And the assistant director never should have been handling any of those firearms or the props. That’s the armorer’s job.

Nyce: In a lawsuit, Gutierrez-Reed claims she was not in the building at the time of the shooting because she wasn’t notified that a gun was being used. What do you make of that?

Pimentel: You can probably chalk that up to them having a half assed production, is what it sounds like. This sounds like another one of the many mistakes or oversights that happened on this project.

Nyce: So, in your experience, the armorer should be the only person, other than the actor, handling the gun?

Pimentel: One hundred percent. When the armorer wakes up in the morning, those guns and the ammunition should be under lock and key. Everything should have been inventoried the night before. They look at their call sheet; they know what they need. They’ll normally have a cart that has the weapons for that particular scene locked up with keys that only they have on their person. They’ll transport them to set when they’re called to set. They’ll open up those cases. For a rehearsal, a lot of times, they will bring out the guns. Now, a lot of times you can do a rehearsal without guns.

Nyce: Baldwin was rehearsing when this happened, right?

Pimentel: Right. But the thing is, if they had not used them in rehearsal and then used them in the actual scene, would he have shot her then? Who knows. But it’s just another layer of protection that’s put in place.

When you’re ready to go, the actors stand on their marks. Firearms are called in. The armorer will walk in with the firearms and put them in the actor’s hands. If they need to fire the guns, the armorer will chamber a round into whatever gun needs to be fired. And he will say “This weapon is hot” right to the actor’s face. Of course, this is after your typical safety briefings that they have every single day and before every single scene is shot with firearms, to let everyone know that firearms are on set.

Nyce: According to court documents reviewed by The New York Times, Halls, the assistant director, is alleged to have announced “cold gun,” indicating that the weapon did not contain live rounds. And the District Attorney who filed the charges against Baldwin claimed that the actor didn’t check the gun. One of Baldwin’s lawyers issued a statement maintaining that the actor “had no reason to believe there was a live bullet in the gun—or anywhere on the movie set.” The statement said Baldwin “relied on the professionals with whom he worked, who assured him the gun did not have live rounds.” What’s your reaction to those statements?

Pimentel: So first of all, if the assistant director was the one who handed him the pistol, there was no professional involved who knew anything about firearms. So that’s hugely concerning.

[Stephen Gutowski: Guns—even props—are not toys]

Baldwin has been doing this long enough. He’s been in a lot of movies, action movies and things like that. If someone hands him a gun, what’s stopping him from looking down and looking through that chamber and saying, “oh, I got rounds in here”? “Why are we dealing with rounds? Are they dummy rounds? Can I inspect the dummy rounds myself?" He’s totally okay to ask that.

Nyce: Do you think safety is partially the actor’s responsibility?

Pimentel: Of course it is. If you do a movie about Ford versus Ferrari, you’re going to drive cars. You get in a race car, and you learn how to drive race cars. You do everything that you have to do to get as competent and proficient in that particular field as possible. Handling firearms is no different.

Anybody that uses guns in a movie should have to go through the exact same training and licensing process that people like me go through: background checks by the FBI, local and state police, insurance, things like that.

Nyce: Gutierrez-Reed’s lawsuit alleges that Baldwin ignored a request to schedule a “cross draw training.” Baldwin is not named as a defendant in Gutierrez-Reed’s suit. What do you think about that allegation?

Pimentel: Anybody who’s fired a real gun from a holster knows that it’s not a skill that you can just pick up in an afternoon, and certainly not with an antique firearm. That is something that you practice thousands of times over and over and over again.

Nyce: But can you train someone?

Pimentel: You absolutely could. As an actor, that part of your job is to make it believable. So why wouldn’t you want to give it your best foot forward?

It’s funny to me how there are so many rules, especially in filmmaking. If there’s going to be a candle on a table in a scene, I kid you not: They will have a briefing about the fire risk that day. And they will have a fire marshal on set for a candle. It’s so amazing to me, especially nowadays, because you can do so much with technology. Everyone’s seen a good flickering LED candle.

It’s make-believe. I think it’s part of the old Hollywood system. Ever since they’ve made films, they’ve used real guns with blanks in films. And it’s just the thing that people continue to do. And believe me: There are tons of productions that still, to this day, use real guns with blanks all the time, and they do it safely. Those are the people that people should be looking at and consulting, asking, “How do you stay so safe?”

Nyce: So is it a training problem, or would you ever see a world in which they remove real guns from movies altogether?

Pimentel: (Laughs.) I don’t know.

Nyce: Is that putting your profession on the line?

Pimentel: Oh, no, no. I don’t do anything with blank-firing guns anymore. I stopped working with blank-firing guns probably 10 years ago.

Nyce: Why did you do that?

Pimentel: Because it’s a hassle. The only guns that we use are airsoft guns and replica guns. And later on, in postproduction, we put in the smoke and the sound and the shells ejecting from the sides. That’s what they’re doing in films anyway. If you have a real gun on a set, a machine gun, and you’re firing blanks out of it, not only do they take the sound out and put in a new sound in postproduction; they put muzzle flash. And they’ll touch up the spent rounds that are coming out the side. So why would you even do all that? Well, it doesn’t make any sense, right?

There’s a show on CBS and Paramount+ called SEAL Team, and they show these guys having these intense firefights and explosions. They do that every week. They manage to pull all that stuff off, and they do it well and safely. So there are ways that you can do it. Does it enhance the production? It totally does. One of the best shoot-outs in movie history is this intense bank-robbery scene from the movie Heat, with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. It’s an incredible scene. And one of the things that makes it so realistic is because everyone on that set, all the actors involved, can hear it. They can feel it. There is something to be said for immersing people in things like that.

I’ve seen it a lot, too, where you hand an actor a gun that doesn’t make any noise, and they have to pretend. And a lot of these movies use airsoft guns that don’t make any sounds. And the actors are supposed to be firing these guns, and no one’s blinking at all. They’re just standing there.

Nyce: That sounds like an acting problem.

Pimentel: Ahh, yes! Thank God somebody finally said it. You’re absolutely right. Which goes back to my original point: These people are so concerned with “My character’s left-handed, so I have to spend six weeks eating soup with my left hand.” There are so many microscopic details that they pay attention to, and yet they gloss over firearm safety and realistic acting with firearms.

[Kimberly Wehle: The best hope for fixing America’s gun crisis]

There aren’t people on a film set whose job it is to come in and say, “Don’t do that.” It’s very difficult to because of the hierarchy. An armorer can come in and handle weapons, but good luck trying to speak up when you hand an A-list celebrity a pistol, and he puts his finger on the trigger and he’s not supposed to. I’ve been there: “You can’t say anything to them in front of the rest of the crew. It’ll be embarrassing.”

Nyce: But that’s why they hired you!

Pimentel: Well, you can say that about dozens of positions.

Nyce: Sounds like a power dynamic.

Pimentel: There’s so much of that involved. Not everybody is paying attention to what they should be doing in their job. It’s everywhere in every department.

Nyce: How do you design a system to protect those people from themselves and harming others?

Pimentel: Exactly. (Laughs.)

Nyce: No, I’m serious.

Pimentel: Oh, I know.

Nyce: The point of having an armorer there is for safety. If the power dynamics on set are not great and making it hard for an armorer to do their job, is it worth it to reform that job? Or should that job just not exist?

Pimentel: I think it absolutely should be reformed. Boy, I’ll tell you, the contracts for working on a movie set have changed dramatically post-#MeToo, which is great.

But nothing has changed in the industry on firearm safety because of what happened with Alec Baldwin. The day that happened, people were calling for—not only did they not want guns in movies, they didn’t want guns at all. All the celebrities came out, and they were tweeting about it. But they’re gone now. They’re on to something else, and nothing has changed.

Germany and the United Kingdom have pledged to deliver tanks to Kyiv, with other Western allies set to do the same.

Photographs by Lenard Smith

On an early-December morning in California’s Mojave Desert, the Geoscience Support Services geohydrologist Logan Wicks squats in the sand and fiddles with a broken white pipe. Here on a sandy road off Route 66, past miles of scrubby creosote and spiny mesquite, Wicks monitors the pumps and pipes of a promising desert extraction project.

But he’s not looking for oil or gas. Crouching under the shade of a 10-foot lemon tree, at the edge of a citrus orchard that spans hundreds of acres, Wicks is here for water.

A fine stream bursts from the plastic pipe, forming a rainbow-crested arc before hitting the hot sand. Wicks pushes his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head, rubs the short dark bristles on his upper lip, and smiles.

“There’s a hell of a lot more where that came from,” he says, nodding at the spray.

In fact, there might be as much as 34 million acre-feet, or enough to flood 34 million acres one foot deep. Wicks and his colleagues work on behalf of Cadiz, Inc., which has drilled 300 feet below the desert’s surface to reach the massive Fenner aquifer. Today, the nine water wells on Cadiz Ranch support a 3,500-acre oasis of lemons, hemp, and other crops. But the company’s ranch taps only a tiny fraction of the aquifer, which extends 700 square miles between two of California’s mountain ranges, the New York Mountains and the Old Woman Mountains.

If it seems improbable that so much water lies under the desert, it is. Just 20 miles from Cadiz Ranch, the ghost town of Bagdad still holds the record for the driest spell in American history: between 1912 and 1914, this town went 767 consecutive days without rain. The wetter climate that filled the Fenner aquifer ended about 10,000 years ago.

Cadiz, Inc., is drilling for what some call “fossil water”—water that has been buried deep in the Earth for millennia. According to new radiocarbon and other isotopic age-dating tools, the water in this aquifer hit the surface as rain during the last Ice Age, when mammoths still lived here. In the current desert climate, this groundwater will never replenish itself, at least not on a human time scale. Once we use it, it’s never coming back. And unless the aquifer is actively refilled, its depletion could have serious consequences for ecosystems aboveground.

Logan Wicks at Cadiz Farms (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

Fossil water, also called paleowater, is the largest nonfrozen freshwater resource on the planet. But for most of human history, few knew it existed. In the 1950s, oil prospectors began turning up vast, untouched supplies of water, often hidden under deserts. Like oil deposits, the buried water inspired opportunists: In Libya, the dictator Muammar Qaddafi tapped the Nubian sandstone aquifer to power his Great Man-Made River, one of the world’s largest irrigation projects. In India, desert aquifers fed the Green Revolution, transforming the country into the world’s second-largest producer of wheat. In California in 1983, NASA imagery revealing the size of the Fenner aquifer attracted the British entrepreneur Keith Brackpool, who bought the land, co-founded Cadiz, Inc., and started digging wells.

The company’s plan for the aquifer goes far beyond lemons and hemp: Cadiz intends to channel ancient water through two pipelines that would cross hundreds of miles of desert to deliver water to Southern California water districts. The plan has persisted through a decade of political and legal challenges.

That doesn’t mean the Cadiz project and others like it are justified, argue a coalition of anthropologists, philosophers, lawyers, and hydrologists. They say existing laws and regulations don’t address the ethics of water use, and that water management in the age of climate change requires not just new pipes, but also new paradigms.

The Fenner aquifer is “an emergency supply,” the University of New Mexico anthropologist David Groenfeldt says. “How can we possibly justify using it now?”

The rainstorms that pounded the California coast this month don’t change the fact that the region’s climate is drying and warming, and that as a consequence, the state is running out of water––not just for lawns and crops and households, but to protect homes and lives from the region’s ever-larger wildfires. With their communities facing disaster, many western water managers ask: How can we not?

Cadiz Farm (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic) Passageway between flourishing plants and trees at Cadiz Farms (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

When you turn on your tap to brush your teeth in the morning, do you know where that water comes from? Do you feel good about using it? What would change your mind?

These are the kinds of questions that interest David Groenfeldt. But when he began consulting on water projects in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s, nobody else seemed to be asking them. No matter where he worked, from the World Bank to his hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he saw that many decisions with enormous consequences—about who should get water, when, and for what––were stripped of moral context.

In most modern states, we pretend that water is an abstract utility, and that our relationship to it is primarily economic. But economic decisions have human consequences: While infrastructure investments have enabled people in most wealthy societies to use far more water than they need, a third of the globe’s population lacks access to clean drinking water. In 2020, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange created the first futures market for water, allowing investors to gamble on future scarcity.

“A commodity entered into a capitalist system always creates winners and losers,” Groenfeldt says. “When it comes to water, the losers are the ones who can’t self-advocate: ecosystems, the marginalized, and future generations.”

Groenfeldt wasn’t alone in wanting to introduce moral considerations into water decision making. At the 2003 World Water Forum, the Indigenous Peoples Kyoto Water Declaration challenged the “dominant paradigm, policies, and programs on water development,” including the commodification of water. At the same conference, scholars from a UNESCO working group established in 1998 presented their first examination of water ethics. In 2010, the United Nations declared access to clean drinking water to be a universal human right.

When Groenfeldt endeavored to apply moral principles to water management in Santa Fe, local policy makers dismissed his ideas as impractical. So he secured funding from the California-based Kalliopeia Foundation (“dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality”) to start the Water-Culture Institute. Soon, like-minded colleagues found him. Neelke Doorn, a Dutch professor of philosophy, had started her career as a hydraulic engineer but had grown frustrated by the self-proclaimed objectivity of her colleagues, and switched fields. The Oregon-based water lawyer Susan Smith had begun working on water issues with the World Council of Churches because “religious institutions were the only ones taking water justice seriously.” Indigenous leaders from the United States and Canada who had long championed water protection for spiritual reasons joined the ranks. At the 2015 World Water Forum in South Korea, some of these thinkers presented the “Water Ethics Charter,” a set of open-ended guidelines meant to help communities bring environmental, social, and spiritual values into their choices—to “provide a moral basis for water management decisions which cannot be accurately valued in financial terms and are not mandated legally.”

Though the guidelines stop short of offering clear dos and don’ts, they can alter the discussion, Groenfeldt says. For example, a corn farm in arid Kansas might be just as profitable as one in comparatively wet Iowa. But the Kansas farm might require 45 times more irrigated water, depleting groundwater that local communities depend on. Similarly, citizens voting on a new river-diversion project might initially favor cheaper water. But consideration of the recreational, aesthetic, and environmental benefits of the undepleted river might change their vote.

“We take implicit consequences and make them explicit,” Groenfeldt says.

The authors of the Water Ethics Charter also stressed that water experts have their own moral obligation: “to generate knowledge about water in all its aspects and attend to the governance of that water knowledge.” In other words, experts must provide us with the best available information, including where our water comes from and how much is left. Which means that now, they are asking us to consider the consequences of sipping on ancient water.

More than 10,000 years ago, a winter storm gathered over the icy shoulders of the Eastern Mojave’s New York Mountains. The falling snow might have landed on pine needles, or the bristly backs of giant ground sloths. When these crystals melted, some of the resulting water joined the roaring Mojave River and sped north to fill Death Valley’s lake. Some of the lake water seeped into the rich soil, then trickled through the pores of the sedimentary rock. Eventually, it stopped exchanging gases with the atmosphere. In a sense, it became a fossil, storing traces of the Pleistocene climate for the next hundred centuries.

At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, the doctoral candidate Jessica Ng is working to decode these ancient molecules. Down an open-air, salt-scented concrete walkway, inside a cramped lab filled with whirring metal instruments, Ng practices cutting-edge groundwater paleoclimatology.

“I guess most people aren’t thinking about the last Ice Age every day,” Ng says, adjusting her blocky, clear-rimmed glasses.

In the decades after World War II, scientists realized that the detonation of atomic bombs had left detectable levels of the hydrogen isotope tritium in the planet’s atmosphere—and in its rainfall. In the 1970s, researchers found that some very deep groundwater was missing this isotope, because it had never been exposed to the modern atmosphere. In subsequent decades, scientists refined their water-dating techniques, identifying isotopes that decay at different rates in water. Traces of argon-39 in groundwater suggest that the water fell from the sky between 50 and 1,000 years ago. Carbon-14 indicates ages between 1,000 years and 30,000 years. In the past five years or so, krypton-81 has shown that some water—such as that in Australia’s Great Artesian Basin—is an astonishing 200,000 years old. Since the majority of the world’s groundwater hasn’t been tested for all of these isotopes, new data are constantly emerging.

In Ng’s lab and others like it, these ancient water molecules can provide snapshots of past climates—their land temperatures, their precipitation type, and the depth of their water tables. They also demonstrate that not all groundwater is created equal. Water that is one year old is typically close to the surface, and if it’s extracted it will likely be replenished by the following year’s rainfall. Water that’s hundreds or thousands of years old is still moving through a hydrological cycle, but it’s not a cycle that you—or your kids, or your grandkids—will live to see completed. From a human perspective, this groundwater isn’t renewable; if you’re extracting it without restoring what you took, you’re mining it.

In 2019, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and California State University at East Bay published the first comprehensive age study of California groundwater, surveying more than 2,000 wells, and found that approximately 7 percent of the samples contained isotopes associated with water that is at least 10,000 years old. In the Central Valley, where worsening droughts have led many large-scale farms to invest in deeper wells, renewable groundwater appears to be especially scarce.

Standing at the lab’s wide sink, Ng hefts a stainless-steel bulb-shaped flask containing ancient water from a municipal well in Tucson, Arizona. With a practiced swoop, she overturns the flask and opens a valve protruding from its side. A thin stream shoots out, hitting the rusted sink rim. I run my fingers under the stream, feeling the familiar pressure against my skin. It looks, and feels, like regular water. Without a mass spectrometer, it’s impossible to tell it’s a fossil.

In March 1977, amid a record-setting drought, the economic approach to water management faced a critic from within the system. On a balmy day in Los Angeles, the hydrologist Luna Leopold—the son of the famed American conservationist Aldo Leopold—stood before California Governor Jerry Brown and made an impassioned case for a radical reduction in water use.

Luna Leopold had been appointed as the first chief hydrologist of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 1963, and had come to realize that the country faced a failure in water governance. Since President Theodore Roosevelt created the Bureau of Reclamation at the beginning of the 20th century, the American West’s lack of rainfall had been treated as an engineering problem, and dams, reservoirs, and canals as the solutions. Any water not put to “beneficial use” in homes, farms, or factories was considered wasted. To this day, the bureau remains the nation’s largest water wholesaler, irrigating 140,000 farms.

In his Los Angeles speech, Leopold described the attempts by the United States to “improve” rivers and hydrologic systems as “deranged,” and called for a gentler approach to management. He acknowledged that his “philosophic view,” which characterized a river as an “organism,” would strike some as “impractical idealism.” But he pleaded with the governor to plan for scarcity and to protect “especially those remnants of the ice-age groundwater bodies not being recharged now.” The young governor ignored Leopold’s entreaties, and took no action to protect these ancient aquifers. Five years later, Cadiz, Inc., bought thousands of acres in the Mojave Desert—along with their accompanying groundwater rights.

In 2017, 40 years after Leopold’s speech, Jerry Brown had returned to the governor’s office during another record-setting drought, and the ethics of western hydrology seemed even more deeply entrenched. Farmers whose shares of the Colorado River depended on demonstrating “beneficial use” flooded their fields with the precious resource. It had also become clear that the century-old measurements used to divide the Colorado River among seven states and Mexico had been taken in an unusually wet period. A 2015 ProPublica analysis found that, since 2001, the average annual legal claim to Colorado River water had exceeded the existing supply by 1.4 trillion gallons. In 2021, for the first time, the federal government cut allocations from Lake Mead, the largest reservoir on the Colorado River; this past July, the reservoir dropped to 27 percent of its capacity—its lowest level since 1937, when it was still being filled. In the current climate, communities hold rights to water that amounts to little more than myth.

Like today’s water ethicists, Leopold knew that nobody has a purely economic relationship with water. Even as supplies shrink, our biological demand endures, and will accept no substitutes.

We’re thirsty, we might say. We need it.

Left: Dry vegetation in Bonanza Springs Right: A duck in Rancho Santa Margarita (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

In the Orange County suburb of Rancho Santa Margarita, the path around its 31-million-gallon man-made lake is often crowded with mothers pushing strollers and joggers being pulled by dogs. In this arid landscape, wealth is often expressed in water, and it spills from fountains, soaks lawns, and fills private swimming pools. If Cadiz, Inc., obtains final federal approvals for the shorter of its two proposed pipelines, 1.6 billion additional gallons of water will arrive here each year for the next 50 years, pumped from the depths of the Mojave Desert.

“We look at a water supply like an investment portfolio,” Dan Ferons, the general manager of the Santa Margarita Water District, says. “We need to diversify.”

Ferons feels an acute responsibility to invest wisely, because more than 165,000 people in eight communities, including Rancho Santa Margarita, rely on his district’s water. Though the district buys water from the Colorado River via the Municipal Water District of Orange County, it is “paper water”—an abstraction delineated in a legal document. As the Colorado River Basin gets drier, the paper water represents less and less real water, and the water it does represent is getting more expensive: Since Ferons started working for the district in the 1980s, scarcity has increased the price of Colorado River water fivefold. In response to these mounting costs, Santa Margarita has become a leader in water recycling; now, a quarter of all irrigated water in the district is recycled wastewater, and the district wants to recycle 100 percent of its wastewater by 2030. With each successive drought, however, the appeal of the Cadiz project grows, too.

“There’s more in this whole desert valley than in all of Lake Mead,” Ferons says. “It’s out there going to waste.”

Preventing waste is central to Cadiz’s moral case for its project. Susan Kennedy, who replaced Brackpool as executive chair in February 2022, argues that the project will conserve water that would otherwise evaporate from dry salt beds. She says the project’s two pipelines—one running 43 miles south from the Fenner aquifer to the Colorado River aqueduct and one 220 miles north to the California aqueduct—will allow water to be “traded and transferred between the state’s major water systems,” benefiting Californians who currently lack access to water. To her, the project represents nothing less than the future of California’s water infrastructure.

Dan Ferons, the general manager of the Santa Margarita Water District (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

In 2011, the Santa Margarita Water District led the project’s environmental review, which, Kennedy says, along with more than a decade of other reviews, proved that the project will cause “zero harm.” During the 2011 review, however, the National Park Service expressed concern about the draft report’s use of a 2010 Cadiz-funded “recharge estimate”—the rate at which precipitation, snowmelt, and other natural water sources refill the aquifer—was between three and 16 times higher than a range estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2000. In fact, nearly 20 estimates over almost three decades have produced different results, each of which tells its own story about the regional water cycle. The company-funded studies have consistently estimated recharge rates that are orders of magnitude higher than those produced by independent and USGS research.

Kennedy maintains that the figures produced for the environmental review represent the most recent and thorough analysis of the region. The environmental firm CH2M Hill (now called CH2M), which produced the 2010 estimates for the company, has noted that they used freshly collected field data and a new model created by the USGS itself. Kennedy points out that many previous models didn’t collect local data; they based their projections on data from similar watersheds. “The difference in estimates comes down to actual data versus no data and updated versus older modeling tools,” she says.

Still, the USGS hydrogeologist John Izbicki, who contributed to the 2000 estimates, says the specificity of some of the new data likely led to overestimations—when, for example, a single high measurement was projected over an entire region. He maintains that the company-supported numbers are “unrealistic” when compared to studies of similar watersheds, and do not reflect “accepted scientific values in the published literature.”

The 2000 and 2010 recharge estimates “are far, far too greatly different to be reasonable,” Izbicki says. (On a more basic level, he points out that evaporation is part of the hydrological cycle, and that water “going to waste” in the salt beds likely benefits the ecosystem and public health by helping to lock dust in place.)

Kennedy is, of course, familiar with the arguments that this particular source of water should be left untouched, and the criticisms that even the highest recharge estimates would not balance the company’s planned extraction rate. But she says the company will not be “mining” water, which is withdrawing groundwater “in excess of natural recharge.” Instead, Kennedy says, Cadiz will largely be pumping “surplus” water flowing into dry surface-lake beds that would “otherwise evaporate.” In fact, she says, the ultimate goal of the project is “groundwater storage,” because drawing down the aquifer will create space that they expect to sell. Aquifers and other underground locations can serve as evaporation-safe “banks” for surplus water; with water evaporating from California’s reservoirs at record rates, the state has increased investments in water banks.

“We’re not going to build any more dams,” Kennedy says. “What the state is missing is storage.”

But Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, says that while the state does need to invest in water-storage infrastructure, it already has plenty of underground storage space. In the San Joaquin Valley alone, groundwater pumping has made room for more than 100 million acre-feet, enough to accommodate all of California’s runoff for three consecutive years. Given that context, Mount says, Cadiz’s strategy looks like an expensive, resource-heavy way to create unnecessary space.

So far, the company has only sold rights to “store” water from the aquifer itself—essentially, contract holders will pay an extra $1,500 per acre-foot to hold on to any aquifer water that they purchased but didn’t use in a given year. Eventually, the company hopes to attract business from water wholesalers, which would then sell space to agencies that need to store surplus Colorado River water. (Ironically, a project designed to fill a river’s chronic shortfall is counting on its future abundance.)

In 2014, after six separate legal challenges from the Center for Biological Diversity, the National Parks Conservation Association, and the salt-production company Tetra Technologies, a state superior court upheld the environmental approvals. Still, the Cadiz project continues to be a political flashpoint. In 2017, President Donald Trump’s secretary of the Department of the Interior, David Bernhardt, reversed an Obama-era policy and affirmed the legality of the southern pipeline’s path on a railroad right of way. In 2019, encouraged by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a longtime project opponent, the California state senate passed a bill requiring all desert groundwater-extraction projects to undergo separate review by the State Lands Commission, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. In 2020, weeks before Joe Biden took office, the Bureau of Land Management approved and transferred crucial rights of way for the northern pipeline, rights that the company finished acquiring in 2021.

In the meantime, plenty of Californians—and not just rich ones, Kennedy says—are thirsting for the water the company promises to provide. Though the Santa Margarita Water District was the project’s first contract, 11 other utilities now hold contracts or options on a substantial share of the water, including some that serve low-income areas. The company’s northern pipeline would pass through 23 low-income communities in the San Joaquin Valley, where local aquifers are already critically overdrafted and existing water infrastructure is scarce.

The environmental attorney Jennifer Hernandez argues that Cadiz could help remedy historic inequities in California’s water infrastructure. In March 2022, her firm filed an amicus brief on behalf of several Southern California housing, civil-rights, and community-development organizations, opposing lawsuits that have delayed the project. Each company contract contains an “escalator clause” that allows for a 5 percent annual price increase over the 50 years of the contract. If the company started delivering water today, it would cost about $1,400 per acre-foot. (For comparison, this year the Metropolitan Water District charged $1,143 per acre-foot for imported Colorado River water.) Every month of delay, the authors of the brief wrote, “results in the cost of water to disadvantaged communities increasing.”

Kennedy says the company will deliver some of its water at cost, in amounts calculated using the percentage of “disadvantaged communities”—those whose median incomes are 80 percent or less of the statewide median—served by each of its contractors. Mount, however, is skeptical that any version of the project could produce affordable water. Pumping from deep wells is extremely energy intensive, as is moving water uphill over long distances. “It’s disingenuous to say you’ll deliver water ‘at cost’ when that cost is prohibitively high,” Mount says. “I’d be surprised if this water is cheaper than other options.”

One alternative, Mount says, is consolidation: In 2015, the state offered financial incentives to large water suppliers to absorb small ones in disadvantaged areas, since larger suppliers have the resources to invest in reuse and recycling and can divide costs among more ratepayers. A second option is demand reduction: A 2022 study from the Pacific Institute found that for the past 40 years, the state has used less water overall even as its population has grown. The same study found that more investments in efficient showers, toilets, and pipes could reduce water use by a further 30 to 48 percent statewide. Finally, in districts that are dependent on groundwater and lacking in infrastructure, Mount says, new management laws are kickstarting aquifer-recharge projects and helping to restore groundwater supplies. With these alternatives, he says, California could increase water access and affordability without digging a single new well.

​​The Fenner aquifer’s relative isolation, Mount says, is key to the project’s political survival. The draining of the Owens Valley aquifer in the early 1900s to benefit the city of Los Angeles, 250 miles away, is remembered as an act of water theft. “We just don’t, on a large scale, mine groundwater and pump it somewhere else anymore,” Mount says. “Even if everyone is paid for it.” With no obvious human communities dependent on the Fenner aquifer for survival, he says, it feels more acceptable to take it.

Lago Santa Margarita (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

But what counts as dependence? What kind of survival? The leaders of the Chemehuevi, or Nuwu, tribe oppose Cadiz, Inc.’s project in part because of the aquifer’s possible connection to Bonanza Spring, a rare groundwater source supporting a wetland on a ridge above Cadiz Valley. The spring provides water to many protected species, including the desert tortoise and bighorn sheep, and is a sacred site for the Chemehuevi and other desert tribes—in part because it is a focal point of the Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) Salt Song Trail, an ancient ceremonial loop through the desert.

The trail covers roughly 1,000 miles, and its 142 songs, each sung at a specific location, form a sacred cultural map. In 2016, President Barack Obama described the tradition in his proclamation of the Mojave Trails National Monument. Matthew Leivas Sr., the Chemehuevi chief and a Salt Song singer, keeps a worn printout of that proclamation folded in his backpack. “Our people always knew water, we talked to it,” Leivas says. “And we know that spring is sacred, holy—if anything, last-resort water.”

Bonanza Springs Desert Wash (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

For those morally opposed to extracting what they call fossil water, the potential impact on Bonanza Spring offers the strongest legal case against the project. For those in support of the project, disproving this connection provides both a moral and legal defense. Cadiz’s environmental-impact report concluded that “the Project will not likely have any impact on springs,” linking their flow to rainfall at higher elevations. In comments, the National Park Service called this an “a priori” assumption unsupported by sufficient data. Since then, a company-funded study, reviewed by other scientists but not published in a peer-reviewed journal, identified fault zones establishing “no hydraulic connection” between the bodies of water. Soon after, an analysis funded by the Mojave Desert Land Trust and published in the peer-reviewed journal Hydrology concluded that a connection to the aquifer was likely. Two other studies (also supported in part by the Mojave Desert Land Trust), published in 2018 and 2020 in the journal Environmental Forensics, suggested that drawing down the aquifer could significantly harm the spring.

While Susan Kennedy, Cadiz’s executive chair, calls the studies “opponent funded” and “refuted science”—pointing to several researchers who have disputed their conclusions—John Izbicki of the USGS describes the findings as “reasonable.” He points out that the Hydrology analysis, which was based in part on regional data collected by his agency, confirmed the existence of a unique, ancient spring source dating back 15,500 years, and while it did not pinpoint that source precisely, he says, that could be accomplished with a little more data collection. But his agency has limited research funds, and other projects have taken priority. Plus, data are unlikely to settle the larger question of when it is ethically permissible to extract extremely old water, if it ever is.

Matthew Leivas, Senior Chief of the Chemehuevi Tribe, at Lake Havasu on the Chemehuevi Reservation. (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

Long before scientists came up with isotopic dating, the Chemehuevi described Bonanza Spring as ancient. To the Chemehuevi, Leivas says, it makes intuitive sense: Any water flowing in that section of the desert must come from very old layers of the Earth. For this reason, tribal members have always drunk it sparingly.

Since 2021, Leivas and other tribe members, the Native American Land Conservancy, and the National Parks Conservation Association have waged a legal battle against the Cadiz project. (The Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, to whom the company has pledged an annual donation of close to 500 million gallons of water, support the project.) People tend to talk about colonialism in terms of land, Leivas says. But his tribe’s story of displacement and decimation is hydrological. In 1853, the federal government declared Chemehuevi land to be public domain; more than six decades later, it granted the tribe 36,000 acres alongside the Colorado River. But within 30 years, the Bureau of Reclamation had seized more than a fifth of that land to build Parker Dam, the dam that created Lake Havasu. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California both lobbied for and funded the dam, and still holds the rights to most of the lake’s water. The Chemehuevi word for water is pa. For the white man, Leivas says, water means money. And that can lead to short-sightedness.

“Our tribe knows that the Cadiz project is not a conservation project,” James F. Wood, the Chemehuevi tribal chair, wrote in a 2018 statement. “Its aggressive pumping of water fails to save water for our children, grandchildren up to the Seventh Generation.”

In 2004, the authors of the UNESCO water-ethics report took up the issue of what they called “the development of non-renewable groundwater resources.” They acknowledged that “some specialists” believed that the extraction of very old water should be “socially rejected, if not legally prohibited.” They proposed, however, that an arid society could ethically use this water if the social benefits outweighed environmental costs, the water would last at least 50 years, and the community had “envisaged” a future technological alternative.

More recently, ethicists in anthropologist David Groenfeldt’s circle have taken a harder line. The Oregon water-law professor Susan Smith points out that new technologies tend to create new environmental problems. For instance, water desalination consumes enormous amounts of fossil fuels, and its effect on marine environments is unclear. To Smith and others, depleting current resources to maintain the status quo fails to recognize the inherent unsustainability of existing systems.

“Tech optimists tend to be Pollyanna-ish about this stuff,” she said. “They don’t have the right humility about human limitations.”

The science of water dating is young, but it is starting to introduce ethical considerations into California water decisions. In the high desert city of Victorville, where years of overpumping have left groundwater supplies dangerously low, Izbicki has provided his age data to water managers. “When you tell people their water is 10,000 years old, that changes the conversation,” he says. The community focused on conserving that supply, and began recharging the aquifer to sustain it—one of the three alternatives to the Cadiz project noted by the water-policy expert Jeffrey Mount. Since Izbicki’s first studies of Victorville water in 1995, Mount says, the water table has stabilized. Izbicki has since provided data to three other high-desert communities to help them manage their groundwater.

But any real ethical shift must be supported by changes in policy. And until recently, California lawmakers chose not to regulate groundwater at all, instead leaving it up to property owners to adjudicate. (The Cadiz project triggered a state environmental review because it needed local permits for pipelines located outside its property.) Not until 2020 did the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act mandate that communities with competing rights to an aquifer work together to come up with a plan for its sustainable use—which means they must prove that any extraction won’t outpace the aquifer’s replenishment, natural or otherwise.

Age dating can help water managers provide that proof. In 2019, Jean Moran, a hydrologist at Cal State East Bay, co-authored the state’s first groundwater-age analysis, based on samples from more than 4,000 municipal and private wells statewide. Since that study, age data have contributed to new, better-informed management plans in areas like Orange, Santa Clara, and Alameda Counties. Now, with support from the California State Water Board under the new law, Moran and her colleagues are developing a “decision support tool” that walks water managers through the likely long-term impacts of their choices. Earlier this year, the board expanded the pilot project statewide.

The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which prioritizes the restoration of highly stressed aquifers, does not extend to the comparatively untouched Fenner Basin. In cases like the Cadiz project, Mount says, the consequences of extraction may lie far in the future—too far for our existing legal system to mitigate. Debates over climate policy have raised similar questions of intergenerational responsibility; in 2021, the German Supreme Court ruled that the nation’s climate policy violated the constitutional rights of future generations and ordered legislators to amend it. In the world’s most arid regions, it’s possible to imagine similar mandates for water.

The long failure to seriously consider the ethics of groundwater management, Groenfeldt says, is a symptom of a larger misunderstanding. When we think about water scarcity, it’s easier to picture a dry lake bed than a drained aquifer. Although groundwater constitutes the vast majority of the planet’s nonfrozen freshwater resources, most people know little about it, perhaps imagining that it collects in underground caverns or lakes. In truth, an aquifer is more like a porous sponge, a network of geologic and chemical interactions that defies reduction to simple formulas. Mount says the current crisis will force us to confront this collective ignorance.

“We’re at this once-a-century transition in water management,” Mount says. “The next generation after me is going to be obsessed with groundwater.”

To convey groundwater’s complexities, future water managers might need to restore “paper water” to its terrestrial context. In studies of aquifer management in her home country of Costa Rica, the University of Southern California anthropologist Andrea Ballestero has seen how detailed conversations about the geology—and vulnerability—of local aquifers can anchor otherwise abstract decisions in a unique and familiar place. Add age data, she says, and decisions begin to be anchored in time as well.

Tree and water on the surface  at Bonanza Springs (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic) California Mojave Desert Wilderness (Lenard Smith for The Atlantic)

On the day I’m scheduled to go to Bonanza Spring, Matthew Leivas isn’t feeling well, so I go with his good friend Chris Clarke, a member of the National Parks Conservation Association staff. On our way there, Clarke points to a group of brown, spiky-crowned yucca stalks, 40 feet across with a dozen lolling heads.

“That’s probably around 4,000 years old,” he says. Yucca grow in clonal clusters, Clarke explains, and the bigger the cluster, the older the plant roots. I stick my head out the window for a closer look. When that yucca germinated, I think, humans were still hunting big game across the desert, but Ice Age rainfall flowing below the ground had barely completed half its journey through the Fenner aquifer.

About 45 minutes later, after bumping up a steep slope at a 45-degree angle, I step out of the car and hear the spring: the buzz of insects, the chatter of birds, and the distant, unmistakable trill of moving water. After the long stretch of sand and cracked earth, I blink in surprise like a cartoon character. Below us is a small valley filled with reedy green cattails, bare-limbed black cottonwoods, and red and yellow willows.

We tramp downward through slick grasses and mud, skirting coyote scat and bighorn-sheep tracks. Pushing through a stand of cattails, we reach a split rock spilling water like an open mouth. I squat down and stick my hand in the flow. It is surprisingly warm. This spring is the largest natural water source for 1,000 square miles.

“In the equation of Southern California water, Cadiz is really a drop in the bucket,” Clarke says. “But for the desert, this water is everything.”

If Cadiz begins pumping 16.3 billion gallons of water from the Fenner Basin every year for 50 years, the 2018 Environmental Forensics study predicts, this spring might eventually run dry. But because geologic predictions are complex––remember the sponge metaphor––it’s not clear how soon that could happen. Cadiz’s environmental-impact report states that, in keeping with San Bernardino County regulations, the company will closely monitor the spring and surrounding vegetation, and the county can stop the project should they detect sufficient harm. The problem, hydrogeologists tell me, is that once a spring has been measurably depleted, it’s already centuries deep in disrepair. If you stop pumping when the flow turns to a trickle, maybe your grandchildren’s grandchildren will see the spring at full gush again.

In the Chemehuevi tradition, Leivas says, the Salt Songs were a storytelling device, a ritualized memory. People traveled hundreds of miles across the desert to this place, where they drew pictographs, held funerals, and otherwise honored the water they knew was ancient.

That tradition might keep the water here. In December 2021, in part due to the lawsuit filed by the Native American Land Conservancy and other plaintiffs, the Biden administration petitioned a federal judge to invalidate a key permit for Cadiz’s planned 220-mile pipeline, which would cross parts of the protected Mojave Trails National Monument. On September 13, 2022, the same judge agreed to send the project back to the Bureau of Land Management for environmental review. If blocked, the company will likely bide its time, as it has for more than 30 years, until the political winds change again. Susan Kennedy believes that it won’t be long before construction begins on the remaining infrastructure: The company, she says, is “shovel ready.”

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

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In the two-plus years that COVID vaccines have been available in America, the basic recipe has changed just once. The virus, meanwhile, has belched out five variants concerning enough to earn their own Greek-letter names, followed by a menagerie of weirdly monikered Omicron subvariants, each seeming to spread faster than the last. Vaccines, which take months to reformulate, just can’t keep up with a virus that seems to reinvent itself by the week.

But SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary sprint might not be the only reason that immunity can get bogged down in the past. The body seems to fixate on the first version of the virus that it encountered, either through injection or infection—a preoccupation with the past that researchers call “original antigenic sin,” and that may leave us with defenses that are poorly tailored to circulating variants. In recent months, some experts have begun to worry that this “sin” might now be undermining updated vaccines. At an extreme, the thinking goes, people may not get much protection from a COVID shot that is a perfect match for the viral variant du jour.

Recent data hint at this possibility. Past brushes with the virus or the original vaccine seem to mold, or even muffle, people’s reactions to bivalent shots—“I have no doubt about that,” Jenna Guthmiller, an immunologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me. The immune system just doesn’t make Omicron-focused antibodies in the quantity or quality it probably would have had it seen the updated jabs first. But there’s also an upside to this stubbornness that we could not live without, says Katelyn Gostic, an immunologist and infectious-disease modeler who has studied the phenomenon with flu. Original antigenic sin is the reason repeat infections, on average, get milder over time, and the oomph that enables vaccines to work as well as they do. “It’s a fundamental part,” Gostic told me, “of being able to create immunological memory.”

This is not just basic biology. The body’s powerful first impressions of this coronavirus can and should influence how, when, and how often we revaccinate against it, and with what. Better understanding of the degree to which these impressions linger could also help scientists figure out why people are (or are not) fighting off the latest variants—and how their defenses will fare against the virus as it continues to change.

The worst thing about “original antigenic sin” is its name. The blame for that technically lies with Thomas Francis Jr., the immunologist who coined the phrase more than six decades ago after noticing that the initial flu infections people weathered in childhood could bias how they fared against subsequent strains. “Basically, the flu you get first in life is the one you respond to most avidly for the long term,” says Gabriel Victora, an immunologist at Rockefeller University. That can become somewhat of an issue when a very different-looking strain comes knocking.

In scenarios like these, original antigenic sin may sound like the molecular equivalent of a lovesick teen pining over an ex, or a student who never graduates out of immunological grade school. But from the immune system’s point of view, never forgetting your first is logically sound. New encounters with a pathogen catch the body off guard—and tend to be the most severe. A deep-rooted defensive reaction, then, is practical: It ups the chances that the next time the same invader shows up, it will be swiftly identified and dispatched. “Having good memory and being able to boost it very quickly is sometimes a very good thing,” Victora told me. It’s the body’s way of ensuring that it won’t get fooled twice.

[Read: Annual COVID shots mean we can stop counting]

These old grudges come with clear advantages even when microbes morph into new forms, as flu viruses and coronaviruses often do. Pathogens don’t remake themselves all at once, so immune cells that home in on familiar snippets of a virus can still in many cases snuff out enough invaders to prevent an infection’s worst effects. That’s why even flu shots that aren’t perfectly matched to the season’s most prominent strains are usually still quite good at keeping people out of hospitals and morgues. “There’s a lot of leniency in how much the virus can change before we really lose protection,” Guthmiller told me. The wiggle room should be even bigger, she said, with SARS-CoV-2, whose subvariants tend to be far more similar to one another than, say, different flu strains are.

With all the positives that immune memory can offer, many immunologists tend to roll their eyes at the negative and bizarrely moralizing implications of the phrase original antigenic sin. “I really, really hate that term,” says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. Instead, Bhattacharya and others prefer to use more neutral words such as imprinting, evocative of a duckling latching onto the first maternal figure it spots. “This is not some strange immunological phenomenon,” says Rafi Ahmed, an immunologist at Emory University. It’s more a textbook example of what an adaptable, high-functioning immune system does, and one that can have positive or negative effects, depending on context. Recent flu outbreaks have showcased a little bit of each: During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, many elderly people, normally more susceptible to flu viruses, fared better than expected against the late-aughts strain, because they’d banked exposures to a similar-looking H1N1—a derivative of the culprit behind the 1918 pandemic—in their youth. But in some seasons that followed, H1N1 disproportionately sickened middle-aged adults whose early-life flu indoctrinations may have tilted them away from a protective response.

[Read: COVID science is moving backwards]

The backward-gazing immune systems of those adults may have done more than preferentially amplify defensive responses to a less relevant viral strain. They might have also actively suppressed the formation of a response to the new one. Part of that is sheer kinetics: Veteran immune cells, trained up on past variants and strains, tend to be quicker on the draw than fresh recruits, says Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. And the greater the number of experienced soldiers, the more likely they are to crowd out rookie fighters—depriving them of battlefield experience they might otherwise accrue. Should the newer viral strain eventually return for a repeat infection, those less experienced immune cells may not be adequately prepared—leaving people more vulnerable, perhaps, than they might otherwise have been.

Some researchers think that form of imprinting might now be playing out with the bivalent COVID vaccines. Several studies have found that the BA.5-focused shots are, at best, moderately more effective at producing an Omicron-targeted antibody response than the original-recipe jab—not the knockout results that some might have hoped for. Recent work in mice from Victora’s lab backs up that idea: B cells, the manufacturers of antibodies, do seem to have trouble moving past the impressions of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein that they got from first exposure. But the findings don’t really trouble Victora, who gladly received his own bivalent COVID shot. (He’ll take the next update, too, whenever it’s ready.) A blunted response to a new vaccine, he told me, is not a nonexistent one—and the more foreign a second shot recipe is compared with the first, the more novice fighters should be expected to participate in the fight. “You’re still adding new responses,” he said, that will rev back up when they become relevant. The coronavirus is a fast evolver. But the immune system also adapts. Which means that people who receive the bivalent shot can still expect to be better protected against Omicron variants than those who don’t.

Historical flu data support this idea. Many of the middle-aged adults slammed by recent H1N1 infections may not have mounted perfect attacks on the unfamiliar virus, but as immune cells continued to tussle with the pathogen, the body “pretty quickly filled in the gaps,” Gostic told me. Although it’s tempting to view imprinting as a form of destiny, “that’s just not how the immune system works,” Guthmiller told me. Preferences can be overwritten; biases can be undone.

Original antigenic sin might not be a crisis, but its existence does suggest ways to optimize our vaccination strategies with past biases in mind. Sometimes, those preferences might need to be avoided; in other instances, they should be actively embraced.

For that to happen, though, immunologists would need to fill in some holes in their knowledge of imprinting: how often it occurs, the rules by which it operates, what can entrench or alleviate it. Even among flu viruses, where the pattern has been best-studied, plenty of murkiness remains. It’s not clear whether imprinting is stronger, for instance, when the first exposure comes via infection or vaccination. Scientists can’t yet say whether children, with their fiery yet impressionable immune systems, might be more or less prone to getting stuck on their very first flu strain. Researchers don’t even know for certain whether repetition of a first exposure—say, through multiple doses of the same vaccine, or reinfections with the same variant—will more deeply embed a particular imprint.

It does seem intuitive that multiple doses of a vaccine could exacerbate an early bias, Ahmed told me. But if that’s the case, then the same principle might also work the other way: Maybe multiple exposures to a new version of the virus could help break an old habit, and nudge the immune system to move on. Recent evidence has hinted that people previously infected with an early Omicron subvariant responded more enthusiastically to a bivalent BA.1-focused vaccine—available in the United Kingdom—than those who’d never encountered the lineage before. Hensley, at the University of Pennsylvania, is now trying to figure out if the same is true for Americans who got the BA.5-based bivalent shot after getting sick with one of the many Omicron subvariants.

Ahmed thinks that giving people two updated shots—a safer approach, he points out, than adding an infection to the mix—could untether the body from old imprints too. A few years ago, he and his colleagues showed that a second dose of a particular flu vaccine could help shift the ratio of people’s immune responses. A second dose of the fall’s bivalent vaccine might not be practical or palatable for most people, especially now that BA.5 is on its way out. But if next autumn’s recipe overlaps with BA.5 in ways that it doesn’t with the original variant—as it likely will to at least some degree, given the Omicron lineage’s continuing reign—a later, slightly different shot could still be a boon.

Keeping vaccine doses relatively spaced out—on an annual basis, say, à la flu shots—will likely help too, Bhattacharya said. His recent studies, not yet published, hint that the body might “forget” old variants, as it were, if it’s simply given more time: As antibodies raised against prior infections and injections fall away, vaccine ingredients could linger in the body rather than be destroyed by prior immunity on sight. That slightly extended stay might offer the junior members of the immune system—lesser in number, and slower on the uptake—more of an opportunity to cook up an Omicron-specific response.

In an ideal world, researchers might someday know enough about imprinting to account for its finickiness whenever they select and roll out new shots. Flu shots, for instance, could be personalized to account for which strains babies were first exposed to, based on birth year; combinations of COVID vaccine doses and infections could dictate the timing and composition of a next jab. But the world is not yet living that reality, Gostic told me. And after three years of an ever-changing coronavirus and a fluctuating approach to public health, it’s clear that there won’t be a single vaccine recipe that’s ideal for everyone at once.

Even Thomas Francis Jr. did not consider original antigenic sin to be a total negative, Hensley told me. According to Francis, the true issue with the “sin” was that humans were missing out on the chance to imprint on multiple strains at once in childhood, when the immune system is still a blank slate—something that modern researchers could soon accomplish with the development of universal vaccines. Our reliance on first impressions can be a drawback. But the same phenomenon can be an opportunity to acquaint the body with diversity early on—to give it a richer narrative, and memories of many threats to come.

I was born to be a social climber. The Evita score was ever present on my grandparents’ stereo when I was growing up, and I idolized Eva Perón, who made her way from poverty to the highest echelons of government and society. She was a woman who, at least from the musical’s point of view, saw clearly where she was in life and decided she wasn’t going to stay there. What did a tiny thing like class background matter to a person with wit, determination, and a knack for making friends? These were qualities, I realized, that could transform your future. They were also things that money couldn’t buy. Which worked out nicely, because my family didn’t have any.

At 18, I left working-class Brooklyn for an Ivy League college. I had worked hard, gotten into a good school, and now … now what? The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, while my well-off classmates were interning at publishing houses and record labels, I found myself stocking discounted shoes in the European Designer section of Century 21. Up until then, I had seen myself as a relatively straightforward beneficiary of the much-vaunted system of American meritocracy, so my initial explanation for the disparity between our experiences was that I had fallen down on the job of excellence. I swallowed and digested that sense of inferiority.

Then I started to ask questions. Where exactly had my peers’ jobs come from? Time and again, the provenance of these plush opportunities was a family connection or friendly favor. My classmates were also bright and eager, of course, and naturally felt they merited what they had been given. But for me a crack had appeared in the system.  

In my junior year, a male acquaintance of mine—of equally humble beginnings—suggested that I run for president of the senior class. I scoffed at the idea, being, as most young people at liberal establishments should be, anti-establishment. My friend explained that I was being shortsighted. A star student athlete, he’d spent his summers at plum internships offered up by alumni athletes and donors. The experience had clued him in to something: In elite circles, not all opportunities were advertised. There were rooms that the rest of us didn’t know existed, and those rooms came with possibilities never advertised by the career-services office. But you could find a way inside. Being class president was more than a line on a résumé, he said—it was a chance to do just that.

I won, and during my senior year, I was invited into oak-paneled rooms and introduced to people with titles of importance in the real world. I shook hands and made polite conversation and boldly stated my great ambitions to get a job “in the arts.” I got lots of tense smiles in return.

But nothing happened. No offers manifested, no suggestions of whom I should talk to. Worse, I got the strange sense that I was doing something shameful, that approaching those in power so openly with what I wanted was somehow sordid. I suspected that I was acting like a social climber, and that social climbing was wrong. Only later did I realize that the climbing wasn’t the problem; I just wasn’t very good at it yet.

I am here to make a modern case for social climbing. To take up the defense of today’s parvenus and tuft-hunters. To destigmatize and demystify the art form—because it surely is an art. One that I don’t believe any of us can afford to ignore in this era of growing income inequality, decreasing social mobility, and increased isolation—particularly not young people who are stymied by the state of capitalism and boxed in by lack of opportunity, and who, more and more, work and socialize online. Meritocracy is make-believe; wealth is elusive. But there’s one form of capital that is not finite, and it is social.

When people think of social climbing, they typically picture a Real Housewives type of social aspirant, one whose goal is entirely self-indulgent—simply to see and be seen in ever more exclusive rooms. The perception is that climbers are shallow, needy people who want desperately for their “betters” to like them.

I have in mind something different, and more useful: the cultivation of relationships that have the potential—in large and small ways—to improve your lot in life. You could just call what I’m talking about “networking”; it might sound nicer. But networking evokes efficient (if often forgettable) business coffees arranged on LinkedIn, and what I’m advocating is striking up a meaningful conversation with someone at your company office party. And then converting that conversation into a rapport, which leads to a connection that might, down the line, lead you to another, better job. I prefer the term social climbing because it puts the emphasis where it belongs: on the dynamics of the ascent.

As I got older, and made my way into more elite circles, I understood better why my earliest, ham-handed efforts to further my career were seen as déclassé. Upward mobility was all well and good when perceived as the earned reward for one’s talent and work ethic. But brazen hobnobbing was the terrain of charlatans and grifters, if not criminals and sociopaths. The phrase social climber is still thrown around as an insult. The Washington Examiner, just last month, labeled Meghan Markle “an opportunistic social climber,” when discussing the duke and duchess’s Netflix documentary. The message is: One can climb, but one certainly shouldn’t.

The implication, of course, is that if you are talented enough, you don’t need to social climb. Opportunities for advancement will present themselves to you. All you have to do is work hard, sit politely, and wait.

But I’ve never been very patient.

Besides, why, in a capitalist society that deifies billionaires for accumulating financial capital, should I feel shame for trying to accumulate the social kind?  

Before I was a writer, I was a co-proprietor of a successful luxury wedding-planning business, though it didn’t start out that way. A friend and I opened the business in 2003 with ambitions of creating the type of stunning productions that were featured in magazines. (Wedding magazines, believe it or not, were once big business.)

The world of wedding-industry professionals is intensely stratified; the pecking order, like the profit margins, mirrors the incomes and class standings of the families it serves. As in life, some wedding planners are born into privilege. They can hang an eponymous shingle advertising, say, Logan Vanderveen Events in the morning and be planning the lavish nuptials of Upper East Side blue bloods by noon. For the rest of us, the path is paved with grunt work: navigating wedding-factory catering halls staffed by grumpy maître d’s worried that you’re encroaching on their tips; placating anxious bridezillas who have gone over budget and are desperately seeking a scapegoat. (The hassle and drama scale up with the budgets, but the compensation does too.)

In the beginning, we believed that if we just worked hard, we would gain the recognition our business deserved. Instead, two years in, I realized we were caught in a cul-de-sac. Our clients and fellow vendors loved us and referred us to friends and family. But those new clients had the same budgets as the old ones. We planned the same wedding over and over and over, which was not only creatively boring; it meant we never made more money. This wouldn’t do.

So my partner and I went on a charm offensive. We emailed the writers and editors of bridal magazines and offered to take them for drinks; we organized happy hours for planners producing events way nicer than ours, because you never knew what overflow business they might be able to send our way. We initiated coffees with higher-end photographers, florists, and caterers. If we were invited to an industry party, we went. We shook hands, we clinked glasses, we got to know people, and we let people get to know us. Little by little, big-budget client referrals and publicity opportunities began flowing in.

If I were to pinpoint the moment when our business transformed from growing to “in demand,” it wasn’t during any one particular wedding we produced but rather during one specific dinner party I schmoozed my way around.

I had befriended a much more established wedding planner, who invited me to a dinner where the editor of the wedding publication of the moment—New York Weddings-–was speaking. Seating was open, and I remember thinking that perhaps it was a bit audacious of me to grab the spot next to the guest of honor. But I had nothing to lose. Several glasses of wine and the discovery of our shared Hispanic roots later, I found my business the newest addition to the editor’s list of top New York planners. My partner and I ate off that listing for years.

The American dream promised that the child of the farmer could one day become a merchant, and that the child of the merchant could one day become a banker, and so on. Each generation’s hands becoming progressively less calloused than those of the generation before, the transformation made possible through the “American work ethic” and the magic of “meritocracy.” The belief that, in America, the cream naturally rises to the top.

Of course, this is bullshit. The school system is largely dysfunctional for all but the wealthiest families. Corruption scandals such as Varsity Blues and the student-debt crisis have cast a pall on even the promise of higher education. Against the backdrop of rising income inequality, rags-to-riches stories have aged from instructive examples to tall tales. The ascents of luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey are about as relevant to our current reality as Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox.  

In America, transforming your lot in life is impossible. Mostly.

It’s true that most capital in our economy is gripped in the hands of the few. But social capital—the relationships that any individual, in any stratum of society, can cultivate for themselves—is the exception. Social capital can achieve what meritocracy fails to deliver.

Though being class president didn’t land me a job, other connections did. One of my part-time gigs was at the school art gallery, where I got to know an older professor who would stop by to chat. One day he asked what I was doing after graduation, and I offered my usual line about “hoping to land a job in the arts.” A few days later, he came by again and handed me a stack of sealed envelopes addressed to gallerists and dealers he knew, all filled with letters of introduction. Overwhelmed, I asked him why he’d done it. He said I was smart and responsible, he’d heard I was class president, and he’d enjoyed getting to know me. Why wouldn’t he help me?

I realized then what my friend the athlete had already understood: The first step of social climbing is not about seeing what people can do for you, but rather seeing people. You learn where they grew up, what books or shows they like, how old their kids are, what you might have in common. You get into the room not to use people, but to know people.

Considering all the upsides, where does the social climber’s bad rap come from? People who seek to improve their station in life have been the objects of suspicion or the butts of jokes since the dawn of social mobility itself.

Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, performed for King Louis XIV’s court in 1670, may feature popular culture’s first social climber. The play satirizes Monsieur Jourdain, the son of a rich merchant, whose aim in life is not to accumulate more wealth, but to be accepted by the aristocracy. The title itself is an oxymoron: A member of the middle class can never become a gentleman. A joke, but one of great comfort to the audience at court. Yes, they have more money than the rest of you here, but they will never have access to this room. These relationships.

By the close of the 17th century, aristocrats, merchants, and servants were crowding into theaters to see bawdy satires like John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, in which a buffoonish Sir Novelty Fashion squanders his fortune purchasing the more impressive title of Lord Foppington. The joke had evolved: Okay, maybe they canaccess this room, but everyone (including the servants) knows they still can’t buy class.

In 1722, Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders, about a woman who cons and sleeps her way into the middle class. Moll might have been seen as unscrupulously obsessed with improving her station in life, but as a widow with no social standing or means, she was also desperate. She wasn’t posing as a gentlewoman to get into great parties; she was climbing to survive.

The social climbers I’m talking about are more like Moll than Sir Novelty. Motivated by economic necessity, we see access as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. We would never squander money to get into the party; we get into the party so that other people might squander money on us.

The scorn for the climber is rich—literally. It isn’t that the wealthy don’t utilize social capital for advancement; they just do so quietly. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s perceived as their right. Wealth, and the things it can procure—elite education, invitations to private clubs, stays at exclusive resorts—come with a cascade effect of trust, merited or not. “If you are in this space, you must be one of us.” This was precisely the genius of Shonda Rhimes’s series Inventing Anna. You get to watch the character discover—just by dropping the right name or stepping onto the right yacht—what people were willing to offer her. No questions asked.

In this view, Elon Musk rallying his “friends” to help him acquire Twitter looks like the “baller” move of a billionaire out to buy his favorite toy instead of what it really was: favor-begging. When a wealthy family calls in favors from friends to write their child recommendation letters to Harvard, they just “want the very best for their kid.” But surely they also want the cocktail-party bragging rights that said admission bestows. For the wealthy, more than any of us, the social and material gains of climbing are intertwined. The degree of ascent might not be as steep, but the fear of falling is more extreme.

When practiced well, social climbing is not only about ascent, but also about sprawl. It’s about building a robust network of friends and acquaintances from all walks of life.  When the dry cleaner who rushes your orders at no charge needs someone to counter a bad Yelp review, you write it. When a former colleague needs an introduction at your new company, you gladly oblige. The adroit practitioner understands that the perks flow in all directions.

Though I perfected the art of climbing in adulthood, it was my youth in Brooklyn that laid the foundation for my success. My friends and I didn’t have powerful connections or fancy parties to go to, but we all understood that relationships were a kind of capital. My friends could hook me up with designer coats that “fell off a truck,” underage admission into nightclubs, employee discounts at retail stores. No one wanted to be considered a “user,” and so, in exchange, I did my own favors, like providing alibis for my friends’ romantic liaisons to their parents, or forging absence notes because I was good at “adult handwriting.”

Now I see that paying it forward is the most rewarding aspect of a successful climb. Helping someone who—like the young me—might not even know where to find the ladder get up a rung or two. Unlike financial capital, whose power grows when hoarded and wielded by the few, social capital is most potent when shared.

This is why I am frustrated not only by the continued stigma around social climbing, but by the general devaluation of relationships. A 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life found that 12 percent of Americans report having no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. More disturbing, the number of people who have 10 or more close friends is also down, from 33 percent in 1990 to 13 percent last year. Our digital networks may still be expanding, but our social lives are shrinking. According to Gallup, just two in 10 American employees say they have a “best friend” at work.

  Too many people—particularly young people just establishing their career—seem disinterested in engaging in exactly the things that might help cultivate or revitalize these relationships, like going into offices or socializing with colleagues outside of work. The workplace isn’t the only route to a social network, but it is one of the easiest places to form long-lasting relationships. Work puts on display not only our personality, but also our ethics—how we respond to stress, how we treat others when faced with adversity. These are qualities that build trust and meaningful connections.  

When we disengage from one another, we forfeit the only source of capital that we can generate entirely for ourselves. Employers give us paychecks, but they also provide us with this additional commodity. Refusing to return to the office is akin to leaving it on the table.

Some might find valuing relationships in economic terms distasteful, but I think it’s worth asking why. Is it because being in reciprocal service to people you know and like seems “icky”? Or is it because of a trope invented to make the elite feel more secure about their station in life—one that, coupled with the myth of meritocracy, has left the rest of us sitting around, waiting to be anointed by the powerful with the gift of opportunity?