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If you’re finding it hard to keep track of all of former President Donald Trump’s legal woes, don’t feel bad: He can’t get it straight, either. Last weekend, he announced that he’d be arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday. It’s now Thursday, and Trump remains a free man, with no indictment from a grand jury yet. Public indications still seem to point toward charges against Trump in Manhattan, but what and when are still a mystery. And several more cases loom beyond that.

Assuming Trump is eventually charged, whether in Manhattan or elsewhere, the result will be a spectacle no one alive has seen before: a former U.S. president under arrest. We likely won’t see a classic perp walk, with officers holding him by each arm and escorting him. The process would instead be arranged and negotiated beforehand, and he’s reportedly been debating whether to smile for the cameras on his way to being booked. Trump would have to be fingerprinted like any other defendant, and then he’d be released. But that would be just the start of a long process toward a trial or plea, and then a verdict.

With so many investigations and cases floating around, maintaining a sense of the issues at stake in each investigation, the timeline for them, and how serious a threat to the former president they pose is tricky—even when you’ve been following the cases for years now, as I have. Here’s my attempt to put all of the open criminal cases against Donald Trump in context for easy reference. I’ve arranged the cases by my assessment of the seriousness of the allegations to democracy and the rule of law, from the least significant to the most.

Manhattan: Hush Money

Because District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not announced charges, we have to speculate a bit, but public evidence suggests that Bragg is looking at a claim that Trump falsified business records in reimbursing his former fixer Michael Cohen for a hush payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who allegedly had an affair with Trump. Cohen’s payoff and Trump’s reimbursement are not in dispute, but Trump denies the affair and any lawbreaking.

When? The timing of any charges is a topic of intense speculation, especially after Trump’s prediction last weekend of a Tuesday arrest. The grand jury unexpectedly didn’t meet yesterday and is reportedly meeting on a different matter today. That means we’re probably looking at next week at the earliest.

How grave is the allegation? Look, falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad. But many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. Unless Bragg has a more elaborate case than he has tipped, this feels like a minor offense compared with the others I’ll get to below.

How plausible is conviction? The case Bragg is most likely to make faces hurdles, including the statute of limitations, a questionable key witness in Cohen, and some untested legal theories. In short, based on what we know, the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest case. Even some Trump critics are dismayed that Bragg seems to be likely to bring charges before any other criminal case.

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

Special Counsel Jack Smith is overseeing a Justice Department probe into presidential records, some of them highly classified, found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Trump removed many documents from the White House when he left office, then refused to return some despite repeated requests. His attorneys attested that he’d returned all relevant documents, but an August 2022 search turned up many, including extremely sensitive documents allegedly stored haphazardly.

When? Smith faces a de facto deadline of January 20, 2025, at which point Trump or any Republican president would likely shut down a case if they take office. Last week a court matter raised eyebrows, as prosecutors persuaded a judge to order Trump’s attorney to hand over documents, ruling that attorney-client privilege didn’t apply because evidence suggested that Trump’s attorneys may have advanced a crime. Then this week, Trump appealed, but the D.C. Circuit Court rejected the attempt in a lightning-fast decision.

How grave is the allegation? The alleged handling of the documents is not as serious as Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, but it’s probably a solid bronze medal on this list. The documents are highly sensitive for national security, and if allegations are true, Trump refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide documents, and lied to the government through his attorneys.

How plausible is conviction? This may be the most open-and-shut case. Not every case involving classified documents gets charged, but if Smith decides to prosecute, the facts and legal theory here are more straightforward than in almost any other of these matters.

Fulton County: Election Subversion

In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis has been conducting an investigation into attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, including Trump’s call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to allow him to win.

When? A special grand jury completed its work in January and recommended that its report be made public. The special grand jury can make recommendations, but a normal grand jury would have to issue indictments. During a January hearing over whether to release the full report, prosecutors told a judge that decisions on charges were “imminent,” but so far nothing has emerged. (The judge withheld most of the report.)

How grave is the allegation? Short of the federal January 6 case (which I’ll get to next), this is probably the most egregious. Trump’s pressure offensive against officials at the state level to try and change the results of the election was a grave attack on democracy. But Willis can focus only on what happened in Georgia, one piece of the bigger whole.

How plausible is conviction? Experts differ. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The grand jury’s foreperson said in an interview that there will be no big surprises in who the jury suggested be charged. Willis has the advantage of the recording of the Raffensperger call, which is close to a smoking gun.

Department of Justice: January 6

Special Counsel Smith is overseeing the federal probes related to Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election and overturn the results, as well as the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

When? No one knows. As with the other DOJ case, Smith needs to move quickly, before Trump or any other Republican president could shut down a case upon taking office in January 2025.

How grave is the allegation? This is the most important Trump case out there. You can’t get much graver than attempting to subvert the American election system and inciting an attack on Congress, and the Justice Department has the potential to address the whole sordid episode.

How plausible is conviction? It’s very hard to say. Everyone saw the attack, but we don’t know what crimes Smith might charge, or what legal theories he might use—the House January 6 committee, for example, made a nonbinding recommendation to apply a seldom-used charge of aiding insurrection—or whether he would even charge Trump or instead opt to prosecute lower-level officials.

Updated at 4:30 p.m. ET on March 23, 2023.

It’s been more than a month since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. More than 100,000 gallons of vinyl chloride, a carcinogen, were released, with some spilling into waterways. Many hundreds of people had to evacuate from their homes. An estimated 43,000 aquatic animals died. When emergency responders burned the cars containing vinyl chloride in an attempt to avoid an explosion, the fire likely created long-lasting toxic chemicals called dioxins. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of now-toxic water used to put out the fire had to be shipped to Texas to be disposed of deep underground. And if dioxins were created, they could trickle into the ground over time, contaminating the water in a community where people rely heavily on wells. Last week, Ohio sued Norfolk Southern for what the state’s attorney general called “glaring negligence.”

In East Palestine, small failures cascaded into catastrophe because of railway deregulation that began four decades ago. Preventing the worst accidents requires layers of intervention, but in the U.S., those layers have been steadily peeled back. Indeed, the same risk factors that led to the mess in East Palestine also led to a deadly derailment nearly a decade ago, and could easily lead to another tragedy.  

In 2013, an oil train run by an American railway derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Canada, releasing 1.5 million gallons of crude oil, some of which ignited almost immediately. The ensuing fires and explosions destroyed dozens of buildings and vehicles. They also killed 47 people, some of whom were found with their shirts melted into their flesh. Twenty-seven children were left without parents.

The trouble began one night in early July. Tom Harding, a locomotive engineer for Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, eased his train onto a stretch of track in the nearby town of Nantes, Quebec, about 20 miles from the border with Maine. The train, loaded with more than 7 million gallons of crude oil, had already made its way about 1,700 miles from New Town, North Dakota. As Bruce Campbell wrote in his book about the derailment, The Lac-Mégantic Rail Disaster: Public Betrayal, Justice Denied, Harding had just picked up the load earlier that morning, after being called in with three hours’ notice on what was supposed to be his day off.

Upon arriving in Nantes, just before 11 p.m., Harding set the brakes on a slanted stretch of track (as he had done several times before), left the locomotive running (as was protocol), and took a cab to his hotel. Not long after, someone noticed smoke billowing from the engine and called 911. Firefighters cut off the engine’s fuel source to douse the flames, which turned off the engine, which then, for reasons related to both company directives and technical subtleties best left to rail engineers, caused the brakes to slowly fail. This all might have been fine had the train been resting on flat ground, but it wasn’t. Around 1 a.m., all 72 cars began rolling toward Lac-Mégantic, a town of about 6,000 people several miles away. The train reached 65 miles an hour before going off the rails near Lac-Mégantic’s downtown.

[Read: The mystery of Amtrak 188]

The official report for the Lac-Mégantic derailment states that no single factor led to the derailment, and strictly speaking, this is true. But it is easy to follow how each failure—the single crew member, the angled parking job, the braking that a report would later determine was insufficient—was propelled by railroad companies’ demand for speed, efficiency, and profit.

Campbell told me that the locomotive that caught fire had been repaired before—poorly. He also said that Harding had parked the train on a hill because, at nearly a mile long, it would have blocked other tracks if it had stopped anywhere else. (Railroad companies have pushed for longer trains—up to three miles long—to cut fuel and staff costs, but those trains are harder to stop and have more cargo to spill.) Harding didn’t properly set and test the train’s brakes; doing so is time-consuming, and Harding had “been warned by this company, ‘Don’t set so many hand brakes,’” Campbell said.

After the fire, Harding wanted to make sure the train was stable, but rail traffic control told him he couldn’t: It would have extended his working hours, barring him from driving a different train in the morning. And because railways had successfully lobbied for a rule change allowing trains to be run by only one person, Harding had no fellow crew members who could go look.

Had the train been parked in a flat area, had the brakes been properly set, or had more than one person been available to check on it, such a large disaster would have been far less likely. But none of that happened, because none of it was required. Starting in the late 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. and Canada massively deregulated the railroad industry. They shrank oversight budgets and “outsourced a lot of safety work and obligations to the companies,” Campbell said. “Transport regulators became just an auditor. It was kind of a paper exercise—there were fewer people out in the field” making sure railroads were following the rules.

According to a 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Transportation, even when the agency found evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of the railways, criminal penalties were not often pursued, and regulatory penalties had “little deterrent effect.” Meanwhile, the cargo was becoming riskier: The shale boom of the mid-aughts led to more oil being transported by rail. At its peak in 2014, rail moved roughly 10 percent of domestic oil.

[Read: The great crude-oil fireball test]

Lac-Mégantic temporarily shocked both governments into action. In Canada, a rule allowing for one-person crews on high-hazard trains was overturned. In the U.S., the Obama administration passed a rule requiring certain trains to use electronic braking systems. (They make catastrophic derailments less likely than the more commonly used air brakes, which were first developed in the 1800s.) But railway operators complained that the new brakes were too expensive, and the Trump administration overturned the rule. Even if the rule had been in force, it would not have made a difference in the East Palestine derailment: It only applied to high-hazard trains, and the quantity of vinyl chloride on the train was is not considered high-hazard by the agency tasked with oversight.

Unlike its northern neighbor, the United States has no formal rules on how many crew members should be on board a train, even after Lac-Mégantic. The Federal Railroad Administration has proposed requiring a minimum of two-person crews, but that hasn’t yet passed. Railways have long argued that such rules are unnecessary because a new technology called a positive train control system means that most trains need only one crew member. But the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report on the East Palestine derailment said that even though the system was “enabled and operating at the time of the derailment,” the train’s two workers did not get much warning before the train derailed.

[Read: The case for positive train control]

Nor did they appear to notice that at least one car was on fire for miles before the derailment, according to Tudor Farcas, an associate with a law firm that has filed suit on behalf of some East Palestine–area residents. One of his firm’s clients lives about 20 miles from East Palestine, “but the train passes in front of her front door,” Farcas told me. Her Ring doorbell captured footage of the train on fire.

Dangerous train derailments like this one are known as low-frequency, high-impact events. From 2010 to 2022, roughly 1,200 to 1,700 trains derailed in the U.S. each year, according to data from the Department of Transportation. (A few weeks after East Palestine, another Norfolk Southern train went off the rails in Ohio.) Only a small subset of these accidents resulted in cars carrying hazardous materials being damaged—but, as East Palestine and Lac-Mégantic have shown, when things go wrong, they can go really wrong.

[Read: The hollow responses to East Palestine]

One of the most striking things about both derailments is how small Lac-Mégantic and East Palestine are: Each community has less than 10,000 people. The trains that caused each crisis had traversed more populated areas before they derailed; in the case of East Palestine, the train passed through Cleveland. It makes one wonder what horrors might have occurred if the trains had derailed in those larger communities instead—and what the U.S. is willing to do to prevent future catastrophes.

Ever since last Saturday when former President Donald Trump predicted on his own social media outlet that he would be arrested the following Tuesday — a prediction that has yet to come to fruition — the entirety of the American media and political firmament quickly jumped from so-called "indictment watch" to all out "fever pitch" as it began contemplating the myriad implications of a former President of the United States being indicted and facing possible felony prosecution.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden called out the GOP for "trying to hide the truth" about Black history. While politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin have described their efforts to reform education as bans on teaching critical race theory, in reality, these bans have been invoked to prohibit teaching elements of American history, especially Black history.

General Motors announced Wednesday that it's ending production of the latest generation of the Chevrolet Camaro, leaving the Ford Mustang as the last gasoline-powered American performance coupe.

In 2017, I was trying to write How to Be an Antiracist. Words came onto the page slower than ever. On some days, no words came at all. Clearly, I was in crisis.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. When words aren’t flowing onto the page, I know why: I haven’t researched enough, organized the material enough, thought enough to exhume clarity, meticulously outlined my thoughts enough. I haven’t prepared myself to write.

But no matter how much I prepared, I still struggled to convey what my research and reasoning showed. I struggled because I was planning to challenge traditional conceptions of racism, and to defy the multiracial and bipartisan consensus that race neutrality was possible and that “not racist” was a definable identity. And I struggled because I was planning to describe a largely unknown corrective posture—being anti-racist—with long historical roots. These departures from tradition were at the front of my struggling mind. But at the back of my mind was a more existential struggle—a struggle I think is operating at the front of our collective mind today.

[Ibram X. Kendi: The mantra of white supremacy]

It took an existential threat for me to transcend my struggle and finish writing the book. Can we recognize the existential threat we face today, and use it to transcend our struggles?

As I tried to write my book, I struggled over what it means to be an intellectual. Or to be more precise: I struggled because what I wanted to write and the way in which I wanted to write it diverged from traditional notions of what it means to be an intellectual.

The intellectual has been traditionally framed as measured, objective, ideologically neutral, and apolitical, superior to ordinary people who allow emotion, subjectivity, ideology, and their own lived experiences to cloud their reason. Group inequality has traditionally been reasoned to stem from group hierarchy. Those who advance anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, and anti-homophobic ideas have historically been framed as anti-intellectual.

The traditional construct of the intellectual has produced and reinforced bigoted ideas of group hierarchy—the most anti-intellectual constructs existing. But this framing is crumbling, leading to the crisis of the intellectual.

Behind the scenes of the very public anti–critical race theory, anti-woke, and anti–anti-racism campaign waged mostly by Republican politicos is another overlapping and more bipartisan campaign waged mostly by people who think of themselves as intellectuals. Both campaigns emerged in reaction to the demonstrations in the summer of 2020 that carried anti-racist intellectuals to the forefront of public awareness.

These intellectuals not only highlighted the crisis of racism but, in the process, started changing the public conception of the intellectual. Their work was more in line with that of medical researchers seeking a cure to a disease ravaging their community than with philosophers theorizing on a social disease for theory’s sake from a safe remove. We need the model these new intellectuals pursued to save humanity from the existential threats that humans have created, including climate change, global pandemics, bigotry, and war.

But this new conception of the intellectual and those who put it into practice face all sorts of resistance. Opponents denounce the “illiberal” dangers of identity politics and proclaim the limits of “lived experience.” They argue that identity politics makes everything about identity, or spurs a clash of identities. In fact, the term identity politics was coined in the 1970s, a time when Black lesbian women in organizations like Boston’s Combahee River Collective were being implored to focus their activist work on the needs of Black men, in Black power spaces; white women, in feminist areas; and gay men, in gay-liberation struggles—on everyone’s oppression but their own. They were determined to change that. “This focus upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith wrote in the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement. It is common sense for people to focus on their own oppression, but these activists did not wish to focus only on their own oppression. The Combahee River Collective was “organizing Black feminists as we continue to do political work in coalition with other groups.”

Forty-six years later, when intellectuals of all races produce work on matters primarily affecting white people, the assumed subject of intellectual pursuits, these thinkers are seldom accused of engaging in identity politics. Their work isn’t considered dangerous. These thinkers are not framed as divisive and political. Instead, they are praised for example, for exposing the opioid crisis in white America, praised for pushing back against blaming the addicted for their addictions, praised for enriching their work with lived experiences, praised for uncovering the corporations behind the crisis, praised for advocating research-based policy solutions, praised for seeking truth based on evidence, praised for being intellectuals. As they all should be. But when anti-racist intellectuals expose the crisis of racism, push back against efforts to problematize people of color in the face of racial inequities, enrich our essays with lived experiences, point to racist power and policies as the problem, and advocate for research-based anti-racist policy solutions, the reactions couldn’t be more different. We are told that “truth seeking” and “activism” don’t mix.

American traditions do not breed intellectuals; they breed propagandists and careerists focusing their gaze on the prominent and privileged and powerful and on whatever challenges are afflicting them. Intellectuals today, when focused on the oppression of our own groups—as embodied in the emergence of Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Disability Studies, Latino Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian American Studies—are ridiculed for pursuing fields that lack “educational value,” and our books, courses, programs, and departments are shut down and banned by the action of Republicans and the inaction of Democrats. We are told to research, think, and write about people, meaning not our people. We are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

[Jarvis R. Givens: What’s missing from the discourse about anti-racist teaching]

Think about the gaslighting of it all. We are told that white people are being replaced in society, in their jobs within the “intellectual” class. One of the most successful living authors, James Patterson, claimed that white men are experiencing “another form of racism” as they, according to Patterson, struggle to break through as writers in publishing, theater, TV, and film.

Aggrieved white people and their racist propagandists are offering similarly dangerous replacement theories across the “intellectual” class. If white people are being replaced by Black and Latino people, then why are Black and Latino people still underrepresented across many sectors of the “intellectual” class—among authors, in publishing, among full-time faculty, in newsrooms? (Such evidence likely compelled James Patterson to backtrack and apologize.) With all of this evidence, other commentators have focused on the extent of “self-censorship” or “cancel culture” affecting white people (as if people of color aren’t self-censoring or being canceled at least as often). Worst of all, the racist perpetrators of these theories, like Donald Trump, frame themselves as the victims. When Scott Adams has his comic dropped after he called Black people a “hate group” and told his white listeners “to get the hell away from Black people,” they claim that the real problem is anti-whiteness.

And then, when anti-racist intellectuals historicize these white-supremacist talking points about anti-racism being anti-white and give evidence of their long and deep and violent history, when we historicize disparities like the racial wealth gap that are as much the product of the past as the present, when new research and thinking allow us to revise present understandings of the past, when we use the past to better understand the present and the future, we are told to keep the past in the past. We are told not to change the inequitable present, and not to expect anything to change in the future. We are told to look away as the past rains down furiously on the present. Or we are told that intellectuals should focus only on how society has progressed, a suicidal and illogical act when a tornado is ravaging your community. Yet again, we are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

“Above all, historians should make us understand the ways in which the past was distinct,” the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote. When we are told that historical writings should be irrelevant to our contemporary debates, it is not hard to figure out why. History, when taught truthfully, reveals the bigotry in our contemporary debates. Which is why the conservators of bigotry don’t want history taught in schools. It has nothing to do with the discomfort of children. It is uncomfortable for the opponents of truthful history to have the rest of us see them, to have their kids to see them. They don’t want anyone to clearly see how closely they replicate colonizers, land stealers, human traders, enslavers, Klansmen, lynchers, anti-suffragists, robber barons, Nazis, and Jim Crow segregationists who attacked democracy, allowed mass killings, bound people in freedom’s name, ridiculed truth tellers and immigrants, lied for sport, banned books, strove to control women’s reproduction, blamed the poor for their poverty, bashed unions, and engaged in political violence. Historical amnesia is vital to the conservation of their bigotry. Because historical amnesia suppresses our resistance to their bigotry.

Or, for others, it is about conserving tradition. James Sweet, while serving as the American Historical Association president last year, challenged what he calls “presentism” in the profession. He recently clarified that his target was the “professional historians who believe that social justice should be their first port of entry, which is not the way that we’ve traditionally done history.” And yet, throughout most of the history of history as a discipline, historians have centered Europe, white people, men, and the wealthy in their accounts and composed tales of their superiority. That is the way historians have traditionally done history until recent decades, all of this social injustice entering our collective consciousness clothed in neutrality and objectivity. So now, abolishing the master’s narrative and emancipating the truth must be one of our first ports of entry. To be an intellectual is to know that the truth will set humanity free to gain the power to make humanity free.

Maybe I did have writer’s block when I started composing How to Be an Antiracist back in 2017. I did not suffer from that sort of blockage when writing Stamped From the Beginning, several years earlier. Writing that book was like writing in a cave, to the cave. I didn’t think many people would read the book, let alone think of me as an intellectual. All I cared about was writing history.

But when Stamped From the Beginning won a National Book Award, I began to think about my standing as an intellectual. Suddenly, I was writing in the public square, to the public square. The traditional strictures kept blocking the writing. Be objective. Be apolitical. Be balanced. Be measured. Your primary audience should be others in your field. Keep them in mind. Do not defy the orthodoxy they created. Reinforce it. Satisfy them to advance your career. I faced a blockade of old and fraught traditions regarding what it means to be an intellectual that had nothing to do with the process of truth finding and telling.

[Ibram X. Kendi: The double terror of being Black in America]

Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who looked like me or who had a background like mine, who came from a non-elite academic pedigree, emerged proudly from a historically Black university, earned a doctorate in African American Studies. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who researched like me, thought like me, wrote like me—or who researched, thought, or wrote for people like me. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who are not ranking groups of people in the face of inequity and injustice. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include those of us who are fixated and focused wholly and totally on uncovering and clarifying complex truths that can radically improve the human condition. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include our conception of the intellectual.

I knew this. I knew about the equation of the Enlightenment and “reason” and “objectivity” and “empiricism” with whiteness and Western Europe and masculinity and the bourgeoisie. I knew that Francis Bacon, the father of “empiricism” in the sciences, held anti-Black racist ideas, and that his work became the basis for “empirical” quests among eugenicists to assert natural human hierarchy that climaxed in the mass sterilization of Black and Latina and disabled and low-income women in the United States and in the Holocaust of Jews and other “undesirables” in Nazi Germany. I knew that the originator of “objectivity” in history, Leopold von Ranke, believed that the “world divinely ordered” meant Europeans, Christians, and the wealthy at the top. I knew that bigoted academics, who obscured their bigotry behind their objectivity, founded almost every academic discipline in the United States. I knew that objectivity and the construct of “balance” migrated from the U.S. academy to U.S. journalism as professional ideals after World War I, when a wave of newspaper mergers and closings compelled reporters to appeal to wide swaths of the public. (Sound familiar?) I knew that the Hutchins Commission, organized in 1947 to report on the proper function of the media, had warned against objective and balanced reporting that was “factually correct but substantially untrue.” I knew that traditional conceptions of the intellectual serve the status quo of injustice.

Intellectuals who are people of color, women, non-Christian, LGBTQ, or working class—indeed intellectuals of all identities who have challenged the status quo, especially traditional and bigoted conventions—have historically been cast aside as nonintellectuals. Commentators lambasted the investigative journalist and educator Ida B. Wells as “partisan” and “a licentious defamer” for the “obscene filth that flows from her pen”—all for finding and telling the hard truths about lynchings. Scholars described W. E. B. Du Bois, a pioneering historian, sociologist, and editor, as “bitter” after he wrote The Souls of Black Folk and his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction. In his landmark book, An American Dilemma, the Swedish Nobel laureate and economist Gunnar Myrdal dismissed the work of Carter G. Woodson—the father of Black History Month—and other Black scholars studying “Negro history and culture” as “basically an expression of the Negro protest,” in spite of its “scholarly pretenses and accomplishments.”

Gay professors were among those harassed and arrested by the U.S. Park Police’s “Pervert Elimination” campaign in Washington, D.C., in 1947—just as LGBTQ teachers are being harassed and censored today. Spelman College fired the Jewish professor Howard Zinn in 1963 for “radicalizing” Black women students by telling them the truth about U.S. history—and firings or threats of firing continue today at other schools and colleges. In 2021, the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees denied tenure to the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones over “politics.”

When the traditionalists today disagree with the evidence-based findings of intellectuals—or envy the prominence of our work—too often they do not contest our findings with their own evidence. They do not usually engage in intellectual activity. They misrepresent our work. They play up minor typos or small miscues to take down major theses. They call us names they never define, like “leftist” or “Marxist” or “woke” or “socialist” or “prophet” or “grifter” or “political” or “racist.” All to attack our credibility as intellectuals—to reassert their own credibility. In politics, they say, when you can’t win on policy, you smear the candidate. In intellectualism, when you can’t win on evidence, you smear the intellectual.

I knew the smears were coming, because I knew history. What blocked my writing bound my intellectualism. What finally set me free to be an intellectual was the face of death, a face I still stare at to amass the courage to be an intellectual.

It took me all of 2017 to write six chapters of How to Be an Antiracist. A slog. But when doctors diagnosed me with Stage 4 colon cancer in January 2018, when I figured I probably wouldn’t survive a disease that kills 86 percent of people in five years, when I decided that this book would be my last major will and testament to the world, everything that blocked my writing wilted away, along with my prospects for living. I no longer cared about those traditional conceptions of the intellectual—just like I no longer cared about the orthodoxy of racial thinking. I no longer cared about the backlash that was likely to come. All I cared about was telling the truth through the lens of research and evidence, reaction be damned. And just like that, between chemotherapy treatments, the words started flowing, furiously: 13 chapters in a few months.

Since I wasn’t going to live, I wanted to write a book that could help prevent our people from dying at the hands of racism. Yes, I was told I would die, but I wanted to tell my people to live. Like an intellectual.

The French villa where the former British King, Edward VIII, lived with his American wife Wallis Simpson will open to the public for the first time.

“Nothing is more emancipating than the fraternity of nations,” the presidents of Argentina and Brazil declared earlier this year, “coming together from the depths of history to make the future theirs.” This sonorous language—of emancipation and brotherhood—evoked the aspirations of South America’s great independence hero, the statesman Simón Bolívar. The reality was more humdrum: a fancy way of saying they’d like to create a common currency, known as el sur.

The plan for a currency union is merely the latest in a long history of treaties and proposals for creating a closer bloc in the region. “The ideas of Latin American integration are so old,” Jamil Mahuad, a former president of Ecuador, told me. “It’s a big dream, but a dream that has always fallen short.” During Mahuad’s term in office, in the late 1990s, the country faced an economic crisis so severe that the local currency collapsed. His solution was a desperate one: dollarization—in a way, the antithesis of el sur (literally, “the south”). In effect, Ecuador joined someone else’s currency union, but without any of the privileges of membership.

“Some of the coverage said that the sur would be the second-largest currency union after the EU, but that’s a mistake,” Athanasios Orphanides, an economics professor at MIT, told me. “The largest currency union is the United States.” The Constitution that founded the U.S. federal government in 1789 also made a point of centralizing the creation of money. Without this system, the dollar might not be so mighty; instead, states would have their own legal tenders and the power to set interest rates.

[Yanis Varoufakis: Is this the end of ‘socialism for the rich’?]

Latin American countries control their own money but at times also lose control of it. Typically, this can happen either because a central bank is pressured to do the government’s bidding and print money, rather than implement good fiscal discipline, or because the vagaries of the global economy force up the price of vital imports. Smaller economies especially tend to have more fragile currencies. When Mahuad decided to adopt the U.S. currency for Ecuador, it was not because he was an apostle of dollarization, he told me, but because he had no better option.

Attempts to bring Latin America into a closer union have met mostly with failure. Bolívar, the leader of independence campaigns in six South American countries, is perhaps the most celebrated for his efforts. In 1819, he proclaimed a single state known as Gran Colombia comprising a territory that includes today’s Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. And in 1826, he tried to assemble an even larger league of republics in the Americas with a military that could protect them from European powers. The only country that ratified the initiative was the one under his rule, which in time crumbled. The Gran Colombia federation dissolved in 1831, a few months after his death.

One reason for Latin American countries’ difficulty in forming a bloc has to do with what makes them distinct nations in the first place. The Spanish empire insisted that its colonies could not trade with one another, and divided its dominion into viceroyalties, captaincy generals, and territories, each with its own bureaucracy. When these colonies achieved independence, their armies were weak and ill-suited for annexing territory, the historian Alfredo Ávila told me, so these postcolonial nations stayed separate, and some split further (the Kingdom of Guatemala, for example, would eventually become five countries in Central America).

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Later, in the second half of the 20th century, the impetus of integration that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank produced similar institutions in Latin America, all promising regional forums or more free trade. The 1960s brought the Andean Pact and the Latin American Free Trade Association. Both languished, however, and even their rebranding in subsequent decades failed to reinvigorate them. The two most promising pacts so far have been Mercosur, a customs union established in 1991, and the Pacific Alliance, a trade bloc founded in 2011. But neither has fully delivered: Mercosur has allowed so many exceptions that its zone is anything but tariff-free; the Pacific Alliance has largely failed to increase trade among its members.

And so, today, Latin America remains fragmented. Only 15 percent of trade stays within the region, compared with 55 percent in Europe and 38 percent in North America. Just one-third of continental flights connect Latin American cities to one another, and the Pan-American Highway, a route conceived with the ambition to link a hemisphere, has stretches that flood with mud during the rainy season and develop potholes capable of sinking trucks.

That lack of ties has been a significant drag on industry. “No country, not even Brazil, has a big enough local market or labor market to make products that compete with Asia,” Shannon O’Neil, a senior fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “They cannot, for example, make their own cars.”

Latin America is not alone in its isolation. South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa have also failed to form major alliances, and rank even lower in intraregional trade. What perhaps distinguishes Latin America from other divided parts of the world is how long its constituent countries have talked about unity. The notion that countries sharing the Spanish language, a religion, and a colonial history could coalesce into something bigger keeps resurfacing. (Portuguese-speaking Brazil gets included because of its proximity and similarity.) The appeal of this idea seems powerful enough to inspire periodic integration efforts but not to make them succeed.

[Books: Who poisoned Pablo Neruda?]

Talk of international cooperation sometimes comes from unexpected quarters. In 2019, Brazil’s then-president, Jair Bolsonaro, proposed the peso real, a currency that would be shared by his country and Argentina, which was also then governed by a right-leaning leader. This, Bolsonaro said, would act as “a lock to keep socialism out.” The Brazilian central bank issued a statement that this currency project would not happen; the next day Bolsonaro insisted that it would, but never brought it up again. Then, in 2021, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican president, proposed building in Latin America “something similar to the European Union, but more in tune with our history, our reality, our identity.” He did not say precisely what that would be, only that it would involve a complex process—and that, on the 238th anniversary of Bolívar’s birth, his dreams had to be kept alive. López Obrador, too, seems to have dropped the plan.  

Besides Bolívar’s dream, the EU provides the main model. Its evolution, however, had a very different purpose. After the end of the Second World War, Western leaders thought that binding Europe’s economies together would guarantee peace. What began as an agreement about coal and steel production among France, Germany, and the Benelux countries gradually became a common market, and then added its own institutions and ever-closer ties among its members, enabling the free flow of labor, and finally, in the late 1990s, plans for a common currency. The euro, fully adopted by 2002, is not universally loved. After the financial crash of 2008–09, heavily indebted Southern European countries were forced to endure severe austerity measures by the eurozone’s governing authorities; Greece, notably, came close to dropping out.

In light of that long and vexed history, the first printing of el sur is a ways off—which may be just as well, given some of the early reviews. “This is insane,” wrote Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the IMF. “It’s a terrible idea,” opined the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who usually disagrees with Blanchard.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

As the EU experience suggests, common currencies demand that countries have stable political systems and a shared view of macroeconomic policy. For the sur to work, Argentina and Brazil would first have to remove trade barriers, strengthen political ties, harmonize business regulations, and make moves to enable the free flow of labor and capital between the two countries. “You can’t just say ‘We’re going to adopt a common currency,’” Orphanides, the MIT professor, told me. “That’s not how it works.”

One major obstacle for el sur is that a common currency would favor only one of its two proponents. In the short term, Argentina would have far more to gain. Brazil has a strong, stable currency that is guarded by a vigilant independent central bank, which has succeeded in keeping inflation in the single digits since 2004. By contrast, Argentina’s inflation rate reached 95 percent last year—something the country’s president blames on the media. Brazil’s monetary policy has credibility in international money markets; Argentina has had to impose capital controls to keep people from buying dollars.

And like other currency or payment schemes that have set out to replace the dollar for trade in Latin America, el sur would need the central banks of member countries to guarantee it with holdings in gold or a reserve currency—which, ironically, would probably be the dollar. Alexandre Schwartsman, who worked at the Brazilian central bank in the 2000s, told me that he’s doubtful whether the sur, if it materializes, would ever become a fully operational joint currency.

Argentina and Brazil’s project is premature because a common currency requires so many other types of cooperation to work; using the same banknotes should be a last step, not the first. Before the two nations are ready to share a coin, they’d need to fix such basic problems as the hours of delay that motorists face just to cross the border between them. El sur, too, will have to wait.

M

y favorite work by the artist X, An Account of My Abduction, depicts a kidnapping. For part of the 87-minute video, a woman lies taped up on the floor, writhing, while a voice off camera hisses threats at her. The woman on the floor is named Věra. The one off camera is named Yarrow Hall. The video is disturbing for multiple reasons. It captures suffering and vulnerability. It presents brutality as art. And both of the women are actually characters inhabited by X. The abduction is staged, performed, fabricated, whatever word you prefer. But its first viewers didn’t know what they were looking at, or whether it was real or invented. And once they realized it was the latter, they were confused by what felt like deception—a reaction that seems to have been the point.

I’ve never actually seen An Account of My Abduction. No one has, or will. But you can “view” it yourself in Catherine Lacey’s genre-quaking new novel, Biography of X, which invents X, and her assumed identities, and her big, brash, occasionally stunty body of work. X is a creation in the vein of David Bowie and Kathy Acker and Cindy Sherman and Andrea Fraser—a shape-shifter who encourages her fictional selves to metastasize until they kick her out of her own life, an iconoclast with many noms de plume but no answers about her own childhood or upbringing. “It only seems to be a simple question—Where are you from? It can never be sufficiently answered,” she enigmatically tells a magazine interviewer, posing the question that animates every inch of Biography of X.

This is Lacey’s fourth novel, and she has shown a keen streak of inventiveness and ambition that’s been rewarded with much recognition: She’s won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim, and a Whiting. But Biography of X revels in the kind of identity theft that artists (and writers) employ to build the stories of their work and themselves. Lacey fashioned this enigma that is X—a woman known for her “uncommon brutality” and venomous disdain—out of dozens of artists and provocateurs and hucksters who inhabit our world, but she also made her something inimitable, a vehicle for exploring Lacey’s favorite theme: the fungibility of identity. “I think because I’m an artist,” X says, “my image will always come before me.” In creating this character made up of characters, Lacey has posed an unanswerable question about whether an artist can bury herself so far under work that it becomes impossible to find the traces of an authentic self.

Sitting at a downtown-Manhattan restaurant on a warm, gusty winter afternoon, Lacey came across as more contemplative and unencumbered than enfant terrible—she was wearing a fluffy, forest-green coat and looked at me through wide blue eyes; large paper-clip tattoos on each wrist appeared to secure her hands to her body. She looked slightly perplexed when I came at her with sharp-angled questions, like I was trying to pry open a shell for a pearl that was already strung on a necklace.

X hides herself so well that her own wife doesn’t even know her birthplace. But the Catherine Lacey who wrote Biography of X and produced its brilliant, vicious, capricious protagonist—an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature—doesn’t believe in a unified theory of the self, so she was happy to hand me remnants of her own life and let me create some Cubist version of her. Under a photo of us that she posted to Instagram right after we met, she wrote that she still has “no idea how to properly organize past selves,” an idea she explained to me that day: You contain multiple people, from different periods of your life, and you lose some of them along the way. “There’s a part of me that feels really troubled by [that] separation of identities,” she noted. “I don’t know; isn’t it troubling?” It seems to me that it is: The lifelong project of making a self is, by nature, hopeless. Turning Lacey into one firmly outlined person seems against the spirit of her project.

A few facts anyway: Lacey is 37. She was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but hasn’t lived in the state since she left for boarding school at age 14. She pinballs around: Right now she’s living in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, swapping houses with a friend for the place she shares in Mexico City. “I don’t have a region,” she told me. “I’m not of any one place.” She’s been married (to a performance artist) and partnered and un-partnered and re-partnered again. In the past nine years, she’s emerged as the rare young writer who has successfully produced a true oeuvre: Her novels vary thematically—they include a hypnotic road-trip tale (Nobody Is Ever Missing, 2014), a speculative pseudo-satire of dating and mating (The Answers, 2017), and a Shirley Jackson–esque race-and-gender fable (Pew, 2020)—but they all share Lacey’s particular ability to build sturdy narratives that point to the flimsiness of narrative itself.

Lacey is an open book but a profiler’s riddle, even though that’s the kind of writing she once hoped to produce: “I wanted to be doing what you’re doing,” she said, with a look of wonder—she wanted to write nonfiction and coerce artists into sharing their lives. Biography of X, a true magnum opus, plants real lives—like Bowie’s and Acker’s, along with figures as varied as Connie Converse, Frank O’Hara, Richard Serra, and Susan Sontag—alongside the fictional, spirographing the two together. It’s almost a form of profile writing, but she’s suitably busted up the whole thing to retrofit those “real” lives to her protagonist’s purposes.

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Biography of X serves as the title of two books, actually: Lacey’s novel and the biography “inside” that novel (“published” by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005), written by CM Lucca, a lapsed journalist. She is also X’s widow—the story is told in retrospect by a grieving spouse using biography to make sense of the unknowable person she loved. CM (alternately Charlotte Marie or Cynthia Malone, depending) obsessively roots through paperwork and gallery slides, interviews old friends and enemies, tries to fill in the broad gaps in the personal history of a woman who appeared seemingly out of nowhere in New York in 1972 and ended up with a retrospective at MoMA two decades later. X was the kind of artist who provoked conversation whenever she exhibited new work—less a lightning rod than the lightning itself. She had several personas: Clyde Hill, a cult novelist with New Directions; Martina Riggio, a feminist small-press founder; the aforementioned Yarrow Hall and Věra, who each put out work of their own.

Lacey’s power as a mimic is on full display here: Her creations are all as believable as X is, even when we know they are Cindy Sherman–like roles, pulled on as a kind of winking game. Longing rises up from every crack. X, CM explains, “lived in a play without intermission in which she cast herself in every role.” But who was she? CM can gather all sorts of information on her wife—through Vanity Fair profiles, towers of notebooks in her study, critics’ takedowns. But she yearns to identify the precipitating event that turned her into X: a name that signifies no name, a woman who claimed, “It’s not that I am a private person; I am not a person at all.” CM wants to know where X came from in order to make sense of her.

Lacey is happy to disclose bits from her own past. As we scanned our menus, she told me that she’s been a vegetarian ever since she read Leviticus during her church-intensive childhood and decided that no matter what her mother said, she’d likely spend eternity in the furnaces of hell if she mixed milk and meat. Her attachment to her Christianity was fierce and then suddenly gone: “I had a total certitude about why the world was put together, the way that it was put together, what happens after you die. It made all these answers completely clear.” She left her faith and Mississippi around the same time, and wound up with a hole that those identities used to occupy.

Her answerless fiction is a new way of working through those big questions; it’s also gorgeously anti-solution—those “viewers” who witness An Account of My Abduction have been conned by the art world into believing that revelation is the end point of any narrative. “I’m constructing this whole fictional thing because it feels like the only way to clearly convey something that I’m feeling,” Lacey noted with a head shake and some laughing exasperation, “which is ridiculous.”

As if its main conceit isn’t distorting enough, Biography of X also steps through a side door to present a bizarro alternative version of American history. Just months after X’s birth, in 1945, the novel’s America split into three big chunks: the libertarian Western Territory, the socialist Northern Territory, and the theocratic Southern Territory, which covertly built a wall and locked itself in. The latter didn’t reunite with the rest of the country until weeks after X’s death, in 1996—“as if her very existence were tethered to that dangerous, doomed boundary.” This lets Lacey imagine a South that could physically trap X as a child, and hint that X might be so powerful as to bend the world, once out of her control, to her whim.

Lacey’s characters usually don’t escape the South intact. (“I felt wrong there,” Lacey offered—an idea she repeated to me over and over.) In The Answers, a girl is entirely isolated on a farm in Tennessee with her radical-Christian father and simpering mother, fed Bible verses and kept blind to pop culture, that American golden calf. She wanders adulthood in search of experiences that might make her a full person. Pew revolves around someone with no discernible age, gender, or race, no background or history—found in a church in a small, unnamed southern town, where citizens fight to decide whether the vulnerable stranger should be sheltered, as Jesus commands, or rejected. Pew ends up “alone” and “gone” and entirely unaccounted for. In Lacey’s South, the region’s external pressure to conform produces irreparably cracked identities.

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Early on, CM learns that X is one of a very small number of people who escaped the Southern Territory, where, as along the Berlin Wall, armed guards shot down anyone caught crossing. X’s birth identity, it turns out, is Carrie Lu Walker of Byhalia, Mississippi (75 miles from Lacey’s Tupelo); her childhood of purged libraries, global isolation, church-house education, and female submission radicalized her into rebellion and then escape. X’s manifestos embrace the notion that “art is an expression of the society from which it emerges.” And the revelations about X’s childhood give CM the feeling that she is making progress toward understanding her wife’s work, now “more folded with meaning and complication.” For X, a refugee from religious tyranny, the act of self-creation is about addition, not subtraction.

This alternative America is a distorted version of our own, ratcheted up just enough that it reads like a dream state. The result is pleasantly disorienting; it gives the feeling that history is operated by a series of levers, and that fiction can yank on some of them to spit out varied, unruly results. If art kick-starts a “total, ongoing delusion,” as X writes, then Lacey understands that setting her work inside a prototype of a slightly different world—with the socialist Emma Goldman as an architect of the American economy, with Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder killed off so that “women were seen as the sex to whom ‘art’ belonged,” with reparations paid for the descendants of the enslaved—keeps the ground just unsteady enough that certainty floats away.

Janet Malcolm has called biography “the arrogant desire to impose a narrative on the stray bits and pieces of a life.” Biography of X came from an experiment designed to amplify that notion by turning it on its head: Use a novel to create a fake biography, then splice in enough of those “bits and pieces of a life” to make it seem real even as Lacey never loses sight of the artifice of it all.

Readers might feel the impulse to parse CM’s reporting for some base truth, but they’d be missing the point. Practically speaking—and Lacey is a devotee of practicality, meticulously explaining to me how each decision in the novel resulted from a set of what she called “enticing boundaries” she’d set for herself—the book is a highly stylized crossbreed of genres. A set of footnotes cites imaginary magazine articles, interviews, and profiles about X by real-life writers such as Joshua Rivkin, Naomi Fry, Hermione Hoby, and Renata Adler. Some of them swirl our reality with the book’s—Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker, her biography of the punk writer, is cited, but with a publication date 15 years early; there’s a magazine (perhaps a cousin of this one) called The Atlantic Coast; the artist Alex Prager films a documentary about a seditious librarian in the Southern Territory. The second set of annotations are Lacey’s 13 pages of endnotes. They cite the parts of our world that she’s collaged into hers: a Tom Waits speech that X recites verbatim; a character’s murder that’s modeled on the assassination of Kim Jong Un’s brother; a quote from Lacey’s own first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, that she attributes to another one of X’s personas, called Angel Thornbird.

The writer David Shields, whose book Reality Hunger employed written collage to illustrate the power of creative borrowing, counseled Lacey to leave those annotations out and let the audience wonder. “But I’m not really trying to get away with something,” she said, while we ordered tea after lunch. It’s vital to her that readers see the wires she crossed and the easy co-opting of one reality for another. What better material to screw with than what people already believe to be indubitable? For Lacey, fiction—and biography—aren’t precious little feats to be preserved in formaldehyde. “The more you buy into the idea that you are somehow the entity that’s really responsible for your work, the unhappier you are,” she said. She wishes her own name weren’t on her novels, and claims she isn’t the authority on them. The self can’t be siphoned off from the work, but it needn’t be the work. “X believed that making fiction was sacred,” CM writes, “and she wanted to live in that sanctity, not to be fooled by the flimsiness of perceived reality, which was nothing more than a story that had fooled most of the world.” Biography of X moves past autofiction: The reality of a personal history is no more reliable than the uncertainty of fiction.

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By sheer luck, the artist Alex Prager, known for her staged, cinematic photos, and now grafted into Lacey’s book, had a new multimedia show that had just opened, and Lacey and I took the C train up to Chelsea to catch it. Part Two: Run! was set in one of Prager’s signature simulacrums: a movie set so luminous and sharp-cornered that it was obviously constructed for the camera. In a short film, four aggressively wigged and costumed actors—to me, all Xs in their invented selves—pushed a giant pinball down the set’s street; it mowed down everyone in its path, but they were miraculously resurrected, standing back up, brushing themselves off. There was a pinball machine too, so observers could implicate themselves: Neither of us was any good. And in the corner, there was a sculptural installation in which a life-size “body,” in a demure gingham dress and sensible heels, lay crushed under the movie’s mammoth mirrored ball. Where the head ought to have been was the ball, and the reflection created a continuation of the body, another body, another self.

While we watched the film, Lacey wondered out loud how the camera wasn’t captured in the ball’s reflection—an artist concerned with the technicality of craft. Standing in front of the orb, we could easily see ourselves, made small but still present, us and another version of us. For a moment, I could imagine that Lacey’s reflection would simply walk away without her.

Players for Nippon Professional Baseball clubs arrived on a chartered flight, while four MLB players rejoined their respective American clubs.